• Neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light don’t seem to exist, and the CERN team that first said they saw some FTL neutrinos, now admit they made a couple mistakes. As some expected, there were systematic errors that produced a timing error of just 60 nanoseconds. [url]
• CERN scientists have trapped anti-hydrogen for a little over 15 minutes — a new record that could allow them to determine more about how antimatter behaves. Does anti-hydrogen rise, fall or do nothing in a gravitational field? [url]
• The Large Hadron Collider is still hunting down the elusive Higgs boson which might not exist at all. This sub-atomic particle has been nicknamed the “God Particle” — but it looks like it’s just a matter of time before people either find it or start re-writing modern physics. [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

“It looks like the patent was filed June 20, 2000, and at that time, I’m not sure this isn’t a novel idea,” Dallas attorney and Law of the Game blog author Mark Methenitis tells Ars Technica. The early filing means the patent “predates Facebook and most all of the social games as we know them,” Methenitis notes, though older gaming services like AOL and Yahoo Games may have been using similar techniques before that.

Even if there is no prior art, this just demonstrates the problem with software patents. Software innovation moves fast, and the majority of “novel” inventions are still pretty obvious and inevitable, usually being developed by multiple people at once. More importantly, they don’t require any actual implementation, just laughably vague descriptions of a concept like the ones above. That allows companies like this to buy a patent, sit on it, do nothing, and attempt to place a private tax on the actual innovators:

But the lawsuit doesn’t seem to comes from a company that actually makes such games. The patent in question was granted in 2006 as the sole protected invention for one Shawn Cartwright. It was then transferred to little-known “revenue transaction software” company Theados Corp. last year, before being reassigned to plaintiff Gametek earlier this month.

The Gametek LLC that filed the lawsuit is based in Newport Beach, Ca., but shares a name with a Florida-based, early-’90s game developer best known for game show adaptations which closed its doors in 1998. The shell company doesn’t seem to have any legitimate products in social gaming or any other field, and may have been created specifically to argue this case.

When companies are able to hold back real progress while contributing zilch, it’s just more evidence that the patent system is broken.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Stopping SOPA and PIPA was a historic victory for digital citizens, but ACTA potentially poses a similar threat to the global Internet community. While the agreement’s stated goal of strengthening intellectual property rights is one all should support, it does so by undermining individual privacy rights and by empowering an unaccountable enforcement bureaucracy. And just like SOPA and PIPA, ACTA was crafted without input from citizens and key stakeholders in a secretive, closed-door process.

Worse, ACTA appears to be an unconstitutional power grab started by President George W. Bush and completed by President Barack Obama – despite the White House’s January 14 criticism of legislative solutions that harm the Internet and erode individual rights. The Constitution gives Congress the power to pass intellectual property legislation – like SOPA and PIPA – and gives the Senate the power to ratify treaties. But the Obama Administration maintains that ACTA is not even a treaty, justifying the exclusion of both American citizens and their elected representatives. It is a practice Vice President Joe Biden decried as a U.S. Senator.

Closed doesn’t cut it. We opened up ACTA in Madison so you can sign up, speak out and collaborate to build a better “treaty.”

For all of the USTR’s ridiculous claims of unprecedented transparency, why couldn’t it have done something like this before ACTA was “finalized”? The answer is that there’s no reason at all. Instead, the USTR released the “final” draft of ACTA as a done deal, and any public comment was meaningless, because the document was not open for any additional changes.

Which raises another unfortunate point. The Obama administration has already signed ACTA. Hopefully this means that Congress is actually going to get serious about challenging the administration on its claimed authority to sign and ratify ACTA without Congress’ approval. Until now, the only Congressional official who had questioned that right publicly was Senator Wyden — though, we’ve heard of a few others who have sent pointed questions to the administration about its claims. With Issa going public and directly questioning this attempt to deny Congress the right to review ACTA — despite the Executive branch not having the right to make copyright or patent law — perhaps Congress will finally step up and make it clear that it won’t let the President simply ignore Congress’ mandate over both IP law and international treaties.

Also, when do we get the Madison’ed version of TPP?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

And American Airlines didn’t like it.

It couldn’t use the “security” argument this time, because everything was local. But, actually, it tried to use that same argument anyway, responding to a question from BoardingArea, saying that it shut down Award Wallet to maintain the company’s…

……long-held stance on how third-party websites access proprietary AAdvantage member details… Because travelers’ AAdvantage account numbers and passwords can be used to claim AAdvantage mileage awards out of their accounts and access personal details, American will always protect this information.

We simply cannot permit websites that have not satisfied our security requirements the access needed to track AAdvantage balances or any other function that is otherwise secured behind AA.com login credentials.

But that falsely assumes that the browser plugin is a “website.” It’s possible that American is just confused… but the more likely situation is that American Airlines is still just worried about controlling the customer, rather than making sure they have the best experience for them. What services like Award Wallet do is make American’s frequent flyer program more valuable to consumers, but apparently American doesn’t want that if it means having less control.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The first question directly challenges Sherman over his NYTimes op-ed in which he claimed the massive opposition to SOPA/PIPA was somehow undemocratic, asking him if he really thinks an informed populace is a bad thing. But Sherman is still convinced that it was all a misinformation campaign by Google (though he avoids using the name):

I obviously think that an informed electorate is a great thing. The question is whether they were really informed or whether they were being misinformed. That was the point of the op-ed: that there was a lot of misinformation about the bill that was being circulated, and that was accepted by readers online in terms of “if it comes from these sources it must be true.” I know that a lot of members of Congress who had worked very hard on the legislation were very frustrated that they couldn’t get out their side of the story, that this legislation was not what it was represented to be. So my op-ed was not intended to really raise questions about whether the legislation was good or bad, but that everybody has a responsibility to be accurate and really factual about what the legislation provides. Otherwise those platforms can be used in ways that aren’t engaging the electorate in a good way, but rather in an anti-democratic way.

Sorry, but Cary Sherman is not allowed to accuse others of misinformation—not unless he’s going into comedy. In the first half of the interview, and in his op-ed, Sherman attempts constant deception. He talks about the dangers of counterfeit products to play up the unrelated issue of copyright infringement; he presents laughably incomplete data; he insists there was “No Duty To Monitor” in SOPA/PIPA, ignoring the fact that where there was no “duty” there was extreme liability incentive; he claims that Anonymous’ DDOS attacks are the “real” censorship in a blatant misuse of the term—the list goes on and on. And can we just pause for a moment to marvel at the sheer insanity of the claim that Congress “couldn’t get their side of the story” heard? Congress? The folks who keep multiple 24-hour cable channels fed with stories at every second of every week of every month? They couldn’t “get their side of the story” out? Now that’s misinformation. Sherman is a misinformation artist, and he’d even be a good one if he wasn’t also so naïve, as the rest of his response demonstrates:

Hopefully that was a one time experience that came from a lot of different things coming together, where a lot of different people came to the conclusion that this was a terrible piece of legislation. I think Congress got that message loud and clear. But in the future, think of how that could be abused for bad purposes. I think all of us have an interest in making sure that we hold ourselves on the internet to the same high standards that we’ve tried to hold ourselves in the offline world, whether it’s newspapers or broadcast journalism or whatever. There ought to be clarity and integrity with respect to the facts.

That’s right: he hopes millions of people actively participating in the democratic process with the help of online tools was a one-time experience. Putting aside the fact that it makes you question his values, this statement demonstrates that he’s a fool. His industry has pushed and pushed for decades, eroding freedoms and locking up culture through deals negotiated in back rooms, and they finally reached the breaking point. The world woke up, and Sherman thinks he can just wait for them to fall asleep again.

He also still can’t get it through his head that the internet is not separate, and that media is just people communicating. Newspapers and broadcast news are no more or less perfect than online news, and only the most oblivious commentators truly believe they are paragons of journalistic ideals that can serve as an example to newcomers. Besides, plenty of traditional sources were opposed to SOPA/PIPA as well.

On the topic of newspapers, the next question asks Sherman for his thoughts on their approach online. He notes that many have yet to find the advertising dollars they hoped for, and says it’s “interesting” (wink wink) that so many are moving towards paywalls. I won’t respond to that, because Mike said it all last week: let ‘em.

Another reader asks what he thinks of online services that let artists go directly to fans:

You know, I have nothing with cutting out the middleman. I think that if an artist wants to go it alone, go it without a middleman, that is the artist’s choice. And for some artists it can work very well. It hasn’t happened that way: most artists who have been more majorly successful have had the help of a label, it could be an indie label or a major label. What they provide is the marketing and promotion that is so clearly necessary to distinguish yourself in this day and age. In 2010 you had 75,000 new albums released. 70,000 of them, that’s 94%, sold less than 1000 copies. That isn’t much to make a commercial career out of. It’s hard to see how you could make a career as a musician when you’re selling less than 1000 copies of your recording, unless all you’re really doing is live gigs and you’re making a few extra bucks by selling some recordings.

It’s a muddled response, because the numbers he presents are from SoundScan and do not include the very direct-to-fan services he’s supposed to be talking about. More importantly, it shows how limited his thinking is: other than live shows, he ignores every single artist revenue stream, even the traditional ones like licensing. Mere number of albums sold is not enough information to decide if an artist can build a career, and it never has been. Sherman continues, rightly recognizing that there are still very important roles for middlemen services today, but failing to realize that his industry is not the only player:

The point is that for some artists who want to go it alone, that’s great, many of the artists that we see are great at making music, they’re great at performing, but business is not what they want to do, promotion is not what they want to do. There are some obvious exceptions to that, but that’s what record companies do, that’s what managers do. They’re all intermediaries in a way, but they are intermediaries that grow the audience, that improve the demand for that artist’s creative work.

What he ignores is that the traditional record label model is not the only way to offer these services. Increasingly, it’s the worst way: even in the first part of the interview he admitted that labels are no longer benefiting artists the way they used to. Artists who eschew labels may have to do some of the legwork of promotions and business, but the tools are all there for them. They can use Bandcamp. They can use TuneCore. They can use Topspin. They can use Bandzoogle. They don’t need label help to find a distributor and build a website and launch a merch store—they can do it all in a few clicks. Good middlemen are enablers, while record labels still want to be all-powerful gatekeepers, as Sherman makes disgustingly clear:

There’s no doubt that there’s going to be a continuing role for record companies. That role may change over time, but the more you’ve got online capability for anyone with a guitar and a little bit of recording equipment to get online and try to become a musician, the more you need specialists to designate and separate the wheat from the chaff, who is worth listening to, who is worth promoting and marketing. That’s what record companies have traditionally done. They have been the talent scouts and then they have put their financial and human resources into actually marketing and promoting that talent and helping to shape it. How many artist pages are there on MySpace right now? Who can figure out who to listen to? So having a curation function that record companies perform is becoming more important, not less.

I hope Sherman has fun separating the wheat from the chaff on MySpace (sigh) while the rest of the world leaves him in its dust. The astonishing arrogance of his statements just underline the problem: the recording industry sees itself as the arbiter of culture, and isn’t willing to give up even a shred of control. The internet has enabled countless new curation models, from the ease of setting up a music blog to the algorithmic possibilities of recommendation engines to the ongoing social curation of Facebook and Twitter—we don’t need executives to “designate” who is worth listening to based on ROI projections. Promotion takes only a fraction of the “financial and human resources” that it once did, and artists are increasingly unwilling to sign over their entire careers for something they can do themselves.

The next question is about ways to enforce intellectual property rights without damaging innovation and creativity, and Sherman calls for balance (as long as that balance is completely in his favor):

It’s finding that sweet spot between protecting content and creators and creativity, and ensuring that you’re not losing the benefits of innovation in technology, that is a difficult thing to do. There are ways that it can be done that aren’t now being taken advantage of. YouTube for example, anything goes up there, but once it’s taken down they have a mechanism, a filter to make sure that it doesn’t go back up. Why aren’t other websites doing that? Why, when other websites are being told that particular content is illegally being posted, don’t they take more aggressive measures to prevent it from being put up there, or being put back up there? There are now technologies available that make it really easy to identify copyrighted content in a way where it can be protected but all the other benefits of the technology would be available. So there are ways for the technology to be used to actually improve the situation for creators and maintain technological innovation, we just need more of a will to see it done.

If it’s “really easy” to identify infringing material, why did Viacom sue YouTube over 100 videos they themselves uploaded? How did Rumblefish accidentally claim ownership of birdsong? Why have the feds been seizing domains over label-authorized material? Why did Universal Music declare 50 Cent’s own website to be a rogue site? It’s only “easy” if you don’t care about legitimate material getting caught in the crossfire—and indeed, even Sherman’s own wording notes that it’s only easy to identify “copyrighted” content, not infringing content.

There is some more discussion, covering Sherman’s shock that the streaming services his industry has fought at every turn are not suddenly making him rich—but it’s all pretty routine. Sherman closes out the interview with a statement that would have sounded optimistic and forward-thinking ten years ago, but today sounds like an obsolete industry playing catch-up, pretending to embrace something they have fought for years, and fantasizing that they can exert control over something that is happening without and despite them:

I think that one of the things we’ve learned is that it’s not likely to be one big thing, it’s likely to be a lot of little things, it could be thousands of little things. There are so many niches in the music market in the way that people want music and the way that people use music and in the type of people who use it, that we think that there are going to have to be a lot of different models to try and monetize many different ways in which content is delivered to consumers. And we’re actually optimistic that over time we’re going to be finding a lot of those models and they’re going to add up to a viable revenue stream for the industry.

