Microsoft sets aside $20bn to establish media software clout : MICROSOFT, the world%u2019s largest software company, has allocated more than $20 billion (£11.2 billion) to spend over the next six years in a drive to grab a share of the film and music entertainment market, The Times has learnt.

I have this persistent nightmare that Microsoft will buy one of the 4 remaining Music companies (Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, WEA, and EMI) and 1/4 of the world's music will only be available legally in WMP with Microsoft's DRM. Tie this in with the Microsoft push into phones and the convergence of phones and MP3 players.

But then maybe this is also a black hole that will swallow Microsoft. There's real problems with owning both the content source and the music players as Sony have discovered. And MP3 rippers are so common now that MP3 is hardly going to disappear.

MSN - Music : How can I get MSN Music downloads to play on my iPod?

The iPod does not currently support the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format and will not natively play any songs purchased from MSN Music, or any other Windows Media-based music service. If you are an iPod owner and would like to play MSN Music songs on your iPod, you can send feedback to Apple and ask them to change their policy and add support for the Windows Media format.

Bwahhahahhahahhahahhahahhhaaaa!

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Cool! My p2pnet article got a mention on The P2P weblog.

Some thoughts on all this podcasting stuff. Excuse the small amount of MS Win-centricity.

- Podcasting really needs a resident, local aggregator that runs all the time in the tray or as a service so that enclosures are collected in background as well as feeds.

- An aggregator with Podcasting really ought to support BitTorrent.

- If an aggregator with Podcasting has a BitTorrent client built in, it might as well be a full BT client handling any .torrent requests from the OS, not just enclosures.

- If it's running all the time, then it will act as a BT seed all the time as well.

So which Aggregators have followed that path and done all of it? This could really help BT with implementations. I think it may be feasible to also build this as a Firefox extension where BT is running whenever the browser is open.

Now looking at a sample of podcasting feeds, very few of them are using BitTorrent. I think there are two reasons for this.

1) Everyone can read MP3, not everyone can collect BT. This means that we need a way of recommending BT but offering MP3 as an alternative in the same feed with some marker to say that the end file is the same. I'm not sure how you would code this in RSS/Atom.

2) Creating a .torrent and getting it on a BT tracker is still too hard. I imagine a tracker service with a REST/XMLRPC/SOAP API where you told it the location of a file on the public net and it created the .torrent, created the tracker entry and then returned the details for inclusion in your feed. This might also be a service that something like Feedburner could meld into your RSS feed. There'd be an HTML UI for this as well. I haven't found anything like this. If you know of one, please say. Once the service exists with the API, this could be built into blogging systems so that it happens automatically when you post a blog entry with an enclosure.

- The other alternative is that a local BT publishing tool packaged the whole .torrent creation and registration process with one of the existing public trackers.

The goal in all this is to make BT ubiquitous but also to have it fade into the background where the end user doesn't need to know any more about it than they know about http.

The top box/backrest attachment. I drilled a small hole in the mounting plate, and added a bolt to attach the plate to. [from: Flikr Photos]

The finished article. The seat height is now about 26 1/2" The bucket I'm sitting in is also a lot more comfortable. The stock seat tends to slide you forwards the whole time. Now I'm wedged in. [from: Flikr Photos]

Kind of hard to see but this is the seat foam after cutting. I started with a hack saw blade and then finished it with the surform. The bits on top are what was removed. Then peel the seat cover back, use a staple gun to fix it on the inside and refit the seat. [from: Flikr Photos]

The view from the back showing how narrow the mirros and bars are now. Note the silly sticker! [from: Flikr Photos]

Is the Burger 400 suitable for turning into a more radical Feet Forwards bike? Seat height with the seat removed is 24" [from: Flikr Photos]

Here's what it looks like with the seat removed. That's as low as you can go as just underneath the panel is the EFI gubbins. [from: Flikr Photos]

Another view under the seat. You need to sit as far back as possible to get the leg room. Which means an uptilt at the back. [from: Flikr Photos]

I've removed the seat, removed the staples and peeled back the cover. Then removed the front half of the foam. You can clearly see you're limited on lowering the seat by the tilt up at the back. Seat height is now 25" [from: Flikr Photos]

Here's the foam. I'm going to attack it! Should be able to get about 1 1/2" lower. [from: Flikr Photos]

Here's the seat after marking up. [from: Flikr Photos]

Woot! I just got one of my rants, Paying for the music published on p2pnet.net

Aldon Hynes writes about the closing of Plink.

Plink: A FOAF update | Orient Lodge : I suspect this may be the tip of the iceberg as more and more people discover the power of FOAF and want to take advantage of it, and at the same time want to protect their privacy.

Here's a couple of interesting stories. Perhaps somebody with some knowledge of the legal status of UK ISPs could comment.

This one's about an Indymedia server being handed over to the FBI by Rackspace in London because there was a story on there with a photograph of a Swiss undercover policeman.

Independent Media Center | www.indymedia.org | ((( i ))) : Rackspace complied and handed the server over to the FBI, but they must have felt bad because they are building us a new server that will be online as soon as possible, oh and they apologized for the abruptness because they think that they are "required to comply with all federal orders of this nature". The servers hosted numerous local IMCs including Belgium and African imcs, Palestine, UK, Germany, and Brasil, Italy, Uruguay, Poland, Belgrade, Portugal, and more. We are unaware as to the reasons for this at this time. We suspect it has to do with an FBI request that we take down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police. They claimed there was threats and personal information, but there was nothing of the sort. The undercover police that were photographed on the page were photographing protesters. Rackspace is a US company, but have colocation in the UK where these servers are (err, were) located. So this is about Swiss police, on a French site, on a server in England, taken away by American federal police... can I be the first to say WTF?!

WTF, indeed! The FBI has long arms these days. Among other oddities about this, you might refelect on the fact that the FBI is supposed to handle domestic cases only and is not supposed to get involved in international issues. Perhaps the story actually meant to say CIA.

The second is about the very public announcement yesterday that the BPI are suing 28 UK based file sharers. Hidden in the story is that the BPI don't know the names and details about the accused only their IP address. And that these are civil proceedings and injunctions. So the question is what power do the UK courts have to force the ISPs to give up their customer details against a specific IP address and date in a civil case. I would hope that they have no power at all. The ISP is not a defendant in this case but a 3rd party. I can't see that it's in anyone's long term interest for any private 3rd party to be able to get access to an ISPs records purely because it helps their case. An inquiry into a criminal case is another matter and I'm sure the government has plenty of scope for demanding this information. Keep your eyes out for the BPI to be pushing for criminal legislation in the UK over copyright theft, the right to issue injunctions against third parties to collect information and no doubt the inclusion of the common carrier in complicity in the "crime". I may well be wrong (please tell me) but I don't think they have those rights now. [from: JB Ecademy]

Eventually it was discovered
that God
did not want us to be
all the same.

This was
Bad News
for the Governments of the world,
as it seemed contrary
to the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings.

Mankind must be made more uniformly
If
The Future
Was going to work

Various ways were sought
to bind us all together
But, Alas
Same-Ness was unenforceable

It was about this time
that someone
came up with the idea of
Total Criminilization.

Based on the principle that
If we were All Crooks
We could at last be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of
The Law.

Shrewdly our legislators calculated
that most people were
too lazy to perform a
Real Crime.
So new laws were manufactured
making it possible for anyone
To violate then any time of the day or night
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President
The most exalted Industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions.

Total Criminalization
Was the greatest idea of its time.
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be Crooks or Outlaws.
So, of course, they had to be
Tricked into it...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal.

(c) Frank Zappa 1979