Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

From The Ethicist - E-Book Dodge - NYTimes.com:

[Q:]... The publisher apparently withheld [a Stephen King book's eBook version] to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y.

[A:]An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical.... Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability...

What crap. Is the book out of print? Is that hardcopy somehow obsolete now? Of course not. There's obviously value added with the eBook or ole C.D. wouldn't've wanted it. How does Mr. Cohen (the "Ethicist") decide when you've paid enough into the system to begin illegal civil disobedience?

Can I pay for the movie in the theater and then download?
Better parallel: Can I burn a Blu-Ray b/c I've purchased the DVD at full price?
What if I paid a clearance price for the DVD? Have I still paid in enough for someone to forward me a bootleg Blu-Ray in high def?
If I've read the book, can I sneak into a theater showing the movie that's not quite filled? Where's the harm in that?

Would it really put poor, poor CD out to take along that "more than three and a half pounds" of codex on his trip? Really?

Look, if you want a law changed because, in this case, you feel superior enough to remark "the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology", then start lobbying. Now show me one fair law that's anticipated a specific technology perfectly. Sort of another anachronism, ain't it? Honestly, I think eBooks are an interesting way to leverage your ownership of IP into more profit. As long as we're not EULAing hardcopies, knock yourselves out.

Furthermore, in this case we have easier solutions for CD. Wait for the g*******d eBook to be released. Trade time for money. Read another book on your trip. I just finished Water is Wide by Pat Conroy on my iPod. You'll enjoy it. If you want to read a new book now, ya gotta pay. Or why not go to your local library and reserve a copy to read while you're waiting. That's a pretty good deal, isn't it? You're not out a buck. Now you read Conroy on your trip and you get to know the latest and greatest from that sick-o King[1]. And guess what, you've already paid for the privilege. Take advantage of it.

Had Cohen even so much as said, "Though the risk of being caught is low, it does exist, and in NY the penalty is [X]. I would also say that you need to delete the eBook as soon as you return from your trip, when its marginal utility is gone, and that once the eBook is released, you should stop using this rationalization immediately," I would have felt a little better.

As it stands, it bothers me that a representative of what's essentially the record of the United States could show such a simpleton's approach to ethics and encourage his readers to break the law without understanding the ramifications on themselves and the corporations that provide them with their goods. I'm no corporate cheerleader, but when a "ethicist" rationalizes stealing in officially sanctioned e-print, you know society's gauge of right and wrong had long since made a turn for the gutter.

[1] Actually, I'm suspicious King is one of the best authors alive. I've read a few of his books that aren't about blood and guts, and they're all exceptionally well written. Still, I tried that city in a bubble book and couldn't get past the first few chapters. SICK. It's all about how you apply yourself, I guess.

Labels: blu-ray, business, control, copyright, digitization, DRM, ethics, evil, hats of money, kindle, licensing, nyt, web 2.0 shiite, zealousness

So Computer Reseller News [sic!] has a particularly concerning case of cover discourses. This is, kids, where a discourse with which one can't reasonably disagree is linked to an action which, in content, does not necessarily link up exactly as its advertised. It's, in a word, presumptuous. In another phrase, it's a syllogistic fallacy. Say we see that folks are too fat, myself included, so we decide to burn all the corn fields in the US. I mean, come on, it's the High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) making us fat and giving us diabetes, after all, and the HFCS is made from... (you guessed it) CORN!!!

This is a much more serious case, however. From CRN: Proposed Child Pornography Laws Raise Data Retention Concerns:

[Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)] are working together to tighten the law against child pornography by forcing Internet service providers to retain Internet usage records.
...
The Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2009 is covered in the House version by Smith as H.R. 1076 and in the Senate version by Cornyn as S.436.

Can we stop child porn by recording everyone's illicit online affairs? Apparently so.

The cover discourse is child porn. The active discourse (the one calling for a specific action) is one of surveillance and control. Everyone wants to stop child porn, except for those sick enough to enjoy it. We can't argue against the motivation for stopping child porn, can we? The problem is that the action is absolute overkill. Because every packet, from Quake's UDP to a kid hitting pbskids.org could be child porn, and we won't know until we check, we have to save it all until someone is suspected. Then we can blast through, find the "paper" trail, and bust the pervert.

