Music piracy beneficial for artists

Posted by on 10 November 2011 10:18 4 comments

Music piracy increases an artist’s reach in his target market. Record labels publishing the music complain about lost revenues, even though most of those revenues never get paid to the artist anyway. Musicians “regard live performances as their almost exclusive source of income”. The more people with copies of a musician’s work (legitimate or otherwise), the higher the demand for live performances. By that metric, artists stand to benefit from music piracy, even while music publishers, the middle men of the industry, do not.

UPDATE: Here’s an infographic that describes the pitiful amount of money an artist earns from legally-sold digital music. Musicians can’t live on royalties alone.

Digital textbooks: Still falling short

Posted by on 7 November 2011 16:58 No comments

Last year, I wrote about some of the reasons the iPad wasn’t suitable for students. One of the biggest reasons I gave at the time was unsatisfying experience of trying to study a textbook on the device.

Audrey Watters wrote today about why students aren’t using ebooks for textbooks. One reason is availability. This has proved not to be a problem for me as a computer scientist; most of the textbooks I’ve needed for the past two semesters are available for the Kindle. But Audrey mentions a few other points that are universally applicable:

  • “[I]t’s still not quite as easy to mark up a digital text as it is a printed one.”
  • Most digital textbooks cost only slightly less than the physical versions. The relative TCO of an ebook is higher since it can’t be sold back at the end of the semester.
  • Ebooks aren’t integrated with social tools that students want to use for research and homework.

The tools available for working with ebooks are ill-suited to the needs of a student. For example, when studying a textbook, my memory is often aided by linking a concept with its physical location on a page, relative to figures and other visual elements. Ebooks by nature remove these artifacts of typesetting.

The biggest problem, however, is the ebook reader paradigm: read one page, advance to the next page, repeat. A textbook must allow me to flip back and forth between chapters, look things up in the index, and mark and write notes in the margin. Some books, like two that I am using this semester (Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware), don’t require that; I can read them a page at a time and still extract sufficient value. Having the device foist sequentiality on the user is not burdensome for books that are read straight through. But for textbooks, which are used more for reference than sequential reading, that paradigm is ruinous.

Until we develop better ways of reading, marking, referencing, and sharing ebooks, the textbook market will continue to make up only a small segment of ebook sales.

Eternal value of education

Posted by on 7 November 2011 15:42 4 comments

One of my core beliefs is the eternal nature of the soul. When we die, we’ll take with us the knowledge gained in this life. The question, then, is what things are most important to learn in a short human life. Cecil O. Samuelson, a retired physician and current president of Brigham Young University, remarked once that he doubted there would be a need for rheumatologists in the next life. Will there be a need for computer programmers? I highly doubt it. But there will be a need for scientists of all disciplines to understand and teach principles of chemistry, biology, physics, and mathematics. While specifics of the engineering disciplines may not be necessary there, the general scientific knowledge they apply will be invaluable. Beside that, if nothing else, engineers help improve our world while we’re still here.

Technology and family history work

Posted by on 3 November 2011 1:29 No comments

Malachi describes the prophet Elijah coming to “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.” The fulfillment of that prophecy today is evident in the ever-increasing interest in family history work around the world. It is aided and intensified by ever-advancing technology. Both of these are being guided by God. When the Internet was new, it promised to have a great impact on genealogy. The evolution of projects like FamilySearch* witness that. Smartphones promise to be just as revolutionary as the Internet. Dr. Charles Knutson at BYU has caught that vision and is realizing it with his Twenty Minute Genealogist project. The future will hold much more that we haven’t even dreamed of today. It is exciting indeed to be a part of this growing field and to witness the advancing work of God.

* Compare this description of FamilySearch one year after its creation to the current vision for the project as of late last year.

