New RSS feed testing!

If you're slightly adventurous and would like to test the new and improved MDJ and MWJ RSS feeds, here they are: New MDJ RSS feed New MWJ RSS feed We've implemented a bunch of changes to try to make issues more accessible to subscribers (and, in enlightened self-interest, reduce the amount of time we have to spend getting them to you if E-mail fails): The feeds are regular unsecured http feeds, which should solve the problems with numerous non-NetNewsWire newsreaders either refusing to read the feeds or not updating them properly. There's absolutely no reason the old way shouldn't work, but the fact is that in a lot of readers, it doesn't. The issues themselves, however, are still for subscribers only. The links go to the https secure site and require your user ID and password, but every reader we've tested can handle that (handing off to your browser if necessary). You can even read PDF issues on the iPhone! Each issue's entry includes links to the issue in both PDF and setext format, and the PDF is available both uncompressed and as a ZIP archive. This lets you retrieve any version at any time, even read the PDF version on the iPhone. The enclosure element still refers to the ZIP file - each item can have only one enclosure, and for compatibility, we've kept that as the ZIP-compressed PDF version. If you set your newsreader not to download enclosures automatically, you can choose which format you want on an issue-by-issue basis. This is the first time we've made uncompressed PDF and setext versions available other than by E-mail, and we know a lot of you have asked for it over the years, so we're pleased to roll it out. If you have any problems with the new feeds, please let us know through the normal channels. The previous RSS feeds are still there, and will be maintained at least until the PDF-in-E-mail changes noted earlier are implemented. Once everything is debugged, we'll adjust the old feeds to permanently redirect to the new ones, so those who don't keep up won't have to do anything - your newsreader will automagically pick up the new feed at the new place from then on. (Or should, at least. We've learned that what newsreaders do and what they're supposed to do are often two different things. But we remain optimistic.) # - Posted to MDJ, MWJ on 7/16/07; 9:13:15 PM

MDJ on iPhone is really cool

Well, we think so, at least. We can't really take sharp pictures of it, but try mailing yourself a PDF issue of MDJ or MWJ, making sure you don't compress it with Zip or StuffIt or anything else. Then read the message on iPhone - at the bottom of the page, you'll see an attachments button that lets you open and read the PDF right there on the phone, with the proper font rendering and everything. Frankly, this surprises us, but we're not complaining. OK, we're complaining about two things: iPhone's PDF reader does not recognize hyperlinks within a PDF document. You can see that something is a link from the blue text, but tapping it does nothing. Even though MDJ is presented in two columns, iPhone's double-tap-zoom metaphor does nothing but zoom the full page to fit the iPhone's screen. We even tried testing an older issue of MDJ that had PDF articles defined for the text, allowing Acrobat and Acrobat Reader to follow stories across columns and pages automaticcally. No dice - iPhone's PDF viewer knows nothing about them, so they don't provide any advantages. (Ironically, we stopped including the "article" features in MDJ and MWJ in 2002 with the new design because Adobe InDesign has no way to generate them from columns and text frames on the page. InDesign has its own PDF export that does a good job in many areas, but this has been a glaring omission since version 1.0.) We've always compressed MDJ and MWJ issues for delivery for a few reasons: The #1 error we used to get in delivery was "mailbox full," so naturally we want the issues to be as small as possible. In the days of Mac OS 9, compression was necessary to include HFS metadata, like the file type 'PDF ' and the creator type 'CARO', necessary to allow double-clicking the file to open Acrobat. When we started this 11 years ago, most people didn't have broadband services, and those outside the US were slower than those here. Downloading big files could take a long time. We've long considered ditching the compression and sending the file as MIME type "application/pdf" because Mac OS X's "Mail" application can display uncompressed PDFs inline, but that would have left people who want compressed files without options, on top of rewriting our software to do the new thing.</P. But now, since mail is so spammily broken to begin with, we have ZIP-compressed RSS feeds for people who want compressed files, and Apple continues to improve the experience for people using its products if we mail uncompressed PDF files. The RSS feeds are irrelevant to the iPhone - it redirects display of any RSS URL to Apple's "reader.mac.com" Web application, but reader.mac.com cannot access or display secure RSS feeds like ours, so at present, you can't view MDJ or MWJ RSS on the iPhone. Therefore, starting around 1 August (2007.08.01), we're going to change our delivery system to mail PDF versions of MDJ and MWJ without compression, as MIME type "application/pdf", encoded with Base-64. We'll also add a new "no E-mail" type of subscription for people who prefer compressed files in RSS - when a new issue is published, we won't send you E-mail at all, just let you find it in the RSS feed. (After all, if you want compressed files, it makes no sense to mail you an uncompressed PDF or setext version that you don't want. If you still want those, they're still available, on top of the RSS feeds available to all subscribers.) We'll announce this in MDJ and MWJ also, but since the "StuffIt file in a Binhex wrapper" format of MDJ and MWJ PDF delivery hasn't really changed in over a decade (except to move to the "newer" StuffIt 5 archives in the late 1990s), we thought we'd give some of you a heads-up in case you have mail filters, automatic processing, or anything similar. Most of you won't notice any difference except that PDF issues won't need to be decompressed before viewing. In most modern mail applications, you'll see an enclosure icon that opens the issue with a single click - and in iPhone, you can tap the enclosure to read it. The coolness factor there isn't going to wear off for a while around here. # - Posted to Administrivia, MDJ, MWJ on 7/4/07; 3:15:14 PM

Cult-like behavior?

The June 2007 New York magazine piece calling Steve Jobs "iGod," combined with iPhone hype, brings back charges of a "cult" of Apple and its followers. However, The Weekly Attitudinal, MWJ's right-by-definition opinion feature, took on this canard nearly a decade earlier. The Attitudinal examined actual scholarly definitions of "cult-like" behavior, and found that not only is there no "cult of Macintosh," but also that you could argue equally well that there was a "cult of Wintel." This is from 1998—no Mac OS X, no iPod, no iPhone, no Intel transition, so some of the references are a bit dated, but it's a good way to let you see where the Attitudinal has been on this issue all along. We don't update the online samples as much as we should, and sometimes it shows. For example, this month, we put MWJ 2003.05.25 into the subscribers-only MDJ and MWJ RSS feeds because that issue includes MacCyclopedia's primer on the HFS and HFS Plus file systems - a fine companion to the Attitudinal's exposition and takedown of ZFS as a "default" Mac OS X file system this month. What we forgot was that the issue was already available as a free sample of MWJ, in both PDF and setext formats. So everyone can enjoy it, while we work on the definitive answer on empirical vs. deterministic upgrade information. And stay out of the rain. We swear, every bit of rain that California's missing, we've found. # - Posted to In The News, MWJ on 6/28/07; 5:30:31 PM

