Up to five million birds a year may die by crashing into cell phone towers at night. After a court order, the wireless industry has been meeting with the FCC to work out the least painful rules for making new transmitter towers avian friendly.
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Intel snaps up Linux mobile developer Opened Hand, but continued validation bottlenecks are constraining the company’s ability to sell Atom processors. Relief could still be a year away, and that gives competitors a (tiny) window of opportunity.
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Can ISPs that receive National Security Letters legally be prevented from talking about them? In oral arguments before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals this week, ACLU attorneys urged a three-judge panel to uphold a lower court ruling invalidating NSL gag orders.
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As the last major brick-and-mortar movie rental chain, Blockbuster needs to find ways to improve its business. But maybe it doesn’t need to change that much.
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Do you download podcasts on a regular basis? If so, chances are that you are 18 to 29 years of age, according to a new study. Enjoy it now, kids!
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When a Linux user attempted to obtain a reimbursement for an unused Windows license, Lenovo agreed to refund him $130, but only if he would sign a nondisclosure agreement first.
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This week we learned that illegal herbs have positive medical properties, while legally available herbs contain unacceptable levels of heavy metals. Also, new theories into the nature of dark matter, simulations of new configurations for fusion reactors, and a summary of the state of the art in sensor coating technologies.
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In this week’s top Microsoft news on Ars, we cover Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7, WGA, Windows Live Messenger 9.0, Windows Live, and Windows Live Hotmail.
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PAX is upon us, but there were still a number of big stories in the week leading up to it. Find out which racing sims professional drivers play, learn about the sexiest gaming table ever made, and read about our experiences with Warhammer.
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We recap the hottest and most important stories of the week gone by.
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During this pre-Labor-Day Apple news roundup, we talk about upcoming product update rumors, Mac clones, iPhone developers, iPhone security holes, 3G speeds, the death of iCards, and the non-death of Steve Jobs. Check it out in case you need to catch up!
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Never before has Apple had such a fine opportunity to grab considerable market share from Microsoft. But in order to do that, it must first be willing to change its tactics.
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Earlier this summer, a musician named Indiana Gregg made the mistake of demanding The Pirate Bay stop allowing people to find her music. The Pirate Bay responds publicly to such letters and doesn’t take down the torrent links, so it tends to not do anything good to send such a letter. Gregg made things worse by arguing with the folks at The Pirate Bay, showing little command for the subject matter. Later, she wrote a long, rambling post for TorrentFreak warning people that “the police were coming” to the “wild west” of the internet, and basically dismissing out of hand any new business model that turns any kind of “piracy” into an advantage, claiming that its the users, not the musicians, who need to change how they deal with music.
You can certainly understand where she’s coming from, as a musician who’s traditional business model is under threat. However, contrary to the opinion of some, it’s the consumers who eventually determine how a market works — and treating consumers as criminals tends to backfire in a big way — especially when other artists are figuring out ways to create business models that work without treating fans as criminals.
The good news is that Gregg seems to be willing to try out new ideas. Her and her producer (who’s also her husband) are apparently planning to launch an ad supported music site that will allow musicians to upload their music and receive a cut of any advertising revenue associated with each stream or download. The details aren’t entirely clear, but I don’t think this plan is going to work all that well. While it is good that she’s trying out new models that end up being free to the end user, ad-supported revenue models are going to be tough — and it seems a bit extreme to claim, as Gregg has, that this is a way to “beat piracy.”
Ad-supported websites are already having enough trouble making enough money to survive online, so Gregg’s going to quickly discover that the ad money won’t flow as quickly as she expects. Is she going to claim that the police are coming after the folks using ad-blockers as well? Also, given the convenience of other sites where music is available, expecting them to go to a different site to get their music may not be very convincing. The problem with an ad-supported music site is that it doesn’t add any value to the end user. Trent Reznor’s business model worked by providing more value to the end-user. Jill Sobule’s business model worked by providing more value to the end-user. Gregg’s solution doesn’t add more value to the end user, and for that reason is going to have a difficult time succeeding, let alone “beating” piracy.
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NBC apparently got about 72 million video streams during this Olympics season, and is touting this as a great success. It’s true that this is a lot more than any previous Olympics, but I don’t think NBC has anything to crow about. Remember, this is the most famous sporting event in the world, and it got non-stop media coverage for close to a month. Yet in a country with 300 million people, they only got a total of 72 million streams? That’s less than one stream for every 4 Americans. And as Ben Worthen points out, YouTube streamed 4.2 billion videos—60 times as many—in the month of May. So people are clearly watching a lot of videos. Most of them just aren’t NBC’s Olympics videos.
Amazingly, NBC is “using the Olympics to assert that TV is the preferred medium of consumers,” with 93 percent of all viewing. I think this says less about consumers than about NBC’s own marketing decisions. The problem is that despite its protests to the contrary, NBC wasn’t serious about web-based coverage of the Olympics. They held back the most popular coverage for television audiences, forcing online viewers to wait until later (sometimes much later due to a desire for tape delays) to watch the stuff they were really interested in. It looks like they also forced anyone who wanted to watch the video to download and install Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin. And of course they’ve gone out of their way to make embedding impossible, cutting off one of the most popular ways of expanding the reach of content. Not surprisingly, when NBC makes the Internet a second-class medium for Olympics coverage, most people watch TV instead.
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Apparently, the head of the British Cartographic Society is no fan of Google Maps. She’s complaining that Google Maps doesn’t include the additional geographic information that makes maps so great, claiming:
“We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.”
Except, that’s not quite true. After all, Google Maps allows all sorts of overlays and additional info. With Google Maps you can also get the satellite view, which is likely to give you a much greater feel for a place than a map. And, of course, many areas have the “Street View” feature as well — again, providing a much greater feel for a place you’ve never been. As for certain landmarks and such not being added to Google Maps, more seem to be added every day, and with Google letting people add their own information to maps as well, it’s only going to get better and better.
If anything, it seems like this guy is complaining not because Google Maps isn’t useful, but because she’s afraid that the need for traditional cartographers may not be as strong (which I doubt will actually be the case). Besides, if she’s so worried that certain information isn’t included on Google Maps, why not create a mashup overlaying all the info she feels has been left out — because that’s rather easy to do with Google Maps.
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My soon-to-be colleague David Robinson has a great post about the recent
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Earlier this year, we wrote about Verizon suing Time Warner Cable over a misleading advertisement, where Time Warner Cable claims that Verizon is “catching up” to Time Warner Cable in offering fiber optics. This is misleading, at best. Verizon is installing fiber to the home with its FiOS service, providing significantly faster connections. What Time Warner Cable is claiming is that it uses fiber in its network, not to the home. It’s true that TWC and plenty of other broadband providers have used hybrid fiber solutions at the network level for many years, but that’s totally different than connecting all the way to the home with a fiber optic connection.
Now it turns out that TWC is hardly the only broadband provider doing this. Apparently lots of broadband providers are now running ads against Verizon where they claim that they’ve offered fiber for longer than Verizon. That’s totally misleading. Having fiber somewhere in the network is not at all an equal comparison to running fiber all the way to the home. As Broadband Reports asks, it’s difficult to see how these claims from others isn’t false advertising. They’re clearly implying that their fiber is the same thing as FiOS when that’s not true at all.
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We were pretty surprised a few weeks back when the European Commission endorsed a plan for copyright extension, despite ample evidence that retroactive copyright extension is a bad idea. Soon after that announcement, a group of European academics sent a letter warning that such extension would harm innovation. The academics keep piling on, as Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, the director of the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law (IViR) has sent an open letter to the Commission blasting them for ignoring all of the research showing that copyright extension is bad. Specifically, Hugenholtz is amazed that the Commission relied only on reports prepared by industry, and willfully ignored research prepared by independent academics, such as his own group, claiming that by ignoring such studies, the Commission has a clear intention to mislead the rest of the EU by hiding the research that shows why copyright extension is a bad idea.
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Over the years, I’ve written plenty about the economics of infinite vs. scarce goods. Too often (and I do this on occasion as well) people default into thinking of “tangible” goods as being the scarce ones, and digital goods or information goods as being the infinite ones. But the definitions can certainly expand beyond that — and there’s also the possibility that material, tangible goods could one day lose much of their scarcity. Economist Arnold Kling, riffing on a post by Will Wilkinson about why energy isn’t really scarce points out that, if energy isn’t scarce, matter isn’t scarce either.
In theory, as you solve “the energy problem” and figure out how to create energy cheaply, then you can make any material you want as it’s needed cheaply as well. Then you’re in a bit of the Star Trek replicator universe where even tangible products become much more abundant. We’re still a ways off from that point, but it’s worth thinking about as a thought experiment (especially as 3D printer technology improves rapidly). Indeed, Chris Anderson is also thinking along these lines, noting that technology is likely to solve both of the big “shortage” problems we’re facing these days: energy and food — if only government regulations would let them.
For those who think that copyright holders should try to artificially maintain scarcity, this may be a scary situation. After all, then the same “problem” facing copyright holders, will also face makers of tangible goods. But the truth is even if you switch tangible goods from scarce to abundant, it doesn’t mean that you run out of scarcities to sell. Music is more abundant thanks to digital technologies, and there are still plenty of scarcities to sell for the music industry. There are always scarcities — it’s just that they’re no longer tangible goods. Instead, business models will start to revolve around those non-tangible scarcities as well, such as time, attention and reputation. But these changes could create a rather radical shift in how economies function. So, even if it’s pretty far out, it’s worth considering the possibilities already.
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Yahoo has shut down its first social product, Mash, after announcing major plans to morph itself into a giant social network. Is this a positive sign of regaining focus, or a bad omen that Yahoo just can’t do social networking?
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In an opinion issued late Thursday, a judge for the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied a motion by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sought permission to participate in secret proceedings to evaluate the constitutionality of the controversial FISA Amendments Act signed into law by President Bush last month.
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Sprint will allow third party developers to build location-aware services on the company’s forthcoming WiMAX network, Xohm.
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A consortium of consumer groups weighs in with the Copyright Office on the thorny question of buffer copies. Do music services need to license song copies stored in RAM on the server and client side?
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Ars Technica has proposed a community building panel for SXSW 2009 and needs your help to make it happen.
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If your e-mail address is “adam@whatever.com,” you probably receive a lot more spam than someone whose username is “quagmire.” According to a Cambridge University researcher, spammers target usernames with common first letters most often.
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Over the last couple of years, we’ve had a series of interesting stories about how the Malaysian gov’t is dealing with “blogs.” First, a gov’t official slammed blogs and tried to pass a law requiring bloggers to register with the government. Outrage over such a plan resulted in it being scrapped, but the majority ruling party still struggled with blogs — though tried to figure out ways to respond to them more feasibly than attacking them. It set up a gov’t agency to respond to bloggers, and later required certain candidates for offices to set up their own blogs. Of course, it also tried to crack down on some bloggers it didn’t like, including having a state owned paper file a libel suit over a blog.
So, with that background, it was interesting to spot two separate stories having to do with blogs in Malaysia. The first, talks about how one of the political bloggers who had been so critical of the gov’t turned that attention into getting himself elected as an opposition candidate. He’s now taking office. However, the other article shows that the ruling party hasn’t quite come to grips with these opposition blogs. Perhaps because of the victories of blogging members of the opposition party, the government has now ordered Malaysian ISPs to start blocking certain political blogs.
From the sound of it, the ruling party is still pretty confused about how this all works. While it gave lip service to blogging, when blogging appeared to help the opposition a lot more than it helped the ruling party, it decided to start blocking and censoring certain blogs critical of the government. This seems pretty likely to backfire, as it should only upset gov’t critics even more — including those who are now in the Parliament itself.
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Google has revealed the Android Market, a software distribution channel for deploying third-party Android applications. Unlike conventional Linux package management systems, however, Android Market is a highly centralized system with a single point of failure, and a single point of control. Ars looks at the details revealed so far and wonders if it is a cathedral or a bazaar.
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Worried about a thief stealing your bank password? You might want to check your WoW account, instead. Virtual world “stuff” is increasingly valuable these days, and McAfee suggests we need to pay more attention to how these goods are safeguarded.
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At the end of an interesting post about the changes in the American economy during the latter half of the 20th century, Dane Stangler has an interesting aside about the role of the military in the early development of Silicon Valley. He notes that the Silicon Valley started out as a hub for defense contractors and only later became a center for the private semiconductor industry and (still later) for the software and Internet industries. Stangler suggests that a city looking to become the next Silicon Valley might want to view military spending as a key driver for regional growth. He’s right that the military was crucial to Silicon Valley’s early growth, and of course it never hurts to have the military creating jobs in your city, but I’m not sure a city today could repeat Silicon Valley’s route to high-tech prominence. A big reason the military was so important to Silicon Valley’s early development was that a lot of the technologies pioneered there were so expensive that only the military could afford them. Silicon Valley firms were building radars, guidance systems, communications systems, and other stuff that was totally out of reach for ordinary consumers. And the Internet, of course, started its life as a military research network because each connection cost tens of thousands of dollars. But prices dropped steadily, and eventually, Silicon Valley firms created commercial spin-offs that became cheap enough that ordinary consumers could afford them, and the rest is history.
Today, private capital markets are a lot deeper and the consumer market for high-tech products is a lot larger than it was 50 years ago. As a consequence, the military just isn’t as important to the semiconductor and communications industries as it was a few decades ago. The military still spends a ton of money on high-tech toys, but private firms also spend billions of dollars on R&D, and their spending is more squarely focused on consumer and business markets. Smart technologists don’t have to chase military contracts, they can raise capital and go straight for the consumer market. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the military is currently incubating some other category of technology that will become an important private industry in the coming decades. But if you want your city to become an important center for the IT sector, luring military contractors to your area is probably not going to do it.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
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Got thoughts on the Ars Open Forum? Share them with us and you’ll help us improve our forums and become eligible to win a $250 American Express gift card.
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Open source software advocates have filed a complaint with the Quebec Superior Court claiming that the government violated procurement policies by granting no-bid contracts to Microsoft without first considering open source alternatives.
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Whenever we talk about business models involving scarce and infinite goods, a few folks show up repeatedly in the comments claiming that the only scarce goods musicians can sell are t-shirts or concert tickets — and then go on to complain that this will never work for musicians who don’t want to tour. Of course, that’s incorrect. Even before we had explained the whole economics behind scarce and infinite goods, we had pointed out another important scarce good from musicians: the ability to create new music. There’s no reason why musicians can’t focus on getting people to fund the creation of a new album.
In fact, we’ve pointed to plenty of musicians doing exactly that, from Marrillion to Jill Sobule to Maria Schneider (who won a Grammy with her album produced this way) — these musicians have all had fans pay for the creation of a new album, often giving them certain extras for helping to fund the album. This way, the musicians make the money they need (they set the “goal” and once it’s raised, they go and record the album). Unlike sitting around and hoping for royalties that never seem to show up, they get plenty of money, and the fans get the music. While not all the artists then adopt this second part of the model, if they then give away that music for free, it helps attract more new fans to create the next album — which, if there are enough new fans, can be done at a higher cumulative price.
This is a perfect example of business model that involves paying for scarcity, with the scarcity being the musician’s time and creative efforts. And the good news is that more companies are showing up to help musicians use such a business model. We’d already covered ArtistShare, which has been around for a while, and which helped Maria Schneider producer her album via this method, and now there’s apparently a new entrant called BandStocks that seems to offer a similar model.
Of course, BandStocks doesn’t seem to really embrace the second part of the model. The benefits to those who prepay are that they get a share of the profits from the later sale of the album — meaning that there’s still a focus on trying to sell the album. It will be interesting to watch, but models that still ultimately rely on selling the music by itself are going to come under increasing business model pressure, especially as others embrace models that don’t focus so much on selling the music, but on using it to sell other scarce goods.
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A judge has ruled that a Virginia woman may continue to publish the Social Security numbers of public officials on her website as a protest against the Virginia government’s failure to redact Social Security from its own public records.
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We’ve pointed to plenty of examples concerning how pharmaceutical patents actually do more to hold back life-saving cures, and here’s another example. It’s actually a continuation of a story we wrote about a year and a half ago, about Indonesia’s decision to stop supplying bird flu samples to the World Health Organization, claiming it was worried that a big pharma would patent a drug based off of it, and Indonesia wouldn’t receive any of the benefit. The country has something of a point: as pharma companies have made various cures incredibly expensive in the past.
However, Indonesia is now taking this a step further, claiming “viral sovereignty” over the bird flu. In other words, it’s claiming that since the virus samples are found in the country, Indonesia owns the virus — and it’s fighting pretty much every attempt by others to do anything with the virus, sometimes using questionable claims such as one about how a US medical research facility is trying to use the virus not to create a cure, but to create biological weapons. It’s basing this claim of “viral sovereignty” on the same ridiculous patent rules that allow a country to claim “ownership” and patents over indigenous plants.
While there’s obviously a huge political component to this dispute, at the heart of the trouble is this idea of “ownership” of something like a plant, virus or drug — and that’s an idea that the US has been a huge supporter of, so it can hardly complain about Indonesia taking it to the logical conclusion. And, of course, that logical conclusion is the exact opposite of what supporters of pharma patents insist the system is designed to encourage. That is, thanks to this hoarding and claims of ownership, not nearly enough research is being done to try to create vaccines for bird flu. And, to make this even worse, it appears other countries are starting to consider “viral sovereignty,” as well — meaning that research into curing various diseases may grind to halt while various countries argue over who owns what.
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We report on so many stories where technology is used in bad or oppressive ways, that it’s important to note when it’s being used in positive ways as well. Technology, itself, is just a tool that can be used in both good and bad ways (not to mention neutral ways), but somehow the good ways don’t always get as much attention. CNN has an article detailing how the rise of mobile phones throughout Africa is helping in making elections that are more fair. It’s certainly not perfect yet, but the ability to communicate has allowed citizens to report abuses of the election process and get the word out when they see any kind of cheating happening.
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T-Mobile has won its request for testing to see whether the FCC’s proposed smut-free broadband plan will mess with its nearby services.
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If LimeWire doubles its library in the woods, does it make a sound? The company recently added another 1.2 million tracks from independent artists and small labels to its library, but it’ll have to do more than that to gain an audience.
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While the US gov’t clearly overplayed its claims that Gary McKinnon was the “world’s biggest hacker” after having him arrested for breaking into US military computers, that doesn’t mean that McKinnon hasn’t overreacted back in response. The US offered him a plea bargain deal that seemed fairly reasonable, given what he did — and he flipped out about it. Now he’s lost his latest appeal against extradition, and it looks like he may finally get sent to the US in the next few weeks to stand trial, for breaking into US military computers, supposedly while high and looking for info on alien encounters.
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In a first for the leaks site, Wikileaks hopes to raise cash and attract attention by auctioning off a high-profile new leak: a collection of e-mails allegedly gleaned from a senior Hugo Chavez aide.
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Last year, HP announced a special button that could be put on blogs to let users
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Sure to fan the flames for those praying for a multi-touch Mac tablet, a recent patent filing by Apple describes how the UI for such a device would work.
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Remember the Phantom? Depending on your perspective, this mysterious gaming console, first announced in 2003, was either a too ambitious product that could never get off the ground (living up to its “phantom” name in that it was almost never actually seen) or a big scam to part investors with money. Over the years, the company made many announcements, almost none of which it lived up to. The company was even sued by its own investment bank for fraud, and the company’s founder was charged as part of a stock scam. At one point, people were shocked when the company hired a real gaming industry veteran as CEO, but once he left pretty much everyone thought the company was dead.
But… not so fast. A few years back it announced that it was ditching the gaming console concept, but was still going to come out with a neat keyboard that could be used for gaming. Of course, it promised that keyboard would be out years ago, and in true Phantom fashion, many delays followed. To be honest, I had thought the company had finally gone completely out of business, but Wired is reporting that it really honestly has a keyboard in production — and it completely sucks. As Wired notes, it certainly wasn’t worth the long wait. The only redeeming factor that Wired can find in the keyboard is the chance to own a piece of vaporware history. Just don’t expect to actually use it, because you’ll be wishing you didn’t.
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Usually, when you’re dealing with a bank, they encrypt your passwords so that no one else can read them. However, apparently that isn’t always the case — and this allowed an employee at Lloyds TSB to change the password of one member from “Lloyds is pants” to “no it’s not”. The customer actually found the story to be amusing — but it does seem slightly troubling that the bank, for whatever reason, was reviewing and changing a customer’s password. They also forbade him from switching the password to “Barclays is better” and “censorship.” Lloyds has apologized, and said the employee in question no longer works for the firm. It also explains why the guy was able to see the password in the first place by noting that on certain business accounts with multiple users, account reps can read the password. This seems pretty weak, though. If it’s a business account with multiple users, why not let each user set up their own username and encrypted password? Also, it’s still not explained why the guy was looking at users’ passwords in the first place.
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Comcast has finally announced that it will introduce 250GB per month bandwidth caps for all residential customers this fall. It insists that this is the same policy it always had, but with clearer limits.
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We’ve seen a few cases against the RIAA in which either state officials or defendants will point out that the RIAA’s hired hands in tracking down file sharers — companies like MediaSentry — are violating state laws requiring private investigators’ licenses for certain activities. Now, the American Bar Association (ABA) has put out a report suggesting that this is silly, and that states and judges shouldn’t require such companies to have a PI’s license. While I’m a bit surprised at myself, I actually agree with the ABA. As distasteful as the RIAA’s legal strategy is, and as flimsy as the evidence is that these company’s collect, going after them for not having a PI’s license is focusing on a loophole, not the actual merits. And, honestly, most of these requirements for PI licenses are really just a way to create artificial scarcity in the PI business, not actually a way to ensure safety or quality. The RIAA’s efforts to sue music fans have plenty of problems, but focusing on whether or not companies like MediaSentry need a PI license seems like a tangent that takes away from the bigger picture.
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This is hardly a new phenomenon, but the Wall Street Journal is noting that some bands and some record labels are
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High-profile artists have forgone putting their albums on the iTunes Store lately as they complain of an unfair distribution system that only helps to reduce album sales. Is cherry-picking only hot singles a trend with staying power, or can full-album sales make a comeback?
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Target has settled a class-action lawsuit with the National Federation of the Blind over complaints that its site isn’t accessible to screen reading technology. The laws regarding disability access in cyberspace are gray at best, but a major settlement like this gives the NFB some steam.
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