According to this CNET article, AT&T and Comcast may soon be assisting the RIAA in combating piracy. What a boondoggle in the making—I’ll try and make this short and sweet.

ISPs cannot become arbiters of content and the defacto police for creators—this would be an extremely dangerous precedent. It conjures images of the Great Firewall of China. Piracy is a serious issue, but attempting to filter it at the ISP level is a minefield.

I have no problem paying for Internet access, but I won’t pay for access to MOST of the Internet. Filtering is not just a threat to individual’s access to a free flow of information, but a threat to all content creators and their rights to uncensored distribution. How long before any company with a bit of cash can filter out a smaller competitor for trumped up violations? How long before blacklists of questionable content become whitelists of paid-for content providers? For customers, what constitutes a violation, and what is the recourse? Does an ISP keep a running list of all your activities using their service without your consent, available for purchase by the highest bidder?

Today we enjoy a huge amount of open access and rely upon law enforcement and the courts to address copyright infringement. These duties should not be turned over to for-profit companies and advocacy groups. This isn’t just a threat to Net Neutrality, but to every citizen’s access to a free flow of uncensored information.

Update
Apparently, Google has similar ideas. Yesterday they launched M-Lab, “an open platform that researchers can use to deploy Internet measurement tools.”

At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation. No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband, and good data is the bedrock of sound policy. Transparency has always been crucial to the success of the Internet, and, by advancing network research in this area, M-Lab aims to help sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.

“I’d like to scale back my subscription to just weekend delivery” I said over the phone to the circulation department. That was last Tuesday, and my last weekday paper arrived on that Wednesday. Just two days later I learned that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was up for sale. I felt like I killed it single-handedly.

I was one of the few—a young web-centric professional that still carried a daily paper subscription. I’ll always feel a print publication offers a lot of important advantages over an electronic edition—and that comes from someone who’s spent years helping people make websites.

Opportunities

I want to see the P-I continue, if not as a conventional print publication then certainly as a web-only production. The latter I feel is a giant opportunity, even though it means cutting a huge amount of jobs and really scaling back the journalistic power of the paper…exactly what you’d rather never have happen…when the bottom line interferes with good journalism.

What the P-I does have is a huge chance to reevaluate what it means to be a modern news institution. Here’s what I want from my local paper—I hope it can happen.

• Community

  First and foremost I want a publication that makes me feel like a part of a whole. Individual neighborhood sections, detailed user profiles, customizable start pages, alerts sent to my mobile or email address based on my news preferences, neighborhood and current location.

  

  I want to be able to find friends and family, see what they are reading. I want the web “paper” to be a community square, with all the advantages you’d get walking down your street—I don’t want just another information fire hose. The P-I has a good start on these tools, but I want more.

• Valuable Ads and Services

  Services aren’t a bad thing, but invasive and irrelevant advertising on the web is. How many times have a I seen someone tear apart the P-I to get to a full Circuit City pullout? Many, many, times…I often wonder why you can’t do that online for the users that want to browse.

  Classifieds? Hasn’t Craigslist ruined that for everyone? I’d love to see a local paper compete with their own free service, but use local knowledge and a superior toolset to that of Craigslist. (Simple mashups like housingmaps.com are ridiculously valuable and pretty easy to implement.) In an ideal world, smart tools and neighborhood specific pages should make ads valuable to everyone viewing the page.

• Local, Local, Local

  Let the AP feeds cover the national and international topics. I want to know what’s in my backyard. Anyone working for a news institution online should look long and hard at EveryBlock, they’re doing a lot of things right!

That’s just a few words from a subscriber that knows a lot about the web, but not a lot about the newspaper industry. I hope the P-I lives on, as the great institution it is. You can read all about the ongoing transition on The Big Blog.

There was potential. That’s the best I can say. Clint Eastwood’s performance is good, but the supporting cast is so miserable they completely suck the soul out of the film.

Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired auto-worker and Korean War veteran. He’s old school, racist and bitter—we know this because throughout the entire movie his disapproving growls are dubbed on top of every grimace. After the death of his wife, Kowalski is forced to deal with his racially diverse neighborhood, which apparently he never noticed in any significant way before the events of the movie despite living there his entire life. The highlights of the film are his parades of racial epithets directed at friends and neighbors. It’s sad to say, but yes, that’s the best this movie has to offer.

Besides the name-calling, the rest of the film builds a ridiculous gang and race driven conflict, with Kowalski in the center and a bunch of partially-motivated stereotypes bouncing around the periphery.

Don’t be fooled by the trailers—this is not a good movie—if you’re really interested in this wait until it’s a rental. The star performance here is probably the 1972 Gran Torino, and heck, you barely even get to see it run.

I really scored at Christmas, receiving many things I very much do not deserve. One of these was a Blu-Ray player, (Thanks K&M!) and it didn’t take me long to jump into The Godfather, Coppola Restoration, which I’d purchased on Blu-Ray even before I had a player.

By all accounts, the original negatives of the first two films were so torn up and dirty that they could no longer be run through standard film laboratory printing equipment, and so the only option became a digital, rather than a photochemical, restoration.

The final product, which the studio is calling “The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration,” combines bits and pieces of film recovered from innumerable sources, scanned at high resolution and then retouched frame by frame to remove dirt and scratches. The color was brought back to its original values by comparing it with first-generation release prints and by extensive consultation with Gordon Willis, who shot all three films, and Allen Daviau, a cinematographer (“E.T.”) who is also a leading historian of photographic technology. [New York Times]

The restoration is a thrill to watch, and I’ve never seen a better presentation, even compared to viewings in the theater. Particularly captivating was the amount of detail preserved (rescued even?) while keeping the character (grain, color) perfectly intact.

Blink

“What?” I yelled in my darkened apartment, fumbling for the rewind button immediately following Michael Corleone’s pivotal showdown with Sollozzo and the corrupt police chief McCluskey. I’d just seen something I’ve never noticed before: a body on the floor blinked as the scene ended. A blinking corpse. It jolted me out of the moment, out of the fantasy, out of the 40s. Blu-Ray did that, it gave me too much detail?

I’ve since learned that McCluskey’s blink is a known quantity—a minor bug in continuity that’s charming in today’s world of computer aided post process. Apparently that blink is visible in other formats, but I’d never seen it until I had the restoration and the resolution to appreciate it. I would never have noticed it without this version. Therein lies the rub.

For me, details matter, technology matters, and I’m just anal enough to obsess about shadow detail and grain when I think it’s important, like in the case of The Godfather. McCluskey’s blink floored me because it reminded me that I’m watching something made 37 years ago and it looks as good or better than things produced today. I never lost anything by not seeing that blink before, and maybe it was actually detrimental to the experience seeing it now.

The blink could be the only thing I’m not crazy about in the Coppola Restoration, an otherwise perfect thing, but that’s not a fair critique. If anything it goes to show how caring, faithful and complete the restoration process was. It does make me wonder however, how frequently we’ll see Blu-Ray editions of classics that aren’t cared for so well. Perhaps those unfortunate reels are best left as they are…perfect with their flaws.

Yesterday during the 2009 Macworld Expo keynote address, most likely due to time constraints, Phil Schiller neglected to mention that the new 17″ MacBook Pro’s matte screen option was added solely because of my moanings. Consider this an official addendum.

Happy holidays. Under threat of site boycott, I’m forced to document a string of weather that’s nearly unprecedented in Western Washington. Here I muster my good humor, so in brief: Swings in Weather. Zing!

Seattle was paralyzed for nearly a week. Several feet of snow collecting—and staying put—in outlying areas. After initial hesitancy, Mayor Greg Nickels has given in to the pressure to lightly season Seattle streets.

For myself, one of the highlights of the snowy deluge was tailgating and attending Mike Holmgren’s swan songy victory over the Jets at Qwest Field. The snow was falling the Hawks were winning and the snowballs were flying—by the end of the game this was all just too much for Jets Defensive End Shaun Ellis.

This proved the costliest of all Seattle snowfall, as that particular cubic foot ended up being priced at a cool $10,000. That could buy a lot of salt.

Happy New Year!