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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: October 2011 (page 1 of 2)

What is E-PARASITE?

Here’s the minimum you need to know about the E-Parasite act that was recently introduced in the House.

In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act went into effect. In order to give copyright holders immediate recourse in fighting copyright infringers, the bill gives those copyright holders the right to send takedown notices to service providers who are hosting allegedly infringing content. If they speedily comply with these notices, the service providers can avoid legal liability for copyright infringement by their users or customers. This is referred to as a “safe harbor” provision, but it’s basically extortion.

The right to send takedown notices is subject to massive abuse. The Center for Democracy and Technology published a report on the abuse of these notices related to political speech. In 2009, Google reported that 57% of the takedown notices it received were from businesses targeting competitors, and 37% were not valid copyright claims.

Most of the time, the subjects of the takedown notices lack the financial resources to defend their rights, so once a site has been subjected to a takedown notice, it just disappears regardless of whether they were actually infringing on someone’s copyright or not.

The DMCA works well enough if infringing content is hosted by someone who will respond to a takedown notice. Now the copyright industry wants to be able to prevent users from accessing material they deem to be in violation regardless of where it’s hosted. To that end, there are two new bills floating through the houses of Congress, both of which would require that US network operators blacklist any sites that are deemed to be in the piracy business by blocking DNS lookups for their domains. That’s what this is all about.

Earlier this year, the Senate took up PIPA — the Protect Intellectual Property Act. This week’s news is that a corresponding bill has been introduced in the House which is even worse. Both bills implement the blacklist scheme described above, and are of course full of loopholes and vague definitions that would make them even more ripe for abuse than the DMCA already is.

James Allworth explains that the bill basically creates a Great Firewall of America. Even people like Fred Wilson who describe the DMCA as an “excellent compromise” (as opposed to an ongoing travesty) see that this bill is massively worse. Over at TechDirt, Mick Masnick digs into the details of the bill and provides the full text as well.

Now is the time to contact Congress about the bill. Opposition to it is widespread and crosses the partisan divide, so don’t assume anything based on party affiliation.

Selected links

Tim O’Reilly declares October 30 Dennis Ritchie Day. I’m in.

Italy’s cheese-making traditions are being maintained by immigrants from India.

Stephen O’Grady says that asking whether open source is innovative misses the point, and concludes thusly:

Innovation is a function of incentive, not the software development model.

You could do worse than to heed the advice of FAKEGRIMLOCK.

Something iPhone users take for granted

When Apple entered the mobile handset business, one of the biggest breaks they made with tradition is that they retained control of the software update process for the iPhone. Regardless of your carrier, which software runs on your phone is between you and Apple, and Apple does a very good job of maintaining support for old handsets with their software updates.

In many cases, with Android, it’s up to the carriers when your phone gets new software, and they have not broken with their long tradition of being very conservative when it comes to distributing software updates. A couple of weeks ago, I was able to update my 27 month old iPhone 3GS to iOS 5 the day it was released. Many people buy Android handsets and never get to run the most recent software, as shown on this chart.

For many customers, this is probably not a big deal. They’re fine with running the software that shipped with their phone as long as they own it, but I find it strange that enthusiasts are OK with it.

Selected links

Rob Neyer explains why intentional walks are bad for baseball.

For all the talk about small business, an over reliance on small firms is bad for national competitiveness. As Matthew Yglesias points out, what countries need is a steady supply of small firms that are growing into large firms.

Brent Simmons, the original author of NetNewsWire, explains why people who count on Google Reader to sync RSS readers may soon be disappointed. Lately I’ve just been using Google Reader directly.

Andy Baio talks about Google ditching the plus operator — another strategy tax casualty. The plus operator was originally invented by AltaVista, but was quickly adopted by everyone else. I vaguely remember Google resisting demands to add it at first, but they eventually relented.

What’s responsible for Tivo’s decline?

Marco Arment speculates on what an Apple television might be. He talks about the beauty of on-demand television, and the fact that DVRs are a poor substitute:

Cable TV customers have attempted to gain these benefits with the DVR, but it’s a bad hack. Even the best results are more like an automated VCR than true on-demand video, and almost nobody reliably gets perfect results. The way to escape the dysfunction of broadcast TV isn’t to record it and play it back later.

I want to talk about this part of his post.

