IT og teknologi – Page 5

Amazons Kindle Swindle

Amazon sælger en e-bogslæser, de selv har produceret, den såkaldte Kindle. Denne ebogs-læser er ikke som ethvert andet boglæserprogram, f.eks. FBReader – nej, en Kindle er forsynet med DRM, også kendt som kopibeskyttelse, der sætter Amazon i stand til i samarbejde med rettighedshaverne at bestemme, hvilke bøger den enkelte kunde kan læse på sin Kindle.

For eksempel udgav Amazon for nylig George Orwells samlede værker i deres e-bogsformat. Det var rigtig fint, og masser af mennesker kunne således købe, downloade og læse “1984” og andre af Orwells værker i deres elektroniske bogsamling.

Men så skete det, at Amazon blev uenig med dem, der bestyrer rettighederne for Orwells bøger. Hvad gør man ved det? Jo, næste gang e-bogs-læserne kommer i kontakt med Internettet, ryger der besked ud om, at Orwells bøger alligevel ikke er solgt – de er så at sige usolgt. Bøgerne blev bag om ryggen og uden at spørge slettet fra folks Kindles, og en eller to må have spurgt sig selv, om det mon i virkeligheden var en Swindle, de dér havde købt:

David Pogue. writing in the New York Times, reported that hundreds of customers awoke to find that Amazon remotely deleted books that they’d earlier bought and downloaded. Apparently, the publisher determined that it should not offer those titles, so Amazon logged into Kindles, erased the books, and issued refunds. This was aptly compared to someone sneaking into your house, taking away your books, and leaving a stack of cash on the table.

That George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were among the wiped books is so funny that it aches. The headlines across the ‘net wrote themselves. Down the memory hole!

If this were the only example of this sort of thing, it could be written off as a mistake. But it’s just the latest in a series illustrating Amazon’s vision for the future of reading.

• First, Amazon selectively disabled text-to-speech. It did this to cosy up to publishers who felt audiobook sales were threatened by the Kindle’s robotic enunciation. This mocks the blind and supports an ugly interpretation of the law, which would make reading to your own children an act of copyright infringement.

• Amazon also refuses to disclose the circumstances under which it will no longer allow you to download copies of books you have bought. Cory’s been stonewalled, by one spokesdroid after another, which would be comical were it not so absurd.

• The Author’s contract for Kindle publications is “the pinnacle of bogosity.” Nor can you resell Kindle books, as you can normal ones, even though you have the legal right to do so. This is because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal to circumvent the electronic locks that Amazon applies to its e-books.

• Amazon has even locked Kindle users out of their own Kindle accounts, for trivial reasons.

Now we find that the books you buy are never really yours, and that enjoying them is a privilege granted and withdrawn by Amazon at publisher behest. No-one who enjoys reading can take comfort in any of this.

Helt ærligt: Kunne man forestille sig en boghandler, der fandt ud af, at han alligevel ikke havde “ret” til at sælge dig en bestemt bog, fordi forlæggeren var raget uklar med rettighedshaverne, og derfor brød ind i dit hus i nattens mulm og mørke for at tage bogen tilbage? Og hvis ikke – hvordan kan Amazon så tro, at det på nogen måde kan være acceptabelt, når blot indbruddet er på et stykke forbrugerelektronik i kundens hjem frem for et fysisk indbrud?

Eksemplet understreger, hvorfor kopibeskyttelse og anden “fjernkontrol” er en uskik, vi som borgere og forbrugere ikke burde finde os i.

Link: Delete this book (via Boing Boing).

Musikindustriens piratsludder – Bad Science regner efter

Den britiske musikindustri har bekendtgjort, at den britiske befolkning hvert år downloader 4,73 milliarder ophavsretsligt beskyttede kunstværker til en værdi af 120 milliarder pund.

Før vi lige spørger os selv, om alle disse ting virkelig er £25 værd stykket, var det måske også værd at kigge lidt på de andre tal.

Det gjorde Bad Science:

You are killing our creative industries. “Downloading costs billions” said the Sun. “MORE than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.”

That’s about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail were worried too: “The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this would amount to 4.73 billion items being consumed for free every year.”

Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music. I’d like more details.

But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73 billion items downloaded each year, worth £120 billion. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. Now before we go anywhere, this already seems rather high. I am not an economist, and I don’t know about their methods, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value. And someone downloading a £1,000 professional 3D animation software package to fiddle about with at home may not use it more than three times. I’m just saying.

In any case, that’s £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that’s still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax. Oh but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473 million items and £12 billion (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist. I can find no public correction.

I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of ten and were widely reported in news outlets around the world. SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn’t say what, explained something about how they couldn’t be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn’t allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn’t need to answer on the record, but I wasn’t allowed to use the answers, and I couldn’t say they hadn’t answered, I just couldn’t say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, that he had been helpful.

In the “believe it or not” dept.

Link: Home taping didn’t kill music

Video uden plugins og uden flash på vej

På DailyMotion, hvor man skriver:

“We are going to make history today.”

Dailymotion is excited to launch a new R&D platform dedicated to open video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com. You don’t need the Adobe Flash plugin to watch videos on this platform – the only requirement is the latest version of Firefox, 3.5 beta, available here.

No plugins? No Flash?
Nope – for all content from Motionmakers and Official Users we are using the new HTML < video > tag, supported by Firefox 3.5, to display the video, and not any proprietary technology.

But wait – the video quality is lower and sound is sometimes crackly…
That’s normal…for now. The new encoding formats we’re using are Ogg, Theora + Vorbis. They’re not yet as good as other common codecs such as H264, ON2 VP6, but they comprise an open format that is not patented, is free to use, and is supported by the Mozilla foundation (http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/01/26/mozilla-and-wikimedia-join-forces-to-support-open-video/). So don’t worry – it’s going to improve soon. We have a few tricks to improve the quality, but for the moment re-encoding 300,000 videos in this format forced us to compromise.

Why does non-Flash video playback matter?
It’s both technical and philosophical, but to make long story short, it will allow us to do new, fun things with video.

Ingen Flash, ingen plugins, åbne formater, som hverken Adobe eller noget andet firma “ejer”. Det er den rigtige vej at gå.

Link: Watch Video … Without Flash (via Boing Boing).

Mellemøsten – interaktiv quiz

Dette er ikke engang en joke, men en rimeligt godt lavet quiz. Vi hører så meget om Mellemøsten – har du styr på, hvor alle de forskellige lande ligger, og hvordan de ligger i forhold til hinanden?

Hvis ikke, er denne quiz en hurtig og sjov måde at få dem på plads. Og hvis ja, er det faktisk alligevel længe siden, jeg har set et så simpelt og dog samtidig så brugervenligt undervisnings- eller lærings-spil.

Link: Rethinking Schools Online

Fotolicens – falsk papir til at vise til ægte betjente

Overalt i verden bliver folk med kameraer generet og mistænkeliggjort, for det er jo kun terrorister, der kunne finde på at tage billeder på offentlige steder. Vi har bl.a. omtalt det her.

Matthew Stanley Williams gjorde noget ved det – han lavede en falsk “Photography License” fra Department of Homeland Security, der kan få de nævenyttige betjente til at gå væk:

Since September 11, photographers have been stopped, harassed, and intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were photographing subjects that made other people uncomfortable, such as ship locks, trains, buildings, bridges, and bus stations. If you live in the United States, here’s a guide to print and carry with you: The Legal Handbook for Photographers. British photographers should carry The UK Photographer’s Rights Guide, since photography is slowly becoming illegal in the United Kingdom.

In the event you’re stopped by overzealous law enforcement or security officials attempting to enforce fictitious laws, I’ve designed these fictitious and official-looking Photographer’s Licenses. If you have Adobe Illustrator, you can download the EPS vector art file and print your own. You’ll need a photo of yourself, and OCR (or a similar font) to fill in your personal information.

Department of Homeland Security Photographer’s License
San Francisco Muni Photographer’s License

Lovligt? Hvem ved – men det er givetvis heller ikke lovligt at chikanere fotografer og beslaglægge deres billeder på baggrund af ikke-eksisterende love og bestemmelser, som det sker overalt i verden, ikke mindst i Storbritannien og USA.

Via JWZ.

Pas på Wikipedia – Maurice Jarre og nekrologen, der gik galt

Pas på, hvad du læser på Wikipedia, hvis der ikke er kildeangivelse, kunne konklusionen vel være – pas i det hele taget på, hvad du læser på nettet eller (viser det sig) i aviserne.

En 22-årig studerende fra Dublin skrev umiddelbart efter den franske komponist Maurice Jarres død et falsk citat ind på hans Wikipedia-side. Det følgende døgn gik det sin sejrsgang i alverdens aviser.

Siobhain Butterworth forklarer i dagens Guardian:

An obituary of French composer Maurice Jarre, which appeared in the Guardian on 31 March, began and ended with quotes. It opened with: “My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life” – and closed with: “Music is how I will be remembered. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear.” The words, however, were not Jarre’s, they were Shane Fitzgerald’s – the 22-year-old student at University College Dublin had put them on Jarre’s Wikipedia page a day earlier.

Fitzgerald’s timing could not have been better. He added the fake quote shortly after the composer died and just as writers were working on his obituaries. The Guardian commissioned an obituary writer on the morning of 30 March, giving him only a few hours to produce a substantial piece on Jarre’s life for the following day’s paper. He was not the only one taken in by the hoax – the quote was recycled in several other obituaries published in print and on the web. Fitzgerald told me that he’d looked for something (or someone) journalists would be under pressure to write about quickly. Jarre’s death was “the right example, at the right time”, he said.

What others might see as an act of vandalism, Fitzgerald calls research. In an email last week he apologised for deliberately misleading people and for altering Jarre’s Wikipedia page. He said his purpose was to show that journalists use Wikipedia as a primary source and to demonstrate the power the internet has over newspaper reporting.

Dette betyder ikke, at Wikipedia er ubrugeligt – som alment tilgængeligt leksikon er det endog særdeles nyttigt. Men det kan, som Butterworth også bemærker, ikke bruges som primærkilde. Selv Britannica kan det være kritisk at bruge på den måde, en Wikipedia har som bekendt det særlige problem, at hvem som helst kan skrive hvad som helst:

The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source.

The desirability of telling readers where information comes from shouldn’t be overlooked either.

It’s worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he’d done and it’s regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so. Why did he wait so long? “I apologise for that,” he said. “I was originally going to do a report for my class and then it didn’t work out. I know I should have told you sooner.”

Fitzgerald says he is shocked by the results of his “experiment” with Jarre’s Wikipedia page. “I expected the quote to get into the blogs, but I didn’t expect it to get into mainstream newspapers,” he said.

Det besvarer vel også et andet spørgsmål, som af og til rejses. Har internet betydning som massemedie? I dette tilfælde synes Fitzgeralds eksperiment at vise, at det kan det i hvert fald have. Om denne betydning så er gavnlig, er et andet spørgsmål – i dette tilfælde har den nok efterladt en del journalister med røde ører.

Link: Open door

Update, 8/5: Politiken har nu også historien – gad vide, om de har set den her? 🙂

Dagens citat: Vi ser ikke verden, vi hallucinerer os frem til den

Ray Kurzweil, i et interview til Asimov’s et par år tilbage:

We don’t actually see things, we essentially hallucinate them in detail from what we see from these low resolution cues. Past the early phases of the visual cortex, detail doesn’t reach the brain.

Hvilket selvfølgelig er velkendt og for mange sikkert såre banalt, men her rammende udtrykt.

Illusionen om øjnene som “vinduesglas”, som vi sidder og kigger ud på verden med er slet og ret dette, en illusion – vore øjne kan faktisk kun detektere kontraster, hvad der gør alle de ensartede flader, vores synssans plejer at forsyne verden med, lidt suspekte.

Folkene bag Pirate Bay kendt skyldige, idømt fængselsstraf

… hvilket der er en masse at sige om.

Som ofte påpeget har The Pirate Bay som “piratside” lige så meget været en politisk aktion som en side af praktisk betydning, eftersom det vrimler med andre og mindst lige så gode hjemsteder for torrents af vekslende lovlighed.

Så hvad er betydningen af denne afgørelse? Vil Pirate Bay forsvinde, og hvis den gør, betyder det noget, og hvad vil komme i stedet? Vi giver ordet til Cory Doctorow på Boing Boing:

After the illegal seizure of its servers in 2006, The Pirate Bay supposedly adopted a distributed architecture with failover servers in other jurisdictions that were unlikely to cooperate with EU orders. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, it’s certain that something else will spring up in its wake, of course — just as The Pirate Bay appeared in the wake of the closure of other, more “moderate” services.

With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill (as opposed to opportunists who supplemented their legal acquisition of copyrighted materials with infringing downloads).

It’s a race to turn a relatively benign symbiote (the original Napster, which offered to pay for its downloads if it could get a license) into vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that’s dedicated to their destruction.

Slippe af med downloads og fildeling kan man ikke – ånden kan ikke puttes tilbage i flasken igen, så lidt som man i 70erne kunne forhindre folk i at kopiere musik fra plader og over på kasettebånd. Kopiering er billig i den digitale alder, og befolkningens retsfølelse har endegyldigt flyttet sig i retning af, at fildeling er OK. Det bedste, industrien kan gøre, er at opdatere deres forretningsmodeller.

I mellemtiden må vi jo tage bestik af dommens indhold og dens mulige konsekvenser:

One of the defendants, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, admitted that Pirate Bay had lost its case.

“Stay calm – nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or filesharing what so
ever. This is just a theatre for the media,” he said.

“Really, it’s a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.”

The trial began on 16 February in Stockholm district court, when the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Fredik Neij, Carl Lundstrom, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Kolmisoppi, were put in the dock on charges of assisting copyright infringement.

The Pirate Bay does not itself host audio and video files, but provides links to torrents hosted elsewhere on the internet.

Throughout the trial, the Pirate Bay defendants have played up their image as
rebellious outsiders, arriving at court in a slogan-daubed party bus and insisting that their position was to defend a popular technology rather than illegal filesharing.

Prosecutors made a major slip-up on the second day of the trial after failing to convince the judge that illegally copied files had been distributed by the site.

The trial has further polarised the tech community and the music industry with both sides eagerly awaiting the result, which will be regarded as a precedent for future filesharing cases.

Link: The Pirate Bay trial: guilty verdict

Økonomisk støtte til fri software

Den hurtigste måde at komme i gang med at lave noget ny software er ofte at basere sig på nogle af de mange, mere eller mindre standardiserede, biblioteker, der allerede findes.

Som oftest vil disse komponenter være fri/Open Source og dermed gratis at bruge i ens eget produkt – vil man have et indtryk af, hvor (svimlende) mange, der egentlig er, kan man kaste et blik på Savannah eller freshmeat.

Men det betyder, at man som mindre virksomhed let risikerer at blive afhængig af software, som andre stiller gratis til rådighed. Hvordan ved man, at folkene bag vil blive ved med at opdatere, fejlrette og generelt vedligeholde de biblioteker, man skal bruge?

For de helt store projekters vedkommende er det klart nok – Linux eller Apache har en så massiv opbakning, at de nok skal blive ved med at være der.

De fleste Open Source-projekter er imidlertid små og drives enten i folks fritid og/eller af enkelt- eller fåmandsfirmaer, der lever af at hjælpe folk med at få deres egne programmer til at virke eller lave skræddersyede udvidelser til dem.

Hvis et firma er i den situation at være afhængig af et bestemt stykke fri software, kan det altså forekomme at være en særdeles god investering at bidrage til projektet bag for at sikre dets fremtid – og hvis ikke med råd eller dåd, så gerne med et økonomisk bidrag i ny og næ.

Da et sådant frivilligt bidrag må kunne sidestilles med de udgifter, man kan have til licenser på kommerciel software, må det også kunne trækkes fra i skat. Eller hur?

Annette Sand driver på sin blog en brevkasse med Q/A for iværksættere, og her finder vi bl.a. dette spørgsmål og svar:

• Kan frivillige bidrag til Open Source trækkes fra i moms eller skat?

Jeg har min egen lille personlige etmandsvirksomhed, og jeg bruger stort set fri software til alt. Derfor vil jeg meget gerne give noget igen til forskellige projekter, og ofte er der en donationsmulighed på de forskellige projekters hjemmeside, f.eks. via PayPal.

Hidtil har jeg antaget, at hvis et projekt ikke har annonceret at de har fået bevilliget en eller anden status som organisation, så kan beløbet ikke fradrages hverken i moms eller skat. Men nu er jeg kommet i tvivl om sidstnævnte, altså muligheden for i det mindste at anføre mine “udgifter” til software under skatteberettigede fradrag. Og selvom et stort projekt har fået en offentlig anerkendelse fra f.eks. de amerikanske myndigheder, så er det vel næppe noget, man kan bruge i sit regnskab her i Danmark?

