Net-neutrality, AppleTV and just what did Steve Jobs 'crack' then?

But you have cable TV, right?

We have two main competing ISPs [Telecom and Vodafone] offering set-top boxes that record and time-shift content from a single cable-TV style provider - SkyTV. The hardware they provide represents varying levels of competence and reliability and require extra fees to enable the viewing of hi-def channels, all in the context of constant ad-breaks and promos for other content. But enough moaning, it's clear that business model is coming to an end, however all too slowly.

I'm just about ready to be a cord-cutter. But here in NZ, data access and bandwidth caps produce hesitation in anyone who is not interested in paying additional $$$ in monthly bills to their ISP. Apple and other content providers still don't make legally available anything near the range of TV-series available like there is in Australia due to distribution deals with SkyTV. And I don't fancy having multiple iTunes accounts, VPN access and having to pay a stranger on Ebay a fee to buy a US iTunes voucher for me, scratch off the number and email it to me so I can buy content semi-legally in a timely fashion.

Seriously, when can I give money to the people who make the content and have them make it available when it's ready? It's 2014!! I'm moaning again. Sorry. The Oatmeal sums it up fantastically if you haven't already seen it.

So we began renting movies that are available through iTunes instead of physical media [DVDs, Bluray discs] through our local movie rental shop. At first, the iTunes delivery is stable and great. We have a 40mb cable modem connection which is more than enough to stream a 720p movie [even with a 15min wait at the start]. But about a year ago, quality of service from iTunes began to drop, with movies we rented pausing 2/3rds through and demanding we wait 20 mins for buffering. Why? Don't we have a fast enough internet connection for this?

Enter the Net-Neutrality debate.

From Wikipedia: Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.

As the internet is increasingly invaded commercially, we've all long suspected ISPs of being vulnerable to 'shaping' traffic volumes where they perhaps shouldn't. Recently this is a hotly debated topic in the US and the forces for and against net-neutrality are slugging it out, with consumers wearing any fallout.

On January 14, 2014, the DC Circuit Court determined that the FCC has no authority to enforce Network Neutrality rules, as service providers are not identified as "common carriers".

I don't know how this is going to play out, but I'm on the side of legislation that protects the internet from too much commercial influence and perpetuates the abilities of anyone to use it fairly as a communication medium, from freedom-fighters to Facebook, Twitter to TradeMe and back. You wouldn't want to have to pay your ISP for top-tier access to your favourite sites on top of monthly access and bandwidth caps would you? Me neither. We've all had enough of 'over-the-top' services from cell providers huh. Dumb-pipes await.

A few days ago, BoingBoing covered the discovery by an independent blogger that Verizon in the US are aggressively throttling Netflix traffic. This blogger, Dave Raphael manages to capture the discussion with a Verizon tech representative where it's admitted that this is in fact what is going on:

So what's this got to do with AppleTV then?

Well back when I bought AppleTV [2nd gen], I was high on the hope Steve Jobs was about to unveil an app store for it and we'd be able to do some of the things we do on the phone/iPad on the TV. That never came to pass, but Steve did, and all we were left with was the notion he'd 'cracked' it and we'd soon be blessed by something much better. And it's been just that, a notion.

Slowly Apple have been adding channels to AppleTV over the last two years. My impression was that this was the thin end of the wedge and that Apple were collecting content makers together one by one to quietly begin to be able much more varied and higher quality offerings than our traditional providers. Yet nothing has really materialised in terms of hardware despite rumours about large screens, 4k displays, bezel-free designs, magical remote control rings etc. Other rumours suggest Apple are hard at work tying up agreements and making deals behind closed doors, getting ready to do to TV what iTunes did to music sales.

Then this report surfaces on MacRumours detailing Apple's progress on building their own content delivery network:

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/03/apple-developing-cdn/

"Apple built its retail store chain because Steve Jobs wanted to own Apple's interactions with its customers. With iTunes and iCloud, Apple controls the data and the service, but must outsource the less visible but still incredibly important job of reliably delivering data packets to users. With hundreds of millions of users downloading apps, music, TV shows and movies -- with many of those being streamed in real-time to the Apple TV -- ensuring quality of service for all users will be essential. "

And now I understand. Apple have already made the assumption that net-neutrality is going down the drain and are positioning themselves to be able to guarantee quality of service to their customers with their own content delivery system. And as Apple are a company that prefer to have all their ducks in a row before rolling out a new product [well not always], I don't believe we'll see any large announcements about AppleTV or channels before these infrastructure updates are complete.

Given the timeline for the data-centre completions and the focus on a watch-style product right now and new iPhone6 rumours, I don't see TV announcements on the horizon for another year at least. Maybe I'm wrong, but, I don't think so. Looking forward to ditching the cable box though.

