I’m with Bruce Schneier on this one, speechless. And if you look in the related videos, there are more. Too funny.

Sorry, this is a guilty pleasure of mine, as my social network friends well know. The new episode is live! They’ve gone back to the longer format and the original opening. Much better.

iTunes 7.2 came down in software update today and the biggest feature is the new iTunes Plus, a section of the store wherein the new DRM-free offerings are available. I like that they have compartmentalized the current and future offerings so if you only want to see the “Plus” music, you can do that without any real effort. All the usual browse and search functions are available and when jumping into the iTunes Plus area limited to just the good, new hotness.

I’ve already run their upgrade option on my existing music and was disappointed that I only had one applicable tune. Hopefully as other labels come on board, it will keep giving me the option to upgrade any other tracks that become eligible down the road.

Technorati Tags: DRM

Saw this on Boing Boing and decided to check it out. It lacks some discovery features, like streams by artist, genre or at random. But you can’t argue with the fact that they offering is plain MP3, first of all, and also that it is 192KBps quality at a price point comparable per track and better per album than iTMS.

Technorati Tags: DRM

Interesting business week article about which I am a little conflict. The according debunks many of the iPod and AAC misconceptions that are driving me up a while. I especially like the list of players, other than the iPod, that support AAC. I wish there was a mention of Dolby’s relationship to AAC, since I think that clarifies much confusion about AAC being an Apple only format.

I guess killing WMA in favor of AAC is technical a “standards war”, but the article’s title is more evocative of AAC supplanting MP3, which I don’t see happening. And another, possibly unintended, benefit of Apple’s higher bit rate, AAC offering of EMI songs is that transcoding from AAC to MP3 will typically result in less perceptible quality loss. Although this is not as compelling as the article’s point about direct support for AAC, it is only a small amount of friction to a dedicate use of a player without AAC support buying and using iTunes/EMI tracks.

Technorati Tags: DRM, AAC

You’ve no doubt seen the news. I’m still chewing through a handful of articles, to see if there are any gotchas.

I commented, on the podcast, that I was skeptical of Jobs’ commitment to DRM-free music in his letter. I am glad to be proven at least partially wrong, first of all.

Also, last year I swore off of iTunes for the DRM. Which hurt since I found the iTunes store to be convenient for discovery and for cherry picking singles, which I prefer to paying a crap tax on a CD where perhaps one or maybe two tracks are actually worth purchasing.

Like my experiments with Jamendo and Amie Street, I’ll treat this like any clueful offering and give it a hearty go and share my impressions based on hands on experience.

Boing Boing has the story. Not surprising, if you read Lethem’s Harper’s piece which I talked about on the podcast after it came out. It is very encouraging to see him so boldly following through. I look forward to the day when this sort of deal is not so unusual.

Technorati Tags: copyright, intellectual property, remix culture

I’m with Cory, The Diamond Age ranks right after The Cryptonomicon in my ranking of Neal Stephenson’s novels. SciFi’s mini-series have been fifty-fifty in my opinion, so I am very anxious about their adaptation of this work. I am one of the few who preferred their version of Dune to Lynch’s, so I may have less to worry about.

This xkcd comic is so funny because it is so true.

Hell, yeah! If you have no idea who I am talking about, get thee hence to George’s web site. In particular, check out the cover of Interrobang. And give B3 a listen. No doubt he should be on this list.