It's A Binary World 2.0

Insights on fatherhood, technology, culture, photography, and politics

Giving them a taste of their own medicine

| May 8, 2013

It is a fact of life that things will be bootlegged. (commonly called pirated, but this is one area where I strongly agree with rms. Piracy is a horrible thing where people get kidnapped on the ocean and die. I have in-law relatives who have died from pirates. So I don’t find it cute to [...]

An Open Plea for Sanity to Amazon and Valve

| April 23, 2011

Dear Amazon and Valve, I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems.  The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation.  Let’s start with Amazon.  The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music.  Back in the [...]

Rethinking Ebooks

| July 30, 2010

Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 – 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it [...]

Another Reason Why People Illicitly Download TV Shows

| January 11, 2009

My father-in-law is over today and he’s been dying to watch the Bizarre Foods Paris episode.  I’m opposed to buying video media off of iTunes because of the digital restrictions management (DRM).  But, he’s been wanting to watch that episode forever and we no longer have cable so I can’t record it onto MythTV.  We [...]

Microsoft DRM Metldown Redux

| May 15, 2008

As I mentioned here, Micro$oft has provided yet another example of why digital restrictions management does nothing but hurt legitimate consumers.  To remind you, this is when Microsoft turned off the servers for its ironically named “playsforsure” DRM system.  These songs, which consumers would told, would play for sure on any digital media player containing [...]

Another example of DRM being hurtful

| April 27, 2008

The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design is reporting that MSN Music is shutting down, leaving anyone who bought music legally left with music they can no longer listen to.  This will have two outcomes and neither of which is what the music labels really want.  Some people will decide they got left holding the [...]

iPod Shuffle

| January 10, 2008

For years I had been saying that I would not buy an iPod product.  After all, they sell music in the iTunes music store with DRM on it.  All of my music on my Linux computer is in the OGG format and it can’t be played with iPods.  However, when it came time to buy [...]

Charitable Donations for 2008

| January 1, 2008

This year I decided to mainly support technological causes.  I donated to the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  I think that rms and the rest over at the FSF are really doing a lot of great work to preserve our freedoms.  I especially like the Defective by Design campaign they’ve been running.  [...]

Another example of the perils of DRM

| November 8, 2007

Time and again I’ve warned my readers of the perils of DRM.  (Specifically here and here).  That’s why I don’t buy music on iTunes and have given all of my digital music patronage to Amazon.com.  Even my wife, who’s not as into FOSS and all that as I am, has become disgusted as she’s understood [...]

HEY RIAA, all you needed to do was offer DRM-free music!

| September 26, 2007

I’ve already spent around $11 on Amazon.com’s MP3 download store. Why? Because they are selling MP3s of my favorite artists without any digital restrictions management (DRM). This is what has been keeping both my wife and I away from iTunes. Oh yeah, and the songs are cheaper than iTunes! It appears that all of the [...]

Why the TV and Movie Companies have it so wrong

| September 15, 2007

Let’s pretend I’m Joe College-Grad Consumer and I’m trying to evaluate how I should obtain my video content. I’m interested in watching shows as they come out – not later when they’re on box sets. Let’s see, I could buy my content on iTunes, Amazon Unbox, or some other such service. If I buy my [...]

That was fast!

| August 17, 2007

Ars Technica is reporting that Netflix is promising that they will be working very hard to get Macintoshes supported. Looks like they read my letter and now they have my brother covered. Now they need to work on Linux support. And drop the DRM because I guess they ignored my paragraph on how it’s BS [...]

An Open Letter to Netflix

| August 16, 2007

I am not an unreasonable man and I full understand your need to focus on making your “watch now” feature debut available exclusively to Windows users. After all, they do make up about 90% of computer users. However, I do have some problems with this as a long time plan. First of all, it does [...]

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

| May 2, 2007

What a beautiful hex number! Check this page out to see what it may mean. The Free Speech Flag…..just check out the hex that represents these colours.

Why buy digital music??

| April 21, 2007

While thinking about digital music recently, and how great it was the BMI decided to sell some of its music on iTunes without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). However, these tracks will cost $2 while the DRM’d tracks will cost $1. First of all, this seems to be a scheme to prove that the public doesn’t [...]