Mile i Pod

Watching What You Want to Watch Where You Want to When You Want to

Alright here is something perhaps new for you... Where do your rights start when it comes to where you can watch or surf something on the privacy of your own PED (Personal Electronic Device -- Notebook or Laptop computer; iPod; Portable DVD player; mp4 player; personal video player...)?

American Airlines has an in-flight Wi-Fi service now for passengers which started on some flights August 20th¹ and there are concerns voiced by flight attendants and passengers about people using the service to access porn sites while on flights. An article on Bloomberg.com mentions that there were "a lot of complaints"¹and that the Association of Professional Flight Attendants has brought up the issue with management  They recommend that American filter its Wi-Fi service -- blocking black-listed sites -- in order to block offensive content² as I believe there are plans to screen VoIP service as well³. VoIP is Voice over Internet Protocol which basically is the primary way of making telephone calls by way of your Internet connection. (image to left* from Image*After)

There are a number of issues involved. There are the worries that passengers will complain that their neighbouring passengers are watching objectionable material on their PED. Of course there are also worries that passengers might be disturbed that their ability to access any site they could from home would be blocked in a form of censorship. More seem to be accepting of this in the case of the VoIP¹. Perhaps they can see that is in direct competition with the telephone service the airlines already charge for on flights?

Flight Attendants in addition to not wanting to get an eyeful of something they'd rather not see on someone's PED also do not want to become "moral policemen"¹ and have one more area where they might have to lay down the law. They have their hands full with other aspects of the job and likely don't want to have to settle disputes between passengers -- which might be either "they've got something objectionable on their screen" or "the person behind me keeps looking over my shoulder". Another aspect is people doing lewd things while watching explicit content.

(image to right from Image*After)

This is not something that came up just with the introduction of WiFi and Internet connectivity on airliners. This issue also comes up with whether an airline can prohibit what sorts of DVD or other content a passenger is viewing on their PED. A person can have a DVD with nearly any sort of content imaginable and pop it into a player -- whether computer or not -- and play it with no Internet involved at all. Likewise for video podcasts or even audio ones -- remember the "faked orgasm scene" from "When Harry Met Sally".

Of course these things did not appear with digital electronics. The same problems can be said about explicit magazines. Anyone could flip open the magazine of their choice on the airplane and start "reading the articles". Things like this have been a part of life for quite a while and are not really new.

Anyone who is offering the service of an Internet hookup probably has the right to say what they want to provide or block -- perhaps other than the actual providers? If  coffee shop provides WiFi connection to its customers, they probably can block access to some sites with blocking programs. I know when I go to places that provide such services the first thing I get when I try to access the Web is a screen asking if I accept the limits and risks imposed on me and that I might be exposed to by connecting to the Internet there. I can just imagine someone suing a coffee shop for a virus they picked up on their computer when the were downloading pirated game software.

(Image to left from Image*After)

I am not sure if it is a "non-problem" really. I don't know that it has been a problem with people sitting in coffee shops drinking Latte and watching XXX. For the most part regular people behave themselves in public. The times they don't seem to tend to be the times when they are getting intoxicated or high... and that is an issue on its own whether on land, "see" or airline. Control the booze and you likely won't have to worry  about controlling the people.

(image to right from Notebook Review¹¹)

Of course if you control porn sites, then you'll want to control pirate software sites too. You'll want to screen out any site that would have illegal activity on it. But what about violent video games? ...music with violent lyrics? ...content that might be deemed offensive for racial, religious, or other sexual reasons? What if someone is watching news content from an enemy country? ...or news from a country that has opposing views to your own country? What if one person is offended that the person next to them is watching religious programming?

I think that often the answer given by peace officers is "then don't look" -- though sometimes it is hard when it is presented nearly on your own lap. Luckily nearly everyone has the decency to use headphones or earphones. I think that rather than blocking things, it perhaps should all be taken care of on a case by case basis.

I was remembering back when I was in university and calculators were a novel thing still, but becoming commonplace. There were worries about people cheating by seeing the numbers on someone else's calculator. I think that manufacturers foresaw this because it wasn't very long before calculators -- at least scientific and engineering calculators -- had recessed numbers so that you could only read the display from where you were using it. If you were to the side at all you couldn't read the numbers.

Anti-glare shields that came out for early computer monitors (image to left - image from Ergo in Demand) also had this function and it was considered to be a feature for offices where you wouldn't want confidential information seen by people nearby. With some older laptops it was difficult to see the screen unless you were in front of them. But because many people want to share what they show on their laptop screen, many consider it a bonus to have the screen viewable from a broad range of angles -- otherwise there would be less problem with neighbours seeing what you see.

But there are purposes for such a product for notebooks especially and perhaps there are such products out already... Yup There is a 3M PF14.1 - notebook privacy filter! (image to right - image from CDW Canada)

Perhaps though there might be a market for disposable/resusable "blinders" for computers? Perhaps the airlines might offer them for safe viewing? They could also double as glare shields from the cabin lighting.

Protection provided for your viewing pleasure.

Later!
~ Darrell

135

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¹ "American Air Attendants Urge Fiters to Bar Web Porn (Update3)" Mary Schlangenstein, Sept. 10, 2008; Bloomberg.com: News.

² "Porn on a plane: Flight attendants fret over inappropriate Web surfing" David Carnoy, Sept. 12, 2008; Crave, the gadget bog -- CNET, news.cnet.com.

³ "Airlines planning to filter, censor in-flight 'Net access" Jacqui Cheng, Dec. 24, 2007; From the News Desk -- ars technica.
"Porn on a plane! Concerns raised over naughty in-flight WiFi" Jacqui Cheng, Sept. 12 2008; From the News Desk -- ars technica.

