Woman illegally downloads 24 songs, fined to tune of $1.9 million - CNN.com.

The RIAA has bribed yet another jury and fined a woman $1.9 million for 'illegally' downloading 24 songs. Do people still pirate individual songs? Since I discovered torrenting I find it easier to pirate by the discography. I've been busy with other stuff but this article reminds me I haven't downloaded any music recently, and I have a long list of artists I wanna listen to. Download all the music you can, spread it around, share it with your friends and family, and support artists directly by going to their shows. Buy indapendent music.

With that said how much would you have had to pay the RIAA?

Here's a screenshot of my Itunes Music folder song count:

MATH: $1,900,000 / 24 songs = $80,000 per song

I have a bunch of podcasts and my own music in there, but according to bribed juries everywhere I currently owe the RIAA about $1,136,000,000, which for the other dyslexics out there is 1.136 billion dollars.

The RIAA suing people who barely pirate obsene amounts of money that they will never actually receive. It doesn't make sense why they're not more outraged at companies that make things like ipods. The current Ipod model has 120GB capacity, that's about 30,000 songs. WHY DOESN'T AN IPOD COST 2 BILLION DOLLARS THEN? Obviously most that music is pirated, millions of people have ipods and very few people in the world have spent $30,000 at 99c/song from the itunes store to fill it up. In case I haven't said it yet in this post, FUCK the RIAA.

Microsoft is getting disparate and desperate, offering a chance at $10,0000 if you use their browser for a few weeks and twitter about it. Check out the contest  Ten Grand is Buried Here | Microsoft Australia. I think it's funny that they don't have anything legitimate to promote their browser so instead they say "our fastest browser yet" and "old Firefox" even though 3.5 is being release in a couple weeks and 3.0 being released a year ago is and was still faster, more secure/standards compliant, etc. than IE. At any rate, since desperation amuses me, I'm posting a bunch of screencaps too so you can see what the above link shows you if you visit it in different browsers. It's kinda sad seeing a massive corporation reduced to throwing money at user contests(instead of at their own staff to make the product better) and childish insults at the competition. But then again the company made its bones by riffing off the competition and locking in deals with oems. The ideal of which is riffing off the wii to make natal which is great,  and then there's the other darker side rearing its head in the online space where they've locked themselves into a corner where all they have is childishness and flailing jabs at the competition. The people have spoken, market share fluctuations are accelerating in their competitors favour.  As more demographics cross over the 50% market share line expect to see a lot more money and name calling from them.

Firefox

Safari

Chrome

Opera

I don't think it's gonna have much impact, just like a really ugly chick playing hard to get and then when you turn her down she tells you she'll only date you if you wear a different shirt every day and IF you're willing to do that you have a 1 in 50,000,000 chance of winning some money. Come on. Especially when there's 4 really hot chicks that put out and know what they're doing just around the corner, and soon in the case of Chrome pre-installed everywhere.

If you browse around MSN there are just tons of ads trying to get you to use their services. Silverlight is total shit, one developer I've spoken to really like it, but it's just not viable, and he was a snob, even the implementations used on live msn sites to promote their products have pixelated poorly made graphics and are slow, it just looks really unappealing. But they're pushing it becasue they want to dominate rich media. Never gonna happen. I read somewhere they're now offering free POP access to Hotmail or Windows Live Mail or whatever the hell they're calling it now(how can they build up so much resentment from their users that they have to rebrand all of their products every few months). Previously it only worked in Outlook Express and a few random email programs that had to pay for the right. But that's so behind, I've got Gmail smtp access for free for moths now, and if Gmail wasn't doing it for me anymore I could just export everything, mail-contacts-calendar-documents, to any conceivable format and move, for that reason I and anyone else that uses Google services does so because their services are awesome. My grandfather tried to leave hotmail about a year ago to gmail but had to keep the hotmail calendar cause it's just not worth retyping his entire calendar, so he's locked in and hates them for it, no matter what they call themselves. Just like enabling free pop access they will have to open up their services but it'll be too late. Even if they somehow magically build usefull open tools by the time they're forced to do it, even blind consumers who just use whatever their computer come with will just hate them so much for all the abuse. It looks like they don't understand that most of their users are from the boom from 1999-2003ish who are just locked into their services and are turning against them. They're user base just isn't growing proportionlly to the rate of internet users. And it bleeds into their other businesses. They want to be in home automation with Micorosft surface and walls covered in wallpaper that's really interactive computer screens and project natal. I personally wouldn't get natal just because it's a camera with a dedicated internet connection built by Microsoft a shady manipulating untrustworthy company that sits in your living room constantly pointed at you while you watch tv and react to commercials. You need trust to enter someone's home like that, and trust has to be earned not bought.