The installer *probably* doesn't overwrite newer files with older ones

If the business news and security news and press watch is not your style, check out this MacFixIt page. The site has often recommended re-installing "Combo" updates to repair mysterious Mac OS X problems, but MDJ and MWJ have responded by pointing out that this could undo later updates - for example, replacing files from a recent Security Update with older, insecure ones. On Friday, MacFixIt insisted without sourcing that this was not the case. MDJ's publisher asked for sources, so the site's Ben Wilson tested it and found it to be true. That led to another technical diversion through a document that explains the situation, but for some reason is marked as "legacy" even though it seems to be perfectly true. We'll expand on it and clean it up for a future issue of MDJ, but if you want a little technical interlude and the answer to a long-standing question, check it out. There are a couple of other situations not mentioned there where the installer might replace a newer file with an older one, but the good news it that it probably works the way you want it to work. # - Posted to MDJ, MWJ on 4/28/07; 3:12:55 AM

Does your MWJ RSS feed seem stuck?

We have now received multiple reports from MWJ subscribers who have been checking the secure, subscribers-only MWJ RSS feed but haven't seen any updates since January. That's bad news - we're not done rebooting yet, but we've had several issues since then, including one last week, and they'll all vanish when MWJ's Book of Security is done (we see the light at the end of the tunnel, we swear we do). The culprit seems to be Safari RSS - even after emptying the cache and refreshing the feed, we're getting reports that it just doesn't update. We don't know why - when we try it, it works for us - but we can't fix Safari bugs anyway. Your MWJ RSS feed should have five issues of MWJ and eight issues of MWJ, ending (as of this posting) with MDJ 2007.04.04. If your RSS reader doesn't show you all of them, we recommend one that will - NetNewsWire or the free NetNewsWire Lite. Every time we've advised someone to switch to NNW from Safari, they've reported back that all of the issues show up immediately. Other readers may work as well, but we know NetNewsWire does, so if your reader doesn't show you everything NetNewsWire does, try again. We believed that Safari RSS and Firefox fully supported password-protected (secure, HTTPS authenticated) RSS feeds, but according to 37signals' FAQ for BaseCamp, they do not. They've apparently seen the same problems we have with Safari RSS appearing to work but not updating properly, and they also advise trying NetNewsWire (or NewsGator's Windows product, FeedDemon, if you're communicating on that platform). We apologize for any inconvenience in the software that we didn't write, but we're simply following well-established Internet standards, and it's a mystery to us why big programs like Safari and Firefox won't support them correctly. There's a free alternative, though, and we heartily advocate for it. Sadly, E-mail is so broken that we're going to have to rely more and more on RSS to provide you with information. Read last August's story for more details. There's nothing we can do when a huge number of mail servers simply drop messages and never tell us, but they can't stop you from reading the RSS feeds we provide you as part of your subscription! # - Posted to MWJ on 4/10/07; 4:29:52 AM

Writing is easy.

All you do is stare a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. —Gene Fowler Repeating that this hasn't been easy doesn't make it any easier on you or on us, but we implore you for just a bit more patience. We're essentially rebooting the entire operation and we're almost to the login screen. We'll make it a better metaphor within the week. # - Posted to MDJ, MWJ on 3/5/07; 4:18:21 AM

A reminder to MWJ readers - issues await you NOW!

We're well aware that the previous issue of MWJ was in early November 2006, and we're not trying to pull anything over on you. We've made no secret that the security topics we wished to tackle throughout the last half of 2006 kicked the crap out of us, and only in December did we start getting a handle on them and cranking through the topics. What we want to remind MWJ subscribers today is that, by policy, while MWJ is delayed, you get free issues of MDJ in MWJ's stead. If you want to read them, they're in the secure MWJ RSS feed to which we distributed usernames and passwords either on 2006.07.02, or if you subscribed after that, when you signed up. (Sorry, free trial subscribers - RSS access is only available with full subscriptions.) Just use the username and password we shared with you in Safari or NetNewsWire (or any RSS reader that supports both enclosures and secure pages) and you'll find every issue of MDJ since the last issue of MWJ was published. (The issues are only available to MDJ subscribers for the first 48 hours after publication, but as soon as we rebuild the feeds after that, they're added automatically to the MWJ RSS feed if the last issue of MWJ was published more than a week earlier.) Right now there are 26 pages of MDJ waiting for you, mostly on security but with a few other topics. MDJ 2007.01.09, just published, has another 11 pages of current news and product announcements for Macworld Expo week, and that'll be available in the MWJ RSS feed by <del>Wednesday</del> <ins>Thursday</ins> morning if MWJ hasn't been published by that time. We're really doing our best through the difficulties to provide you with as much information as we can, but we simply feel it's inappropriate to distribute issue of MDJ to you in E-mail because, well, many of you don't want that much E-mail. RSS allows us to make those issues available to you now, just a click or two away if you want them now. Please feel free, as the scripted text in the RSS feed says, to "download, decompress, and enjoy!" Updated: Thursday morning. Tuesday + two days = Thursday. We knew that. We think. It's very busy this week. (Does the iPhone have a calendar?) # - Posted to MWJ on 1/9/07; 5:48:23 AM

An RSS Update

Of course, a Security Update arrived while we were trying to write about Security Updates. That's just how that works. As of tonight, we believe we've fixed the MDJ and MWJ secure RSS feed generators to fix two problems: We're now using ditto to create the ".zip" archives, so they should unzip correctly on just about any Mac OS X system you care to try, and If the previous issue of MWJ was published more than week ago (when the feeds are built), it should automatically include all issues of MDJ published since that issue of MWJ (except those in the last 48 hours, as we originally noted back when we formulated this policy). When the next issue of MWJ arrives, the MDJ issues will vanish from the feed. With any luck, now that this code is completed, it won't run again for weeks or months. We could live with that version of "that's just how that works." # - Posted to MDJ, MWJ on 12/21/06; 1:33:30 AM

A quick 2006.12.18 update

MDJ 2006.12.18 is now in distribution - and we've verified that the ".zip" file in the secure RSS feed both downloads and decompresses properly. The setext version has a proper digital signature, too. If MWJ is not out by Tuesday night, MDJ 2006.12.18 will appear in the secure MWJ RSS feed. We still have to do that by hand, but after last week, we think we remember all the steps. After that, MWJ should return to a normal weekend schedule through the end of February, with one weekend off (though we don't know which one yet). # - Posted to MDJ, MWJ on 12/18/06; 5:43:12 AM

