Pirate Who?

One of my favorite bloggers sums up my own recent acts of piracy in a post titled: Doctor Who, the BBC, the Rest of the World, and Bittorrent 

I have been increasingly annoyed by the practice of broadcasters releasing TV shows or movies in one part of the world long before they come out in another. Or in the case of Doctor Who (one of my all-time-favorites) the fact that it doesn't air in my own country at ALL!

And what really chaps my ass is that there aren't any plans for the show to be distributed in the U.S.A. anytime in the foreseeable future... and please don't even get me started on the region encoded DVDs that make it super annoying to buy the show so I can watch it legally.

But there is a REAL proposal for a workable solution to the issues of digital piracy and media distribution in this two part article titled "Piracy is Good?" (part 1 and part 2). This article is aimed primarily at the most threatened of all of the traditional media productions; broadcast TV, but the solution would apply well to any video media distribution.

This is a truly amazing piece, that explains the existing problem that all forms of TV currently face. But most importantly, it proposes real solutions that will work. 

I hate your wiki!

I fucking hate your wiki! I'm serious. It makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a cheese grater.

The basic idea of Wiki is that you can slap up a site devoted to some topic, and then anyone interested in the site can post content. Users are encouraged to edit other user's content to make corrections, expand on the subject, ask questions, or whatever. The result of a well implemented wiki should be a living library of constantly evolving data with a community of people working together to maintain and grow it.

Technologically, a wiki is just a simple content management and publication system. It combines etiquette guidelines with simple text formatting rules to make authoring content as simple as possible. The concept is based on the idea of implementing "the simplest thing that can still work”, a design principle from extreme programming. The etiquette rules are easy to follow for any reasonably mature person. And most wiki systems maintain a version history of each page so you can see what has been changed (and sometimes even who made the changes).

There are many different wiki sites on all kinds of topics (including a massive encyclopedia project), but in actual practice most wiki sites are devoted to software projects. Wiki is especially popular with open source projects where the wiki acts as open source documentation. It is expected that the people that write code for the app will add to the wiki too. Users of the software are also asked to contribute to the wiki if they have insights that other users may find useful. Since I'm a developer, this is where I personally run into wiki sites most frequently.

The geek in me loves the simple elegance of wiki, and I'm a big fan of collaborative works and online communities too. But I have come to loath all things Wiki. The phrase "have you checked the Wiki?" makes me want to vomit.

No, I didn't check the fucking wiki!

The reason I didn't check the wiki is because the wiki sucks! It is a giant garbage heap of trivial shit that anyone who can spell "wiki" already knows. The answer to my question, if one of your lazy wikizens even bothered to add it to the wiki, is buried so deep in the tangled mess of irrelevant and obvious junk that it'd take me longer to find my answer than it would take me to correct every spelling error on the entire site. If I do find something vaguely like what I am looking for, it'll be based on a version of the software so old that the information will not be useful to anyone still alive. Of course, there will be a note by one of the developers related to the new version, but the note will be in indecipherable indian-pseudo-engrish. In an act of desperation, I'll try to follow one of the links to an external site only to find that the site was recently bought out by pumpkinfuckers.com where someone wants to hook me up with some horny house-wives and sell me Russian vioxx.

It's about this time that I reach for the cheese grater.

There seems to be one overriding (unwritten) rule in wiki-land. Every useful piece of content in the wiki must have an evil twin page. It works like this. I'll be snooping the wiki for information about some aspect of some software. I'll come across a page with good info. This page will have nothing to do with my immediate question. Two days later, I'll have a new problem and need to find that good page again. I KNOW the answer is on the wiki because I've seen it before. But a search, no matter how carefully crafted, will only turn up the evil twin page. The evil twin will have a simple bullet list of summary trivia almost but not quite related to my investigation. It'll also have 900 links to other pages in the wiki and a few vioxx-sponcered external links. But NOT ONE of those links will lead to the good page I'm looking for. Every other page in the wiki that references the topic will link to the evil twin page... except ONE... and that one page with the magic link will be the page in the wiki most unrelated to my question.

It is also a rule that every wiki has to devote 1/2 or more of the links to other sites that explain what a wiki is about. These sites are written by permanent residents of wonderland, who write prettily yet manage to miserably fail to explain the concept of wiki. These "about wiki" pages will all make wiki sound like some sort of deity, and that any involvement in wiki is a religious cult affair (this may be true). No where in these pages will anything about wiki actually make coherent sense.

There are a few other unpublished wiki rules:

• The most well documented topics on the wiki must be devoted to explaining the most obvious and mundane aspect.
   
• Any commonly asked about topic must have no less than 10 different pages explaining the topic in great detail, but every single one of them must provide completely contradictory information or be so outdated as to simply be misleading or confusing. You should also throw in a couple of pages on the topic that provide no useful information at all. This can be achieved by visiting a Denny’s about 5am on Friday night and collecting napkins with drunken scribbles all over them. Just post the contents of the napkins and make sure as many pages as possible sneak in a link to the drunken-dumb-dumb page.
   
• You must link to the same page every time the name of the page is used, the author of the page is mentioned, or the content of that page is even hinted at. That way a page containing only five different links will appear to be an index for the library of congress. This will scare off most people before they truly comprehend just how damned useless your wiki is.
   
• You must avoid useful navigation at all costs.
   
• You must make sure that anyone moderating the site removes all content that is relevant within 1 day of posting. This is to make sure that any helpful contributor feels unwelcome and never posts again. Be sure you email the contributor and explain how their post was inappropriate (make up a reason). This is especially important for software wikis since it will spare the pride of your programmers by ensuring that they remain the most informative of your site's contributors even though they stopped updating the wiki 5 minutes after it was put online and have long since forgotten it was there.
   
• You must enlist the aid of at least one user who always posts something that starts like this: "I disagree with this because...” This user must update every page in the wiki, several times if necessary, so as to argue against any point previously made by another user. This user's posts must be condescending, irrelevant, and argue the most minute and irrelevant detail possible. This user should, if possible, be completely ignorant of the topic under discussion and constantly refer to open source, Linux, and must refer to Microsoft as M$.
     
• It is most useful to have a very pretty front page on the wiki with a nice clean and professional layout and design, but completely random layouts and color schemes on the rest of the pages in the site.
   
• You must make absolutely sure that you have a completely different menu and navigation system from any other wiki ever made. If your navigation fails to resemble any previously encountered anywhere on the internet then you get bonus points. Also, make sure the words and phrases used in any navigation system are the most obscure synonyms possible.
   
• Any search feature of the wiki must omit all of the useful content pages. It must also omit at least 30% of the evil twin pages just in case one of them accidentally links to a page someone would want to read. Don't worry about Google... Google's spiders will get so frustrated trying to navigate around your twisted redundant-link infested wiki that it'll give up long before it actually makes it to a page with useful content.

And that is why I hate, hate, HATE  your piece-of-shit wiki!

Where is my cheese grater?

Got 'em with a fax-back!

So, Caress tells me a story today about how her co-workers don't trust her. For background, she works at a security alarm company. For security reasons I can't name the company, lets just say it is a pretty big security franchise that rhymes with steamroll if you get really drunk.

Anyway, it fell on Caress's shoulders to order new electronic door passes for a customer. To do this she had to contact the parent office in a nearby city and have them make the passes and send them to her. She also asked for a list of the new pass codes (numbers) and who each code was to be assigned to (so she could make sure the right people get the right pass).

One employee at the parent office who we'll simply call Ms. Bee took Caress's issue, and then faxed her the requested list of codes.

Later another person at the parent office, who we'll call Jewel, came to the conclusion that Caress shouldn't be allowed access to those codes because she isn't certified in North Carolina (where the parent office is located).

Never mind that Caress is certified in South Carolina where her office and the customer are both located. These details are not directly relevant to the story.

So... anyway, Jewel calls Caress up and says something very much like this:

“You shouldn't have those codes, so I'm going to have to ask you to fax them back to me.”

<blink>

<blink>

Of course, Caress must not have been on her game today because her reply was:

“I'm going to make a copy first”

DRM doesn't whip the Llama's ass

I recently had occasion to deal with a DRM protected music file.

Now, I personally make it a policy not to purchase DRM protected content as a general rule. It isn't because I want to be able to copy a song and give it out to millions of people for free, nor because I object to big brother watching over my shoulder to see if I have “permission“ to do what I'm doing (though that does bother me quite a lot). It's mostly just because DRM protected files don't give me what I want.

When I buy music, I want to be able to play it on any device, anywhere, without having to jump through hoops and ask the person who supposedly "sold" it to me if I might copy it to a CD or to my portable music player, pretty please! I also don't want to have to bother with copying a single instance of a song out and back from one device to another each time that I want to listen to it on another player like some DRM schemes require. I want to have a copy on each player I might possibly use and be done with it. And I really don't like the way current DRM schemes allow some record company the right to change what I'm allowed to do anytime they wish, with my computer just blindly going along with whatever they decide.

So... Fuck DRM, that's what I say!

And come to think of it, this notion that I didn't really “buy“ the music, that I just paid for a “license“ to listen to it... that's total horse-shit too! I paid for a copy of the song. The way I see it, I own that copy. I don't so much care that the law doesn't see it that way, that's how I see it. It's my fucking CD, WMA, or MP3 that I paid for so if I want to copy it, translate it into another format, or jam it up my ass sideways; well, that's my business. Sure, it is illegal to give copies to all my friends, but if I choose to do that and get caught you can come and sue me for it. That's fine. But what I can't stomach is when the record companies set it up so that that *my* computer is supposed to stop me from copying music just because I *might* break a law. Or even worse, expect that my computer should inform the authorities if and when I do decide to break a law.

I'll tell you what! I'll license you this dollar in exchange for you licensing me that song. But under the terms of my license, you may not give or loan the dollar to anyone else, nor can you exchange the dollar for another currency. And while I'm at it, you have to ask me before you transfer that dollar from one bank account to another so that I can make sure you aren't doing something I don't like with my dollar, like gaining interest on it (the closest money equivalent to copying). And I also reserve the right to change what you are allowed to do with my dollar whenever I want to, or I can revoke your license to my dollar at any time for any reason at all, at which time you must destroy the dollar or return it to me. That sounds fair doesn't it?

But anyway, about the file... Kelly decided to buy from an online music store. She did this because the artist that wrote this one song doesn't write anything else anyone could possibly want to bother with (and I'm not too sure about this particular song either), so purchasing the entire CD was a bit expensive when you can just buy the one song online for under a dollar.

The file is, of course, a DRM protected WMA file.

Ah! A challenge!

I might not like the song that much, and I certainly didn't want a copy on my own system, but  I decided  that I was going to circumvent the copy protection in direct violation of the DMCA (sue me!) so that I can exercise Kelly's fair use rights (if they still exist) and copy the song as an MP3 file.

Of course I had no idea how to do this, me having no experience with DRM files and all, but I expected a quick google search would turn up a ripper in no time. This turned out to be a lot more difficult than I would have thought. There were a couple of commercial products that people on several forms claimed would do the trick. However, in most of these same forums, other people claimed that the product didn't work, or only worked with older DRM formats. I wasn't feeling like wasting $20 - $100 per application just to see if it might rip the $1 file I had. Most people in the forums suggested just playing the WMA file and using the sound card to re-record it in anther format. This sounded bothersome to me and I lacked the proper software for this option; besides many people indicated that this option often results in noticeable loss of quality.

Eventually though, I came across a particularly interesting forum where a user pointed out that the popular MP3 player Winamp could be used to convert the WMA into a standard WAV file (which of course then means that it would be trivial to convert the WAV to an MP3 later). Surprise! Winamp does have a way to do this. All you have to do is go into Winamp's options --> preferences, then go to the Output section and select the Nullsoft disk writer plug-in. After that, when you play the song in Winamp, instead of playing in the speakers, it plays the file into a WAV file that it jams a copy onto your hard drive. It is a slow process, and you can't hear the song while it is being played into a file... but it works great! I'm sure it wasn't the intended use of this feature to violate the DMCA by allowing Winamp to violate DRM (considering the feature is older than most DRM schemes anyway), but I'm glad it does so. Sure beats playing inspector gadget looking for a ripper.