Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets

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Just a quick note, but in Britain lollipop ladies may soon be outfitted with cameras to monitor traffic at dangerous intersections. It’s the children, of course, who are motivating this new deployment of cameras - cameras will presumably cut down on dangerous drivers. Whether attaching cameras to little old ladies will be effective, it has been shown that traffic cameras have been incredibly effective in some areas of the US in reducing dangerous driving. These cameras have been so successful, in fact, that cities are removing their cameras because drivers are committing fewer crimes; the cameras are simply not profitable.

I wonder if Britain will treat cameras attached to old ladies the same way?

Technorati Tags: Britain, Ubiquitous computing

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I’ve written about Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies before, and their various potential privacy issues. Generally, I’ve talked about how the possibility of having your ISP persistently monitor your online actions could stifle the substantive abilities exercising of autonomy, liberty, and freedom of conscious. I won’t revisit those issues here, though I’d recommend checking out my earlier post on DPI. What follows examines how ISPs are injecting information into the webpages that you visit, which prevents you from viewing webpages as they were designed.

Web Tripwires

When you visit a webpage, your computer downloads a little bit of code and renders it on your screen - the web is an environment where visual stimulation necessitates copying data. Recently, researchers from the University of Washington and the International Computer Science Institute have discovered that about 1.3% of the time what is displayed on your computer’s screen has been altered. This having been said,

70 percent of those modifications were caused by client proxies installed to deal with pop-ups or to block advertising. The researchers also note that not every alteration is problematic; some cellular operators, for example, will strip extra whitespace from pages or will provide extra compression for images to keep bandwidth usage low and browsing quick. (Source)

You can take a look at the program that the researchers used, and see if some of your pages are being blocked, by heading over to their research site.

Innovating for Life(TM)

Rogers announced last year that they were bringing PersonalWeb(TM) to their users. This sounds like a great thing - the news brief notes that;

. . . the undertaking will enable end users to obtain an entirely customized Web experience. PersonalWeb will deliver tailored content such as sports, news, music, video, advertisements and product recommendations based on those users’ unique interests .

. . .

[The initiative] will bring together all the content a user likes most about the web: links to their favourite sites, their email, a multi-engine search bar - all on one neatly organized page. As they surf the web, users will teach PersonalWeb what they are interested in and the software will build their page with links to Web content related to those interests. At the same time, using standard Interactive Advertising Bureau advertising units, the PersonalWeb technology serves highly relevant ads to consumers on their home page. The tool will cut through noise and clutter to bring users more of the things they like best - and help them steer clear of the rest. (Source)

This has led to some intrusive, though (currently) benevolent alterations of content. One blogger has captured an image of a Rogers-altered webpage: Google.ca/

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You’ll note the text above the Google logo, which notes that the user in question has reached at least 75% of their monthly quota. The issue, of course, is that Google didn’t give permission to having their webpage defaced, nor were you given the option of disabling the technology from inspecting your packets. Lauren keenly notes in her blog post about this that another logo has been inserted onto an ‘owned’ page. Given that this technology is meant to develop contextual links that are built ‘for you’, and given that it has the ability of inserting that information in webpages without your consent, with Rogers you are rapidly entering a space where not only can your digital activities be monitors, but they are.

Who Cares!?!?

Beyond network neutrality experts, who gives a damn? In Rogers’ case, they’re providing a valuable service, right? If this is how they are going to limit their involvement with webpages, then it doesn’t matter!

I would generally categorize ‘people who care’ into a few groups.

1. Privacy advocates - how is the information being stored? What information is being collected? Why must this information be collected? What processes are in place for individuals to inspect the digital records that are kept on them? How will these technologies affect the creation/reinforcement of data cocoons?
2. Parents - how do I know that the ads which (might) be displayed won’t be inappropriate for my five year-old child? Will the sexual interests held by my partner and I result in pornographic ads? Can I contextualize the inspection and delivery results? Will software/technical support be provided so that I can easily manage this new technology/have it managed for me?
3. Corporate business - is my brand being diminished? How can I prevent my brand from being associated with other logos? Can I protect my website from being misrendered? What will my consumers think when they realize that they are being watched while visiting my online space? Is there legal action I can pursue? I can’t just stick stickers with my logo in clothing stores, why do ISPs think they can stick their label on my stores? Will this affect my ad revenue?

These are just a few of the things that immediately come to mind. I’m sure you can think of others.

ISP injections are not something that are likely to go away without at least the threat of legal regulation/prevention. In this case, we can hope that corporations will go to war with one another, where companies like Google and Yahoo! take issue with the defacement of their corporate web spaces. Given that ad revenue will (eventually) be on the line, one can expect that they will make an issue of things. This said, I’d rather not leave things to a market solution - a democratically legitimated solution would be far, far better.

