Entries Tagged 'Politics' ↓

Maybe the music industries issues are not all about piracy, but also a secondary confluence that we have heard of but did not really think about. The Motley Fool though comes wading into the RIAA and its minions against everyone on the planet with an interesting take on things.

Maybe it is not piracy that is the full issue much to the consternation of RIAA et Al, but another even bigger side band, independent artists, going their own way, using alternative methods to distribute music, mainly wal-mart.

With discount department stores, live event promoters, and premium coffee houses becoming the new music brokers, is it any wonder to see the majors reeling? It gets worse. Madonna, McCartney, and The Eagles proved marketable…The ability of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Live Nation to generate adequate promotional muscle for The Eagles, McCartney, and Madonna will make it that much easier for proven acts to snip the strings in the future. Source: Motley Fool

So while the industry burns down around the old model, the new model looks promising, sell at cost or for small profit on line, sell the albums at Wal Mart, Starbucks, and other venues including Amazon where you can really cut your own deal with some software and a lawyer. Use the on line sales to promote off line sales, to promote the concert gig or touring gig. All of this without signing to a label, or feeding the RIAA and its minions machine against everyone else in the whole world.

There will always be piracy, there has always been some form of piracy, the point where the sanity begins is when you embrace chaos and work out a path that leads to less chaos. While the RIAA and its minions are busy looking elsewhere, the rest of the world has moved on, and that is the good thing. In a few years or a decade, it just won’t matter.

Tags: riaa, wal-mart, motley fool, music, minion, money, business, model

Kreativraschen has an English language blog entry on how Germany’s new data retention law is altering human behavior when it comes to using telecommunications systems, such as the phone. Germany enacted a data retention law that requires telecommunications companies to log who called who and store that information for six months so that law enforcement could use the data if they needed to.

The Forsa institute did a survey of a little over 1000 people to see how the data retention law altered their behavior if any. Their results are very interesting.

* 73% know about the data retention
* 11% said that they had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions
* 6% believe to receive less communication since the beginning of the data retention
* 52% said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention
And the sad fact: 48% still think that data retention is a necessary step for crime prevention.

Source: Kreativraschen

What is interesting is one of the side bar comments on the entry about people not calling their therapists, which can be bad depending on how much the person under therapy is in trouble mentally or emotionally. There is also the argument that beyond crime, this information can be used to determine what journalist broke what story, and that if using the phone, journalists should not be doing so when contacting confidential or private contacts.

In all this is an interesting survey, well worth taking a look and dumping it into babel fish to get the full translation and the full impact.

Tags: germany, data, retention, law, user, habits, altered

This one is interesting, with the democratic race sewn up for the presidential primary, who has a more comprehensive technology platform, McCain or Obama. It is still Obama who actually has a technology platform to work with.

Read Obama’s technology platform here and it is enough to warm up the hearts of many folks who want a free and open internet. As well as acknowledging that we have a generation of people who are hitting the job market who know how to use the internet. Web 2.0 over the last few years has transformed how we do things, along with updating our infrastructure to manage all the content that is coming as well as what is already here.

John McCain does not have a technology platform on his web site, there is no way to tell how he plans on integrating technology, updating, or otherwise using technology to further American business.

That is the sharp demarcation between the two candidates for people who follow technology, one who acknowledges we have technology and can use it to our benefit, and a candidate that does not have a plan on his web site. Frankly we would love to see some kind of platform on McCains web site about where he wants to take technology.

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered that only an informed policy can provide. Right now we are seeing a subtle erosion of what we can do in relationship to fair use, copyright, time shifting, reselling, and a host of other things we can do with the materials, entertainment and goods that we purchase. The head long collision between corporations and users that we have all been suffering under requires a strong leader to bring some sanity back to where we are going with Web 2.0.

Maybe we will get lucky, at least there is one candidate left on the field that has an idea of what they want to do. As well Obama has been very effective in using the internet to get the word out, something to think about as we vote in five months. If you can use it, or have those around you use the internet effectively, we might just stand a chance at copyright reform, patent reform, data portability, security, privacy, education, and just about everything else that relies on technology today.

Tags: obama, mccain, technology, platform, politics, participation, future

If you never followed the Kathy Sierra debacle then go quickly catch up on this one, then start following the saga of Ariel Waldman.

Kathy Sierra who has been silent for far too long at the hands of trolls and people who were truly evil is just one example of when otherwise good social networking goes bad.

Ariel Waldman is now on that list of folks who is dealing with a very unfriendly secret stalker who is following her via Twitter. Twitter rather than deal with the issue directly and banning the user has decided to do nothing about the issue and rewrite their terms of service rather than enforce it. That essentially means that twitter is now giving a green light to a big pile of badness that is going to descend on the service, if they refuse to reign in folks who are clearly harassing other members of their service.

