General

Here's my google search box.The

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Here’s my google search box.

<%google.macros.box ("Mike Cohen")%>

The only items here which are really me are the references to my radio weblog. I’m not a doctor and I don’t own a Porsche 365. Everything other than my weblog is a different Mike Cohen.

From SFGate:LET US START with

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From SFGate:

LET US START with an analogy. Suppose I go to a bookstore and plunk down full price for a copy of Jonathan Dee’s wonderful new book “Palladio.” Suppose I read it and think my friend Nancy would also like to read it. I give the book to Nancy, but, alas, she cannot read it. Marvelous new retinal scanning technology built into the book determines that my eyes are not reading it, and so the type in the book disappears. Only I can read my book.

If Nancy wants to read “Palladio,” she has to pay full price for her own copy.

Not only that: This retinal scanning technology is legally mandated. If anybody tries to find a work-around in order to read the book, that person is a criminal. Plus, the commission that created these draconian schemes held all its meetings in secret.

Naturally, this law is called the Readers’ Protection Act.

Of course that’s far-fetched — books are the old technology, and there’s just not that much money in them. But Sen. Fritz Hollings and five colleagues have proposed SB4028, the so-called Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which may make any form of file sharing, even my sending my version of Otis Spann’s “Blues Is a Botheration” to my friend Nancy via the Internet, completely illegal.

(It should be noted that Mr. Spann himself received virtually nothing for that recording; the music company that controlled it got the loot. This situation has changed, but not enough.)

And yes, SB4028 does mandate that the standards committee conduct all its meetings in secret.

THE REAL POWER behind the Hollings bill is the six companies that now control most of the media we consume every day, including music, movies and television. They are worried that their profits will be diminished, and, like King Canute by the seaside, they have stamped their little feet and demanded that information become a private commodity.

According to Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The government is mandating what your technology has to do. The government’s now in some ways effectively writing code that anyone who makes anything with a microprocessor has to implement in anything they make. I’m unaware of any other requirement like that.”

One charming aspect of the new law: If your DVD breaks and you want to play your copy of “The Matrix” on another machine, too bad. Won’t work. Amazing, huh?

Here’s a true thing: Hackers are always smarter than the government. Whatever restrictions are in place, dedicated amateurs will find a work-around.

These work-arounds are called “patches” and can be downloaded from the Web.

AT THIS POINT, it is unclear how much damage file sharing (things like Napster and MP3.com) has actually done to music conglomerates. Just this year, EMI had to spend $28 million to buy Mariah Carey out of her $100 million contract. It also had extensive layoffs. It blamed file sharing.

Yup, must have been that red-hot market in illicit Mariah Carey songs.

But it is clearly a problem. The digital revolution redefined the nature of information. It made old copyright laws obsolete, and it made new ones hard to write.

And yet, people who create art should get paid for it. If the conglomerates use the profits from the sale of the art to pay the artists, then that channel should be kept open. It requires new modes of thought, new ways of defining property rights.

It does not require consumer-unfriendly legislation written by lobbyists for Fox and Disney. There are important ways in which a song is different from a plot of land; legislation should be written that takes account of that reality, or else we’ll all be buying our DVDs from bootleg distributors in Indonesia, one of your major lose-lose scenarios.

I just found a CD

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I just found a CD that I couldn’t import with iTunes 2.0.4 on my G4 (DVD-RAM drive). “Kwassa Kwassa” by Kanda Bongo Man (1988). It’s definitely NOT copy protected – it’s 14 years old!

When i try to import it, all of the songs are truncated to less than 1 minute (they’re all 5-7 minutes). I’m definitely NOT running out of disk space. Interestingly, I was able to import the entire CD on my iBook 500 (Combo Drive) with iTunes 2.0.3.

Life on The Net in

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Life on The Net in 2004

“Fond memories of the days when there were alternatives to Microsoft’s OS pass through your mind — but that was before the government realised that software was like petrol — a totally essential commodity in the lives of most businesses and individuals. Legislation was passed in 2003 that required all software developers and vendors to be licensed and a 45% tax added to all sales. Of course, much to Microsoft’s glee, this killed the Open Source movement since being an unlicensed software supplier risks a stiff fine or even a jail term and those licenses are incredibly expensive.

You type in “cnn.com” then enter the ID and password associated with your monthly subscription. Remember when there were hundreds of sites offering the latest news for free? Not any more. Sure, there still a few, but they’re regularly hit with law suits by the big names who allege breach of copyright. Although such suits are inevitably dismissed — the cost of defending them means that the independent news sites usually only last a few months at most.

Flicking the remote beside you kicks your digital music player into action and you marvel that 95% of its computing power is dedicated to the sophisticated digital rights management system it contains.

Following an unsuccessful attempt to copy-protect CDs, the recording industry forced everyone to a new mini-CD format that has yet to be cracked (although there are rumours that some Russians have succeeded). You just can’t buy music on CDs anymore and the old CDR/RW media now costs $10 a disk, thanks to the $9 anti-piracy levy that was introduced in 2003.

Another warning appears — ‘Your license for this recording has expired, unable to play.’ Damn — another $49 if you want to listen to that music for another year. You wonder, if as they claim, these new measures significantly reduce piracy, why music is now so much more expensive?

You type up a quick email to a friend, inviting them to meet you for lunch. Of course you’re very careful not to use the words ‘bomb’ and ‘aeroplane’ in the same message for fear of attracting the attention of the new anti-terrorism police. After all, every single bit that enters and leaves your PC is now scanned by the authorities — under the premise that it is in the interests of (inter)national security and crime reduction.

It’s funny how they can supposedly detect even an unfriendly tone in an email but they can’t (or won’t) stop the endless tide of spam isn’t it?” [The Daily Aardvark, via Slashdot]

And if you haven’t already read A Love Song for Napster, you should.

[The Shifted Librarian]

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16182 ª April 8 9:16 AM. An African Pope? Rock on. (Via Fark.) [MetaFilter]

A few months ago I was talking to a Catholic friend and we got into a discussion about the future of the church. We started talking about who might be the next pope, and he thinks a Nigerian priest is likely to be elected.

IPod: Music to Hackers' Ears"Jean-Olivier

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IPod: Music to Hackers’ Ears

“Jean-Olivier Lanctôt-David is a 14-year-old hacker who has figured out a way to display online news headlines on Apple’s iPod digital music player.

Lanctôt-David, who has been using Macs since he was 4 and programming since he was 11, was given an iPod for Christmas and immediately wanted to make it do more than just play music.

So he whipped up PodNews, a program that fetches headlines from the Web in XML format and displays them on the iPod’s small screen.

In the last few months, hackers have figured out clever ways to store not only names and addresses on the iPod but calendar items, song lyrics and even phrases in foreign languages.

The iPod, which must be the hottest gadget on the planet, has also been made to work with Windows. It’s supposed to be Mac-only, but EphPod is a free program that allows iPods to connect to Windows machines; Mediafour’s Xplay, currently in beta, is a commercial program that does the same thing….

Michael Zapp, an instructor at the University of Manitoba in Canada, has created a pair of AppleScript applications that take data from Microsoft’s Entourage (the Macintosh version of Outlook) and transforms it into vCard file format, which can be displayed using the iPod’s new contacts feature.” [Wired News]

This is the kind of impact the NetGens will have on our culture in the future. If you think we’re recycling old ideas and morphing them into something new now (hip hop, the movie Moulin Rouge, any animated Disney movie), then just wait. These kids are much more computer-literate and they’re much more prone to interact directly with their environment.

Everything is two-way for them, whereas most of us are still stuck in one-way. For them television, radio, the internet, books, music – they’re all something from which to get entertainment or information, but they also expect to give back to them, too. Sometimes this is in the form of filtering what is coming out (digital video recorders, recommendation engines), sometimes it’s global discussions (online discussions, instant messaging instead of email), and sometimes it’s creating new distribution channels from old ones in order to do what they want to do (Apple iPod, Gameboys with ebooks on them).

Whatever you give or sell them, they’re going to expect to make it do what they want. Letting them go to town on iPods is an excellent strategy by Apple, although this isn’t anything new for them. Apple understands these kids extremely well. They could try to put a halt to all of this hacking using the DMCA and other laws, but by letting folks hack it instead, they’re letting the community take the iPod to new heights.

This is the point the entertainment industry is missing. Instead of realizing the vast potential of customers who would interact directly with their product to do even more with it (all the while paying for this privilege), they want to lock out the very people that will innovate them to new levels.

I also wanted to highlight this article because I still want to figure out how to automatically generate vCards for events in the SLS Calendar. If you come across anyone doing this (especially if they’re using Oracle or Microsoft Access), please let me know!

[The Shifted Librarian]

Burning a Book Before It's

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Burning a Book Before It’s Printed. It is easy and comfortable to believe that we live in enlightened times, that scientific and rational thought have illuminated all parts of our culture. But every now and then we are reminded that there are subjects that we are not supposed to talk about, even think about. One of these subjects is child sexuality, as is demonstrated by the reaction to the book Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine. Even one month before its publication, it has been widely denounced as “evil” by people who have never read the book — because it argues that children and juveniles should be allowed to have satisfying sex lives. A stunning tale of shutting up those who dare to ask the wrong questions. [kuro5hin.org]

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16159 ª April 7 12:16 PM. The only moral and practical answer that there has ever been to this question: partition, territorial compromise, a two-state solution, the establishment of a Palestinian state in most of the occupied territories with security arrangements in the Jordan Valley and identity arrangements in Jerusalem. An analysis that I can live with from The New Repuclic. [MetaFilter]

This article contains a very interesting statistic: 1,229 Palestinians and 408 Israelis have died in the conflict. We lost more people than both of them together on a single day in the attacks of 9/11. Israel needs to get rid of Sharon and find someone more moderate & reasonable who’s willing to negotiate. They’re accomplishing nothing with their attack on Arafat’s headquarters except provoking more attacks. They should be negotiating with him instead of attacking him.