Category: .

NoPassword:

Most web sites ask for a password when you register.
After logging in, you can access the site until your session expires.
When you forget your password, you can request an email with a link to a password change form.

NoPassword factors out the password from this process. You register with an email address and receive a link that gives you a session on that browser until you log out.
If you ever need to log in from somewhere else, you can request another email with a link that will log you in wherever you are.

Check out the code on Github.

For working this morning I’m listening to instrumental music hosted on a contemporary classical composer’s own site.

Just listening through the page, one MP3 after another. Good sounds for calm and focus.

The guy’s name is Marcos Balter.

The page is http://www.marcosbalter.com/works.html

I stumbled on his music at New Music reBlog.

Philip Glass – Einstein on the Beach – Knee Play

Screens are everywhere, Pages are dead:

25 percent of YouTube videos are being watched on mobile devices and the number is accelerating rapidly. In some markets, like Korea, that figure is already at 50 percent. Rajaraman attributes this rise to everything from larger screen sizes, more 3G and 4G networks, and consumers turning to tablets over desktops for info and entertainment.

For content makers, this means that creating a video channel page in a “classically desktop” design is folly. Pages with links, browser bars and other desktop architecture just doesn’t belong in a video environment, says Rararaman.

“Pages are dead,” he says. “It’s all about fluidity and a full screen model.. like TV.”

Pages have a supremely great API. Video has no API. There are no standards for screen-oriented apps. So how do you customize the user experience on a screen without a page?

One of the best business books I ever read is Biz-Op: How to Get Rich With “Business Opportunity” Frauds and Scams. Not because I learned how to get into the biz opp business, but because I learned how to recognize the scam in its many forms.

The leverage for biz op scams is unrealistic ambition. The antidote is knowing your limitations.

1709 Blog – Linking to infringing material is an infringement of copyright in the Netherlands
:

The great debate continues: is it an infringement of copyright to link to third party content? And does it matter whether that content is itself infringing or not, or whether the person providing the link is making a profit from their website? A quick recap on what the courts have found recently: in the US it is ok to link to infringing content, but it might not be in the UK, and in Canada it is ok to link to non-infringing content.

Last week the Dutch Courts gave their view on the issue: in the Netherlands can be an infringement of copyright to provide a link to an infringing photograph.

The Court held that while linking to a photo does not infringe in itself infringe copyright in that photo, there are a number of factors which must be taken into account and which may cause copyright infringement. In this instance it was relevant that the public was not aware of the existence of the leaked photos before GeenStijl published the link, and that the public would not have had access to the photos had GeenStijl not published the link.

The Dutch Court also took into consideration the fact that GeenStijl is an ad-supported website, which would profit from posting the link, as it would attract more visitors to its site.

These two factors served to make the link infringing.

So let’s say you have a search engine. Is it possible to write code to prevent infringement by this definition?

Maybe you can check that some image is new to the public, if it’s out there but nobody is linking to it or copying it. But how can you distinguish things that people won’t care about ever from things that people don’t care about yet?

You’re ad-supported. You profit from posting the link. So there’s no way for a search engine to escape that test.

In a case like this I think that what happens is a “jerk” test: the case law is only intended to apply to jerks. Nice-guy companies will be excluded. That’s what has happened with file hosting services. Compare Megaupload to Dropbox. Megaupload came across as sleazy and exploitive, Dropbox comes across as upstanding and decent. The law is the same, their actions are nearly the same, the outcome is totally different.

Granted, the idea of the rule of law is that the law is intended to be the same for everybody.

From Soundboy’s blog:

YouTube has everything. EVERYTHING. Even some obscure dubplate my 16 year old self thought I had the only copy of. But in a UI optimised for video rather than music consumption

the more excited I am by new artists (e.g. right now Swag Rap), the more time I spend on Soundcloud/Bandcamp/DatPiff/Mixcloud. When there’s no new scene I’m into I retreat into catalogue on Spotify.

I spend a lot of my listening time in Rdio and MOG. That conversation motivated me to do more pure music listening on YouTube, so I have been creating YouTube playlists for music listening.

Some decent blogs on napsterization:

• Plagiarism Today
• TorrentFreak
• IP Kitten
• 1709 Blog
• Techdirt

Plagiarism Today aka Jonathan Bailey says (in a rantish videoblog post) that the difference between the 2009 57% error rate in takedown requests submitted to Google vs the 3% error rate last year is technology. Takedown requests used to be faxed in, now they are submitted via a form.

At least I think that’s what he said. It was hard to parse the way he said it.

I recommend the Plagiarism Today blog. Strong-IP views and blogging well don’t go together often.

CCIA blog — Do Rightsholders Really Own Their Rights?:

Copyright owners in the creative sector are very vocal in demanding payment for their rights – and removal of material that isn’t licensed – both of which they are of course entitled to do. However, it can easily be argued that we couldn’t make it more difficult for legal services to pay for rights in the current copyright system if we tried.

Many have asked the reasonable question “How is anyone to tell what is licensed and what is not?” However there is another, equally fundamental question: “Can the assertion of anyone that they have any legal right to the content they claim be independently verified?”

The answer to that question, believe it or not, is no.

The solution they call for is a centralized registry. That seems like more burden than necessary. I’d propose instead that every DMCA takedown request should be made available to the public with something like Chilling Effects, so that rival claimants to the rights can find out about one another.