Many of you have probably seen the new Anonymous movie about William Shakespeare? If not, don’t worry no spoiler alerts here, this is one that you should go and watch for yourself.

Anyway, in South Africa should you get a separate Internet connection for your new 55 inch flat screen full 3D  television set or just join it to the home network?

If you have tivo and you are streaming your own content from overseas you could probably use your existing adsl connection as your selected content can stream in while you are working (or even while you are watching other content). The new TV sets that I saw at CES in Vegas, has wireless as well as cable connections and has settings for DHCP or fixed IP as well and they could easily form part of your home network or have their own connection. Anyway, if you are not streaming your own content but want to stream live from any of the cable providers (or netflix or any one of the other hundreds of new startup companies) you should probably invest in an account just for your TV, as the TV would be using the bandwidth at the same time as someone else in the family wants to watch something on youtube and with most of us still limited to a single 4MB pipe in SA, this could be problematic)

It is wrong to be allowed to sell the same thing over and over and over ad infinitum and to hide behind ancient laws of copyright which provided for the costs of reproduction, printing, distribution and marketing, which used to be excessively expensive before the Information Revolution happened.

In fact it is EVIL to be allowed to produce a product and then to sell the same product over and over and over, and furthermore it is EVIL to charge someone to see and hear something, where should the modern information society draw the line?

Even the old copyright act of most civilised countries allowed for the rights to expire after certain amounts of time has passed.

Now that technology has removed the duplication costs, distribution costs and other costs the period of ‘copyright’ protection should also be reduced, possibly to as little as 30 days or less.

To protect the artists and the production costs of certain media possibly society could introduce better laws to protect our people, economies and countries These laws MUST see that they are relevant to the online world, technology and the people of today (not those of yesterday) and at the very least content should decline in price as the popularity thereof increases.

There are other arguments as well of course

Extreme Capitalism is evil, when people are allowed to vend bread at a 100000% profit margin just because they are the resource ‘owners’, so many Governments all over the world have legislation to protect consumers against exploitation. This is only fair, nice and decent.

Online Piracy. Something evil, wrong, illegal and anti social. Or is the enforcing of anti piracy EVIL?

The future will tell what we already suspect. That the ancient copyright laws not only clash with technology but that they also clash with Consumer Protection and other laws of the modern time.

Society will have to decide whether to continue enforcing outdated, unfair and immoral copyright legislation and embrace laws similar to SOPA, PIPA and the myriad that are still coming or whether to adapt copyright to the electronic age.

Is SOPA dead? Who knows what people in the USA will decide, but my best guess is that SOPA is not dead and the same issues will arise again. Until society accepts a fair and morally correct solution the problem will never go away.

Thinking about monopoly brings back fond memories of racing around the board in the classic monopoly racing car, trying to accumulate as much money, property and houses and hotels as fast as possible, a true dying breed capitalist consumerist. In the new Information Revolution the whole instant gratification thing has taken a completely new spin and the way that Informationists view Consumerists is probably the same as a century or two ago a a young Eskimo would have looked at an aging Eskimo that thinks there is a few years left before mounting the floating piece of ice destined for nowhere.

Anyway, I digress. Monopoly.

Is monopoly a bad thing?  Are there benevolent monopolies (maybe Google?) Anyway, Megaupload was a file storing monopoly and the recent International crackdown by the United States of America (aka the USA) on the cartel that operated Megaupload, which received great publicity all over the world, is going to prove interesting when it goes to court. Megaupload was the largest file storage cloud application on the planet and had a monopoly in certain way as it stored millions of terrabytes of files at locations all over the world on thousands of servers.

Since the very public arrest of Kim Schmitz and detention without bail in New Zealand  at the  request of the USA government, many things have changed and technologically here are important lessons for all citizens of the word:

1. Megaupload and all it’s affiliate companies, associated companies and partners have completely closed shop directly due to the arrest of all the executives of the company. No court case, no trial, no long detracted case or any defense and many normal employees are left without jobs almost instantaneously.

2. Megaupload in itself probably did not break any USA laws, it removed copyrighted content when it was requested to do so. The court case and outcome thereof would be interesting to watch. The USA flexed its very huge muscles, New Zealand (and other coutries) jumped to attention and effected the closure of the largest file storage website in the world.

