Eye-Fi

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Ten years ago if you said that I would like to have an Internet-connected camera I’d have said you were nuts. But acquiring an iPhone changed my view: I’ve found it really useful to be able to upload pictures from anywhere at any time without having to be tethered to a computer. The iPhone camera isn’t great, but as the man said the best camera is always the one you have with you, and I always have the phone. But it’d be nice to be able to have instant uploads from a better camera.

Enter Eye-Fi, an SD card which can talk to a wireless network from inside your camera. I bought one from Amazon for just under £70 — which is expensive for an SD card, but what the hell. You install some software on PC or laptop, register with Eye-Fi, put the card into your camera and — Bingo! Images are automatically uploaded. You can link your account to other services like Flickr and Facebook. And the card can do geolocation based on Wi-Fi network location.

Sounds too good to be true? In a way, it is. The system works fine, but uploads are slow unless one constrains the size and quality of the images. For shooting and uploading web-friendly jpegs it works fine: in fact it might be a good way of getting stuff in near-real-time onto Flickr. But you can’t use the full range of image quality and size available on a decent camera. So it’s got its applications, but it looks as though the iPhone camera will still find plenty of use.

It’s also got lots of embarrassing potential. Suppose, for example, you were careless with the upload settings: you might find that a set of, er, intimate pictures were attracting an admiring audience to your Flickr account or Facebook page. And, then of course, there’s this.

Paul Baran RIP

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Paul Baran, the engineer who first thought of packet-switching (Donald Davies independently came up with the same idea later) has died at the age of 84.

Baran was one of the most entertaining and intriguing figures I came across when I was researching my history of the Internet way back in the 1990s. The story of how he came up with the idea — and of his hilarious experiences with AT&T — is told in Chapter 6. Essentially, AT&T’s position was: “this packet-switching stuff couldn’t work, but even if it did we wouldn’t allow it”. After he’d submitted his proposal for a packet-switched network to the Pentagon, Baran realised that the contract to build the pilot network would go to an agency staffed mainly by ex-AT&T engineers, concluded that they would make sure that it didn’t work and — rather than have them strangle his baby at birth — withdrew the proposal. It’s the kind of story that one couldn’t make up. And yet it happened.

Another Times, another paywall

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Today the New York Times disappears behind a paywall. Introductory pricing is 99c for first four weeks, but the non-discounted rates seem steep, even for such a good journalistic product. After reading 20 articles over 4 weeks, you hit the wall. Then you must choose between: $15/month for web viewing + smartphone; $20/month for web access + app on a tablet; or $35/month for accessing the NYTimes on all devices

Lots of commentary around on this. I liked Frederic Filloux’s analysis which includes the observation that the NYT paywall pricing “is like the French tax system: expensive, utterly complicated, disconnected from the reality and designed to be bypassed”.

In another post, Filloux explores an intriguing option: that the Times continues to print its blockbuster Sunday Edition (which makes tons of money), while going online-only for the rest of the week. His conclusion is that this could result in annual revenue of $1 billion compared with the $1.5 billion the Times has been earning to date.

The Austerity Delusion

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Krugman on The Austerity Delusion.

But couldn’t America still end up like Greece? Yes, of course. If investors decide that we’re a banana republic whose politicians can’t or won’t come to grips with long-term problems, they will indeed stop buying our debt. But that’s not a prospect that hinges, one way or another, on whether we punish ourselves with short-run spending cuts.

Just ask the Irish, whose government — having taken on an unsustainable debt burden by trying to bail out runaway banks — tried to reassure markets by imposing savage austerity measures on ordinary citizens. The same people urging spending cuts on America cheered. “Ireland offers an admirable lesson in fiscal responsibility,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, who said that the spending cuts had removed fears over Irish solvency and predicted rapid economic recovery.

That was in June 2009. Since then, the interest rate on Irish debt has doubled; Ireland’s unemployment rate now stands at 13.5 percent.

And then there’s the British experience. Like America, Britain is still perceived as solvent by financial markets, giving it room to pursue a strategy of jobs first, deficits later. But the government of Prime Minister David Cameron chose instead to move to immediate, unforced austerity, in the belief that private spending would more than make up for the government’s pullback. As I like to put it, the Cameron plan was based on belief that the confidence fairy would make everything all right.

