Read: Wi-Fi radio roundup

Read: Logitech Squeezebox Boom review

Recently, we asked the question, “Is the Logitech Squeezebox Boom the ultimate Wi-Fi radio?” Now that we’ve had two full weeks to play with it, we have an answer: Yes, it pretty much is. The Boom is the first product in this category we can enthusiastically recommend. Like its predecessor, the Logitech Squeezebox Duet, the Boom’s garnered a CNET Editors’ Choice Award. Check out the links below for the full review, the updated CNET Wi-Fi radio roundup (which includes some lower priced alternatives), and the overall list of best network music players.

(Credit:
Logitech)

You could start by learning more about the near-mystical number–3.14 in its most severely abbreviated form, hence the March 14 (3/14) honors–at the official Pi Day site. There you can find out about the history of pi, how to use the number in a classroom to good effect, and how other people are celebrating the occasion. (Hint: The celebrations often involve a dessert that is both circular, as befits a number used in calculating the dimensions of a circle, and a homophone for the term itself.)

I’m a humble wordsmith, so I’m stopping there. The rest of you more mathematically inclined types, feel free to keep adding to that list of significant digits, ad infinitum. But if you do, you might miss out on some of the other Pi Day festivities.

And be sure to check back here at CNET News.com later on Friday for video and other coverage from Kara Tsuboi and Daniel Terdiman, who’ll be reporting from the scene at the San Francisco Exploratorium, which is where–according to Tierney–the Pi Day feasting began.

John Tierney offers further musings and amusement in his blog at the New York Times Web site: “Win a Pie on Pi Day”

(Credit:
Pi Day.org)

The Huffington Post, too, has good pointers to various pi-related posts: “Pi Day: Time To Party!”

“We have been working slowly but surely, directly and through the offices of (New York Attorney General Andrew) Cuomo, with virtually every major ISP on common approaches,” said Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman in an e-mail. “During the past six months, a number of different ISPs have forwarded nearly half a million RIAA notices to P2P infringers. They had not done that before last winter. A number of individual ISPs now argue that notices alone are proving to have a sufficient deterrent impact.”

Ernesto, founder of the blog TorrentFreak, which focuses on file sharing, was always skeptical of the RIAA’s announcement. He noted that some telecoms have voluntarily sent warning notices to subscribers accused of illegally downloading songs for years, while other companies refused. He says he sees nothing new.

“Yes, the RIAA, MPAA and other outfits do plan to send copyright infringement warnings to ISPs,” Ernesto wrote in March, “but they’ve been doing so for at least half a decade. Every other month these Hollywood lobbyists pitch their antipiracy efforts to the public…this doesn’t mean, however, that something is about to change.”

“Perhaps broadband subscription sales are saturated in many territories and the ISPs are belatedly but realistically now turning to building revenue collection businesses with the content owners,” McGuinness said. “I just hope it’s not too late.”

“Every day that passes we realize how important Internet connectivity is to people’s lives,” Cohn said. “The RIAA looks so out of step with what most people think is a reasonable response to (copyright) infringing behavior. Even to the people that believe we’re locked into this 19th century view of copyright law, the RIAA looks hysterical.”

So, why did the RIAA announce the ISP-based program without any ISPs on board so many months ago?

“Every other month these Hollywood lobbyists pitch their antipiracy efforts to the public…this doesn’t mean, however, that something is about to change.” –Ernesto, TorrentFreak founder

Six months later, the music industry is still waiting to hear from the RIAA which ISPs have explicitly agreed to work with the association. When the RIAA first announced its new antipiracy project, it didn’t name partners. Behind the scenes, industry insiders assured the media that the group would disclose the names of partner ISPs “within weeks.” Six months later, however, not one ISP has publicly acknowledged working with the RIAA on a “graduated response.”

“(The RIAA) has tried various ways to turn ISPs and other intermediaries into their own Internet cops,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users. “What the ISPs appear to be saying is that this isn’t our job.”

Filing lawsuits against individuals accused of illegal file sharing was, for the most part, a thing of the past, said the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the top music companies. The new strategy was to enlist Internet service providers, the gatekeepers of the Web, to issue a series of warnings meant to increase pressure on alleged pirates in what the RIAA called a “graduated response.” Under the plan, those subscribers who refused to heed warnings could eventually see their Web connection suspended.

