... they'd mandate that ISP's did this at the DNS server level. I'd bet 90+ % of average Joes use their ISP's DNS and have no idea what it is.
(Well, except in the UK where TalkTalk's DNS goes down so often half the population have learnt about OpenDNS)
Of course, this would allow the technically capable to get round it easily, but hey, so would what they are suggesting.
The difference is that mandating a blacklist on an ISP DNS server is actually feasible and would not attract so much attention - making the world and his wife change browsers isn't.
I'd have thought the real "concern" among these RIAA types is not that someone will record a youtube vid (someone made it possible to watch listen for free already by uploading) but that someone might make it easy to get a $5 / month Napster subscription and then just digitally record 1000 albums, then end the subscription and keep the MP3's for ever.
I frequently use TotalRecorder to record dial in conference calls/webinars from Skype so I can listen at my leisure when walking the dog in the woods. Is that fair use ?
This was, what, 2 years before the netscape browser went mainstream ?
There was no web to speak of, people like me who were heavily into CompuServe knew the internet as this necessary evil to send mail to people outside CIS but which (without MIME yet becoming widely accepted as the defacto way to attach a file) was a real mess to use for communication and tended to full your screen with horrible headers few could understand.
At this point "the internet" (Archie, Gopher etc) was for serious geeks only.
You could argue that they shouldn't have been even trying to do the segment without more research, but to not know what they were talking about in 1994 hardly put them at the bottom of the pile.
In fact considering there was no real web yet, it was actually fairly prescient for them to be even realising it was worth talking about
There's a range of different attitudes to speed cameras.
Some feel that any speed limits are bogus because "I know I can drive safely at 90 as long as it is away from pedestrians". Unfortunately people's self image as a driver is not always correlated with their actual ability.
Some feel there are plenty of incidences of needlessly low speed limits. (There's a patch of 50mph freeway near Cardiff, UK, where I live. Why not 70 ? Are they just persecuting motorists ? Turns out they accidentally built central crash barriers with too low a crash speed rating and now have to upgrade the whole stretch. Stupid, but not sinister).
If you've just left a freeway at 70, 30 feels like you could get out and walk. Without some external persuasion, motorist simply go too fast in these situations. And they are not the best judges of what too fast is.
Often residents have a big say in what the speed limits are. They campaign for camera in and upstream of their distructs. I live on a bend everyone goes round too fast. People frequently lose control and mount the kerb, (luckily not while there was a pedestrian standing there, so far). Once a car misjudged it so badly they smashed through a 5 ft tall brick wall into our garden, throwing bricks onto the kids trampoline 20 yards away.
If they put a speed camera 100 yards from my house I'd applaud it. But 99% of local drivers would rail against it and call it a revenue raising device.
If you are one who rails against cameras, ask youself this. If you had a switch you could flick in your car that would automatically ensure your car never exceeded the current speed limit, would you flick it on ?
What if you had a transparent process for questioning suspect speed limits (and all the "bogus" ones were revised). Would you flick the switch then ?
What if your insurance would be half price if you had the switch locked in place ?
(Personally I think such a switch would be dangerous - Some people would drive everywhere with their foot to the floor and blame the state when they rolled the car at a tight corner. But it's interesting to explore how people think.)
I never cease to be amazed how people claim cameras trapped or tricked them. Speed limits are explicit and extremely easy to obey. Noone should need telling cameras are there.
There is an argument for keeping their location secret (so people don't exhibit dangerous braking behaviour in their immediate vicinity) but publishing data about how many people were caught in this general area.
I've been caught myself. No doubt I thought "bastards !" at the time but I was banged to rights and if I can't take responsibility for my own actions then cameras are are the least of my worries in life.
Seems we have a spectrum of possibilities for what a link is
At one end, a link that leads directly to a download.
At the other end, describing an infringing website in such a way that people can find it and engage in activity with infringing content. Ie the news storty example mentioned above.
What bothers me is that I could post a link to a blog in jan that started hosting infringing content in feb. Am I supposed to revisit any link I post periodically to see if the target is still valid ?
There have been various legal analogies posted here, but I feel that "linking to illegal content" is like running a TV ad for an illegal casino. There is clear intent to get people to go there and do something illegal.
But if you're producing a local free newspaper that lists the local businesses in your high street and you list a video shop that (though this is not common knowledge) sells dodgy vids, you'd hopefully get away with it.
The difference is whether you have a reasonable chance of having not known that there was illegal stuff there.
In the casino TV ad case, I'd expect the TV station to respond to a takedown, but not to be prosecuted if they had not actually seen the ad when it ran.
Google can link to infringing sites with impunity because they have no way of realising till they are told. Robots don't do advanced legel processing. But a person who sets out to post a link to a torrent site has fairly clear intent.
The assumption that people would subscribe just to read it on the iPad almost for the novelty value seems to be at the core of the problem.
if you actually look at the dead tree experience, and ask "how could iPad be better than this" you end up with either
- sensible stuff (cross links to articles in this or previous issues, or better use of hyperlinks to replace "inset panels" to make reading flow better)
- hype and nonsense ("make it interactive" whatever that means) which miss the point that sometimes people want to just consume without interacting.
Advertisers, though, should be salivating. A video ad with a click through to be sent more details while you carry on reading the magazine ? Ads that can feedback WHO turned on the volume for this particular vid. Targeted live ads (this guy likes car ads a lot but hates drug company ads).
And yet unlike the web, the guy's not sat at a computer - he's in relaxed mag reading mode.
I'd have said that the real innovation that would make the iPad compelling should be coming from the advertisers, not the main content presenters.
But regards pricing, there should be a single subscription and you get all formats.
I get the economist by subscription, and I consume about half on a sat am with breakfast (dead tree), and half as MP3 while walking the dog. The latter REALLY adds value for me, but if I had to pay separately I might not.
I play it on a Sonos, a sony phone, a PC and an very old MP3 player. And an MP3-capable CD player in a car (when I can be bothered to burn a disk)
I didn't have all these options before I could buy plain old MP3's easily. iTunes store was of no interest to me.
Could I buy all the albums I wanted by finding them for free somewhere ? Probably.
Could I be bothered ? No
Would said pirate site(s) offer me the convenience of the Amazon background downloader ? Probably not. Would I trust a piece of background software from a pirate site anyway ?
Would the site make sensible recommendations based on what I have anonymously downloaded before ? Hardly.
So if you're comparing the convenience of Amazon with the free content from god knows where, I'll happily pay £5 per album. And I think Amazon are doing very nicely thank you to prove that penty of people agree. Or maybe it's just that 90+% of the populace are not geeks who enjoy finding pirate sites and downloading torrents.
Of course, if Amazon offered a legal free and a paid option with no difference between them, I'd take free. Why not ?
But that's not the comparison.
Now, as many have mentioned here, the common scenario is that the "legal" option is actually a complete pain in the ass compared with an illegal free version somewhere.
That's just stupid, isn't it ?
Another point ...
Have you noticed that Macdonalds don't charge for the use of their seats. Oh my god, what if all the seats get taken up by people who are not actually buying food there ?
(And Macdonalds execs do say that they are basically in the real estate business, don't they ?)
I guess RedHat's business model must be useless, because Linux is free, right ?
or AVG.
or LogMeIn
Both of which I have at least 1 paid (and several free) subscriptions too.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Never pay a man to do the job of an inatimate object...
Even if they had..... big whoop. 150 people killed
2 points.
1. The idea is to terrorise. That is, make Americans not feel safe. A plane bombed out of the air would sink the aviation industry lower and hurt the USA generally.
2. A plane bombed out of the air over a major city would be hard pressed to miss a load of people on the ground.
However, the shoe bomber would maybe have left enough of a plane for a pilot to make at least some choices before meeting the ground.
However, (and I said this after 9/11) if Al Quaeda really wanted to scare the American people they would pull off a million small operations in cities and small towns alike so NOBODY felt safe.
9/11 was for recruitment. There won't be a re-run of the same thing again.
Really good ones (eg SLR, for quality pics.
