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Japanese officials say "TV stations should suspend TV programs during midnight to prevent CO2 emission"

Link: asahi.com：テレビの深夜放送自粛しては？　自民、環境対策で検討へ - 政治.

会合では、森山真弓元法相が「オイルショック時のように、テレビを自粛するぐらいのことはやるべきだ」と提案。加藤紘一元幹事長も「京都議定書を国民に理解してもらうためにも検討すべきだ」と同調。中には「深夜までテレビを放送する必要性があるのか」との意見も出た。

(Translation): In the meeting, Mayumi Moriyama, ex Minister of Justice, said "Like when there was an Oil Shock, we should do as much as we can do, like suspending TV broadcasting." Koichi Kato agreed by saying "We should consider that suggestion in order to let Japanese citizens understand the Kyoto agreement as well." There were some officials even asking "Is there any reason TV shows are broardcasted in midnights?"

Looks like they think people don't sleep until very late in the midnight because there are so many TV shows airing until late.

Huh?

Do you SERIOUSLY think that's the reason and people go to bed early if we suspend the program?

The fact is this (and yes, everyone knows this):

1. Employees are forced to work until very late, like 11pm or 12am.
2. They usually live apart from central Tokyo where their offices are, because of the high rent fee in those areas. It typically takes 45-60 minutes to get from the office to their home using subway and trains.
3. They probably get by a convenience-store to get their food and it is 24 hours open.
4. They have the food and while watching some TV shows live or probably recorded on their DVR. And probably do things like netsurfing, youtubing and niconico etc.
5. They take a bath or shower.
6. Now it's easily 2 or 3AM.

I believe this is the typical end of day of office workers in Tokyo. There are lots of things to be improved in the bullet lists, and suspending TV programming in midnight doesn't help, at all.

I'd love to see the discussion of applying Daylight Saving Time in Japan. I know there are lots of pros and cons (probably more cons) for DST but discussing about the possiblity would be definitely more useful, than just saying "People did this at the time of Oil Shock, blah blah blah".

Net Neutrality is dying in Japanese cellphone ISPs

Link: 「あまりに急」「検閲では」――携帯フィルタリングに事業者から不満続出 (1/2) - ITmedia News.

未成年者は携帯フィルタリングに原則加入――昨年末、総務省の突然の要請が、携帯コンテンツ業界に波紋を広げている。未成年者は市場のけん引役。「一律フィルタリングでは健全なサイトも見られなくなる」「検閲に近い」などと、事業者側は不満を募らせる。

Net Neutrality is one of the hottest topic here in the States, and there's a strong reaction against the ISPs shutting down p2p traffic etc. and FCC started an investigation on these ISPs like Comcast.

In Japan ... Net Neutrality already is about to die in just a month, at least if you surf the net with cellphones. In the last December, Ministry of Internal Communications (総務省) "requested" Japanese major cellphone ISPs (NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, which makes 99.9% share of the market) to "force" URL blocking if the subscribers are minors, i.e. under 18 years old. The subscriber can opt-out the filtering if they and their parents agree to, but it's on by default.

The list of blocked sites are maintained by the company called Net Star and those three ISPs all use the same blacklist. Net Star is just a private company and the goverment is trying to filter the internet for underage users based on this list. WTF?

These days it seems Japan is trying to become China in terms of internet control.

Japan: Running Dating websites would require certificates? WTF?

Link: 出会い系事業者に対して届け出を義務付けへ、警察庁の研究会が提言.

National Police Agency of Japan is considering to submit a law to require precertification to run "Online dating sites". The reason behind this is that it's currently hard to figure out the organization behind the sites when the criminal activities occur (like prostitution of the minors), especially when the servers are placed in foreign countries.

This approach is ALL WRONG.

One, Even if you require precertification to run this in Japan, it'll still be unnecessary if you have servers outside Japan and this law wouldn't give any benefit. Two, the organization to give certificates will be a private sector, and who can trust these organizations? Three, the definition of "online dating sites" is so vague that any sites that has a social networking aspect or web-messaging functionality would need to do this.

