We Need More Happy

Music has always had the ability to lift one's mood. These songs in particular are doing that for me right now. The Goldfish song has already reached 1.2 million views. They even wrote a song about it, which has also got plenty of views. Not bad for a South African band. Pharrell Williams has also created the world's first 24 hour music video, even if I can't get the site to work.

Using Sound to Improve Focus at Work

I heard about the focus@will web site on Security Now, a podcast I follow every week. There is a free version at www.focusatwill.com, which is worth trying out. It will play an hour of music that is suitable for background music to eliminate other distractions and help you focus.
I experimented with it for a week or so, and now I have taken the plunge and will be paying $5 per month for the paid version. This gives you an endless variety of music in high quality stereo audio. It doesn't seem to use up much bandwidth, but I'm not about to use it on my phone.
I will give more feedback on this in a week or so, since I am going on a business trip and will be able to see how it helps (or not) in a different environment. In the meantime, check out the interesting articles on their blog, as well as the science primer, which explains the research behind the web service.


Update 20th Feb: One of the joys of living in South Africa is the crappy bandwidth. So around lunchtime the sound starts breaking up, with annoying gaps in the middle of a track, or forcing the player to go to another track. So I have been using TotalRecorder to record an hour or 90 minutes of the selection I play in the morning, and then I play that offline in the afternoon. It also means I have some music on my laptop for those times when I can't connect to the internet.

Music is Life!

Redi Tlhabi is one of South Africa's best talk show hosts. She gets to the heart of many issues, without imposing her opinions on others, by letting them speak freely and openly. She is well known and liked on 702 radio in Joburg. Her new show is on Aljazeera English called South 2 North. It just aired its first show, and is well worth watching. I just wish more people could see it. She has also published her first book, "Endings and Beginnings"

Goldfish Video Hits 2 Million Milestone

Ever since I first heard "The Four Forty Five Blues" I have been a Goldfish fan. That was on their first album, "Caught in the Loop". Then, on the "Perceptions of Pacha" album they went big with "Soundtracks and Come Backs"
Now they have signed a record deal with EMI, produced a new album, called "GoldFish", and this video has passed the 2 million plays mark. Cool! The new album includes "Soundtracks and Come Backs" and "We Come Together" and a great new song, "Washing Over Me". Let's hope it does even better.

Update: I have noticed that Last.fm alone has 1,093,393 plays (54,282 listeners) recorded. That's pretty impressive.

LM Radio now in Joburg

In the dark days of the SABC broadcast monopoly and censorship, one bright light on the dial was LM Radio, broadcast from Lourenço Marques, now called Maputo, in Mozambique. In fact, it was one of the earliest independent stations on the continent. LM Radio was on the air from 1936 until 1975 and played a very important role in shaping the style and content of broadcasting in South Africa.
Now it's back in Joburg, and this time on 97.2 FM (Cofifi Community Radio Westbury). Broadcasting started about a week before Christmas. Instead of having to fiddle with short wave tuners (my dad had a Supersonic tuner with little stickers on the dial) you can just use an FM radio, or listen to the streaming signal from the internet. It streams at around 17megabytes per hour, which is manageable even on a capped account.
You can hear an audio history and some of the old jingles on the LMRadio.org site.
Update: I also discovered the station on the "Internet Radio" app on my Nokia phone. Just do a country search and it's listed under "Mozambique". The 32kb stream sounds pretty good on my phone.

Awesome "Change"

Four talented young musicians recently recorded this album. I gladly paid the US$15 to buy the album, and enjoyed listening to the songs and reading the lyrics. I think its pretty awesome. Last year they played at the music festival at Clarens and impressed a lot of seasoned musos with their energy and talent. This year they are even better. They even recorded, mixed and produced the album themselves. I'm seriously impressed.
The band is called "When in September"
From left to right in the photo:
Thomas Quinn - Guitar and Backup Vocals;
Levon Lock - Guitar and Lead Vocals;
Timothy Edwards - Drums and Backup Vocals;
Warren Graham - Bass and Backup Vocals;
They have a Facebook Fan Page and there are 4 extra free songs on their MySpace profile.

Vineyard Music Extra

My very first web site started in around 1996 when I was working at The Star newspaper in Joburg. That's where I got involved in all things Internet for the first time.
I realised how effective the worldwide web would be in publishing information about the worship music that I love: Vineyard music. That's why my email address is still "vmusic@". I registered www.worship.co.za in September 1997 and it has moved hosting companies several times, the last time in 2006 from DataPro to Hetzner.
Now I've had to move it again, this time to WebHost4Life in the USA, because Hetzner no longer supports Active Server Pages. It turned out to be a bit of a mission, but the transfer went through on the weekend with very few glitches. I must say that Hetzner have been helpful and professional, but somewhat inflexible. Still, their pricing is low and their level of service is high, so I'm not complaining. They have never put their prices up. That's amazing.
Around 2000 the Vineyard Music official site was providing almost all the information I was providing, so my interest waned as my life moved on. Nonetheless I kept the existing site going and there have been over 5 million visitors. There is even the original version of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, the song that was changed to become our national anthem.
I have also begun work on www.mustang.co.za, a technology showcase site. There isn't much to see yet, but as my work on the FishWise Pro site progresses, the Mustang site will progress as well.

Goldfish: Soundtracks and Comebacks

I bought my first Goldfish album ("Caught in the Loop") after listening to a sample on the SmallBizPod podcast. Usually it has electronica music at the end, and the track "The Four Forty Five Blues" is a wonderful mix of electronica, blues and an underlying South African "something".
This video belongs to their second album, "Perceptions of Pacha", and there are samples of all the tracks and a link to buy the album at Goldfishlive.com

Down with DRM!

Increasingly, music lovers are becoming fed up with competing rights management schemes for digital players like iPod and Zune.

Fred Benenson spent a recent drizzly Saturday afternoon with friends in Manhattan wearing yellow hazmat suits. They were in front of the new Apple store on Fifth Avenue, distributing flyers and explaining to passersby why iTunes, Apple’s online music store, “sucks.” The target of their ire: a technology the recording and film industries call “Digital Rights Management.” DRM, as it’s known, is encoded onto downloadable digital content so that copyright owners can prevent piracy. But it also prevents people from transferring downloaded content as they might like. Since different companies use different DRM technologies, an iTunes-bought song can’t be moved to a Zune, Microsoft’s new answer to the iPod, or even e-mailed to a friend. Since the vast majority of online music is sold on iTunes, “Apple has a stranglehold,” says Benenson, 23, a graduate student at New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. “There are some musicians who I like who will only offer music on the iTunes store.”

Music: Fans Mad at Anti-Piracy DRM - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com

There's a Bug in my Apple

I'm so glad that Windows is written by Microsoft and not Apple, because I don't think I could cope with any more bugs, not to mention the sheer arrogance that is Apple Computer Inc.
They're happy to sell iPods in South Africa, but sorry, no music. The iTunes Store is closed to South Africa and New Zealand. Why? Who knows, and of course they're too snooty to say. Talk about American cultural imperialism!
Then there's the iTunes software. It just doesn't work properly. iTunes 7.0 was a disaster, and iTunes 7.0.1 is still a joke. Now I'm told that iTunes 7.0.2 is available, but the "Apple Software Update" application disagrees, and says everything is fine. Are these guys for real? Why should I put up with all this rubbish? I'm almost tempted to uninstall it and go back to the version of iTunes that shipped with my iPod. At least it worked. Some of the time. Oh, and did I mention the jokes on the iTunes 7.0.2 page?

What’s New in this Version
iTunes 7.0.2 adds support for the Second Generation iPod shuffle and addresses a variety of stability and performance issues found in iTunes 7 and 7.0.1.

Note how much detail is provided on the stability and performace issues. Then there is the blatant lie about the size of the download: 25MB according to the page, but actually it's 35.1MB.


Update: They say they fixed the performance issues? I don't think so. The software still fails to download some postcast files, even when they appear on the iTunes store listing. And don't expect your PC to perform well while you're listening to a podcast being played by the iTunes software. You're still better off using a decent audio player like WinAmp, or even the RealOne player. iTunes has become buggy bloatware. And talking about stability: the software has randomly shut down twice since installing the "fixed" version, something it has never done on my PC before. And it seems to crash quite regularly now.

See also: Audio Apartheid

The Problem With Music

Ever wonder why bands hate the record companies? Ever wonder why the artists never complain about losing out on royalties but the RIAA always does? Ever wondered why bands are increasingly using the internet to distribute their music in order to get fans to come to their concerts? This article explains why. And the numbers speak for themselves.

