90% Crud

iTunes 4.5 Good and Bad

iTunes 4.5 has been out for a couple days, and it's certainly a big refinement of 4.0. Of the new features, I think iMix is the most interesting, because it acknowledges one of the driving forces behind SongBuddy — that people who listen to music can drive the market. I would like to see them rewarding people who post iMixes in the same way Amazon rewards people who drive sales through recommendations, but I doubt their razor-thin margins would support a referral program.

The other big thing is that iTunes 4.5 reduces the use of music that you've spent money on (notice I didn't use the word bought). As Jim Heid explains: You can now burn a playlist containing purchased music up to seven times (down from ten). And the old workaround of simply changing the playlist slightly does not work. LawGeek picks up on what this means: So after one year and 70 million songs, $0.99 now buys you less rather than more -- seven hard burns instead of ten soft ones. What will Apple "allow" us to do with the music we "buy" next year? three burns? one? zero? If you don't like the new rules, can you return your song to Apple to get your money back?

The problem with DRM is that you don't own anything it protects. You're renting, and the contract can change at any time. As a general rule, owning something is a far better choice than renting, but what happens when that isn't available? Where can I buy a copy of the iTunes Exclusive Beastie Boys - Ch-Check It Out? By supporting this market, people are supporting the erosion of their rights as consumers.

So what can be done? Well personally I'm boycotting the iTunes Music Store until they start selling music until renting it. I'm not spending a lot of time (outside of this post, I guess) advocating that other people boycott it, I simply realized that the store is a bad deal financially and politically. However, if you do enjoy shopping there, you would do well to consider what changes Apple might make to the terms of use in the future, and what your options are if those changes affect you negatively. If you don't want to lose more rights, be sure to let them know what you think before they change the terms of the deal again.

Email Worms, Spam and LOAF

I just received an email from a mail server with the subject Symantec AVF detected a repairable/quarantined virus in a message you sent. I don't know which of my computers is infected with the latest Windows email worm. Is it my Apple laptop at work, my Apple laptop at home or the Linux box that I run Mutt from? Obviously it's none of these, the worm in question spoofs the From: address with one it finds on the infected computer's hard drive.

You think Symantec would know enough about worms and viruses to know which ones spoof the From: line of emails. In fact they do, they simply ignore this and go ahead and send it anyway. Why? To advertise their product in an unsolicited solicited email, also known as spam. Jericho from Attrition addresses this issue in more detail in Anti-Virus Companies: Tenacious Spammers.

There's still the question of how this person wound up getting an email from my address. I've never emailed anyone at that domain (I checked with ZOË) but most likely we've both exchanged email with someone else. I'm not about to send her my address book for her to read and look over for common acquaintances, but what about a hashed version?

Loaf is a project from Joshua Schacter and Maciej Ceglowski that uses Bloom filters to create a one-way hash of people you email, meant for public consumption. It isn't possible to extract email addresses from it, but if you know an email address you can check a LOAF file to see if its in there.

What does this have to do with spam? Well what if the person who got an email from me sent me her LOAF file? I could compare it against mine and find out who we both knew. We could then contact that person and get them to download anti-virus software, like AntiVir, which is free for personal use.

Worms like this one and Buddylinks are exploiting our social software to spread. It only makes sense to use social software analysis to stop them.

The Decalogue and Polytheism

In the King James Bible, Exodus 20:3 reads Thou shalt have no other gods before me. If you're Christian this is part of the first comandmant of the Decalogue, for Jews (note the Jooglebomb) this is part of the second statement of the Decalogue.

The only way I can read this is that there certainly are other gods, and that's cool, but they aren't to be worshipped above Yahweh, Jehovah, God. This explanation fits with Exodus 20:5 - Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. A jealous God would certainly order His flock not to put other gods before Him.

So are Christianity and Judaism polytheistic? I'm not thinking in a saints-taking-the-place-of-minor-deities type of polytheism, I'm thinking more of a sure-Zeus-is-real-just-don't-worship-him deal.

