The Blog of Will

Open Source in the Third World

2006-04-23T17:39:00.000-06:00

The Blog of Will

Via Newsforge comes an interesting look at Open Source and developing nations

The argument is not new: open source is good for developing nations since its cost of entry is much smaller than most closed source options. It does have an interesting angle in that it points out that third world nations will have a hard time contributing back into the Open Source pool, at least in the short term.

The foundation of Open Source is the community interaction between developer and user. If the user doesn't understand or want to communicate with the developer, the process breaks down. The article has a few valid points in that people who have to work full time to support basic needs will probably not take the time to debug someone else's code, or send a list of issues to the developer. They're too busy trying to eat and acquire shelter.

The point they miss is that just like how Apple & Microsoft give away software to educational facilities and students, Open Source needs a way to catch people before they become used to something. Its really nice of Microsoft to sell students copies of Windows at $10 a pop. But its certainly not altruistic. They do it so that we get used to using windows, and are less willing to switch.

The Open Source movement can do the same, but at a national level. If these developing nations really are developing, then they will become used to Linux and other Open Source solutions. When they mature, they'll continue to use the software they learned on. And at that point they will be able to, and probably likely to, contribute to the software pool.

In short, long term benefits outweigh the short term one way trade between OS & developing nations.

Warning: Wireless Internet may lead to Identity Theft & Jail Time

2006-04-23T17:28:00.000-06:00

The Blog of Will

Well This is one way to handle those pesky hackers.

Exec. Summary: New York county passes law requiring busisnesses to secure their wireless internet access.

Likelihood of working: .001%
Likelihood of being silly: 99.99%

Right now there are four wireless networks, unencrypted, accessable from my laptop. I could piggy-back on any one of them. Very silly users. Not at all uncommon. Very few people understand the necessity for encrypting ones wireless communications. Everyone wants it to be easy, but few realize that easy != safe.

Yes, I encrypt my access point. But I didn't always. Too much of a pain. Then I picked up a nasty case of code red, a virus that ran around a few years ago. I'm not positive it got through the wireless, but its a possibility. Since then I have done my best not to be on an unencrypted AP. Too many coffee houses and busisnesses don't encrypt. This is a very good way for a not-so-nice person to sit and dig through all the bits to find that one nice credit card #.

Next time you use a free wireless point, remember, you are broadcasting everything you type to everyone around you. I'm not positive passing laws to protect users is the way to go about it. It would be exceedingly difficult to enforce for one, and secondly, its a bit of excessive control from the govt. too.

The amusing bit is that part of the law says that store owners must post a notice letting people know that they need to have firewalls & antivirus to be safe. Seems a bit like the warnings on cigarettes. Danger! The internet is not a safe place!

Education, not legislation.

Wireless Email CAGEMATCH

2006-04-17T06:20:00.002-06:00

The Blog of Will

I love the Times on Tech.

In this above article they discuss the original inventor of wireless email. He used pagers instead of blackberries, but the principle is the same. What the article brings up, just barely, is a really interesting debate over patent law in the US.

There are two companies. One buys a lot of patents. Thats all. They don't make anything, they don't plan on making anything, and their whole business plan revolves around people paying them for the right to make things. Then there is company B. They make things. A lot of things! That a lot of people use!

Company A holds a patent, one of a very many total patents they hold, that covers the broad general term of "wireless email". Company A sues Company B, who is out there making the thing.

For all intents company A wins. Company B pays a ton of cash to A.

(Of course A is NTP, B is Blackberry).

How is this sane?

Patent law is supposed to protect those who actually create. Its there to encourage innovation and creation in the marketplace, and prevent people from stealing others ideas. But it looks to me like NTP never intended to make crap here. They own a piece of paper with some words. And because of that NTP can sue anyone who does anything similar.

So people make less. NTP got something in the order of $20 Million in a settlement with Blackberry. That's a heck of an operating cost. Isn't it better for the market that someone be out there making things and generating revenue (not to mention making millions of people more productive (maybe)) than not? Yet somehow patent law protects people like NTP over Blackberry.

I think an addendum is in order. Patent law should protect those who do, not those who have paper. If a patent holder can show no actual intent to ever make a device, then they don't deserve to hold onto that patent like a blackmail photo. Give the patent to the people who will actually make something of it. Everyone prospers.

Wireless Email CAGEMATCH

2006-04-17T06:20:00.001-06:00

Google takes over the MSM

2006-04-09T21:01:00.000-06:00

The Blog of Will

The NY Times, that most main stream of MSM, has an interesting article up about how google's presence is altering the way headlines are written.