A wider issue for consumers is that programs such as Rogers’ may sound benevolent, but they fail to capture how these ‘personalized’ experiences will be generated - they make no mention that delivering this environment requires a constant surveillance of your online actions. Rather than just clicking ‘I like sports, politics, not technology, not women’s issues, and I like comics’ your ISP will monitor where you go and deliver results to you before you even ask for them. While perhaps convenient in some cases, this threatens to cut us off from information that deviates from our routine interests - rather than experiencing the ‘New York Times’ effect, where you find a random article that shapes your views and attitudes while browsing to page 78 of the paper, you’ll never see that article on page 56, and only ever see the items on page 78 and others like it. This isn’t healthy for a developing mind, nor a mind that wants to be critically engaged in society.

Technorati Tags: network neutrality, puppy, Rogers, Surveillance, Technology

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A little while ago, the New York Times ran a piece where they discussed the ‘Sticky-factor’ of Facebook. Effectively the article boiled down to the fact that it’s a nightmare to exit the Facebook ecosystem - actually removing your data from their ecosystem borders on being a Sisyphysian task. The most poignant part of the article reads:

It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

The Obligations of Social Networking

Imagine this: you adopt some service or another and it doesn’t require you to exchange the popular unit measurement for access to that service (i.e. you don’t shell out cash for access). That said, you do provide an alternate form of capital - one that tends to elude a clear monetary value - your personal information. You give information concerning your religious orientation, your gender, relationship status, etc. Now, you’re not required to put all of that information into a public space, but what you do provide should be accurate to improve the service for both yourself and - this is the catchy part - the other people who are using the service. The system is more valuable both to others, and to yourself, by providing as much accurate information as possible.

In order to receive the service, a condition is that you avoid corrupting the service through the insertion of inaccurate information. Your obligation is limited to be truthful, but not just for your sake, but for the sake of other users as well.

Stickiness

When I provide information to Facebook, it tends to be done in good-faith; sure, I might goof off and identify a carrot or something in a picture, but by and large the information that I provide is relatively accurate. Why shouldn’t it be? It’s a ‘fair trade’ for the environment that I get to operate in. This accuracy both assists me (because developers can comb data to improve various services), but it also creates more and more ways to monetize the system - a large quantity of inaccurate data would hinder its marketability. Similarly, when I agree to the End User License Agreement (EULA) that accompanies my Facebook account, I’m consenting to their terms surrounding the retention of data. Of course, Facebook is particularly nebulous when it comes to defining their data retention periods, but aren’t you signifiying that their defined (or, as it may be, more or less undefined) retention periods are acceptable?

Effectively: Haven’t you already consented to the ’stickiness’ of a Facebook profile? Don’t you want the benefits of complex data analysis that accompanies the insertion of past and present data if such an analysis improves the service for you? Don’t you owe it to others to leave your data for this analysis, just as others did prior to your arrival?

I Choose Gatekeeper Number Two

There are various companies (Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google) that are striving to become more effective digital gatekeepers. Effectively, they want to absorb all of your data traffic, giving them large quantities of data that will allow them to present services, goods, and other consumables that you will be likely to purchase, either because you are looking for the consumable in question, or because you are susceptible to buying that consumable even when you don’t really want/need it. In other words, they want to take data and translate it to marketable information. However, because of the inefficiencies in data collection by the aforementioned Big Three, social networking services such as Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace are seen as particularly valuable. Imagine: the ability to have a more or less accurate portfolio of millions of customers! Rather than fighting to understand data, everything that’s provided is immediately useful information.

The problem, of course, is that to develop increasingly valuable portfolios, new data-consumption programs and applications have to be developed. In Facebook, this has meant that there are more immediate ways of informing users about changes in their Friend-based ecosystem, and now you can even communicate in real time to other members of the environment. This has the end of drawing users into the environment for longer periods of time and, since Facebook is predicated on the sharing of personal information and content, the more time that you spend in the Facebook environment, the more pressure there is to add more content. This is experienced in a series of different ways, such as:

• Changing one’s status;
• Importing new blog posts;
• Adding pictures;
• Commenting on other people’s posted items;
• Collaboratively creating content;
• Collaboratively or independently critiquing content.

These divergent modes of content-interaction amount to participating in info-ecosystem that is provided to you for ‘free’ by social networking companies and subsequently increasing the value of the environment for for yourself, your Friends, and the corporation. Critiques are observed whenever an individual posts false information - there are even processes in place to cut down on ‘fake’ and ‘false’ content. These processes, in turn, reinforce the notion that a person as a duty to be truthful, or at least they are not expected to deceive others. You are obliged to be honest and, if you are found to be contributing content that deviates from truth, it can be removed/deleted and/or your account can be closed. Additionally, critique can simply be a refusal to engage with a particular facet of content - the refusal to speak about something that is created to be spoken about is as psychologically harmful (perhaps more harmful), than the active negative engaging of that content. Thus, content provided must be simultaneously truthful and appealing - normatively ‘good’ content has these two nebulous social tags.

