Babbage

THE idea of collecting cash online through a mix of patronage and prepayment sprouted informally a few years ago. Initially bands used it to raise money for studio rental and the production costs for releasing an album. But the idea took off and is now offered by a plethora of middlemen, and embraced by all manner of creative types. In 2011 Kickstarter, the most successful of the online enablers, received nearly $100m in pledges for over 27,000 projects launched at its site.

This newspaper has written about Kickstarter several times in the past two years, including an overview of how crowdfunding works after the firm had raised about $15m in its first year. At the time, it was unclear whether such crowdfunding (also called micropatronage) was a passing fad or a rising alternative to conventional starter financing for creative media.

Kickstarter's performance in 2011 bolsters the latter case. The $99.3m pledge figure represents all commitments, backed by valid credit cards, to over 27,000 projects launched last year. The two biggest categories were film (with $32.5m pledged) and music (with $19.8m). Only those projects which reach a pledge target they set themselves within either 30 or 60 days receive the cash, which is charged to donors' credit cards. (These are validated on making the pledge, so Kickstarter's collection rate is close to 100%.) Last year 46% of the projects managed the feat; those that fall short do not get the cash and their donors are not charged.

In 2011 nearly 12,000 projects were financed through contributions by 960,000 unique donors with a median pledge of $25. Kickstarter's Medici, with the handle "H.T.", supported 724 projects. Yancey Strickler, one of Kickstarter's founders, says that just over $83m was collected. Projects which do reach their goal typically surpass it, typically hitting 130% of the target amount, and raising on average $4,500. However, ambitious ideas routinely muster $100,000 or more, and record holders have come within a whisker of $1m. (The company features a page listing its biggest success stories.) Unsuccessful campaigns rarely pass 20% of the goal. 

Continue reading "Micro no more"»

THE cast of characters in a controversial case involving alleged online piracy of copyrighted content seems like it could have come straight from an action-film script. There is Kim Dotcom, a German internet entrepreneur who changed his surname from Schmitz to reflect his passion for the web, and at whose mansion in New Zealand the police reportedly seized a load of luxury cars, including, yes, a pink Cadillac. There is a bunch of activist hackers, or “hacktivists”, collectively known as “Anonymous”. There are Hollywood film and music companies. And there are the G-men from America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 

Yet there is nothing remotely fictional about the accusations that have been made against Megaupload.com, an online file-sharing site that Mr Dotcom founded. On January 20th the FBI and authorities in a number of other countries, including Hong Kong, Britain and the Netherlands, seized servers or other assets of the firm, effectively shutting down the service. Mr Dotcom and several other people allegedly involved with the site were arrested in New Zealand the same day.

These moves were a response to charges brought by American prosecutors, who have accused the site of criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale. A lawyer representing Megaupload has said that the company intends to “vigorously contest” the allegations, which are “without merit”. The case will be watched closely by entertainment companies in America, whose efforts to get legislation passed to make it easier to pursue copyright violators have just been stymied by opposition from the internet industry, as we reported in this week's print edition. 

That legislation was aimed at companies operating entirely outside America. In Megaupload’s case, the Hong Kong-based firm was already vulnerable to a legal challenge from the United States because it used a large number of servers on American soil. Like other so-called “cyberlockers”, the firm enabled customers to store films, music and other content on its servers and then to create links to the material to be shared electronically. People wanting to keep large amounts of stuff on Megaupload—and to take advantage of faster uploading and downloading speeds—paid a fee to the firm, which touted its services in videos such as this one, which claims that the site accounted for 4% of all internet traffic. 

These fees plus revenue from online adverts allowed Megaupload to make megabucks. According to prosecutors, the firm had generated over $175m since 2005. They also say that when entertainment companies complained to the company that their copyrighted material was being exchanged illegally via its service, it removed some offending links to the material, but not the content itself. This is said to have deprived copyright owners of over $500m in revenue. 

Whatever the eventual outcome of the case, it has already elicited a swift response from two very different quarters. The entertainment industry has been quick to point out that if Megaupload hadn’t had operations in America, it would have been beyond the reach of its prosecutors. Industry lobbyists say this shows why new legislation is badly needed to target copyright violators with no presence in the country.

