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It is absolutely clear that this has to do with regional licensing¹ of the titles. Publishers often hold the rights to titles for the US market but not the European markets or vice versa. Amazon’s in a legal bind there. However, they could make it possible for Kindle devices to change which store they’re associated with.

I’m now waiting to see what happens if I don’t supply any of the above mentioned forms of proof of residency.

It’s sad, really, to see the publishing industry make the exact same mistakes as the recoding industry before them. You’d think they’d be able to learn.

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The problems began when it didn’t have drivers for syncing via linux. Doing what it is I do, I figured I’d whip some up real quick. This is where things when horribly, horribly wrong.

Yes, that’s a user’s email and password, unchanged and in clear text, being flung over to their website via a pure http connection. This step is also logged to the user’s hard drive in a clear text file, that is world readable.

This is bad.

Vendors who sell Quantified Self applications better start seriously thinking about security. Users want to log this data, but they also want it reasonably secure. Failing to do that could potentially set back the whole industry, which is besieged by privacy concerns this way or the other.

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The Green Button is like OAuth for energy data. It is a simple standard that the utilities can implement on one side and web/mobile developers can implement on the other side. And the result is a ton of information sharing about energy consumption and in all likelihood energy savings that result from more informed consumers.

Here’s something I completely missed, but what on the face of it looks like a very good initiative indeed.

Opening up energy consumption data is one of the most important steps to bringing innovation into the energy sector. Giving data into the hands of the customer enables companies to directly work with them instead of having to negotiate with the utilities.

Details about the standardization can be found at the NIST wiki.

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Google’s feature-creep is creeping me out.

I’ve been wondering for a while what it is that makes me increasingly uncomfortable in my reliance on Google. Dave puts his finger on it.

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We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

Interesting move. However, with Thingiverse already fairly established, this likely will end up as the platform sharing more controversial blueprints.

via Alex

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Government coffers have been compensating for a number of market challenges solar faces, including the incumbency advantage of the fossil fuel industry and private investors’ distaste for capital-intensive enterprises that will take years to deliver a return. And in 2012, the solar industry may face a sudden reduction in these subsidies, as the post-Solyndra political climate grows less and less receptive to investments in clean energy. Despite the fact that renewable energy received only a quarter of the subsidies that fossil-fuel-based electricity received between 2002 and 2007, it’s wind and solar that are on the chopping block.

A sobering account on the clean tech industry in the US. The question becomes thus: can we accumulate the talent that is working on entertainment products now to tackle energy?

There are fundamental problems which contradict much of the firmly held beliefs on entrepreneurship in the digital age. The barriers to entry are massive in an industry tightly regulated and practically interwoven with government – in many countries the pillar of government even – and so fundamental to all of our lives. It’s hard to imagine “lean startups“ in the energy industry, and the “a couple of guys in the garage“ founding myth won’t work here.

As Eilperin puts it:

Venture capitalists tend to work on three- to five-year horizons. As they were quickly finding out, energy companies don’t operate on those timelines. Consider a recent analysis by Matthew Nordan, a venture capitalist who specializes in energy and environmental technology. Of all the energy startups that received their first VC funds between 1995 and 2007, only 1.8 percent achieved what he calls “unambiguous success,” meaning an initial public offering on a major exchange. The average time from founding to IPO was 8.3 years. “If you’re signing up to build a clean-tech winner,” Nordan wrote in a blog post, “reserve a decade of your life.”

The truth is that starting a company on the supply side of the energy business requires an investment in heavy industry that the VC firms didn’t fully reckon with. The only way to find out if a new idea in this sector will work at scale is to build a factory and see what happens. Ethan Zindler, head of policy analysis for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, says the VC community simply assumed that the formula for success in the Internet world would translate to the clean-tech arena. “What a lot of them didn’t bargain for, and, frankly, didn’t really understand,” he says, “is that it’s almost never going to be five guys in a garage. You need a heck of a lot of money to prove that you can do your technology at scale.”

One possible answer to this problem could be to start working on the demand side, not the supply side. The internet wasn’t meant to uproot industries; that was consequence of the shift in consumption patterns.

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The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us… then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, “OK, compromise,” and gets half of what they want. That’s not the way to win… that’s the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It’s time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we’ve got. Let’s force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have.

I agree with the diagnosis. Although not completely, as the internet doesn’t always wake up when someone tries to take something away from them. The best example for that is ACTA, an international treaty, almost as bad as SOPA/PIPA, which has gone almost completely unnoticed.

And of course I agree with his proposed direction. We have to find avenues to fight for. We have to find causes to fight for. His list makes a good start, but I’d love to see this discussion furthered.

In the meantime, we desperately need a legislation tracker and early warning system. One thing that has been mentioned over and over again in the aftermath of the Jan 18th blackouts is, that legislation very similar to the one protested will be back. We better know when it’s back, then.

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We should delight in the stand we’ve taken in favor of things like, say, notifications, and trials, and proof before censoring someone, but we should get ready to do it again next year, and the year after that. The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we’ll think we’ve won. We haven’t; they’ll be back. Get ready to have this fight again.

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A small camera fitted to the glasses can capture 400 facial images per second and send them to a central computer database storing up to 13 million faces. The system can compare biometric data at 46,000 points on a face and will immediately signal any matches to known criminals or people wanted by police. If there is a match a red signal will appear on a small screen connected to the glasses, alerting the police officer of the need to take further action or make an arrest.

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