Federico Pistono - Blog

Silvio Berlusconi: ten more [than fair] questions

Federico Pistono — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:09:37 +0000

The private and public behaviour of Italy’s prime minister is under intense scrutiny. A leading Italian newspaper has asked him for an explanation. Geoff Andrews adds to its list of queries with ten of his own.

Dear Signor Berlusconi,

It is now nearly three weeks since La Repubblica published its list of ten questions in connection with your relationship to Noemi Letizia. You have chosen not to answer their questions, claiming that the newspaper's initiative was part of a campaign organised by the left. In the weeks since, you have accused La Repubblica of orchestrating a left-wing plot that has extended to the international press, drawing in the Times and the Economist, amongst others. In this period you have also described the Italian parliament as "useless" and judges as being fuelled by "hatred" and "jealousy".

It is now only days before the European elections to be held across the European Union's member-states on 4-7 June 2009, with Italy's on 6-7 June; these will be followed by Italy's hosting of the G8 summit in L'Aquila on 8-10 July. Your response has once again raised questions of wider public interest over your performance as Italian prime minister. I would like to put these further ten questions to you now.

1) You have made many criticisms of the role of the press in this case, despite the fact that Il Giornale (a paper owned by your family), as well as other newspapers, have regularly defended your conduct. Few prime ministers have that privilege, yet you persist in saying that the press is against you. What is your understanding, then, of a free press? For example, would you put any conditions on criticisms the press may make of the prime minister?

2) You accused La Repubblica of "exploiting private matters for political ends". Yet, the "public" and "private" boundaries often overlap in your political life, notably through your own vast private ownership of daily newspapers and several TV stations, while you simultaneously wield political power. You agreed to resolve this "conflict of interests" within 100 days of taking office, yet nothing has been done. There are wide criticisms of this situation throughout Europe. Why have you not resolved this "conflict of interests" and do you not think it presents a problem for Italian democracy?

3) On 21 May 2009, you described the Italian parliament as "useless", suggesting that only 100 MPs were needed to get the work done. At the same time, you claim that the Italian people are "with you". Is your view, then, that the Italian electorate would happily give you more power to "get things done" more efficiently?

4) You have compared the role of government to that of a private company, and contrasted legislators unfavourably with entrepreneurs. Do you understand the difference between being a successful salesman and a successful statesman?

5) On 19 May, an Italian court ruled that you had bribed your British lawyer, David Mills, by paying $600,000 to give false testimony on your behalf. Mills was convicted in February, though you have been protected by parliamentary-immunity legislation passed by your government. You have said that you will be making a statement to parliament on the matter "as soon as you have time", but not before the European elections. Why is that and when will the statement be made?

6) In addition to your criticisms of the Italian parliament, you regularly attack Italian judges for their bias and "insanity". You have recently faced criticism for undermining constitutional procedures, leading to conflict with the president of the Italian republic, Giorgio Napolitano, most recently in the right-to-die case of Eluana Englaro. It has been claimed that you yourself have high aspirations to succeed Napolitano. Can you confirm your intention to become president of the republic and what would you bring to the role?

7) In July 2009 you will be hosting a G8 summit in L'Aquila. At previous summits and international gatherings of world leaders, you have had some communication problems with some of your peers. Do you envisage any more this year?

8) What, in your view, are your greatest achievements as Italian prime minister?

9) During the last few weeks you have denied being directly involved in the selection of TV showgirls as parliamentary candidates for your party, even though your own newspaper Il Giornale has admitted as much. Can you clarify whether you have or you have not?

10) Finally, why does Noemi Letizia, your 18-year-old friend in Naples, call you "Papi"?

Yours sincerely,

Geoff Andrews

From OpenDemocracy.

The blog gets facelift and upgrade: drupal 6.12 and facebook connect

Federico Pistono — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:43:09 +0000

Good news everyone! I took some time to make this blog a little bit more usable, as well as safe. I made quite a lot of improvements, here's a list of the most significant ones.

Dupal 6.12

I've been running Drupal 5 for quite some time, and I've meaning to upgrade to Drupal 6 (version 12) since I had the chance to work with it and see the huge improvements the community has made to this amazing Open Source Project. It's now faster to load, better looking (improved theming), more secure, easier to use, supports OpenID in its core, and a lot of other small goodies that make it irresistible. It's the most important update, as well as the least noticeable by the end user.

Facebook Connect

See that nice facebook icon, just down the login form? This module allows you to login on my blog using your Facebook login and password. Sweet.

After logging through Facebook Connect, you can create a local account
You can choose which of your Facebook public information you want to import and synchronize with your local account, following Facebook Connect API Terms of use
You can see which of your Facebook friends already have an account on this blog
You can publish a customizable message on your Facebook feed announcing that your have created an account here
You can invite your Facebook friends to create an account here

For this purpose I'm using the excellent Facebook Connect drupal module.

Quicktabs and AJAX sidebar blocks

Nothing really special, but it improved the readability of the blog. Eveything is more handy and clear. I hope you like it.

Let me know what you think. ^_^

When pigs fly: the death of Oink, the birth of dissent, and a brief history of record industry suicide

Federico Pistono — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:37:13 +0000

I've been meaning to write a serious article the RIAA, the music industry, and their futile and utterly nonsensical war against the music fans. I regularly read torrentfreak, the Creative Commons blog and i followed very closely the Nine Inch Nails new business model. I finally found an almost exhaustive article that I can say it fairly represents the past, the present and the future of the music industry as we know it. A slow and painful death, with the record labels burning to the ground, and we'll all dance around the fire, in feast.

This is a copy of the original article "When pigs fly: the death of Oink, the birth of dissent, and a brief history of record industry suicide" by Demonbaby, a.k.a. Rob Sheridan, Nine Inch Nails' art director, photographer, and video editor.

[Currently Listening To: Music I Didn't Pay For]

For quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I've thought about it many times, but never gone through with it, because the issue is such a broad, messy one - such a difficult thing to address fairly and compactly. I knew it would result in a rambly, unfocused commentary, and my exact opinion has teetered back and forth quite a bit over the years anyway. But on Monday, when I woke up to the news that Oink, the world famous torrent site and mecca for music-lovers everywhere, had been shut down by international police and various anti-piracy groups, I knew it was finally time to try and organize my thoughts on this huge, sticky, important issue. For the past eight years, I've worked on and off with major record labels as a designer ("Major" is an important distinction here, because major labels are an entirely different beast than many indie labels - they're the ones with the power, and they are the ones driving the industry-wide push against piracy). It was 1999 when I got my first taste of the inner-workings of a major record label - I was a young college student, and the inside of a New York label office seemed so vast and exciting. Dozens of worker bees hummed away at their desks on phones and computers. Music posters and stacks of CDs littered every surface. Everyone seemed to have an assistant, and the assistants had assistants, and you couldn't help but wonder "what the hell do all these people do?" I tagged along on $1500 artist dinners paid for by the labels. Massive bar tabs were regularly signed away by record label employees with company cards. You got used to people billing as many expenses back to the record company as they could. I met the type of jive, middle-aged, blazer-wearing, coke-snorting, cartoon character label bigwigs who you'd think were too cliche to exist outside the confines of Spinal Tap. It was all strange and exciting, but one thing that always resonated with me was the sheer volume of money that seemed to be spent without any great deal of concern. Whether it was excessive production budgets or "business lunches" that had nothing to do with business, one of my first reactions to it all was, "so this is why CDs cost $18..." An industry of excess. But that's kind of what you expected from the music business, right? It's where rock stars are made. It's where you get stretch limos with hot tubs in the back, where you get private jets and cocaine parties. Growing up in the '80's, with pop royalty and hair metal bands, you were kind of led to think, of course record labels blow money left and right - there's just so much of it to go around! Well, you know what they say: The bigger they are...

