"If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don't, they're doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town."

"I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy."

"Nonetheless, the success of JMLR does provide a clue that the cost of running a premier journal might be far less than publishers imply, if they were to rethink the process substantially — maybe not $10 per article, but surely far less than the $5,000 average revenue per article that scholarly publishers currently receive. This expectation is borne out by the several non-profit and commercial open-access journal publishers that are able to operate in the black with publication fees a fraction of that average."

"The industry is inhibited by several obstacles that executives themselves candidly acknowledge. One involves the difficulty of changing the behavior of people trained in the ways of a mature and monopolistic industry. Still another is the unavoidable fact that the part of the newspaper industry that is growing, digital, continues to provide only a small part of the revenue, while the part that is shrinking, print, provides most of the money-a paradox that is difficult to navigate and hard to resist. One pervasive feeling is that 15 years into the digital transition, executives still feel they are in the early stages of figuring out a how to proceed."

"My readers ask me that question more than just about any other. So here's my question back: What is school for? (Click the link to get to the free download).

I've just published a 30,000 word manifesto, totally free to read, share, translate, print and, most of all, use to start an essential conversation. It took a lot to get it to you, and I'm encouraging you to take a few minutes to check it out. After you read it, perhaps you'll write one of your own."

"Today, however, Tribler is more relevant than ever before.

Developed by a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology, the main goal is to come up with a robust implementation of BitTorrent that doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline.

“Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak.

“We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.”"

"To attempt to draw a political map of the reconstituted North America is to confront these contradictions head-on. What counts as a nation? How to capture the overlapping spheres of responsibility? What about the areas all but abandoned to wilderness? Does membership confer citizen-hood?"

"The News of the World staff reportedly greeted Ms. Brooks' statements in their newsroom with hoots and derision. One would expect no less. Britain now apparently faces a period without coverage of vicars with knickers before Murdoch launches the Sun on Sunday to cover the screws of the world.

Murdoch has been brought to bay by one great British newspaper, the Guardian. It devoted two years to the task. It did what frightened politicians and cowed opinion leaders dared not do -- it defied the power and the money of the Alien. Ironic, that Murdoch seems about to lose what would have been his crown jewel because he was never able to restrain the low tastes and trashy standards that wounded my newspaper in one of his drive-by shootings."

"The German one sounds a lot more ominous, though, because it's all "Nazis chaining women to their stoves," instead of the Dutch piece, which was more "look at those lucky ladies, zipping around on their bicycles on their way to flower arranging class.""

"Below, the book is available for PDF download in a variety of languages. Check back soon, as more languages are on the way."

The basic premise of Lytro’s technology is pretty simple: the camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. (I got a demonstration of the camera’s 3-D photos on a laptop earlier today, and was blown away.)

"The idea is to create an open-access online philosophy journal (and then journals in other disciplines), with the peer review process crowd sourced. As many reviewers as want to read a paper can vote to accept/reject, with brief comments. Accepted papers will immediately be published online.

From what I can see, the open access will be free for authors. They are now recruiting reviewers.

Interesting idea."

"One of them, Karim Hijazi, used his Infragard password for his personal gmail, and the gmail of the company he owns. "Unveillance", a whitehat company that specializes in data breaches and botnets, was compromised because of Karim's incompetence. We stole all of his personal emails and his company emails. We also briefly took over, among other things, their servers and their botnet control panel.

After doing so, we contacted Karim and told him what we did. After a few discussions, he offered to pay us to eliminate his competitors through illegal hacking means in return for our silence. Karim, a member of an FBI-related website, was willing to give us money and inside info in order to destroy his opponents in the whitehat world. We even discussed plans for him to give us insider botnet information."

"The new PLoS Search API gives developers access to rich data that can be flexibly integrated into applications for the web, desktop or mobile devices. It allows PLoS content to be queried using any of the fields in the PLoS Search engine. By opening the PLoS content and data through this API, we hope to encourage the development of tools that will improve the way PLoS users discover and interact with our (and their) content."

"Read carefully, and you can immediately see what's going on here.  Basically, the digital world has made sharing educational documents more efficient, such that reproducing printed copies of material is no longer a necessity.  And academic publishers are freaking out because a revenue stream is threatened.  This, of course, is where fair use should come into play as a protection for those seeking to share and enhance knowledge for our nation's young people, something which virtually everyone would agree is important.  But not so-called academic publishers.  For them, it's that revenue stream that's important, and the progress of the nation's knowledge be damned. "

"What should be amazingingly clear is that books--trade publishers, self-publishers, ebooks, etc--are doing fine, but scholarly books are bankrupt. The old style academic blogs that many of my colleagues used to keep may be fading but blogging is shifting and proliferating. Writing is alive and growing. I imagine it has little concern for the humans that hitch a ride to it. Stop trying to save the monograph and instead try to answer the question that the monograph was originally developed to answer: how can I communicate with the world?"

"…"Earlier this year Fang closed a microblog within days of opening it after thousands of Chinese internet users left comments, almost all of them deriding him. They attacked him as 'a running dog for the government' and 'the enemy of netizens.'"

According to the Associated Press, who spoke to local police, Chinese authorities are searching for the egg-loving shoe-thrower. Fang's office, however, denies the attack happened at all."

"When I privately asked them why they had used R*-trees, while it was easy to check experimentally that they did not help, the answer was “it was the only way to get our paper in a major conference”. So my work has been made more complicated for the sole purpose of impressing the reviewers: “look, I know about R*-trees too!”"

"Political FORCE offers a robust data analysis platform for campaigns, and is offering full access to its file of 182 million registered voters as a free service to all NationBuilder subscribers, in compliance with applicable laws limiting access to authorized entities for political purposes. Starting immediately, candidates can sign up for NationBuilder with full, free access to their voter data at NationBuilder.com."

Those corporations that successfully implement these techniques will be torn apart as their traditional hierarchies and silos dissolve into right-sized communities; those that fail will be nibbled to death by community-based "competitors" who ignore those hierarchies. Either way, it's full of win.