i-sako.com

Jeffrey Zeldman,

Owen Briggs, and

this petition for proper PNG support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser for Windows. If you have a moment to spare, go sign it!

Windows users of MSIE are the vast majority of Web surfers, but most of them are completely unaware of the fact that MSIE is, on its technical merits, not a very good browser. Other browsers (your humble blogger is a Mozilla/Netscape/Opera enthusiast) do a lot better job of supporting Web standards. PNG is one of the standards that Microsoft has been promising to support since MSIE 4 (MSIE is currently at version 6), but has never actually gotten around to doing.

Part of this is no doubt because of internal politics at Microsoft, as Owen suggests in his blog, but there’s really not much excuse for not supporting a 7-year-old standard like PNG in Windows when it is fully supported in MSIE for Mac (which was one of the first to support PNG, I gather). Users of nearly all other current browsers can see PNG images with no problems, but Windows MSIE users can’t, which makes life unnecessarily difficult for people who want to use PNG.

Anyway, stop reading this blog and go sign this petition! Ninety percent (or roughly so) of the Internet-using population will thank you for it. Maybe.

When I first saw the news about Disney’s new EZ-D disposable DVDs, my reaction was similar to many of the people interviewed for this article at Wired: What a wasteful concept!

The main sales point, I gather, is that you can buy these DVDs at a check-out counter (an impulse purchase, of course), then throw them away after they expire. (Contact with oxygen causes a chemical reaction in the media that causes it to become unreadable within 48 hours after the package is opened.) Because they can be thrown away, the company argues, the customer is spared the burden of returning the discs, as they would need to do if the DVDs had been rented. That may be true, but the media itself—and the air-tight packaging it comes in—would end up in a landfill somewhere, right? Although the company spokesman claims the product is environmentally safe, there’s no way to claim that it is environmentally friendly.

But that doesn’t stop Flexplay (the Disney company behind EZ-D) from trying: Used discs can always be mailed to GreenDisk, they say. Excuse me for pointing out that this pretty much destroys the whole point of the product, which was supposed to be convenience. Not only that, but it’s really kind of lame to push people to buy this kind of product when the rental system already in place is so much less taxing on our resources—and our landfills.

Better technologies are available; this one we can do without. Personally, I see no need for it. Convenience isn’t that important! But if Disney’s pushing it, I imagine we will be seeing EZ-Ds everywhere before long.

This article at Wired provides a look at Howard Rheingold’s recent keynote speech at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, in which he emphasized that “vested interests, flexing their political and economic muscle, are stifling technological innovation.”

Rheingold certainly is not alone in his fears; the same theme dominates a great deal of Larry Lessig’s work as well. I see these concerns as a genuine threat to freedom.

Innovation is being stiffled to protect profits. This is bad for society. Change is good—and it is inevitable, so erecting artificial barriers to innovation is both wrong and immoral.

Excerpt:

After the talk, Rheingold said, “An era is coming to an end. Geeks and consumers are under assault. We really have to organize to protect our rights.”



Esther Dyson, former chair of ICANN and a noted technology impresario, said she agreed with Rheingold’s thesis “in spades.”



“Technologists always say they just code, they don’t make laws,” she said. “But they should be going to Congress. Our rights are in jeopardy.”

I hope other geeks will begin to look a politics as I do, as a vast Open Source project aimed at creating the best possible legal code. If we continue to let the Microsofts and RIAAs of the world craft our laws, we will soon be left with only the right to consume—and nothing else.

In a follow-up of my earlier post about Microsoft’s power to deny access to information, I thought it only fitting to point to this article at Wired about how Microsoft’s latest “trustworthy computing” efforts will probably have the effect of stamping out the practice of corporate whistleblowing.

On one hand, I find it hard to fault Microsoft for introducing this technology, which will be based on an industry standard (XrML) that any other company could use. In this sense, Microsoft’s behavior is simply consistent with its stated goals of making its operating system more secure—a move that is long overdue. It also makes good business sense for Microsoft to be among the early adopters of this important, new technology.

But, on the other hand, I find it very hypocritical of Microsoft (whose own wrongdoing would have never been made public had this technology been in place) to introduce this technology with little regard for the effect it will have on the ability of the public to uncover corporate wrongdoing. The very company that is asserting corporate rights over the computers of end users (in the form of DRM) is also providing a new right to corporations: The right to never get caught red-handed.

It is possible to see how this new technology, dubbed Windows Rights Management Services, can be both good and bad. On the whole, however, I think it will be bad for the public good.

See, I told you this would happen! (Hat tip to this entry at Slashdot for pointing me to the article.)

Now that academics are waking up to the problems that Microsoft’s Palladium project could create for researchers, I wonder if there will be a movement to draft a “digital bill of rights” (something like this one, but for real) with some real legal teeth to it. If the government doesn’t take some steps to ensure that users have some inviolable rights, Palladium (a term that Microsoft has apparently stopped using—perhaps because of all the bad press associated with that name?) could be used to enforce the shrink-wrapped licensing agreements de facto.

Why is that so bad? Well, because companies can write pretty much whatever they want into there licensing agreements. It’s not uncommon for companies to prohibit benchmarking their products against those of competitors, for example. It is not difficult to imagine how this could easily be carried to ludicrous extremes, but Palladium would enforce those conditions anyway—no matter how ridiculous or unfair they might be.

Oh, and forget about fair use, too. Palladium would make sure that you only get the rights the publisher/content owner grants, nothing more. The days when you actually owned what you own would quickly come to an end. Wouldn’t that be a great thing for all of the copyright holders of the world? They stand to gain the rights to sell things while still maintaining complete control over how it is to be used.

As I wrote before, giving a known monopolist the power to define your rights is a bad idea. Stop Palladium before it’s too late!

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

—Benjamin Franklin