Category: Journalism

First Draft by Tim Porter: Why TimesSelect is the Right Thing for the Times to Do

Tim Porter says TimesSelect is the Right Thing for the New York Times to Do:

Charging for full access to the newspaper, like the Wall Street Journal does, is one option. Selling subscriptions to pure online journalism products like Salon or TheStreet.com is another. Putting a price on the head of your most popular columnists, like the Time does, is yet another.

That one hit close to home.

I pay $99 for an annual subscription to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. I pay $39 for an annual subscription to Salon. And I pay $199 to TheStreet.com for its RealMoney service. And I’ve seriously considered paying the New York Times for TimesSelect.

Gee, maybe this online publishing thing could work after all.

With NTFS, you get eggroll

David Lawsky of Reuters, analyzing the Microsoft antitrust hearings before the European Commission’s Court of First Instance, comes up with the Worst. Metaphor. Ever.

The workings of what one might call “Chinese restaurant protocols” may help explain the importance of computer protocols.

Chinese restaurants deal with clients, who sit at tables waiting to eat while servers go from table to table taking orders and delivering food.

In the case of computer protocols, the clients are personal computers, operated by Microsoft’s near-monopoly Windows system. The PCs send requests to central computers, known as servers, to validate passwords, provide files and print documents, among other tasks.

Chinese restaurant servers, like computer servers, follow protocols—that is, rules and custom of interaction—in meeting the needs of the clients.

For example, clients are served in the order they came in, unless they have reservations. All clients at the same table want their meals at the same time.
Menu items may be designated by number as well as description, a familiar code to Chinese restaurant clients. Egg fried rice might be Number 18 and General Tsao’s Chicken Number 14.

But if someone calling from home for take-out has an old menu, the code could be wrong. The old number 14 was sweet-and-sour pork, and the caller winds up with General Tsao’s Chicken.

About the only cliche he missed was a reference to wanting to access those files again an hour later. I had to check the dateline carefully to make sure it wasn’t April 1.

Dear PR agencies, please don’t be this clueless

Me, in e-mail to PR agent, after receiving two particularly irrelevant press releases this morning:

I am not the least bit interested in fuel cell technology. I write about Windows and digital media. Not about fuel cells. I also don’t write about Macs, except when those Macs run Windows. So the press release about the world’s largest online community for Mac users was also irrelevant.

Can you at least make an EFFORT to target your releases to appropriate press? If you can’t do that, then take me off your list completely.

The reply floored me:

You never told me what you write about, so how would I know?  I’ll just take you off the list if you’re that picky.

Wow. This particular flack has been in the business for as long as I have, which means we were working tradeshows together back in the Early Comdex era. She added my e-mail address to her mailing list without asking my permission, apparently without bothering to find out who I am or what I write about. And after all these years she hasn’t figured out how to use Google or Bacon’s to see which pitches might be appropriate for a particular journalist? Amazing.

Let’s see…

Unsolicited? Check.

Commercial? Yep.

E-mail? Indeed.

And I’m “picky” to ask her to stop spamming me? Heh.

In self-defense, I’ve set up a rule at my e-mail server to automatically delete any incoming messages from this domain.

Now, do you think this agency’s clients know that they’re being represented by someone so clueless? Do they know they’re basically pouring their PR dollars down a rathole? If you’re a marketing executive at a high-tech company, maybe you should check in with some editors to find out what they really think of the PR agency you’ve hired. You might be surprised.

The slow death of the English language

My erstwhile[*] PC Computing colleague John Montgomery, now at Microsoft, has a wonderful eulogy on words that the PC industry, led by Microsoft, has killed. One of my favorites: 

Community. A word now utterly without meaning, community used to be have connotations of people connecting with other people who have like interests. Now it means a Web site. I’m hoping this one will be able to be reborn.

The whole thing is worth reading, especially if you’re a PC marketing type wondering how not to debase the English language any further. It’s also entertaining if you’re a once or former editor or a high-tech blogger desperately trying to avoid writing like a hack.

[*] Alas, the word erstwhile is hopelessly misused these days. It properly means “in the past” or “former” but is all too often confused with esteemed. John happens to be both.