And point and shoot for just capturing the moment.
And there are correspondingly two kinds of picture, ones where quality matters (eg a landscape, portrait, whatever) and something just recording an event (the time when John fell down that storm drain when drunk).
When I was at college in the mid to late 80's, I knew two photographers. One was all SLR and lenses, the other had small Olympus compact in a leather belt pouch. Only the second of these would catch the hilarious event on the way home from the pub, because he took his compact EVERYWHERE.
When you first have kids you often decide you need a REAL camera (or a video camera) because there is so much you'll never want to forget. But experience starts to show you that
- you can't carry an SLR every where you go
- you can't predict when the most valuable moments will happen.
So it comes down to trying to have a camera with you ALL THE TIME. And there's only a few ways that is going to happen:
- it's on your keyfob
- it's on your watch
- it's in your wallet
- it's on your phone.
Long before iPhone happened, Nokia had become one of the top sellers of digital cameras. My wife and I choose camera phones when it was still an extra feature specifically to not miss moments with the kids.
Now we have citizen journalism, movies of events that nooen would have ever seen otherwise, and it's JUST because so many people are carrying a camera.
I've probably MMS's about 3 pictures in my life.
All my pics go from Phone via USB to home NAS to Cloud. Not through an overpriced data plan, and not through a carrier's network.
The camera on a phone has taken off simply because it is there when you need it, and it's simple.
The fact that it has taken off more of late is not the iPhone, it's that the cameras are finally good enough. My very basic phone now is better than my digital camera purchase of 5 years ago.
The connectivity / smartphone angle is hardly relevant at all.
If you think differently, explain the Flip video camera. Is that a success because of connectivity ?
If someone rang the local newspaper and dissed the coach, would they ban use of phones ?
If there is a specific act (e.g. criticising the coach) that they wish to ban, why not say "to be in the team you agree to not publically criticise the coach". This is part of the contract of being in the team (not attending the institution).
I'm sure people would not fail to apply to a university that said "if you are selected to be in our football team, you will be asked to sign a 'don't publically diss the coach' clause before being allowed to join the team.
The sanction should be limited to being thrown out of the team.
Of course, there should be some mechanism for disaffected players to privately raise constructive criticism as a first resort.
But if the up front clause was "don't ever publically criticise teaching at this institution", then I'd certainly not apply to any such university. I mean, what have they got to hide ?
But no Facebook ? They must be joking.
I mean, I'm 45 and barely use Facebook but at least I get how important it is to younger folk these days.
Like "Tomorrow there will be a huge leak and our moles in iran might be outed/arrested/tortured. Lets neutralise them today just in case".
I find it staggering that so many docs (inc supposed quotes from the Saudi king, UN bugging, etc) were at such a low level of confidentiality and available to so many people to see. How could one person make off with so much ?
Sounds like fairly poor information management to me.
If there's an upside, it's watching Iran try to dispute the revelation that they have no friends in the region...
But overall, this doesn't sound like dirty secrets being revealed (like the helicopter shooting video was). This is just pissing a lot of people off when noone serious is learning anything they didn't know.
This time I feel like saying to Wikileaks "and your point is ?".
The radio network has per second OVERAGE billing.
So as long as the cops don't "over use" it, costs are reasonable.
It strikes me that if a Government on an austerity drive can renege on a pension commitment to someone who has spent their life making contributions on the understanding of final benefits, they can certainly renegotiate a contract with private some radio company.
But as the original article implies, there are people higher up the food chain who don't wish to rock the boat too much.
BTW, these cops don't expect to text sentences with the new arrangement, but short status codes.
I wonder if this bright idea stems from the recent exercise when a police force tweeted 24 hrs of control room info to show the public what they actually do all day.
Given that
- you can buy secure end to end encrypted cellphones
- cell companies have somewhat of a headstart over private radio networks.
It would appear to have made more sense to have put the money into fixing the gaps in the UK cell network, rather than building a new one from scratch.
After all, there are mechanisms for prioritising 999 (911) calls on networks already, and surely telcos could allow the police to roam on any and all networks they can find ?
