Japanese Reprimanded For Denuding Media

According to the BBC, Japanese bookstores are set to launch a national campaign to stop so-called “digital shoplifting” by customers using the lastest camera-equipped mobile phones. The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association says the practice is “information theft” and it wants it stopped. It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women wouldn’t think twice about doing. The Japanese use their phones for much more than just calling. They might spot a new hairstyle or a new dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their friends think — so they take a quick snap …

About time too…

My favourite coffee-shop suddenly has an open wifi gateway. Happy Happy. Listening to Sole’s Selling Live Water on The Continual and drinking a decent latte. Sometimes things work out. I’ve been off in the real world for a while, working on turning some of the recent posts from here into a more structured document. Will upload a draft here soonish.

Apple's Music Service

Apple is planning to move into online msuic distribution. I’m hoping their plans are something more exciting than another click-to-buy website with iTunes support. Radio-of-Me, possibly?

TV Sucks

From TV Sucks, by Michael Rosenblum: Television, up until now, has been a group activity. Why? Mostly because it has been so difficult and expensive to make. After all, if Picasso had to pay $1500 a day to hire a paintbrush, and then had to deal with union canvass setters, union paint mixers and union paintbrush dippers — and then had to be an employee of the Sherman Williams company to paint, he probably would have sold life insurance instead. (Not to mention having to focus group Guerinca. “No, put the eyes back in the heads. The audience finds this …

Zeitgeist

We’ve been looking at satellite phones for a project in a hot place far from normal coverage. The best we’ve found so far is the Thrane & Thrane TT-3080A which has worldwide coverage through Inmarsat, and can do single-channel ISDN data transfer. The only problem, according to the very helpful sales guy at Satphone.co.uk, is that we’ll have to get our order in quickly “as we only have limited numbers of them and they are very popular with journalists going to the Middle East.”

Music Piracy a Blip, says Lessig

From Associated Press: Washington politicians would make a grave mistake in crafting new copy-protection laws based on Internet patterns today, an influential Stanford law professor warned. The professor, Lawrence Lessig, pointed out Wednesday that millions of consumers are downloading music and other materials onto their computers because slow dial-up connections make it tough to stream content quickly to a variety of devices. That’s bound to change within a few years as connections get faster, he said, making today’s debate irrelevant. “In the future, it will be easier to pay for subscription services than to be an amateur database administrator who …

Low-Tech Location-Sensitivity

A very simple idea for low-tech location-sensitivity for venues, which usesonly mobile text-messaging, some printed signs and a central database.