Heh.. MPAA caught Pirating!

I love this (click on the post title for a link to The Register story on this). The MPAA, after promising not to.. PIRATED (made illegal copies) of a Documentary Movie on how the MPAA does rating of movies in America. Heh.. I love it. The MPAA Response? "We're above the law" (my interpretation).

What happened to Google's 'don't be evil'

With the announcement of Google opening a search engine in China, and agreeing the the Chinese government's limits, you have to wonder: Is Google becoming evil?

Could be.

Or, just maybe, it's a trojan horse.

Here's my Doing Business With China story and how I think it might relate to what Google's doing right now with it's internet business in the Middle Kingdom.

I used to work for Motorola back in the mid to late 90's where I ran new business creation for a recently created multimedia group. This group lived inside of a business unit that was responsible for creating services business within 'greenfield' (not yet penetrated by the company) markets. Places like Asia and S. America. Mostly for Motorola products like cellphones and pagers.

So, after I'd been there for two weeks, they asked me: What can we do with some of our new products and with our friends at Kodak?

So I made up a product and business that combined Kodak digital camera's (just coming into their own) and the Irridium sat phone technology that Mot was just getting up and running (a sat based phone that would work anywhere on the surface of the planet).

The idea was: Create a kiosk with a camera in it that would link the mass of young adults who were moving from China's countryside to the cities back with their parents. The kids (about 100 million of them) would send emails and pictures back to their rural parents through these kiosks placed a post offices around china. The kiosks would have Kodak cameras in them, and it would be linked by the Irridium network (since there was no infrastructure in China's rural areas).

I thought is a kind of interesting. But only kind of. It was one of several ideas but it had a Camera in it, and our boss was friends with the CEO of Kodak. So..we pitched it to the CEO of Kodak at the time and he loved it (go figure). A 30 min meeting with him went on for 3 hours.

So we went to build a prototype. I spent alot of time in China and in New York (Kodak) getting things worked out.

My secret goal: Sneak the internet into China. Create informational freedom. Open up the country to new ideas and the internet way.

It's SO nice to be ignorant of reality at times. But only in the beginning.

I wanted to use an internet protocol based server in each kiosk (using standand POP type mail to send the pictures and messages around the country). I figured, if I could get an internet server into every city and village in China (or, at least, several thousand), I could backdoor the Internet into the country. And if there was a company that could pull it off, it was Motorola. It was worth a shot.

Man, was I ever wrong.

China get's the power of information. They control it. Period. The post office, in China, is run by the Military (yea.. it would be like the US Army 'owning' the mail system in the US). They required that we give them tools to read every message sent over this system. EVERY message. No exceptions. If we wouldn't do that, they wouldn't let us put it in place.

(side note: I don't know if this is still true, but at the time, people in China didn't seal their envelopes when sending standard paper mail. They knew it would be opened anyway, so why bother?).

I agreed to do this. I hated it, but I also thought: well, it's a crack in the wall. Maybe, just maybe, we can still work real internet access in over time. I was willing to allow some 'evil' (the government reading all your messages) in order to get my foot in the door so, later, I could do some good (you can't really control the internet, once it's in place- or so I believed at the time).

So how does this relate to Google being evil or not being evil?

It's China, not Google, that's being evil (relatively speaking).

If you want to be in China, you do business by their rules. No exceptions. If you don't, then you're out. Since every 5th person on the planet is Chinese, it's a bad idea to ignore them if you're in the 'capture all human knowledge' business like Google. So, you play by their rules.

AND, if you're enlightened, you hope, over time, the power of the internet, like water on a rock, will eventually wear down the Chinese government walls of censorship and oppression of information.

Personally, that's what I think (hope) Google is doing here.

Time will tell.

Overload!

OK.. it's happened. I am offiically overloaded on data from the blogosphere. I've always been a data sponge, soaking up any and all information that came my way but the tools are now SO efficient that I'm overwhelmed.

And not just by 'too much data', but by too much actual knowledge!

I've always catagorized 'media' into Data... Information... Knowledge and, finally, Wisdom. And they go up in value as you move to the right.

The first three you can get externally, the last is what you create for yourself by putting together the other three in your mind into something useful (at least to you).

