07.31.02
Posted in Copyright, Security at 12:34 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
HP uses the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to Hide Security Problems
I didn’t think it could get even more idiotic than the Disney/RIAA shenannigans, but yes, Hewlett-Packhard has managed to wrench copyright to even new, more disgusting levels of idiocy.
You should read “Security warning draws DMCA threat “Declan McCullagh ’s CNet article, but essentially, HP has threatened researchers from SnoSoft who publicized a vulnerability in HP’s Tru64 Unix operating system. The vulnerability is a bug, a serious one, and one HP had been alerted to last year. However, rather than acknowledging the flaw and fixing it as rapidly as possible, when an individual, independent of SnoSoft, published the information, HP sent a letter in which an HP vice president threatens SnoSoft with DMCA damages for copyright infrngement, including fines “up to $500,000 and imprisoned for up to five years”.
Let’s be very clear about this. This was a warning about a vulnerability, one that could allow an intruder to takeover a system. This was in no way an infringment of copyright!. Moreover, HP had plenty of time to issue a fix. They chose not to. Then, they sued the group, not the individual who released the information, and they still have not fixed the bug!
UPDAT 08/01/2002: CNET reports that HP is backing off the DMCA prosecution.
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Posted in Blogging, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 8:34 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Meg Hourihan, one of the creators of Blogger, and the author of Megnut, wrote on essay for O’Reilly Network on “What We’re Doing When We Blog.” Meg makes a number of intelligent, accurate observations about the nature of web logs, including emphasizing their “commonality.” She writes:
If we look beneath the content of web logs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share—the format. The web log format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.
Go read her excellent essay, then come back for my piffle, if you must.
Ms. Hourihan has begun to document the beginnings of a rhetoric of web logs. Now, lest you begin foaming at the mouth, at the use of “rhetoric” in reference to blogs, I would like to remind you that the true meaning of rhetoric is the art of persuasion using language, and that a rhetorician is a master of communication, using specific tools, techniques and methods.
Classical rhetorical theory divides the art of rhetoric into five parts (I’m cribbing wildly from Richard Lanham’s excellent A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). The five parts of rhetoric are:
- Invention
- Arrangement
- Style
- Memory
- Delivery
Though Classical rhetoricians were largely interested in the spoken word, as any writer will tell you, these divisions, or “steps” if you will, work quite well for modern writing, or even blogging.
Ms. Hourihan, in her anatomy, has neatly presented us with the various attributes of the second part of the blogging ars rhetorica, the arrangement.
- The basic unit is the “post” rather than the paragraph or page.
- Posts are listed in reverse chronological order, with the newest at the top of the page.
- Posts are date-and-time stamped.
- Posts contain links, often to primary sources.
- Posts are archived, at regular intervals, often by virtue of the software used to create the formatted post and mount/upload it to a web server.
- Posts are associated with a permalink, allowing them to be linked to directly, specifically, and retrieved in isolation, from the archive.
- Writers’ email addresses are prominently featured, allowing immediate contact, and encouraging incorporation of emails into a post.
Much of the arrangment of a blog is taken care of by the wonderful tools, Radio, Blogger, MoveableType, that allow us to separate content, our words, from presentation. But the other parts of rhetoric are also slightly changed in blogs as well. Invention, for instance, relies in part on the role of the blogging and Internet community, since blogs depend on linking. Memory is moved largely outside the human cerebellum to silicon, as we utilize Google and other search engines, and bookmarks. Style is perhaps the least changed, since we are still using words and text, albeit presented on the flat-panel pixellated LCD. Delivery is entirely changed from the format used by Cicero; we upload and the ‘net disseminates for us. I’ll probably post more about the rhetoric of blogging as I come to grips with blogging rhetorical strategies, but Ms. Hourihan has already laid the groundwork.
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Posted in Blogging at 8:33 am by Lisa Spangenberg
I mentioned that the Oxford English Dictionary created an entry for the lemma “blog.” Now William Safire in the New York Times has a bit on the word “blog, though his is at best a folk etymology. Still, it does show increasing awareness of the word, and the functions it has absorbed.
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Posted in Copyright at 7:01 am by Lisa Spangenberg
I’ve already ranted about copyright, but it’s time to rant some more. I’m perfectly willing to pay for a product I want, but there need to be some changes to the way recordings, especially digital recordings, are sold. We need to protect consumers’ rights to make personal copies of lawfully purchased recordings, and insure that artists can directly distribute their performances via digital files, and internet broadcast, without needing expensive licensing arbitrage, and five or six adminstrative drones raiding the till. Right now, very little profit trickles down to the artists; most of the money goes to the drones.
I’d like to buy digital music files over the net, and from a kiosk at the mall. I’d also like to see the artists’ rights respected, and I’d like to see them getting paid. I’d like to be able to explore the work of unfamiliar artists, by downloading digital music files, and by listening to Internet Radio. The RIAA doesn’t want me to do any of those things, and so I’m boycotting the RIAA.
As I explained earlier, we’re not buying CDs from RIAA distributors/producers. Right now in fact, we’re not buyiing CDs at all. We want to be able to use our CDs where we want, and how we want, including making personal copies. We also want the artists to be paid. Right now, they frequently aren’t.
