Perhaps you’ve heard about Apple and EMI striking the first blow to crumble the wall of Digital Rights Management on music. I really can’t comment on the blessed event itself without tripping over somebody else’s analysis. There is one tangental point to all of this that I think is very interesting: this move will be a big step in breaking the walls of Apple prejudice in the minds of geeks.

A name like Craftsman to a carpenter is like the names Microsoft or Apple to a geek and there’s generally a sense of product loyalty (or repulsion) with either. In the case of Apple, a lot of geeks are still biased against the company for their previous history of proprietary technology and the decline in the quality of their products during the late 80s and early 90s. Recently Apple has been doing a lot of things that have been gaining back the trust and the iPod and the Mac have demonstrated that not only can Apple create some really slick products but that they can also do it in a way that is thoroughly standards-based. The proprietary nature of the iPod and iTunes ecosystem tied together with DRM was one of the last major arguments left.

Oh, and in addition to my post of March 23rd, add AAC to the list.

Lastly, I promise no more Apple-based articles for a while. I need to branch out into things I know a little bit less of.

Apple’s Proprietary Past Precedes Present Plans

Apple is often accused of using only closed standards. This was true 10 years ago, but a lot of things have changed since then. Unfortunately the closed nature of the iPod, iPhone, and iTunes music store have had a reverse halo effect on those who remember Apple’s past and aren’t looking at their present any further than their entertainment devices. While Apple computers have gotten easier to update since the transition to Intel, I’ll admit that the designs of some models make that somewhat difficult. Still, there’s much standardized love to be had in the Apple computer world such as:

• Apple has led the industry in the implementation of USB, Firewire, DVI, Bluetooth, and gigabit ethernet
• Every application in OS X can print to PDF
• OS X can host AFP, SMB/CIFS, web, SSH, and FTP services
• OS X reads everything above plus HFS(+), FAT(32), NTFS, NFS, WebDAV, ZFS (soon), and more
• All Cocoa-based OS X applications support Unicode
• OS X can connect to Active Directory, LDAP, and SLP
• Address Book exports to the vCard format
• Dashboard uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript
• iCal exports to the iCalendar format
• iChat supports the AIM and Jabber protocols
• iTunes rips to the MP3 format by default
• Mail uses plain text files (with some XML mixed in) to store messages
• Preference files in OS X are XML formatted
• Preview, OS X’s viewer, can read and save BMP, GIF, JPEG(2000), Photoshop, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA, and TIFF

I’ve been playing around with a neat little tip today that I thought I would share. I certainly can’t take credit for the idea but I like it enough that I’ll repeat what can be found elsewhere in the name of spreading the word.

The problem?
In a word: spammers. Grown in Petri dishes, their hideous forms climb directly from their incubation chambers directly to their computer room. Nobody who has looked upon their form has returned without their soul in tatters. Their sustenance doesn’t come from the vitamins and proteins that good, honest creatures take in. They thrive on the suffering of their victims and the hate that they generate. Through the wires of man they pull to them ancient energies long forgotten. Always in search of victims they constantly search for E-Mail addresses.

The solution?
Spammers, so hungry for their daily meal, want to find E-Mail addresses as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort. Therefore they don’t always look very hard. For example take this HTML link markup you might find on a webpage:

<a href=”mailto:jshmow@gullible.net”>Your name</a>

Did you see it? So did the spammer! Another victim’s productivity absorbed into a blob of advertising.

Moving on, the spammer tries another website:

<a href=”mailto:&#109;&#99;&#115;&#109;&#97;&#114;&#116;&#112;&#97;&#110;&#116;&#115;&#64;&#99;&#111;&#111;&#108;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;”>Your name</a>

The spammer squints, grunts, and moves on. When your browser looks at it however it says, “Oh my, I see we have a bit of a mess here. Let me just clean this up… there!” and when you click on the link it opens up a new message.

What’s going on?
If you look carefully at the second example you’ll notice a pattern. There is an ampersand (&), a pound (#), a number, and a semicolon (;). Together, they form what is called an HTML entity. In the encoded E-Mail, each character is replaced with an HTML entity. These are nice because they allow you to say you want a certain character just as it is without it being interpreted as something else. For example, the greater-than character (>) can be written in an HTML document as &gt; or, like in the example above, &#62;. These are both HTML entities that will display a greater-than sign without thinking it’s part of the HTML markup.

In the second example, we’re taking advantage of the fact that every character can be represented as an HTML entity because when spammers are looking for E-Mail addresses, they’re looking for at signs (@) and dots (.) and not ampersands, pounds, and semicolons.

Unfortunately this isn’t foolproof. Spammers get smarter all the time and there are almost certainly a number of them out there who know about this and have made the extra effort to interpret these E-Mail addresses properly. The nice thing about this technique, though, is that browsers have understood HTML entities for years so they won’t even flinch. This slows down spammers without slowing down people that want to E-Mail you as opposed to people who just want to E-Mail everybody.

How do I do this?
It’s easy. For each character of your E-Mail address, type &#number; where number is from the “Dec” column of this table.

Or if you’re lazy like me, you can use this script that I wrote. I understand if you don’t want to put your E-Mail address into that form. If you’re like me you don’t make a habit of putting your E-Mail address into strange web forms. If I were you I wouldn’t put my E-Mail address into my form either.

Bad Ruby jokes:

# The Enumerable Snowman
yeti.each { |y| y.growl }

Sorry… it’s late and I’ve been Rubying late into the night.