Arsreports that Universal Music is pondering a leap onto the no-DRM bandwagon:
Doug Morris, UMG’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement that the company began internally considering the DRM-free waters earlier this year, and the company is expanding its plans into a nationwide test to “provide valuable insights into the implications of selling our music in an open format.”
The test will see UMG offering a portion of its catalog—primarily its most popular content—sold without DRM between August 21 and January 31 of next year. The format will be MP3, and songs will sell for 99¢ each, with the bitrate to be determined by the stores in question. According to Universal, Amazon, RealNetworks, and retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart will have first crack at selling the music. RealNetwork’s Rhapsody service will offer 256kbps tracks, the company said in a separate statement.
Universal has apparently snubbed Apple, choosing to make DRM-free music available on other music services first.
The Wall Street Journalreports that the slow-motion train wreck that was Movielink has finally come screeching to a halt:
Movie-rental chain Blockbuster Inc. secured a foothold in the small but potentially significant online movie downloading business by acquiring Movielink LLC, a downloading service owned by the major Hollywood studios.
After several months of talks, first reported in March, Blockbuster said late yesterday it had acquired Movielink from the studios for undisclosed terms. The Wall Street Journal had reported in March that the price was said to be less than $50 million, although the final deal was less than $20 million, said a person familiar with the situation.
This looks even worse for the studios when you consider that, according to Ars, the studios have sunk more than $100 million into the company over the last five years.
I can’t say I’m surprised. As I’ve argued here before, the service was over-priced, low quality, and so crippled with DRM that they were dramatically less useful than DVDs. Is it any wonder few consumers jumped on board?
I really hope Blockbuster is buying MovieLink for the customers or the relationship with the studios. Because they certainly can live without MovieLink’s technology.
While I’m on the subject, my favorite TLF reader sends me this “mythbusters” page on the liquids ban from the TSA’s website. Here’s their explanation of why terrorists couldn’t combine multiple bottles of liquid:
We also paid close attention to the idea of terrorists combining multiple small bottles in a larger container or combining many small bottles together after going through the checkpoint. Due to the extreme volatility of liquid explosives, the international consensus was that those scenarios don’t represent a significant threat. Thanks to this unprecedented international cooperation, 67 countries, a great majority of the world’s air travelers are under a common set of security rules for the first time.
Can someone explain what this is supposed to mean? Are they saying that the liquids in question are so volatile that they’ll evaporate/explode the moment they come into contact with the air? I find it hard to believe drug stores would be selling such explosive liquids, so they must mean evaporate. I admittedly haven’t taken chemistry in a while, but I find it hard to believe there exist liquids that evaporate almost instantly from 3-oz containers, but can, in larger quantities, be reliably mixed with other liquids in an airport lavatory, with no equipment, in order to make a bomb powerful enough to take down an airplane.
Oh, and the explosion video is available on that site. It strikes me as pretty useless. No details are given about what was mixed, how it was prepared, or in what quantities, and we have no close-ups of the blast site either before or after. I’m sure that Sandia labs has chemists who know how to blow stuff up, but that hardly proves that a terrorist could do the same thing in an airport lavatory.
Bruce Schneier points to this underwhelming story purporting to explain that the liquid ban is really vital to airline security and not just security theater. Color me unimpressed.
Although I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to view it, there’s apparently a video showing a large explosion made from the components in question at Sandia Labs. Fine, I’m sure there are some liquids out there that, if mixed together under the right circumstances, can produce a large explosion. The question is whether it’s possible to do that in an in-flight airline restroom, where you have very little space, no stable work surface, no access to lab equipment, not a whole lot of time, and no ventilation.
If the powers that be really wanted to convince us that this was a real threat, they should release details about what the ingredients are, so other labs can reproduce the results. The “national security” excuse doesn’t make any sense here: the terrorists obviously already know what ingredients they were using, so there’s no point in keeping the secret away from them. Moreover, if there were a real threat, public disclosure might have real benefits: labs around the country could work on developing new equipment to detect the ingredients in question, and passengers could be on the lookout for telltale signs that a liquid bomb was being mixed.
Finally, as Schneier points out, the really ridiculous part is that the TSA’s Byzantine liquids rules just don’t stop terrorists from getting a significant amount of liquid through the checkpoint. Schneier says that he was able to smuggle in 12 ounces of non-saline-solution liquid in a saline solution bottle. If it takes more than 12 ounces to make the plane go boom, you can have multiple terrorists go through the checkpoint, or make multiple trips.