First of all, in case you’ve forgotten about it, or never read it, here’s Courtney Love talking about the corrupt nature of the biz, and how the real pirates are involved in the recording industry. You really need to read the whole piece—it’s intelligent, facutual and thought provoking. Ms. Love points out that “The system’s set up so almost nobody gets paid,” and talks about how “work for hire” with regard means that record companies, thanks to RIAA buying Congress, can own copyright in perpetuity. As she points out (the links are mine):
Last November, a Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier, with the support of the RIAA, added a “technical amendment” to a bill that defined recorded music as “works for hire” under the 1978 Copyright Act.
. . .
That subtle change in copyright law will add billions of dollars to record company bank accounts over the next few years&7mdash;billions of dollars that rightfully should have been paid to artists. A “work for hire” is now owned in perpetuity by the record company.
Next, I particularly want to point you to Janis Ian, yeah, that’s right that Janis Ian. She makes some very good points about the “internet debacle,” responding to the typical naive assertions about digital distribution as “thievery.” Among other things:
Most consumers have no problem paying for entertainment. One has only to look at the success of Fictionwise.com and the few other websites offering books and music at reasonable prices to understand that. If the music industry had a shred of sense, they’d have addressed this problem seven years ago, when people like Michael Camp were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online. Instead, the industry-wide attitude was “It’ll go away.” That’s the same attitude CBS Records had about rock ‘n’ roll when Mitch Miller was head of A&R. (And you wondered why they passed on The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.)
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07.16.02
Posted in Macintosh at 5:35 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Well it’s tomorrow, and yeah, it’s going to be streamed. What do I think will be announced? I certainly hope there’s a lot of attention paid to QuickTime 6, the free Streaming Server, the free Broadcast Server, and Jaguar. I hope that we’ll hear interesting things about FileMaker Pro 6. I expect that Apple will be a bit more open about what I see as the cruicial nature of web services, particularly as they relate to the “Digital Hub” and open standards. I’m expecting iDVD 2.1 to be released too, because of this page, and some more information about AppleScript support for Web Services and XML. We may even see an “iWeb,” an Apple-branded browser/web page creator, since that’s one of the few slots in the iApp fold that’s not filled.
But what about hardware you ask? Maybe a larger flat-screen iMac, maybe an eMac with a superdrive, and possibly, just possibly, a digital camera (though I expect that is more likely in January) or a graphic tablet with support for Ink, Apple’s Newton-derived handwriting recognition technology. And of course, there’s always the “One thing more.”
I have no inside knowledge; I’m just guessing based on public statements, and the documentation that Apple’s been steadily releasing.
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Posted in Blogging at 4:14 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
What’s up with Salon.com? First there are two articles on the value of bloggging—” Use the Blog, Luke” and “Much Ado About Blogging“. Then there’s this from SiT about Blogs.Salon.Com. Well, it’s kinda there. Something’s up. The numbering scheme at blogs.salon.com reminds me of Radio’s. Which makes me think of this post of Dave Winer’s where he refers to ” hosting thousands of weblogs under a new brand quite soon. “
The growth of blogging as an ordinary and a professional pursuit, and the development of easy to use tools has got me thinking about teaching composition again (literature classes are much much easier to teach) and maybe proposing a new course.
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Posted in Copyright at 3:30 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
Kuro5hin has a good overview and discussion of MPEG-4 with particular attention to the licensing agreements for broadcasters. This is very very good news for educational broadcasters who want to use Apple’s free QuickTime Streaming server technologies.
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Posted in Development, Macintosh, HTML/XML/CSS at 3:07 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
The official press release is here, but basically Amazon has gone a step beyond XML support to opening up their API for full Web Services SOAP support. You can read the developer information here.
Since I am an Amazon Associate on my Celtic Studies Resources site (finding places to buy Celtic Studies scholarly works can be difficult), I’m obviously pleased, but Amazon’s support for SOAP has instructional potential. It makes it easier to order those books in small seminar-size quantities that the college bookstore may not be able to get from their supplier—or keep on the shelf long enough for the enrolled students to buy. I’m interested to see if the SOAP support is two-way; will they bring in content from outside the Amazon server? I’ve used the Amazon review writing invitation as a writing assignment for composition classes, to a fair amount of success. If you could write a review, say on your local web log at Blogger or Userland, and then have it upstream to Amazon, you’d get a lot more eyeballs, from a lot more communities than either a weblog or Amazon alone could provide. There are of course issues about content monitoring, but Amazon has those problems already.
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Posted in Macintosh at 9:41 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Last night Apple released the new QuickTime 6. You can download it, for Mac )s 8/9, Mac OS X, and Windows Me/2000/XP here:
You can also download a self-contained installer here, that doesn’t require an internet connection to install.
QuickTime 6 delivers a host of new features that include:
- MPEG-4 ISO compliant file creation
- MPEG-4 video codec
- AACaudio codec
- Instant-On streaming
- Macromedia Flash 5
- An enhanced QuickTime Player interface
- QuickTime Picks, bringing you the best, up-to-date QuickTime content
- JPEG 2000 (Mac OS X Only)
- Enhanced AppleScript support (Macintosh Only)
What’s really cool about QT 6 is the support for MPEG-4, and the quite reasonable licensing agreement for broadcast use that Apple worked out with the licensing group. QT 6 Pro, which, among other things, lets you edit and make QT files, is 29.95 for a license key, and you will need a new one for QT 6.
The release of QT 6 strikes me as a good time to remind people about the free QuickTime Streaming server, available for pretty much any platform, and the all new free Broadcaster server.
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07.06.02
Posted in Blogging, Software at 11:00 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Thanks to Jed Bowtell of urldir.com, I’ve discovered the Weblogs Compnedium, another annotated list of blogging tools, indices, and add-ons.
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