Continuations

For the New Year, I tweeted that we should “ll work together in 2014 to keep the Internet open for the benefit of humankind everywhere." That couldn’t be any more pressing as there is a full scale assault under way and we don’t seem to be doing much about it. First, thanks to Edward Snowden we have a much better view into the extent of domestic and international surveillance activities. The non-democratic ultra-secret and blackhat based approach taken by the NSA has done much to undermine the...

In the future we can’t have privacy for the same reason that the record labels and Hollywood can’t have DRM and that’s ultimately a good thing. DRM has proven a fool’s errand because it is not compatible with general purpose computing. At some point a song or movie has to be decrypted in order to be played back and short of tamper proof and “trusted” hardware at that moment it can be digitally copied (and even if we had all of that it could be re-recorded or re-filmed during playback). That i...

The Department of Justice earlier this week sued several large publishers and Apple over alleged collusion surrounding the agency arrangement for the sale of ebooks. The legal situation here is quite complicated as should be evident from the fact that Random House which does have agency agreements with both Apple and Amazon was *not* sued. This suggests that agency agreements in and of themselves are not the issue. Rather it would seem to be the combination of agency agreements together with ...

The New York Times had a piece yesterday on ebook pricing, which I have written about before. Interestingly, the piece simply states and doesn’t question that an ebook retailer such as Apple should be entitled to a 30% fee. What will Apple provide? There would seem to be four separate functions: discovery, payment, delivery and DRM. Let’s start with payment. The fraud rate for ebooks is likely to be very low and the cost to process a payment at scale should be no more than 25 cents (and hopef...

Comedians get to say what most of us think but don’t have the courage or circumstance to say. Louis CK has a fantastic new special out (warning: if you are easily offended this is definitely not for you) that is full of hilarious but also poignant observations about the human condition. That special also marks a critical breakthrough in the future of content: it is a paid direct to consumer distribution. If you like his style of comedy (as I do), head on over to LouisCK.net and pay your 5 buc...

Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds but the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote goes on to refer to Pythagoras, Socrates and Newton and so may it doesn’t refer to logical consistency but rather to the ability to learn from new information and form a new opinion based on that. Be that as it may (any Emerson scholars here?) there seems to me a logical inconsistency in the arguments of many staunch privacy advocates. They want to be simultaneously pro strong privacy yet anti DRM and pro Gener...

When I first heard about SnapChat I was immediately reminded of the attempts of a friend of mine to establish a DRM’d email platform that would let recipients read an email but not do anything else with it that hadn’t been explicitly authorized (printing, forwarding, etc). There was some amazingly fancy crypto technology involved. In the end though it was never possible to close up the many holes inside general purpose computing technology. Those of course include the ultimate hole – the so-c...