Mekka

The writing is on the wall for the Music Industry.

Harvey Danger releases their new album via free downloads on the Internet.

Why did they do it?

From their press release...

"Why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99).

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record.

However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos. It’s a bet that the resources of the Internet can make possible a new way for musicians to find their audience – and forge a meaningful artistic career built on support from cooperative, not adversarial, relationships. (ed. emphasis mine)

We realize that digital files are the primary means by which a huge segment of the population is exposed to new music; we also believe that plenty of music lovers in the world will buy a record once they’ve heard it – whether via radio or computer.

We also believe there’s an inherent qualitative difference at work—not only between MP3s and CDs, but between clicking a mouse and finding a record on the shelves of a good record store. These experiences are not mutually exclusive – they’re interdependent facets of music fandom, and equally important considerations for a band in our position.

Even with the proliferation of websites and magazines paying attention to independent music these days, it remains difficult for bands—especially rock bands—to get exposure, regardless of how good they may be (or how successful they once were). Making the record freely downloadable removes the main barrier that exists between an artist and the world of potential listeners. And we do mean world; the web’s reach is everywhere.

Whether or not people will buy something they can get for free is obviously a big question, and there are facts and figures to support both sides of the argument. We think it’s not only possible, but likely. The more fundamental challenge is ensuring people have access to your work to begin with.

At the risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish, making records has never been about making money for this band. If the worst thing that happens is a whole bunch of people hear Little By Little… and no one buys it, we’ll know our experiment was costly. But that won’t make it a failure.

This is by no means a manifesto. We don’t pretend to be the first band to spin a variation of the shareware distribution model. We love record labels and record stores. We buy lots of CDs and are committed to supporting independent music. We’re not a bunch of fake Marxists. We’re just trying to be smart capitalists so we can sustain our lives as musicians. This is an experiment. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the record. Everything else is secondary."

BRAVO!!!

[Found at Mixed Content]

The American Military Coup of 2012

Here is where the Human Spirit takes a stand...

"In 1992, General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, awarded the prize for his strategy essay competition at the National Defense University to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap for 'The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012'.  Rumor is, Colonel Dunlap's essay has been circulating among the military's top brass and strategists.        Vice Adm. Allen's appointment as successor to FEMA Director Michael Brown could be conditioning Americans (intentional or not) to accept the idea of Martial Law.  Rep Cynthia McKinney's (D-GA) mention of "impeachment" four days ago on the House floor was omitted from the record.  If our representatives will not be heard and if we do not want to live under a military dictatorship, then what? It makes me think of Romania (1989) Of course there's always concentration camps and slave labor."

[MetaFilter]

Katrina: Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11.

Katrina: Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11.

I tend not to post too much on current news events such as this, but I felt not only did this story serve to show what a couple of technologist citizens are doing to help, but also what our government is doing to hurt the situation.

Via Xeni Jardin:       

Image: a New Orleans resident who remains in the city, and says he will not leave. Behind him, code markings left by rescue and/or disaster mortician teams. Shot in NOLA today by Jacob A., Link to his photostream (contains graphic images of dead).

Jacob Appelbaum and Joel Johnson are in the New Orleans area, helping with communications reconnect efforts and documenting what they witness. They have connectivity, a solar-powered backpack, iChat capabilities, and the ability to do live streaming video.

This morning, I woke up to my cellphone ringing with Jacob on the other end. He and Joel were on foot inside NOLA, seeing corpses in the streets. Jacob was trying to decrypt the markings spray-painted on a trash dumpster by DMORT (disaster mortician teams). "What does '9705 CF' mean? Does CF mean corpses found?" asked Jacob. From what I could figure out, the markings meant that a team visited this spot on Sep. 7, and observed that there were dead at this location. Four days later, the body (or bodies) had not been removed from the road. "I gotta hang up," he said, "the death smell is too much, we have to get away from this spot now. This place is a perfect example of duality in response. Some parts of the city are heavily guarded and under repair, other parts of the city are flooded and full of locked, unsearched houses."

On the phone with another friend who's there with a television news network -- my friend says, "This place looks a lot like Iraq. Only in Iraq, when there's a dead body, it's never on the street for more than an hour -- someone, Iraqi or US forces, rertrieves it right away. Here, they're just sittiing out there for days, weeks, rotting." 

