SPS Q Festival

The blogosphere and indeed local media are probably all over this thing, with sentiments ranging from high praise and celebration to bitter complaints about noise pollution and propaganda. But hey, I might as well make my own (very) little contribution.

I have to admit I was originally highly sceptical about the whole thing. The previous day I was dragged straight from Core 2 into a rehearsal, spent half an hour laying out deckchairs, and was immediately plunged into a three-hour rehearsal (about which I had known nothing until I was ‘reminded’ about it that morning) which ended at six. And I somehow managed to survive all that on breakfast: two pains au chocolat (or however you choose to pluralise the French expression) and a cup of tea (lunch was out of the question. Apparently). The information I had, as a performer, received beforehand, also gave me the impression the entire event’s organisation left much to be desired; I was until the eve of the Q Festival unsure as to the colour of the suit I was to wear (conflicting data manifested itself in several different letters I had received). Rehearsals denied me the latter half of Apposition (= prizegiving) lunch which cost me an excellent dessert and also barred me from the chance of helping out with the open day, something I had dearly wanted to do since I had first been told about it. I also hate having to turn down offers to help blow up things (Chemistry); in fact I had to turn down every subject teacher who asked me to help, which was not particularly pleasant. And to cap it all it transpired at about 6pm of the actual day that they had somehow either forgotten or ignored the fact that musicians, like most other people, require dinner. And apparently all the musicians grabbed from the outside world were being paid, including old Paulines, while pupils like me who had been non-optionally drafted in were being treated essentially as unpaid trained monkeys. In other words I was not immensely impressed with the entire proceedings.

But when the actual concert started after a major emergency involving a lost bag, absent music scores and instruments locked in inaccessible (and inconspicuous) locations, I actually started to feel good about it. The crowd was relaxed and the Prokofiev sextet of which I was a member actually went quite well. Interestingly, although I quite literally had a microphone pressed against my head and an enormous high-resolution camera that resembled the Hubble Telescope pointing directly at my fingerboard, I felt much more at ease than playing for a small concert in the Wathen Hall. Perhaps it was the physical distance from the audience, but it just seemed really relaxed and unstressful. Or maybe it was just the champagne. And after that were the orchestra pieces. The incredibly boring passages that we had rehearsed to death in a hot cluttered hall with an insufficient caffeine supply for eternity and a day (i.e. 4 hours) suddenly came alive with the choir and, needless to say, Katherine Jenkins. The entire jubilant feeling of the celebration did start to affect me and wearing a ridiculous, sweaty, unnecessarily insulating outfit with a bow tie and white dinner jacket started actually to feel rather good and for a moment made me feel proud to be a Pauline. There’s for some reason a certain amount of self-confidence that a bow tie and excessively formal suit gives one. And right at the end when the drunk and high members of the crowd thronged around the stage to touch the one and only Katherine Jenkins and scream demands for an encore it felt good sitting on the stage pretending to have played everything correctly.

I have never been involved in anything of this magnitude before, and it was really quite a wonderful experience to take part. One thing that really struck me was the quality of the orchestra. The school orchestra is relatively good, depending on your interpretation of ‘relatively’ and ‘good’, and we tend to work for quite a long time on each piece before it even begins to make sense. The orchestra I was playing in was composed mostly of professionals and extremely good musicians and it truly made a huge difference – each of the five or so pieces was conquered in half an hour of rehearsal, and everyone *actually* played in time (which for the Carmen and Gershwin was quite a feat)!

I was also somewhat surprised by the police presence – while our rehearsal was in mid-swing, three police vans pulled up and a hoard of crowd control officers began patrolling the empty deckchairs.

Anyways in summary:

Apposition: Very interesting declamations, awesome lunch

Open Day: CompSoc was mostly us pissing around with SSH and MacOS’s text to speech functionality. And of course playing games. Chemistry smelt like some combination of pyridine, ammonia and chlorine. I also saw some old friends at Physics (building a trebuchet).

Concert: Brilliant.

Nutrition: High-quality Sodexo stuff for lunch, champagne and white wine to see me through the concert, Tesco pasta as a substitute for dinner, and a nice Stella Artois to conclude the evening.

Oh. That wasn’t brief at all. Never mind.

And finally, a word of apology for lack of activity. It’s exam period right now and I’m stressing over Economics. So you probably won’t hear much from me until 16 June (the day after my last exam). Meanwhile, good luck to all those other unfortunate souls with exams, and to all relevant parties, have a good half term!

More photos can be found here

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How to Download Youtube Video/Audio

There are lots of tools out there claiming they can stream Youtube video and audio to file. I’ve tried to use many different ones but most seem to fail either at the downloading stage or the playback stage, i.e. they produce unreadable output files. Even worse is when you end up with an FLV file which only seems playable in VLC. I think I’ve found the perfect solution which can stream Youtube to an AVI file (properly, using a standard algorithm and producing a fully legitimate file) which can subsequently be converted into any format at all, be it audio, video or whatever.

1. Download

The best solution in my opinion is VDownloader. It provides a no-nonsense interface with settings for the use of a proxy, AVI codec, and download directory. It’s freeware of course, with a small encouragement at the bottom of the window to donate. To use it, simply paste the Youtube URL into the URL box and hit download. It first downloads it as a file without extension before converting it to AVI.

