We could communicate
by Bill Stilwell. License:

Think about it.

On YouTube there’s a still-frame video posting of a song called “The Device Has Been Modified” by Victims Of Science. It’s a collection of samples from the game Portal, pitch-shifted for musical appropriateness, placed over a slick synth beat. The video description laments the practical nonexistence of the artist.

*Please note, this song ISN’T made by me (or anyone that claims to on YT), it’s by Victims of Science, who don’t seem to have a website.. if you find one, please let me know*

A song inspired by Portal using various sounds from GLaDOS.

The song is so absolutely hardcore, it’s difficult for me to contain myself.

[audio:thedevicehasbeenmodified.mp3]

I’ve wrought my Google Fu, and the oldest source I can come up with is a blog post by Jonathan Coulton dated October 23, 2007. The YouTube video linked to above was posted October 24, 2007, which says to me that the song couldn’t have hit the internet much earlier than the Coulton post.

I’ve looked up the track on Last.fm and the oldest wall shout is also dated October 24, 2007. I checked for diggs, and the oldest I found was posted 54 days ago, which, according to my calculations, means November 7, 2007.

I must find this artist so that I can PayPal him my life savings. And then give him something in addition to that 16MB 3dfx Voodoo3 card I never threw away. I’ve already listened to this song way more than is healthy.

OK, yeah, and I listened to a German version of “Silent Night” by Manowar. That’s definitely not healthy and I’m already seeking a therapist for help.

[audio:manowar-stille_nacht]

Download the MP3s directly here:

• Victims Of Science – The Device Has Been Modified
• Manowar – Stille Nacht

Über props to J for telling me about this. (I’m talking about the Portal song, not the Manowar one. Don’t want to shame him or anything.)

Check out this particular former pet, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, exhorting his fans to download his new album illegally.

Has anyone seen the price come down? OK, well, you know what that means: Steal it! Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing. Because one way or another these motherfuckers will get it through their head that they’re ripping people off and that’s not right.

Powerful words from such a well established musician. But it gets better.

Very recently 50 Cent gave an interview and offered a very sensible, realist perspective on the current situation of digital piracy.

“The advances in technology impacts everyone, and we all must adapt. Most of all hip-hop, a style of music dependent upon a youthful audience. This market consists of individuals embracing innovations faster than the fans of classical and jazz music.”“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”

[...]

“A young fan may be just as devout and dedicated no matter if he bought it or stole it.”

[...]

“The concerts are crowded and the industry must understand that they have to manage all the 360 degrees around an artist. They, (the industry), have to maximize their income from concerts and merchandise. It is the only way they can get their marketing money back.”

This guy gets it. Now, before I go too crazy, I should mention that the interview was originally conducted in Norwegian, and was then translated for the write-up on TorrentFreak. The validity of the translation should be questioned, as a site like TorrentFreak would have a lot of reason for putting words in 50 Cent’s mouth. Although I’ve seen the TF article linked all over Technorati, I haven’t yet seen a separate translation done.

I have two stories about my experience with such sentiments by artists, if you’ll bear with me.

Anecdote The First

In March of 2007, I saw Dark Tranquillity live in Philadelphia. It was a damn good show, and they were touring for their newest album, Fiction. They came out on stage and the keyboardist opened up with a slick synth riff that has characterized the latter half of the band’s discography. The crowd erupted in cheers even before the heavy guitars came in. We all knew the song, Terminus (Where Death Is Most Alive), even though the CD hadn’t been released yet.

After the band finished the song, the vocalist, Mike Stanne asked, “Seems like you guys have heard that one before. How many of you knew it?” The whole venue went nuts. “Ahhhh, you damn pirates!” Stanne said, then laughed and introduced the next track.

When Stanne started to sing Terminus, and the crowd was with him on every word, he honestly looked surprised on stage. But there was not a hint of anger or resentment. I honestly believe that amazement gave way to feeling flattered, although I unfortunately didn’t have a chance to meet the band and ask him personally whether I understood his reaction correctly. But the obvious fact is that the majority of the fans there that night had downloaded illegal advanced copies of the album from torrent sites, in anticipation of the band playing new material at the show.

Like 80% of the fans there that night, I bought a Dark Tranquillity t-shirt for $20 to prove I’d seen them live. I wear it way more often than is healthy.

Now, Dark Tranquillity are in a somewhat unique position in the industry, given that their rhythm guitarist (and former lyricist for both Dark Tranquillity and early In Flames) Niklas Sundin is a graphic artist, and thus designs the band’s merchandise himself. This means the label doesn’t appropriate money from the band’s revenue to pay for merch. It’s self-funded and the profit margin for them is huge. Sundin has designed almost 150 album covers for various metal bands, and has released a book of his sketches that sound incredibly well among fans of Dark Tranquillity.