I would think that a police officer with secure cell (with built in GPS & camera) would be a better bet than one with a fancy 3rd party radio that is just a radio.
They could upload faces, vehicle registrations etc and get route planning info or direct feed from helicopers sent in real time during a chase. And whatever else comes out next year (biometric id, real time ECG etc)
& this would be a good excuse for someone to make a genuinely rugged smartphone (something I'd like to get !)
-- 1. Watermarking ... decreases the quality of the content --
Seriously ? If I hide a small encrypted code in 11MB of MP3 it will distort the music ?
-- 2. Watermarking is almost always easily removed. --
There seems to be an assumption here that all watermarking is to some "standard". As a content producer, I could use a different system with every single thing I publish if I wanted. There's certainly no reason to use an open or published standard. A pirate would need to "diff" many legit copies to identify what the watermarked part of the data was.
So a generic tool that would enable a non expert punter to remove the watermark from a single item of media he has paid for before uploading it strikes me as a nearly impossible coding task.
Programs to get around DRM are widely available because lots of end users may want to use them. Code to remove a watermark would be far less in demand because only the uploader would actually care. Furthermore, with DRM circumvention software the punter can tell if it has worked (it plays). With watermark removal software, how can I tell it has really worked ?
The main limitation, as you say, is the expense of generating individual watermarked media on the fly at point of sale so it can be tied to the buyer (or rather, at the point of distribution, as the publisher does not want the retailer running this).
It'd be easier if they had started a while back. Now the genie is out of the bottle (stores up and running selling un DRM'd MP3s are now the norm) the best that the distributor could hope for is a watermark per retailer (so they can at least follow part of the trail).
-- Of course the "real pirates" (and in that rather ironicly titled group I include anyone who knows what to do with source code) will have got there long before that and will have broken the technology before the standard to implement it was even decided upon and the source code and/or scripts for it will likewise be floating around for anyone who cares to look.--
Watermarking does not have to be to a "standard".
Every publisher can have their own. They can change it daily.
All that matters is
- the publisher's search tool can find and identify rogue content of their own
- the principle is algorithmically strong enough to make a legal case against the identified source of an upload
-- In the mean time, it will turn out that the new "technology" means that the media you just bought doesn't work with whatever you're trying to play it on --
A watermark does not make an MP3 unplayable. It is hidden within the data.
-- Why is it everyone who suggests watermarks things they are the first person to have thought of it
I mrerly asked "why don't they use it ?". Because I genuinely don't understand and thought I'd get an answer here (of anywhere).
It always struck me that DRM pisses off the innocent and won't catch the guilty.
So if you were trying to reduce the incidence of MP3's being pirated you'd
- watermark each copy sold, tying it to the buyer
- have something google-like to find your content on illegal sharing sites, and identify the buyer whose copy was fed to the sites
- fine the people who allowed their personal copy to be pirated.
Now, REAL pirates could get round this (ie could remove the watermark)
But it addresses the worry that making content too easy to copy would make even amateur pirates share files.
Crucially, it does not in any way impede the use of the content by the innocent.
But it makes distribution a tad more expensive and I suspect some in the industry are just too greedy to put up with that cost increase.
It won't stop me copying something for a mate, but it might stop me uploading my copy so 20,000 people can download it.
And that's surely what they are worried about, isn't it ?
On the post: Politicians Considering Useless Browser Blocks Against 'Rogue' Sites
If they had any sense...
(Well, except in the UK where TalkTalk's DNS goes down so often half the population have learnt about OpenDNS)
Of course, this would allow the technically capable to get round it easily, but hey, so would what they are suggesting.
The difference is that mandating a blacklist on an ISP DNS server is actually feasible and would not attract so much attention - making the world and his wife change browsers isn't.
On the post: Is Downloading And Converting A YouTube Video To An MP3 Infringement?
What about streaming services ?
I frequently use TotalRecorder to record dial in conference calls/webinars from Skype so I can listen at my leisure when walking the dog in the woods. Is that fair use ?
