Eclectic Views

    

   It's Not Just Grokster

In 1984 the US Supreme Court ruled in the Betamax case that Sony was not
liable and its VCRs could not be outlawed, because they were capable of many
legitimate uses even though they might also be employed to make copies of
copyright-protected works.  On March 29 the court will hear arguments in MGM
vs. Grokster asking it to modify that ruling for file-sharing services.
Critics at the recent Emerging Technologies Conference in San Diego point to
the potential for liability of other peering apps if the rule is weakened.
Examples cited were sharing of:

 - photos (Flickr)
 - search criteria (Amazon's A9)
 - plans for do-it-yourself projects (Emeryville firm iFabricate)
 - text (Wikipedia)
  

    
Flickr actually has the usual copyright policy that the user asserts
anything uploaded is something he or she has the rights to post. It's not
peering at all; it's RSS-enabled folksonomy (which you can look up at
wikipedia)

Not sure any of those are file-sharing in the music copyright sense.
  

    
(And I know I'm conflating technology and the way it is used. But isn't
the combo why peer-to-peer has been a phenom and a threat to the 
establishment?)
  

    <scribbled by ronks Thu 17 Mar 05 19:23>
  

    
> Not sure any of those are file-sharing in the music copyright sense

I believe the concern goes beyond file-sharing, and is that if the maker or
operator of a product or service that has substantial lawful uses but also
some unlawful ones is to be held liable for the latter, it could stifle
emerging technology development.  Imagine if Sony and other manufacturers
had been held liable for infringing uses of their VCRs back in 1984.  Why,
hardly anyone would have a Betamax today.  No, wait...
  

    
That's an interesting point. The laws about ISPs carve out a certain kind of
immunity for copyright liabity so long as the ISP is involed in a sense in
resolving copyright complaints (with a big bias for the one who wants the
stuff taken down).  Flickr seemed to me to able to comply with that 
model, when I looked at their terms of service, though they are in Canada,
for whatever that's worth.

Peer-to-peer breaks that legal model, since there is no responsible
single server-policing party.  But the examples don't seem to, to my
eye.  Not that it's not a good thing to argue that they are in the same
boat, since they are cool.  Thanks for posting about this case!
Interesting argument.
  

    

   The Future of American Information Technology

Pundits seem to disagree on whether there is one; Goldman Sachs was quoted
as believing that with increased low-cost innovative overseas rivals,
"technology looks to be firmly in the cyclical category" along with steel
mills and other business groups that rise and fall with the economy.  A
contrary view was expressed at Esther Dyson's PC Forum confab last week.
Speculation there centered on seeking out specific markets, more specialized
than the bigger faster cheaper wave of computing and networking but not
necessarily narrow in the sense of niche markets.  One example was medical
IT: a company called Medsphere took public-domain software the founders had
created for VA hospitals (an interesting use of a Freedom of Information Act
request) and revised it as "Vista" to run on Linux for smaller hospitals who
need an in-house clinical records application.  Another medical IT firm is
Epocrates, who delivers research, diagnostic and drug data to doctors'
handheld computers.  Outside the clinic, Socialtext claims rising demand for
its corporate-level wikis, with Nokia and Kodak among its clients.


   Lights, Electricity, Action

Startup Luxtera using technology developed at Caltech says it has developed
a chip that integrates "electronic computing and optical communications".
They say that in about a year they expect to offer processors that will
"make inexpensive 10-gigabit office networks possible".
  

    

   El Linux

Brazil is on its way to becoming the world's most open-source-friendly
country.  A story today reports that government agencies and state-run
companies are under orders to gradually migrate from Windows to Linux, and
all software developed with government financing must be licensed as open
source.  In addition an initiative called PC Conectado plans to enable up to
a million low-income families to purchase desktop computers this year, with
another six million qualified for the future.  The "Connected PC" plan will
offer the systems for about $500 payable in 24 installments, and the
country's three major phone companies will offer 15 hours a month of Net
connectivity for under $3/mo.  And a thousand community centers in poor
neighborhoods are to receive PCs with open-source software and free Internet
access.  Microsoft has offered a "simplified, discounted version of Windows"
but the government has turned them down, saying the crippled product is too
limited.  The conservative opposition calls PC Conectado "undemocratic",
saying users should have the ability to choose to pay more and get Windows
on the subsidized PCs as a matter of free choice; Sergio Amadeu, the
president of Brazil's National Institute of Information Technology replied,
in the

   Quote Of The Day

"We're not going to spend taxpayers' money on a program so that Microsoft
can further consolidate its monopoly."
  

    

   New Video Games

"Grand Gift Auto" challenges players to be the first to donate their car to
a charity for orphaned seal pups, while "Mood" features demonic creatures
getting in touch with their feelings and taking anger-management seminars.
Aimed at the target market of 18-34 year old males, the new games are
expected to sell up to two copies.

And the developer of "JFK Reloaded" (in which the player simulates the
assassination of President Kennedy) announced its new "Behead The Hostage"
game, set in Iraq.  However, they deny rumored plans for one in which the
player ranges through the offices of a game publisher slaughtering
executives, saying the concept is morally repugnant.


   Stem Cell Research Threatened

The controversial use of human embryonic material for medical research is
imperiled by the recent discovery that more effective results have been
obtained from earwax. NIH funding for the new line of inquiry may be denied
however; a group of senators declared there must be a biblical prohibition
against it somewhere.


   New ATMs

Not to be outdone by Wells Fargo's banking terminals which scan deposited
checks and currency, the B of A announces new units that make lattes and
download songs to customers' iPods, automatically debiting their accounts.
Critics complain the presence of espresso machines will make it impossible
to tell a bank from a bookstore.


   Nokia Reinvents Itself

After years of making cellphones, the company will convert its manufacturing
facilities to produce Zen meditation cushions.  The CEO, sporting a button
with the new corporate sales motto "Ask me about my vow of silence", says
"Oh, the units were profitable enough but when we did research we found
nobody said anything worthwhile on them, they just wasted time gabbing."
  

    
Given that Nokia started out as a lumber company and from there went on to
sell wire, the last one isn't entirely implausible.
  

    
Kudos, maestro.
  

    

   TV News

With rival cellphone carriers eroding the customer base of the traditional
phone companies, and cable services offering cheap voice calls, the Bells
are in dire need of a counter-stroke.  So they have come up with - ta da  -
a new acronym! Which they are backing with billions of dollars, by the way.
IPTV stands for "Internet Protocol Television", and represents a major bet
by the phone companies to invade cable's turf by offering programs over
their lines.  Not their old copper ones, for the most part: SBC has budgeted
$4 billion over the next three years to install fiber optic cable to about
half its customers.  The hurdles are high, with cabling perhaps the least of
them, since the phone companies with next to no experience in the field must
negotiate deals with networks and other providers to carry shows, as well as
work out tax arrangements with the cities where they will serve them up. All
this, and with their late start in the business they also have to offer
something to wean cable customers away from coax.

Meanwhile OneVideo Technology and Agile TV are planning to announce "voice-
activated channel changers" that will allow couch potatoes to surf the tube
without even moving their hands, let alone getting off the sofa.  That is
not entirely new, but these gizmos are also making a play for advertisers:
you may be able to order a DVD or a pizza by talking to your set as well as
change channels.  O brave new world...  Sample commands mentioned by the
vendor include "Find football", probably to illustrate the users' limits in
syntactical complexity - three words might be a strain - in response to
which the unit will dutifully look for 300 lb. guys in Lycra smashing each
other on a grassy background.  The units can recognize accents (think
"Cherchez football") and ignore extraneous noise (think "Zzzzzzzz").


   Disk Storage Density Record

Hitachi claims to have developed a disk drive that packs 230 billion bits
per square inch; the units may be commercially available in two years.  The
technique they used, called "perpendicular recording", is interesting: it
consists of placing the magnets which hold the data vertically to the disk
surface instead of parallel, analogous to boosting the capacity of a
graveyard by standing everybody up in it.
  

    
Can that voice-operated TV remote to set to ignore female voices?  
Children's voices?
  

    
ronks, bravo for your April 1 edition! I'm just catching up around here or
I'd have said something sooner.
  

    
Can you hear the Tiger breathing, just offstage?  (Mac OS X 10.4 reference.)
  

    

   Solstice?