The other response came from Anonymous. After news of Megaupload’s fate emerged, outraged members of the group launched a series of cyberattacks on several websites, including those of the FBI, America’s Department of Justice and the New Zealand police service. The hackers appear to have used large numbers of computers to overload the target sites with traffic, knocking them offline, in what is known as a “distributed denial of service” attack. The sites were eventually able to recover from this digital assault. Megaupload will find bouncing back from the legal one it faces much harder.

DECADES ago, your correspondent visited one of the larger sewage works in the Thames Valley to learn how the new biodegradable detergents, with their long hydrocarbon chains, were affecting the plant’s filtration processes. The plant was coping just fine, he was informed. And the output was so good, it was piped straight back to local reservoirs for redistribution.

Each drop of water used by Londoners subsequently passed through the plant for reprocessing at least six times before eventually escaping to the sea. The engineer in charge was convinced that, with further refinement, the sewage works would be capable of recycling the same water indefinitely—with the quality improving with each treatment cycle. Offered a glass of the finished product, your correspondent thought it tasted a good deal better than the chalky liquid that spluttered from London taps (see “From toilet to tap”, September 26th 2008).

In America, the assumption is that, if recycled at all, reprocessed effluent is used strictly for irrigating golf courses, parks and highway embankments, or for providing feedwater for industrial boilers and cooling at power stations. The one thing water authorities are loathe to discuss is how much treated sewage (politely known as “reclaimed water”) is actually incorporated in the drinking supply.

The very idea of consuming reprocessed human, animal and industrial waste can turn people’s stomachs. But it happens more than most realise. Even municipalities that do not pump waste-water back into aquifers or reservoirs, often draw their drinking supply from rivers that contain the treated effluent from communities upstream.

A survey done in 1980 for the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), which looked at two dozen water authorities that took their drinking water from big rivers, found this unplanned use of waste-water (known as “de facto reuse”) accounted for 10% or more of the flow when the rivers were low. Given the increase in population, de facto reuse has increased substantially over the past 30 years, says a recent report on the reuse of municipal waste-water by the National Research Council (NRC) in Washington, DC.

Along the Trinity River in Texas, for instance, water now being drawn off by places downstream of Dallas and Fort Worth consists of roughly 50% effluent. In summer months, when the natural flow of the river dwindles to a trickle, drinking water piped to Houston consists almost entirely of processed effluent.

The main problem is not changes in the weather (though global warming hardly helps), but population growth. The American population has doubled, to over 300m, since the middle of last century—and is expected to increase by a further 50%, to 450m, over the next half century. Meanwhile, households as a whole have been consuming water at an even faster rate, thanks to the housing boom and the widespread use of flushed toilets, dish washers, washing machines, swimming pools and garden sprinklers.

Continue reading "Difference engine: Waste not, want not"»

BESIDES hosting the information-technology firms of Silicon Valley, California is well-known for being one of America's more left-leaning states. One consequence is that it is home to some of the world's most progressive environmental and energy legislation.

For decades, America’s most populous state has adopted laws that set energy efficiency standards for appliances like refrigerators, air conditioners and televisions that other states later followed. Starting in 2006, California implemented mandatory standby requirements for various electronic devices—the first such regulations in the world. These new laws required all TVs and DVD players sold to consumers in California no more than three watts of power in standby mode, and that their power adapters should be limited 0.75 watts—a number that fell to 0.5 watts in 2008.

Following a new ruling by the California Energy Commission (CEC), the state will now expand that power limit to include battery-operated items of all kinds, such as mobile phones, laptops, power tools,and electric toothbrushes. This new law will take effect by February 1st, 2013, and will be extended to industrial equipment like forklifts by January 1st, 2014.

Most mobile-phone chargers, however, already have a fairly low energy footprint. According to a study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also in California, the average mobile phone draws 3.68 watts while charging, 2.24 watts when charged, and just 0.26 watts if the charger is left in a wall socket by itself.