In those days, "piracy" was barely even a word in the music world. My friends and I traded MP3s in college over the local network, but they were scattered and low-quality. It felt like a novelty - like a digital version of duping a cassette tape - hardly a replacement for CDs. CDs sounded good and you could bring them with you in your DiscMan, and the only digital music you could get was as good as your friends' CD collections, anyway. It never occurred to any of us that digital files were the future. But as it turned out, lots of kids, in lots of colleges around the world, had the same idea of sharing MP3 files over their local networks, and eventually, someone paid attention to that idea and made Napster. Suddenly, it was like all those college networks were tied together, and you could find all this cool stuff online. It was easier and more efficient than record stores, it was powered by music fans, and, well, it was free. Suddenly you didn't have to pay 15 to 18 bucks for an album and hope it was good, you could download some tracks off the internet and check it out first. But you still always bought the CD if you liked it - I mean, who wants all their music to be on the computer? I sure didn't. But increasingly, more and more people did. For college kids, Napster was a Godsend, because you can all but guarantee two things about most college kids: They love music, and they're dirt poor. So it grew, and it grew, and it started to grow into the mainstream, and that's when the labels woke up and realized something important was happening. At that point they could have seen it as either a threat or an opportunity, and they, without hesitation, determined it to be a threat. It was a threat because essentially someone had come up with a better, free distribution method for the labels' product. To be fair, you can imagine how confusing this must have been for them - is there even a historical precedent for an industry's products suddenly being able to replicate and distribute on their own, without cost?

For quite a while - long after most tech-savvy music lovers - I resisted the idea of stealing music. Of course I would download MP3s - I downloaded a lot of stuff - but I would always make sure to buy the physical CD if it was something I liked. I knew a lot of musicians, a lot of them bewildered at what was happening to the industry they used to understand. People were downloading their music en masse, gorging on this new frontier like pigs at a troff - and worst of all, they felt entitled to do so. It was like it was okay simply because the technology existed that made it possible. But it wasn't okay - I mean, let's face it, no matter how you rationalized it, it was stealing, and because the technology existed to hotwire a car didn't make that okay, either. The artists lost control of distribution: They couldn't present albums the way they wanted to, in a package with nice artwork. They couldn't reveal it the way they wanted to, because music pirates got the albums online well before the actual release date. Control had been taken away from everyone who used to have it. It was a scary time in unfamiliar territory, where suddenly music fans became enemies to the artists and companies they had supported for years. It led to laughable hyperbole from bands like Metallica, instantly the poster-children of cry-baby rich rock stars, and the beginning of the image problem the industry has faced in its handling of the piracy issue. But still, at the time, I understood where they were coming from. Most musicians weren't rich like Metallica, and needed all the album sales they could get for both income and label support. Plus, it was their art, and they had created it - why shouldn't they be able to control how it's distributed, just because some snotty, acne-faced internet kids had found a way to cheat the system? And these entitled little internet brats, don't they realize that albums cost money to create, and to produce, and to promote? How is there going to be any new music if no one's paying for it?

On top of that, I couldn't get into the idea of an invisible music library that lives on my computer. Where's the artwork? Where's my collection? I want the booklet, the packaging... I want shelves and shelves of albums that I've spent years collecting, that I can pore over and impress my friends with... I want to flip through the pages, and hold the CD in my hand... Being a kid who got into music well past the days of vinyl, CDs were all I had, and they still felt important to me.

It's all changed.

In a few short years, the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the record industry has rapidly worn away all of my noble intentions of clinging to the old system, and has now pushed me into full-on dissent. I find myself fully immersed in digital music, almost never buying CDs, and fully against the methods of the major record labels and the RIAA. And I think it would do the music industry a lot of good to pay attention to why - because I'm just one of millions, and there will be millions more in the years to come. And it could have happened very, very differently.

As the years have passed, and technology has made digital files the most convenient, efficient, and attractive method of listening to music for many people, the rules and cultural perceptions regarding music have changed drastically. We live in the iPod generation - where a "collection" of clunky CDs feels archaic - where the uniqueness of your music collection is limited only by how eclectic your taste is. Where it's embraced and expected that if you like an album, you send it to your friend to listen to. Whether this guy likes it or not, iPods have become synonymous with music - and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226. How does that make sense? It's the ugly truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends.

Already is the key word, because it didn't have to be this way, and that's become the main source of my utter lack of sympathy for the dying record industry: They had a chance to move forward, to evolve with technology and address the changing needs of consumers - and they didn't. Instead, they panicked - they showed their hand as power-hungry dinosaurs, and they started to demonize their own customers, the people whose love of music had given them massive profits for decades. They used their unfair record contracts - the ones that allowed them to own all the music - and went after children, grandparents, single moms, even deceased great grandmothers - alongside many other common people who did nothing more than download some songs and leave them in a shared folder - something that has become the cultural norm to the iPod generation. Joining together in what has been referred to as an illegal cartel and using the RIAA as their attack dogs, the record labels have spent billions of dollars attempting to scare people away from downloading music. And it's simply not working. The pirating community continues to out-smart and out-innovate the dated methods of the record companies, and CD sales continue to plummet while exchange of digital music on the internet continues to skyrocket. Why? Because freely-available music in large quantities is the new cultural norm, and the industry has given consumers no fair alternative. They didn't jump in when the new technologies were emerging and think, "how can we capitalize on this to ensure that we're able to stay afloat while providing the customer what they've come to expect?" They didn't band together and create a flat monthly fee for downloading all the music you want. They didn't respond by drastically lowering the prices of CDs (which have been ludicrously overpriced since day one, and actually increased in price during the '90's), or by offering low-cost DRM-free legal MP3 purchases. Their entry into the digital marketplace was too little too late - a precedent of free, high-quality, DRM-free music had already been set.

There seem to be a lot of reasons why the record companies blew it. One is that they're really not very smart. They know how to do one thing, which is sell records in a traditional retail environment. From personal experience I can tell you that the big labels are beyond clueless in the digital world - their ideas are out-dated, their methods make no sense, and every decision is hampered by miles and miles of legal tape, copyright restrictions, and corporate interests. Trying to innovate with a major label is like trying to teach your Grandmother how to play Halo 3: frustrating and ultimately futile. The easiest example of this is how much of a fight it's been to get record companies to sell MP3s DRM-free. You're trying to explain a new technology to an old guy who made his fortune in the hair metal days. You're trying to tell him that when someone buys a CD, it has no DRM - people can encode it into their computer as DRM-free MP3s within seconds, and send it to all their friends. So why insult the consumer by making them pay the same price for copy-protected MP3s? It doesn't make any sense! It just frustrates people and drives them to piracy! They don't get it: "It's an MP3, you have to protect it or they'll copy it." But they can do the same thing with the CDs you already sell!! Legal tape and lots of corporate bullshit. If these people weren't the ones who owned the music, it'd all be over already, and we'd be enjoying the real future of music. Because like with any new industry, it's not the people from the previous generation who are going to step in and be the innovators. It's a new batch.

Newspapers are a good example: It used to be that people read newspapers to get the news. That was the distribution method, and newspaper companies controlled it. You paid for a newspaper, and you got your news, that's how it worked. Until the internet came along, and a new generation of innovative people created websites, and suddenly anyone could distribute information, and they could distribute it faster, better, more efficiently, and for free. Obviously this hurt the newspaper industry, but there was nothing they could do about it, because they didn't own the information itself - only the distribution method. Their only choice was to innovate and find ways to compete in a new marketplace. And you know what? Now I can get live, up-to-the-minute news for free, on thousands of different sources across the internet - and The New York Times still exists. Free market capitalism at its finest. It's not a perfect example, but it is a part of how the internet is changing every form of traditional media. It happened with newspapers, it's happening now with music, and TV and cell phones are next on the chopping block. In all cases technology demands that change will happen, it's just a matter of who will find ways to take advantage of it, and who won't.

Unlike newspapers, record companies own the distribution and the product being distributed, so you can't just start your own website where you give out music that they own - and that's what this is all about: distribution. Lots of pro-piracy types argue that music can be free because people will always love music, and they'll pay for concert tickets, and merchandise, and the marketplace will shift and artists will survive. Well, yes, that might be an option for some artists, but that does nothing to help the record labels, because they don't make any money off of merchandise, or concert tickets. Distribution and ownership are what they control, and those are the two things piracy threatens. The few major labels left are parts of giant media conglomerations - owned by huge parent companies for whom artists and albums are just numbers on a piece of paper. It's why record companies shove disposable pop crap down your throat instead of nurturing career artists: because they have CEOs and shareholders to answer to, and those people don't give a shit if a really great band has the potential to get really successful, if given the right support over the next decade. They see that Gwen Stefani's latest musical turd sold millions, because parents of twelve year old girls still buy music for their kids, and the parent company demands more easy-money pop garbage that will be forgotten about next month. The only thing that matters to these corporations is profit - period. Music isn't thought of as an art form, as it was in the earlier days of the industry where labels were started by music-lovers - it's a product, pure and simple. And many of these corporations also own the manufacturing plants that create the CDs, so they make money on all sides - and lose money even from legal MP3s.

At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era. These laws allow the labels to maintain their stranglehold on music copyrights, and they allow the RIAA to sue the pants off of any file-sharing grandmother they please. Since the labels are owned by giant corporations with a great deal of money, power, and political influence, the RIAA is able to lobby politicians and government agencies to manipulate copyright laws for their benefit. The result is absurdly disproportionate fines, and laws that in some cases make file sharing a heftier charge than armed robbery. This is yet another case of private, corporate interests using political influence to turn laws in the opposite direction of the changing values of the people. Or, as this very smart assessment from a record executive described it: "a clear case of a multinational conglomerate using its political muscle to the disadvantage of everyone but itself." But shady political maneuvers and scare tactics are all the RIAA and other anti-piracy groups have left, because people who download music illegally now number in the hundreds of millions, and they can't sue everyone. At this point they're just trying to hold up what's left of the dam before it bursts open. Their latest victim is Oink, a popular torrent site specializing in music.

If you're not familiar with Oink, here's a quick summary: Oink was was a free members-only site - to join it you had to be invited by a member. Members had access to an unprecedented community-driven database of music. Every album you could ever imagine was just one click away. Oink's extremely strict quality standards ensured that everything on the site was at pristine quality - 192kbps MP3 was their bare minimum, and they championed much higher quality MP3s as well as FLAC lossless downloads. They encouraged logs to verify that the music had been ripped from the CD without any errors. Transcodes - files encoded from other encoded files, resulting in lower quality - were strictly forbidden. You were always guaranteed higher quality music than iTunes or any other legal MP3 store. Oink's strict download/share ratio ensured that every album in their vast database was always well-seeded, resulting in downloads faster than anywhere else on the internet. A 100mb album would download in mere seconds on even an average broadband connection. Oink was known for getting pre-release albums before anyone else on the internet, often months before they hit retail - but they also had an extensive catalogue of music dating back decades, fueled by music lovers who took pride in uploading rare gems from their collection that other users were seeking out. If there was an album you couldn't find on Oink, you only had to post a request for it, and wait for someone who had it to fill your request. Even if the request was extremely rare, Oink's vast network of hundreds of thousands of music-lovers eager to contribute to the site usually ensured you wouldn't have to wait long.

In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I say that safely without exaggeration. It was like the world's largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers. If the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn't make Oink illegal, the site's creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now. He would have revolutionized music distribution. Instead, he's a criminal, simply for finding the best way to fill rising consumer demand. I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink - but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen.

Here's an interesting aside: The RIAA loves to complain about music pirates leaking albums onto the internet before they're released in stores - painting the leakers as vicious pirates dead set on attacking their enemy, the music industry. But you know where music leaks from? From the fucking source, of course - the labels! At this point, most bands know that once their finished album is sent off to the label, the risk of it turning up online begins, because the labels are full of low-level workers who happen to be music fans who can't wait to share the band's new album with their friends. If the album manages to not leak directly from the label, it is guaranteed to leak once it heads off to manufacturing. Someone at the manufacturing plant is always happy to sneak off with a copy, and before long, it turns up online. Why? Because people love music, and they can't wait to hear their favorite band's new album! It's not about profit, and it's not about maliciousness. So record industry, maybe if you could protect your own assets a little better, shit wouldn't leak - don't blame the fans who flock to the leaked material online, blame the people who leak it out of your manufacturing plants in the first place! But assuming that's a hole too difficult to plug, it begs the question, "why don't labels adapt to the changing nature of distribution by selling new albums online as soon as they're finished, before they have a chance to leak, and release the physical CDs a couple months later?" Well, for one, labels are still obsessed with Billboard chart numbers - they're obsessed with determining the market value of their product by how well it fares in its opening week. Selling it online before the big retail debut, before they've had months to properly market the product to ensure success, would mess up those numbers (nevermind that those numbers mean absolutely nothing anymore). Additionally, selling an album online before it hits stores makes retail outlets (who are also suffering in all this) angry, and retail outlets have far more power than they should. For example, if a record company releases an album online but Wal-Mart won't have the CD in their stores for another two months (because it needs to be manufactured), Wal-Mart gets mad. Who cares if Wal-Mart gets mad, you ask? Well, record companies do, because Wal-Mart is, both mysteriously and tragically, the largest music retailer in the world. That means they have power, and they can say "if you sell Britney Spears' album online before we can sell it in our stores, we lose money. So if you do that, we're not going to stock her album at all, and then you'll lose a LOT of money." That kind of greedy business bullshit happens all the time in the record industry, and the consistent result is a worse experience for consumers and music lovers.

Which is why Oink was so great - take away all the rules and legal ties, all the ownership and profit margins, and naturally, the result is something purely for, by, and in service of the music fan. And it actually helps musicians - file-sharing is "the greatest marketing tool ever to come along for the music industry." One of Oink's best features was how it allowed users to connect similar artists, and to see what people who liked a certain band also liked. Similar to Amazon's recommendation system, it was possible to spend hours discovering new bands on Oink, and that's what many of its users did. Through sites like Oink, the amount and variety of music I listen to has skyrocketed, opening me up to hundreds of artists I never would have experienced otherwise. I'm now fans of their music, and I may not have bought their CDs, but I would have never bought their CD anyway, because I would have never heard of them! And now that I have heard of them, I go to their concerts, and I talk them up to my friends, and give my friends the music to listen to for themselves, so they can go to the concerts, and tell their friends, and so on. Oink was a network of music lovers sharing and discovering music. And yes, it was all technically illegal, and destined to get shut down, I suppose. But it's not so much that they shut Oink down that boils my blood, it's the fucking bullshit propaganda they put out there. If the industry tried to have some kind of compassion - if they said, "we understand that these are just music fans trying to listen to as much music as they can, but we have to protect our assets, and we're working on an industry-wide solution to accommodate the changing needs of music fans"... Well, it's too late for that, but it would be encouraging. Instead, they make it sound like they busted a Columbian drug cartel or something. They describe it as a highly-organized piracy ring. Like Oink users were distributing kiddie porn or some shit. The press release says: "This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure." Wh - what?? That's EXACTLY what it was! No one made any money on that site - there were no ads, no registration fees. The only currency was ratio - the amount you shared with other users - a brilliant way of turning "free" into a sort of booming mini-economy. The anti-piracy groups have tried to spin the notion that you had to pay a fee to join Oink, which is NOT true - donations were voluntary, and went to support the hosting and maintenance of the site. If the donations spilled into profit for the guy who ran the site, well he damn well deserved it - he created something truly remarkable.

So the next question is, what now?

For the major labels, it's over. It's fucking over. You're going to burn to the fucking ground, and we're all going to dance around the fire. And it's your own fault. Surely, somewhere deep inside, you had to know this day was coming, right? Your very industry is founded on an unfair business model of owning art you didn't create in exchange for the services you provide. It's rigged so that you win every time - even if the artist does well, you do ten times better. It was able to exist because you controlled the distribution, but now that's back in the hands of the people, and you let the ball drop when you could have evolved.

None of this is to say that there's no way for artists to make money anymore, or even that it's the end of record labels. It's just the end of record labels as we know them. A lot of people point to the Radiohead model as the future, but Radiohead is only dipping its toe into the future to test the waters. What at first seemed like a rainbow-colored revolution has now been openly revealed as a marketing gimmick: Radiohead was "experimenting," releasing a low-quality MP3 version of an album only to punish the fans who paid for it by later releasing a full-quality CD version with extra tracks. According to Radiohead's manager: "If we didn't believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD then we wouldn't do what we are doing." Ouch. Radiohead was moving in the right direction, but if they really want to start a revolution, they need to place the "pay-what-you-want" digital album on the same content and quality level as the "pay-what-we-want" physical album.

Ultimately, I don't know what the future model is going to be - I think all the current pieces of the puzzle will still be there, but they need to be re-ordered, and the rules need to be changed. Maybe record labels of the future exist to help front recording costs and promote artists, but they don't own the music. Maybe music is free, and musicians make their money from touring and merchandise, and if they need a label, the label takes a percentage of their tour and merch profits. Maybe all-digital record companies give bands all the tools they need to sell their music directly to their fans, taking a small percentage for their services. In any case, the artists own their own music.

I used to reject the wishy-washy "music should be free!" mantra of online music thieves. I knew too much about the intricacies and economics of it, of the rock-and-a-hard-place situation many artists were in with their labels. I thought there were plenty of new ways to sell music that would be fair to all parties involved. But I no longer believe that, because the squabbling, backwards, greedy, ownership-obsessed major labels will never let it happen, and that's more clear to me now than ever. So maybe music has to be free. Maybe taking the money out of music is the only way to get money back into it. Maybe it's time to abandon the notion of the rock star - of music as a route to fame and fortune. The best music was always made by people who weren't in it for the money, anyway. Maybe smart, talented musicians will find ways to make a good living with or without CD sales. Maybe the record industry execs who made their fortunes off of unfair contracts and distribution monopolies should just walk away, confident that they milked a limited opportunity for all it was worth, and that it's time to find fortune somewhere else. Maybe in the hands of consumers, the music marketplace will expand in new and lucrative ways no one can even dream of yet. We won't know until music is free, and eventually it's going to be. Technological innovation destroys old industries, but it creates new ones. You can't fight it forever.

Until the walls finally come down, we're in what will inevitably be looked back on as a very awkward, chaotic period in music history - fans are being arrested for sharing the music they love, and many artists are left helpless, unable to experiment with new business models because they're locked into record contracts with backwards-thinking labels.

So what can you and I do to help usher in the brave new world? The beauty of Oink was how fans willingly and hyper-efficiently took on distribution roles that traditionally have cost labels millions of dollars. Music lovers have shown that they're much more willing to put time and effort into music than they are money. It's time to show artists that there's no limit to what an energized online fanbase can accomplish, and all they'll ever ask for in return is more music. And it's time to show the labels that they missed a huge opportunity by not embracing these opportunities when they had the chance.

1. Stop buying music from major labels. Period. The only way to force change is to hit the labels where it hurts - their profits. The major labels are like Terry Schiavo right now - they're on life support, drooling in a coma, while white-haired guys in suits try and change the laws to keep them alive. But any rational person can see that it's too late, and it's time to pull out the feeding tube. In this case, the feeding tube is your money. Find out which labels are members/supporters of the RIAA and similar copyright enforcement groups, and don't support them in any way. The RIAA Radar is a great tool to help you with this. Don't buy CDs, don't buy iTunes downloads, don't buy from Amazon, etc. Steal the music you want that's on the major labels. It's easy, and despite the RIAA's scare tactics, it can be done safely - especially if more and more people are doing it. Send letters to those labels, and to the RIAA, explaining very calmly and professionally that you will no longer be supporting their business, because of their bullish scare tactics towards music fans, and their inability to present a forward-thinking digital distribution solution. Tell them you believe their business model is outdated and the days of companies owning artists' music are over. Make it very clear that you will continue to support the artists directly in other ways, and make it VERY clear that your decision has come about as a direct result of the record company's actions and inactions regarding digital music.

2. Support artists directly. If a band you like is stuck on a major label, there are tons of ways you can support them without actually buying their CD. Tell everyone you know about them - start a fansite if you're really passionate. Go to their shows when they're in town, and buy t-shirts and other merchandise. Here's a little secret: Anything a band sells that does not have music on it is outside the reach of the record label, and monetarily supports the artist more than buying a CD ever would. T-shirts, posters, hats, keychains, stickers, etc. Send the band a letter telling them that you're no longer going to be purchasing their music, but you will be listening to it, and you will be spreading the word and supporting them in other ways. Tell them you've made this decision because you're trying to force change within the industry, and you no longer support record labels with RIAA affiliations who own the music of their artists.

