WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
And another edition of Winding down comes to you hot off the presses - well hot off my keyboard, anyway.
Actually, when I was the production editor of the London weekly listings magazine, 'City Limits', I had to go down to the printers for the overnight run a few times. The press was huge, literally three stories high, all these spinning drums and the web of paper going through it at an incredible speed. Great feeling of excitement. Of course, I'd seen this all in the movies and I knew exactly what to do. Fortunately, I was able to restrain the impulse to shout, "Hold the front page!"
Ah, those were the days - somehow shouting "<Hold the first HTML tag/>" doesn't have quite the same feel to it!
[Note from the editrix: At this stage the author descended into muttering about bare feet, snow, punched cards, loader switches on the front of the computer, youth these days, and the 'Who Live at Leeds' concert...]
Story: Minefield ahead for old Media
Wired has an interesting piece on one of the lesser known consequences of the US 1976 Copyright Act. The act has a provision in it that allows, after a specific length of time, authors, musicians, etc, or their heirs, to reclaim their copyright from the media business that published their works.
The act lays down two options. If the author sold the copyright before 1978, they can take it back 56 years later - currently that means anything before 1953. If they sold it during or after 1978, they can take it back after 35 years - that means that in 2013, works from 1978 can be taken back.
What does this mean in practical terms? It means that among other things, the value of the big media back catalogs is due to take a very big nose dive over the next 10-20 years as all the material from the late 1950s and the 1960s comes into the frame, and at the same time so does the material from the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s.
In terms of UK bands the 56 year limit would cover the bulk of the Beatles and early Rolling Stones music, while in the US it would cover the early material from the West Coast bands, and Elvis. The 35 year limit would cover, among other things, most of the Eagles' material and the entire UK punk and post-punk explosion.
This material is some of the most lucrative in the music business catalogs, much more lucrative than the more recent stuff. The music business has already sold this stuff twice - once on vinyl, once on CD - and they are hoping BluRay will make three.
The music business is terrified, as well they might be. It's not just that the material could be taken away from them, it's the thought of the leverage that it gives the bands, or their heirs, to cut better - much better - deals than the original ones. Remember most of the bands we are talking about cut deals with their record companies before they were known, something which was used by the companies to cut very, very, favourable deals for the music biz. Now, the boot is on the other foot.
Few of the surviving musicians actually like the record companies, even if they back the music biz campaign against 'piracy'. Virtually all consider they were ripped off by their record companies, and will welcome the opportunity to squeeze a bigger share of the profits out of the business by using the threat of taking away the copyright.
Of course, big media have known this was coming ever since 1976. Unfortunately for them, the options for wriggling out of it seem to be very limited. The main suggestion doing the rounds seem to be to claim that the digital re-masters made for CDs represent a new copyright starting when the re-masters were made, so that all the musicians get is the old mono master tapes.
However, they managed to score a mega-own goal with this one, when they recently took BlueBeat.com to court for selling remastered/remixed Beatles songs and claiming that they were new copyrights. The court had no hesitation in nixing this little earner and ordering BlueBeat to stop selling the songs. Given this ruling, it's going to be very, very, difficult to argue that what applies to BlueBeat doesn't apply to the rest of the music biz!
I've talked just about music but as entertainment lawyer Robert Bernstein pointed out, this isn't just about music. "It's every type of copyright. It doesn't distinguish between the types of copyright." I don't know why US lawmakers of the 1970s chose to put these clauses into the Act, but they are certainly creating interesting times for the media business to live in!
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/copyright-time-bomb-set-to-disrupt-
music-publishing-industries/
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091119/ap_on_en_mu/us_emi_beatles_lawsuit
http://www.physorg.com/news177839212.html
Shorts:
I was fascinated to discover that you can buy second hand ATMs. I assume they take the remaining money out of them first, but who knows, the banks have done more bizarre things in the past. Security expert Robert Siciliano picked up one of these for US$750 through Craigslist. As it happened there wasn't any money left in it by its original operator, a bar in Boston.
What there was, though, was something much more valuable - data. The previous owners hadn't cleared out the data collected by the machine. As a result the new owner was able to extract a list of more than a thousand credit and debit card numbers and transactions.
Apparently, there are no rules in the US about who can purchase these machines (this one was sold by a bar going into liquidation, so there would be few records available about where it went). Presumably anyone could buy one of these and set it up somewhere that looked legit in order to skim off card details and PINs.
I suspect we will see more and more of these types of scam, until there is some sort of restriction on who can buy them, and where they can be put. By that time though, the bad guys will probably have factories in the Ukraine building their own machines...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/18/second_hand_atm_fraud_risk/
Most of you, like me, probably make your backups by burning the data onto DVD. You do make backups, don't you? Now, I can reveal that you can get DVDs based on an artificial stone, that will last a thousand years.
Very nice. One has to wonder, though, what DVD players are going to last a thousand years so that your descendants can watch your home movies in the next millennium. This is an issue that doesn't seem to be covered by the maker, Cranberry LLC. There's also the question of how you can know that they will last a thousand years when they haven't been around for very long.
Looking at the spec - they can take high temperatures, UV-radiation, and have none of the materials in them that usually cause deterioration - I suspect that if the disks hold up, regulatory bodies and the military will be interested.
If you routinely do backups out in the sun in Death Valley, or the central Antarctic plateau, then it might be worth you taking a look at this rather expensive system. Just don't expect anyone to be able to read the results in 1,000 years time!
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140771/Start_up_claims_its_
DVDs_last_1_000_years
Here in the UK, an unusual case has just come to light. We hear all the time about companies selling personal data, but this story is slightly different. It seems that employees of mobile phone company T-Mobile stole customer data from T-Mobile and sold it to T-Mobile's competitors.
