Thursday, April 12, 2007
It'll take a sex change, but they can do it
Hope for local TV in a Giant Zero world is my latest at IT Garage. It's actually a post of an email I sent to Terry Heaton answering his request for a few paragraphs of thinking about what local TV news operations are facing in an increasingly (inter)networked world. Perhaps the most important point:
2) Supply from the Demand side. Thanks to the Net and inexpensive video recording and production systems (Apple's leading the way here), countless former consumers are now producers as well. Nothing the Net does is more important than the ability it gives *everybody* to be a producer as well as a consumer.
Don't think of these new producers as competitors. Think of them as potential allies, partners and collaborators in building out the new systems that will replace TV as we know it. By the way, this trend isn't about "user generated content" — a term that calls to mind packing material. It's about participation by parties who will sometimes be much closer to news sources than your reporters, and more educated about countless subjects as well.
The All of Some Fears
I'm at a CITS talk by Michael Stohl, an authority on media and terrorism and Chair of the UCSB Communications Department. Notes...
The media tend only to cover happening events. Or cyber attack games and simulations that are premised on Real Threats, or remarkable simulations.
Consultancies like Gartner and CSI want you (i.e. your govenment, your company) to buy their security services and not the other guys'.
The cybersecurity community are part of the same media-consultancy-government sector complex that are all engaged in mutually tendentious and often recycled arguments that frequently bring up the threat of an "eclectronic Pearl Harbor", which even predates former cyber caar Richard Clarke's non-coinage of that term. (It had been around long before he adopted it.)Also, Clarke was one of the "consummate political in-fighters" who always brought up new cyber threats at budget time.
Yonah Alexander of the Potomac Institute has been um, laundering "ops side" CIA intelligence on "Iraq Net", a "cyber arsenel" that turned out to be no more real than the WMDs that were never found, but over which we went to war in Iraq.
Why do these guys "continue to exist"? One reason is "bureaucratic machismo", a system within which "it is much safer to make dire predictions and be proven wrong than ti is to make rational cost/benefit recommendations." And "no penalty in being wrong when you request large sums of money to prevent against security risks."
Richard Clarke is "a special case", who is currently selling (literally, through his book Breakpoint 2007) World War III.
Why have there been no cyber terror attacks? Two reasons. One is BKTP: "Break Things, Kill People". In other words, "terrorists continue to prefer truck bombs over logic bombs". Another is "organizational conservatism". They do bombings after bombings, beheadings after beheadings, whatever after whatever, by their own handbooks. Cyberterrorism needs an extraordinary amount of time, energy, resources and a certainty of payoff. Bet against it.
More thoughts later...
Trojan whoring
The first question that came to mind was, How much money does Rep. Ric Keller get from the the entertainment industry for floating HR 1689 — the Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act of 2007?
I looked for the answer in OpenCongress.org's page on Keller, where there are four stories about Keller: one from Slashdot, one from the Orlando Sentinel, one from Download Splog, aka "Communication Software Review" (speaking of piracy, it was scraped from Chronicles of Dissent), and one from CannonFire.
Here's Keller's own statement about the bill, which he says "would expand the allowable use of funds...to provide for innovative on-campus, anti-piracy pilot programs designed to reduce digital piracy." He concludes, "This troubling trend on college campuses has led to lawsuits against computer users who engage in illegal downloading of copyrighted content. These suits force colleges to spend a great deal of time and resources responding to notices of illegal downloading."
Translation: Take our bribe and we'll call off the RIAA's goons.
The bill claims it will "improve the security and integrity of campus computer networks" and "save telecommunications bandwidth costs, while ensuring such bandwidth is first and foremost made available for research and education-related purposes."
Never mind the fact that file sharing itself is at the heart of the Web's design, and that universities and even governments now share files using BitTorrent — itself a perfect example of how creative techies and users are bound to route around censorship.
Of course, the RIAA loves the legislation. So does the MPAA (in a .pdf).
Quote du jour
Certain socially-skilled people learn early in life to parlay arrogance and dismissiveness into social prominence, and Imus is the poster child for these poseurs. Naked emperors all, they ply a trade even older than the so-called oldest profession (that would be "Ho"). I submit that this pose is so effective that other bullies have parlayed it into temporary dominance of the globe
As for Imus, the guy was funny as hell when he was always drunk or stoned, back on the old WNBC in the Seventies. His Rev. Billy Sol Hargis (of the First Church of the Gooey Death and Discount House of Worship) was — to me, anyway — one of the great comic bits of all time. Alas, Hargis' time was three decades ago.
So much wisdom, so little time
I quote Kurt Vonnegut, and then he dies.
Already I miss him. He was a good man, and a great, great writer. Better than nearly all who criticized him.
I love the memorial drawing — by his own hand — on his website:
