Archive for the 'Open Culture' Category
Open Mouth, Insert Entire Body
January 15th, 2008
One thing y’all may have noticed lately: I don’t write much about the RIAA or about DRM and such issues anymore. Well, there’s a simple reason for this: DRM is effectively dead in the United States. What with even Sony recently agreeing to drop DRM in order to sell unrestricted tracks on Amazon.com, the "culture of copy protection" in the States has prettymuch admitted defeat—though, of course, there are still plenty of holdouts in the movie industry. Nonetheless, DRM is on its way out.
And I rarely pay attention to the RIAA anymore, as well, for one simple reason: they are blithering idiots. It’s not even a slight challenge to point the finger at them and laugh. Witness this statement from a recent interview conducted between CNet.com’s Don Reisinger and RIAA talking-head Cara Duckworth:
Don: Why [sue] college students?
RIAA: First, it should be clarified that our college campaign is in addition to the lawsuits we file against individuals using commercial ISPs to illegally download and distribute music. Second, college students have reached a stage in life when their music habits are crystallized, and their appreciation for intellectual property has not yet reached its full development. These two points coupled together present challenges to those who would like to be compensated for their creative works. Understanding the value of intellectual property is important to the future job market for many of these students–industries that rely on copyright protection employ more than 11 million workers nationwide and continue to grow.
Ummm. Right. So, how does it help to sue college students so that they can’t afford to earn degrees and work in these industries? And what’s this "appreciation for intellectual property" mean, anyway? College students have a full appreciation for artist’s rights—they just refuse to spend their money on overpriced CDs and digital downloads that are keyed to only work on one computer.
The international music industry has to realize one very simple fact in order to survive: the existence of digital media has completely undercut their old 20th-Century business model. They can react to this in one of two ways: adapt or die. The Internet is never going away; neither are P2P networks. But if the RIAA and the IFPI are any indications…well, the recording industry is doomed. Oh well. It’s been nice knowing you, but you’ve clearly overstayed your welcome.
09 F9 11 02 9D–
May 4th, 2007
Oh no! THE NUMBER! *Whew* Glad I forcibly interrupted myself there before I scribbled out all of the offending hex digits! If I hadn’t…well, I could be facing a DMCA takedown notice courtesy of the code’s “authors”, the defrocked and now defamed AACS, or perhaps the very end of the Universe itself. Remember that old Arthur C. Clarke story “The Nine Billion Names of God”, in which a computer deciphers all nine billion names of God and thereby initiates the End of Reality? How do you know The Number isn’t the 8,999,999,999th name?
With the amount of stink Advanced Access Content System has been stirring up surrounding the literally unstoppable proliferation of their cherished HD-DVD decryption key across the entire ‘Net, you’d think the damn thing was the code that will launch all of the United States’ ICBMs. Of course, it’s perfectly understandable and reasonable for the company to be upset that its Secret Code has been cracked and released into the wild, in effect invalidating their entire reason for being…but the extent of AACS’ anger has gone well beyond righteous and has become nothing more than petulant.
My advice to Michael Ayers, chairman of the AACS business group: At this point, shut up, give up–and start working proactively on a whole new product angle.
But noooooo….Ayers has declared that AACS “will take whatever action is appropriate”, including any and all “legal and technical” steps they deem appropriate to ensure their copy-protection scheme is not subverted. No doubt, this includes a number of DMCA takedown notices.
Well, at present count, there are 976,000 sites catalogued by Google that list the Sacred Code of HD-DVD Cracking. Hope you have deep pockets, Ayers…’cause you’re going to be paying a LOT of lawyers for a LOT of time spent sending out takedown notices!
Which is a futile process anyway. The Code’s presence on the ‘Net is growing exponentially. For every DMCA takedown notice posted by the AACS, The Code shows up on five more sites. How far up in one’s transverse colon must one’s head be lodged not to see that, obviously, the battle is already lost. The Secret is Out. AACS is busted. The End. It’s over.
I cannot think of a more obvious statement of the fact that the public does not want DRM, and both can and will do whatever is necessary to circumvent it–whether that circumvention is legal or not. Consider what happened on Digg.com when that site attempted to censor its community members’ ability to distribute information as they see fit. And yet, on the AACS website, you find the following words in the latest update concerning updated security protocols for their copy-protection:
Consumers can continue to enjoy content that is protected by the AACS technology by refreshing the encryption keys associated with their HD DVD and Blu-ray software players.
ENJOY?! How can you enjoy something that prevents you from watching the HD-DVD disc that you paid for on many different platforms? A person can’t pop an HD-DVD disc in a computer running Linux, because AACS does not support any Linux-based software players. A person can’t make a backup of his/her investment in case the original gets scratched. Half the damn time, a person can’t even get the disc to play on several different HDTV systems because of bugs in the hardwired decryption path between television and HD-DVD player. Does that sound particularly enjoyable to you?
I am truly amazed at Big Media–both in the US and abroad. They just do not get it. This has all happened before, y’know. Ars Technica reminds us that this exact same rigamarole happened previously in 1999, when the encryption used on standard DVDs was cracked and spread across the Web in a matter of days. Year after year after year, copy protection schemes are developed and are promptly broken. Not by pirates who simply want Something For Nothing–but by people who simply do not wanted to be told what they can and cannot do with their legally-purchased property by some copy-protection company/system.
The second any business stops giving the public what it wants, that business is as good as dead. And yet Big Media’s shumbling, brain-hungry corpses continue their onslaught despite widespread public resentment and resistance. Do they honestly think they can wear down the public by nonstop assault? That has never worked before, and it will not work now.
Offensive Content Warning! OH NOES!
April 24th, 2007
Well, shit the bed!–looks like 80% of blogs contain “offensive” content! As Ars Technica fuckin’ reports,
Blogs are known to be a free-for-all for “expressive” content, but according to a new report by ScanSafe, a vast majority of blogs host content that is considered “offensive” and potentially “unwanted.” ScanSafe’s Monthly “Global Threat Report” for March 2007 says that up to 80 percent of blogs host offensive content, ranging from “adult language” to pornographic images. The company suggests that businesses should be aggressive about preventing users from accessing some or all of this material. And of course, they’d hope that you’d use their products to do so.
Naturally, this “report” is no doubt little more than a fuckin’ baiting tactic that ScanSafe, “The World’s Leading Provider of Web Security-as-a-Service,” hopes to use to lure in more corporate customers–but that doesn’t mean that the fuckin’ data they’ve accrued is necessarily fuckin’ suspect. After all, it’s simple enough to draw up a list of naughty fuckin’ keywords and compile a list of how many fuckin’ times those words appear on various motherfuckers’ blogs. And, judging from my experiences in the blogosphere, I’d have to say they’ve got a fuckin’ point: some of these motherfuckers can’t seem to say five fuckin’ words without tossing some manner of fuckin’ expletive into the mix.
But…what’s the problem here?
Ars Technica quotes:
ScanSafe’s larger focus is not necessarily on single instances of offensive content, but overall security and liability for employees who might get caught with undesirable content on their computers while at work. “The content on blogs and other sites powered by user contributed content is constantly changing. As a result, Web security solutions that rely on Web crawling—or periodically scouring the Web for threats—rather than actually scanning the URL each time it is requested, can leave users exposed to malware and unwanted content,” Nadir [ScanSafe’s Vice President of Product Strategy] said.
In simpler terms, let’s protect employees from getting nabbed for reading naughty material at work and from accidentally exposing corporate intranets to various forms of malware. I can understand implementing a defense against malware that could potentially damage a company’s systems or expose private data to the World At Large…but protecting against bad fuckin’ language? Gimme a fuckin’ break.
Here’s the deal, folks: I rarely use expletives in my general writings, simply because they’re usually unnecessary, nothing more than “the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter.” I’ve often found those who overuse expletives of various sorts to be gauche and clearly lacking in solid material to discuss–yet it’s their right to write whatever they like in the sanctity of their own blogs. Furthermore, sometimes it’s necessary to throw in a good ol’ “fuck” or a “shit” of two–especially when quoting someone accurately, when using them for humor’s sake, or for rare instances of shocking emphasis.
And who’s to say what words are ultimately offensive or not? I certainly don’t have an attack of the vapors should my eyes come upon the word “cocksucker” in a text; nor do many in the contemporary world. Issues of obscenity have caused more pointless legal troubles than anything else…simply because “offensiveness” or “obscenity” is so incredibly difficult to define.
Which is why I find wanting to block or otherwise restrict anyone’s access to the Web based on something as mutable and as vague as a blog’s “offensive” word content to be ludicrous at best, and a waste of time and effort at most. Sure, most companies wouldn’t want their employees reading Fleshbot or pr0n reviews, but what about…say, Pegritz.com? I routinely post stories of an amusing and occasionally edifying nature whose only subject matter that could be considered “offensive” is the use of expletives here and there when spoken by characters. What about blogs that reference “offensive” words such as “nigger”, “ho”, “bitch” and so forth when discussing the pathetic state of popular hiphop? Would ScanSafe’s software block a website concerning mammograms and women’s health because it used that awful, dirty, pornomographic word “breast”?
Filtering content for malware and potentially deleterious code is admirable, and these days even necessary…but filtering content for a handful of fuckin’ words that some fuckers consider fuckin’ obscene is just stupid, because you’ll end up blocking not only 80% of the blogs Out There, you’ll end up blocking 80% of the entire fuckin’ Internet.
In short: FUCK DAT!
Codes of Conduct
April 9th, 2007
There’s no one in the world I hate more than The Obstreperous Blogger. You know…the guy who regards his own blog as the ultimate soapbox from which he can spew thoughtless, kneejerk invective all day and night long. That’s bad enough–I mean, who wants to read three hundred straight entries decrying Wii users as “sissy-fags” or calling for immigrant concentration camps?–but, hey…if you own a website, it’s your sovereign right to bedeck and bespatter it with whatever you like, and if someone finds that content offensive, immoral, distasteful, etc…well, they can just close that tab and never look at your N-word-celebratin’ site again. Right? But the true Obstreperous Blogger can’t contain his vipertongued vituperatives: he has to sally forth and leave little coprolites of his “wisdom” (if using the word “cockfag” sixteen times in a single sentence can be said to indicate “wisdom”) in the comments sections of others’ blogs. That’s when the Obstreperous Blogger truly becomes annoying.
So…what do you do with people like that? Well, here on Pegritz.com, we gots a 100% No-Tolerance Policy for that kind of crap. If you leave a snide, stupid comment–whether bearing your signature or anonymous–it gets deleted. Period. Do not for ONE SECOND think I’m somehow responsible for the blather that others may leave here as comments…but, at the same time, don’t think that I’m going to leave such turd-nuggets on my site to pollute discussion or initiate flamewars.
Recently, Tim O’Reilly has drafted a Blogger’s Code of Conduct to provide the blogging community with a voluntary code by which signatory members could police their blogs for Obstreperous Jagoffs. And, for the most part, it’s a good document–certainly something whose sentiments I agree with. But take a look at this legal dissection of the terms used in the draft code, and…what’s this?
We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
- is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others
What the hell does copyright have to do with an ethical code of conduct? As the Tristan Louis, author of “Blogger’s Code of Conduct: A Dissection,” notes:
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, O’Reilly, AOL, etc… are all trademarks. I have not put a TM after every single one of those trademarks in posts I write on TNL.net, which technically makes me in violation of this effort, from a trademark standpoint.
For the purpose of this post, I am quoting the substantial majority of the post by Tim O’Reilly, which would technically put me in violation of his copyright. However, Tim has a Creative Commons License so he’s granting me some rights. Unfortunately, the rights granted by the CC license also say that you can’t reuse the content for commercial purpose: I run adsense ads on this site, which could be considered a commercial effort so, as such, I would technically be in violation of Tim’s copyright AND CC license. Under the terms of this, quoting substantial portion of copyrighted content would be a violation of the code. This means that blogs now have a choice: write only original content without extensive quoting or don’t run ads. It’s a tough choice for many bloggers.
