Forbes

Jan 12, 2015 ∞

A Reminder To Ditch The Disclaimer This Tax Season

Kelly Phillips Erb, writing at Forbes:

According to the final Regs, “the rules in the final regulations are intended to eliminate the need for unnecessary disclaimers.” In other words, the IRS gave a nod to how crazy things had become, noting, “These types of disclaimers are routinely inserted in any written transmission, including writings that do not contain any tax advice.” The rules and the lack of understanding of the rules “contributed to overuse, as well as misleading use, of disclaimers.”

Please, please, please listen to her sage advice and get rid of those stupid disclaimers unless your correspondence actually includes actionable tax advice.

And while you’re at it, if you’re into tax law you should check out her blog and find her on Twitter, as well.

Jan 19, 2014 ∞

Who cares if I think this link leads to a silly blog post at Forbes.com?

No one. Least of all I.

I just wrote too many words about why I think the post I link to above isn’t worth the bandwidth it’s transmitted over, but I was being tired and petty and shitting on the good-natured opinion of someone more successful than I, so I deleted those words.

I’m embarrassed I wrote the first version of this note, but I give myself a few points for having published this far more self-aware and candid revision.

May 3, 2013 ∞

Now you can 3D-print a gun.

Andy Greenberg at Forbes:

Once the file is online, anyone will be able to download and print the gun in the privacy of their garage, legally or not, with no serial number, background check, or other regulatory hurdles. “You can print a lethal device,” Wilson told me last summer. “It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.”

Law student Cody Wilson has added some steel to make it detectable and lawful, and gotten the appropriate firearms manufacturing license. But that doesn’t mean the world at large will do the same when Wilson uploads the files needed to print the gun to the internet.

I often write about how technology has made the cost of copying trivial, while the laws on the books still hail from a time when the cost of copying was non-trivial. When it comes to audio and video copyright, that triviality can be economically disruptive at best, and can disturb entire industries at worst. But when it comes to weapons, that triviality to copy is downright dangerous.

Mar 21, 2013 ∞

Dropbox isn't a feature, it's an infrastructure

Dropbox isn’t a feature, it’s an infrastructure

Collin Fletcher of The Tech Block makes the solid case that the acquisition of iOS email app Mailbox by Dropbox signals the latter company’s push to build a “windowed ecosystem” on top of its core file syncing service. It’s worth reading the whole article, but I’d go a step further.

Victoria Barret of Forbes reported in October 2011 that, as Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told her in an interview, Steve Jobs called the company a “feature, not a product” when Houston rebuffed Jobs’ acquisition offer.

Steve was wrong, though. Dropbox isn’t a just product (although plenty of people pay for its core sync functionality), nor is it merely a feature (although it can be integrated into many different types of apps and services).

Dropbox is, at its most fundamental level, an infrastructure. What the Mailbox acquisition really signals is that Dropbox is confident enough in its core service that it is time to invest in ways to add value to that service. The Dropbox file storage and syncing infrastructure already undergirds the daily workflows of millions of people.

Email is the perfect product to build on that infrastructure. So is a personal music storage and player product. So is a task manager. So are innumerable other products that benefit from a powerful, reliable file synchronization mechanism that can functions flawlessly at scale.

Jun 12, 2012 ∞

Pirates of Westeros: the untapped half-billion dollar market for Game of Thrones

Ernesto at TorrentFreak:

It’s clear that HBO (and others) prefer exclusiveness over piracy, which is a dangerous game. They might make decent money in the long run by selling subscriptions. However, this limited availability also breeds pirates, and one has to wonder how easy it is to convert these people to subscriptions once they have experienced BitTorrent.

TorrentFreak is unabashedly pro-torrent and, some might argue, pro-piracy if necessary. And they don’t exactly divulge great detail on their methodology for determining downloads and viewership. But, let’s assume for the sake of a blog post that their numbers are accurate.

Game of Thrones pulled an estimated 4.2 million legitimate (read: cable-subscribed) viewers per episode and 3.9 million illegal torrent downloads per episode during its second season. You could even, as Gizmodo's Casey Chan did, pull legitimate viewership numbers from Wikipedia and use those alongside TorrentFreak’s download numbers to come ot the conclusion that more people pirated the second season than legally watched it. I don’t think you need to massage the numbers, though: