Cingular Treo 650 hacked: Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking enabled

Yay!

Remember how a few days ago we got a hot tip that the Bluetooth
Dial-Up Networking profile had been disabled on the Cingular version of the
Treo 650? Yeah, well the phone isnt even officially out yet (just a few
more days, yo), and already Treo hackmaster Shadowmite has figured out way
to make your Treo whole again (he already did this for the Sprint version
of the Treo 650, too). Obviously you install this one at your own risk,
ok?

U.S. Kids Don't Understand First Amendment

From our
friends at Slashdot

l4m3z0r writes "This rather alarming article discusses a study
of high-school students in which they were asked about censorship,
protected speech, and other aspects of the first amendment. The results are
extremely worrisome: "Only half of the students said newspapers should be
allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories." and this
"Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It's not. About half
the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the
Internet. It can't.".."

This is horrifying. Note the casual evil of it. If the next generation
thinks we don't have free expression, it doesn't much matter what
the Constitution says...

Quote of the Day - Leo Rosten

"The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help
it."

Misunderestimating the market

Pocketfactory - Does Bradley's Departure Signal A Changing Strategy For PalmOne?: "Colligan has been the driving force behind the Treo line, since his days at Handspring. He brings a lot of marketing know-how to the table. And it is in this capacity where his presence will act as a catalyst for Smartphone growth, provided he stays at this post permanently and not simply in an interim capacity. But at the same time his appointment could spell doom for the handheld line. PDA sales are flat. With Colligan's Smartphone centric background, he will undoubtedly use this opportunity to strengthen the company's Smartphone line while weakening PalmOne's dependency on traditional handheld sales, which is a declining market. What this company needs more than anything right now is to push further into the Smartphone segment with innovative new products, and entry level models."

Kent doesn't get what's really going on, so I don't think he's actually trying to lie here. While PDA sales did decline by 8.7% in Q3 2004, smartphone sales more than made up for the loss, but they aren't counted in the same category as PDAs by analysis groups like Gartner. Smartphones and PDAs combined continue to grow as a market.

And here's the part people like Kent don't understand. It really is the same market. PDAs and smartphones aren't really different products, or they are, but the same way cars and SUVs are different. They're different segments of the same overall market. PDAs aren't going way any more than coupes have gone way with the proliferation of SUVs on the road. There is a market for both types of devices.

If anything, the line between them will continue to blur as more and more PDAs incorporate cell radios and WiFi primarily for data communications. While a Pocket PC Phone Edition can be used as a cell phone, like a Blackberry it's less than ideal for that purpose. It's great for cellular data. We'll see a lot more of these devices, but they're still PDAs at heart.

EFF: Endangered Gizmos!

EFF: Endangered Gizmos!: "FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo 'God's machine,' and its devotees have been known to declare, 'You can take my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!' But suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo -- or, for that matter, an iPod? Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn't grow up to threaten the status quo?

That's the strategy the entertainment industry is using to control the next generation of TiVos and iPods. Its arsenal includes government-backed technology mandates, lawsuits, international treaties, and behind-the-scenes negotiations in seemingly obscure technology standards groups. The result is a world in which, increasingly, only industry-approved devices and technologies are 'allowed' to survive in the marketplace.

This is bad news for innovation and free competition, but it also threatens a wide range of activities the entertainment conglomerates have no use for -- everything from making educational 'fair' use of TV or movie clips for a classroom presentation, to creating your own 'Daily Show'-style video to make a political statement, to simply copying an MP3 file to a second device so you can take your music with you.

Rather than sit back and watch as promising new technologies are picked off one-by-one, EFF has created the Endangered Gizmos List to help you defend fair use and preserve the environment for innovation."

Fwd: [PalmAddicts] 100-Year-Old School on Technology Fast Track; Illinois Institution Plans Schoolwide Use of palmOne Handhelds

href="http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2005/01/_100yearold_sch.html">PalmAddicts:

Avery Coonley School may be nearly 100 years old, but when it
comes to endowing its teachers and students with handheld technology for
the classroom, this private, independent school in Downers Grove, Ill., is
one of the most forward-looking schools in the state.

After the rousing success of a fourth-grade pilot program last year, each
student and teacher in grades four through eight now have their own
Zire(TM) 72 handheld, as well as a wireless keyboard, from palmOne, Inc.
(Nasdaq: PLMO). It's the realization of the school's vision to provide a
learning device for every student, and one that has earned full support and
cooperation from students, teachers and parents.

"The pilot program gave us a chance to discover the possibilities that
handhelds bring to teaching, learning and other aspects of school life,"
said Joe Janojak, technology director at Avery Coonley. "Once we
articulated our vision, parents embraced the idea and were instrumental in
helping us raise the funds. They see the benefits."

According to Jennifer Garetto and Laura Bojkovski, the fourth-grade
teachers who ran the pilot program, the benefits are obvious -- students
are more enthusiastic and motivated. They also require very little
instruction. Within a few days they are scheduling appointments, writing
memos, writing lists to keep themselves on task, filling in the calendar
with homework assignments and due dates, and even setting the alarm to
remind themselves of a deadline. But the benefits go beyond organization.