Tough, indeed. I refuse to host any form of advertising here on Pegritz.com–so that’s not an issue with me…but I quote. I freely quote from sources that I am responding to, and nothing is going to change that. Coming from an academic background, I fully recognize the dangers of plagiarism and misquoting, which is why I am also meticulous about: 1) making sure any quoted material is accurately copy’n'pasted from its original source document, or at least making sure that, if I am summarizing or paraphrasing material, I do so accurately; and 2) that I attribute my source via hyperlinking. Go ahead, check out every entry on this blog–everytime I quote a source, I make sure that the quote is properly attributed and referenced. That’s not a violation of copyright; that’s fair use.
O’Reilly’s Code of Conduct is a decent step in the right direction, but the Code must restrict itself only to issues of interpersonal ethics–copyright issues are not something that needs to be addressed in a voluntary code of conduct…mainly because it’s far too sticky a situation. You don’t want a whole mess of copyfight crap sullying your otherwise-decent Code, would you?
Once that’s taken care of, I’ll gladly sign up. But not until then.
And, regardless, I reserve the inalienable right to call George W. Bush an asshole an asshole, and an idiot an idiot. The day I stop making inflammatory statements willingly is the day I receive a $100K/year teaching position that will obviate my sell my writing online.
Citizendium: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?
March 26th, 2007
Wikipedia is the greatest organized, easily-accessible compendium of information known to Humankind. I spend at least twenty minutes or more per day either looking up information on that site, or–even better–contributing information to the site. (Virtually every page dealing with H. P. Lovecraft or his works has felt my editorial touch at one time or another, for instance.) Presently offering 1,706,156 articles in English dealing with everything from “The Letter A” to “Zzyzx“, Wikipedia is a nearly-bottomless treasure trove of massively-crossreferenced data, trivia, and silliness which can easily lead one to wasting hours just clicking link after link after link until one’s short-term memory buffers are packed to the last neural bit with random knowledge! Don’t believe me? Check out XKCD’s handy-dizzandy infographic, “The Problem with Wikipedia,” for sheer truthiness.
But…can Wikipedia be trusted? IS there a demonstrable truthiness to the site’s content?
The short answer is so simple it needs but one qubit to represent it: Yes and No.
This is manifestly not an article dealing with the reliability of Wikipedia–or…well, not entirely. There are thousands of such articles already pinging and ponging back and forth around the Web. Every other month, another “Wikipedia scandal” (such as half-forgotten comedian Sinbad’s recent brush with Wikipedian death) calls the site’s reliability into question yet again, and yet another university bans students from citing Wikipedia on their papers, blah blah blah….But this is all inherent in the very nature of Wikipedia: if you open up a website to contributions from anybody, you are simply bound to end up with moments of vandalism, clandestine character assassination, disinformation, and so forth.
Is there anyone with at least half a brain Out There in InternetLand who does not know this? The truthiness of such a realization should be manifest to anybody the second they see the site’s front page slogan, identifying it as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Use a little logic, people:
Anyone = people who know what they’re talking about and people who don’t.
Wikipedia’s greatest strength, its open informational architecture, is also its greatest weakness–but that latter weakness is usually overcome by that former strength. For every juvenile joker or politician’s spin control agent who defaces a Wikipedia article with disinformation, there’s some responsible, knowledgeable person who will quickly step in and clean up the bullshit or rectify the errors. Of course, this can–and frequently does–lead to ongoing arguments over hotly-debated or ambiguous topics (take a look at “Islam“’s discussion page to get an idea of just how crazy it can get)…but, ultimately, Truth Will Out.
Most of the time.
Usually.
Wikipedia is, in essence, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Planet Earth–a clearing-house for vast amounts of info…but it’s not your One Stop Shop for Everything. It is, after all, an encyclopedia. A reference work. In other words…a starting point where you can begin researching a topic. Don’t know a damn thing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Get thee to a Wikipedia page! You can learn a great deal of generalized information about Hamlet there…but it makes no more sense for, say, a student writing an ENG 102 essay on Hamlet to cite the Wikipedia page as his/her primary source of information than it does to cite an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Start at the Wikipedia page, familiarize yourself with the material presented there, then shuffle on over to Google, Google Scholar, EBSCOHost, PROQuest, or whatever other online search tool you like and use your new basic knowledge of Hamlet to find some stone-cold primary sources from reliable journals and scholars. That’s how Wikipedia–and all encyclopedias–work.
But is the Britannica, in either its (rare) print or online form, inherently more reliable that Wikipedia? “Well, duh,” some say. “The good Ol’ Brit’s got an editorial board of ‘Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, the leading scholars, writers, artists, public servants, and activists who are at the top of their fields’ to oversee the folks writing up entries for it.” In 2005, however, a study conducted by science journal Nature and reported here
revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.
So…what does that say about Ol’ Brit’s editorial board of PhD’s, Nobel Laureates, and Pulitzer Prize Winners? That they’re less reliable than Joe Blutz and Derek C. F. Pegritz, Wikipedia Citizen Editors? NO. Not one bit. If anything, it shows that both the Britannica and Wikipedia are more or less equal in terms of reliability. The study simply shows that–god, must I say it again?–encyclopedias are not primary sources. They are BEGINNERS’ REFERENCE MATERIALS. The End. Got it? OK, let’s move on.
Wikipedia is obviously more popular than Britannica.com. Why? Let’s see….Wikipedia’s got close to two million articles. Britannica Online has…well, they don’t say–but I’ll bet they, too, offer a fairly gigantic number of entries. Wikipedia is free, but Britannica.com isn’t.
Ah. And there it is. Freeness.
Britannica Online is a wonderful site–I use it all the time, just as I use Wikipedia. BO’s equipped with some wonderful educational resources, as well, to help learners of all ages discover the wonderful wide world of online information. I would never disparage it. But…it ain’t free.
Furthermore, Wikipedia owes its position at the top of the online encyclopedia heap to its easy-to-use interface and its (almost-)universal editability. Anyone with expertise in a particular subject can contribute his or her knowledge to appropriate entries: adding new information as it comes to light, correcting erroneous information, and just generally keeping Wikipedia as honest as it possibly can be. Wikipedia does have a board of editors: the community of scholars and knowledgeable folks, worldwide, who take part in its überdemokratischer functionality.
