Peter Gutmann, a very reputable computer scientist, has written a highly critical analysis of the content protection features of Microsoft Vista, which is currently being discussed on Slashdot (1, 2) and essentially every other place in the known blogosphere. It seems like Microsoft is trying to close the "analog hole" by using market fiat to require all hardware vendors to downgrade performance unless all devices are certified as DRM-capable. Here’s the executive summary:

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

[…] The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

I’ll withhold judgement until I hear from people who know hardware design better than me, but this sounds like a major stumbling block for Vista adoption. The underlying market dynamics in the computer market, as Nick Carr recently said it, is that "hardware wants to be software, and software wants to be free." The Vista content protection specs seem to want to reverse that. I don’t think it will work, long-term: As Gutmann points out, cheap and single-use hardware devices can be created that circumvent premium content protection quite easily.

And to think that I just went out and bought a Media Center PC. Arrgh. I have been thinking about buying a Macintosh as my next laptop, this just about clinches the decision. 

(Via Hugh McLeod)

Update Dec 31st: This is turning out to be an interesting discussion, see Joho and Bob Cringely for viewpoints. What a pity Scoble has left Microsoft.

Update Jan. 14, 2007: There is a good interview with Peter Gutmann at Tvit.tv. Amongst other things, he says he got the phrase "longest suicide note in history" from a bad political program – and that you could not listen to the podcast of the interview without having parts of your PC either shut down or intentionally lose performance. The interviewer describes Vista, with it’s 30-times-per-second system authentication check as "insanely paranoid".

Somehow I don’t think this will fly, and not just because hackers will fix it. It has never been good strategy to go to war against your customers. 

Chris Anderson goes all soft and mushy over the fact that we now seem to be breaking the "penny per MIPS" barrier.  He is right to step back and shake his head in wonder: Moore’s Law is still going strong, thank you very much, and it is sometimes (OK, once per year would be about right) useful to step back and reflect a bit on what this means.

I started saying in various speeches back in 1995 or so that computing, communications and storage should be considered free. That doesn’t mean that you won’t continue to pay Intel or your telco or various harddisk producers a lot of money, but it does mean that if you want to do something strategic, lack of computing power is not going to hold you back. I think I was right then, and I think I am right now: It is not the technology that slows us down, it is our imagination. Or lack of it.

In a market with falling resource costs, it is sound practice to think of resources as free – it frees up your mind as well. One of the reasons Google is possible, for instance, is because they use cheap hardware and an open-source base, on which they build their infrastructure. If they need another 40000 servers, that does not mean they need to pay another 40000 licenses – a saving not just in license fees but also in the inevitable monitoring and accounting that goes with any kind of pay-as-you-go scheme.

Now if we could only free up the information of the world to the same degree. I wonder when the European countries will reach the same realization that the US seems to have reached a long time ago: That the value of making all public information freely available (in tax from companies profiting from it, for instance) vastly exceeds whatever license fees can be had from selling information already paid for by your tax money back to the people who provided it in the first place. I predict that public information will be public, partly because what Yochai Benkler calls "social production" can recreate it (the way UK internet users are recreating the proprietary postal code database), partly because in a connected society, having free access to public data becomes both an individual right and an effective check on government – and voters will start demanding it.

But it will take time and it will not proceed according to Moore’s law. But perhaps we can use Moore’s law to free the information – by using search engines to sniff out and systematize the information that should be ours in the first place?

That would be a hacking project in the Wikipedia spirit. Free the captured information!

Steven Berlin Johnson has an interesting little piece in the NYT Review of Books, where he discusses how words acquire meaning – or, rather how online definitions of words acquire meaning over time, thanks to the perpetual ephemerality of online material. Definitions by Googlerank. Recommended.

PS: The NYT has come up with an alternative view ("Single Page") for those of us who like to see the whole article at once. Previously, you could use the "Print" version, but that would strip out pictures and diagrams and make the page less readable on screen. Smart.

PSPS: If I were to follow SBJ’s viewpoints here, I should probably have written the first PS as a separate blog entry, titled "Single Page". Oh well. Guess someone else will have to carry the burden of defining it…

Firefox 2.0 has been released and has more than 2 million downloads in 24 hours. Including mine.

The main updates seem to be in more RSS functionality, a tastefully updated UI (including better tabbed browsing), and the ability to restore work sessions. The latter feature is one I will appreciate – when you work researching something and your computer freezes, being able to bring up all the tabs again is reassuring. (Haven’t tested this yet, luckily, but I am sure I will in the not-to-distant future.)

Firefox can sometimes be a memory hog – hopefulle this has been fixed in the new version. 

Seamless install and transition from earlier version, as usual with Mozilla applications. Highly recommended.

Update: Slashdotters (some, at least) think 2.0 inferior to 1.5. So far, I disagree.

My latest essay in ACM Ubiquity is called "The waning importance of categorization" – and deals with the impact on those who categorize when information becomes infinitely searchable. Not unlike Kevin Kelly’s latest article in New York Magazine, though I deal more with the near-term changes. The main point is that, just as mobile phones made us substitute communication for planning, digitally searchable information will make us search rather than categorize.

