Humans Obsolete

An artificial intelligence programmer has created software capable of writing academic books based on statistics gleaned from the internet and databases, obsolescing academic researchers, technical manual authors, and their editors. But as though that wasn't enough, the software also writes game shows.

So far bloggers are still safe, but I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

Hulu to Launch for Reals

The NY Times mentions that Hulu.com is finally being made available to the general public. I signed up a year ago and was invited to join the beta version. Hulu, for those of you not in the know, is a streaming video website created by Fox and NBC Universal to stream television and film, supported by ads, and thus providing a free video on demand service. The real reason this service was created though, was to compete with and stave off file sharing sites.

We've been using Hulu for a while. I have an old desktop computer plugged into the PC input in the back of the living room television allowing us to view services like Amazon Unbox, iTunes, and Netflix as though we were watching old fashioned cable.

Hulu so far is a moderate success from the viewers standpoint. Locating content is easy enough, and the media player is cross platform working both on a Mac or with Windows, and in Firefox as well as IE6. Hulu has a full screen mode for viewing content, though I have found this sometimes crashes the player during a transition between the content and the advertisement. Otherwise, the streaming is high quality, instantaneous, and generally simple to use.

My biggest complaint with Hulu has been management of content. I started watching Arrested Development at lunch a few months back. I never watched the show before, but heard good things. Indeed, turns out I love this show. I watched the first season on Hulu, and the first five episodes of season 2. The next available episodes are the first five episodes of season 3. Arrested Development, in case you have never seen it, relies on an evolving plot throughout the season. Each episode is essentially a continuation of the next unlike the self contained episodes of a show like Law and Order, where the plot of each episode is resolved by the closing credits. I was not the only viewer leaving crass comments demanding the remainder of Season 2 and 3 be made available (Hulu subsequently removed said comments).

I suspected that my experience with Arrested Development was the result of some executive deciding that Hulu might be one great advert for DVDs. The Times essentially confirms this:

"One challenge Hulu faces is building a predictable and stable library of content. To protect DVD and Web download sales, media companies often make TV shows and films available free on the Web for certain periods of time and then remove them. For example, there are 11 episodes of the TV show “24” on Hulu — beginning with episode 18 of the first season."

There you have it. Hulu is limiting availability in the hope of selling DVDs. So as it is now, I have watched a season and a half of Arrested Development futilely waiting for the next episodes to made available on Hulu. I have no intention of buying the DVD, because I Hate DVDs.

For Hulu to be a success, executives will need to treat it as a primary revenue stream, not as an oversized advertisement for DVD sales. The Times is right in asserting that customers will be alienated if shows disappear. Also, by making available shows, users like me are perhaps more likely to watch other content from the studios.

For instance, I had not seen 30 Rock, an NBC show until a few days ago. 30 Rock season 1 is available through Netflix, a service that I subscribe to. I watched the entire first season in a weekend. However, even though I think its one of the best shows on television, I'm not going to jump into season 2 without watching the first episodes of the season. Hulu has some episodes from this season available, but not the first half dozen, meaning, I won't be watching NBC when new episodes air, and I won't be watching the few episodes currently on Hulu. Eventually, I assume, the entirety of 30 Rock season 2 will be available from either Netflix or on Hulu. But until then, I won't be a regular viewer.

Hulu is a great initial foray by an old media company into modern technology. But it is still just a baby step. Users will not stick around forever waiting for content. To compete with file sharing and torrent sites, Hulu needs to step up and make more content available, permanently, and immediately, otherwise the site will soon become another failed attempt by old men in suits rather than a destination for the next generation of media consumption.

I Hate DVDs

DVDs were a great follow up to VHS tapes. VHS tapes were bulky, broke easily, didn't play in a computer, and took up plenty of storage space. The DVD on the other hand, is compact, maintained picture quality over years of use, and was easily played in a college dorm via a computer. But now DVDs are obsolete, and not just because high definition discs are going to replace them. Physical media, DVD or Blu-Ray discs, simply are irrelevant.

Many things have changed since the debut of the DVD. Portable media players, mostly the iPod, but also Zunes and Playstation Portables, are ubiquitous devices. Yet content on a DVD, thanks to digital rights restrictions, can't be transferred to an iPod (at least not easily and legally). Music CDs still have significant value in the age of Mp3 players because the CD's content can be transferred to a player easily. The CD is then a backup copy of the content that can be safely stored only to be called upon in the case of a hardware failure.

The same is not true of DVDs. A DVD needs to be easily accessible to watch the content rather than stashed in the back of a closet or under a bed, meaning my library of DVDs consumes a large block of bookshelf space I rather have books on. Additionally, finding the DVD I want to watch, or even browsing the library I have, is a major task since DVDs are stacked two deep. By contrast, a digital library can easily be browsed, searched and instantly accessed with a remote or a mouse.

In the DVD's heyday, computer hard drives were smaller, and prohibitively expensive to amass a library of DVD quality movies. Physical discs were cheap to manufacture and provided a great alternative. But now, terabyte hard drives, enough storage for hundreds of DVDs, cost fifty to seventy cents a gigabyte. In comparison, my six year old desktop came with a hard drive with 4 percent of that storage space, or enough for maybe 5 DVD quality movies, cost about $3 per gigabyte.

Movie studios want us all to buy the next generation laser disc, the Blu-Ray format from Sony. Not only do players cost several hundreds of dollars, movies on the discs cost about twice as much as standard DVDs. And on top of that, Blu-Ray discs still can't be transfered to iPods and still require the disc to play the movie.

The alternative is clear: digital videos over the internet. iTunes is one alternative, though this locks users into using an iPod for portable media. Amazon's service works smoothly for the most part, but is incompatible with iPods. There are rental models too, like Netflix which streams video on demand, and also cable service video on Demand which doesn't require a computer at all. All of these services, especially when used in tandem, are far superior to DVDs. There is no collection of discs taking up valuable real estate. Libraries are indexed and easily searched or browsed. In short, its time to say goodbye to the DVD.

You were a good friend DVD, but sadly, I won't really miss you.

A Tax for All Seasons

A brief editorial in the LA Times suggests taxing intellectual property as a solution to protecting valuable intellectual property while allowing less valuable property to fall into the public domain. The concept is simple: create a cost for maintaining copyrights so that non-revenue generating copyrighted material falls into the public domain.

At first glance, this seems like a great idea. Disney gets to keep Mickey Mouse under copyright in perpetuity by paying a tax while something like an ancient Atari game is released into the public domain to avoid paying the tax. The trouble is such a tax benefits corporations even more than current copyright law.

An IP tax would require an immediate assignment of value to copyrighted work, work like say, this blog. With several hundred pages, this blog would immediately become a huge tax liability, or immediately be released into the public domain. Either way, it creates a disincentive to write a blog entry knowing that the blog entry immediate begins accruing costs or that it can be copied freely elsewhere.

Corporations on the other hand, have vast reserves of cash. Early Nintendo games-- those pixelated 16 bit classics-- would seem a perfect candidate being released into the public domain if there was an IP tax. Yet, Nintendo has released older games on new systems for nostalgia seekers, a "value added" model to help sell new consoles. They have also vigorously defended their existing property rights shutting down emulation software sites and flash game remakes. All that defense of two decades old games would seem to indicate an IP tax would not immediately send material like old Nintendo games into the public domain.

The internet has already democratized intellectual property. Newspapers are now competing with blogs. Publishing houses are competing with digital downloads. Record labels are competing with MySpace Bands, and Hollywood competes with YouTube. These nascent technologies may not yet offer the same quality as newspapers, publishing houses, record labels and Hollywood studios, but eventually, as these distribution channels and contributers mature, the line between amateur and professional will evaporate. An IP tax however, may price out amateurs before demolishing the old standard bearers of intellectual property.

There should be little debate as to whether or not copyrights, patents and trademark laws are amended. The real debate now should focus on how to change intellectual property protections; an IP tax will not encourage creativity and will only benefit the corporate domination and manipulation of intellectual property.

In Pursuit of the Office

The BBC television show The Office was wildly entertaining. When an American adaption was announced, I eagerly awaited its arrival. I watched the first six episode season which aired on NBC four years ago. I missed the following season, mostly because NBC made horrible choices in creating their programming schedule.