Sun Microsystems reported a quarterly loss of $9 million, compared with a
loss a year earlier of $760 million.  CEO Scott McNealy hailed this as "a
huge move forward", though without extraordinary income in this quarter and
one-time losses in the earlier one the difference narrows to a loss of $61M
versus $260M last year.  Gross revenue was down, but by less than one
percent.  Mr. McNealy bragged that "customers no longer think the company is
about to go out of business", which I guess is improvement of a sort.


   Let A Hundred Processors Bloom

Well only two actually, but it's a start.  Intel says it began this week to
ship its new dual-core chips with a pair of CPU units on each. AMD is
expected to announce its own version next week, though it's unclear from the
story if that means shipping or just production.  While Intel still holds
about an 80% market share, the changeover is said to give AMD a window of
opportunity to reduce the gap.  Both manufacturers plan to use the design
across their line from laptops to servers, as the laws of physics come to
limit further increases in raw processor speed.
  

    

   Next-Generation Wireless

A news report says Intel has announced commercial availability of a new chip
with the ability to receive high-speed broadband signals over the air. It's
unclear from the story if the chip can also transmit, but I think so; it's
intended for use inside modems. The "WiMax" standard (IEEE 802.16) offers
the potential for fast wireless connections over distances up to 20 miles,
essentially DSL without cords.  The long-term potential, that is; Intel says
tests are underway with AT&T, British Telecom, and Brasil Telecom now and
service may be available in 18 months, rolling out city by city. Eventually
WiMax may replace the short-range WiFi standard, or the two may co-exist for
specific purposes; you don't need a 20-mile range when you're in a cafe with
an access point, and WiMax may require line-of-sight connections in some
cases.  Technical specs are at <http://www.wimaxforum.org/technology>.
Analysts speculate the real growth potential for WiMax may lie with less
developed regions and countries where laying cable is prohibitively
expensive, given the terrain and the number of prospective users.  The
planned rollout of service initially to "where cable and DSL don't exist"
(per Intel) suggests that objective, with them taking the lead in products
to connect "the next billion users" to the Net.  Now where did I put those
Tibetan fonts...
  

    

   Google Up

Internet search firm Google turned in a record financial performance in the
last quarter, with net profits up 477 percent from the same period a year
ago to $369 million and gross revenue up 95% to $1.26 billion.  Google's
EBITDA (pretax and pre-deduction profits, basically) represented 69% of
revenue, up from last year's 65% margin.  In after-hours trading its stock
reached $224, compared with its IPO valuation last August of $85.  One
reason for the high profit margin is its low sales-and-marketing expense,
10% of revenue (Yahoo spends 25%).  Other reasons for its success are ...
totally unknown, which worries some analysts.  One observed that Google
explains very little of how it works financially; he said "Google's business
model is a black box that mints money. The risk of owning Google is you have
to trust them to keep that working."  He also observed that Google has a
short history, raising the specter of a meteoric rise followed by the usual
consequences so familiar to high-tech investors.
  

    

   Fewer US Tech Jobs, But Not As Many Less As Before

What?  Well basically the American Electronics Association says the country
is continuing to lose jobs in the industry, but the decline is flattening
out.  In 2004 the employment figure fell 25,000 to 5.6 million, after
dropping 333,000 the year earlier and 612,000 in 2002. Manufacturing and
telecommunications  took the brunt of the loss, while software and
technology engineering and services actually rose.


   iCensor

Apple is fighting a new biography of its CEO by refusing to sell any books
of the publisher in its stores unless the new bio is suppressed.  John Wiley
& Sons, who also produces technical works that include Apple hardware and
software, says it sent a manuscript of "iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest
Second Act in the History of Business" to Apple two weeks ago; the response
was a demand to halt the release of the book entirely. When the publisher
declined, Apple pulled all of Wiley's books off the shelves of its retail
stores.  Thus of course providing free publicity for the offending bio
(which the author describes as "pretty positive and laudatory") which many
would never have heard of otherwise.


   Free Money

Venture capitalists are limbering up their wallets again for open-source
software companies that give away their primary product.  They uncritically
shelled out $714 million to 71 such companies in 1999-2000 and endured such
losses as Turbolinux ($95 million) and LinuxCare ($80 M), after which they
invested as little as $0 in the second quarter of 2002. But they're starting
to emerge from the cave; VC firms invested $149 million in open-source
businesses in 2004.  Two factors are cited for the recent, more cautious,
liberality besides the normal action of the economic pendulum: one is the
growing adoption of open-source technology by corporations.  The other is
the success of Red Hat, with $125 million revenue and a $2 billion market
capitalization last year.  A few other success stories like MySQL are
fueling the boomlet as well.  The Red Hat business model (give the software
away, sell enhancements and support services) is followed by most companies,
but a two-tier product (a free basic version and a fee-based "professional"
one) is reported to work for others like SugarCRM of Cupertino.
  