MWJ update read by some

We've had our heads buried in the upcoming issue for a while and forgot to post an update until a few of you reminded us - sorry. MDJ 2006.12.06 is now in the MWJ RSS feed to help tide you over. Long-time MWJ readers may remember May 2003, when MWJ seemed to vanish for a couple of weeks back before any health problems had come to the fore. The reason? MacCyclopedia was taking a complete look at HFS and HFS Plus, something we believed was necessary at a time when non-developer explanations of the Mac file system simply were not available. It took a long time, and not everyone agreed with that decision, but we were comfortable with the editorial decision. We've built on those concepts many times in the past 3.5 years, and will do so again this month with coverage of Alsoft's DiskWarrior 4. Right after WWDC 2006, we knew that the Macintosh story of 2006 was going to be security. We've covered the topic on and off in MWJ, including a few explanations of terms like buffer overflow, but it was time to take a much broader look at the issue. We set out to answer some of the obvious questions: How do you know if a "vulnerability" is serious or not? What was the deal with the "MacBook wireless hack?" How can data, like movies or JPEG files, be a security problem? When should I apply security updates? What's wrong with Safari's "Open 'safe' files after downloading" preference? And, of course, the big one: Is Mac OS X more secure than Windows? This is what we started assembling in August, even as the publisher's "flu" got worse and worse until it turned out not to be the flu at all, and that became the primary focus for a couple of months. That's how that had to be, and we all know that, though we still grump about it (especially him). But both before and after the major health problems, this security story has been kicking the crap out of us, and we're not too shy to admit it. It's not just that security reports change by the day - that's confusing, but we're used to changing situations. It's that our repeated attempts to put a narrative structure around these concepts failed, and failed, and failed again. Some of the above questions have only unsatisfying answers, as you'll see in our coverage. You can't always know certain details about security problems, and you must make the best you can with what's available to you. Discussing that process has taken more than we ever imagined, because every explanation tries very hard to slip into the Land of Jargon. You can find explanations like "the exposure for the vulnerability is predicated upon privilege escalation and user participation in adversarial activities," but it's a lot harder to find "You're relatively safe from this problem if you don't click on the URL or download the program. If you do, it could run with the same privileges as your user account. If you're running as 'root' and let this thing have control, you're totally screwed." Jargon is safe and comforting - passive voice, concept nouns, linking verbs. Jargon has no action - bad things "could result" from vulnerabilities that "allow" tasks "to happen." It's like the gag a few years ago in The Simpsons where Lisa tips off a local newspaper reporter that her brother and his friends are doing good in the community. The reporter says he has the perfect headline for it: "ACTIVITY PARTICIPATED IN BY SOME." It's not that we have to "translate" this, for we understand the concepts. It's that we fall into jargon as well because it's so familiar when describing security issues, even though jargon obscures the facts. It turns into page after page of deathless, impenetrable babble, and no one knows any more after reading it than they did before. You expect better from us, and we expect to provide it. We just didn't expect it to kick the crap out of us for so long. Some of the sections in MDJ 2006.12.06 (and upcoming in MWJ) have, literally and without exaggeration, been rewritten 15 times since August to cut out the cruft. The newer material hasn't had such extensive review, but we're looking at it very carefully. As Strunk & White say, "Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise." Zinnser adds, "There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough." Sound like any security writing you've read? A heap buffer overflow may be triggered when the Finder is used to browse a directory containing a corrupt ".DS_Store" file. An integer overflow exists in Perl's format string functionality. This integer overflow may lead to arbitrary code execution in Perl applications which use format strings unsafely. It is possible to create an X.509 certificate containing a public key that could consume a significant amount of system resources during signature verification. An attacker may cause a system to process such a certificate, leading to a denial of service. Sure, there are some subjects and direct objects, but not many. It's so familiar we don't even notice the writer passing the buck. Try these replacements: The Finder may overflow a buffer in its heap if it reads a corrupt ".DS_Store" file. A bug in Perl's "format string" functions overflows an integer variable when Perl code uses the functions unsafely, either accidentally or deliberately to exploit the problem and execute attack code on your system. Mac OS X's X.509 certificate verification code has a bug - it can get stuck forever during signature verification if the certificate contains a public key crafted to exploit this bug. A malicious Web site or other Internet resource could present such a certificate to the system, locking up the program that tried to verify the certificate, a "denial of service" problem. What may overflow a buffer? Finder (or, just as likely, the private "Desktop Services" framework that provides the Finder's back-end). In Apple's description, you can't know - the problem "may be triggered" when the Finder does something. Does the X.509 code have a bug? Apple only wants to say that "it is possible" for an unnamed someone "to create" a certificate "that could consume" system resources. But certificates don't consume resources. The code that verifies certificates consumes resources. That's where the problem lies - and that's what Apple (and every other company with security problems) conceals with the passive voice. It's not just about vigorous writing - passive voice hides the facts by leaving out subjects and objects. We want facts like "Pre-Teen Braves Restore Local Field," but we get "Activity Participated In By Some." We're trying not to fall into that trap, and it's taking time. Read the first part from your secure MWJ RSS feed and tell us how we're doing. This is MWJ's Book on Security, and we want it to settle as much as it possibly can. # - Posted to MWJ on 12/14/06; 2:11:32 AM

"But Steve Jobs' options really WERE worth millions!"

