O'Reilly Digital Media

I have to laugh when I see my picture atop my weblog these days. As Frank Willison once said, “I’ll never model.” As Gumby Wallace once said, I have “boxcar looks” (i.e. somewhere near the end of the train).

It is not that the picture looks that bad, but it doesn’t really look like me. Certainly, you wouldn’t recognize me on the street based on it. For that matter, I might look entirely different. That picture may just be an avatar.

I know several women who use online pseudonyms, and at least one told me she did it specifically to conceal her gender. A few years ago, people communicated primarily via text, but still images are now common, and videos aren’t far behind.

Upon meeting my wife, who is quite petite, in person, a client remarked that she had sounded fat on the phone. I’m not sure how someone sounds fat (she’s not).

My biting and often cynical online demeanor has prompted several people to assume I’m bald, short, fat, ugly, or single. I’m sorry to report that I’m none of the above (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I guess it just goes to prove, you can’t judge a book’s cover by its contents.

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Has your preconception of someone’s looks ever matched reality?

I’m moving this week and today I had some new phone lines installed in the new place. Within an hour of hooking up the phone, I received not one, but three (!), telemarketing calls, all within a 15-minute window. Someone must have determined the optimal time to bother people at home, or the same telemarketer kept calling with different offers.

Coincidentally, on the radio I heard one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto talking about the death of mass marketing. We’re well beyond segmentation to the point where individual messages will be tailored to each consumer. Ironically, the marketer doesn’t care who we are, so long as we fit the profile. Two of the three telemarketing calls were for the previous tenant. When I said they no longer lived there, I was shocked that the telemarketer didn’t try to pitch me. No longer does “or current resident” apply. What a relief.

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Any funny telemarketing stories to share?

I attended a conference recently and wanted to print some business cards with different URLs for different purposes. (I wear many hats as a multimedia developer, author, editor, and P2P programmer.)

I picked up a $10 Business Card Maker program from Cosmi at CompUSA. Another $10 garnered me some Avery 8371 business card stock (250 cards, 10 cards/sheet).

The software is pretty mundane, but it comes with an adequate editor, some sample layouts, and enough clip art to handle almost any situation. I used a picture of a globe on one card, and a cartoon character carrying books on another card. I printed them up the day before the conference and included my brand new cell phone number.

This week, I’m moving both my home and office, so I’ll print up some more cards for friends, relatives, and business associates. I even made up cards for my six-year-old daughter to give out to friends (she’s changing schools, but we’re only moving 10 minutes away). Her violin teacher liked the cards so much that she asked if I’d make her some!

My favorite business card story is as follows:

Mary: When did you become a writer, John?
John: When I printed up business cards that said “Author” on them!
Mary: Obviously a writer of fiction! :)

The business card kit allows me to print small batches tailored to specific needs. They look great even on a cheap Lexmark Z22 color ink jet printer. Highly recommended!

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Related link: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/11/27/wireless.mickey.idg/index.html

Mickey Mouse has gone wireless, as Walt Disney World is using an 802.11b LAN throughout most of it’s 47 square mile park. Not only do they get you paying to get the family into the park and for your meals within, but they can now come to you to offer you their goods while you are waiting the 2 hours to ride Space Mountain.

What do John Ashcroft’s assault on civil liberties and the recent debate over cloning humans have in common? The opposition to both arise partially from the cost of error.

Few people object to criminals being imprisoned, but we cherish our constitutional liberties precisely because governments often abuse their power. Knowingly or unknowingly, governments imprison the innocent, and we’ve decided that such errors are too high a price to pay in the name of security. Better that a guilty man go free than an innocent man be imprisoned. But with the higher risks and fear associated with terrorism, that equation has already shifted.

Of course, cloning is also a huge controversy that I can’t resolve here. There are (at least) two kinds of cloning at issue, so-called therapeutic cloning for improved medical treatments, and reproductive cloning to create a full person. One of many objections to reproductive cloning is that the process is likely to be faulty. It has been called immoral to attempt to create clones when the likelihood of birth defects is so high. Need reproductive cloning be guaranteed error-free, or merely no worse than the risks associated with traditional conception? Ironically, the objection to reproductive cloning may become greater when the likelihood of failure lessens.

