regulation « Tama Leaver dot Net

28Jun/10

Digital Culture Links: June 28th 2010

Links through June 28th 2010 (catching up on the last week!):

Fairfax and content theft - mUmBRELLA - Mumbrella asks if Fairfax media is copying YouTube videos and placing them onlive via a Fairfax media player, then using them on Fairfax online properties: is this "piracy"? Aren't Fairfax ripping off YouTube creators who are relying on advertising (on their YouTube clips) to make a little money? I've no idea if Fairfax has some sort of license to do this (or if it might be legal under fair dealing - although using the whole clip can't be) but it's an important question given the rhetoric of piracy being a problem with individuals, rather than corporations, downloading "illegally".
Google’s mismanagement of the Android Market [Jon Lech Johansen's blog] - Jon Lech Johansen’s critique of the current Android marketplace. While it's preferable to the closed Apple App store, the Android Marketplace clearly needs a lot more work on its centralised architecture to sell and distribute apps effectively.
Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature [Android Developers Blog] - Android centrally nukes their first app from the marketplace and all phones using it; from the Android blog: "The remote application removal feature is one of many security controls Android possesses to help protect users from malicious applications. In case of an emergency, a dangerous application could be removed from active circulation in a rapid and scalable manner to prevent further exposure to users. While we hope to not have to use it, we know that we have the capability to take swift action on behalf of users’ safety when needed. This remote removal functionality — along with Android’s unique Application Sandbox and Permissions model, Over-The-Air update system, centralized Market, developer registrations, user-submitted ratings, and application flagging — provides a powerful security advantage to help protect Android users in our open environment."
Pakistan to monitor Google and Yahoo for 'blasphemy' [BBC News] - "Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, for content it deems offensive to Muslims. YouTube, Amazon, MSN, Hotmail and Bing will also come under scrutiny, while 17 less well-known sites will be blocked. Officials will monitor the sites and block links deemed inappropriate. In May, Pakistan banned access to Facebook after the social network hosted a "blasphemous" competition to draw the prophet Muhammad. The new action will see Pakistani authorities monitor content published on the seven sites, blocking individual pages if content is judged to be offensive. Telecoms official Khurram Mehran said links would be blocked without disturbing the main website."
ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups [Threat Level | Wired.com] - ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) tries to rally against alternative copyright licensing, even those which actually assist creators to license clearly! "ASCAP’s attack on EFF and Public Knowledge are farfetched. Those groups do not suggest music should be free, although they push for the liberalization of copyright law. But the attack on Creative Commons is more laughable than ASCAP’s stance against EFF and Public Knowledge. While lobby groups EFF and Public Knowledge advocate for liberal copyright laws, Creative Commons actually creates licenses to protect content creators. [...] The licenses allow the works in the public domain, with various rules regarding attribution, commercial use and remixing. The group’s creative director, Eric Steuer, said nobody forces anybody to adopt the Creative Commons credo. “I think it’s false to claim that Creative Commons works to undermine copyright,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s an opt-in system.”"
dev:wordpress [Zotero Documentation] - Plugins to make the COins data on blogs visible from WordPress (ie makes Zotero recognise WordPress blog metadata).
Sex domain gets official approval [BBC News] - .xxx is coming: "Official approval has been given for the creation of an internet domain dedicated to pornography. The board of net overseer Icann gave initial approval for the creation of the .xxx domain at its conference in Brussels. Icann's approval will kick off a fast-track process to get the porn-only domain set up. ICM Registry, which is backing the domain, said .xxx would make it easier to filter out inappropriate content. The decision ends a long campaign by ICM Registry to win approval. Stuart Lawley, chairman of ICM, welcomed the decision and said it was "great news for those that wish to consume, or avoid, adult content"."
Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review [danah boyd | apophenia] - "I’m pleased to announce a rough draft of Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review for public feedback. This Literature Review was produced for Harvard Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative, co-directed by John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and myself and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This Literature Review builds on the 2008 LitReview that Andrew Schrock and I crafted for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. This document is not finalized, but we want to make our draft available broadly so that scholars working in this area can inform us of anything that we might be missing. Risky Behaviors and Online Safety: A 2010 Literature Review."
