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Wednesday, May 04, 2005 |
Interview with Google's Director of Video.
Richard Koman has an interesting interview with Jennifer Feikin, Google's director of video. As with Brightcove, Open Media Network, Lulop, and others, the plan is to create a new market for video content:
The plan is to allow content owners to charge for their video content. When you upload content you're asked to specify a price for your content, and a sale results in a cut for Google.
Though Google is looking at DRM, it is also exploring ad supported models.
Via Television Archiving [unmediated]
10:43:22 PM 
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Bootleg browser. A new list of links to bootleg downloads -- and a question about the ethics of it. [Salon.com]
4:13:12 PM
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Dan Gillmor: Operating Systems and Recent History.
(I'm writing a periodic column for the Financial Times. Here's the one that appeared today.)
Early last week, Bill Gates demonstrated Microsoft's next Windows desktop computer operating system at a conference for manufacturers of computer hardware. Later in the week Apple started selling its latest version of the Macintosh operating system, known as Mac OS X Tiger. Although the Microsoft product is a long way from hitting the retail marketplace, Gates's talk garnered lots of coverage in the trade and popular media. The timing, coming next to the Apple launch, was part of the reason; the media can not resist the Microsoft versus Apple story. But the Tiger release and Microsoft hypefest were only the latest engagements in a never-ending campaign for the hearts, minds and wallets of computer users. Their interests, not corporate power games, are why this matters. More...
[Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.]
4:13:07 PM
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The Problem of Identity, Authentication and Control.
The creation of authentication systems is a major industry. Stephen Downes argues in his paper on 'Authentication and Identification' that we we don't need authentication, that authentication won't work, and that people don't want it.
Though the development of authentication systems will no doubt continue to be a source of considerable churn and considerable investment in the near future, Downes states that it should be evident that authentication is (a) not necessary, (b) won't work, and (c) is not desired and raises the questions What will work? What do people want?
Authentication won't work because no system of authentication provides any more security than a system of self-identification. Authentication will not work at all unless it is tied to a proxy, the identity of which can be established online, which means that the security of the authentication is no greater than the value of the proxy to the user. With cheap computation, computers on a USB (reference is out there somewhere), disposable telephones, e-paper, and more just beyond the horizon, it seems clear than the value of the physical asset to which authentication is being tied will continue to decline, at which point authentication will provide no disincentive against misrepresentation of identity whatsoever. Authentication is useless if not tied to the person, and can be tied to the person only with the compliance of the person, which in effect reduces it to self-identification.
And it is not desired because authentication essentially involves the transfer of control over one's own identity from oneself to a service provider or identity broker, and as a consequence, enables the breach of the user's security and privacy whenever it is in the interests of that service provider or broker to do so. It moreover undermines the individual's fundamental right to determine and express who they are.
Stephens Downes pleads in his paper for the need of a mechanism for self-identification, where clear and unambiguous control is placed in the user's hands, a mechanism that enables the user to declare to every site (or none, if that's their choice), "I am me!" And a way to do this automatically, unambiguously, with as little effort as possible. [Smart Mobs]
6:34:33 AM
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Joel has two announcements: first, that his book is now out in Korean. Second, he's Making Summer Plans. They're pretty interesting, and I'm looking foreward to seeing what comes of it.
Yes, it's true... there will be a filmmaker, Lerone Wilson of Boondoggle Films, working out of the Fog Creek office this summer creating a documentary about our summer internships.
As I wrote earlier, "This summer, Fog Creek Software has hired four summer interns from Yale, Duke, and Rose-Hulman. Our selection process was extremely competitive, with over 800 kids applying for only four positions.
"Instead of wasting their talents giving them the usual dull and unimportant tasks of a typical summer internship, we decided to let the interns create a complete new software product, from beginning to end, over the course of one summer. With experienced software developers as mentors, the team will design, program, test, and roll out a complete software product over the course of one hectic summer, going from concept to paying customers in about ten weeks."
Now, I'll be the first to admit that this product will be a 1.0 version... the minimum thing that can possibly work. We've thought long and hard about the amount of code it will take, and we're fairly confident that three interns can get a beta version out in about 4 weeks. One chunk of the project is basically an enhancement to the "fogshop" ecommerce engine; another chunk is a couple of simple features added onto an existing open source program; the third chunk is possibly the simplest sockets-based server you can imagine that still does something useful. Each chunk would be a reasonable programming assignment in Yale CS323 or MIT EECS 6.001 (insiders will recognize these as two of the most challenging programming courses on the planet, but, hey, we hire the kind of people who love challenges).
The fourth intern is going to focus on product marketing so he will be working on a brand name, pricing, the website, advertising, and PR. The product we're building is something we need internally anyway, so it's almost worth the expense even if nobody buys it, but we think it should be useful to a lot of other people, too, so I see this as fairly inexpensive market research.
We'll keep a weblog so you can track the interns' progress, and, if we're lucky, at the end of the summer there will be a DVD documentary you can get to see the whole thing in living color. (Does anyone have a spare HDV camcorder we can borrow for the summer? Otherwise it's going to be DV!)
6:09:49 AM
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Zuckerman on How to Blog Anonymously (Donna Wentworth).
Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps, Berkman fellow, and all-around great guy, has written a terrific technical complement to EFF's recent white paper, How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). Zuckerman's guide approaches anonymous blogging from the perspective of a government whistleblower in a country with a less-than-transparent government -- the kind of person for whom the promise of the Internet as a vehicle for democratic speech is especially desirable and important. Though the guide is about using technology, it's one-hundred per cent accessible to the non-geek -- Zuckerman's hypothetical "Sarah" walks the reader step-by-step through a set of increasingly challenging technical strategies for keeping your identity private on the Internet:
Sarah starts to wonder what happens if the proxy servers she's using get compromised? What if the Minister convinces the operator of a proxy server - either through legal means or through bribery - to keep records and see whether anyone from his country is using the proxy, and what sites they're using. She's relying on the proxy administrator to protect her, and she doesn't even know who the administrator is!
Spending quite a long time with the local geek this time, she explores a new option: Invisiblog. Run by an anonymous group of Australians called vigilant.tv, Invisiblog is a site designed for and by the truly paranoid. You can't post to Invisiblog via the web, as you do with most blog servers. You post to it using specially formatted email, sent through the MixMaster remailer system, signed cryptographically.
It took Sarah a few tries to understand that last sentence. Eventually, she set up GPG - the GNU implementation of Pretty Good Privacy, a public-key encryption system. ...She generates a keypair that she will use to post to the blog - by signing a post with her "private key," the blog server will be able to use her "public key" to check that a post is coming from her, and then put it on the blog.
She then sets up MixMaster, a mailing system designed to obscure the origins of an email message. ...She sends a first MixMaster message to Invisiblog, which includes her public key. Ethan has asked for a thorough de-bugging; if you care about freedom of speech on the Internet and have expertise to share, drop by Global Voices and lend a hand.
[Copyfight]
6:05:55 AM
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On Copyfight Battle Strategy (Donna Wentworth).
Three quick links that provide insight into the various ways the copyfight battle is being engaged: in the first, Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn reveals who supports PK in DC and how that affects organizational strategy; in the second, Cardozo law professor/broadcast-flag burner Susan Crawford reports from the front lines of a highly contentious panel she moderated between copyright moderates and maximalists; in the third, the folks from Downhill Battle provide a fresh resource for newbies seeking to understand what all the fuss is about. [Copyfight]
6:04:35 AM
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