Rocket scientists strike back!

Just after I posted about Google unleashing Google Earth I heard about the equivalent mapping wonder World Wind from those rocket scientists at NASA.

Having played around with both a bit I can report that on my humble laptop Google's rendering engine is less quirky than NASA's but when it comes down to the resulting image NASA often has much better data. By being able to manually select different data sources NASA lets you go from super high res urban photos all the way to non-photographic topographic maps.

By and large NASA has much better (higher resolution) topographic info so when you tilt the view the images sometimes end up looking amazing. Along the cliffs where I fly my paraglider the view is stunning only marred by the fact the photos appear to have been taken quite a while ago. On the roof of my building I can see the stanchions of our fence around the rooftop garden, they are less than 1 foot - much higher resolution than Google. And out in the wilds where Google often has very low res NASA's World Wind still offers 1m resolution which is still very good.

About the only thing Google really beats NASA on is the user interface and the ability to do stuff like show roads and import GPS waypoint data. However there appear to many add-on features for the NASA program which I have not fully explored. I think this may allow multiple layers to be combined and there is quite likely a way to get regular maps merged into the view.

I look forward to playing with World Wind on my PC that has a decent 3D graphics card, it should be fun!

Google unleashes Keyhole

Back in February I mentioned that Google had finally produced a great mapping service and acquired Keyhole to boot. At the time Keyhole was a subscription service (about $30 a year) that gave an amazing three dimensional view of the earth using satellite and aerial photos combined with topographic data. Now Google has made this same service available as "Google Earth" and best of all the basic service is free.

The Google Earth service was launched as "beta" and predictably I think their servers quickly became saturated with users. That will be their biggest problem because as it was Keyhole was a gobsmacking "must have" app that anyone, even your granny, could have hours of fun with. Finally a use for computers that doesn't involve shooting things, doing work or even typing. So for the time being the free download for Google Earth has disappeared from their web site but my adventurous friends can still get it from here. You'll just have to trust me that its virus free :-)

Share and enjoy!

Did it really kill P2P?

So it seems like everyone is saying that the recent Supreme Court ruling has killed P2P and basically that all P2P has been outlawed. Like the other ruling about religious displays in courthouses it seems like the truth isn't quite so clear-cut. Didn't the ruling actually say:

"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties,"

So surely that distinguishes between technologies that can infringe copyright (VCRs) and technologies that are promoted specifically to infringe copyright (as Grokster was). Specifically if people really think this has overturned the VCR ruling then surely it means that photocopiers and scanners are now illegal - along with tape recorders, MP3 players etc. Indeed the entire infrastructure of the world wide web would be held suspect as it can (and is) used widely to infringe copyright. I don't think that was at all what the justices intended.

Blogger screwed up my blogs!

For some reason Blogger decided to start adding an HTML div section to the start and end of each of my blog posts. That wouldn't be so bad but they gave it a style attribute of "clear:both" which totally screwed up this and other blogs I have because there's a little column to the right with the archive index and such. The result of the clear directive was to make all the text in the blog entire zoon down to below the point where the right hand column ends - most often below the bottom of the page.

Fortunately I found someone else who had noticed the same thing and blogged about it. Like me they had complained to Blogger with no resolution or feedback. Fortunately some CSS guru pointed out that one could modify the CSS code in the blog template to include:

.Post div { clear: none !important; }

which overrides the clear attribute set on Bloggers inserted div.

Now I know why they did what they did - they wanted to avoid the problem of floating images that are embedded into posts sometimes. If you don't put a clear at the top or bottom of a post then it can cause the next post to appear to the left or right of an image in the previous post. However I've always done this as needed and generally float my graphics to the left not right to avoid conflicts with my menu column.

Its too bad they didn't test their "fix" with more templates - including their own standard ones which this blog's is based on.

Unpatent #3: Plugged in but not listening

I have been curious why no one has thought of fitting a microphone into headphones and earbuds as standard. If they did then iPods and MP3 players could allow the wearer to selectively mix in the sound of the outside world and hear their music while the rest of the world didn't hear it.

Wearing headphones would no longer be such a security risk, and you could actually have a conversation with such a person without them having to yank out the devices or just stare blankly at you not understanding. Best of all when wearers start reaching their advanced years - well 30+ anyway which is about when all that loud music will have fried their auditory senses - they can just crank up the mix of the outside world and have the headphones double as a hearing aid. The same could be done while normal hearing persists to give the wearer augmented hearing capabilities.

To some extent I have already achieved this effect - while gaming on my home computer system I've been known to plug in the microphone and crank it up so that I can still hear what is going on in the room around me. If I needed to have a conversation I could just increase the microphone gain and converse normally - without shouting.