A few months ago, TBS began running back to back reruns of The Office on Tuesday nights. The plague of reality television shows on the major networks along with their preference for stacking the only watchable shows on television into competing time slots on Wednesday and Thursday nights left me free to watch the back episodes of The Office. After watching half the second season, it was decided there was a certain urgency to viewing the remaining episodes and catching up to the new episodes of the current season.

The first place we turned was Netflix. A subscription to Netflix comes with several hours of video on demand available over the internet. We had already watched half of season 2, and Netflix was able to get us through season 3.

The Office is currently halfway into season 4, and thus season 4 is not yet available on DVD. NBC does provide several of the most recent episodes for streaming on its website, NBC.com. Unfortunately, that left five episodes from season 4 unaccounted for. Since we were now addicted to The Office, we had every intention of watching the new episodes as they aired-- once we watched the previously aired episodes of season 4.

Season 3 ended with a bit of cliff hanger, and not wanting to ruin the surprise, there was no way of justifying skipping the first episodes of season 4. The first three episodes we found on the internet streamed from some Asian website. The only downside here was the Japanese subtitles and long load times, but certainly nothing to make the episodes unwatchable. The fourth episode we bought from Amazon Unbox, which was convenient and easy to use. The downside to Unbox however is that Unbox videos cannot be transferred to the most popular portable media player-- iPod. The next episode purchased from Comcast as a video on Demand; the quality was slightly better than the Amazon episode, but we also didn't own a copy after we finished watching it. Then using NBC.com we were able to watch the last three most recent episodes, available free with commercials splice in, just as though we were watching them during a normal broadcast. Now we are dutifully awaiting the end of the WGA strike so we can watch the rest of season 4 as it airs.

All of this would have been much easier had NBC not been so short sighted with distribution. Netflix, which we paid a subscription to use, did not have the most recent episodes. Amazon Unbox, while convenient, is expensive for a product with limited use. Comcast on Demand was great, but entirely unreliable for access to the shows since not all episodes from the season were available to rent. Finally, NBC.com should have made available all the episodes from season 4 since they are all streamed with ads anyway. Either way, the constant here is the internet. We watched three seasons of the show through legal distribution like Netflix, Amazon, and Comcast, and through gray market sites streaming episodes. We watched nearly 40 episodes of television.

From now on, I will be a faithful viewer of the Office, if only NBC would settle with the Writer's Guild and end the strike. The sticking point for the writers, of course, is royalties from internet broadcasting.

Pandora's Jar

Beginning in December of 2004, Google, in its ever expanding quest to index content, began scanning and indexing the texts of millions of volumes of books from partner libraries. Google allows users to search the database and identify those books relevant to their research needs. In one sense, the google book search project is not a new concept. Proprietary databases have existed for years. LexisNexis, a database of legal cases was founded in 1970, and by 1980 included news sources. Westlaw, a competitor, also began in the 1970s.

There are plenty of other proprietary archives such as JSTOR for academic papers, and open access databases like Project Gutenberg, a user created attempt to make available all out of copyright works. There are two main differences between Google's book search and these other projects. First, these other resources more or less cater to specific markets and set of users, not as Google does, offering up the vast contents of books to the world. Second, Google is much less interested in making available the texts they index and much more interested in making those texts searchable.

Publishers and some authors don't seem to comprehend the difference. Since the announcement of the project, the publishing industry has been suing to stop Google from indexing books under copyright which includes the vast majority of books. Book search is however, more about connecting a potential customer with a potential product. Book search will only display a short snippet of a copyrighted text and then offer a link to purchase the book. In short, Google Book search is and will continue to sell more books, mostly books that many users may not necessarily ever have found.

Google is not the only software giant attempting to catalogue the world's literature. Microsoft has their own version as well, and many large libraries, especially university libraries, have digitized their card catalogues. But all of these projects, and the proprietary databases as well, all have holes. Early texts often are overlooked due to the difficulty in scanning in delicate manuscripts. Proprietary databases are not linked together, so a research actually needs to search multiple databases no matter what.

But assuming Google and Microsoft prevail in their legal fights with the publishing industry, and there seems little reason to think they won't considering how little water the publishers' argument holds, it is quite reasonable to believe in a few short years, most modern writing, western writing, will appear in a search friendly databse, available for anyone to find.


A few years ago, I was on a team researching a local politician, looking through the municipal records of his tenure in office. His career spanned about ten years. The tomes of municipal records each covered about six months of time; the books were more than five hundred pages each, and about the size of a newspaper. The municipality had records going back to the 19th century, had I been particularly interested in council meeting minutes from 1890. In all, identifying the relevant pages from the books took more than 50 man hours, just to cover ten years of information. The thought occurred to me: why is this not indexed by google?

New Jersey's Open Public Records Act requires all public records be accessible. Clerks and secretaries of government agencies are allowed to charge a small copying fee per page, but otherwise must fulfill all requests; they have seven days from the time the request is filed. During the course of my research, we could have simply filed an OPRA request, giving the municipal clerk 7 days to make roughly 10,000 copies for a mere $2,500. Such a request would have overwhelmed the municipal clerk, which is why ultimately I spent three days marking off the exact pages we needed copies of. How much simpler this would have been to do had the records been digitized and available online in a database that could be searched with Google.

To the chagrin of many New Jersey politicians more accustomed to hiding their deeds behind the veil of government bureaucracy, the Open Public Records Act did not bring undue financial hardships to the state's agencies. Government did not stop working under the weight of unfettered OPRA requests. Likewise, mandating the digitization of public records would cause little more trouble.

The process is largely a matter of linking existing hardware with existing software. In short, there are few obstacles, other than the political ramifications for corrupt politicians, to keep this information from being easily accessible in a searchable database. From the perspective of researchers, raw data like municipal meeting minutes could prove invaluable, if only it were freely available. In all likelihood, digitizing public records in the same way Google book search is cataloging library contents will be a common practice in the coming years.

The information age is upon us, and the digitization of all information, on demand, anytime, anywhere, will define the coming future. Digital archives are becoming so ubiquitous, hard copy libraries are shrinking. Thanks to LexisNexis and West Law, the traditional law library is in many firms nothing more than ornamental. JSTOR's archive of academic journals is so far superior to anything a single academic library could contain, many institutions are cutting back on journals in favor of paying for database access. Yet, while digital archives are physically smaller, more available, and easier to identify relevant information, the system is not perfect.

As the New Yorker hinted at in Future Reading -- available digitally of course -- all this digitizing may democratize information, but that doesn't speak to the accuracy of it. Anthony Grafton explains: "When Erasmus told the story of Pandora, he said that she opened not a jar, as in the original version of the story, by the Greek poet Hesiod, but a box. In every European language except Italian, Pandora’s box became proverbial."

In essence, with digital information, as a society, we run the risk that all information becomes Pandora's Jar.

The plot of Star Wars, Attack of the Clones, centers around Jedi Obiwan Kenobi attempting to unravel a mystery. A source tells him of a mythical planet. He first heads to the main library archive searching the database-- but can't find information on the planet he knows exists. The librarian informations rather curtly, if the planet isn't in the database, it simply does not exist. The answer is revealed by the simple mind of a child: the database has been altered.

In Orwell's brilliantly frightening 1984, Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth where he and his coworkers painstakingly update history. They remove photographs and alter magazines and newspapers to provide the correct and "accurate" history. When Orwell wrote 1984, the idea of "cut," "copy" and "paste" were not figurative, but in fact literal, physical actions. With digital archives though, editing and revising history becomes significantly easier. Cut, Copy and Paste is a matter of a few easy keyboard commands, or a few clicks of the mouse.

A complete digital archive of history, literature and science is a real possibility in the not too distant future. But such a record has the very real possibility of manipulation and alteration. Relying solely on a database like google book search might seem an easily solution to the arduous research process, but we also risk opening Pandora's box-- or jar as it may actually be.

Distributed Wi-Fi

Let's be honest, one of the coolest functions of the soon to be released iPhone is the use of a fully functional web browser to surf a fully functional internet. Steve Jobs even showed off one of our favorite time wasters, NYTimes.com. But of course there is the flip side of all this: mobile data charges.

Mobile data services are still quite expensive, even when customers buy an all you can eat plan for their laptops. Mobile internet is still a tool for the rich and powerful. Wi-Fi hotspots of course are the poor man's version, but these are almost exclusively tethered to a particular location, like a coffee shop offering the service to customers. Or even worse, the Wi-Fi which costs next to nothing to provide, carries high access charges, like t-Mobile hotspots at Starbucks.

Some cities have begun installing free or cheap wi-fi networks to provide coverage within the boundaries of their city. In part this is to bring high speed internet to the poor, or to encourage small businesses to set up shop in town. A consequence of this has been drawing the ire of telecommunications companies who have launched lobbying campaigns to stop cheap or free municipal wireless.

Concurrent with the rise of wi-fi and broadband internet has been the voice over internet telephones. Voice over internet phone lines have been heavily pushed by cable companies eager to steal even more business away from long distance carriers. But the trend by many people to convert to a mobile lifestyle has rendered the need for land based phone lines-- whether carried over copper wires or over the internet-- obsolete. VoIP can't compete with mobile phones--

Phone companies older high speed internet solution, DSL, has lost ground to the faster, more reliable cable services. In response, Verizon began rolling out fiber optic service, providing even faster data connections and television services. Fiber optics will offer real competition to cable companies who have over the last few years enjoyed tremendous monopolies on high speed internet and television service. Since verizon also provides land based telephone services and mobile phone services, it will be in the position to compete in all of the cable companies' markets and also provide better phone service options. There is one area though, that cable companies can beat fiber optic empowered phone companies: mobile data charges.

Verizon was recently called out on having quoted users the cheap rate of .02 cents a kilobyte for data usage, when in fact they meant .02 dollars (or, 2 cents) per kilobyte. When you've figured out that $.02 per kb is rather expensive to surf the regular old internet (sending word document attachments, at 5kb to 10kb would cost 20 cents each), you might see why there is a great vulnerability to mobile phone companies offering mobile data plans.

If you said that Cable companies don't transmit wireless signals, and don't have the capabilities to compete with wireless companies, you'd only be partly right. While cable companies don't broadcast signals from cellular towers, they do use wireless technology. Or rather, their customers do. Many people run their internet signal into a wireles router, creating a small area network for their home. Wi-Fi signals are fairly short ranged, and signals degrade when they hit things like walls. Most home users are lucky to get 1,000 feet without needing to boost their signal. But this weakness is also the strength of the network.

Wireless companies like Verizon and AT&T rely on their extensive network of cellular towers to maintain a wireless monopoly. In essence, cellular towers are controlled by three companies that in a flagrant flaunting of anti-trust laws, have struck deals with each other to create essentially one national network without roaming fees for customers. Cellular phones work by literally creating a network of cells. At the center of each cell is a tower that broadcasts and receives signals from phones in that cell. As a user moves from cell to cell, new towers take control of the signal, but all this happens seamlessly without the user knowing they have switched cells. Since the big three companies control the vast majority of the cellular network as well as the radio spectrum used for the service, they pretty much can keep competitors out of the market.

And then there are wi-fi networks. Wi-fi networks use an area of dedicated radio spectrum. As a result, wi-fi networks have a limited range, but are versatile in who can use them-- no license required. Home wi-fi networks are also rarely used to capacity. Many networks sit idle all day long while their owners are at work. Even when users are at home, its very hard to use the network to full capacity. Even high volume users are rarely straining their connection to the internet, though broadband providers usually cap the monthly usage despite claiming unlimited access. Heavy users are kicked off the network despite companies' advertising unlimited access. (the claim there is a difference between access and use, but if you think about how the internet works, there isn't). This is of course one reason why users limit their home networks. Strictly speaking, too many users sharing a wi-fi connection will use up the allotted bandwidth the internet service provider allows-- though rarely will this correlate with the physical capacity of the network. Thus instead of living in a wi-fi utopia, we live in a society of "locked" wi-fi neighbors. Take a drive through any gentrified urban neighborhood, and you'll probably come across dozens or even hundreds of "closed" wi-fi networks. You can't get access to these networks, but they are all there, not being used to capacity.

A few years back, a researcher over at the SETI project came up with a brilliant way to analyze the billions of bits of data the project had collected: let amateurs do the work. Or rather, let their idle computers do the work. Volunteers would download software onto their computers that would take small bits of the SETI project, analyze it, and then get more data when they were finished. The idea was simple: harness the power of home computers sitting idle while their owners were at work or when they were at home, use their computers at the office. This is distributed computing.

Peer to Peer software -- Napster, Kazaa, BearShare-- works in a similar way. Users have files stored on their computers. You want those files, but instead of burdening one user's computer with the full file download, you retrieve small bits of data from 10 or 20 or 100 users. In this way, no one person has the burden of serving up the whole file.

Cable companies have hundreds of thousands of users plugged into their broadband computer networks. All of these users have a company provided cable modem to interpret the data signal that comes over the cable network. Cable companies could swap out standard cable modems for wi-fi enabled versions that automatically create a local Wi-fi cell. Because in most places, cable companies enjoy local and regional monopolies on cable service, the customers' local home network would immediately become an entire neighborhood or city by sharing hundreds or thousands of other users' cable wi-fi networks that are otherwise not being used to capacity.

Since the cable company would be sponsoring the wi-fi networks, individual customers would not have to worry about using "too much" of their unlimited access. In essence, instead of the customer leaving open their door and hoping their neighbors are kind patrons and don't use too much bandwidth, the cable company is inviting all of their customers to use the subscription they otherwise would be using at home.

Further, since cable companies rarely compete with each other in the same neighborhood, cable companies would probably be able to strike deals with "competitors" to allow for a single seamless cable network. Perhaps Comcast provides service in one municipality and Cablevision in another, but customers of each cable service would enjoy interoperability between networks, creating one super network.

These wi-fi networks would not probably require FCC licensing since signals used by wi-fi networks are already allocated for such use. Because its simply an adoption of existing, non-regulated technology, there would be no need for new government interference.

The key component of all this is Voice over Internet telephony. The cable companies make a lot of money stealing customers from traditional land line phone subscribers. After all, the networks and capacity are in place for VOIP phone service. The cable company is basically getting free money every time someone signs up for the phone service, which is in part why combination phone, television, and internet packages are so cheap. The added benefit is the cable companies steal customers away from telecom rivals. But who really needs a land line anyway? In age of wireless, cellphone only households are quickly replacing traditional land lines. With a wi-fi network in place however, cable companies could get into the mobile phone market.

Obviously a mobile wi-fi phone is not the same thing as a wireless cellular phone. The limitations are much greater. Wi-fi signals use battery power faster, for one thing, and even in the most densely populated urban networks, the wi-fi network will never be as complete as a cellular network-- to say nothing of rural and even suburban areas. But by offering a land line that connects to a customer's neighborhood network, not just the wall jack in their house, a mobile wi-fi phone could further encourage customers to sign up for the phone package along with television and internet services. In addition, the cable company could make a nice profit selling handsets.

Yet there are of course a few normative concerns that are raised by such a system. First would be privacy. One of the main reasons most home users don't leave their existing networks open to any passers-by is that a few bad seeds have ruined it for everyone. Its a safe practice to lock strangers out of your wi-fi network not just to prevent your unlimited access account from hitting the monthly bandwidth limit, but also to prevent strangers from hacking into your computer for nefarious purposes.

This solution is somewhat easy to come by. The cable company could simply create two networks-- one connection for the home user, and then another separate public network that requires a subscriber password to login. In essence, the cable company provided wi-fi network would be a separate interface from the home user's network, only sharing the physical connection to the outside cable line.

Secondly, it requires vast customer adoption at the same it requires the customer to provide a service-- their electricity-- to run the modem and wi-fi network. The key to a successful distributed wi-fi network then would be to trade the customers' electricity for access to the network. In essence, customers agree to provide electricity for their local wi-fi network in exchange for free access to the other networks provided by their neighbors. Since the network would only be open to subscribers, the cable company is collecting fees from the users anyway. The key to success is for cable companies to not get greedy and attempt to extort more money from customers for this service; as soon as they do, some customers will opt out, and then there will be holes in the network coverage, making the service less valuable. Instead, distributed wi-fi would be a benefit of being a full cable subscriber, which would entice users to stay with their cable company rather than switch to satellite or fiber optic service. But that would also not close the door to cable companies charging a subscription fee for users who are not also home network subscribers. Essentially, by providing a node on the wi-fi network, users get the service free, but non-subscribers could pay for an access fee.

Third, the system would need to give priority to the subscriber's home network. That is, when the customer who is providing a particular wi-fi cell happens to be at home using their network, their data receives priority over other users using the network. This could easily by achieved through software and should not present a problem.

Urban areas would clearly be the biggest beneficiaries. Anyone living in a city has probably taken notice to the fact there there are a half dozen or so other wi-fi signals in close proximity to their own. But with the exception of rural areas or very large parks, the wi-fi signals would probably be strong enough even in many suburban neighborhoods to provide extensive coverage. While such a network would never be as good as a true cellular network, a wi-fi network would probably be "good enough" for most users.

Its possible of course for a non-cable company to provide software that would do roughly the same thing. But because adoption would not be as wide spread, and because cable companies still impose limits on their advertised unlimited access networks, its unlikely that it would be particularly successful. Furthermore, cable companies probably lack the foresight to implement a system like this, and even if they did, they would ruin it through greed.

Even though its doubtful cable companies will ever follow through on such a plan, it probably doesn't matter in the long term. Ultimately of course, the cost of providing cellular services continues to drop, including data services, and especially as more people adopt its use. Meanwhile, more and more municipalities and government agencies are building free or low cost wi-fi access. In all likelihood, sometime in the next decade or two, some form of ultra mobile internet will become like water-- cheap and readily available in the civilized world.

Blame TiVo

We're fairly irate about Comcast's recent decision to install advertising on the guide menu of our digital cable box. But perhaps our anger should be directly at TiVo.

We came across this little bit from over a year ago about a Comcast / TiVo relationship.

"As an extension of the relationship, TiVo and Comcast will make TiVo's interactive advertising platform available across Comcast's customer base"

One of the alternatives we were considering was dropping digital cable and returning to the old days of standard analog cable, and buying a TiVo box for our DVR-ing needs. This would not have been quite as convenient as a direct Cable DVR box, but it would be slightly cheaper and those fuckers at Comcast would be getting a whole lot less of our green. But if TiVo is responsible for those ads, then I see no reason why they should get any money from me either. Probably just means waiting things out until Verizon Fiber Television is available.

Fuck You Comcast

If Viral Advertising wasn't enough, now Comcast Cable, my local cable monopoly has decided that $170 means you also get ads on your Guide Menu. Where once was five channels listed on each screen, there are now only 4 and a whole fucking ad for television we don't care about (read: football games, Smallville, ect.)



And cable operators are wondering why consumers are flocking to satellite providers.

Meanwhile, this ad wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't treated as an item on the list. There is no casual scrolling down the menu because as you do, the ad gets highlighted. This would be fine if you could channel surf with digital cable. But, unlike the analog signal, digital cable takes a few seconds to load each channel-- just like satellite tv. So in essence, using the menu is the only way to reasonably find the show you want to watch. And now Comcast thinks I should get to look at ads while I do this.

We've lodged complaints by phone and email. ecare-Union@comcast.com and 800.COMCAST, respectively. We're telling all our friends to do the same thing. This is bullshit. $170 gets you a lot of television, but it also means you should be able to channel surf in peice. So Fuck you Comcast.

Hungry, Hungry Power Grid

The New York Times is reporting that a poorly updated national grid of interstate electrical transmission lines are causing energy prices to skyrocket. The author wants us to believe that for customers east of the Rocky Mountains, the apocalypse is upon electricity users.

Indeed, the price per customer is expected to jump $40, and in some cases more as customers aren't each receiving a fair distribution of the rate increases. But this isn't a bad thing. The United States has enjoy a long period of cheap energy prices, be it gasoline for cars or electricity for homes and businesses. While cheap electricity might keep factories humming, it also reduces the incentive to conserve energy.

Cheap electricity keeps electric companies from expanding services and upgrading facilities because there is little incentive for them to invest in new plants. So then places like California endure rolling blackouts. Or New York City's power grid blows up on hot summer days.

Meanwhile, customers with cheap electricity make little effort to save energy when the price per kilowatt keeps the bill about the same no matter how much they use. But raise the price of electricity, and using energy efficient appliances and light bulbs begins to add up. For example, compact fluorescent bulbs running at twenty watts produce the same amount of luminosity as incandescent bulbs using three times as much power. But now with the price of electricity artificially low, there is little incentive for the consumer to replace cheap incandescent bulbs will more efficient but more expensive compact fluorescents.

Furthermore, most customers don't think twice about electricty leaks-- the slow sucking of power by appliances that for all purposes appear as if they are off. However, if the price of electricity increases dramatically, customers will be encouraged by their bottom line to seek out energy efficient appliances that don't waste electricty.

At the end of the day, the cost of producing goods might go up if electricity prices rise. But America builds ideas, not things. Customers, particularly those with low or fixed incomes, might see the rise in electric prices hurting thier pocket books. Yet the average customer can make very small changes in their lifestyles-- compact flourescent bulbs, energy efficient appliances, and ensuring power sapping devices are turned off-- that add up to huge savings when millions of people across the country begin making the switch. Everyone agrees that energy conservation is a good idea, but no one agrees they should be the ones to do the conserving. Highery energy prices will help people make the decision they know they should be making anyway.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Lately there has been a whole lot of buzz surrounding "user" created content. Barely a day goes by the mainstream media, fascinated by their own shortcomings, fails to mention YouTube, the video file sharing service. But there is also Wikipedia, the encyclopedia written by the people. There is xTube and PornoTube-- you guessed it, adult versions of YouTube. There is even a cable television channel dedicated to user content owned partly by none other than Al Gore.

While Wikipedia is a non-profit organization, most of these sites are run as for profit ventures, and profit they do. YouTube sold for a billion and a half dollars. That's a lot of money for a site that mostly features teenage girls dancing and lip syncing to Jessica Simpson or the guy who shares your cubicle performing an air guitar solo to Aerosmith. The fact that so many of these amateur videos use professional musicians' music has lead the recording industry-- massive media companies-- to assume they either deserve the revenue generated by sites like YouTube or similar knockoffs or threaten to file suits against teenages for video taping their dance parties.

But apparently, media companies have every expectation to copy user content without compensation.

CNN.com a few months back launched i-Report, , a little user outreach program where users send in pictures or video clips that CNN might than use online. Or on TV. Or some future technology not yet invented. Its all there in the "Terms of Service" agreement:

"you hereby grant to CNN and its affiliates a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print, sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the materials you submit, or any portion thereof, as incorporated in any of their programming or the promotion thereof, in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without payment to you or any third party."

Interesting how they work that bit in there.

So while Time Warner, the parent company of CNN supports the Recording Industry Association's war on grainy, YouTube dance videos, CNN is hoping those same suckers send their own grainy photographs for use by CNN without compensation. We're left wondering: if a user submits a video to i-Report that contains music froma Time Warner artist and CNN airs that video, will Time Warner sue itself for payment?

As if that wasn't bad enough, Yahoo and Reuters are apparently turning everyone in the world into a potential reporter.

"Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites."

Sure, this isn't so different from Flickr, the photo sharing site that users already flock to. Except on Flickr, users control their own content, adding and removing photos as they wish. But the new service will use editors to select photos and run them alongside news stories-- this actually sounds like Yahoo and Rueters are trying to undercut professional photographer fees.

Further adding to this point is the followup:

"people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events."

Indeed those payments will be 'relatively' small-- relative to what professionals would earn for the same picture's usage. Amatuers without an agent or photo agency backing them will not receive the best price for their photographs or video content, while at the same time flooding the content market with images and photographs.