I'm all for busting the child porn pervs. But Alex Rodriguez might have something to tell us about the way the government collects information that wasn't supposed to be recorded or saved, and tends to cast wider rather than narrower nets in a manner that shows, practically speaking, the practical has more immediate effects for citizens than the theoretical.

The Internet and binary media in general offers the potential for measurement and recording in a way we've never been able to do before. Why? Because there's no play on the net. Everything done from the interface to the network must be first translated to digits that can then be accurately recorded and precisely reproduced. Watch five people walk down the sidewalk, and each's feet will take a different path. But, give or take, and enough give to be practically accurate, everyone reading a relatively static web page will see the same thing. More importantly, get someone to retrace their steps on the sidewalk and, even if you measured down to an accuracy of nano-inches, there were still be room for play. On the net, again give or take, there is *none*; the system requests and nearly always creates a situation in which there is no play. I can exactly reproduce not just the steps, but everyone else's steps at a certain moment in the virtual w/World of Warcraft. Exactly. Each choice breaks down to a digital (as in numeric) decision. Every movement is reduced to a number. Every decision. Everything is reduced to real numbers. Not just numbers, but digits. Easily represented digits. Everything measurable. Everything reproducible exactly. EXACTLY. EVERYTHING. Capiche?

It's a seductive power whose proverbial siren song asks us to keep precise ties on what happens just in case. Each measurement is already being taken and it's a trivial addition to record it all. If we could know a priori what Internet traffic -- what numbers, what digits, what zeroes and ones -- were illegal, we, providing the laws are just (as I believe these discussed in CRN much more than likely are), should record them to help make the actions stop. But right now we don't know the difference between child exploitation numbers and the numbers of mailing pictures of grandkids to grandma before the fact. Which is more evil, 3 or 4? Tell me now which number should be disallowed (ignoring for now John Muckelbauer's theory that open 4's are more likely to catch on fire than any other number). We might know a subset of numbers (and a very useful subset -- wasn't this Carnivore?) for which we could filter and which could and arguably should automatically trigger recording, but we don't know them all. The cover discourse certainly doesn't argue well for our collecting every digit. Because there's a long, long spectrum between grandkids and child porn within which there's a number of activities that are not a threat to society, there are numbers that should, in this approximation of a free country, be allowed to stay private.

The link between child porn and Internet traffic records might be onto, but it sure ain't one-to-one (do I have that backwards?). Laziness and technical naivety is no excuse for us to trade in our freedoms, maxim or no.

Labels: control, digital

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, April 22, 2010
The NY Times' "Ethicist" is Anything But From The Ethicist - E-Book Dodge - NYTimes.com: [Q:]... The publisher apparently withheld [a Stephen King book's eBook version] to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y. [A:]An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical.... Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability... What crap. Is the book out of print? Is that hardcopy somehow obsolete now? Of course not. There's obviously value added with the eBook or ole C.D. wouldn't've wanted it. How does Mr. Cohen (the "Ethicist") decide when you've paid enough into the system to begin illegal civil disobedience? Can I pay for the movie in the theater and then download? Better parallel: Can I burn a Blu-Ray b/c I've purchased the DVD at full price? What if I paid a clearance price for the DVD? Have I still paid in enough for someone to forward me a bootleg Blu-Ray in high def? If I've read the book, can I sneak into a theater showing the movie that's not quite filled? Where's the harm in that? Would it really put poor, poor CD out to take along that "more than three and a half pounds" of codex on his trip? Really? Look, if you want a law changed because, in this case, you feel superior enough to remark "the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology", then start lobbying. Now show me one fair law that's anticipated a specific technology perfectly. Sort of another anachronism, ain't it? Honestly, I think eBooks are an interesting way to leverage your ownership of IP into more profit. As long as we're not EULAing hardcopies, knock yourselves out. Furthermore, in this case we have easier solutions for CD. Wait for the g******d eBook to be released. Trade time for money. Read another book on your trip. I just finished Water is Wide* by Pat Conroy on my iPod. You'll enjoy it. If you want to read a new book now, ya gotta pay. Or why not go to your local library and reserve a copy to read while you're waiting. That's a pretty good deal, isn't it? You're not out a buck. Now you read Conroy on your trip and you get to know the latest and greatest from that sick-o King[1]. And guess what, you've already paid for the privilege. Take advantage of it. Had Cohen even so much as said, "Though the risk of being caught is low, it does exist, and in NY the penalty is [X]. I would also say that you need to delete the eBook as soon as you return from your trip, when its marginal utility is gone, and that once the eBook is released, you should stop using this rationalization immediately," I would have felt a little better. As it stands, it bothers me that a representative of what's essentially the record of the United States could show such a simpleton's approach to ethics and encourage his readers to break the law without understanding the ramifications on themselves and the corporations that provide them with their goods. I'm no corporate cheerleader, but when a "ethicist" rationalizes stealing in officially sanctioned e-print, you know society's gauge of right and wrong had long since made a turn for the gutter. [1] Actually, I'm suspicious King is one of the best authors alive. I've read a few of his books that aren't about blood and guts, and they're all exceptionally well written. Still, I tried that city in a bubble book and couldn't get past the first few chapters. SICK. It's all about how you apply yourself, I guess. Labels: blu-ray, business, control, copyright, digitization, DRM, ethics, evil, hats of money, kindle, licensing, nyt, web 2.0 shiite, zealousness posted by ruffin at 4/22/2010 12:05:00 PM

