Steve Hannah: This week

I have an iPhone with a pretty good data plan through Rogers (6 gigs/mo for $30). No complaints. I generally use under 100 megs per month. I recently bought an iPad but didn’t want to spring for the 3G version because they are trying to make us spend an additional $35/mo for a separate data plan for that unit. My original hope was that I could tether from my iPhone to my iPad so that I could make use of my existing data plan. Well…. they thought of that and disabled tethering intentionally on the iPad. They want to squeeze that additional $35/mo out of us.

No worries, though. For now I’m happy to just use the iPad at home on WiFi.

A second scenario came up this past weekend. I was traveling in the states with friends and I need to have internet access at all times due to my online businesses so I looked into the options that Rogers has for me to be able to use my 3G in the US. For $30 you can get 10 megs!! That means that if I used 100 megs in 5 days (which is entirely likely) it would cost me $300 for 5 days. Get real!

My next idea was to see about getting a sim card from AT&T to use my iPhone on AT&T’s network while I was in the states. AT&T seems to be drinking the same cool-aid as Rogers, however because in order to get 3G with tethering support I needed to sign a 2 year contract at $60/mo with them. Not really worth it for 5 days.

So I walked into Best Buy to see if there were any other solutions available to me. There I discovered the flourishing pay-as-you-go market in the states (that is non-existent in Canada). I was able to buy a Virgin Mobile Hotspot for $150 that generates a WiFi network wherever I am that I can use to access the internet on all of my devices (my 3 friends and I were all able to work online while we travelled down the I5). All I had to do was buy a $20 access card for Virgin which gave me 300 megs of 3G data (more than we needed). And if I ran out I could have just paid another $20 for another 300 megs. If I’m ever traveling in the US now I can just throw $20 on my account and have full internet access wherever I go.

This was an awesome solution so I decided to see if we have anything comparable in Canada.

Lucky me! Rogers sells a MiFi device that is very similar to the Virgin one for only $249. The only thing is that they don’t have any form of pay-as-you go packages. Their cheapest package is $35/mo for 500 megs. Remember that I’m already getting 6 gigs on my iPhone for $30/mo. So for more around twice as much money, I can get less than 10% more usage (when I’m currently only using under 10% of my existing 6 gigs per month).

This is just greed. They offer no solution for me.

So I guess we’re out of luck in Canada. Guess again. A quick search on Google brings up an iPhone app called MyWi which will transform your iPhone in to a wifi hotspot. That way you can run your computer, your iPad, your iPhone, and whatever else you want off of your iPhone’s data package.

Of course Apple doesn’t want you to use this (so it’s not in the App store), and Rogers doesn’t want you to use this. They to milk you for everything you have. No thanks.

To me (as a software developer), the most exciting thing about the iPad is the fact that it is integrated with the App Store. On the iPod and iPhone, the App store has proven to be a fantastic commercial success, opening a new distribution channel for software developers. There have been a few attempts to create similar type app stores for the desktop (or laptop), but none have been wildly successful. I think this is due to the culture. We are too used to downloading our software through the web browser - we don’t really see the need for an app store. If there was single app store for the desktop that allowed users to purchase /install software as easily as the iPhone app store does, I’m sure that the software industry would double or even triple in revenue in a short amount of time.

The iPad, being closely related to the iPod/iPhone in user interface makes it far more likely the at users will embrace its apps in the App store. This means that software developers who develop for the iPad will have an easy and automatic distribution channel for all of their works, where they can get paid in a simple and secure fashion. And the possibilities for application development on the iPad would appear to far exceed the possibilities of iPhone apps - nearing the level of desktop applications (or even beyond).

This simple fact is why developers will embrace the iPad. And when developers embrace a platform, historically, so too do users.

I wrote this in response to a number of “pro piracy” or “piracy rationalization” comments to a CNN article:
http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/20/a-turning-point-for-online-piracy

This appears to be a culture war, and one that is being lost - and will eventually cost us dearly. Many of these comments are consistent with my anecdotal experience with friends and acquaintances. People who are involved in theft, be it digital or material, always try to rationalize their behavior. Nobody actually believes that they are a bad person. I have known people who earn a living by stealing car stereos. Their justification will generally include such points as “insurance will pay for it - and big insurance companies deserve to be robbed..”, or “the guy who owns the car is obviously rich and can afford to get a new stereo”. Either way there is some justification or rationalization that allows the thief to sleep at night.