While media companies might think user content is a great way to generate interest in their websites and a cheaper alternative to generating content, they ultimately are hurting themselves. First, they are making a trade off of quality for quantity. With tons of content out there at a low quality, big old meida companies lose their hegemonic control over content. Second, by using user content for little or no payment, media companies are essentially telling consumers that digital content has no value-- in essence, endorsing the free distribution of digital content. And what is music or movie piracy if not free distribution of digital content. Its easy for media companies to say "do as I say, not as I do," but considering the "piracy" war needs to win the hearts and minds of consumers as much as anything, big media is only hurting themselves.

Data Management Would Make the iPhone the Phone Killer

There are plenty of rumors now running around the internet about a possible iPhone launching from Apple. There is a single key feature that Apple usually gets right that we suspect will make any phone from Apple the only phone anyone will want to buy: software.

Within weeks of the first generation iPod, open source software hackers were making applications to turn the iPod into a quasi PDA that could hold contact information. More recent iPods do store and display contact information. Windows users have the option of synching contacts from Outlook or manually using Windows Address book, a little known application that ships with every modern version of Windows. But for now, iTunes, the software that has made iPod THE mobile music device really doesn't support contact information.

Since standard cellphones for most part lack any hardware to PC connection, few if any phone models can synch to PC Address books. Sure, blackberries and sidekicks do, but the average person isn't walking around with a SmartPhone, and many folks carry both a standard phone and SmartPhone. Meanwhile, the wireless carriers have decided to make a few extra dollars charging customers to move address books to new phones. The last phone we dropped $100 on after "loyalty" rebates, but wound up paying an additional 10% of that price to transfer our address book to the new phone. This is beyond aggravating, and frankly, reason enough for us to consider dropping Verizon.

We've been playing around with contacts on our fifth generation iPod for a while now. Its tough though, since we're smart enough not to use Outlook. Indeed, most of our contacts are in gmail and hotmail. So instead, we manually maintain our Windows Address book, and when we remember to, update our iPod Contacts accordingly. So besides our Gmail Address book and the iPod Contacts folder and the Windows Address Book files, we also have our phone Address book. Maintaining all of these databses is time consuming. Yet, this is where an Apple branded cellular phone could surpass other, lesser media phones.

Apple needs to build an address book function directly into the iTunes software for an iPhone to really be the Cell Phone killer the company will want it to be. This may seem counter intuitive, since you can't really buy contacts from an online store as you can music or videos or movies. But it is the key feature that would differentiate an iPhone and the feature that made the iPod the success it was.

Furthermore, building contact software directly into an iPhone / iTunes would allow people to actually be welcomed to "the Social." More times then not, when we come across someone we know but don't have their phone number, party A takes the time to input Party B's contact information. This is then followed up with a 15 second call so that Party A has Party B's contact information without going through the motions of inputting data on a tiny cellphone keypad. Yet, if iPhone / iTunes manages contacts, then two users could simply swap contact data wirelessly. Ultimately, this is a social behavior people engage in all the time that modern technology has failed to really figure out how to streamline.

So indeed, we have high expectations that the Apple iPhone will change digital communication. But at the end of the day its not about the hardware, but instead about the software, which Apple has proven again and again to understand.

Wikipedia: Website Killer

A few years back I launched a small website titled "The Theater Guide." The site was moderately succesful for a first time web publisher, coded by hand and published without the aid of any blog software. It was good enough to be plagarized and to win a prize. That was almost seven years ago.

The Theater Guide was essentially a resource I had written including information about community theater. At the time, the internet was pretty bare when it came to informaton about theater; theater geeks were simply not web geeks. I was not a professional, but I'd like to think most of the information presented on the site was useful to the people who happened to come across it. That was then.

Now of course, everything I had published on the site can easily be researched on Wikipedia. Compare for instance, the Wikipedia entry on stage lighting to a similar page on my guide. Not only is the Wikipedia entry more extensive, but offers links to other areas. The best part is, Wikipedia is being edited by hundreds of thousands of people, providing collective knowledge rather than the limited knowledge of a single publisher. All of this is obvious.

But what this does mean is that sites like my former Theater Guide have a lot less relevance. Small publishers are less necessary today then before Wikipedia. This is in part why my old site has been moved to an archive and I no longer support it. Better information is produced for far less effort then I could devote to expanding the theater guide.

Indeed, Wikipedia has meant a rich assortment of information is freely available on the internet tubes, but it also means small time web publishers must work harder to provide any sort of innovative service.

Welcome to Web 3.0

Faster, Richer, and Omnipresent, the Internet is an Integral Part of Life; Now We Have to Pay for It.

The internet is roughly ten years old. Lot's of nerdy folks will argue that the internet has been around many more years than that, and email and local area computer networks existed long before that on college campuses. But the main stream internet we think of today is about ten years old. An eighteen to twenty-four month window a little more than a decade ago brought the launch of Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo. The New York Times has been on the internet since the same period. During this time, the internet transmission from research tool to modern living room convenience as most service providers switched to a flat rate monthly fee system, including America Online's conversion in 1996, from an hourly fee system.

Sometime around 2001, the internet era came to a screeching halt. Or at least, the dotcom frenzy did when the market crashed. Web services that had been hemorrhaging money were no longer worth operating. The "second" generation of the internet was labeled Web 2.0 by OReilly who then subsequently held conferences to discuss what made the new, modern web fundamentally different from the early days. More recently, Web 2.0 was in the news again as competitors of OReily's trademark were sued. As bloggers condemn OReily for their "abuse" of trademarks, let's consider that, in part, the whole lawsuit is in why Web 2.0 is now irrelevant.

Web 3.0 is perhaps just the next step in the evolutionary process of the internet, yet for better or for worse, these changes making the internet more expensive.

Paying for Content

OReily's first example of Web 1.0 vs. 2.0 is the difference between DoubleClick, the ad software notorious for popups and spyware, and Google's Adsense, the benign text ads that quietly wait for a reader to click. But text ads, served by Google or yahoo and now even Microsoft are slowly losing credibility with advertisers as click fraud becomes an evident problem. Advertisers as a result are paying less for ads.

In addition, the maturing internet audience is now keen on ads, dubious or genuine. The shock value of the world's first Banner Ad was a brilliant marketing ploy. How many thousands of users clicked on it? Yet, so ubiquitous are ads today that users are much more able to zone out all the ads. The result is one of two things; the much more aggressive Flash ad that engulfs the webpage (though you can avoid this by not installing the most up to date version of Flash Player), though these too will lose their shock value, or the alternative result, paying for content.

A millennia ago in internet years, content was free for the taking. Some content providers required "registration," which usually meant forking over an email address that would eventually be spammed, but the content was free. The content of course was paid for through internet ads, largely based on DoubleClick software or similar products from competitors. That's web 1.0 according to OReily.

Google News was launched in 2002. Google news is an aggregated search engine of various news websites. The service allows access to many more news websites than an ordinary person might read on any given day. The net effect of this is the devaluation of news. Why pay for a copy of a news story from one online paper when another, similar article is freely available from another online paper.

Meanwhile, the rise of the blog produced millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of pages of "fresh" content for the web. Blogging software eliminates many of the technical hurdles associated with operating a webpage. Suddenly the whole world was a content creator. Obviously, this further devalued web content by providing so much more of it. Even if most or almost all of blogs are useless, banal pieces of information, the universe of blog pages is so vast that even a small percentage of valuable information is a lot of content.

Finally, the rise of Wikis, or group edited webpages, has meant that the accuracy of information has improved on the internet. Now, "accurate" does not necessarily mean Britanica.com and "truthful" does not mean a .gov url. Wikipedia has become an invaluable resource (perhaps too valuable, considering the number of instances 'professional' reporters have been caught citing whole passages without giving credit to the source). Again, Wikipedia is devaluing products like Britannica's online subscription by making content so cheap its impossible to charge for it.

That's Web 2.0 according to OReily.

Yet despite all odds, a few months ago, the New York Times launched Time's Select, a subscription service that allows access to "premium" content like Op Ed pieces. Essentially, the Times is saying their Op Ed pieces are more valuable than the opinions bloggers offer for free. CNN also offers premium content in the form of restricting access to certain video feeds over the internet. Or consider Fark.com. Developed during "Web 1.0" as a place to amass links for friends of founder Drew Curtis, it evolved during the "Web 2.0" phase as a community site allowing users to leave comments and feedback. Since then the site has been commercialized with a "premium content" section known as Total Fark where users pay a fee.


"Premium content," is here. But how many subscription fees can users afford to pay? Web 3.0 is poised to find out.

Multi-tiered Internet

Another recent occurrence has been the idea of "Net Neutrality." The last decade of internet service has been served up under the principle that internet service providers could not effect the flow of data from a content provider to a user. But now, network owners--those sleazy folks that provide unlimited high speed broadband access to your home--have decided that they can make even more money charging not just their users, but content providers.

Widely adapted broadband internet promised faster download speeds for content rich websites. Those flash animation ads are made possible largely because high speed internet allows them to load quickly. Videos, music, audio commentary--these are all content sources that rely on broadband speed connections. Yet now that broadband access is piped into homes and businesses across the country, the service providers, looking to earn even larger profits, would like to extort content providers for fees as well. In essence, websites that serve up videos and that consume large amounts of bandwidth will either pay huge fees to individual service providers or their content will be "throttled" to a slower network speeds.

End users will end up paying for this. Either they will pay service providers higher fees for unthrottled internet access, or content providers will pay the extortion fees and make up the difference by charging more for the content they serve. Additionally, this will return power from the hands of individual net users to big corporations. "Average Joe" content providers will be forced into the slow lane of the internet. This gives large corporations an advantage in that by paying off service providers, their content will be sent to users at a faster rate than "average Joe" websites, including video and audio blogs. The immediate result will be a reduction in content, and therefore the value of content will rise.

Take for example the Time Warner company. Time Warner is a huge owner of media content including movies, music, television, websites and magazines. But Time Warner is also a internet service provider through their retail cable divisions and through AOL for Broadband internet service. Time Warner could easily leverage its market share of content AND internet hosting; users of Time Warner cable could get "fast" service of Time Warner content, while other content providers would be forced into the slow lane. As media companies continue to form ever larger conglomerates, scenarios like this become ever more likely.

Taxes

During the wild West days of the early internet, lawmakers had decided levying a tax on internet service would hinder the development of the infantile network. Well the internet has matured. As early as last year, members of Congress began suggesting it was time for an internet tax similar to other telecommunications taxes. So far the net is still tax free, but how long remains a mystery. A recession in the start of the new millennium had nearly bankrupted many state treasury accounts. Internet taxes were just one of many suggestions state government made to try and fill the gaps in their budgets. Luckily, for the most part, state budgets have rebounded considerably. But the next economic downturn may very well bring with it "innovative" state levied internet taxes.

Straight up taxing internet service is not the only place greedy government accountants have turned in recent years. State sales taxes were largely circumnavigated by internet retailers. Essentially, out of state customers never paid retail sales tax. As lawmakers grew keen to the practice--and more importantly saw sales tax revenue drop as more people converted to online shopping--state governments began closing loopholes. At present, dotcom retailers with any physical presence in a state must then pay sales tax on sales within that state. As online retailers have expanded, so have their operations in multiple states. In part this makes business sense by reducing shipping times to customers, but it also means fewer customers are enjoying a tax free savings.

The next step of state sales taxes is forming sales tax pacts with other states. In essence, several states agree to collect a common sales tax on items either originating from or shipped to their states. This extends the collective "physical presence" of online stores to many more business operations.

Finally, states are also beginning to wise up to the fact that digital goods can be taxed as well. Digital download sales of software or music or any other non physical good has quietly slipped under the sales tax radar. Not any longer. Many states have or are considering legislation to tax digital downloads. Virtual sales taxes have real effects on the cost of goods.

Service Software

ZDNet declared in November of last year that the Web 3.0 would include "Application Services." The era of stand alone software is slowly coming to an end. The future of course, is online software applications that replace products like MS-Office. Users would pay a monthly fee that would allow them to access the software and user files from anywhere with an internet connection.

In theory, this brave new world of web applications seems like a brilliant idea for the consumer. They never again have to worry about backing up their hard drive, because the web service would. They would have access to their files from any computer, not just their primary PC. And, yes, it would seem this would solve the problem of acquiring software licenses for a business computer, home computer and secondary home computer.

But the reality is, a service based software system gives more control to the software developer. There would be no pirated versions of MS-Office floating around, and today there are hundreds of thousands of unauthorized copies. Software pirates are not just in remote places like China or Russia. Microsoft has made the price of a legitimate copy of off the shelf Office so high, that the risks associated with pirating the software far outweigh the risk. Service applications however, would always be paid for because the software would run through the vender's servers where it could be verified as authentic.

Meanwhile, service applications are rented, not owned. Take for instance the Word 97 we received with our first Windows 95 machine. Part of the software bundle, the cost of the software was included in the price of the computer, i.e. "free". As we've disposed of subsequent computers, Word 97 has migrated with us (don't worry Microsoft, we've only ever installed it on one computer at a time as our older machines went defunct). Imagine instead though, that for the last nine years we were paying a nominal service fee of $10 a month for that software; instead of being "free," the cost of the software jumps to $1080.

Internet service applications may sound phenomenal at first, but really they are just another way for software corporations to squeeze even more money from consumers adding to the cost of Web 3.0.

Big Business Web

Another feature of the new internet is that Big Business is taking over. In part this will be accelerated by "web throttling" where only big business will be able to pay for bandwidth access. But its also a change in the way content is developed.

Consider for instance, flash animation websites. Flash animation has become the new standard of "professional" websites. But the software to create a flash website costs hundreds of dollars. Websites that are hand coded using a basic text editor available on every computer in America are slowly being obsolesced. The result essentially is that instead of the cost of building a website being relatively low, the minimum cost is going up.

The cost of computer hardware has come down dramatically allowing every jack ass with an internet connection to set up a website. Yet add to that a tax on hosting services, extortion payments to internet service providers, and higher fees on development software and the new, adjusted cost for operating a website skyrockets. The end result is fewer websites, less content and higher prices for everyone.

If Web 2.0 was blogging, Web 3.0 is professional bloggers. Media companies like Gawker Media and Curbed.com are built on blogs, the modern newspaper. These blog networks command higher ad prices because they receive more visitors. As a result, they are raising the cost of entering the internet media market. Ironically, Gawker's roots are in mocking the "closed society" of traditional, big business print media.

Saying Goodbye to the PC, Hello to the Fee

The internet has been for years synonymous with personal computers. Yet technology has evolved now that the internet is also available on mobile computers, cellular phones, and other devices that are not the person computer like the Microsoft xBox. Both the xBox 360 and as yet released Playstation 3 have a "premium" online component that again charges users a subscription fee. These fees are in addition to the cost of an initial game and the cost of internet access. Sure, online networking of game systems is a great leap forward in computer gaming, but at a price.

Then there are the palm pilots and blackberry systems that use wireless technology to serve the internet to mobile users. Wireless companies love these devices because they extract higher fees from a market saturated with cellular phones. There is very little room for the industry to sell more phones, but plenty of room to sell additional services like wireless internet. The key point here is that all these services add new fees to the wireless bill of customers.

And Beyond

The internet fever of the 1990's was replaced by somber optimism of the next generation internet. Yet here we are again at another crossroads. The freedom of the internet is being replaced with the fees of the internet. Once upon a time, the internet was the great leveling device allowing the common man the same privileges and opportunities of corporate America. The internet was a soap box that anyone could stand on.

The era of Web 3.0 is upon us. No longer is the soap box free to proselytize from. The same obstacles facing innovative small businesses and independent voices in older mediums are coming to the net. Greater restriction, tighter regulation, and higher costs are culminating to form private enclaves, elitism, and corporate society that the net promised to eliminate.

Yet, the internet is not beyond saving. Perhaps, the next generation of the web will reverse the trends we are now seeing. Free wifi networks as large as cities are under construction. Google is implementing free a Wifi service in San Francisco, that if successful could be extended elsewhere. Service providers like Verizon and Bellsouth have powerful lobbyists who so have so far been successful at ending “net neutrality.” But content servers like Google and Amazon and Microsoft have equally deep pockets working to keep the whole of the net in the fast lane. Perhaps a decade from now, we will remember Web 3.0 as the dark ages, that perhaps a new renaissance of the internet will be as compelling and inexpensive as the network we leave behind.

