Apropos of Microsoft’s WTF?! deal to pay a privately levied tax to Universal on every Zune sold here’s what UMG’s chairman/CEO/arsehole in chief Doug Morris had to say:

“These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it, so it’s time to get paid for it.”

That really makes me regret all the legally purchased Universal music on mine. Am I unusually perverse that now I do want to steal from them? After all it won’t make them think any worse of me than they already do. Surely it can’t be too much longer before there’s critical mass of people who are sick of lining the pockets of people who treat them like criminals?

Link via BoingBoing.

2006/11/15 Update: Josh Smith links to several lists of Universal artists so you know who to avoid in future.

I really don’t understand this. Microsoft are saying that Zune will not be compatible with Plays for Sure encoded content bought through the MSN music store. The story’s been floating around for a week but I assumed that once MS realised how bad it made them look they’d claim it was all just a silly misunderstanding and fix it.

It’s hard to tell from the BBC story which media might work with which player or what the possible reason for the incompatibility might be. Not that the specifics really matter; the real problem is that proprietary DRM means you don’t really have a clue what you’re buying and how its capabilities might change after you’ve bought it. DRM turns devices that are technically capable of playing just about any digital audio content into little walled gardens of artificial rules and constraints - and those walls can be moved with every software update.

The rational alternative is to download the music illegally, send a few quid directly to the artist and ask them to distribute as much of that back to their record company as they see fit. No DRM, more money for the artist and record companies getting paid what they’re worth rather than what they can extort. Unfortunately that’s illegal - so I can’t possibly recommend it.

I’m reposting this here because apparently the original page is itself censored. You can also see the original page here on my proxied version of BoingBoing. I’d like to encourage other bloggers to mirror a copy of this item on their own blogs. Presumably they can’t censor everyone.

“The Internet interprets censorship as damage
and routes around it.” — John Gilmore

If your employer or corrupt, undemocratic, dictator-based government uses a filtering service such as Secure Computing’s SmartFilter to block access to BoingBoing.net — or anything else online — you can try the following workarounds:

• Distributed BoingBoing mirrors everything on BoingBoing.net at random IP addresses to foil filters.
• Read "Technical Ways to Get Around Censorship," a helpful primer from Reporters Without Borders: Link.
• Google can act as a lightweight, proxy-like tool for accessing forbidden sites — but don’t rely on this method for anonymity. Link.

• The popular RSS reader Bloglines can offer lightweight help in some cases, too. Boing Boing reader Tom Jeziorny
  says, "I work for a BIG financial services company that apparently uses (not-so-) SmartFilter because BoingBoing has recently become a forbidden site. I use Bloglines as my RSS reader so that I can access the blogs I read from work and home. It turns out that Bloglines is acting as sort of a proxy, since it connects to your RSS feed and not my computer, I’m still able to read BoingBoing at work. Since you publish the full text of your entries in your feeds I’m not missing much, though any photos linked directly from your site are edited out."

• A group called Peacefire created proxy software called Circumventor to bypass censorware. Install this software on your home computer and allow others to use your proxy to access the web, or use your proxy from work or school to access any web site. (Thanks, Sean!)

• Bennett Haselton
  of Peacefire, who developed Circumventor, says:

  "For 90% of users in the USA affected by SmartFilter, there is no reason to use anything but Circumventor. The reasons are:

  1) It’s simple to set up. Just run three simple point-and-click installers. We even have a wizard that comes up automatically to help you set up port forwarding on your router if you’ve never done it before.
  2) You are not required to install anything on the "censored" computer, you just bring a URL in with you to work.
  3) It works even if the censored network blocks direct connections to IP addresses outside the network (which would break some of the other solutions recommended in this guide).

  "If you’re in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or some other country censored by SmartFilter, then your best choices are (a) TOR, or (b) use a Circumventor if you can get someone in a "free country" to set one up for you. (The reason Circumventor works for 90% of workplace-filtered users in the U.S. is that they can almost always set it up on their home computer and take the URL in with them. But not everybody in a censored *country* has someone outside who can help them.)

  "Circumventor is the *only* method (as far as I know) that will work reliably on computers where people are blocked from installing their own software (or even changing proxy settings) — because after you install it on your home computer, all it gives you is a URL, and you can take that URL in with you to work and use it whenever you want. Many people in workplaces and libraries are blocked from installing software on their computers. Or even if they could, it would be a definite ’smoking gun’ if anyone noticed that the software had been installed; whereas our software leaves fewer traces. (There is a ’smoking gun’ in the form of a URL in the URL history, but that’s much less likely to be noticed than a TOR icon on your desktop!)"

• Rich
  says, "This cgi-bin script is the guts inside Peacefire’s Circumventor - a Perl CGI script that proxys for you. While Circumventor is a full script to get it working under Win2k/XP, the cgiproxy script alone lets you get it going on Linux and (presumeably) Mac OSX. And the best part - the setup is dirt simple - if you’re already running a web server, pretty much just drop it in your cgi-bin directory.

• Access the TOR network. The more people who run Tor servers, the faster and more anonymous the network becomes.
• Using an SSH tunnel, VPN, or anonymous overlay to an unfiltered network is widely considered to be the best way to protect yourself while accessing "prohibited" content. (Thanks, chris)

• Chris says, "There is a new option in OpenSSH that allows for ethernet level tunneling using the kernel’s TUN interface. This is probably the most powerful solution if you have access to a friendly system to use as the end point of the tunnel. Manual for ssh, see -w option: Link. For ssh_config, see Tunnel option: Link. And one more way to use SSH as a tunnel is to with SOCKS: Link. osx example script: Link.

• Breaking out of a Proxy Jail. Link (Thanks, Mutz!)

• Try Daveproxy, and other services listed on the proxy list at samair.ru/proxy together with AntiFirewall (a small app that tests proxies). (Thanks, Joao Barata!)
• Try Java Anonymous Proxy. JAP uses the TOR network, and installation is pretty easy for non-nerds. (Thanks, Jonas)
• The Bitty browser, while not initially designed as an anonymizing tool, has helped some of our readers work around corporate internet filters. (Thanks, Scott Matthews!)

• Some of our readers have found the Coral Content Distribution Network (CCDN) helpful for evading internet blocks.
  Just add ".nyud.net:8090" at the end of boingboing.net — for example, instead of typing
  http://www.boingboing.net to your browser’s address line, instead type http://www.boingboing.net.nyud.net:8090. If port 8090 is blocked for some reason, the Coral Cache also functions on port 8080. Or, try adding .cob-web.org:8888 to the URL if the Coral Cache is blocked, for an alternate cache network. (Thanks, BeHE, Tian and Michael!)

• Check out the regularly updated list of public proxy servers
  at publicproxyservers.com.
• For BoingBoing readers in the UAE or Qatar, or other countries where BoingBoing is blocked, one anonymous reader tells us: "There is an internet via satellite called OPENSKY sold through www.broadsat.com which goes around these problems. Using VPN with normal dialup, the signal gets sent back from Europe, so, uncensored. Works really well and is cheap!"
• Andy Armstrong says, "I’ve also set up a proxy for boingboing at boingboing.hexten.net."

• Ben says, "You can also set your home computer up for remote access. Windows XP has the components built in. If you run XP at home it will take you about 30 min to set up. You can find instructions here. Once you set up remote access you can use Zone Edit freeware to set up a static IP, even if you are on a cable modem. If you really want to go all out register a website for $5 and have that point to the Zone Edit IP address. I can hit my home computer from anywhere with web access, and have its full functionality, including censor-free web browsing."
• Marcus Aurelius
  says, "This is how I dodged Etisalat’s (The UAE ISP and telco) proxy-server blacklist. It is only really useful for text-rich sites since it involves using Lynx a text browser."
• Abdul Aziz
  says, "It’s a pain to know that countries and companies alike are blocking and censoring sites like Boing Boing. I face this at my office everyday. I’ve mentioned two ways on my site by which you can bypass these proxies and filters safely and securely without breaking any rules or arousing the network admin’s suspicions." Link

• Former Censorware Project chief programmer Seth Finkelstein
  posts anti-censorware
  resources here .

• A tutorial on how to bypass Internet Censorship using proxies, shells, JAP, and the like: Link (Thanks, Seth Finkelstein)
• Michael sez:
  

  The Anonymizer company has a contract with the Voice of America to provide anonymous internet access for users in a number of foreign countries, including Iran and China. Here’s how an Anonymizer sysadmin describes the Iranian portion of the service: “It’s based off of PrivateSurfing [...]. Added features for the Iran proxy is full time SSL, URL encryption, Farsi language support, and we switch the proxy website about once a month (every time the Iranian government blocks us). We perform checks on the service from within Iran to see if our site is actually blocked (yes, it works), and we maintain a database of all known e-mail addresses that we can detect as being located in Iran. Every time we switch the proxy site we send an e-mail informing them of the new free proxy location so the citizens of Iran can find it. The sites are also broadcast via radio and TV into Iran by the VOA. To be honest, we’re usually about a day behind the blocks, due mostly to time zone differences.”

Or…

• If you’re accessing BoingBoing from work, you may be able to ask your system administrator to whitelist BoingBoing.net. That’s shorthand for selectively removing the domain from a list of forbidden sites provided by the filtering software vendor. If your employer uses SmartFilter, for example, a sysadmin can selectively allow the BoingBoing.net domain, while keeping the rest of the entries for the "blocked" category in which BoingBoing is listed. Bribing your network administrator with cartons of Skittles and Red Bull may expedite this option. (Thanks, mcsey!)

   

If you know of any good ways to defeat censorware, please send us your suggestion.

Ever had an idea that seemed kind of obvious and then immediately, given the current climate in which patents seem to be dished out like parking tickets, wondered how long it would take for a patent to show up featuring your ‘obvious’ idea?

If you have an idea that you don’t want to patent yourself but fear someone else might be able to push through the patent system pop along to Bleeding Obvious and make a page describing it. It’s a wiki so anyone can edit it - but it keeps previous versions so nobody can re-write history.

From the iTunes 6.0.5 release notes:

Note: After purchasing music from the iTunes Music Store with iTunes 6 or later, you also need to upgrade your other computers that purchase music from the iTunes Music Store to the latest version of iTunes.

Is it just me or does that imply that they’ve updated their DRM again? I can’t think of any other reason why newly purchased music would be incompatible with older versions of the software.

In any case it neatly highlights the extent to which music bought from the iTunes music store is locked to Apple’s proprietary software. You did realise if you want to keep playing the music you bought from them you can never buy an MP3 player other than an iPod, right? And if you decide to ditch Mac OS in favour of, say, Linux you’re shit out of luck too.

The New Scientist and others are running a story about a technique that seems to be able to silence a braying racist mob:

Soccer hooligans could be silenced by a new sound system that neutralises chanting with a carefully timed echo.

Stadiums could use the technique to defuse abusive or racist chants, say the Dutch researchers behind it. The echoes trip up efforts to synchronise a chant, neutralising an unwelcome message without drowning out the overall roar of a crowd.

Cool! How long before it’s used on peaceful protesters?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting (Holiday Buyers Spurn Tunes As Industry Picture Worsens) that, after a brief recovery, music sales are down some 20% this year compared with the same period last year.

They’re blaming all the usual suspects - high prices, CD burning, competition from other sectors and - of course - ’sharing’. I think there might be another reason. Since I transferred all my old CDs onto my iPod I’ve realised how little of the music I owned I’d actually listened to properly. So I declared a moratorium on music purchases until I’d heard every track I already owned at least once. It just seemed profligate to buy new music until I’d cleared the backlog. I’ve been chugging through them (and some of them are pretty dire) for a couple of months. As a result I have only a thousand or so unheard tracks left now.

So that’s my contribution to the downturn. Of course I’m boycotting Sony BMG so even when I’m back off the CD buying wagon I’ll give them a miss - but apart from that I should be ready to start lobbing my hard earned cash down their greedy little gullets sometime in the new year. Let’s hope they can hold out that long.

The folks over at Sory Electronics have taken my T shirt design and run with it. The result: soryelectronics.com - a call to boycott Sony. Just do it.

In related news Cory Doctorow is reporting over at BoingBoing that Sony have issued a ‘non-apology’ - way to go Sony. You know Sony really should be taking this a bit more seriously - after all Cory seems to be the hardest nerd.

Er, sory.

So the geeks are up in arms about Sony’s ill advised Root-Kit-as-DRM approach to hoarding their treasures. If by any chance you’ve missed any of the saga I’m not about to rehash it here - there’s a timeline of the whole debacle on Wilcohol.com.

Mighty though the geek hordes are we should really be thinking of a way to get everyone else - normal people fired up about this. Otherwise the danger is that it’ll all blow over in a couple of weeks and then before we know it they’ll be back with something equally intrusive along with a bunch of spin to explain how it reduces the risk of cancer, promotes democracy and involves no cruelty to animals.

To that end I’ve knocked up a T shirt design (find V1.0 on Cafepress) which I hope might prompt questions that will allow the wearer to explain why we shouldn’t be buying Sony’s products right now.

Disclosure: if you buy a shirt from that site I’ll get a couple of bucks. I’m quite happy though for people just to take the design and use it. The artwork is here if anyone wants it. Or better yet remix that design or produce one of your own. If you do tell me about it.

Update: Cory Doctorow has a piss boiling timeline of the whole thing over on BoingBoing.

John Edwards has a piece in the Washington Post today in which he expresses (what sounds like) sincere regret at having voted for the war in Iraq. A cynic might suggest that he’s trying to surf the rising tide of public disapproval for the war but even if that’s his game the novelty of a US politician saying “I was wrong” and “I am sorry” stands in such stark contrast to the arrogance, complacency and deceit of the Bush administration that I can’t help but find this article significant.

Irrespective of his motives the fact that ’sorry’ sounds incongruous from a politician tells us how far the administration has strayed from decency.

Link here (Washington Post)