Who Performs as the Gatekeeper?

Social networking services, in their attempts to act as gatekeepers, rely on the members of the community to actually be the gatekeepers - the administrators of the service are members and gatekeepers with considerable power, but that power is divested amongst all members, rather than being persistently held by the admins alike. Much like in Discipline and Punish, the inmates of the Facebook discipline one another through their collective gazes upon one another - that gaze normalizes behavior, detecting and reproaching deviate behavior.

What is perhaps most significant is that these gazes penetrate beyond the prison itself; whereas the inmates in Discipline and Punish stare at one another and (presumably) cannot see beyond the prison walls, in social networking services the inmates necessarily see past its walls and militantly observe what transpires in the areas where content for inmates’ consumption originates. This occurs by virtue of the contents’ importation into the social networking service. By consenting to have their content drawn from sources outside of Facebook’s maw-like walls, content creators are forced to be aware that their external content repositories will be examined; while one’s ‘Friends’ may never visit your Livejournal blog, their gaze is directly experienced in the process of content creation on that blog. This works to normalize content creation that is external to Facebook itself insofar as what is being created is expected to be consumable by other inmates. Cases of deviance will have your account removed from the prison, leaving you unable to inspect others and unable to be inspected and valued by other inmates of the Facebook ecosystem. Indeed, the pleasure of content aggregation in Facebook is that there is (hopefully) a pleasurable experience when you, through the content you contribute, are positively valued. Diametrically, there is a terrifying despondency when your creation is rejected by your peers. It is of incredible importance that the morsels provided to social networking sites are palatable because their palatability indicates your own degree of integration with your peers, it provides a metric that evaluates whether you are ‘normal’ and thus like your peers, or whether you are abnormal and potentially in need of normalizing assistance as a diseased body or mind requires professional medical assistance. Moreover, as you refine you content and improve its palatability for the content-consuming masses your behavior is further normalized, that normalization is internalized, and you are consequently able to provide ever-more-appropriate content feasts.

A good meal is essential for healthy growth. What does it mean when your good meal is simply what others expect you to prepare, and ‘good’ has transformed to meeting the expectations of normal?

Can content begin to ‘taste’ like chicken? Has that already occurred?

Technorati Tags: Commons, facebook, Surveillance, Technology

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The Parsons: together in celebration

One of the memorable things about my Grandfather was his workshop. There were tools absolutely everywhere (perfectly organized - he just had a lot of them!). As someone who’s never really enjoyed using power tools, his workshop was a pure expression of bored terror for me - they didn’t hold any appeal, but i was always worried that I’d come out with one arm less than when I walked in. I don’t know if it was something someone told me (”Power tools can hurt/maim/kill you - don’t touch your Grandfather’s!”) or the commercial in the 80s where a robot had its various limbs cut off with the rejoinder at the end “I can replace my limbs. You can’t.”

Maybe it’s just a genetic deficiency of some sort.

The Mediation of Digital Content

Regardless of any genetic aberrations, I’ve always been drawn to reading/writing/producing literary content. I’ve developed incredibly crude websites (this one included) that are functional without being ‘cool’. My digital creations and content spaces have never paralleled the plaque that was created for my Nanny and her cat, Puss, for example. There is something that has (and seems to continue to) alway impressed me about physical creation; its very tangibility and physical being-in-the-world, where it becomes clearly ready-at-hand is impressive. That’s not to say that a digital creation can’t operate on the same metaphysical levels - I’d argue until I was blue in the face that there were clear ontological similarities - but it doesn’t strike as direct, perhaps because accessing digital creations seems somehow further removed/mediated by technologies. This mediation, in turn, prevents the subject from fully comprehending what they are creating if they are using ’short-hand’ (i.e. programs that automate a significant element of the more challenging aspects of content generation, such as the code that this blog sits upon) and enslaves them to their technology.