On the post: Katie Couric And Bryant Gumbel Discover The Internet
Give them a break
There was no web to speak of, people like me who were heavily into CompuServe knew the internet as this necessary evil to send mail to people outside CIS but which (without MIME yet becoming widely accepted as the defacto way to attach a file) was a real mess to use for communication and tended to full your screen with horrible headers few could understand.
At this point "the internet" (Archie, Gopher etc) was for serious geeks only.
You could argue that they shouldn't have been even trying to do the segment without more research, but to not know what they were talking about in 1994 hardly put them at the bottom of the pile.
In fact considering there was no real web yet, it was actually fairly prescient for them to be even realising it was worth talking about
On the post: It's January, Which Means Congress Promises Patent Reform That Will Never Come
Re: Piracy Coalition
Use patents to create new wealth ? I thought they used new inventions for that.
On the post: Band Discovers Leaked Song... And Its Response Is To Release A Better Version For Free
Where's the preview ?
Remember when you went into a record store and could listen on headphones before buying. That's not such a new idea is it ?
Imagine going into a car dealership and being told you couldn't sit in a car to get the feel of it until you'd actually bought it ?
On the post: Band Discovers Leaked Song... And Its Response Is To Release A Better Version For Free
Worked for me
But now I have the Mp3, c/o of this story
And I kinda like it.
Might go and buy an album. Assuming it is available to buy is MP3 not some stupid DRM'd format.
On the post: UK Man Convicted Of A Crime For Letting Drivers Know They Should Slow Down To Avoid Speed Camera
Clarifying attitudes
Some feel that any speed limits are bogus because "I know I can drive safely at 90 as long as it is away from pedestrians". Unfortunately people's self image as a driver is not always correlated with their actual ability.
Some feel there are plenty of incidences of needlessly low speed limits. (There's a patch of 50mph freeway near Cardiff, UK, where I live. Why not 70 ? Are they just persecuting motorists ? Turns out they accidentally built central crash barriers with too low a crash speed rating and now have to upgrade the whole stretch. Stupid, but not sinister).
If you've just left a freeway at 70, 30 feels like you could get out and walk. Without some external persuasion, motorist simply go too fast in these situations. And they are not the best judges of what too fast is.
Often residents have a big say in what the speed limits are. They campaign for camera in and upstream of their distructs. I live on a bend everyone goes round too fast. People frequently lose control and mount the kerb, (luckily not while there was a pedestrian standing there, so far). Once a car misjudged it so badly they smashed through a 5 ft tall brick wall into our garden, throwing bricks onto the kids trampoline 20 yards away.
If they put a speed camera 100 yards from my house I'd applaud it. But 99% of local drivers would rail against it and call it a revenue raising device.
If you are one who rails against cameras, ask youself this. If you had a switch you could flick in your car that would automatically ensure your car never exceeded the current speed limit, would you flick it on ?
What if you had a transparent process for questioning suspect speed limits (and all the "bogus" ones were revised). Would you flick the switch then ?
What if your insurance would be half price if you had the switch locked in place ?
(Personally I think such a switch would be dangerous - Some people would drive everywhere with their foot to the floor and blame the state when they rolled the car at a tight corner. But it's interesting to explore how people think.)
I never cease to be amazed how people claim cameras trapped or tricked them. Speed limits are explicit and extremely easy to obey. Noone should need telling cameras are there.
There is an argument for keeping their location secret (so people don't exhibit dangerous braking behaviour in their immediate vicinity) but publishing data about how many people were caught in this general area.
I've been caught myself. No doubt I thought "bastards !" at the time but I was banged to rights and if I can't take responsibility for my own actions then cameras are are the least of my worries in life.
On the post: Would Twitter Be Liable For Links To Infringing Material?
Different shades
At one end, a link that leads directly to a download.
At the other end, describing an infringing website in such a way that people can find it and engage in activity with infringing content. Ie the news storty example mentioned above.
What bothers me is that I could post a link to a blog in jan that started hosting infringing content in feb. Am I supposed to revisit any link I post periodically to see if the target is still valid ?