Update: It's 2015 and nothing has changed regarding Apple's approach to TV. It's effectively still a hobby for them. The iPhone6 is here, the watch is about to hit and no TV in sight.

-j

Wouldn't it be great if these services were available in NZ without using a VPN?

My Fuji x100s Christmas Fauxhemian Transformation

I've been craving the Fuji-x100 since it came out. The combination of the rangefinder aesthetic and sharp, fixed 35mm equivalent lens have me thinking constantly of how many situations I'd be able to use one in where toting the 5DmkII might be overkill, and the iPhone5 would be underkill.

Luckily enough I've waited long enough that the successor to Fuji's upstart digital rangefinder, the x100s is now available and is going to be my Christmas present this year!

David Hobby's x100s in it's Lo-Fi travel duct-tape camouflage.

My usage theory goes like this:

1. Canon 5DmkII for assignments and clients and weddings etc.

2. Fuji x100s for holidays, short trips and places where too much gear is a burden.

3. iPhone5 for everything else.

David Hobby [Strobist] has been using the x100s for a while now and has an excellent series of posts covering it's flexibility and attraction to photographers everywhere:

In-Depth: The New Fujifilm X100s

On Assignment: Margo Seibert

Fuji Follow-Up

And his YouTube run-through of the features is worth a look if you need a sense of what the camera can do and where it fits into his world: Click on the image below to visit YouTube and watch:

And if you wanted more, a search on Flickr shows plenty of examples by others.

I think my biggest stumbling block is going to be the x100s' excellent in-camera processing and jpeg output. This may mean not shooting RAW files as the increase in shooting speed and flexibility afforded is pretty impressive. I... *think* I'm going to have trouble committing to this over the xmas break and won't have my computer to compare images on, so maybe RAW+jpeg it will have to be.

I make use of the iPhone5's panoramic shooting mode regularly: 

and so I'm pretty stoked to read that the x100s has a mode for shooting this way too. It should mean higher res and sharper images in this format. 

The way the lens flares out is great. The built-in ND filter is good. The ergonomics are very nice. The shooting modes and film emulation is fantastic. The leaf-shutter and wide aperture should mean much more interesting looks outdoors in full sunlight. In short, I cannot wait for Christmas Day this year!!

I hope your Christmas is filled with family, fun, sun and good cheer!

-j

So long Facebook and thanks for all the posts!

....

Yeah, so I deleted my Facebook account. I haven't activated any bots to go through and remove me from any posts historically cause I think that's kinda rude towards my friends and family who are still there. But I'm gone and I won't be leaving any more info with that company for future use or whatever.

I'm not so naive that I think that this will 'erase' me from that part of the internet. Far from it. Information I left inside Facebook is only private for now and I know it's never really deleted just stored for later on. In the meantime they're already employing new algorithms to figure out which of your posts are worth reading or not.

I'm not bitter, and it was a free service and I definitely got some fun time out of it. I'm under no illusions about the nature of the arrangement, but I think the scales are finally tipping too far in their favour.

So [aside from this stupendous list of criticisms!] these are my reasons for departing [in no particular order]:

• 1. Ever increasing monetization. [Wasn't it more fun when there were less ads?]. Edit: Now they want your credit card too!
• 2. Pretensions to politics. [fwd.us Really? Something about this just ain't right].
• 3. Privacy policy changes and fluctuations in the use of your material. What, don't you want to be famous? Your face could be used to sell vacuum cleaners!
• 4. Facebook's crappy treatment of 3rd party devs. I believe Social Fixer likely made Facebook a better place to be, although I never used it. What's wrong with people making client-side tools to make Facebook's site more enjoyable?
• The bloated arching rise of the Junk Web. I love me some cat macros but some of my 'friends' are completely out of control on Facebook. And it's ugly.
• The inane posts, VagueBooking, and general time wastage. I'd rather get excited and make things than sit and read about someone else eating their dinner.
• Cross-site tracking and monitoring what I'm into, yo.

All this being said, I love you people and think the internet is a great place. Too bad it's being compartmentalised and monetized so aggressively. I'll be in touch, and you know, when we chat next I'll have more new stuff to tell you cause you didn't hear it all over Facebook!

I may return to Facebook at some point in the future but likely only as a photography or app business entity as I fully recognise the power [hand raised to eye in salute] of 'the social' in this regard.

-julian

P.S. if you have interesting reasons why are or are not on Facebook I'd love to hear from you in the comments! What did I miss? Why should I still be there? What did you have for breakfast? Don't hold back.

Privacy

So... I don't know about you, but I find the furore surrounding Edward Snowden's revelations regarding the NSA and big tech companies betrayal of it's users and their data astounding. I mean we used to joke that privacy on the internet was a thing of the past and now we know conclusively that it really is.

Edward, we ALL owe you a beer, and probably a LOT more.

