It's funny how times change

Over the past few days, I've been going over the old Benscomputer.no-ip.org archives and have republished some of the content.

What's struck me as funny though, is how times change, but a lot of the issues remain exactly the same.

 Not that everything is unchanged. Back in 2006 I wrote a (very) short post on how Apple had taken another step towards vendor lock-in. What they'd done was to change their update mechanisms so that you had to use iTunes to update your iPod (prior to this, there was a standalone installer available - meaning Linux users could extract the update and apply it manually). In the pre-Iphone days, this was quite a big thing, although it wasn't the first step towards lock-in, it was a big change.

Contrast that to the level of control Apple exerts today. There's no (supported) route to load an app onto an iThing other than through the App Store (something which some predict will become the case with OSX too).

 

Privacy

The other collection of posts that caught my eye was the (many) posts I made about a company called Phorm (remember them?). It strikes me that not much has changed in that arena, except this year the outrage is about Security Agencies monitoring connections rather than a private company.

The technology, and the rules, may have changed in the arena of online privacy, but the game is very much the same. Some of the things I noted back then have changed though;

  • Google now uses SSL on all of it's services (rather than just for log-in)
  • Google is now much harder to avoid

Phorm's no longer operating their service in the UK (as far as we know), but they are still around!