"Sex" and Unintended Consequences

Why Blindly Censoring the Internet Is a Bad Idea

The surprise we enjoyed this morning was a sudden blockage of certain web URL's by a newly installed firewall. Gmail, Hotmail, and any other website with a "Mail" in the URL was suddenly being blocked. Obviously, the blockage of "mail" was a bad idea, as anyone on the office network would not be able to access email addresses often used for daily business. Besides, mail is a fairly benign URL.

Our first reaction when the message "URLs or Pages Blocked" was to google news Gmail in to find out if the server was down. It is after all a Beta program, and we've grown accustomed to the occasional glitch. Of course, because google returns the search term in the URL, the search results were also blocked. We were a bit confused until we tried hotmail and yahoo mail. After those sites returned the same message, we realized in fact "mail" was being blocked on our end.

Perhaps not surprisingly, "Sex" was also blocked. Of course, the censorship was being done rather blindly. Websites with the word sex in the text were allowed to pass through, only those with sex in the URL were being blocked. For those of you suffering from Puritanical morals, keep in mind where "sex" appears. Middlesex, Essex, and Sussex are all counties in New Jersey. Inadvertantly, the official county webpages were suddenly blocked.

While all this was quickly remedied by removing the blocking software, the conundrum illustrates not only the difficulties of censoring the internet, but also the unintended consequences. Imagine instead the same software operating on a small business network, but rather installed on a large scale government network with many levels of bureaucracy. How long would government workers be barred from viewing the official Middlesex county webpage in a vain effort to thwart office pornography?

Is It Time for a Virtual CDC?

Stopping Today's Security Threats Has Proven Too Much for Corporate America

Today, digital viruses are as great a threat as their real world counterparts. Sensitive information ranging from personal credit data, bank accounts, medical records and more are stored on computers running some flavor of Microsoft's operating system. Yet Microsoft waits weeks to acknowledge a flaw in the software, and still longer to fix the holes.

If the real Center for Disease Control was run by Microsoft, an Avian flu pandemic would have wiped out most of North America long before Microsoft even acknowledged the existence of a virus.

There are few reasons for Microsoft to bother fixing security holes with the expediancy necessary to prevent damage on a large scale. For one thing, its in the interest of Microsoft's public relations to ignore potential security flaws. While at this point, few people probably trust MS software to be flaw free, every public announcement of a security flaw detracts from the image of the company.

Second, having a full time team of digital "doctors" on call to respond to threats immediately costs alot of money. Microsoft obviously is not short on cash, but from a business stand point, the company has little interest in developing software that ultimately is being distributed for free.

That brings up another point. Microsoft has been making inroads into the rather lucrative anti-virus, anti-spyware software business arena. The latest version of Windows has inspired anti-virus maker Symantic to even file suit against the company for allegedly infringing on Symantic software patents. Once Microsoft is able to profit from preventing virus infections, expect "security holes" to exist for even longer because the company will have a financial incentive to sell propietary anti-virus software.

Yet another reason not to entrust Microsoft to patch security holes is the company's recent anti-piracy measures. Of the millions of computers running windows worldwide, a good number of them are running cracked copies of windows. Now though, for customers to gain access to security patches, users must also download an anti-piracy spyware program developed by Microsoft. Has the end result been for millions of illegal copies of Windows to suddenly be paid for? No, indeed, the real result is there are now millions of computers without the latest patches and are hence millions of computers vulnerable to infection.

Law and order types might declare that users running pirated copies of windows will get what they deserve if they become infected with a computer virus because they fialed to download new security protocols. But guess what, its not a problem confined to their machines. On the global network of computers, every user effects every other user.

Perhaps, for instance, you are a user of a legitimate copy of windows and have all the proper security fixes. Indeed, perhaps even you are smart enough or lucky enough never to have been a victim of a virus or a phishing scam. But what about your bank, your doctor's office, or your credit agency? You're information is only as secure as their computer systems. And of course, many of todays' viruses only need to infect a small number of computers connected to the internet before they act as mindless spam robots or launch a denial of service attack on your favorite website. Indeed, computer security is only as strong as the weakest link, and now, thanks to Microsoft anti-piracy spyware, the weakest link is every computer not running a legitimate copy of windows.

Loyal Mac users will probably point to one or all of these reasons as why they prefer their little Apple computers. But don't be so smug. The last few months have brought a number of Mac based viruses, and if Apple computer ever makes a comeback in the personal computing market, expect even more. Just look to the success and failure of the Firefox browser.

The Firefox browser is an open source internet browser developed as an alternative to the flawed Internet Explorer developd by Microsoft. At first, Firefox was a safe alternative to explorer. Explorer had a number of security holes that easily allowed dubious websites to install malicious software on users who simply browsed their pages or clicked on links sent to their email. Yet, as Firefox grew in popularity, so did threats to the integrity of the software. Today, Firefox users should not assume they are immune to various infections just because they are using an alternative browser. Likewise, Mac users should be worried too.

Just as Microsoft hesitates to admit security flaws, Apple would also like to pretend that everything is okay in the Garden of Eden. Apple's television ads plain out deny the Mac OS vulnerability to viruses, yet these viruses do exist.

So yes, it is time for a virtual CDC. A virtual CDC would work with Microsoft and Apple (and any other vender of Operating Systems) to patch flaws in the operating software. This would remove the burden from these companies to develop software patches that ultimately are given away for free.

In turn, the Virtual CDC would be able to react more quickly than MS or Apple to threats. The Virtual CDC would post warnings more quickly because there would be no fear of a drop in the price of stock. The agency would be a government facility: properly crafted legislation creating the virtual CDC would also compel the companies to share the source code of their operating systems, but without fear of a competitor running off with the companies' trade secrets.

Microsoft, and to some extent Apple, has proven time and time again that their operations are incapable of dealing with security holes in an appropriate and timely fashion. The threats posed to the operating systems that run the world's computers and the data stored on those computers offer a clear and present danger to the United States. Now is the time to take action, not after a virus infects a critical government computer that launches a nuclear strike.

iPod Video: The Real Deal Will Involve TiVo

With Apple's release of the iPod Video, critics have been quick to ask if users really want to watch video on a 2.5 inch screen. The very simple answer is Yes, just not the shit that ABC produces.

The release of iTunes 6.0 has meant owners of the new iPod video will be able to buy thousands of music videos-- moderately interesting-- and 5 different ABC television programs. Five. That's right. Five. Who the fuck cares what ABC is broadcasting anyway?

Sure, Lost and Desperate Housewives are hits, but neither have held our interest, and we suspect there are at least a few other people out there who share that view. And then there are the other three shows that we've never even heard of.

More importantly, we're Apples target audience. After all, we're literally getting ready to purchase an iPod, and it very likely will be an iPod video. Beyond that, we fit the demographic Apple is targeting: young and with disposable income. But we sure aren't planning on downloading Lost or Desperate Housewives.

Indeed, the iPod video will not have a profound effect on the way people store and watch media. At least not by offering the crap that on ABC that no one watches anyway. The real deal is when the iPod can plug into TiVo and other home Digital Recorders, eat up whatever was recorded the night before, and then play it on the bus, train, or subway, or while on a break at lunch, [we of course would never condone watching television in the car, but we know some asshole out there is going to be sitting on the interstate watching his iPod. That person will probably be watching Lost].

Of course, the television and movie industry probably is not going to want to get a whole bunch of people having the ability to download their favorite shows from TiVo. Those old executives simply hear "mobile" and suddenly start crying about copyrights. On the other hand, TiVo is a company that has been like that old tire on your car slowly losing air. TiVo's slow death is not because it offers poor service, but from competition from other services, primarily cable systems offering their own digital recorders. But making TiVo's iPod compatible would give both companies an edge over the competition.

What would we want? We'd want to have the ability to download The Daily Show or the new Colbert Report. Maybe we'd want to watch a show on Fox, like The O.C. or one from NBC like The West Wing [NBC after all, has been notorious for switching around their program schedule, which is mainly why we stopped watching that network's shows].

And as far as downloading videos from iTunes, we'd perhaps want access to an archive of the Simpsons. Or if by some accident we started watching Desperate housewives, access to all the shows we'd never seen before.

