Thoughts on Technology and Society

This article is a bit tongue in cheek, but it include some numbers from a real polling firm, and if the numbers are real then Colbert has lots of myspace friends. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003663830

On election night 2004 I was following the results hopefully clicking from site to site. Seeing news about polls being kept open by a judge in Missouri and voting machine malfunctioning Ohio. The the signature experience of the evening (other than the deep morbidity that set in the next morning when the results sank in) was registration required newspaper websites. I kept following links from blogs to this or that story and many sites required registration. This was frustrating as my primary email was not webmail. My hard drive based emails were set up on different PCs all over the house. And the speed of these emails was a problem. By election night 2006 I had a plan. and I had set up accounts with major regional papers. This helped, in addition I read a lot on the web about Intellectual property and technology, and have registered with countless sites. (meaning I stopped counting). I understand that these sites need to know a little about me before they give me the content f...

Everything you’ve read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1) by ZDNet 's Ed Bott -- Self-described "professional paranoid" Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland has become the most widely quoted source of information on DRM and content protection in Windows Vista. The trouble is, Gutmann's work is riddled with factual errors, distortions, contradictions, and outright untruths, and his conclusions are equally wrong. In this three-part series, I'll show you why Gutmann's outrageous and inflamatory arguments don't stand up to close scrutiny.

Fair use is not a consumer right | Perspectives | CNET News.com http://news.com.com/2010-1030-6205977.html?tag=tb I'll Start with a quote from the article: Still others, including some uses within the home, may not be specifically designated fair use by a court, and may or may not qualify if put to the test, but are generally not the subject of legal challenges by a copyright owner. Mr. Ross is saying in this one sentence that: 1. Watch what you do in your home we are watching you! 2. There is no way to know if you have a right to anything unless you get sued. Because as he said earlier there is no affirmative right. 3. Just because people have not historically generally been sued for what they do int their homes doesn't mean we won't come after you now. Wow! I make a living in the the publishing industry and believe strongly in copyright but this is absurd, belligerent and threatening. And Ok it is a response to a lawsuit so maybe that is why it is so bellicose in tone. ...

I once heard a C level executive at an international publishing company describe the platform hosting the online version of over 1800 of his journals as simply a fulfillment system. In fact it is but in the online world the publishers role is much larger. Librarians, publishers, and Google all claim as part of their mission organizing information. When an end user goes to a university library and uses a z39.50 enable federated search gateway to find content the holdings knowledge base will direct them to the appropriate copy on some platform where the IP address is recognized as coming from a university and the user is given access to the content they have found. and in that content there are scholarly citations to other content and the platform builds an OpenURL link back to the Library's link resolver which again looks in the holdings database and directs the user to the appropriate copy of the second conten item. I have spent a good part of the last ten years getting this sy...

So I have been doing some thinking lately, some about how unreliable my WiFi is and some about how unreliable my cable modem is (which makes my VoIP phone pretty unreliable). And of course I have been like so many others lusting for an iPhone. Then I saw this and it all came together: The day the iPhone turned into a web surfin’ iPod http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13362/1103/ And I thought about it some more and looked up links to some of what I have been reading listening to. T-Mobile says hello to Wi-Fi calling service http://news.com.com/T-Mobile+says+hello+to+Wi-Fi+calling+service/2100-1039_3-6193517.html?tag=item#talkback Verizon technology chief talks fiber http://news.com.com/Verizon+technology+chief+talks+fiber/2008-1033_3-6195106.html?tag=item IPhone-Free Cellphone News http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/technology/circuits/05pogue.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin Mobile Malcontent http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/03/02/04 So ...