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for my Profile
of Google Thanks to Professor Karen Sparck-Jones for pointing me to a very useful site on PageRank, the ranking system on which Google was based. Links
for column
of December
15 There's a thoughtful essay by Glenn Harlan Reynolds of the University of Tennessee on the Australian High Court decision. Reynolds starts with a lovely historical analogy: "In the 1950s, before space travel was a reality, scholars worried about whether orbiting the Earth would even be legal. Under the law as it existed at that time, each nation's sovereignty extended usque ad coelum - literally "to the heavens". Each nation's territory thus consisted of a wedge beginning at the Earth's core and continuing infinitely upward and outward. This posed a number of absurdities, but the greatest difficulty was to orbiting spacecraft. Flying over a nation's territory without permission was illegal, perhaps even an act of war. But although aircraft could change course to avoid passing over countries who desired to bar their way, spacecraft - their orbital paths fixed by the laws of physics - could not. If any country beneath them (which might mean any country in the world, depending on the inclination of their orbit) objected, it didn't matter that everyone else agreed. People worried about this at some length, but after the launch of Sputnik the Soviets and the US, soon followed by the other nations of the world, agreed that parochial concerns should not stand in the way of a promised worldwide communications revolution. Spacecraft in orbit were thus regarded as beyond the reach of earthbound law, and subject only to international space law and the law of the launching state, not that of the nations that they happened to pass over. The benefit, of course, was an explosion of satellite-based communications that was a boon for the entire world, and especially for previously isolated nations. Now another new technology - the internet - faces a similar problem...." In the case of Dow Jones and Company v. Gutnick, the High Court of Australia, yesterday ruled that anyone who publishes on the internet should be liable to be sued in any country in which an individual believes that he or she has been defamed by that publication. This is so, even though the High Court admits that, much as spacecraft cannot control their orbits: "The nature of the web makes it impossible to ensure with complete effectiveness the isolation of any geographic area on the Earth's surface from access to a particular website."... Links
for column
of December 8 Internet filtering in China Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman have created an intriguing online tool for testing whether a particular URL is being filtered. I've tried it and got 'indeterminate' results, but they have released a report after trying 200,000 sites. According to the NYT summary, "China has the most extensive Internet censorship in the world, regularly denying local users access to 19,000 Web sites that the government deems threatening, a study by Harvard Law School researchers finds. The study, which tested access from multiple points in China over six months, found that Beijing blocked thousands of the most popular news, political and religious sites, along with selected entertainment and educational destinations. The researchers said censors sometimes punished people who sought forbidden information by temporarily making it hard for them to gain any access to the Internet. Defying predictions that the Internet was inherently too diverse and malleable for state control, China has denied a vast majority of its 46 million Internet users access to information that it feels could weaken its authoritarian power. Beijing does so even as it allows Internet use for commercial, cultural, educational and entertainment purposes, which it views as essential in a globalized era..." The BBC Online take on this is that the Chinese censors seem to be ambivalent about porn (some well-known soft-port sites) are not filtered. But they are, for some reason, very exercised about Slashdot, where the only vice is technolust. Links
for column
of December 1 John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of Independence' is here. Content owners are becoming increasingly aggressive in targeting file-sharers. Here is the report about the attack on Danish file-sharers, in which they are being sent bills for up to $16,000 by lawyers acting for content owners. And there was a report that the RIAA has even gone for US Navy cadets, some of whom are now being disciplined for using Navy machines for infringing copyright. (The RIAA says it had merely written to Navy authorities just as it writes to heads of universities whose students are suspected of engaging in file-sharing.) At the same time, students are finding ways of concealing what they're up to. The battle continues. You can download a copy of "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution" from here (it's a Microsoft Word document, naturally). The BBC also picked up the story. Links for column of November 24 The sad tale of the bandwidth-challenged eEnvoy is here. The 'Benchmarking' report which so excited the Prime Minister can be downloaded from here. (Warning for broadband-challenged readers -- it's a 1.5 MB pdf file, so go and make yourself a cup of coffee after clicking on it!) Links