Meanwhile, we doubt the television and motion picture industry will quickly realize the sort of money making potential they have in the iPod Video until its too late. By too late, we mean that we expect in a very short time, open source software that would allow iPod Video owners to rip their DVD's to an iTunes format ready for their iPods.

DVD security technology was cracked shortly after DVDs first hit the market, and we tend to think the most likely reason there has not been a larger internet trade of movies is not because of long download times, but instead because no one wants to sit around with their friends and watch a movie on their 12 inch laptop screen. Why strain your eyes staring at laptop screen when you can rent a DVD for a few dollars. The iPod Video changes that though. The new ipod will plug into a television set seamlessly, and so the masses will easily be able to take movies from their computers and put them on the television to watch with friends. The iPod video will do for movies what Napster did for music: make it cool again.

The motion picture association needs to act quickly, but they won't. They'll fear that selling movies over iTunes will result in people sharing movies instead of buying DVDs. Yet, people are now going to watch movies on their iPods whether the source of the video is from iTunes or from Kazaa.

The only thing we think the iPod video reall needs is a way for our xBox to plug into the device. Sure, the xBox isn't exactly portable, but we still think it would be fun to play it on a 2.5 inch screen.

Blogging With A Rubber

Recent Blogsphere events have again brought to light the dangers of a misunderstood medium and of the corporate world. Call Center Purgatory coincidentally has posted about Work Blogs. But we thought it might be relevant to add our own thoughts.

Blogging is not much different than posting a personal website. While personal sites have existed for several decades, blogs are mostly an invention of the last five years or so. The only true difference is that most personal websites tend to be static while blogs are frequently updated. Blogs have increasingly become influencial. The mainstream media loves reporting on "the power of bloggers."

Due in part to the rise of popularity of blogs and their influence in society, people have begun to take notice. Like most new technologies or changing social patterns, blogs are misunderstood and feared. Plenty of high profile cases exist where people have lost their careers or have been harrassed because of what they say or do online. While we wait for laws and society to catch up to changing cultural patterns, there is in some cases a genuine threat to people's livelihoods or safety.

Take precautions.

Play Within the System Because You Can't Beat It

Many articles recently have suggested bloggers go underground and cover their tracks to avoid real life problems as a result of blogging. Inevitably, you will be caught, so play within the rules.

Know The No Policy
Some places of employment have specific policies addressing blogging. Others do not, and have an implicit policy addressing the issue. Other places actually encourage personal blogs, such as Sun Microsystems. Know what you are allowed or not allowed to do on company time or using company resources such as the internet. Some states such as California have laws prohibiting employees from being fired for off hours legal activity. This doesn't protect you while you are "on the clock."

If you are looking to circumvent this and need to blog during work hours, most blog programs allow you to set the time stamp on the post to whenever you feel like it. You could date the whole thing in 1985 if you wanted to. Of course, some places will monitor incoming and out going net traffic, or randomly screen capture computers on the corporate network, so you aren't entirely safe.

Make Hoffa Proud
Labor organizing is federally protected by law and can have harsh consequences for employers who fire employees discussing unionization. Discussing issues of organizing your workforce may offer you some protection. This defense has not yet been tested in court specifically relating to blogs, or whether a blog that contains both union and non-union posts would be protected.

Don't Violate Their Trust
Don't violate the trust of employers by giving away corporate secrets. Don't pose nude wearing part of the corporate uniform. Many states allow "firing at will," meaning employers can fire employees for any reason other than race or sex. However, most employers are not going to fire a valued employee who does not violate their trust. That is to say, if you are blogging on your own time, without reference to your place of employment, most places will not care or merely issue a warning at first. Don't rant about your boss and expect him to pay a blind eye if he happens to discover your blog, even if every other post is about your new cat fluffy. But in most cases, if you keep a personal blog purely personal, most people will ignore it.


Going Underground
The internet has always been seen as an [semi] anonymous public forum. Sometimes this is abused with harrassment, but most often users enjoy the freedom their otherwise restrained lives prevent them from having. However, the internet is rarely truly anonymous, and even casual users can use basic tools like google to find information that is thought secure and private.

Red 5, Standing By
If you want to remain anonymous, the first thing you must do is never reference your name or even the names of those around you. Intials are sometimes ok to use, but even then, its probably best to use an alias. Change your codenames for different things: don't make your anonymous blog name the same as your email address or even a private log in for your bank account or other service. Your anonymity is only as strong as the weakest person who can identify you. Change the names of people you blog about. Don't give away to your friends that this is 'your blog'. Make sure people who do know who you are protect your identity when linking to you or blogging about you.

Private Information
Just like you shouldn't give out your mother's maiden name to people, you should never give away information that can identify you. For instance, don't say you live in "Muarry Hill", say "New York City" or even better, "A Major East Coast City," or best, "A Large American City." Even a simple post like "today is my birthday" reveals when you were born. This of course is difficult if you have an entirely personal blog as some events such as "Partied like a rockstar last night, really hung over," require a qualifier like, "because it was my birthday."

The One Armed Man Did It
Blog from public computers if you are really afraid. Most places like libraries can track their uers, date and time. However, for the most part, matching an IP address with a specific user in a public setting is very difficult. Internet cafes are another possibility, especially independently owned operations that don't keep track of users or net use.

A blog "Some Blogs Are Better Than Other Blogs" made a career out of poking fun of other blogs. The creator lived with two other people, who shared his IP address. After his roomates were accused of creating the blog -- they had semi public lives as psuedo journalists -- he had to confess to clean up their names. Be careful who is using your IP address. Just because you are taking precautions to remain anonymous, doesn't mean everyone else is.

E-Mail is alot more easily tracked as the mail servers do keep track of IP addresses. Sending email and posting to an anonymous blog at the same time can reduce your anonymity.

Go Corporate
Foetry was once an anonymous site dedicated to exposing corruption in poetry contests, until GoDaddy.com revealed the user's name and address. Feotry's creator was less than happy since as it turns out, his wife, a semi successful poet, was attempting to win many of the contests he was exposing. Also, many of the people he exposed were not too happy he exposed them and sent him fan mail telling him so. In either case, to really shield your identity, go through a third party. A lawyer may be able to help you out, registering the domain and other things in their name rather than yours. Or create a corporation for your blog. For instance, the mythical reporter Wally Edge of PoliticsNJ.com has withheld the scrutiny of the New York Times [not that they are authoritative hackers] because he has the protecting of a private company behind him.

Final Thoughts
Blogging is very new in terms of cultural phenomenons. Attitudes will change with time. In most cases, bloggers have gotten in trouble for doing things that people have always done -- gossip, rant, spread rumors, give away company secrets -- but have gotten in trouble because they have left an evidence trail. How often has someone been fired for talking about the boss's extra-marital affair around the water cooler?

Protections for bloggers will develope both through statutes and through court cases over time. The decline of labor unions over the last two decades has also meant that employers have taken increasing liberties with regards to abusing employees and making demands about their personal lives. Looking back through the history of labor movement, many of the events that are happening today-- firing bloggers, demanding unpaid over time, abusing workers-- caused the creation of labor unions to begin with. The backlash from Corporate America will inevitably result in changes in workplace laws and more laws like those in California protecting workers from legal, out of office activities. But again, these things take time.

The Revolution Will Be Blogged.

xBox 360: New Era, Still a Failure

The xBox 360 has finally been shown off and will be available for next holiday season. It promises a whole lot more than merely a console game system, but might fall short on real innovation.

First, the device comes with a removable 20GB Harddrive. Impressive compared to the 8GB that shipped with the original xBox, but pitiful compared to an off the shelf PC circa 2000. The Harddrive is removable though, meaning folks will no doubt be able to buy upgrades. At least MS designers caught on to the trend of people cracking open their old xBox's and isntalling new drives.

The wi-fi ready box should be able to hook easily into wireless home networks allowing users to hookup many devices. Sadly, most [read: none} televisions will be able to wirelessly recieve data making for a mess of wires. However, it might mean the xbox 360 will work similar to Apple's airport connecting to a windows xp computer and other, future devices.

The XBox 360 seems to be trying to fill a roll D