Virgin unplugs its subscribers

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Here’s an interesting insight into Digital Restrictions Management, aka DRM.

Virgin has closed Virgin Digital, its Windows Media-based alternative to Apple’s iTunes. It stopped selling one-off downloads on Friday, though subscribers will still have access to their collections until their next monthly payment is due.

After that, their songs will no longer be playable, thanks to the limitations placed on playback by the DRM technology built into each track.

Virgin announced the move this weekend in an email sent out to all its customers, all of whom have presumably been busy backing up their tracks or – in the case of subscribers – burning them to CD so they can be re-imported as MP3s.

The service will formally close on Friday, 28 September – coincidentally the day Apple’s new iPod Touch is due to arrive in the UK – and finally shut down on Friday, 19 October.

Translate that into non-digital terms. You buy an album from a record store, and play it happily on your CD player. And then, one day, it won’t play any more. Why? Because the store from which you bought it has — for some reason decided upon by the store’s owners — closed.

All your iPhone are belong to us

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From The Register

Apple has issued a notice that unlocked iPhones could suffer permanent damage when they update the firmware, and reminded customers that such damage is not covered by the warranty.

The process of unlocking an iPhone is complicated, and involves code running at a pretty low level in the OS. Users may feel confident that they can always re-flash their iPhones using iTunes, but even that requires a working kernel (minimal OS) on the phone – damage that and you’ve got a Jesus doorstop.

Such damage is unlikely. Far more probable is that every time an update is installed users of unlocked iPhones will have to unlock them again, but Apple felt the need to remind people of the risk they take when unlocking the handset or installing third-party applications.

Engineers inside O2, the UK operator deploying the iPhone in November, are under the impression that Apple will be able to re-lock phones to their network when they’re updated, but that will depend on the unlock process used and if Apple can be bothered to apply the resources needed to reverse it.

The assumption among many iPhone buyers seems to be that no matter what Apple does, the hackers will make everything work. The faith in techno-anarchism is touching, but may be misplaced if Apple just reverses everything with each update…

Footnote: readers puzzled by the grammatical infelicities in the headline are respectfully directed to here.

Iran invades US

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Lovely column by Maureen Dowd on the tempestuous US visit of the fruitcake who is now President of Iran.

First, we break Iraq and hand it over to the Shiites, putting in a puppet who leans toward Iran and is aligned with the Shiite militias bankrolled by Iran. Then, as Peter Galbraith writes in The New York Review of Books, President Bush facilitates “the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia,” with the ironic twist that “there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in Southern Iraq.”

And on top of all that, we help build up the self-serving doofus Iranian president, a frontman with a Ph.D. in traffic management, into the sort of larger-than-life demon that the real powers in Iran — the mullahs — can love.

New York’s hot blast of nastiness, jingoism and xenophobia toward its guest, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, only served to pump him up for his domestic audience. Iranians felt that their president had tied everyone in knots, including the “Zionist Jews,” as Iranian state television said. The Times reports that Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Revolutionary Guards, was on TV criticizing the rude treatment his president received: “It is shocking that a country that claims to be civilized treats him that way.”

Ms Dowd also solves a problem that had been baffling me: how to remember (and pronounce) the name of the Iranian Prez. Solution: Just say “I’m a dinner jacket”.

Harnessing collective IQ for reviewing patent applications

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Interesting Technology Review report on “Opening Up the Patent Process”…

A new website called Peer-to-Patent intends to harness the power of online collaboration to streamline patent review. By creating a community around each application, the site facilitates public discussion and lets people upload relevant information. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is currently involved in a limited trial of Peer-to-Patent, with the hope that it will bring openness and transparency to a review process that was previously limited to communication between the applicant and the examiner vetting the patent.

“There’s never been a bridge built between the information available in these expert communities and the government institutions that make these important policy decisions,” says Peer-to-Patent founder Beth Noveck. Noveck is a professor at New York Law School and the director of the school’s Institute for Information Law and Policy. She is also the director of the Democracy Design Workshop, which is running an experiment, called Do Tank, to encourage research into projects that foster community and encourage citizens to take action.

Peer-to-Patent could benefit an overloaded government organization. The USPTO faces mounting difficulties stemming from large numbers of patent applications of increasing complexity. According to the USPTO, 173,771 patent applications were approved in 2006. The government agency claims that it is currently backlogged with more than 800,000 patents. This means that new submissions have a pendency, or time from filing to first action, of up to 52 months…

The market for blather

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Jeff Jarvis wrote the definitive judgement on the New York Times decision to drop its paywall. It’s a good read, but what struck me most was this passage:

TimesSelect’s brilliant cynicism was that, when forced to find something to put behind a pay wall, they came up with content that was, indeed, uniquely valuable — the columnists and archives. But this was also content for which there was no significant ad revenue at the time (advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather).

This explains why I’ve never earned anything from putting Google Adsense on this blog!* The Google engine has always struggled to find appropriate ads to go alongside my bla.., er, deathless prose!

*Footnote: I’ve just checked, and so far I’ve earned $47.55 in over a year!

PC users still prefer Windows to Vista – Telegraph

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According to the Daily Telegraph,

It took took five years and $6bn (£3bn) to develop, but Microsoft’s Vista operating system, which was launched early this year, has been shunned by consumers – with computer manufacturers taking the bizarre step of offering downgrades to the old XP version of Windows.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates speaking during the press conference at the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system launch
Microsoft launched the Vista operating system to great fanfare in January, at least a year late

A note on the electronics retailer website Dabs.com reads: “If you’re not ready for Vista, you can downgrade to Windows XP without affecting your Sony VAIO warranty and switch back to Vista at any time.”

Dell took a similar line earlier this year when it brought back XP on a range of computers for its US customers in response to a deluge of online complaints.

Argument 2.0

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Martin Weller has started something interesting:

I am starting something of an experiment today for the rest of this week.

I am going to construct an article by structuring a debate across four blogs. The article is around the future of content and starts in my next post.

The plan is:

Monday – I post a piece on where I think digital content is going, arguing that it is moving towards being free and widely distributed.

Tuesday – Ray Corrigan is going to post a piece responding to mine which looks at how digital rights may make it a more, not less, controlled future for content.

Wednesday – Patrick McAndrew will focus it on education by bringing in the perspective from open educational resources.

Thursday – Will Woods will look at some of the relevant technologies and how these might impact.

Friday – we’ll draw some conclusions.

It’s an intriguing idea. The only problem is the timescale. Martin’s opening contribution covers a lot of ground and begs many questions. If Ray can respond effectively in 24 hours, then he’s a quicker thinker than I am.

TechBubble 2.0 coming along nicely

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According to today’s New York Times,

Some people laughed at Mark E. Zuckerberg when he reportedly turned down a $900 million offer last year for Facebook, the social networking Web site he founded three and a half years ago.

But Microsoft, Google and several funds are considering investments in the fast-growing site, according to people with knowledge of the talks, that could give the start-up a value of more than $10 billion.

While discussions were still in the early stage, these people said that Microsoft was considering an investment of $300 million to $500 million for a 5 percent stake of the company. Google is also said to be interested in an investment.

Facebook’s valuation could go even higher as the two rivals create the kind of competitive bidding situation that has recently driven the acquisition prices of other start-ups into the stratosphere.

Representatives from Facebook, Microsoft and Google all declined to comment on the talks.

Er, that’s $10 billion for an outfit that, according to one analyst quoted in the Times story, brought in $60 million to $96 million in annual revenue, with no real profit.

Later: It’s interesting to see the rationalisations being offered for this valuation — and why Microsoft and Google might want Facebook. Here’s one for example:

“There’s a lot of strategic value beyond the pure financial value in an investment like this,” said Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, who closely watches Web investments. Liew, a former executive at AOL, said social networks like Facebook and MySpace are encroaching on the turf of portals like Microsoft’s MSN to serve as users’ home page.

“There’s not a lot of a zero-sum games, but there’s only one home page,” Liew said. “There’s only one thing that is the first thing you see” when signing on to the Internet. “That’s what I think is the strategic value, and I think Microsoft needs it more than Google.”

The Left list

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Oh dear. The Torygraph had the amusing idea of compiling a list of the 100 most influential lefties in Britain.

By the time they get to No. 61, however, they are clearly scraping the barrel.

61. AMARTYA SEN
Economist
Amartya Sen is a noble prize winning economist and activist who introduced the notion that development of third world economies was a necessary precursor to freedom and democracy. His ideas have had global influence but in a UK context he is as important in the corridors of DFID and Downing Street as he is in the office of the key INGOs.

How about that: a Noble Prize!

Keyboard skill

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Like many people who write for a living, I’m obsessed with keyboards. I loved the early IBM PC keyboards, which had proper microswitches and made an agreeable clacking sound. But then mass production took hold and the tactile attractiveness of keyboards declined, to the point where most of them had a repulsive mushy feel. Unusually for a company that is supposed to care about design and ergonomics of laptop drive, Apple ignored the keyboard for many years. The ones supplied with successive iMacs were as unsatisfactory as anything produced by the PC industry. And the keyboards on some (though not all) PowerBook models also left much to be desired. (The best, in my experience, was the keyboard on the original G4 Titanium PowerBook). But now, suddenly, someone at Apple decided that things should change. The new wireless keyboard is simply delicious to use. And it’s a marvel of economical compression which fits neatly into my laptop case. The battery holder serves as a wedge that tilts the keyboard at a good angle for typing. And the on-off switch is neatly built into the end. As the man said, sometimes the right thing is the right thing to do.