There have been various legal analogies posted here, but I feel that "linking to illegal content" is like running a TV ad for an illegal casino. There is clear intent to get people to go there and do something illegal.
But if you're producing a local free newspaper that lists the local businesses in your high street and you list a video shop that (though this is not common knowledge) sells dodgy vids, you'd hopefully get away with it.
The difference is whether you have a reasonable chance of having not known that there was illegal stuff there.
In the casino TV ad case, I'd expect the TV station to respond to a takedown, but not to be prosecuted if they had not actually seen the ad when it ran.
Google can link to infringing sites with impunity because they have no way of realising till they are told. Robots don't do advanced legel processing. But a person who sets out to post a link to a torrent site has fairly clear intent.
On the post: As Predicted: iPad Magazine Subscriber Numbers Plummeting
How could iPad be better than dead tree ?
if you actually look at the dead tree experience, and ask "how could iPad be better than this" you end up with either
- sensible stuff (cross links to articles in this or previous issues, or better use of hyperlinks to replace "inset panels" to make reading flow better)
- hype and nonsense ("make it interactive" whatever that means) which miss the point that sometimes people want to just consume without interacting.
Advertisers, though, should be salivating. A video ad with a click through to be sent more details while you carry on reading the magazine ? Ads that can feedback WHO turned on the volume for this particular vid. Targeted live ads (this guy likes car ads a lot but hates drug company ads).
And yet unlike the web, the guy's not sat at a computer - he's in relaxed mag reading mode.
I'd have said that the real innovation that would make the iPad compelling should be coming from the advertisers, not the main content presenters.
But regards pricing, there should be a single subscription and you get all formats.
I get the economist by subscription, and I consume about half on a sat am with breakfast (dead tree), and half as MP3 while walking the dog. The latter REALLY adds value for me, but if I had to pay separately I might not.
On the post: Debunking The 'But People Just Want Stuff For Free' Myth
It's the convenience, stupid
I play it on a Sonos, a sony phone, a PC and an very old MP3 player. And an MP3-capable CD player in a car (when I can be bothered to burn a disk)
I didn't have all these options before I could buy plain old MP3's easily. iTunes store was of no interest to me.
Could I buy all the albums I wanted by finding them for free somewhere ? Probably.
Could I be bothered ? No
Would said pirate site(s) offer me the convenience of the Amazon background downloader ? Probably not. Would I trust a piece of background software from a pirate site anyway ?
Would the site make sensible recommendations based on what I have anonymously downloaded before ? Hardly.
So if you're comparing the convenience of Amazon with the free content from god knows where, I'll happily pay £5 per album. And I think Amazon are doing very nicely thank you to prove that penty of people agree. Or maybe it's just that 90+% of the populace are not geeks who enjoy finding pirate sites and downloading torrents.
Of course, if Amazon offered a legal free and a paid option with no difference between them, I'd take free. Why not ?
But that's not the comparison.
Now, as many have mentioned here, the common scenario is that the "legal" option is actually a complete pain in the ass compared with an illegal free version somewhere.
That's just stupid, isn't it ?
Another point ...
Have you noticed that Macdonalds don't charge for the use of their seats. Oh my god, what if all the seats get taken up by people who are not actually buying food there ?
(And Macdonalds execs do say that they are basically in the real estate business, don't they ?)
I guess RedHat's business model must be useless, because Linux is free, right ?
or AVG.
or LogMeIn
Both of which I have at least 1 paid (and several free) subscriptions too.
On the post: New TSA Report: Every Test Gun, Bomb Part Or Knife Got Past Screeners At Some Airport
Re: Re: Re: Re: Never pay a man to do the job of an inatimate object...
2 points.
1. The idea is to terrorise. That is, make Americans not feel safe. A plane bombed out of the air would sink the aviation industry lower and hurt the USA generally.
2. A plane bombed out of the air over a major city would be hard pressed to miss a load of people on the ground.
However, the shoe bomber would maybe have left enough of a plane for a pilot to make at least some choices before meeting the ground.
However, (and I said this after 9/11) if Al Quaeda really wanted to scare the American people they would pull off a million small operations in cities and small towns alike so NOBODY felt safe.
9/11 was for recruitment. There won't be a re-run of the same thing again.
On the post: A Look Back: Remember When Camera Phones Were A Dumb Idea?
It's not about the connectivity
Really good ones (eg SLR, for quality pics.
And point and shoot for just capturing the moment.
And there are correspondingly two kinds of picture, ones where quality matters (eg a landscape, portrait, whatever) and something just recording an event (the time when John fell down that storm drain when drunk).
When I was at college in the mid to late 80's, I knew two photographers. One was all SLR and lenses, the other had small Olympus compact in a leather belt pouch. Only the second of these would catch the hilarious event on the way home from the pub, because he took his compact EVERYWHERE.
When you first have kids you often decide you need a REAL camera (or a video camera) because there is so much you'll never want to forget. But experience starts to show you that
- you can't carry an SLR every where you go
- you can't predict when the most valuable moments will happen.
So it comes down to trying to have a camera with you ALL THE TIME. And there's only a few ways that is going to happen:
- it's on your keyfob
- it's on your watch
- it's in your wallet
- it's on your phone.
Long before iPhone happened, Nokia had become one of the top sellers of digital cameras. My wife and I choose camera phones when it was still an extra feature specifically to not miss moments with the kids.
Now we have citizen journalism, movies of events that nooen would have ever seen otherwise, and it's JUST because so many people are carrying a camera.
I've probably MMS's about 3 pictures in my life.
All my pics go from Phone via USB to home NAS to Cloud. Not through an overpriced data plan, and not through a carrier's network.
The camera on a phone has taken off simply because it is there when you need it, and it's simple.
The fact that it has taken off more of late is not the iPhone, it's that the cameras are finally good enough. My very basic phone now is better than my digital camera purchase of 5 years ago.
The connectivity / smartphone angle is hardly relevant at all.
If you think differently, explain the Flip video camera. Is that a success because of connectivity ?
IMHO...
On the post: Is It A First Amendment Violation For Public Universities To Tell Athletes They Can't Tweet?
It's not about the medium
If there is a specific act (e.g. criticising the coach) that they wish to ban, why not say "to be in the team you agree to not publically criticise the coach". This is part of the contract of being in the team (not attending the institution).
I'm sure people would not fail to apply to a university that said "if you are selected to be in our football team, you will be asked to sign a 'don't publically diss the coach' clause before being allowed to join the team.
The sanction should be limited to being thrown out of the team.
Of course, there should be some mechanism for disaffected players to privately raise constructive criticism as a first resort.
But if the up front clause was "don't ever publically criticise teaching at this institution", then I'd certainly not apply to any such university. I mean, what have they got to hide ?
But no Facebook ? They must be joking.
I mean, I'm 45 and barely use Facebook but at least I get how important it is to younger folk these days.
On the post: Homeland Security's Domain Name Seizure May Stretch The Law Past The Breaking Point
Is it just me ?
On the post: London Underground Told To Cut Back Legal Expenses... So It's Suing A Restaurant Called The Underground
Not a train...
I think the next "B" Ark ship is what they are looking for.
On the post: Obama 'Considering Legal Action' Against Wikileaks
Iranian nuclear scientists assassinated
Like "Tomorrow there will be a huge leak and our moles in iran might be outed/arrested/tortured. Lets neutralise them today just in case".
I find it staggering that so many docs (inc supposed quotes from the Saudi king, UN bugging, etc) were at such a low level of confidentiality and available to so many people to see. How could one person make off with so much ?
Sounds like fairly poor information management to me.
If there's an upside, it's watching Iran try to dispute the revelation that they have no friends in the region...
But overall, this doesn't sound like dirty secrets being revealed (like the helicopter shooting video was). This is just pissing a lot of people off when noone serious is learning anything they didn't know.
This time I feel like saying to Wikileaks "and your point is ?".
On the post: UK Police Told To Text Instead Of Using Radios In Order To Save Money
Re: Re:
So as long as the cops don't "over use" it, costs are reasonable.
