12.30.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:28 am by
Here is something straight out of science fiction: a professor in Australia is breeding new music forms with bacteria cultures. Anyone scared of what biological entity will be derived from Britney Spears? 
Rather than taking given DNA structures and rendering them as musical code, GeneMusik takes fragments of conventional Western melody and sequences them as DNA that is subsequently ‘bred’ and ‘mixed’ within bacterial cultures.
DNA extracted from these cultures may then be re-sequenced, translated to musical notation and interpreted as new musical forms
It is anticipated that the first public manifestation of GeneMusiK will be a series of elegant body adornments that contain ‘musicalised’ synthetic DNA sequences. Each item will be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and an audio CD of the musical sequence.
All the technology in the world and what do we do with it? Designer music sequences.
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12.29.04
Posted in forum archive at 2:48 pm by
Wired online has a multipage interview with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent about just what he hath done:
You could think of BitTorrent as Napster redux – another rumble in the endless copyright wars. But BitTorrent is something deeper and more subtle. It’s a technology that is changing the landscape of broadcast media.
“All hell’s about to break loose,” says Brad Burnham, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures in Manhattan, which studies the impact of new technology on traditional media. BitTorrent does not require the wires or airwaves that the cable and network giants have spent billions constructing and buying. And it pounds the final nail into the coffin of must-see, appointment television. BitTorrent transforms the Internet into the world’s largest TiVo.
One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film’s producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That’s almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt’s site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. “It’s amazing – I’m a movie distributor,” he says. “If I had my own content, I’d be a TV station.”
During the last century, movie and TV companies had to be massive to afford distribution. Those economies of scale aren’t needed anymore. Will the future of broadcasting need networks, or even channels?
I know that with the combination of software I’ve talked about here and here I’ve managed to assemble what amounts to my own personalized, commercial free, TiVo’ed network. Betweeen the hours of 7pm and 7am my ISP allows for unlimited bandwidth usage. I fire up my laptop and then I just let it sit there. By the morning bus ride I might have some episodes of the Daily Show,Monster Garage, American Chopper, XPlay, or Myth Busters with the occasional music video thrown in. It’s media my way and its hard imagining it otherwise.
If a studio were smart they’d just jump right in and begin doing what that system still lacks – recommendations. I know what I like now but there really is no way to go out and find new programs I might like without returning to the television and clicking aimlessly. What is needed is something to the Amazon.c “if you buy this you might also like this” system, or something like what del.icio.us does for social networking.
Sigh. What fun. Who wants to hunker down in near poverty for the next 1-2 years for a chance at winning the killer app lottery?
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Posted in forum archive at 2:36 pm by
Entertainment Weekly has announced their ten best music albums for 2004. What tops the list, however, is an album we’ve talked about before – the Beatle, jay-Z mash-up entitled the Gray Album:
Only in the age of accelerating technology could someone have thought to pinch rhymes from the rapper’s Black Album and synch them up to random riffs, refrains, and snippets from the White Album. The someone in question is DJ Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton, and the result could have been a novelty worth one listen at most — the sound of an iPod with seriously crossed internal wires. Yet far from being a wack job, The Grey Album — a free download before the Beatles’ reps not surprisingly put a halt to it — is the ultimate artistic validation of technology and the mash-up. Even such praise, though, doesn’t hint at its ingenious merging of two generations: the hypnotic blend of ”Long, Long, Long” and ”Public Service Announcement,” the ”Hova!” shout-outs in ”Encore” newly buttressed by the guitar snarls of ”Glass Onion,” the childhood recollections of ”December 4th” merged with ”Mother Nature’s Son.” (The album would have been the perfect capper to Jay-Z’s retirement, had he actually retired.) Rock and rap have tangled with each other for over a decade, but rarely this seamlessly. The astonishing thing about The Grey Album is that despite its mad-scientist origins, it feels more organic than so much other music released this year. It’s an experiment even a Luddite — never mind a rap or Beatle hater — could love.
Amen to that. We live in a remix culture where the media that we surround ourselves with is increasingly in forms that allow us to interact, recombine, and make new. Remix culture is not the death of creativity – its the birth! Actung Baby! 
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12.27.04
Posted in forum archive at 12:57 pm by
A sweet little application called Tor (made by the good people at EFF) was brought to my attention today. It sits between your computer and the outside world doing all sorts of things that would drive a marketing guru batty:
Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to figure out who and where you are. Tor’s technology aims to provide Internet users with protection against “traffic analysis,” a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.
Traffic analysis is used every day by companies, governments, and individuals that want to keep track of where people and organizations go and what they do on the Internet. Instead of looking at the content of your communications, traffic analysis tracks where your data goes and when, as well as how big it is. For example, online advertising company Doubleclick uses traffic analysis to record what web pages you’ve visited, and can build a profile of your interests from that. A pharmaceutical company could use traffic analysis to monitor when the research wing of a competitor visits its website, and track what pages or products that interest the competitor. IBM hosts a searchable patent index, and it could keep a list of every query your company makes. A stalker could use traffic analysis to learn whether you’re in a certain Internet cafe.
There is a somewhat noticeable speed hit (ironic because I had just sped up my browser). However, watching it squash advertisements from ad networks and knowing that I’m not building profiles for marketing agents to use seems well worth it.
* An additional note: Tor is used in conjuntion with KNOPPIX, a privacy app on your machine. To simply use a proxy with a browser isn’t ideal because the browser still sends out DNS and header info with ever request. KNOPPIX strips the header info before sending out and removes obvious ads before reaching your machine. NICE! So far so good with Firefox. Now I need to set up the Tor for Azureus. Another side benefit – KNOPPIX keeps a log file of all requests for your machine so you can see exactly what is being pulled and from where. Good stuff.
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Posted in forum archive at 12:15 pm by
In another example of the usefulness of RSS comes a very useful abilty to track UPS shipments with an RSS feed.
I always hated the fact that there was no good “push” mechanism for getting UPS shipment updates. I don’t want to go to their website every hour to see where my package is. I want to be notified when it moves. Of course I immediately thought of RSS, but I couldn’t find anyone who had turned the UPS data into a feed. I then decided to make it myself in ASP.NET!
I threw together a working version. The url is in this format: http://www.young-technologies.com/utilities/packagetracking/rsstracking.aspx?Type=UPS&TrackingNumber=XXXXXXXXX where the XXXXXXX’s are the UPS tracking number you want to track.
It doesn’t use screen scraping, which can be unreliable. If I wrote it that way, I would have to change my interface every time UPS decided to change their website. I found out that UPS had an XML interface to get their tracking information directly. I wrote a .NET dll to make the request, and process the response into an object.
Sorry this is late for all those who may have packages over the holidays but hopefully it will be useful in the future. 
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Posted in forum archive at 12:12 pm by
The Iowa city Press-Citizen tells the story of Jathan Desir, the first to be convicted as part of operation fastlink.
The search of Desir’s residence was part of “Operation Fastlink,” which targeted the underground community’s hierarchy with agents conducting more than 120 searches within 24 hours in 27 states and 11 foreign countries. At the time, authorities identified nearly 100 people as leaders or high-ranking members of international piracy groups.
As a result of host libraries of music, videos, software, and games Desir faces 15 years on felony counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. A warning for the warez scene – people are watching.
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Posted in forum archive at 12:07 pm by
PlaneShift is an open source (except for art) MMOG that has just reached beta phase.
While the idea of an open source MMOG would sound like a neat idea the implementation leaves something to be desired. I tried it out this weekend and the protected graphics are the sort that the socially inept geeks at the back of the class would cover their notebook with (it throws usabilty software gains back at least ten years). The graphics are also sorely dated.
I suppose some lee-way must be given because this is the product of mostly volunteers. However, given the source of so many low cost professional MMOGs out there it hardly seems worth dealing with random crashes and frequent server down time.
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Posted in forum archive at 12:00 pm by
This is a neat idea: Lawrence Lessig, Standford Professor and consumer IP rights advocate, is preparing an update to his book: Code, and other Laws of Cyberspace. He knows the text is out of date after the 5 years since its first publishing. However, V2 will be authored a little differently.
Beginning in February, we’ll be posting Version 1 of Code to a Wiki. “Chapter Captains” will then supervise updates and corrections. Depending upon the progress, sometime near June, I will take the product and edit and rewrite it to produce Code, v2. The Wiki will stay live forever (under a Creative Commons license). The edited book will be published in the fall. I have donated my advance for Code, v2 to Creative Commons. All royalties beyond the advance will be donated as well.
…
My aim is not to write a new book; my aim is to correct and update the existing book. But I’m eager for advice and expert direction.
Wiki’s can work very well: just look at WikiPedia. Using the interested community to edit and update a text is a very interesting idea. Good luck to Lessig on his grand experiment.
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12.24.04
Posted in forum archive at 7:43 pm by
Need more holiday music for your stereo but can’t find anything 8 bit enough? Check out the 8bitpeople’s 8bits of Christmas. With free mp3’s available for download, its the NES Christmas game soundtrack that was never made.
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Posted in forum archive at 7:39 pm by
Raisin prodded me to go ahead and post possibly the coolest thing a steel worker has made since… well… hmmm… gonna have to thing on that one. Anyway, an Alaskan steelworker is building his own mech. There’s more on the story:
“I’ve always been building things,” he said. “But with the mecha I wanted to do something different than what everyone else was doing. It’s hard to invent something new.”
When completed, the idea is for the pilot to be able to strap himself into a central, padded compartment, and then control the mecha with the motions of his own body. When the pilot walks, the mecha walks. Raise an arm and open a hand, and the mecha does the same, with 46 possible movements planned.
Owens said he can’t afford top-of-the line equipment, like infrared sensors and electronics that would govern the motion. Instead he’s using a hydraulic system to transfer the motion of his limbs to the larger structure, and a gas engine mounted on the back to generate the power needed. In all, the system can exert about 3,500 pounds per square inch, or more than enough to set his ton and a half creation in motion, he said.
Lets hear it for the garage inventor! 
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