Tuesday, June 17, 2003

I prowled for some news from Iran. Found these things. Lady Sun: He was sleeping when the wasps came; many other students were sleeping as well when they were beaten in the same way. Other students were protesting peacefully when the thunderstorm hit them out of nowhere. People in Iran were living their lives when the thunderstorm hit them. Mortal impact I name it. Where did it come from? Where does it get nourished? Who is supporting all these wasps, all this thunder; all these pressure groups; you name it? No one exactly knows. Or we know and we don't want to admit, or we know and we are afraid of admitting, or we know and we can do shit about it! I am bitter, sentimentally angry, and dreadfully sad. Monarchists are killing themselves rambling about a new revolution, a protest, an opposition… I hate monarchy, we hate monarchy, we hate any sort of dictatorship. I hate this stupid Bush who is releasing statements in support of the students. I hate him who has no idea what kind of people Iranians are. I hate the monarchists who think we are that stupid to put the red carpet for Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah's sun. I hate the pressure groups who are literally massacring their fellow Iranian citizens. I hate our reformist government who can do shit about all this chaos. I hate our 'real' Government who has closed its eyes on the reality and seeks for popularity and stability in suppressing people. I hate all the students including myself who can do nothing. The biggest thing we can do is just playing the role of scapegoats, victims of the ignorance, brutality, whatever... If only they knew how small the amount of freedom we are seeking is… [Lady Sun] ali has photos up, from the dormitories, but you may not want to look. (And the permalink is taking it to the wrong place. They're on the front page today, dated Tuesday, June 17. Should be in the next week's archives when they post, I guess?) [How I learned to stop worrying and write the blog] The Pensive Persian has chosen this moment in time to visit Iran for the first time in sixteen years. (Inspirational line from elsewhere in the blog: I also occasionally like to watch this pre-pubescent bear frolick with his Species-ambigious cohorts. It’s always a good break between not understanding Wittgenstein and not understanding Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Can't help but love those references!) [Musing over the ontological status of a boiled egg] kaveh got e-mail from someone (supposedly!) in New York, New York, who didn't believe he was really in Iran, Because isn't Iran a police state where they will drag you into jail for saying human things and beat you up or worse? What to say? But a good answer given, it seems to me. Elsewhere on the blog, dated advice about nightlife in Tehran. (I remember Harlem!) [observations of Tehran life] More another time. 10:03:22 PM    comment []

Macrovision splits into two units. The digital rights management company says it decided to reorganize because entertainment and software companies have different protection needs. [CNET News.com] 9:21:37 PM    comment []

Can anyone stop the music cops?. As Hollywood wins one court case after another, one Republican senator is suggesting that maybe it's time for some new laws -- that protect consumers instead of entertainment companies. [Salon.com] 9:20:03 PM    comment []

Check out the NYU weblog portal listing the blogs of NYU students and alumni. [Scripting News] 6:55:43 PM    comment []

Phonecam Nation: Everyone's posting instant photos on the Web. Get ready for your close-up. By Xeni Jardin, in Wired. Whipping out a cheap phonecam at the height of a late-night bash, a Michigan frat boy snaps his own Girls Gone Wild shots and instantly uploads them to an online gallery accessible by anyone in the world. At a Los Angeles convenience store, a woman witnesses a holdup - and with the press of a button, she captures the thief's image and zaps it to 911. In Hong Kong, a mobile phone user photographs the apartment complex of a neighbor suspected of carrying SARS. He posts the pictures, details, and GPS coordinates to an unofficial database designed to do what the government won't: collect and provide data about the spread of the virus. . . . As phonecams proliferate - more than 13 million were sold in Japan in 2002, and US buyers will snap up 2 million this year - you'll never know when someone out there might snap your photo, then upload it for the world to see. The cams will instantly capture and disseminate scenes of crimes in progress or police brutality as it happens (think Rodney King or Lizzie Grubman slamming into her four-wheeled prey). Like TV's addictive, blurry-jerky live videophone footage from Mideast war zones, device portability makes up for image quality. As the mobile imaging hordes colonize the globe, they'll capture and send news of natural disasters or political upheavals before conventional media can react. (London war protesters did just that last winter, uploading images to a site created by the BBC.) And the news and gossip feed will be cross-platform: Minutes after a story breaks, television and Web sources will gather phonecam shots from the scene and disseminate them to viewers. The world will be one big reality show. 1:11:08 PM    comment []

Awestruck Teens Remake Raiders of the Lost Ark, Violate Copyright Law, James Grimmelmann, LawMeme. In 1981, a trio of 10-year-olds saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and were awestruck. Awestruck enough to make film their own shot-for-shot remake over the next seven years. After spending years as the stuff of urban legend, the film reemerged last year, wowing Raiders director Steven Spielberg and other fans. The tribute film has even recently been shown on the big screen. Of course, what they did was quite possibly illegal. Fab analysis of whether the shot-for-shot remake is infringing. 11:10:45 AM    comment []

The MP3 Economy: How labels and artists divvy up your MP3 dollar. By Nancy Einhart, Business 2.0. In descending order, according to the piece, site, label, artist, other intermediaries, publisher 11:10:41 AM    comment []

