Dr Horrible Finally Available through iTunes Australian Store
A mere 54 days after it was released in the US (and after a few teething problems, free across the globe for just over a week), the three-episodes of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog are finally available in the Australian iTunes store (and the UK one, too). The delay, I’m sure, is less about the desire of the Whedon boys to get Dr Horrible out there, and more about the challenges involved in pushing material into the various national versions of the iTunes store. This rather long delay serves as a fairly poignant footnote to the talk I gave a little while ago on entitled What Dr Horrible Can Teach TV About Participatory Culture. It seems there’s still some challenges even the bad doctor can’t immediately overcome. That said, it’s out now, so here’s a link to the Australian iTunes store; it’s $5.99 for the series, or $2.99 per episode.
In the meantime, the Evil League of Evil has been looking for a few more evil recruits, but you need to apply before Oct 11th!
Annotated Links of Interest: October 8th 2008
Links of interest for October 3rd 2008 through October 8th 2008:
- Generational Myth: Not all young people are tech-savvy [ChronicleReview.com] – Siva Vaidhyanathan convincingly argues we need to move away from the simplistic rhetoric of the ‘digital natives’ before this generational pigeon-holing causes even more harm: “We should drop our simplistic attachments to generations so we can generate an accurate and subtle account of the needs of young people — and all people, for that matter. A more responsible assessment would divorce itself from a pro- or anti-technology agenda and look at multiple causes for problems we note: state malfeasance or benign neglect of education, rampant consumerism in our culture, moral panics that lead us to scapegoat technology, and, yes, technology itself. Such work would reflect the fact that technologies do not emerge in a vacuum. “
- MySpace a new fraud market [The Age] – “Hugely popular services such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are being blamed for a boom in sophisticated email scams in which criminals mining the information on social networking sites to create personalised attacks.
These so-called spear phishing emails appear to come from a trusted source and aim to persuade the victim to hand over valuable data such as banking details or passwords to corporate networks.” - Privacy lags in technology rush [The Age] – “The [Australian] federal minister in charge of privacy, John Faulkner, has warned that personal information posted on social networking websites can linger forever “like an ill-considered tattoo”. But the cabinet secretary said the challenge for legislators was not to protect people from the information they volunteer about themselves but the data collected by others. He called for privacy values to be at the forefront – not an afterthought – when technology was being developed.”
- A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century [Esquire] – “Chuck Klosterman issues his predictions for the coming century.” It’s more speculative satire than future history, but this sort of fictional list is always amusing and until 2040 it extrapolates from contemporary trends fairly well. Then we get time travellers, robots, AIs, war with the animals and overpopulation on the moon.
- China spying on Skype users – VoIP – Connectivity – Technology – theage.com.au – “China is monitoring the chat messages of Skype users and censoring them if they contain sensitive keywords such as Tibet or Communist Party, according to a group of Canadian researchers. The massive surveillance operation of TOM-Skype, a joint venture between Chinese mobile firm TOM Online and Skype, owned by US online auction house eBay, was alleged by Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto research group.” (Another case where ethics are treated as national institutions, not global issues!)
Barackbar
He knows when it’s a trap!
Guess who I’d vote for if I lived in the US? 😉 [Via]
Thomson Reuters/Endnote sue George Mason Uni over Zotero!
I was disappointed (but not really surprised) to read earlier this week that Thomson Reuters Inc., the owners of Endnote, were suing George Mason University for housing the team in the Centre for History and New Media which created of Zotero. Zotero, if you haven’t been introduced, is a Firefox plugin which makes saving academic referencing material, building an archive of reference details, a pretty much everything else to do with citation, much, much easier. Endnote is the big proprietary player in this field while Zotero is still a pretty small fish. While I’ve never claimed to be a lawyer, the the complaint from Thomson Reuters seems based on the notion that (a) Zotero ‘reverse-engineered’ Endnote and (b) that Zotero used the import/translation files from Endnote without permission and what I’ve read suggests both of these claims are probably false. If anything, in highlighting the proprietary nature of Endnote, I suspect this lawsuit is more likely to be the best publicity Zotero has ever received. Also, I’d like to add, having used both Endnote and Zotero in tandem for some time (it’s not hard to move between the two) I probably wouldn’t have given the process much more thought. Until today, that is, where in light of the philosophy at play in this lawsuit, I shall not be using Endnote ever again.
