EFF EMI

The record companies, in this case EMI, are again after your rights.  This time your rights to store a file you own in a "cloud computing" system.

(They've found that suing sixteen year old girls is not the best for publicity - even if the law is on your side and you win.)

The question this time is a web site called MP3Tunes.com.  These folks offer you 2Gb of free online cloud storage for you MP3 files.  On the main page they list all sorts of devices and apps to listen to your music anywhere - iPhone apps, plug-ins for various MP3 players, and so forth.  The idea is that once the music is in your "cloud locker" you can play it from anywhere you might be as long as you can access the locker.

Of course there is the requirement that whom ever is using MP3Tunes actually owns the music.  (Though I did not try the service I have no doubt you are required to click a confirmation that says you may not upload music for which you do not own the copyright or rights to digitally duplicate.)

Under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) EMI notified MP3Tunes that it was infringing its music copyrights for some 350 songs.  This notification was supposed to be performed under the "take down" notice portion of DMCA.  MP3Tunes claims that it is a "service provider" under DMCA.  This means that its a service, like an internet ISP, and is itself just a "pass through" for things its users do.  In this case EMI found 350 songs and sent a notice asking MP3Tunes to remove them - which it did.

MP3Tunes subsequently filed a lawsuit claiming that 1) their business is a DMCA "service provider", 2) the notice provided by EMI did not conform to the DMCA format for take down notices, and 3) their service does not constitute direct, contributory, or inducement to perform copyright infringement.

Point #3 is very interesting.  The keys are contributory infringement and something called vicarious liability which, from this site, is defined as "vicarious liability requires two elements: (1) the right and ability to supervise or control the infringing activity; and (2) a direct financial benefit from that activity."

Contributory infringement (from the same site) is "(1) knowledge of the infringing activity; and (2) material contribution to the activity."

Now, given these definitions one must ask whether a Xerox machine or VCR or iPod would "contribute" to copyright infringement or allow "vicarious infringement" - they certainly meet the definition.  Ultimately the courts have found in Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc that "The sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses. The question is thus whether the Betamax is capable of commercially significant noninfringing uses."

So the question becomes what is a service like MP3Tunes?  In the same link there is a length discussion of copyright law as it relates to Napster and other services like it.  In reading this description of the basic "music locker" concept I would have to agree that this concept does not infringe any copyrights.  Otherwise off-site backup systems like Carbonite would create infringement, i.e., backing your hard drive up to cloud storage would create infringement because you had made an illegal copy.

MP3Tunes also owns something called sideload.com.  Sideload allows MP3Tunes users to share links to music and, among other things, load the linked content into their cloud storage.

So where does all this lead? 

If we look at a court brief filed by the Electronic Freedom Foundation we can get to some of the main issues.

Basically the US Congress created the DMCA so that service providers would have a well-defined world in which to operate and would not have to worry about frivolous lawsuits and claims.  So long as a company follows the rules to act as a "safe harbor" site a company like EMI cannot sue it for infringement.

"Safe Harbor" means that if the company complies with these rules then regular copyright law does not apply.  In particular, the "take down" process allows a copyright holder to notify a "safe harbor" that infringing material is on its site.  The company must then immediately remove that material.  So long as this process is upheld there is no copyright infringement.

Ultimately all this, if not resolved, limits your rights to your own music or other digital content.

The bottom line to me is that these technologies offer users additional ways to manage music that might be stolen.  But its the user him or herself doing the stealing - not the "service provider".

EMI has found that suing kids for "sharing music" doesn't make them popular and they have withdrawn from this activity.  Unfortunately, companies like MP3Tunes.com have now taken the place of the children as targets.

People have copied and shared music for decades on cassettes and tapes - no doubt cutting into the sales of EMI and others.  Its only now that the web, offering virtually unlimited sharing, has caused these companies a problem.  Don't get me wrong here.  I believe that copyrights must be upheld.  Unfortunately, its the "how" this must be done that's a problem here.

I hope that at some point a truce is reached on this and that well-defined and clear law is written so that this expensive nonsense is stopped.  This was tried with the DMCA and, though, not 100% successful so far, I think it will lead the way to resolve these issues going forward.

Hysteresis and Reporting News

When I was a kid I used to read science fiction quite a bit.  This was in the 60's and 70's.  I don't read that much these days because a lot of it isn't as good as it used to be (though I did read Eifelheim recently).

A common theme is a lot of stories was that humans would become immobilized as they and society became more automated.  For example, there were stories about people who didn't do anything but lay in bed all day while their brains where connected to some other reality and stories about what happened when those people suddenly found themselves disconnected from that reality, and so on.

These themes have been picked up by various movie studios, e.g., the Matrix, so they are still alive today.

A few weeks ago someone told me a twitter story that brought back some of these memories (Yahoo link here).  The way it was told was "Bill Nye the Science Guy" collapsed on stage during a talk or presentation and, rather than rush to aid him, the audience busily twittered and facebooked about it for several minutes before anyone bothered to help him.

This is more or less what is reported in Yahoo article: Alastair Fairbanks, a USC senior in attendance for Nye's presentation, told the Los Angeles Times that "nobody went to his aid at the very beginning when he first collapsed — that just perplexed me beyond reason." The student added, "Instead, I saw students texting and updating their Twitter statuses. It was just all a very bizarre evening."

Now, interestingly, there is an update at the bottom of the article where these events are replaced with something different: confused people not knowing what to do.

Unfortunately, this isn't the only such incident.  According to nola.com a young man was gunned down on the street.  Immediately after the gunshot the image of his face in death appeared on the internet along with various twitter accounts of the incident.

One thing that technology brings to life in place of print is lack of hysteresis. 

So what is "hysteresis"? 

Hysteresis is a delay in the response to given event.  (In this case I am NOT talking about sitting there while someone is dying or needs aid and doing nothing.)  What I do mean is that news and reporting and delivering information is delayed in response to the event.  In the world of print this usually meant, at least recently with the advent of electronic communications, a delay of a day or so.  If a bridge collapsed, you read about it the next day.

Over the last hundred years or so the hysteresis between events and people being presented with the information about that event has been shrinking.  Its gone from days or weeks to minutes and seconds.  With today's technology its no longer the night beat reporter writing about an incident like a collapse of a speaker at a talk - its someone who is just a random person with a cell phone.

Personally I believe that not all people are cut out to "report" in this manner - much less deal with the actual situation.  Without some experience (like being a cop or beat reporter) people really cannot deal well with situations like the ones I describe above.  They aren't trained, don't have experience, and don't necessarily handle them as well as some better equipped.

I don't believe that the human mind has changed much over the last century to adapt to the reduced "hysteresis" in their lives - particularly as it relates to tragic events.  This was seen, for example, in the reporting on the Vietnam war.  Prior to that time soldiers from all sides carried cameras and filmed combat - but the results where always delayed and often edited before anyone saw them.  Vietnam brought war into people's living rooms directly. 

Today with cell phones we have virtually instantaneous reporting of events - with virtually no hysteresis.

I think that question that needs to be asked is whether or not this is a good thing.

Do I really want to see someone's shattered limb, inert body or dead child posted on Facebook or twitter?  For good or bad the news reporting function supplied a buffer between the horror of unpleasant events and the description you read over breakfast coffee.  But today that buffer is vanishing.

And were will that leave us? 

Certainly there is plenty of horror in the world - but do I really want a live feed of it all coming directly into my cell phone?

And as a human being am I equipped to deal with something like a dead persons face popping up on twitter as I peruse my phone at a break at work or at home during dinner?

Happy Thanksgiving...

The Lone Wolf will be on vacation until Monday, November 29th.

ivi - Copyright Pirates?

