David Demaree

No, Actually, It’s Not Like That At All

Last night I had the following brief Twitter exchange with a fellow about the whole Gizmodo-stolen iPhone affair:

ddemaree: @esoneill @chartier Property != information. If the seller had sold them photos of the stolen iPhone, they might’ve been in the clear.

esoneill: @ddemaree @chartier But, arguably, all property contains information of some kind. The Watergate tapes were property as well.

ddemaree: @esoneill - True, but 1) the Watergate tapes were surrendered, not stolen and 2) Presidential records aren’t exactly private property.

esoneill: @ddemaree Agreed, but imagine if the physical tapes themselves were stolen. Does that make Watergate the journalistic equivalent of this?

Yeah, what if?

All of you listen to me very carefully: There are no meaningful similarities between Gizmodo’s alleged involvement in the iPhone theft and Watergate, and it worries me that some of you seem to think that there is.

Which is why, if you’ll indulge me, we’re going back to school for the next however-long-it-takes-you-to-read-this.

To start, I think Edmund here is confusing the Watergate tapes—i.e., the ones Nixon secretly recorded in the White House—with the Pentagon Papers, the latter of which were leaked to a New York Times reporter by a Defense Department analyst named Daniel Ellsberg. The Papers’ contents were a classified DoD study, detailing the history U.S. involvement in Vietnam up to and during the Vietnam War (which at that time was still going on), which showed the government had misled the public about the war on numerous occasions.

Nixon’s Watergate tapes are arguably less significant as historical documents, but are far more infamous, maybe because Nixon makes a far more compelling villain than the entire U.S. military establishment. Regardless, they’re a poor point of comparison for the stolen iPhone since (unlike the Pentagon Papers) the Watergate tapes were not leaked directly to the press. The press got them, sure, but only after they’d been subpoenaed by the Justice Department and surrendered by the Nixon White House after a weeks-long constitutional crisis.

These days Ellsberg is seen as a hero for blowing the whistle on a war most people see as, at best, a military failure, but at the time things weren’t so clear cut, and the Pentagon and White House made a serious effort to prosecute him for treason. (As in full-blown, punishable-by-death treason.)

It’s also not true that the New York Times simply published Ellsberg’s (according to the Pentagon) stolen files without troubles of their own. Before publishing the Pentagon Papers the Times did talk to their lawyers, who advised them against publishing the material. After the Papers were published the Justice Department sought and got an injunction against the paper preventing them from publishing any more classified material, which the Times appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and ultimately got declared as unconstitutional prior restraint.

All that is to say: the Pentagon Papers leak may be the most obviously right example of a news outfit publishing something they shouldn’t have had access to in American history, and even then it wasn’t obvious they’d get away with it. And, unlike the way Gizmodo obtained their secret iPhone prototype, the Times didn’t solicit the documents or pay for them.

So, while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about another important distinction that’s been glossed over in the discussion of iPhonegate: the difference between intellectual property and real property.

Property laws are some of the oldest, and simplest, laws we have here in the U.S. On a basic level they’re not much more complicated than that one of the commandments about not stealing. Even though the law refers to private information (like trade secrets) as “intellectual property,” there is a major distinction drawn between information crimes and crimes such as destruction of property or theft.

California state law defines theft in terms of misappropriation: if you take possession of an object that’s not yours for any reason other than trying your damnedest to give it back to its owner, you’ve stolen it. If you sell it to a third party, not only have you stolen it, but the people you sold it to are (at the very least) accessories to theft. And if those people, having knowingly bought stolen property, then take apart and effectively destroy the object before posting photos and video of it to their blog, they definitely are guilty of something.

(I think that last point is very important, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been talked about more. Gizmodo didn’t simply take possession of the prototype iPhone—they dismantled it, and took pictures of themselves dismantling it. That’s not journalism, that’s destruction of property.)

I’m not a lawyer, which is why it’s good for armchair legal scholars like me that Gizmodo seems to have gone out of their way to turn this into an open-and-shut property crime case, masquerading as a battle over whether bloggers are journalists. Engadget wisely limited their coverage to just photos, which is why (as far as we know) they’re not a target of this investigation. It’s possible Gizmodo may be able to claim protection under the shield law, but if so that’s a legal hack, not proof that they’re innocent.

The facts of this case lend themselves to extreme examples, and it’s annoying and frustrating to not only see people compare this affair to one of the saddest recent chapters in American history, but to do so incorrectly.

Laws like California’s shield law are meant to ensure a news organization’s right to blow the whistle on public or private misdeeds, but the intent of the law presumes that the information being published is in the public interest. In other words, it’s designed around the Pentagon Papers, or the Watergate tapes, or a secret memo about MegaAgroCorp infecting cabbages with baby-killing toxins. It’s for things people need to know.

The public doesn’t have a right to know anything it wants just because it wants to. Certainly not to see the insides of Apple’s next iPhone a few weeks early.

Simple Elegance.

TechCrunch says the upcoming Foursquare app for Windows Phone 7 Series™ Ultimate Home Makeover Edition© “destroys” its iPhone counterpart with its “simple elegance.”

I have to admit, the WP7S version is a lot simpler. None of that pesky “information” to clutter the display, just big fonts and a fancy dark color scheme.

And Foursquare for WP7S™ is an app with questions. “What’s going on?” “Where are my friends?” That’s a good one—where are my friends? Are they even my friends?

The iPhone version shows you nearby places right on the first screen. Windows Phone doesn’t even tell you it knows where you are. But that doesn’t stop it from asking you what’s going on. What is going on? What’s the point of all this checking in, all these badges and mayorships?

Foursquare for Windows Phone may have the answers to these questions, but you’ll have to tap buttons (and then maybe more buttons) to get them. It makes you work for wisdom, and doesn’t really promise you’ll find it.

The iPhone app, on the other hand, doesn’t have time for any of that Socratic bullshit. It’s too busy telling you what you wanted to know.

No more computers.

Most people wouldn’t even think of file management as a feature of traditional computers; files are just always there, like grass or rocks, part of the landscape.

It’s not just that filesystems are ubiquitous. From a technical standpoint, especially in Unix-like systems like OS X, the filesystem really is the computer, or at least a user or developer’s first, best way to interact with the system. And for ordinary folks, their whole mental model for distinguishing computers from other kinds of gadgets (like game consoles or phones) revolves around hierarchical file systems.

Which isn’t to say people really understand filesystems, as Rob Foster pointed out on his blog recently:

These days, tech support calls involve questions of how to do stuff these folks like to do. Because they can now actually use their computers instead of simply restarting them, I’m able to better see how they use them. And the one commonality I’ve seen is that no one knows how to use the file system.

Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.

I’ve had to deal with friends-and-family support calls too, and there’s only one thing in Foster’s post I disagree with: a lot of the friends I’ve had to help also don’t understand the desktop or documents folders. One very bright person I know saved everything to her desktop because that was the only place she knew she could find it, except that after a while she had so many files she couldn’t really find anything there either. So she started keeping windows open for weeks. When she needed a file, she skipped the desktop and went looking for its minimized window in the Dock.

When my friend had to restart her computer, it was like she was losing weeks of data every single time.

The genius of Apple’s approach to file management in iPhone OS is to make this workflow — ignoring the filesystem and looking at apps or windows instead — not just the default, but the only way for users to work with files. The iPhone and iPad still have a filesystem, of course, and there are several new frameworks in iPhone OS 3.2 for working with files and documents.

But, to quote Apple’s iPad Programming Guide,

[…]it is important to remember that although you can manipulate files in your iPad applications, files should never be a focal part of your application. There are no open and save panels in iPhone OS for a very good reason. The save panel in particular implies that it is the user’s responsibility to save all data, but this is not the model that iPhone applications should ever use. Instead, applications should save data incrementally to prevent the loss of that data when the application quits or is interrupted by the system. To do this, your application must take responsibility for managing the creation and saving the user’s content at appropriate times.

In other words, except in cases when you’re sending or receiving a document to another user (i.e. via e-mail), files and folders are as much developers’ concern as the Cocoa framework or the processor architecture. And even in the e-mail case, users are not to be exposed to arbitrary files so much as meaningful documents.

This approach seems obvious on the iPhone, but a little bit radical on the iPad. I think that’s because of a weird semantic fixation we have about iPhones as phones.

Palm tried for years to sell general-purpose pocket computers, but only really found a wide audience when they started integrating the Palm OS into smartphones.¹ Windows Mobile is a similar story: its predecessor OS, Windows CE, was mostly used on nerdy niche products like PDAs and ‘palmtop PCs’ until there were Windows-powered phones. And I shouldn’t have to tell you what happened with the Newton.

It’s been rumored that when Apple was first developing the iPhone, they were really working on what is now the iPad but decided it would be a good idea to release a phone first while they perfected the multi-touch user interface.

People just react differently to phones, portable game consoles and music players than they did to PDAs. A pocket computer that manages your e-mail, calendars is a nerdy indulgence. A cell phone that does those things, on the other hand, is luxurious, convenient, and cool. Even the iPod touch, today Apple’s top-selling product and the driving force behind the iPhone OS’s dominance in mobile software, seemed a little bit weird when it first came out, because it seemed more like a PDA than an iPod. Apple even intentionally removed apps like Mail from the OS for the first iPod touches, because they didn’t think anyone would want to use them on a device that wasn’t a phone.

The iPad has an even bigger hill to climb. It’s definitely not a phone. Arguably it’s not even portable. Several people I’ve talked to about the iPad believe it’s supposed to be carried around and used outside the home, even though in their ads and marketing photos Apple usually shows people using it at home, sitting on the couch.

It seems appropriate to call iPads computers, because like laptops they’re multi-purpose devices that run a variety of apps and aren’t pocketable. Definitely I feel like the iPhone OS approach — where the default input method is touch, and computery bits like file systems are abstracted away behind windows and apps — is the future of GUI computing, and the iPad is merely the first mainstream device to go there.

Obviously an iPad is not a phone, bit nor is it just a game console or e-book reader. It’s a multi-purpose device, like a computer, but it doesn’t have a desktop, windows, or an exposed filesystem. It handles many of the jobs we use computers for, and has similar technology at its core.

But I wouldn’t say the iPad is just a friendly computer that hides the filesystem. I would say that without a visible filesystem, an iPad is not a computer.

So, what is it? That’s the thing: we can easily describe what the iPad is not, but we don’t yet have a category for what it is. Maybe that explains why everyone is so perplexed by it.

The iPhone is just a phone and the iPod touch is just a music player, but despite being just a larger, more powerful version of those same devices, the iPad is something completely new.