Netflix and the Death of the DVD?

Netflix has essentially killed Blockbuster, which itself killed the mom-and-pop video store business. And now they're saying "we're going to stop doing DVDs". You will get only online "Watch Instantly" access to movies.

Interesting bait-and-switch.

The first article I read about this was a bit alarmist. It turns out that the switch will happen over a number of years. Apparently Netflix hasn't even peaked, yet, in the DVD space -- that doesn't happen until 2013, according to projections. Nevertheless, I find the predicted shift interesting.

I see a few drivers for the shift away from physical to online:

1. Decrease costs associated with physical management of the DVD media -- mailing costs, storage costs, replacement costs, etc. And it's not just about DVDs, either. Remember videos? 33 1/3 LPs? Tower Records? Who wants to be stuck with the world's largest collection of DVDs, when Gra-ray(tm) comes out?
2. Better control over copyright issues. Personally, I believe this is the main driver. It's easy for customers to copy DVDs, and the RIAA is probably breathing down Netflix's neck about doing stuff to prevent this. With Netflix controlling delivery of the content via the Watch Instantly functionality, they may be able to make it harder to copy movies. I'm not saying they'll be able to control it completely (this is unlikely), but they'll be able to make it hard enough for all but the most determined to make copies, so that from their perspective they'll be making a sizable dent in the "copyright infringement" problem.
3. Better control over your commercial experience. This is probably another big driver. We see this sort of thing already -- when you watch The Daily Show or Colbert Report online, you are not permitted to fast-forward through the commercials, and even more annoyingly, unlike your TV (which you couldn't fast forward either) they are REALLY LOUD, so that you are forced to hear them even if you try to escape them in the bathroom. Netflix will be able to sell this capability to advertisers or sell you premium commercial-reduced service. Great for improving revenue stream either way.
4. Finer-grained customer profiling information. I would have to bet that online viewing offers some interesting data-mining opportunities, including stuff like how often you watch a particular movie, what times of day you watch it, which segments you watch over and over, etc. You know...the kind of stuff that would be great for targeted advertising.

Of course, without physical media, and customers' complete dependence on online providers, it will be interesting to see what happens to prices and diversity/availability of content. But for the reasons I've listed above (and probably others, too) I'd say that the writing is on the wall.

Another conspiracy theory? Or more proof we're too stupid for democracy?

I find it a bit disturbing that the Department of Justice appears to be investigating Rop Gongrijp, among others, on the Wikileaks thing. Specifically, we know that it has subpoenaed Twitter for records about Gonggrijp, as well as Assange, Manning, and Birgitta Jonsdottir (an Icelandic MP), in connection with creation of the video "Collateral Murder".

What disturbs me more about this than I am already disturbed by the whole approach to addressing Wikileaks is that Gongrijp is also one of the main investigators involved in a study that exposed weaknesses in the electronic voting system used in India.

So far, no one has been talking much about the connection, but call me a conspiracy theorist...I have to wonder how much they'll "accidentally" uncover while poking around his stuff. One of the big bones of contention in the India study was that the investigators refused to reveal who was the source of the machine they used in order to test for weaknesses. One very brave scientist, Hari Prasad, was in jail for nearly a week over this issue last August. If the DOJ has subpoenaed email accounts, as well as Twitter access, with as broad wording as the Twitter subpoena, there could be a lot of information in there relevant to the voting machine study, and it could be child's play to accidentally run across the identity of the voting machine source while examining Gongrijp's emails. Once this identity is found it would be simple to (perhaps illegally, but nevertheless surreptitiously) pass the information along to the Indian government.

As of this posting, the only thing we know the DOJ has subpoenaed was Gongrijp's Twitter posts (which seems rather silly, since they're public). We know this because Twitter actually informed him that the request had been made. We don't know what else they may have subpoenaed. And though IANAL, the Twitter subpoena looks rather broad to me...it does not restrict information requested to that relevant to the Wikileaks investigation (which surprises me a bit). It does cover a restricted time period (Nov. 1, 2009 to the date of the subpoena), but this time period also covers the time in which the Indian voting machine study was going on.

If I were the source of the test voting machine, I'd be a little extra nervous, just now. And having him/her punished as a by-product of the Wikileaks investigation would be unfortunate collateral damage, in my opinion.

Too stupid for democracy?

I was driving home from dropping my mother off at the train station on Jan. 2, and turned on WPRB, to hear this operatic voice singing something about "every four or five years they play a little game, saying 'You can pick your leader, take your choice". You know I was going to tune in, then! Turns out the piece was "Too Stupid for Democracy" by Eileen McGann. It's quite amusing...take a listen, if you haven't, already.

