February 1st, 2010 — Shared News, atm, crime, gadgets, skimmerskimmer
Brian Krebs continues to scare the pants off of me with his ongoing series on sophisticated ATM skimmers (devices that capture your card number, working with a hidden camera to catch your PIN). His slideshow of next-gen skimmers has me convinced that…
Read More...January 26th, 2010 — Shared News, file sharing
Bittorrent Inc. announced today that it has begin to collaborate with the Google-funded Measurement Lab (M-Lab) to test ISP connections and home networking related issues that could impact a user’s connection speed. From Bittorrent’s blog:
“M-Lab is supporting important research into how our Internet is actually performing and informing the debate on how this shared resource should be managed.”
At the core of this collaboration is a tool that was integrated into uTorrent ever since its 2.0 beta launch last summer: uTorrent users are now given the option to test their connection speed upon starting the application for the first time. The client then tests a user’s connection and suggests various connection settings based on this test.
However, BitTorrent isn’t relying on it’s own server for these speed test. Instead, it is using a service supplied by M-Lab that is also aggregating the anonymized test results to get a better sense of how fast the average DSL or cable connection is, what kind of problems users are facing as part of their home set-up and related issues. All of this data is available under the Creative Commons Zero license, which means it’s essentially part of the public domain, free to use by anyone for any purpose. Bittorrent’s blog post elaborates:
“Given µTorrent’s substantial user-base, we are hopeful that this data will stimulate new research into the state of the Internet and support the public debate with unbiased measurement data.”
Bittorrent plans to include related M-Lab tools in the future. One that could be particularly interesting is Glasnost – a tool developed to detect ISP interference with P2P file transfers.
Read More...January 16th, 2010 — Shared News
“Money can’t buy happiness, but neither can poverty.”
Read More...January 12th, 2010 — Shared News
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …’”
Read More...January 10th, 2010 — 1099689, G-rated, Shared News, avatar, copycat, movies, plot, voting-page
Avatar Plot Fail
Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader
January 10th, 2010 — Best Laid Plans, Shared News, scam
I love this idea. In fact, I think it should be franchised. What name would work on strip mall storefronts everywhere? Apetcalypse? Number of the Beasts? I dunno . . .
Are you a Christian or Catholic worried about what will happen to your
beloved pets…
January 5th, 2010 — DRM, Shared News
In today’s New York Times, we read that Hollywood is working on a grand unified video DRM scheme intended to allow for video portability, such as, for example, when you visit a hotel room, you’d like to have your videos with you.
What’s sad, of course, is that you can have all of this today with very little fuss. I use iTiVo to extract videos from my TiVo, transcoding them to an iPhone-compatible format. I similarly use Fairmount to rip DVDs to my hard drive, making them easy to play later without worrying about the physical media getting damaged or lost. But if I want to download video, I have no easy mechanism to download non-DRM content. BitTorrent gives access to many things, including my favorite Top Gear, which I cannot get through any other channel, but many things I’d like aren’t available, and of course, there’s the whole legality issue.
I recently bought a copy of Disney/Pixar’s Up (Blu-ray), which includes a “Digital Copy” of some sort that’s rippable, but the other ones are rippable as well (even the Bluray), so I haven’t bothered to sort out how the “Digital Copy” works.
(UPDATE: the disc contains Windows and Mac executables which will ask the user for an “activation code” which is then sent to a Disney server which responds with some sort of decryption key. The resulting file is then installed in iTunes or Windows Media Player with their native DRM restrictions. The Disney server, of course, wants you to set up an account, and they’re working up some sort of YouTube-ish streaming experiences for movies where you’ve entered an activation code.)
So what exactly are the Hollywood types cooking up? There are no technical details in the article, but the broad idea seems to be that you authenticate as yourself from any device, anywhere, and then the central server will let you at “your” content. It’s unclear the extent to which they have an offline viewing story, such as you might want to do on your computer on an airplane. One would imagine they would download an encrypted file, perhaps customized for you, along with a dedicated video player that keeps the key material hidden away through easily broken, poorly conceived mechanisms.
It’s not like we haven’t been here before. I just wonder if we’ll have a repeat of the ill-fated SDMI challenge.
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Janko over at P2P Blog just pointed out some interesting facts from the new Study Commissioned by the European Union.
The part that got my attention was the fact that of the people who currently pirate content only 20% of them would be likely to pay, they’d rather go without than pay for content.
In my previous thinking about how business deals with piracy this was one of the key questions, because if this is true then it doesn’t really matter what business does with pricing, quality improvements, user experience, etc… People just won’t pay, even if there is no other option.
If the data had been different and 80% would be willing to pay, given some change in situation, price, quality, etc… then the onus was on business to work hard and find the right combination of price vs. quality and user experience to get paid.
I guess this means that the future of online content is ad supported, or other methods where the end-user doesn’t perceive the exchange as “paying for” content.
I don’t know, but this data seems to indicate that if the user perceives it as paying for content they won’t do it.
My First Homebrew in 6 years
It’s so awesome having more space in our new house. One of the things that I had been looking forward to was getting back into homebrewing. I started homebrewing about 15 years ago, but when I moved back to Santa Cruz in ‘03 we got a small place with no room to brew.
My first brew in 6 years or so is an organic IPA. The pic to the right is during primary fermentation, this last weekend I racked it and dry hopped it with some NZ Hallertaur hops. Just a few more weeks and it will be ready to drink!
This is a follow up to my previous post describing where I think social networking should go. Karen Snyder pointed out Motion, a plug in for Movable Type that is very much taking the approach I was thinking of.
They’ve gone further and allow your friends to “log in” to your site with whatever other social networking site username and password they have and comment / contribute.
Unfortunately I’m way too deep into Wordpress to switch, but this certainly made me think it might be worth it. Hopefully the wordpress community sees this and decides to build something similar.
It seems to me that not much has changed between the version of the bailout bill that got rejected in the house and the one that got passed in the senate except for the addition of some pork.
How about some real oversight?
How about some help for the people in the troubled mortgages that are causing this crisis of toxic debt?
How about some regulation to address the root cause of this crisis?
How about some rules about ceo pay with teeth for those companies seeking help?
Come on people take the time required to rationally think this through. Fear is not a good reason to pass stupid legislation.
Yesterday I went to another in a series of Product Management related breakfast discussions, the last one was on The Philosophy of Product, this one was about creating a value proposition. Once again Ellen Grace was an excellent host and facilitator of a great conversation.
Here are some of the key take-aways I had from this discussion:
A value proposition is a multi-layered and multi-faceted thing. Depending on what level you are at and what view you take the answer to “what is the value proposition?” may be very different.
Here’s my idea for the day, “Distributed Open Social Networking” free for anyone to take and implement.
Take wordpress or similar self publishing platform and add a few features to it to make it into a distributed social networking platform.
That’s it. Maybe it exists, I dunno I haven’t gone looking for it yet.
One of the advantages would be that you own your own data, and you get to choose what platform to use so long as it complies with the open specification. No more choosing what platform to use.
In my last post I made a key assumption, that piracy is stealing. Recently I was in a conversation where someone challenged that assumption and made me think.
Laws around the world are, by and large, representations or codifications of our collective sense of right and wrong, our morals in other words. In my previous article I built on the assumption that piracy was stealing and therefore bad and consequently laws would eventually catch up to technology and find ways to legislate enforcement theft related crimes online as well as they do in the real world and that would lead to a reduction in piracy.
