Blog category: Internet
Just got this SOPA-related response from Sen. Durbin’s office in my email, regarding my earlier email. Suffice it to say that this doesn’t go into any details about how “reasonable steps to cease doing business” is a can of worms big enough to fit, like, a really big number of worms, and it doesn’t sound like he fully changed his mind. Still, the bills are tabled for now, so it’s all good.
Mr. Patrick Stack
(MY ADDRESS WAS HERE SO I BLOCKED IT OUT)
(TOO BAD, STALKERS)
Dear Mr. Stack:
Thank you for contacting me about the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I appreciate hearing from you.
The bipartisan PIPA bill (S. 968) was introduced to rein in foreign-based websites that have no purpose other than to sell or distribute pirated or counterfeit goods. U.S. law enforcement agencies already have authority to seize and shut down domestic websites that are dedicated to violating copyright or counterfeiting laws, and hundreds of sites have been shut down in recent years. However, our law enforcement agencies lack effective tools to stop foreign-based websites that are dedicated to the same illegal behavior. These websites deprive American innovators and businesses of revenue and result in the loss of American jobs.
PIPA aims to close the gap in our laws that enables rogue websites to simply locate themselves overseas in order to avoid accountability for stealing American intellectual property and selling pirated and counterfeit goods to Americans. The legislation would authorize the Justice Department to seek a court-ordered injunction against a foreign website if the court found the website to be dedicated to illegal piracy or counterfeiting. If an injunction were issued by the court, it could be served upon third-party payment processors, advertising networks, search engines and other companies who would then be obligated to take reasonable steps to cease doing business with the infringing website.
The drafters of this legislation tried to address the serious problem of foreign rogue websites in a way that respects due process, protects freedom of legislation, and preserves the vitality of the Internet. However, I have heard from many constituents that PIPA and a more expansive bill introduced in the House of Representatives, SOPA, fail to strike the right balance between the goals of combating illegal piracy and protecting the Internet. Both the House and the Senate have postponed consideration of these bills in order to engage in more discussion with stakeholders and achieve more consensus on a legislative approach. I support these efforts and hope that stakeholders can agree on a reasonable solution that addresses these important issues.
I will keep your concerns in mind as the Senate continues to consider these matters. Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to keep in touch.
Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator
I love to see the Internet blackouts going on today in protest of SOPA and PIPA. The public needs to understand that this legislation could put the sites they use every day at risk of private-industry censorship without any due process. I wrote this email to one of my Senators, Dick Durbin, who’s currently still supporting the legistlation:
Dear Senator Durbin:
As an Internet professional and a near-continuous user of all the wonderful benefits brought to us by this amazing technology, I urge you to oppose the SOPA and PIPA acts currently being debated in Congress. As a former employee of several online magazines, I fully recognize the need to fight piracy of intellectual property, but this poorly written legislation will break the fundamental structures of the Internet and will serve as a dangerous permission slip for private-industry censorship of websites without any due process. Please vote to protect America’s most dynamic economic sector, the interactive industry, by opposing this legislation and any attempts to clamp down on the economic freedom of the Internet.
Sincerely,
Patrick Stack
Chicago, IL
So get on Google’s anti-SOPA/PIPA page and register your opposition. Take it from an Internet dude – you don’t want this to pass.
It’s most user-friendly. Nice work, Raanan and crew.
8:45 a.m.: Awake to my smartphone’s hella annoying alarm ring. Stare at it cockeyed and fumble with it until I manage to drag the screen to “Snooze”.
9:28 a.m.: Roll out of bed. Stub my toe.
9:43 a.m.: Do my toothbrushing-facewashing thing while I check the BBC News Android app for news of the world and Chicagoist mobile site for news of the Windy City. Have wife tell me to stop playing with that damned phone already and come eat breakfast with the family.
9:51 a.m.: Finish light breakfast of cereal, fruit and tea to prime my stomach for the rest of the day. Warming up is important before a strenuous workout.
10:01 a.m.: Everybody’s finished and just chillin’ on their own around the house, so read my phone some more — this time, Deadspin and ESPN to prepare for the day’s three NFL games. Think about how adding a third non-Dallas / non-Detroit game has nothing to do with Thanksgiving traditions and is just a brilliantly underhanded way for the NFL to shoehorn a game onto its own network, thereby avoiding the need to share any revenue at all (even advertising) with the networks.
11:17 a.m.: Finish up a round of NFL reading and jump in on the food prep. Search for “mashed potato recipe” in my Gmail phone app as I forget my mom’s recipe for the 4th year in a row. Simultaneously celebrate and bemoan the fact that my phone fits me so well as a brain-augmenting device.
