Saturday, November 23, 2002
Extelligence
Next buzzword attack on the Net: accountability. Eric Norlin points to this CNET piece about the Pentagon's (now tabled) plans to stamp out anonymity in the name of something else. Here's what I wrote about the subject in a blog last November.
What goes boing must go boing again
I just gotta say BoingBoing is a radically good blog that only gets better. Coffee for the eyes, it is.
Distrustworthy computing
James Coates (in the Chicago Tribune & Elsewhere), in Promising Movielink bombs in debut:
In essence, Movielink took my American Express card, sold me a movie and when I tried to download it the company's software burped, ate my money (a paltry $1.99 for "Barbarella") and told me I was out of luck.
Repeated e-mails sent to the Movielink customer support site went unanswered, despite repeated auto-response promises of a prompt reply.
Not only did I get stiffed but I also learned the site offers a weak collection of only 76 or so movies, some of them current best sellers and others barely worthy of the clearance bin at Kmart.
I also wasn't particularly pleased to learn that if one were to actually succeed in downloading a movie, the Movielink software is set to delete the film file 24 hours after the picture is first started. If something comes up and you have to pause for too long, your paid-for film will self-destruct.
And if he had a Linux or a Mac box, he still wouldn't have his movie, but at least he'd have his lost money and time, because Movielink would have stopped him cold, right here:
Thank you for your interest in Movielink. We want you to take part in the powerful Internet movie rental experience that Movielink delivers; however, you currently do not meet our minimum system requirements. You will need to adjust the following:
You Need Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
Aye, matey
Apple is one hundred percent ahead of the game here - so far ahead, in fact - that it's completely unable to say it loud and clear. That's why they have to keep saying again and again, "Don't Steal Music", when everyone knows that they're only doing it to cover their own backs. The fact is that they know that however much money is being made through the selling of software, music and copyrighted material, the future isn't in protecting the trade routes - it's in making everyone a pirate.
Bonus link from BBC News: Efforts to stop music piracy 'pointless'. Thus spake P. Biddle, P. England, M. Peinadao and B. Willman, who researched and wrote The Darknet and the future of content distribution for Microsoft. It's a .doc file with a link from the DRM 2002 conference where it was presented. Richard Chlopan at Sysrick has some long quotes from it, but the permalinks don't work.
[Later...] Thanks to the reader who suggested there might be a white bicycle angle to this thing, too.