This morning’s Observer column…
What’s in a number? Quite a lot, it turns out, if it’s a 16-digit hexadecimal (base 16) number that begins ’09 F9′. (That’s ‘9’ followed by ‘249’ in normal – base 10 – numbering.)
Why the fuss? Well, it appears that the 16-digit number in question is the cryptographic key for unlocking the copy protection on the new generation of DVD discs. It was discovered a while back and posted in obscure parts of the web, where it languished…
This morning’s Observer column…
Collapse of stout conspiracy theory, then? Well, yes. But also a striking illustration of the collective intelligence embodied in the blogosphere. Memo to traditional journalists: there’s always someone out there who knows more than you…
This morning’s Observer column…
Wearing his best public-spirited citizen look, Bradford Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, told the New York Times that Google’s proposed acquisition would ‘combine the two largest distributors of online advertising’ and thus ‘substantially reduce competition in the advertising market on the web’. Between them, Citizen Smith continued, Google and Doubleclick deliver ‘over 80 per cent of the adverts delivered to website publishers, so their combination in a single company has big ramifications’.
Call me Panglossian, but this is encouraging news. One looks forward to General Counsel Smith advising his employer that its 92 per cent control of the market for operating systems also has ‘big ramifications’…
This morning’s Observer column.
The future, as the novelist William Gibson observed, ‘is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’. One place where it might be found is Mount Holly, Berkeley County, South Carolina. I’ve just flown over it (courtesy of Google Earth), and you’d never think it was a place where our destiny lies. The terrain is flat and wooded and includes some magnolia plantations. There’s a highway and what looks like a railway line (the image resolution isn’t great). The nearest town is Goose Creek, a settlement of 30,000 souls.
So why is this obscure spot a pivot of the universe?
This morning’s Observer column…
DRM was in the news because of EMI’s unexpected announcement that, starting next month, it will sell its stuff on iTunes in two flavours: one is the standard, DRM-crippled variety; the other a premium version with higher audio quality and without DRM.
The announcement came as a bolt from the blue, though I suppose that if anyone had spotted Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, going through Heathrow they might have suspected that something big was afoot. Mr Jobs does not normally descend to earth for anything as mundane as another company’s press conferences. But there he was on the platform, alongside EMI’s chief executive, Eric Nicoli. Selling digital music DRM-free is the right step forward for the music industry, intoned Steve. EMI has been a great partner for iTunes and is once again leading the industry as the first major music company to offer its entire digital catalogue DRM-free…
This morning’s Observer column…
[Tom] Lehrer is famous for many things, but chief among them is his famous observation that ‘satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize’. The song of his that I like most is ‘The Elements Song’, in which he recites the names of all the elements of the periodic table at high speed and without fudging a syllable, while at the same time playing a stirring piano accompaniment of what he described as ‘a barely recognisable tune’. It’s an astonishing performance and it resides happily on my iPod.
The other day, I chanced on a link to a lovely piece of Flash animation (see it for yourself here), in which a chap named Mike Stanfill took the Lehrer soundtrack and visually added the names of the elements in a witty – and technically very demanding – way. My first reaction was pure pleasure. My second thought was that this provides a good object lesson for understanding the current debate about intellectual property in a digital age…
Later… Adam Hodgkin pointed out a lovely Lehrer song about the virtues of plagiarism!
This morning’s Observer column…
Think of it as mud-wrestling, but at a higher level. Viacom is suing Google for a billion dollars because YouTube (which Google purchased a while back for $1.6bn) continues to host clips of Viacom’s video properties. The documents launching the suit express moral outrage wrapped in three coats of prime legal verbiage. The gist, however, is clear: nasty bully Google is getting rich on the back of poor little artists and the companies that support them…
This morning’s Observer column — about user-generated content…
The London bombings of 7 July 2005 marked the first time we had seen such content impact on traditional news media in Britain. On that terrible day there was far too much going on, in too many locations, and movement was so restricted after the initial shock, that networks found themselves unable to cope and were desperate for any footage and imagery that became available. It flooded in from the cameraphones and digital cameras of observers on (and under) the ground; a lot of it was striking, moving and informative; some was tasteless, even ghoulish. But whatever its characteristics, it was greedily accepted by the networks. Mainstream media suddenly began to understand what user-generated content meant…
This morning’s Observer column…
Of late, however, Dell has hit a bad patch. Senior executives have been fired, opted to spend more time with their families or departed to take up promising new careers in the fast-food industry. Michael Dell, the company’s flamboyant founder, has returned to take command of the listing ship. And as part of his attempts to revitalise the company, Mr Dell and his team had a Big Idea: why not ask customers for their ideas about what should be done?
Thus was born IdeaStorm, Dell’s effort to harness the collective intelligence of its actual and potential customers. It was launched on 16 February and has turned out to be very popular. Hordes of people signed up to volunteer their ideas. And that, of course, is where the trouble started…
This morning’s Observer column…
So we have two curious facts: Google has acquired fabulous amounts of bandwidth capacity, for which it has no obvious use; and it’s putting local data centres all over the place. Why would it be doing this? What’s the factor that links these two observations?
The answer is…