11:20 a.m.: Argue again that using a pressure cooker will mess up the potatoes because they don’t get enough potato-starch glue without boiling. Volunteer to clean up the pot later for being a pain in the ass and producing so much starch-glue.
11:44 a.m.: Look up a recipe on the Epicurious phone app in response to a query about yams, find an interesting-sounding ingredient, then decide this ingredient is too much work because it’s not directly in front of my lazy ass. Substitute butter instead.
12:02 p.m.: Chop celery for the stuffing while I pick at the bowl of cashews nearby. I’m finally looking at something that isn’t my phone.
12:30 p.m.: First NFL game begins in Detroit. On goes the TV while I find the mute button for when Terry Bradshaw and/or Nickelback appear. I really hope Joe Buck isn’t calling this one, but he usually sticks to Dallas thanks to the Troy Aikman connection. I already hate the Cowboys, so it’s not like he’ll ruin that game.
12:31 p.m.: Start checking the NFL scores against the Yahoo! Pro Football Pick ‘Em page because I forget the spread every five minutes. (For the record, I like Green Bay giving 6, Dallas giving 7 and San Francisco getting 3.5.)
3:14 p.m.: Lounging around for hours gives way to a guilty need to excuse the lounging around for hours. Hit the treadmill for an intended 45 minutes but laze out at 30. Track it on JEFit. Have some crotchety old-guy resident yell at me for making too much noise when I unstrap the velcro on my armband. (Florida!)
4:30 p.m.: Shower. Fit my belt one notch looser than normal. Google “history of potatoes” and find the tubers’ Andean origin fascinating.
5:30 p.m.: FOOD.
7:30 p.m.: Food aftermath involving the loosest pants I can find. More NFL. More spread-checking. Curse myself for not picking Detroit and Miami after they cover the spread and leave me 0-2.
8:01 p.m.: Finally have room for dessert: three kinds of pie, minimum. Cherry remains unsurpassed.
9:33 p.m.: Awake to a start from food/football coma. Realize Baltimore is blowing out San Francisco. Check the weather on my phone for tomorrow and call it a day — A DAY OF SUCCESS.
Happy Thanksgiving, all.
For many fall Sundays now, I’ve trotted out the door in my Steeler gear to drain $3 Coors Lights with assorted bar-based bits of Steeler Nation. I have many fond memories of this from my 20s, but at age Lame, I’d rather just watch the game on my couch like the NFL-loving entitled American that I am. Between affordable good beer, commercial-vanquishing HD DVR, Trader Joe’s chicken taquitos and the freedom to react as violently as I should when the Steelers’ practice-squad OT goes down with an ACL tear, there’s no way I’m dragging my ass an entire block (!) to Durkins’ Bud-soaked confines.
What to do? The Steelers play three or four Thursday, Monday or Sunday-night games each year, and they show up as the alternate televised game here in Chicago every once in a while, but that only represents half of a 16-game season if I’m lucky. I might be luckier if I lived more proximate to Pittsburgh, but I don’t. The most well-known option for non-resident fans is NFL Sunday Ticket from DirecTV, which has brought many dollars to many bar owners, but some of us can’t get a DirecTV hookup due to building restrictions or whatever else. Enter Sunday Ticket on the Go.
STotG is the multi-platform version of Sunday Ticket: it’s built to run on smartphones, tablets and “big browser”, a.k.a. your basic Chrome / IE / Firefox / Safari. DirecTV says STotG is strictly for households that can’t get DirecTV due to line-of-sight issues or restrictions on satellite dishes. I don’t know how they enforce this policy — is some offshore firm logging my IP and running test signups in my area to see if I’m cheating? — but our building isn’t cool with satellite dishes (I think), so I was golden to sign up, once I got over the sticker shock of $350. (Damn. And a major point below.) So, the review:
Interface(s): Pretty good. DirecTV did a phat job of fitting the application to the platform. I like to use my work laptop to watch the games, as I can either hook its HD output up to the TV for mucho size or sit it on my lap for sehr schön interactivity. (See this bitchin’ four-game screenshot.) Last week while in Jacksonville, I checked out a few games on the STotG Android phone app and the interface worked well there, too, in a way that wasn’t just a cut-and-paste of the web interface. I like the constantly updating scores, and particularly the inclusion of the RedZone channel — if I’m feeling information overload, I’ll just click that mug and overload is underloaded, or whatever the hell that should say. (RedZone is not a part of my cable package and not yet offered online, plus RedZone obviously wouldn’t include entire Steeler games, so it’s not much of a stand-alone option for now.) I do wish STotG would have highlights show up in chronological order when I click “Play All” highlights, and Twitter junkies like me would also like to see publicly shareable links to individual highlights. So DirecTV: get on that.
