A Man and his Penguin

I have recieved another message back from Samantha:

Dear Christopher,

I understand that you are still unable to reformat all of your purchased items to put on your mp3 player as they are not all showing as eligible. I realize how concerning this may be. I will be happy to assist you.

At this moment, not all items purchased on the iTunes store are available to reformat or download to iTunes plus. I do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Thank you for using the iTunes Store. You are a valuable customer. Have a great day Christopher.

Sincerely,

Samantha

I don’t think I posted her previous letter, but it bears a lot of resemblence to this one.  "I understand that <problem>. I realise how <random adjective>ing this may be. I will be happy to assist you." Then, at the end, "Thank you for using the iTunes Store. You are a valuable customer. Have a great day <name>."

Of course, I don’t bear any malice toward Samantha. She’s got to work within the system. Nobody in their support department would even have access to any Fairplay decryption software. I feel a bit funny tonight (just drank some coffee, that’s why) so I’ll write back tomorrow night and ask to speak to someone higher up.

DefectiveByDesign.org appears to be slowing down - I don’t think they actually remembered about their Stop DRM day, which was supposed to be October 3rd. If you know anyone from DBD, please give them a nudge.

I did download the music video from Youtube, as well as the full 10 minute version that had been recorded on a camcorder in a cinema somewhere :-)  I used Blacklight to put them onto my MP3 player, and then watched them. It’s funny, but after I watched the 10 minute version I turned my MP3 player off, and realised I was grinning. Hairspray really does leave you in a good mood, even in low doses.
 

This video that I’m trying to unprotect is "You Can’t Stop The Beat" from Hairspray. It just occurred to me how fitting the lyrics are, in relation to my struggle against DRM:

Tracy:
You can’t stop an avalanche
as it races down the hill
You can try to stop the seasons, girl
but you know you never will

Maybelle:
You can’t stop today
as it comes speeding down the track
Child, yesterday was history
and it’s never coming back

In essence, that is what DRM is an attempt to do: Stop something much more powerful than itself. You can’t stop the beat!

Samantha from iTunes Music Store Support got back to me about the ticket I raised with them. Her form letter suggested I try upgrading the video to iTunes Plus. A good suggestion that I hadn’t thought of. In my line of business, it’s like someone buying a fridge and it being faulty on arrival, and then me offering to upgrade them to a functional model for a small fee. Can you imagine how quickly Consumer Affairs would shut down my shop if we operated like that?

Anyway, I downloaded the latest version of iTunes (actually, I already had a copy that I used with WINE), installed it onto Windows (got a creepy feeling while clicking the "Agree" button, remind me not to read the EULA again!), and tried the iTunes Plus upgrade procedure.

Fantastic. NOT! For $1.50, I could convert 3 songs (out of about 70), and no videos. Two of those songs were the Spice Girls’ single Stop, which I had bought from iTunes solely because of the Stop To The Top campaign (I already have a CD single of it). The other was the Moby & Mylene Farmer duet, which I could already unprotect with QTFairUse (that program rocks!).

I have e-mailed Samantha back, telling her that it doesn’t work and that I need another option, and hopefully she’ll throw her hands up at this point and say "Sorry, can’t be done". At which point, I take it up a notch.

I’m aware that I could download the video from Youtube, and in fact I tried a few minutes ago, but parts of Youtube are down at the moment. But it’s the principle of the thing.

I WILL get the music video in unprotected format, no matter how long it takes or how many people I have to hassle. Hopefully I’ll inspire a politician or a judge to make DRM illegal in this country.

Samantha from iTunes Music Store Support got back to me about the ticket I raised with them. Her form letter suggested I try upgrading the video to iTunes Plus. A good suggestion that I hadn’t thought of. In my line of business, it’s like someone buying a fridge and it being faulty on arrival, and then me offering to upgrade them to a functional model for a small fee. Can you imagine how quickly Consumer Affairs would shut down my shop if we operated like that?

Anyway, I downloaded the latest version of iTunes (actually, I already had a copy that I used with WINE), installed it onto Windows (got a creepy feeling while clicking the "Agree" button, remind me not to read the EULA again!), and tried the iTunes Plus upgrade procedure.

Fantastic. NOT! For $1.50, I could convert 3 songs (out of about 70), and no videos. Two of those songs were the Spice Girls’ single Stop, which I had bought from iTunes solely because of the Stop To The Top campaign (I already have a CD single of it). The other was the Moby & Mylene Farmer duet, which I could already unprotect with QTFairUse (that program rocks!).

I have e-mailed Samantha back, telling her that it doesn’t work and that I need another option, and hopefully she’ll throw her hands up at this point and say "Sorry, can’t be done". At which point, I take it up a notch.

I’m aware that I could download the video from Youtube, and in fact I tried a few minutes ago, but parts of Youtube are down at the moment. But it’s the principle of the thing.

I WILL get the music video in unprotected format, no matter how long it takes or how many people I have to hassle. Hopefully I’ll inspire a politician or a judge to make DRM illegal in this country.

I used my two Free Song codes from Coke bottles last night to buy some music. A Gene Pitney song and the song "We’re All In This Together" from HSM.

While I was there I noticed that You Can’t Stop The Beat was released as a music video, so of course I downloaded it. But now I’ve noticed that it’s encrypted with DRM, and I can’t burn it to DVD or put it onto my MP3 player!

I am considering my legal options. Did Apple warn me that I wouldn’t be able to get the video out of my computer? If not, would they be legally obliged to provide an unencrypted version since I didn’t actually ask beforehand if the video was right for my purposes?

Yep, I’m aware that it’s probably on Youtube for free. But I wanted a high quality version. And I want to get the video OFF my computer, dammit! I will write a letter to Apple and demand that they provide me with a way to burn a DVD of the video. If they don’t, maybe I should call Consumer?

iTunes Plus? DefectiveByDesign.org puts it another way. For Sale: Unbroken Car: "Imagine a used car salesman putting up big signs advertising "unbroken
cars." That’s exactly what Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Microsoft are doing.
Their marketing campaigns are based on the fact that their music is
DRM-free." . They don’t mention Apple’s trailblazing attempts to sell unbroken cars, probably because Steve Jobs makes a big show of claiming that he’s against the idea of DRM. Personally, I think Steve Wozniak should be chairman of Apple, then Apple would make a computer that was cheap, flexible, a doddle to use, and didn’t support DRM.

I’m just on the iTunes support site right now, complaining to all and sundry (in a nice way, of course). Did you know that if you make a playlist containing DRM’ed music, you can’t burn that playlist to CD more than 7 times? Why? It’s absolutely zero deterrent to pirates, as they can just burn one copy, then copy the copy. In fact, if I was a pirate making massive numbers of copies, I’d rather use a dedicated bulk CD burning program than iTunes.

Let’s hope iTunes Support gets back to me about "how I would go about burning my purchased video to DVD" soon. If I don’t get a reply, I’ll simply go up the chain of command. I really am thinking of getting Consumer involved.

Lately I’ve been finding that my computer’s memory usage is very high. Right now I have Pidgin and Firefox running on XGL/Compiz, and the computer is using a massive 440 megabytes of RAM.

Isn’t it so perverse that gnome-panel alone is using 100 times more memory than the 1984 Macintosh shipped with? I mean, dude, you could run the operating system and MacPaint in a mere 128 kilobytes of RAM, off a 400 kilobyte floppy disk.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on here before, but we are doing the same things with our computers that we were doing in 1999, but with 10 times as much memory in use. Think about it: Voip? Some people were using it; heck, some people were video conferencing. Video editing? I was doing that back then. Virtualisation? Maybe not, but some people did emulation (and both tasks require similar amounts of memory). Music production? Dude, I could keep 12 audio tracks and a MIDI synth going at once on my iMac with 96 megs of RAM and a 333 MHz processor.

The only things we do these days that might justify such a broad expanse of memory are gaming (where the games do, through higher resolutions and improved textures, require more RAM) and running the Storm worm.

Just checking my e-mail, I found an e-mail telling me that my ecard was waiting. On opening it, I found a link to the "crazy kitty ecard" which is actually a Storm binary!

I found a "From" e-mail address. I went to the domain name in the "from" field and it is some sort of cafe. I e-mailed them with the following message:

• To Whom It May Concern,

  I have been sent a spam e-mail from an e-mail address belonging to your domain name. This spam e-mail attempted to convince me to download a malicious file - a virus. Here is the message:

  To
  Subject	[Spam?]Your ecard is waiting!
  From	<schulkebass@bjs.co.za>  Add to Contacts
  Date	Sunday, October 28, 2007 9:02:40 PM
  [ ↓ ↑ ]	View Message Source
  Headers	Message-ID: <002e01c81962$d2266480$4cdaac8e@kcfjy>Content-Type: text/plain;format=flowed;charset="windows-1250";reply-type=originalMIME-Version: 1.0X-Priority: 3Received: from c2mailmx06.mailcentro.net (10.2.14.106) by C2MAIL02.mailcentro.net (NPlex 5.5.042)id 47238B3B00001F7F for webmaster._.dancepop@zzn.com; Sun, 28 Oct 2007 06:03:26 -0700X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bitFlags: \Recent

  Please click here to view your Crazy Kitty Card Online.

  (and then there is an IP address of a compromised computer, serving up the virus).

  Please update your anti-virus software immediately and run a scan. (unfortunately, this is a resiliant virus that can evade anti-virus scans). If the e-mail address listed in the "from" field is attached to a particular computer, you will definitely want to disconnect that computer from the Internet until you have removed the infection - either through anti-virus or, if that fails (or the anti-virus program doesn’t see the infection) through erasing the hard disk.

  You will also want to educate your staff on the dangers of downloading random programs from the internet. This virus spreads only through people downloading and running it, so it’s obvious that someone with access to the infected computer has received the virus through their own actions.

  If you have any questions, please e-mail me back on this address.

  Christopher Lees
  http://bigbolshevik.blogs.friendster.com/a_man_and_his_penguin

I wanted to commit DoS against the IP address that was serving up the page, but that is a seriously bad idea as it gets the whole botnet to do the same thing to you!

I also recieved a Nigerian scam e-mail; I tried a "social engineering attack" by sending them the Storm binary and telling them that my bank account details were in it.. but Hotmail recognised the virus and wouldn’t send the message.

EDIT: I used nslookup on the IP address in the Storm e-mail. It resolved to the customer subdomain of a particular Swedish ISP. I have sent an e-mail to their abuse department, giving them all the relevant information, and I hope they chase it up.

Today I discovered that my program accepts Flash Video as input; i.e. downloaded Youtube videos. I came to the decision that my program should be extendable through input plugins. Input plugins would be selected through a drop-down menu labelled "Input Source". Once selected, they would basically open up a separate program which would do all the necessary whatevers to get an FFMPEG-compatible file (i.e. download video podcasts from an RSS feed, rip a DVD, search and download from Youtube, etc). Once they had achieved that, they would pass the filepath back to BlackLight for encoding.

I just found out that Free Hugging is a craze, possibly one which will be as short-lived as flash crowds. Better get my hugs from pretty girls while I still can

Today I discovered that my program accepts Flash Video as input; i.e. downloaded Youtube videos. I came to the decision that my program should be extendable through input plugins. Input plugins would be selected through a drop-down menu labelled "Input Source". Once selected, they would basically open up a separate program which would do all the necessary whatevers to get an FFMPEG-compatible file (i.e. download video podcasts from an RSS feed, rip a DVD, search and download from Youtube, etc). Once they had achieved that, they would pass the filepath back to BlackLight for encoding.

I just found out that Free Hugging is a craze, possibly one which will be as short-lived as flash crowds. Better get my hugs from pretty girls while I still can

My father and I went into the city today; he wanted to look in some hobby shops, and I wanted a trip into town for more general reasons :-)  Actually, the real reason why my father *had* to go into town was to see the new William Street platforms at Perth station - the same reason why I went in a few weeks ago!

Anyway, while we were there, there were two girls holding up a handmade sign saying "Free Hugs". There were a handful of guys taking advantage of the offer. Since I was with my father, I was too proud to go up there and give them a hug, even after he suggested it. I suppose that’s part of the whole thing about not involving my parents with my interpersonal life.

But the slightly sad thing was that I seem to be craving female affection so much, that I *really* wanted to hug them. I mean, REALLY. So much so that I’ll probably go into the city next Sunday to see if they’re there, and if they are I’ll give them a hug.

That’s a bit of a sad act, but such is life. (Why does everyone say "Such Is Life" so much these days? It’s like how back in the days of the Spice Girls, people used to say "At the end of the day".)

My monitor is really playing up, but I didn’t have time to go to the place in Wangara to buy a new one. I guess I’ll go on Wednesday.

I’m quite tired today, because I spent most of last night troubleshooting FFMPEG, compiling a new version, and then writing the GUI frontend. That’s the power of Pythoncard though - I was tired, yet I still managed to write a graphical frontend and bring it up to 0.1 release in an hour or so. In fact, in the background, the program is encoding some more Two Ronnies. My eyes are a little bit sore from watching The Two Ronnies through a 1.8 inch screen on the train.