A potential alternative is Orbit Downloader with Grab++ which can grab streamed flash off any website. While it will work without fail, you end up with a FLV file which for some reason only VLC media player seems to be able to play and recognise as any sort of legitimate video file, preventing the next step from working. I thus never managed to get VLC to stream anything to a file. Perhaps it uses an outdated / incorrect .flv format.

2. Convert

If you feel the need to convert it from AVI to, say, an audio format like MP3 (some very rare classical recordings only exist on Youtube for some reason, but I’m not sure about the legality of downloading them to local storage), by far the best all-purpose media converter I’ve come across is SUPER. Frankly I find the interface revolting but the functionality is truly wonderful and more than makes up for looks – just take a look at their site to see what features are on offer (the site is also not very pretty…). Again, it’s all free.

To use it, first install then run the program. You’ll be confronted with a hideous UI. Select the top-left drop down menu and select the target format (e.g. mp3). If necessary change the codec (top right drop-down). In the blue ‘Audio’ rounded rectangle set your preferences for the output stream. Drag and drop the AVI you downloaded with VDownloader into the grey file list box near the bottom. Tick the file you want converted and press ‘Encode’. It might take a while (and the window sometimes freezes) but chances are it’ll complete and you’ll have an mp3 waiting in the output folder. The default is C:\Program Files\SUPER\OutPut\

So there you have it – that’s the best way I’ve found to download youtube content and convert it into any format desired. I’ll leave the legality of this for you to decide / work out / research – if you download music from Youtube and it turns out to be illegal, don’t blame me!

Good hunting

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The Pirate Bay Situation

It’s big (and by now fairly vintage) news in the torrenting and general technology community that a verdict has been reached for the lawsuit against The Pirate Bay’s four founders. I won’t say much about the gory details of the trials – there are plenty of articles on good websites that will give you all sorts of facts; I’m just going to state some of my opinions on the matter. In case you don’t already know, the verdict was a jail sentence and a $3.6M fine.

Firstly my thoughts on file sharing in general. BitTorrent is used for a whole host of good things – I’ve used it on multiple occasions to grab up-to-date linux distributions and it’s a fantastic way to download without limitations on server upload speeds (private trackers have exceptionally high ratios and speeds but linux and other open source stuff tends to download fast as well even on public trackers). There’s also the whole debate about whether or not piracy really does harm the economy as much as Sony would like us to think. But personally I think there’s no hope for companies trying to shut down piracy because it stems directly from the entire point of the internet: sharing information. If torrenting somehow gets shut down (an incredibly unlikely scenario), an alternative P2P system will immediately spring up to replace it, and there are a great many out there waiting to be exploited. But basically what I’m saying is that an attempt to target the infrastructure of filesharing is just a pathetic way for companies to seek some sort of revenge for probably mostly imagined and definitely largely over-hyped and bloated losses.

It is transparently obvious that the trial is much bigger than just The Pirate Bay – the verdict poses a threat to the entire community of file sharing. The Pirate Bay may have had certain special circumstances that made this verdict even vaguely plausible: something to do with Sweden possibly. But the verdict has set an incredibly dangerous precedent – if the team really end up facing significant jail time and massive fines, it would serve as a massive deterrant to anyone even considering starting up a novel platform for sharing, be it open-source software, ideas or whatever. My opinion is that the entire spirit of a collaborative internet is being broken apart piece by piece, while the pirates will still always find a method of sharing illegally obtained and distributed material. The supposedly illegal side always tends to be far more determined to keep sharing than the average supposedly law-abiding person who is probably fairly ambivalent anyway about whether or not to share those photos on Flickr.

There’s also a huge amount of wastage. I noticed Isohunt have put a notice on their front page linking to some legal material. I wouldn’t be surprised if other trackers are calling their lawyers right now, preparing for a legal assault on their communities. I’m not saying lawyers’ pay is waste, but the sheer amount of effort and time going into nit-picking against a multi-corporate legal mob in front of an unconvinced and generally non-tech-savvy jury seems to me at least a somewhat inefficient use of resources.

And to keep everything in perspective, the recording industry are fighting against a phenomenon they themselves are helping to create. The measures being adopted to prevent piracy such as music DRM make life a misery for law-abiding citizens who pay for their music; for example iTunes forced all its customers to re-download and thus re-buy all their music just to (supposedly) remove one layer of DRM from audio files. All this hassle actually makes pirated music of higher quality than purchased music, a ridiculous situation created by companies like Apple. How can anyone blame me if I decide to download a torrent of a few songs (which I’ve already paid for) just to be able to play them in something other than iTunes?

In my opinion, it will become increasingly difficult in the future to download plain DRM-free music and films, and indeed the risk of being caught doing so will probably increase, as will the penalty. The current trend is that more and more companies are getting involved – once it was just bodies such as the MPAA and RIAA who were targeting file sharers. Then more private companies joined in for the money such as MediaDefender, and now even ISPs and governments have joined the witch-hunt. If you want my take on this, I suggest that if you already download and share pirated material, do so while you can and max out on it; the window of opportunity to get hold of clean untrackable media may well be closing.

Good hunting

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John Polkinghorne at St Paul’s

John Polkinghorne's signature on The God Delusion

On Friday, Halley Soc welcomed Dr John Polkinghorne to St Paul’s to talk on how science and religion work together. Lest this post turn into an enormous dissertation I will attempt to digress as little as possible from what he said, and merely restate some of his main arguments (the things that I wrote down) and explain why I think he’s wrong. All quotations are paraphrased since I didn’t write down every word he said. Apologies if I’ve misinterpreted some of the things he said.

