WWdN: In Exile

Dear Lazy Web: Video Cameras?

Dear Lazy Web: I'm thinking about getting an inexpensive (<$300) (Let's go $400-$450. I guess <$300 isn't realistic for the features I want) small video camera to take with me on all my Geek Tour stops this summer, starting with Mysterious Galaxy and the Stone World Bistro this weekend.

I haven't had time to do the normal amount of research I'd like to do, but I'm sure at least one of you out there on the interweebs has.

The only thing I know I do not want is something that records onto DVDs. We reviewed lots of those on inDigital, and they all sucked out loud. I think I want something that records to a hard drive or solid state memory instead of tapes. HD isn't that important to me if it adds too much to the price, and I don't have a particular brand loyalty or aversion. I assume that whatever I get will play nice with iMovie. Oh, and I need to be able to pick it up by Friday.

If you've got a suggestion on something to consider or avoid at all costs, would you leave a comment? Maybe we'll have the bonus side effect of building a useful list for other people, too.

KTHXBAI.

audio greetings from mount needaplotpoint

With Vozme, you can turn any chunk of English text into an MP3 file by clicking one button. It's far from perfect, and isn't as clear as using the "speak" thing on my Mac (Oh, Vicki, tell me that you love me!) but it gets the job done quickly and easily, especially if you're supposed to be working and really want to be screwing off instead.

I just amused myself by converting a bit of my forthcoming Angel One review for TV Squad into a weird robotic voice.

Enjoy: Download mp3_angel_one.mp3 (136KB mp3 file)

(Vozme was found via Lifehacker)

DRM and the DMCA: so stupid it makes me want to punch babies

I hate DRM. I hate it so much, I want to punch babies. DRM's mere existence infuriates me, because it's anti-consumer, turns honest customers into criminals, and does nothing to stop dedicated pirates.

You've read my blog before, so this is nothing new. DRM is in my mind today, however, because of two links I read at boingboing.

Link the first:

Wellington Grey has a great little slideshow about the idiocy of the DMCA's "anti-circumvention" measures, which prohibit breaking the digital locks off the stuff you own. In it, Grey recounts how offended he was when he bought a TomTom GPS that came with a CD in a sealed envelope, the seal on which read, "By breaking this seal, you agree to our contract," but the contract itself was on the CD, behind the seal. In other words, the CD said, "By breaking this seal, you agree to a bunch of secret stuff."

I saw this on Reddit last week, and meant to link it then. Whoops. Anyway, I love how this guy explains just how fucking stupid and pointless DRM is, and that he shows us what would happen if DRM and the DMCA were applied to real world objects. It's good perspective that's useful for explaining to technophobes (and congress critters) why these things need to go away. Now.

Link the second:

Techdirt reports that Steve Jobs has been pitching studio execs on a scheme whereby DVD owners can pay extra for the "privilege" of ripping their DVDs -- but only for playback on iPods and iPhones. The thing is, Jobs fought the music industry back in the early iTunes day, arguing that people who buy CDs should have the right to rip them without paying anything extra.

So what's the difference? DRM -- Digital Rights Management. This is the anti-copying software that studios put on DVDs, allegedly to "stop piracy." But DRM isn't doing anything to stop piracy (people who want to pirate DVDs just break the DRM, because it's impossible to stop determined attackers from copying bits on their own computers). It seems like the primary use for DRM is to sell you back the rights you used to get for free, so that the studios can pick your pocket every time you find a new way to use the media you buy from them.

That second link reminds me of the first time I encountered some sort of restrictive, proprietary "software": when I was 9, my mom let me buy this really cool cap gun. It was so awesome! It looked just like a real gun (this was in 1979, when things like this were harmless fun for a suburban 9 year-old) and you could load this strip of plastic caps into a clip that went into the handle. When you fired it, it went off with a satisfying bang, and ejected one spent cap like it was a shell.

I didn't want to ever shoot someone for real, and as an adult I don't have any interest in owning a gun, but when I was 9, this thing was the coolest toy, ever, and it was the perfect addition to my James Bond superspy roleplaying adventures with the other kids in my neighborhood.

