I don't typically use this blog to post feature announcements of my employer, but this one thing we just launched minutes ago is seriously cool: You can now share arbitrary Last.fm radio stations (similar artist radio, tag radio, a user's personal radio, ...) using our embedded flash player. Put it on your blog, on your fanpage, anywhere you want. You don't even need a Last.fm account to do this.

Here's the officially shit tag radio:

• Having \n as the only type of newline.
• TSV as ubiquitous data exchange file format -- it even has its own mime-type.
• NTP on every machine.
• UTF-8.

It's the simple things...

So regarding that upcoming + forced Flickr-Yahoo-ID merger... got the email a couple of days ago, read the Slashdot thread, and kinda felt unaffected by it all. I faintly remembered discussing this in some old Flickr group, but had forgotten the details; the whole thing seemed to have little real impact on my digital life. Will have to remember another login.

But seeing Anil point to Bruce Sterling's commentary on the Flickr Yahoo login merger reminded me of my original reason not to like being forced to switch, just when I was about to cave in:

• A Yahoo login is obviously stored in a Yahoo session cookie, i.e., written by a Yahoo domain. Accessible by other Yahoo services.
• If you keep logged in with you new Flickrhoo ID, you will leave traces of your Flickr identity every time you step on Yahoo property.

In other words: this introduces an ubiquitous session cookie, one of the reasons I don't like GMail, and one of my motivations for wasting time on that CookieFilter script (which I ported to Ruby btw, should upload that somewhere at some point).

Seems I'll have to cave, no matter what. But Flickr gets off my CookieFilter white list. Fuck convenience, Yahoo won't get to watch me browse.

Related Link

• Remaining worry: Yahoo collecting user behavior data, 1.5 year old thread on the "Flick off!" group.

I'm start to look into more secure ways to store sensitive data, and Apple's encrypted DMG disk images seem like a good compromise between security and convenience. If you're worried about long-term storage and retrievability it of course has the disadvantage of being a proprietary format, which means you would need an OS X machine to decrypt those disk images.

Not any more! In one of the interesting talks I missed during last year's 23C3 (while being busy doing other things) Jacob Appelbaum, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and David Hulton presented their successful attempt to reverse-engineer the file format. They provide slides and source code of their "vilefault" tools at crypto.nsa.org/vilefault/ (under a liberal license that only requests you to properly credit their authorship, but allows the publication of modified versions.)

The source download includes two programs, vfcrack and vfdecrypt. The former implements a brute force dictionary attack against .dmg files, but I'm actually only interested in the latter which decrypts disk images for which you already know the password. In other words, an open implementation that allows you to read encrypted disk images on other operating systems.

Using vfdecrypt I could successfully decrypt an encrypted .dmg, but an attempt to decrypt a .sparseimage unfortunately failed ("internal error (2) during key unwrap operation!").

They neglected to ship a makefile for vfdecrypt, but it's really straightforward to compile. Here is what I used:

CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -Wall -O2 -funroll-loops
TARGET = vfdecrypt
LDFLAGS = -lssl -lcrypto
OBJS = vfdecrypt.o\
	util.o

all: vfdecrypt

vfdecrypt: $(OBJS)
	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(OBJS) $(LDFLAGS)

clean:
	rm -f *.o *.core $(TARGET)

And then call like this (from the included manpage):

vfdecrypt -i <in-file> -p <password> -o <out-file>

Links

• crypto.nsa.org/vilefault/ -- vilefault download page
• 23C3: the "Unlocking FileVault" event page
• Chaosradio: "Unlocking Filevault" video recording of the presentation

Just read David Byrne's Crappy Sound Forever!, in which he relates the evolution of popular and classical music as a series of technological changes, in a brief history from gramophone and microphone to MP3.

I liked his observation that Hip Hop "might be the most radical popular music around" as it's the first mainstream music purely made by machines, where the composition has no relationship to a live performance any more, where the idea of a band vanishes:

Most other pop genres retain some link to simulated live performance, but a song put together with finger snaps, super compressed vocals, squiggly synths and an impossibly fat bass doesn’t resemble a band at all.

