josath writes "Texas Instruments' flagship calculator, the Nspire, was hacked to allow user-written programs earlier this year. Earlier this month, TI released an update to the OS that runs on the calculator, providing no new features, but only blocking the previous hack. Now, just a few weeks later, Nleash has been released, which defeats this protection. The battle rages on as users fight for the right to run their own software on their own hardware."
eldavojohn writes "Gizmodo's got an interesting scoop on a list of IPs acquired from Peer Block revealing who is downloading the Facebook user data torrented this week: Apple, the Church of Scientology, Disney, Intel, IBM and several major government contractors just to name a few. The article notes that this doesn't mean it's sanctioned by these companies or even known to be happening, but the IP addresses of requests coming to one of the users' machines match to lists of IP blocks for each company."
TravisTR sends word of research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance which found that direct subsidies for renewable energy from governments worldwide totaled $43-46 billion in 2009, an amount vastly outstripped by the $557 billion in fossil fuel subsidies during 2008."The BNEF preliminary analysis suggests the US is the top country, as measured in dollars deployed, in providing direct subsidies for clean energy with an estimated $18.2bn spent in total in 2009. Approximately 40% of this went toward supporting the US biofuels sector with the rest going towards renewables. The federal stimulus program played a key role; its Treasury Department grant program alone provided $3.8bn in support for clean energy projects. China, the world leader in new wind installations in 2009 with 14GW, provided approximately $2bn in direct subsidies, according to the preliminary analysis. This figure is deceptive, however, as much crucial support for clean energy in the country comes in form of low-interest loans from state-owned banks. State-run power generators and grid companies have also been strongly encouraged by the government to tap their balance sheets in support of renewables."
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft will issue an out-of-band patch on Monday for a critical vulnerability in all of the current versions of Windows. The company didn't identify which flaw it will be patching, but the description of the vulnerability is a close match to the LNK flaw that attackers have been exploiting for several weeks now, most notably with the Stuxnet malware. The advance notification from Microsoft on Friday said that the company is patching a critical vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild and affects all supported Windows platforms. The LNK flaw in the Windows shell was first identified earlier this month when researchers discovered the Stuxnet worm spreading from infected USB drives to PCs. Stuxnet has turned out to be a rather interesting piece of malware as it not only uses the LNK zero day vulnerability to spread, but it had components that were signed using a legitimate digital certificate belonging to Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer."
pcardno writes "The UK government has responded to a petition encouraging government departments to move away from IE6 that had over 6,000 signatories. Their response seems to be that a fully patched IE6 is perfectly safe as long as firewalls and malware scanning tools are in place, and that mandating an upgrade away from IE6 will be too expensive. The second part is fair enough in this age of austerity (I'd rather have my taxes spent on schools and hospitals than software upgrade testing at the moment), but the whole reaction will be a disappointment to the petitioners."Update: 07/31 11:43 GMT by S : Dan Frydman, the man who launched the petition, has posted a response to the government's decision.
Innovation Happens When Ideas Have Sex Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:39:00 PST A few months back, we wrote a bit aboutMatt Ridley's new bookcalledThe Rational Optimist. I still haven't had a chance to read the book, but reader sehlat points us to an essay that Ridley has written for Reason Magazine that is adapted from the book, which is an absolute must read, onhow innovation occurs. Many of the points won't surprise regular readers of Techdirt, since it talks about concepts and studies that we've discussed many times before. For example, it discusses some of the same research we recently wrote about how government funding of basic science research oftendoes more harm than goodfor innovation. It also explains how money is often not a key ingredient in innovation. It's helpful, yes, but not the key ingredient. There's a nice bit on the fact, as discussed time and time again around here that intellectual property laws have never been shown to increase innovation:
Yet intellectual property is very different from real property, because it is useless if you keep it to yourself, and an abstract concept can be infinitely shared. These features create an apparent dilemma for those who would encourage inventors. People get rich by selling each other things (and services), not ideas. Manufacture the best bicycles, and you profit handsomely; come up with the idea of the bicycle, and you get nothing because it is soon copied. If innovators are people who make ideas, rather than things, how can they profit from them? Does society need to invent a special mechanism to surround new ideas with fences, to make them more like houses and fields?
There is little evidence that patents really drive inventors to invent. In the second half of the 19th century, neither Holland nor Switzerland had a patent system, yet both countries flourished and attracted inventors. The list of significant 20th-century inventions that were never patented includes the automatic transmission, Bakelite, ballpoint pens, cellophane, cyclotrons, gyrocompasses, jet engines, magnetic recording, power steering, safety razors, and zippers. By contrast, the Wright brothers effectively grounded the nascent aircraft industry in the United States by enthusiastically defending their 1906 patent on powered flying machines.
