Salon recently ran a two part feature on Burst.com. The feature talks how Microsoft stole Burst.com technology, and positions Burst.com as a David to Microsoft’s Goliath.

Salon’s articles are normally wonderul. The problem with this one is that the author apparently didn’t have the technical background to see through Burst.com’s “technology”.

While I was Apple’s QuickTime Evangelist, I was a magnet for all kinds of folks who claimed to have miraculous codecs and other holy-grail technologies. Burst.com claimed to have a revolutionary way of delivering streaming content. Lossless. Faster than realtime.

Well, golly. You can deliver content losslessly and faster than real time via HTTP and FTP, too. Only Burst.com did this with a magical, proprietary protocol that required a magical, proprietary server that they would be happy to sell to you. The secret of the “secret sauce” that Burst.com CEO Richard Lang mentions in the feature is that there is no secret sauce.

Mr. Lang believes that Microsoft was out to get him. However, the reality is that Burst.com was, at best, a fly to Microsoft’s mountain.

Now Burst.com is suing Microsoft, a move apparently prompted by Windows Media 9’s “Instant On” feature. If you have a really fast conneciton and there are no bottlenecks along the way, it lets you see/hear media almost instantly. It works by putting a huge buffer at the client, and then filling that buffer as fast as possible so that buffering time is minimized.

QuickTime’s “Fast Start” provided much of this functionality with QuickTime 3’s progressive streaming (1998), and QuickTime 6 added the final missing piece (random access) with its Instant-On feature earlier this year. RealNetworks uses a similar method to optimize the viewing experience in RealSystem 9.

Burst.com is one of the last vestiges of the P.T. Barnums that contributed to the terminal over-inflation of the Internet bubble. It’s time that they go away, and I’m rooting for Microsoft as they pound the nails in the coffin. Microsoft’s media monopoly Goliath crushes David

A Red Herring article discusses where we are on the high-speed wireless data curve, comparing this period of network upgrades to the analog-to-digital transition of the last decade.

…the industry remains in the midst of its most difficult transition since the migration from analog to digital voice service in the mid-’90s. Back then, the business suffered through a period of substandard growth. Users didn’t want to buy new phones that would operate on the soon-to-be-outmoded analog network, but they also were reluctant to buy digital handsets until the necessary networks were built. Once nationwide digital networks were complete, however, handset sales took off, and the industry boomed.

Although there are useful insights in the article, it’s a bit confused. The article talks about a “transition” from wireless voice to wireless data services, but obviously data services simply supplant voice services. It’s also contradictory, in the subtitle asserting that “communications devices reflect the limitations of their underlying network” and then later declaring that “handsets that exploit the existing network will be far more compelling this holiday season than they were last”. It also claims that “Motorola has the most compelling handset product cycles”, which is completely ridiculous IMHO. Caveat lector. Link

Arnold Reinhold has posted a summary of the technical overview of Palladium that Microsoft recently presented at MIT.

Palladium is a collection of Microsoft technologies for enforcing system-wide DRM. The technologies fall into four categories: (1) “Curtained memory” ensures that code can’t observe (read) or modify (write) other code’s memory. (2) “Attestation” means that code can “attest” that it’s data was created by it and belongs to it. (3) “Sealed storage” means that only code that created the data (or code it trusts) can get to it once it’s stored to a non-volitile storage medium. (3) “Secure input and output” means that communications to the keyboard, mouse and display are encrypted. Palladium achieves all of this through a virtual PC running it’s own OS (“Nexus”) that communicates to the real PC via agents.

How to prevent the secure channel to the on-screen window from being spoofed is still an open problem. Brian suggested a secure mode LED that lights when that window has focus or having the secure window display a mother’s-maden-name type code word that you only tell Nexus. Of course this doesn’t matter for DRM since your trusting the window is not the issue.

Sheesh. Get ready for your forced move to a gated community where you can’t see what’s in the refrigerator unless you put it there. Link