Copyright thuggery (contd)

Posted on by

Revision3 is an Internet television network that creates and produces a variety of popular niche shows like Diggnation and The GigaOm Show which are distributed using BitTorrent. Over the Memorial Day weekend, Revision3 was slammed by a Denial-of-Service attack which overwhelmed the company’s servers and disabled both its video service and internal networks for more than three days. The culprit was MediaDefender, an outfit that describes itself as “the leading provider of anti-piracy solutions in the emerging Internet-Piracy-Prevention industry,” which, working on behalf of clients like the record and movie industries, has a history of launching DoS attacks on sites allegedly distributing copyright content.

That’s the background. GMSV continues the story

In a post today, Jim Louderback of Revision3, tells the technical tale as entertainingly as a mystery story, complete with disturbing discoveries, and it’s worth a complete read. But the capsule version is that MediaDefender had been secretly using a backdoor to inject thousands of bogus files into Revision3’s BitTorrent tracking system as part of its pirate hunting efforts, and when Revision3 found and closed the door, not knowing how it was being used, MediaDefender’s system responded with the scorched-earth attack that shut down a legitimate business. “It’s as if McGruff the Crime Dog snuck into our basement, enlisted an army of cellar rats to eat up all of our cheese, and then burned the house down when we finally locked him out – instead of just knocking on the front door to tell us the window was open,” says Louderback. Even more galling — MediaDefender admitted responsibility freely and apologized, not for misusing Revision3’s system in the first place, but for the misbehavior of its thwarted server. Being that DoS attacks are a crime in the U.S. under a variety of statutes, Louderback has called in the FBI and is also getting much encouragement to file a civil suit.

Yep. I’d contribute to a fund that would pay for it.

Jim Lounderback’s admirably restrained post is worth reading in full. It ends:

All I want, for Revision3, is to get our weekend back – both the countless hours spent by our heroic tech staff attempting to unravel the mess, and the revenue, traffic and entertainment that we didn’t deliver.

If it can happen to Revision3, it could happen to your business too. We’re simply in the business of delivering entertainment and information – that’s not life or death stuff. But what if MediaDefender discovers a tracker inside a hospital, fire department or 911 center? If it happened to us, it could happen to them too. In my opinion, Media Defender practices risky business, and needs to overhaul how it operates. Because in this country, as far as I know, we’re still innocent until proven guilty – not drawn, quartered and executed simply because someone thinks you’re an outlaw.

In a way, this is an old story. At its core is the content owners’ fanatical intolerance of any technology that might adversely impact on their business models. The fact that BitTorrent (and P2P generally) happens to be a strategically important technology for society (it is, after all, what enables us to harness the power of all those PCs connected to the Net — what Clay Shirky called ‘the dark matter of the Internet’) doesn’t matter to them. They’re the spiritual heirs of the men who wanted to ban the telephone because it enabled their wives to speak to men to whom they hadn’t been properly introduced. They seek to persuade legislators that all P2P technology is evil, by definition — their definition. I remember how, many years ago, Larry Lessig arrived in his office in Stanford to find that the university’s network police had disconnected his computer from the network. Why? Because they had discovered that he was using P2P software. The fact that Larry used P2P technology to distribute copies of his writings — to which he, and he alone, owned the copyright — had never occurred to them.

Q: Where has Obama spent $3.5 million so far this year? A: Google ads

Posted on by

From ClickZ…

Barack Obama’s campaign spent at least $3.47 million on online advertising related purchases between January and April. The biggest recipient of the Democratic Presidential hopeful’s online ad dollars was Google.

The search giant scored over 82 percent of money spent on online media buys for the Illinois Senator’s campaign this year through April, according to information compiled from Federal Election Commission filings. More than $2.8 million was paid to Google, as listed by Obama for America in its itemized FEC reports.

After spending about $640,000 in January on online advertising, the campaign pumped its online ad budget up to over $1.9 million in February. Expenditures tapered to about $888,000 the following Month. Filings show spending of only around $234,000 in April. However, previous monthly reports suggest more April online ad payments will be reported in the future; Google didn’t even appear in April spending data supplied by the campaign…

Rage against the machines

Posted on by

Tom Chatfield has written a terrific piece in Prospect about computer gaming.