I only recently discovered WPRB, while station surfing in my car...they have some good stuff. As does WKCR (to which I have a sentimental attachment).

Great way to start off the new year!

2010 books

Just as a prompt to my own memory, I'm going to list the books I've read in 2010, in more-or-less chronological order. It's been a very good year. Some real winners in there, and even most of the non-winners were quite good (unlike 2009 which was, for the most part, a disappointment)

*=Recommended

X=Stay away

• The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky
• Things Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe
• X Snuff: Chuck Palahniuk (audiobook)
• * The White Tiger: Aravind Adiga (my review here)
• Ethan Frome: Edith Wharton (my review here)
• * An Enemy of the People: Henrik Ibsen (my review here)
• Hedda Gabler: Henrik Ibsen
• * Fear of Flying: Erica Jong (I'd read it maybe 20 something years ago...it's so much more meaningful now :-)
• The Wild Duck: Henrik Ibsen
• X Lovers' Vows: Elizabeth Inchbald (my review here)
• * Good Omens: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (audiobook) (Probably the most fun read I had this year -- my review here)
• X The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: David Wroblewski (audiobook)
• Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• For the Win: Cory Doctorow (I'd put this as a * if you're willing to put up with a lot of discussion about computer gaming -- excellent intro for teens to a lot of economic concepts -- Annapurna loved it; very thought provoking)
• Unaccustomed Earth: Jhumpa Lahiri (audiobook)
• Up in Honey's Room: Elmore Leonard (audiobook)
• The Graveyard Book: Neil Gaiman (audiobook)
• * Remarkable Creatures: Tracy Chevalier (audiobook) (my review here)
• X High Plains Tango: Robert James Waller (audiobook) (I'm a little hesitant to put an X -- there was a lot I liked in this one, but...where was the editor???)
• The Odyssey: Homer, via Butler (with Annapurna)
• Delivered from Distraction: Edward Hallowell and John Ratey (I'd put this as a *, but it's really for the ADD/ADHD crowd)
• The Lady and the Unicorn: Tracy Chevalier (audiobook)
• The Mission Song: John LeCarre (audiobook)
• Disobedience: Jane Hamilton (audiobook)
• Helen: Euripides, via E.P. Coleridge
• X A Way With Words IV: Understanding Poetry: Michael Drout (audiobook) - Very focused on the syntactic, and organized purely chronologically...very shopping list feel to it.
• Babbitt: Sinclair Lewis (audiobook)
• Tropic of Capricorn: Henry Miller (audiobook) (Not sure I can really claim to have read this one...the prose is lovely, but it's only marginally easier to follow than Quentin's portion of The Sound and the Fury -- I confess my mind wandered more than a little.)
• Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen (for only about the 3rd time...it's my second least favorite Austen)
• Ghosts: Henrik Ibsen
• The History of Tom Jones, a foundling: Henry Fielding (I'd put this as a * if you're willing to put up with 18th Century-speak)
• A Mercy: Toni Morrison (audiobook) (This one could probably stand another round of reading, to really say I've read it. It's got a fairly complex structure. And it's a little hard to follow on audio for two reasons: first, the narrative keeps shifting points of view, without much of a cue; second, it is read by Morrison, herself, with a lovely poetic voice, but with phrase breaks that made it hard for me to parse.
• How to Read and Understand Poetry (audiobook): Willard Spiegelman, via The Teaching Company (I liked this one much better than the one by Michael Drout, though I'm still stumped)
• About 6 zillion OMB memoranda and NIST Special Publications from the 800 series...especially 800-53 (Many are quite good, really -- highly recommended if you're in the IT Security business, or even just IT.)

Started:

• Neuromancer: William Gibson -- just haven't been able to get into this one...it's been recommended to me several times...I'll keep trying
• Nuclear Jellyfish: Tim Dorsey (audiobook) -- too many in jokes about Lynyrd Skynrd and Florida for me to follow...just wasn't compelling enough for me.
• Transmission: Hari Kunzru (whose "The Impressionist" I loved) -- nothing wrong with this one...just it's on paper, and my life does not permit much paper reading
• Malgudi Days: R.K. Narayan -- I absolutely loved the parts I read...just it's on paper
• Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft -- I'm sure it was controversial and exciting in its time, but it harped a bit too much on the moral and chastity advantages of educating women to get me really worked up enough to plow through it.

And with Sidharta:

• * Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: Robert C. O'Brien
• * lots and lots and lots of Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson
• The Lightning Thief: Rick Riordan
• The Titan's Curse: Rick Riordan
• The Battle of the Labyrinth: Rick Riordan
• The Last Olympian: Rick Riordan
• lots of Asterix
• Assorted "educational" books on UFO's and cryptids
• Assorted Amar Chitra Katha comics on various characters from the Ramayana and Mahabharata
• Part of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (he read most of it himself -- Thank You, Rick Riordan, for waking him up to the joys of reading!)

