Favorite quote of the month from this Techdirt article:
Law enforcement isn’t supposed to be easy in a free society. If the goal of society was to make law enforcement’s life easy, we’d get rid of all privacy rights entirely. The excuse that this is somehow “necessary” for law enforcement to do their job is a lie. It may mean they have to investigate crimes in different ways, but no blanket removal of privacy is ever “necessary.”
Spotify is a good idea. Too bad that the implementation is pretty horrible.
For starters, Spotify makes it very hard to find new music to listen to. I can search just fine, and Spotify even has a modest amount of the music I listen to. But why can’t I find any new music?
If I look at the “radio” tab, I see eighteen categories, none of which describe the music I like, and a slider to pick a range of decades of music. The big problem here is that the categories are horribly generic.
I listen to a lot of electronic subgenres, yet the only thing vaguely resembling my taste is “techno” — and I don’t listen to techno. After 30 minutes of listening to music in this strange techno category, I heard one single song I could maybe classify as techno. The rest was trance, goa trance (which, of course, isn’t the same as trance), drum and bass, synthpop and futurepop. I can’t think of any way to make Boards of Canada qualify as techno.
They need to take a long hard look at last.fm. There I can participate in social tagging and tag artists and groups with whatever genres I think they fit into. Looking at the EBM tag at last.fm I see a fairly accurate representation of actual EBM – though I don’t really know what Covenant is doing that high up on the list.
Another thing they need to borrow from last.fm: Where are all the other users? Why can’t I add friends? See what they listen to? Find other users with similar taste in music that way?
Spotify is a nice idea. But it feels too much like Web 1.1 with one-way communication from the music industry to a silent crowd of passive consumers, rather than the social activity you can get at last.fm with user taxonomy, forums, discussion and music comparisons letting you find new music.
If I want to find new music on Spotify the only way is to play the incredibly vague “techno” category and hope I stumble upon something I actually like.
This is me on last.fm. At a quick glance you can see what I’ve listened to recently, what my favorite music is, and if you’re a registered user, get a comparison to see how our music tastes match.
Get to work, Spotify! We’re not in the 1990s any longer.
Last-minute edit: One minute after posting this Spotify gave me opera song and instrumental chamber music… which is apparently techno.
Update: It does seem that they actually listen, and last.fm scrobbling support was recently added. It’s a small step forward, at least.
What in the name of sanity is going on with politicians lately?
First we had the Swedish FRA law mandating that all internet traffic that passes national borders (in effect nearly all traffic) shall be routed through FRA for surveillance for “threats to the nation.” Citing a poignant part from the Wikipedia article:
According to the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment’s Director-General, Ingvar Åkesson, they destroy the data collected after eighteen months, but they confirm that they have, in fact, been collecting information not just on foreigners but also on Swedes as the presence of Swedish search terms used on the data would indicate.
So for a decade they have conducted illegal surveillance on Swedish citizens. No politicians ever talk about holding them responsible for their crimes. The general opinion seems to be “but the FRA law makes it legal, so then we can turn a blind eye to the decade of criminal activity.”
The FRA law went in effect on January 1, 2009. I assume that everything I write on this blog passes through FRA, including my password for the admin interface. Anyone that uses Hotmail or Gmail have their passwords intercepted, as well as all the emails they read.
Now we have the next outrage around the corner: the telecommunications data retention act.
This act requires ISPs to store metadata — each and every IP address you communicate with and when, how long the communication lasted. If it is a cell phone call, the cell phone carrier will record who you called, how long the call lasted, and where you were when making the call, turning your cell phone into a government tracking device.
This isn’t paranoid rambling; this is openly written in the act.
In the UK the police may be able to hack into computers without a warrant and access the contents of your computer. Other countries can ask British police for access to any results of the intrusion.
Here in Sweden there’s a similar inquest that’s already written. The government is debating the proposition for the law, and the Social Democrats in the opposition are positive to this.
In the same inquest it is openly written that passwords, cryptographic keys and anonymizing proxy services are seen as a problem that needs to be solved.
In the UK it is already a criminal offence punishable by prison time to not surrender the keys to encrypted files. I expect that to be law here within five years if this keeps up.
This is all done in the name of “fighting terrorism.”
Terrorism can threaten freedom and democracy. But only politicians can destroy it. And they are dismantling our freedom piece by piece.
I am a member of the Swedish Pirate Party. It is the only party opposed to the FRA law and other freedom-crushing laws. You should join too.
One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?
“O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!”
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON’T SOUND WELL.
“I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.”
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
“But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.”
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.
Happy new one!
I kick this year off by switching this domain to a different server. Same web host; just a different server. I was one of the first to sign up with TextDrive, and consequently one of the first on their servers.
Sadly, those early servers suffered a bit from overcrowding and general early illnesses. Since I’m one of the VC200s, the 200 people that invested 200 dollars each in TextDrive when it started up, I have a free account with them for the lifetime of the company — and I’ve certainly gotten my 200 dollars worth of web hosting a long time ago.
The early investors were offered a Golden Ticket to move to an equivalent account on newer, fresher servers, and my new account was just activated. In a few days I’ll start the move, beginning with a fresh WordPress install. I won’t just copy the entire account over; it’s a damn mess behind the scenes and I want a clean slate to work with.
There may be some downtime while the DNS switches over, but overall it should be a transparent change.
If there’s one thing that gets on my nerves when politicians start yapping, it’s the culture of compromising.
There’s a saying along the lines of “a good compromise is when both parties leave without satisfaction.” The problem with that is that you can just over-exaggerate your suggestion and then negotiate a compromise that is what you actually wanted, making you seem like you threw some bones to the party you’re compromising with. Politicians are oh so good at doing this.
Take the recent political brawl about the FRA law. Proponents want it to pass. Opponents want to reject it completely (though mostly to change a few details and vote it through when they’re in power themselves). Proponents call names and say the opponents are bad at politics since they can’t come up with a compromise.
Some things are so stupid and dangerous that you should never compromise with them — that just make them slightly less stupid and dangerous. It’s the equivalent of suggesting “give me all your money” and then calling names when you don’t want to compromise and only hand over half of your money.
Today there was an article by Carl B. Hamilton (in Swedish), frowning upon us little people for “not understanding” why the FRA law is good for us.
This is the same deal the Moderates used when they got trounced in the 2002 election — “We must have failed to reach people with our information.” That they in fact did reach people, and people didn’t like what they saw, is of course a possibility that’s impossible to accept if you’re a politician. No, clearly the people misunderstood or never received the information.
The problem with Hamilton’s article is that it doesn’t make a case at all. All he says is that “there are reasons” for the FRA law, yet never stating them. If they’re secret, just say so. Don’t assume we’re too dumb to understand them.
Might it have something to do with the fact that then-minister of defense Mikael Odenberg on the 13th of April 2007 signed an agreement with USA to exchange information for “terrorism research”? And that a large part of Russia’s internet traffic is routed through Sweden, making it a handy place for some wiretapping?
The disconnect between career politicians and normal people just keeps growing.
There’s a long rant about the FRA law coming up later.
Churchill once wrote: “If your argument is weak, shout. ” Remember that when you watch the politicians & the preachers on tv. Just sayin’. Ben Templesmith
For my feed reading needs I used Gregarius hosted on my site for nearly three years. But the downside is that I can only update feeds manually. I guess I could do a crontab that does a request for the update page, but I spent three years being too lazy to get that done.
I’ve been using Google Reader for nearly two months now to try it out, and I decided to stick with it. It’s good, it’s free, and it has great options for sharing interesting stuff with my friends that also use it (all one of them). You can find my shared items here if you’re interested. Feed also available there. The occasional shared post in Swedish, but mostly English.
Interface-wise there’s one thing that confuses me though: Google Reader treats folders (for different feeds) and tags (for individual entries) the same. But not.
I exported all my feeds from Gregarius as OPML and imported them to Google Reader with my old categories preserved. Nothing fancy — I had categories like People, Tech, Design and so on.
After importing the OPML, Google Reader picked it up just fine. The problem is when I want to tag individual entries, something I typically do with stuff I want to keep around for later.
The problem: The names of what I think of as “folders” show up as tags when I tag individual entries. And it’s making my brain melt. Google, you got tags in my folders and folders in my tags!
Another problem is that the name of the folder a feed is in is always added as a default tag for all entries from that feed. Very annoying. I have a folder named “People”, and that’s a very poor tag for the items in it.
The Dictionary application in OS X is just plain gorgeous with its typography.
This is how you make a proper unsubscribe feature for your newsletters. I click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email, I get a page with this, and it’s done. No further action needed. First I thought it was a bit unsecure without a confirmation button, but then I spotted the resubscribe link in case you accidentally unsubscribed.
That’s good design by 37Signals.