Friday, October 21, 2011

A Couple of Articles on Apps

The impact of Apple’s Siri release: From the former lead iPhone developer of Siri "For Siri to be really effective, it has to learn a great deal about the user. If it knows where you work, where you live and what kind of places you like to go, it can really start to tailor itself as it becomes an expert on you individually. This requires a great deal of trust in the institution collecting this data. Siri didn’t have this, but Apple has earned their street cred."

ars has a long article, How I learned to stop worrying and love the App Store. "Yet it's hard to see how to reconcile Richard Stallman's conception of user freedom with an app-store-based computing model. As an accomplished hacker, Stallman is more than capable of selecting the software he wishes to run on his computer, so he has no use for an app store. But most users are not Richard Stallman. Lacking his expertise, they likely benefit from delegating some authority over their software choices to a knowledgeable third party such as Apple or Google. What's needed, then, are mechanisms for users to delegate authority over their devices to third parties while holding those parties accountable for their decisions, along with a less autarkic definition of user freedom that leaves room for such delegation. This is a new problem for the software industry, but fortunately it's not a new problem for Western civilization. Centuries ago, western societies began to develop institutions and principles for delegating authority to third-party regulators while still holding them accountable for their decisions. These principles map surprisingly well into the app store debate. Here are four principles of liberal, constitutional government that can be usefully applied to app stores."

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