Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Copyright

What are you willing to give up?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Internet Radio is at risk due to CARP — the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel. There’s also a new bill being put forward before Congress that would make copying watermarks and holograms illegal.

Dallas News is issuing “cease and desist” orders against online sites for deep linking.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation — the main watchdog against copyright abuses is working overtime just to keep up with all the attacks against free speech.

Personally, I splurged and bought myself a CD, which I can’t afford, and then proceeded to find that I can’t play it on my computer because it’s one of the new copy-protected CDs.

Motion Picture Industry. Disney. The recording industry. AOL Time-Warner. Newspapers. Magazines. Cable. Sony. Television. Pieces of the creature we know as The Media Monster Machine.

And to fight this we’ve had a day of silence on Internet Radio, letter writing campaigns to congress, and discussions of a march on Washington.

I’m curious — what would you be willing to give up to fight for a more balanced viewpoint in regards to copyright law implementation? What would you be willing to give up to send a message to The Media Monster Machine?

Would you be willing to give up movies? Including Spider Man? Star Wars? Would you be willing to give up Radio, traditional or Internet-based? How about TV, would you give up sports and movies and Six Feet Under or Buffy or Sex in the City? Would you be willing to not buy that new CD, DVD, or VHS? Would you cancel your newspaper and magazine subscriptions?

What would you be willing to give up?

When you consider that people actively fighting any of the copyright legislative abuses add up to less than 5% of the total population of the country, marches and letter writing won’t have much of an impact on a congress whose main interest is in being re-elected to office.

However, when you consider that this same 5% of the population is made up of people representing a major purchasing power, particularly when it comes to cable, electronics, music, movies, and other items dependent on a larger than normal discretionary income matched by a larger than normal interest in entertainment and gadgets — then you begin to see the shadows of a hammer strong enough to beat against the box the media industry is trying to create.

The question is, though — what are you willing to give up?

Categories
Healthcare

War on health coverage

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There’s been discussion throughout weblogging about whether people would vote for Bush again or not. Many of the postings I’ve read said that the webloggers would primarily because of his policies regarding Israel, and his “handling of terrorism”.

To vote for Bush solely because of terrorism ignores so many other issues that are critical to this country. Issues that also cost lives, daily.

For instance, there’s the issue of health coverage in this country. My friend Chris recently posted some statistics about American life at his weblog. Among these was one that I felt was particularly relevant to my own situation — the fact that 40,000,000 people in this country don’t have health insurance.

If you want something to back up this statistic, then will a press release from the US Census Bureau do? According to the press release, we’re actually improving our lot in life, as the number of people without health insurance coverage in our country dropped to “only” 38.7 million in 2000. However, this number has changed drastically due to the current recession and higher unemployment. Other publications now put the number at 44 million.

This is only about 15% or so of the populace, but considering that the US is the richest country in the world, wouldn’t you all agree that any amount over 0% is a cause for shame?

Instead of dealing with the health care crises effectively, George W Bush tries to put through a health plan based on tax credits, an approach that’s been proven ineffective in the past. In addition, Bush also wants to put through an “intermediate” pharmacy discount plan that could, at most, reduce prescription drug costs by only about 10-25%. With prescription costs exceeding thousands of dollars a month for some illnesses, saving a few hundred dollars is not going to make a difference.

I have a close friend in Oregon who works for the Job Corps, teaching carpentry to displaced kids. He doesn’t make the bucks a master carpenter would make in the public sector, but he loves his work. He’s past retirement age, though, and needs to think about quitting. He isn’t able to because of health care coverage.

My close friend’s wife has severe emphysema that requires drugs costing thousands of dollars a month to keep her alive. If he quits, he loses his personal health care coverage, and Medicare doesn’t provide coverage of most of the costs of the drugs. If he quits, he’ll quickly go through all of his savings in order to buy the drugs his wife needs to stay alive.

This is a real person. He goes by the name of “Red”. He has a wonderful smile, a great sense of humor, an enormously huge heart, and he used to be my father-in-law. And if he retires, which he’ll have to someday, he’ll be financially destitute within one year.

I suppose, though, he could get “lucky” and his wife will die before he’s forced to retire. By the way, she goes by the name of “Bert”. She’s firey and tempermental, with an incredible laugh. She loves her kids and her grand-kids and she loves to travel. With adequate medication, and some restrictions, she can still travel.

She and Red had always planned to travel when he retired.

Without health insurance coverage, people in this country are making decisions daily that result in early or immediate death. They’re literally gambling with their lives because of the cost of medical care.

How many people are dying because of inadequate health coverage and care? I couldn’t find a statistic on this, but as a conservative guess, if only 1 percent of those uninsured in this country die because of lack of easily accessible medical care in a year, thats over 400,000 people a year. And that’s over 1000 people a day.

