Internet & Security

The new technologies bring along a plethora of delightful new options for consumers to sample content. One of those new ways is the music samples some groups put online. A full track or even a full album to build the hype and allow people to sample the tracks and to persuade them to Go out and BUY their newest creative offspring. And we all love it. It works, its Awesome! Embrace Technology.

A pitty though is the fact that many of these fancy previews lack the least of security measures to keep the actual music safe. The previews are on sites with fancy flash based interfaces to enable people to play them from the browser without hassle and instead of building a decent degree of security into that player, some of them just take plain mp3 files from sites. Fully tagged Mp3s that ll just download to any location and Play. Want them? Go trough the source, click on the mp3 links and wait till the goodies have downloaded. You will have to rename the files to the correct names, but since the mp3 files are cleanly tagged, that wont be an issue – and you cant have it all ey.

In a time where a lot of cds are nearly unusable due to draconic DRM measures, where DVDs play only in certain regions and where you re getting fucked in the arse whenever you shell out hard earned money to enjoy music or a movie. (Dont get me started about the modern day Cinema experience!) Its unbelievable that the other end of the line is So under protected. Im not advocating for DRM here, but to be honest .. if I would have put those online, Id at least chosen a method with a bit more protection along the way.

And its not as if these dont exist.. Take the new Gorillaz site for example. Im a big fan of the Murdoc podcasts and I wouldnt mind listening to them in my car. Contrary to other online content, they go trough the effort of using a flash player (so far we re on the same road as the aforementioned) and having that player connect to a streaming server with a bit more protection to the whole, instead of just placing .mp3 download links in their source!!

Now, lets get down to brass tacks here. Talking as an IT and Security professional with a dose of real life common sense. Not everyone will read the source code to see if it contains usable links (im just curious like that) and then proceed to download those instead of just listening to them on the web site as it was initially intended. And as a second, a stream server isnt failsafe either. Take the time to figure out how it wants its url and how to piece it all together; open VLC and stream it to disk and you ve got the music too. And if you re not up to any of the above, you can take the radio style approach and just have some software record whatever your computer outputs. Or go Really low tech and just hang a mic in front of your speakers while playing them and record that. There is ALWAYS a way 😉

All im saying is .. You cant at the same time screw up the cd I just bought to a degree where it wont play on my car radio; and at the same time put the mp3s in a clickable format in the webpage source, ready for free downloading for anyone who can right click a mouse.

That being said.. Thank you for the Music!