We probably should have expected people to respond to our previous trip down memory lane by complaining that Steve Jobs' 27,500,000 options of Apple stock, though underwater, were indeed "worth something" when Apple's board asked him to trade them in for 5,000,000 shares of restricted stock in March 2003. (Apple's SEC documents say that the board decided to reduce option overhang, not that Jobs asked to trade in the shares himself, so barring any evidence to the contrary, that's what we believe happened.) Alas, the evidence for this claim is the work of "compensation experts," specifically Graef Crystal, whose balloon of "All Apple CEOs are overpaid" has been deflated in MDJ and MWJ repeatedly for nearly ten years (first mentioned in MDJ 1997.04.11, when the "overpaid" CEO was Gil Amelio). As an antlered Mac observer said: As Graef Crystal has pointed out, Jobs was given the present value for the options in March 2003 using an industry-standard means of calculation. This value is calculated based on the strike price of the options, a price that was benefitial to Jobs. He received shares valued at $75 million. If he had received a less favorable strike price - such as that on the date he received the options - he would have received less in 2003. Parts of this are factually incorrect, and the conclusion is therefore unsupported by evidence. Jobs was not "given the present value for the options in March 2003 using an industry-standard means of calculation" anywhere but in Graef Crystal-world, where he's been inventing fantasy numbers for Jobs' compensation since 2000. Crystal and other critics continually try to value Jobs' options using the Black-Scholes method of determining the present value of a future asset. We covered this in MWJ 2003.04.15: Compensation columnist Graef Crystal has ridden this story hard, initially estimating Jobs's grant of twenty million options as worth US$471 million, and second 7,500,000 option grant as worth US$52 million. However, in a recent Apple-bashing column, Crystal estimates that the present value of the 27,500,000 options as of 2003.03.20 was about US$89 million, while five million shares of Apple stock that day would have been worth around US$74.5 million. "Allowing for some elasticity in the assumptions that go into the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, exchanging US$89 million of underwater options for US$75 million of free shares is pretty much an even exchange," he writes. And, as always, that's the rub. Option-pricing models use stock price statistics over time to put a present value on stock option warrants because people like to trade them, just as they like to trade all kinds of commodities. If someone offers to sell you an option to buy 100 shares of Apple Computer stock for US$30 per share in two years, it would be nice to have some history-based way to estimate how much that option is worth. But as experts like Crystal continually refuse to tell their readers, Jobs can't trade his stock options. If they're worth US$523 million, they're worth that only to Steve Jobs [in his own personal satisfaction]. Apple employees and directors cannot transfer their stock options; they can only sell the shares themselves once the stock options are exercised. Remember that: those 27,500,000 shares are worth exactly US$0 to anyone other than Steve Jobs. He can't even use them as collateral for a bank loan because the bank can't get the options and exercise them itself if he defaults on the loan. Option warrants that are traded have an estimated present value because if you buy the warrant, you can exercise the options. If you took possession of Jobs' options, they'd automatically be cancelled. This makes trading them more difficult. Compensation henny-pennys usually also usually have a fluid concept of time. They tend not to mention that the Black-Scholes model estimates a value for the option on the last day it can be exercised. Jobs' options are good for either seven or ten years, so if they're worth US$523 million, they're worth that much in 2009 or later, not before. Also, as noted above, Jobs doesn't receive the five million shares for three years. Crystal's calculation that five million Apple shares are worth US$74.6 million is based on the fact that, as of the date of calculation, they were trading at US$14.91 per share. That's manifestly irrelevant: Jobs doesn't have the shares today. Nor does Crystal bother to estimate what the stock price will be in three years when Jobs actually gets the shares. It's much more fun to throw around large but irrelevant numbers to use in denouncing Apple and Jobs. Crystal's animosity towards Jobs' compensation is, well, crystal clear: he calls the 20,000,000 option grant "the largest option grant made on a single day in the history of mankind," because comparing it to thousands of years of civilization makes it look a lot worse than comparing it to the three decades or so that options have been granted as compensation. Jobs' option grants might have been worth US$523 million had they been tradable or salable, like standard option grants are, but they were not. They were only worth any money at all if he was still an employee of Apple Computer at the time they vested, barring any extraordinary event like a "poison-pill" anti-takeover strategy that makes all unvested options vest immediately so existing directors can fight a hostile raider. Their value on the "open market" is manifestly irrelevant because they could not be traded on the open market. While we understand the desire to place some value on such option grants for the purposes of seeing who gets paid more or how much it may cost the company "someday," it is not useful to live in the Land of Make-Believe where King Friday XIII can magically make restricted options tradable on the open market. Methods like Black-Scholes are realistic for an option contract you can buy or sell, but not for one that you can't. It is particularly galling for Crystal to blast Jobs for having made this exchange in 2003 because, in 2003, Crystal said that the options-for-restricted-shares exchange proved that Jobs didn't believe in his company's future and that he should not have taken it. Again, from MWJ 2003.04.15: Crystal gets some numbers right, but draws questionable conclusions from them. He writes, "Jobs' acceptance of this exchange implies that he isn't particularly bullish about his company's future. Comparing his 5 million free shares to his 27.5 million option shares, if Apple's stock price were to rise to US$44.85 a share, just about what it was in January 2000 when he received his first grant, he would break even between the two alternatives. If the stock price rose above US$44.85, he would be shown, in retrospect, to have been foolish in making the exchange, because the 27.5 million option shares would be worth more than the 5 million free shares. On the other side of the price spectrum, any future price less than US$44.85 would vindicate his judgment in taking the 5 million free shares." This presumes, as most pundits do, that Jobs is in it for the money, but there's just not much evidence of that. Crystal derides the title of the press release, "Apple enhances corporate governance," because he considers giving Jobs five million free shares to be a horror somewhere near the scale of Enron. And his calculations are correct: at any price below US$44.85 per share, Jobs makes more money on the new deal than he did with the much larger option grants. However, Apple said that the point of the exchange was to reduce option overhang, defined as the number of stock options granted and outstanding expressed as a percentage of outstanding common stock. Apple Computer has far fewer shares outstanding than most of its competition, somewhere around 360,000,00 shares. Microsoft, thanks to repeated stock splits, has around 10,700,000,000 shares outstanding; Dell has 2,580,000,000 shares outstanding, or seven times as many as Apple. The 27.5 million shares Jobs had options to exercise were a significant overhang on the company, around 6% of all outstanding shares and options. The options that Apple expects employees to trade back in are another 1%, for a total overhang reduction of over 32,000,000 shares. Crystal refuses to even consider this as a motive for the company's actions, even though Jobs has repeatedly refused to exercise his options, has declined all salary beyond US$1 per year, and has accepted no actual compensation in almost six years of leading the company other than an admittedly expensive Gulfstream V jet. So far, Apple's total compensation expenditures on Jobs amount to just over US$90 million in just under six years, or around US$15 million per year. That's certainly high, but nowhere near the top of the compensation list – and admitting that would deprive Crystal of a favorite target, so he doesn't. So why didn't Jobs just give up the options completely? Jobs' conduct over the past several years indicates that what he really wants is to run Apple Computer the way he wants to, and to be respected and recognized for it. Accepting a huge stock option grant is a headline-grabbing way to say Jobs is worth millions of dollars without actually requiring Apple to spend a single dollar – as long as Jobs doesn't exercise any of the options, and he hasn't exercised a single one since joining the board. However, if Apple announced that he had "voluntarily cancelled" 27,500,000 stock options, the entire business and technology press would put on their Kremlinology hats and immediately conclude it was a rebuke by the board. Why would they take back potentially millions of dollars worth of options if they weren't unhappy with Jobs? Canceling that kind of grant without replacing would be seen as punishment, no matter how Apple tried to present it. Similarly, Apple couldn't simply reprice the options, because the goal isn't to give Jobs more compensation (according to the board's statements), but to reduce overhang. Repricing 27,500,000 options wouldn't accomplish that, nor would it be easy to find some smaller number of options to issue Jobs that would reduce overhang and not be seen as a big financial take-back. As Crystal reports, the swap is basically a wash if the share price in three years is US$44.85 per share. If the price is actually higher than that, no one's going to call Jobs an idiot for engineering a massive stock price increase just because he doesn't become another billionaire from it. All the numbers in the quotes are after the 2000 two-for-one stock split, but before the 2005 two-for-one stock split. In today's numbers, the break-even point was US$22.43 per share. Apple's stock was well above that price in March 2006 when Jobs' restricted shares became unrestricted, so as Crystal points out, Jobs lost millions of dollars by exchanging the options for shares. Perhaps most tellingly, we're sure Crystal doesn't want you to notice that in October 2006, he writes: I calculated the options' value based on the Black-Scholes model. And what do you know, my estimate of their present value at the time they were "voluntarily" surrendered was $77 million, a figure almost identical to the value of the shares given to Jobs. But thanks to this link from the MWJ excerpt, we can see what Crystal actually wrote at the time, and guess what - it's not the same! By my estimation, the value of his two option grants, measured at the time of their grant, was about $523 million. By March 20 this year, the present value had declined to about $89 million. Allowing for some elasticity in the assumptions that go into the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, exchanging $89 million of underwater options for $75 million of free shares is pretty much an even exchange. This fits Crystal's decade-old pattern perfectly: no matter what Apple pays a CEO, he gets plenty of attention for pointing out that it's too much. At the time the options-for-restricted-shares exchange occurred, he said the "present value" of Jobs' stock option grants was US$89 million. Today, when he's much more interested in portraying it as an "absolutely even" exchange to validate his option pricing scheme, he retroactively drops his estimate of their March 2003 worth to US$77 million. He does this, by the way, in a column accusing Apple of manipulating past numbers to make the company look better. Valuing Jobs' options using Black-Scholes or any other method, maybe even ones that value them only on the very last day they can be exercised, might be useful for keeping score. It just bears no resemblance to reality - the value of an option contract that you cannot legally sell to anyone else is $0. Furthermore, quoting Graef Crystal on the ethics of Apple compensation is like quoting Steve Ballmer on how much music on your iPod is "stolen" - he is pushing a definite agenda and hopes you're not going to notice. We noticed. (We appreciate the links from around the Internet and encourage everyone who finds this interesting to sign up for a free trial subscription to MDJ or MWJ, but we mention that this post comes from our editorial staff - no single person is credited with authorship of the MWJ issues in question or this message.) # - Posted to In The News, MWJ on 11/3/06; 12:42:34 PM

