Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’ve had in-person discussions with certain people (you know who you are) who rolled their eyes at me when I said that, if you give the government an inch, they’ll take a mile.

Well, I’d like to point out to you that, this past Tuesday, a tax on long distance telephone calls originally established to pay for the Spanish-American War (1898, President William McKinley, U.S.S. Maine, Teddy Roovevelt’s charge up San Juan hill, etc.) was ended. One-hundred eight years later. To pay for a war that lasted months. In 1898. Point made.

Next on my personal government to-do list: The repeal of the 16th amendment.

What’s the difference between Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and Windows Vista?

Microsoft employees are looking forward to Leopard.

I read this blurb today from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball (emphasis added):

The Washington Post’s Brian Krebs reports on a supposed wireless networking exploit that allows a MacBook to be hijacked. I smell bullshit, though — if you watch the video, the exploit apparently requires the MacBook to be using a third-party wireless card. Given that all MacBooks come with built-in AirPort support, how many MacBook users are actually susceptible to this? Any?

Worse, Krebs’s post makes no mention of this, instead making it sound as though the exploit works against MacBooks using their built-in wireless cards and drivers. If it’s truly the case that this particular exploit only works if a MacBook is using a third-party Wi-Fi card and driver software, it’s sensationalism at its worst — a case of supposed security experts impugning Apple’s reputation for the sole purpose of drawing attention to themselves.

Actually, I’d say that it’s a case of supposed security experts impugning Apple’s reputation for the sole purpose of impugning Apple’s reputation.

From the “security experts” themselves:

“We’re not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those ‘Get a Mac’ commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something.”

You are specifically picking on Macs, and your motivation to make dubious security claims about a computing platform is because you don’t like their commercials. That’s immature at best and a complete credibility destroyer. You’ve let a television commercial create a sense of personal animosity rather than looking past it and going ahead with your life. Why should anyone attribute any priority to what you have to say when it is rooted in disingenuousness and irrationality from the beginning?

Late addition: More thoughts from John Gruber, asking some very good questions and reinforcing my own points.

Wow, I dunno if this is fake, but it certainly looks real. I don’t want to be too sure of myself, however, because I’ve been duped before. So let’s just treat this as a little exercise in creative thinking.

iChat Mobile seems like the perfect name for an Apple phone product. It ties into an existing piece of Apple software used for communicating with your friends. The tag line under the product name sounds just like a tag line Apple would use. The device seems very simple and it’s stylistically consistent with other Apple devices, like the iPod nano, the iPod shuffle, and the Apple remote.

But here’s the kicker… Imagine that it’s not a cell phone. Instead, it’s an 802.11-enabled VoIP phone. You’d need to be in range of a wireless access point, and then you’d use your iChat Mobile to make a call through an Apple VoIP server to a PSTN phone number. Your number travels with you as you and your phone change wireless networks. There would certainly have to be a fee of some kind for Apple to recoup the costs of building the support infrastructure, for maintenance, and for profit. Perhaps it’ll be tied into .Mac in some way, as in, you can pre-pay for a discounted year of service as part of your .Mac subscription.

Think about it… Why would Apple want to enter the already crowded cell phone market and tie themselves to a provider when they can set the standard in an emerging VoIP market that really has no dominant player, and they can control the service themselves? Sounds a lot like the music scene a few years ago, doesn’t it?

This could all be a complete fantasy. We’ll know Monday. But you gotta admit, even if the phone isn’t real, the concept makes good sense.

PS: What appears to be a camera on the back isn’t for video chatting, it’s for taking pictures… just like the camera on the back of many cell phones. The phone would have IM capabilities like its namesake and the camera would allow you to send pictures as you would in an IM chat. A combination of audio chat an IM in this device would truly make it an iChat Mobile.