They get it mostly right

Only thing is, they miss tagging. That's what they almost come out and say. They talk about how search engines don't do irony or humor very well, which is funny to me, because if you google the word "failure", I consider the response pretty funny. They talk about how headlines are becoming a string of keywords. But they miss that bloggers have already fought this battle. How to do you have good subject lines and still get searched? Tags.

You keep your keywords, and let them make the life of a search engine all the easier, and keep your headline. Seems like a pretty good fix over all.

Oh, I was also amused by the bit of "They don't teach this kind of stuff in Journalism school." Really? I'll be darned. What have I been doing at 9:00 AM this last semester? I could have been asleep.

Security scares the crap out of me

2006-04-09T20:51:00.000-06:00

The Blog of Will

The Daily Kos is a good read, if you don't already subscribe to it. Add it to your favorite reader. Now.

But, today, they scared me. Badly. This is the black box from hell. A company, under the name of Narus, has developed and apparently deployed a device capable of monitoring 10 gigabits of data a second. As a brief idea, that's gonna be pretty close to what is generated every second by the city of Austin.

Think about this. This is a device that can literally, on demand, recreate the email of every single net-connected individual in the city upon request of any federal authority. They list among its features the ability to reconstruct what web pages a consumer has been to.

Here's why this is scary. Before this, while it was possible to do on a one-by-one basis, it took a lot of work. And you couldn't possibly have a system that would automatically retrieve and store this level of data. 10 Gig a second adds up pretty fast. So while the feds could easily try and get what email was in your inbox now, they couldn't possibly hope to find out what all web pages that you'd been too in the last month.

This device would let them do that.

I can't imagine how much storage this thing would require. What interests me is that they sell it as a network monitoring device. I do a lot of network monitoring, and I can tell you, I would never see a need for something that could monitor EVERY SINGLE THING a million + people did.

Ah Technology, isn't it grand.

PhotoBlog of Art in the Forest

2006-04-02T23:04:00.000-06:00

The Blog of Will

Hosted by Flickr. Best viewed as a slideshow, which is what the link below is. Also available via the badge on the right.

Art in the Forest PhotoBlog

I'm blogging about a blog post about a blog post

2006-04-02T22:45:00.000-06:00

The Blog of Will

Guess I'm really part of the blogsphere now.

Revenews, a blog about revenue generation online, posts about the company 180solutions.

Who is 180solutions you may ask?

Why, I answer, they're evil! Truly. They sell spyware. Addware. Evilware. They install a small application on your system, via various illicit means, that generates pop-up ads. Constantly. It generates these adds based upon what you're browsing, or what you have browsed. Thus, it is also spyware. It is also pure evil, since until a few years ago, they didn't have a method to uninstall their software. You could install it, but there was no way in god's green earth to get rid of it.

The post in question is from a former employee, who talks about what its like to work in the death star. Darth Vader, it turns out, is not so much a great boss.

The reason I link this is twofold. First, if you don't know your enemy, you're in trouble. Second, 180solutions, for all their malice, has a method to make money on the internet. Not many others do.

I fear for web 2.0. At the moment it feels like the stock market is treating it like web 1.0. Do we remember how well web 1.0 did? Really great for a year or two. Then it kind of fell apart.

Does anybody out there really think that myspace is worth whatever absurd amount of money Fox paid for it? Help me out here. It doesn't generate a red cent. Sure it doesn't cost much beyond server and bandwidth charges. That's the great thing about user-generated content. But the problem is that user-generated content only really thrives in a free environment. Charge for it, and watch your system collapse.

How long would myspace last if they charged $5 a month? About 1 month. And still, to this day, nobody has proven that online advertisements are worth the paper they're not printed on.

180 may be 90 degrees from a good idea, but at least they're trying. So far people, and the market, seem content to buy up random RSS-blog-cast-sphere orginizations like they're going out of style. Next we'll see the VC people get really frothy at the mouth about it. Then we'll see Friendster Inc. IPO at about $50000 a share. And then we'll all be living in boxes.

Except me. I'm going to start work on Web 3.0. Its going to be a hyperlinked convergence of user-generated moblogging with WiFi interconnects to a P2P dynamic database.

Just call me Gates Jr.

The Times, they are a changing

2006-04-02T22:22:00.000-06:00

The Blog of Will

Kudos (or Karma) to Sharon for pointing out a times article I might have missed.

The Times on Poli-Blogging

Great article all around, but one bit really stood out to me. Ken Mehlman, RNC chairman, said the following (emphasis added):

"You need your message out through the Internet, through e-mail, through talk radio."

Which one of these is not like the other?

Ok, you have a massive networked system that is content -independent. Then you have a person-to-person exchange, and finally, you have talk radio.

What?

Radio?

Are you kidding me? Did he mean to say podcast? Its even worse when you take his directly prior quote into context:

"The effect of the Internet on politics will be every bit as transformational as television was,"

Ok. Mr. Mehlman seems a tad confused. Talk radio has been manipulated to extend political bias for years. Traditionally by the right wing. Lately with Air America the left is giving it a shot, but that's a pretty recent event. What really interests me is how he includes the net with talk radio.

I don't think its biased of me to say that talk radio has been right-wing for quite a long time. Its also a medium through-which the Republican party has effectively gotten its message out. To include email and the internet in the same list is of some interest to me.

Clearly both sides want to use the net to convince people to vote for them. As well they should. But implicit in Mr. Mehlman's quotes is the idea of talk radio as a mouthpiece of the republican party. Probably not news to many people, but it has rarely been so candidly admitted.

In any case, I'm sure to be just as sick of political blogs/pop-ups/spam/etc as I am of political commercials around 2008.

Secrecy and Security

2006-03-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will

The Homeland Security Department has decided to keep some of its meetings secret. In general I support part of this idea. Clearly you don't want terrorist organizations sitting in on the planning meetings that talk about keeping the nation secure. I found this story interesting mainly because of my enrollment in J360, Media law and ethics. In this class we're currently discussing access to government information, so this caught my eye.

What gets me a little bit here is the fact that the meetings that they want to keep secret are the ones where they meet with industry representatives to discuss infrastructure security. Telecommunication industry heads are a big part of this apparently. A not small part of me wonders how much of their interest in keeping the meetings secret is really about terrorism, and how much of it is keeping actual details about the service they offer secret. I personally know that TWC doesn't really like sharing with anyone what capacity their network holds. The data has significant impact on their stock price, and in the wrong light could be a PR nightmare.

No I'm not going to talk about the actual capacity of the TWC network here. Don't want to get fired.

There is also a serious concern about competition knowing the specific details about network layout and capacity. Peering deals, which involve the traffic exchange of major network backbones, can run into the billions for a year deal. Data on the capacity of these systems would be a problem for major players like Level3 or SBC.

I doubt we'll know much about what goes on behind the closed doors. There are legit arguments for closing off the meetings, but any time they do this the Journalist in me gets a bit skittish.

The Rolling wave of Web

2006-03-26T16:35:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will

I love the smell of old media on new media in the morning (afternoon, evening, etc).

Newsweek takes on Web 2.0

Steven Levy & Brad Stone in the above article go over the various incarnations of Web 2.0. While personally I dislike the monkier Web 2.0 for technical reasons (the behind-the-scenes tech of HTTP & HTML are still pretty much the same, with XML & Ajax hooks. Probably should be Web 1.5), I do appreciate how much people writing for Newsweek seem to "get it".

Course, they don't offer comments or a venue for user-generated content on their site. Proof is in the pudding after all. But they do focus on the use of the tech over the tech itself, which makes me happy. Generally articles like this tend to hold up the tech (Ajax, XML, RSS, etc) as being some sort of holy grail that lets people do all these magic things. Ajax is JavaScript! (mostly). JavaScript has been around since the 90's! This isn't new! XML & RSS have been around for ages too. All the revolution here is people understanding what all they can do with the new tech.

Web 2.0 is just the understanding that you can get a lot of value from user-generated content without spending much money. There's a great quote from Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz. He's talking about why Yahoo bought flickr.

"That's a neat trick. If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something.".

Duh.

Yahoo's advantage in search was that they paid people to categorize information on the web. This was really rough when there were only a few million web pages. Now, its pretty much just a silly way to waste money. If yahoo figures out a good way to institute tagging in their searches, then maybe they'll actually compete with google. Tagging in search would be really ripe for abuse, as meta-tags in HTML have been used to abuse search engines since AltaVista went live. But there should be some happy medium that takes tagging into account in categorizing searches.

One last comment about the article. One of the new wave application categories they talk about are the TV on Computer sites like google video and YouTube. Great tech, no doubt, but they don't even mention the massive copyright issues invovled. Really, If I mash-up an episode of southpark with a speech from G.W. Bush then am I violating Southpark's copyright? Really murky waters here, and this doesn't even get into the not-uncommon practice of posting whole television shows on these mediums. Piracy == bad.

The web is full of crazy people

2006-03-05T21:08:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will

The end times are near! The devil approaches! The mark of the beast will be borne on every man woman and child!

Not exactly.

Instead, a basically simple technological concept is being vilified by some as the end of privacy, freedom, and possibly the entire world.

Fair warning, this is Wired, who has a tendency to be a tad melodramatic.

RFID is from hell

The author mentioned in the above link wrote two books. One a condemnation of RFID as an end to privacy and a boon to corporations or governments wishing to control and track their citizens. She then re-wrote the same book to label RFID as the sign of the coming of the apocalyptic future.

