H/T to Cory Doctorow.
April 21, 2010
“The biggest defeat for internet freedom in the UK since it opened for business”
Andrew Orlowski looks at the overwhelming legislative victory for the music industry in the UK:
Back in January, a senior music business figure explained to me that Clause 17, which gave open-ended powers to the Secretary of State, was unlikely to survive the wash-up. But he didn’t much care; the other sections which compelled the ISPs to take action against infringers were good enough. Anything else was a bonus – possibly even a distraction. Yet to the amazement of the music business, web blocking is now legislation.
I think this is a watershed in internet campaigning. It’s not just a tactical defeat, it’s a full-on charge of the light brigade, and the biggest defeat for internet freedom in the UK since it opened for business. I’ve spent time talking to legislators and protagonists, and concluded that it was avoidable. Much of the argument was already lost when the Bill was introduced last November, admittedly, but campaigners’ tactics made a bad situation worse. This explodes the idea — sometimes called the ‘Overton Window’ in the jargon — that by adopting an extreme position, you pull the centre ground your way. The digital rights campaigners forced waverers into the music business camp, and hardened their support for tougher measures against file sharers.
In the end, the BPI wiped the floor with the Open Rights Group.
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April 20, 2010
25 years on, the “Hackers” bestride the globe
Steven Levy revisits some of the people he profiled in his book Hackers, back in the Pre-Cambrian period of the geek revolution:
“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.
The book I was writing, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, came out just over 25 years ago, in the waning days of 1984. My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and so I shot high, crafting a 450-page narrative in three parts, making the case that hackers — brilliant programmers who discovered worlds of possibility within the coded confines of a computer — were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation.
I hadn’t expected to reach that conclusion. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as I researched them, I found that their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard for what others said was impossible, led to the breakthroughs that would define the computing experience for millions of people.
I must have read Hackers during my first or second semester in college, as I tried to figure out how to get out of the series of dead-end jobs I’d had since leaving school. I found strong echoes of many of the characters Levy portrayed in the people I encountered in my first few “high tech” jobs, although I don’t think any of them have managed to become billionaires yet.
April 15, 2010
The technical term is “totally insane”
Cory Doctorow has a horrible dystopian future in mind. No, it’s not the background to his next science fiction novel — it’s what the MPAA and RIAA think our future should be like:
The MPAA and RIAA have submitted their master plan for enforcing copyright to the new Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Richard Esguerra points out, it’s a startlingly distopian work of science fiction. The entertainment industry calls for:
* spyware on your computer that detects and deletes infringing materials;
* mandatory censorware on all Internet connections to interdict transfers of infringing material;
* border searches of personal media players, laptops and thumb-drives;
* international bullying to force other countries to implement the same policies;
* and free copyright enforcement provided by Fed cops and agencies (including the Department of Homeland Security!).There’s a technical term for this in policy circles. I believe it’s “Totally insane.”
I find the audacity of (as Cory calls ’em) “Big Content” to be breathtaking: it’s as if they’ve never heard of fairness or privacy. If they get their wish, we’ll never hear of ’em again either.
As Greg Sandoval points out, there’s almost no reliable data to quantify the problem all this draconian lawmaking and enforcement is supposed to address:
“Three widely cited U.S. government estimates of economic losses resulting from counterfeiting cannot be substantiated due to the absence of underlying studies,” the GAO said. “Each method (of measuring) has limitations, and most experts observed that it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.”
In what appears to be a setback for Hollywood and the recording industry, the government said that it sees problems with the methodology used in studies those sectors have long relied on to support claims that piracy was destructive to their businesses. The accountability office even noted the existence of data that shows piracy may benefit consumers in some cases.
[. . .]
“Consumers may use pirated goods to ‘sample’ music, movies, software, or electronic games before purchasing legitimate copies,” the GAO continued. “(This) may lead to increased sales of legitimate goods.”
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April 13, 2010
Surprise! Apple allows competing browser onto the iPhone
I guess even Apple has to trim their sails to the prevailing wind every now and again. Andrew Orlowski reviews the new iPhone implementation of Opera:
At last. Apple approved Opera’s Mini browser for the iPhone overnight, and in in a few hours it’s already attracted over 150 reviews. They’re not all positive, and not all accurate, but it’s an indication of how much interest there is in a better browser. While Safari was the jewel in the crown of the iPhone user interface, it hasn’t changed in three years. There are now 80 million iPhone and iPod Touches out in the wild, so some choice is long overdue.
What’s it like, then?
They said it was impossible . . .
Mini is fast, and Opera has sprung no surprises in the look and feel department. The font rendering and touch navigation — the mechanics of scrolling and zooming – aren’t quite as slick as we get with Safari, but they’re not far off. Mini also boasts also some very nice user-friendly features absent in Safari, such as saving web pages, searching inside a page, custom searches, and bookmark sync. And so it should . . .
Performance is the big draw, here. It’s always been the Mini’s signature feature: it was designed around speed and overcoming the obstacles to a good user experience on a mobile. Unlike the native version of Opera, Mini is really a lightweight document viewer, with the web page rendered on a proxy server, compressed, and sent down to the phone as a compact binary stream. The page is sent in large chunks, because TCP/IP’s chatty, bitty nature exacerbates the latencies that are a feature of 3G networks.
I’ll be downloading a copy as soon as I post this blog entry . . .