Twitter Users Shame CNN For Not Covering Iran Elections, Riots | NEWS JUNKIE.

Well there you have it, CNN one of the most respected news networks has hit a visible wall with its adventure into social media. They keep adding more and more shows centered around Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace comments and using blogs as sources for stories and it's come back to bite them in the ass. While a blog - the Huffington Post - is liveblogging the Iran elections with Video, images, and reports from the ground http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html. CNN who has enourmous reach and tons of actual reporters and journalists is talking to bikers and reporting on six flags. I'm glad I threw out my tv the other day, but it's not about the medium used it's about all the news shows not just CNN pandoring to advertisers and trying to boost ratings and putting those ambitions over actually reporting news and historic events. A good example of this is MSNBC and their product placement deal with Starbucks and how it's taking over one of their morning news shows. Not just talking about the coffee constantly but also interviewing the CEO about how great the coffee is, instead of the economic shithole the world is in and the thousands of people the guy just laid off.

I thought I'd stop by Facebook this morning(ok it's 1:00pm and I just woke up and happened to go there now-ish, but I was totally working on something cool till early this actual morning[6:40am], so for all intents and purposes this right now is 'morning' for the rest of the post.) and saw they'd updated their Terms of Use now deemed 'Statement of Rights and Responsibilities' which alone probably set at ease at least 30% of its outraged users. For the most part it's the same as before except now they've closed a whole lot of legal loopholes that their lawyers didn't see originally, specifically the stuff that made the contract completely null and void by virtue of being contradictory and unenforcable, and the language has been revised to be 90% not shady, and in the shady spots to be convoluted enough to throw off an estimated combined further 45% of disgruntled current and former users. After that there's an estimated 20% that has to use Facebook for work or networking and does so cautiously and then the again estimated, 5% that realizes they couldn't take the social network giant in a legal battle, and that they could easily change their TOS by a few words to something like "By maintaining a membership you give us lifelong irrevokable consent to use and ownership of your content to do with it as  we please including all your intellectual works you've posted on or may post in the future on Facebook or stashed away in your basement" oh wait, they already tried to do that. I meant do something like that again.

So with that said, what are the goods and bads about the new Facebook TOS (a.k.a. [long pandoring name])?

Pros

• It's now legally enforceable and valid - a pro cause all the protection they claim to provide, they now actually mean it and are legally obligated to enforce it. With an invalid document as they had prior they could do ANYTHING with voluntarily submitted content, including identity, by virtue of it being invalid.
• They now have to give 3-7 days notification when they change the TOS, which will allow users the chance to get out at the very least for one TOS revision, more if in that revision they don't choose to change that very statement, in which case you get at least one more use out of the clause.