Lately, Wikipedia has been taking steps to curb abuse by “locking down” certain pages (such as “Abortion“), restricting editing privileges to only established, well-known users in order to prevent any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a rabid pro-life or pro-choice grudge from slipping weighted statements into the articles. There has also been talk of employing a number of professional editors to help oversee the clamor–a great idea, if you ask me. As much as I love the power inherent in a highly-democratized source of information like Wikipedia, I fully realize that there’s a fine line between democratic sharing of information and mob rule. In order to prevent abuse, there has to be someone “at the top” keeping an eye on things…and one cannot fully trust the council of one’s peers to always be ready, willing, and able–like minutemen of the mind–to come a-runnin’ the second some jackass changes the name of the The Republic of Iraq to The Republic of Bootystan.
So what does all of this have to do with something called “Citizendium”?
<Borat voice>It is-a the simple</Borat voice>: Citizendium is new “experimental wiki project”, initiated by a founder of Wikipedia itself (Larry Sanger*), that “aims to improve on that model by adding ‘gentle expert oversight’ and requiring contributors to use their real names.” In short, Citizendium is Wikipedia with a professional editorial staff and an application process that hopes to vet out non-experts and uneducated hacks by requiring anyone applying for an authorial or editorial position (for some reason they have the two separated) to verify their credentials with a CV, proof of expertise, etc. As of today (26 March 2007), Citizendium has just taken their beta version public and has already been receiving a great deal of interest. The front page even notes that they have “over 1,100 articles” in process. And, as with Wikipedia, it’s free as can be!
So, does this mean that Citizendium will become the “more reliable free encyclopedia” that the world so desperately, desperately needs?
No. In fact, I’ll wager anyone $5 or a cookie of their choice that Citizendium is little more than a footnote in Web history by the end of the year. Why? <THESIS ALERT!> Because it just is not necessary </THESIS ALERT!>
I can understand Herr Sanger wanting to do his thang on his own–but there’s a big problem with that. Who needs another Wikipedia? The Citizendium process is a great idea–but why start a whole new separate project in order to implement it? Even if Citizendium has gone public with a respectable deck of 1,100 articles ready for viewing, it’s still…oh, about 1,705,394 articles to go before they catch up to Wikipedia–and that’s downright impossible, since Wikipedia’s content is growing exponentially. Citizendium may very well offer more “certifiably reliable” information than Wikipedia, but it also offers far, far less. And besides…if Britannica, one of the oldest encyclopedic resources in the world, is not appreciably more reliable than Wikipedia, than who honestly expects Citizendium to be any better?
I’ve been exploring Citizendium all day (at least until the site’s newfound popularity hosed its servers), and my initial impressions of the site are entirely positive. Because it’s Wikipedia with a slightly different site layout and design. In a blind taste test, scientists here at Pegritz Laboratories replaced your favorite coffee Wikipedia with Folger’s crystals Citizendium, and four out of five people didn’t know the difference! In the future, I plan on providing you, Dear Readers, with text examples from similar Wikipedia and Citizendium pages to allow you to compare/contrast the overwhelming similarities between the two…but, as I noted, the site’s dead for now.
At any rate, Citizendium looks to be little more than a test-bed for ideas that, hopefully, if they play out–and I sincerely hope they do–will be gently incorporated into Wikipedia. Citizendium as its own entity, competing with Wikipedia? Not a chance in hell.
Citizendium is facing the same kind of competition that smaller, specialized search engines like Clusty face when going up against the insurmountable might of Google. Google is universally known. Google is astonishingly competent at what it does (hence the reason it’s got such name-recognition under its belt). And Google is simple to use. Wikipedia is the same: easy-to-use, information-rich, and known ’round the world as the place to start when looking for organized, basic, encyclopedic information. Anytime you do a Google search for, say, “Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” guess which site is right there at the top of the first page of links? Wikipedia.
Citizendium could offer the best, most reliable information in the world. Its entry on “Hawking radiation” could be written by Stephen Hawking himself, but that still won’t give it a chance against Wikipedia–because Wikipedia’s gigantic, universally-known, FREE shadow lies heavy upon the land as the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Plus, it is a sure bet that if some new information appears stamped and certified 100% Truthful on Citizendium’s “Hawking radiation” page, what’s to stop a true citizen editor on Wikipedia from adapting that information and adding it to the Wikipedia page on the same topic? All information on both sites is offered up under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2, after all….
So, really…will Citizendium still be around by the end of the year? I doubt it. Will it have an impact on the basic idea of the wiki? Very likely. I certainly hope so, because Wikipedia could be a bit more controlled.
But will Citizendium ever grow to be an actual challenger to Wikipedia? Not a chance in hell. Like a primitive mitochondria being absorbed and integrated into early bacteria as energy pumps, so will Citizendium be swallowed whole by the mighty Wikipedia, and perhaps will energize the great beast to truly become The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Planet Earth.
——————
*Whom Wikipedia frontman and Whiny Bitch Extraordinaire Jimmy Wales claims was little more than his subordinate. You’d think the fella generally regarded as Top Dog at Wikipedia would have much better things to do than creech and cry incessantly about his competitors and their various supposed schoolyard attacks on him, but…hey, what do I know?
Roll Your Own Panopticon Society
March 24th, 2007
What am I doing right now? Typing this line.
What am I doing right now (approximately three-five seconds later)? Typing this line and thinking about getting another Capris Sun drink-sac to pierce and drain.
What am I doing right n–
WHO FUCKING CARES?! Why should the second-by-second, minute-by-minute minutiae of my extraordinarily average, unexciting life mean ANYthing to you?
And yet…there is a new website, yclept Twitter, which has been gaining quite a bit of notice lately–and its purpose is simply to answer the question “What am I doing right now?” by allowing users to keep a running log of…well, whatever the hell they’re doing at that particular moment. Por ejemplo, let’s take a look at the site right now (2459 on 23 March 2007) and see what’s happening….
User bogomo has just posted something in one of those unintelligible Asian hieroglyphics that no one on earth but other Asians can understand.
Be-bearded and smiling user bear poses the question, “cygwin, o cygwin — how can it be that I love you and also hate you[?]”
