Right. They're playing with the definition of "unauthorised" and with most people's understanding of copyright to make the act of ripping sound illegal.
The act of offering the files via p2p probably was illegal, but the act of copying them to his computer was legal, despite being unauthorised by the RIAA. The copy was authorised by the US government under the principles of Fair Use.
What does the word "copyright" even mean? You didn't buy a license, you bought a copy.
At least, I assume so. I know that none of the CDs in my house have a license on them, and I certainly never agreed to any such license in the store where I purchased them.
The thing that'll make Android "pop" is if they come up with a way to separate their phones from the carriers, so that we Americans can be like everyone else in the world, where they buy a phone, and THEN they worry about finding a carrier for it, and all phones work with all carriers. You can already do this. The phones just cost a whole lot more. I don't see why the cost of the phones would change suddenly because of Android.
This is the fatal flaw with Apple's iPhone. It looked really cool, but when people found out they were required to only use AT&T, and had no choice in the carrier, many lost interest. A lot of people are sick of the cellular carriers, and how they get locked into one carrier for a long contract with a crappy phone, and changing to a new carrier means buying a new phone. Most carriers have a free model that you can buy with a new contract. Getting a new phone may not be fun for everyone (having to transfer numbers, and such) but I can't believe that many people consider it that much of a hassle.
People may well be tired of carriers, but they're pretty deeply entrenched in this way of life. Until they can get cheap, unlocked phones, and until these phones are heavily advertised, they're just going to go to the carrier store to buy their next phone.
We're starting to see this situation unravel already with the announcement by Verizon that they're going to abandon CDMA and move to a GSM network, which will only leave Sprint in the CDMA camp. I don't really understand the relevance here. Can you explain? Does it have to do with Sprint throwing in with Google on Android?
As for the "enterprisey" features, WTF cares? Even though the iPhone isn't exactly a slam-dunk, it's still doing well in the market without catering to the Crackberry addicts. Let RIM have that market. Most people don't want a phone with enterprise features; they want a phone for all their personal needs, and have no desire to be connected to their work email 24/7. Well, the iPhone is an anomaly here, but it integrates nicely with other Apple products, and it's a sleek, sexy device, and it's gotten marketing up the wazoo, so yeah, it's been successful. But it's not particularly successful in the corporate sector. There's plenty of speculation as to why, but lack of integration with corporate e-mail may be one factor.
Android, being an OS, will be on lots of phones. Few companies will likely market their phones in such a way as to gain significant marketshare. They need some sort of hook, or else it's just going to be another phone OS. There's nothing particularly wrong with it being just another phone OS, but that's certainly not 'popping.'
It's going to be really hard to shake up the cell phone industry. I just can't see Android doing it.
Apple really has little to fear from Google. Google has a long history of making good products--even products superior to what's out there--but failing to grab the marketshare. The only place where they're absolutely on top is with search.
Android looks like a really neat platform, but it's a geek platform. It won't have the enterprisey features that business people want (primarily Exchange integration) and from the looks of things, it doesn't have the sleek design that has captured the hip market (like the iPhone has.) It will almost certainly be priced comparably to other smart phones, with nothing to set it apart for the average customer.
I really hope that I'll be proven wrong, but so far, I just don't see anything that makes Android pop.
Google Reader is an RSS aggregator. For quite some time now, it's had a sharing feature--that is, you can mark an RSS item as "shared." When you mark an item in this way, it appears on your Google Reader Share page. The share page looks like a blog page with all of the items you've shared (in their entirety--at least as far as the RSS summary goes.) Anyone who knows your unique URL can access your Google Reader Share page and see items you've decided to make public.
The problem that some people have is that they made items public and gave the URL out to only a few people. They thought that because they used a public resource in this way (by minimizing who knew the user->url mapping), that they were maintaining their privacy. Then, when Google decided to effectively give the user->url mapping to anyone on your Google Talk list, these people felt betrayed.
Everyone's also talking about GMail in all of this because Google Talk automatically updates your contacts list with any GMail account with whom you have corresponded using your own GMail address. If you use the same username for all of your Google applications, and so do many of your friends and family, this can mean that a large number of people now know your user->url mapping.
Really, lables are no different from folders. People just have a hard time changing the way they think about things. It's a universal human trait.
Google's specific implementation of labels, however, leaves a little to be desired. For one thing, it would be nice if labels could be nested, or collapsed or hidden in some way. Having a long column of labels kinda sucks. In your example, I might never want to browse the UK label alone--I may only care about it in conjunction with the Friends label. If that's the case, I don't want to see UK on my list of labels on the left side of my browser screen. Nested labels would effectively allow this, but only showing the top level, and expanding it if you want to see more.
It also wreaks havoc with IMAP folders. Google...mostly managed to work around this, but it's a hack.
