This is insane.
Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.
While I recognize Viacom has a right to protect its copyright, this is absolutely insane and a total violation of every youtube users privacy. I watched a clip from a South Park episode on youtube once, does that mean that I’m going to get a DMCA notice? or sued? When will they learn???
Ah,
URL, we hardly knew ye. As has been
widely reported and almost
uniformly lamented, the
ICANN has decided to “relax” naming rules for website addresses, ditching the nearly universal .com, .org and .net for things like .dot, .awesomenewending, and .fart.
Shouldn’t we celebrate this? Shouldn’t we feel emancipated from the shackles of URL arcana, free to define a website address that really describes who we are, instead of some third-level compromise?
Well, yes. And no. As constricting as the old system was, it gave a familiar structure to website addresses, so much in fact that it had nearly reached social awareness saturation. URLs were expected to end in .com, so much in fact that if you simply type in “nike” into any modern browser it will take you to www.nike.com.
The new rules obliterate this familiarity, and add a second level of complexity to an already ridiculously technical way of reaching a site. Instead of just having to remember djdougpound, for example, since the .com is inferred, you’ll now have to remember dougpound.dj, or somesuch nonsense.
All of this is really moot, which brings me to the title of this post. The URL was already on its way to obsolescence. The rise of all-powerful Search has made remembering any web address a non-issue, and as the technologies become more intelligent, no one is going to care if your website is named awesome.com or awesome.brah. They’re just going to find it in Google anyway.
That said, I’m still going to go out and register ICANN.hascheeseburger.
While I didn’t agree or disagree with the author’s point that massive amounts of data will fossilize the scientific method as we know it, I did start thinking about the future of data and how it will change everything.
Most of the supporting articles talked about existing large databases that are helping people understand immensely complex systems and information. Stuff like a satellite that takes a picture of the entire night sky every three days, unimaginable data from the Large Hadron Collider, years of airline ticket prices, and even the projected agricultural supplies for countries. Some of this stuff has been around since the turn of the century with the others right around the corner. What’s cool about all of this is that we’ve been able to harness huge amounts of data back around same time I was deleting things because I ‘ran out’ of disk space. Back then you had to be able to afford storage to stop worrying about it. Now anyone can get access to more storage than they’ll ever need at almost no cost.
So in comes the Petabyte age. Unlimited data. Not only can we stop worrying about deleting anything ever again, we can now store everything. Literally. Collective human knowledge is growing within Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet daily. We can assume that everything man-made will eventually be cataloged and remembered somewhere. People are blogging and micro-blogging by the minute. They’re shooting videos and taking photos and putting all of this onto digital storage. This is happening now.
Babies being born this very second will have their entire lives digitally recorded once they’ve left the womb thanks to their eager parents. Once they’re old enough to master a language and access a computer, they’ll take over that roll themselves by Facebooking their preschool classmates and emailing around cellphone photos of their boogers and crayon art. None of that sounds too outlandish until you wonder what celebrities or politicians do in the future when their entire lives can be perused by complete strangers. Instantly. Privacy being irrelevant.
That’s all near future stuff though, what’s after that? We could archive every tree on the planet. Then each one of their leaves. Do all the animals while we’re at it. Tracking individual atoms starts to sound less like wizardry when you’re thinking on the infinite storage level. This being the level where things start to get really interesting.
Star Trek brought us science fiction like transporters that memorized our atoms and scattered and resorted them instantly. So in 20 years, or even 10, when every baby’s DNA is coded and their atomic makeup is on file somewhere, we can finally take a crack at thinking about teleportation. THAT’S the future, all of this data and our ability to discover crazy things from it. We’ll be solving problems we never even knew about. Then again, we’ll probably also generate a whole slew of new ones we can’t solve.
Like what happens if all that information starts getting permanently erased…
So, after writing a
somewhat incendiary post a few months back, I was berated by a colleague (well, berated is kind of harsh – let’s say ‘grilled’) to find an example where traditional media had influenced me into a purchase.
After a minute, i conceded the point. I had likely been inspired to plunk down a serious amount of hard currency on a new
LCD TV because of the Sharp Aquos campaign that ran in print and on TV last fall starring David Ortiz. You see, I’m a
Red Sox fan, seeing that big beautiful man sliding face first into second in slow motion just got my gears turning. Suddenly, the future seemed clear: I’d buy a new TV, the Sox would make and win the
ALCS, then the World Series, and I’d get to watch every moment of it in sparkling HD.
Except, of course, that I did my consumer due diligence and bought a Sony Bravia instead (bouncing ball influence notwithstanding). So yes, advertising convinced me to buy something I probably didn’t need, luring me with the promise of an ideal future. But it didn’t dupe me into buying an inferior product.
So, D-Train, and I were talking about namin’ babies this weekend at a bar, whilst wearing fake moustaches (don’t ask). Well, there’s were fake, anyways. And D was saying how she is almost impossible to Google, because her name is unique (i.e. kinda made up – love you!). But this leads to unique problems: we discovered a few months ago that if you simply Googled her first name, the third link was to her secret blog – not great for a public school teacher.
So Rick was saying how he used to think it would be awesome to name his child something unique so they were eminently searchable in the future, but now thinks it’s better to be stealthy: Name your child something so common that it’s nearly impossible to separate the signal from the noise. You simply vanish into a sea of digital homogeny. This is something I ran into when an ex-girlfriend started dating some guy who shared a name with an NFL quarterback (luckily he was NOT the quarterback) and it’s also something our own Reneé Zellweger can attest to.
Michel Gondry is one of my favorite directors, made
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (loved it, genius) and
Science of Sleep (liked it, very sweet) and, most recently, and a movie I just watch on
PPV last night,
Be Kind Rewind (rough start, a bit sentimental). The story of Be Kind Rewind, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is about a flailing local video rental shop where all the tapes have been erased and in order to keep making money Jack Black and Mos Def remake all the movies. Their remakes are of course more interesting and popular than the originals and they save the store from closing its doors.
Okay, decent premise, and the movie was okay but all I really wanted to do was see the movies that Jack Black and Mos Def had made. Remakes of Ghostbusters, Lion King, Men in Black. Where are these movies? Of course I was hoping they would be on the
website but instead there was a too-cool-for-school site about erasing the internet. Hrmpf. I then went on YouTube and found a
branded site built so that everyone else can make and post their own remade films. Yikes. I don’t want to watch some idiots’ remake of
No Country for Old Men, I really just want to see Jack Black doing Bill Murray.
This made me think about film marketing. Why wouldn’t Michel Gondry post all the remade films online before Be Kind Rewind was even released? It would have created significant buzz. I would have sent a Ghostbusters film with Jack and Mos to all my friends asking if this was for real. It would have made me want to see the film. He should have taken a lesson from
The Blair Witch Project and
Cloverfield and used the web to do all the marketing be pre-releasing all remakes, ahead of time, untethered. It certainly would have done more than $4MM on opening weekend (and $12MM overall). And, more importantly, I wouldn’t have to wait for the
DVD.
I’m pretty late this week on the attack stats, mostly because this has been a super busy week! which is awesome! anyway onto the attackers….
210.0.209.39 ->
125.17.111.147 ->
195.154.70.138 ->
89.219.135.162 -> hs.electurmtrading.ee
221.10.254.205 ->
193.238.157.17 -> nuke.the-it-crowd.org
200.7.198.162 -> mail.mscecuador.com
65.162.105.66 -> host-65-162-105-66.ftbooker.net
211.125.188.61 -> server5.e-savaway.net
on July 03, 2008 at 08:15 AM
