waffle

Brent Simmons has shipped NetNewsWire 3.2.7, and it’s more important than the Google Reader authentication adjustment it provides.

NetNewsWire is now code signed. It has a cryptographic signature, signed with Brent’s certificate. Thanks to this, the application and all of its updates can be trusted as originating from the same cat-loving source. This means that the Keychain will now stop asking permission for new NetNewsWire versions to gain control to the old version’s site passwords. Additionally, the application can be proven to be intact.

However, there’s signing the application and there’s being a good citizen. NetNewsWire has a lovingly eccentric user base. Actually, it has a very wide user base, which would attract a large number of any sort of users, but it’s an application that to its core plays to the delightfully OCD-inflicted. These people like to customize their applications; replacing graphics and templates even beyond NetNewsWire’s news themes, or why not adding, removing or editing localizations. This is their right in much the same way that they may paint a table or a chair after buying it; it might be troublesome with updates, but there are ways around that.

By default, signing your application in Mac OS X includes every file in the application bundle in the cryptographic signature. Brent took the time to exclude the Resources folder as being vital to the integrity of the application. The application executable and a handful of other vital files are still protected while people can mess with the resources without fear of breaking the cryptographic seal that allows Mac OS X to trust or mistrust the application.

If you’re signing your Cocoa application, please consider omitting files in Resources that aren’t vital to the application’s functionality from the cryptographic seal.

• Sheep Man?
• Strike Man?
• Pump Man?
• Seriously, Sheep Man? His level looks like he was called “Chip Man”. Also, I thought his power was going to be about commenting uncritically on politically or religiously charged YouTube videos.
• Seriously, Pump Man? I’m supposed to be frightened of something looking like that? I might be frightened if he said he liked looking like that.
• Pump Man’s weapon beats Solar Man? Yeah, because we all know that we can just extinguish suns with massive amounts of water. Unless this is some parallel about solar power and rain.

I may worry for the well-being of my own democracy, for the EU and for the world in general, but it really is shocking to get to see actual Ministry of Truth-like editor notes sent to the government-controlled media.

Not shocking because you couldn’t figure out that if they’re gonna control 1.3 billion people they have to keep a tight lid on the populace; shocking because it looks almost exactly like out of 1984, and because it’s the kind of thing that gets more horrifying the more you’re exposed to it.

Zeldman:

That the web’s existence makes all content free is a Brooklyn Bridge most of us have bought, but it just ain’t true, as Erin Kissane makes clear in Content is Expensive at Incisive.nu.

What the hell? It’s remarkably handy to rephrase the question to make it easy to debunk. Nope, the web’s existence does not make all content free. I don’t see anyone who’s argued that.

What I do know has been argued, and what seems to be the case is that people who do browse the web largely tend to be put off by paid-only content and go some place else. Putting off your readers isn’t a sound strategy.

The web does make things cheaper because it’s a hell of a distribution mechanism compared to almost anything that’s come before, but it doesn’t remove the cost of everything else, including feeding the hand that writes the articles. The end result may be that “all content [is] free” to some degree, but it’s not a fact that people would take for granted.

Zeldman also attacks “Information wants to be free”, a sentiment I long disagreed with along the lines of “people want information to be free”. But I understood, finally, that the motto just means that the “free” doesn’t refer to charge but to mobility, to spreading. The two concepts are deeply intertwined, even with the change of viewpoint that the web brings, but they’re easy to tease apart. Most if not all government documents are free in this regard; they took tax money to produce, but the fruits of the labor remains available to everyone without restriction. Physical books are easier to lend out than digital copies because of the shifting semantics of the word ‘copy’, the technical construction of computer memory and copyright laws in need of updating.

On the whole, though, Zeldman knows this stuff down cold, which is why I agree with everything else he said. I might even agree with Erin’s article as soon as I get to read it. So I can’t help but quote one bit that I agree with:

Of course there will always be web content that is purely a labor of love. That is why we love the web. And it’s kind of sad, quite frankly, that you almost can’t write “Shit My Dad Says” or create a LOLcats page purely out of love any more; that even stuff tossed off as a laugh ends up being “monetized.” By the way, whoever came up with that word should be deathetized by beatingization.

I can’t remember who said it first, because it wasn’t me, but today, Mahir’s web site would have read “Bandwidth Exceeded” within ten minutes.