Published August 9th, 2007
in Security and Software.
“There will always be something that falls into the gray area,” BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa told the Wall Street Journal. That’s where his company comes in. BayTSP is currently employed by Viacom for over $100,000 per month—other companies pay up to $500,000 per month—for its services. For that money, BayTSP sends out over a million takedown notices every month and says that clips are often removed within a couple of hours. — Ars Technica
I was reading today on Ars Technica about BayTSP (a digital copyright protection firm) and how they were contracted by Viacom to find and eliminate pirated clips on video sharing sites like YouTube. This is a very interesting idea but could only happen on the west coast. Viacom supposedly pays $100k per month for their services which include paying individuals $11 per hour to sift through videos and send a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take down notice. On top of that BayTSP claims they have other corporations paying $500k per month for the same services. Now I can’t imagine many other corporations with the same size pirated portfolio as Viacom on sites like YouTube, so who really is paying those $500k per month fees?
There is no way to see inside the operations at BayTSP but from what I can imagine they have a numerous employees working in cube land and once they spot infringing content they can submit the URL for further investigation. The employees tasked with verifying the content of course would have more experience in these matters and more than likely use a standard DMCA notice which they just paste the offending content URLs into. I just can’t believe and entire industry has sprung up over the past ten years based just on watching online videos!
I think this just proves that DRM and that old media fighting new media is here to stay and prosper!
Published August 2nd, 2007
in Software.
Microsoft’s first ad-supported office suite is almost here; it just happens to not be Microsoft Office. The Redmond giant has opted to use a more expendable test subject for its foray into ad-supported software: the much overlooked Microsoft Works. The existence of the pilot program has been confirmed by Microsoft to Ars Technica and other news out — Ars Technica
So Microsoft plans on releasing software that retails for $39.95 for the low low price of free if you are willing to look at ads. I applaud Microsoft for venturing into Google’s playground of ad supported software but who actually uses Works any more? I haven’t seen it installed on a PC in years, and when I did see it I was uninstalling it for people! I think Microsoft needs to start out with some more serious software otherwise they are setting the whole program up for failure. Add on to the fact this program will only be available from OEMs like Dell, HP, Toshiba and it’s easy to see how this won’t work! You can get Works installed for free on most Dell PCs. So how do you get users to utilize ad supported software when it’s already available to them for free?
The Microsoft Expression development tools look great and I think a ‘lite’ version would be the perfect target for the ad supported software market! Once that is finished you would just need to make the software available to everyone and Microsoft would be making a great way to thousands of more developers attached to Microsoft products instead of Adobe’s!
Published July 31st, 2007
in Software and News.
The iTunes Store said Tuesday it had passed a milestone, selling more than 3 billion songs since launching four years ago.
….
In April, the Cupertino-based company said it had sold more than 100 million iPods. It reached that milestone in the five and a half years since the first iPod was sold. –Yahoo News (AP)
Selling 3 billion songs in four years is impressive but if you put that number into perspective with 100 million iPods sold that only works out to be 30 purchased songs per iPod ever sold. That is a LOT of ‘ripped’ music on to the world’s iPods!
Published March 25th, 2007
in Security and Software.
While surfing Google News today, there were some very interesting articles on Microsoft Vista’s security.
In case any one is interested here are the original links in the image:
Published February 27th, 2007
in Software.
Fasterfox checks robots.txt where a webmaster can disable features which make Fasterfox so great, Here it has been edited to disable this robots.txt checking so that now if you use this Fasterfox your speeds will be increased on all websites regardless! Read more
I am all for a user being able to use FasterFox to prefetch information, but it does come at a cost to the web site owner. The FasterFox authors knew that their plugin can and will lead to higher server loads, more bandwidth usage, and slower page loads for everyone else. That is why they put in the option to disable this plugin on a site by site basis! I cannot believe that someone would want to purposely disable this feature! They have the nerve to say ” I decided that people need faster speeds and the server shouldn’t be able to easily disable this :P”, it’s my server, it’s my web site, and it’s my decision to not let you abuse it!
This kind of attitude is what drives people to not share information and in the end hurts the Internet as a whole! It seems a lot of people think running a web site is cheap and that they can use all of the resources they can to make their seem experience better without thinking of anyone else!
Also if you administer a web site and wish to block the normal Fasterfox plugin just add this to your robotos.txt
User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /
