Stephen L Harlow

I watch a lot of television. I see a lot of movies. I listen to a lot of music.

Access to that content in a place-shifted and time-shifted world has only increased the amount of time I spend with media.

I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu and Spotify. I rent stuff off iTunes and use Amazon Instant Video’s Prime Access. I use tons of “TV Everywhere” apps from HBOGo to Showtime Anytime. I rarely buy (though it looks like I’ll be buying Thom Yorke stuff for awhile), but then again, I believe we will live in a future of access, not ownership.

Most of these products deliver their content via streaming.

As my friend Bob Lefsetz recently said: “Streaming won.”

Of course, streaming requires that you have a really fast mobile connection or Wi-Fi. And whether you believe it or not, we don’t yet live in a completely Wi-Fi world. Data connections, while getting better, can be shoddy, depending on where you are. Try making a phone call or getting a data connection reliably where I spend my weekends — it will make you grind your molars. Oh, poor me, I know. #firstworldproblems.

That said, I love my TV, movies and music, and I want them when I want them.

My music service, Spotify, has a content-sync functionality that deals with this issue. I choose the songs, playlists or albums I want synced offline, and when I’m taking my morning walk (where I think a lot and make mental lists of those who have wronged me), the tracks don’t cut out because of AT&T, “The nation’s fastest 4G LTE network. All backed by our 100 percent dedication to quality and service.”

Simple. Easy. Totally useful.

I travel a lot. I am on a plane constantly. Gogo Inflight Internet is great for email, not awesome for Web and nonexistent for streaming media. It is getting better, but I have to download before I board to watch up in the air. Just one use case.

I want the ability to sync the movies or TV I want to watch within Netflix or Hulu — or any service — for mobile usage when I don’t have good coverage, or any coverage at all. I would even pay extra if I had to. And don’t give me content-protection excuses. It’s relatively simple.

When speaking to my friends at these services, the answers are:

• Not worth it, mobile connections and Wi-Fi will get better before we can get rights.
• Users haven’t asked for it.
• Just another set of rights we need to get, and it can be cost prohibitive.

And content guys?

• They can’t stand rental.
• Want us to buy more.
• Haven’t totally accepted the access economy as they speak of revenues past.

Downloading is dying, “streaming won,” and yet we are in a no-man’s-land of not always being connected (at least for bandwidth-hogging media).

“In a world” (say it in a movie-trailer voice) where I have to watch live TV, use a DVR, multiple VOD services and my Slingbox to get all the video I want — if I could have just one functionality, it would be offline syncing of selected video content.

So, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon, Showtime and others, whaddya say?

Jason Hirschhorn is the CEO and chief curator of REDEF. He was formerly CEO of his first venture, Mischief New Media, chief digital officer of MTV Networks, president of Sling Media, and most recently co-president of Myspace.

File photo/HNN staff.

For the past few days, there has been much ado about Paula Deen's use of a certain racial epithet. It's not much ado about nothing, however, as many of her defenders would like to us believe. This incident, along with a seemingly unrelated case now before the Supreme Court, challenge our understandings of what history is and what it means for the nation's political life.

Both Deen and her defenders plead her case by arguing that she is old and southern and therefore cannot help using such language. Her great-grandfather owned slaves. She grew up under Jim Crow. "She's just from another time," concluded one patron of her popular restaurant. Perhaps it is ironic that the patron was of the race that bears the stigma of the racial epithet that the chef admitted using. Perhaps not. For both Deen and her unlikely defender, the past is like a well-worn apron stained with remnants of old messes that she wears not because it is comfortable and useful but because the knot that holds it to her body cannot be undone.

