The entertainment industry always likes to take the digital world and compare it to the physical world as if the two were the same -- often making claims like unauthorized downloading is "just like stealing a CD from a store." However, they don't seem to like it when you do that back to them to prove all the inconsistencies in their arguments. Lee Griffin wrote up a good blog post about the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, wondering how people would feel if the same rules were applied offline: Would you appreciate being put under house arrest not because of any court determined guilt, but because of someone making accusations of copyright infringement against you for something that may or may not have occurred in your property at the time? Is it even remotely justified to put you under house arrest, to stop you from going to the library, to work, or to socialise with your friends because of those accusations alone?

Or how about point 4...how would you feel if the police were stopping you from accessing your local community centre because a single individual or organisation had threatened the local council in such a way that it is too much for the council to risk the financial cost of allowng it to continue functioning for the community? Imagine arriving at your local pub only to find it inaccessible to you, even though anyone that is visiting from another town can use it freely; not for anything that you or your town have necessarily done, but because of the implications made by an individual in a completely unscrutinised manner?

Finally, point 5 would be very interesting. Could you imagine the police coming and turfing you out of a building you've legitimately bought, and putting it back on the market without paying you a penny, simply because you knew it was in a good location and could make some money off of the future sale? Somehow I don't think that's all too likely! Of course, supporters of the DEB will claim that "this is different!" but they seem to be the same people who will still insist that infringement is no different than theft. Funny how that works.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The Chancellor is considering using next week’s Budget to advocate plans for a global tax on investment banks and other financial institutions that pose a “systemic risk”.

Consumers' association Which? warns of the risk of huge bills for people using smartphones abroad to connect to the internet.

Testing for a virus linked with cervical cancer during traditional screening does not help identify high risk women, say doctors.

Testing for a virus linked with cervical cancer during traditional screening does not help identify high risk women, say doctors.

During my recent trip to India, I flew down to Bangalore for one reason: To meet N.R. Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO for 21 years of Infosys, the first Indian company to go public on Nasdaq and effectively the company that began the $30 billion Indian IT outsourcing market.

Murthy’s idea was so successful that it quickly became controversial—not only within the United States where some Americans feel Indians are “stealing jobs,” but also in India where many are concerned about a tech economy that doesn’t make anything. I wanted to meet with Murthy, because in many ways he’s the best person to address what Indians at home and abroad are facing and where Indian entrepreneurship goes from here.

Here are a few highlights from our meeting:

His Day Job. Murthy thought he was stepping down from Infosys back in 2002, but he couldn’t fully let go. As such, he still works pretty much full time for the company, traveling to meet with customers and running a lot of the company’s mentoring and training programs. The more surprising aspect of his job: He personally signs off on the architecture of every building on each one of Infosys’ campuses that employ some 17,000 people around the world. The one we were sitting in was spread of eight acres and had some remarkable buildings, including one that looked like the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.

I asked why this was a top priority—after all, many Valley campuses are plush but from an architecture standpoint look about the same. He said when GE and other American multinationals were starting to come into his business everyone thought Infosys would lose the local talent war. So Murthy studied why people want to work at a particular place. One of the results was the comfort and design of the facilities. That was in 1994 when Infosys was designing the very building we were sitting in as we had this conversation. “I’ve been in charge of every building since– all over the world,” he says.

Hurting or Helping Local Entrepreneurship? Given exactly how plush Murthy and his colleagues have worked to make Infosys, has he indirectly hurt Bangalore’s entrepreneurship scene by making the risk of leaving so daunting? He smiled when I asked this and said, “We may have unwittingly. But I do feel like the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and kicking in Bangalore.”

Further, I asked about Bangalore’s Zippo-flipping, free-spending generation of young techies who’ve graduated to a huge wave of multinational jobs that pay them far more than their parents ever made, in many cases more than the rest of their families combined. Murthy didn’t deny that that instant-gratification, “gimmie” contingent was strong in the city he helped build, economically speaking. But he blames the Internet and the mass-cross-pollination of Western pop culture, not the bigger paycheck from companies like his.

“We are moving towards a uniform, global culture with an intense competitive spirit and an intense desire for instant gratification,” he says. “But I have a firm belief that each generation is better than the previous one. The Indian entrepreneurs today are more daring than we were.” (This from a man who became a capitalist after after hitchhiking across communist Eastern Europe and getting thrown in jail for chatting up someone’s girlfriend on a train. “More daring” is a tall order, young Indian techies.)

Is India’s Tech Community Too Addicted to Services? Clearly, services has been a great business for Infosys and the hundreds of dollar-millionaires and even more rupee-millionaires that the company’s generous stock program has created. But a lot of Indian CEOs and investors complain that in most cases services-based tech businesses are a great way to get revenues quick, but not a way to build a huge, high-growth business. There’s a big question of whether India’s tech sector has a worrying lack of product-building know-how.

Murthy says it’s a progression. “India missed the industrial revolution, but Indians had intelligence,” he says. “We had to make do with pen and paper. We were always forced to look at the abstract. What is happening in India today is the creation of jobs. Let’s create jobs as long as they are legal and ethical, it doesn’t matter, as long as we make money. The time will come for creating products. I wouldn’t lose sleep over this. If we create enough jobs we’ll raise the confidence of the youngsters and they’ll create products.”

India’s Infrastructure. Here’s something it’s hard for even Murthy to be upbeat about: India’s shoddy physical infrastructure. Murthy has traveled the world and it’s frustrating that so much money has poured into the country he loves, and yet, the infrastructure is still so shockingly bad.

There is progress—Infosys for instance has benefited from a new overpass that cuts down on the drive to the campus by more than thirty minutes. (See!) But it’s not moving nearly fast enough, he says. “I don’t know if we will reach the level of the United States or China,” he adds.

Murthy gave a more nuanced explanation than the usual “it’s corruption” answer you get in India. He explained that 65% of India’s population lives in rural areas and 35% live in cities. And there’s such polarity between the quality of life that politicians have to appear to be doing more for the villages than the cities if they want to get re-elected. That leaves prosperous economic cities blighted by poor sewage systems, pollution spewing generators and beggars weaving through traffic tapping on car windows. “Different emerging nations take different paths,” he says. “In China, they chose to emphasize giving people economic freedom first and political freedom second. In India we chose the opposite path.”

Hurting or Helping US-based Indians? All you have to do is read the comments on one of Vivek Wadhwa’s posts to see the ugly, anti-immigrant, anti-Indian fervor that’s been whipped up in America, post-recession. A lot of it has to do with outsourcing. I asked Murthy if he felt his company and industry’s huge success has indirectly made life harder for Indian-Americans. He turned the blame on xenophobes like Lou Dobbs and grandstanding politicians who use the wedge issue to get viewers and votes.

But it’s an issue he has to address a lot. He answers it by saying every morning he gets up and gets a Pepsi out of his GE Fridge and drives his American car to work where he sits down at his Dell computer. India used to have companies that made soft drinks, refrigerators, cars and computers. But the American ones were better. Allowing them in hurt Indian workers in the short term, but provided a far better quality of life for a much bigger swath of Indians long term. He argues outsourcing has done the same thing for US companies. Greater efficiencies and cost-savings enables these companies to stay competitive and there’s no reason they can’t—in theory—plow those savings into better local jobs or job training.

This argument isn’t going to pacify hate-mongers, because nothing will. Murthy knows that too and while he regrets it, he seems to accept it as reality.

Advice for Entrepreneurs. Murthy has started a $170 million venture fund, so although he spends most of his time still at Infosys, he clearly cares about encouraging the next generation of entrepreneurs. He had two big pieces of advice for them. One, be able to articulate what you do in one sentence. If you can’t, you don’t have a good idea. And two, make sure the market is ready. Businesses are killed, not congratulated, for being ahead of their time.

If you’re a photographer and use a Mac, chances are you’re using Lightroom or Aperture. Probably Lightroom, since Aperture is less popular among pros — and the latest version seems to be an acknowledgment of that. The features added in version 3 are clearly intended to draw casual shooters using iPhoto to the paid image editing honey pot. Since so many of these amazing new features are direct side-loads from iPhoto, it smooths the process and makes the program as a whole more approachable, though whether existing Aperture users will find them helpful is questionable. Brushes, on the other hand, are a welcome addition to any photographer’s toolset, and depending on how dedicated you are, may be worth the price of admission.

Invasion of the iPhoto features

As long as I’ve been using Aperture, I’ve considered it a processing application. Its photo management was troublesome here and there, and iPhoto had the best ways of showing off your shots, but I dealt with it since maintaining two separate libraries of the same photos would be disk space suicide. I’ve only used Lightroom a little bit (and a version or two back) but all my friends say that it just has a better workflow for serious photo work — importing a couple hundred shots, scrubbing through them, doing the necessary adjustments, and outputting to the necessary format. Not that I have trouble doing that in Aperture, but apparently it’s faster and better in Lightroom.

Confronted with such a fearsome opponent, Apple decided that it would be better to flank than to risk a frontal assault. Hence the expansion of Aperture’s incorporation of iPhoto features Faces and Places. I question their relevance in a photo processing application, but given Apple’s tendency towards coalescing functionality, I’m guessing that iPhoto will eventually be Aperture: Gimped Edition, and the only real choice for organizing and messing with large numbers of photos will be Aperture.

There are some kinks to be worked out. Faces plainly doesn’t work. After it spent literally five hours going through my photos (about 1000 per hour), this is what it has come up with:

No, it didn’t have a lot to go on (I hadn’t “trained” it much yet) but really now. After giving it a few more pointers on what I looked like, it still mistook a three-year-old tow-headed girl, my friend Monica (who is Indian, and in a wedding dress), some E3 booth babes, and Casio president Kazuo Kashio for pale, bearded, Devin Coldewey. The cork board background is jarring and the interface for going through your shots is terrible. I realize this is a technology still being perfected, and that is why I am wondering: what is it doing in my RAW editing program?

Places is useful if you have a geotagging camera (still rare) or want to spend a few hours dragging and dropping stuff onto the map. It can be fun, actually, if you take a lot of pictures of your friends, and want to drag and drop this or that night onto the location you went to; it’s like creating a different kind of album (“Linda’s Tavern”), and indeed you can make a browsable smart album from locations. If you’re like me, you won’t feel complete until the photos are more or less where they were within the city, and not all grouped in a single pin, smack in the middle of the city. This could have some promise, but with a backlog of several thousand shots, getting a library up to date in Places is a task I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

It’s a mistake to judge Faces and Places by simply saying “well we were fine before them,” because it may just be that we found ways of working in the old system of organization (Project>Folder>Album) that approximated what these new features do. But I don’t think it’s wrong to say they just don’t really do much, and feel out of place to boot. You have to work at them, or shoot for them, in order for them to really be worthwhile. Still I have to give credit where credit’s due: if you just consider Faces and Places new columns to organize by (like rating or date) then they’re worth their salt. As flagship features, though, they’re duds.

Lastly, the slide show thing. It’s like finding a trout in the milk. Not that it doesn’t work — it works as well as iPhoto’s thing, and I suppose it’s better to have than not. It’s just a little weird to have a sort of… aftermarket feature popped in there next to the serious editing tools. Its little presets are, like in most Apple programs, 25% solid, 75% fluff. Who in the name of all that is holy is going to pick “Shatter” as their slide show transition? It’s ghastly.

The new features are very well explained in little videos accessible through the “Welcome” screen, which will be handy for new users — if they can find the screen after they close it (it’s in Help>Welcome to Aperture).

The good stuff

So if the iPhoto features are icing, the actual cake is the RAW editing, adjustment tools, and user interface. Let’s start with what I would say is the best new feature: Brushes.

You can see a pretty thorough overview of the feature at Apple’s site, but the gist is that it allows you to apply certain effects in limited areas using a brush of adjustable size and intensity. That’s great! I can’t count the number of times I’ve vacillated between two versions of a photo where an adjustment necessary for one part ended up blowing out another, or I just wanted to bring out the color in the eyes but not in the background. A lot of fiddling could usually approximate the effect I wanted, but it would be so much easier to just use a brush. I’ll be using the hell out of this feature, and it’s perhaps the only real step Apple took against Adobe in this update.

(combination Brushes and Help Video screenshot)

The brushes are non-destructive, like any of the dials and curves you can play with in the adjustments panel, so you can feel free to experiment, layer, and try out different effects. One thing I often have to do when shooting review shots is emphasize the color of LEDs, but if the subject is well-lit, the LEDs are going to be barely visible. No problem; make a little brush, add in a little contrast right there, bump the saturation just in the one area, and boom, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Brushes are useful for lots of little things like that.

The new full-screen browser is handy but not really a revolution. They’ve added the ability to get around your library a little more, which is nice, but it’s not as streamlined as the regular browser, which is always accessible by a single keystroke. The fullscreen presentation has definitely been improved, however, and when showing off photos to friends or clients, it’s a better option than either the plain editing window or a slide show.

The preset adjustments, I think we can agree, are being blown way out of proportion. These are the same kind of “professional adjustments” that you have been able to apply on cheap point-and-shoots since the beginning of time. There are a few quick adjust things like high-contrast black-and-white or exposure +1 that are nice to have previews for (the live preview window is handy), but let’s be honest, these are just filters. I’d like to be able to say that they’re carefully adjusted so you won’t see weird color effects, blackouts, or blowouts, but the fact is every one I tried looked cheap and overdone. The others, like white balance and so on, seem pretty redundant considering the actual controls for adjusting those aspects are mere pixels away in the same window.

Click to see it larger. You can’t really tell here, since this photo isn’t very high contrast, but in several of the other shots I tried this on, the vintage look was really purple, cross-processing was really green, and toy camera pushed the contrast way too far. Subtle adjustments these are not.

The good news is that people new to the program might try a couple, see that they were created by dragging curves and color bars around, and then make their own. I’ve had my own “base” adjustment for years now, which was just as easily accessible and just as customizable. Putting together a “look” for a shoot using this feature might be easier now than before, but it’s still just a toy at this point.

