| Comcast Tries a Kinder, Gentler Approach |
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OK, so they can’t throttle back BitTorrenters. So now it’s time for a different approach. Come October 1, Comcast will limit each customer account to 250 gigabytes of data per month. Use 250+ GB twice in a 6-month period and you’ll be in the penalty box for a year. Comcast says all this won’t matter to 99.9999% of their customers. Some people in the are up in arms about the decision anyway. Memo to Comcast: Don’t take any technical advice from the Recording Industry Association of America about how to identify bandwidth pirates. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (3)| Just Can’t Trust Anybody Nowadays |
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My buddy and dominoes partner Geoff alerted me to a class action suit against Symantec, the makers of Norton Antivirus. The suit alleges that Norton has an “unlawful policy of terminating subscription time of certain customers who purchased upgrades”: “As the subscription expiration date approaches, the Norton security software prompts the user to consider renewing their subscription for another term and also presents an opportunity to upgrade to a new product by making an online purchase. If the user then chooses to purchase an upgrade, the new subscription begins when the upgrade is installed, not when the existing subscription expires. Plaintiffs allege that the new subscription should begin when the existing subscription expires, and that Symantec unlawfully terminated subscription time without providing a credit or refund and without disclosing this policy.” Personally, I got tired of Symantec dinging me $40 each year for antivirus software. And every time I booted my laptop, it took forever for Norton to get its act together and let me start working. So I ditched it. For the past year I’ve been using AVG Anti-Virus and ZoneAlarm. I’m totally pleased. Both are free, and both are available from the Jenkins Security Research Links page. Mac users, please refrain from looking so smug. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Book Review: The Future of the Internet – And How To Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain (2008) |
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Will fear of viruses and worms, coupled with a desire by the major players — Google, Apple, and others — to control their products and services, leave us with an Internet that stifles innovation and growth? Jonathan Zittrain fears it might happen. Here’s the central premise of the book, from page 3: “The PC revolution was launched with PCs that invited innovation by others. So too with the Internet. Both were generative: they were designed to accept any contribution that followed a basic set of rules (either coded for a particular operating system, or respecting the protocols of the Internet). Both overwhelmed their respective proprietary, non-generative competitors, such as the makers of stand-alone word processors and proprietary online services like CompuServe and AOL. But the future unfolding right now is very different from this past. The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a generative network. It is instead one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.” To boil it down, generative is good, tethered is bad. Zittrain makes an interesting point on page 123: Web 2.0 apps — e.g., Google Maps — can be both generative and tethered: “It is certainly understandable that Google, in choosing to make a generative service out of something in which it has invested heavily, would want to control it. But this puts within the control of Google, and anyone who can regulate Google, all downstream uses of Google Maps — and maps in general, to the extent that Google Maps’ popularity means other mapping services will fail or never be built.” Now I was with him for the first 2/3 of the book: Parts I (The Rise and Stall of the Generative Net) and II (After the Stall). However, he lost me in Part III (Solutions), which was weak and rambling. I’m still unclear if there *are* any practical solutions. Judging from the “last checked” date of Web sites in the notes — which are excellent, BTW — I assume Zittrain completed the manuscript during Winter-Spring of 2007. The world has changed since then. For example, on page 2 he states that the iPhone is tethered: “Rather than a platform that invites innovation, the iPhone comes preprogrammed. You are not allowed to add programs to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you.” As of July 2008, this is no longer true. I can’t hold this against Zittrain, since it occurred after his book was released. However, he made the iPhone a major component of his introduction. He would have been wise to contact Apple just to make sure that his premise would remain true in the near future. Was it worth the $30 I spent for this book? Let me put it this way: I should have waited for the paperback edition to be released. Or — doh! — I could have clicked on the Creative Commons free download. However, the book came highly recommended by Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, whose sci-fi stories I generally like, so I bit. All things being equal, I would have been smarter to put the $30 into an O’Reilly book. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 28, 2008
| Say It Ain’t So |
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Bloomberg financial newswire updated its obituary for Steve Jobs today and — oops! — went ahead and published it. It was retracted very soon thereafter, but was spotted by some folks. I know that major news outlets update their collections of obituaries regularly. And I realize that this was a simply a slip-up. But it attracted some attention because of the concerns people have had recently with the state of Jobs’ health. He *did* look a bit frail back in June. He says he’s just fine, so stay out of his bidness, you stupid @$#%^%#$. Like any of us, Steve isn’t going to go on forever. Apple needs to be planning for the future, so they don’t take a 20 mil hit. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| Squeezing Every Last Penny |
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“More Artists Steer Clear of iTunes: Apple’s Online Music Store Sells Lots of Singles, But Labels Seek Higher Profits of Full Album Sales”, so says The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) in an article posted today. Let me try to summarize the positions of the 3 opposing groups in this mess:
All of this makes me glad I just stick with WXPN. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| A Little Sanity Breaks Out in the Copyright Wars |
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Yesterday U.S. District Court Justice Harold R. Lloyd issued a summary judgement in the case of Io Group v. Veoh, deciding that Veoh qualifies for “Safe Harbor” under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This case may have an impact on an even bigger one: Viacom v. YouTube. Io Group, which produces and distributes adult videos, sued video-sharing site Veoh over some copyrighted material uploaded to Veoh’s Web site. Judge Lloyd neatly summed up its case against Veoh: “[P]laintiff contends that, if Veoh cannot prevent infringement on its site given the current volume of its business, then Veoh should be required to either hire more employees or to decrease its operations and limit its business to a manageable number of users (whatever that number might be). Its not-so-subtle suggestion is that, if Veoh cannot prevent infringement from ever occurring, then it should not be allowed to exist.” Judge Lloyd made a disctinction between Veoh, which actively discourages sharing copyrighted material, and other, less-reputable services: “Veoh is distinct from Napster in at least one significant respect. Napster existed solely to provide the site and facilities for copyright infringement, and its control over its system was directly intertwined with its ability to control infringing activity … In fact, as virtually every interested college student knew — and as the program’s creator expressly admitted — the sole purpose of the Napster program was to provide a forum for easy copyright infringement.” He went on to say that, “this court finds that no reasonable juror could conclude that a comprehensive review of every file [uploaded to Veoh] would be feasible.” (Thanks for giving us some credit, judge!) Finally, Judge Lloyd makes a statement that Google could also claim for YouTube: “[T]he record presented shows that Veoh has taken down blatantly infringing content, promptly responds to infringement notices, terminates infringing content on its system and its users’ hard drives (and prevents that same content from being uploaded again), and terminates the accounts of repeat offenders … Once content has been identified as infringing, Veoh’s digital fingerprint technology also prevents the same infringing content from ever being uploaded again. All of this indicates that Veoh has taken steps to reduce, not foster, the incidence of copyright infringement on its website.” Compare this common-sense approach with that of the judge presiding over Viacom v. YouTube. Google certainly was paying attention to this ruling. It will certainly help their case. However, Justice Lloyd did include a qualifier of sorts at the end of his decision: “[T]he decision rendered here is confined to the particular combination of facts in this case and is not intended to push the bounds of the safe harbor so wide that less than scrupulous service providers may claim its protection.” For more commentary by a real lawyer, including the text of the summary judgment, visit TechCrunch. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 27, 2008
| Sheesh … Another Browser Post [UPDATED] |
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Today Steve Lohr of the NY times reports on the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2. As I’ve blogged previously, there’s a browser war going on, reminiscent of the Microsoft-Netscape war of the 1990s. Why bother downloading IE8? In a word, don’t. At least not right now. It’s a beta release, so it’s going to be buggy. But it appears to offer some interesting features:
There’s a lot more new functionality I’m not covering here. But like I said, I’m gonna wait. For my sanity’s sake. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| My Top 3 Firefox Annoyances |
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There are people who have drunk the Firefox Kool-Aid, just like there’s a Cult of Apple. I’ve been using Firefox at work for about a year now. (And much longer at home, on my Mac.) While I agree it’s superior to Internet Explorer, and eminently customizable as well, it’s not perfect, viz.:
The upshot of all this is that I have to use three different browsers to get through the day. If I had to pick one, right now I’d choose … Safari. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 26, 2008
| Will the Kindle Become Amazon’s iPhone? |
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Short answer: no, given that they’ve sold only a quarter-million of them in 10 months (verses 6 million iPhone 3Gs sold in one month.) But TechCrunch poses an interesting idea: license the technology — especially the software — to other manufacturers. In other words, make the Kindle the de facto platform for electronic books. Conventional wisdom is that Apple torpedoed its market share back in the 80s and 90s when it refused to licensed its operating system to other manufacturers. (Despite the iMac buzz, their market share is still in single-digits.) Microsoft-licensed copies of Windows running on a broad range of PCs took over the market. You sure wouldn’t confuse the Kindle with something created by Apple’s design team. It screams “PC” rather than “Mac”. So licensing it to others make sense to me. Hmm … after reading that last paragraph, I’m thinking the title of this post should be “Will the Kindle Become Amazon’s PC?” Or, “Will the Kindle Become Amazon’s Windows?” Well, anyway, you get the idea. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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| A Little Too Much Transparency In Government, If You Ask Me |
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On Friday I read this article about how the UK government lost personal data on 4 million subjects in one year alone. That’s about 7% of the population. If you read the article, you’ll note that it contains the phrases “two unencrypted discs”, “two unencrypted CDs”, and “two … unencrypted laptops”. (They seem to lose things in twos over there.) Just a few minutes later, this article came across my RSS reader: a USB drive with data on 84,000 prisoners was lost during the past week or so. Also unencrypted. We can’t make our governments any smarter. We can, however, take responsibility to protect our own data. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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