Technology as a Defining Element of Metabolism

I’m certain that at least one of my colleagues would suggest that that last comment surrounding the enslavement to technology would demonstrate an ontological-illness/blockage that has to be overcome prior to realizing the full ethical and ontological significance of technology itself. To suggest that technology, as a facet of our metabolic processes, can enslave us is as absurd as claiming that my hand, foot, or eye can enslave me. While true that any of these limbs is capable of momentarily diverting my attention as it comes into contact with the world, that diversion should likely be considered a regulatory biological process. Technology, once understood as an element of our metabolic existence, thrusts us before our traditionally understood selves, both in material and metaphysical senses. This said, understanding technology as an element of ourselves, just as our epidermis is an element of what composes us, involves claiming that technology (and as a result ourselves) are drawn forward before ourselves, only to be recognized for what we are and have been. We create and cannot comprehend its implications until it operates in the world - our comprehension of metabolism is predicated on our recognition of what has become, and less upon what will become. Our metabolism structures our very Being-in-the-world, and we can only understand it after being thrown into it; it is impossible to perfectly comprehend how we will be pitched.

Metabolism’s Digitization

So what does this mean for my digital creations? To return to my Grandfather’s creations, in the process of creating a facet of himself was necessarily injected into the project and then released into the environment. Retaining core facets of his project, just as a fragment of hair holds a person’s DNA, his technological creations blended with others’ metabolic projects. In doing so, a commons was created, one where technology served to bind those who necessarily participate(d) in the narrative of the self-that-has-been-projected. In other words, a facet of my Grandfather was in the sign he created for my Nanny, and that her usage and integration of that metabolic process into her own inextricably bound the two through a common expression of metabolism.

In my case, a digital creation functions in a similar manner, though seemingly with a significant difference. In the creation of the flash banner at the top of this post, a series of technological artifacts we taken, molded, and reshaped - I absorbed material from my environment and, through a metabolic process, those materials were fundamentally transformed. This transformation, however, was and remains predicated on the technological constructs of others - much as a tree’s limb requires the soil, water, sun, and other common environmental stimuli, my construct is predicated on the social, technological, and biological environment(s) that I exist in. Moreover, the extension of social and technological from biological, while significant insofar as it provides an analytic differentiation of terms and metabolic zones, is just that: it functions dominantly as an analytic differentiation. With an understanding of technology as a metabolic, and thus biological, process, we cannot differentiate the social, environmental, technological, biological, etc in a fashion that we would understand according to common parlance.

Is Digital Ontologically Similar to Analogy Metabolic Processes?

I did note that there was a difference between my creation of a flash banner and of my Grandfather’s plaque, though I’m uncertain precisely how to understand it. My creation is digital - it is a perfect logical sequencing of 1s and 0s, a creation that is analytically perfect. My Grandfather’s creation, however, is an analogue process that is riddled with the intricacies and uncertainties of life itself. Of course one could return by claiming that my process is as biologically ‘imperfect’ as my Grandfather’s process by the very fact that I am here, as a biological being, working within a metabolic structure to generate this life-embued artifact. I would have to question how strongly that ontological similarity can be carried, however - I don’t want to commit myself to either an affirmation or rejection of the metabolic similarity at an ontological level, but I do have my doubts that the digital and analogue creation retain an identical ontological form.

Whereas normally I’d like to end with a clear ‘aha!’ moment, where I reveal a clear solution/logical avenue that is compelling, I’m still left without a clear stance. Are my digital tools as ubiquitous as my Grandfather’s drill presses and saws? Is there genuinely an ontological difference between the cold math of 1s and 0s and the impact of a hammer slamming upon a nail if we understand technology as a core facet of our metabolic structures?

Technorati Tags: Commons, Grandpa, Metabolism, Technology

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For the past two days I’ve been troubleshooting a problem with iWeb, and thought that I’d post my problem (and troubleshooting steps and solution) here so that other people who experience a similar problem can diagnose and remedy the problem.

Problem:
I had used iWeb to toss together a quick placeholder site for my girlfriend’s new domain without any incident a week or two ago. A few days later I went back into iWeb and was unable to add new pages, or create a new site. While the options to do both actions were available, clicking on them neither added a new page, nor created a site.

(Unsuccessful) Troubleshooting:

1. The first thing that I did was to shut down iWeb, drag com.apple.iWeb.plist in /Users/Library/Preferences to the desktop and reboot the computer. Once it started up again, I launched iWeb. Upon launching I was presented with the .Mac splash screen and, when entering the program proper, ran into the same issues that were listed in the Problem section.
2. Next, I again quit iWeb, and moves all of the files located in /Users/Library/Application Support/iWeb/ to the desktop. I rebooted the computer and once I was logged into OS X again, launched iWeb. I was presented with the .Mac splash screen and, once I got past it and into the program, I was unable to create a new page or site. This difficulty differed from that listed in the Problem section, however, because the options to create a new page or site were greyed out - I wasn’t even given the option to try creating them.
3. Next, I quit the program and reinstalled iWeb. I experienced the same problems as in (2).

