The music industry has been waging a war on its consumers with DRM, and it’s getting to concerning levels. With Sony BMG’s latest gaff of installing crippling rootkits on user’s computers via its CDs, it’s more important than ever to let the industry know that this is not acceptable. Elizabeth Stark and Fred Benenson of Freeculture.org created this PledgeBank pledge: “I will pledge to never purchase a CD contaning any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but only if 500 people around the world will too.” Sign this petition to let the music industry know that it’s a problem crippling their consumers’s PCs. (They already hit the 500 mark, but it’s a good idea to get the petition to as large a number as possible.)

I’m a poster boy for the RIAA, in the sense that my music collection is completely legal. I’m their ideal customer — I buy music, and I don’t share it. I’m an example of someone who would be most affected by their change here. The problem is, they aren’t targeting me. They’re targeting the subset of people who do rip this music and share it — which, incidentally, are the people least likely to be affected by this, as it’s easy to circumvent. So, what does this mean? The music industry is using DRM to target a subset of people who are not their core customers, with the net result of negatively impacting their core customers. In terms of business, this is a bad idea: they’re burning the very people who give them money. So why do are they doing it? Because they are incredibly short sighted.

I have signed this online petition because it’s true: I won’t buy a DRMed CD. I don’t need the extra headaches associated with DRM, be it with managing licenses to dealing with root kits. I’ve had enough, music industry, stop tormenting me! Music is supposed to soothe me, not aggravate me.

WEP must die. Really. I convinced a friend of mine recently to upgrade his router, because it only supported WEP. (In fact, he had a wireless router that was wide open, meaning anyone nearby could have popped on with no effort previously.) I suggested he pick up the Linksys WRT54G, as it supported WPA, which while not uncrackable, is not as easily cracked as WEP.

WEP stands for “Wired Encryption Privacy”, which, sadly, is a misnomer. While initially considered a secure protocol, it became clear that in fact, it’s not. The first search in Google for WEP turns up an article on WEP’s insecurities. This is unfortunate, because WEP was rolled out as the standard form of encryption for wireless networks, meaning that if something is 802.11b, chances are, it’s insecure. Even the Feds pubically noted that WEP isn’t considered effective security, demonstrating by cracking a 128-bit WEP key in three minutes.

Unfortunately, my friend had issues setting up the router, so spent forty minutes on the phone with Linksys tech support. What did they recommend? Yup, using WEP. Okay, so he’s slightly better off than he was before, but at that rate, he might as well have stuck with old equipment. He’s also under the illusion of security.

So, death to WEP! People need to be aware that WEP is far from secure, with easy point-and-click hacking tools coming out all the time. It’s had its time, but quite clearly, WEP is now doing more harm than good. People are going to enable it, thinking they’re getting decent protection when they’re not. The only possible benefit is that enabling WEP will make it more difficult to break into your network than your neighbor’s. That is, unless your neighbor happens to be using WPA.

For all those thinking that disabling SSID broadcasts or using MAC filtering offers any protection, I present this article on the six dumbest ways to secure a wireless LAN. Time to upgrade that wireless equipment!

Tech World recently reported that the UK police want to make it a criminal offense to withhold encryption keys. This is naturally in response to terrorism and other criminal activities which are making increased use of these privacy technologies.

I can understand why they would want such powers. With very little time, money, and effort, the average person can encrypt documents, files, and messages in a manner difficult if not impossible for most anyone to decrypt. This is law enforcement’s nightmare: seize a criminal’s computer, and not be able to extract any evidence from it.

The flip side of this issue is individual privacy. People should have the right to privacy, which is growing to become the most critical personal issue going into the 21st century. In our efforts to fight criminals, we must make sure we aren’t trouncing individual liberties at the same time, because once you start, you find it hard to arbitrarily stop.

But all that aside, I’m just wondering about this from the average computer user’s experience.

The way most encryption keys work is that there is a private key used to decrypt files, as well as a passphrase on that file. These two items are needed in order to decrypt something. If one or the other gets lost, then the file is unrecoverable. (Yes, there’s “conventional encryption” which just uses a passphrase and other forms of encryption, but that’s not what’s at issue here.)

This is all fine and good, but what if you’re the average end user? Have you ever forgotten a password? There’s a reason most sites have a little link marked “Forgot Password” — it’s not for aesthetics. Have you ever lost a file? Ever accidentally deleted one? Had a hard drive crash? Put it on a USB key and lost it? Reformatted your computer, forgetting to grab that file? This happens more often than many might think.

