WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
I see that 'they' are already blaming the Boeing 777 crash at Heathrow airport on computer problems. Very convenient, but let's hope it doesn't distract from finding out the real cause of the accident, which may, or may not, be computer related.
Incidentally, just after the 777 went into service, I was flying back from New York to London, and the counter clerk asked me if I would be prepared to be bumped onto the next flight. "You'll love it", she gushed, "It's one of our first brand new 777s." I replied that I wasn't planning travelling on the 777 until version 3.1 came out. She looked puzzled and said she couldn't understand why I wouldn't want to fly in a brand new plane. "I'm a programmer," I told her. She didn't get it.
Oh, incidentally, I've stopped using Google. They've started flipping up screens announcing that my queries look like requests made by viruses. I can just see a virus writer sitting down with his/her mates and coding up a piece of malware that asked Google to search on 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'. For the record, Google thought it was sent by a virus, ask.com, yahoo and answers.com all had no problems. Google's message ended in '...hope we'll see you again on Google.' Somehow I doubt it, especially since I think I'm getting this crud because I use AddBlockPlus to block double-click adds in my browser!
Finally, an amusing snippet from Robert X Cringley which relates to last week's item on Microsoft's productivity monitoring software. '...just imagine the kind of dialog boxes you'll see: "Microsoft CubeSpy will restart your heart in 10 seconds. Accept or cancel?"'
And now for something completely different...
Roundup: On Piracy, DRM, Lawyers, Real Sales, and Real Music
This week the analyst IDC released a report in the UK claiming that cutting the use of pirated software by 10% would contribute an extra 4.5 bn UK pounds (about US$8.5 bn) to the UK economy, and create 13,000 jobs. This was a smart move by IDC. It will certainly create them a lot of cash as desperate media company executives snap up expensive copies to find arguments for extending the copyright laws and draconian Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) legislation.
Unfortunately for those who would believe the report, there is a fundamental flaw in all these arguments about 'if only we could cut piracy, then we would make xxx more money!' It's very simple. The assumption that everyone with an 'illegal' copy would automatically buy a legal copy of the software is quite simply wrong.
Maybe ten years ago, there was an element of truth in the argument, although even then many of the users would have done without, rather than pay out large amounts of money. Now, however, most expensive software applications have either cheaper, or even free alternatives. There are few things more compelling to examine alternatives than the thought of having to pay lots of hard earned cash for something you are currently using for free!
So, IDC, definitely not 4.5 bn UK pounds, and probably not even 1,300 jobs, but a nice try :)
http://Mail.computing.co.uk/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBQZ20BsjfA0Xxi0EoUr0EO
Meanwhile, over at PCMag.com, Lance Ulanoff was indulging in a bout of doom and gloom, claiming that the abandoning of DRM by the big four music conglomerates was putting everyone on the road to ruin, because musicians would no longer make music.
Possibly he's right that the likes of Warner, Sony and EMI will have serious problems, but who says the media conglomerates have to make billions of dollars? They never did before the mid-seventies, and I don't recall there being a lack of music around before that time.
As an example Ulanoff points out that when Radiohead released their latest CD as a download, the bulk of the downloaders didn't pay anything. He's missing the point. In fact, when the physical CD was released it sold far more copies than had been anticipated, and that was the true effect of the free downloads.
For the vast majority of musicians, the problem is not so-called 'piracy', it's getting people who've not heard your music before to listen to it for the first time. The lower you make the cost of that first listen, the more likely you are to be in with a chance of creating a new fan who will pay for your music. It used to be that local radio stations provided this sort of exposure, but with local stations being bought up by play list driven media conglomerates who operate from central studios, that avenue is fast drying up.
Enter the Internet!
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2251666,00.asp
Turning to books, torrentfreak.com has an interesting piece about a talk given recently by Paulho Coelho, author of the best selling 'The Alchemist'. It seems that he has been pirating his own book. In particular, he uploaded a Russian translation to bittorrent, and the Russian sales went from about 1,000 a year to 100,000, and then to in excess of a million. He even created a site - called 'Pirate Coelho' - which provided download links to the 'pirate' copy.