Regardless, in our personal and national decisions, we must consider both the risk of inaction and the cost of errors resulting from action. In either case, it is naive to debate the topic as if there are no risks involved in inaction (the current war on terrorism being but one example). It is equally naive to debate a topic as if actions are risk-free when both failure and sucess carry considerable consequences (the current war on terrorism again serving as a prime example).

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Which arguments put forth by government, industry, or technologists have you found to be faulty?

We all expect computer terminology to evolve rapidly, but we’re on the verge of a wholesale rewriting of concepts that were hitherto unassailable. Our reality is changing faster than the words used to describe it. “Computers” were once people that performed calculations, not the machines they used. In 50 or 60 years, the word “computer” may again represent a sentient silicon being. But the oldest words in our language already fail to describe our current reality.

Words like “corn” and “food” now represent something engineered in a lab and not just grown in the fields. Is it still “corn” if it includes genes from a cotton or peanut plant? Is a dietary supplement (such as a nutrition drink) a food? Is cereal crammed with vitamins equivalent to your grandfather’s corn flakes? Do athletes on performance-enhancing drugs represent anything more than world-class chemistry research?

What is a “human” when humans can be cloned? Is a human human by virtue of its genes or its method of conception? If a fetus is some day reared in an artificial womb, will we redefine what it means to be “born”? What is a “heart” or “heartbeat” when a surgically-implanted device can pump your blood?

We are already inundanted with relatively mundane redefinitions as technology evolves. Legal and political entities are already arguing over what it means to “do business in a jurisdiction.” Are you “located” where you live, where the transaction occurs, where the server resides, or where the consumer resides? As another example, Congressman Rick Boucher (D-Va) is proposing a bill specifying that downloading an MP3 file does not constitute a “performance” for the purposes of copyright law.

We already face an enormous array of legal, political, ethical, moral, and religious questions. To discuss them intelligently, we must redefine existing words at an unprecedented rate. We are rapdily moving away from science fiction into uncharted linguistic territory. Computing power will become a property of matter itself. We will redefine words like “grow”, “evolution,” “animal,” and “flesh.” When we can create, destroy, and transport matter at will, it will no longer seem evasive to say, “That depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

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What will force us to redefine language most rapidly? Biotech? Genetic Engineering? Computer Science? Politics?

I took my kids to see “Monsters, Inc.” last night. The graphics for the main characters were strong, but many of the peripheral characters were rendered very simplistically. They clearly spent a lot of time getting Sully’s fur to look right, and it did look great. The human toddler (Boo) was rendered too simplistically for my taste, and I think it would have been better to give her some speaking lines. My three-year old is scared of monsters, but he has been talking fluently for over a year.

The plot and themes were strong (not as good as Toy Story I or II, but much better than Bug’s Life). The movie was a bit scarier for my kids than I expected, and the pace was quite frantic at times. There was a scene in which a SWAT team decontaminates a monster who came in contact with a human sock. There is an extended chase scene that may make some people motion-sick. The villians are pretty creepy, and there is a horrific machine that sucks screams out of children. (Too graphic/scary for my liking.)

The point of the story is that kids’ laughter is much more powerful than fear. It sounds stupid and simplistic, but when Sully (the leading scarer) unintentionally scares Boo, he realizes how many kids he has scared over the years. I’d hate to think how many times I’ve scared my kids by yelling at them. I resolved to try to never scream at my kids again. Of course, I’ve made that resolution several times, but maybe this time I’ll stick to it.

I was expecting a light night of family fare and instead got slapped in the face with a clue-by-four. Maybe that is why I didn’t like it as much as I’d anticipated.

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Did you like the movie?

I had the displeasure of meeting the world’s rudest realtor yesterday. This woman–I call her Ginger because that was her name–was showing prospective tenants the townhouse I’m moving out of. This bitch–I’ll call her a bitch because she was one–barged in and had the gaul to say, “Why don’t you leave and I’ll let myself out.” She proceeded to criticize everything about the place while saying it was the same as the last place she saw. She headed upstairs without asking permission and was generally rude and impatient. (Bear in mind, this was the agent who makes money only if she finds a tenant. The prospective tenants must have been mortified). I never thought I’d hear myself udder the words, but I actually said, “This is my house and I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

What does this have to do with computers? It was once common for TV show hosts to thank the audience for inviting them into the viewers’ living rooms. For many years, TV shows acted like guests in your house. Web sites generally act like they own the living room and invite you into the other side of the looking glass.