Thursday, April 01, 2010
David Pogue Misunderstands eBooks From David Pogue’s Review of the iPad - NYTimes.com: There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). Well, he's probably not wrong in the sense that movies in a book form factor have largely displaced the demand for text. That said, I've personally purchased a good deal more books (here, "books writ large") recently because of my iPod. I've sailed through a few junk novels (vampires and WoW fantasy), Pat Conroy's The Water is Wide (horrible job editing the eBook, however, RosettaBooks), part of Pygmy from that Fight Club guy (a little too hard core for me to finish), short story from Frank Herbert, a double issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, etc etc., as well as a few books for young'uns that I've managed to share. The key is that it's lots easier to read when you're accidentally carrying these books around with your calendar, notebook, mail handler, and mp3 player. If the iPad is mobile at all, those who do read will read more. And more importantly to book publishers (and this is where Pogue misses the boat), it's a lot harder to buy a used eBook than a used codex (ie, paper book). The iPod/Kindle/iPad/iPhone platforms all allow strict DRM, both in software and in physical tipping points (how exactly would I share my eBooks? I can figure it out, but 1) it's illegal to pass files, I believe and 2) I can't toss 'em across the office when I'm done and not worry about when they come back). The iPad will be much friendly to read on than the iPod and iPhone, even friendlier than the none too colorful (see Sega Game Gear commercial, above -- and that's the guy from My Name is Earl, ain't it?) Kindle. I've used my laptops a good deal, but a longer-lived battery and a friendly, hand-holdable device should encourage even more folk who like to read to read digitally and, I'll wager, to read more. And it's going to be much more likely that what they're reading is material they purchased directly from the publisher. Take that, local thrift store! Labels: amazon, control, copyright, digitization, DRM, ebooks, hats of money, iPad, kindle, online distribution posted by ruffin at 4/01/2010 11:27:00 AM

