Author: schloss

Tips and tricks for getting around plugins and HTML madness

I hate plugins. The worst thing ever is when you’re browing to a site then your computer grinds to a halt for 20 seconds while loading Java just so a 20 by 200 pixel scrolling text bar can display on the page, showing you useless content that you didn’t really need.

But what pisses me off even more are the lengths that some people go to trying to hide their embedded media from you. You go to Apple’s Quicktime site to view the newest movie trailers and you really want to save it to your hard drive, but you can’t. Or you watch a really cool flash cartoon but you can’t send the link to your friends because it opened in some popup window and took away the address bar.

Embedded content sucks. I can save web pages but I can’t save that Windows media clip of O.J. in the white Bronco speeding down the highway because someone else doesn’t want me to. My greatest Internet fear is that the walls of content protection will get too high, forbidding users from even copying text off of web pages.

Until then, I offer you the following tips I use to get around embedded content madness. Joe got me thinking about this with his complaints about how Google may be tracking your search habits. Below you’ll find my Google hack and much more.

The software that makes all of this possible

Before you try any of the following, download and install Mozilla Firefox. It’s a fantastic browser and makes all of the following possible. Once you install Firefox, you’ll probably want to change some of the popup settings too. I set my blocker to stop all popups, then add exceptions for the sites that I want to allow popups. You’ll see a little window-shaped icon with an X through it indicating that Firefox has blocked a popup on your current site. Click that box and you can change the site’s popup settings.

Let’s start blocking!

The main tool of my embeddedd-content-breaking is Adblock, a Firefox extension that will block any content you want to block. Install it by going to the website and following the instructions. You’ll also want to download a handy text file like this to import into Adblock as your initial filter list.

In a browser window, type control-shift-p to open the Adblock options window. Click “Adblock Options” near the top right and make sure “Obj-tags” has a check next to it. This will cause all embedded objects like Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime, Real Player, and anything else to have a handy little “Adblock” tag on them. This tab is the key.

Now go to your favorite web site that uses embedded content, like Apple Movie Trailers, and try to view some embedded content. Click the “Adblock” tab on the movie and a window will pop up. Copy this link (control-c), paste it into your browser’s address bar. and hit enter. You’ve now got a direct link to the content and you didn’t have to sift through any HTML code to get it. Now you can save the content by hitting Control-S or going to the file menu and choosing “Save.” Wait a bit and it will be on your hard drive, free of any embedded protection for your consuming freedom.

But that won’t always work

Sometimes you’ll save a Quicktime, Real Player, or Windows Media link and get a 1kb file. Welcome to the next level. People use these kinds of files to redirect your media player to the real content — a further layer of protection to stop you from saving it to your hard drive. Don’t worry though; you can still get the real movies, but it will take a little more effort.

Open the downloaded 1kb file in a text editor. A simple way to do this is rename it with a .txt extension. In that text file (somewhere, you may have to search a bit), you’ll find one of three things…

1. An http:// url. This one is easy. Copy the URL, paste it back into your browser’s address bar, and keep repeating this process (open as a text file, find the link, paste in address bar) until you get the full movie.
2. An rtsp:// url. This is easy too, but you’ll have to download some software to do it. I use Net Transport for rtsp links, but with some searching, you can find a free program that will save rtsp streams to your hard drive.
3. A filename (ending in .mov, .rm, .asf, .wmv, or something like that — it’s easy to find the ‘.’ with a search function). Copy the file name and go to the browser window where you last copied a URL to the address bar. Remove everything after the last ‘/’ and paste in the file name you copied from the text file. Hit enter, save, and enjoy.

There ya go. Embedded content breaking 101. And don’t worry — it’s all legal. There’s no DMCA protection for this because no ‘technical protection measures’ are used; you only read the text of some file on your computer.

iFilm sucks too

The biggest whore of them all in the embedded content world is iFilm. They pull every stop they can to prevent you from getting their content links — popups, redirects, javascript. Have no fear, I’ve got your solution. This iFilm bookmarklet will let you skip all that BS. Save that link as a bookmark. Then go to the iFilm page where it lets you select the format and resolution of the movie (the first page after the full-screen advertisement) and click that saved bookmark. Booyah – the film opens in a new window for your instant, uncluttered, save-able consumption. FYI, the link is for the medium quality Quicktime link. You can probably fiddle with it to get other formats, but it works for me, and I don’t feel like going through their hellish HTML and javascript again.

Greasemonkey Google whacking

As linked to earlier, Joe complained about Google stealthily adding a redirect to google.com in some search results. I call this “evil,” as opposed to their motto “do no evil.” Adding those redirects alone isn’t evil; adding those redirects and not telling users about them is. (Extra evil points to Google because the redirects only show when you click down on the link, not when you simply put the mouse over the link.) I should add that these redirections apparently don’t show in everyone’s results — just some people and for a short time, a kind of sampling.

Enter Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox that lets you do pretty much anything you want on any web pages you want if you know Javascript. Want to make any http:// style text appear as a link even if there is no link in the HTML? Greasemonkey can do that. Want to prevent sites from opening links in a new window? Greasemonkey can do that.

Want to nip Google’s search result redirection in the bud? Greasemonkey can do that too. I whipped up this little script to do exactly that, removing all ‘onmousedown’ events from google.com pages. Now the warning: I don’t know if this will have any bad side effects, so use with caution. Having said that, you can get the GoogleWhacker (after installing Greasemonkey) by right-clicking on this link and selecting “Install User Script.” Booyah, Google is prevented from knowing what search results you used. This will only stop them from knowing which individual search results you clicked, not how many search result pages you looked through or what your search terms were. I guess a little privacy is better than none.

That’s all the tips I have for now. More as I stumble upon them…

The future is not to be trifled with.

There was a time in my life when I thought Nostradamus’s predictions were pretty cool. How many people could get so many events right, even down to names and dates? I believed in psychic powers, ghosts, and other unusual phenomenon…

But thankfully I’ve come to my senses since then… Fortune telling is like the old adage about monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare. Given enough predictions and enough time for people to make them, one person’s predictions are bound to be close enough to correct to be interpreted as such.

The 60th anniversary just passed for Vannevar Bush’s essential contribution to information science — “As We May Think” — which described his electro-mechanical machine, the memex, which would allow people to instantly call up a microfilm projection of any information they seek. Many people today interpret the modern Web as the fulfillment of Bush’s dream.

But for every Vannevar Bush, Marshall McLuhan, or Nostradamus, there are tens of thousands of “World of Tomorrows” and Epcot centers, homes of the future, sci-fi novels, and MST3K shorts which depict a future that never happened… Psychics quoted in Weekly World News who can tell us what’s going to happen to our favorite celebrities in the coming year or who killed Jon Benet Ramsey… Someone telling me I should stop writing this drivel and carry on with my former career as a barber shop quartet singer…

And this is the same Vannevar Bush who was supposedly involved in UFO conspiracies at Roswell, who spent years working on his electro-mechanical computer, who predicted computers the size of the Empire State Building… Fitting his outlandish and wrong predictions, he leaves us with the term “vannevar” referring to incorrect predictions of future advances because of technological advances. I can only hope that the word “schlossberg” never receives such an ugly distinction.

People are rewarded for their contributions to a field, not for predictions unrealized during their lifetime. History has an amazing way of forgetting the bad parts of these people’s lives… Details like Newton’s obsession with alchemy (as in turning lead to gold) or Einstein’s insanity late in his life, that Copernicus believed the sun was God, that Turing was convicted of taking part in homosexual acts and then killed himself with cyanide, Freud and the Anna O. mess, Bill Clinton getting head in the Oval Office…

But there’s a reason history forgets those details. Most likely, its because those people had other accomplishments that outweighed those faults. Maybe it’s just that we don’t want to remember the bad parts so we don’t blemish their images. Does that mean Bush’s only real accomplishment was his one article in the Atlantic Monthly and all the other parts of his life are irrelevant to how we remember him? No, because he was also important in establishing the National Science Foundation and ARPA, which became DARPA, which eventually spawned that thing called the Internet, which brings us back to that thing called the memex. Or that Newton, Freud, Einstein, Copernicus, and Turing all transformed their respective sciences in ways that we take for granted today. People who make great contributions leave appropriate legacies.

There’s plenty of other good rewards that come from predictors, prognosticators, and the like. They spawn our imagination, making us think of futures that we might have, inventions that we could build, life on other planets, and eventually someone will fulfill those visions and spawn someone else’s creations. Or at the very least they give us a laugh, like guessing how much weight Oprah is going to gain next year.

Predicting the future is a luck filled task, and I guess Vannevar read the tea leaves correctly. However, predictions alone don’t make the man; people are not remembered for lucky guesses and predictions. What else can you tell me about Nostradamus’ life other than he made those crazy guesses? And how many of you read your horoscope every day? Can you even tell me the name of the person who writes your hororscopes? You’ll be remembered longer if you make your own path, not if you guess the future.

The doggie style that broke the game industry’s back

Easter eggs in games and software are fun. The supposed first one was in the Atari game Adventure where if you do certain things, you would see the name of one of the game designers. A version of Excel had a built in flight simulator. There’s a neat one in Macromedia Central where you can see Strong Bad and Homestar in a cartoon.

And then there are mods. Mods, short for modification, are a trend in newer video games where users can add content to an existing game. It could be as simple as a new weapon or tweaked environment all the way to a completely new game that runs on the underlying game engine. The most famous one by far is Counterstrike, a mod for the game Half-Life which pits terrorists against counter-terrorists in first-person realistic gun, grenade, and bomb combat. Counterstrike now has hundreds of thousands of players around the world.

And then there was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. For those of you who don’t keep up with the video game industry, the Grand Theft Auto series is perhaps the most violent ever created. The objective is to beat up and kill people, steal cars, and have sex among other socially unacceptable point-ratcheting objectives. If there ever was a reason to be angry at video game violence, these games certainly provide good material.

The latest revelation was no big surprise to me — a minigame where you control the sex with hookers was released on the ‘net. It’s still unclear whether it’s a mod (user created) or a well hidden easter egg (made by Rockstar, the game developers), though the “mod” creator claims it was already part of the game and he simply unlocked it.