But she hasn’t: British growth has stalled, and the government has marked up its deficit projections as a result.

Buffett cautions social-networking investors

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Warren Buffett is warning investors to be careful about which social networks they friend with their investment dollars.

Buffett, the chief executive of the Berkshire Hathaway investment empire, warned investors Friday at a conference in New Dehli to be wary of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter–a sector that has recently generated great interest and anticipation on Wall Street.

“Most of them will be overpriced," Buffett said, according to a Bloomberg report. "It's extremely difficult to value social- networking-site companies.”

“Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest,” he said, without specifying which companies he expects to be winners and which will be losers.

This is news?????

[Source.]

Google booked by judge

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last week, a US judge in Manhattan made a landmark decision. As to what it means, opinions vary. Some see it as arresting the cultural progress that began with the Enlightenment; others are celebrating Judge Denny Chin’s ruling as the blocking of a predatory move by a giant corporation to control access to the world’s cultural heritage. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between…

LATER: Interesting comment by Tim O’Reilly:

I think that when we look back at the history of the e-book market one of the classic business school cases is going to be how stupid it was for publishers to sue Google. Here you have a powerful, monopolistic company, and then you have another company that comes in really as a white knight, and the publishers sued the white knight. And the thing that was wrong about this was that the publishers’ settlement basically made Google into an ineffective competitor to Amazon. It took away all of Google’s strength. It made their model like Amazon’s, in which it had no advantages.

There were some really interesting things that Google could have done like algorithmic pricing. They were talking about taking a much smaller cut of the transaction, building the marketplace in a very different way. They were talking about open standards. Google ideally should have been building a book search engine that searched all e-books where they were and not just on Google’s site. They made mistakes. If the settlement had pushed them in that way it would have been really, really interesting. But it made Google a book retailer, which they aren’t, and now we have one dominant player, and the publishers are going to really come to regret that. Apple may end up being a big player, but it’s hard to tell.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

Framing ‘The Social Network’

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Terrific cinematic critique of the Sorkin/Fincher film by Jim Emerson. Sample:

Since it came out last fall, I’d almost forgotten what an exhilarating information-overload experience David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’is. Cut and composed and performed with breathless, jittery speed, it’s a movie that consists of virtually nothing but conversations in rooms (the attempted, missed, short-circuited, coded connections that struck me when I first saw it). It’s action-packed — enough to give you whiplash, watching all the elements interacting within the 2.40:1 widescreen frame — even though there are no ‘action sequences’ (car chases, shootouts, fist fights, acrobatic stunts, etc.); the filmmaking is charged with energy without falling back on today’s routinely frenetic, handheld run-and-gun/snatch-and-grab camerawork (the camera is generally mounted on a tripod; when it moves, it’s on a crane or a dolly — often for establishing shots or a shift in perspective that brings a new element into the frame). Smart, quick, efficient.

Because I’m not a film buff, I’d never come across this kind of criticism before. But I know this particular film well, and suddenly began to see it in a new light.

Here, for example, is Emerson’s analysis of the opening sequence:

The crunchy guitar riff starts over the Columbia Pictures logo and then the crowd noise comes up, the music drops down, and before the logo fades to black and the first image appears, we hear Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) speaking the movie’s opening line — a question that’s also a challenge: “Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?” What follows is a blisteringly fast-paced screwball comedy exchange (“His Girl Friday” through a 64-bit dual-core processor) between Mark and his girlfriend (not for very much longer ) Erica in which nearly every line is a misunderstanding (intentional or unintentional), a sarcastic jab, a leap of logic, a block, an interruption, a feint, an abrupt shift in the angle of attack, a diversion, a retreat, a refinement, a recapitulation (I’m sure there are many fencing terms that apply to the various conversational strategies employed here)…

The scene offers just a few variations on some simple camera set-ups, deployed at high speed. Erica (Rooney Mara) is always on the left, Mark on the right (even in their individual close-ups they’re slightly shifted to those positions in the frame). The cutting is as quick and nervous and aggressive as the dialog, ricocheting from volley to return (and reaction shot to reaction shot). Most edits are right at the end of each character’s lines — there are hardly any pauses between them — so that the effect is like watching an intense two-camera tennis match, cutting from one side of the net to the other.

