WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
With the exception of Viacom's suing of Google for US$1 billion, which is covered later, and Microsoft's MP3 patent case which I mentioned last week (they lost this round, but will undoubtedly appeal), the news this week has been mainly bitty-bits. That shows up in a higher than normal number of 'Scanner' items.
It is perhaps, though, worth just drawing your attention though to the interview with Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of Public Key cryptography. His views on privacy laws certainly made me consider a number of my own views on the subject. Also worth a quick look from that section is the Ubiquity magazine piece on the Post-Digital Media Cloud, especially if you like writing that punctures the pretentiousness of the digiteratii.
So, while I install Fedora Core 6 onto my old Windows laptop, let's have a look at what was in the news this week.
Shorts:
Bruce Sterling, author of 'The Hacker Crackdown', made a few interesting comments about blogging and other techno-fads at SXSW (the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference and Festival, held in Austin, Texas), this week. In particular he predicted the demise of the blog, of which there are reputed to be 55 million around at the moment, within ten years. Personally, I wouldn't give it that long. To me the so-called blog-o-sphere is the ultimate disproof of the old idea that if you gave enough monkeys typewriters they would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare...
The talk was the most popular of the conference, which is a bit weird when you consider that the sort of people who attend are just the sort of dweebs who snap up the latest techno-fads. Sterling was also pretty scathing about musical 'mashups', portrayed by some ideologues as the ultimate in the democratisation of music - anyone with a laptop can do it (and it sounds like it). Sterling commented that the only reason they were popular was because they are novelty music, and that wouldn't be enough to sustain the trend.
I can but agree!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/14/sterling_sxsw/
As a coda to my piece on Microsoft and the refusal of certain US government bodies to upgrade, I note that Microsoft are denying that it is of any significance, while at the same time planning a schmooze-up for senior US Department of Transport officials in Microsoft's Redmond GHQ at the end of this month. I think that's what is commonly referred to as having your cake and eating it...
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=16A0EF9:215D3E184FC552DC937ED64BD56651F9EFF29049075316B4
Ah yes - my old friends Google. The company, commonly touted as the Microsoft of the 21st Century, are certainly doing their utmost to emulate the arrogance Microsoft showed in the 20th Century. Google's vastly overpriced acquisition of the much hyped YouTube may well prove to be the defining moment, since it meant that YouTube was now owned by a company with enough cash - more than enough cash actually - to make it worth suing.
And that's exactly what happened this week. Media giant Viacom has sued Google for hosting 160,000 infringing works on YouTube, which, it claims, have been viewed 1.5 billion times. The suite alleges that YouTube has 'built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself...'
You know something? That sounds just like the description of the big media companies - like Viacom, for instance. Clearly they don't like other people emulating their activities!
I've no idea what the outcome of this case will be. Judging from the comments of legal experts, pundits, analysts, commentators and others who claim to be knowledgeable on the issues involved, both sides have a case. For me the only problem with the whole business is that there isn't a way they can both lose and have to pay out vast amounts of money to the people who actually wrote the copyrighted material.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/13/viacom_sues_gootube/
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command
=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012984&source=NLT_PM&nlid=8
Intel and AMD are involved in a long running anti-trust court case. In fact it goes back so far that even I don't remember when it started. It's been grinding it's way through the courts and recently there was a filing from AMD that made me smile.
You may recall that at the height of the Microsoft v the US Department of Justice anti-trust trial it was revealed that Microsoft had no policy for archiving e-mail, as a result of which vast numbers were unavailable. (Except, in the event, it seems, the most incriminating ones!)
At that time there were a number articles about how one of the reasons Intel were not being sued (not true, even then) was because it had a company wide policy of not committing stupid water-cooler type remarks to e-mail, and because it had an impeccable e-mail archiving policy which enabled it to clear itself of accusations of malevolent intentions.
Unfortunately...
All was not quite so pristine in the fortified caverns of Intel, and AMD's latest filing lists a slew of Intel employees, starting with Chairman Craig Barrett, CEO Paul Otellini and sales chief Seam Maloney, who have suspicious gaps in their e-mail records. Intel, we are given to understand, is in the middle of building an automatic backup system for its e-mail.
Funny, that. I thought that was what they were already doing!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/11/intel_tortellini_episode/
You've just got to hand it to the Nigerians for creativity! They recently launched a fake London Metropolitan Police web site, complete with a fake anti-terrorist hotline number. Its purpose? To sell something called 'Anti-Terrorist Certificates'.
Wonderful!
This is only the last in a long line of fake sites which have included, in the last year alone, ones for Interpol, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Secret Service and a whole parcel of Banks. At one stage they even created fake sites for DHL and Lufthansa Cargo to lure victims into paying transportation costs for none existent motorbikes and cars!
These guys could make a fortune if they applied their fertile imaginations to legit business.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/12/nigerian_launch_fake_met_police_site/
Scanner: Other stories
Amazon 1-Click to rule 'em all? Not if Kiwi has his way
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/15/amazon_patent_reexamination/
Where are the programmers?
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e5Qz0FypUC0FrK0E7KL0EG
Fraud, not incompetence, to blame for Nortel's accounting woes!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/12/seec_charges_nortel_four_with_accounting_fraud/
Ubiquity Magazine: Pfeiffer on 'The Media Cloud'
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v8i09_pfeiffer.html
Windows Vista's 90-Day Report Card
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e5TP0HiOOq0G4S0E7ET0Ed
Whitfield Diffie: Privacy Laws could hurt the little guy
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=16842D1:215D3E184FC552DC4CC87C70846C93E9EFF29049075316B4
Management 'scared' by open source
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/03/09/open_source_licensing/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barbara, Fi and DJ for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
18 March 2007
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html
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