It's not a flash in the pan either. Sci-Fi author Eric Flint had a similar experience with his works when he started providing digital copies on Baen Books' free library. Not only did sales of books that would otherwise have gone out of print zoom up, but so did sales of current titles.
Sounds to me like a more successful business model than suing your customers - unless you are a lawyer, that is!
http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books-080124/
http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm
Lawyers rejoice! Warner Bros. Records has found someone else to sue. This time it's music search engine Seeqpod. Seeqpod (the name makes it sound like an alien from a 50's B-movie), is relying the provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to protect it. As far as I can tell Seeqpod is within the law, but, as one commentator put it, '...copyright owners are trying to change the rules in court.' I'll be following this case with interest in the coming months/years/decades.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080125-warner-sues-playable-search-
engine-tests-dmca-safe-harbor.html
The Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) claimed in a report it commissioned in 2005 that 44% of the industry's domestic 'losses' came from the illegal downloading of movies by college students. They've been using this as justification for trying to force already cash strapped institutions of learning to act as free policemen. They are also using the figure to get tough legislation through the Hose of representatives.
Now, though, it has emerged that the 44% figure is entirely imaginary. They have admitted that the figure is only 15%. Human error, they claim. But why would anyone believe the new figure? Maybe there's an error there too, and it should only be 1.5%, or perhaps even 0.15%... let's hope the legislators see through this and totally discount all MPAA figures in the future.
Coda: I'm sure you will all be shocked to know that the MPAA has yet to commission a study on the effect on profits of turning out a stream of turgid crud masquerading as movies, year after year!
http://www.physorg.com/news120316088.html
Meanwhile, over on this side of the pond, the EU Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education has nixed an attempt by big media to install mandatory ISP filtering and copyright extension. The committee actually produced a report in 2006, which, to say the least, wasn't to the taste of the media companies.
Among other things it included the dangerous suggestion that '... criminalising consumers so as to combat digital piracy is not the right solution...' The European recording industry tried to amend the report to extend copyright lifetime and force ISPs to implement content filtering.
Well, I'm happy to report that the committee trashed all of those amendments, so the report stands as it was originally written. Good news, for once. Now let's see some of the other politicians round the world stand up to the media companies!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080122-proposed-eu-isp-filtering-and-
copyright-extension-shot-down.html
And finally, in this section, something more positive - The RPM Challenge '08. The challenge is to record an album (10 songs or 35 minutes of original material) in the 29 days of February, without using professional recording studios. Last year's Challenge saw 850 new albums recorded, 8,000+ songs, and they are available - all of them - free and DRM free on the site's jukebox.
Go for it!
http://www.rpmchallenge.com/
Shorts:
Apple seem to be doing pretty well these days with Macs and gadgets like iPhone flying out the door like there is no tomorrow. Or are they? Well yes, but in the case of the iPhone the real question is where are they flying to?
You see, AT&T, who are the US carrier for the iPhone produced some interesting figures at an earning conference call on Thursday. It seems that AT&T had two million iPhone customers at the end of the year.
Two million...
The problem is that, a couple of days earlier, Apple reported it has 'sold' 3.7 million iPhones. So where are the missing 1.7 million iPhones? Well, some of them have obviously been sold in Europe. The carriers involved there are talking about 200,000 in the UK (but from personal observations I'd suspect that the final figures will be lower), and 100,000 each in France and Germany.
That's a total of 400,000. We are still 1.3 million iPhones short. So where are they? One possibility is that some of them have been doctored to work with other carriers. Doing so is not that easy since the latest upgrade, and very difficult to do in software. Let's be very, very, generous and assume that 250,000 iPhones purchased are being used with other services (this was Apple's estimate last year - I would be surprised if the number exceeded 50,000). That gives us 670,000 - two thirds of a million - missing iPhones.