Some new startups are challenging the existing Media Industrial Complex (cable and networks).  ivi TV (http://www.ivi.tv/) offers you the ability to watch television broadcasts from specific parts of the country live and free on your computer using their special application.  The idea is that ivi captures broadcast signals just like a cable company might and routes them to your computer via is system in .ivi file format (instead of over the cable wires).  The format is proprietary and requires you to have the ivi viewer installed on your computer.

The claim by ivi is that they are protecting the copyright holders with their system.  According to their "protecting copyright" web site: "Copyright owners have been improperly taken down a rabbit hole by technology companies promising to protect their content the wrong way."

The issue here is whether or not ivi is a "passive carrier" under the Copyright Act.  The copyright laws have a specific exemption for this type of activity.  It requires anyone doing the retransmitting, in this case over the internet, not to have control over the content being transmitted so ivi must rebroadcast the entire stream untouched.  From the copyright act:  "(3) the secondary transmission is made by any carrier who has no direct or indirect control over the content or selection of the primary transmission or over the particular recipients of the secondary transmission, and whose activities with respect to the secondary transmission consist solely of providing wires, cables, or other communications channels for the use of others: Provided, That the provisions of this clause extend only to the activities of said carrier with respect to secondary transmissions and do not exempt from liability the activities of others with respect to their own primary or secondary transmissions;"

The intent is (underlined parts by me) that as long as someone like ivi is not fiddling with the content or controlling who gets to see it they are not infringing the original copyright.

So it would seem that ivi needs to convince the court that its a "passive carrier".

It would also seem the strategy in the case of ivi is to start up a company that does this kind of rebroadcasting, wait to get sued by the Media Industrial Complex, and win confirmation as a "passive carrier" from the courts.

This is how cable TV started.  In 1974 cable companies captured broadcasts and sold them to their subscribers.  Ultimately the Supreme Court decided Teleprompter Corp. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. 415 U.S. 394, 408-09 (1974) in favor of the cable companies.  This decision was replaced by new Federal law in 1976 that specifically creates "compulsory licensing" for cable companies, satellite companies, and the like.

One imagines that ivi wants to be included in "the like".  If you read the rest of ivi's copyright page you will see that there system is designed to do exactly this.

The broadcasters, of course, view all this differently (from this), and sued ivi: "Our complaint filed today with the U.S. District Court of New York underscores our commitment to protect our rights vigorously," said the plaintiffs. "This is a company that's simply stealing our broadcast signals and copyrighted programming and streaming them on the Internet without permission."

One imagines that this is exactly what was said in 1974.

ivi has counter-sued claiming that they are not infringing.

Though the Copyright Office does not believe that internet distribution systems fall into the category of passive carriers there is still the tide of technological change to consider.  According to this WSJ article 43% of all North American internet traffic is realtime streaming movies, up from 10% in 2008.

This is very much like the music model with Napster initially infringing and ultimately being replaced by things like iTunes and Hula.  There are more complex issues with this type of broadcast, e.g., local sports blackouts.  Though the NFL and others are considering creating their own streaming applications - perhaps to replace having to rely on the Media Industrial Complex for distribution of their products; imagine a day when your favorite NFL game is available only by subscription on your iPad.

A Trail of Bread Crumbs...

The WSJ has an article today called "Insurers Test Data Profiles to Identify Risky Clients".

It turns out that "risky behavior" can be inferred from scanning the internet (including social web sites) for "bread crumbs" (or maybe cookie crumbs) you leave about yourself.  What sort of bread crumbs are these you might ask?

For example, hunting permits, boat registrations and property transfers, purchase histories, credit data, forum discussions, blogs, an so forth - all public information or information you allowed someone to collect about you. Remarkably, according to the article, this data can be used to tell things like if you like gourmet food, if you exercise regularly, or sit on the couch, commute long distances, watch too much TV, and many other things.  There is a lengthy discussion of how this works in the article.

You'll probably also be surprised to know that is not a new idea, either.

Twenty years ago companies like auto insurers, according to the link, began to use things like credit score to decide how to price your policy (the higher the credit score the less likely you are to file claim).

Now the really interesting part of all this is that life insurers are thinking about how this can replace things like a "blood test" to determine what kind of "risk" you are in the case of insurance.  I think this replacement of an actual "blood test" with an internet "risk" test is itself risky business on the part of the insurance companies.

So let's talk about risk as it relates to this sort of data mining.  A few days ago I wrote this article about "Cholesterol, Heart Disease and Magical Thinking".  People do not understand how people like epidemiologists calculate risk - and that's a big problem.  You hear about risk all the time: on TV, in ads, from friends, from doctors.  Don't do this or that because its "risky".

First of all, what is risk?  Well, for one thing its not a predictor that something will happen.  A predictor is something that, when we observe it, tells us the a high degree of certainty that some other corresponding event will occur.  For example, a clap of thunder can be predicted from the observation of a lightning bolt.  Risk is also not a cause of something.  Causality is represented by a direct link between two events, i.e., lightning and thunder.  We can say the lightning bolt caused the clap of thunder to occur.

But risk is different. So how is this kind of risk defined?  What does it mean?  

Well, in epidemiology risk factors are calculated as follows:

We take a statistically significant group of people (you can use common sense here - for something like heart disease you wouldn't study just five people - you'd study a large number).  Just how large a number is not really important here, all we need to know is the number is large enough for statistical purposes.

We'll pretend in this post that 100 people are subjects in the study because math with 100 is relatively easy.

So let's say (and we're making this up) that 20 people out of our 100 subjects have had heart attacks.  That's 20 / 100 = .20 = 20%.  So we say that in general you have a 20% risk of heart attack.

Let's also say that 25 people in our example buy pants with a waste size of 40 or above and we'll pretend that 15 people in this "large pant size group" also have had heart attacks.

So the number of people that have a "large pants size" and have had a heart attack is 15, or 15 / 100 or .15 or 15% of the population.

If we divide the 15% (people who purchase "large pants" and have had an heart attack) by the 20% that just have had a heart attack we get .75 or 75% risk factor that if I buy large pants I will have had a heart attack.

But what does this risk factor really mean?

Nothing concrete.  It does not tell anyone what you will do - it just says that when a lot of people get together there is a chance that something will occur.  A risk factor represents this numerical chance that something might happen based on examination of a large group.  (Chance here is a number between zero and one, commonly shown as a percentage, i.e., .1 = 10%.)  Sort of like saying 10% of the people at a baseball game buy hot dogs.  We don't know which people will buy hot dogs but we can generally assume that for any given baseball game about 10% will buy hot dogs - everything else being equal (for example, there are no sales of hamburgers that day).  This is why stadium vendors can buy just about the right amount of food so none is wasted and they don't run out.

So using purchase histories, information about permits, and so on statisticians can develop an entire profile about you that tells them what sort of risk you are relative to whatever insurance policy you are applying for.  But, if you are clever, you will also realize something else. 

Just because you purchase large pants doesn't mean you wear them. 

For example, you may have an elderly relative at home who you care for and you go online to purchase their clothing for them and not yourself.

This is a big difference here between a true epidemiological study and "skimming and mining" data from internet sites and data providers.  In a true epidemiological study we can have definite links between buying and wearing the pants, i.e., we can include in our study the notion of collecting definite data.  Here we don't know who is using the products we are buying.  We're assuming the purchaser is the user - and we all know what assuming does.

So to some degree I see this entire process as "magical thinking" on the part of those insurance companies correlating internet data with personal risk, i.e., the insurance companies.  Correlation means, in this case, that when one thing happens there is an observed relationship with some other thing happening.  A correlation is an observation.

Dogs make correlations: If I walk to the container holding the dog food they think I am going to feed them - so they stick close by me.  The dog mind predicts that I will feed them when I do this.  But walking to the dog food container does not cause me to feed them.  Similarly if I walk by the dog food container all the time and don't feed them the dogs will soon realize that their correlation is not useful and abandon it.

