ITV News - Hacker cracks iTunes code

Trying to get my head round this. I think it means.

1) A company could create a music store that sold AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes which would then play in iTunes and on an iPod.

2) A company could create a music player that played AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes bought from iTMS

And somewhere in there, a customer could take AAC-Fairplay DRMed tunes from anywhere, strip the DRM and play it on anything that supports AAC but that's not what DVD John is selling.

What's the deal for Apple? Well if any company actually does any of this they've lost their virtous circle lock in on the iPod and they have to compete purely on their ability to design and ship a quality product. Arguably option 1) doesn't actually affect them much and actually makes the iPod more attractive. Any competitor selling tracks will have to get music company approval although they may be able to undercut iTMS. But even if iTMS sales drops to zero, it doesn't make any money.

But option 2 would make it easier for someone like Creative to compete directly with the iPod with no downside. And I think Creative is just the company to do it given that they must be upset with Microsoft for making PFS obsolete. The iPod is where all the money is. So that's where the lawsuits will come.

So then we have Microsoft. Will they license the Zune DRM to Creative? Because then Creative can build a player that works with all major formats and all major DRMs. Something neither Apple or Microsoft are likely to be able to bring themselves to do.

And of course all DRM is evil. But DRM from a single supplier is even more evil.

Working XML: Serve friendlier RSS and Atom feeds
[from: del.icio.us]

Don't you just love Government Catch-22s

Boing Boing: No-Fly lists even dumber than suspected : Even worse, because the gargantuan lists have to be widely circulated, the CIA won't allow the names of actual terrorist suspects to be added to them -- in other words, the No Fly lists only contain the names of people who aren't under any serious suspicion.

So. If you're a terrorist you're not on the list and so you're allowed to fly. But if you're not a terrorist you could be on the list which will stop you flying because you might be a terrorist. In which case you couldn't be on the list and so...

Other Advertising Networks Besides Google AdSense
Could come in handy? [from: del.icio.us]

Project FindMusic
Mostly works, but not so good for obscure artists [from: del.icio.us]

Plastic: Why Is Our Universe Just Right? is the classic problem of why our universe seems to be perfectly poised with every fundamental constant just right for the universe to be the way it is and so for us to appear to see it.

But this is what really happened.

God was lonely and had nobody to talk to. She tried creating somebody but as she was all knowing, all powerful and everywhere, the creation was part of her so she was just talking to herself. And she could do that without all that creation nonsense.

So she cleared a space where she wasn't. An empty void. Then she broke off a tiny piece of herself and dropped it into the void where she wasn't. There was a small bang but it fizzled out and nothing came of it. She tried again and again, tweaking the initial conditions an unimaginable number of times for aeons and aeons, until finally there was a Big Bang and our universe came into existence.

Now at last, God had a chance of somebody appearing to talk to. She just had to wait and wait for a thing to appear in the universe that could reach out and talk back across the space she had cleared in herself.

So there you have it. The universe is the way it is because God kept trying until it turned out just this way. And it's screwed up because she's not here. And our challenge is to contact and talk to her through the void and to give her some company. And if that doesn't happen, she'll just try again with another set of initial conditions until it does.

A comment caught my eye in the middle of this rant : "I've been looking for a good verb to describe losing all of your music to DRM because it's increasingly common and I think I have one: zune."

What about the iPod? Shouldn't we be worrying about that instead?

iPod doesn't seem to work as a verb. My music has all been ipodded. has the wrong sense.

How about Gah, the iPod ate all my music. Or Sigh, my iPod broke and I lost all my music. Or I plugged my iPod into someone else's computer and now all my music has gone.

I still can't find out how you are supposed to get usic off your computer and into the Zune. It apparently doesn't use or support PlaysForSure. But does it still use MTP? We're just beginning to get 3rd party support for MTP in things like Winamp and for those of us who are non-Ipod people stuck with a PFS/MTP player, it would be a shame if Microsoft ditched it completely. I guess this probably involves WMP v11 but we're already hearing about issues with WMP11 refusing to do firmware uploads on PFS hardware.

All this stuff must be seriously pissing off people like Creative, Toshiba and Samsung. They thought Microsoft would help them write the software and provide something to challenge iTMS. INstead they've been screwed. However there is a solution for them that is good for the consumer. They should turn their backs on DRM and build a machine with plain old USB mass storage and specifically designed to run Rockbox. And then give a 10th of the money they would have spent on Microsoft licenses to fund the Rockbox team.

Bitchun puts skype users in touch based on keywords that you put in and questions you ask the Bitchun Skype bot. You can then say thanks by putting in a Thumbs up or Thumbs down emoticon. There's a small plugin that shows people's Whuffie scores based on how many thanks you get.

Neat. Reminds me of the Karma tracking in JiBot on IRC.

We're going to be running the Skypecast of the Ecademy event again tonight.

Details here. Starting at 7:30pm UK time.

Go to that page after 7:30 and follow the instructions to listen in. You'll need your Skype password to join.
[from: JB Ecademy]

In the not too distant future, laptops will come pre-loaded with Vista. Which means that we're in the end days when you can still buy a laptop with XP. Will there be a last minute rush?

I reckon my next laptop will run linux with WINE.

What are the chances of Parallel for Linux?

So, what is DRM?

I'm running the old plugin on Winamp for Last.FM (v1.1.10). Scanning the source code I found a hidden registry entry. allowhttp in HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAudioscrobblerWinamp Plugin reating this value and setting it to a DWORD of 1 and now the Winamp PMP plugin for PFS devices streams into Winamp and is then reported correctly into Last.FM. Result! I was a bit worried that LastFMProxy would also report to last.FM from inside Winamp as well as from the Last.FM radio stream and I'd get dulicates. But it turns out that the Winamp plugin can't understand the metadata on that stream and gives up.

So it's all good. I just have to make sure I don't watch any pron in Winamp or that fact will get spread all over all the places I've now got my listening habits being reported!

Yet Another Extended Acronym (YAEA). With Yahoo! announcing a Single Sign On system we have a new acronym. Yet Another Single Sign On System or YASSOS.

So what happens when every major player plus a host of others each have their own SSO? Yup, we have another incompatible mess just like Instant Messaging. And we're back to sign on systems that only work within the owner's silos. Does anyone seriously think MS CardSpace, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay are going to interoperate?

As usual, this is a tax on independent software developers. Groups like Drupal and Wordpress will need to spin off development projects to support each YASSOS. Or just ignore all of them. Which will then work against any of the major players getting enough traction to become any kind of standard.

Out of all these, I think Yahoo! actually has the best chance of getting some traction in the low end of hosted PHP apps. Purely because they've chosen to use a very simple REST+XML interface. And one that doesn't require fancy browser add-ins.

I have a Zen Xtra 30Gb 2.5" HD player that I've hacked with an 80Gb disk. I've just hit yet another limit. If you have more than 60Gb of tracks on the disk, it no longer plays playlists on the player. The playlists exist and you can see them and play them on the PC either in Creative's explorer, Windows explorer or in winamp with the PMP plugin. But the player won't open them or play them. This is after previous problems with the PlaysForSure (not!) firmware that has a metadata limit on the total number of characters in the filenames and ID3 metadata tags. Apparently this is a known problem with the Creative firmware. It stores the playlists near the end of the partition and the internal software can't open them, although the files can be accessed via the USB port. Some programmer somewhere put a hard limit on disk size by mistake and based on Creative's biggest production player being 60Gb.

And BTW. if you're in this situation, don't upgrade to WMP 11. It breaks PFS and Creative firmware updates no longer work.

The PFS firmware came out in 2005 and there's been no updates since. And there's still no way of downgrading the system back to the old NJB firmware.

This is so frustrating. I really want a Not-An-iPod that uses 2.5" disks and plays Rockbox; that looks like a USB mass storage device. I don't care about or want DRM. But I want to stash my entire collection in my pocket. This is possible. It's not particularly cutting edge. But nobody makes one. Now that 80Gb 1.8" disks are coming on stream, maybe it's going to be possible in the near future to switch. And 100Gb and 120Gb 1.8" disks are not far away but they're premium price. So perhaps somewhere in my future is a late model iPod hacked with a big disk and with Rockbox loaded.

I'm almost tempted to go back several generations and try and find an old Archos Jukebox on eBay.

Yet again, I'm struck that hardware companies should just get out of the software business. They're no good at it. It would actually make sense for them to fund the open source community (ie RockBox) and use that. And this is not just about Creative. Linksys/Cisco could do the same with their wireless routers as could Apple with WINE. There's a catch of course. FOSS is never going to support DRM and that in turn deep sixes any business model based on implementing DRM in order to get customer lock in.

So Just Say No To DRM!

Just step back a moment and look at your mobile phone. You have a contacts list with almost no information behind each entry. And you can engage in slow motion conversations via SMS. Now look at your instant message client, like Skype. There you have a contacts list with a rich profile behind each one. You can see if the people are on line. Some times you can see what they're listening to or where they are. And you can engage in relatively high speed text only conversations.

So how could the phone improve and take on some of the characteristics of an IM program? I'd *really* like a Skype client on my phone, not for VoIP but for text and for the contacts list. This feels do-able to me mainly because the bandwidth requirements are pretty low. But of course it would cannibalise the *huge* business cash cow of SMS.

Google - Search History

I just discovered that Google Talk can now track your listening and have ti turn up in your search history. Inevitably it doesn't quite work right.

So here we have a Creative Zen Xtra with an 80Gb disk and PlaysForSure firmware. This plays into Winamp using the beta V5.25 build which can stream tracks from a connected (iPod/Creative NJB/PFS/USB) player. Google talk then picks this up from the winamp window name, it then reports it up to Google. Except that the default Winamp layout is "Artist - Title". Google reverses this in Googletalk status to "Title - Artist" which makes more sense. Except that I agree so I've modified my playlist display in Winamp to "Title : Artist (album : track number)" which works better for me. So google then can't always find the artist and sometimes reverses my reversed display. Hey Ho.

I've also written a bot to grab the Winamp window title and drop it into my Skype status.

But then there's Last.FM. Last.FM's scrobbling refuses to scrobble streams. Which means that when I play back tracks from my external player they don't get scrobbled and added to my Last.FM profile. Which is a shame. Especially when I'm picking that up via RSS and dropping it into the box over on the right. Now it turns out that the Last.FM plugin for winamp did do streamed music once and the source code was available. So clearly I'm going to have to hack that.

Any Road Up. Looking at Google Music vs Last.FM It's clear to me that Google doesn't grok community in Web 2.0 stuff. There's no way to aggregate music into friends although they do encourage you to join the GoogleGroup for an artist. And their music genres suck just as much as everyone esle's. That's another story, which Last.FM's music tags don't quite fix. And that luscious google data about what you listen to isn't visible to anyone else and has no RSS/Atom feed. Just like your personalised search page isn't visible to anyone else.

There's a disconnect here. Google is fascinated by the statistics of it all. And it constantly pushes the short head of the zeitgeist. When we people out in the long tail want to find the other long tailers in our little niche, not be told that ColdPlay and Snow Patrol are at the top of the short head. And that fascination with statistics and Internet scale search works against individual people communicating with other independent people.

This all started when I found out that GoogleTalk no longer requires a Gmail address to sign in with. Great. Except that my other three Google accounts with other email addresses are independent. I can sign in with them, but then Google thinks I'm another person with another set of contacts and friends. We really need to separate "Identity" here from "Authentication" and I badly need a way of telling Google to merge and aggregate my accounts. It's not 3 people with 3 email addresses. It's one person with 3 email addresses. Yahoo discovered this problem as did LinkedIn and they dealt with it. One day I'll deal with it on Ecademy.

Skype Journal: Eight Ways to File Transfer Using Skype :

There's something weird about when Skype relays file transfers. My PC is normally in the DMZ of my linksys router so I run the risk of being a supernode[1], but I also get fast transfers. But then I did one a day ago and it was relayed. Really not sure if this was a bug in beta 2.6 or I'd changed something and forgotten about it.

This is one situation where a centralised relay could help. Or where there was something we could do to the firewall to speed up just file tranfers. P2P apps like Bittorrent or Soulseek manage much faster file transfers direct between PCs but you usually have to mess with firewall or router settings to get it.

For a while there I thought supernodes were just handling call setup, switching and NAT busting, but once the connection was established they stepped out of the way. But relayed file transfers suggests they still participate in the conversation.

Given all the FUD about Supernodes it would be good if we could get some definitive information about where they sit and what they do in all situations.

[1]I can tell when my laptop is a supernode and being used for a call because the fan kicks in. ;)

An interesting comment here. The Engadget Interview: Viodentia, creator of FairUse4WM - Engadget : My suggestion to future designers is simple: don't bother with weak client-side decryption. Instead, provide a public specification for licenses using digital signatures, manage the PKI through a not-for-profit organization, and apply social and legal pressure to programs that don't comform. Accept that folks can trivially patch around the system, but if the restrictions aren't onerous most people won't go through the hassle.

I've been saying for a while that DRM (and software copy protection) is inevitably flawed from a cryptographic point of view. Because you can't give somebody the private key, the public key, the algorithm and the encrypted text and expect to have any control over the plain text. But I wonder now if there is any mechanism whereby part of this can be retained and the DRM made cryptograhically secure. In reality of course the plain text does eventually get out and so the "analog hole" must always remain. But this would prevent tools like Hymn and FairUse4WM from working. I suspect that the trick is to never give out the private key and to create a one time hash based on it that is passed out on demand. This would then imply that the playback device would only work while it was on line which pretty much counts out things like iPods.

I'm getting out of my depth here on cryptography. But it seems to me that TLS/SSL works something like this.

Ultimately, the content ends up as a bitstream that can always be captured so DRM is still a dead end. Even if we see increasingly draconian measures to try and prevent us getting anywhere near it. See Trusted Computing and HDMI.

Will Apple sue PodTech.net? (My employer) « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger :

Does anyone actually listen to podcasts on an ipod? Or any portable media player?

RSS enclosures were a great solution to a scarcity problem when bandwidth was expensive. As bandwidth becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous the need to download in background goes away. And it's questionable whether it's cheaper for the provider to deliver thousands of enclosures that are then discarded or to stream fewer on demand. The one thing that would have changed this dynamic would have been widespread use of BitTorrent as a delivery mechanism.

So let's celebrate audio and video blogging, and the democratisation of audio and video production and back off from promotion of a specific product from a specific company. Especially one that doesn't want to be inclusive.