Category Archives: Uncategorized

Just when it seemed like there couldn’t be any more exciting copyright news in one week, Amazon launches a cloud storage service aimed specifically at music. Copyright and music are simultaneously the best friends and enemies; we need copyright to have music (maybe), but the music industry has been spending more money on copyright infringement lawsuits in the last decade then they could ever hope to get back in the courts.

Amazon’s Cloud will surely lead the music industry back into court. It’s a free, 5 gig storage on the web that can be accessed from any internet device (except for iphones…), or 20 bucks for 20 gigs for a year. You upload your music, and it stays in your Cloud to be accessed wherever. Amazon has no plans to pay any content creators, which, if you ask me, is fine. Everything you upload has to be yours to start with, so I’m not even sure what the copyright claim could be, especially given Cablevision, which allowed essentially the same and more for television shows. But the music industry is apparently stunned by Amazon’s move, and now sitting with lawyers in wait hoping for somebody to find a flaw in a system that Amazon’s own lawyers no doubt spent months examining themselves.

I don’t actually think Amazon will see that much success with Cloud, though I admire their brash entry into a space filled with copyright timebombs. Amazon made a big mistake in not allowing access via an iPhone, though. I’m not sure what motivated that decision: Apple is obviously a competitor in music distribution but denying the value of mobile access to a huge number of your potential users is going to cripple the technology’s adoption rate. And it’s hardly like Google, purveyor of the Android platform on which a Cloud app will be released, is that much less of a threat to enter the mobile music storage space. Anecdotally I’ve heard that the upload client doesn’t work on Linux and the site for it crashes on Chrome, and it doesn’t work at all on Opera, so I’m not too certain this launch isn’t already a disaster. At least the copyright blogs are talking about it!

I’ve always been a fan of the hacker group Anonymous… or at least, until recently. Anonymous, the large group of moralistic hackers who have terrorized the church of Scientology and most recently companies who withdrew support from wikileaks, made more mainstream news when they hacked Gawker and stole millions of email addresses linked to users.

That’s where I lost them as a supporter. I appreciated their hacking of the mega companies as a form of protest against pulling support for wikileaks (a stand that, if illegal, was at least principled). And plus, all it really did was shut down the websites of a few companies with DDoS attacks, which a site usually recovers from pretty quickly and causes little long-term damage. But attacking Gawker and releasing private information of innocent people for no reason? That’s just meaningless harm.

A few days ago somebody may have gotten their revenge for the Gawker hack, and it may have been for the same reasons. A member of the group apparently leaked chat logs and personally identifying information of lead hackers to Gawker in a sort of karmic retribution. The logs, if real, display the paranoia and egocentric nature of a pseudo-hierarchical group of hackers, and basically little else. They reference hacks they’ve made, they freak out once when they think they’ve been made, and that’s basically it. The logs might be fake, sure, but based on how boring most of the chats are, I’m more inclined to believe that a fringe member just scraped up every log they had and thought it might be enough to give him credibility as a snitch.

It’ll be interesting to see if the information purported to identify the hackers pans out, but in the meantime it looks like Anonymous is still alive: They may have just attacked another website today.

I’m a lakers fan, and as such I’m likely to overanalyze the behavior of Kobe Bryant. Here’s my latest theory: Kobe threw the Lakers last game down the stretch. For those who didn’t see, the lakers were visiting the Heat, who had just been widely reported to be crying in the locker room after a close loss to the Bulls. The game was close the whole way, with the Lakers doing a pretty decent job working inside-out through their big men, who were guarded by undersized or untalented players the whole game. Kobe knew that was the way to win, keep feeding the post and pressing their advantage. But, instead, Kobe takes a number of terrible shots down the stretch, hogging the ball and going one-on-one with Wade for most of the 4th quarter. He later tried to justify some of the shots [http://bit.ly/hfPhOW], but Kobe is a pretty smart guy, he knows going one-on-one with an All-Star is not the best approach to attacking a defense.

So my theory is that Kobe did it on purpose. Now, I’m more than capable of admitting that Kobe can just be a ball hog who abandons the offense at points. But this game was different for two reasons: The Heat were getting slammed in the press for crying after the Bulls loss, and Kobe went out after the game and shot around for 2 hours, until midnight when they forced him off the court, because he wanted to work on his shot after the loss. This was Kobe making a statement that he could only make in a loss, and he set it up for himself perfectly. The story now is about how Kobe has a crazy motivation, a drive unmatched in the NBA and its why he has 5 titles. And Lebron is a crybaby. If you told Kobe that all he had to do was shoot 2-11 in the second half of a relatively meaningless regular season game, then go shoot for 2 hours after the game and in exchange he might get a lasting anecdote about his legendary work effort while also making Lebron look like a wimp, he would at least consider it.

This blog exists, but that’s about it at the moment. Starting later today, it will be filled with a random assortment of thoughts on things I’m interested in, like technology, law, games, sports, philosophy and maybe other things. At best it will be a great way to converse with other people with similar interests, at worst a constantly updating cloud storage solution for my thoughts. Hope it works!