Into Tech

Capturing cassette tapes

Is there a cheap device to copy cassette tapes direct to PC?
Paul Niemiec

JS: You don’t need one. Using the traditional method, all you need is a cassette deck, a cable to connect it to your PC’s sound card, and Audacity software, which you can download free. You can find instructions on the Lifehacker blog. Obviously you will get better sound if you start with a good-quality cassette deck, but for less critical purposes, a Walkman-style portable will do. If you are using a hi-fi cassette deck, the connecting cable will probably have two phono plugs at one end and a 1/8in mini-jack at the other (often called a Y cable). If you’re using a portable device, it will probably have a mini-jack at both ends. For preference, plug it into a line-out on the portable, rather than the headphone socket. If not, turn the volume down or it will be too loud.

Lifehacker suggests digitising the sound using the LAME MP3 encoder. This is a good but “lossy” compression system: it sacrifices some detail to save a lot of storage space. If quality is critical, however, you should capture the sound as a WAV file, and store it using a lossless format such as FLAC. You can still make compressed MP3 or AAC versions for everyday use. The process is basically the same if you buy a specialised recorder such as ION Audio’s Tape2PC deck, except it connects to the PC via a USB port.

An even simpler and cheaper approach is not to use a PC at all. In this case, all you need is an MP3 player that has a direct encoding (line-in) feature, plus a stereo line-in cable (sometimes called a Direct Encoding Cable) costing about a fiver or less. Players with the line-in feature include the Creative Zen V+, iAudio X5, MPIO HD200, iRiver X20 and many more.

Fibre to the home

I live in Bournemouth, which apparently is about to become the UK’s first “fibre city”. We’ve had the offer of free installation, but what’s involved?
Barbara Oldham

JS: Bournemouth will be England’s first “fibre city”; Dundee will be Scotland’s. Basically, H2O plans to deliver 100Mbps broadband by routing fibre-optic cables via the sewer system. It has already wired council offices, the Bournemouth International Centre and Pavilion Theatre. FibreCity will also need to connect to homes, and says this will be done by cutting channels just 20mm wide and 100mm deep to a cable-style box on your wall, so it should not be too disruptive. There is not much info beyond that because FibreCity will only be the carrier. It will sell capacity to cable TV and broadband suppliers etc, who’ll try to sell you their services.

No political comment

Have you tried the Microsoft spellchecker in Outlook Express, on the word “Obama”? Oops.
Martin Saunders

JS: The spellcheckers in Hotmail and Microsoft Office (Outlook Express does not have one) had not been programmed to recognise Obama, and therefore suggested the closest match in their dictionary: Osama. (Next closest is Bema.) Microsoft is fixing it …

Cleaner discs

Have you any advice for cleaning CDs and DVDs?
Denys Vaughan

JS: They are usually best left alone unless they skip or cause other problems. If they need a clean, you can blow the dust off then wipe them down with a damp lint-free cloth. Distilled water and microfibre cloths are recommended. The main thing is to wipe gently from the centre to the edge. If a bit of grit scratches across the disc, the hardware error correction will probably deal with it. If you scratch around the groove, you may lose lots of bits in a row, and the error correction will not be able to cope.

If the disc is so dirty that it needs more than water, isopropyl alcohol is the solvent recommended on the web.

It’s a hard drive

I recently bought a hard disk recorder to timeshift TV. Can I assume the hard disk works like a PC hard disk and needs a periodic clean-up?
Jim Curran

JS: Yes, hard disk recorders work much like PCs running Windows Media Centre or MythTV, and sometimes have defragmentation problems. The manual may offer an “optimise” function such as Sky+ Planner rebuild, which will at least do a tidy-up and could recover some storage space. If you can connect a PC via a USB port, you may be able to see the DVR’s hard disk as an external drive. If it uses the FAT file format, then standard Windows utilities should work on it - but at your own risk! DVR disks are subject to failure, the same as PC hard drives, and should therefore be regarded as temporary storage. Anything you want to keep should be burned to DVD.

· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

The idea of the “Top 40″ music hit seems like a relic of a different age, and the Billboard best sellers list hasn’t done much to really update with the times. However, reader Will North writes in to point us to a rather interesting experiment being done by the BBC and IBM to basically reinvent the concept of the music chart with a beta test of a new offering called Sound Index.

Rather than just checking on sales at certain shops which (as Will notes in his submission) can be easily gamed, Sound Index tries to look at a variety of online sources to find out what music people are really interested in:

“Crawls some of the biggest music sites on the Internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are.”

In other words, they’re reinventing the music charts, but making it much more accurate and relevant. But it doesn’t stop there, either. Rather than assuming there’s just one single chart to rule them all, the system lets you create custom lists for a better understanding of more niche-targeted music. So, say, if you wanted to know who’s hot on YouTube and Last.fm in the indie and punk worlds among US listeners between the ages of 20 and 30, you can create just that list. Or, as per Will’s suggestion, you could find out what female Emo fans between the age of 15 and 20 are talking about on Bebo — and get that list.

It does seem a little limited right now, but it’s definitely a step up from the lists you normally see these days, and shows that niche appeal can actually be worth something these days. That’s a big deal, because the believers in old time copyright insist that with more file sharing and such, only “mass market” music will survive. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening, as it’s easier than ever (often by leveraging such tools) for more targeted niche music to create a modest success by being tremendously successful within its own niche. Tools like Sound Index should make it easier to get even more recognition of success in those niches.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Slashdot points us to the news that a new study, by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represents music rights holders, and Big Champagne, a company that measures file sharing activity claims that the music industry should embrace piracy rather than continuing to fight it. Specifically, it points to the success of Radiohead’s “name your own price” promotion, and the fact that the music was still widely available on BitTorrent, even though you could download it for free from Radiohead’s own site. This, the study’s authors, suggest, show that stopping piracy has little correlation to “success.” That’s not a surprising finding as plenty of previous reports have shown the same thing. In fact, albums that are considered a success tend to have a lot more unauthorized file sharing than those that are not. It’s not hard to understand why, either: popularity is popularity.

Slashdot highlights the fact that this is a study done by the music industry itself, suggesting that maybe the industry is open to changing its strategy. But, that’s not quite accurate. The “music industry” is made up of made different parts, with very different motivations. The two players who did this study are both angling for different benefits. Big Champagne has been around for years, and has established itself as the sort of “go to” player for the industry in monitoring file sharing. The more the industry embraces file sharing, the more business Big Champagne gets. As for the MCPS-PRS Alliance — that represents songwriters, composers and publishers — not necessarily the labels. MCPS-PRS is looking to establish a new set of draconian compulsory licensing system, where you could still make use of file sharing, but where it would (perhaps with Big Champagne’s help) get paid for every download through some sort of system, whether sharing in the ad revenue or through subscription fees. This is the deal it’s already worked out with Google’s YouTube, even though it’s unclear what legal basis there is for such an agreement.

So, this study is hardly the “music industry” embracing file sharing, but a very biased part of that industry trying to push the rest of the industry towards compulsory licenses and an effective “music tax” on file sharing.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

It still seems rather amusing (if not twisted) that some patent system supporters are trying to convince the world Google would be harmed by an absence of software patents. Instead, it seems increasingly obvious that it would only serve to help Google, who is a regular target of questionable patent infringement lawsuits. Take the latest such case as an example. A company by the name of Web Tracking Solutions, which ironically enough, doesn’t appear to have much of a web presence (if any), has sued Google for patent infringement, claiming that its patent on third-party on-line accounting systems is being violated by Google’s AdSense offering.

