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DRM can bite my ass
As you all know, I stopped buying CD’s because the rights holders went apeshit on their customers - and I’d rather be an ex-customer than submit to their kind of abuse.
It now appears that even non-DRM music is not safe:
[Quote:]
Dear Apple:
As I’m sure you know, I’ve been a pretty unrepentant Mac fangirl for a while. I like shiny things. I like your laptops. I like your operating system (and I used to like your old one, too). I like my transparent terminal windows. I like not having to run OpenOffice just to read the attachments people insist on sending me. I like Quicktime. I like a lot of things you do.
But I’ve got to tell you, this iPod destructive mind-meld “link” to a specific computer, or whatever the hell it is, is just fucking stupid.
So I’ve got two powerbooks. One’s my “real” computer, which has a slowly failing hard disk, and so I’ve also got a loaner from work. I copied my home directory over to the new one via drag and drop and everything worked very well — thank you — such as my shareware apps recognizing my previous registration codes, all my photos and documents and the cruft accumulated over years. Even my Firefox plugins came over (and, it should be noted, that the Firefox on this laptop doesn’t exhibit the completely wack-ass behavior that Firefox on my other laptop does — so that seems to prove well enough that it’s not my preferences or plugins or something that’s causing it, interestingly enough). Everything was great.
…Until this morning. I had ripped some music over the weekend, onto my external hard disk and added it to the real laptop’s iTunes library therefrom. I wanted to listen to it at work today, but my upload speed from home is pretty crummy, so I decided I’d just throw the music on my iPod Shuffle and take that to work and listen to the tracks off of it. I hopped in the car, happily listened to my new MP3s on said faithful iPod on the way in, arrived at work, and plugged in the iPod to my loaner laptop. Whereupon I got a message that said something like “Some songs have not been copied to the iPod ‘wee’ because this computer is not authorized to play them, including ‘$song_by_some_other_band_that_was_in_aac_format_but_i_dont_care_about_that_band.’”
Okay. Whatever. I have that album on this laptop and I don’t know why you’re whinging about it anyways, as I didn’t ask you to “copy” anything. ‘Cos it was already *there* and all. But whatever, I didn’t want to listen to that band at the moment (and I can always go type in my stupid iTunes Music Store password if I did). I want to listen to those new MP3s……hey, WHERE THE HELL DID THEY GO?
What I’m assuming happened here is that my iPod, named ‘wee’ (what? it *is*!), had some sort of sympathetic bond with my old laptop, “shiny.” It liked shiny. It was evidently involved in a fiercely monogamous relationship with shiny. When I plugged it in to my loaner laptop, “snooty,” it decided that, as a part of automatically updating the iPod (why was snooty auto-updating wee if wee is married to shiny?) it would delete the MP3s that were not a part of snooty’s music library. Despite the fact that they’re not AAC files and had no DRM of any kind. And it’s not just that iTunes is not showing them; I downloaded and fired up PodUtil just to check. Then I plugged the iPod directly into my external speakers. Gone, daddy, gone; the love has gone away.
Attention Apple: Those were my bloody MP3s. I wanted to play them for myself on my bloody iPod. You morons have just fucked me over because now not only can I not listen to them on my laptop speakers, but you deleted them off the iPod entirely so I can’t listen to them in the car or over headphones until I get home tonight. (I would be SO PISSED if this had happened while I was travelling and away from my home computer!) In practical terms, won’t someone please explain to me the legal reasons I have *less* right to listen to music I purchased on one set of speakers versus another, to the point where the laptop not only disables the music in question but outright destroys it? You disabled the AAC files that were not authorized. If you wanted to similarly refuse to play back the MP3 files that were not in my currently-connected laptop’s music library, why was it necessary to REMOVE them and not simply disable them?
I used to carry my old 5G original iPod around with music on it and plugged it in to listen to on other people’s computers with some regularity. That was evidently okay behavior back in the halcyon days of, what, 2002? The times they are a-changin’.