As an aside… Back when the Internets were just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, I wrote an essay on Microspeak, the curious blend of jargon, slang, and groupthink that characterizes conversation around Redmond. It’s lost to the ages, but a bit of Googling turned up this mid-1990s-vintage page that has a lot of the same material.

If you spend any amount of time at Microsoft, you’ve probably noticed that many Softies, when asked a question, begin their answer with “So…” What’s up with that?

Don’t reward bad journalism

Thomas Hawk reminds us what happens when journalists lose track of their ethical responsibilities. He suggests a letter-writing campaign to Joe Fay, editor of The Register, reminding him that his publication printed a fabricated e-mail message and has never apologized for or retracted that story, despite repeated notices of the underlying facts.

Thomas could go a step further with this campaign. I would suggest writing some letters to The Register’s sponsors, pointing out that they’ve chosen to align themselves with a publication that doesn’t respect the truth.

Expansys.com (along with its USA subsidiary, Expansys-usa.com) is a major sponsor of The Register. I certainly won’t buy anything from them, and I won’t recommend them to anyone else as long as they’re supporting this outfit.

I just saw an ad for Crucial.com on The Register’s site, served via Mediaplex.com. I regularly recommend Crucial.com. I think they might want to know that they’re unwittingly affiliated with an unethical organization.

If you want to join Thomas’s letter-writing campaign, be sure to cc those folks.

Clueless commentary from a big name

John C. Dvorak’s latest column is a rant about Microsoft’s security software that includes this amazing paragraph. And by “amazing,” I mean “breathtakingly ill-informed and doesn’t PC Magazine have any technical editors anymore?”

I use a utility called Prevx [link: http://www.prevx.com], a host-intrusion protection system, as well as one or two other antispyware packages to keep the stuff at bay. And it still sneaks in once in a while. Most recently, I forgot to turn off my CUTEftp client and left it running all night. In the morning some system had loaded some weird software called “active skin,” and I had to use SpySubtract to remove 26 Registry entries. Exactly how anything manages to worm in through the open port and place items in the Registry is beyond me, but it happens all the time.

Oh, lordy.

Repeat after me: Leaving an FTP client open does not allow an intruder to install software on your computer. Cannot happen. Science fiction. Even if you were to run an FTP server on your computer, the only thing someone could do would be to upload files to your PC. They couldn’t run the program or edit your registry. And anyway, that’s completely irrelevant in this case, because Dvorak was running an FTP client.

So what about this horrible spyware program that had to be removed? ActiveSkin is a UI development environment from ShapeSoft. It uses an ActiveX control. I can’t find out much about it (and the company that owns it has gone dark), but I know that Symantec calls it “a non-malicious component that may be used by other applications.” I have seen hints that it is used with ICQ, with Ad Hunter, with the SigmaTel audio control panel, and with a number of homebrewed VB6 programs (like this one). Several well-known spyware and Trojan programs use this component, including Insecure Executable Downloader, but it does not appear to be harmful in and of itself.

In fact, given that the spyware scanner John is using is from Trend Micro, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a false positive. The ActiveX control (remember, Symantec calls it non-malicious) was probably included with a program that Dvorak installed. It registered itself at installation time (thus adding entries to the registry). It wouldn’t be the first time that Trend Micro had been guilty of identifying a perfectly legitimate program as spyware.

From that false premise, Dvorak then reaches the sweeping conclusion that Microsoft is unwilling and unable to “fix” Windows so that it’s perfectly secure.

Sigh. There ain’t no such thing as a secure operating system. Sensible security precautions can be built in, development processes can be improved, reaction time for fixing security issues can be cut down. But “fixing” Windows does not mean creating a code base that has no more security issues ever.

This is yet another reason why I stopped reading PC Magazine. The trouble is, several hundred thousand people still do, and after reading this column they’ll come away with the mistaken belief that hostile software can attack their computer using a simple FTP client. Who knows what other ridiculous technical errors are in this same issue?

As Dvorak would say, sheesh.

Tony Glover, please call your fact-checker

In defense of his inaccurate story on Microsoft’s nonexistent “cheap, disposable pre-recorded DVDs,” Technology Editor Tony Glover of The Business Online makes still more errors. Here’s one:

Last week’s story … also sparked a bushfire of debate across the internet by thousands of web bloggers, with many claiming this newspaper had been hoaxed.