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Ah, Congress. It appears that it's moving fast in response to the revelations, leaked by NSA contractor Ed Snowden, that the NSA is scooping up a ridiculous amount of digital data about all of us. But that atypically fast response is not about stopping the NSA from this overaggressive collection of data. No, it's to try to ban contractors from having access to highly classified material. This is straight out of Senator Dianne Feinstein's playbook: focus on demonizing the action of whistleblowing, rather than what was revealed by the whistleblower. And, of course, as always, that's a really stupid move. It may generate some headlines, but it does nothing to deal with the underlying problem of abuse of the law (which has been done with full knowledge of Feinstein) or the fact that plenty of people have access to this information. Locking out contractors won't stop the next insider from leaking information -- and it will actually likely inhibit the NSA from using the best technical talent out there in building and maintaining its computer systems. Either way, it's a weak attempt at treating the symptom, rather than the actual problem.

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We already wrote how the main backer of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, has said that it was never intended to allow dragnet surveillance of all phone records, as recently revealed. However, it appears he's not done yet in fighting back against this abusive interpretation of the law he sponsored and championed. He's now claiming that those who are defending the NSA and claiming that there's no big deal in having the NSA collect all that data are spewing "a bunch of bunk" directly claiming that the key provision of the Patriot Act, Section 215, was drafted to prevent such data mining.

Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, who introduced the PATRIOT Act on the House floor in 2001, has declared that lawmakers' and the executive branch's excuses about recent revelations of NSA activity are "a bunch of bunk."

In an interview on Laura Ingraham's radio show Wednesday morning, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin reiterated his concerns that the administration and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court have gone far beyond what the PATRIOT Act intended. Specifically, he said that Section 215 of the act "was originally drafted to prevent data mining" on the scale that's occurred.

He also claims that people calling Ed Snowden a traitor are off base because without Snowden, he wouldn't have known how the Patriot Act was being abused. That's quite an incredible statement when you think about it. While we can argue that Sensenbrenner, given his role in Congress, probably had an obligation to further investigate how the law was being used -- especially given the warnings raised by other members of Congress -- it still seems to weigh pretty heavily in favor of showing how valuable these disclosures have been as whistleblowing. The very author of the Patriot Act claims that the leaks enabled him to realize that the law is being used in direct contrast to his intentions. Perhaps it's now time to fix that.

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On Facebook. Border Hammock by Murat Gok in Istanbul, Turkey. More information here.

The post Border Hammock – By Murat Gok in Istanbul, Turkey appeared first on STREET ART UTOPIA.

Want to hide your data from the prying eyes of the US government and its information-gathering program PRISM? A team of South African developers may have an encrypted-communications solution for iOS that'll let you call and text in complete privacy.

As noticed by the Daily Caller, the Seecrypt group recently updated the Seecrypt app which lets you "make and receive unlimited, secure voice calls and text messages between Seecrypt Mobile-enabled devices, anywhere in the world." It works over any carrier's data network and uses end-to-end, military-grade encryption to protect all your VoIP calls and text messages. Because all the calls and texts are transmitted as an encrypted data stream, any snooping programs will only know that you sent some data and cannot detect when or how long you made a call or exchanged messages.

The service is available for US$3 per month and comes with a free three-month account trial. The Seecrypt app is available for free from the iOS App Store. It's also available for Android.

[Via The Daily Caller]

PRISM got you worried? Seecrypt app promises secure calls and texts originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Amazon Bets On Web Groceries, Expands AmazonFresh To L.A.  —  Confirming reports from earlier this month, Amazon has today expanded its online grocery service AmazonFresh to it first non-Seattle market: Los Angeles.  The company homepage was quietly updated this morning with news of the expansion …

A restaurant here in London is delivering its customers' food orders in a unique way: via an iPad-controlled quadrocopter. The Yo! Sushi restaurant in Soho is promoting its new sushi burgers by delivering them to diners' tables via the "iTray" -- a quadrocopter fitted with a tray for the food, controlled by an iPad.

If you've eaten at a Yo! Sushi before, you know that the company likes innovative ways of delivering its food. Its restaurants currently feature conveyor belts where diners can lift the items they want as they crawl past their tables.

While I give the company props for finding a creative techie way to promote its new menu item, I'm not sure if you can call something that uses fish as the main ingredient a "burger."

Video: London resturant delivers food via iPad-controlled quadrocopter originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the points we've made throughout this discussion on the revelations around widespread NSA surveillance is that if you had been paying attention, none of this should have come as a surprise. It's just the confirmation of the exact issues that people raised. In 2007, when Congress passed the "Protect America Act," some people quickly pointed out that it massively expanded warrantless surveillance with little oversight:

But the hastily-enacted legislation, dubbed the Protect America Act, does more than permit the interception of foreign-to-foreign communications. It permits warrantless surveillance "directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States." There is no language specifically restricting surveillance activities to communications originating outside of the United States.

And then, a year later, we got the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which raised more concerns:

In passing the FISA Amendments Act, Congress gave the executive branch the power to order Google, AT&T and Yahoo to forward to the government all e-mails, phone calls and text messages where one party to the conversation is thought to be overseas. President Bush signed the bill into law Thursday morning, describing it as a bill that "protect[s] the liberties of our citizens while maintaining the vital flow of intelligence."

Of course, last year, the FAA was up for renewal and we spent a lot of time discussing how folks in the House and the Senate (1) pretended that it only applied to foreign calls (when it clearly did not) and then (2) ignored Senators Wyden and Udall, who repeatedly made it clear that the law was being abused in this way, and asked others in Congress to demand a full and public accountability.

And, of course, the nefariousness here is not a partisan issue. Both of the laws above were signed by President Bush, and while President Obama campaigned on the fact that he would end such practices, we can safely say that that never happened.

So, while it's good that people are now realizing just how widespread the spying is, perhaps next time, when the same group of folks raise the alarm at these bills, they shouldn't be ignored or brushed off to the side as "oh you guys again..."

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John Koetsier at VentureBeat has played with the new tool that ingests scripts and turns out visual storytelling:

I think this could be useful for a lot of people in situations far beyond movies and scripts.

You need a visual story? Storyteller can help. You want to create a quick overview of your long, in-depth essay or paper? Storyteller can help. You want to make your business report come to life? Storyteller would be an interesting way to create a graphic novel approach to communicating the dry facts.

The plant's twin reactors went offline last year because of a small radiation leak, and the operator has been unable to get approval to restart them.

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Here's an interesting one. Amazon is getting some buzz today for launching Kindle Worlds, a setup by which authors of fan fiction can effectively profit from their works without fear of legal repercussions. Obviously, there's a ton of fan fiction out there, and while most copyright holders don't mind it (with a few notable exceptions) as long as nothing is being sold, Amazon seems to be trying to take it to the next level. They're basically licensing the copyrights from certain popular works (at this point, mostly TV shows, it appears), such that fans can write their own fanfic, have it sold via Amazon (of course) and the profits get split up. For works over 10,000 words, the fanfic author gets a 35% cut. For shorter works, it's 20%.

There may be some concerns about this. The "ownership" of the new work belongs to Amazon, as you're basically signing a publishing agreement with Amazon, who then controls the work. Given the situation, that might not be that much of an issue for most fanfiction authors, but some may be concerned (for example, imagine if this had happened with 50 Shades of Grey, which originated as Twilight fanfic, before becoming a monstrosity of its own). Also, there's no guarantee that Amazon will agree to sell the work, but it claims it will publish "as many as possible." It basically sounds like they reserve the right to reject ridiculously bad works.

In some ways, though in very different circumstances, this reminds me of some of the cooler aspects of YouTube's ContentID program, in that it sets up a way for people to reasonably monetize what might be considered infringement under the law, but which most people realize isn't what copyright law should be destroying. Once again, if you just make it so that innovation can occur, people quite frequently figure out business models that build on what maximalists consider "piracy" if they give it time and let the business models shake out.

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