Nick Coghlan 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: DoD Blocking Access To Techdirt Because It's About 'Computers And Internet'?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 19 Jan, 2011 @ 07:37pm

    Re: Re:

    Yeah, this applies to defence related companies as well: the web filters all appear to have a block for any URL containing the word "wikileaks".

    A recent article on Ars Technica ran afoul of this as well.

  • On the post: How Facebook Used White Space To Crush Myspace

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 19 Jan, 2011 @ 03:03pm

    Re: Reminds me...

    The answer is actually a blend of the two. You need enough preprogrammed behaviour to actually get things done right, but the overall *direction* needs to remain fluid enough to adjust to changing circumstances.

    Ars have a great article up about this in the context of the StarCraft AI contest:
    http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swarm-how-the-berkeley-overmind-won-the-2010-starcraft-ai-competition.ars

  • On the post: How Facebook Used White Space To Crush Myspace

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 19 Jan, 2011 @ 02:19pm

    Re: Re:

    I actually thought they were going to mean the term literally. The Facebook UI is a decent example of good use of white space to draw attention to the critical elements of the pages.

    That lack of customisability also gives the whole site a coherence that MySpace lacked.

  • On the post: Cracked Lists Streisand Effect Sufferers, Curiously Leaves Out Streisand

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2011 @ 05:36pm

    It was a little disappointing to see them discuss the AACS key without mentioning the previous similar situation with the original break of the encryption on DVDs:
    http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/

  • On the post: Rock & A Hard Place: Will Google Dropping H.264 Lead To Antitrust Questions?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 12 Jan, 2011 @ 07:47pm

    Re:

    It leaves us sitting out here wondering how you patent a mathematical algorithm in the first place (since that is all compression is).

  • On the post: Our Long National Nightmare Is Over? Duke Nukem Has A Release Date?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 07 Jan, 2011 @ 08:17am

    Made up release dates so they can start taking pre-orders

    Amazon, Gamestop and the like have a long history of making up release dates so they can start taking pre-orders. They've done it for every WoW expansion, long before Blizzard have nailed down the actual release dates.

  • On the post: Copyheart: Encouraging People To Copy

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 23 Dec, 2010 @ 04:35pm

    Re:

    More accurately... in Gnome.

    KDE is having a stupid turf war as to whose responsibility it is to provide this feature :P

  • On the post: Does The FCC Really Not Understand The Difference Between A Device Operating System And A Mobile Network?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 23 Dec, 2010 @ 04:31pm

    Re: Context much?

    Indeed, I just read a nice write-up on Ars that provides the additional context that Engadget missed:
    http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/net-neutrality-and-the-fcc.ars

    The FCC is actually making a very reasonable point - competition tends to be much more vigorous in the wireless market and wireless systems are on a trajectory *towards* increased openness. A "wait-and-see" attitude is much easier to justify in that environment than it is in the limited-competition, high infrastructure cost wired environment.

  • On the post: Copyheart: Encouraging People To Copy

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 09 Dec, 2010 @ 07:00am

    CC licenses are complicated for a reason

    Creative Commons licenses are complicated for the protection of the people relying on them.

    Using

  • On the post: French Author Plagiarizes Wikipedia; Does That Mean His Entire Book Is Now CC Licensed?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 30 Nov, 2010 @ 05:08am

    Did they stop distribution?

    "Innocent infringement" isn't a defence, just ask anyone sued by the **AA.

    As far as this goes, it is similar to GPL enforcement cases. Now that the violation of the license terms has been pointed out, the publisher can either cease publication and work out a deal with Wikimedia for past infringement, or else they can accept the license and continue to publish the work.

    The options of continuing to publish the work without a license, or seeking a non-CC license from Wikimedia aren't available to them.

  • On the post: Animated Version Of TSA Naked Scans And Gropings

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 18 Nov, 2010 @ 10:05pm

    Recovery of losses

    At what point does US industry (both tourism and other) start suing the government for loss of business?

    I've been to the US on holiday years ago and still have friends over there, but these days I would choose a less paranoid destination every time.

  • On the post: When China Redirected 15% Of Internet Traffic… Was It On Purpose Or An Error?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 18 Nov, 2010 @ 09:58pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: And the winner is...

    AES is only defined up to 256 bits. There are no publicly documented and appropriately vetted symmetric encryption algorithms that operate with more bits than that.