Cons

• It's now legally enforceable and valid - even though they had carte blanche with your identity, content, and intellectual property with their old invalid agreement, some local laws trumped such behavior. Now that you're signing a valid contract by using their service, the shady things they stipulate are now their legal right.
• Their ownership of your intellectual property, personal information, and identity(name, address, phone number, pictures of you, etc.) is total and unlimited. ANYTHING you post on Facebook belongs to Facebook until you delete it or close your account. The excerpt below may be confusing,  it doesn't give Facebook the right to use anything you post anywhere on Facebook, instead it gives Facebook the right to use anything you post on Facebook or anywhere else on the net in connection with Facebook(and increasing amount of sites including CNN and other big players, there is no stipulation how loose a connection it needs to be) anywhere in The Universe(incl. France, Mars, Texas, TV, Magazines, Patent office, Jive Records, Radio, etc.). While you have some control over their ownership of your content via privacy and application settings there is nothing in the TOS that stipulates Facebook has to give you the ability to control all aspects of their ownership rights. Furthermore there's no stipulation that you need to be notified when they remove or change the wording of privacy and application controls. In fact, there are no Intellectual Property controls mentioned.
  "For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account (except to the extent your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it)."

So what to make of this? Is Facebook less or more shady now? Here's my survival guide for the current TOS:

1. Use Facebook every day. In some cases(when it involves money, and/or you've written an application for Facebook) you only get 3 days warning of TOS changes and knowing Facebook's past stance on the permanancy of their rights you don't want to be stuck in that mess. You also need time to say goodbye to your 'friends', once you delete your account, any goodbye message will be hidden from other users; snatched from their inboxes.
2. Don't put anything on Facebook or any site that uses 'Facebook Connect' or is in any other way connected with facebook that you don't want to share equal ownership of with Facebook [and any of it's employees acting in the name of Facebook],  including but not limited to your name, likeness, image, identity, video footage of you or your family, art, poetry, music, or any other creative content. It's worth mentioning again that they can do anything with such content anywhere, for and to anyone.
3. If you have to put personal information up, you know, so people know who you are and so you can interact with them, make sure to double check your privacy settings. Keep a note that all the privacy settings that were there yesterday are still there today, because they can change whenever Facebook pleases without notice of any kind. Hope Facebook gives you controls over how THEY can use your content rather than just what type of friends and other users can view your content.

To reiterate and conclude: fuck facebook, they are at par ethically with people that author malicious viruses and data harvesters. I hope Zuckerberg get's analy raped by big donkey dick and/or if the site should EVER manage to turn a profit for him to turn around and support cancer research or something good that balances out the shameless exploitation of his sheep-like mindless users.

I just threw out my TV and I feel ok about it. You think something bad's gonna happen when you do, but nothing did.

Over the last 2/3 years i kinda stopped watching cable tv. I was never just sitting around doing nothing when the shows I liked came on so I used to just watch them online(if it was 'available in my region') or torrent the episodes and play them on my 1st gen softmodded xbmc xbox which was, hooked up to a tv. Recently I came to find two things:

1. I didn't really care enough to download new episodes of stuff
2. I found a whole lot more shows I liked and started trying to get in front of the tv when they were on

oh yeah and a 3rd thing:

3. The only thing I've really gained from tv is hours and hours of lost time. Fleeting precious hours gone watching people cook things I'll never eat, talk to people I'll never meet, places I'll never go and events that will never affect me.

Some days I'd watch CNN for hours, I'd even leave it on while I worked so I could keep up with what was happening in the world and to make sure I listened to the same story told by 8 different groups of people throughout the day. I now know a ton about the inner workings of the U.S. government and virtually nothing about Canadian politics. At least I find that fact funny, or maybe it's more amazing than funny... In my defence this was partly due to a need to understand the deeper layers of what Jon Stewart was talking about, but also partly to understand the even deeper layers of what Stephen Colbert was parodying. I've seen Iron Chef so many times I'm a pro when there's only 1 thing in my fridge and I have to make a 7 course meal. Thanks to Gordan Ramsay I could help any restaurant turn a profit and get their shit together and I feel really comfortable yelling at cooks in a scottish accent. I got to see The Simpsons lose their subtlety and finesse (quite frankly a little piece of me died), and developed ADHD from watching Family Guy, and American Dad. If I ever end up working in a cubicle I'll find it hillarious thanks to the Office. I reaffirmed my vegetarianism watching Anthony Bourdain visit Egypt where a bunch of guys murdered and chopped up a camel before feeding it to him. I now see that it's possible to be a somewhat modern family and practice polygamy thanks to Big Love. Thanks to House I now know for sure that it is really all about the doctors and their egos or perks.. depending on the doctor. They also never show any nurses, anyone who's met at least one nurse and at least one doctor knows that there wouldn't be a functional health care system anywhere without nurses. Without nurses healthcare would be more like factory farming--cold sterile and abusive. Myth Busters is one of the best shows to ever exist by far. Last night was the season premier, the first time I'd ever seen a show that wasn't a repeat which are on all the time cause it's such a great show. It was a 2 hour special of blowing things up and smashing other things. It was late, I was tired, and I feel asleep halfway through. The fact that I missed the other half, doesn't really bother me at all. Watching Jimmy Fallon burst out of the whomb was interesting, but since I'm not a movie critic I've got nowhere to put all my comments. The Roots are the only thing that made it watchable. I feel like I might regret watching Conan's first week, but let's be honest, tonight, late night, late late night.. Every night is really just the same infomercial with the same monologue and slightly different guests reading from a script promoting the next thing on tv or movie they're working on. Planting a little seed so by the time you see the trailer or the promos you've got yourself a little seedling and when it's d-day and you've got to tune in or drive down to the movies you're just dying to buy your ticket to another crappy flick. It's all the same crap though. Watch one season of one show and you get it, you don't have to watch anything else ever, you could come back in 50 years and watch the newest plasma hologram show and you'll see all the jokes coming from a mile away. It's like trying to listen to more than one Bill Hicks album in a day without hoping and praying to find a shotgun delivery service in the local yellow pages. ITS THE SAME SHIT on loop. Break your TV, SMASH your tv... throw it out on the curb, unplug it and melt it down for the uncompromizing soul sucking leach that it is and has been all your life and be free. That is my gift to you, the 5 people that will ever read this. Freedom. It's a cold lifeless dying medium who's only unique contrabutions to the universe are infomercials and made for tv movies. Two things that if left unchecked for too long could flatten the earth all by themselves, individually or together. A medium centered around selling you shit you don't need and don't want. Carson Daly's new format is pretty cool, it's up there with MythBusters, it is. Live music, artist interviews--not the cheesy obviously scripted kind from other shows, but you know what, some content shouldn't be locked up on tv. The few good shows in the sea of crap aren't worth it. Besides there's a pretty spankin' music scene around here and as cool as Carson is it still doesn't beat actually being there. Flight of The Concords,  The Sarah Silverman Program, and tons of other not as good are just the next trend of suedo reality. Triggered by Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and popularized by viewers who got sick of pathetic 'reality shows' especially when they found out during the writer's strike actually had writers. I won't deny that there are some great shows out there but I'd rather get the finished compiled version,  commercial free, comentary, and not have to revolve my life around the schedule of a glass rectangle. "Technology will one day enslave us" is the phrase uttered by someone who hasn't yet taken a step back to see what's happened over the last 110 years.

Hopefully with this post I've released all this useless fucking knowledge back into the ether from where it came. I did it in the hopes that I get a little real estate back that can once again be used to host useful things. Things like thoughts and ideas, and with the extra time maybe, just maybe I can implement one or two of them.

So I was watching the Discovery Channel the other day, and there was this piece on panda bears in zoos, and all this research that's going into why they won't fuck each other. I'm paraphrasing here but the scientist or professor or something, lets just say the highly educated guy that is leading the research and who served as information source for the story said something like this, "in the wild they reproduce at about the same rate as other bears, but for some reason, in captivity they seem to lack the drive to reproduce." As I sat there I tried to wrap my mind around what I was seeing and why scientific and financial resources were being devoted to studying why any intelligent living breathing being would lose their sex drive after being forced into captivity and surrounded by fake plastic trees only to be gawked at by hordes of snot nosed children and lost elderlies of an alien species for hours on end day after day. If any of you idiots who commissioned the study are reading this, it's you. It's the very people who want the pandas to screw that are draining their sex drive. Ironic, a bit, but it's true. So just stop it. You want a panda that sits on the couch all day eating cheesy poofs and watching tv, put it in a zoo. You want a panda to act like a panda, put it where pandas generally live and let it be.

