Sunday, March 28, 2004
Free Culture readathon
I joined in AKMA’s "free culture readathon":
Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s new book?
The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as we’re not making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of (“perform”) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen chapters, a conclusion and an afterword.
The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as we’re not making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of (“perform”) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen chapters, a conclusion and an afterword.
I recorded the Preface of Free Culture which has me referring to Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace as 'my first book', which is a kind of lèsé majesté, or Lessig majesté.
I used the Audacity Open Source Audio editor for this, which works very nicely, and reminds me of SoundEdit from long ago.
Here's a QuickTime version for people on slow modems.
posted by Kevin Marks 12:19 PM
Saturday, March 27, 2004
Life imitates code?
Big picture of baby spider cluster
posted by Kevin Marks 3:47 AM
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
How prior would you like that art?
Jeneane's Phonecon made me smile, but the early days of telephony were full of inventive people trying out new services and business models.
With the Patent Office moving toward rejecting the Eolas plug-in patent on prior art grounds, maybe it's time for them to reconsider the Acacia and SightSound patents that take an obvious idea and add the word 'digital', and then go around shaking down anyone doing rich media online.
Alexander Graham Bell invested heavily in a company to send opera over the telephone for a fee in the 19th Century.
Live music over the phone was happening in 1877, and remote playback by telephone in 1888 and even remote paid playback of recordings over the phone on demand, from 1909.
posted by Kevin Marks 1:54 PM
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Black, White, Grey and mediAgora
I know I've been quiet on the mediAgora front recently, but the Grey Album case is in many ways a perfect example of the mediAgora principle of rewarding Creators of both derivative and original works.
Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe where The Beatles 'White Album' and Jay-Z's 'Black Album' had been released under mediAgora licences.
Along comes Danger Mouse, and mixes the two to make the 'Grey Album', and releases it for sale under a mediAgora license too.
So what happens?
He list both monochromatic albums as 'source works'. Everyone who buys 'The Grey Album' has to own a copy of the two source albums too. If they already do, they just pay Danger Mouse; if they own The Beatles but not Jay-Z they pay him and Danger Mouse.
As DM is generating incremental sales in this way, he gets promotion fees from the other two.
And all those bloggers pointing to the Grey Album? They get promotion fees from Danger Mouse, insofar as they generate sales (and have bought a copy themselves).
End result - every Customer has 3 great albums, and all Creators involved get paid the price they set.
And even Glenn Miller and the orchestras George Martin and the Beatles sampled could be rewarded too.
posted by Kevin Marks 11:40 PM
Monday, February 16, 2004
Technorati, Xanadu and other dreams
Tim Oren says nice things about Technorati:
As we all know, Ted Nelson meant hypertexts to have bidirectional links. But due to a laboratory accident in Switzerland, we ended up with this lame thing. Mechanisms such as Google link search and Technorati are just hacks, ways to leverage Moore's Law to ameliorate a fundamental flaw in our hypertext data architecture, crawling the Web faster and faster to aggregate all of our trackbacks.
Yesterday, David Sifry convinced me that's just wrong. What Nelson missed, with his focus on 'literary' architectures, is that networked hypertexts are inhabited by people. Links are not just citations. They are gestures in a social space, parts of conversations or other interactions. There's an inherent value in looking at the dynamics of the record as it is created.
Yesterday, David Sifry convinced me that's just wrong. What Nelson missed, with his focus on 'literary' architectures, is that networked hypertexts are inhabited by people. Links are not just citations. They are gestures in a social space, parts of conversations or other interactions. There's an inherent value in looking at the dynamics of the record as it is created.
Obviously I agree with the broad thrust of this or wouldn't be working at Technorati. However, I think the one-way nature of links was necessary for the Web to achieve what it did. The globally connected nature of the web as a small world network is built on a scale-free distribution of linkage. If all links are required to be two-way, this rapidly becomes unwieldy and cumbersome - imagine if the front page of Apple.com showed all the inbound links to it. The unidirectionality created the permission-free linking culture the web depends on, and reversing those links in a useful way is an interesting problem we're having fun solving - the hot products page is an example of this.
In fact, that page addresses another issue, if obliquely. Shelley asked how being a community member affects your writing:
[W]eblogging [is] different than Big Media, because it puts publishing in the hands of the people. I have to presume they think this is a good thing because webloggers can write what they want, and aren't censored. Unlike Big Media, we aren't accountable to an editor, or big companies, or important politicians.
But I guess we're accountable to each other, and that's the most dangerous censorship of all -- it's the censorship of the commons.
But I guess we're accountable to each other, and that's the most dangerous censorship of all -- it's the censorship of the commons.
Indeed. I think this is a good thing. The fact that when blogging we are accountable for our writings and their public history acts, in general, in a good way - it makes us stop to think about our reactions before they 'end upon our permanent record'. Shelley's own campaign against comment spammers that violate community norms in this way is an example. David Weinberger in 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' put it this way:
A human being raised in isolation would not be identifiably human in anything except DNA. Sociality grants a mute herd of brutes their souls and selves.
The example of what happens when anonymity is allowed in Amazon reviews, leading to all kinds of dubious behaviour was revealed in the NYT , and picked up by auctorial bloggers like Cory and Neil Gaiman. The bloggers' comments show up in context with the rest of their writings, so you can gather whether you are likely to agree with them generally too.
For example, when Lago attacks Vote Links for reinforcing hegemony I can see that he is the same person who threatened to offer Joi a reading list, but then didn't, so I can offer him one instead:
posted by Kevin Marks 3:31 AM
Sunday, February 15, 2004
DRM a sign of Disney's malaise
Mitch Wagner:
DRM doesn't work and consumers don't want it, so of course it's very appealing to big business, who are also in a big rush to sell other, equally practical products, such as anchovy flavored ice cream and bicycles with square wheels.
We learned that DRM doesn't work in the late 80s, only back then it was applied to software and we called it 'copy protection.'
We learned that DRM doesn't work in the late 80s, only back then it was applied to software and we called it 'copy protection.'
Not much to add, but it's good to see the meme spread.
posted by Kevin Marks 7:43 PM
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Vote Links
A while back I made a proposal for 'Vote Links' - a way to indicate that just because you are linking to something, you are not necessarily endorsing it (which is the default assumption by search engines and other dumb robots).
My original proposal used a nonstandard attribute which would make it hard to validate.
Tantek has helped me create an XHTML compliant Vote Links specification, which we'll be talking about tonight at the Technorati Participant Session and the XHTML Semantics session at ETCon.
posted by Kevin Marks 4:36 PM
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Technorati at Etcon
We've got Dave's talk at etcon this morning. Here's the newest thing - the recent amazon products page
See what amazon products people have blogged about recently.
Power laws and blogs: first, the classic power law chart - note how smooth the curve is - no saturation due to no barriers to entry.
In fact, if you count up the total number of blogs with links you see a different picture - look how the 'little' blogs totally outweight the top few.
posted by Kevin Marks 9:55 AM
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Technorati is Hiring
I don't think I've mentioned it here yet, but as Director of Engineering at Technorati,we're hiring.
posted by Kevin Marks 12:19 PM
The Mass Media bubble bursts
Doc and I were taking about this the other day, and tonight I remembered how well Douglas Adams explained the end of Mass media five years ago:
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Read the whole thing. Regularly.
posted by Kevin Marks 3:21 AM
Friday, January 30, 2004
Orlowski trolls again
In his latest rambling, shambling semi-coherent collection of innuendo, semi-sourced smears and out of context quotes with no attempt at fact-checking or giving anyone the chance to reply, Orlowski says:
"What sort of people go to these?" he asks, rhetorically. The panel on Political Blogging doesn't even include a Political Blogger. We can help answer that one: andsometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. (Taken at the $500 a head BloggerCon conference).
Now that is a picture with me in the middle. Admittedly Adam Curry, Elizabeth Spiers, Jeff Jarvis and Charlie Nesson are there too, but what is he trying to say? That we use laptops in public?
He even repeats his widely debunked Googlewashing hogwash.
Fortunately we don't need to worry about him giving space for responses - you can read the rebuttals here.
posted by Kevin Marks 5:48 PM
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
RSS Winterfest - I'm speaking
I'm speaking at RSS Winterfest this morning, with Anil Dash and others on 'RSS 2.0 and Atom'
Tune in
posted by Kevin Marks 9:07 AM
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Categorising blogs
Why I Write - George Orwell :
There are four great motives for writing:
1. Sheer egoism.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.
1. Sheer egoism.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.
Seems like one way to categorize blogs.
posted by Kevin Marks 12:31 PM
Technorati beta test
Dave Sifry just announced what I've been working on with him: We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine - essentially taking a Volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in.
Head on over to http://beta.technorati.com and try it out.
Or recursively see who has linked to it at the beta Technorati beta cosmos
posted by Kevin Marks 12:20 AM
Monday, January 19, 2004
Alienaid: Iowa Caucases
I think these were explained by Lewis Carroll:
What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'
`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'
`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'
posted by Kevin Marks 5:41 PM
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Media Heresy: Compression is becoming redundant
Yesterday, Ross sent Bambi Francisco to talk to me, and she asked an interesting question: "Is there a Moore's Law for compression?" My answer didn't all make it into her article, so here is an expanded version for my 'media heresies' series.
"Is there a Moore's Law for compression?"
In the sense of compression getting uniformly better over time? No.
Compression has different constraints - it is primarily based around fooling human perception systems by sending less information. Compression generally has two phases - a lossy phase where the data is transformed into a less accurate version by exploiting limitations of human vision or hearing, and a lossless phase where redundancy is squeezed out mathematically (this phase is like using .zip).
With more computing power, more elaborate transformations can be done in the first phase, and more complex mathematical compression can take place in the second phase, and still give the computer enough time to achieve a useful frame rate, but overall compression standards do not improve at anything like Moore's Law speed.
I'd say video compression is maybe 2-4 times as efficient (in quality per bit) than it was in 1990 or so when MPEG was standardised, despite computing power and storage having improved a thousandfold since then.
However, what does happen is that the Moore's Law effects on computing power, and the Moore's Law cubed effect on storage capacity mean that compression becomes less relevant over time.
You can now buy an off-the shelf computer that can edit uncompressed High Definition TV for under 10% of the cost of an HD tapedeck.
Consider that the iPod has gone from 5GB to 40GB in under 18 months - a factor of 8. The MP3 compression iTunes uses is about 8:1, so that means you could fill the new iPod with uncompressed audio and store as much as you did in the old one. Apply that rate of doubling another few times and think about pocket TiVos. Farfetched? I'm not so sure - Computer users have been watching DVDs on laptops for a while now; hand-held DVD players are being bought for children in the backseat and people who travel. According to my friends at Best Buy, they sold out all the portable DVD players they had this Christmas - they had hit a sensible price point.
The deeper point is a trend based one. If storage continues to improve in capacity per dollar at 3 times the rate of computing power, compression becomes wholly redundant - the CPU running the bit-manipulation is the bottleneck. The HD editing computers work this way - they have DMA (direct memory access) hardware in the disk interface and the screen interface, and the computer's job is to get out of the way.
The other reason compression is a bad idea in the long run is precisely because of its success in removing redundancy. If you have uncompressed audio or video, a single bit error will likely go un-noticed. If you are unlucky and it is the high bit of a sample, you will get a transient click in the sound, or a brightly coloured dot in the wrong place in video, but it will soon pass and be covered by a correct bit.
If you have a single bit error in a compressed stream it will make the rest of the frame, or possibly many frames, corrupt. In the worst case it can destroy the rest of the file from then onwards.
For archival content this kind of fragility is not what you want.
posted by Kevin Marks 1:33 AM
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
RIAA's fake cops harrass based on racial stereotypes
LA weekly story:
'A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature,' Langley said. 'Today he’s Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow he’s Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that he’s something else. These people change their identity all the time. A picture’s worth a thousand words.'
Langley is Western regional coordinator for the RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit.
posted by Kevin Marks 6:18 PM
Sunday, December 28, 2003
New model for music playlists
We were talking in #joiito about wanting to play music for each other, but not being able to just post urls to our mp3's for fear of vexatious prosecution.
So here's my initial straw man suggestion for how to do this.
1. create a new playist format that refers to songs by a canonical naming scheme - MusicBrainz has a good starting point. These get put in URI's that look something like:
songid:66fea472-0093-4764-a574-7ef87ade4433?artistid=d1601842-8052-4ac1-81ef-67e8259250dd&artist;=Shannon%20Campbell%20and%20Scott%20Andrew%20LePera&title;=Nothing%20New
How does one resolve this URI?
Implement an app that tries several alternatives:
1. Is it in the local music collection?
2. Is it available on a label or artist website/bittorrent?
3. Is a promotional extract up on Amazon or iTunes store?
4. allow further plugins
In each case the name/title are used for an initial match, and the sing identification process defined by MusicBrainz used to be sure we have a real match.
posted by Kevin Marks 5:25 AM
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
DRM 'Industry' hates freedom
Bill Rosenblatt :
The DRM industry should hope that the ISPs lose. If they do, then that means that ISPs do not have a free pass around liability for their treatment of content, and therefore that they should be proactively offering DRM services, both to protect themselves legally and as a source of incremental revenue from copyright owners. If the ISPs continue to win these cases, then a major segment of the digital media value chain that could support DRM technologies and services may disappear.
Remarkably honest reporting by DRM Watch here. The DRM 'Industry' has a vested interest in destroying the free transmission of information over the public internet in favour of closed, restricted networks.
posted by Kevin Marks 1:09 PM
Saturday, December 13, 2003
Deeper pixels needed
Glenn Reynolds, assorted Slashdotters and Peter Lewis at Fortune are speculating on whether Ansel Adams would have used digital cameras.
