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An interesting rant on the state of tech (mostly computer) journalism.

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The Failure of Tech Journalism
Posted by steve_gilliard
(August 26th, 2001, 12:54am)
As I write this, I'm watching a documentary called Breaking the News, commissioned by the Museum of Radio and Television. It's about the exploits of the big TV anchors, who, for some reason, seem to always wind up close to combat. I.e., Ed Bradley asking a Klansman whether black people should vote. The general question seems to be: "how close can you get to combat and not get killed"?

Journalism is serious business. It may not seem that way some days, but it is. Too bad the online journalists, with their big parties and their fancy offices, never got it. In the real world of journalism, people report from their homes, from foxholes, from hotels without water. No one needs $60 million in leases to be a good reporter.

In theory, there is no reason that a publication can't cover IT, make money and still function. The only reason that they didn't (Red Herring is about to chop half their staff) is that they forgot what business they were in.

As Online Journalism Review columnist Ken Layne says: journalists are fucking idiots. I would add, especially when it comes to money. Journalists are not good with money, don't much like it. Send them a paycheck and they'll kill for you. Journalists are most happy when they are kicking up dirt. And that is how it should be.

The hacks and weasels who worked for these sites filled their magazines and web sites with completely unaggressive, pathetic coverage of some of the biggest criminals of the last decade. They should hang their heads in shame. The reality is that everyone had their heads up their asses because they thought they were going to be rich. Call it the Almost Famous syndrome. They thought they were part of the news. Not even on his worst days did Dan Rather think he worked FOR the White House. He knew Nixon didn't sign his checks. Read More …

I liked this observation on the issues of increased surveillance technology (in private business and public areas):

Enhanced surveillance technology is almost never accompanied by enhanced accoutablility for the operators of that technology. (Be it governments, corporations or spies.) These systems are being deployed with no concern for the fact that they upset balances of interest that have been carefully formed over centuries.

I love this analogy. From Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto-Gram:

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Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either.

I am a scientist, and I explain the realities of the science. I apologize if you don't like the truth, but the truth doesn't change because people wish it would be something else. I don't know how authors and artists will make money in a world of easy copyability. I'm an author myself, personally concerned about protecting my own copyright, but I still don't know. I can tell you what will and won't work, technically. You can argue about whether my technical analysis is correct, but it just doesn't make sense to bring social arguments into the technical discussion.

If I had to guess, I believe companies will find a way to make money despite the prevalence of digital copying. Television stations figured out how to make money despite having to broadcast their programming to everyone. There are lots of financial models that don't require selling individual units to make money: advertising, patronage, pay-for-performance, pay-for-timeliness, pay-for-interaction, public funding. I started Crypto-Gram when I was a consultant; I gave the newsletter away and charged for my time. The newsletter was free advertising. The Grateful Dead gave away concert recordings but charged for live performances. Stephen King kept writing chapters of his electronic book as long as a sufficient percentage of his readers paid him to.

I don't know what model will become the prevalent one in the digital world. But I do know that technical methods to prevent digital copying are doomed to fail. (This is not to say that social methods, or legal methods, won't work.) Those companies that have business models that accept this reality are more likely to succeed than those that have business models that reject it. Complain all you like, but reality is reality.

My original analysis:
http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0105.html#3

I liked this post on a slashdot thread about Dimitry Skylarov's case:

It seems to me that in this whole debate, we need to make clear the difference between COPYright and ACCESSright. That's the real rub about the DMCA, it legally transforms copyright into accessright, and gives the copyright holder new controls not previously granted.

It is supposedly about preventing unauthorized copying. But in reality does little to prevent it and puts the publishing industries in the driver's seat in a new way.

The REAL fear here is if we get to the point where all 'media player devices' (not necessarily related to Microsoft media player) play only DMCA-encumbered media – where you can't even play non-access-controlled media if you wanted to. Then free speech and discourse necessary for democracy are in deep trouble

As seen on I, Cringley:

Here's another guy with a fix I couldn't find fault with. "My TCP skills are somewhat rusty, but isn't the biggest problem with raw sockets that people can masquerade as some other IP address, and become untraceable? Wouldn't it much simpler to program the routers not to accept packets generated from an IP address out of range? For instance, (the place where I work) uses an address range starting with 35.8.x — I'm pretty sure in the last year we have added a filter so that we don't send any traffic from some other range. It seems like we could legislate that every ISP has to be a good citizen and only send out packets from its own IP addresses for a quick fix to the problem."

Now why didn't I think of that?

This article from the 30 July 2001 NY Times:

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Jail Time in the Digital Age
By Lawrence LessigDmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who, until recently, lived and worked in Moscow. He wrote a program that was legal in Russia, and in most of the world, a program his employer, ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation bought a copy and complained to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the program violated American law and that, by the way, Mr. Sklyarov was about to give a lecture in Las Vegas describing the weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software. Two weeks ago, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in a Las Vegas jail.Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America. Mr. Sklyarov himself did not violate any law, and his employer did not violate anyone's copyright. What his program did was to enable the user of an Adobe eBook Reader to disable restrictions that the publisher of a particular electronic book formatted for Adobe's reader might have imposed. Adobe's eBook Reader, for example, has a read-aloud function. With it, the computer will read out loud an appropriately formatted eBook text. A publisher can disable that function for a particular eBook. Mr. Sklyarov's program would enable the purchaser of such a disabled eBook to overcome the restriction. A blind person, for example, could use ElcomSoft's program to listen to a book. The problem from Adobe's perspective, however, is that the same software could enable a pirate to copy an electronic book otherwise readable only with Adobe's reader technology — then sell that copy to others without the publisher's permission. That would be a copyright violation, and it is that possibility that led Congress to enact the statute that has now landed Mr. Sklyarov in jail — the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The D.M.C.A. outlaws technologies designed to circumvent other technologies that protect copyrighted material. It is law protecting software code protecting copyright. The trouble, however, is that technologies that protect copyrighted material are never as subtle as the law of copyright. Copyright law permits fair use of copyrighted material; technologies that protect copyrighted material need not. Copyright law protects for a limited time; technologies have no such limit.

Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive.

Using software code to enforce law is controversial enough. Making it a crime to crack that technology, whether or not the use of that ability would be a copyright violation, is to delegate lawmaking to code writers. Yet that is precisely what the D.M.C.A. does. The relevant protection for copyrighted material becomes as the technology says, not as copyright law requires.

Read More …

From the 23 July 2001 issue of the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing":

In 1995, according to the June Gilder Technology Report , all the computers in all the world contained a total of 200 terabytes of storage. This month — just six years later, the advent of commodity ($300) 100-gigabyte drives means that just 2,000 PCs could contain the world's storage of 1995. (There are about ten exabytes of storage overall all at this point in time — "half-a-millionfold growth in less than a decade." IDC estimates that the data stored by companies is growing at 80% per year.)

Looking forward, considering IBM's projections for 0.4-terabyte "Pixie Dust" drives in 2003, it will then take a mere 500 PCs to match all the storage, in all the world, of just eight years before. And we can expect that trend to continue.

Below is a "Talkback" response to a 13 June 2001 commentary by Patrick Houston of Anchordesk regarding the tensions between copyright owners and librarians.

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Name: Stephen Wheeler
Email: wheeler_stephen@hotmail.com
Location: Basking Ridge NJ
Occupation: ConsultantPatrick,

Isn't it time to recognise that copyright is broken? Copyright is a social tool and, as you mentioned, is promoted as the best way to ensure that those who create, or apply original thought, can be rewarded.

Take a step back. Is that really true? Is copyright the best way to reward (and therefore encourage) people who attempt to make new contributions to society?

I read your personal take – the archetypal 'struggling artist/writer' is commonly used by everyone who gains from copyrights. Are all their motives as pure as yours?

For an excellent history of copyright link to: http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html

As you will see, copyright is only three hundred years old – and the nature of copyright has changed dramatically in that time. A key moment in the history of copyright is this extract from 1909: In addressing new categories of materials available for copyright the Congress addressed the difficulty of balancing the public interest with proprietor's rights.

Read More …