Geek News and Musings

The Daily App Deals post is a round-up of the best app discounts of the day, as well as some notable mentions for ones that are on sale. More »

Firefox: If you’re living in a location where local DNS and IP blocks keep you from visiting certain websites, The Pirate Bay Dancing is an extension that undoes that automatically by routing you through random proxy servers. More »

Data caps on your broadband, while in principle sound troublesome, are at least understandable. Bandwidth is a limited resource and we all have to share it, and presumably if we all were maxing our connections out all the time, we’d tax the system beyond its capacity. But who uses the most bandwidth and when is a more practical thing to investigate, as knowing that could prevent congestion at peak hours and so on.

Some studies and theories have suggested that so-called bandwidth or data hogs, in other words people who use the entirety of the product they paid for, aren’t really a great source of congestion, and the data caps intended to prevent such users from maxing out all the time aren’t an effective countermeasure.

The guys at Diffraction Analysis examined data from “a mid-size company from North America” that was interested in understanding its consumers’ use patterns. Good for them, by the way. The data they submitted was bandwidth consumption throughout the day, with five-minute granularity. The study’s aim was to determine whether a small subset of users (the hogs) could indeed affect the quality of others’ service, and whether caps were an effective deterrent.

The conclusions, briefly stated, were that while heavy users do in fact consume far more data in aggregate than the average (288GB vs. 9.6GB in this study), their contribution to congestion during peak hours, and when the network is at 75% of its capacity or above, is in fact not much greater than the average user.

What the statistics bear out is this: during peak hours when service is most likely to be affected by overcrowding, heavy users only make up a small percentage of those consuming bandwidth – 14.3%, to be precise. And of the heavy users, only half of them were on the fastest connection, further driving home the fact that while they may consume more in total, they are not contributing more than anyone else to the actual problem, which is slowdown in peak hours.

So why the data caps? Clearly a limit of, say, 300GB a month (or lower) won’t prevent peak usage from affecting service quality. In fact, if people are limited by draconian data caps, they are likely to limit their usage to peak hours: streaming a movie in the evening, or browsing YouTube when they get home from work. This would in fact contribute even more to the problem of peak crowding.

What’s the solution? Bandwidth caps seem more important, and advertising a range of values instead of a maximum would be both more honest and indemnify the ISP against slowdowns. If a dynamic bandwidth cap let you download at 30Mbps in the middle of the night but limited you to 5Mbps during peak hours, it’s the best of both worlds and nobody has to worry about overage charges.

And how would you make money to replace those overages, not that they amount to much? Sell a limited number of premium accounts that aren’t limited during peak hours. Since the ISPs control the number and width of the pipes, they can calculate how many premium and how many standard they can offer. This seems much more logical than imposing a total data limit that’s a pain for some and immaterial to others, though both contribute equally to the problem ostensibly being addressed.

The whole report is available for purchase here for the sum of €750, though the executive summary provided by the author is illuminating as well.

Familiar, the artist formerly known as Picadee, launches in beta today. Familiar has an incredibly simple yet compelling value proposition, namely that billions of screens worth of untapped real estate are worth taking advantage of …

Familiar is basically a socially programmed screensaver (yes, screensaver) which allows you to share and display photos with contacts you select through Facebook and via email. In the beta version, all photos you upload to Familiar will turn into a collective screensaver for the people you’ve connected with, combining with photos that other users have shared in Familiar’s ‘The Shuffle’ function.

To share photos, you can either drag and drop selected images into Familar’s downloadble desktop app or use the web interface to sync from Facebook Albums (via Facebook Connect), Flickr and Picasa. Familiar co-founder Marcus Womack tells me that they plan on supporting mobile services like Instagram and possibly others.

“The [photosharing] fragmentation is great for us – people receive photos from their friends in email, on Facebook, or via links to a dozen different websites,” says Womack, “With Familiar, we make it simple: your family and closest friends send photos directly to each others’ screen, even if everybody is using a totally different app to take, manage, or share photos.”

After Familiar users have built up a palatable collection of photos, they can go to Familiar ‘Preferences’ and decide whether to use ‘The Shuffle’ as their screensaver and/or ‘Photos I Love’ (which they can designate by clicking the ‘<3′ button on each photo) as their desktop background. They can also adjust the volume on various friends by using a Less/More slider.

Womack explains that his vision for Familiar extends way beyond photos, but that the company wanted to launch their pared-down beta in time for the holiday season, which is typically a photosharing extravaganza.

In addition to granular contact sharing options, Womack eventually wants to develop a version of Familiar for all screens including iOS and Android. He also wants users to be able to share updates and other content like local news, stocks, sports and weather via their screensavers. Womack hopes that people will think of Familiar on the mobile phone as a mobile photo wallet and Familiar on the iPad as a mobile photo magazine,”Your usecase will depend on the device.”

Familiar is an interesting endeavor as no one has done anything ambitious with the screensaver since Pointcast in the dotcom era. There are infinitely more screens and infinitely more people who want to share in today’s startup environment; “Every time we see a digital screen we think it’s an opportunity to make you more informed and connect you to world around you,” Womack says.

Amazon is debuting another holiday shopping app, but this offering is geared towards kids. Amazon Santa is a free app for Kindle Fire and the iPad that allows children and their parents to create holiday Wish Lists to share with friends, family and of course, Santa Claus.

Basically, Amazon Santa brings the e-commerce giant’s wish list functionality in a kid-friendly app. Kids can browse and search more than 500,000 toys, games, books, clothes and other kids items. Kids can then make holiday wish lists that can be shared with loved ones. Of course, kids under a certain age will need to a little help from parents in creating wish lists.

Amazon has also made the wish lists secure—lists created by kids through the app will only be able to be seen by authorized viewers who receive the Wish List link. Parents can review and edit the Wish List as needed and the list shows recipients wished-for items, including those that have already been purchased, similar to a gift registry.

It’s actually a useful app to have when it comes to shopping for children. It can be tough to know what “Santa” should bring kids for Christmas and this provides a fun way for children to create their lists, and an easy way for grandparents, aunts, uncles and more to find the right gift.

Caleb says: “I blogged almost every detail of building a small green tiny-ish house to rent out in our backyard where our garage once was. It even includes a public Google spreadsheet of our costs.”

The issues of SOPA/PROTECT IP and censoring the internet are slowly creeping into more mainstream news sources. PBS Newshour hosted a brief debate, mostly focused on the recent domain seizures. The debate was between Steven Tepp, the former Copyright Office official, who jumped ship to the world’s largest lobbying organization, the US Chamber of Commerce (who, along with the MPAA has been leading the charge in getting SOPA and PROTECT IP approved) and Larry Downes, author and consultant, whose excellent work on both the domain seizures and SOPA/PIPA we’ve mentioned repeatedly. Unfortunately, as you might expect in 10 minutes, it’s hard for anyone to get into much depth. I think Downes made a key point early on in noting that these domain seizures are almost entirely “symbolic,” since the sites themselves aren’t seized.

But what I really wanted to focus on was how Tepp misleads with statistics. This is a specialty of the US Chamber of Commerce, and Tepp plays exactly to expectations here. First, you can watch the full 9 minute video, if you’d like:

And let’s call out the specific examples of how Tepp misleads with stats:

“The scope of the problem is unbelievably huge. Rogue websites — those dedicated to the theft of American intellectual property, our creative and innovative products — get over 53 billion visits every year. That’s 9 visits for every human being on the face of the earth. And they’ve been estimated to do at least $135 billion in harm to legitimate businesses. The products they sell are made in completely unregulated facilities, and can often be, not only shoddy, but harmful to consumers’ health.”

So much misleading in one little paragraph. Lets start with the 53 billion claim. Guess what? It’s from a US Chamber of Commerce-funded study by an anti-piracy monitoring company called MarkMonitor. And the details suggest serious problems with the study. First, the study itself was based on Alexa, widely considered the least accurate web traffic measuring tool out there. Second, the number of “visits” to any site is an especially meaningless number — especially when trying to discuss the actual economic impact of such visits. Who cares how many visits there are if we don’t know anything about what people do on those sites?

Third, a large percentage of those visits all come from three sites: RapidShare, Megavideo and Megaupload. These are three cyberlockers that the industry has declared as “rogue,” but which have significant legitimate purposes. Rapidshare, in particular, has been repeatedly ruled to be perfectly legal, both in Europe and in the US. The company follows DMCA takedown rules and has plenty of legitimate uses. Including Rapidshare in these calculations makes the whole thing a joke. And none of those sites are involved in “selling” counterfeit goods that put US citizens in harm’s way.

Fourth, that “estimated to do at least $135 billion in harm,” is a totally made up number. The US Chamber of Commerce cites a different MarkMonitor report to support that. But it’s not actually a report or a study or anything like that at all. Instead, it’s promotional “white paper” (read: sales pitch) from MarkMonitor entitled “Seven Best Practices for Fighting Counterfeit Sales Online.” That report does say that “criminals” setting up ecommerce storefronts “will likely cost legitimate businesses $135 billion in lost revenue this year.” But it doesn’t source that number. Notably, other statistics in the report are sourced. Which makes you realize that the $135 billion is basically made up. But Tepp doesn’t mention that.