The thing was, I could only load the gun with a particular type of refill, and if the store was out of those refills -- but flush with all of the "standard" strips and rings of caps -- my really cool gun instantly became a useless piece of plastic and metal that only made whatever "bang bang" noise I could create myself . . . just like the kids up the block who used Legos to make guns that didn't make an awesome "BANG" but more of a 9 year-old vocalized "bang".

Of course, the proprietary caps were more expensive than the standard caps, and after a few months they went off the shelf, never to return. The cap gun became a paperweight, and was sold at a garage sale.

It's not exactly a 1:1 on DRM, but I believe the fundamental concept is the same: a manufacturer uses some restrictive bit of technology to lock consumers into one format and one device. It's stupid, it's anti-consumer, and it makes me stabby.

RIAA, through SoundExchange, is lying to webcasters

The RIAA and its goonsquad, SoundExchange, is working very hard to destroy internet radio, by forcing webcasters to pay royalties that will run from 60%-300% of their annual revenue. For context, satellite radio pays 5%-7%, and over-the-air broadcasters pay nothing.

Why is the RIAA trying so hard to destroy Internet Radio? I wrote in a Geek in Review a while ago:

Because the RIAA (which is essentially the major labels) has spent a lot of time and a lot of money building a monopoly with a few media conglomerates, and it's been very profitable for them all for decades. 

This effort to wipe out independent online radio has nothing to do with protecting artists, and everything to do with protecting a status quo that supports a very few top 40 acts at the expense of everyone else. In their effort to protect their outdated business model and insanely corrupt relationship with a few broadcasters, the RIAA is happy to prevent their artists from having a magnificent way to reach potential customers who will buy albums, merchandise, and concert tickets.

I am rather worked up about this because I believe it's about choice. The airwaves in the United States are supposedly owned by the American people, and licensed out to broadcasters for use, but in practice, that's not the way it works at all. In practice, the airwaves are owned by Clear Channel, and they work hand-in-hand with the big four record labels to limit our choice of music. It's a great scam they've got going, and it's been a very profitable system for all of them for a very long time.

For the rest of us, though, this system sucks. For guys like me who can't stand top 40 music, who can't stand the utter crap they play on KROQ these days, and who want some fucking variety in their music, we're screwed . . .

. . .with the notable exception of Internet radio, where we have choices as diverse as Radio Paradise, WFMU, Groove Salad, and Indie Pop Rocks.

Indie webcasters like SomaFM have been working tirelessly with the Save Net Radio Coalition to educate our representatives in congress so that legislation can be passed which would make it possible for these indie broadcasters to stay in business. The RIAA doesn't like this, so they're trying to fight it, but in a surprisingly competent move, Congress is forcing RIAA and its goonsquad SoundExchange to negotiate realistic and fair royalty rates with webcasters.

That brings us more or less up to today, where we discover that the RIAA is getting desperate, and doesn't like that it can't get its way simply by threatening a lot of people and paying off a lot of congressmen.

Rusty Hodge, the GM of SomaFM, has been in DC for a couple of months, working like crazy to save his business and an entire industry. He's been blogging about his experiences, sharing the little victories and big frustrations during the fight.

The RIAA must be afraid of Rusty and everyone who is working to save internet radio, because they've now resorted to outright lying to webcasters, in their latest efforts to threaten and scare them:

RIAA has SoundExchange issue press release to try and trick congress into thinking the royalty situation has been solved. Nice work guys.

The reason many people are signing is because they fear lawsuits from the RIAA. RIAA representatives have been calling webcasters and telling them if they didn't sign by Sep 15th, they would be operating in violation of the law. That's the only reason they signed.  It's like a Sporano's episode.

The only way that webcasters can escape the high royalty rates is by signing this current agreement and only playing SX affiliated label music. This means less independent music, and more big label music. Which is exactly what the RIAA wanted.

The press release Rusty is referring to is reprinted in his blog, but here's the short version: 24 webcasters signed an agreement with SoundExchange that gives them slightly-better royalty rates now, but expires in three years, putting them right back where they are today. If SoundExchange can scare enough indie webcasters into signing this horrible agreement, the RIAA will be able to go to congress and tell them that they really don't need to pass the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would permanently save internet radio by preventing the RIAA and SoundExchange from jacking up royalty rates so high, it would force indie webcasters out of business.