Thursday, March 25, 2010
The iPad's inherent DRM If there's one thing that I know Jobs would like to have back, it's an Apple computing platform with tightly controlled access for developers. As the Wall Street Journal apparently reports (via AppleInsider): "Jobs has kept 'tight control and directors have rarely challenged him.'" His preferred dev environment is no different. Right now, on the Macintosh, anyone can code up an app and release it without so much as Googling (Binging?) the Apple Human (once User) Interface Guidelines. Heck, even I've released apps for the Mac into the wild. Oh noes!!! Oh wait, Jobs has gotten that closed development environment, hasn't he? It's the iPod, iPhone, and, increasingly overlapping with the Mac, the iPad: In February, it was rumored that Hulu, an online streaming video destination for multiple networks, plans to make its videos available without Flash for the iPad platform. Reports then alleged that the Web site could be prepared by the time the iPad launches April 3, though it was said the service would likely be subscription only. If the iPad only does HTML5/H.264 jive, the fact that this protocol isn't the most popular on the net gives it a leg up on open browsers. That is, if Hulu makes HTML5 pay to play only, thanks to the iPad's effectively closed platform, Hulu has a ready-made, similarly closed/captive market. * If the iPad did Flash, not only would there be a closed system involved that Apple doesn't control, but there'd be no easy way to differentiate folks using the iPad platform. Goodbye Hulu revenue stream. With no Flash, Hulu has a reason to partner/get in bed with/come to the defense of Apple's iPad and to temper its support of Adobe's Flash. Captive markets are exactly what Jobs likes to have (see the iPhone developer program and the rules for distributing software, where Apple can even, 1984-style, rip programs off of your iPhone retroactively!), at least until he gets to the point that market dominance (digital music) makes it so that captivity works against Apple selling hardware*. So once the iPod and the iTunes Music Store dominate digital music, Jobs makes DRM leave the stage precisely to ensure there are no competitors to the gorilla. But, again, the interesting point here is how Apple is reinventing the Mac. As the iPod stretches out and begins to swallow the Macintosh via the iPhone and now iPad, it's essential to pay attention to the compromises these [at least relatively] closed platforms are making. The iPad will do 50% of what I use my MacBook for and essentially 90% of what I use my iPod touch for (the balance being "fitting my pocket"). But I can't run my Java apps on my iPad, and probably never will, and certainly won't without Jobs' permission. (Yes, I realize Apple develops and maintains the standard Mac JVM, but there are others that work on OS X. Don't split hairs, please. ;^D) Labels: browsers, control, DRM, ethics, evil, html, iPad, iphone, ipod, iTunes, online distribution posted by ruffin at 3/25/2010 10:01:00 AM

Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Silly NYT rabbits, information wants to be free From AppleInsider \| WSJ has pre-release iPad kept 'under padlock and key' by Apple: How much to charge for content on the iPad and other devices remains a point of contention. While reports have suggested that Times executives cannot agree whether to charge $10 per month or closer to $30 per month, the Journal began charging users of its iPhone application late last year. Murdoch has previously said that News Corp. intends to charge for all of its online news sites, noting that 'quality journalism is not cheap.' A coworker once told me (luckily in a story about a third coworker) that, "A mistake on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine." Same sort of reasoning seems to apply here. That good journalism is costly doesn't make it worth more to me. Let me be blunt: I'm not paying $10 a month to access the NYT on a mobile device. I love the NYT, and consider it, on some level, to be the national register. I'd gladly pay $15 a month to receive the Sunday edition printed and delivered to my door if I was within an area with delivery. But on an iPad? Forget it. I believe newspapers are going to have to learn to recut their information. I have no idea the best way to do it. I would have thought the current advertisement driven version would have to do (and I've enjoyed the interactive Apple dual-ad advertisements in particular; not all advertisement is bad). To sum this ramble, I think it'd be smarter to figure out how to get the most money out of an ad-supported, open publication model, and then determine how much information that medium/genre/style of publication supports. I'm occasionally tempted to argue against the operation of the open market in specific situations -- there are things which the market has not yet been able to price accurately, and things for which I don't believe accurate prices can be found -- but this is a clear example of where I'm all for it. I believe the Times et al will find that Pay to Play is going to taunt them a second time. Labels: ads, control, copyright, DRM, iPad, market, news, nyt, online distribution posted by ruffin at 3/03/2010 05:50:00 PM

