b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt
More on RSS, Blog Tools
HTML Markup Tutorial
Web Struggles for Bertelsmann
rinetd: Cool Tool for Using Radio Remotely
A Busy Writer's Guide to Radio Renderers
Discussion on Radio Category Templates
On the Road Again
Workplace Monitoring Being Revisited in Canada
Diligence, Skepticism, Refusal to Buy
The Internet Isn't Cable TV Redux
Euro Copyright Suit
Tuesday, July 2, 2002
Blogging from the Road
Things are moving along in sunny Lincoln. They need rain here, though. Getting my transition plan in place. Finally nailed down a schedule for final site visits with vendors and have a schedule for sending all the pertinent contracts, audits, and miscellany to the new team.
Didn't get to review Manila. Bummer. The Manila guy here took off for vacation. I was really looking forward to getting a peek under the hood and asking some questions from someone who has been a Manila site admin. Found a few blogs that look interesting this week. Dan Rosenbaum at Over the Edge has made a couple of recommendations, as well. I haven't had time to check them out but will do so later and post accordingly.
Found BookNotes for fans of traditionally produced books. Craig has a background in library book binding -- an area that I really enjoy and don't know nearly enough about. Bindery is still plagued by quality problems in the demand-driven production world. Craig's from my home state -- Texas. Maybe I should give him a call sometime.
Also found this site by Mark Bernstein, Chief Scientist at Eastgate Systems and creator of a Macintosh hypertext tool, TinderBox. Weblog is mostly personal stuff, but has a separate blog for TinderBox. Mark has an amusing quote on his site:
"You'd think the purpose of a roof is to keep rain off the television." -- Bob Frankston, on the net industry's fixation on entertainment.
I need to look up Bob Frankston. Mark's site pointed me to elegant hack, a site on information architecture run by Christina Wodtke. Seems pretty good. She reviewed 3,600 sites for a C/Net award panel, and seems to have done lots of web design for a variety of art nouveau dot.com design firms.
Another privacy blog -- Privacy Parts. Haven't spent much time viewing it. No insight into how useful it is. Just listed it so I wouldn't forget. We'll see.
Picked this up from Steve Pilgrim:
SHOWING MY IGNORANCE
What's the difference between a VPN and an Intranet?Paolo is covering Intranets. What are the big picture differences between intranets and VPN's?
I'm writing something about how Intranets are developing, and I made a few drawings to better illustrate the concept. Maybe somebody is interested... [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Has a nice group of set theory-style pics showing how Intranets sprout KLogs. And Paolo's site points to RadioTools, a site that has some interesting tools; RSSDistiller will let you create RSS fees from web sites (like WhatTheyThink.com) and RemoteEdit will do an out-and-back conversion of Radio Templates to HTML pages so you can edit in standard editors. Doesn't look like either program has been updated in a while. I'll test next week. Hope I don't blow anything up.
Monday, July 1, 2002
Berman Proposal A Publicity Stunt
Cory Doctorow has skipped a beat with his Letters of Marque post on Congressman Berman's "Safe Harbor" speech to the Computer and Communications Industry Association. First, this is nothing more than a publicity stunt by an incumbent Congressman campaigning in a new district. Berman knows full well such an idea would never gain any support. He's just waving a banner to see how many people will screech. Like any good PR hack, he knows that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all.For the record, I support copyright protection. What I do not support is prior restraint, treating customers like criminals, or using the acts of a few to mandate wholesale monitoring and control structures for the many. No rational person would ever suggest legalizing unregulated vigilantism on the part of businesses. There are better ways to solve this problem. We've spent 200 years developing the rule of law. Only an idiot would throw it out over this.
A review of Berman's speech shows that his entire economic argument is based on worldwide figures for the piracy of mass produced hard goods --
There is no doubt that piracy causes substantial harm to copyright owners. The evidence is everywhere and the numbers are staggering. In 2001, the U.S. recording industry lost $4.2 billion to hard-goods piracy worldwide, the U.S. movie industry lost $3 billion to videocassette piracy, and the U.S. entertainment software industry lost $1.9 billion due to piracy in just fourteen countries. In 2000, hard- goods piracy cost the U.S. business software industry alone $11.8 billion.
