Monday, August 12, 2002

All Your Music Are Belong To Us XP "protection" can render music backups useless. By default, Windows Media Player encodes your music collection using your machine's unique key, so that you can't share, loan or give away the tracks you rip to your machine. What that means is, if you have some file-system or OS corruption and reinstall from scratch, then restore your music collection, it will be unusable. You won't be able to play the files. There's a backup utility that'll preserve your license keys, but if you fail to employ it, you're SOL -- MSFT's position is that you need to start over from scratch at that point, re-ripping all the CDs in your collection. Speaking as someone with 30GB of MP3s, ripped from over 1,000 CDs in a process that took days, I gotta say, I'm glad I'm an OSX user. Link(via On Lisa Rein's Radar) [Boing Boing Blog] 11:37:21 PM    comment [] Miscellanea Had a busy weekend, trying to bring my newsfeeds down to manageable proportions. Here's a few goofy items that held my attention for whole minutes at a time.  Dada is not dead. BBC NEWS | England | It's sport, it's extreme, it's... ironing! [Daypop Top 40] Michael Jackson's face, going through some scary ch-ch-ch-changes. "La historia de la cara de Michael Jackson" [Daypop Top 40] Animated cartoon. Salon.com Politics | Why we should invade -- right now! [Daypop Top 40] Ooh, scary! Tales of the Plush Cthulhu.  Wonderful, twisted children's photo-book about the day that Plush Cthulhu came to visit the nursery. Link [Boing Boing Blog] Fotos from Fiji, Postcards from Polynesia, Tidbits from Tonga, etc..  Unimaginably large (thousands!) gallery of photos, watercolors, stamps, postcards and other images from Oceania. From historical Missionary paintings to 1960s cheesecake National Geo shots to modern postcards, this has it all -- in no particular order. I'm told that there's a bad midi soundtrack on the pages, but thanks to Mozilla, I never heard it. Link [Boing Boing Blog] 7:14:35 PM    comment [] All Your PC Are Belong To Us, part 837 SJ Mercury: End user licenses keep getting more intrusive. Dan Gillmor. Impenetrable EULAs are nothing new in the tech business. But they're getting more intrusive and less fair every day. The latest anti-innovation is the vendor's claim of a unilateral right to change the function of the product you've already purchased. [Tomalak's Realm] If I understand the language and the issues at stake -- and I believe I do -- the latest EULAs in the WIN2000 service pack and latest incarnation of the MS Media Player allow Microsoft to make changes to basically whatever they damn well please, in the background, without telling you about it. Some of these 'upgrades' may or may not someday be realted to DRM (digital rights management), so imagine one day you find you can't play a movie clip or an MP3 file that you played yesterday because it isn't properly watermarked. Is this "where you want to go today?" I don't think so. This stuff is old news to veteran blogger/news hounds/information hunter-gatherers. I am posting this link in case some of my friends and buddies wander in (and you know who you are) because the Dan Gillmor article is short and sweet. They are winning. Until we can trust these bastards (in other words when hell freezes over) we need legislative changes to protect our rights as (basically) honest consumers. So if anyone has a couple of million bucks to buy some legislative 'influence', we can get started. And that's the problem in a nutshell. They have those funds, they have purchased the services of their lackey dog boys over in Washington, and, basically, their will be done. Rights we have enjoyed up until now are slowly being eroded, and in the long run it will not be good for us, for them, or for this country of ours. I have no answers, and I have to stop writing NOW.  (from the article) "Microsoft's response: This is just a boilerplate legal language that we have to use; it's benign, anyway, so you should simply trust us. Earth to Microsoft: You have a consistent record of selling brittle, insecure products and using unethical business practices. You haven't begun to earn our trust, and this kind of no-choice choice is one of the reasons why. You could start by explaining, in extreme detail, precisely what you mean by this vague language -- and then by letting computer users make decisions on what ``upgrades'' or ``fixes'' they want to let you install from Microsoft headquarters." 6:43:59 PM    comment []

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