Actual cause of Internet slowdowns

An extremely dangerous law has been passed in New Zealand and goes into effect on February 28, 2009. This law enables a person’s internet access to be permanently terminated if they are accused of copyright violation three times. No trial. No judge. No jury. No conviction. Just an accusation by a copyright holder.

We’ll get to the legal stupidity of this in just a moment. Let’s establish why this matters: because this is 2009, and the Internet is no more optional than power or water to a civilized society. Banned from the ‘net, you and your children will be at an increasing disadvantage in education, commerce, career advancement, and more.

There’s a long litany of lawmakers and judges who enact legislation, set precedent, and make policy decisions regarding the Internet that, at best, illustrates how uninformed they are and, at worst, encroaches upon fundamental freedoms that are supposed to be protected by the laws of the land in which they reside. This law, specifically Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act in New Zealand, may just take the cake for dangerous ignorance in the realm of legislation aimed at controlling the Internet. Well, ignorance in the case of the lawmakers at least, but the organization pushing for such laws can hardly claim ignorance. This is exactly what they want, and they’ve been pushing for something similar in the USA. What organization would that be? Wait for it…wait…

…Oh yes! Our old friends the Recording Industry Association of America/New Zealand/[insert country name here].

The RIAA and its international devil spawn have become notorious in the last few years for extorting thousands of dollars at a time out of mostly clueless individuals by threatening to sue them for copyright violations. Not suing — just threatening to sue. Basically, they would say “pay us $5,000 (or whatever) or we’ll take you to court, which we can afford to do and you can’t.” I’m not kidding, they did this to thousands of people and got away with it for awhile. Some of the accused, however, with the legal and financial backing of groups like the EFF, have called the RIAA’s bluff and in many cases won because the RIAA actually didn’t have any proof these people were knowingly infringing on copyrighted material. The RIAA had “logs” that simply were rarely concrete enough to a identify a specific individual. For example, people were sued because they had open wireless access points and neighbors shared music through it — OK, not a smart thing to leave your wireless AP open, but there’s nothing in our laws that makes it criminal, nor that makes you responsible since you weren’t “knowingly” sharing copyrighted material. Or more often, records and IP addresses got mixed up at the ISPs (some of whom just handed this stuff over to the RIAA, shame on them), and the wrong person was fingered. Most often, the accused simply didn’t know they were sharing music or movies, because their computer was just infected with some really nasty stuff (as unmaintained Windows machines can be) and was acting as a file-sharing hub for all the internet. Ignorant users? Yes. Criminal? Hardly. You want to slap them with something, slap them with a “how to properly use a computer” book, not a lawsuit where the payment goes to a huge media corporation.

But wait, we’re not done. I’m still not to the law passed in New Zealand. Just so you know how specious it is that the RIAA should be allowed to serve as judge, jury and executioner in this “three strikes you’re out,” “guilt upon accusation” law, consider their record with their traditional lawsuits. The RIAA has sued dead people, a woman who was getting a transplant (they won a default judgment against her when she didn’t respond to their request…hmm, wonder why?), and another woman who has never bought, used, or even turned on a computer in her life. In one instance, even after the court smacked down the RIAA because they were suing the wrong person in the household, the RIAA argued that the defendant could still be held liable because “the computer may well have been in a common area such that defendant heard music coming from the computer when [the] admitted infringer … was using it.” Yes, the RIAA was arguing that simply hearing music coming from a PC is copyright infringement. When they lost that court battle too and the court ordered the RIAA to pay the defendant’s attorney fees, the RIAA appealed the order to pay the fees so that other individuals might still be scared of going to court, and they could go back to their extortion scheme.

This, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg, just a tiny sampling of what the RIAA has done and how they have extorted people and abused the legal system over the past decade.

The law about to take effect in New Zealand, as I said, allows for any user to get banned from obtaining personal Internet access if they get accused of copyright violations three times. Accused, not convicted. By the copyright holder — often, the RIANZ. Somehow, either through bribery and kickbacks (probably — the RIAA et al spend hundreds of millions of dollars around the world on lobbyists and legal fees) or sheer, astounding ignorance (probably some of that too), the law was passed by the New Zealand government. In addition, it changes the definition of ISP to include anyone who runs a DHCP server — in layman’s terms, basically anyone who provides a shared internet connection. Have a home router? You’re now an ISP. From the Creative Freedom Foundation site:

ISPs now include businesses, schools, libraries, government departments and any organisation that provides internet services. Odds are, you’re an ISP.

Why is this important? Because under the new law, ISPs have to keep records of all internet activity through their network for a period of two years, just in case the police need to come sifting through in order to confirm future accusations. This could come at significant cost of both time, money, and manpower for everyone now identified as an ISP.

So let’s review: the Recoding Industry Association, which has been pushing for this type of law almost everywhere, including the United States, finally managed to get their baby passed in New Zealand. It will allow them to kick anyone off the Internet simply by accusing them three times of copyright infringement with no trial, no due process, no proof, nothing. This is a vile, horrible, dangerous law and of course has ignited the attention of a great deal of the ‘net in the hopes of getting the word out before it goes into effect.

But how did it get passed in the first place? Here we come to the really important part, at least for the rest of us. In our government, like in many, there’s a representative who is in charge of education plans and policy, of energy policy, of transportation policy — all people who spend their energies on one area of public infrastructure and who are responsible for making sound decisions for their field of influence. For the most part, this works. And that’s why scary laws like the one in NZ and other disturbing digital surveillance and anti-privacy laws here in the US have gotten passed — because there’s no one person in our government responsible for the Internet. Fortunately, President Obama has pledged to appoint an “Internet Czar” (terrible name) or “US CTO” (Chief Technology Officer) to do just that — and it’s quite evident that we need it. One tactic of the RIAA is to attach “but there could be child porn!” to any legislation to get it passed. For example, discreetly through lobby groups, the RIAA has tried at various times to make all P2P software illegal, to require ISPs to log all P2P traffic, and has encouraged legislation empowering the FBI and other federal agencies to have ridiculous power over the Internet because “P2P networks are rife with child pornography.” Few politicians with a hope of reelection are likely to vote “no” on a law billed as preventing child pornography, no matter how stupid or unjust it is, so combating these ridiculous proposals is quite the uphill battle for people who actually — how do I put this — “get” the Internet and…what was the other one…oh yeah, the Bill of Rights.

These battles and the RIAA’s idiocy have been going on for some time now, but I never want to miss the opportunity to make regular people — non tech-industry folks — aware of what’s going on. There are several salient points to be made here:

1. The Internet is not optional in our society, just like power is not optional, water is not optional, basic education is not optional.
2. Any lawmaker who allows an independent, for-profit organization to act as judge, jury, and executioner in a matter of law should be immediately removed from office, slapped in some way for egregious ignorance, and perhaps put on trial (if possible) for the civilian equivalent of dereliction of duty of a public officer and disregard for the Constitution of the United States.
3. The RIAA needs to have the tables turned on them. THEY should have a “three strikes” law levied against them, perhaps — three frivolous lawsuits and you’re done, you can’t file any more? Would be nice.
4. Be aware of this kind of thing and contact your representatives if you hear they’re on a committee that’s considering such a law. It’s less likely something scary will be passed with the Obama administration, which seems to have met the Internet, unlike the Bush administration, but it’s still possible. There’s at least as many idiots as smart people.

Let me make something clear before I conclude: I’m not saying copyright violation/piracy is OK. Not at all. Especially as a content creator myself (in the form of software and user interfaces), I understand that copyrighted content needs to be protected and the creator should received their due. What is not OK is the RIAA extorting people and then being handed the power to remove them from the Internet without the involvement of any legal or governing body whatsoever.

Everyone hope for the best for our friends in beautiful New Zealand. And send dark, evil thoughts the RIAA’s way.

