Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I apologize to readers out there who’ve been tryin to get to the site over the last couple of days. Apparently my blog host, Blog City, has been dealing with Denial of Service (DOS) attacks because of the elections. They indicated that the sites that were being attacked specifically were pro-Bush, so I guess that means Kerry/Edwards has the hacker vote! Which could come in handy if those voting machines are as hackable as some suspect! But really, such attacks are completely idiotic if they are indeed substantiated. Blog City is based in Scotland, hardly a bastion of conservatism, and hosts blogs of all political leanings. Cutting them down is hearting everyone and goes against the whole idea of the internet – everyone should get their say, no matter how much you disagree with them.

Update: Well, it does seem that Blog City isn’t the only site having problems right now. I’ve had issues getting to Boing Boing for some time now. Boing Boing, although not completely political in its subject matter, does lean to the left when it does express political viewpoints. So I wonder if there is just some general traffic issues with the net on a day like today or if there is indeed a movement by partisan hackers to take down sites they don’t agree with. Blah!

While this story broke last week, there’s been no more news since and I’ve been wanting to throw in my two cents.

T-Mobile still refuses to allow third-party developers to offer people the tools they need. It’s as if Dell were to lock down their PC’s and only allow people to install hardware or accessories that they decided (based on who knows what) they wanted to offer.

Mark/Space is the company that developed the sync product, and they actually did it many months ago. When Danger offered their latest Sidekick II through T-Mobile in September, sync was offered as an add-on for a nominal fee through Intellisync, but it was a sync solution only for PC users. Intellisync, as far as I can tell, does not make software for Macs. So there was great hope recently that with the offereing of PC sync for the Sidekick II, T-Mobile would finally approve the release of the Mark/Space sync for Macs. But apparently this is not the case, as MobileWhack quotes a message from the missing-sync-hiptop-talk mailing list at Mark/Space:

“Unfortunately we have not been able to reach an agreement with Danger, and at this point are not expecting to.”

Here we go again!

I owned a Sidekick for a year and a half until I finally made the move over to a Treo 650 last June mainly because I was fed up with T-Mobile’s refusing to release a sync solution for Sidekick users, even though one had been developed and was actually being offered by other providers who offered the Sidekick. Equally important, in my view, was the fact that the Treo employs the Palm operating system and one can download any and all Palm programs, which number in the thousands. Users don’t give up their support if they load these programs, and no one needs approval to develop or offer such to the users. This type of environment has proven to be instrumental in how popular Palm devices have remained, but also in how Linux grew in popularity. Heck even on the mainstream PC and Mac platforms, there’s no approval process. This seems to be one of the few environments where a company has decided to lock things down so tightly that it makes all the decisions and apparently it only wants to offer a small subset of what developers are creating.

What I don’t understand is why. Why does T-Mobile want to stifle development? Why do they want to hold this phone hostage? It seems to go against all marketing logic and the trends in operating systems and software. I can only believe T-Mobile has some clueless marketing people that want to cripple the phone because they want to control not only who it’s marketed to, but who it’s sold to. Perhaps Intellisync is working on a Mac version (although I doubt it since they don’t appear to have any other Mac products) and T-Mobile is keeping the competition down based on some earlier agreement? Who knows. At this point it seems pointless to guess anymore. T-Mobile is either clueless or completely mean-spirited, or both. They deserve to be abandoned not only for this, but for refusing to get it even after everyone in media and their user community has told them how idiotic they are being.

Luckily I don’t have to deal with this issue anymore, but my wife has a Sidekick II, and although we don’t use Macs, it still means that she has to deal with a phone that could be so much more than it is, but never will be because of this corporation’s utter stupidity.