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MS, in a brilliant strategy designed ito multiply the number of people using Linux on the desktop by several orders of magnitude, will tightly integrate DRM into the next version of it's operating system.
For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer's connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren't in place.
In short, the company is bending over backward--and investing considerable technological resources--to make sure Hollywood studios are happy with the next version of Windows, which is expected to ship on new PCs by late 2006. Microsoft believes it has to make nice with the entertainment industry if the PC is going to form the center of new digital home networks, which could allow such new features as streaming high-definition movies around the home.
Personally, I like Unix. A lot. I use it everywhere I can at work. At home, however, I've tended towards MS platforms for simplicity and convenience. It's not that I can't make Linux play nice with Windows, it's just easier to deal with all the people that aren't also on Linux when I have Windows. Sure, I give up a fair amount of power and utility, but it's been (on balance) easier with Windows.
Now, this changes. If MS is going to block me from using the full range of power that I desire out of my machine, then I'm not going to go with MS. It's just that simple.
Thanks to Cory for the tip, who also has a pretty sage observations:
Microsoft is cutting its throat here. There isn't a single Windows user who wants a version of Windows that lets her do less with her music and movies.
This could be the strongest play for open source yet....
With the rise of tech savvy amongst the general public, more and more photos are, well, questionable. Here aare some tips to pick out of the gold from the dross.
Kinda like LemonDate, True Dater allows people to review the dates they've been on from online dating.
Thanks to Rexfor the tip.
These days, advertisers are using more than just cookies to track where you've been on the web.
Thanks to Jason for the tip.
A quite interesting read.
For 20 years, broadcast processor designers have known that achieving highest loudness consistent with maximum punch and cleanliness requires extremely clean source material. For more than 20 years, Orban has published application notes to help broadcast engineers clean up their signal paths. These notes emphasize that any clipping in the path before the processor will cause subtle degradation that the processor will often exaggerate severely. The notes promote adequate headroom and low distortion amplification to prevent clipping even when an operator drives the meters into the red.
About three years ago, we started to notice CDs arriving at radio stations that had been pre-distorted in production or mastering to increase their loudness. For the first time, we started seeing frequently reoccurring flat topping caused by brute-force clipping in the production process. Broadcast processors react to pre-distorted CDs exactly the same way as they have reacted to accidentally clipped material for more than 20 years—they exaggerate the distortion. Because of phase rotation, the source clipping never increases on-air loudness—it just adds grunge. The authors understand the reasoning behind the CD loudness wars. Just as radio stations wish to offer the loudest signal on the dial, it is evident that recording artists, producers, and even some record labels want to have a loud product that stands out against its competition in a CD changer or a music store’s listening station.
Thanks to Brad for the tip.
So, as I said before, I'm thinking about getting a new cell phone. And I did. On the 6th of March, to be precise.
It was nifty. Lots of toys and gee whiz stuff, along with actually useful things (like the ability to synchronize the phone book on the phone with Outlook). And that's where the good news ends.
The phone that I got from Cingular had a known problem with it: namely, that the volume level of the earpiece couldn't keep up. I didn't know that at the time, but it became manifestly evident as soon as I tried to use the phone in a place that wasn't a quiet store.
Naturally, I took the phone back to the store and asked for a replacement. They said they would have one for me within a week. Well, today, I took the phone back. I had gone by the store a few times, checking on the delivery, but no success. Prior to me taking the phone back, I went to both Amazon and Cingular's websites and found working copies of the phone there. I also called to another Cingular store in the area. They didn't have any of them in stock, but they did a check of the computer and found fifteen (15!!) in stock in two other stores in the area.
Why the store that I bought the phone from couldn't do either of these things in three weeks is completely beyond my ability to understand. Needless to say, I returned the phone. And, if you'd like to see a copy of the letter I'm sending to Cingluar, click the Continue Reading link.
March 30, 2005
Cingular Wireless Customer Care
Attn: English Correspondent
17000 Cantrell Rd.
Little Rock AK 72223
Dear Sir or Madam:
On March 6th, 2005, I purchased a Motorola MPX220 phone at one of your Cingular stores (Newcom Digital, 3301 Lee Highway, Arlington VA 22207). Within a very short period of time, I noticed that the volume coming from the earpiece speaker was not even close to being acceptable. I attempted to return the phone to the store at that point. The store suggested that I call the Handset Exchange program. The following day, I called the program.