3. With huge multinationals all from the USA) fighting to be the largest cloud business, the business angle of the Megaupload closure should not be overlooked. Interesting to note that Fileserve and Filesonic as well as numerous other file serving websites have either closed shop, scaled down or have changed the way they operate. Also interesting is that the instant vacuum in that market was filled by hundreds of new startup companies, from Afganistan, Pakistan, China, Russia and every corner of the world.  So where there were about ten largish players there are now thousands of small players and new entrants daily.

Torrents was basically killed by file sharing sites, similar to the web that killed usenet, I mean, yes, usenet is still operational and of course some people still have torrents, but they are not relevant any longer as the new technologies offer ease of use,  speed and broader base support and money.

Now file sharing may have changed, it seems that the new method in which files would be shared is through the use of shared accounts, in this less public way of sharing it would mean that an account would have to be compromised and infiltrated before an infringement notice could be sent.

This will complicate the ongoing piracy battle and the next chapters in this interesting saga will be watched with great anticipation and excitement.

Just a last comment:  It would be a better world if the content owners would offer online licensing for their content. (oh, no wait, that would mean that they cannot make 100000% profit margins any longer, silly me)

My definitions of Informationism (and Informationists):

As if we don’t have enough on our plates depressing us, we are advised by some of the sensationalist media that the Sun is going to attack us in an unprecedented level of solar storms.

Okay, to quickly put your mind at ease: The world in NOT going to end in 2012 and the Sun is not going to kill you. At least not in the next few days.  The USA Government Space Weather Agency says that we are going to have great Sun and Space weather for the next few days at least…

Whenever I feel a bit down I always remind myself that things could always be worse. No matter how bad life is, it could always become worse.

Weirdly enough the hottest thing at CES Las Vegas is 3D television (3D without any glasses) and the coolest is probably the LED lanyards. Problem is that 3D tv’s without glasses is already very very old news… 10 000 different people, all seeking attention.

Sustainable technology is the next big thing. There is very little or no such thing in much of the consumer electronics available or on offer at CES. Yes, there are very cool ideas, products, software and concepts. The remote control touch screen pad for television and the voice recognition television controls and technological achievements like the so very very high definition television images seem like future consumer technology that we could all be using. The very niche market products like custom pads and pad operating systems for specific use, seem interesting but I am not convinced that these niche products will matter in five years time…

Of all the unsustainable technologies the uber coolest is probably the multi dimensional television tech. I mean, come on, how cool is it for two people to sit together watching the same screen and seeing (and hearing) two entirely different things…

So, in summation:  Most cool stuff is television based. Televisions on which you can access Facebook and watch Harold and Kumar killing Santa in 3D is about what CES 2012 has to offer.

Yahoo News reports that Polish condom sales has declined on a year basis, by around 10%

Polish Professor Aleksandra Jodlko says that it is not only the global economic meltdown but also the actual stress of the bad economy that has caused the decline in condom sales as Poles are just not in the mood to be frisky.

It is not true that Poles are showering more after worldwide publicity given to ANCYL supporters dancing whilst promoting showering.

How is all this tech related to the Internet?

Well there has been a remarked increase in the number of spam emails marketing illicit pharma products as well as dubious  hardening and enlarging content the past year. Maybe there is a worldwide epidemic of less friskyness, increased global stress levels and this explains the increase in spam…

Does this mean fewer births during 2012 or an increase?

The sudden realization that just overhearing Dorothy being told that we are no longer in Kansas and actually understanding that the bus has left and it seriously is not Kansas anymore together with that sinking, empty and hollow feeling in the bottom of your stomach as it all sinks in.

The Information Revolution is upon us and the Chinese recon that us non Asian types are lucky enough to be living in interesting times.

Internet Growth:

There are now over 95 million .com domains (In 12 months more than 6 million new .com domains added, from 88.8 million .com domains last year, according to Readwriteweb )  (Our own co.za space recently passed 700 000 names)

Facebook grew by adding 250 million new users in 12 months and Facebook is now the size of the entire Internet was in 2004.

Lady Gaga is the most popular person on the planet and has over 18 million followers on Twitter she added 11 million followers only in the last 12  months, now that is just plain scary.

But the best for last.

In the last twelve months the amount of Internet websites doubled to around 7.74 billion pages, what does all this mean?

It means that the Information revolution has arrived in 2011 and in 2012 it is going to explode even further.

2012 tech to watch out for include Bitcoin

Later peeps