Friday Tunes

Mercedes Skye is the only singer I could think of to run for this "Fridays Tunes".

Her attitude to putting herself out there and publishing content on YouTube epitomises what a free and level playing field for the Internet is all about.

I wonder if she knows that the death of the net neutrality last week means that someone coming up behind her in a few years wont have the opportunities that she enjoyed.

:(

Dean

Digital Media Magazine Article

This is an opinion piece I wrote for an online & print technology magazine in Australia called “Digital Media” – the online version was just released today, I thought it might interest some of you.

I’ll probably post the much longer piece on my blog at www.collins.net.pr/blog (lol - I’m a blogger not a writer) at a later time as well because for the sake of brevity a lot was edited out of this piece.

I don’t think people understand Net Neutrality was struck down last week in the name of preventing kiddy porn, this is the “first act” in a play which will radically change the internet we all benefit from.

Regards,
Dean Collins

dean@collins.net.pr

Adobe AIR is flat...?

http://lifehacker.com/396393/top-10-apps-worth-installing-adobe-air-for

Is it just me or have people reading this been ‘unimpressed’ with the ‘volume’ of adobe air applications released?

When Adobe AIR was first announced last year I expected every man and his dog to be building apps like this – I’m yet to hear of anyone in NY building a small independent app or see anything on offer that blows me out of the water the way I thought I would.

Are people all ‘developed’ out after writing Facebook apps, browser toolbar apps, etc etc – is a ROI now a critical factor on creating for the sake of creating or is there some limitation in AIR/Silverlight/Firefox(or whatever their proprietary chromeless runtime was called that i said was always going to be a dog) I haven’t read about?


Cheers,
Dean

Attorney general says looking at child porn is a-ok with him

"ISPs: We're limiting our own Usenet groups, not blocking others".
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9967004-38.html

So according to Cuomo's office, it's ok for ISP's to disconnect 99.7% of usenet groups from customers without any explanation BUT that if you want to pay $15 to one of the other Usenet providers it's all cool to go and look at child porn on their servers thats a-ok.

I cant work out what is more laughable that he's strong arming ISP's to drop usenet and he thinks this is a good thing OR that he feels he's gotten enough press so going after the hard work of actually blocking child porn is a waste of his efforts and too hard.

When exactly is this guy up for re-election again???


Cheers,
Dean

The great Firewall of Cuomo

Imagine if you went into work on Monday and only 8 out of every 1000 websites you saved in your browsers favorites folder was deemed 'cuomo' friendly?

What would you do then?

Will it be too late before you take time to notice?

Cheers,
Dean

And so now it begins......

Verizon Cutting Access To Entire Alt.* Usenet Hierarchy
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/15/1258238

"Verizon has declared it will no longer offer access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups to its customers. This stems from last week's agreement for major ISPs to cut off access to 'newsgroups and Web sites' that make child pornography available. The story notes, 'No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups — out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.' In response, Verizon will cut its customers off from a large portion of Usenet, as it will only carry newsgroups in the Big 8."


This is plain and simple bullshit - you are either offering internet access (yes the whole internet or you aren't)

It's the commercial companies right to offer a 'cut down version' of the internet but if they do they should lose all exclusive rights allocated to them by the federal government so that Verzion no longer have any federally awarded benefits of sole exclusive provider or any other common carrier status mandated subsidies etc. Your tax dollars are paying for their interpretive editorial decisions.

To be able to make what amounts to an 'editorial' non court mandated decision to cut off parts of the internet makes Verizon no better than China. In fact it makes them worse than China because at least China is upfront about their censorship, Verizon are hiding behind the guise of 'protecting the children from kiddy porn',

Yeh ok but what about the other 99.5% of the alt. groups you just killed? Yep alt.startrek.creative. very dangerous stuff.

What this means in practice is that, thanks to the New York state attorney general, Verizon customers will lose out on innocent discussions.

Verizon is retaining only eight newsgroup hierarchies, even though over 1,000 hierarchies exist. That means not carrying perfectly innocuous--and, in fact, very useful--newsgroups like symantec.customerservice.general, us.military, microsoft.public.excel, and fr.soc.economie.

Please forward this post on to every political figure with a brain (apart from Andrew Cuomo) who makes decisions concerning Verizon's rights to common carrier status - they cant have it both ways.


