AOL Get Careless with Information Privacy

10 Thursday Aug 2006

With all fuss a few months ago about releasing search results to the US Federal Government and privacy, AOL have managed to go one step further and release three months of search data onto the net. It turns out that the information being held contravenes both US legislation as well as the their own privacy policy.

The EFF have suggested that some organisations are treating such personal information with very casual regard. Although it may seem fairly minor, as the EFF have pointed out the impact could be personally very harmful – for example if you’ve been using your AOL account to research a serious illness that you’ve been diagnosed with and its information that you don’t want people to know about.

I have doubts about how hard AOL will be treated by federal organisations on this breach, so it may fall to a well presented class action from AOL users (or former users) to make it clear that personal data should be treated with the utmost respect and security.

Having looked at the AOL site to see what they say about the situation – AOL UK at least make no reference to what has happened in their news pages – but still carry news about Id theft in the UK.

Music on the Net – Legislation Moves On

08 Tuesday Aug 2006

Posted by mp3monster in Music, Technology

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Last Friday () saw French legislation requiring music download stores to provide interoperability unless the artists affected approve the absence of interoperability. French legislature has fudged the law giving Apple (and others) this opt out. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Danish and Scandinavian countries are also addressing the same issue I’d say that Apple will have it easy. As by far the largest download service Apple wouldn’t be difficult to pressure artists into the sign off so meaning that Apple have a small administrative overhead. But maybe the risk of losing several more countries in the EU might force Apple to being do more than just a paper exercise.

At the other end of the spectrum, a coalition of the major record companies have started proceedings against another P2P network – this time Limewire. Given that Kazaa has finally completed its roll over with $100M payout, I can not see Limewire holding out very long.

Interestingly, I wonder how much of the $100M that Kazaa have coughed up will find its way into the pockets of artists – given that the money is payment for lost revenue, which means artists royalties? Not to mention how the money will be divided amongst the artists, if that actually happens.

Net and the Law

01 Tuesday Aug 2006

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

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As the internet is in the eyes of the legal world is a new thing (relatively speaking, although even for the non-techie people it is rapidly becoming part of normal life and taken for granted), the legal position of actions; particularly those that cross traditional frontiers are having legal presidents established and laws past. It can make things a little bit of a minefield for people; even for people who just browse – by visiting certain sites (even accidentally) could end up having you labelled as a potential terroist; what if I have a blog and express my opinions about a company which they don’t like? Is downloading from AllOfMP3.com legal or not (AllOfMP3 claim to be paying royalties in the US)? Why is that cd-wow has had to setup UK operations to sell into the UK, but BangCD does not?

To understand the legal implications of these things several organisations and associated websites have come about. Perhaps the most famous of these is the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Although the EFF provides some guidelines and battle to protect electronic rights, it is at the end of the day an american organisation and therefore looking at American law. for those of us in the UK, we’re probably best looking to Internet Rights organisation http://www.internetrights.org.uk/.

These organisations certainly make it easier to understand how the law effects us web users than trying to follow the establishement of legal presidents, not to mention trying to read papers as they’re read and pass into law.

MSN and other Spaces

27 Thursday Jul 2006

Posted by mp3monster in Technology

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In the last few days I’ve upgraded my MSN Messenger to the new MSN Live Messenger primarily as it finally offers the first step in the right direction by being able to communicate with Yahoo messenger users plus with the absorbing of the FolderShare technology that I used in the past until the service became a pay for only option.

The look & feel and how some of the previous instant messenger functions don’t appear to as well realised with the new MSN Messenger. For example the colours used to indicator when someone is on or off line aren’t as distinctly different, sa rather recognising someone’s status with a glance you have to look with a little more care – which in my opinion is a step backward.

With the new MSN Live push has been a further promotion of MSNSpaces, the Microsoft alternative to MySpace. I have been intrigued by the attraction of MySpace and MSNSpaces has had to people. To be honest, I struggle to see what they offer, beyond features that are already available on the net – bulletin boards exist; blogs do; and online photo albums as well. Having had a quick tinker with MySpace and now MSNSpaces (http://mp3monster.spaces.msn.com/). I can’t say that they offer these features in a manner that beat the best solutions (like WordPress and Flickr). So what is the attraction, simply that they’re all under one virtual roof? The fact that they have drawn a reasonable number of people there already?

If this is the attraction, then whoever integrates the best offerings combined with a good market reach stands an exceptional chance of seizing a very large slice of the market.

Why do I have an MSN Space? Well to be honest, because a friend was setting up a space and in replying to the friendship request Microsoft get you to create a your own address. Content wise it only exists to point people back to this website. I have the ability to work the best of breed solutions together like WordPress and Flickr.

What ever the outcome my current MSNSpace is here, but everything will remain with the website.

The Producers DVD & The Digital Home

20 Thursday Jul 2006

Posted by mp3monster in Technology

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If you haven’t seen it yet – then the new take of Mel Brook’s The Producers with Matthew Broderick & Nathan Lane is very much worthy of a viewing, so much so in my opinion that we’ve purchased the DVD. Bully for you, I hear you cry. Well, being a techie I’ve got the house setup to handle streamed media – including video, so now rather than trawling through our DVDs to choose something to watch; we simply flick the TV over to the media device and then navigate through our online collection. The DVDs themselves get stored away, keeping the place nice and clutter free. To store the DVDs, I convert the film to the popular DIVX format which gives me a nice compression of 50%-75% without seriously compromising quality.