So what is it that leads to innovation? Well, it's the sharingof ideas and building upon them -- again, a point raised here time and time again. Ridley describes it as "ideas having sex." This isn't a new idea (though it's "newish"). In the past thirty years, a growing number of economists have recognized that economic growth comes from the collision of information and new ideas, shared openly. As Ridley notes: "Innovators are in the business of sharing." While he doesn't bring this up, there's actually a tremendous amount of research that show that communities that more widely and openlyshare ideastend to have greater innovation (and, no, that doesn't mean through such false disclosure systems like a patent system -- which teaches little, and doesn't let anyone really make use of the knowledge shared). But the key point that Ridley makes is that innovation happens when people keep building on what's been done before:
The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity. The telephone had sex with the computer and spawned the Internet.
Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Henry Ford once candidly admitted that he had invented nothing new: He had "simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work." Inventors like to deny their ancestors, exaggerating the unfathered nature of their breakthroughs, the better to claim the full glory (and sometimes the patents) for themselves. Thus, Americans learn that Edison invented the incandescent light bulb out of thin air, when his less commercially-slick forerunners, Joseph Swan in Britain and Alexander Lodygin in Russia, deserve at least to share the credit.
It's a great read that really highlights and ties together many of the points I've written about here for years.
Detroit News Anchor Realizes How Twitter Has Changed How He Engages With Viewers Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:32:00 PST One of the key points we tried to hammer home at our Techdirt Saves* Journalism event in June was the importance of realizing thatnews organizations are really in the business of buildingcommunity. So many in the news business focus on the belief that they're in the "news" business, but that's never really been the case. The news has always been the piece that brings together a community (and the business of a news organization has usually been to then sell that community's attention to advertisers). The biggest problem that news organizations face these days isn't scary"news aggregators,"but that there are now many, many, many othercommunitiesthat people can join, and most of them treat their members a lot better. Many traditional news organizations, in contrast, seem to have a rather condescending view on "community." They lock up comments, they complain about readers, and they focus on just delivering the news, not engaging with their community or enabling their community to do anything useful.
As I've reported in this blog before I have had a very long one-sided relationship with the people who watch my newscasts. I talk, they listen. If they had something to say to me they yelled it at the TV screen like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Twitter changed all that. I can now hear you and I can now answer you...
I can't speak for the dozens of people who check in regularly every night... sometimes at 6 or 7:00.. but mostly 11:00. I don't know exactly whattheyget out of it except a kind of cool experience of actually conversing in real time with the guy on TV. But I can tell you whatIget out of it. For the first time in years I actually feel like I'm talkingtosomeone rather thanatthem. Frankly it's energizing!
Of course, the next step is to go beyond just talking "to" them and to talking "with" them. But that will come. In fact, getting to that point, Clark explains an amusing way that the community tried to connect with him, picking up on the recentOld Spice commercialmeme of"Silverfish Hand Catch!", where some of his viewers started saying that if 100 people retweeted the request, Clark would close the broadcast by saying the line on TV. He didn't get the 100 retweets, and admits that he wouldn't have said it anyways (noting he probably would have lost his job), but he diddo an "air" silverfish hand catchsurreptitiously, to let folks know he was paying attention.
But, much more interesting was the realization he had while all of this was happening:
It was all a bit silly sure, but I realized something else was going on. The audience of our 11:00 newscast wasn't just talking to me... they were talking to each other! I felt like Alexander Graham Bell when he made his first call to Watson. The backchannel worked!
I know that many folks around here still like tomock and dismisscommunications tools like Twitter, but many people are realizing what powerful tools they are for conversations and for building communities where none really existed before. And, in businesses where community and relationships are everything, that's quite powerful for those who figure it out.
What About Creating A Digital Transmission Right Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:25:00 PST Bennett Lincoff has been proposing a different kind of solution to the music industry's online woes for quite some time. Last year, he did a great job picking apart some of themajor problemswith Jim Griffin's Choruss plan (which, again, we've been told was supposed to launch in January, but we're still unfamiliar with any universities -- let alone thetens of thousands of students-- who have signed up for it). However, we haven't really looked at Lincoff's own proposal.
ReaderSteelWolfsent in acopy of Lincoff's proposalthat was sent to the Canadian government during its open copyright consultation last year. On the whole -- of the various proposals out there, Lincoff's might be classified as one of the "least bad" solutions, but that's a lot different than it being agoodproposal.
