112 West

I am not a gamer.  I enjoy videogames, but I am far from being a hardcore gamer.  But I do understand opening night numbers.

Activision Blizzard said that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has sold $550 million worth in five days.

That is a little over half a billion worldwide.  That is a larger take than the first five days of ANY movie.  If this can be verified, this should be huge news.  But overall, it has been met with a collective yawn in this news cycle, where the President’s bow to the Emperor of Japan seems to be generating more heat.  While this may not represent anything other than something a lot of people have been waiting for in a year where there have been no really huge titles to go against, it is still news. 

Still, that success hasn’t come without some controversy. Several British politicians have spoken out against Modern Warfare 2, and in Russia, Activision is releasing a censored version of the game. The Russian edition leaves out a scene called “No Russian,” which allowed the user the opportunity to shoot at – or otherwise injury – innocent civilians in a Moscow airport.

But no matter. Reports are overwhelmingly positive on game play, from what I have seen on the boards.  Heck, I might even give it a shot.

Now Playing: Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms - Brothers in Arms

“I Know” is a favorite Fiona Apple song of mine.  Elvis Costello’s interpretation remains faithful but adds another layer to it.  Enjoy.

There is an interesting article in Wired online concerning current copyright laws and the deadline that the music industry is facing.  Deadline?  Yes, it seems back in the mid 70’s, congress passed the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.  In it, it states that if an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978 (Section 304), they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. If the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978 (Section 203), they can terminate that grant after 35 years. Therefore, the take-back starts, technically, in 2013.

That is, as they say, a lot of music.  It is interesting to see how a law like the copyright act happened back in 1976, because it would never happen today.  So step into the time machine, Sherman and let’s go back…

You see, back in 1976, Rock was bloated, Disco was jaded and Punk was just getting off the ground.  Nobody, besides the Rolling Stones and maybe David Bowie  and Elton John were making huge amounts of money, as the recording business was still in what I call a cowboy phase.  Besides, one can argue that back in 1976, the idea of thirty five years in the future was probably thought of as a realistic period of time for copyright, as looking backward from 1976, grandparents and Bette Midler were the only people listening to music made in the early forties.  Apparently, the record industry also thought that music was a throw away media, a mindset from the disposable 60’s.  I mean, who would have thought that KISS would still be huge today? 

As they say, times change.  You see people at a KISS concert with their children and grandchildren.  The Eagles are still popular.  There has been at least two disco revivals and expect another one in about five years.  The Ramones are venerated and still sell albums, even though the band is long gone.  This is not the thirty five years in the future that people in 1976 thought it would be. 

So what are the record companies to do?  You know they aren’t rolling over on this one.  Too much is at stake.  From the Wired article:

The record labels tried to defuse this bomb in 1999 by sneaking an amendment to the Copyright Act through the House of Representatives that would add sound recordings to the Act’s list of copyrights that were considered “works for hire,” which would make them exceptions to the grant termination clause. According to one source close to the situation, the labels told Congress that the Copyright Act already covered sound recordings as exceptions because albums of music are “compilations” — but that “just to be absolutely clear, [the labels] wanted to put it in so nobody can debate it.”

After musicians, including Carly Simon, reacted negatively, the amendment was withdrawn amid public outcry leaving record labels with precisely two options for fending off notices of termination, neither of which looks promising. The first is to continue to claim that albums are compilations, which doesn’t pass the common-sense test (compilations include songs from different artists), and probably won’t pass legal muster either…

…The second option is to re-record sound recordings in order to create new sound recording copyrights, which would reset the countdown clock at 35 years for copyright grant termination.

For example, when Omega Record Group remastered a 1991 Christmas recording, the basis of its new copyright claim was “New Matter: sound recording remixed and remastered to fully utilize the sonic potential of the compact disc medium.”  What it boils down to is that the record company can look at the artist and say you can have the originals.  The updates are ours.

Sneaky. Suddenly the reasoning behind the Beatles’ hesitancy in releasing their catalog makes sense.  It is the grail of music catalogs and Paul and Yoko want to milk it for everything it is worth. To which I say-good for them.  It is their music, not the record company’s. 

So if the world doesn’t end in 2012, expect there to be major earthquakes in the RIAA in starting in 2013.  The Eagles plan to file grant termination notices by the end of the year. 