I’m not going to comment on whether or not video game violence is affecting kids because I don’t think you can separate out violent games from, say, violent TV shows and movies, music portraying violent acts, sibling rivalry, overhearing mom and dad having sex, or Jerry Falwell. Even if you made these games for ages 18 and up, younger kids would find a way to get them. Maybe violent games are a just a zeitgeist…

But it was on ABC World News Tonight this evening where I think something snapped in me. David Walsh, who works at the National Institute on Media and the Family, was interviewed about the GTA:SA sex minigame. Here’s the quote from the news report:

“Dr. Walsh says it would be perhaps more disturbing if it was outside programmers who produced this sexual content. He says that would mean any game could be changed so the game your children buy isn’t necessarily the one they’re playing.”

Oh my fucking god…. People can change a game into a different game? Hooooly shit. Before you know it, they’re gonna take a game with violence and no sex then add sex to it, which means that they’ll have to know what sex is like to make it, which means they’re either having sex, will have sex, or watch porn. Or they’re going to make a violent game even more violent. Or they’ll take a sex game and add guns to it. Or they’ll take a happy cheery game and turn it into a bloody, gory, gun toting one. Or they’ll throw Barney into a super violent game (try your favorite search engine for Barneystein 3D).

So what’s the complaining about? Does the sex game suddenly push the ultra-violent game from acceptable to unacceptable for kids? Yes, this is yet another bullshit witch hunt. Let’s find a way to blame the video game makers and the people who made the mods, because any good parents would never buy this game for their kids, right? Whatever… If they want the game, these kids will find a way to get it.

Who cares about the sex in the game. Maybe the interactive sex thing will make these kids better in the sack, which will benefit them as they get older. Hell, maybe Rockstar should take the cue and make a totally interactive sex video game, complete with foreplay, oral, anal, toys, handcuffs, midgets, STDs, and a glass eye. You can combo from cunnilingus to 69 for extra points.

But the big mystery, which I don’t think anyone can solve, is what took them so long to catch this. This “mod” was released over a month ago (June 15 is the date I found), and the game itself was released in October 2004, so why has it taken so long to get this attention? GTA:SA is just the unfortunate target of some groups’ political agenda, and I imagine it took them a little while to figure out the best way to spin this story to maximum effect. But don’t worry — I don’t think anything is going to change because of this. As long as copies of the game are flying off the shelves, I’m sure the industry will keep churning out violent games, appeasing both video game fans and video game company execs alike.

Dear Hollywood…

I know “Hollywood” isn’t a real person, but I figure if someone down there reads this then passes it on to your friends and then their friends and so on, eventually all of you will read this. For the record, I’ve watched movies for over 20 years, worked at a movie theater, and even explored movies academically, so I feel highly qualified to make the following argument.

What the fuck happened to good action movies? I recently saw one of your so-called “summer blockbuster” films and was very disappointed — not because of the acting or plot, but because the action scenes were terrible. However, the problem isn’t the action itself. The real problem is that somewhere between The Dirty Dozen and Batman Begins, you decided that we don’t really need to see the action any more.

These days, action films are loaded with tons of special effects, complicated choreographed fights, and stunts, all essential parts of the Hollywood action film. We love to see these things because we can’t do these things in our own lives — escapism that you only find in a movie. Certainly a good plot and good acting helps too, but it’s the excitement of the fights and explosions that separates action films from, say, The Prince of Tides.

But somewhere along the way, the vision of what an action film should be was lost. There are still fights and explosions and shit like that, but now directors are trying harder and harder to bring the audience into the fight using motion blur, incredibly short cuts, and excessive camera shaking so that we can’t tell what’s happening in these scenes. All of the action is lost in a half second jiggling blur. That might even be a half second of the director’s hairy ass pointed at the audience for all I know.

I’m not sure individually who is responsible for this. I’m sure directors are largely to blame, but then so could the cinematographers, editors, writers, and the special effects people too. I’ll leave it to you to decide who should be punished. Besides my anger with you, I feel sad for the stunt people, fight choreographers, and other people whose work is marred because you can’t see it for the blurred three seconds it appears on screen. You pay those people a lot of money to do their work, and if I was one of them I’d be really pissed off that my contribution to the film was spoiled because the director felt that an added camera shake would really make the audience feel the force of that punch better.

So Hollywood people, here are some lessons for you to work on:

1. Use a steadicam. If a student can build one for $14, you can too, but I’m sure you can afford ones better than that.
2. Long cuts work for action scenes too. There’s an elegance to action scenes that is ruined by short cuts.
3. If you’re not willing to pay for 1 or 2, pay your special effects, stunt, and fight people less. No sense paying them if you respect their work by not letting us really see it.

Two more things. If you could pass this on to the appropriate people, I’d appreciate it…

Robert Rodriguez… I love your movies, except for the whole “Spy Kids” thing, but I hope that’s just a phase. You have a great visual style but you can’t write music worth a damn. In all seriousness, the opening theme from Sin City made me want to flee the theater. You could have written a score that rivals Batman, adding a deeper texture to a dark film, but instead floundered like a Daredevil. The music hurt what was otherwise a decent film. Stick to the directing and leave the music writing to a Danny Elfman or Hans Zimmer — to someone who know how to write good movie scores.

