waffle

Let me mention two things.

First up, waffle’s now in Planet Cocoa. Planet Cocoa, like other Planet sites, syndicates my posts inline with those of other weblogs with the same subject; for Planet Cocoa, this means chiefly Cocoa weblogs. I’m in good company already, with other collaborators including Daniel Jalkut (Red Sweater) and the WebKit team (Surfin’ Safari).

Second, I’ve been working with and will continue to devote a small bit of my free time to freelancing for MacSpeech, creators of speech recognition software. Code that I’ve had my hand in has already been shipped. I’m working with Jeff Ganyard who’s got so much self-awareness and ego detachment, it is my cemented belief that his feet and his head are frequently occupying different time zones. (And with that, I’ve mentioned half the people in this photo - yes, I do wish I could have gone to C4.)

Even though MacSpeech gives me money, Jeff helps elevate it above that by doing what he does very skillfully. I mention this because I believe it’s in my best interest to reveal it, because it’s in the interest of full disclosure (although, no, I don’t actually use any of their products) and because it’s a nice full-circle kind of thing - Jeff became interested in me and contacted me in no small part because of what I wrote on waffle, and I thank him for giving me the opportunity to work on some interesting software. And, naturally, as with any other weblog that doesn’t say “MacSpeech official company weblog”, their opinions and my opinions are not guaranteed to overlap on the Venn diagram.

The stupidest thing I’ve read in ages: “Why Firefox is blocked”.

Apparently, a number of sites block Firefox since it allows extensions. One of these extensions is Adblock Plus. Therefore, apparently, the sites are “robbed of rightful advertisement revenue” and using this extension is apparently “theft”.

I am not making this up. I told you it was the stupidest thing I’ve read in ages. Here’s a clue stick. I’m going to beat anyone willing very hard with it. Here’s how the Internet works:

1. Supposing it satisfies local laws and your server network’s policy, you are free to make anything at all available on the Internet.
2. You are free to offer this up to as few and as many people as you’d like, using whatever protocols you please.
3. As soon as people have downloaded, streamed or fetched this information in any way, it is theirs to do anything with. You don’t get a say.

Surprisingly, many people do not get point 3.

Smart tags were shot down in an Internet Explorer beta years ago for providing contextual data recognition. Because it was Microsoft and because the idea was that they’d actually misuse their large market share to shoehorn people into using Microsoft services this way (rather than any other way), people who should know better were furious and began to disable smart tags on their sites via a specific meta tag. The same thing happened with the similar image toolbar, which was a bit more understanding since it appeared on practically any image large enough to fit it, and most layouts used tables with inline images to acheive layouts.

Now people are doing this again with Greasemonkey, where you install JavaScripts that load on specified sites and mess with the document. And people are doing it all the time by inventing screen scrapers, to, say, load a web site and turn its contents into a feed. It’s not only accepted, it’s useful for everyone and it’s something you’re entitled to.

People. Stop. What do you do on the Internet? You get to send information to people when they’ve requested it. Normally, the receiver gets use of it, and may even send information back to you. But that’s it. It’s your right to broadcast your information to the people you choose; but regardless of if those people include everybody or not, it is the user’s innate right to do whatever the hell she pleases with the information she receives. If you don’t get this, please do the rest of us a favor and abandon the Internet at once. You are not welcome.

If people click your ads, you are privileged. And if people don’t click your ads, chances are your ads are annoying. Instead of telling people to go fuck themselves and accusing them of crimes they didn’t commit for not liking your site, why not improve your site?

Update: Sören links and nails it:

[B]oth of these absurdities are prevalent not just in advertisement-supported websites, but also in other media, such as TV. This goes so far that many people indeed think that blocking advertisements (such as by, say, cutting them out of your PVR recording) is somehow morally wrong. It’s not! It never has been. If you want to show your token of appreciation for content, go buy a product of theirs with an actual price tag, or donate to the producers. For any company or organization to rely primarily, or even exclusively, on advertisements for their profits is their choice to make, and their problem to deal with.

This is the reason that, when you say that you want to get rid of DRM, people ask you if you don’t want the artists to get paid. (And the answer is that it’s up to them to make sure they get paid. You don’t have a responsibility to pay for stuff you hear - it is however courteous to pay for stuff you like, and courteous of the labels in return to not give you a crippled product.)

Google kills purchased Google Video scheme and throws all purchased videos to the wind. For everyone. Paul Thurrott nails it: “This is, of course, the nightmare of DRM come to life. Even content that you “purchase” (i.e. not rented content) isn’t actually owned by you and it can be taken away.”

You get store credit (Google Checkout), but it’s still unbelievably crappy. You can’t get your ware back.

Paul Thurrott of course is a champion of the subscription model. What happens when you lose DRM on purchased music? You keep your music. What happens when you lose DRM on subscriptions? You keep your music.

The theory of a flat rate for unlimited downloads is good. But it’s just a good theory, and it’s cracked by the fact that there’s no perfect DRM: if there was a DRM that every device supported, that had terms that meant the customer could do everything she is entitled to thanks to fair use and that had a solid backer behind it that wouldn’t ever drop support for it, yes, it’d work. But it won’t work, because there’s no such thing.

As soon as “every device” supports it, by the nature of business either the backer will start pressuring the market and abusing the monopoly, or a new actor will appear to challenge the monopoly, and the DRM will no longer work on “every device”. Making an “open” DRM won’t work either - it’s like locking people into jail cells fit with a key anyone, including the imprisoned, can create.

And the current DRMs (that are neither universal nor open) are simply keys locking in innocent people. The people who want to sell counterfeit CDs will sell counterfeit CDs, and the people who’re just trying to use their stuff are inconvenienced. The epitome of this is that you’ll be treated to a one minute spot about how you shouldn’t “steal” movies on most legitimately acquired DVDs, and that that same video accusing you of doing something you clearly didn’t will not be there on the, uh, “stolen” DVD.

For how many minutes would people stand it if the police knocked on everyone’s door saying: “Hey, you! Stop stealing stuff! Yes, we know you’re not a thief, but we can’t tell the thieves so we’re telling you instead! And if you see a thief, could you tell him? Thanks.”?

It’s like the old stereotype of the bearded hippie telling the establishment to “stop living in the past, man”. Except now, the hippie is the majority of the customers. A number that’s actually growing as the various industry associations try to figure out how to put them away in jail without losing sales. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle anymore. Something’s got to give.

The simple answer, the way out of all this bullshit, is to drop DRM altogether.

A short film about the word “chartreuse”.