He began by stating that religion is a search for truth, and that both science and religion rely to an extent on belief:

Both science and religion are a search for truth, and both rely on motivated belief

In my opinion, while science is a genuine search for truth, religion is in many cases the opposite. Looking at evidence, God seems to be no more than a convenient gap-filler for what humans do not know. When Pasteur turned up, disease was no longer a manifestation of God’s wrath but merely the action of millions of tiny microbes, and was treated with medicine instead of prayer. On the subject of belief, while science relies on believing measurements made by humans and machines, religion relies mostly on what a book full of contradictions is interpreted to say – which seems to be just about everything.

He subsequently said something about religion being a human version of science:

Science treats humans as objects. Humans are obviously not objects, thus need something else: religion

I think humans are objects. Just because we classify ourselves as intelligent life with complex emotions, we are governed by exactly the same laws as everything else. Emotions are simply manifestations of neurones firing and hormones and chemicals being released in the body (I’m no biologist but I’m pretty sure it’s something along those lines). However complicated the brain is, I believe there’s nothing to separate the mind from the brain than a different paradigm – fundamentally the mind is a function of the state of the brain. Humans are objects after all. Saying they are different things are a bit like saying the Newtonian paradigm contradicts the Hamiltonian one.

He used this argument to create an argument about beauty, specifically music:

When we hear music, we hear its beauty, and can appreciate that. This implies there is something other than science, and we call this other thing God

As above, beauty and emotions relating to it are merely functions of the brain, abstractions relating to certain neurones firing. Beauty is not an inherent part of the universe – we merely interpret it to be.

He then said that science and religion help each other:

Science helps religion by telling the world how the world works, about truth

‘Truth’ is the exact word he used (I wrote it down enclosed in quotation marks). If science tells religion the truth, his first statement must be false: religion can’t be told the truth and come up with it at the same time. More importantly and indeed disturbingly, he insists that religion can explain evolution:

God made the world so that creatures can evolve: rather than making homo sapiens with five fingers he created a world in which life can make itself. Life evolved from a ready-made world

Apparently it is more likely that we are living in a computer simulation than in a ‘real’ world (c.f. several New Scientist articles). So God is a computer programmer with a genetic algorithm. In a way I can believe that, after reading the articles. There’s still no justification for practising religion though – merely believing in a probability of there being a form of ‘god’, and only tenuously.

He then said Newton is proof of God:

Evolution cannot explain Isaac Newton: there is absolutely no evolutionary benefit for humans to be able to understand the cosmos

I think he’s made a mistake here. Of course there’s no evolutionary benefit for the ability to understand the universe and invent calculus, just as there’s no evolutionary benefit for a dolphin to be able to jump through hoops (I’m not intentionally comparing Newton to a dolphin). What allowed Newton to discover his laws was his intelligence and a high degree of intuition, undeniably qualities beneficial to an animal; qualities which enable it to survive better.

He fell back again to a beauty argument:

Science and Maths are beautiful: Mathematical equations and the way everything fits together is just so beautiful that it cannot exist without God. Quoting Wigner, ‘Mathematics is so unreasonably effective’. God must have made it that way

Personally I think there are three good reasons why science and maths yield such beautiful equations. The first is statistics. It is statistically likely that there will exist some beautiful equations, and some not so beautiful ones. Beautiful ones include e^iπ+1=0. Not so beautiful ones include the quadratic formula, or indeed the quartic formula. The second reason is that science and maths are based on very simple rules which can themselves be described as beautiful. Simplicity of certain solutions and results stem from the fact that the basis is fundamentally simple – there are many hidden fundamental underlying patterns interspersed throughout the sciences, which means you tend to end up with something quite nice. The third reason is that aesthetics are a human invention. Beauty doesn’t really exist – humans just assign that quality to certain things. So saying beauty proves god is circular: “God made man to invent beauty to prove God”.

The last part of his talk involved a well-known argument for intelligent design:

Life as we know it can’t exist without the parameters of our universe.

I have all sorts of objections to this and could get into the anthropic principle and keep going forever. He said ‘life as we know it’, citing specifically carbon-based life. He also said if those parameters were tweaked just slightly, we couldn’t exist. It’s possible though that a radical change in one or more of the parameters might still yield intelligent life. Who knows, that life might not even need photons.

Someone asked a question about the multiverse theory, a popular method to get round this problem. He replied that this is too speculative an idea. I asked whether he thought, if the idea of multiple universes (a part of many theories such as M-theory and the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) was too speculative, that God is too speculative. He said something about there being evidence for God and none for multiple universes. I asked him what he thought of David Deutsch’s idea that quantum computing is evidence for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as the computing power is too great to come from one universe. His reply:

I think it’s perverse for David Deutsch to say such a thing. All you need is the Copenhagen interpretation

So multiple universes are ridiculous to even consider, but God is; and spooky action at a distance is fine?

