Accept no substitutes

Category: Information Commons (Page 20 of 26)

Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other

Google Accelerator: put on the brakes, stay out of clutches

WebAccelerator logo
The long, heated and open debate about the Google Web Accelerator seems to have slowed down. The Register, in their lovely snippy and witty way, covers the story as “Google puts the brake on Web Accelerator.” The lead: “Google has disabled downloads of its Web Accelerator software less than a week after introducing the service. The suspension follows reports that the software was caching sensitive content, such as user control panels to online forums.”
However Google says:
“Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support.”
More from the Google side of things at their FAQ. And from the blogosphere via Technorati. Dan Gillmor covered the problems a bit a week or so ago.

Bidnez of Music still great for Musicians

James Surowiecki essays in this week’s New Yorker that touring not only pays musicians better and more reliably, but it’s booming. “Hello, Cleveland” has good numbers and good writing.

The most concise observation comes from John Perry Barlow (via Surowiecki):
We are seeing the Music Business being replaced by the Musician Business.
The Music Business (labels etc) used to control the most valuable and expensive assets — production, distribution, costly studios, access to shelf space, promotion — but now the Musicians control the scarcest assets, therefore the most valuable, their performances live, their presence.
All goes to show that ole Walter Benjamin was wrong in his “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” As a work becomes more available the desire to experience the original increases, not decreases. The “aura” is stronger mysteriously to me — and to ole Walt — as the reproduced materials become better and more accessible. Our fetishism of the creator, the original, is growing as we become familiar with the works even in an indirect way.

“It’s funny that, in an era of file-sharing and iPod-stealing, the old troubadour may have the most lucrative gig of all.” (Surowiecki)

Roger McGuinn removes the “may” from Surowiecki’s sentence as he talks to USA Today’s Kevin Manley (in the context of music piracy in China and elsewhere):

While visiting USA TODAY last week, Roger McGuinn, who led the Byrds in the 1960s, said he earned just 0.0007 cents on each early Byrds album sold. He adds that although Arista Records sold 500,000 of his solo album, Back From Rio, McGuinn never got a penny. In other words, thanks to the machinations of the recording industry, McGuinn has never made any real money on even his most popular recorded music.

Yet he’s done OK and now has a forward-thinking business model. He has a Web site, www.mcguinn.com, where he posts free songs. McGuinn made his most recent solo CD [Limited Edition] by recording it on his laptop and paying to have copies produced and packaged. He sells the CDs online and at concerts and says it’s the first time he’s ever made a profit on an album.

The online music, the CD and a stalwart Byrds fan base all fuel interest in his live performances, which often sell out small venues. That’s where he makes his money. McGuinn is apparently not lavishly rich, but he seems comfortable and is still making music.

Extreme Web Makeover for Chapel Hill

When a house or car is so far gone and so pathetic that it seems unsalvagable, the Extreme Makeover Team shows up and saves the day. The Town of Chapel Hill website, which may be been fine back in the day if that day was pre-1995, just “won” an extreme web Makeover. The extreme team from Civic Plus of Kansas selected the Town site over more than 130 other municipal government entries, according to the Civic Plus website.

As a part of the remake, Civic Plus will also host the Town’s website, provide training, and more.

“We are thrilled to receive this opportunity to better serve our citizens. The new web site will have a lot of features to help users find information quickly and offer more ways to interact with local government.”

Bob Avery
IT Director
Town of Chapel Hill, NC

Note: The Chapel Hill Public Library has already done its own extreme makeover on its own inititiative. There is more to be done to integrate the catalog systems, but it looks great! (I’m on the Library Board of Trustees, but the Library took the lead and managed all the work on the site. We, Trustees, encouraged and suggested only.)

There are questions here though. The award for the Town looks like a two year lock-in to a proprietary technology set hosted in Kansas which could result in a difficult migration to any other system later. Hosting public information off-site and out of state means giving up ownership of the Town’s information and although there is CMS style control, ultimately the Town loses control of their own information flow and presentation.

But potentially the worst part of the deal is that the Town will now be two years away from getting to a more integrated information technology infrastructure with parts of their information in Kansas and parts in various departments. The workflow needed to make the town work well will be difficult to manage and to migrate.

Tell me where I’m wrong or what I’ve left out.