I started using Bloglines about 6 weeks ago. I found many blogs that were loaded with great information and many with real knowledge. I subscribe to around 60 or so blogs on topics of interest. Well, I'm finding that many of these guys are just frigging brilliant. I can't not read them. Insights, views, perspectives... it's incredible.

And it's becoming amazingly mentally fatiguing. I'm not dumb, and, in the past, I've never really hit a wall on what I could absorb, but it's finally happened. I can no longer keep up with the flow and volume of valuable knowledge being pumped my way by Bloglines. I feel like it's spilling out of my ears by the end of the day.

So.. simplify. Cut back the data needle into my brain. It'll be painful at first, (I just KNOW I'm missing something juicy.. damn!) but it's getting out of hand.

Fed's force Google to reveal private info

So.. Google actually IS trying to not be evil. They're fighting the government's demand.

It has just come to light that the federal government is trying to force Google to reveal all searches conducted in a one-week period, as well as records for 1 million Web addresses.

The effort is part of a government campaign to revive an anti-pornography law, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which the Supreme Court struck down two years ago. The law attempted to ensure that only adults visited porn sites by requiring that visitors register, or use access codes, before gaining entry to such sites. Now, the Bush administration is back in court, trying to prove that these requirements are the only realistic way of preventing minors from accessing online porn.

What remains unclear is why the government would need records from Google--which is, after all, a private company and not an investigative arm of the Department of Justice.

Too bad Yahoo can't claim the same thing.

Yahoo Inc., based in Sunnyvale, Calif., acknowledged on Thursday handing over search data, but insisted no personal information on users was given to government attorneys. The disclosure followed reports that rival search engine Google Inc. had refused to comply with a similar subpoena, issued last year.

I'm not all that excited about kids getting into porn sites .. not good...but these guys regularly take 'common' causes (like stopping terrorists by illegally listening in on US citizens phone conversations, and now this) and using these common causes to IGNORE the laws we have in place that make this a free country.

What the hell, let's just start over. How about throwing out that pesky constitution thing that keeps getting in the way and writing a new one (Hey Mr. Attorney General... whip something up for us and slip it into that case titled 'The Constitution"...no one will notice, at least not for awhile).

Why am I so mad at a technology company?

I've been thinking about this the last few days. I am unreasonably pissed off at Apple right now because I bought a G5 based Mac a few weeks before I could have bought an Intel based Mac that runs twice as fast at the same price.

I bought it on the companies word that it would be 'summer' of 06 before these would be available.

My reaction, though, was more than just being PO'd at losing performance for the buck spent. It was an emotinoal response.

As much as I hate to admit it, I still am an admirer of Apple Computer. Having spent the better part of a decade of my life working there, it's in the blood. Like it or not.

A big part of it is watching them go down the same roads that almost killed them off in the past (proprietary hardware 'copy protection' for their operating system). They're still doing it, and even more so with the iPods.

I now own a Mac and an iPod (although I fought it for a long time, I swore off Mac's back in 95 shortly after leaving Apple for Paramount Pictures and finding that 'normal' customers were treated, well, like crap). I think this experience just underlined that treatment of customers that pushed me away from them initially. I felt lied to.

Ever have your girlfriend of wife lie to you? Maybe it's like that. I, sort of, want Apple to succeed, but then they slap me up the side of the head when I take a flyer and try them out again, unloading 'old' equipment on me when they knew damn well that it would be obsolete the instant (hell before) I bought it, but telling me it would be 'months.. maybe a year' before that would happen.

It's hard to get over, or ever completely forget, true love.

That'll teach me NOT to buy Apple

So, I bought a brand new G5 iMac a couple of weeks ago because Apple said their new Intel based Mac was 'at least' 6 months away.

Today, they screwed me. They announced their Intel Macs 'at the same price, but twice the speed'.

Thanks Steve Jobs. You lying bastard. From me and the several hundreds of thousands of 'new G5 owners', thanks a frigging lot.

NO more new Apple's for me. If I need an Apple product in the future, I'm going to buy something cheap and used from this day forward.

Create an e-annoyance, go to jail

And it keeps coming.

Bush signed into law big fines and up to 2 years in jail for annoying people (via anonymous posts or emailing under a name not your own) on the internet.

Story on Cnet (link above).