"copyright" entries

Four short links: 13 February 2013

Four short links: 13 February 2013

Open Regulations, Inside PACER, Hacking Memory, and Pirating Buildings

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 13, 2013
  1. CA Assembly Bill No. 292 — This bill would provide that the full text of the California Code of Regulations shall bear an open access creative commons attribution license, allowing any individual, at no cost, to use, distribute, and create derivative works based on the material for either commercial or noncommercial purposes. (via BoingBoing)
  2. The Inside Story of PACER (Ars Technica) — PACER has become a cash cow for the judicial branch, generating $100 million in profits the court has plowed into non-PACER IT projects. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Manipulating Memory for Fun and Profit (PDF) — It is a common belief that RAM loses its content as soon as the power is down. This is wrong, RAM is not immediately erased. It may take up to several minutes in a standard environment, even if the RAM is removed from the computer. And it may last much longer if you cool the DRAM chips. With a simple dusty spraying at -50°C, your RAM data can survive more that 10 minutes. If you cool the chips at -196°C with liquid nitrogen, data are held for several hours without any power.
  4. Pirating Buildings (Spiegel) — putting the “property” back in Intellectual Property.
Four short links: 30 January 2013

Four short links: 30 January 2013

Cheap Attack Drones, Truth Filters, Where Musicians Make Money, and Dynamic Pricing From Digitized Analogue Signals

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 30, 2013
  1. Chinese Attack UAV (Alibaba) — Small attack UAV is characterized with small size, light weight, convenient carrying, rapid outfield expansion procedure, easy operation and maintenance; the system only needs 2-3 operators to operate, can be carried by surveillance personnel to complete the attack mission. (via BoingBoing)
  2. TruthTeller Prototype (Washington Post) — speech-to-text, then matches statements against known facts to identify truth/falsehoods. Still a prototype but I love that, in addition to the Real Time Coupon Specials From Hot Singles Near You mobile advertising lens, there might be a truth lens that technology helps us apply to the world around us.
  3. Money from Music: Survey Evidence on Musicians’ Revenue and Lessons About Copyright Incentives — 5,000 American musicians surveyed, For most musicians, copyright does not provide much of a direct financial reward for what they are producing currently. The survey findings are instead consistent with a winner-take-all or superstar model in which copyright motivates musicians through the promise of large rewards in the future in the rare event of wide popularity. This conclusion is not unfamiliar, but this article is the first to support it with empirical evidence on musicians’ revenue. (via TechDirt)
  4. Max Levchin’s DLD13 Keynote — I believe the next big wave of opportunities exists in centralized processing of data gathered from primarily analog systems. […] There is also a neat symmetry to this analog-to-digtail transformation — enabling centralization of unique analog capacities. As soon as the general public is ready for it, many things handled by a human at the edge of consumption will be controlled by the best currently available human at the center of the system, real time sensors bringing the necessary data to them in real time.
Four short links: 11 December 2012

Four short links: 11 December 2012

Tasty Drones, Faux Reform, Trippy In-Flight Entertainment, and Money for Enviro-Drones

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 11, 2012
  1. Burrito Bomber — drone that delivers burritos. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Copyright Hardliners Adopt the Language of Reform — Sadly, in the end, Barnier’s “copyright fit for the Internet age” looks depressingly like the current, dysfunctional version: one based on a non-existent scarcity, on treating the public as passive consumers, and on pursuing unachievable enforcement goals with ever-harsher punishments.
  3. Mars and Sleep in Air New Zealand Flights (Idealog) — Air New Zealand in-flight entertainment to include advertisements for Martian timeshares and relaxing music set to a slow continuous shot along a New Zealand country road. Beats the hell out of the Nashville Top 20 channel and that gloaty “still many more hours to go!” map.
  4. Google Drones Target Poachers (World Wildlife Fund) — that’s not the real message of this piece, announcing Google has given a $5M grant to WWF to use technology to protect animals, but that’s the vision I have. I look forward to being able to switch on the reticule on Google Savannah View and smoke a few poachers straight from my phone’s maps app.
Four short links: 29 November 2012

Four short links: 29 November 2012

Internet of Zings, Public Domain Alternate Universe, Web Engineers Tools, and Dashboards for All

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 29, 2012
  1. Is It The Internet of Things? — we’ve moved from “they ignore you” to “they laugh at you”. Next up, “they fight you”, then finally the earless RFID-enabled location-aware ambient-sensing Network of All wins. (via BERG London)
  2. The 2012 We Could Have Had — list of famous and interesting works which would have entered the public domain had we not had the 1976 extension of copyright law.
  3. Web Engineer’s Online Toolbox — a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation.
  4. Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard — everyone should have a HUD showing the things they care about. (via Courtney Johnston)
Four short links: 19 November 2012

Four short links: 19 November 2012

Mac git tool, Web Developer Tool, Bullshit Detector, and ISPs Join Devil For Baby-Eating Orgy

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 19, 2012
  1. Wing Man — Mac app for source control management with git, implements workflow rather than simply being a wrapper for git commandlines.
  2. CodeKit — Mac app for web developers, automates (invisibly, thanks to watching filesystem changes) much of the web site tools.
  3. LazyTruth — Chrome plugin for gmail that detects bogus forwarded email and gives you the option to reply with the truth. RoboSnopes for the win! (via The Atlantic)
  4. Verizon to Throttle Pirates (BBC) — unable to solve their business model problems though the courts, Hollywood “partners” with ISPs to extra-judicially punish alleged infractions. ISPs win when heavy downloaders are throttled, of course, because it lets them have higher contention ratios (sell the same upstream cable to many more downstream email-checking residences instead of just a few torrenters). These five ISPs are mall-cops, private tax collectors, and regional monopolists, all in one nasty bundle of evil.
Four short links: 9 November 2012

Four short links: 9 November 2012

Civil Drones, Fencing the Public Domain, Quantified Spy, and Data Daemons for Fun and Metrics

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 9, 2012
  1. Helping Drones Play Nice With Other Aviation — The U.S. airspace is quickly being filled with simultaneously flying drones. To such an extent, unmanned aircraft could soon become a nightmare for the ATC controllers. The ADS-B will improve Predator B’s crew situational awareness making the drone capable to operate more freely and safely in domestic and international airspace in accordance with civilian air traffic and airspace rules and regulations.
  2. Reclaiming NZ’s Digitised Heritage — Out of a sample of 100 books: 50% of NZ Heritage Books (published before 1890) have been digitised; 90% of digitised texts are fully accessible; 98% of accessible texts are downloadable; Despite all works being in the public domain, only one did not have any licencing restrictions applied to its use. Most groups who digitise then go on to put restrictions around their use. [T]here are also many instances where arbitrary restrictions are being applied to the detriment of the public good.
  3. Self-Spy (GitHub) — Log everything you do on the computer, for statistics, future reference and all-around fun!
  4. statsd (GitHub) — Etsy’s data-gathering daemon, written up in an excellent blog post.
Four short links: 31 October 2012

Four short links: 31 October 2012

Turing Complete Users, Live Bootstrap Editor, Remix Exemptions, and Automatically Strengthening 3D Designs

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 31, 2012
  1. Turing Complete User — General Purpose Users can write an article in their e-mail client, layout their business card in Excel and shave in front of a web cam. They can also find a way to publish photos online without flickr, tweet without twitter, like without facebook, make a black frame around pictures without instagram, remove a black frame from an instagram picture and even wake up at 7:00 without a “wake up at 7:00” app. [… They are] users who have the ability to achieve their goals regardless of the primary purpose of an application or device. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Bootstrap Live Editor — a WYSIWYG HTML5 Editor built for Bootstrap. It offers a nice and elegant way to edit and beautify html content with Bootstrap-ready UI elements. I love how Bootstrap has become this framework for simpler website creation. I’m just disappointed they’re all startups chasing $ instead of being open source infrastructure.
  3. DCMA Exemption Recommended for Remix — recommended expanding the noncommercial remix exemption to cover both DVDs and online services. The reference to “motion pictures” covers “movies, television shows, commercials, news, DVD extras, etc.”
  4. New Tool Gives Structural Strength to 3-D Printed Works (Science Daily) — Findings were detailed in a paper presented during the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in August. Former Purdue doctoral student Ondrej Stava created the software application, which automatically strengthens objects either by increasing the thickness of key structural elements or by adding struts. The tool also uses a third option, reducing the stress on structural elements by hollowing out overweight elements. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 5 October 2012

Four short links: 5 October 2012

Robocopyright, OECD Numbers, Half Of Which Are Probably Wrong, Science Incubator

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 5, 2012
  1. Improving Content ID (YouTube) — finally they’re adding some human intervention to lower the number of false positives.
  2. OECD’s Internet Economy Outlook (OECD) — lots of stats, from growth of streaming media to crime and EHRs. This caught my eye: In 2010, on average, 35% of all businesses with ten or more persons employed used the Internet for purchasing, and only 18% for selling goods and services.
  3. Half Of What You Know Is False — The field of scientometrics – the science of measuring and analyzing science – took off in 1947 when mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. He stacked them in order and he noticed that the height of the stacks fit an exponential curve. Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually since the 17th century. The upshot was that scientific data was doubling every 15 years.
  4. Catalyst Grants — Macmillan’s Digital Science incubator.
Four short links: 4 September 2012

Four short links: 4 September 2012

Visual Strategies, Copyright Robots, Fast Small 3D Printing, and Javascript Dataviz

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 4, 2012
  1. Visual Strategies — book of useful tips for improving visualisations, described as “a useful Tufte”. (via NY Times)
  2. Copyright Enforcement Bots Killed Hugo Streaming (io9) — automated content policing ‘bots killed the live stream, and uStream wouldn’t bring it back. This is the problem with automated enforcement: bots can’t tell all permitted uses, let alone fair use.
  3. High Resolution 3D Printer — 5m/s at micrometer precision. Looking forward to my nanoscale RepRap.
  4. Javascript Data Visualization Tools — elegantly-presented selection of tools for dataviz in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
Four short links: 16 August 2012

Four short links: 16 August 2012

Terms of Service, Exporting Copyright, Monitoring Networks, and Learning Programming

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 16, 2012
  1. The Medium Terms of Service — easily the best terms of service I’ve ever read. Clear and English wherever possible, apologetically lawyered-up CAPITALS where necessary. Buy that lawyer a beer.
  2. All Nations Lose Under TPP’s Expansion of Copyright Terms (EFF) — leaks reveal the USA negotiators’ predictable attempt to expand the term of copyright in other nations. TPP is a multinational SOPA.
  3. Network Theory to Identify Origins of Outbreaks (MIT Technology Review) — “By monitoring only 20% of the communities, we achieve an average error of less than 4 hops between the estimated source and the first infected community”. The paper says it depends on good knowledge of the network, which makes me wonder how useful it will be for government tracing of Anons and the like.
  4. Introducing Khan CS — John Resig built a Bret Victor-inspired teaching environment for learning Javascript. Nicely done, and soon to be open source.