Tron, der CCC und Wikipedia

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Derzeit zieht es durch den digitalen Blätterwald: die Eltern von Tron haben sich mit einer einstweiligen Verfügung an die Wikimedia Foundation in den USA gewendet, um die Nennung des Realnamens von Tron in dem entsprechenden Artikel rückgängig zu machen oder vielleicht auch für alle Zeiten unmöglich zu machen. Wie die sich das vorstellen ist mir ein Rätsel. Vielleicht fördert die Aktion auch gleich noch die Einführung automatischer Zensurmaschinen um die Hinzufügung bestimmter Informationen in allgemein zugängliche Informationssysteme zu unterbinden. Na dann gute Nacht.

In Anbetracht der Tatsache, dass der Realname schon zahlreich im Internet publiziert ist (und beleibe nicht nur in der Wikipedia) erscheint die Aktion recht sinnlos. Der entsprechende Wikipedia-Artikel wird sicherlich auch nie wirklich verschwinden können. Ob hier der (nachvollziehbare) Wunsch der Eltern auf weniger Aufmerksamkeit durchsetzbar ist erscheint mir mehr als fraglich. Mit solchen Aktionen erreicht man natürlich genau das Gegenteil. Aber vielleicht war das ja auch erwünscht.

Was mich beunruhigt ist, dass nun die Aktion auf den CCC bezogen wird, der daran aber nicht beteiligt war. So liest es sich bei Spiegel Online und dem unsäglichen Artikel von dem unsäglichen Burkhard Schröder in Telepolis, der auch auf seiner Seite nochmal nachlegt. Tatsächlich ist Andy eine treibende Kraft in dem Kontext, doch muss klar sein, dass er hier im Alleingang unterwegs ist.

Im CCC gehen die Meinungen auseinander. Mancher tendiert in der Diskussion mehr zum Schutzes der Privatsphäre, andere zur Unmöglichkeit der Kontrolle der Wikipedia. Ein Konsens wird sich da nicht so ohne weiteres finden lassen, was für solche Diskussionen im Club auch typisch ist. Ich sehe da auch kein Problem. Wichtig ist, dass die Diskussion erfolgt. Das hat sich auch schon bei anderen umstrittenen Themen gezeigt. Dieser Diskord ist an der Stelle für mich selbst immer wieder sehr aufschlussreich und gibt einem neue Sichtweisen, was wichtig ist. Hätte Andy versucht, für seine Vorgehensweise im Club im Vorfeld eine unterstützende Mehrheit zu finden, wäre er aber sicherlich gescheitert, da bin ich mir sicher.

Es muss allerdings klar sein, dass es hier kein „CCC vs. Wikipedia“ gibt! Ich verstehe mich selbst als Wikipedianer, auch wenn ich nicht an Treffen, Mailinglisten oder gar Vereinsfoobar teilnehme. Ich liebe das Projekt und werde es auch künftig unterstützen. Zum 21C3 haben wir das erste Entwicklertreffen der Wikipedia und ein Treffen der Wikimedia Foundation auf dem Congress gehabt und auch auf dem 22C3 war die Wikipedia-Community zu Gast. Henriette, die an meiner Seite seit Jahren den Congress mitorganisiert ist Autorin des ersten Wikipedia-Buches und Vorstandsmitglied im deutschen Förderverein. Dem CCC lässt sich nun wirklich keine Wikipedia-Feindlichkeit unterstellen.

Die Medien und Blogs sollten sich langsam mal an den Gedanken gewöhnen, dass der CCC aus mehr Leuten besteht als nur Andy Müller-Maguhn und dass nicht alles, was Andy sagt und tut dem CCC zugeschrieben werden kann.

Wer Lust hat, sich in die Materie ein wenig einzulesen sollte sich den Eintrag Der Geist von Tron im Weblog von Andreas Bogk durchlesen. Andreas ist mit den damaligen Vorgängen wohlvertraut gewesen und schreibt in der ihm eigenen klaren Art ausführlich über die Zusammenhänge. fukami hat auch noch ein paar interessante Anmerkungen zur Namensproblematik und dort entwickelt sich auch schon der erste Kommentaraustausch mit Wikipedianern.

Background information regarding the 15″ PowerBook G4 audio loop problem

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NOTE: Seems as if Apple really got the problem fixed with the Mac OS X 10.4.5 update. Hooray.

I have been suffering from a bug that affects my brand new 15″ PowerBook machine and it seems to affect this machine only as I haven’t experienced that bug on any of my other Macs and I know quite a few people with the same model that recently ran into exactly the same problem. Here is a short sample of the bug that I accidently recorded in my Chaosradio Express 003 podcast episode (german only and a really weird one a it was all about testing things ;). Here is another example I found in an ongoing discussion in Apple’s forums.