So next time you buy a CD and think your favourite artist is getting a chunk of the money, think again. If they composed the words and the music, and produced the album, and played all the instruments, they'll get 4%. The rest goes to the record company, the distribution company, and 20% goes to the shop that sold the CD. And the cost of manufacture is typically 2%. Now you know why record companies don't like MP3 files. It's got nothing to do with the artists, and everything to do exploiting musicians to make money.

The Problem With Music

Pandora Offers Hope Once More

If you read the legend of Pandora's box you'll find that the last thing let out of the box was hope. Listening to the modern version of Pandora, a music service at www.pandora.com, gave me a sense of hope once more. Finally, a music station that understands music and doesn't impose someone else's tastes on yours.
There is only one tiny problem: the music quality is 128kbs stereo, which is great to listen to, but uses up bandwidth: 116 MB in 80 minutes. Since my ISP only allows me 3GB per month, or 100MB per day, I'm using up my bandwidth pretty quickly here.
What can I say? It's worth it! Check out www.pandora.com for yourself.

File Sharing Dangers

Can you spot the errors in this article? Do you think everything it says is true?

Introduction
So you have decided to join the ranks of other Internet users who share files. There is much for you to learn and understand. First understand there are many risks to what you are doing. Files you download from others can contain viruses and other nasty things. So be sure to have a good anti-virus application installed, certainly if you have a Windows-based system. Besides the risks of viruses and such, there are other risks, such as hackers and groups that monitor the internet. Understand that there are many unsafe ways to share files. Including but not limited to P2P, IRC, newsgroups and websites. There are also safe ways to share files as well.

For every connection to the internet there is assigned a unique number, called an IP address. There is no way to hide it, there is always a trail and plenty of ways to record and trace connections. There are methods of mucking up such trails and making it harder to match IP addresses. However they are usually very weak and offer little to no real protection from being traced.

Why share files?
An easy enough question to answer and understand. So that you can distributed and download content freely without paying money for it. Not that it is ever truly free, there is the cost of network bandwidth and system resources, along with the power and internet access costs. Also it can be for social reasons, such as to gain friends and access content you normally would not think to or could not easily get to otherwise. For such reasons file-sharing is very popular with millions worldwide engaging in it.

Scams
There are many bad people out there running scams, they offer access to networks and content, usually charging monthly or yearly rates for it. Granted there are legal services which do exist such as iTunes, eMusic and Audible. However there are also many scams, which upon being paid may give download access to a client, which a free and clean copy could be found elsewhere, usually at the original authors website. Such clients downloaded from the scam websites may be infected with viruses, dialers and other such nasty things. Nasty things like those with damage your system and misuse it, can even get you into trouble with the law. Such scams will lure people into unwittingly conducting content piracy, which they think is legal because they are paying for it. They will still get sued and can face time in jail, even if they were setup by a scam. Just because they were clueless does not make them safe. Anti piracy groups are usually totally heartless and courts usually will side with them if matters go that far, on the rare chance they cases make it to a jury trial, defendants are very likely to lose.

The Law
Beyond what was stated elsewhere in this FAQ, there is not much more to say. Just that understanding your local laws is a good thing if you intend to do any file-sharing. Also that regardless of any such understanding, it is not unusual to be burned by your court system, even if you did not commit a crime.

Set Up and/or Framed
So you think that you have been set up and/or framed. However wrong that may be, you should know often file-sharers are very weak and vulnerable. No matter what the circumstances that lead to you getting into trouble with the law, you are most likely to lose. Sure if you are wealthy and manage to get a very good lawyer who has a good understanding of the law, given enough time and money you can fight the charges, possibly even eventually win the case, though you must also understand you still end up losing in what you have had to spend on lawyer fees and time. File-sharers tend not to be wealthy, so there is not much need to any further along these lines.

Clients
There are many different file-sharing clients, which each offer different features and methods of networking users together. Most of which are unsafe and their users frequently tend to get into legal trouble for using them. Among the most dangerous are the P2P file-sharing clients, which usually allow direct insecure connections between file-sharers, all information concerning file-sharing is easily matched to IP addresses and file-sharers usually are left very open. A few such clients include but are not limited to LimeWire, BearShare, eMule, Morpheus, shareaza, directconnect and BitTorrent.

