New Wave

Software maker arc90 has created a free browser-bookmarklet they're calling readability that markedly improves surfing by removing all the distracting stuff you're trying not to look at on a web page.

It’s a great concept and well executed.

For instance if you're reading an article on a newspaper website, one click re-formats it to look like a page from a novel.

Everything else vanishes, ads, banners, all the extraneous junk. The only thing remaining is the text presented in your choice of crisp font on a white background with links intact.

Think clean. Think quiet. Think AdBlock taken to the ultimate extreme in engineering and design.

- js.

Cache and Carry

I was listening to a CBS Flash Internet station in September. Something I'd been doing with my Opera browser since the summer. Just for kicks I opened the cache (C:\Documents and Settings\SprattsJ\Local Settings\Application Data\Opera\Opera\cache) and moved some files to another player. Not that I was expecting much.

Until last year Opera’s cache included file endings (which looked something like opr088LY.xyz), making it simple to access pictures, mp3s, video files and games, but no more. By version 8 or 9 they had joined other browser makers and eliminated the extensions, and what had been another in a long line of good reasons for using Opera as well. Now they're just indeterminate titles like opr088LY.

So when I dumped these mysterious little units into Winamp I didn't think they'd play. But they did. Of the thousand files loaded into Winamp, seven hundred worked. When I put them into Media Player Classic, they all worked. Bit rates varied but they all sounded consistent and punchy, due probably to the Orban processing the station uses.

About 15 new files came in each hour I streamed the station. So I did, running it every day from 8 am 'till midnight, until the empty space on my drive filled with 6500 tracks. After analyzing them with a free duplicate-file eliminator this week I wound up with 2700 unique songs. Then I made a playlist and randomized it for variety. Verdict? Sounds just like the station. Identical actually, without the breaks or announcements.

Next I gave GrooveShark a spin. I saw a poll on the most beautiful songs at a bulletin board. A reader streamed a few dozen submissions. I played it yesterday. When it ended I looked in the Opera cache and there they were, all thirty-nine of them. I moved them to a new folder called Most Beautiful and this is what I got:

opr016P5
opr016QY
opr016T8
opr016TC
opr016TI
opr016TN
opr016TS
opr016TV
opr016TZ
opr016U3
opr016UP
opr016V1
opr016V4
opr016V8
opr016VG
opr016VM
opr016VP
opr016VS
opr016VW
opr016VZ
opr016W4
opr016W9
opr016WB
opr016WG
opr016WK
opr016WP
opr016WT
opr016WX
opr016X0
opr016X2
opr016X6
opr016X8
opr016XD
opr016XH
opr016XK
opr016XP
opr016XS
opr016XW
opr016XZ

Pretty perplexing, right? But wait. I dragged them into my player, removed a few files I didn’t want, added a couple I did.

This is how Winamp then showed the very same file group:

1. Aphex Twin - Flim (2:53)
2. Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata (6:50)
3. Eva Cassidy - Over the Rainbow (4:59)
4. Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah (Grace) (6:55)
5. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (5:34)
6. Sigur Rós - Starálfur (6:46)
7. Radiohead - Exit Music (For a Film) (4:24)
8. Beatles - In My Life (2:27)
9. Imogen Heap - Hide And Seek (4:28)
10. Debussy - Clair de lune (4:53)
11. New York Philharmonic;Leonard Bernstein - Adagio for Strings from the String Quartet, Op. 11 (Instrumental) (9:58)
12. The Smiths - There Is a Light That Never Goes Out (4:02)
13. Sufjan Stevens - John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (3:19)
14. Iron And Wine - Naked As We Came (2:32)
15. Moby - Porcelain (4:01)
16. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (3:22)
17. Massive Attack - Teardrop (5:30)
18. Beethoven - 9Th Symphony (11:20)
19. Pink Floyd - The Great Gig in the Sky (4:44)
20. Flaming Lips - Do You Realize?? (3:32)
21. Neutral Milk Hotel - Oh Comely (8:18)
22. Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day (5:54)
23. Wilhelm Kempff - Piano Sonata #17 in D minor "The Tempest", Op. 31 No. 2: 3. Allegretto (7:17)
24. Elliott Smith - Waltz #2 (XO) (4:40)
25. Okkervil River - Black (4:39)
26. Fleetwood Mac - Landslide (3:18)
27. Eva Cassidy - Fields of Gold (4:42)
28. The Beach Boys – Caroline, No (2:17)
29. Radiohead - Everything in Its Right Place (4:11)
30. Erik Satie - Gnossienne no. 1 (3:49)
31. Fleet Foxes - Drops In The River (4:13)
32. Ludovico Einaudi - nuvole bianche (5:57)
33. Original Soundtrack - Halcyon and On and On (9:24)
34. Bjork - Unison (6:47)
35. Deutsche Opera Berlin - The Marriage Of Figaro: 'duettino - Sull 'aria' (3:33)
36. Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven (8:03)
37. Jonathan Edwards - Sometimes (2:47)
38. Delibes - Lakme (Flower Duet) (6:14)

Presto.

As you can see the ID3 tags survived the process and Winamp displayed them properly. Apparently as long as the stream had them it will.

I created another playlist and dropped it into MPC, merged it with the original 2700 song file and randomized it again. Simple.

Finally I put the whole thing on a thumb drive and stuck it in a small laptop I carry around. Outside, in the car etc. It turned out to be a very easy way to clone my favorite station and free it from the net.

- js.

Wall of Bable

The big media moguls just came off a "conference" where the #1 gripe was so-called free content (it's not free boys if it's ad supported). This has been a bug up their presses since debs used snail mail to swap how-to-land-rich-guy magazine articles. The internet simply gets moguls even more tightly wound.

I mention this because they are very much aware that for pay-gate models to work, every single player must adopt them. Hence the recent announcement from Rupert Murdoch that his properties will no longer be free, following a darker one from the Associated Press. Expect to see more in the months ahead as the big players close ranks.

Since the net has essentially reduced distribution (but not production) to zero, any wide scale walling off of content opens the door to at least one ad supported player to thrive, and as a non-fee destination become gargantuan, making the pay models irrelevant. The moguls know this and will try to block with new copyright laws and work "incentives" (read onerous contracts. Somebody will always crank out this stuff if desperate enough). It remains to be seen how effective any of this will be but keep an eye out for congressional action, particularly with respect to copyright, anti-trust and employment legislation.

I expect things to proceed much like they have however with players continuing to exit the business and a general shake-out proceeding until some semblance of balance is reached where advertising itself can support pricey content with unpaid or hardly-paid-but-dedicated bloggers taking on much of the see-and-post local stuff.

Things will just be a lot noisier for a while as big media whines loudly about the unfairness of it all and congress flops around trying to appease them.

- js.

Back to the Salt Mine

British performer Billy Bragg rails against the music business this month, claiming big entities like MyFace ruthlessly leverage massive market share to dole out recordings for free, exploiting hapless artists merely to grow larger still. It’s a provocative proposal and one that’s fairly widespread among artists generally, who by and large sidestep sticky issues of fan culpability. Says Bragg:

The people who are doing the most damage to our industry are not the music fans swapping files for no commercial gain – it's the sites that are making money without paying for content that are really ripping us off.

To be fair, Bragg doesn’t let fans totally off the hook. He acknowledges they may play some part in his nightmare but basically blames the record companies’ decline on continuing corporate gluttony. While historically such greed has been a factor it doesn’t negate the fundamental reality behind the collapse of the modern music industry.

Here lies a very hard truth: music lovers themselves discovered a simple way to distribute content for free and took to it with gusto, and copyright values according to author Nora Ephron and others have become nil.

Until Bragg and the artists who cling to misguided myths come to terms with this immutable fact all the op-ed pieces in the world, and rants against Ares, BitTorrent, Blubster, FaceBook, FastTrack, LimeWire, MySpace, PirateBay, RapidShare, SoulSeek, WASTE etc. will add nothing to the debate beyond distractions and dissemblances.

Artists are not merely at war with faceless corporations. The sharper conflict lies with the very record buyers vowing love to the artist, and those vows, when screamed at the top of all those lungs, probably mean as much as the performers do when they return it at the end of a show.

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

- Joni Mitchell

Forty summers ago rebellious fans, determined to get in free, flattened fences at a fabled music fest and had their way with it. The only remaining barrier between organizers and ruin was the financial commitment of a major film studio underwriting a legendary documentary. It hasn’t been 1969 for a very, very long time, but really, not much has changed.

- js.

Morpheus Redux

Peer-to-peer technology mavens Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who along with Jaan Tallinn co-created the FastTrack protocol - at one time the largest P2P system in the world - have pooled their personal resources to buy internet phone giant Skype back from eBay, the company they sold it to several years ago for $3.7 billion in cash and considerations. Analysts generally believe the auction house would welcome a sale of the unit.

Complicating matters for eBay is the proprietary peer-to-peer code Skype depends on for connections. It's licensed to eBay from Joltid, a company Zennstrom and Friis control, and there are indications they're no longer interested in continuing the association. Their self-described supernode technology was also at the heart of file-sharing giant Morpheus and when that license was pulled in 2002 the social forums were shuttered and several hundred thousand members found themselves locked out of a dying platform. The company that owned Morpheus changed protocols but never regained its market share and is now bankrupt. Without this technology it's not clear if Skype, which presently commands nearly one out of 12 international calling minutes, can continue to function. An IP dispute could keep other buyers from stepping forward.

Ebay is reportedly looking for at least $1.7 billion for Skype. Zennstrom and Friis plan to bring in additional investors and perhaps get financing from eBay itself.

 - js.

Back to the Future

I suppose it's possible for people to download more, although my acquaintances seem to be to doing it already with as much abandon as there is impunity. Meanwhile I personally know of no one affected by any legal campaigns, and let’s face it, with file sharers numbering the 100s of millions, and lawsuits in the thousands the odds will always favor the file sharers, and overwhelmingly so.

The most game changing trend however is the exuberant return of sneakerware. Not that it ever fully disappeared but now that harddrives have crossed the 1TB threshold and easily hold 10,000 albums at high bitrates, offers to share have become ubiquitous. A quick perusal of Craigslist shows "DJ" drives being openly advertised in the 300 dollar range fully loaded with karaoke, CDs, videos or any combination one chooses. Then there're movies: a 1.5 TB drive holds 1000 high-bit AVIs in an era when the typical Blockbuster outlet has I think less than 4000 titles in stock, and drive sizes are increasing. Soon an entire store’s inventory will fit in a home cartridge smaller than a VHS tape, no small irony for a company that was founded by enticing consumers to go out and rent them one at a time.

Obviously at present transfer speeds it would take months to grab such prodigious amounts – in the unlikely event one found an uploader willing to service the transfer for that duration - but a pal-to-pal hard drive dub is measured in hours, and perfect for a socially acceptable Saturday afternoon barbecue or big Sunday game.

The internet will always be the ideal medium for low level “background transfers” and the copyright mavens have in all likelihood resigned themselves to it, and the realization their lawsuit strategies are beginning to encounter serious and expensive legal resistance.

It's also beginning to dawn on them that the big issues moving forward will be full quality library swaps via hard drive, where the entire TCM archive, or all the films in Maltin's movie guide, are available to be plugged directly into a TV via consumer devices like Western Digital’s TV HD media player, and no amount of Limewire trolling is ever going to stop it.

It’s no surprise they’re retiring the distracting lawsuit campaigns.

In a few years time the RIAA will be looking back with fond remembrance on the good ol’ days of Napster/Grokster/BT because the media companies’ brain trust will be caught in a truly difficult quandary: herding consumers back to the store when they already have every album they can conceivably hear and every movie they can conceivably see, and all acquired for far less than the price of the media center they're enjoying them on.

- js.

The Return of the Invisible Mesh

Several years ago my main WASTE profile disappeared. The program ran, received and sent files, IMs, chat etc, but the main window just plain left the building. I mentioned it to some users on meshes I frequent and heard from other folks with the same trouble. It didn’t happen often but it was a hitch, it was real, and not being able to see the member list was a problem. People told me their windows came back after a while, as mysteriously as they vanished, so that was something to look forward to and sure enough mine did too eventually, about six months after it departed. So OK, chalk that up to the vagaries of an early release that never, ever had a single upgrade and little oddities like that are to be expected. It’s a testament to Justin Frankel’s programming talent that his WASTE file-sharing system works as well it does, considering we’re still using the very first version he released on a day in June more than five years ago, when he let it out for just a few brief moments, before AOL dragged it back in and slammed the door on it.

Last month I ran this versatile utility directly from a USB drive – without installing it first on a host computer, and remarked how well the setup works on the road. It opens normally, runs the same way, connects instantly to meshes and allows chat, IM’ing and will save downloads right back to the dongle it’s running from. The only issues I found were on a Windows 2000 ThinkPad where WASTE had never been installed: the laptop wouldn’t display the GUI’s. At first I thought it might have something to do with a lack of any initial installation or perhaps even the version of Windows, but it got me thinking and you probably know why. Sure enough the folder I pasted to the USB was copied from that box with the old vanishing interface and it was doing the same thing: launching invisibly. To see if perhaps another profile might produce better results I copied a different one and ran it on the ThinkPad. It worked. As soon as WASTE launched the interface popped up and the windows appeared. Files transferred to the thumb drive, chat and the other features functioned, all exactly as if I’d been running it off the original machine where it was first created several years before. The clone was perfect in every respect which was what I was hoping for so I simply copied several folders from a few PCs that connect to various meshes and placed them on the thumb drive. After a brief moment of C&P’ing the setups were done. Normally these profiles are time consuming to generate and a connection is needed to at least one other member of each mesh to complete the process and load current IP addresses. It’s basically impossible to do alone on the fly. Not that it’s easy to begin with. For some reason generating profiles doesn’t always work even under the best conditions – it’s the number one problem preventing WASTE from catching on beyond the very determined - but no matter how difficult it was I still had to recreate these iffy profiles from scratch each and every time if I wanted to log onto any networks while traveling. Not anymore. Now I can connect effortlessly to any mesh I belong to, including my own personal LAN, without installing or creating anything or leaving any trace on any computer I’m borrowing, making an already versatile app the king of the roam.

There was still one more thing to do however. Out of curiosity I re-ran that “invisible mesh” and tried sending IM’s and files to see if it was actually operating in some inadvertent stealth mode. It was. Even though I couldn’t launch a chat box directly, incoming messages from another host popped open a window making two-way conversations possible, and even though I couldn’t start a download, incoming transfers pushed from the host streamed directly to the thumb drive. The bottom line is that everything worked, even if I couldn’t see it.

There was and still is something spooky lurking inside that old profile, and although the original device on which it resides accommodates it somehow, the new drive will not. Yet. It’s one of those unexplained things that defines WASTE. Mysterious but workable, and always I think worth exploring. Who knows? Under certain circumstances a ghost in a machine like this could become an interesting friend.

 - js.