Web designers would be wise to understand that site visitors consider themselves guests. The expectations for guests and hosts are quite different. As a host, it is rude to leave your guest alone and disoriented in the foyer, which is precisely what most web sites do. As guests, visitors don’t want to explore. They’d rather be given the house tour, or at least a convenient map. Although web commerce is obviously healthy, it won’t meet the needs of my 65-year-old mother until it looks and acts like QVC. She isn’t about to search a web site for a gift, but she’ll be glad to buy the things the nice lady she invited into her living room recommends.

TV will never succeed as an interactive medium if the viewers perceive themselves to be inert observers. The web will reach beyond the technically savvy when designers figure out which side of the CRT the living room exists on and design their sites accordingly.

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Has any web site met your expectations for interactivity, or do you just treat it like a configurable newspaper/TV?

If you own any domain names such as yourdomain.com, you’ve surely received emails telling you to register the equivalent names in the new top-level domains (TLDs) .INFO and .BIZ such as yourdomain.info and yourdomain.biz. Quick! Register the new domain names to protect your online identity!

Anyone else see the irony here? The .INFO and .BIZ domains were ostensibly set up to give legitimate businesses a domain name to match their real-world business name. There is only one problem. If the business that already owns yourdomain.com registers yourdomain.info and yourdomain.biz, it simply splinters its brand recognition. If a different business registers the new domains, it causes even greater recognition problems.

A namespace like DNS isn’t infinitely extensible simply because a standards body can add new TLDs. The .EDU, .MIL, and .GOV TLDs work mainly because there are a limited number of institutions that use them and the institutions tend to have unique names. But .COM, .ORG, .NET, .INFO, and .BIZ, suffer from too many entities with similar names in the same geographic area (the entire world for the purposes of the Web). For example, I own the domain names zeusprod.com and zeusproductions.com. I get some interesting phone calls and emails from people who confuse my multimedia consultancy, Zeus Productions, with the porn video company of the same name (I think they’re at femalewrestling.com).

Unless the public magically distinguishes between the new .INFO and .BIZ domains–which they won’t–the new TLDs simply add another yearly expense for existing domain name holders looking to “protect” their identity. I’ve chosen to ignore the new TLDs because they are meaningless to my customers.

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Have you registered any new .INFO or .BIZ domains? Have you ever visited a .INFO or .BIZ site?

When a newbie is confused or can’t get something to work, he blames himself. When an experienced developer encounters a problem, he blames the software. When an O’Reilly reader can’t get something to work, he blames the documentation.

That’s all right. As an editor and author for O’Reilly, I think our readers should expect no less than excellent documentation. That means covering the software both in theory and practice, warts and all. In my favorite review of ActionScript: The Definitive Guide, the reader writes “I have realised [sic] an important philosophical truism: From now on whenever I fail to understand something, I should blame the author and find a better book! ”

Many authors are technically competent abysmal as writers. Many publishers and editors don’t devote the resources or time to turn a so-so manuscript into a great book. I’m thankful to have worked with Colin Moock on my first book as an editor. If I edit 100 books, I doubt I’ll ever work with an author as technically skilled, motivated, and personable as Colin.

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What is your favorite computer book and why?

I’m a fairly left-of-center kinda guy. But at the recent O’Reilly P2P and Web Services conference, perhaps only Mark Lucovsky of Microsoft and Hillary Rosen of the RIAA were to my right. I found myself largely at odds with the larger P2P community (I’ll hold up Fred von Lohmann of EFF as a convenient example).

The public perception is that anyone using a P2P network is a pirate and that anyone who encrypts electronic communication is a terrorist. Tim O’Reilly joked about renaming next year’s conference The Pirates and Hackers Conference, but the rest of Washington isn’t laughing. The DMCA in effect criminalizes publication of ways to circumvent copy protection mechanisms. This isn’t just a proposed bill, it is the law. And it is the law because we are losing the PR battles that shape public opinion, the political battles that formulate laws governing technology, and the legal battles that put people like Dmitry Sklarov in jail for six weeks.

