Photos & Curiosities

Sweden's Film Industry is Wiped out?

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:35:00 -0500

Today, former Senator and current head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Chris Dodd spoke at the Center for America Progress about creativity and copyright. While there are a number of points I could push back against in his talk one remark in particular stands out. Shortly after beginning of his conversation with Alyssa Rosenberg, Dodd claims “The entire film industry of Spain, Egypt and Sweden are gone.” At least with respect to Sweden, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Sweden actually produces a number of high quality films. Released in 2008, the vampire flim Let The Right One In received critical acclaim here in the U.S. Additionally, all three best-selling books of the Millennium Trilogy are Swedish films and 2009’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was quite successful. The film made a modest $10 million in the U.S. and a respectable $104 million worldwide.

Considering the budget for the U.S. remake of the film is $100 million - as much as the original film has earned to date - perhaps Dodd meant that the film does not count until Hollywood gets a chance to remake it. Ironically, the U.S. remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was shot in Sweden.

Chris Dodd was correct to say that film is an international industry, but he was wrong to say that the Swedish film industry has disappeared and misleading to imply that all Hollywood jobs are American jobs. At least for this Hollywood production, Sweden has a lot to gain.

The Internet's Intolerable Acts

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:34:45 -0500

Sascha Meinrath and I have a new article Slate on how the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act amount to collective punishment against online communities.

More than 300 years later, the U.S. Congress is considering bills that would lead to collective reprisals against online communities. The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are supposed to address copyright infringement and counterfeiting. In reality, they are so technically impractical that they do little to address these problems. They would, however, undermine participatory democracy and human rights, which is why these bills have garnered near-universal condemnation from both human rights groups and technologists.

The interconnected nature of the Internet fostered the growth of online communities such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. These sites host our humdrum daily interactions and serve as a public soapbox for our political voice. Both the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA would create a national firewall by censoring the domain names of websites accused of hosting infringing copyrighted materials. This legislation would enable law enforcement to take down the entire tumblr.com domain due to something posted on a single blog. Yes, an entire, largely innocent online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority.

Continue reading at Slate

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:13:00 -0400

“ “may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented”-B. Obamadigiphile October 5, 2011“ “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change-agent.” Steve Jobs, 2006, Stanford Commencement. #stevejobsmerelvanbeeren October 5, 2011“ Flags at Apple HQ at half mast from @awesome http://t.co/PGZPsphjjameslosey October 5, 2011“ Steve Jobs was a genius; the world is less for his passing. Sent thanks to an iPhone.zittrain October 5, 2011“ Steve Jobs has died. Quiet groups of people have started gathering around his house, as I drove by I saw them—and the most amazing rainbowTeklaPerry October 5, 2011“ “He completely changed how we interact with technology”-@Wired http://t.co/00vCmWsn Lovely video tribute. #RIPSteveJobsdigiphile October 5, 2011“ “Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed intuitive products over the sheer power of tech itself”-@WSJ http://t.co/1ZM97zdedigiphile October 5, 2011“ Part of his legacy: interactive gallery of some of Steve Jobs’ patents http://nyti.ms/pPuOCajameslosey October 5, 2011“ “Steve Jobs saw the future & brought it to life long before most people could even see the horizon”-@MikeBloomberg http://t.co/zz5Anj9sdigiphile October 5, 2011“ Apple has posted a tribute to it’s late co-founder: http://t.co/gYobDbdAjameslosey October 5, 2011“ For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely. http://b-gat.es/qHXDsUBillGates October 5, 2011“ “here is a guy that created tools that everyone in the world just loved”-@SteveWoz on @CNN, now. #RIPSteveJobsdigiphile October 5, 2011“ “the early spark was that you take the technology of today and turn it into tomorrow’s technology”-@SteveWoz #RIPSteveJobsdigiphile October 5, 2011“ May the uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs live on, inspiring others, making them reach further, do better.timoreilly October 5, 2011“ http://wired.com is black. http://google.com is linking to http://apple.com. The Web feels united in its grief tonight.digiphile October 5, 2011

A few thoughts on the new Kindles

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:30:00 -0400

Today Amazon announced three new products: a $199 tablet, a $99 touch screen e-reader, and a $79 e-reader. While I rarely comment on product releases I think Amazon’s trio of new Kindle’s brings up a few themes to watch:

Explosion of E-book Sales, and Amazon control: For the first time this year e-book sales overtook hardback sales. However, for e-books really to become dominant I think the price of e-readers being over $99 has largely been prohibitive.Amazon is able to leverage their online store to offer partially ad-supported e-readers for Amazon has two readers priced at $99 and $79. (Without “special offers” the prices jump $40 and $30 respectively). I think this year we are going to see tremendous growth in E-book sales, with Amazon’s store and terms of use becoming the leading example. Even furniture manufacturers have taken note, with Ikea redesigning their top selling bookshelf to account for less books. However, we will also see Amazon in a position to use their market power to define terms of service of e-book use and leverage against with publishers.
Growth of Interactive magazines: After the iPad was released some publishers experimented with presenting print media in a new way, with Wired offering a spiffy design on their iPad app and an app for Alice in Wonderland garnering rave reviews. By offering a flash ready table for $199 Amazon is offering a more affordable platform for interactive “print” media. Knight Ridder was predicting the coming of the tablet newspaper in 1994 but I think the Kindle Fire has a low enough price point to make this more appealing.
Fork of Android market offerings: The Kindle Fire is Android 2.1 based, but those keeping track will not that this is considerably behind the latest 3.2 (with a new 3.3 coming this fall). Amazon has chosen to use an older operating system that can run on cheaper hardware and build their own skin. I think this will start a trend of tablet manufacturers trying to compete on their “OS,” that while based on Android, will have different features and quite possibly run different apps and subscriptions.
Privacy Concerns: part of the Kindle Fire’s ability to run on a slower processor is the dependence on the cloud for processing power. Amazon Silk, the OS, will coordinate with servers to process HTML 5, Java, and the like. However, part of this depends on remember, and predicting, a user’s browsing habits to cache the latest websites users visit. Privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani and Law Professor Jonathan I. Ezor have both noted that the terms of service for Amazon Silk state: “Amazon Silk also temporarily logs web addresses

Vermontreal 2011

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 10:00:00 -0400

I’m off for a 500 mile bike trip this Saturday around the state of Vermont and Montreal click through for our route and follow updates at Vermontreal.

In Defense of the Internet Craftsman

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:00:00 -0400

A new article I wrote with Sascha Meinrath is up on Slate discussing the importance of user control of Internet enabled technologies”

To save the Internet as a platform for innovation, we need to see concerted intervention to protect the rights of users to create. Most importantly, we must fight for the Internet craftsman—the individual who is free to develop networks, services, and applications and who shapes networking technologies better to meet her own needs and those of her community.

But in all this praise of the Internet, we can’t forget one thing: The Internet is a democratizing technology not because users have access to services like Twitter and Facebook but because it supported the development of these tools in the first place. Ignoring this distinction has led to the United States’ unfortunate decision to craft public policies that focus primarily on expanding Internet “access” with too little attention paid to the fact that not all access is created equal (PDF). By focusing on access, disregarding the mounting threats to the openness of the Internet, our politicians and regulators are ignoring a growing divide between users with control over digital technologies and those without.

Digital Feudalism published

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:07:00 -0400

Digital Feudalism: Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide was recently published in the latest issue of CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Policy. As Sascha Meinrath, Victor Pickard and I write in Digital Feudalism:

As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, we find ourselves at a rare historical moment—a time of great opportunity fraught with substantial pitfalls. Numerous potential trajectories of the Internet may unfold before us. While the decentralized and participatory platforms of the Internet have birthed a revived movement for democratized media production, these phenomena depend on the common resource of the Internet…But even as social networking and media production have empowered users, less visible structural changes threaten to foreclose many of the Internet’s democratic possibilities…If these trends continue, the Internet will devolve into a feudalized space—one that limits democratic freedoms while enriching an oligopoly of powerful gatekeepers.

Discussing the concept of feudalization, the structural transformations through which public space becomes controlled by private interests, the paper argues for a new police provisions required to preserve the democratic potential of the Internet.

Click to continue reading.

Attending the Bicycle Film Festival in DC this weekend reminds...

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Attending the Bicycle Film Festival in DC this weekend reminds me of the bike video Erica and I made on our trip to Helsinki last summer, aptly titled Helsinki by Bike. The vide was picked up on a number of blogs including the much revered Copenhagenize, Visit Finland, Sustainable Whitney in the UK, and the Finnish blog Coming Thru with a post titled Girl Meets Boy on a Bike in Helsinki. Green Bikes, where we rented our Jopos from, also gave us a shout out.

Bicycle Film Festival 2011, Washington DC.

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

Bicycle Film Festival 2011, Washington DC.

A Growing Digital Divide

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:47:00 -0400

A new article by Sascha Meinrath, Ben Lennett and myself in IEEE Internet Computing discusses a new framework for discussing technology and the digital divide. While there is a growing consensus that communications is a fundamental right, achieving digital equality in the broadband age has become considerably more complex than just universal access. The article offers a more nuanced perspective on the widening digital divide that’s centered on a user’s utility of a broadband connection and outlines networking technologies that place control in users’ hand by embracing craftsmanship and participant control over networking technologies.

A Growing Digital Divide: Internet Freedom and the Negative Impact of Command-and-Control Networking.

I joined some of my colleagues on Al Jazeera this week to...

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 11:27:00 -0400

I joined some of my colleagues on Al Jazeera this week to discuss a project that was highlighted in last Sunday’s New York Times. A new type of tool for democratic organizing, the project will develop software to create device-as-infrastructure networks that uses off the shelf computers, routers, and cell phones.

Nighttime feeding: The latest from Sherwood Forest

Wed, 04 May 2011 16:56:00 -0400

Nighttime feeding:

The latest from Sherwood Forest

Joy of spring: A baby robin is looking for food on at the start...

Tue, 03 May 2011 03:12:00 -0400

Joy of spring:

A baby robin is looking for food on at the start of May.

Baby robin on the first day of May

Sun, 01 May 2011 12:28:00 -0400

Baby robin on the first day of May

Yesterday my attempt to exit the Metro hit a wall

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:19:30 -0400

Yesterday my attempt to exit the Metro hit a wall

Cherry Blossoms: Absolutely at their peak

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 05:02:00 -0400

Cherry Blossoms:

Absolutely at their peak

This week we hosted Vint Cerf for an event demoing visual tools...

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:54:00 -0400

This week we hosted Vint Cerf for an event demoing visual tools for data collected by Measurement Lab. Over the last two years, M-Lab has collected over 300 terabytes of data and the tools are pretty fun to explore. This chart ranks worldwide broadband speeds. Because speed is affected by the number of tests and distance to test servers, this data is available as well.

Wireless versus Wireline Broadband and the Digital Divide

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:59:00 -0500

With all the talk of wireless broadband and the digital divide I became curious what the price difference was between wireless and wireline broadband access. After all my Computer may have cost $1000 when I bought it three years ago, but my phone, with the mandatory service I barely use like Voice, ran nearly $3000 over two years. Granted a phone with a data plan is cheaper, but my next computer will likely run $400.

Additionally, the functionality between the two is much different. Can you imagine trying to do your taxes or type up a resume on a handset keypad? And while I can share my home broadband connection with a housemate or a visiting friend this feature is restricted or more expensive on a wireless plan.

For more and a run-down of the prices of wireless versus wireline see my piece over on the Open Technology Initiative’s blog.

Watching Gnomeo & Juliet in 3D

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:23:00 -0500

Watching Gnomeo & Juliet in 3D

The Wireless Generation Gap

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:48:00 -0500

If you’ve followed broadband discussions in Washington, DC, then you’ve heard that wireless is the future of communications. The National Broadband Plan offers wireless as the competitive solution to the broadband duopoly dilemma, and in the recently released White House Wireless Innovation and Infrastructure Initiative, President Obama reiterated his State of the Union commitment to helping “extend next-generation wireless services to at least 98% of Americans.”

If you watch TV, you might think this is a good thing. The whole country is moving to 4G—next generation wireless—and according to some carriers, this is our chance to beat the world in broadband. For Obama, it’s a chance to Win the Future.

It will certainly help us win a future—but if this, as Obama said, is our “Sputnik moment,” we are not reaching for the moon.

Keep reading at Ars Technica.