Daily Archives: December 4, 2011

A close look at SOPA

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Jonathan Zittrain has produced an excellent legal critique of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). His conclusion is:

Others have weighed in on why SOPA makes for poor public policy and is an ill-considered technical intervention. In this paper we’ve hewed closely to simply reviewing it as legal doctrine. On those terms, its vague language and undue granting of law-like powers to private parties without sufficient public protections make it worthy of a firm “no” vote. SOPA is both overly strong and overly broad; overly strong in the collection of remedies provided, and overly broad for the problems it is attempting to take on.

LATER: Chinese bloggers see SOPA as “the Great Firewall of America”. Who said irony was dead?

Technology: a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating photographic art

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The Observer asked me to write the introduction to a feature about digital cameras. This is how it begins…

The strange thing about photography is that although it’s been revolutionised by digital technology, at heart it’s the same medium that entranced Louis Daguerre, Eugène Atget and André Kertész, to name just three of its early masters. And although it’s become much easier to take photographs that are technically flawless (in terms of exposure and focus), it’s just as difficult to capture aesthetically satisfying images as it was in the age of film and chemicals. It turns out that technology is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for creating art.

Still, the technology is pretty impressive…

In the piece I pointed out that the iPhone is now the most popular camera among Flickr users (which highlights how distinctions between hitherto different types of device (phone/camera; MP3 player/phone; etc.) are becoming blurred. This morning I noticed that the Guardian had an interesting feature in which a professional photographer compared the images produced by an iPhone 4S and his top-of-the-range Canon DSLR. The phone turns in a very creditable performance.

A useful ArsTechnica piece comes to similar conclusions:

For snapshot purposes, the iPhone 4S is comparable to the 8MP Canon 20D when it comes to image quality. But that comparison is a little unfair—you can easily achieve better results with newer DSLRs in terms of exposure, noise, and megapixel count. What you can’t do with any DSLR, though, is (again) slip it into your pants pocket. Lenses that have as bright an aperture as the iPhone 4S’s f/2.4 will also either be limited to a single focal length or generally be much larger and heavier than the lightweight kit lenses that many users have.

Thanks to @4b5 on Twitter for the link.

Software: or why the government should engage in magical thinking

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This morning’s Observer column.

What governments don’t seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we’ve yet invented. It’s pure “thought stuff” – which means that it enables ingenious or gifted people to create wonderful things out of thin air. All you need to change the world is imagination, programming ability and access to a cheap PC. You don’t need capital or material resources or adult permission. Tim Berners-Lee and a tiny group of colleagues created the web out of nothing more than vision and programming skill. A gifted teenager named Shawn Fanning created Napster – and spawned the file-sharing revolution – by sitting in his bedroom for six months and writing code. All Mark Zuckerberg needed in order to launch Facebook was a laptop, his precocious programming skills and a thousand bucks borrowed from a friend. And so on – through Amazon and eBay and Google and Blogger and Twitter and YouTube and countless other world-changing ventures built out of computer programs.

That’s why software is like magic: all you need is ability. And some children, for reasons that are totally and wonderfully mysterious, have an extraordinary aptitude for programming – just as some have a musical, mathematical or artistic gift. If the government excludes computer science from the national curriculum then it will be effectively slamming the door to the future.

ALSO RELEVANT: This post.