The bottom line is that if every container of liquid is a potential bomb, then no liquids should be allowed through security at all. The TSA obviously isn’t that concerned, so it makes me skeptical that there’s anything more to the story than bureaucratic ass-covering.
Susan Landau, an engineer at Sun Microsystems and the author of Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post that builds on the FISA issues we discussed in our Tech Policy Weekly podcast yesterday. Her editorial is entitled, “A Gateway for Hackers: The Security Threat in the New Wiretapping Law.” In it she argues that:
Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations.
Such threats are not theoretical. For almost a year beginning in April 2004, more than 100 phones belonging to members of the Greek government, including the prime minister and ministers of defense, foreign affairs, justice and public order, were spied on with wiretapping software that was misused. Exactly who placed the software and who did the listening remain unknown. But they were able to use software that was supposed to be used only with legal permission.
The United States itself has been attacked. … [and] U.S. communications technology is fragile and easily penetrated. While advanced, it is not decades ahead of that of our friends or our rivals. Compounding the issue is a key facet of modern systems design: Intercept capabilities are likely to be managed remotely, and vulnerabilities are as likely to be global as local. In simplifying wiretapping for U.S. intelligence, we provide a target for foreign intelligence agencies and possibly rogue hackers. Break into one service, and you get broad access to U.S. communications.
I have no idea if she is right, but this is scary stuff. I’d be interested in hearing what others think.
One of this week’s podcast guests, Derek Slater, has a fantastic post over at the EFF blog on AT&T’s flip-flopping position on domestic surveillance. In 1928, in an amicus brief in the famous Olmstead wiretapping case, Ma Bell made the same comparison I made earlier this week:
The telephone has become part and parcel of the social and business intercourse of the people of the United States, and this telephone system offers a means of espionage to which general warrants and writs of assistance were the puniest instruments of tyranny and oppression.
And of course, the voice recognition and data mining technologies the feds have today makes the wiretapping at issue in Olmstead look puny.
Apropos of my post earlier today on Google’s good privacy citizenship, the Center for Democracy and Technology has a report out reviewing progress in the search privacy area.
“Despite the progress that has been made,” Ars reports, “the CDT still feels that there is a need for stronger privacy legislation. ‘No amount of self-regulation in the search privacy space can replace the need for a comprehensive federal privacy law to protect consumers from bad actors,’ the report says.”
The computers at CDT have a macro on them (Alt+CDT) that writes an argument for comprehensive privacy legislation into any document. I heard that one time an intern at CDT printed a Chinese food menu, and it came out of the printer with a special on Comprehensive Privacy Legislation Foo Yung.
Update: I like snark, obviously, but don’t want to put snark ahead of substance. This is a good report and reports like this are a good thing to do. Do ISPs next, CDT!
Over the weekend, Congress passed legislation that dramatically expands the executive branch’s domestic surveillance powers. The legislation replaces the FISA warrant process that has governed domestic surveillance since the 1970s with a new process in which courts would only review the general procedures used to select surveillance targets, not a list of the targets themselves.
In this week’s podcast, Adam and I are joined by two of my favorite commentators on civil liberties: Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Julian Sanchez of Reason magazine. They explain what’s wrong with the legislation, how it’s connected to EFF’s ongoing lawsuit against AT&T, and what we need to do to restore our privacy rights.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
There are no two ways about it: Google is doing good things on privacy.
The video below provides ordinary people very important information that will empower them with the awareness they need to protect their privacy. To those of us who are technically aware, the information presented here is a little obvious, but the average Internet user doesn’t know it. They need to.
Over the long haul, this kind of education will be much more effective protection for consumers than privacy regulation – and it will have none of the costs of regulation: in wasted tax dollars, market-distorting rent-seeking and regulatory capture, etc.
The video raises some important new points and questions, of course:
Think about it: we leave fingerprints all over the place, just like our SSNs are all over the place. As we use fingerprints to regulate access to more value, the value of collecting fingerprints and faking them will rise.
It won’t be tomorrow or next week, but watch for fingerprint-based identity fraud – if we rely on that biometric too much. DNA has the same quality. Other biometrics, like vein recognition, are neither easy to collect nor to reproduce (though, yes, both of these facts are technology-contingent).
In my book, Identity Crisis, I talked about the qualities of identifiers: fixity, permanence, and distinctiveness. Biometrics like fingerprints and DNA are high on the scale of fixity and permanence, but may drop in reliable distinctiveness with advanced forgery techniques.
The better designed systems will use biometric identifiers that are not only hard to forge, but that are somewhat hard to collect. Biometrics that can only be made available through some volition on the part of the individual will be the most secure.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.