Category: Sign of the Apocalypse

As if we needed another reason to loath DRM, testing done at CNet shows that playback of audio files incorporating the dubious copy protection scheme can shorten battery life on portable players by as much as 25%! And just when battery life was getting to a level that didn’t feel like a total joke.

An excerpt:

“Those who belong to subscription services such as Napster or Rhapsody have it worse. Music rented from these services arrive in the WMA DRM 10 format, and it takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself. Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them. Take, for instance, the critically acclaimed Creative Zen Vision:M, with a rated battery life of up to 14 hours for audio and 4 hours for video. CNET tested it at nearly 16 hours, with MP3s–impressive indeed. Upon playing back only WMA subscription tracks, the Vision:M scored at just more than 12 hours. That’s a loss of almost 4 hours, and you haven’t even turned the backlight on yet.

“We found similar discrepancies with other PlaysForSure players. The Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder maxed out at 11 hours, but with DRM tracks, it played for less than 9 hours. The iRiver U10, with an astounding life of about 32 hours, came in at about 27 hours playing subscription tracks. Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent. What I’m saying is that while battery life may not be a critical issue today, as it was when one of the original hard drive players–the Creative Nomad Jukebox–lasted a pathetic 4 hours running on four AA nickel-metal-hydride rechargeables (and much worse on alkalines), the industry needs to include battery specs for DRM audio tracks or the tracks we’re buying or subscribing. Yet, here’s another reason why we should still be ripping our music in MP3: better battery life, the most obvious reason being universal device compatibility.”

Read their complete findings here.

If you’re a pet curmudgeon like me, there’s nothing that makes you angrier than seeing a big steaming pile o’ dog poo in public (except maybe seeing the dog doing it and the owner walking away without picking it up).

Italian interface and service designer Aram Saroyan Armstrong has come up with a…ah… shitty idea for dealing with the menace of public pet crap. It’s a “mobile poop awareness and avoidance system” he’s dubiously dubbed “Pooptopia.” He explains how it would work on his site:

“On her way home from the market, Signora Pelle wheels her cart into a fresh pile of dog poo. Infuriated by the indignity of the situation, she takes out her mobile to document the uncharted poo and fires off pre-formatted SMS to local city officials stating “No shit is good shit. Enough with irresponsible dog owners!” with photo and GPS coordinates attached. The picture is then uploaded to the Pooptopia website where other angry Poogilantes gather to vent and crook fingers at the filthy pictures and lament over falling real estate value of their neighborhood on Pooptopia’s message boards. From the comfort of her apartment, Signora Pelle pecks on her keyboard, “Let’s show them we mean business!” She organizes a flashmob of Poogilantes and descend into the heart of their Pooptopian neighborhood to poolog en masse. Nearby at a city substation, a small squad of sanitation workers wheel out on specially modified Segways and head off to the new, large blip on their Poodar PDA screen.”

Okay, so maybe this guy has an unhealthy interest in pet excrement (and a penchant for corny coinages with “poo” in them), but it’s all a means for him to evangelize the potential for location-based Net-connected services and his ideas for making “service design” more entertaining.

[Via We Make Money Not Art]

We can’t guarantee that this packing tape, emblazoned with your 4th Amendment rights, won’t earn you the unwanted attention of airport security, if you seal your luggage with it, but what’s a full cavity search when our Constitutional rights are at stake? As EFF Chairman Brad Templeton puts it:

“Now, if they want to search your stuff, they have to literally slice the 4th amendment in half in order to do it. Ok, it may not stop them but it’s a nice metaphorical statement of protest.”

The tape is US$8/roll and available in the EFF Store.

[Via Boing Boing]

GoDaddy Chair Bob Parsons alerted us (via an otherwise obtrusive “dear loyal customer” letter) to a pretty dire situation with domain registration. Apparently ICANN voted a few days back to let VeriSign continue its monopolistic control of .com domain name renewals and allow 7% increase in fees each year, with an all-but-cerrtain extension of its control after 2012.

I did a little math (not my forte) and figured out that this amounts to a 50% increase over the remainder of the deal, and amounts to a huge cash giveaway straight from your pockets to those of VeriSign. Apparently the deal is part of a settlement of a suit by VeriSign against ICANN, but in typical back-handed, under-the-table deals, this benefits both companies.

As our new friend Bob points out, the deal still requires approval by the Dept. of Commerce, so there’s still time to intervene. Profiteering on URL registrations is an impediment to free speech, so call your rep! Email Dept. of Commerce head Gutierrez!

If ever there was a blog item worthy of our “Sign of the Apocalypse” shingle, it may be this one.

Paul Boutin has a very unsettling piece on his blog about DIY bioweaponry. As you’re likely aware, the common punditary wisdom is that “A significant bioterror attack today would require the support of a national program to succeed” (quoth the NYTimes in 2002).

Paul’s article paints a very different picture of the relative ease involved in creating such weapons and quotes a current researcher, Rob Carlson, as saying: (if biotech development proceeds apace, within a decade) “…cooking up a lethal bug will be as easy and cheap as building a Web site.”

[Via O’Reilly Radar]

First the vibrating robo-squirrel, now this: a stove, announced from Sanyo, that offers “voice navigation.” The stove allows you to download ringtones over the Net that play to alert you to things like a completed meal, a boiling tea kettle, etc. The stove also offers voice tutorials for newbie cooks. Just what I freakin’ need, my stove launching into “My Humps” to let me know that my ravioli is ready!

Okay, I’m out. Somebody hit me in the head with a frying pan. No, really. I think this one just put me over the top.

[Via Popgadget]

The EFF is recommending that users not install Google Desktop, citing increase risk of privacy violation:

“If a consumer chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user’s computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who’ve obtained a user’s Google password. ‘Coming on the heels of serious consumer concern about government snooping into Google’s search logs, it’s shocking that Google expects its users to now trust it with the contents of their personal computers,’ said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston.”

Full statement here.

Some days, the comedy just writes itself (from Gear Factor):

“…Tony Alleyne, a British man…converted his entire apartment into a replica of the starship Voyager. What began as a simple weekend project converting his refrigerator into a faux warp coil became an all-out compulsion to create a totally immersive Star Trek environment after his wife left him (apparently because of the refrigerator thing)…Unfortunately, starships ain’t cheap. Alleyne racked up 100,000 pounds of credit card debt financing his endeavor and has now filed for bankruptcy.”

Julian Dibbell has an interesting piece in the Jan/Feb issue of Legal Affairs where he explores the idea of whether the trading of virtual “goods” in virtual worlds could constitute an income-generating, and therefore, taxable exchange under the IRS rules of barter. This may sound ridiculous on the face of it, but because virtual world goods now have real-world market values, there is a legal argument here (albeit an unsettling one for anybody who plays online multiplayer games or hangs out in SecondLife). The good news is that, when he pursued the question with IRS officials, they cocked their heads to the side like dogs hearing a high-pitched noise, i.e. don’t expect to see 1099 forms shipping with multiplayer games anytime soon.

C|Net is reporting that there’s a new worm going ’round the Net, but this one’s got a clever twist: it’s actually an AOL chatbot that sweet talks people into downloading the worm. Like most of these scams, the bot lacks proper grammar and syntax, but that’s not exactly symptomatic of just the worm… it applies to most people I talk to on IM.