And Arnold Schwarzenegger… I never liked the idea of you running for governor of California. When I think of my politicians, I always like to consider their resumes — what about their past makes them qualified to hold a public office. So Arnold, what about your role in the film Batman and Robin makes you qualified to be governor? For that matter, maybe you can also explain The 6th Day, Last Action Hero, and especially Kindergarten Cop. I’ve got questions about some of your other films too, but I don’t want to waste the governor’s time…

Damn I’ve got a lot of writing to do

Rather than write the 70-some ramblings that I have in the backlog, I’ve decided to cut away at it little by little, condensing what would otherwise take me forever to write…

Live Journal and the Law

Yeah, this one was a while ago. SixApart bought LiveJournal and shortly afterwards required that children under 13 get parental approval when signing up for a new account by having them fill out part of the registration. This is because of COPPA — the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act — which requires parents to approve what youngsters do online. Many people complained — too easy to get around it, too many kids who are mature enough to decide for themselves what they want to do online are now impeded, kids in threatened homes who blog their predicaments would be blocked…

I looked at the numbers from late last year to now. The number of blogs for people under age 13 looks like it went down a bit, maybe 10% down in 10 months, so maybe there has been an impact (but why are there 681,594 blogs for people age 5?). As much as I want kids to have a sense of agency — a way to speak for themselves, do what they want — I really have to side on the law on this case. It’s not because of the threat to kids, but rather the threat to LiveJournal and their kind. Without clear limits of liability, companies won’t make things like LiveJournal, or a barrage of lawsuits could quickly put them out of business by parents who blame LJ for the terrible things that happen to their children as a result. Worse yet, without clear liability, companies will bitch and moan endlessly until they get that protection.

I’m not advocating more protection for companies either. There’s a fine line between how much companies like LiveJournal is responsible for what happens on their site versus how much freedom individual users have. You can wave this off, saying companies have control over the legislative process and decide what the law should be. I’m not that extreme, but I still think companies are rightfully scared of being sued. COPPA may not be ideal, but it represents the kind of debate we need to have about issues like liability for when children go online. Of course, parents should be aware of what their children are doing online in the first place, so maybe COPPA isn’t very useful at all…

The Fiona Apple Debacle

Does anyone remember Fiona Apple? That song “Criminal” that was her one hit wonder? Her latest album has hit the Internet before it was released to the stores. The funny thing is it’s not even on the slate for release. If you believe the rumors, Epic, her record label (owned by Sony), asked her to come up with a radio hit that she hasn’t been able to provide. Epic’s official statement is something like, “we’re awaiting the new album just like her fans.”

If the album still gets released, will it be a success? Who will buy it? If the album is a flop, then the spin will be because the songs were released online before its commercial release. If the album is successful, then it must have been because of online “marketing” — that is, its release on the file sharing networks. Nobody wins in situations like these. The reality is that the album will be successful if it has good songs and if the fans like it. Remember when Moby whined that nobody bought his album “18” because they were downloading it instead? The album sucked. That’s why we didn’t buy it. Similarly, Fiona’s album will be successful or not on its own merits, not because it was available online. By the way, has anyone heard from Fiona about this? She has remained surprisingly silent through this whole ordeal…

The iPod People

I don’t remember that much from high school. All the Spanish I learned back then has evaporated from my brain. There was band, AP classes. And there was physics. I don’t remember most of physics either except for this one tidbit. Those little earbuds people use to listen to music, like the ones that come with the iPod, is just like putting a fire hose to your mouth for a drink of water. So when I see all the people walking to UC campus with their little white earbuds dangling out of their ears, I can’t help but feel sorry that they’ll have to face the consequences of hearing damage for the rest of their lives. I’ve already damaged my eardrums enough. But given that I really love music, I’ve resigned myself to the lifestyle of the hard of hearing.

Some people complain that the iPod people have tuned themselves out of society by cranking their music, much like the “zombie effect” seen by my friend Sean in reference to people who are detached from reality while working on their laptops in coffee shops. It’s also a class identifier — the people who own an iPod probably also have a computer, Internet access, and more. And then there’s the issues about what iPod means in terms of sources of culture — whether it closes or expands individuals’ music horizons as a result. And what does this mean for radio when people can listen to music of their choice wherever they want?

I’m most worried about a generation of deaf people. It’s going to happen too — we’re already working on a generation of people with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Someday we’ll be able to understand the consequences of an iPod nation, but for now I’m content to speculate. Give it a little time and there will be iPods with extra volume boost for the hearing impared. And if someone can try and sue McDonalds for making him fat (and lose), someone will sue Apple for making him or her go deaf.

The Family Movie Act vs. the ART Act

The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 was just passed into law. Did anyone else notice this? ClearPlay is a company that makes systems that skip over naughty bits in DVDs so families can watch the movies without fear of exposing themselves or their children to sex, violence, and Michael Moore. Think of it like a template that knows when all the bad scenes occur then skips over them automatically. They were sued in 2000 by Hollywood (specifically by eight movie studios, sixteen directors, and the Directors Guild of America) because they thought ClearPlay’s system was violating copyright and trademark laws. The Copyright Office ruled that this wasn’t infringement because there was no modification to the underlying work, among other reasons.