In March, the British government released the Byron report—one of the first large-scale investigations into the effects of electronic media on children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. Since then, however, the debate has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions. In one corner are the preachers of mental and moral decline; in the other the high priests of innovation and life 2.0. In between are the ever-increasing legions of gamers, busily buying and playing while nonsense is talked over their heads.

The video games industry, meanwhile, continues to grow at a dizzying pace. Print has been around for a good 500 years; cinema and recorded music for around 100; radio broadcasts for 75; television for 50. Video games have barely three serious decades on the clock, yet already they are in the overtaking lane. In Britain, according to the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association, 2007 was a record-breaking year, with sales of “interactive entertainment software” totalling £1.7bn—26 per cent more than in 2006. In contrast, British box office takings for the entire film industry were just £904m in 2007—an increase of 8 per cent on 2006—while DVD and video sales stood at £2.2bn (just 0.5 per cent up on 2006), and physical music sales fell from £1.8bn to £1.4bn. At this rate, games software, currntly our second most valuable retail entertainment market, will become Britain’s most valuable by 2011. Even books—the British consumer book market was worth £2.4bn in 2006—may not stay ahead for ever.

In raw economic terms, Britain is doing rather well out of this revolution. We are the world’s fourth biggest producer of video games, after the US, Japan and Canada (which only recently overtook Britain thanks to a new generous tax regime for games companies). Here is a creative, highly skilled and rapidly growing industry at which we appear to excel. 2008, moreover, is already almost certain to top last year’s sales records thanks to the April release of the hugely hyped Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV), the brainchild of Edinburgh-based company Rockstar North. Worldwide, GTA IV grossed sales of over $500m in its first week, outperforming every other entertainment release in history, including the Harry Potter books and Pirates of the Caribbean films.

The media analysis that accompanied GTA IV’s triumph was of a markedly higher quality than it would have been even a few years ago. But truly joined-up thinking about the relationships between games, society and culture is still rare…

Worth reading in full.

Android

Posted on by

The Google-led project is much more advanced than I had realised.

It looks like it might give the iPhone a run for its money. And it’s open rather than closed. Hmmm…

Heading into the cloud

Posted on by

Bill Thompson’s most recent BBC column cast a sceptical eye on ‘cloud computing’. “In the real world”, he wrote, “national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story”.

Quite so. You’d have thought that this rather undermines Nick Carr’s confident prediction of the inevitability of ‘computing as a utility’, so one expected that he would pick up Bill’s piece on his blog. Which indeed he has. But he’s oddly uncommunicative about it, confining himself just to summarising Bill’s views. Or am I missing something?

How to get through Harvard

Posted on by

From John Markoff…

A variety of legends have grown up around Bill Gates’ brief career at Harvard. (He dropped out halfway through and co-founded Microsoft). On Tuesday night, during an interview at the “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Mr. Gates regaled the audience with his strategy of not bothering to attend classes and then catching up in a single intense burst during a separate reading period at the end of the term.

On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, himself a Harvard dropout, appeared to one-up Mr. Gates. Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that he had also skipped classes, in particular avoiding “Art in the Time of Augustus.”

When it came time for the end-of-term study period, he was too busy building the prototype of Facebook to bother to do the reading. So in an inspired last-minute save, he built a Web site with all of the important paintings and room for annotation. He then sent an e-mail to the students taking the class offering it up as a community resource.

In a half an hour, the perfect study guide had self-assembled on the Web. Mr. Zuckerberg noted that he passed the course, but he couldn’t remember the grade he received.

Zuckerberg’s the original one.

Vista: success or failure?

Posted on by

Interesting comment in response to Darren Waters’s post about Windows 7.

I would hesitate to call Vista a failure. A lot has been made of a perceived poor uptake by businesses but it’s worth pointing out that in early 2005 – four years or so into XP’s lifecycle – only 40% of companies were running it, the majority of the rest were using 98, 2000 or NT. In it’s first year XP was only installed on 10%.

Personally I think the hype around Vista has created a perception that isn’t supported by reality – it is selling well both to individuals and customers and it’s actually a pretty good OS. Businesses won’t move to Vista until there’s a compelling reason to do so, which was the same for XP.

Perhaps Vista can be considered a victim of XP’s success rather than a failure in its own right?