We have to jettison the losing arguments, such as that MP3 swapping is justified because evil record force musicians to sign lousy contracts. Instead, we have to focus on winnable arguments like the protection of fair use and the First Amendment. Mike Nelson of IBM said that we need better bumper stickers, and he is right.

The events of September 11th have created a pliable public convinced that limits must be placed on technology to catch child pornographers and terrorists. Congress wasted no time granting sweeping new powers to law enforcement, and the attorney general, Richard Ashcroft, shows no signs of letting up. It is up to the technology community to focus the public debate on facts rather than let passions, paranoia, and PR erode our First and Fourth Amendment rights.

A few weeks ago on NPR radio, there was a piece about trying to “profile” whoever sent the anthrax-laced letters. According to NPR, someone thought that the perpetrator was not just a programmer but a Perl programmer! Some thought that the leading zero in the month (09) indicated a programmer. Don’t ask me how they reached the conclusion that it was a Perl programmer. If anyone can find a transcript of the NPR report or the story on which it was based, let me know.

My point is that software developers are increasingly viewed with the kind of jaundiced eye once reserved for unseemly artistic types. Although “Reefer Madness” now seems comical, it reflected some widely held views at the time it was made. The software community has to consciously craft a public image instead of letting someone else, like the RIAA, do it for us.

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What do your non-geek friends think about electronic surveillance?

The web and email bring geographically diverse communities together. Some of my best friends are people I’ve never met. Some of the people I’ve known online (including my boss) have died without us ever meeting face to face.

But the technology that has brought some people together has also isolated us tremendously. Last night my new neighbor knocked on my door. Noticing the boxes in my house, he said, “I’m moving in, too.” Fact is, I’m moving out after living here five years and having hardly met most of my neighbors. I’ve shared an office building for 2.5 years with people down the hall. We’ve hardly spoken, except when I go to retrieve a Fed Ex that they’ve signed for.

Once, I encountered a middle Eastern gentlemen in the building after hours. It turns out that he was renting the office next to mine, but I had never met him. He said he was in the textile import business, which sounded kind of odd to me. He disappeared for many weeks shortly after the Sept. 11th attacks. Many of the terrorists lived in NJ and anthrax was detected in several local post offices. (I live in Franklin Park, which was the return address for the letter to Tom Daschle). Was he part of the conspiracy? Was he simply on a business trip or stuck outside the country? I briefly considered phoning the local authorities, but he returned last week.

The sad fact is, I can write whatever I want in this space and my neighbors will never know about it because they aren’t computer geeks. So while the web has brought us closer to people we would never otherwise meet, it has isolated us from our geographic neighbors.

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Are you best friends online, in your neighborhood, or both?

I’m a multimedia programmer and consultant by trade. I specialize in Macromedia products such as Director, Flash, and Dreamweaver. In the summer of 2000, every consultant I knew was flush with business. We couldn’t find a programmer with 2 or 3 years of real experience for less than $80,000/year (in the NJ area).

By January of 2001 the market had tanked, and by summer almost 75% of my colleagues were unemployed and the remainder were underemployed. Today I stopped to get gas and the attendant asked what I did. When I said I was a software developer, he said that he was too. Earlier this year he was a middleware programmer integrating PCs and mainframes. Today, he was pumping gas to pay the rent. He says he submits resumes to various online places but gets no responses.

Update Dec 1, 2001: I was at a gas station and the attendant noticed my Macromedia T-shirt. He asked if I used Macromedia products. Turns out that he was a student at a local multimedia training program, also pumping gas to pay the bills.

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How bad is the market for programmers? When will it turn around?

I lost my keys about 4 months ago. Much to my surprise, it didn’t bother me at all, as I had duplicates of most keys. (Of course, the day after I made additional copies, my wife found my missing keys.)

Losing my hard drive would be a much greater inconvenience. Although I perform an incremental backup frequently and a complete backup occasionally, recreating my work space would take substantial time.