I realised we were living in a surveillance-state online only about 8-12 months ago when I began to use Ghostery in addition to adblock in my web-browsing activities. In using these tools I learnt more about online advertising's pervasive intrusions into our everyday web-surfing habits involving cookies, image tags, HTML mail with triggers pointing back to companies letting them know when their message had been even simply opened by me, and more. But I still thought that my communications were basically safe, let alone un-interesting enough that I wasn't really concerned that it might be true that someone, somewhere could be reading or listening in. I wasn't using encryption beyond https or SSL and the idea that I might want PGP or anything else seemed like an unnecessary encumbrance.

"If you have nothing to hide you don't need any rights."

Things have changed dramatically in a few short months. The online landscape has forever altered. US spying programs with names like PRISM, Five-Eyes, Xkeyscore, Tempora and more yet to be revealed are illustrating [much to the US' chagrin] just to what extent ALL our communications are being hoovered up 24/7 in rolling caches of searchable records. And individuals like NSA head General Keith B. Alexander are struggling to stay on top of the leaks and are forced to engage in a comedic cat and mouse game of leak vs assurance in what increasingly is a massive abuse of the trust of the every American citizen.

And it's not just the US. The UK have a three-day rolling store of pretty much everything going in and out of the United Kingdom in electronic form. And metadata storage for up to 30 days. Metadata can be more revealing in analysis than the actual conversation in your phone call. Information about who and when you spoke to someone and for how long can be manipulated in ways that yield connections between parties otherwise invisible at first glance.


New Zealand

Here in New Zealand, the ongoing saga of Kim Dotcom being illegally spied upon by the NZ government simply won't seem to lay down and be quiet. This is likely because the GCSB and NZ Police force used PRISMs data supplied by the NSA in their efforts to raid his Auckland home and place him in police custody on behalf of the US government. If the NZ government is using PRISM to look for copyright offenders where do they draw the line with your information? PRISM was designed to facilitate US government surveillance of foreign intelligence targets "reasonably believed" to be outside of the United States during the Bush era, not spy on what music you might be downloading.

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

This famous quote by activist John Gilmore from the Electronic Freedom Foundation seems to suggest that the internet can heal itself and work around problems like censorship. Organisations or governments that wish to know what your internet connection is carrying use technology like deep packet inspection and internet filtering that are designed to detect the nature of traffic on the internet. However in the wake of the knowledge that the NSA and GCHQ actually fibre-tap the very cables that cross undersea between our countries before they come into contact with your countries different landing points and ISP's, this sentiment now seems more like a wistful, rose-tinted vision of the pre-Snowden era that we'd now like to magically come true. And it's really not going to.


Laura Poitras and Glen Greenwald

The two reporters chosen and initially contacted by Edward Snowden are now under tremendous pressure from multiple governments and go to great lengths to protect themselves electronically. They are at the pointy end of the very tools they are exposing and the measured pace with which they reveal each new piece of information is vital in keeping these issues on the tip of public awareness. If they revealed everything in one release WikiLeaks style, the scandal would likely froth over and the US would quickly return to pointless outrage over Miley Cyrus' VMA costume choice or other such matters, and it'd soon be business as usual.


Sympathy for the devil?

Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Skype and most recently Apple...

We all use something from one of these companies in some shape or form, right? And they all let the NSA in the door and they all share data with the US government. They are now clamouring for permission from the US government to reveal the amount and type of data requests placed upon them in an effort to own up to their part in the information hoovering. I find it very hard to have sympathy for them at this point and indeed so it seems does Europe and other large parts of the world. Confidence in cloud-based storage products is taking a bashing as anything connected to the internet is vulnerable. I'm not about to trade-in my cellphone for paper and pen but it makes me think twice about *free* services like Gmail or Facebook.


Now the conversation about real privacy begins.

I think we're lucky that the debate is happening. I believe we're lucky that a democratic world-leading country is at the heart of these revelations and is attempting to deal with them in any sort-of public fashion. I find it hard to imagine many other countries owning up to the nature and extent of programs like that which the NSA are engaged in and discussing ways of backing up and out of the current situation. I acknowledge that there are necessary lengths that governments need to go to in order to protect it's people and I don't pretend to know where that line gets drawn. But it simply does not include my internet t-shirt orders by default, right? Or your phone call to order pizza? Or our drunken text messages from last night? Or your Facebook status update about how you just fed your cat. Or indeed the photos of your cat on your cellphone.

So now the rush to build proper NSA-proof encryption begins as it's revealed that the NSA has worked hard to undermine established encryption standards so they can peer into hidden communications. Discussions and tips about how to remain unseen by the NSA and secure online are highly informative. Can you reliably use TOR or not? And who wants to? Who wants to have to jump through all these hoops to protect our privacy? What is it worth to you or me who previously took it for granted that no one was listening?