So, it’s very easy to lose both the file as well as the passphrase. It’s human nature. While one would hope that if you took the time and effort to encrypt something, you’d take measures to make sure you wouldn’t lose both, the average computer user tends to play things a little fast and loose.

Now, let’s say that you’ve done just that — played around with encrypting files a little bit, forgot about it, and lost the passphrase, the private key, or both. Entirely plausible; I’ve done both before. Then let’s say that you’re a suspect in an investigation, say, through racial profiling. (If you don’t think racial profiling is going on in this world right now, you’re being incredibly naive.) The police seize your computer, and demand that you hand over your encryption key, which you no longer have, so they charge you. Immediate criminal offense for being a little too lackadaisical. Making poor computer habits a crime is a bad thing. Especially when most computer users don’t have good computer habits.

This is all Big Brotherish, but as the EFF knows, it only takes a little bit to get the ball rolling on taking away civil liberties. One hopes that the UK will consider this as they work to increase policing powers.

I love Dreamhost. There, I’ve said it. I can’t help it. I’ve been using them for a few months, and so far, they’ve been great. I’ve switched between three different hosting providers, and so far, have loved them the best. Read on for why.

When looking for a web host, there are a three main considerations: reliability (uptime), features, and price. Rarely do you find all three in one place.

When it came to uptime, I came from a host that had rather spotty issues in that regard. They would go down for a few hours at a time. They would have a crash, restore from backup, and my site would have reverse-aged itself a week. One time, after a particularly nasty crash, they were redirecting my site to someone else’s poster site, because of some DNS issues. I decided it was time to move on.

When it came to features, I found that on a previous host with great uptime, features were quite lacking. No shell accounts, no scripting, no options. I’m beyond the point where I want to concern myself with static pages — that’s just so 1990′s.

As far as price went, I went from being gouged with the reliable host, to getting a good rate at the other host in exchange for that reliability.

Then, a friend told me about Dreamhost. I’m generally skeptical of new services, so I decided to do a little research. How reliable were they? What did they offer? What were their prices like? The answers to those questions are “very”, “a lot”, and “good”.

Reliability is reported to be and has been good. I haven’t had downtime yet (knock on wood). It may not have the reputation of pear Networks, but they have a good standing in the field.

Some things people look for as far as features go include shell access, FTP access, IMAP mail, POP mail, web mail, multiple accounts, Perl, spam filtering, PHP, one-click installs, and fine-grained DNS control. Check. This is a full-fledged host in that regard. If you like to develop your own applications in Perl / Apache / PHP, that’s not a problem. They even have procmail support, if mail processing is your thing.

However, all is not well in Dreamhostville. You can forget about CPanel and WHM. In fact, no reseller accounts of any kind. (Webmaster referrals don’t really count, but they are nice.) No Fantastico either. Those are dealbreakers for many publishers. The homebrewed control panel at Dreamhost isn’t as easy to use as CPanel, nor does it offer as immediate results. Doing a one click install of WordPress? No problem! Click this button and…come back in an hour. Some manual setup also may be needed to tweak settings. This is fine for me, as a reasonably tech-savvy user. I wouldn’t put my wife through it unattended, though.

When it comes to price, Dreamhost also shines. For $9.95 a month ($7.95 if you pre-pay for two years) you get 2,400 MB of disk, 120 GB of monthly bandwidth. That’s nothing to sneeze at, though at only one domain, it’s a little limiting. Stepping up to the next level at $19.95 a month ($15.95 if you pre-pay for two years) gets you 7,680 MB of disk, and 192 GB of monthly bandwidth, for 15 domains. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with 3,000 email accounts and 375 shell accounts.

What got me to write this post, however, was none of that. Rather, it was their insane newsletter. Here’s a random quote from it:

In actuality, I love dog food! In fact, I was just in China for my honeymoon and ate a lot of “dog” food. And I’m not talking about Purina.

I don’t think he’s serious. That’s just the sort or weird, random flavor their newsletter has. However, it wasn’t this quirky character that made me write, either. It was this:

Every week, your plan limits will grow as follows, at
absolutely no charge:

L1: 20MB disk and 1GB bandwidth each week!
L2: 40MB disk and 1.5GB bandwidth each week!
L3: 60MB disk and 2GB bandwidth each week!
L4: 80MB disk and 2.5GB bandwidth each week!

Wait…so as long as I host with Dreamhost, they’re going to keep upping my disk and bandwidth limits? For no apparent reason? They were already reasonably priced, but apparently, they like to keep pushing the edge. I have to appreciate a company that continues to go that extra step, rather than just resting on their laurels.

