Here's the foam. I'm going to attack it! Should be able to get about 1 1/2" lower. [from: Flikr Photos]

Here's the seat after marking up. [from: Flikr Photos]

Woot! I just got one of my rants, Paying for the music published on p2pnet.net

Aldon Hynes writes about the closing of Plink.

Plink: A FOAF update | Orient Lodge : I suspect this may be the tip of the iceberg as more and more people discover the power of FOAF and want to take advantage of it, and at the same time want to protect their privacy.

Here's a couple of interesting stories. Perhaps somebody with some knowledge of the legal status of UK ISPs could comment.

This one's about an Indymedia server being handed over to the FBI by Rackspace in London because there was a story on there with a photograph of a Swiss undercover policeman.

Independent Media Center | www.indymedia.org | ((( i ))) : Rackspace complied and handed the server over to the FBI, but they must have felt bad because they are building us a new server that will be online as soon as possible, oh and they apologized for the abruptness because they think that they are "required to comply with all federal orders of this nature". The servers hosted numerous local IMCs including Belgium and African imcs, Palestine, UK, Germany, and Brasil, Italy, Uruguay, Poland, Belgrade, Portugal, and more. We are unaware as to the reasons for this at this time. We suspect it has to do with an FBI request that we take down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police. They claimed there was threats and personal information, but there was nothing of the sort. The undercover police that were photographed on the page were photographing protesters. Rackspace is a US company, but have colocation in the UK where these servers are (err, were) located. So this is about Swiss police, on a French site, on a server in England, taken away by American federal police... can I be the first to say WTF?!

WTF, indeed! The FBI has long arms these days. Among other oddities about this, you might refelect on the fact that the FBI is supposed to handle domestic cases only and is not supposed to get involved in international issues. Perhaps the story actually meant to say CIA.

The second is about the very public announcement yesterday that the BPI are suing 28 UK based file sharers. Hidden in the story is that the BPI don't know the names and details about the accused only their IP address. And that these are civil proceedings and injunctions. So the question is what power do the UK courts have to force the ISPs to give up their customer details against a specific IP address and date in a civil case. I would hope that they have no power at all. The ISP is not a defendant in this case but a 3rd party. I can't see that it's in anyone's long term interest for any private 3rd party to be able to get access to an ISPs records purely because it helps their case. An inquiry into a criminal case is another matter and I'm sure the government has plenty of scope for demanding this information. Keep your eyes out for the BPI to be pushing for criminal legislation in the UK over copyright theft, the right to issue injunctions against third parties to collect information and no doubt the inclusion of the common carrier in complicity in the "crime". I may well be wrong (please tell me) but I don't think they have those rights now. [from: JB Ecademy]

Eventually it was discovered
that God
did not want us to be
all the same.

This was
Bad News
for the Governments of the world,
as it seemed contrary
to the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings.

Mankind must be made more uniformly
If
The Future
Was going to work

Various ways were sought
to bind us all together
But, Alas
Same-Ness was unenforceable

It was about this time
that someone
came up with the idea of
Total Criminilization.

Based on the principle that
If we were All Crooks
We could at last be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of
The Law.

Shrewdly our legislators calculated
that most people were
too lazy to perform a
Real Crime.
So new laws were manufactured
making it possible for anyone
To violate then any time of the day or night
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President
The most exalted Industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions.

Total Criminalization
Was the greatest idea of its time.
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be Crooks or Outlaws.
So, of course, they had to be
Tricked into it...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal.

(c) Frank Zappa 1979

Four links today loosely related and a question/answer at the end.

UK record industry sues 28 file-sharers | The Register
This is the entirely predictable story that the UK BPI has begun suing people with very large numbers of music files available for download over the P2P networks. At least they seem to be going after people who are willfully sharing huge quantities of music rather than the average customers and students that the RIAA thinks are good targets.

The Long Tail
The second is a truly excellent article about the implications of the economics of abundance as opposed to the economics of scarcity. The gist is that once you solve the scalability problems of addressing the market for products in the long tail of the power curve, the returns are much, much bigger than simply focussing on the top 20% hits. The implication for the record industry is that they should be digitising their back catalogue and copyright free recordings as fast as they can and offering them for sale at a much reduced rate. In fact the best business model for them for downloading looks to be huge volume of inventory allied to a premium rate for the latest hits rapidly dropping to near zero for back catalogue.

Brewster Kahle on "Universal Access to All Human Knowledge"
Then we have a presentation on a proposal to digitize and make available every book that's ever been published. 26M books in the Library of Congress -- more than 50% out of copyright, most out of print, a tiny sliver in print. A digitized ASCII book is about 1MB, so this is about 26TB, which costs about $60K and takes up one bookshelf. It costs $10/book to scan -- they're digitizing all the books in the Library of Alexandria, and they're going this in China, too. A group in Toronto is doing a robot-scanner that will bring the cost in the industrial world -- where labor is more expensive -- to scan books for $10. At $10 per, that $260 Million to scan all the books. Now you can expect all these costs to come down if this becomes a major project funded from the public purse.

Finally we have BBC Planning to open source its archives.

So let's say we can digitise all the books, make every piece of audio ever recorded available on the web, and then make a start on digitising and making available every piece of video ever recorded. That should keep Google, Amazon, Altavista, Yahoo! and the other search engines busy for some time!

So now here's the question that goes back to that first quote about the RIAA and the BPI suing it's customers.

How much are you really prepared to pay for music?

And here's my answer.

The first thing I want is a product I actually want to buy. That's a minimum of an MP3 digitised at 192Kb VBR with no DRM. That's the point where the product is as good as something I rip myself from a CD. It's also quite a bit higher quality than that available from iTMS, Napster, Sony, Rhapsody and the other online services. And I can play it anywhere. On my home PC, on my laptop, my portable music player, my MP3 CD player or in the car.

Now for me $0.99 (or whatever the UK equivalent is) per song is too much. And grabbing it for free from a P2P service is too much hassle in locating it, fixing the tags and file names, assembling the album and discarding the badly ripped or corrupted copies. What I've discovered is that if I buy it from AllOfMp3.com at $0.01 per Mb or about $0.06 per song, I don't even think about the cost. $1 per album is so low that I'll just do it. So the price point where I'll switch from illegal to semi-legal for downloads is somewhere between $0.06 and $0.99 or $1 and $10 per CD.

My guess is that for most people the point where they stop thinking about the price and download huge quantities is around $0.25 per song. So clearly the best strategy for the music industry is to go flat out for scale so that the overheads drop well below $0.25 and offer up everything they've got even it only gets a couple of downloads a year. At that point the P2P networks should just fade away because nobody can bothered any more.

And then we can all just forget about DRM, suing customers, priceing cartels and regional price differences. [from: JB Ecademy]

List of YASNs [from: del.icio.us]

Plink is being taken do. How sad. You can read the gory details here
[rdfweb-dev] Plink

It was fun to do, but I'm now getting way too many complaints from
people who have appeared without permission in other people's FOAF files
and have found themselves via Google.

Trying to explain FOAF to these people generally doesn't work, and more
often than not, they're too irate to care. So the easiest thing for me
to do is just take the site down.

The interesting thing here is that there are approximately 15 Million structured data files out there on the web in XML of which FOAF is just one type. And the search engines currently do nothing with it. And when a programmer does try to do something, they get abuse from people who don't realize they didn't have any privacy anyway.

Hey-ho. Maybe I'll go live with my own version. [from: JB Ecademy]

Really important article about the implications of The long tail, online music pricing elasticity and abundance economics as opposed to scarcity economics [from: del.icio.us]

[from: del.icio.us]

Spyware, Malware removal [from: del.icio.us]

Last night I had hours of fun cleaning up the house PC after a combination virus-malware attack. I run AVG on this PC. I'm pretty good about keeping windows update up to date, and I also run Adaware and Spybot every so often. I still don't know how it got there but I suspect it had something to do with the kid's party a couple of weeks ago. The first indication of something wrong was that it wouldn't close down properly and then wouldn't complete scandisk.

This one was distinctly evil.
- An extra web search toolbar in IE6
- A "Play Bingo" icon on the desktop
- Rundll32.exe deleted so that you can't run anything in control panel like Add/Remove Programs or system properties from My Computer.
- System restore turned off and all previous restore points deleted.
- A bunch of extra startup services and programs running in background.
- On every boot, it would install the files again.

Eventually I had to:-
- Copy rundll32.exe fom the windows install disk
- Use the task manager to kill any odd looking running programs
- Remove odd entries from the registry in local machine, software, microsoft, current control set, run-runonce-runservices
- Boot into safe mode
- run Scandisk
- Use Add/Remove programs to remove a bunch of toolbar and web search "helpers"
- Run the anti-virus program and the malware checkers which found 4 infected files with premium rate dialler trojans. Thankfully this machine no longer has a modem link.
- reboot, reboot, reboot... ...reboot, reboot...
- Turn system restore back on
- Save a restore point
- Run Windows Update. Nothing to install so I was already fully patched but despite that and a running AVG it still got infected.

Needless to say I didn't find all that in one go and I was on the verge of starting a windows re-install.
Aaaarrrgghh! Talking to my kids it turns out that all their friend's PCs have died and won't work properly any more. Given the effort it took me as an IT professional, I'm not surprised. How is the average family supposed to cope with all this?

Anyway I've had enough of this game. IE6, Outlook, Outlook Express, Real Audio are now officially banned in this household. [from: JB Ecademy]

My new fresh Suzuki Burgman 400 [from: Flikr Photos]

My trusty combined top box and backrest. This one's followed me round for years but has served as a backrest on a Helix and Burgman AN400X. It's held on with a metal strap underneath that ties into a bolt in the bum rest. The side straps just hold it steady and straight. The new Burger has a huge luggage compartment, but you can always use more storage space. [from: Flikr Photos]

The standard mirrors are stupidly wide. I've replaced the stems with a short cut down bolt. Great for squeezing through London traffic. [from: Flikr Photos]

I like Skype. I really do. And I've enjoyed making long and extremely cheap phone calls to the USA using it.

But what's up with this? Skype Account Overview : You have 85 days, until December 29 2004, to use this credit.

As Guy Kewney says in this fine rant about IM programs. "My money does not expire, guys, and if I don't get it back, you'll hear from my lawyer." [from: JB Ecademy]

Slashdot | Redmondmag on Dumping IE has a pointer to an article from RedmondMag which describes itself as "The Independent voice of the Microsoft IT community", entitled "Time to Dump IE? Internet Explorer is a hacker's dream. Can you (and should you) drop it right now?" The same article is in "Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine"

It's a well written exploration of the issues with switching from IE to an alternative.

The Slashdot comments included this.

Being more serious. How to migrate a clueless n00b from IE to with minimal future support:

1. Download/Install Firefox itself
2. Download/Install Sun Java Runtime, do necessary fiddling to get Firefox to use it
3. Download/Install Flash plugin
4. Download/Install Shockwave plugin
5. Download/Install all necessary streaming media plugins
6. Download/Install Googlebar plugin. This is optional but probably a Good Thing. Configure until said clueless n00b offers free coffee.
7. Add 'obvious' trusted sites like mozilla.org to trusted sites list (I can't believe mozilla forgot this!) Be very careful here.
8. Turn on all automatic updates (remember, we are talking about clueless n00bs here)
9. Make sure all bookmarks, cookies etc have been correctly migrated by checking with, yes, you guessed it, the clueless n00b... (I've never had a problem).
10. Delete all unnecessary IE icons (or if they are really clueless then just redirect them to Firefox)
11. While you're at it remove PDF from MIME associations, Acrobat takes zonks to load up, make sure it doesn't load in a tab but downloads as necessary. [While you're at it why not clean Acrobar of the unused plugins? It'll make it load an order of magnitude faster]
12. Set default download directory to something more sensible than the desktop (optional). Go through the options (possibly consulting your n00b), configure.
13. Teach n00b how to use tabbed browsing, integrated searching, pressing '/' to find something etc etc. Teach common keyboard shortcuts. RSS bookmarks if not THAT much of a n00b. Watch n00b face light up with unrestrained glee! Relish free food, foot massage etc by n00b.
14. Explain your undying hero worship for Charles Babbage, why Darl McBride is Satan, the contents of Bruce Schneier's latest cryptogram, and why Eberlin's Slashbot rhyme r0xxors. Attempt explanation of the concept of bash.org. Get kicked out by increasingly freaked out n00b, safe in the knowledge that you are battling Evil.

WARNING: above not to be used in ALL situations, only for the 'I want my IntarWeb' types. [from: JB Ecademy]

What is Metroblogging London and it's 17 siblings in atlanta, boston,
chicago, houston, istanbul, los angeles, new orleans, new york city, orange county, orlando, san francisco, seattle, tokyo, toronto, vienna, washington d.c.? London at least seems to be looking for writers. [from: JB Ecademy]

[from: del.icio.us]

Mark Pesce on Emigrating from the USA and other topics.