As a long term TiVo customer and reluctant user of a DVR provided by Time-Warner Cable, I agree with this. Here’s the thing, though. When TiVo arrived, it was incredibly disruptive. The ability to pause and rewind live television as well as easily record shows and watch them at your convenience was something completely new in the world. Even today, the DVRs provided by cable companies cannot compete with TiVo in terms of user interface.

TiVo’s original capabilities are particularly impressive when you consider the network infrastructure available when it was introduced. For a very long time, TiVo downloaded its guide data over a telephone line using a built-in modem overnight. Broadband wasn’t pervasive enough for TiVo to ship a product that could assume a persistent Internet connection.

I, and a lot of other people, thought TiVo would become a major player in the television industry, mainly because once people experienced television on a TiVo, they would never go back to watching television without it. I was right about that — once you’ve had a DVR, you can give up on TV, or you can shift to a fully on-demand lifestyle, but you can never go back to regular broadcast television. It’s too painful.

Sadly, TiVo has not been doing well for a long time. Here’a report from earlier this year describing TiVo’s shrinking subscriber base. The question is, why has TiVo performed so poorly given their entry into the market as an incredibly disruptive force?

I can think of a few reasons, not all of which are entirely TiVo’s fault.

TiVo’s biggest problem is that they were unable to successfully license its software to cable companies. Cable companies don’t build their own DVRs or write the software. For whatever reason, they have gotten into bed with companies that provide awful hardware with slow, difficult-to-use software. The remotes are terrible, the units are unresponsive, and the on-screen interfaces are embarrassing. TiVo’s software would have been infinitely better. Unfortunately, those licensing deals never happened. What the cable companies offer instead is good enough for most people. The inferior boxes from the cable companies cost less per month and you don’t have to buy the hardware yourself. Most people, given the choice of hundreds of dollars in up-front costs (TiVos cost less now) and upwards of $10 a month, will instead choose to just tack on $5 to their cable bill for the lesser but still functional DVR.

The second problem for TiVo is digital cable and switched digital video. TiVo was at its best when the box at the end of the cable line just needed an analog cable tuner in order to work. Then the instructions for the TiVo just involved plugging the coax into the back of the TiVo and giving it power. When digital cable arrived, you had to connect an IR transmitter to the TiVo so that it could change channels on the cable box your cable company provided. When HDTV became available, the government mandated that cable companies support a standard CableCard interface so that people could tune in HD channels on their televisions. Theoretically, this should have simplified things. TiVo added CableCard support, but the cable companies have never done a good job of supporting them, and in practice, getting a Tivo set up with CableCards has traditionally involved multiple phone calls with the cable company and often a home visit from cable technicians.

Finally, cable companies started using switched video, which requires even more intelligence in the client. My TiVo has two CableCards and a separate tuning adapter, which is required to tune in switched videos. The setup is very flaky and the TiVo fails to record shows on a regular basis. None of that is TiVo’s fault, nor is there much they can do about it. They are dependent on the cable companies, who are ambivalent if not actively hostile when it comes to supporting anything other than their own boxes. The complexity of the required setup has eaten away at the user experience TiVo provides. It was once rock solid and dead simple, but that’s no longer the case.

And the third problem is that TiVo missed the boat on video-on-demand. TiVo supports most of the popular on-demand video services now, but that’s a minimum requirement for anyone who wants to sell you something to connect to your television these days. Netflix, Hulu Plus, Apple, and Amazon.com are the ones making money from video-on-demand. Netflix captured a bunch of subscribers via DVD rentals and has been moving them to video-on-demand. Apple is selling on-demand video through iTunes, and Hulu has key deals with broadcasters. TiVo could perhaps be in a better position had they offered a service that provides downloadable videos (as many people thought they would) long ago, but it’s certainly too late now for them to become a player in that market on their own.

What’s interesting to me is that TiVo clearly saw that cable television was just a data stream that they could tap into in order to let people watch whatever they want on their own time. Before downloading high-quality video of television shows over the Internet on a regular basis was really feasible, tapping into the cable stream and picking what you wanted really was the best option available. I don’t know whether TiVo didn’t see that transmitting shows directly over the Internet was in the nearer future than they predicted, or they saw it but were unable to put the deals into place to become a player in the on-demand market, but their inability to do so perhaps cements their decline.

