In dire need of a project to make time pass mroe quickly? Why not try this manual: Boing Boing: DIY self-RFID-chipping HOWTO, Wed. Jan 4 at Dorkbot in NYC
Mikey Sklar installed a $2 RFID tag in his left hand. Why the hell did he do it? How can you cram an RFID under your own skin for fun and profit? How ever does one choose the right tag to subcutaneously implant, and what other crazy hacking hijinks are others exploring with RFIDS?
Enjoy!
Since I mentioned the relative size of the German an French Blogospheres below, here’s another interesting fact about relative sizes: If you look at
Wikipedia’s main page, you will notice that, using an article per capita measure, the German part of the free encyclopedia is holding up very well not just in comparison to the Anglosphere challenge but also with respect to our French friends (about 1.3 times).
Assuming for the moment that both blogging and writing for Wikipedia means participating in some kind of digital civil society, do the different relative sizes of the respective elements thereof tell us something about the people behind the ventures?
Could it be that Germans are more interested in participating in something with a more authoritative, slightly more hierarchical, aura than the blogosphere, where the laws of information markets determine reputation, pseudo-link-list-authority, success and failure and everything is very much evolutionary, sometimes even in the short run? Could it be that the French are displaying an unknown taste for the said market forces?
I’m not sure, but it seems, just as contemporary forms of dating have apaprently enabled social scientists to gain a new level of understanding concerning the rules determining human mating ( you may not like it ;) – from Zeit Wissen, in German), mass participation in the digital public discourse could provide previously impossible insights into national discoursive preferences.
What do you think.
Last Friday, Proximity Deutschland, the BBDO group CRM-agency’s German subsidiary, released a blog survey according to which 27% of German web users know what a “blog” or “weblog” is, 41% of which allegedly read weblogs – that would equal about 5% of the German population, or 4m weblog readers in Germany -, and 4% of which, or about 650,000 people, allegedly have a blog of their own.
Quite frankly, I haven’t read the survey, but the endless stream of confused “your whats” with reference to this site or to afoe tell me that there is something seriously flawed with this survey. On the other hand, their main finding seems to be intuitively correct: compared to other countries, blogs do not yet have an important role in German media… (link to the press release in German).
I’ve just put up a longer post about the EU’s Intellectual Property Right Enforcement Directive over at fistful. So in case you’re interested, click here to read.
Ever wondered what the legal situation regarding internet traffic data retention by ISPs and governmental access is in EU countries? Don’t look further, saveprivacy.org has a note sent by the general secretariat of the EU council to the EU’s Multidisciplinary Group on Organised Crime (MDG) that outlines the current legal situation as well as possible future projects with respect to traffic data retention.
Very much so. In pretty much all possible respects. I wonder if this kind of service was what the mobile handsets’ manufacturers’ marketing department had in mind when developing the idea of mobile handsets with cameras?
Quote 1: The BBC News Online today –
“Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told BBC News Online earlier this year that digital piracy could become “debilitating” for the industry.
‘Digital piracy has become a real menace,’ he said. Despite the availability of pirate copies, The Matrix Reloaded has made more than $363.5m at the box office worldwide so far.“
Quote 2: Brad DeLong, Speculative Microecomomics For Tomorrow’s Economy, draft, November 14, 1999 –
“The ongoing revolution in data processing and data communications technology may well be starting to undermine those basic features of property and exchange that make the invisible hand a powerful social mechanism for organizing production and distribution. The case for the market system has always rested on three implicit pillars, three features of the way that property rights and exchange worked.
Call the first feature excludability: the ability of sellers to force consumers to become buyers, and thus to pay for whatever goods and services they use.
Call the second feature rivalry: a structure of costs in which two cannot partake as cheaply as one, in which producing enough for two million people to use will cost at least twice as many of society’s resources as producing enough for one million people to use.
Call the third transparency: the ability of individuals to see clearly what they need and what is for sale, so that they truly know just what it is that they wish to buy.
All three of these pillars fit the economy of Adam Smith’s day relatively well. …
But digital data is cheap and easy to copy. … Without the relationship between producer and consumer becomes much more akin to a gift-exchange than a purchase-and-sale relationship. The appropriate paradigm then shifts in the direction of a fund-raising drive for a National Public Radio station. When commodities are not excludable then people simply help themselves. If the user feels like it he or she may make a “pledge” to support the producer. The user sends money to the producer not because it is the only way to gain the power to utilize the product, but out of gratitude and for the sake of reciprocity.
This reciprocity-driven revenue stream may well be large enough that producers cover their costs and earn a healthy profit. Reciprocity is a basic mode of human behavior. People in the large do feel a moral obligation to tip cabdrivers and waiters. People do contribute to National Public Radio. But without excludability the belief that the market economy produces the optimal quantity of any commodity is hard to justify. Other forms of provision–public support funded by taxes that are not voluntary, for example–that had fatal disadvantages vis-a-vis the competitive market when excludability reigned may well deserve reexamination. …[But t]he market system may well prove to be tougher than its traditional defenders have thought, and to have more subtle and powerful advantages than those that defenders of the invisible hand have usually listed.