So, I’m not going to go so far as to say they’re perfect. They’re not. They’re not even the most user-friendly: it helps to either be a techie, or know someone who is, to help you through the setup. However, I am going to say that as far as reliability, features, and pricing are concerned, they’re the best I’ve seen and used so far. Plus, they continue to try new things, to see what they can do to offer their users even more. I like that. Let’s hope they continue to live up to their reputation.

Yes, I am committing the worst type of blogging offense: I’m posting a picture of my cat.

Actually, I’m playing around with moblogging, using Flickr. Very neat technology — check it out!

This picture was taken with a Treo 600, which, as you can see from this photo, takes atrocious pictures. You should see pictures from dark bars — almost unviewable. I hear the camera in the 650 is significantly better, but don’t really feel like shelling out a huge chunk of cash for an incremental upgrade to my phone.

Do I really live a life interesting enough to document with a moblog? Probably not, but at least I’ll be entertained.

As a technology whore, I’m always interested in new services for my various electronic devices, so when I got an email message noting that odeo.com was open to try out, my curiosity was piqued. As a tech geek, it was naturally my duty to check this out and see what they had to offer.

For those not in the know, “Odeo is the place to browse, listen, upload, download, sync to your iPod (or any Mp3 player).” Be that as it may, it would appear to help to be an iPod user. People create audio feeds for download, which people can then listen to on their PCs or on their portable MP3 players. This is a practice known, for better or worse, as podcasting.

Desite my desire to be cutting edge and my knowledge of the availability of podcasting, up to the present, I hadn’t been actually doing any podcasting yet. iPod, check. PSP, check. Downloading random audio posts from bloggers and copying the files to my player(s)? Ummm, well, yeah, I never quite got around to that step.

That’s what makes Odeo such an interesting concept. They’re basically a catalog of various audio blogs on the web, simplifying the task of finding audio feeds, “subscribing”, downloading, and importing into iTunes or Windows Media Player. Then, theoretically, it’s just a matter of syncing up your MP3 player to make them portable. Neat!

As far as implementation goes, it was pretty painless as an iPod owner / user. I downloaded the Odeo syncer (which actually downloads MP3s and drops them in iTunes), then browsed their site for various feeds to add. Nicely enough, you can listen to snippets of these channels right on the web site. As far as interface goes, Odeo is a pretty slick package, and I got subscribed to a few shows right away. No MP3 player is necessary — if listening to podcasts on your PC is your bag, then Odeo is a nice step in simplifying that task.

However, while actually listening to a podcast, I came to a quick realization: just because you podcast doesn’t make you interesting. Case in point: MAKE Magazine has a podcast, and while they discuss much that I find incredibly fascinating, I’d hate to be listening to that in the car. I might nod off and wind up in oncoming traffic. The Suicide Girls channel (to which I subscribed purely for research purposes, of course) droned on about what a guy was wearing on a blind date and whether or not wearing a belt is optional.

There’s a decent number of podcasts catalogued in Odeo, including categorization, with the ability to see the Top 40 channels, as well as a selection of featured channels that change each week. Unfortunately, I can see how easy it is to get lost in the shuffle here. Being driven by the network of people actually using the service, good channels that haven’t been promoted very much will get buried in the listings. The fairly open ability to add any feed into Odeo also clutters up the choices. Random shows like “The Dawn and Drew Show” (self-proclaimed as “sex, jokes and more from a married couple in Wisconsin”) combine with junk marketing like the show “Adv – THIS SPACE FOR RENT” by Aruntx and people blogging just for the sake of audio blogging (I’m talking about you, Tom Greene), making it hard to find the fledging, good quality content podcast. The signal to noise ratio is rapidly decreasing!

That’s when I discovered something else: this is just radio. Yeah yeah, it’s downloaded off the Internet and allows people without FCC licenses to broadcast in some form, but at the end of the day, it’s still radio. I was listening to on-air ad spots in these things. The people who actually create good on-air personae and line up the sponsors will probably be the most successful.

My overall thoughts: Odeo is pretty good. Not bad at all for beta. It’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re looking to get into podcasting. However, we’re going to see a few things happen in the not too distant future, namely:

• Cataloging sites like Odeo will be flooded with poor podcasts and marketing spam. A rating system will be implemented, or some sort of moderation will happen.
• Dead channels will ensue. The low barriers to entry mean that a lot of people will start podcasts, and then just stop doing them.
• Someone will do a good job of consolidating podcasts. Instead of having a bunch of sites each running their own podcast, they will combine a slew of smaller podcasts to consolidate the marketing, and split the revenue.
• Good audio personae will develop the largest audiences. Leo LaPorte, you’ve got the right voice!

Overall, podcasting is still growing as a technology. I look forward to Yahoo and MSN folding in support for Podcasts into their portals, as that’s when you know the technology has gone mainstream. Looks like we’ll need more MP3 players, stat!

If you can read this, then I’ve successfully migrated from one hosting company to another. While it appears to have gone off without a hitch, I’m left wondering, “How does the average person do this?”

This is not an uncommon question when it comes to computers. I think one of the standards of the industry has to be, “Would my mother know how to do this?” If the answer is yes, then congratulations, you’re ready for prime time. If the answer is no, then you’re developing for that smaller group of technorati who know what the hell ‘DNS’ or ‘ping’ mean.

To migrate between hosts, I had to copy all the files, do a mysqldump of the database, go to my new host, install the blogging software, restore the MySQL database, copy over original files, update files, change paths, and otherwise run around doing techie stuff on a terminal window that would send the average person into conniptions. I have no problem with this, mind you; having worked in the interactive industry for several years, I knew what I was doing. That’s not to say it wasn’t a headache: it most certainly was. However, I at least knew what was going on and why, while beating my head against the keyboard. Ah, the simple pleasures in life.

People who are “good” with computers are well aware that a lot of technology isn’t ready for the masses. Ask them about assisting family members or friends with spyware. When I was setting up a web site for my wife, she asked simply, “Can you teach me what you’re doing?” About ten minutes into the affair, I could see her eyes glazing over. Another friend of mine asked for help installing a hard drive. He did the initial installation fine, but when he asked for assistance and I had to boot into a Knoppix CD to run fdisk on his unpartitioned drive, I definitely lost him.

This need for tech knowledge in the modern day is ridiculous. The advancement of technology means that there’s always a learning curve for new things, but even existing technology is beyond the average just-started-paying-bills-online soul. The problem is that people are more excited about the advance of technology, and less about bringing current technology “down” to the common person. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is arguable, but it’s still definitely in the realm of techno-geeks, for the most part.

There’s probably nothing to be done about this. As advances continue, current technology gets obsolete. The problem is that people become more and more dependent on assistance from the technorati to do the things that they should not have to know how to do. Perhaps this is good in a way; it forces people to expand their social system a bit. Or pay for it. Hmm. Anyone interested in a little consulting? I can remove that spyware fast for a price!

Maybe I should just get back to work. It’s less aggravating.

Yes, I know I just posted about the Sony PSP. However, I’ve been seeing the PSP come up time and again. Has the PSP reached critical mass as a content platform? It is, after all, a gaming system, right? Apparently, it’s that and a little more.

Having just shipped 2.97 million units to Japan and the US, they’re at least getting to the point where people need to begin paying a little attention. They project that they’ll ship 12 million units by year’s end. This is not a huge market sampling, but it’s worth investigation. Certainly, due to its hefty price tag, it skews in favor of the higher income market.

Other people are jumping on the bandwagon, though. Atom Films is releasing some films for PSP. The Gorillaz’s “Feel Good Inc.” music video is available as a download in PSP format. Heavy.com provides some of their content in format as well. Sony’s been keeping a page of downloadable PSP media on their PSP Connect site, where you can download videos formatted for your PSP. What’s even more interesting is that ABC News is releasing some news segments on that site. Add some RSS feeds tied to auto-downloaders like Videora, as well as a good way to sync, and I think they might have something here: PSP videocasting. (Yes, Videora and PSPVideo9 thought of it first, but they don’t have ABC News.)

Even the movie sites are getting into this. The Fantastic Four movie site provides a secret section with a PSP exclusive downloadable movie. The new Jet Li flick, Unleashed, provides their trailer in PSP format. I guess if Playboy can do it, so can they.

Sony is on the verge of doing something that no one else has done successfully yet: developing a successful mobile content platform. Content distribution, promotion, video casting…this player has the hardware to make it happen, if only they can build the critical mass, and make it simple enough for mom to use. Unfortunately, neither of these two things have happened. Their window is limited, however. Bill Gates may be right when he said, “The phone sort of trumps everything.” Sony has a limited window of opportunity here, provided they can bring it all together.

That’s okay, though — I’ll settle for the games anyway.

I have nothing against porn. I also have nothing against PSPs. However, I do think it odd that chuckleheads around the world think that for some reason, PSPs and porn should go together. Maybe it’s that small electronics are sexy, so having a video display unit playing porn is doubly erotic. Somehow I doubt it. Certainly, visions of people wandering off to the bathroom stalls to get in some, uh, gaming time come to mind.