Congress stepped in to clear this up. The Family Movie Act explicitly grants companies like ClearPlay exemption from prosecution as long as they don’t modify the original work itself — in this case, the DVD — among other guidelines. That’s nice if you don’t like four letter words, nudity, violence, or Jar Jar Binks. And I can’t really sympathize with the directors and Hollywood — this will probably open a new market for their movies, further adding to their wealth.

But this bill was more than the Family Movie Act. It also was the Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005 or ART Act. This smattering of legalese makes recording movies in a movie theater illegal including selling the resulting recording, reproducing the work, or distributing copies on a computer network. The best way to deal with a problem is to make it illegal rather than change your business model to accommodate the Internet, right?

Does anyone else notice the glaring differences between these two parts of the bill? One gives the movie industry strong prosecution rights against people trying to record movies in theaters. The other gives companies and individuals the right to “edit” movies for home viewing, to the dismay of the movie industry. You gotta wonder what was going on behind the scenes here. “We’ll give you the ART Act if the Fundies can have their sanitized DVD viewing.” Heh…

This is just a red herring

Maybe you heard the one where a monopolistic photo editor software developer complains that someone is screwing up their plan? That’s what happened the other day when one of the Photoshop original developers complained that Nikon wasn’t playing fair. Some bad-ass digital cameras today have the ability to save the photos in a raw mode, including info on light intensity, which allows for much more powerful digital photo editing.

Nikon apparently decided they didn’t like the idea of photographers using other software to access their raw mode, so they did what any reasonable company would do — they encrypted it. Now Photoshop is claiming they can’t decrypt it without potentially being liable under the DMCA for breaking that encryption. This is either a serious misinterpretation of the DMCA or a huge smokescreen for Adobe’s eventual goals.

For those of you not familiar with the DMCA, it prohibits breaking digital protection schemes, such as encryption, under a variety of circumstances. I think the intent was primarily to prevent people from profiting from the sale of such software or devices (think Sklyarov and the Adobe eBooks encryption). It’s also being used to stop individuals from releasing software into the wild that breaks business models (like DeCSS).

I find any claim of copyright on a photograph’s format highly dubious, much less encryption of that format. The hidden secret is that to violate the DMCA you must also violate copyright laws. No copyright violation means there’s no DMCA violation. If that’s Adobe’s justification for this mess, they’re just lying.

Furthermore, I don’t think they’re violating the DMCA’s tests. The DMCA has three main “tests” as written into the law to determine whether you’re liable or not — the primary function of the technology is to break the protection (for Photoshop, editing photos), the technology has little value other than breaking the protections (again, photo editing), and the technology is marketed as something to remove such protection schemes which then violates copyright (and again, editing photos). I don’t see how adding decryption of this raw photo format breaks any of these rules.

In fact, the DMCA says in section a.1.B that it “shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are … adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title.” I think this raw format encryption represents exactly this exemption. Accessing and editing your own photos are probably the best noninfringing uses I’ve ever heard in the history of DMCA issues.

Of course, I’m not a lawyer, but I know bullshit when I see it. So what’s Adobe’s game? For one, they want to avoid a costly lawsuit as does Nikon, but that’s a bit naive. They might also want to avoid paying Nikon for their software or Adobe’s own software engineers to break the encryption. I see two other big issues that they may be thinking about. First, Adobe is worried about losing their position in the digital photo editing realm. It’s not that there’s any fear of another piece of software competing with Photoshop in the near future. It’s just that they worry about people buying any other piece of software from any other vendor because of technology lock-in, wasting valuable money that they might not spend on Photoshop or other Adobe products.

Second, Adobe worries that this is the tip of the iceberg for photo companies adding similar “features” to their digital cameras. Adobe wants this to stop now before things get worse. Of course, Adobe doesn’t care about whether or not the file formats are encrypted. Adobe does care that their software is compatible with all those protected formats. In short, Adobe wants free or cheap licenses for those file formats, and there’s no better way to reach that goal than after a storm of free negative publicity against Nikon. Politicians already knew the value of free publicity, getting free airtime for their campaign commercials on news programs. This is the Internet way of doing the same thing.

So Nikon looks to be the loser in this little game, right? I guess they are. They’re probably worried about a couple of things — that someone will break their proprietary raw file format (which has already been done), that their competitors will use the unencrypted format to their advantage, that they won’t collect rent from Nikon digital camera users by requiring them to pay for the decryption software or for enhanced features in such software, or that they won’t collect rent from groups like Adobe or other software developers who want to be compatible with their new cameras. In this case, Nikon simply had the unfortunate honor of being the sacrificial lamb for Adobe’s holy vision.

What’s the best solution? Nikon should open their protection scheme for anyone who wants it for free. Simply protecting the data will ensure a protest by users, other software developers, and Richard Stallman. Nikon won’t sell any more cameras by protecting their photo format, so is it worth even the potential of negative publicity? No. The value is in the camera, not the file format. For Adobe, open formats are good, but twisting the arms of companies in related lines of business won’t accomplish anything either.

