coondoggie writes to mention NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have announced a new record in the history of scientific ballooning in Antarctica. The new record was established by 'launching and operating three long-duration sub-orbital flights simultaneously within a single southern-hemisphere summer'. "The milestone is significant, as it occurs during the height of the International Polar Year (IPY), a coordinated scientific campaign that is utilizing scientists from more than 60 nations. NSF is the lead federal agency for IPY, which began in March 2007 and will continue until 2009 to allow for two full years of observations and field work in parts of the world that are generally uninhabitable for as long as six months each year, researchers said. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And I keep on fighting for the things I want
Though I know that when you're dead you can't
But I'd rather be a free man in my grave
Than living as a puppet or a slave

Jimmy Cliff, The Harder they Come.

Just got off the phone with Scoble.

He told me about a blog post he just put up, entitled Erased.

He says something really simple. When Facebook had an issue with him, they erased his presence.

Seems they could have frozen his account leaving his presence as-is until they could figure out what to do about it.

Anyhooo...

We want to do a podcast from our phone conversations. I'd love to use Twittergram, but we're limited there to 30 seconds. I wanted to use BlogTalkRadio, but their service does so much more than we want, and you can't just call it when you have an idea you want to record. I'd like to try something other than Utterz, so if you know of something, please let either Scoble or myself know.

Think of it as Trade Secrets 2.0. It's the same idea that got me doing a podcast with Adam Curry in 2004. We were having interesting private phone conversations where we'd get around to saying sheez why the fuck aren't we recording this stuff. Scoble and I are at the same place now.

So if you know of some service we could use, or if you can convince the BTR guys to give us the service we want (that would be my first choice) please let me know.

An anonymous reader writes "GM has introduced a new website called GMnext. The site utilizes Wordpress and launching in spring a Wiki allowing General Motors to get better feedback on topics such as energy, design and technology from the community. The interesting part is the executives at GM are participating in the collaborative website. 'We're starting our second century at a time of fundamental change in the auto industry,' said GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner. 'We'll use GMnext to introduce some of our ideas for addressing critical issues concerning energy, the environment and globalization. In the process, we also hope to spark a broader, global discussion on these important topics.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What is it about turning on a GPS system that makes people lose just about any bit of common sense they may have had? Last year, we wrote about a woman who blamed her GPS device for getting her into a train accident. You see, the GPS device told her to go straight, even though there was a gate blocking the train tracks. Now we've got a similar case. As pointed out by the folks over at the Tech Liberation Front, a California man who was in New York for work, and driving a rental car, apparently turned onto the railroad tracks for the MetroNorth line because his GPS told him to turn. To his credit, the guy eventually realized that maybe the tracks weren't where he was supposed to turn, but he was unable to get his rental Ford Focus to reverse back down the tracks. At that point he "abandoned" the car, leaving it for the next train to hit. At least the MetroNorth spokesperson seems to have a sense of humor about the whole thing. When talking about how the guy tried to warn the oncoming train, he deadpanned: "He tried to stop the train by waving his arms, which apparently was not totally effective in slowing the train." Not totally effective indeed. When noting that the driver worked in the computer field, the spokesman also noted: "One computer brain listening to another." Time to reprogram some of the logic, however.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

We've noted a few times that people have gotten way too trigger-happy about invoking antitrust law any time a company does something they don't like. Antitrust law is supposed to prevent the abuse of actual monopolies like Ma Bell. It's not supposed to be an all-purpose weapon to be used against any company whose market share exceeds 50 percent. A lawsuit filed on New Year's Eve claims that Apple has violated antitrust law by declining to license the WMA DRM format from Microsoft for the iPod. There are several obvious problems with this. In the first place, while Apple has undeniably dominated the market for portable music players, there's no shortage of competition. Big companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Samsung make competing MP3 players. Consumers who don't like the formats supported by the iPod have no shortage of alternatives. Second, it's really not a good idea for the courts to be getting embroiled in technical debates over what formats devices should support. The issues involved are complicated, and the market evolves quickly. By the time the courts get around to making a final decision, the issue is likely to be ancient history. Third, it's hard to fault Apple for failing to support WMA-based DRM when even Microsoft itself broke compatibility with its old DRM scheme when it introduced the Zune. Surely if Microsoft can't be bothered to support its own audio format, it's hard to justify forcing Apple to do so.

