Jason Antman’s Blog

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Interesting Links and Resources

After seeing a link to it on the SAGE mailing list, I happened to read Mark Dennehy’sblog post on
Tips for hiring new engineers. I felt the need to make a few comments on some of his findings. Perhaps someone in HR, or a recruiter, will actually read this and learn a thing or two.

The basics of professional work – getting along with others, being able to manage your time, being able to communicate clearly and well, being able to work to deadlines – it is a waste of your time and mine to put these in the job advert. You aren’t taking random people off the street here – you’re hiring trained professionals who’ve working in this field for some time. It’s nearly insulting to tell them not to apply unless they play well with others.

Unfortunately there are some places where this is required. In the public sector, at least, the job ad and description set up fixed guidelines. If you have a job description that doesn’t include “plays well with others”, and the hire doesn’t play well with others, it’s immensely difficult to fire them – the hire’s failing wasn’t listed in the job description.

Don’t have the HR people write the technical requirements. You have engineers, use them.

I have to whole-heartedly agree with what Mark said about writing technical requirements. I don’t know why HR seems to think that they can write IT job descriptions – they wouldn’t attempt it for most other professionals. IT job descriptions should be left to IT people to write – and, more importantly, people who actually understand what the person will be doing.

And don’t class all those requirements as being absolutely necessary. Have two lists – critical, mandatory skills; and skills which would be advantageous to have. Because many professional engineers will look at the mandatory skills listed and if we see some we don’t have, we won’t apply.

Also a very good point. Even when I’m not actively looking for work, I usually get a lot of phone calls and emails from recruiters. Especially if I update my resume on one of the big job sites or post a consulting ad on CraigsList, I get inundated with emails and phone calls (which I usually refer to email, unless they’re from a big player). I can’t possibly spend the hours to read and apply to all of them. The first ones that get deleted are from people who obvously didn’t even look at my resume – entry-level (operator) positions, Windows admins, anything with a primary duty that isn’t even near my skill set (i.e. they just used keyword matching and never read anything).

From there, I start looking through the descriptions and building two lists – the ones that will likely get thrown out unless there’s some amazing thing that redeems them (i.e. a company that I really want to work for) and the ones that I know I’ll follow up on. Here are some of the criteria I use:

Likely to ignore:

• I read the job description and still can’t figure out what I’d be doing.
• The buzzword-to-content ratio is horrible.
• The skills/requirements section lists every hot technology – a list that no human being can master.
• The skills/requirements section has far too disparate of a list – something that only an engineer, administrator, programmer, and hardware designer could master.

Follow-up:

• Use of the SAGE Job Descriptions.
• An actual salary range, not “varies with experience” or “competitive”.
• Some description of where I’ll work – size of the team, responsibility, work environment, etc.
• Examples of current things the team is working on, or examples of what I’d be working on.
• Skills/requirements broken down into mandatory and optional/preferred.
• A description that was obviously written by someone who understands the technology.

In closing, I have a theory for companies (especially those in the public sector that have stringent HR/hiring policies) listing jobs in the IT sector: have both HR and IT write portions of the job description. Have HR write a paragraph or two with all of their non-IT-specific stuff, and then have the IT hiring people (preferably the manager the new hire will report to) write the rest. Put the HR stuff at the bottom. Break the skills/requirements lists down into “Technical Skills” (further divided into Required and Preferred/Optional/Bonus) and a “Soft Skills” section for HR (with the usual crap like “works with a team”, “eligible for employment”, etc.).

Everyone’s up in arms about the recession, high unemployment, and low job openings. Logic would dictate that it’s an employer’s market – and, to a large extent, it is. However, that doesn’t mean that employers don’t need to worry about making the advertisement attractive and descriptive. Actually, I’d say it’s the opposite – since I know that there will likely be hundreds of other applicants, I only send a resume in for jobs that I think I have a very good chance of getting. I’m sure I’ve skipped over good positions just because the description didn’t communicate that to me – and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Ideas and Rants hiring, hr, jobs

I just came by an interesting post on Slashdot, A Public Funded “Microsoft Shop?”. The author works at a publicly-funded hospital and comments that he received an email from management stating:

Information Services is strategically a Microsoft shop and when talking to staff / customers we are to support this strategy. I no longer want to see comments promoting other Operating Systems.

