Piracy: Are you really pirates?

Few days back DOT (Department of Telecom) blocked a number of music and file sharing sites. My first reaction was “This government is a dictator. It’s trying to block freedom of speech etc”.  After my aggression was down I tried to think over it. The government is just trying to block some sites which are violating copy right and doing piracy. This brings to bigger question are we pirates?

                The Internet has given us a feeling that anything that we see in internet is free and that we can download each and everything. The click of a mouse button does not seem like a crime does it?

                Its not like we are not paying for what we download from the net. If you do the maths you will come to know we are actually paying more in some cases.

                A high speed internet connection would cost around Rs 100/ GB of data. A normal movie has typical size of 700 MB and considering we pay for both upload and download. A movie download will cost as around Rs 80-90.

                Thanks to high piracy rates cost of CDs has come down to Rs 50 (Mosearbear CDs).

        But is it really about money? I feel below are the reasons why people find it easier to download then to buy a CD.

1.       Large Collection: One has an endless collection of pirated movies available on the internet. Even if you are looking for those age old classics, you most probably will find someone seeding it.

2.       Easy availability: One can download a movie with just a few clicks and within hours he is ready to watch the movies. And the best part is it can be done at any time of the day at any place. Provided you have an internet connection.

3.       Choice of Quality: Most of the time you download a movie you have choice of what quality you want to download (Blueray , DVD, CD). Everyone may not have that choice in conventional movie purchase.

4.       Cheap preview of new Movies: Considering the quality of some recent movies, one has to think twice before watching a movie in a multiplex. Even though the quality is not good people download watch movies. It gives them a better offer then wasting both money and time in a multiplex.

5.       Habbit: People has just become used to downloading movies for free.

                If movie industry is really serious about bringing down piracy then they will have to address all those issues. For merely blocking of sites is not going to help. Today Internet has become too big to be controlled by any organization or government.

So what can the movie industry do?

1.       Make complete collection available on the internet: It’s very important that the film industry come together and put all the movie collection under a single umbrella.

2.       Easy download: People should be able to buy a CD should have the option of both soft copy and hard copy.

3.       Quality: Most people today watch movies on High Definition so it’s important to have HD quality of all movies possible.

4.       Price: People are already paying for internet connection. So it’s important soft copy purchase should be relatively cheaper.

5.       Publicity: It’s very important that the model is fully publicized in such a way that people find purchasing Movies as the way of life rather than downloading pirated version.

                For all those people who think there is nothing wrong in piracy, know this that if piracy is not stopped it’s going to eat up all our creations. And then it does not matter whether you have drawn picture, made a song, made a video, software, a game everything will be pirated and there is nothing you will be able to do about it.

                 

Social Image Search

 The social tag is hot now a days, every product is trying to get associated with it. The general trend is to have a  like button and you are social. That debate is for another post today we talk about Image Search with a social touch.

 When we do a image search in Google, Yahoo or Bing and type Priyanka, then you are bound to hit Priyanka chopra (if you are in India). But what if you actually meant a friend Priyanka. Search engines have no clue what you are talking about unless you give that information to it. You give exact name Priyanka XYZ still chances are low you will get exact result.

 Your social life information rests with the social networking sites Facebook, Orkut (some say its dead), Google Plus etc. The Social Image Search is going to come from one of those or Search giants will have to partner with them. Lets see how it develops.

 Till then I have a prototype with me as how it might work (Please bear with the dull UI still a prototype).

http://lazybuds.com/socialimagesearch/index.php

How it works:

1. As you click on the link it asks for your permission to access your friends list and photographs. Don't worry it does not save any of those information.
2. In the search you can type your friends name to select. 
3. Once selected it appears below with a remove icon with it. 
4. You can have multiple friends searched together. If there is a photo of them together it will find you else it will return individual photos.

Note: Photo search is entirely based on tagging. So you may not get the best result.

 I am not sure how best the user interface should be designed. Looking forward to your suggestions. 

Think before you click like on a page

                Facebook feeds are always full of funny, heart touching, emotional posts from different kind of pages. The author encourages you to like the page to show your support. And at times we also click like on the page to support our cause, to show our liking for a celebrity, movie etc. Little do we wonder that we are providing our details to people who can sell it and exploit it for advertising.

                Lets see how people do business by exploiting our emotions.

Step1: The first step is to create a page giving it an attractive name. Most of the time people target on humor or an emotional point. Let say we created a humor page titled “I am too lazy to type”.

Step2: Next is to post interesting comments. Google a bit about humor and you will get plenty of jokes and funny pictures. Creativity is very important for the competition has increased. You need to lure people to like you page.

Step3: With a good amount of subscribers to your page you are ready to cash it. Now all you need is a buyer for your page who can use this page to post advertisements. Go to any freelancer website and its flooded with buyers request.

Step4: Once the page is sold to a buyer he can simply edit the title and content of the page. “I am too lazy to type” has now become “XYZ company”. And you are flooded with advertisement that you did not subscribe for.

So what do we do about it?

The best thing will be to not to like pages at all. But that is not going to happen and we will like pages. This is what facebook is all about right?

So what we need to do is be a little cautious about the pages that we like. You can see the pages liked by you in your profile.

The Pages that you like show at the bottom of the Info tab, under Activities and Interests. 

If you see any pages that you did not like or don’t like any more you can unlike them.

You can unlike a Page by taking the following steps:

1.    Find the post in your profile (timeline) that states you like the Page or find a post from the Page in your News Feed.

2.    Click the "x" located in the top right hand side of the post.

3.    From the drop-down menu, click "Unlike Page."

You can also navigate to the Page by entering its name into the search bar in the upper right corner, and click the "Unlike" link located on the lower left hand side of the screen.               