My UWA colleague Sky has made a very smart post on this issue, which I’d like to quote at length:
Now, back when I was doing honours, I used EndNote because the uni provided free copies, and free training. When I switched over to Ubuntu, I stopped using EndNote because it wasn’t available on linux at the time. I also put a bit more thought into the whole thing, and became mildly ticked off that the uni was putting yet more money into proprietary software (a student license for EndNote is about AU$300, although I imagine UWA gets a discount for volume).
I very strongly disagree with the university’s use of Windows, Endnote, and other proprietary software. Firstly, proprietary software goes against the ideals of academic scholarship (openness, peer review, building a body of public knowledge, etc etc). Secondly, the common complaint that “open software isn’t supported” isn’t true in most cases – on the Ubuntu forums you can usually get a response to a question within the hour. Thirdly, it is ludicrous that we are spending this amount of money on software when it could be better placed somewhere else. It could even, conceivably, be given to students and staff to help develop open source tools like Zotero and Ubuntu (or R, or any of the thousands of other potentially useful projects).
You may think that these things don’t matter. Maybe you’re not all that technical, and you’re used to using Windows. Maybe you’re studying anthropology, or politics, or cultural studies, or sports science, and you can’t see how it’s relevant to your work. But it matters. It matters because how we work affects the outcomes of our research – that’s one of the reasons why we have to fill in so many ethics applications. It matters because universities should contribute to a public pool of knowledge, not just “produce intellectual property”. It matters because as academics many of us spend vast amounts of our time working with computers: you may well spend more time with your software than with your kids/partner/students/pet fish/whatever.
I couldn’t agree more, and now that this lawsuit has made the politics behind Endnote and Zotero transparent, I’d like to anyone working in a university today one question: are you using Zotero, and if not, why not?
Update (5 June 2009): “I’m delighted to announce that this morning the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters.” 🙂
US: Don’t Vote.
For any American citizens who read this blog: Don’t Vote.
Apparently your opportunity to register to vote ends very, very soon. [Via]
Annotated Links of Interest: October 2nd 2008
Links of interest for October 1st 2008 through October 2nd 2008:
- Google Search 2001 – To celebrate Google’s 10th birthday they’ve gone back in time and worked with the Internet Archive to let you search the 2001 web … YouTube is a nonsense word, ‘blog’ only returns 76,400 hits and Facebook has just under 1800 results!
- EA Downplays Spore’s DRM Triggered Piracy Record [TorrentFreak] – Despite credible estimates that Spore has been downloaded over a million times via bittorrent networks, EA are playing down these figures and, in a turnabout for a big media producer, are arguing that not every download would have represented a legitimate sale were bittorrent not around (something many downloaders have been arguing about p2p film and even tv for years). Despite EA’s PR spin, it seems likely DRM is one of the big things nudging fans into downloading the Spore (and bypassing the DRM altogether).
- Blizzard wins Warcraft bot payout [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “World of Warcraft creator Blizzard has won $6m (£3.36m) in damages from the makers of a software ‘bot’. The damages award comes after Blizzard won the first round of its legal battle against MDY Industries in July 2008. Blizzard embarked on the case against MDY claiming that the World of Warcraft Glider software produced by the small company infringed its copyright. The Glider software lets Warcraft players automate many of the repetitive steps the game involves. … it helped them automate the many repetitive tasks, such as killing monsters and scavenging loot, required to turn low level characters into more powerful ones.”
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.