The next technological breakthrough to hit the market in hard disk technology is perpendicular recording. As I understand it, this means that the magnetic field is flipped 90 degrees up from the disk surface, increasing the storage capacity per areal unit as much as ten times. This Flash video from Hitachi (which includes ceiling pointing dance steps  from Saturday Night Fever) should give a technically correct, though rather hokey explanation.

The upshot is somewhat thicker but ten times as powerful hard disks. The initial market seems to be iPods and similar devices (where the density premium is higher, I assume, but maybe also because smaller disks vibrate less just because they are smaller), but 3.5 inch disks are already announced. Today’s top-of-the-line disks have about 500GB capacity, so get ready for 5TB on your laptop within a year to three….

That is rather amazing. I like disk technology – not just because it is the perennial example of  continuously disruptive innovation, but also because every time you think it has reached its technological limit and we will finally switch to solid state memory, a new dimension opens up (this time by using an old technology previously thought too complex to be worth it.)

5TB on a laptop…. I used to say that you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much hard disk space, but now I begin to wonder. This means simple scanning of all your digital content, including music and videos, and carrying all your information with you at all times. Which new applications will we get that will take advantage of, eventually outstrip this capacity and thus drive the technology forward?

Furthermore, were will disks go once the compression-on-a-single layer dimension is exhausted? Following what happened in computer design, I suspect we will see some architectural innovation (a la Seymour Cray creating supercomputers by creatively combining – and packing – known technology) or just techniques for increasing the number of disks attached to each device. Or perhaps increases in communications technology, especially wireless, will allow us to, once more, go back to centralized data storage.

Ahhh, the march of technology. Don’t we love it. 

(Via Engadget.)

Tim O’Reilly has two good posts on the computer-book market (post 1, post 2) with cool displays of what goes up and what goes down – rather good indicators of what is going up and down in terms of technological temperature.

Jonas Söderström, Swedish information architect and pioneer blogger, has a brilliant illustration of the value of information about people’s information seeking behavior: In a complex information seeking situation in the subway in Milan, he finds the way from the central station to Cadorna (where Leonardo’s The Last Supper is.) He does this by observing the smudge pattern left behind by hundreds of people putting their finger on the map and tracing out the route:

 If anything illustrates the value of what Google and other search engines do, this is it: A gigantic Delphi analysis where we all know a little, and together know a lot.

There is, of course, the implied danger captured in the phrase "ten thousand lemmings can’t go wrong," but a system with feedback (i.e., repeated searches and some learning) the danger of that should be small. Most of Wikipedia’s errors eventually get corrected, and the algoritms of search engines improve daily. The fact that we all leave electronic traces may be worrying from a privacy viewpoint, but the upside is a unique opportunity of turning searching and finding into unwitting and implied teaching.

We learn as we search, but now we can teach as we search.

I find this entry in the CIA World Factbook fascinating: The World. Yes, there are lots of factoids that should be there – for instance, Spanish is a larger language than English, but that is for first languages only – and isn’t the world’s most important language "broken English"? Still, just the fact that an entry like this can be put together with some kind of factual underpinning is to me proof that the world is getting smaller. I also like that the very first page of the CIO World Fact Book contains an option to "Submit a Factual Update" (though the link is to a general "contact CIA" page), which is an indication that someone, somewhere, understands that mistakes are inevitable and change constant.

(Via one of the blogs on my blogroll, can’t find the entry.)

Steve Krause has an excellent in-depth post about the different approaches to recommendation engines for music: Pandora vs. Last. It takes understanding and imagination to refer to Pandora vs. Last as "nature vs. nurture."

(Via Dragos). 

Via the BBC comes a link to a fantastic article in the Chicago Tribune about how you can find CIA agents and installations by searching the Internet.

This is actually not a new problem – the fact that by searching for behaviors in many databases at the same time, you can uncover patterns that point to people. The term when I heard if first – in the early 80s – was Rasterfandung, which is German and means something like "sieve finding". The story was that the police in one city in Germany was looking for a terrorist, and used a number of computerized registers to focus in on people of the right age group who had recently rented an apartment, hired a car, etc. The police then charged one specific apartment and found the terrorists inside.

The problem, of course, is the perennial one of false positives – what if you are a fairly innocent person cleaning a hunting weapon when the police comes barging through the door? Anyway, the way to mitigate against this kind of searching is, as the corporate blogosphere is beginning to pick up, to flood the net with false positives. I wonder how the CIA (or anyone else) can do that?

Marc Hedlund has a great little reflection on various new ways of Web Development 2.0″ href=”http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/02/web_development_20.html”>digging into the nuts and bolts of Web 2.0 services over at O’Reilly Radar. I am currently mulling over search as a disruptive technology in preparation for a talk in March, with FAST CTO Bjørn Olstad. Seems to me we are increasingly moving to a situation where we all are on one (or, at most, a few) system(s), and that fact rather than what we can do as individuals is beginning to catch up to us.