Thousands? Thousands? Wow. According to Technorati, which is widely regarded as having the most exhaustive index of weblogs (19.1 million sites, according to their About page), the number of blog posts since the publication of the original, inaccurate story that contained the words Microsoft, disposable, and DVDs was … 40. And that includes pickups from “spam blogs” that steal and repurpose other people’s content as well as a few duplicate posts. A Technorati search for “one play only” DVD Microsoft turned up only 18 blog posts.

Memeorandum.com, which is pickier about its index, found four blogs that linked to the original story (including mine) and seven blogs that linked to my follow-up post.

So, thousands of blogs? Heh. Nice try.

Oh, and while I don’t usually call people out on typos (anyone can make a mistake), one of the things I learned in J-school was just how important it is for a professional journalist to spell names correctly, especially when the name in question belongs to one of the most powerful and well-known executives in the technology industry and said journalist has the title Technology Editor. Tony Glover, in this week’s story about how search engines are changing the face of business, spells the name of the CEO of Sun Microsystems wrong. Twice. Tony, you might want to make a mental note that the company’s CEO has the unlikely name of Scott McNealy, not McNealey, as you wrote. Twice. You could fact-check it yourself here if you’d like.

An “unlikely” defense of the one-play DVD story

Tony Glover of The Business Online delivered his promised follow-up on the single-play DVD story one day early. Read it for yourself here:

The Business, the bloggers and Microsoft’s ‘one-play’ DVD

It doesn’t start out well:

One blogger going by the unlikely name of Ed Bott claimed to have carried out a piece of investigative journalism of his own to prove the story was a “hoax”. Though dismissed by other online commentators, Bott’s blog found favour with a hard core of dissenters on the internet.

I’ll have to tell my parents all about the unlikely name they chose for me. I certainly didn’t expect a professional journalist to start a serious defense of a controversial news story by making fun of my name, although I will give him credit for spelling it correctly. But let’s carry on…

Glover’s defense of his story is almost comical. Last week, he wrote, “Microsoft has developed a cheap, disposable pre-recorded DVD disc that consumers can play only once.”

This week, he unmasks his source and provides a quote:

Alistair Baker, Microsoft’s UK managing director, told The Business: “Microsoft’s digital rights management [DRM] software generates a licence key to give the DVD content owner total control over how the content is viewed. This could mean watching a film only once, or over a limited period.” [emphasis added]

Yes, it could mean that, exactly as I said in my earlier posts. But it certainly doesn’t mean that Microsoft is poised to unleash a new disposable disc format on the world, which was what the original story screamed. (It referred to the alleged new disposable disc format as a “revolutionary product.”)

I don’t see anything in Mr. Baker’s quote about “cheap” or “disposable” DVD discs. In fact, given the retooling costs involved and the greater complexity of the dual-layer HD DVD media, the new discs will probably cost somewhat more to make than current DVDs.

As I pointed out earlier today, the DRM components in the Windows Media format can be used in a variety of ways. Using the DRM toolkit, a content provider could choose to create digital media files that can only be viewed on the 28th day of any month between 1300 and 1400 GMT. Why they would choose to do so is another question completely. It would be a bad business decision, in my opinion, just as building a business around disposable DVD discs would be.

The real story, the one that Glover should have printed last week, goes something like this:

Next year, new optical disks in the HD DVD format will begin hitting the market. This format, a competitor to the Sony-backed Blu-Ray Disc, can be used to produce a hybrid disc that includes standard-definition content and high-definition versions on different layers. Consumers who play the new disks in standard DVD players won’t be able to view the new high-definition content. For that, they’ll need a new player or a personal computer running Microsoft’s Windows Vista, which is also due out in 2006.

[update: Some details in the following paragraph have been revised based on discussions with representatives of Microsoft’s Windows Media group]

The most controversial aspect of digital media is its support for Digital Rights Management (DRM). Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM strategy, which has been widely debated among experts in the digital media community, gives content distributors a wide range of tools to lock down content that is released in Windows Media format. They can limit the number of plays, or specify that a promotional video can’t be played past the date the film is released. These DRM technologies are used in online content distribution. Some content providers (MovieLink and CinemaNow) already offer Internet-based services that allow consumers to download movies on a pay-per-view basis; future services could take the form of all-you-can-watch subscriptions similar to the Napster and Yahoo music services.