Try to read the patent without gagging over the question of what the USPTO was thinking when it approved this as a “non-obvious” process. Basically, it describes a system for tracking ad clicks on third party websites, and then showing that information (how many clicks, etc.) for customers of an ad service. In other words, apparently the USPTO thought that the idea of actually accounting for how many ad clicks were made by an advertising service to its clients is somehow deserving of monopoly protection. I would imagine that Google would be perfectly fine losing its own patents if it meant not having to defend against these sorts of lawsuits on an all too regular basis.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

It was really disappointing, if entirely understandable, earlier this year when the until-then-anonymous “Patent Troll Tracker” had to shut down his blog. Prior to that, it had been one of the only sources (and in some cases the only source) to report on some important cases and trends in the patent world. Unfortunately, it appears the same thing is now happening in the copyright world. William Patry, recognized around the world as an expert on copyright, has shut down his blog. Tragically, he didn’t just stop writing it, he’s deleted the entire archive — so even posts of his that we pointed to just last week no longer are live. This is really unfortunate — and there seems to be no reason he couldn’t have allowed the archives to live on.

As for the reasons for shutting it down, his first is that he was sick of people taking the word on his personal blog as the position of Google, since he works there. When he started the blog, he did not work there, and since he joined the company he was quite explicit about that fact and never commented on cases or stories that involved Google or even other cases involving companies involved in lawsuits against Google. However, too many people would take what he said as the “word of Google,” unfortunately.

Much more importantly, however, he notes that writing about the state of copyright these days has become “too depressing.” This should really open some eyes. Patry has always been a supporter of the copyright system. But he’s become depressed with how the system has been changing, such that he finds himself constantly writing about changes or abuses of the system. Even (as he puts it) being a “centrist” on copyright issues, he’s seen how far in one direction certain interests are trying to pull copyright, and it means he’s constantly pulling hard in the other direction, making him seem less like a centrist and making him depressed for having to write so negatively about things happening in the copyright world.

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

It is profoundly depressing, after 26 years full-time in a field I love, to be a constant voice of dissent. I have tried various ways to leaven this state of affairs with positive postings, much like television news shows that experiment with “happy features.” I have blogged about great articles others have written, or highlighted scholars who have not gotten the attention they deserve; I tried to find cases, even inconsequential ones, that I can fawn over. But after awhile, this wore thin, because the most important stories are too often ones that involve initiatives that are, in my opinion, seriously harmful to the public interest. I cannot continue to be so negative, so often. Being so negative, while deserved on the merits, gives a distorted perspective of my centrist views, and is emotionally a downer.

This should be a huge downer for everyone else as well. While Patry and I disagreed about the extent of reform needed in copyright, he is one of the sharpest minds on any issue having to do with copyright, and having him silence himself means that the forces he was sick of fighting — those who are constantly stretching and abusing copyright — have just won yet another battle. That makes it that much harder for the rest of us to stop certain industries from continuing to stretch, twist and abuse copyright, not for good reasons, but merely to prop up their own obsolete business models. One hopes that others in the field will step up and help prove to Patry and others that this isn’t too depressing — and that this is a battle that can be won — but no one will be able to fully replace his regular insightful opinions on the subject.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

You may have heard a lot about Google’s Knol recently, but you have probably never heard of HubPages. This is a pity, because while Knol is based on the same idea - inviting users to create pages on topics they know about - HubPages looks better, reads better, and is better organised.

I am being a little unfair to Knol, of course. The service was only announced in December, and opened to the general public on July 23. It will certainly improve. HubPages, by contrast, is already two years old, and Squidoo - another site based on exactly the same idea - is even older. But by learning from these pioneers, Google could have done a much better job with Knol.

Most of us have compared Knol to Wikipedia: they could have called it Googlepedia. But both Knol and HubPages do two things very differently from Wikipedia. First, they identify their authors, who take full responsibility for their own pages. Second, they provide a way to make money, though I suspect most contributors won’t make much.

Writing knols or hubs is therefore a competitive rather than a collaborative sport. A thousand people can all create pages about the same topic and hope the best one wins.

But there are also differences. Knol has a desperately dull home page with text links to articles about Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding, Evolving Trends in Laparoscopic Surgery, and so on, and most of the featured articles are very academic. HubPages has a colourful invitation to “Publish your passion”. It features articles about Beatles album cuts, the Top 10 Most Expensive Items On eBay, How to Identify Poisonous House Spiders, and so on. It takes a populist approach.

Hubs are easier to browse than knols. HubPages uses tags to create subject categories such as Love, Health, Finance, Shopping and Business. You can also browse by author, request a hub if you can’t find what you want, and chat with other hubbers in the online forum.

In these respects, HubPages is more of a social networking site. If you like one of Shalini Gupta’s hubs, for example, you can vote for it, leave a comment, browse her other 260 articles, download some of her ebooks, and become a fan - she has more than 600 already. She’s popular partly because one of her subjects is writing hubs for profit.

So far, HubPages has published more than 50,000 hubs and attracts more than 5 million unique visitors per month. It also makes more than 90% of its revenue from Google Adsense advertising, and Google features HubPages as a case study. For a small start-up, this is success. Can that success continue now that Google has invaded its turf?

HubPages gets most of its traffic and almost all its money from Google, but what if Knol’s pages appear consistently higher in search results than those from HubPages, Squidoo and similar sites? Google’s search is closed and proprietary, so we have no way of knowing if it favours Knol unfairly. But we’re watching.

It’s almost cute when long-time newspaper columnists with almost no grounding in basic economics try to come up with plans to “save” the newspaper industry. It almost always ends up demanding some form of collusion, government bailout or a complete suppression of basic economics. Sometimes all three. We’ve seen ideas where newspapers would team up to collude on ad prices. We’ve seen (many, many times) the idea that newspapers should collude to charge for all content online, and we’ve seen demands that newspapers should just get money from the government. Even better, some have demanded that Google somehow fund or just outright buy newspapers.

The latest to jump into the fray of ridiculous suggestions on how to “save” newspapers is political cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall. Reader “parsko” points us to a new Ralls column where he makes three suggestions on how to save the newspaper industry — except that I’m half wondering if this is pure satire. Because his three suggestions seem more likely guaranteed to kill the newspaper industry even faster than just sitting still. Of course, the reason he gets it so wrong is he so badly misunderstands basic economics as the underpinning of his argument:

All three of my suggestions are predicated on the simplest principle of capitalism: scarcity increases demand. Newspapers have made news free and plentiful, which is why they’re going broke.

Apparently, Ralls has never looked at a supply/demand curve (or, if he has, he misunderstood it badly). Scarcity does not increase demand. If it did, you would imagine that the best manufacturing strategy of every company in the world would be to produce just one of something. After all, demand would sky rocket, and everyone would be filthy, stinking, rich, right? Scarcity can increase price, but that’s different than demand. And, in fact, induced scarcity that increases price would almost certainly decrease quantity demanded (which is not the same as demand itself), rather than increase it. And, “demand” shouldn’t be what newspapers are looking to maximize, but profit. And, raising price does not mean great profit. This is pretty basic economics, though, apparently foreign to Ralls.

As for the reason why newspapers are going broke, well, first that’s an exaggeration. Most newspapers are actually quite profitable, even if revenue has been shrinking for some of them. Also, claiming that the reason some newspapers are facing declining revenue is because they’ve made content more available is simply, laughably, incorrect. It shows a near total lack of understanding of the history of newspapers (odd, since Ralls’ degree is in history), as well as a complete misunderstanding of the market newspapers are in. The problem isn’t that they’ve made news abundant, but that they built their old business model on the basis of a near monopoly on information — which is now gone.

Let’s move on to his suggestions:

First: newspapers should go offline. If the last decade has proven anything, it’s that you can’t charge for a product–in this case, news–that you give away. So stop! All the members of the Newspaper Association of America should shut down their websites. At the very least, papers ought to charge online readers twice as much as for print subscriptions–searchability must be worth something. Want news? Buy a “dead tree” newspaper.

You see why a part of me wonders if this is satire? Apparently, the solution (or at least part one of the solution) is that newspapers should all collude with each other to make their product less valuable while pretending that competition doesn’t exist. Talk about a recipe for disaster. Ralls makes a few huge mistakes here (beyond the collusion and ignoring competitors part). First, he doesn’t seem to understand what product newspapers actually sell. He complains that you can’t sell what’s free (which is, of course, untrue…) but seems to not realize that what newspapers are really selling is eyeballs to advertisers.