Here in Canada Doritos has just started a new marketing campaign. They're asking people to submit ad spots, and name their "new" flavour. I just tried it and like every other Doritos flavour it's really just a slight variation on their original product. Turns out that fact has drawn a lot of idiots to the Doritos brand over the years. The ability to get excited time after time about the new flavour when the only notable difference is it's name, is a quality possesed by only the highly idiotic.

Doritos knows this, and so they've had to design the contest to weed out the idiots from winning. The reason they care is because it involves tv appearances and press releases for the semi-finalists and obviously Doritos doesn't want to be represented by a clutch of their target demographic, and they certainly don't want to award an idiot with the grand prize which could only initiate a chain reaction of idiotic behaviour.

To prevent this the rules stipulate that to qualify your entry, once they've decided they like it, they want you to answer a skill testing math question.:

Before being declared a Semi-Finalist, the selected entrants will be required to sign and return to Contest Sponsor a Declaration, Release and Assignment (the “Release Form”), described below in Rule 7, and correctly answer without assistance of any kind, whether mechanical or otherwise, a time-limited mathematical skill-testing question to be administered at a mutually convenient time by telephone.

Another way they're filtering out the clueless is by this organic coincidence where some of the submissions(all hosted on YouTube) are set to private, now since the first stage of the contest is largely based on user votes and comments these people have already lost.

So the last few days I've written about Facebook. After leaving Facebook, I remembered that I still had a MySpace account and figured I may as well delete it too while I'm at it. Before I did I looked around a bit and was shocked to see how MySpace had changed over the years. It's very similar to Facebook. Privacy controls, apps you can add to your profile, status updates/news feeds, find and recommend friends based on other friends. I think the only differences between MySpace and Facebook right now is that MySpace profiles can be made to look unique and there are specific profile archetypes for people/musicians/comedians/artists, etc. and their ToS and account deletion process.

MySpace takes a couple days to "process your account deletion" so they can remove all your content from their system as apposed to Facebook which wants to perpetually hold on to anything you upload forever. Like Facebook you get presented with the same awkward forms and so on to try understand why you're deleting your account. They're implemented differently, although both use Javascript effects to present you with custom reasons to stay as you fill out the form, MySpace uses a lightbox effect, and Facebook uses an innerHTML/expanding box approach. Also of note to me and other dyslexics is the confirmation process. Facebook shows you a captcha to make sure you're not a robot, but MySpace sends you a confirmation email to make sure you're you, screening for robots and people that may have hacked into your account.

Both MySpace and Facebook are moving towards a pay to promote business model. A few user generations from now where more privacy conscious people find MySpaces privacy settings, and more people join Facebook just to promote themselves and add as many friends as possible the two will be indistinguishable.

I thought since I'm on the subject I'd have a look at some other social networking sites, specifically the generic ones that try to do it all. The Facebooks and MySpaces if you will. But this post is already pretty long so I'll just leave you with some social network stupidity I've encountered over the last few days.

I'd been using Facebook as a contact database to keep track of everyone's email addresses and phone numbers, so before deleting my account I went through and copied the latest stuff into my phone. In searching for a particular friend the top search result was my own profile and noticed that they added a note to this paradoxical result, "Note: You can always find and click on your own profile in Search." Now why on earth would that ever be necessary. Equally disturbing, if you examine the screencap below is that Facebook lets you Message yourself.

Facebook doesn't let you delete a group. Instead you have to make it secret, and then kick each member out of the group one by one. Not only is this ridiculous, but the whole premise of a secret group on a social networking web site seems odd to me.

Now moving onto MySpace are people a) stupid enough not to understand that MySpace's scope of control doesn't stretch beyond the MySpace.com domain. b) unaware or new to the concept of phishing.. c) really contacting MySpace and blaming them after falling for a phising scam, and d) still not using a decent browser that alerts you when you're on a phishing site. It's my estimation that either all of the above is true giving a lot of weight to the theory of eugenics(to weed out these rediculously lost and confused people), or that MySpace is engaging in fear tactics to keep you on their site a bit longer by presenting you with what's essentially a page full of links back to ad-supported pages within MySpace.

Myspace lost its credibility for a number of reasons. The final nail in the coffin, at least for me, was when they changed their Terms of Service so they they owned the music and all other content including blog posts and images you upload to the site. Facebook updated their Terms of Service on February 4th. They did it without notifying its users. They added a clause where by continuing to use the Facebook service after the terms were updated I, and everyone else, became binded by those terms. They removed a clause where deleting your account ceases their rights to your content.

It's not just an issue of Facebook now being able to use the content I did put up, but Facebook can now create or edit my content and claim I did it. It's about the possibility of Identity theft, deformation of character, etc. and an issue of the slick way they got their users to 'agree' to the terms. Facebook—long heralded as the anti-myspace, the good guys, now has the credibility of a second hand timeshare salesman.
The following is an excerpt from Facebook's ToS:

Licenses

You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

The following is Q&A for you who don't speak lawfirm:

What does that mean Yoav? Why is it so bad?
Facebook wants "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license(with the right to sublicense)" to do stuff with my stuff.

What do you expect, they obviously need to have certain rights with your content otherwise they wouldn't be able to even display it on the site and it would be unusable, right?
a) Facebook's rights to my content should definitely be revokable, and they used to be.
b) Facebook should have notified its users of such a drastic change in their ToS instead of being shady.
c) Facebook does not need rights to "publically perform or display", "scan", "frame", "create derivative works and distribute(through multiple teers)" my content, that's ridiculous.

What else are these bastards trying to get away with?
They want all of these rights to apply, not just to everything you've ever put on Facebook, but to anything anywhere in the world that talks about or alludes to Facebook. This may be a typo, the word 'connection' can be interpreted multiple ways, it's still fucked up.

They want to be able to use my "name, likeness and image for any purpose", in other words they want to be able to call CNN and tell them that "Yoav Givati loves facebook", or "Yoav Givati married a giraffe and flew to Mexico for the honeymoon after stuffing his face with wedding cake" and I can't do anything legally to stop them. They can even put me in a commercial without compensating me, speak for me in public, commit crimes in my name, sell and perform any art or content I've uploaded in the past, and other unspeakable thing that I, as a not evil internet company, cannot imagine.

But Yoav, I'm sure once they see everyone's reaction to this they'll change it to something more acceptable.. right?

No, Facebook's big revenue idea(after years of not being profitable) is to use people's image to sell products to each other. like "Yoav went to so and so amusement park yesterday!, he loved it, click here to buy tickets" This used to be an opt in feature, but no one opted in, and it used to be based on fact, like say if I had actually gone to an amusement park, now it doesn't have to be.

What to do now?

It would be stupid to just delete my account now when there's a chance they'll reconstitute their ToS to include a clause that severs their complete and unlimited ownership and carte blanche of my content and identity upon account deletion. If I just delete my account now I'd be doing so with the current terms, which I do not accept.

I've taken down all my content except my email address, and I've deleted all my posts and groups(except yoav's pinky finger which I'm not an administrator of since I landed on that island with my coconut radio I made.) Facebook does still claim to have copies of everything archived and still has the right to use those copies as described above. I removed my content merely to show my distaste for the road Facebook as gone down and to make it clear to my friends that I don't use Facebook anymore, and won't.