It’s entirely possible that onstage, Stanne was just biting the bullet and smiling at his executioners. Maybe he hates his fans for downloading that album early. But maybe, just maybe, he loves them for it. And Dark Tranquillity seems to be doing just fine, seeing as they’re still on tour for the Fiction album.

Anecdote The Second

At that same show in Philadelphia, March 24, 2007, I also had the chance to see Into Eternity live for the third time. Fortunately, I was even able to catch some of the band up in the venue’s bar later that night, and I tried my best not to giggle with joy.

I told the band’s lead guitarist and songwriter, Tim Roth, how awesome I thought it was that he was posting step-by-step instruction videos on YouTube for how to play his songs. His riffs are extremely intricate, and most of the time blazing fast, so slowing them down and piecing them together is really necessary for most people trying to learn the play along with the CD. Here’s an example of what I mean.

“That’s just stupid. Why would you go after your best fans? The last people I would want to alienate are the guys listening to my songs again and again, trying to piece together how I played a riff. Those are the guys that love the music, you know? Everybody wishes they could play this stuff, and you see them at the shows, hypnotized by the fretboard, they don’t even headbang most of the time.

“People writing out tabs to our music doesn’t hurt the band. It sure as hell isn’t stealing. It helps everybody, like the labels should support it, because it keeps the music alive.”

That resonated with me. More than anything, I came away from my conversation with Roth believing that was a passionate musician. He didn’t seem to care too much about the legal issues or want to talk about band income. He just wanted to get up on stage and shred, then cross state lines, hop an ocean or two, and do it some more. Yes, Into Eternity are a young band.

The Point

Now we come to the point of this whole post. Amazon has recently partnered with a new and wonderfully bizarre record label called Sellaband. Sellaband is different in that it tries to eschew a lot of the presence of a middleman and empowers the fans of the music to more directly influence the fate of the band.

Unsigned bands upload their music, and if fans like it, they can buy a stake in the profits of any future album sales for $10 (£4.90).

Once a $50,000 (£24,500) threshold is reached, Sellaband helps the band produce an album. A fan can buy any number of $10 investments, each of which equates to a one five thousandth stake.

When the album is made, the backers each receive a copy, which they can either keep or sell at a 10 per cent profit on their personal Sellaband page. They also receive a cut of future sales on the Sellaband or other sites, as well as of any advertising revenue when the song is streamed.

This is quite a novel idea, but I have concerns with how well it’ll manage quality. I think there will be a lot of people who don’t give a damn about the artists, and just invest in those they think will sell well. That doesn’t sound like it’s going to solve the problem of most pop music in the country being utter dreck.

Also, the focus on “making a profit” seems a bit inappropriate, especially for fans of music that can only be considered marginally popular. It’s thoroughly unrealistic that many people will ever see income from this plan. What I do like about this is that the system permits and even encourages fans to pay more money than the standard cost of a CD. This is appropriate, especially for niche music. If the band Arsis would put a PayPal link on their site, I would give them $100 easily. I’ve already bought every CD they’ve made and attended several concerts just to see them. I’ll probably rebuy their discography, because I can’t help it. They’re that good.

I think it’s time this industry stopped focusing on forcing people to pay and started concentrating on making them want to pay. I think this Amazon and Sellaband deal is a step in that direction.

Just last week, a U.S. federal judge ruled that the court could not demand that a man accused of transporting child pornography across state lines divulge the passphrase for his encrypted hard drive.

Especially if this ruling is appealed, U.S. v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach. (A U.S. Justice Department attorney wrote an article in 1996, for instance, titled “Compelled Production of Plaintext and Keys.”)

This debate has been one of analogy and metaphor. Prosecutors tend to view PGP passphrases as akin to someone possessing a key to a safe filled with incriminating documents. That person can, in general, be legally compelled to hand over the key. Other examples include the U.S. Supreme Court saying that defendants can be forced to provide fingerprints, blood samples, or voice recordings.

This is a fascinating legal issue to me, and is a crucial watershed at a time when privacy is being ripped limb from limb in America. If this case stands on appeal, it will be a phenomenal step forward for encryption in the public sphere. I like to think that the ruling being upheld on appeal would generate a lot of press coverage, which might lead to increased public interest in personal encryption schemes, whether for hard drives or internet communication.

In discussing this miraculous (though not yet definite) precedent with some friends here, one girl I spoke with acted very confused, and said, “But what if he was doing something bad? Then the police couldn’t read his files and send him to jail.” She was American.

