For example, I’d get hits to /blog/2009/03/05/entry-slug/comment-page-1/, which is an URL that’s pretty hard to actually find on the page — it’s only used for permanent links to entry comments, with an anchor to the comment ID tacked on, like this.

What I’d prefer to see is incoming hits to the actual blog entry URL – /blog/2009/03/05/entry-slug/ in this case. Luckily, there’s a smart and simple solution — canonical URLs. The Google Webmaster blog explains it nicely with examples.

So I simply add a canonical tag referencing the preferred URL in each page. Now, it’s just the preferred URL on my side — this is just a hint to search engines that tells them that this page is a duplicate, and that I’d prefer them to let results point to one particular page of these duplicates. In 99% of the cases it will be respected, though.

The actual code is just a few lines. Add this in header.php of your theme, somewhere in the head:

<?php if (is_singular()) { ?>
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" />
<?php } ?>

is_singular is a function that returns true if any of is_single(), is_page() or is_attachment return true — in other words, if you’re currently visiting a single entry, a page or an attachment.

With this, each entry sub-page of comments has the main entry URL as their canonical URL. Now to wait a few days and see when the search engines¹ pick up the change.

¹ And by “search engines” I mean “Google.”

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.

Here’s the shared page, or go straight to the feed for it.

There will be the occasional item in Swedish, but most of it is English.

Addendum: I should also mention that I have a habit of sharing things that I know interest people that follow my shared items. Breki wrote about Things recently, so I’ve shared a handful of Things-related entries that show up in my feed.

Want me to share stuff that interests you? Make sure I read your blog and tell me that you follow my shared items, and I’m almost certain to start sharing stuff you’ve blogged about recently.

• GlimmerBlocker — Ad blocker for Safari implemented as a non-intrusive proxy.
• Noscope | Journal | Extra Image Tags Plugin — This is a very minimalistic Wordpress plugin, which finds all images you insert into your posts, and wrap them in extra divs, so you can style the hell out of them.
• The $300 Million Button — “It's hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.”
• Cops Talk Funny — “From recruits in academies to senior officers and command staff, you talk funny when you take the stand. Is it in the water at the academies; is there a secret society where you're taught this special language?”
• Videogames outsell DVD and Blu-ray in 2008 — Retail sales of videogames overtook that of DVD and Blu-ray for the first time, as sales of packaged media grew 6 per cent worldwide to hit USD 61 billion in 2008, according to Media Control GfK International.

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.

• Applescript support in Adium 1.2 and later — AppleScript reference for hooks in Adium.
• AppleScript Language Guide: Introduction to AppleScript Language Guide — This document is a guide to the AppleScript language—its lexical conventions, syntax, keywords, and other elements. It is intended primarily for use with AppleScript 2.0 or later and Mac OS X version 10.5 or later.
• Matt Legend Gemmell – MGTwitterEngine – Twitter from Cocoa — MGTwitterEngine is an Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API. The entire API is covered, and appropriate data is returned as simple native Cocoa objects.
• The Raw Story | Whistleblower: NSA spied on everyone, targeted journalists — “The National Security Agency had access to all Americans communications – faxes phone calls and their computer communications” Tice claimed. “It didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas in the middle of the country and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.”
• RedBedlam Boss Says Gold Farming “Inevitable” | Rock, Paper, Shotgun — The boss of virtual world tech company RedBedlam, Kerry Fraser-Robinson, has said that companies must find a way to bring virtual currency trading into their games. The must, he argued, accept that virtual currency trading will take place in games that have an economy. “Trying to stop that happening is literally like telling the tide not to come in – you will fail.”
• Key binding in L4D — Brief tutorial on how to bind keys in Left 4 Dead, including a list of Vocalize commands.
• GreaseKit – User Scripting for all WebKit applications — GreaseKit is a SIMBL plugin, that adds user scripting to Safari, Mailplane, Diet Pibb.app and all WebKit applications.

I’ve seen this sort of semi-scammy deal before. Sure, they have auctions. Sure, people win them and get the item. But the entire auction method is completely stacked.

When you bid on an auction, it goes up by 0.10 SEK (about 0.012 USD, or 1.2 cents). However, you must first buy bids before you can place them.

You can either pay per bid on your phone bill for extortionate sums that MrSvensson blames on the phone carriers (which I totally believe), or buy bid packages with 10 to 50 bids. It starts with 10 bids for 149 SEK (14.90 each) to 50 bids for 3849 SEK (7.70 SEK each). A bid via cell phone costs 20 SEK per bid.

The big scammy profit for MrSvensson is that you pay them to bid even if you don’t win. You bid on something, the cost of that auction goes up by 0.10 SEK, and you’re down one of your paid bids. If someone places a new bid, it goes up by another 0.10 SEK and you’re both not winning the auction and paying them for that lost bid.

Granted, they do have a “cashback” deal where the second and third highest bidders (as in most bids placed) get a certain amount of bids back, probably to instill a sense of not actually throwing your bids away, while at the same time encouraging you to place more bids.

On their “Lucky winners” page we get a few examples. Someone won a bid on a vacuum cleaner for 25 SEK. That means with bid increases of 0.10 SEK there were a total of 250 bids on it.

Let’s assume that most people go for packages and buy 20 bids at a time. That gives 12.45 SEK per bid. With 250 bids, that’s a total of 3112.50 SEK for that vacuum cleaner.

Did the vacuum cleaner cost that much for MrSvensson? I doubt it. So there’s one person that got a vacuum cleaner for the extremely low price of 25 SEK (about 3 dollars), and the rest of the bidders essentially threw their money straight at MrSvensson.

Another example: a digital camera won for 122.70 SEK. That makes 1227 bids for a total of 15276.15 SEK or 1860 USD in bid fees. It looks like some semi-decent compact camera that I very much doubt costs more than 500 dollars.

Playstation 3 for 216.40 SEK (26 USD)? That netted 26941.80 SEK (3280 USD) in bid fees.

Is this a legal business method? I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. It probably is. But I still see it as just a step above scams. There is nothing whatsoever preventing mysterious users run by the people behind the site to place snipe bids on auctions so they don’t sell too soon in case the item isn’t profitable via the bid fees yet.

I’ve already found some bug in the default templates that try to stick paragraph tags in silly places.

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

• Dutch government study: net effect of P2P use is positive – The 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.
• Practika: A Free Icon Set – Practika: 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

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.”