"The students write more often and more efficiently because they have
keyboards and are no longer dependant upon going to the computer lab once a
week," said Garetto. "They write essays, stories and vocabulary words, as
well as print them using a wireless Bluetooth(R) printer. They also take
their handhelds on field trips, use them to create animations and draw, and
use them throughout the curriculum -- keeping everything they need together
in one place."

Students fresh from the pilot program are ready and eager to show others
the ropes. "They are mentors to other students and teachers. It's a very
fun way for them to engage with each other," Garetto said.

The students also have enormous respect for the technology, thanks in part
to a creative program that rewards student responsibility. Before they can
take their handhelds home, students must earn a "palmOne Operating License"
by mastering a set of skills and demonstrating them to their teachers. To
get a license, students must be able to enter characters using the
handheld's built-in Graffiti(R) 2 software, beam, manage a To Do list,
schedule tasks, operate the handheld's camera, change preferences, and sign
a contract confirming their understanding of how to take care of their
handheld and keep it safe. Most kids get their license in three weeks, and
so far, not one handheld has been lost.

What impresses Headmaster Tom Kracht and the other administrators and
teachers is how quickly the kids adapt to using the technology and how
versatile they are.

"They work more independently, have more conversations, and share
information by beaming notes to each other," he said. "Overall, they are
more efficient and organized. Having a handheld to use is fun and
exhilarating. It gives them a certain measure of independence. To these
kids, handheld computers are indispensable tools."
- Jason McLoughlin, Associate Writer, (UK)

Quotes of the Day - Ambrose Bierce

"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."

How's that for irony?

Ship of Palm looking for a New Captain

Head over to Brighthand and read the lead article. A very thought provoking perspective on what Palm needs to do to "get right" again.

Personally, I think HP and Dell are wiping PalmOne's clock, and if Tapwave would make the right moves in marketing, they could be a major player (but I doubt they will) in the Palm space.

Most of you won't agree, but I think unless PalmOne does something radically innovative, their days are numbered. Let's face it - with Sony gone, only Tapwave has anything exciting in the Palm space. (There's Garmin, but they're even more of a niche player than Tapwave).

Anyway, go see what Shawn has to say. Thought provoking...

the (c) office asks a brilliant question

Lessig's blog

As is old news (but everything on the Lessig Blog is old news),
the Copyright Office has asked for comments on whether a solution is needed
to deal with "orphan works" -- works still under copyright but whose owner
cannot be identified.

This, as PublicKnowledge notes, fantastic news. For many years, many have
been trying to refocus this debate on copyright from the binary questions
that p2p sharing seems to raise ("seems to") to the more pragmatic and
fundamental questions that this insanely inefficient and bizarrely complex
system of speech regulation called copyright raises. When Congress shifted
our system of copyright from an "opt-in" to an "opt-out" regime, it
transformed copyright from a system that automatically narrowed its
protection (and hence regulation) to those works that had some continuing
need for copyright protection, to a system that totally indiscriminately
spreads copyright to every creative work reduced to a tangible form --
automatically, and for the full term of copyright.

This issue is the focus of our challenge in Kahle v. Ashcroft. It is
something I've been whining about in every publication that will have me
(see, e.g., this op-ed in the LA Times).

But this is an issue that I've only become aware of because of the writings
and emails from many who visit this space. And it is time for you to speak
to government. No one who read the emails that I've collected could think
that this was not a problem. But the copyright office doesn't accept email
inboxes. It reads submissions only. The requirements are simple. Submission
is free. We'll be organizing as many submissions as we can at eldred.cc.
But please help spread the word: The Copyright Office needs to hear about
every example of where the existing system is stifling the cultivation and
spread of our culture. Not because Congress extends the term of copyright
for Mickey Mouse. That battle is over. But because the way in which it
protects Mickey Mouse blocks access to the balance of our copyrighted
culture - for no good copyright, or free speech, related reason. This point
is clear to many. You need to make it clear to the government.

They never frickin' learn: Cingular to crippled Bluetooth on their Treo 650

The madness never
ends. Why do carriers hate their customers?

Cingular might have bumped back the release date of their
version Treo 650, but we just got a tip from a reliable source that when it
does come out, it'll have the Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking profile disabled
on it just like it is on the Sprint version of the Treo 650. That means you
won't be able to use it as a wireless modem with your laptop, and unlike
the Sprint version of the Treo 650, you won't be able to enable the DUN
profile with that hack that's been making the rounds. At least, not until
someone hacks the hack.

Old Habits, New Technology

I'm not just a podcaster, I'm also a listener.

I just noticed something that I thought was funny and maddening at the same
time. Remember when you where a kid and you sent off for something in the
mail? And every day you'd run out to the mailbox to see if it was there
yet. The crushing disappointment every time you opened that box and bill,
bill, junk mail... Damn! Still not here! And then one day, just as you'd
almost given up hope, you go out to the mailbox jaded, not expecting to see
anything and IT'S HERE! Oh happy day!

Well, I'm starting to do that with podcasts. My podcast for 1SRC.com seems
to be relatively rare in that it's posted every Wednesday, no matter what.
Sometimes I define Wednesday as 3am Thusday morning, but you get the idea.
No matter when I record it, you'll be able to listen by Thusday.

