...more recent posts
Really interesting TED talk from Pranav Mistry, an MIT Media Lab PhD student, about future augmented reality computer interfaces. Great video demonstrations. Worth the 12 minutes.
Please design a logo for me. With pie charts. For free.
Haven't been able to blog recently, although I've made a few failed attempts. It is starting to look like a really interesting time is coming up so I want to keep trying to restart. But there are so many different pieces I haven't been able to put it all together. I'll try here with a series of posts about the "interesting to me" topics without necessarily trying to tie it all together. If you can tie it all together please clue me in because we're in for some real changes in our computer networked world.
I used to think much more clearly, and therefore maybe not as deeply, about the tension between intellectual property (IP) and the digital world. I knew for sure that no digital rights management (DRM) scheme could ultimately work on a general purpose computer, and so all such schemes would prove ineffective and either IP rights enforcement would therefore be impossible, or general purpose computers would have to be prohibited legislatively.
But, to skip right to the end, I now think neither of those two options has or will come to pass. DRM protected digital IP is already somewhat effective (from a rights holder's point of view) in a world of freely available general purpose computers which can, in theory, break the DRM. And even better, for this side of the fence at least, a new computing device is about to emerge that will make things even more secure. It won't be, by my particular definition, a general purpose computer, and it won't be capable of circumventing the controls. This new class of device will exist along side our general purpose computers, and we will buy and use them despite this drawback, because they will do their specific tasks better than our general purpose computers.
To put the central issue in a different way: what used to be a solid line (or even wide gulf) between general purpose computing devices (what we would call "computers") and single purpose computing devices (like a thermostat, or fancy fuel injectors, or a fax machine) is now growing fuzzy. And that's pretty interesting.
Sometimes I read people who say "Wow, it's amazing that we actually have this whole internet thing that is so open - you'd think 'they' would have never let it happen." I think this sometimes myself. But if that sort of reasoning makes sense to you, then what should really seem amazing is not that we got the internet, but that we got the general purpose computer. Denying that is the way to really lock things down. And that is what is happening. Except not by outlawing the general purpose computer, but simply by building something new, something like a "just less than general purpose computer," and making it better than the alternatives. I really didn't forsee this possibility.
This would all be more clear if I could just say what this new device is going to be. But it's not that clear to me yet. In one way it's here already with the iPhone and now Droid. Except I'm not talking about just phones, and they are just one of many beginning. But since I'm looking for a place to pick up the thread for some new blog posts I think that's the place to start. Droid is really important. Or Android is really important and Droid is the first device to show it. (How long has it been since I've said "Way to go Motorolla!" Feels kind of good :-) And the iPhone is probably the most important because it shows where we are going with closed stack systems for interacting with DRM protected digital IP. It's not the iPhone so much as the iPhone + iTunes + iTunes Music store + App store universe. It's really breathtaking what they have built. Probably I sound like what's derisively called a fan boy when I say that. And I guess I am a fan in the sense that I really like some of Apple's products. But I don't say breathtaking here with any of that feeling. I'm genuinely not sure whether to be scared or not. I don't know how it's going to come out, but we've been at an impasse for some time and that is about to break. The future of our commercial mediasphere (which I guess might be a better way of saying "DRM protected digital IP") is about to take shape. My hope is to post a series, starting with the iPhone and Android, and see if writing it out can help me see more clearly.