The Null Device
2005/11/25
Scare meme of the day: if bird flu, al-Qaeda weaponised ebola or a meteor strike don't get us, alien computer viruses exploiting Seti@Home to take over Earth's computer systems just might. Assuming, of course, that the aliens understand enough about our puny earthling computer architectures, operating systems and library vulnerabilities to write a useful exploit and encode it the right way in a radio signal.
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 0
Never ones to allow reality to get in the way of the Great War on MP3 Terrorism, Sony BMG, the company behind the copy-protected CD rootkit, have announced that they will be adding copy protection to CDs in Australia. Perhaps someone in the Australian office missed the memo about DRM having been thoroughly discredited throughout Sony BMG by the recent rootkit fiasco. Though the company has announced that the CDs will magically prevent users from making copies without causing the problems that affected users of their CDs in the US, so that's alright then.
A key cultural difference between Britain and Australia: had recently deceased footballer George Best been Australian, he would probably have received a state funeral.
The aftermath of the Christmas party season is the busiest time of the year for photocopier technicians, thanks to drunk office workers' propensity for photocopying their bottoms, with the increasing weight of McWorlders possibly adding to the problem:
Geoff Bush from the north of England said one case he'd attended, where a young lady had cracked the glass mid-scan, also jammed the scanner so that it wasn't until the machine was fixed and her colleagues all sober that copies of her backside starting pouring from the machine.
Partly in response to this trend--or perhaps because of the "supersizing" of the western physique--Canon has now increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimeter.
This site will be linking to a different Creative Commons-licensed song for every day of the next year:
Many of the artists available under the Creative Commons are just as good as anything you might hear on plain 'ol everyday terrestrial radio. So "what's the difference" you say? What is the difference between the artists you hear every day and the artists you'll find under the Creative Commons?
Plain and simple, the artists you hear every day, many of them very talented, have the backing of the Major Record Labels. Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal, spend millions of dollars every year, and work really, really, really hard to make sure you hear the music they are selling. They have the collective power of giants.
No, they can’t manufacture hit records. The public is a fickle beast, a ‘hit’ is a combination of marketing and the public’s will to succomb to that marketing. What they can do, is pick a big handfull of bands, throw them all at the virtual public wall, and hope something ’sticks’. And for the 100 - 200 acts a year that are lucky enough to get this big shotgun launch, out of the thousands per year that are signed by record labels, out of those thousands emerge tens. Tens of acts that will make top 40 radio what it is this year.
But what of those thousands of other acts? Well, the record label still owns the rights to their music. They can’t promote it themselves, without the lion’s share of the profits from that promotion going directly into the hands of those same record companies that failed to promote them. They signed a contract, they got a ‘deal’, the dream of all musicians who just want to pursue their art and make a living, they got the golden record deal.
CC:365 exists to showcase those that went the other way. We are here, quite simply, to turn you , the music listener on to some of the greatest music floating around the internet today.