Fifth, he focuses on “the products they sell.” This is the really slimy part, for which Tepp should be ashamed (if the man had any shame at all). The obvious implication of all of this is that when you tie together these disparate numbers — you’ve got 53 billion visits to sites selling counterfeit goods that may be harmful to consumers. We’ve already pointed out that the 53 billion is bogus — but it’s even more bogus when combined with this final sentence. That’s because that same MarkMonitor report that gave us the 53 billion, also notes that the traffic to sites selling counterfeit goods is a minuscule percentage of the 53 billion. Specifically, the same report says that the sites selling counterfeit goods receive merely 87 million per year… or 0.1642%. That’s not 16.42%. Or even 1.642%. It’s 0.1642% of the total. In other words, the sites actually selling counterfeits… seem pretty small.

Sixth: even that exaggerates the problem — because even then you’d have to assume that every one of those sites involves selling counterfeits that are shoddy or harmful. But that’s crazy. Most counterfeits are merely replica versions, that are passable. They’re not harmful in any way. So now we’re talking about significantly less than 0.1642% of the big scary 53 billion he’s talking about. Basically, the 53 billion, besides being meaningless in general, has no connection to the rest of the claims about losses and harm to consumers. It’s complete and utter bunk.

What you have here is that Tepp and others are taking a real, but tiny problem: mainly an exceptionally small number of counterfeit drugs, and then pretending that the “harm” is broad and applying it to sites already judged to be perfectly legal, because some people use them for copyright infringement. The reports he relies on actually show what a tiny problem this is, but tries to mask that by lumping a bunch of totally disparate things together, from the tiny percentage of fake drugs out there… to the already judged to be legal cyberlockers like Rapidshare.

Tepp’s misleading bogosity doesn’t stop there. He then goes on to claim that these sites “steal jobs.” Um, how? But beyond the rhetoric, lets get back to the misleading numbers. Later on he states:

“Another study, earlier this year, showed that 19 million Americans have jobs that rely on ‘IP-intensive industries.’ This is a huge part of the American economy. 60% of US exports are from ‘IP-intensive industries’ and $7.7 trillion dollars are output from ‘IP-intensive industries.’”

This one we’ve attacked head on before. The intellectually dishonest bit here is easy to spot. It’s the reliance on “IP-intensive industries.” Not IP. The “study,” if you can call it that, involves the biggest maximalists teaming up to fund a report that defines “IP-intensive industries” extremely broadly and then pretends that everything that comes from such industries… is because of strong IP laws. That’s ridiculous, because you know who’s included in the “IP intensive industries”? Basically every tech company — including all of those which are fighting against these crazy new laws.

Tepp is being intellectually dishonest in the extreme here, suggesting that the only reason that the broadly defined “IP-intensive industries” are so successful is because of IP law. But that’s showed to be bogus quite simply. As CCIA has done for years, it uses the very same methodology to show that exceptions to IP contribute more to the economy than IP laws themselves. You can’t except one report without excepting the other since the methodologies are identical. There are only two logical conclusions from this: (1) the suggestion that those jobs, exports and output numbers are due to IP are complete bunk or (2) Tepp and the US Chamber of Commerce really believe we should do away with IP completely, since his own favored methodology shows that the less IP laws we have, the greater the output. So which is it, Steve?

Either way, Tepp is being painfully intellectually dishonest throughout the entire interview, citing facts and figures that are misleading in the extreme, if not completely bogus. What’s unfortunate is that none of the press that lets Tepp speak his mind ever calls him on these ridiculous claims.

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There are plenty of package trackers to choose from on the iPhone, some of which are very good, but nothing really comes close to the ease of Slice. It wins our pick for best-in-class package tracker because you never have to enter you tracking numbers into the app. It pulls them from your email inbox automatically and lets you know when they’re out for delivery. More »

Music discovery service Spotify got a big upgrade today with the inclusion of apps that enhance the desktop program. The new Spotify apps platform is also opened up for third party developers to use for their own sites and apps. More »

Our favorite manhacks, the Quadcopters, are currently building a 1,500 piece styrofoam sculture in the FRAC Centre in Orleans. The robots follow a pre-set plan but can sense each other in space and assess which pieces have already been placed, resulting in a ballet of tiny, flying machines that are about as smart as a barn sparrow.

Called “Flight Assembled Architecture,” this demonstration shows how far we’ve come from the early days of quadcopters and how much smarter these things are getting. I’m honestly waiting for the day when these things can swarm, piraña-style, and pick our grapes, apples, and occasional enemies of the state.

No video yet but if someone in Orlean can head over there and check it out, we’d be eternally grateful. It looks insane.

via PopSci via Giz

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