Tag business

That's not how Western democracies work

Dealing with illegal file-sharing is a job for the police. It is their job to enforce the law. Now we have given private corporations the legal right to go after our civilians. That's not how Western democracies work.[...] In a study, 80% of people thought we shouldn't go after file-sharers. But ask them how they feel about taking money out of the pockets of musicians, authors or artists and that number falls by a significant amount. Ultimately we have to change peoples perception on file-sharing.
Indeed we do. But most importantly we have to change executives' in those media multinationals perception on culture, art, freedom of communication and privacy as well as protect our liberties from unbounded profit and greed. If file sharing did anything, besides rendering the status quo obsolete, it was to bring to the spotlight on how slanted and unfair the media industry is: favouring less than 1% of the artists globally, fixing prices to maximise profit, compromising on our very own cultural foundations through the systematic, condescending promotion of junk while at the same time making thousands of executives rich for no reason whatsoever. There's no doubt that stealing is bad, although I'm not so sure that not-for-profit sharing of digital copies is. What I am sure about is that what the industry is accustomed to doing --- and keeps trying to achieve, now through the institutions --- is worse.

Bye bye Last.fm

It's not that they are asking for money to keep themselves going. No, they are --- and have been for a time --- owned by CBS. It's not even that they put it like this on their blog ("promise that we’ll be hard at work improving the service for years to come."), but it's mostly that they are so keen to discriminate, they've been doing it for a while (see geographically-limited iPhone app, geographically-limited free radio service etc.) and now they will make their service unattainable for so many worldwide. Pandora was the better of the two services. Last.fm was the more 'decent' one (socially) and apparently the savviest one from a business point of view as it managed to keep the service available worldwide for longer. The change to Last.fm radio will probably mean the end of the service for many users outside of the three countries that will keep enjoying it for free. For me, I guess my subscription will not be renewed.

Το Τριπλό Παράδοξο

Στις αρχές του 2007 έγραφα για τις αστείες, τότε, διαφημίσεις της Forthnet που μιλούσαν για Triple Play όταν ούτε καν Double Play δεν ήταν διαθέσιμο, για τη τραγική κατάσταση της ευρυζωνικότητος στην Ελλάδα σε σχέση με προηγμένες — στον τομέα — χώρες και, εν ολίγοις, το γεγονός πως εταιρίες και κυβερνήσεις των οποίων η ρητορική […]

An ISP is not a court.

The saga continues, with the music industry attempting to subvert the law in Europe and turn ISPs into policy enforcers and courts of law all at once. With ever higher profits in 2008, and a pretty grim record of accusing and prosecuting the elderly, single mothers with no computers etc. in the States, it seems like the music industry would rather hand the dirty job over to ISPs. This is, besides illegal, pretty prone to error --- as history has shown. I'm really looking forward to the next settlement Eircom will reach, this time with wrongly-accused (and disconnected) individuals. Hopefully it'll be more than enough to compensate for their stupidity.

Τέλος Εποχής

Η ερμήνευση της — προσωρινής, έστω — αποχώρησης του Στήβ Τζόμπς από την θέση του διευθύνοντα συμβούλου της Apple ως ένα από τα σημαντικότερα γεγονότα της τελευταίας δεκαετίας στον χώρο της βιομηχανίας προσωπικών υπολογιστών σε καμία περίπτωση δε θα μπορούσε να χαρακτηρισθεί ως υπερβολική. Η Apple, μια εταιρία θρύλος που εδώ και κάποιες δεκαετίες ορίζει […]

Δικτυακή Ουδετερότητα στην Ευρώπη. Το Κράτος ως Ρυθμιστής.

Η δικτυακή ουδετερότητα είναι ένα ζήτημα που φέρνει κοντά πολύ κόσμο που κατανοεί την αξία της ελευθερίας του επιχειρείν, της έκφρασης και της επικοινωνίας στο διαδίκτυο, ανεξαρτήτως της ευρύτερης ιδεολογίας του και πολιτικών θέσεων. Θεωρητικά, η βέλτιστη προσέγγιση στο θέμα της ουδετερότητας — και με την οποία τείνω να συμφωνήσω — θέλει τη πολιτεία να […]

Talk about returning to Europe

1,000Mbits of transit over Gigabit Ethernet in Bucharest now costs no more than it does in London - and only a couple of dollars more than in San Francisco. That’s incredible, and impressive. Talk about returning to Europe.
[via AFoE] Impressive, indeed! Anyone knows what the price is in Athens?

