Imagine you are a member of a successful mega-band with expensive music videos and everything. You started out small, worked your way up, and now you’ve sold millions of albums. The band’s music is owned and distributed by a big Label, and the Label has reluctantly put your music videos online. It is easy to show that Music Labels are wary of video sharing sites (such as youtube) because the Labels often choose to disable sharing when they are given the option. Makes sense, right?

Since you’re a band member in our hypothetical mega-band, what this means to you in practical terms is that bloggers cannot put your videos in their blogs, among other things. Naturally, the music label wants to disable sharing, because they want fans to be dependent on the label to get band updates. In Internet terms, this is a de facto walled garden of content, which in the music labels’ ideal world would be something completely separate from the Internet.

Ideally, as a band member, you’ll get a cut of everything the Label sells, so there’s a lot to say for the walled garden concept. The big problem is this: by definition, sharing is disabled between the Internet and the walled garden. For as long as the Label was the best way to promote your music, there has never been any benefit to sharing content. Ever since broadcast radio music was used to promote albums, and even through the whole music video era, sharing has never played into the promotion scheme.

Maybe sharing should be a part of music promotion.

I’m not talking about ripping whole albums or bittorrent filesharing, per se, although there are some people would riff on this. They might go so far as to argue that if you give an artist some money as a result of downloading an entire album worth of mp3s, then that artist got some free promotion via filesharing. It’s happened before.

But I’m not even going to touch that. The situation I am talking about is when a music label on youtube clicks that one checkbox to “disable embedding.” In the picture below, these are some of the options youtube gives you.

It’s worth considering why someone would ever decide to disable sharing, but the inescapable observation is that many music labels have made this choice. A practical consequence is that they are missing out on potentially free promotion through the Internet. More on this point later.

Some time around 2006, I started thinking about my online passwords in a new way. Until this point, I had used a collection of perhaps a dozen gibberish passwords, which I reused on various sites depending on the sensitivity of the site. For example, my bank account would use a nearly unique password, whereas a random forum would use a very commonly reused password.

This worked acceptably well, but I frequently had to ask myself: “which password did I use when I signed up for this service?” In response to having to guess my own passwords, I made two decisions: I would start writing my passwords down, and I would make them all unique and randomly generated. Four years later, I am using a totally different system, and I’ll explain all of my reasoning.

Read on…

A recent comment on BoingBoing asked if there was a way to download a video from youtube, such that it could be reposted elsewhere. One solution, suggested by Cory Doctorow, is to use pwnyoutube.com, but there exists a general method that works on all flash video (not just youtube), and happens to be faster than using pwnyoutube.com. Behold! For I shall demonstrate a painless use of lsof, the under-appreciated and extra-useful command line tool.

Read on…

I’m working on a REST interface at the moment, and there’s nothing I need more than a quick utility to test out various functions.  Curl fills this role perfectly, but I have run into a strange problem that interferes with multipart/form-data form POSTing.  Let me explain some of the evidence I’ve collected, as well as tell you a workaround I learned from an IRC conversation.  In the end, this comes down to the HTTP 1.1 100 CONTINUE response code, which plays a critical role in HTTP 1.1 POST.

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Freedom, glorious freedom.

Once upon a time, I took a class based on  a single question: “what is freedom?”  We meandered through US history, identifying several distinct stages in the evolution of the definition of “freedom.”  I was horrified to learn, during a discussion, that so many of my classmates wanted what I will call “freedom from information.” Ah yes – Professor Sandage had a way of bringing the ugliest truths to the surface, for all to witness.

On the one hand, I can understand this desire for freedom from information: telemarketing, advertising, spam, the scrolling headlines at the bottom of a newscast…  well, any unsolicited attempt at selling things you don’t care about.  On the other hand, I think we need more information instead of less, and we need effective tools to filter and manage that information so we only see what we care about.

The term “freedom” is muddied by historical contexts, but also through the process of etymological erosion.  With that said, I want to take a moment to discuss the expression, “free as in speech, not beer.”

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I just upgraded my laptop to OS X 10.5 and it’s great, but I hit one major snag along the way.  Although I thought all of the Intel Macs shipped with the new GUID partition scheme, it seems like my early-generation Macbook Pro used the old Apple partition scheme, and unless I reformatted my drive as GUID, I couldn’t install 10.5.  Fortunately, I spent the day backing up my old drive, so I just forged on, and once 10.5 was installed, I used the Migration Assistant to transfer my old home directory.

It worked…  mostly.  Partially by design, I chose to not migrate some command line tools, but now I find that every so often, I want to accomplish some task and I can’t … quite … do it, because I need to reinstall something, or perhaps reconfigure something.  I’d say 95% of the old functionality is still there, but the remaining 5% comes up often enough that it feels like something more than 5%.  The feeling is this lurking suspicion that I can’t trust my computer to do something that I know it used to be capable of, and it reminded me of a disease called Semantic Dementia. I don’t have semantic dementia in the sense of the neurological disease, but I’d like to start this off with a story about it.

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Yesterday, I  grabbed an 802.11b/g/* router from Chinatown ($32 – can’t beat that) and set out to use my laptop’s wireless network card.  I hadn’t done this before because I was (justifiably) concerned about wireless security, so I wanted to make sure that a breach of the wireless network wouldn’t turn into a breach of the wired LAN (which includes a printer and a few sensitive servers). This post collects some of my research and observations, and it concludes with my recommendations for how you can secure your own wireless network…  or at a minimum, it tells you how you could if you were willing to spend $32 on a new wireless access point.

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