Only once after the opening shot does Fincher offer a balanced two-shot, as Erica presents an opportunity to disarm the conversation/confrontation and take it in a neutral direction: “Should we get something to eat?” Superficially, Mark makes a similar counter-offer, but it’s really another challenge: “Would you like to talk about something else?” And then we’re back to the over-the-shoulder shots (moving into close-ups) as Erica dives back in: “No, it’s just since the beginning of the conversation about finals club I think I may have missed a birthday.” By the time Mark tries to circle back to this juncture — “Do you want to get some food?” — it’s too late to recover that balance.

It would be fun to do a line-by-line, shot-by-shot accounting of the dynamics of this scene (or this whole movie), but let’s get to the point: The style here is a modern variation on some pretty straightforward, classical Hollywood filmmaking principles, distinguished two things: the velocity at which the scene is performed and cut; and the amount of information packed into the widescreen picture. (The idea of cutting a CinemaScope picture like this — especially for a simple, two-person dialog scene — would have been unthinkable until recently. Audiences for early anamorphic pictures in the 1950s and 1960s probably would have thrown up.)

Great stuff.

Hipstory

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Very interesting blog by a war photographer who has found his iPhone to be a useful casual camera. Some of his images, though technically crude, are very powerful — especially the shot of the feet of a civilian casualty in the Benghazi morgue.

This blog is part of a project borne during my travels as a professional photojournalist. For years, I have worked with bulky digital cameras, always mindful of the technical maneuvers from setting the shutter speed and aperture to editing and toning on a computer screen. In the last two years I have discovered that my iPhone has allowed me to capture scenes without feeling that I am once again on the job. To “point and shoot” has been a liberating experience. It has allowed me to rediscover the excitement of seeing imperfections and happy accidents rendered through the lens of my handheld device. I am able to create imagery, edit, and transmit all the images straight to this blog, creating a modern and efficient workflow for the most inefficient of pursuits – self expression.

The Hipstamatic App must seem weird to non-photographers — a digital app that makes digital images look like they’d been taken by a Kodak Brownie. A cynic would call it retro chic, but there’s more to it than that. See, for example, this picture of mine, snapped in a speeding train.

U.S. develops ‘Panic Button’ for democracy activists

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I recently attended a seminar in LSE given by a State Department official — one of the people who advise Hilary Clinton on technology. (The seminar was held under the Chatham House rule, so I can’t identify the speaker, but Charlie Beckett blogged about it.) What I found interesting — and encouraging — was the discovery that, despite its curiously disorganised reaction to the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables, the US administration still apparently believes in the idea of an open Internet. In that context, this report in the NYTimes is intriguing, perhaps even hopeful.

WASHINGTON Reuters – Some day soon, when pro-democracy campaigners have their cellphones confiscated by police, they’ll be able to hit the ‘panic button’ — a special app that will both wipe out the phone’s address book and emit emergency alerts to other activists.

The panic button is one of the new technologies the U.S. State Department is promoting to equip pro-democracy activists in countries ranging from the Middle East to China with the tools to fight back against repressive governments.

“We’ve been trying to keep below the radar on this, because a lot of the people we are working with are operating in very sensitive environments,” said Michael Posner, assistant U.S. secretary of state for human rights and labor.

The U.S. technology initiative is part of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s push to expand Internet freedoms, pointing out the crucial role that on-line resources such as Twitter and Facebook have had in fueling pro-democracy movements in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.

The United States had budgeted some $50 million since 2008 to promote new technologies for social activists, focusing both on “circumvention” technology to help them work around government-imposed firewalls and on new strategies to protect their own communications and data from government intrusion.

“We’re working with a group of technology providers, giving small grants,” Posner told reporters.

“We’re operating like venture capitalists. We are looking for the most innovative people who are going to tailor their technology and their expertise to the particular community of people we’re trying to protect.”