for column
of November 17 The latest Halloween memo This one is a remarkably candid meditation on the progress of Microsoft's anti-Open Source campaign to date. Conclusion: it hasn't worked. The memo also recommends that Microsoft should stop denigrating Open Source software. Black propaganda doesn't work. Well, well. Details of the Evesham Lindows machines are available here. Links
for column
of October 27 According to this report, nine of the 13 Root Servers came under sustained DoS attack last Monday. Details are sketchy, for obvious reasons. Here is the Washington Post account, which claims that all 13 servers were attacked and that there was more than one attack. The Register has the most detailed report. "In a distributed denial of service attack that began 5pm US Eastern time Monday and lasted one hour, seven of the 13 servers at the top of the internet's domain name system hierarchy were rendered virtually inaccessible, sources told ComputerWire." "It was the largest and most complex DDoS attack on all 13 roots," a source familiar with the attacks said. "Only four of the primary 13 root servers were up during the attack. Seven were completely down and two were suffering severe degradation." The source said each of the servers was hit by two to three times the load normally born by the entire 13-server constellation. Paul Vixie, chairman of the Internet Software Consortium, which manages one of the servers, said he saw 80Mbps of traffic to the box, which usually only handles 8Mbps. Bruce Schneier on the so-called 'National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace' As usual, Bruce is right on the button. "For some reason, Richard Clarke continues to believe that he can increase cybersecurity in this country by asking nicely. This government has tried this sort of thing again and again, and it never works. This National Strategy document isn't law, and it doesn't contain any mandates to government agencies. It has lots of recommendations. It has all sorts of processes. It has yet another list of suggested best practices. It's simply another document in my increasingly tall pile of recommendations to make everything better. (The Clinton Administration had theirs, the "National Plan for Information Systems Protection." And both the GAO and the OMB have published cyber-strategy documents.) But plans, no matter how detailed and how accurate they are, don't secure anything; action does." Amen. Links
for column of October 13 Eldred v. Ashcroft was argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Nice profile of Lessig by Stephen Levy. By all accounts, it was a sobering hearing. Here's a wonderful blog by a non-lawyer who sat in on the session. Business Week did a good piece in September on the significance of the Eldred case. There's a good roundup of the case and its coverage here. The plaintiffs' document centre is here. And here is Larry's home page. Later... The Economist has a nice piece about him. "A Ralph Nader of the Internet, he fights against the mighty corporations that want to squeeze the vitality out of the web, trampling consumers in the name of Mammon. Were his target a cigarette company, say, Hollywood would already be making 'Lessig, the movie'. Instead, it has branded him a cultural anarchist bent on justifying the rampant theft of others' property in the name of 'openness' -- ie, a direct threat to its bottom line. This week, Mr Lessig landed another blow, arguing his case before America's Supreme Court." The article expects Lessig to lose but concludes: "Mr Lessig is surely correct that creativity in a media-obsessed culture relies on easy access to existing creative works. Disney itself, he points out, has thrived in large part by exploiting stories already in the public domain, such as 'Snow White' and 'Cinderella'. On the other hand, America's mighty entertainment industry faces a genuine dilemma: how to use the digital revolution to make loads of money when new technology can turn customers into its biggest enemy. Mr Lessig and his fans want to ensure that, far from embracing the revolution, Hollywood and its allies do not simply strangle it." And still more... The "NYT" reported that "the statute's challengers knew they had not scored a decisive victory. 'My sense is that the case could be in trouble, 'Charles Nesson, the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said afterward at a lunch reception. 'They saw the problem, but they didn't necessarily buy our solution.'" Links
for column of October 6 The New York Times piece which alerted me to Lands End hot pants wheeze. Here's an Industry Week article on Robert Holloway, the guy behind the software. He came, needless to say, from Levi Strauss. There is even a German 'Institute of Mass Customization' at the University of Munich. Home page here. Links
for column
of September 29 A Register story reveals all. "Woman falls for Nigerian scam, steals $2.1m from law firm" is the headline on the report by Lester Haines. "A bookkeeper for Michigan law firm Olsman Mueller & James has been taken for $2.1m by Nigerian 419 fraudsters, the Detroit Free Press reports. " There are links to other fraud stories in the piece. And more here, including the wonderful Scamorama site. Apparently the number '419' refers to the section of the Nigerian Penal Code which specifically outlaws internet scams. No
