EFF BoF talk at eTech

I did a live webcast of this and recorded it, some very interesting discussions on legality of various web 2.0 services.

Technorati Tags: death threats, EFF, etech, etech07, openID, podcasting

death and rape threats are criminal

Kathy Sierra has cancelled her appearance at eTech because of death threats she has received online. I am shocked to see this happen, and I am particularly shocked because some of the people who brought me to blogging in the first place are connected. I have seen a rise in mysogynistic nastiness recently, from the casual asides on lonelygirl15's youtube comments to attack blogs like Violent Acres, but this is way beyond that, and we need to help track down those making the threats.

The history I know is that Chris Locke and Jeneane Sessum began commenting on some of Tara Hunt's posts, particularly this one, and when the conversation got heated, and 'mean kids' were discussed, Chris (and some others) set up meankids.org as a place to comment without being deleted. It became a place to post ad hominem rants.

In a post there attacking Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero, Frank Paynter pointed to the unclebobism.wordpress.com blog that Kathy mentioned specifically as making threats. Paul Ritchie mentions specifically being invited to unclebobism as the successor to meankids, then posts links to his vandalism of Kathy's Wikipedia entry. (Some links are to Technorati caches of deleted posts).

Thats what I have found out, hopefully those who know more will talk about it too.

When I am at conferences like eTech, I always pay extra attention to the female speakers, because I know how much extra work they have had to do to get up there in this field. I can't believe it has come to this.

Update: Chris and Frank have posted, distancing themselves from the comments. However, if "You Own Your Own Words", how about identifying the 'owners' of the threats and nasty posts on the blogs they administered?

Technorati Tags: death threats, Kathy Sierra

How many Newspapers did you deliver today?

So, how many podcasts did you download today? I didn't download any, Tim. My computer downloaded 4 episodes for me from different shows, and when I plugged my iPod in, it synchronised them so I had something to listen to. That's the whole point.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, podcasting

My talk at VON

I gave a talk on video, the net, feeds an microformats at VON today - I also answered questions with other panellists, but I'm only posting my bit here as I didn't get their permission. Here are my VON slides.

Thanks to Denise Howell for holding the camera for me while I spoke.

Technorati Tags: 2007, Live TV is Dead, microformats, video, VON

Social network narcissism

I just read a very thought-provoking post on narcissism by danah. It reminded me of lots of things bubbling around in my head before, such as Danny's essay on the death of privacy online and Chris Locke's ongoing documentation of the self-esteem virus (including this latest post). As for reality TV, I also see it as a grab for extreme power over a few instead of diffuse power over many by the broadcasters.

I'm also reading Publics and Counterpublics on danah's recommendation, which makes a distinction between the notion of the general public, and the different publics we are each addressing when blogging or making profiles on Social Network sites. In these activities we are performing to a public of our own, and we can feel invaded when a wider public pays attention, as in Danny's discussion above - danah has said that children's MySpace public includes 'everyone except parents and teachers'. Coping with fame becoming a smooth continuum rather than a sharp dichotomy is something else we need to work on in a power-law distributed long tail world.

Update: John Scalzi is grappling with simialr issues in his SFWA campaign.

Technorati Tags: long tail, power law, social, software, tagcamp

Hot news - people lie

Danny Ayers posts a demonstration that you can't always trust assertions people make on webpages. He seem to think that assertions people make in the <head> are somehow immune from this. But then, he is a big fan of another technology that is all about trusting assertions on webpages.

Technorati Tags: data formats, microformats, RDF, semantic web

Misunderstanding the Innovators Dilemma

Don Dodge, in saying Microsoft Will not Fall into the Innovators Dilemma, compares Google Apps for Your Domain to Office Live, but he misses Christensen's point on how successful businesses gets stuck making only incremental innovations.

The real technology disruption here is that Google Apps for Your Domain (and Google Docs, the free version) use HTML as their native format, not Microsoft's crufty legacy format, nor the equally crufty XML data-dump. Writers who use Word every day, like David Weinberger and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, get stuck trying to make it behave and judging by the comments on both those posts they aren't alone. When my friend Maf was working on Microsoft Office, he summed it up by saying "every time I tell someone I work on Word they tell me it's far too complicated, then ask for 3 more features".

Most people use Word because it is the default - they have to use it because others do too. They do not use its advanced features, they just type stuff in. Fifteen years ago, I was a keen Word user, and spent hours working out how to do well-laid out tables in it, and carefully constructing style sheets so that they behaved right. Nowadays I do those kinds of things with HTML and CSS, which are open technologies that anyone can implement and use.