The Solution:
Ultimately, I ended up just dragging iWeb to the trash can, and then reinstalling the bundled software that came with my Macbook. I can now open iWeb, and use it with full functionality again. All of my other iLife applications also work, and I haven’t had to register my iWork suite again.

Note:
The solution that I outlined results in you losing all of the sites/pages that you had previously created in iWeb. This isn’t an issue for me, as I only lost a placeholder, but it may be an issue for you. This said, since you still have the old domain.site file on your desktop (assuming that you performed step (2) in the Troubleshooting section), you might be able to use the iWebSites program to resurrect your prior sites. I haven’t tried this, however, so try this at your own risk.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iWeb, puppy

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Honda has released a new GPS system for their vehicles where it will warn drivers when they’re about to leave their car in areas where there is a high chance of theft, vandalizm, or other criminal activity. I have two, relatively short, things to note about this:

A Comical Note
I can just imagine programming this thing for Rio - all the device would say was ‘If you’re stupid enough to think that this will help you here, you’re almost certainly a tourist’.

A Less Comical Note
This continues the pervasive surveillance of what you’re doing AND associates it with databases that you can’t be certain are terribly secure. I imagine that if a particularly enterprising individual surreptitiously made a few changes, and the the GPS was followed to the letter, that badness would ensure. Beyond fear-mongering, however, this technology associates perpetual vehicular monitoring with safety, and mistakenly presents the notion that police equally monitor and respond to reports in all areas of GPS coverage. This is a legitimate badness - it further complicates the problems surrounding self-awareness and unquestioned reliance on external data sources, sources that can become significant factors in one’s daily life.

Of course, it won’t be sold that way: Live in safety! Let us watch you! Surveillance stops all crime! Just look at CCTV in Britain.

Gizmodo link

Technorati Tags: Surveillance, Ubiquitous computing

This guide is intended to let me (and you) quickly set up an Apple computer as a media centre. I’m currently using a PC running Windows Vista Home Premium as the media centre - it’s native media centre functionality works quite well but, given my hope to move to a more Mac-centric environment, I want to see if it’s possible to actually use something like a mac mini as a media box. For the purposes of this guide, the media centre has to do the following:

1. Be reliable! No weird and unexpected crashes. Moreover, I don’t want to be servicing the damn thing on a semi-regular basis.
2. Be fairly easy to manage. I’m not going to have a lot of time to futz around with this thing come September.
3. Be simple! If it take a lot of work to maintain, my hopes of spreading that work around are doomed to failure!
4. Be as good as Vista Home Premium! While I really do want a dominantly Mac environment, I’m not willing to do so at the loss of overall functionality.
5. Access media from my Fileserver (this, really, is what makes this whole thing a pain in the ass).

Now that we’ve identified the conditions for victory, let’s go and investigate how to do this!

Hardware/Software Requirements
Listed are the items that this has been tested on. Hopefully I’ll be able to add to this when I actually own some of the hardware myself *grin*

• Macbook: 2.2 Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, Intel x3100
• Leopard 10.5.2
• Frontrow
• Apple Remote
• Perian 1.1
• Flip4Mac WMV
• Script: Move2iTunes 1.2
• Script: Doug’s Find Album Artwork With Google
• Script: Doug’s Enter Long Description Text for Selected
• (Optional): Fileserver/NAS/Networked Storage Drives

The Setup
First, head to the above linked software/scripts and download them. Make sure that you’ve updated your iTunes to at least version 7.6. Once you’ve done that, we’ll proceed through them (as a note: this whole process can potentially take a lot of time. Give yourself an afternoon or more if you are going to be adding a substantial library).

• Install Perian, let it update itself automatically. This give you the ability to play most video formats in Quicktime.
• Install flip4Mac WMV; this will let you want WMV files in Quicktime.
• Drag the Moveie2Tunes script to the Applications folder. Then drag a copy of it to the Dock - this will save you a lot of time later on. Trust me on this.
• Drag the ‘Find Album Artwork With Google’ script to [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/. If there isn’t a ‘Scripts’ folder there already, just create a New Folder, name it ‘Scripts’, and place the script in the newly created folder.
• Follow the onscreen instructions for ‘Doug’s Enter Long Description Text for Selected’ script.

Now that we’ve done the easy parts, let’s get a bit closer to actually getting ready to play your precious, previous media *grin*.

Mount Yer Volumes!
As it stands, I’m currently running a (crappy) Windows XP fileserver. I should be honest - all I’ve done is load up an old PC with a buttload of HDDs, assigned them unique names, and share out the volumes across my network. I know - it’s not the best or nicest method of doing things, but it’s what I had at the time. Consequently, I’ll be laying out how to easily automount Windows NTFS-formatted drivers. Once I move away from the present system to external drives made available through the Time Capsule that’s in my future I’ll update how to access that. Until then, however….

