Month: January 2005

Well, after having resisted doing so for many, many years, my wife and I finally drank the Kool-Aid and got cellphones. Our landline is going away as of tomorrow. So if I haven’t already notified you via email, and you need my new phone number, get in touch and I’ll get it to you.

It’s actually cheaper to get these than to have the landline, which is very surprising. But now that we have a car, I actually feel better that my wife will have a phone with her if something happens.

Matt and I were joking last night about how much newer cellphones look like Star Trek communicators. I’m sure this joke is old and tired, but it was particularly vivid in my reality last night.

My first job out of high school (this is 1987 for those keeping score) was assembling “bag phones.” Cellular phones were just starting to hit the mainstream, though most of them were the install-permanently-into-your-car variety. My job was to take one of these phones, which had the handset and a large transceiver (about the size of a shoebox), install them into a camera bag, add an antenna and solder a cigarette-lighter plug for power, and put a short stubby cellphone antenna into the package. Boom! Instant portablity! “The ultimate in mobile communications.” Back in da day. And now this phone is almost too small to be useful in terms of stretching from my ear to my mouth. Very funny.

I’ve just perused my web statistics for this site for the first time in a while. Since I began this site, the traffic here has steadily increased, with a few bumps (notably the Janet’s tit fiasco that I satired heavily here, bringing me thousands of hits after the SuperBowl) along the way. But I’ve consistently had several thousand visitors per month for months now. I have no idea who is reading this, and I wish people who were reading it would feel free to comment more often. Yeah, I know. Wah.

But what intrigues me is the browser identification of people coming to my site. Supposedly, Microsoft Internet Explorer has a 90-something-percent market share. Yet, people using IE come in a distant third in popularity of browsers on my site. The breakdown goes something like this:

Netscape (compatible): 35.8%
Mozilla: 27.5%
Internet Explorer: 21.9%
Opera: 1.8%
Konqueror: 0.68%
Safari: 0.44%
Netscape: 0.25%
Galeon: 0.098%

A few notes: Netscape (compatible) is a smokescreen; it is basically browsers set to identify in a somewhat generic way. Lots of Konqueror users are set this way, as well as Safari (I imagine) and Mozilla users. So it’s impossible to tell which browsers are here, other than they are NOT Internet Explorer. So the largest clearly identified browser visiting this site is Mozilla, many of which are undoubtedly Firefox users. But together, 66.5% — almost exactly 2 out of 3 — of my visitors are not using Internet Explorer. Very interesting indeed.

Note that the above percentages do not add up to 100%; the difference is in search engine spiders and counters.

I knew lots of people were switching away from IE, mostly to Firefox, but I had no idea it was this dramatic. I wonder how many other sites are experiencing statistics like these?

One of the things Google does is archive newsgroup posts. Newsgroups were “the thing” in terms of information exchange before the onset of the world wide web, though some would argue they are still a huge source of information. From this vast collection of data, Google has published a 20 Year Archive of usenet.

It’s fascinating for a variety of reasons. First, it shows real-time reactions to major events, such as Tiananmen Square, the birth of the Web, the birth of Linux, the first mention of The Simpsons, and many other things. It strikes me as interesting to not only give a snapshot of mentalities of the time, but also as a new way to “do” history.

Richard Menta, on mp3newswire.net, has announced his 2004 Digital Media Awards. There are winners and losers. Some very interesting ideas in his comments. For example, he observes that Canada may hold the future for p2p hosting:

I have always talked about an American digital media industry separate from the traditional media conglomerates, but legal strife caused much of it to flee overseas. Canada, which has legalized P2P services is where this digital industry will grow as embattled and new services will start to take root there. Closer in culture to the US than any other country, English speaking Canada will have no problem serving US customers.

If the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Grokster appeal goes in favor of the media industry this year. Canada will be the biggest winner, not the record or movie industries.

So the Grokster case (which also made the list) ruling by the Supreme Court, coming later this year, will largely determine the direction of digital media for years to come. The sooner the Intellectual Property capitalists realize that p2p filesharing is not going anywhere — as evidenced by the BitTorrent phenomenon, which now counts for 1/3 of all traffic on the ‘net — the sooner we will be able to move on in the digital age of media. The Virtual Enclosures continue to battle the Virtual Commons.

Related to this is #10 on the Losers list:

10. RIAA “Sue ’em all” Campaign

Thousands of file traders have been sued by the music industry so far and the RIAA claims that these suits have succeeded in reducing file trading. That statement is false.

Just look at the average number of simultaneous users trading files as measured by Big Champagne and it is obvious that file trading increased dramatically in 2004 as the record industry filed suit after suit.

Global monthly average simultaneous users 2004:

January, 6,046,998; February, 6,831,366; March, 7,370,644; April, 7,639,479; May, 7,286,377; June, 7,401,431; July, 7,115,975; August, 6,822,312; September, 6,784,574; October, 6,255,986; and, November, 7,452,184.

US monthly average simultaneous users 2004:

January, 3,528,419; February, 4,039,989; March, 4,603,571; April, 4,688,988; May, 4,589,255; June, 4,583,920; July, 4,584,111; August, 4,549,801; September, 4,687,536; October, 4,435,395; and, November, 5,445,200.

So a key point: despite laws, lawsuits, and security technologies attempting to enforce the virtual enclosures, more people are engaging in filesharing worldwide — with half of them in the US — than ever before. Digital information is inherently a commons; any attempt to enclose information is arbitrary and artificial, and is furthermore damaging to the information itself and its status as a commons.

The key in this new age, many will say, is for artists to figure out how to make money with their “art” being a commons. But I would suggest that the problem is not in the artists figuring out how to profit from their art, but by the fact that society is structured such that the artists need to profit. Food for thought.

Well, this is the 3rd weekend in a row I’ve worked during a winter storm. It definitely gets busier here during these. It’s kinda fun, though, in a weird way. It’s good to know that I’m helping people, at least in some small way.

Though sometimes there’s nothing we can do for people. It’s amazing what people expect out of us at times. Like, they can’t get up a hill because it’s too slick, so somehow our 4-ton tow truck, with their vehicle in tow, will somehow be able to get up the same hill. Too funny.

It’s gonna be a long night, methinks….

The court cases around arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York have begun. And, well, let’s just say the cops don’t look so good:

Officer Wohl made several interesting assertions during his testimony suggesting to some that the falsification of arrest documents and police testimony may have been part of some sort of concerted effort by people involved in security planning for the RNC.

At one point, Wohl testified that his captain told him to arrest everyone within a certain area. Later, he stated that he could not really tell the difference between protestors, bystanders, and people merely coming and going from the library. The combination of an officer unable to discern between supposed suspects and innocent pedestrians, and an order from superior officers to make mass arrests based on geographic location rather than specific incidents, would seem to suggest there is a very real potential that large numbers of detainees were wrongly arrested and incarcerated.

This evidence indicates nothing less than state-sponsored repression of political dissent. Let no one doubt this.

Or at the very least, a solution to my audio computer woes. This machine would allow me to take the offending hard drive out of my studio computer, install it into this enclosure, and connect it easily and quickly to *any* computer, including the new laptop. Hmmmmm……

There is an article in Wired this month called “The Shadow Internet.” It provides an interesting look at the seedy underbelly of vicious sea robbers in the Internet age. The article is a very interesting and entertaining (if a bit reactionary and melodramatic) read, describing the origin of much of the “pirated” material available online, in p2p networks and such. This sharing consists of “topsites,” which are highly secret, highly secure sites that host these files:

Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in.

The article touches upon the motives of these “pirates” (arrr, matey…):

It’s all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about “the scene,” fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies – all the progeny of that original file – spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry. (BitTorrent, a faster and more efficient type of P2P file-sharing, is an exception. But at present there are far fewer BitTorrent users.)

Interesting stuff. It seems to me that these people share something similar to the old hacker ethos; the practice of modifying machines (either hardware or software) and being clever about it. Bottom line, it’s fun and the challenge of sharing with this technology that drives them, not some malicious desire to steal. When the Intellectual Property intelligentsia realize this, they’ll see that it’s less of a problem than they’re making it out to be.