I love how this references this. (Whether intentionally or otherwise).
Archive for February, 2006
I almost hesitate to post this, for fears that I will get my ass DMCA-ed, but let’s hope the readership of this blog is small and discreet enough as to not attract unnecessary attention…
So, lots of music label / artist sites post up a little Flash audio player that streams previews of tracks to your browser while you’re looking at the page. Warp does it, Biirdie does it… Hell, even MySpace does it. And the thing about all these audio players is that, based on the nature of Flash, the easiest way to code them is to just pass in a series of URLs in ActionScript and stream the audio directly to the Flash Player.
This used to be not such a big deal, since sites would only post up the first 30 seconds or so of each track, so even if you figured out where the actual MP3s were streaming from and downloaded them directly, you’d only end up with the first few seconds of each song. More recently, however, many sites have been posting up *entire* songs to stream via their Flash players, entire *albums* even.
Of course, most Flash programers are aware that this makes downloading the MP3s much more attractive, and so each attempts to obfuscate the location of the files in his or her own unique way. The best tricks involve passing encrypted URLs with JavaScript, autogenerating unique directory names on the fly, or even hardcoding the URLs into the source of the Flash file.
Most of these methods are a sufficient pain in the ass to decipher that it’s hardly worth the effort unless you are willing to sit up for an hour or two picking apart some crazy-ass code just to download one album for free. Occasionaly, however, a coder will (intentionally or otherwise) make it almost criminally easy to locate the original MP3 files.
This evening I stumbled across just such a case.
Thrill Jockey Records, based in Chicago and home to such artists as Bobby Conn, Tortoise, Trans Am and the Lonesome Organist, has traditionally had a pretty crummy homepage. It had remained unchanged for the last several years and was just pretty unappealing to look at, generally. (That being said, their tour and album release info always seemed shockingly up-to-date!)
Anyway, I surfed into the site tonight while looking into an artist (Aki Tsuyuko) Momus had mentioned in an old post on his site, and I was pleasantly surprised to notice that the whole site had undergone a pretty nice redesign! Not only that, but each album page in the catalog had a Flash player with full-length previews of every song!
I was kind of bored, so I thought I’d take a look at how they’d gone about protecting the source MP3s from prying HTTP clients. It turns out that they haven’t really done so at all. The MP3s *are* being hosted on a server called “beta” however, so I suspect that this state of affairs may not last forever. In the meantime, here’s how it works:
- Go to the Thrill Jockey web site
- Navigate to the album page of whatever you want to download. The URL should look something like this: http://thrilljockey.com/catalog/?id=100364. Note those last six numbers.
- Roll over the track titles in the “Preview” player with your mouse pointer. Note that URL for each link ends with a nine digit number.
- Visit the following URL: http://beta.thrilljockey.com/assets/audio/100132/100001348.mp3, but replace the six and nine digit numbers in the URL with the ones from your track.
- Repeat. Enjoy. Don’t ruin it for the rest of us by writing a script that does something horribly abusive like downloading the entire catalog.
Thank you, that is all…
I was in the middle of writing a longer post but I had to save it and post this up before I forget (or more accurately… Before I plunge a pencil into my ear to *make* myself forget!) So I have Wheel of Fortune on TV, muted. It’s only on because it comes on directly after Jeopardy, which I was actually watching. When I glance up at the screen, this is what’s already on the board: S??L ??? IN?? T?? S?NS?T. The category is Phrase. Now, I’m not trying to brag or anything, but I figured it out pretty quick. These allegedly literate people on TV have taken so long to get to this point that they are into the “Lightning Round” mode already, where you don’t even get to spin the wheel anymore, they just let you take turns naming a letter and taking a guess. D…(no guess) R…(no guess) M…(no guess) They are just not getting it. Finally they blind-luck it up to: SAIL O?? INTO THE SUNSET before this one guy comes up with, “Is it ‘Sail Our Into the Sunset,’ Pat?” I fucking thought he had gotten it right and there was just an error in the subtitles! (I have it set so that subtitles come up on my TV when it’s muted) NOPE! He could not even come up with the grammatically correct (but idiomatically wrong) “Sail OUT into the sunset!!” Finally, the next lady up chose “F” and put them all out of their misery, but I think maybe I saw Pat Sajak die a little inside while all this was happening. Sweet. Fucking. CHRIST! (Oh… Also, and on a related note, when the hell did they just start “giving” people the RSNTLE in the final round and letting them choose an additional 4 letters before solving the puzzle? That is even worse bullshit than when they quit making people “buy” stuff out of cheesy showcases with their winnings and started just letting them keep the money!)