If only more podcasts were like that. When's the next Engadget Podcast
going to come out? Have Phil and Len just fallen off the planet? Every day,
I check my podcast download folder. Slashdot review, Rip&Read, stuff from
IT Conversations I probably won't get time to listen to... No Engadget!
Damn!

And I listen to three shows on Air America Radio by podcast so I can
timeshift them. Depending on whether I'm in morning person or night owl
mode, I can't listen to both Morning Sedition and Majority Report here in
Denver. I also get to listen to those and the Franken show sans
commercials, which is nice (for me, not the network).

Whoever puts these 'casts together does a great job. The sound quality is
great for the file size and the commercials are edited out cleanly. But
sometimes it can take up to three or four days for the 'cast to make it's
way to my download folder (from where it's dragged and dropped into Palm
Desktop to sync to the music player on my Zod and played in prodcast
order). It's Wednesday evening here in Denver (I'm at Chipotle, avoiding
recording my own podcast) and I just now got to listen to Morning Sedition
from Monday morning! Argh!

Again, I'm not complaining. These are free services and I wouldn't suffer
so much waiting for them if they weren't so darn good. But the waiting, the
endless waiting is just killing me!

Thank goodness I have Audible to fall back on...

Conservatives back Hollywood

href="http://news.com.com/Conservatives+back+Hollywood/2100-1032_3-5548781.html?part=rss=5548781=news.1032.20">It's
back.

Movie studios and record labels' Supreme Court fight against
file swapping draws unlikely bedfellows.

These people MUST BE STOPPED. Not only is this bonehead stupid legislation
that would technically criminalize PCs and iPods, but it's against the best
interests of the people backing it.

There are studies upon studies showing that at worst there's no correlation
between file sharing and record sales, and at best files sharing actually
helps studios by exposing new listeners to music they wouldn't have heard
and subsequently bought otherwise. The RIAA and other groups are fighting
with all they have to kill the goose laying the golden eggs, and they'll
suffer as much as everyone else if they succeed.

When Josh and I finally get Solo Media off the ground (technical
difficulties and I'm going to be spending most of next week at 30,000
feet), we're offering our issues in Fictionwise's Multiformat editions,
completely sans encryption. We're also releasing them under a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons license that
allows and even encourages derivative works as long as they're
noncommercial and share alike (basically, we want to see fan fiction set in
our stories). Why are we doing this? To encourage new people to see what
we're doing and jump on board. If an issue gets emailed to a few friends
who like it and decide to subscribe for a year (at year of issues for the
low, low price of $5.00), I come out ahead. Word of mouth marketing is the
most effective on Earth. Why would I try to stop it?

The RIAA is trying to put a bullet in their own head. It's our duty to save
them from themselves.

Issues with Sprint

Ten days ago I got the Sprint LG 325. It's Sprints only bluetooth phone, and I was pretty excited to finally start true mobile computing. Too bad the bluetooth is apparently only good for headsets however. I was kind of disappointed but decided not to get to angry since it seemed to be a pretty good phone aside from the lousy bluetooth implementation. Well this afternoon the phone took a turn for the worse, it started powering off mid-phone call. So I did what anyone who just bought an electronic device that stopped working would do and I went to my local Sprint store to have it replaced.

The guy at the Sprint store on my side of town (there are only 2 Sprint stores in Wichita) was very nice, and told me they could do an exchange, but they were totally out of the phone. So I hopped in the car and headed to the Sprint store at 3101 North Rock Road. A 20 minute drive didn't seem like too much hassle to just replace the phone. I waited about fifteen minutes and was finally asked if I needed help by a young man named Ryan.

I told Ryan that I had just come from the other store and I just needed to swap out the phone I had only had for ten days. He asks to see the phone and gives it the, did you drop and break this once over. He asks where I bought it. I say "Online at Sprint.com".

"And you brought it to the store for replacement?"

"Yeah I bought it at Sprint.com." At this point I'm thinking this isn't going to be as easy as it would have been at the other store.

Then he gets up and says he has to go ask his manager. Now I'm a bit confused, but maybe Ryan is new, maybe he doesn't know how the fourteen day policy works. I stand patiently and Ryan comes back with a new LG phone and says, "Just so you know any damage and we usually can't do this, even something this small." And he proceeds to point at the tiniest scratch, one I hadn't even noticed, that probably came from keeping my phone in my pocket. "But we're going to do it anyway."

So now I'm trying to figure out if he really thinks he's doing me a favor so I say "Wait a second, wait are you trying to say?"

Without missing a beat this 5'6" kid with a Napoleon complex says to me. "Well it's pretty clear that something happened to the phone. If you want to argue about it I don't have to do the exchange." So here's where I decide that as much as I would like to jump over the counter and kill the punk, I'd rather get my phone, go home and send a nice friendly complaint email to sprint. I shut my mouth, and even give the kid one last chance at the end to apologize. I tell him I sorry for being snippy. And I get "Sure whatever."

So now I politely walk out the door. And proceed to be pissed. I've worked as a Customer Service Manager, as a Sales Manager and every other retail position known to man. You don't treat a customer that way, especially a new customer. If Sprint thinks power hungry kids are the people they need doing customer service, then I need to look into a new cell provider.

