unmediated

anonymous network, offering both UDP and TCP modes

"I2P is an anonymous network, exposing a simple layer that applications can use to anonymously and securely send messages to each other. The network itself is strictly message based (ala IP), but there is a library available to allow reliable streaming communication on top of it (ala TCP). All communication is end to end encrypted (in total there are four layers of encryption used when sending a message), and even the end points ("destinations") are cryptographic identifiers (essentially a pair of public keys)."

The Associated Press reported about a high school in Sparta that ordered its students to remove their online diaries from the Internet, citing a threat from cyberpredators.

[via the Boston Globe]

The school's principal told the school population in an assembly earlier this month to remove any personal journals they might have or risk suspension.

ficials said students aren't being silenced but rather told that they cannot post online writings about school or their personal lives. The Associated Press found no postings by users who mentioned the school. Profiles posted by other users include photos and detailed personal information on topics such as musical tastes, body measurements and sexual history.

Kurt Opsahl of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions the rights of bloggers, said there have been several attempts by private institutions elsewhere to restrict or censor students' Internet postings.

is the first time we've heard of such an overreaction," he said. "It would be better if they taught students what they should and shouldn't do online rather than take away the primary communication tool of their generation."

A spokeswoman of the school said parents of students who enroll in the schools sign contracts governing student behavior, including responsible Internet use.

That could dilute the students' free speech claims somewhat, acknowledged Ed Barocas, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

The iPod’s screen is by no means large, but if you understand the basics of codecs and video compression, you can make video podcasts that look really sharp.

" The Material eXchange Format (MXF) is an open file format targeted at the interchange of audio-visual material with associated data and metadata. It has been designed and implemented with the aim of improving file-based interoperability between servers, workstations and other content creation devices. These improvements should result inimproved workflows and result in more efficient working than is possible with today's mixed and proprietary files formats."

Yahoo has teamed up with Target to offer image printing to members of its online photo-sharing service, Flickr.

WiMAX World, running Oct. 26-28 in Boston, opened [yesterday] with a flurry of announcements. It's billed as the world's largest exclusively WiMax show. The show features 160+ sponsors and exhibitors and 130+ speakers.

The WiMAX World program covers every aspect of WiMAX and mobile broadband trends over 3 days and is said to feature the largest exhibition in the world of wireless and mobile broadband solutions.

The seven main conference tracks include:

• WiMAX Business Track
• WiMAX Technology Track
• WiMAX and Wireless Broadband for Municipalities
• WiMAX and VoIP Track
• WiMAX Deployments- Case Studies
• WiMAX Broadband Backhauls
• WiMAX Ecosystem led by WiMAX Forum

(Continued at Daily Wireless.)

: The Online Publishers Association (OPA) has released a white paper making recommendations for local website audience measurement. It compares data from these services: comScore Media Metrix, NetRatings, Scarborough Research, and The Media Audit.
Here's the ridiculousness of data: For LATimes.com, visitor data differed by one million between two services. The Media Audit, which uses phone surveys to report data, projected about 1.5 million visitors to the Southern California news site. ComScore's Media Metrix panel reported half a million readers.
A good guide, all in all.
Download the full white paper here (PDF file)

The director of the Women’s Game Conference says that games fail to attract as many women as men not because of the games themselves (as “there is such diversity in design”), but because there’s “an exclusionary system in place that uses advertising and magazines to create an environment that is hostile to many women.” (Exhibit A: midlife Lara Croft.)

Suzanne Freyjadis-Chuberka claims that having a few female readers of (or even women staff on) specialist mags only proves that the most persistent females have nothing else to read (or that they “buy into the lad culture when they write about themselves.”) Of course, a rebuttal from the major game mags was posted the day after, but a quick look at the pubs involved would seem to confirm the conference director’s outlook on the ads, if not her final analysis on media as a whole. (Exhibit B: Bloodrayne.)

The issue of women in games—and how to get more to play them—is not a new topic in the media by any means, but can anyone recall a game marketing campaign that was geared mainly towards women in the recent past (and not “primarily built on male fantasies”)?

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"Videoblogging and education go together like peanut butter and jelly. And all of sudden, there are a lot of sandwiches being made. Here’s some links to some recent activity on this front:"

The NEtROBOt project aims to establish a new concept of communication over the Internet, getting a feel of existence in the virtual world by using an actual robot "AIBO" as interface.

3D models of AIBO are displayed on a web page, and the physical AIBO reflects the communication of the AIBOs in the web 3D world. You can operate AIBO avatars on the Internet, and you can also make a music session with two or more other avatars by typing and hitting keys.

NEtROBOt uses "un-simultaneous session system", in which players do not need to operate in "real-time". You can play sounds and add on the past log.

If you make your actual AIBO dance manually, the virtual AIBO will synchronize and dance (AIBO2PC). A reverse flow (PC2AIBO), i.e., "AIBO operation on your screen, -> operation of actual AIBO" works similarly. AIBOs which met on the network can enjoy a dance and a music session as a "dance battle. The motion and sound will be recorded on a server as a log, and will be used in a session with the player of the future un-simultaneously.

Photon started NEtROBOt started in April 2002, and today there are hundreds of thousands of players.

Videos on the website.

NEtROBOt Project is exhibited at "META VISUAL:10e Anniversaire du Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography", Centre des Arts, Enghien-Les-Bains, through December 18, 2005.

jg21 writes "A brief essay on the SOA Web Services Journal claims there is a new phenomenon among startups, the 'momentary enterprise'. The article defines the term as a business that 'takes advantage of an opportunity that may only exist for months'. The piece claims that we're entering a golden age of technologies that can be glued together to create new types of information that fill an identifiable need. On example given is VOware like Groove, which is likened to IM on steroids. From the article: 'The ingredients for another wave of new companies are all around us - pervasively all around us. They include new wireless extensions of the wired network and the further exportation of technologies such as XML.' Intriguingly optimistic."

You tell Behaviour which elements do what and it adds the events for you... like CSS if you applied functions instead of styles

Paul Conley: "A portion of my life these days involves trying to explain blogging and the world of conversational media to B2B journalists. And these journalists are divided into three distinct camps."

Is there a connection between sound, vibrations and physical reality? Do sound and vibrations have the potential to create?

[Yet another] flickr for video. Revver lets you share your videos with thousands of people and earn money whenever someone watches. Revver is free and getting started is easy.