There are a few safe clients and methods for file-sharing, none of which connect to the internet directly. They go through overlay networks. Overlay networks are networks which exist on top of the internet. They use secure routed networking to route data between sources and destinations. They are general networks in that they are not designed specifically for file-sharing. Two such networks are tor and I2P. Tor is a very limited weak outproxy network that allows for simple web browsing and little else. So it doesn't do file-sharers much good to try abusing it. The other better developed network I2P, is more interesting and useful to file-sharers. Unlike tor it is robust and strong, but with extremely limited outproxying. Instead, members of the network have several safe options for sharing files, including serving them up on websites and with special file-sharing clients. Two such types of clients include certain Gnutella and BitTorrent clients, which have been modified to work on top of the I2P network. They offer safe file-sharing with decent speeds. Transfers and content shared using these modified clients are extremely hard to match to IP addresses, thus are safe enough for average file-sharing of most content.

Of course there are other far less safe but more lightweight and simple clients, which are safer than P2P clients. They use onion routing to make linking IP addresses to specific content hard. However they still link IP addresses directly to file-sharing, though not exposing which content the addresses were responsible for sharing.

Safety
So while sharing content through clients and networks, you should ask yourself is it safe for you to do so with the software and networking that you are using? Are you at risk and is it more than you are willing to handle?

Content and The Scene
There are many types of shared content, both legal and otherwise. Much of the more popular content is considered to be scene content. The scene is often considered as copyrighted music, movies, TV shows, software, warez and anyone sharing such content are usually tagged as pirates. Pirates which are caught, can and often are heavily fined, some may even end up spending time in jail, for the "crime" of illegal file-sharing. If you intend on sharing scene content, unsafe file-sharing is highly recommended against, it is highly risky and sooner or later you will be caught. While of course you are not encouraged to engage in illegal file-sharing by the author of this FAQ, laying out much of the facts the author knows concerning such matters is good for the FAQ's readers. For both law abiding file sharers and pirates alike.

Legal content, since illegal content was already briefly mentioned, next we will point out the less popular legal content, which should be safe to share no matter what methods and clients you use to do so. While sharing such content should be safe, it may not be allowed by your internet service provider and if certain methods are detected, some people have already lost their connections for using them. Worse more people in the future will likely also lose their connections over using file-sharing, even for use which is allowed by their local legal systems. So understand that using unsafe file-sharing can result in losing your internet connection, even if you were not breaking the law by doing so.

So just what is legal content? Legal content is the kind with licenses such as freeware, shareware, demos, trialware, public domain, GPL and LGPL. Homemade contents such as pictures, movies and personal documents are also considered legal, as long as they were originally shared by their authors and artists.

Security Measures
Some file-sharers resort to taking security measures in the hopes of protecting themselves. Such measures include but are not limited to certain client settings, filter applications such as peergaurdian, protowall, both of which use IP block lists to blacklist IP addresses which are suspected to belong to bad peers. Also content filters which block content that is supposed to be bad, either fake, infected by viruses or something along those lines.

Most such measures are limited and weak at least when it comes to the unsafe file-sharing clients and networking. Yet they can help reduce but not totally eliminate exposure to such peers and content.

I2P
Just to make some things clear concerning I2P. First it is not a file-sharing network and application. It is a general purpose network and application for freedom and privacy. No matter what is stated on the official website, forums and by developers, it is ready for large scale use, at the very least by people that are tech savvy. Which largely tends to fall into the age ranges of 30's and under.

That said, it is important to understand the risks of running it, the kind of networking and security it uses. However it is also important to realize that for the average internet user it is safe enough and provides more than enough security already to meet their needs. Just do not expect to use it as providing a haven for paedophiles and pedographic content, that the networks peers are very likely to gang up on anyone that does such things and attempt to turn your information over to the authorities. Note that the term attempt was used, because it is extremely hard to 100 percent prove a peer is the source for such content. Still the networks peers can certainly point authorities in the correct direction to a possible number of addresses they think the content provider may be from and for the authorities to start their investigation with. Though just know that peers are very unlikely to provide the authorities help against each other for other reasons. As many of them do not want to see the network become a haven for pedographic content and thus tarnish the network and projects reputation. So just know while it does help provide and protect a great amount of freedom, for the most part it is within reason. Not something which terrorists and paedophiles are welcomed to use, they should stick to abusing freenet as they have been doing.