West Virginia drops Microsoft appeal (Reuters). Massachusetts remains committed to this appeal and will see it through, [Sarah] Nathan [spokeswoman for Tom Reilly, Massachusetts' attorney general] said in a statement. . . . Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will provide as much as $18 million worth of vouchers to consumers who purchased Microsoft software. The vouchers can be used to buy any software or hardware products, even from Microsoft competitors. Of those vouchers left unclaimed, up to half will go toward needy schools in the state, McGraw's statement says. Microsoft will provide another $1.7 million that will go directly to the state, including $1 million for West Virginia schools, McGraw said in his statement. 10:10:30 AM    comment []

One manager's IT lesson. As Ameritrade's new CIO, Asiff Hirji runs a tech operation that handles 116,000 stock trades a day. Though he's upping IT spending, his approach breaks with those of boom times. [CNET News.com] 7:02:58 AM    comment []

What difference will the Iranian protests make? Have you been involved in the protests? Have they affected you in any way? Tell us your experiences. The following comments reflect the balance of views we have received. BBCNews via hoder. 6:43:19 AM    comment []

In Stores, Private Handcuffs for Sticky Fingers. Macy's and other retailers are operating detention rooms for shoplifters, using private security to fill the void left by overburdened police. By Andrea Elliott. [New York Times: Business] Andrea Mohin/The New York Times A holding cell and handcuffs on a bench in the detention area of Macy’s department store in Manhattan, where suspected shoplifters are taken. If someone is arrested by police, they know they're going to court, they know they're going to get a lawyer, they know they're going to tell their story to a judge, they know if they're innocent that within a short period of time they're going to be talking to someone who can help them, said Susan Hendricks, deputy attorney in charge of the criminal defense division of the Legal Aid Society. 6:31:36 AM    comment []

Rock 'n' roll fantasy. I've got the guts, the grit and the fishnet stockings, but now, minutes away from the Air Guitar Championship, do I have that elusive quality of "airness"? [Salon.com] This is just about air guitar. That's drab, compared to air band competition. As an undergrad, in the days when the Front Room still sold alcohol, we had some great nights watching the Air Band Contest, with students decked out as Elton John, The Who, The Partridge Family, inhabiting the bands' exteriors kinda sorta for one night. Or more, if they advanced in the competition. And none of this sixty-second crap -- they played a three-song set or fifteen minutes, something like that. Man, that was fun. (Just spotted and fixed a perfect typo error: "d" for "s" in "three-song set." 6:24:55 AM    comment []

xian: Talk about your text ads. Susannah Breslin's efforts (on behalf of a loyal reader) to turn up a frontal shot of a female streaker has already yielded one slightly more revealing image. The cowgirl says "points of for pasties," but I say points off for implants. Also, outing myself as a dyed-in-the-wool word freak, I'd like to see a picture that shows what the streaker had written on her skin, front and back. One of the texts (on her back) looks like a domain name, something like goldenpalace.com (an online casino). Susannah says "Alright, who's got the streaming video, dammit," while I say who wants to bet she's a stripper or some other kind of sex business pro? [Radio Free Blogistan] 6:20:28 AM    comment []

Thanks, Kevin, for the pointer to William Gibson's speech to the Directors Guild of America. Kevin wouldn't excerpt it, to encourage us to read it. I'll grab just a little, on account of this excerpt begins with a point I aimed at in the Philosophy and Film class I taught last summer: But I need to diverge here into another industry, one that’s already and even more fully feeling the historical impact of the digital: music. Prior to the technology of audio recording, there was relatively little one could do to make serious money with music. Musicians could perform for money, and the printing press had given rise to an industry in sheet music, but great fame, and wealth, tended to be a matter of patronage. The medium of the commercial audio recording changed that, and created industry predicated on an inherent technological monopoly of the means of production. Ordinary citizens could neither make nor manufacture audio recordings. That monopoly has now ended. Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and non-profit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite. The means of production, reproduction and distribution of recorded music, are today entirely digital, and thus are in the hands of whoever might desire them. We get them for free, often without asking for them, as inbuilt peripherals. I bring music up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly as an example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change. It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying business-model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex interaction between several. You can see the difference if you compare the music industry’s initial outcry against “home taping” with the situation today. Whatever changes will come for film will be as unpredictable and as ongoing, but issues of intellectual property and piracy may ultimately be the least of them. The music industry’s product is, for want of a better way to put it, a relatively simple, relatively traditional product. Audio recordings just aren’t that technology-heavy. Though there’s one aspect of the digital’s impact on music that’s absolutely central to film: sampling. Sampling music is possible because the end-consumer of the product is now in possession of technologies equal or even superior to the technologies involved in producing that product. Human capital (that is, talent) aside, all the end-consumer-slash-creator lacks today, in comparison to a music-marketing conglomerate, is the funds required to promote product. The business of popular music, today, is now, in some peculiarly new way, entirely about promotion. Film, I imagine, is in for a different sort of ride up the timeline, primarily owing to the technology-intensive nature of today’s product. 6:09:34 AM    comment []

Brain Experts Now Follow the Money. Many neuroscientists are beginning to argue that it is time to create a new field of study, called neuroeconomics. By Sandra Blakeslee. [New York Times: Science] This might be valuable for what it shows us about the brain, rather than for what it tells us about economics or decision making. 6:00:59 AM    comment []

Update on the 1000 Journals Project. One journal is back. 999 are circulating (or lost). Someone is offering one night's accomodation (adorable cottage in rural location close to historic university town of Cambridge) to anyone travelling in the UK with one of the journals from elsewhere (not a local), on condition that the bearer put the journal into circulation in his town. 3:09:03 AM    comment []