Journalists present at Apple’s big event last month, were greeted by volunteers of the Free Software Foundation. The volunteers where protesting the DRM restriction of the iPad, and they said the iPad the iBad for two reasons:

• All media in the iTunes store (with the one exception of music) is wrapped in Apple’s DRM. That means films, TV shows, movies and audiobooks (NB: books are in an open format ePub) are locked to Apple’s platform, taking away your right to share.

• All applications must be signed by Apple if they are to run, an unprecedented level of control for a general purpose computer. On top of this, Apple can push updates to the device over its wireless connection, letting them add or remove capabilities at any time.

Given the fact that the people who attended this event were either journalists or devoted followers of the Apple cult, you would wonder how many of them would care about this. Well, it turns out that thousands of people are against iPad’s restrictive DRM which makes Apple the only available supplier of software for the iPad through the fact that users can only download software onto the gadget from Apple’s App Store.


Sure, since the iPad runs on iPhone OS, it can be jailbroken , but since iPad’s hardware is mostly an unexplored territory it will probably take some time, before you can run outside code on the device.


Anti-DRM group Defective by Design, who staged a protest last month outside San Francisco’s Moscone Center where the iPad was unveiled, told CoM that their online petition is currently up to 8,800 signatures since its inception four days ago; although the first 5,000 signatures were captured within 24 hours. DbD has already sent off their first 5,000 signatures in the form of a giant postcard (that’s it in the photo above).


“What Apple is doing with software is quite different,” Sullivan told CoM. “This is a scary step … as Apple move towards this model in the future.”


[via FSM]

The online Apple store is down. Pretty unusual for a Tuesday , but since the MacWorld 2010 – 25th annual gathering of Mac users – opens today, maybe Apple wants to let us pre-order the iPad or introduce a new line of MacBook Pro’s with fast i5 or i7 processors and maybe built-in 3G. Let’s see…

[via FSM]

Peter-Paul Koch has won international renown with his browser compatibility research and is the man with opinions about mobile web. Here is one of his opinions: mobile Safari is this generation’s Internet Explorer 6, and will be hated by future webdevs.



No matter how much better the iPhone/iPad/iPod might be as a mobile browsing experience, developing content that only works on those devices, ignores everything else, is a backward step.

The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we’ll have the real mobile web that wasn’t made by us and doesn’t give a shit about web standards and best practices. Worse, it seems web developers are happy with this state of affairs.


Mentioning Nokia is the mark of the rude boor. The man of discernment mentions the iPhone. And mentions it and mentions it and mentions it. And then mentions the iPad, to show he is open to non-iPhone devices. The bigger the better.

Peter-Paul notes that too many webdevs are concentrating on optimizing for MobileSafari , even though there are a lot more platforms out there, that they can work with. The same thing happened back in 2000, when Internet Explorer 6 was the most popular browser, but today webdevs from all around the world are trying to get rid of it once and for all.
[via CoM]