Darren wrote:

the biggest question about this public demo of Windows 7 is: what harm will its promise do to sales of Vista?

I just received an interesting note about Windows 7 from the Microsoft PR team. In it, it states: “Microsoft absolutely recommends customers deploy Windows Vista today.”

In other words, Microsoft are telling XP customers not to wait for Windows 7 but to grab Vista now.

Despite issuing more 140 million licenses for Vista worldwide, it’s seen by many as a failure.

Why Walter Bender left OLPC

Posted on by

Interesting piece by Steve Lohr

I sent Mr. Bender an e-mail, asking him why he left. He replied that he decided his efforts to advance the cause of open-source learning software “would have more impact from outside of O.L.P.C. than from within.”

I also asked Mr. Negroponte about Mr. Bender’s departure, and he called it “a huge loss.” Mr. Negroponte said that, in his view, some people had come to see open-source software as an end of the project instead of a means. “I think some people, including Walter, became much too fundamental about open source,” he said.

After the article was published May 16, Mr. Bender sent a letter to the Times, taking issue with Mr. Negroponte’s comment and elaborating on his own views: “Mr. Negroponte is wrong when he asserts that I am a free and open-source (FOSS) fundamentalist. I am a learning fundamentalist.”

I talked to Mr. Bender last Friday to discuss his views at more length and give them a broader airing.

“Microsoft stepping in is the symptom, not the disease,” he said in the interview. The issue, in his view, is whether the tools that bring computing to children are “agnostic on learning” or “take a position on learning.”

“O.L.P.C. has become implicitly agnostic about learning,” he said. The project’s focus, he said, is on bringing low-cost laptop computers to children around the world. “It’s a great goal, but it’s not my goal,” he said.

So what is Bender’s goal? The answer is the “constructionist” learning model derived from the work of Jean Piaget and the practical research of his intellectual descendants like Seymour Papert, the M.I.T. computer scientist, educator and inventor of the Logo programming language.

Constructionist pedadogy holds that people learn best by building things — solving problems by “constructing” answers as active agents — instead of by being passive recipients of facts and received knowledge.

Lohr goes on to say that Bender

thinks the collaborative, interactive learning environment embodied by Sugar could be “a game changer in how technology and education collide.” He says he wants to see the Sugar software run on many different kinds of hardware and software platforms, even on Windows, if the Sugar experience is not sacrificed.

The Twitter backchannel

Posted on by

Could this be the first time anything interesting has ever emerged from the Eurovision Song Contest? Martin Weller has been musing about it — as was Darren Waters a few days ago.

Martin writes:

I started to watch it, but put a DVD on, then when I looked at Twitter it was awash with Eurovision comments. It struck me that Eurovision was in many ways the perfect Twitter event. It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too.

This reminded me of something I read years ago which made a great impression at the time. It was a fantasy. Imagine you’re hovering high above the earth some hot summer night. You can see into millions of homes. A big networked TV show is being broadcast — the kind of thing that used to attract tens of millions of viewers. In each household it’s been watched by one of more silent, passive viewers. The show is crap, and every one of those viewers knows that, really. But still they watch in silence.

And then someone shouts “Hey! This is crap!” And because it’s a hot summer night and it’s a fantasy, his words carry long distances. Other viewers hear them. And then they begin to shout “Yeah, it is crap. Why are we watching this garbage?” And other words to that effect. Viewers are communicating with one another, and suddenly the world has changed.

When I read that, I remember thinking that it constituted a great metaphor for the change from a media ecosystem dominated by push technology (aka broadcast TV) to something much more complex and interactive. An ecosystem in which big companies can no longer dictate the public conversation the way they used to. A much more interesting space.

This morning I spent a while searching for the post that had triggered these thoughts. Initially, I guessed that it must have come from the Cluetrain Manifesto, but I’ve jut re-read it at high speed and it isn’t there. No matter. It’s the thought that counts.

Later: Bill Thompson emails to say that my recollection

sounds like Network, the 1976 film with Peter Finch as the news anchor who gets everyone to go to the window and shout ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more’. Directed by Sidney Lumet.

He’s probably right. Funny how memory plays tricks on one. I could have sworn that it was something I’d read. But, courtesy of YouTube, here it is: