RicRicho

Surfer magazine has started using an excellent promotion channel to
get people to link from their mags to their web site… many of their
inspired wave double spreads have been provided as desktop backgrounds
with the link discretely advertised in the corner of the page.

Why should this idea be limited to pics of waves. Wired mag is full of
inspirational, thought provoking artwork and pictures, every one of
them an excellent opportunity to build the readers association/
loyalty…

My only request. Keep the promotion to a minimum (IE a little
reference or copyright in the corner) no one likes to feel like their
monitors desktop is an advertising billboard.

I discontinued my subscription to Wired because it got tangled in my
mail and triaged as does all my mail into specific time slots…
picking up an issue at the corner store somehow has more of a sense of
occasion.

Interestingly, I always spend more time in one session looking through
the paper version than I ever would looking at the RSS feed for the
Wired online. Even more interesting is the fact that the focus the
paper version lends to each article means that the full import of a
story or a new idea is felt so much more strongly. The commitment to
the time to thumb through the magazine results in a more thoughtful
open minded perusal by the reader.

I’m no expert but I think the music industry started when Edison
recorded the first vocal performance by an opera singer. But that’s
technology. The industry as we know it has always been about control.
Control of distribution, the talent and promotion (i.e. the way people
hear new music).

This all worked very well when the promotion channels were few and
highly subscribed. Two or three regional radio stations, three or four
television channels and talent eager to sign the next ten years of
life away for the opportunity make it big in the next year. This all
added up to maximum profits at minimal cost and high efficiency in
distribution and promotion.

The excellent book “The Long Tail” proves that with more diverse media
promotion options (take MySpace by itself) and the ability for talent
to self distribute, the industry is facing a sharply down turning
future.

A few things that have contributed to the change of affairs for the
industry is the miscalculation that the MP3 file format represented an
opportunity to resell and expand their market when in fact Mp3s are a
poor cousin to Cd’s just as cassettes where a poor cousin to LP’s… you
have to ask how many Cd’s would they have sold if they offered the MP3
versions for an extra dollar or two and included them on the CD? How
much goodwill would they have generated?

Another bad choice in my mind was to not get in quickly with an MP3
based album format including digital sleeve and liner notes. In the
mid 90s I remember seeing a digital album format done by a mob from
South Africa… it was really cool and could easily have been integrated
into the popular players of the day. On this point I think they really
missed the boat.

Now onto a touchy subject… singles. Most musicians hate singles.
Albums capture a body of work. A time in the bands life. They help
songs grow on you. Take Led Zep 4. Rock and Roll grabs you. Levee
breaks pounds. Stairway.. well. But how many punters have all of these
in their play lists, yet in context they say so much about the music
of that album.

Lastly lets look at copy protection (including DRM). A dirty subject.
Yes, only because of how it was used. Either to stop the CD to MP3
onslaught, or to try and get people to pay yet again for a CD they
only bought a few years ago by re-releasing in MP3 at no greater gain
in fidelity. Its such a temptation to use technology to force
customers to pay again.

Maybe DRM enabled music would be entirely dominant if the music
industry wasn’t completely arrogant in its use. Firstly, if DRM
enabled versions were transparent to use (i.e. self registering) and
easily accessible (i.e. on the CD alongside the Redbook audio
versions) the whole confrontational mp3 thing could have been avoided.

Secondly DRM can be set with softer, kinder policing settings so that
people could copy their music to as many devices as they would
reasonably own and only stop massive copying when 30 or 40 copies
start appearing at diverse and disparate locations… such tolerance or
as we call it at Uniloc “throttling” is a no-brainer.

Phew. Sorry to be so long winded but its an important subject to me.
The future? Every day it looks less and less likely that the record
industry as we know it today will be there.

When I first started Uniloc back in 92 I remember somewhere along the
line picking up a copy of Dr Dobbs, the programmers programmer
magazine. After making the rounds of all the usual technology haunts
(slashdot etc) I’m back at the trusty Dobbs website now as
authoritative as ever.

Just wish they’d allow custom search with RSS feed as the subject
matter of the site is so diverse and low level it’s hard going using
the category RSS feeds to find articles and news that I’m really
interested in…

CIO India - More ‘Brute Force’ Attacks on SMBs, says Security Software Vendor: "’Prior to this, what we noticed out there being directed at mid-sized companies was the more broad-based sweeps or scans, which means that there were certain well-known vulnerabilities that were being targeted, but they were being broadly targeted,’ Smith said. ‘That means that the bad guys were broadly sweeping a bunch of companies … for these general vulnerabilities and when they found those vulnerabilities they would find a way in.’

Now, however, hackers are targeting their attacks at specific services like File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and are employing the brute force password cracking technique, Smith said."

Boing Boing: Circuit City offers DVD ripping service: “A Circuit City store is offering ‘DVD transfer service’ to an iPod at $10/disc. This seems like a natural service for a store that sells iPods to offer, except that ripping DVDs is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It’s not that making a copy of your DVDs for your iPod is illegal — that part’s all right. It’s breaking the flimsy anti-copying locks on a DVD that’s against the law — the DMCA prohibits breaking any lock, even if you’re doing it for a lawful purpose. Link “

Yet another example of why anti-piracy measures need to be more intellegent. From the beginning we at Uniloc have opted for “fair use” capable version of copy control software. For example should you be able to let your Dad see a movie you recommentd to him via broadband? Yes. Should he have a copy that he can share with others? No. Thats fair use… common sense. Unfortunately DRM has become the means for content owners to charge you a new license for every device you want to use for playback and that’s plain wrong.

Larry Brilliant on TED Talks:

“TEDPrize winner Larry Brilliant is an epidemiologist who presided over the last case of SmallPox on the planet.”

Includes success factors and strategy of eradicating Smallpox as well as polio (5 countries left to go) as well as estimations on what will happen when Bird Flu strikes… estimated to happen within 3 years.

Today his blog featured:

“Lunch with Prime Minister Tony Blair…
I had lunch with Tony Blair today. (And yes, I have been waiting all afternoon to type that.) “

Full of interesting tidbits like that SUN’s first two letters refer to Stanford University (alluding to the link between innovative companies and universtities in close locale, and a survey of all the CEOs visiting with the PM… all of them where public shool educated.

ZD Net reports from Australia:

“According to Denehy, techniques used not only include ‘the obvious ones’ such as encryption and rootkits but also ‘compression bombs’–which are compressed files that try to make life difficult for forensic tools by attempting to expand to an infinite size when executed.”

This is a new twist on a strategy that has really not been exploited fully by hackers, that of impersonation of legitimate applications. Anti-virus tools use checksums at differnet locations in a file to assess the legitimacy of a file against known results from verified software. If this procedure is known then hackers can get their malicious software to look, feel and act like legitimate software.