• Momsmæssigt er der ingen tvivl: For at man kan trække momsen fra, skal der være tale om en regning, hvoraf momsbeløbet fremgår. (Og kun dansk moms i det danske momsregnskab.) Så du kan ikke trække momsen fra dine donationer.

Om udgiften til dine donationer kan trækkes fra skattemæssigt er mere usikkert. Grundlæggende mener jeg ikke, de er fradragsberettigede, fordi udgiften ikke direkte medgår til at “erhverve, sikre og vedligeholde indkomsten” i din virksomhed. Hvis du på den anden side driver en virksomhed baseret på opensource software og kan tiltrække kunder netop på det grundlag, herunder at du reklamerer med at “firma xx støtter følgende opensource projekter….:” på f.eks. hjemmeside og i andet reklamemateriale, kan man måske argumentere, at der er tale om en fradragsberettiget reklameudgift.

Bidrager du med et beløb til direkte udvikling af et modul/program/koncept, som du skal bruge i din egen virksomhed, kan man ligestille udgiften med køb af software – som så bare stilles til rådighed for andre også.

Svaret er ikke helt tilfredsstillende, fordi et løbende, frivilligt bidrag til et projekt, der leverer en komponent, som ens egen virksomhed afhænger af, kan forekomme lige så “nødvendigt” som en Word-licens (hvis nogen altså gider bruge det skrammel) og derfor burde kunne trækkes lige så meget fra i skat.

I USA er nogle foreninger, der producerer fri software, for eksempel Free Software Foundation, godkendt som velgørende organisationer, så bidrag til dem kan trækkes fra i skat.

Måske man burde indføre noget lignende i Danmark eller på europæisk plan; man kunne forstille sig, at et projekt blot skal godkendes som værende seriøst, og så snart det er godkendt, kan bidrag til det automatisk trækkes fra, fordi projektets formål (at bidrage til den samlede pulje af fri software) anses for at være samfundsnyttigt i sig selv.

Eller noget – mere fornuftige forslag modtages gerne.

Tak for tippet til Rene, der skriver:

Jeg er selv begyndt at se meget på det økonomiske aspekt af FOSS. Da mange af de programmer, jeg hyppigt gør brug af, ofte er så små, at de ingen seriøse sponsorater har, så formoder jeg, at udviklerne ville sætte pris på et ekstra incitament i form af et tilskud til huslejen.

Nogle få udviklere (f.eks. Paul Davis fra Ardour) giver mulighed for, at man kan donere med et fast månedligt beløb (typisk 10 USD). Jeg håber lidt, at andre tager idéen op, for i praksis må det være guld værd, at man har en omtrentlig formodning om hvor meget, der kommer ind i bidrag hver måned. Hvis de er rigtigt heldige, så kan de finde et deltidsjob for resten, og dermed dedikere sig rimelig samvittighedsfuldt til deres projekt.

Link: Støtte til Open Source-projekter

Wikileaks censureret i Australien for at afsløre dansk internetcensur

Kortere comon.dk:

Australian Communications and Media Authority har blacklistet Wikileaks, fordi sitet har offentliggjort en liste med 3863 sites som bliver blokeret for danske internetbrugere.

Den danske liste indeholder links til en lang række børneporno sites. Men Wikileaks har lækket listen, fordi folkene bag sitet mener, at den viser, hvordan de danske myndigheder udnytter børnepornografi til at blokere andre sites. Wikileaks offentliggør hemmelige dokumenter, der afslører korruption og undertrykkelse.

Nu er Wikileaks blevet blacklistet i Australien på grund af den danske liste, skriver The Sidney Morning Herald. Indtil videre kan det koste dagsbøder på 11.000 dollars at linke til sitet. Men på sigt vil alle sites på den sorte liste blive blokeret for australske netbrugere.

“Den første regel ved censur er, at man ikke må tale om censur,” skriver folkene bag Wikileaks i en kortfattet kommentar.

Der er i øvrigt én meget interessant egenskab ved den offentliggjorte liste – den påstås at udgøre et “børnepornofilter”, der skulle beskytte børn mod overgreb, men har stort set ikke indeholdt den slags materiale – men nok andre former for porno. Men det er jo svært at se, når man ikke må få listen at se – og den aktuelle censurliste (den på Wikileaks er et år gammel) er stadig en velbevaret hemmelighed.

Link: Australiere straffes for at linke til hemmeligt dansk dokument