On the Tech Sector, Wages, and "Capitalism"

In my second-straight post cribbing a link previously pointed out by John Gruber... this is a really interesting analysis:  Maximum Wage - Steven Johnson

From the sweatshops and rubber factories to the Nike store, your sneakers are pretty much market economics from the first stitch, all the way down the chain. But your iPhone isn’t just made up of startup brainstorming and Foxconn labor; it also has in its makeup open source networks, and academic research, and military funding, and government-subsidized science labs, and whatever strange hybrid of socialism and monopoly capitalism Bell Labs was. Some of those systems increased inequality by making their founders rich; some of them decreased inequality by making a valuable resource free. Indeed you could make a strong case that the most important innovations that drove the triumph of Silicon Valley did not emerge inside traditional private corporations at all.

I'm enough of an occasional-utopian-futurist to really like the idea of Basic Guaranteed Income in a post-scarcity world largely run by our digital and mechanical creations... but some of the conclusions and ideas presented here are much closer to the real-world-of-today.

Film vs. Digital, with Steve Yedlin

I'm going to start out by straight-up quoting John Gruber's post about this in its entirety:

Jim Coudal:

Check Steve Yedlin’s Film vs. Digital Tests, plus this series of tweets from Rian Johnson who is directing SW Episode VIII with Yedlin as DP, and finally this conversation about the matter.

This is a deep rabbit hole for film nerds, but I ate the whole thing up over the weekend.

(and yes, that post itself quotes someone else's post.  Blogception, everybody!)

All three of those links do indeed make for a great rabbit hole to fall into.  It's very interesting seeing such an articulate and well-backed-up take from the Cinematographer of "real" films I admire (particularly Brick and Looper).  Overall, I definitely agree;  while there was still a strong argument to be had back when I was in college, high-end digital acquisition not only caught up to, but in many cases surpassed 35mm film in most technical attributes (ability to resolve detail, dynamic range, low-light sensitivity) a few years ago now.  The prevailing argument since then has mostly been one about the supposedly-innate aesthetic "looks" of each medium, but I think Yedlin makes a very strong case that the malleability of digital image processing makes these sort of argument relatively moot.

That said, I'm still glad he will be shooting Episode VIII on film.  It may not make a lick of difference to the image itself, but the touchy-feely emotional connotations are still real.  (A cynic would call this "marketing," but would still agree...)

On Teenagers and Social Media Apps

I just read a story on Medium on "A Teenager's View on Social Media."  While reading it, I saw some interesting connections to my post about Twitter from back in 2009, so I thought it worth writing about.  Since I am now slipping inexorably closer to the "30" milepost, it's worth admitting that I'm probably not such an authority on such things anymore.

Disorganized thoughts and comments, arranged by social network:

Facebook

I've definitely noticed the shift in how Facebook "feels" to use.  It doesn't surprise me that it isn't considered cool anymore, since the exclusivity it originally had (by virtue of only allowing college .edu emails) has long since gone.  I definitely agree that it's hard to not have an account though.  Facebook grew fast enough that the network effects are incredibly strong now - if you aren't on Facebook, it's not that much of a hyperbole to say you're invisible in a social media sense.

I also find it interesting, and at times frustrating, how pretty much every conversation I used to have on AOL Instant Messenger has now moved to Facebook Messenger.  I still refuse to download the app though, out of spite.

Instagram

This one really is interesting, and I get the reasons the author mentions.  I'll admit that my own use of Instagram is fairly limited, but my fiancé has attracted quite a few followers, due to tapping into the strong "craft beer aficionado" niche.  It definitely feels much less commercialized and "creepy" than Facebook.

Twitter

I admit, I feel somewhat vindicated that "To be honest, a lot of us simply do not understand the point of Twitter."  Although I did eventually get an account, I don't tweet very much.  I mostly use it to follow people who have interesting things to say, frequently "celebrities."  Though one strength I do see about Twitter in this regard is that you can follow people that you normally wouldn't hear too much about.   I can't see a gossip magazine caring one bit about Wil Wheaton's latest craft beer exploits, Adam Savage's latest prop-recreating obsession, or anything William Gibson has to say...

The odd parallel-life Twitter leads as a news outlet is also fodder for an entire post unto itself.

Snapchat

Yup:  I'm old.  Don't care.

Though I do find it interesting that the "private, but you know who you're talking to" aspect of it is very similar to the sort of things that initially drew me (and pretty much everyone I knew) to Facebook back in 2005-ish.  Note to future social media companies:  I think there's something there...

Tumblr

To quote:

"Tumblr is a place to follow/be followed by a bunch of random strangers, yet not have your identity be attached to it. Tumblr is like a secret society that everyone is in, but no one talks about."

Sooooo... you're saying it's LiveJournal, basically?  That's what I'm getting here.

YikYak

This is completely foreign to me.  I've seen the icon before, but that's about it.

Medium

Haven't really looked into this too much personally. (Though it is where the originally article is.  I found it through a link in the comments of another site.)  At this point, I'd have to say I pretty much look at all blogging services as more or less interchangeable, from a reader's standpoint.  This may be because few of my real-life friends maintain blogs anymore.  (and frankly, can you even say I do?  How long ago was the last post before this one?)

LinkedIn

"We have to get it, so we got it."  Yup.  I think this applies to pretty much everyone, regardless of age group.

Pinterest

Yup.  I do literally nothing with this site (though I do know what it is).

Kik, WhatsApp, and GroupMe

I can't bring myself to bother with pretty much any messaging app.  (Including, and especially, Facebook Messenger, though that one is more a form of feeble protest...)  E-Mail and group texts suffice (especially since among my iPhone-using friends, iOS 8 brought a lot of useful controls to group texting).  I totally get why WhatsApp is useful internationally, though.

Fragmentation

I kept deleting files and deleting files, but for some reason Parallels kept saying that it couldn't reduce the size of my virtual machine file!

I wonder why that could be...

(It's better now!)

My Bizarre Run-In With Content ID

I recently uploaded a Diablo-themed Special effects video to my YouTube channel, continuing the pattern from that earlier Nerf one.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but the story behind it highlights a corner of the copyright-related minefield facing content-creators on the web today.

The video is an original work made by me, starring Bill Lyon, a former-colleague and current-collaborator of mine.  All of the audio in it was either recorded by my own microphone, or came from one of two fully licensed stock libraries:  the included library that comes with Final Cut Pro X, and the "Pro Scores" music collection by Video Copilot.

When I uploaded the video to youtube it was flagged by their Content ID system as matching a track owned by AdRev.  The track they were claiming?  One of the pieces from Pro Scores!

Now it gets crazy, because AdRev isn't even the bad guy in this story...

For anyone unfamiliar with YouTube's Content ID system, it's a fully automated process whereby copyright holders can submit their work (video or audio) to Google, and it is then compared against new videos that are uploaded.  If the software detects a match, it will automatically get flagged.  What happens next depends on what the rights holder has chosen.  They may choose to block the new video entirely, or allow it to remain up.  However the most popular option has been to leave the video, but "monetize" it with advertisements, the revenue from which goes to the original copyright holder.  Naturally, this prevents the uploader of the video from monetizing it themselves.

This system has, for the most part, been an extremely useful and pragmatic Faustian bargain for YouTube and its users.  The ability to monetize infringing works has so far been sufficient to placate rights holders, and prevents the YouTube library from being eviscerated by clamping down on the free-for-all nature that made it popular in the first place. A few of my own videos, like Project Gravity, could not remain on the site without this largesse.

However, every system does have flaws.  As it turns out Video Copilot has been having issues for some time with unscrupulous third parties fraudulantly claiming Pro Scores music as their own, submitting it to Content ID, and monetizing videos that use it.  This doesn't sit well with Video Copilot, since the "infringers" being denied full rights to do what they like with their videos are the company's own customers!  As I learned from their site, Video Copilot was eventually successful in getting YouTube to shut down the fraudulant flags, but without the music "assigned" to someone in the Content ID system, there was currently nothing preventing it from happening again.

The solution?  Video Copilot partnered with AdRev, a company that handles this sort of copyright enforcement on an outsourced basis, and registered the music themselves.  Now, videos that included Pro Scores music would still get immediately flagged, but contacting Video Copilot's customer support would let you put your channel on a whitelist to be excluded from the process.