This should serve as an example to all you companies out there with proprietary, encrypted, or otherwise sheltered formats. Don’t protect the stuff that doesn’t mean anything to you. Selling high quality products will sustain your company, not improving your crappy encryption. If anything, making the formats open will improve your status and bump up your sales a bit.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to get people to play with you. Adobe and Nikon demonstrated the wrong way of doing it this time. But they are not alone, and I’ll be sure to point out as many acts of technology stupidity as I can in the future of this web site.

That load of skeptical, arrogant, jump-to-conclusions, narrow-minded bastards…

I’m mad now… News of a research project I’ve been involved in broke on Slashdot today. $3.3 million from the MacArthur foundation to research kids and technology. Everyone seems to misunderstand it:

Let’s see: $3.3M / 3 professors / 3 year study = $366K/year/each.

I wish I could make that kind of money to “discover” that kids use cell phones and e-mail to find out when to meet their “crew” at the mall.

[snip]

My point is that we should probably take a look at fixing what’s actually broken before trying to play around with gee-whiz high-tech crap that does little/nothing to improve the basics of education.

http://www.omninerd.com/news/news.php?nid=110#820

The following distills the perspectives of our primary investigators Peter Lyman, Mizuko Ito, and Michael Carter, as well as the slew of students, professors, and other advisors involved in this incredible project. Of course, this is entirely my opinion, so don’t complain to them if you don’t agree or if I get it wrong.

I’m not going to respond to the insinuation that these amazing, friendly, funny, selfless, incredibly intelligent professors, one of which is my Master’s final project advisor, are going to do anything but the research they’ve been funded to do. You see, we ARE trying to find out what’s broken. One short version of our research is that educators are severely disconnected from the people they’re trying to educate — making poor choices about technologies to use, not taking into account the technology habits of the very people they’re trying to help among other gaps.

Saying they “use cell phones and e-mail” or that kids do childish things only shows that you’re assuming you know what they’re doing — that you’re holding them to your own ideal of childhood. They may think their activities are perfectly normal, so maybe we’re the ones who should change our habits. The reality is that we can’t be certain of anything because nobody has done the research.

What we aren’t going to do: We aren’t going to suggest they buy 10,000 AMD based, wireless networked PCs running Ubuntu Linux. We’re not out to create things and throw them into the wild to see if kids will use it, wasting the money and momentum of this project. We’re not here to pad our pockets with dead man foundation money, much like the uninformed soul above suggests.

The angry reaction to this story is probably due to the failure of the two other disciplines that focus on kids the most — education and marketing. Those fields treat children as brainwash-able vessels of information absorption, reflecting adults’ perspective about what the children should be and how they should attain their future status. For instance, this perspective has advocated bringing technology into classrooms and forcing kids to learn how to use them. This makes their lives better? Improves their education? This resembles what the kids do with that technology outside the classroom or in the future?

The failure is not understanding the problem from the perspective of the people it impacts the most — the children. This problem is the very reason ethnographic and other qualitative research methods exist. Someone out there has to speak for these kids but not in some disconnected, adult voice. We have to speak for the children in their own voice, in their own words, reflecting their concerns, habits, and preferences as best we can. This is more than understanding that “kids use cell phones and e-mail.” The real understanding will come when we know how and why kids have appropriated these new technologies for their own uses in and out of schools, what uses they’ve created, and using that knowledge to advance the use of technology in education.

Why is there such animosity when disciplines collide? Why do technologists hate social research? I think about my final project research — Berkeley freshmen and communication technology use — and how disconnected developers, educators, and administration are from the needs and habits of those students. I’m especially concerned because my ideas for future research are highly cross-disciplinary. Will my research be rejected outright simply because I’m trying to bring a new perspective into a field with different acceptable methods? That still won’t answer the question which inspired this writing: Why is the Slashdot readership so uninformed when problems don’t directly involve computers?

So for all you people who think this is money wasted, that you can think of better uses for it, that technology should be taken out of schools, or any other reflex reactions, you obviously don’t know a thing about what the goals of this research are. We’re incredibly excited about this research and hope it will solve your concerns as well as ours. At best, we’ll transform education and our understanding about how kids appropriate technologies in new and unexpected ways. At the very least, it will keep a dozen or so graduate students happily employed for three years, doing research and furthering their own education and research goals which, as a graduate student, is a damn good goal too.

Even though I’m leaving this research after I graduate in May, I know it will continue in the good hands of some of the best and brightest people I’ve ever known. And if you think that our PI’s are going to kick back, relax, and bask in their new found wealth, then I can understand exactly why they received the grant and you didn’t.

Go somewhere else!

I got my first comment spam last week! I’m so excited! It means my web site has now passed from just some random pages to one that people actually care about enough to use to their own advantage. You call it annoying, but I call it progress.

So to all you comment spammers out there, I highly recommend you don’t try it. I offer the following:

• All links in comments use rel=”nofollow” and all comment pages plus my comment RSS feed are in my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from counting the links in page ranking.
• All HTML tags are removed from comments. Too bad.
• I have filters and I’m not afraid to use them.
• The only people you’re pissing off are the scarce numbers of readers I have. In other words, you’re not reaching a big audience.
• Comments like “Your site colors suck!” don’t mean shit to me, and the other readers of this site know that already.

