For Katharina, Wherever We May Find Her

She wrote once and we wrote back. Now she's gone.

Get It Try It

> Hello Rixstep,

Hello Katharina!

We don't find you amongst our registered subscribers. Perhaps we should send you a copy? Would the Xfile collection be sufficient? Would you use it?

> https://rixstep.com/1/20210201,00.shtml
>
> as a Mac user I found this entry and I find it horrible what nasty methods are used to enslave the users. So no more freedom.

Oh agreed. You might remember that Jobs had an online discussion with a user who said that 'freedom to' was at least as important as 'freedom from'.

> Currently I still use a Mac with Intel processor and without T2 chip.

I'm not sure we have any of those T2s or would have an M1. I'm sure we don't want them. We were keen on the new gold MBA, sold at the same price as before, but after reading the piece by Jeffrey Paul...

> Your idea to remove this flag is a good idea, but as a user it is too complicated for me and it shows that this platform is not user friendly anymore.

Not much bother. Makes life a lot simpler. Just fire it up and forget it. Set it and forget it. :P

It's aesthetic as well. Our stuff exposes all that gunk, and it's messy, and it's not Unix. All you do is start Keymaster...

There was a culture clash in January 1997. The NeXT people didn't win. Jobs found it impossible to change the corporate mindset.

> In summary, Apple wants to go the same way with their M1, T2 chip and later as with the iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS devices. Totally dependent on network connection (central server), force online account for apps installation (App Store = central server).

Yes. Total control. Totalitarian control.

> Generally Apple mobile devices are already designed by default that user needs network connection to activate the device in 'Setup'. Do you know what that is? Why do I need to activate my iPhone and Apple TV in the Wi-Fi selection in 'Setup'? Why can't I complete setup offline like on my Mac (without T2 chip)?

Why? One can only speculate of course. And we have speculated. The speculation is it's a combination of at least two things, as is the case with a lot of stuff in even other fields. In the one case you've got the story sold to Joe Blogs. In the other case you have the real reason.

The story for Joe Blogs is it's 'for your security'. The real reason is - as always - $$$.

> I also have a very old iPhone 3GS and the same problem here too. The iPhone 3GS is worth $10.

Wow. Incredible. Terrible!

> For example I want to use only the camera app, clock app or notes app. So use the stock app of iOS because I know that these stock apps can be used offline. but I can't do it because of the general device activation in 'Setup'. Unfortunately I haven't found any good information what this devices activation is in iOS and other mobile products from Apple. Is this a license activation, like with Windows? If so, is the license activation different for Windows, because the user can activate the license later and has 30 days or a little more to activate it with a valid license.

We've specifically steered away from mobile as we have no interest in it. Sorry!

> Do you know if this year or soon a better platform and devices where the user has freedom, user-friendly and always privacy? Is there already development or what should I do now? How do you see the future?

As John pointed out, that's the question we're ourselves asking.

Twenty-some years ago, we started a Watership Down. Had to. Windows was too insecure and irreparable. We did this through our mailing list.

We were really at an impasse for a while. Red Hat Linux it'd be - but hardware? Everything we'd seen was crap. Then someone mentioned Apple.

We'd never even dabbled in Apple. Left field. But they'd bought NeXT and everyone knew about NeXT. And one thing led to another.

It was a strange marriage. No one in Cupertino had even used C, and everyone outside Cupertino knew what a mess Pascal was. Apple's Pascal code looked like IBM mainframe COBOL code - ALL. IN. CAPS. Sad story.

NeXT sleeps on Unix and Unix is a way of thinking and no one thinks like Apple and that's not a good thing.

But NeXT at Apple meant an opportunity to find a thin end of a wedge to drive into the Microsoft hegemony. Nothing against Microsoft - we've worked with them, can find them a bit strange, but they're nice guys - but we'd like the world to be safe. And it's not just the safety. It's the ability to not fill each day to 95% with security concerns and instead think about the possibilities of the WWW.

I myself was a late WWW adapter even though I'd used it in work. I couldn't see the point until I discovered email. Global communications. We made so many friends all over the planet. It was obvious security couldn't be a continual obsession. As Linus says of OSes: people shouldn't know they're there.

Finding an esoteric Linux distro means nothing. Getting behind a platform that can dominate for the betterment of humanity is everything. And that's what we saw in OS X.

We knew journos who'd been given free Macs and returned them. Why, we asked. They didn't like the graphics. But don't you realise what they're doing there, we asked. They have floating point screen coordinates. They have alpha channels. They use vector graphics, not raster graphics. The way the system looked is the least of your problems!

NeXT application architecture is unique and takes getting used to. But it's OK. The old Project Builder and Interface Builder were brilliant.

Why did Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian quit on the same day, one day before the 30th anniversary of Apple? They'd shepherded NeXT.

Apple could have taken the personal computing market. All of it. They didn't care enough.

The foundation of it all are two code frameworks, Foundation and AppKit. Their design is one of the high points in computing science. They're that well designed. And Objective-C is nothing short of brilliant.

NeXT took over management but the rank and file were hard core Apple fanboys. The counterrevolution began and the erosion of the frameworks was underway too. Sheer chaos under the bonnet.

Stagnancy after Jaguar. Panther was a ho-hum. Tiger introduced some weird stuff. Tiger was also when the R&D for iPhone began.

iPhone was a monumental feat but we hate phones. You can't tinker with a phone. All our lives we'd waited for the ultimate computing *appliance*. There it was and did it ever suck. You can't program an iPhone on iPhone. No bootstrap. No tinkering. So no interest.

Things started wobbly enough. Three iterations with everything running as root. Then something happened. Apple did a 180.

Sometimes evil can have symmetric beauty. The way Apple marketing married their two narratives was brilliant - and evil.

OS X was trashed. It kept getting worse. Developers can't work in an environment like that. If they wear red sweaters and have one application, or if they're located in scenic Portland and have two, then yes they might make it. The way Apple kept changing APIs and even macros on the fly, updates every few weeks, meaning everyone everywhere had to go back over old code and change it AGAIN...

Dark Mode was a bait 'n' switch. More draconian trashing of the core frameworks, bits and pieces ported from mobile code, havoc. Many people wonder 'is that possible?' The original Mac was a mess. Glue, string, and Frog Design. Same thing.

The upshot is 'what now?' And no one knows. You want a mobile? That's all most people want. We have no interest in that. Apple are within reach of a clue, the other companies aren't even that close.

The mobile is the end of civilisation as we knew it.

But freedom is the name of the game. The name had been 'privacy and security' for almost precisely twenty years. Now it's freedom - freedom from and freedom to.

We need freedom from hacking and vulnerabilities. We also need freedom to do anything we want.

Freedom from is here for the taking. Freedom to is nowhere to be seen.

All the best.

About Rixstep

Stockholm/London-based Rixstep are a constellation of programmers and support staff from Radsoft Laboratories who tired of Windows vulnerabilities, Linux driver issues, and cursing x86 hardware all day long. Rixstep have many years of experience behind their efforts, with teaching and consulting credentials from the likes of British Aerospace, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Lloyds TSB, SAAB Defence Systems, British Broadcasting Corporation, Barclays Bank, IBM, Microsoft, and Sony/Ericsson.

Rixstep and Radsoft products are or have been in use by Sweden's Royal Mail, Sony/Ericsson, the US Department of Defense, the offices of the US Supreme Court, the Government of Western Australia, the German Federal Police, Verizon Wireless, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Microsoft Corporation, the New York Times, Apple Inc, Oxford University, and hundreds of research institutes around the globe. See here.

All Content and Software Copyright © Rixstep. All Rights Reserved.