Tor: The Onion Routers for anonymous communications

How TOR works
Native Chapel Hillian and Free Haven maven Richard Dingledine writes to get the energy up for a big throwdown in SFO where he will tell his “Stories From the Trenches
About the Creation of Tor, an Anonymous Internet Communication System.”

Explore the World of Anonymous Communication Online

Join EFF at 111 Minna Gallery to Hear Stories From the Trenches
About the Creation of Tor, an Anonymous Internet Communication System

WHEN: Tuesday, May 10th, 2005, 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

WHAT: Tor: A Brief History of the Most Important Privacy Software Since PGP
Tor is a free/open source software project to create an anonymous
communication system on the Internet. Tor runs on all major platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/UNIX).

WHO:
Roger Dingledine – Tor Project – tor.eff.org
Roger Dingledine is the chief researcher and developer of Tor and has worked on anonymity and security software at MIT, Reputation Technologies, and his own Freehaven Project. Roger will share his personal experiences about the creation of Tor.

Chris Palmer – Electronic Frontier Foundation – www.eff.org
Chris Palmer is EFF’s Technology Manager. He will discuss EFF’s goals and reasons for supporting the Tor Project.

WHERE: 111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: (415) 974-1719

This event is free and open to the general public. You must be 21+.
Refreshments will be served. Free t-shirts for people currently running Tor nodes. (Bring your IP address.) To learn how to set up a Tor node, see http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc.html#server

Please RSVP to (415) 436-9333 x129 or bayff-rsvp@eff.org

111 Minna Gallery is accessible via BART. Get off at the Montgomery station and exit at 2nd and Market. Walk south on 2nd Street for a block and a half, and take a right down the Minna Street Alley. 111 Minna Street is located between Mission and Howard.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world: http://www.eff.org/

Tiger, Tyger, TigerCats, Lulus and Red Hats

Hamilton TigerCats
Most Slashdotters miss the humour (note Canadian spelling) of Bob Young’s offer to give Apple a free license for the use of the term “Tiger.” Bob owns Canadian Football’s Hamilton TigerCats who have been the Tigers continually since 1869.
TigerDirect is suing Apple claiming that Apple’s use of Tiger infringes on TD’s trademark specifically by knocking TD down the results pages when one searched Google for the word “Tiger.”
Bob Young, Red Hat Linux founder and current Lulu CEO, says:

This lawsuit is a load of codswallop. Nobody and no company should have the exclusive use of the word ‘tiger.’
136 years ago we were called The Tigers. If anyone owns the exclusive rights to the word “tiger” with that much history and tradition, it’s gotta be us.

In a recent check (2 seconds ago), the first result for a Google search for “Tiger” was dedicated to the 5 subspecies of Tigers and the second was TigerDirect.

Anyone who can use the word “codswollop” in a complete sentence is someone I admire.

CopyNight, Copyright Day

Today is World Intellectual Property Day. And tonight is CopyNight. The first is a promotion of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which says that the objectives of the day are:

WIPO has tailored its 2005 World Intellectual Property Day message and publicity material towards young people. The over-arching objectives are:

  • To encourage young people to recognize their own ability to create;
  • To increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps to foster creativity and innovation;
  • To raise awareness of the importance in daily life of patents, copyright, trademarks and designs

.

On the other hand,

CopyNight is a monthly social gathering of people interested in restoring balance in copyright law. We meet over drinks once a month in many cities to discuss new developments and build social ties between artists, engineers, filmmakers, academics, lawyers, and many others.

And there is a CopyNight in Raleigh which is sponsored by old friend and theremin player, Steve Burnett, but somehow I’m just finding out about it.

Beyond Heroism!

21st Century Achievement Awards image
We are now beyond Heroism and beyond Laureate-ism here at sunsite/metalab/ibiblio. I just received a note from the Computerworld folks that we are Finalists in the Education and Academia Category (only 5 finalists in each category) for the Computerworld 21st Century Achievement Awards.
We’ll be at the June Awards Ceremony in Washington at the National Building Museum Building on June 6th.
I think I’m to wear a tuxedo again. Maybe I should buy one. And possibly I get to wear our medal again too! Just glad to represent all the folks who have worked on sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and all our contributors.

