Wired News: Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders. Legal experts said on Friday that the CBDTPA regulates nearly any program, in source or object code, that runs on a PC or anything else with a microprocessor. That’s not just Windows media players and their brethren, as you might expect. [Tomalak’s Realm]

At last — common sense about the US

Those of us who love the US but loathe its current President and his regime currently face a ridiculous kind of totalitarianism. It’s the “You’re either for us or against us” mentality, and it’s patently absurd. How nice then to find a splendid article by Jonathan Freedland condemning this much more eloquently than I can. Quote:

“So today I issue a plea, in defence of that little sliver of middle ground where I – and, apparently a good chunk of the public – want to stand. We want to be pro-America and anti-Bush. We want to applaud what the United States stands for, even as we express our dislike for this particular administration.

This should not be brain surgery. No great intellectual agility is required to laud the founding ideals of the American republic while simultaneously lambasting Washington’s current masters. You can admire the 1787 declaration that we, the people should be sovereign – and still insist that bombing Iraq is not the best way to get at Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. No contradiction. ”

Bob Cringeley wants to make an Open Source television show. Not as daft as it sounds either.

Typically thoughtful Economist piece on the nightmare facing the Hollywood studios as broadband links spread — that they will be Napsterised.

“The lesson from the music business is that, however hard they try, the studios will not be able to stop copies of movies from being downloaded from the Internet. What Hollywood has to do is find a reasonable balance between protecting revenues and keeping consumers happy. Striking that balance will not be easy. Movie makers do not want to encourage illegal copying on a massive scale by supplying unprotected digital copies themselves. And yet the more restrictive they try to be over what people can do with the movies they pay to download, the more the studios[base ‘] own Internet services will be a second-rate alternative to piracy. ”

Really sharp essay by Dave Winer on the current copy-protection mania in Congress

Excerpt:

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act would require rearchitecting all computer and software systems, and networks — including the Internet — so that every act of copying would be subject to what’s known as Digital Rights Management, a brilliant spin on an old idea, copy protection. It failed in the 80s, in the software business and the movie business, because copying is so very basic.

Computers do a lot of copying, all the time, and almost all of it is non-controversial. To insert a new controller into every bit of code and hardware that does copying would be like diverting the Mississippi River to irrigate the Great Plains, another idea the Congress contemplated at one time. You can’t do it, it won’t happen, there aren’t enough dollars or programmers in the world to make it so. Even in these tough economic times, it would be hard to recruit capable programmers to perform an act as utterly idiotic as trying to disable copying on computers.

Now the law may pass, but the future it envisions will not. The government will eventually realize that it would cripple even their own computers, so at some point they must come to their senses, and stop listening to the industry execs (many of whom are in bed with the entertainment industry) and talk directly to some scientists and engineers and find out what’s possible.

I suppose it’s also possible that we could vote Hollings and his colleagues out of office. That would be something. And politicians could be opportunists now, but only if they know something about computers. Get on the talk shows and strut [5] your stuff. A reasonably informed Congressperson could really shine now.

The ACM has written to Senator Hollings pointing out the flaws in the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). It’s a good, temperate letter which can be found here.

Is the ‘digital divide’ narrowing?
Robert Samuelson thinks it is.

But he’s only talking about the domestic divide in the US, and even then I’m not sure. What his article does successfully highlight, though, is how vague the concept of the ‘divide’ seems to be.

A new role for the DMCA in quelling free speech
Salon article on how the ‘church’ of Scientology has found a way of using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to intimidate ISPs hosting its critics’ web sites. Basically just another illustration of my ‘contested space’ thesis.

Wired: “The Church of Scientology has managed to yank references to anti-Scientology websites from the Google search engine.”

How to be creative: keep an untidy desk

Let’s face it, my study is a mess. Lots of computers surrounded by piles of paper — magazines, books, letters, drafts etc. My wife (a supremely tidy, organised administrator) despairs of me. When people come to stay (or even come to dinner) I have to ‘tidy’ my study, which basically means sweeping all the piles into containers and placing them out of sight. This of course is a disaster for me because the act of sweeping the piles into boxes scrambles what is in fact a sophisticated filing system.

But now comes a marvellous New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell (yes, he of The Tipping Point) arguing that there are very good reasons why creative people are great pilers of paper. Excerpt:

‘Why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.’

So there! Why I feel six inches taller already.