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Washington Post Reporters Now Writing Specifically for Computer Readers This from Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post's Ombudsman, titled "Why you're seeing more copy-editing errors in The Post": Why the increased errors [in the Washington Post]? Clearly, reduced staffing plays some role. A decade ago, at its peak, The Post's newsroom had more than 900 FTES (full-time equivalent employees)... Today, the now-integrated print and online staffs total about 650 FTEs... The answer may be less about staffing levels and more about the changing duties of copy editors. Gone are the days when they primarily detected errors and smoothed prose for the next day's newspaper. Now they must also operate in an online environment where "search-engine optimization" is a key goal. That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties. Separate online headlines must be written in a way that attracts attention on the Web. ... Some relief may be coming for beleaguered copy editors. This week, The Post will begin search-engine optimization training for the entire newsroom. Front-end help from reporters and other staff should ease the burden on copy editors. [emboldened emphasis mine] I don't know about you, but I'm not happy to hear that journalists are writing for the computers to the exclusion of their human readers. I realize there has always been a pressure on writing to the technology. I've done a review of newspapers from the 18th century, and realize the way that length was constrained by the sheets you could afford to print and sell, or how headline lengths are influenced by column and font size, and how inserting pictures are exceptionally difficult. I've seen papers run out of a font and start printing in, eg, italics to finish up a page to save time. I know that content is influenced by technology directly. Still, what the Washington Post is doing marks a significant change for the press. Now, people are writing content for, say, Google News rather than to point out the most newsworthy events of the day. Like a gamer figuring out the secrets of the algorithm for Mike Tyson's Punch Out ("When he makes the noise, dodge right, and then upppercut"), newspaper reporters, the front line folk, are being asked to learn, anticipate, and integrate the algorithms of the news search engines ("When we're talking about someone in the movies, try to tie Angelina Jolie in there somehow" or "Make sure 'failed Obamacare' is in the title of three of today's stories somehow"). I've noticed the WaPo's declining editorial attention. To redefine what "editing" meanings is to take the lazy fellow's way out. What's happening isn't that you're doing a more complicated job. It's that you're no longer doing your old job. We're more worried about hits than grammar. And what bothers me the most is the degree to which an American institution is pushing onto the front ranks of the free press the onus for making our news match whatever Google's programmers feel is newsworthy. In the briefest terms, then, I'm exceptionally disappointed that Google's programmers have become the editors of the Washington Post. Labels: acad, business, cheating, control, digital, ethics, evil, Google, market, politics, pseudo-academic posted by ruffin at 2/16/2010 09:50:00 AM

Thursday, February 11, 2010
HTML 5 Video: Apple's Next USB AppleInsider \| Hulu to make videos available on iPad without Flash - rumor: 'The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesn’t support Flash, and all of Hulu’s videos currently run inside a Flash player,' states TechCrunch 'But that could change by the time the iPad launches in March. One rumor I’ve heard from an industry insider is that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market,' continues TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. If there's one thing Apple's figured out, it's how to leverage the 3-10% of folks that use Macs to push new standards over the tipping point. The iMac all but killed the PS/2-serial port mismash that came before it. USB was happening, but it wasn't until the iMac supported only USB (and at the same time merged the Apple peripheral market with WinPC) that USB became the dominant connection tech. Compare to Apple and Firewire, for which Apple collected license fees for a while. Firewire didn't go nearly so well as USB because firewire was an add-on, not a go-for-broke replacement for USB. USB 2.0 became so much more dominant that Jobs himself was eating his Firewire a few years after its introduction. Honestly, to make Firewire work, Jobs probably should have killed USB and gone 100% Bluetooth for peripherals, but Bluetooth wasn't ready for the weight then, and it's not now. Now, the iPad is killing Adobe. I'm not sure what Jobs has against Flash other than it's not something Apple controls. But he is killing it. HTML 5 video support in Firefox is a better solution, imo, than closed Flash plugins. It's, in a sense, a level less complicated. Once codec compression, speed, and resources are up, up, and down, respectively, to Flash levels, why not use HTML 5? The iPad helps make that "why not" an easier question to answer. If I'm worried about paying licensing for encoding and having end users have the proper Flash plugin installed, now I have a good excuse (aka, "business plan") to develop an alternative: a new platform that only supports the alternative that helps me hedge my bets against Flash. I can develop for HTML 5, pull an id and Quake 3 (where they released a test version of their latest game on Mac first) with the iPad to help bug test a relatively stable platform, and be ready to roll things out if Adobe doesn't give me a sweater deal. Reminds me a lot of AOL and Mozilla. At one point, AOL's licensing deal with Microsoft over using IE as the browser engine in AOL's client was coming due. AOL actually released a version of AOL based on Mozilla for the Mac, showing Microsoft that they didn't really need IE. MS no longer had AOL over a barrel, and a licensing deal was worked out. And b/c of this, in large part, we now have Firefox. AOL's bet played out perfectly for us, though perhaps not so well for them. HTML 5 video is the same move all over again. s/Microsoft/Adobe. s/AOL/[Hulu\|YouTube] Labels: aol, apple, control, F/free, hats of money, id, iPad, licensing, microsoft, mozilla posted by ruffin at 2/11/2010 10:28:00 AM