Crow simply notes that he/she/it is “Watching Mario Batali–oh, it;s [sic] off.”
And, finally, shtikl ponders the Jack-Handeyish Deep Thought: “Is this Twitter Zen?” But, of course, does not offer up an answer or any form of followup thought…because that’s not what Twitter is all about. Substance? Reflection? Commentary? Intelligence? Such things are beyond Twitter’s purview.
To get a more thorough appreciation of the colossal pointlessness and stultifying banality of Twitter, let’s have a look at the above-mentioned Zen questioner shtikl’s posts over the last few days, as cut’n'pasted directly from his Twitter page:
Drinking Ayurvedic Tea ‘Nirvana’ w/ Soy Milk, drawing new Shtikl Cartoon while Elli and Baby are still asleep. 8 minutes ago from web
“baking” pre-baked bread-rolls in the mini-oven for the family. preparing new Shtikl for the world! about 24 hours ago from web
reading: JPod by D. Coupland (Late, I know. Still.) 11:47 AM March 21, 2007 from web
twitter is still 20% ’bout coffee 11:00 AM March 21, 2007 from web
@ado: one of my favorite lines in music, (by the band Garbage, I think): The trick is to keep breathing! (Sorry for the pun…) 10:01 AM March 20, 2007 from web
@Scobleizer: HR may rock, BUT: With 25 contacts (the free version) it is useless, the next bigger version is 144 Dollars a year–come on! 07:42 AM March 20, 2007 from web in reply to Scobleizer
I am Robert Scoble’s newest friend! Whoooot! Yeah! Hello Scobleizer! :-)) 07:07 AM March 20, 2007 from web
Hooray, finished the paper on ‘Augustine 05:34 PM March 19, 2007 from web
I’m not watching, I’m not watching. [Covering eyes. What is the visual equivalent to ‘BLA BLA BLA’?] 09:07 AM March 19, 2007 from web
The next minute just became this minute, will soon be a minute ago. 08:52 AM March 19, 2007 from web
Wow. “The next minute just became this minute, will soon be a….” That is deep, man.
Yeah. About as deep as a goddamned sheet of paper. The text on a shithouse wall is positively epic in comparison to the monodimensional drivel that people scrawl all over Twitter.
Mind you, Twitter’s purpose is, indeed, almost Zen in its simplicity: it exists only for the purpose of letting people keep a tally of events in their lives–and, to be fair, it does that brilliantly. I loves me a well-built website regardless of its purpose. Twitter gives users a plethora of means by which they can post: via a typical web form, via cellphone, via Post-It notes stuck into empty Coke bottles and left on appropriate streetcorners for all I know. The design of the site is elegantly simple, too: very easy to navigate, and intuitive to grasp…as one would only expect from a site whose purpose is, ultimately, to reduce its users to brainless babblers for whom even MySpace and LiveJournal are simply too complex.
Y’see…Twitter is institutionalized Adult ADD. In effect, it reduces the concepts of both blogging and social networking to their most stripped-down, minimalistic, skeletal natures…paring away any and all meaning and leaving little more than bitesized chunks of barren text. I call it microblogging. That is, blogging for those who really have absolutely nothing to say but simply must take part in the expanding universe of the Social Web. And what better way to let the shallow take part than by providing them an “in” as simple and as undemanding of their miniscule intellects as possible?
But…why?! Why would anyone think it a Good Idea to spatter the Web (or, at least, this one little corner of it) with such trivial blather in the first place? And why would other people want to keep an eye on their fellows’ and total strangers’ trivial blather?
Because we’re living in a burgeoning panopticon society. The original “Panopticon” was a prison designed by social and criminological pioneer Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s to “allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a ‘sentiment of an invisible omniscience.’” In other words, someone’s always got their eye on you. Big Brother’s watching. Orwell’s 1984 depicts the stereotypical panopticon society in which citizens have no privacy and are observed at all times by elements of The State. In 1998, sci-fi writer David Brin published a landmark nonfiction work, The Transparent Society, arguing that traditional ideas of privacy are rapidly disappearing in the present age of cheap, ubiquitous surveillance technology–but, he notes, this is not a Bad Thing…because the same technology that Big Brother uses to watch you gives you just as much power to watch Big Brother.
Many of the ideas broached by The Transparent Society have already become accepted entirely by our society–or, at least, by the younger generations who are actively taking part in driving the cyber-boom of the Internet. Witness the continued success of MTV’s The Real World and other “reality-TV” programmes, in which “everyday” folks live out their lives before the camera eye. Consider the fact that millions of people worldwide have blogs, many of them accessible to anyone and everyone on the ‘Net, in which they gladly discuss aspects of their personal lives that my mother’s generation never, ever would’ve brought up in public. (Hell, there were things–y’know, like “S-E-X”–that they wouldn’t even discuss behind closed doors!) Notions of what information a person should keep “private” and what a person should make public are entirely culturally-defined, and those definitions are greatly in flux. And old-timey ideas of secrecy and privacy are crumbling.
Open-ness and transparency in democratic societies are generally Good Things, for reasons which I shan’t get into here, as they’re not particularly relevant to this argument. But, like all Good Things, they can be exploited by the smallminded and petty. Especially those folks–like Paris Hilton or, for that matter, Perez Hilton–whose lives revolve around attention-mongering.
People raised on Real World reruns don’t get nervous when cameras are pointed at them–they preen. The MySpace/Facebook generation doesn’t understand the concept of overexposure. Social networking is a wondrous concept that personalizes the power of the Web and redefines Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to apply to everybody. But it can just as easily devolve into nothing more than Popularity Contest 2.0. The same technology that lets me rediscover and stay in contact with long-lost relatives on the other side of the country, converse with my favorite musical artists, and stay abreast of upcoming Major Events (like weddings) in friends’ lives can also be used to engage in an ever-spiraling game of childish one-up-manship called “Who has the most MySpace friends listed?”