To my limited understanding, Hailstorm’s Passport feature will be akin to my keys, wallet, medical history, and credit report rolled into one. Even assuming that Microsoft never loses my records, a brief interruption in access could be quite inconvenient. Worse yet, someone could steal my online identity unless Microsoft’s hitherto Swiss cheese security suddenly improves.

Most disturbing was Mark Lucosvky’s keynote at O’Reilly’s recent P2P and Web Services conference. (Lucovsky is Microsoft Hailstorm’s chief architect). Lucovsky volunteered several times that other divisions of Microsoft had asked to get at the Passport information but that he had “held them at bay.” When Tim O’Reilly asked whether Microsoft management would respect the sanctity of the personal information held in Passport, the best Lucovsky could reply was that he “had management’s ear.”

If someone wants my key, wallet, etc., I want a lot more than their second-hand ear in return.

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Which would you most hate to lose: your keys, your hard drive, your wallet, or something else?

Sure, I love tele-commuting, but some aspects of virtual offices really suck. Forget the days when employers are afraid that they won’t be able to adequately supervise tele-commuters. Let’s talk about the drawbacks for the employee or contractor who works from a home or remote office.

I rent an office about a mile from my house, which eliminates the typical complaints from people who work from home (kids, TV, refridgerator, work being too close). The real drawbacks are the lack of football pools and the isolation inherent in working alone. In a physical office, there is the opportunity for non-business banter, a chance to share a game of hearts over lunch, or the possibility of finding a tennis partner. Working in a virtual office is like having a foster child in Senegal. An occasional airmail letter isn’t the same thing as a nightly bath and bedtime hug. Hell, even mail order brides get delivered eventually.

This situation never hit home until I attended the funeral of O’Reilly’s former (beloved) Editor-in-Chief Frank Willison. Thankfully there were people who worked with Frank in the Cambridge office who could provide CPR when Frank had a heart attack, but alas to no avail. At Frank’s funeral, I realized that I had never met him face-to-face despite our numerous emails and phone conversations. I felt robbed never to have shared lunch or a holiday party with Frank. We talked about music, but never sat in the same room letting the sound of Little Feat soak into our tired brains.

In a few weeks I’ll be moving into a new (or at least different) house about 10 minutes from where I live now. Unfortunately, there are no co-workers that I can ply with promises of free pizza and beer to help me move. I have no doubt that Frank would have glady leant a hand.

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Are virtual (remote) workers more or less productive than office workers over the short term? The long term?

Is it a coincidence that the US government has negotiated a slap-on-the-wrist “remedy” following the ruling that Microsoft abused its monopoly power? I think the reasons go beyond Microsoft’s well-spent lobbying dollars or PR campaigns. A Microsoft monopoly is in the interest of law enforcement agencies who only recently were reportedly seeking Microsoft’s cooperation in electronic surveillance.

Am I suggesting that Microsoft and the DoJ struck some back-room deal? Naturally, I have no evidence of that, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me. Whatever legal or political obstacles there are to government initiatives like Carnivore, as Lawrence Lessig points out in “Code and other Laws of Cyberspace,” business interests will continue to play an important role.

Wouldn’t it be convenient to have access to the Microsoft Passport database and attendant data if you were in law enforcement? Why bother spending tax dollars to finance a database that Microsoft and its users will pay for?

Why are many users marching happy towards Windows XP, Passport, and Hailstorm? Why not? They offer a brave new world of ease of use and interoperability. And despite occasional complaints, what webmaster wouldn’t prefer to support only one vendor’s browser?

Although Microsoft isn’t a natural monopoly in the classic economic sense, it is a natural monopoly in the topology of cyberspace. Microsoft is the path of least resistance for government, users, and administrators alike. Microsoft may have many faults, but they make a lot of things easier too. And most users are willing to trade that convenience for privacy, security, etc.

So what are the risks? Like any monoculture, an all-Microsoft world is vulnerable to viral and other attacks. Certainly, the terrorists have shown enough sophistication to use encryption, and launching cyberattacks is relatively trivial. I suspect that terrorists also know how to install Linux, blunting the likelihood that the ability to surveil Windows users will enahance national security. So what have we wrought? In the name of unfettered business “innovation” and national security, we’re marching towards a centralization of information and power that has never been enjoyed by any government, much less a private corporation.