He readily admits there are no reliable figures to gauge the actual economic impact of P2P piracy. He extrapolates his extraordinary claims from a Viant study, The Copyright Crusade, on P2P network piracy. The study indicates that online piracy is a serious issue and worthy of considerable effort. But it in no way suggests, authorizes, endorses, or supports the outrageous claims of Mr. Berman.
InfoWorld quotes Berman as claiming that "billions" of files are pirated each month, yet he has little supporting evidence. The childish statements by his spokeswomen in the same article, and the admission that the bill has little chance of passing noted in a brief review at IEEE-USA are clear indicators of Berman's disingenuous nature.
A review of the CCIA site shows no mention of the Berman fiasco and, given the organization's stand on other Internet-related issues, it seems unlikely they would support such a stupid proposal. Moreover, if Berman really wanted something this asinine put into law he certainly wouldn't announce it in public. He sits on the House Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Courts, Internet, and Intellectual Property, and could easily broker an amendment to some unrelated bill if that were his real intent.
Berman also claims: "Internet piracy threatens to undermine the symbiosis between the technology and media industries."
My question is just who is this vaunted symbiosis supposed to benefit? This reminds me of Bob Frankston's quote [via Mark Bernstein] on the net industry's fixation on entertainment -- "You'd think the purpose of a roof is to keep rain off the television."
It is unfortunate that a legislator who is directly responsible for Internet regulation has no more regard for the truth than Congressman Berman has shown. For whatever else he may have done, Mr. Berman has shown himself a shallow, feckless shill for the RIAA and Hollywood fatcats, and someone who has little connection to real-world Internet users, their issues, or their concerns. Rather than fanning the flames of his PR effort, we should be reaching out to the constituents of CA28 and letting them know they have a poser in Congress. And that, come election time, Mr. Berman should be sent to the unemployment line. Perhaps it's time to support one of Mr. Berman's opponents. The Unofficial List of Candidates for the November 5 General Election provided by the California Secretary of State lists Berman's opponents as follows:
DAVID R. HERNANDEZ, JR. -- Republican
P.O. BOX 3245
NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CA 91609
BUSINESS: (818) 761-1820
E-MAIL: drhassoc@earthlink.net
Insurance Adjuster
KELLEY L. ROSS -- Libertarian
13403 WEDDINGTON STREET
VAN NUYS, CA 91401
BUSINESS: (818) 788-8647
E-MAIL: kross@friesian.com
College Philosophy Teacher
More on RSS, Blog Tools
Dorothea at Caveat Lector has some outstanding explanatory posts on HTML, RSS, and other items. This one is on RSS and has some good resources I missed when I made my earlier post.HTML Markup Tutorial
Dorothea sends us to school on html markup. I just browsed (it's late), but it looks like soem easy-to-grasp explanations of some things -- like DIV tags and such -- that may as well be Greek to me.And don't miss this follow-up.
Sunday, June 30, 2002
Web Struggles for Bertelsmann
The web isn't like everything else and even the big publishers are having trouble figuring out how to make money. <blockquote>Bertelsmann suspends Pixelpark payments. Europemedia.net Jun 29 2002 3:32PM ET [Moreover - Media: Europe news] </blockquote>
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Books, Copyright, Future of Print
rinetd: Cool Tool for Using Radio Remotely
This little tip looks like the ticket for making all the Radio auto-subscribe stuff work if you are doing remote access. It fixes some of the Radio macros that direct back to local network addresses (127.0.0.1). Good for futures.
rinetd DESCRIPTIONRedirects TCP connections from one IP address and port to another. rinetd is a single-process server which handles any number of connections to the address/port pairs specified in the file /etc/rinetd.conf. Since rinetd runs as a single process using nonblocking I/O, it is able to redirect a large number of connections without a severe impact on the machine. This makes it practical to run TCP services on machines inside an IP masquerading firewall. rinetd does not redirect FTP, because FTP requires more than one socket.
A Busy Writer's Guide to Radio Renderers
This might help me get an answer to rendering link and bookmark lists in Radio. I see more uses for outline renderers and for rendering outlines as lists. I don't know if I want to go as far as Mark Barrot at slam. Needs more investigation.More discussion: In-line macros in OPML files, What controls the template that is used to render files in categories.., viewOPML() in Radio. This last looks really good.
Discussion on Radio Category Templates
I had some difficulty understanding Radio's Category templates and this discussion thread with Lawrence Lee got me on the right path.On the Road Again
Heading out to beautiful, suave Lincoln, NE for the next few days so I'll be posting via Mail-to-Weblog again as I have time. While I'm traveling I'll also be getting my daily dose of American Invisible, Inc. Click on over and see what Hugh Madison is doing. It's a nice little break in the day and a clever switch from some of the more staid ideas in publishing.
Dan Rosenbaum at Over the Edge was kind enough to pass on some info on how he gets remote access and what I need to make it work. I'll be putting Dan's suggestions to work over the next few weeks. Thanks Dan!
I've got a temporary fix for my laptop woes. I've managed to scrounge an aging IBM ThinkPad 385XD. The thing is an absolute brick, but it looks like what the IBM CEs used to carry so I know it's rugged. It's a little slow, but it was free. And I don't need to do anything but web browse, e-mail, and a little word processing. This is just the ticket for someone in transition.
When I return I'll be working on Radio again, trying to get some Categories setup. Lawrence Lee of Tomolak's Realm has been a great help in understanding just what makes the Category Templates work. I'll try to adequately document that when I start working.
The Categories will let me better manage and organize content elements so I can begin focusing on my real objective, which is to track some of the warm undercurrents surging beneath the rather tepid surface of the print and publishing industries.
There's a lot happening there that isn't readily observable. What is observable often looks very foolish. I don't see anyone really taking an unbiased view of the foolishness (maybe this is because consultants have to get paid and can't afford to piss everybody off. I'd like to get paid, too. But not if it means running around parroting Mr. Indu Strypundit and cheerleading for questionable ideas.
Workplace Monitoring Being Revisited in Canada
If an employer is paying for your equipment, you time, your services, and the place you are working they have some right to ensure you are not misusing said provisions. Beyond that, I'm not sure how far it goes.This is happening in Canada mostly because they have a Privacy Commissioner, a bureaucrat who needs something to do. We don't have that here so don't expect any similar thought process to taek place until monitoring practices are challenged by the unions.
globetechnology.com - Shift to more workplace privacy protection.[Privacy Digest]In sorting through the legality of workplace surveillance, many assume that employers' ownership of the computing equipment and the right to set workplace rules grant them an unfettered right to monitor employees' computer usage provided that they disclose the practice. Typically framed as a matter of reasonable expectation of privacy, the belief is that if employees are told not to expect any privacy in the workplace, they don't have any.
A closer examination of Canadian law suggests the rules for workplace surveillance are gradually shifting, however -- moving away from an assessment of the reasonable expectation of privacy toward deciding whether the surveillance itself is reasonable.
Diligence, Skepticism, Refusal to Buy
I remember a speech someone gave at Stanford on the EULA for MS PassPort. They disected the the entire agreement and shwed how within it MS claimed ownership and use rights for everything that passed over the network and other insanely stupid clauses. It was hilarious -- except it was very real.Of course, MS changed the agreement shortly thereafter to something less onerous.
Diligence, Skepticism, Refusal to Buy -- words to live by.
Slashdot | Microsoft Media Player "Security Patch" Changes EULA Big Time.[Privacy Digest]MobyTurbo writes "In an article on BSD Vault a careful reader posts that in the latest Windows Media Player security patch, the EULA (the "license agreement" you click on) says that you give MS the right to install digital rights management software, and the right to disable any other programs which may circumvent DRM on your computer." --- So if you want your machine secure, you also want microsoft to have free reign on your PC.
The Internet Isn't Cable TV Redux
We already have the world's best streaming audio/video system -- it's called television. Leave the Internet alone.AOL's Ultravox set to enhance streaming media services. Europemedia.net Jun 29 2002 7:09PM ET [Moreover - Online portals news]
Euro Copyright Suit
Something to watch.Online copyright suit could set deep link precedent. Copenhagen Post Jun 28 2002 11:26PM ET [Moreover - IP and patents news]
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