HTML is now the default document format, and an easy wysiwyg editor for it is long overdue. GMail's automatic conversion of attachments to a hosted document with version control is just the kind of 'worse is better' disruption Christensen documented so well 10 years ago.

Oh, and by the way Don, Nintendo Wii is the disruptive innovator in consoles too.

Technorati Tags: HTML, Innovators Dilemma, Word, writing

Missing the cage

When Rosie and I first came to the bay area in 1992, we visited San Francisco Zoo. One of the exhibits there were polar bears, and we watched one pace out a looping walk, his feet hitting the same spot each time through, one leg swinging out over the edge of the moat on each circuit. He was completely accustomed to his cage.

Reading Ars Technica's commentary on Airport Extreme's IPv6 support reminded me of this. Apparently, if you use this device, your computers can route across the world again; people can connect to them from anywhere, just as the internet was designed to behave. That's what the 'inter' part of the name is about.

That's right, if you enable password protected services that are off by default, like ssh and ftp, on your Mac, the new Airport base stations actually route them, instead of requiring further buggering about with port mapping and explicit protocol translation through packet sniffing to get them to behave as they were designed. This gives Iljitsch van Beijnum a fit of conniptions, because he'd apparently rather rely on the illusionary security of a firewall then actually securing his machines services. Lets hope he doesn't own any laptops.

Technorati Tags: Apple, internet, security, Wifi

Begoogled

I joined Google this week, and am busy getting my head round its fractal complexities. Rosie wondered if I was begoogled (somewhere between bedazzled, beguiled and besotted).

Then, naturally, she googled 'begoogled' and found this blogpost, which uses it to mean something else.

Rosie then clicked on Chalicechick's Buy me stuff, I'm cute wishlist link, and, as she scrolled through it, became rather concerned.

What Rosie saw was this list, and as she progressed, she was increasingly worried about how much this random blogger girl had in common with me.

"Glenn Gould? Homeschooling? Ealing comedies? Father Ted? Roger Waters? Groundhog Day? Extreme Programming? Who is this woman?"
"I'd better not tell Kevin about her, he might fancy her more!"

I had used Rosie's Mac to buy something from Amazon, so when Chalicechick bookmarked the link to edit her wishlist instead of the permalink to it, Rosie got mine instead...

Technorati Tags: Amazon, bego, geeky, Google, wishlist

iPhone's great step back from iChat

I did watch the iPhone Macworld Keynote last week - here's my chapter-list version of the stream so you can skip through it to the bits you find interesting:


(I'd do the same for the download except 1. Apple obfuscated the url enough that I can't be arsed to packet sniff it out and 2. they still don't have HTTP 1.1 seeking support working right, despite me building and demoing it about 5 years ago).

After watching it, my biggest surprise was how much of a step back it was from the rich interaction that iChat supports. With iChat you get presence info, chat, sending documents and integrated audio-video chat (when the other user's computer and connection supports it). Instead, iPhone had a legacy telco worldview baked in, with calls not conveying any further context (watch the combined demo near the end, where Jobs has to retype Schiller's email when talking to him on the phone). The iPhone has the camera on the wrong side to be a videophone, and Jobs did not mention any ability to make calls over Wifi rather than the Cingular network, or anything about IM (as opposed to SMS).

My hope is that this is just Jobs not mentioning the features that don't demo well yet, but my sidekick's AIM integration is the reason I am so hooked on it; it buffers chats server-side so thatintermittent phone connections on the train don't interrupt conversation flow.

Apple reverses the Osborne effect

Apple has long kept its new product secrets close, wary that details leaking of new hardware will reduce sales of current products, just at the point where they are most profitable. I've written before how this culture spread unnecessarily into Apple's overall culture, and why they have missed a lot of the social media effects because of it. However, something has changed - both with the iTV AppleTV and todays iPhone
announcement, Jobs is trumpeting new hardware months before it's available.

The difference here is that these are new categories for Apple, and the goal is to make customers wait for the Apple product instead of buying an alternative from someone else. By setting the price and broad features now, Jobs forces the competition's shipping product, based on last years technology and manufacturing costs to compete with what he will have in 6 months time. This is something that can only be done from a position of strength, which the iPod success gives him, but it is also a bit of a risk, as the product may disappoint.

I'm reserving judgment on the AppleTV until I see more details of what software it will run, in particular whether it can use Perian to play other video formats, and can use BitTorrent for HD podcasts, but it only having enough CPU oomph for 720p playback seems to be aiming low compared to a lot of existing Apple products, as well as the Xbox 360.

Update: Apple seems to understand the advantages of downloading media for later playback - these two new products both cache video locally in the great iPod tradition. So why on earth is the keynote up as a stream? I'd like to watch it on the train home tonight, so I want to download it, but no. Twits.

