Into The Unknown

The timing on this couldn't be much better - I'm in the process of drafting up my open letter to the music industry, but I thought I'd mention this story in the meantime - I think it pretty much sums up everything bad about DRM...

[Microsoft] has arbitrarily decided that all the music you bought from it is now worthless because it can't be bothered to live up to its end of the bargain. It goes something like this, MS came up with a DRM infection and attached it to its music downloads. When the Zune came out, it decided it wanted a bigger piece of the pie, so it cut out all its partners.

The new toy, the Zune has a completely different DRM infection making any of the things you bought from Microsoft saddled by the old way incompatible with the new way. All the partners that made devices compatible with the old way, and all of the people who bought infected music, well, MS has your money, so you're dumped.

This was about a year and a half ago. Today, MS is saying that come August 31, a week or four shy of the two-year anniversary of the night of long knives, you will not be able to re-authorise your music. That means that the music is yours to keep. On one PC. As long as it doesn't crash. Or you don't update your OS. Or something doesn't just decide to stop the music playing. If you do any of these things, you just lost your music permanently.

Basically, MS is stealing from you. It has your money, but you can't have access the services you bought any more. So they are stopping, and legally, you are screwed. Microsoft has got your money though.

If you were a subscriber to MSN Music, you will have recently found yourself out in the cold when Microsoft decided to arbitrarily turn off their DRM authentication servers, leaving all your music you'd legally paid for in (effectively) stasis. Walmart did this with their video rental service last year, Microsoft this year - I'm glad that it's a discernable move away from DRM, but still... Support your legacy customers, or are you condoning your customers to break the law and strip the DRM from their tracks so they can achieve the same level of functionality as they enjoyed prior to this?

The full article, in all its gory detail, can be found on The Inquirer.

Have you struggled at the hands of outdated or vague psyBNC setup guides? psyBNC is a wonderful application, but it's like flailing about in a dark room trying to find the lightswitch if you've not done it before. So, I spent a couple of hours writing up my experiences (and a guide for others) for setting up and configuring a psyBNC shell, from scratch, for multiple networks - the article is on my personal blog.

I was compelled to write it because the existing tutorials, FAQs and guides are all over the place in terms of accuracy and legibility - hopefully my step-by-step guide will be easy enough to follow that anybody can just equip themselves with a couple of basic tools and be up and running within 15 minutes.

It's published under a CC licence, so do as you will with it! As the readership of my personal blog is quite small, I thought crossposting it to here be of some use - If it helps you, post back in the comments! The full link to the tutorial is http://kerblam.co.uk/2008/04/definitive-2008-guide-to-multi-network.php. Enjoy :)

PS - when I get handy enough with psyBNC scripting, I'll post up some of my scripts and write another little reference to help newbie coders. It's not got a great scripting engine, but you can code in some useful shortcuts to speed up your daily goings-on. I'm still learning the ropes, but it's not too tough to understand the basic syntax. Why don't you have a go in the meantime!

We thought we could make money on the Internet, but while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn't matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that lets you trade real and immediate opportunities of income for the promise of online revenue. It will be a few years before digital distribution of media on the Internet can be monetised to an extent that necessitates content producers to forego their fair value in more traditional media.

-- Kyle Broflovski to Stan Marsh, Canada On Strike

So, thought for the day: If a fictional nine year old can explain, in a nutshell, why the Internet doesn't work as a distribution mechanism, why can't the music and movie industries seem to understand that we're still only really playing in the sandpit when it comes to legal digital content? Once the traditional industry heavyweights let the technology organically progress and develop into a ubiquitous distribution channel, letting things like broadband availability and speed, format support and hardware plateau, then they can monetise it. No sooner. We'll look back in five/ten years and see how iTunes was nothing more than a brief (and well-marketed) flash in the pan.

Moving on now - well, hasn't this past week been eyebrow-raising? MySpace officially announcing their (expected) music offering, with three of the four majors on board and the fourth expected to join suit shortly. A hooray! for DRMless downloads, but a booooo! for going with MP3. Another hooray! for (like Amazon) forcing the music labels' hand though on the DRM issue, the fight between AmazonMP3 and MySpace Music is going to a good one if they both continue apace. Though, all that aside, when you have some record labels forging ahead of the curve and going / already offering FLAC or WAV lossless audio for only a little more than MP3s, it makes you wonder why we're still paying so much for digital music - and we're putting up with it!

I know a little about this: for the past nine months I've been on work placement at a small indie label. Our primary revenue stream is iTunes thanks to our 30-year back catalogue, but we still get a pittance in terms of money we actually see from sales. People would be surprised if they found out how little we get from each sale. Only the dominant vendor is the real winner in any online distribution scenario, as they have little overheads, instant content for monetisation, and in this case iTunes also has the closed - and somewhat captive - userbase (for the moment).


TheNextWeb 2008 looked like a big success - a shame the web streaming completely gave up when Diggnation was being filmed. Still, we had a Dutchman telling post-watershed jokes on a live webstream at 5pm, Jim Louderback (bless him) not dropping or breaking something on-stage for once (watch near enough any DL.TV episode he's featured in to see what I mean). And if that wasn't enough, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht turned up half an hour late, got ludicrously drunk on stage, were accosted at various points by a kilt-adorned Scotsman and a cheeky PR guy - and to top it off, there was a girl wearing a moustache. I also didn't have to pay $1,000 to watch the live stream. That, and no cost of plane ticket and accommodation to get there... I class that as a win.

In the UK, Ofcom announced their decision and their initial roadmap for digital terrestrial TV's migration to HD [free registration required], and not everybody's happy with them... likewise, the Freeview Consortium's relative inaction (or inability) to wrangle a good solution for the future of digital terrestrial broadcasts, combined with their apparent hatred for good programming and worthwhile use of the available spectrum has irked quite a few people (myself included). My housemate even wrote an open letter to them.

Oh, and in other news, I'm putting together a brand new design for ITU. The current look (Glossy Blue by Nick La, found via BlogCrowds) worked well as a placeholder while I gathered my ideas together, but I hate basing sites on templates (however good they are)... Any designer will know what I mean when I say "It just doesn't feel 'mine' 'til I've done the design." (A poet and I don't know-et.)

Until next time, stay classy.

If you've been sleeping on The Next Web Conference 2008, it's being broadcast live in high-quality WMV and Silverlight... Just had a presentation from one of the founders of Pownce, now Netlog's developers are on (oh wait, they just finished - Lookery now) and Wakoopa are coming up soon.

Tune in live at http://www.silverlightstreaming.eu/tnwc2008 - the conference runs until the end of the 4th of April, so if you're interested in emerging web technologies and ways in which companies are transforming how we use the web on daily basis... Well, tune in!

One thing's for sure - their web site needs some better Search Engine Optimisation, because it doesn't come up at all on the front page of the web site (being largely shrouded by tech news blogs).

For all us frustrated licence payers, Beebhack aims to discuss what the BBC is afraid of mentioning; "This site is designed to be a resource for re-purposing on our own terms the BBC content that we, the licence payers have paid for."


VirusTotal (like Jotti's malware scanner) is a web-based virus scanner; "a service that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines." Simply, you upload a file through the web site, it passes your submission past ~30 commercial antivirus programs and reports the results back to you within two minutes. A remarkably simple way to check a file if you're feeling a bit suspicious. Curious? See a sample results page here (for a real virus file, in this case an MSN worm).


I know this has been around for a while, but it deserves some attention. Are you a Digg user? Do you want to visit a really popular site but it keeps on timing out or downloading really slowly? You could give the Coral CDN a go - in a nutshell, it's a free service anybody can use which lets you request web sites and files, all of which go through their own network of servers scattered around the world. The idea behind this is that at some point in their network, they're bound to have a machine geographcially closer to the target location than your machine is, so it will speed up transfers.

It does work too, particularly for heavily-trafficked sites. It's simple to activate, too: just add .nyud.net to the end of any web address (so google.com would become google.com.nyud.net). .nyud.net:8090 and .nyud.net:8080 also work sometimes when just using .nyud.net doesn't, so give those a go too.

Simple to use, faster transfers and free! Next time a site gets slashdotted or dugg heavily, give it a try. Alternatively, you could give the Planetlab/CoDeeN free academic network a go, although that involves one extra step (choosing one of their server IPs and configuring it as a proxy server in your browser). For a comprehensive list of Planetlab/CoDeeN public proxies, use Samair's Proxy Checker (just look for any proxy with Planetlab/CoDeeN next to it).


Oh, and lastly, if you're after decluttering your browser home page, give Symbaloo a try.

A recent discussion on Slashdot (and reported on BoingBoing) raises an interesting question: with the commercial world moving ever more towards conditional licencing agreements for games, music, and ebooks, is there going to come a flash point whereby consumers realise they're paying for nothing more than thin air? Or, will the powers that be see the necessity to force a change in law to ensure that people still get what they (think they) are paying for?

It's one of the reasons I've shied away from music rental services (that, and the horrible DRM too), but it's also a driving force behind me actively avoiding ebook and digital media purchases for things like films and TV shows. If we're paying the same as we'd pay for physical media, but we're getting less rights in return (and often, not even a permanent digital copy) why should we even bother paying?

It's definitely one of the factors for the MP3 format sticking around as long as it has (and I fully support open* formats like FLAC and MP3, but I would only hand over money for music in FLAC format at a push for reasons of quality). I'd most definitely never enter into a licencing agreement between myself and a publisher - books are one of those things you can savour, hold in your hand, leaf through the pages or enjoy at your own pace. And, when I'm done with it, and if I don't want it, I can sell it on - can you do that with an ebook? Not likely.

Well, not yet, anyway... But isn't the whole point of digital media that by its very nature, it removes the element of scarcity? Surely the death knell of the humble printed book isn't already ringing?

Can there ever be 'digital rights'? (and can industry ever expect to be able to 'manage' these rather nebulous 'consumer rights' when, arguably, they themselves don't have the right in the first place?)

From the Gizmodo article,

In the fine print that you "agree" to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you're not paying to own 'em, in spite of the use of the term "buy." Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn't take away your purchases. Still, it's a license you can't sell.

But is this claim legal? Our Columbia friends suggest that just because Sony or Amazon call it a license, that doesn't make it so. "That's a factual question determined by courts," say our legal brainiacs. "Even if a publisher calls it a license, if the transaction actually looks more like a sale, users will retain their right to resell the copy." Score one for the home team.

There's a kicker, though: If a court ruled with you on that front, you still can't sell reproductions of your copy, an illegal act tantamount to Xeroxing your Harry Potters. You'd have to sell the physical media where the "original" download is stored—a hard drive or the actual Kindle or Sony Reader. Our guess is that it only gets more complicated from here. What happens when the file itself resides only on some $20-per-month Google storage locker?

There's a full commentary on BoingBoing (and a link to the parent Slashdot story via the Gizmodo article).