DRM - never works and a DRM-Free world is being herald in.

DRM is one of those misguided attempts to prevent piracy, developed based on mythical and unsound assumptions, and ending up hurting the consumers. This article refuted many myths propagated by these Music Industries and DRM vendors.

In the article, according to EFF's

In fact, argues Schultz, DRM drives some would-be paying customers to the music black market, because, to date, it's the only place where you can obtain music downloads that you can use without constraints.

A myth that is often used to justify the use of DRM is that the artists being ripped off by these file-sharers. According to this article:

Recording artists won't necessarily suffer in a no-DRM world. These are the struggling musicians who supposedly would be playing their guitars for tips in the subway, in the doomsday scenario, if music were distributed DRM-free. For them, however, the move to a DRM-free world is either good news or irrelevant. It may mean fewer sales for the top moneymakers, but the majority of recordings—85 percent according to the RIAA—don't generate enough revenue to cover their costs.

According to Todd Rundgren, a recording artist

is that artists don't see money from their recordings; we capitalize on music we have recorded by going out and performing live. It is actually more worthwhile to give your music away—and make it up in terms of ticket sales.

[...]

If it takes me a year to sell a million records and I made $1 million in royalties from that, I'd make that much in a week or so if I toured

The recent appearance of sites like http://www.gbox.com selling DRM-free music is a welcoming sign.

Evidence piracy helps record companies

The release of the e-mail from MediaDefenders to the Internet - it must be the sweetest revenge for file sharers - reveals evidence that piracy is actually helping record company.

Piracy is not all one way - it also benefits consumers

I have been tracking this argument that piracy is bad and hurting companies for quite some time. Evidence is now available showing that some form of piracy, others calling this in a less offensive term, Fair Use, is actually good for the companies. This is not surprising at all.

I do not have solid evidence but from experience, the loss of revenue attributed to piracy is probably money well spent than big budget advertising campaigns and trade shows. What benefit could one derive from a week's trade show? Giving someone a few copies of software is probably money well spent in spreading the words of it.

Piracy also has demonstrable benefit to consumers. The latest one is forcing Microsoft to cut the price of their Office suite for students and according to Microsoft

"It is also part of our drive to address piracy issues," Microsoft Australia education marketing manager Donna Magauran said.

Piracy acts like a ceiling setting a upper limit which a company can charge and that it could be tolerated by the community. Without the hackers, will Microsoft cut the price of Vista to 1/3 of the original price in China?

Lately, DRM is on the way out because it is offensive to customers and giving them a bad taste.

Portable devices preinstalled with Malware from manufacturers

Today, I was shown two portable devices - one was a Toshiba 4G memory drive and the other one was a portable ruggerdized hard drive made by I-O Data. On the surface, none of them is found offensive until you insert them into your machine. I was asked to get rid of the programs spawned by these device upon insertion.

This request was a warning to me of potential attack using autorun and so I examined it using my machine that has autorun permanently disabled for security reason, particular since Sony used this technique to infect user's machine before the user had any chance to decline installation of any software.

After inserting the Toshiba into my machine, it took up 2 drives letters. I was asked to eliminate the annoying programs that started automatically when they are inserted.

This is a good reason why you should disabled autorun permanently on all drives because none of these annoying malware runs up on my machine.

The Disk Manager gave this away. One drive letter was consumed by CDFS and the materials on this drive gave this away as being from U3.

The second partition was just an ordinary FAT partition. It is not U3 that I have found offensive.

The second device was a Japanese made 12G rugged portable hard drive. Once again it behaved like that of the Toshiba, except that it did not have English instructions with this devices. They are all in Japanese. Once again one partition containing their software was packaged in a CDFS.

What I have found offensive with this kind of device is their manufacturers' arrogance and dictatorial attitude in not asking their user if they want to configure the devices in that manner.

Their behavior is identical to that used by Sony Rootkit attack in not seeking user' consent in loading up all these software, no matter how useful the manufacturers believe in. Thankfully the U3 had provided a program to eliminate the u3 partition on the device and I quickly used it to get rid of that rubbish. But it did not come with that CDFS partition. I had to download from their site. The I-O Data was less friendly.

