Here’s a new term for you–stogware, which blights DVD movie technology now and could hurt e-books in the future, when multimedia counts more.
This neologism, which I’ll define in a moment, came to mind when I was trying to play the DVD of Boiler Room, a film about stock-market crooks. Hollywood itself committed a crime against me. The DVD refused to run on on my Dell Optiplex unless I installed a program called PCFriendly. Orwell Land here. This “Friendly” program wasted half an hour of my time, perhaps because I preferred for my firewall to block the software’s path to and from the Net. Also, once I installed PCFriendly, my computer couldn’t load DVDs as quickly. Drat. My Dell had already come with a good DVD player. But thanks to proprietary encryption schemes, apparently, Hollywood wanted me to waste my hard disk space with a second program. Worse, to be able to play another DVD, I’d already installed InterActual Player, the successor to PCFriendly.
I uninstalled PCHostile and somehow managed to see Boiler Room with the RealOne player, at least after I’d selectively disabled the firewall; but the bad taste lingered. No telling what the greedsters–an apt term, considering that an AOL Time Warner offshoot released the film–had in mind for the innards of my machine. A little stealth here? Privacy-invading programs? At the same time, PCFriendly was taking up 10 megs on my drive if I recall correctly. Combine “stealthy” with “hoggish” and you come up with the term “stogware.” That’s, ugh, PCFriendly.
Meanwhile, aided by Silicon Valley, the assault on users’ present and future machines continues. A Safer System for Home PC’s Feels Like Jail to Some Critics is the New York Times’ headline over John Markoff’s piece on the sleazy “trusted computing initiative.” You might think of secure computing as a form of slogware. It’ll gobble up computing resources, cripple our machines and along the way be damn stealthy.
The irony is that our jailers, America’s stogware promoters, are far from squeaky-clean. Check out the Washington Post’s review of When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent Into Power and Influence, by Connie Bruck. Reviewer John Anderson, Newsday’s chief film critic, says that the late Wasserman “laid waste to a promising infant medium (television) and ensnared politicians of both parties in the film industry web (his legacy includes TV reruns, a performer’s participation in profits and arch-lobbyist Jack Valenti). Sidney Korshak, the Man Who Was Al Capone’s Lawyer, hardly needs much more of an introduction. Suffice to say, he did a lot of the dirty work, albeit without getting his own hands dirty.” The sleaze, as exemplifed by the massive campaign contributions that gave us the DMCA and resulted in Hollywood’s increased ability to bully Silicon Valley, continues–setting the stage for DC-blessed stogware.
One of the best antidotes for stogware threat, of course, besides a less buyable Congress, would open, nonproprietary standards for books and movies alike.