So, after a confused weekend of sending emails to both Video Copliot and AdRev (just to be safe...) my video is now up for the world to see, with full rights retained by myself.  I wish I could end this post with a grand proposal for how to avoid the headaches I went through, but everyone involved seems to be doing the best they can given the odd constraints of the situation.  (Except of course for the people who claimed the Pro Scores audio as their own.  Not cool.)  Regardless, it remains a great example of just how strange the intellectual property landscape has become.

And if you'd like to see the video in question, here it is!

Foam Dart Shootout!

And just like that, the video I teased in my last post is finished!



This took me so much longer to make than I intended it to.  Christine and I actually went out and filmed the source footage late last summer.  "Life" and other related circumstances led me to not really doing much with it for quite a while after that...

This year though, I resolved to get back into filmmaking in a major way, especially after 2013 was almost entirely devoid of it.  Even then, the visual effects took me a bit longer than expected, but I'm really happy with how it turned out!  (as a side note, if anyone ever hears me say again, "setting up a green screen won't be practical in that location - I can just rotoscope everything..."  please smack me.)

"Work" in Progress

The intermediate stages of things can look... strange.

(More to come later...)

Evening Edition

Bouncing around a few of the blogs I follow semi-regularly, (starting with Gruber, in this case) I discovered this:

http://evening-edition.com

It's designed as a concise summary of major news stories of the day, with a sober approach that avoids the list of linkbait that a lot of online aggregators can turn into.

As a bona-fide graduate from a "Journalism" school, the most striking thing about it to me was that although the site is gaining some cred among thoughtful techies for being so refreshingly "well written and concise", its "voice" seemed very old-school to me;  Read it aloud, and it seems to follow all the usual rules for writing good on-air copy...

John Carter

I still say that Disney's marketing team screwed the pooch on this one by dropping "of Mars" from the title, leaving the uninformed viewer really confused as to what in blazes the movie is even about.

I just saw it the other night, and found it thoroughly entertaining and well executed, but with a plot that was pretty rough around the edges.  In the end, I enjoyed it more than I expected, though that may be aided by the fact that there's been a dearth of adventurous science-fiction/fantasy in my viewing as of late...

This quote from io9's review sums it up pretty well for me:

The real question is should you watch the movie to catch those moments of greatness, or skip it because you know you'll be frustrated by its problems? I would err on the side of watching. This is an imaginative bit of fun, and it looks fantastic splashed across a giant screen. (Do not, however, make the mistake of seeing it in 3D. It wasn't filmed in 3D, and the 3D frankly looks like crap, spoiling the visuals at every turn.) John Carter may not be the gamechanging retro-futuristic epic we were hoping for, but it's still worth checking out.

Though I disagree with the author on one point:  I rather liked the frame story!

On another note, the original Edgar Rice Burroughs story, A Princess of Mars, has lapsed outside of copyright in the US, and is available on Project Gutenberg!  I'm partway through now, and it's intriguingly different enough from the film to be worth a read if you're interested.  Very much a product of the time it was written, and if you're fascinated by the history of the genre, it's cool for that reason alone.

Extreme and Murderous Absence

Space is a vast and frightening thing; it is an extreme and murderous absence; it's the closest physical metaphor for the disturbing unknowns that follow death; space is a villain from a children's book -- it's the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story.

- Robert Brockway, writing the Cracked.com article "7 Awesome Images That Will Make You Mourn The Space Shuttle".

Last weekend Christine and I went on a very-much-needed brief vacation to Toronto.  As has become our habit, we took the Megabus there and back.  During the trip up last friday, I took some time as we passed through Buffalo to fire up Ustream on my iPhone and make good use of my unlimited 3G data...

On one hand, it was certainly impressive to realize I was watching the launch of a rocketship.... from over a thousand miles away (and orders of magnitude farther once it flew higher), in pristine quality, on a device pulled from my pocket, on a bus -- a true "This is the 21st century" experience.

On the other hand however, it was very bittersweet to see the end of this era.

Supreme Court Rules Video Games Covered By First Amendment

Full NY Times Link

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

Thank you!  (And take that, Jack Thompson!)

PlayStation Network Data Compromised

This morning I received an e-mail from Sony, including the following:

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

Fun.  Time to change some passwords...

