Friday, August 19, 2005

File-Sharing Continues at Colleges (AP): AP - As a college freshman, Will Mount feasted on the free but mostly illegal music available through online file-sharing software such as Kazaa. Now a senior, Mount has seen his free music fix become legal, thanks to an initiative by American University in Washington, D.C., to dissuade students from using its computer network to illegally swap music online. (Via Yahoo! News - Technology.) This lead paragraph is misleading. If you read the rest of the story, you find out that students are using university-provided legal services to sample music, but then use other methods to burn or to download to digital players, because the subscription services do not support offline listening, especially on iPods. The subscription services pretend that this is fine, since it introduces the students to the service. Spin. It introduces students to the shackles of subscription services, and gives them even more incentive to download illegally by allowing them to sample but forbidding them to use the music legally offline. 9:02:12 PM

Om Malik: Philadelphia is inching towards realizing its WiFi dream.(Via Scripting News.) I like it. Current DSL and cable offerings in Philadelphia have mediocre quality and high cost. This could light a fire under the lazy ILECs (I'm lumping cable under the term, for obvious reasons). 1Mb/sec symmetric for $20/month is way better than what I get now. We should of course expect interesting somersaults from the ILECs. The AT&T/Lucent/... consortium was cut out. Sic transit... 7:12:42 PM