Many things he said contradict things I believe and conclusions I have come up with. I remain no more convinced that religion is worth practising and that God exists. Furthermore, after all this argument why theology in general is maybe a good idea, he became specifically Anglican, a branch of religion that requires him to believe all sorts of ridiculous assertions made by the bible. He said he has his reasons but wasn’t prepared to delve into them with the little time that he had. My suspicion is that he and I will never agree. But to commemorate the occasion (a famous person coming to St Paul’s), I managed to get his signature on my copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in which he is (probably) referred to as a crackpot (image is at top of post, and on my Flickr photostream). Score…

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Copyright Infringement

This is in fact my Economics essay for the Barnett Prize. The person who marked it thought it was a terrible essay (fair enough), but I still think it’s interesting to discuss. So here it is, however horrific an essay, after being cut down to exactly 1500 words, and with a less bellicose attitude towards the RIAA than normal (for the sake of being PC). It’s entitled “Steal this Essay”. This is also an experiment to see how well WordPress’ ‘import from Word’ feature works. I have to say, I’m impressed by how it deals with footnotes and citations/bibliographies.

Using a specific microeconomic case study from either the UK or abroad, assess how governments can deal with market failure.

Copyright infringement is a growing concern in the music and film industry. Despite the best efforts of governments, private firms, law-enforcement agencies and cyber-police, the amount of music and film in illegal circulation over the internet has grown at an exponential rate since the conception of Napster, the first peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing service to hit the internet. According to Ars Technica (1), usage of Bittorrent, a popular tool used by file sharers, grew 24% in five months, and Bittorrent is apparently responsible for 80% of the world’s traffic. Global music sales dropped from $38bn in 1999 to $32bn in 2003 and American studios reported $2.3bn in losses to film piracy in 2005 alone (2). Free market forces are failing: talent starved of adequate funding will fail to flourish and music, entertainment and culture may be eroded as a result. Without consumers willing to pay for goods produced by talented artists, such artists will be unable to invest profits in creating more music (they may opt to record fewer CDs), and supply of the product decreases, increasing its cost which in this case further exacerbates losses leading to a vicious cycle. With revenue from their music falling, artists may choose to switch careers, discontinuing their contributions to music: the labour supply decreases, as does the pool of musical talent. Culturally, the negative externalities of this are highly significant, resulting in a shallower music culture.

In my opinion, the primary reason for file sharing is simply convenience. The internet allows even very large amounts of data to be transferred at zero cost and supersonic speeds; the temptation to cheat the system becomes irresistible: the opportunity cost of buying a CD from a local store, which involves both monetary as well as time sacrifices, is far greater than the single mouse click it takes to download the entire album. Pirated media can be seen as a substitute good for which consumers pay with risk of getting caught rather than with conventional currency; industry is losing out to this illegal competition.

Existent government measures have proven ineffectual at best. For a while law enforcement worked: the RIAA[1] and MPAA[2] succeeded in intimidating file sharers into accepting monetary settlements out of court, thereby recouping losses and deterring potential copyright criminals. However when exonerated file sharers began to sue the RIAA back (3), subsequent copyright lawsuits became somewhat anathematised and digital rights organisations procured an increasingly unpopular and disrespected reputation for aggressive methods (as illustrated). One of the primary difficulties is the issue of evidence: piracy is exceedingly difficult to detect with ever-advancing encryption technology. Taking the current trial of The Pirate Bay[3] as an example of ineffectuality, on the second day of the trial half the charges have already been dropped (4) (at the time of writing this). To make things worse, the music industry’s attempts to cover itself from piracy only punish the law-abiding: employment of digital rights management on music by online retailers such as Apple renders the files unusable with anything but iTunes and iPods, causing frustration, heavily discouraging the buying of music.

The government has attempted to enforce the law through Internet Service Providers (ISPs): since they provide the means to perform illegal activities, perhaps it should be their responsibility to police their networks. In 2008, the UK’s largest six[4] ISPs[5] agreed (5) to a code laid out by the government: if an ISP has reasonable evidence upon which to suspect a customer of illegally downloading music, it will throttle his download speeds significantly. This appears promising: a large proportion of the country is now under surveillance by ISPs and users have an incentive to stop file sharing; Virgin Media even sent out warning letters to several hundred of its file sharing customers. However the government is pitting itself directly against the free market forces: as pointed out by the Wired article (5), it is far more probable that they were merely taking measures against losing customers: firms appreciate the revenue from them. In addition, ISPs abiding by this code are likely to lose business owing to a pervasive sense of intrusion from being constantly monitored. Besides, imposing regulations on businesses raises supply costs (employing a monitoring team for example), shifting the supply curve leftwards, resulting in a more expensive, and less abundant, good or service:

[Insert bog standard Economics AS/AD diagram]

One suggestion was for the government to accept the fact that internet users will share files, and rather than fight this unwinnable war, to tax broadband usage and return tax revenue to industry, thus compensating for the market failure. Unsurprisingly this has been met with much fury: not only does this demonstrate great cynicism and mistrust on the government’s part, but it may actually exacerbate the problem: consumers might decide that since they have paid for their illegal downloads they are entitled to download copyrighted material.

Alternatively, similarly to using disturbing television advertisements about lacking TV licences, the government could attempt to threaten the population into submission. There is good evidence that advertising works with anti-smoking campaigns, so there appears to be a high probability of success with this measure. Again the government is no longer working against the free market: it is rather injecting information into the market and allowing consumers to make a better-informed decision. Unlike regulation, such measures preserve human rights and can be highly effective in combination with other measures. Unfortunately, unlike the case of smoking and even TV licences, a savvy file sharer knows he can hide his activities indefinitely: threatening advertisements do not work for such people (who also tend to be the heaviest sharers). Education may eventually curb the problem through generations of law-abiding citizens, but such slow-acting measures may not be sufficiently effective in the short run to avert cultural erosion.

In September 2007, it was discovered that a large (needless to say illegal) cyber-offensive was being planned (6) against The Pirate Bay by MediaDefender[6] in an attempt to halt file sharing activity. Although it was discovered and averted, perhaps such measures are the only ones that will work: aggressive attacks on the central hive of activity; this is after all what governments are accustomed to doing when dealing with terrorists and criminals. However, despite a worldwide offensive on terrorism, ever since September 2001, little, if not negative, progress has been made against it; what guarantees the success of an offensive against a worldwide network of highly intelligent anonymous criminals?

Perhaps to understand fully the nature of this market failure, one should reconsider the extent and type of damage done by file sharing, and also take into account its positive aspects. According to US District Judge James P. Jones (7), ‘17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales’. If a customer wants some music but is not prepared to pay the price quoted on Amazon (indicating he is not willing and able to pay for it), he would not be in the market in the first place, so the music industry should be indifferent to whether he downloads that music illegally in the end. Of course this line of reasoning cannot be extended too far, but the point is that not every illegal download harms industry. In fact there was a study (8) (English synopsis (9)) commissioned by the Dutch government which concluded that in fact file sharing contributes €100m per year to the Dutch economy. Apparently much downloaded content becomes treated as sample content to be bought later, and downloaders tend to buy more games than non-downloaders (possibly an effect of exposure to online marketing). In addition, the positive externalities of file sharing include broader cultural wealth. By annihilating file sharing, the government would lose out on positive externalities as well as negative ones. The report concludes that most losses can be attributed to things other than piracy, including competition with other forms of entertainment. Notably in The Netherlands, downloading media for personal use is legal. Perhaps an unconventional solution to the market failure is to legalise file sharing, thus maximising the social benefits and accepting the (minimal) social costs. Besides, surveys show that 80% of British people would be in favour of this measure (10).

In conclusion, business has taken a radical new direction since the concept of ‘free goods’ first appeared. Google provides millions with enormously powerful search facilities for free and receives its revenue largely from advertising. According to Wikinomics (11), ‘free and collaborative’ (complete with externalities) is the future, whether we like it or not. I believe governments should embrace this future and work with the market, rather than fight it. Whatever the solution to the problem of copyright infringement eventually turns out to be, I suspect, and hope, that the RIAA and MPAA will not be closely involved, that free market tools will be capitalised upon, and that the positive externalities of change will be fully appreciated.

Bibliography

1. Bangeman, Eric. BitTorrent use soars as MPAA fights on against P2P sites. ars technica. [Online] 17 04 2008. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/bittorrent-use-soars-as-mpaa-fights-on-against-p2p-sites.ars.

2. File sharing. Wikipedia. [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing.

3. Oregon RIAA Victim Fights Back. Recording Industry vs The People. [Online] http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2005/10/oregon-riaa-victim-fights-back-sues.html.

4. enigmax. 50% of Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped. TorrentFreak. [Online] 17 02 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/50-of-charges-against-pirate-bay-dropped-090217/.

5. Buskirk, Eliot Van. British ISPs Agree To Curb File Sharers’ Internet Access. Wired. [Online] 23 07 2008. http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/uk-could-announ.html.

6. Leyden, John. Pirate Bay sues media giants for ’sabotage’. The Register. [Online] 24 09 2007. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/24/pirate_bay_counterstrike/.

7. Cheng, Jacqui. Judge: 17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales. ars technica. [Online] 19 01 2009. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/judge-17000-illegal-downloads-dont-equal-17000-lost-sales.ars.

8. Ups and downs – Economische en culturele gevolgen van file sharing voor muziek, film en games. TNO. [Online] 2009. http://tno.nl/content.cfm?context=markten&content=publicatie&laag1=182&laag2=1&item_id=473.

9. Ernesto. Economy Profits From File-Sharing, Report Concludes. TorrentFreak. [Online] 19 01 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/economy-profits-from-file-sharing-report-concludes-090119/.

10. Orlowski, Andrew. 80% want legal P2P – survey. The Register. [Online] 16 06 2008. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/bmr_music_survey/.

11. Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics. London : Atlantic Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84354-637-5.

12. P2P Survey Results. In HIIT. [Online] 2007. http://inhiit.blogspot.com/2007/09/p2p-survey-results.html.

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[1] Recording Industry Association of America

[2] Moving Pictures Association of America

[3] A large Bittorrent tracker and hub of illegal piracy

[4] Virgin Media, Sky, Carphone Warehouse, BT, Orange and Tiscali

[5] Internet Service Providers

[6] Anti-piracy company

Competitive Subjects?