¹¹ "Coffee Shop Laptop Zombies" Andrew, May 23, 2007; Notebook Forums and Laptop Discussion - Notebook Review

* Images of airliners not intended to represent American Airlines or specific airline

Biting the Apple: How Do I Back Up Files to a DVD?

How Do I Burn Files to a DVD?

I might be more computer literate than your average bear, but I sometimes look upon new tasks with trepidation. It wasn't so hard to use my CD Burner -- I guess you would call that a CD Writer-ReWriter if you even still remember such things associated with computers. At least it wasn't so hard to use the CD Burner to create disks that I could essentially use as small removable hard drives or like very large "floppy disks".

Just a little Aside:

Now if CD Burners are alien to you, floppy disks will even be more so. Floppy disks were the medium of choice for transporting files from computer to computer long before Internet connection even by dial-up was common. While many offices had networks, smaller ones often had what was referred to as "sneaker-net" which basically meant you copied the files to a "floppy" and carried it to the other computer physically -- "sneaker" referring to your common ordinary running shoe. They started out being flimsy plastic discs permanently contained in slightly less flimsly plastic (vinyl?) envelopes with windows and notches cut into them. The first ones were around 8 inches across. Later they shrunk to 5 1/4 inches square or the 5 1/4" floppies. Tandys, Apples, Commodores, Ataris, and even the original XT's and all the way up to the 386's of the PCs had them. The Classic Mac went away from them as did the Amiga, though the Amiga I know had an available external one. The Macs and Amigas went to the more robust, faster, more powerful, bionic... well not bionic... 3 1/2 inch floppy. A lot of people don't realize that these 3 1/2" disks were still floppy disks because they came encased in a protective hard plastic shell with a sliding window that protected the disk inside. That disk inside was still very much like what was in the 8" and 5 1/4" floppy disks. Eventually they held typically a whole 1.44 Mb of data and that is what everyone got their software to install on their computer on. Windows 3.1 came on floppy disks for instance.

That worked well until I tried to take disks I created to other people's computers only to discover they didn't work as the system I was using was "proprietary" -- meaning does not play well with others -- and this was an issue. It was possible for me to create disks nearly anyone else could use, but it took more learning to do and for some reason I just never made many disks other than necessary backups.

The CD's were also limited to around 700MB and while at one time that was "HUGE", huge has a tendency to shrink very quickly in the computer world.

Well, one of the reasons I was upgrading to a newer system was to be able to work with DVDs. DVDs could hold more than the 700 MB that the CDs could. I am not sure how much the original DVD recordable media could hold, but the current DVD-R discs can now hold 4.7GB of Data. Considering that 700MB is not even 3/4 of 1GB, that is a large jump in size. I discovered actually that DVD players came way down in price and started saving for that. I wasn't sure how my cobbled together system -- I don't think it really has a "Powered by Frankenstein" sticker on it -- would handle a DVD player or Writer. But I realized when saving my birthday and Christmas money that I might consider saving for an actual new computer... That is how I got the cobbled together desktop computer in the first place really. My income did improve and rather than the low end notebook computer I was aiming for I realized I could aim for an Apple notebook. So I did.

The bottom of the end of the 13" MacBooks still had the CD Writer DVD Player combo -- I think that was called the Super Drive? -- and I wanted to be able to back things up in larger chunks than 700MB. Currently people buy multi-GB memory cards and card readers for some sorts of storage or memory sticks of multiple GB size. GB is Gigabyte or a thousand million bytes using binary numbers which means the actual numbers come out weird. MB is Megabyte or million bytes and KB is Kilobyte or thousand bytes.

So I got the middle of the line MacBook which I am fairly pleased with still after 7 months.

Getting back to backing up files to a DVD. Now I still don't know all the ins and outs, but one very simple way is to create a folder and give it the name you want the DVD to eventually have. Then copy all the files you want to go onto the DVD onto that folder. If you had already opened an Info window on that folder you could watch as the file size increased. I don't think you want to go much over 4.3GB though I am not 100% sure on the exact value. DVD recording material is not very expensive so I think that perhaps organization is more important than ramming every last byte you can onto the disc. Also I am not sure what happens if you go over. Also this is for DVD-R discs. I think DVD+R disks are the same and am not sure that there are other sizes or not?

Once you have the files in that folder you created and you have named and renamed them to your satisfaction and I figure if you have an obsessive nature you might want to sort the folders the way you want -- not sure it makes a difference -- then place a blank DVD into the drive. The Mac will spin up the drive and look to see what sort of disc it is. When it discovers that it is recordable and blank it will ask you what you want to do. In this case I click on "Ignore". There are other ways to do things, but this is how "I" am doing things at the moment and not an all inclusive manual. Once you have done that, Open up the folder you have created with the name you want on the DVD. It now has all the files you want to put on the DVD as well. If you have this folder open and it is the active folder, the "Finder" menu will be at the top of the screen. Click on "File" and when the menu drops down, towards the bottom will be a choice: Burn "DVDTitle" to disc

"DVDTitle" of course will be the title you gave to the folder you want to turn into a DVD. Conversely the computer is telling you that it is preparing to turn "DVDTitle" into a DVD. I left things as they were, It selected 8x for speed though I think my discs are rated for 16x. I think that is the maximum speed for the burner in the notebook. I clicked okay and the computer started creating my DVD. There was a progress indicator which showed how much had been done so far. Once the DVD had been written onto the DVD it then verified the data went on okay... I am not sure what would happen if it didn't -- would it be able to correct the error or just say "Sorry we have to try again, please insert another disc."

Simple -- the next thing I did was to eject the disc and use my permanent marker to label the disk. I do that right away now... I don't know how many of those darned floppy disks I have without labels...

Later!
~ Darrell

81.