File sharer fined for sharing music

An American student has been fined $675,000 for sharing just 30 songs. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8177285.stm)

It seems to me that the recording Industry has been too slow to react to these things. The internet has been in a growing number of homes for the last 20 years, and file sharing available since the mid 90's. How come it's taken the recording industry this long to do anything about file sharing?

The porn industry has driven secure payment processing (and digital rights management to a lesser extent) for a vast chunk of this time, and has done it all to protect their customers. Those on the moral high ground of music have done pretty much nothing, other than chase people for money where they have simply copied music form one format and made it available to others.

There was no copyright system to get round for this guy, other than a piece of paper which he didn't necessarily even have.

I accept that Sony tried to protect their rights, but were knocked rejected by the consumer. Installing software that affects your whole system is basically malicious code, and that's why it was rejected.

This also looks like an excessive fine for someone sharing just 30 songs - others have shared far higher numbers of tracks but have not been caught - and this was not done for profit.

Joel Tenenbaum, I hope you win your appeal.

Especially since the price of on-line music has been excessive until the arrival of itunes. I remember being given the option to buy music to listen to on my PC for £2 per track, despite this being the price of CDs in Woolworths at the time. This with basically nothing to show - and minimal distribution costs for the product. And most of the secure payment development had been done by the porn industry!

In my opinion the fine should be costs plus restitution to the affected parties. I.e. Mr Tenenbaum has to pay $0.79 per download from his shared files to the record companies. Maybe a fine on top of that.

If someone copies music and then sells it on, then this is totally different. Yes, throw the book at them. Cease their ill gotten gains and fine them, but not for simply sharing music with like minded fans.

Sometimes I go crazy.

Hayseed Dixie have the right idea. They actively encourage bootlegging of their gigs and actually giving hints on recording their gigs on their website. Check it out. They just want to be famous!

Some times, time flies...

Sometimes the sky is green and sea is black. Things have been a bit crazy this last few weeks, hence the lack of updates.

We've been working hard on application deployments and completing the dev cycle for our Business Metric Dashboard. This obviously includes bashing thing in the test environment, validating the deployment pack and generally working my nuts off until the drop dead date for deployment. At this point it's out of our hands, as we need to wait for customer feedback.

I've just finished installing a flue in our server room so we can run the air conditioning 24/7, and just completed another development cycle for a data import tool. We're now in the process of trying to get it to build in our TeamCity environment, but we're getting strange issues with that at the moment. I'm going to try swearing at it shortly, so at least I'll feel better.

Next week may be quiet, but as ever, when there's nothing planned, there's usually more to do. I'm sure I'll find plenty to do!

As ever, priorities have changed. The FastCGI and Python thing isn't going to happen. Instead I have to try and remotely solve an issue on a customer site with IIS setup... and I'm convinced it's a firewall issue that we can't solve.

I've found a few resources for the issue, and I've tried a few things off the top of my head to try and fix this, but it just ain't happpening yet.

I'm pretty sure we'll have a solution to the problem today, but it's annoying. We're getting access to a site over a VPN connection, but not from the local network, unless we turn authentication off. If we do that, the application stops working.

Anyone know anything about how to go about solving this?

Python on IIS and FastCGI

Looks like I might be trying to do the impossible. Again!

I'm about to try and build a web server on Windows 2003 technology, and use this to host ASP and ASP.Net applications, using multiple frameworks, and without upsetting sharepoint.

I will also be attempting to set up a Python server running FastCGI.

There is no reason why it won't work, other than setting up the application we want to use may not work. I may need to tweak lots of bits before I can get the application running.

So, if anyone has experience of setting up a Python scripted web application designed for Linux using FastCGI on a Windows IIS server, let me know!

Once I have succeeded in this, I will update the world, and may even include a set of instructions on the configuration of the web server.

Similarly, if anyone can find instructions, then let me know!

Microsoft, IE and competition

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8096701.stm

The article relates to Microsoft not shipping IE with Windows 7.

That’s fantastic news – it’s good to see Microsoft are opening up the market to allow other providers a chance to install their software.

One question… how will Joe User find and install a browser?

Midweek Madness

Ah, Wednesday!



The day where traditionally shops close for the afternoon and schoolchildren run out of sugar at around 2 o'clock. The Post Offices are closed and nobody can get a loaf or a pint of milk. Ah, the good old days!



I've just spent a chunk of the last couple of hours helping a colleague try to work out how to send a file from Nigeria to Norwich. As it turns out, it was a fairly simple thing that was missing to make this program work, but we got there. I've also spent a substantial chunk of the day trying to work out how to get the prices of electricity in Belgium in 2012 into a database. (Much easier than it sounds!)



The problem I have now is that I can't get a pint of milk or a loaf to get me through the rest of the day!



Still... almost time to go home.

RRAS Connections

And for my next trick...

I will attempt to connect to the internet using an existing connection and a big shiny router.

Sounds easy, straightforward, simple and all that, but it may not be. I've had a few looks at this in the past, and it seems reasonable and all that, but it's just not so simple.

The problem is that the router is connected to the internet and has 6 public facing IP addresses. The internal side has a single IP address, and I need to connect to it using a specific IP address from a firewall.

Still with me?

Good.

I then have to share this connection with our network on a separate network definition. This is where I start to swear under my breath and utter oathes about Bill Gates AND Linus Torvalds.

My First port of call is Google, closely followed by Serverfault.com and trying to work out the questions to ask before I can recognise the answers I get.

I intended originally to use Windows RRAS (Routing and Remote Access Services) but am starting to realise they may not be the best solution. I am now considering a 'Nix based software firewall solution, but I have no experience with this OS other than playing with the web intrerfaces of other routers.

I could always get funky and build something from scratch, but that may be substantially less fun than I think it might be!

In the meantime, we'll keep browsing the web through our ADSL connection!