So one problem here is that, using this sort of system, some behavior you have, for example purchasing pants for an elderly person you take care of, may be correlated with you instead of the actual user of the purchase, i.e., the elderly relative.

Another potential problem here is that even though there may be invalid individual correlations a system like this is making about you the overall predictive ability of the model may still work.  For example, caring for an elderly relative might cause you a lot of stress and you have a heart attack because of it.  Effectively this becomes some form discrimination.

Hence the bread crumbs you leave behind may be leading others on a false trail.

Copyright Trolls

Several days ago I wrote"Patents, Trash Mobs and Apple Pie" about an editor at a publication called "Cooks Source."  The post was about the republishing of articles written and owned by others.  This was interesting to me because it illustrated how law and the web interact.

We now come upon a company called Righthaven, LLC.

Righthaven came to light a while back by suing a couple of bloggers in federal court who "reposted" stories from a publication called the Las Vegas-Review Journal (LVRJ).  In both cases the reposts contained some or all of the original LVRJ story with credit.  One blogger was Mary J. Santilli of Boston and an "American Idol" fanatic posted a full LVRJ story on her blog with credit.  Another was Allegra Wong, also of Boston, who wrote a story from her cat's perspective about a fire that killed some birds - again providing credit but only using a portion of the story.

Since then Righthaven has filed additional federal lawsuits in about 100 or so cases.  Typically the cases ask for "damages of $75,000 and forfeiture of website names" according to the Las Vegas Sun.

So let's see, 100 x $75,000.00 US = $7,500,000.00 USD.

The suing proceeded until Righthaven came across Reality One Group, Inc.  Group One fought back and won based on this decision.  The decision reads in part: "The Fair Use doctrine states in pertinent part that “the fair use of a copyrighted work, . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, [or] news reporting . . . is not an infringement of copyright.” 17 U.S.C. § 107. In determining if an alleged infringement is a fair use of the copyright, district courts consider several factors including: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. 17 U.S.C. § 107; see also A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001). "

The judge goes on to discuss this indicating that while Group One may be a commercial entity using LVRJ's content it meets the "Fair Use" exception to copyright law because A) the use is factual new reporting and commentary, B) Group One use only eight of thirty sentences in an article (about 26%), and C) the use does not dilute the original copyright holders (LVRJ) market.  For me this decision is dead on with standard "Fair Use" doctrine (link here).

Another judge, Robert Johnston, has questioned Righthaven's court costs related to these suits.  Righthaven, for example, demands costs in these suits and its in-house counsel charges $160 - $190 USD per hour.

All this said we have to now step back somewhat and view this from a different perspective.

While its clear that posting an entire article from a publication like LVRJ would be infringement what's not so clear is the legality of the process that LVRJ has constructed with Righthaven to attack supposed infringement.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) a blog host, such as blogspot in the case of this blog,  should register a "takedown agent".  A "takedown agent" is a person who is to be notified if infringing material appears on the site.  If you do not have such a person registered the actions of an entity like Righthaven can be more problematic.  Under the DMCA if a blog has a registered takedown agent Righthaven must notify the agent of any infringement.  The agent must then take steps to "take down" the infringing material. 

In the case of Google, typically this means simply removing the material, though there are a lot of complex legal elements related to this (see this).  A more complete discussion of your rights relative to "online-freedom" can be found here.

In defense of another Righthaven target the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) has filed a counter suit against Righthaven alleging that it is a "Copyright Troll" that seeks  to extract “... windfall recoveries of statutory damages and to exact nuisance settlements” from its targets.

So what's the bottom line to all this?

Clearly in a case like "Cooks Source" copying an entire article into your blog or publication without permission is wrong.

Its also clear that trolling for cases like this with the intended purpose of extracting "nuisance settlements" is also wrong.  (It will be interesting to follow this counter claim - my guess is that the US legal system will ultimately reject the notion of nuisance claims for a number of reasons).

The real losers here are you and I (unless you're a lawyer).

The creation and filing of nuisance lawsuits is an all too common practice of which I myself have been a victim over the years.  What these articles don't say is that any defense, no matter how simple, is likely to cost tens of thousands of dollars in addition to whatever claim is made against you (unless the EFF comes to your rescue).

I think the US legal system includes the implicit presumption that the filer of claims like Righthaven's have substantial merit - they wouldn't have sued if they didn't, right?  This bias comes from a history of law developed over several hundred years before the electronic age.  You and I did not file claims like this except in exceptional circumstances - and most publishers (like newspapers) respected copyright and the law - lawsuits were the realm of big business who could afford them.

Today, however, the mere threat of a lawsuit is substantial - far beyond the resources of most individuals or small businesses.

And this argument goes to both sides:  In the case of Cooks Source I mentioned at the beginning of the article the original author could have filed a federal lawsuit against Cooks Source claiming infringement.  However, this would also have cost tens of thousands of dollars - regardless of any success or failure.

The "takedown" portion of the DMCA is a step in the right direction - but it doesn't go far enough. 

There needs to be a simple, straightforward legal mechanism to handle the first level of these types of claims without need of lawsuits, lawyers and judges.  This would allow you and I to handle issues that arise without the involvement of legal trolls looking to benefit from the hard work of others.

The bottom line is this: 

In the case of Cooks Source using the "Tale of Two Tarts" article without the permission of Monica Gaudio wouldn't it be better to have this resolved through a simple legal means, e.g., arbitration or the like, rather than have a legal trolls collecingt tens of thousands of dollars from both sides?

Its wrong to steal copyrighted materials - but I think its just as wrong to profit beyond the original value and scope of the material. 

My guess is that the "Tale of Two Tarts" did not generate nearly enough money for Monica Gaudio to pay for a federal lawsuit against Cooks Source.

Damages and costs should be limited to the real value of the materials and harm in question.

Acrobat/PDF Security Issue

Link here - patch for current Acrobat and Reader.

GigaPans and Xeikons

 I have always been interested in GigaPan. 

GigaPan is a system that allows you to create an enormously detailed image by stitching together a large number of high resolution images - each of just a tiny fraction of the whole picture.  Special camera attachments and software tools allow you to take these pictures and you can also use software to stitch together images you have lying around.  There is a web viewer that allows you to zoom around in the stitched result as if it were one giant picture.

The viewer works a lot like the Google Map viewer.  You can zoom in and out from an interplanetary view down to your mailbox.

I found this site at National Geographic - it has some very cool examples (check out the "Pill Bug" if you're not squeamish).

GigaPan is a partnership between Google, CMU, NASA and a few others.  The site claims its an extension of the Google Connection Project (site here, but it loads very slowly) whose purpose is "... develop[s] software tools and technologies to increase the power of images to connect, inform, and inspire people to become engaged and responsible global citizens."

The technology is amazing but I am surprised that there aren't a lot of commercial applications for it yet.

One that would seem obvious is "digital pathology" - taking the slides pathologists make from biopsy's and so forth and converting them into GigaPan images.  There is a company in Pittsburgh call Omnyx which is developing such a platform - but as far as I can see it does not use GigaPan.

I thought about this a bit and it seems reasonable that a commercial venture would want to make sure that there was sufficient bandwidth to load the images quickly and smoothly - something you could not necessarily guarantee on an regular internet connection.

In a lot of ways this is similar to the Xeikon Digital Press technology that allows images invoked by PPML to be streamed to the press on demand.  For the Xeikon press you RIP various elements of the job onto a server available to the press via a network.  As the press runs the PPML driving the job calls in assets.  The assets are then pulled in over the network by the press.

In the case of the Xeikon there is a much greater demand on performance and reliability of image delivery because the moving paper really requires that the images arrive on time - if they don't the press really has no choice but to stop with an error.

I recall talking to the Omnyx people about this but they seemed very interested in re-inventing the wheel.

I would imagine that another issue for Omnyx is depth of field.  Though a GigaPan has tremendous resolution it only has it at a particular focus distance.  But a pathologist would probably like to have focus at various distances so that he could see what's effectively "behind" or "in front of" some element on the image.

I bet it would be easy to create a GigaPan viewer that supports a depth of field adjustment allowing you to make an on-the-fly adjustment while you are viewing.

I also noticed on a lot of GigaPans that the focus at high resolution is relatively poor.  For example, you have a beautiful mountain scene from a great distance and you can zoom into the specific trees on one part of one mountain.  But the focus on those trees is not sharp.

GigaPan has just released a camera mount system that automatically takes a sequence of images (it costs $895.00 US).  If you had two and they were synced you could do 3-D.  A friend of mine bought one of these - it seems to work quite well.

Are We There Yet?

Based on Mark's comment from yesterday I updated my knowledge about E-Paper.

The Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), a research center for Xerox, was well known for inventing the Alto, a precursor of most modern computer systems.  The Alto, as the computer was called, consisted of an networking card (Ethernet - invented by Robert Metcalfe), a bitmap display, a mouse, a custom processor, and a hard drive (2.5 Mb).

The "Dover Laser Printer" was also invented around this time (I wrote about it here).  It was, as far as I know, the first networked printing device (as well as the first laser printer).

The concept of E-paper was invented by Nicholas K. Sheridon at Xerox Parc in the mid 1970's.

Some interesting material is presented here including a lengthy interview with Sheridon.

Sheridon makes an interesting point: "Much has been written about the incredible myopia of Xerox executives of the time, so I won't go into that except to say that there were numerous other opportunities to enormously expand Xerox's business that were similarly fumbled. Xerox had enough money to create an incredible research lab with top-notch people, but Xerox management could not shake off the copier mentality."

Xerox had literally invented the future of computing at Parc by 1980 or so.  Everything you use and take for granted in a computing sense was created there.  Supposedly Steve Jobs "stole" the idea to create the Lisa - the precursor of the Macintosh - from Parc after a visit.

But Xerox management could not understand what their research team had invented: they only understood copiers.  The proof, of course, is that only the Dover was commercialized by Xerox (initially as the Xerox 9700).  They eventually tried to commercialize the Alto as the Xerox Star Office - but it was a dismal failure.  Even with the commercialization of the Dover as the X9700, however, the networking and so forth was discarded in favor of a mainframe channel adapter (for communicating with main frames) and an 9-track, reel-to-reel tape drive.

The link covers Gyricon and E-Ink in some detail which were various spin-offs from Sheridon's work at Parc right up through 2007.

Of course, the article says, by 2012 E-paper will be as common as napkins...  It's all just around the corner.

Today's commercial uses of E-paper seem to be primarily readers, an example of which is here.  While there are other uses as well, there seems to be well recognized limitations with color and speed.

But back to Mark's point: "Soon we could see the commercialization of full color and motion passive devices. That may be what is needed for epublishing to usurp traditional print publishing."

I think this is a good question.

The answer, though, is somewhat complicated and inter-twined with history and happenstance.

In terms of the history of computing and digital printing Parc is the rosetta stone, as I commented above.  But only a very small number of technologies created there ever survived to be commercialized.  The reason for that, among other things, is that the people that invented the technology were inventors, not business men.

Metcalfe, I think, was the chief exception, founding 3-com to commercialize Ethernet.  And, even as late as the early 90's this was no sure bet.  Prior to that Novell, Microsoft and others (IBM and token ring) offered networking solutions that eclipsed Ethernet.  It wasn't until the Internet as we know it today took off did Ethernet's place in the world get solidified.

The metaphor at Parc was the replacement of paper for doing your work - which is not the same as replacing paper: the Alto had email, drawing programs, and so forth.  But, at the end of the day, you still needed a Dover to print out the results.  E-paper does not fit into this model - it was far ahead of its time in that regard.  It wouldn't find a real application until maybe 2005 and later.

The early Acrobat ads focused on the same thing:  Acrobat was designed to replace the need for paper on a computer.  I remember watching an ad Adobe created:  there was an office with copiers and typewriters.  People were trying to work on documents by physically cutting and pasting and copying.  People were attaching notes, marking on the paper, re-typing, re-printing and so on.  Acrobat was presented as the "holy grail" that allowed allow this to mostly be done on the computer.

You also have to me what looks like simple ignorance and arrogance: Apple's iPad no Match for E-Paper.

This headline is probably true, but not in the way the authors intended it.  Reading this and other E-paper ads its clear that E-paper bigots (I apologize if this offends anyone) can only imagine their product in a world where people do what they think it should be used for.  In this case, behave like a book reader.

However, I think this is remarkably short sighted on their part.  I have enough digital devices already - a laptop, a phone, an iPod.  I don't need another one.  The seem to miss the fact that the trajectory of digital products is to integrate these functions into fewer and fewer devices - not more and more specialized devices.

Do I believe that no one will see value in a Kindle?  Of course not.  But its a very specialized market I think - someone literally replacing the physical book with a device designed to behave as a book.  But that limits E-paper to that metaphor.  An iPad or laptop not only replaces the book but also does much, much more.

And finally, as I commented yesterday, the juggernaut of LCD manufacturing is just to large to be stopped or steered away.  Literally there is already overcapacity in the marketplace.  I talked about the cost progress of LCD's here.  Its declining so rapidly that if the Virgin Space program were to be as popular the $125,000 USD cost of a flight to space will be a mere $7,500 USD in 5 years or so.

I think that E-paper will find its place in specialized applications that are well suited.  My guess is that in the long run these will be manufactured or targeted applications outside the mainstream of laptop and iPad-like systems.

Print is being affect by this, not from direct replacement so much as by abandonment.  Many things are still printed but the previous user base is abandoning them.  Its not that an iPad user would ignore a magazine in a doctors office as short term entertainment, it just that at home that same user simply won't bother with the printed version.  After doing my research I feel that E-paper is already being or is about to be abandon as well for its initial "holy grail" applications - which will leave it relegated to manufacturing and other specialized applications.

The New Publishing Systems...

I have been interested in doing away with more paper in my house.  The only real paper left that comes in on a regular basis is the Wall Street Journal, a Sound-on-Sound magazine, and junk mail.  At the same time I am always interested in platforms for printing (not just magazines, but books, various personal-type information like statements, bills, etc.).

The most rational choice for a reader for me would be an iPad.  Most of what I read on a regular basis would work on there, e.g., the WSJ for iPad.

On the book front there are problems, though.  Some books, like "The Drunkard's Walk", by Leonard Mlodinow, is available for an iPad via the free Kindle group of apps.  Many are available via other forms of eReader.  However, many are still not available electronically.

Now this was supposed to be the realm of Acrobat.  But Acrobat peaked too early and its model is too closed (more on this below).

Recently I came across a website called www.readoz.com.  This is some sort of startup publishing site that offers you the ability to publish your book, magazine or other printed work electronically.  You "drop off PDF files" and they do the rest.  What's interesting about this site is that they have a lot of technology to integrate your publishing with social media and they mimic the printed world very closely.

On the social media side (from this) "ReadOz digital editions also feature full search engine optimization, bookmark and share technology with 35 social networking platforms, audio/video capabilities, as well as iPod, iPad and Android applications."  Their free reader applications address most of how this works.

They accept source material in PDF form (presumably plate ready but it doesn't say) organized for how the paper version of the product would  be printed: You can provided belly band content, gate-fold content, and the rest.  There is support of audio annotation, targeted ads, surveys, dynamic content, full ad tracking, engagement tools for email opt in, etc., and so forth (you can see the full list here).

The business model appears to be tied to the front-end - somehow the cost of using this to reduce your print-run length pays for the service.  I couldn't find any details on the site regarding this however.