What is it about new technology that brings out the fear in some people? RFID has its issues, certainly. There are legitimate privacy concerns. There are technical limitations at the moment, range being the foremost of these.

All in all, RFID shows promise for many forms of inventory tracking and purchasing convenience. However, its unlikely to be installed in humans any time soon. Additionally, it would be much more likely for someone to carry around an RFID enabled credit card than have it implanted in their body.

The real question here is why has RFID attracted all of this privacy concern attention? There are many more legitimate issues with privacy and the net than RFID. Look at how much you can find out about yourself on a cursatory google search. Tell me that finding out things you did five to ten years ago isn't kinda creepy. That worries me. Google cache worries me. Google desktop worries me. Security backdoor holes in Windows Vista worry me. RFID? Its an upgrade to carrying around five credit cards, a picture ID, and a checkbook.

Flickr & Killer Aps

2006-03-05T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will

Its amazing how bad ideas can give birth to good ideas. Any number of Killer Applications have come to life not intentionally, but as an offshoot of a failed project. These lucky accidents have given us such gems as powerpoint (originally designed to be part of Microsoft excel, spun off once people realized how easy it made life), blogging itself (techie home pages become general home pages become blogs), and most recently Flickr.

Read its history Here

This story is by USA Today, who has a passing acquaintance with technical writing, but in this case sticks to a historical account of how Flickr came to be. In reality its not much more than has been done before, but it manages to do it just a little bit better. Just enough, it turns out, to grow at an amazing rate.

People have been sharing photos for years. Since the beginning of the web basically. Flickr just does it in a cleaner, easier, saner way. Searchability. Tagging. Comments. Take a bunch of bits from all over the place, combine, become a millionaire.

Don't take this for dismissal. All google did is do search really well. The idea is good, but not amazingly unique. In the age of global competition, the separation between first place and the rest of the pack can be measured in nanometers.

Maybe that's why companies are all mad to hire the latest "genius" of the day. Examine the amount of flack google got by hiring away Kai-Fu Lee from microsoft. Those few, those lucky few, who manage to squeeze out just enough to get ahead are immediately snapped up by a big corporation. Flickr, blogger, myspace, etc. This, I feel, is a sign of the times. The big money doesn't know where the world is going, so in order not to be caught off guard, they buy up whatever seems hot at the moment.

Is blogger a good investment? Myspace? Who knows. Internet advertising is still an iffy concept to me. We went through that model already, and it didn't work out so well. My AOL stock still has scorch marks on it from last time. I hope the best for Flickr & Crew. Their product is slick, and clearly deserves the kudos it gets. I'm just not sure how much I'd pay for a company who gives away storage space and hopes people click on banner ads.

RSS and hardcopy

2006-02-26T09:47:00.001-07:00

The Blog of Will

Little bit of link lovin first:

Steve Rubel talks about RSS & Major Newspapers

I'm on an RSS kick today. Rubel's post gave me a pretty interesting insight into how media may be distributed in the future. He talks about RSS as the future. I agree, but until this point I hadn't stopped to consider how RSS's medium would affect the content it carried. As it stands now RSS just dumps the highlights into a reader. Cool enough, but the logical extension is to allow the user to filter out RSS posts by tag. Eventually if every big media source (blog or MSM) hands out an RSS feed, the user may not want to see every single new thing. Instead you apply a content/tag based filter that shows you stories you want to see.

What you end up with is a meta-magazine or newspaper. Content from all over the place laid out in a sectional organization like a newspaper. Why have it all mixed together? You can read your sports section, your technology section, your politics section, all with content from all over the globe. Bloggers and MSM living together in beautiful harmony. If all a newspaper is is a collection of writings by various authors separated by subject, then why have the organization? You need the organization if it costs money to put out the actual medium. With RSS a user can subscribe to an author. If the author posts on his blog, or in a magazine, or in a paper, who cares? You get the story in any case.

This may be a "next decade" development, but RSS would fit very well into a virtual newspaper like format. Mix it with various forms of RSS, podcast, videocast, picturecast, whatever.

Then all you need is smart paper. Carry around a pamphlet of smart paper, and open it up every day to the various stories you care about from authors you trust. Add in micropayments, and you have a new business model.

Technorati tag: RSS

RSS & Microsoft

2006-02-21T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will

Microsoft is out to conquer the the world yet again. $5 says they screw it up.
Use of RSS within IE7

In effect Microsoft is copying Firefox's implementation of an in-browser RSS reader. They're going a little further by allowing a feed added in IE to be accessible to other (Microsoft) applications.