I am *totally* helping to get kids addicted to their own adrenaline! I think next time I get on a plane, I’m gonna try to sneak a PSP through security so I can get high in the friendly skies! Anyway, for any politicians interested in the prohibition of video games, just make sure you get in touch with the game industry *before* you do it, so that we can set up a structure for kickbacks and shit. I’d hate to see you guys miss out on the big profits like you did with all the other drugs you banned.
From an article in The Guardian:
An experiment conducted at Harvard and cited by Layard makes the point. Students were asked to choose between two imaginary worlds; in the first they would earn $50,000 a year while the average for everybody else would be $25,000, while in the second they would earn $100,000 against an average of $250,000. Conventional economics would suggest that any rational individual would choose the latter option since they would be twice as well off. Actually, a majority plumped for the former; they were happier to be poorer if that meant they were higher in the pecking order.
(via Momus)
I’ve got a slightly longer post about the Web and society in the pipeline, but I couldn’t resist posting something about this when it popped up today. In the article, the self-proclaimed “inventor of the Flash Mob” writes about the goals and methods behind the creation of the “social phenomenon” and what he’s learned from charting its progress. Mainly, it seems, he’s simply proven his initial hypothesis (that “Hipsters” are mindless, consumerist sheep) correct.
Or at least that’s his take on it.
Having experienced the “thrill” of being in a Flash Mob myself, I can attest that while I may not have known exactly why I was taking part, I really don’t believe that I was seeking any sort of social validation, or demonstrating an utter lack of individuality. Rather I was just curious as to what the deal was, and when the opportunity came to check it out, I did. That said, I can appreciate where the author is coming from in his attack on Hipster culture; I think Willie Nelson said it best in Half Baked: “Getting high [in the 60's] wasn’t the thing to do because it was the thing to do. It was the thing to do because it got you high!”
Flash Mobs, being designed as perhaps the ultimate “Thing to do because it’s the thing to do” would seem to prove the easy malleability of today’s scenesters, but I think there’s maybe a little bit more to it than that. What of the SMS-aided downfall of Philippine President Joseph Estrada in 2001 (pre-dating “Hipster” Flash Mobs by 2 years, btw) for instance? In an age where government wants to know where we are every minute of the day, perhaps having a method for being where we’re not expected is a good strategic asset.
Basically, all I’m saying is that it feels kind of cheap to write off Flash Mobs as just (forgive the pun) “The wave of the future!” =)
Sometimes I have sort of a masochistic streak when it comes to TV. One time, for instance, I sat and watched an episode of Nanny 911 until I was just so disgusted with America, FOX, nannies, children, the suburbs, and myself that I could taste the bile rising in the back of my throat. I guess that is part of the appeal of shows like this, but I really can’t imagine watching something like this on a regular basis. Once in a while though, who doesn’t enjoy chugging a pint glass of gravy (so to speak)?
Tonight I’ve encountered the crack cocaine of crap TV. I kind of had a hunch about this before, but I needed to be sure. So yeah… That’s why I’m in the middle of watching A Dr. Phil Prime Time Special: Love Smart and I am love/hating every minute of it. The genius of Dr. Phil (and I don’t use this term lightly) is how expertly he walks the line between Oprahschmaltz and Springerscum. The sappy music, the soft focus and the sympathetic voice all lull his victims into a false sense of security right before he drops the “Kablammo! You are all fucking morons!” hammer. And in spite of how shallow and pretentious and mean-spirited I know this makes me sound, it is just so much more satisfying watching this particular hammer get dropped on metrosexual dudes and Sex-and-the-City-looking girls than it is seeing trailer trash tear into each other on Springer. Why? I think it has to do with their inability to just let it all out and just call each other bitches and fuckers, throw some furniture around and get it over with. They try *so* hard to keep their cool that you can almost hear them grinding their perfect teeth in outrage while Dr. Phil sits there grinning like a serial killer. Finally he eases up on the cavalcade of shame and embarassment and starts trying to “help” these people, but you might as well just change the channel at this point because solving problems is not really Dr. Phil’s strong point. Oh sure, by the end of the show everyone is crying and telling him how he’s changed their lives, but this is just window-dressing for viewers who can’t appreciate the whole spectacle as pure, uncut schaudenfrade-porn.
I know it’s been awhile since I’ve harped on how chillingly prophetic George W.S. Trow’s Within the Context of No Context (1980) is, but it’s worth recalling here (especially the excerpt in that linked post). Dr. Phil is “Matron” and we are all living in his (brave, new) world. Booyakasha!
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker is super-interesting! He talks about “power-law” distributions, which in a lot of ways are akin to the maxim “One bad apple spoils the bunch.” In other words, social issues that we might *assume* are broadly based and pretty much intractable, are in fact much more concentrated (and therefore solvable) than we might think.
His central example is homelessness. Most cities offer some kind of assistance to the homeless, providing shelters and soup kitchens, and in some cases job training and other counseling. In spite of this, the number of panhandlers and drunks sleeping in doorways remains pretty much constant. The standard “American” attitude in response to this is that some people are just “lazy” or “shiftless” and that nothing is going to change that. Furthermore, there are so many people in the “system” that it would be impossible to help them all. After looking into some studies and speaking with some police officers who deal with the homeless on a daily basis, Gladwell finds that the situation is really quite a bit different. Most people are homeless for incredibly brief periods, and make every effort to avoid returning to the shelters once they get back on their feet. It is a small-ish group of chronically homeless (often mentally or physically disabled) who consume the majority of public aid, especially when it comes to the medical treatment they often receive at the government’s expense. It has been speculated that by addressing these cases directly, the overall cost and impact of homelessness could be drastically reduced.
Sounds great, but there is a problem with this approach. Studies have proven that the most effective way of “addressing” certain of these cases is simply to give a chronically homeless person a place to live, regardless of their ability to pay or even their willingness to try to improve their situation. From a purely cost-benefits analysis, it turns out to be much cheaper to give a person a single room apartment for a year, and to monitor their health & etc. than it is to house them at a shelter and cover the medical costs attributable to their living on the street. Furthermore, by taking this approach, the visibility of homelessness in major cities could be largely eliminated, or so the theory goes, because when people speak of the homeless “problem” they are really referring to this group in particular, and not those who just pass through the system before re-building their lives.
However, for obvious reasons, this approach doesn’t sit very well in the American mind. Why should the worst offenders be given the best treatment? And how do we decide who the “worst” offenders are anyway? It seems less fair than just giving the same treatment to everyone. Gladwell offers another example that is a bit easier to stomach perhaps. According to some studies, “Five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution.” And yet, American emissions testing tends to treat all vehicles as equal-opportunity offenders, despite the fact that most new cars run so cleanly that they might as well be hybrids! Many other countries enforce terribly stringent registration and maintenence requirements on older cars, but again there is a mental block in the US psyche when it comes to addressing these issues effectively.
Anyway, I think I’ve summarized things enough here. Go ahead and read the article if you want the whole story. And you can check out Gladwell’s other recent bit on Pit Bulls and racial profiling too!
I wonder if when the internet kids of today come across this movie if their first question is: Why would they want to title a movie, “Safe For Work??” (Or for the dyslexic ones… “Is this a movie about meeting men on Craigslist?”) On a related note, why have there not been any good acronym movies made lately? I’m sure “STFU, N00B” would be B.O. Gold, as they say in Variety. (I must admit, I’m always amused when leafing through issues of Variety to read headlines like, “B.O. Problems for Disney?” or “Paramount exec predicts healthy B.O. this summer!” =)
Watching the Chinese New Year parade on TV, you get to see some interesting commercials. Ford, for example, brings us this campaign which I guess is designed to sell hip young Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean urbanites (Japanese is notably excluded from the “Choose Your Language” option on the site) on the idea of bringing home an American car to meet the parents. The car itself looks ok, even if it does remind me a bit of a miniature Cadillac. One thing you can’t argue with is that more advertising campaigns need copy like this:
Jasmine had finally broken ties with Simon. In doing so, she had rid herself of the engagement ring that would have handcuffed her to a life filled with material things but empty of the love Simon was incapable of…Little did Jasmine know that for now, she was in the eye of Simon’s storm. That’s because her path was about to cross that night with Tommy’s, who was on his way to his first gig at the club Fusion. Was it luck that they met? Or destiny? Did it matter either way, or even if it was a soul in pain seeking out the arms of someone offering comfort in a lonely world?
Oh advertising… I love the way you pander.
[Update] Upon further investigation, I cannot over-emphasize how hilarious the writing on that site is. e.g. “Why, Tommy, have your eyes been unable to turn away from this Jasmine. This woman named after a scent that intoxicates and beckons you?”
[Update 2] Also awesome is “DJ Tommy 2T’s Mixer” in the “Headliner Room.” Much like the auto buyer, empowering himself by choosing which color of “trim” best represents his particular ethos, users of Tommy’s mixer can choose which genres of music will comprise the “rhythm” or “melody” of a song. I was pretty blasé about the whole thing, until I realized that I could use this thing to create an unnatural Country / Reggeaton hybrid. In keeping with the automobile theme, this is the kind of music that I imagine people driving those awful Chevy SSRs must listen to all the time. Thanks again to Jon for Audio Hijack (and no thanks to Ford’s ass-tacular Flash-based site), I am able to present you with a little taste of the musical future. It’s what I call Countreggeaton! Enjoy!