Several years ago, when LiveJournal was the New Big Thing, my friends and I signed up for accounts because we all loved the idea of being able to publish our own thoughts and comment on each other’s. LJ was, and still is, an excellent means of staying in contact with each other, sharing anything and everything from amusing links found while trawling the ‘Net to troubling affairs that could really benefit from others’ input. We’ve all made stupid, silly posts to our LiveJournals before–hell, I’ve a friend who regularly blogs his BMs (he calls it his Journal of Ass Production)–but for the most part, the material that we post to our journals is thoughtful or thought-provoking. Many of us now have official blogs of our own, such as this one, and we tend to follow the same rules for posting there as well: don’t waste everyone’s time with inane chatter. If you’re going to post something to a blog, post something that someone will want to read because it appeals to their mind, or their funnybone, or their boner, if pr0n’s their thing–but for gods’ sake, do NOT waste untold kilobytes on random stupidity.
My friends and I come from a slightly-older generation, though: a generation that had been thought to think before opening our mouths. To not put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) without having something to say first. We’re attention-seekers just like everyone else–I mean…why else would I have a domain all my own on which I post stuff like this for the delectation of friends and Total Strangers? We want our voices to be heard, just like anyone.
But when we speak, we say something. It may be a Portentous Statement on the sad state of American politics. It may be a quick’n'dirty analysis of a story from MSNBC concerning a polar bear cub and moronic “animal rights” activists. It may be a fart joke. Regardless of type of content, there’s some kind of content there for the edification or amusement or excoriation of our readers.
“Twitter twits,” on the other hand, are taking the easy way out: they’re posting stuff to the Web, sure–but it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Who gives a shit if you’re “out shopping wit the wife” at 8:04:13pm on 19 March 2007 or pondering “What bra sizes of the red0haired bitch on Desprate Hosewives [sic, sic, sick]?” These people have nothing of substance to say–but, oooooohhhh, do they crave the attention. They just want to be Real Life stars, too! But instead of setting up a webcam, whipping out a tit, and declaring themselves camwhores, or setting up a blog and actually writing something that comprises more than 20 words and makes a point of some sort…why, they just jump to Twitter, where all they have to do is cough up a handful of words n’ letters to describe “What are you doing now?” And SHAZAM! You have a web presence. You have defeated solipsism! You have PROVED YOU EXIST!
And all you had to do was take a few seconds to record a meaningless moment of your thoroughly-average existence.
So maybe someone, somewhere, will look at your latest post–”12,32 am just took a shit and there was corn in it”–and think to him/her/itself, “Wow, there’s someone whose crap I just have to keep up with!”
Perhaps if you actually had a life that matters, you wouldn’t need to bore the world with soundbites of it.
UPDATE: There is a program called Twitteriffic (shown here in 2.0 Beta screenshots) that gives users not only another means of posting their minute-by-minute inanities to the web, but lets them keep track of their friends’ inanities as well. Wow. Talk about a productivity murderer.
Microsoft Vista’s “Protected Media Path:” Cracked Already?
January 29th, 2007
I’m gonna cut right to the chase and give this stuff to y’all straight: security researcher Alex Ionescu has just published a claim on his blog that he has developed a means to bypass Window’s Vista’s “Protected Media Path” DRM scheme. Yes, this is the entrenched DRM scheme built into Vista’s very guts that I mentioned a little while ago as being irrelevant to anyone who simply avoids protected media.
However, Ionescu is a bit of a candy-ass, and is a bit trepidatious about releasing the information because, as he puts it, the open-source community has no interest in his code (don’t be so sure about that, bucky) and releasing it as an anti-DRM device would be a scaaaaaaary, scaaaaaaary violation of the Digital Milennium Copyright Act. Oooooooooh! In Herr Ionescu’s defense, however, I must note that his description of the method on his blog may very well be detailed enough in and of itself to give other…shall we say, less scrupulous researchers enough information to reverse-engineer it for themselves. Sly!
Do keep in mind, though, that refraining from wasting your cash on protected media is a much more certain and stable means of avoiding any issues with Vista’s copy-protection. Don’t make me PMP-slap you!
John McCain Can Kiss My Ass
December 18th, 2006
Oh, humanity, pity out poor beleaguered children! The Internet is nothing but one gigantic seething pit of sex-offenders, child molesters, and NAMBLA phishing sites just lying in wait for some poor, poor little tyke to log on so they may all pounce and RAPE AWAY! How can we possibly sanitize the Internet to make it a safe and wholesome place for our kids?
John McCain has an idea how to do it. Recently, he floated a bill before Congress that would–get this, folks–make blogs just like this hyar PEGRITZ(.com)! circus equivalent to ISPs and hold them responsible for all activity in their comments sections and user profiles! Think Progress, one of my alltime favorite progressive-though websites, has a nifty little breakdown of Herr McCain’s lovely little piece of patriarchal bullshit. Under the law, should it be passed:
– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”
– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.
— Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.
PEGRITZ(.com)! is, primarily, a personal blog–my personal blog–but I do welcome comments to any and all entries, and anyone on earth is free to leave said comments. Sooooo…let’s say one of the people registered on my site were a–dun-dun-DUNNNN!–wicked, disgusting, thoroughly evil sex offender. If that person posted in a comment a picture of a naked five-year-old being “bathed” in a thoroughly inappropriate manner, I would be legally obligated to report that person to The Government or face fines that would put me and my descendants in hock trying to pay ‘em off. Would I immediately delete such a comment and ban that person from ever posting on my blog again? You’d better damn well believe I would! Hell, I’d probably report the jackass to the Feds on principle! But Herr McCain doesn’t trust me, a responsible citizen, to report such egregious behavior on my own, so legislation must be introduced requiring me to do so under threat of crushing fines.
But, quite frankly, I’m not too worried about that eventuality coming to pass. What particularly bothers me about this legislation is Item 3 above: the responsibility it places on social-networking sites to police their boundaries for the dreaded scourge of the Internet sex offender. It is basically stating that, under Federal law, anyone registered as a sex offender would be barred from taking part in almost any form of social interaction on the Internet–including being banned from creating a user profile on a commerce site like Amazon.com.