Technology must not replace spirituality

Posted by on 24 October 2011 16:49 No comments

A theme constantly stressed by my religious leaders is the judicious use of technology. The Internet, Twitter, Facebook, and smartphones are a great boon. They deliver information to me and help me use and disseminate it. They enable me and other members of my church to share the good news of the gospel of Christ. But they can also be distracting and detrimental to my spiritual awareness. The more intrusive those technologies become, the more careful I must be in watching their proper usage, ensuring they don’t cheapen my relationships with others or with God.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Posted by on 24 October 2011 14:52 No comments

Eric Raymond’s seminal paper, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, outlines the different software construction methods used today. One is very measured and managed, and it is usually commercial. The other is community-driven, iterative, and democratic. As Joshua articulates so well, both have merit. We need both styles of software creation. Some innovations are best driven by a single visionary at the helm of a company like Apple. Others are best driven by a community with a shared vision.

Bash script to easily sign multiple PGP keys

Posted by on 21 October 2011 11:16 No comments

The project this week in Computer Security (CS 465) deals with secure email. Everyone in the class generated a PGP key, and we had a “key-signing party” in class. Everyone identified his or her PGP key ID and showed two forms of identification to prove ownership.

The second part of the key signing is done by each person individually. It requires downloading each key, verifying it, and signing it. This can be a tedious process that consists of four gpg commands:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --search-keys user@email.com
gpg --fingerprint user@email.com
gpg --sign-key user@email.com
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-key KEY_ID

Typing those is obviously a pain, so I wrote a bash shell script to automate them. I also added a grep-like command that extracts the KEY_ID from the fingerprint output so I don’t have to read and type it in manually. The whole thing loops infinitely until I press Ctrl+C. Here’s what it looks like:

Privacy and security

Posted by on 14 October 2011 17:30 3 comments

Tension between privacy and security is made ever starker by today’s advancing technology and eroding morals. An article by Jonathan Segal describes the legal grounds employers must take to protect themselves from employee backlash when security needs overpower privacy concerns. His solution: ensure that your employees have no expectation of privacy. That frees you to invade it while leaving them no legal grounds to complain about the violation. While Segal’s advice is legally sound, it ignores the more important human elements of the problem: lowering employee expectations does not make them happier or more productive or more ethical but rather less so. Only by raising morale and improving the sense of community and ownership do employers have a chance at positively influencing the human factors that necessitate the security measures in the first place.

Communities of trust

Posted by on 11 October 2011 12:37 3 comments

I recently read Cliff Stoll’s book “The Cuckoo’s Egg”. The book relates the fascinating story of tracking a hacker all across the world through the early computer networks of the 1980s. While the story itself is worth reading, Cliff uses it to make some excellent arguments about the importance of trust in communities, both in real life and on the network.

Cliff had a terrible time getting the FBI on board with the hacker investigation because they only wanted cases with large monetary stakes. Those bureaucrats failed to recognize the real loss, intangible but just as damaging: trust. Once the hacker broke into one of their computers, even if he harmed nothing, the trust formerly enjoyed by the network users was destroyed. Cliff compares it to a small town where citizens leave their doors unlocked. The first burglar to visit the town, no matter how little he steals, destroys the trust community members had in each other and in the world; people start installing locks on their doors. This “enlightenment” demonstrating the value of strong security worsened forever the quality of life.

Trust is difficult to build and easy to destroy. That is true in families, between citizens and governments, and among community members. This book has made me more aware of the importance of maintaining trust in my personal and professional life, never doing anything to betray it. One thoughtless mistake could ruin everything I have built, but continuous care to my behavior and character will eventually yield its commensurate fruit.

“Pre-crime” being developed by Homeland Security

Posted by on 10 October 2011 22:42 No comments

CNET reports that the Department of Homeland Security is developing a technology to predict intent through monitoring behavioral changes.

This could be used for all sorts of benign things, like a police officer approaching your car and knowing whether or not you were about to do something rash—he can brace himself before you get too close. The article also cites uses in high traffic events or at border crossings where behavioral analysis can aid in law enforcement.

One can’t help but wonder about the privacy implications this will entail. DHS has said that the system doesn’t store any personally-identifiable information about individuals, but it does require that information to function. Hopefully this system won’t garner the same omniscient status as had the pre-cogs in Spielberg’s film. But even in that case, this system, as any computer system, could be exploited in myriad ways. The technology is only useful within safe, reasonable limits that respect our privacy and agency as human beings.