The ability to have multiple libraries is nice; splitting work and personal stuff would be my move, so that if a meteor crashed into TC HQ (or, more likely, I’m fired for insubordination), I could free up a couple gigs in one clean sweep. It’s also convenient for backing up and sharing; “here’s my whole ‘wedding’ library, feel free to do what you like with it” rather than “here’s a folder full of RAW files.”

A quick note

Just a PSA: installation of Aperture 3 took ages. Plan on losing at least a working day to 100% processor usage as it converts your library, searches for Faces, and reprocesses your RAW files with the new profile. I’m not holding this against Apple (it’s a LOT of data to sift through) but it’s just something to be aware of.

Conclusion

Aperture is still a great program, in my opinion, and the budding photographer would be a lot better off with this than with iPhoto if they’re planning on doing anything more than collecting snapshots. I’ve gotten used to Aperture’s workflow and they haven’t changed it much in 3, in fact they’ve provided a couple serious improvements with Brushes and potentially Places and Faces — you know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The trouble I see is that Aperture, once a rather single-minded program, is being diluted with features that have nothing to do with its core functionality. Why not have a new program, called “Collection” or something, that hooks into all your libraries, allows for creating robust slide shows, exporting directly to Facebook, and all that sort of thing? Putting all this junk into Aperture is doing to it what Apple has done to iTunes: once a sleek and straightforward program, it has now grown bloated beyond comprehension; it’s a bit like seeing a once-great fighter gone to seed. I have more of an attachment to Aperture than to iTunes, but if Aperture 4 continues along the vector indicated by Aperture 3, you can consider me a Lightroom conversion.

Give Aperture 3 a 30-day trial for free here. $199 to buy, $99 to upgrade.

When Terri was diagnosed with cancer, Lionel Shriver was doting – at first. But as her condition worsened, there always seemed to be a reason not to call...

I met Terri in the early 1980s at an arts camp in Connecticut. We were both in the metalsmithing workshop, and this sharply featured, appealingly surly Armenian taught me some new tricks. Her speciality was rivets and other "cold connections", an apt expression in her case. She was a wilful, stubborn woman, more fiercely so than I first realised; 25 years later, I'd discover just how defiant my closest girlfriend could be, even in the face of the undeniable.

Terri was full of the contradictions that always captivate me in people: inclined to bear grudges but incredibly generous (often rocking up with gifts for no reason – why, I still have half a dozen pairs of her shoes). Harsh but warm. Prone to depression but with a knack for festivity. I conjure her scowling down the pavement and rolling in laughter with equal ease. She was tortured and brooding; she was terribly kind. And she was a serious artist in the best sense: not pretentious, but determined to craft interesting work well.

Back in Queens, where we both lived in our mid-20s, we found common cause in our improbable aspirations. She wanted to become a famous artist, I a famous novelist – but Terri had then sold next to nothing and I'd not published more than my phone number. It was a big, indifferent world out there, and an ally was crucial. We'd conspire over a six-pack in my tiny one-bedroom flat, jovially certain that we'd still be best friends when we were "cancerous old bags". It was a running gag. We thought it was funny.

Beware the jokes of your heedless, immortal youth. Fast-forward through two and a half decades, during which Terri and I survived abusive boyfriends, marital problems, professional setbacks, my expatriation to the UK and her exile to New Jersey, Terri's painful endometriosis and four failed IVF treatments, as well as, of course, each other. During my regular summer migration to New York, in 2005, Terri shared her perplexity that she'd been running a low-grade fever for weeks. I said it sounded like a tenacious virus. But shortly thereafter she rang from hospital.

She was being tested for a range of ailments, the most far-fetched of these a rare disease called mesothelioma. Thus it was quite a shock when the doctors confirmed that peritoneal mesothelioma was exactly what she had – almost certainly caused by exposure to the asbestos that laced metalsmithing materials when she was in art school. Her husband Paul reported grimly that the average survival rate for this ravaging cancer was a single year.

Terri was only 50, and the timing was tragic for other reasons, too. From frustration, malaise and exactingly high standards, through most of her career she had underproduced. Yet in recent years something had loosened up, and her output had accelerated. Better still, she was at last imbuing her creations with the feeling they'd sometimes lacked, the most moving of which was an elegy to her unavailing IVF treatments. She was finally pulling in big commissions, one of which was about to go on display at the V&A. At the same time, her brooding demeanour had brightened; she'd grown more outgoing, energetic and relaxed. Almost... happy. Well, so much for that.

On the heels of her diagnosis, I was doting. I'm not tooting my own horn. I suspect being a paragon at the very start of a loved one's illness is pretty much the form. We're on the phone daily. We stop by regularly, and bring freshly baked scones. We follow every medical twist and turn. And we're inclined to rash promises. With a flinch, I recall declaring before Terri's surgery that I'd be willing to move into their house in New Jersey for weeks at a time! I'd be at her beck and call, running errands, preparing meals and filling prescriptions.

Useful tip: if someone close to you falls gravely ill, at the outset, in the first flush of anguish and desperation to help? Watch the mouth.

For the timing of Terri's cancer was terrible for me as well. A month after her diagnosis, I was intending to return home to London, where a host of professional commitments could not (or so it seemed) be reneged upon. Although for most of my literary career I'd scribbled in obscurity, my prospects were suddenly looking up. My seventh novel had inexplicably hit the bestseller list in the UK, and subsequently won the Orange prize earlier that summer. (I still have the droll good-luck package Terri and Paul delivered when I made the shortlist: orange marmalade, orange candles, orange oil.) For the first time, I faced a smorgasbord of opportunities – festival gigs, bookstore appearances, feature assignments – and I was in the middle of a new book.

So, however reluctantly, I flew back to London. After Terri's surgery, Paul phoned with the lowdown: the surgeons had discovered a patch of aggressive "sarcomatoid" cells, which meant Terri's prognosis was bleak.

I will give myself this grudging credit: I did fly back to visit Terri for Thanksgiving that November, and for a while I kept in faithful touch, ringing weekly and following every grisly detail of her punishing chemotherapy. But this is not a boast about what a wonderful friend I was in Terri's time of need. This is a mea culpa.

Little by little, I'd notice that it had been a fortnight since I'd rung New Jersey. I'd kick myself. But some book review would be due that afternoon, so I'd vow to ring tomorrow. Time and again some immediate task would seem more urgent, and I'd tell myself that I should ring Terri when I'm settled and concentrated. Watch out whenever you "tell yourself" anything; it's the red flag of self-deceit. Long hours of being "settled and concentrated" mysteriously failed to manifest themselves.

I stuck a Post-it note on the edge of my desk: "RING TERRI!" Over the months, the note faded, much like my resolve. On the too-rare occasions I acted on the reminder, I had to put a mental gun to my head. But why? This was one of my closest friends, and she was dying. While she was still on this Earth, why was I not battling to maximise every moment? Surely the problem should have been my ringing too often, whizzing back to the States too many times, making a pest of myself.