So now my gripes about the phone. The one thing I tried before I ranted about this was to see if maybe my other phone had just been broken and this phone would do it's bluetooth thing right. Well forget about that. The phone has no Obex, I knew that going in, but it's supposed to support DUN. So I fire up my Zodiac, set the phone as a trusted device, create an all new network and connection profile. Then I hit the connect button and.... the phone disconnects after 13 seconds. This is a known problem, some people have it, some people don't. It only effects Palm devices but Mac's have their own set of issues. Pocket PC and PC devices seem to handle the DUN just fine. This is the first bluetooth phone Sprint has carried openly and it doesn't freaking work.

The Bradley thing isn't a big deal.

I'm a little concerned about the mobile industry. Man, people fly off the
handle at a moment's notice. There was less doom and gloom on the frickin'
Titanic.

As I'm sure many of you know by now, Todd Bradley has announced that he
will step down as CEO of PalmOne at the end of this quarter. Predictably, a
lot of mobile tech sites have chosen to see this as yet another sign that
the sky is falling for PalmOne.

But as with everything in life, kids, you have to read the fine print. What
has Bradley really done for PalmOne? He's presided over some of their great
successes, like the Tungsten E and Zire 31. But he's also been in charge
for the i705, the Tungsten W and the Tungsten T5 (which I still say doesn't
deserve the bad rap it gets, but it has been poorly marketed). Are we
really going to shed a tear for this guy?

Who's stepping up to replace him? Ed Colligan. You may remember that name.
He was the President of Handspring and is largely responsible for the Treo,
the most impressive line PalmOne has. He was with Palm from day one, and is
the forgotten member of the founding trio that also counted Donna Dubinsky
and Jeff Hawkins. In short, Colligan has a much better feel for the
industry and a better track record for building devices that people will
actually buy than Bradley. He came back to PalmOne as part of the
Handspring merger and it's about time he was put in charge.

So out with the new, in with the old. Welcome back, Ed.

Read/Write Web: Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS

Read/Write Web: Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS: "In 2005 in the blogosphere, RSS is a community-enabler. You find someone you like and you subscribe to them, and conversations ensue. What I'm suggesting is that in the future RSS will still be a community enabler, but by far its biggest use will be as a means to subscribe to personalised news and other information important to the lives of non-blogging people. Examples of the information I'm talking about: stocks, bank statements, weather, information needed for one's job, sports news, niche information (the long tail), lots of other things we can't predict yet ;-)"

Really interesting stuff. Technorati's new tag system is likely to feed into this as well. My question is how do you keep track of all the conversations in which you participate on a mix-and-match web?

RIM says, No lawsuits please, we're Canadian

Oh, the
humanity...

Blackberry maker/dealer Research In Motion has come up with a
clever new strategy to counter NTP's patent lawsuit  playing up theire
Canadian-ness. To get you up to speed: last year a federal court found that
RIM had violated about a dozen of NTP's patents, ordering them to stop
selling BlackBerry devices in the United States and pay NTP $53.7 million
in damages. RIM managed to get another court to stay the order while they
filed appeal, and last month an appeals cour overturned the injunction
barring them from selling BlackBerrys while upholding the most of the
patent infrignement counts. Heres where it gets interesting. Since RIMs
based in Canada, and so are their servers, they're now arguing that US
patent laws don't apply to them. Seems unlikely that they'll be able to
pull this one off, but they might be in luckNTP might not own those
patents either. Yeah, this makes things hopelessly complicated now, but a
company calledComputer Leasco Inc is suing NTP for patent infringement,
claiming that they're the ones that actually own the wireless email patents
in question.

GTD Template for Palm

PalmGear.com Link

Quickly setup your built-in Palm applications to fully utilize David Allen's Getting Things Done. The setup is completely based upon David Allen's personal recommendation on how to use a Palm with GTD.

First time users of GTD will appreciate how rapidly you can get started . Experienced users will use it again and again for "Processing".

Features

* Fast and Easy!
* Preserves all your existing data
* Perfect for both the first time and experienced GTDer
* A great first step in making GTD a part of your life.

Compatible with many third party applications, including Datebook5!

"Getting Thing Done" is copyright David Allen and his company. This program has no relation to David Allen or his company except that the developers are very happy customers. If you have not done it yet buy David Allen’s book! It will change your life.

I still think Life Balance is easier and more effective, but people keep asking me for this, so I'm glad someone went ahead and created it.

Great stuff from BJC

Wow.

We began with excellent session, led by Brendan Greeley, on
podcasting. Very informative and good at the conceptual level as well. It
seemed to be well received by the media folks. (Q: Why was this session
about podcasting accepted so well while text blogging stuff yesterday met
hostility?)

Next, Ethan Zuckerman is leading a session about tools. Jimmy Wales of
Wikipedia starts off by talking about why it has a neutral point of view
(NPOV) policy. Without it, he says, he'd lose tons of contributors.

I ask Jimmy: You have an operational view of neutrality: It's neutral when
we stop arguing about it. But who is the "we"?

Jimmy responded that he's concerned to make the community that supports
Wikipedia as diverse as possible, in part by encouraging a culture of
openness and niceness. Once you join the community, you gain some civil
rights. E.g., you can't be banned just for disagreeing with someone
politicallly.

