My Observer column about how to keep search engines honest is on the Web.

Music labels planning to go after individual file-sharers
MSNBC story.

“Major music companies are preparing to mount a broad new attack on unauthorized online song-swapping. The campaign would include suits against individuals who are offering the largest troves of songs on peer-to-peer services….”

The problem of Microsoft

Uncomfortable thoughts department. I’ve been pondering — under pressure from a terrific essay by Scoble — about the problem posed by Microsoft. It’s easy to slip into the ‘Evil Empire’ view of Gates & Co. (and I do slip into it from time to time), but really it’s not a fruitful way to understand what’s going on. Microsoft is a tough, highly aggressive, company, but not uniquely so. I guess that anyone who came up against John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the early 1900s would have reckoned that was a uniquely aggressive, ruthless company. Ditto for Disney. The truth is — as Scoble points out — that there are some very good reasons why Microsoft has become as dominant as it is. In the early days of the PC, for example, many of us wanted a technical standard — any standard — that would liberate us from the curse of incompatible software and document formats. The rise of MS-DOS and (later) WIndows gave us that. We just weren’t very good at forward thinking — at extrapolating what ownership of that technical standard would lead to.

Secondly, Microsoft hasn’t become as successful as it is solely by forcing its products on customers. Indeed you could argue — and Nathan Myhrvold for one has argued — that much of the feature bloat which disfigures Microsoft software comes from user demand, particularly the demands of corporate customers. Microsoft is very good at listening to its customers.

Which brings us to Palladium. One way of looking at it is to see it as Gates’s bid for global domination. Another way is to see it as a response to corporate demand for more security and control over their employees.

There is a public policy dilemma here too. On the one hand, we want to preserve the unique possibilities for innovation introduced by the open architecture of the Net and the PC. On the other hand we have to face the terrifying possibility that the communications infrastructure of our societies is incredibly vulnerable to attack — whether by script kiddies, terrorists or rogue states. Of course the security deficiencies of Microsoft software (especially the raw socket capabilities of Windows XP) greatly contribute to this vulnerability. But even if we remove that from the picture, we are left with the awkward reality that we have a terribly vulnerable infrastructure. That’s the problem to which the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) and Palladium are proposed solutions.

News.Com: Copyright fight comes to an end. Hacker publication 2600 magazine won’t appeal a ruling prohibiting it from linking to code that can crack copy protections on DVDs, bringing a closely watched digital copyright fight with Hollywood to an end Wednesday. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Hal Varian on the anti-competitive impact of technologies like Palladium
“NYT” article.

“If the industry supplying the products isn’t very competitive, then controlling after-purchase behavior can be used to extend a monopoly from one market to another. The markets for software operating systems and for music and video content are highly concentrated, so partnerships between these two industries should be viewed with suspicion. Such partnerships could easily be used to benefit incumbents and to restrict potential entrants, a point made by Mr. Anderson.”

Why analog film still has a lot of mileage in it
“NYT” piece.

“There’s probably a gigabyte’s worth of information on this little piece of film,” Mr. Simons said of the 6-by-6-centimeter transparencies produced by most of his film cameras. “There’s no way any scanner can even get it all. There’s not much of a substitute for a piece of film.”

More useful background on digital photography

The Economist has run a couple of decent pieces recently. Here’s on digital cameras. And another on the printing problem.

Digital cameras continue to boom
“NYT” story by Katie Hafner.

“This year, according to Infotrends, a market research firm in Boston, some 9.5 million digital cameras will be sold in the United States, compared with 15 million film cameras (disposable cameras are not included). In five years, the number of digital cameras sold is expected to double as the sale of film cameras declines. “

[…]

Those crossing over to digital are beginning to use cameras in ways they would not have considered with film. One of the biggest changes is the end result: just 12 percent of digital photos are ever printed, Mr. Pageau said. And that fact has altered the practice of compulsively organizing pictures into albums [~] or stashing them in shoe boxes.

“We’re beginning to take pictures not to keep them around, but to reach out and touch someone with them, to extend the moment, that sense of presence,” said John Seely Brown, the recently retired chief scientist at the Xerox Corporation and author of “The Social Life of Information.”

Dr. Brown cited the increasing practice of sending photos by e-mail as an example. “There’s a sense of using this to connect in the moment to someone else I want to touch,” he said. “I’m more concerned about getting it to them and touching them than in having a photograph I can put in an album.”

Beginning of the end for unregulated Internet search?
CNN story.

WASHINGTON (AP) –Internet search engines that take money from Web sites in exchange for prominent placement should make that practice clearer to Web users, federal regulators said Friday.

Many search engine Web sites, including AltaVista, LookSmart and AOL Search, give preferred placement to paid advertisers. The Federal Trade Commission said that prime space can confuse Web users who are looking for the best response to their search, rather than ads for sites that paid up front.

The commission’s decision came in response to a complaint from consumer advocacy group Commercial Alert, which is backed by activist Ralph Nader.

Six months after it crashed on launch, the UK census site is still down

The last word on Palladium

Ross Anderson has written an amazingly informative FAQ page about the background to Palladium.