By doing this, all internet community sites would require bullshit process to keep the site up, or just simply move their servers outside Japan, which is a loss to the nation itself.

Stop making an effort to control internet. It's useless.

Japan to make downloading "illegal content" illegal

Link: 私的録音録画小委員会：「ダウンロード違法化」不可避に - ITmedia News.

「違法サイト」からの動画・音楽のダウンロードが違法とされる方向が、私的録音録画小委員会で固まった。違法化への反対意見も踏まえながら、ユーザーが大きく不利益をこうむらない形で制度設計するとしている。

Japan is to make downloading content from the pirate/illegal websites criminal. You might say what's wrong with that ... It is wrong because the definition of "downloading", "illegal content" is really vague. Imagine you receive an email that has a link to mp3 file that's breaking copyright of someone. Click the link by mistake and you're now criminal.

Also, you might go to sites like MySpace or YouTube and find individual bands music really attractive and want to download them ... but if it's made illegal, you're afraid of clicking the link to download them, because you can't tell if it's legal or not.

Their plan is to make a list of legal content distribution sites and distribute a certificate label (like Verisign SSL mark thingy) and make an exception that if you don't know if it's legal or not, downloading these is still not criminal.

They won't ever work. Stupid.

And here are other things these "content rights holders" are saying:

• "DRM Broadcast: Yes. Never copy more than once. Why? People are stealing content"
• "Blu-ray and iPod: pay indemnity for us because you're making money out of our content"
• "Internet is a dark-side. Everyone is stealing content."

Shame, shame, shame.

Spoiler microformats?

Spoiler is a hateful activity on the internet. Someone who intentionally wants to spoil your movie/tv show/sports expectation by revealing the result deserves the hate. But what about the unintentional one?

Every weekend I watch European football games, and once in a couple I watch Formula 1 GP races. And every monday, shows like Heroes, Chuck and Prison Break. What I usually do, after the live show ended and before I actually watch it, is to shutdown my RSS feed reader and twitter app so as I won't be spoiled by Sports news RSS feed or my friends' twittering "OMG congrats to Raikkonen for the win!"

But I sometimes forget about it, or accidentally clicked the link, and see the results, that really spoils my watching experience. It's something fundamentally hard to avoid, since we have timezone differences, and we love to discuss about TV or cinema movies on blogs. There's nothing wrong about it.

What we usually do is to add a big "SPOILER" warning in the title or beginning of the post. Some neat people like to mark up the spoilers so as the text won't appear until you drag your mouse to select it. I believe some movie review sites like IMDB allows users to check the box "this is a spoiler" and provide some javascript so it won't be displayed until the user agrees to see. Is there a possibility to do this with microformats?

I saw a mention of microformat about NSFW (not safe for work) links. I haven't followed the discussion in details and am not sure if there's a concensus about it, but adding a markup to the links that are not safe for people in the office seems like a good idea to agree on.

Can we do this for spoilers as well? Something like:

<span class="spoiler" title="Spoiler about F1 Brazil GP" spoiler:about="http://www.formula1.com/">OMG Raikonen won the F1 Brazil GP race! The race was so exciting.</span>

That way you can add user-defined CSS stylesheet to turn the text into the same color as background, or can easily build a browser extension to give you a dialog saying "This page has a spoiler about http://www.formula1.com/. Do you want to see it?" Of course you can add the class tag to elements like div or p, or even A tag links, where you won't have any spoiler in the current page but the links might contain the spoilers. Very close to that NSFW microformats isn't it?

We obviously will have a namespace problem with spoiler:about's URI value, since there are lots of ways to refernece the same event, probably using URLs like Upcoming, Wikipedia or Google search results. But I think it should be just optional anyway, since you can just specify the content using title attribute for that.

Thoughts? Is it a good idea, or something doable with existent POSH standards etc.? Just looked at hReview, but couldn't find any mention of spoilers. xFolk might be good for tagging outgoing urls, but wonder how we can do that to markup the part of the page.

Livedoor and 6 million OpenIDs

Now they did it: livedoor speaks OpenID for their 6 million+ users. Wondering who's next?