It's also worth noting that none of this would be an issue if the DMCA didn't give digital rights management technology the force of law. This sort of thing isn't a problem with non-DRMed music formats because there are plenty of tools out there for converting from one music format to another. Without the DMCA, there would be similar tools for converting copy-protected music to the appropriate format. But under the DMCA, such a tool would be an illegal "circumvention device." Repealing the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions is a much better solution because it would give consumers the freedom to play their music on the device of their choice without getting the courts involved in the messy business of deciding which MP3 players have to support which audio codecs.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

buzzardsbay writes "The good folks over at Baseline Magazine have an intriguing — and worrisome — report on a movement to limit computer forensics work to those who have a Private Investigator license or those who work for licensed PI agencies. According to the story, pending legislation would limit the specialized task of probing deep into computer hard drives, network and server logs for telltale signs of hacking and data theft to the same people who advertise in the Yellow Pages for surveillance on cheating spouses, workers' compensation fraud and missing persons. Those caught practicing computer forensics without a license could face criminal prosecution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, well, well. This morning when we pointed out that the RIAA's responses to the whole Howell affair were rather lacking, we missed an important point. In the NPR debate between the RIAA's Cary Sherman and the Washington Post's Marc Fisher, while Sherman may have had the stronger case (this one time!), he did make one interesting statement that could have much wider implications. When pushed on the Howell case, rather than admitting he was wrong, Fisher moved on to a different situation: the infamously incorrect statements by Sony BMG exec Jennifer Pariser, who said on the stand, in response to a question about whether it was okay to make a personal backup copy from a CD, that saying so was "a nice way of saying, 'steals just one copy.'" As we (and many others) pointed out at the time, this statement is blatantly false.

When Fisher brought it up, Sherman responded by saying:

"The Sony person who (Fisher) relies on actually misspoke in that trial. I know because I asked her after stories started appearing. It turns out that she had misheard the question. She thought that this was a question about illegal downloading when it was actually a question about ripping CDs. That is not the position of Sony BMG. That is not the position of that spokesperson. That is not the position of the industry."

This actually is somewhat believable, as the industry does believe that downloading a single copy is the equivalent of "stealing just one copy," (even if that's questionable in itself). However, Sherman also claims "other reporters and bloggers had called about Pariser's quotes and chose not to write about them after learning she had erred."

It's not clear who those other reporters and bloggers are, but it's a bit surprising that they would then choose not to write about it. After all, it was a recording industry exec admitting she had made false statements under oath -- and those false statements were part of the case that helped Jammie Thomas lose her lawsuit. That has folks like Ray Beckerman wondering if the RIAA had notified the judge that Pariser had misspoke. Considering that we never heard the judge tell the jury to ignore those statements, at the very least, it would appear that the jury was never told that Pariser misspoke -- which certainly would suggest that Thomas has grounds to call into question that original ruling against her.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

A new show of Erik Otto's mixed-media artwork opens tomorrow, January 5, at San Francisco's Gallery Three. Otto's captivating work draws from his experiences in graffiti, animation, commercial art, graphic design, and set production. The exhibition, titled "The Calm Before The Storm," runs until February 2. All of the pieces are also viewable online. Seen here, "What Lies Ahead" (mixed media on wood panel, 50" x 32"). Link to online gallery, Link to Gallery Three

I have to admit that I was sorry to see that my fellow Techdirt blogger Julian had beaten me to the punch, writing a characteristically insightful post on the Robert Scoble/Facebook story. But Facebook and screen-scraping are two of my favorite things to talk about, so I can't resist pointing out that I disagree with some of Julian's analysis.

Having noted that a script acting on Scoble's behalf can only access information that Scoble himself can reach manually, Julian argues that this can't be considered the only criterion in evaluating the situation:

[P]rivacy is not just a function of the publicity of your personal information, but of the searchability and aggregability of that information. Public closed-circuit surveillance cameras, for instance, typically capture the same information that a casual observer on the street is already privy to. But we recognize that being spotted by diverse random pedestrians, or even being captured on diffuse and disconnected private security cameras, is not intrusive in the same way as being captured on a citywide surveillance system that is searchable from a centralized location.

All of this seems true: individuals' attitudes about privacy are rightly driven by a pragmatic appraisal of the likelihood of someone doing something bad with the available information — a judgment based on the information's value and the cost of obtaining it. Ripping up your credit card statement before throwing it in the trash doesn't make it impossible for a dumpster-diving thief to target you, but it increases the difficulty of ripping you off enough that you'll probably be safe.

But I think Julian makes a mistake when he assumes that this is a viable way to conduct your life online. The problem with applying this approach to an digital context is that a user's estimation of the accessibility of a given piece of online information is almost invariably going to be too low — and will be getting more so by the second. The costs to automatically collecting data are very small and getting smaller.

There are a few reasons for this. First, the tools are getting better. Libraries like WWW::Mechanize are simple for any programmer to use and available in a variety of languages. And GUI-based applications like Dapper and Piggy Bank aim to make things even simpler. Second, if done properly, it's very difficult to prevent, detect or punish automated data collection. Facebook's script detection technology is impressively existent relative to that of its competitors, but it's still almost certainly trivial to subvert it with proxies, faked user agents and plausibly human delays. Third, once the data is collected it can, of course, be easily distributed.

And the situation is only going to get worse! In fact, it's getting worse at such a rapid rate that counting on the privacy of any even slightly public online information is a mistake.

The negative reaction to Scoble's script is coming from users who think of it as a violation of the covenant they perceived to surround their data. But that covenant was based upon their own mistaken understanding of the internet. Scoble's actions shouldn't be viewed by these users as a transgression against them, but rather as a pleasantly benign lesson.