As I worked on the first official release of Ansel Adams images in digital form - the Ansel Adams screensaver - I feel somewhat qualified to pontificate on this.
What everyone is missing is that it is not a question of resolution, but of dynamic range.
With film the issue is blurred by questions of grain, but with digital the problem is which image format to use.
TIFF supports more than 8-bits per channel, but JPEG does not, nor do most computer displays. Most digital cameras only generate 8-bits per channel of dynamic range, and are still competing on resolution.
On the other hand, even the $30 scanners do 12-bits per channel these days, and 14-bits per channel (42-bit) are only about $50.
I expect that digital cameras will pick up on this soon, but we'll need a file-format change (and possibly a better transient storage device than flash memory) and new low-cost software to make it mainstream. Ironically, all the sophisticated exposure calculation that makes many digital cameras too slow to use for action snapshots could be reduced if they upped the dynamic range a few stops.
If you want to see what kinds of dynamic range digital photography is really capable of, have a look at the Hubble images, where every photon is carefully counted.
posted by Kevin Marks 6:35 PM
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Tasty links
Down on the right is my del.icio.us linkblog. Its a bookmark replacement, and a place to find great links, as you can see other people's links and categories too.
posted by Kevin Marks 4:36 AM
Monday, December 08, 2003
HTTP diffs
Steve
I came up with an idea on the train recently that might be useful here: If you're given the right bytes and told where they should go, you can construct the right document. HTTP does have semantics for giving you bytes and where they should go.
Steve, there is an existing HTML RFC for sending diffs that is perfectly suited to this - RFC3229. I mentioned this when it came out in Jan 2002.
posted by Kevin Marks 2:05 PM
Friday, December 05, 2003
The technical argument against DRM
Although the economic argument is more powerful - that DRM destroys value for customers and hence will be shunned by them - the technical argument is strong too.
This rests on one of the fundamental pillars of Computer Science - the Church Turing Thesis that states that any computer can emulate any other. When this is combined with the continual improvement in computing power available, it means we will always be able to run old software, or indeed protected software, by emulating the environment it runs within.
Simson Garfinkel describes how emulation saved the BBC Domesday Project, the authors of which I worked with at the BBC and the MMC.
"But that wasn't DRM" I hear the cry, "just obsolete hardware and data formats".
How about a systematic program that defeats the hardware protection for pay per use interactive experiences that works in a general enough way to encompass 25 years worth of hardware design?
It's called MAME and it has just been ported to the Nokia N-Gage cellphone/game gadget. It has emulators for various CPUs (and graphics and sound chips) to run the code directly from the original game ROMs - they look and feel just like the real thing
If Nokia are smart they will license this and the games and use it to promote the gadget - this company has licensed Atari ROMs for sale. After all, those 80s games are smaller than most MMS photos that get sent, and they're lots more fun than ringtones.
I hope Ed Felten and maybe can explain this to the assembled lawyers at the Berkman conference today. Most of them seem to like on compulsory licensing schemes.
I wish I had been able to take the chance offered to join them and present mediAgora to them. I look forward to reading the blogging of the event.
Here's a cartoon I made with the wonderfully silly Bayeux Tapestry Construction Kit
posted by Kevin Marks 3:32 AM
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
99% perspiration
Tim Oren takes me to task for saying Dave invented outlining. Now I could go on about the long history of simultaneous or convergent invention in history, but I won't, I'll just say this.
Tim - you're in VC. You should know the difference between a demo and a product.
posted by Kevin Marks 10:53 PM
Commodities are a good thing
Doc:
The stupidest conceit of the software business is that commodities are bad.
If it weren't for commodities, we wouldn't have civilization. Or food.
There's plenty of money to be made in - and on (or choose any other preposition) - commodities. You just have to think smart about the stupid stuff. Is it that hard?
If it weren't for commodities, we wouldn't have civilization. Or food.
There's plenty of money to be made in - and on (or choose any other preposition) - commodities. You just have to think smart about the stupid stuff. Is it that hard?
Commodities are great - to paraphrase something Clayton Christensen said - once your business has become commoditized it is simple enough that you can hire some MBAs to run it for you.
posted by Kevin Marks 10:07 PM
Jessica Litman's music idea
Comment on Sharing and Stealing - Jessica Litman
It is a great essay until this paragraph::
The key to the opt-out mechanism I propose is the selection of a single digital file format or family of formats capable of conveying copyright management information as defined in section 1202 of the copyright act. The format will probably incorporate digital rights management capability because the people who will be using it will desire that feature, but there's no need for any copy-protection to be hack-proof, or even exceptionally durable. It should also be compatible with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players. I'll call the format *.drm for short.
This aspiration: "It should also be compatible with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players." is impossible. CD players play unencrypted, uncompressed digital audio. A drm'd format would require new players.
posted by Kevin Marks 3:51 AM
Monday, December 01, 2003
Hierarchies, webs and emergence
Last week Dave Sifry and I met up with Dave Winer and Steve Gillmor at Technorati to share ideas. We talked about the public resource that Dave W created in weblogs.com, about Technorati, and about Dave's new idea to help people categorize blog postings and the things they link to.
Dave W said: I feel we're at a turning point in the weblog world, either we're going to be like every other hierarchy that's ever been, with secret deals, lots of impediments to progress, eventual stagnation; or we're going to overcome that.
Dave thinks in hierarchies; whether this is because he invented outlining, or why he invented outlining I'm not sure. Along the way he added links into the picture, so his hierarchies can link to other nodes, or other hierarchies to get as complex as you like.
The conventional wisdom is that links beat out hierarchies - Google's link-centric approach beat out Yahoo's hierarchy-centric approach (the HO in Yahoo stood for Hierarchically Oriented).
However, another way of looking at it is top-down versus bottom-up - central design versus emergence.
Dave W wants to build a bottom-up emergent taxonomy, using open debate and open standards.
Steve Gillmor is saying something similar about how we can grow new things.
I have a couple of ideas that I need to write up as spec proposals to try to start such discussions - one about 'vote links', one a new bit of metadata for feeds saying whether they are complete or not.
posted by Kevin Marks 5:02 AM
Now that's data mining
Mining company publishes geology data and offers prizes for good spots to dig
posted by Kevin Marks 2:17 AM
What am I missing?
One fascinating thing about Technorati is how many blogs are showing up in languages other than English. One of the highest on the the Top 100 is an Iranian blog, which is a great thing.
However, I look at blogs like this and feel like Ginger in Gary Larson's classic What Dogs Hear.
'squiggle squiggle squiggle Blog squiggle squiggle squiggle Permalink'
posted by Kevin Marks 1:59 AM
Friday, November 28, 2003
iTunes Security blather
Tracey Meyers wins the most errors in the shortest amount of text award this week:
"So sue me" stated young Norwegian hacker Jon Lech Johansen last week after he posted a program to crack iTunes air-tight security.
Johansen posted the program called "QTFairUse", with the previously mentioned quote, on his own website. The free software has the uncanny ability to sidestep iTunes anti-copying software, MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding that once installed illegally views protected music files in QuickTime without paying a fee or royalty.
1) 'air-tight' security is remarkably meaningless. In fact, oscillating air is the primary security 'hole' in iTunes, followed closely by the built-in CD-burning code.
2) 'uncanny' is an odd thing to say about source code. It's pretty clear what he is doing if you can read C, and if you can't why not talk to someone who can first?
3) MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding is not anti-copying software, it is a compression format. The anti-copying stuff is called FairPlay.
4) That last sentence manages to call AAC illegal.
5) You can already listen to (not view, unless you count the tiny spectrum display) the protected music files in QT Player, as long as you know the username/password.
6) You have to have already paid for the music for this to work. All it does it replace the 'burn to CD' option with a less convenient way to extract the audio (It only works on one song at a time as it is played).
7) It's highly arguable that this is illegal, given that transferring music to other forms is explicitly legal - indeed were it not, the CD to MP3/AAC part of iTunes would be illegal. There may be a DMCA case on circumvention grounds here, but it isn't a good one, given the fact that iTunes will let you make CDs from the same file. In any case the DMCA is not Norwegian law.
Still, I'm surprised it took this long for someone to start the arms race in this instance. I hope my old friends in Apple don't get dragged into it.
posted by Kevin Marks 12:15 AM
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Donate to Rupert - the True Survivor
Rosie and Andrew were shocked by the betrayal on Survivor last week when Rupert was thrown off that they asked me to set up a website for him. Here it is:
Donate to Rupert - the True Survivor
Andrew drew the picture.
He made a t-shirt too.
posted by Kevin Marks 8:49 AM
Sunday, November 23, 2003
Co-opting the Future By John C. Mahler
Trolls, are all the rage in some quarters. We're told that trolls will evolve into a unique source of information and are sure to become the future of journalism. Well, hardly. Two things are happening to prevent such a future: The first is wholesale abandonment of troll sites, and the second is the casual co-opting of the troll universe by Big Media.
Let's start with abandoned trolls. Thanks to busy debunkers trolling has got harder.
The most obvious reason for abandonment is simple boredom. Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a troll mystifies a lot of professional writers. This is compounded by a lack of feedback, positive or otherwise. Perseus thinks that most trolls have an audience of about 12 readers. Leaflets posted on the corkboard at Albertsons attract a larger readership than many trolls. Some people must feel the futility.
The problem is further compounded by professional writers who promote trolling, with the thought that they are increasing their own readership. It's no coincidence that the most-read trolls are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into trolling, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.
Unfortunately, at some point, people will realize they've been used. This will happen sooner rather than later, since many mainstream publishers now see the opportunity for exploitation. Thus you find professionally written and edited faux trolls appearing on MSNBC's site, the Washington Post site, and elsewhere. This seems to be where trolling is headed—Big Media. So much for the independent thinking and reporting that are supposed to earmark blog journalism.
So now we have the emergence of the professional troll working for large media conglomerates and spewing the same measured news and opinions we've always had—except for fake edginess, which suggests some sort of independent, counterculture, free-thinking observers. But who signs the checks? The faux troll will replace the old personality columns that were once the rage in newspaperdom. Can you spell retro? These are not the hard-hitting independent voices we were promised. They are just a new breed of columnist with a gimmick and a stern corporate editor.
By John C. Mahler
Previously by this author: Deconstructing the Troll
posted by Kevin Marks 3:46 AM
Thursday, November 20, 2003
A third morality?
crw from #joiito pointed me to Chris Phoenix's extension to three of Jane Jacob's two moralities:
According to Jane Jacobs, the Commercial and Guardian systems each have developed a distinct and identifiable set of ethics. You will be able to identify these ethics in governments, police departments, and a variety of commercial organizations. The Information ethics, and this table, are a synthesis of the work of several authors. If you are not familiar with any organizations that operate by creating information and then giving it away, think of your friends who are avid hobbyists - chances are that they have written articles or put up web sites without being paid.
| Information - Spread Innovation | Commercial - Improve the Status Quo | Guardian - Maintain the Status Quo |
Imagine a programmer working at 2 AM to add a feature to an Open Source program he didn't write. The programmer is not paid for this work; he does it because he wants the program to be more usable and more popular; he has been working for ten hours without a break. At 2:30 AM he adds his name to the list of authors, uploads the improved program to a web site for free distribution, then spends the next hour reading free articles on-line. | Imagine a small neighborhood shop. The employees should be ready to do business with anyone who walks in, and must maintain a reputation of honesty with both suppliers and customers. The store must continually improve, or the other stores will lure away its customers. A small business owner does not have a lot of free time and must work efficiently. | Imagine a fortress guarding a frontier. The soldiers must always be prepared to fight, but most of the time they are training or relaxing. Strict discipline is necessary to make them a unified fighting force. One traitor, or paid spy, can get them all killed. Visiting merchants are a distraction and a security problem; too much money floating around can weaken their dedication to the task. |
| Shun force | Shun force | [Rely on force] |
| Shun trading | [Rely on trading] | Shun trading |
| Use intelligence | Use initiative and enterprise | Exert prowess |
| Publish all information | Be honest | Deceive for the sake of the task |
| Be idealistic | Be optimistic | Be fatalistic |
| Ignore comfort | Promote comfort and convenience | Make rich use of leisure |
| Respect authorship; Ignore ownership | Respect contracts | [Defend your territory] |
| Demonstrate the superiority of your own ideal | Dissent for the sake of the task | Be obedient and disciplined |
| Invent and create | Be open to inventiveness and novelty | Adhere to tradition |
| Shun authority | [Adapt to the system] | Respect hierarchy |
| Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens | Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens | Be exclusive |
| Accept largesse | Be thrifty | Dispense largesse |
| Be unique; Develop a reputation | Be industrious | Be ostentatious |
| Be productive | Invest for productive purposes | Take vengeance |
| Cooperate | Compete | [Fight, when necessary] |
| Be skillful | Be efficient | Be loyal |
| Gain mindshare | Come to voluntary agreements | Show fortitude |
| Treasure reputation | [Treasure financial success] | Treasure honor |
posted by Kevin Marks 3:04 AM
Keep your 3D spaces offline
Greg Costikyan on 3D worlds and games:
Supposedly, virtual worlds will eventually be our interface for everything online, a far friendlier and more fun and "easier" interface than, say, eBay. This is, when you think about it, a crock of shit; when I want to buy a shirt, I for sure don't want to walk through a virtual mall. In fact, the reason I go online to buy a shirt is to avoid walking through a goddamn mall. Give me quick access to your shirts and swift checkout, and I'm a happy puppy. Search and shopping cart in a web browser is what I want, thanks, not some high-concept notion of a high-touch universe. 3D worlds are lousy ways to find most of the things you want, precisely because they use the phenomenological universe as a metaphor.