And this "deal" is actually a giant load of bullshit. According to Wired's Listening Post:

However, the agreement only covers artists and labels who are SoundExchange members.  Webcasters who sign the agreement but still want to play music from other bands would have to pay SoundExchange the higher per-song rates originally specified by the CRB for those songs, because that music is not part of the deal. In essence, small webcasters who sign have an economic incentive to avoid lesser-known music.

So that's what this is all about: stopping lesser-known music from even having a chance at finding an audience. The RIAA's major members -- Universal, Warner, Sony BMG, and EMI --  are trying to put indie webcasters out of business. They're not working to protect artists. They're working to protect their monopoly, and now they're lying to do it.

Geek in Review: Brave New World

This week's Geek in Review is about a communications revolution I see happening right now. It crosses generations, and it scares the absolute shit out of a lot of people who benefit from ignorance and the control of information.

Communication empowers people, and an empowered people are very, very scary to the powerful upper class who hope that we’ll just go away, right after we buy a lot of crap from them that we don’t need. And holy shit are they scared right now. The revolution may not be televised, but it’s being blogged, YouTubed, MySpaced, Facebooked, Dugg and Netscaped. Instead of embracing this new technology and the generation that’s growing up with it and taking it for granted, the big media conglomerates and their *AA organizations are spending time, money and energy they could be spending on creating awesome content on trying to destroy the technology that scares them. Is it any wonder the big media cabal want to destroy network neutrality? Is it any surprise that they’re clinging to stupid DRM schemes that punish honest customers and infect computers with rootkits?

The audience isn’t going to stop consuming content online, and creators aren’t going to go back to the old way of groveling at the feet of some network boss or studio head or label president, because they don’t have to anymore. Instead, they’ll just use inexpensive technology to put it all together, and use the Internet to distribute it directly to the audience. The studios have a choice now: continue their full-on war against consumers and technology, or join and benefit from the revolution.

This column has the potential to generate some discussion, you know . . . some communication. Am I nuts? Or does anyone else see or experience the revolution, too?

some netscape stuff

I really like working for Netscape. I wish I could talk about the insanely cool stuff that's coming up, but I've already said too much.

Instead, I thought I'd point out this nifty widget we have for people who are interested in tracking what's on our homepage. If you're not interested in the homepage stories, but want to see exactly what I am submitting, you can use this spiffy little widget to see my latest submissions.

Here are the widgets in action. They use flash, and you probably can't see them if you're reading via RSS:

darryl issa is an idiot

Rusty Hodge, the GM of SomaFM, has been posting updates from Washington, where he is attempting to help congress understand why we should all save internet radio.

His latest dispatch shows just how idiotic our congresscritters are:

[California Republican Darryl] Issa spoke a lot about HD radio, and the threat it makes to sale of CDs. He is under the impression that the 64kb or lower compressed digital audio sounds as good as CD. HD does not stand for High Definition. It stands for "Hybrid Digital". Unlike HDTV, which improved the signal quality delivered to consumers, HD radio is not a marked improvement. Signal to noise ratios are improved, but there are audible compression artifacts in the audio.

Issa also talked about a flood of HD radio recording devices that automatically split tracks coming out soon. (I think he's extremely wrong on this, there is so little uptake on HD hardware, there are only 2 or 3 HD radios on the market right now, and they're selling very poorly. I've heard a statistic several times that say an American is more likely to be run over by a bus than they are to listen to HD radio in the last year.)

I would like to know why complete idiots like Issa, who clearly have such problems understanding technology, are given the responsibility of crafting legislation that affects technology, and those of us who use it.

Ted Stevens should get his staff to send Issa an Internet and let him know what an ignorant jackass he is.

UPDATE: Rusty has some further thoughts about this - Defending Issa (and other politicians).

Geek in Review: On the Benefits of Going Off The Grid

This week's Geek in Review was inspired by my technology-free vacation last week, where I learned the benefits of going off the grid:

This ultra-connected world we live in is really cool, isn’t it? Any information we could possibly want is literally at our fingertips: we get directions from Google Maps sent straight to our cell phones, our GPS devices ensure that we’re never lost (despite our best efforts) and the days of wondering what that actor’s name is, or what the lyric to that song actually was (Alex the Seal? What the hell does that mean?) are gone forever, replaced by just a few keystrokes at Google or Wikipedia.