“Over time”? Sorry, guy-who-just-noticed-MySpace: time’s up.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

As I’ve been saying since these various groups started their various hacking and vandalism campaigns, I think these efforts are a really bad idea, and don’t do much to further the supposed causes that they’re trying to support. They’re only going to lead to backlash, as we’re already seeing in government officials using these groups as an excuse to try to make a power grab over the wider internet.

Given that, as I’ve said in the past, I haven’t been surprised to see the various arrests of folks supposedly associated with Anonymous or LulzSec. I expect that we’ll continue to hear such stories — in part because these kinds of stories are likely to provoke more of the same type of activity. Law enforcement keeps claiming that these arrests will frighten off others, but that shows a typical lack of understanding of what’s going on. As counterproductive as these activities are, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t about criminal activity for the sake of criminal activity, but about dissatisfaction with what’s going on in the world — and, as such, the arrests are actually only likely to create more such activity, which is the exact opposite of what law enforcement should be seeking to do.

Not understanding who they’re dealing with, and taking a top down approach to a bottom up threat, seems to be a specialty of US law enforcement.

Again, I think that the actual efforts by these folks are incredibly counterproductive and set up this “battle-siege” mentality, when the folks involved in all of this could be much more strategic in using their skills for good, rather than destruction. But that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the reality of why it’s happening, or how it’s likely to continue to evolve. More groups will pop up, more hacks will happen and (I’m sure) more disaffected skilled computer hackers will be arrested. But none of that (either the hacking or the arrests) is likely to bring us any closer to actually dealing with the problems that created this mentality in the first place.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Now, to his credit, Masiá sounds a lot more reasonable than most people who have a problem with Google’s results. He’s noticed the bizarre fact that the generic query “camping alfaques” produces the disturbing images, while the more specific “accidente camping alfaques” doesn’t. He understands that Google results are purely algorithmic, but feels this is a problem with that algorithm, and has been trying to get it fixed:

A regional IT consultant told him that the websites hosting the pictures had no interest in making any changes, so Mario decided to try Google. He began reporting the images as offensive, using Google’s own tools, sometimes clicking on each five times a day; it had no result. He sent a certified letter to Google, begging them to associate the graphic images with searches for the accident and not with generic ones for his campground; they said there was nothing they could do.

… “We don’t want to erase history, we want them [Google] to classify properly the information,” Mario told me. He cited other searches, such as the one for the “MGM Grand” in Las Vegas. The hotel suffered a famous fire, but no picture or links to it appear just by searching the hotel name. Only specific searches for the tragedy bring up images of the burning building. Most of the world’s accidents and terror attacks don’t bring up such “horrific close-ups of people,” Mario said.

After taking legal advice on the question and making no progress with Google, he finally sued the company’s Spanish subsidiary in a local “court of first instance” in Spain. He didn’t want any money; he wanted the images moved to other searches that he argues are more appropriate for the information. Last week, a judge threw the case out, saying that US-based Google Inc. had to be sued instead, as they were responsible for the algorithm.

The MGM Grand example seems damning at first, until you consider that it is a globally famous landmark that was the largest hotel in the world for years—and that was turned into Bally’s, while the new MGM Grand Las Vegas has become an even more famous spot and is gobbling up lots of the search results.

Ars compares the situation to a few others, such as Google’s “explanation page” linked from the distressing results for the query “jew”, the changes Google has made to address “bomb” attacks that mocked public figures, and the suicide hotline notes they use in some countries. All those examples have key differences, though: the explanation page started as an internal Adword buy, and now exists as an organic result; Google bombs were addressed with algorithm changes, not curation; and the suicide hotline was included in their program to highlight emergency services information, just like fire and poison control phone numbers.

The fact is, sometimes bad things happen to good businesses. It’s unfortunate that Masiá’s business must contend with the fallout of an accident that he could not control, just as it’s unfortunate when a crime scene shuts down a retail street during vital business hours, or when a “haunting” rumor forces a real estate agent to sell a house for less than its value—but bad fortune is a part of life. Google has to take an all-or-nothing stance on curation, because if they meddle with the results for one complainant, where does it end? Should a search for “Kent State” not return photos of the infamous massacre? Should a search for “Tiananmen Square” show only peaceful, touristy shots as it does in China?

Masiá is considering his next move, possibly planning to appeal the Spanish court’s ruling rather than pursuing a judgement against Google in the U.S. as the first judge ruled he should. If he does, hopefully the appeals court will uphold the decision, and Masiá will realize that though he got a bum-deal, it’s not Google’s responsibility to fix it. But given Spain’s mixed history of rulings about Google results, anything could happen.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story