Litigation Risk in Apple's Leopard

Link: Apple.

Apple begin their promotion of Leopard and I am excited - it promises many good things. I am looking forward to everything except one feature - Time Machine.

Now if memory serves, Time Machine is an implementation of what Dave Gelernter first imagined in Life Streams and Mirror Worlds. Early on in that development I recognized a pragmatic disadvantage to this model - and it is a show stopper really.

I worked with Dave Gelernter at Yale, for a while as an external collaborator while I was at INMOS and later as an invited member of his group at Yale. I like Dave a lot and there is much about his work and his thinking that I admire. I don't much like his Right Wing diatribe of recent years, to be honest, but I know him to be a fine man.

I have publicly observed fundamental flaws in Dave's models in the past. So, sorry Dave, I'm not picking on you, honestly. This is directed at Apple.

The truth of the matter is, that the kind of right wing society that Dave promotes and that has sadly landed upon us, no-one can afford to keep a trace of everything they do - not even a little. The litigation risk is simply too high.

Also imagine what a corrupt government would do with Time Machine. For example, imagine a government that rejects the basic tenets of individual liberty. It's not hard, is it? You know who you are.

Lots of people willl turn Time Machine on at first. But just wait a little until the courts start laying sopenas to a few instances of those. My guess, we'll see the first major cases appear within two years. I project that at Apple the feature will, of necessity, either be eliminated entirely as a bad idea or it will be revised to something that looks more like selective version control.

The thing is, in an ideal world it would be a really good idea. But in the world as it is today, it's a good idea that's really really bad.