StealthSurfer

I just was reading up on Stealth Surfer (via Engadget) and it looks like a pretty cool device, but it still has a ways to go. It's a USB device that aims to protect your privacy by not leaving browser trails on your computer.

As you can see from the picture to the left, it is only for Windows and includes a copy of Netscape 7.0. Why Netscape 7.0? Because they wanted to use a dead browser instead of Mozilla. The browser has been configured to store cookies, cache, etc. on the USB drive to prevent people from finding out what you've been looking at. It's also configured with home.stealthsurfer.biz as its homepage, which in the documentation has a lot of porn links that are absent from the live site.

The problem is that it appears to be of no help against network monitors, which is a far greater threat to privacy than cookies and cache files. What they should do is team up with someone like Anonymizer to provide anonymous surfing. This would protect their users from both hardware and network forensics.

Another concern I would have with one of these devices is the number of writes that a flash memory device can take. For casual file transfer it shouldn't be a problem, but a browser using this as a temp directory involves a lot more writes. I forget how many hundred thousand writes flash memory is rated for, but I can imagine this hitting that limit.

Then again, if you're using something like this to cover your trail, you shouldn't get too attached anyway. After all, you may have to rectally conceal it to keep people from knowing that you've been searching for world domination.

Also, would it kill them to include Enigmail on there? Make it easy for people to secure their email as well as their web surfing. Still, this is a neat idea and I hope to see more "theme" USB drives like it.

TidyText 0.4

The TidyText plugin for Moveable Type has been updated, in no small part due to L. M. Orchard.

The Porn Myth and gender politics

From The Porn Myth by Naomi Wolf:

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

...

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

In the article, Naomi Wolf argues that the ability for men to have porn on tap and society's acceptance of it has left men with better things to do than sleep with women. The porn stars become men's sexual outlets and the real women in their lives can't live up to that standard.

This puts women in an new position (sorry) of having to not only pursue their own sexual interests, but also compete with the hyper-sexualized prurient media. The media that decries the obscenity of Janet Jackson's nipple while at the same time running that pixelated 3 second video clip over and over and over. The newspapers should have just ran the headline What is so fascinating about my forbidden closet of mystery? It certainly isn't conveying the message that real women offer things that pr0n can't anymore than Flatlanders are extolling the virtues of three dimensions.

The interesting consequence of this, is that it flips sexual politics on their head:

When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real.

...

Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars.

Suddenly women aren't the sole gatekeepers to the sexual progression of a relationship. A man might present sex as an option slower than he wants to his woman because he's afraid of appearing oversexed. Now a woman might also have to compromise sexually because she's afraid that her man might become bored or have unrealistic expectations.

Obviously these are caricatures of men and womens' roles in a sexual relationship and as such have a great number of counterexamples, but they are the roles that our culture enforces. There's no terms in our culture for a man being a slut or frigid. Men are expected to be sexually voracious and women are expected to tell their men to cool down. There are exceptions (Married With Children being the first one to mind) but as a culture this is how we view the genders.

There are also implications beyond normal sexual relationships; consider the case of computer generated child porn. Pornography that depicts a consenting adult that has been manipulated to appear to show a minor is as illegal as if it had been made with a minor. The argument here is that anything that feeds the appetites of pedophiles - whether it harms a child or not - is harmful to society because it will increase their desires. If adults' porn is decreasing their interest in other adults, would virtual child porn decrease pedophiles interest in children? I wouldn't want that law changed without a lot of science to back it up, but it's still something that flows from the article's premise.

I've tried to avoid value judgments up until this point, because I wanted to get some commentary in before injecting my own beliefs. I don't think porn is bad, but excesses of anything will produce negative results. Speaking of excesses, it's hard to argue that porn exploits women when you look at where Jenna Jameson lives. I think that this is an interesting example of the invisible hand of the free market in action, but I'm not sure that forcing women to compete with porn stars is good for anyone other than horny teenage boys.

