Amazon: Amusing us to death

Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices – NYTimes.com

In a rather “Big Brotherish” move, Amazon.com recently removed access to 2 digital editions of books by George Orwell.

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

The funny thing about this story is that, while Orwell’s 1984 portrays the intrusion of governmental power into our lives, it’s really restrictive copyright laws encouraged by the content industries that made this possible. It looks as though Postman’s Huxleyan prediction was indeed much more correct! If books follow the trend of music–away from physical media–we can expect this loss of control over things we “buy” to happen more often because you never really own anything but an “implied license” use it (with a number of restrictions). Yet, as long as we’re entertained, there’s little chance anyone will protest.

Edit: here is some more detail

Total Telecom – Online ad sales open door to viruses

Total Telecom – Online ad sales open door to viruses

A good deal of the Internet is, for better or worse, funded by advertising. Stories like this show just how shaky of a foundation this might be.

Viruses can be incorporated directly within an ad, so that simply clicking on the ad or visiting the site can infect a computer, or ads can be used to direct users to a nefarious Web site that aims to steal passwords or identities. In most cases, the problem becomes apparent within a matter of hours and quick fixes are put in place, but that’s not fast enough for Internet surfers whose computers end up infected or compromised.

If Internet users loose faith in their ability to click an advertisement, ad revenue will decline. If ad revenue declines, companies like Google or (insert newspaper name here) will be hard pressed to continue operating at no cost to the bulk of their users. While a business model change might not be a bad idea, problems like this show just how quickly the landscape of the Internet might change.

I wonder if we can categorize this as a browser bug? Could Firefox/Safari/Opera/IE/etc lock themselves up tight enough to prevent malware, or do we need more trusted computing (or Macs)?

Open sourcing homework

Academic source code dust-up symptom of CS education ills – Ars Technica

Short story–student puts Comp Sci class homework online under an open source license after the class is over; instructor is annoyed.

My quick take on this is that it sounds much like paranoia over sharing of test questions. I think, as academics, we should approach teaching just like research. The way that we teach should evolve over time to be constantly improving. This includes revising test questions and assignments every time a subject is taught. It’s more work, but it has the added benefit of eliminating the exact problem that this professor thought he saw.