The harassment continued throughout the course of 2007. Since Twitter and I had an open dialog started, I would periodically report cases of continuing harassment (some of which spread between Flickr and Twitter). Twitter would take no action while Flickr would immediately ban and remove all traces of the harassment. Unfortunately, in 2008 it escalated to a level that could no longer be ignored. Tweets were being fired off directly calling me a “cunt” amongst other harassing language. On March 14, I wrote to Twitter, giving the example URLs of abuse and stated to them clearly: Source: Ariel Waldman

While web 2.0 is generally a wonderful thing, this type of behavior is nothing new, the idea of harassment even to the point of death (MySpace Suicide Debacle) means that as community managers, regardless of how you look at yourself, service or whatever, the enforcement of the Terms of Service essentially becomes an obligation if you state what is and what is not acceptable behavior. If you say “no harassment” then you have to believe and act on what people are calling harassment. You as a community manager might think it is trivial, but to the person who is believing they are being harassed, then it is a very real issue to them.

Not saying that Ariel has thin skin, putting up with an uncomfortable situation for a year all the while reporting it is also interesting, and not saying this is bad, it just shows that she is committed to the Twitter service. Twitter stands to lose a customer because of someone else, that customer will talk, and if Twitter is perceived as a haven for trolls, trogs, and other Internet miscreants, they will have people who will drop their accounts, stop using the service, and they will lose customers.

Can twitter afford to be seen as a haven for Internet miscreants?

Do they want to be seen as a haven for Internet miscreants?

All good questions, and if they rewrite their TOS (Terms of Service) to remove section 4, then they probably are going to do themselves more reputational harm than they will be doing things well. Even the phone company will help you track down someone who makes threatening harassing phone calls so you can report them to the police. For twitter to do any less than this could cause them reputational damage that they can not afford.

Tags: twitter, harassment, ariel waldman, kathy sierra, troll, Internet, service

Green Peace has gone off the deep end yet again screaming that game consoles are not green enough, pulling out a list of chemicals that they say exist in game consoles, which probably really exist in just about any environment that we live in at this point.

Meaning you should not make love to your game console, do not lick the insides of your game console, do not otherwise expose yourself to your game console, just sit back across the room and pray the controller does not harm you either. Forget about the game, it is all about the exposure to evil chemicals, forget that they most likely exist in one form or another in every electronic item you own, its all about game consoles today.

Here is why we are sarcastic as hades on this one, remember the green peace Iphone oh my god we are all going to die PANIC there are chemicals in there too? Remember how that ended badly for green peace?

The report also claims that Greenpeace fails to highlight the fact that, right now, there are no alternatives as effective as BFRs to prevent fires in consumer electronics. Also, according to the EMSnow article, since the iPhone complies with all European Union legislation, “the BFR most likely used in the iPhone is actually a reactive—i.e. it reacts with other substances to form a plastic and, once reacted, it is also no longer available to the environment.” Source: Gizmodo

Yet more alarmist happy hoopla from the folks who are in this for the political issues, not really to do good anymore. Green peace at one point was most likely a good organization, but their alarmist BS that comes out every once in a while is pretty lame.

Just enjoy your game console, recycle it when you are done, and do not expose your bodily fluids to your console, things should be ok.

Tags: greenpeace, green peace, bs, alarmist, panic, chemicals, game console, wii, ps3, xbox 360

More disturbing news coming out of the information security business today about the McAfee hacker safe program that is fairly disturbing in the longer run. Not just for the industry at large but for people who tend to trust that web sites and other sites are doing the right thing to keep their customers safe.

There are just some ideas that are fundamental to hiring someone, and that is the background check. Only to find out that there is yet another security person who has been indited for securities fraud. I wrote about that here.

This is more my general thoughts on things, like run a background check on those you hire. Not everyone is going to want to work for your shiny new company who has your companies best interests in mind.

There is a long trail on friend feed about this one as well right here.

While there are a lot of folks who are generally decent, but you can not trust everyone you hire, you want to, but some folks have motivations that can destroy a team, a company, a group, even a product, there are far too many examples of this kind of behavior.

This story here is one of those “prime examples” of otherwise good employee causes company lots of pain. These kinds of stories are far too common.

I keep on saying to just about anyone who will listen that people who are in the security industry have the same ability to mess with someone’s life as a bad lawyer, a bad doctor, and a bad nurse. Maybe it is time to clean the industry up, bring some real professionalism to it, so we can catch people like this earlier. Of course this takes a lot of due diligence on the part of an employer, we might not get there.

Tags: hire, information security, trust, false, sense, security

May 21rst is the “Boycott Twitter Day”, which is generally, refuse to use twitter for one day because people don’t like the outages that Twitter has been having. Twitter is a great service, that has seen its own share of outages and performance issues, but is that worthy of a boycott?

Probably Not.

So is this boycott really about teaching Twitter a lesson or is it a group tantrum? Source: Mediaphyter

You can read other equally interesting statements here.

Lets see, will anyone die, is there blood, anything broken in terms of life and limb, no not really. While the ebay boycott folks had a leg to stand on, if you hate twitter, go to Jaiku or Pownce, they exist, they are alternatives, do what you want. But this is really on the lower end of the totem pole in terms of significance or duration.

If you really hate twitter go somewhere else.

Just a thought, and good luck with that boycott!

tags: twitter, boycott,temper,tantrum,ebay,jaiku,pownce