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Is Hailstorm’s ubiquity and dominance inevitable? Will Sun, IBM, or anyone user advocacy group slow it down?

Related link: http://news.webnoize.com/item.rs?eID=20011115s&ID=14777

(Rep. Boucher begins the long battle)

As terrorism and war begin to lose their grip over the legislative agenda in Washington, intellectual property battles about peer-to-peer file-sharing, digital rights management, the scope of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other issues are poised to re-emerge, said prominent Capitol Hill power brokers during a symposium Wednesday.

First-generation P2P networks formed groups based on the peer’s computer resources. For example, so long as you had the desired MP3 stored on your hard drive and could serve it up efficiently, no one cared who you were. Likewise, SETI@home just wants your computer’s cycles, not your personal input.

But next-generation P2P networks must enable users to form groups according to the social rules inherent in human society. Let’s use school kids as an example. My daughter takes the bus to and from school each day, but there are different children on the bus in the morning versus the afternoon (don’t ask me why). In the morning, my daughter sits with her friends who congregate in the back of the bus. In the afternoon, she sits with an afternoon-only friend in the front of the bus. Life is good.

Yesterday, we were told that children on the bus must have assigned seats. They must sit in the same seat in the morning and the afternoon (if they take the same bus to and from school). This threw my daughter’s world into disarray. Clearly, if there are different children on the bus in the morning and afternoon, the bus driver will need two separate seating charts. Doesn’t matter, rules are rules (it’s allegedly a state law). Never mind that it made no sense or that the driver took 2 months to enforce the rule. So we’ll be driving our daughter to school in the morning and letting her sit where she wants in the afternoon. We’re too lazy to fight the institutional stupidity because we are moving in a few weeks.

So what are the lessons for P2P networks?

First of all, you shouldn’t change the group-forming rules mid stream if there is a risk of alienating your users. (Phone companies learned that customers would rather dial 10-digit numbers than have their area code changed every time the phone company ran out of numbers).

Secondly, if software doesn’t mesh with the way people operate in the real world, they simply won’t use it.

Thirdly, human peer groups form along very complicated criteria not reflected in most computer architectures. My daughter had a preference for a specific peer and fell back to other peers only when the first peer was unavailable.

Lastly, human peers are not interchangeable. If I want to talk to a peer who is unavailable, I might prefer to wait for that peer to become available instead of talking to someone else. So whereas in a pure computational or file-sharing P2P group, I’ll settle for the most readily available resource, in a communicative peer group, I need a proxy to buffer the conversation if my target peer is not immediately available.

The winners in next-generation P2P applications will be those that reflect social networks, such as email and IM already do. However, pure peer-to-peer architectures in which no server is available will be unable to handle the asynchronous nature of certain peer communication.

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Do the current crop of P2P tools offer support for the ad hoc and complex group-forming behavior of humans?

[The adventure begins…This is my first blog entry, so be gentle with me]

I recently stayed at the Westin Grand hotel while attending the O’Reilly P2P and Web Services Conference hosted there.

Being vaguely aware of books like “The Design of Everyday Things” (Donald A. Norman, Doubleday, 1990) and Apple’s human interface guidelines, I was struck by the idiosyncrasies of the hotel.

There are no less than 5 different elevators from the lobby. Some only go up, others only go down, and some go down but not all the way down to the parking level. Where’s a Wonkavator when you need one?

When descending from my room (on the third floor), I could get all the way to the Conference level if I took the left elevator. If I took the right elevator, I had to switch elevators at the Lobby level.

Of course, elevators interfaces have their own quirks. When “calling” an elevator, you have to know which floor you are on to determine the vector to your destination. Even if I know that I’m on the “Promenade,” how am I supposed to know if the “Conference” level is up or down from here? If you pressed the wrong arrow to call the elevator, you have to wait for it to change directions. Once in the elevator, you must select your destination, but you can’t unselect it if you make a mistake.

I resorted to taking the stairs only to be locked out of certain floors from the stairwell. My favorite is the door to the parking level. When you open this door, you are immediately faced with another door! (like the dual doors that separate adjoining hotel rooms).

Of course, none of the door handles gave any clue as to whether a door should be opened in or out. I saw many people walk away from a door thinking it was locked when they had simply pushed/pulled the wrong way. The disorientation was compounded by a central rotunda with identical hallways in every direction and extensive use of mirrors.

The shower was perhaps the most interesting UI in the hotel. It had two shower heads with directions on how to use them. Do showers really need directions? The hot/cold knob in the shower” was labelled with temperatures from 60 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Never mind that 120 degrees is near scalding and that many visitors to DC might be more familiar with the Celsius scale. A simple hot/cold scale would have been sufficient if not better.

The real question is, why do we tolerate and perhaps not even notice these inconveniences in our daily lives? If software behaves as poorly, we scream bloody murder or simply refuse to use it. Automobile reviews address ergonomics, but hotel reviews do not. Why?

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Sound off!

Aimster decided to push a few more buttons over at the RIAA this week, as they launced their own subscription service, dubbed “Club Aimster“. The service claims better connection and download times than you would get without subscribing. Something tells me Aimster’s lawsuit stack will soon be getting a bit higher, and according to this Wired article, “AbovePeer (who runs Aimster) filed a lawsuit in New York’s Northern District court asking for a judgment on the legality of its network. The RIAA fired back with two separate lawsuits filed in New York’s Southern District.” On a side note, I just can’t help but have an icky feeling when going to the site, as Aimster’s spokeswoman, Johnny Deep’s 16-year old daughter Madeline, flaunts her stuff in a bikini and has cooing quotes like “Come on in … I really waaanntt you to join…please?” I feel dirty just cutting and pasting that in.

Also this week national radio conglomerate FullAudio announced that they will be launching a music subscription service in January that will directly compete with the record labels own subscription services, MusicNet and pressplay. The major difference is that the new service will let individual Clear Channel stations create genre-specific services targeted to its listeners, but it looks like the music will still be tethered to the users computers. Since the RIAA has recently had the anti-trust finger pointed at it, FullAudio will most likely be given the licenses that it will need to broadcast the majority of the labels catalogs.

And in somewhat related news, Wired is also reporting that Liquid Audio is fighting off takeover attempts by investors trying to shut it down and split the cash. I can remember a representative from Liquid Audio coming up to my college during a music industry convention about five years ago, and thinking to myself “why the heck would I want to download this player, and then try to find songs that were in the Liquid Audio format to play?” I didn’t realize back then that they were more of a digital rights service, but even that would require customers to download yet another player to play yet another proprietary format. Funny thing is I was looking for any job back then, luckily they turned me down ;)

Related link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/washtech/techthursday/columns/dotcom/A59099…

Washington Post, Thursday, November 8, 2001; Page E01

The Pentagon is taking a friendlier view of Napster’s file-sharing concept than are America’s big entertainment companies, which have repeatedly sued tech upstarts to stop people from swapping songs, movies and other copyrighted material.

by Leslie Walker

RIAA President Hilary Rosen delivered a talk yesterday at The O’Reilly Peer-to-peer and Web Services Conference
in Washington, D.C.

Rosen delivered the music
industry’s perspective and position on P2P technology and laid out the
reasoning behind its three-pronged P2P-containment strategy: public
enforcement, education and litigation.

Rosen explained that her industry’s focus has traditionally relied on
promoting music to the buyers for record store chains, not listeners. The
Web, she said, has changed all that, and is causing a shift in its approach to one that is more
consumer-oriented.

She described the difficulties in shifting focus and pleaded with the
technology community for continued patience while the industry evolves its
strategy.

“Building a legitimate business model from scratch — one that involves literally hundreds of millions of copyrights and interlocking creative rights, navigating incompatible DRM’s and players and building customer service and ease of use that music fans have always enjoyed — isn’t quite as easy as people might think,” she said. “It is clear that record companies haven’t been as quick as some have hoped to get online. Maybe that encouraged piracy — not excused it, to be sure, - - but encouraged it by not filling the vacuum of consumer demand.”

Rosen explained that the interests of recording artists are threatened by
P2P technology. “This is an industry of advances, not royalties,” she said. “A record company executive once said to me: ‘If an artist of mine gets a royalty, I haven’t done my job at negotiation time.”

