title: 1984 is here, and Apple is Big Brother link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/09/29/1984-is-here-and-apple-is-big-brother/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 628 created: 2007/09/29 13:39:12 created_gmt: 2007/09/29 13:39:12 comment_status: open post_name: 1984-is-here-and-apple-is-big-brother status: publish post_type: post

1984 is here, and Apple is Big Brother

A nice commentary on the new corporatist war against the consumer, in which Apple just scored a major hit for the corporate team, If you care about your rights, don’t buy an iPhone. The lead in is gripping:

Late last fall, the Library of Congress issued six exemptions to the Digital Millennium

Copyright Act, the far-ranging anti-piracy law that governs virtually all modern technologies. Among the exemptions was this: It is perfectly legal to unlock your mobile phone in order to move it to a cellular network of your choice.

The first response by the corporatists is truly “a shot heard round the world”, Apple’s “bricking” of modified and unmodified iPhones through a firmware update (the mods have been all the rage on the Internets because they allow users to break their Apple-required contract with AT&T and use another’s carrrier’s service). Again, the best commentary on this has to be from Salon’s Machinist:

Apple has now made it plain that anybody who buys the iPhone is not really buying it. What we’re doing instead is more like renting it — Apple remains your landlord, stern, controlling, and allowed to evict you at will.

Scoble, whose own son’s (unmodified) iPhone has been damaged, posted that Apple has a PR nightmare brewing. While I like Scoble, and think he’s always worth listening to, in this case I’m afraid that he, and other Apple owners, long ago succumbed to the Kool-Aid, and are now responding just as you’d expect a religious cultist to their great leader’s unmasking as evil incarnate. There won’t be any PR nightmare here, and Apple knows it, because it’s loyal minions will continue to buy their products undeterred by their idol’s abuse of its own customers.

How ironic that the company whose it’s break-out PR event was a commerical evoking the metaphor of Orwell’s 1984, with itself as the lone rebel against the computing Big Brother of the day, IBM, has now been revealed to have morphed into Big Brother itself.

(One blog I read on this had a link to the famous Applie 1984 video, which, of course, was in Quicktime format and required the plugin to view — which true freedom-loving techies like myself who run open source operating systems and browsers can’t access)

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo