Eminem against Bush

Very dark music & video. I quite like the atmosphere that actually feels like Bush reelected again...

Two years ago, this video would not have been approved by a single record label. A year ago it would never had the possibility of being played on television. But with the changing tide of public sentiment marked by the success of our last video for Chronic Future, an anti-war message that made it into rotation on TRL we think it might just have a chance.

John Peel died today

He was truly unique in the music world. And remained true to music.

The Peel Sessions of so many bands will remain in the history to remember this wonderful guy.

So you think you can trust Google ?

Since Google released their beta tool to search locally on your desktop, there has been concerns about privacy and what Google could do when they know more about you. Now it's about security.

Google couldn't explain why it didn't have a working email or phone contact for security alerts

Conclusion of the article :

It's good to know Google takes security as seriously as it takes privacy.

(one more from Andrew Orlowski)

JetGroove no longer worth

Apparently JetGroove had legal problems selling music. Most of the stuff they had was not available for sale, but you could still listen to a streamed version. Now even that feature is gone. All the (about) 100 tracks I selected but couldn't buy (and didn't bother listening as streamed) are now gone !

Of course it's the copyright pigs again at work. They can't stand when anyone but them can make money on music. Even if that's a service they don't even offer (underground music mostly found on shitty vynils). So the guys with the big MP3 collection behind JetGroove know what they should do : spread the music for free on P2P to piss the pigs even more !!!

JetGroove

Finally a good digital shop has emerged for electronic music ! JetGroove seems to have a lot of hard to find things in underground music, even from vynil sources. I'll try it with a vynil source to see if the digitalisation is better that if I do it myself... The price is 1$ to 1.25$ for each track in MP3 format. It's way more expensive than AllOfMp3 but that's the price for underground music...

Free publishing

Back in the good old days it was easy to publish content on the net, especially text and music. But now that the pigopolists are lobbying every possible inch of world parliaments, it's becoming harder to publish even legitimate content.

This interresting dutch study on 10 ISPs is quite impressive. It shows how the ISPs are devoted to the copyright owners or fear possible legal actions. Sometimes don't even caring about their own users. So be careful with your own content !

Live forever ?

The new book of Raymond Kurzweil will probably lead to a lot of questions on the real possibilities of "eternal" life and wether we really want that or not.

I think the 'blind' minds will find it cool and want it, while the 'lost' minds will not find it that interresting... I think that as long as I discover new things I'll be happy to live.

Kurzweil said he doesn't think such changes will detract from our humanity. "The emergence of artificial intelligence is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines coming from over the horizon to compete with us," he declared. "Rather, it is emerging from our human civilization."

Protective Patent

Sun recently said they would patent their 3D interface to protect them. They relased the code with the GPL license, which is supposed to be the most politically correct OSS license. So putting a patent on a GPL code is kinda strange.

But that's a really week argument when you think about it for a second ! Why would you need to patent something to protect you ? Prior art exists and means that if you can prove that you have made a system using the same technique as a patent, before the patent was applied, this patent is void. How could someone attack Sun for a system that is not patented yet and that they have made public ?! That's simply impossible...

So don't believe Sun or anyone else when they tell you that it's just to protect them !

(the only worth protection needed is to find if patents exist on the subject before you release something, only companies can afford that)

Sony Japan stops DRM

The reason? According to Sony, Japanese consumers now have a far better appreciation of the issues surrounding copyright and music piracy, and the law is now tougher on those who flout it.

Hopefully that will be a general move now...