O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://www.cs.rice.edu/Conferences/IPTPS02/

The 1st International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS) aimed to provide a forum for researchers active in peer-to-peer computing to discuss the state-of-the-art and to identify key research challenges in peer-to-peer computing.

In case you missed the link on Slashdot, here is the Wall Street Journal on Rotor, Microsoft’s “shared source” release. This piece is focused on Rotor as a play for a piece of the academic research world. It quotes MS’ Dave Stutz: MS is investing “in the place where a lot of innovation comes from,” academia; and MS’ research director Rick Rashid: MS wants a “fair chance” of having compsci students educated in their products.

All in all, the article’s tone suggests that while shared source is leaps and bounds past what they’ve done before, Microsoft still has an uphill path in their attempts to get mindshare in the university.

Academics, would you use Rotor in the classroom?

Related link: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-868921.html

Netscape is looking like Rocky Balboa (and you can never count out Rocky!) as AOL looks to use Netscape in future releases. This decision could invoke Browser Wars, Part II, and cause many headaches to web developers who have been designing for IE exclusively for the past few years.

Related link: http://www.p2pwg.org/letter.html

In a Letter to P2PWG Members, the Peer-to-Peer Working Group considers joining the Global Grid Forum

What other groups are working on P2P standards? Is there some other group that you think P2PWG should merge with?

Related link: http://www.tomshardware.com/video/02q1/020315/index.html

Cool, simple explaination of codec features in DivX :-) and by extension, other MPEG-4 family codecs.

Related link: http://www.macromedia.com/

Macromedia ships Flash MX today, with the Flash Player 6 available for download now.

Leading the list of new features are:

• Support for AVI, QuickTime and DV video, via Sorenson Spark, from the makers of the QuickTime codec. Transform video with scale, skew and rotate features, and get a live preview in the editor.
• A components panel that lets you use predefined interface objects like checkboxes scrollbars. You can customize the skins for these components, and control them via ActionScript.
• A preferences panel that centralizes all attribute controls.
• An improved ActionScript editor that offers code hinting and completion, a complete language reference, a more powerful debugger, and improved performance on native functions (100x for some functions). You can also customize the display of code by color, font and point size.
• Integration with Macromedia’s ColdFusion middleware product (a new version code-named Neo is expected mid-year), persistent XML connectivity for real-time updates of XML data, ability to store client data on the user’s machine, 20x performance increases for XML objects.
• Improved text tool, dockable palettes, an “answers” palette, improved color mixing tools, ability to source in video and MP3 files during playback.

For the release today, Macromedia is showcasing MX-based web apps from Boreal Ski Resort and Webvertising’s OneScreen iHotelier hotel reservation system.

For more on Flash, check out Simon St. Laurent’s outraged blog entry, “Macromedia Reinvents the Web,” complete with entertaining reader discussion; and Dale Dougherty’s more, um, balanced, interview with Bruce Epstein, “Why Flash is Significant” (an equivocal headline if ever there was one).

In fact both of these pieces hint at the basic question about Flash MX: Can Flash offer a better client development platform than HTML and JavaScript? That’s the topic I’ll be looking at in the initial installment of a four-part series on Flash MX. Look for that piece next week.

Are you rushing out to buy MX? Are you mystified by its popularity? Start a discussion.

Related link: http://www.recordare.com/xml.html

XML Standard for sheet music description and interchange. Too cool.

Related link: http://nytimes.com/2002/03/10/books/review/10ZIMMERT.html

On the question of whether artificial life is possible, the New York Times takes the position that macro-structure, not micro-structure, is what matters:

“Computers don’t replicate nature; they replicate what we think we know about nature. And biologists are the first to tell you their models of the brain, the immune system or the network of proteins in a cell are pretty crude. Computer programs modeled after these models are even cruder. The most complex digital ‘’brain'’ consists of a few thousand simulated neurons — a far cry from the human brain, which consists of 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to thousands of its neighbors and uses dozens of neurotransmitters to communicate with them. To treat them as the same thing is a bit like treating four notes played in a thousand combinations as the same thing as Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. They share some things, but not the things that really matter.”

This is pretty much the standard view of biologists. The key features of life, according to this view, may arise from things you can reach from the reductionist principles of evolution, but that does not mean that the evolution is all you need to create life. To this camp a neural network is intelligent if it successfully models a brain, regardless of whether it passes a Turing test.

Pick quote #2, which I paste in here solely because it is funny:

“Washing machines with chaos-theory-driven spin cycles! Carpet-cleaning microrobots! But more stuff tends to clutter life, not change it. To observe people leading an utterly conventional lifestyle, just watch ‘’The Jetsons.'’”

