Savage Popcorn

My current issue of New Scientist hasn’t turned up yet but Slashdot has linked to an interesting article about the science behind the upcoming Iron Man film. They note that the technology in the film is a lot more firmly rooted in reality than you might realised – and much more realistic than the usual pretend science that infests so many of these types of film.

It’s worth reading and, I have to admit, makes the film seem a lot more appealing than it has done up to now.

Two German companies have patented (via) technology for sending scented text messages between mobile phones. The opportunities are (nearly) endless.

Six months ago I decided to take another look at Linux and installed Ubuntu in a second partition on my PC. Not wanting to dual boot indefinitely I decided to see how things went for six months and then reinstall with either a fully windows or fully Ubuntu environment.

Yesterday Canonical – the people behind Ubuntu – released version 8.04 of the operating system and, not having booted into Windows since early January, I had no qualms about wiping Windows from my hard drive.

And, with a bit of preparation up front, it all went incredibly smoothly. The short version is: backup the home folder; format the drive and install; restore the home folder; reboot.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play around with it as yet but the first thing I noticed was how fast it is. The system boots up in under a minute and applications are launching at a blistering speed.

But for now, it’s back to Jamendo to download (again) all of the music I deleted in order to fit my data on a USB key.

When the recent, and rather pointless, format war between Sony’s Blu-Ray and Toshiba’s HD-DVD was at its height, several commentators started predicting the imminent death of the shiny disk in favour of digital downloads across the *cough* unlimited *cough* bandwidth now available across the internet.

The New York Times’ David Pogue (via) lists four reasons why these predictions are premature:

First, downloadable movies require high-speed Internet connections - and only about half of American households have them. That number won’t change much for years.

Second, downloaded movies don’t include the director’s commentaries, deleted scenes, alternate endings, alternate language soundtracks or other DVD goodies. It’s just not as rich an experience.

Third, movie downloads don’t deliver the audio and video quality of DVD discs - even standard-def ones. Internet movies are compressed to download faster, which affects picture quality, and offer older, more compressed audio soundtracks than modern DVDs. (Check out the astounding quality-comparison photos at http://tinyurl.com/3e488m for details.)

Finally, today’s movie-download services bear the greasy policy fingerprints of the movie studio executives - and when it comes to the new age of digital movies, these people are not, ahem, known for their vision.

I don’t doubt that digital delivery of films has a future and may even become the norm. But this isn’t going to happen any time soon.

If you’ve been been following the High Definition DVD War as vaguely as I have, and didn’t buy a HD-DVD player, you may enjoy this piece of YouTubery.

Found at the Interplanetary blog.

The Register thinks so.

DRM is bad for society because it attempts to monitor what we do and how we live our digital lives. It is asking us to give up control of something which gives us some degree of democracy, freedom and the ability to communicate with a large group of people.

- Peter Brown of the Free Software Foundation on the news that Western Digital has blocked its customers from sharing media files that are stored on networked drives.

Digital rights management (DRM) is an umbrella term that refers to access control technologies used by publishers and copyright holders to limit usage of digital media or devices. It’s been touted by various media companies as a way to control piracy, and criticised elsewhere as doing nothing more than making consumers pay twice for stuff they’ve already bought. Now Steve Jobs has admitted (via) that the latter is the case.

Steve Jobs has apparently been pitching Hollywood studios on the idea of selling “premium” DVDs that include an iTunes-compatible version of the movie. For an extra $3 or $4, you can buy the privilege of playing your legally-purchased movie on the device of your choice—well, the Apple-manufacturered device of your choice, anyway.

This is known as space shifting and - for CDs - is considered fair use. But for DVDs, Apple wants to make you pay for the privilege.

Back in November, Energia – the people behind Star Wreck – started an experiment in community creativity by asking the members of their forums to to design elements around the Nazi base on the far side of the Moon for their upcoming film, Iron Sky.

The amount, diversity, creativity and sheer quality of the submissions were a pleasant surprise for us – we knew to expect the community to be active, but it was nice to see how eagerly people took to the task and how much effort they put to their work. Based on a month of active discussion on the forum, we have now put together a selection of the best ideas and formulations, and the next step will be to refine them into elements for the Iron Sky demo. The thread on our board amassed a total of 283 replies from 53 individual participants, for a grand total of almost 20 forum pages of discussion.

Creative communality has once again demonstrated its power, for which a great big thank-you is in order to all participants! This thread will make a fine example to show filmmakers when discussing the potential of communities in motion pictures, but the process was by no means an uncomplicated one. It is not a question of whether communities can offer new avenues for filmmaking, but rather of how to control, motivate and schedule the community.

The experiment was so successful that Energia are developing a Star Wreck Studios platform in order to build a better tool with which to extend the concept. And it is an interesting concept, and one that potentially allows filmmakers – especially independent filmmakers – to access a wealth of talent and creativity.

The proof, of course, will be seen when the film is released.

About a month ago, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sent a letter to 25 major US universities urging them to download and install a ‘university toolkit’ to help identify students who were downloading/sharing movie files. This let to security concerns being raised since any university that installed the software would be placing a virtual wiretap on their networks for the MPAA (and the rest of the world) to listen in on all of the school’s traffic.

The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user’s machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited. Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser.

This sledgehammer attempt to deal with online piracy was taken offline on Monday… because it violated copyright laws.

The toolkit was cobbled together from a suite of open-source applications, based on the Ubutu Linux distribution, a fact not lost on Matthew Garrett, a Cambridge (UK) Ubuntu developer who sits on the distribution’s technical board. He and others in the open source community wrote to the MPAA to point out that - by not releasing the source code or providing a written offer for the code - the were in violation of the software’s GPL licence and, therefore, breaking the law.

After his concerns were ignored, Matthew Garrett pursued the matter with the ISP hosting the site universitytoolkit.org. He wrote on his blog: “I did attempt to contact them by email and phone before resorting to the more obnoxious behaviour of contacting the ISP.

“No reply to my email, and the series of friendly receptionists I got bounced between had no idea who would be responsible but promised me someone would call back. No joy there, either.”

He then sent the ISP a DMCA takedown request (before and after shots here).

Much could be said about the irony of copyright enforcers violating other people’s licenses, but to keep it simple: kudos to Matthew Garret for successfully demonstrating that GPL and Free licenses do need to be taken seriously.