Friday, January 31, 2003

Electronic Frontier Finland fights EU copyright directive and wins Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Finland Drops EUCD For Now. replicant_deckard writes "Electronic Frontier Finland just got a huge legal victory. They report the local DMCA-copy (based on EU copyright directive) was dropped today at the parliament after heavy criticism. So far just two EU nations have accepted the innovation threatening law. Campaigns go on in different European states. They need your support!" cabra771 writes "The European Commission has put up a new proposal dealing with online music piracy that appears to have slightly upset a few people." [Privacy Digest] 11:52:09 PM    Comment [] Randomentality.com: a very fine photoblog Gotta give a "Me, Too" here, as this is outstanding work. I like it very much and wish the web hadn't decided to hiccup on my DSL while I was going through it, or I would have gone through the entire site. Miasma What an interesting photoblog!. I love how Kevin puts a group of related photos on his randomentality blog as one post. Each group conveys an idea, an emotion, a sensibility. Often subtle, sometimes poignant. This is thinking visually in a deep, rich, and personal way. It goes beyond iconography. And the collections, posted four or five times a month, reveal something of Kevin's inner life passage. [a klog apart] 11:40:25 PM    Comment [] Controlling the People thanks corporate news!. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] 3:40:20 AM    Comment [] What Not 'Getting' Interactive Communication Models and Cultures Costs: $100 Billion I have to take this whole long thing, because it is just rich. See the part Doc wrote below, that I put in bold? That is my favorite part. Here's the thing that really gets my goat. You got a couple of practical theories running counter to each other. You can debate the theories, sure. But you also have a power struggle for ascendancy between two conflicting cultures that have adopted these respective theories. This power struggle colors any kind of debate over interfaces and communication models. We should not look at either aspect in isolation. The theories? I'm overly dichotomizing here, but I'd pair off two main binaries: Mass Media, 1 to Many, with an artificial glass (symbolized by the television screen that can't hear when you shout back) that taught mass media producers to LOVE one-way communication, what at universities is called Mass Comm theory (yeah yeah, the theory pays lip service to a feedback channel, but in reality, the practitioners LOVE the isolation and heroic measures that lack of a feedback channel creates. It is a powerful drug). Interactive Media, Many to Many, with all the myriad forms interactivity can take across matrices of synchronous and asynchronous time and contiguous and acontiguous (are those really words?) spaces. The second binary I'd name is: Broadcasting lowest common denomonator audience modeling and Narrowcasting rich and fragmented audience modeling that goes beyond niche marketing (niche marketing is an idea that deserves extinction very soon because it is still of the broadcast worldview, like horseless carriages) The reason I separate the second binary from the first, although they appear related, is that through my work in TV right now, I've discovered further idiocies of the lowest common denominator programming model. Audience models are first and foremost CULTURAL models, while we can fool ourselves that 1-Many or Many-Many communication models are primarily influenced by communication channels created by technological artifacts, artifacts with limitations as well as political effects (centralizing, democratizing, etc can be built into a machine interface just as surely as nuclear power is highly centralized and solar power is democratized and distributed). I am not, however, claiming that communication models are not just as cultural as audience models. And where culture enters, there is also the power struggle between Old Media cultures of passive consumption and New Media culture of active and interactive participation. And with that, I'll let Doc take over on making big fun of the terrible losses of AOL Time Warner. For those with ears to hear the irony, let them listen! Miasma [The Doc Searls Weblog] The new record (loss) business. So far AOL Time Warner has written down its value by $99 billion dollars. $99,000,000,000.00. Billion. With a B. Impressive. Man, that's a lot of business not to have. And that's probably not the whole thing. Consider the momentum here. $54 bil back in Q1 of last year, and now $35 bil for AOL and $10 for the cable division. We're a lousy $1 bil away from a twelve-figure loss. The real kicker here, the the eleven-zero irony, is that this merged company was counting on AOL, of all things, to provide understanding of the very platform on which all this inter-divisional "synergy" was going to take place. They actually thought AOL understood the Net. Amazing. What AOL understood was how to keep an online service alive for a few more years by leveraging the very platform that was sure to make the service obsolete. It worked for quite awhile because AOL saturated the known universe with free sign-up disks that temporarily locked customers into a system that was marginally easier to use than the alternatives. But that was when most ordinary folks thought the Net was about email, instant messaging and Web surfing in slo-mo. Those folks are wising up now. A couple years ago, something like half the households using the Net had AOL email addresses. (I can't find the exact numbers here. Anybody have them?) Now customers are leaving in droves, because they don't want to dial up anymore. The masses want broadband, and AOL is what they're leaving to get it. Worse, they don't want broadband so they can watch Warner Brothers pictures or listen to Warner Music recordings. Worse than that, they actually want broadband so they can share their own movies, records and pictures with each other. Freely. For no money. Pretty soon, they'll want to serve their own stuff from their own machines, in their own homes. And why not? The Net was built for fat, symmetrical, end-to-end sharing of everything, with no value-adding intermediator in the middle. It wasn't built so big dumb companies could use it as a one-way sluice for their own "content." Yeah, the Net'll support that, but that's not what users want it for. Sadly, AOL never came up with a broadband strategy worthy of the label, and that's what will finally do them in. I'm not sure a strategy would have been possible anyway. As a Time-Warner Cable customer, are you going to let AOL intermediate your Net access? Are you going to pay one penny more for exclusive stuff that nobody outside AOL can see on the Net? Some will, sure. But for how long? Time-Warner says it gives customers a choice of Roadrunner, AOL and Earthlink. I don't know what the cost difference is, but I'll bet customers are choosing whatever's cheapest, which I'm sure isn't AOL. Maybe that's how AOLTW is finding out what its first three letters are really worth. AOL may not go away, but they're sure to matter less and less over a long period of time. Kind of like Novell. What I have to wonder is, do they know that not understanding the Net is what's killing AOL's value? Will they get the lesson? [The Doc Searls Weblog] 2:56:41 AM    Comment [] A liberal and a conservative were sitting in a bar... You do the math From [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] When I was in school learning about the difference between an average (or mean), where you add up the values of a bunch of items and then divide by the number of items, and a median, where you line up a bunch of items and find the value of the one in the middle, I always thought the median was sort of meaningless. What practical use would it ever have? Watching President Bush's State of the Union tonight I thought, Oh, this is where medians come in handy. I'm referring, of course, to the claim -- repeated yet again in the president's speech -- that his tax cut plan offers an "average" tax break of over $1000. "Ninety-two million Americans," Bush told us with a straight face, "will keep this year an average of almost $1,100 more of their own money." This average is a convenient fiction; it's a statistic that exists only because the enormous benefits accruing to the dividend-owning super-rich skew the "average" -- and camouflage the fact that the cuts most middle class taxpayers will receive under Bush's proposal are piddling. The few rich taxpayers with mega-breaks are statistical "outliers"; if you used a median rather than an average you'd end up with a far lower number -- one much closer to what most of us would actually get under Bush's plan. Now, this claim had already been widely debunked before the speech; I'm not breaking any news here. Paul Krugman put it most memorably when he wrote, "A liberal and a conservative were sitting in a bar. Then Bill Gates walked in. 'Hey, we're rich!' shouted the conservative. 'The average person in this bar is now worth more than a billion!'" (emphasis mine, Miasma) [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 2:21:47 AM    Comment [] Without evidence, hard evidence, we live in a barbaric culture of aggression, not a civilized world of reason Postmodernists make fun of the Enlightenment, but you throw away the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and suddenly you find yourself sitting in sloppy, corrupt, relativistic empire of Imperial Rome and the barbarians are at the gates. And you lack any tools to use against them that would ennoble your side as the side worth saving. Miasma From Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment Fool me once, shame on you, etc. Today's NY Times features an interesting piece by David Sanger about the contortions the Bush administration is going through in trying to decide what evidence about Iraqi arms violations it can declassify for Secretary of State Powell to present to the U.N.. I can understand not wanting to reveal stuff from informants for fear of blowing their cover; but apparently they're reluctant even to reveal satellite photos, because somehow they might reveal details about the satellites' capabilities to our rivals. So where does that leave us? If you can't use the intelligence you have to sway world opinion it's not much use -- unless the world trusts you. And this is where the Bush team's habit of twisting the truth has got them in deep trouble. Things would be much simpler if we could take what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have to tell us about Iraq at face value. But their record -- whether on the economy or their tax plan or the budget deficit or the environment or virtually anything else that's really important -- is awful. On subjects where we have good intelligence, we know that this is an administration ready to disregard facts and say whatever it thinks will sway listeners to its side. So on a subject where we don't have good intelligence -- like what's going on inside Iraq right now -- I'm afraid I must default to a position of distrust. That's what Bush has earned. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 1:53:26 AM    Comment [] Heh heh. Tom Matrullo said 'salubriously subversive.' Heh. Besides that, the post is pretty cool too. Miasma Man addresses nukulur homunculus. ''One power with a president who has no foresight and cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.'' Nelson Mandela. The remarkable thing about a man of this stature undertaking this ad hominem argument is, it encourages the world to ripple into laughter vibrant enough to be salubriously subversive. [Tom Matrullo's Stuff] 12:39:30 AM    Comment [] Correction on Film post of 10/31 Not sure how to go back and edit that far back, so I will post a correction pointed out by someone who stopped by, that I incorrectly attributed the Bergman parody film I love so much to Woody Allen, when it is actually the people listed below. So sorry. Glad to get it right here. Hey, thank you B Andrews for the correction. My bad. Not Woody Allen. 'Love and Death' must be what stuck in my head, but "Die Duva" is the film I was referring to here, the one I got the biggest kick out of. I may go back and correct the post, but here is the corrected poop: the dove (de düva) Directed by George Coe & Anthony Lover 1968 With a quick synopsis from http://mason-west.com/Bergman/dove.shtml: This short film is a parody of two of Ingmar Bergman's best known films: Wild Strawberries (Smultronstaellet) and The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet). The dialog, seemingly in Swedish, is actually Swedish-accented English with most nouns ending in "ska". The principal character, Professor Viktor Sundqvist, 76, is being driven to a lecture at the university, when dove droppings splatter the car's windshield. Detouring at his uncle's old house, his mind wanders back to his youth, when Death came to a family picnic to claim his sister, Inga. Knowing that Death is a gambler, Viktor has Inga challenge Death to a single-point game of badminton for her life. While they are playing, a dove flies above, soiling Death's cape, and distracting him enough to miss the birdie. Having won the game, Inga is free, and she and Viktor run off for a swim in the lake. And, as the late great Madeline Kahn would say in the film, "Phallica Symbol?" (Subtitle: "Would you like a cigar?") Miasma 12:25:20 AM    Comment []

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