Marc Ambinder has the (few) details.  It seems such a small thing, but I think it’s remarkably important. A backchannel with the world, if you will.
Related: Keep the Blackberry
Category: Distribution Page 5 of 15
I remember arguing about this in law school, over a decade ago:
A federal law intended to restrict children’s access to Internet pornography died quietly Wednesday at the Supreme Court, more than 10 years after Congress overwhelmingly approved it.
The Child Online Protection Act would have barred Web sites from making harmful content available to minors over the Internet. The law had been embroiled in challenges to its constitutionality since it passed in 1998 and never took effect.
COPA was a patently ridiculous law, the product of populist grandstanding more than anything else. It put the onus on me, as publisher of this site, to make sure your little precious was unable to see something that you didn’t want her to see.  The law was challenged virtually the moment it was signed, and it’s amazing that it took 10 years to finally be done with it.  I do fear that now that it’s off the table, some enterprising congressman or senator is going to take up the cause of government content regulation (probably some young and ambitious Republican congressman plus Lieberman).
I didn’t criticize the Presidential Inauguration Commission’s decision to sell HBO exclusive rights to broadcast the We Are One concert because I thought that was a reasonable compromise between free public access and the very high levels of private contributions that would otherwise be required.  But then HBO decided that they were going to use copyright law to make sure that most Americans couldn’t witness this piece of history without their permission. That absolutely amazing moment on the Mall I posted about, led by Pete Seeger? Sorry, no longer available to you. HBO owns it.
Your history, copyright HBO.
It’s a bit surreal to see the DTV transition come to pass, as I’ve spent much of my legal career dealing with the various factors delaying it. In any event, it looks like it’s coming. For real this time:
At noon sharp Thursday in Hawaii, a message appeared on analog TV sets across the islands: “All full-power Hawaii TV stations are now digital.”
The state shut down old-fashioned broadcast signals, more than a month before the rest of the country is set to make the now-contentious switch.
It was, of course, a surprise to people who can’t actually comprehend what’s been flashing across their screens for months (if not years):
“The calls we’re getting now are from those people who are waking up and saying, `Oh my God, what do I do?'” said Lyle Ishida, the FCC’s Hawaii digital TV project manager, just before the switch.
I alternate between having some sympathy and outright mockery. Maybe the eldery lady down the block simply tunes out whenever see hears the word “digital”. Her? I want to help. But for all these twits who won’t understand why their screens have gone snowy because they couldn’t comprehend the announcements between Judge Judy episodes? They deserve a break from television.
In any event, it’s here. It’s coming. A month from now. For real this time. The incoming administration may delay it a short bit (an ultimately pointless exercise, from a consumer’s point of view, I believe), but that television set in the spare bedroom will very soon need a new box to be useful.
(And if that’s the set your grandmother or dad watches? Maybe you should ask them if you can help.)
Now that things are hitting a little closer to home for newspapers, maybe we’ll get some real journalism on the impact of outsourcing on American jobs:
On Wednesday, the Sun-Times Media Group, at a meeting in the Sun-Times led by CEO Cyrus Freidheim Jr., told their unions they needed to cut their overall wage and benefit packages by 7 percent; they asked the unions to come up with ways to do it.
[ . . . ]
Sure to be on the agenda too is an idea the company floated Friday afternoon at the Sun-Times. It’s to eliminate 25 to 30 jobs — about a fifth of the editorial jobs remaining at that paper — by outsourcing the copy editing and layout functions, possibly to India.
[ . . . ]
The Sun-Times Media Group would have to be in terrible shape to consider such an idea. To turn copy over to editors on the other side of the world whose idiomatic English is so different is to guarantee constant aggravation and frustration, not to mention published howlers.
They must mean different published howlers.
Looks like the Republican rodeo clowns are already starting their show:
Republicans introduced a bill Wednesday that would bar Congress, President-elect Barack Obama and federal media regulators from bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, which they said would all but eliminate the talk-radio industry.
Maybe we can get a bill to bar bringing New Coke back, too? As Steve Benen notes:
These guys aren’t pushing a bill to get rid of the Fairness Doctrine, because it’s already gone. They’re pushing a bill to prevent anyone from trying to bring it back — despite the fact that there is no meaningful effort to do so. TNR’s Marin Cogan recently wrote a great piece, noting that she couldn’t find anyone on the left who was serious about reinstating the policy. Cogan explained, “The prospect of being in the opposition often brings out the worst in conservatives — paranoia and self-pity.”