So earbud and headphone manufacturers - bring it on. But remember, if its not already patented the idea is out and public.

One good Republican

Well it seems like there is at least one good Republican in favour of Municipal Wi-Fi - apparently John McCain is co-sponsouring a bill that would explicitly allow municipalities to set up their own broadband networks. This would turn the tables on States that have recently danced with the devil, formerly known as big-telco, and agreed to a state-wide ban on municipal wi-fi.

Now that Internet access has become as much an essential service as clean water and air, it seems to me to be nothing but a good thing that government should regulate in favour of allowing government the power to provide it, especially when private business is so busy gouging the market. If you want examples of commodity de-regulation gone wrong look no further than South American countries where water business was sold off to private (foreign) companies who then saw fit to gouge the local populace just because they could, and to California where Enron pissed its pants with pleasuret as it sucked $30+ billion from the State while exercising its "free market" rights (read greedy corporate monopoly) in an orgy of profit making excesses.

Privacy schmivacy - I want DRM for my private data

Sigh, yet another personal information leak.

You see I told you before that corporations just don't get the first thing about privacy and it is more than abundantly clear that when they send us their pledges about maintaining privacy of our personal information, well they ain't worth the paper they are written on. Seriously. I kid you not.

You see all those pledges are saying are "we'll try our best" with no guarantee of what their best should be and certainly no guaranteed recourse if they don't meet that standard. All this will continue indefinitely because our governments refuse to regulate storage and trade of personal information with the seriousness they would, say government secrets. The only other thing that might reign in this total disregard for our personal information would be widespread, tabacco industry scale, class action suits with massive punitive damages. Of course it wont benefit us, the victims, but it might send a message.

Now all these corporations will whine and tell you these were not intentional breaches of privacy, they were just accidents. You know, like chemical companies always say when something bad goes wrong, like say Bhopal. Its up to the victims to prove after the fact it wasn't an accident. But it really seems like these financial companies have completely inadequate protocols for protecting this data. Sure better controls will make doing business more expensive for them, but it should be that way.

Think about it - when it's, say, music industry assets at question they will use the full force of the law to track down and prevent trading of them. I want my private data protected with the same rigour that RIAA and the MPA is now dictating for music and movies. I want my private data encrypted by technology that means only me and the users I authorize can have access to it. In the absence of my renewed permission I want their rights to access that data to expire in a timely fashion - at least yearly, maybe monthly, maybe even instantaneously.

For instance I could let someone keep and access my data for the next year - say a magainze company that has my name and address, and use my credit card info once per month for billing purposes. Indeed they shouldn't even need to have access to my credit card info - I should be able to grant them permission to present my encrypted card info to my credit card company who knows how to decrypt it. Along with my digital signature on the bill presented to me, there should be no need for the magazine company to ever know my credit card info. And if they try to present the encrypted version without a digitally signed bill, well then its worthless. Now that is what I call privacy.

Furthermore:

It should be a felony crime for any corporation to store my data in any form other than that originally agreed on i.e. with the same time limits and access restrctions. This would prevent them making an unprotected, or less protected copy of my personal data without my permission. So they can't take my social security number out of my personal data and store it elsewhere unless I also have the same encryption and data access expiry guarantees.

It should be a felony crime for linking identifiable unencrypted personal data to my records. So if I they know my name, address and credit card and they find out my date of birth or social security number, by whatever means - even if I tell it to them - they can't store that and link it to my existing identity without also guaranteeing the same restrictions applying to my other info.

It should be a felony crime for sharing their access keys and unencrypted data outside of a well defined limit defined by such parameters as specific personel, a geographic location or a computer network definition. That definition should be declared to me, a regulating body and audited and policed.

Finally all crimes should carry a jail term and fine per record so compromised, and a defined limit should be placed on who many instances of the above are tolerated before an entity loses its license to handle personal data completely. So when a company looses 40 million records its going to be paying billions in fines and someone is going to spending years, if not the rest of their life in jail for it. I believe that would do the trick.

All this may seem like a big inconvenience. But ask yourself - when its a case of single track of music leaked onto the Internet you can be fined thousands of dollars, if not actually sent to jail. Corporations are devoting huge resources to the issue of digital rights management and have successfully deployed it onto consumer desktops allowing "renting" and copy protection of their data. So why not insist they turn similar resources to the protection of our, the consumers, data?

Napster recommendations

I'll have to confess that aside from the fact that I think Napster's subscription service is a good deal, the integration with Windows Media Player sucks. While having Napster features as part of WMP makes sense, the fact that it is always bringing WMP to a grinding halt has slowly been driving me crazy for the last three months. What is worse was that every time I went to check for an update it always told me there wasn't one. In the end I decided I would uninstall the troublesome cat and start from scratch.