Don’t bother to spam here. Seriously. It’s not worth the time — yours or mine.

Also for the record, I’ve tried very hard to make this site more compliant with accepted practices for blind and low vision readers. Hopefully this hasn’t created any readability or navigation issues as a result. I know the photo pages still need some work, but otherwise the site should be much better than it was before.

Money can buy you new feet… or at least a bitchin’ wheelchair.

As you regular readers can probably tell, I’m a little behind on my writing. In fact, I just counted and I have 71 articles and ideas in the backlog. I’m not very proud of this fact. Because oral arguments were heard today in the Grokster case, I felt finishing up this article would be very timely.

Using the courts to solve your problems is like playing with loaded guns — someone is going to get a bullet by the time you’re done. In the legal revolver dance, everyone could be riddled with bullets in the end.

Worst of all, you could shoot yourself in the foot. You go to court with a smoking gun — an argument that you’re certain is unstoppable — and end up with a ruling against you that will inhibit your ability to fight that battle in the future. Just ask Eric Eldred, Lawrence Lessig, and the crew who litigated Eldred v Ashcroft. If you don’t remember, this is the case where Eldred wanted to publish books that would have been out of copyright if not for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. (I can only imagine the mess in the pants of those media companies’ execs when Sonny Bono got elected to Congress.) Lessig et. al. argued that extending the duration of copyrights was creating an effective monopoly, something that the Constitution doesn’t allow, thereby impacting free speech and other stuff.

In a 7-2 smackdown, the Supreme Court ruled that copyright legislation is solely the domain of Congress as enumerated in their Constitutional powers — Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8. The Courts must also defer to Congress since they’re in a better position to judge what the proper duration of copyrights ought to be (because Congress has better judgement than the Supreme Court?). 7-2 is not good. That means at least three Justices have to die or step down or get a lobotomy to have even a tiny chance of the case being decided differently.

Brewster Kahle, not content to have his ideals shot down by a Supreme Court decision, decided to challenge the lengthened duration of copyrights again. This case, Kahle v Ashcroft, focused on the shift from conditional copyrights (registering works to receive copyright protection) to unconditional copyrights (where everything is protected by copyright upon creation). The result is many works are now orphaned — still under copyright but without copyright holders available to ask for use permission.

Kahle and the Internet Archive got shot down. Citing the Eldred case as part of the reasoning, the case was dismissed outright from the district court. They are appealing the decision, but don’t hold your breath for a different answer.

If there’s any silver lining on this cloud, the U.S. Copyright Office had an epiphany about orphaned copyright works in the mean time. In Canada, a system is in place for individuals to petition for use of a copyrighted work when the copyright holder can’t be found. Our U.S. Copyright Office has asked for comments about what they should do. This does not mean they will do anything. This does not mean they will do the “right” thing, whatever “right” means. This does mean they recognize the problem and are hoping someone has a solution that will be amenable to all parties. I think Brewster should be celebrating this move by our government and drop the lawsuit to focus all energy on the copyright office, but he probably won’t.

As I’ve said before, going to court is a last resort. It’s an expensive, lengthy process where you’re gambling on a decision in your favor. The best advice is don’t go to court in the first place. The next best advice is don’t put yourself into a situation where going to court is even an option. Resolve your differences elsewhere — like Congress. For the same amount of money it would take to go to court in the first place, you can hire a lobbyist to go to D.C. and get a law passed saying the same thing.

Both sides think they have a smoking gun, but they’re blinded by their idealism. As the Eldred and Kahle cases show, the penalty for following this idealism blindly is a ruling against you. You don’t see straight and you shoot yourself in the foot. The next time you go to the revolver dance, you’re on crutches versus an opponent out for the kill.

But that’s not exactly why I worry about the Grokster case. Grokster thinks their right because their peer-to-peer software just a technology — not something forcing people to infringe copyright by sharing music and movies. The media industries see Grokster and other P2P software developers as thieves profiting off the copyrighted works they own. They’re talking about two different worlds entirely, and it’s up to the Supreme Court to figure out who’s right.

The difference between Grokster and their opponents is that the RIAA and cohorts have already put the money and resources into Congress, they have no present intention of accepting or working with P2P technologies and companies, and the courts are simply their current venue of choice. Regardless of the decision in this case, you can expect to see a new DMCA-ish bill raised in Congress shortly after — maybe the INDUCE Act, maybe something else. Those media companies don’t innovate; they just attack anyone who beats them to the money — player piano rolls, radio, cassette tapes, VCRs, seat belts, airbags… oops. Wrong industry.

I have a prediction for the Supreme Court ruling in this case which I won’t share now. I will say that the outcome of this case will not make a big difference in the end. MGM has the resources to pursue other options — legislation, new P2P system development, sicking zombie Sonny Bono on infringers — and Grokster doesn’t. I guess that means even if Grokster wins, they’ll lose.

If you lose in court, you can hope that the Copyright Office will decide to hear your argument instead. Or if you lose, you can go to Congress and ask them to see the problem your way. So don’t give up hope if you shoot yourself in the foot. The miracle of modern government will get you back up on fresh legs in no time — well, the government and a whole lot of money. And an army of lawyers. And lobbyists too. Don’t forget those lobbyists…

iMovies anyone?

