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Logging frequent blogging miles I'm writing this on approach to Raleigh-Durham airport from Chicago. I wrote the item below at O'Hare. The item below that I wrote at SFO. And the first item I wrote in Seattle, waiting for the first plane of the day at Sea-Tac. I love this shit. Look at it this way: Don is Neo and Leonardo Chiariglione is that doomed agent, just before Neo blows him into green digital dust Yesterday morning I was sitting and clicking away on final copy for next month's Embedded Linux Supplement at Linux Journal's editorial offices on the top floor of Seattle's Ballard Building (those are our windows, right below the BAGDAD sign on the roof) when an email came from Don Marti, who was on the other side of a glass wall a few feet away. Normally both of us are at our own places in Silicon Valley, but we try to work a few days every month at the magazine's Headquarters, and this was one of those days. Don's email was an open letter to Leonardo Chiariglione, Executive Director of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, which calls itself "a forum that brings together more than 180 companies and organizations representing information technology, consumer electronics, security technology, the worldwide recording industry, and Internet service providers." Here is what this instrument of group denial says it wants for you, the music lover: SDMI participants share a common goal: a satisfying consumer experience. With the major music, consumer electronics and technology companies supporting SDMI, consumers will have access to a variety of SDMI-compliant music, software and hardware. It gets worse: SDMI systems will also enable consumers to easily collect and play music purchased from a variety of sources both on-line and off-line. SDMI-compliant systems (software and hardware) will allow consumers to use the music they already have on their computers, or other currently available digital music, in the same ways they do today. In addition, SDMI-compliant software will allow consumers to access new digital content. All hypertypical, as this kind of stuff goes. But where it gets strange is in "An Open Letter to the Digital Community" from Mr. Chiariglione. Here is the gist of it: The Secure Digital Music Initiative is a multi-industry initiative working to develop a secure framework for the digital distribution of music. SDMI protected content will be embedded with an inaudible, robust watermark or use other technology that is designed to prevent the unauthorized copying, sharing, and use of digital music. We are now in the process of testing the technologies that will allow these protections. The proposed technologies must pass several stringent tests: they must be inaudible, robust, and run efficiently on various platforms, including PCs. They should also be tested by you. So here's the invitation: Attack the proposed technologies. Crack them. By successfully breaking the SDMI protected content, you will play a role in determining what technology SDMI will adopt. And there is something more in it for you, too. If you can remove the watermark or defeat the other technology on our proposed copyright protection system, you may earn up to $10,000. This is the strategic equivalent of a bear trap that says "Here, Bear!" in blinking lights. Don was not the bear they were looking for. His own open letter back to Mr. Chiariglione — the same email he had just sent me — went up on the Linux Journal site, where it call for a boycott of the SMDI offer. News followed. There was Salon, which said "Crack SDMI? No thanks! Hackers turn up their noses at a challenge' proposed by the recording and electronics industries." Then there was ZDNet, which said "Linux users say SDMI contest a trick." A few minutes later Don wandered out of his office, and the two of us walked down the stairs for a coffee at Tully's on the corner. "Never got so much attention for doing nothing," he said. GIGO This report says Alan Meckler trashed Cluetrain in a keynote. But he wrote to Chris Locke and said it wasn't so. Can't trash this The latest Amazon purchase circle rankings for The Cluetrain Manifesto:
Special thanks to Chris for both this and the Meckler items.
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