Granted, our conversations were sometimes awkward. My own life had never gone more swimmingly, while Terri's was circling the drain. I was embarrassed. I found myself editing from our discussions anything I'd done that was exciting or fun. When I returned from an author's tour of Sweden, I portrayed the trip as a drag. This  sort of cover-up reliably backfired. So apparently I felt sorry for myself – for going to Sweden! When Terri could rarely leave the house.

I make no apologies for this, since this is what novelists do: at some midpoint in Terri's decline, I decided that my next novel would draw on this encounter with cancer. At least I had the humanity to refrain from taking notes during our phone calls, thus relinquishing many a "telling detail" and much "great material". Consequently, I had to do an enormous amount of research on mesothelioma later, and this is what I do apologise for: not having done all those web searches on her treatments – the surgery, the drugs, the side-effects – when Terri was still suffering through them. Now, I'm mortified to have Googled "mesothelioma" only once the search was for a book.

When I returned to the US that second summer, Terri had alarmingly deteriorated. Thin to start with, she'd lost weight. She was gaunt and weak, her skin tinged a dark, unsettling orange: a chemo tan. It was obvious where this was headed. But whenever anyone acted as if she wasn't going to make it, Terri grew enraged. She resented the "sentimental" testimonials her friends and relatives recited at her bedside; she thought they were delivering a death sentence. Though she wouldn't have put it that way. I wonder if throughout her illness I ever heard her say the word "death" aloud.

Thus on one count only could I blame Terri herself for my increasingly deficient friendship. Her refusal to admit she was dying meant we couldn't ever talk about the elephant in the room. Pretending that the treatments were working and she was going to come through this injected an artifice in our relationship at odds with the confidences we'd shared for 25 years. Days I did visit, afternoons I did ring, we'd end up talking, lamely, about recipes. Indeed, on a brief trip in November 2006, I visited Terri in New Jersey; it was the last time I'd ever see her, and I knew this instinctively at the time. Yet we spent an appalling proportion of that final visit talking about mashed potatoes.

When her husband rang me in London a few days later with the news, he was consumed with a steely rage. Obviously Paul was angry that he'd lost his wife. But he was also angry at other people. Oh, he expressed his disgust in general terms, as a disillusionment with the human race, a good-riddance to our whole species. But I knew what he meant. Paul's fury was aimed at Terri's friends and family, who had almost universally made themselves scarce for months. His fury was also aimed at me.

I thought I deserved it. I had visited, some. I had rung up, some. But not nearly often enough, and in truth one of my best friends perishing before my eyes had instilled a deep aversion, an instinctive avoidance, a desperation to flee.

It would be a far better thing if I were a lone shithead amid an ocean of altruists. And surely some folks really do step up to the plate when a friend or relative falls mortally ill – wonderful people who keep popping by with casseroles to the very last day. I have a new admiration for such stalwarts, as well as a new appreciation for the Christian duty to "visit the sick". Yet I fear this suddenly-remembering-somewhere-you-gotta-be is a common failing of our time. In fearing and avoiding death, we fear and avoid the dying.

I'll risk sounding preachy, since I've paid for my sermon with a regret that never leaves me. Most of us will experience the afflictions of our nearest and dearest perhaps multiple times before we're faced with a deadly diagnosis of our own. So be mindful. Disease is frightening. It's unpleasant. It reminds us of everything we try not to think about on our own accounts. A biological instinct to steer clear of contagion can kick in even with diseases like cancer that we understand rationally aren't communicable. So the urge to avoid sick people runs very deep. Notice it. Then overcome it. There will always be something you'd rather do than confront the agony, anxiety and exile of serious illness, and these alternative endeavours seem terribly pressing in the moment: replacing the printer cartridge, catching up on urgent work-related email. But nothing is more pressing than someone you love who's suffering, and whose continuing existence you can no longer take for granted. So never vow to ring "tomorrow" – pick up the bloody phone.

· So Much For That, by Lionel Shriver, is published by HarperCollins on 25 March at £15. To order a copy for £14, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

• Bereavement
• Relationships
• Cancer
• Health

Lionel Shriverguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

It was a good run while it lasted, but it looks like the video retail chain Blockbuster is finally on its way to the big strip mall in the sky. Yahoo reports that the video chain is close to filing for bankruptcy after a disastrous year, which saw them losing over $500 million in 2009. The Texas-based company has been meeting with lawyers to discuss their options, and even went as far as to consult Pierpont Communications about how to break the news to the press, and more importantly the stockholders, that the retailer had, "issued a regulatory filing claiming it may need to seek federal bankruptcy protection if it cannot restructure its debt."

So how bad could it be? Well, just take a look at Blockbuster's record over the past few years: they have closed hundreds of stores, sales have gone down by 20%, and profits are plummeting. The retailer made some attempts last year to get into the digital content game, but I think this is a case of too little too late, because revenue from their new kiosks, online rentals, and streaming video hasn't helped. Now compare that to a company like Netflix that has grown annually by 20 per cent and is posting profits of $679.7 million for 2009.

Blockbuster had revealed that it was in negotiations with Hollywood studios for better financial terms to provide their stores with DVDs when the bankruptcy story hit the wire. If Hollywood decides that Blockbuster is too much of a financial risk, it could force the already cash-strapped retailer to make up-front payments for their content, and with 'liquidity' being a real problem for the video retailer, it could be the last nail in the coffin. So far, the financial melt-down is focused in the US, and according to Blockbuster, Canadian and UK stores are just fine. But I can't be the only one who thinks it's just a matter of time before what started out as a joke has gotten one step closer to becoming reality.

Filed under: Exhibition, Newsstand, Home Entertainment

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Florida fund signals trillions at risk, protections lacking.

Google patches Chrome for eight vulnerabilities that could have left users at risk. The fixes come just as white hat hackers are set to go to town in a vulnerability search contest.

Big increases in minimum wage and reduction of voting age to 16 being considered for party's 'next phase of national renewal'

Labour will pledge an end to the era of extortionate credit in its election manifesto, and is considering big increases in the minimum wage, the introduction of free school meals for all and a reduction in the voting age to 16, Ed Miliband, the cabinet minister responsible for its drafting, reveals today.

In a Guardian interview trailing Labour's manifesto for an unprecedented fourth term, Miliband reveals that the prospectus will be about showing that Labour can lead the country to "the next phase of national renewal" and that the party "will reform both the market and the state".

The manifesto will also set out proposals for a new model of banking built round a People's Bank, drawing on the post office network, and a possible cap on credit interest rates.

Miliband said one aim would be to show that Labour's rights and responsibilities agenda "needs to go all the way to the top". The manifesto would "not promise the earth", but he said: "One of the profound issues in this election is: in a world of tough decisions, in whose interests do you make those decisions? We are going to be very clear about where money comes from in this manifesto."

The energy and climate change secretary likens the introduction of a People's Bank, in the wake of the banking crisis, to the creation of the Sure Start network of children's centres – an institutional reform that meets new demands in society and brings together poor and middle-class people. Built round the 12,000-strong network of post offices, the bank would provide capital for the hundreds of credit unions in the UK, he disclosed.

He argued: "Institutions are the things that define governments. The 1945 government was defined by its relationship with the NHS. The 1997 government was defined around rebuilding the fabric of communities through institutions like Sure Start. I think the idea of the People's Bank ... is one of those ideas."

Ministers are completing talks with the Post Office on the range of banking services to be provided, and the scale of its initial capitalisation.

Miliband said: "Frankly banks have let down low-income consumers. The People's Bank can be a very serious financial institution and a competitor to the conventional private sector. One of the exciting ideas is for the People's Bank to provide the network of credit unions access to funds, but it can also become a banking alternative for a significantly wider group than just the low-income consumers. It is part of a bigger reform we need in the relationship between individuals and financial institutions."

Some consumer groups have warned that a cap on interest rates might see the suppliers of credit refuse to provide it to poor people altogether. But access to an alternative supplier of credit would reduce that risk, making a cap easier to introduce.

Miliband said: "We are looking more widely at a cap on interest rates. There is a real issue about the way in which low- income groups are being ripped off."

A review into credit card companies this month proposed smaller-scale reforms, but government sources said the option of a cap was likely to be in the manifesto. Despite historically low Bank of England base rates, the average interest charged on a credit card has reached 18.8% – the highest level since 1998. Some consumers are now paying more than 40% on the cash they have borrowed.

Miliband has been working on the manifesto for three years, and says it will offer the country a radical response to the banking and political crises.

"What people do not want after these two events is a return to business as usual. They want a sense we have learned lessons from the past. They want the next stage of national renewal," he said. "The task of the manifesto is to show that when it comes to the national renewal we are the people to deliver it, not the Conservatives."

Miliband said he favoured the introduction of votes at 16 to be included as part of a package of constitutional reforms, including changes to the voting system. "Perhaps the opportunity was not there before, but expenses has so brought into focus a sense that politics needs to change and open up. There is a new appetite for political renewal."

He also indicated the possibility of a strengthening of the minimum wage, currently £5.80 an hour, saying that reforms would go beyond tighter enforcement to examining a radical increase in its level.

He also said that, subject to an affordability test, there was "a strong case for universal free school meals. It makes a big difference in terms of nutrition. It makes a big difference in terms of concentration in classrooms."

The manifesto would also contain proposals for a more open state in which the floodgates of government data are opened to the public, so changing the relationship between citizen and state.

In a speech on Monday, Gordon Brown may suggest making one welfare benefit available exclusively online as a way of encouraging Britain's 10 million digitally excluded towards the internet.

Miliband also trailed a more interventionist European industrial policy, including both infrastructure and green investment banks.

"The old view that the conventional private sector on its own would ensure our infrastructure was built, the right sort of companies were supported and people will get the banking services they need has not worked."

He promised the manifesto would offer fresh guarantees for citizens to seek redress if the health service, police or schools let them down. The government has already announced that it will offer a private sector alternative in the case of NHS failure, a parental ballot in the case of a failing school, and a right to a neighbourhood beat meeting in the case of police.

Miliband said: "We need to be stronger in terms of the redress we offer and you will see that in the manifesto, because people have to have a sense that they are meaningful and will give them power."

• Labour
• Manifestos 2010
• Ed Miliband
• General election 2010

Patrick WintourAllegra Strattonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

"Although the word "entitlement" fits, it's been used so frequently as to have become inadequate to capture the preening self-regard, the obliviousness to the damage that high-flying finance has inflicted on the real economy, the learned blindness to vital considerations in the pay equation. Getting an education, or even hard work, does not guarantee outcomes. One of the basic precepts of finance is that of a risk-return tradeoff: high potential payoff investments come with greater downside. But how did that evolve into the current belief system among the incumbents, that Wall Street was a sure ride, a guaranteed "heads I win, tails you lose" bet?" Yves Smith writes an essay on 'indefensible men.'

The e-book war between Amazon.com and Apple is
getting uglier. Dennis Johnson cites a report in Publishers Marketplace (subscription required) that alleges that Amazon.com is telling publishers that if they switch to an agency model (ala Macmillan) , they will lose Amazon as a platform for both e-books and print.

This battle, which in many ways mirrors similar struggles between record labels and online music stores, underscores some of the challenges that moving into widespread digital distribution for a formerly non-digital product can bring.

The Agency Model Conundrum

Recently, Macmillian’s CEO John Sargent explained the agency model, as it relates to e-book sales, in his blog:

“Starting at the end of March, we will move from the ‘retail model’ of selling e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who then sell to readers at a price that the retailer determines) to the ‘agency model’ (publishers set the price, and retailers take a commission on the sale to readers).”

In other words, Macmillan wants to be able to control how much digital books are sold for on a per-book basis. Much like music publishers fought (and eventually won) the right to sell certain digital tracks or digital albums for more (or less, in some cases) than the $0.99 per track/$9.99 per album standard, publishers want that same control.

Amazon disagrees. And while it did acquiesce to Macmillan’s position at the end of January, it apparently has no plans of making those same concessions for future publishers.

In the Publishers Marketplace report, Michael Cader writes:

“At least one independent publisher of scale was told categorically by Amazon in a recent phone call initiated by the retailer that Amazon would not negotiate agency selling terms with any other publishers outside of the five initial Apple partners. This publisher was told that if they switched to an agency model for e-books, Amazon would stop selling their entire list, in print and digital form. In conversation, Amazon is said to have reiterated that as matter of policy they are declining to negotiate an agency model with any publisher outside of the five who have already announced agreements with Apple’s iBookstore.”

In other words, the agreements that have been made with the five publishers signed to work with Apple — Macmillan, Harper Collins, Penguin, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster — will not be passed on to smaller publishers.

It seems even the agreement with the other four publishers outside of Macmillan (known as Agency Four) isn’t set in stone.

Cader also writes:

“The indications are that if the Agency Four have not finalized new digital sales agreements with Amazon prior to the launch of Apple’s iPad, they could face delisting from direct sale at Amazon, as Macmillan did.”

Translation: If those publishers don’t finalize a new digital agreement with Amazon before the launch of the iPad, they risk being removed from Amazon.com

Amazon Is Biggest Now, But For How Long?

Because it is both the biggest seller of e-books and print books, Amazon has enormous power in the publishing industry. However, it’s unclear how long it will be able to play hardball with publishers, especially as formidable competitors like Apple (with iTunes) and Google emerge.

Apple, interestingly, held a reverse stance with music executives for many years before finally changing course in January of 2009 with the introduction of variable pricing. However, one reason Apple was able to exert so much influence over record labels pricing was because until Amazon launched its service (again, Amazon took the reverse approach with music, letting publishers set variable pricing for tracks and albums), there was no real competitor in the digital music space.

Amazon isn’t quite as lucky. First, e-books have been around for years and are available in a variety of formats from a variety of different storefronts. In fact, Amazon sold digital books long before it introduced the Kindle.

The e-book market has evolved much more quickly than the digital music space, which leaves less wiggle room for retailers, like Amazon, to exert pressure.

However, make no mistake, for smaller publishers, the risk of losing listings on Amazon.com is still probably a big enough threat to have an effect.

We’ll keep following this situation as it develops.

[via John Gruber]

Reviews: Google

Tags: amazon, apple, business, ebook price war, ebooks, ipad, Kindle, Macmillan

There used to be two independent movie rental places in my neighborhood, with one just a few blocks further away offering a seemingly endless array of movies - blockbusters, esoteric indies, extreme horror, sexploitation and grindhouse, triple X features, and even dubiously dubbed impossible to get films like the infamous Skidoo, Preminger's LSD freakout featuring a stoned Groucho Marx as God.

Since rents have skyrocketed and Netflix has appeared on the scene, these brick and mortar stores have been wiped out like the T-Rex, and if I don't like my Netflix offerings at home or if I need to find a movie for research, well, my choices are Blockbuster (which does have some surprising DVDs to rent) or the rental place that's squeezed into the corner of a pizza joint.

For what it's worth, I love Netflix. Love it. I love rating films and seeing what it comes up with, and I love getting those little envelopes in the mail. I love seeing what my friends have rated. My queue is topped out, and I have started bookmarking movies I need to Netflix. Streaming to my Xbox is great, and new films are being added at an alarmingly awesome rate.

At the risk of sounding like a younger female Richard Corliss, I do miss browsing my local video store - a good one, mind you. I could examine each shelf for ages, looking for the perfect movie to suit my mood that night, or getting something on a whim because its cover catches my eye or because it's an employee pick I'd never heard of, in the same way I visit my favorite book store and peruse the books they have handpicked to display in the shelves at the front.

Filed under: Fandom, Home Entertainment

Continue reading When Netflix Isn't Enough

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Last year, OneRiot ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has since been integrated into the search engine’s API. Today, the realtime search startup is improving upon its advertising product by offering Trending Ad unit that automatically updates in realtime corresponding to the the most popular trending topics at the time.

The ability to update in realtime allows OneRiot to show advertiser content that is relevant to trending topics as they emerge on networks like Twitter, Facebook and the web. The ads are available via standard-size IAB Ad Units and is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. And previously, OneRiot’s “Trending Ads” were available only via OneRiot’s API. This meant that developers had to integrate the raw feed into their applications, and create their own UI. The new ad unit allows any website currently monetizing with standard static ad units to display RiotWise Trending Ads.

In order to implement he new ad unit, publishers need to integrate Trending Ad Units in the same way they would call standard ad units. The ads will then link to realtime and relevant content from OneRiot’s network of media partners. One Riot claims that the realtime relevance of the ads leads to click through rates at four times the average rates.

Currently OneRiot’s trending ads have been used on Twitter apps (ÜberTwitter) and desktop clients (Digsby). OneRiot shares revenue with the application developer. As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content with realtime ads, especially is the ads are refreshing constantly to match trending topics. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. Regardless, it seems like a viable monetization tool for developers.

The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, has been steadily innovating its product and is gathering up partners quickly. The realtime stream ramped up this year with all the big players adding functionality to their search offerings and OneRiot was smart to get in the game early.

A new Gartner study suggests that virtualized workloads are being deployed insecurely.

Hugh Pickens sends in a Washington Post story about how US military cyber-warriors attacked and shut down a CIA-backed intelligence gathering site. "US military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled an online 'honey pot' monitored by US and Saudi intelligence agencies to identify extremists before they could strike, after military commanders said that the site was putting Americans at risk. The CIA argued that dismantling the site would lead to a significant loss of intelligence, while the military (in the form of the NSA) countered that taking it down was a legitimate operation in defense of US troops. 'The CIA didn't endorse the idea of crippling Web sites,' said one US counterterrorism official. The agency 'understood that intelligence would be lost, and it was; that relationships with cooperating intelligence services would be damaged, and they were; and that the terrorists would migrate to other sites, and they did.' Four former senior US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the creation and shutting down of the site illustrates the need for clearer policies governing cyberwar."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens sends in a Washington Post story about how US military cyber-warriors attacked and shut down a CIA-backed intelligence gathering site. "US military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled an online 'honey pot' monitored by US and Saudi intelligence agencies to identify extremists before they could strike, after military commanders said that the site was putting Americans at risk. The CIA argued that dismantling the site would lead to a significant loss of intelligence, while the military (in the form of the NSA) countered that taking it down was a legitimate operation in defense of US troops. 'The CIA didn't endorse the idea of crippling Web sites,' said one US counterterrorism official. The agency 'understood that intelligence would be lost, and it was; that relationships with cooperating intelligence services would be damaged, and they were; and that the terrorists would migrate to other sites, and they did.' Four former senior US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the creation and shutting down of the site illustrates the need for clearer policies governing cyberwar."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the release of court filings in the three-year old copyright infringement suit between Viacom and YouTube, we’ve seen the video share site argue that it is not liable for infringing videos uploaded to its site, as it claims protection under the safe harbor provision of the Digital Milennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

But in Viacom’s filing for a partial summary judgment, it makes the case that the site’s founders — and later executives of acquirer Google — turned a blind eye to copyrighted material in an effort to drastically grow the site’s user base. And since YouTube’s founders were aware of infringement and chose to do nothing about it, Viacom argues that the company is liable under the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision, which found that a site operating with the intent of infringing should not be protected by the DMCA.

Using internal emails that were passed between YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, Viacom paints the picture of YouTube as a young company whose leaders were willing to grow its user base at any cost. For instance, the filing states that Chen urged his associates in one email to “concentrate all of our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil.” The comment notably contrasts with future purchaser Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra — but more importantly, that attitude set the stage for a number of decisions that the YouTube founders made to grow at the expense of rights holders that it was infringing on.

YouTube didn’t always ignore the sensitive copyright issue. At one point during the summer of 2005, for instance, the site’s founders removed “some of the most obvious infringing video from YouTube to give the impression of copyright compliance,” the Viacom filing claims. However, they also chose to leave a good deal of infringing content up, believing that enabling users to search for less high-profile content was worth the risk. According to the filing, Chen wrote in an email, “That way, the perception is that we are concerned about this type of material and we’re actively monitoring it. [But the] actual removal of this content will be in varying degrees. That way . . . you can find truckloads of . . . copyrighted content . . . [if] you [are] actively searching for it.”

And at one point, YouTube founder Jawed Karim even uploaded infringing content to the site himself, which drew some criticism from Chen. In an email, Chen acknowledged, “We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.”

But for the most part, Viacom argues that the founders mainly did nothing about the copyright issue, even though internally they knew it was driving a large portion of their traffic. In an email exchange between the founders, Chen estimated that 80 percent of the site’s traffic was driven by pirated videos, and opposed taking them down proactively because, “if you remove the potential copyright infringements . . . site traffic and virality will drop to maybe 20% of what it is.”

While Viacom tries to make the case that YouTube’s founders knew the extent of the infringement taking place and chose to do nothing about it, it argues that Google was also well aware of the site’s infringement issues at purchase. As part of Google’s due diligence into YouTube, financial advisor Credit Suisse analyzed the site’s content and estimated that more than 60 percent of video views appeared on premium content, but YouTube only had a license for about 10 percent of those videos, according to Viacom.

Furthermore, Viacom claims that Google not only acquired YouTube despite those problems, but it chose initially to take the same approach as YouTube’s founders by ignoring copyright issues. Rather than screen videos prior to putting them on the site, as Google had done with its own video site, Google Video, it allowed YouTube to continue operating without any pre-emptive enforcement policies in place.

All this, Viacom argues, suggests that YouTube and Google should not be protected by the DMCA. Like Grokster, the company argues, “Google and YouTube were not just innocent and unwitting accomplices to infringement perpetrated by YouTube users. Defendants operated YouTube with the unlawful objective of using infringing material to explosively build their user base and become the dominant video website on the Internet.”

With the release of court filings in the three-year old copyright infringement suit between Viacom and YouTube, we’ve seen the video share site argue that it is not liable for infringing videos uploaded to its site, as it claims protection under the safe harbor provision of the Digital Milennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

But in Viacom’s filing for a partial summary judgment, it makes the case that the site’s founders — and later executives of acquirer Google — turned a blind eye to copyrighted material in an effort to drastically grow the site’s user base. And since YouTube’s founders were aware of infringement and chose to do nothing about it, Viacom argues that the company is liable under the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision, which found that a site operating with the intent of infringing should not be protected by the DMCA.

Using internal emails that were passed between YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, Viacom paints the picture of YouTube as a young company whose leaders were willing to grow its user base at any cost. For instance, the filing states that Chen urged his associates in one email to “concentrate all of our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil.” The comment notably contrasts with future purchaser Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra — but more importantly, that attitude set the stage for a number of decisions that the YouTube founders made to grow at the expense of rights holders that it was infringing on.

YouTube didn’t always ignore the sensitive copyright issue. At one point during the summer of 2005, for instance, the site’s founders removed “some of the most obvious infringing video from YouTube to give the impression of copyright compliance,” the Viacom filing claims. However, they also chose to leave a good deal of infringing content up, believing that enabling users to search for less high-profile content was worth the risk. According to the filing, Chen wrote in an email, “That way, the perception is that we are concerned about this type of material and we’re actively monitoring it. [But the] actual removal of this content will be in varying degrees. That way . . . you can find truckloads of . . . copyrighted content . . . [if] you [are] actively searching for it.”

And at one point, YouTube founder Jawed Karim even uploaded infringing content to the site himself, which drew some criticism from Chen. In an email, Chen acknowledged, “We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.”

But for the most part, Viacom argues that the founders mainly did nothing about the copyright issue, even though internally they knew it was driving a large portion of their traffic. In an email exchange between the founders, Chen estimated that 80 percent of the site’s traffic was driven by pirated videos, and opposed taking them down proactively because, “if you remove the potential copyright infringements . . . site traffic and virality will drop to maybe 20% of what it is.”

While Viacom tries to make the case that YouTube’s founders knew the extent of the infringement taking place and chose to do nothing about it, it argues that Google was also well aware of the site’s infringement issues at purchase. As part of Google’s due diligence into YouTube, financial advisor Credit Suisse analyzed the site’s content and estimated that more than 60 percent of video views appeared on premium content, but YouTube only had a license for about 10 percent of those videos, according to Viacom.

Furthermore, Viacom claims that Google not only acquired YouTube despite those problems, but it chose initially to take the same approach as YouTube’s founders by ignoring copyright issues. Rather than screen videos prior to putting them on the site, as Google had done with its own video site, Google Video, it allowed YouTube to continue operating without any pre-emptive enforcement policies in place.

All this, Viacom argues, suggests that YouTube and Google should not be protected by the DMCA. Like Grokster, the company argues, “Google and YouTube were not just innocent and unwitting accomplices to infringement perpetrated by YouTube users. Defendants operated YouTube with the unlawful objective of using infringing material to explosively build their user base and become the dominant video website on the Internet.”

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

Ever since she brought me into the world, my mother has taught me many things, namely to not only learn from my own mistakes, but also from the mistakes of others.

Microsoft clearly never spoke to my mom, as evidenced by its decision to leave cut, copy, and paste capabilities out of the new Windows Phone 7 Series platform, at least in the early rounds. If they had paid Mom a visit, they would have been told -- after being offered some tea, of course -- to fix all the boo-boos of earlier smartphone operating systems before releasing their own updated version. She would have advised them to understand the rough spots encountered by competitive offerings, and do everything in their power to avoid them.

I think my mom's ticked with Microsoft

Okay, perhaps she wouldn't have worded it precisely that way, but I'm certain you get my point regardless. I'm sure I speak for my mother (and likely, a whole bunch of you, too) when I say I'm disappointed in what may either be Microsoft's "decision" to leave three of the most basic functions in the history of computing out of its just-announced OS, or as we seem to be learning now, it's having overlooked the whole subject in the planning phase.

This morning, blogger Long Zheng reports he was told by Microsoft that cut and paste is something the company hopes will find a place in Windows Phone 7 Series at some future point.

Now, the initial excuse the company provided was (and is, and quite likely always will be) insufficient and, if we're being brutally honest, more than a little arrogant: "Most users, including Office users, don't really need clipboard functionality." So what's the story now, after Long's report: "We asked users to give us some details, and they decided, most users do like clipboard functionality, just not right at first?"

While I realize OS vendors have to make countless decisions about which features should and should not make it into the final product, I bristle at Microsoft's tone -- a bit like US Congresspeople explaining why the public option for health care is a really, really, really good idea, but just not for the bill being discussed today. If Microsoft (or, for that matter, if anyone at all) can learn anything from Congress this year, it's that people don't like being told by The Powers On High what they are supposed to want or not want, and when.

It isn't Microsoft's place to tell users that they won't ever need to cut, copy, or paste anything for as long as they own their new devices. It's the kind of blow-off statement that sounds shockingly like Apple when it introduced the iPhone in 2007, similarly stripped of any ability to cut-and-paste. After a sea of complaints from users and reviewers who actually do know what they want, and don't need to be told, Apple wisely retro-baked that functionality back into the OS two years later. While the controversy didn't seem to dent Apple's market share, Microsoft hardly has the benefit of Apple's marketing prowess or brand equity.

Apple aficionados were willing to cut the company some slack, and ended up buying iPhones anyway. Microsoft aficionados are a lot harder to find, they won't line up around the block in the middle of the night, and they'll probably pick up an Android-powered device as an alternative. With Windows Mobile...oops, Classic devices retaining this feature, and Windows Phone 7 Series lacking it, the inconsistency is difficult to understand. However you slice it, there will be no slack for Windows Phone 7 Series, and it's more than a little shocking that Microsoft couldn't see this coming.

Teaching us all a lesson?

In fairness to Microsoft, its new mobile OS includes a data detection service that automatically recognizes common elements like addresses and phone numbers. Within this context, perhaps there's room to make the argument that cutting and pasting is yesterday's news. This technology, popularized with the first mass-market GUIs in the early '80s, and perpetuated in virtually every desktop and mobile OS ever since, could be one of those things that we hold on to like a security blanket. And like the ratty old blanket, perhaps there's a time when we need to let go. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is doing us all a favor by pushing it out the door.

But consumers are a fickle lot. And what's makes sense from a strategic or historical perspective isn't necessarily right from the point of view of the guy forking over the dough for your new wonder-product. Never mind that Microsoft may, in fact, be "right" in concluding that we no longer need cut, copy, and paste on our mobile devices. Customers, after all, are always right, even if their choices make them look like circus clowns who do their makeup in the dark. It's their mistake to make and their shame to live down. Even if the vendor believes otherwise, it's not the smartest business strategy to call them idiots and make fun of their smudged face paint.

Casting off a legacy

In fairness to Microsoft, I somewhat understand where the company is coming from. Previous versions of its mobile OS suffered from what I like to call Shrunken Windows Syndrome. Instead of being built from the ground up as truly mobile-enabled solutions, they seemed to be pared-down versions of Microsoft's flagship desktop OS products. Microsoft's philosophy seemed to be that if it worked on a PC, it would work on a smartphone or a PDA, too. I used a number of Windows CE and Mobile devices over the years, and I never got used to navigating a full-on Start menu, complete with cascading sub-menus, with a stylus or thumb keyboard. It was as if Microsoft never actually used its own mobile products out in the field, and never listened to users who complained bitterly that its design philosophy simply didn't work out there.

With Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft seems to have finally gotten the mobile message. It's built from the ground up as a modern, competitive, lean and efficient mobile OS. I suspect the cut-and-paste omission is the company's way of overcompensating for years of heavy Windows legacy on its mobile products, a hackneyed way to break with its past.

Memo to Redmond: There are other ways to accomplish this.

It's only temporary

If Long Zheng's reporting is accurate (and it often is), I'd wager that v7.1 will have copy and paste...that is, if Microsoft doesn't cave to the firestorm earlier and release it as an on-the-fly fix. Either way, the only way Microsoft will ever gain traction in the mobile OS market is by listening to both customers and prospective customers and integrating their suggestions -- well, the value-added ones, at least -- into successive generations of their product.

This is a gaffe Microsoft simply can't afford. Its mobile OS is in the fight of its life as Microsoft battles the Apple/Google/RIM juggernaut on one hand and its own declining mobile market share on the other. Beyond the numbers, there's the risk that the market has already given up on Microsoft succeeding as a mobile vendor. That psychological factor (something Palm knows all too well) is something Microsoft needs to fix by reinstating cut-and-paste support. Now wouldn't be soon enough.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Study finds peer-to-peer file sharing exposes personal health data on home computers to security vulnerabilities.

One of the concerns expressed by both users and experts attending Cloud Computing Congress in London this week was the risk of data being exposed to third parties in a multi-tenant environment. There seems to be a lot of confusion on the matter, so I thought it would be useful to blog a quick overview that may be helpful for people evaluating whether to go multi-tenant.

Intuitively, we feel that if our data is physically on the same computer system — or, in a fully multi-tenant stack, actually in the same database — then there has to be a higher risk of data being exposed. Either inadvertently, when for example a software bug or system mulfunction gives access to a user of another system on the same shared infrastructure. Or maliciously, when someone exploits some weakness in the architecture to gain illicit access to data.

In theory, there is some truth in this intuition. But in practice, it depends what level of multi-tenancy we’re talking about and how rigorously it has been architected. The theoretical comparison assumes the same security regime in both cases, whereas in real life, the provider of a multi-tenant service is going to put a lot of expertise and resource into making sure its infrastructure is as secure as possible against this kind of data exposure, which would be very bad for its reputation. Most multi-tenant systems are operated to much higher security standards than standalone systems. Look at it this way: in theory, a single house with a fence around it is much more secure than an apartment in a block shared with many other households. In practice, the householders in the apartment block will pool the cost of having a porter on duty 24×7 to control access to the building and monitor security.

There are two main risks to be aware of, depending on what type of infrastructure you’re looking at. The first risk applies to a virtualized infrastructure, where a single physical machine hosts many separate virtual machines. There is a theoretical risk that one of the machines in this kind of setup could monitor what its neighbours are doing, burrowing into the underlying infrastructure to bypass security implemented at the software layer. I’m not aware that anyone has shown they’ve been able to do this in a commercial cloud provider environment, but in theory the risk applies to anything from an infrastructure-as-a-service provider such as Amazon EC2, all the way up to a SaaS provider who is keeping customer data in separate virtual databases.

Some Gartner research that’s been publicized this week will fuel the anxieties of those who aren’t yet ready to trust multi-tenant clouds, but in fact the detail of the findings bears out what I’ve said about security measures. Gartner found that 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace. But this is not because virtualization is inherently insecure, says Gartner’s Neil MacDonald. It’s because the people implementing this new, unfamiliar, technology aren’t doing it right. “Most virtualized workloads are being deployed insecurely. The latter is a result of the immaturity of tools and processes and the limited training of staff, resellers and consultants,” he explains.

Gartner provides a list of six risk factors that it says should be addressed. I’m sure that most cloud providers will already be on the right side of all these risk factors. It is internal enterprise virtualization projects that are neglecting them (some of which, please note, apply to projects that host virtualized servers on cloud infrastructure, but are still about user best practice rather than the provider’s infrastructure itself).

Risk number two is the risk that your data will inadvertently get exposed to other users, due to poor implementation of the access management process or some kind of software bug. People are most conscious of this risk in a multi-tenant database, where every customer’s data is stored in the same tables, but it also applies where only the application code is shared, since a simple slip could result in redirection to the wrong database. If there’s a vulnerability, it could be maliciously exploited, but most of these episodes are cases when a user logs into their system as normal and discovers they’re looking at someone else’s data. The best known cases of this have been in the online banking world (which hasn’t stopped people using online banking, by the way).

The fact that, in theory, there’s a greater inherent risk of this happening means that, in practice, providers go to great lengths to ensure that it never does. It is a very simple matter to flag data as belonging to a specific customer and then make sure that flag is always respected when reading data. Providers build and test their software to design out the risk of these data leakages.

It comes down to trust and confidence. Knowing these risks, do you believe your provider will have done what’s necessary to prevent them occurring? It’s also important to weigh up the risks your data is exposed to if you don’t use a cloud provider. How secure is it kept on-premise or in a third-party hosting center under your own control? There’s a tendency to distrust multi-tenancy simply because it’s new and less well understood (and requires us to trust a third-party provider), but we too readily forget the shortcomings of more familiar environments.

One final consideration to bear in mind is the law. There may be types of regulated data that, because the law was drafted before virtualization became commonplace, forbid the hosting of data on a shared infrastructure. Unfortunately, the only way to get round this — even though the unintended effect of following the law may be, paradoxically, to make the data less secure — is to get the law changed.