column on 22 September Links
for column
of 15 September The New York Times ran a good piece about the way Bruce Perens parted company with Hewlett Packard.The 'Initiative for Software Choice' is here. Perens's dissection of it is here. He has also set up his own web site to promote real choice in software procurement. There's a good Ziff-Davis account of the issue here. No columns on 1 September or 8 September Links
for column
of 25 August The New York Times account of Jonathan Miller's plans for AOL Time Warner is here. Links
for column
of 18 August For comment on the Berman Bill see here [News.com] and here [Rolling Stone ] and here [The Digital Speech Project]. The Opensecrets.org record on Congressman Berman is interesting (wish we had as much information about UK politicians' sources of funding). Berman's draft Bill is here. He also issued a Press Release outlining his thinking about 'P2P piracy'. Commenting on the whole sorry saga, security expert Bruce Schneier writes in his regular newsletter: "This
bill would make it legal for the MPAA, the RIAA, and its ilk to
break into computer systems they suspect (with no standard of evidence)
are guilty of copyright infringement. It will allow them to perform
denial-of-service attacks against peer-to-peer networks, release
viruses that disable systems and software, and violate everyone's
privacy. People they choose to target would be deemed guilty until
proven otherwise. In short, this bill would set up the entertainment
industry as a Gestapo-like enforcement agency with no oversight. Links
for column
of 11 August The
New New Thing -- handwriting! Links
for column
of 04 August Cambridge University, which along with MIT and Stanford, has a liberal policy on academics' IP rights, is proposing to change it to a more intrusive regime. The people behind this seem to have little conception of what they are effectively doing -- hobbling the geese that lay the golden eggs -- and indeed seem contemptuous of the notion that there is any connection between liberal attitudes towards IP and industrial creativity. Here's a splendid polemic by Ross Anderson against this idiocy. For a comparison between Silicon Valley and Route 128 (the Massachussetts equivalent) see here. And here's how MIT handles Faculty IP. Links
for column
of 28 July 200,000
UK school children are finger-printed without parental knowledge
or consent And all because they lose their library cards. PI resources page on this story here. Thanks to Professor Gerard de Vries for the idea of the legal system as the embodiment of certain non-'efficient' values. Links
for column
of 21 July See here for a useful Wired account of the current state of play in the Webcasting royalties saga. Conventional radio stations pay royalties based on a proportion of their revenues. The reason the Library of Congress adjudication is so punishing is that it levies a royalty per song per listener. The rate set ($0.0007 per song per listener) doesn't sound much, but it adds up. According to the Guardian, "assuming the average internet radio station plays about 15 songs an hour, to an average of 1,000 listeners, a year's worth of licensing fees adds up to almost $100,000". It's easy to see why Webcasters have closed. For background on my comments about how and why the Internet has uniquely encouraged innovation see Larry Lessig's wonderful book, The Future of Ideas, or almost anything he and his colleagues have written on the 'end-to-end' design philosophy of the Net. A particularly good source is the paper "The End of End-to-End: Preserving the Architecture of the Internet in the Broadband Era" by Mark A. Lemley (University of California at Berkeley) and Lawrence Lessig, (Stanford Law School), April 1, 2000. It's available in PDF format from here. Links
for column
of 14 July Lots of interesting stuff about the digital photography boom. For example, this New York Times piece by Katie Hafner. The Economist has run a couple of decent articles recently. Here's one on digital camera technology and the imminence of high-resolution consumer models. And another on the printing problem. And, just to remind us digital fanatics that analog has a lot of mileage left in it, here's an interesting piece which claims that a 6cm x 6cm Hasselblad negative contains about a gigabyte of data. Links
for column
of 7 July The CNN story about the FTC's letter to search engines is here. The Search Engine Watch site runs a number of interesting pages about practical aspects of paying for preferred placement. There's also a rather good book about the politics of search engines. New!
AltaVista complains that I got it wrong. "(a) Altavista does not boost rankings in search results in return for a fee. All results are ranked by AltaVista's patented relevancy algorithm.
</complaint> Interesting Editorial in this week's Nua Internet survey. Quote: "[C]ould we be wrong in placing all our trust in search engines? Sure, they may make life easier, but a new recommendation issued by the US Federal Trade Commission seems to imply that a number of leading search engines are misleading users.
Links
for column
of 30 June It seems that my piece told only one half of the story. According to this remarkably informative and authoritative web-page by Ross Anderson, Palladium belongs within the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), an initiative led by Intel whose goal is `a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.' Strange to relate, this will require us all to buy new Intel processors and motherboards. Netcraft.com provides a constantly-updated survey of Web-server market share. For statistics on browser market share, see here. Steven Levy's 'scoop' on the Microsoft Palladium project appeared in Newsweek. Standfirst reads:"An exclusive first look at Microsoft's ambitious-and risky-plan to remake the personal computer to ensure security, privacy and intellectual property rights. Will you buy it? " The Register takes a more detached view: "According to Levy, Palladium is a hardware and software combination that will supposedly seal information from attackers, block viruses and worms, eliminate spam, and allow users to control their personal information even after it leaves their computer. It will also implement Digital Rights Management (DRM) for movies and music to allow users to exercise 'fair use' rights of such products. Palladium will essentially create a proprietary computing environment where Microsoft is the trusted gatekeeper, guard, watchstander, and ruler of all it surveys, thus turning the majority of computing users into unwilling corporate serfs and subjects of the Redmond Regime. " The essence of Palladium: excellent piece by Dylan Tweney. Some quotes: "Microsoft's newest project, code-named Palladium, is supposed to make computing safer, by building encryption and authentication technology into the hardware of your computer, right down to the level of the CPU. For example, data will be encrypted as it passes from your keyboard to the computer, to prevent wiretapping. It will be encrypted before it's stored on your hard disk. Files and documents can be digitally signed to ensure their authenticity. And your computer can defend itself against viruses and hacker attacks, because unauthorized programs won't even run on your computer without Palladium's permission. Windows XP has some rudimentary self-protection technologies built in, but Palladium won't appear full-blown until the next major release of Windows in a couple of years. That's because Palladium depends on specialized chips being developed by Intel and AMD, which will handle the encryption and authentication. In the early stages, this will rely on a so-called "Fritz" chip (named after Sen. Fritz Hollings, the sponsor of a draconian digital rights bill), which verifies that your computer is running an approved combination of hardware and software -- before your computer even boots up. Once Fritz certifies the system, it can pass that certification along to third parties, such as Microsoft, Disney, Sony, or AOL/Time Warner. Later, "Fritz" capabilities will be built right into the central processor, making it next-to-impossible to intercept unencrypted data. Everything coming in and out of the CPU will be encrypted and digitally signed. The problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don't get to decide what runs on your computer -- Microsoft does. You can't even open files unless you've been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party. And that puts a huge amount of power into the hands of these corporations." Bob
Cringeley on Palladium "This week, Microsoft announced Palladium through an exclusive story in Newsweek written by Steven Levy, who ought to have known better. Palladium is the code name for a Microsoft project to make all Internet communication safer by essentially pasting a digital certificate on every application, message, byte, and machine on the Net, then encrypting the data EVEN INSIDE YOUR COMPUTER PROCESSOR. Palladium compatible hardware (presumably chipsets and motherboards) will come from both AMD and Intel, and the software will, of course, come from Microsoft. That software is what I had dubbed TCP/MS. The point of all this is simple. It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That's taking the Internet and turning it into MSN. Oh, and we'll all have to buy new computers. This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn't choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It's a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love. Ironically, Microsoft says they will reveal Palladium's source code, which is little more than a head feint toward the Open Source movement. Nobody at Microsoft is saying anything about giving the ownership of that source code away or of allowing just anyone to change it. Under Palladium as I understand it, the Internet goes from being ours to being theirs. The very data on your hard drive ceases to be yours because it could self-destruct at any time. We'll end up paying rent to use our own data! "
Column
of 23 June Links
for column
of 16 June
(Happy Bloomsday!)
The
RIP Act really begins to bite "The news in the UK this week that surveillance powers are to be handed to a host of government departments and other groups takes the use of data retention - the keeping of detailed information on how and with whom we are communicating - to a level not seen anywhere else in the world. The new UK proposals would allow bodies ranging from the Home Office and local councils to Consignia and fire authorities to access the records... " [more] "A draft order to be debated by MPs next Tuesday reveals that ministers want the list of organisations empowered to demand communications data to be expanded to include seven Whitehall departments, every local authority in the country, NHS bodies in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and 11 other public bodies ranging from the postal services commission to the food standards agency. Until now, the list included only police forces, the intelligence services, customs and excise and the inland revenue... " The Foundation for Information Policy Research is the main focus for intelligent criticism of these measures in the UK. See its Press Release on the new measures. Update On Tuesday, the Home Secretary said that he had made a mistake and that the order was being withdrawn. Not clear why this welcome development happened, but I'm pretty sure that my column had nothing to do with it. There was much more coverage of the issue in the mainstream press this time -- compared with the deafening silence when the RIP Act was being rammed through. Maybe the penny has dropped even with the densest journalists -- that the Act makes it impossible ever to protect a journalistic source again if s/he communicates by email. The FIPR issued a helpful Press Release. Here it is, in full: FIPR
Press Release: Ian
Brown, Director of FIPR welcomed this news, "these proposals
were No column on 09 June Links
for column
of 02 June The Guardian story about Kingston Communications is here. Column
of 19 May For a scarifying glimpse of the ambitions of Hollywood to rule not just Cyberspace but also every computing device that is henceforth manufactured, see this essay by Cory Doctorow. Column
of 12 May Links for column
of 21 April about the demise of the AT&T Lab Last chance to see... the AT&T Lab's Web site. Information about the Broadband Phone is here. You can download the Virtual Network Computer software from here. Some of the researchers who worked at the Lab have set up an interesting Web site to keep in touch with one another -- and let the world know what they're doing next. |
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| Links
for column of 14
April .............................................. |
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| AOL
Time Warner shares slump New York Times story. "AOL Time Warner's stock has plunged 10 percent over the last two days, as investors have grown concerned about the company's balance sheet, turmoil in its Internet unit and stock sales by a big shareholder. The stock closed yesterday at $19.60 in heavy trading, piercing the $20 mark for the first time since late 1998, more than a year before AOL announced plans to acquire Time Warner." Shake-up at AOL Time Warner Financial Times story here. Original New York Times story here. And the FT followed up with an admiring profile of the company's putative saviour. Scott Rosenberg's perceptive original piece about the merger is here. |
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| Links
for column
of 24 March ............................................... |
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| Other
comment on the current copy-protection mania
Senator Hollings's activities represent not just economic madness, but are also a serious threat tot he liberties of anyone who writes computer code, as Dan Gillmor observed in his San Jose Mercury column. Much the same point was made in a Wired comment. There was a typically thoughtful
Economist piece on the nightmare facing the Hollywood studios
as broadband links spread -- that they will be Napsterised.
An excerpt: Dave Winer (of Scripting.com) wrote a very sharp essay explaining what's at stake. Excerpt: "The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act would require rearchitecting all computer and software systems, and networks -- including the Internet -- so that every act of copying would be subject to what's known as Digital Rights Management, a brilliant spin on an old idea, copy protection. It failed in the 80s, in the software business and the movie business, because copying is so very basic. Computers do a lot of copying, all the time, and almost all of it is non-controversial. To insert a new controller into every bit of code and hardware that does copying would be like diverting the Mississippi River to irrigate the Great Plains, another idea the Congress contemplated at one time. You can't do it, it won't happen, there aren't enough dollars or programmers in the world to make it so. Even in these tough economic times, it would be hard to recruit capable programmers to perform an act as utterly idiotic as trying to disable copying on computers. Now the law may pass, but the future it envisions will not. The government will eventually realize that it would cripple even their own computers, so at some point they must come to their senses, and stop listening to the industry execs (many of whom are in bed with the entertainment industry) and talk directly to some scientists and engineers and find out what's possible. I suppose it's also possible that we could vote Hollings and his colleagues out of office. That would be something. And politicians could be opportunists now, but only if they know something about computers. " The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has written to Senator Hollings pointing out the flaws in the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). It's a good, temperate letter which can be found here. |
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| Links
for column
of 17 March ............................................... |
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| For
a illustration of what local communities in the US are up to with
Wi-Fi, see this
Computerworld report. For an account of how a Maine
ISP is using Wi-Fi to get broadband to its isolated customers, see
this
article. Here's
an account of how some techies working for the O'Reilly publishing
company managed to get Wi-Fi working over distances of five miles.
For people wanting to get started with Wi-Fi, there are numerous guides -- like this -- on the Net. There are lots of community groups in the US doing Wi-Fi now. Seattle Wireless, for example. Or SFLan in San Francisco. And here's a good overview of the free network movement from Salon. |
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| Links
for column
of 10 March ................................................ |
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|
Interesting Salon
piece on wireless broadband.
Some quotes: What the broadband industry doesn't
get -- Internet users are not couch potatoes Nice
Technology Review
piece on the idea of wireless broadband as a community resource. The best source of information about wireless networking is 802.11b Networking News. And here's a nice New York Times piece on the Neighbourhood Area Network idea. |
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| Links
for column
of 24 February ..................................................... |
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| The
Berkman Center
at Harvard has played an important role in challenging the hegemony
of copyright owners. In order to fight the Eldred case, the Center
had the inspired idea of harnessing the methods used by the open
source software community for the collaborative production of
high-quality programs.
