J.R.McHale

Time: Current routers are not the only cause of internet bottlenecks (e.g., last mile issues), but as Cisco, Google and others work to dramatically speed up the internet, Hollywood and other content providers are likely to experience even greater disruptions to their business models.

Vanity Fair has an interesting excerpt from “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,” the new book by Michael Lewis being published this month by W.W.Norton. Lewis describes how a 32-year-old hedge fund manager and former doctor spotted the bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market and diligently and patiently developed a strategy to reap large profits by betting against the market.

Motoko Rich in the New York Times sketches out the economics of book publishing in comparison to ebook publishing and pricing. Rich makes the common mistake of assuming overhead as fixed, when there is little reason for many large components of publishing overhead (e.g., rent) not to be slashed in a world of ebooks.

According to The Financial Times: “Hollywood’s hopes for a future built on digital film downloads have been severely undermined by research showing cooling consumer demand for movies online… . US revenues for 2009 were substantially lower than forecast at $291m. ‘The market just cooled off,’ said Arash Amel, a research director with Screen Digest. ‘This wasn’t caused by economic factors . . . the level of interest in digital downloads just isn’t there.’”

Via Futurepundit.com: “A study headed by Anna Dahl, MS, of Sweden’s Jönköping University, found that individuals with higher midlife body mass index (BMI) scores had significantly lower general cognitive ability and significantly steeper decline than their thinner counterparts over time. These statistics were compiled from a study of Swedish twins that took place over the course of nearly 40 years, from 1963 to 2002; the results were the same for both men and women. The press release also describes how people with a history of cyclical weight loss and gain have more problems in their old age.”

According to Techcrunch: Two law firms filed a class action lawsuit in federal court alleging unfair business practices by Yelp – “The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.”

Among the tips given by Fred Von Lohmann of the EFF: (1) get your own domain name; (2) back up your blog, be ready to move it; (3) make sure your hosting provider can reach you; and (4) choose a service that has clear DMCA policies.

As described by Peter Kafka at All Things Digital, Twones is likely designed to be a legal Hype Machine, but according to Kafka it is not as convenient or usable as the Hype Machine. The Hype Machine, because it caches songs for listening, is in at best a legal grey area (which has deterred investors in the service). Twones apparently works as a Firefox browser plug-in that takes one directly to mp3 blogs to listen to songs.

Techcrunch describes Bloom Energy’s technology, which was unveiled today at a Silicon Valley press event: “Each fuel cell, which is made from sand essentially (zirconium oxide), is a square wafer about the size of a CD box. Each wafer can produce about 25 watts of energy, enough to power a lightbulb. Stack them together and you get a box that could power a house. Group them into larger units, and you get enough energy to power a building or an entire campus. [Bloom Energy’s founder and CEO] calls them energy servers because they are modular like servers in a data center. Need more energy? Add more boxes.” The downside: not yet cost effective for homes.

More on Bloom Energy’s fuel cells:
Wired compares Bloom’s fuel cell approach with solar and wind. Also in Wired, are the Bloom fuel cells too expensive?

The Citizen Media Law Project (hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society) analyzes the question of whether photographing a public artwork can be fair use. The topic has come to the fore in photography circles as the result of a relatively recent lawsuit regarding a photograph taken of a woman standing near a sculpture in Seattle.

After weighing in that there appears to be a decent fair use argument in the Seattle case, the CMLP author recommends that: “Cities … should reconsider how they commission public artwork. Cities could demand that artists surrender their copyright interests in order to receive public funding … The most reasonable solution is to keep public artwork completely open to the public. Until cities do this, however, commercial photographers may want to think twice about incorporating public artwork into their photographs.”

Freedom to Tinker is running a series of posts on the relative ease of unmasking anonymous speakers online.

Also in the series: What Third Parties Know About John Doe and The Traceability of Anonymous Online Comment