It strikes me that if a Government on an austerity drive can renege on a pension commitment to someone who has spent their life making contributions on the understanding of final benefits, they can certainly renegotiate a contract with private some radio company.
But as the original article implies, there are people higher up the food chain who don't wish to rock the boat too much.
BTW, these cops don't expect to text sentences with the new arrangement, but short status codes.
I wonder if this bright idea stems from the recent exercise when a police force tweeted 24 hrs of control room info to show the public what they actually do all day.
Given that
- you can buy secure end to end encrypted cellphones
- cell companies have somewhat of a headstart over private radio networks.
It would appear to have made more sense to have put the money into fixing the gaps in the UK cell network, rather than building a new one from scratch.
After all, there are mechanisms for prioritising 999 (911) calls on networks already, and surely telcos could allow the police to roam on any and all networks they can find ?
I would think that a police officer with secure cell (with built in GPS & camera) would be a better bet than one with a fancy 3rd party radio that is just a radio.
They could upload faces, vehicle registrations etc and get route planning info or direct feed from helicopers sent in real time during a chase. And whatever else comes out next year (biometric id, real time ECG etc)
& this would be a good excuse for someone to make a genuinely rugged smartphone (something I'd like to get !)
On the post: Netflix Avoided Android Because It Didn't Have Enough DRM
Seriously ? If I hide a small encrypted code in 11MB of MP3 it will distort the music ?
-- 2. Watermarking is almost always easily removed. --
There seems to be an assumption here that all watermarking is to some "standard". As a content producer, I could use a different system with every single thing I publish if I wanted. There's certainly no reason to use an open or published standard. A pirate would need to "diff" many legit copies to identify what the watermarked part of the data was.
So a generic tool that would enable a non expert punter to remove the watermark from a single item of media he has paid for before uploading it strikes me as a nearly impossible coding task.
Programs to get around DRM are widely available because lots of end users may want to use them. Code to remove a watermark would be far less in demand because only the uploader would actually care. Furthermore, with DRM circumvention software the punter can tell if it has worked (it plays). With watermark removal software, how can I tell it has really worked ?
The main limitation, as you say, is the expense of generating individual watermarked media on the fly at point of sale so it can be tied to the buyer (or rather, at the point of distribution, as the publisher does not want the retailer running this).
It'd be easier if they had started a while back. Now the genie is out of the bottle (stores up and running selling un DRM'd MP3s are now the norm) the best that the distributor could hope for is a watermark per retailer (so they can at least follow part of the trail).
On the post: Netflix Avoided Android Because It Didn't Have Enough DRM
Re: Re: What's wrong with watermarking ?
Watermarking does not have to be to a "standard".
Every publisher can have their own. They can change it daily.
All that matters is
- the publisher's search tool can find and identify rogue content of their own
- the principle is algorithmically strong enough to make a legal case against the identified source of an upload
-- In the mean time, it will turn out that the new "technology" means that the media you just bought doesn't work with whatever you're trying to play it on --
A watermark does not make an MP3 unplayable. It is hidden within the data.
-- Why is it everyone who suggests watermarks things they are the first person to have thought of it
I mrerly asked "why don't they use it ?". Because I genuinely don't understand and thought I'd get an answer here (of anywhere).
On the post: Netflix Avoided Android Because It Didn't Have Enough DRM
What's wrong with watermarking ?
So if you were trying to reduce the incidence of MP3's being pirated you'd
- watermark each copy sold, tying it to the buyer
- have something google-like to find your content on illegal sharing sites, and identify the buyer whose copy was fed to the sites
- fine the people who allowed their personal copy to be pirated.
Now, REAL pirates could get round this (ie could remove the watermark)
But it addresses the worry that making content too easy to copy would make even amateur pirates share files.
Crucially, it does not in any way impede the use of the content by the innocent.
But it makes distribution a tad more expensive and I suspect some in the industry are just too greedy to put up with that cost increase.
It won't stop me copying something for a mate, but it might stop me uploading my copy so 20,000 people can download it.
And that's surely what they are worried about, isn't it ?
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