In ernst, there will be a lot of people using this technology to hide their involvement in illegal activities. But there will also be people using encryption to hide their innocent yet sensitive data from theft and exploitation. If the encryption is sophisticated enough, it should stand up to datamining attempts at Langley. It should mask the content of communication well enough to foster what is typically considered unsavory political discussions.

It’s difficult for me to explain how very, very important I find it that communication remain discrete and private while the profusion of nodes of communication multiplies. Technologically it’s quite feasible, but unfortunately the cultural ingredients are not yet present in much of the world, most likely because most people simply don’t understand the systems they interact with every day.

But there are parties hard at work to prevent the widespread adoption of content-masking encryption schemes. Who they are isn’t immediately obvious, but it’s not hard to infer if you pay attention to major players in the tech industry. For instance, Wired recently covered a very compelling oddity in the new Dual_EC_DRBG encryption standard, which was published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (130-page PDF here).

In an informal presentation at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described a backdoor.

This is how it works: There are a bunch of constants — fixed numbers — in the standard used to define the algorithm’s elliptic curve. These constants are listed in Appendix A of the NIST publication, but nowhere is it explained where they came from.

What Shumow and Ferguson showed is that these numbers have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can predict the output of the random-number generator after collecting just 32 bytes of its output. To put that in real terms, you only need to monitor one TLS internet encryption connection in order to crack the security of that protocol. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG.

Not to be pedantic, but this should scare you. The U.S. government is very probably engineering and propagating faulty encryption standards. One might say that this in itself isn’t particularly heinous, given that the flaw has been exposed, and should therefore never enjoy substantial implementation. Cue the toolbags over at Microsoft, who list among the security updates for Vista Service Pack 1 the same nasty Dual EC standard.

Strengthens the cryptography platform with a redesigned random number generator, which leverages the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), when present, for entropy and complies with the latest standards. The redesigned RNG uses the AES-based pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) from NIST Special Publication 800-90 by default. The Dual Elliptical Curve (Dual EC) PRNG from SP 800-90 is also available for customers who prefer to use it.

Oh dear. This news comes a year and a half after a Microsoft cryptographer swore no such move would ever be made.

“The suggestion is that we are working with governments to create a back door so that they can always access BitLocker-encrypted data,” Niels Ferguson, a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft, wrote Thursday on a corporate blog. “Over my dead body,” he wrote in his post titled “Back-door nonsense.”

Notice anything funny? That March 2006 quote is by Niels Ferguson, the same cryptographer who presented on the flaws of Dual_EC_DRBG at the CRYPTO 2007 conference. And yet Microsoft is still going ahead with the implementation of this broken algorithm, despite the objections of cryptographers around the world and its own employees.

When I noticed Ferguson cropping up on both sides of the playing field, I tried to do a little more research on him. For some reason his homepage is redirecting to a spam pharmaceuticals page. Searching on the Microsoft Developer Network blog doesn’t seem to yield any posts by Ferguson more recent than September 2006, but the search functionality is horrendous and frustrating, so I may have missed something.

I don’t know what to make of this yet, but I’m interesting in learning more about Ferguson. I know he’s collaborated heavily with eminent cryptographer Bruce Schneier, so I’ll have to look up some of their papers together. In the meantime, I’m incredibly suspicious, and I’m going to start locking up my data with more trusted, peer-reviewed encryption techniques. I highly recommend you do the same.

So super, Flickr is more popular than Jesus. On some levels it’s absolutely awesome to be a part of the biggest thing going on, but obviously on other levels, it sucks. The coolest stuff always seems to be going on in the fringe. The mainstream doesn’t innovate.

I listen to metal, I use Linux, I still game occasionally. While all of those things are definitely climbing in popularity, they’re still weird, geeky things to like. Definitely not “cool” yet. Is Flickr cool?

I googled “is flickr cool?” and got only one page back, entitled “Flickr is fun.” Interesting. This research certainly doesn’t count much on its own, so I undertook to bolster the validity of it by running a Google Fight between “flickr rocks” and “flickr sucks”. Results were encouraging.

Now, Flickr being huge definitely affords some advantages. It’s absolutely the largest image repository on the web, so it’s usually tapped as a source for imaging data. For example, I often search Flickr tags when looking for a picture of a specific type of object. For certain things, it can be much more helpful than Google Image Search, as the tags are applied by humans. Check out this awesome project that mines and aggregates images from Flickr.

Networks all over the place are growing much faster than comfort dictates, as in the case of Facebook partnering with Microsoft and rolling out a new intrusive ad system, which kind of gives users the middle finger. And of course people are still talking about Google surreptitiously taking a stab at world domination.

Basically I’m trying to strike a balance between maintaining diversity and achieving critical for a userbase. I think that Ubuntu has done a wonderful job in rallying and organizing support for a Linux distribution, but I can’t help but wonder whether such success is harming the open source movement by catalysing too much homogenization. It’s certainly possible that Ubuntu is recruiting new users to Linux, rather than leeching them off of other, existing distributions, especially given Ubuntu’s n00b-friendly vibe.

It’s difficult for me to imagine what will happen after the great exoduses from the major data repositories on the internet. As it stands, places like Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and Last.fm would wither and die without round-the-clock content submissions from eager users. Once those users are gone, though, all the data they already submitted will still be there, unlooked at.

What will become of that data? It’s unlikely that it will simply be handed away to academic institutions to be pored over. Since a good deal of the interactions occur behind password authentication, it’s inaccessible to projects like The Internet Archive. I think it’s actually quite likely that it will just get deleted, as the costs for maintaining it will become too high, once the userbase is lost. No users, no advertising.

I guess what I’m waiting for is a flexible platform for social networking that is domain independent. I should be able to post my photos on my personal blog, yet still tag them with Last.fm event numbers and have them show up in group pools on Flickr. I envision it rather similar to how WordPress works: I download the open source software, upload it to my personal server space and configure it, then I’m part of the global WordPress network, without ever needing to interact with the WordPress site again.

Well, there’s always tomorrow.

Major piracy operations will still be targeted, but tracking individuals simply isn’t worthwhile. A big reason for this, which the official interviewed admits, is that it’s just too damn hard to track individuals on the internet. Of course, this guy obviously isn’t a government official in the U.S. or UK.

Torrent Freak has coverage of the news, and if you speak French, take a crack at the original interview.

I guess this is just one more reason for me to study in Canada, hm?

DIMMU BORGIR Accuses German Rapper Of ‘Stealing’ Band’s Music 

Now that’s golden. The article even has embedded YouTube videos, so you can “decide for yourself” whether the infringement accusation has merit.

And since the headline itself isn’t enough material for a blogpost, I leave you with this:

In the meantime, I wanted to throw out an article in the New York Times about students at Brown University getting hit with filesharing lawsuits by the RIAA. It has two great quotes in it. The first is by a Brown student accused of infringing copyright by filesharing:

“People wonder why college students aren’t rallying more around the Iraq war,” Mr. McCune said. “If there were a draft, we probably would be. Students are so quick to fight for this cause because we’re the ones bearing the burden.”

That’s sociologically pretty important, I should think. It’s a very functional thing: hurt students, piss off students. If you piss off the ones from well-educated, wealthy families, you’re going to have to put up with whatever resistance comes of it. I assume the RIAA was thinking that filing suit against rich kids would lead to faster and higher settlements, improving their bottom line on this whole litigation scare tactic they’ve been running for the past 5 or 10 years. It might not be as simple as that, though, as the next quote illustrates:

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, said the recording industry lawsuits were not “scaring students away from file-sharing, but scaring them into political consciousness.” Last year, Mr. Doctorow was an adviser to the Students for Free Culture chapter at the University of Southern California while teaching a course on the history of copyright law.

Read more

This is fact.

I must further point out that this article in itself is rather detrimental to the movement of Free Culture as popularized by Lessig, as have been many posts I’ve made myself. The FreeCulture.org community recently voted to change its tagline to “Students for Free Culture,” and I can’t say that I support this decision. My objections are best summed up by Crosbie Fitch’s post on FreeCulture.org’s listserv last week:

I would have thought “Artists for Free Culture” would have been better.

Or even “Free Citizens for Free Culture”

I would suspect that the popular conception of a student is a passive
receptacles for knowledge, only expected to start doing anything
significantly productive/creative until after they’ve ceased being a
student.

The last thing a passive receptacle needs is the freedom to publish copies
or derivatives. People will assume students are just after broader
educational exemptions for using the library photocopier.

So ‘Students for Free Culture’ comes across as if it was “Couch Potatoes for
Free Culture”.

At worst “Students can’t afford much, so we should get the world’s culture
free of charge. Thanks.”

The best light it can be put in is “Typically militant students having the
luxury of being able to agitate against cultural oppression of the masses”

What’s so special about a student?

Emphasis mine, of course. So was the RIAA wise to pick Brown students for lawsuits, or not? They might get settlements, sure, but will that pay off in the end? I honestly think that pissing off well-educated rich kids–and their families–isn’t the best way to maintain a solid revenue stream, but what do I know about business?