In a lot of ways this means that RSS will be hitting the mainstream really soon here. I'm pretty curious to see what Vista does with the technology. If its just a way to get RSS in IE, that's boring. If its a way to integrate it in the Desktop platform, that's a bit more interesting.

The use of RSS is still pretty technocrati only IMHO. The necessity for an external reader is a hurdle that needs to be resolved. Firefox & Opera do a good enough job of using RSS as a sort of living bookmark, but its not really how RSS was intended. A stand alone aggregator comes much closer to the ideal, but is a bulky solution for most of the standard users out there. If microsoft were to integrate RSS as part of their active desktop solution there might be a greater usage, especially if the setup/wizard was user friendly.

As it stands a standard "browse the web and check email" user probably won't stumble on RSS as a media source. Its still too under-the-radar. Sites like Yahoo and other personalized portals allow you to insert your own RSS feeds, but again this isn't something a standard user will probably gravitate towards.

As hesitant as I am to let microsoft take over RSS, the operating system would be a decent repository for RSS feeds. Particuarly the desktop. Imagine an iTunes like interface. A category separated list of RSS feeds that can be added to by users. Searchable, bookmarkable, and interconnected. It already works for podcasts, that are really just hyped-up RSS feeds anyway. An iTunes like program wouldn't even need integration with the OS, but it would work better if the browser you were using could talk to it. Maybe this is more a job for the firefox people.

Technorati tag: RSS

d00d, l33t sp33k 4tw!

2006-02-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will

Ah the regular attack upon the perceived attack on the English language. "How dare they!" the puritans scream. "They use words we don't know! They use words we do know differently! Clearly they are unintelligent swine!" This is a frequent occurrence during times of change. I'm sure in the 60's a major reason to attack the long haired hippies of the day was their horrid use of English. "Dude" after all wasn't found in a dictionary, at least not in the way it was used.

I am here referring to Tony Long's attack on "l33t" speak. In this article, that reads like a blog post, he attacks bloggers, young people, busisness executives, and anyone who uses abbreviations. Bad people! Type everything out!

Ok, maybe he has a few points, email does tend to have a bit of informality to it at times. I personally cringe when I get a work email with "u" instead of "you". But old Tony here just comes across as a grouchy old man beating on young whipper snappers with his cane. Not a surprise he goes by "The Luddite" on Wired.

My point in this is that I don't quite understand why he felt like including bloggers in his diatribe. Saying bloggers have bad grammar is like saying that journalists wear trench coats and drink too much. Some do, sure, but not all.

He also misses a large point here. Formality is all good when called for, but I sincerely hope he doesn't talk like he writes when he's sitting down to family dinners. He would come across like a cross between a Harvard English professor and dictionary.com.

Some emails are written like people speak. Thus they can be informal. Some blog posts will also be written in this way. If you're blogging about how sweet the concert you attended last night was, you probably don't need to use absolutely perfect English. Myspace is a pretty good example of where perfect grammar would stand out as absurd.

A Citizen Journalist would likely want to be held to a higher standard. If you're writing for a large audience you want to be clear. Grammar is a tool to that end. If you're writing for your close friends, you can assume they understand you when you say "LOL".

One small complaint about the origin article here. He lists "WYSIWYG" as an acronym people use. Has anyone here actually used WYSIWYG as internet slang? Hell, I only barely know what it means, and I'm a developer. LOL, WYSIWYG, IMHO. Which one of these is not like the other?

In closing, old men should not be allowed near computers. They only get up to mischief.

PS: Blogger's spell check doesn't know the word "Blog" or "Blogger". This amuses me greatly.

Technorati tag: Old Men

The Root of All Evil Mark II

2006-02-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will
Root of All Evil Mark II

Unrelated to the other post of the same name directly below this one. This time I want to shine the light of justice on some true evildoers lurking in the Internet.

EVIL!

No, not just their horrid web design and annoying music. Get past the marketing speak and you'll find a business plan straight from the Darth Vader's to-do list. The "Hype Council", and isn't that orwellian, makes its daily bread by creating accounts on a variety of forums, and talking up their customer's products. So you're a major american business. Got a new product coming out? Why don't you pay these guys, who have for months been posting regularly on a long list of respected sites, to pimp out your newest overpriced gadget.

This new marketing evil is a version of viral marketing. We've seen similar behavior in the real world already. People paid to go to bars or clubs and talk up the latest alcohol or CD. From there companies began to create very cleverly disguised marketing campaigns that appeared to be games of a sort. The "I Love Bees" alternate reality game is a great example of this method. And now they're doing it in the web.

So is this really an issue? Yeah, I think so. If its Sony talking up its latest TV on a respected Tech Review forum, then people will take the previously reliable source at face value. It undermines the already shaky reliability that many online forums or blogs have. If there are wolves in sheep's clothing in the herd, we will all be looking at our neighbors.

