Month: April 2012

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Weekly Wrap 96: Plenty of chaos and a mysterious pump

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 2 to Sunday 8 April 2012.

T’was a short week in terms of writing and media production because it was the 4-day work week prior to Easter, I spend about 10 hours judging entries in the Lizzies, the Australian IT journalism awards — the finalists have now been announced, and the awards night is on 20 April — three and a half hours troubleshooting the ADSL connection at Bunjaree Cottages, and two hours restoring a website that a new developer had accidentally taken offline.

There was also a mysterious pump.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 132, “Cyberwar: don’t believe the hype”. Thomas Rid, reader in war studies at King’s College London, destroys some myths. I found this to be one of the more fascinating podcasts I’ve ever done.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday I was quoted in Harrison Polites’ story at Technology Spectator, A storm in a postbox, on the Australia Post’s new Digital Mail service and a similar product from Computershare. “I already have a ‘digital mailbox’. It’s called email,” was one of the things I said. “Why on earth would I want yet another information silo to check for so-called ‘important’ mail — by which they seem to mean bills and bank statements?” Plus some stuff about encrypted email.

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I’m in Sydney all this week, and the main blocks of work are a Patch Monday podcast to be posted on Tuesday and a 2000-word feature for ZDNet Australia. I daresay other stuff will turn up as well, but let’s focus on one stressor at a time.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: New Holland Honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), a daily visitor to Rosella Cottage but a bugger to photograph because they move so fast.]

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cPanel’s new EULA: more software industry arrogance?

[Update 16 April 2012: Early communications with cPanel indicated that their EULA may in fact have been unchanged, just presented again as part of the license activation — which would put a very different perspective on things. I added a question mark at the end of the headline at that time. Either way, their eventual official response indicates that this process might well be changed. That’s a win for us all.]

What is it with software companies that shove a multi-page contract in your face and expect you to click “I Agree” on the spot? Seriously, what level of ignorant arrogance does that require? cPanel Inc, creators of a popular web hosting management system, are just the latest in this conga line of suckholes.

(Note to fragile American readers: that’s a literary reference. Grow up and deal with it.)

This morning the shared web server I provide for clients had updated its cPanel/WHM software overnight. As it should. But I had to agree to a new end user license agreement (EULA) before I could even start to address an urgent maintenance matter.

I was far from impressed. If you want to change the rules, cPanel, you’ll bloody well give me the chance to consider those changes and decide whether I agree.

I just fired off this email. I await their reply.

Dear cPanel Inc,

I take serious issue with the way you have just handled the change to your end user license agreement (EULA) that came with the new version 11.30.6.7. of cPanel/WHM installed automatically overnight.

There is no warning of an impending change to the EULA that I can immediately see in either the news or blog sections of your website, nor was there any notice that I saw in the cPanel/WHM interface. You simply popped up the new EULA in front of people once the new software had been installed, giving them no choice but to agree or be unable to maintain their servers.

Forcing people to agree to a new contract on the spot?

This is appalling!

cPanel/WHM is not consumer entertainment software. This is operational internet-facing software used by businesses. The EULA sets out all manner of terms and conditions with operational, risk and security implications — not only for your direct customers but for their customers in turn.

To pick just two examples, you grant yourself the right to “access to any facilities in which the Software is used or stored, including without limitation the facilities which house the Licensed Server”, and to “copy, access, store, disclose and use cPanel Data indefinitely in its sole discretion”.

While there are phrases limiting those rights in some cases, you have not given your users a reasonable time in which to assess the changes, decide whether they will accept them and, if they are unhappy with them, to make other arrangements — let alone discuss them with their customers.

Maybe the changes are minimal. Maybe not. Did you provide us with a clear list of changes, explaining the implications? No, you did not.

Your customers face a true dilemma today. Do they roll back to the previous version of the software, knowing that it doubtless contains security flaws that have been patched in the new version? Or do they blindly accept your new EULA without being able to think through the implications for their business and their customers?

Your new EULA will not have been written overnight. Your lawyers will have taken time to consider it, and it will have gone through an approval process within your own company. Why did you not have the simple, basic courtesy to extend the same opportunity to your customers?

Not impressed.

I have pressed “I Agree” because I needed to perform an urgent maintenance task on my server. However I wish to make it clear that I have not, in fact, agreed to your new EULA because I have not been given a reasonable opportunity to consider it.

Your once-happy but now extremely unhappy customer,

Stilgherrian

Of course cPanel are far from the only example of this arsehattery. Who have you had to deal with lately?

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Weekly Wrap 95: Speaking of chainsaws…

My usual weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. This post covers the week from Monday 26 March to Sunday 1 April 2012.

Not so much media output this week, ‘cos I was dealing with a web development matter for a long-standing client, I researched one story that turned out to be a fizzer, and yesterday I got caught up in a cleaning the hackers out of a website. Plus I recorded tomorrow’s Patch Monday podcast early. Plus it hit the end of the month and I reckon my editors’ freelancer budgets had run out.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 131, “Your word is your log-in, literally”. Dr Clive Summerfield, chief executive of Australian company Auraya, talks about the state of the art in voice biometric authentication. Fascinating stuff from a great explainer.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

I won’t be able to lock in the week ahead until I talk to some people on Monday morning. However there’s a technical briefing on the NBN rollout in Sydney on Monday that might be useful to attend, and I’m thinking of sitting in with a team participating in the Cyber Defence University Challenge and turning that into a podcast. But, as I say, I’ll work that out tomorrow.

Friday, of course, is Good Friday, and I’ll be moving down to Sydney for a couple weeks while Bunjaree Cottages enjoys the busy time of school holidays.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up). The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Chirgwin with Chainsaw: Bunjaree Cottages proprietor Richard Chirgwin observes all safety precautions — although technically this photograph, actually a frame grab from a video, belongs to last week as it was taken on 25 March.]

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Talking total surveillance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

I’m speaking at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival in a free session on Sunday 20 May called iSpy.

Even before Google controversially demolished the privacy walls between its various products, we were already living in the total surveillance society. With every keystroke we are voluntarily telling companies, governments and heaven knows who else an awful lot about ourselves. Should we be worried about the uses to which this information could be put? Technology writer Stilgherrian discusses the implications of what we share with social media consultant Thomas Tudehope.

I daresay I’ll be covering material like that in my Sydney Morning Herald story You are what you surf, buy or tweet, and the more recent ZDNet Australia story The Facebook experiment, but the conversation will be up to you, the audience.

The theme for SWF this year is “the line between the public and the private”. As artistic director Chip Rolley says in his welcome message:

The question of the limits of what is personal is one of the hottest subjects around.

“Privacy is for paedos,” ex-News of the World journalist Paul McMullan told the UK Leveson Inquiry into the media. Now, via Facebook and Twitter, we voluntarily tell the world things we previously might not have told even our loved ones. Investigative journalists thrive on leaks and finding out what others don’t want us to know. And the state knows few boundaries (personal or political) in its need to prevent another 9/11.

(If you want a high-powered discussion of these issues, Sydney Town Hall discussion on Friday 18 May with former High Court judge Michael Kirby, former director general of MI5-turned-thriller writer Stella Rimington, former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle, media and news blogger Jeff Jarvis and investigative journalist Heather Brooke.)

iSpy is on Sunday 20 May 2012 at 2.30pm at the Bangarra Theatre, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay. It’s free, and you don’t need to book — but I’m told that it can sometimes get busy at SWF.

Before that I have speaking engagements on 27 April at DigitalMe in Perth and 11 May at the Saasu Cloud Conference 2012.