    

   You Can Play But You Can't Hide

The Sony PlayStation Portable, a game device that also displays downloadable
content such as movies, will soon show advertising as well. A Web host
appropriately named Heavy.com is signing up vendors to include their ads in
its film and animation products. The first spate of them will be for a
Unilever product called Axe Body Spray; aimed at 18-24 year old males who
may be unaware of their need for body spray, it consists of a series of
"branded shorts".  Ouch.  No actually it seems to be a bunch of filmed
vignettes, concerning "two guys roaming the country" and their "efforts to
meet women" who one presumes are finicky about their mates' spray flavors.
Any who wish to view this timeless drama (boy meets girl, boy loses girl,
boy covers self with body spray, boy regains girl) without the encumbrance
of non-advertising content may go straight to www.evanandgareth.com or to
heavy.com according to the news story.  And what *is* body spray, anyway?
It sounds like something for The Man Who Is All Armpit.
  

    

 !!!
  

    

   Social Networking On The Rise

The business of "social networks" similar to the Well (except for the
differences) seems poised to take off.  One venture capitalist who recently
plunked down $10 million on LinkedIn of Palo Alto observed that two years
ago he kept his wallet shut because the prevailing philosophy among sites
was "Let's hope some users come and if they do we'll figure out how to turn
that into a business".  LinkedIn now has 2.5 million registered users and
predicts it will turn a profit by early 2006; it seems to be the most
successful of the type so far. (The Well does not break out its financials
separately from Salon, and is reported to have somewhat fewer subscribers.)
Per the article it concentrates on business networking, with professionals
in various fields allowed to join; for free, but by invitation only.
Employers are charged a fee to post job listings, and classified ads are a
larger source of revenue.  Other social network sites are picking up VC
money but look to be farther from profitability.  Tribe.net in San Francisco
offers a wide variety of "tribes" such as mountain climbers and people
"searching for low-priced ethnic restaurants", but reportedly does not have
sufficient traffic to sustain interest outside SF.  Friendster was a big hit
when it opened in 2003 and still reports a positive cash flow but the shine
appears off, with more specialized rivals like MySpace (music-oriented) and
TheFaceBook.com (college students) moving up the charts.
  

    

   Data Security In The News

The State Department has announced that RFID chips to be embedded in new US
passports will be encrypted, to avoid "transmitting easy-to-intercept data
identifying American nationality and other personal information."

In another story, a 16-year-old in Sweden is believed responsible for a wave
of computer break-ins that included stealing Cisco's networking source code
which he then posted on a public Web site in Russia, destruction of files at
UC Berkeley (he was reportedly angered at a security researcher there who
called him a "quaint hacker" so he erased her hard drive), and other
intrusions at the University of Minnesota, the Patuxent River Naval Air
Station, the White Sands Missile Range, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
He accomplished this via a hack to the SSH module used to implement, er,
encryption.
  

    

   Progress Of Science

The advance of civilization continues with:

  The Grill Alert Talking Remote Thermometer, consisting of a steel probe
you stick in your barbecue entree - having first specified whether it is
beef, chicken, fish, hamburger, lamb, pork, turkey, or veal, and the desired
level of doneness - and a remote display unit (with belt clip) that beeps to
inform you first when it is close to being cooked and again when it is done.
The display also shows the current and desired temperature, and a progress
bar toward completion.

   A Disney portable DVD player with mouse ears on the cover; perhaps future
versions will use them for antennas in 802.11-equipped playpens. In keeping
with the intended audience's short attention span, the battery lasts only
about two hours.

   The Epson Stylus Photo R2400 photo printer, for gorgeous black and white
prints.  The unit's claim to fame is its four dazzling ink cartridge colors:
"matte black", "photo black", "light black" and "light light black". (For
light light light black, you take out all the cartridges.)
  

    
<flash> that consumate early adopter showed me some sort of remote bbq
probe a couple or four years ago.