The story was released by the UK's data protection office, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which reported it had been approached by an unnamed company about this problem. The information was renewal information, which rivals then used to solicit T-Mobile customers whose contracts were about to expire.
Weirdly enough, there seems to be some doubt about whether it's possible to prosecute those responsible. It seems we can pass laws making the tax-payer fund the policing of where people get their music from, but can't manage to make stealing other people's data illegal! Sort of government of the people, paid for by the people, on behalf of the big media...
Mind you with a thousand years of laws on our statute books, and a similar amount of common law, we must be able to prosecute them for something. If the worst comes to the worst, we could always charge them with failing to practice archery in the high street on a Sunday, as required by one of our more ancient laws.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=221800448&cid=nl_tw_security_txt
I see that the Pirate Bay tracker site is to close for good. At its height it was coordinating something in the region of 25 million peers. The ostensible reason given for the closure is the evolution of the BitTorrent protocol which is claimed to have made trackers redundant.
Well... yes... possibly... Most people, I suspect, will feel it has more to do with the legal woes that the site has been facing over the last year.
On the other hand, it is likely that the closure of a major tracking site like Pirate Bay, will encourage BitTorrent users to move to trackerless solutions, making it even more difficult for the powers that be to track who is downloading what from where. There is also the political legacy of Pirate Bay. The EU has now got 'pirate' political parties in most countries, and even the odd MP or so in the European Parliament, so the political issues are not going to go away in a hurry. RIP Pirate Bay 2003-2009.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tracker-shuts-down-for-good-091117/
Google seems to have finally run into some serious opposition to its iniquitous StreetView program in Switzerland. The Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner has finally run out of patience with the Googlistas on this issue and has announced that it is planning to take legal action to deal with Google.
Google remains, "absolutely convinced that Swiss View is legal in Switzerland". The Swiss seem to disagree, and if it does turn out to be legal, I can sniff a referendum to change that in the offing. In the mean time I would suggest that Google doesn't store its massive amounts of cash in a Swiss bank account!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/13/street_view_switzerland/
I see that New Zealand scored the top spot in Transparency International's annual poll, giving it 9.4 out of 10 for being the least corrupt country in the world. The UK and the US managed to make it in at 17 and 19 respectively with scores of 7.7 and 7.5. Loafing around at the bottom were the usual suspects. Somalia managed to snatch the bottom position from Afghanistan, Myanmar (aka Burma), Sudan and Iraq. Our old friend Nigeria managed to make it at 130th. No real surprises there, then.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/18/corruption_index/
Homework:
There's a really interesting article on poker, including online poker, on the 'Spiked' website. Poker tends to provoke heated exchanges between those who consider it a skill, and those who consider it pure gambling. The article argues for the former, and although I'm not totally convinced by their argument, I think it makes a good case. (I do think the person they were interviewing was skating on thin ice when trying to prove that poker was a skill by comparing it to operating on the stock market!)
As it happens, I do know something about poker having worked in the online poker business for a while, although I personally don't gamble. I don't see any justification for trying to impose my morals on other people.
My feeling is that there is both skill and luck involved in playing poker. The luck is in the hands you get, though if the shuffling is good these will average out over time (shuffling algorithms are a big thing in on-line poker). The skill is in being able to make accurate estimates of what the odds against you are, and being able to put yourself into your opponents mind (empathy, if you like). Even in online poker, you can do the latter, though it is more difficult.
On an empirical level my observations, over the year and a half I was involved, made it absolutely clear that the primary requirement was skill not luck. Even over a relatively short time a skilled player would usually come out better off than a lucky player. In the long term skilled players always came out ahead.
Take a look at the article - there's some interesting points made in it.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7711/
Geek Toys:
Rich geeks only need apply for this one, but the rest of us can gawp in amazement at how the other half lives. Take a look at the BillionaireXchage, a sort eBay for the toffs, offering auctions on very expensive toys. I was particularly impressed with a 2003 Enzo car, a snip at a US$1,175,000 starting price. There's also a very classy looking 2006 Azimuth 68E yacht with starting bid of US$1,799,000. It's enough to make James Bond weep...
If your funds don't quite run to that amount, though, never fear. The rose gold and diamond iPhone has a starting price of a mere 17,990 UK pounds (about US$30,000). Go for it!
http://billionairexchange.com/
I'm sure that most of you, like me, have sometimes wished you could take an AK-47 to a recalcitrant computer. Well I can't offer you an AK-47, but you might like to work off a little of the agro by watching this video of computers under assult from everything from an M2 .50 caliber machine gun to a Thompson submachine gun. The video is brought to you by keepgoing.biz, who promise you bullet proof server backups, so to speak. Good clean fun...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/18/shot_server/
Scanner: Other Stories
Microsoft confirms first Windows 7 zero-day bug
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/microsoft-confirms-first-
windows-7-zero-day-bug-475?source=IFWNLE_nlt_sec_2009-11-16
Microsoft disconnects Xbox gamers/Xbox Live class action
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8354166.stm
http://www.abingtonlaw.com/Xbox-Live-class-action.html?gclid=CPfl4-Tjkp4CFQ8MDQodYlHSoQ
Amazon's arguments against collecting sales taxes do not withstand scrutiny
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2990&emailView=1
AOL asks 2,500 employees to quit
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/AOL-Asks-2500-Employees-To-siliconalley-2344103485.html?x=0&.v=17
DNS problem linked to DDoS attacks gets worse
http://www.itworld.com/security/84742/dns-problem-linked-ddos-attacks-
gets-worse
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter 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
22 November 2009
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! 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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