In short, these people are proposing to sell themselves and the reputation they have established in good faith. These are double agents in our midst. They are, to be blunt, liars.

What would happen if it turned out that the Wall Street Journal's tech section was taking money from Microsoft to give a glowing review of windows vista? It would be huge. A major breach of ethics. And yet here is a company proposing to do just that. But even worse, they are pretending to be legitimate just to stab us in the back.

Post Post Edit: Holy Crap the guy who runs this vile scheme has a blog on Blogspot!

Technorati tag: Marketing, Evil

Root of all evil

2006-02-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

Ha ha I made a linux joke. God I'm a dork

Ok, here's Bill Thompson on the BBC talking about a plan that Verison and a few of the big telco's are pushing. The nut of the issue is this. Big net content providers (Google, Microsoft, VoIP providers like Vontage) use a lot of bandwidth due to the number of people who use their services. The pipe providers, usualy DSL or Cable companies, are getting pissy because they think they're loosing out on a potential cash flow. They want in on the disgusting amounts of money the content providers are making to add to the already disgusting piles of money they are making selling the pipes to the consumer. Under their new plan the content providers would pay them to provide "premium" services and insure that the quality of service remains constant. Its pretty much blackmail. Currently illegal, but that might change.

Evil? Depends. If you're talking about Google, yeah, its pretty much evil. Google's bandwidth use as it stands as a search engine is tiny. Once they start doing video or audio in a big way that might change, but at the moment its negligable. Vonage or the big video streaming sites probably eat up a lot more with a much smaller audience. And for Vonage, its not just the relativily easy downstream traffic, its the much rarer and more expensive upstream bandwidth. Anything that travels up the pipe from the customer's home costs the pipe provider. Here's the counter argument. The pipe provider is already getting paid by the customer to access the content. So the pipe provider would get more cash for something they're already doing. They aren't really offering any better service to Google, Microsoft, or Vonage. Instead they are in effect saying "Pay up or we will slow down traffic to your site".

This is a pretty big change in the way things have worked. In the past the only busisness relationship has been between the points in the network. Google or Microsoft might pay a pipe provider for their own access to the net, and the customer might pay the pipe provider for access, but never before has the content provider had to pay to insure that the customer could access them. There is a scary underside to this.

If the pipe providers are allowed to do this then they may go ahead and set all the content providers at a crap level of priority. Basically anybody who doesn't pay them can't provide a regular service on the internet without paying the company between them and the customer. You like your homepage that sells t-shirts for fun? How about having to pay every SINGLE possible pipe provider between you and a customer for the right to be accessable to them. So you'd pay Verison for their DSL customers, TWC for the roadrunner customers, and AOL for the dialup customers (assuming there are any left at this point), and every other ISP in the world. How much? Nobody knows.

Honestly, its pretty terrifying. I recently had the honor to listen to a high ranking executive in Time Warner Cable talk about this very subject. He said it was a proposal that needed "careful examination", and wouldn't go beyond that. Fair warning, I work for TWC. But if you ask me, I'd be pretty pissed if I made money on the net.

GPLv3, DRM, and who cares

2006-02-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will

Time for acronym soup. GPLv3 and DRM. Horrible terms for complex nerdy debates. But there are some interesting details in the mix. First of all, there is the definition of freedom. There is an absolutist stance that RMS and the rest of the GPL team are taking that holds that for software to be free, it must be TOTALLY free. That means that it cannot constitute an "effective technological protection measure". This is important text that has been added to the third revision of the license that covers most of the Open Source world (and more besides). It refers to terminology used in the contrivercial DMCA act that prevents reverse engineering of computer systems.

The point in this addition is pretty clear. RMS wants Open Source software to not play nice with DRM enabled applications. This is consistant with the generally viral nature of the GPL. Meaning that the GPL follows the code base it covers, and cannot be removed. So here's the crux. Can an Open Source software package incorporate closed-source DRM enabled code?

Example: A Open Source iTunes alternative. It plays Apple's DRM enabled AAC codec. And Microsoft's WMA codec. The majority of the player is open source, but the bits that care about playing these files aren't, because they aren't really owned by the person who wrote them. They're owned by the people who created the codec. Under GPLv2 this is fine. The code that is written under the GPL is shared sorce, but the actual DRM bits aren't. Under GPLv3, this is not kosher. GPLv3 is totally anti-DRM.

What this would do is prevent people from publishing new software under GPL3 that cooperated with non-opensource DRM stuff. RMS wants all OS code to be free of any DRM restrictions. Its very principled, but it limits the crap out of developers.