Look who's blogging

Wouldn't you know it, there's another weblog at a .hotelling.net address: http://harold.hotelling.net/blog/. My brother Harold is getting into the game; stop by and check it out. He knows more about computers than I so expect some good commentary and technical insight.

Why isn't Election Day a national holiday?

It seems like it should be fairly straight forward. Celebrating Election Day with a national holiday is fundamental to celebrating democracy. As it stands, the law establishing federal holidays has been amended several times to create new holidays. Why do we celebrate our independence, our presidents and our flag, but not our democracy?

Election Day falls on the first tuesday after the first monday in November, basically the tuesday from November 2nd through the 9th. This is actually a pretty crowded time for holidays, Veteran's Day is November 11th and Thanksgiving is usually 16 days after election day. What I would like to see happen is moving Veteran's Day to Election Day, to celebrate the men and women who protect our democracy as well as the central tenet of that democracy.

By giving people the day off we would be making it easier for people who have less free time between work and family life to contribute to democracy. We would also be sending a national message that choosing our government is important enough to take some time off.

I'm certainly not the first person to have this idea, but its time has come. The Atlantic covered this in a story in 1998. Still, we install democracies all over the world, yet we have one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world.

Of course there are still some questions to answer. Do you have the party annually or bi-annually, when congress is elected? The Atlantic article suggests that Election Day be moved to a Saturday, but I don't like that because it doesn't have the same celebration for Democracy that creating a holiday does. And by combining it with Veteran's Day, there's not a net increase in holidays, which means no additional cost to taxpayers.

If you think that this is something worth doing, please spread the word. Spread it on your weblog, spread it to your friends and family and coworkers. Spread it to your government. I think this is an idea whose time has come.

On a related note, something I personally will be doing is having an Election Day party, where entry will hinge on having an "I voted" sticker. I can think of few better reasons to have a party than to celebrate democracy.

[Update: Eric posted some more information including information on Bill S.726 which aims to do just what this post suggests.

Goodspeed Update is also looking at this, which will hopefully encourage Ann Arborites to contact Senator Stabenow.]

New Design

If you are reading the RSS feed or using a cached stylesheet, come by the site and shift-refresh. The building is Dr. Chase's Steam Printing House, which was at the NW corner of Main and Miller in Ann Arbor in 1870. I got the picture from the Ann Arbor District Library's Making of Ann Arbor site, which has a lot of historical photos. Thanks to Davidissimo and Stephen for their help.

The (poor) state of copyright activism

I just read The state of copyright activism by Siva Vaidhyanathan and am impressed with the points made. It goes over well trodden ground, talking about how copyright has been eroded over the past 30 years. It talks about the Electronic Frontier Foundation, DigitalConsumer.org and Public Knowledge and what they are doing for us. It also covers recent events like Eldred vs. Ashcroft.

What makes this paper unique is that I've never seen one that argues for the public to take the fight up. Many of us who are interested in taking back our rights are some of the most wired people on the planet. Why haven't we been able to take our message to the streets where people will understand just how far censorship is going?

What we are missing are two things: a leader to organize the fight and a coherent movement to rally around. The Dean campaign had Joe Trippi managing a swarm of volunteers and creating an army from the ground up. We need a Joe Trippi to define our copyfight, to create something that people can say "I support the copyfight" on their bumper-stickers or their lawns or to their coworkers.

Why don't we have a DeanLink that connects people interested in taking back the commons? Why don't we have a DeanSpace that lets anyone create a copyfight group? Where's our Meetup? The EFF one isn't that well attended. Where's our manifesto? How can we have a revolution if we don't have a manifesto? It just wouldn't be proper!

In his paper, Siva Vaidhyanathan outlines four things that seem essential to the copyfight:

• The principle of fair use — at its base a legal defense against an accusation of copyright infringement.


• The principle that after the "first sale" of a copyrighted item, the buyer could do whatever she wants with the item — such as making a hat, or a broach, or a pterodactyl — save publicly performing the work or distributing unauthorized copies of it for sale. The first sale doctrine is what makes the lending library possible.