If you like bands who are releasing music on open, non-RIAA indie labels, buy their albums! You'll support the band you like, and you'll support hard-working, passionate people at small, forward-thinking music labels. If you like bands who are completely independent and are releasing music on their own, support them as much as possible! Pay for their music, buy their merchandise, tell all your friends about them and help promote them online - prove that a network of passionate fans is the best promotion a band can ask for.

3. Get the message out. Get this message out to as many people as you can - spread the word on your blog or your MySpace, and more importantly, tell your friends at work, or your family members, people who might not be as tuned into the internet as you are. Teach them how to use torrents, show them where to go to get music for free. Show them how to support artists while starving the labels, and who they should and shouldn't be supporting.

4. Get political. The fast-track to ending all this nonsense is changing intellectual property laws. The RIAA lobbies politicians to manipulate copyright laws for their own interests, so voters need to lobby politicians for the peoples' interests. Contact your local representatives and senators. Tell them politely and articulately that you believe copyright laws no longer reflect the interests of the people, and you will not vote for them if they support the interests of the RIAA. Encourage them to draft legislation that helps change the outdated laws and disproportionate penalties the RIAA champions. Contact information for state representatives can be found here, and contact information for senators can be found here. You can email them, but calling on the phone or writing them actual letters is always more effective.

Tonight, with Oink gone, I find myself wondering where I'll go now to discover new music. All the other options - particularly the legal ones - seem depressing by comparison. I wonder how long it will be before everyone can legally experience the type of music nirvana Oink users became accustomed to? I'm not too worried - something even better will rise out of Oink's ashes, and the RIAA will respond with more lawsuits, and the cycle will repeat itself over and over until the industry has finally bled itself to death. And then everything will be able to change, and it will be in the hands of musicians and fans and a new generation of entrepreneurs to decide how the new record business is going to work. Whether you agree with it or not, it's fact. It's inevitable - because the determination of fans to share music is much, much stronger than the determination of corporations to stop it.

Linux, Windows and OS X according to their users

Federico Pistono — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:42:22 +0000

True.

Amazing HTML demo - the future of video and Web is Open Source

Federico Pistono — Sat, 02 May 2009 10:32:27 +0000

I report verbatim an article from the standblog which represents perfectly what I think is the future of video and how should the web be: Open Source, open minded, multiplatform, easy, fast and cool.

For years, digital video has been soaring, just like still digital images 15 years earlier. It's now easy to capture video, editing it is now possible thanks to user-friendly applications and with broadband becoming more common, the pipes are now big enough to download video. The only caveat is that Web browsers have not evolved over time to include video, because the dominant browser vendor had little reason to invest in it. Proprietary plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime or Windows Media have been until now the only way for Web developers to include video in their Web application. Unfortunately, resorting to proprietary plug-ins and patented codecs has drawbacks. I won't get into the patent and proprietary code issues and focus on the fact that resorting to plug-ins for video brings some limitations to what one can do. Plug-ins are like boxy islands of information on a page. They can do wonders by themselves, but they have a hard time being mixed with the rest of the Web content. It's hard for example to interact with a Flash video, unless you write the complete page in Flash. But all of this is now over, since Firefox 3.5 and other modern browsers support native video using the new <video> element. Now, a native video is just an element in a page that you can manipulate with the DOM, style with CSS etc.

This is why my friend Paul Rouget has written an amazing demo, which uses no Plug-in technology, juste native Web technologies such as JavaScript, DOM, and HTML 5 elements (video and canvas). If you run Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 or Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 or later, you can visit Paul's Dynamic Content Injection demo. If you want to experience it yourself, just Get your copy of Firefox 3.1/3.5 Beta, install it and visit Paul's demo. For those of my readers who are stuck with another browser for some reason (and have to use the old proprietary plug-ins), I'm made a quick screencast below:

Screencast of Paul Rouget's Dynamic content injection via canvas and video elements

(If you can't view this video for some reason, here it is in Ogg Theora format (11MB) and MPEG-4 format (31MB))

What's cool with this demo?

It's built with native Open Web technologies: JavaScript + DOM, CSS and HTML 5 (canvas and video) that hundreds of thousand people are already familiar with.
It's Open Source by default. You can view the source and learn from it. This is one of the very reasons why the Web is so wonderful: it's the mother of all generative technologies.
It's just the beginning (at least we hope it is) of very cool innovations around videos and special effects. When will we see a Web-based video-editing application? Who knows what we'll collectively be able to build?

Want more explanations of what happens under the hood? Just View Source (Ctrl-U)^[1], read the code and head over to Paul's explanations. Then imagine what you can do with this... and build it!

Notes

[1] Try that with a Flash applet

UK police murders harmless man at the G20

Federico Pistono — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:12:08 +0000

Dramatic footage obtained by the Guardian shows that the man who died at last week's G20 protests in London was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton–wielding police officer in riot gear.

Moments after the assault on Ian Tomlinson was captured on video, he suffered a heart attack and died.

The Guardian has handed a dossier of evidence to the police complaints watchdog.

It sheds new light on the events surrounding the death of the 47-year-old newspaper seller, who had been on his way home from work when he was confronted by lines of riot police near the Bank of England.

The submission to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) includes a collection of testimonies from witnesses, along with the video footage, shot at around 7.20pm, which shows Tomlinson at Royal Exchange Passage.

The film reveals that as he walks, with his hands in his pockets, he does not speak to the police or offer any resistance.

A phalanx of officers, some with dogs and some in riot gear, are close behind him and try to urge him forward.

A Metropolitan police officer appears to strike him with a baton, hitting him from behind on his upper thigh.

Moments later, the same policeman rushes forward and, using both hands, pushes Tomlinson in the back and sends him flying to the ground, where he remonstrates with police who stand back, leaving bystanders to help him to his feet.

The man who shot the footage, a fund manager from New York who was in London on business, said: "The primary reason for me coming forward is that it was clear the family were not getting any answers."

The Guardian's dossier also includes a sequence of photographs, taken by three different people, showing the aftermath of the attack, as well as witness statements from people in the area at the time.

A number of witnesses provided time and date-stamped photographs that substantiate their accounts.

Some said they saw police officers attack Tomlinson.

Witnesses said that, prior to the moment captured on video, he had already been hit with batons and thrown to the floor by police who blocked his route home.

One witness, Anna Branthwaite, a photographer, described how, in the minutes before the video was shot, she saw Tomlinson walking towards Cornhill Street.

"A riot police officer had already grabbed him and was pushing him," she said.

"It wasn't just pushing him – he'd rushed him. He went to the floor and he did actually roll. That was quite noticeable.

"It was the force of the impact. He bounced on the floor. It was a very forceful knocking down from behind. The officer hit him twice with a baton when he was lying on the floor.

"So it wasn't just that the officer had pushed him – it became an assault.

"And then the officer picked him up from the back, continued to walk or charge with him, and threw him.

"He was running and stumbling. He didn't turn and confront the officer or anything like that."

The witness accounts contradict the official version of events given by police.

In an official statement on the night of Tomlinson's death, the Metropolitan police made no reference to any contact with officers and simply described attempts by police medics and an ambulance crew to save his life after he collapsed – efforts they said were marred by protesters throwing missiles as first aid was administered .

The force said officers had created a cordon around Tomlinson to give him CPR.

"The officers took the decision to move him as during this time a number of missiles - believed to be bottles - were being thrown at them," it said.

Yesterday, the IPCC began managing an investigation by City of London police into the circumstances of Tomlinson's death after the Guardian published photographs of him on the ground and witness statements indicated he had been assaulted by police officers.

The IPCC commissioner for London, Deborah Glass, said: "Initially, we had accounts from independent witnesses who were on Cornhill, who told us that there had been no contact between the police and Mr Tomlinson when he collapsed."

"However, other witnesses who saw him in the Royal Exchange area have since told us that Mr Tomlinson did have contact with police officers.

"This would have been a few minutes before he collapsed. It is important that we are able to establish as far as possible whether that contact had anything to do with his death."

The IPCC added that Tomlinson was captured on CCTV walking onto Royal Exchange Passage.

"This is the aspect of the incident that the IPCC is now investigating," it said.

It was here the video was shot. A post mortem carried out by a Home Office pathologist last Friday revealed Tomlinson died of a heart attack.

Prior to seeing the dossier of evidence, Tomlinson's family said in a statement: "There were so many people around where Ian died, and so many people with cameras, that somebody must have seen what happened in the Royal Exchange passageway.

"We need to know what happened there and whether it had anything to do with Ian's death.

"We know that some people who were at the protest may not feel comfortable talking to the police.

"People are putting pictures on the internet, writing on blogs and talking to journalists. But we really need them to talk to the people who are investigating what happened."

[wired] How To Make a Solar Cell with Donuts and Tea

Federico Pistono — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:26:33 +0000

Donuts and tea are the main ingredients in a MacGyver-style do-it-yourself solar cell, epxplained step-by-step in this video.

"It turns out these delicious little things contain everything we need to make a simple solar cell," said Blake Farrow, a Canadian scientist who filmed the video while visiting Prashant Kamat's lab at the University of Notre Dame.

Powdered sugar contains titanium dioxide nanoparticles, a substance that is also used in paint. When that powder is coated with an organic dye, like the colorful chemicals in pasionfruit tea, it can be used as the light-absorbing layer of a photovoltaic device.

"In dye-sensitized solar cells, colored materials like tea absorb some visible light and transfer the energy to good electron transporting materials, like white TiO₂, that cannot absorb on their own," said Farrow.

Once those electrons have been excited, they need somewhere to go. So Farrow sandwiched the TiO₂ between a clear electrode, and a graphite electrode that he fashioned by rubbing a pencil onto some glass. As a finishing touch, he added some electrolyte solution, improvised from everclear and iodine water purification tablets.

Dye-sensitized solar cells are cheaper and more durable than traditional photovoltaics, but they are less efficient. And by extracting the titanium dioxide from donuts, Farrow gives them a whole new layer of inefficiency.

Video: Blake Farrow / YouTube
Photo: House of Sims / flickr
Story via: Wired and Mitch at Chemistry Blog

xkcd - students

Federico Pistono — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:16:36 +0000

This is so true.

Dilbert - Pointy-Haired Boss fail

Federico Pistono — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:20:05 +0000

This is by far one of the best comic strip I've read in a long time.

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

Federico Pistono — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 12:29:42 +0000

Thanks to the onion for this great piece.

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

Measuring intelligence with Google Suggest

Federico Pistono — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:54:49 +0000

Via reddit.

The Pirate Bay vs. Music Industry (Cartoonish)

Federico Pistono — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:38:35 +0000

NIN case study video: Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy

Federico Pistono — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 02:15:27 +0000

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick gave a great case study lecture on Nine Inch Nails’ music business successes at MidemNet last month. He describes the “formula” as:

Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB) = The Business Model ($$$$)

Toward the end of the video he explains CwF also means “Compete with Free” and RtB means “Return to Business” as an alternative to prosecuting fans.

Offering creative work under a CC license (as NIN has done with its last two albums) is a way to powerfully signal an intention to connect with fans and that the creator has returned to business. This doesn’t absolve a creator from the need to provide interesting reasons to buy that compete with (or perhaps rather complement) free, which NIN has done in spades.

Another good point Masnick makes at the end of the presentation is that the model works for large and small creators. A few years ago, often I’d hear people comment that tools like CC licensing were only useful for artists that weren’t well known and needed to take extreme measures to promote their works. Ironically, more recently, and especially following NIN’s successes, I see comments that open music can only work for bands that already have a rabid fan base. Obviously both can’t be true, and it turns out neither is. See some of Masnick’s previous posts on open music business models (here’s a recent one with lots of links back) for more.

If Masnick’s lecture inspires you as an artist to try the model, go for it — for additional inspiration check out Jonathan Coulton’s letter for CC’s recent campaign (because he writes eloquently about how essentially the model Masnick describes has worked for him, not because he’s asking for donations to CC, though you can make those too). If you’re inspired to help document and explain successful applications of the model, we’d love for you to help expand the CC case studies project, which is going to get much bigger this spring.

History of the Internet

Federico Pistono — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:42:23 +0000

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Best movie about the history of the internet I've see so far.

How to download 720p HD video from YouTube in one click

Federico Pistono — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:07:36 +0000

DL YouTube HD

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar, use it to download the 720p version of a YouTube video. Name it .mp4, it's H.264, 1280 x 720 with AAC, Stereo (L R), 44,100 kHz, ready for iTunes, Apple TV, MPlayer et cetera.

Enjoy! ^_^

Enemy of the state

Federico Pistono — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:50:17 +0000

"There's a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."

Commander Adama, "Bastille Day"

Toc toc...

2008 Greek riots

Federico Pistono — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:09:31 +0000

On the night of Saturday, December 6th, two Special Guards of the Greek police clashed with a small group of young men. The exact details of what took place are still unclear, but it is known that one of the Guards fired three shots, and one of those bullets caused the death of 15-year-old Alexander Grigoropoulos (Greek: Αλέξανδρος Γρηγορόπουλος) - whether the injury was made by an accidental ricochet or deliberate shot remains to be determined. The two Guards are now in jail awaiting trial, the shooter charged with homicide. This incident sparked an immediate and widespread response in the form of angry demonstrations and riots in many Greek cities that have continued at varying levels to this day - though dimming in intensity recently. Alexander's death appears to have been a catalyst, unleashing widespread Greek anger towards many issues - police mistreatment of protesters, unwelcome education reforms, economic stagnation, government corruption and more.

The death of Grigoropoulos resulted in large demonstrations, which escalated to widespread rioting, with hundreds of rioters damaging property and engaging riot police with Molotov cocktails, stones and other objects. Demonstrations and rioting soon spread to several other cities, including Thessaloniki, the country's second-largest city. Outside Greece, solidarity demonstrations, riots and, in some cases, clashes with local police also took place in a number of European cities including Istanbul, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Frankfurt, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, The Hague, Copenhagen, Bordeaux, Seville as well as Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, and the western Cypriot city of Paphos.Newspaper Kathimerini called the rioting "the worst Greece has seen since the restoration of democracy in 1974".