Reflecting on the music industry’s hodgepodge of mostly stillborn attempts
at making their assets available over the Internet, Rosen admitted that the
industry had made some critical errors along the way.

“If we had it to do over, I think the recording industry would do it differently. Technology development and innovation might not have been left to the consumer electronics and IT industries as it was by the recording industry in the 80’s, leaving our companies less than fully operational on that level when the wave of new opportunities hit again in the early 90’s. But it is clear — our member companies see an enormous opportunity here and now and are working diligently with technology partners to seize it.”

Rosen said she feels there is “too much music available for the current distribution model” and looks forward to the potential for new “legitimate business models” in the future.

“Obviously, in a free market, our approach isn’t the only one, nor, for that matter is peer-to-peer. What we seek — and what I hope you’ll embrace — is an open market in which everyone competes with mutual respect on the value of his or her creations.” But she also assured the audience that the RIAA has no intention of halting its current legislative efforts. “We have no choice but to continue them as long as copyrights are being infringed,” she explained. “But we also know legal efforts won’t get music online.

Legitimate business models will.

Consumer demand will.

Technology will.

I want to get the lawyers out and the innovators in.”

Rosen finished her speech with traditional promises of new services and technologies on the horizon:
“New subscription services are being launched in the coming days and months. Virtually all RIAA member companies are participating in launches of these multiple services. I think the initial offerings will be very good. But they will get better as technology develops and the desired consumer experience has better definition. A lot of progress is being made and more will be done.”

O’Reilly and Associates President Tim O’Reilly asked Hilary to explain the math a bit behind the Recording Industry’s cost model.
Rosen commented that such figures were hard to nail down, due to the many possible variations of recording and marketing agreements. “There’s no single model. There’s no single way,” she said. (Note: the RIAA’s Cost of a CD document and Market Data newsletter offer a bit more specifics on the numbers involved.)

Zooko, a software engineer at Mojo Nation, asked Rosen if she truly understood the physical impossibility of effective Digital Copyright Protection, quoting a Bruce Schneier Cryptogram that clearly illustrates the situation:

“Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. “How will authors and artists get paid for their work?” they ask me. Truth be told, I don’t know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: “How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?”

Rosen nodded. “I get it,” she said. “It’s going to be very hard.”

“Not hard: Impossible!” Zooko and the entire crowd exclaimed.

“I get it! I get it!” she insisted.

The complete transcript of Hilary Rosen’s speech is available as a PDF or HTML file.

Rael Dornfest contributed to this report.

Resources

• Tuesday Photos from O’Reilly Peer-to-peer and Web Services Conference
  
  By Derrick Story   
OpenP2P.com
     (November 6, 2001)
  (http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/11/06/tuesday_photos.html)

• HTML’d version of Hilary Rosen’s Speech At The O’Reilly Peer-to-peer and Web Services Conference
  
  By Hilary Rosen
     (November 6, 2001)
  (http://www.finetuning.com/rosenp2p10-06-2001.html)

• The O’Reilly Peer-to-peer and Web Services Conference
  
  
  Washington, D.C.
     (November 5-8, 2001)
  (http://conferences.oreilly.com/p2p/)

• Rosen Reaches Out to Technology Community at Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference
  
  RIAA Press Release    (November 6, 2001)
  (http://riaa.org/PR_story.cfm?id=466)

• PDF file of Full Text of Speech at O’Reilly P2P Conference
  
  By Hilary Rosen    
  (November 6, 2001)
  (http://riaa.org/pdf/peer_to_peer_speech.pdf)

• Recording Industry Association of America
  
  (http://riaa.org/)

• Market Data Vol. 1 No. 1
  
  RIAA Marketing Data Newsletter
     (No Date Available)
  (http://riaa.org/pdf/public_newsletter_final.pdf)

• The Cost of A CD
  
  The Recording Industry of America
     (No Date Available)
  (http://riaa.org/MD-US-7.cfm)

What do you think about these issues?

Related link: http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,48147,00.html

A step towards the old adage, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?”

As file-trading networks continue to propigate, major label EMI has decided to offer a limited selection of videos from its Priority Records label through the Gnutella network according to this Wired article. It looks like the file will also contain links to buy the record online, as well as advertisements.