The suggestion is that they haven't been sold at all, they are sitting on retailers' shelves. Not only that, but Apple has been ramping up production, so by now it's likely that there are even more sitting on dealers' shelves. This fact that hasn't been missed by Wall Street. In spite of its soaring Mac sales and a great holiday quarter, Apple's stock has lost 15% of its value this week...
Someone, somewhere, can clearly do sums and get 2+2 to equal -670,000!
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9857622-37.html?part=rss&subj=
news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
One story this week really said it all about the state of government IT in the UK. Our National Audit Office, supposedly the custodian of value for our long suffering tax payers, produced a report praising the government's record in using IT to tackle social security benefit fraud. The report is full of praise and relishes in acronyms for new IT initiatives - FRISC, FRAIMS and the like. Unfortunately, the true state of affairs is well hidden from the casual reader: the department concerned identified 106 million UK pounds (about US$200 million) of overpaid benefits, and..
...wait for it...
...spent 154 million UK pounds (about US$300 million) to do so! In other words, we'd be 48 million better off if they hadn't bothered - assuming they actually managed to collect the overpayments, that is, something which I seriously doubt.
Sometimes, I think the lunatics are running the asylum.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/23/it_gets_benefits_cheats/
And now for your weekly dose of lost ID data. The UK Ministry of Justice lost 4 CDs with case notes, including sensitive witness details. The UK Ministry of Defence (formerly known as the War Office) lost a laptop with personal details of 600,00 people who applied for information on joining up, including those of 150,000 serving personal and bank details for 3,500 of them. J.C. Penny managed to lose a backup tape with 650,000 customer's details. The latter loss was all the more ironic in that it coincided with the release of a video on cyber crime featuring J.C. Penny's CEO talking about the threat posed by online thieves.
I'm sure I'll be able to tell you about more stolen data next week!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/23/court_info_sent_in_post/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/20/mod_recruits_laptop_theft/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/18/jc_penney_customer_data_lost/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/22/mod_laptop_lack_policy/
That reminds me, the UK government's abysmal record at protecting data is leading to renewed calls for its massive planned national ID card scheme to be junked. The implementation time scales are already drifting back, and now there are two new straws drifting in the wind. Consultants Accenture and weapons and tech company BAE have both pulled out of bidding for the project. Since neither of the companies are exactly known for their reticence in feeding from the public trough, this is a clear indication that they expect it to go belly up so badly that they will either be out of pocket, or that the disaster will seriously damage their reputation.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/01/24/accenture_bae_ditch_id_cards/
And last for this week is a Microsoft story. (You didn't really think there wouldn't be one, did you?) Rumour is rife among the cognoscenti that Microsoft is trying to speed up the next version of Windows. Originally rather exotically code named 'Blackcomb', later changed to the more staid 'Vienna', and now boringly named 'Windows 7', it's supposed to be out at the end of 2009.
While it's understandable that they would want to put Vista behind them as soon as possible, I have my doubts about their ability to meet the current schedule, let alone an accelerated schedule. Maybe what the rumour really means is that Microsoft are accelerating the schedule to get Windows 7 out on time. I wonder how many bugs there will be in it?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/23/windows_7_release_2009/
Scanner: Other Stories
Microsoft tries to CTRL-W WordPerfect lawsuit again
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/microsoft_seeks_dismissal_wordperfect_lawsuit/
Motley Fool writes off Microsoft
http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2008/01/23/microsoft-bear-argument.aspx
Asian vendors tout tiny Bluetooth adaptor at Eee PC
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/01/21/tiny_bluetooth_adaptor/
Phishing the phishers!
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/01/23/
Hackers-target-aspiring-Internet-scammers_1.html
Computer system suspected in Heathrow 777 crash
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/777_computer_theory/
Chinese firm sets legal dragons on Microsoft
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/18/microsoft_font_patents_china/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi and Lois for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
27 January 2708
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html
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