Vanished News Found – Berkeley Laptop and Dr. Rine

Miles at tinyapps.org has found and put together a few sources for the missing ABC News story on ranting laptop theft victim and Berkeley prof Jasper Rine. Miles also notices that the original video has been edited at Berkeley to remove Rine’s rant — so much of archives as history. But luckily there are copies around the Net [torrent of QT format] in case you are wondering what we’ve been talking about.


Page 1 on the story in Google cache.
Thanks to Miles.
Page 2 of the story in Google cache. Thanks to Miles and Julian Robichaux.

Earlier stories here about Rine and the laptop theft and here about the vanishing story on ABC News.

Alert commenter, Julian Robichaux also points us to Jasper Rine’s teaching statement in which he tells us all “Facts just aren’t that important.” To be fair to Rine, he’s getting our attention in order to make a point. That is teaching the emerging discoveries in biology that the process of discovery and research is more important to learn than a series of facts of the moment.

CalStuff blogger, Allen Lew let’s us know that the Berkeley student blog is on the case as well with pointers to articles on Rine and laptop there.

To our knowledge, the laptop remains unfound.

Vanishing News Story – ABC version

Not long after the story broke on the net of the angry rant by stolen laptop victim Jasper Rine, a story pointing out the very obvious problems with the claims made by Rine appeared on the ABC News site. The story by Hari Sreenivasan did a great and lively job of describing why Rine’s claims were wrong while sympathizing with him over the theft a bit.
Not long after I linked to it, the story vanished. Luckily I grabbed at least one good paragraph for my post. As it turns out no one else grabbed any of the story that I nor others can find.
Miles at tinyapps.org managed to get a screen shot of Google News to prove the story existed once.
Now not only is the ABC News story gone, but the site that broke the story originally seems to have vanished as well (at least for me for Miles of tinyapps).
Here’s the challenge: Can you find the story anywhere? In a cache? Other places on the Net?

Meyer and Gillmor in the Economist

In an ongoing in North Carolina invasion of Britain, Phil Meyer appears in today’s Economist (just as Jamie Boyle is in the Financial Times). Phil is quoted, his book cited and props given.
Recent visitor, Dan Gillmor also gets star treatment in the same article, “The Future of Journalism: Yesterday’s Papers,” which asks or rathers tells us what Rupert Murdock told US editors last week, the business of news is changing drastically.
Also mentioned blogs, podcasting, wikis — the usual technological suspects.

Brainz: Meta and Music

MusicBrainz
Robert Kaye, who has the most creative hair styles known, writes to announce the MetaBrainz Foundation, which is designed to run the evolving MusicBrainz project.

MusicBrainz is a user maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the name of an artist, the name of an album and list of tracks that appear on an album. MusicBrainz collects this information about music and makes it available to the public.

With the creation of the MetaBrainz Foundation, the MusicBrainz project enters its second phase of life. In the first incarnation, the project was privately maintained and focused primarily on basic music metadata described above. Today the MusicBrainz project has the legal backing and infrastructure of the MetaBrainz Foundation, which will allow it to embark on a mission to expand its scope.

MusicBrainz recently released the Advanced Relationships feature which allows volunteers to enter vastly more information about music than previously possible. This new feature allows MusicBrainz to capture essential music information as well as obscure facts about music and the musicians who created it. With these new features, MusicBrainz takes the first step towards creating a user contributed music encyclopedia.

MetaBrainz has a killer Board, including Larry Lessig, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow and Dan Brickley and is officially tax-exempt and is ready to receive your donations and your help.

Pimp My Ride – Library edition

This just in from the North Carolina Library Association:

Senate Bill 971 – North Carolina Libraries Special Plate – The bill authorizes the Division of Motor Vehicles to issue a North Carolina Libraries special registration plate. The additional fees for the special plate will go to the North Carolina Library Association, Inc. for the Association’s public programs.

Notes: The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Finance. Each year several bills are introduced to add special plates for the benefit of various groups. This type of bill is generally held until late in the legislative session for consideration. If the bill passes, plates will not be issued until there are at least 300 requests and there is no estimate given on the amount of income the plates could generate.

Ross A. Holt
Head of Reference
Randolph County Public Library

Note: the primary sponsor is our State Senator, Eleanor Kinnaird.

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