Performance: Eh, OK. The video looks good on my phone, but only so-so on the PC’s greater resolution. I like to hook up to my TV via the PC’s HD output, which came through decently but not as well as the broadcast from a game on HD cable. I’m not as good on video-format technology, but it looks like STotG is a 720p HD stream, and that naturally isn’t going to look as good as the 1080p feed coming from the cable box. I also had some account-logout failure in the 3rd quarter of the Houston game that made me miss the Steelers’ only TD, which sucked because that game didn’t exactly have many other highlights for Pittsburgh. There are also some video-quality issues when you try to do the four-games-at-once quadrant view, but they clear up once all four games have been tuned in for a few minutes.
Value: Sucks. Let’s do some seasonal math up in this bitch:
- Bar: 16 games * $20 tab per week (beers and food) = $320
- STotG: (Fees: $350 / 16 games) + (beer: $8 beer-snob two-week supply * 16/2) + ($4 two-week taquito supply * 16/2) = (Per game: $21.88 + $4 + $2 = $27.88) * 16 games = $446.08
That’s a pretty significant difference when you account for food and beer. Excluding those, you’re paying $21.88 per game for STotG — comparable to a bar, but in what crazy world does someone skip food and drink when watching football? That would be like Eric Cantor conversing with someone who isn’t pre-screened to agree with him. I could try to put a dollar value on not having to leave home to watch the game, but then that’s a lot of work for a post I’m not getting paid to write. The point is, dropping some cost-benefit analysis on this STotG offer comes up with a questionable result, particularly in light of available substitutes …
What I’m going to do instead of STotG next year: RedZone plus NFL Rewind equals Tha Shiznit. If NFL RedZone gets this streaming thing going, I plan to combine that with NFL Rewind and get my pro-football fix for a mere $30 plus whatever NFL RedZone charges, which will surely be less than $350.
This plan has some holes: the extent of most of my live Steeler-watching will be RedZone cutaways, and I’ll have to wait up to a day to get a full game on Rewind. But the pro-Rewind Slate dialogue between Tommy Craggs (who was a sports editor at The Daily Northwestern at the same time I was a city-desk editor) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (who worked at TIME Magazine while I was at TIME.com) convinced me that NFL Rewind is a life-changing opportunity to both enjoy the NFL on a new level and shamelessly name-drop journalists I’ve encountered in my career. And you can watch condensed games in 30 minutes? Sheeit, my primetime TV lineup is set for weeks. All for just 20 percent of 2011′s outlandish football-watching cost.
In conclusion: STotG is probably not worth the money. I shelled out for it this year, but having done some more research, I think RedZone + Rewind is the way to go for the 2012 season. Just in time for the Steelers’ many old dudes to wither and fall off the roster.
I’ve been reading up today on what I once thought was a pretty cool and bold redesign, but now is an evident disaster: the relaunch of Target.com after the company’s break from Amazon.
Fun dog photos on the homepage aside, it seems the site is plagued by timeout errors, vanishing wedding/baby registries and unresponsive customer-service centers. (I haven’t seen this myself, but then I’m not a big target.com customer in the first place: For the types of things I buy online, I usually just go straight to their ex-e-commerce partner.) This is sort of like the fresh coat of paint on a dilapidated house, only in this instance the house is brand-new construction where the owner hired 20 contractors and expected them to coordinate. That number might, just might, be the source of these issues.
If anything, this is an important reminder that the underlying technology has always got to be solid and the first consideration — great design is everything, but you need Atlas holding everything up. It’s therefore important to pick a firm that can coordinate both technology and design. I’m searching around for ideas on this one.
When I was 18 and went off to Northwestern, I thought the newfound ability to centrally store, play and enlarge my music library through compressed MP3 files was the coolest thing ever. (Then-beloved Winamp also had those great skins: The purple theme and NU logo from Daniel’s Winamp Skins (still online since 1998!) went so well with Busch Light and DJ Kool’s “Let Me Clear My Throat” in a Bobb dorm room.)
When I was 23 and got around to an iTunes account and MP3 player, I thought being able to legally buy music for cheap and run the whole library on a handheld device was the coolest thing ever. (You gotta outgrow the college piracy at some point.)