How quickly things change. For years, US telcos have been claimed that there was no need at all for network neutrality regulations, because they would never (never, ever, we promise!) block usage of their connections. They even pointed out that, if they did start blocking stuff, it would be a publicity nightmare and they'd probably lose customers over it. However, since that time, a few things have changed. High bandwidth apps have become more popular and a few service providers have been able to get away with blocking competitive applications. On top of that, new tools are coming out that will make it easier than ever for service providers to block or simply degrade applications like VoIP. So is it any surprise to see Broadband Reports point out that BellSouth refuses to promise network neutrality and reserves the right to block whatever they want to? Of course, this wouldn't be much of a problem if there were real competition in the broadband space, but the same FCC that won't fully mandate network neutrality has determined that a duopoly is enough competition for everyone.

DirecTV subscribers may be getting more HD programming this fall, thanks to DirecTV's recent contract with LG Electronics to supply them with "next gen" HD set-top boxes. The new set-tops are designed to transmit satellite broadcasts in MPEG-4 HD, basically compressed HD, as well as up to 150 channels in normal HD. This is all part of DirecTV's recent push for increased HD programming. LG Electronics has already started production and will begin shipping its boxes soon which in DirectTV terms means "in five years or so." Definitely a good sign for DirecTV subscribers who've already invested a chunk of cash in their HD-capable TV set.

Next Gen DirecTV Set-Tops [Digital Media Thoughts]
DirecTV Contracts LG for MPEG-4 HD Set-Tops [ExtremeTech]

MIT and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Nokia Research Center today announced a research collaboration to advance the state of the art in mobile computing and communications technologies.

CSAIL and Nokia will establish a new research facility - the Nokia Research Center Cambridge - near the MIT campus, where researchers from MIT and Nokia will work closely together on a new vision for mobile computing.

"By carrying out long-term research in these fields, including novel uses of hand-held devices, MIT and Nokia will make new communication opportunities and services available for people around the globe", said MIT President Susan Hockfield." [via Moco News]

Britons are communicating more frequently than ever, but many feel that the rise of text-based digital services has made communication with friends and family less personal, according to a new survey, reports Netimperative.

... Despite mobile phones and the internet, nearly 50% of people felt that they have less time to keep in touch with friends and family now than in the past. Neil Armstrong, head of marketing at PlusNet, said: “When you’re busy, it’s tempting to send an email or text, rather than pick up the phone.

Other communication trends revealed by the PlusNet research included a high proportion of people resorting to using email, text and IM in situations where they are trying to avoid confrontation or find communication uneasy_

-- Two-fifths (40%) of respondents found new technologies less confrontational and used them to flirt (27%), apologise for missed birthdays (22%), and to inform their employers about being sick (19%)."

PC as Personal Companion for Computer Studies"
Chicago Flame (10/24/05)

The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $520,000 grant to support the development of a personal computer that will act like a student and assist students in solving problems. University of Illinois at Chicago associate computer science professor Barbara Di Eugenio will develop a "dialog agent" along with Pamela Jordan and Sandra Katz, research associates at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to developing a dialog agent that can think, respond, and speak like a college student, the researchers have to design a unit that college students, including female undergraduates, would want to use. The researchers will also work with David Allbritton, a psychology professor at DePaul University. The computer has to be able to answer questions if it is to interact with students, says Di Eugenio.

A former student leader who helped topple Serbia's Milosevic teams up with a company that designs combat simulations for the military. The result? A game that teaches how to topple governments through nonviolent resistance. By Chris Kohler.

There's now a browser-based interface for chatting in the unmediated IRC channel.

http://unmediated.org/irc

(thx shawn.)

Since my presentation in Edmonton was about pervasive computing, transduction and protocol, and I still haven't managed to get it online, I thought I'd quickly point to some related reading:

Steven Shaviro writes on Simondon on technology and individuation

Mark Hansen on Deleuze and Simondon on internal resonance

Multitudes 18 (2004): Politiques de l’individuation. Penser avec Simondon.

Adrian Mackenzie at Lancaster

Glen Fuller reads and comments on Mackenzie's Transductions

Mackenzie on Protocols and the irreducible traces of embodiment: the Viterbi algorithm and the mosaic of machine time (pdf)

Alex Galloway at NYU

Steven Shaviro reviews Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization

Jason Lesko also reviews Protocol

Village Voice: This Is Freedom? NYU prof Alexander Galloway unmasks the inner workings of computer networks

Dan Glicksman thinks so: Hollywood lobbyist concerned about protectionism [pdf]

Hollywood’s top lobbyist has fired a warning shot against countries that might be emboldened to use the newly approved UNESCO convention on cultural diversity as a means to block Hollywood movies.

“No one should use this convention to close their borders to a whole host of products,” Dan Glickman, the chairman of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, told representatives of an annual French film industry conference held Friday in the Burgundy wine capital of Beaune, in eastern France.

“If countries start passing laws that are in contravention of World Trade Organization rules, there will be conflict,” he warned.

[…] “It appears to be more about trade than the promotion of cultural diversity. The World Trade Organization is the place for (trade),” Glickman said. “What’s to stop a country saying that it’ll only take 20% of U.S. films, or taxing our films but not its own?” he asked.

Glickman was a lone voice in Beaune not heralding the U.N. convention as a major triumph for free expression as a way to affirm cultural identity.

(I never understood cultural imperialism until I heard Celine Dion playing from loudspeakers in rural Yunnan. ;) -kc.)

I missed this last week, but I find this new service from Hutchinson’s 3UK called See Me TV incredibly interesting:

See Me TV is set to become the ultimate reality channel - providing an opportunity for 3 customers to shine in front a potential audience of millions.

budding star has to do is submit a thirty second video clip to the service displaying their talents in front of or behind the camera. The clip will then be uploaded to the ‘See Me TV’ channel for other 3 customers to view*.

Each time a clip is downloaded by a 3 customer the performer gets paid 1p. With a potential audience of 3.2 million, the most popular clips from contributors could make thousands of pounds worth of cash.

Credits from downloads are accumulated in an account and then a transfer made via Paypal - with no cap on what a 3 customer can earn from See Me TV.

I think this is pretty amazing. God knows how much they’re charging the viewer for the clips - probably a lot more than the meager 1p they’re sharing back to the creator… But it’s just the fact that Three is basically doing a rev-share for user-generated content that blows my mind. Not a lot, but if you happen to have a hit video seen by a decent percentage of Three’s 3 million UK subscribers, you could make some money!