The state estimates that each Californian household has an average of 11 battery chargers, for a total of 170m chargers. By reducing their standby power consumption, the CEC says that this new legislation will save 2,200 gigawatt hours each year, which is the equivalent of powering 350,000 homes—around the size of the city of Oakland—for a year.

But it is important to note that while any easy energy saving is useful, tinkering with such consumer devices will do little to bring the state's overall power bill down. Los Angeles County alone, home to just shy of 10m people, consumed a total of 67,323 gigawatt-hours in 2010, according to the CEC’s own figures. This means that the estimated savings from the new law would total around 3% of the total energy used by the state's most populous region.

In other words, while the regulations may be an easy way for the state to decrease its power footprint, the difference will still be marginal. In 2009 David MacKay, a professor of natural philosophy in the physics department at the University of Cambridge, and an advisor to the British government, observed in his book "Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air", that worrying about mobile-phone chargers “is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. Do switch it off, but please be aware how tiny a gesture it is." "Let me put it this way," he continued, "all the energy saved in switching off your charger for one day is used up in one second of car-driving.”

HEALTH officials are paid to feel apprehensive. For some years they have feared that tuberculosis (TB), an ancient scourge tamed by modern drugs, might evolve into a new, indestructible state. New strains of mycobacterium tuberculosis have already emerged, some resistant to isoniazid and rifampicin, two of the best known treatments, and some resistant to additional injected drugs. The advent of completely resistant TB seemed inevitable. Now it may have arrived. 

On January 17th doctors in Mumbai declared that a dozen patients at Hinduja National Hospital had contracted TB that responded to no treatment. Three had already died. If the claim is proven true, it would usher a new era for an old foe. 

M. tuberculosis does its dirty work mainly in the lungs, where it destroys tissue. A cough, sneeze or even idle chatter can propel the bacterium into the air, then into the lungs of another person. In the 20th century antibiotics helped to quash TB in much of the rich world. But the bacterium has mutated. This has often been blamed on patients who do not take a full course of medication, giving the bacterium the chance to adapt.

The share of TB cases that are resistant to drugs is still small. Out of 12m TB cases in 2010, 650,000 were resistant to multiple drugs, according to the World Health Organisation. But resistant strains are more prevalent in certain regions. In Belarus and parts of Russia, for example, more than a quarter of new TB cases survive several drug treatments. And reports of resistance continue to rise. As of October, 77 countries had reported at least one case of TB that was resistant to first- and second-line treatments. The Stop TB Partnership, a group of non-profits, governmental and international agencies, is doing its best. By 2015 the group hopes to have better surveillance, broader distribution of treatments and at least one new drug for resistant TB. However, the plan will cost $47 billion. 

It remains unclear whether the doctors’ claims in Mumbai are accurate. India’s government has sent a team to investigate, according to the BBC. If the strain of TB is indeed resistant to any treatment, it may portend another spell in the limelight for the disease. The Mumbai patients came to the hospital from the city’s slums. The bacterium undoubtedly still lurks there, undiagnosed, and will continue to spread.

TWO organisations are teaching protesters to behave like journalists and building apps to protect and preserve the videos they shoot

ON JANUARY 18th a slew of prominent websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit and Mozilla, will show the world what they might look like if two bills under debate in America's Congress come into force. For twelve hours starting at 8am Eastern time (1pm GMT) the portals' pages will go black. Wikipedia will be dark for all of Wednesday Eastern time (starting at 5am GMT). Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, has already advised students in a tweet to do their homework early.

The laws in question are the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), being discussed in the House of Representatives, and the Senate's Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (a contrived moniker designed to yield the acronym PROTECT IP, or PIPA for short). Both are meant to curb unauthorised sharing and streaming of copyrighted content by requiring American hosting companies, advertising networks and payment processors to stop consorting with copyright infringers who distribute content abroad that can be reached from the United States. Search engines might also have to remove links to such sites.

Many critics, including some of the internet's founding fathers (and mothers) and major players like Google, have been scathing about the proposals. SOPA, in particular, has come in for a lot of flak. This newspaper has argued that tougher laws against online pirates are needed, but that SOPA could hit law-abiding businesses. At present websites such as Wikipedia or YouTube, which rely on user-generated content, must take down offending material if copyright holders file a complaint about it. But if the material is hosted on a site overseas, American law is powerless. So SOPA would let copyright holders complain to American sites that merely carry links to pirated material abroad, and would force them to comply quickly unless they can show the complaint is dubious.

Some argue that the bill could be interpreted as forcing American sites to scour their servers for links to potential violations of copyright before even receiving a complaint, which would be a big burden for smaller sites. SOPA would also require internet service providers to block or divert traffic to offending foreign sites, in a manner that could disrupt the security of the internet's addressing system. Companies that fail to comply face fines, or even a spell in prison for their executives.

Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, frets that although SOPA’s supporters say the bill targets "foreign rogue websites", its definitions are by no means limited to foreign sites, or indeed pirate sites. As such, he says, it threatens free speech in America, because the law is broad enough to allow shutting down an entire site over one offending link, posted not by the site's operator but by a user.

Several sponsors of the two bills, notably Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont who was active in drafting PIPA, have already admitted that the backlash from the public, businesses and pundits, including some from Barack Obama's administration, has prompted them to revise certain provisions. Both chambers are now considering an alternative bill, called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN), which focuses more explicitly on non-American websites and includes additional free-speech protections along with judicial process and oversight.

The blackout was originally planned to coincide with congressional hearings on security issues stemming from SOPA and PIPA, though these have now been postponed since it became clear that SOPA had hit a wall in the House. Many of the protesting websites see their move as another salvo in the pitched battle against what they describe as grasping copyright holders, bent on combating infringement even if it means staunching the free flow of other, unrelated information. They hope that the blank screens will win more converts to their cause. Perhaps. But many people will just be annoyed.

"DON'T be evil" has long been Google's motto. Yet in Kenya it has failed to live up to it. Mocality, a Kenyan firm that creates online business directories, has accused Google of misusing its database and misrepresenting its relationship with it in order to drum up business in the country. On January 13th Nelson Mattos, a Google executive, said that his firm was "mortified" by the episode, had "unreservedly apologised" to Mocality for its behaviour and was in the process of investigating how the situation arose.

Mocality, whose boss, Stefan Magdalinski, is a start-up veteran, said it had discovered what was going on by posting its own phone number alongside various listings of different businesses on its service. It was soon receiving calls from people who urged their interlocutors to use Google's services and claimed that the web firm was working closely with Mocality, which is not the case. In a blog post entitled "Google, what were you thinking?", Mr Madgalinski says he initially thought the problem was due to a rogue Google employee. But it soon became clear that the effort was far more extensive, involving phone calls being placed from call centres on two continents.

That Google should look to online directories for sales leads is hardly a crime, though if the plan was to use Mocality's database extensively it would surely have made sense to seek the company's assent to do so first. (According to Mocality's estimates, almost a third of the firms on its database had been called by Google representatives by January 11th.) What is so shocking is the revelation that Google's callers frequently intimated that the company and Mocality were working together when they were not.

In his post, Mr Magdalinski, says his firm had held talks with Google about possibly co-operating to bring more Kenyan businesses online, but that no agreement had been reached between them. And he says he would like to know who at Google specifically authorised the practice Mocality unearthed and who else within the search giant knew (or ought to have known) about it. Google should provide comprehensive answers to these questions fast, as well as laying out how it intends to ensure such a debacle does not happen again.

THE digital camera had a serial number of "0000001" etched on its case, your correspondent recalls. The Kodak Digital Camera System (DCS) 100 he walked around with in 1991 was, quite literally, the first commercially available digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera. The device had a charged-coupled device (CCD) sensor array retrofitted on the back of a Nikon F3 body. It came with a shoulder-pack containing a computer, 200MB hard drive to store a 100 or so images, enormous batteries and a tiny LCD screen for viewing stored images. The lot weighed about 7kg. In 1991 Kodak was a decade ahead of its time. Now, with a looming bankruptcy filing, it looks a decade behind (as we report in this week's print edition).

At the Centre for Creative Imaging, a short-lived Kodak teaching outpost in coastal Maine, this Babbage used the remarkable digital device constantly. It was proof of Kodak's technological supremacy and marked a turning point in the history of photography. After a century where photographers relied on chemical reactions to record images on an analogue film, these could now be captured as a series of numbers. 

