Darknet

TiVo shifts to help Hollywood

NY Times: TiVo Shifts to Help Companies It Once Threatened

Tivo may be getting a second chance by thinking outside the box that made it famous in the first place.

As the company that popularized digital video recorders, TiVo turned time-shifted, commercial-skipping television watching into a verb, only to antagonize the television industry and see cheaper, more generic DVRs undercut its success. Now it is trying to climb into the black by working with the media companies it once threatened and moving away from the hardware that it pioneered.

During the last two weeks, there were several promising developments for TiVo, which accounts for about 4 million of the more than 20 million digital video recorders in American homes. ...

Altered iPhones freeze up

Katie Hafner at the NY Times: Altered iPhones freeze up.

Since the iPhone hit the market in June, tech-savvy owners of the phone have been busy messing with its insides, figuring out how to add unauthorized software and even “unlock” it for use on networks other than AT&T’s.

But the Web was filled Friday with complaints from people who had installed the latest iPhone software update, only to see all the fun little programs they had been adding to their iPhones disappear — or, still worse, see their phones freeze up entirely. ...

Cue the crackdown

From the November issue of Wired, on fine magazine stands everywhere: Cue the crackdown.

It's called camming – sneaking a videocam into a theater to record a bootleg – and the Motion Picture Association of America says it costs the movie biz billions every year. Now the MPAA is cuing the crackdown: It's working with US tech firms on new tools for thwarting pirates and keeping their booty off street corners from Mumbai to Manhattan. In a few years, when you settle in with your popcorn to watch a flick, you'll be watched right back. Here's a sneak preview of anticamming strategies.

SEEK AND DESTROY
What it is » A combination optical scanner and narrow-beam spotlight, small enough to be hidden behind an exit sign or a speaker
How it works » Pans the audience looking for the faint glimmer of a camcorder's lens and blasts it with a beam of white light

HYPNO-BLOCKER
What it is » Patterns added while processing or projecting the movie, invisible to the eye
How it works » Produces "psychovisual" illusions – spinning concentric circles, moiré patterns – that become visible in recordings. Aghhh! Shut it off!

PULSE WEAPON
What it is » A speaker-shaped box mounted behind the screen
How it works » Periodically emits a pulse of infrared light, which doesn't disrupt the movie but ruins camera images

WATCHMEN
What it is » A squad of security guards equipped with night-vision goggles
How it works » Creeps everyone out by marching through theaters to look for videocams during screenings for the press or Hollywood insiders

SCOFFLAW TRACKER
What it is » Watermarks added to the movie in real time during a digital projection
How it works » Stormtroopers decrypt the embedded code to reveal the time and theater at which the copy was made (helpful if theater employees did the bootlegging)

SNEAK ATTACK
What it is » Extra frames – with text reading "Busted!" or something equally clever – inserted into the movie print
How it works » Flickers faster than the eye can register but shows up on a digital recording

The big gamble on e-voting

Sunday NY Times: The Big Gamble on Electronic Voting. Diebold declines to let Princeton researchers test the latest voting machine, which uses a standard industrial part to protect the door to its memory card slot. I quoted Felten in "Darknet" about black boxes. Here's an excerpt from the Times article:

Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton, and his student collaborators conducted a demonstration with an AccuVote TS and noticed that the key to the machine’s memory card slot appeared to be similar to one that a staff member had at home.

When he brought the key into the office and tried it, the door protecting the AccuVote’s memory card slot swung open obligingly. Upon examination, the key turned out to be a standard industrial part used in simple locks for office furniture, computer cases, jukeboxes — and hotel minibars.

Once the memory card slot was accessible, how difficult would it be to introduce malicious software that could manipulate vote tallies? That is one of the questions that Professor Felten and two of his students, Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Haldeman, have been investigating. In the face of Diebold’s refusal to let scientists test the AccuVote, the Princeton team got its hands on a machine only with the help of a third party. ...

Corporations mull how to disable your remote control

Randall Stross in the Sunday New York Times: Someone Has to Pay for TV. But Who? And How?

THEY will take my remote control away only when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

This thought followed my first reading of a patent application for a new kind of television set and digital video recorder recently filed by a unit of Royal Philips Electronics at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The design appears to threaten the inalienable right to channel-surf during commercials or fast-forward through ads in programs you've taped.

A second, calmer reading of the patent application revealed that the proposed design would uphold the right to avoid commercials, but only for those who paid a fee. Those disinclined to pay would be prevented from changing channels during commercials. If the viewer tried to circumvent the system by recording the program and skipping the ads during playback, the new, improved recorder would detect when a commercial segment was being displayed and disable the fast-forward button for the duration.