When I chose my AS subjects about a year ago I chose based essentially on three main criteria: whether I enjoy the subjects, whether I’m any good at them (this immediately ruled out History), and whether they’d be any use in the future. I also appear to have managed to choose the most competitive subjects available: right now, almost every subject I’m doing has some competition which I’m involved in (voluntarily or not!). In fact, most of the things I’m involved in at school are highly competitive at this time of the year, including extra-curricular activities such as music and young enterprise. Here’s a run-through of the competitions I’m in:

Maths: BMO (early December), BMO2 which I failed to get into (January), Hans Woyda (throughout the year more or less)
Chemistry: Olympiad (early February)
Physics: Olympiad (late February)
Economics: Barnett Economics Essay (mid February)
Music: Strings competition (late January), Piano competition (early February), Music competition finals (late April)
Computing: BIO (mid December), BIO2 (mid March)

So December had two, January had two and February will have four. Having said that, it’s not all bad. In fact I’m not even complaining, especially considering the conversation I had with this person in Slovenia:

Person: got an English competition coming up
Person: a competition tomorrow…
Person: the day after tomorrow
Person: the day after that
Person: and 2 days after THAT
Person: and a day after that
Person: so I got… 4 competitions coming up
Person: English competition, then amateur radio, then physics then chem
Me: holy crap
Person: 2 competitions tomorrow, actually
Person: but due to the lack of communication between the organizers, I won’t be able to attend them both
Person: there’s computer programming and English
Person: but English is regional, computer programming is school
Me: does this level of competitioning happen on a weekly basis?
Person: no
Person: always on the start of Feb
Person: except for logics, which is sept
Person: and maths, which comes later
Person: everything else, around this time
Person: dunno why
Person: it’s idiotic

Instinctively one’s reaction is just like mine: ‘holy crap!’ (or ‘holy Xenu!’ or ‘his noodly appendages!’) but it’s not all bad.

Competitioning is certainly rather stressful. In the junior school it was really all a bit of fun: everyone knows the Maths olympiads are hugely difficult and nobody is really expected to get a vaguely decent mark. However at this stage of my education, expectations are beginning to rise from “5% is _really_ good, well done!” to “anything above 60% is OK I guess” to “you lost _one_ mark!? you muppet!”. And you really know things are getting serious when the entire Chemistry department give up an hour or two after school to train the L8 to do olympiad problems. The pressure really starts to mount, and I increasingly stop to reconsider my involvement in extra-curricular activities as I toil ever-further into the night to finish olympiad-related homework after a night’s editing of articles. To make things worse, some of these olympiads will be the last we sit before applying for university so it is absolutely imperative for some of us to do well in this round of olympiads to have much hope of getting into Cambridge. As you can imagine, my stress levels are high as a result.

On the other hand, I am still completely in favour of olympiads. Although I’m attending one of the best schools in the world, there are still far too many homeworks and lessons in which the entire class ends up mechanically hammering out answers to the same question over and over again using a formula: as Mr Toller put it, “bashing things doesn’t take any thought”. Olympiads actually rarely involve bash methods, and many of the problems require a large amount of lateral, diagonal and (often on my part) convoluted thinking which tends to result in a deeper (or more confused) understanding of how the subject works, which in my opinion is an opportunity which should never be missed. I guess that’s why I appreciate Dr Leversha’s homeworks so much!

The question still remains I guess of why the subjects I’ve chosen seem to be the most competitive. I never hear anything of a Geography or English olympiad – why must Physics and Chemistry have them? In fact, until this year a Biology olympiad was unheard of. I suspect is has something to do with my taste in subjects. I love anything in which there are a few fundamental principles/ideas from which a huge amount of theory and thought-provoking thinking (and stuff) stems. I also can’t resist a good challenge, even if I completely fail. Olympiads tend to be all about testing the depth of one’s understanding of very basic principles and tough challenges. I notice a connection here… It’s true that I’m just inexorably drawn towards anything with the words ‘off-syllabus’ attached – maybe that’s the reason? Or perhaps there really is a History competition that I’m not aware of, in which case it must be just coincidence and what I’m saying is complete nonsense, as always

I feel I need to conclude somehow like Farhan does with ‘Pax’ but that would just be copying. I think have a better substitute:

๏̯͡๏﴿

Why File Sharing Isn’t Bad for the Economy

I notice from my Slashdot feed that the RIAA have been giving up on a lot of cases recently. For one they failed to extract $222K from someone who shared 24 files on Kazaa. There was also a case (the same one maybe?) in which the defendant subsequently turned on the RIAA following his success in court and sued. There have been two cases that I know of since the beginning of the Christmas holidays in which lawsuits have been dropped by copyright firms. Fairly recently a Dutch study (thank you Slashdot) found that actually file sharing is good for the Dutch economy. Then someone wrote a book/blog post/ebook/news article about the concept of free stuff in an economy and how it works really quite well. It appears that the whole DRM thing is rapidly turning on its head, against law firms and in favour of open source and freebies. Here’s a concise exposition of all I’ve gathered that seems to make sense regarding this phenomenon.

17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales

- US District Judge James P. Jones

Mike Henley, a former member of CompSoc, pointed out something that I think makes a lot of sense. If music downloaders suddenly no longer could download it for free, I suspect many of them would just stop downloading full stop. The reason they download is more because it’s convenient than any reason concerning the price: there are simply so many good deals out there that good music is already available for decent prices. Therefore it can be deduced that they are actually not harming the industry – they aren’t reducing demand and removing themselves from the market by downloading for free since the market wouldn’t contain them in the first place.

- Me

I think everyone who’s outraged about people downloading and enjoying stuff that they should be paying for and blaming them (amongst Maths, public schools and gnomes) for the economic downturn should really consider the fact that, As Michael observantly pointed out in a comment, most people who currently download for free just wouldn’t buy music in the first place if the download option didn’t exist. If you don’t know you’ll definitely like a product, why risk £12.99 buying it? This judge has definitely got it right.

The way I see it (not why it’s right/wrong but why it’s taking place) is that a new market for music is being created involving mostly bittorrent and uploaders. The ‘product’ is really a few megabytes of data – an mp3 file. The cost to the producer (warez-bb.org uploader for example) of sharing this product is approx. zero. (compare £10 with the millions recording companies must spend on equipment, overheads, disks, labour etc) Chances are they downloaded it themselves in the first place. Every time someone downloads the share, nobody has to pay to get it copied. So there are no production costs, and ‘competition’ (kudos is the new dollar – believe me it’s true – warez-bb forum uploaders survive on the number of thanking replies they get) results in a price of zero and a well-archived and user-friendly method of obtaining free music.

Dutch Study Says Filesharing Has Positive Economic Effects

- Slashdot

Interesting as the economics of this may be, I’m not prepared to learn Dutch. However from what I can deduce: those who opt to download are probably more exposed to online marketing and are thus more likely to buy products that can’t simply be downloaded for free – concert tickets, firefox.com gadgets… To make things better, the actual act of transferring data via downloading costs both parties virtually nothing. A CD on the other hand would involve paying for the media, case, P&P, etc.

I’m reading a book (yes, another one – still haven’t finished the other[s]) called ‘Wikinomics’. It’s about open source and collaboration. I think it’s fairly clear that the internet is bringing a whole new business model to the world (there was an article in the FT on this but I didn’t bookmark it) which revolves around goods and services which the consumer doesn’t actually pay for. Google deliver unbelievably powerful search power to millions (billions?) of users around the world, for free. How nice of them. In fact, our young enterprise idea was (still is come to think of it) based on this system of providing free stuff and using advertising/sponsorship to earn the actual income.

Finally, it’s probably a safe bet that the RIAA and MPAA are fighting a losing battle. Digital music and films are just so easy to copy and distribute that whatever crazy measures ISPs, Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA, the MPAA and Apple dare put into place, a workaround will be found, probably within minutes, and probably in a secret underground hacker convention in Germany or China. Besides, lawyers aren’t exactly popular, especially if employed en masse and paid an unreasonable fee to crucify people like you and me.

I think I’ll leave you with a thought from xkcd.com:

La Femme D’Argent

I’m now learning an amazingly cool bit of music by AIR called La Femme D’Argent from their album Moon Safari; for the uninitiated, AIR is a French music duo, consisting of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel. The name AIR is a backronym for ‘Amour, Imagination, Rêve’ (Wiki). I think they make quite unique music and really know how to write to affect mood and set atmosphere.

The entire piece revolves around a single chord sequence and a catchy rhythm: that’s it; simplicity is typical of all AIR pieces, including a song in which almost the only lyrics are ’surfing on a rocket’! As always, there’s also quite a bit of ad lib, which if you listen to recordings of them performing is truly masterful and always perfectly in keeping with the atmosphere of the piece.

The chord sequence is not starkly unusual in its own right, going B, Bm7, F#m, E, but is repeated every two (4/4) bars, setting a harmonic structure which underlies the entirety of the piece, with an accompanying base (base guitar in recording) drumming out the catchy rhythm. The top line (there are in total 3 lines), played by some electronic instrument which I don’t recognise (‘Electric Piano’ in my piano part) is where all the ad-libbing happens in between some awesomely complicated rhythmical patterns.

Apparently, unbeknownst to many, AIR pieces are used as background music to a large number of TV programmes and films, including The Virgin Suicides – so they’re surprisingly important despite their apparent lack of prominence!

Cover your ass from anti-P2Ps

When record labels are being taken down for sharing their own music you know it’s time to hide. Like it or not, the RIAA and MPAA are going to have to face up to the fact that they simply cannot contain piracy. So long as the media exists in an electronic form, it is easily possible to replicate and distribute it, and with internet speeds commonly measured in Mbits/s, levels of music and film piracy are completely out of the control of the law. So this means that the few unfortunate souls who do get caught sharing files illegally are in for one heck of a punishment and end up used as examples to the rest of the torrenting community.

I’d like to think that most of those who stumble upon my blog can be considered friends, and so in this friendly spirit I offer some advice for those who simply can’t help but fire up uTorrent whenever they miss that one must-see episode of Dr Who. Of course, in no way do I encourage breaking the law, but I reckon if you do, as a friend, you deserve some protection from the huge-capital goliaths of the music and film industries.

Torrenting

Lifehacker had a wonderful feature on BitTorrent privacy which I’m going to replicate partially here rather shamelessly.

Basically the way you get caught on BitTorrent is when an anti-P2P organisation pretends to seed a file and grabs your IP as you download from them (or vice versa), and once they have your IP, you’re pretty screwed.

Solution 1: use IP blacklist blocking programs (PeerGuardian)

Begin Lifehacker copy-paste-summarise:

IP-blocking application PeerGuardian2 (PG2) uses a constantly updated blacklist of IP addresses known to track your activity. By default, PG2 already blocks Anti-P2P organizations but it’s capable of blocking more IPs if you have other privacy concerns beyond P2P that you want to address. PG2 is not and cannot be 100% effective, but it will provide a good deal more protection than downloading without. With PG2 running, you’ll never connect to the IP addresses on the Anti-P2P blacklist, meaning that those organization can’t log your IP and your participation in a copyrighted download.

Solution 2: use a proxy

[Lifehacker]If we’re talking about file sharing, a proxy protects you by routing all of your traffic through another server when it leaves your computer and before it comes back to you. That means that when you’re downloading data using a peer-to-peer protocol like BitTorrent, your peers can only see the proxy IP address, not your home IP address—so even if they are tracking your activity, they’re not actually tracking your address at all.[/Lifehacker]

Apparently a good proxy service is BTGuard ($7/mo), but if you don’t like paying, you might consider using Tor, the Onion Router.

Taken from the Tor website:

Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Your (encrypted) traffic is routed through other peoples’ computers, giving you fantastic privacy for free. The downside is that the network is under enormous strain as many people have exactly the same idea, so download speeds tend to be fairly limited and the damage done to the network’s capability to re-route data is detrimental to the Tor community. Which is why, as a Tor user and relay host myself, I’d encourage you, if you do decide to download through Tor, to run a relay and give something back to the Tor network, traffic-wise.

Solution 3: Encrypt torrented traffic

I suppose if you can’t be bothered to install PG or Tor, the least you can do is make some attempt to hide the data through the encryption service provided by most Torrent clients. There’s a fantastic set of instructions here. Many ISPs understandably hate BitTorrent as it’s apparently responsible for 80% of total internet traffic (Ouch) so throttle BitTorrent speeds. This encryption is designed to get round that, but at the same time affords a limited level of privacy. Without PeerGuardian though, there’s absolutely no guarantee you aren’t downloading from a sting-operation server owned by the RIAA itself.

HTTP Downloading

There are numerous other ways of obtaining pirated material though, including Rapidshare, which are generally less susceptible to spying. There’s an entire forum dedicated to Rapidshare download links of pirated music, films and software, and since your ISP is probably too busy spying on Torrent traffic it’s unlikely to be watching HTTP traffic streams for un-paid-for material, especially since many HTTP downloads are actually legitimate, e.g. from online stores, and regulating it all would be too much of a nightmare. Many Rapidshare download links are also password-protected rar files (forum posts contain the passwords) so even if your traffic gets spied on, ISPs won’t be bothered enough to attempt to brute-force your archive. Even better, if it’s software, the forum format provides some protection as users submitting feedback for download links normally complain loudly if their AV detects malware. HTTP downloads are also easily routed through proxies and require only a browser to initiate so are almost ideal for most people.

Steganography

And of course, rather than making it blatant that you’re downloading pirated stuff but frustrating authorities by encrypting it, you can always try hiding the fact that you’re downloading a song, including concealing an mp3 file inside a suitably large image file:

copy /b image.png + piratedsong.mp3 innocentlookingfile.png

To extract, rename the innocent looking file to have an mp3 extension.

I hope this has been useful to someone, as all these methods have been tried and tested extensively vicariously by myself at some point and been found to work very well indeed.

Superior Software Alternatives – Part 1: iTunes

Almost everyone I know uses iTunes for music, and while in my personal experience it’s extremely uncommon for anyone to use anything other than Windows Live Messenger for instant messaging, it’s practically unheard of not to use Adobe PDF Reader for PDFs. In my opinion, it’s simply a sad historical accident that these programs ended up as the default, and a real pity that there are so few people open-minded enough even to imagine using better software, since there is a huge collection of truly excellent open-source and free software out there. I’ll post an ongoing blog series of superior software alternatives, and if you have suggestions for better alternatives (or disagree with me!), please go ahead and leave a comment.

iTunes …

iTunes, while having many powerful and easily-accessible features, is, for lack of a better word, stressful to use. The stubbornly un-customisable interface and the painfully slow scrolling through large libraries are annoyances, while its gleeful enforcement of DRM is a real hindrance to music enjoyment. Its unnecessarily large memory footprint and insistence on installing Safari on updates, when added to the apparently obligatory iPodService and iTunesHelper module serve merely to aggravate its users further. All in all not pleasant to use and I was glad to rid my computer of it once and for all.

… replaced with Foobar2000

My suggestion is foobar2000. As a direct comparison: it is Firefox-like in customisability in terms of skins, keyboard shortcuts, library view styles, and actually pretty much everything. DRM is not insidiously forced upon the user to the point that converting to another player would involve losing gigabytes of purchased music to the notorious m4p format, and the user experience is incredibly fast and snappy; scrolling through thousands of items is a breeze. It’s also very conservative on the system performance front, and generally a much more satisfying and enjoyable experience to use. It can also, unlike iTunes, automatically scan folders for new media; plugins (of which there are many, and of which one implements iPod support) are a breeze: a simple matter of dropping a dll into a folder; and the entire package is even portable! But for me, a power user who can’t do without APIs and programmable features, the best part is the immense power of the search bar which can use bitwise logic operators. As a simple example, to search for classical pieces with a rating of over 3 stars I query %genre% IS “classical” AND %rating% IS “* * *”. As a replacement for iTunes’ ‘consolidate library’ feature, foobar has ‘file operations’ in which you can copy / move music files using patterns. For example moving your library to %artist%\%album%\%tracknumber% %title% organises it in folders by artist and album with track numbers in the file name.

Foobar has even been rumoured to sound better than other media players and it overcomes all the problems people may have switching from iTunes (primarily iPod support). It’s a truly impressive program; there’s no excuse not to switch to it from iTunes (for music) and I’d definitely call it my best free software find this Summer!