Twitter has a bad day: FTC tells it off and the site's not running well [Technology | guardian.co.uk] - "Twitter's having a bad day. First it got told off by the US Federal Trade Commission for incidents in January and May last year when 33 accounts, including Barack Obama's, were hacked using the company's own internal support tools. And then it's having to scale back on its API in order to get the site in order, according to its status page. The FTC settlement is "the agency's first such case against a social networking site" over flawed data security. According to the FTC's complaint, between January and May 2009, hackers who gained administrative control of Twitter were able to view nonpublic user information, gain access to direct messages and protected tweets, and reset any user's password and send authorized tweets from any user account."
1 in 5 Android Apps Pose Potential Privacy Threat [REPORT] [Mashable] - Further fuel for Steve Jobs decision to police the Apple App store so tightly: "Mobile security company SMobile has looked into the potential privacy and security issues in more than 48,000 apps in the Android Market. The company’s findings are alarming for Android owners, since approximately 20% of Android apps request permission to access private or sensitive information.[...]. By contrast, the Android (Android) market is open, meaning that Google (Google) doesn’t minutely examine apps for approval (it did, however, ban certain apps from the Market) and Android apps don’t have to be acquired from the Market; users can obtain them from other sources, like a developer’s website. Google’s approach makes it easier on the developers, but it can also result in a security nightmare for consumers. According to the report, one out of every 20 apps can place a call to any number without approval from the user; 3% of apps can send an SMS to any number..."
HUGE: Twitter Lets You Automatically Follow Your Facebook Friends [UPDATED] [Mashable] - "Twitter has announced that it is launching major upgrades to its Facebook and LinkedIn (LinkedIn) applications, bringing added functionality and integration between Twitter and two of the world’s largest social networks. The new Twitter app for Facebook, which is now available here, not only allows you to syndicate your tweets to the world’s largest social network, but now has a feature that allow users to see which of their Facebook friends are also on Twitter and choose which ones they want to follow. The new feature could be huge: it brings existing Facebook connections into the Twitterverse, which is likely to spur new levels of engagement and growth."
Judge Sides With Google in Viacom Suit Over Videos [NYTimes.com] - "In a major victory for Google in its battle with media companies, a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement against YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google. The judge granted Google’s motion for summary judgment, saying that the company was shielded from Viacom’s copyright claims by “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law generally protects user-generated sites from liability for copyrighted material uploaded by users as long as the operator of the site takes down the material when notified by its rightful owner that it was uploaded without permission. The dispute is over videos owned by Viacom that others had posted to YouTube. Viacom, which sued Google in 2007 for copyright infringement, had argued that Google was not entitled to the copyright act’s protections because Google deliberately turned a blind eye and profited from to the rampant piracy on YouTube."
YouTube Video Editor [Google OS] - Useful for only the very basics, but still a useful on-the-fly tool: "YouTube has a new video editor that lets you create videos using excerpts from the videos you've already uploaded. You can also add a music file from the AudioSwap library, but YouTube mentions that it might display ads if you use some of the audio files."
Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King [Business Insider] - ""Content is King" -- no longer. Today, the world has changed. "Curation Is King." Ok, I hear all the content-makers sharpening their knives to take me on. I'm ready. First, why content is dead: Content used to be the high quality media that came out of the very pointed end of the funnel. Articles in the New York Times. Movies from Miramax. Thursday night comedy from NBC. Books published by Simon and Schuster. Creative folks wrote pitches, treatments, sample chapters, pilots, but only the best of the best got published. Then, the web came along and blew that up. Kaboom! Now content has gone from being scarce to being ubiquitous. [...] We've arrived in a world where everyone is a content creator. And quality content is determined by context. Finding, Sorting, Endorsing, Sharing - it's the beginning of a new chapter [...] The emergence of a new King -- a Curation King, reflects the rise of the new Aggregation Economy. It is an exciting time to be in content, and the best is yet to come."