Share out your Windows XP HDDs. Find the folders/drivers and set up sharing. Check out either Microsoft or the Computer Digest to figure out how. There are other places on the ‘net to do it as well.

The grunt way of setting this up (i.e. the ‘I don’t want to use Applescript, and you can’t make me!’) is a bit of a pain, but not all that painful. First, ensure that you assign static IP address(es) to the computers that are sharing files across the network. While I haven’t run into problems with DHCP, it’s probably better to be safe. After you do that open Finder and press Command + K. This will let you connect to your server(s) - just enter the names of your server(s) here and access the shares that are presented to you. Once you’ve mounted that share open Accounts and click on ‘Login Items’. Drag your shares into the list of items that will open automatically when you log in.

Log out, and log back in. Make sure that your volumes have mounted as they were supposed to.

Adding the Media!
Great - now our gigs and gigs of video, music and TV are available through Frontrow! Because we’re on a Mac we can just drag and drop all of our media into iTunes and we’re done, right? Oh, young padawan, you have so much to learn about the ways of the Apple…

Because we really belong in the Apple digital environment, our benevolent pomum-dominus has tried to ‘assist’ our choices by limiting us to items purchased from His iTunes music store. While that’s . . . great . . . sometimes a bit of choice is actually a good thing. While I don’t mean to upset the Godhead (i.e. Steve Jobs), I think that this is a case where more choice is good. That said, because iTunes is designed to be a neatly locked pen, it requires a bit of work to escape it. Fortunate the scripts that we’ve downloaded are going to help with that.

Brain Rot - Movies and TV
If you tried to ‘drag and drop’ the TV shows and movies that are on your mounted volumes and were disappointed that it didn’t let you automatically add them to iTunes, you’re not alone. Fortunately we can create .mov reference files using the Move2iTunes script. All you have to do is drag your .avi, .wmv, etc files onto the script that you’ve conveniently placed in the Dock and give yourself some time. Depending on the amount of media you have, this could take a while. Once you’re given a notification that everything has been referenced open up iTunes and click on the TV and Movies links in your Library. You should see that your video content has been moved - yay! Unfortunately, you’ve probably noticed that there is a file extension after the name of each item (i.e. Capote.avi shows ‘Capote.avi’ instead of just ‘Capote’ as its name).

Here’s your first afternoon task: going through all of your library items and removing the extension-part of the name - just Get Info for the file, and remove the offending extension from the ‘Name’ and input the genre and date produced. This sucks, but if you’re as anal retentive as I am about these things will make you smile once its over. Finally, hit up the Internet Movie Database and search for the movie in question. Once you find the movie, copy the summary and, in iTunes, click on the newly imported movie, click the Apple Script menu item, and ‘Enter Long Description Text for Selected’. Paste in the summary. This last part is important if you want to have summaries of each movie in Frontrow.

Follow the same process for filling out your TV collection. You’re now seeing why this could take you a while - if you have anything larger than a 1TB collection all I can say is ’sorry’, but I’m sure that the Godhead has a good reason for forcing us to go through this process. Perhaps it prepares us for the joy we’ll experience when actually seeing a film?

The Siren’s Call - Music
Now that our brains are as mushy as porridge, let’s shift gears a bit and import our music, eh? Before just dragging and dropping all your music into iTunes, and assuming that you are already storing your media elsewhere (a Volume, external drive, etc), open ‘Preferences’ in iTunes, select the ‘Advanced’ tab, and make sure that ‘Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding the library’ is not checked. Now that we’ve done that, you can select your (presently blank) Music library, open the File menu, select ‘Add to Library’ and select the folder/volume/directory where your music lives in.

Now that we’ve waited for God-knows-how-long while your library was imported we can try to automatically download your missing album art by selecting ‘Get Album Artwork’ from the Advanced menu item. Open up your drink and enjoy . . . look, it’s just going to take time if you have a large stash of music. Get a case of beer and enjoy the next few hours in drunken bliss. That state of mind is going to help soon.

Now that we’ve taken some of the Godhead’s knowledge and added it to the iTunes installation in front of us (read: now that the most obvious album covers have been added to their corresponding albums) we’re ready to make some more brain-porridge. The first thing: consolidating compilation albums.

Consolidating Albums

If you’re like me (or other people too, I suppose), you probably listen to a fair number of albums that are compilations of various artists. Unfortunately, this often means that the Dance Mix 2008 album you’ve been enjoying is currently split into a dozen or so different ‘albums’. This sucks, especially if you want to use the Cover Flow view. Here’s how we fix this:

1. Select all of the items in your library that belong to the same library.
2. Right click on the items and select ‘Get Info’.
3. Type ‘Various’ or ‘Various Artists’, or something like that for the Album Artist and under ‘Compilation’ choose ‘Yes’. Click OK. Note: If the divided album isn’t a compilation album, but rather is an album by a single artist, insert their name in the Album Artist field. While you’re there, you can also fix up the Genre and other information as you see fit.