Do you know the actual phone numbers of the people you call regularly? Or is that just saved in your cell phone? When you’re online, do you actually know your passwords, or are they auto-saved as well? Do you have a roadmap in your car, or a Thomas Guide? What would you do if you got lost without a cell phone or a GPS device? Have you ever stopped to think about how dependent we actually are on technology, and what we’d do if we suddenly lost it one day?

I think about it all the time, and I have considered trying my hand at writing a short SF story about what happens when all the technology we rely upon goes kaput one day. Because whenever anything bad happens to technology, the most correct way to describe it is “kaput.” I’m serious. Go look it up at Google, or go to the library and use the card catalog if you really want to see what I’m talking about.

If you don't have time to go to the library at the moment, keep reading: I unintentionally got to experience how it felt to be entirely “off the grid” and live a technology-free life for five days beginning last Thursday.

It turns out that it's very similar to the benefits of not being seen, without as many exploding larches.

About that blogger's choice thing? Turns out it's not so good. - UPDATED

I didn't realize that the Blogger's Choice Awards is sponsored by PayPerPost, which is at best deeply unethical, and at worst damn close to evil.

In essence, PayPerPost pays bloggers to post about companies, products, or services, without any disclosure at the top of the post which indicates the blogger is being paid to shill whatever they're shilling. It sure seems like the sketchy world of SEO to me, and undermines the legitimacy and hard work of a lot of bloggers who write about things they genuinely love and care about.

As a longtime blogger, I care a lot about this little chunk of the Intertubes we've sort of carved out for ourselves, and I believe that companies like this do us all much more harm than good. With that in mind, I wish I'd done my homework a little better before I posted earlier today. I can not, in good conscience, encourage anyone to sign up for or participate in anything they sponsor.

All of that said, I don't have any personal vendetta or whatever against Rosie O'Donnell. Other than the whacky Truther Conspiracy garbage, I actually agree with her damn close to 100% of the time politically, even if I find the way she posts in her blog rather off-putting. But one of the greatest strengths of the blog-o-sphere (a word I still hate) is that everyone get to express themselves and have their voice heard, in whatever way they choose to do it. This latest thing on The View? Yeah, I try to avoid that kind of celebrity drama, but where in the world was she going to get to tell her side of the story if not on her blog? How many times have I cheered the fact that I can tell my side of a story on my blog? One of the things that makes blogging so awesome -- and, in fact, the reason blogging gave me a second act in my life -- is that we can be as unedited or as edited as we all want to be. I regret that the dry humor I intended to convey earlier didn't come across. I keep forgetting that the Internets aren't the best venue for subtlety.

What's important, and what the point of this post is, is this: Everything I've read about PayPerPost, and every discussion I've had with my friends and people whom I trust leads me to believe it is an incredibly unethical company that is going to do more longterm harm to us as bloggers than good. I'm not going to promote anything they're involved in, and I hope everyone who reads this will join me. Don't vote for me; don't vote for anyone. In fact, read xkcd instead.

I'll leave my earlier post up for posterity, and because outright deleting something like this when new information comes to mind and comments have been left is pretty lame.

Afterthought: Some people associated with PayPerPost have posted comments, and tell me I have my facts wrong. I encourage everyone to read their side of things and make up your own mind.

To clarify my position on this whole thing: I've stopped reading dozens of blogs because the bloggers began filling their blog with sponsored posts, and I felt like I was watching a lot of commercials instead of reading whatever drew me to their blog in the first place.

Paying for editorial content is advertising, and mixing advertising with other content is misleading to the reader. When I read a newspaper, I can clearly discriminate between advertising and actual content, and give each one the appropriate amount of attention and credulity. When advertising begins to mingle with the actual content without clear and obvious measures taken to clarify for the reader what it is, I believe an ethical line has been crossed. I believe that PayPerPost should force disclosure at the very top of each paid post, and maybe even in the title; hey, if it's not such a big deal to include posts that you've been pad for, why not make it perfectly, unambiguously clear right at the beginning?

To be absolutely crystal clear: When I post about a product or service in my blog, I do so because it's something I genuinely like or think my readers will like, not because someone paid me to post about it.

But, as I said, the people behind PayPerPost disagree with me, so hear them out and make up your own minds.

flickr loves me

Flickr has apparently upgraded from "gamma" to "loves you."

Now I have to tell Flickr that I just want to be friends. This is going to be awkward.