Tagged as: america, android, apa, apps, appstore, ascap, BBC, censorship, coins, commerce, content, curation, cyberbullying, danahboyd, design, dns, editing, eff, fairdealing, fairfax, fairuse, filtering, freeculture, icann, internet, iphone, legal, marketplace, mobile, mp3, music, net303, plugin, referencing, regulation, safety, search, secuirty, security, usa, viacom, video, web207, wordpress, www, xxx, youth, zotero No Comments

26May/10

Digital Culture Links: May 26th 2010

Links for May 24th 2010 through May 26th 2010:

Facebook 'hindering the police' [WA Today] - The Australian Federal Police take on Facebook: "Facebook's woeful relationship with law enforcement bodies is hampering police investigations and putting lives at risk, the Australian Federal Police says. The AFP's assistant commissioner and head of high tech crime operations, Neil Gaughan, will fly to Washington DC today for a meeting convened by the US Department of Justice in which senior law enforcement officials from around the world will discuss their concerns with the social networking website. State and federal police have told the Herald's sister paper, the Age, the company has been unwilling to provide police with the intelligence they need for investigations. They want Facebook to appoint a dedicated law enforcement liaison in Australia who can, for example, match user accounts to physical internet addresses."
Facebook told to set up warning system after new sex scam [The Age] - Just what Facebook needs, its own viruses: "A major computer security firm urged Facebook to set up an early-warning system after hundreds of thousands of users were hit by a new wave of fake sex-video attacks. British-based virus fighter Sophos warned users of the world's biggest social networking site to be on guard against any posting entitled "distracting beach babes", which contains a movie thumbnail of a bikini-clad woman. In a press statement, Sophos said the malicious posts appear as if they are coming from Facebook users' friends, but it urged recipients not to click on the thumbnail. By clicking on it, users are taken to a rogue Facebook application informing them that they do not have the right player software installed, Sophos said. It tricks users into installing adware, a software package that automatically plays, displays or downloads advertisements to their computer, and the video link is spread further across the network."
Lady Gaga Says No Problem If People Download Her Music; The Money Is In Touring [Techdirt] - "... Lady Gaga admits she's fine with people downloading her music in unauthorized forms because she makes it up in touring revenue:

She explains she doesn't mind about people downloading her music for free, "because you know how much you can earn off touring, right? Big artists can make anywhere from $40 million [£28 million] for one cycle of two years' touring. Giant artists make upwards of $100 million. Make music -- then tour. It's just the way it is today."

Similarly, she knocks bands that don't really try to work hard to please the fans, and who just expect them to automatically buy each album:

"I hate big acts that just throw an album out against the wall, like 'BUY IT! F*** YOU!' It's mean to fans. You should go out and tour it to your fans in India, Japan, the UK. I don't believe in how the music industry is today. I believe in how it was in 1982."
The Twitter Platform [Twitter Blog] - Twitter makes clear, that they will control advertising on Twitter, and no one else will: " ... aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly." (Their logic, while motivated by finances as much as anything else, does actually make sense in terms of user experience.)
How The Australian fell in love with the iPad [mUmBRELLA] - Is The Australian an Apple customer or commentator? "While it’s fair to say that the world’s media has been pretty excited about Apple’s iPad, The Australian appears to be on the verge of spontaneously combusting over the device’s official arrival Down Under this Friday. Clearly the newspaper’s plans to launch its own paid-for iPad app are unrelated to that. Indeed, if it sells as many apps as it has written stories about the iPad, it will be well on the way to securing a digital future for itself. [...] I’d love to bring you every article The Australian’s carried about the iPad. But Google tells me there are 4,790 of them. So I’d better stop there. Did I mention that The Australian’s got an iPad app?"
Quitting Facebook is pointless; challenging them to do better is not [danah boyd | apophenia] - boyd's discussion points:
"1. I do not believe that people will (or should) leave Facebook because of privacy issues.
2. I do not believe that the tech elites who are publicly leaving Facebook will affect on the company’s numbers; they are unrepresentative and were not central users in the first place.
3. I do not believe that an alternative will emerge in the next 2-5 years that will “replace” Facebook in any meaningful sense.
4. I believe that Facebook will get regulated and I would like to see an open discussion of what this means and what form this takes.
5. I believe that a significant minority of users are at risk because of decisions Facebook has made and I think that those of us who aren’t owe it to those who are to work through these issues.
6. I believe that Facebook needs to start a public dialogue with users and those who are concerned ASAP (and Elliot Schrage’s Q&A doesn’t count)."

Tagged as: afp, api, CwFRtB, danahboyd, ethics, free, freemium, ipad, journalism, ladygaga, lost, monetize, murdoch, music, net303, p2p, police, regulation, scam, security, termsofuse, theaustralian, virus, web207 No Comments

5Nov/09

Digital Culture Links: November 5th 2009

Links for November 3rd 2009 through November 5th 2009:

The ABC of social media use [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] - How bizzare: social media use guidelines in a major corporation which actually make sense! "ABC managing director Mark Scott has announced new social media guidelines, which the national broadcaster's journalists and staff must abide by. [...] In an email sent to ABC staff this morning, the new Use of Social Media policy gives four standards which staff and contractors must follow when using both work and personal social media interaction:
1. Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute.
2. Do not undermine your effectiveness at work.
3. Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views.
4. Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work."
The temporary web [BuzzMachine] - Jeff Jarvis articulates some important concerns about the way Twitter and other social services are contributing to a more temporary, less archivable (or, at least, less searchable in the long term) web: "...search is turning social and our search results are becoming personalized, thus we don’t all share the same search results and it becomes tougher to manage them through SEO. Put these factors together – the social stream – and relationships matter more than pages (but then, they always have). "
Internet piracy [Background Briefing - 1 November 2009] - Australia's Radio National programme Backgroud Briefing takes a look at copyright in the digital age, featuring the big arguments and comments from everyone from AFACT to Lessig and Girl Talk. Segment by Oscar McLaren.

Tagged as: abc, archive, australianbroadcastingcorporation, journalism, memory, net303, piracy, policy, preservation, radionational, regulation, search 3 Comments

30Jul/09

Digital Culture Links: July 30th 2009

Links for July 24th 2009 through July 30th 2009:

Law 2.0 - Law 2.0: The Challenge of User-generated and Peer-produced Networks, Content & Culture [Peter Black's Freedom to Differ] - Peter Black's primer on the changing legal landscape in the 'Web 2.0' era. Pitched at legal educators, but a really useful overview for anyone interested. [Talk on Vimeo] [Powerpoint Slides]
Microsoft and Yahoo Reach Search Agreement [NYTimes.com] - "Microsoft and Yahoo announced a partnership in Internet search and advertising on Wednesday morning intended to create a stronger rival to the industry powerhouse Google. Under the pact, Microsoft will provide the underlying search technology on Yahoo’s popular Web sites. The deal provides a lift for Microsoft’s recent overhaul of its search engine, renamed Bing, which has won praise and favorable reviews, after years of falling further and further behind Google. Running such a search system proves expensive, and Microsoft can now filter more searches through the Bing technology infrastructure. It expects to deliver better answers to search queries over time as well by learning from more peoples’ queries." Yacrosoft or Mihoo! ?
Would the real social network please stand up? [apophenia] - Some useful thoughts about social networks and their differences from danah boyd and Bernie Hogan: "The truth of the matter is that there is no "real" social network. It all depends on what you're trying to measure, what you're trying to do with those measurements. We do ourselves an intellectual disservice when we assume that these different types of networks are interchangeable or that studying one automatically tells us about another. Most scholars get this, even when they're quoted out of context by journalists to suggest otherwise (see Cameron Marlow). But I get the sense that a lot of journalists, marketers, advertisers, politicians, and everyday folks don't. This is a problem."
China now has 338m internet users [News.com.au] - "The number of internet users in China is now greater than the entire population of the United States, after rising to 338 million by the end of June, state media reported today. China's online population, the largest in the world, rose by 40 million in the first six months of 2009, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing a report by the China Internet Network Information Centre. The number of broadband internet connections rose by 10 million to 93.5 million in the first half of the year, the report said."
6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations [Mashable] - Cool visualisation tools for Twitter - useful for explaining the potentially global conversations going on.
Movie studios try to harness Twitter effect | Technology [Internet | Reuters] - "Box office watchers say Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows anyone to post on-the-fly wisecracks for all the world to see, is the latest weapon in an arsenal of cell phones and computers that audiences use to critique films quickly, often when they are still sitting in theaters. Such word-of-mouth publicity from fan to fan can boost, or bomb, ticket sales. "Has everything speeded up? The answer is yes," said Adam Fogelson, Universal's president of marketing and distribution. "Depending on how big your opening day audience is, word-of-mouth starts playing a factor immediately," he said."