CHS Council Investiture 2003 from Daniel Tsou on Vimeo.

My good friend Hua Xia found this video that I had a chance to work on 5 years ago! It’s quite interesting to check out what you were like in the past, and how they eventually became seeds for who you are today. That video you see was my first attempt at playing with animations and trying out video techniques. Today all these have led to me pushing the boundaries of Keynote presentations and well, doing tonnes of videos.

P.S: I was friends with Jerrick by then, and you can tell how he’s managed to influence me to use the Star Trek Enterprise theme (which he loved back then) in this video

I just got my essay back and I actually did relatively well for it (because, frankly, DRM is so obviously silly ) and thought I’d share it here. Feel free to critic it, and discuss it. In fact, I thought about it (because I think about this), and there might actually be some cases for DRM. What do you think?

Content providers should abolish digital rights management

There has been one form of technology that I have always been having trouble understanding its existence, and that is digital rights management, or DRM. DRM is a form of copyright protection that content makers of digital content such as digital audio, digital films, electronic books and nowadays, even computer games, have that impose limitations on its use in hopes to prevent piracy. Digital audio with DRM, for example, would require special hardware and software that recognizes it in order to play. Even within the recognized hardware and software, there is a limitation on the number of instances it can be played on. DRM, however, does not achieve any of its goals, and instead causes a lot of problems for the very consumer that wants to use the content legitimately. Therefore, content providers should abolish DRM.

There are many reasons why DRM has been problematic, and here are some of them.

Firstly, DRM hampers freedom on its consumers. In the past, one could buy a single audio CD, plop the disk into the disk player in the kitchen, bring it along and use it in the car stereo, and then put it into a Discman and continue listening it on the move. Today, unless the DRM is supported by all these hardware, there is no way that is going to happen. Even then, it commonly means having to buy hardware from the same manufacturer. This example is a legitimate use of digital content that becomes almost impossible with DRM.

Secondly, with DRM, consumers never know when they will lose their digital content. Every form of DRM requires that the hardware or the software to talk back to the DRM maker’s servers online at least once to identify itself. This is to make sure that it’s only played on a limited number of instances. Apart from the inconvenience that it would cause which is shown in the previous example, this also means that should the company one day close down, every copy of the digital content that uses their DRM would become unusable. One example of something like this that happened was when MSN music, which sold digital music that was on their DRM, closed down a few years back. Its customers then discovered that the music library that was painstakingly built up would become completely lost. The irony is that the very people that are being punished here are the people who genuinely put in effort and money so as to help the content provider pay the content maker, the excuse that content providers always use to promote DRM and anti-piracy. Today, there are CDs in my house that are older than me, containing music that is no longer on sale. That will never happen again thanks to DRM.

Thirdly, DRM hampers user experience. The number of steps required activating every device and every computer is quite a hassle, something that non-DRMed content, whether legitimate or not, would never face. The user needs to be consciously aware of the number of hardware his content is on, which hardware has been activated etc. In order to play the content on an additional hardware, they will need to decide which other hardware to deactivate first. Consumers without internet connection will also face lots of problems. While these consumers usually would not buy music, movies and eBooks online, they will still buy games and software from shelves. Games today have begun to come with DRM these days, posing problems to people who do not have internet access. In addition, like any software, DRM does not always work, resulting in people occasionally not being able to consume the content they rightfully own.

People who promote DRM always talk about how it is to prevent piracy. They always talk about how content makers need to be rightfully paid. The irony is that DRM has done nothing to stop piracy. There is no software today that pirates have not failed to crack, and this includes DRM. In other words, DRM only slows down pirates, but it does not stop them in any way from going around them. In fact, DRM only helps pirates, since there is now a benefit for consumers to purchase or download pirated content since they are DRM free, and can be consumed on any supported device in any number of times. As a result, the people that are actually getting punished are the very consumers who genuinely want to help the content makers.

Therefore, DRM hampers the consumers by treating them guilty by default, yet fails to stop pirates in any way. Fortunately, companies are starting to see the problems of DRM, and some have begun to abolish it completely. Apple, for example, who owns the largest digital music store in the world, announced in early 2009 that they have begun removing DRM from their music, and today, 100% of their music is sold DRM free. Just last week, Apple sold their 10 billionth song since they began 7 years ago, proving that they can be successful even without DRM. In fact, Amazon MP3, the no. 2 digital music store today, sold DRM-free music from the start as well. More and more companies need to realize that DRM is a hopeless cause, and the best way to ensure better sales is competitive pricing and, honestly, better quality content.