Now the point is, the studio has so kindly put some form of copy protection on the disk so I can not do the conversion, so much for the networked home media solution if they keep that up. So what can I do? Well ironically, I can either keep the DVD laying around – not desirable got too many to easily store anyway; or I can turn to the one thing the media moguls love to tell us is both illegal and the source of inferior versions – P2P, and hey thirty seconds and I’ve found someone who is sharing a DIVX conversion of the DVD film. So what has been gained by the effort in figuring out how to stop me converting a DVD to meet my home media requirements, aside from from really annoying me?

The silly thing is, if I download the converted form of the DVD then the studio will scream thats another lost sale. I was going to say that of course this is rubbish in this case, but it occured to me that if you’re looking to do the same thing you may well not bother buying the DVD – not because I’ve said you can find downloads available on the net, but because you like me want to show the film within in your streaming media environment and wont bother buying it now given that you can’t load it into your media system! Not the intention that the film studio or distributors wanted to achieve.

Incidentally, Sony who have a huge investment in both music and film have announced such a home media streaming device – and I bet you that it wont help you transition from their DRM/protected content to their media network.

Flickr missing an opportunity?

14 Friday Jul 2006

Posted by mp3monster in Photography, Technology

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Best start with my cards out on the table – I’m a big fan of Flickr, no doubt about it. I love the fact that they’ve provided APIs and people are creating lots of cool extras like screen savers etc etc

But I think Flickr maybe missing a great opportunity. Let me first give some background. I enjoy photography, and could reasonably labelled as an amateur photographer rather than just a snapper. Some of the photos I’ve taken friends have blogged about (Richard’s Blog) and one particular friend has been encoruaging me to perhaps get my photos used. For me, that means allowing my photos to be used is a stock photo library (these are libraries where photos for commercial calendars etc are purchased). So started looking around a bit at services where I could submit photos for use in a stock library.

I have to admit I was a little shocked. Some libraries charge a considerable amount (£60+ or ~$100 per year) for holding your photos which may or may not be picked up and used, and or a large chunk (around the 60% mark)of any payment you might get. I’ve also seen criteria for a minimum number of photos, and if you’re starting out in this area you’re probably not going to have enough photos!

So here we are with Flickr – which if you hadn’t noticed allows you specify a Creative Commons license on your photos (i.e. free to use as long as you don’t modify) – so by default you still own copyright. With a means by which you can track down photos on a theme, you have several elements of what it would take to provide a stock library (i.e. indicate licensing, find photos by type, see the photos and download them). From here surely all they need to do is to allow people looking photos to buy a means to make a purchase.

There is a question of quality of picture – well Flickr could provide a premium service to buyers by reviewing photos marked as stock usable; and resolution – well Flickr already has the idea of the pro account that allows higher quality images for a fraction of the price being offered by the stock library services), so could they offer a pro plus account for a few more dollars which allows you submit even higher res images or the images with their associated RAW format?

Perhaps someone could implement a brokerage solution using the Flickr API?

Artist’s web sites – all Flash and no RSS?

10 Monday Jul 2006

Posted by mp3monster in Music, Technology

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As a result of vast volumes and numerous sources of information available through the web; evnough that even the best information worker, let alone the average punter can be swamped. We’ve seen the rapid adoption of RSS (and for RSS you can also include Atom and others). Anyone more than the most casual of users will know RSS gives you the means to gather together sources of information and see when they change (give or take a bit in the technicalities).

With all of these feeds combined with a personal news aggregator – which could be something like delicious or pluck (my preference), it starts becoming a relatively easy task to keep with your favourite artists and wider happenings in the world of music. Well almost; if you follow your favourite artists through fan sites, you’re probably ok. But if you want to hear get the news from the source, then you’re likely to have a few problems. Lets take the new Scissor Sisters site. The ‘sisters have just launched a fresh site as part of the build up to the new album. Looks pretty, but no RSS feed to pickup the news. Which means either you have to sign up to their email or visit the site regularly, navigating through the unnecessary flash animation of entering the site – pretty, but pointless (but thats a whole different kettle of fish – but of you want to know more now checkout Jakob Nielsen).

To keep up with news from their site you have no choice but join their email list, but it does mean that you now have to keep track of which sites you’ve given your email to. What happens you email account gets spammed to death or compromised? Besides, all your other news is coming through your RSS feed, so why do these sites insist on going against the flow. All I wanted to do is keep abreast of the release dates for the singles and new album; I do not want to be emailed everytime their is a ticket auction for gigs in Witchita when I live in London.

The Scissor Sister’s are far from the only artists who have a website like this (I could bore you with the length of the list of sites that I have a grievence with); pretty with the use of Flash but far from quick for access to news when it happens. It seems to be a terrible sin amongst many artists sites to use Flash and no RSS. It would be interesting to know if the record labels/management people sit around wondering how it is they pour lots of money into website teams or companies (and given the glossy look of the sites founded by ex PR/Ad Agency people) and wonder why the fan sites attract so much more traffic and run by people in their spare time.

The biggest sinners are some of the print journals – like NME. I know that the website is paid for through advertising revenue (an evil I can live with), but that doesn’t stop you having an RSS feed – I’ve seen a couple of sites with feeds where they’ve incorporated ads into the feed information without it being annoying. Ironically, I think the NME have possibly lost out here, as a major news source people have ended up making an RSS feeds available by regularly scraping the website, filtering out all forms of advertising. This does mean that the sites that provide of this RSS can exploit the situation to the NME’s detriment – a situation already created some ripples on the web elsewhere. But a revenue stream lost for the NME which could at least pay for the service, at best funder a richer friendlier site.

So will these sites stop being all Flash and no RSS? I hope sooner rather than later, but I have my doubts.