It could be the beginning of a whole new revenue stream for the mobile industry based on multimedia microcontent. Think about it. This isn’t a mobile operator playing broker between merchant and consumer (like DoCoMo has famously done), but instead playing broker between the consumers themselves. It’s got an eBay or AdSense like quality to it, no? Who’d have thunk the Wall Gardeners would be the company to do this?

Speaking of eBay, I have to wonder why they’re bothering with PayPal, though. Why not just deposit your earnings back into your account? Maybe because of all the pre-paid accounts out there? Maybe because Three doesn’t want to become essentially a bank (by holding your earnings in case you earn more than you owe)? Very strange to me.

Regardless, I think it’s brilliant. What do you think?

-Russ

VideoEgg & TypePad:

"The VideoEgg Publisher is a small browser plug-in that makes it truly simple to capture, edit, encode, and post video online. VideoEgg and Six Apart have partnered to make it easy to post video to your TypePad blog. You can post a short video clip to any one of your TypePad weblogs. "

After logging in from a Mac you get this message, "A Macintosh Version of VideoEgg Publisher is currently under development - please check back soon!"

Also, your videos are limited to 2 minutes, and at some point in the future VideoEgg might add advertising.

This partnership looks like it will open the door even wider for people to easily post their videos on the web. By integrating a video publishing platform directly into TypePad, nontechnical users will be able to try it out, without having to learn an extra set of video publishing tools.

I use vblogcentral.com which allows me to drag and drop my video to a desktop app, which also allows me to key in a blog post title and text.

vblogcentral then uploads my video and converts it to windows media and quicktime for both dial up and broadband.

The cool thing about this is that it allows people to subscribe to my rss 2.0 feed and have my videos automatically delivered with an aggregator such as FireAnt.

If VideoEgg converts everything to Flash, do they also support enclosing the Flash video in an RSS 2.0 feed?

If they do support Flash in an RSS feed, it won't help my subscriptions since FireAnt does not support that yet. They are working on it for the next release.

So I won't be subscribing VideoEgg video in TypePad blogs until aggregators can read Flash in a feed.

Having QT or WMV enclosures is better, and in the case of audioblog.com, they convert your uploads to Flash AND soon you will be able to make a video podcast.

That is better all around...

Look for some of this in PCmag.com or publish.com tomomrrow.

Californian cool cat Julian Bleecker wrote a very interesting piece about what he calls dislocation: the “ways in which various forms of (mostly electronic) communications/networking social infrastructures make tectonic, geographical alterations on the landscape“. This is meant to appear in a book about locative media edited by Jeremy Hight.

… some of the ways that certain spatial practices related to some technologies are changing how we operate in space. Specifically, the way VoIp shifts the practice of telephony from place-specific to place-agnostic (area-code assignment, Skype from plane or Vonage from plane). There’s no one way to read this shift, other than to say it is emblematic of practice-in-transition. This was anticipated by cell phones and is tied to the relationship between location and motility. The relationship being that location is “ours” in the case of this practice. We decide from where we telephone and how to represent where we are when we telephone. In the primary case, it was such with the portable handset evolving in degree to the VOIP systems, with cellular telephony in between (as well as more sophisticated DIY call-forwarding schemes, one of which got a colleague at Data General reprimanded for configuring his phone to call-forward to his parents house so he could avoid the toll charges.)
This topic also relates to the challenge of anonymity at a time during which resources are committed to surveillance and intelligence gathering. The gangster calling from an “outside phone” is working against the agents who’s task it is to trace and record and locate the originators and recipients of telephone calls.

Why do I blog this? I like this concept very much and I think it’s a new ‘technosocial situation’, i.e. a new technologically-mediated social orders (= Erving Goffmans’ theory of social situation : isomorphism between physical space and social situation). This concept comes from Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe’s paper Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use. Julian’s article also connects this dislocation concept with locative media projects.

Some of you may have heard of the Photogapher's Right, a guide to your right as a photographer in public places by attorney Bert P. Krages II.

Well, videoblogger Pete Prodoehl, in a post on the videobloggers mailing list titled Are We The Media?, relates this episode today:

Yesterday I was shooting some video and walked into a university. I was told by an employee "I don't mean to ruin your fun, but you can't film in here." (She may have said 'videotape' instead of film, I'm not 100% sure, I just remember I was told I had to stop shooting.)

I noticed later that the fine folks from the local TV station were allowed to shoot inside, where I was not allowed to.

So, that brings up some questions in my mind.

Were the media given 'special priviledges' ordinary people are not?

Could the fact that it was a university have been in my favor? Don't my taxes help pay for it?

Is there "Videographer's Rights" document, like the Photographer's rights? Would it apply?

I was following what became a news event -- this is backed up by the fact that the local TV folks were there. I can't help but feel like I'm the little guy who got squashed by Big Media.

imate question. In my view, citizen journalists should have the same rights of access afforded news crews from the mainstream media.

With TV shows now sporting a price tag with the lure of no advertisements, will lawsuits be more apparent in the future?

: Yahoo has the Hollywood connections but Google Video gets a boost of publicity and content today from a deal with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation to showcase the Emmy foundation's Archive of American Television. The archive includes 284 in-depth interviews with a "who's who" from every aspect of television. The first 75 interviews -- about 240 hours -- are available now.
Foundation chairman Steve Mosko calls it "a perfect marriage of irreplaceable content and one of the most powerful delivery systems in the world." Press release
Meanwhile, AOL is expanding the universe of RSS feeds in its video search engine, announcing new deals today with Blastro.com, EVTV1.com, Forbes.com, GameTrailers.com, PC World and Time4 Media. The feeds optimized for video will show up through the AOL.com video portal, AOL Search and the AOL service. The deal includes AOL's Singingfish video and audio search engine, along with its search network. By using RSS feeds to deliver information, AOL becomes the conduit while video traffic goes back to the sites. Press release.

A growing number of "social content" applications such as Flickr, del.icio.us, audioscrobbler, and AllConsuming are making open web services part of their core offering to end users. These interfaces allow users to query, share, and manipulate the data managed on their behalf by these social content applications.

Based on a brief review of the common features of a selection of these sites, this paper suggests some best practice guidelines that developers can follow when creating new service interfaces for similar applications.

Xbox 360 chief architect Peter Moore has already stated that there are no plans to stream full-length 360 titles via Live. However, there is great potential to introduce episodic gaming. Services like Xbox Live Arcade are definitely going to take a chunk out of retailers’ profits, but episodic gaming could completely change how we buy and play games.

By staggering the release of a game’s content into weekly intervals, publishers can create the same kind of frenzy and anticipation that avid television watchers experience. But is the Xbox 360 HDD prepared to handle this transition? Would new episodes replace old ones? How would this affect replay value? Once you own an episode, can you download it again? Questions, questions, questions…

[Thanks, Davis]

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The Creative Weblogging network of bloggers has launched a new project, Creative Reporter, that pays readers to write "collaborative journalism." Creative has no formal contract with the reporters, but will give them a byline and pay $10 for every 1,000 page views of a story, according to PC Magazine. So far 100 "reporters" have signed up for free registration.

"There is no line for us between blogger, amateur, and real journalist," CEO Torsten Jacobi said. "We are blurring the lines." That is certainly true, but don't believe everything you read.

Jay raised a fantastic question Saturday that I haven't been able to get out of my head since:

Do the benefits of MySpace outweigh the benefits of My Space?

Rendered unclever: Which is better? To publish and participate in a closed social networking environment or to publish a blog/videoblog/podcast on your own server with your own blog installation?

Jay comes down on the side of My Space. He wants to see everyone self-publish with their own straight-up blog and their own server space. If personal media is partially about self-expression, then it is, in a way, also about self-determination. Content creation within MySpace comes with a whole slew of content restrictions and user agreements that many content creators may come up against one day. Plus there's that little issue of content ownership. As Eli pointed out to me the other day, News Corp owns any content produced on MySpace. In this sense, content creation within MySpace might be likened to slaves on a ship talking about who got the flyest chain.

But there are a ton of reasons to not dismiss MySpace as a platform for participatory media, primary among them are the social rewards that are crucial to introducing newbies to the world of blog authoring. (Even the videobloggers have their own "MySpace". It's called the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.)

Years of participatory media classes by Liz and Tricia have taught me that without strong, constructive and immediate feedback from one's peers, most students will stop blogging as soon as the class ends. There is no consistent reward down on the low end of the long tail, so unless you're able to connect a student's content creation with their existing social networks, that student's Blogger account will most likely go inactive soon after (and sometimes well before) the class ends. Meanwhile, these same students will continue to participate (and create content!) online within social networking services like MySpace.

So if a social networking service's user base includes a significant portion of a student's immediate social network, shouldn't that be our target space for introducing them to participatory media? If we teach them how to blog/videoblog/podcast within their existing social network, aren't we empowering them within their existing context?

In a content creation economy without financial rewards, peer feedback will drive users to create more sophisticated content. Within social networking spaces, comments -- along with more valuable "friends" links -- are the currency of that economy.

If we teach someone how to post a videoblog entry on their MySpace home page, they have a greater chance of receiving feedback from their friends (and a few strangers) than they would posting to a Blogger account. As they receive more comments ("That's so COOL!"), it may spur them to post more content. As they post more content, they hone their content creation skills, and the sophistication of their posts increases.

This is the thinking behind the latest changes to the videoblogging curricula I'm involved in implementing. It's only been a few weeks, so check back in a few months and I'll tell you how it goes. In the meantime, one thing I know for certain is that I shouldn't be teaching participatory content creation without a strong, relevant social framework to place people in. My hope is that other folks will do the same.

Mark Gibbs has a nice piece in Network World discussing the proposal for ID3 tags for music files. The gist is that ID3 tags could be added to any digital encoding format (ogg, MP3, etc) and that these tags could contain information such as table-of-contents. Thus, you could rip a whole album to one file and yet retain the ability to skip around to various tracks within the larger file, using a player that read the ID3 information. In theory, Version 2 of the ID3 tag proposal permits any sort of tag, including very long ones. Given that freedom, it's easy to see that DRMistas and others will have many uses for them, including encrypted watermarks, hidden alternative encodings, and I'm sure you can all think of other amusing nastiness.

Business Week has an interview with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

As he waits for the White House to fill vacancies that will give him a Republican majority, the FCC chief is now set to approve the historic mergers of SBC and AT&T, and of Verizon and MCI, by as early as the end of October (see BW Online, 8/31/05, "So Long, AT&T? Not So Fast").

Then, he tackles an ever-thornier set of issues, ranging from indecent broadcasts to the rewrite of the telecom laws. Martin discussed upcoming issues with BusinessWeek's Washington correspondent, Catherine Yang, on Oct. 12. Below are edited excerpts of that conversation.

What do you want to accomplish most during your tenure?
The Commission's top priority is broadband deployment and to make sure other new technologies are deployed as quickly as possible.

Are you troubled that the U.S. ranks No. 16 in the world in broadband penetration?
It should be a concern of the Commission to make sure that broadband technologies -- both wire-line and wireless -- be deployed as quickly as possible.

When you compare where we stand internationally, you have to take into account that we have very large sections of the country that are rural and where it costs more to deploy (see BW Online, 6/28/05, "Good for Cable, Bad for America").

For example, Massachusetts and Japan have about the same population density. Massachusetts is ahead of Japan in broadband penetration. But that doesn't mean there's not more we can do.

Should broadband providers have to pay into the universal service fund, which taps long-distance fees to subsidize phone service for rural and low-income households?
What I advocate is moving to a technology-neutral way of collecting universal service funds. Telephone numbers are technology-neutral. Whether you're a wire-line provider, wireless provider, or new VOIP provider, [your customers] need a telephone number. [By assessing charges per phone number,] we're could [put a system in place to] collect money from consumers regardless of which technology they use.

One hot regulatory issue involves the efforts of phone companies to win approval from local cable-franchising authorities to provide TV services over fiber networks. Do you favor a broad granting of authority allowing phone companies to go ahead?
Local franchising authorities have the responsibility of granting access to their communities. But the 1992 Cable Act says local franchising authorities are not allowed to [unreasonably prevent] second entrants [in a market] from coming (see BW Online, 9/28/05, "Verizon's Muddy TV Picture"). The Commission may hold a proceeding to see if we have a role in [the franchise approval process].

Why have you taken such a strong stand to require Internet phone providers to link up to 911 operators -- at a time when many warn of saddling new technologies with too much regulation?
There's nothing we can do that's more important than making sure new communications services don't leave people unconnected with emergency personnel.

Many of the FCC policies completely baffle me.

