Radiohead’s latest video is certainly gaining a lot of attention, purely because of the fact that it was shot without any cameras.  The end result is amazing. As you can see …

But having an engineering background I found the short video clip about how the video was made, just as intriguing…

The BPI (formerly British Phonographic Industry)  along with Virgin Media have started getting tough with people they believe are downloading illegally.  Virgin Media according to BBC News have sent out 800 letters to people they believe are illegally downloading warning them that they may face being disconnected and possibly legal action.  This is probably a step up on the BPI’s RIAA like campaign and probably to help apply pressure with the negotiations with ISPs about dealing with illegal downloading of music (previous blog here). The downloading information has been provided by the BPI to Virgin Media according the BPI’s new page (here) – interesting given that the similar approach by the RIAA is coming under increasing legal questioning in the US. 

The chief executive of the BPI told the BBC that the BPI in very bullish terms that if necessary the BPI will take the ISPs to court and win, including ISPs who will not participate in their actions such as Carphone Warehouse. This is also very reminiscent of the RIAA’s early campaign.  It seems to me that the BPI have not looked at the way the US litigation for the RIAA is going which has resulted in both counter cases, a lot of embarrassing revelations about how the cases have been built.  Not to mention that a number of US record executives and artists have been publicly disagreeing with the RIAA.

Interviews with a few of those affected so far suggests that Virgin Media may stand to lose subscribers as the perceived invasion of digital privacy talks hold, plus the ISP dictating how people can use the service that they’re paying for.

 Fergal Sharkey (yes the Fergal Sharkey of the Undertones and singer of Teenage Kicks) has blogged on the Guardian website about recent research to try and identify how the illegal music download issue maybe resolved,  The article can be seen ay Illegal downloads – guardian.co.uk.

According to Digital Music News, MediaDefender an anti-piracy company has used an illegal means to try an shutdown what is a legitimate online media selling service Revision3.  Revision3 legally uses bit torrent technologies and as a result of a security hole had servers tricked into acting as a tracker for some illegal content, setup up by MediaDefender by exploiting a security hole according to Revision3.  When Revision3 spotted the abuse and shutout MediaDefender it appears to have triggered a denial of service attack (achieved by saturating a web server with too many requests for content).  So Revision3’s actions which were correctly taken to prevent their servers from being exploited and used for illegal copying (also the the job of MediaDefender) resulted in the service attack. Reviosn3 has a good description of what the DOS attack is like.

Given MediaDefender’s failure to atleast talk with Revision3 let alone use correct legal channels, has been referred the matter to the FBI as it breaks 12 different statutes including Computer Fraud and Misuse act.  Revision3’s news article on the whole event is fascinating insight into how blasé MediaDefender about its actions.  Since the attack, MediaDefender have said they’ve updated their policies to first check to see if the server they’re looking at is associated to a legitimate business. Hey, shouldn’t you have been doing that anyway?  As Revision3 had said, what if someone had exploited an loophole in security for an emergency service to host a bit torrent tracker which had then been attacked by MediaDefender?

Interestingly most of the information describing what has gone on has come from Revision3, and MediaDefender’s website is particularly quiet on these events.

Peter Gabriel is a busy man, quietly helping music in the world of technology, with his work with OD2 (On Demand 2), We7 and now Bowers & Wilkins music club.  Bowers & Wilkins are a audiophile speaker manufacturer and wither Peter have indicated that sharing music using MP3s results in a loss of quality.  So they have set up a music club through which you can buy high quality music recordings (in the Apple’s loss less audio file format as used in the recording studio) recorded at Peter’s state of the art Real World recording studios.  Although not explicitly stated, the indications are from the website’s information is that the music is DRM free. The club costs £33.95 per year for which you get a free album to download  every month.  You don’t get to choose the artist or album, but initial indications that the artists involved so far are both interesting and diverse in styles so within a year you should get to hear a couple of albums that will appeal to your musical palate, unless you’re exclusively a Spice Girls and Sugababes fan. So far albums have been recorded with blues artist Little Axe (aka Skip MacDonald), Grindhouse and Gwyneth Herbert.