Interesting and disturbing piece in today’s New York Times about the implications of a world in which machines can always locate one another — and determine what they are being used for at any moment.
This is a posting fromt he Smithsonian. Explanation. I was lecturing about threats to the Net to an audience in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and I wanted to illustrate one of the magical aspects of the Net — the way it allows anyone to become a global publisher. So I used Radio as an illustration — typed the above string (complete with typo), then hit ‘post and publish’ button and then held my breath. (Well, you know what live demos are like.) But it worked like a dream. Within seconds the posting was up on the Net. The audience — mostly non-techies — had never seen anything like it. Wish Dave Winer could have seen it.
First posting (by email) from a freezing Washington. Walking from my hotel to a restaurant the other side of Dupont Circle made me feel like an extra from Shackleton. This morning is crisp and freezing. Just read the Washington Post over breakfast. Full of stories about Bush’s budget proposals (‘wrapped in the American flag’ is how the Post describes it) and the Powers report into the Enron scam. Funny to see the high priests of capitalism scrambling to reassure everyone that the system is okay, really.
Splendid! Nottingham City Council has started ‘fining’ its staff for incorrect use of the apostrophe. A marvellous idea. If only they would do the same thing in schools… [Status-Q: Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s notepad]
In the meantime, teachers can sign up for the Apostrophe Protection Society!
More on the copy-protected CD issue. Excellent article by Neil McAllister in SF Gate. Some quotes:
“The market for digital audiotape (DAT) was the first to feel the AHRA’s effects [AHRA=Audio Home Recording Act of 1992]. Once it passed, vendors were forbidden to manufacture DAT decks without technologies that prevented tape-to-tape copying. Some say it was this fact that doomed DAT to failure as a consumer audio medium. If a consumer wasn’t free to record things with a tape deck, then what use was it?”
“The same rules applied to all digital audio media, including the later digital compact-cassette format (remember those?) and even Sony MiniDiscs. It wasn’t until Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio MP3 player that a consumer-electronics device would escape the AHRA’s restrictions. Diamond successfully argued that the Rio wasn’t a digital recording device as defined under the AHRA, because it wasn’t actually capable of creating MP3 files itself — you needed a PC for that.”
“Unfortunately, PCs themselves can’t be classified as digital audio devices. They may be that, but they’re also much more, meaning they aren’t governed by the AHRA. So now the recording industry has come up with a solution for this problem, as well. It’s taking the battle straight to the source: By creating a disc that’s unreadable by the CD-ROM drives of most PCs, it can effectively disable most of the MP3 encoding software out there. But the question remains: Will it work?”
My Observer column (about predicting the tech future by watching kids) is on the Net.
Something’s up with the recording studios who eviscerated Napster. According to this New York Times report, “the major record companies, which two weeks ago surprised analysts by seeking a temporary suspension in their copyright lawsuit against Napster, were about to face potentially damaging inquiries into their own behavior on maintaining copyrights. According to transcripts made public today, the judge in the case said on Jan. 16 that she intended to grant a request by Napster to explore whether the record companies might have colluded to prevent Napster and other online music competitors from licensing music to sell on the Internet. The judge, Marilyn Patel of the Federal District Court in Northern California, also said she would allow Napster to explore whether the record companies might not control all the copyrights they claimed to own.”
The battle between AOL and Trillian, Cerulean Studio’s instant messaging application that allows people to chat with users of all major messaging systems through one interface, continues. AOL is claiming that security concerns prevent it making its IM system compatible with others.
“Terrorism really flourishes in areas of poverty, despair and hopelessness, where people see no future.” Colin L. Powell, US Secretary of State, quoted in The New York Times.
Right on, Colin. Now why not do something about poverty, despair and hopelessness?
More on the postmodernism generator… The abstract for A.C. Bulhak’s paper (“On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility using Recursive Transition Networks”) describing the engine reads:
“Recursive transition networks are an abstraction related to context-free grammars and finite-state automata. It is possible, to generate random, meaningless and yet realistic-looking text in genres defined using recursive transition networks, often with quite amusing results. One genre in which this has been accomplished is that of academic papers on postmodernism.”