Argument in SAF form

(1)    DRM restricts where the content can be used

(2)    > DRM hampers consumer’s freedom

(3)    DRM relies on a server

(4)    > DRM can cause consumers to lose their content at any time

(5)    Consumers need to go through a lot of steps to authorize their device to use DRM content

(6)    DRM fails from time to time

(7)    > DRM hampers consumer’s user experience

(8)    > DRM is punishing legitimate consumers

(9)    DRM does not stop piracy

(10)> DRM is not fulfilling the cause it was meant to achieve

(11)Pirated content does not have all the restrictions DRM has

(12)> DRM is promoting the purchase or download of pirated content

(13)The top two online music stores are all DRM free

(14)> Content providers without DRM have been doing well

(15)> Content providers should abolish DRM

Note that numbers are based on number of conversations, not the exact number of emails.

Break down of my Inbox

I have 3 Tech65 email accounts and 1 SMU email account coming into my Gmail inbox. I’ve set up quite a number of filters and auto-labels in my gmail for me to quickly identify the source of the emails and which organisations. This graph shows a break down of all the emails I see in my Gmail inbox according to what they were for.

Legend:

• Tech65 related = All Tech65 emails including press releases, internal discussions and viewer/listener questions.
• Arrow related = Emails regarding serving (Interesting fact: Church staff don’t work on Saturdays and Mondays)
• SMU Filtered = SMU emails that are important to me (SIS specific emails, emails from Profs, project group mates and emails directed specifically to me).
• Others = Includes daily devotional, newsletters and social networking feeds, as well as caregroup emails and discussions and those who are not caught by filters

Lesson: I think I should start looking at the non-filtered emails (i.e. newsletters and twitter, facebook emails etc), since there are days where they take up the majority.

Break Down of my email accounts

All my email accounts come into 1 single inbox. This graph shows which email accounts take up the most emails. Note that in this graph, the SMU emails are totally not filtered. If you compare this graph with the previous one, you’ll realise that quite a portion of the emails sent to me skip the inbox. The next graph will show which are the emails that are getting filtered.

SMU Emails breakdown

This is a break down of all the SMU emails that come to my account. In case you’re wondering, only the red section gets to my inbox. The blue section consists of mostly CCA promotions. Note that these emails still get to my account, they just don’t appear in my inbox. So they do collect, and every few days I still go in there, take a quick glance to make sure I don’t miss important emails, and “Mark as read”.

Take away? My filter is working If you want to know what kind of filter I use, you’ll have to find me in person. I don’t want the CCAs to find away around my filter.

Summary

So there you have it. A summary of my email. Yes, I get tons of email and I do think I need to filter some more, such as all the social network emails that are good to know, but shouldn’t be in my inbox, as well as the newsletters I’ve been getting. I’m quite surprised the amount I get frankly.

Interesting fact: Emails I received in the time I made this graph (1 hour): 4

Okay, back to work!

I came across this video on Gizmodo where Steve Jobs was talking to his employees shortly after he returned, and it really spoke to me. The phrase that really inspired me was this:

“Apple at the core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”

That’s one of the things I hope Tech65.org will one day show people, that if you are passionate enough about something, you can change the world for the better.

So discover what you’re passionate about, because Love does indeed make the world go round. If you can harness your love for something, you can move the world, and I believe that we are all planted with unique giftings and desires so that we can play a part in making the world a better place in every unique way.

Shalom.

This was a video our team submitted for the WOMWorld Nokia E72 Challenge. What can US$199 do for your city? The song was “New Beginning” from the latest album by Starfish Stories, a CC band.

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0006.mov (4735 KB)

I got this as a prize for an LTB class activity that my team won. I’ve never actually seen it before. Wonder what happened to the kinder surprise.

Posted via web from Daniel’s posterous

I’m at the HP Future Is event. The bloggers are now attempting to build a gadget of the future! *this is a test post*

Posted via web from Daniel’s posterous

One thing I’ve always wanted to do was to be able to share cool sightings of technology in Singapore with people. Twitpic really helped but then the photos would not be in one single location and attached only to a single tweet. Now I’m trying posterous along with the iPhone app!

Posted via web from Daniel’s posterous

My first threadless shirts have arrived! I bought these two shirts during the 24 hour free shipping (international) promotion over at Threadless.com and waited patiently for close to three months before they arrived. I actually got a little (just a little) concerned when Jun Kit got his less than a week after he ordered his, but trusted God that they’ll arrive safely in any case.

I bought the Geek shirt and the AV shirt (they’re actually both geeky shirts, I know) cos I’m proud to be a geek!

This is my social graph, generated using Nexus on Facebook. I decided to try it out after reading Kevin’s post about how relationships on the internet tend to be clustered more by geography than shared interests, but I realised it was different for me. Mine tend to be clustered by my different “lives” or associations. I guess that’s probably due to the fact that unlike Kevin, most of my friends are in Singapore.

What does your social graph look like?