I'm not sure but we are going to find out. Sooner rather than later thankfully.

-j

LightPulses from MrWinter

Mr Winter requested my assistance for his latest release entitled LightPulses, an ambient ride through some of his latest sonic meanderings mellowed with tasty tidbits and aural treats from sessions gone past. This being a purely digital release, Chris requested an animated gif for the cover, and let's face it, who doesn't love an animated gif lately?

w00t, two for two.

After listening to a pre-release version of the mix [putting my headphones on and going 'somewhere else' for a bit], the music demanded something spatial and ethereal...

I'd been gagging to experiment with LEDs and fibre optics and longer exposures some more and this led the charge into creating the imagery this time. The final result is a combination of some long exposure images like these:

Some Maya motion-blurred object rendering, a little comping in Shake and finally some logo and colour work in Photoshop, et voila!:

Thanks for the opportunity to work with you again MrWinter!

-j

Palmer Lucky, OculusVR and the Rift

The shipping developer version may differ a little to this.

http://www.oculusvr.com/  <== take a look here for a quick clip explaining what it's all about. If you're like me you were rather excited in the mid 90's at the thought of virtual reality taking off but ultimately disappointed as the tech and implementations never materialised beyond The Lawnmower Man, then you'll understand my enthusiasm for this whole project! As Michael Abrash [now a developer at Valve] puts forth in posts on his blog, the time may finally be right for the holy trinity of micro-componentry [tracking chips, hardware gyros, LCD displays with enough density], computing power and audience acceptance for VR to finally arrive.

Enter Palmer Lucky and his Kickstarter campaign to create the Rift which ultimately raised nearly 2.5 million dollars US [ten times what they asked for], and now the developer kits look like they'll ship to keen recipients in March/April this year. There's talk of a commercial version in the coming months which may be compatible with current and future gaming platforms including consoles that should include an internal display capable of 1080p.

The Oculus Rift's FOV can be summed up in the image below:

Now that's immersive.

This widely expanded FOV [Field of View] is achieved through a combination of anamorphically pre-distorted stereoscopic left and right views and LEEP optics. You can get an idea of what the pre-distortion looks like in this image here... check out the monitor view:

 Cue moments of vulnerability where friends and family re-arrange the furniture while you're in RiftSpace or pelt you with projectiles in an effort to increase the immersion.

Alongside Mr Lucky are some heavyweight industry proponents proclaiming their involvement including John Carmack [of ID software and Doom fame] supplying space-industry know-how in the form of low latency gyro software and hardware, Gabe Newell and Valve Software [who have already prepared Team Fortress2 for the Rift], Epic Games' Unreal SDK and game engine, Unity3D's game engine [ready alongside the Unreal SDK with built-in support for the Rift's launch] and Adhesive Games' outstanding Hawken already Rift-ready. The list increases almost daily!

Naturally this head mounted display will offer the kind of immersive experience gamers have been craving for years, but as an artist as well as a gamer I see a new possibility opening up, that of creating experiences that people simply want to be part of - moments of exploration, virtual sculptures and the kinds of visual poetry that is rather lost when displayed on a normal computer monitor. Alongside the entertainment options I'm interested in creating and sharing 'places' that cannot be visited physically and moments that are otherwise impossible to be part of.

All in all it's a very exciting time for game development and game consumers and I can't wait to try a set of these things out!

-j

Hardcore realtime HDR stereoscopic welding helmet

It is a very exciting time to be interested in imaging and potential VR/AR developments...

http://www.eyetap.org/~siggraph2012/

"In this demonstration, we present a specialized version of HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging (use of multiple differently exposed input images for each extended-range output image [2, 1]), adapted for use in electric arc welding, which also shows promise as a general-purpose seeing aid. Tungsten Insert Gas (TIG) welding, in particular, presents an extremely high dynamic range scene (higher than most other welding processes). Since TIG welding requires keen eyesight and exact hand-to-eye coordination (i.e. more skill and more visual acuity than most other welding processes), being able to see in such extreme dynamic range is beneficial to welders and welding inspectors."

This is a fantastic example of current realtime stereoscopic image processing in an application where AR [augmented reality] can be of real benefit to the technician... you can see in the associated video clip where the AR overlay indicates critical information like the speed of the weld and the TIG tip distance so the technician performing the weld can close in on the creation of the optimum join in the metal. Normally not only would the join itself be nearly impossible to see where the tip is, but the technician can see other things like the smoke emanating from the weld, the surroundings, the rest of the metal involved. Plus the helmet looks cool! Reminds me of this:

Coinciding with Michael Abrash's blog at Valve about his involvement in and development of the Oculus Rift mean things may be coming together at the right time finally!!

So excite!

-j