Atomic Playboy

Welcome to Spotify Bay.

There’s an application called SpotSave making waves in the Spotify community. SpotSave lets you save music from Spotify straight to your computer, no strings attached, with the same quality you hear straight from Spotify itself.

I haven’t tried it myself, because to be quite frank, Spotify stinks and doesn’t have any music I enjoy after the Great Purge the record industry performed. (Probably because they don’t really want to see Spotify succeed, because then they’d have to move forward to a new business model.)

Now, consider the following statements:

• SpotSave lets you connect to Spotify to download music to your computer.
• µTorrent lets you connect to clients via The Pirate Bay to download music to your computer.

Is there any difference here?

Technically? Not really. Technology doesn’t care about concepts like “copyright” and “fair use.”

Spotify wasn’t designed to let you download music — the intended design is that you stream music to listen to it.

Pissing in the stream

Here’s another thing technology doesn’t care about — the intended design. Here we have another couple of statements to consider:

• Receive a stream of data from the internet and write it to your hard drive.
• Receive a stream of data from the internet and don’t write it to your hard drive.

When you download, you receive a data stream from the internet and write it to your hard drive. When you stream, you receive a data stream from the internet and let an application do something with it, and then throw the data away.

From an outside perspective, it looks identical — a data stream going from the internet to your computer. What happens inside your computer is what makes the difference between streaming and downloading.

Once the data stream reaches your computer, it’s a Wild West. Spotify intends for me to stream the data to the Spotify application and never save it, but who are they to tell me what to do with a data stream my computer receives from the internet? Sure, there’s probably some unreadable legalese in the Spotify EULA about this, but that’s not exactly enforcable without a Spotify representative watching over my shoulder, is it?

I haven’t tried SpotSave, but here’s a qualified guess at what happens: it looks at connections to/from your computer, identifies the ones going to Spotify, and then makes a copy of the streamed music and writes it to disk.

This is very basic stuff, and has been done before. It was a popular method to save web radio transmissions for later use, and probably the main reason the record industry got their panties in a bunch about web radio technology in the first place.

Floodgates

Since history tends to repeat itself, this will start an arms race between Spotify and SpotSave. Spotify will start by encrypting their data stream (and I’m surprised they didn’t do it in the first place). If the SpotSave authors pick up the thrown gauntlet, they’ll dig deeper into Spotify’s allocated memory and rip the decrypted stream out of that instead. Spotify might claim the Blizzard defense and state that they own the copyright of a part of memory in your computer and sue SpotSave for copyright infringement. And so on.

This is why DRM – Digital Restriction Management (though some people insist on the R meaning “Rights”) — keeps failing. In order to prevent the product from being copied, they lock it up with encryption. But the customers can’t play it if it’s encrypted, so the key to unlock the encrypted data is also included in the product the customer buys.

That’s right; the customer gets both the lock and the key. It’s always just a matter of time until someone discovers where the key is hidden, and then the floodgates are wide open again. All it takes is one person to discover it and then tell someone else. Security through obscurity isn’t.

Here’s another cute little application of relevance — Mutify. Mutify is an app that also listens to the incoming data stream to Spotify. If it detects a song with a title that is in its database, it simply mutes Spotify until the next song starts. The list of “songs” are, of course, the ads Spotify plays for non-paying accounts. If there are new ads you can just click “This is an ad” in Mutify and enjoy the silence.

The arms race has already started here, and Mutify currently doesn’t work as intended with Spotify — Spotify simply pauses the ad when Mutify mutes the sound. Until then, you can just lower the volume yourself. Let’s see Spotify try to work around that.

On a similar note, there was a faceless TV exec that expressed great horror at the concept of switching to a different channel during the commercial breaks, stating that you violated a social contract by doing so. What if I need to go pee? What if I mute the sound and read a book until the commercials are over?

Owning your own interpretation

I have random thoughts about this all the time — what kind of control do I actually have over the interpretation of data streams arriving at my computer?

Let’s take web pages. They’re written in HTML, which is basically a language that tells your web browser how to display a page.

You could argue that I’m violating a contract by having a program that auto-mutes Spotify whenever an ad plays. Am I violating a contract if I tell my browser to not show images even if the HTML tells it to?

I use GlimmerBlocker to strip out the image tags for ads and banners from the stream of HTML before it reaches my browser. Am I violating any contract here? I’m clearly not viewing the page as the designer intended.

It’s the Wild West again. Once HTML reaches my computer, it’s up to me to render it as I see fit. Noone would argue with me if I surfed with images disabled in the browser due to being on a very slow connection. Stripping out useless banner ads not only preserves your sanity, it also makes the page load way faster due to all the needless crap you don’t have to download.

I’ve specifically configured my ad blocker to let text ads from Google through. These ads aren’t intrusive and don’t tell you to punch the monkey. This is the type of ads I want to encourage, so I let them display.

Once or twice a year I even click on one.

Ingvar Åkesson, chief spymaster of FRA, was on SR (Sweden’s Radio) openly declaring that citizens should consider all email sent on the internet to be “postcards,” thus making it perfectly okay for anyone who handles the postcard to read its contents.

My first question here is what he thinks of people using a new technology called “envelopes,” in the shape of asymmetrical public-key encryption. That has to be okay as well, right? (Here’s my public key.)

Sadly, Swedish politicians have already stated that anonymity and encryption are “problems” on the internet. I wonder how long until it’s illegal to use envelopes for your mail, since it prevents military intelligence agencies from spying on their citizens?

Apart from that Åkesson constructed the usual straw men about how they’re not at all going to store all email sent. Nearly everyone already knows that they won’t do this. Our problem with the military surveillance of civilian traffic is that we feel infringed the second our email gets scanned by FRA, whether they store it or not; whether it’s done manually or with automated algorithms.

These are my links for January 23rd from 04:38 to 04:41:

• Dutch government study: net effect of P2P use is positive – pThe Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs commissioned a study by research company TNO about how much Dutch Internet users download music, movies, and games, and what the social and economic effects of this downloading are./p
• Practika: A Free Icon Set | Freebies | Smashing Magazine – pPractika: a free set of 11 practical and useful high-quality icons, designed by DryIcons, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The icons are available in resolutions 64×64px, 128×128px/p

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.”

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.

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.

Finally, something that makes sense among the infected patent disputes in USA.

According to Ravicher, roughly half of all patents in the United States are illegitimate, meaning they should have never been granted. Illegitimate patents restrict the availability of critical medications to the public and deprive small businesses in information technology industries of fair opportunities to compete in the marketplace. Utilizing legal action, advocacy and public education strategies, the Public Patent Foundation will work to expose and neutralize illegitimate patents through various mechanisms, including filing requests with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to have such patents revoked. Prominent law professors from Columbia, Georgetown and Stanford law schools have already pledged support for the organization.

The Public Patent Foundation is a non-profit foundation whose goals, according to this interview with the founder are:

(1) challenging patents that threaten the public’s health, freedom, or other interests, (2) helping small businesses defend themselves from patents being asserted against them, (3) establishing patent commons within markets crippled by patent thickets, and (4) educating the public regarding these issues and advocating for reform of the patent system.

I’m thoroughly sickened by the latest influx of absurd patents, like a patent on playing card games on a computer, a patent on URLs, burning CDs, online testing, instant messaging and interactive gaming servers. And that’s just a quick search of recent patent stories on Slashdot.

Here’s how you get a patent granted in USA:

1. Take an utterly obvious idea that nobody else would ever think of patenting
2. Add “on the Internet” to the claim
3. Sue everyone who is remotely close to using your brand-new, never-before-heard-of technology
4. Profit!

If I was an American citizen, I would patent the following:

• Rolling a die… on the Internet!
• Watching a movie… on the Internet!
• Writing the word “and”… on the Internet!
• Watching porn… on the Internet!

I recall a story that circulated around 1997 — someone had a patent about “digitized images of human characters acting as avatars,” originally aimed at a tennis game where the player characters were animated images of actual tennis players. This was broad enough to apply to every single computer game containing a human figure!

Ils sont fous. <toc-toc-toc>