The Bush administration says they want to offer ubiquitous broadband and plans to open of 90 Mhz of spectrum (see DW: President Wants 90MHz), which will be auctioned next June. The spectrum, at 1710-1755 MHz and 2110-2155 MHz, will be broken up in smaller geographic portions in order for smaller carriers to bid on them. Sounds good. But duplex 5Mhz channels sound like a sweet deal for UMTS-based Cingular. How does that help inexpensive broadband wireless? It sounds like a bad play.

The buyout and elimination of 2.3 GHz broadband wireless by XM radio is another issue. Then there's the domination of licensed 2.5 GHz by Sprint/Nextel, the power limitation of 5.4GHz (made available by the efforts of Senator Barbara Boxer), the elimination of telco DSL competition, the limitations of 3.5GHz, silence on attempts to ban virtually all municipal networks, the elimination of unlicensed 700 Mhz, a screwed up DTV system, and the general lack of affordable broadband and competition in the United States.

What kind of broadband policy is that?
Sucking up to SBC is good for America?

Canon today announced a new compact WiFi camera, the SD430, the first Canon model to feature built-in WiFi (802.11b). The Canon PowerShot SD430 retails for $499 and will be available at the end of January 2006 in the United States.

Canon PowerShot SD430 can also function as a webcam or be remotely operated by a computer. It will offer users the ability to automatically transfer pictures to a personal computer via the wireless link as the pictures are taken. Images can also be sent through a wireless access point.

The wireless features include:

• Wireless direct printing: The supplied Wireless Print Adapter plugs into the PictBridge port and is pre-registered for instant, wireless direct printing to any Canon PictBridge compatible printer2 – including the SELPHY CP range of portable Compact Photo printers. Users can also connect wirelessly via PC1 and configure to print automatically to a USB connected photo printer.
• Auto Transfer mode: The camera automatically transfers each image as soon as it is taken and the supplied software displays the images on the PC as they are received, allowing for real-time full screen viewing with friends.
• Wireless Remote Capture: Enables users to wirelessly control camera shooting functions from the PC1 – ideal for candid party shots or home wildlife photography.
• WEP security and WPA-PSK with TKIP/AES encryption for enhanced data security.

It features a 5-megapixel CCD and 3X optical zoom lens. A movie mode captures 640 x 480 resolution at @ 30 / 15 fps, 320 x 240 @ 60 / 30 / 15 fps and 160 x 120 @ 15 fps.

Purchasers of the camera are eligible for membership of CANON iMAGE GATEWAY, which offers 100 MB of online space for uploading and sharing images. Membership also allows users to download start-up images and sounds to customise their My Camera settings.

(Continued at Daily Wireless)

It's got an incredibly ugly interface, and it ain't Native Instruments FM7 by any stretch, but CuteVST has two things going for it: first, it's an FM synth that's open source, and second, it imports Yamaha DX7 sysex data. So think of the ugly interface as geek cred. It's the real deal: classic 6-operator synthesis, modeling the original Yamaha keyboard. Downloads for Windows available at SourceForge. Thanks, AA!

But, wait, there's more: CuteVST is a port of Hexter for Linux/LADSPA. Meaning you can download for LADSPA hosts -- and probably meaning you can run this on the Mac, if you're really savvy. I'm just going back to Ableton Operator, thanks.

.

The Trusted Computing Group, a nonprofit industry association that creates open industry specifications that vendors use to create more secure computing products, today announced its plans to enable trust and security in mobile phones and their applications. The organization has created a set of use cases for mobile phone security and intends to have a publicly available specification ready for first half of 2006.

More in Nokia Security.

Portable Augmented Reality

Computer monitors are by no means an endangered species, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that they will soon be replaced for many uses by floors, walls and table tops. The latest evidence: a Microsoft Research scientist has developed a projector and computer vision system dubbed PlayAnywhere that projects interactive computer-generated images without the need for specially mounted cameras.

Researchers have been reducing the cost and complexity of the augmented reality systems in recent years. (See PCs augment reality, TRN June 26/July 3, 2002). The PlayAnywhere system goes further by packaging the components into a single portable unit that doesn't require calibration. The system consists of an NEC tabletop projector, an infrared light source, an infrared camera and a computer. The device projects a 40-inch diagonal image onto the surface it stands on.

Computer vision techniques allow users to use their hands to move, rotate and scale projected virtual objects. The system tracks shadows to determine where fingertips touch the surface; frame-to-frame pixel-level changes determine hand motion. The system also keeps track of sheets of paper in its view and can project images onto them.

The projector system could be used for games, educational software and other interactive graphical computer applications.

(PlayAnywhere: A Compact Interactive Tabletop Projection-Vision System, Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2005), Seattle, October 23-26, 2005) [posted on Technology Research News Roundup]

Adrants reports that Budget Rental Car has launched an online contest/marketing campaign that includes The Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt blog. The site drops clues in a nationwide scavenger hunt. The contest itself will be promoted almost entirely within the blogosphere with advertising promotion on 74 weblogs in what is a big test for the medium. Congrats to B.L. Ochman who played a pivotal role in the campaign. This is one to watch.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Promotions

In the technology and Internet industries, a lot of companies publish what's called an application protocol interface, or an API for short (definition). These special “hooks” enable software developers to build new fangled tools on top of existing platforms. For example, this mashup of Google Maps and Craig's List was created using APIs. Same thing applies for this Flickr Sudoku game.

The same model could be applied to better journalism and marketing in the rip, mix, burn economy we live in. In fact, some are already experimenting. The BBC recently set up the Creative Archive License Group. The BBC hopes to foster innovation by letting anyone re-use its material for personal and educational purposes under the Creative Archive Licence. Currently some 100 clips are available for mixing.

This is just the beginning. Consider the following scenarios...

Imagine if Fidelity Investments released video/audio snippets of their new ad campaign featuring Paul McCartney for mixing. Citizen marketers could come up with new creations using components of the ad campaign, such as the music or even just images, provided they adhere to certain guidelines set forth by Fidelity. This could generate even more word of mouse.

Or what if BusinessWeek published a story that had half the factual reporting covered. Let's just say they can't confirm a certain fact with a secondary source. They could publish the article online and ask the community to corroborate the story or even take it in a different direction if that's what the facts show.

Marketers and journalists need to take a page from the tech industry and start releasing “the bones” of what they produce into the wild and then wait and see what comes back. They might be surprised to find that what consumers create is far better than what the pros produce, fostering more innovation and better content. Whether they will try this is another story entirely. This is something Joseph Jaffe and I will take up on our next podcast.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Media

Dam!