The Republican party likes to go on and on about responsibility and self-reliance, but they’ve got this whiny victimhood thing down pat.
Sounds like LiveJournal might be on its way out:
The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees — and offered them no severance, we’re told.
[ . . . ]
The company’s product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support.
Ouch. It’s entirely unsurprising – there are only so many investors in the world willing trade something for nothing – but it’s still a bit sad. LiveJournal – started in 1999 – can lay claim to being part of the foundation upon which online social networking was built. Further, it provides the infrastructure on which a number of unique shared-interest communities depend (however, that sort of ecological frailty is not a good idea). I hope that its users can find a new home (preferably one that doesn’t depend on an unsustainable business model).
Obama wants to keep his Blackberry. From TPM:
Obama acknowledged in a nationally broadcast interview Thursday that the Blackberry is a concern, “not just to the Secret Service, but also to lawyers.”
Asked in an interview broadcast on NBC’s “Today” show whether the issue had been resolved, Obama replied, “I’m still in a scuffle around that.” He asked: “How do you stay in touch with the flow of everyday life?”
Enough with the mob mentality – no fingerprints, no records – that’s characterized the White House.  It may not be in the White House counsel’s best interest to have a Blackberry in Obama’s pocket, but it’s certainly in the public interest.
Like many, I’m fairly cynical about blogs in most of my conversations about them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see enormous value and potential there. This video reminded me that I should say that more often.
Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.
This story on “passive” heating of homes just confirms my decision that if I’m ever building a place for myself, I’m hiring Germans to do it:
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
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I wouldn’t even consider owning an iPhone (keyboard required), but I’ll have to admit that this nifty little application – which geocodes your photographs by syncing your iphone’s GPS position with the timestamp on your photos – makes me wish my Treo could do that.
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I wonder if this search/bridge will make the Tor anonymizer service any more useful. I try to keep a Tor node running most of the time, but it doesn’t seem to see much use. What’s Tor?
Tor is endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. It works by randomly routing traffic, such as website requests and e-mail, through a network of nodes hosted by volunteers around the world before delivering it to its destination. The traffic is encrypted enroute through every node except the final one, and the end point cannot see where the traffic or message originated. Theoretically, nobody spying on the traffic can identify the source.
It’s often painfully slow and not terribly easy to use, however. Perhaps the app I linked will help stimulate some interest in overcoming that.
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Looks like NASA is contracting out resupply of the International Space Station to two private operators. While part of me is pleased to see an operator like SpaceX get some stability through this, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a significant step down the path of placing the space program (and tech) entirely in private hands. The problem I have with that is massive public spending on R&D that will only end up being locked up for private benefit.
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Consider the possiblities of this published research:
Rapid and selective erasures of certain types of memories in the brain would be desirable under certain clinical circumstances. By employing an inducible and reversible chemical-genetic technique, we find that transient CaMKII overexpression at the time of recall impairs the retrieval of both newly formed one-hour object recognition memory and fear memories, as well as 1-month-old fear memories. Systematic analyses suggest that excessive CaMKII activity-induced recall deficits are not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories. Further experiments show that the recall-induced erasure of fear memories is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain.
Well.
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Open source once against illustrates the dangers of putting our elections in the hands of Diebold and other black box voting technology companies:
“Ballot Browser, an open source Python program developed by Mitch Trachtenberg (yours truly) as part of the all-volunteer Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, was instrumental in revealing that Diebold counting software had dropped 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California’s official election results. Despite a top-to-bottom review by the California Secretary of State’s office, it appears that Diebold had not informed that office of the four-year-old bug.
Shocked!
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I spent no small amount of time this year revising and improving my shot-to-publication workflow for my photo coverage of pro cycling races. It’s an enormously time consuming process, and I’m still looking to improve it. Reading this (recent) history of pro photog filing systems makes me rather thankful for today’s tech.
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Speaking of photo tech – Polaroid is done making instant film today.
Almost 60 years after Polaroid introduced its iconic instant camera, the company will stop manufacturing the film Dec. 31. Remaining film supplies are expected to dry up sometime next year.
“Shake it like a what?”, the kids ask.