The basic idea of the proposal is that anew right would need to be created under copyright law, the digital transmission right, that would replace the mishmash of copyright rights that currently cover online music (generally reproduction, distribution and performance rights). Basically, this transmission right would cover any and all music transmissions online and any license fee would be paid by the transmitter, not the transmittee. Thus, anyone could download or stream any music they want on their computer with no penalties at all and no need to secure a license. However, you would not then be able to share (transmit) that same music to someone else without a license.Butthis wouldn't matter so much (the theory goes), because a large service provider could pay for the transmission rights, absolving the individuals. In other words, with such a system, in theory, The Pirate Bay or a Napster could pay the transmission rights, and users would be free to both download and upload via those services. The theory is, of course, that it would be worthwhile for those sites to pay because they would get many other benefits from all the users flocking to them for sharing:
This "digital transmission right" would be a new right, not an additional right. It would replace the parties' now-existing reproduction, public performance and distribution rights (and, where applicable, the making available right and the right of communication to the public). These would no longer have separate or independent existence for purposes of digital transmissions of sound recordings or the musical works embodied in them.
The only act that would require a license, or payment of a license fee, would be the digital transmission of recorded music. Every transmission that is not subject to exemption would require authorization. This does not mean that separate payment would be due for each transmission of each recording; only that, regardless how license fees may be calculated, all non-exempt transmissions would require authorization.
Licenses would be made available unconstrained by the concerns that have driven the industry's failed campaign to salvage its sales-based revenue model. The determinative consideration would be whether or not recordings had been digitally transmitted, not whether transmissions result in sales, promote sales, or cause sales of recordings to be lost.
Licenses would be issued without regard to whether recordings are streamed, downloaded, or transmitted by some means not yet devised; whether music programming is interactive or non-interactive, or contains this, that or another recording; whether the service accepts user-generated content, operates as a P2P or social network, or otherwise retransmits or further transmits recordings that originate from other sites or services. The number of copies necessary to effect transmissions and the type of transmission technology used would not affect the availability of a license.
There are alotof other details, and Lincoff has clearly put a lot of thought into the proposal and tried to cover many of the bases that people would likely critique. Compared to our current system, it certainly sounds like it makesmoresense. He definitely does an excellent job describing that the only realproblemis one of the industry's own making in still thinking entirely in the context of the old way that music was "sold." But the proposal still has a variety of problems. First, it's incredibly complex and not easy to understand. This is, of course, also true with existing copyright law. But replacing one super complex system with another one isn't necessarily a great thing either -- especially if that level of complexity isn't needed.
Second -- and this is my really big problem with it -- is that it still involves a huge and totally unnecessary bureaucratic nightmare in the middle that represents tremendous economic and societalwastein terms of managing the licenses, monitoring the usage and the transmissions of content and collecting and distributing the money. It's bureaucracy that isn't needed. We're already seeing over and over and over again that if you take out the unnecessary bureaucracy, artists can create business models that are much more direct, whether directly between the artist and the fan who wants to buy something or between an organization representing the artist. This is a much more efficient system, whereby there are plenty of opportunities to pay artists for various scarcities, rather than making up a totally unnecessary license for an abundant good which the market has already decided should be priced at zero.
As soon as you set up this bureaucratic structure, what really happens is that much of the money that could have gone directly to the artists (or to the artists' business partners) goes instead into the massive overhead required to keep the "collection society" working in the middle. This isn't a solution that helps musicians. It's a solution that helps bureaucratic middlemen.
As SteelWolf notes in his submission:
Personally I find these kinds of plans to be dangerous as they promote the idea that there is some kind of a "solution" that allows content creators to retain control over digital files as they propagate across the internet. These are not solutions, they are handwaving to obscure the fact that the economy has changed so that absolute control over content is neither possible nor necessary. The voluntary aspect of licensing promotes the idea that negotiating uses and fees with rights-holders is somehow the "morally correct" way to proceed, never once considering the idea that our culture may have moved beyond that construct.
Marvel Issuing Takedowns Over Thor Trailer; Hey Marvel: Trailers Are Advertising Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:21:55 PST There's been plenty of buzz over the the upcoming movieThor, and at the recent Comic-Con in San Diego, Marvel apparentlyshowed off a trailer of the moviethatgot people excited. Of course, with so many people in the room, some filmed it, and it didn't take long for the clip to go online. Other movies have done this as well. I remember last year that Jon Favreau showed the first clips fromIron Man 2at Comic-Con and then happily tweeted links to videos that people had put up. Apparently, however, Marvel isn't too happy about this.Benny6Toespoints out thatthe trailer has been taken downand looking around the web, it appears to have beentaken downfrom a bunch of sites, though others claim you can find it if you really want.
Either way, I'm trying to figure out how this makes any sense at all. It's atrailer. Thewhole ideaof it is to act as advertising for the movie and get people more interested in seeing the movie. And having people put it online for you makes itfree advertising, which is even better. So why take it down at all?
In the meantime, since apparently it's forbidden to show the real trailer, we might as well include the absolutely hilarious fake trailer of adifferentmythologically-based movie, which is what the movieGod of War, based on the video game of the same name, would look likeif made by Wes Anderson:
