Napster Wins Court Stay Music & MP37/28/2000; 5:14:00 PM 'A federal appeals court Friday granted a last minute reprieve to online music company Napster Inc., staying a judge's order which had directed it to pull the plug on its online song-swapping service by midnight Friday.'In a brief order, a panel of judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Napster could stay in business pending a further resolution of its case.'I thought this injunction was unfair and the judge was being... hasty, to be kind.One wonders if this isn't a message from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to Judge Patel that she's being a little too gung-ho in her support of RIAA.

Radio Userland Personal Commentary7/28/2000; 3:59:51 PM I'm waiting for Radio Userland. From an examination of the source code as it comes down over Pike, it looks like the "Next Song" feature, if you choose to have randomized playing, 'just' hunts for a random song, with no other criteria.As I posted in the discussion group yesterday, I've found an acceptable quality of MP3 encoding and have been converting my collection to MP3 for listening at home and at work. The problem is that the WinAMP playlist algorithm is just like the one Userland currently seems to have implemented, assuming it doesn't change before release. (Please take careful note of those qualifications! I don't speak for Userland!) It simply picks a random song out of the list. If you play a song "A", then the random selector plays "Q", when the random selecter goes to pick the next song, "A" has as much a chance to come up as anything else, despite the fact you just listened to it.I'd like to re-write the selection routines. My collection is 'eclectic', containing classical, 'oldies', some New Age, some electronica, and who knows what it will contain in the future? While I like each of these genres, and am open to other new ones, I find it jarring to stick all of them together into the same pot. A chunk of a Mozart concerto, stuck next to rock ballad, stuck next to some New Age thing, then to hard rock, it's very jarring, not pleasent.What I'd like to do is implement the ability to use the outline groupings as hints about the actual structure of the song's relationships to each other, and create a sort of "stickiness" within those groups. Once the player starts playing in the outline header called "Oldies" (or "Exciting"), it will quite likely stay there for a while, unless it happens to jump out or it runs out of songs in that section. I'd also like to keep track of the last N songs played, and avoid repeating them (perhaps tie it to the number of songs in the player queue as a ratio, like "Do not repeat until half of the rest of the collection has been played"). Finally, I'd like to be able to specify that a section of MP3's should be played in sequence and all in a row (for instance, Pink Floyd's "The Wall" might benefit from this treatment (don't know, never heard it), or many symphonies, which are intended to be heard all four movements in succession). In a sense, this allows binding multiple MP3s into one concrete song unit. In practical terms, this means that once the "classical" music starts playing, it's likely to continue playing. If you specify Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to be played together in sequence (a good idea, BTW), and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony gets selected randomly, the whole thing would play non-stop. After that, the check for 'stickiness' in classical might fail, and you might jump out to Hard Rock, and hang around there for a while. (Of course, you don't have to sort by genre... you can sort by anything you want.)It'll complicate the interface a bit, but it'll be the best darned playlist on the planet (for me, anyhow) when I get this going. I'm interested enough... I just hope I can get iRights's technology nailed down enough to distribute it as a theme first, then I could concentrate on this. (I've got sort-by-date working on a test page (took more work then I'd like), and I'd like to be able to use the querystring to pass arguments to the script so I can actually link to sorted, filtered pages, although that can wait.)Have a nice weekend!ps... I'm getting really used to the keyboard shortcuts I've added to the edit box, esp. the link one... if a link is in the clipboard, adding it is a matter of SHIFT-CTRL-ARROW-KEYS (to select the words), SHIFT-CTRL-L (link), CTRL-V (paste), ENTER, and I've linked something. If you'd like to add it to your Manila site for your own use, please contact me... it's relatively easy.

LinkBack Database Corruption
LinkBack
7/28/2000; 3:12:26 PM I've had a massive database corruption in the LinkBack Frontier database, and the service has been reset. As a result, a lot of links that were being suppressed due to being old will show up again for the next two days; it'll have itself sorted out by Sunday.

The good news is I only lost data... all the scripts and who is a member is intact. Could have been worse.

Spammer Pays Up at EBay Content Integrity7/28/2000; 2:00:17 PM 'ReverseAuction has agreed to pay $1.2 million and to quit harvesting emails from eBay's site as part of a settlement agreement.''Harvesting users' email addresses from eBay servers was an act of trespass, said Monahan.'Apparently this ruling stems from the same legal theory as the one they used to block Bidder's Edge from collecting eBay auctions either.

Treat EBay Listings as Property? Lawyers See a Threat Content Integrity7/28/2000; 12:57:01 PM 'oncerned that a recent federal court ruling dangerously extends the ancient law of trespass to cyberspace, 28 leading Internet legal scholars are arguing in an appellate court that the decision "threatens the very foundations of the Internet." The red-alert language of the professors is aimed in part at drawing attention to a legal dispute in California between auction giant eBay and a smaller rival, Bidder's Edge, that raises important questions about property rights in the digital age.'I feel justified in following this story now 'For one thing, the professors argue, the trespass theory as embraced by Judge Whyte would allow Web sites to fence off non-copyrighted information that should be available to consumers. For example, they assert, the resulting enclosure movement could chill the ability of shopping comparison sites to ferret out information about a company's products and prices, retarding the growth of e-commerce.'There are other things there as well. This case is importent to anybody who runs a web server or has content on the web.

U.S., Web Ad Firms Strike Privacy Deal
Privacy from Companies
7/28/2000; 12:55:48 PM 'A group of Internet advertisers announced Thursday a new set of industry standards crafted with the federal government to give Web surfers a say in how their personal data is used by online marketing firms. The deal also bars Internet firms from using visitors' medical or financial data, Social Security numbers and online sexual behavior to determine which advertisements to flash on their screens.'

TheStandard.com: U.K. Passes E-Mail Snooping Bill Into Law
Country Watch: Britain
7/28/2000; 12:24:04 PM 'A surveillance bill granting the U.K. government sweeping powers to access e-mail and other encrypted Internet communications passed its final vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday and is set to become law on Oct. 5. Among other provisions, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) bill requires Internet service providers in the U.K. to track all data traffic passing through their computers and route it to the Government Technical Assistance Center (GTAC). The GTAC is being established in the London headquarters of the U.K. security service MI5 – the equivalent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S.'

Fairtunes
Music & MP3
7/28/2000; 10:38:08 AM 'Fairtunes is an Internet service that allows digital music consumers to pay artists for their work.'

Note, paying the artists is not the same as paying the copyright holder, as the studios hold the copyright. It's a purely moral gesture with no legal force.

No "There" There Misc.7/28/2000; 9:41:25 AM 'Cyberspace isn't on any map, but I know that it must exist, because it is spoken of every day. People spend hours in chat rooms. They visit Web sites. They travel through this electronic domain on an information superhighway. The language we use implies that cyberspace is a place as tangible as France or St. Louis or the coffee shop on the corner. But why, exactly, should we think of the Internet as a geographic location? I recently participated in a telephone conference call with people in several other states and countries. Were we all together in another "place"? I doubt that any of us thought so.'Counterpoint: In Bruce Sterling's relatively well-known (and freely available on the Internet) book, he starts the first chapter with the invention of the telephone as the first 'cyberspace'.To some extent, both views are right. Part of the problem is simply the nature of the metaphor, which not everybody agrees on. To his credit, the author actually points this out at the end of the article:'The cyberspace-as-place metaphor is probably here to stay. And it has its uses, as do the many other fanciful metaphors we use in everyday speech. But let's not be misled. The regulation of cyberspace -- in areas from copyright to taxation to privacy -- hardly represents the spoliation of a pristine and untamed land.'

Divided Data Can Elude the Censor Free Speech7/28/2000; 8:11:34 AM 'The system is called Publius, after the pen name adopted by the authors of the Federalist Papers. It dices up messages, encrypts the pieces and spreads them across many computer servers. The pieces, called keys, are designed so that even a small number of them can be assembled into a complete message. Thus, while keys would live on dozens or hundreds of computers, a user would need to have access to only a few of those computers to have enough information to reassemble the document. Publius recently accepted its first users as part of a two-month trial.'Dr. Rubin said he hoped that political dissidents and others would use Publius to spread messages that otherwise would run the risk of being censored by autocratic governments or powerful organizations. In a paper about Publius, for example, Dr. Rubin and his co-authors, Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor, a senior researcher at AT&T, and Marc Waldman, a doctoral student at New York University, wrote that the Church of Scientology tried to censor information about itself that it considered secret. "The Church has used copyright and trademark law, intimidation and illegal searches and seizures in an attempt to suppress the publication of Church documents," they wrote.'AT&T doing this? Wow... in today's climate, they will be sued as a liable party when something gets released that somebody doesn't like (the Church of Scientology, mentioned in the article, is a likely one), and by their own admission, they will be powerless to stop it. This is a bold thing for a company to support.