Done yesterday (20090805)

[mdlbear]

0805 We
  * up 8am; W=192.4; coffee; drugs, nose, teeth; dishes
  * work: good progress on demo
  * Walk.  Around the pond.
  * call back from Callie
  @ The Details Behind Amanda Palmer's Amazing Impromptu Music Video  
  @ music sales from 1973-2008, by medium.
  @ The Death Of Paid WiFi
  @ article on the new Woody Guthrie recordings
    from this post by filkerdave
  * allow connections to sg:2222 from the PC and wireless subnets
  * ordered: http://rounder.com/index.php?id=album.php&catalog_id=7186
  & call to Callie
  & 10:30 Everybody's gone now, and Colleen's in bed.  I'll go to bed myself
    as soon as I finish my drink. 
  & new shelf up in office (window).
  * laundry -> drier
  * bed ~11pm; snuggle

On the whole a very good day, albeit a busy one. Good progress on the demo at work (which is a damned good thing considering that it's this afternoon!), a walk, two calls to Callie because she called me back from the first one as I was starting to get busy with debugging, and an order for the new Woody Guthrie CD set.

A bit of link sausage:

The Details Behind Amanda Palmer's Amazing Impromptu Music Video -- a music video conceived and filmed in 20 minutes at a gig on the beach advertised via twitter. Hmm.

A chart showing music sales from 1973-2008, by medium. The CD's rise and LP's fall track pretty well; the CD's peak year was 1999, and its decline seems to be particularly rapid. I'm not sure I entirely believe the numbers, since they come from the RIAA and so probably don't include the indie labels. But it's clear that CDs started their decline a couple of years before downloads came on the scene.

The Death Of Paid WiFi -- welcome news indeed. About the only places you still have to pay for it are some hotels and airports.

And, from this post by filkerdave, A trove of Woody Guthrie gems are brought to light -- the metal masters of the defunct label Stinson Records, stored in cardboard barrels in an old lady's basement. A 4 CD set is nowavailable for pre-order from Rounder Records. Yes, I've ordered it. The price and the packaging are both a little over-the-top, but...

Comments

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

Free WiFi is subject to sniffing and DNS spoofing attacks, among others. Remember, you get what you pay for -- and if you pay for privacy, you get it.

There's a case in the Mozilla Bugzilla about a girl who was using a public free hotspot, tried to use Firefox to log into all of her sites, and ended up getting a bunch of certificate errors, 'unknown_issuer'. She, not understanding what the digital certificates are supposed to do (provide a second factor of authentication of a site, with the first one being the DNS entry), accepted every one.

Guess someone got her bank, ebay, yahoo, and god only knows what other passwords.

(The worst part is: even pay-for hotspots are subject to the same types of end-user attacks.)

[mdlbear]

Exactly -- any public hotspot is vulnerable; you don't get what you pay for. The problem is that even paid hotspots don't use encryption: they rely on being open to get you to the splash page.

The best thing would be a free hotspot with the password posted -- that wouldn't be subject to sniffing.

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

Las Vegas McCarran Airport relies on being open to get the splash page. However, they then offer a download for an ipsec client to connect you to their ipsec server.

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

A chart showing music sales from 1973-2008, by medium. ... But it's clear that CDs started their decline a couple of years before downloads came on the scene.

Napster began in 1999, I think, which coincides with the peak in CD sales. DVDs and games were also almost certainly competing for the same pot of money. Where music distribution goes from here is hard to guess - my crystal ball is exceptionally cloudy.

[mdlbear]

Hmm. OK, point taken.