About Thoughts of a TechnoGeek: This is where I'll post my thoughts, interesting articles, or anything else I want to. If you don't like it, don't read it. David L Brenner my email Subscribe Links
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Sun, 08 Aug 2004
Every once in a while (okay, fairly often) people do things that are well intentioned, but very irresponsible. This story over at the BBC is a good example. Wanting to raise people's awareness of the ease of duping the media these days is one thing; creating a credibility problem for everyone involved is another. In case you don't want to read the other story, this guy faked his own beheading in the style of the Islamic militants in Iraq. He posted the video on the net and it took like 5 minutes for the thing to be linked and shown on al-Jazeera. This just feeds into the militants hands as a recruiting tool because the retraction won't make it on the air on that "news" station. In America, it could lead to the belief that there isn't anything happening and this is all a hoax. Like I said, this is just irresponsible. I'm sure that this guy is only looking for publicity for himself. If this was done by a media watchdog group, it would definitely have more credibility as a "let's show how fucked up the media is"-kind of thing. This guy just comes across as a board idiot that thought it would be funny. I hope the FBI finds something to charge him with.
Every once in a while, you find an article that pulls a bunch of data together in interesting ways. This one is very interesting. It talks about a view on Apple's strategy around the iPod and DRM content. The basic premise was intiated by the news that Apple is bent that Real reverse engineered the iPod in order to put their copy proctection software in place. This would allow iPod users to listen to content that is copy protected by someone other than Apple. This would generate more iPod sales, which is good, but the article goes into why they are so worried about other DRM software. It is very long, but it is worth reading. I think there is a very good summary of the multimedia industry, the motivations, the history, and a very plausible hypothosis. |