Into Tech

Digital downloading of music, whether legally or illegally, has been a big talking point for years now. Both consumers and record companies are pretty vocal about the pros and cons of the current state of the industry, but the most interesting opinions must surely come from the horse’s mouth.

A few artists have been quite vocal on the subject recently, so we’ll kick off in the blue corner with Sir Cliff Richard who is still the only one to have had number one singles in five consecutive decades.

Cliffy doesn’t like downloads you see, and doesn’t seem too concerned with showing his age when he recently announced that “I like putting six CDs in the machine and playing them for two or three days. The 12″ vinyl album was the best because you could read [the sleeve] without getting a magnifying glass. I like the human aspect of music. It’s all getting a little bit too technical now, too easy; you don’t do anything now”.

It seems like every few months, well respected security researchers come out with yet another report about just how insecure various e-voting machines are. The amazing thing is how hard the various e-voting companies have fought against allowing these researchers to look at their machines, always insisting that the federal certification process (the one that’s were later shown to have not done a very good job testing the machines) was fine. Of course, even the Government Accountability Office has admitted that the federal certification process sucks.

One of the complaints that the e-voting firms have had about having independent security researchers testing the machines is that those tests are not in real world conditions. In fact, we had a commenter from one of the e-voting companies who insisted that these independent tests were useless because:

The point people often miss, which is left off of the conspiracy blogs, is that all of these ‘hacking’ attempts that are requested are made to do so in some sort of vacuum. In some obscure room where a gang of hackers get together and try to penetrate the system with unlimited resources. In any election, paper or fully electronic, there are procedural and security measures taken that complement and supplement the security features of the system itself. This is in addition to internal and system-independent, pre- and post-election audit features.

That’s really rather meaningless, because if it were true, then that info would also come out in those independent research reports. However, even that comment turns out to be untrue. As a few folks have submitted, some security researchers at UCSB have demonstrated not just how insecure Sequoia’s e-voting systems are, but they’ve shown how easy it is to hack an election with a pair of videos that you can watch right here (if you’re in the RSS feed, click through to see them):

What this shows is that the hack that the researchers shows demolishes that comment from the insider. All it required was for those wishing to change the results of the election to drop a USB key into the pile of USB keys used to set the system up. All of the security measures that the insider talks about are then bypassed with ease. The video shows it getting buy the procedural security measures, as well as the pre- and post-election audit features.

The video also shows why paper ballots are hardly a solution, as the second video shows how the malware included in the software can be set to void out legitimate votes and replace them with fake votes, in a variety of different scenarios, almost all of which are likely to go undetected. This is a hugely damning report — and it comes against a company that has fought so hard against having its machines tested by independent security experts. While some may say that this shows why they didn’t want it tested — it should concern anyone who believes in free and fair democratic elections that we’re using such insecure voting machines.

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A lot of people are hesitant to make an investment in high definition DVD technology and for good reason. Any new technology needs some time to be debugged so that it can function smoothly and deliver the performance that mainstream consumers expect, but since HDTV DVD technology has been out for over a year, that [...]

One of the points of contention we sometimes have with those who disagree with us about the role of free in a business model, is how you deal with the issue of “freeloaders.” People often respond to our posts on business models that use free to point out that many people who get the content will never pay, and thus the business model is somehow a failure. Amusingly (and, perhaps, tellingly), most often these sorts of comments come from individuals who insist that they, themselves would never pay — and basically suggest that copyright and artificial scarcity is necessary to protect artists from folks like themselves. But that’s missing the point, entirely. The point isn’t to get everyone to pay. In fact, it need not be to get the majority of folks to pay — it’s to build up your audience so that it’s big enough that when you offer a scarce good of value, enough people do pay for that good. In such a world, the “freeloaders” aren’t a problem — they’re simply providing free advertising.

Another way to think about it is that BMW creates some entertaining advertisements — and plenty of people enjoy those ads without ever buying a BMW. Yet, those same people don’t complain that folks who watch BMW ads without buying a BMW are “freeloading” off of BMW — despite the fact that they are. Instead, they understand the nature of advertising is that not everyone buys the product that’s actually for sale. In fact, a very small number of people may actually buy the product, but that’s okay. It’s not freeloading, it’s just the nature of a promotion.

Cory Doctorow has taken this concept a step further in explaining yet another reason why micropayments aren’t the solution for content online:

I don’t care about making sure that everyone who gets a copy of my books pays me for them — what I care about is ensuring that the everyone who would pay me decent money for a book has the opportunity to do so. I don’t want to hold 13-year-olds by the ankles and shake them until their allowance falls out of their pockets, but I do want to be sure that when their parents are thinking about a gift for them, the first thing that springs to mind is my latest $20-$25 hardcover.

We’ve long pointed out plenty of reasons why micropayments aren’t a real solution for the “online business model” question surrounding content, with most of the focus being on the mental transaction costs, and the fact that competitors will always beat micropayment solutions by eventually embracing business models using free, but Doctorow makes another good point about the failure of micropayments. Beyond the reasons we’ve discussed in the past, micropayments also focus too much on shaking the pennies from every passing individual, rather than recognizing the real win is in getting someone else to spend more on a bigger scarce product down the road.

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You may remember about six years ago, a company named 321 Studios released a product called DVD X Copy, that was designed to allow you to rip a DVD to a digital file on your computer. Despite the fact that the law is clear that making a backup copy like this is perfectly legal, the problem (from the movie studios’ perspective) was that this software got around the encryption they put on DVDs, and thanks to the “anti-circumvention” clause of the DMCA, the act of getting around that DRM (even if for a perfectly legal reason) was illegal. Unfortunately, 321 Studios lost that suit and eventually went out of business, when it became to expensive to continue to fight the studios. It was a very bad ruling, highlighting the more ridiculous aspects of the DMCA, but without anyone else willing to take the case further, not much has happened in the space since. There are plenty of DVD ripping tools out there, but none from a major company… until now.

Apparently, Rob Glaser over at RealNetworks is so desperate for some attention that Real is releasing its own DVD ripping program, though it’s loaded down with its own limitations. You’ll only be able to watch the movie on the machine you ripped it to — or can transfer it to another machine, but with a limit of 5 machines, and each of those machines has to have a purchased copy of the same software. In other words, while it rips the movie, it puts its own restrictive DRM on it as well, which hardly seems appealing — especially at $30, when there are DVD ripping products for free that don’t have such restrictions.

Yet, the nameless Hollywood insiders still think that Real will get sued over the product, which is probably what Glaser is hoping for (in order to get the free press). So, even if the product is likely to be a dud, the resulting lawsuit could be pretty important in determining the limitations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause — or, at least, reminding the American public that the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause leads to ridiculous situations, such as making it illegal to provide a product that does perfectly legal things.

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If you read the comments on this site regularly — especially concerning posts having to do with patents or the patent system — you’re probably quite familiar with a guy named Ronald J. Riley. He’s quite the character. He’s also quite the fan of the existing patent system. He’s started a bunch of different “organizations” supposedly to protect the patent system, though there are plenty of accusations that Riley’s main focus in life is getting unsuspecting inventors to give him money. Someone has even created a site cataloguing Riley’s ridiculous statements. It’s not clear what Riley has actually done in his life, but he has been effective over the years in using his made up organizations to give himself an air of legitimacy, which often gets him quoted in the press on patent issues, despite showing a consistently poor understanding of the process of innovation, technology and the patent system itself (for example, he believes the purpose is only to protect small inventors, not to promote overall innovation — and he believes that anyone accused of patent infringement clearly “stole” the idea, even if they came up with it independently).

Riley also has a history of being… well… a bit abrasive in comments on various sites all across the internet, including here at Techdirt. He enjoys personally insulting me or lying about me and does so on a regular basis (such as here and here for just a couple of examples). Most hilariously, he continually accuses me of somehow being on the payroll of companies who support the patent reform bill that keeps showing up in Congress every year, despite the fact I have clearly stated that I think the bill will make the situation worse rather than better. Riley is also famous for taking credit every time this same patent reform bill fails to move through Congress, ignoring that it’s actually the powerful pharmaceutical industry lobbyists that kill it, not Riley. In the three plus years that he’s been commenting here, Riley has never once had anything other than an insult or a lie to say about me.

Given all that, I can’t believe that I’m actually about to defend him.

A few people have sent in the news that Ronald J. Riley is being sued by the Dozier Internet Law Firm. From Dozier’s press release, the actual charges are not at all clear. The only thing listed in the press release is that “Riley’s misconduct includes his attacking bloggers and blog and forum moderators with threats of getting IP addresses of anonymous bloggers and then tracking them down.” Given the way Riley acts around here, those accusations don’t seem particularly surprising — but it’s not clear what’s illegal about them. Perhaps there is more to this lawsuit, and if so, Dozier should be much more forthcoming about it, because based on what’s been described, it certainly seems like Dozier is just suing Riley because Riley is a pest. And while Riley may be a pest, may be insulting and may even be misleading, it’s hard to see what’s illegal about his activities. Despite the fact that he regularly insults me and lies about me, I have no problem with Riley posting his ridiculous messages — as it just encourages others to show how clueless Riley is.

And, of course, Dozier is something of a piece of work himself. You may recall his name from when he tried to send an online review site a cease-and-desist letter that he claimed they could not post on their own site because it was covered by copyright. He later announced that courts had said cease-and-desist letter copyrights were acceptable, even though that turned out to be quite an exaggeration of what had actually happened.

So, here we have a lawyer who has repeatedly tried to silence critics with questionable use of copyright law, suing a patent system defender who throws around insults and lies like they’re going out of fashion. These two were made for each other, so it’s really difficult to root for one over the other — but, based on the facts explained so far, it’s difficult to see what Riley has done wrong, other than be an annoying jerk. And, even if that’s annoying, it’s still not illegal.

Update: In the comments, someone points out that the entire lawsuit filing is available on Dozier’s website. Amusingly, it actually quotes one of RJR’s comments here on Techdirt (though, the lawsuit doesn’t mention where it’s from). Basically, I stand by what I said originally. While Dozier does a good job outlining RJR’s history and pattern of lies and mistruths, his ability to either make up organizations or surreptitiously recreate defunct organizations that had a good reputation, there’s little in there that appears to be illegal. The only actual charges seem to be from highly questionable claims that RJR somehow infringes on Dozier’s trademarks.

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When I first heard of Twitter I didn’t get it. I saw some friends using it, and tested it out for a bit, but again concluded that it just didn’t make sense to me to be able to write short, 140-character, explanations of what I was doing — or to read similar blurbs from other people. But about a year ago, I started using it again, and quickly discovered that it was much more useful and interesting than I had ever expected — often in totally unexpected ways. Since then, I’ve run into a bunch of folks who seem to feel exactly the same way. They absolutely did not understand Twitter until they actually started using it, and then suddenly found it incredibly useful in totally unexpected ways. So, I can absolutely understand the many, many people who continue to mock Twitter as being useless — I felt exactly the same way — but haven’t been able to explain why it is actually useful.

However, Clive Thompson has done an excellent job with his latest piece for the NY Times Magazine, explaining the concept of “ambient awareness” that describes Twitter and things like Facebook’s news feed. It’s not so much about telling everyone everything you’re doing, or knowing everything that everyone is doing, but it does give you an amazing ambient view into what’s going on in the lives of whoever you follow, and in an odd way makes you feel much more connected to them than you might otherwise. I know that I’ve become much closer friends with some folks entirely due to Twitter just because I’m more aware of what they’re up to on a regular basis, rather than only talking to them infrequently.

I think the problem is that many people, myself included, originally think of Twitter in similar terms to email or instant messaging, where you’re really expected to provide your undivided attention and to respond to what is sent to you. But Twitter doesn’t work that way. It really is an “ambient” flow of information about what’s happening with lots of different people, which makes you feel much more connected with them. It’s great to see Thompson do such a good job explaining why, because despite experiencing it, I couldn’t have put the concept into words like he did.

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The fart joke. We’ve all smiled at at least one or three of them in our time. You’d have to mising a funny bone not to have smirked a little at the cowboys eating beans round the campfire in Blazing Saddles. Hell, they’ve even traced the oldest fart joke back to 1900 B.C. - it’s not very good, but I’m sure it had ancient Sumerians rolling in the dirt.

But, it seems, Apple doesn’t get the long tradition of the fart joke and, as a ressult, iPhone users will not be getting the ‘Pull My Finger’ application on the App Store.

It doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to guess what the app does but Apple felt that it’s not the type of app it wants iPhone users having. God forbid they’d have some fun. Apple told the developer:

“We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.”

Like there aren’t useless apps on the App Store already. You can support the Fart App on Youtube by leaving positive user comments, which the developer hopes will help sway Apple’s fart-free policies.-Martin Lynch

[Macrumors]

As Google prepares to blow out the 10 candles on top of its birthday cake this Sunday, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin can be forgiven for cracking a wry smile as they reflect upon the fire they have just lit under Microsoft.

The conflagration that has the creator of Windows running for the fire extinguisher was caused by Google’s launch of its own internet browser. The arrival of Chrome, announced in typically idiosyncratic style through the medium of an online comic strip this week, represents more than just a challenge to Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer. It represents a fundamental fight over the future of the computer.

Microsoft, as so many potential rivals have found over the years, has a stranglehold over the market for the software that runs computers thanks to its hugely successful Windows operating system. So Google has taken heed of the old adage that if you cannot win, change the game.

The rise of broadband internet access has finally created an environment where applications such as word processors or spreadsheet programs do not need to reside on a computer. Instead they can be run on the internet and the documents created can be stored on web servers so they can be accessed from anywhere a person can get online. In a world where such web-based applications abound, it does not matter what operating system a computer runs because all it needs to have is an internet browser and an internet connection. In that world, a user could even opt for a free operating system.

It’s a change that Bill Gates himself foresaw when 13 years ago he wrote an internal memo in which he assigned the “highest level of importance” to the internet and warned his colleagues that it was a potential “tidal wave” that could fundamentally alter the rules.

That memo mentioned then market-leading browser Netscape as having the potential to “commoditize the underlying operating system”. That infamous memo was one of the catalysts of the browser wars of the late 1990s, which ultimately saw Internet Explorer crush Netscape Navigator, and it also included a line about ensuring that makers of computers ship their machines with a Microsoft browser pre-installed. That practice landed Microsoft in court and led to the effective split of the company. But by then the damage was done and Netscape ended up in the hands of AOL before disappearing all but completely.

When Gates testified as part of the anti-trust case brought against the company 10 years ago he was asked what that line about “commoditizing the operating system” had meant. He replied: “They were creating a product that would either reduce the value or eliminate demand for the Windows operating system if they continued to improve it and we didn’t keep improving our product.”

Firefox cub

Ironically, Chrome, which has been roughly two years in the making, builds upon innovations made in browser technology by Microsoft’s rival Mozilla, custodian of the Firefox browser, some of whose technological DNA comes from Netscape Navigator.

But the browser wars of a decade ago do not live on just within the technology of Chrome, but in Google’s decision to create it in the first place. The search engine’s chief executive admitted after the launch that “the browser wars of 10 years ago were right: the browser matters”.

Brin added that “operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world. They have become kind of bulky … We [web users] want a very lightweight, fast engine for running applications. The kind of things you want to have running standalone are shrinking.”

That is bad news for Microsoft, which makes a significant chunk of its revenues from its Windows operating system and Office suite of software, both of which sit upon the computer itself.

Google, of course, makes pretty much all of its revenues from online search. It has gone from a doctoral project at Stanford University to the world’s largest search engine in 10 years, blasting through the traditional media and advertising industries on the way. It is now one of the world’s most trusted and recognised brands.

Over the past few years, the company has moved into online applications and services such as email, word processing, calendars, instant messaging, maps, spreadsheets and even bought the online video phenomenon YouTube.

But ultimately everything it does is about persuading people to do more with the internet. The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to search for something and the more likely they are to generate revenues for Google or queries that help improve its search algorithm. So why would it want to dabble with browsers?

Firstly, the sense that Google’s executives have given over the past few days is that if the rest of the industry had produced good enough browsers, there would have been no need for them to create Chrome.

Announcing the launch of Chrome - which was leaked after a Google staffer posted a copy of the 38-page comic that heralded the move - the company said on its website: “People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

“We realised that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”

Android attack

Chrome, according to early testers, is certainly faster than many of the browsers already in the market - especially the current version of Internet Explorer - and it has been engineered so that if one website being visited freezes up, the entire program does not crash.

Google has moved into another area - mobile phones - for roughly similar reasons. The creation of its Android operating system for mobile phones - the first device that runs it is expected in time for Christmas - owes much to the fact that the mobile internet has been promised for years but the industry’s love of proprietary systems has held back its arrival.

The first gadget to deliver on the promise of the mobile web, Apple’s iPhone, owes some of its success to the fact that it is an “open” platform, so anyone who uses common web standards can create applications for it. Android is also an open mobile platform, in the same way as Chrome is an open browser platform.

But Chrome is also a crucial defensive play for Google. If you rely - as it does - on people having access to the internet to make your money you not only want to make it as simple as possible but ensure no one gets in your way.

The new, eighth version of Internet Explorer, which is due out soon, includes the ability to view web pages anonymously. Erasing a user’s online footprints would make it harder for Google to collect the data about visitors that it uses to improve search results and serve relevant adverts.

Chrome also has an anonymous browsing mode - which has quickly been dubbed “porn mode” because it hides details of where the user has been from other users of the same machine - but Google will still know what that user has been doing online.

Then there is the fact that browsers increasingly contain search boxes within them, raising the risk that a popular new browser could slowly squeeze Chrome out of the market by signing up with a rival search engine.

Google has already been hedging its bets. It has a deal with the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit-making organisation that funds the development of Firefox, the web’s second most popular browser, to have its search box within the browser itself. Just last month Google extended that deal - which has recently generated more than three quarters of Mozilla’s revenues - until 2011. Google’s toolbar is already standard on Apple’s Safari browser and can also be downloaded and installed on Internet Explorer.

Chrome has excited the tech world but ultimately it
all comes down to money and for Google that means more people searching more often. As Citigroup put it in a note to clients this week: “Given that search has become such a fundamental part of internet usage, anything that impacts overall internet usage is important for Google.”

Backstory

Google is either more than 12, nearly 11, exactly 10 tomorrow or not quite 10 years old, depending on which event is taken as its birth. While still at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on technology that would become the forerunner of Google by January 1996. It was called BackRub, because it analysed back links - essentially the links to a site from other sites.

BackRub was “let loose” in March 1996. Brin and Page had created an algorithm that ranked pages by importance - PageRank, which is still at the heart of Google today. The bigger the internet got, they reckoned, the bigger the search engine would get, which led them to name it after googol, the term for the numeral one followed by a hundred zeros. Google was launched in August 1996

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000, making the cheque out to Google Inc, which did not exist. So on September 7 1998 Brin and Page incorporated Google as a company.

I wasn’t going to comment on Microsoft’s new ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates buddying around, but the response among the press and bloggers is almost universally negative — often in extreme ways, and I don’t get why there’s such a virulent negative reaction. Just a few examples:

• Tip for MS: Fire the Advertising Agency
• MSFT Ad is to PC/Mac Campaign as Zune is to iPod
• Bill Gates, Jerry Seinfeld ad airs - Apple has nothing to worry about
• Internet disses new Microsoft commercial
• New Microsoft Seinfeld-Gates ad campaign starts with a dud
• What’s the deal with this commercial? No, seriously.
• Microsoft Commercial Is Anything But Funny
• Microsoft Seinfeld Ad Not Exactly a Hit
• Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld = What?!!???
• Seinfeld-Gates TV commercial — vague, baffling and unfunny
• Seinfeld Vista ad is out, and it’s bizarre
• First Microsoft/Seinfeld Ad Bombs
• Seinfeld & Gates: Was this ad supposed to be funny?
• First Gates-Seinfeld ad leaves us scratching our heads

And that’s just a quick sampling that I grabbed in a few seconds. It goes on and on from there. To be honest, I’m not sure I get this massive negative reaction. The ad itself is a little silly and barely mentions Microsoft at all, but isn’t that bad at all.

And, to be perfectly frank, you have to think that Microsoft is thrilled with the reaction. It’s gotten a ton more people talking about the campaign than any normal ad program, and it actually does a bit to humanize Bill Gates. And, it fits in with what we’ve been discussing about how advertising needs to be content first and advertising later.

Also, I’m a bit surprised that none of the commentators seem to be comparing this to the very similar efforts that American Express did four years ago also with Jerry Seinfeld. They created a series of “shorts” somewhat similar to the Seinfeld/Gates episode, and people enjoyed them. Is it just because it involves Microsoft that people react so negatively? Already Microsoft has been able to draw people into the storyline (even if negatively), and it can now use future episodes to continue to entertain and educate. That seems like a good thing, not something to be so widely trashed.

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