The only way to treat that kind of device is to send it back to the manufacturer for a refund. Don't touch it and consider them as being malware infected.

Anyone considering buying any portable device should examine the product description to determine if they are infected with this kind of anti-customer malware. If I buy a drive, a hard drive or memory drive, I want to format and partition it in any manner I want. Not forced upon by the manufacturer.

Sony is another company caught recently with this kind of stupid acts with their Microvault.

Because I turned off the Autorun, I minimized the attack to only losing a drive letter to that partition that was loaded as a CDFS. None of the Malware was started.

For those that has the default settings on allowing Autorun, the U3 will be automatically loaded on the Toshiba device because the CDFS has the autrun.inf.

On the I-O Data Portable device, it can be more damaging had I allowed it run the Autorun.inf. It would have loaded 3 programs: AutoCRD.exe, and two others as well as some DLL. All without seeking users consent.

Since these companies are so rude to their customers, people should avoid buying this kind of rubbish until they treat their users with respect. In the mean time turn off Autorun permanently.

If anyone knows of any general software to delete CDFS on portable devices, please let me know.

Unhealthy obsession with using executables - an example of Golden Hammer Anti-pattern

When one is obsessed with anything, it will lead to bad things - in life and in software development.

This is a real-life example of Golden Hammer Anti-Pattern [1]. The characteristic of this anti-pattern is the tell-tale signs of the blind applications of a technique without question of their validity and suitability. The story below will illustrate this concept and the harmful effect that not only has on the product but also the company culture.

This is a story of a product and suffice to say that it is a serious business application. The product has set out with a form of architecture and has for a while religious following it. However, this reliance on executable, most like came from Unix background, soon become an obsession developed into a Golden Hammer Anit-Pattern. Everything has to be an executable. COM is then used to support automation allowing one executable to incorporate functionality that is packaged in another executable.

To be fair, the product does have DLL's but they are not inproc server. Normally using COM local server is not a bad thing but when the organization is trying to put dialog boxes in a COM local server and trying to maintain the modality across the process boundary, the fool-hardiness of such obsession becomes obvious.

This obsession breeds bad programming practice. Since these local server are registered to be single-use, the developers blatantly abuse the use of global variables. Since there is no code review or mentorship, this abuse becomes cancerous making correction relatively expensive and limiting their options.

The obsession is repeated over a number of years and successfully infecting several generations of management and technical leads. No one has raised a question.

The authors [1] are spot on in explaining why this lemming-like behavior is developed:

In many cases, the Golden Hammer is a mismatch for the problem, but minimal effort is devoted to exploring alternative solutions.

This AntiPattern results in the misapplication of a favored tool or concept. Developers and managers are comfortable with an existing approach unwilling to learn and apply one that is better suited.

Further more, the authors suggest the causes of this are:

• Ignorance, Pride, Narrow-mindedness
• Reliance on proprietary product features that aren't readily available in other industry products.

Couldn't agree more.

Here are some of the harms in this obsession representing in real term missed opportunities to provide innovative product and to exploit new products/platform:
1) Because everything is packages as COM local server, the product is unable to provide correct user-experience reliably. Often forms packaged in another COM local server fails to sit on top of the 'owner' form (the launcher). Extraordinary amount of effects over the years are expanded on trying to fix this problem ignoring that a simpler solution using in-proc server would immediately fix this courtesy of Microsoft. Pride and Ignorance have a lot to do with the blindness in recognizing this simple solution.

2) Because the process isolation shields the developers of the harmful effect of blatant reliance on global variables, they even use global variable to do the job of the this pointer, an obvious sign of lack of training in OOP.

3) The obsession has produced a culture so blind that when they considered moving to .Net technology, as everyone did, they refused to concede the inappropriateness of the executable model in the .Net architecture. As most .Net developer would tell you that you cannot develop COM local server using .Net languages but you can for in-proc server. "Igorance" as the authors suggest the cause of this disease, blinding them so badly they ignorantly believing .Net Remoting is a replacement of COM local server that needs no registration.