Now that we’ve consolidated the albums, we can move on to adding album art that is missing.

Adding Album Art

Remember the Doug’s Find Album Artwork With Google script that we installed? It’s going to get a workout now! Select a song from an album that lacks cover art, open the Applescript menu item, and click on ‘Find Album Artwork With Google’. Find the appropriate image in the browser window that opened. Right-click on the selected on in iTune, choose ‘Get Info’, select the ‘Artwork’ tab, and drag-and-drop the album artwork that is in your browser window. Click OK. You’ve now added the artwork for your album!

Now go do it for the other items in your library. If you’re into dance/techno/anything that isn’t iTunes-popular, I’m sorry for the time that this will take. At least you’ve still got beer, right? Right?

The Hybrid Threat - Music Videos
Adding in music videos is only a little bit lengthier/annoying than adding movies (that gets you excited to add them, eh?). We’ll begin by assuming the following:

• You have your music videos on an external drive/volume/etc.
• The Move2iTunes script is working for you.
• You still have time to keep doing this.

First, drag your Music Videos on the Move2iTunes item in your Dock. This will place your videos in the Movies or TV Shows sections of your iTunes Library. Find them, right click on them, click ‘Get Info’ and select ‘Music Video’ as their Video Kind. Now click on the Info tab, and fill out the correct name for the video and the artist’s name. You could probably fill out the Year if you wanted to, though I don’t think that it makes any real difference. Now click on the Sorting tab and make sure that the Name and Artist fields both have the information from the Info tab. Click Ok.

Your music videos should now be available in Front Row; access them through Front Row by clicking ‘Music’ and then selecting ‘Music Videos’. Everything should be sorted by artist.

Enjoy Frontrow
Now you can finally enjoy using Front Row with the media that you already own. While I don’t think that it’s a direct competitor to the Windows Media Theater experience (yet), if our Great Godhead decides to let us add our media in a more open fashion I can certainly see it taking at least a little marketshare.

The Wrap-Up
Remember the five criteria at the beginning of this article? Let’s briefly revisit/respond to them.

1. Be reliable! No weird and unexpected crashes! Moreover, I don’t want to be servicing the damn thing on a regular basis!

Though there is an ugly initial time investment, after that’s been ‘paid’ the system is technically stable. Of course, if the Great Godhead and his minions of joy (i.e. Apple Coders) make substantial changes to iTunes and/or Frontrow I’m totally not going to be responsible for your hours of dedication being ‘improved upon’ by our Apple overlords.

2. Be fairly easy to manage.

It’s easy to get going, once it’s going.

3. Be simple!

Well…it’s reasonably simple to get working, and has a relatively short process loop once things are running. That said, adding hundreds or thousands of, well, anything all at once is going to be ugly.

4. Be as good as Vista Home Premium’s media center.

This is a real hit and miss for me. I’m in Canada, so I get bupkis as far as extra go. The nice thing about WHP’s media center: it dynamically adds content when add it to a volume. That said . . . I’m on Vista if I’m using MS’s media center, and that’s not a lot of fun. Ultimately, however, I really think that the Mac media center is only almost as good as the Vista one. A big plus: You can easily buy media, can easily look at movie trailers, and the remote comes with older macs. That almost counts for something, right? right?

5. Access media from my Fileserver

Done and done.

The Conclusion
So, would I recommend this to others? Probably, actually. I like the Mac OS (and have for some time). I’d just love to actually have the hardware (a mac mini would be perfect!) to set one of these up for myself *grin*.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Media Center, Frontrow

Jim Harper, Esq.
Director of Information Policy Studies, Cato Institute
Editor, Privacilla.org
Washington, DC

In a recent presentation to the Summer 2007 Privacy Symposium, Jim Harper lays out a series of concerns about a national identification system. I’m just going to run through them quickly - watch the video that I link to at the end of the post to view his presentation yourself.

Authentication versus Identification

• Authentication is where you are challenged to provide a set of items/data in order to gain access to something. An example would be the requirement to have both a banking card and a PIN to access your bank account - this authenticates your access to the resource, but it isn’t a wholesale validation that it is actually Christopher Parsons who is accessing my bank account. Instead, what this does it is gives enough information to the bank that it is comfortable providing access to my bank account, without actually knowing for sure that it is me accessing the account.
• Identification draws on unique characteristics that make up who you are, and validates that person attempting to gain access to X or do Y against the recorded characteristics that identify that person. This involves validating a person against facets of their constitutive being, with a popular identifier coming from biometric information. This passes beyond authentication systems because the person is certifiably identified. Whereas I can give you my bank card and PIN, I would have a far harder (and more painful) time giving you my right eye and left thumb.