Windows Media DRM is not, however, used in the HD DVD disc format. It uses the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), currently under development.

That’s the story I would have written [and then rewritten!], and I would have proudly tacked my “unlikely” by-line on it. But Slashdot wouldn’t have been interested in it, because it’s not news.

So, what’s missing from Glover’s story? How about a quote from one of the content providers who are dying to flood the market with these revolutionary new disposable DVDs? Somehow I think it’s highly unlikely that anyone from a major content producer has any such plans.

More on the single-play DVD

Earlier this week, I posted an item debunking a story that claimed Microsoft is on the verge of introducing a “cheap, disposable” single-play DVD.

Yesterday, Wall Street Journal columnist Jeremy Wagstaff, in his loose wire blog, says he doesn’t know what to believe:

I contacted the author, business editor Tony Glover, who says the online publication “stand[s] by the story 100% and will be running a follow-up on Sunday naming sources”.

Well, that should be interesting. Glover’s original story appeared in The Business and its online edition, under the headline Microsoft invents a one-play only DVD to combat Hollywood piracy. (And his by-line lists him as Technology Editor, not business editor.)

The story is unsourced and lacks any details that would allow an independent reader to do any further investigation. It also makes a bold assertion that is thoroughly contradicted by known facts:

Computer software giant Microsoft has developed a cheap, disposable pre-recorded DVD disc that consumers can play only once. … The revolutionary product could be on the market as early as next year, with the new DVD players needed to view them.”

Break it down:

Microsoft has developed a new DVD disc? That’s just plain wrong on its face. Microsoft doesn’t develop optical disc formats. Anyone who follows digital technology knows there are two next-generation optical drive formats due out next year. One is the Blu-Ray Disc, from a Sony-led consortium, and the other is the HD DVD format, from a consortium led by Toshiba. Both formats have been under development for some time and are due to be introduced next year. Microsoft didn’t develop either format, although they recently threw their support behind the HD DVD, which was approved by the DVD Forum in December 2003.

Disposable discs that can be played one time only? This is almost certainly a reference to digital rights management features in Windows Media. If a content provider chooses to use the DRM features in the Windows Media format, they have all sorts of options, including the ability to specify an expiration date for a media file, or to specify how many times it can be played, or to require a subscription. Again, there’s nothing new here; the DRM-enabled Windows Media video format has been around for more than two years. (See the Digital Media Timeline here, and note that WMV HD was added in January 2003. For details on what content providers can do with Windows Media DRM, see “Enabling DRM on Windows Media High Definition Video DVD ROM Discs,” available in Word format here, for more details.)

The rest of the story was a complete mishmash, jumping from discussions of downloadable content to the fortunes of Netflix without ever making much of a point. It’s exactly what one might expect from a business writer who is trying to write about a complex technology he doesn’t really understand. (That’s why I avoid stories about the business side of Microsoft or its stock price. I’m not an expert.)

Wagstaff says my story was “intemperate”:

When a writer finds a story they believe to be untrue, they should try to contact the author for comment when publishing their ‘knock-down’ story. At the very least, they must show they have authoritative sources who contest the story’s accuracy or veracity (not the same thing) and make this clear. They might also choose careful language which allows for the possibility of gray between the black and the white — “source X said he knew of no such meeting/product/agreement”, or “company X denied the story and said on the contrary it had no plans for xxxx”. Saying something is a hoax/has no truth to it/is bogus without enclosing the comment in quotes is not only a tad extreme, it’s not good journalistic practice. Imagine if someone did it to you.

Contact the author? Please. When a journalist publishes a story, it stands on its own. If the story is wrong, the story is wrong. This sensational story was picked up by dozens of sites, none of whom bothered to contact the author or Microsoft before amplifying it. The story took on a life of its own and it should be judged on its own merits, which are sorely lacking.

I will agree that “hoax” was a poorly chosen word. That implies deception on the part of the author, and the more likely explanation was that the author simply jumped to unwarranted conclusions based on an inadequate understanding of the technology. It’s also possible that he was deliberately “spun” by a source. But without giving any details of where the story came from in the first place, all we can do is guess.

I’ll publish a link to the follow-up story when I see it posted.

Update: Tony Glover posted his reply a day early. Here’s the follow-up.