Monthly Archives: June 2007

Federal Judge Ruling Issues In New Era of Non-Privacy

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Never before has any judge declared that the memory footprint stored in RAM on computers was evidence. Now one has. CNET reports that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has asked the courts to rule that the small memory footprint that is stored in BitTorrent servers when users download videos from Torrent servers is evidence that can identify individuals downloading movies and television shows illegally.

The ruling passed down from the Central District of California orders TorrentSpy (and likely other Torrent companies) to begin tracking IP addresses from RAM.

The curious part about this ruling has nothing to do with the MPAA or TorrentSpy. The real issue, and much bigger, is the precedent set by the lower court. If this ruling is to stand, for the first time ever, temporary data in RAM would be considered under the law “Storage” and subject to subpoena. It does not take a whole lot of imagination to extrapolate how government and complainants can get access to information that they really shouldn’t have access to.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the online champion of privacy and freedom on the internet, is casting tentative support behind this sentiment. EFF attorney, Fred von Lohmann, states in an email to me, “We tend to agree. We’re looking into the case and may file an amicus brief in the coming weeks.”

Safari OS To Become the New Standard

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I was not one of the folks who had the pleasure of being at WWDC07 today, however I followed closely what was being said through the variety of websites who were live blogging Steve Jobs’keynote.

I was expecting a little more in the way of announcements today but got very little of that. Cool insight into what Leopard will look like in October and much needed improvements to .Mac. The biggest “read between the lines” moment came when Jobs announced that there is no SDK for the iPhone and, in fact, Safari 3 would be released for Windows (available for free download now for both Mac and Windows users) and would be deployed in its fullness on the iPhone.

What does this mean? It means that Apple has single handedly created the OS of the future and it is Safari. Notably, don’t ignore Google who seems to be Apple’s latest bed-buddy, and is poised to benefit the most from this move – particularly since there has been long standing rumor of the Google OS which has been vaporware so far but could very well blossom on the Safari Platform.

Yes, I did say Safari Platform. If the “read between the lines” moment was the intuitive announcement that there is no SDK for the iPhone and, in fact, web apps are the means of deploying iPhone software, and in fact Safari will be available to the vast majority of folks, there is no reason to believe that Safari is not the new OS platform.

“We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it, and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure. and we’ve come up with a very sweet solution,” said Jobs.

This capability is being exposed through the full version of Safari that will run on the iPhone, said Jobs, using Web 2.0-style technologies like AJAX that will enable developers to create content that “looks and behaves exactly like apps,” integrated with the iPhone and iPhone services.

“They can make a call, they can send an e-mail, they can look up a location on Google Maps,” Jobs added for emphasis. What’s more, distribution is simple because developers can put them up on their own servers, update the code themselves, and incorporate the built-in security that Web 2.0 applications provide.

“They run securely on the iPhone, so they don’t compromise its reliability or security. And guess what? There’s no [software development kit]. You’ve got everything you need, if you know how to write apps using existing Web standards,” Jobs said. (Macworld)

There is no barrier to entry to building software for the next generation smart phone and considering that the iPhone is locked into only AT&T here in the U.S. as the sole provider of the device for the next 5 years, it’s not unreasonable to assume challengers from other manufacturers and providers will emerge. In fact, Verizon Wireless is already talking about their own device in the fall.

If the challenger devices don’t have the same features as the iPhone, how are they challengers? Expect new mobile browsers that display “the real web”, and perhaps even device that ship with embedded Safari (don’t know the legalities of that so feel free to correct me on that!).

If Web apps are the future, there’s really no reason to assume that everyone won’t follow suit and that *ahem* Google *ahem* won’t be marketing Gmail, Documents and Spreadsheets, YouTube, Google Calendar and the plethora of other web based software that is already available to smart phone users.

Before you know it, Apple and Google will have created the world’s first OS in such a format.

Your thoughts?

Washington D.C. Area New Media Conference

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For those of you in suburban Washington, I’ve been asked to be a panelist at the New Media Nouveaux Conference in Tyson’s Corner on July 13. The topic is “Futurists, what’s coming next?” and I’ll be sharing the stage with Sean Gorman, CEO of FortuisOne and Brian Williams, CEO of VigetLabs. The entire conference is branded, “How to Make Your Audience Fall Madly, Deeply, Crazy in Love With You, Your Message and Your Company.” Incidentally, that tagline wins the award for most thorough descriptive sentence.

See you there!

Update: Readers of this blog who have made more than 5 comments somewhere along the line, and who come to the event, should introduce yourself (You should introduce yourself anyway!). Those who have commented at least five times are eligible to recieve $100 in iTunes music from yours truly.

Hosting the Carnival of Maryland

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Just a word to let you all know that I am hosting this week’s Carnival of Maryland. The Carnival is spearheaded by members of the Maryland Blogger Alliance, a loose confederation of bloggers from Maryland that began as political blogs banded together a few years ago and today represents a much broader cross-section of the Maryland blogosphere. Explore other MBA sites.

If you are from Maryland, think about submitting your entry for the Maryland blog carnival via the blog carnival submission site. Entries must be in by Saturday, June 16.

Facebook or MySpace?

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My Art of War entry the other day caused quite a stir. Notably, it caused a stir with the readers of b5media blog BuzzNetworker where Kevin Palmer, the author who has developed a professional public profile using MySpace takes issue with my sentiments regarding Facebook’s success. He has successfully stirred the pot and many more commenters came out in support of MySpace than Facebook.

I’ve issued a challenge. It’s really simple. Record a video and tell me why you prefer MySpace over Facebook. Keep it under a minute.

If I get a significant amount of input, I’ll publish the results as a video and you can say you were made into a movie star because of this blog (yeah, right!). Just to clarify, I need an actual file emailed to me. Feel free to publish to YouTube but if I don’t get a file, I can’t use it. :)

The YouTube Video Revolution

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It was announced the other day that YouTube would begin serving H.264 video format on all their YouTube videos. This is an announcement that was made in conjunction with Apple regarding video formats for their Apple TV which uses Apple’s Quicktime format.

If you’re not familiar with H.264, it is a high definition video encoding protocol which allows for resolution scaling. It is the format used in Quicktime and video purchased on iTunes that allow HD crisp display on tiny iPod video screens and that allows for unpixelated resolution scaling on normal televisions.

It is the revolution of video but it’s not really new. It has become more known with the advent of iPod videos.

The plan is that all new videos will be encoded as H.264 starting sometime in the middle of June. There will be a significant quantity of YouTube content which will be available immediately for AppleTV users and new content will become available as YouTube users upload new content and as YouTube processes through their archives converting older content to the H.264 codec.

The big losers here are Microsoft and Adobe. Currently, all YouTube videos are played in a Flash video player (FLV). The move to a standardized codec means that proprietary solutions lose out. Adobe’s Flash? Gone. Microsoft’s Windows Media Player? Need to download a codec. Who wants to work for their videos?

H.264 can be played in most industry standard players. Quicktime, of course is the big one, making the deal a winner for Apple. AppleTV users are immediately benefited. iPhone users will benefit. Other players – VLC, MPlayer, and others.

From a business perspective, this deal continues to enhance the Google-Apple position that places the duo in stiff competition with Microsoft. The pair creates a highly distributed media network – Google with software and deliverables via the internet, and Apple with hardware multiplicity – iPod, Intel Macs, Apple TV, etc.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to promote their proprietary infrastructure cemented by Windows Media Center/Vista, the XBOX 360 and the Zune with restrictive access to non-Microsoft media distribution (no H.264/Mpeg-4 support built into Windows Media Player) . Incidentally, why does the Zune only integrate with a single OS media player while the iPod integrates with a cross-OS iTunes? Fascinating.