Napster Vs. RIAA
Administrative
6/15/2000; 10:16:36 AM Wesley Felter starts a conversation on whether or not the RIAA really could control Napster.

"The centralized Napster servers (which are owned by Napster-the-company) keep an index of all the MP3s that users are sharing. (Otherwise, how would searching work efficiently?) Thus, the Napster server software could be modified to omit all MP3s matching certain keywords from the index."

US bids to ban spam Spam & E-Mail6/15/2000; 8:43:56 AM "If passed, the bill would require each spam to have a genuine and valid reply, instead of the usual gutless anonymous rubbish currently invading inboxes. It would also require that all junk email be labelled as spam so that Net users would know exactly what they were dealing with beforehand."Cross your fingers.I think this is the ideal solution. *Banning* spam probably is a violation of First Amendment rights. Requiring people to clearly label it is not, anymore then requiring that demonstrations be peaceful and not block people from conducting business. However, it should be limited to commericial e-mail only. Requiring other sorts of labeling based on personal ground is asking for abuse. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with historical precedents where forced labelling was abused.)

Another day, another DoubleClick privacy PR disaster
Privacy from Companies
6/15/2000; 8:39:29 AM "DoubleClick has been caught mucking around with personal privacy - again. The world's biggest online ad sales house has been caught gleaning email addresses and other personal information from Web site customers - without the knowledge of Web sites."

So, where's all the free music? Music & MP36/15/2000; 8:16:00 AM Linux demonstrates that software can exist where there is little or no money. Is there an equivalent demonstration for music? Actually, yes.Almost everybody has heard of "MP3" by now, but few have heard of a family of formats that pre-date MP3 by at least fifteen years: MOD files. Visit the Mod Archive to get an idea for what free music can be. (WinAmp should be able to play nearly anything you can find on that site.) MOD files store sounds and instructions for combining them, and actually started out on the Commodore Amiga. They attracted a "scene" and are still in development and use. I actually started out my computer music by created MOD files.The music is free, and it often shows in the quality, which goes down to as bad as you can imagine . Still, there is good stuff to be had. Three of my favorites are Inside Out, Unreal ][ (which is actually a soundtrack, not a "song"), and Space Debris. (Space Debris is truly an artistic masterpiece... at any given time, only four distinct sounds are playing... the chords count as a single sound as far as the computer is concerned.)What you'll see if you play around with the site for a while is that it tends heavily towards techno, European music, and atmospheric. That's mostly because of the "scene"... there's nothing about the formats limiting them to that (though classical doesn't work very well). But the kicker here is that the music is free... and some of it, like the songs I linked to, are of very high quality. Even now, ''free music'' isn't an oxymoron. Who knows what it could be like if this form of composing was brought more mainstream?And, a final note, if you are interested in creating this type of music, it's not as hard as you might think, though it does take work. If you can play the songs, you've already got all the hardware you need to create this music. You might start with The Tracker's Handbook. (Let me know if you do, I'd be interested.)

The Underground Grammarian
Personal Commentary
6/15/2000; 7:56:27 AM I run a program on my linux system called "fortune" whenever I log on which produces a pithy saying of some sort every time I start up a terminal. (Fortune also lives on the web; reload to see others.) I saw something from the Underground Grammarian, did a quick web search, and lo, there was a collection of nearly all of them on the web.

Fun reading, and you'll learn something too.

Software that can spy on you Privacy from Companies6/15/2000; 7:47:23 AM "A growing number of companies clearly think that it's acceptable to build covert monitoring systems into their programs. Proposed legislation specifically allows software vendors to exercise "self-help" in enforcing their copyrights -- actions that could include disabling your computer if they think you have violated the terms of your license agreement. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous Internet connectivity afforded by cable modems and DSL will make it harder and harder for us to know when these sorts of programs are active."I don't just bring this up as a warning, I have a solution for you, too. The ideal solution? Convert to linux, examine the source code of everything you run, and keep a network sniffer handy just-in-case.That's not feasible for most people. What is feasible is a nifty program called Zone Alarm. That program intercepts all network communication on your system and makes sure you approve of it. It gives you a lot of flexibility... for instance, as an experiment I once had this program set things up so Napster could receive songs but couldn't respond to download requests. If the DSSAgent program mentioned in the article had tried to access the Internet, ZoneAlarm would have brought it to your attention and allowed you to block it. It's annoying at first to give your normal programs the permission they need to function, but the first time you see something come up that you have no idea what it is or what it's doing, you won't regret it.

Michigan Warns Sites on Privacy
Privacy from Companies
6/14/2000; 8:07:06 PM "The state of Michigan doesn't think it needs to wait for laws governing online privacy before taking legal action against websites. . . The state attorney general's office is using a decades-old consumer-protection law to make a piecemeal but pointed campaign against what it sees as ubiquitous privacy violations online."

Go Michigan! (That's the only time you'll hear me say that... )

The latest in anti-piracy efforts: keystroke recognition Music & MP36/13/2000; 10:40:02 AM ''Start-up Musicrypt.com and Net Nanny Software, best known for its Web filtering programs, said they are joining forces to create software that can identify individual music listeners by the way they tap out letters on computer keyboards. This information would be used to protect songs against unauthorized distribution and use.''The article points out that people don't like this sort of restraining technology (why should they?) and recall the DivX incident.I've got another point. From the technology page on Musicrypt's site: "Net Nanny Software's BioPassword® Client makes it possible to identify a particular user, with an average accuracy of 98%. Coupled with a basic password (or just the name of the user), this provides a level of transparent security that effectively frustrates both casual and determined piracy."98% accuracy is 2% failure. That means that 1 out of 50 times, this software claims you aren't you, and locks you out. Considering that this is marketing literature and not a scientific paper (where we could look at the methodology), I feel confident in predicting that actual performance could well be even worse. Isn't it frustrating to not remember your password? Wouldn't it be worse if there suddently was no right password?I'm not buying it, what about you?

RIAA asks judge to pull all major-label songs off Napster Music & MP36/13/2000; 9:45:51 AM "The Recording Industry Association of America fired its latest legal salvo against music swapping firm Napster late today, asking a judge to block all major-label content from being traded through the service." "For the first time, the industry is providing hard statistics on how much material on Napster it believes is breaking copyright law."Napster replies "The company, however, has long said that it doesn't have the power--legal or technological--to block individual songs from being traded. It says the individual members are storing the copyrighted material on their own computers, and none of the copyrighted material flows through its servers, the company notes."I can confirm Napster-the-companies' position as correct on a technical level.

FTC, Online Ad Firms Haggle Over Privacy
Privacy from Companies
6/13/2000; 7:09:22 AM "In the wake of last month's Federal Trade Commission recommendation that Congress pass basic online privacy laws, a group of Internet ad-server companies is continuing to hold secret talks with the FTC and the Commerce Department about a set of self-imposed privacy standards for the online-advertising industry in lieu of new privacy legislation."

Unfortunately, the ad-server companies cannot be trusted. (*ick*) Lets have some laws (how I hate to say that!).