Instead of taking time out "to exploring alternative solutions", they develop a technique to bend the .Net framework to maintain their obsessive behavior using .Net Remoting. This is chalk-and-cheese difference but to them this is brilliant.

The end results are excessive consumption of memory, slow start up etc. producing a laughable implementation that is neither .Net architecture nor Unmanaged COM local server one. Management did not even thought of the inappropriateness of their flawed architecture. Poor customers.

Had they been less blatant in using global variables, they could have easily transformed their code from an executable model to one using assemblies thus giving them registration-free deployment without being obese.

The authors [1] are perfectly in their observation and suggested refactor technique:

Philosophically, an organization needs to develop a commitment to an exploration of new technologies. Without such commitment, the lurking danger of over reliance on a specific technology or vendor tool set exists. This solution requires a two-pronged approach: A greater commitment by management in the professional development of their developers, along with a development strategy that requires explicit software boundaries to enable technology migration.

[snip]

In addition, software developers need to be up to date on technology trends, both within the organization's domain and in the software industry at large.... They can also form book study clubs to track and discuss new publications that describe innovative approaches to software development. In practice, we have found the book club paradigm to be a very effective way to exchange ideas and new approaches....

[snip]

... is to encourage the hiring of people from different areas and from different backgrounds...

Finally, management must actively invest in the professional development of the software developers, as well as reward developers who take initiative in improving their own work.

So true.

---

[1] "Anti-Patterns - Refactoring software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis" by William J. Brown, Raphael C. Malveau, Hays W McCormick III, Thomas J Mowbray

CBA Netbank UI gone from bad to worse

Further to my previous blog on the need to test UI on a number of Desktop settings, Commonwealth Bank of Australia's Internet Bank has just rolled out a new UI.

Sad to say that it has gone from bad to worse. See this layout distortion on 120DPI in IE6:
This is bad. The placements of all the controls are all over the places. When the same page is rendered in Firefox 2, the page layout is good compared to this.

Wooden spoon prize for CBA's Web developer.

Test your UI with a range of desktop settings

It is getting more and more common to see badly written UI that cannot handle different desktop settings. One reason is that most so called UI text book does not talk about DPI (Dots Per Inch) display settings.

Everyone assumes that it is always the default - 96 DPI. Sorry I have news for you. When you write a Windows program, there are certain things that belong to the users and there are things within your control. One of the things that is beyond your control is Desktop display settings but the operating system has functions to allow you to discover them and to react accordingly. The last bit is often left out by the programmer who then assumes the defaults or the same settings as their desktop.

To change this setting in XP, just bring up the Display applet in the Control panel, go to the Settings tab, then press Advanced button. In the general tab you can change the DPI settings. Many do not even know about this.

My development machine is always set to be different from the standard to catch violators - myself included. It can also work the other way - a program developed with 120DPI will not display properly in 96DPI environment.

So you need to test both and the best way is to use a Virtual Machine. Fortunately WinForm in .Net 2 has a built in facility to adjust for these.

Below are some bad examples.

From the internet banking department of one of the largest banks in Australia - Commonwealth Bank of Australia:When the 'menu' is dropped down, the distortion is more pronounced:

The bank's did not actually leave their customers in the dark. Here is a cop out from the bank:

Why do the navigation tabs within NetBank (i.e. View Accounts, Transfer Money, Bills, Admin & Services) appear to be so large or small?

This could relate to the Dots Per Inch (DPI) setting on your computer.

The normal DPI setting is 96 DPI. If you are using Windows XP the best way to check your DPI setting is as follows:

• Open Display icon in your control panel;
• On the Settings tab, click Advanced
• On the General tab, in the DPI setting list, click the DPI setting you want to use.

This is a real cop out because such demand is not necessary as million of other web pages can handle this issue without any problem. I suggest that it is their programmers' lacking the skill to deal with this. One of their subsidiaries' web page handles this perfectly.

On a smaller scale, the popular NantAddin for Visual Studio demonstrates a very commonly made mistake:

The almost disappeared OK and Cancel buttons are marked in red rectangle.