Craig Reynolds' Technobriefs
Sony-BMG DRM reverberations: BusinessWeek describes the debacle as For Sony, a Pain in the Image. There are now major lawsuits filed in California, Texas and New York. Roundup of outrages: Does Sony's Copy Protection Infringe Copyrights? (more here and here), Sony, First4 Knew About Rootkit Issue in Advance, News.com asks: Who has the right to control your PC?, Sony insider: DRM is discredited at Sony, Sony BMG - malware feature comparison and Sticky Tape Defeats Sony DRM Copy Protection. The last word goes to FoxTrot.
Google backlash: the company whose credo is "don't be evil" is getting less and less popular as it grows: Big Google Becomes Big Target, Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone. and Cringely on: Google-Mart. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an in-depth discussion of issues surrounding Google Print: A Risky Gamble With Google (free for a limited time?). See also: Google Video of the Day, a blog that recommends several selections each day.
iTunes: Joel Spolsky's Price as Signal is a great analysis of why the music labels want to change iTunes' winning "any song for 99 cents" policy. The music barons may want to control iTunes, but since Apple's operation is on its way to becoming the leading music retailer (Apple's iTunes edging out music stores) it seems Steve Jobs can call his own shots. Also: iPod DRM faces another reverse-engineering challenge.
Video on demand revisited: as recently discussed here, there is a spike of renewed interest in "video on demand". It was seen years ago as the killer app for interactive cable TV which never panned out. Now with web-based access and delivery, video iPods, TiVo-to-iPod, etc., it is quite the trendy topic again: Wherever, whenever video in spotlight for 2006 and Phone and Media Firms Haggle Over Video on Demand.
Malicious bibliography on Wikipedia: it is easy to sympathize with the plight of John Seigenthaler Sr. (of the Kennedy administration, father of the NBC correspondent) who was apparently the target of a deliberate smear via an article in the open source encyclopedia, as he describes in A false Wikipedia 'biography'. However in his anger I think he overstates the problem when he says "I am interested in letting many people know that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool." He says his experience refutes the view that Wikipedia's "community of thousands of volunteer editors ... corrects mistakes within minutes." But keep in mind that the likelihood of an article being corrected is proportional to its readership. A false statement inserted into the article about President Bush would be fixed in minutes. An error in an article about John Seigenthaler Sr. apparently takes about 132 days to be noticed. How much harm was caused by this malicious article? It would be important to know just how many people accessed this Wikipedia article during those 132 days. I suggest the number is probably very, very low -- and hence so is the harm done.
Technobits: Baking privacy into personal data --- Search Inside the Music --- Olive oil's heart effect located --- Probe 'gathers asteroid material' --- Browser Face-Off --- The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities (mostly Windows oriented) --- Free 1200-page physics textbook --- A Sense of Scale a visual comparison of various distances --- self-referential Dilbert --- beautiful Crab Nebula Mosaic from HST.