And you know what advertisers almost certainly don’t like? Fewer eyeballs. And that’s exactly what you get when you make it more difficult for anyone to see your newspaper.

Second, copyright every article in the newspaper.

Apparently Ralls is unfamiliar with copyright law as well: every article in the newspaper is already under copyright. Automatically. Welcome to US copyright law.

“The majority of bloggers and Internet addicts, like the endless rows of talking heads on television, do not report,” notes the invaluable Chris Hedges. “They are largely parasites who cling to traditional news outlets…They rarely pick up the phone, much less go out and find a story. Nearly all reporting–I would guess at least 80 percent–is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take that away and we have a huge black hole.” And a lot of unfulfilled demand one can charge for.

Or… a huge blackhole that will almost immediately be filled in by opportunists who recognize how wonderful it is that old school newspapers just cleared the playing field for them. Not to mention, in doing so, those newspapers will have pissed off a large majority of old readers who will be thirsting for new sources of news that don’t try to make life more difficult for them. Apparently Ralls thinks that “newspapers” are the only people who report news, and that they somehow have the lock and key on it.

Newsgathering requires extensive infrastructure. Beat reporters, freelancers, editors, stringers, fact-checkers, and travel cost a lot of money. (A week in rural Afghanistan costs at least $10,000.) Why shouldn’t newspapers–the main newsgathering organizations in the United States–be compensated for those expenses?

And they are compensated for it — when they put in place a business model that makes sense. There is no right to compensation for expenses. There is only a right to set up a business model as you see fit, and see if the market has demand for it. Apparently Ralls also missed that economics lesson when he skipped out on the one about how scarcity impacts demand.

Every newspaper article should enjoy an individual, aggressively enforced, copyright. Radio and TV outlets that currently lift their news reports out of newspapers–without forking over a cent–would have to hire reporters or pay papers a royalty. Paying newspapers for usage, even at a high rate, would probably be cheaper.

Aha. We’re back to copyright. Except, again, he seems to be confused about copyright law, implying that somehow copyright covers the very concept of the story, rather than the actual expression of the story. Ralls appears to believe that whoever reports first hand on a news story somehow “owns” that story and can charge anyone who reports on it as well in a non-first hand manner. I would suggest he talk to some lawyer friends about how well such an “aggressively enforced copyright” effort like this would succeed in court.

Step three on the road back to fiscal viability: cut off the wire services. Nowadays an article written for a local paper can get picked up by a wire service, which sells it for a ridiculously low reprint fee to other papers and websites like Google. At bare minimum, newspapers that originate stories ought to require wires to charge would-be reprinters the thousands of dollars each piece is worth. Better yet, don’t post them in the first place.

Yes, please, make distribution more difficult. Because, you know, there’s nothing your market likes better than the fact that you’ve made it that much more difficult to get your product.

There are a couple of problems with my prescription.

Just a couple?

First, my suggestions only work if every paper follows them. Aside from the cat-herding organizational hurdles, accusations of collusion and price-fixing might bring down the wrath of government officials assigned to enforcing anti-trust laws.

Oh yes, there’s that.

Second and perhaps more daunting, the “information wants to be free” mantra, once the cry of wacko libertarians, has become state religion.

Ah, and of course, a nice final slam at “wacko libertarians” with nary a single explanation of the basis for those claims (you know, the basic economics, which Ralls apparently skipped over). These are actually the least of the problems with Ralls plan. The much bigger one is simply reality, which would take his three suggestions and basically destroy any newspaper that agreed to go along with them.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

When Chinese search engine Baidu first went public, some folks pointed out that the main reason why people used it a lot more than Google was that it had an MP3 search engine, which let people find music to download. Google, being afraid of copyright infringement lawsuits, chose not to have such a specific search engine. Of course, once it had gone public, Baidu attracted the attention of record labels as well, and was quickly sued. However, Baidu eventually won that lawsuit — which does seem like the right decision. Baidu, as a search engine, isn’t making any copies of the file itself at all. It’s merely linking to where those files are, and it’s difficult to see how that’s copyright infringement.

