ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I’d ever sign up to willfully receive advertising. But I recently signed up for Groupon, one of the fastest growing companies in the history of the internet. Here’s the deal: You give them your email address and, optionally, a list of offers you’re interested in receiving. Every morning you receive an email with the day’s offer and usually a side offer. The offers are usually on the order of buy a US$50 store credit for US$25. The problem is that some of the merchants that offer Groupons haven’t done the proper research or haven’t properly honed their offer. As a result, Glenn Kelman, writing for Redfin, recounts the experience of Portland’s Posie’s Cafe. Posie’s sold customers a US$13 credit for US$6—not a bad deal. But Groupon tried to keep the entire US$6—Groupon and Posie’s later negotiated a 50/50 split. Wild success for Groupon; not so much for Posie’s. As a result, the Posie’s had trouble making the rent and payroll. As Kelman advises, business owners have to think like shopkeepers not web entrepreneurs, “focusing on happy, profitable customers rather than growth at any cost: If you don’t make money on the first widget, stop making widgets.”

From the why does a dog lick it’s balls category comes Intel charging US$50 for a scratch-and-sniff card with a digital rights management (DRM) key to unlock features that already exist in the computer you just bought. Because they can.

President Obama has proposed extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for most, but wants to eliminate the cuts for the top two percent of those who have income. Predictably, the conservatives warn that the sky is falling. “It’s a body blow to the small-business community,” Gover Norquist tells David Kocieniewski, reporting for the New York Times. Sounds good, Grover, except Kocieniewski reports the US “Internal Revenue Service statistics indicate that only three percent of small businesses would be subject to the higher tax, and many studies of previous tax increases suggest that it would have minimal impact on hiring.”

Cryptography

The master key to the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital rights management system that prevents the copying of data sent over DisplayPot, DVI, and HDMI interfaces has allegedly been leaked. The master key is a 40x40 matrix of 56-bit numbers from which Digital Content Protection—the HDCP licensee—generates the private keys used in all HDCP devices. HDCP, developed by Intel, supports key revocation, but if all of the keys generated from the master key were revoked, nothing would work. Digital Content Protection could, of course, generate a new master key and re-distributing private keys. Any new master key would be incompatible with all existing HDCP devices that aren’t software or firmware upgradeable.

ESRD

Keith Chartier, writing for Renal Business Today, reports an analysis by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services predicts dialysis patients will see a 1.2 percent increase in their co-pays. The increase is a result of the inclusion of laboratory tests in the new payment bundle.

Carol M. Ostrom, writing for the Seattle Times, reports that Washington state has added chronic kidney failure to the list of conditions for which medical marijuana is permitted. Washington state’s “Medical Quality Assurance Commission said it was convinced that nausea caused by dialysis could be helped by marijuana,” writes Ostrom. “But it noted that using marijuana could also jeopardize a renal-failure patient’s eligibility for transplant or have other adverse effects and that patients need to be informed of that when a provider authorizes them to use marijuana legally.”

With the rise of the content farms, misinformation is spreading across the net. When that misinformation is about end-stage renal disease, it can be dangerous. For example, consider this jewel (unlinked because I don’t want to encourage the content farms and add to the problem): “The normal life expectancy of a dialysis patient is 3-5 years. It is assumed that if a person is undergoing dialysis for chronic kidney diseases, then the end is near. ... The mortality rate for patients suffering from ESRD is 22% annually, and this effectively means that surviving beyond 5 years is going to be highly unlikely. This is wrong medically, mathematically, and just about every other way you can possibly imagine.

Internet

Want to know more about your net connection? M-Lab offers a set of tools that measure and report on your net connection. Specific tests include a network diagnostic tool capable of testing down to the quality of your CAT5e cable; a Glasnost test that attempts to determine if your internet service provider is blocking or throttling certain applications or traffic; network path & application diagnostics useful for broadband connections, a traffic shaping test, and a mobile traffic test.

Politics

Eric Utne challenges MoveOn.org to transcend issue-oriented politics and focus on building community. Let’s face it: Progressives are pretty much burned out. As Utne notes, after Obama’s election, “things have not gone well: Obama’s health care reform initiative stalled, green jobs czar Van Jones was driven from office, the war in Afghanistan escalated, and the Copenhagen climate conference fizzled.” Utne attributes this to the issue-oriented style of activism used by progressive groups, especially MoveOn.org. He relates his experience at Camp MoveOn, an organizational training effort. Not until Utne put his “self, us, and now” story in terms of his personal history and experiences did the other attendees become engaged. “I felt that I was glimpsing the future of community organizing in America,” writes Utne. “[O]rganizing based not on hot-button issues, but on building relationships through deep personal sharing and active listening.” Utne advocates and logic here: Not policy initiatives or community building; policy initiatives and community building. As an example of an organization already using these principles, Utne points to the Green Tea Party.

Privacy

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed its own decision (.pdf; 264KB) that had limited the government’s powers and protecting the citizenry’s Fourth Amendment privacy rights with regard to court-ordered searches of computers. The original 2009 ruling limited such searches to the specific data outlined in a search warrant, precluding the confiscation or copying of entire hard drives. The court clearly defined precisely what steps the government had to follow; specifically, with regard to data-search cases, if the government was incapable of restricting its search to the specific data outlined in the warrant, a third-party would be contracted to search for that specific information—and nothing more—under court supervision. The Obama administration objected to these clearly defined parameters, arguing that “plain sight” findings should be admissible. The two dissenting judges in the court’s ruling wrote that the decision fails to explain “why the Supreme Court’s case law or our case law dictates or even suggests that the plain view doctrine should be entirely abandoned in digital evidence cases.”

Publishing

This week should see the publication of Tom Waits by Anton Corbijn. The pair’s 30 year collaboration brings more than 200 photographic images of Waits by Corbijn along with 50 pages of images and writings by Waits. A selection of the images will be exhibited at De Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam 22 September - 12 October 2010 during the staging of Shakespeare’s Richard III, incorporating music by Waits and Kathleen Brennan.

Technology

William Gibson wrote an op-end for the New York Times late last month, that I just recently got around to re-reading. We never imagined something like Google. Entities like Google’s search were seen as specifically discrete—“a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned,” Gibson writes. But Google is distributed—what Gibson calls “a two-way membrane… [making] everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world.” As it turns out, the future was fairly evenly distributed after all; just in time for Gibson’s latest novel, Zero History.

When the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) likely approves an expansion of unlicensed bands of the airwaves later this month, the days of hunting for a WiFi hotspot will be over. The spectrum was freed up when television was required to convert from an analog signal to digital. Because the freed spectrum airwaves are low-frequency, they can travel much further and can better penetrate obstructions like walls and trees. Wireless broadband networks would be able to cover an entire university or corporate campus at speeds up to 40Mbits per second (with an expected update offering bandwidth up to 1Gbit per second. According to Edward Wyatt, writing for the New York Times, the bandwidth could also be used for a smart electricity grid and a variety of other uses.

User experience

Is it time to stop writing for the web? Tamsin Hemingray thinks so, and she may have a point. Make no mistake, Hemingray isn’t at all in the content doesn’t matter camp; she self-identifies as “someone who bangs on about the need for the highest quality writing being a non-negotiable element of online content delivery.” Her point is that the web has become so fractured that there’s no longer a single, coherent web. Hemingray wites that professional web editors and writers “know how to do all the basic stuff—use hyperlinks, shorten URLs, provide references to supporting information, check facts, quote accurately, get all relevant permissions, keep it short and sweet, be interesting and original, source a kick-ass Creative Commons image to support their copy and so on. (We wouldn’t have hired them otherwise). But after that, the idea that there are further hard-and-fast, one size fits all ‘rules’ for ‘web writing’ which can be applied in all circumstances is pretty silly.”

Monotype has released part of its typeface library for use on the web. Including 7,701 typefaces from Monotype, Linotype, ITC, and others, the foundry offers Helvetica, Frutiger, Univers, ITC Franklin Gothic, ITC Avant Garde, and Rotis among others. Monotype provides its typefaces as a service—your use of Monotype typefaces is dependent upon Monotype’s website staying up (although a single desktop license is available for the typefaces you license at the top level). This marks the final entry of all of the major typeface foundries licensing their faces for web use. What’s especially exciting for me is that Sumner Stone’s entire ITC Stone family—the ARTS & FARCES corporate identity typeface—is available through Monotype. The foundry offers three pricing levels: More than 2,000 typefaces are available for 25,000 pageviews per month for free (but a badge is required after the end of the year); the entire typeface library is available for 250,000 pageviews for US$10 per month; and the entire library (with desktop license) is available for 2,500,000 pageviews for US$100 per month. These prices are extremely steep. Licensing the entire ITC Stone family for unrestricted print use (with infinite text pageviews) is a one time cost of US$236. Licensing for web type will almost certainly have to follow traditional typeface licensing.