As a business proposition, the concept appears dead on arrival: what consumer would voluntarily buy a television designed to charge fees for using it? When I spoke last week with Ruud Peters, the executive in charge of intellectual property at Philips, to learn how it would be pitched to consumers, he explained that the patent application had no connection to any Philips products in the pipeline. And, he explained, the notion of temporarily crippling the remote control to protect advertising is already out there and did not originate with his company.

But limiting remote controls is a possibility that could be realized in a new technical standard — M.H.P., for multimedia home standard — that the television industry is contemplating for the future. Neither broadcasters nor television manufacturers, whose joint cooperation would be necessary, have yet to adopt the standard. If the television industry embraced M.H.P., broadcasters could insert special signals to immobilize the remote control during commercials. If this came to pass, Mr. Peters said the Philips technology would "give consumers the freedom of choice" — "freedom" defined as exercising the option to pay a fee in order to regain the use of the remote control. ...

Worried? Try an encrypted bubble

p2pnet.net: Worried about the copyright police? Try an encrypted bubble.

Courts need to tread lightly in patent cases

Op-ed piece in today's San Jose Mercury News: Patent-infringement remedy needs Supreme Court tuneup. Excerpt:

A single computer produced by Dell or Hewlett-Packard or IBM may include thousands of patented hardware components licensed from others. A single computer chip set manufactured by Intel or AMD may involve more than 100,000 individual patents -- many which are licensed from third parties.

What the recent court decisions fail to consider is the impact of an injunction on a key component on the hundreds -- or thousands -- of other component manufacturers whose patented intellectual property is tied up in the complex product that the plaintiff seeks to pull off the shelf.

These innocent component manufacturers and their employees have done nothing wrong, but all pay a heavy economic price. Every student of litigation abuse knows that an injunction preventing the sale of the final product could be a corporate death sentence for these other component manufacturers. ...

Annotating rich media

A videoblogger named Robert says, "Imagine how cool it would be to have everyone's annotation of video and audio media in a searchable database."

It should begin happenning by next year.

Exhibit A: The BBC Annotatable Audio project.

The project we undertook was focused on Annotatable Audio (specifically, but not exclusively, of BBC radio programming) - and we decided to look in an unorthodox direction - towards the possibilities of user-created annotation and metadata. We decided that we wanted to develop an interface that might allow the collective articulation of what a programme or speech or piece of music was about and how it could be divided up and described. Our first ideas looked for approaches similar to del.icio.us, Flickr or our own Phonetags - which create collective value by accreting the numerous annotations that individuals make for their own purposes. But after a fascinating discussion with Jimmy Wales, we decided to think about this in a different way - in which (just like Wikipedia) individuals would overtly cooperate to create something greater and more authoritative.

Exhibit B: At the Open Media Developers Summit on Oct. 20, some of the members of NYU's ITP program described their work with "video comments," a system that allows users to add comments to a specific point in a video. They moved from videoblogs, I believe, over to live chats, where a Java applet embedded within a QuickTime player let them attached comments to live chats via a time code.

I think that a non-chat environment will make better use of this technology, however.

Exhibit C: Ourmedia has on its roadmap what we're calling a rich media clipping service (regular people don't use the word "annotation"). It would allow bloggers (or anyone) to link to segments -- clips -- within an audio file or video. We've been in discussions with tech journalist Jon Udell (who has described the idea in his writings) and Doug Kaye about it, and hope to get some momentum going on the project in the coming weeks. (If you're a coder who'd like to help out on this open-source project, contact me.)

It's going to happen.

Later: Related to all this somehow: Interclipper, a real-time video organizer for the PC. Doesn't look like a social media tool, however.

Web, DVDs could mark CDs' slow death

Washington Post: Web, DVDs Could Mark CDs' Slow Death.

Why online commons are besting the mainstream media

From the ever-thoughtful author-blogger David Bollier at OntheCommons.org:

When I look at the online world these days, I feel like I’m watching one of those old nature films in which an unseen narrator excitedly whispers as a baby bird miraculously pecks its way through the eggshell and announces itself to the world. Who is this fragile new creature? I feel the same sense of amazement as I contemplate the new modes of expression made possible by digital technologies. What is this podcasting, this video-blogging and these new public-domain repositories?

Here’s my excited narrator’s whisper: A lot of new media genres seem to be empowering individuals by providing them with a lightweight commons infrastructure. Unlike today’s media market – our brain-dead NYC-LA axis of TV, radio and film that cranks out sensational junk/product to mass demographics – the new online commons are soaring because they tend to be more efficient, versatile, responsive and socially authentic as modes of communications. They’re out-competing the market! ...

As we are able to capture more of our socially created value through commons (blogs, wikis, webcasts, open source, etc.), we are forcing the mass media to re-tool its business models in order to compete with the strange new forms of non-market value-creation. Can they do it? What sorts of “value-added” service will they excel in?