But Google never said that sharing was limited to one person. In the real world, we can do things like that. On the Internet, it should be obvious that if there isn't an explicit way to limit access to a resource (through the use of a password, for example) then that resource isn't restricted.
It's a public page. In this case, share with someone = everyone in the world being able to see it. If you want to share it with just a few people, e-mail them the link to the damned item.
The thing that I can't get over is that this was already public information. If I found your public feed and sent it to your friends and family, while you might be mad at me, no one would claim that it was a privacy violation.
The only problem here is with bad software design. Generally speaking, features not essential to the operation of the software should be toggleable. "No, Google, I don't want to spam my friends with my latest shared feeds."
I've heard a lot of complaints of 'throttling' even on the ISP I'm on who don't throttle anything at all. I'm not convinced anyone is doing it. There are companies that specialize in traffic shaping devices which do just this. It's possible that no one actually uses the devices, but if that's true, it's odd that these companies are still in business.
Then there's the Comcast thing, which isn't throttling in the strictest sense (instead of dropping packets, they send a RST after a few seconds.)
Basically BitTorrent is slow because you always end up downloading from people on dialup etc. instead of downloading from a fast mirror as you do with FTP. Plus unless your firewall is wide open you aren't uploading.. which means the trackers will throttle you because your upload ratios are too low. BitTorrent is a boon to content distributors, since it takes some of the weight off of their servers. It can be faster overall than just FTP for popular releases, because the sum total upload rate of a thousand cable users may well exceed the upload rate of the torrent/FTP host. However that just means that it will be faster to distribute those thousand copies to all of the users--it doesn't mean that one individual user wouldn't have gotten it faster by downloading it directly.
The service allows you to visit the web portion of BitTorrent trackers without revealing your IP. I'm not even sure there's much value in that, but nevertheless, he's running a server and showing ads on it. If you don't want to deal with the ads, find another anonymizer (and use a different browser.)
How is this any different from Kazaa charging for pirating media? Except that with this service you're slightly less likely to get caught. I don't know much about KaZaA's business model. Were they charging for the use of the network? Charging for the software? Displaying ads in the software? Does it even matter in this context (for that matter, what context do you care about? Legal? Moral? Other?)
By in large our education system has become nothing more than a good 'ol boy network. The phrase is "by and large," but the irony wasn't lost on me.
Regardless, your analysis of the businesses is fairly accurate. It's really a very dangerous bubble. People work hard for gains in the short term. It makes some sense on a personal level--they rise up a bit because of those decisions--but it's pretty bad for the company and economy as a whole.
Actually, you want to do the opposite: use VMWare for your dangerous browsing, and keep your host system as clean as possible. If you do your important stuff in VMWare, a keylogger/screen capture trojan will still get your info.
Even better, there's little need to reimage periodically (though you certainly can) as you're expecting VMWare's guest to get compromised.
Of course, if enough people start doing this, then the malware authors will start targetting the VMWare installation and infecting the host.
You might get away with some iframe hackery, but even that seems extremely unlikely. JavaScript is NOT threaded. I don't care how many times you, or others like you, want it to be -- the day we have to make a single webpage threaded is the day that webpage can no longer be a webpage, as we know it today. The only way it would continue to be a webpage at all is if we redefine the concept of "webpage". This really struck me for some reason. I think it's the conflation of webpages and Javascript into an inseparable lump. It hasn't always been that way. There was a time when Javascript wasn't integral to a web viewing experience. But more and more people started using it, they started doing really cool things with it, and now there are many sites that are designed on it.
But here's the key--they were designed on crappy tools. Javascript has a lot of problems--including lack of concurrency--that don't make it a particularly good application platform. And yet we've turned it into one, not only with "AJAX" applications, but with Firefox itself (much of the user interface is written in Javascript.)
We're in the middle of a web redesign right now--going from static or even dynamically generated webpages to dymanic webpages and web applications. If things are going to continue to head in this direction, we really need to make sure that the tools on which we are building this new web are up to the task. Fixing Javascript is probably the least-painful solution, because the more elegant one--designing a better scripting language--would fail.
Just because no other browser provides it, that doesn't mean they don't need it. And you can argue that Firefox needs it most of all, since it's got such awful memory problems.
I use Opera for 99% of my browsing, and Firefox for those few pages that just don't seem to work. It's extremely rare, but at least I don't need to have so many tabs in the bad browser--I can just put them in Opera.
The downside is that they both use quite a chunk of memory, just being open, so having to have both open is pretty wasteful.
Did you read through the source code for Foxmarks? They could be stealing your bookmarks AS WE SPEAK!