It really is a shame. I am still a happy TiVo subscriber, and it’s still much, much better than the alternatives if you want to watch cable programming. Services like Hulu Plus and Netflix Instant aren’t viable options if you want to watch sports, or Food TV, or plenty of other channels. But it’s hard not to look at TiVo and think about what might have been. In spite of all of the difficulties, they still offer the best product on the market. The TiVo Premiere Elite looks awesome. You should ask for one for Christmas.

Selected links

A now-implausible “What if?” scenario — what happens to the global economy if the US government pays of all of its debt?

How much economic growth is the US throwing away by not liberalizing its immigration policy? Michael Clemens argues trillions of dollars. Via Matthew Yglesias.

In the spirit of Last Year’s Model, Ars Technica reviews an original iPod on its tenth birthday.

The life of a maker of Windows machines:

Microsoft and Intel were also petitioned to allow greyscale versions of their respective product logos. ASUS’ request was also approved, which is why you see less obnoxious Intel inside and Windows 7 stickers on the Zenbook.

Google Reader pays the strategy tax

In 2001, Dave Winer wrote about the strategy tax:

Ben explained that sometimes products developed inside a company such as Microsoft have to accept constraints that go against competitiveness, or might displease users, in order to further the cause of another product. I recognized the concept but had never heard the term.

Google is retiring all of the social features in Google Reader in order to push users to Google Plus instead. Discontinuing these features is bad — I find that people use them very effectively to share interesting stuff and would argue that the shared links from my Google Reader friends are generally more interesting than any single blog that I read. Even worse, Google is going to delete everyone’s past shared links in a few days. So people who have been using link sharing as a sort of blog will soon see their entire archive deleted.

Why? In order to prop up Google Plus. I wouldn’t argue that the strategy tax is never worth paying, but I would say that it’s higher than most companies realize. The good news for Google is that there’s not much competition in the news reader space any more, so it’s not like Google Reader users are going to rush off to use some other product as a result.

Update: I can’t find confirmation that archived shared links will be deleted and I don’t want to be a rumor monger. Hopefully I was just wrong about that.

Update: Courtney Stanton explains the value of Google Reader’s social features. (via Andy Baio) After reading it I realize that I wasn’t really taking advantage of Google Reader.

Selected links

How to tune your Mac and learn DTrace at the same time. DTrace is a tracing framework that instruments the heck out of all of the processes running on a system and lets you access that information in realtime.

Caterina Fake writes about how founders establish the cultural DNA for companies. Great essay.

America is underpopulated. Under the most facile analysis, it may seem as though immigrants are taking shares of a pie of limited size from people who are already here, but the facts show that immigration is a net positive for economic growth and doesn’t negatively pressure incomes in the US.

Everybody knows that the US killed Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone attack. Today I learned that a more recent drone attack killed his 16 year old son, born in Colorado. The fundamental duty of the US government is to protect US citizens. Killing them in drone attacks is a dereliction of that duty.

Selected links

Here’s one of those posts where the comments are as important as the original posting: John Peebles says that systems administrators are endangered species and commenters dissent. Good stuff.

People who don’t pay any federal income tax are still taxed.

Here’s why I don’t read any gadget blogs: after the tech pundits panned the iPhone 4S as underwhelming, it sold double the units that the iPhone 4 did on “opening weekend.”

Don’t miss this interview with PIMCO co-CEO Mohammed el-Arian on Occupy Wall Street. Here’s the bottom line:

In the U.S., the bailing out of the financial sector was sold on the basis that it would allow growth and job creation to resume, and that has not happened. So the rationale for socializing those losses hasn’t played out.

Selected links

Matthew Yglesias offers a strong argument against the usefulness of public choice theory.

Here’s a lesson in the painful side effects of architectural changes: Marco Arment explains how Instapaper is hurt by Apple’s elimination of a permanent cache from iOS 5.

Hacked! by James Fallows. The original blog posts that led up to this story are the thing that convinced me to turn on two-factor authentication for my Google account.

Horace Dediu looks at how much Apple spends to open an Apple Store.

PIMCO CEO Mohammed El-Erian explains why people should be paying attention to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Here are a couple of profound sentences:

People are not living in a mean-reverting world. They’re living in a world of path-dependency, and it’s getting worse.

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