Sunday, November 22, 2009
Is there such thing as "practically free" software formats? I enjoyed thinking through Should we fight for Ogg Vorbis?, a contribution to the Linux Journal by Glyn Moody back in 2007. The most problematic statement in the piece, I think, is this one. So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems. Whereas DRM and software patents, for example, are manifestly and unequivocally bad for free software (and indeed for everyone), that doesn't seem to be true for the MP3 format. Is there a reason to have an open and free format when patent holders don't seem to care much about the folks who are making free software and aren't paying royalties/license fees? Rather, aren't there more pressing places where license holders are worried about enforcing patents where someone could be turning their OSS coding resources? I'm not sure how to feel about this one. I know that I'm getting to the point that I prefer PDF over any other file format for printed works. I'm so freakin' tired of dealing with the way doc, docx, rtf, etc keep fookin' slightly whenever I open them in the wrong application. I used to make do with Microsoft Word, 1998 and 2000, and as long as those apps kept working I figured I'd make do. They don't work so well any more. Now that Word 2100 or whatever it's at now can save in pdf, I'd rather just see pdf files. It's harder for me to edit a pdf than even a wacky docx at times, but there are a wealth of fairly reasonably priced apps that'll allow one to mess with pdfs. At worst, I just print them out and scrawl. Perhaps ODF is the best alternative, but PDF is the practically open format that seems to be doing best, and I don't even have to Google LAME to display it on most OSes. Does this disinclination to support ODF more directly comprise my politics? Yes, I believe it does. We need a standard that will display well outside of its contemporary platform, and display that way for the foreseeable future and beyond. That seems to be pdf to me (and yes, I realize pdf can sometimes be no more descriptive than avi; you really don't know what's in the wrapper. Again, egg + face). Still, is there "practically free" that should be good enough? I'm not sure. I don't like the mp3 reasoning any more than I did for gifs years earlier or pdfs, even after they've been declared an open standard (thanks wikipedia) in 2008. OOXML is open too, you know. Yet there's a certainly practicality to using these formats not designed to be open to humans and machines at the same time. I hate bluffing. Is GNU/hurd ready yet? Labels: control, copyright, DRM, ethics, F/free, licensing, pseudo-academic, Word posted by ruffin at 11/22/2009 01:00:00 PM

Tuesday, July 07, 2009
I've broken Netflix For months now, Netflix hasn't so much as ventured a recommendation -- or, if it has, they have been few and quickly dismissed. This despite my having rated 444 movies. Seriously? You've got nuttin? If I've got Bloodrayne on my list, isn't it likely I'll watch anything? Maybe my queue's long enough and my plan sorry enough they don't feel they need to entice me into using Netflix more. Still, I'd expect recommendations and an upsell. In other news, I'm at least temporarily tired of blogging about much of anything, really really like what I've seen of Paintbrush for OS X (which does what Seashore should have done for OS X: provide a Paint replacement), and believe that Ogg Theora will eventually be used more for commercials than anything else. That's right, the new built-in video codec in Firefox will be used to ensure everyone in that browser sees what are now Flash adverts without a hitch. Until bandwidth costs < licensing, I'm not sure why anyone would walk away from what's already on the scene -- Flash, Silverlight, h.264. In fact, Apple's serving the h.264 Kool Aid as quickly as possible, putting hardware support into every consumer Mac it makes in addition to the iPhone. I'd like to see Theora do to video what png did for images on the net. Still, the only place they make sense -- file size is small enough and the desire to get the message out there more pull than push -- is advertisements, and even then only for adverts being pushed to folk with Firefox browser strings. Labels: apple, control, copyright, firefox, iphone, licensing, paint, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 7/07/2009 12:47:00 PM

