L’iPhone est arrive!

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Yawn. According to the New York Times…

Apple Computer and Motorola plan to unveil a long-awaited mobile phone and music player next week that will incorporate Apple’s iTunes software, a telecommunications industry analyst who has been briefed on the announcement said on Monday.

The development marks a melding of two of the digital era’s most popular devices, the cellphone and the iPod, which has become largely synonymous with the concept of downloading songs from the Internet or transferring them from compact discs. Roger Entner, a telecommunications analyst with Ovum, a market research firm, said he had been told by an industry executive that the new phone, to be made by Motorola, would be marketed by Cingular Wireless. Mr. Entner said it would include iTunes software, which helps power the iPod.

Filesharing traffic continues to dominate

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According to a Macworld UK report…

A new study that looks at the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic on service provider networks shows file swapping forges on unabated.

CacheLogic of Cambridge, England says the practice shows no sign of slowing down despite court rulings that have shut down some popular sites such as Suprnova, a BitTorrent tracking service that offered links to pilfered television and movie content.

CacheLogic’s global monitoring network shows 60 per cent of all Internet traffic is the result of peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms, with eDonkey taking over the top spot from BitTorrent.

“The Whack-A-Mole game continues,” says Andrew Parker, CacheLogic’s CTO. “The authorities go after one [peer-to-peer] system and another one pops up.”

At the end of 2004, BitTorrent accounted for 30 per cent of all Internet traffic. But after the Motion Picture Association of America’s moves to shut down BitTorrent tracking sites, centralized servers for locating distributed content, swappers began moving to other less-publicized services. Today, eDonkey, a system that uses no centralized servers or tracking sites, consumes the most bandwidth of any application on the Internet, particularly overseas, according to Parker. In the US, Gnutella has seen resurgence in popularity among swappers.

Of the files being swapped on the four major file-sharing systems (eDonkey, BitTorrent, FastTrack and Gnutella) 62 per cent is video and 11 per cent is audio, with the rest being miscellaneous file types, according to the study.

Gillmor on Google’s “Unnecessary Arrogance”

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Google is a great company, but a layer of hubris threatens to encrust the excellence. It was exemplified most recently by the childish banning of contact with CNET journalists after the news site did a story highlighting what can be done to invade privacy using the company’s own tools.

The attitude problem has been evident for a while now. While I support the company’s refusal to offer “guidance” to Wall Street — a game used by public corporations to game the stock market — the utter opacity of the operation is disconcerting. It’s one thing to stick to principle, but another to rub people’s faces in it, such as when Google held an open house and had the CFO — the chief food officer, not the chief financial officer — give a presentatinon. Cute, but that stunt will be remembered by people whom Google will someday need.
Right now, Google needs no one’s special good will, and acts that way. This is reminiscent in some ways of Microsoft, a company that had public support and industry allies, but almost no tech-world friends. Google is no Microsoft, yet, certainly not in the willingness to flout the law. But Google’s willingness to flout other norms — in particular, its grossly insufficient privacy stance, which amounts to “trust us” — will eventually rebound in ways the company may not appreciate today.

I attribute much of Google’s arrogance as the missteps of a young company. (It’s baffling, however, that someone like Eric Schmidt, a seasoned executive, could have such a tin ear.) The public still thinks of Google as a hero, and the good it does still far outweighs the bad. The well isn’t bottomless, though; it never is.

Amen. [link]

Digital Rights Manag…, er, obliteration

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An often-overlooked downside of DRM. This from a column by Oren Sreebny of the University of Washington:

It’s very important to universities that the recorded record of human history remain accessible to students, teachers, and researchers – and remain accessible for the long run. Who’s willing to bet that we’ll have the tools to read files encoded with Windows Plays For Sure (speaking of irony) a hundred years from now? Chances are good we’ll still be able to play mp3 files then. The industry’s current drive to lock that content away in proprietary formats is a pressing matter of concern to all of us. We are very interested in new distributors (like Audio Lunchbox and Mindawn) that are using open formats such as ogg vorbis and flac as well as mp3.

Update: Thoughtful email from Bill Thompson, pointing out that I missed

one important point, which is that none of the proprietary schemes are in fact very good, and that’s why they have to be protected by laws like the DMCA/EU Copyright Directive. I doubt that archivists in a hundred years will respect (or even be aware of) these laws just as we disregard the laws which would stop us plundering ancient burial grounds or reprinting sacred texts. So unless someone comes up with an unbreakable DRM scheme we should be ok – just as long as we have enough hackers working in the area :-)

Fighting the last war

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CNN reporter Miles O’Brien has been sent to New Orleans to cover the looming threat of hurricane Katrina. He’s keeping a Blog. Here’s an excerpt:

This morning as we arrived at Newark with one way tickets booked only 12 hours prior to departure, we all received secondary screening from the TSA. I am going to go out on a limb and make a prediction: terrorists will pop for a round-trip booking if they try to use airplanes as cruise missiles again. Perhaps we should learn from the past war — instead of fighting it over and over again — mindlessly.

Google grows up…

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… and becomes just another ruthless corporation? There was a lot of inane comment this week about a “Google backlash”, but the sad truth is more prosaic: Google is no longer a cheeky start-up but a multi-billion dollar outfit which will obey its founders’ prescription to “do no evil” just as long as it doesn’t impede corporate strategy. In that context, the New York Times has an interesting piece by Randall Stross. Here’s the gist:

Last month, Elinor Mills, a writer for CNET News, a technology news Web site, set out to explore the power of search engines to penetrate the personal realm: she gave herself 30 minutes to see how much she could unearth about Mr. Schmidt [Google’s CEO] by using his company’s own service. The resulting article, published online at CNET’s News.com under the sedate headline “Google Balances Privacy, Reach,” was anything but sensationalist. It mentioned the types of information about Mr. Schmidt that she found, providing some examples and links, and then moved on to a discussion of the larger issues. She even credited Google with sensitivity to privacy concerns.

When Ms. Mills’s article appeared, however, the company reacted in a way better suited to a 16th-century monarchy than a 21st-century democracy with an independent press. David Krane, Google’s director of public relations, called CNET.com’s editor in chief to complain about the disclosure of Mr. Schmidt’s private information, and then Mr. Krane called back to announce that the company would not speak to any reporter from CNET for a year.

CNET’s transgression is unspeakable – literally so. When I contacted Mr. Krane last week, he said he was not authorized to speak about the incident.

So… it’s ok for Google to profit insanely from technology which provides all kinds of information about ‘ordinary’ people. But not ok to use the technology to provide all kinds of information about Google’s CEO. And it’s ok to boycott a legitimate news outlet which reveals this fact. That looks awfully like old-style corporate Stalinism to me.

We will have to get used to the idea that Google will become as powerful in due course as Microsoft is today. And more dangerous. After all, Microsoft only screws around with your computer (if you’re daft enough to use their stuff). But Google could screw around with your privacy.

The kindness of strangers

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Andrew Brown has written a terrific profile of the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. Sample:

In the early 70s, as a graduate student at Harvard with no formal training in biology, he wrote five papers that changed forever the way that evolution would be understood. He came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs. Then he analysed the reasons why, in almost all species, one sex is pickier about who it mates with than the other; then the ways in which children can be genetically programmed to demand more attention than their parents can provide. Even the way in which patterns of infanticide vary by sex and class in the Punjab is predicted by one of Trivers’s papers.

None of which persuaded Harvard to give the man a professorship, btw. Great universities can be very stupid sometimes. Think of Cambridge and FR Leavis (or William Empson, for that matter). Or Brian Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize for physics and yet hadn’t been deemed good enough for a Cambridge Chair!