This article by Jon Udell is a really scary look at the future of audio processing.
Cheap storage makes it feasible to save voice recordings of many of our meetings, teleconferences, interviews, and other conversations. In some environments -- call centers and certain sectors of finance and government -- that already happens. But audio surveillance isn't yet routine, and the thorny legal, social, and cultural issues it raises haven't yet been widely debated. That's because, until now, there was no practical way to mine voice data.
As with other forms of practical obscurity, this artificial barrier was bound to topple, and now it has. Fast-Talk Communications' revolutionary phonetic indexing and search technology brings the magic of full-text search to the formerly opaque realms of audio recordings and video soundtracks. If you consider the way in which Google has already become everyone's indispensable "outboard brain," and extrapolate that to all the voice data that exists -- and to the vast quantities that soon will exist -- it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fast-Talk is one of the most disruptive technologies in the pipeline.
If you haven't read it yet, go read the Wired article: Google vs. Evil.
The Creative Commons has launched their first project: The Licensing Project. Here's my license:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Tim O'Reilly wrote a great article titled Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution.
It's nice to know your President watches good Sci-Fi. But it's not good when he gets his ideas for running the country from the bad guys.
Dave posted: "A promising new anonymous weblog. Check out the tagline. Interesting hexadecimal name."
Anonymous? Pffft, took me about 5 minutes of googling to find that the author is one <name removed at the request of the guilty> who also runs <other website removed>. Come on Dave, just cause you don't know who he is doesn't mean he's anonymous.
When famed hacker Kevin Mitnick wrote his book on computer security, The Art of Deception (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), the first chapter was autobiographical in nature. It was included in the advance galleys that were sent to reviewers, but when the book itself came out, that chapter was not included.
And, here it is.
"George Ziemann, an independent musician, made an album with his band and like many small operators, he then produced copies of the the album on CD-R and attempted to sell them on the Web. He listed copies on his own Web page, on MP3.COM, on garageband.com, and on eBay. All was going well... until eBay abruptly began to de-list the auctions.
Ziemann and his band were the authors, engineers, producers, and publishers of the album, and could prove that they owned the copyright and all other rights to it. Yet, eBay's "droids" unilaterally removed all of his auctions merely because the item descriptions stated that the recordings were on CD-R media. (This disclosure is important, because some players will not play CD-Rs.) At the same time -- ironically -- the system left many auctions involving illegitimate copies of copyrighted works undisturbed. Despite his repeated attempts to contact eBay and inform them that his products were legal, Ziemann was unable to prevent them from removing his album each time he listed it for sale.
Ziemann speculates, in his detailed account of the incident, that the RIAA has put pressure upon eBay to block sales of all CD-Rs -- not only to exclude illegal copies but to prevent independent musicians from self-publishing. But regardless of whether this is true or not, it's clear that his travails while attempting to publish legitimate products are a case of security gone awry." [ExtremeTech]
Natural Born Hackers has an article titled Microsoft Wants To Own The Internet. Its a bit old (July 15th) but its still a good introduction to TCPA / Palladium and DRM and how evil they really are.