Initially, my anti-Microsoft buzzer went off. But the post also stated that they were ordered to remove Firefox from any computers not specifically authorized by management. As usual, the Slashdot conversation degenerated into a proprietary vs open debate.

As I have to comment on the Microsoft issue, I have two remarks. First, software (an OS, a browser, a text editor, whatever) is a tool. A tool should be chosen base on whether it’s the right one for the job, not just because of who makes it. I’d like to see a major construction company state decree that they’ll only buy Stanley and DeWalt tools. What will their answer be when the plumbers realize that neither of those companies make a simple pipe wrench? “Use a hammer”? Secondly, as is evidenced by history, popularity is a relatively poor indicator of quality, and always ephemeral. Wigs were popular for wealthy men. The telegraph was popular, and many thought the telephone would never catch on. The fluoroscope was popular for shoe fitting. Racism was popular. Smoking was popular. BASIC was the greatest programming language ever. Decisions based solely on popularity are rarely good in the long term.

But, alas, enough of the Microsoft-bashing. What struck me more was the prohibition against Firefox, and what it means for technically-apt employees. Times are changing, and many of the people now entering the workforce are well-versed with technology. The days when employers could expect to give their new hires initial computer training are long gone. And, while many may not see it, the days when every new employee could be expected to know only a common “popular” system (Windows, MS Office, MSIE) are gone, too. Many people who work at universities, such as myself, are seeing browser stats that report less than 40% Windows, with an explosion of Mac-based users and (perhaps thanks to Android, Netbooks, and Ubuntu) a strong growth in the Linux user base.

The Rutgers University student computing labs have both IE and Firefox installed on the Windows machines (and we also have a *very* large number of Mac or dual-boot Windows/Mac clients) and a walk through a busy lab will reveal a strong majority of users on Firefox. Many cash-strapped students, even the ones I knew a few years ago, were using OpenOffice rather than pay for MS Office.

A similar trend can be seen in the new hires and young professionals who simply won’t settle for a corporate cell phone – Windows Mobile, iPhone or Android, they already have a phone and OS that they like, and consider a part of their lives.

There’s a very simple point here – for an increasing number of people, especially those now entering the workforce, technology is an inextricable part of their lives. It’s part of their sense of self, of expression, of free choice. Telling many people what browser they can and can’t use is like telling a new hire a decade or two ago how their handwriting had to look or what size note pad they could use. Asking many of my (even non-techie) friends to switch cell phone OS would be like telling them what color clothes or tie they have to wear to work. Telling the average 20-year-old that they can’t use instant messenger or facebook at work is like telling the average 40-year-old they can’t receive a phone call from their spouse or child. Most especially, with the pervasiveness of Internet access, connected devices and choice in browsers and other software, these choices are being seen as a part of life, a part of technology.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly to many businesses, the role of IT as seen by the end-user is changing, and the role of technology in productivity is changing. For many young college-educated workers, IT is more of a procurement avenue than a support system. Many would happily install the software application of their choice (whether it is Firefox, OpenOffice, or something else) on their own, without the worry of a formal help desk. There’s also the issue of productivity – technologically proficient new hires are already used to a software environment. They’ve been able to choose their own applications, OS, browser, etc. Forcing them to switch – especially if they have been using an application for years and still do at home – will only result in lower productivity and some amount of frustration. I know that I, for one, have almost laughed when people advertising for Linux admin jobs said I’d be using the same Windows desktop environment as all of the users.

Ideas and Rants microsoft

As has been in the news (and advertised to high hell) for the past few days here in NJ, Cablevision and ABC are involved in a feud. Cablevision is advertising everywhere – I heard at least 4 ads on the drive home from work about how ABC is making unreasonable demands, asking for $40M, etc.

Well, then I found something more interesting. I stopped at a friend’s after work and turned on the (Cablevision) cable box. Strange. It was a full-screen ad from Cablevision about the ABC situation. And it seemed to go on forever. But… huh? The cable box was tuned to channel… 1999. I changed the channel, and got regular TV back.

But when I got home and turned on my cable box – which was last tuned to channel 47 and is setup to resume on the last channel it was tuned to – it also started up to the Cablevision ad on channel 1999.

To anyone who’s read Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, this is as clear an indication of the problems with appliancization as anything.

Don’t take this lightly. It has some serious implications. Specifically, the basics of what Cablevision did:

1. Pushed out a new software version to all of their cable boxes, very quickly, that added a new channel.
2. Changed an arbitrary setting in the configuration of their customer’s boxes (the channel that displays at power on) remotely.

The idea that Cablevision can control all of their customer’s boxes remotely, and this quickly, is a bit disturbing. If any of you have ever checked out the diagnostic mode on a Scientific Atlanta box, you’d know that it’s more or less a full computer (the “channels” are actually streaming media over IP) and the amount of control that Cablevision has is virtually limitless.

(The automatic channel change has been confirmed by a number of other people.)

Miscellaneous Geek Stuff appliance, cablevision, freedom

Note for non-technical readers (not that I expect there to be many). The title of this post includes the word “hacker”. If you think that has anything to do with illegal acts or unethical behavior, you’ve fallen victim to what happens when the mainstream media latches on to a term they don’t understand. The definition of this word is far from negative. Within the geek community, the title “hacker” is the utmost compliment – something like Grand Master in the martial arts, or perhaps whatever title is given to an eminent artist. It both describes someone who is an expert in their field. Or, more generally, someone who enjoys seeking knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge – figuring out how things work, how to make them, and how to make them better. If you’re looking for a term that describes a criminal, “attacker”, “malicious user” or “computer criminal” work fine. While I wouldn’t by any extent consider myself a hacker in the super-genius-wizard sense of the term, I do definitely subscribe to the hacker ethic – the burning need to figure out how things work and make them better.

Thanks to the snow at the end of last week, and a long weekend, I actually got to do some reading that didn’t involve man pages or books strictly about software. I finally finished The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin by Peter H. Salus, a wonderful book (with a great foreword by maddog Hall). I also finally got a chance to start reading The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond (ESR). I’m only up to page 50 or so, but it’s an equally good book, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it for years.

I’ve always been very interested in history (heck, I have a minor in it), and specifically the history of my other interests. When photography took up most of my time, I read every photo history book I could get my hands on (including many primary sources on now-archaic techniques). In the past few years, I’ve been amassing books on computing history (specifically ARPANET/the Internet and Unix/Linux/Free software) at a near-alarming rate.

Through all of my reading, two main things have struck me: the utterly amazing feats accomplished by previous generations, and how my own generation takes them for granted. I was born in 1987 which, I feel, makes me part of a very small group who were lucky enough to grow up during the real rise of the Internet. I remember playing simple games on my grandmother’s (business) 386DX long before I could read most of the words on the screen. But I also remember my father dialing in to an ISP (I honestly don’t remember which one) on a 9600 baud serial modem, and how unique that was at the time (at least among kids my age). By 13 or so, I had a 10BaseT network in my house, sharing a 56k dial-up connection between two computers. I feel that I’m part of a short historical period of kids who “grew up” with computers, used them in middle school, are perfectly at home with them, but still remember dial-up, the launch of Windows 98, and ordering Linux on CDs because you just couldn’t get it any other way (too young to have access to the resources of a college, only dial-up).

Anyway, on to my point…

As I read about those who stepped before me (and my generation), those who thought up such amazing ideas as Unix, the Internet, networking and most of the software and protocols we have today, I realize how big their shoes are, and how difficult it will be for the next generation to fill them. Sure, we have Facebook, RSS feeds, Web 2.0 and smartphones, but will we be able to innovate on the level that those who came before us did? And then it strikes me how much we young aspiring hackers take for granted. How many aspects of technology today would be seemed impossible 20 years ago, but we use without a second thought.

The last generation of hackers and programmers were raised on software distribution tapes. Their idea of “open” was formed by what they were used to – a Cathedral development model, with regular releases (production, perhaps beta, perhaps even less) and accompanying source code. However, in the pre-Internet days, they were still bound by physical media. They were still bound to the Cathedral development model, to a small and tight-knit group of sages determining when the world was ready to see the fruits of their labor.

The current generation – those of us just out of college or grad school, or even younger – think of Linux as the quintessential open source project. For those of us who came into computing when Linux was already around (I first ran Linux in 2001 when, at 14, I bought the newly-released CD set of SuSE 7.3), Linux sets the bar. It’s what we were raised on (at least in terms of open source). Fixed releases – even with source – seem antiquated, pre-Internet, our fathers’ open source. To us, open means nightly builds, world-readable ticket/bug trackers, anonymous Git or SVN access, and RSS feeds of every commit. It means being able to see every line of code at every moment in time, even if we’ve never e-mailed one of the developers.

Even just a few years ago, the word “open” was used by vendors to mean almost anything – everything from software based on Linux, to software that included source (regardless of the license) to software that just used (patent encumbered) documented protocols or formats. For the next generation, even the generation entering the workforce now, open means much more. It means transparency in development, in code, in documentation, in management.

Many times, I’ve found an “open” software project, and searched their web site endlessly looking for links to Git or SVN or CVS. Or looked endlessly for the (internal) bug tracker. Every time, I had to remind myself that the world, even many of the open source projects, are still far behind my expectations. Even Google’s Android Open Source project only has code merged in periodically from the production (closed) tree, and maintains a separate bug tracker. Far from my expectation of just having some parts of the tree unavailable on the Internet, and some classes of bugs filtered out from public view.

Nobody – not even Microsoft – can deny that the world is moving more and more to open source. It’s already the de-facto standard on the Internet, but it’s moving more and more to the desktop every day. And, as this happens, the expectations of what open means (increasingly more transparent than just “open”) are also increasing. The software world – both proprietary and open source – will have to keep up. And, hopefully, as the generation raised on the Internet begins to fill the ranks of geeks in the workforce, we’ll see more and more open source usage.

As a side note, I’d be very interested to see how open source use compares to demographics. I know that Linux use (on student-owned computers) at most colleges is way above the global average, and the same goes for Firefox.

History free, hacker, linux, open source, svn

• Chris’s Wiki :: blog/solaris/SunDown
• Chris’s Wiki :: blog/solaris/ReadingSolarisTeaLeaves
• High Scalability – High Scalability – MySQL and Memcached: End of an Era?
• Should Open Source Be An Enemy Of The State? | NetworkWorld.com Community
• Dealing with User 2.0 – SysAdmin118 Expounds

Interesting Links and Resources

Tonight, more or less on a whim, I moved my blog from my older (dual 1GHz Pentium III Coppermine, 1GB RAM, 10k RPM SCSI disks, Compaq Proliant DL360 G1, OpenSuSE 10.2 32-bit) web server to my newer one (dual 1.4GHz Pentium III, 2GB RAM, 10k RPM SCSI disks, HP Proliant DL360 G2, CentOS 5.3 32-bit). I did some profiling with ab (ApacheBench), and just moving from one server to the other got some serious performance gains (I was profiling with runs of 1000 requests total, 10 concurrent requests). I also added the W3 Total Cache Wordpress plugin, which got the numbers to look even better!

As a side note, this was all done pretty quickly (moving the database and tarball for the vhost, installing the plugin, changing DNS), so please give me a heads-up if you experience any problems.

The numbers are rather impressive:

All tests were performed on my workstation, a Dell Precision 470, two dual-core Xeons at 2.8 GHz, 2GB RAM, 16GB swap, OpenSuSE 11.1 64-bit. This was on the same LAN and subnet as the servers, with the workstation connected via a 1Gbps copper Ethernet link and the web-serving interfaces of the servers connected via 100Mbps (There’s a trunk in between, from the gigabit aggregation switch to the 100Mbps distribution switch).

Projects apache, optimization, performance, wordpress

The past 48 hours has been very eventful in my Android world. Thanks to the instructions on rootyourdroid.info (hey, it’s an expensive phone and locked hardware – I’m not fooling around the way I would with something more common), I rooted my droid and did a few minor hacks. Though, I must say, it pains me to see all of the post-rooting instructions based on access via adb, instead of using a terminal emulator on the phone. Also, last night, my mother (definitely not a technical person) for a Droid – and loves it! (My dad got one a month or two ago).

Anyway, in the last 24 hours, I’ve gone app-crazy. I thought I’d share some of my findings here. Unfortunately, while a few of the app/file managers out there do dump a list of applications, I can’t find one that dumps a list including the package names (which are required to create an effective link to the app). If any of you know of one, please enlighten me. For now, I’ll construct this list by hand (using the list from ASTRO 2.2.4), and maybe write an app to do it in the future.

(Note: These links all use the market:// URI scheme, so they’re only useful if clicked on an Android device with the Market app.)

• AndFTP (1.3) – A good FTP/SFTP client for Android, includes pubkey-based authentication and host storage.
• Android Battery Dog (0.1.2) – An app that runs as a service and collects detailed statistics on battery usage, including temperature, charge percent, voltage, discharge rate, battery technology and external power status. While it can display a graph or formatted data, its’ real shining point is the ability to export timestamped semicolon-delimited data files for external graphing and analysis.
• Any Cut (1.0) – Allows you to create shortcuts on your home screen to almost anything, including Android OS Acitvities, direct calls or direct text messages.
• ASTRO (2.2.4) – File manager that allows copying of files on the device (both internal memory and SD card), image and file viewing, listing/management of apps (including finding out the package name of an App), reading of tar and tgz files, etc.
• Battery Widget (1.5.2, by mippin) – Very simple widget for the home screen that takes up one square and shows current battery level. When clicked, provides shortcuts to settings screens for display, GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth.
• Compass (1.1) – Simple compass app. Shows a compass which seems to be accurate, current lat/long and current street address. Has extensive settings and some nice skins for the compass.
• ConnectBot (1.6.2) – A very good SSH client for Android. Allows storage of multiple hosts, pubkey-based authentication (with a master password), etc. Unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have any way (that I can find) to enter certain characters, such as tab and pipe (|).
• Dolphin Browser (2.5.0) – An alternate browser for Android. I haven’t used it extensively yet, but it shows multiple tabs at the top of the screen like Firefox (easier to switch between tabs than the stock browser’s Menu -> Windows) and supports iPhone-like multitouch on the Droid.
• drocap2 (2.07) – Screen capture program (requires root). Allows you to trigger a capture from the notifications bar and stores captures on the SD card.
• DroidLight (3.0) – Nice twist on the usual flashlight app. By Motorola, this app triggers the camera’s flash LED in a steady burn mode, providing very good light output. Probably a real battery killer.
• FoxyRing (1.12) – This was an ANdroid Developer Challenge winner and, among other things, it claims to monitor ambient sound levels and adjust your ringer volume to match them. Unfortunately, due to the overly restrictive End User License Agreement (EULA), specifically the strong provisions against reverse engineering and redistribution, I was forced to uninstall the app before even trying it.
• GPS Status (3.0.3) – Very nice app. Provides a display like a real GPS, showing the location and status of various satellites (in a rotating compass), heading and orientation, number of fixes, estimated error (DoP), signal strength graph for stelites, speed, altitude, pitch/tilt of phone, magnetic field, acceleration, coordinates and time of last fix.
• iPerf (1.07) – An iPerf client for Android that seems to work fine. How cool! Seems to be a wrapper around the binary, lets you specify CLI arguments, shows console output.
• Meebo IM (22) – A simple, good, multi-protocol IM application.
• Metal Detector (1.2-RELEASE) – Maybe not that useful, but way cool. The Droid (and perhaps other phones?) uses the compass to detect magnetic fields to trigger the modes for car dock and multimedia dock. This turns it into a metal detector. Wonderful cool-ness factor.
• Nagroid (0.0.7) – A Nagios watcher for Android. Can be configured with only one URL, but can do HTTP Basic Auth and handle self-signed SSL certs. Options to hide everything that’s OK, and show only unhandled (un-acknowledged) problems. Also can start a service to poll and alert at regular intervals. Only down side is that it only handles one Nagios URL.
• Network Discovery (0.2.7.1) – Intersting little app that I haven’t played around with much. Does port scans of IPs and runs a “network discovery” of the LAN, though it doesn’t say whether it is active (ping/port scanning) or passive (ARP). Displays info on devices (IP, MAC address, decodes MAC manufacturer name from address) and a button to run a port scan.
• OSMonitor (1.1.0) – Good process monitor for Android – shows running processes. load from each process, total CPU usage, network information for all NICs (WiFi, BT, cellular/PPP), active TCP connections, battery status, storage status (of ALL filesystems), and internal log.
• Ping (1.5.3) – Simple ping app. Lets you enter an IP and select how many pings to send out. Shows console output.
• Shazam (1.3) – Yup, same thing that was the killer app for iPhone.
• SMS Backup & Restore (2.1) – Allows backup and restore of SMS data to/from SD card, as an XML file. Good for Droid users who experience the disappearing SMS bug.
• Speed Test (1.7.0) – A simple speed test app for Android from speedtest.net. Not sure how accurate it is, but it does upload and download tests over WiFi or cellular/PPP.
• Spirit Level Plus (1.2) – Simple but cool. Spirit level for the phone, using the builtin accelerometer. Seems relatively accurate.
• StopWatch (1.07) – AWFUL. It’s a stopwatch app, but I could not get it to stop displaying stuff in the notifications bar.
• Terminal Emulator (1.0.4) – Terminal emulator for Android. It feels so wonderful to be able to pull up an app, pop open the keyboard, and type “su” on my phone. On the down side, once again, I can’t figure out how to enter the pipe or tab characters, and I don’t know what shell the phone has on it.
• Wifi Analyzer (2.2.9) – REALLY COOL. Vaguely WiSpy like, but I doubt it’s accurate. Shows a graph of spectrum utilization with SSIDs and signal strength, a time-based graph of signal strength per SSID, a simple list of APs with channel number, BSSID, frequency, signal strength and encryption, and a simple “signal meter”. Looks like it could be pretty useful.
• WifiScanner (1.7) – Simple WiFi scanner app. Shows all detected WiFi APs along with SSID, BSSID/MAC, signal level, channel and encryption.

android android, apps, droid

There’s been a lot of buzz over the past few years about DRM, file sharing, “intellectual property theft”, etc. A lot of that has been the two extreme sides – the media industry and their “have it our way” attitude, and the extremists who feel that everything digital should be freely shareable by everyone. I don’t fall into either of those categories, and I don’t think the majority of people do either.

First, let’s look at a bit of history. In my early childhood (1990’s), cassettes were giving way to CDs, and VHS tapes were the norm for videos. You could go to any corner store and buy a blank cassette tape or VHS tape, and it was widely known that people recorded TV shows or copied audio or video tapes. To cope with this, a portion of the purchase price of every blank tape was distributed among media companies and artists, to compensate them for the copies being made. It seemed that everyone was happy about this – nobody was trying to ban the sale of blank tapes, and my neighborhood video rental store never made me sign a contract promising not to copy a rented tape. There seemed to be a balance between the need for profit and what consumers wanted to do.

That all changed when the world went digital – first audio CDs, then movies on DVD. It requires mention that almost all of the problems faced by the media industry (namely “piracy” and file sharing) were brought by the industry itself. I vividly remember, over a period of a mere two years or so, the transition from VHS to DVD. I remember going to the video rental store (we were late adopters, nobody in my family had a standalone DVD player) and being told that new releases were no longer coming out on VHS. We had to buy a DVD player. This was a format that was pushed on consumers by the movie industry, and was pushed hard and fast. While everyone talked of the quality benefits, it was obvious that distributors were in love with the format’s cheap and quick reproduction. I simply do not believe that the movie industry was unaware (especially given the proliferation of DVD drives in computers) that this cheap reproduction was as easily available to consumers as it was to them. If they were unaware, we must ask how their million-dollar-a-year technical teams never mentioned it. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. The movie industry chose to convert to a format that’s easily copied. The movie industry chose to convert to a format that could be easily read – and copied – on any home computer. They should be forced to accept that choice, and the effect that anyone with a computer can duplicate or share their products. If they didn’t want people to do this, they should have stuck with VHS, or gone to a higher-quality tape format.

But, I digress. The main point that I want to make is about consumer choice, and how that effects purchasing (and sharing) habits.

In my parent’s generation, and those before it, customers voiced their choice through making a purchase or not making a purchase. If they didn’t like a car salesman’s attitude, they’d buy the car from someone else. If they didn’t like the terms of a warranty, they’d buy their washing machine from Sears instead of the local store. If they didn’t like their phone company, they’d switch.

My generation, in the digital age, was faced with a different choice – buy or share. The recording and movie industries more or less made this choice for us. They wouldn’t let us buy how we wanted to, so we made the other choice.

This choice required a bit of a tangent to explain. The industry wants us to think of file sharing as stealing. When sharing digital files, they want us to think of the fact that the file is duplicated (i.e. my friend now has it, but I still have it too). This is simply a side-effect of how digital systems work. Whether right or wrong, whether antiquated or not, in most human minds the concept of stealing is inextricably linked to physical property. Walking into a library and walking out with a book that you didn’t check out is clearly stealing. However, most people wouldn’t think the same thing of photocopying some pages from the book. Most people wouldn’t think of photocopying a newspaper article and mailing it to their friend as stealing. How many people, in the day of audio cassettes, thought of it as “stealing” when they copied a tape for their friend? I’d guess that, for the vast majority of people, file sharing is much more closely associated with these actions than walking out of a record store with a CD.

My personal theory is that a large amount of file sharing (of copyrighted material) would stop if the movie industry would let people buy the way they want.

There was a time, a few years ago, when I got almost all of my music through peer-to-peer file sharing (though, unlike many, I didn’t allow uploads). I never thought much of it – I shared lots of things with my friends, why not music? Then RIAA started their PR and lawsuit campaigns. They started suing college kids for sharing music – and suing them for a lot more than even the cost of the CDs they’d “stolen” (and that’s ignoring the fact that they just “stole” the information on the CDs, so the actual cost should have been lower, less the physical media and distribution costs). So, I heard what the recording industry was telling me: we don’t like you. I stopped downloading music, and I also stopped buying it. For about 3 1/2 years, I listened to what I already had on CD, or the radio, but nothing new.

Then there was iTunes. You could buy whatever music you wanted, usually for less than $1. But you had to use their software, which didn’t run on Linux. And if you wanted to listen to it away from your computer, you had to use an iPod. And you couldn’t burn it to CD, so it wouldn’t work with the older stereo in my car.

Finally, the industry woke up. Amazon came out with their MP3 store, where I could buy individual songs or complete albums, as standard (non-DRMed) MP3 files, that I could listen to on my cell phone, any of my computers, or burn to CD and play in my car. And I’ve been hooked ever since – I get all of my music for a low price, in a standard unrestricted format. I can burn it to CD for my car, put it on my computers at home and at work, put it on my laptop, put it on my phone. Thanks to 1-click ordering and instant downloads, I probably spend more on music now than I did when I had to go to a store to buy CDs. And why? Because I have choice. Because, finally, they’ll sell music to me the way I want it – and I buy it.

I don’t know of any source of unbiased statistics, but I’d venture a guess that since various stores have begun selling DRM-free music online, the volume of peer-to-peer sharing of copyrighted music files has gone down.

But it seems that the movie industry hasn’t woken up to this, the MPAA hasn’t taken a lesson from RIAA. While options are starting to appear – NetFlix streaming and others – they still haven’t made the realization that customers will continue to choose “other” until offered the choice they want. I still can’t buy and download movies on Linux, and since I use MythTV for my home theater, it’s no use to get a NetFlix box. Until offered what they want – a download of an unencumbered, DRM-free movie file, or full DVD image, people will keep sharing movies, and will keep renting them and ripping full-resolution copies.

Finally, it’s worth mention that the secret Anti-Counterfitting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is obviously tilted in the favor of content producers, and has a number of chilling provisions for the Internet. Most importantly, it seeks to reverse previous law and hold ISPs liable for infringement by their customers. Firstly, and I say this with all my heart, this is wrong. Until publishers start successfully suing Xerox for every copy of a page of a book ever made, don’t try and hold ISPs responsible for what their customers do. But more importantly, this is braindead – we should know by now that copyright holders can’t win the cat-and-mouse game. We saw it with p2p and random ports, etc. Trying to detect transmission of infringing material is impossible. Once a new method is invented, it will be bypassed. No matter how many millions the media industry spends on trying to detect violations, there’s simply more people working on the other side, and they’re probably smarter and better motivated as well. If the media industry pushes for ISPs to use deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, the users will just turn to PKI and encryption to hide their data. If ISPs just look at traffic patterns, the users will accept slower download times and shape their traffic to look like web browsing.

If the media industry really wants to stop file sharing of their content (instead of just benefiting from lawsuits) the solution is simple – let consumers buy it the way they want.

Ideas and Rants drm, file sharing, intellectual property, IP, music, p2p, peer to peer, shopping

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• Michael Geist – ACTA Internet Chapter Leaks: Renegotiates WIPO, Sets 3 Strikes as Model
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• Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Suspension of Disbelief
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• Linux News: Legal: FOSS Dev Gets Damages in Precedent-Setting Model Train Case
• Testing the Path to Pain – The Daily WTF
• Michael Geist – EU Data Protection Supervisor Warns Against ACTA, Calls 3 Strikes Disproportionate
• The Apache Software Foundation Announces the 15th Anniversary of the Apache HTTP Web Server : The Apache Software Foundation Blog
• Open letter to Google: free VP8, and use it on YouTube – Free Software Foundation
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• Massive Network is an Olympian Feat | Playbook

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