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iTunes Internet Sharing Restored With Third-Party App
Suppafly writes "As reported at boingboing, iCommune creator Jim Speth whipped up a little application called 401(ok) that combines a few hacks to restore internet-wide sharing to iTunes 4.0.1. You can download the app from SF.net." As one might expect, it is basically a port redirector.
So Apple is trying to prove to the music companies that it's software is trustworthy. Musci companies notice that anyone can stream tunes ffrom anywhere with iTunes. They also notice that within two weeks someone has come up with a way to take those streamed music feeds and convert them into MP3/s. They get pissed. Apple gets egg on their faces. This program is counterproductive. If we want to convince music companies that the computer is a viable distribution model and that we want those distributed files fairly unfettered by copy protection, than this goes against all that. It makes Apple look bad, and we're at the point where Apple is really our best hope for a scheme which we like. This needs to catch on, or else something worse (Microsoft) comes along and takes over another branch of the internet. Sad thing is, I like the idea of being able to stream across the internet. Leave it to script kiddies to ruin it for everyone.
In life nothing is free. Either you pay now, or you pay in the long run. Unfortunately this doesn't simply means a delay of payment. We may end with free music now and no music in the future. This might seem silly, since many can make pretty decent music on their instruments and spread it for free on the net. But it's different with games and movies. I don't see anyone making The Matrix Reloaded on their PC or Mac with only their free time. How the ITMS ends up now, will guide the decision for the moviemakers. And then I haven't even mentioned that DRM-stuff the americans are facing.
In the 'good old days' of 1997, Apple authored a list of "ten commandments" as a part of it's compatibility tech note [apple.com]. It is the seventh commandment which is particularly interesting: "VII. Thou shalt think twice about code designed strictly as copy protection." Note, that these are the the commandments that are "determined from extensive testing of our diverse software base."
Of course as soon as you choose to make allies in the music industry, you are going to have to negotiate, but one of the primary issues (mentioned so many times on slashdot that there is no point in providing links) is the question of whether we should have our liberty constrained in order to prevent us from breaking the law.
We would love to say 'No!', but then watch how many of us flaunt copyright law as a standard practice.
But also Apple was right - copyright protection is an unending waste of human resource, computer resource, comms resource, and slashdot posts!
Again and again we find that the music/video/text/etc. copyright and patent laws are incompatible with the Internet as a technology, and the Internet is not going to go away. Sorry, lawmakers, but one day soon you will have to wake up to the revolution that came from a direction you didn't expect, and then we will stop having to put kludges on top of kludges to deal with the cultural soup that we are in.
Creative minds will find a way of being able to provide a direct passage to it's audience. The huge publishing corporates are hanging onto a dying game. Monolithic software corporations are being replaced by interoperability standards.
Apple, Listen! Remember! Think different!
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At least it would seem so from a few perspectives. Why the hell do you need to pump your music selection out to the masses? Do you really think I want to hear you favorite crap indie garage band mp3's? I mean really, people. Get over yourselves. If you really want to share your music selection with a friend (and I mean someone you know by thier birthname, not some jack off in another country with the AIM logon of DickBig070002) there are simple and perfectly legal ways of doing so. Burn a CD, or, if you're so smart, set up your own private pptp session between your 2 Macs and share that way. But honestly folks, what the hell do you need to be wasting bandwidth for? Does that bootleg of Madonna's latest album make you naughty bits tingle? Do you feel like you are a part of the revolution sitting at your computer taking money from the pockets of the performers and artists? Good for you. Viva la revelutione you bad ass. My god. No wonder everyone hates you. And don't think for a minute that I don't have aspirations of grandeure, and dream of becoming the next underground sensation that people will love forever and my music will be the greatest colelction of free speech/thought on the internet. Guess what. You are a dime a dozen in the world, so get over yourself. Go outside. Say hi to your neighbor and share some music with them. See if you don't enjoy someones actual company for once. Maybe they own a Mac too and you just didn't know if because you were too freakin busy posting on /. how much the RIAA and MPAA and Microsuck was beating you down. Asshats. All of you.
As an aside, I think it's pathetic how the RIAA pressured Apple into stopping the internet sharing. Come on, there was a hard coded limit of how many users could connect at one time. Plus, anything you stream on the net, whether it's audio or video or peanut butter, you can _ALWAYS_ capture to file. Bits are bits are bits. Nothing will ever stop them from being captured and written to disk. Asshats. That is the nature of computers. Geez. Maybe the RIAA thinks that the internet is a magical cloud of pixie dust and the data is magically wisked from one computer to another and if you have the pink pixie dust of the grand poohbah DRM you can't capture the data bits (kind of like a good acid trip). Morons. The entertainment industry is about ethereal things. Only it's too settled into the world of brick and mortar. They need to get out of the concrete and back into the minds of the audience. Interesting paradox; there are 5 media giant companies, who own 100's of affiliate distributions, that pump out the same 2 things, black or white (sides of the issue, not color of the skin). Maybe the biggest failure of our society is that we are such a binary culture.
Anyway. Enough postulating. Back to coding (WORK SLAVE WORK)
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
I had and have no intention of using the internet streaming feature, but I downloaded this plugin as soon as it came up because it was something I used to be able to do and now I can't do it any more.
As my communications teacher would have said in my class on persuasion, "Scarcity principle."
There was absolutely no consumer-based reason t upgrade to 4.0.1, other than to appease the record labels.
Wrong. Not just a little bit wrong. Completely wrong.
1. The sound enhancer bug was serious. Turning on the feature basically made your shiny, new AAC's sound like hammered shit. And leaving it off was bad for people with average or below-average speakers.
2. The AAC encoder was hard-coded to use the "fast" setting, when it was supposed to be hard-coded to use "best." As a result, AAC's encoded with iTunes 4 don't sound nearly as good as they should have.
3. A variety of issues existed regarding ITMS and firewalls. These have been fixed.
4. Internet music sharing was never actually supposed to be possible. According to the documentation, it was supposed to be limited to the local network segment, either via Rendezvous discovery or via direct connection. The fact that you could share music over the Internet was a bug, not a feature.
I think they may have snuck in some minor networking fixes, but overall the motives were quite... arbitrary.
No, the motives were quite specific and concrete. "We screwed up, and people are using iTunes for music piracy. That's the ONE thing we won't stand for. Fix it! Now!"