A few more stories about the RIAA

• Academics warn of EU ‘three strikes’ back door plan
• RIAA ordered to shell out $100k for P2P witch hunt
• Judge approves public broadcast of RIAA lawsuit * I love this one

Photo 1 of 365: Emergency

I’m embarking on a new photographic adventure: Project 365, a self-imposed assignment in which I will take at least one photo a day for an entire year.

The concept dates back several years, and I first heard about it last year, but it seems to really be picking up steam lately. By taking a photo every day, you’re forcing yourself to think creatively and think about composition and think about lighting — no matter where you are or what you’re doing. It has the added bonus of documenting your life over the year — you’ll be able to look back and see at least one clue as to what you did on any particular day. Everyone I’ve read about or talked to that has gotten involved in this has said how wonderful it was in developing their photographic skills.

Which makes perfect sense, really. Think about the things you normally identify yourself as really good at. I’m really good at playing piano; I’ve played for 20 years and while I don’t play every day anymore, I did play every day for nearly 12 of those years. I’m pretty good at designing web sites; I can’t say I design a new one every day, but every time I *do* design one I get better.
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Yesterday, Google unveiled a new service called (simply) Sync that updates your contacts and calendars between your wireless phone and the Google servers instantly and over the air. And guess what: it works! Guess what else: it’s free!

That’s more than can be said for Apple’s $99 per year MobileMe service. I tried MobileMe for three months, and it just never worked. I don’t care about the 10GB of web space (have my own servers, or something like DropBox), I don’t care about the email account (uh, GMail), and I don’t care about the fancy photo galleries (I’ve got Flickr and my own gallery). The biggest thing I need is my contacts and calendar data everywhere, on every computer I use, and on my iPhone. MobileMe failed spectacularly in that respect — syncs were inconsistent, would sometimes replicate data, and just could never be depended upon to replicate data reliably from one device to another.

Google Sync works on the iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, S60, and a handful of other devices. It utilizes the broadly adapted Microsoft Exchange wireless sync protocols (thank you, Microsoft) and is relatively easy to setup (Google has basic instructions for all devices). And after more than 24 hours on my iPhone, I’m quite happy with it.
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I’m coming up on one year of my foray into “real” photography (that is, putting some effort into my shots rather than just random point-and-shoot), and I wanted to share an experience I had that demonstrated the importance of spending quality time post-processing your photos. One of my pictures that got little attention at first started getting a lot more looks, comments, group invites, and awards once I knew what I was doing in post and spent some time tweaking it.

Until relatively recently, I hadn’t really done much post-processing work — I’d pull the shots off my memory card, maybe do a little tweaking to the exposure if I had under- or over-exposed, maybe crop a little, but that was about it. But as I’ve spent more time trying to learn about photography, both from the pros and from some talented friends, I realized in addition to developing “the eye” in the field, I needed to be developing my skills back at my desk, long after the shot. I have plenty of experience designing user interfaces for web sites, but little with enhancing photographs. Once I started putting some effort into post, some of my shots really started to pop much more than they used to. One great example of this is my mossy ravine photograph.
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WhiteHouse.gov - before and after

Today was a historic day. The nation saw the biggest inaugural crowd ever, the peaceful transition of power (and a massive shift in politics), and — what we web designers really care about — a new WhiteHouse.gov web site.

Yes, at exactly 12:00 noon, just minutes before Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama stumbled over the exact wording of the presidential oath (really, you had just one job today, Roberts — and you screwed it up), the official White House web site switched over from the Bush version (which interestingly just got a redesign a few months ago…not sure why they bothered) to the shiny Obama edition.

All joking about “change” aside, I really do find the new site interesting. For one thing, it obviously exhibits the high level of polish and design sense that all of Obama’s sites have demonstrated over the past couple years. It now includes a blog. It has a clear statement on copyright, creative commons, and the DMCA (very significant for those battling our archaic copyright laws). The whole site is designed to be a platform to support Obama’s pledge for transparent government, and looking at it purely from a web designer’s point of view it’s a great start.