For at least five years. If you search my blog you will find that I have repeatedly said that all attempts to sell musical downloads will suffer from problematic price policy. Apple’s new itunes download service is no exception. True, it is probably closer than anything previously seen to actually enhancing the user experience with digital music. According to wired news,
“… opening day downloads equaled the number of songs legally downloaded over a six-month period last year.”
But it is nonetheless bereft with a pricing dilemma. A dollar a tune is not always a justifiable price, even though NY Times columnist David Pogue is ridiculing criticism of this pricing policy.
In fact, for most downloads it is clearly too much, even though things are cheaper when an entire Album is downloaded – for 10 dollars. While a tenner a disk makes downloading for some albums cheaper than your local record store, it is, on the other hand, probably a prohibitive price for DRM protected material, and, moreover, a price justifiable only due to the channel conflict with the non-digital distribution universe, which still makes it necessary to spend millions on marketing songs to people who are not interested in them anyway. It is a price only justified if the advantages of the internet, especially in the realm of marketing to a smaller, but more appropriate audience, are not exploited.
Thus, a dollar a buck can just be the beginning. People will continue to negotiate this price by using KaZaa and Grokster. Record companies will continue to try to scare unwitting conservative politicians about “the end of property” as well as send cease-and-desist letters to people sharing songs.
The big unknown variable is the political one. Will politicians be willing to understand the conventional definitions of property are just not appropriate in the digital age? Or will they allow the record industry to gain a windfall from perpetuating the economic structures of previous times for an unknown amount of time? I firmly believe that eventually, the social and economic institutions will adjust to a new reality.
But again, it is a matter of pricing. This time, a matter of the price that our information societies will be willing to pay for patrolling people’s hard drives and digitally fingreprinting their lives. Maybe US Sen. Santorum’s intervention telling homosexuals that they do not have a right to privacy came at the right time. I don’t know. But it is more important now than ever to tell people that digital privacy is an important issue. Something, many people were concerned about when it wasn’t a real issue yet, back in the 1980s.
Now that it is one, people don’t seem to realise that the same mechanism that allows to reduce the prices of individual songs could be the reason for the end of civil liberties as we know it. [ author off to pay to see a film in a real movie theatre…]
Just in case you haven’t yet heard about it, humanity’s decade-old suspicion has apparently finally been verified. It looks like Microsoft is indeed collecting more data about its customers than necessary via recent versions of its “Windows Update System”, according to a German computer website, tecchannel.de [link in German], which has deciphered the encrypted stream of bits sent to Redmond during any update of Windows.
Luckily, there’s help. In fact, heise.de[link in German] points to a Microsoft White Paper cryptically called Using Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 in a Managed Environment: Controlling Communication with the Internet describing how to deactivate the system.
But don’t ask me – I did not read it. It’s only 172 pages of small print…
If it weren’t so serious, it might actually be funny. Last year, Apple’s German pricing policy kept me from buying the new Imac, but now Bill seems to update his efforts to drive me to Apple’s gates…
One of the real problems of the Iraq induced congestion of the media is that there is so much more important stuff going on that no body hears about – well, at least, that a lot less people hear about than should hear about it.
One of the big issues which currently receive a lot less attention than they deserve is the war concerning intellectual property rights. Yesterday, Berkeley’s Bradford DeLong posteda list of what he believes are the five most important questions facing the world economy today. Number three reads as follows –
“3. How will the current intellectual property wars be resolved? Will they be resolved in a way that greatly increases the profits of CD and movie companies and that slows the adoption of broadband and other advanced information technologies? Or will they be resolved in a way that implicitly or explicitly confiscates a bunch of the intellectual property of CD and movie companies, but that gives consumers and other users enormous incentives to adopt broadband and other advanced information technologies? It is clear to me that the second would be better for economic growth, but that the first is more likely.”
He’s right. Ttwo weeks ago, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case Eldred vs. Ashcroft that it was legal for the US Congress to extend the copyright protection, the “Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act”, which extended by 20 years both existing copyrights and future copyrights, for the law does not extend the protection forever. For Disney (and the like), it was a case about cash flow from exploiting the Mickey Mouse’s of this world. For everybody else (immediately only for those living in the US, of course), it was a case about the balance of private vs. public interests – in the economic realm but also far beyond. The plaintiff’s case had been supported by an amazing amount of intellectual capacity, including various Nobel Price laureates.
But private interests prevailed. It really looks as if owners of intellectual property are able to use their current economic clout and and a socialised narrow, conventional definition of property to put their short term interests above the social long term ones.
The next big battle in the IP war is probably the EU directive 2001/29/EG, which is an attempt to harmonize European copyright regimes with respect to the digital age. While theoretically maintaining the right to a limited amount of personal digital copies of copyrighted work one owns, the directive also contains a clause prohibiting the circumvention of any technical copyright device in order to exercise the right to a personal copy. Thus the private copy clause will in all likelihood be useless following the implementation of the EU directive into the member states’ national legal frameworks.
But resistance is not futile. So far, the directive has only become national law in Greece and Denmark. All other nations let the deadline pass. Debate and opposition are growing, and there are even legal doubts about the directive’s validity. It may be late, but not too late. Click here for a summary of the state of the national legislative processes of all EU member states.
The site also features the web addresses of online petitions in most European countries. It is not too late to sign.
To sign the German petition, just click here.
