01.17.07

Burning down libraries remotely

Posted in General at 4:43 pm by Steven

Seeing this article over at Wired (Public Libraries, Private DRM) reminded me of a cool thing you can do to help accelerate the downfall of civilization:

  • Invent a DRM scheme with revocation (naturally, most of the ones coming out, such as AACS, have this).
  • Get useful content recorded with your scheme, then into libraries, through the force of the marketplace.
  • Let people go on thinking that libraries are a way to preserve cultural content beyond its life in the market and outside of the hands of future censors.
  • Revoke, revoke, revoke! The content magically disappears off library shelves (given that devices can no longer read the content, ever again).
  • Instead of revoking explicitly, you can also go out of business, release a new and incompatible version of your DRM scheme, have a bug in your DRM, let your servers go down, etc. The possibilities are wide open.

01.10.07

Good business model

Posted in General at 7:55 pm by Steven

This is kinda cute. The One Laptop Per Child project is talking about selling the laptops to the public with a “buy 2, get 1″ model. I’ll probably buy one, though more for the design/geek factor than for philanthropic reasons.