1. DRM doesn’t really stop anyone from illegally downloading.

2. DRM slows down the program it is installed on, and sometimes even leaves computers vulnerable.

3. Pirates will always find ways to download something for free.

The conclusion of course is that DRM should be removed from all media and never be considered again.

Sources:

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/6002/drm.html

Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig

Consumer’s Guide To DRM

In chapter two, Lessig goes into the separation between our real lives and the lives we lead online. He cites two examples to start. The first is an argument between two people playing a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), and arguing over who is at fault, the man whose dog is dead, or the woman whose poisonous flowers the dog ate.  The resolution they come to is that the woman make her flowers poisonous only when on her property or when bought by someone else. Lessig uses this story to illustrate that in the virtual world, there are solutions to problems not available in the real world.  The second example is that of a state that outlaws gambling in its borders. In response, one of the citizens sets up a gambling website based on an offshore server.  Regulation of the activity becomes very difficult, if not impossible, for the state.  He goes on to list many more stories and examples, including a man who wrote disturbing stories online and a theoretical worm, but his main point in this chapter seems to be that the rules we apply to the real world rarely translate perfectly into cyberspace.  We cannot simply transfer our constitution into cyberspace and be done with it. For there to be regulation in cyberspace, it will have to built from the ground up, and completely new.

In chapter three, Lessig begins outlining two different types of networks at the extremes of control. One is the University of Chicago network, which essentially lets anyone with an Ethernet port get onto their system. The other is Harvard’s system, which requires that one register, and be monitored the entire time they are on the network. He then goes on to describe how the Internet as it was in the 1990s is largely the way it is today: unregulated and unsupervised.  he argues that the Internet will see a shift in the coming years to something more like Harvard’s system. The point he tries to make, however, is that supervision is not so important as identification. Removing the anonymity is the trend he sees for the Internet. He says that such a system could be laid on top of the existing Internet, thereby keeping most of its functionality.

The fourth chapter begins with a discussion on authentication and anonymity.  Lessig gives examples of authentication in real life versus those on the Internet. One of these examples is a child who is trying to view pornography on the Internet.  In real life, a child would have a extremely difficult time disguising himself as an adult, because his physical attributes give him away. By contrast, on the Internet, it is very easy for that same child to lie about his age and access pornography. He goes on to describe the reason for this is in the current structure of the Internet. The TCP/IP system doesn’t check or care about the information in the packets except the IP address they came from and the IP address they’re being sent to.  Cookies are (at least in his view) a step in the right direction, as they allow the website to remember all the information you have previously given it. He also goes into Single Sign On technology, which works a bit like online ID badges. Lessig then talks about Microsoft’s Identity Layer, which it is currently working on.  This layer would essentially provide only the information a certain website needed at any given time, like age, citizenship, and so on.  Packet sniffing programs are also mentioned.  He says that in order to regulate the Net, one needs to know who is sending information,  what they are sending, and from where.

Chapter five continues the theme of regulability, addressing the issue of the government regulating code in order to regulate behavior on the Internet. It starts with Lessig describing a situation where the government mandated that phone companies write their code so that their phones can still be wiretapped. Another situation was described where the FBI wanted information from cell phone calls collected every time they were used, and for that information to be retrievable by the FBI whenever there was a “legitimate law enforcement reason.”  The government can actually be far more indirect than this, however. They once tried to subsidize the development of Clipper encryption technology, thereby making it the cheapest and then everyone would use something the government knew how to break. Another strategy mentioned by Lessig is the idea of having everyone use an online ID, not by forcing it on them, but by providing very strong incentives to use one.  The difference between “East Coast Code”(code made by Congress in the form of laws) and “West Coast Code” (that written in Silicon Valley) is also explored. He also addresses one of my biggest irritations with the book so far: that there will always be ways to remain anonymous. However, he makes a good point that just because a lock can be picked does not make a lock useless.  His next point is about the current architecture of the Internet shaping its use. Because there are really no restrictions on what can be done, it breeds people who want to do harm.

By the end of Part I, Lessig has made his case that the forces that are turning the Internet into something far more regulable cannot be stopped.  They will continue until the Internet has changed, radically, and there is little we can do to stop it. More importantly, his point is that very few will want to stop it.

With AIBO, very young children were used as research subjects. They were evaluated during their interactions with AIBO on the basis of their apprehension, attempts to animate it, moral response, and other factors. In an attempt to balance it out, Professor Kahn also had the children interact with a stuffed dog. In this way, they could rule out any interactions that were simply associated with any artificial dog. What he found was that children generally did not attempt to manually animate the AIBO in the same way that they would a stuffed animal. They also, with one exception, never displayed apprehension with the stuffed animal like they did with the robot. The other group used to test hypotheses on the AIBO was posters on a message board about AIBO. Going through their posts one at a time, their responses were categorized. Roughly 75% of the forum posters displayed a solid knowledge that it was a piece of technology and referred to it as such, and many of them developed an emotional attachment to the AIBO. However, only 12% assigned any kind of moral standing the AIBO, such as it being morally wrong to damage the AIBO, the same as a real dog.

The tests with Robovie were done exclusively with children. They were led around a building with a Robovie, and interacted with it for an extended period of time. Tests conducted during this time included a discussion between the Robovie and the experimenter about the type of coral in a fish tank, and a situation where the robot was being morally slighted. What the researchers found was that not only did the children assign moral status to the robot, they attempted to intervene in the experiment on the robot’s behalf. One child even tried to come up with new ways for the robot to resolve the dilemma as it was being put away.

In summary, the age of the person interacting with the robot seems to have a large impact on the amount of emotional bonding they create. Interestingly, there are parallels between this and other information technology. Generally, the earlier in life someone is introduced to computers and other IT devices, the more comfortable they are with them throughout their lifetime. Also, our intellectual knowledge that something is merely mimicking human or animal behavior is often not sufficient to prevent emotional bonds from developing. It remains to be seen what impact this will have on our interactions with machines and other humans in the decade ahead.

This is a personal pet peeve of mine. When netbooks were first created, they were designed as cheap, (relatively) rugged laptops that would come loaded with a light OS to get around their low-power hardware. But the price and specifications on them go up in the name of Microsoft, who decrees that their OS be on top at all costs.

Anyway, the first netbooks to come out were around $100, with bare-bones specs. Now they keep inching to where ultra-portable laptops are, and one wonders what the point in calling them netbooks is.

Perhaps they’ve finally realized that hi-def is the way video games are going, but Nintendo is rumoured to be including a Blu-ray player in the next iteration of the massively popular Wii system. One of the primary negative points of the first Wii was that it didn’t include any kind of high definition support. This lack of support also seriously impacted many people’s views of it as a potential “serious gaming console.”

I find it somewhat hard to believe that Sony would let another company use their Blu-Ray technology on another gaming console, seeing as how Blu-Ray is one of the main selling points of the PS3. But perhaps they feel that the money they will make on each Wii carrying the Blu-Ray player will outweigh the potential loss of money on PS3s sold.

While cloud storage is a great way to keep documents accessible, it is probably better that it NOT be used for confidential medical records. According to the above article, although the medical data is scrubbed for personal information, 87% can still be identified by cross-referencing the records with freely available information. Not to mention, this information is being sold by third parties with their own interests and agendas.

One hopes that the inevitable public backlash will make a dent in this practice, at the very least.

Samsung’s new 55-inch 3D LCD television promises to be the next big thing to hit television.  Using special “active shutter” glasses, the image is presented in 3D at 240HZ.

Obviously, Disney and Pixar can attest to the success of 3D movies in theaters, but it remains to be seen how much of an impact 3D has in homes, and how many people will be able to afford the new technology.

One of the biggest barriers to the e-book has been the strain they put on the eyes and the constant battery drain. Most of these problems are massively alleviated with the invention of electronic paper. Instead of being backlit and actively projected like traditional screens, e-paper only consumes energy when the image on the screen is changed. In addition, they use reflected light to be read instead of backlights which consume energy.

If this technology is someday put into widespread use around the globe, it could save incalculable numbers of trees from being cut down. Also, with memory storage technology advancing at the rate it is, whole libraries will soon be able to fit into these devices.  There is also the issue of being able to search through electronic text far more efficiently than paper books.

At the moment, the most prominent consumer product to use the technology is Amazon’s Kindle, but it is also being used to make energy effiicient cell phone displays and watches. Although this technology is still in its infancy, it would not surprise me in the slightest if I read to my grandchildren from an e-book using it someday.

Just as LCD and plasma screens push CRTs out of the market, there arrives a new contender, in the form of the Organic Light-Emitting Diode display. Unlike LCD and even standard LED screens, OLED displays require no backlighting. This has the dual benefit of making them extremely thin and far more energy efficient.  Since each pixel creates its own light, they are also capable of incredible refresh rates and amazing contrast ratios.

OLEDs are also potentially capable of feats that, before now, were confined to science fiction. These screens can be transparent and/or flexible, giving them applications such as functioning as a Heads Up Display in cars and airplanes.

However, for all of these advantages, OLED screens are not without drawbacks. They are, for the moment, ridiculously expensive to manufacture, and this cost increases the larger the display becomes. There also remain concerns about their longevity. However, once these issues are cleared up, we will certainly have taken another large step forward in display technology.