The centre, run by Kodak from 1990 to 1993, swept in several thousand artists working in photography, illustration, animation, graphic design and suchlike. They paid hundreds to thousands of dollars to come to Camden, Maine, for classes lasting between two and five days. Many were in part drawn by the centre's impressive collection of hardware: 100 state-of-the-art Macintosh IIfx computers, piles of advanced scanners, even several dye-sublimation printers designed to be mounted in military tanks that produced digital photographic prints the likes of which Babbage did not see again for a long time (only years later did their staggering cost come down enough for commercial applications to become viable).

Then there was the staff who knew how to use it all. Time magazine's "Man of the Year" cover in 1991, Ted Turner's head emerging from a globe of television screens, was produced by photographer Greg Heisler with the help of the centre's employees. (Babbage's bailiwick as course manager was both designing curriculum and ensuring all the kit was running smoothly.)

Many people came specifically to lay their hands on the DCS100. With a price tag of $25,000, only some companies and newsmagazines with very specific needs for portable and instant digital capture purchased this first model. (Though judging by the seven-digit serial number, Kodak may have been hoping to sell millions.) Photographers at those organisations came to learn to use the camera; others wanted to catch a glimpse of the future (albeit only at a resolution of 1.3 megapixels). Small classes were held in which the camera was lugged into the field (in gorgeous coastal Maine) and participants were taught the nuances of digital photography. That the centre had the camera at all—and, notably, unit 0000001—was thanks to its director, a vice-president of Kodak who left his post to run the facility and who had been instrumental in bringing the DCS100 to market.

Professionals would not go near earlier, prototype digital cameras. But those were mere toys by comparison. The DCS100 took decent pictures, and it used a camera body that photographers were familiar with; it supported the Nikon's interchangeable lenses, for instance. The CCD was large enough to capture an image quickly, only requiring relatively short exposure times with a flash or in relatively well-lit conditions. Most remarkably, Kodak engineered the DCS100 to have a near-instantaneous shutter release. Press the button, and the picture was captured at that instant. This may sound like a prerequisite for any decent camera (George Eastman, Kodak's founder, incorporated the mechanism in his first snapshot camera back in 1888), but it took another 15 years before affordable consumer digital cameras managed the feat. (Professional DSLRs got there faster, but cost well over $5,000 until recently.)

Given Kodak's current woes it may now seem strange that the company introduced the world to digital photography. In the early 1990s, though, it did not come as a surprise. There is a strong case that Steven Sasson, a Kodak employee, invented the digital camera at the company's lab in 1975. (He discussed his invention with photographer David Friedman in a short interview recently.) Kodak invested substantially over the ensuing decade and a half to bring the DCS100 to market. Many Kodak executives, including the centre's director, often told Babbage that digital photography would eventually consume the analogue market. But the centre's instructors, including your correspondent, were asked to assure inquisitive students that "film will be a viable medium well into the future". The future has arrived, but Kodak's foresight must have fallen through the cracks along the way.

THE annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) feels right at home amid the blazing neon excess of Las Vegas. For four days each January, thousands of companies gather to showcase their flashiest technologies at America's biggest trade show. This year over 20,000 brand new gadgets competed for attendees' attention. Each has its own power cord or battery, and almost every one is either bigger or faster—and thus more power-hungry—than last year's model.

The International Energy Agency expects consumer electronics' appetite for electricity to double over the next decade, from 15% to 30% of residential consumption worldwide. Even supposedly energy-saving innovations, such as the organic-LED (OLED) screen in the massive 55-inch television proudly displayed by South Korea's LG, consume oodles of power, just by dint of being so big.

But this year's show also sees a welcome counter-trend. Several companies launched products labelled as having "infinite power". Such devices are meant to generate at least as much power as they consume. Buy one of these gizmos, the theory goes, and you need never connect it to a wall socket.

