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Cory Doctorow <a title=“Boing Boing: Could “noise” cause a TiVo to block recording? Experts say no” href=“http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/15/could_noise_cause_a_.html">reports that he’s been told by DRM experts that line noise could not cause the copying restrictions that people are seeing with their Tivos. The restrictions are part of a Macrovision copy protection scheme, and Tivo claims that the protection is being tripped by data errors, as opposed to being enabled purposefully by broadcasters. I’ll be following this story as it develops. ...

Some disturbing news from Tivo-land bears scrutiny (if you’re a Tivo user anyway). Tivo provides a feature to content providers that enables them to dictate the terms under which it can be recorded. They can specify that a show can only be stored for two weeks, or that the person who recorded it can’t copy it to another device. This feature has come with assurances that it will only be utilized by companies offering pay-per-view content or video on demand over Tivo. It seems like usage of the feature may be leaking out, perhaps by accident. ...

Of all of the interface elements on an application that I’ve built, the one that users have the hardest time with is batch uploads. This system, which processes transactions, can accept transactions in batches. The system is very simple, the batch files are CSV files which can be easily created in Excel. There are no optional fields and the order of fields isn’t flexible. Even for this relatively simple use case, people have an awful time trying to use it. Even people who use the batch facility frequently often upload files that the batch processor cannot deal with. Being a programmer, my first temptation is to blame the users, but in the end it’s my responsibility to make the application easier to use. ...

Google has released Google Blog Search. Technorati only had so long before the gorilla showed up. Update: Worth noting – Google indexes feeds rather than weblogs, so sites with full text feeds are at an advantage in terms of being reachable.

The Omidyar Network is matching Katrina donations dollar for dollar. The matching program is delightfully low-tech. Just make a donation and note it on the Wiki. (Via Ramit Sethi.)

Here’s the first weblog entry I’ve seen on problems with iTunes 5.0. However, I have read posts from a number of people who have had problems upgrading iTunes, all of them Mac users. I upgraded one of my PCs and everything went without a hitch. If I were a Mac user, I’d hold out until Apple posts an update. (I don’t think people are losing their music, rather their computers are left in a state where they can’t run iTunes, and all of their metadata appears to be gone.) Macintouch has a page about iTunes 5.0 as well. ...

Nelson Minar posted the answer to a question I had planned on researching recently, explaining how the smaller CCDs relate to lens size on SLRs. I have an old school Nikon SLR and have been interested in purchasing a digital SLR, and was wondering whether my lenses would work as I expect. Here’s the answer: But inexpensive digital SLRs don’t shoot a full 35mm frame. Instead they have smaller sensors. The 350D has a “1.6x crop factor”, which basically means your pictures look OK but your lenses are more telephoto than you’d think. A 35mm lens acts like a 56mm lens. If you want a wide angle 28mm shot you have to buy a 17mm lens. Really wide angle lenses for these small sensor cameras are very dear. ...

I downloaded and installed Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 today because there’s nothing I love better than the beta version of a Web browser. You can read about all the cool new features in the release notes, and what the browser offers developers in an article by Simon Willison, but what you really want to do is install it and try using the back and forward buttons. I had no complaints about the back button previously, but it is now instantaneous. I’m eager to see how much better the popup blocking is as well – advertisers seem to have caught up wtih the current release of Firefox to a certain degree. ...

I’m still trying to figure out why eBay is paying $2.6 billion (or more, depending on performance, for Skype. Judging from the Business Week article, analysts are having trouble figuring out what’s going on as well. Here’s the closest Business Week comes to taking a stab: EBay buyers and sellers can communicate with each other via e-mail before a transaction is complete, and presumably Skype would give eBay a way to add voice to such chats. But eBay traditionally has been guarded about such communications out of fears that deals might get taken offline to avoid fees. ...

I just finished reading Reza Aslan’s No god but God,which I picked up after watching the author interviewed on The Daily Show and reading Phil Carter’s recommendation over at Intel Dump. The author succeeds at his main task – explaining the history of Islam, from its origins in the Arabian desert, through the life of Mohammed, to the various changes and schisms that have brought us to the present day. Like any good history writer, though, Aslan’s main goal is to put forth an argument. I’ll get to that argument in a bit. ...