I was just going to write a new post as if nothing had happened – but then I realized that it has been 10 months since my last post on this blog, so I figured it might be a good idea to give you a quick personal update before continuing.
So, what happened in the last 10 months. They were quite busy – one of the reasons I didn’t take the time to sit down and write stuff here. Actually, I did post on some of my other blogs occasionally. But I was travelling a lot in the second half of 2007 – Holland, several trips to the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, South Africa… none of those were holiday trips. OM still keeps me pretty busy (we still try to keep IT moving forward with less than half the people we would actually need – check our recruiting page if you’re interested). As does my church – still leading worship about twice a month in our evening service, working with the band almost every week, plus meetings and home group and…
This year started with another trip to the annual OM conference that was featured here in the past. And I had a good reason to call it the “best conference ever” this time… let’s just say I’m no longer single 
. Now there are no major trips planned for the next few months, which of course can change rather quickly, so I’m not counting on it. I’m looking forward to my holiday in March, though – a friend and I are going to London for the Worship Central event.
Anyway, that’s about it for now… and now I feel I can go back to posting regular stuff on this blog again. Stay tuned for a few things I would like to talk about – recent developments in the digital music market, for example, or my new linux based media center PC.
Technorati : OM, announcements, personal
February 8th, 2008
The press conference in London is still underway, but the press release is already available on EMI’s website and earlier rumours that were started by a Wall Street Journal article yesterday have been confirmed: EMI is releasing “DRM-free superior quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire” and “Apple’s iTunes Store will be the first online music store to sell EMI’s new downloads”.
This is exciting news indeed – regular readers know that I have explained more than once why DRM is not a good idea and will hurt our cultural heritage as well as the music industry’s bottom line in the long run. Let’s hope that this is the beginning of the end of DRM – EMI is only the third largest label, but if this is a success (and my prediction is that it will be), the others will have to follow suit. And there is hope that what works in the music industry might work in the movie download business as well.
Why is this a good idea for EMI and won’t it hurt their sales figures? I believe that it’s a good idea because finally consumers are given a choice. So far, illegal downloads have provided a better user experience than legal downloads – it was always possible to freely copy illegally downloaded music, burn it to as many CDs as the user wanted, use it on many different digital devices etc., whereas DRM prevented a lot of legitimate uses. I resorted to buying CDs, others may have just downloaded DRM-free tracks from illegal sources. Now, for the first time, will I even consider buying downloadable music – and chances are that EMI will have most of what I’m looking for because many bands I like are with christian labels that are part of EMI’s christian music group. I personally wish EMI a lot of success with their smart move, which many in the industry may see as bold and some even as suicidal.
Technorati : Apple, DRM, EMI, iTunes, legal downloads
April 2nd, 2007
People keep asking me why I haven’t updated my blogs for so long – the reason is actually quite simple. I’m not ill, dead or have lost interest – the last few weeks have simply been rather busy and I haven’t found time to write the things I had been planning on writing next and I didn’t want to post anything else just to keep the sites updated.
Anyway, maybe I should give a quick update what I’m up to at the moment. Remember last year around this time I was at OM’s Global Orientation conference? Well, I am again now – in fact it’s starting today and I’m writing this sitting at the information desk, waiting for the first participants to arrive. I love these conferences, it always amazes me that after five years with OM I have gotten to know so many people and it’s great to see them coming together for an event like this one again. The next two or three days are going to be quite busy, after that I may be able to update some blogs – I have another sermon (about patience) that I would like to post here, as well as some thoughts about song lyrics that need to be posted over at ccmlyrics.com and a few new recipes for my german cooking site. So please bear with me – I’m still alive and I will be posting stuff again soon. Thanks for your patience!
Technorati : OM, conference, personal news
January 9th, 2007
A friend just pointed out a post to me that suggests that EMI may be starting to experiment with DRM-free downloadable music. This is the first time I know of that a major label is trying something like this and I certainly wish them a lot of success with it. They seem to be going about it in a rather smart way, giving customers not only (pre-release) access to the MP3 file, but also to some exclusive extra features like video footage and artwork from the release. In my opinion, that’s the way to go – do away with restrictions and create an incentive to buy by providing extra features. At least that would work for me – I’m often willing to pay quite a bit extra for a nice DVD set with special features (which you usually don’t find on an illegal download), so I can see this working in music as well.
I’ve written a few times about the pitfalls of DRM in general and especially the dangers to our cultural heritage. If the major labels do see the kind of success they are hoping for with this and we will see more DRM-free releases in the future, there is still some hope. After all, MP3 is a pretty well documented standard and we’ll always be able to write players for that, even on hardware that hasn’t even been invented yet. So let’s hope and give every encouragement we can to trials like this.
Technorati : DRM, EMI, MP3, dowload, music
December 1st, 2006
SecurityFix reports on an interesting new idea to combat phishing – Phishtank is a service operated by the same people that also brought us OpenDNS. It is a reputation based community service that invites users to submit suspected phishing sites and then puts them up for voting with a screenshot. If a site gets enough votes, it will then be classified as a phishing site (and when I said “reputation based” earlier, that means the votes of regular submitters and reliable voters count more, so phishers can’t game the system), which means it will be blacklisted in OpenDNS. There is also an open API that others can use to integrate the results of the service into their own applications. There are even RSS feeds, so for instance an ISP can get a live feed of all the suspected phishing sites in their IP range.
There is one noticeable problem with the service at the moment – it only displays the URL and a screenshot of a suspected site. If I want to look at the sites and determine which are genuine and which are phishing sites, it would be much more helpful to have the email that the URL came in available as well. Voting can be difficult if there is only a screenshot to look at – the whole point of running phishing sites is to make it look genuine, the email might be the thing that tips the scales when I need to make the distinction between a legitimate and a fraudulent site. So hopefully at some point, there will be an option to see the email together with the URL before voting on it.
But I like the idea of a reputation based service and the way it’s been implemented makes a good first impression. This could really become yet another way of combating phishing – now what’s needed is a simple way to get the results of this service to those end-users who are unlikely to even worry much about phishing. If it gains enough momentum to be included in browsers or used by ISPs, it could become a really useful tool.
Technorati : email, internet, opendns, phishing, phishtank, security
October 6th, 2006
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