Into The Unknown

I'd like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We've never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn't consent to it.

Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for.

As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up.

A response from Russ, an employee at Last.fm, over allegations made by TechCrunch recently that Last.fm had essentially handed over massive chunks of private user data to the RIAA so they could find out who was listening to (and therefore, most probably sharing and/or downloading) prerelease leaks of the new U2 album.

Who's telling the truth? As long as no British laws were broken, I don't really care, and I'm sure we'll find out soon enough anyway once the FUD has dissipated. (I'm sure the RIAA and U2's manager are conveniently forgiving Universal Australia for 'accidentally' making U2's latest album available for digital download via their web site a few weeks before its official launch... One rule for them, another for us, just as usual.

To be honest, I'm far more interested at the moment in an announcement from Indian scientists who say they've developed a method of using enzymes to take carbon dioxide emissions and convert them into things like cement and other useful building materials. How cool is that!

... But the current industry major players can't figure out how in the hell they're supposed to wake this sleeping beast. Hands up who else is waiting for some real innovation? Hands up who doesn't think We7 will last in its current incarnation for more than 18 months? Yeah, me too.

In lieu of a more long-winded post (which may yet happen), I thought it wise to note the latest info on paid digital downloads from the OCC:

London - Digital music sales in the U.K. were up across the board in the first quarter of 2007, with digital album sales rising 69.3% from the same period a year ago, and digital singles up 42.3%, according to data compiled by the Official U.K. Charts Company.

Source: DMW

So, what's the industry still complaining about this time around? Oh wait, the $100,000 legal bills they're having to pay from some of their frivolous lawsuits won't be helping. That, and all the other people who don't have iTunes gift vouchers are starting to realise (I think) that the current crop of legal P2P services just aren't fitting their requirements (and are STILL clunkier and less satisfying to use than the original Napster), and so continue to take to the pirate seas en masse.) Yarr!

The sage commentary shall return when I have a free moment to sit down and write more cogently - for now, that's about as intelligent as I get. (Why am I always horrendously busy in fits and starts, with long periods of downtime inbetween? Very frustrating. If anybody can suggest some effective time management strategies, I'm all ears.)

Until next time...

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.

This is great news! On top of the announcement fron Fon the other day that they're teaming up with BT to offer all their Total Broadband customers the chance to get a Fon wifi router (and share some of their wifi), McDonald's has just announced that they're going to offer free Wifi in partnership with TheCloud.

Now, normally you have to pay for TheCloud access, so that's very nice indeed. It also means that I can sit in the much posher upmarket sandwich shop with my laptop next to McDonald's in the centre of Brum and use their free wifi ;) It does make me wonder to an extent as to how vulnerable BT users are with regards to lawbreaking (because it's already acknowledged that running an insecure hotspot allows others to perpetrate IP theft and other cybercrime, punishable by UK law, and there's not much they can do to stop it), but I suppose BT is willing to take this into account - or just doesn't care - if it happens once BT users start opening up their networks.

I'm a little more worried for newbie home users, because they're the ones who may well become compromised security-wise. Back in January I had to make our wireless access point open for a couple of days (because one of our housemates was having problems connecting, something I eventually sorted out) but in the meantime someone who lives in the vicinity of us managed to get onto my laptop's root drive, save an RTF file to the root dir and inside write me a rather worrying message! I'm still figuring out how they managed to do that, because my Windows shares are pretty secure and I use strong passwords combined with an in/egress firewall... They must've done something along the lines of sniffing the wifi signal to retrieve some NTLM or MD5 hashes of my password, and then bruteforced their way onto my machine. A little bit worrying, but that was in January and my network setup is a lot stronger than it was back then. If I can have a machine compromised, it doesn't bode well for newbie users who just turn on and go with Windows Firewall. I may have even been compromised via my own La Fonera... Still investigating.

Back to business, however, and thinking about Fon, I must get round to posting my review of my La Fonera sometime! It's already been taken apart, photographed, examined, compared and praised/criticised, I've already done my own testing so I have my own real life results to post up! Might as well, I have them all on my laptop.