MSN Search general manager Ken Moss reports via the MSN Search Weblog that MSN responded to the porn-related subpoena from the Department of Justice with aggregated data. No personally identifiable information was supplied to the government. I expect Yahoo and AOL to weigh in on what, exactly, they provided at some point as well.
I’ve been wanting to write more about lying memoirist James Frey, but I haven’t gotten around to it. In the meantime, some other people have written outstanding pieces on Frey, including the New York Observer’s Tom Socca, who says everything I would have said much more eloquently – and a lot of insightful things that didn’t occur to me as well. He even makes an interesting comparison of James Frey to George W Bush. ...
I’ve mentioned the truly boneheaded and potentially disastrous idea put forth by bandwidth providers to offer some kind of tiered access scheme to companies wherein they would not only offer connectivity but also the right to have their data delivered to the customer faster by paying more. Of course, as I explained, what this would really mean is slowing down everyone else’s traffic just a little bit. Anyway, Tim Bray has caught Washington Post writer Christopher Stern parroting the spurious arguments of the telcos. ...
Universal Pictures has put up a Web site to get an idea how many people would pay to watch season 2 of Firefly. Obviously it’s good news to Firefly fans that the show isn’t just dead in the water, but it’s also an interesting experiment. Can a huge online fan base provide enough revenue to support a television series? I guess we’ll find out. Update: In answer to a question in the comments, I said Universal Pictures put up the Web site based on the whois entry for fireflyseason2.com. It may turn out that I spoke too hastily – I’m not sure what “UP.BSE” means exactly, but I guess it has something to do with the brilliantscreen.com email addresses associated with the domain registration. ...
Ed Felten has posted a review of Google’s DRM scheme over at Freedom to Tinker. Bottom line: Google’s DRM, like everybody else’s, can be defeated without great difficulty. Like all DRM schemes that rely on encrypting files, it is vulnerable to capture of the decrypted file, or to capture of the keying information, either of which will let an adversary rip the video into unprotected form. My guess is that Google’s decision to use DRM was driven by the insistence of copyright owners, not by any illusion that the DRM would stop infringement. ...
Next time I need a lawn mower, I’m buying a Snapper.
Rebecca Blood has actually started using Movable Type to edit her blog and comments on how moving to a new tool may change how she works. I think that the degree to which the writing tool matters in terms of how one writes is almost always underestimated. Every time I made changes to my own blogging tool, it changed how I wrote, and moving to Movable Type changed things as well. The biggest change came when I inserted markers between each entry on my weblog – that freed me to start writing posts of more than one paragraph. What a bad day that was for my readers. I’m probably better when I’m more succinct. ...
eMusic seems to be getting quite a bit of buzz around the Internet. (See James Governor’s pro-eMusic article today for more evidence.) Two weeks ago I had never heard of it, and now it seems like I’m reading about it everywhere. The biggest marketing problem eMusic has, aside from not offering any of today’s popular hits for download, is that they don’t allow you to browse their full catalog before you sign up. To me, not offering today’s popular hits is actually a bonus, because I generally hate all of those songs. The other problem is ameliorated by the fact that they offer a two week trial during which you can browse the full catalog and download 50 songs which you get to keep. I signed up last week and I’ve downloaded 48 of my free 50 songs. (I grabbed one full CD with 18 tracks and another double CD with 30.) ...
It’s time for another episode of Rate the Privacy Threat. In our most recent installment, we looked at the click tracking in iTunes (new downloads now include a privacy warning before enabling the feature). Today’s issue is a new Mozilla Firefox feature that will allow sites to specify a “pingback” URL that will be hit after the user clicks on an outbound link from the site. To understand what this feature will do and why Web site creators are asking for it, it’s necessary to look at how sites currently track how many people follow outbound links. Many sites (including some weblogs) like to keep track of which links people are clicking on. The way this is implemented currently is that they direct all links to a script that acts as a “clickthrough tracker.” The actual URL to follow is passed as a parameter to the script, which logs the clickthrough and then sends the user on their way. As the blog entry describing the Firefox feature points out, there are some problems with this approach. Number one on the list is that you have to wait for the clickthrough script to process your request before you get to see the content you really wanted to see. If that script is bogging down, you can wait to see your content even if the link’s destination is on your LAN. The second problem is that if you don’t want your clickthrough tracked, you have to copy the link location, cut the URL out of it, and then paste it into your browser. ...
Yesterday I read that Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday had drawn some unwanted attention to his article in Wikipedia. I checked out the page history and in looking over the revisions, I noticed a name that looked familiar among the people who were rolling back malicious changes to the page – Jpgordon. A quick trip over to the user’s bio page confirmed that it was in fact, Josh Gordon, a one time incredibly prolific user of The Well. Anyway, Josh used to be a full time programmer, struck it rich at eBay, and has retired. Anyway, Josh disappeared from The Well about 5 or 6 years ago, and I had wondered what he was up to. I’m not surprised to see that he has occupied himself by working to make Wikipedia better, mainly by working on thankless tasks like getting rid of junk and reverting vandalized pages. In discussions, he was always the person who brought facts to bear in an argument, and it’s logical that now he’s working on an encyclopedia. ...