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Friday, September 13, 2002
Appropriate measures 
| | i truly thought that the LA Times piece would bring out all the best writers in the blog-o-sphere for a massive gang thrash. instead you got me and welch and pretty much no one else. |
| | are we all so used to second-rate features of the Blogger phenomenon that we don't expect anything decent from the mainstream press any more? |
| | I'm not either. Same with radio. I keep hitting SCAN waiting for something Good to happen. |
| | But radio's always been kinda fucked. It never had newspaper-grade Authority. |
| | The biggest disappointment for me, when I moved down here from the Bay Area, was discovering that the LA Times serves mostly as a newspaper-like wrapping for ten pounds of car ads. |
| | But somebody's gotta keep calling 'em on their shit. You 'n Matt are closer. You do it. |
| | I'll stick to heaping local crap on ... what is it? Oh, the News-Press. Right. |
Independent Developers v. Lawrence Lessig, round 2
BigMedia watch
| | Lou Josephs points here to what's happening at the NAB, among other interesting stuff I don't have time to unpack. |
Shoving Wazoos
| | Here's some push-back from Eric Norlin on the item below. He's defending Microsoft, and Paladium in particular — a subject about which he knows a great deal and I admit to knowing approximately squat. |
| | Eric argues for gray. I'm for gray too. So is Larry Lessig (in the quoted piece below and elsewhere — Hell, gray is what Creative Commons is about). The question with the gray is what kinds of black and white get mixed, and whether the result is just a rationalized form of either. |
| | While I know sqat about Palladium (which may truly be a wonderful thing — I do trust Eric's values, as well as his expertise on these matters), I know a great deal about Hollywood's agenda in respect to "managing" digital content. They want perfect control, not only of distribution, but of use as well. They want to turn the Net from what it is now — a public commons that supports real markets with lots of suppliers and lots of customers and no one company or industry running the whole thing — into their own private, government-regulated content retailing and distribution system, with DRM out the wazoo. |
| | In fact, that's what these new DRM-über-alles PCs Intel is contemplating ought to be called. Wazoos. Because that's what Hollywood wants your next PC to be: an anus for a DRM'd disto system that they control completely. And they want to shove it up the part of your digital life where the Sun don't shine. |
| | More delicately put, they want to move the PC into the consumer electronics cartel they know so well. They want to succeed where dot-coms failed, at the biggest fantasy of the era: TV with a buy button. Stereos too. Also MP3 players. All of it. |
| | They want Intel to be Sony. They want HP to be Panasonic. They want IBM to be Hitachi. They want to outlaw the white box PC business, unless those PCs include government-mandated DRM. And they want to proscecute any and all who circumvent that system. |
| | That's why the Microsoft person's statement — help Hollywood feel comfortable — strikes me as impossible, given the absolutely customer- (I refuse to say "consumer-") hostile and Net-hostile positions taken by the MPAA, the RIAA and the Disney Corp., the three parties that together pretty much wrote the DMCA, the heinous piece of lawmaking that established the rules by which the Copyright Office and the Library of Congress, under direction by the RIAA, is demolishing an entire Net-based business category, Internet radio, which is ironically in a good position to help the record industry. But no, it's not something Hollywood controls, so it's being taxed to death. |
| | Gray indeed. More like what you get when you mix black with blood. |
| | Which is why the prospect of Microsoft helping make Hollywood "comfortable" with PCs that support a real commons looks to me like the wolf helping the fox "manage" the chickens. |
| | But I do want to be wrong here. I do want Eric to be right. I do want to trust Microsoft, which in fact may be the only business entity on Earth that's more powerful than both Hollywood and the U.S. Government. It's certainly a shitload smarter than either. |
| | Eric says he's taking me to task on this subject. |
| | But here's the task not just for me, but for the rest of us: Go to DigitalID World. Microsoft will be there in force. So will Cluetrain ringleaders. I know both David Weinberger and I will be there (multiple times apiece on stage), and I'm hoping locals Chris Locke and Rick Levine will show up too. |
| | But so will a raft of Really Big Companies with Really Big Stakes in helping Absolute DRM happen all over the fucking place, unless they get the clues. |
| | This is where Microsoft has a chance to finally take sides, unequivocally, with the Net, and with the real marketplaces the Net's commons supports. |
| | By the way, I'll be travelling up to Microsoft to speak the day after DigitalID world. At their invitation, by the way. |
| | That does give me some hope. |
Speaking of clues
| | The Wall Street Journal just called to hassle me into renewing a subscription that lapsed in mid-August. One problem: I paid for two more years with a check dated August 3. When I told the caller that, she thanked me for renewing and hurried to get me off the phone. "Wait," I said. "Can you check and make sure you got the payment and it was credited?" "Sorry, I don't have access to those records, but you can call customer service at 1-800..." Translation: "I'm just an outsourced telemarketer reading from a script." |
(Probably) Dumb questions
| | Can iCal sync with a Palm PDA over USB? |
| | [Later...] First, this answer from Mike Jamieson. Thanks! |
| | Now I have a bigger problem, which is that iCal doesn't work at all, even after I re-install it. It hogs the cpu while hanging in start-up, so I have to terminate its process. I think some of the data I imported via vCal from my Palm database (or something)got corrupted, so reinstalling iCal doesn't help. |
| | Where does its data live? I need a complete uninstall, I think. Is there a way to do that, I wonder? |
Murphy's holiday
Ugliness inside
| | ...under pressure from the Pigopolists who own today's analog entertainment distribution industry, Intel is buckling under. It's now devoting its considerable brainpower to kill the open platform that it nurtured and popularized. |
| | On Thursday, when most of the press will have departed, it will host a session discussing a variety of share-denial technologies being funded by, or developed in, Intel's labs. These include our old favorite CPRM - incorporated into DVD-Audio players from Panasonic (DMR-E20) and Pioneer (DVR-3000) - along with DTCP (Digital Transmission Content Protection, which encrypts air to ground, or cable transmissions over FireWire) and HDCP (High Bandwith Digital Content Protection), which encrypts the display transmissions from your computer to your monitor. |
| | What an astonishing loss of courage from America's greatest technology company - and we mean that most sincerely. |
| | Microsoft is in a leadership position here where we've got an opportunity to help Hollywood feel comfortable with digital distribution and to help them develop (digital rights management) solutions so consumers can have content everywhere...We have two relationships we have to balance here: the consumer who wants the content and Hollywood so they feel comfortable with that process and don't clamp down and make that impossible. |
| | Which sounds like a reasonable compromise, but it's not. Instead it's the devolution of PCs from unencumbered platforms for innovation to cartelized consumer electronics appliances. |
Phlog flog blog
There are responses to this message:Re: Friday, September 13, 2002, lou josephs, 9/13/02; 12:15:56 PM Re: Friday, September 13, 2002, Mike Jamieson, 9/13/02; 9:26:39 AM Re: Friday, September 13, 2002, Mike Jamieson, 9/13/02; 9:26:20 AM
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