The executive complained that the RIAA has tried to use Andrew Cuomo to push the ISPs into helping. But Cuomo doesn’t have the kind of political muscle to sway the major ISPs when they are acting well within the law, the executive said. There’s nothing in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that requires ISPs to send their own warning letters to subscribers.

To be sure, the RIAA continues to pitch its plan to ISPs, numerous sources have told CNET News. AT&T has launched tests of a graduated response–everything, that is, but service interruption. The telecom said it would never shut off a customer’s service without a court order. The recording companies may soon announce some kind of agreement with one of the ISP trade groups. But this won’t bind the group’s members and the RIAA will still need to strike deals with individual companies.

“We keeping hearing about how (Cuomo) is supposed to make this happen,” said the executive. “You don’t see much changing, do you?

What the RIAA seems to be suggesting here is that it doesn’t need a threat of service termination for a graduated response to be effective. This, however, conflicts with what music executives say in private. They want a carrot and stick approach. They know they have to offer the public inexpensive and easy-to-use alternatives to illegal peer-to-peer sites. They also believe chronic abusers won’t stop without the threat of a serious punitive consequence.

According to the ISP executive who asked for anonymity because he’s involved in negotiations with the music sector, the RIAA’s tactics in dealing with the ISPs have been too heavy handed.

In an interview with CNET last week, Paul McGuinness, manager of the rock band U2, says that ISPs have for a long time profited from selling broadband to file sharers and have little interest in taking action without seeing financial reward. But he sees some progress around the globe.

Some RIAA critics have speculated that the December announcement was a smokescreen to cover the music industry’s retreat from the 5-year-old and highly controversial strategy of filing copyright lawsuits against individuals accused of copyright violations. The theory goes something like this: the RIAA needed a face-saving way to walk away from the litigation, which resulted in more than 30,000 people being sued, a fortune in legal fees, a huge public relations black eye, and didn’t do all that much to stop piracy.

Last December, the music industry’s message to song writers, publishers, and musicians was that antipiracy help was on the way. Hopes soared after the major labels announced that they had convinced a group of telecoms to work with them.

That there are still no announced deals–and there’s no guarantee the RIAA can sign any of the major broadband companies–indicates that at best the big recording companies may have spoken too soon when they said broadband providers would help, says one ISP executive. Ironically, at a time when many figured the RIAA had finally hit upon a compelling way to go after music piracy, the association’s copyright protection efforts may be more toothless than ever.

So if Cuomo isn’t enough, why don’t the music labels appeal to Congress to legislate the ISPs into submission? That’s easy. The ISPs have much more influence in Washington than the music sector. There’s also little public sympathy for recording stars, who are often perceived to be rolling in money–even if this is a reality for a tiny fraction of working musicians.

Cohn, from EFF, sees it differently. To her, cutting off someone’s Internet connection for file sharing is like refusing to sell shoes to someone accused of jaywalking.

RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol

(Credit:
Declan McCullagh)

While the company has since made it easy for people to bookmark Web apps onto their home screens by adding a quick link from inside of
Safari Mobile, the “official” directory of Web apps continues to be unapproachable for iPhone users unless they’re on a speedy Wi-Fi connection. Widget directory Widgetbox has come up with its own solution and launched a directory of
iPhone-friendly widgets that can be installed on the home screen as mini widgetized Web apps.

The directory interface is completely iPhone-friendly, and to go alongside it there’s a simple how-to guide to turning bits of Web content into widgets that can be added to the directory just by tagging your work with “iPhone.” Users without any sort of Web development experience will be able to make their own iPhone widget apps using Widgetbox’s widget-building wizard, which I’m assuming will get iPhone-centric size presets.

The one thing I found underwhelming with most of the example iPhone widgets is that they look just like they do in the directory instead of taking up the entire screen. They also come with Widgetbox branding and links back to the directory–two things which are bound to take crucial seconds to load while on an EDGE connection. However, it’s still a lot better than having to load the entire Web page, which in the case of BART’s QuickPlanner tool (which serves up travel times for local Bay Area trains) means a nearly three-fold load time decrease from loading BART’s home page.

You can navigate to iPhone.Widgetbox.com on your iPhone or
iPod Touch to go to the directory. You can also check out the developer specs to make iPhone/iPod touch-friendly Widgetbox widgets here.

The new iPhone widgets directory (left) gives you a listing of tiny Web apps to run on your iPhone. When it comes time to 'install' them, you simply add them as a bookmark on your iPhone's home screen.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

One of the biggest problems in the hundreds of data breach and data loss incidents that have been reported over the past few years is that so little of the data is encrypted. If a laptop containing sensitive medical information is stolen, the thief merely needs to turn it on to read through a goldmine of personal data.

Some government agencies have taken action following particularly heinous incidents. After the state of Ohio lost backup tapes containing 160,000 social security numbers that were kept in a summer intern’s
car, the state purchased McAfee disk encryption software for every state employee. Likewise, after the hugely embarrassing data loss incident at the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2006, the Bush Administration issued new standards mandating encryption for all federal agencies.

Laptop password loophole

Indiana passed a data breach reporting law in 2006. However, the law had a number of problems. The biggest of these involved laptop passwords.

Many state data breach laws are written in a way to incentivize businesses into protecting their customer data. It would be exceedingly difficult to pass a law forcing all businesses to encrypt their data, and so states opt for the carrot and the stick.

Businesses are given a choice: If you protect your customers’ data, and you lose a laptop containing sensitive information, you won’t have to spend the money and suffer the reputation hit by telling the public. That is, as long as you’ve protected the data sufficiently.

Indiana’s law created this incentive by narrowly defining a data breach incident. The giant loophole in the law stated that businesses would not have to report an:

“Unauthorized acquisition of a portable electronic device on which personal information is stored, if access to the device is protected by a password that has not been disclosed.”

As a computer security researcher, the problems in this sentence immediately jumped out at me. A password doesn’t mean encryption, it merely means a password. Windows login passwords would satisfy the law, even if they did nothing to protect the data on the disk. An attacker could start up the device with a recovery CD, or use one of many software tools to break the Windows password — which will take just a few seconds to do.

Changing the law

In mid 2007, I contacted my State Representative Matt Pierce and asked him to look into fixing the law. He liked the idea, and asked me to compile a list of the problems in the existing rules and suggested fixes.

In January 2008, Representative Pierce submitted a bill to committee that fixed the data encryption flaw, as well as requiring the attorney general of the state to post a copy of every data breach incident impacting 1 or more Indiana residents to an official website.

The bill passed through committee, and then passed unanimously through the Democratically controlled House, 94-0. Unfortunately, once the bill arrived in the state Senate, it had attracted the attention of lobbyists - some of whom flew in from Washington DC specifically to oppose the website reporting provision in the bill. The experience was eye-opening, and gave me a rapid education in the influence of money in politics. Sadly, the lobbyists from AT&T, Microsoft, and Lexis Nexis got their way.

In the end, the Republican controlled Senate stripped out a number of portions of the proposed law. The bill that came out of the Senate, which included the laptop encryption fix, passed unanimously 46-0.

Finally, on Monday the 25th of March, Governor Mitch Daniels signed the bill into law.

As of July 1 2008, Indiana’s data breach law law will be amended, such that a companies will not have to report the:

“Unauthorized acquisition of a portable electronic device on which personal information is stored, if all personal information on the device is protected by encryption and the encryption key:
(A) has not been compromised or disclosed; and
(B) is not in the possession of or known to the person who, without authorization, acquired or has access to the portable electronic device.”

I am confident that Indiana’s new law will provide an extremely strong incentive to businesses in the state. Either, they can start using encryption to protect customers’ data, or when they do lose a laptop, they can pay the financial and reputation costs of having to send out hundreds of thousands of letters to consumers.

No business is being forced to do anything - but the smart ones will most likely start taking additional steps to protect customer data.

All the credit and thanks for this effort should go to Representative Matt Pierce, who fought the good fight, and waged battle against big money lobbyists. While the perfect bill did not pass, the change to the law is positive, and it would not have happened without Pierce’s hard work.

The search giant has leased 25,000 square feet in the heart of hip downtown Austin, Sixth Street and Congress Avenue, according to an article Thursday in the Austin American-Statesman.