Digital piracy is no different. There seem to be many well-articulated arguments to justify digital piracy, but all seem to predicated on the assumption that since “stealing” digital content does not deprive the original owner the content, it isn’t really like stealing at all. You wouldn’t steal your friend’s car because then your friend would be without a car (and you would be without a friend). However if such a thing as a car replicator existed that allowed you to duplicate your friend’s car for free, then you probably wouldn’t think twice about “replicating” your friend’s car.

So for pirates who otherwise are not thieves, it seems to boil down to an internal rejection of the notion that digital piracy is, in fact, theft. Fair enough. It is different enough from material theft that we might as well distinguish it from material theft and give it a different name. So piracy is not “stealing” it is simply “piracy”.

Now that we have distinguished it, let’s look at some of the implications of piracy.

1. If a product is freely available via piracy, and in our culture, piracy is considered OK, then anyone who decides to “purchase” that product is really engaging in a form of charity because they believe in the cause of the product or the person who created it. This is why 10 years ago you thought it was OK to pay $20 for a DVD movie (because you were purchasing a product), but now you think that $20 is a rip-off, because you are now engaging in $20 or charity - more difficult to justify (people spend up to 10% of their income on charitable donations, and the other 90% on themselves - by the same formula you’d think that a pirate who likes a movie would be willing to donate $2 to the movie-maker, even though he would have been willing to purchase it from the movie maker for 10 times that).

2. Based on the economic assumption that people are inherently greedy, most people won’t choose to “purchase” a product when they can get it for free.

3. The marginal value of any product that can readily be pirated will approach zero.

4. At a value of zero the product is not worth making, so the supply of good digital products (e.g. music, movies, software, e-books) will also approach zero - you won’t be able to get them anymore.

If, as a culture, we want to preserve our rich climate of art and ideas, it is imperative that we address this issue. Simply lowering prices to reflect what “pirates” perceive as reasonable prices would result in artificially low prices (because a pirate’s perceived value of content is based on how much he would donate out of altruism, not how much the product should actually be worth to him). If we completely eliminated piracy, only then could we find out what a digital product is really worth. If prices are too high, people won’t pay them, and they will come down. If prices are too low so as to deter artists from producing product, then prices will go up until they reach equilibrium.

They cannot reach equilibrium as long as there is a free alternative to every digital product.

Attempts such as Apple’s DRM are certainly a step in the right direction, but have been met with much resistance from the “pirate” community, as they want the ability to copy anything that they buy freely. Unfortunately we’ve seen that people are not responsible enough to handle this privilege, so it is unrealistic to think that any solution without some form of DRM will solve our problem and produce a proper equilibrium.

Given the facts and the implications of those facts, it is imperative that we proceed with whatever reasonable acts are necessary to curtail piracy. It may not be stealing, but it is still bad for society.

If you’ve used the internet even casually over the past few years you have probably experienced CAPTCHA already. From wikipedia:

A CAPTCHA (IPA: /ˈkæptʃə/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human.

It is common to see an image like this:

and be asked to type the letters you see into a text field. If you answer correctly then your input is accepted. Otherwise you are assumed to be a robot, and your input is rejected.

CAPTCHA is an annoyance to the user because it makes him spend extra time every time he submits a form on the internet. It is, however, necessary, thanks to spammers.

This “annoyance” sparked an idea in some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, to try to derive some good out of this situation. They made a key observation about CAPTCHAs:

Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.

If this catches onto some high-traffic web sites (say Facebook, or Gmail), imagine the productivity that we can attain in digitizing these old books.

I have to say that this is one of the cleverest ideas I have seen in a long time. It takes wasted energy and transforms it into useful energy.

Hi had the pleasure to behold two boxing greats go toe to toe on Saturday night: Roy Jones Jr. and Felix (Tito) Trinidad. Jones, in his prime was arguably the greatest boxer of all-time, with a brilliantly unorthodox style, lightning fast punches, and absolute control over his opponents. A few years ago he decided to challenge John Ruiz for the Heavyweight championship, for which he gained about 30 lbs.

He, of course, defeated Ruiz and captured the crown, however, it spelled the end of the greatness that we had come to expect from Jones. The problem, apparently was that he had to lose the 30 lbs he had gained in order to defend his Light-heavyweight crown. This took a toll on Jones’ body and left him a mere shadow of his former self. Going into the Trinidad fight on Saturday, he had lost 3 of his last 5 fights, with 2 of those losses by devastating knock-outs.

