Kids don't talk on the phone anymore

Weird:

Nearly all age groups are spending less time talking on the phone; boomers in their mid-50s and early 60s are the only ones still yakking as they did when Ma Bell was America's communications queen. But the fall of the call is driven by 18- to 34-year-olds, whose average monthly voice minutes have plunged from about 1,200 to 900 in the past two years, according to research by Nielsen. Texting among 18- to 24-year-olds has more than doubled in the same period, from an average of 600 messages a month two years ago to more than 1,400 texts a month, according to Nielsen.

Young people say they avoid voice calls because the immediacy of a phone call strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less-intimate pleasures of texting, e-mailing, Facebooking or tweeting. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip of an arriving text.

US judge kills LimeWire, used by 60% of music pirates

A few days ago, a US district court judge ruled against LimeWire, effectively forcing the company to fold its extremely popular filesharing product:

While Wood's decision won't come close to killing online piracy--there's still BitTorrent and plenty of other ways to share files--she likely has scuttled a peer-to-peer service used by nearly 60 percent of the people who download songs. She also may have ushered out the era of large, well-funded file-sharing services, at least the kind that help distribute mostly copyright-infringing content. By making Gorton personally liable for damages, Wood served notice that operating these kinds of businesses is now a very risky financial endeavor. If the RIAA gets its way, Gorton, Lime Wire, and Lime Group will collectively be responsible for paying damages of $450 million.

BitTorrent is still the major player in the filesharing game, with the protocol carrying about half of all internet data. It's harder to use than LimeWire and other standalone filesharing applications (especially to download individual songs), but it's possible that the death of LimeWire will spur either easier-to-use BT clients, or broader consumer knowledge about how to use BitTorrent as is. And once consumers learn to use BitTorrent to download albums, it's only a short step to video piracy, BitTorrent's niche, which has the potential to be much more disruptive.

Did Google's unsubsidized Nexus fail in a free enough market?

The Tech Liberation Front has a post about Google's failure to attract customers to its unsubsidized smart phones, and reasons that the widespread subsidization of phones by wireless providers (the reason your iPhone only costs $199) must be the market, revealed.

I'm a bit weary of the "market has spoken" kind of talk, though, considering how managed the wireless market really is. The government doles out spectrum rather arbitrarily, shaping the market in a pretty heavy-handed way. Even an auction system is still imposing a perhaps unnecessary layer of government control – open spectrum and competition in interference avoidance might utilize the spectrum more efficiently than either the status quo or an auctions.

I'm not sure how exactly the government intervention is pushing carriers towards offering subsidized phones, but the whole industry is just too managed to be accepted at face value as a working market. I'm not saying that there should necessarily be a complete free-for-all, but until the government does with long distance-capable bands what it did with the frequencies now used for wifi, I'm going to be skeptical of any weird things that the wireless industry comes up with.

Here is my archive of open spectrum-related posts, for those interested in the idea of ending government control of the airwaves.

Military press conferences as "hypnotizing chickens"

The NYT has a weird article about PowerPoint (over)use in the military, but the last-liner is the funniest thing I've read in the NYT in months:

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

Apple's secrecy kills...literally

In the wake of the leaked iPhone 4 there has been a lot of discussion on the interwebs about Apple's notoriously tight controls on its yet-to-be announced products, and while reading about them I found this fascinating and slightly chilling article published last December about Apple's "Worldwide Loyalty Team," a.k.a. the Apple Gestapo. Here's an excerpt:

The operation, as Tom calls it, is not anything special. It is not one of a kind event. It's just a normal practice, and the process is pretty simple: The manager will instruct all employees to stay at their desks, telling them what to do and what to expect at any given time. The Apple Gestapo never handles the communication. They are there, present, supervising the supervisors, making sure everything goes as planned.

All cellphones are then taken. Usually, they collect them all at the same time, which means that the process could take a long time. If you need to contact the exterior during the time your cellphone is under examination, you will have to ask for permission, and your call will be monitored.

They don't ask for cameras because there are no cameras at Apple: Employees are not allowed to get into the campus with them. If the cellphone is an iPhone, it gets backed up onto a laptop. "In fact, at the beginning they used to say that the iPhones were really their property, since Apple gave every employee a free iPhone," he points out. All the employees are asked to unlock and disable any locking features in their cellphones, and then the special forces will proceed to check them for recent activity.

They back up everything and go through all the other phones' text messages and pictures. If you have porn in your phone, they will see it. If you have text messages to your spouse, lover, or Tiger Woods, they will see them, too. Just like that. No privacy, no limits.

In fact, the pressure to keep secrets is so strong that Foxconn – one of Apple's Chinese supplier who produces the iPhone – once had its "security team" drive an employee to commit suicide after he lost an iPhone prototype. Not Apple per se, but I have a feeling that if he had lost a Palm prototype, he'd still be alive today.

The Supreme Court struggles to understand what a text message is

The Supreme Court, struggling to understand what a text message is:

The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. - who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer - asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”

Other justices’ questions showed that they probably don’t spend a lot of time texting and tweeting away from their iPhones either.

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.

“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider.

“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.

Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.

“Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.

I've heard stereotypes of Supreme Court justices as old and out of touch, but damn! John Roberts is barely 55!

Match fixing scandal rocks Korean gaming scene

I guess this mean Starcraft is officially a big-time sport...at least in Korea?

The largest scandal in e-sports history is currently unfolding in Korea, with revelations that a number of current pro gamers are involved with match set-ups and illegal betting.

While the gamers are un-named at this point, the story is said to touch many A-list StarCraft celebrities – including sAviOr, Ja Mae Yoon – one of the best-known and most successful players of all time.

At this stage, we hear that various pro gamers have been found intentionally losing matches, as well as leaking their team’s replay files to illegal gambling groups.

The article als includes this interesting bit about the Korean legal system:

As part of Korea’s human rights laws, it is illegal to release criminals’ names – they can only be implied – which means that as the police have now gotten involved, we may never be officially told who was involved in this drama. Unofficially, however, it’s only a matter of time before fingers are pointed and pro gamers find themselves without a job.

I know Japan has a notoriously high (99.8%?) conviction rate, so it's surprising that (South) Korea affords so much protection to the prosecuted. (Not trying to conflate Japan and Korea, but I know they share a similar cultural and legal [I think?] heritage.) I'm guessing it has something to do with East Asian shame culture – prison is one thing, but the shame of having gone to prison is probably worse.

Wikileaks faces existential meta question...

...and passes with flying colors:

What’s Wikileaks, the net’s foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list of email addresses belonging to the site’s confidential donors as a leaked document? [...]

Wikileaks, which has been criticized for lacking discretion in deciding whether to release documents or not, published the email and the donors’ email addresses on Wednesday. The entry noted that the email was submitted "possibly to test the project’s principles of complete impartiality when dealing with whistleblowers."

One notable email address belongs to convicted former hacker Adrian Lamo, who now runs his own security company. In a Twitter post on Saturday, Lamo noted the screw-up, writing "Thanks WikiLeaks, for leaking your donor list.[...] That’s dedication." See more in his comment to this story.

Russia's porous borders

Apparently half of Russia's cell phones are smuggled into the country:

Counterfeit phones currently make up 2 percent to 3 percent of the Russian market, according to estimates by Mobiset.ru, a telecoms portal. Total contraband phones, a category that includes both counterfeit and authentic phones that have been smuggled into the country, account for about half of all mobile phones currently sold in Russia.

It sounds shocking at first, but I wonder if the rate isn't much different from that of other ordinary products like cigarettes and computers.

And by the way, the English-language Moscow Times is a surprisingly good paper.

The iTunes Store: just a detour on the way to a world without intellectual property

Tim Lee has an interesting analysis of the shortcomings of Apple's iPad, but at the end he makes what I believe is a very prescient, more general point about the future of intellectual property and digital media:

This is of a piece with the rest of Apple’s media strategy. Apple seems determined to replicate the 20th century business model of paying for copies of content in an age where those copies have a marginal cost of zero. Analysts often point to the strategy as a success, but I think this is a misreading of the last decade. The parts of the iTunes store that have had the most success—music and apps—are tied to devices that are strong products in their own right. Recall that the iPod was introduced 18 months before the iTunes Store, and that the iPhone had no app store for its first year. In contrast, the Apple TV, which is basically limited to only playing content purchased from the iTunes Store, has been a conspicuous failure. People don’t buy iPods and iPhones in order to use the iTunes store. They buy from the iTunes store because it’s an easy way to get stuff onto their iPods and iPhones.

Apple is fighting against powerful and fundamental economic forces. In the short term, Apple’s technological and industrial design prowess can help to prop up dying business models. But before too long, the force of economic gravity will push the price of content down to its marginal cost of zero. And when it does, the walls of Apple’s garden will feel a lot more confining. If “tablets” are the future, which is far from clear, I’d rather wait for a device that gives me full freedom to run the applications and display the content of my choice.

Even though Apple's managed to stave off some amount of piracy with the iTunes Store, I think this is likely to be temporary as it becomes easier and easier to pirate media. (Streaming music – legally through YouTube and MySpace pages – and movies – through illegal content hosted on sites like megavideo.com – have already been essentially freed, and as soon as the internets' pipes become thick enough that you can download quickly without resorting to BitTorrent, I think it's over for online movie/TV sales.)

This same analysis could be applied to the Wall Street Journal – it has a niche now, but it may not in the future, and I doubt any company (including the New York Times) will be able to emulate its online strategy.

My advice to content providers in it for the long haul would be: make it all free, find a good behavioral advertising firm, team up with a company like Facebook or Amazon which already has a lot of mineable data stored in already-established profiles, and, most importantly, hire a damn good lawyer, lobbyist, and PR firm.

"Picture-driving programming for the masses" (warning: geekery ahead)

This is pretty fucking cool – essentially an extension to Python (a pretty accessible programming language) that can take data from screenshots. So, if your bus transit company only has a webpage that outputs a bus' location using HTML but doesn't offer any sort of XML/formatted document/RSS feed/whatever, you can use the webpage's screenshot as an input. It brings to mind Apple's not-so-successful Web Clips on Dashboard that let's you isolate a part of a web page to display as a widget. This takes that one step further and lets you use the clip as an input, likely turning it into data a little more refined than just a .jpg (perhaps using OCR technology to convert it into text). With straight HTML this is a bit convoluted, as you could just take the text straight off the .html (or .php or whatever) file, but this system seems easier for the end users, as you don't have to use regexes or whatever to isolate the text you want. Sorry if this post was a bit geeky for most readers, but the whole idea seems revolutionary to me.

The Wikileaks tragedy of the commons?

A German blog has an interview up with Julian Assange of Wikileaks. The focus is the financial aspect of Wikileaks, including its recent "strike" (see here, at least for now) as a plea for cash. One interesting thing mentioned is that the founders are "refugees from China and other places." Also interesting is that at least one of Wikileaks' five core staff members isn't averse to paying sources (hypothetically, of course – they don't even have enough for servers and staff right now):

Actually we would have no problem giving sources cash. We don’t do that, but for me there is no reason why only the lawyers and the journalists should be compensated for their effort. Somebody is taking the risk to do something and this will end up benefiting the public.

Paying sources is frowned upon in old media, but then again, stodgy old newspapers might not be the best companies for budding new media organizations to emulate. New media darling Gawker (which only "inadvertently" commits acts of journalism) has been toying around with paying sources, though it's not clear how that's worked out.

The article also deals heavily with Julian Assange's idea that Wikileaks' information falls prey to a sort of tragedy of the commons – Wikileaks will publish what its believes is an important but complex document, but no organization will spend the time combing through it, since they anticipate that someone else will beat them to it. As a result, according to Assange, nobody will end up writing about it. But if it's clear that no news organization is going to write about it, doesn't that essentially give whichever one decides to read the document de facto exclusivity? Couldn't the NYT, say, just do research for a month and not tell anyone it was doing it, and then release the synthesis all at once?

It just doesn't seem likely to me that there's a huge problem of news organizations demanding exclusivity in order to even bother reading something that's publicly available – I'll bet that in reality, the information just isn't as important as Wikileaks would like to believe. Unless anyone has a better explanation?

Google may pull out of China?

Google's got big news about its China operations (spoiler: they might pull out!). This Slashdot user's summary is good:

Following a sophisticated attack on Google infrastructure originating from China late last year, Google has decided to take 'a new approach' to China. In their investigation, Google found that more than 20 large companies had been infiltrated and dozens of Chinese human rights activists' Gmail accounts had been compromised. Google has decided to 'review the feasibility of [its] business operations in China,' no longer censoring results in Google.cn, and if necessary, to 'shut down Google.cn, and potentially [Google's] offices in China.'

"Don't be evil" is pretty much the only rule of Google's code of conduct.

Update: It looks like they've already started to make good on their promise to lift the censorship of google.cn.

Consumer-scale fuel cell battery hits the Japanese market

This sounds pretty mundane at first, but revolutionary when you think about it. Here's Engadget's description from a few months ago:

[T]he long promised and highly anticipated direct methanol fuel-cell (DMFC) with dedicated fuel cartridge for on-the-go refueling will go on sale October 29th in Japan for ¥29,800 (about $328) plus another ¥3,150 (about $34) for a set of five, 50ml fuel cartridges. Dynario takes about 20 seconds to fill its 14ml fuel tank with an injection of a concentrated methanol solution at which point it's ready to charge USB-connected devices. Dynario's hybrid structure uses a lithium-ion battery to store enough electricity to charge two typical cellphones, according to Tosh. That works out to be about $1 per recharge, if our calculations are correct, based on the fuel costs alone. We assume the battery can be charged via wall socket power too but this isn't explicitly stated in the press release. The first run consists of only 3,000 units after which Toshiba will gauge consumer reaction before extending the launch outside of Japan. Boy oh boy, a new age in portability has begun.