Do I think that sex offenders’ activities shouldn’t be monitored? Of course not. But first of all, what indeed is a sex offender? Obviously, someone with a history of sexual crimes–particularly against children–matches the definition. But so does the sixteen-year-old boy convicted of statutory rape because he had 100% consensual sex with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, whose parents found out that Daddy’s Little Girl was more than old enough to give up skins on her own accord and decided to prosecute the boy who made off with her virginity. At present, the definition of “sex offender” is far too broad and far too legally unstable in the United States to require individual websites to accept responsibility for policing themselves based on it.
And, more importantly, why require it in the first place? Republicans constantly rattle on about the evils of Big Government and the fundamental rights of American citizens to go about their lives with as little interference from Washington or state governments as possible…yet they are always the first to push such “Big Daddy” legislation that tacitly declares American citizens unable to properly monitor themselves. Oh, in many cases, American citizens can’t be trusted to govern themselves: if they were allowed to do so, in many parts of the country gay citizens would be hounded like Jews in Nazi Germany and African-Americans would probably still be suffering under Jim Crow laws. However, the aim of federal social legislation should be to protect the liberties of ALL its citizens from the prejudices and idiocy of certain others, not to restrict or otherwise oversee liberties–and such laws as McCain’s ludicrous blogosphere regulations do just that.
People…it’s simple: if you want to protect your children on the Internet, you as parents and individual citizens have to keep an eye on what your kids are doing. Of course, that won’t always work, especially if you have older kids who can easily hide their activities from you. But rather than expecting the government to do your job of providing your children with the necessary knowledge to protect themselves, why don’t you step to the plate and actually do it yourselves? Then the Senator McCain’s of the nation wouldn’t have any reason to trouble our nation with these kind of overbearing laws.
Google Calendar
April 13th, 2006
For the past few years, I’d been using Microsoft Outlook’s calendar functions to plan my classes and organize my daily affairs. Without an external calendar app of some sort to help me keep track of everything I need to do, I wouldn’t even remember to wake up in the morning or breathe most of the time. But Outlook 2003 is riddled with mysterious bugs that have sometimes caused me to lose an entire semester’s worth of class schedules, it’s slow as continental drift even on my hopped up Sony media-monster desktop, and…well, I can only access it from either my desktop or laptop (which hasn’t even been functional for the last five months).
Recently, I’ve become a huge proponent of non-localized web applications that I can access from ANY computer terminal or ‘net-capable device such as my cellphone. In fact, I am a complete Web 2.0 junkie. I go into withdrawl if I don’t get my daily AJAX fix. So far, I use ProtoPage as a general start-up page and link repository, GMail for email and online chat/collaboration, Del.icio.us for bookmark storage, Backpack to manage to-do lists and store assorted worknotes, and Writely for document writing. It’s getting to the point that I don’t even need local apps like MS Office anymore (except for spreadsheets and presentations, because so far I haven’t come upon web-based versions of either Excel or PowerPoint)…but I hadn’t yet found a decent online calendar package that could do the same stuff as Outlook. I was using HipCal for a while, but at best its functionality was basic and it’s almost as buggy as Outlook.
When I heard Google was working on an online calendar app that would be closely tied in with Gmail, I immediately got excited. Google’s last few offerings (such as Google Video and Google Talk) didn’t impress me very much, but GMail is, easily, the best web-based email solution to have ever existed. The scuttlebutt on the net was that Google Calendar was going to tie in very tightly to GMail and be built primarily in AJAX to give it a solid foundation of wide-spread functionality. Leaked screenshots showed a GUI very similar to Apple’s iCal, with nifty colorschemes and extremely easy, intuitive methods of adding new events.
Google Calendar went live yesterday, and I leaped at it like a starving badger. I was sold within seconds. Google has provided an excellent tour of Calendar’s functions, so if you want to check them out for yourself, go there for the full scoop. All I’m going to do here is give you a brief rundown of what makes Google Calendar so useful to me, which will hopefully illustrate how useful it can be to you as well!
First and foremost, Google Calendar lets you implement multiple calendars…so you can have one for, say, personal events like doctor’s appointments, birthday reminders, and anniversaries–and another for professional activities like meetings and classes. Each calendar’s visibility on the day, week, and month lists can be toggled, and you can assign different colors to the individual calendars to let you keep them straight. These calendars can be private, or shared with other people, even if they are not registered Google Calendar users. Furthermore, you can send invites to scheduled events (parties, for instance) by providing folks’ email addresses when you create an event. Calendars can also be subscribed to via the icalendar standard or RSS, making it even easier to keep track of others’ calendars or let others keep track of yours. And, of course, there are a plethora of reminder features that can let you know when something is coming up by sending you emails, text messages on your cellphone, or just showing pop-up bubbles on the main screen.
Adding events is ridiculously easy. I generally use the “Create Event” link on the uppermost left because it gives you the most control over event parameters, letting you: set the usual stuff like names, times, and repeat options; add comments; add email addresses of people to invite to the event; and, of course, select which of your calendars you want the event to be added to. “Quick Add” is a nifty little addition, too, allowing you to type something like “Meeting at Mike’s Office at 5:00pm on April 12,” which Calendar will automatically parse and add to your default calendar. Setting repeat options for re-occurring events is a little weird, as the options given are surprisingly limited: for instance, I have a class that meets every Monday and Wednesday, but the only repeat option I can select that is close to that is “Every Mon., Wed., and Friday.” Which gives me an extra event listing on Friday of every week that must be deleted by hand. Somewhat annoying, but I’ve already sent an email to the development team letting them know that this is something they might want to look into.
But this is what really sold me on Google Calendar. When I’m adding a class to my Penn State calendar, I set the first occurrence as the first day of class and set the repeat options to fill in every, say, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from the first day of class (January 18) until the last day (April 26). All that does is basically fill in the slots to let me know that I have class at those times on those days. But I like to use my calendars to plan my classes as well by annotating each separate occurrence with the lectures or activities scheduled for those individual days. This was simple to do in Outlook: just double-click on any instance of an event and select the checkbox for “Edit this occurrence” in the dialogue box that pops up. No other online calendar package I’ve ever encountered let me do that, which obviously limited their appeal, since that’s primarily why I used Outlook in the first place. Fortunately, Google Calendar lets you do that, too. Just click on any colorful block in your calendar view. When the bubble with extended information pops up, select edit–it will then ask you if you want to modify this particular instance of the recurring event, or the entire series. Select “This Instance Only” and modify away! Your added information will show up on that day’s instance and no others, which makes it simple as can be to plan individual activities for a series of events.
