i@m.fm

Maybe they will listen this time:
The Globe and Mail: Would you pay 5 cents for a song?

What do you think? Flat fee even for those who do not listen/download music?

Anybody considering voluntary payments, a bit like shareware? There
once was an Ottawa company aiming to facilitate anonymous voluntary
payments to musicians. Of course the music industry would not support
this, because this would mean that they would accept being bypassed. So
it never came to fly. Maybe it’s time to dig out that concept again.

Maybe one day the music industry will also get the their part of this
world is changing. More people can become publishers these days, CDs
can be low-cost produced on demand and music can be downloaded. So we
do not need as many records, we do not need the management overhead. Of
course it’s always hard to lose money and jobs, but think about the
mindset being created at the moment.

Some people that download music think it should be for free. A lot of
them still buy albums. Had the music industry jumped onto the bandwagon
early enough, they might have been able to create more momentum,
supporting voluntary payments. Creating the willingliness to
voluntarily pay money, instead of the current expectation to be able to
download the music for free…

But I am just repeating myself…

In any case, I think portability is a must, so DRM should probably be bust

You know these graphics where you have to re-type a phrase or some
characters or number in order to prevent automated registrations or
queries:

Boing Boing: Solving and creating captchas with free porn

Basically the spammers make porn-hungry people work. So they show them
the so-called ‘captchas’ from other sites and ask their site visitors
to ‘crack’ the code for them in order to get past the protection. Just
like a human brute force attack.

As Charles Leadbeater points out in Fast Company: We are in the middle of an Amateur Revolution. The article is based on Charles’ Pro-Am Revolution Report. This revolution extends to any space of our lives.

FYI:

I have decided to shut down one of my experimental sites as the domain comes up for renewal:

ContestBlog :: Contest Blog closing down in March

This will also allow me to focus on more important projects.

This was one of the movies we watched over the holidays – and we
enjoyed it. This is good entertainment if you want to escape from our
reality.

The graphics and effects are just great in the movie and so is the
humour. The fish resemble the actors and fit very well with their
voices and there are some hidden jokes in there as well. Don’t expect
any references to any political issues or so… I enjoyed watching it.

Lycos Europe just released a
screensaver that creates traffic to the webservers of spammers: “Make Love not Spam“. So is
this a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, or a good method to
deal with spammers? It will cost those websites money, yes so on the
first glance it sounds like a good idea.

However the spammers might very well start suing Lycos for the cost it
creates for them. After all initiating a DDoS is anything but legal in
most countries.

I will check into this a bit further, because it also seems it
partially comes down to how Lycos actually picks the sites. Let’s say
some affiliate of a major site just ends up spamming, and the Lycos
screensaver generates a lot of traffic to his site. He did not initiate
the spam nor really permit the spammer to use his affiliate link. So
the affiliate ID would be disabled, but would Lycos also remove that
site from their list?


[Update] So it turns out they are actually using the Spamcop
list to pick their targets. They are also just sending a get request,
but actually not waiting to receive a response. They also say that the
will distribute the requests in such a way that they will not bring
down the entire server, by some ‘health check’ they implemented. The Lycos website also shows a percentage by how much certain webservers are slowed down by the screensaver.

gimme-five.org

1. Train or car?


I prefer the train. I can read a book, or sleep etc. I somehow associate cars with traffic jams and polluted environment


2. How do you get to work?

My wife drops me off at the local commuter train station on her way to work. I take the train and have about a 7 minute walk to work.


3. Do you have a comfortable chair at work?


I don’t like it that much.

4. Do you listen to music at work?
No. The soundcard is not set up properly.

5. What do you like best about your job?
Most of my colleagues.

Have you seen the TV ad by TD Canada Trust? The one where they are using the Fine Young Cannibal‘s Good Thing?

Well, it’s a good thing, that they did not play the full lyrics of the song… Because you probably know how the chorus goes:

Now I am not quite sure if this was a clever choice of a song, because
in the ad, they mention how many customers have joined them in the last
year… And the question they want to ask along with this information is “good thing, where have you gone“?

I am really a fan of the way the ‘attach’ the text lines to people’s
heads, that was really an original idea, even though it is starting to
wear out a little, now that other companies are starting to copy this
effect.

But there’s another thing about the TD ads that I have been wondering
about. The green leather chair in the end. “Banking can be this
comfortable”. Now, I am not sure about you, but I am not a big fan of
leather chairs, even more so if they are green

In general I am not really a big fan of the Canadian banking landscape,
since I’ve had my share of bad experiences with some of the banks.

PS: I really need to re-organize the structure of this blog.

We watched this a while back back – Kim came across it and we rented it on video. Here’s the short description from the IMDB:

Five young people apply to live in an isolated house together for six
months whilst their every move is filmed by numerous cameras. Each has
their reason for wanting to be there – fame, money, adventure. The
prize – $1 million. The rules – if one person leaves, everyone loses.
It becomes the ultimate morality test. When Danny’s beloved grandfather
dies, does his greed overcome his love? When the skittish Emma finds
blood on her pillow why does she still stay behind? And what dark
secret does the house harbour that leaves them feeling as though
they’re being watched by more than just a million pairs of eyes?

So basically this is about a reality show on the
internet. And since it’s in the horror genre, you can already imaging
that people get killed. Basically this could be considered the modern
version of “And then there were none” by Agatha Christie, also known as “Ten Little Indians“.

I don’t want to spoil the story, so I will not give too many details.
The filming style pretty much imitates the people being filmed by
webcams, the noises of the zoom and servos moving the camera add to the
eerie atmosphere. However I don’t think the movie is this great – it
sort of leads up to a predictable outcome and contains some technical
weirdness.