Also there is much to I2P beyond the file-sharing clients that have been ported to it. There is real time chat, email, nntp news, websites, forums and other such common applications. Mostly 100 percent legal uses, which peers most commonly use the network for. So just because someone is running I2P does not mean they are likely using it for illegal or even questionable purposes. How much less likely, well nowhere near as likely as the P2P networks, certainly not anywhere close to as likely as freenet. So it should be legally safe to be a I2P peer at least in most areas of the world that have freedom and democracy. Such as America, Canada, Europe, Australia and Japan. As the network grows larger so will the peers safety.

Safety aside, as long as I2P's version is below 1.0 just know that there are bound to be things like bugs and a general lack of documentation, harder to configure and use, though that does not mean you cannot or should not use it. Just that it is still under heavy development and not to demand too much from it and it's developers just yet. If you are bright and willing to spend the time and effort in installing and configuring I2P and its clients, beyond that on a day to day basis it is very little if any time and effort to maintain and use. It is not yet something for the clueless unlike Kazaa and P2P clients are.

Related Sites
There are many such sites, too many to bother listing. A few such websites are
http://eff.org http://planetpeer.de http://www.slyck.com http://www.i2p.net

It is important to note, like everything which is on the internet, not all information found on a website is certain to be completely accurate and unbiased. For example slyck's forums have many posts which can be misleading, total lies and certainly biased towards P2P. You are advised against just taking much of what is on such forums as the complete truth.

The Future
No matter what the future may hold for file-sharing, such as new software and other technology. There is bound to be worse problems with shared content and bad peers, ligitious groups like the RIAA and MPAA, more file-sharers being sued and more. Sure there are safe options available now, which all file-sharers are highly recommended to use instead of the older unsafe options. You can be safe now if you take the time and put in the effort to be. Your own safety is your sole responsibility, you can ignore this FAQ's advice and continue to use unsafe file-sharing clients and networking, it is your choice to stay vulnerable or not.

The future of file-sharing is being built now, the software and networks which will become mainstream for the next five or more years are just being setup and adopted. The older type software and networks are already played out and degrading, even if they continue to grow with more new clueless users.

You do not have to join the ranks of the clueless, such as people who use Kazaa and other such vulnerable P2P. You can choose to show leadership and concern for other file-sharers well being, by adopting the safe software and networks now.


Also visit the File Sharing FAQ at DSL Reports. Download the above inaccurate information in a badly written FSFAQ as a PDF file.

RIAA bans telling friends about new songs

November 30, 2005, LOS ANGELES
The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. "We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material," a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read.
"We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating 'buzz' about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves." RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of-mouth "favorites-sharing" sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.

Check out RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs from The Onion - America's Finest News Source, and a brilliant source of satire | digg story

RIAA Sued for Hacking

A WOMAN who was sued by the Recording Industry of America for file-sharing has countersued the outfit for hacking.
Tanya Andersen, a 41-year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation. She is claiming hurt feelings and "outrage", and deceptive business practices.
According to court documents here, Anderson said the record industry has been abusing the law courts and waged a public relations and public threat campaign targeting file sharing.
She claims that the RIAA hired an outfit called MediaSentry to invade private home computers and collect personal information. Based on private information allegedly extracted from these personal home computers, the record companies have reportedly filed lawsuits against more than 13,500 anonymous "John Does".
She claims the record companies provide the personal information to Settlement Support Center, which engages in outlawed and deceptive debt collection and other illegal conduct to extract money from the people allegedly identified from the secret lawsuits.
She said that she has never downloaded or shared music online. She has not infringed on any of plaintiffs’ alleged copyrighted interest. However, she has been a victim of the record companies’ public threat campaign.
The RIAA falsely claimed that Andersen had been an "unnamed" defendant who was being sued in federal court in the District of Columbia. She was never named in that lawsuit and never received service of a summons and complaint, she said.
When Andersen contacted Settlement Support Center, she was advised that her personal home computer had been secretly entered by the record companies’ agents, MediaSentry.
Apparently she had been up at 4:24am downloading "gangster rap" music under the login name “gotenkito@kazaa.com.” Andersen does not like "gangster rap", does not recognise the name "gotenkito", is not awake at 4:24 a.m. and has never downloaded music.
The Settlement Support Center threatened that if Andersen did not immediately pay them, the record companies would bring an expensive and disruptive federal lawsuit using her name and they would get a judgment for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Looks like this one will run for a while.

See The Inquirer: RIAA sued by victim | digg story | Blog index