Category: Networking

The Betamax case of the digital age

Wired News: File Sharing Goes to High Court
I have my fingers crossed on this one. If these file-sharing services can be held responsible for the actions of their users, what does that mean for any company developing software that allows people to connect via public networks? What about ISP’s and common-carrier laws? What about FTP, IM, Email and so on?
The devil in this one may be that the media companies will renew vigor in lobbying congress for legislation like the INDUCE act.

BroadSnatching – Get that Content

HOW-TO: BroadSnatching to a Portable Media Center – Engadget – www.engadget.com
From the article:
Getting video on a Portable Media Center is a fairly complicated task, but not because it’s all that hard, it’s just because no one has ever shown folks how. It’s a lot easier if you have a Media Center PC (MCE), but even if you don’t have an MCE, we showed you how to put DVDs on your Portable Media Center when we reviewed the Creative Zen.

ANTs Not Television

ANT | ANTs Not Television
Go Jay and Josh GO!

ANT helps you download and watch video published on the Internet.

ANT allows you to organize and manage video playlists

ANT is a video aggregator that allows you to subscribe to RSS 2.0 feeds with video enclosures

ANT seeks to build opensource software tools to enable an emergent, grassroots, bottom-up, video distribution network based on exisiting technology such as weblogs and RSS.

ANT is about FREE VIDEO — not free as in price, but free as in freedom.

BeyondTV – Keeping my eye on this one!

BeyondTV: BeyondTV – An offline internet TV project

This is an undercurrents project to create a real alternative to the centralization of media by narrow corporate power. Its not an Indymedia project as quality control is too much of an issues- TV with out quality control is not open to normal people to watch. Most activist media is made for a tiny minority of popule and is un-intelligible/un-whatebal outside this minority.

The project will work in a number of stages the first being a functional full screen activist TV channel, based on MPG1 and MPG4 content from the current archive of ruffcuts and euro/US Indymedia newsreal CD‚Äôs (we have over 20 hour of programming encoded and access to at least another 20 hours). Secondly stage we add ‚Äúautomatic functionality‚Ä? and some user input into viewing choices. Third stage a re-write to create a decentralized user rated P2P universal TV network when we have good experiences of the idea working in a practical way. I feel it is paramount that we start at the beginning using simple, thus reliable, tools and techniques.

ITP Winter Show 2004

ITP Winter Show 2004
Sunday, December 19 from 2 to 6pm
Monday, December 20 from 5 to 9pm

A two-day explosion of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP.

An oversized Greenwich Village loft houses the computer labs, rotating exhibitions, and production workshops that are ITP — the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists uniquely dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactivity in the real and digital worlds. A hands-on approach to experimentation, production and risk-taking make this hi-tech fun house a creative home not only to its 230 students, but also to an extended network of the technology industry’s most daring and prolific practitioners.

Interactive Telecommunications Program
Tisch School of the Arts
New York University
721 Broadway, 4th Floor South
New York NY 10003

Take the left elevators to the 4th Floor
This event is free and open to the public

No need to RSVP

For questions: 212-998-1880
email: itp.inquiries@nyu.edu
http://itp.nyu.edu/show

AT&T Wireless/Cingular can not route calls to Vonage?!?

After 45 minutes on the phone with AT&T Wireless/Cingular and conversations with Vonage, I have determined that these two companies are incompetent and can not successfully route calls between each other’s networks.

Update: After threatening to cancel my service, I was informed by the customer care (yeah right) that my contract explicitly states that they can not guarantee interoperability with any other network, including the international phone network. Pretty interesting considering they are selling me phone service.

Hillary support’s The INDUCE Act

I was dismayed to learn that Senator Hillary Clinton has come out and in fact co-sponsored Senator Hatch’s Induce Act. What follows is a draft of a letter that I am writing to Sen. Clinton to express my concern. I hope that others will do the same.

Here is some background material:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.2560:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64315,00.html
http://techlawadvisor.com/induce/
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/004563.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040618-3906.html
http://www.futureofmusic.org/articles/INDUCEanalysis.cfm
http://action.eff.org/site/pp.asp?c=esJNJ5OWF&b=164928

Like your iPod, read this:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Apple_Complaint.php

Please comment on the letter as you see fit.

Dear Senator Clinton,

I was dismayed to learn that you have come out in support of Senator Hatch’s Induce Act. I hope that on further consideration of the issues that this bill covers that you change your stance to better reflect the opinions of your constituents and for the betterment of our society.

The Induce act as it currently is written does much to stifle free-speech, artistic and fair uses of media. Imposing legal responsibility on the makers of devices and software for illegal use such device or software will create a burden so great on manufacturers and creators of such programs that they will not develop or offer products that have potential for misuse.

I fear that by trying to curb the theft of copyrighted material you will instead be curbing the ability for individuals and groups with legitimate uses for the technology that enables such to use it. Being thoroughly immersed in an academic and artistic atmosphere, I am witness every day to fair uses of technology that would not exist today were such a law in existence. In fact I feel that the software that I am using to write this letter would not have been developed simply because it includes the ability to cut and paste text from any source into the document.

I believe that should this Bill become law that it will undo much of the progress of free-speech and alternative media creation that has been enabled by the internet, personal electronic devices, computers, tape recorders and so on. Furthermore it will be a giant step backwards and lead to increased power by the media and further relegate citizens to the role of consumer without a voice.

I hope that you will reconsider your position on this matter.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Shawn Van Every

Internet Archive Hosting Creative Commons licensed audio and video

Killer CC App: The Publisher, beta version
Bye bye bandwidth bills for *free* media (maybe because I don’t think bandwidth and disk space is really that cheap that it can just be given away in large quantities, yet).

Oh yeah, the link above is for their nice tool in support of this.