Category: Uncategorized

A closer look at Microsoft’s unethical business practices

A recent reader’s article on boycottnovell.com offers a very insightful look into the unethical side of Microsoft’s business.

The author, Roy Schestowitz, makes a number of very good points. In particular:

  • Microsoft abuses “guerilla” or “viral” advertising more than other companies, disguising recommendations as “impartial” when in reality they are anything but that. An unfortunate choice for a company that really should not need to resort to these tactics.
  • Microsoft combines products into “bundles” solely to squeeze out competing products. Examples abound: perhaps the best known is Windows 95, where MS-DOS was no longer available as a separate product. Another example is the inclusion of Web browser and media player software within Windows.
  • Microsoft abuses standards and in fact the entire standardization process to suit their needs. While this is not really explored in Roy’s article in detail, the most obvious example I can think of is the confusingly named Office Open XML format. Microsoft appears to have chosen this name to confuse on purpose as the first version of the OASIS OpenDocument standard (sometimes called ODF) was finalized about a year before.
  • Microsoft’s “partner” network is a sham, as the “partners” really aren’t partners in the truest sense of the word. In essence, the partnership arrangement is coercive; “partners” are agreeing to support and recommend Microsoft’s products exclusively and are threatened with loss of competitiveness if they want to back out.
  • Microsoft also refers to free software, and particularly the GPL, as “Communist” and “un-American.” This is a transparent smear tactic to anyone who is paying even the smallest amount of attention to Microsoft’s motives.

More insanity about photography

This pair of stories from the UK, plus one from Miami, Florida, US, are enough to make any decent person’s blood boil. While these first two are both UK stories, these are equally likely in the US (and other “free” countries).

The first is a report from the Telegraph about parents not being allowed to photograph their own children at a sports day event. The second is a story from the Mail Online about a policemen deleting a tourist’s photos in the name of security. The third story comes from Carlos Miller who documents an absolute absurdity with regard to his long-running legal action. The courts want Carlos to transcribe the entire trial at his expense, not just the portions he believes are pertinent to the appeal. This will cost Carlos at least US$2,500 at US$5 per page.

I don’t know what the schools are attempting to accomplish by keeping parents from taking pictures of their own children. Have we really reached the point where a camera is more feared than a firearm?

With regard to the second, this story is evidence that security paranoia has gotten way out of hand. At least in the US, police or private security guards almost never have legal basis to delete photos (or video or audio). As a general rule, one should never voluntarily surrender one’s camera or recording media.

Finally, Carlos is already appealing his case pro se mainly due to lack of money for a lawyer. Every lawyer Carlos spoke to wanted upwards of US$10,000 to handle the appeal. It disgusts me that our “justice system” expects people who obviously can’t afford it to spend thousands of dollars to get what is rightfully theirs.

For those unfamiliar with Carlos’ story, he maintains an excellent blog entitled Photography is Not a Crime which has complete archives dating back to the first post on 2007-04-28.

Twitter: dead or alive, dying or growing?

Okay, I was really torn between going ahead with a very belated entry about this, versus just moving on to the next story. (Aside: I actually have a backlog of stories I wanted to blog, and deleted three draft entries about news articles that looked good when I landed on them in StumbleUpon but which turned out to be rather blah for writing a real blog entry about.)

But, given how much time I have spent on Twitter, I can’t very well just up and delete a draft post concerning a news story about it. Especially when the headline of the original is “Who Killed Twitter?” and the article is still relatively fresh.

I almost have to wonder if the question should be rephrased: Is Twitter dying? If so, who is really behind it?

Some very interesting claims are made. Among them:

Harvard Business School says the average Twitter user tweets once and never again.

I have yet to see any Twitter users give up after only one tweet, most maybe after 5-10. Maybe there are a few out there; I wonder if this study weeded out spam accounts, as most of those would appear to “give up” after one tweet, but their purpose is accomplished once they have tweeted once and followed 2,000 people.

TechCrunch says that the ol’ 80-20 rule is in full effect on Twitter: 20% of Twitter users are creating 80% of the activity. Harvard Business School says it’s even more extreme than that: 10% of Twitter users post 90% of the Tweets.

This is not surprising. I don’t think it’s any different for Twitter than it is for Blogger, Livejournal, or any other major online service. There are people who blog once a month, once a week, all the way up to once–or more–per day. There are people who blog for a few days and then say “this isn’t for me” just as much as there are people who have been blogging since the days before people abbreviated “weblog” to just “blog.”

It’s the same with Facebook. And I’m not going to lie, I almost gave up on Facebook. Heck, I almost gave up on Twitter at one point. I still feel like I have not truly mastered either, but then again I was a very late adopter for Facebook and several other services (Digg, StumbleUpon, and FriendFeed being most notable as I signed up for all three in the closing days of 2008).

A survey from Pace University and the Participatory Media Network found that only 22% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 use Twitter (though nearly all have social networking profiles).

I have to wonder how accurate this is. Maybe it’s too limiting for the under-25 set, though I fail to see how a generation that grew up with text messages can’t wrap their head around something that is, in essence, text messages that can be read by everyone even if they don’t have a phone.

It is entirely possible the non-Twitter users are using one of the other microblogging services such as identi.ca or simply using the status update feature of Facebook as a rather hackish substitute for Twitter. (Several tools exist to populate Twitter updates to Facebook status, and at least one exists that is selective and looks for a “#fb” hashtag.)

Personally, I don’t think Twitter is dying for me. Quite the contrary: I’m now north of 600 followers which is almost where I was a few months ago. I am at the point where I can’t follow everyone back that follows me.

The problem with stories like this, everyone sees them differently. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say almost everyone and their dog is on Twitter–literally.

The important things to remember are:

  • Twitter does not replace your blog. Not everything I say fits neatly in 140 characters.
  • Twitter does not replace Facebook, MySpace, or similar sites.
  • Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, and CNN did not kill Twitter.
  • For that matter, Cracker Barrel did not kill Twitter. (In fact, Cracker Barrel was probably the reason a lot of businesses all of a sudden hopped on Twitter.)

Free speech, old laws, and vibrating objects

(Warning: linked pages contain profanity and obscene gestures. If you are easily offended by adult topic matter, you may wish to skip this post.)

AlterNet recently published an excerpt from a book entitled In Praise of Indecency, entitled “You Still Can’t Buy a Vibrator in Alabama.” The excerpt is a very candid–almost too candid–look at obscenity in the media.

Of particular note is this incident:

In March 2007, on International Women’s Day, a public high school in Westchester, New York suspended three 16-year-old girls for saying the word “vagina” during a reading from The Vagina Monologues. Principal Richard Leprine said the girls were punished for disobeying orders not to say the word, which he referred to on the school’s homepage as “specified material.” Writer Brigitte Schoen suggested calling the play Elastic Muscular Tube Monologues.

I honestly think this goes a bit too far. “Vagina” is, after all, a medical term. It is one thing to discipline kids for gratuitous use of street terms for private parts; it is another entirely to censor the proper, medical term. Heck, Elliott in E.T. uttered the very-famous “penis breath” line and the movie was still rated PG, and probably airs intact on TV.

And, of course, the part for which the excerpt is named:

Which brings us to Sherri Williams, a casualty of the war on pleasure. She was acquitted of the heinous crime of selling non-prescription vibrators. She had violated an Alabama statute, which bans the sale of vibrators and other sex toys. The law prohibited “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”

But the not-guilty verdict in her case was overturned by a 2-1 decision. In the Court of Appeals, the state’s attorney general defended the statute, arguing that, “a ban on the sale of sexual devices and related orgasm-stimulating paraphernalia is rationally related to a legitimate interest in discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex.” Rationally related? Moreover, he said, “There is no constitutional right to purchase a product to use in pursuit of having an orgasm.” There isn’t?

I think Texas still has a similar law on the books; why, I don’t know. Such is the nature of laws; once passed, they tend to stick around until legislators find time to repeal them. I think these laws, if they ever served a legitimate purpose (big if), do not serve a purpose today. As stated later in the article, Sherri is not giving up, and plans another lawsuit on First Amendment free speech grounds. Which is pretty daring, given some of the past case law on the First Amendment versus pornography.

But I cannot honestly blame Sherri for continuing to fight the good fight. The article ends with this stirringly defiant quote from Sherri, which is great inspiration to us all:

“My motto,” she says, “has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up.”

The plight of Numerama and the future of copyright

Torrentfreak reports on a story involving the French P2P news site Numerama and the French courts. The courts have ordered Numerama to publish extracts of convictions of 27 copyright violators.

Although the court is compensating Numerama to the tune of €10,000 (about US$14,000), it is not surprising that Numerana is a bit worried about taking money from the pro-copyright lobby, even if it is indirectly. Some creative uses for the money have been proposed, and they run the gamut from buying servers for a file-sharing network to a donation to the (unfortunately named) Swedish Pirate Party.

This order comes even though Numerama is not involved in any of the cases. Such appears to be the quirkiness of French law. I question the wisdom of the move, and would still question it even if I believed the draconian copyright enforcement we face today is justified (which I don’t). For one, Numerama’s readers will probably see these people as martyrs or even heroes. With this in mind it is not clear at all just what the copyright holders, through their trade organizations, intend to accomplish.

We live in an age where the previous scarcity of recorded media no longer exists because of the advance of technology. Records, tapes, even CDs in the early years cost what they did because it was expensive and difficult to make copies. Now, all one has to do to make a copy is frequently no more than dragging icons from one window to another, or even typing in a command like cp -a music /media/travel5. That’s still a lot easier and faster than hooking up a tape deck to a record player ever was.

What has been the response of trade organizations like the MPAA and RIAA? Higher prices, and vicious attempts to restrict the freedom of the users. Everything is bits, and bits can be copied over and over again with no loss of quality; rather than embrace this, the companies which make up the MPAA and RIAA have tried to layer scarcity on top of it via Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). This is doomed to failure (already, the RIAA has admitted this by allowing Apple and Amazon to sell MP3 files without DRM).

Let’s define what copying, recording, and playback are, fundamentally (this is really as simple as it gets):

  • Copying is reading bits from a storage device (CD, DVD, hard drive, SD card) and writing the same bits again to another storage device.
  • Recording is reading bits from an input device (camera or microphone) and writing those bits to a storage device.
  • Playback is reading bits from a storage device and writing those same bits to an output device (video monitor or speakers).

All three are fundamentally the same operation. The only differences are where the bits come from and where they go.

The RIAA (and similar music/audio recording trade organizations) may finally be realizing this; when will the MPAA and television producers follow suit?