What is Identity for?

• While it is helpful for both communication and business, it is perhaps even more valuable for when we need to associate responsibility for particular actions, something that is especially important if something goes wrong. Case-in-point; when a politician fails to perform their tasks in a fashion meeting community standards, it is because of our ability to identify that politician that we can find a way to sanction them. Without an identification-based system it would be incredibly challenging to hold individuals responsible for actions that they have taken and, simultaneously, we would be less likely to effectively reward those who performed exemplary services.
• Identity can be valuable because it is multifaceted - we project and have projected upon us different identities depending on the particular relationships that we are in. This is valuable since I don’t necessarily want the identity that I share with my parents to be the same as the one that I share with my friends or my bank. In essence, identity is multifaceted/multivariate, whereas my personality (ought) to remain uniform.

Identity Compression

• When we compress identity to a single point of contact, by instituting something like a unified state or national identification system, we create a single point of vulnerability and/or failure that lends itself towards identity theft. Effectively, by consolidating information to a single space, we make it a more valuable target and eventually someone will gain illegitimate access to the system.
• Drawing all information into just a few databases increases the risks of dataveillance dramatically. It allows for a substantial degree of usage-creep, where the intended uses of the ID systems gradually extend beyond its initially defined confines. Harper notes that this kind of data-creep has, historically, led to genocidal activities.

Forcing Analogue to Digital

• The attempt to move everything to a unified system is entirely at odds with how we live our lives. We have multiple sets of keys so that we can let someone drive our car but not gain access to our house. Effectively, our ‘traditional’ systems take into account the fact that we don’t really want to be in an environment where we have a single point of failure or hold a lone identity. Moreover, our analogue history has shown us, time and time again, that we like to let different people access different parts of our lives depending on the relationship that we have with those particular others. The attempt to force changes in digital environments that are out of sync with our historical attitudes should be, if nothing else, a warning that we’re trying to change something with considerable historical and social precedent.

The Inefficiencies of Databases

• I won’t spend much time on this here, because I talk about it reasonably frequently, but as soon as your actions are validated against a single database you become incredibly vulnerable to inaccuracies in that database. In the case of the US SSN Administration Database, Harper notes that there is a 4-5% error rate in that database. Imagine what will happen if, after compressing identity to a mere handful of databases, there is an error!
• While Harper doesn’t not this, we should remain mindful of the regenerative characteristic of many databases, where changes in slave databases are only temporarily effective.

Link to Video: http://www.icvclients.com/ehcca/privacy_2007/2_245/

Technorati Tags: Identity, Surveillance, Transparency

(Source)

Ars technica has a pretty good rebuttal to the recent piece in the London Times that offered the (seeming) common line of crap that you hear when old industries talk about peer to peer networks. You know what the line is in its general format: “Without the guarantee of making money through our tried, tired and tested revenue streams, authors will stop writing, culture with wither away AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!” (There is often a “Think of the children!” added in there for good measure.)

Now, why isn’t it likely that authors are going to flee writing like bookworms from a server farm?

(1) It’s a pain in the ass to scan a book, cover to cover. Don’t believe me? Scan a decent book and then post it for all of us at The Student Bay. I bet you give up before you get halfway through your task. And I bet that you can’t scan in Communicative Action (ISBN-10 0807015075) in a searchable PDF format! (Let’s see if this whole reverse psychology stuff really works…)
(2) People don’t tend to read as many full books as they used to, and they sure as hell don’t read them on computer screens. Yeah, I said it: people are reading less than before. Personally, I blame reality TV and YouTube.
(3) Because there is a REALLY simply way of dealing with this problem (Note: This may not be political simple, but it’s pretty easy from a technical standpoint): When you spend the money on a book, you also buy a license to access a digital copy of the book. A SEARCHABLE and TAGABLE digital copy - it can sit on the publisher’s website for all I care, so long as the publishers don’t act like the goons I know they are and let me search all of my books, from all of the publishers, simultaneously and from one search point. I would prefer a Google-based search. This way, when I’m looking for that single bloody quotation so I can sleep at 5 am, I can find the quotation by throwing out search strings, rather than digging through a pile of books. The people that will buy books, the real audience that you’re catering to, will purchase rather than download if there is clearly added value to owning the book itself. Tactile + digital search = win for the book industry.

Source: Why (most) authors and publishers need not fear online piracy

Technorati Tags: academic misconduct, learning, Literature