I ask about the demographics of the community that does the bulk of the
support of the Wikipedia. He says for the English version, it's definitely
white, male, and a slim majority are US citizens. "We're in over 50
languages by 8 or 9 have over 10,000 articles. There's a certain kind of
diversity that's hard to achieve just because of where pepole live." He
points out that USB article in the US version is a "fantastic, clear
article, but the article about Emily Dickinson is Ok but not fantastic." He
says they're trying to reach out to people. "I'm very interested in
reaching out to the Arabic community. We're trying to reach out but it's
difficult."

Jimmy says that the quality of the encyclopedia takes precedence over
almost everything else, including being open to anyone to edit.

Jane Singer asks Dan Gillmor what he wants citizen journalists to learn
from established journalism. Dan says that, for example, most people don't
know that the Freedom of Information Act applies to them, not just to
professionals.

Jonathan Zittrain worries that when Wikipedia gets noticed by the
mainstream, its norms will be swamped by its catastropic success. "How do
you batten down the hatches against that?" Jimmy says: We try to think of
problems ahead of time but not try to solve them until they happen. "The
community's already scaled much larger than I ever imagined."

Jimmy says that wikipedia does not do original research but wikinews will
have some original reporting. It's going to have to be high-quality, he
says, and he has no prediction about how much of wikinews will be original.

Dan points out that the Emily Dickinson article that Jimmy uses as an
example of an ok-but-not-great article quotes her poem "Tell all the Truth
but tell it slant," and suggests that that's a good motto for this
conference.

Dan asks how the various constituencies would handle seeing a charge about
a government official posted on an anonymous blog.

Jim Kennedy says the AP wouldn't publish it without checking it out. E.g.,
the wife of a Navy Seal posted photos on oFoto (maybe) that looked like it
was Abu Ghraib-style abuse. The reporter checked it out and ran the photos,
and now the family is suing the AP. No matter how it comes to you, you
follow the same rules.

Jay Rosen says he wouldn't run it.

Dave Winer does run items he hasn't checked out. He asks himself if he
thinks it's true, and asks himself what he's basing it on. He also tells
his readers the degree of confidence he has in it.

Jill Abramson says that in the old journalism craft, verification isn't
enough. Even if you confirmed the story, you'd have to get comments.

John Hinderaker. Powerline doesn't go with anything that's anonymous.

Me: This is right where this conference hits the shoals we were warned
about. This discussion assumes that blogging is continuous with journalism
and ought to be judged by the same criteria. And it isn't. The change to
the institution of journalism will come, I think, not from bloggers who
think they're sort of journalists but from the 99.999999% of us who don't
think we're journalists at all.

Jane: Bloggers have an ethical obligation to their readers. Saying untrue
things cause harm.

Ethan says that I'm being disingenous when I say that my blog is like a
talk over the water cooler because it gets read by more than two buddies
and it gets indexed. [Yes. It's not identical to water cooler talk, but
it's more like that than it is like journalism. So, the blogging form of
rhetoric has a set of responsibilities that water cooler talk doesn't. But
those responsibilities aren't the same as journalists...although we can
learn a lot from the ethics and practices journalists have developed. E.g.,
disclosure.]

Jay: I'm trying to increase informational certainty but decrease conceptual
certainty.

Jimmy: Free licensing does the media no harm if they're revenues are based
on advertising. Release your work under a license that requires attribution
back to you. People say "Gee I wish we had your Google power." We got that
power because people are copying our content.

Jim Kennedy: In concept, it's kind of neat. I'm worried about what sort of
abuses would occur and how the brand might be hijacked by people who
thought they had a right to it. And it's more of a problem for images and
video.

Jimmy: Take a look at the spectrum of licenses...Your model doesn't depend
on people coming to your web site so maybe it doesn't apply to you. But it
does to newspapers.

Dave: How do you point to something that disappears after a couple of weeks.

Jim: It's an archive issue. We sell access to the archive.

Jay: In five years you'll change.

Dave: How can we judge the credibility of an author if we can check what
he's written?

Jim: I don't disagree with you. We just don't have a mechanism for it.

Dan puts in a plug for Creative Commons. "I don't know if it hurt sales,
but I do know it helped bring attention to the topic."

Dave Sifry: The elephant in the room is about business models. Until we ask
how people still make money doing it, we can't talk well together. (Dave
says that every page of Technorati is Creative Commons licensed.)

Jay points to the damage done by locking up the archives. He says
journalists don't recognize the damage because they can always get at the
content via Lexis/Nexis. But for the rest of it, the content is simply
gone. This is critical to the development of the Web and the future of
journalism. the place to watch is Greensboro North Carolina. Jay calls upon
journalists to demand this.

Bill Mitchell of Poynter says this discussion is changing his mind. He came
in thinking that archives were one of the reliable sources of revs, but now
he's thinking about the social impact of locking up the archives and about
alternative business models.

Jay points to an article about The Guardian's reasons for making the
archives permanently available.

Alex Jones of the Shorenstein says that it would bring people to the pages,
and they could sell advertising.

Jim (AP): Our management is enlightened. We're just stuck between models
for a while.

Fwd: [Boing Boing] Torrent site-owner running circles around MPAA lawyers

Great stuff here. Keep fighting!