In doing so I discovered that the standalone Napster software has been updated so I just installed that and have been using it standalone. Now I find I can still play Napster files from WMP too (well of course they just use Windows DRM), there is just no integration of the Napster browsing and download interface within WMP. So you can't click on a track, see its artist and go to download other tracks by that artist from Napster. But it turns out I wasn't really using that feature anyway - because it was so unreliable to do network issues as best I can figure.

So my recommendation is don't install the Napster Windows Media Player plugin. Just use Napster's standalone browsing tool for discovering and downloading new music. Then when you are playing music you can just do it from within WMP as normal.

You should also consider telling Napster to put its music files in a folder separate from where your normal music files are stored. This will make it easy to move, share or even purge Napster content later on. It also means you can choose to have WMP not see the Napster files if you want but not adding it to the list of folders in your WMP library. Also last time I tried it Napster's feature for putting music into multiple folders vs. one single folder didn't work, now it does seem to. If download a lot of Napster music you could end up with one huge directly which will be slow to browse if you ever visit it using a Windows explorer. So separate folder for music wither Napster putting its tracks in folders by artist and albun seems to make sense.

Some additional issues to look out for are that by default Napster names its tracks based on the artist and the track name, which may not match your Windows Media Player settings. If your WMP options tell it to rename tracks automatically to conform to its settings then you'll quickly find Napster things your files are now missing. So if you are going to play Napster tracks from within WMP then make sure that renaming option is off, or that your WMP naming scheme matchines the - scheme used by Napster.

My final tip goes to those people who are sharing a Napster music folder across a network so multiple computers don't have to download music already downloaded. Make sure when you point a Napster client at the network folder, you also tell it to import music from that folder. Otherwise it will not see the files already downloaded and insist on streaming them, and if you download the files it will add extra copies to your library wasting a lot of disk space. Note: if you have a lot of files this process will take a long time, especially over a slow network connection like WiFi.

Unpatent this: endochronic backup

It seems like backup systems are back in the news - what with all the big players rushing to cash into the glut of cheap storage which is causing a glut of multimedia files being hoarded on hard drives at home by a glut of consumers who are now (or aught to be) wondering what they'll do if they lose the several hundred megabytes of whatever it is on their hard drive. The thing is that few of the really good backup software solutions are targeted at consumers. I'm using Dantz Retrospect which cost me $80 for up to three computers and it works, actually it works well. But it is for people who know what they are doing - I wouldn't hesitate to put it on someone elses system, set it up and let it tick over sending me (not them) and email if it fails.

The sad fact is that Windows XP has a pretty decent backup system included, but it does two things badly to the point where I would no longer install it on someone elses computer. Firstly it doesn't notify you when it fails, except by storing something in the system event log. I don't know about you, but I only ever look in the system event log when stuff goes wrong - which is usually when your machine may be in need of some backup recovery. Not a good time to also discover your backup has been failing for the past three months. Secondly its a pain to set up a decent backup regime that can get your files back quickly without doing multiple restores or eating up tons of disk space, yet also allows you to recover deleted stuff from several days, if not weeks back. Retrospect solved both of these problems for me - it optionally sends notificaitons by email, and it can do a rolling fast incremental backup as often as you like yet create complete "snapshots" of your disk each time that can be restored without having to restore a base complete backup place multiple incrementals. Basically you can fill your backup storage to the brim with incrementals and let Retrospect manage when to remove old data. That works for me just fine and really optimizes backup storage with the minimum of fuss.

Anyway, this entry wasn't really going to be all about my home backup scheme. Actually I wanted to tell you about my brilliant new super fast method for multimedia backup. Lets face it, many people have large chunks of disk filled with MP3 files, ripped DVDs and the like, maybe even some adult themed two dimensional byte arrays (otherwise knows as pr0n). So how about I create a backup service that works like this: doing a backup simply checksums all your files and if its never seen that checksum before it makes a copy to a remote location (or you burn a DVD, or write it to a spare disk and mail it to our backup service center). If it has seen that checksum before then no copying is necessary - there's already a remote copy. When you disk crashes you just tell me the checksums of all the files lost or damaged and my backup service will send you the replacement bit patterns.

Now there is a small, but finite chance the checksum thing may not work - the probability is really small if the checksum method is good (recently one was found to be broken - I forget if it was MD5 or SHA5). But if I send you the wrong bit pattern then I'll refund your backup service fees and pay a penalty - if you can prove the data didn't match your original. I'll be interested to know how you'll do that short of producing the original :-)

Also there's a chance that people with common files will find they accidentally loose their information quite often. Indeed if those files were say MP3s it would be convenient to checksum them, make a backup and then "lose and recover" on demand. I.e. this could be a loophole via which an offline music storage system could be built (possibly) legally. For instance if Joe has an MP3 called stairwaytoheaven.mp3 and checksums it, and I see that that checksum matches the checksum of data already sent me by Tom, well then I really don't need to be sent ANOTHER copy of the same bit pattern that produced that checksum - do I? Or if you do send it to me, maybe I don't actually need to save a second copy. Even my Retrospect software has that option to not save multiple copies of identical files - and checksums are a widely used method to do that identity comparison. Indeed if a user has a high speed Internet connection that can deliver a backup copy faster than it is played then why bother even keeping the file stored locally anyway? Just delete it and ask for the backup to be streamed and played on demand.

Now immediately you can imagine RIAA jumping down peoples throats for this. They didn't like MP3.com allow people to insert a CD into their machine and magically "save" it remotely for later streaming to them via the internet. All that was doing was a crude checksum based on track lengths. But where does backup and copying end. Surely someone wouldn't argue against backup being a fair use (except RIAA and MPAA), otherwise that would prevent me from ever backing up my drive that has all my legally downloaded or ripped songs (or other content). And surely no one is going to try and regulate how a remote, internet based backup service would work or insist it keep multiple copies of identical files. That just doesn't make sense.

So here goes - I launch my music file backup system. Get a few thousand users online and within weeks have made backups of several terrabytes of music data containing hundreds of thousdands of songs. Pretty soon most users can connect and find that a significant percentage of their music has already been "backed up" with no data transfer necessary. Lets call it endochronic backup - thats reverse time backup because the file backup is actually complete before you even started the backup. We'll also recommend that what bit rates you should rip your music in to guarantee maximum endochronic backup "compatibility", we'll also recommend you avoid ripping music to include DRM signatures that would minimize (well eliminate) your chance of an endochronic file transfer. We would probably even charge you extra for any file that actually needed a regular remote file transfer, unless later on we found that file was also common with another user - in which case we'd incrementally refund your initial fee based on how many other users possess the same file.

Other non-music uses are obvious. Say for instance you had a digital family photo album and had shared many of the photos with your family - you don't all need remote backups of the same files. If a large enough set of people are sharing the same files then the average cost per user would be tiny. Say there was a particularly striking hi-res image of someone in a revealing pose that had been widely downloaded by young males, lets say millions of them, and stashed onto hard drives the world over. Total file space used by that image storage, worldwide - terrabytes. Total space required to it up. Just one or two times the image size. Total cost to owners of said file to get access to that backup if they lose their copy - effectively zero.

Indeed such a system effecitvely already exists - most of the peer to peer sharing systems could easily implement it. Except those systems are based on the predicate of sharing bit patterns before you actually own an original version. The details of how that original was obtained should be irrelevant to the service offer. If you rent a space from a storage company and the put copies of copyrighted material in it, is that storage company to be blame for what you did? If you put illegally downloaded MP3 files on your hard drive, make a backup copy and put that copy in your bank's safe deposit box, are they to blame for providing that storage?

Really if you carry the DMCA to its logical conclusion you might say they were, since they are providing a mechanism that aides copyright infringement - under DMCA any storage system, physical or logical could be faulted, even plain old paper or ones own memory cells. Don't ever hum a tune you hear on the radio because RIAA might come after you for infringing DMCA... Indeed they might even go after god for creating humans that were clearly one big copyright infringement device waiting to happen.

I'm going to bet that its only a matter of time before someone tries to implement my endochronic backup system for at least some subset of file types. If the system was operated offshore in some country that thinks DMCA is a crock then there's a good chance it could go and stay live for some considerable period of time. With sufficient restrictions on how file checksums are obtained, verified and how backup copies are restored (e.g. not streamed on demand) there's even a chance it could be kept live legally indefinitely. It might not turn into the ideal music streaming service for consumers, but it could at least perform some useful function.

Homeland security vs. cellphones

A while ago I blogged about the dangers of putting WiFi and cellphones into planes. Sure everyone is bothered about loud-mouthed cellphone talkers causing fist fights, but what about the remotely triggered bomb bringing down the whole shebang? Anyway, it seems I wasn't the only one thinking about this as the Homeland Security boffins are now worried about it too (although they apparently have not come out against WiFi yet). They even managed to add a scenario I hadn't thought of - cellphone disputes distracting air marshals. It seems a no brainer though - hijacker one gets into simulated cellphone related argument with their neighbor (hijacker two) and air Marshal has to intervene. Hijacker three then does his thing while the air marshal is distracted - maybe whacking him over the head with kosh cunningly disguised as a vintage 1980's Motorola phone.