Here's a point. Linus has already said that he won't license the Linux kernel under v3. Its currently under v2, and it appears its going to stay that way for a while. Part of this reason is linux is currently used in a number of embedded devices that play copyrighted and DRM'ed media. Adopting GPLv3 would complicate that greatly.

Here's another. The GPL has recently been used in various forms for licensing not just code, but media. Books, movies, songs, and mixes of all have been published under the GPL. There is some question if these forms of expression could be published under the GPLv3 and then played on an iPod. After all, they would be interacting with DRM enabled software and hardware.

So RMS really doesn't like DRM, and doesn't want anybody to use it. Big companies really like DRM, and are expecting everyone to ue it. This conflict may very well restrict how Open Source software grows in the corporate market. That is, if anyone listens to RMS any more.

Technorati tag: GPLv3

The Great Man and his Blog

2006-02-05T18:43:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will

I'm stealing a line from my media law and ethics class here. The phrase "The Great Man" refers to the idea of one statesman leading social change for the ignorant masses. Its a pretty empty premise honestly, as most of the great men in history can be shown to be reacting mainly to social forces outside their control. I'm using the phrase here to allude to personality-centered blogs. I followed a link from the main class page to Is the Citizen Journalism Model Viable? and read up on the apparent departure of Dan Gilmore from a blog that was originally centered around his posts. What I find interesting about the discussion there isn't necessarily the debate on how to orgainize a citizen journalism blog. That topic is of course of interest to the course, but I respond more to the social dynamic involved.

Here you have a movement in minature. This community organized itself around an individual who was promoting an ideal. That individual is now moving on to a position that will prevent him from being the spearhead of the community. The change inherent here mirrors the changes and debates present when a social movement has to grow beyond the direction of its original leader. the debate on Bayosphere over how to manage a microcosom of journalism centered on the bay area could easily be compared to the struggle of the civil rights movement after its leaders were killed.

This is an interesting facet I had not thought of before this post. I would think that a large number of the most popular blogs out there are currently managed mainly by a single personality. That individual attracts others due to the strength or power of their arguements. Afterwhich a community forms around them.

What then happens when the object that this community orbits around is removed? In the traditional media world the object in this sense is the orginization. The New York Times isn't just one editor or colluminist. Instead the institution is the organizing force. In the blogsphere this organizing force is much more distributed, and has a greater reliance on an individual.

I don't know if this could be considered a weakness. The blogger in question may disappear eventually, but the community will either continue under its own force, or it will distribute to alternate venues of expression. There is some question on continuity though. By making an individual the centerpiece of the community you open yourself to the risk that that person can either be corrupted or may just loose interest.

There is a relevant comparison to the open source community here as well. People have been terrified in the OS world of Linus leaving for a while. He has been seen as the patriarch of the community, and there have always been fears of his possible corruption or removal. Personally I feel that much of the OS world, specfically Linux, has already gathered enough monumentum to survive in a post Linus world, but it will remain a question as long as he is the benevolent dictator.

Out Out Damned Links!

2006-02-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Blog of Will
Had an insight while reading Bloggers vs Journalists is Over. While not directly related to the content of the piece (which is very worth reading), I found myself analyzing how I was reading the article. As with many blog/web pieces the article was resplendent with links, from supplementary data to the piece to links to other people who have thought on similar subjects. Many of these drew my interest, and I found myself frequently drawn away from the original article. When I would return I had to work to find my place and get back into the subject. This, to be ironic, links me to my point.

Can the use of hyperlinks in traditional article-style pieces detract from the experience of reading them? Rosen uses links in a way to expand on subjects related to the article he wrote, but in doing so created a non-linear reading experience. Can an article survive as non-linear? The structure we are taught in Journalism education focuses strongly on the form and function of articles. The ways to open, deliver information, continue interest, and close the piece are all complex and detailed subjects of study. The reader's experience is a carefully controlled path, that in the traditional system, is not expected to vary far from the author's expectations. While a reader may skip a paragraph, or just breeze past the hard data, in a traditional article they will rarely read one paragraph of an article, jump to another paragraph of a completely separate article by a totally different author, and then return to the origin. Yet this is how the web works. The links Rosen uses, and most bloggers for that matter, have meaning only in the context of the sentence they used. A reader may read through the entire origin article and then go back and open the links sequentially for additional information. Or they may open the links in a tab or background window while reading through the first time. Or they may, as I did, stop reading the origin article to examine most of the links the author used. I found my experience distracting from the original article, although did come away more informed I suppose.

My point here is that the reader determines the path they take through an article. The author has to take into account each possible branch of the article, and each link can possibly lead to endless paths. While I did not do this, a reader could easily follow a link from Rosen, read that article, follow yet another link from that article, and so on. Thus the reader, while growing more informed from a greater number of sources, may miss out on the full content of the origin article.