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/21/torrent_siteowner_ru.html

Cory Doctorow: The creator of Isohunt, a BitTorrent indexing service, has
been duking it out with the Motion Picture Association of America's
lawyers, in public. He's running circles around these bullies, too:

You repeatedly mention the "representative" list of works, which serves
only to intimidate us as a search service. If you look at the Betamax vs.
Universal case, the VCR was not deemed illegal since it is capable of legal
use. isohunt.com is a content agnostic search service on indexing torrent
links over the net, which is very much capable of legal use. While as a
service we can filter content, and that is exactly how we cooperate by
filtering identified copyrighted titles, we do not have the man power to
manually verify the tens of thousands of torrent links, nor is it even
technically possible without a complete list of copyrighted works to filter
against. Since you seem to have trouble producing a complete list, a
technical difficulty I can understand, you should also understand the same
difficulty we have in making your copyrighted works magically disappear...
somehow. So instead of calling it a complete list, which seems unfeasible,
it should be referred to as a sufficient list. Without it, we cannot help
you in filtering your works in our search results.

> Although you have suggested that you would like us to provide an index
> of copyrighted works to which you can refer regarding the torrents on
> your website, we simply do not find it credible that you are unable to
> identify as copyrighted material the many popular motion picture titles
> currently referenced on your website. To the extent you need further
> guidance, the United States Copyright Office maintains records of every
> motion picture and television program in the United States that has a
> copyright registration. Additionally, on-line databases provide
> information regarding who distributes motion pictures and television
> programs. You are already aware of at least one such source, the
> website imdb.com, to which you provide your users deep-links for motion
> pictures.

Read above. According to normal procedures of DMCA takedown, it is your
responsibility to identify what maybe infringing your copyright, and then
we will comply. Your notion that we should know every title MPAA owns,
while you have difficulty producing such yourself, is absurd. Links to
websites such as imdb.com is user submitted, while torrent links may be
user submitted or indexed from other sources on the internet. We do not
moderate this process, we don't have the resource to do so and it is not
our policy.

(Man, did you catch the MPAA lawyers drop the "deep-linking" bomb on him
-- Earth to Hollywood: "deep linking" is what the Web is for, and it's no
crime!)

Wireless Carriers Must Stop Crippling Bluetooth

Get 'em, Ed! Bluetooth is wonderful when it's not crippled.

http://brighthand.com/article/Carriers_Must_Stop_Crippling_Bluetooth

Ed Hardy urges carriers to end their habit of disabling some functions on
their Bluetooth-enabled phones, forcing their users to pay for services
they otherwise could have for free.

Life, liberty and blogging

>From CNET:

http://news.com.com/Life%2C+liberty+and+blogging/2061-1030_3-5545951.html?part=rss=5545951=news.1030.20

Recent actions by tech companies are making bloggers wonder whether they
have the right to free speech or only the right to remain
silent.

SJG unDRMs RPG PDFs

(Alphabet soup, anyone? :)

Back during the WoYP blog's first go-round, I wrote a lengthy piece on the idea of role-playing game books on one's PDA. The observations I made then are still largely true today.

Nonetheless, one roleplaying game company has moved a little closer to the sort of openness with which Baen publishes their SF ebooks under Webscriptions: Steve Jackson Games is publishing a line of unDRM'd PDF RPG books, with a distinctly Baen-like philosophy.

Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?

A. No. That would interfere with your use of them. We just have to hope that we can sell enough to honest people to make up for what gets stolen by the kiddies and cheapskates.

They also keep your orders on file so that if you should lose your copy, you can download another one.

PDFs aren't really suited for PDA use, but it's still nice to know we're getting closer.

Legal Digital Downloads Up 10 fold

My Way News: "LONDON (AP) - The recording industry reports a tenfold increase in the number of people legally downloading music from the Internet and the first significant revenues brought in by digital sales.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, also says it will continue its campaign of suing people who illegally download music, a practice it claims severely erodes the profits of its 1,450 member record companies across the globe.
The IFPI said Wednesday that music fans in the United States and Europe legally downloaded more than 200 million tracks in 2004, up from about 20 million in 2003."

I'm glad to see digital music gaining so much popularity. The problem is the IFPI smells blood in the water now. Digital music has become such big business that recording executives are going to want free file sharing shutdown even harder. As the recording industry embraces digital music as a format, they look to shutdown the people who showed them how valuable the medium could be.

Quote of the Day - Alfred North Whitehead

"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not
discover it."

Puts a new spin on "derivative" works, doesn't it?

State bill could cripple P2P

href="http://news.com.com/State+bill+could+cripple+P2P/2100-1028_3-5540937.html?part=rss=5540937=news.1028.20">This
is stupid for so many reasons. The biggest is that it's flat out
unreasonable to expect a service provider to be liable for any use of that
service in which they're not directly involved. If this bill passes, I'd
have to ask, who's making sure people don't send copyrighted material
through the postal service? The act is exactly the same, only the medium
differs. So why should the internet be less free than the "real" world?

California proposal would impose jail time for file-swapping
developers who allow copyrighted music, movie trades.

Treo 650 Hacked Again!

If you've got a Treo 650, href="http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2005/01/blog_mention_tr.html">check
this out. I helped a client hack a Treo 650 over the weekend to install
the sound quality fix, and it's not only really easy to do, it takes about
five minues to reflash the device. It's nice to know that if PalmOne won't
give people what they want, the user community will do it for them.