Of further interest is Calendar’s close ties to Gmail. Anytime you receive an email that contains time/location-related information, an option to automatically import that info into Calendar is available on the right of the message. There are also many options for exporting calendars as comma-separated values and iCal files, as well as importing the same from any calendar programme that can save info in the same formats. We’re talking serious interoperability here!
Managing calendars and individual calendars’ sharing options is incredibly easy and intuitive. The interface is pure Google: simple, colorful, and very easy to navigate. The learning curve for Google Calendar is so shallow it’s practically a straight line from logging on to being a Calendar pro in under five minutes. Simply put, this is a superb web app that will no doubt prove itself virtually indispensable to many people in no time. I can now access my various itinerary’s from ANY computer, meaning that I needn’t lug my laptop around with me everywhere, nor worry if it’s stolen–my calendar information is safe on Google’s servers.
Check it out. You will not be disappointed.
Le Pomme Stupide
March 22nd, 2006
You know…I used to hate the French. Not for any truly legitimate reason: it was just a typically-American gut reaction to their stereotypical self-righteousness. But even though France has been embarassing itself on the social front by becoming more racist every day, the country has displayed an uncanny understanding of digital rights issue by passing legislation that could force Apple’s iTunes store to open up its DRM scheme to support other, non-Apple-branded music players. As noted in the just-linked article, “At issue isn’t DRM itself but interoperability.”
Of course, Apple Computers immediately had a standard-issue DRM hissy fit, calling France’s actions tantamount to “state-sponsored piracy”, and that “[i]f this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers.”
So what will Apple do if this legislation remains upheld? Probably close its French incarnation of iTunes completely. Which is, of course, completely childish–the grown-up equivalent of grabbing all your toys and going home.
Now, let’s take a look at what’s at issue here. France wants Apple to open up its DRM scheme to allow folks who buy tracks via iTunes to load those tracks onto mp3 players other than the Apple iPod. The bill in question does not threaten the existence of Apple’s FairPlay DRM scheme in any way, it only asks that it be opened up to other manufacturers so that consumers have the option of loading the music they have legally purchased through the ITMS onto any portable mp3 device, not just Apple’s over-priced, buggy iPods. Nothing in this bill in any way threatens Apple’s DRM scheme, and does not contribute to or even remotely suggest piracy. If anything, the bill would lead to a reduction in piracy!
Think about it: Monsieur X has a Creative mp3 player because he can’t afford an iPod, or he just switched over to Creative when his iPod’s hard-drive burnt up for the seventh time in under a year. He has a LOT of music purchased from iTunes…but he can’t load it onto his Creative player because Apple’s FairPlay DRM scheme is not compatible with said player. He has paid for the music he owns, but Apple computer will only allow him to sync it onto one of their own devices…which does not happen to own. So what can he do? One perfectly viable option is that he could go out to the local record shop, buy all the CDs or songs he has already purchased from iTunes again, rip those CDs, and then load them onto his Creative mp3 player. But who wants to spend more money? Instead, Monsieur X will probably just fire up BitTorrent, track down the music he wants to put on his Creative device, and download it for free. Now that is obviously piracy! If Apple Computers would simply abide by French law and release its DRM scheme to other manufacturers, then Monsieur X would just be able to hook up his Creative mp3 player to his computer and sync it with iTunes–and would, no doubt, continue to purchase music legally from the ITMS simply because there would be no hassle involved.
But, of course, that’s not how Apple sees it. They’d rather keep their iTunes/iPod monopoly going strong even if it means: A) closing an entire regional branch of iTunes and thereby losing a gigantic market (the entire country of France) and B) actually CONTRIBUTING to piracy by maintaining their DRM scheme as it exists.
Apple Computers is stupid. That’s as simple as it gets. There’s no need for me to even go into how ridiculous DRM schemes are to begin with–that’s an entirely separate issue that I have bitched about many times before. The present situation is nothing more than an example of a company being put on the spot to open itself up to greater interoperability and/or competition, and patently refusing to do so even when said refusal will most likely harm the company in the formers of a lot of lost profits. But Apple Computers has traditionally been a company so wrapped up in its own incestuous corporate ideology that it will always choose to support its own ridiculous party line even at its own expense. That’s just not good business.
L’Update: Wow. Looks like even the US government itself is getting involved by backing Apple now. Said US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, “But any time something like this happens, any time that we believe that intellectual property rights are being violated, we need to speak up and in this case, the company is taking the initiative.” Au contraire, Don Carlos: this is manifestly not an issue of intellectual property theft or, as one positively brilliant respondant to the original Wired writes, an “pathetic socialistic move, stifling business creativity” aimed at undermining capitalism by stripping away a corporation’s right to its own business secrets.
This is a ridiculously SIMPLE issue of competition. Apple Computers basically wants a monopoly on its own services: you can only sync DRM’ed up songs purchased from Apple Computers’ iTunes Music Store on Apple Computer iPods. At present, the iTunes Music Store is the leading online supplier of legal music downloads, and the iPod is the bestselling portable mp3 gizmo on the market. No doubt, if Apple were to open up its FairPlay DRM scheme to other manufacturers of portable mp3 players, then iPod sales would almost certainly see a slump. Apple just doesn’t want to give up a certain edge it has in the mp3 player market to competition. That reason, and only that reason, is why Apple is fighting this.
Releasing the DRM standard to other manufacturers would not in ANY endanger Apple’s intellectual property claim to their FairPlay code: it would still be their property, and no doubt they would require any other company wishing to license the FairPlay code to naturally pay a premium to Apple for the license. That’s just basic business. Quite frankly, if Apple were to do so, I’m sure the money they’d earn for licensing out the FairPlay DRM scheme would make up for a large portion of profits they might lose on sales of iPods. But, of course, that would mean Steve Jobs’ Apple hardware/software monopoly would be weaked and, ohhhh, we just can’t have that!
