Obituary: Netscape browser, 1994-2008
Scott Gilbertson writes at Wired’s Compiler blog that as of today, America Online has turned off the switch: “Navigator will continue to function should you happen to have a recent copy stashed away. But America Online, which has been Netscape’s guardian during its long, downward slide in popularity, will no longer support the browser and will stop releasing updates. Support for all versions of the software will be off-loaded to the Netscape community forum. Netscape.com will continue to live on as a web portal.”
Video: Google Street View 2.0 will be even more powerful and versatile
Via Valleywag, and one of the hotter YouTube clips of the week.
ArsTechnica: The state of the music industry 2008
If you follow news about the music industry, then you already know that the piecemeal drip-drip-drip of bad news is relentless. But coherent big-picture stories aren’t easy to come by. Last week Nate Anderson of ArsTechnica wrote the best analysis of music business trend lines I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s accompanied by interesting and accessible infographics. Highly recommended.
Excerpt:
“Don’t put all the blame on file-swapping… or chalk the problems up to an inability to ‘compete with free.’ Digital music sales soared in 2007, and in fact, the total number of ‘units’ moved during the year increased over 2006. eMusic, the number two music download service in the US behind iTunes, doubled its own projections for the Christmas season, pushed out 10 million tracks in the month of December, and added 50,000 new paying customers in the last six months.
“And all of this happened without the four major labels even offering DRM-free tracks online. Now that Sony BMG has finally capitulated, 2008 is poised to be the year digital goes so mainstream that even your parents use it.
“All that good news means that music is alive and well—but it doesn’t mean that things are rosy at the major labels. Let’s run the numbers from 2007, then do a case study on eMusic’s recent results to see just what kind of success can be had in the digital download world by competing with free.”
Google may get into the scientific data business, and the “Google generation” isn’t
Two items about the Behemoth of Mountain View from the invaluable ArsTechnica:
- John Timmer writes that Google has been providing science researchers with powerful computers–in exchange, effectively, for copies of the data–and may soon open a science data store under the auspices of Google Research.
- Nate Anderson writes that a British study has found that the “Google generation”–kids born since 1993–are not the search and navigation jocks they’re presumed to be: “It’s true that young people prefer interactive systems to passive ones and that they are generally competent with technology, but it’s not true that students today are ‘expert searchers.’ In fact, the report calls this ‘a dangerous myth.’ Knowing how to use Facebook doesn’t make one an Internet search god, and the report concludes that a literature review shows no movement (either good or bad) in young people’s information skills over the last several decades. Choosing good search terms is a special problem for younger users.”
Wired: The life cycle of a blog post
“You have a blog,” writes Frank Rose. “You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.”
The heart of the piece is the very detailed graphic illustrating what happens after you hit Publish.
[Via boingboing]
Are iPhone sales already starting to top out?
The short answer, writes Jacqui Cheng at ArsTechnica, appears to be no–but sluggish European sales, a no-thanks from business clients, and concerns about the ultimate size of Apple’s customer base suggest the iPhone may not conquer the world as fast as its acolytes prophesied.The MPAA needs a new shill in Congress, and a new accountant
California Democrat Howard Berman, the man known as Congressman Hollywood during his time as chair of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, will likely leave that post to chair the much more prestigious House Committee on Foreign Affairs (whose current chair, Tom Lantos, is retiring for health reasons), according to Nate Anderson at ArsTechnica.
As chair of the intellectual property subcommittee, writes Anderson, “Berman has consistently backed stronger IP rights for all industries that want them. He’s been behind the push to make radio stations pay performers for playing their music (instead of just paying the songwriters) and has backed the MPAA’s campaign against colleges and universities. Berman has also argued for “reforming” the DMCA on the grounds that it did not go far enough, and he has backed the PRO-IP Act, a bill that Google’s top copyright lawyer has called the most ‘outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US.’”
One possible replacement: Virginia Democrat Rick Boucher, whom Anderson called “a voice of sanity in a cacophony of idiocy.”
More intellectual property news from Movieland: The Motion Picture Association of America has admitted that the estimate of movie thefts via campus file-sharing in a 2005 report it released was three times too high.
Time-Warner will try new anti-piracy tack: charging for bandwidth
We’ve blogged before about the various approaches cable companies have been exploring as means of discouraging file-sharing of copyrighted material by their users (Comcast, AT&T). Now Time-Warner Cable is trying out a pilot program in Texas that would bill users according to the amount of bandwidth they use, thereby jacking up the fees for people who do a lot of file-sharing.
Related: According to CNet News, last week “federal regulators… took the first formal step into investigating complaints about how Internet service providers, such as Comcast, manage peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on their networks.”
Video: The AT&T webcast you won’t see on AT&T
Mole reader and media man Paul S. sent along this clip. Backstory: boingboing technology editor Joel Johnson was scheduled to appear on The Hugh Thompson Show, a videocast that airs regularly on AT&T’s Tech Channel. Shortly before his appearance, AT&T announced that it’s looking at plans to examine its customers’ activities to detect infringements of copyright law. (Tim Wu, mentioned earlier today, wrote a great piece about it at Slate.) So Johnson decided to talk trash about AT&T on AT&T’s broadcast.
Johnson asked a friend to tape the first cut of the interview. He did, and it’s below. And no, this is not the version you’ll see on AT&T’s Hugh Thompson Show. (Johnson explains in this post.)
Surveill U: Watching every move on US campuses
In the January 28 issue of The Nation, Michael Gould-Wartofsky examines the proliferation of cops and cameras on American campuses since 9/11 and, more recently, the Virginia Tech shootings. ” Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission,” he writes. Excerpt:
“3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally–one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people’s every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.
“The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling or, in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.”
Highly recommended, and here.
Web legal scholar and author proposes new “fair use” standard
Cory Doctorow at boingboing notes that Columbia University law prof and web scholar Tim Wu (pictured) offers a new and streamlined proposal for defining “fair use” in the age of the Internet and digital file-sharing. Wu explains it this way:
“[I]t is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines: no one (well, nearly no one) would watch Mel Brook’s Spaceballs as a substitute for Star Wars; a book review is no substitute for reading The Naked and the Dead. They are complements to the original work, not substitutes, and that makes all the difference.
“This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web. Fan guides like the Harry Potter Lexicon or Lostpedia are not substitutes for reading the book or watching the show, and that should be the end of the legal questions surrounding them. The same goes for reasonable tribute videos like this great Guyz Nite tribute to Die Hard. On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.
“We must never forget that copyright is about authorship; and secondary authors, while never as famous as the original authors, deserve some respect. Fixing fair use is one way to give them that.”
Wu is also the co-author, with Jack Goldsmith, of the best book I’ve read about threats to the freedom of the internet as a communications medium: Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. Very highly recommended.
This is cool: Library of Congress is uploading picture archive to Flickr
Xeni Jardin at boingboing writes that the Library of Congress has started a pilot project in which it’s uploading select images from its archive of 14 million images to Flickr. So far about 3,000 have been posted. Why? The LoC hopes we’ll all tag them. Jardin quotes an LoC rep:
“[M]any photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images. We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called ‘The Commons.’ Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.”
Check out Flickr’s Library of Congress images. (Above: House, Houston, Texas 1943)
Steve Jobs: The last word on Kindle, e-books, books?
The man from Apple talks to NYT technology blogger John Markoff:
“Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading. ‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,’ he said. ‘Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.’”
You’ll want this to go with your MacBook Air
And such a bargain.
Here’s all of Gizmodo’s coverage of Macworld 2008, including, of course, LOTS of information about the 3-lb, less-than-an-inch-thick, bigger-than-Jesus Air.
Hulu climbs in bed with Comcast
Mary Jane Irwin at Valleywag reports that one of Comcast’s partners in its plan to port all its on-demand video to the web is Hulu, the joint CBS/Fox venture we wrote about (and offered video previews from) last week.
Irwin writes: “[W]hat the move mostly highlights isn’t Comcast’s ambitions but the strategy of its partners — CBS and Hulu, the NBC/News Corp. joint venture. CBS has said it would rather distribute its video widely across the Web than labor to lure viewers to CBS.com. Hulu, likewise, is not really a destination site like Google’s YouTube; its a video-syndication arm.”
RIAA starts new year as it rung out the old: with lawsuits
The recording industry’s litigation focus remains the nation’s college campuses. But Digital Music News reports that if you’re a student who’s into file-sharing, it’s best to be a Harvard man or woman:
“On Thursday, the organization announced that its university-focused legal enforcement campaign would be continuing in force in 2008. Just this week, the group issued 407 legal notices to students across 18 universities, including Stanford, Duke, Bowdoin, Arizona State, and UCLA. All students received pre-litigation notices, which allow quick settlements without formal court paperwork. Absent from the list was Harvard University, a school not-yet-tapped by the college campaign… Last year, Harvard law professor Charles Nesson — among others — openly questioned the RIAA assault, and set the stage for a future challenge.”
Finally, a taser that plays mp3s
Media Guardian (UK) makes note of a new product that deserves much more publicity than it’s gotten so far: The iTaser, writes Richard Wray, “combines a Taser stun gun, used by 12,000 law enforcement and security forces, including the Metropolitan police, with an MP3 player and earphones…
“The company says the new device is particularly aimed at women–with red, pink and even leopard print designs intended to make carrying a stun gun fashionable. A spokesman in Las Vegas said the inclusion of a music player would encourage purchases by women who want a form of self defense while out jogging, but would otherwise choose to take an iPod or other MP3 player with them instead of a weapon.”
RIAA wars: Jammie Thomas can’t afford an appeal
Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minnesota, the first person to lose at trial in an RIAA copyright suit, will have to find an organization willing to handle her appeal pro bono, CNet News reports. She got some good news as well: She won’t be on the hook for the record companies’ legal fees. Those were waived–not out of the goodness of the labels’ hearts, but because one of the plaintiff labels screwed up in preparing its case.
Your stereo is obsolete
You knew this was coming, too: Sales of home iPod-docking playback devices, per the trade pub Twice (This Week in Consumer Electronics), “will outsell combined sales of traditional compact shelf systems and home theater in a box (HTiB) systems for the first time in 2008, Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) forecasts show.”
Google TV is on its way coming for you
Via Valleywag: The marriage of TV and the web that we all know is coming someday moved a step closer this week when Google announced a deal with Matsushita/Panasonic to produce flat-screen TVs with limited internet capabilities. According to CNN/Money, the sets should reach market in the spring. They won’t have full browser capabilities or anything, but they will allow users to reach two Google services–YouTube and Picasa web albums–with the press of a key on the remote.
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