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The Ninth Circuit court of appeals has made a decision that has serious implications about your online privacy:

Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect’s computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web pages the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

…In Friday’s ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages.

I see the analogy beteen emails and phone records. There’s a difference between the FBI knowing I called punkass marc and knowing what I said to punkass marc even without a warrant. Similarly, the FBI can know that I emailed him without actually being given the contents of the message. But the webpages part is a little different. Any legal minds care to comment?

*What? You don’t? *sob* I thought we meant something to each other!

After months of foreplay, the iPhone failed to bring America to orgasm, although not for lack of effort:

My old phone, one based on Windows Mobile 5.0, had almost every feature the iPhone has – point by point. The differences between the products (like the differences between their desktop cousins) have to do with how functionality is exposed to the user. In this matter, you’ll find that Apple’s product is almost infuriatingly superior.

At $600 most people have to say, sexy, but not $600 sexy. Apple products are known for being a bit spendy and as they fan out into the non-computer consumer electronics market, smart shoppers know to let those near-psychotic first-adapters test the techie waters first before they blow that kind of cash themselves. Even die-hard Apple fans had an excuse for being wary – Apple doesn’t have a phone network so that part was being handled by AT&T. Unlike iPod, whose iTunes are an Apple-controlled service, meaning that even when iTunes is pissing you off you can at least expect Apple’s comparatively ball-licking customer service, the iPhone has two providers: Apple for your hardware and non-phone bits, and AT&T for the phone part.

In the Apple world, you hand them obscene amounts of money and they hand you exactly what you want. In the AT&T world, you hand them an amount of money that you are just barely OK with, and in return they almost provide you with a service. This is not a good marriage.

Two providers means two hundred times the confusion, and customers accustomed to the loving arms of an Apple store were in for a rude surprise: even though you give them lots of money, AT&T hates you.

The line was less than a hundred, and it seemed for a while that the wait might not be too long. Wrong! The employees at the AT&T store at 2195 Broadway were in no hurry. In fact, a woman employee at the door seemed annoyed by all the people in line and would offer no information about wait times or availability of the iPhones.

But one thing she did make certain, this AT&T location was closing at 11 p.m., line or no line. There were no promises to service those who had been waiting for hours.

A friendly restaurant next door handed free samples of a mango drink and even offered take-out food, but not one AT&T employee ever came outside to interact with waiting customers or to explain the situation.

…Even though the line was longer than that at AT&T, the wait was short — less than 15 minutes. Friendly Apple employees stood by with wireless credit card terminals taking orders. The process took only
minutes. Leaving the store, a cheering row of Apple workers high-fived new iPhone owners.
(emphasis mine)

I can imagine that it is terribly difficult for a consumer base accustomed to being actually applauded for making a discretionary purchase to come back to earth and have to deal with the kind of sales employees and tech support that make the rest of us loathe our phones and computers so much. However, my sympathy only extends so far:

A consumer advocacy group has expressed outrage over Apple Inc.’s battery replacement program for the iPhone…”The cell phone industry is notorious for not being consumer-friendly while Apple has a fairly good reputation, so for Apple to stand on a technicality of a hidden disclosure that’s going to cost the user as much as 20 percent of the purchase price I think will prove to be a colossal mistake,” Rosenfield said.

People are upset to find that the iPhone’s battery is soldered to it, and will cost almost $90 to replace. This is shocking! Horrible! Completely unfair! And only something they’ve done like once before

Many of you may remember the furor surrounding failing (and failed) non-replaceable batteries found in iPods, which ultimately resorted in a class-action lawsuit against Apple. That was sorted only after years of irritation and bad press, so Apple’s being a little more proactive this time, announcing just how much it’ll cost you to replace the little battery tucked inside your shiny new iPhone long before its warranty expires.

Regular Apple users might not have too much of a problem with this (well, sure they’ll bitch about it but they’ll still pay it), but Apple has spoiled them into expecting to get stuff for the scads of money they spend so they’re going to have a real hard time with AT&T. On the other hand, non-Apple users who buy an iPhone may accept AT&T’s horrid service as par for the course, but will balk at routinely spending close to $100 and three days to keep their extremely, uncomfortably expensive all-in-one device in working batteries.

The latter catagory of customers is the one I’d focus on if I were Steve Jobs. Once they get over the sticker shock and join the Apple cult, they’ll hardly remember how angry they were the first time they had to ship their phone out for service. But the former group may never get over the sense of betrayal that will come the first time they have to get AT&T to solve a problem and the AT&T employee kicks him the the balls because Mr. Apple-user didn’t pay the $25 monthly “Employees won’t kick you in the balls for speaking” fee, which in Applelandia would already have been factored into the price of service.

Via Freedom to Tinker, Apple’s DRM Freeee! iTunes are going to set your file-stealing ass up:

Recently it was revealed that Apple’s new DRM-free iTunes tracks come with the buyer’s name encoded in their headers. Randy Picker suggested that this might be designed to deter copying – if you redistribute a file you bought, your name would be all over it. It would be easy for Apple, or a copyright owner, to identify the culprit. Or so the theory goes.

Of course, easy to mark, easy to find, easy to frame:

But there’s another problem – and a pretty big one. All a digital signature can do is verify that a file is the same one that was sold to a particular customer. If a file is swiped from a customer’s machine and then distributed, you’ll know where the file came from but you won’t know who is at fault. This scenario is very plausible, given that as many as 10% of the machines on the Net contain bot software that could easily be directed to swipe iTunes files.

Apple is offering DRM free tracks from the EMI music library at a mere $0.30 more. Supposedly you get a higher-quality track, but is that really worth it if it also makes it easy for someone to steal all your account info?

News site Ars Technica was among the first to discover that downloaded tracks free of Fairplay have embedded within them the full name and account information, including e-mail address, of who bought them.

…It was not clear, said Ars Technica, whether the data was part of Apple’s administration system for iTunes or something else. It said because the data was easy to spoof Apple needed to explain why the data was present.

The information is also embedded in the non-free-for-all tunes, but Apple’s proprietary deathgrip on iTunes meant that no one really looked, noticed and/or cared until now. I realize that until recently, owning an Apple was like being in a really hip family with lots of disposable income. When you owned an Apple, you owned a fairly obscure machine owned only by others to artsy and boring for the meanie hackers and bots to deal with. And as Apple tries to take the act mainstream, the very things that are supposed to make Apple so appealing are being abandoned in the name of competitiveness. Apple’s insides are more like PCs than ever. iPods and subsequently iTunes are becoming very ubiquitous even on already notoriously secure PCs and therefore incredibly targetable. The Apple neighborhood is less safe than it was, but apparently Apple is still leaving the back door unlocked at night. But now it’s my backdoor, and your backdoor, and EMI can walk through it and sue the fuck out of us. This had better be fixed in my next iTunes update, I’ll tell Steve Jobs what. I’ve been seduced by Apple’s sexiness and am willing to convert: please don’t fuck this up.