Credit card stealing app in Apple's official store

The other day, I downloaded an update to an iPhone app that I own that streams Romanian radio stations called roRadio. They added a page of ads that are displayed each time you open the app, and they struck me as a very candid assessment of what tech-savvy Romanians are into. The first one (in no particular order – they're displayed randomly) is an ad for a DEX app. DEX is the official Romanian dictionary, and, for what's essentially a dictionary with some etymology notes, it comes up surprisingly often in everyday conversation with Romanians. The second is some utility with Romania-specific facts – not exactly sure what they are, but it seems pretty normal.

The third one, though, is the most fascinating: it's an app whose only apparent utility I can see is to credit card thieves! It's 99¢ and I didn't buy it, but according to screenshots, it tells you the card issuer and whether or not a given credit card number is valid – things that you'd only need to know if the card in question wasn't actually yours (who forgets whether their card is a Visa or Mastercard??). Romanians are prolific hackers, but given Apple's notoriously stringent App Store policies, I'm surprised this one made it through.

Google to sell phone directly to consumers, without contracts

Google is planning on introducing an especially Google-y phone to consumers, according to the WSJ:

Google Inc. has designed a cellphone it plans to sell directly to consumers as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The phone is called the Nexus One and is being manufactured for Google by HTC Corp., these people said. It runs Android, the operating system for mobile phones that Google developed, they added.

But unlike the more than half-dozen Android phones made by phone manufacturers today, Google designed virtually the entire software experience behind the phone, from the applications that run on it to the look and feel of each screen.

The Internet giant is taking a new, and potentially risky, approach to selling the device. Rather than selling the phone through a wireless carrier--the way the bulk of phones are sold in the U.S. today--Google plans to sell the Nexus One itself online. Users will have to buy cellular service for the device separately.

This is groundbreaking for two reasons. First of all, while the iPhone is physically stunning, it's the software that makes it. No other phone could compete because no company had the design sense of Apple. Google, however, just might. They definitely have a different aesthetic – nobody would mistake Google's homepage for Apple's – but I think that Google's style is becoming refined enough to compete against Apple in the cell phone market, where good design has apparently eluded every company except Apple (...until now?). (Astute Google watchers will note that Android has been out for a while now, but, as the article hints at, companies always make changes to the OS, and it isn't as unified and beautiful as a pure Google produce could be.)

The second reason why this phone may be revolutionary – in a way that the iPhone won't be – is that it will be carrier-independent, and could serve to break up the dominant American cell phone market paradigm of phones subsidized by subscription fees and mandatory contracts. This could introduce a much-needed element of competition for data services among carriers, who have already started competing more fiercely for regular voice service. Unfortunately, I fear that perhaps the American market favors the subsidized phone/long-term contract for a reason – because of some market-altering policies that I'm not aware of, but that will work against the Nexus One.

Farmville vs. Twitter

Fun fact: Farmville, that annoying farming game that all your friends on Facebook bug you to play, is bigger than Twitter. Farmville has 69 million users active every month, and 26.5 million active daily users. Twitter's apparently at just 18 million – not clear if that's total users or daily (monthly?) active users, but whatever it is, it looks like Farmville wins.

FTC sees into the future, corrects problem

The FTC is imposing rules on internet publishers (bloggers, tweeters, etc.) for the first time, in terms of disclosure and some other things. But just in case you thought that this new spate of regulation was in response to an actual problem, the FTC wants to disabuse you of that notion:

Richard Cleland, assistant director of the division of advertising practices at the F.T.C., said: “We were looking and seeing the significance of social media marketing in the 21st century and we thought it was time to explain the principles of transparency and truth in advertising and apply them to social media marketing. Which isn’t to say that we saw a huge problem out there that was imperative to address.”

Obama plans to socialize the internet?

Wired.com's headline: Broadband Is This Generation’s Highway System, FCC Chief Says

Scary words, those are. In 1956, when Eisenhower set out to construct a national, socialized network of highways, he was fulfilling the dreams of many progressives since the turn of the century, who believed that a road system designed and funded by the government ought to replace the privately-owned networks of streetcars and other rail-based mass transit that had up until then been the mainstay of urban and suburban transportation. Their plans profoundly transformed America, giving birth to venerable American icons like the road trip, fast food restaurant, and large-lot suburban subdivision.

But it hasn't been all white picket fences and manicured lawns. Suburan and exurban sprawl consume ever-increasing amounts of energy and land, and are at the root of many of America's ecological and foreign policy problems. Our obesity epidemic may even stem from our car-based culture, and while the isolation that suburbs provide can be nice, there's something to be said for the diversity and culture that one finds in cities.

If the Obama administration doesn't back off the internet, it very well may end up as interesting as a suburban subdivision and as fast as a SoCal highway during rush hour.

The Twitter Revolution

So I got an article about Moldova's would-be "Twitter Revolution" published on Splice Today. You can read it here in its entirety.