It's fine to lament the situation, or to applaud Facebook for taking steps to keep its valuable, freely-acquired user data away from competitors (and, while they're at it, script-employing users). But this assertion of community norms is unlikely to stop those who, unlike Scoble, are genuinely acting in bad faith. The technology for containing digital cats in digital bags is woefully inadequate, and it's unlikely to improve anytime soon.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

eweekhickins writes "Mad about Facebook's treatment of Robert Scoble? 'The idea for people to move their social graph from one service to other is a fabulous benefit,' Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales told eWEEK. 'To me, it's a benefit to customers. People should be very wary about services that are uptight about that kind of thing in an effort to lock you out of the customer.' The problem is that while the profile data may be yours and yours alone, your address book contains the names and e-mail addresses of your friends, family and business contacts. So who owns the data?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mjasay writes "Red Hat just got a new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, but based on a recent CNET interview with him, he's cut from the same cloth as Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's former CEO. He won't buy an iPod because it won't play Ogg Vorbis files. He refused other CEO roles because he 'must have a mission.' He suggests that taking proprietary shortcuts is a fundamentally wrong way to build a software business. And he believes Red Hat should be doing $5 billion, not $500 million. It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses, according to Whitehurst."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in October, we had mentioned that Trent Reznor was producing an album by Saul Williams and had decided to mimic the Radiohead name your own price model for downloads. At the time, I was a little worried that musicians would simply mimic Radiohead's first part of the promotion (the name your own price part) without recognizing two important things: (1) the "name your own price" part was just one part of a larger strategy to get publicity for a variety of things that would earn money and that (2) whether or not anyone pays a dime for the album is meaningless in that larger context. We've already seen a few people make that mistake, and it's rather "disheartening" to see that Trent Reznor is making that mistake himself (in part...).

For reasons that are not at all clear, Reznor's site is a blog that has no history. There's no way to link to a specific post and once a new post goes up the current one will disappear. However, as pointed out via Digg, the current front page of Reznor's site has some stats about how the "name your own price" experiment went: "As of 1/2/08, 154,449 people chose to download Saul's new record. 28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning: 18.3% chose to pay." Reznor then says: "I'm not sure what I was expecting but that percentage - primarily from fans - seems disheartening."

Chris Anderson has already challenged Reznor's math, by pointing out that by avoiding a record label, they still probably made more money this way, but even that is missing the larger point. You don't do a "name your own price" offering to make money directly off the downloads. Any money you actually make is a bonus. You do it to get publicity and to add value to other things that you're selling, creating a larger market for them. Reznor seems to admit to that part at the end, stating: "But... Saul's music is in more peoples' iPods than ever before and people are interested in him. He'll be touring throughout the year and we will continue to get the word out however we can." When you begin to focus on that larger picture, how much is made directly from sales, and what percentage pays vs. what percentage "freeloads" is meaningless. It will be more interesting to see the eventual results going forward.

Of course -- there is one more thing that should be mentioned when discussing all of this. None of these business models work if no one actually likes the music. This isn't a comment on Saul Williams' music (which I have not heard), but if you can't make music that people like, no business model is going to be effective. And, especially in the case of a new act that people have not heard of, they may be even more reluctant to pay upfront for the music, because they're unsure how much they actually like the musician, especially if the music itself is an acquired taste. It's yet another case where obscurity should be a much bigger worry than "piracy" or "freeloaders." Every one of those "freeloaders" or "pirates" is not just a potential future buyer, but a potential marketer, promoter or sales person for future endeavors by that artist. To understand the business models in the future of music, you need to take a long-term view. So, don't be disheartened, Trent. Focus on that final thought and look to the future.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Lally Singh writes "BusinessWeek is reporting that Sony BMG is planning on dropping DRM from their music. Salon's Machinest had an interesting take on this; 'Actually, what's happened is quite ironic. It was the industry's own DRM mandates that tied many music-lovers in to Apple's music storefront (we all had iPods, and the only way to buy digital music for the iPod was from Apple). Now Apple's become too powerful for the labels. They need an alternative distribution channel — they want to get music to our iPods, but they don't want to go through Apple to do it. The only way to do that is to offer retailers like Amazon the chance to sell songs as plain, unrestricted MP3s, which are iPoddable.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If only all software instructional videos were as funny and useful as this one, called "You Sucjk at Photoshop." I hope the creator, Donnie Hoyle, makes more of them. Link (Thanks, Gord!)

Brandee07 writes "Designed for a 90 day mission, the Spirit Mars Rover is starting its 4th year of exploration. Spirit's sister-module, Opportunity, will turn four on Jan 25. 'We never thought we'd still be driving these robots all over Mars,' said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover science team. 'We joked about driving Opportunity into Victoria Crater, but now we're there, and we're looking at doing even more science. Each day they still work is an amazing one.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The NY Public Library has scans of an 1804 book from China that shows 22 engravings of common punishment methods of the day.

Shown here: a malefactor enduring the "punishment of the wooden collar." Can anyone translate the Chinese characters on the collar?

Link (Via BibliOdyssey)

The Patent Troll Tracker is back from holiday vacation