    If someone told me they were using 512 or 1024 bit symmetric encryption, I'd be very worried (since it suggests they're using a home grown algorithm instead of AES).

  • On the post: Is WIPO Really The Right Organization To Fix Copyright?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 18 Nov, 2010 @ 12:01am

    Brazil. Russia. India. China.

    The US helped itself grow by ignoring European demands when convenient. Those 4 countries will do the same to the US. Hopefully the rest of the world will learn a few useful lessons along the way.

    (Brazil in particular is already a leading light in "getting it" when it comes to the domestic benefits of embracing locally and internationally supported open source solutions over foreign proprietary solutions)

  • On the post: Amount Of Video Content Uploaded To YouTube Increasing At An Astounding Rate

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2010 @ 04:14am

    Re:

    I was scanning the comments to see if anyone else had already mentioned Sturgeon's Law and sure enough... :)

  • On the post: Time To Stop Being So Fascinated With The Cyber- Part Of Cybercrime

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 10 Nov, 2010 @ 06:20am

    Re: say it ain't so!

    To take a facetious comment at face value...

    In the US? No, copyright infringement for personal use is usually just a civil matter.

    The RIAA/MPAA/BSA would like everyone to believe it's always a crime on par with theft, though.

    Not that this article had a word to say about copyright infringement (it was about real crime, you know, the kind that actually destroys innocent lives, rather than the kind that makes a studio exec have second thoughts about buying a second Porsche).

  • On the post: When The News Lets Everyone Really Participate, It Changes The Way News Works

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 10 Nov, 2010 @ 06:03am

    Tiers of participation

    I think one of the key things that needs to be remembered in any participatory model is the concept of 'styles of participation'. When I linked the Shirky article on FB, it came up with a great icon of an outer grey circle of figures holding hands, with a smaller orange circle of figures also holding hands, but the two circles were interlinked rather than having one completely nested inside the other. It illustrates nicely that the ways people participate often don't have nice neat boundaries.

    Here at TD, we obviously have Mike and the Floor64 staff with one style of participating (i.e. writing the actual articles). But even within that group, they vary in how much they participate in the article comment threads.

    Readers can obviously participate by commenting on articles, submitting ideas for new articles, as well as making purchases through the TD CwF+RtB program. But even there, the levels of participation vary - some will comment on almost every article, others only occasionally when they feel they have a novel perspective to add to the discussion.

    Some of us can even make (very mild) pests of ourselves trying to get Mike to interview our favourite webcomic author that we've seen go from a part-time hobbyist to professional artist while supporting a family of 6 in an absolutely picture perfect case of CwF+RtB ;)

  • On the post: If Only Newspapers Put As Much Effort Into Correcting Errors That Didn't Involve Captain Kirk & Captain Picard

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 09 Nov, 2010 @ 01:55pm

    Follow-up interview with the author of that piece

    A friend pointed me towards an interesting Columbia Journalism Review follow-up interview with the author of that piece.

  • On the post: One Dunkin Donuts Tries To Abolish The Penny… Until Customers Demand It Back

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 03 Nov, 2010 @ 06:34am

    Re: Re: Re: Pirce Change

    They call it a dime, and it is tiny (smaller than the penny)

  • On the post: One Dunkin Donuts Tries To Abolish The Penny… Until Customers Demand It Back

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 03 Nov, 2010 @ 06:33am

    Re: Psychological

    Yeah, getting rid of the 1 and 2 cent pieces was a great idea. It was seriously annoying having to deal with 1 cent coins again when travelling to the US.

    However, there are a few key things that made our situation a bit different from this example:
    1. Almost all our prices are advertised tax-inclusive so x.98 and x.99 prices just gave way to x.95 (something *else* that I find rather annoying not to have in the US/Canada)
    2. A couple of the major retailing conglomerates ate the price difference completely by always rounding the price in the customer's favour, even if doing so cost them up to 4 cents for the transaction (they probably figured customer griping at staff would waste more time and cost more money than the "generous" rounding scheme would).
    3. The mint had physically stopped making the coins, so it didn't really do anyone any good to demand them...

    If the DD had simply said "we will round your change up to the closest nickel" (such that the change was $2.25 in the second example) it probably would have gone over much better.

  • On the post: Dear Dan Bull: A Case Study In Musical Innovation

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 19 Oct, 2010 @ 09:51pm

    I do wonder how folks who insist that no "real" musician would ever speak out against copyright respond to folks like Dan Bull.
    Claim he isn't a real musician, of course...

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