Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Grokster decision: on to the appeals court

by

The Grokster decision — a ruling in Federal District Court on Friday that peer-to-peer file-trading services Grokster and Streamcast/Morpheus are not illegal — is being hailed as a victory for the computer user over the forces of copyright uber alles. And of course it is. In recognizing that, thanks to the precedent of the Betamax decision of the 1980s, the government should not outlaw a technology that has legitimate and legal uses even if some users employ it toward illegal ends, the court made a critically important distinction — one that every sophisticated user and software developer understands, but one that the so-called “intellectual property lobby” is determined to blur as it fights its own customers to preserve a dying business model. The court also seems to have accepted the essential difference between Napster’s central-server model of file-trading, which put the service in a middleman position that made it vulnerable to legal attack, and the new file-trading networks, whose true “peer-to-peer” architecture means that the software’s providers are not in a position to regulate what sorts of files users exchange. (Lawrence Lessig credits the Electronic Frontier Foundation for much of the hard lifting in the case.)

Still, it’s hardly time to cheer yet. Thanks to decades of Republican appointments, the federal courts of appeals tend to be extremely friendly to corporate interests. In theory the conservative judges are supposed to be believers in limiting the power of government — at least that’s the libertarian basis of much of conservative legal thought. So you’d think that they’d resist the music lobby’s infringements on individual freedom. In practice, however, it seems that many of these judges are actually believers in not limiting the powers of business — and they sway back and forth between laissez-faire logic and deference to government prerogatives depending on which favors the corporate side in any particular case.

It’s for analysts more legally trained than I am to guess at how soundly entrenched in the law the district court decision was, and how far a potentially hostile appellate court would have to dig in order to overturn it. Something tells me the appellate court may prove tough on the file-sharers. On the other hand, since the case was in Los Angeles, it will go before the Ninth Circuit, which has the reputation for making maverick moves — and for being regularly overturned by the Supreme Court, where I imagine all of this will end up.

Oh, right, the Supreme Court is even more dominated by conservatives than the appeals level.

Cavalcade of spam

by

Good piece in today’s N.Y. Times on the continuing explosion of spam: “America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches two billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the total its users receive.”

Anti-spam tools emerge, the spammers figure out a way around them, better tools come along, the spammers adapt — it’s a perfect example of what my friend and colleague, Andrew Leonard, described as “the technodialectic” in his fine book, “Bots.”

Me, I’m getting upwards of several hundred spams a day now. It’s the curse of having had public e-mail addresses on the Web now for eight years or so. I like my e-mail addresses; I refuse to give them up. SpamAssassin is doing a pretty good job of filtering out 99 percent of the crap right now.

What’s notable in Saul Hansell’s piece are the absurd self-justifications and defenses proffered by the spammers. Here’s what one says:

“These antispammers should get a life… Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?”

Last weekend I received nearly 1000 spam messages. No, my fingers don’t hurt. SpamAssassin is my friend, and I know how to hit “select all,” then “delete” in my filtered-spam mailbox.

But at this pace of spam growth the burden on the Net’s infrastructure will at some point become insupportable. Spammers are “free riders”; their defenses are ludicrous, and their abuse is a classic instance of the “tragedy of the commons.” The Internet is our commons. We need to keep working on better ways to keep it from getting choked by spam.

VisiCalc memories

by

As the father of twin three-year-old boys, I don’t get out much, I’m sorry to say. But I did head down to Silicon Valley last night for a special event hosted by the Computer History Museum. Titled “The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc,” the panel discussion featured Dan Bricklin, who dreamed up VisiCalc; Bob Frankston, responsible for coding it; and Mitch Kapor, the father of Lotus 1-2-3, which succeeded VisiCalc in the spreadsheet marketplace. Microsoft’s Charles Simonyi moderated.

The story of VisiCalc is the stuff of software-industry legend: It is widely viewed as the original “killer app” for personal computing (though Simonyi said that that term was actually first applied to Lotus 1-2-3 and only later retroactively extended to VisiCalc itself). People would see a demo of the spreadsheet, or see a friend using it, and decide to go out and buy a computer so they could use it.

VisiCalc first achieved its popularity on the Apple II, but it ceded its market to Lotus when the IBM PC arrived: 1-2-3, which was coded to take advantage of the PC’s 16-bit processing (the Apple II and CP/M computers popular before the PC were 8-bit) seized the moment of this “platform transition” to take the lead. (The panel, which was being hosted at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, did not touch on the process by which Lotus, in turn, lost out to Microsoft’s Excel, as part of Microsoft’s cementing of its “Office suite” dominance in the ’90s.)

Though this is an oft-told story in the annals of computing, I learned a number of new things from listening to Bricklin and Frankston.

Bricklin explained that his father was a printer and that’s how he learned the importance of prototyping, doing quick mockups for customers first before you committed to stuff that was hard to change. He showed a manual page from a typesetting terminal, the Harris 2200, that also served as one inspiration for the spreadsheet, with its separate layers of data, calculations and formatting. He also mentioned that it was his background in computerized typesetting that inculcated in him the principle of “keystroke minimization” — because in that field, people were actually paid by the keystroke.

Bricklin and the other panelists agreed that VisiCalc succeeded because it was different from the kind of financial forecasting software that already existed — it was a free-form, general purpose tool, an electronic “back of the envelope.” It allowed non-programmers to do things at a level of complexity that, previously, you had to learn programming to accomplish.

Bricklin and Frankston recalled that their initial efforts to promote VisiCalc did not meet universal enthusiasm. Experienced computer people weren’t bowled over, Bricklin said; they would dismiss the spreadsheet with, “Hey, I can already do most of this in BASIC.” People who had no experience with computers tended to think that computers could do anything under the sun, and so VisiCalc didn’t wow them. “But when the accountants saw it — there was an accountant [at a particular computer store], he started shaking — he said, ‘This is what I do all day!'”

Kapor closed out the discussion with a tribute to this pioneering piece of software: “VisiCalc literally changed my life. It was a complete inspiration. I don’t think people remember what impact it had. It had an elegant minimalism — it got out of your way… My goal in life was to design something that could stand next to VisiCalc without embarrassment.”

As someone who was an undergraduate in Cambridge at the same time in the late ’70s that Bricklin was dreaming of a “magic typable blackboard” at the Harvard Business School, I found Bricklin’s photos from that era (posted on his own Web site here) evocative. Since I spent a lot of time in that era working on Compugraphic typesetting machines, I was amused and intrigued to hear him acknowledge his debt to the world of that technology.

Bricklin also displayed a copy of Inc. magazine from Jan. 1982, with a cover story on “The Birth of a New Industry” and a cover shot of Bricklin and Frankston. (You can see it on Bricklin’s site here.) As the photo appeared on the screen at the front of the lecture hall, someone in the crowd shouted, “Same shirt!” Then and now, Bricklin favored the plaid flannel look.

COPA news

by

Those of you with long memories will recall the saga of the Child Online Protection Act, once known as “CDA II.” “CDA I,” an effort to restrict “indecent” communications online, was struck down by the courts as an unconstitutionally broad restriction of free speech on the Net. The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was Congress’s attempt to outlaw or restrict porn online by drawing a narrower standard that might pass legal muster. The ACLU sued the government, immediately after the bill was signed into law in 1998, on behalf of Salon and a group of other plaintiffs representing a broad swath of online publishing and businesses who felt the new law was also highly problematic. (You can read Salon’s original editorial on the matter here.) The ACLU and our plaintiffs’ group won in district court, and won again at the appeals court level. The Supreme Court offered a complex mixed ruling last year that essentially sent the law back to the appeals court for further review.

Well, the appeals court issued a ruling late yesterday, in favor of ACLU and the plaintiffs. According to the ruling, “COPA’s reliance on ‘community standards’ to identify material ‘harmful to minors’ could not meet the exacting standards of the First Amendment.’ ”

I don’t doubt that the Ashcroft Justice Department will wish to challenge this ruling once more — it has 90 days to decide. And so the whole thing is likely to end up back before the Supreme Court once more.

10 years of digital storytelling

by

If you’re in the Bay Area you should consider this event Thursday evening at the Yerba Buena Center: “Voices Known: Celebrating 10 Years of Digital Storytelling.” This is a kind of anniversary party for the Berkeley-based Center for Digital Storytelling, a major hub — maintained by Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen — of the digital storytelling movement that I’ve been writing about, on and off, for years now. It’s a live performance featuring Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Awele Makeba, Brenda Wong Aoki/Mark Izu, Scott Wells and more. Tickets are $15-25 (info at 510 548 2065).

A good day for slashdotting

by

Some days Slashdot is just an endless loop of Microsoft-bashing and obscure developer jokes. Other days, like today, it’s a treasure trove.