The reality about Steve Jobs and stock options

We're not going to spend more space right now in MDJ or MWJ refuting items that were obviously false months ago, but it is disappointing to see Dave Winer appear to endorse a story about Apple's backdated stock-option controversy, quoting a passage that says "Apple will end up being a model case of how NOT to handle such affairs, and Intellectual Dishonesty will have cost the company more than dishonesty itself." The actual story, from Mark Anderson of the "Strategic News Service," claims that Steve Jobs did benefit from backdated stock options because he later traded in all of his options for shares of restricted stock, and they wouldn't have been worth as much if they hadn't been backdated. This isn't "intellectual dishonesty" from SNS as much as it is "intellectual laziness." First, as noted in MWJ 2003.04.14, not long after Jobs traded in his options for shares, all of Jobs' options were underwater at the time. Even the ones that hadn't vested were still underwater. Jobs exchanged 27,500,000 options that were almost all vested but seriously underwater for less than 20% as many shares - 5,000,000 - that he would not be able to sell or vote or do anything with for three more years. To argue now, three and a half years later, that Jobs benefited because these options were underwater by US$30 per share instead of US$32 per share doesn't pass the laugh test. In fact, as of the day Jobs made the switch (2003.03.19), it would have been a net loss for him if Apple's stock didn't pass US$44.85 per share by the time the shares vested in March 2006. As of the day of the options-for-future-shares exchange, Apple's stock closed at US$14.95 per share. If Apple's stock didn't at least triple in a three-year period, Jobs would lose money on the exchange. This is the transaction that SNS now says "benefitted" Jobs because his never-exercised, heavily-underwater options could have been two or three bucks more underwater per share. Second, all this presumes that Jobs is interested in selling Apple stock or exercising Apple's options. There is not one piece of evidence to support that idea - not a single one. For this, we quote from MWJ 2006.08.05: Early reports seemed to zoom in on Jobs' 2000 stock option grant, the one that was for 20,000,000 shares by the time he exchanged it for restricted shares in 2003, thanks to the February 2000 2-for-1 stock split. The famous grant captured media and analyst attention after Apple's announcement, even though no one could explain why it might be irregular. In fact, it doesn't look bad at all: Apple granted the options to Jobs on 2000.01.12, and announced it just one week later, on 2000.01.19. Unless the company was scanning a much larger period but chose to backdate the options by only one week, there's not much "there" there. Observers looking for some hint of backdating seem to have forgotten about Jobs' second grant – 7,500,000 options with a striking price of US$18.30 per share (or US$9.15 per share in today's split-adjusted pricing), awarded on 2001.10.19 because all of the previous 10,000,000 (pre-split) options were underwater. The potential problem? Apple didn't reveal the grant until an SEC filing in March 2002. Using prices in today's shares (after 2-for-1 splits in both 2000 and 2005), an examination of Apple's stock prices finds that during the window between 2001.10.19 and 2002.03.22, Apple's stock closed between US$8.78 and US$12.73 per share. For example, on 2002.03.04, Apple's stock closed at US$12.15 per share, a full US$3 per share higher than Jobs' option striking price of US$9.15 per share. If Apple's board actually awarded the options in early March 2002, but backdated them to 2001.10.19, it would have made Jobs' grant worth US$45 million more than had they been awarded on 2001.10.19. Before you shout "j'accuse!" at this revelation, you should realize there are plenty of problems with this theory. First, if Apple's board tried to backdate options to give Jobs more money, then why didn't the directors pick one of the four other dates in that same window when the closing price was lower than US$9.15 per share: 2001.10.23 (US$9.07), 2001.10.29 (US$8.81), 2001.10.30 (US$8.80), or 2001.10.31 (US$8.78)? Two trading days before the grant date, Apple's stock closed at US$8.49 per share (2001.10.17); two weeks before that, the stock closed at US$7.49 per split-adjusted share (2001.10.03). If the directors were willing to backdate six months to give Jobs an additional US$45 million, why not an additional three weeks when that would have added another US$24.9 million to the same grant? Second, you must consider that Jobs has not exercised a single option or sold a single share of his Apple stock since returning to the company, except in March 2006. We explained that at the time on the MacJournals-Talk mailing list, currently on hiatus. Jobs sold almost half of his shares of Apple stock, starting on 2006.03.19 (yes, a Sunday), at US$64.66 per share. As of that week, Jobs completely owned 10,000,004 shares of Apple stock. Jobs received 1,500,000 shares of Apple stock in late 1996 for selling NeXT to Apple Computer, and according to former CEO Gil Amelio's book On the Firing Line, Jobs promised not to sell the shares for six months to avoid undermining public confidence in Apple. Amelio says that Jobs professed to understand how important it was to hold that stock longer than six months. Instead, just as he had sold all but one share of Apple stock after being evicted from the company in 1986, Jobs turned around in 1997 and sold all but one of his new shares as soon as the six-month period had elapsed. The sale, at near record-low prices for Apple stock, hurt investor confidence in Apple and helped usher Amelio out the door nine years ago (MWJ 1998.04.06). That one share turned into four shares with 2-for-1 stock splits in 2000 and 2005. That was all of the stock Jobs owned until March 2006, when his restricted grant of 10,000,000 shares (not options, and doubled from 5,000,000 thanks to the 2005 split) vested in full. Once they vested, though, they became his personal property. As far as the IRS is concerned, a gain of 10,000,000 shares at US$64.66 per share is income of US$646,600,000. That makes for a hefty tax bill that has to be paid in cash, not in shares of stock. The SEC recognizes that this happens. Company insiders (executives and directors) are required to notify the SEC and the public when they sell shares of stock so that there's no secret insider trading. Every year, around the time of Apple's annual meeting, another round of executive stock options vests, and there's a slew of SEC Form 4 filings as Apple's executives turn those restricted options into actual Mercedes-buying cash. Jobs had never done this, and his own filing showed that his sale wasn't the usual kind. Form 4 has a "transaction code" in section 3 of Table I, and it's almost always either "P" (purchase) or "S" (sell). For Jobs' transaction, the code was "F": "Payment of exercise price or tax liability by delivering or withholding securities incident to the receipt, exercise or vesting of a security issued in accordance with Rule 16b-3." That rule lists exemptions to filing notice of insider trading; Apple's grant of shares to Jobs qualifies because Apple's board of directors approved it. It means that Jobs didn't have to file Form 4 when he gained ownership of the shares. In short, Jobs sold 46% of his new Apple shares to pay the taxes on the 54% that he kept. Even if Jobs had US$295 million in cash lying around, he probably didn't want to spend it on taxes just to preserve shares that he hasn't shown any interest in exploiting for nine years. Other than this tax obligation, Jobs has neither sold shares nor exercised options on Apple stock [since taking over as interim CEO in July 1997], not on a single share, even though they were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Jobs' history with Apple shares strongly suggests that he views [options and shares] not as liquid assets, but as recognition of success and as power chits. Jobs doesn't seek compensation from the companies where he works, and recently made news by refusing compensation for his service on the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company. (Disney's board had to modify the director compensation policy to accommodate Jobs – the existing plan had no provision for a director declining to be paid. The SEC filing about the change tipped off the media.) Jobs holds on to the stock of companies where he works, and sells it only in dramatic gestures when he's not in charge and things aren't going his way. It wouldn't surprise us for Jobs to sell all but one share of his Disney stock if he perceives management as fouling up his Pixar legacy. Given all this, it just doesn't make much sense to believe that Apple's board would go to such lengths to backdate options for a man who obviously didn't care to exercise them anyway. As long as Jobs is in charge of Apple Computer, he has no interest in selling stock or options. Given these facts, what does Mark Anderson of SNS say about it? Here is my conclusion: I think (and I have no direct evidence for this, other than the behaviors and quotes from those involved) that Steve Jobs was aware of the practice, did personally benefit, and had some role in the granting and dating of those options. So, Anderson says if certain things had happened that didn't, and if Jobs had done something that he didn't do, then the statements that Apple made about what really happened would be false and Steve Jobs is in legal trouble. We were talking about "intellectual dishonesty?" # - Posted to In The News, MWJ on 11/1/06; 7:53:59 PM