Supplement this observation with the following. Rosen has the following at the end of a paragraph discussing the credentials of bloggers and journalists:

"Even fights about credentials matter, sometimes"

Ok, in that sentence. The word credentials, and in fact the whole sentence, is changed greatly by the link if the reader follows it. If the reader doesn't, the sentence has much less data and content. How can the author write to the audience, when the author doesn't know if the reader has read this link or not? The link, at its most fundamental level, is just a reference. Like a footnote. But unlike a footnote, a link can be a full article in itself. And it contains references. That contain references. Can you imagine a footnote that points you at another footnote that points you at an appendix that points you at another book? And to understand that original paragraph fully, you have to read each one of the steps in this possibly endless chain? The complexity grows constantly. In a book, this would never work. In an article in a magazine it would drive a reader batty. Forget "story continued on Pg. 56", instead "Story continued on Pages 56, 59, 102, 175, 191, and in 'Bass Fishermen's Weekly Vol. 5 Page 18 paragraph 2' ".

This is not a condemnation of the use of hyperlinks. That's the foundation of the web after all. But more to ask, how should they be used? As footnotes? As optional reading? The answer will have to come as the medium develops. But for me, I'm going to go with the "read the whole article first" option, and see if I remember to read the links afterwards.

Proxies Are for Pixies

2006-01-29T16:54:00.000-07:00

Just read a fun article on the times linked off of Darknet about the use of of proxies to maintain anonymity on the net. From a technical standpoint proxies are little iffy at best. While their use would allow the information starved souls in China a brief view of the greater unrestricted net, proxies are in general very easy to restrict. Most are run on the south side of legality, and unfortunantly are generally used to circumvent pefectly legitimate laws. Equally they don't provide a perfect solution if you really don't want big brother to know what you were looking at. A number of proxies have little or weak crypto. Routing your request through bob's box will keep people from easily guessing where you went, but a dedicated big brother institution will be able to watch your traffic all the same.

Ideally you have a middlewear network with really good crypto. The tor project is a good start. Its not really a proxie, more like a P2P method of delivering internet resources. Its also heavily encrypted. Only problem is that the great firewall of china could start filtering out tor-like traffic. It wouldn't be hard for them to block all non-authorized encrypted traffic. Since they already put most of the burden on their ISPs, this wouldn't be much of a change. Now a really smart crypto-freak could possibly generate an algorithm to encrypt data in a way that a snooping firewall would read it as valid unencrypted text. To my knowledge that doesn't exist yet though, but it should be possible.

Personally I still maintain that China will eventually drive itself crazy trying to keep out the free internet. Its like playing wack-a-mole on a galactic scale. Every time they develop a way to block info, somebody will have developed three new ways to sneak it in. It won't help that by blocking out the free exchange of information they'll slow down their internal technological growth, making it harder and harder to keep up with the changes around them.

2006-01-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

Does the internet make you friends?

I don't know about this. While I certainly can believe that your number of contacts can grow thanks in part to the magic powers of the internet, I remain unconvinced that these contacts are the same thing as friends. Take friendster. Its a massive experiement in social networking, and certainly successful in that it has a lot of interlinked users, but are these people friends? I'm refering to those that don't have a "real" life connection of course. Using a networked medium to keep track of your fleshy buddies is nothing new, but the idea of creating a totaly virtual social set is something that gives me pause.

My primary concern here is that, while we all "edit" our personalities around our social circle, the options to do this over the internet are greatly expanded. Blogs in particular are a very strange way to get to know someone. I note the irony that this is being written on a blog, but follow me here. In a face-to-face conversation with someone it is mostly impossible to take the kind of time you have on the net to edit your statements. IM, email, IRC, blogging, all of these have a premeditated feel to them. The amount of time you have to edit, replace, adjust, or massage your communications is so much greater when you're typing it all out.

So when the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that

"Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts -- a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers"

I have to question their definition of "close and significant" contacts. Is the text on your screen the same as the face across the pub table?

At work again

2006-01-26T01:57:00.000-07:00

Its 3:00 AM and I'm at work. Overnighters are the bane of my existence. I have class at 8:00 AM. This will be a very amusing experience. At least I have class though, getting into these last three courses was quite the challenge.

I've just created this blog in the downtime. I'll be adding more humane content to it, probably relating to my college experience this semester, more specifically for the course "Writing for online publications". At this point I haven't read anything yet and thus have nothing to comment upon, but that will be resolved quickly enough tomorrow.

Edit: Apparently being up late makes me terse and my writing short and to the point. This is atypical of my usual verbosity. Perhaps due to lack of caffeine? It is a mystery.