Link & Suggestions # 5: slotMusic, videogame class actions, mafioso states and P2P

October 13, 2008 · Filed Under Babel fish, Links & Suggestions 

Babel fish - A mental interface between Sir Arthur's sensibility and the events from the outer world. And for all the rest, tooCan a multimillionaire industry rely on stupid asses insomuch that there isn’t the awareness of being on the edge of extinction? Of course. Can a sovereign state blur with the organized crime to such a degree that you can’t possibly understand anything of that nation without knowing in details the history of crime through time too? Absolutely. Can George Lucas reduce himself to endlessly recycle an old character because he’s painfully short of ideas? Hum…

  • The majors announce their next failure. CDs don’t sell as much as years ago, and the recording industry has been reduced itself to sue its own customers (moreover with no profit at all) rather than having the guts to admit to be, in its current form, only a relic from the past. Not only the labels don’t sell Audio-CD anymore, but now they would pretend to impose a new microSD memory-card based format called slotMusic. The good news is that any single card should be 1 Gigabytes fat and should be shipped with DRM-less MP3 tracks, the bad news is that someone should explain to these folks, before they get involved in the nth failure with no story, that the only two possible solutions to (their) extinction are the Voluntary Collective Licensing for file sharing and the regard of Audio-CD as a surplus value format no more pivotal, a luxury good in market dynamics unfortunately managed by emeritus morons. SanDisk & big 4 labels launch music on microSD.

  • Electronic Arts takes it in… the court. And serves it right. The furious controversy aroused by the absurd protection integrated into Spore have brought some results at last, and these are all but pleasant for the videogames multinational: one Melissa Thomas has decided to bring a class action lawsuit against EA for the use of SecuROM, the DRM that in the lawsuit is described as a “hidden program which secretly installed to the command and control center of the computer“. Wonderful, I hope EA would end the same as Sony did with its malicious rootkit stuck in Audio-CDs. And to think that, in 1985, the software house had another idea on “piracy” and software protections. EA Hit By Class-Action Suit Over Spore DRM.

  • The return of the ruler. Some books are a mandatory purchase if you want to understand what is really hiding among the crinkles of reality, beyond the “official version” of the facts daily transmitted by the TV into the brains of people. Il ritorno del principe (literally “The return of the ruler”), written by the reporter Saverio Lodato and the magistrate Roberto Scarpinato, is just one of these books, because it describes through “obscene stories” the dark weaving, firm through the centuries, between power, politics, crime and death in that mafioso country that is Italy in its essence. A state in which Machiavelli, a folk that praised the behaviour of ruthless killers making it memorable and rightful, is considered to be among the founders of the common cultural heritage. The reign of Silvio IV, from this standpoint, is completely coherent with the history of the country. “Il ritorno del Principe” al Teatro Quirino di Roma .

  • P2P rulez. That file sharing is one of the main activities of who use the Internet beyond the simple web surfing is a trivial consideration, nevertheless recalling with numbers that we are so many, almost anyone into downloading and sharing it’s always a pleasure :-D The figures from ipoque state that P2P is equal to 70% of all the Internet traffic. The most popular networks are BitTorrent and eDonkey2000, with this last one quite often used for smaller files. It seems that the historic Gnutella network is almost gone, summing up to only 10% of sharing activities. Anyway, P2P is Legion: for we are many :-D BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 Represent nearly all P2P Traffic.

  • Indiana Jones 5, wtf? Someone should kill George Lucas, by headshooting him and then by separating the head from the body. Only in this way, maybe, he would stop recycling with no curb old glories (mummies?) of a movie past that should remain so rather than continuing to be projected into a silly future, capable of transforming an icon into a mockery. After the good but not exceptional Indiana Jones 4, Lucas says he wants to let Indy return for a fifth adventure too. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been a huge hit at box office, earning 770 millions of dollars and promising to do the same with the next release on DVD and Blu-ray. Commercially, Lucas is right. Cinematographically, the idea makes me sick: the worth of the “classic” Indiana Jones trilogy is undoubted, I have enjoyed the fourth episode but it is plain that it carries the signs of tiredness of a character that is a son of other times. So I repeat: someone, near California, should kill George Lucas before it is too late. Indiana Jones 5 si farà?

Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas

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