Something you can do to help

[Note: This item was originally posted on September 28, but for some reason, it keeps vanishing. Restoring it occasionally bumps it to the top of the home page, but unless you see an "Update:" at the top or bottom, there's nothing new for those who've already read it. Sorry for any inconvenience.] We're all extremely grateful for the E-mails and other things that have poured in since Matt first discussed his diagnosis of heart failure, and the new batch that came in today after it was disclosed in MDJ 2006.09.28. Many people have asked if they can do anything, no matter how small, and after reading today's E-mail, there is one thing everyone can do that would help us tremendously. Stop using StuffIt 7 or 8. Seriously. We've distributed the PDF versions of MDJ and MWJ as binhexed StuffIt archives for over ten years, because until the days of Mac OS X, that was the best way to save bandwidth while preserving the "PDF " file type and "CARO" creator type necessary to allow double-clicking the issue files. In the past couple of years, readers have requested a switch to Zip archives because they're easier to decode on other platforms. We would have preferred switching to StuffIt X because, frankly, it makes smaller files, and we're all about saving bandwidth - but the free StuffIt Expander for Linux can't decode these files, and a few people do process their E-mail on Linux boxes, so we've resisted the temptation. But for some reason we don't really understand, a lot of people seem to have stopped paying attention to StuffIt when Apple stopped bundling it. StuffIt 7 was released over three and a half years ago, and a lot has changed on Mac OS X since then. That was pre-Safari, for pete's sake. StuffIt 9 (released two full years ago, before Tiger) added important new decompression algorithms to keep up with the latest in Zip technology, as well as to support new StuffIt features. We know that Aladdin/Allume/Smith Micro has not always made upgrading StuffIt easy, especially if you want a new Expander while keeping the functionality of an older paid version. Some versions of Expander installed a "replacement" StuffIt framework that made older paid versions stop working. Even today, Smith Micro requires you to provide your E-mail address to get a link to the StuffIt Expander download page, and notes that by doing so and clicking the links, you are signing up for an opt-out mailing list about new products. We're glad that you're no longer forced to download the entire "StuffIt Standard" product and install it for evaluation just to get Expander at all. Even so, this is the kind of behavior that has dropped Expander from a "must-have" to "must-tolerate" product. Nonetheless, if you use StuffIt Expander, you are well advised to use a current version. If you're unwilling to try the brand new Expander 11.0, the same download page offers Expander 10.0.2. If you have multiple versions already, we advise that no one use any version of StuffIt Expander older than version 9.0.2. Version 9.0.1 and earlier simply cannot expand all modern StuffIt and Zip archives. If you're not using at least version 9.0.2, you need to update, or alternately, accept that there are archives in the wild that you cannot decompress - and some of them may come from us. Paying for StuffIt is no longer a no-brainer (we hope to take a full look at version 11 in an upcoming issue of MDJ and MWJ), but that doesn't obviate the need to stay up-to-date if you do use the free StuffIt Expander. We try to stay up-to-date on lots of tools to get the smallest files possible, and we simply cannot guarantee that we can create files that old utilities know how to decompress. It's more of a pain than it should be, but one of the best ways you can help us deliver issues to you is to have a current (i.e., 9.0.2 or later) version of StuffIt Expander. We hope to make Zip archives that either the command-line or the Finder can decompress, but even that may require current versions of those programs (i.e., Tiger or later). The best way to make sure you can decompress anything that anyone creates is to use StuffIt Expander 9.0.2 or later. Just that simple change would probably drop our support E-mail by 25% per month, believe it or not. Oh, and if you're unhappy with current StuffIt offerings or practices, tell Smith Micro. Be specific about what you don't like and what you'd like to see instead. We know they want to hear from you. # - Posted to MDJ, MWJ on 11/1/06; 10:54:31 AM

MWJ expected soon

We don't think we'll get Saturday morning delivery of MWJ, but we do anticipate an issue this weekend. Meanwhile, we've added the last two MDJ issues to the MWJ RSS feed available to all (non-trial) subscribers. Clarification: Sorry, our bad - some uncaught US-centricism in that last paragraph. This is a holiday weekend in the United States ("Columbus Day"), and we're targeting late Monday for MWJ. Sorry we didn't make that clearer. Update: We didn't make it, alas. The publisher is still working to get all of his energy back and reset the schedule to something more writing-friendly (that is, less time available during daylight where people demand his time and more time available otherwise). We're really trying, folks. # - Posted to MWJ on 10/6/06; 11:28:12 PM

A few answers to current questions

I last got MDJ or MWJ on such-and-such a date. Has there been an issue published since then? Our status page lists the current issues of both MDJ and MWJ, including issue sizes, and when distribution began - and it's been there (and up-to-date) for more than five years. Unless your or our Internet connection is down, this information is always instantly available to you. As of this summer, subscribers can also get the same information in their secure RSS feeds. We sent this information to all current subscribers in June, and it's been part of the "Welcome to MDJ" (or 'MWJ') letter for all subscribers since then. See here for more information about how difficult it's proven to be to tell people about this. Have you published anything since then? We published over 30 pages of on-the-spot information from WWDC 2006 right here, available to all MDJ and MWJ subscribers. See here for our attempts to tell people about this and how they seem to not have worked very well. We've also provided a few updates on this news blog, including an article on why E-mail is broken, and why we can't use it to tell you things the way we'd like. It's not a standard "issue," but it's still a significant amount of material that some of you didn't seem to know about. Where's the next issue of MWJ? We're sorry if we haven't made this very clear somehow, but due to problems with the ventilation in our office, working here this summer has made staff members seriously ill. We're talking emergency rooms, chest X-rays, heavy-duty prescriptions for weeks on end, significant respiratory distress, inability to sleep due to breathing problems, extensive coughing fits, multiple doctor visits - seriously ill. We haven't been trying to emphasize this because, honestly, there's really nothing more boring than stories about how other people are sick, is there? But from the questions we're getting, we apparently need to make clearer that the fungus in our office this summer is not like a day of a hay fever attack - it was a continuous, slow-to-build, undiscovered source of poison in the air we breathe. At this point, we're basically just extremely lucky that more staff members didn't get even more ill than they did. The most distressing thing about it is that when it was just getting started in June and July, and we had no idea what was going on or how serious it was, we kept spending more time in the office trying not to fall behind. The symptoms were of allergy attacks (not infections), and it seemed perfectly reasonable to go slow in front of a computer instead of at home on bedrest, so we kept trying to get more work done - and every moment we tried, we were getting even more seriously ill and had no idea. This does not heal instantly. We've had the ventilation fixed for nearly a week, but the staffers who work here are still having severe coughing fits and other symptoms of the toxins clearing out. (This is similar to what Matt experienced near the end of WWDC, he says - after a week away from the bad ventilation, he felt like he was getting worse, but now he realizes his lungs were just trying to expel the last of the nastiness.) It really has been a nasty episode, and we're still amazed that we managed to get MDJ 2006.08.30 out the door (now available to all MWJ subscribers in their RSS feeds). We're hoping to get on a regular schedule next week, and we're planning to spend time away from the studio Friday and Saturday to help make sure things are on track. (That is, if being outside for a long spell and then coming back to the studio makes us feel worse, it's a good sign something is still wrong. We have felt significantly better this week, but a sanity check seems like an excellent idea. We have follow-up doctor appointments this month as well. There's really only one thing we want to do more than get back to a June-style schedule around here - we hope you miss us for the same reasons we miss providing the high-quality information and reality check you expect from MDJ and MWJ. That one thing we want more? Unobstructed, regular, oxygen-rich breathing. Once that happens, the rest should be a cinch. But how come I haven't seen any traffic on the MacJournals-Talk (or, as some still call it, MWJ-Talk) mailing list? The discussion list has been unavailable for months due to abuses of the honor system, and with everything else going on, we have not had the time to try to complete the work tying it to the subscription database. If you didn't know this, please let us know how we could have communicated it better other than trying to send E-mail to everyone, which has its own set of problems (again, see here for more information on those problems - basically, even if we put important news in the very front of an issue, a lot of people just don't see it, and then ask us months later what's going on). We'd really like to know how to do this better. # - Posted to Administrivia, MDJ, MWJ on 9/8/06; 3:17:39 PM

