Tag Archives: featured

In 2012, Apple introduced AirDrop for Mac OSX and with iOS, brought it to iOS, too. Unfortunately, AirDrop != AirDrop and you cannot use both together. While sending something from one iOS device to the other, and from one Mac to another, you cannot send a photo from your iPhone to your Mac. Because AirDrop for iOS is compatible with AirDrop for OSX.

Mind you, this incompatibility is most likely not due to technical issues, but rather a product decision Apple took. Why? The heck I don’t know.

Since the emergence of computers in your trouser pockets, we started to increasingly see usage patterns where one user would use more than one device at a time. Well, not AT THE SAME time, but near enough. Working on your notebook to quickly switch to your phone to take a photo of the mind map your team created that you want to include in the document you are working on. Stuff like this. There is many more of these patterns out there, and they include the whole lot of computerized gadgets that make up our surroundings.

So why, why, can I not send a photo from my phone to my notebook? What is the reason for Apple taking the decision to restrict multi device usage in this way?

This is taking place after a review undertaken in 2013 by former Director of Public Prosecution Lord Ken Macdonald concluded that while pre-register screenings are not feasible, leading to far too many false-positives and thus undermining the UK government’s support of free speech (and the European Convention), a post-registration filtering and screening process indeed would be feasible and would help Nominate to protect the public from being exposed to domain names like rapehimnow.co.uk.

The review indicates that 20 to 25 newly registered domains per week would need screening and of those none would usually be de-registered/reported to Police.

Lord Macdonald also hints at the obvious problems anyone who wants to automatically filter “bad” words faces: False-positives & context assessment. He even states some of the more famous examples of these issues in relation to domain names such as penisland.com.

While Macdonald repeatedly stresses the important of free speech in general and the question of taste in regard to censorship, he caves in (in chapter seven) and postulates that post-registration filtering and screening to weed out the odd, possibly unlawful domain name is worth it.

B for effort.

Side-notes

Originally aimed at “unlawful” domain names, Macdonald at one point concludes that ONLY domains with words related to sex crimes could possibly be filtered and screened. All other crimes are just to hard to detect. Huh.

In chapters 8 and 9, Macdonald explains PRSS (an automated system open to everyone who pays 400 GBP/a plus a large group of NGO and executive offices with which to query the .uk zone file) and defends (or tries to defend, depending on your point of view) why the Dispute Resolution Service DRS is not good enough to help in Nominate ongoing effort to keep the .uk zone file clean.

Read more at BBC, Nominate.

Photo by Pete Markham, CC-BY-SA.