Sunday, February 22, 2009
Today's lesson in discourse So Computer Reseller News [sic!] has a particularly concerning case of cover discourses. This is, kids, where a discourse with which one can't reasonably disagree is linked to an action which, in content, does not necessarily link up exactly as its advertised. It's, in a word, presumptuous. In another phrase, it's a syllogistic fallacy. Say we see that folks are too fat, myself included, so we decide to burn all the corn fields in the US. I mean, come on, it's the High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) making us fat and giving us diabetes, after all, and the HFCS is made from... (you guessed it) CORN!!! This is a much more serious case, however. From CRN: Proposed Child Pornography Laws Raise Data Retention Concerns: [Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)] are working together to tighten the law against child pornography by forcing Internet service providers to retain Internet usage records. ... The Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2009 is covered in the House version by Smith as H.R. 1076 and in the Senate version by Cornyn as S.436. Can we stop child porn by recording everyone's illicit online affairs? Apparently so. The cover discourse is child porn. The active discourse (the one calling for a specific action) is one of surveillance and control. Everyone wants to stop child porn, except for those sick enough to enjoy it. We can't argue against the motivation for stopping child porn, can we? The problem is that the action is absolute overkill. Because every packet, from Quake's UDP to a kid hitting pbskids.org could be child porn, and we won't know until we check, we have to save it all until someone is suspected. Then we can blast through, find the "paper" trail, and bust the pervert. I'm all for busting the child porn pervs. But Alex Rodriguez might have something to tell us about the way the government collects information that wasn't supposed to be recorded or saved, and tends to cast wider rather than narrower nets in a manner that shows, practically speaking, the practical has more immediate effects for citizens than the theoretical. The Internet and binary media in general offers the potential for measurement and recording in a way we've never been able to do before. Why? Because there's no play on the net. Everything done from the interface to the network must be first translated to digits that can then be accurately recorded and precisely reproduced. Watch five people walk down the sidewalk, and each's feet will take a different path. But, give or take, and enough give to be practically accurate, everyone reading a relatively static web page will see the same thing. More importantly, get someone to retrace their steps on the sidewalk and, even if you measured down to an accuracy of nano-inches, there were still be room for play. On the net, again give or take, there is none; the system requests and nearly always creates a situation in which there is no play. I can exactly reproduce not just the steps, but everyone else's steps at a certain moment in the virtual w/World of Warcraft. Exactly. Each choice breaks down to a digital (as in numeric) decision. Every movement is reduced to a number. Every decision. Everything is reduced to real numbers. Not just numbers, but digits. Easily represented digits. Everything measurable. Everything reproducible exactly. EXACTLY. EVERYTHING. Capiche? It's a seductive power whose proverbial siren song asks us to keep precise ties on what happens just in case. Each measurement is already being taken and it's a trivial addition to record it all. If we could know a priori what Internet traffic -- what numbers, what digits, what zeroes and ones -- were illegal, we, providing the laws are just (as I believe these discussed in CRN much more than likely are), should record them to help make the actions stop. But right now we don't know the difference between child exploitation numbers and the numbers of mailing pictures of grandkids to grandma before the fact. Which is more evil, 3 or 4? Tell me now which number should be disallowed (ignoring for now John Muckelbauer's theory that open 4's are more likely to catch on fire than any other number). We might know a subset of numbers (and a very useful subset -- wasn't this Carnivore?) for which we could filter and which could and arguably should automatically trigger recording, but we don't know them all. The cover discourse certainly doesn't argue well for our collecting every digit. Because there's a long, long spectrum between grandkids and child porn within which there's a number of activities that are not a threat to society, there are numbers that should, in this approximation of a free country, be allowed to stay private. The link between child porn and Internet traffic records might be onto, but it sure ain't one-to-one (do I have that backwards?). Laziness and technical naivety is no excuse for us to trade in our freedoms, maxim or no. Labels: control, digital posted by ruffin at 2/22/2009 01:27:00 PM

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