Recently in Tech Category

It's always strange when something you worked on a couple of years back suddenly starts generating interest, without any particular reason. I've been asked to speak at a couple of different seminars this month on the Concrete Dialogues writing project, a rather mammoth undertaking which has been online now for a couple of years. I can't explain why it's being noticed suddenly, but it certainly makes me happy. There's even talk of developing the concept in other areas.

To celebrate, before I speak about it tomorrow at the Still/Open Online Publishing Forum along with many infinitely more interesting international guests (at the Bakery, info here), I've gone in and tidied and fixed up a few things. I've also removed the ridiculous age restriction that was imposed on us by funding bodies, so anybody can now contribute.

It's still too heavily javascript-dependent, but all good mashups seem to be, and it feels like something I wrote two years ago, which it is, but I'd actually forgotten how much fun it is. And to make it more fun, I've just wasted the afternoon integrating with Google Earth. Just load this file into Google Earth and, in the words of Jobs, "boom". Wicked cool - and freaky as hell when you turn on flight simulator mode.

X-Men 3 sucked, but I'll get over it. In one of the week's few pieces of good news (along with what looks like a viable AIDS vaccine), Australia is likely to enact new copyright laws, in which we shall no longer be committing a crime by ripping CDs and placing them on our iPods. Recording television will now also be legal. I know you've waited 20 years to tape something legally on your VCR, and now you are free to do so without fear of prosecution.

Of course, there's a catch. Any recording you make must be watched only once and then destroyed. You are free to invite your friends to come around and watch your recording, but they must watch it at the same time as you - if they watch it before you do, then it's been watched and must be destroyed. I'm not kidding.

That's it, Ruddock. Bend over. You know, you don't have to listen to the industry lobbyists when they ask you for absurd provisions that will never be enforced, designed only to protect DVD sales and cripple the introduction of TiVo-esque hard drive recorders in this country. America laughed in their faces when these things were demanded there. The introduction in this country of recording hardware with inbuilt "watch-once" features is more likely with these laws in place, although I have no doubt that consumers will no doubt soundly reject such absurdities.

"Everyday consumers shouldn't be treated like copyright pirates," Ruddock says. "Copyright pirates should not be treated like everyday consumers."

Great sentiment, and yet we introduce laws designed to put everybody in the country with a VCR in breach of them. This morning I interviewed a copyright expert who claimed that it wasn't so bad, because the old law was silly and will never be policed, so a new silly law won't be policed either. I'm sorry, but is there anything more dangerous than accepting an absurd law because we know it's so absurd that it will never be enforced?

If Australian law does not keep up with the changing pace of technology, we'll find our content industries completely burned out and destroyed by the internet within the decade. Other more enlightened countries have realised the smart thing is to levy blank media and provide royalties to the artists, and to introduce legitimate, legal download services which are every bit as easy to use as the illegal ones -- the American TV networks are now beginning to sell or stream their content online, and although most of it is restricted so that Australians can't get to it, it's but a trivial hack away to fool the servers and get to it. For as long as we don't keep up, and for as long as we don't recognise the changing face of the digital planet, Australian artists and creators will continue to be left behind. Lip service changes to copyright to make sane some of the insanities of the last couple of decades is always welcome, but all we're really left with is further proof of a government that doesn't get it.

Other fun changes include the ability to make mix discs, but only if we "format shift". We can make a disc of MP3s, but not a disc of full quality audio, from my layman's interpretation of this FAQ:

Can I make a compilation CD by copying tracks from CDs that I own to a blank CD?

Yes, if you copy the tracks in a different format to the original, such as making a compilation CD in MP3 format.

But to give the government credit, they've been realistic in one sense - we don't have to ensure that only legitimate rightsholders are within earshot. At least if they're a friend - if you don't like them, it may still be a copyright violation:

Will I be able to share my music collection with a friend?

No. You will not be able to sell, loan or give away any format-shift copy you make in a different format, but a friend can listen to your music with you.