And with Annapurna (who has very little time for stories these days) parts of:

• The Wee Free Men: Terry Pratchett
• Grimm's Fairy Tales
• Frankenstein: Mary Shelley

Beware of reading your wife's email

One man in Michigan could go to jail for 5 years for logging into his wife's email account and reading her messages. He is being charged under a Michigan statute that is intended to protect against identity theft and hacking into corporate systems for the purposes of intellectual property theft.

I'm having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around this one. IANAL.

Here's the ostensible story: Husband #3 logs in and reads wife's email and figures out (a) that wife is having an affair with abusive ex-Husband #2 and (b) wife's child with ex-Husband #1 is endangered by this. Husband #3 then forwards wife's emails to ex-Husband #1, apparently out of concern for the child.

A few points strike me as possibly relevant, but then IANAL.

1. Mr. Walker (Husband #3) apparently went out of his way to log in to the email account. Would it have been different if his wife had just left her email logged in and he happened to see the messages? I don't know.
2. He claims it was a shared computer. She claims it was hers, only, though he bought it for her. Does this make a difference? I don't know. I tend to doubt it. The email was in a gmail account which could have been accessed just about anywhere in the world.
3. Independent of having read the emails, does forwarding them to a 3rd party make things worse? I don't know. Intuitively, I would say yes. Forwarding them to law enforcement rather than an interested party might have been more justifiable, though I can understand that many people might not want to get on the law enforcement radar, if they believe they can get things settled privately.
4. Did Mr. Walker have independent reason to fear for the child? Had he, in the past, taken any actions to protect the child? This would establish that he was acting in good faith, rather than trying to take some sort of revenge against the wife.
5. In what way is this different from a husband opening physical mail addressed to his wife? Is it a crime to do this? If so, I doubt that it is ever enforced to the extent of a 5 year jail sentence.

If it turns out that there was independent cause to fear for the child's safety, I think that charges against Mr. Walker will probably be dropped. I don't see any judge or jury coming to the conclusion that anything, much less privacy, trumps a child's well-being. In fact, played right by Walker's defense attorney, even if there was no prior fear of harm to the child, simply raising the possibility may be sufficient to get charges dropped.

What disturbs me most about this case is that while Mr. Walker's motives appear admirable (protecting the child), I would hate this to turn into a green light for just anybody to poke around in their spouse's emails at will. I can see abusive spouses monitoring email to micromanage or to find out about plans to combat the abuse. I can see thoughtless spouses forwarding emails to 3rd parties as a humiliating prank. I'm sure they do this, already, but I don't like to give them the legal air cover to do it with impunity. We no longer question the concept of spousal rape, though we may argue over specific instances. I would submit that pawing through a spouse's emails without an invitation to do so can be a violation in many cases.

For the record, I advise never putting anything in email that would do more than make you look silly. Just a suggestion. YMMV.

I love a good conspiracy theory

Ok...so here's a good one.

It seems that slightly over 10 years ago, the FBI may have arranged for some "backdoor" code to facilitate eavesdropping on VPNs (Virtual Private Networks -- things that people use as secure communication lines between computers to prevent eavesdropping) in the OpenBSD operating system, specifically in the implementation of IPSEC. That's right. The FBI apparently wants to be able to eavesdrop on secure communications. And they're willing to sneak the code to do it into widely-used software (think something like Windows).

The allegations come from what ought to be a fairly reliable source: Gregory Perry, the former CTO of NETSEC, a company responsible for some of the OpenBSD development. You would think that such an individual would not make claims like this frivolously. And what makes the situation even more interesting is that the "open" in "OpenBSD" is for open source: the source code (i.e. the computer programs that make up the operating system) is available for scrutiny by essentially anyone in the world. This means that (1) it's in use by a number of organizations because it's free (so there may be a lot of vulnerabilities out there) and (2) lots of folks can be pawing through this code to see if the alleged backdoor code does, indeed, exist.

It is hard to imagine that a backdoor would not have been noticed long before now, given that the code has been freely available for 10 years. This calls into question the validity of the allegations. It is possible, however, that the backdoor was, indeed, discovered some time back, and the offending code removed from earlier versions, attributed to coding errors rather than FBI interference. All of this will be fleshed out as people look through the current version of OpenBSD as well as earlier versions and other operating systems that evolved from OpenBSD.

It is tempting to chalk this up to the Bush-era penchant for secret eavesdropping (aka warrantless wiretaps), but if it turns out to be true, I'm afraid we'll have to lay this one to the credit of another backdoor bad boy. Yes, I'm talking about Bill "Clipper Chip" Clinton.

A good summary of the story is to be found here.

The original email and the announcement to the OpenBSD community can be found here.

And further information provided by Gregory Perry can be found here.

It will be very interesting to see whether Perry's allegations are confirmed over the coming weeks. I don't think it will take long, if they are true.

Edited to add: Declan McCullagh has some good context information here.

Edited to add (12/22): report indicating that head of OpenBSD acknowledges that Netsec may have been paid to create backdoors, but believes that these were never actually released (except possibly in Netsec variants).

Edited to add (12/23): Another report with a bunch of, what I believe is misleading title and text, but with some interesting technical details at the end.

Brain power

Annapurna informed me the other day that the human brain runs on about 15W. I couldn't believe that so I looked around a bit. Seems like 15's a little bit of an underestimate, but only a little. Most sources I could find (and I will be the first to admit that I have not done a thorough investigation...I really couldn't find any super-trustworthy sources, like say NIH/NIMH/NLM) say that the brain operates on 20-40W of power. That's kind of like the lightbulb in your fridge or oven.

Now I understand why the human species is, on the whole, rather dim-witted.

Wikileaks

Now I may have some opinions about whether or not it was a good idea to leak those documents from SIPRNet. But that's not what I want to talk about. No, I want to talk about information security.

Simon Jenkins makes a very nice point on the Huffington Post: The documents taken from SIPRNet were available to "some 2-3 million authorized accessors to the State Department intranet worldwide."

In a pool of 2-3 million accessors, there is guaranteed to be a good sized pool of spies and other individuals who would be...umm...susceptible to assorted temptations and coercions. It boggles the mind that the State Department/Department of Defense would leave the kinds of documents included in the leak out there for just any of those 2-3 million people to read.

Basic IT security includes providing access to information on a Need to Know basis. Did all of those 2-3 million people (or for that matter a Pfc, such as Bradley Manning, putative source of the leaks) really need access to all of that data? In addition, thumb drives and writeable media are a known source of data loss. There is a whole branch of IT security known as Data Loss Prevention (aka Data Leak Prevention) which attempts to address the problem of leaks. In general it's a tough problem, but on the other hand, it's really not rocket science to turn off USB ports and CD writers on computers that can access sensitive data.

I would be willing to bet pretty good money (like a bank account much larger than my own) that many, many of those 250,000 documents to be leaked by Wikileaks were out there long, long ago in the hands of people who weren't intended to see them.

I'm with Jenkins: "Blame the State Department, Not the World's Media" (or Wikileaks).

On friendship

I am reading The History of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding. It's a lot of fun, in an 18th Century sort of way. Full of witty quotes. I just ran across this one, though, which I really like.

I hope my friends will pardon me when I declare, I know none of them without a fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine I had any friend who could not see mine. Forgiveness of this kind we give and demand in turn. It is an exercise of friendship, and perhaps none of the least pleasant.

Yes, indeed.

Some words from the Tropic of Capricorn

Ok...yes...I know...it's weird...Dawn is listening to Tropic of Capricorn...when did that ever stop me? Lovely prose...bit too male-existential-crisis/stream of consciousness for my taste, though he expresses many thoughts that I can relate to. Likewise Babbitt (minus the stream of consciousness) which I listened to immediately before this. What can I say? I'm having an accidental run of early 20th century men's midlife crisis books...I didn't know what I was getting into. But that's not what I want to talk about.

No...I bring this up because I was struck by some cultural aspects of these two books. Namely, that though they both describe events that took place nearly 100 years ago (1920s), they nevertheless describe lifestyles and technologies that are remarkably recognizable in modern terms. I get the sense that if you dropped me in the middle of those novels, I'd be able to function pretty well (except for the internet part). Unlike, for example, dropping me into a Jane Austen book, where I suspect that I wouldn't know how to use the bathroom. (Sorry...couldn't resist...too much Tropic of Capricorn, I guess.)

These novels also used a number of terms that I would have expected to be more modern, such as in Babbitt "boneheaded", and in Tropic of Capricorn "bimbo" and "daffy". According to the Word Detective, bimbo (derived from Italian bambino) first showed up in English around the 1920s, and didn't come to mean a ditzy female until somewhat later than that, so that this reference in Tropic of Capricorn (published 1938) would have been one of the relatively early uses, I guess. "Daffy", on the other hand, from "daff" (meaning fool) apparently showed up around 1400. Word Detective has references to "bonehead", but does not actually comment on it, so I don't know when it arose, but it would never have occurred to me that it was as old as 1920s.