In terms of competitors I found www.zmags.com.  This platform appears to be somewhat similar to readoz though it would appear to have been around longer and have some real customers.  Their web site offers some better clues about the revenue model: "Achieve rapid ROI with digital publications. By converting just 5 percent of print subscribers to Zmags, you will save enough on print costs in one month to pay for your Zmags license for the entire year."

Zmags also offers support for marketing materials like dynamic catalogs and educational recruiting.

Educational recruiting?  I have not heard of this as an industry before - and apparently its full of regulations.  From the site: "A growing number of colleges and universities are now distributing digital editions of recruiting materials and media guides to prospective students. These interactive digital books offer a more dynamic way to educate prospective students and student-athletes, while complying with recruiting regulations. Zmags, the industry leader in interactive digital publishing software, enables universities to provide prospective students with a high-quality interactive reading experience that includes digital pictures, video clips, live links, news feeds, and more, which fully immerses prospective students into their institutions."

Now the Sound-on-Sound magazine that I subscribe to uses some kind of technology like this - but I cannot tell if its home grown or from a service like one of these.  So far I have not been pleased with the electronic version of this - its kind of clunky to have to zoom and pan around to see the entire page at any given point. (I like to view the entire page - lots of articles in technical magazines have things on the spreads that cross-reference each other, e.g., a box with Pros/Cons and pricing on the opposite page from the article intro.

I don't see the current iPad models making this any better (I have 17" Mac laptops which are also clunky for this) and this is the primary reason I would not switch.

Also, I have to wonder about sharing a lot of content via Facebook and so forth with these platforms.  While I can see how this might be handy on occasion in general I don't think people on your Facebook will want to dive into too much detail.  I think that the length of your posts on Facebook correspond to your age - the younger you are the shorter the posts.  Linking to long-winded articles probably won't do much for the younger set.

Overall, though, I cannot see how publishing would not move in this direction - whether with these particular tools I described or with others - in any case the die has been cast.  I think that one thing that will be needed to succeed will be a 17" display - like the one on the MacBook - but without a keyboard and turned 90-degrees.  Ideally I'd like to see double that - almost like two 17" displays. (Perhaps a version with which you could fold the keyboard all the way back around the display would do it.)  The iPad is the first step - but I think its not quite enough (sorry Steve).

Part of this too is that I am a geezer and like larger type.  My kids and grandkids have no problem with tiny text on tiny displays - me, I don't care for it.  Though I can see that texting on a 17" iPad might be distracting while driving.

Acrobat wants to do all of this but it can't.  I think the reason is that its too closely tied to the publishing end (in terms of creation) and not properly tied to reading end.  It supports everything all the rest do - interactivity and so on - but its not quite the same.  I think its also a bit too "technical" for a lot of things - particularly basic reading.  There are a lot more computer users today with a lot less knowledge of publishing and associated issues.

I think Flash is also part of the problem - its not really integrated with Acrobat and yet most of the effects like page turning and such that you see with eReaders and such are Flash-like.  Adobe, I think, will remain a player as long as print is involved.  But once the scale tips away from print, i.e., 5% read the magazine in print instead of 5% electronically, the publishing baggage (CMYK, plate-layouts, etc.) will be cast off and replaced with newer, sleeker tools.

Google: What Would Jobs Have Done?

I was reading this article at CIO regarding how Google might look a little different had Steve Jobs taken the helm in place of Eric Schmidt.  I bring this up because a while back I wrote "Whistling Past the Graveyard" which talked about why companies that get defocused from their primary expertise tend to get lost.  Google is another case in point.

Google defined the concept of a "search company".  There were lots of search technologies before Google, and many that have come after, like Bing.  But Google remains the master at search.

Unfortunately, this is no longer the chief focus as far as I can see.

So what about the idea of Steve Jobs in charge at Google?  I think that would have made Google far more focused on its core search technology and much less focused on satellite things like blogspot, gmail, chrome, android, cell phones, wave, the supposed Google Me Facebook replacement and all the rest.

Not many of these things are really winners - particularly from the "big picture" perspective.

I would also say this is exactly why Steve Jobs would not have taken the head job at Google.  The core search engine model for Google, while technologically exciting,  is far from an ego and marketing pizazz blockbuster and it really doesn't offer much for Jobs.  Can you really imagine him standing up on the stage a Moscone Center talking about some low-level Python search wizardry?  (Yes, he could pull it off, but it wouldn't be the same as the Apple events he hosts.)

Jobs likes to focus on making things great.  He does this by grinding away the superfluous crap that make things annoying and complicated and getting down the real nub of the issue, e.g., the iPod interface.  The Google search screen is already this way - as are the returned results (at least for the most part).  What would he be left to focus on?

Making clunky weird things like wave and chrome.

As wonderful as Google is today at what they do there are, however, still search problems to be solved.  My concern with Google these days is that they have become so focused on the other things I mentioned that making search work right is no longer the number one priority.

Do I need really Chrome?  Does my browser really need to be that much faster?

Android has its own set of issues, particularly about not being as "open" as Google claims.

I have also written here about Google's bizarre ideas about "cloud printing".  HP has scooped them in this regard - just watch their TV ads.

Certainly I use blogspot at Google for this blog.  It works okay though at some point I may consider moving the elsewhere to have more control over it.

Many people love gmail.  Now I really have a hard time understanding why this is so.  People put personal things in email, business things, things they say that are private.  Why would you trust Google with this information?  Particularly as the company grows and grows beyond all real means to control it.

I fear the insidious nature of Google's approach to content.  Particularly my content (not me personally necessarily, but the whole notion of people putting their private information into Google).  Now this blog is a public blog - and "behind the scenes" there isn't really anything - I don't keep any email on Google, no secret links or stores of data, and I do most of my research outside of blogspot.  So while Google hosts my blog it doesn't have any personal information about me or my blog or, for that matter, my company.

And Google tends to create weird standards for things, like mail attachments.  We have a customer that loved to send gmail's with these bizarre Google attachments that would not work on a Mac.

How nice.  I guess no on there uses a Mac.

Google now finds itself in the position where its no longer the "technological hot ticket".  Eric Schmidt recently decided to give all the employees a 10% raise.  I doubt very much this was out of the goodness of his cold black heart.  He's doing this to keep people.  Keep people for escaping to Facebook and other startups.

This is going to make these defocused activities harder to support because most of them are pet projects cooked up by employees in the first place.

The problem with companies and privacy as they get larger and larger is that not everyone follows the privacy code the founders established.  Eventually  there will be unhappy employees who leave - taking secure information with them.  And when they go who's gmail passwords will go with them?

"Don't be evil" only gets you so far - there's a lot of latitude around "evil".

Things like Facebook are now starting to breath down Google's neck.  Facebook is more exciting and starting to draw employees away from Google.  This will make Google's life harder and put more stress on the whole mess.

So, for me, what does all this mean?

First off, I think Google needs to stick to search and fix what's already broken with search.

My biggest beef has always been, being in the PDF business, that you cannot effectively search for things about PDF without getting a list of things that are PDF, i.e., PDF files about the things you are interested in.

For example, suppose I am interested in whether there's a PDF viewer on a specific kind of microprocessor, e.g., the ARM LPC1343.  You would think that Googling "LPC1343 PDF" might work - but it doesn't.  Instead I get a bunch of PDF files about the LPC1343.

This is just an example, but I find this quite annoying and not helpful at all.

So Google, if your listening, get back on track at what you do best - before you too are "Whistling Past the Graveyard".

A Decade Ago...

I  came across an article at WhatTheyThink about the Pitman Company.  The press release from Pitman begins: "Camden, NJ — The former chief financial officer of the Harold M. Pitman Company, a New Jersey-based graphic arts and printing supply company, pleaded guilty today to wire fraud and tax evasion in connection with a $2 million embezzlement scheme, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced."

