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Wednesday, April 26, 2006 |
Kevin sends these Benton headlines:
DISNEY-ABC EXEC SAYS ONLINE OFFERING FIGHTS PIRACY
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Jeremy Pelofsky]
The ABC television network's decision to sell its content online,
while angering affiliates, was aimed at preventing piracy from
eroding the broadcasting business, said Disney-ABC Television Group
President Anne Sweeney on Tuesday. "It's actually becoming common for
programming in the U.S. to be captured real time and the East Coast
broadcast is put online for anyone in the world to see before the
same show airs on the West Coast," she said at the National
Association of Broadcasters' annual convention in Las Vegas. A major
concern of the local affiliates is that they will be cut out of the
revenue picture by the television networks when popular shows are
made available for downloading or are streamed directly to consumers
over the Internet.
BBC EXPANDS INTERNET PRESENCE AFTER REVIEW
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Aaron O. Patrick]
After a yearlong review of its strategy, the British Broadcasting
Corp., the world's biggest and best-known public broadcaster, said it
plans to put more resources into its already-large Internet presence
and no longer regards itself primarily as a producer of television
and radio. The London-based BBC, which was founded in 1922, said it
plans to offer a service on its site similar in some respects to
MySpace.com, a popular U.S. site used by young people to share
information about themselves with friends.
Users will be able to create their own space on the BBC Web site
where they can post Web logs -- or blogs -- home videos and links to
BBC TV and radio shows, the BBC said. The broadcaster also said it
would launch a competition to redesign its Web page, create a feature
in which members of the public will write a personal history of every
day in the past 100 years and allow people to tailor the music they
listen to over the Internet, creating the equivalent of personal
radio stations. It didn't say when the changes would be completed,
but it said work was already underway on the new Web site.
60 BILLION EMAILS SENT DAILY WORLDWIDE
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Louis Charbonneau]
Internet users around the world send an estimated 60 billion emails
every day and many of these are spam or scam attempts, business
leaders said on Tuesday. [Suddenly, the 5,000+ e-mail I generate each
day don't seem like that big a deal!]
2:37:49 PM 
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The business of Second Life.
 Business Week this week features a set of articles on Second Life, the avatar-based virtual community operated by Linden Lab. I started to say created by, but online communities are co-created by their members, the folks who make the platform are like any city's infrastructure – they serve the community, but it's inherently beyond their control. What's great about Linden Labs is that they totally understand that, and they're all about creativity in building an infrastructure that brings out the best in the community – perhaps I should say the various communities – that they serve. Business week notes that "it's not all fun and games," there are business applications for Second Life (and potentially for other graphically-realized virtual worlds that might follow).
[Weblogsky]
6:40:11 AM
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Saving the Net from the Real Predators.
The Save the Internet coalition is trying to prevent a hijacking of our future. The robber barons of the Information Age — the phone and cable giants — are trying to wrest control of this absolutely essential infrastructure away from the edges of the networks, and put that control back in the center where they can tell us what to do and how.
Please understand: This is not an abstract argument over theory.
The future of citizen media, at least in the United States, will depend in significant degree upon whether our elected officials continue to do the bidding of the phone and cable companies, or whether they recognize the danger inherent in this power grab. Sadly, almost all of the signs are the wrong ones, forcing me to conclude that the political powers-that-be are much more comfortable on the side of the control freaks than on the side of genuine freedom and innovation. Perhaps that is nothing new, but it is disheartening.
Add your voice to the debate, however you feel.
[Center for Citizen Media: Blog]
6:36:46 AM
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The Story of PGP. Hefty crypto has a complicated history full of lawsuits, legislation and international intrigue. This account of PGP's creation and rise to fame is excerpted from the new book by Michael W. Lucas. In Webmonkey. [Wired News: Top Stories]
6:36:12 AM
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Hentoff on Civics Courses.
Nat Hentoff, long one of my favorite writers despite his surprising and indefensible position on the Terri Schaivo situation, has a column in the Village Voice about the importance of civics classes in public schools. He points to the abysmal ignorance that study after study has shown about some of the very basic facts about our system of law. I'll post a long excerpt from that column below the fold:
Read the rest of this post...
[Dispatches from the Culture Wars]
6:35:40 AM
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RFID Cards and Man-in-the-Middle Attacks.
Recent articles about a proposed US-Canada and US-Mexico travel document (kind of like a passport, but less useful), with an embedded RFID chip that can be read up to 25 feet away, have once again made RFID security newsworthy.
My views have not changed. The most secure solution is a smart card that only works in contact with a reader; RFID is much more risky. But if we're stuck with RFID, the combination of shielding for the chip, basic access control security measures, and some positive action by the user to get the chip to operate is a good one. The devil is in the details, of course, but those are good starting points.
And when you start proposing chips with a 25-foot read range, you need to worry about man-in-the-middle attacks. An attacker could potentially impersonate the card of a nearby person to an official reader, just by relaying messages to and from that nearby person's card.
Here's how the attack would work. . . . .
[Schneier on Security]
6:35:23 AM
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R.I.P., Jane Jacobs.
No Straight Lines.
Jane Jacobs has died.
To my mind, she was exactly what an intellectual should be, in every respect.
I like the quote from the Globe and Mail referenced at Crooked Timber: “She believed implicitly that there was no such thing as a straight line in the way people thought.”
I’ll have some of that, bartender.
[Easily Distracted]
RIP Jane Jacobs, urban activist.
Jane Jacobs has died at 89 in Toronto. Jacobs was an urban activist and writer about cities. Her book Death and Life of Great American Cities is the best book I've ever read about cities -- how they work, how they change. Reading that book rendered visible whole rafts of secrets about how the world around me functioned. It was like taking off a blindfold.
 "The key with Jane was that she believed that the world was a complex place. It was not a simple place, it was a complex place, and you couldn't just think in straight lines," said Sewell.
"You had to think about context, how things fit together. That was the key about her."
"Jane Jacobs will be remembered as one of the great urban thinkers of our time," Toronto Mayor David Miller said Tuesday in a statement.
"Her contributions and insights have forever changed the way North American cities are developed.
Link (Photo credit: Juan Freire, Flickr) (Thanks, Dave!)
[Boing Boing]
RIP, Jane Jacobs, urban visionary.
I was lucky enough, as a high school senior in New York City in the mid-'70s, to take an elective course in "urban studies." The course consisted of reading a bunch of real books, not textbooks, and talking about them. (Later I came to understand that virtually every college course, at least in the humanities and social sciences, proceeded along the same lines.)
I've forgotten all but one of the books we read. But the one I remember, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I remember vividly, for its calm, reasonable, and, to me, profoundly persuasive rejection of the Big Central Plans approach to urban design -- which had previously made perfect sense to my 17-year-old mind. Diversity matters, Jacobs argued; people crave variety in their experience of their surroundings, and engagement with other people, and living cities offer people wide and varied opportunities for hanging shingles and rubbing elbows and delighting others.
Jacobs' book gave me a lifelong, visceral understanding of principles that I would later see popping up in other, unexpected contexts, thanks to writers like Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, and experiences I'd have in helping build one small corner of the online cityscape.
Jacobs died today at 89 [thanks to Kottke for the news].
[Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
TheStar.com - Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban legend.
TheStar.com - Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban legend:
Jane Jacobs was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist, and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.
Mrs. Jacobs died this morning in Toronto. She was 89.
She wrote one of the classics of all social science, the life and death of great american cities.
[Too many topics, too little time.]
6:35:10 AM
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Kids eat a bag of chips for every hour they spend watching TV.
A US study has concluded that children consume the caloric equivalent of a bag of potato chips for every hour they spend in front of a television. Food advertising in implicated in causing unconscious eating among young viewers.
The study followed 550 children aged 11 to 13 over a period of 20 months. For each hour they spent watching television, their food intake was found at the end of the period to have increased by 167 calories a day. (A packet of crisps contains around 180 calories, while a can of Coke has 140)....
Numerous scientific studies have shown that children who watch more TV have a higher calorie intake, but advertisers argue that this is a result of their more sofa-bound lifestyle rather than of the adverts they are watching.
Dr Wiecha, however, said her work contradicted this. "Although children and youth are encouraged to watch what they eat, many youth seem to eat what they watch," the report's authors wrote.
Link
[Boing Boing]
6:20:59 AM
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Induction, deduction and abduction.....
Evolgen says:
Let's focus on two things: the hypothetical deductive method and essential information that you must know to be able to read the science section of a newspaper.
Hm. Amen. Sort of. Scientists in many fields needed to be straight-jacketed into the "hypothetico-deductive" model for a reason. I remember a phylogeneticist telling a group of us why the hypothetico-deductive method was crucial in his own work, before his time taxonomists would get into arguments where they would justify their opinion about systematic relationships with an operational "Cuz I said so!" Testing hypotheses are essential for science. That being said, scientists do more than test truths derived from their models.
Read the rest of this post...
[Gene Expression] which also has:
Scientific knowledge for the masses..
Over at Evolgen, RPM links to an article that lists ten "basic questions" to which ten different scientists think high school graduates should know the answers. (It was one question from each scientist, so it's unclear whether all ten would agree that they are the ten most important questions, or even that all ten of these scientists could answer all ten to the others' satisfaction.) RPM opines that the list seems heavy on trivia (or at least seemingly random facts) and light on really helpful scientific knowledge. He opines:
Let's focus on two things: the hypothetical deductive method and essential information that you must know to be able to read the science section of a newspaper.
Well, I'm a bandwagon jumper-upon of long standing, so let me add some items I'd like the masses to be able to take on:
6:19:03 AM
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