So tivo has launched its new tivo to go software, which allows you to download shows you’ve recorded to your tivo onto your pc so you can watch them on other devices (a laptop for when you’re on the road, for example). Except. Except they’ve crippled it, you have to use encryption keys to access your own recordings, and you can’t share them with others (at peril of having your Tivo account deactivated), and you are not able to encord some cable channels, which are maintained at Tivo’s discretion. HBO being one example. So Tivo, tell me why the hell I would pay you for such a device, when I can go get these recordings off the net restriction free, or when I can use my snapstream box to record the shows myself, restriction free, then move them wherever I like in whatever format I like?

The answer is – I won’t pay Tivo, and you shouldn’t either. Can you imagine how the VCR would have gone over if it had been encumbered with such crap? I’m sure the hacker community will crack their protections but no corporation should be rewarded with your $$$’s for so completely failing to recognize the sea change that’s taking place. I’m aware that Tivo is trying to walk a fine line and they’re terrified they’ll be sued into extinction by big media if they don’t build in restrictions like this, but they’re going to go under anyway with half-assed offerings like this.

Or more specifically, is the thing eating cpu cycles on my computer? Say you visit a site and it’s got several of those wonderful attention grabbing blinking ads from hell. ESPN has them for example, as does Bluewsnews and the IMDB on occasion. They’re all over the place, really. The definitely eat cpu cycles on my machines, especially on the Mac if they’re flash based, you can actually see the slowdown of the browser’s ability to scroll when they’re on screen. My question then – if the browser is minimized or occluded by some other app’s screen or the finder or whatever, and the screen with the ad is not visible, is it still eating cpu cycles? Intuition would say not, but some testing on my laptop was inconclusive. Anyone know? Lacking a working commenting system you’ll have to IM me if you know the answer, or email me to one of the addresses on my contact page.

…actually announces something good. Again. Time Warner is giving its subscribers a new year’s gift of enhanced downstream speed for their broadband customers, an increase of 2Mbit for most folks, including me. This is great and much appreciated, but since I’m an irritable fellow I’ll once again ask: Where is my fucking upstream bandwidth!!! This is the second time in the past couple of years Time Warner has increased my downstream, but without the attendant upstream bandwidth it’s increasingly less useful to me, since most of my use of downstream use is limited by my available upstream due to the way P2P apps like Direct Connect and BitTorrent work. I subscribed to Time Warner’s product over 5 years ago and my upstream is substantially less now than it was when I started.

Repeat after me: content companies should not be in the access business. They’re conflicted. Keep your fingers crossed that Verizon’s Fiber to the Premises efforts work out.

(and lest anyone think I’m simply a pirate using my bandwidth to scarf content illegally, I’ll point out that increasingly the legal content I acquire is coming to me via P2P apps, especially bit torrent. I haven’t downloaded a game mod or patch that hasn’t used bit torrent in several months now. Time warmer could increase my downstream 1000 fold and I wouldn’t get the files any faster, whereas if they would only double my upstream, I would get them twice as fast. See the problem?)

A lot of my friends have been getting the Time Warner DVR (the tivo-like device thats replacing the VCR). Here’s an excellent example of why you should not do it. Not unexpectedly, Time Warner is beginning to investigate limiting the amount of time a show you’ve recorded can live on your DVR. They already limit your ability to get the show off your DVR – now they want to limit how long you can keep it.

This is yet another example of why the content companies should not be permitted to be in the distribution business. It’s a lot more involved, but anyone who considers themselves technically literate should build their own DVR. There are open source (mythtv) solutions as well as a host of different (sagetv) commercial options (meedio). There is even at least one macintosh solution (eyetv). There are also systems integrators out there who will build a complete system for you, software, remote control, and all. If you’re interested, check out htpc news, there are tons of reviews and really useful forums.

I use snapstream myself and am mostly pleased with it.

There’s an interesting race that started yesterday which will most likely make for an excellent case for the value of open source software. Secunia has identified a fairly nasty security issue in almost every web browser. You can read up on the details of it on secunia if you want. The gist of it is a vulnerability in popup windows and the ability of other open browser windows that did NOT originate the popup to take over the popup. That sounds relatively benign, but imagine a site where when you go to login, a popup window comes up asking for your authentication information. Unbeknownst to you, joe script kiddie owns this popup and you just gave him your login info. Or, say, you go to your bank and they popup a window ‘0% interest rates on transferred balances!’ Except you’ve been pwned and it’s Joe Script Kiddie again, and he has your account info now.