Good ideas spread like daring wildfire

Here's a section from MDJ 2006.08.30: Given the secrecy, duplicity, and inconsistency that has marked Maynor and Ellch's presentation, starting with going to the press to take on that Mac user "aura of smugness" before Black Hat and continuing through the next month, there are only two easy ways for the pair's credibility to be restored. One would be for Apple to release a patch for the problem they found, describing it and fixing it so that everyone would be free to talk about it. That, of course, presumes the bug exists and affects Apple's hardware, not just third-party drivers. The other way is trivial. Maynor or Ellch (or both) need to perform their demonstration attack not in front of people like Krebs who don't know the platform well, but in front of recognized Macintosh security and networking experts who do. We'd nominate Glenn Fleishman, but Alan Oppenheimer at Open Door Networks or Macworld Labs would be just fine, too. The task is simple: Maynor or Ellch would bring whatever tools they wanted to use for their attack, but the target machine would be a stock, unmodified, black MacBook computer (though extra RAM might be allowable), with AirPort turned on and a valid network available if the researchers need it. They would then be free to do whatever they wanted to attack the MacBook except physically touch it. If they can repeat the demo feat of logging into the MacBook, with or without root privileges, and create and delete files on the desktop, they are redeemed. If they can't do it in, say, two hours, then they withdraw their claims about MacBook vulnerabilities and apologize to everyone involved. The experts who monitor the test would have to agree not to divulge details about how the vulnerability works, of course, but that's a small thing - if the vulnerability is real, Mac experts won't want it in the wild any more than Maynor and Ellch would. Less than two days later, John Gruber took this upon himself! I’m issuing the following challenge to David Maynor and Jon Ellch: If you can hijack a brand-new MacBook out of the box, it’s yours to keep. Gruber's version of the challenge doesn't allow extra RAM in the MacBook, nor does it require a black MacBook as seen in the demo, or stipulate the presence of known Macintosh security experts like Fleishman, Oppenheimer, or the Macworld Labs folks. Still, if either Maynor or Ellch demanded these things, we suspect Gruber might acquiesce - and you have to admire him stepping up and putting his own money at risk for it. Third-party monitors might make Maynor and Ellch feel like they're not being railroaded, but if Gruber wants to pay for the MacBook, we say he has the right to watch the attack succeed or fail - provided no one tries to snoop on the network packets as Maynor and Ellch have always said they feared. But especially now, with a stock machine ready for the demonstration any time this week that they want, Maynor and Ellch either need to put up or shut up. Either they can compromise a MacBook's internal AirPort Extreme hardware with no additional user requirements, or they can't and have just enjoyed the attention from almost publicly claiming that they could. They need to do it and be revered, or note the end of their 15 minutes and go away. If the duo will not demonstrate this attack under controlled conditions now, a full month after demoing it at Black Hat, no reasonable person should be expected to believe the vulnerability ever existed. (MWJ subscribers: This issue of MDJ is now in your MWJ RSS feed per our previous policy of providing MDJ issues when MWJ is delayed - enjoy!) # - Posted to MDJ, MWJ on 9/3/06; 1:09:42 PM

Pre-WWDC MDJ and MWJ Status (final)

MDJ 2006.08.04 is in distribution and MWJ 2006.08.05 have both been distributed: double or triple size, figures and tables, even a sidebar. It's a festival on your screen! We'll update you from San Francisco this weekend. Part of the original item from Wednesday: With this heat wave now having affected almost all of the United States, we appreciate that everyone seems to understand what working with sub-optimal cooling is like. According to Weather Underground, we've had temperatures of 100°F or more for 18 of the past 23 days, a bad time to be without good cooling. (It's still not perfect, but it's functional - slightly distressing, because the current system was installed brand new while we were away from the building for WWDC 2001!) We'll replace this item with further updates on our pre-WWDC issues as they transpire. # - Posted to MDJ, MWJ on 8/4/06; 11:20:58 PM

No MWJ this weekend

After coming back from the 2005-2006 MDJ Power 25 and the US 4th of July holiday, we had only two days left in the work week - and several complicated stories (10.4.7, Apple's iPod factory investigation being "complete," the stock options story, and now the whole "phoning home" thing) that just didn't get sorted out before Friday. Our calendar had shown Apple announcing Q3 results on Wednesday (2006.07.12), but it turns out that's wrong - the announcement comes in 10 days, on 2006.07.19. We expected it a week earlier last quarter, too, and when we discovered our error, we checked Apple's investor calendar and adjusted the dates. Now the adjusted dates for July and October are still a week too early, so we're wondering if it's a Gaslight kind of deal. Anyway, we build a week off into every month that has five weekends. We'll have to do something similar the second week of August, though, because staffers will be attending WWDC 2006. We've tried to publish MDJ and MWJ while attending the conference before, but it winds up being so exhausting that doctors get involved. We're not sure what the schedule will be that week, but we're considering a few unusual options to keep subscribers up-to-date. Stay tuned! # - Posted to Administrivia, MWJ on 7/9/06; 12:27:30 AM

A few July notes

Just a couple of things that you might want to know: A few subscribers have asked about seeing nothing lately on the MacJournals-Talk mailing list, a high signal-to-noise mailing list we've offered for years to paying subscribers of MDJ and MWJ. Your mail client hasn't gone haywire - the list has been down for a few weeks. We mentioned about a year ago that we intended to tie membership on the mailing list to subscription status, because, sadly, the honor system was not working: people who were not subscribers (or who dropped their subscriptions) were continuing to use the mailing list for free support, sneak peeks at issues, and all kinds of other goodies - with resources paid for by subscribers, of course. That had to change. Alas, the code work isn't going as quickly as we'd hoped - the list server doesn't get its addresses from the subscription database. We can modify the database to send commands to the list server to add and drop subscribers, but if the two get out of sync, it will confuse everyone. (Also, that would mean we'd have to disable manual unsubscribing to avoid sync problems, and we're wary of making you get list mail until one of us gets around to changing it for you.) We plan to bring it back when we figure out how to make it work for subscribers the way we'd always intended. (We really were surprised at the amount of freeloading going on.) Also, as you may have noticed, with all the new systems and publishing finally in place (including this blog), we've raised the price on MDJ and MWJ for the first time in seven years. Oddly enough, MWJ's new price of US$14.95 per month is the same price that MDJ cost nearly a decade ago - for about the same number of pages per week. We still think both are a bargain at twice the price, and we'll continue to try to prove that to everyone. Coming on Wednesday: public release of the 2005-2006 MDJ Power 25! # - Posted to Administrivia, MDJ, MWJ on 7/3/06; 5:41:58 PM

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