Suck my dick, Apple.
Site-Lookup Service Foils Fraud
[Quote:]
The OpenDNS system, which will open its servers to the public Monday, wants to be a more user-friendly name resolution service than those provided by ISPs, with technology to keep fraudulent sites out of its listings, correct some typos and help browsers look up web pages faster.
Setting up an internet connection to use OpenDNS is about as difficult as setting up a POP3 e-mail account, and more advanced users can tinker with their router settings to make the change across a small network.
In return, sites like the notoriously sluggish MySpace.com load significantly faster, thanks to the way OpenDNS caches IP addresses. Users who type “wordpres.sorg” or “craigslist.or” into their browser’s address field are automatically routed to the correct address, instead of getting a 404 error page.
Those who click on a link in a phishing e-mail that attempts to take them to a fake site and con them into entering their credit card number won’t even make it to the website, if OpenDNS knows about it.
[..]
“The problems we are trying to solve, such as phishing and malware, these are social DNS problems, not technical,” Ulevitch says. “Recursive DNS servers are the root of the problem. None of these attacks work without DNS. We set out to create a DNS server and DNS service that provides intelligence and transparency into the way recursive DNS service works.”
The startup hopes to make money when users type in a nonexistent domain name, such as schwinnbicyclepumps.com.
Currently, web surfers simple get an error message when they attempt to navigate to an unused domain. OpenDNS users will instead be routed to a company server that will present a list of search engine results and paid advertisements.
So these guys found a social problem, and their answer is a technical solution that throws censorship and advertising at the user.
Right.
I’ll save my enthusiasm for something else.
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Freedom Of Speech Does Not Extend To Criticising The Police
[Quote:]
My friend Phil and I were going through a metal detector on the way out of Highbury & Islington tube on Friday evening around 8.30pm, on our way to a gig. Phil, who has a degree in physics, said to me in a low voice that the metal detector was a “piece of shit that wouldn’t stop anyone”. Obviously, someone was listening, as all of a sudden, half a dozen policemen jumped on him and hustled him over to the corner of the tube station, where he was detained for about 20 minutes for the grave crime of swearing in public, and fined £80 for the privilege. For swearing! On the tube! If it’s such a crime, then I owe them about a million pounds, as swearing on and at the tube is the only way to deal with the pain of having to travel on the dratted thing every day.
The police were fucking rude, too, and treated Phil like he was a hardened criminal - they were really aggressive, and clearly wanted him to lose his temper so they could charge him with something worse. They said repeatedly he was very close to being arrested. For the terrible crime of swearing and calling their machine a piece of shit - which, as a physics graduate, he actually knows about. Phil co-operated fully and gave them every piece of ID you could think of, and allowed them to search his bag, but that wasn’t enough for them - they just had to keep on firing questions. I got really upset and started crying through rage, frustration and fear. I also asked them very politely if this was the UK or the People’s Republic of China. They then told me I was very close to being arrested, too.
Zidane
[Quote:]
Wham! Zidane uses his head on Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup Final - Italy vs France, 9th July 2006
(Set up, photographed and loaded to Flickr within 15 minutes of the incident
)
When I set this picture up I never knew this (copied from Zidane’s Wikipedia entry):
“Zidane was sponsored by LEGO for a while and wore their logo. He was the official endorser of their Soccer/Football line, and was also immortalised in plastic in the form of a LEGO minifigure of himself, available in several of the sets.”
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Cartoon
What a great paper, what a blah abstract
[Quote:]
Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, we exploit a natural experiment, the stationing of thousands of diplomats from around the world in New York City. Diplomatic immunity means there was essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations, allowing us to examine the role of cultural norms alone. This generates a revealed preference measure of government officials’ corruption based on real-world behavior taking place in the same setting. We find strong persistence in corruption norms: diplomats from high corruption countries (based on existing survey-based indices) have significantly more parking violations, and these differences persist over time. In a second main result, officials from countries that survey evidence indicates have less favorable popular views of the United States commit significantly more parking violations, providing non-laboratory evidence on sentiment in economic decision-making. Taken together, factors other than legal enforcement appear to be important determinants of corruption.
Here is the paper. I might have tried the following:
During a period of diplomatic parking immunity, the average Kuwaiti diplomat to the United Nations racked up 246 parking violations. No Swedish diplomat had any parking violations. This paper explores how that might possibly be the case.
Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.
[Quote:]
58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
42% of college graduates never read another book.
80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57% of new books are not read to completion.
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The Bride Price
Ghulam Haider, 11, is set to be married. She had hoped to be a teacher but was forced to quit her classes when she became engaged.
[Quote:]
In many societies, the term “child bride” calls to mind impetuous sweethearts, a ladder cautiously positioned beneath a bedroom window, a silent kiss in the moonlight and a young couple making an anxious getaway to a justice of the peace. But this is not a ready image the world over. In Afghanistan, a child bride is very often just that: a child, even a preteen, her innocence betrothed to someone older, even much, much older.
Rather than a willing union between a man and woman, marriage is frequently a transaction among families, and the younger the bride, the higher the price she may fetch. Girls are valuable workers in a land where survival is scratched from the grudging soil of a half-acre parcel. In her parents’ home, a girl can till fields, tend livestock and cook meals. In her husband’s home, she is more useful yet. She can have sex and bear children.
Afghanistan is not alone in this predilection toward early wedlock. Globally, the number of child brides is hard to tabulate; they live mostly in places where births, deaths and the human milestones in between go unrecorded. But there are estimates. About 1 in 7 girls in the developing world (excluding China) gets married before her 15th birthday, according to analyses done by the Population Council, an international research group.
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3 Senators Protest Possible Tax Deduction for Boeing in Settling U.S. Case
[Quote:]
Three prominent Republican senators have written to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to express concern that Boeing may be allowed to take a tax deduction for a $615 million settlement reached last week with the government.
The three senators — Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; John McCain of Arizona, a longtime critic of Boeing; and John W. Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee — said in the letter that allowing Boeing to deduct payments to settle government ethics charges “would be unacceptable.”
Boeing and the Justice Department reached an agreement on Friday in which the company agreed to pay $615 million to avoid criminal charges and settle claims arising from its improper hiring of a Pentagon official and its obtaining of proprietary documents from the Lockheed Martin Corporation relating to government rocket launchings.
Allowing the Boeing settlement to be tax deductible, the senators said in the letter, would result in “leaving the American taxpayer to effectively subsidize its misconduct.”
Vacation coming up
I’m really due for a good vacation.
My dad is still showing good progress, and it looks like nothing will stand in the way of my planned vacation, starting next monday.. this weblog will go on sort-of-hiatus. I’ll have net access in curaçao, so I’ll probably post one or two nice underwater pictures, but you won’t get the stuff you usually find here…
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La carretera más peligrosa del mundo
[Quote:]
En la altiva cordillera de los Andes bolivianos se encuentra la espectacular y vertiginosa carretera de La Cumbre a Coroico (la carretera de los Yungas). Tiene 3600 m de desnivel a lo largo de sus 64 km de recorrido. Viendo las fotos se comprende el calificativo de carretera de la muerte.
More pictures here.
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Border for Sale
[Quote:]
Five major military contractors are competing to design a system to tackle up to two million undocumented immigrants a year in the United States. Boeing, Ericsson, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are working on proposals that focus on high technology rather than high fences, but ignoring some of the fundamental problems of immigration.
At each checkpoint along the path to citizenship or deportation — from desert wilderness to urban labyrinth — private contractors are expected to be hired to detect, apprehend, vet, detain, process, and potentially incarcerate or deport people seeking economic and human rights asylum in the U.S.
An indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, estimated at $2.5 billion, for the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) will be awarded September 30th 2006, to build a seamless web of new surveillance technology and sensors with real time communications systems for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The plan also includes funds for additional personnel, vehicles and physical infrastructure for fencing, and virtual fencing for U.S. borders.
Sumatran tiger cub
In this photograph provided by the Smithsonian Institution, National Zoo Veterinarian Carlos Sanchez, right, uses an eye scope to examine a Sumatran tiger cub held by Animal Keeper Jeanne Minor Thursday, July 6, 2006 in washington. Three tiger cubs o ne male and two females were born at the National Zoo May 24, 2006. The 6-week-old cubs received their first round of vaccinations during Thursdays medical exam. (AP Photo, National Zoo, Jessie Cohne)
Cracking the Secret Codes of Europe’s Galileo Satellite
Most people think the quality of encryption and security depends on the choice of the encryption algorithm.
Not quite.
Just as important is the random number generator, as the European Space Agency just found out…
[Quote:]
Members of Cornell’s Global Positioning System (GPS) Laboratory have cracked the so-called pseudo random number (PRN) codes of Europe’s first global navigation satellite, despite efforts to keep the codes secret. That means free access for consumers who use navigation devices — including handheld receivers and systems installed in vehicles — that need PRNs to listen to satellites.
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I have never had any of those problems with my IAudio player. Drag and drop and no ITunes!
A little unfair as a criticism since it is nothing to do with DRM. It is part of the design of the iPod family that they are essentially mobile mirrors of a single iTunes library (or subset of it). If you sync an iPod to a different machine then it will erase the current songs and replace them with the library, or subset of it, from the new machine. I believe it warned me the one time I tried it, but I might be mistaken.
That is a most stupid design if it’s true.
That’s why I don’t use iPod, but a simple mp3 player. Smaller, cheaper, and it does not try to decide for me what I am allowed to listen to.
It’s just perfect.
Fuck Corporate Mentality. Period.
My iPod has never decided what I am allowed to listen to, and I have never purchased anything from the iTunes music store, or even been bugged to do so. All my music is in MP3 format imported from my CD collection and it handles that perfectly.
The design might be stupid, but I suspect that it is there to make the device as simple to use as possible for the 80% use-case. Apple is very good at keeping the usage model simple for people who do not want to understand technology. That has the side effect in many cases of frustrating those who do understand it and want to do different things with their devices or software than it was designed for. A simple flash drive model might make more sense to you, but would probably baffle a lot of the non-technical users of iPods (and the non-tech savvy community is probably still larger than the tech-savvy one, so it makes business sense to design for them).
All of that said, the main reason I bought the device over the other choices however was that it supported downloading the photos from my camera directly. That allows me to leave the laptop behind when I am on a trip and still have a means to offload the images from the camera’s flash cards. When I get home, the offloaded images are imported into iPhoto as if they were on a flash card. It makes my travel kit much lighter, and provides me with over 30GB of storage for images (allowing some space on the 40GB drive for some music, my contact list and the thumbnails of my recent photos).
Ok, I see your point,though I don’t know how a simple mp3 player is technically more difficult than iPod.
I would say that if my mum - not a technically savy lady in this area - would have experienced the same thing, she would have been more angry than the lady who wrote the letter above.
I don’t think that technical ignorance makes it easier to accept that your music just disappeared.
If you use it to store pics, then it is probably a good choice, though I only want to listen to music
It has everything to do with DMR. If I don’t have to use a program that makes DMR decisions for “my” music that I have purchased, then I am better off. Your player, which needs ITunes to function normally, is the problem because it relies on a program that is buddy, buddy with DMR. When I drag and drop, my player says, “Okay, your the master, whatever you want!” The iPod is a fine piece of hardware but the software it uses has made me go elsewhere. My player doesn’t warn me that I am about to do something legal but that it doesn’t like.