Oh the Irony [2]

Time for a humorous break. Check this 1980s French Apple Computer Inc. television advertisement. It shows an old wealthy businessman showing his company's assets to his son (?) in their luxury automobile while explaining that all this will become his, but he should make the decisions alone because his workers should not think, but only execute as they cannot handle making decisions and should just stick to following orders. The ad ends with the narrator saying that "this is one way to run a company, but fortunately there are others", at which time the apple logo fades in. And this is why for so long so many people thought Apple was an elitist, out of touch company. For many years its products were mostly appealing (in terms of price and marketing strategy) to people exactly like the old man: elitist and wealthy. If the ad were from the late 1970s/early 1980s (before Jobs left), it'd probably be a snipe at IBM --- the 'evil' giant of the time that only had mainframes and micros and dismissed personal computers as toys. Or equally, those that didn't think personal computers could increase the productivity of their workers. In which case it'd make some sense, but still be be laughably ironic, for Jobs' own managerial style is probably more authoritative, selfish and hierarchical than any (based on what's been written about him in numerous books, articles etc.) and would probably make the old man look like an egalitarian-supporting socialist running a cooperative business and making as much as everyone else. But, according to Gruber, the ad came out after Jobs left. It makes little sense: the alternatives to the Mac in the mid to late 1980s, a time of so much competition and so many different architectures and offerings, were more affordable, generally equally productive (at least given the software that was out for a significant part of the tasks people performed at the time) and were definitely accompanied by less arrogant, more pragmatic marketing campaigns, while IBM was clearly far from the all-mighty player in the industry it was half a decade earlier. [via daringfireball.net]

Comcast. Greedy. Liars. [Updated]

After consistently denying it for months, Comcast just admitted they were throtlling a number of protocols since 2007. After FCC ordered them to abandon the practice in early August, they admitted to throttling traffic using a Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch 8210. The company stated they are going to change the way they manage their network by 2009. According to Comcast spokewoman Sena Fitzmaurice "The new technique does not manage congestion based on the protocol or application a consumer uses. This new technique will ensure that all customers get their fair share of bandwidth every hour of the day". In my view they are lying and greedy and if FCC was doing its job right they should have been fined considerably high for others not to imitate them. Their admission comes almost 45 days after the FCC ruling and proves how much regulation is required to keep greedy businesses in line. Regarding their upcoming 'network management' policy, I'm somewhat puzzled. In particular, I'm not quite sure how they'll ensure a fair share of bandwidth without selective throttling (or any other classification technique that would --- again --- violate the Net Neutrality rules), unless they radically change their offering to a quota-based range of offerings, place relatively low speed caps on everyone for sustained connections or increase their network bandwidth by an astronomical amount. We'll see. Update: ArsTechnica seems to have the details. Apparently the system is going to be use 'shallow packet inspection' and packet-counting triggers for throttling. It does seem ridiculous and completely unacceptable, given that many legitimate applications actually depend on high packet throughput to function properly (VoIP is a good example here). Of course, without first seeing how this works in practice it's hard to judge it, but either way either the FCC will stomp on them once again or the system is going to function without enough disruption to Comcast's (sad) subscribers.

Λίγο πριν τις Βρυξέλλες

Λίγο πριν την αναχώρηση για τις Βρυξέλλες, έκατσα και συγκέντρωσα σημειώσεις, bookmarks και σκέψεις σχετικά με τα θέματα προς συζήτηση. Μπορεί κανείς να συνοψίσει τα βασικά ζητήματα στο παρακάτω πίνακα: Στη κορυφή του πίνακα παραθέτω τις χαρακτηριστικές ‘εφαρμογές’, ή αν προτιμάτε δραστηριότητες που φέρονται να ‘απαιτούν’ επιπλέον νομοθετική ‘ρύθμιση’. Αφ’ενός το peer to peer, ή […]