dessalles

That’s how the 7th season of American Idol ended for a handful of viewers who watched the finale recorded on their DVRs. The live broadcast, which extended a couple minutes beyond the scheduled end time, was cut off right as host Ryan Seacrest went to announce which David (Cook or Archuleta) had won this year’s competition. Brilliant.

When limited by a scarcity of storage resources, what parameters dictate what will and won’t be recorded? An assumption as to the temporal certainty of an event’s occurrence lead those who hadn’t accounted for any margin of error to miss the mark. And seeing how it was the television network, the thing being recorded, that supplied the erroneous information, we’re reminded yet again that distributing misinformation is an extremely effective means of resisting surveillance.

Which begs a few questions: First, in a future of truly pervasive and distributed computing, is it useful to extend the notion sousveillance to include all surveillance facilitated by information supplied by the entity being observed? And more importantly, did Fox intentionally let the broadcast run long to teach time-shifting freeloaders a lesson?