Apparently the fraud was conducted between 2003 and 2009.

I bring this up because my company crossed paths with Pitman during that period.

Lexigraph started out in the late 1990's by producing what would become pdfExpress.  The first version was a plug-in for Acrobat 3.0 that ran on a PC.  Previously the focus of revenue had been market research and mailing companies I had started.   The mailing company I have discussed before.  The market research company conducted mailing survey's using the "fill in the oval"-type printed surveys.  We also tallied the results and produced reports.

Once the first plug-in was working I made the decision to travel to a trade show in Moscone Center in San Francisco to demonstrate the product.  I hand built a back wall using example output I printed on a color laser printer I hand bought.

The booth generate a lot of interested from a company called PR1ME Source (PS).  PS was a distributor of Xeikon digital presses in the USA and claimed to be "the largest integrator of Xeikon branded presses in the world."  The reason for this was that our PDF process worked a lot like the front-end of their digital press at the time: the PrintStreamer II.  This was a hardware device built by a third-party Xeikon integrator that used a scripting language to assemble pages from components.

 

Our product, pdfExpress, worked in a similar fashion except in software assembling PDF components, e.g., overlays, charts, graphs, logos, into a PDF file.  This was a very advance technology and together we could do a lot of things that the big companies could not.

Over the next couple of years Lexigraph became heavily involved with PS - primarily because it was easy for us to build, simulate and test workflows in software without having to turn on a press.

The Pitman article piqued my interest because Pitman at that time was the chief rival of PS.  Both companies were primarily resellers of plates and other print related software and hardware to the printing industry.  I believe that PS's arrangement of Xeikon was kind of a poke in Pitman's eye.  PS was run by some far-ahead seeing executives and though in the long run it has since disappeared (I am not sure what happened to it - it got involved with a Xeikon partnership called Canopy and then I believe was bought by Fuji).  These execs understood that the real future growth of the print industry was going to be digital (this is about 2000).

I think that 9/11 in the US eventually caused PR1IME Source to be purchased by Fuji.  The print industry took a bit hit after that attack and recovery took several years.  PS's investment in the Xeikon relationship was expensive and Fuji bailed them out.

Eventually I hired some of the Canopy employees and I recall visiting the Pitman booths at trade shows in the subsequent years with them and discussing their company and products.  

I discussed the "digital printing" business with some Pitman people over the years.  They always felt that it was a mistake for PR1ME Souce and that they were going to stick with their primary business.  I think that they probably were right in the sense that they are still around and independently doing what they do.

Its a shame to see employees go bad like that - but anyone who runs a business has to deal with that sort of thing.

I had forgotten about Pitman until I read the linked article.

Jailbreaking: To Infinity and Beyond

Given the copyright law in the US what are we allowed to do or not do with the things that we buy?

Historically, of course, this has not been an issue.  For example, purchasing a hammer with a license to only build houses would be considered nonsense.  You've bought the hammer so its now yours.  The previous owner has no claim what-so-ever on your use of it.  Of course the seller of the hammer might attach a license but more than likely people would either ignore it or buy another hammer without one.

In the modern digital age many things we buy contain license agreements and software.  For example, an iPod or iPhone is a physical thing, like a hammer, but it also involves the use of some sort of intellectual property, like software, to make it work.  The software is typically covered with a license that restricts what you might do with the software - not the device ifself.  For example, decrypting the software or posting it on a public web site are types of restrictions typically found in such licenses.

Most of the law on this is covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  From WikiPedia: "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself."

This protects downloaded music and DVD's from being unfairly copied as well as makes it a crime to decode or decrypt certain types of protection systems, e.g., the iTunes music system that limits your playing of music to, say, an iPod.

However, there are certain exceptions to the DMCA and an important one was added very recently: iPhone Jailbreaking.

Apple, of course, disagrees with this (see PDF here).  Apple argues that A) "jailbreaking" violates its license agreement and B) that a "fair use" of the iPhone and its software under the copyright law such as jailbreaking is not allowed because the jailbreaker does not own the software and is merely a licensee.

But Apple's view was struck down on two fronts:  First the Copyright Office concluded that, “while a copyright owner might try to restrict the programs that can be run on a particular operating system, copyright law is not the vehicle for imposition of such restrictions.”

Second, a Federal Appeals court ruled that "dongle protected software" can only enforce copyright issues but must allow the user to use and view the software.  From the ruling (listed here): "Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision.  The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners."

The next front on which this will play out is now video games. 

If I buy a video game is it fair use to install "modded" hardware? 

(In case you don't know what "modding" is here is the Wikipedia definition: "Modding is a slang expression that is derived from the verb "modify". Modding refers to the act of modifying a piece of hardware or software or anything else for that matter, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer. ")

In this case the defendant, Mathew Crippen, thinks so - for the same reasons I listed above - he took money from some under cover agents to jailbreak an Xbox and was arrested.

The two rulings listed above are remarkable and I predict that, by the same logic used in both of these cases, the government will lose its case against Mathew Crippen.

What does this mean for the rest of us?

Well, for one thing I think that it says that if I buy software, like a PhotoShop or Windows, and I don't like what it does I can alter it despite what any license agreement might say so long as I don't violate the copyright provisions of that license, e.g., make illegal copies for someone else because of this.

In the case of my copier spying on me, which I wrote about recently, it says that me somehow hacking the software to prevent such spying is legal.

Could I "jailbreak" my RIP for my highspeed inkjet or digital press?

Could I take apart a printer I own with a color Adobe RIP and make use of it in some other way?

Could I view the inner workings of a PhotoShop or Quark and make use of what I saw so long as I did not violate other patent or copyright law?

Could I buy a junk RIP and diddle the innards to make a new product?

I think the answer to all these questions is yes.

Acrobat/PDF Security Issue

 Listed here.

Adobe's response here.

The Head of a (Green) Pin...

 There's a lot of discussion in the printing industry about being "Green". 

Sure, we all have some generic understand that "green" means "saving our mother earth from ecological disaster at the hands of man" but, if you want to write articles that quantify the savings, i.e., cloud computing is better than X, or producing a National Geographic Magazine has a carbon footprint of Y you had better have some sort of rational scientific basis.

The problem here is separating the causuistry, which I wrote about a few days ago, from actual causality.  If we pretend what we are talking about is a form of causality or exact measurement and it turns out not be then the entire discussion is no more valid than arguing about how many angles can dance on the head of a pin, even if the pin has a green head.

Before delving into something like the "greenness" of publishing a magazine or deciding whether a "cloud computing" facility is "more green" than some other type of computing we need solid foundation on what "green" actually means.  The classic definition of "green" in this context is the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by some process: driving, heating, generating electricity, and so forth.

Now there isn't such a thing as a "green-o-meter" that you can just punch in some numbers to get the "greenness" of some activity.  Sure there are web sites and other things that claim to do this but they really cannot be real (which we'll see in a minute).

So instead we have to use a proxy for the "green-o-meter" - that is something that we can measure easily which can be translated into a measurement of "greenness".

We're going to define green here in a comparative way:  We're going to say something is more green than another thing if it uses less measurable energy to do the same task.  This is actually a cheat as we will see later but for now, and to keep this article simple, we will assume this.  Of course, this assumes we actual want to do the thing we are talking about, i.e., drive, because, I could simply not drive instead which would use zero relative energy.

But even this can be subject to disagreement.

Let's take the example of something everyone can understand and is familiar with: a stove.  I had remodeled our house and in the process I planned to move the kitchen into the new addition.  In this process we are switching from electricity to gas.  However, because of the bad economy we cannot afford to acquire the kitchen appliances we originally wanted so we decided to temporarily acquire some used ones instead.  That we could complete the move of the kitchen and replace the used appliances with new ones in the future.