First, they alerted me to this bit of browser-skulduggery: Did MSN deliberately set out to make Opera users get a “broken” version of its home page? I tend to be skeptical of such claims — on the Web, things break easily enough by themselves, so my default assumption is glitch before malevolence — but the Opera site’s explanation sure is persuasive.

Then I clicked over to this unbelievably fascinating explanation of the continuing mystery of hiccups. It seems that the latest theory suggests they are related to that stage of our evolutionary development when we had gills; and fetuses hiccup as they’re recapitulating that stage. But read the New Scientist piece for yourself.

That old broadband song

by

“Broadband” is in the news again, sigh. The word has a huge capacity for mischief, since it means so many different things to different people. Today broadband means high-speed, always-on Internet connectivity, usually delivered via cable or DSL. Broadband is, we’re told, the axe that will break AOL and the torch that will fire up the tech economy once more.

I’ve been a broadband skeptic for years based on my own experience and my observations of my friends. I don’t think broadband “transforms the Web experience”; it just fixes it. Broadband makes the Web work the way it’s supposed to.

What broadband does not do, and will not do, is turn the Web back into a TV-style broadcast medium — which, I’m afraid, is what Hollywood and the media industry keep crossing their fingers and hoping will come to pass. Sorry, guys.

To be sure, broadband does enable all sorts of interesting peer-to-peer and Web services-style applications. Wonderful. Only Hollywood and the media companies, far from investing in new ways to use this broadband potential, are actually terrified of these tools.

Truth is, right now broadband is just a good, reliable way to get your e-mail, read your Web sites and maybe download some music files. And that’s what it will remain until someone comes along to show us the next great thing.

I like the way Mitch Ratcliffe put it in a recent post:

  The unexpected will decide this market. That is, someone is going to come up with an engaging client that turns broadband into a symphony of excitement people will flock to. And, frankly, that game is still wide open to all the players, dial-up laggards included.

Actually, Napster was that “engaging client.” Look what happened to it.

No future? The Well is well

by

I respect Dave Winer — and, as the founder of UserLand, which supplies the software this and all Salon Blogs run on, he is a business partner and general godfather of our little corner of the blogosphere. But he wrote something today that I need to offer a different perspective on.

  At a party last week I met the former CEO of The Well, Maria Alioto. We talked about her experience. A total parallel to AOL. Good start, probably was necessary for the Web to get going. The core of the West Coast Web. The meeting place for the future staff of Wired and EFF. All good things. But in the mid-90s when she came on, it had no future. As AOL had no future when Time-Warner was snookered into taking their stock.

I’m assuming this refers to Maria Wilhelm, who was Well CEO at a time when, yes, the folks who owned the Well had a notion of trying to compete with AOL. That didn’t work for a bunch of reasons — including a very important one, that the Well’s users didn’t want it to be like AOL.

But to say that the Well had “no future” then is demonstrably wrong, unless “future” means “big growth that grabs the attention of Wall Street,” which is not what I think Dave means. The Well had the future then that you can find in its present existence — as a thriving online community with thousands of interesting posts each week. So what if it didn’t grow to become AOL-sized? The Well was always a different beast — a for-pay community when that was unfashionable, a “closed door” space (only members can read most of the conferences) rather than a fully public environment, and an online place where posting under your real name is the norm, and you pretty much always know who you’re talking to. These attributes may not be what everyone is looking for as they choose their online homes, but they help make the Well unique.

Salon acquired the Well back in 1999 and from where I sit (as a Well member since, I think, 1990) it remains enormously important to us in many ways. Most of the Well remains “behind closed doors” to non-members, but if you’re interested in checking it out, you can look at a couple of areas that are open to anyone to read: the “Inkwell.vue” conference, which features interviews with authors (Cory Doctorow’s in there now); and the new “Pre.vue,” a members-organized conference that offers a taste of the range and depth of the Well’s conversations.

Opera fans

by

I’ve always loved Opera, the browser touted as “the fastest on earth.” I can’t confirm that claim but I know it’s always been fast and super configurable. There’s a new version out, it’s even faster, and I just upgraded. I like it.

But: One always upgrades at one’s peril. Here’s the catch: I used to keep a personal ordering of my bookmarks. Opera let me pick any order I wanted in the “hotlist” window, then that order would show up in the Bookmarks menu. But now, when I reorder the hotlist window, the Bookmarks menu is staying put, in dumb alphabetical order.

Bug? Feature? Any other Opera users out there know what to do about this?