Of course, the record labels aren’t known for giving up easily, and they simply sued again. However, it appears that Google has seen enough of getting beaten handily in the Chinese market by Baidu, and that initial ruling in favor of Baidu and has apparently decided to set up its own MP3 search engine on its Chinese site. The report notes that Google is first looking to get “approval” from the recording industry, though it’s not clear what sort of approval is sought or needed. If it’s going to be an industry approved search engine, it’s unlikely to do what Google needs it to do. That is, it will most likely be quite limited and locked down, meaning people will just stick with Baidu’s.

At the same time, it’s still difficult to see why a separate search engine is really necessary. What’s wrong with just doing a search with specific parameters included? In fact, some have already automated the process.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

While I don’t think that passing laws in favor of net neutrality is necessarily the right way to go about things, it really is amazing to watch anti-net neutrality types completely make up bogus arguments in favor of their position. We pointed this out exactly two years ago, when lobbyist Mike McCurry wrote a blatantly bogus editorial, claiming that Google didn’t pay a cent for its broadband bills, and that it was arguing in favor of net neutrality to avoid having to pay for broadband. This was an outright lie — and I challenged McCurry to agree to pay Google’s bandwidth bill. Not surprisingly, McCurry declined — though, the organization he represents, Hands Off The Internet, has shown that it reads Techdirt and doesn’t mind quoting us out of context when it furthers its telco-funded argument.

Yet, here we are again, with anti-net neutrality supporters are making completely bogus claims about how net neutrality somehow prevents them from charging more. The Wall Street Journal is running an anti-Kevin Martin editorial, claiming that his decision to sanction Comcast for traffic shaping is a victory for net neutrality supporters, and then stating:

Net neutrality proponents…. would prohibit Internet service providers from using price to address the ever-growing popularity of streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive programs that cause bottlenecks.

That’s simply untrue. No one is saying they can’t charge more for bandwidth. Again, does anyone really believe that Google isn’t paying a ridiculously large bandwidth bill? Instead, as Tim Lee describes, net neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with price. What the telcos are really trying to do is get you to pay twice for the same bandwidth. That’s because internet connectivity has always been about paying for the connection from your home to the “cloud.” We each pay for that connectivity from the ends, to the middle of the network. So, note, all of those connections are fully paid for.

What the telcos are trying to do with breaking net neutrality is also get companies providing services to pay again for connectivity from that middle out to users. As you’ll recall, those users have already paid for that bandwidth themselves. So, the telcos are, in effect, looking to double charge for bandwidth already charged for.

This has huge implications when you think about it. After all, if everyone providing content and services to the middle also has to pay to deliver that to the ends, then it makes the initial connection that much less valuable. Telcos may be shooting themselves in the foot by trying to do this. In double charging companies for the bandwidth consumers are already paying for, they may make it such that consumers are a lot less willing to pay for it, since it will be a lot less useful. Note that none of this says that the telcos can’t charge what they want for the initial bandwidth — from the customer to the middle. Net neutrality advocates are simply saying it doesn’t make sense to then charge again to send content from the middle outward. After all, it’s already paid for, and who pays for “half a connection” anyway? The reason you pay for a connection is to get on the net. Not to get to the middle where the next tollbooth exists.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The Google-sponsored Lunar X Prize has received plenty of attention. Similar to the original X Prize for a privately built manned spaceship, the focus of the Lunar X Prize is to get a privately built spaceship to the moon with a robot (so, unmanned), then have that robot travel 500 meters and then send video and images back to Earth. Cool, right? Of course, you can imagine that there would be numerous permits and licenses necessary before you could just privately blast something out into space (and onto the moon). However, an anonymous reader points us to an odd one. It appears that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is warning users they may need a special license from the NOAA for any sort of remote sensor which establishes a sustained connection with Earth. In fact, some are warning that any entrant in the contest that wants to take any images of Earth needs to first get a license from the NOAA. While the NOAA points to the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992, it’s not clear why it makes sense that an entrant in such a contest should need a special license just to take photos.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story