I’m pleased to announced that the second episode of the Bitsplitting Podcast is now available, featuring my friend Erika Hall of the Mule Design Studio.
It was a lot of fun talking with Erika. Easily the greatest challenge so far in recording this podcast is trying to keep the length of shows around the 1-hour mark instead of talking for four hours as I’d be inclined to do.
I hope you enjoy the interview!
I’m excited to announce that the previously hinted Bitsplitting Podcast is now live. The first episode features Guy English of Çingleton and Aged & Distilled fame.
The show will come out on a biweekly schedule, so in general you can expect a new episode “every other Friday” from here on out.
New episodes will always appear on the podcast’s home page, but I encourage you to subscribe via iTunes, or through another app using the podcast-specific RSS feed.
I hope you enjoy the show.
Marco Arment addresses the common defense among media pirates that lack of a legal alternative has “forced” them into pirating it:
Admit it: you’re ripping it off, it’s morally questionable at best (and illegal), but you don’t care.
A few years ago my wife opened my eyes to the phenomenon of shame projection. In short: assigning blame for your own shortcomings to external circumstances. Now it’s like that thing where you learn a new word and suddenly start noticing it everywhere: our society is swimming in shame projection.
I am no psychologist, nor have I ever taken a psychology class, nor have I even finished the “Psychological Projection” Wikipedia article cited above. So I’m probably completely misguided and wrong about this, but an example that springs to mind is when a motorist almost runs me down, and then screams at me for being in the way.
What happened in the blink of an eye is:
Most folks who pirate media are feeling some of those same terrified, ashamed, regretful, and grateful feelings that the motorist felt upon almost killing me. In the case Marco cites, the projection outlet is on the companies for not making the media available.
This kind of projection seems to have a delightful efficiency. When the media companies do make the media available, the blame will be on their pricing it too high. When the price is right, it’s the media format that’s wrong. If the media format is right, then the DRM is too odious. If DRM is absent, then the authors are making too much money, anyway. If the authors aren’t making much, you’re only pirating to try it out. Once you’ve tried it and like it, you’ll pay for it when you get your next paycheck. You wouldn’t have to pirate at all if your boss wasn’t such a cheapskate and paid you better…
Wolf Rentzsch learned about the various gotchas of linking directly with Mac OS X’s OpenSSL security libraries, and shared his wisdom in a cheeky Apple-style technote format:
Long story short: we screwed up when we included OpenSSL (
libcrypto) in OS X in the first place.(We learned our lesson and didn’t repeat the mistake with iOS.)
Now there’s some transitionin’ to do.
Linking directly to OpenSSL on Mac OS X is a time bomb. This is probably a more pervasive bug than it would otherwise be, since Apple prescribed using OpenSSL in their Mac App Store documentation demonstrating how to analyze Mac App Store receipts. The vast majority of developers probably followed Apple’s example, and are thus using OpenSSL and linking directly to libcrypto.