Posts filed under 'Technology'
It looks like some larger companies are starting to see the light and realizing that DRM is more of a burden than it has benefit to both consumers and content providers. In a symbolic move, Yahoo are now offering a DRM-free personalized MP3 download – you may think about the artist and the song what you want, but at least it’s a step in the right direction and the reasons that Yahoo gives for this initiative show that they are in fact serious about this.
“The only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.” – that’s a strong statement, especially coming from a technology company that could easily jump on the DRM bandwagon and do the exact same thing. But it looks like Yahoo have realized that DRM comes at a cost that is much higher than the potential benefit and so this recent move is a warning shot in the direction of the record labels that still seem to think of DRM as the best thing since sliced bread. Instead, Yahoo suggests that offering better features, personalization etc. and the option to play the music on whatever platform they want to their customers is what they would like to do to add value to music downloads. I couldn’t agree more. As Yahoo put it so nicely, “Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer”.
Of course the success of Indie-music sites like Emusic, which have been selling un-DRM’d MP3s with increasing success, is also starting to threaten a DRM based business model, so it only makes sense for Yahoo to put some pressure on the labels to be allowed to start doing the same thing. But regardless of their motives, the move for more DRM-free downloads is a step in the right direction and should ultimately provide consumers with more freedom of choice. And maybe our cultural heritage will in the end be a bit less threatened than it seems to be at the moment. And that’s good news indeed.
Technorati : DRM, MP3, Yahoo, freedom, record labels
July 21st, 2006
I’m in Upland, Indiana for the annual International Conference on Computing and Missions (ICCM) this year, together with a lot of OM’s IT staff. The entire Linux team actually drove all the way from Pennsylvania yesterday, which is where my colleague Matt and his wife live. We arrived just in time for introductions and it was kind of fun when a guy stood up, claiming he’d just “wandered in”… it was actually Larry Wall, this year’s keynote speaker, who I’m sure you’ve heard of if you’re a techie… maybe not if you’re a Christian just generally interested in technology.
Larry actually trained to be a linguist with Wycliffe, the Bible translators, but then couldn’t go out on the mission field for health reasons. So instead, he developed the Perl programming language. This morning he gave the first keynote speech and there are a couple more to follow… this one was great fun. In typical Larry style, he introduced the topic of his speech as “Seeking a pe(a)rl of great price”, while saying that he really didn’t want to spiritualize Perl too much. It was very interesting to hear about a programming language from a linguist’s perspective and he certainly made it a lot of fun, while at the same time making fun of a lot of other programming languages in a very intelligent way. I’m definitely looking forward to his talk tomorrow. Funny side thing – he actually ended up in prayer group #42 
Right now I’m actually sitting in a Windows Vista demonstration and I’m very unimpressed with what I’ve seen so far… well, I guess I’ll never become a Windows guy at heart. Anyway, they say the conference is really all about the food and lunch is not too far away anymore, so I’d better get this posted and get ready.
Technorati Tags: ICCM, missions, technology, IT, Linux, Perl, Larry Wall
June 10th, 2006
It’s been a while since I’ve pointed you to an article by Brian Krebs and I’ve resisted the temptation once before, but now he’s written another excellent piece on how to make your Windows XP user experience more secure and probably keep your kids from installing all kinds of stuff you really don’t want. He explains two different approaches, one using an administrator account, but dropping privileges for certain programs to heighten security and one where you use a limited user account and only run certain software with administrator privileges. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, I prefer the option with the limited user accounts, but they make the use of some software slightly more complicated. Anyway, the explanations he gives are really excellent and I think this should be required reading for every Windows XP user. Go and have a look.
Technorati : Windows, security, administrator
May 31st, 2006
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is finding its way into more and more areas of our everyday life. At first it was used to protect downloadable music and video, then it found its way into applications for document management and was added to all sorts of documents. The broadcast flag discussion clearly shows that TV is the next big area that it will find its way into. DVDs have it, CDs try to have it and future media formats like BlueRay and HD-DVD won’t be available without it. But what rights does DRM actually protect and who is it protecting them from?
There are two main issues I have with DRM: its imbalance between the rights of the content provider being protected and the rights of the consumer being taken away and the question of what it will do to our cultural heritage in the long run. Let me go into the first point for just a moment. The way it is at the moment, DRM is a one-way street. The content owner sets the policies and the consumer puts up with them. And that actually favors the content owner in several ways – it’s quite a ridiculous situation, if you think about it, that the consumer can be charged multiple times, for example if he already owns a digital recording on their iPod, but can’t transfer it to another digital music device they got to replace the iPod because the DRM only works with that one device. The consumer has no right to even request a re-issue of the recording for his new device and I guess even if he did, the service charge would probably be a convenient 99 Cents. Just imagine what will happen in a few years time, when your DVD player breaks and you can’t get a new DVD player anymore because nobody makes them – do you think you can ask the media companies to trade in your DVDs for whatever the latest platform of the year is? Of course you could probably go and copy the contents of those DVDs to the new format… but wait no, that would be illegal. So in the end, you end up paying yet again to be able to view movies you already own. If they are even available in the new format…
That’s where we get to the second point. Once upon a time, in a DRM-less world, people would make a movie. They would make it on good old film reels and release it to the movie theaters. After that, it would sit in some archive for many years to come, until some movie lover discovered it and decided it would be a nice thing to show it on television. The television showing made it popular and so it would eventually be released on video, let’s say a VHS tape. If you bought this VHS tape, you would probably copy it to DVD at some point because your VHS player is showing signs of ageing and you could go on copying it to whatever the latest format is going to be until the end of your time on earth. Now imagine the same situation in a DRM world. A movie is made and released on digitally coded, watermaked film reels. Shortly afterwards, it’s released on DVD. The TV showing of it has the broadcast flag set that prevents you from recording it, but you go and buy the DVD. Only few others do because it was an artsy movie and not wildly popular, so when the next format rules the world and DVD players are history, the studio decides it’s not going to make a XYZ-Disk version of it. The digital formats it was saved in are no longer available, the DRM codes long forgotten when a historian remembers the movie and wants to look at it… but he can’t.
We know what the world was like 100 years ago because people preserved movie recordings, music recordings, photos etc. – and we know it because these recordings and photos can still be looked at and listened to today. There was no rights management and no encryption and no laws that prohibited us from breaking them in order to preserve them. What will our children and grandchildren be able to know about the world of today? What the media companies allow them to know? Because even if a movie enters the public domain after several decades (soon it will certainly be centuries…), what use is there if the bits and bytes we hold in our hands make no sense because we don’t have the code to actually view them?
There is a third danger that just came to my mind. Sooner than we think, we may be living in a world where TV brand A only shows a part of the political spectrum because that’s what its DRM allows you to see. If you want to see other opinions, you may have to get a second TV from brand B, that has the DRM used by other networks. But maybe brand B is much more expensive because brand A is actually favored by the powers that be… maybe I’m getting paranoid here, so I’ll leave that thought hanging. Just think about it for a moment – it’s not just about the money, it’s about culture and ultimately about freedom. How far will we allow the media companies to go with these decisions that impact our future and that of our children? Maybe it’s time to remember that they serve us and not the other way round…
Update May 10, 2006: Some interesting followup links worth checking out:
ZDNet on an article by Pamela “PJ” Jones of Groklaw
Blog of Helios on Linux and the mainstream, with a look at DRM and TC
David Berlind on ZDNet on the Warner/BitTorrent deal
Technorati : DRM, DVD, culture, freedom, heritage, media
May 5th, 2006
Well, the last few days were quite busy, so I still didn’t get to finish that article I promised on DRM. And now I’m going away again – for the first time in quite a long time, it’s not a business trip, instead I’m going on holiday for a week. London is calling… my favourite city in the world. I’ll spend a couple of days there with a friend, enjoying the sights and attractions (and I can assure you the real attractions are not the usual tourist things) and probably meeting a few friends from my London days.
This means that you’ll have to wait a bit longer for that article – I will deliberately stay away from the Internet while I’m away, just so that it becomes a real holiday. But I can now already promise you what’s next after that DRM article. I just finished an antispam gateway project for a regional ISP here in Germany, so the plan is to provide a little paper on how I did it and how it works – it’s all based on Open Source Software, so there are no trade secrets to hide from anyone, except maybe the few little extensions I made to the software that might come in handy if you’re trying to give your users more control over what the filter does. So stay tuned and come back soon… so will I.
Technorati : DRM, London, spamfilter
April 7th, 2006
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