I guess I don't make it onto Jason Shellen's list. And I guess Adam Bosworth doesn't consider me important enough to get back to me and followup from our meetings on microcontent from six months ago.

Oh well - cause it sure is nice to see Google swallow the red pill so hard. And gulp it down.

Regardless of what their schemas loOk like, we'll support them and bake them into our 'Structured Blogging' compatiblity box. That way people won't be locked into the Google schema and can post their Reviews, Events, Lists, Recipes, JogBlogs, People and Group showcases, Listings, Personal ads, etc. - anywhere they want.

They can choose to put it into Google cloud - or anywhere else. Or both. That's what the 'OutputThis' service will allow - sending stuff to multiple locations - your favorite destinations.

Anyway - this is great news for us 'structured content nuts' - as long as Google publicly exposes all this content and lets others spider it and index it - as well.

Here we go.

I bet Tantek is happy - too. And Bob and Salim.

Now where was that San Francisco Restaurant Reviews server? I'd better go ask Gavin.

In a speech to the U.S. Telecom Association, Hearst-Argyle CEO David Barrett reached out to the telcos. "The sooner we embark on this partnership the better," Barrett said. "We are in the throes of a political battle in Washington with your cable and satellite competitors who want to restrict consumer access to multicast programming. If telephone companies can help us secure multicast carriage for all television viewers, you will find broadcasters across America welcoming your arrival to the program distribution market."

Libraries, schools and other institutions that use the Internet are protesting new rules that allow law-enforcement wiretaps and require changes to allow the eavesdropping. These groups argue they should not be covered by the new wiretapping rules.

Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher says a lot of the citizen journalism material is simply dull. Then he gives suggestions to editors on how to improve the quality of citizen journalism.

Here are some highlights of an article worth reading:

"If you don't have a well-developed strategy to populate the site with content of interest to people, you will end up with a site full of junk," says Rich Gordon, an associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the faculty advisor behind the school's GoSkokie.com, citJ Web site. "Hard as it is to get people to visit a citizen journalism site for the first time, you don't want them to come and decide it's not worth coming back."

Nearly everyone I interviewed for this article emphasized that getting people to submit content to citJ sites requires lots of outreach and marketing. There's no such thing as "build it and they will come."

Amy Gahran, who co-writes a blog about citizen journalism called IReporter.org ...thinks that being willing to highlight the best citJ contributions prominently -- and not treating it as a less valuable or valid form of news -- can go a long way in increasing the quality of citizen content.

"To get the best content," says (Chris) Willis, We Media co-author, "I do believe people will have to be compensated. News companies had a chance to get a lot of participation for free, but as blog networks begin to get bought up by the likes of AOL, the New York Times or News Corp., a value for influential online voices is being set. That's a genie that won't be going back into the bottle anytime soon."

Microsoft says "me too!" to the idea of digitizing books. MSN Book Search will be a part of the Open Content Alliance and a beta version will launch in early 2006.

A while back now we asked you to submit ideas to rethink how to present TV and Radio listings using the TV anytime data and other relevant feeds.

The response was magnificent and thanks again to everyone who took the time and effort to submit entries. But on to the bit you really want:

The winners of the first Backstage competition are...

Leon Brocard and Leo Lapworth for
http://www.mightyv.com/

We all loved this.

It’s a fantastically impressive prototype with a wealth of features and innovative ideas already implemented that we were almost overwhelmed. That said the simplicity of the user experience meant that it was easy to use out of the box. There is a lot of different findability here; tagging, ratings, recommendations as well as the basic grid format with innovative and different ways of navigating your way through thousands of hours of TV and radio.

There was a real effort to integrate non BBC feeds (imdb, bleb) and the TV Anytime metadata was neatly exploited via the accessibility search tool as well as genre lists such as films and comedy. I haven't mentioned the personalisation (but you can sign up for your preferred channels) and some real heavy lifting behind the scenes plumbing like an open source PERL TV-anytime parser which the team have made available to CPAN. We were itching to use this and show it around as soon as it was submitted which is a sure sign that Leo and Leon had come up with something special...

This is fantastic prototype which thoroughly deserves to win the first Backstage competition.
Leon and Leo win some "Geek Bling", ie: a rackmount server to the cost of £1K and a trip to the BBC to talk further.

Runners Up:

Thomas Scott for the TV Map
http://tvmap.thomasscott.net/

It was the lateral approach to the brief that we liked here. The idea that TV metadata descriptions could be versioned as a google map mash up sounds odd but, in fact, works very well.

This is a very simple prototype with only a weeks sample data but we can see the opportunities for introducing viewers to programmes they would have never considered viewing.

It’s rough and ready but does the job of suggesting that there are different ways to visualise those hundreds of tv and radio programmes per week. Thanks Thomas.

Fraser Nevett for the Programme Similarity Visualiser
http://www.nevett.org/lab/tv/similarity

The complete departure from the grid was what made this stand out. There's a simple algorithm there combined with a compact visualisation tool and Fraser has done a fine job of representing a weeks broadcasts in a vastly different way to the time/channel axis. There were plenty of ways in which we could think how this could be built on with plenty of different features but it was again another easy to use prototype with an extremely intuitive interface. More importantly it set us thinking about what might be possible.

We'll be dropping a note to the winners/runners up to arrange prizes/delivery and meet ups as soon as this mail has arrived

Please don't think that because your prototype wasn't shortlisted that we weren't impressed. There was some great use of phones/sms, avatars, automated speech, some traditional but keeping it simple listings layouts, some fine personalised epgs and a Radio 4 clock!. Thanks for putting the effort in.

Watch out for further competitions...

DataTiles is inspired by the film "2001: A Space Odyssey", where the memory of the computer HAL was stored in transparent rectangular slabs. The system enables users to manipulate digital data as physical DataTiles.

Tagged transparent acrylic tiles are embedded with RFID tags. These tiles serve both as physical windows for digital information and to trigger specific actions (to launch an application, or submit a query) when placed on a sensor-enhanced display surface. When a tile is placed on the tray, its associated function is automatically triggered. For example, placing a weather tile onto the tray retrieves the current weather forecast information from the Internet and displays the processed results on the region of the screen under the tile.