These beautiful and at the same time horrible photos testify this event.

A protester holds a molotov coctail next to a burning barricade in athens on December 8, 2008. Fury at the fatal police shooting of a schoolboy, 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, erupted in a third day of rioting across Greece on Monday, with youths burning banks and shops, attacking hotels and clashing with the security forces. (LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images)

A protester shouts at riot police in central Athens on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008. Athens and other Greek cities were ravaged by three successive nights of rioting after police shot teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos dead. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

NIN releases 400GB of free HD concert footage via torrents

Federico Pistono — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:16:05 +0000

Trent Reznor never ceases to amaze me. Today he posted on the new NIN website:

1.7.09: your gift!
The internet is full of surprises these days.
I was contacted by a mysterious, shadowy group of subversives who SOMEHOW managed to film a substantial amount (over 400 GB!) of raw, unedited HD footage from three separate complete shows of our Lights in the Sky tour. Security must have been lacking at these shows because the quality of the footage is excellent.

If any of you could find a LINK to that footage I'll bet some enterprising fans could assemble something pretty cool.

Oh yeah, you didn't hear this from me.

posted by trent reznor

A few minutes later Rob Sheridan in person adds:

There is about 405gb of HD footage available. It was recorded with multiple consumer HDV cameras during three shows: Victoria 12.05.08, Portland 12.07.08, and Sacramento 12.12.08.

This is raw, unedited, un-color-corrected HD footage. It will be primarily of interest to advanced users, who may wish to attempt to edit it together into something. It could be really interesting to see what creative users can put together using this and other fan-recorded footage. These guys are off to a great start already.

Novice users might not want to download this just yet. If you don't have a fast computer for playing back high definition video, or hundreds of gigabytes of storage available to save it to, this download will probably cause you nothing but problems. If you just want to see some live footage, you might be better off waiting until more advanced users get the footage and turn it into something more digestible for the masses. I'm sure a lot of this stuff will be turning up on YouTube as soon as people get it downloaded.

The footage is available as a free download via bitTorrent. If you don't know what bitTorrent is, please go to this link and read every word of it before you ask anyone on the forums what to do with the torrent files.

As the files are tremendously large, don't expect any instant gratification - the download may take days, even weeks. There are a handful of seeders to start things off. Until we get a large number of seeders, please only download these files right now if you intend to help seed them for a while after you're done. Certain downloaders will get much faster download rates than others, depending on your IP address. This is due to peering relationships our hosting provider has which we're utilizing to get some initial seeds out as fast as possible. If your download is going incredibly slow or not going at all, don't worry, it'll pick up within the next couple days.

Here are the links:

Victoria
Portland
Sacramento

The included README files have some further notes about the footage, which has been conveniently formatted for easy editing and even includes Final Cut Pro sequences with the footage pre-organized for editing.

The discussion at the NIN forum is very intense, at the moment there are more than 24 pages of replies, and every time I come back there are a few posts. Some have questioned the authenticity of the work. In fact, it looks too good to be real. But, as it turns out, this is actually happening.

NIN has nothing to do with us. First of all, due to Hippygeek's ostentatious website design skills, he was able to create a code that would automatically log everyone's email from your nin.com profile or ETS profile. It's a simple code (or maybe no so simple) that allows one to find and log information needed for the site to run.

Next - yeah. We might have already had everything ready to go when the stuff was put out, but we might have heard a rumor that something was going to happen. Might have. It wasn't officially from NIN, so don't get your panties in a twist.

Also - the footage that is for download on the nin.com page is NOT from fans. These mysterious shadows were professionals that just happened to be there. WINK WINK WINK *how many fucking winks do I have to insert in here to let you know that they were hired?*

Definitely not a marketing ploy. This is real fan shit. To be cheesy and quite frank, we (the fans - not me) control how this footage is to be used for the future and how it gets delivered to the fans. It's a cool thing that the NIN camp has let us do, to combine creative forces and come up with something for ourselves.

I am not aware of anything like this happening in the history of music. A worldwide collaborative high quality fan work. It was to be expected, with a personality like Trent Reznor evoking creativity and creating that personal contact with fans all over the world beautiful things can happen. I am excited to be part of this and I can't wait to see what we can do.

blogging is

Federico Pistono — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:24:27 +0000

First part of the series of posts "Life according to Google".

Google Suggest is a feature that analyzes what you're typing into the search box and offers *relevant* suggested search terms in real time. That's what they claim, at least. It probably looks at the results with most pages, but mixed with your personal search history and location. I find it quite amusing, it is a representation of the internet culture at a very intriguing level.

Results: notable mention

Blogging is dangerous.

Results: irony

Blogging is dead. (I'm blogging it ^_^ )

Reznor's model works - NIN’s CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 Album

Federico Pistono — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:23:12 +0000

In March 2008, Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails released the first part of Ghosts I-IV via BitTorrent, and released all four albums under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Even though fans could easily get free versions of the album, Ghosts actually went on to become the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

NIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

Money and CC music coexist

As Fred Benenson eloquently put on the Creative Commons' blog:

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

The future of Music

As I already stated in the past this is the only viable business model that the music industry should adopt, the only one that's fair to both the fans and the artists, the only one that has a future. Many have pointed out that if you are not a superstar you can't make it work, unless Jamendo can pull out a multimillion € quarter it would seem to be the case. But this thinking is very myopic. The idea of music distribution has to change drastically, the pyramid needs to be inverted: at the top there should be artists and fans, no the record labels. Once a direct relationship is established between the two real players in the game, things will evolve and work out naturally. The equation is simple:

   artists produce good CC music = more people share = people discover new artists =
   = more people go to their concerts = more people support their favourite artist

In theory is very simple. It worked for NIN, let's see if it can work for everyone else.

65daysofstatic - Don't go to sorrow

Federico Pistono — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:42:52 +0000

65daysofstatic - Don't Go Down to Sorrow

Amazing.

180 to 1

Federico Pistono — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:58:46 +0000

United Nations' General Assembly 10801 on human rights, social, humanitarian issues.

The Committee’s report on promotion and protection of the rights of children (document A/63/426) contains a draft resolution on the rights of the child, approved by a recorded vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States), with no abstentions, on 24 November, which would have the Assembly -- among other things -- call upon States to create an environment conducive to the well-being of all children, including by strengthening international cooperation in regard to the eradication of poverty, the right to education, the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health and the right to food. (Press Release GA/SHC/3941)

Draft resolution XX on the right to food, approved on 24 November by a recorded vote of 180 in favour to 1 against ( United States), with no abstentions, would have the Assembly reaffirm that hunger constitutes an outrage and a violation of human dignity, requiring the adoption of urgent measures at the national, regional and international level, for its elimination. (Press Releases GA/SHC/3940 and GA/SHC/3941)

Vote on Right to Food

The draft resolution on the right to food (document A/63/430/Add.2) was adopted by a recorded vote of 184 in favour to 1 against, with no abstentions, as follows:

In favour: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia (Federated States of), Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Against: United States.

Abstain: None.

The world doesn't hate the US. The US hates the world, and apparently its own people.

Image by riacale.

