andrewnim's posterous

Yesterday, we ran a post about the keynote speaker at this year’s WWDC, based on an old press release. (Apple has not yet announced who will be giving the keynote this year).

I apologize for this error. We don’t know quite how this slipped through, except that it was a result of a complete failure of our process.

So we’re reevaluating our processes, specifically in regard to fact-checking, and we’re going to make whatever changes are necessary to make sure something like this never gets published to our site again.

There is nothing more important to me, as an editor, than the relationship we have with our readers. We let you down here. We’ve learned our lesson, and we are taking steps to prevent this from happening again. We know it won’t be easy, but we will do everything in our power to restore your trust in us.

An apology from Nicole Solis at TheAppleBlog. A few companies should take note of this and learn. It may seem contrite, its not a big deal, but we as readers do expect professional journo's to get the facts right.

Thanks Nicole, I will keep reading.

Whats wrong with this mashup map?

There are no Tim Horton stores in new Zealand, thats what. Come on Tim.

The Scope of Piracy

The report, which looks at 22 brands as a criteria for finding counterfeit goods and pirated content online, includes the following figures:

• Traffic to the 43 sites it identified as the major pirates of digital content was over 146 million visits a day and about 53 billion visits per year
• The top three websites it classified as "digital piracy" - Rapidshare, Megavideo, and Megaupload - collectively generate more than 21 billion vists a year
• North America and Western Europe were hosts for 67% of digital piracy websites

MarkMonitor's Methodology

In order to generate the report, MarkMonitor used the following methodology: It identified 22 brands targeted by pirates. It used its "patented technology" to find sites suspected of offering pirated material. It hand-examined and verified these sites. And it then ranked the sites and measured their traffic with data from Alexa.

In addition to problems with the accuracy of Alexa as a definitive source of Web traffic, the report is based on the assumption that all visits to these sites involve copyright infringing activities. And for their part, two of the companies named in the report as the Web's worst offenders are pushing back on the findings. MegaUpload contends the report contains "grotesquely overblown allegations." And RapidShare has issued a press statement calling the report "defamation."

Jumping to Conclusions

Both RapidShare and MegaUpload contend that their visitors use their sites for legitimate, legal purposes. And they say that they respond to DMCA notifications, taking down materials that violate copyright. MarkMonitor does note in its report that "while some of these sites do offer takedown processes for pirated content, the action must be initiated by the content owner." But that is standard operating procedure for most sites, including YouTube, which is noticeably absent from MarkMonitor's list even though it's likely a site with plenty of infringing video content.

Questionable methodology aside, the report also makes a rather large leap from calculating the number of visitors to these websites to then arguing that they threaten the U.S. economy, public health and well-being. As a recent article in O'Reilly Radar on DRM and digital books contended, we need a lot more data before we can make these sorts of conclusions about what impact piracy may or may not have on the bottom line.

See Also

• Court Refutes Claim that Photos on Twitter Are Free For the Taking
• The Most Popular BitTorrent Searches of 2010
• Google Vs. the "Bad Apples": Four Steps Against Copyright Infringement
• U.S. Government Explains Its Seizure of 80 Web Domains

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Audrey is right on target here, I wonder if like me she is wondering who paid for the "conclusions".
No doubt some of our politicians out side of US will start citing this report. I am looking at Aus and NZ here.

It reminds me of how the media companies jumped on the Piracy supports terrorism claim, as most pirated material is passed for free I never really saw how that one stacked up. I do not condone piracy or copyright infringement, people should be paid for their efforts. But nor do I condone such utter twaddle as these claims which are so similar to the ones the music business made about file sharing. The figures do not support them.

Things have gone too far when this is taking place in the public eye. This poor guy (on the left). Would it be so hard to have some curtains, or just get real!!!!!!

Have you ever had that problem?

Is this the start of gen C? I coined it first naff as it is...........

TPM Reader TT chimes in on the safety issue. Before getting to TT's comments, let me say that despite the fact that there are no levels of ra

I just wanted to weigh in on several points on the new TSA scanners and procedures as a scientist and as someone that frequently works on homeland security topics. First, as any scientist can attest, that one of the major training messages in radiation safety courses is to always minimize the dose of ionizing radiation. There is NO safe level of ionizing radiation (there are three major types of ionizing radiation: alpha particles [helium nucleus], beta particles [electrons], and gamma rays [short wave, high energy electromagnetic waves]). Nada. Zip. None. Argonne National Lab did studies in the 1950s-1960s on many generations of beagle dogs to determine if there was a safe, minimum exposure level. The theory was that radiation exposure was like chemical exposure in that at some point the dose is so low that no damage occurs. The evidence proved otherwise. Also, the damage from ionizing radiation is cumulative, so frequent or repeated exposures have much longer lasting effects. The US and other governments have set some standards to limit radiation exposure for workplace and health safety, but there is no lower threshold dose that does no damage.

The TSA pulls a couple intellectual "sleights of hand" in its discussion of these machines. First, the TSA website compares the dose of radiation received from the machines to the radiation from cell phones (I will note this comparison is for the millimeter wave machines, not the back scatter variety). This is not a good comparison and may lead to confusion about the two different types of machines being used. Cell phones emit radio waves. Radio waves, while electromagnetic waves like gamma radiation, are much longer and of significantly lower energy, and, thus are not ionizing radiation. That is, they do not have the ability to damage DNA and to cause cancer. I can put a flask of cells next to a radio wave emitter and the cells will grow just fine and not accumulate any additional mutations from that exposure. Second, the TSA often compares the radiation from the back scatter machines to chest X-rays or cosmic radiation. These are much higher energy and typically pass through the body, so the dose is more diffuse and over a much larger part of your body. The back scatter radiation from the scanners is lower energy, but still ionizing, so the exposure is concentrated within a small amount of your body (the top layers of skin). This could potentially increase the effective exposure by 10-100-fold over what the TSA is saying. This second point is the one that the UCSF letter discusses in much greater detail.

The TSA also admits that the ionizing radiation penetrates through 1/10 of an inch of the skin. While that might not sound like much to many lay folks, that is actually quite significant. There is A LOT going on in your skin at 1/10 of an inch. To expose that layer of skin to increased ionizing radiation will lead to increased damage and the potential for mutations and ultimately cancer. It would take years to figure this out and maybe that is what the TSA/DHS is hoping for...the fog of epidemiology to hide the true health impacts. Look how long it took for the risks of smoking cigarettes, with a clear danger, to become well accepted with tons of independent data confirming the point.

The FDA response to the UCSF letter basically says, "the machines are below the threshold of an arbitrary dose limit we developed with the help of the manufacturers of these machines."

So as the FDA says, we can trust the manufacturer. After all they do not have a vested interest or anything....

Sir Ken is always watchable but this proves a lot of what he is saying. It helps prove his point about children's attention.

Sir Ken is up there with John Holt, John Taylor Gato and of course most of the Home ed community.

It is time for a new model. One without endless tests to record standards which represent a false group perception not an individual reality.

Mix it with Seth Godin and we could have tribal education.