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how do i live without you?

Apparetly a ton of you clicking on the "tune into Keyur" link in the "Last 5 songs" section. This morning as I write this I've got a listener from the National Technical University of Athens from a Telecom lab in the ECE department. Yesterday when I was mixing up Western and Eastern music in a chaotic playlist I had listeners from Canada, Sweden, UK, India, and four from Singapore. Thats just cool. Anyway to all my listeners, WORD UP! Of course all of you can make requests. Just use the email or AIM links in the "about a keyur" section on your right. I still have to figure out what to do when I'm playing MP3s that only have ID3v2 tags, because as of now that only displays a simple dash instead of the actual song title.

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That John Gruber is at it again with an unintended yet masterful discource on the whole application centric v. task centric UI models. Heres a small tidbit of the goodness John dispenses:

"So the Mac paradigm enforces a three-level hierarchy: you’ve got the system, which runs applications, which display windows. The Windows paradigm tries to eliminate the middleman, presenting a system, which displays windows — i.e. the idea is not that your windows belong to applications, but that they belong to the Windows system itself. The problem with this is that it’s an illusion, in that Windows is still very much an application-centric system. It just doesn’t look like it. When it comes right down to it, Windows is almost every bit as application-centric as the Mac, but the Windows human interface attempts to disguise this, ostensibly to make things simpler."

Hearing my frustrations put into well thought out coherent sentences like this is as good as getting free money. If nothing else its a rather illuminating read into one of the most common frustrations computer users face. As if all of that isn't good enough, John quotes MPT, 'nuff said. Ram I hope after reading this you get some insight into why I'm forced to use X-Mouse (focus follows mouse) on windows.

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So I've been trying to get a few of friends to stop using Hotmail now. There are a lot of good reasons to not use Hotmail. My family is definitely not ready to listen just yet, and some friends have bottomles bags of excuses. These types of security problems are just the tip of the iceberg. I had 8 "password reset" emails in my hotmail account inbox. That means either one or more people tried to reset my hotmail password and thankfully failed. For the record I have a hotmail account only so that I can use MSN messenger to chat with some people who use it exclusively. I just don't understand why people put up with a measly 2MB of space, infinite spam, ads out the wazoo a web interface thats busier than Times Square, and no easy way to check mail with any programs other than Outlook. I guess people just tend to stick with whatever they've made themselves get used to. Just terrible. For all my readers using Hotmail for their email needs, please stop, just don't do it. Email me and I'll give you a ton of free email options that are way better than Hotmail.

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As is habit I was was checking out my server logs and caught a very interesting visitor: 131.107.163.50 - [18:15 05/07/03] - MicrosoftPrototypeCrawler (please report obnoxious behavior to newbiecrawler@hotmail.com)

I checked out the forums at Webmaster World and apparently this is a valid bot adhering to standard crawlers conventions and there have been replies from MS employees stating to be from the Microsoft Universal Agent group. This is most interesting. I wonder how this is going to play out in the search engine world. It can't be all bad, because Google has been the unchallenged champion for some time now, maybe some real competition will really kick things into overdrive and bring some truly innovative search features to the market beyond just finding relevant material.

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I've been meaning to write about DRM for some time now, but it always happens that I've already got something else to written and I push off the DRM thoughts to another day. Not today. For those of you unfamiliar with DRM, its a way for the content creator (musician, software company, e-book publishers, etc.) to control how you the user can use their content. According to Steve Ballmer's executive email on DRM, "rights management technologies enable a content owner to stipulate a set of rules, or policy rights, that govern how the content may be used, by whom, for how long, etc."

This wouldn't be too scary but you see in order to really control how content is used once it gets to the user there have to be hardware and software blocks in order to make it happen, because any pure software solution can and will be circumvented. For example if a song file has DRM but the computer its being played on doesn't have hardware DRM then you could just record the song from the digital output port and make a perfect digital copy sans the DRM that you can then distribute the song freely.

Microsoft has been quietly building a hardware and software DRM solution that was originally called Palladium but recently had its name changed to Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSC). This type of system is designed from the ground up to give the user only rights the content publisher chooses. Whats seriously troubling to me is that this allows companies like Sony, Universal and Microsoft to tell you exactly how you can and cannot use your computer, not just the software on it, but the actual computer itself. For example you can only use speakers "approved" my Microsoft that work with a PC "approved" by Microsoft to listen to songs you buy from your convenient online music store.

The worst part of all this is how Microsoft Marketing and Public Relations is doing a remarkable job getting the idea out there that DRM is somehow supposed to make the life of the cosumer easier and freer. Recently Bill Gates was quoted saying, "We're building a security system that people can use or not use as they please. We are not telling anyone what they have to do or not do with their computers or with their content." This is utterly misleading. Users who have DRM enabled computers cannot opt out of using it, its there, its like trying to opt out of using a monitor. You can't really do that without really jumping through some hoops. DRM isn't desinged to protect you the consumer its designed from the ground up to protect the content publisher. If anything DRM is going to further limit the way you can use your own computer and the way the use of your computer is limited is fully up to the the company that designed the DRM scheme in use. More than likely than it will be Microsoft, considering they already have more than 90% penetration in the cosumer desktop market.

Clearly its fair for content publishers to get paid for their work and not have thier rights taken away completely, but what about the user? There is something intrinsically "Big Brotherish" about having a computer tell you what can and cannot do to data that you have purchased. A clearer analogy to this whole DRM concept would be if you bought a car which didn't let you drive to the part of a city because of the percentage of people there who commit a crime. Once you have purchased something, especially something as multifaceted as a computer, you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it. People who submit to draconian DRM schemes are essentially admitting, "I'm a computer criminal and cannot control myself so I have Microsoft controlling what I can and cannot do."

A lot of you are going to think that I'm humping Apple's leg again, but they are the only company so far that have managed to balance the interest of the copyright holders and the users. Apple's DRM allows users to copy music they've purchased to 3 other machines, burn unlimited audio CDs (one playlist can only be burned 10 times without changes), you can copy the music to an iPod and you can even stream music from the machine that holds the music to whatever machine you happen to be using. This is way better than anything else that has been even remotely considered on the PC side of the things.

In an ideal world we would have a solution that protects our rights as consumers and the rights of the artists creating the content we enjoy and still manages to not revolve around the products and services of one company be it Apple, Microsoft or anyone else. Lets see what the future has in store for us. As always, hope for the best, but expect the worst.

How you doing Linux?

Linkses:
Why IT won't let you customize your PC
Long arm of Longhorn
Why some file sharing networks get sued and die and others survive

Posted by Mr. Keyur at May 8, 2003 05:27 PM | TrackBack