Blog mention, this time it's from it's funny to me..."It was
cool when the 650 was hacked to enable Bluetooth DUN. Now the geniuses have
done them one better and hacked the 650 to enable WiFi
support...."

Saving you from cartoon ass

And people wonder why I've completely written off television. From Jeff
Jarvis's blog...

http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_01_18.html#008906

Feeling the chill... in more ways than one

: This is what the FCC's censorship has brought: Rampant stupidity
necessitated by stupid government. From the AP:

Fox says it covered up the naked rear end of a cartoon character recently
because of nervousness over what the Federal Communications Commission will
find objectionable.

The latest example of TV network self-censorship because of FCC concerns
came a few weeks ago during a rerun of the "Family Guy" cartoon. Fox
blurred out a character's naked butt, even though the image was seen five
years ago when the episode originally aired.

"We have to be checking and second-guessing ourselves now, and that's
really difficult," Fox entertainment president Gail Berman said Monday. "We
have to protect our affiliates." ...

PBS executives also said this weekend they will edit out a glimpse of a
naked woman in a fictional account of a terrorist "dirty bomb" attack that
will be aired next month after being shown first on HBO.

Why MAC Filtering Alone May Not Be Enough

This is yet another reason why I don't have or want WiFi in my apartment. I
just isn't secure, no matter what you do with it. I worked in data security
in the Pentagon years ago and the only really secure PC is locked in a safe
with no power and no one knows the combination. But wired ethernet is a lot
more secure than wireless.

(and while I'm out, Bluetooth to cellular 1xRTT is fine, thanks)

http://channels.lockergnome.com/mobile/archives/20050118_why_mac_filtering_alone_may_not_be_enough.phtml

We hear it all the time -- WEPs broke, so why use it? Most people then
move to MAC filtering and are content to just leave it at that. However, as
this TechRepublic article explains, that may not be enough. The short
version: with little effort, an intruder can pull a valid MAC address out
of the air and bind it to their card, thus spoofing a valid address and
getting onto the network.

Quote of the Day - Dorothy Parker

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with
great force."

FontSmoother

This is amazing stuff. For anyone that's used Plucker with anti-aliased phones, this brings the same capability to the entire system. Beautiful, clear fonts that rival the printed page.

There's just one problem. It doesn't work on the Zodiac because it's a hack and requires YAHM to run. YAHM uses some ARM-native code, and thus requires Tapwave to sign it.

If you want to use this on the Zod, email Igor Nesterov nest at palmoid.com and let him know you need a copy of YAHM that works on the Zodiac! That's the only part we're missing. He just needs to get YAHM Tapwave signed and we can enjoy smooth, easy-to-read fonts too.

Exclusives are Fun, Too

But this is the way journalism should be.

http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/01/exclusives_are_.html

Kevin Marks gives me more credit than I deserve in this Many to Many
posting, where he notes the traditional journalistic model of going for an
exclusive scoop. He says some journalists are thinking how to make stories
more inclusive: "measuring success by how many people they bring into the
conversation, and they recognise it doesn't necessarily start with them."

This was with most of the things I used to work on when I was writing a
regular column. I was writing about people, issues and organizations after
the news had already come out -- trying to put it into perspective with my
own take on the topic.

But I also hungered for the scoops. And when I got something all by myself,
which happened periodically, I loved the feeling.

This is a valuable part of journalistic competition. It is surviving the
shift we're seeing from Big Media dominance to a more synergistic system
including the rest of us. Scoops will continue to occur -- though they'll
take different forms, and the scoop will last for about five minutes before
it spreads widely -- and that's a good thing.

Meanwhile, the involvement of more people in the conversation is the big,
and most important, shift of all. This definitely doesn't start with us, or
end with us. It continues, and grows.

palmOne Announces Change in Global Operations Leadership

Does this matter?

http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2005/01/_palmone_announ.html

palmOne, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLMO) today announced that Angel Mendez, senior vice
president and head of the company's Global Operations, will leave palmOne
to become senior vice president of Worldwide Manufacturing at Cisco
Systems, Inc.

Mendez, 44, joined palmOne in July 2001. He assumed responsibility for
maximizing the company's operational excellence and efficiency by leading
its supply chain, manufacturing, quality-assurance, logistics and
customer-service efforts. Prior to palmOne, he was vice president of Global
Supply Chain Management at Gateway.

Mendez will remain with the company through the end of the quarter to
facilitate a smooth transition. palmOne has launched a search for his
successor.

"Angel brought many valuable and lasting contributions to palmOne," said
Todd Bradley, palmOne chief executive officer. "He initiated and oversaw
comprehensive system and process improvements that allow our company to
scale to meet the exciting growth potential before us. He also built an
outstanding team, a team I am confident will continue to execute well on
the strong foundation established. We thank Angel for his years of
service."

Pair Arrested After Telling Lawyer Jokes

How can this not be a joke?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/13/2344253=rss

fembots writes "Two men were arrested for telling lawyer jokes while
standing in line leading into First District Court. A spokesman for the
Nassau courts said the men were causing a stir and that their exercise of
their First Amendment rights to free speech was impeding the rights of
others at the court."

Older Copyright Works Not Worthy

Save our culture!!!

http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/1,2167,66229,00.html

Why extend the copyright on works that no longer have commercial value? By
Lawrence Lessig from Wired magazine.

How copyright is killing culture

Okay, this is freaking terrifying. Our past is disappearing before our
eyes. Mister Orwell, your table is ready...

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/17/how_copyright_is_kil.html

Cory Doctorow: Today's Globe and Mail contains an amazing, disturbing
article about documentary films that are disappearing from the world
because the filmmakers can't afford to re-clear copyrights to the archival
footage they contain.

The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage
they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or
the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize's tight
budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the
minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long
since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous
copyrights involved is proving too expensive.

This is particularly dire now, because VHS copies of the series used in
countless school curriculums are deteriorating beyond rehabilitation. With
no new copies allowed to go on sale, "the whole thing, for all practical
purposes, no longer exists," says Jon Else, a California-based filmmaker
who helped produce and shoot the series and who also teaches at the
Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California,
Berkeley.

Diesel eBooks adds mobile browser support

This is pretty cool. I've shopped at Diesel before, and while their
selection isn't as good as eReader, they're not bad. Follow the link from
MobileRead below to get 20% off.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3128

Try visiting Diesel eBooks with a mobile browser and you will see that they
now automatically sense your browser and redirect it to a mobile-friendly
version of their site. Very nice addition!

If you visit them, don't forget our exclusive 20% discount on any e-book
valid until 2/15/05.

Tiny Robots Powered by Living Muscle Cells

This is cool, but extremely icky.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/17/1738204=rss

voma writes "Tiny robots powered by living muscle have been created by
scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. The devices were
formed by "growing" rat cells on microscopic silicon chips, the researchers
report in the journal Nature Materials. Less than a millimetre long, the
miniscule robots can move themselves without any external source of power.
Muscles like these could be used in a host of microscopic devices - even to
drive miniature electrical generators to power computer
chips."

No New Zodiac Until 2006

From Brighthand - looks like no new Zodiac until 2006. Check out the link at Brighthand. Looks like his Jeffness was right about the hard drive, though. And didn't he mention WiFi as well?

Everything on the net is a reprint

I don't get this. Why post anything online if you don't want other people
to run with it?

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/15.html#a9204 |
Comments

I've just removed Martin Schwimmerfrom my subscription list. Why? Because
he doesn't want his posts reprinted in Bloglines (and, I assume, in sites
like my link site).

The real trick here is: if you don't want your full posts reprinted
somewhere else, don't put them into RSS. That's one reason most commercial
sites don't include full content in their feeds.

I don't mind that Bloglines reprints my content and I don't mind that
anyone using an RSS News Aggregator looks at my content without seeing my
design or my navigation links or my email address or cell phone number.

If I did care, I'd switch my RSS feeds to only shove out partial content,
or I'd delete my RSS feed altogether.

Handango's Dirty Tricks

As much as PalmGear has been reviled by developers over the years, they
never tried this. Among the reasons I don't shop at Handango...

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3104

Msmobiles.com runs a story this morning that made me practically climbing
up the wall: "Handango does not allow a trial software to contain a link to
the developer's web site (e.g. for trial activation), and they want the
trial version to only provide a link to handango.com for purchase of the
full product. Links to the developer's website in the product activation
dialog are now forbidden."

50 Tips to Make Yourself Write

http://sfwa.org/writing/strategies.html

This is some good advice. My favorite is to pay yourself an hourly wage for
writing and pay for leisure activities (movies, eating out) exclusively out
of that fund. If you're not writing enough to pay for that movie out of
"writing money", you're not writing enough.

This just in: establishment still blind to change until it runs over them

I think the subject line pretty much sums up my take on this. Ignore the
future at your peril.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/15.html#a9208 |
Comments

ZDNet's David Berlind talks about how a Wall Street Journal reporter told
him that a source in the financial sector said that Web sites with content
in reverse-chronilogical order are insignificant and that podcasting is
nothing that anyone has to pay attention to.

Oh, he's right! How many readers a day do I have? A few thousand? Maybe
10,000 on a good day. Now, how many users of computers are there? Hundreds
of millions, right?

But that's totally missing the point. How many people does it take to
change the world? Not many. .NET was done by a handful of people. From what
I hear from Apple the iPod team was a handful of people. From what I hear
from my friends in politics change in massive policies usually happens due
to a handful of people. Ever watch the West Wing? They say it's pretty
close to how it's done.

I've seen what happens when Dave Winer and Adam Curry get together.
Podcasting happens.

So, it doesn't take too many people reading you to make some wild things
happen.

I am just wondering: who's next to change the world?

Working in someone else's business: been there, done that

Wired has a story on a Mac software developer that works out of a coffee
house, paying their "rent" for the office space by buying coffee. I'm
familiar with the tactic, as I'm typing this from a table at my local
Chipotle, where I can be seen most days that I'm writing.

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66276,00.html

Delicious Monster's cataloging software is a big hit, but the company works
out of a coffee house. Not only is it cheap, but the collegiate atmosphere
is an inspiration for turning obsessive catalogers into personal lending
libraries. Leander Kahney reports from San Francisco.

BostonHerald.com - the Edge: Readers turn new page with e-books

BostonHerald.com - the Edge: Readers turn new page with e-books: "Driving t