Recently, the same bug occured to Adam Curry in episode #309 of his Daily Source Code podcast. I wrote an e-mail to Adam and he talked about it in episode #311 two days later. Another podcaster provided an audio comment on the same issue as well.

Update: I have filed a bug with Apple (Problem ID: 4402288). If you have an ADC account (which is free) you might want to refer to that bug.

Update 2: The update to Mac OS X 10.4.4 and QuickTime 7.0.4 did NOT solve the problem. Damn.

Update 3: Apple has posted a tech support Article #302978: „PowerBook G4 (Double-Layer SD) audio stutters or skips“. For my part I can say that the problem occurs even when I am only running Ableton Live with no other applications running at the same time whatsoever. At least Apple has confirmed there is a problem and it actually seems to be tied to the 15″ PowerBook G4 only as expected. The document closes with „This document will be updated as more information becomes available“. Well, Apple, we keep an eye on that.

Update 4: So far I thought the problem is related to sound being sent to the built-in audio port only. But I recently encountered the audio loop problem in a setup where Ableton Live sent audio to QuickTime Broadcaster via the Soundflower virtual audio port. This seems to indicate the problem is related to software instead of hardware as the built-in audio port was not used in this setup. However, it might still be related to some kind of internal timing-related hardware.

Update 5: There is a new activist site dedicated to the problem at http://powerbookdefect.info/ (or http://maclantic.com/powerbookdefect/The%20Defect.html if you don’t like frames). If you have the same problem, you can add yourself to the list. The story has been dugg. Digg it!.

Update 6: HardMac.com is taking up on the story. Please let all other news sites know about this as well. The list of affected users on powerbookdefect.info has grown to more than 800 now.

Update 7: ZDNet.com is summarizing the disaster so far adding well-known display and DVD problems to the list. I haven’t had any of the display and DVD problems but I haven’t done so much DVD stuff recently as well so it might well be that more problems are ahead.

Update 8: According to a posting at Macintouch, an Apple employee at an Apple Store promised a solution to the problem „within a week“. We’ll see. Obviously the problem has received at least some attention at Apple.

Others have been reporting about the bug as well:

I know the Ableton tech support guy is suffering from the same problem.

So what is it all about?

This is what happens: Out of the blue, the Mac suddenly starts looping all the audio that goes out to an audio device. This usually last for around five seconds, effectively adding all audio being sent to that device playing everything over and over again at the same time increasing overall volume and creating a crazy and confusing mix that disappears after five seconds.

The bug seems to be related to CoreAudio as this is the subsystem managing audio devices. It does not seem to be tied to a certain application as I noticed the bug using iTunes, Ableton Live, QuickTime Player and other programs. There is no obvious event that triggers the bug, it just happens. Sometimes the event repeats within minutes two or three times and then again the bug is not coming at all for days. It is so annoying.

My configuration is the following:

  • Most recent Macintosh 15-inch PowerBook G4 (1440×960 display, optical audio)
  • Mac OS X 10.4.3
  • 2 GB RAM (I doubt the bug is related to RAM as the recent WLAN stability bug was)

Apple does not really promote a distinct name for the PowerBook generation introduced in October 2005 but I refer to it as the PowerBook with „Optical Digital Audio“ as it is the first Apple laptop to feature optical audio input and outputs. Read about it on Apple’s developer site. The most visible difference is of course the bigger screen size.

Main problem here is reproducing the problem. I haven’t found a way to do that so far and I am open for any suggestions. I think is related only to audio output as I haven’t experienced the bug when recording audio so the bug seems to not be affected to audio input. I only have been able to record the bug while producing audio feedback during the above session because I had loudspeakers running during the recording (as I did not have extra headphones for my guest).

So what can be done? I’d be happy if you would share your experiences with me here in this blog. I am going to reintegrate all feedback in this post to make the description as complete as possible.

Zencast hijacks your feed (no more)

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If you find your podcast being listed on Creative’s new Zencast site, I would consider writing them an angry e-mail now as they are basically hijacking your feed: people who subscribe through the Zencast site get a subscription URL of zencast.com instead of your original feed. This means that they can track your stats, filter or modify your content and that your subscriber’s not only depend on the stability of your server but on the zencast site as well.

Really bad self-introduction to the podcasting scene, Creative. Better quit now before it’s too late. Nobody is buying your ugly players anyway.

Update: It seems as if they have given in and changed the behaviour. Zencast now hands out the original feed as it has to be. Good boy.

More reliability with BitTorrent?

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Antworten

Adding to my other plea regarding integrating BitTorrent in iTunes, I’d like to add that I think that BT might make downloads much more robust over unreliable and slow Internet links. I am currently behind a really flaky Internet connection and there is just no way downloading larger files at all. Half way thorugh, downloads get terminated and iTunes tries to start all over again. Continuing http downloads from where they left off might be a way to do it, but this is not very reliable in case the target file changes on the server (I agree this does not happen often but I just did that myself a few times for various reasons and it must be taken into account).

Best thing about BT is that it splits up the file in smaller chunks that are each secured by a checksum. So downloads can be done incrementally and (more or less) securely.

Interviews with Joi Ito, Régine Débatty, Eric Blossom and Jacob Appelbaum

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22C3 is over. It’s been an intense event.

For the first time since eight years I have been able to get the chance of pursuing a more or less personal project during such an event. Many people contributed to the Congress this time taking over much of my work in the recent years.

So I could do what I really wanted this time: I wanted to experiment with podcasting and produce a new kind of coverage for the event: personal interviews with speakers. The interviews are produced as episodes of the new Chaosradio Express podcast series with a german intro. Chaosradio Express is usually in german only, but the interviews are of course held in english.

Joi Ito was my guest in Episode #11 of our Chaosradio Express podcast series. Joi was our keynote speaker at the conference and delivered a great speech.

In the interview, Joi talks about his way into the digital media and communications world, hackers, 22C3 and being a DJ in Chicago. He also shares many ideas and ideals with us that he stands for. I loved the atmosphere of the interview. Joi is a very bright and encouraging character.

I did three more interviews: with Régine Débatty (We Make Money Not Art), Eric Blossom (GNU Radio) and Jacob Appelbaum. They too are all very interesting characters and it was big fun for me to talk to all of them. Very gifted and lovely people. Thank you all very much for your time and dedication.

Joi apparently liked my podcasting setup. You’re welcome!

MPAA and BitTorrent announce collaboration

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As Boing Boing reports, the MPAA and Bram Cohen of BitTorrent.com have agreed to implement ways to automatically detect DMCA infringements and „expedites takedown actions“. So Bram Cohen tries to be a good guy and to find a way to prevent the death Grokster died.

„If an MPAA member sees their copyrighted content in the torrent search engine at BitTorrent.com, they will now be able to ask BitTorrent to contact the party responsible for the infringing content or tracker in „a more expedited manner“ than previously in place. BitTorrent will also remove the offending item from search returns at BitTorrent.com.“

The article also points out:

„Torrent searches on sites other than BitTorrent.com (for instance, Google) aren’t controlled by BitTorrent.com, so they’re unaffected.“

Hmm. Does these two really go together well? If BitTorrent scans for content on other trackers as well this will absolutely „affect“ these sites.

Another problem I see here: the new „trackerless“ operation mode of BitTorrent uses „routers“ instead of trackers. These „routers“ pass the BitTorrent tracker protocol from client to client where each client also plays the role of a tracker using the concept of a distributed hash table . While these routers could be everywhere in principle, the default location are BitTorrent’s own BitTorrent router servers. So what happens when people pass along DMCA-affected material through these routers? Does BT sniff in here?

The whole announcement is going to affect something else: many people will probably not understand what is actually done and will back down from using BitTorrent no longer trusting the system in general. At least FUD is spread already just by seeing the star of P2P talk to the bad guys. I am still not sure how I should react to this.

iTunes should support BitTorrent

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Looking at the amount of data our servers spits out to deliver our Chaosradio podcast (sorry people, german only) and seeing that iTunes makes up for a huge percentage of the dopwnloading clients, it’s becoming clear that pure HTTP doesn’t really scale well.

Apple should really, really think about supporting the BitTorrent protocol in iTunes to subscribe to podcasts. The way BitTorrent works makes it the ideal protocol for podcasting as it performs best if many people want to download the same file at the same time which is exactly what happens in podcasting. Many podcasting clients have already endorsed BitTorrent and quite a few video podcasts offer BT as an option.

Apple isn’t known for adopting protocols and file formats not sanctioned by a standards organisation of any form and I doubt BitTorrent is going go through one of these entities in any way. But looking at the latest release of iTunes, Apple has also endorsed OPML which is another (lesser known) very important format of the Blogosphere. OPML is of course much simpler and you can’t really compare file formats and protocols easily. However, I have high hopes Apple might „get“ this as well. I guess before they roll out BT suport in iTunes they should consider buying BitTorrent stock before ;)