SciFi

I'm an avid reader of Science Fiction since I was a kid (the great collection of SciFi books from my elder brother and specially from my elder sister were a great help for such). Many don't understand what I see on SciFi, when the response is quite obvious: SciFi is a futurology practice of telling you the possibilities of our future, an help for us to understand the choices we have today to help us shape the future. So when I read some news of today about some practices that shock someone, I usually aren't shocked: it was something already predicted by someone, and that means something. Fahrenheit 451 talks about a society where books are taken out from their owners, a couple of weeks ago Amazon decided to take out some books they sold from their "owners". 1984 is a book that talks about a society where people's houses are watched ("Big Brother is Watching You" is an expression that comes from that book). Yesterday came the news that United Kingdom are making a program to keep an watch on more than 20.000 families using CCTV cameras. Now, the question really is: do people understand what's at stake? Do they know the choices? What are they doing to make the world turn into the direction they want? For instance, it still puzzles me how can people vote the way they do...

Microsoft to buy Yahoo! ?

Is today the sad day? Last May I wrote:

According to NY Post, Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo!, in a move that speculation sees as to make a force against Google dominance in some markets. It makes a lot of sense to me Microsoft wanting this, but I surely hope Yahoo! to fight against it. And if Microsoft manages to buy Yahoo!... It will be a sad day.

In fact, when Google acquired YouTube in October 2006, I said:

I mean, why are you all worried about Google's relations with Fox (MySpace owners) when the real Google competitors nowadays are Yahoo! and Microsoft?

And, as a matter of fact, 2008 begins with

• Microsoft and Yahoo! being the two direct competitors of Google
• Google, Yahoo! and Apple being Microsoft's direct competitors
• Microsoft and Amazon being the direct competitors of Apple

Now, if Microsoft buys Yahoo!... Who will compete with it? Google and Apple? Separately or together?

Microsoft just made an hostile Yahoo acquisition proposal for $31 per Share, in a $44.6-Billion Deal. Hostile means that Microsoft isn't asking Yahoo nothing, instead telling its shareholders to sell at their target price.

Yahoo! stocks are rising and Microsoft stocks falling, but Google's stocks are falling too.

What's going to happen? I'm surely waiting to see, if this acquisition happens the IT world will change violently the next months or even years.

ping

This weekend I saw a curious thing: Ubuntu made the right choice of having the reportbug-ng package in their distribution, but they forgot to change it to check Ubuntu bugs and report to Ubuntu instead of doing that to Debian. So, there's not a bug report against Ubuntu's bugreport-ng [1], even if tagged as "wishlist" (something I don't think is correct, and will try to see changed).

On other issue, IFPI is pressing Europe [2] to adopt some silly stuff like the recent Olivennes disagreement [3], and European politicians seem open to the idea of ISPs policing and interfering with their customers' communications on behalf of rightsholders.

We all know that Amazon is generally "cool", but they have some bad stuff too. Cory Doctorow decided to talk about it [4].

Finally... I'm a sucker for these things, it's not the first time and I doubt it will be the last that I see some piece of unmaintained software going offline and I having to taking over it. This time it was Crystal [5], a text-based MUD client that has support for both telnet and telnet-SSL. A new version was released, I have already plans on how to attack the "TODO" and I even made a Debian Package, that I'll try to make official [6].

Which reminds me to ask: any DD out there wanting to sign my GPG key? ;-)

---

[1] - http://smallr.net/ubuntu-bug-175508
[2] - http://smallr.net/IFPI-vs-Europe
[3] - http://smallr.net/olivennes
[4] - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/11/amazon
[5] - http://talkerspt.no-ip.org/~mbooster/crystal/
[6] - http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=455759

Amazon Watermarking mp3's?

Yesterday some people started a buzz around some Amazon mp3's being "watermarked". Now, please, calm down: I know that talking about watermarked songs might be good to get some readers, after the discovery of iTunes watermarks on their DRM-free songs, but not everything can be considering watermarking...

Amazon sells plain and simple mp3's, directly ripped from CD's. That means that there are no watermarks in the sound, and since there's no way in the mp3 specification of watermarking a file in another way, the only information that Amazon could possibly add to the files is the ID3 info - simply editable by almost every mp3 player out there. And yes, some Amazon mp3's (surprisingly not all) have ID3 tags telling that they were purchased in Amazon, but there's no personal info there and there's really nothing wrong in those tags. To give you a comparison term, all songs bought at amiestreet.com come, in the Comments section, "This song was downloaded from AmieStreet.com". Simmilary, all songs downloaded from last.fm have in the Comments section "Free download from www.last.fm (http://www.last.fm/)".

It gives me more nerves knowing that every last.fm downloaded track comes bad tagged (every track is tagged as being the 1st of the album, even when the last.fm website knows it is not) than knowing that Amazon's mp3's come with full tags, including a comment saying the track was purchased there.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Amazon opens DRM-free music store

And to end the day, news that Amazon finally open it's DRM-free music store [1].

What's good

• Songs cost between 89 and 99 cents, meaning that the most expensive mp3 file there is at the same price and never more expensive than a DRM-encumbered file on iTunes. There are also albums as low as costing only $4.99.
• The store is to be used by Windows, Macintosh and Linux users, and not only Win and Mac like the iTunes music store.

What's bad

• So, I went to the store and it said to me that they wanted to recommend me some music. I clicked there and the result was a "Sorry, we have no recommendations for you in this category today." So, do you have it or not?
• You can buy mp3 tracks, but to buy full albums you need to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader [2]. Worse than being forced to use a standalone application is that it is not available yet for GNU/Linux systems...

Their catalog surprised me (negatively) both by choice and price, when searching for Indie records stuff. Yet conclusions about that, and the overall success of this new music store can only be taken when the first figures start coming out.

Oh, BTW, here's the link to the store [3].

[EDIT:] Despite some people are saying, the tracks and albums are taggen in US dollars, like everything else in amazon.com, but that does not stop you from buying them. The concept of buying the same thing by $.99, £.99 or .99€ depending on where you are is just silly, and people are only used to it thanks to Apple. BTW, since the EU is aiming to sue Apple also because of that, it wouldn't really be wise for Amazon to go the same route. For those don't understanding why I'm talking about this, remember that at this moment 1 U.S. dollar = 0.710378632 Euro, meaning that in Europe the tracks are way cheaper.


[1] - http://tinyurl.com/3cz4h8
[2] - http://tinyurl.com/yo679f
[3] - http://tinyurl.com/2gdkkn

Is this the future?

Is this the future?

Amazon to create online music store without DRM

According to this article, Amazon is aiming to launch a online music store, competing with the iTunes Music Store, but selling only DRM-free songs.

On the "new Amazon"

Several days ago (two or three weeks perhaps) everyone was talking about Amazon's new features, so I decided to surf a little bit on Amazon to check it out. Like I was expecting, there's nothing really new on Amazon for the final user - the guy that is really making Amazon a profitable business. Yes, they fixed a couple of things regarding usability and that's good. So here my two hints for what they should fix next:

• I'm at Amazon's website using a web browser, and I can do almost everything I want that way, so why do I have to give feedback via e-mail? When clicking on "give us feedback" I got no web form where to write but a pop-up asking me if I really wanted to launch my e-mail client. I said 'no' and they got no feedback. Bad for the user and for Amazon.
• Amazon works great with my browser (SeaMonkey or IceApe), thank you very much. So, why do I get a pop-up message telling me that the website is optimized for IE and Firefox? You would be better not saying nothing.