The rather nice gentleman on the other end of the phone informed me that I needed to return the phone to the establishment at which I had purchaed it, as it was their responsibility to affect any exchange within thirty days. I went by the place of business on the 8th of March to request a replacement phone. The manager on duty assured me that he would be able to get a new phone no later than the following Monday.
It is now the 30th of March, over three weeks since the initial report of the problem. At no point in time has anyone from Cingular (either the service provider or the vendor) made any effort whatsoever to contact me regarding my issue. I have taken time out of worko day to visit the vendor on a number of occasions, all to no avail.
I find this level of customer support distressing, to say the least. I have need for a SmartPhone (it happens to best address my business concerns) and decided that the Motorola MPX220 would be the optimal model. In fact, the sole reason why I even talked with Cingular in the first place was a direct result of Newcom Digital having one of the MPX220's in stock.
My understanding of the situation is that Newcom claims they have been unable to get a replacement ordered in time. I do not know if this is or is not the case; I do know, however, that I was able to locate a replacement online at Amazon within fifteen minutes. Furthermore, when I called around to a few other stores in the DC area, I was able to locate 15 MPX220's within ten minutes. If Newcom was actually having problems, I would have expected them to do me the courtesy of calling to let me know, rather than requiring me to travel to their location to find out in person.
...
In short, all of these reasons are directly contributing to me leaving Cingular. I have not been all that thrilled with Sprint's service, but at least they both do as they promise and seem to be vaguely competent.
Sincerely, if not highly annoyed,
--Casper
From time to time, I sell some of my older crap on Amazon. Still, I have some hopes of selling some original material of my own some day (maybe a Canvas CD someday?). Kevin Kelly gives the eight steps you need to get onto Amazon.
Blog one day, try to find a new job the next.
Part of running a blog is dealing with spam. I use MT-Blacklist to handle most of the headaches, but now I find a new variant. Referral spam.
One of the things that I enjoyed about checking my stats was finding a new website that had not only linked to me, but also sent a few people my way. Now spammers are trying to abuse this system to clog it up with crap. Such grand sites like:
At least it's not porn. I banned the domains from my site altogether and found that they are all coming from the same IP -- 219.150.118.16. Feel free to use this information to help out your own site, if you wish.
Ed Felten does a great service to us all, explainnig the ins-and-outs of how BitTorrent actually works.
Now we can see the big win offered by BitTorrent: the download time is independent of the number of users (N), and of the speed of the server's connection (S). Adding more users doesn't make the download faster, but it doesn't make it slower either. (It's also worth noting that if N, the number of users, is small, BitTorrent is worse than old-fashioned systems, by a factor of two.)
With BitTorrent, the bottleneck is the end user's net connection, only half of which can be used for BitTorrent downloads. (The other half must be used for uploads.) Most users' connections, even the broadband ones, will take an awfully long time to download high-quality video content, BitTorrent or not.
Yeah, there's some math there, but it's not a big deal.
Good things to consider, if you're thinking of building a web site.
Kryptos is the name of a sculpture posted outside of the cafeteria window at Langley VA (aka CIA headquarters). The artist embedded four encrypted messages onto Kryptos. Three of the messages have been solved; one has not. The story behind the sculpture makes for some interesting reading.
Thanks to David for the tip.
Yeah, I took some time away from writing. Both November and December have been crazy busy at my day job, but things are getting better. I should have more free time to burn on this site....
And, right on time, CD Baby comes up with Host Baby, a wizard tool for bands to host a website. It's a nice tool; probably good enough for the 80/20 rule of design. A bit pricey, though ($20/month).
Thanks to Brad for the tip.
A step-by-step to convert Tivo recordings into something a bit more portable.
I think I manage to fulfill all of these obligatoins, with the possible exceptoin of the No Search one: There's a search box for this blog, but not for the rest of the site. Then again, something like 75% of the content of this site is in the blog, so I don't think it's a huge loss.
I've been using Firefox for a while now, and it's easily the best browser I've seen in a long time. The bandwagon grows.
It's not all porn anymore.
Internet users are doing far fewer searches for sex and pornography and more for e-commerce and business than they were seven years ago, University of Pittsburgh and Penn State researchers say in a new book.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent," said Amanda Spink, the University of Pittsburgh professor who co-authored Web Search: Public Searching of the Web with Penn State professor Bernard J. Jansen.
Thanks to Andrew for the tip.
The nice part about this USB drive is that other USB drives can hook into it. Coping files may never have been easier.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
The advent of quality, inexpensive recording hardware/software available for home use has revolutioned the face of the music industry:
Digital technology has changed everything about the process of making music: From the way artists compose and record their songs, to the way these works are distributed. Apple Computer's GarageBand, Sony's ACID and other powerful yet easy-to-use software programs let professional musicians write and record music whenever and wherever the muse strikes. On the tour bus. In the dressing room. Even on the plane.
"Recording with Pro Tools made me feel more like a 14-year-old punk rocker than I have in years,'' said [Tim] Quirk [of Too Much Joy], 39, who by day is RealNetworks' executive music editor in San Francisco. "There are no rules and no restrictions. Even if you wanted to do things before, you were physically limited in how much you could pull off.''
Now, he says, ``If you can think of something, you can pull it off.''
Speaking as one of the people with a home setup, it's a lot of fun, too.
Thanks to Gerd for the tip.
The uncanny valley is a theory that explains why androids that are sort of humanistic (think C3-P0 from Star Wars) are acceptable to humans but creations that are almost human are not.
The Sims 2 is a popular game in which you can control the lives of computer characters. For the more sadistic out there, a step-by-step on how to torture the characters.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
Acadia, hot after trying to collect on a supposed patent on streaming media, is claiming that they have the exclusive right to wireless redirects. And just when I thought the scummiest thing on the planet would have been a lawyer for Microsoft.
Thanks to Donna for the tip.
A brand new wrinkle on the problem -- a virus that can be transmitted via a jpeg. You are reading this right -- it's now possible to get a virus just by viewing a JPG. Particularly in a MS program like Outlook or IE (one of the nearly infinite reasons why I use other products to do my web work). Rev Bob has some good deatils on what the virus does and how to defeat it.
In perperation for a possible EU edict, Microsoft has created a version of Windows that does not include the Windows Media Player embedded in it.
Thanks to Brad for the tip.
Whether it's a brand new series or an old favorite, the RCA LYRA Audio/Video Jukebox lets TV junkies record their favorite programs directly onto a pocket-sized device - without the need to use a PC. The 20 GB RCA RD2780 is a "virtual VCR" in your pocket, featuring a 3.5" screen that easily connects to a television set via an analog composite video output and can record up to 50 hours of video content directly from an analog video source. The RD2780 also plays back digital audio files and JPEG photos.
As Todd put it
Just plug into your TV via the venerable eponymous plugs [the RCA plugs --ed] and presto! Instant portable video. No need to go to messy websites for downloading - why go to CinemaNow when you can go right to Turner Movie Classics or HBO? It has line-in and line-out. No DRM - though press release makes passing mention of respect for "analog copy protection signals from pre-recorded media." So you can't in all likelihood copy your latest DVD to the device. But so what? Think of what you can copy.
Kryptonite locks can be opened with a Bic pen and hard shove (more detail on that, if you want it). George Hotelling draws a parallel between this and DRM/DMCA.
...Let's pretend that the law treated the Bic pen vulnerability the way it treats decrypting DVDs.
First, the person who discovered the flaw has his home raided by police and goes through two trials in as many years. Next, everyone linking to the video is sued, although the New York Times is spared. Finally once all the lawsuits had gone through their motions, Kryptonite congratulates itself on a job well done. Of course the don't fix the lock, but since it can silence anyone who talks about how to break the lock they don't need to.
Hmmm... does this sound like anyone to you?
Following up on an earlier post, Microsoft's Fable made more money on it's opening week than Sky Captain did.
See where a zip code lives in the US.
Greg Hughes his mp3 player, cannibalizing the 5G hard drive for his camera. Pretty cool.
Thanks to Johnny for the tip.
Spam is the bane of all of our existence. Run a blog with comments and you'll get even more. Some tips on how to fight spam in comments are helpful, but it's still mostly a lot of effort.
Thanks to David for the tip.
Ed Felten wades into the Wikipedia controversy, looking up Princeton University, virtual memory, the Microsoft antitrust case, as well as himself. Wiki holds pretty well, only botching the MS court case.
The technical entries, on virtual memory and public-key cryptography, were certainly accurate, which is a real achievement. Both are backed by detailed technical information that probably would not be available at all in a conventional encyclopedia. My only criticism of these entries is that they could do more to make the concepts accessible to non-experts. But that's a quibble; these entries are certainly up to the standard of typical encyclopedia writing about technical topics.
So far, so good. But now we come to the entry on the Microsoft case, which was riddled with errors. For starters, it got the formal name of the case (U.S. v. Microsoft) wrong. It badly mischaracterized my testimony, it got the timeline of Judge Jackson's rulings wrong, and it made terminological errors such as referring to the DOJ as "the prosecution" rather than the "the plaintiff". I corrected two of these errors (the name of the case, and the description of my testimony), but fixing the whole thing was too big an effort.
Until I read the Microsoft-case page, I was ready to declare Wikipedia a clear success. Now I'm not so sure. Yes, that page will improve over time; but new pages will be added. If the present state of Wikipedia is any indication, most of them will be very good; but a few will lead high-school report writers astray.
Thanks to OnlyConnect at MetaFilter, you can find out the dirt on the dating site you were thinking about using. Or you can find out if the guy/girl you're going to go out with is a lemon or not.
The RIAA is all unhappy about a Canadian inventor's software that allows him to record XM transmissions and play them back later. Sounds sneakily like a VCR, huh? It's almost as if Sony v. Betamax didn't happen....
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America said his organization had not reviewed the software, but said that in principle it was disturbed by the idea. "We remain concerned about any devices or software that permit listeners to transform a broadcast into a music library," RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said.
Thanks to Simon for the tip. And we'll go to him for the closing quote:
Let's hope nobody ever tells them about the compact cassette - they'd have kittens.
-- Update --
Here's more from Ernest. XM radio is pulling support for PC based listening. Not because the RIAA wants them to -- oh no. Just because.
A few days ago, Al Fasoldt wrote an open letter to librarians in the Syracuse Post-Standard to not use Wikipedia on the grounds that it couldn't be trusted (The Wikipedia is an encyclopedia editted by the users). Challenged by some denizens of the web, Fasoldt Alex Halavais entered thirteen changes on thirteen different entries hoping to prove the unreliabilty of Wikipedia. They were all found and corrected within two hours.
Thanks to Cory for the tip.
-- Update --
Ernest Miller, always indispensible, gives a nice wrap-up of the events.
-- Update 2 --
I've been corrected by the author; it was Alex Halavais who made the changes to Wikipedia, not Al Fasoldt. My bad, and it's been corrected in the main article.
An interesting piece of software. It slices, it dices, it julianes (and just WTF is that anyway?).
It also converts the following formats --
- Amiga 8svx files
- Apple/SGI AIFF files
- SUN .au files
- CD-R data (music CD format)
- Macintosh HCOM files
- Amiga MAUD files
- MP3 files (with optional external library) [and I recognize that this caveat probably moves the this piece of software into the for-techies-only list]
- Psion Record.app files
- Turtle beach SampleVision files
- Soundtool (DOS) files
- Yamaha TX-16W sampler files
- Sound Blaster .VOC files
- Ogg Vorbis files
- Microsoft .WAV files
to list just a few of the features. It's worth checking out, so long as you're comfortable with command line utilities.
The latest version of Discs can hold about a terabyte of data. To do the math really quickly, that's about 200 DVDs or 1400 CDs. Does this mean I have to buy all this music all over again?
A listing of most of the prominent blogging software.
BugMeNot -- a great site that allowed people to get around that annoying registration that some websites use. Well, unfortunately, they're no more.
Interestingly enough, these are the top 25 sites requested on BugMeNot.
-- Update --
Some more info on what actually happened.
-- Update 2 --
BugMeNot may be gone, but it'll be back soon.
Pardon me while I get my geek on.
SHA-1 is a one way hash algorithm used almost everywhere to secure computer transactions. If you've ever bought something over the web using SSL, you've used this without knowing about it. Well, it may have been cracked -- or, to be more accurate, a hole may have been found in the math. If this is the case, it's a big deal -- almost every website will have to retool to not fall prey to hackers, and there will be massive compatibility problems until everything gets worked out.
I must emphasize the word maybe. This may not pan out to be a full bore hole in the function. Either way, it's something to pay attention to.
-- Update --
It seems that it is true in a sense. A MD5 variant has absolutely been proven flawed; SHA-1 is still up in the air.
Paper Napkin is an email service dedicated to anonymous rejection emails.
