BoingBoing
New free Boston daily written by bloggers April 20, 2007 02:43 PM
Cory Doctorow: Jason sez, "This week, Boston Now, a new free daily newspaper launched in Boston to compete with the Metro. The paper is called Boston Now and will rely heavily on bloggers and user-submitted photos for content, with very limited content from the wire services and traditional full-time journalists."LinkIn the name of relevancy, BostonNOW is handing huge swaths of its editorial pages to its readers. Instead of bemoaning competition from bloggers, they're proposing a true pro-am partnership, promising to publish the work of any blogger who's willing and literate enough to work with them.
Andrew Sullivan
Oh. My. God. April 20, 2007 02:42 PM
[Megan] I'm sure I will now reveal that I am a net neophyte, and that everyone saw this, like, eight zillion years ago, but surely there are a few dinosaurs in the audience like me who have not seen Songs to Wear Pants To, where a young musician composes songs based on random requests from his readers. Here's how it works. Andrew, who runs the site, gets a request:
can you write a song about snails who eat people? haha
The result: Reverse Escargot.
Current favourites include This Girl, The THX Song With Just My Voice, and Celtic Techno Burrito.
Andrew Sullivan
In The Year 2000 April 20, 2007 02:42 PM
[Ross] Predictions from 1900. (They were really into pneumatic tubes.)
(via Tyler Cowen, Kottke, etc.)
John Fleck
Water in the Desert April 20, 2007 02:33 PM
I wish I’d had a camera, but I’ll have to attempt a word picture instead.
I was out riding in the foothills with some friends yesterday morning, doing repeats up the road to the Elena Gallegos picnic area. It’s a gentle and persistent climb that winds up an alluvial fan splaying out of the Sandias. It’s a classic desert landscape, where Albuquerque’s wealth has found a bit of elbow room, meaning the road is lined with discrete adobe-style houses. Big houses.
Off to the right as we were riding up the first time, I saw the spray of sprinklers from one of these big houses, backlit by the sun, watering some sort of big expanse of lawn. The backlighting highlighted the effect of the wind, which was blowing away a significant fraction of water the homeowner was apparently attempting to get on some sort of lawn. The home was on a slight hill above the road, so we couldn’t see the lawn, just the water blowing south, to someplace presumably other than its intended destination.
It’s a beautiful desert landscape, just below the edge of the piñon juniper, with sage and yucca and a gravelly alluvium well suited for not lawn. The water was still running when we made two more repeats up the hill, meaning at least half an hour.
This is groundwater, being pumped out of an aquifer at a rate substantially higher than it is being recharged. This is how we use water in the desert.
David Weinberger
Everything Is Miscellaneous launch party at Berkman April 20, 2007 02:22 PM
The Berkman is holding a launch party for Everything Is Miscellaneous on April 30. I'll give a talk at 6pm in Pound Hall Room 335, and then there will be a reception at 7pm at the Berkman Center at 23 Everett Street. (Pound Hall is a block away.)
You are invited.
Last night the Center threw a similar affair for John Clippinger's new book, A Crowd of One. These are really nice events. John's talk was terrific and engendered a lively discussion, and the wine-and-cheese party at the Center embodies much of what's best about the Center. So, I hope you'll come. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]
David Weinberger
[berkman] John Clippinger: A Crowd of One April 20, 2007 02:22 PM
John Clippinger is giving a presentation about his just-published book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Identity. [As always, I'm typing quickly, missing some stuff, getting things wrong, and making a seamless talk sound all choppy. But in this case, the remedy is easy: If you want to know more about what John is saying, buy his book.]
John approaches human nature through evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Identity, he says, is social and multiple. Trusted identity is essential for community, he says. And he's interested in how virtual worlds "allow us to build new kinds of institutions, economies and identities."
The brain is not a blank slate, he says, citing Steven Pinker. The brain is "highly specialized, opportunistic, and jerry-rigged." Some of our most important decisions originate at a prec-conscious level. This is very different from thinking we make rational decisions. "It's more a reflex." He points to our "mirror neurons," that enable us to have empathy. Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau, and the Enlightenment are wrong. Research shows that our natural inclination is to reciprocate, trust and coordinate. Virtual worlds are the new state of nature. You may think you can create any identity you want, but "our identities are socially embedded." And we all have multiple selves.
How do you have a trusted community on the Net? You need a persistent, trusted identity, says John. "But the Web was born without an identity layer." We need one. Just look at all the fraud, flaming and phishing. "How do you make people accountable for their actions without having overly draconian measures? You have to have some way of creating a cost for breaking the rules, being deceptive, etc." John refers to biological signalling theory — there's a cost for deception. [I may be getting this wrong.] You want to make the cost greater than the payoff. That's essential to any kind of trust network, says John.
In re-imagining identity as the virtual and real worlds become more intertwingled, people will want control over their identities. They'll want to have a persistent identity. They'll want multiple identities, the ability to take their identity info in and out of different virtual worlds. They'll want a range of degrees of identification, from anonymity to authenticated anonymity to complete disclosure. And they'll want to develop peer networks of trust and authentication.
Over the past two years, John's been working on a project called "Higgins," an open source interoperable identity system. (It's called "Higgins" because higgins is a long-tail mouse.)
We are getting "new narratives about cultural and political futures, not laden with moralistic doctrine." This is a kind of "social physics": there are some predictable behaviors and phenomena. It looks for "evolutionary stable strategies."
There's an opportunity, John says, to invent new digital institutions: governance mechanisms, more reliance about measured risk and reputation, transparency and accountability for all forms of authority, and acceserated social innovation through digital experimentation. He says the Chinese are very interested in social physics because they want to know if there are rules are principles they can use. [China's interest in social physics as a way of predicting and managing social behavior is not necessarily a good thing.]
Q: [me] Having an identity layer would solve of bunch of problems, but is there demand for identity itself, as opposed to a demand for solving those problems?
A: At SecondLife I was surprised that people do want to be able to authenticate themselves to others. But that doesn't mean they know your real world identity. There are degrees and types of authentication and identity. The user gets to control it. You may give up small attributes or fragments of your identity for particular purposes in particular circumstances. Community norms will arise to govern that.
Q: Is it to authenticate you as a consistent person or to get to a level of trust?
A: There is a need for persistence, frequently, although that can just be a number. And there's another issue about whether you can authenticate the claims you make about yourself. Another party may have to authenticate those, and they may change over time.
Q: How will reputation factor in the changing nature of public opinion? E.g., Don Imus.
A: You have to be careful what you mean by reputation. It may be people rating each other for particular attributes, e.g., trustworthiness at eBay. Those are often easily gamed. I'm interested in work being done on understanding how the immune system [the real one] identifiers cheaters.
Q: Do you see a role for government?
A: Government is going to play an important role. When you have a Linden Dollars exchange, [where Second Life money can be brokered for real money], the government will get involved. And when you set up ecommerce sites, identity matters.
Q: [me] Right now, sites solve their identity problems differently, and generally satisfactorily, pretty much. Given that there are risks to having an identity layer, at what point do we say the ad hoc system is broken enough that we want to have such a layer?
A: The layer won't be uniform. There are risks of abuse, of course, but the identity layer will be an interoperable set of tools for disclosing what users want to disclose.
Q: [chris meyer] Massachusetts no longer uses the SSN for drivers licenses, presumably because it's insecure to have a single number encode so much...
A: There may be one number that makes multiple sign-ins far more convenient. That will enable innovation. But you can't get that without a pretty sophisticated layer underneath. Ad hoc-ery will give way, but not necessarily to uniformity.
Q: People worry about uniform identity not in Second Life but in larger systems. E.g., people have proposed used SpeedPass to use to issue tickets for speeding in the tunnel.
A: They'd be persistent, not consistent. It'd be hard to link them. And people will not do business with businesses that betray them.
Q: [chris meyer] Transparency is two sided. When you suggest it, people get worried that they'll connect up too much information. When does transparency engender trust and when does it not?
A: Transparency may be transparency on not your full identity but on a chosen set of attributes.
Q: Integrated health care records are important for healthcare. If you try to set up a false identity, you could hurt yourself badly from a healthcare perspective.
A: [irving wladawsky-berger] When it comes to health care and children, I believe there will be legislation.
A: [someone else] Yet at Virginia Tech, people didn't know the killer had been hospitalized because of privacy laws.
A: [clippinger] Right now it's ham-fisted. It's either/or. We need it to be more flexible so people can see what they need to see. That's the new generation of social technology we now need.
[Fascinating, although I remain skeptical about the need for an "identity layer." And the reception afterward was a great time to talk with some amazing folks, including the Clipmeister himself.]
[Tags: john_clippinger identity berkman everything_is_miscellaneous]
James Governor
Ready Your Company For The Burst Economy: Kill PR, mashup IT and marketing. A 7 Step Program April 20, 2007 02:20 PM
Alan at Folknology threw out one of those posts the other day that is brilliant because, not despite the fact, its a rant. He didn’t give it a particularly catchy title, but you can’t have everything. I am stealing the whole thing:
1. Scrap the IT and Marketing departments and replace with a new department called “Communications”.
2. Hardwire clients and suppliers into the new ‘Comms dept’ by destroying your call centers and accounting bouncers by replacing with wikis, blogs and home brewed social software build on web/SaaS APIs.
3. Have the folks who used to work in marketing participate in and enable blogs.
4. Fire your PR company, use the money to hire good bloggers and evangelists.
5. Have the Folks formerly know as ‘The I.T. dept’ build and run wikis and the locally brewed social software, have them report to the bloggers.
6. Outsource legacy IT, and move away from it.
7. Transform your business into a purple cow, which will surely happen as you actually learn what the market place actually needs and desires.
It strikes me that what Alan describes is quite a lot like the smarter startups we see at the moment. Decisions about how and where to apply budget must be reassessed in light of 2.0 dynamics.
BoingBoing
Bill Gates and Free Software heckler in China April 20, 2007 02:03 PM
Cory Doctorow:
Wen sez, "On April, 20th, Bill Gates went to Peking University to give a talk titled "Creativity, China, Future". After the talk, someone held a piece of paper written with 'Free software, Open source' rushed to the stage before Mr. Gates while spoke word to support open source software. It is said that that man is named Yang Wang, and he is a representative of LPI (Linux Professional Institute)."
Link
(Thanks, Wen)
BoingBoing
Tiny perfect Hobbit doll-house April 20, 2007 01:43 PM
Cory Doctorow:
Back in 2005, LiveJournaller Obelia Medusa posted an extensive photo-record of her gorgeous Bilbo Baggins doll-house. It's fantastically detailed with a huge larder stuffed with Hobbit food, teetering stacks of books, a clutter of Hobbit knick-knacks, and round doors and windows. Link to work-in-progress shots, Link to finished project (via Neatorama)
BoingBoing
The Theatre of Comets, 1668 astronomy book from Amsterdam April 20, 2007 01:43 PM
Xeni Jardin:
"Necessarium est autem veteres ortus cometarum habere collectos. Deprehendi enim propter raritatem eorum cursus adhuc non potest, nec explorari an vices servent et illos ad suum diem certus ordo producat"The text above is an excerpt from this book:[It is essential that we have a record of all the appearances of comets in former times. For, on account of their infrequency, their orbit cannot yet be discovered or examined in detail, to see they observe a periodical interval and whether their reappearance on a fixed day could be the result of certain cause] {Seneca, 60AD}
The vast 'Theatrum Cometicum' (The Theatre of Comets) was published in Amsterdam in 1668 and includes about 80 lavish engravings (a great many of them are double-page fold out illustrations). It provides accounts of over 400 comet sightings throughout history and in discussing their meaning, [Polish astronomer Stanislaus] Lubienietzki essentially helps usher in a more astronomical rather than astrological approach to the study of comets.Link to more text and scanned images pages, taken from the wonderful old-book blog Bibliodyssey. The editor adds,
The whole of 'Theatrum Cometicum' is available online at the National Digital Library of Poland. Also known as Biblioteka Narodowa, this digital library deserves special mention. In addition to having a large selection of books in page image format, the interface is one of the best I've seen.
David Weinberger
Gender Genie confirms I'm a man, pretty much April 20, 2007 01:43 PM
Over at Everything Is Miscellaneous I've posted about the Gender Genie, a tool that guesses the authors' sex based on her/his use of innocuous keywords. ..
James Governor
International Tech Expo Today in Second Life April 20, 2007 01:37 PM
More than 60 firms are exhibiting across four floors, including Sun and SAP at ITE. Its kind of odd to go to a tech show in Second Life but with first impressions it works surprisingly well. Craig is the man, but the entire crew over at Silicon Island are just incredibly welcoming and helpful. Kudos to the v3group
In case you tire of the crowds, feel free to pop in at RedMonk’s SL office, which is just around the corner from ITE.
Monkchips Congreja wont be there all the time by any means (its my weekend in First Life, and my First Wife had dibs) but I will try and pop in. If I am not around feel free to grab yourself a coke or just chill out in the lounge and perhaps play some pool.
Michael Dolan
Google shows Wall St. the “Wow” April 20, 2007 01:37 PM
Not this kind of “Wow”, but rather, the beat earnings estimates by 38 cents per share kind of “Wow”.
Shares are up $18.84 in early trading…
Aaron Weber
Dropping the N-Bomb April 20, 2007 01:36 PM
The trouble with automatic translations is that sometimes you end up with the wrong word. Oops! An honest mistake, and easy enough to fix. It’s not like it was deliberate.
I remember clearly when I learned the n-word. I was a precocious reader and I’d grabbed Huckleberry Finn way before I was old enough to understand it. I must have been about eleven or twelve. I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t know it was a bad word. I told my mom about the plot and the characters, and described them as they’d been described in the book. She set me straight pretty quick. I also learned the word “derogatory” that day.
This is similar to the story of how I learned to pronounce the word “genre” — I’d only ever seen it written down, so I just guessed at how to say it. I would have been in junior high, I guess… right in the middle of my science-fiction obsession. I think I pronounced it jenn-air, like the appliances. In front of my parents and a dinner party of their friends. Everyone laughed. I still feel a twinge of sympathy when people mispronounce that word, although it doesn’t stop me from laughing at them.
BoingBoing
Web zen: meaty zen April 20, 2007 01:23 PM
Xeni Jardin:
grass fed cooking
meat alphabet
sweet meats
cuts of beef
meat cake
hot dog loaf
octodog
hot dog aquarium
hot dog opera
hot dog sculptures
chili cheese burrito
in-n-out secret menu
garbage plate
poutine
eat bunny
Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!).
BoingBoing
Armchair meets padded cell April 20, 2007 01:23 PM
Cory Doctorow:
The "Paddy Chair" is a cross between an armchair and a padded cell, described by designer Nick Melville as a "comfy chair for nutters."
Link
(via Shiny Shiny)
Patently-O
CAFC: Claim Differentiation Again April 20, 2007 01:20 PM
Intamin v. Magnetar Tech (Fed. Cir. 2007).
Intamin owns a patent on a magnetic breaking system for a roller coaster and sued Magnetar for infringement.
The claim construction dispute involved an "intermediary" between two magnets. Relying on an ordinary meaning interpretation, the lower court had found that the intermediary could not itself be a magnet: "In short, ordinary meaning supports [a narrow construction], and neither the specification nor the prosecution history changes the ordinary meaning."
On appeal, the CAFC found an error in claim construction -- holding that the claimed intermediary could itself be an intermediary. The court based its result on an implication of claim differentiation.
[A dependent claim] discloses "[t]he braking device of claim 1 wherein said intermediary is non-magnetic." This dependent claim shows both that the claim drafter perceived a distinction between magnetic and non-magnetic intermediaries and that independent claim 1 impliedly embraced non-magnetic intermediaries.
Interestingly, the CAFC allowed the claim differentiation argument despite the fact that "Intamin did not raise this argument until reconsideration." As a backup, the court implicitly relied on the ordinary (broad) meaning of intermediary to further justify its holding.
At one point, the '350 patent describes an embodiment of the invention with a "non-magnetic" intermediary.... The single reference does not expressly limit the entire invention but only describes a single embodiment. Moreover, the term "intermediary," like the term "baffle" in Phillips, embraces more than the limited specification disclosure.
Vacated and Remanded.
Ed Felten
Is SafeMedia a Parody? April 20, 2007 01:05 PM
Peter Eckersley at EFF wrote recently about a new network-filtering company called SafeMedia that claims it can block all copyrighted material in a network. We’ve seen companies like this before and they tend to have the warning signs of security snake oil.
But SafeMedia was new so I decided to look at their website. My reaction was: what a brilliant parody!
The biggest clue is that the company’s detection product is called Clouseau — named for a detective who is not only spectacularly incompetent but also fictional.
The next clue is the outlandish technical claims. Here’s an example:
Pirates are smart and innovative, and so is Clouseau. Our technology is dynamic, sees through all multi-layered encryptions, adaptively analyzes network patterns and constantly updates itself. Packet examinations are noninvasive and infallible. There are no false positives.
Sees through all encryption? Even our best intelligence agencies don’t make that claim. Perhaps that’s because the intelligence agencies know about provably unbreakable encryption.
Wait a minute, you may be saying. Perhaps SafeMedia was just making the usual exaggeration, implying that they can stop all bad traffic when what they really mean is that they can stop the most common, obvious kinds of bad traffic. Good guess — that’s the usual fallback position for companies like this — but SafeMedia doesn’t shrink from the most outlandish claims of infallibility:
What if illegal P2P no longer worked? What if, no matter how intelligent, devious, or well-funded an Internet pirate was, they absolutely could not transmit copyrighted material via P2P? SafeMedia’s goal was to create the technology that would achieve exactly this. And we succeeded.
Employing our new technology, Clouseau and Windows + Transport Control, makes illegal P2P transmission of copyrighted material impossible. IMPOSSIBLE. Not difficult and not improbable. IMPOSSIBLE!
The next clue that SafeMedia is a parody is the site’s blatant rent-seeking. There’s even a special page for lawmakers that starts with over-the-top rhetoric about P2P (”America is at war here at home within our own borders. And we are taking casualties. Women, men, and children.”) and ends by asking the U.S. government to act as SafeMedia’s marketing department:
We need the Congress to pass legislation appropriating funds for installing the technology on every Federally-supported computer network in the country, most importantly in educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities, libraries)…. We need the Department of Commerce to promote using the technology in all American businesses big and small, and to push for its international adoption. We need the Department of Education to insure that every educational institution in the USA, private and public, primary and secondary, college and university, is obeying the law.
You now have the right weapons. Let’s end the war!
Add up all this, plus the overdesigned home page that makes maddening fingers-on-a-blackboard noises when you mouse over its main menu area, and the verdict is clear: this is a parody.
Yet SafeMedia appears to be real. The CEO appears to be a real guy who has done a few e-commerce startups. The site has more detailed help-wanted ads than any parodist would bother with. According to the Internet Archive, the site has been around for a while. And most convincingly of all, an expensive DC law firm has registered as a lobbyist for SafeMedia.
So SafeMedia really exists and company management thought it a good idea to set up a parody-simulating website and name their product Clouseau. What an entertaining world we live in.
(Thanks to Peter Eckersley for sharing the results of his un-Clouseau-ish investigation of SafeMedia’s existence.)
BoingBoing
Recreating vintage photos of London April 20, 2007 01:02 PM
Cory Doctorow:
The London Then-and-Now Flickr group invites Londoners to visit the sites depicted in vintage photos and recreate the shots, showing what those sites look like in modern London. I love this shot of George Court, off the Strand, right by my PO Box.
Link
(via Oblink)
BoingBoing
Donald Duck's 1937 vision of the future April 20, 2007 01:02 PM
Cory Doctorow: The Paleo-Future blog's feature on the 1937 Donald Duck cartoon "Modern Inventions" has some good analysis and gorgeous stills from this yesterday's tomorrow:LinkThe museum is full of wonderfully ridiculous inventions from the future such as the pneumatic pencil sharpener, peanut sheller, robotic nurse maid, old razor blade mangler, robotic hitch-hiker's aid, potato peeler, the hydraulic potato peeler, mechanical bottle opener, and the automatic bundle wrapper.
IP and IT conferences
Self-Regulation and Spam at Touro April 20, 2007 01:00 PM
Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center and the Touro Institute for Business, Law and Technology are pleased to present a major conference on e-mail law and self-regulation, to be held on Monday, April 30, 2007, at Touro’s state-of-the-art new campus in Central Islip, NY.
The conference, entitled “When Spam Isn’t Spam: An Unfiltered Look at Self-Regulation and the Law Behind E-mail”, will bring together technologists, marketers, attorneys and academics for a real-world look at the challenges posed by unsolicited bulk e-mail, and how both the law and the technology communities have sought to address them.
With keynote presentations from David Pogue of The New York Times and Prof. David Farber of Carnegie Mellon, and sessions taught by law professors, executives from Spamhaus, Return Path and Invision as well as other experts, attendees will walk away with practical knowledge and tools for improving the deliverability of e-mail they send and receive. Attorneys can also receive up to 3 hours of NY CLE credits.
The brochure for the conference, which is being sponsored by The Lustigman Firm (http://www.lfirm.com), Invision (http://www.invision.com), and LISTnet (http://www.LISTnet.org), may be downloaded from:
http://www.tourolaw.edu/pdf/emailconference.pdf
Sponsorship, hotel and travel information is available upon request.
Please feel free to contact Prof. Jonathan Ezor, director of the Institute for Business, Law and Technology, at jezor@tourolaw.edu if you have any questions or need information.
IP and IT conferences
Patent Update at Suffolk April 20, 2007 01:00 PM
CURRENT AND FUTURE TRENDS IN PATENT LAW
Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference
Sponsored with the Suffolk University Law School Intellectuap Property Law Concentration and Social Law Library
Date: Friday, April 20 2007
Location: Suffolk University Law School, 120 Tremont St., Boston, MA
Time: 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Link: http://www.law.suffolk.edu/academic/als/coursedetail.cfm?cid=554
BoingBoing
Digital camera disguised as giant vintage locket April 20, 2007 12:42 PM
Cory Doctorow:
This gigantic vintage-esque necklace is actuall a Kodak 1881 camera, designed by Lindsey Pickett to look like an old locket. It has a pair of LCDs inside that display your photos. This is a neat idea, but man, that is one big locket -- Flava Flav big. Link (via Shiny Shiny)
BoingBoing
Adjustable breast implants April 20, 2007 12:42 PM
Cory Doctorow: These breast-implants can be adjusted after surgery, varying the size of your fake tits based on your post-operative feelings about them until you're perfectly happy with your wobbly plastic boobs.Link (via Futurismic)The Spectrum is a technologically innovative design that allows the surgeon to continue making adjustments to the breast after your breast augmentation operation. A small, removable fill tube is left temporarily attached to the breast implant after surgery. The tube is accessible to the physician by injection through the skin. In a simple office procedure, breast implant size can be varied until you have achieved the result you desire. At this point, the fill tube is removed (again, in a routine office visit) and a self-sealing valve immediately closes and seals the breast implant.
William Patry
WKRP in Cincinnati and Section 114(b) April 20, 2007 12:13 PM
Wired magazine has been covering the saga of putting the TV show "WKRP in Cincinnati" on DVD. The first story, from March 2005, details how the show's license to use music in the original show did not extend to syndication or DVD. Since the show involved a radio station, music was an integral part of the plot. The most recent story, from Tuesday, gives the solution:The series will finally be released on DVD on April 24th, but fans are already irate. The music originally included in the show has been replaced by generic muzak in order to placate the almighty copyright gods, who would otherwise have prevented the series from being released by (apparently) demanding so much licensing money as to render the whole project unfeasible.
Here's an account of the situation from the guy whose job it was to replace the offending musical compositions in order to pave the way for the series' release on DVD:
"During my years with MTM, I was asked to perform the most painful duty I have ever had to do in entertainment business. I was given the task of excising much of the original music from the episodes and replace it with Muzak-style songs that could be licensed in perpetuity for a small flat fee. This was deemed necessary in order to keep the program in syndication.
"Music" in the above discussion refers not to the musical composition, but to the sound recording. Making DVDs of music even when included in a TV show involves the reproduction right, and without a license from the music composition owner, no such DVD can be distributed. The real problem is the sound recording then. The muzak solution is the cheap way out. Other times, as with sound track albums, a sound-alike band has been hired to produce a sound recording mimicing exactly the original performance. This happened with the soundtrack to Peter Fonda's 1969 "Easy Rider" movie, when The Band would not give permission for its song The Weight to be included in the (vinyl) album, and so a cover was done by Smith. A reviewer on amazon.com gives the story in connection with a 2 CD release:"The new music that was inserted into the show sucked ass. It was wrong for the feel and attitude of the show. Some scenes relied on specific songs at particular junctures (i.e., Les Nessman trying on a toupee to the soundtrack of Foreigner's “Hot Blooded”) . Those scenes were ruined. In many instances, we couldn't even finesse the proper audio levels in order to cut the costs of replacing the music...
"Allegedly, the original producer of the show (Hugh Wilson) was involved in replacing the Muzak with some other generic songs that are more palatable. While this is admirable, and Wilson has some great artistic instincts, it still isn't enough to undo the damage."
In some ways it's fitting that the soundtrack to this landmark film has suffered a series of legal hassles from The Man. In its original 1969 vinyl release, it was denied the film's use of The Band's "The Weight" (by the band's then-label Capitol), and a sound-alike cover by Smith was issued in its place. More recently, the soundtrack was withheld from domestic CD reissue, squeaking out a European version many years before MCA's 2000 digital issue. The latter reunited The Band with their film-mates, at the expense of altering the original Smith-bred artifact. Hip-O's deluxe two-disc reissue provides the best of both worlds - including both versions of "The Weight" - and filling out a second disc of contemporaneous radio hits.
One can now decide which one prefers, Smith or the Band. The legal basis for covers of sound recordings goes back to the original 1971 legislation granting federal copyright in sound recordings, embodied now in Section 114(b):
The exclusive right of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under clause (1) of section 106 is limited to the right to duplicate the sound recording in the form of phonorecords or copies that directly or indirectly recapture the actual sounds fixed in the recording. The exclusive right of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under clause (2) of section 106 is limited to the right to prepare a derivative work in which the actual sounds fixed in the sound recording are rearranged, remixed, or otherwise altered in sequence or quality. The exclusive rights of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under clauses (1) and (2) of section 106 do not extend to the making or duplication of another sound recording that consists entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds, even though such sounds imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording.
James Governor
OpenXML vs ODF: fighting dirty isn’t a good look April 20, 2007 12:10 PM
Yesterday I asked whether the archiving argument for ODF against OpenXML stacked up. One comment came from Sam Hiser, who came back with:
“It’s utter naivete. You’d amend your view if you understood how the MOOXML format operates throughout the stack.”
Being naive, I wish we could have a mature conversation about the pros and cons of document formats. I dont like dirty politics and associated swiftboating in any field- and tech is no exception. Digging through trash and talking it. That’s my biggest concern about the way this argument is playing out: going negative may win elections but it doesn’t help the body politic in the long run. Would you like to be in George Bush’s place right now? Black helicopters circle.
I would counsel both sides to be cautious about the behind the scenes, and front of house, brawling and finger-pointing. Customers in many sectors don’t seem to care about the same things the industry appears to right now, and that’s a bad thing. Public sector requirements and politics are framing the conversation for everyone, which is hardly Cluetrain. The public sector 0wnz the document format discussion. But as Hugh points out in his seminal Porous Mebrane: Why Blogging Works post:
The things that A is passionate about, B should also be passionate about. This we call “alignment”. A good example would be Apple. The people at Apple think the iPod is cool, and so do their customers. They are aligned.
Best comment yesterday came from Clive, who is on the customer side of the equation:
James - knowing you are not exactly a Microsoft apologist, your post made me actually reevaluate which camp i was rooting for. I was finding it so easy to get caught up in the whose side is winning when I realized, wait, we all could actually lose if it’s just one format. That solves nothing, plus ODF sort of sucks when you strip it down despite how emotionally i wanted MSFT to take one. Hats off for helping me at least question myself and get back to my day job which has always been “what problem are we trying to solve”. My boss the CIO isnt going to ask me which friggin format i implemented, but does it work, who supports it and does it WORK WITH WHAT WE HAVE.
By not arguing solely for either side of ODF vs OpenXML am I really the enemy of both? Seems a shame. I do know one thing - I will be covering both standards for the next few years, because customers will be using them. I am an industry analyst - pragmatism is a big part of the job, even if openness is a personal prejudice. I hope I don’t lose any friends by calling for a middle ground…
disclosures: IBM and Microsoft are both clients.
Hugh Macleod
tagline feedback requested April 20, 2007 12:03 PM
We're having an internal discussion at Stormhoek about what the final tagline on the front label of "Couture Rose" should be. The main take-out is that we want to communicate in a fun, funky way that this rose tastes BEST with ice, expressed in as few words as possible. Here's our shortlist:
1. Magic over ice.
2. So nice with ice.
3. Pour over ice.
4. Nice over ice.
5. Happiest over ice.
6. "Best over ice, Darling."
7. Seriously best over ice.
8. Perfect over ice [Thanks, Brent]
9. Made specifically for ice. [I know it's boring, but it gets the point across etc.]
10. Made specifically to be poured over ice.Anybody have any ideas? All opinions or suggestions gratefully received. Thanks.
[Note To Self:] I like Number 10, myself. But since I wrote it, I would say that etc.
[UPDATE:] I really like Vinny's suggestion: "I would make it less tagline-y and more directional (ie, boring). It's a pink wine so it's already got enough "fun" inherently in it: BEST SERVED OVER ICE."
Bruce Schneier
Social Engineering Notes April 20, 2007 12:01 PM
This is a fantastic story of a major prank pulled off at the Super Bowl this year. Basically, five people smuggled more than a quarter of a ton of material into Dolphin Stadium in order to display their secret message on TV. A summary:
Just days after the Boston bomb scare, another team of Boston-based pranksters smuggled and distributed 2,350 suspicious light-up devices into the Super Bowl. Due to its attractiveness as a terrorist target, Dolphin Stadium was on a Level One security alert, a level usually reserved for Presidential inaugurations. By posing as media reporters, the pranksters were able to navigate 95 boxes through federal marshals, Homeland Security agents, bomb squads, police dogs, and a five-ton X-ray crane.
Given all the security, it's amazing how easy it was for them to become part of the security perimeter with all that random stuff. But to those of us who follow this thing, it shouldn't be. His observations are spot on:
1. Wear a suit.
2. Wear a Bluetooth headset.
3. Pretend to be talking loudly to someone on the other line.
4. Carry a clipboard.
5. Be white.
Again, no surprise here. But it makes you wonder what's the point of annoying the hell out of ordinary citizens with security measures (like pat down searches) when the emperor has no clothes.
Someone who crashed the Oscars last year gave similar advice:
Show up at the theater, dressed as a chef carrying a live lobster, looking really concerned.
On a much smaller scale, here's someone's story of social engineering a bank branch:
I enter the first branch at approximately 9:00AM. Dressed in Dickies coveralls, a baseball cap, work boots and sunglasses I approach the young lady at the front desk.“Hello,” I say. “Jarred White with XYZ Pest Control, here to perform your pest inspection.” I flash her the smile followed by the credentials. She looks at me for a moment, goes “Uhm… okay… let me check with the branch manager…” and picks up the phone. I stand around twiddling my thumbs and wait while the manager is contacted and confirmation is made. If all goes according to plan, the fake emails I sent out last week notifying branch managers of our inspection will allow me access.
It does.
Social engineering is surprisingly easy. As I said in Beyond Fear (page 144):
Social engineering will probably always work, because so many people are by nature helpful and so many corporate employees are naturally cheerful and accommodating. Attacks are rare, and most people asking for information or help are legitimate. By appealing to the victim’s natural tendencies, the attacker will usually be able to cozen what she wants.
All it takes is a good cover story.
EDITED TO ADD (4/20): The first commenter suggested that the Zug story is a hoax. I think he makes a good argument, and I have no evidence to refute it. Does anyone know for sure?
Hugh Macleod
"gapingvoid got it wrong" April 20, 2007 11:42 AM
Heh. Nothing like seeing "Gapingvoid Got It Wrong" on the front page of Techmeme to get your attention...
OK, so it's on the advertising section of Techmeme, still, it's pretty prominent. Prominent enough for me to go "Oops".
Microsoft's Sam Ramji makes a good point:
Their definition of the problem includes long-term viability, mission-critical support, and interoperability with their other technologies. So what this quote means is “if you have a technology for me – open source or not – you have to provide for my key concerns.” Companies like Novell, Red Hat, JBoss, and MySQL have built businesses based on meeting these needs. This is reality. It is foolish to label these companies and their customers, users, and community as playing with things that are “not proven” or “science experiments”.
This is not a war. This is about technology.
It’s only a war when we hold on to hunter-gatherer era tribal mentalities and say “Our way is good! Their way is bad!”
It comes off the Microsoft Port25 blog, the latter I only became really aware of after my friend, James Governor enlightened me.
[UPDATE: Terrific Stuff from Vijay:] "Nice to see Microsoft people feeling uncomfortable with Hugh’s post and coming out quite strongly against it. It shows how far Microsoft have come. I hope the Opensource guys are taking notice of Microsoft’s defence of it!"
[Great, great comment- Michael Neel:] "Open, Closed, Microsoft, Sun - it doesn't matter. _Software has no value_ (nod to eric raymond). What has value is the people, companies, and support behind the software. If software had value, then upgrades and new versions wouldn't replace prior versions. Mac OS 9 anyone? Windows 98? Apache/Linux/MySQL - great support and people involved - high value. Sharepoint 2007 and .Net, again great support and people involved - high value. When I write code for someone they are buying me, not the code. I'm the one that brings the value."
[Related Link:] "The Case For Technological Atheism".
Andrew Sullivan
States rights April 20, 2007 11:42 AM
[Megan] The alleged logic of overturning Roe v. Wade is, for many libertarians, that it will throw the issue back to the states. There, states will rapidly use the legislative process to come to a compromise that makes the majority of people within their borders roughly happy, and both the pro-choice and pro-life groups will lose much of their energy.
This argument has a lot of appeal. As one of my colleagues at The Economist pointed out, Europe had the same conversation as America about abortion in the sixties and seventies. The difference is, European countries either passed laws, or submitted the question to referendum. Even those who weren't happy with the outcome felt the process by which it had been reached was legitimate. In America, neither group feels that the Supreme Court's process was morally legitimate--or at least, I infer that pro-choicers do not, since they seem to view an attempt to ban abortion by exactly the same process as a completely illegitimate usurpation of power by conservative ideologues.
Besides, the more local a problem is, the less anger it generates; American pro-lifers do not, after all, head over to England to hold their candlelight vigils, nor do pro-choicers fly to Germany to protest the country's near-complete (de jure, though not de facto) abortion ban.
But what if this doesn't happen, as Scott Lemieux has argued? What if Congress starts making abortion law? We'll see a substantial nationwide curtailment of abortion rights, then, without the decentralised decision-making that libertarians so love.
Certainly, no classical liberal is cheering the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Federal partial-birth abortion ban. Even those who are pro-life (yes, there are some!) or like me, moderately pro-choice, are unhappy that any federal abortion statute would be upheld under the commerce clause. The procedure is so rarely performed that it's hard to view it as a sort of devil's bargain. And it bodes ill for any future in which Roe is overturned.
Still, you have to ask whether a Roe-less world with federal restrictions would be worse than than the status quo. The restrictions that could actually be passed at the Federal level would probably bring our abortion law roughly in line with the rest of the world's: no abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions for the life and health of the mother, mental health not being included in those exceptions. That wouldn't actually stop very many abortions, though obviously it would make unhappy anyone who thinks that you should be able to abort right up until the moment the doctor slaps it on the ass.
But even a suboptimal law--and I'm sure that it would be more restrictive than I'd like, since what I'd like is pretty much no restrictions--would probably be better than the current situation, because as in Europe, the process would legitimate the decision. It would burn out a lot of the energy on both sides for packing the courts in order to legislate from the bench by fiat. It would force legislators to actually put what they want right out there in the sunlight, rather than insulating themselves from accountability by standing behind nine people in black robes. I'm not saying that we wouldn't still have vigorous debate, because obviously, the period of deciding abortion laws would be even angrier than the current one. But at the end, you would have a law roughly acceptable to most of the population. The extremists on both sides, those who think they can still win the game of Supreme Court Chess with some surprise killer move and therefore need not compromised with the [great unwashed/heretics] in most of the country, will obviously not think that this is a great thing. But I'm not sure it sounds so bad to me.
And of course, it is also good for the process itself. The perception that the Supreme Court just gets to make shit up whenever it wants has not added to either civil discourse, or public faith in our institutions. That of itself might be worth the tradeoff.
Bruce MacEwen
How Did You Do in Northern California in 2000? April 20, 2007 11:41 AM
Nobody likes to be the weatherman when the forecast is for wind-driven freezing rain, and far be it from me to aspire to that dour post.
But based on some indicators such as the Hildebrandt/Citigroup Private Bank March 2007 Client Advisory, which reports that "the compound annual growth rates (“CAGRs”) of revenue and profits per equity partner for the 2001-2005 period were 9.8 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively," it's only fair to ask how long these tail winds and this sunny environment can prevail.
It's time, in other words, to mention the dreaded "R" word: Recession.
[Time out for a Favorite Economist Moment: Alfred Kahn, the NYU-educated Cornell Professor of economics who headed the late Civil Aviation Board under the Carter Administration, and who we have to thank—seriously—for airline deregulation, was called to testify before Congress at one point during his tenure and, anticipating that the Senators would stray afield from questions about the airline industry to questions about the parlous state of the OPEC-shocked, stagflating economy at the time, President Carter firmly instructed Kahn that "Under no circumstances can you say that we're in a recession." When the inevitable question arose on the Hill, Kahn replied calmly that "I have been instructed not to say that we're experiencing a recession. So I'll tell you that we're experiencing a banana."]
Which brings us back to the word I have not been enjoined from using. First, another extract from the Hildebrandt/Citigroup report:
"Looking ahead to 2007, we believe that law firm revenues will come close to reaching 2006 levels but that net income will be squeezed by increasing costs. Although firms will continue to manage their expense budgets carefully, we believe that growing pressures for discounts, coupled with increases in “big ticket” expense items (including compensation costs), are likely to limit both revenue growth and improvements in profitability."
Now, as innumerable jokes have it, economists/the Dow Jones/the Fed have predicted 12 of the last 5 recessions, so I'm not about to advance a prediction, but I do know that cyclicality is still a characteristic of even our 21st-Century economy. [A reader now tells me the most credible source of the 12-for-5 quote is Paul Samuelson, whose tireless revisions of Economics instructed generations of Econ. 101 students.] This raises the question: What, if anything, is to be done to prepare for the inevitable?
The good news is that law firms have high variable and low fixed costs. The bad news is that your assets are elevator assets? Yes, but in bad times that's a blessing in disguise. It can be, and will be if the time comes, terribly painful from a human, and humane, perspective to unload idle people, but such would be the imperatives of the market, especially if your competitors are doing the same. Understand: I take no satisfaction whatsoever in this. But I point it out as reality, and as the ineluctable responsibility of those of you who get paid the bucks to be in charge.
Short, indeed, of overly ambitious lease obligations or (quelle horreur!) outsized debt obligations, there's little reason a law firm should be fatally imperiled by a recession.
Still, don't there remain smart and not-smart ways to prepare?
Yes, but don't take my word for it. McKinsey has released a study this month of how, during good times, you can prepare your firm to not only survive, but to thrive following the upturn after the next recession. As usual, McKinsey's data is exhaustive: This time, they looked at 1,300 US companies across a broad range of industries and looked at how they fared during and after the 2000—2001 recession, identifying those who emerged with gains in industry leadership.
And yes, while some of their findings, which are focused on industrial companies and banks, don't relate directly to the peculiar economics of law firms, we as a profession are built to reason by analogy, so let's proceed.
The key findings support the intuitively correct notion that the more flexibility your firm has going into the bad times, the more svelte your operations, the more diverse your offerings, the healthier you will emerge.
| Lever | Industrial Companies | Banks |
|---|---|---|
| Balance Sheet Flexibility |
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| Operating Flexibility |
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| Service Offering Flexibility |
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So how do we translate this industrial/bank-land advice into law firm land?
Lesson #1 is that balance sheet strength matters. We've all seen this in the bloody post-dot-com experience of many firms in Northern California. Those with large liabilities—Brobeck's lease obligations being the most notorious—had a tough time. Those with lower debt obligations lived to tell the tale.
But balance sheet strength is not just what lets you survive: It's what enables you to thrive. One phenomenon of a recession is that previously-valuable assets can get cheap, as distressed sellers multiply. If you have the wherewithal to pick them up at a local minimum price, why wouldn't you? The flip side of this, of course, is that you don't want to be a "distressed seller." If you've larded up, you may fit just that description.
#2, "operational flexibility," with the focus on "SG&A" expenses (selling, general, and administrative), has a slightly different tale to tell. In a law firm, the rough equivalent of SG&A is non-lawyer-related staff and associated overhead. These costs are notoriously difficult to cut in the short run, unless you're already prepared. Ways to prepare include:
- outsourcing; and
- using a higher ratio of temps, contract workers, and part-timers to full-time full-benefits people.
The problem is that to prepare the groundwork in this fashion means you are substituting people whose primary allegiance lies outside your firm for people whose primary allegiance is (one can hope) to your firm. A compromise that accommodates both goals of flexibility and loyalty may be to examine some lower-cost geographic regions within your firm's overall national or international footprint, and putting more "SG&A" expenses there.
#3, adjusting your mix of product and service offerings, may be the easiest for law firms to achieve. If we're any good, we adapt to the economy and our clients' changing demands organically and continuously: We just have to be more intense, focused, and relentless about it when times are tough.
How do you prepare for this? Ideally, you want to have a geographically and substantively diversified practice before the downturn. Then you will be able to see which clients with what precise legal needs are still spending—indeed, they could be spending even more.
Faithful readers of "Adam Smith, Esq." know that I'm a proponent of firms' placing an array of small, smart strategic bets rather than pushing out one or two enormous piles of chips into the center of the table. (Northern California in the late 1990's, again, an historic phenomenon I will be eternally grateful to for its educational value.)
Two examples, both taken from the 2000-2001 downturn:
- Starbucks reacted not by discounting but by adding more services, such as Wi-Fi, the Starbucks card, and new products. Result: Same store sales growth continued virtually unabated.
- Verizon, like the rest of the telecom industry, was facing ever-declining revenue per minute of call: From 27.5 cents in 1999 to 11 cents in 2003 (a 60% decrease in four years!). Nevertheless, they readjusted their services towards broadband, cellphone's, and value-added services, and their average revenue per subscriber (1999 index = 100) went from 100 in 1999 to 108 in 2003, while the industry finished that period at 100.
Am I forecasting a recession? Harry Truman famously fumed that he needed someone to find him a "one-handed economist," exasperated with on the one hand, on the other hand prognostications. And I myself have often found truth in the crack that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they wouldn't reach a conclusion.
But actually, I am decisively not forecasting a recession. Still, we all know one lies in store sooner or later. Will your firm be ready?
Hugh Macleod
change my stats April 20, 2007 11:22 AM
[Cartoon part of the Microsoft Blue Monster Series.]
I drew this one at a pub in Chiswick last week. Microsoft's Chris Parkes explains.
Madisonian.net
Copyright Infringement and the Multistate Bar Exam April 20, 2007 11:20 AM
It had to happen sooner or later. According to Law.com, the NCBE has obtained subpoenas commanding Earthlink to disclose the identity of an anonymous person who posted 41 multistate bar exam questions on a blog. The postings apparently appeared in the comments section of the blog “tabandbrandy.blogspot.com.” The story also states that the NCBE subpoenaed Google as well about the posting. If you try to visit the blog, it no longer appears at Blogspot. I don’t know if the poster took the blog down voluntarily or whether Google did it as part of a notice and take down procedure. If you hunt for the cached pages of the offending posts, they show several “This post has been removed by a blog administrator” messages where the offending posts might have been.
As far as the merits of this individual case go, it seems pretty likely that the posting of 41 questions is infringement. That case is particularly strong if the poster repeated the questions verbatim (darn, that would be hard to do). But what if the questions are merely summarized? Or what if the questions aren’t summarized, but merely discussed in ways that reveal their substance? I can understand that the NCBE doesn’t want its questions disclosed, but - as they appear to acknowledge - they can’t stop people from talking about the exam. If that’s true (and it surely is), what about those who write about the exam?
Does anyone know what other standardized testing services do about this problem? Do they only go after the mass posters of near-verbatim repetition? Or do they try to stop all disclosure? And, do they only use the notice and take down procedures, or do they file real copyright litigation?
James Governor
Twitter vs Jott: One World vs One Country. Aanvangsleerfase overslaan April 20, 2007 10:43 AM
I have heard a couple of nice things about Jott and would like to try the service. Sadly I can’t because I am in the UK, and Jott only works across US cell phone networks. Compare and contrast with Twitter, which supports Europe, using the UK as a bridge. My Twitter network now has a nicely global flavour. Yesterday Suw Charman needed a translation of a Dutch phrase… and Werner Ramaekers provided it. She wasn’t subscribed to him, but he was to me, so I provided a pivot point. Needless to say after Suw discovered that “aanvangsleerfase overslaan” meant “skipping the initial learning phase” she subscribed directly to Werner.
Bursty people tend to aanvangsleerfase overslaan, but interestingly enough they’re probably less likely to need to RTFM because they immerse themselves in the services they use.
Perhaps I am being unfair to Jott, given it relies on voice transcription, whereas Twitter is “just” text. But explosive service growth is always going to be more likely if you skip the initial learning phase and go global out of the gates. America is not exactly a backwater yet, but its only a portion of the addressable market. My furthest Twitterer is aqualung. He is why RedMonk has an Aussie client. To get a sense for out of the box globalisation check out the hypnotic “view of God” Twittervision. Apparently the BBC twitters in viatnamese. Who knew?
John Scalzi
Off to Penguicon April 20, 2007 09:42 AM
I'm heading north to Penguicon (less a physical location than a state of mind), so you want to stalk me this weekend, you'll have to go to Michigan to do it. And here's what I'm doing on the programming schedule, to make your stalking of me that more efficient:
Friday:
8:30 – 11 PM: "Starship Troopers" Heckled MST3K Style Nick Sagan, John Scalzi In the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000, our two expert class clowns will provide a hilarious sendup of a film, which (by all reports) the director sincerely thought he was basing on a Heinlein novel of the same name. Whether the director ever read the book is an open question. ;)
Saturday:
1 to 2 PM: Works and Influence of SF Grandmaster Godfrey L. Winton John Scalzi, Nick Sagan, Sarah Monette Winton. A dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. Some say he was an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. Our panelists may disagree on the details. Did he really tour New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration, or is that just legend? Prove how familiar you are with the works and influence of 11 time Nebula winning, 26 time Hugo winning Grandmaster Godfrey L. Winton.
3:30 to 4PM: Signing Nick Sagan, John Scalzi
6-7PM Limited Female Roles In Fantasy, Comics, and SF TheFerrett, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, Sarah Monette, M. Keaton Why is it that a female character will either be raped or lose her child? Do TV writers have difficulty coming up with a motivation for women that isn't vagina-related? We rarely see every man's worst fear: castration. For equal rights, what if every time a woman gets raped on a show, they also neuter a male on the cast? The panelists will evaluate the causes and discuss this and other solutions.
Sunday:
10-11AM Creative Commons and Internet Marketing Charlie Stross, John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell, Sylvia Hubbard Building a fanbase online. First hit's free!
When I'm not at these places you're likely to find me loitering in the lobby, talking up people, or at one of the Penguicon dances, because you know I'm a dancing fool. Come up and say hi if you're there. If you're not there, well, I pity you, since this is going to be a damn cool convention.
TechCrunch
Google Acquires Marratech; Gets Into WebEx Territory April 20, 2007 09:25 AM
After reporting a monster fiscal quarter (the company has close to $12 billion in cash sitting around now and has hired nearly 2,000 new employees this year), Google made a quiet announcement on its corporate blog tonight - they’ve acquired Swedish startup Marratech for an undisclosed price.
This is the first I’ve heard of Marratech, which is broadly in the e-meeting space and certainly competes with WebEx (recently acquired by Cisco for $3.2 billion). Users are able to communicate via text chat, VOIP and video, and share applications in a virtual meeting.
Their service requires a download, whereas most of the newly released e-meeting solutions are browser based (and therefore have less functionality). The Windows version of the software is 31 MB; the Mac version is just 9 MB. Google already has software on many computers with their GTalk, Desktop and Toolbar applications. Bundling this in isn’t unthinkable.
Google’s enterprise ambitions move forward another step.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
TechCrunch
Microsoft Live Spaces Rolls Out New Features April 20, 2007 08:57 AM
Microsoft Live Spaces (rebranded last summer from MSN Spaces) is rolling out some new features this morning and announcing recent usage updates. The enhancements are aimed at making Live Spaces more of a social network and less of a simple blogging/home page service. The changes should be live at 6 am PST.
The main change is that the new home page when you log in shows what’s happening with contacts in your social network, a similar approach as Facebook. Users can also now send messages directly to each other, and add a guestbook module that allows visitors to leave rich-text comments, including photos and videos. There are also enhancements to their APIs - see dev.live,com/spaces for details.
Microsoft says Live Spaces now has 93 million user spaces; recent Comscore stats put them at 112 million monthly unique visitors. 4 billion photos have been uploaded to the service by users, and 18 million new photos are uploaded daily.
Live Spaces is clearly one of the larger social networks. Like Google’s Orkut, though, most of its users seem to be non-U.S. and it is frequently forgotten in this MySpace/Facebook world.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
TechCrunch
Digg Releases Public API, San Francisco Tech Crowd Parties Hard April 20, 2007 08:00 AM
Strictly speaking, tonight’s massive Digg party in San Francisco was held to celebrate the 1 million registered user milestone announced last month (CEO Jay Adelson told me tonight they are now at 1.2 million registered users). Drinks were free, toy light sabers were passed out and the crowd was boisterous. It wasn’t as large at the Netvibes party earlier this week that drew 1,500 people, but this was one of the better startup parties thrown over the last year.
In addition to celebrating the member milestone, Digg officially released their public API and announced a contest to seek out the most creative and innovative visualizations and applications developed using the API and Flash toolkit. More details on both are at the Digg blog.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Annalee Newlitz
Living on Twitter Time April 20, 2007 05:39 AM
A lot of my friends and colleagues have been playing with Twitter, and they’re not the only ones. The Web app that lets you update friends on your every move via mobile has become the social network of the week. I could think of no reason why it should have become so popular until I read a fascinating article by researcher Luis Bettencourt and several colleagues about how the pace of life in urban spaces speeds up exponentially relative to population expansion.
I think Twitter — a hyperactive version of blogging — reflects the increasing pace of urban life as mor eand more people move to cities and try to keep track of each other. I write in my column this week:
Twitter, primarily an urban phenomenon, makes perfect sense if you look at Bettencourt’s model. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and many city centers such as the Bay Area are growing. As these populations grow, tech innovation grows far more quickly: thus the move from daily newspapers to blogs to Twitter in just 10 years.
The question is really whether we can sustain ourselves in Twitter time. Bettencourt and his colleagues’ models suggest that as urban populations grow, the pace of life increases exponentially but then must slow down again or crash. If Twitter is a symptom of urban life speeding up, we should expect to see communications tech like it become unsustainably fast and bottom out — or slow way down. Read more about Twitter time.
Annalee Newlitz
Jonathan Lethem — Literary Copyfighter April 20, 2007 05:39 AM
Wired just posted my profile of Jonathan Lethem — author of Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn — who has recently become interested in playing agent provocateur with copyright dogma. He and I met for coffee and talked about two recent “experiments” he’s done with releasing rights to his new novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, and several of his short stories. Essentially, he’s encouraging people to make derivative works out of his creations while still affording him enough time to reap some financial benefit from those creations.
Read the profile to find out more about Lethem’s copyright experiments.
Steven O'Grady
links for 2007-04-20 April 20, 2007 05:23 AM
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some kudos for DeWitt on his recent APP event at the GOOG
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this, as my quote indicates, is definitely a project to track; with Qt’s recent focus on devices and GNOME getting into the act via GMAE, the mobile and embedded spaces are getting more interesting every day
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good news for the Sun folks, and i know a couple of Ubuntu folks that’ll be pleased
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“And what would we do without your plug-ins?” a hell of lot more work, for one thing
but in all seriousness, James is right - Alex is The Man -
this is bad news for Sun; some surprising (and not) Apache solidarity here
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great headline work from Rob, and interesting tidbits on Papelbon, Hansack and Hansen
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Mono too, i believe, Raven
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unfortunate, but a good problem to have - i’m now 100% Feisty in house (bishop and drake) - hicks is still running Dapper LTS; when i talked to Mark last week, he did mention that the bandwidth bills were non-trivial
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$199 SSD laptops? seriously? what’s the catch? i don’t like Asus gear, but i’d consider this strongly
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my friends are going to hate this before too long - absolute comedy
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outstanding - the Yahoo Pipes folks are going to be keynoting at the MySQL conference next week
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more validation that DRM’s only customer “benefit” is preventing them from consuming content they legitimately purchased
crooked timber
Solecisms April 20, 2007 05:21 AM
From the Economist, some advice on English As She Is Wrote. As is usual with such lists, there’s much to agree with and a few nits to pick. A current peeve of mine—which doesn’t make the list—is the use of “incredibly” to mean “very.” There is also probably a name for the law requiring that there be several errors of style or grammar in this paragraph, but I don’t know what it is.
BoingBoing
Tripod dog T-shirts are awesome April 20, 2007 05:04 AM
Mark Frauenfelder:
Talented arteeste Amanda Visell says: "I'm trying to spread the word for this site. This girl Sonia started it to pay for her dog's medical treatment as well as other dogs that are diagnosed with osteosarcoma and require leg amputation. So she makes these cute shirts and other stuff. My dog actually just came back from his week long stay at the vet today, he got his front leg amputated for the same reason, so of course I'm all emotional and trying to help." Link
Michael Dorf
Happy Birthday to Justice Stevens April 20, 2007 04:25 AM
Justice John Paul Stevens turns 87 today. He is a remarkably sharp human being for any age, but still, that number gives one pause. In keeping with yesterday's theme of quoting other abortion opinions, I thought I'd excerpt here the closing paragraph of Justice Blackmun's concurrence in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He stated: "I am 83 years old. I cannot remain on this Court forever, and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor well may focus on the issue before us today."Some people criticized Justice Blackmun at the time for expressly politicizing the issue, but the criticism seems to miss the mark because everybody already knew the issue was politicized, and both the plurality (actually the majority on this point) and the dissent talked about the interaction between politics and the Court's jurisprudence.
It will be interesting to see whether and how Wednesday's decision plays politically. I have always understood "partial birth abortion" as a wedge issue. Someone who is truly pro-life can't possibly think that killing a baby after it's partially delivered is much worse than killing it inside its mother's womb, but people who are on the fence or pro-choice with reservations could be moved to think (if only, as Judge Posner noted, through ignorance) that there is something especially horrific about this class of abortions. That's why, after all, partial-birth abortion bans were enacted even in states with pro-choice majorities. To the extent that yesterday's decision approves the federal ban, perhaps it neutralizes this particular wedge issue, which ought to favor pro-choice candidates. In fact, however, I think the likely effect will be to motivate both pro-life and pro-choice activists, as they realize that Roe itself may be on the table after one more appointment.
But the main point of this post is simply to say happy birthday to Justice Stevens.
Ethan Zuckerman
links for 2007-04-20 April 20, 2007 04:18 AM
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Coverage of the nail house shows that bloggers might have the power to affect journalism in China, but a closer look shows that that power islikely to be very limited. Thanks for the link, Akwe
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Visa costs $295 in China, or under $4 as warez. Is it any wonder that Microsoft sold only 244 copies of Vista in the first two weeks of its release in China, despite a massive ad campaign?
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What’s wikipedia good for? Giving Chinese DVD pirates copy for the back of their boxes… Great post by Andrew Lih…
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Is a $3 per seat educational edition a direct response to OLPC, or is this a general strategy towards licensed software in the developing world?
groklaw
CA Gets Outside-Counsel-Only Confidentiality; and Extensions on Expert Discovery in Novell April 20, 2007 04:16 AM
Do you remember Computer Associates mentioning needing a protective order to protect CA's confidential materials before it would agree to submit to Novell's subpoena (not that it wanted to at all)? Well, the parties and CA have stipulated to a second addendum [PDF] to the original protective order in SCO v. Novell whereby CA's confidential materials can be viewed by outside counsel only. I guess that means CA will do the deposition and turn over the documents Novell asked for. It only took around four months to achieve.You can see the details in the Second Stipulated Addendum to Protective Order [PDF]. There was a first addendum to the protective order in March, for the benefit of IBM, you'll recall. The terms for CA's protection are identical to those IBM got, except that they apply to both parties, Novell and SCO. Only outside counsel for the parties can view CA's confidential materials.
No doubt that means we don't get to see any of it, unless someone refers to it at a hearing, attaches it as an exhibit to a filing, leaks it by poor PDF control or whispers it to a friendly journalist or whatever.
Like that would ever happen. Who'd do a thing like that?
BoingBoing
Bobby Lee April 20, 2007 04:03 AM
Xeni Jardin:
Comedian Bobby Lee, best known for his work on Mad TV, is one funny dude. You can totally tell from his MySpace template.
One of the editors at UCLA's "Asia Pacific Arts" project turned me on to this new online video of an interview with Lee, in which he makes funny faces, hacks, farts, and explains why parodies of Korean telenovelas inexplicably yet consistently make for such terrific sketch comedy.
SF Gate columnist Jeff Yang (who I met by phone today, in the context of a different story) recently wrote a column about Bobby Lee's current blowing-up-edness. Link to Yang's April 10 piece, "Mad Man." Lee has a role in a forthcoming film about breakdancing, and there's some kind of new Comedy Central TV thing in the works or something.
There is a lot of him on YouTube: Link.
BoingBoing
Yahoo aided China in torture, says dissident in lawsuit papers April 20, 2007 03:43 AM
Xeni Jardin:
Snip from New York Times story:
A Chinese political prisoner and his wife sued Yahoo in federal court Wednesday, accusing the company of abetting the commission of torture by helping Chinese authorities identify political dissidents who were later beaten and imprisoned.Link, here's a Reuters item, here's the AP's item, and here's the Washington Post's item.The suit, filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act, is believed to be the first of its kind against an Internet company for its activities in China.
Wang Xiaoning, who according to the suit is serving a 10-year prison sentence in China; his wife, Yu Ling; and other unnamed defendants seek damages and an injunction barring Yahoo from identifying dissidents to Chinese authorities.
Wired News reporter Luke O'Brien, who covered the story as it developed in this earlier piece, has an update today. Snip:
I just spoke with former dissident Harry Wu, who helped arrange Yu's travel to the United States. He told me Yu Ling is leaving tomorrow morning to go back to China. Today she wanted to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. She walked the whole thing.Link to post, with PDF of the legal complaint filed in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Update: ArsTechnica has a post, too: Link (Thanks, Glyn)
Previously on BoingBoing:
creative commons
“please let this become a trend” April 20, 2007 03:40 AM
please let this become a trend
That’s the top-ranked comment on the Digg story about the first Academy Award winning film to be released under a Creative Commons license. Another Digg comment:
This is as good as apple pie or chocolate. I am very impressed. A thumbs up to the Interplast volunteer surgical team, and to the filmmakers. Plus a hug to those children and to their parents that waited on news about their child not knowing what kind of life their child may have. Those children are grown now in the film. :) I hope their lives today are good too.
These and other comments show that there is a tremendous hunger for quality media whose owners have done the right thing — give their constituency at least some rights (this film is released under the most restrictive standard Creative Commons license), i.e., a tad of respect — and organizations that do the right thing get tremendous respect back.
Even the usual snarky comments call out the practical value of doing the right thing:
Yeah! This would have made TONS of money on DVD, but they decided to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Probably unrelated to the fact that it’s basically a PR package for Interplast, which will in turn cause people to donate money to Interplast.
I’m not taking away from what they do, but you’re a fool if you think this isn’t about money. There’s just more money to be made in donations (which is a good thing!) than selling a DVD of this short doc.
It’s true. If media isn’t earning tons of money through traditional channels and it promotes your organization or you, keeping the media locked up incurs huge opportunity costs.
Coming back to trends, a del.icio.us user’s bookmark description:
The first CC-licensed academy award winning film. Inconvenient Truth is next?
Why not? Inconvenient Truth is all about the opportunity costs of not acting.
Om Malik
Analyst: Microsoft’s Gaming Effort “Disastrous” - O RLY? April 20, 2007 03:30 AM
As a gamer, Roger Ehrenberg is a fan of the Xbox 360; unfortunately for Peter Moore, however, his day job is President of a Wall Street analysis firm. And the investor’s perspective is decidedly at odds with the gamer’s. To wit, as he writes on his blog:
“Gaming has been a disastrous endeavor for Microsoft, particularly from an investment perspective…” [Emph. mine]
His argument for a statement of such face-punching boldness is threefold: basically, 1) after blowing $21 billion over five years on their Home & Entertainment division, all Microsoft really has for its efforts is $5.4 billion in total operating losses, 2) the Xbox line has simply failed to take off in Japan, heart of the console industry, and 3) despite their stated intentions, the 360 has failed to diversify its audience much beyond hardcore gamers who own HDTVs.
It’s a solid analysis– read it all here. But is it correct? Short term, maybe. To take Microsoft’s side (and if I won’t, who will?), I can suggest three big picture rejoinders:
1 – Microsoft has finally bested Sony in the console wars.
After the first Xbox failed to capture the market away from the PS2, the 360 dominates over PS3, and looks poised to continue doing so.
2 – The Wii and the 360 aren’t directly competing.
While it’s true the Wii has succeeded magnificently, it did so by being an extremely cheap, non-HDTV console that has far less of the 360’s non-game features.
3 – The 360’s a full entertainment platform.
Where the Wii has revolutionary game functionality and Web browsing, the 360’s success as a next gen console will boost its appeal for downloading high-definition TV and films, and being a music/podcast hub for the Zune—content that the Wii can’t (so far) provide. (And hey: first console-based keyboard out the gate.)
So—disastrous in terms of money spent versus profits (not) earned? Sure. A failure 3-5 years from now, when HDTVs are much cheaper and broadband is better and faster? I suspect not.
Hat tip: Infendo.