Yet eventually my fascination with those two digital-music mediums wore out, and the poor interface and DRM annoyances, respectively, sank me into sonic complacence. But based on my experience, the newest (at least to the U.S.) digital-music wunderkind has the promise to stick around for a lifetime of ear-splitting goodness: Spotify.
I’ve had a Spotify paid account for almost two months now, and this fits into my “the bomb” pantheon of software. For $10 a month, I get access to unlimited plays of more than 15 million instantly retrieved songs, whenever and wherever I want. The Spotify Android app duplicates all of this functionality on my phone, including being able to play tracks without the Internet connection if I’ve created and synced the tunes to a playlist. Normally I’m a cheap bastard online, but hell yeah I’ll pay $10 for that type of music-fan elation and convenience.
Spotify has been an iTunes killer for me because its catalog has just one DRM gate. I have no idea how $10 per month makes enough money for Spotify to get access to the Universal, Warner, EMI, Sony and Merlin catalogs (UPDATE 10/11 – Seems they aren’t making enough money to do that) — according to The Guardian, it’s because the creative talent is getting screwed on their share (shocking) — but for us end users, the goal has always been to get in the door and gorge on as many songs as we want. Spotify chief Daniel Ek is completely correct in this article when he says that any music service needs to be more convenient than piracy to be successful, and Spotify miraculously does that with the companies’ cooperation.
Providing this single, convenient gate is where the main competitors fall short. iTunes’ single-track DRM means it would theoretically cost me $14 million to fully access the catalog, which is quite a bit more than the $12,000 I’d pay to access Spotify for 100 years. Spotify may tie me to its application for playing any Spotify-accessed music, and I have to add tracks to a playlist to take them with me offline, but so many iTunes downloads restrict playability to iTunes and Apple systems that this is basically a wash between the two. (I’ve lost several purchased albums by switching out of iTunes, the most anger-inducing being Meantime by Helmet, which was a great “time to kick ass at weights or PowerPoint” album.) On the unlimited-play side, Grooveshark ostensibly does a lot of the same stuff as Spotify for free, but it’s got huge shortcomings: Grooveshark’s catalog depends on user uploads, playing local files is a convoluted pain in the ass, the mobile app requires a paid subscription, and I have to be connected to the Internet to play anything.
The importance of playlists in Spotify means I’ve made some themed gems, including “Destroy All Workouts”, “Your Basic NYC Meat-Market Bar Circa 2004″, “Yes, I Sometimes Listen to Hipster/Indie Shit” and “Music For Baby Boomers in Powerboats at the Three Rivers Regatta”. I also use the Starred playlist to rotate songs in and out of music-binge mode, so that’s a pretty eclectic grouping that currently features Lil’ Wayne, The National, Megadeth, Nicki Minaj, Nirvana, The Kills and The Archies. (“Sugar Sugar” is still the shit after 40 years.) The best part? You too can subscribe to “Music For Baby Boomers in Powerboats at the Three Rivers Regatta”, because Spotify did a great job with playlist sharing across Facebook friends using the service.
To close, the executive summary of this post: Spotify is great.
Like most Americans, I can instantly recall what I was doing, thinking and feeling on September 11, 2001. Within a year I was working for the national news media in a New York City still processing the attack, and the ongoing military response to that day has been at the center of my brother’s, brother-in-law’s and friends’ time in the service. It’s been a divisive decade for the United States, and we’re entering the 2010s arguing about how to reverse the demoralizing political and economic damage — much of it self-inflicted — that we still face today.
That ongoing trauma sparks two emotional reactions in our culture: reactive anger at all that’s happened and all the negativity we’ve had to endure, and grief for the trauma itself. Even at the early stages of the anniversary, these two emotions are guiding how we look back. Full-throated political commentary is plentiful about the events subsequent to Sept. 11th (Politico, Hitchens in Slate), but remembrances of the day itself are muted and emotional in a way that’s probably the only possible theme (NBC New York, the upcoming TIME special). It’s a delicate balancing act when approaching something visceral for all of us, and it’s what will guide this week online.
I was 21 on Sept. 11th, and my own past decade featured the myriad ups and downs that that time in life represents. As much negative emotion as Sept. 11th and the American experience since then has brought, and even with some of the tougher things that occurred in my own life in that time, there have been so many positive things that coincided. Humans can never eliminate the sadness that’s part of life and existence, and this commemoration is a powerful reminder of that. But I’m also quietly thankful that those positive things have still occurred despite the wider circumstances, and that keeps me going.
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