Day: 13 May 2022

Farewell to the iPod ⇥ newstatesman.com

Tom Gatti wrote a rather lovely eulogy for the iPod for the New Statesman. I was nodding along until I got to the last sentence of this excerpt, where I think my brain played a subliminal record scratch:

Crucially, the music was yours – made up of albums you owned, whether you’d spent many evenings patiently “ripping” your CD collection to your iTunes (it was lucky I already had a girlfriend by my early twenties otherwise I might have struggled to find one) or spent your disposable income in the infinite aisles of Apple’s digital music store. Of course, there were the illegal downloaders, too – peer-to-peer file-sharing continued long after Napster was shut down in July 2001. But I suspect the music fans who dumped enormous quantities of material onto their iPod for free ultimately regretted it – stuck in an endless scroll of the entire Bob Dylan and Jay-Z back catalogues, they lost sight of what they actually liked.

“Regret”? What is Gatti talking about? Anyone who has immersed themselves in an artist’s catalogue has used that as a jumping-off point and a way to develop their musical taste. If you spend enough time with a single artist, you will go through their highs and lows, their “new sound” album, their “return to form”, their masterpieces, their throwaway tracks. And then you will discover the artists they inspired and drew inspiration from. Piracy, for all its ills, is one reason why any music fan’s library these days has breadth and depth that would be unheard-of in the days of milk crates full of records.

Gatti:

Which is, of course, where we find ourselves today: a digital landscape dominated by Spotify and other streaming platforms, in which music is not exactly free, but not owned either. Instead of a collection that has been expanded and cultivated over years, we have a bottomless pool of recorded music. You can “like” an album and “follow” the artist, but the transaction is so low-stakes that it feels meaningless, and your “library” is not really yours at all.

A low-stakes transaction is a recipe for discovery.

But I do sympathize with Gatti’s other argument: these music libraries do not belong to anyone. For all music customers won by encouraging record labels to drop DRM, the labels clawed their way back with a reverse bargain: anyone can listen to all the music they want for $10 per month. But there is no way for that to be a sustainable business model if all that music could simply be walked off with, so we are back to having DRM-encumbered libraries.

Riccardo Mori:

As I said at the beginning, a device like the iPod touch is rather redundant for the way we consume music nowadays. However, I think a device like the iPod shuffle still makes a lot of sense. Its main characteristics, what made it an ingenious and very successful device back then, still make it an interesting and appealing device today: […]

Tyler Hall:

With all the shit in the world in the last few years, listening to music has become even more of a refuge and safe space for me than it ever was before.

But, for me at least, the incredible technological convergence of every single use-case into a deck of cards-sized pocket super-computer means that when I do want to only listen to music – there are a million beeps, boops, and badges fighting for my attention.

An underappreciated feature of the iPod (because it wasn’t a feature you could market during its heyday) was that it was only an iPod. Not also a mobile phone and internet communicator.

For all the new things added to Apple Music in the past couple years — animated covers, Spatial Audio, a dedicated section for songs that friends have texted me — all I really want most of the time is to put on a record and listen to it uninterrupted. I do not care what device that is on.

Hall bought an Android-based Sony Walkman. I know Sony has a few of these players and I am sort of intrigued by them. Not enough to buy one, though; that is what my turntable is for. Sometimes, I just want to escape and, for me, music provides that venue. I wish the experience on my existing devices were better suited to that. Unfortunately, the incentives for streaming services are not always aligned with these modest goals.

But this does not have to mark the end of the personal music library. The iPod was a signifier of that, but its death — which really happened several years ago; the iPod Touch is more like a stripped-down iPhone than an iPod, but never mind — does not mean personal libraries have to go away. You can still buy music on iTunes, Bandcamp, and elsewhere. Vinyl records often come with download codes. And, yes, there are still plenty of places to acquire music illegitimately. I will keep building my personal music library in a way unencumbered by DRM, without rights negotiation issues, and free of dependence on third-party services. If you care about the music you listen to, I encourage you to do the same.

Email and Password Exfiltration Before Form Submission ⇥ homes.esat.kuleuven.be

Leaky Forms is a new study by Asuman Senol, Gunes Acar, Mathias Humbert, and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius (emphasis theirs):

Email addresses — or identifiers derived from them — are known to be used by data brokers and advertisers for cross-site, cross-platform, and persistent identification of potentially unsuspecting individuals. In order to find out whether access to online forms are misused by online trackers, we present a measurement of email and password collection that occur before form submission on the top 100K websites.

These researchers received marketing emails from some of the leaky sites where, I will repeat, they never submitted a form. Their typed email address was captured and whisked into the ad tech and data broker machinery without their explicit consent. When using a U.S.-based crawler to assess these forms, researchers found a greater proportion of incidents (PDF, section 4.3) of email address collection than when they used an E.U.-based crawler, “perhaps due to stricter data protection regulations”.

The worst offenders were, according to researchers, fashion and beauty websites, with shopping and general news sites in second and third places. Notably more private: porn sites, the only category for which not a single one was found to have leaky forms.

Competition Bureau Wants to Block Rogers–Shaw Merger on Wireless Basis Alone ⇥ canada.ca

The Competition Bureau earlier this week released a statement objecting to the merger of Rogers and Shaw, to which the providers preemptively responded. Unfortunately, it is entirely focused on the wireless space, which makes sense given the two companies’ firewall avoiding competing in cable TV or internet:

The Bureau’s investigation concluded that the proposed merger would substantially prevent or lessen competition in wireless services.

The Bureau is challenging the merger to shield Canadians from higher prices, poorer service quality and fewer choices which are likely to occur as a result of the merger.

The two providers say they are prepared to jettison Shaw’s wireless division, thereby resolving the Bureau’s concerns.

It is too bad the Bureau cannot seem to nullify the longstanding non-competition agreement between Rogers and Shaw. It cannot force them to compete in the same markets, but it should not permit such a blatant divvying up of the country.

E.U.’s Online CSAM Proposal Compromises Privacy and Is Overbroad ⇥ edri.org

Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch:

The European Union has formally presented its proposal to move from a situation in which some tech platforms voluntarily scan for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to something more systematic — publishing draft legislation that will create a framework which could obligate digital services to use automated technologies to detect and report existing or new CSAM, and also identify and report grooming activity targeting kids on their platforms.

Lomas reports this is an attempt to unify a splintered set of policies that apply to individual countries within the E.U. but, as written, it appears to require the ability for providers to locally scan the contents of messages and even detect the possibility of minors being coerced, if ordered.

The European Commission has published a guide in question-and-answer format. While it assures there are multiple safeguards, that is not comforting to European Digital Rights, an advocacy group:

The proposal may appear superficially to contain a balanced and proportionate approach. In particular, providers can only be forced to scan on their platform or service if required to do so by a judicial authority, and are subject to a series of safeguards. According to Contexte, many of these safeguards have only been introduced in the last few days, which shows that pressure from the EDRi network and our supporters has had a positive effect.

However, there are several provisions which would indicate that these protections are mainly cosmetic, and that we may in fact be facing the worst-case scenario for private digital communications. For example, providers of services and platforms have to take actions to mitigate the risk of abuse being facilitated by their platform. But they will still be liable to be issued with a detection order forcing them to introduce additional measures unless they have demonstrated in their risk assessment that there is no remaining risk of abuse at all.

Even German child protection advocates are worried this is overbroad. This proposal is one to keep an eye on for its potentially far-reaching consequences.