Yes, the PSP has a big beautiful color screen…for a handheld. It’s a 4.3″ screen that sports a 480×272 pixel resolution (nerd alert!). The widescreen aspect ratio is nice for watching videos on the road…but when was the last time you were on a roadtrip when you said to yourself, “You know what would make the time pass faster right now? Looking at some porn!” I can just imagine what a conversation starter it is for you to be watching some hardcore gangbang video in coach on a cross-country flight. That might get someone to trade for your aisle seat.

Nonetheless, the desire apparently exists to check out some psporn. Even Playboy is jumping on the bandwagon (not their first foray into digital device content). By the by, if you’re thinking about checking out the free sample Playboy content, don’t. Maxim could make more titillating stuff than that free sample. The six pictures and sample video clip they offer were so tame, I showed them to my wife who commented, “I’ve seen more explicit stuff on NBC.” She might be right.

Though it’s not as easy as it should be, it’s not really all that difficult to get content onto a PSP. You might have to do a bit of the work yourself, such as sizing pictures to the right resolution, or converting the video yourself, but it’s not exactly rocket science. When you plug in the PSP, it shows up as a hard drive. If you can’t figure it out from there, you might want to consider switching to jacks.

Yet, people continue in this newly expanding field. Through the amazing power of hackery, it’s possible to go online with your PSP. See above on screen resolution for why this might not be desireable (anyone who’s surfed the web on their phone is already familiar with why this sucks). This leads us to the strange entrepreneurship of people wanting to be first to market with a PSP porn site. Like Playboy above, they’re aiming to get people to sign up and spend money, to get a steady stream of racy pictures and video to their gaming system. Weak.

Perhaps I didn’t emphasize that last point enough. It’s a gaming system. It’s meant to play games. Lumines is a pretty good game. Give that a whirl. Or, if you want your gaming system to do something besides games, why not convert a DVD to watch? It can be a porn DVD if it makes you feel any better.

If I want to surf the web, there’s a perfectly good computer sitting at my desk. Just because I can surf on my PSP doesn’t exactly mean that I necessarily should, unless I really do want to go blind (because of looking at the small screen, not for…ah…forget it).

So it goes. I can’t believe there’s a market for this stuff. Yet, by listening to mad ramblings on the Internet, it would appear there is some demand. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash my PSP. It feels a little dirty.

I want a Sony PSP. I’m not afraid to admit it. I’ve been fairly lukewarm about gaming handhelds in the past, but I really want this one. It’s just my tech geekiness flaring up, I know, but this thing just looks sharp. A decent launch lineup plus more games in the pipeline make for a strong outing against the relatively uncontested marketshare of the Nintendo DS. Sony is relatively quietly releasing the PSP tomorrow across the US, to the delight of hundreds of thousands of fanboys. Some are a little more excited than others. I don’t actually think availability will be an issue tomorrow, but we’ll see, I guess.

In anticipation of the great buyout of Sony merchandise tomorrow, I figured I’d do my part to promote the PSP. Enjoy!

Information

PSP Space — digital download and PSP news headquarters.

PSP Home — “Here at PSP Home.com we aim to provide you with everything you need to know about the Sony Playstation Portable, better known as the Sony PSP.”

PSP 411 — More collected information on the PSP.

PSP Vault — News updates regarding the PSP.

PSP Forums — community of PSP fanboys.

PSPcasting?

The principle here is very cool. Similar to podcasting, but with video, the idea of combing bittorrent, RSS, and video encoding is quite enticing. The application probably isn’t quite there yet, but being that the PSP hasn’t been released yet to build up marketshare, that’s not surprising. It’ll be interesting to see what this will be like in a year.

PSP Video 9 — “PSP Video 9 is a free PSP video conversion and management application. It can convert regular PC video files (avi, mpeg, etc) into PSP video files, as well as manage/copy these PSP video files between your PC and PSP. When combined with another application, Videora + PSP Video 9 form the first PSPcasting solution, allowing you to download, convert and copy video to your PSP, automatically using BitTorrent and RSS technology.”

Videora — “Utilizing BitTorrent peer to peer technology and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, Videora automatically and intelligently finds and downloads video you want to watch.”

Media On PSP

It’s nice to be able to convert your own DVDs for the road. Sure, UMD movies will be coming down the pipe, but if you already own a DVD, why not convert it yourself, if you’ve got the patience? Though Sony memory sticks aren’t cheap yet, they will probably drop in price before too long, making this even more attractive as time goes by.

Video 2 PSP — DVD to PSP conversion guide.

PSP Forums thread on converting video

There is a dark side to PSP owners, though. You can find sites that have torrent links to encoded video. I don’t imagine these sites sticking around very long, as neither the MPAA nor Sony take kindly to that sort of thing.