I recently learned about Podzilla — a Linux distro for the iPod. iPod already has some recording support, but here’s the kicker — you can pay the $50 for the iPod recording hardware and get 16-bit recordings at 8kHz (telephone-ish quality) or you can install Podzilla for free and record whatever you want at up to 96kHz (DVD audio quality).

Why is recording crippled on the iPod? Well, part of the answer is that the market for voice recording hardware is pretty small. Dedicated voice recorders are incredibly expensive, and Apple is not at all in that market. They’re out to sell their iPods and get people to use iTunes. Furthermore, voice recording doesn’t need amazing quality, so the low audio rate is sufficient for most.

However, this is not a market issue. If Apple really wanted to make an iPod capable of high quality recording, they could have. Their competitors, such as Creative, Archos, and iRiver, have MP3 players full quality MP3 and WAV recording (44kHz, CD quality). My Creative Jukebox 3 even has digital recording inputs. In fact if Apple was concerned about being competitive, they would have included high quality recording in the iPods from the very beginning.

Which leads me to an interesting conclusion: Apple was pressured by the RIAA and big music distributors to disallow high quality recording on iPods. If you’re the RIAA, you’re worried that someone can take a CD, plug it’s output right into an iPod, then play the CD and end up with MP3s on the iPod (or AACs or whatever their damned format is). Worse yet, someone can bring an iPod to a concert with some microphones and make great quality bootlegs (because bands haven’t learned that if they could make live concert CDs on the spot, they could rake in the money).

I think Apple was either told by the RIAA no recording on the iPod or intentionally crippled it to avoid the wrath of the music industry in the first place. Think about the case if Apple had allowed high quality recording… “Sorry big music distributors, but we released our tiny music player with the ability to record the same music of yours that we sell online. We know people will record music themselves and avoid paying you the royalties you so desperately want. But we don’t really need the iTunes store to sell iPods because we’re Apple and people will buy our hardware since it looks cool, is vastly overpriced, and has less features than our competitors.” Or something like that.

All of this makes me wonder about the iPod photo, or whatever that new device is. Already most of Apple’s competition has moved on to portable movie players, some of which even record video, so why is Apple just moving to photos and not movies? My prediction is that Apple will have a movie playing iPod just as soon as they create iMovies (or iFilms or something like that, like iTunes but for movies… call it Quicktime?) and sort out the issues with the MPAA and big movie distributors.

To put this another way, if Apple doesn’t get into movies, then it’s because they couldn’t line up the studios. I think most people are comfortable making MP3s from their CDs now, but Apple would have to overcome a huge hurdle to get DVD ripping software on everyone’s computer. Why would you buy iTunes if you already own the CD? Likewise, why would you want to buy videos online when you already own the DVDs? The MPAA has harshly attacked anyone releasing DVD ripping software, so Apple would have to get their blessing before the iPod + video or iMovies comes out.

But that’s just my opinion. Back in reality, I don’t know of any other portable music player manufacturers that also have a vested interest in selling online music except for Sony, but then Sony has been very quiet about their efforts, and they own the music they’re selling anyway. Since Steve Jobs is already in bed with the movie studios (Pixar) and since iTunes has been more successful than anyone could have predicted, I’m sure he’ll be able to convince the other big movie studios to fall in line with the portable revolution. The iTunes store is as important to iPod’s success as the iPod itself — both for the RIAA’s blessing and the iPod’s overall success — so a movie version of iTunes would be equally essential for Apple to break into the handheld movie player market.

I’m certain this isn’t the only instance of the RIAA and others putting pressure on big software companies to bow to their whims. Microsoft wholeheartedly jumped onto the DRM bandwagon, much to the delight of the media industry, with recent versions of their Windows media formats. I just wonder if MS did that before or after their conversations with those companies. I wouldn’t characterize these as “alliances” as much as “necessities for doing business.” If MS hadn’t bowed to the pressure of the RIAA and others, then someone else would have. Therefore, I say MS and Apple both made the right decision for their business, much to the detriment of all the people stuck with their hardware and sofware. Pressure like this goes beyond software and hardware, but I’ll deal with those aspects some other time.

I’ll give you one other similar example. There’s a Palm device — the Treo 650 — that was made specifically for Sprint and is pretty much a combo cell phone and PDA. The 650 came crippled in that you couldn’t use its Bluetooth to connect to the Internet. Why would Sprint let you do that anyway? Someone hacked it and enabled that feature; supposedly it was always there but just hidden. That same person also figured out that you can use an SD WiFi adapter with some driver hacks — a wifi adapter that Palm wouldn’t release drivers for. Sprint certainly pressured Palm just like the RIAA pressured Apple; both Sprint and Palm want to milk the cell phone market for everything they can.

Back to Apple… Based on what Apple did before, I bet their iPod photo already has video support. It’s just crippled. And so if you’re patient enough, wait for a version of Podzilla to uncripple the video playback support built into their new iPod. It’s either that, or wait until a sanctioned, overpriced, under-featured iPod video finally comes out. Or just pick up one of the non-Apple portable media players that already support video playback and avoid the whole iPod thing in the first place.