So I ask myself this: which is greener?  The electric stove or the gas stove.

This seems like a simple question, doesn't it?

So first off, let's take away the issue of the creation of the stove, its transportation, etc. and just consider the basic function: heating something, like a pot of water. 

This limits the question to this: when we turn the knob "on" to heat, say, a pot of water, which type of stove is more green?

First off let's see what we can find out relative to this.  Certainly some people seem to think electricity is more "green" than gas (from the link): "Unfortunately, I’m going to have to disappoint everyone who loves to cook on a gas cook top and tell you right now that an electric cooktop is going to be more eco-friendly – hands-down."  Yet this site says the exact opposite: "Usually it's more efficient to burn natural gas where it's needed -- in your home -- than to burn it at a power plant, convert the heat to electricity and then send the electricity over wires to your house. "
Well, this isn't much help...

Let's look at the specifications for the stoves then - perhaps that will make it possible to compare.

Some digging reveals that a gas stove might have a 9,500 BTU nat. rating per burner.  From more digging apparently nat = natural gas.  However, electric stoves are rated in Watts, e.g., 3,200 Watts per burner.

Since there is a direct formula for the conversion: 1 watt = 3.412141633 BTU/Hr you can easily compare the two.

But wait, this just compares the output of the burner on each type of stove.  Different stoves have different ratings, e.g., one electric stove might have 1,250W burners and another 3,200W burners.

So let's pick two imaginary stoves that have exactly equivalent rating for their burners - one gas and one electric.

So which of these is more green?  Neither, actually, as the burners are rated the same so the stove use the same amount of energy.

But is that a proper comparison?  Is a gas stove "as green" as an electric one?

No, actually, because of how you use the stove.

If had two stoves, one gas and one electric, equal BTU/Watt ratings mean that given both stoves are on and the burners heating at full efficiency it would take the same amount of time to heat the same amount of water (in equal amounts in equal pots) the same amount.  Not from scratch, mind you, but with the burners already on and placing the pot on the running stove.

But in reality you don't use the stove like this.  You start out with a cold pot of water on the stove with the burner off, you turn on the stove, and let the burner heat the water.   When you consider this the problem becomes more complicated because now you must consider a time element - how long does it take the stove to reach the full operating temperature?  We know that both stoves have the same burner ratings so once each reaches full operating temperature we know they are equivalent.

Though you don't have to believe me the gas stove has a virtually instant startup time: that is once the flame appears its at full temperature.  So let's say, just for argument, that it takes 1 second to bring the gas stove up to full temperature.

On my old electric stove it takes about 90 seconds for the burner to reach full temperature.

Bottom line is that while both stoves produce the exact same amount of heat the electric stove takes longer to reach full temperature.  Of course, during this warm-up time some heat is transferred to the pot, but not nearly as much as full power.

So, all things being equal, including exactly equal stoves, it would seem that the gas stove is greener because it uses less energy to do the same job as the electric stove.

So does a gas stove cause my "green footprint" to be smaller than the electric stove?  Or am I being fooled by causuitry here?

This is a much more complex question since it involves the relative "greenness" of the infrastructure used to provide gas and electricity to my house as well as the efficiency of that infrastructure in delivering this energy to me.

Now, most people of live near a big city probably have both gas and electricity.  Generally everyone in the US, at least, has electricity, and some have other technologies like oil if they live in rural areas.

We must now examine the relative greenness of the infrastructure used to deliver the gas and electricity.  Which uses more energy?  Is one greener than the other?

For example, we could say the the delivery system for each was "equal" in terms of green, i.e., the wires and the pipes use the same amount of energy to build and maintain.   But that's not enough either because gas in a pipe is not the same as electricity in a wire.  Electricity is lost in the transmission from point A to point B.  This is not true with gas.

Similarly something must create the electricity, i.e., a generator, and something must power that device.  Where as gas simply comes up out of the ground under pressure in the first place - though a gas well must be dug to reach the gas.

So what is greener for my stove? Gas or electricity.

The actual answer is probably impossible to tell.  I can guess that since gas does not involve a conversion to another form (electricity) and does not lose energy during the transmission that its more efficient, but that discounts the discovery and drilling process.

The point of all this discussion is how on earth would it be possible to tell if a physical, printed magazine was "greener" than, say, an electronic version of that magazine shipped via a cloud computer through a WIFI to my iPad.

I have greatly simplified the stove example - virtually anyone you discuss this with might not agree with the cheats and short cuts I took.  They might have different ideas about measuring green.

The bottom line is don't write articles and say "X is more green than Y" without some rational, scientific basis.

If you don't believe me check out some of the web sites the "green" ad sponsors offer to see if you can find any rational, scientific basis for their claims.

Patents, Trash Mobs, and Apple Pie

First a short note first on those who love Apple (no, not pie, computer) here.  If you like to guess what Steve Jobs is up to this site may be quite a bit of help...

But on to trash mobs and Apple Pie.  About five years ago Monica Gaudio wrote an article called "The Tail of Two Tarts" about the history of Apple Pie.  Several years later Ms Gaudio was notified by a friend that her article had appeared in Cooks Source - a for pay on-line and print publication.

The lifted article had appeared here, but now its no longer available at facebook - no doubt due to the pummeling provided by the trash mobsters.

According to this when Ms Gaudio contacted the Cooks Source editor, Ms Judith Griggs, this is the reply she got (she asked for a published apology and $130 to be sent to a specific charity cause):

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut oman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

Well there you go!  Ms Griggs want's to be paid for editing the original article.  How nice!

The picture at the beginning of this article was taken from the Cooks Source facebook page.

It looks like its the result of a trash mob that has shown up to give Cooks Source and Ms. Griggs what for (from the Cooks Source "Wall" at facebook).

Well this is all fine and good....

But wait!  Not so fast...

What's this?  A parody of Ms Griggs (image at the top of this article, link to facebook here) superimposed on a "Dummies" book.  Now as far as I can see the "Dummies" book format is Copyright © 2010 & Trademark by Wiley Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Hmmm, it would see that not only Ms. Griggs is serious about considering the web to be "public domain" - apparently a "Maggie Gorn, whoever that is, also believes things like the "Dummies" model is public domain - unless Wiley gave her permission to doctor up the cover of a Dummies book as a parody.  (Though this is possibly a "fair use" case under copyright.)

To me the big to do here is a little like the pot calling the kettle black.  I scrolled through a bit of the trash mobbing of Cook Source and while there were a few like Maggie most just posted text comments on how vile and evil Cooks Source is.  Since I did not find the use of the original Tarts article in context its hard to tell if there was or was not an offense committed (perhaps it was parody as well).

Even more interesting is that at the site of the original Tarts article there are a number of pictures.  These are not links to other sites but actual images housed on "www.godecookery.com" - the place where the original Tarts article was published.

However, these have been taken (with credit listed as "Gathering Apples. From Tacuinum Sanitatis, Paris, 15th c.") from another original work:  the Tacunium Sanitatis, which is a physical book, that looks like this:

According to Wikipedia a whole series of these books was published starting in 1531 - several complete copies survive today as well as parts of others.  I imagine that the French library in which these reside owns the copyright to these books.

In the original "Tale of Two Tarts" an image from this book is used.

Did www.godecookery.com take these photographs themselves?

Was permission to use these gotten from their owners or copyright holders?

If not, how is this different from Ms. Griggs supposed offense?

While "trash mobbing" might be fun and even necessary in a case like this, everyone needs to be careful that they themselves are not guilty before casting the first stone.

EDIT: I posted a link to this on the Cooks Source wall...

The Creation of JLight (Part 1)

In the fall of 2007 I needed a technical project to work on.