Saturday gave us glimpses of Jones’ former self as he demonstrated good speed and ring generalship, especially for his 39 years. He handily defeated the 35 year old Trinidad, who himself is a great boxer and former champion. One thing that stuck out to me during the fight was how Jones’ stamina is not what it used to be. He would fight for 45 seconds to 1 minute per round, and rest for the remaining 2 minutes. This may be acceptable for an aging and rusty opponent like Trinidad, but it would spell disaster against the current top contenders such as Joe Calzaghe, whose youth and energy would result in a sustained onslaught that Jones surely would not survive.

Don’t get me wrong. Jones still appears to have the tools to beat the best in the game. He just doesn’t have the stamina. In watching his actions in and out of the ring it almost looks like he has mono. In any case, I would love to see Jones rise to greatness one last time and face the best in the division - but only if I can solve his stamina problem. I don’t think I can bear to watch another Holmes-Ali fight where a hero gets dismantled.

Unions were originally created to protect workers from being exploited by unscrupulous employers and improve working conditions. They work by allowing the workers to withhold labour en masse if they feel that they are being treated unfairly. This works because every day that a business’ employees are off the job, it costs the business money. Long strikes could cause the business to go under so there is tremendous pressure on the employer to settle a strike quickly.

This, perhaps, is the reason why many public sector strikes have been prolonged and largely unsuccessful. Every day that the workers are off the job, the employer saves money. Not alot of pressure to settle on the employer side. On the workiers’ side, there is still pressure in the form of lost wages. The only possible pressure that the employer might feel in a public sector strike comes from its constituents. And this is where a strike essentially breaks down into a public relations campaign. The employer tries to convince the public that they are being reasonable so as to paint the union greedy, while the union tries to convince the public that they deserve their raises.

Unfortunately in a world where union workers are perceived by many as being overpaid, the battle of public opinion sways in the direction of the employer. Hence the employer has NO urgency to settle, and we end up with long strikes where the union cannot win.

So where does this leave the working man in the 21st century? Is he doomed to descend to minimum wage? Of course not. We will certainly see a shift in the distribution of jobs towards the private sector, but this is not all bad. In fact this is where workers should look for help from unions, and where the union will truly have teeth. One of key points of contention in recent years has been in the employers’ rights to contract out services to the private sector. The unions see this as a threat, and indeed any changes are sure to disrupt the steady flow of things for some workers, but in the long run the unions will still have a prominent role in ensuring fair wages for the working man in the private sector.

I was recently in the market for a new car, and I found myself constantly switching back and forth between Craigslist and fueleconomy.gov because I wasnted to see what the gas mileage was like on the cars that were for sale. Suffice to say, this was tedious. So I developed a tool that allows me to see both the Craigslist ads and the fuel economy ratings of the advertised cars in one place. The tool is available for free at http://fueleconomy.weblite.ca.

See the press release here.

I discovered Digg and Reddit a few months ago and was immediately impressed by the quality and relevance of content contained therein. So I subscribed to their RSS feeds so that I could keep up to date with the latest internet news in my RSS reader.

For those unfamiliar with Digg and Reddit, they are web sites that allow users to rate other web sites and articles that are found on the internet. Users essentially vote for web sites and articles that they like and popular sites show up in the top 100 list.

This presents a problem for RSS feeds, however, since every time a ranking of an article is changed (e.g. it is ranked 21 instead of 22) the timestamp is updated, so it appears at the top of the RSS feed again. Needless to say it is quite annoying to finding 30 or 40 Digg and Reddit articles at the top of my news list every time I refresh my subscriptions.

How should it work?

Preferably when an article breaks into the top 25 or top 50, it will show up in the RSS feed - and will never show up again. Even if it rises to the top. I want my news feed to contain news - not “olds”.

Solution

I created a feed filter that takes RSS feeds and filters out duplicates. Even if the timestamp has changed, an item that has been loaded once, will never be loaded again.
You can find the tool at http://feedfilter.weblite.ca.

Now I can subscribe to Digg and Reddit without being bombarded by old news every time I refresh.

Here is another riduculous law-suit over a patent that should never have been granted.

It involves a company named Polaris IP suing a collection of companies (including Google and Yahoo) for using software to automatically respond to email using a sort of artificial intelligence. Polaris IP did not create the software to do this, they merely patented the idea of using computers to automatically respond to email.

Ridiculous!

Ran across this article talking about some of the recent sites that claimed to know the top paying search words on Google. In this article, the author claims that these figures are a hoax - which makes sense because there are some pretty ridiculously high payouts listed for legal search terms. My guess is that the person who originally released this list made some good money off the page because lots of people are looking for this information…. and if the information that people want isn’t available, why not fabricate it, right?