Exactly. We can transcend space and time here, and we like it that way.
posted by Kevin Marks 2:06 AM
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Apple planning to take on Exchange?
I just got spammed by Apple to take part in a Web Survey which although ironically amusing:
Our records indicate that you have purchased a PowerMac in 2001 . Do you still use this computer?
Which of the following best describes your current employment status? (Please select all that apply)
went on to ask lots of detailed questions about the Calendar software I use both at home and work.
It didn't give an opportunity to say what I did like about iCal (open file format, easy calendar publishing, easy to incorporate conference schedules) or what I dislike (UI is still really clunky and frequently messes up on my intentions), but asked lots of 'competitive analysis type questions.
posted by Kevin Marks 12:07 PM
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Candidates should endorse a free internet
Dave Winer:
I would love to see their candidates make an impassioned plea to keep the Internet free of interference from the entertainment industry. I would welcome this for two reasons.
1. First, I'm part of a constituency, like many others, who are looking for a candidate to vote for who supports our primary issue. Nothing unusual about that, easy to understand.
2. But as important, it would signal that the candidate is not beholden to the media companies. I would happily give money to candidates for ads that warn that the media industry is trying to rob us of our future, and explains how important it is to protect the independence of the Internet. Use the media industry channels to undermine their efforts to the control channels they don't own, yet.
1. First, I'm part of a constituency, like many others, who are looking for a candidate to vote for who supports our primary issue. Nothing unusual about that, easy to understand.
2. But as important, it would signal that the candidate is not beholden to the media companies. I would happily give money to candidates for ads that warn that the media industry is trying to rob us of our future, and explains how important it is to protect the independence of the Internet. Use the media industry channels to undermine their efforts to the control channels they don't own, yet.
I previously blogged how 'pirate' Radio Caroline swung an election in the UK in 1970 and issued a call for copyright focused campaign weblogs.
Good to see Doc, Dan, Donna, Glenn, Cory and Jeff picking up on it this time round.
posted by Kevin Marks 4:51 AM
Liz: familiar stranger
Liz Lawley:
The Familiar Stranger is a social phenomenon first addressed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay on the subject. Familiar Strangers are individuals that we regularly observe but do not interact with. By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction. [...]
In presentations at conferences (and to students) lately, I've been talking about the importance of technologies like zero-conf networking, particularly as evidenced in OS X Rendezvous-enabled tools like iChat, iTunes, and SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra). [...]
When I open iTunes these days, I often see shared music libraries from people I don't know;mostly students, some colleagues from other departments. The same people often show up in my Rendezvous iChat window. I don't know them, I don't interact with them, but I see them regularly, recognize their virtual presence.
In presentations at conferences (and to students) lately, I've been talking about the importance of technologies like zero-conf networking, particularly as evidenced in OS X Rendezvous-enabled tools like iChat, iTunes, and SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra). [...]
When I open iTunes these days, I often see shared music libraries from people I don't know;mostly students, some colleagues from other departments. The same people often show up in my Rendezvous iChat window. I don't know them, I don't interact with them, but I see them regularly, recognize their virtual presence.
Virtual shared public spaces need to get fairly large for this to happen, but it is happening. As fewer people travel by public transport or congregate in public spaces, these can perhaps re-kindle a sense of others around.
posted by Kevin Marks 2:18 AM
Monday, November 17, 2003
Technorati dactyl
Reading through Making Light
Teresa asks for help
wishing she heard more from
Technorati
We're adding more servers
to help one find websites
serendipitously
linked back to thee
Blogospherically
adding nine thousand to
one point two million
every day
Improves your chances of
getting that egoboo.
New infrastructure will
keep you au fait.
posted by Kevin Marks 1:57 AM
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Non-verbal semantics
Britta sums up the semantic web discussion with her personal ontology.
posted by Kevin Marks 9:56 PM
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Remembrance day
Patrick Nielsen Heyden: Things that don't change
Teresa Nielsen Heyden: Ghosts of the Great War
I remember in 1982, when at school in the UK, there was a vogue for wearing white 'peace poppies' that funded CND. On November the 11th, my history teacher, Mr. Evans, came in wearing a red poppy, and noticing some of the white ones, scrapped his lesson plan and told us about the Somme.
The part that sticks with me is him saying "The machine guns on the front used soft lead bullets about 4 inches long. They flattened and spread out on impact, making a hole the size of a soup plate on the way out of the soldiers body. Money given for the red poppies goes to care for the soldiers who survived this."
posted by Kevin Marks 11:00 AM
Sunday, November 09, 2003
Google lies about search terms
I was trying out searching for Rosie's Science Club
If I google for wonder why science , Rosie comes out number 2, but the text at the top says
"why" is a very common word and was not included in your search.
If I google for wonder science , I get a completely different result set and Rosie is nowhere to be seen.
I think this is another example of Google weighting <title> tags above PageRank, but the disclaimers haven't caught up.
posted by Kevin Marks 11:12 PM
Thursday, November 06, 2003
Moral Syndromes
Jane Jacobs: Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics
Jacobs identifies two moral syndromes - a Guardian one and a Commercial one - takers and traders. You need both, but you shouldn't mix moral messages from each group.
posted by Kevin Marks 5:01 AM
Monday, November 03, 2003
Where is the real security problem?
Ian Grigg: Ladies and Gentlemen, there you have it. The Internet Threat Model (ITM), in a nutshell.
It's a strong model: the end nodes are secure and the middle is not. It's clean, it's simple, and we just happen to have a solution for it.
Problem is, it's also wrong. The end systems are not secure, and the comms in the middle is actually remarkably safe.
(Whoa! Did he say that?) Yep, I surely did: the systems are insecure, and, the wire is safe. [...]
...in practice, we can conclude, nobody much listens to our traffic. Really, so close to nobody that nobody in reality worries about it.
But, every sumbitch is trying to hack into our machine, everyone has a virus scanner, a firewall,
etc etc. I'm sure we've all shared that weird feeling when we install a new firewall that notifies when your machine is being port scanned?
A new machine can be put on a totally new IP, and almost immediately, ports are being scanned....
posted by Kevin Marks 3:13 AM
Friday, October 31, 2003
pythonmac.org - Mac OS X Python Resources
pythonmac.org is a great place to go to get information about Python on Mac, and the MacPython iChat room is even better...
posted by Kevin Marks 12:33 AM
Saturday, October 25, 2003
It's about barriers to entry, not power laws
Sandhill Trek: A Public Space Frank quotes Betsy quoting me at Bloggercon. Here's what I was trying to say:
The net extends the range of the power law distribution.
If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power law curve that goes all the way down smoothly, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single link.
If you look at popularity in the publishing world - movies, chart music or books - the curve starts out with a power law, but soon drops like a stone.
That's because in order to get a movie made, a recording contract or a book published, you have to convince somebody that you're going to sell a million tickets, a hundred thousand CDs or tens of thousands of books.
You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten.
Tim Oren is saying much the same thing, with a different metaphor.
Update:
Hear my original comment. It starts about 59 minutes into this stream.
posted by Kevin Marks 3:20 AM
BBC - iCan - MP3 Downloads from the BBC
The BBC iCan initiative is designed to help you campaign for things you want.
I want the BBC to release radio programs as MP3's instead of streams, so I can listen to them without a computer with a live net connection.
Speech radio programs don't go with using a computer to read and type.
posted by Kevin Marks 2:59 AM
Friday, October 24, 2003
Amazon and the fat tail
Gary Wolf::
All of Amazon's important innovations - starting from the concept of a Web bookstore - have suggested a profound change in the bookselling business, a change that makes it possible to earn a profit by selling a much wider variety of books than any previous retailer, including many titles from the so-called long tail of the popularity curve. 'If I have 100,000 books that sell one copy every other year,' says Steve Kessel, an Amazon VP, 'then in 10 years I've sold more of these, together, than I have of the latest Harry Potter.'
So digitise and index all books - brilliant.
posted by Kevin Marks 9:55 PM
Dive into Panther
Mark Pilgrim writes a thorough guide to some of Panther's new features.
posted by Kevin Marks 11:00 AM
Monday, October 20, 2003
Streaming bugs
Apparently QuickTime 6.4 broke the playback of edited streams I relied upon to parody Jobs in the post below - now I get timeouts and 'waiting for media' countdowns.
Sorry about that.
posted by Kevin Marks 3:31 PM
Saturday, October 18, 2003
Remember Rip, Mix, Burn?
At the iTunes Music launch, Jobs said something very wrong - that record labels should be the arbiters of taste - that they edit for our own good, and that unsigned bands need not apply.
The key point of digital media is that we can all edit, so I edited him:
If that fails due to bandwidth Click here
NB - QuickTime 6.4 broke this. See above.
posted by Kevin Marks 12:38 AM