April 1, 2010
March 31, 2010
Disciplining the customer
In what may yet turn out to be a groundbreaking method of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, the US Copyright Group is suing 50,000 of them:
The number of Americans targetted by entertainment industry lawsuits nearly doubled this month, as the the US Copyright Group (“an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance”) brought suit against 20,000 BitTorrent users. 30,000 more lawsuits are pending, bringing the total number of US entertainment industry lawsuit defendants up to 80,000 (when you include the 30,000 victims of the RIAA).
This beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves gambit is puzzling to me. It seems likely to me that most of these defendants will settle for several thousand dollars (regardless of their guilt) rather than risk everything by hiring a lawyer to defend themselves. But does the “US Copyright Group” really think that Americans will go back to the mall with their credit-cards in hand once their friends’ lives have been ruined by litigation?
You have to wonder how they think this is a useful and creative solution to a problem they’ll be facing for the rest of their corporate existance. Suing your own customers would seem — on the face of it — as an unlikely way of persuading them to remain customers . . .
Some of the folks being sued are, undoubtedly, guilty of deliberate and repeated copyright infringement for purposes of personal gain. In a sample size like this, some of ’em will fit just about any profile you choose. Most of them, however, will almost certainly turn out to be teens and twenty-something students with no particular assets worth taking. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to a cloud of gnats: you’ll mess up a few permanently, but most of ’em will not be touched.
March 26, 2010
Times to go pay-for-access in June
The editors of the Telegraph, Guardian, and Daily Mail rub their hands in glee, anticipating more page views from former casual Times readers:
The Times and The Sunday Times will become the first British newspapers to charge readers to access the titles online from June, Rupert Murdoch’s News International announced on Friday.
Customers will have to pay one pound for one day’s access and two pounds for a week’s subscription, in a move that will be closely watched in a newspaper industry suffering steadily dropping sales.
Both Times titles will launch new websites in early May, replacing the existing combined site, Times Online.
I rarely link to Times articles as it is, so their decision to pull everything behind a paywall won’t have much direct effect on my reading habits. If it’s a success (for varying values of “success”), other newspapers may follow suit. That might start to impact me, as I do link to articles from other British newspapers on a more regular basis.
Personally, I think this move won’t work, but it’ll be interesting watching the experiment happen.
March 16, 2010
QotD: The iPhone vision of the mobile internet
The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.
The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.
Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.
I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.
The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.
Tim Bray, “Now a No-Evil Zone”, ongoing, 2010-03-15
March 10, 2010
Some things never change
I was looking though some old postings and found this little gem, which is as true as ever:
It is a sad real-world fact that most legislators, when presented with something they do not understand, almost always attempt to ban it. This probably started with the first neolithic fire-tamer . . . who was probably beaten to death with sticks when the tribal shaman saw it. Senator Hatch is showing all the finely nuanced reactions of Ug the caveman here.
This was in reaction to Senator Orrin Hatch introducing a bill to make peer-to-peer file sharing illegal back in 2004.
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Slight stylesheet change
A comment by “sm” let me know that not everyone was seeing the same formatting on the blog that I was seeing (the term he used was “spidery” to describe the text). As I’m not an expert at stylesheets, I consulted Jon, my former virtual landlord. He quickly diagnosed the problem as a stray lettering specification which affected most paragraphs, but which didn’t show up for visitors using ClearType. Each of the machines I’d been using to post on the blog had ClearType turned on, so I wasn’t seeing any issues.
So I’ve changed the stylesheet to remove the negative letter spacing, which should provide a better viewing experience for anyone not using Windows XP/Vista.
March 9, 2010
Opening the door to arbitrary punishment
Cory Doctorow talks about why the proposed “three strikes” internet ban is such a stupid idea:
March 2, 2010
QotD: The true nature of school
If you objected to high school students getting spied on in their homes by school district-issued webcams, maybe junior high students under nonstop cam surveillance on school grounds by a tubby administrator with a chinbeard (but no chin) will be the charm [. . .] I’m creeped out by the obvious glee with which Beardy McBeardsworth describes his prey at a Bronx junior high school in almost exactly the same tones you hear from Air Force flacks narrating thermal footage of hits on insurgents. But I must acknowledge that the concept of school as a place where the rights of students are severely curtailed dates back at least to my own schooling during King Philip’s War, was recently upheld by the Supreme Court in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, and seems to enjoy broad popular support. For the majority of Americans alive today, the function of school has always been to break you for a workplace where you will meet obstruction and indignity every day, be subject to every type of invasive surveillance, and generally, as even that greatest of working stiffs Jerry Langford put it, “have idiots plaguing your life.”
Tim Cavanaugh, “Junior High Lives of Others”, Hit and Run, 2010-03-01
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January 21, 2010
And yet more on passwords
This is becoming a quarterly topic around here. Imperva has done some statistical analysis of the 32 million passwords which were exposed in the Rockyou.com security breach:
Key findings of the study include:
* The shortness and simplicity of passwords means many users select credentials that will make them susceptible to basic forms of cyber attacks known as “brute force attacks.”
* Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, and so on). The most common password is “123456”.
* Recommendations for users and administrators for choosing strong passwords.
“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second—or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” explained Imperva’s CTO Amichai Shulman.
The report identifies the most commonly used passwords:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123
So there you go — all the tools you need to be a world-class password cracker.