Users can use a pen or a mouse to interact with the information displayed by DataTiles. Several combinations of physical and graphical interfaces are possible. For example, a printed high-res image (on a tile) can be visually fused with dynamic displayed graphics. Grooves engraved upon the tile surfaces also act as passive haptic guides of pen operations.

The tiles can be used independently or can be combined into more complex configurations.

Mind-blowing Video. Images.
More information in the PDF.

By Jun Rekimoto.

Via rhizome < DV blog.

A group of engineers from the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Strathclyde plan to develop tiny "Specks" for low power sensor applications.

The Specks are sensors with computational and communications capabilities that can be embedded in objects. They could be used as lighting and temperature sensors in buildings, placed in aircraft wings to detect failures or used to sensitise medicine bottles to ensure that people take their medication at the correct times.

Thousands of Specks, scattered or sprayed on a person or surfaces, will collaborate in programmable computational networks called Specknets. Scientists are even considering the idea of a putting the devices in a spray-can, allowing the Specks to be sprayed onto any surface.

"In the future, computers will be able to be diffused into the environment," explained Professor DK Arvind in 2003. "One way to achieve that will be computers the size of a grain of sand. Just by spraying them on to objects, you can computerise them. They would create a network which can transmit wirelessly to each other. In a cubic millimetre, you can have a sensor for heat, pressure, light and so on, but also a computer and wireless technology."

Via The Engineer Online. See also a previous article in Scotsman . Image.

Reblog's 1.0 announcement promised "push-button republishing for the masses", and we've been doing pretty well following that track for the past year or so. Last night, we pushed the button on Reblog 2.0. The concept behind the software has always been a form of attention cagefight: many feeds go in, one feed comes out. Reblog closes the loop between piqued interest and publishing by making the act of marking a link for publication a one-step affair. We've long thought this was a pretty interesting addition to the standard functionality of an RSS reader, and I'm surprised to see that in late 2005, there's not a lot of other software that performs the same task.

In the meantime, Reblog has started to see slow but steady growth. Eyebeam and Rhizome both use the software to publish net art blogs, and Eyebeam has an explicit "curator" role in the fortnightly reblogger. Global Voices Online has expressed strong interest in adapting the project to their multitiered reblogging operation, and Reblg from Broadband Mechanics borrowed the term for a similar idea based on microformat republishing from within the browser. A lot of these uses place Reblog in the role of plumbing: like the mixer in your shower, it's there behind the wall but you never see it. Reblog's output is typically meant to be fed into a MoveableType or WordPress plugin, where it surfaces as a series of blog posts on an HTML site annoted with "Originally by so-and-so from..." attribution notes.

We've been thinking a bunch about expanding this role a bit, so that the RSS output from Reblog carries more weight. What happens when you chain a bunch of Reblog installations together, so that the output of one person's attention stream becomes fodder for the next? You get an omnidirectional passive e-mail substitute, great for washes of "FYI" type information and general interest sharing. In a lot of use cases there's no reason for the output to ever make it to a regular blog. Small, distributed groups can use the software to share information among themselves, and only escalate to the relatively disruptive e-mail level when action or response is required. Alternatively, chaining feeds together could result in a progressive-filtering mechanism, reducing the complexity of a thousand feeds into a few pertinent pieces of information through a pyramid of editors.

So, with the interest of making Reblog a more flexible sharing tool, we worked on version 2.0 with a few broad goals in mind:

• Usability: Reblog's user interface needed to help the end-user manage large numbers of feeds more effectively. Tagging feeds & entries has proven to be the most flexible way to accomplish this. We were also interested in ways of making the interface look less... dorky. There was a lot of techno-cruft that just had to go.
• Extensible Input via a public API: Greasemonkey is pretty damn cool, so we thought it'd be useful to provide for a way to perform common Reblog editing actions via a programmable API. XML is boring to parse, so Reblog now has a JSON-RPC API exposed.
• Extensible Output via support for plug-ins: We were strongly interested in seeing some sort of plug-in ecosystem evolve around Reblog. If the software's useful, it makes sense to provide for a way to adapt it to specific uses. My own guide for this has been Blosxom, a simple blog engine written in Perl.

One huge change that became apparent as we wrote 2.0 was the need to post your own entries, independent of any particular feed. Historically, Reblog 1.x assumes that the target blog would be used for this purpose. In 2.0 we've added a "post item" feature, which acts as stripped-down Blogger or Del.icio.us analogue, and handles one of the primary uses cases suggested by Reblg. This idea has been gaining some traction recently, most conspicuously in Mark Pilgrim's microformat atom store concept. Mark decribes the idea as "having your own private database", but my own takeaway from Del.icio.us has been the value of making such micro-information public. Reblog is built to share. Bud Gibson has been referring to this idea as the xFolk Veg-o-matic, a slice & dice greasemonkey-based browser augmentation that trawls websites for microformatted links and posts them into Reblog for you.

We believe this is pretty cool.

Hipster beltbuckles have got nothing on this waist contraption from Feelspace. Strap this electronic compass around your waist and one of those circular green sensors vibrates to tell you which direction is north. The creators describe this using more fancy terminology: "vibrotactile stimulation." Not exactly a fashion statement, but the goal of this research is to "investigate the effects of long-term stimulation with orientation information on humans." It also has some obvious short-term uses, say for the blind, people who run marathons across the Sahara desert and tele-sexual fetishists.

Feelspace [via Information Aesthetics]

Victor Lombardi of the Management Innovation Group: "We've been working for several companies facing how they and their markets change with the further spread of social media. It's creating enormous potential for more democratic media production and sophisticated tools, but a lot of it will rely on companies understanding it and being receptive to it. We're developing a framework to help companies do this, and one of the key considerations is not scaring the shit out of them."

(See also: Social Media and Value Creation. -kc.)

Stephen Hill: "2005 will be remembered as the year the lid finally came off media distribution. Personally, I look forward to discovering the unique talents that will emerge from podcasting."

Publish: We need to build systems into user-supplied content sites that provide the necessary checks and balances to create quality.

The Register: So right now, the project appears ill-equipped to respond to the new challenge. Its philosophical approach deters subjective judgements about quality, and its political mindset deters outside experts from helping.

Specialised robots, devices for DIY content creation and new TV displays are among the trends to watch in 2006.

That is according to the American-based Consumer Electronic Association which has published its view of technologies set to influence in next 12 months.Devices and trends around video gaming and high-definition TV (HD) also make it into the top five.