So if and when the new Googlers ever leave the office, they can walk right onto Sixth Street–Austin’s famed drag of music venues. In their more sober moods, they can peer up Congress Avenue and view the state’s austere capitol building.

The new office space is set to become an engineering center, the Statesman said, and Google expects to hire about 100 engineers. There is apparently room for another 50 or so employees as well.

One issue that Googlers will face will be the crawling commute traffic, though Austin keeps threatening to finally launch light-rail trains.

The only real question left: Will Google’s new office open before South by Southwest?

All retailers, no matter what their channel of choice, often sell the same products as at least some of their competitors. If you are a big enough fish, you can command enough power to at least obfuscate that fact . . . different product names, model numbers, etc. — of course the underlying product is often still the same, anyway. Ever wonder how some retailers offer those huge pricing guarantees if you find the same product elsewhere at a lower price — much easier to do when you have your own guarantee with the manufacturer that no one else can carry that same model.

But online retail is a bit more challenging, because aside from brand loyalty or being at a convenient location, the difference is often about search results . . . obtaining those highly coveted top rankings for the right searches. I began our duplicate content discussion by focusing on the duplicate content filter or penalty topic and the challenges of external content duplication. What better way to bridge the gap from external to internal, or on-site content duplication, than by talking about sales copy.

Actually, we’re talking about much more than just sales copy . . . really any text that is provided for use on Web sites is open game here. That could be product information provided by the manufacturer, or the entire “product,” if that product is textual, such as articles, guides or other information.

What makes this text so very important is that there often isn’t a lot of copy at the product level page to begin with. Depending on the type of product, much of it is often general spec detail, such as features, colors, dimensions and so on. These are details that nearly every product page will have on nearly every site. But when someone lands on a product page because their search query was so specific to bring that result up in the search results instead of a higher level category page, that’s often a search you want to be found for because that’s a searcher that is often ready to buy.

Needless to say, we really don’t want the engines to be seeing our product copy as duplicate content. Maybe you’ll come up tops in the results anyway, but why gamble?

Unfortunately, many online retailers take this gamble every day. Maybe you can’t take the time to customize the copy for every product you have, or create custom intro or summary copy for your guides or articles, but at least try to identify the most important pages on your site, whether they be the most competitive topics or highest profit driving products, and do what you can to help them stand out from all the me-too duplicates.

Give your important pages that extra love and attention to help differentiate them from the masses. Better yet, find ways to make this about more than just search, but speak to the human side of things as well. Take J. Peterman for example. Long before the web came around, here was a mail order company that built whole back stories to their products. They mailed these non-standard sized catalogs, with one product on each page, and incredibly captivating copy that made you want to be a part of the story . . . in fact, I imagine they might debate whether they were actually selling products or selling experiences.

They still feature these captivating product stories, though their overall online presence could probably use some SEO TLC, but visit J. Peterman online to get a taste for how you can present your products differently than your competitors. This is probably overkill for many retailers, but you’ll get the idea, and a little copy differentiation may go a long way in the eyes of search engines and duplicate content filtering.

In all likelihood, there will be many hundreds, if not thousands of people at the Digg party, which takes place Tuesday night as the last SXSWi gathering. A large number will be longtime SXSWi attendees.

“Hangers-on and sycophants”
But if the newcomers are corporate suits looking to cash in, SXSWi could go the way of R.E.M. after its 1988 album, Green and, dare I say, blogs after The New York Times started blogging in earnest.

Still, first-timer Eiseman is expecting to get value out of the conference.

(Credit:
SXSWi)

These days, Twitter is a worldwide phenomenon, a household name, and has even spawned a verb, “to Tweet.”

With so much going on, one thing that is necessary for SXSWi survival is to keep careful track of everything going on. Making the rounds is a mashup called Sched.org that pulls information from the official SXSW schedule and allows users to easily select the sessions, parties, and keynotes they want to attend. Once finished, Sched.org creates a personalized, Web-based schedule that attendees can share with their friends and colleagues, a feature that helps people figure out what’s worth going to.

