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.

It can't be argued that we've come a long way as a species and as a society without it, but one thing's for sure - we couldn't have advanced this far technologicaly. On Sunday, the humble transistor turns 60, in no small part thanks to three guys: 'William Shockley (1910-1989), John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987). As El Reg also notes, 'it was Bardeen and Brattain who made the first working point-contact transistor on 16 December 1947.'

So, while you're in the pub, enjoying some sports on the plasma TV whilst sipping on a pint brewed to tightly-controlled specifications in a computer-controlled brewery, pause for a moment's thought and say thanks to three of the people who gifted society with one of the most ingenious little inventions in recent history.

... Apparently. From around the time of the latest (and last) iPlayer closed beta launch, which I reviewed and commented on, the client has been updated, the site's a bit slicker, and the content is encoded better. There's been a lot of talk, heated discussion (on the BBC Backstage mailing list, primarily!) and all kinds of indignant comments from people snorting about how the iPlayer launch was almost a dummy run, given that you could only really properly install and use it on one OS...

Yeah, I'm steering well clear of that, the BBC are having to work within the constraints of the rights holders here, and I get this continued feeling that they're breaking them in gently (today: 'how about digitising your content?'... 18 months later: 'we'd like to renegotiate the availability period for digitised content, up from 31 days after broadcast and 7 days after first viewing'... 36 months later: 'after becoming a requirement of our latest Public Value Test, we're removing DRM from our available programming content')... You get the picture.

Anyway, I don't have a copy of Vista installed (deliberately) to check, but others are reporting success installing and running the app without having to resort to glorious hacks to get it to work.

So, if you're game for a bit of timeslipped BBC content, go install it! http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer. (After I installed it almost four months ago, I never looked back. :)

... Hold tight! Hopefully they'll both be up by Friday, and Hulu will get first dibs.

Joost have recently publicised their Joost Feeds feature available to its users. In a nutshell, it's RSS feeds for new content. They've got a ton of 'em, too: Selected picks feeds, Genre feeds, News feeds and Forum feeds. The pick of the bunch for me from the recent updates is The Onion News Network's video feed - their stuff has always amused me, it's the perfect blend of sarcasm, cynicism, subtle humour and a good dollop of irony. Sometimes their articles have even left me in doubt as to whether what they're talking about actually has a grain of truth to it - and I know for a fact it's parody ;) Joost is worth checking out if only for The Onion's stuff.

Unfortunately, every time Joost does an ad campaign, it means that the world and his wife checks out all the content they've advertised - meaning all the new content is going to be seen by everyone, resulting in a dearth of decent stuff "you've discovered" (because hey, if everybody else has seen it before you, what gives you the cool factor edge?)

...Cynical, moi? Oh, also, don't forget that there's other alternatives available rather than just sticking with Joost, some of which aren't half bad at all. Tubecast takes the video-over-internet concept on a little differently, and the interface (whilst still alpha) is quite neat and tidy.

It was my birthday yesterday (21+1!) so here's some comics instead to wile away your weekend. If I laughed, you should too :)


The Ballmer Curve


Ever wondered where Google gets all its storage space?

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.

Today, Blogger officially turns 9 years old. That's only a couple of years short of being half as young as I am!

Yay for good things lasting a long time.

I know that whenever something comes over from the US (or Japan), the price conversion is more often than not a straight $ -> £ conversion (so $20 would equal £20, even though at present $20 is only worth £10). This has really hacked me off, and the iPhone is no exception - the 8Gb model going on sale in the UK for £269, equivalent to $542 (given that £1 = ~$2). In the US, the 8Gb model is on sale for $369. What really spurred me on was reading the SiliconValley.com article about O2 being announced as the exclusive UK carrier (Dear god, they must have been desperate for the custom, O2 is one of the worst networks in the UK - I should know, I was dicked about for 12 months by them before moving to T-Mobile!) The article wrote off the higher UK price to "value added tax." Well, it's not all VAT, and here's my quick maths to prove it:

(All sums done with Google btw because I'm lazy and it has currency conversion built in, and decimals rounded up to nearest £ or $ because that's what they all do anyway.)

# globals
let VAT = 17.5%, or 1.175
let $1 = $2.015 (thanks Google)

VAT-inclusive UK price in USD: $536 = £266 according to the article, but £269 from Google = $542. For the sake of simplicity, let's go with the article's figure.

£269 (UK sale price for 8gb model) x.85 = £228.65 before VAT = $462.

$536 (UK sale price VAT incl.) - $397 (US sale price) = $139 difference = £69 difference.

$397 (US sale price) = £197 in GBP (plus VAT).

Now, if the world was fair, we should be being charged £200 (well, £197, 'but what's £3 between friends,' quipped Steve Jobs).

Therefore,
£200 x 1.175 = £235 with VAT, which is what we *should* be being charged for the 8Gb iPhone. Ha.

So, somewhere, somebody's making £34 to £35 on each sale ($70, by the current exchange rate). Maybe it's for Ives' pension fund? And, even though I don't think the iPhone is a particularly great device save for two things - its multi-touch interface and its form factor - I still get really annoyed when companies bring their products to the UK and rip us off. The iPhone's not the most spectacular example of this, consoles and PCs being much worse for this problem, but it still hacks me off. If you're planning on becoming a beta tester for a new product (i.e., early adopter), you really have to have a fat wallet to survive this kind of hobby.


And yeah, if you're wondering, I have posted this elsewhere, I am active in more than one place on the Internet. ;)

Steve Fossett, known to many as an incredibly intrepid and fearless explorer, has been missing for a number of weeks now. Amazon's helping in the search for him (and his plane) by offering the services of their Mechanical Turk online utility, but a key part of this system is you - the user. Nothing can replace the subtlety and dynamism of the human brain, and they're encouraging as many volunteers as possible to help join the search.

For more info, and to participate, go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk page for Fossett's search, where there's further instructions and related info on the MTurk project itsself. Amazon themselves describe Mechanical Turk as a system where you, "complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn." The Fossett search is unpaid, but definitely worth it if you have any time to spare. Nothing beats the human brain for this kind of thing, and I wouldn't trust a computer alone with the search, so know you're helping a worthwhile cause!

Mmm, reheated browser wars anyone? Opera released their latest Alpha build of Kestrel (aka Opera 9.5, Alpha 1) on the 4th of September. I, being slow and lazy (as per usual) held back on downloading it until earlier this week.

I've been playing about with it on both my XP laptop and 2000 desktop, and I've been MIGHTILY impressed. I use the big 3 (Firefox/Flock, IE and Opera) daily, in fact I have all three clients open right now! However, I find myself leaning towards Opera more and more. Firefox feels a little clunky and bloated to me, and even with addons like FasterFox and my own tweaks, it can drag its heels sometimes.

I'm not saying that Opera 9 is without sin... Like any browser, it has its odd flaw (for example, if I'm a little too hasty (re)loading a webpage Opera can sometimes get stuck mid-pageload, resulting in me having to close the tab, presumably killing the loop the browser's stuck in, and then reopening a tab with the same URL, which makes it work first time). That's about the only *real* flaw I can find with Opera, though I don't use their integrated mail client, so I wouldn't feel comfortable to comment in a qualified manner about that aspect of the software. Outlook's hardly the perfect mail client though, and I only use it because of its great ActiveSync features (yep, I'm a WinMo PPC phone user, my MDA Vario 2 never leaves my sight these days!) What's just as exciting is that when Opera 9.5 makes it to retail status, it's going to get a simultaneous release for both cross-OS desktop and MOBILE USERS! That's going straight onto my phone as soon as it comes out, I already use Opera Mobile on my device but I can't wait for the next version.

Thinking about it, I should really give Opera Mail a try, I have plenty of email accounts knocking about. Anyway, on to the good stuff...


Opera 9.5 has either improved on or brought many wonderfully-useful features to the end user in their latest browser build, the most notable for me being Full History Search, right from the URL bar (this is incredible, and I'll elaborate further below) and the ability to reopen both closed tabs and, now, closed windows, from the Trash Can feature. Speed Dial also has an undo feature, and Opera Mail has IMAP (ooo!) support, plus general speed increases.



Full History Search is possibly one of the best innovations I've come across in the current crop of browsers. There've been times when I've sat in front of my computer, struggling to get my brain into gear to remember the URL (or some keywords) for a site I was on last week but closed, then forgot the URL of. Full History Search gets around this problem by letting you just type in words found on the webpage, so if you were on this web site, for example, all you'd have to do is type "beta test blog" and the entry would appear in the FHS bar with some relevant information - and you'd just select it / click it to load it back up. What makes this even easier to use is the fact that the browser lets you do this from the URL bar, so you just hit Ctrl+D (or Ctrl+L for the old-skool Opera users! though I prefer Ctrl+D) and type what you can remember from the text on the webpage... And blam, quick as a flash, there's your webpage.

HOW USEFUL IS THIS!

I've been so impressed with the upgrades and improvements in Opera 9.5a1, it's actually become my preferred browser of choice. The only downside is that there appears to be no way to disable Opera's inbuilt BitTorrent client, so if you click on a .torrent link it'll try and fire up its own BT client every time, meaning you have to crack open Firefox or IE to load the link up (if you don't just open links directly in your Torrent client's Open File dialog, that is). A minor pain, and I'm sure the ability to disable Opera's BT client will be added in a future alpha or beta build.


As Opera said on their own Kestrel release announcement page,

All that, and this is just the alpha. Even more amazing stuff will arrive shortly. Thanks for taking the time to evaluate.

Other people have also been alpha testing Kestrel, and have written their own comments and reviews - including Peter Gasston, iVirtua Community and a nice-sounding chap called David Woods, on their respective blogs (Mr. Woods sounds like a talented, witty and intelligent person - we share a surname, so if I'm anything to go by...) </sarcasm>

I know that some people prefer Firefox due to Opera's Widgets not being quite as intensively-developed as Firefox's extensions, but personally I don't use widgets or extensions that much - I certainly don't have extensions continually RSS feedscraping or anything operating remotely in realtime, unless it's for design purposes (like DOM inspectors). What I'm after is a clean, well-written browser which can handle being stressed with loads of tabs and multimedia content, multiple Flash instances, video player instances, and sites with lots of content, right down to huge several-hundred-kilobyte chunks of poorly-written HTML. My average load on a browser during a session is 30 to 40 tabs in one go, and that's when Firefox really starts to chug, even with 2 gig of RAM installed. Opera just seems to handle having loads of tabs open much better, possibly due to its (arguably) leaner rendering engine. It certainly feels faster, and the latest Alpha feels almost like a beta, there's no noticeable speed drop for me, and just about all of the functionality from 9.2 is there in 9.5a1 without big gaps in the UI showing placeholder text. The subtle UI effects, present in Opera since a few versions ago now, don't go unnoticed either - and I love the additive-style lighting effects when you mouseover menu items and tabs. All these small touches really add value to the user experience, and it's the only browser where I feel quite happy about leaving it in its unskinned state because it's more than pretty enough!


Kestrel installs right alongside any existing Opera installation you might have, another geek-friendly consideration from the Opera team, so you can have 9.2 and 9.5 running simultaneously. I am doing exactly that right now, and neither browser is balking at the other running at all - [borat]great success![/borat] So go grab your copy of Kestrel and install it now, you have nothing much to lose aside from a few seconds of your time, and a very pretty, efficient and feature-packed (standards compliant!) browser to gain as a result.

Blogged with Flock

Here's a handy little search engine I stumbled across the other day - BYWav.com, a bilingual English/Mongolian search engine, currently in beta. Created by the designer of niqi.net, a categorised worldwide news aggregator web site (in English), BYWav's main aim is to provide search services by way of its Super Search, and - the most interesting feature - an English/Mongolian dictionary service, right from the search box. You search for a word, for example "name", and it produces a list of all the various Mongolian equivalents, along with their phonetic pronunciations. The dictionary isn't complete up to the point where it has context for each different interpretation, but for anybody either learning the language or looking for variations on a particular word, this site has to be really quite useful.

I know how to say 'feckless' in Mongolian now, so the day wasn't a total loss!

Check it out for yourself: BYWav.com.

Martin Belam has introduced a new UK news site aggregator to the masses, under the moniker of Chipwrapper. It sources fresh articles from all the major broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, plus a smattering of ITN, BBC and Sky articles (because he thought it would be "weird" to not see these contributors in his aggregated content) but there's no content featured external to British publications.

If you've never been to a British fish 'n chip shop, here's a brief introduction to the historical significance of the name "Chipwrapper": takeaway fish 'n chips have traditionally been wrapped in newspaper (it tends to be a good insulator and it's cheap, and it's one of those comforting familiarities) - a chip shop which doesn't wrap your stuff in yesterday's newspaper is either snobbishly upmarket or very popular because they've run out of sheets! I think it's quite an apt name.

Anyway, here's Martin introduced his project to the Backstage mailing list:

Hi all, I wanted to introduce... a site I've been working on, and invite you to have a play with the feeds being produced, and maybe help make some new tools for it.

Called Chipwrapper, it is intended to be a hub for searching purely UK newspapers and UK news sources.

OK, I know, I know, the Chipwrapper metaphor doesn't work once you add TV news. Originally it was strictly newspapers only, but it just seemed weird to be searching UK news and not see links from the BBC, ITN and Sky.

The homepage is a headline aggregator and a Google Custom Search Engine which only brings back results from the major UK newspapers, plus the TV news giants.

I plan to add regional and local newspapers to the results later in the year.


There are Opensearch plugins and a custom Google Toolbar button for the service.

http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/browser_search_plugins.shtml
http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/google_toolbar_buttons.shtml


There are also some RSS feeds for news headlines, sport headlines and football headlines - with some rugby-flavoured stuff to come to tie-in with the upcoming world cup.

http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/rss_feeds.shtml

There's also a Headline Buzz feature. It uses a longer Yahoo! Pipe which takes ten headlines for each source - http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=QKDz_ihT3BGSheQho_NLYQ&_render=rss
- and then analyses the most popular words.


The top 7 words (at the moment) appear on the Chipwrapper homepage as the Headline Buzz links, but there is also a headline buzz RSS feed.
This has all of the words (minus "stop" words like 'the', 'of' etc) that appear more than 3 times in the set of headlines in popularity order. It refreshes every hour.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chipwrapper-buzz


There's a page on the site about making DIY stuff, with links to all the feeds and the original Yahoo! Pipes I've used to mash-up the newspaper content in one place.

http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/make_stuff.shtml

Personally, I think this is great for those of us who enjoy reading around but don't like relying solely on Google News (or trusting it, for that matter) to deliver an impartial spread of national and international news. Really, all that's missing is a 'myChipwrapper' feature where you can choose your own pick of the newspapers for display - then I could eliminate all those awful tabloid newspaper articles and just have articles from the quality broadsheets. Nevertheless, it's a very useful little thing to have on your bookmarks, and I'll certainly use it again... Chipwrapper might just grow on me.

'Michael Arrington' has moved into the world ofNew Media Foodstuffs with the launch of CrunchFood:

CrunchFood is the newest addition to the “Crunch” family founded by Michael Arrington, which includes TechCrunch, CrunchNotes, CrunchGear, TalkCrunch and MobileCrunch. A departure from our Web 2.0 themes, but a subject still near and dear to the hearts of geeks — food.

For those of you who haven't quite caught on yet, this is a clever fake - but if you're familiar with his writing style then you'll appreciate the nerdy humour. Some of the comments are absolute class, too.