By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

With the amount of information I had this week I made two additional Cassandra Pages:

• Mac Tech Comments; and
• Patent Wars - More Interesting Revelations

Apple Stuff

As much as I would like a new MacBook Pro with Retina display, it is not going to happen for a while, although rumours about a 13" version of this not only make sense, but look a little more attractive too. There seems to be a certain reality to the rumours as Eric Slivka reports about online benchmarking that has been spotted suggesting such a machine exists, it is running an unreleased version of OS X and the benchmark figures are respectable.

Happy birthday Hypercard. We are told by Kelly Guimont on TUAW that the app which was a revelation for teaching with the way it could display and link to other pages -- something we take for granted these days with the way the WWW works -- is 25 years old this week. it did come on all new Macs from 1987, but was also available as a $49 purchase although it did have the unusually large (for then) RAM requirement of 1 MB.

Also going back in time is a report by Kelly Hodgkins on Apple Employee, Number 12, Daniel Kottke who discusses Steves Jobs and Wozniak in an interview with Avi Solomon of Boing Boing.

Along with OS X we have always had a Mail app, which some do not like at all. I deal with it and its oddities. John Martellaro writes about this application that is not really strong enough for business use and has a couple of solutions, but in the end, mail applications are not really sexy enough for developers.

A few months ago there was a shake-your-heads news report about a teenager in China who sold his kidney to buy an iPhone and iPad. There is a certain sadness about the stupidity involved here by the boy. However, there was more to this and the boy was apparently duped as the kidney was sold for about $35,000 so his iPhone and iPad were a fraction of that. If he was tricked into selling the organ then there is a fraud involved and Jeff Gamet reports that the medical personnel involved are on trial now. The boy is too sick to attend.

In timely fashion, then, Chris Oldroyd on iMore reports about a scam that is happening in the US. iPads are being offered for sale on Craigslist and the buyers are sent for meetings at car parks where they are robbed; some being taken to ATMs to withdraw money. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Half and Half

A possible solution -- and one that would work for other devices -- is a clip-on lens that is being developed called Mobi-Lens. It uses an attachment like a clothes-peg (or clothes-pin as Americans apparently call this) so size -- or at leaset width -- does not matter. I read about this in an item by Steven Sande at the weekend, but these are not available for months yet. Instead there is a funding round and those who pledge certain amounts are able to receive a specific variation or colour of the lens. Unlike the olloclip kits, there are two: "a 2-in-1 wide-angle/macro lens as well as a fisheye lens version." To help things along, I pledged $60 which will give me a wide-angle/macro lens in black (I would prefer black anyway) if the funding is successful.

Other Matters

The comment is actually about its "fair share" but when it comes to taxes and corporations the very idea of fairness automatically goes out of the window. We saw this not so long ago when the NYTimes had another of its carefully aimed get-Apple articles that investigated how Cupertino legally avoided paying tax by moving offices and capital around.

Google is doing the same and are under fire for £6m on a turnover of £395m last year. As the article explains all the mechanisms used were entirely legal, so how does "fair" apply? If UK governments had wanted corporations to pay a flat 20% then that would be the law, but over the years, tax law has become a minefield with loads of restrictions and ways to offload income to different years and other methods. And should there ever be a return to the simplest form of a flat rate tax, watch the rush for the exits: last one please turn off the light. We might also remember a (very) few members of the rich, for whom I hold little regard, who were taxed at 20s 6d (shillings and pence) in the pound: for every £1 income some were taxed an extra six pence (years ago), meaning you paid more than you earned.

What might really be fair is if the UK government made sure that some of the UK companies and individuals actually managed to pay the taxes on their incomes, rather than using the offshore mechanisms and tax havens that many have done for years. Sure Google should pay more tax; but other factors and other companies are involved too.

Further to this, another report by Kevin Rawlinson that I saw Monday morning suggests that some of the top management of Google could be called before British Members of Parliament to explain their tax payments (or lack), with a special committee calling the way Google pays, "entirely improper and immoral" and I would call that comment, hypocritical. Jeff Blagdon on The Verge also follows this up with some comments. Despite the soundbites that MPs like to make, such as "this is a company avoiding its obligations and we are letting them get away with doing it", Google is not avoiding its obligations, it is merely avoiding paying tax by making use of loopholes and tax law provided by British MPs, usually to favour their old chums.

By paying licensing fees for example to a branch in Bermuda, Google avoids taxes in Ireland and there are similar provisions that UK law provides, "The process is entirely legal." And Google is paying the legally required taxes. Fix the house not the visitors.

Facebook has had several problems with privacy since its popularity began to rise and these are not simply fictions of a conspiratorial mind. The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has been looking at the way Facebook looks at us and deals with our data, and this may not have been all that satisfactory. Adi Robertson reports that Facebook has been ordered to attend to some of the problems and that they are to be "assessed by a third party every two years for a total of 20 years, and the FTC reserves the right to request documentation on consumer complaints, privacy settings, and any materials used in the assessments". Handcuffs. There was no mention of any monetary sanction.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.