The Berkman OpenLaw project harnessed the collective IQ of hundreds of smart lawyers, law students and academics to create the arguments which appear to have persuaded the Supreme Court of the importance of the case. The Supreme Court's acceptance of the case means that at least four members of the Court believe the Sonny Bono CTEA raises important constitutional questions. A date for oral arguments has not yet been set. Among those fighting the CTEA on behalf of Eric Eldred are Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, Berkman Center Director Charles Nesson, and Berkman Center Faculty Co-Director Jonathan Zittrain." Here's a complete archive of arguments made and briefs filed as part of the OpenLaw process. See here if you'd like an introductory reading list on Open Source ideas. There's been lots of intelligent comment and reporting on the Net about the Supreme Court decision. Just a selection:
|
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| Links
for column
for 17 February ..................................................... |
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| The
text of BT's submission to the court is here.
(It's a pdf file so you will need the (free) Acrobat
Reader to view it.) The 1989 Patent document is here.
And just to complicate matters, here's another guy who claims to have invented hyperlinking. Lots of media coverage of the case...[here], [here] and [here] for example. The video of Douglas Engelbart's Fall 1968 demonstration of hyperlinking in action is being streamed by Stanford. Warning: it's a busy site and you will need the (free) RealPlayer software. |
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| No column for 10 February | |||||||||||
| Notes
for column
of 03 February ..................................................... |
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| Here's
a
useful general introduction to the history and technology of Instant
Messaging.
The big problem with IM is 'interoperability' -- making the rival IM systems communicate with one another. This is clearly what users want, but not what the companies (AOL, Microsoft) want. A company called Cerulean has come up with an IM client which can cross the interop boundaries. But according to this News.Com story an elaborate game of cat and mouse has developed between AOL and Cerulean Studios -- as the start-up has repeatedly released new software designed to get around the block, prompting AOL to rush in and stop people from using it. The battle between AOL and Trillian, Cerulean Studio's instant messaging application that allows people to chat with users of all major messaging systems through one interface, continues. AOL is claiming that security concerns prevent it making its IM system compatible with others.Ê A good piece on IM in business -- by Scott Kirsner. Thanks to Quentin Stafford-Fraser for the link. |
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| Column
for 27 January ................................. |
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| No
column for 20 January :-( ............................................... |
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| Links
for column
of 13 January ..................................................... |
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| More
trouble for copy-protected CDs. The
Register
reports that Phillips, the inventor of the CD format, is demanding
that crippled CDs must be clearly labelled as such. The report claims
that Phillips is insisting that that CDs including anti-copying technology
should bear what is effectively a plague warning. They should in Philips'
view clearly inform users that they are copy-protected, and they shouldn't
use the "Compact Disc" logo because they are not, in Philips' considered
view, proper compact discs at all.
The Many Futures of Music, Maybe One of Them Real. Interesting New York Times report from the 'Future of Music' symposium. Four scenarios: a) Everything ever recorded will be available on demand via the Internet, through a high-speed wireless connection to your wristwatch. b) No one will be willing to pay for any of that music, leaving songwriters destitute and bands trying to make a living from touring and selling T-shirts. c) A handful of multinational corporations will control virtually all recorded music, limiting public access to it while ruthlessly exploiting musicians. d) Musicians will reach listeners around the world instantaneously, with no need for intermediaries, so fans can support their favorite performers directly. Thanks to the many readers who e-mailed to point out that "More Fast and Furious" is by no means the first CD to be released with copy-protection. The Campaign for Digital Rights runs an admirable, regularly-updated page which gives a blacklist of cryptographically-challenged recordings. Professor Edward Felten on the technology of copy protection. Very thoughtful and insightful Business Week interview:
The Los Angeles Times ran
a
nice article on the advent of the copy-protected CD. Excerpt: |
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| Column
for 06 January ..................................... |
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© John Naughton 1999,2000,2001,2002. Nothing in this Web page should be construed as offering investment advice. Information is posted here to supplement my column in the London Observer in the hope that additional links and background will be of interest to readers. If you are seeking advice or information about online investment, pay off your credit card bills first and then consult The Motley Fool. If you want to know where the World Wide Web is headed, buy a crystal ball.