Free iPods: the sequel

Well, here I go again.

I've gotten my free iPod already. You all know about that by now. I've been using it happily for months. Quite the clever little gizmo, and it enables me to carry around a significant chunk of (though not all of) my music. Thanks to the smart playlist feature, though, I can actually rotate through my entire collection automatically, so long as I sync the thing every so often. I simply tell it to play the stuff with the lowest play count, in random order, and so it goes. (Oddly enough, it works its way through in reverse alphabetical order. But it doesn't really matter the order to me.) It's kind of like having my own personal radio station, with an ever-changing mix. I can even plug it into my computer at work and play the songs through iTunes that way.

It looks like I'll very shortly be enjoying a new 27" flatscreen TV, too. I've finally managed to get 8 people to sign up for it on freeflatscreens.com, and now I just have to wait for them to acknowledge the offer I signed up for to go ahead with it. They haven't yet; they ask that I wait for 15 days from the time I signed up for the offer to contact them about it. That's March 1st. But that's OK, I've waited this long, I can wait a little longer.

By now, it should be pretty clear that GratisNetworks is legit. Just in case there was any doubt, they're still getting news coverage. Here's a recent Boston Globe article contrasting them with a more fly-by-night free iPod offer. All you have to do is google and you'll find dozens of happy customers proclaiming how they Really Did Get the Free Stuff. (If you're new to this journal, I wrote an entry a few months back about how they can afford to do this.)

Anyway, now I'm going for my most ambitious free project yet: a free Mac Mini. If I can get enough people to sign up for it and complete an offer, I can get my hands on a free teeny-tiny fully-operational Macintosh. The kicker is, this offer requires ten people to sign up. It took me forever with the TV. It may take me even more forever with this. But it can't hurt to try; I don't even have to do my own free offer until I know enough people signed up for me to make it.

So...interested in a free Mini Mac of your own? Or want a free iPod? Go over to my conga line and check it out. And if you sign up, email me your own referral link, and I'll put it up after mine.

Can bloggers protect their sources?

Adam Penenberg has an interesting commentary over on Wired.com today. He takes on the issue of whether bloggers should have the same right to protect their sources as traditional journalists enjoy. The protection of source thing is one of the hoariest old clichés associated with journalists, right up there with the notebook and pencil stub, the flash bulb going off, or the "Press" card stuck in the band of a fedora. In addressing this question, Peneberg trots out some of the newer but still hoary clichés of blogging, on both the pro-blog and anti-blog side of the fence, then concludes that the point is essentially moot—because those protections have been vanishing from even traditional journalists over the last few decades; even if bloggers were to get equal "protection," that still wouldn't be saying much.

It's an interesting issue, the question of how web journalists compare to "real" journalists in terms of the protections they enjoy—yet another example of how fundamentally the Internet is changing our world. People used to say that "freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one," but thanks to the Internet and blogging, now everybody "owns a press." Everybody has equal potential to be a "journalist," equal potential to be read by people all over the country or even the world.

Interesting times indeed.

Interesting times...

The ancient Chinese reputedly had a curse: "may you live in interesting times." Sometimes I wonder whether something was lost in the translation of it, but other times I'm pretty sure it wasn't. We live in "interesting times" right now, and sometimes that really does seem like a curse.

There's a lot of turmoil going on in a lot of different areas, but the one I'm really thinking of at the moment has to do with the Internet. In the last few years, we've seen people begin to realize just how the free, unedited communication potential of the Internet empowers them—and we've seen the big conglomerates start to have a remarkably hard time dealing with that new power. You see it everywhere—the RIAA suing file-swappers, the MPAA shutting down BitTorrent sites (and making ominous noises about tracking down perpetrators from their system logs), Lawrence Lessig and Brewster Kahle and others writing books and filing lawsuits to try to overturn the Disney perpetual copyright. Elsewhere, bloggers are becoming a force to be reckoned with; let some political figure or journalist try to pass off falsified documents as legitimate or say the wrong thing and BAM, they're negotiating their retirement package.The traditional media are still trying to figure out how to react to these new changes. And nobody really knows where it's all going to end.

I suppose that as a blogger (I hate that word, but what can I say, it's in common use) myself I should feel "empowered"—I'm on the fringe of this movement that is getting allegedly-homosexual-pornographer fake-journalist shills thrown out of the White House press corps and all that—but I also feel kind of nervewracked by the whole thing. I wonder if ordinary people felt this way during the sixties and the Civil Rights movement—the sense that this big Thing is happening all around you that could affect your fundamental liberties or the ways in which you perceive the world, and you don't really have much more say in it than a pebble does in an avalanche. It's not so much that I want things to go one way or the other but the uncertainty that gets to me. I wish I could just push the fast-forward button and jump ahead a few years just to see how it all comes out.

LokiTorrents brought low by MPAA

Ever notice that when someone says "I hate to say 'I told you so,' but..." they really don't? I mean, if they really hated to say "I told you so," they could just keep their big mouth shut and not say a darned thing, right? You just know they're gloating on the inside.

Well, I hate to say "I told you so," but LokiTorrent has finally gone under. That's right, that BitTorrent site that was requesting donations for a legal fund to Fight the Man? As found on Slashdot and on BoingBoing (I'm such a Technorati trackback whore), it just gave up the fight; if you click the LokiTorrent link now, you get to see the MPAA's sneering "You can click but you can't hide" notice.

(Oddly enough, BoingBoing seems to be more indignant about that notice than any other part of it. "Many Boing Boing readers wrote in today to express dismay at the MPAA's decision to replace shuttered filesharing sites with their own content. Reader Brad Clarke says, 'Taking down a site is one thing but putting up their own content has GOT to be illegal. He's to hoping they finally went too far.'" Uhm, guys, they were probably awarded ownership of the domain name as part of the settlement. If it's theirs, they can put whatever they want to on it.)

Checking the Google news coverage brings up some interesting facts in the case. Fileswap news site afterdawn.com has one of the more interesting stories.

The owner of the site has been under scrutiny since news circulated that the site was put up for sale. Webber later claimed this was just an experiment to find out just how much the site would be worth to somebody. However an experiment like this seems like the wrong kind of experiment to try when you are asking for donations in the first place.

The MPAA is claiming in its press release that the site's operator "by Court Order must provide the MPAA with access to and copies of all logs and server data related to his illegal BitTorrent activities, which will provide a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities."

One would think that the site admin would have to have been pretty dumb to keep logs of BitTorrent activity, given the likelihood they could be subpoenaed. Heck, the EFF recently came out with a tool to help sysadmins track down and delete logs on their servers so they couldn't be subpoenaed. But then, you'd have to be pretty dumb to run an IP-swapping site from American shores in the current climate to begin with, let alone think you could pull a David-and-Goliath act with donations once it came to the MPAA's attention. And then putting the domain name up for sale during all this would seem to be the crowning stupidity. So I wouldn't bet the farm on this guy's brainpower; seems he was just dumb enough to legally darwin himself. I feel sorry for the people who were regular hosts of 'torrents through this site, though. I would expect the larger ones to start getting a knock on the door pretty soon.