The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Sony BMG have announced that security tech provider SunnComm is making available a software update to address a security vulnerability with its MediaMax Version 5 content protection software on certain Sony BMG CDs, a flaw discovered by EFF that leaves up to 20 million consumers vulnerable to viruses and other security threats. [See important update below — EFF no longer recommends this patch.] In late November, EFF filed a class action suit against Sony for not only its infamous “rootkit” technology but also its use of the SunnComm security technology.
Sony took its sweet time responding to the public outrage and legal problems caused by the harmful stealth security technologies it embedded in CDs to track theft of content, but now the company seems to be in a much more responsive mode, as evidenced by this joint announcement with the EFF. Instead of sounding antagonistic toward the EFF, Sony is assuming a thankful public posture. “We’re grateful to EFF and iSEC [the security firm hired by the EFF] for bringing this to our attention,” said Thomas Hesse, president, Global Digital Business, SONY BMG.
Maybe now the pseudonymous Bonhomie Snoutintroff at The Register will eat his or her witty but caustic words of criticism toward the EFF. OK Mr. or Ms. Snoutintroff — given the egg that EFF now has on its face (see below), your acerbic critique rings a little truer now.
URGENT UPDATE: EFF DOES NOT RECOMMEND THIS PATCH Oops. The nice-nice talk between EFF and Sony came too soon. It seems that crack code jockeys Ed Felten and Alex Halderman found security flaws in the patch that potentially allow hostile programs to run rampant over a PC, including those areas normally subject to tighter security. For now, then, EFF is telling users to not install the patch. What a Pandora’s box of woes Sony opened with its attempt to dig into its customers’ CD usage activities. My suggestion: Just run any future fixes past Professors Felten and Halderman before releasing them to the public.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:12 PM | Print | Comments (0)
A post by David on the 37signals’ “Signal vs. Noise” blog responds to recent posts by Jeremy Wright and Om Malik. While Jeremy and Om argue that scaleability issues are important for and too often ignored by Web 2.0 companies, David sees the costs and benefits of upfront investments in scaleability and reliability differently:
Wright correctly states that those final last percent are incredibly expensive. To go from 98% to 99% can cost thousands of dollars. To go from 99% to 99.9% tens of thousands more. Now contrast that with the value. What kind of service are you providing? Does the world end if you’re down for 30 minutes?
If you’re Wal-Mart and your credit card processing pipeline stops for 30 minutes during prime time, yes, the world does end…Now what if Delicious, Feedster, or Technorati goes down for 30 minutes? How big is the inconvenience of not being able to get to your tagged bookmarks or do yet another ego-search with Feedster or Technorati for 30 minutes? Not that high…The criticality of your average “Web 2.0” application is one with loss of comfort as the result of something going wrong.
The real lesson to keep in mind, David says, is that “Before you have users, it’s a waste of time ensuring that they can always get to the service.”
A project that spends a lot of time upfront on scalability is the one that can’t afford to fail…You can’t carry around the label of Zero Risk (TM) and expect to be the next big thing. It will focus your energy on all the wrong things.
What you need is to embrace the goal of getting someone to care enough about your product that they’ll actually complain when its down. Once the first complains starts to trickle in, you know you’re riding something right, and then you start caring about adding another percentage point or two.
Om Malik thinks that the running-with-scissors approach of most start-ups is a sign of a bubble. Awahh? The bubble was when people thought they needed to spend $3 million dollars buying Sun servers and Oracle databases to build a site for wedding invitations.
The business smarts is when you don’t blow the farm before the crap shot has turned sure bet. Fail cheap. Because odds are you’re going to. And you need to have your shirt for the second round.
So. Don’t scale. Don’t worry about five 9’s or even two. Worry about getting something to a point where there’s reason to worry about it.
Update: A post at The Stalwart argues that David has it backwards, that downtime may be more of a problem for a Web 2.0 startup than it is for Wal-Mart:
If Wal-Mart is down for half an hour I’ll come back later, because there’s really no competition at those prices. If Technorati is down I’ll immediately start looking elsewhere, maybe Google blogsearch, Yahoo blogsearch, Sphere, PubSub, Feedster, etc. There’s not shortage of alternative to try out with absolutely $0.00 switching costs. To make matters worse, I might even like one of those other search engines, and remain a loyal user forever. Even if I went to a Wal-Mart competitor for a day, it’s unlikely I’d be a permanently lost competitor.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:40 PM | Print | Comments (0)
It sounds like a wild time at Time Warner regarding the finagling over a stake in AOL, with a lot of posturing and pressuring among the various parties taking place in the press. Despite yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece that proclaimed Microsoft close to a search-related deal with Time Warner that would stick it to Google, Reuter’s Ken Li has an item today saying that Google is very much in the running for an AOL deal, with an announcement slated before Christmas.