"They truly illustrate the progress of technology in the digital age," said Gary Shapiro, president of the CEA.

via BBC

Thanks to Ian, there's now an irc channel for chatting about all things participatory media. Visit channel #unmediated on irc.freenode.net.

"Instead of making a two-hour movie, we're going to make 150 hours worth of [TV] movies for the same amount of money."

The AMV community reacts to Larry Lessigs publicizing of the AMV phenomenon.

"The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very lon g term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years."

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

Participant believes that a good story well told can truly make a difference in how one sees the world. We seek to entertain our audiences first, then to invite them to participate in making a difference next.

Those looking for video content for the iPod should be aware that archive.org has tons of mp4 files that are iPod compatible in most of its collections including Feature Films, Prelinger, Universal Newsreel

a sophisticated social network data visualization system that end-users of social networking services can use to facilitate discovery & increased awareness of their online community. vizster presents social networks using a simple network node-link representation, where nodes represent members of the system & links represent the articulated 'friendship' links between them. network members are depicted using both their self-provided name & a representative image. the networks are presented as 'egocentric' networks, consisting of an individual & their immediate friends. users can expand the display by selecting nodes to make visible others’ immediate friends as well. in addition, inferred community groupings of two or more nodes are visibly represented as 'blobs' surrounding community members, taking advantage of low spatial frequencies to make community structures apparent.
this work will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization conference next week. see also the Enron email visualization. [jheer.org & jheer.org(pdf)]

It’s been a couple months since the CVS camcorder downloading alpha release. [Matt Gilbert] thought it would be a good idea if we checked up on the community. There has been a lot progress made: from low level stuff like unearthing USB commands to upping the resolution and record length. Modding for macro work and building helmet mounts has also been done. A great overview of how all of this came about is the “credit where credit is due” post. Recently they’ve been dealing with new firmware versions that make the cameras harder to play with (sound familiar?). No worries though, if the solutions maintain the simplicity of jumping one wire there’s a bright future ahead. Congratulations to everyone involved in this project; you’ve done some incredible work.

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

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In a response to NIcholas Carr´s The amorality of Web 2.0 David Gerard states that ”… if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it’s going to have to be a good Wikipedia. So those who care about getting a good encyclopedia are going to have to work out how to make Wikipedia better, or there won’t be anything.”

Taking the "automatically torrent your RSS feed" idea I used for PEP which is an app I wrote to show off Prodigem's shiny new API, I have now distilled it as a direct feature of Prodigem. That means you can now just simply sign into your Prodigem account, go to your "Settings", tell Prodigem your RSS feed address and sit back and watch it auto-torrent. Here's what the Prodigem controls look like:

To put this plainly, this means you can just continue publishing your media through your blog or content management system as you always have, except now whenever your existing RSS feed gets updated, Prodigem reads it and spits out a torrent of your content. You tell your audience about your Prodigem RSS Torrent Feed and you are then automatically on the road to bandwidth redemption.

For the guts of how it works, Prodigem just scans your feed once an hour. It checks the latest 5 RSS items in your feed and if any contain an enclosure, it pulls that enclosure into your Prodigem account via the web and just torrents it. That's it. You can also specify if you want Prodigem to email you whenever it attempts to make a torrent, and you also specify the license you want to use for the content you distribute. Folks, it doesn't get any easier than this.

Several ISPs and telecom providers' first reaction to the likes of Vonage and Skype has been fairly predictable, network neutrality be damned. The Wall Street Journal today has a round up of many network providers' feelings on the matter, hidden under the guise that heavy users are hogging bandwidth and slowing down service for all their other customers. But one consumer advocate nails it when he says it's not a network-management issue, but rather a revenue-maximization issue, with an exec from Time Warner saying they're looking at different ways to control traffic, but that "Revenue opportunities...definitely exist." So, basically, it sounds like more providers will implement "price blocking": you'll be able to use whatever you want, you'll just have to pay extra for it . The problem is that these ISPs are looking to block services with which they compete -- Vonage packets might get hung up, for instance, while data for a provider's own VoIP system sails through just fine. FCC boss Kevin Martin has said that market forces will keep providers from blocking certain traffic on their networks, but that's not an assertion that's held up. But given how the commission has changed Internet freedoms into entitlements, and how the industry wants regulation to disappear, it's hard to see this situation getting any better before it gets a lot worse.

Forget borrowing somebody's notes or looking at the prof's PowerPoint slides on the Internet, now college students can just subscribe to the podcast if they don't want to go to class. Cue the inevitable backlash from people calling this the downfall of higher education, but it seems like a pretty good use of technology, really. If a student wants to go over a lecture again, they can, and somebody that tries to replace actually showing up for class with a podcast probably wasn't that interested (and probably wasn't going to do very well) anyway. But I guess Duke's finally found a use for all those iPods they gave out.

A Texas Instruments executive says open technical standards will make or break the potentially lucrative market in mobile digital television.

Doug Rasor, TI's marketing vice president, told the Society of Broadcast Engineers Thursday night that open standards such as Digital Video Broadcasting will create a level playing field for everyone involved, which will lower costs and make the technology more appealing to consumers.

Texas Instruments said its research has shown consumers are willing to pay around $10 for television service to be provided over their mobile telephones.

Rasor also told the engineers' conference in Dallas that the market would also depend upon a good mix of high-quality digital content to keep customers amused and informed.

p2p news / p2pnet: It’ll be D-Day at 7:00pm outside the Virgin Megastore on East 14th Street and Broadway in New York City on October 25, 2005.

Or, rather, it’ll be DRM-Day because Free Culture believes it’s time to make the offline public aware of DRM (Digital Restriction Management) issues. Accordingly, supporters of the protest will be turning up at the Megastore to hand out leaflets.

“If you’ve purchased CDs from Sony BMG or EMI, you may have purchased a digital rights management product and your fair use rights to your CD are at risk," says the handout. "Here’s what you can do:

• Return the CD and demand a DRM-free version
  
• To disable the DRM from working, try holding down the shift key in Windows when you insert your CD
  
• Circumvent the DRM protectiion using other instructions available on the Internet.
  
  

s out, the Dave Matthews and Switchback bands both have albums poisoned by DRM. But both groups are telling fans how to get around it.

Discs with DRM are indeed damaged goods and should be treated accordingly.

DRM is just another entertainment and software cartel scam to limit your ability to freely choose.

But it can't, and doesn't, work because anything which can be seen or heard can be copied by ones means another.