Jacob blogs:

We’re heading into the [New Orleans] city center for various reasons. I’m bringing a gps unit, a laptop with a 200mw 802.11b card and a laptop on the car power inverter. We’re going to log and then make maps tonight.  If I provide kismet logs with GPS information is anyone interested in making a google maps hack? It’s certainly possible to make this a once a day operation.

Snip of an earlier post from Jacob last night, when he and Joel were visiting the home of Malik Rahim (his portrait is below.):

    As I’m sitting here, the only light I can see is the light of my laptop illuminating my fingers. My cell phone would light up if people could call in. Only rarely does that work, no one has left voicemail but when they do get through they tell me they’ve rung for hours, upwards of two dozen times.

We didn’t have to pass through a single check point to enter the city, we simply went around them. There was much debate about the amount of danger we would be in by coming here and so far I feel pretty safe. We didn’t bring a gun, partly because we didn’t want to believe it would be so bad that we would need one and because it was probably impossible to get one at such short notice. I don’t think that was a mistake, we don’t need firearms. I do find it pretty surprising that the American government has recently hired Blackwater security forces to patrol the streets here. At the same time they’re removing firearms from citizens who rightfully feel they need them. It’s a strange future we’re living in and have no doubt about it, we’re living in the future. It’s too bad that we’re living in that other future, the dystopian one. The one with terrorists, murderers, corruption at the highest government levels, global wars and a world with an environment being destroyed by serious pollution. A world where people are now literately drowning in it.

(...) We recently got video streaming working from one of our laptops. Some of the best hackers on the planet decided that our neo-gonzo journalism was worth some bandwidth, I’m pretty flattered and I hope I don’t let them down. I hope they’re ready to watch Joel and I cook food, build computer networks, scout antenna locations and otherwise talk about the current state of New Orleans.

There’s that light again, the patrol seems to be pretty frequent. The helicopters are flying overhead again. I wonder if they have thermal imaging gear? Certainly they’re working overtime to patrol the skies but I wonder what they’re collecting data on and what they plan to do with it.

The people on the ground here, Malik being the main man, are really righteous people. They’re getting ready to help the citizens of this parish to live, to eat, to be clean, to sleep safely, to communicate with the world.

(...) Hopefully all the plans we have will actually work out, hopefully we will be able to get more fuel into the generators, hopefully we’ll get more generators on the ground. Hopefully we’ll be able to get better uplinks without having to resort to using the cell network but it seems doubtful. I haven’t heard back from the people at DirectNIC. I suppose they’re busy with something else, hopefully someone else can supply these people with uplinks to the real world.

It’s late and I have to be up in the morning because the military is going to march down the road here in some sort of security exercise. I want to photograph it because I can’t believe it’s happening in an American city. 

 

Image: Corpse at a school in the Algiers region (15th Ward). "It has been there for probably 10 days," says Joel Johnson, who shot this photo, "but despite the neighborhood informing the police, it has not been removed... we asked two federal officers about it and they were unconcerned." Link to his photostream (contains graphic images of dead.)

Joel blogs about the damage to New Orleans, and gear requests:

Jacob was kind enough to write up an updated list of equipment. If you can ship this stuff to Baton Rouge, we can probably use it. No worries if you can't, but the more we have, the more we can deploy. We expect to deploy everything we brought with us from Houston, save perhaps the big Wi-Fi antenna (but you never know). Also, Verizon, if you'd like to loan me an activated Samsung i730, I can give it back to you when I'm done.

Joel also blogs about allegations that a volunteer nurse named Bobby Lee Huss was apprehended just outside of NOLA by armed Homeland Security forces, who seized all of the medical supplies from his truck at the request of the Red Cross. Anthony Lappé has more details on GNN:   

According to Huss, he was given over $25,000 worth of medical supplies by the Red Cross in Covington. He claims he was given all the necessary credentials and Red Cross workers helped him load up his 1989 Dodge Caravan. But not less than 10 minutes later, he found himself staring the barrel of a gun at a Homeland Security checkpoint on the north side of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. According to Huss, a state police officer told him the Red Cross had requested he be detained.

Shortly after a Red Cross official showed up and said he wasn’t authorized to have the supplies (The Red Cross is officially mandated by FEMA to act as their on-the-ground medical and relief agency). Huss says his van was ransacked and the supplies were confiscated. He says he was interrogated for hours by state police officers, who asked him about his entire background, and even accused him of being a child molester because he had baby supplies in the van. Huss said he had just went through an FBI background check.

Huss said he wasn’t released until 12:40 AM Sunday morning, after 11 hours of detention. He says he was only given one bottle of water and was held for most of the time in the back of a police cruiser. He was given his van back, but the supplies were confiscated. “They are keeping supplies from people who are in need,” Huss told me. Huss also accused the Red Cross of hoarding much-needed supplies.  Huss is now on his way back to Texas, demoralized and angry. “Tell the people of Algiers I’m sorry,” he said.

Link to the full text of Anthony's post. 

 


Joel blogs about confrontations with armed private security contractors from Blackwater:

We got yelled at some by police and official-types who wanted us out of areas where they were operating. Herding media isn't really their job, but they weren't rude about it (just brusque). The Blackwater employees, on the other hand, were phenomenally unpleasant. Jake has a lot more to add soon, I'm sure, but there's a serious question as to the authority of these mercenaries.

Previously:

Bloggers Joel and Jake visit NOLA for geek aid

Blackwater gets carte blanche.

[ Found via Boing Boing]

Cops have to pay $41k for stopping man from videoing them

Cory Doctorow: Jeff sez,

Last month a federal judge awarded $35,000 in compensatory and $6000 in punitive damages to a man state troopers arrested for video taping them.

Given the Utah rave case and the Oakland police stop reported today, this seems like an important decision because it makes it clear that citizens are free to video law enforcement in action.

The ruling finds violations of the plaintiff's first and fourth amendment rights. It states "The activities of the police, like those of other public officials, are subject to public scrutiny...Videotaping is a legitimate means of gathering information for public dissemination and can often provide cogent evidence, as it did in this case. In sum, there can be no doubt that the free speech clause of the Constitution protected Robinson as he videotaped the defendants on October 23, 2002....Moreover, to the extent that the troopers were restraining Robinson from making any future videotapes and from publicizing or publishing what he had filmed, the defendants' conduct clearly amounted to an unlawful prior restraint upon his protected speech....We find that defendants are liable under § 1983 for violating Robinson's Fourth Amendment right to be protected from an unlawful seizure..."

PDF Link  (Thanks, Jeff!)

[Found via Boing Boing]

Post RAVE act, post PATRIOT act America

Krick of Evol Intent offers a firsthand account of the events that took place at a party that he was scheduled to play August 20th in Utah.  The event was fully licensed, fully legal, and non-violent.  Halfway through the party, authorities arrived in full riot gear and ended the event like a full-scale riot (tear gas, attack dogs, and assault rifles). One attendee managed to escape with actual video footage of the shutdown.  Another DJ at the event who goes by Syne offers her own account of the same event, and the Utah Raves forum is lit up like a switchboard.  Lawsuits are pending...

[Found via MetaFilter]

Linkin Park wants a Warner-free IPO

Cory Doctorow:

"Linkin Park is looking to float an IPO, but only if it can get out of its deal with Warner: it's not longer interested in being tied to a label, and intends to release its music strictly over the Internet from now on.

The band claims it has been responsible for ten percent of the label's record sales over the past five years. Linkin Park owes Warner Music four more albums, but the band says they're looking into releasing music over the Internet and it does not plan to deliver a new album to Warner."

Link 

[Via Boing Boing]

Individual-I: a "peace symbol" for individual liberty

Individual-I: a "peace symbol" for individual liberty
Cory Doctorow:

 

"Individual-I is a new campaign that Bruce Schneier has launched, to promote the idea of individual liberty. The sign shown here -- a vaguely humanoid capital letter I -- is intended to be a readily recognized symbol of personal liberty, freedom from surveillance and control, guarantee of due process rights and other fundamentals that are eroding in today's world. It is meant to be as recognizable and simple as a peace symbol or a cross, and as iconic.

I think it's a wonderful idea. Bruce isn't claiming any ownership or control over this, hoping that it will grow organically (though he will help you sell your Individual-I merch through his site). I got some Individual-I stickers last week at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, and they will shortly adorn my laptop."  Link  (Thanks, Bruce!)

[Via Boing Boing]

The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin

The countdown for the extinction of CDs is about to begin - Mark Cuban

"...The only question is who will be the first label to crack and offer this and how soon will it be. Of course  the cynics will say that this won’t ever happen, but I’m not buying it. It’s too much cash up front for the labels to  say no to. It also makes too much business sense.

When it happens, the music industry will EXPLODE and sales and profits will go through the  roof.

Why? Because stores can be smaller, physical inventories minimal to non-existent, and an entire segment of middle  infrastructure on both the label and retailer side for ordering, delivering, warehousing, duplicating, returning, and forecasting of product can be eliminated.

Most importantly, that money can be spent to develop, market and promote music so that more and more people can  experience it, and also, just in case hell freezes over, be used to lower the price of music to consumers

Once that first label, or the first organized group of indies goes purely digital at retail, then the countdown  for the extinction of the CD begins. T-minus 5 years from that first day, and your CDs will be sitting right next to  the LPs your dad and mom collected when they were kids.

Until then, if Im a band selling on my own, I’m carrying a laptop to every show, and charging 5 bucks to drop a  show on an IPod. Call it concertpodding.

If I’m an indie record store, I’m making sure that all music from the labels you support is available for direct  to player. I’m offering every song as Ipod or MP3 player ready to anyone who walks in the door with their Ipod and  wants to leave listening to the music.

It’s money in the bank."

[Via Mark Cuban]

Nutrition researcher was cooking the books

Nutrition researcher was cooking the books

The Boston Globe:

"In the worst case of scientific fakery to come to light in two decades,  a top obesity researcher who long worked at the University of Vermont  admitted yesterday that he fabricated data in 17 applications for  federal grants to make his work seem more promising, helping him win  nearly $3 million in government funding." [...] "Some colleagues speculated that Poehlman buckled to an exaggerated  perception of the pressure to publish papers and win grants to keep his  laboratory going. Or perhaps he was so sure he knew the right answers  that he cut corners to get to them, they said."

Page 3 of the Globe coverage gives the whistle-blowing part of the story.  The whistle-blower was an undergraduate at University of Vermont who  had been hired as a research assistant. ''I was in a unique position to  act,"[Walter] DeNino said. ''I did not rely on  Dr. Poehlman for funding, a post doc [research position], or a salary."  DeNino had to expend thousands of dollars in lawyer fees when Poehlman  denied the claim that he falsified data. Fortunately, under the US  whistle-blower protection statute, he will receive $21,600 before taxes  and his legal fees will be paid.

There's another article on this at The Scientist.  In terms of scientific impact, the worst part is the ripple effect. Poehlman was a huge star in obesity research. Many other  researchers trusted and built upon the work that Poehlman had published  in peer-reviewed journals. The validity of their own work is now called into question. According to The Scientist, "Poehlman's work was cited widely; the top 10 most-cited of his more  than 200 papers have been cited an average of 125 times each. One of  those top 10, a 1995 Annals of Internal Medicine paper that was retracted last year was cited more than 150 times." And three times this year. Ouch.

Here are the Feedster search results for Eric Poehlman, including commentary over at Respectful of Otters.

[Via Seb's Open Research]

The Music Never Stops

The Music Never Stops
"While the Grateful Dead were pioneers in the sharing of music, it wasn't too long ago that fans had to meet in-person with other DeadHeads at taping parties to grow their library of "bootlegs."  In the late 1990s when CD burners became more prominent, The Dead again led the way.  They went on record to say that fans were still welcome to copy, share and trade their music as long as no money changing hands—including no advertising on web sites with downloads.  Yesterday, the band again made history when they announced they are releasing the contents of their vast vault electronically (and simultaneouly) on iTunes Music Store and their very own Grateful Dead online store, the latter making the songs available in mp3 (128 and 256kbps) and FLAC ."
[Via MetaFilter]