• The concept that copyright protected specific expression of ideas, but not the ideas themselves. This is the least understood but perhaps most important tenet of copyright. You can’t copyright a fact or an idea.


• The promise that copyright would only last — as the Constitution demands — "for limited times," thus constantly replenishing the public domain.

The copyfight is about something that should be easy to understand, but usually isn't. Lawyers and legalese scare people away from protecting what is ours: our culture. Up until now our culture has been held hostage by copyright, and any child understands what it means when you take their favorite book away from them. How is taking the Grey Album away from the public any different?

Individual shots in this fight have already been fired. DeCSS. Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Dimitry Skylorov. But the people who benefit from owning our culture have shot back. The DMCA. State level Super-DMCA legislations. Digital Rights Management.

We have a number of groups that have both the wherewithal and the respect to get this going. The EFF already has their action center, why not give an identity to the people who already take action? Instead of being a place that I send my money and tells me what good things it does, why not help me organize an EFF house party?

We already have people like Lawrence Lessig and John Walker telling us that the Internet doesn't ensure freedom. We have to fight for it. So who's going to step up to the plate and lead the thousands (or even millions) of people to take back our culture?

[Update: Copyfight proclaims that activists for copyright reform are Copyfighters]

AOL discovers reality

AOL to launch reality show:

Hoping to capitalize on the sensational buzz around NBC's hit reality show, AOL is launching an online feature that will follow the travails of four small-business owners for their first 12 months.

1998 called and they want thespot.com back.

Lightning strikes 5.89 times

Given billions of copyrighted works, from Web pages to feature films, the stats show that it's probably harder to get sued in a copyright case than to get hit by lightning. - Stephen Manes

1:700,000 - Chance of getting struck by lightning. (Source)
1:120,000 - Chance of getting struck with a copyright suit. (Math in extended entry)
1:5.89 - Ratio of chance of getting struck by lightning to chance of getting struck with copyright suit.

(Lessig responds to the rest of the article, I just felt like correcting the math.)

To figure out the chance of getting struck with a copyright suit I used a US population of 290,809,777; the estimated population for 2003. The number of copyright suits in 2003 according to Manes was 2,448 and 2,448/290,809,777 = 118,794.8435457516.

Attention all web developers:

You have me type my password in twice when signing up to make sure that I'm typing the right thing. That's cool, because I can't see what I'm typing. But I can see my fucking email address, so I don't need to fucking type it twice. Jackass.

I'm actually not all that upset and Kinja seems like a good service for bringing RSS to the people. I've just been meaning to go off on someone for the double email thing for a while and this was a good chance to let my inner BOFH out.

Gmail and ZÖE

First off, this isn't an April Fools Day post, I was going to do something but was having trouble with the code, so I'll do something sometime next week. I subscribe to the Jimmy James theory that if you do your April Fools thing on April 1st, people will be expecting it.

So Google is launching Gmail, a free email service with 1 gigabyte of storage, spam protection, and the ability to Google your email. There's plenty more information available, and I suggest you read it. It sounds like a pretty cool idea, but their business plan is a little creepy. They plan to use AdSense to display ads relevant to the email you're reading in the interface. The only way that could be weirder is if they attached relevant text ads to your outgoing mail. I think only Google and Apple have enough trust in their brands to be able to pull this off.

The "Googling your inbox" stuff sounds really cool, but I shy away from big centralized hosted services. Even though they say Your email should never be held hostage by a service provider I'm still leery. Instead, I'll probably start using something like ZOË.

ZOË bills itself as Googling Your Email, which I suspect will be changing very soon. It uses POP or IMAP to download your email from your server, then it indexes everything for searching. It's written in Java and uses a browser interface for searching, so it runs on damn near everything. You probably want to see the screenshots by now. It does everything the Google service does (except for having the gig of storage) and it's up and running now.

Jon Udell has a great overview of ZOË over at O'Reilly