Posts

Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo! Music lays it out in simple terms for the music industry: But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years. ...

Tonight I was listening to Terry Gross interview Stephen Colbert, and I was fascinated to hear his reaction to the idea that his show might influence the political discourse. (You can listen to the interview here.) He rejects the idea that his show or satirists in general play any role whatsoever in shaping the political discourse in this country. More importantly, he obviously hates the idea that his show could play any role in the political discourse. ...

Jeff Atwood posts on YouTube’s copyright hypocrisy and how the fair use rules for copyright work. He points out that the copyrighted video clips posted to YouTube generally do not pass muster for fair use, and that YouTube is essentially flouting the law with the silent assent of many copyright holders. Last October I posted about the benefits of YouTube, which sadly do seem to rest upon a foundation of widespread copyright infringement. If anything I think that YouTube is the best demonstration yet of the absurdity of copyright laws, especially with regard to sports broadcasts. In theory, people are not allowed to post video of events that were witnessed in person by tens of thousands of people and on television by millions of people, but that strikes me as patently absurd. ...

The New York Times has a big article on state lotteries today, and the verdict isn’t good. North Carolina, as the state which has most recently started its own lottery, is featured prominently, and the results are not good. The end result is exactly what any economist would predict: In reality, most of the money raised by lotteries is used simply to sustain the games themselves, including marketing, prizes and vendor commissions. And as lotteries compete for a small number of core players and try to persuade occasional customers to play more, nearly every state has increased, or is considering increasing, the size of its prizes – further shrinking the percentage of each dollar going to education and other programs. ...

Microsoft has announced that Internet Explorer 7 will no longer be restricted to only those installations of Windows XP that pass Windows Genuine Advantage validation. I’m glad to see Microsoft make the right decision here. IE7 is, among other things, much more secure than IE6. Forcing millions of computers to languish with insecure browsers punished all Internet users by making it easier for those computers to be hijacked and used to distribute viruses, send spam, or otherwise make life miserable for all of us. ...

I couldn’t publish anything yesterday because upgrading Apache (to deal with some security issue) blew up suexec and I couldn’t get it to work again. suexec is an Apache module that you can use to tell the Web server to run its CGI scripts as a user other than the user who owns the Apache process. The idea is that if I own some files on the server but I want to let Apache write to them, rather than using file permissions, I can just configure suexec to run CGI scripts as me, so that then they can write to my files. ...

Today TUAW published an interview with Ambrosia Software president Andrew Welch on their iToner product (which the iPhone 1.1.1 update killed), and what it’s like to develop for a closed platform in general. Welch is pretty clear on his role on the iPhone ecosystem, but the way Apple has treated his product still stinks. I think he’s right on the money with these remarks: So I take it your position is basically that the user area of the phone should belong to the user and it’s not really fair for Apple to artificially restrict what you can put there? ...

J Alex Halderman notes that MP3s downloaded from Amazon.com do not include watermarks that tie the files to the customer who downloaded them. That’s an important difference from the DRM-free tracks available from the iTunes Music Store. Here are the downsides of watermarking: Individualized watermarks give purchasers an incentive not to share the files they buy, or so the theory goes, but, like DRM, even if watermarking does reduce copyright infringement, that doesn’t necessarily mean it makes business sense. Watermarks create legal risks even for customers who don’t engage in file sharing, because the files might still become publicly available due to software misconfigurations or other security breaches. These risks add to the effective cost of buying music for legitimate purchasers, who will buy less as a result. ...

It has been widely reported that Burmese soldiers raided the monasteries that housed the monks who instigated the widespread street protests in Rangoon last week. A government official from Burma who is attempting to defect to Norway claims that the Burmese government executed thousands of the monks and dumped the bodies in the jungle and that he fled the country rather than participate in the execution program.

It strikes me that “that’s stupid” is just about the most self-defeating thing you can say if your goal is to analyze, well, anything. I’m seeing “that’s stupid” a lot lately with regard to Apple’s iPhone. Unlocked iPhones being rendered useless by the 1.1.1 upgrade is stupid. Charging extra for ringtones is stupid. Locking out third party applications is stupid. Not selling an unlocked version of the phone is stupid. Not supporting 3G data networking is stupid. I could go on. ...