SideQuest

DMCA takedowns have no merit to the world

Wow internet people of the world. I was surprised tonight. As slow as defending DeCSS took off all those years ago, so quick was the defending of the AACS key. Many people on the Internet spoke out tonight after AACS LA started sending out takedown notices to companies that hosted a key published by some of their users. The biggest thing as far as I'm concerned is that people seem to be willing to break the companies they love (digg and Google) just to prove the stupidity of the DMCA take down notices. These users are not against Digg and Google, they are it's most active supporters, and they will use their favourite tools to prove the governments in the world that the DMCA is giving the DRM companies too much power over other companies that are simply doing their work. They proved that the "secret" is to be protected by the DRM company, and not by all the other companies in the world. The secret is out, and Google and Digg can't stop it, just as little as the DRM companies could prevent the "secret" from getting out in the first place. To ask Google and Digg to stop it is unrealistic, costly and without merit to society as a whole. There are thousands of ways we can communicate those few digits, songs, videos, DNS records, different notations, weak "encoding" variants, barcodes, images, ascii art, etc etc.
It is my full conviction that not a judge in the world will judge Google or Digg as libel in this case. There was no stopping the world, without a full take-down of the companies involved. They couldn't have hired people fast enough to remove it, as others would be able to post it online. Let's HOPE it goes to court, that will stop this idiot-icy once and for all.

]]> I'm proud to be part of the new Internet generation. Sure it has it's faults, the world always has had faults, but it's time people realize that there is no stopping to this. Information is shared now almost by definition, and the knowledge it has spread is far outweighing the "bad" knowledge it's spreading. Information is our drug, our virus. Change your business models, because I'm tired of not owning what I buy, and I'm not the only one.
These companies are forgetting that they serve society in their needs. We pay them and expect certain things back. More and more of our expectations are flatly ignored in order to "save the income" of these companies. If we don't give you money, then that means you are doing something wrong, and the company deserves to go broke. It should not get protected by governments and organizations that serve those same organizations. Many people have said: "If there was a better business-model, then that model would be more successful and win over the other companies". However this is no longer true. This industry as a whole has become so protected that any other business model is no longer viable. You want proof of that ? Well here is a model: I use work of others that I'm allowed to use for free. Let's say an Internet radio station and freely licensed music. Sounds like a viable model, albeit one where I have to do a lot of work. Any commoner would come to such a conclusion. Guess what; It's not viable. In the USA you will have to pay SoundExchange (a daughter of RIAA) regardless of what kind of music you broadcast on the Internet. If the artist doesn't join up with RIAA and collects it's fees, too bad for them, all the money goes to RIAA. (link) This is just anti-competitive and the US government should be thrown out over allowing RIAA to work in such a matter.

There is one big thing that people are often forgetting. There is a lot of talk about the movie and music industry. Their sales are indeed rapidly decreasing etc etc. But what we forget is that the Entertainment industry as a whole is still growing. Television, gaming, sports, events, internet entertainment, iPod, etc have all seen enormous growth over the past years. We are just busy with more stuff then ever before and that's the primary reason we consume less music and movies. You are not losing money over piracy, you are losing money because you are not correctly reading the market you are selling to. Hell some people are even turning to piracy now because of the trouble they have to go trough with their legally bought digital music. And knowing the average computer capabilities of the Internet user I'm not surprised, and neither should they be.

Finally more and more people start to see where all these guidelines are problematic and they start fighting it. This is not about not being willing to pay certain companies for their products. It's about the protection these companies enforce and the government's involvement with these companies. It's about owning a song once you bought it, regardless of the format. It's about being able to buy what you want, without having to wait 1,5 year before the product enters your geographic-market. It's about being able to decrypt your movies 30 years after official DVD players were taken out of production. It's about your right to publish a 16 hex number, regardless of what it means. It's about the bullying of the companies we love, by the companies we hate. And if one happens to go bankrupt in order to defend that, then we will gladly sacrifice such a company and create another one once the issue is settled.

So with saying: "09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" to everyone I end this post.

MacUrT

Woekele from SNT approached me yesterday if I knew how to build a launcher for Urban Terror, my at-one-time favourite game. I remembered I had once written a quick mock-up application called MacUrT that did just that. I never really took it upon me to finish that, since I had a lot of other work todo.

However once woekele talked to me, I felt I had to finish this app. I mean, it's just a little thing. So I spend an evening coding, and here it is the new and probably last version of MacUrT, for all you Urban Terror fans on Mac OS X out there.

MacUrT 2.0 (with sourcecode)

Start thinking

It's soooo difficult sometimes to put under words the things you feel and know in your heart are true. There are a lot of things in the US government that I do not agree with by a longshot. I feel they are wrong. Recently I saw the movie Why We Fight. Now of course this might not be the full and complete truth. That doesn't even matter, as long as it makes YOU think about what you are told and what you believe. I advise everyone to go and see this movie. It's absolutely great.

Then on the heals of that, there is this whole issue about the ABCs mini-series "Path to 9/11". It was partly just incorrect or bended truths mixed with reality. Everyone knows the best lie is half the truth. It was nothing I didn't expect to see as part of the gulf of movies and TV dramatizations of 9/11 that are currently being released. It's the on opposite side of the "Why We Fight"-movie you could say. There is nothing wrong with that. What I however did NOT expect was for someone who is key in this issue to come with an eloquent and honest reply. However former-president Clinton did just that in an interview with Fox. You could see this was not prepared. This was a man speaking from his heart and telling the world what he believed. I wish I could put things in words like that man. I have long since forgiven him his human misstep with Monica Lewinsky. I see him as the most honest US president in decades and I know that he now fights to help the WORLD.

IBC 2006

Jean Paul Saman and I visited IBC 2006 again this year, and I have put a small photo tour online. VLC was seen quite a few times again on the floor, this time some of the companies included were names like Cisco, Siemens, Thomsson and Fraunhofer. Our friends from Anevia were there as well of course. It was a busy IBC this year with great weather and we had a wonderful time. I was however a bit disappointed by not seeing much revolutionary technology. It was all basically a refinement of what we saw last year, but nothing really stood out.
Let's hope next year will show as some new things.

The founding of VideoLAN

VideoLAN has been around far longer then most ppl realise. The project's sourcecode wasn't released till somewhere in 2001, but there was something working long before that. One of the 4 co-founders that started with the idea, intially known as 'network 2000', was Antoine Brenner.

Antoine was recentrly interviewed by a friend of him. The vidcast of this interview (in French) is now available on the Mobitrends weblog.

The VideoLAN servers

For those who are interested, and just so that I remember the link. Here is a gallery and a description of the VideoLAN serverpark.

VLC is just delicious

Have you seen Del.icio.us yet? It's an online community for sharing bookmarks basically. Now you know I always have to check what VLC brings up in tools like this. Well, the results are in.

Among the different interesting tidbits, I found this link to a website describing how to RIP Windows Media based Musicvideo's from Yahoo. The tutorial is pretty extensive, and applies to most other MMS streams as well. There is even a nice Flash video showing you the exact proces.

GPL violations

So after our recent issue with the Sony Rootkit, yet again several things have been reported to us. This time someone is selling our software for $29,99 without informing the user they will simply be getting VLC media player which is free for download. Read the full story on the blog of J_K9 Linux. The other report is about the possible violation of the Elanvision EV-8000S STB, which firmware includes VLC.

Google and VLC

I have always liked crawling trough Google search results for websites and images that look at, use, review, list etc. VLC in one way of another.

I have now created a small webpage that presents you with 6 random images from the Image search result of Google. It's fun to see what users do with their VLC. Give the page a whirl and see what you run into.

VLC subtitles in Japanese or Chinese

People keep running into issues with this, even though it is described in the README.MacOSX.rtf file on the diskimage. I happened to run into a small HOWTO explaining it a bit more detailed, and with pictures. I hope that by listing it here, people will be able to find the solution faster.

Added Google Adsense

Recently my website was abused by Referral Spammers. My ISP made a whole analysis of it. As a result of this, my statistics are currently no longer viewable outside my usual browsing location.

However the huge amount of hits this generated made me think. Why not use it? So I added Google Adsense and a Google referral button to the site. No idea if it's gonna bring in any money, but I might as well give it a try.

New Buildserver

We have asked for donations in the past in order to assist us in developing for the Mac OS X platform. Now all of a sudden we had to return our Xserve machine, which was doing the daily nightly builds and the buildbod commit checks. So we cut to the chase and bought ourselves a Powermac G5 1.8 Ghz Dual Processor machine.
It's standing at my apartment atm and I'm working on setting it up as the new buildserver. The G5 is lovely and really fast. HDTV is a breeze with this machine.
After we set it up as the new server, and as soon as I have a TOS cable etc, I will start working on improved Digital Audio support for VLC OSX, and then i made give Video Capture a try, since I know also own an iBot firewire webcam.
I'm not making any promises, but I think I should be able to get something usable soon.

Pay to tell your story

As Stallman and many others already feared, the USPTO has come up with yet a more idiotic patent. From today, it is apparently possible to patent a storyline. You say: "So what?". Oh my.. you have no idea. This means that the person awarded the patent can collect licensing fees from ANYONE who writes a story, makes a movie or in any other way base a work on this storyline. This is the END of creativity of the mind people. When is America gonna stand up for their rights instead of for money and say: "Enough is enough!!!". This is totally getting out of hand.

Below a repost of an earlier blogentry with some links to related materials
My friend Jon Lech Johansen pointed me at some speaches by Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig. Cory is a Science Fiction writer and EFF spokesperson and Lawrence is a Stanford Professor of Law. Both have great ideas on copyright, DRM and Freedoms. And even better examples of what often goes wrong in the current situation of regulation of these. I would consider this obligated viewing material for all European Parliament members before they take the all important EU Patent vote. It's directly related to patents in that patent law is BUILT on these copyright laws. And the current proposal (let's not even talk about the legality of how it got trough the EC :D ) protects and exploits exactly some of the defects of current copyright law.

And it's interesting material for anyone interested in Piracy, Copyright, DRM, Creativity and Freedom. Cory's famous DRM speach at Microsoft (txt) Cory's NUUG speach (mpg) Cory's NUUG post speach discussion (mpg) Lessig's talk (takes a while before it gets really interesting, but VERY good). (mpg)

VLC iPod Video Conversion

As reported on tuaw.com, Phil Windley has created a script to automatically convert Tivo (or other MPEG2 sources) into iPod G5 compatible MPEG4 video files.

Windows to Mac migration

After years and years my father is finally "Back to the Mac". I have been migrating his data and I ran into some problems which we're quite annoying.

First was migrating my father's Favorites from Internet Explorer to Safari. This is actually quite easy. Simply go to the Export function in the File menu of IE. Export the Favorites to an HTML file. Now pay attention. The file is named with the .htm extension. You cannot import this into Safari, because Safari desires the .html extension. Rename the file and simply use "Import Bookmarks..." in the Safari File-menu. Choose Bookmarks-menu and then "Show All Bookmarks". Your imported bookmarks are in a seperate folder here.

Second issue. Exporting Outlook Express mail. There were several ways to do this, but most included a couple of shareware applications, exporters and other hoops to jump trough. However this Mac OS X hints article pointed me in another direction. So I installed Mozilla Thunderbird on the Windows XP machine. Opened it. I chose to Import Settings from Outlook Express. After this copy your Mozilla Thunderbird profile (located in your hidden Application Data\Mozilla Thunderbird directory) to the Mac. I then followed the hints in the article. What was import btw. is not to select the actual .mbox. You have to select the directory which contains the .mbox files. Mail.app will then look in all the subdirs for these .mbox files and all your mail should be imported in a breeze.

Last issue revolved around the old Address Book application my father was using on his Windows machine. He had been using a seperate application because he was keeping addresses for his Club in it as well and was using it to print labels. I exported the data as CSV, but I had to edit the data in MS Excel because a lot of columns were outdated and needed to be removed, the charset had to be converted, all columns/rows had to be validated etc. I then tried to save as CSV again, but the columns still had fields with the comma character in them. So I choose "Text (tab delimeted)" instead. Now the problem was that this couldn't be imported into Apple's Address Book. It seems it's CSV importer is quite picky. So what now? Did a bit of googling around and found this great online CSV2vCard utility. It works great and I could easily save (with the .vcf extension) the vCard text with TextEdit (don't forget to disable Rich Text in the new document you create for this) and import the .vcf files into Address Book without a problem. Great tool that really helped me out.