Technorati Tags: copyright, ip

The cover of this week's Time Magazine asks Can We Trust Google With Our Secrets? It's a question that's been asked more and more loudly over the past year or so, as people begin to realise just how much of our lives we've invested in Google. Google is our gateway into so much of our lives, and we're just starting to realise it's a private company. Searching and browsing the web has become a large part of the everyday existence of most privileged Western societies.

This innocent loooking, disarmingly simple search box of a page, with its terribly colourful logo that breaks every design rule in the book, and its button that shouts "I'm feeling lucky!" as though the web was Vegas, has become the doorway to a place best described lazily by quoting William Gibson. Which I won't. Everybody gets Google. As the web is the internet, google is the web. If this were the essay of the lazy academic who can't help but quote Neuromancer, I'd have a paragraph here about how we no longer "look" for things, we google them. I'd drop in pop culture references, throw off something about Sex and the City, and make you think I'd done some really deep research into the usage habits of net surfers (heck, I'd still say surfers like it was 1997 and this was Hotwired). I'd say the search engine is having a profound effect on our language. Of course, I wouldn't really get the internet at all. I'd be using outdated tools and ways of thinking to try and gain some sort of understanding. I would compare Google to Dewey, as though that were useful. But permit me, if you will, to not be that. Permit me, if you please will, to call bullshit on that.

The cover story of this month's issue of The Monthly is Gideon Haigh's attempt at bringing some highbrow critique to the net, "Information Idol: How Google Is Making Us Stupid". Let me say for starters that I subscribe to The Monthly and have a growing respect for it as it finds its feet -- it seems to be slowly achieving its goal of becoming the only Australian periodical consistently worth reading. It has a right to try things, and to make mistakes such as this one. Haigh, also, seems to be a halfway decent journalist, and what I have heard of his work on James Hardie Industries seems to suggest some damn fine work. His Quarterly Essay "Bad Company" is also a great piece of corporate journalism. However, it has been a long time since I have read an article that so clearly reads like the old world trying to understand the new, and missing the mark so wildly that it makes me seven different kinds of sad.

Relying on Neil Postman's 20 year old diatribe against the idiot box, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Haigh paints a world where results are fast but information is light. Postman's work is a fine and angry sign of its times, McLuhan-light for another soundbite-hungry age, but it is from just that -- another age. In attempting to understand the internet, Haigh turns to a middling work of cultural theory/diatribe from 1986. Back in university, I had my wrists slapped several times for lazily slapping McLuhan onto the 'net (I was reading Wired lots at the time, and they seemed to like it, back before they started to confuse businessmen with philosophers and visionaries) without at least bothering to try and apply his ideas to new media forms without some discipline and critique.

Haigh's mistake is to confuse Google's window into the internet with the internet itself. He seems to attack Google for not providing the most worthwhile information on its front page of any set of results, for linking to flaky Wikipedia articles and racist sites pushing the "ideas" of David Duke under a banner of Martin Luther King. The fourth link for "Adolf Hitler", he complains, is a link to Nazi sympathisers. So what's his point? Is it that the internet contains myriad points of view, far too many of which are propounded by monkeys with typewriters at one hand and switchblades in the other? This is true. Is it that Google is letting the wrong results gain prominence? What are the right results? Are Haigh's correct results the same as China's? I am no Google apologist, but i would really like to know the alternative.

The key to understanding the misunderstanding is in Haigh's overuse of the term "on Google". Information, he implies, lives on Google. As though Google is a publisher. Or perhaps, to take a step back, as though Google is a library. He compares Google to the Dewey Decimal System, as though they were both the same thing. But they are not. Dewey is a taxonomy for published works, a rigid system for the rigid world of library shelves and the book industry. You know a book is somewhere because it's a certain category -- you find knowledge through the wonder of the card file.

When web-searching was young, many people thought taxonomy was still what we needed. Haigh suggests Google's failing is that lack of categorisation, of structure of knowledge. But we've tried that, and we didn't like it. Since the dawn of HTTP, Yahoo! has been providing just this kind of search -- a human-oriented, editor-created taxonomy of the web. To find what you wanted, you would drill down through category after category until you arrived at the place you wanted. In other words, to find what you wanted, you had to know what you were looking for, and where it would fit in somebody else's hierarchy.

When was the last time you looked for something that way on Yahoo? I'm guessing you threw it away the first time you tried Google. Actually, look at Yahoo! these days (if you can find the search amongst all the "content provider" malarkey) and you'll see they've all but abandoned it themselves. It was not the right way to hold information on the net. You cannot order anarchy -- the innovation of the web was that information would not exist or be delivered through the traditional hierarchy of content providers: it exists only as it is interlinked from other documents. It's a web. Sure, we can mumble things about the massive realms of unlinked content on the web (for which Haigh misuses the concept of the dark net, something else entirely), and how Google's failing is in not finding them. I would argue (and perhaps this is a long bow to draw) that content unlinked from anywhere is not really part of the web, it's merely hypertext served over HTTP. It's the best book ever written, gathering dust as unstapled pages of rejected manuscript in a depressed would-be author's loft. Or perhaps it's the Magna Carta, not gathering dust under protective glass and tastefully low lighting in a corner of the British Library - you can get to it, you can look at it, and maybe it's worth looking at, but it's not going to be the first thing you see on your journey.

Technorati Tags: gideon haigh, google, postman, knowledge, search

Just a follow up on the last entry -- why am I wasting my efforts worrying about compensating major labels when they worry not a jot about us? That link is probably only for the very nerdishly inclined, but the plain English translation is that copy-protected CDs, manufactured and sold to you by the good folks at Sony Music, will not only secretly install software on your Windows computer, but hide deliberately obfuscated and potentially dangerous code deep at the root level of your system, with no way of removing it unless you're a righteous Windows hacker. To what end? Well, that's a little unclear... One of those "glad I'm on a Mac" moments, for sure, but considering how little concern the label has for the rights of me, the consumer, well I feel a little obligated to reciprocate. Consider my music buying policy as discussed previously to be amended with the following precondition before purchase: "It's a Sony? The right thing to do would be to steal it".

A real entry soon, he promises (should be writing more than one thing a week now, shouldn't I?), but this week has been nothing if not profoundly crazy. I've got a nearly finished in-depth article on the Enron bankruptcy to post, amongst other things. Promises, promises...

Update: More nastiness from Sony, only now they're screwing the bands as well. And I like My Morning Jacket. How I long for the days when we could all love our bright yellow Sports edition Walkmen without contemplating the evil of its makers. Vive la rock'n'roll libre!

Technorati Tags: drm, sony

After two and a half years of delay, yesterday marked the launch of the iTunes Music Store, ocker edition, complete with all your latest masterpieces from Missy Higgins, Eskimo Joe and Powderfinger treats (but nothing on Sony). I've been looking forward to this for years, but now that it's here, i find myself completely underwhelmed.

One of the advantages in living in a backwater country such as this one is that we get to watch genuine cultural shifts from afar and decide whether they're really for us before we jump on the bandwagon. As an Australian Mac user, I'd pretty much given up on the world of legitimate digital downloading, and have made something of a fun hobby of roasting recording industry representatives who come on to my radio show to complain about piracy and parrot about victories over insignificant has beens like Kazaa. If the music industry really thought they'd made a dent in illegal downloading by killing off Kazaa in 2005, I guess they know their own industry even less than I thought. While Sony/BMG were holding back the launch of the iTMS because they wanted a much higher price per track, they continued to lose more potential sales (potential, not actual) to the Soulseeks and Bittorrents of the world. And we Australians adapted to a new way of experiencing and buying music. Now we have most of the majors and a healthy smattering of the larger indies (including Inertia and Shock) available a click and a credit card swipe away in iTunes, I wonder how things will change.

Perhaps I should explain how I currently buy music. Hosting a three hour radio show (and more) every week, I have to keep pressure on myself to at least vaguely keep up with what's coming out. This usually means subjecting myself to bitchy snobbishness and elitism of the drably predictable internet journalism type, and slightly better written but even more meandering fan writing. Lately I've also fallen under the spell of last.fm (see the top 10 in my sidebar over there) and its magical methods of deciphering things I'd probably like, not based on what's cool, but based on what other people are actually listening to that have similar tastes to mine. When something strikes me as interesting, I rummage around on illegal download sites until I find it (usually takes no more than five minutes), and hit download. Once the music's in my iTunes library (with a decent bittorrent download, this'll take no longer than half an hour), it ends up in a "recently added" playlist. Often I'll also find legit free downloads from places like Salon.com, Better Propaganda or Epitonic.

From there, it becomes a game of Survivor, where killer choruses duke it out to win the immunity bracelet (fetching on both rock gods and twee indie goddesses alike). If something gets played more than a few times -- that is to say, if I think I might want it to be a proper part of my musical life, it goes on a "to buy" list. I then vaguely attempt to remember that list next time I'm in a music store or rummaging through InSound. One could argue that if it doesn't get bought, I should delete it from my hard drive, but I don't -- often things can show up on a shuffle play months later and surprise me, forcing me into a purchase I could never have expected. Usually by the time I play something on the radio, I've bought it. And hopefully also encourage other people to buy it -- many obscurities unearthed in this way have resulted in countless radio station phone calls wondering how to get hold of what I'm playing.

The end result of this is that I buy more music than I ever did before I knew how to run a search in Soulseek. The music I buy is more diverse and exciting, and I find sounds I may never have discovered before, save in the eloquent descriptions of half decent music journalists. And I'm not alone there. While I have many friends that simply never buy music any more, I have just as many that spend more than they ever have before, despite having easy access to abundant free tunes. It's not like giving us libraries killed off the publishing industry, is it? (I never did see the Publishing Industry Association of America's campaign against photocopiers, did you?).

Now, I'm old fashioned and still find it hard to let go of the idea that music should come with a tangible physical object to hold on to when I buy it. I run a graphic design company that's worked on artwork for what must be closed to 100 releases by local and international artists. I still buy vinyl sometimes just for the feel of the sleeve. I know I'm a dying breed, but a little jpeg in the corner of the iTunes window just isn't the same as real cover art. But, in the Baudrillardian sense of things, the disc was no more accurate a representation of the music than a digital file is, so the postmodernist in me can accept defeat without feeling any less of a purist.

The Australian's article on the iTMS says that the files are of a quality "equal to or better than" CD. Aside from being blatantly false, this is a little sinister. Even to my non-audiophile ears, the lack of range in a 128kb AAC file is obvious. It's certainly better than an equivalent MP3, but it's not great. What the geniuses at Apple know better than I do is that their files aren't perfect, they're good enough. While the industry boffins have been squirreling away for years trying to improve on the CD with technologies like SACD (six channels!) or DVD Audio, us consumers out here in the real world have been busy not caring. I can say that the moments when I've put on Transformer or Marquis Moon and thought they would sound much better with a full 5.1 digital mix are, well, few and far between. Most people just want the music. Personally, I wish the iTMS files were of a better quality, and I also wish they weren't rights protected, but the vast majority of the population aren't going to care a jot.

I actually made my first ever completely digital purchase two days before the launch of the iTMS. I'd finally accepted that there were some songs I only ever listen to on my laptop, and on discovering the awesome bleep.com, online outlet for Warp Records and friends, my excitement at finding a digital download site that treated the purchaser like a customer they were happy to have, rather than making out like they were begrudgingly dealing crack to street urchins off to onsell it to children, meant I bought the new Boards of Canada for about 16 dollars Australian. Bleep sell their music as entirely unprotected MP3s, produced from the masters with the best possible encoder settings (the exact same ones I use when ripping music myself, the nerdarific "lame" encoder at its standard preset). The purchase was extremely smooth and the tracks came with a free screensaver and a couple of wallpapers, which was a nice touch to make up for the lack of tangibles. I wouldn't do this for every album, but given that the process was even easier than an illegal download, I saw something of the future for the music industry in there somewhere. How's this for a crazy transaction: I give you money, you give me music, we both go on about our lives. The album, incidentally, is amazing.

Back in iTunes world, I must authorize any individual computer I wish to play the tracks on, which involves a process of sending keys back and forth to an Apple server. Sure, I can burn tracks for my friends same as ever, but any individual playlist can only be burned seven times. I can't import the music into other programs if I wanted to, say, create a little video cutup over some found footage, purely for fun. That would be illegal, see. Compared to Bleep (a site run by and for several independent record labels who know how important it is to embrace the new digital age of music properly), iTunes provides me with files loaded with restrictions at a lesser quality. Now that I've embraced the digital download thing, I've been poking about and noting that many of my most favourite labels are beginning to offer high quality unrestricted MP3 purchase of their tracks. It's the majors that still seem scared.

I thought I would be excited to finally have the iTunes store available to me, but it's here now, and I'm struggling to find much I'm willing to spend money on with that quality and those restrictions. To test the waters, I bought the first album by The Hold Steady, and admittedly the process is super smooth and easy. But it just doesn't feel like my music (_our point exactly!_, cries the recording industry). So now what I'll have to do when I want to buy music online is first rummage around and see if the music is available somewhere that has respect for me, and if not, I'll think about buying it at iTunes. Both of those options still come after CD in the list of preferences, of course (and let's not even get into the fact that in Australia, it's still technically illegal to rip your own CDs into your computer -- that's a dumb copyright issue for another day).

What are the morals if i pay for a protected version of an album from the iTMS and then either strip the protection or download some much higher quality MP3s from a high quality download site? Nobody's missed out on royalties and no music or artists have been killed. I've done the right thing by the artist, and have in my possession music that's no more likely to be pirated further than if I had bought an (equally unprotected) CD. I can keep the tracks on my laptop, work computer and loft server thingy and play them on any portable device I like that's not my ipod (which stopped working about six months ago). Of course, it's violating several laws and license agreements -- this is why the unrestricted nature of sites like Bleep is so refreshing. I couldn't really find much of anything on the iTunes store that I would be willing to buy in its restricted form.

Is the music industry in decline? Another topic, for another day. Whenever I walk into JB Hi-Fi, the queues to the till are massive, regardless of the time of day. The people lining up to buy music look exactly like the people that are supposed to be downloading it. The indie stores might be doing it harder, but I would argue that that is more due to the relaxation of parallel importation laws, and the ability of the big chains such as JB to get ridiculous bulk discounts and onsell at miniscule profit per unit. The teen-focussed singles market may be licking its wounds (and hey, did anybody actually buy Hey Ya?), but up here in grown up world where none of us would be buying singles anyway, the only real difference I can see is that independents find it much easier to compete on an even footing with the majors, and it's the majors that are hurting like hell.

I'd like to get a real sense of what the next few years are going to be like in the Australian music industry. I'm a tech savvy geek with the ability to find and purchase unrestricted music, legally or illegally. I know how to manage playlists and have been nurturing a digital music collection for years. I get a lot of music for free anyway (as do most of the people in the industry that harp on about the fact that you should be paying -- promo discs are almost as prevalent as cocaine in the business). I'm also a hopeless music obsessive. I know I'm not the target market for the iTunes store. How do you buy/steal/obtain your music? Do you care even a tiny bit about copy restrictions and low bitrates? Do you buy things you've already downloaded? Does the iTunes store matter to you at all? Or will you never stop being the shy shuffling kid who really really hopes that the cute girl at the record store will comment with approval and a little bit of flirtation on your purchase of the latest Sufjan Stevens on import?

My latest download and soon to be purchase is the new Arab Strap album, The Last Romance. Just who the fuck let Aidan Moffat grow up? My favourite misanthrope, while still drunk and in hate with the world, seems desperately ready to fall in love, and he's brought a horn section. With lyrics like "there's no better journey than me on my way to you" and "not everything must end", this is a million miles away from the band they used to be, but all the better and more mature for it. The epic final track, "There Is No Ending", is like a fucked up Glaswegian "When I'm 64", with pills. For full effect, best accompanied by a healthy pouring of cheap blended whisky and a lifetime of regret.

Technorati Tags: music, itunes