So here's the scenario: You're out at a bar, riding transit, or even just walking down the street, and some bozo who desperately wants into your pants starts up a conversation with you. Rather than make a scene or make them upset, you're polite and at least nod at the proper times. Then, of course, they ask you for your number. Except this is 2004, so maybe they ask for your email address instead.
That's where Paper Napkin comes in. Give them anyname@papernapkin.net, tell them it's your address, and when they write you, they'll automatically get a response telling them how badly they've been rejected.
Not all of these would be required, but it's worth looking at when creating a site.
They know exactly what they want.
It's a close call.
Thanks to Simon for the tip.
I love Fark. There's always something there to read, and it usually draws a chuckle from me. Yet, a possible fly is in the ointment.
After trying to figure out a deal they told me that I could just buy the editorial. The cost? Like $300 to $400 for a story.
I was shocked…. all this time I’ve been reading Fark.com it turns out that some percentage of the stories are paid for. Looking back on it I’m now sure the adult links are all paid for, as are the ifilm.com links.
It would make some sense as to why such dreck as iFilm is featured as much as it is. Just for the record (and in the interests of full disclosure), I do not get paid for anything I say here. If you buy something from Amazon off of one of my links, I get a cut, but that's it.
The geek in me is just about frothing at the mouth of a stapleless stapler.
Coming on the heels of the whole IE fandango, you can remove IE completely from your machine if you want. Well, remove enough references to it so that it won't be called anymore.
One critics' thoughts on the Sony Walkman.
The Walkman, with revolutionary force, made music portable and subject to personal selection. It fulfilled the nursery-rhyme, ‘he shall have music wherever he goes’ and became so ubiquitous in a short period of time, with 340 million worldwide sales, that its brandname became generic and was admitted to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Its advantages were many, mostly unforseen. ...
But these benefits were soon outweighed by its corrosive effects.
He ends his rant with a bit of over dramatizing:
So while the moguls of Sony may celebrate the jubilee of another small step for mankind with the launch of an I-pod challenging Newtork Walkman, I shall mourn an art that was ripped from its rightful place and reduced in moral worth. The day the Walkman landed was the day the music began to die.
Thanks to Andrew for the tip.
Shahin sent me a link to Play Like A Pro. A few articles and a mountain of links for manufacturers (bass, for example) as well as a list of great guitarists.
Iosono is a way to do very spatially oriented sound using approximately 300 speakers. In a recent demo,
...[A] ring of over 300 speakers hangs roughly 10 feet above the ground. Using a digital pen and a touch-sensitive tablet, a sound engineer drags individual sound elements from one point to another to direct the position of sound elements. Samples of phantasmic voices whisper, hiss and appear to be darting and sliding invisibly from one spot to another throughout the room.
Iosono's developers claim the system offers "three-dimensional sound," and that it could revolutionize the entertainment experience for movie theaters, theme park attractions, gaming environments and home systems.
It sounds cool enough to me that I'd go out of my way to check it out.
Thanks to Xeni for the tip.
Jeff Jarvis lists a mountain of blogs concerning the media. I didn't make it -- surely there was some sort of oversight.
If you're interested, that is.
It's not just that someone took the time to choreograph dancing in an online game, it's that the developers wrote the code to support it.
Here's Chumbawamba and Vanilla Ice with characters from Star Wars.
Thanks again to Cory for the tip.
A quick look-see at some of the inner workings of MS Office.
And more on MS Office causing problems. Although, in this case, I'm very surprised that genetic researchers aren't keeping a backup of their data.
Audible Magic, the techology introduced by the RIAA to campus networks to foil (I just love that word. "Curses, foiled again," the villian said as he twirled his moustache) file sharing, doesn't work all that well. Edward Felten analyzes a number of reasons why it has some pretty massive technological holes in it
CopySense [Audible Magic's product name] would be defeated in practice, without even reaching the question of whether Audible Magic's underlying audio-scanning technology is sound. His encryption argument applies to any system that claims to detect infringing music transfers by listening to network traffic.
It may turn out -- and I suspect it would, if independent experts were able to study Audible Magic's technology -- that copyrighted music files could be tweaked in a way that made them undetectable to Audible Magic's algorithms, while still sounding fine to typical human listeners.
When paper shredders just aren't enough.
Sites that require registration to be read (NY Times, Salon as two quick examples) are not doing so well when it comes to web searches.
...[R]ecently, when I googled the terms "Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib" -- certainly one of the most intensively covered news stories of the year -- the first New York Times article was the 295th search result, trailing the New Yorker, Guardian, ABC and CBS News, New York Post, MSNBC, Slate, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Denver Post, USA Today, Bill O'Reilly on FoxNews and a host of others news sites.
What's more, tons of other non-traditional news sources came ahead of the Times, including a number of blogs and low-budget rabble-rousers like Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, truthout and Beliefnet (a site dedicated to spirituality). So did Al-Jazeera (twice). But the Times still ranked low, even after it plastered an Abu Ghraib story on its front page for 32 straight days between May and June. And Google isn't the only one to shun the Times: I got similar results from other search engines (AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo).
I wonder if they'll drop the registration requirements. I doubt it; they seem to perceive an economic benefit to having people register. Either they expect to make money off subscriptions (The Wall Street Journal does this successfully, Salon is failing quite miserably), or they think the gained demographic information for marketing purposes is valuable (although I would suspect that a majority of their data is spoofed and flawed -- I know that I don't give out real information).
Quite a few of the heavies of technology and film are banding together to try and create video technology that cannot be pirated.
The alliance marks the culmination of years of tentative and often suspicious contact between the high-tech industry and Hollywood. It will be aimed at developing specifications to protect copyrighted content such as movies inside home networks. If the group is successful, a consumer might be able to download a high-definition movie, store it on a PC, watch it on a television and transfer it to a mobile device to watch while traveling. ... Despite the inclusion of some tech and content heavyweights, to be successful many hurdles will need to be overcome. Most importantly are the differing goals of the two main camps. Tech companies have much to gain from the digitization of the living room and want consumers to be able to perform a wide variety of tasks with digital content. Companies that produce movies and music want make sure that people are buying the content and not simply watching pirated material, a la Napster.
On the one hand, you have to give these companies credit. Unlike some people (say, the record labels), they're not ignoring the problems ostrich-like, hoping that it will go away. Rather, they're trying to work with people who have some rather competing goals (while both want people to buy as much of their product as possible, techies want to ease the use of the studio's products as much as possible, where the studio just wants people to buy as much as possible). On the other hand, money talks and consumers don't have as much as the studio does. In any case, it's bears closer attention.
-- Update --
Some good thoughts from Edward on the subject.
The new entity will fail just as badly as the old ones, and for the same reason: there is no effective anti-copying technology on which to standardize. You can get together as many company representatives as you like, and you can issue as many joint reports and declarations as you like, but you cannot change the fact that the group's goal is infeasible. This just isn't the sort of problem that can be solved by negotiation.
But perhaps the group's real goal is to limit the use of digital media technology by law-abiding consumers. That's certainly achievable. And, as Ernest Miller notes, they may also be able to erect barriers to entry in technology markets, by creating "security" requirements that lock out smaller companies.
Brad also has a word or two:
So this cross-industry working group resembles nothing less pathetic than the failed SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) project which made the music industry look like a pack of fools several years ago.
What is the quixotic dream of the content companies? Call it smooth friction. The content owners want to establish invisible gates that quietly prevent undue levels of copying without getting the user angry. Accordingly, they are looking ahead to targeting not just P2P companies, or Internet service providers, but each private junction that holds together an in-home network. Sure, watch the start of an HD movie in your living room, and finish it in the bedroom. But there might be a technology gate between those two rooms that prevents making a copy that could leak out of the house.
The alliance of tech and content companies is an uneasy one. Silicon Valley needs to build copying devices. Tech companies recognize an unalterable truth about their marketplace: people love making copies of cultural products. Copying technology has driven the computer and Internet industries for the last seven years. Hollywood despises copying technology, and always has—despite the fact the once-reviled VCR has spawned a hugely lucrative branch of the industry.
Some pretty cool technology.
A few years ago, I was working at a facility that required me to be very familiar with computer security threats. I had heard about quantum encryption, thought I should bone up on it just to be familiar with it and picked the seminal work on quantum crypto. I remember reading about the first three of four pages when my brain started hurting. Really badly. It's one of the few books that I put back on my shelf rather than read because I just couldn't follow it.
Maybe the Turing Test shouldn't be the end-all, be-all yardstick anymore.
I want. I want! I WANT!
(thanks to Brad for the tip)
For DC, Virginia and Maryland.
Coming on the heels of the Internet Explorer discussion is an overview of the open source Mozilla, as well as the Firefox/Thunderbird approach.