Livedoor Open Auth API

Livedoor released its open auth API, which allows you to build a site using their over 6 million user accounts. Now all we need is OpenID built on top of this!

Dapper, Pipes and Plagger: meta-Mashup

The launch of Yahoo! Pipes raised a lot of discussions of "similar services / products" and apparently a lot of people have found the similarity between Pipes and Dapper or Plagger.

We can say something about pros and cons for these products, because they're built on top of different architectures and implemented differently. But instead of just comparing what-can-do or cant-do, I'd suggest doing some "mash-up" of these services. Let's say it's a meta-mashup.

Pipes accepts RSS/Atom feeds as an input, and doesn't have an ability to detect site updates that don't come with feeds. Dapper and Plagger are good at it. So you use Dapper's cool UI to analyze and generate API for any web pages, then consume that generated feeds as an input to Pipes, and create a flow to generate remixed feeds.

Dapper and Pipes are both hosted on the server and hence there's no way to interact with local devices or personally authenticated services, like storing updated feeds to iPod, or notify via MacGrowl or post the updates to Twitter using your account, which Plagger is really good at.

So you can mash up these remix sites to create a fully GUI controlled API creator (Dapper) and Pipes-flow programming (Pipes) with your own publisher/notification engine (Plagger).

Yahoo! Pipes = Dressed up Plagger, but the dress is nice

Plagger is a perl-based, open-source feed routing system, or so called "mash-up creator." A couple of interesting sites, like CDTube (a mash-up of Count Down TV and YouTube) are powered by Plagger and it has been driving geeks to do some interesting bits with RSS/Atom/iCal feeds.

The most annoying thing about Plagger development, for me and for end users as well, is the lack of the document, and the lack of pretty interface. And it requires half of CPAN to run it. (Well, not really, because most of CPAN modules are required by "plugins" and you don't actually need to install all plugins. They're all optional.) These barriers have been sort of intentionally made there, to reduce the S/N ratio in the community, and looks like it's been working well, but it caused the other problems ("Plagger is HARD to install!").

But anyway, the most frequently asked question in the conferences have been: "Are there any hosted version of Plagger that I can use, without installing it by myself?" and I always answered "Yes, there could be, but if you're asking me to do it, I won't. Why? I don't need it :) Plagger is licensed under Artistic/GPL and there's no way for me to stop someone to create the hosted Plagger."

So now, Yahoo! Pipes could be the answer for these people. I'm not saying "Y! Pipes ripped off my idea!" since there are other services already like Dapper or xFruit, but having that cool IDE and the feature to share the "pipe" is really awesome. Congrats to the Pipes team.

It also makes me grin that they named the service "Pipes," and follks like Jeremy or Tim O'Reilly are saying "RSS is the pipes for Internet!", which coincidentally matches with the Plagger's tagline "the UNIX pipe programming for Web 2.0." As you can see from the slides (esp. in YAPC::Europe and XML Developer's Day), I've been saying "Plagger allows you to mash up feeds just like Unix pipe/filters." Thanks to Yahoo! for proving that my vision's been correct :)

Plagger upgrades your feeds ... but it degrades too.

Plagger tries real hard to upgrade and normalize your feeds data. For example if you have a feed without a content (title or summary only), Filter::EntryFullText module does auto-fetch the content of the page and extracts fulltext body from there.

Sometimes we need to degrade the content, though. One example is embedded YouTube video in the feeds. When you use Publish::Gmail to read feed updates on Gmail, Thunderbird or whatever Email clients, YouTube embedded videos are not playable, due to the security reason. (Thunderbird has an option to enable scripting in the HTML emails, but then you'll have a security risk reading phishing emails.)

So tokuhirom suggested a filter to strip the embed tag and replace that with a simple A link with IMG tag to the thumbnail image on YouTube server. We named it Filter::DegradeYouTube and now I committed it to the trunk. If you provide your YouTube dev_id, which is highly recommended, it calls YouTube API to figure out the thumbnail image location.

This works really great. I'd like to create a more general, Filter::DegradeHTML framework, so other sites similar to YouTube can be degraded like this.