To be blunt, you’re more likely to die in this country because of inadequate medical coverage and care than you are from being killed by a terrorist. Regardless of your religion, race, sex, or any particular orientation.

You might want to consider this the next time you say you want to vote for Bush primarily because of his handling of terrorism.

Categories
Weblogging

Centralization cont.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In the previous posting, Dave attached a comment that returns us to the conversation about centralization. However, I don’t expect that we’ll generate any definitive answers to “what is centralization”, as the folks who are interested in distributed systems and P2P have been working this issue for years, with only qualified success.

Centralization hasn’t as much to do with technical points of failure or with issues of deployment as it has to do with control. Centralization implies a single point of control residing in an authority other than yourself.

Is weblogs.com centralized? Yes, from both a control as well as a technology perspective.

Webloggers can automatically invoke the weblogs.com web services, or use the weblogs.com form to invoke the services manually. If the weblog has changed, the blogname and URL are added to the publicly accessible changes.xml file, and eventually to the weblogs.com HTML page. It remains on this page for three hours.

Both the HTML page and the associated XML file and supported services provide a single location to check for recently updated weblogs — a useful technology. However, this single location also leads to the service’s vulnerability.

If the server goes down, weblogs.com is no longer accessible. Dave provided a temporary backup location but if you’re dependent on automated processes to look for the updated information the temporary location didn’t work for you (not unless you wanted to modify your application to point to this new location).

The downtime with weblogs.com last week demonstrates a technical point of failure for a centralized application. There are mechanical methods one can take to avoid this such as the use redundant backup servers, as well as the use of banks of servers. However, as we’ve seen with DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, if there is a determined foe any centralized service can be brought down.

The possibility of technology failure doesn’t concern me in regards to centralized services, as for the most part, this isn’t an issue. As we’ve seen, weblogs.com has rarely been down in the past and the only reason we’re more attuned to the issue now is because of the rather lengthy downtime of the service this last week. Redundant backup servers would have prevented this, but as Dave has said, Userland is a software development company not an ISP. Backup servers are expensive and weblogs.com is a free service.

What does concern me about weblogs.com is the control: Userland has complete control over who shows on this list. And Dave has written filters for this list, as he’s discussed, openly, at Scripting News. (Though these filters may have been removed.)

That’s the danger of centralization.

Are there alternatives? Sure, there are other centralized locations of weblog updates. However, these are also subject to the same technical point of failure as well as issues of control.

Trying to decentralize a service such as weblogs.com would require a new infrastructure overlayed on top of the existing Internet to support the concept of centralized services that are decentralized — in other words to support supplying and consuming information about recently updated weblogs at a single point, the location of which can change from day to day, minute to minute.

Semi-decentralized applications such as Kazaa and Napster don’t provide the technology to solve this problem; they aren’t providing access to centralized resources, they’re providing access to files that can be located on any number of machines.

Until such an infrastructure is in place, we’ll continue to use weblogs.com and benefit from the service, while understanding the limitations inherent with centralized services such as this.

Returning to the comment in the previous post, Dave also mentioned the hypertext link. Now the simple hypertext link truly is a decentralized technology.

Anyone can put a link into their weblog. There is no authority controlling what you can and cannot link to unless you pay attention to the ridiculous and unenforcable “rules” that some web sites publish about deep-linking. Web sites may require permission to access certain pages, but you can place the link on your page — it’s up to the person clicking the link and the web site to negotiate actual viewing of the page.

And if you have a weblog, there is no authority controlling who links to you.

Weblog A links to you and you link to Weblog B, creating an indirect link from A to B. Continuing this process, weblog B links to weblog C and C links to D and D links to E and so on until you have an unbroken chain of weblogging circles forming a living, dynamic community that cannot be controlled and cannot be stopped — not without taking down the Internet, itself. And though some have tried, the Internet is too vast now to be controlled by any one authority.

Centralization. It’s all about control.

 

Categories
Technology Web

Netscape 4.x not supported here

I have a confession to make: I’ve not always been a strong voice for standardization.

As much as I believe in the necessity of standards, I was so concerned when the Mozilla organization was strongly chastised for spending time on new innovations rather than implementation of standards that I wrote an article, The Tyranny of Standards, about this for O’Reilly.

However, there is a difference between pushing back at standards groups because of wanting to protect what I still consider one of the most innovative technology applications of this time, and pushing back because an organization or a person refuses to acknowledge that it’s time to let go of a technology that has outworn its usefulness.

With the upcoming release of Mozilla 1.0, it’s time to say good-bye to Netscape 4.x. It’s time to close this chapter in our lives. It’s time to abandon LAYER and ILAYER and BLINK and move on with our browser-based lives.