Update: Since I wrote this, it has shown up as a podcast on the iTunes store, so I will be able to watch it on the train on Monday. It's not linked from the Apple main page, so you may have missed this too; clearly there are still some internal Apple turf wars over this.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macworld , iPhone, AppleTV , HD, HDTV, Live TV is Dead, video

HDTV disappointments

I spent a chunk of time looking at HDTVs in Best Buy and the Sony shop yesterday, and wasn't impressed. Overall, what I saw on the displays looked full of compression artefacts, with poor colour. Most of them were 720p displays, with the 1080p ones starting about $4,000. It seem there is some buyer's remorse around too, as customers grapple with upconversion and, no doubt, with HDCP's deliberate degradation. It sounds like Pip Coburn's warning in The Change Function - that flat panel TV's are a no-brainer, but HDTV complexity could mess things up with extra perceived pain of adoption - was more accurate than Mark Cuban's 'HDTV beats the net' rant.

I also had a look round the Apple store yesterday, and saw excellent HD quality on a $2000 HD iMac, and a $999 23" Cinema display (not to mention the $2000 30" display which is way beyond 1080p in size). Where did I get the HD content? Over the net - The Harry Potter 5 trailer and Rocketboom's HD edition. The problem of connecting computers to HD screens is a mess, but it is one of the media industries' own creation, as they insisted on a new connector with DRM in the cables. Another friend of mine is working on some interesting new projection systems that may mean that all the computers will need is a white wall to point at.

Technorati Tags: DRM, HD, HDTV, Live TV is Dead, video

Happy New Year...

...to the Line Islands of Kiribati.

Technorati Tags: 2007, New Year

AT&T's bait and switch

Susan Crawford explains the fraudulent concession to neutrality from AT&T in an attempt to get their merger approved before the year-end. The small print excludes their 'IPTV' service from neutrality, which was the point at issue. I have already covered the underlying flaw in their special pleading; what we see is a bizarre coalition of legacy TV and legacy networking to sacrifice the low-latency traffic paths we need for gaming, two-way conversations and other communication servcies for the goal of replicating the 'you have to watch it right now' TV experience we are rejecting in droves now we have a choice.
Update: The FCC approved it anyway, and watered down the neutrality commitment further:

AT&T made a series of voluntary commitments that are enforceable by the Commission and attached as an Appendix. These conditions are voluntary, enforceable commitments by AT&T but are not general statements of Commission policy and do not alter Commission precedent or bind future Commission policy or rules.

Commissioner Adelstein seemed to think there was a new policy here:

Most significantly, the Commission takes a long-awaited and momentous step in this Order by requiring the applicants to maintain neutral network and neutral routing in the provision of their wireline broadband Internet access service. This provision was critical for my support of this merger and will serve as a “5th principle,” ensuring that the combined company does not privilege, degrade, or prioritize the traffic of Internet content, applications or service providers, including their own affiliates. Given the increase in concentration presented by this transaction – particularly set against the backdrop of a market in which telephone and cable operators control nearly 98 percent of the market, with many consumers lacking any meaningful choice of providers – it was critical that the Commission add a principle to address incentives for anti-competitive discrimination. Defining the exact parameters of any neutrality provision is, almost by definition, complex and difficult. The precise contours, scope, and exclusions in this provision reflect compromise and a predictive judgment about how, in the words of Prof. Tim Wu, “to preserve the most attractive features of the Internet as it now exists.” The work is not done, however. It is critical that we remain vigilant and continue to explore comprehensive approaches to this issue; but I expect this significant step will inform the debate in the coming months and years. I appreciate the efforts of the many diverse groups and individuals who have contributed to this effort and, in particular, I want to thank Commissioner Copps for his leadership on this issue and for his commitment to the effort to devise a carefully-crafted condition.

Looks like he got bait and switched too.

Starship Troupers

John Scalzi and Brad DeLong have kicked off a serious debate about the different interpretations of Starship Troopers by Heinlein and Verhoeven. However, I think they are both neglecting the important critical interpretation by Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip .

One reason Torchwood has been disappointing is that it's "Dr Who with shagging" premise isn't really enough to sustain it. Camp and sexist as it was, the original Star Trek did try to grapple with moral and societal dilemmas. A big part of the enormous power of the revived Dr Who series is that the Doctor lives by a moral code and stands by Rose without yielding to his temptations. They have you feeling the unrequited love of Madame de Pompadour and sympathy with a wounded Dalek. Torchwood's aimless bed-hopping is more like Katy Manning posing with a dalek.

Technorati Tags: Dr Who, Starship Troopers, television, Torchwood