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Saturday, May 25, 2002 |
Unfairly Used
"There's a strange battle being fought in Congress right now between Hollywood and Silicon Valley over who will define and control digital rights management technology. While it's a little early to say who will win, I think I can predict who's going to lose: consumers. And what consumers stand to lose is the very concept of fair use.
That our fair use rights are under siege should come as no news flash. As iMac users recently discovered with a Celine Dion CD, not only may you not be able to play the CD or DVD you just bought on your computer, the copy protection may even damage your system if you try. And Jamie Kellner, the CEO and Chairman of Turner Broadcasting, was recently quoted as saying he feels viewers who skip television commercials are thieves who are guilty of stealing network programming. So if the media giants have their way, fair use won't even extend to using the bathroom during the commercial breaks.
You might think Congress, which wrote the copyright laws that created the concept of fair use, would be stepping in to put a stop to this abuse. On the contrary, so far Congress seems eager to sell consumers' fair use rights down the river, and it's just a matter of determining who will be the highest bidder....
Even assuming the consumer side is ignored or booted out (von Lohmann has been threatened with exclusion for discussing the BPDG at http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org), any consensus the BPDG reaches is likely to be fragile. Von Lohmann fears that means Congress won't risk subjecting the group's findings to public discussion and will instead just mandate that the FCC implement them in its rules.
It's anyone's guess what the outcome of this process will be, or even when the outcome will be made clear to the public at large. But it is a fair guess that fair use doesn't have a fair chance." [InfoWorld, via Tomalak's Realm]
Question: if Jamie Kellner implies that you shouldn't be taking bathroom breaks during commercials because it's theft, then when are you supposed to go to the bathroom? During the shows? But wait - if you do that, aren't you then stealing from the company that produced the show? And the actors, director, and writers that worked on the show? Can they now sue Kellner for advocating that people watching TV steal their content by going to the bathroom during the show?
11:30:29 PM Permanent link here
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Diskless in Detroit: Why Your New Car Doesn't Have a Built-in PC
"Last week in Detroit, there was a two-day conference all about Telematics, which is a made-up word meaning the business of putting computers and digital communication into cars. Telematics is supposed to be a hot area of technical development because we've run out of places to put computers outside our cars, so the next logical place to put them is inside. Except it doesn't seem to be working that way, because at last week's conference, most of the participants seemed to be complaining. Progress was slow, business was illusory, customers just weren't coming in the expected numbers. In short, the car industry was complaining that they'd been 'dot-com'd,' which is apparently a very bad thing. Telematics is a bust this year, we're told, and might not even deserve to have its own name.
There are only two real hopes for telematics. First is the aftermarket industry. If we ever do get a hard disk drive in our cars, the first one will probably be installed at a car stereo shop, not at the factory. Alas, that isn't a big enough market to entice the beleaguered hard disk makers, who can't afford to lose even more money designing for what would initially be a very small volume business. The second hope for telematics, though, is that the car makers could bring themselves to think literally outside of the box. Instead of seeing the car as something to put intelligence in, they could see it as a platform to put intelligence ON -- intelligence that might have nothing at all to do with transportation.
Cars are the perfect Trojan horse for distributed communications, for example.
Cars are everywhere people are, they are generally outside, they have their own power source, and they have extra places to stash black boxes.
A really smart car company might take a look at Mesh Networks, for example. Mesh is a Florida company that is about to introduce a proprietary 2.4 GHz wireless network that offers dramatic advantages over 802.11 WiFi. Mesh nodes act as routers and repeaters so communication can be extended far beyond normal Internet access points. Mesh networks support tens of thousands of router/repeaters.
Mesh networks offer Quality of Service (802.11 doesn't) and support Voice-over-IP. An enlightened car company -- or better still EVERY car company -- should put a Mesh node in every car they make whether the owner wants it or not. In a couple of years, when 20 million Mesh'd cars are on the road and the car companies (I'd suggest a consortium of car companies, since this is a new field for them and anti-trust is not a concern) could light that network and, in one stroke, take a big chunk of the U.S. telephone, Internet, and mobile phone markets. Just buy space on cellphone towers and tie it all together with cheap fiber from a Global Crossing or Williams Communications.
Of course, it isn't really that simple. My ideas never are. But it is simple enough that Toyota is considering doing exactly this in Japan. Watch out NTT DoCoMo. [I, Cringely: The Pulpit, via Slashdot]
10:57:43 PM Permanent link here
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"From the archives of the New Yorker comes an article by E.B. White on an early demonstration of television: '...and finally a telecast moving picture of television. This was where we began to crack up nervously. Try and appreciate our situation: we were in a dark room looking into a television set at a television set which was showing a picture of a moving picture.
I'm trying to appreciate the mind-bending experienced by that audience, but in the postmodern rip-mix-burn world I live in, the above sounds perfectly normal." [Kottke.org]
My kids think it's hilarious that when I was a kid I had to get up and walk over to the TV to change the channel. To one of the other four channels that we had.
10:35:31 PM Permanent link here
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The Future of Mind Control
"Ignoring a possibility does not, however, make it go away. If asked to guess which group of scientists is most likely to be responsible, one day, for overturning the essential nature of humanity, most people might suggest geneticists. In fact neurotechnology poses a greater threat--and also a more immediate one. Moreover, it is a challenge that is largely ignored by regulators and the public, who seem unduly obsessed by gruesome fantasies of genetic dystopias.