After my posting yesterday, both Allan and Jonathon wrote their own views about supporting Netscape 4.x.

Allan, who has a web development company, wrote:

Our small company, which definitely can’t afford the time, let alone anything else, to cater to the whims of an outdated browser, has explained the situation to our new clients.

And, we must have been persuasive, as they’ve all agreed to let us support web standards as far as we can for their sites.

The lavish days of the dot-com boom are gone and most development work on the web is lean and mean and pared down to the essentials. As Allan says, companies can no longer afford the amount of time and resources to expend on a browser that has been replaced by not just one but several different options — Internet Explorer, Netscape 6.x, Opera, and now, Mozilla.

And Jonathon wrote:

So why is it that Netscape 4.x users—who could easily upgrade to a standards-compliant browser—put their desire to use an obsolete browser above the needs of all other Web users? Not just above those with disabilities who benefit most from accessible sites, but above everyone who uses a modern browser. And why are they so frequently arrogant about it? As if using a tenth-rate browser is a mark of distinction.

Arrogance. Is that why Netscape 4.x users refuse to upgrade? Or are there other reasons?

I had an email from a reader who mentioned that her company can’t upgrade their browser because of security. I can see that there might be concerns about upgrading to IE, but what about Netscape 6.x or Mozilla? Or Opera?

I created an online tutorial demonstrating how to use Mozilla’s XUL that I had to remove as the browser continued through it’s many pre-release betas. With the soon to be released version 1.0, I would like to spend time with this tutorial; to update it for 1.0, to try out any new technical goodies being released with 1.0, and generally have a bit of fun with Mozilla.

I can either spend time trying to make sure that this weblog page shows equally for people using Netscape 4.x, or I can use the same time to update my Mozilla tutorial. There is no choice here — I choose to look forward, not back.

Netscape 4.x. You were a good friend at the time and you helped show us that we can do more on the web then click a hypertext link. But It’s time for you to say good-bye. And it’s time for me to post to my weblog:

Netscape 4.x NOT supported here.

Categories
Weblogging

Weblogging Community

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dave responded to my earlier post with a thoughtful and considerate posting that asked a very valid question:

So anyway, here’s a question for Shelley. When I see your site update on Weblogs.Com, I usually go for a visit to see what the bird is burning about now. I think of that as a community feature. Do you think it’s valuable? If not, why do you participate?

First, thanks for stopping by Dave, always appreciated. And as a point of clarification — I dropped that silly rule about comments I had about five minutes after I originated it, so please feel free to drop in with comments.

Back to the question: Why do I participate in pinging weblogs.com, when my interest tends to be on the people aspect of weblogging rather than the technology?

Though my focus is on the participants, I also appreciate much of the technology used in weblogging, particularly the weblogging tools such as Movable Type, Radio, and Blogger. And I also appreciate community services such as weblogs.com that let me know when my favorite webloggers have updated.

To me, technology provides a framework that allows me to communicate with my weblogging community easily and without a lot of hassle. I’ll alway be grateful for the folks who create all this technology that makes my weblogging life a lot easier. Still, technology is only an enabler — the content of the weblogs is the key aspect to “community” in my opinion.

If technology could be considered equivalent to the nerves in the brain, it is the people that provide the chemistry that enables the synaptic (community) connections to be made. Without the chemistry provided by the webloggers, the technology is nothing more than bits and bytes and wires all jumbled about in a chaotic and undifferentiated mess, thrown into the ether.

Consider my own community of webloggers — the virtual neighborhood that I reference fondly and at length. Technology will tell me that Bill Simoni’s weblog can be accessed at the URL, http://radio.weblogs.com/0100111/. And technology can let me know when Bill has updated his weblog, through weblogs.com.

Bill uses technology to create his weblog (using Radio), which is accessed through additional technology (the Internet). And I read the weblog through my browser (Mozilla by preference), contained on my laptop — yet more examples of technology.

However, technology doesn’t tell me that Bill is expecting a baby any day now. And technology doesn’t tell me that Bill has a nice, self-deprecating sense of humor, is pretty excited about the baby, and has a a thing about grammar and spellchecking 😉

That’s community.

If Userland and Movable Type and Blogger were to discontinue innovating their products as of this minute, we would perhaps have less fun toys to work with. We’d miss out on better products, and more reliable hosting, and more interesting ways to post, and better ways to aggregate the postings, and more efficient approaches regarding notification…

…but we’d still have our community.

You’d have to take the Internet down to take down our community, and due to the pervasive nature of the Net, I don’t think this is even possible, now.

Ultimately, the community is not dependent on the technology as much as the technology is, itself, dependent on the community. Because without the community, why would we need the technology in the first place?

And the topic is continued here.