Bill Maher's final comment from Religulous

Federico Pistono — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:28:22 +0000

Bill Maher's final comment from Religulous, which is of grave importance to the society in which we exist. People must come together, and help the world move on, so that a safer future can be insured for ourselves and for our children. Let us free ourselves from this mass hysteria and insanity that plagues our daily lives , from the most subtle to the extremest consequences. Let us be more that what we used to.

Peace, for once.

America, a life in pictures

Federico Pistono — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:19:23 +0000

Knock knock...

Iran: A Nation of Bloggers

Federico Pistono — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:24:04 +0000

Created by Vancouver Film School students Aaron Chiesa, Toru Kageyama, Hendy Sukarya, and Lisa Temes through the VFS Digital Design program. Read more if you like.

The world has never seen such pile of freezing heat crap

Federico Pistono — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 13:07:44 +0000

Global Warming. The Earth became the newest Waterworld. by SoftPIX_Techie

There is an article by By Christopher Booker which goes something like this.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

Global Warming (Effetto Serra) by Roberto Rizzato

It's been circulating on the internet over the last few days and it spread out virally. So, who exactly is the author of this masterpiece? Let's find that out.

Booker's scientific claims, which include the false assertion that white asbestos (chrysotile) is "chemically identical to talcum powder" ^[2] were analysed in detail by Richard Wilson in his book Don't Get Fooled Again (2008). (The chemical formula for talc is H2Mg3(SiO3)4 or Mg3Si4O10(OH)2, while the formula for chrysotile, the primary ingredient of white asbestos, is Mg3(Si2O5)(OH)4).
Wilson also highlighted Christopher Booker's repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who has claimed to be "the world's foremost authority on asbestos science", but who in 2005 was convicted under the UK's Trade Descriptions Act ^[3] of making false claims about his qualifications, and who the BBC has accused of basing his reputation on "lies about his credentials, unaccredited tests, and self aggrandisement".^[4].
Christopher Booker's scientific claims about asbestos have been criticized several times by the UK government's Health and Safety Executive. In 2002, the HSE's Director General, Timothy Walker, wrote that Booker's articles on asbestos had been "misinformed and do little to increase public understanding of a very important occupational health issue."^[5].
In 2005, the Health and Safety Executive issued a rebuttal^[6] after Christopher Booker wrote an article suggesting, incorrectly, that the HSE had agreed with him that white asbestos posed "no medical risk"^[7].
In 2006, the HSE published a further rebuttal^[8] after Christopher Booker had claimed, again incorrectly, that the Health and Safety Laboratory had concluded that the white asbestos contained within "artex" textured coatings posed "no health risk". ^[9].
In May 2008, the Health and Safety Executive accused Booker of writing an article that was "substantially misleading"^[10]. In the article^[11], published by the Sunday Telegraph earlier that month, Booker had claimed, falsely, that a paper produced in 2000 by two HSE statisticians, Hodgson and Darnton^[12], had 'concluded that the risk of contracting mesothelioma from white asbestos cement was "insignificant", while that of lung cancer was "zero"'.

But who am I to gudge? And beside, these things abou him do not say anything on the content of the article itself. Fair enough, let's go deeper. Booker's articles in The Daily Telegraph on asbestos and also on global warming have been challenged by George Monbiot in an article in The Guardian newspaper ^[12]. Read it through. I also found some interesting comments on the reddit page regarding this article. Here's a collection of the smartest remarks:

If you think this was great, you should wait until I publish my landmark paper, "Twenty Years of Climate Science Disproven By My Astute Observation That It Was Kind Of Warm Here Last Month".

Don't forget the chapter on "Even in rising average temperature, some places will be colder than that and some places will be hotter". Global weather allows for some truly bizarre anomalous local aberrations.

A few measurement over a single month do not constitute hard evidence for a pattern, and the fact that a pseudoscientist is reporting it with the smirking ambition of debunking global warming studies without actually oing through the scientific process of analysing data and publish apapers accordingly it tells a lot about the credibility of the author. last time I checked the scientific consensus by real scientists was overwhelming, as reported by the peer-reviewed process. Until I see hard evidence against it I will not waste my valuable time debunking an attention freak that posts a questionable article.

HD quality videos on YouTube (720p)

Federico Pistono — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:28:00 +0000

YouTube has quietly started testing out real HD quality videos on a smattering of its content, a development that is getting attention from viewers in message boards and blog forums this week. The new format could be a big move for YouTube, as the video size is over 80MB, which means that they are probably the same H.264 encoded mp4 files available in the iTunes store.

Getting premium quality video available on the site is integral for YouTube's success as the company struggles to turn a profit from its vast array of content available online.

The new formats have been available on a few videos for a few months now, and a small hack can upgrade any video taped at a high enough quality. YouTube confirms this is part of their efforts to test out different video formats.

The new format seems like real HD 720p video and looks clean and professional in the widescreen format.

YouTube already provides an option to view higher quality versions for some videos and you can also append "&fmt=18" to the URLs for the other videos. If you add "&fmt=22", some YouTube videos are now available at an even higher quality, which makes the full screen view a very useful option. Compare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY (standard format - mono, resolution: 320x180)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=18 (stereo, resolution: 480x270)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=22 (720p - stereo, resolution: 1280x720)

To embed a higher quality version of a video, replace "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID" with "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" or "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" in YouTube's embeddable code.

Japanese website Google Mania claims that there is also an option to download video as an MP4, which would be big news as YouTube users have long desired that option, but the download link does not seem to appear on any of the U.S. versions.

While these videos will result in slower loading and require powerful PCs for smooth playback, HD quality videos are a step in the right direction for YouTube. Now if they can just work on getting a larger inventory of high quality content people want to watch on there, their ad model will be in business.

If you'd like to see the difference for yourself, here is an HD embed at 720p. Enjoy.

Via Wired }

Invaders...

Federico Pistono — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:35:40 +0000

Minority Report's computer interface is among us

Federico Pistono — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:06:44 +0000

It's called G-Speak: Gestural Interface Technology. John Underkoffler, one of Oblong’s co-founders, was the science advisor on Minority Report and built much of what we saw in the film from what he was working on at MIT.

The gesture-based g-speak “spatial operating interface” (SOE) software platform has been in development at MIT’s Media Laboratory since the early 1990s and its intended use isn’t as nerdy as we’d expect. It’s meant to facilitate answers to real-world issues. The platform is reportedly compatible with Linux and Mac.

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

Some of the SOE's core ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: Underkoffler based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT. Other foundational components are less directly visible but as crucially transformative. The g-speak platform braids development arcs begun in the early 1990s at MIT's Media Laboratory, where Oblong's principals produced radical user interface advances, distributed and networked language designs, and media manipulation technologies.

From academia; into popular cinema; and out broadly into the world as commercial product: it's an unordinary path for technical thought and effort, but one -- leading to g-speak -- that seems now logical and even necessary. The people who work in Oblong's Los Angeles and Barcelona laboratory offices are as concerned with design as with programming, with humanist principles as with running a company. Synthesizing these concerns is the only way to insure that the metamorphosis of human-computer interaction we offer the world will be one of beauty and durable worth.

Links

Oblong project's home page.

Welcome to Earth

Federico Pistono — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:48:39 +0000