Facebook should look into this aspect and a page once created should not be allowed to change its title (atleast).

Facebook as an OAuth

Continuing my last post we will now be seeing how we can use Facebook as an OAuth for our website.

The very fast step would be to register your website in facebook as an Application.

• Go to the link https://developers.facebook.com/apps. It will ask you to log into facebook if you are not already logged in.
• Click on create new app.And input the fields.

• Once Namespace and Display Name is accepted it will take you to next screen where you can input your website information.
• Input your email address in contact email field. Input your website address in Site URL mentioned below and App Domain should be a subset of your Site URL.

• After this click save and go to Basic page in settings. Copy the App Id and App Secret, you will be needing these two fields to validate users.

Next step you will create the website OAuth.
• In first page we will directly redirect to facebook authorization page. In production this can be done on click of a link or button.

index.php

<?php

    $facebookAuthURL = 'https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth';

    $facebookClientId = '145XXXXXXXXXX10'; // Put your App Id here.

    $facebookRedirectUrl = 'http://subirkumarsao.dyndns-server.com/oauthdemo/userAuth.php'; // This will be the url which will do the second part of authentication.

    $authUrl = $facebookAuthURL.'?client_id='.$facebookClientId.'&redirect_uri='.

$facebookRedirectUrl;

?>

<html>

<head>

<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=<?php print $authUrl;?>"></meta>

</head>

</html>

• After user accepts to allow your site to access basic information, facebook will redirect the user to redirect_uri mentioned above and pass code as a paramter.

userAuth.php

<?php

    $facebookAppAuthUrl = 'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token';

    $facebookGraphUrl = 'https://graph.facebook.com';

    $facebookClientId = '145XXXXXXXXXX10'; // Put your App Id here.

    $facebookRedirectUrl = 'http://subirkumarsao.dyndns-server.com/oauthdemo/userAuth.php'; // Redirect url same as passed before.

    $facebookAppSecret = "7f2feXXXXXXXXXXc40806fYYYYYYbf16"; // Put your App Secret here.

  $code = $_GET['code'];

  

  $url =$facebookAppAuthUrl."?client_id=".$facebookClientId

."&redirect_uri=".$facebookRedirectUrl

."&client_secret=".$facebookAppSecret

."&code=".$code;

  

  $output = urlResponse($url);

  $var = strtok($output, "&");

  $ApCode = strtok($var, "=");

  $ApCode = strtok("=");

  

  //  This $ApCode will be used as a token to get user info from facebook.

    

    $url = $facebookGraphUrl.'/me';

    echo '<pre>';

    $resposeObj = json_decode(processUrl($url,$ApCode));

    var_dump($resposeObj);

    echo '<pre>';

    

    function urlResponse($url)

    {

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);

curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

return $response;

    }

    function processUrl($url,$apCode){

if(stripos($url,'?')>0)

           $url = $url.'&access_token='.$apCode;

else

           $url = $url.'?access_token='.$apCode;

return urlResponse($url);

    }

?>

• If everything goes fine you will see user info in JSON format in output.

• You have now successfully integrated your website to use facebook as an OAuth. You can now save the user info received in JSON format. If you need more specific information about the user you can ask specific permission by specifying scope in the request url. Ex: .....&scope=read_friendlists. For more details go through https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/.

Thanks for reading my post. If you have any doubts do post them. Suggestions are always welcomed.

Why OAuth (Open Authorization) is necessary.

We visit many websites daily, of them some asks you to register to their website. And every one knows how boring it can get to fill up same details everywhere. It's a major issue for web designers. Most try to postpone registration unless required and keep it as small as possible.

Looking at the perspective of company it is very important to keep customer details. If you don't have customer details how do you push more products to them. Marketing teams needs it to plan advertisement to target consumers.

Think of a scenario. You want to buy a cell phone you go and search, you land up in a decent website. You like the product, and the vendor. You want to do some more research. That's the point where you left the website. Chances are you don't come back. To the website its a great loss. If they had your information they might have given a last try with some discount. But you never registered to the website.

OAuth comes here as a savior. You put a up a OAuth login option, user is directed to his OAuth website, he logs in , accepts to share basic information and you are done. Just a few clicks and you are saved from the lengthy registration form. You can always un-share your details when you want, something that was not possible before.

OAuth allows users to share personal data stored on one site to another without having to give user credentials.

On next post will take on how you can use Facebook as OAuth with an example code. And then do the same with Google. Do post about your suggestions.

Social Networking and Cinema

Social Networking and Cinema

  Like it or not Social Networking has grown larger then we could have ever imagined. Its taking new shapes and decisions without being controlled by any individual or organisation. Much like the the science fiction villains social networking sites has become a controller of our lives from just being a dumb website.Take the example of Indian Cinema.

  Friday is the release date of Cinema in India (I don't know the reason behind it.). Its a working day most of the people. So who is going to movies on Friday. Students who can bunk a class or two, die hard fans of the stars, and rest people cannot be exactly to put into some category lets call them random people. Once they watch the movie they have their opinion about the movie. Say around 10% people totally hated the movie on the first day and around 10% of that posted on internet about how much they dislike the movie. Say around the same 10% liked the movie, but how often do we see people going to internet to praise a movie unless they are die hard fan. The problem is if a die hard fan is praising a movie people simply ignore them, thinking them to be biased.

10% disliked the movie - 1% posted on social networking sites - People spread it like fire.
10% liked the movie -     1% posted on social networking sites-  People ignore it thinking its biased.

Friday night working people are on the way home, quickly checking rating of released movies. People trust Social networking sites more then rating from film critics. So there you go a movie which had a fair chance of survival (10 % liked it and 10% disliked it) is already a flop.

So what do we do about it?