"The Formats Won"

Adam Wilt, writing for ProVideo Coalition about the current state of the film/video post-production world:

A few years back, we were talking about seeing the end of the formats wars.  Remember when we shot interlaced 4x3 SDTV with a specified colorimetry and gamma to a handful of tape formats, and delivered interlaced 4x3 SDTV to an audience using interlaced 4x3 CRTs? Ah, those were the days… we didn’t know how simple we had it.

Now, let’s see, for acquisition, we have AVC-Intra, AVCHD, HDCAM, HDCAM-SR (in three different bitrates), ProRes (in more than three different bitrates, depths, and color resolutions), XDCAM HD and EX variants, DVCPROHD (still out there), ArriRAW, R3D, Codex Digital, Cineform, uncompressed (S.two; DPXes on SR 2.0), and whatever your HDSLR du jour shoots, just to name a few. And that’s just HD. There’s still SD being produced, and 2K and 4K, in gamma-corrected “linear” or log (LogC, S-Log, REDlog); 4x3, 16x9, 2:1, 2.4:1; 8-bit, 10-bit, or 12-bit; 4:2:0 to 4:4:4; full-res, subsampled, or oversampled (both well and poorly).

If you add in the number of deliverables the various presenters were talking about, and consider all the permutations of inputs and outputs, it just boggles the mind.

The format wars are over. The formats won, all of them. May their tribes increase.

Deal with it.

Truer words, never spoken - even in my low-end, behind-the-curve corner of the industry.  I just moved into a new apartment, and glancing over at my newly-reorganized shelf of archival media for video projects from the last couple years, I see:

• MiniDV tapes
• Digital8 Tapes (basically the same as MiniDV, but require a different camera/deck.)
• Video DVD's with some Quicktime masters as a bonus
• Mini-DVD's from a Sony DVD-camcorder (not my choice)
• A couple SDHC cards from my HDSLR, that I still haven't decided on an ideal archival plan for.

But hey - at least we're leaving tape behind!  (I say, having just spent over an hour tonight fighting to get Final Cut to stop complaining of timecode problems while recapturing some interview footage from barely a year and a half ago.  But I digress...)

It's The Little Things...

How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail

This is what I love about many Apple products - not big, impressive features that "revolutionize" a product, but the little, well-thought-out details that, once your realize them, make you frustrated that everything doesn't work that way.

Other favorite examples, from Mac OS, include spring-loaded folders, and proxy icons.

Soundtrack Preview for Tron: Legacy

So, so very excited for this movie!

Flynn Lives!

Post-Gazette Video on iD Tech Camps

As some of you might already know, I spent the last month and a half working at the CMU location for iD Tech Camps.  This past week was my last week working there, and during the week a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette stopped by, doing a story on "non-traditional" summer camps in western Pennsylvania (the story appears in today's paper, starting in a sidebar on the front page).

The reporter also shot some video of the camp!



Unfortunately, the class I was teaching that week was in a different lab, so you won't see any of me there.  But the camp director gets plenty of face-time!

And yes, I was (more or less) dressed as a pirate that day too...

Hacked!

Oh well isn't that cute... someone hacked my webcomic!

Of course, I'm not exactly clueless when it comes to these things, so after verifying the extent of the damage, I did some digging through the logs.

Ready for a laugh?

"K4Rel," the Iranian "L337 H4x0r!" who defaced my site is a complete poseur!

The actual break-in was done on Monday by someone in Jakarta, Indonesia.  They found a way in, uploaded a backdoor for themselves (the quite useful "b374k" php script), and changed the (hashed) passwords for the admin section. Once finished, it appears this individual passed off (or let's be honest, probably sold) the admin passwords to a second person.

The second guy actually was from Iran.  But he was only able to add a new "comic" to the database, as you can see above, and wasn't able to touch anything else on the site.  Heck, he barely even did that - the internal page id had incremented by two, which means he effed it up the first time and had to try again!  Laaame.

For the technically curious:  the original Indonesian hacker used classic SQL injection.  SomeryC, the extremely lightweight comic-oriented CMS I use for Directionless, was doing nothing to sanitize the page number in the URLs.  This allowed him to edit the hashed passwords for the admin section.  From there, he used the comic uploader to install the backdoor script, and after that appears to have left the server alone, after passing it off to the Iranian "hacker" (and for him, I use the term very loosely indeed...)

Over the last few hours, I've restored Directionless to normal.  Will helped me with some of the PHP, so the site should no longer respond to bogus input.  Additionally, I have put the entire admin section between an additional level of security with htaccess, and of course, changed all the passwords. DirectionlessComic.com should be secure now, at least from this type of attack.

Inside Facebook "Like" Spam

Update 6-1-10:  Looks like Download Squad caught the story now too.  They're calling it "likejacking." Cute. According to them, security experts have confirmed that this is simply an annoyance, and there appears to be no real security threat at this time.
----------

Be careful what you "Like" on Facebook - there's a new exploit someone out there has discovered, and it seems like people are falling for it in droves!

A couple hours ago, I was taking a look at my Facebook news feed, when I noticed some of the usual silliness:

[So-and-so] likes "LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE."

Eh, seemed like it could be funny, and I was bored.  So I clicked on it.  This brought me to an external website, with an empty white page with black text reading "Click here to continue".

Hovering over the text didn't show any destination URL in the address bar.  Naturally, I was suspicious, but since Macs are immune to most viruses, I clicked to see what would happen.

Nothing happened.  Or so it seemed, until my brother informed me that I now liked this page...

At this point, I felt a little silly, but also curious as to what was going on here...  how had the site made me Like something without clicking on a Facebook "Like" button?  And who was running these things anyway?

Well, I did some digging...

From the HTML of the "Continue" pages, it was fairly clear how the trick was working.  The words were just plain text - not even a link.  However, the pages also contained an HTML "IFRAME" which was used to embed the on-Facebook page that is used to confirm a "Like".  This page element was rendered invisible, and positioned underneath the page's text.  Any clicks on the words would pass though them, and into the actual "yes, I want to like this" button on Facebook.  Clever.

The particular bit of spam I fell for was hosted on a Blogspot blog, but there were quite a few other popular ones, such as The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School!  That one was hosted on thedatesafe.com/promdress.  When I went to the top-level, I found folders for several other similarly-set-up scams...  as well as a running tally page, at thedatesafe.com/stats.htm

Whoever runs this server has since locked it down, so you can't see these pages anymore.  But I was sure to take screenshots...

Cute.  This particular shot was taken around 11:50 pm on Sunday May 30th.  The one with over 130,000 "likers" is the prom dress one.  Six minutes later, the number had grown by another 6,000.  Facebook admins finally got wise and started blocking the page shortly after midnight.

I found similar scams spread across a number of domains:

• Several Blogspot blogs, including girlownedbypolicelike.blogspot.com
• thedatesafe.com - probably the main site, since that's where the stats page was located.  WHOIS information (a public registry of who owns what websites) was anonymized on this one.
• mprosperstats.info - this one did have valid WHOIS info, but I won't post it here, since it's unclear whether the owner of this site is involved, or just an innocent victim who had their website taken over by spammers.  It would hardly be the first time.

I suppose it's possible that these are separate spammers, unrelated except in the method they use.  But I think they're all connected.  Facebook recently gained a feature that lets you "hover" the mouse over a link on the site to get some brief info on it - for example, if you hover over someone's name, you get their picture, and a list of some friends you have in common.

Hovering over these spam links also gives some info, including a picture... the same picture, across pretty much every one I have seen...

So uh.... anyone know this face?

ConFICK!

The Enemy Within - Magazine - The Atlantic

Utterly fascinating (albeit long...) article on the history of the infamous "Conficker" worm. I had never realized just how sophisticated - and let's be honest, clever - it was/is.

Spoiler:  The worm is still out there, lying dormant in a massive botnet estimated at over 6.5 million computers in size.  And security researchers aren't entirely sure they can ever truly eradicate or contain it...

Portal for Free! (Until May 24)

Steam is now finally available on Mac OS X, and clearly I'll post my impressions on it here in due time.  However, Valve did something else pretty exciting, coinciding with the Mac release...



Portal is an amazing game, and this is the perfect time to check it out if you haven't gotten a chance to yet. This also serves as a great bit of advertising for the upcoming Portal 2, due out late this year.

As a side note - love the trailer too.  Like the earlier teaser for Portal itself, the stylized, graphic animation perfectly captures the game's wicked sense of humor.