Even looking at the source, it’s clean code. Tags are organized, tend to be properly indented, and CSS classes are named well most of the time. Javascript (in the form of jQuery — my personal fav) is used efficiently and effectively to enhance the experience without weighing down the page. Graphical elements and typography are generally strong and well optimized, with only a few exceptions. It’s encouraging that his digital team takes this much care with the web site — I think it bodes well for all Internet denizens that the new president clearly has a great number of people who “get” the power of the Internet — and the power of good design.

UPDATE: CNN now has a story about the new web site.

On Friday, January 16, the first of the final ten episodes of BattleStar Galactica aired on SciFi. As some of you may know, this is one of my favorite shows of all time. Considering the cliffhanger that the last episode left us on back in June of 2008, and how SciFi feels the need to split these “mid-season breaks” into huge 6-month gaps, the anticipation was high. This is going to just be some quick impressions, not a detailed review.

Overall, I thought the episode was very good. Yes, we find out what’s up with Earth and why it’s so desolate (not a huge mystery), as well as who used to be there (that was more surprising). There were lots of new twists in this episode, good ones I think, that will be explored through the final nine shows I’m sure. Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell are amazing dramatic actors, and they really carry the emotional weight of this show. The Adama/Roslyn scenes were always so powerful. In contrast, the scenes with Lee and Dualla, in which they’re rediscovering their romantic attraction to each other, were less enjoyable. They felt forced and campy. I never liked that matchup.

Although the mix-in of the newly discovered cylon allies with the regular colonial crew — and the members of the crew who were just outed as cylons — provided a different and quirky “elephant in the room” kind of atmosphere, this show did in some ways represent a return to roots for several characters. Baltar was being a scientist again — no more creepy followers and weird religious rants. Laura was being herself — a strong presence around others yet emotional and fragile in private. Even Tigh seemed to have gotten over the fact that he’s a cylon and tried to be his old self again — his old self when he wasn’t drunk, that is. In that respect, one of the most powerful scenes was when Adama was the raging drunk and Tigh had to talk him down. For all the times that Adama was there for Tigh, now the roles became reversed. It was a very interesting reflection.

Among the many new pieces of information and surprising twists and turns, the most shocking was the sudden — and graphic — loss of a major character that has been with the show from the very beginning. We don’t even yet know why this character died.

Most important of all: we now know who the 5th cylon is.

Battlestar remains excellent television and, I think, one of the best stories ever told on the small screen. If you haven’t watched it and you like human drama, give it a shot. Start with the 2003 miniseries, then move to season one and watch it in order. The DVDs can be had from Netflix or any other video rental store.

Plex, the fantastic media center software I’ve written about before, added some icing on the cake recently: out-of-the-box support for Logitech Harmony universal remotes.

Logitech Harmony remotes are great because Logitech maintains a massive database of all the codes for pretty much every consumer electronics device ever made (the Harmony 550 was my pick for the best gadget gift under $100). You (usually) don’t have to sit there “training” the Harmony with your original remotes — you just hook it up to your computer, type in the model numbers of your TV, receiver, game console, etc, and you’re off. It vastly improves (and simplifies) control of your home entertainment center.

However, while Logitech did have remote codes for the Mac Mini (which is what I’m using to run Plex), the six buttons of the Apple remote aren’t enough to control a full-featured software suite like Plex. So I wound up buying a piece of software called Remote Buddy that interprets signals from remote controls and turns them into keystrokes. Basically, I spent 2 hours having my Harmony learn IR codes from 7 “virtual” Apple remotes (7 distinct sets of 6 IR codes) to give me 42 effective buttons, but then I had to create keystrokes for each of those 42 IR codes in Remote Buddy so that the proper commands would be sent to Plex (as keystrokes). It was extremely tedious, and I wound up having to do most of it over again because one of the learned IR commands was corrupted (resulting in double-presses).
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One of the more interesting discussions I had over the holidays was with a couple friends of mine who work at Ford. As usual (to my wife’s good-natured annoyance) the topic eventually turned to cars. What I’ve been really curious about these days is figuring out what our long-term replacement for traditional gasoline engines will be. There seems to be little doubt even among the average citizen that we can’t depend on oil forever, and that some day we’re going to have to get off the teat of the middle east. Of course, no one knows for sure what exactly our savior will be, but there’s plenty of speculation to go around.

Currently the two main candidates are pure electric cars and hydrogen fuel-cell cars. Both of these types of automobiles actually exist and can be bought (sort of) right now; if you’ve got about $100,000 you can grab a blisteringly fast all-electric Tesla Roadster, and for $600 a month and a lot of luck you can get on Honda’s list to lease the family-friendly hydrogen powered FCX Clarity — provided you live in southern California where they’ve installed some hydrogen filling stations, that is. (No, you can’t buy the FCX Clarity — some estimates value the vehicles at $10 million each, given the R&D costs Honda has put into them.) Neither of these vehicles emits anything harmful; the Tesla just gives off a little heat, and the only thing that comes out of the FCX Clarity’s tailpipe is pure water vapor.
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The greatest change to hit our living room since HDTV arrived came last month in the form of the November Xbox 360 system update — known as the New Xbox Experience — which included the much-anticipated Netflix Watch Instantly feature. The whole idea of this on-demand streaming service is that you don’t have to wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail — you just pick the movies on the web site, then fire up your Watch Instantly device. Throughout 2008, Netflix has been rolling out Watch Instantly to various platforms — first to PCs, then through a $99 dedicated box you attach to your TV, and then to the Xbox. The past two weeks have seen the service added to two more devices — Samsung Blu-Ray players and the TiVo HD. I have both the TiVo HD and an Xbox 360, and have tried out Watch Instantly on both.

I haven’t done extensive testing, so I’ll make this quick: it’s better on the Xbox. Movies seem to be a notch lower on the quality scale when viewed through the TiVo, as if my internet connection is slower than it really is. Even my wife noticed the lesser quality immediately, and she’s not nearly as much of a HD nut as I am. In addition to being so obviously pixelated, the TiVo variant of the Netflix software stretches 4:3 aspect movies for some reason; I checked Eraser the other night, and the TiVo stretched it while the Xbox’s Netflix program played it in its proper ratio (with black bars on the sides — I hate stretchovision, I’d rather have the bars than fat faces).

Finally, I found the Netflix interface on the Xbox more pleasant to use — the new sliding panel interface of the NXE plays well with browsing movies, while the TiVo’s Netflix interface — like the rest of the TiVo interface — seems dated and clunky. I love my TiVo, but they really need to get moving on that rumored interface overhaul.

I was digging through some old files on one of my hard drives the other night and came across what I believe is my very first web site design, from my early college days in 2002. I had cobbled together a few web sites before this in high school, but the mockup you see here is the first time I actually planned the whole design in advance with a graphics program (Macromedia FireWorks, in this case). Please keep in mind, this was done by someone with zero art or graphics training, so excuse the atrocious green! MRNonline.net was sort of a blog (way before there was all this great blogging software available), sort of a community site — I ran it for my friends off of a server in my dorm room for about a year, providing news and discussion forums. I wrote the whole thing from scratch using ColdFusion (the first dynamic web language I taught myself…that was the first and last time I used CF), and the whole experience taught me a lot. I’ve designed dozens of sites in the six years since, but this was what really kicked me off on loving web design. Sadly, it’s the oldest surviving piece of my work that I can find — I’ve been unable to locate a copy of the very first web site I built, which I believe was in 1998 or 1999, but I did that with FrontPage so seeing that code might prompt tears of agony rather than nostalgia.

It’s kind of fun to look back at where you came from, especially if what you find was done at a time when you had no idea that such work might be your career one day. This type of fun digging and nostalgia also reminds me of how important it is to back stuff up — due to a hard drive crash a number of years ago, I lost everything I ever wrote and created for high school. I don’t need that stuff, obviously, but it would be fun to have.

What kind of work do you have really old examples of?