A person's genetic make-up certainly has something important to do with his subsequent behaviour. But genes exert their effects through the brain. If you want to predict and control a person's behaviour, the brain is the place to start. Over the course of the next decade, scientists may be able to predict, by examining a scan of a person's brain, not only whether he will tend to mental sickness or health, but also whether he will tend to depression or violence. Neural implants may within a few years be able to increase intelligence or to speed up reflexes. Drug companies are hunting for molecules to assuage brain-related ills, from paralysis to shyness (see article).
A public debate over the ethical limits to such neuroscience is long overdue. It may be hard to shift public attention away from genetics, which has so clearly shown its sinister side in the past. The spectre of eugenics, which reached its culmination in Nazi Germany, haunts both politicians and public. The fear that the ability to monitor and select for desirable characteristics will lead to the subjugation of the undesirable—or the merely unfashionable—is well-founded." [The Economist, via Privacy Digest]
10:07:36 PM Permanent link here
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Power Naps Boost Work Performance
"Taking a 'power nap' during the working day may well help us perform better, suggests new research. Scientists found that when volunteers slept 60 minutes midway through a series of gruelling tests, their performance dramatically improved compared to their wakeful counterparts." [New Scientist]
9:56:18 PM Permanent link here
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"We all express our frustration with Canadian banks' inability to rapidly clear American funds differently: John yells, this guy Flashes it, and I write letters." [Matt Goyer]
Definitely check out the Flash link! If I ever get to learn Flash and play with it, I'd love to do something similar presenting a bad reference interview as a training video for librarians.
9:22:42 PM Permanent link here
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Thanks to jenett for pointing me to Andy who pointed me to Jake's Radio 'Blog, which ultimately ended up in me finally being able to re-publish a list of the sites to which I subscribe! There's now a Radio macro for this that you can insert into any template. Since I subscribe to so many sites, I put it on its own page, so you can now view a list of Sites I Read in My Aggregator. I'll be adding a permanent link to it on the right. I also plan to re-do my blogroll using Radio's outliner at some point, too.
2:40:31 PM Permanent link here
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Google Labs - New Ideas in Internet Searching
"Google is recognised as the leading internet search engine, both for the breadth of pages it has indexed and the features it provides. To refine new ideas they are working on, Google allows the public to try them out through the research labs server labs.google.com. There are currently four new ideas available to try out: Google Glossary; Google Sets; Voice Search; Keyboard Shortcuts." [kuro5hin.org]
11:59:39 AM Permanent link here
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Audible All the Way
"Audible.com, the audio Web service, lets you download audiobooks, newspapers, and radio broadcasts, while its custom-built Otis player makes you a digitized commuter...."
Audible Otis review - "If you want to listen to the New York Times every morning or you like books on tape, you'll love the Otis; however, hard-core MP3 fans should look elsewhere."
Audible.com review - "Audible.com ranks among the Web's best services, with a huge library of discounted audio programs and long-overdue support for CD burners. If you like your reading material in digital format, subscribe ASAP. "
ZDNet gives Audible and its MP3 player high marks, although they do make one factual error. If you become a premium subscriber (2 titles each month for $15.95/month), you get the Otis free, not for an additional $50. I give the service even higher marks than they do. I don't have an Otis (yet!), but I've played with one and it serves its purpose well.
I think my home library is going to start circulating Audible titles this summer. Whoo-hoo!
11:37:14 AM Permanent link here
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Section 508 ‘not as Hard as People Thought’
"A year ago, many industry and government executives were looking ahead to June 25, 2001, as a 'panic day,' said Terry Weaver, director of the Center for IT Accommodation at the General Services Administration.
On that day, a new federal procurement regulation would take effect, requiring agencies to buy electronic and information technology that is accessible to people with disabilities and to create accessible Web pages....
But the fears, it turned out, were largely groundless. As the first anniversary of the Section 508 rule approaches, McKeown, Weaver and others said that while much work remains in order to achieve a government powered by fully accessible IT, great strides have been made. Some organizations, such as the U.S. Postal Service, have even tried to go beyond what the law requires....
But both government and industry officials still cite examples of the others’ failure to understand the Section 508 requirements." [Washington Technology, via meryl's notes]
10:43:16 AM Permanent link here
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The Pendulum Returns, Part 2
"Last week I argued for the importance of decentralized organizations to unify their online presences. Now, achieving that is much easier said than done. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a handful of companies that have very successful web experiences despite strongly decentralized organizations. We set out to discover what makes these companies’ sites more effective, and found some consistent characteristics....
Your website is nothing without its visitors, so it never ceases to surprise me how often this step gets skipped, ignored, or otherwise devalued. Before even considering design solutions, study the people who already visit your site. Understand their approaches, their methods, how they go about achieving the goals and tasks related to the service you are offering. This is essential to shaping a Web experience that truly reflects their needs, rather than your company’s structures, or what your product manager thought would be “cool.”
The key to this is that a little research can go a long way. A website’s customers probably won’t fundamentally change their behavior for many months or years. One round of solid pre-design user research (whether it’s contextual inquiry, rapid ethnography, or simply good in-depth interviews with current users) should last through many iterations in the product development cycle." [adaptive path]
I'm trying to build into our portal project at SLS a phase for usability testing on our current site, so I'll be going back to this article as that time nears.
10:28:37 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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