More seriously, most of the time, I don't even bother with bookmarks. Google does a fantastic job of helping me find things I want to keep track of. It's usually only when I've hunted something really esoteric down that I need to keep track of it, and usually I'll e-mail myself a note of it so that I can access it wherever I am.
I used to do that, but I just use RSS now. Specifically Google Reader, since it can be used wherever I am (really nice since it works quite well on my phone.) It's got the benefit of remembering which stories I've read, keeping a list of interesting ones (with tags and stars), etc. I highly recommend it--it reduces memory consumption by quite a bit.
It's a horrible interface. The recent beta (9.5) made it quite a bit faster, but it's still pretty sluggish. Worse, some sites don't make it obvious where the flash is coming from, making it pretty hard to track down and allow it. Similarly for enabling Javascript on a per-site basis. There's just nothing quite like Noscript.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. They're playing with the definition of "unauthorised" and with most people's understanding of copyright to make the act of ripping sound illegal.
The act of offering the files via p2p probably was illegal, but the act of copying them to his computer was legal, despite being unauthorised by the RIAA. The copy was authorised by the US government under the principles of Fair Use.
I am not a lawyer, but I play one on Slashdot.
NO NO NO!
What does the word "copyright" even mean? You didn't buy a license, you bought a copy.
At least, I assume so. I know that none of the CDs in my house have a license on them, and I certainly never agreed to any such license in the store where I purchased them.
People may well be tired of carriers, but they're pretty deeply entrenched in this way of life. Until they can get cheap, unlocked phones, and until these phones are heavily advertised, they're just going to go to the carrier store to buy their next phone. We're starting to see this situation unravel already with the announcement by Verizon that they're going to abandon CDMA and move to a GSM network, which will only leave Sprint in the CDMA camp. I don't really understand the relevance here. Can you explain? Does it have to do with Sprint throwing in with Google on Android? As for the "enterprisey" features, WTF cares? Even though the iPhone isn't exactly a slam-dunk, it's still doing well in the market without catering to the Crackberry addicts. Let RIM have that market. Most people don't want a phone with enterprise features; they want a phone for all their personal needs, and have no desire to be connected to their work email 24/7. Well, the iPhone is an anomaly here, but it integrates nicely with other Apple products, and it's a sleek, sexy device, and it's gotten marketing up the wazoo, so yeah, it's been successful. But it's not particularly successful in the corporate sector. There's plenty of speculation as to why, but lack of integration with corporate e-mail may be one factor.
Android, being an OS, will be on lots of phones. Few companies will likely market their phones in such a way as to gain significant marketshare. They need some sort of hook, or else it's just going to be another phone OS. There's nothing particularly wrong with it being just another phone OS, but that's certainly not 'popping.'
It's going to be really hard to shake up the cell phone industry. I just can't see Android doing it.
Apple isn't really trying for the smartphone market, though. They're trying for the slightly-more-intelligent-than-basic-phone market.
Apple really has little to fear from Google. Google has a long history of making good products--even products superior to what's out there--but failing to grab the marketshare. The only place where they're absolutely on top is with search.
Android looks like a really neat platform, but it's a geek platform. It won't have the enterprisey features that business people want (primarily Exchange integration) and from the looks of things, it doesn't have the sleek design that has captured the hip market (like the iPhone has.) It will almost certainly be priced comparably to other smart phones, with nothing to set it apart for the average customer.
I really hope that I'll be proven wrong, but so far, I just don't see anything that makes Android pop.
Microsoft Bob was released. Did you forget the definition of Vaporware?
Yeah. Luckily, this data was made public by the Google Reader user when they clicked on the "Share" button.
Google Reader is an RSS aggregator. For quite some time now, it's had a sharing feature--that is, you can mark an RSS item as "shared." When you mark an item in this way, it appears on your Google Reader Share page. The share page looks like a blog page with all of the items you've shared (in their entirety--at least as far as the RSS summary goes.) Anyone who knows your unique URL can access your Google Reader Share page and see items you've decided to make public.
The problem that some people have is that they made items public and gave the URL out to only a few people. They thought that because they used a public resource in this way (by minimizing who knew the user->url mapping), that they were maintaining their privacy. Then, when Google decided to effectively give the user->url mapping to anyone on your Google Talk list, these people felt betrayed.
Everyone's also talking about GMail in all of this because Google Talk automatically updates your contacts list with any GMail account with whom you have corresponded using your own GMail address. If you use the same username for all of your Google applications, and so do many of your friends and family, this can mean that a large number of people now know your user->url mapping.
Man. Now I wish that I hadn't posted a comment in this thread, just so that I could mod you insightful.
It's true for others. People just didn't pay attention. Everyone clicks through warnings, thanks to Microsoft.
Thanks, Microsoft. You just ruined my Christmas!
The fact athat you had to quote "private" in "private URL" speaks to the fact that you know that the URL isn't private. It's obfuscated, nothing more.
Really, lables are no different from folders. People just have a hard time changing the way they think about things. It's a universal human trait.
Google's specific implementation of labels, however, leaves a little to be desired. For one thing, it would be nice if labels could be nested, or collapsed or hidden in some way. Having a long column of labels kinda sucks. In your example, I might never want to browse the UK label alone--I may only care about it in conjunction with the Friends label. If that's the case, I don't want to see UK on my list of labels on the left side of my browser screen. Nested labels would effectively allow this, but only showing the top level, and expanding it if you want to see more.
It also wreaks havoc with IMAP folders. Google...mostly managed to work around this, but it's a hack.
But Google never said that sharing was limited to one person. In the real world, we can do things like that. On the Internet, it should be obvious that if there isn't an explicit way to limit access to a resource (through the use of a password, for example) then that resource isn't restricted.
It's a public page. In this case, share with someone = everyone in the world being able to see it. If you want to share it with just a few people, e-mail them the link to the damned item.
Perhaps you shouldn't expect so much.
The thing that I can't get over is that this was already public information. If I found your public feed and sent it to your friends and family, while you might be mad at me, no one would claim that it was a privacy violation.
The only problem here is with bad software design. Generally speaking, features not essential to the operation of the software should be toggleable. "No, Google, I don't want to spam my friends with my latest shared feeds."
Then there's the Comcast thing, which isn't throttling in the strictest sense (instead of dropping packets, they send a RST after a few seconds.) Basically BitTorrent is slow because you always end up downloading from people on dialup etc. instead of downloading from a fast mirror as you do with FTP. Plus unless your firewall is wide open you aren't uploading.. which means the trackers will throttle you because your upload ratios are too low. BitTorrent is a boon to content distributors, since it takes some of the weight off of their servers. It can be faster overall than just FTP for popular releases, because the sum total upload rate of a thousand cable users may well exceed the upload rate of the torrent/FTP host. However that just means that it will be faster to distribute those thousand copies to all of the users--it doesn't mean that one individual user wouldn't have gotten it faster by downloading it directly.
Regardless, your analysis of the businesses is fairly accurate. It's really a very dangerous bubble. People work hard for gains in the short term. It makes some sense on a personal level--they rise up a bit because of those decisions--but it's pretty bad for the company and economy as a whole.
Actually, you want to do the opposite: use VMWare for your dangerous browsing, and keep your host system as clean as possible. If you do your important stuff in VMWare, a keylogger/screen capture trojan will still get your info.
Even better, there's little need to reimage periodically (though you certainly can) as you're expecting VMWare's guest to get compromised.
Of course, if enough people start doing this, then the malware authors will start targetting the VMWare installation and infecting the host.
But here's the key--they were designed on crappy tools. Javascript has a lot of problems--including lack of concurrency--that don't make it a particularly good application platform. And yet we've turned it into one, not only with "AJAX" applications, but with Firefox itself (much of the user interface is written in Javascript.)
We're in the middle of a web redesign right now--going from static or even dynamically generated webpages to dymanic webpages and web applications. If things are going to continue to head in this direction, we really need to make sure that the tools on which we are building this new web are up to the task. Fixing Javascript is probably the least-painful solution, because the more elegant one--designing a better scripting language--would fail.
Just because no other browser provides it, that doesn't mean they don't need it. And you can argue that Firefox needs it most of all, since it's got such awful memory problems.
I'm in the same boat.
I use Opera for 99% of my browsing, and Firefox for those few pages that just don't seem to work. It's extremely rare, but at least I don't need to have so many tabs in the bad browser--I can just put them in Opera.
The downside is that they both use quite a chunk of memory, just being open, so having to have both open is pretty wasteful.
Did you read through the source code for Foxmarks? They could be stealing your bookmarks AS WE SPEAK!
More seriously, most of the time, I don't even bother with bookmarks. Google does a fantastic job of helping me find things I want to keep track of. It's usually only when I've hunted something really esoteric down that I need to keep track of it, and usually I'll e-mail myself a note of it so that I can access it wherever I am.
I used to do that, but I just use RSS now. Specifically Google Reader, since it can be used wherever I am (really nice since it works quite well on my phone.) It's got the benefit of remembering which stories I've read, keeping a list of interesting ones (with tags and stars), etc. I highly recommend it--it reduces memory consumption by quite a bit.
Yes, it does, and I use it, however....
It's a horrible interface. The recent beta (9.5) made it quite a bit faster, but it's still pretty sluggish. Worse, some sites don't make it obvious where the flash is coming from, making it pretty hard to track down and allow it. Similarly for enabling Javascript on a per-site basis. There's just nothing quite like Noscript.