Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• EchoStar acquired by Sling Media

  EchoStar has acquired Sling Media for $380 million . While this is interesting in and of itself, the timing is particularly curious considering Sling just announced a deal with competitor DirectTV to bring its NFL Sunday Ticket to the desktop . It will be interesting to see what EchoStar does with Sling and whether it makes any special changes for its own network. Posted Sep 25 2007, 08:13 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Sports, Business, Video

• The Sopranos Series Finale

  I never thought we were going to get closure, but perhaps the issue was that we got too much of it. A lot of it just felt, for a lack of a better word, cheesy to me. Complex story lines that were developed over several years were tied up with amazing ease, especially the whole feud with NY. (They went from being on high alert camped out in some safehouse to not looking over their shoulders incredibly quickly, didn't they? Wouldn't you have been just a bit more cautious especially with Phil still out there?). I predicted that Tony would win, but lose something important in the process. I thought that "something important" was someone in his family, but really it was a sense of security. As Agent Harris said, "we won" the battle, but the war is far from over - and the end could come at any moment, whether in the form of grand jury testimony or a shady looking dude coming out of the bathroom. A lot of people are very upset at the final scene, but my real problem was that the way we got there... Posted Jun 10 2007, 11:38 PM by Tim with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: Rants, Things that bother me, Things that amuse me, Video

• Refocusing Net Neutrality

  Awhile back, I echoed the electricity analogy : the problem is that the "telecoms are threatening to charge a premium for how the utility is used, instead of how much of it is used." Someone from the Hands Off the Internet Coalition commented on that post. Tim, the analogy is flawed and doesn't make sense. Unlike electricity, the internet and e-commerce sector is growing exponentially. It seems that the telecoms are already implementing some of Lessig's points on usage but our entire internet's infrastructure must undergo a series of major upgrades that net neutrality laws will slow down, further relegating the US the slow lane (no pun intended). Net neutrality is simply a distraction. I work with the Hands Off the Internet Coalition and I don't think we should be adding rules and regulations to fix a problem that doesn't exist. More recently, Andrew pointed to a rebuttal by David Cowan : ISPs are not public utilities; they are businesses whose owners–including individual investors and... Posted Jun 04 2007, 01:36 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Rants, Things that bother me, Google, Video, Net Neutrality

• Microsoft Silverlight

  A lot of people are very excited about Silverlight , the technology that was formerly known as WPF/E. Jesse says it will give Flash a real run for its money because of a better video story (emphasis in original). Unlike Flash, Silverlight (the new name) will support DRM, it supports the industry standard VC-1 codec used in HD-DVD and Blueray, and it can take advantage of the built-in media streaming capabilities of IIS. As for DRM support, I don't think that's of any real consequence. Jesse claims "companies that want to stream TV and movies over the web, will not consider any method that doesn't allow for DRM protection", but we're already seeing a trend away from DRM. That said, there are certainly things to get excited about, particularly the prospect of cross-platform CLR support and the ability to develop Flash-like applications with the power of the Visual Studio environment (and not having to learn a new scripting language at that). One thing worth noting is the fact that Flash is... Posted May 25 2007, 02:30 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Innovation, Microsoft, C#, .NET, Video, Programming, DRM

• What are your predictions for The Sopranos?

  With 2 episodes down and just 7 left, what do you think is going to happen? Who will die and who will make it? Who will end up in jail and who will turn informant? How will things play out with the Brooklyn family? Personally, I think that Tony will not end up dead or in jail - it's just too predictable, especially in light of the conversation with Bobby on the boat. Tara thinks that A.J. will get killed somehow and Tony will in turn "put it all in perspective" and walk away from it - and especially with the foreshadowing of A.J.'s tough hood, this is plausible. I also think David Chase is not going to give us as much closure as we want, and things are going to be left open (particularly in terms of who will succeed Tony). Of course, that only keeps things open for the rumored movie. So, what do you guys think? Make your predictions... and we'll see in a few months how accurate we were :) Posted Apr 16 2007, 10:19 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Personal, Video

• Understanding the Cablevision DVR lawsuit

  While I agree with Mark Cuban that the lawsuit is a mistake , I thought it was worth discussing why - from a legal perspective - the network DVR is an issue. Copyright gives the owner a limited monopoly over a few aspects, most notably the ability to reproduce and distribute the work. In a "normal" DVR, there are two points where these rights come into play: a reproduction and distribution in the initial broadcast, and a reproduction when saving to the hard drive. (Under current case law, even taking a digital file and loading it into memory to play is technically a "reproduction", fixed for purposes of copyright). The former is obviously licensed by the copyright holder. What allows the latter is a concept known as fair use . (Remember, I said it was a limited monopoly). There are four factors to determining whether something qualifies as fair use: the purpose and character of the use the nature of the work the amount used the effect on the market for the work None of these factors are... Posted Apr 11 2007, 08:25 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Gadgets, Copyright, Video, Law

• The UAC security flaw in Vista

  User Account Control (UAC) is one of the key security mechanisms introduced in Vista. In the past, the default account as an administrator. Following the principle of least privilege , the default Vista account runs with limited access, and Vista detects when something requires "administrator prompts", as mocked in the most recent Mac ad. All told, this is a good thing. Unfortunately, Microsoft made some poor design decisions in the implementation, sacrificing some of the security for ease of use. Joanna Rutkowska summarizes the issue : One thing that I found particularly annoying though, is that Vista automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges. So, when you try to run such a program, you get a UAC prompt and you have only two choices: either to agree to run this application as administrator or to disallow running it at all. That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer... Posted Mar 03 2007, 03:57 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Security, Microsoft, YouTube, Video, Apple, Advertising

• Streamburst offers innovative DRM for video

  I've already discussed the German music store using watermarks to discourage piracy , and now it seems another service is applying the same principle to video . Instead of handcuffing viewers who want to view films they purchase on multiple devices and otherwise use content legitimately in ways DRM blocks - Streamburst takes two steps to prevent movie piracy. The first is that every film begins with a 5 second display of the name of the person who purchased that copy, as it appears on their credit card. The second step is that Streamburst eliminates an undetectable but unique series of bits from each copy of a file downloaded. That idea is that the psychological barrier of being named will stop many people from illegally distributing the files and those whom it doesn’t stop can be identified by the unique series of bits stripped from whatever copies make it into illegal file sharing networks. These techniques are just as effective at preventing the bad guys as "real" DRM (that is, they... Posted Feb 28 2007, 01:46 PM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Security, Innovation, Video, Social Behavior, DRM

• An Introduction to OpenID

  OpenID, which describes itself as "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity", has been gaining momentum and getting press in the Identity 2.0 space. The fundamental idea of OpenID is that a URI is necessarily unique and thus a good way to identify users. If you say you own a URI and can properly authenticate with the URI, then you must be who you say you are. Admittedly, this can be tricky to understand at first. Perhaps the best analogy is an open version of Passport, where you can download and run your own Passport server. When you go to Microsoft.com or MSDN, you don't log in to a "local" account - you are instead redirected to a Passport (now Windows Live ID) screen to enter your username and password. From a user perspective, OpenID is not that different as Simon Willison showed in this his screencast (embedded below). Scott Hanselman also discussed OpenID on a recent Hanselminutes and has a number of good resources (including the screencast) linked... Posted Feb 15 2007, 09:06 AM by Tim with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Security, .NET, Video

• An Anthropologist's Take on Web 2.0

  The Machine is us. ( Link to the video ) Posted Feb 09 2007, 02:35 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Web 2.0, Innovation, YouTube, Video, Blogging, Entrepreneurship