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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
He was to advertising what Shakespeare was to Theater 
| | An email exchange led me to a quote bank of David Ogilvy lines. Back when I was in the advertising business, Ogilvy made me believe that my job, at its best, was good for the world. |
DemoChalking
| | From the senior side of the pond comes pointage to YourParty (a political party where you take the decisions, where you choose the candidates who then vote as you decide), BBC's iCAN beta (find info, find people, take action), Public Whip (Counting votes on your behalf), mySociety (a new charitable project from a mixture of the people who brought you FaxYourMP.com and VoxPolitics. Our aim is to build internet projects which have strong, real world benefits, and which do so at very low cost per person served). And last but not least, Steven Johnson's Can the World Wide Web give ordinary people a shot at true populism, under the heading Emerging Technology: Internet-Era Democracy at Discover. Great read. |
It's official
| | 9:20pm, EST, eh? Ah well. I'll be in a queue for JetBlue at JFK. And no, I don't do TiVo. Looks like IV drug dispenser to me. |
You're well— (click!)
| | A recording from United Airlines just thanked me by phone for being such a good customer. |
A trip
Execution
| | Speak Freely, John Walker's original VoIP creation, is slated to die tomorrow: |
| | On January 15th, 2004 all Speak Freely documentation and program downloads, along with links to them on the site navigation pages, will be removed from the www.fourmilab.ch site. |
| | He gives many reasons. The one that creeps me is this: |
| | The Internet, regardless of its state of development, is in the process of metamorphosing into something very different from the Internet we've known over the lifetime of Speak Freely. The Internet of the near future will be something never contemplated when Speak Freely was designed, inherently hostile to such peer-to-peer applications. |
| | I am not using the phrase "peer to peer" as a euphemism for "file sharing" or other related activities, but in its original architectural sense, where all hosts on the Internet were fundamentally equal. Certainly, Internet connections differed in bandwidth, latency, and reliability, but apart from those physical properties any machine connected to the Internet could act as a client, server, or (in the case of datagram traffic such as Speak Freelyaudio) neither--simply a peer of those with which it communicated. Any Internet host could provide any service to any other and access services provided by them. New kinds of services could be invented as required, subject only to compatibility with the higher level transport protocols (such as TCP and UDP). Unfortunately, this era is coming to an end. |
| | One need only read discussions on the Speak Freely mailing list and Forum over the last year to see how many users, after switching from slow, unreliable dial-up Internet connections to broadband, persistent access via DSL or cable television modems discover, to their dismay, that they can no longer receive calls from other Speak Freely users. The vast majority of such connections use Network Address Translation (NAT) in the router connected to the broadband link, which allows multiple machines on a local network to share the broadband Internet access. But NAT does a lot more than that. |
| | A user behind a NAT box is no longer a peer to other sites on the Internet. Since the user no longer has an externally visible Internet Protocol (IP) address (fixed or variable), there is no way (in the general case--there may be "workarounds" for specific NAT boxes, but they're basically exploiting bugs which will probably eventually be fixed) for sites to open connections or address packets to his machine. The user is demoted to acting exclusively as a client. While the user can contact and freely exchange packets with sites not behind NAT boxes, he cannot be reached by connections which originate at other sites. In economic terms, the NATted user has become a consumer of services provided by a higher-ranking class of sites, producers or publishers, not subject to NAT. |
| | There are powerful forces, including government, large media organisations, and music publishers who think this situation is just fine. In essence, every time a user--they love the word "consumer"--goes behind a NAT box, a site which was formerly a peer to their own sites goes dark, no longer accessible to others on the Internet, while their privileged sites remain. The lights are going out all over the Internet. My paper, The Digital Imprimatur, discusses the technical background, economic motivations, and social consequences of this in much more (some will say tedious) detail. Suffice it to say that, as the current migration of individual Internet users to broadband connections with NAT proceeds, the population of users who can use a peer to peer telephony product like Speak Freely will shrink apace. It is irresponsible to encourage people to buy into a technology which will soon cease to work. |
| | Starting this year, HP will strive to build every one of our consumer devices to respect digital rights. In fact, we are already implementing this commitment in products such as our DVD Movie Writer, which protects digital rights today. If a consumer for example, tries to copy protected VHS tapes, the DVD Movie Writer has HP-developed technology that won't copy it instead, it displays a message that states, "The source content is copyrighted material. Copying is not permitted." And soon, that same kind of technology will be in every one of our products. HP will also work constructively with technology and content industries to implement Broadcast Flag into some of our products this year. |
| | Later this year, we¹ll also introduce a new protection technology that encrypts recorded content. Going forward, we will actively promote the interoperability of content protection technologies to ensure that content protection becomes the enabler it was intended to be not the obstacle to compelling content that many fear. And we will also step up our efforts to work with anti-piracy industry advocates and consumer advocates. |
Iraq 'n role
| | There are good stories happening. There are good things being done, as Bush tries to constantly tell us. But they're not effective. They don't affect the lives of Iraqis. For example, the sewage system is being seriously overhauled, but it will be years before an Iraqi can turn a tap and drink healthy water in their homes. There is serious work being done (some good, some bad) on revamping Iraqi laws, but nobody can see that happening. I see virtually nothing that would tell an average Iraqi that the US occupation is working hard to make their lives better. There are good people working hard, but it's all invisible for now. Who cares about revamping securities oversight laws when you're scared to go out at night. |
| | There's a new movement underway today that says relevant journalism could be — and perhaps should be ‹—a conversation, not a lecture or the squawk and noise that comes when journalists talk to each other, and today's media, with a little modification and a new point of view, could provide a forum for such conversations. |
| | The essential conflict between the old and the new in journalism is the belief by those of the new breed that ongoing feedback — and interaction with that feedback — advances a story. It does so by moving the assumptions of the original piece in directions unknown, and this frightens the mainstream press, who insist that journalism isn't journalism without the editorial process and, by default, editorial control... |
| | Regrettably, the vast majority of television and news executives didn't get onboard the Cluetrain when it passed by their offices years ago. If they had, they might understand the current reality; that, like markets, news is a conversation. |
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