Time Warner executives must be having a ball, pitting two of the Internet’s giants against each other in a bidding war over AOL’s search supplier, lapping up the public fight over this tempest-in-a-teapot. (Admittedly the $447 million in revenue that AOL generated for Google last year isn’t chump change, but as Li points out in his article, after subtracting paybacks to AOL, the amount reflected only 4% of Google’s net revenues.)
Stay tuned tomorrow as Time Warner Chmn./CEO Dick Parsons gives a talk to CS First Boston’s Media Week conference.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:17 AM | Print | Comments (0)
In another sign that P2P video services are emerging from the darknet to become respectable commercial enterprises, Mill Valley, CA-based start-up Grouper has landed a big fish funder, T-Ventures, the investment arm of T-Online, wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG. T-Ventures has plunked $1.75 million into Grouper, raising the total funds generated by the social-networking-P2P-video-file-sharing venture to $5.25 million.
The funding was revealed in Grouper’s official announcement of its device-to-device video sharing service. Grouper offers a free, ad-supported web-based service for viewing, syndicating and downloading user-created videos, audios and photos and an application to import, edit and share user-created or shared media.
With the new functionality, Grouper extends its file-sharing capability so that users can port the videos to the Apple video iPod, the Sony PSP and other video playback devices. In addition to transfer, storage and editing capabilities, Grouper also offers users the ability to send their video feeds to friends and families via RSS.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:12 AM | Print | Comments (0)The Wall Street Journal’s Lee Gomes has a column today that validates my view and gives a boost to my fellow bloggers, if not in name, then in spirit. Gomes contends that tech blogs are the new stars in the media sky.
Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it’s not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.
Gomes casts a spotlight on Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme, well-deserved recognition for a site that most tech bloggers check several times a day. He also notes that unlike political blogs, which need the mainstream media to feed them, tech blogs don’t rely on the big guys as much as serve as the source for the mainstream press.
The major difference between politics blogs and tech blogs is that many of the former still depend on the mainstream media to provide the grist for their mills. The tech blogs, though, have become a world onto themselves, and require no such crutch.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:49 AM | Print | Comments (0)
According to this piece by Bara Vaida in the National Journal’s Tech Daily, key legislators will meet today to decide the fate of telecom reform legislation in the current Congress. The discussions will involve all the key decision-makers including House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX), Energy and Commerce ranking member John Dingell (D-MI) and Reps. Fred Upton (R-MI), Edward Markey (D-MA), and Charles (Chip) Pickering (R-MI).
One bone of contention is whether the bill should move forward with bi-partisan support or only Republican support. On the House side, the first Telecom Act rewrite draft bill had bi-partisan support while Democrats feel they were excluded from the second draft bill.
The biggest issue is network neutrality, which was substantially watered down in the second draft. One key problem for staff is drafting net neutrality rules that achieve two somewhat conflicting goals: bar broadband providers from blocking services and applications without imposing overly intrusive and possibly regressive rules on those providers.
Lawmakers and staff have been arguing over whether and how to write network neutrality language so that it does not impede telecommunications and cable company efforts to grow their businesses in new directions — while also ensuring that no company has a leg up over the other in using the infrastructure of the high speed Internet to distribute its content. Among the questions that committee staff are trying to answer is when activity would “trigger” network neutrality rules, and how much flexibility network operators would have under the rules, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
It could be wishful thinking on the part of the Republicans, but the piece quotes a Bell lobbyist as saying a House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee vote on draft legislation could come as early as December 12.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:08 AM | Print | Comments (1)Doc Searls raises some important questions about the current state of broadband and its implications:
In the shower this morning I was thinking about the unstarted businesses that can only thrive in online markets made possible by symmetrical broadband - markets we have never seen, because broadband to the home (and even to many businesses) has been provided in asymmetrical form from the beginning.
How many small and home office (SOHO) businesses would be made possible by services that let people produce as well as consume?…How many business-building activities are strangled before they are born by prohibitively narrow upstream bandwidths?…How fast would economies grow if every consumer had unlimited powers to produce? That was the promise of the Net in the first place, folks. It’s still not fulfilled.
In spite of the Net’s peer-to-peer, end-to-end, symmetrical, smart edge-stupid middle native architecture, bandwidth provision has carried the assumption that consumers don’t produce anything other than cash for producers and intermediaries. And we’ve bought into those assumptions, too — because most of us have never known anything else.
Responding to a comment, Doc talks about his own experience:
Today, if I want to put 200 photos in my Flickr collection, or worse, if I want to send a multi-gigabyte video file to Google Video, I can’t even do it easily over my “business” broadband connection, which costs me $109/month and provides only 300kb of upstream bandwidth. So I go down to a Starbucks, where there’s typically a T-1 in every store.
This is not a good thing. Worse, it’s a clueless thing, six years into the new millenium, for carriers who could be making a lot more money if they realized the gold mines sitting in the households they hold captive for Hollywood fare that still hasn’t come through like everybody in that business imagined, back in ‘95 or whenever.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:04 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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