menso's blog

"You cannot compete with free" is a commonly held perception of the music industry in its fight against piracy. Piracy must be tackled with harder and heavier penalties. But is 'free' what the industry is competing with?

Innovation
Long before the Apple iTunes Music Store came along, angry consumers were already sharing music online. An adolescent in an attic programmed the Napster service (the precursor to services like Kazaa and Limewire) and demonstrated that there was a market which, along with its billions of revenue, was rejected by the industry. For the consumer it was a logical step: content could be bought in the same way the Internet worked, without international shopping hours. Albums that were never released in the Netherlands could be on your hard disk ten minutes later. Films and series that were not released in the Netherlands could still be viewed immediately.

On 17th September Gendo held a workshop for the Cascadis Webmasterclass meeting. Arjen Kamphuis and Menso Heus gave attendees a broad overview of what the security landscape is like, what are the common threats and what participants could do about it.

Imagine that all the modern communication tools of today are not be available to you. No mail, no chat, no Twitter, Facebook or phone. Now imagine that you are a company with 50 employees who need to be in daily contact. How do you solve it? With them all working at the same location. Simple puzzle, right?

Now let us turn the question around: all these modern tools are available to you, so why are you going to the office every day? And as a bonus question: are you aware that a hundred years ago we were driving around with a horse and carriage?

Our computers remind us daily of old-fashioned working methods: we neatly arrange our files and folders in our digital filing cabinet every evening before we go home. To share information with colleagues we make a copy of the folder and forward it on. And if we make changes, there are suddenly two versions of the document. Colleagues can also modify the file, and then there are three.

The last weekend of July, I was with two friends in Bristol. A city we would never have visited, had it not been for museum exhibition of Bristol graffiti artist Banksy.

The exhibition is the most popular the museum has held over the last hundred years. Eeven though we went a few weeks after the opening, we still had to queue for about  half an hour to get in. How often do you see that at a museum?

A BBC report also stated that business in the city benefited. Like us, many people were visiting Bristol especially for the exhibition, and they all needed  somewhere to eat, drink and sleep. There are even hotels with special "Banksy arrangements' for the guests.

Banksy is good for the city, said a member of "Destination Bristol" proudly to camera. But the weird thing is that the city has not treated him well in the past. When we asked someone where we could find some original “street works” of Banksy, we were pointed on the map to a number of places where the city had painted out his works .