Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Shanghai program begins with few students. Shanghai is one of the largest cities in the world, with a population surpassing 20 million. Five American students will now join the ranks of those millions of city-dwellers, as Webster University starts its new China Studies program this semester. [The Journal] 9:48:24 PM    comment []

City of Brotherly Love may embrace Wi-Fi. Philadelphia may spread the joy of wireless Internet access to its citizens. [CNET News.com] 5:56:47 PM    comment []

Stamps Of Approval: Rosenbergs, Milosevic, Lewinsky dress now on official U.S. postage Nobody's dog deserves to be on a stamp. That was our first thought when we heard that the U.S. Postal Service had approved a pilot program for personalized postage. For about twice the regular cost, consumers can now slap any old picture on a stamp and surprise the recipient of their postcard or envelope (the image, of course, must not be deemed objectionable by the folks at Stamps.com, the online firm handling the trial run of Uncle Sam's postage gambit). But since objectionable is such a subjective term, TSG sought to determine what kind of interesting stamps we could actually create. While the image censors rejected our request for stamps featuring mug shots of Lee Harvey Oswald, Salvatore "Sammy Bull" Gravano, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, they did green light other equally, um, distinctive postage. On the following pages you'll find nine separate sheets of personalized postage (20 stamps per) that TSG can now legally affix to its snail mail. We're kicking off the collection below with our personal favorite, a 37-cent stamp featuring Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the New York couple executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union. On the succeeding pages you'll find stamps honoring Monica Lewinsky's black dress (the one splattered with Bill Clinton's DNA); Linda Tripp; deposed Yugoslavian ethnic cleanser/war criminal Slobodan Milosevic; MIA labor racketeer Jimmy Hoffa; executed Romanian dictator/Communist oppressor Nicolae Ceaucescu; New Jersey Governor James McGreevey and alleged gay lover Golan Cipel; and high school and college yearbook photos of Kaczynski, who used the postal service to deliver his homemade bombs. We put one of the Kaczynski stamps on an envelope and mailed it to our office, so click here to see the cancelled result. TSG, of course, will not actually be using our personalized postage. This was just an exercise to point out that the only people truly worthy of stamps are statesmen (George Washington, Benjamin Franklin), civil rights leaders (Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall), and cartoon characters (Wile E. Coyote, Jiminy Cricket). (The Smoking Gun) 7:01:08 AM    comment []

Cory: Video of GOP House Speaker accusing Soros of taking dope money Here's the video of Dennis Hastert calling George Soros a druglord. What a dirtbag that Hastert is. I mean, I don't know where he gets his money from. He's a dick, so maybe he gets his money by selling little children to trolls to bake into pies. Can we be sure he doesn't? 900k WMV Link (via Joi) Soros responds to drug-lord accusation George Soros has responded to Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert's accusation that he is financed by narco-gangsters in a great, stiff letter that demands an apology: You do a discredit to yourself and to the dignity of your office by engaging in these dishonest smear tactics. You should be ashamed. For the Speaker of the House of Representatives, even in the midst of an election season, to descend to a level of political discourse where innuendo and slander replace reason, truth and argument is unacceptable. This past Sunday, on national television, you suggested that I might be a criminal simply because I have exercised my First Amendment rights to dissent from the policies of the Bush administration... I must respectfully insist that you either substantiate these claims -- which you cannot do because they are false -- or publicly apologize for attempting to defame my character and damage my reputation. Go gettim, George! 52k PDF Link (Thanks, Raypride!) Also, this bonus Cory blinkage: Valenti's magical DRM thinking debunked Ed Felten picks apart Jack Valenti's Engadget interview (in which Valenti compares himself to JFK: "I was in Dallas in the motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, and I saw that day a brave young president murdered, and a new president take over. The president is dead, long live the president, the nation goes on. No one is indispensable, I learned that day in Dallas. My successor will come into this job and he won't be me, but he might do a hell of a lot better job than I'm doing.") It may be possible to so infect a movie with some kind of circuitry that allows people to copy to their heart's content, but the copied result would come out with decayed fidelity with respect to sound and color. Another would be to have some kind of design in a movie that would say, 'copy never,' 'copy once.' Even ignoring the technical non sequiturs ("stuff ... algorithms into a movie"; "infect a movie with ... circuitry"), this is wildly implausible. Nothing has happened to make the technical prospects for DRM (anti-copying) technology any less bleak. We can only hope Valenti's successor stops believing in "technological magic" and instead teaches the industry to accept technical reality. File sharing cannot be wished away. The industry needs to figure out how to deal with it. Link [bOing bOing] 6:56:01 AM    comment []

Chamberlain v. Skylink (Garage Door Openers), DMCA, and fair use. So, the Chamberlain vs Skylink DMCA case has been decided in favor of the right to have compatible garage door openers. But as I've noted in an earler Chamberlain v. Skylink post, I'm not anywhere nearly as enthused as many others I'm afraid I've again turned into Eeyore.  . . . As I read it, the whole opinion boils down to the judicial version of a Monty Python-ese statement of: "Stop that! It's silly.". Or, in legalese: Under Chamberlain's proposed construction, explicated at oral argument, disabling a burglar alarm to gain "access" to a home containing copyrighted books, music, art, and periodicals would violate the DMCA; anyone who did so would unquestionably have "circumvent[ed] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the Copyright Act]." § 1201(a)(1). ... Yet, were we to read the statute's "plain language" as Chamberlain urges, disabling a burglar alarm would be a per se violation of the DMCA. My take on this is the inverse of many other commentators. I think here, the DMCA 1201(c) fair-use-not-affected section is being used as the statutory support for the basic statement of "It's silly". But that doesn't mean anything should be read into other instances: We leave open the question as to when [fair use] might serve as an affirmative defense to a prima facie violation of [the DMCA]. For the moment, we note only that though the traditional fair use doctrine of [fair use] remains unchanged as a defense to copyright infringement under § 1201(c)(1), circumvention is not infringement. That is, nothing here has been resolved regarding the tension between fair use and copying. Here's the critical part (emphasis added): Such an entitlement, however, would go far beyond the idea that the DMCA allows copyright owner to prohibit "fair uses . . . as well as foul." Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 304. Chamberlain's proposed construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses even in the absence of any feared foul use. All this is saying is, basically, that if there's no conflict between fair use and anything else, the DMCA can't be used as, in effect, a patent for any product. That's nice. It's good for other businesses. But it doesn't address the issues of DMCA reform, which are exactly that conflict. [Infothought] 6:50:26 AM    comment []

World's Caviar Faces a Ban. The U.N. agency that controls trade in endangered species has halted exports of caviar, an official of the agency said on Monday. By By CHRISTOPHER PALA and FLORENCE FABRICANT. [The New York Times > Dining and Wine] 6:47:49 AM    comment []

Broadcatching Roundup - TV Stations Now Unnecessary and Other News. Lost Remote makes a bold claim and is nearly right (TheKnot and Comcast's marriage): Your life changed last week. If you work in TV or on the web, your work life changed immeasurably. If you're a TV or web user, it changed nearly as much. Why? TV stations are now unneccessary. Comcast and wedding website TheKnot.com have announced a new V.O.D.-only channel that will feature programming from The Knot on Comcast's digital cable. So what? So with one move, a website becomes a TV channel - without the messy (and expensive) need for a television station or churning out 24 hours-a-day of fresh programming. No more "feeding the beast" of all-day, all-night cable. They can put up what they have, and swap out the shows people aren't watching. [emphasis in original] Absolutely, and there is much more insightful analysis, but the problem I see with this is that it still leaves the cable company as a gatekeeper. True broadcatching bypasses such gatekeepers. I also don't really see cable companies opening up their services to all comers, as it would likely undermine their existing subscription models and relationships with major content producers. See, also, 500 Channels with Nothing On? Nah - No Channels At All. Still, this is an important article to read and an important experiment to keep an eye on. Check out the comments too. Read on for many other links and etc... (Continued at The Importance of...) [unmediated] 6:47:34 AM    comment []

3 Planets Are Found Close in Size to Earth, Making Scientists Think 'Life'. A trio of newly discovered worlds are much smaller than any other planets previously discovered outside of the solar system. By By DENNIS OVERBYE. [The New York Times > Science] 6:47:16 AM    comment []

Astronomers: More Earths Likely. Two separate teams of astronomers find Neptune-size planets beyond our solar system. Earth-like planets are just around the corner, they say. By Amit Asaravala. [Wired News] 6:44:58 AM    comment []