I quite like the one click scenario however it’s flawed in some respects that I can forward a newsletter to a friend as I often do and they’ll end up with my one click link

Today I found myself unsubscribing from the Dublin City Enterprise Board emails … I think I’d been at an event a while back so they signed me up as a result.

Firstly I was required to login … really don’t remember setting up an account but anyways I found their Reminder Sent notification quite funny

Once I was all logged in I’m hit with more strangeness usually I like to tick to opt in to emails … not tick to opt out

Also receive I before E except after C … *sighs*

I see a total figure of around the 6 million mark for their expenses

€6,041,840.76

that’s 165 claiming expenses and one didn’t

Averaging that out we get €36,617.22 per TD

NICE!!!

What’s the minimum wage again in Ireland?

It looks to be €1,461.85 a month?

So that’s €17,542.2 a year? double that and it’s €35,084.4 just under the average TD expenses ( lets not forget they are on €90,000 salaries as well?? )

So quick maths

2 * 165 = 330 minimum wage jobs (rough figures as always with me)

NICE of course that’s a bit simplistic some expenses are of course going to be justified but I wonder how 1 TD can not claim any expenses and get by?

It’s not like I’ve seen any of them in the dail for these debates re SOPA recently is it? so where on earth is the money going?

Guess the big question would be … would I do any differently in their situation?

I’ve been lying here in bed for the last hour or two unable to sleep as I do from time to time and my mind inevitably wanders to the news and what’s happening at the moment and I start thinking about the whole Stop SOPA Ireland thing.

I laugh a little to myself and start to wonder

How many people actually know what it’s all about?

• How many people are speaking out against SOPA Ireland cus they are afraid they won’t be able to download their favourite TV show?
• How many are having their voice heard that they don’t want to be bullied by the big corporations?
• How many are true advocates of freedom of speech?

I grew up with transition from Records and Tapes over to CDs so yes I’m not actually that old or if you’re the generation that doesn’t know what a tape is then maybe I am that old. At the time we bought a new HiFi system our old record player had finally packed it in and we went down shop street to O’Connors in Galway. It was a time when shop street wasn’t pedestrianised so just a few years back. We heard the sound quality from one of the demo CDs and it was a little bit of a wow moment for me. Not necessarily one that I’ll take to my grave just a this is cool moment. The selection of available CDs was truly terrible I could have probably counted them on one hand. They were mostly classical music CDs and £20 or maybe even a bit more. HUGE price difference there on the cost of a Tape which would have been around £8. I actually didn’t start to get into music until the mid 90s so my figures may be off here. One thing to note however was the huge price difference. I remember at the time being told ah it was because of the production costs of the CDs that they were so pricey. Tapes started to be phased out over the next few years but the prices of CDs didn’t really drop that much especially on new releases.

The mid to late 90s saw me come across digital music for the first time. From the time of downloading sound bites from TV shows in wav format to the coming on stream of the first MP3 players. It was pretty ground breaking stuff. I was quite possibly the first one to have an MP3 player amongst my friends a Diamond Rio rather shiny little device with a MASSIVE 32MBs of space. If I tweaked the settings when I was converting tracks I could nearly fit a whole album on there That was in let me think maybe 97? I’m not exactly sure when the first commercial MP3 track was sold but it wasn’t around this time. Meanwhile CDs have stabilized at around 15 or 16€ in price. Factor in distribution costs and so on and fair enough. The end artist still probably only gets 5% or something if that ( source of comments like that from friends who produced music in the early 90s). Flash forward 5 or 6 years and after countless court cases to do with the illegal distribution of music and we’re coming to the iTunes Store. The iPod being an insanely cool device is helping leap portable music years forward. We’re finally able to get music online in a relatively sane way. Though at a price.

Looking today at the price of downloading an album on iTunes I’m seeing a price tag of 9.99€ for the new Lana Del Rey album. Individual tracks are what €1.29. Interesting and I don’t have to go to a store you say. NICE .. of course you’re always going to have the people with a need to buy CDs or a physical collection but I’d guess that number if dwindling. I’m not currently sure but the amount of people I know who have Discman’s or whatever other type of physical media player is relatively low. They have MP3 players left right and center and in general it’s the iPod or their mobile phone. YET in the Irish medai we seem to be getting quoted figures about dwindling CD sales? wow … do ya think? !!!

My wife for example used purchase a HUGE amount of CDs, I’ve a relatively small collection in comparison. I’m currently not sure when she last purchased a CD. I know we received a present the other day for our daughter of an instrumental Coldplay greatest hits collection and my immediate thought goes to aw that’s so cool I must rip that so we can actually use it. My wife when we were in Spain started to listen to Spotify for new and old music the pain of switching CDs starts to get to be a bit much after a while. Initially she was using the ad fueled version but has since upgraded to the basic offering. One year now and I’m not sure if she has bought a CD in that time. We’re both working from home so generally at a computer most of the time so why would you need to buy a CD. Hang on given the subscription price on Spotify why would you need to go to iTunes to buy an album? Just listen away to your hearts content. Yet the major record labels / associations are still obsessed with falling CD sales and what they are flagging as piracy. My wife can’t be the only one feeling this way. Hang on I’m on iTunes and I don’t want the whole album why would I buy it when I can just grab that track I heard on the radio.

The other day I saw it announced that Spotify now has 3 million paid subscribers? That’s a hell of a lot of lost CD sales They’ve got another 12 million non paying customers who are using the ad fueled version. This is pretty amazing a company that is moving with the times and giving people what they want.

In the early 90s I had a problem getting my hands on computer games the stores around Galway didn’t really stock much and the price was insane … 3 years after the release of a title it’d still be on the shelf at the day one price. I think at the time a lot of “demos” passed hands alternatives were to buy from the UK and I could end up getting hit with UK customs and also had to go through the hassle of sterling bank drafts and so on. BUT the gaming industry took note or at least one company did Steam. They made it so easy for me to buy a game and download it that it’s too much hassle to go pirate one. These days I see a sale on steam and I even end up buying games I don’t really want but think that’d be cool to have at some stage. In store most shops I’ve been to tend not to stock a great selection of PC games and again they sometimes suffer from this day one pricing.

So could the music industry please take note and in the words of a great man “For the times they are a changing”.

But my rant is going strange places

I have to admit I don’t fully understand the SOPA Ireland thing. I’ve read through some of it and it all seems a bit mad Ted. Giving over a lot of power to the music industry to have certain sites shut down seems to be the gist of it maybe someone will write a very simple bullet point of the whole thing for me at some stage?

As I see it there was a legal case brought against UPC by EMI to block a music sharing site from being able to be used through their service.

An example that was cited was that Aslan had 22,000 tracks downloaded. I’m not exactly sure where and how they came up with this figure. A search online came across someone refuting this figure basing their calculations on the number of seeders / leechers and so on and that figure came well below the mark.

Converting 22,000 tracks into album sales 10 tracks in an album we’d have 2,200 albums. Give it a nice round figure of 10 Euro for a CD and we’re back up to €22,000 euro that that would convert into in sales. What would an artist see of that 5 – 10% maybe? I’ve no idea of the exact figure they’d have gotten from it tbh but having spoken to a few artists in the past album sales were nothing to them it was all about the touring. Let us say that’s 10% of €22,000 and we’re back down to 2,200 and there are 5 members? (someone correct me) in the band so that’s less than 500 quid each. Work in the legal fees if the band wanted to go after it all and yeah that doesn’t seem worth it. I wonder how many of those albums that were pirated would have been an actual album sale? No idea to be honest but I’d guess not the full 2,200 albums or singles or whatever. The band would have maybe picked up extra ticket sales from any gigs they’d be doing. But hang on that sounds like me trying to justify piracy which I’m not here.

Flash forward to today and they want the music industry bodies to have more control on things ok. They are saying that don’t be ridiculous they couldn’t shut down the likes of Google / YouTube and people are talking through their asses. Are they though?

I head on over to SoundCloud lets do a search for Aslan http://soundcloud.com/search?q[fulltext]=OfficialAslan ooh and I see a few tracks there NICE and I can play them for free. Lets take a look at this system for a minute. I’m a web designer / developer and one of the tools I use is FireBug. http://getfirebug.com/ FireBug does some rather cool stuff for debugging webpages and seeing how things work. In the course of using it I started looking into best practices in optimizing websites. Fair enough I may not always implement them BUT that’s another story entirely time and money factor heavily in decisions like that. Anyways I digress …

I click the little inspect element button. Click the Net tab and enable it and I reload my sound cloud page

Oooh jibberish for most people but to me I see file size .. load time and funnily I look at where the files are being pulled from.

I click play on Aslan – Crazy World in there ( This file has been uploaded by OfficialAslan so I take it that’s really them? )

Back in my firebug net monitoring window and I’m seeing it loading up a 3.6MB file. I wonder what that could be.

Lets right click on that and open it up in a new window

Hang on why is this starting to play music in my other window http://ak-media.soundcloud.com/ [ link withheld by me I don't want to be accused of anything ].mp3 <– what on earth is that? This is on the soundcloud site and they are linking into MP3s ???

So we’re being assured that the likes of Google / YouTube won’t be shut down by this new SOPA law???

What about the likes of SoundCloud? it seems to be distributing music is … is this legal???

Lets head on over to the Guardian where I saw the new Paul McCartney album is available to play online.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/jan/30/paul-mccartney-kisses-on-bottom-stream?CMP=twt_gu
Let me check … turn on network monitoring once again and .. erm .. HANG ON .. what’s that 3MB file that has a GET request in there hmm.

BUT BUT this new SOPA law is only about illegal file sharing isn’t it and torrents are evil. Hang on no torrents aren’t evil though they may provide links to copyright material I think I’ve just proved that the Guardian and SoundCloud are both linking to copyright material as well.

Hang on lets investigate further …

Lets head on over to myspace.com they can’t be doing anything like this.

Ah there we are http://www.myspace.com/aslanireland again I’ll assume it’s an official page as well lots of bands have them don’t they?

http://www.myspace.com/aslanireland

Now surely they can’t be linking to files on there let’s click play on one of the songs …
OK they’ve disabled the little download icon in their player there PHEW

OK quick check and it seems that they are streaming the music .. I could be wrong though I’ve just had a quick check.

SO before you go an say things like we won’t be shutting down websites like google or so on can we please have an investigation into the whole thing properly and not go passing over power to the record labels. The internet has changed a lot of things and and I feel certain industries aren’t moving with the times.

People are impatient and they want things now. A show that airs in the US why hasn’t the show aired here yet? (Though I think the divide on this may be changing slightly with things airing in both the US and EU at the same ish time though I could be wrong). If a movie or TV show is 1000MBs in size and you’re on a 20Mbit line that takes somewhere around 500 seconds ( 8+ minutes ) to download vrs. waiting a few weeks to see your favourite show.

I guess however with the introduction of NetFlix in Ireland now things will change slightly though no hang on most of the shows I want aren’t available on the NetFlix Ireland account yet … but they are available on the US version… what to do what to do…

The whole thing needs to be revisited. Obviously if piracy is happening it’s happening for a reason it’s my belief that people are inherently good if you give them a simple effective means to do something they will. You’ll never rid the world of piracy / crime altogether but …

Distribution models / Pricing models need to be investigated companies need to move with the times or you end up in situation similar to the one Kodak finds itself in.

He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Calm
down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence,
then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now
what?”

Found it over on http://whiteappleer.tw/2011/09/25/steve-jobs-stay-hungry-stay-foolish-the-whole-earth-catalog/.

RIP Steve

My Wallpaper for the day that’s in it shall be

The most recent of these to get added to my list is Donncha O’Caoimh’s http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner/

Of course when I installed it at the same time as installing the 3.2.1 release of wordpress the hash files weren’t available for 3.2.1. This lead me to lots of False positives. Yesterday then when I scanned I for some reason thought I was seeing the same thing. I mean upd.php and config.php seem like two perfectly normal files don’t they? Well hell no after asking a rather silly question over on Google Plus I realised the error of my ways and went about fixing things.

Exploit Scanner works on the basis that all your core files should have the same hash as a clean version. ( A hash is a value that gets created and mostly two different things can’t have the same hash )

Click to enlarge

The md5 Hashes for the two files are as follows

• exploit-scanner.php (1.0.5): ac8d7f3574a7470a245a2067e9c79072
• hashes-3.2.1.php: a660a35382f648c8735414a7d3531970

So if your websites version of these doesn’t match it’s fair to assume someone has edited the files on your site. You can always find these values on the exploit scanner plugin page. It’s well worth installing.

The Exploit scanner immediately told me about the errors. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a manual process as you still need to see what’s wrong and make sure the files aren’t valid. So backing up is a good idea first. I also ended up removing a few unused plugins and all the old themes I had on the site. It doesn’t have hash values for any plugins or themes you’re using so you may need to manually scan these and check if they have been altered. One way I did this was visually check the date of creation / modification of the files in my ftp client.

Anyways exploit scanner is about to become the first plugin that gets installed on all new wordpress installs ( and even a few older ones ) and I’m debating creating a rather simple script to show the last edited / created time for files as I’d find that one handy as well. The files were uploaded to my site on the 6th august for example. I know I wasn’t doing much there then so apart from an image or two and my cache things shouldn’t have been changed recently.

Yesterday LinkedIn pissed me off I found out via someone on Google Plus that my photo could be used in advertising on there?

Click to enlarge

Hang on when did I agree to that?

LinkedIn may sometimes pair an advertiser’s message with social content from LinkedIn’s network in order to make the ad more relevant. When LinkedIn members recommend people and services, follow companies, or take other actions, their name/photo may show up in related ads shown to you. Conversely, when you take these actions on LinkedIn, your name/photo may show up in related ads shown to LinkedIn members. By providing social context, we make it easy for our members to learn about products and services that the LinkedIn network is interacting with.

Ways to piss me off … lesson 1 sign me up to something and make like I agree with random advertising I’ve no control of.

NOT COOL LinkedIn

So yet another reason I don’t much see a use for LinkedIn though I’ve probably originally agreed to LinkedIn’s terms and conditions this is just wrong.

Well this game has been around a while now and I reckon it’s behind all the problems with housing and the banks.