Now Playing: David Bowie - Station to Station - Golden Years

Anonymity used to be a somewhat easy thing.  But the internet made that much harder for people to do.  You can trace things like IP addresses, payments, things like that.  So it is surprising that the literary world had not only an anonymous writer but blogger as well by the name of Belle de Jour.  What was even more surprising was that Belle de Jour was a call girl who wrote about her experiences.  The icing on the cake was that Belle stayed anonymous for six years, during which time the blog became a series of best-selling books as well as an internationally successful TV series.  Even her agent didn’t know her real name until this past week. 

And then, the world was let known via the Sunday Times that Belle was actually Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of her PhD thesis and decided to become an escort to make ends meet.  From there the blog was born.  Dr Magnanti was all ready an established scientific blogger.  In fact, the style and substance of the writing was one of the things that fueled the question “Who is Belle de Jour?” and kept people guessing. 

Did the good Doctor got tired of being anonymous and decided to give it all up?  Paul Carr of TechCrunch says, maybe not:

Let’s give Belle and the Sunday Times the benefit of the doubt and assume that Magnanti really did approach them, and not the other way around. There’s no reason to doubt Magnanti’s version of events, but it’s worth remembering that the Sunday Times has a particularly grubby history when it comes to anonymous bloggers…

…Zoe Margolis opened the door of her London home at an ungodly hour of the morning to accept a flower delivery from an anonymous admirer. What she didn’t know was that the delivery man had actually been sent by the Sunday Times who had positioned a photographer across the road ready to snap her when she came to the door. Two days later she learned the horrible truth: an email arrived from the paper’s ‘acting news editor’; a scumbag called Nicholas Hellen. In the email, Hellen announced that the paper was preparing to out Zoe as the author of the anonymous sex blog ‘Girl With A One Track Mind‘, which – like Belle de Jour’s blog – had just been turned into a book.

Hellen proposed a deal: either Zoe could agree to give her story to the Times, illustrated with a photoshoot in “glamourous evening wear” taken by their resident fashion photographer – or the paper would run its own hit-job expose, written by fellow-scum-bag Anna Mikhailova and complete with the (in Hellen’s words) “not particularly flattering” paparazzi shot.

Zoe told the Times to go fuck themselves, and the rest is a painful outing, a hideously uncomfortable conversation with her parents and a week of press-camped-out-on-her-doorstep hell (stories she tells in a follow-up book to be published in March 2010)

How might a newspaper like the Times have found out something that had been kept under wraps for six years?  There is talk in the interview about an ex-boyfriend with a big mouth.  Did he contact the Times?  There is that.  Supposedly other friends new about the double life that Dr Magnanti lived.  There is also the rest of Carr’s column that goes on by saying that basically Belle was an ego-maniac who outed herself in order to take credit for everything that she had done.  But I think the answer is far more complex than that.  You see, secrets are a pain in the ass.  You have to create a separate reality around the secret in order to explain all the inconsistencies of life.  After a while, the act of keeping two separate realities in check becomes a rather tedious job.  Throw in an ex with a big mouth, the fact that it was becoming apparent that the adventures of Belle was beginning to finally play out, and the idea of saying “sod it, that was fun, but its time to move on” looks pretty good. 

So here’s to anonymity.  It can be done, but the fact is you’re the only one who can know about it.

Now Playing: Robert Palmer - Secrets - Under Suspicion

That is, according to Rupert Murdoch.  You see, a few days ago, good ‘ole Rooper-boy told the Australian press (well, SkyNews Australia) that he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

Of course this caused a great disturbance in the blogosphere, who really didn’t seem to want to remember that the man who controls the less-than-accurate-media empire has said this before.  The Associated Press has said it (and has yet to pull the trigger).  Google was sanguine about the matter, saying in essence “Go for it”. 

So how does Rupert Murdoch plan to quit teh Google?   Making a deal with Bing?  Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land thinks otherwise:

The reality is that the Wall Street Journal execs seem to be leading a charge against Google without really knowing where they are going or what they want. They already get lots of traffic plus get to have a paywall, thanks to First Click Free at Google. And yet, Murdoch doesn’t seem to know exactly how that operates or how Google indexes his paper. His managing editor Robert Thomson gets confused about font sizes and how Google News works. I get the impression both of them are good at talking but don’t know the actual realities of their traffic situation in relation to Google. Or they know it well but are happy to ignore it.

Oh, Snap. You see, right now, news has a relationship with Google much like Billie Holiday did with heroin.  While it is possible to quit, it won’t be easy.  It will be a long, painful process, that may not even need to happen.  Especially when it is estimated that Google brings about twenty-five percent of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal traffic.  That kind of pain stockholders may want to think twice about before going cold turkey.

But there is an ugly truth out there that Murdoch may have sensed out that many do not see.  Twitter.  Twitter is surpassing Google as a destination for finding information on breaking and recent news of all types.  Twitter and Facebook are platforms that allow the news sources to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not.  In other words, if I trust a newspaper, TV or any  brand, I can follow it on twitter and expect the news to come to me.  The concept  of “If the news is important, it will find me” works better by the day.  If it matters to me, chances are very good its in one of the twitter feeds I follow on real time feed. Users will continue to source news through Google.  Now don’t get me wrong, Google ain’t going away any time soon.  But for Real-Time news, Google is not in the equation. 

But all of this ignores a very simple question that no one is really wanting to ask-Do you really want to pay for opinutainment Fox News?

Now Playing: Missing Persons - Spring Session M - Words

Cory Doctrow has done it again.  He went and leaked the details of the internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns.  It is not good.  It is very bad indeed.

Some of the more insane details include the following:

*That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

Makes me want to become a renegade HVAC repairman.

Now Playing: Metallica - Black Album - Wherever I May Roam

Oh my.  Apparently AT&T finally got tired of Verizon's claims that AT&T’s 3G coverage is, well, spotty.  AT&T took matters to federal court claiming Verizon Wireless' latest TV ads are misleading, and falsely indicate that AT&T has gaps in wireless coverage.  AT&T is seeking an emergency injunction to stop the ads. It also seeks unspecified damages, accusing Verizon of false advertising, and claims the ads harm AT&T's ability to compete. AT&T also said Verizon's ads are causing AT&T to lose "incalculable market share" and goodwill with customers.

Of course the questions concern the maps in the Verizon ads.  If you have seen the ads, Verizon’s map  of the US is almost all Verizon red.  The AT&T map, however, has a lot of white and very little AT&T Blue.  The ads concerns itself with 3G coverage only, which is quite different from regular phone and texting service.  After all, why buy an iPhone if you can’t use most of its features?  Unfortunately, some people have taken the white voids as meaning that AT&T has no coverage at all.  Then again, there appear to be a large supply of people in the US who think that Sarah Palin could run the country.   I’m guessing it’s the same bunch. 

But back to the maps in the commercials.  Gizmodo, being a site that prides itself on getting all things mobile right, compared the 3G maps for themselves.   And guess what?

The maps that Verizon chose do seem to represent the same thing—3G coverage only. Yes, AT&T lawyers, if I'm right about this, it means that had Verizon cheated, their map would have been even redder than the one in the ad. So what's say we spend more of that iPhone subscription money on fixing the network (near my house, please!) and less money on frivolous lawsuits.

Ouch.  Now, I loves me some technology and I know that AT&T’s problem has been a network that is as ancient as it is untrustworthy.  And as much as they would love to think otherwise, suing your competitors for the public’s stupidity is well, par for the course for Ernestine Tomlin’s employers.  As for improving their service?  I’m pretty sure there are some applications for that, but AT&T doesn’t want to seem to want to use them.  I guess they’re too expensive for the shareholders. 

Now Playing: The Main Ingredient - The Main Ingredient - The All-Time Greatest Hits - Everybody Plays the Fool

There is a storage facility being built in Utah.  Now, as data centers go this one is impressive.  Why?  Well, first of all, consider the source.  The NSA, otherwise known as Big Brother to some or the people who keep us safe to others is behind it all.  Second, the facility will house and analyze all forms of electronic communication that goes on in this country. 

If you think that’s a lot, you are correct.  The word we are thinking of here is a Yottabyte.  How big is that?  The people at Cruchgear puts it rather succinctly:

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB.

Now that figure, is of course just one estimate from the Pentagon.  The more realistic number at the moment is a few hundred petabytes.  But really, how long ago did the term terabyte seem huge?  A few hundred petabytes in about ten years will seem rather small in comparison.  So credit the Pentagon for thinking a few years down the road. 

The other point to this is just how will all this information be stored.  Face it, the amount of power to keep hundred of thousands of disks spinning would keep Hoover Dam busy.  So storage media is of prime importance, as well as finding all that power.  But this is the government, and they are sinking a couple of billion dollars to start this puppy up.  Small change for sure, but they are still obstacle that will need to be solved before we all start adjusting out tin-foil hats. 

Now Playing: King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King - 21st Century Schizoid Man

Sometimes, that stupid little voice inside me says “Are you sure its safe?  Really sure?”  Call me paranoid, a modern day Luddite, whatever.  The voice will not be silenced.

And then I read things like this, from a letter abstract from the site nature nanotechnology:

Carbon nanotubes are shaped like fibres and can stimulate inflammation at the surface of the peritoneum when injected into the abdominal cavity of mice2, raising concerns that inhaled nanotubes may cause pleural fibrosis and/or mesothelioma.

The study showed the immune response and fibrosis disappeared within three months of exposure. However, this study used only a single exposure to the nanotubes.

Ruh-Roh.  In other words, carbon nanotubes may act like asbestos fibers.  More study is of course needed, but suddenly the voice jumps up and screams “I told You!  Anything that small can be mistaken by the body for something else!”  It is completely unknown at this point whether inhaled carbon nanotubes will prove to be carcinogenic in the lungs or in the pleural lining.  But, I’ll wait.  And watch. 

Now Playing: Joe Jackson - Night and Day – Cancer

Oh, it is On.  If you haven’t been keeping up with the headlines, when last we left the bizarre love triangle between ATT, Google and Apple, Apple had basically thrown Google’s clothes out on the street at ATT’s prompting.  Then the FCC decided that maybe some investigation into all this might help all this out.  Round one went to Google, who looked totally innocent, while AT&T looked like, well, what we’ve always expected them to look like; an archaic phone company that is credited with the invention of busy signals, dropped calls and poor customer service.  And completely out of their element. 

And that, as they say, is when the fight really started.

In September, Ma Bell asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Google Voice on the grounds that it was preventing consumers from calling certain numbers, which AT&T argues violates the principles of net neutrality.  Google, of course, didn’t agree with such a portrayal of Google Voice and argued that since it’s not a traditional phone service, it shouldn’t be treated as such. The company instead referred to Google Voice as an Internet application.

On October 9, the FCC decided, what the hell, and investigate Google Voice, especially after congressional members asked it to do so.  Google replied saying that it’s blocking Google Voice calls to rural areas because they’re directed to free conference call lines and sex hotlines engaged in the dubious practice of so-called traffic pumping

Today, in response, AT&T brought out Nuns.  That’s right, a convent of Benedictine Nuns who apparently can’t receive, or make, Google Voice calls, either. 

Oh snap!

But sideshow aside, the FCC is soon going to find themselves in uncharted territory.  They are opening a can of worms concerning traffic pumping and that will take them beyond Google Voice into the practices of other VoIP providers, such as Speakeasy and MagicJack.  So be it.  They need to.  But really though, it rings hollow for AT&T to get all preachy about Net Neutrality when dealing with Google, given the past few months.  As someone pointed out, the Internet is the Internet and the phone system is the phone system.  While the two work together at points, they are indeed different legal animals-at least for now.  And therefore, the idea of AT&T whining about Net Neutrality while talking about the phone system is nothing but a bait and switch, or worse yet, a naked power grab that has everything to do about controlling the debate over Net Neutrality.  Remember, Net Neutrality is something the telcos does not want to see happen.  Google does.  Control the debate-control future rules.  Discredit the main prophet of Net Neutrality in the process and there’s the bonus point. 

But still the point AT&T makes has some merit – it seems unfair for Google Voice to act as a layer on top of the telcos that shunts the expensive calls to the underlying telcos, and does the free ones themselves.  But like many things in this world, it may be legal, even though it may not be right.  It will prove interesting just what the ruling turns out to be.

Now Playing: Blondie - Parallel Lines - Hanging on the Telephone