Eton Corporation announced Rukus, a portable boom box that can stream music from Bluetooth devices such as smartphones and tablets. For every hour that the Rukus is in full sunlight, it can play an hour of music, harvesting solar energy from 40 square inches (260 square centimetres) of photovoltaic panels. It has an internal battery which stores sunshine for cloudy picnics and can also be tapped to recharge other mobile gadgets.

Similarly impressive is a high-tech cover for Amazon's Kindle ebook reader by Solar Focus (see picture). A solar panel on the outer face gives 90 minutes of reading time for every hour of sunlight. Surplus energy is stored in a small lithium-ion battery and allows an LED reading lamp to run for up to 50 hours without drawing on the Kindle's own battery.

Both the Kindle and the Rukus have frugal monochrome E Ink displays that consume a fraction of the power of the colourful LCD screens found on most gadgets. Even the best solar-panel case for Apple's iPhone, for instance, can do no more than slow the rate at which the smartphone runs down. You might think, then, that something as large as a practical solar-powered electric car would be utterly impossible. Not so, says Ford. At CES, the carmaker showed a domestic solar panel kit it claims will offset all the electricity used over the lifetime of its new Focus Electric plug-in vehicle. The 150 square-foot (14 square-metre) array, to be installed on owners' houses, should feed as much power to the grid as the average driver ever needs fully to recharge his car's battery. Panels on roofs in rainy Seattle might allow 12,000 miles (19,300km) of driving each year; denizens of sunny Tucson may squeeze out 15,000 miles or more.

The solar kit will set a Ford owner back around $10,000 (the price would be higher were it not for American federal incentives). It comes with a 25-year guarantee—22 years more than the warranty on the car. This is still some way from the dream of a self-contained solar runabout, but it is a start. The increasingly power-hungry electronics industry will no doubt need to steer itself in a similar direction.

THE Consumer Electronics Show kicks off in Las Vegas, ICANN expands its range of internet domain names and Google's search engine gets personal

FOR more than 120 years the projectionist has been integral to the cinema-goer's experience. His tool is an elaborate machine which displays 24 still pictures from the film strip onto the screen every second. His job is monotonous and tedious. It also involves plenty of skill. But it is a dying craft. A recent report by IHS, a market-research outfit, predicts that by 2013 mainstream usage of 35mm prints to project movies will cease altogether in America and digital projection will take over. By 2015 theatres around the world will follow suit.

Depending on its running time, a film would typically be split across six to eight film reels which are mounted on a spindle one at a time at regular intervals. To perform his task accurately, the projectionist relies on cue marks. Every 20 minutes or so a small dot flashes at the top right hand corner of the screen and reappears after eight seconds. The first dot warns the projectionist that it is time to switch reels; the second one indicates the precise moment to do so. In one quick motion he must cut the image being projected on the screen by the first machine and replace it with the next reel, threaded on the second projector. A seamless transition takes barely one-twentieth of a second. Digital projection requires no such mastery: the projectionist simply double-clicks a file name on a computer.

For all the reel's romance, the move to digital projection has been swift—unsurprising given its assorted advantages over its analogue predecessor. Reels have a limited shelf life, cost a lot more to manufacture and are not easily portable. A digital print, on the other hand, is essentially immortal, cheap to reproduce and can be distributed easily on hard drives or over communications networks. Even in India, world’s biggest producer of films, many small-town theatre owners have been quick to adopt the new technology; previously, they had to await their turn as more established players ran a film for a few weeks.

The departure of analogue is not limited to projection rooms, of course. Filming, too, is increasingly dependent on all manner of digital gubbins. Most recently, high-definition cameras have made both filming and editing much easier. Although images on reel have greater depth and clarity compared with those captured digitally, most cinema-goers' untrained eyes can barely spot the difference.

Still, many in the industry are sceptical about ditching the 35mm reel for good. Some film-makers mix both technologies. “35mm will stay, but the future is definitely digital,” says Anil Arjun, boss of Reliance MediaWorks, a company which stitched together “Social Network”, David Fincher's Facebook flick released in 2010. That film was shot partly in 35mm and partly using digital cameras. Used wisely, such fiddling enhances the cinematic experience. Ultimately, though, directors—at least fine ones like Mr Fincher—will not allow it to take precedence over storytelling.