By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: December 28, 2007
Friday, 28 December 2007
- NYT’s Markoff Says Maybe More Than Just Fox ★
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John Markoff, reporting for The New York Times:
Apple’s sputtering efforts to be a major purveyor of video downloads may get a boost in 2008 from an agreement with 20th Century Fox for digital movie rentals.
Apple has been trying to interest a number of Hollywood studios in an iTunes rental service, and several people familiar with the negotiations said that more than one studio would appear onstage at the company’s MacWorld exhibition here beginning Jan. 14 to endorse a new Apple movie rental service.
“Sputtering” doesn’t sound fair to me. Clearly iTunes video sales pale in comparison to music sales, but is iTunes really far behind any other online distribution service? I think Apple’s in a terrific position to build a killer video rental business very quickly.
- Financial Times Reports Apple Has Online Movie Rental Deal With Fox ★
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Matthew Garrahan and Kevin Allison, reporting for The Financial Times:
Apart from letting people rent online, Apple will also for the first time extend its FairPlay digital rights management system beyond its own products.
A digital file protected by FairPlay will be included in new Fox DVD releases, enabling film content to be transferred or “ripped” from the disc to a computer and video iPod. DVD content can already be moved to an iPod but this requires special software and is considered piracy by some studios.
Rentals are the sweet spot for online movie distribution; if they can get a large library of titles, I’d drop Netflix. Sounds like The Financial Times’s source is someone at Fox.
- Letterman Makes Deal With Writers ★
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Late Night With David Letterman is set to return next week, with its writing staff on board. Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno are returning the same day, but almost certainly without writers. Good for Letterman, and good for his writers. But the funny part is that Letterman is the host most capable of pulling off a writer-less comedy show; my gut feeling is that Leno’s writer-less shows are going to be awful.
- He Directed That? ★
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Nice list of anomalous films in the oeuvres of well-known directors. (Via Coudal.)
- Rob Enderle, Jackass of the Nation ★
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Rob Enderle questions the sanity of Steve Jobs and the future of Apple, based on Dan Lyons’s fake story of legal threats against him for the Fake Steve weblog. I.e. Enderle has written an entire column premised on a Fake Steve joke being actually true. Someone should send Enderle some links from CARS and see if he’ll fall for them, too.
Update: Enderle explains how it’s not his fault.
- Cyndicate 1.1 ★
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Bug-fix and minor feature update release of Cynical Peak’s email-client-ish feed reader. Normally $30, but you can save 10 percent through the end of the year via MacSanta. (Worth checking out all the other apps on sale through MacSanta while you’re at it.)
- Circuit City Executives Run Company Into Ground, Reward Themselves Handsomely ★
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Dean Baker:
The basic story is that last March, the wise men who run Circuit City came up with the brilliant idea of laying off their more senior salespeople, who get $14-$15 an hour, and replacing them with new hires who get around $9 an hour. It turns out that this move was not very good for business. One of the reasons that people go to a store like Circuit City, rather than buying things on the Internet, is that they want to be able to talk to a knowledgeable salesperson. Since Circuit City had laid off their knowledgeable salespeople, there was little reason to shop there.
- Club Thievey ★
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Mike Lee, the world’s toughest programmer, wants to buy you a Lemur.
- John Nack on Adobe CS3’s Connections to Omniture ★
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Adobe’s John Nack discusses the ways that Adobe uses Omniture, but completely misses the point of my criticism. What I’m calling a disgrace is that the server that’s getting pinged is named in such a way that it is clearly an attempt to masquerade as a local area network IP address. Regardless the nature of the data that is being sent to Omniture, it is wrong that the server is named “192.168.112.2O7.net”.
Update: Nack acknowledges that the issue is the deceptive server name, has no answer now, but vows to investigate.
- Warner Music Group Now Sells DRM-Free Digital Downloads ★
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Nate Anderson:
Warner Music has bent beneath the force of the anti-DRM winds sweeping the globe. The label will now offer its complete catalog, DRM-free, through Amazon’s new MP3 store.
The announcement means that EMI, Universal, and Warner now offer their catalogues in DRM-free digital formats, making Sony BMG (of rootkit fame) the lone holdout among the majors.
- Omniture Privacy: 2o7.net Explained ★
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Omniture:
2o7.net is a domain used by Omniture to help provide portions of its Omniture SiteCatalyst and Omniture SearchCenter products. Specifically, this domain is used by Omniture to place cookies, on behalf of its customers, on the computers of visitors to customers’ selected websites.
Oh, well, that certainly explains what Adobe CS3 apps and iTunes are doing making connections there, and why the subdomains on 2o7.net are designed to masquerade as a local-network IP addresses.
- Omniture, Apple, iTunes, and Privacy ★
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The iTunes MiniStore sends data to the same scammy-looking “192.168.112.2o7” Omniture-owned web server that Adobe CS3 apps do. There’s no reason to use a server address like this other than to hope to slip past firewall filters misconfigured to allow traffic matching a wildcard pattern like “192.168.*”.