Related link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1860000/1860241.stm

Empty cans of Pringles crisps could be helping malicious hackers spot wireless networks that are open to attack.

KaZaA’s legal representation in DC has sent href="http://www.grouter.net/ipuf/BidenReportLetterBA.htm">a strongly
worded letter to Joseph Biden, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, who released a report titled href="http://www.senate.gov/~biden/IPREPORT.pdf">“Theft of American
Intellectual Property: Fighting Crime Abroad and at Home” on
February 12. Biden’s report was not tame by any means — by my count
there are 48 mentions of theft and 99 mentions of piracy in the 52
page document — and neither is the letter sent by KaZaA’s
representative. For example:

• “We
  must comment on the ironic incongruity of permitting the Recording Industry
  Association of America to testify at a hearing focused on the “Theft of
  American Intellectual Property”. After a decade of rampant consolidation, five
  major labels that collectively control nearly ninety percent of the industry’s output dominate the recording industry. Four of the five members of this
  recording industry oligopoly are not U.S. companies but subsidiaries of
  foreign-based multimedia conglomerates.[2]
  These companies, which dominate the RIAA’s policy-making process, routinely
  strip U.S recording artists of all copyrights in their creative output as a
  standard aspect of the industry contract.“
• “The only technology cited as possibly displacing record
  sales is that of CD-R burners. […] Yet the recording industry continues to litigate against
  file-sharing software companies and attempt to scapegoat them for its current
  difficulties (which are largely a result of its growing inefficiencies), as
  they apparently find small, underfunded technology startups more tempting
  litigation targets than the large information technology hardware and software
  firms that produce and actively market CD-R burners and related programs.“
• “Were the
  courts to hold KaZaA guilty of contributory infringement the results could be
  devastating for the entire technology sector, as any and all could be the next
  victims of the content industry’s ongoing litigation witch hunt. “

The letter goes on to suggest a means to generate revenues for artists: “KaZaA is ready and willing to join with all other
parties who benefit from the availability of digital content in a
discussion of how to best compensate rights holders and creators. It is
our view that a combination of a new compulsory license with a broad-based
Intellectual Property Use Fee (IPUF) would be the best means of generating
substantial new revenues that help preserve the incentive goals of
copyright law.“

This is an idea that has been making the rounds for a little while. I first heard it from Sergueie Osokine at the O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference, and he has developed it into a high level of detail in a paper titled A Quick Case for Intellectual Property Use Fee (IPUF). The idea is basically to have a surcharge on ISP accounts. He has two main points:

1. Collecting revenues for content shared via decentralized networks is a classic communal problem in need of a communal solution. Like street cleaning, where most people litter sometime and most people want clean streets, filesharing should be a universally shared cost and a universally shared good.
2. DRM that controls the spread of digital goods on a per-copy basis is impossible, but DRM that monitors the spread of digital goods is not. When monitoring fails the only damage is a slight misallocation of royalty payments; there is no incentive to evade the system and there is no requirement that the system work perfectly.

In the KaZaA letter, they support the IPUF idea as follows:

“

We
suggest that it is time for Congress to step in and halt the “whack-a-mole”
litigation excesses of the music and movie industries through new legislative initiatives that compel content availability, while establishing a compensation
scheme that requires a contribution from all the many industry sectors beyond
P2P software that benefit from content availability.

[snip]

The Audio Home Recording Act provides a model for the undertaking
that needs to be considered. That 1992 statute mandates a small
royalty on digital audio recorders and recording media, with the
proceeds of that levy redistributed to content creators. A similar
levy – an Intellectual Property Use Fee (IPUF) — applied to a much
broader base of parties, could provide a significant new revenue
stream to copyright owners to compensate them for the inevitable
“leakage” resulting from Internet distribution.[31] We do not
minimize the difficulty. […] Yet there is already ample precedent,
especially in the music realm, for the need for and workability of
such compulsory license and royalty schemes. We also realize that some
would prefer a market solution negotiated by private parties, yet the
content marketplace is already a landscape littered with content and
broadcasting oligopolies[…] Whatever the difficulties may be in
pursuing this concept, they are nothing compared to the present
practices of the content industries that are stifling innovation,
retarding the necessary rollout of broadband, and threatening the
innovative freedom of the information technology industry. “

As insane as it sounds, I think that this is a good idea. There are a lot — a lot — of problems with the details, but it’s the only practical solution yet offered. It’s simple, it’s feasible, it avoids draconian regulation, it does provide a revenue stream for artists, it doesn’t depend on the fiction of DRM, and it stops the game of whack-a-mole.

Related link: http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/events/grid.html

IBM is pursuing ‘grid computing’ instead of the peer-to-peer computing everyone else is doing.. of course, they seem to include web services and an Internet OS in that category… a good read.