Mark Zuckerberg

“With these things, it’s never too late,” said Eiseman, editor of the travel blog TheLobby.com. “It’s just a matter of what you expect from it. I sort of expect it as a kind of place where I’m going to absorb so much, and each year, there’s more and more to absorb. What you get out of things, whether they’re small or large, is a personal experience. And I don’t think that changes.”

One thing that has many people excited about this year’s event was that Forrest and his team of organizers were overwhelmed with submissions for panels and sessions. Rather than have to sort through and make all the choices themselves, they relied in large part on what is known as the “panel picker.” This system allowed members of the SXSWi community–even newcomers–to vote on the panels they wanted to see selected.

“Two years ago, I stood in the hallway (and) saw nobody I knew,” said Molly Steenson, a Ph.D. student in architecture at Princeton University who will be making her 11th visit to SXSW, “and started yelling, ‘Others! Others!’ (a Lost reference about unfamiliar people showing up in the middle of a well-established group of people) at the top of my lungs when I did make eye contact with an equally freaked out friend.”

But before the second week of March of last year, when thousands of geeks began arriving in Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi), few people had even heard of the nascent microblogging service. Within days, however, Twitter had taken the conference by storm. The story of how Twitter took over SXSWi, and how it spread to the outside world because of the many influential early-adopters in attendance, is well known.

So the answer to the “edge” question depends on who the newcomers are. If most of the first-timers are legitimate interactive media and technology movers and shakers, people who are well-wired and who simply had never managed to make it to SXSW before, then the growth may well be a boon for the conference’s street cred as a central location in the larger geek and interactive media conversation.

“We are promoting the Digg SXSW party on Facebook, Pownce, Twitter, traditional e-mail, and Upcoming,” Murphy told me by e-mail. “In addition to Upcoming, we’ve asked for an RSVP on Facebook and Pownce.”

“More and more to absorb”
For a first-timer like Carly Eiseman, coming to Austin for the conference is a chance to finally take part in something she sees as “an American cultural institution for independent art.” While she acknowledged that SXSWi has likely changed a lot over the years, she isn’t worried that she’s missed the event’s best days.

Whether it’s because of Twitter’s SXSWi emergence or all things cybergroovy becoming part of pop culture, one thing is certain: SXSWi has gone mainstream. Does that mean it’s also lost its edge?

“He is the most ‘it’ person we’ve had,” said Forrest. “As with a lot of things that happen at SXSWi, I think it is the right match with the right person at the right time. Facebook wants to reinforce their message with the cutting-edge crowd that attends the Interactive festival.”

Of course, event organizers are making use of many different services to get word about their gatherings. When I got my invitation to the Digg party, it said to be sure to RSVP on Upcoming. (Is Digg still edgy? I’ll have to go to the party to find out.) But Beth Murphy, Digg’s director of marketing, said the company has been tech-agnostic in its promotion strategy.

Make no mistake about it–despite a calendar of panels, sessions, and keynote speeches that dwarfs any SXSWi has had in the past, the real engine behind the event is the social scene. Parties abound, with several scheduled each night. For many attendees, these soirees are the most important place to make connections, meet new and old friends, and find out about cool new technologies. This year alone, parties are being hosted by Gawker Media, Facebook, Google, Flickr, Moo, and Digg, to name a few. (The festival also has a tie-in with Microsoft’s new Silverlight Web technology.)

Yet Steenson also argues that the growth may well be a good thing. “Last year was particularly good because there were so many people who had never come before,” Steenson said, adding that she had been pleased to see old friends finally make it to SXSWi.

“People see what happened with Twitter last year,” said Hugh Forrest, the SXSWi conference director, “and want to be the Twitter of 2008.”

“You have to check it out at least once,” Eiseman, who had only recently arranged housing for the conference, said. “But if you talk to me at the end of it, I’ll probably (be able) to tell you where I’ll be staying next year.”

But with huge crowds showing up at each successive shindig, SXSWi can stop feeling like an annual reunion of friends.

(Credit:
SXSWi)

In the end, the majority of the conference programming was selected by the community, and there are so many panels and sessions that Forrest and his crew have had to rent far more space at the Austin Convention Center than they have in the past.

See more stories in CNET News.com’s coverage of SXSWi (click here).

Let’s start with the mainstream question: There’s little question SXSWi has hit the big time. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be keynoting, a certain coup for the 11-year-old event. It’s not a Bill Gates keynote, a la CES, but he’s certainly a borderline household name.

“I’m using a combination of Upcoming and Sched.org,” said Baio of his organizational planning. (He no longer works for Yahoo, which purchased Upcoming.) “Sched.org is a brilliantly designed scheduler for the panels and official events, so I’ve been using that for scheduling my daytime programming. Upcoming has all the unofficial events and gatherings, and is social, so I can see where my friends will be.”

Hmm…Not to take anything away from Zuckerberg, but Facebook is not really cutting edge anymore. Not with many tens of millions of users, cover stories in national magazines, and a market valuation of $15 billion.

“If there are a lot of industry hangers-on and sycophants–investors, shameless self-promoters, or wannabes,” said Andy Baio, the founder of Upcoming.org, “it’ll make it harder to randomly find interesting people at parties and in the hallways. (But) if you already have a strong social network, it shouldn’t impact you.”

To his reservations, I add one. By no means am I the first to point this out, but when Wikipedia excludes most Internet users from the most populous country on Earth, it’s got a long way to go before its relative robustness in English is matched in Chinese. Of course, the billions of individuals not online around the world are also missing their say.

Vandalism on Wikipedia is a serious issue. People turn entire pages into insults directed at their subject. Others insert more insidious misinformation that’s hard to detect. The community is generally very good at catching these things, but banning open proxies was seen as a good way to reduce the number of people doing these things with impunity. If you don’t want your own IP to get banned for vandalism, maybe you’d use a service that hid your identity.

Here’s to 10 million nodes in this emerging body of knowledge, but idealists should be careful to note the limits of the project. I just hope the franchise extends more and more. If nothing else, I have a lot to learn from people who aren’t yet participating.

That’s right, Wikipedia now has 10 million articles. But participation in this global brain-share is restricted in China.

When I want to see an article on Wikipedia, I pop it into the Anonymouse Web site, and the content comes right up. But if I see a mistake in an article, I’m unable to make my contribution.

Wikipedia being blocked is news to no one in China, but there’s a bit of a catch-22 even for those who use proxies to get around the restrictions: many proxy URLs and anonymizers are banned from editing Wikipedia to reduce vandalism.

Tor is perhaps the best known relatively robust anonymizing tool online. The Global Voices Online project promotes it in its guide to anonymous blogging. (It’s in English, but not blocked in China.) But Tor nodes, too, are usually blocked for editing.

commentary

Apple, you wasted three hours of my time this morning. At the end of it, I have two bureaucrats sitting in your store and in AT&T’s telling me that while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my account, I can’t get an iPhone 3G. AT&T’s system is telling Apple that there’s a problem…the same system that the AT&T people looked at and said there’s not even the shadow of a problem.

So, after waiting three hours in line at the Apple store, Apple was unable to activate my iPhone. The reason? There was a “PLU” on my account. Except that when we called AT&T, there wasn’t a PLU on my account. Verdict? I’m out-of-luck.

This is one of the clumsiest product launches ever. Apple knows hardware and software–it knows nothing about telecommunications, and the lack of an effective hand-off relationship with AT&T makes for problems like this one. (I wasn’t alone in having the PLU problem. There were dozens at the Salt Lake City Apple store who had the same problem, and I’ve read online that huge numbers of people are having trouble activating their iPhone 3Gs
and
getting their iPhones updated to the 2.0 software. While I was in line, Apple’s activation system went down three times (apparently nationwide).

In my case, there is no PLU because there is no foundation account. Apple told me I’d have to get the phone at the AT&T store, which was fruitless since AT&T was out of the
iPhone 3G by 9:30 a.m. I walked over to the AT&T store to ask if I could buy the phone at the Apple store then walk the two minutes to AT&T to activate it. Nope.

(As an aside, it’s “ironic” that Apple has huge quantities of iPhone 3Gs at its stores, but has rationed out the phones to the AT&T stores. So, the party best able to activate the phones is least likely to be able to do so, thanks to Apple’s desire to make as much margin on the iPhone 3G hardware as possible. It wouldn’t seem like such a nefarious plan if activation actually worked.)

Try again, Apple. For a company that makes as excellent products as you do, the buying experience couldn’t be worse.