Cheers,
Dean
P.S. If you dont think Net Neutrality is the biggest issue affecting information publication and distribution in your life I challenge you to watch this short video and tell me you dont care http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/net-neutrality.html

DIY UAV

Way too cool anyone know if there is a New York based UAV club?




Cheers.
Dean

Copywho?

photo by jimieye

We were just discussing how copyright has been stretched and twisted so many times that it really just isn't designed properly to handle internet communications -- and a good case in point may be the funny little spat we covered a few weeks back between Prince and Radiohead. If you don't recall, Prince performed a cover of a Radiohead song at a concert. Someone in the audience videotaped it and put the video on YouTube. Prince's representatives demanded that the content be taken down under a DMCA request -- raising all sorts of questions. After all, Prince didn't own the copyright on the song. That's owned by Radiohead, whose lead singer wanted the video back online. Prince didn't own the copyright to the video either, since he didn't take it. So how could he use the DMCA to take down the video?

But, it's not that simple, apparently. As Ethan Ackerman details, as lawyers began to think about the situation, the more confused they got, noting that maybe there was a right under anti-bootlegging laws.
(more)... http://techdirt.com/articles/20080610/1651401368.shtml#comments

Love it - especially seeing Prince is being a prat lately (though I still love his music).


Cheers,
Dean

Unlimited data.....drives product decisions?

Interesting spin on the iPhones unlimited data plan;

http://newteevee.com/2008/06/12/qik-iphone-was-video-capable-all-along/

Does anyone know if AT&T have 'fair use limits' on the iPhone contracts?

Do you really think that AT&T forced Steve Jobs not to include video recording capability into the iPhone so that AT&T wouldn't have to pony up all the bandwidth that Qik users are now going to chew up?

- Oh and trust me they are going to chew up bandwidth, I've seen a heap of people fall in love with this application and use it to 'death' - it's only that it's been restricted to the N-series nokias that it hasn't seen wider deployment.

Not that what they are shooting is any good...though i have seen a couple of tech conference sessions that I thought cool that was worth watching etc.

So the question is who will be the first suspended iPhone user for streaming 24x7 of their tropical fish tank.


Cheers,
Dean

Voip Users Conference Call Friday the 13th 12 noon USA EDT

I just wanted to give you a quick heads up that I’m going to be speaking on the Voip users conference call tomorrow Friday the 13th, 12 noon USA EDT (-4 gmt)

The indial number will be +1-724-444-7444
Call ID 22622
Download the real time chat client at Talkshoe (http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/22622) or log in using IRC #voip-users-conference on freenode.net

Tomorrow I’m going to be talking about the new Vdex-40 ip-pbx appliance from http://www.taa.com/ . I’ve been playing with this unit for the last few weeks and I think it’s got some really nice aspects for a ‘mainstream’ non geek asterisk solution.

This is the first Asterisk appliance to have dual cpu’s. This along with flash memory storage and hardware based codec’s and echo cancellation, 4 FXO ports directly built in (e.g. connection for regular telephone lines) and SIP support for up to 6 voip providers and 35 SIP extensions makes it quiet and dependable solution to implement Asterisk into any small to medium business.

For those of you on the list that are commercial voip dealers/distributors there is a limited number of ”not for resale” in house-demo units available at 40% off rrp. Please don’t pass this URL to end clients but details and requirements can be found at www.taa.com/buy_demo.html

If you want to purchase/install vdex-40 units for your own clients and are in the USA/Canada then go to this form http://www.taa.com/dealer_application.html and the TAA guys will get in touch with you, the sooner you get listed on the TAA Dealer List the better as they are farming out all retail enquires to their dealer list depending on original location of the end user query.

If you have any questions feel free to forward them to TAA sales guys at vdexsales@taa.com but otherwise look forward to talking with on tomorrows call.

Also if you cant make tomorrows call it will be available as a mp3 from http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/22622 about 24 hours after the call (you should also browse through some of the other past calls as well, eg. I also ran this talk back on May 9th http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-109845.mp3?dl=1).


Cheers,
Dean Collins

P.S. The call went great - for anyone find this post after Friday the 13th you can download the mp3 here http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-122833.mp3