RIAA and P2P Music

In an article by Fred von Lohmann, the attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the issue of all the RIAA suits against individuals who are file swapping is discussed. Lohmann, inRIAA’s college lawsuits a wrong answer | CNET News.com, argues that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 makes people guilty until proven innocent because organizations can get subpoenas automatically by “merely making allegations of infringement.” (In other words, the federal court issues them automatically without review of a judge or a lawsuit being filed.) Universities are responding to these subpoenas that they don’t know who is responsible for the IP address, since they are assigned dynamically. Thus universities can’t help the RIAA – one wonders if universities are setting up their systems so they cannot know who used the offending IP address to frustrate the RIAA.
Continue reading RIAA and P2P Music

Skins

Ruth Nichols has written a M.Sc. thesis on skins, “A study into the Useful Application of Skins for Information Filtering” (Computer and Software, McMaster University, 2003). She has brought out an interesting area of user interface design and theory that is connected with the work done on Mods in the gaming community – namely Skins.

She writes that “The original idea of skins was developed by Winamp, an MP3 player build by a small company Nullsoft. Winamp was first released in 1997.” (p. 20) Winamp was officialy released in 1998 and was bought by AOL in 1999. Skinning was added in 1998.
Continue reading Skins

Affordances and Prospects

Stan Ruecker today successfully defended a thesis on theorizing rich propospect affordances for interpretively-tagged text collections. Two things that are very interesting about the thesis are:

1. He traces the literature on affordances (that show up without a lot of background in UI discussions like Norman) to JJ Gibson and environmental psychology.

2. He proposes prospects (visualizations that have a meaningful representation of all items in a collection) as useful way to interface with medium sized text collections like Orlando.
Continue reading Affordances and Prospects

Eunoia

Christian Bˆk Eunoia Toronto: Coach House Books, http://www.chbooks.com/online/eunoia/index.html, 2001 is a book with Oulipian experiments. Eunoia is written with a chapter for each vowel. Each chapter works within constraints, one of which is to use all words that only use that vowel. The chapters also begin with something about writing. There is a Flash version of the Chapter on E online along with the full text of the other chapters.
Continue reading Eunoia