Anyway, the point of this post is this: my guess is mozilla/firefox will have this patched in relatively short order. Want to lay odds on how long it takes microsoft? I’m not guaranteeing MS will lose – there have been occasions where too much bad press manages to light a fire under their ass and they get patches out relatively quickly. But their track record is pretty bad, generally. I’m laying my money on Firefox, and if I’m right this episode gets added to my ‘why open source is superior to closed source’ file.

Meanwhile, make sure your popup blocker is set to kill, and for sites where you have to allow the popups, make sure you don’t have any other browser windows open that might be a source of malicious scripts. You could also turn javascript off to deal with this, the same caveats apply.

Everyone reading this is running firefox, right? If not, click the link and install it.

Anyway, evangelism aside, I happened across a most excellent extension to firefox yesterday. Regular readers know I’m a huge fan of wikis these days, and over the past year or so mediawiki, the engine that powers wikipedia has evolved into one of the best wiki engines. Now someone has put together a firefox extension that enhances the process of authoring wiki content. It’s geared specifically towards wikipedia authoring, but some testing at work has shown it is helpful in other wiki engines, or at least with oddmuse, which we’re using at Skidmore. If you’re authoring wikipedia content, definitely give this a look, and even if you’re using another wiki engine it might be worth your time to check it out.

No, not that Gravitar (notice the spelling) – this gravatar – a modestly clever idea for making a universally available graphic (an avatar) for web forums, weblogs, and the attendant comment systems. Register yourself, and any system that supports this will begin to show your avatar when you use it. This is much simpler than the normal process of registering your avatar at every site you register for, and their rating system makes sure your r-rated avatar doesn’t show itself in all its glory at, say, disney.com. This is already supported by a lot of the big publishing tools (blogger, movabletype, wordpress, livejournal), and there are implementations out for drupal and phpbb, presumably the other big message board toolsets will have implementations shortly.

I’ve waxed enthusiastic about usenet here over the years, without too much success as far as I can tell. Most folks remain largely unaware of how useful it is. Google has just made some changes to their web interface into usenet that may help in terms of raising public awareness. Basically they seem to have stolen a page from Yahoo’s Groups function – the interface is similar. Subscribe to a group, you can post to it freely, and it keeps track of what you’ve seen and not seen. The difference is google is tying directly into usenet whereas with Yahoo they’re using their own (unfortunately ad heavy) system. It would be awesome if Google would stitch in some improvements, especially RSS feeds (I wish anyone would do this, I’ve craved it for ages) and ‘watches’ similar to what I can do in feeddemon – what I mean by this is…for example, imagine I am subscribed to comp.sys.lang.perl and I have a watch on ‘libxml’ – the system would alert me to any posts that come through mentioning libxml. On the surface this doesn’t seem hard to do, and as you can imagine it’s enormously useful in terms of reducing the amount of chaff you have to sort through to get to the wheat. But anyway, regardless of my own needs, google’s just made it easier for anyone to play around with usenet and get a feel for how useful it is. Check it out.

Microsoft launched their free weblogging system today, joining the likes of typepad (from the movabletype folks), livejournal, the original blogger (now owned by google) and others with a commercial blogging service. This will undoubtable further raise public awareness of the whole blogging phenomenon. Their system’s not half bad on first look either – it seems like it has a decent feature set, including photo galleries, mobile phone integration, buddy lists, music lists and more. It’s hard to say how well it all works though since it requires an MS passport which I dont have and dont want, and since it seems to be overwhelmed with traffic on its first day. Worth keeping an eye on as each of the big players adjust their offerings.

The latest release of inkscape is out. I’ve linked to this in the past. While it can’t yet actually replace Illustrator or Freehand on the professional graphic artist’s desktop, it’s more than competent enough for the average piker like me. There are windows and linux binaries and mac users can grab it if they have fink up and running. Well worth grabbing even if you do use Illustrator regularly.