Out of the blue a fella called me from across the state - he had a problem.  His customer was a large Indigo printer and occasionally they had overflow work.  He, of course, had an Indigo, but he also had two iGens.  The Indigo was old and slow, but the iGens were new.  Was there a way, he wanted to know, to print the Indigo output on the iGen?

Not understanding I said, "sure, just send the file over to the iGen RIP".

"No, No" he said, "the files are already RIPed print ready JLYT files."

Now I understood.  This was some sort of file image-type format out of the Indigo RIP that went to the actual printing engine.

I said, "I'm not familiar with that format except generally.  I know its some sort of compressed image.  Send one over and I'll see what I can do..."

So he did.

(Some later efforts on this are described in this blog which I started in early 2009 to discuss the details of decoding the high resolution elements of the file.)

The discussion that follows here is based on my original efforts to decrypt this file format.  I did this as a black-box reverse engineering project.  (I had no prior knowledge of how JLYT works and no access to a JLYT implementation - either as a RIP or print consumer.)

First, what is a "black-box" reverse engineering project? From this link:

Black box reverse engineering is closer to the scientific method, only applied to hardware or software:

   1. Gather information and resources, typically by reading any available public documentation.
   2. Form a hypothesis, such as how something is implemented.
   3. Perform experiment and collect data. For software, the "experiment" is typically a test program of some sort.
   4. Analyze data.
   5. Interpret data and draw conclusions.
   6. Repeat 2..5 until the underlying hardware or software is understood.

The J-LAYOUT files, as they are called, is really a series of press-ready images inside of a PDF wrapper.  This was easy enough to tell by simply opening the file and looking at it.  At the surface it has all the common elements of a PDF file: COS objects, XREF, a root, pages, Kids, and so forth.  Being somewhat expert in this it was fairly easy to see this by basically opening the file in an editor.

However, below the PDF /Page level things were a bit different.  Each JLYT page turned out to be a series of PDF streams.  The structure and form of these was much less clear.  I could see, for example, that what appeared to be each page began with a stream prefixed with 'IC96'.

I surmised this to mean "I = Indigo, N.V. - the original maker of the press and file format", "C = compressed - as in compressed image format", and "96 - the year it was created."

The streams appeared to be sequential within a page so it seemed likely that the series of streams together made up the page.  Each stream was only 65,536 bytes in length - which was odd. PDF streams can be much longer.  So I guessed this was some sort of design limitation - Indigo presses had been around since the mid-1990's so a limit like this seemed rational for the computer hardware at the time.

So my next step was to cobble together the series of streams that I thought made up a page, which I did, and placed it into a file imaginatively called "dummy.guts".  This file was in binary format so it was hard to work with.  I then created some tools to dump out the file in various textual forms: binary, decimal, hex and so on so that I could try and discover the structure.

Since I knew the raster size of the page from the PDF structure I started looking around the IC96 portion of the file.  Eventually I deduced this:

typedef struct {
  char iid[4]; // 'I' 'C' '9' '6'
  short int height;
  short int width;
  short int q1;
  short int q2;
  short int q3;
  short int q4;
} IC96T;

Which told me the height and width of the image - not surprisingly, this match the height and width of the page declared in the PDF portion.

The nex step was to figure out what came next...

How Your Office Copier is Spying...

So I was looking into the specs for the Canon ir2200.  This is a copier/printer/scanner/fax-type device that costs around $1,500.00 USD used, a lot more new.

This is the kind of device you might find in any office.  Typically something like this is leased.  In fact, most modern copiers are leased these days.

The specs for this device include the following:

Image Server Memory: Standard 128MB RAM+5.1GB

So this is not only a copier/printer/scanner/fax device, but it has a hard drive and a built in processor of some sort as well.

Hmmm...

I did a bit of digging and I came up with this PDF on "The Forensic Analysis of Digital Copiers":

"Many modern digital copiers store copied and printed information on internal hard drives.  Such information may have value as evidence. In order to test the possiblities for evidence extraction from copiers, two digital copiers containing hard drives were dismantled and forensically analyzed. The analysis shows that it is possible to retrieve exact copies of documents that has previously been copied and/or printed on digital copiers. "

So this device, as probably most or all of the same type, doesn't simply image your copy onto the old-fashioned selenium drum, charge the drum, let toner stick to the drum, and impress the toner on the paper.  No.  It scans your page into a hard drive memory and prints it out onto the page.  This PDF is about using that information as evidence.

Apparently it never deletes the scanned image.

Now the old fashioned copier method ensured security because once the selenium drum as discharged all the toner would come off - leaving almost no trace of what was copied.  I suppose someone very clever could probably recover an image or two from the toner residue on the drum.  But that's probably a lot more tricky and complicated than what I am about to describe.

So these folks in the forensic analysis PDF do the following:

1) They scan a set of 20 pages of known content into the copier.

2) They take the copier apart.  Apparently this involves nothing complicated.

3) They find the hard drive: a standard 2 ½ “ ATA hard drive of size 5.6 Gb. "The drive was easily imaged using EnCase 3.20 through a writer blocker on a standalone computer."  The EnCase 3.20 is some sort of commercially available disk tool for accessing contents computer hard drives.  Basically you physically remove the drive from the copier and hook it up to this device - most geeky 12-year olds could do this.  My guess its probably not even as complicated as they describe.

So they dump out the information on the hard drive:

Code Type Start Sector Total Sectors  Size
06 BIGDOS 0 8401995 4.0GB
06 BIGDOS 8401995 1269135 619.7MB
06 BIGDOS 9671130 1028160 502.0MB
06 BIGDOS 10699290 1028160 502.0MB

Their first attempts to read the information yield some gibberish, but with some effort:

"... it was found that swapping the bytes of the entire file systems, the contents could be read. The file systems of partition 2-4 were now readable as a variant of the FAT file system (with headers reading as “VXDOS”.) The first partition however contains no clearly visible file system (With header reading “NadaFSFastVCTTable”.

It was however found that the contents of this partition was indeed corresponding to the direct storage of images of previously copied document pages. These pages could be extracted and viewed in a standard image viewer."

4) They find their 20 pages of images.

Now they don't specify the image format used but my guess would be TIFF or JPEG - very standard because open-source (free) software is available to read and write these formats.

The byte-swapping they describe is because the device was probably designed in Japan.  Japanese DOS-type operating systems, no doubt like the one used in the ir2200, use a different byte order than those in the US.

So, in the case of the Canon ir2000, it can store about 4.000 images.  Now, most software that's embedded in a device like this is fairly dumb.  My guess is that it simply cycles through all 4,000 image slots as copies are made and only starts writing over previously copied and stored images on copy 4,001 - leaving an embedded history of the last 4,000 copies at any given time.

The analysis I describe to was done by some sort of group associated with gathering evidence, i.e., lawyers or prosecutors.

So what does this mean for you?

Well, for one thing that photocopy of your "rear end" made at the last Christmas party might still be lingering in the office copier (remember that the device I discuss is about 7 years old and has a tiny 5.6Gb drive - I am sure newer devices have much larger drives holding a much longer history of images).

If your boss leased the copier and the lease has run out since then your "rear end" copy might be hanging out across town at this very moment - say at "Joe's Autobody".  Hopefully little Joe Jr. isn't reading this article...

It turns out that "erasing" this hard drive is not something that happens between one lease and another. (Though by now there is no doubt legislation making it a federal felony of some horrific sort to not erase the drive - but still I doubt anyone bothers.)

On the other hand, if you made copies of your spouses or boss's personal files for revenge, well, that evidence may also still be on the copier.  Hopefully their lawyers are reading this either...

Then there's the issue of whether the device supports networking.  If so, no doubt there is hackery to simply access the images.  Imagine the fun when someone emails the image of your "rear end" to ... well, you get the picture (no pun intended).

The bottom line is this: modern copiers are not your friend.  Public copiers even less so...

Who knew?