Tuesday, June 20, 2006

A year on, Ahmadinejad's popularity is soaring. Iran: President favourite to win second term · Nuclear issue and populist strategy boost standing [Guardian Unlimited] 11:23:31 PM    comment []

Uploaders or Freeloaders. Interesting perspectives from PaidContent.org on the tensions inherent in user generated content business models. "Perhaps the social web will come to be known for its freeloaders, rather than its uploaders," it quotes Donna Bogatin saying. By noemail@noemail.org (Jim). [Inflection Point] 11:20:41 PM    comment []

Wendy Seltzer smokes the MPAA in the Wall St Journal. My pal and former EFF attorney Wendy Seltzer conducted a debate with MPPA exec Fritz Attaway in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. In it, Wendy makes mincemeat of Attaway's arguments, which keep coming around to accusing her of wanting to commit piracy and rip off artists, which, as she explains over and over again, isn't what she's trying to do at all: Fritz, I have not been asking for media free of charge. I have been asking for it free of usage and interoperability restrictions that go beyond copyright. The difference is critical -- I fully support a market in which creators are compensated for their works, but not one in which a creative industry can monopolize cultural reference and the technology around its works. The copyright balance is that both creators and the public get the returns on investment, neither to the exclusion of the other. None of us creates from scratch, rather one creative work is input to the next. I'd gladly pay more for fully usable media. The problem is that I don't just want to see my own creative output, but the works of the public around me. DRM hides the choices from us until we have a whole ecosystem of limited-use devices: iPods that need their songs re-purchased after one too many computer crashes; first-generation HDTVs that won't work with the next generation of HD-DVD players; and movies you don't realize you can't re-mix until you have a flash of inspiration after Jon Stewart's Oscar show. I would ask you how you justify DRM that does not stop the commercial pirates -- we all know they use even more sophisticated copying than the still-available DeCSS -- but does interfere with noncommercial transformation. Link (Thanks, Wendy!) [Boing Boing] 11:20:30 PM    comment []

Close, but no Cuban cigars. Alas, my career as a Mavs fan, which started with such promise, has ended (at least for this season) with a thud. The Miami Heat won the NBA championship 4-2 tonight with a 95-92 win over Dallas. Exciting game and, with a couple of exceptions, an exciting series. Technorati Tags: mavs [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 11:19:14 PM    comment []

Wow. Some series. It got real ("you don't have an NBA Finals series until a team wins on the road") at the moment it ended. Wow. Sorry, Mark. Looking forward to your next blog. 11:18:59 PM    comment []

False Identity Generator (via tecznotes links) Apparently generates sufficiently legit addresses, phone numbers. [unmediated] 6:06:39 PM    comment []

Opera, Dressed to the Nines. Opera ups the ante with the release of its improved browser that includes BitTorrent functionality. [Wired News: Top Stories] 6:06:36 PM    comment []

Top-100 living songwriters list (annoying textbox) .... Top-100 living songwriters list (annoying textbox) [robot wisdom weblog] 8:32:19 AM    comment []

Privacy-Enhanced Data Mining. There are a variety of encryption technologies that allow you to analyze data without knowing details of the data: Largely by employing the head-spinning principles of cryptography, the researchers say they can ensure that law enforcement, intelligence agencies and private companies can sift through huge databases without seeing names and identifying details in the records. For example, manifests of airplane passengers could be compared with terrorist watch lists -- without airline staff or government agents seeing the actual names on the other side's list. Only if a match were made would a computer alert each side to uncloak the record and probe further. "If it's possible to anonymize data and produce ... the same results as clear text, why not?" John Bliss, a privacy lawyer in IBM's "entity analytics" unit, told a recent workshop on the subject at Harvard University. This is nothing new. I've seen papers on this sort of stuff since the late 1980s. The problem is that no one in law enforcement has any incentive to use them. Privacy is rarely a technological problem; it's far more often a social or economic problem. [Schneier on Security] 8:31:53 AM    comment []

Which may also delay Scoble's departure. Excerpt from Jon Swift on Bill Gates' retirement: — Although Bill Gates announced that he would be retiring in two years, there are sure to be delays in the transition schedule and the date of his retirement will probably be postponed many times. In fact, it may never happen at all. — It is also possible that Gates may be retired prematurely before all the bugs are worked out. Microsoft may decide to go through a retirement beta testing phase to work out these bugs. Even when Gates does officially retire, there may still be problems, so he may be forced to announce his Retirement 2.0, although you can be sure new problems will then crop up, some of which, but not all, will be fixed in the Second Edition of Retirement 2.0, followed by some patches. — The entire retirement process may be scrapped and a new retirement process may be started from scratch. This retirement process may then be abandoned after a year and Microsoft would go back to the first retirement process. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 8:31:47 AM    comment []