LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

This week, Yahoo Music e-mailed customers who purchased music from their site and let them know that as of September 30, 2008, Yahoo Music will go dark.

And they will take the DRM key servers down with it.

That means that anyone who legally purchased tunes through Yahoo Music will lose the right to transfer that music to other devices or computers, even though they paid for that right.

Microsoft's MSN Music sent a similar notice out earlier this year, but acquiesced to leaving the DRM servers online until 2011.

Once again, this truly provides food for thought for libraries signing up for content services who cripple their wares with DRM. When they decide to leave, they can take their toys with them. Unfortunately, they can also take your toys with them too.

With the market for electronic books still relatively sleepy, Sony Corp. is trying a new tack: untethering the latest model of its e-book reading device from its own online bookstore.

On Thursday, Sony will provide a software update to the Reader, a thin slab with a 6-inch screen, so the device can display books encoded in a format being adopted by several large publishers. That means Reader owners will be able to buy electronic books from stores other than Sony's.

Locative information is one of the most practical and heavily used aspects of information science. iPhone users are showing up on Twitter with new apps allowing their iPhone to pinpoint where they are and seek out others using the system. Lots of us use GPS to get around and I don't know about you, but the last conference I went to, my GPS was incredibly useful. Not only could I get around, but I could find bars, restaurants, bookstores, and anything else I needed.

The problem is, GPS only works on the Earth... which could be an issue if we're thinking about going back to the moon.

Now granted the moon is only about a quarter of the size of Earth, but you could still get lost pretty easily and it's not like there's anyone about to ask for directions. So NASA needs a plan... and it turns out that they have one.

So, this weekend I attended my first hacker conference, “The Last H.O.P.E (Hackers on the Planet Earth)” sponsored by 2600 Magazine. Featured con speakers were: Steven Levy, Kevin Mitnick, Jello Biafra, Steve Rambam and Adam Savage of MythBusters fame. Some of the sessions I did attend included: “Evil Interfaces: Violating the User”, “A Hacker's View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)”, “Hacking Democracy: An In Depth Analysis of the ES&S Voting Systems”, “One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer”, Wikipedia: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”, “YouTomb - A Free Culture Hack” and all the featured speakers (except I very sadly missed Steven Levy, I loved that iPod book!).

So what’s a librarian to make of all this? Well believe it or not, there is some common ground between the hacker community and us information science professionals. Chief among these are copyright (especially now with all the digitization occurring in libraries), The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), censorship, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) and the ever popular Wikipedia. There are more parallels between library science and hackers than you would ever think possible. We have similar concerns such as: accessibility of information, the sharing of information, collaboration and community outreach.

Hackers get a bad rap. I always had a soft-spot for them, even the nasty ones, as they show great ability to think outside the box and open up previously closed discussions on security and our rights. At the con there were no phones stolen, no re-wiring of the hotel elevators, no malicious hacking, or anything of the like. At the end of the 3-day con I was not surprised to hear this, from the session I had attended and the people I met, I learned a lot about hackers and their community. Hacking from a positive prospective brings attention to topics that definitely need more discussion, RFIDs and electronic voting for instance. Their act of exposing security flaws becomes shared knowledge within the community. They bring to light the shortcomings of processes and systems we depend upon, making way for improvements. Today, many hackers have jobs where they keep our precious data safe by testing systems, exposing vulnerabilities, looking for back-doors and ways to compromise the system, resulting in systems that keep our data safe.

Tina Gasperson reviews Glubble, a free proprietary Firefox add-on from Glaxstar that limits the activity your child can perform online by blocking access to Web sites and filtering Google search results. For parents, a tool like Glubble can seem like the perfect answer to the problem of protecting kids from the unsavory elements of the Internet. But as she discovered through her use of Glubble, the questions surrounding the idea of Internet filtering don't come with easy answers.

Seeing the eReader program icon on the iPhone's screen literally brought tears to Joe Hutsko's eyes. Having spent the last decade reading scores of e-books from backlit cover to cover on Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia and BlackBerry devices, he thought the arrival of eReader to the iPhone was a dream come true ...

E-book readers allow you to take hundreds of books and documents along with you in a device that’s not much bigger than your smartphone. Michael Kassner looks at the technology behind these products and offers his opinion about two e-book readers using a road warrior’s perspective.

From The Security Community Blogs When Libraries Are Vulnerable:

I'll be brief. A friend and I discovered a flaw in our local library's web site that allows an attacker to gain control over someone's card. With each others' permission, we were able to use this flaw to take over each other's accounts.

Porco reiterated Amazon.com's claim — a surprise to some publishers — that Kindle downloads from early June through early July made up 12 percent of total sales for the more than 100,000 books available both through the e-book reader and in traditional form. In early June, at the annual booksellers convention, Amazon.com head Jeff Bezos said Kindle sales were 6 percent of the market for books in both formats.

In an age in which day-to-day questions and research are just a click away, libraries — once thought to be in danger of being permanently checked out — are more relevant than ever.

"Libraries are being used more now than the pre-Internet days," Stainbrook said. "Libraries help to conquer the digital divide — between those who have computers and those who don't. All indications are that libraries are going to thrive in the digital age."