The best decision made with the iPad is the refusal to to use or enable Adobe Flash. The rest of the iPad is the continuation of the Apple is God control meme. As Mike Copeland at Brainstorm Tech notes, it is all about control and money.
“If Flash were allowed on the iPhone or the iPad, software developers would have free rein to sell apps directly to consumers, bypassing Apple’s shops and Apple’s cut of the sale. If Flash were on the iPhone, you could watch Hulu and play games on Mini-Clip rather than buying movies from iTunes or buying games from the App store.”
Source: Brainstorm Tech
Flash is the most notorious piece of spyware in existence compromising your privacy with every animation or movie played.
Flash is a virus program masquerading as a helper application. It does not just process video for compression and playback but creates a cornucopia of spyware hidden to the standard privacy settings in your browser. Flash cookies are spyware. The animation characteristics of Flash is too small a percentage given the primary usage is video playback. You can clear your text cookies, but Flash Cookies remain and merrily spy and report to every site their are scripted for. Not just first party but third party sites as well.
John Nack who is an Adobe employee brings out the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people argument” in defense of Flash as being blameless.
when he talks about how wonderful Flash is. He goes on to entertain us in how much standard compliance there is with Flash. That being the current save the world H.264 video codec.
H.264 and Standards
The H264 codec is being bandied about as the new open standards video darling, but it really is not. It is encumbered by patents requiring the payment of royalties which does not qualify it as an open standard. The HTML 5 Working group seems to have forgotten open standards in their discussion and or implementation of an open video standard.
I thought that we had the RAND discussion back in 2001. Back then I wrote:
The W3C is currently exploring RAND as a method of allowing commercial entities to incorporate proprietary or closed technology to be adopted into the Recommendations that are known in the web development community as THE STANDARDS.
RAND stands for “reasonable and non-discriminatory”
The Danger with “reasonable and non-discriminatory”
They are neither. They sound good, and seem to be fair, but they are not. Poll Taxes ‘were reasonable and non-discriminatory’.
The theory was that if you couldn’t pay to vote you were a second class citizen. Excluding women from voting was reasonable and non-discriminatory. Same Deal. Times have changed and both of these propositions are no longer reasonable or non-discriminatory.I see this RAND business as a coercion attempt on the part of private companies to subvert the work of the W3C and to control the web through license intimidation.
This is a preliminary document outlining a mechanism for including intellectual property, patents of questionable validity and proprietary code and software components into the W3C Standards as Recommendations.
The W3C is a world wide resource. If it is to remain the authority that we have made it, we cannot allow it to be blackmailed by private companies looking to bleed every developer, business, and user from Boston to Bangladesh.
The only thing that has changed since I wrote that is time has gone by. And your privacy is at greater risk than at any time ever.
With Apple you know that you are getting screwed, but you know that your partner is clean and have made that decision. Flash is like getting fucked in an alley by a wino with various STD’s.