At first I was surprised at his singling out Hip Hop (there is a huge amount of even more radical electronic music around), but of course he's right, Hip Hop is the first genre of electronic music to gain a huge mainstream awareness. And as genre borders are dissolving and electronic production methods transforming even the most boring white-bread mainstream pop it might well be the last. Everything is electronics now, Hello Computer.

My favourite statement, on how MP3 may put and end to music being a thing you buy, and transform it back into something you simply listen to:

What is also new and old is that MP3s return music to experience rather than being things, commodities. To some extent this technology also returns music to the social experience it always was, maybe not in the way Microsoft would like to link to in their ads for Zune, and not entirely about file sharing either, but somehow. It’s information, communication, as it once was.

And his guess on how MP3 will transform music production:

But is there a composing response to the MP3 and the sound of digitized compressed and private music listening? I don’t hear it yet. One would expect that private listening habits would result in a different kind of music being written — maybe a flood of ambient moods as a relaxing way to decompress, maybe dense and complex compositions that reward many replays and close listening, maybe intimate and sexy vocals that would be inappropriate to blast out in public. If any of this is happening I am unaware of it.

People seem to be migrating in drones from the former golden boy of the Rails community: the Typo blogging engine. Reasons vary (Sporkmonger's Bob Aman is put off by the lack of effective spam filters) -- but I can't say I'm surprised. Never installed Typo myself, but have been curious about the surprising amount of people who deem it acceptable to replace a solid solution (say, WP or MT) by something that exchanges stability for Ajax widgets.

Apparently one year later the trend-setters can finally admit that flashiness is only cool when it doesn't require cleaning up every couple of days. I'm relieved and hope that this reduces the amount of sites I have to remember to revisit because the maintainer forgot his daily is-it-still-running check.

"Enter Mephisto", as the community likes to joke. A new Rails-based blogging engine/CMS that managed to breach the threshold and gain popularity in Rails circles. May I introduce its flashy demo site:

The Mephisto demo site, broken for at least 24 hours as of 2007-01-14.

After hearing about Mephisto for the first time (yesterday -- yeah I'm slow) I curiously sought for more information until I saw this, then stopped.

The award for the funniest comment on this story goes to a two-liner (from the blog search results page linked above, amidst a stunning plentitude of dissatisfied Typo users):

I was looking for the instructions to upgrade to Typo 4.0 (for my other blog). And my search for "upgrade typo" resulted in a link to Mephisto, which I have been wanting to try.

Oblig Pop

Happened to stumble upon Cristian Vogel's Last.fm user profile, and found it one of the most exciting treasures our community has to offer. Not only is he an avid user of the site, he uses his journal to publish stories of his life as a musician, his record label station 55 records, to tease us with intriguing technicalities of his production experiments, and much more.

Cristian Vogel also uploaded his upcoming, still unmastered Night of The Brain album "You and Yours", and went as far as allowing full-length previews for a limited time -- he just scaled it back to 30sec previews a couple of days ago, so sorry for posting this so late. It's quite an exciting album, may see a release in April. If the music industry was more like this I'd have less of a bad conscience when I'm spending money on CDs.

Am now eagerly awaiting a company blog to share this exciting bit of pop culture gorgeousness, and more -- just hope I manage this before Anil beats me to it. (As a web dev in our company he has early access...)

I finally have a digital camera again, and it's a great toy! Used iMovie 5 for this, but don't really like how effects and text overlays work (you can't apply them to individual frames). Still, it's quite simple to use and everything works flawlessly, not least of all iPhoto integration.

(Note: Youtube indicated that this video was still in the upload queue about one hour after I posted it, don't remember that happening before.)

Update: uploaded the file again, this time without audio -- and it was instantly available. Youtube might not support AAC, and iMovie didn't offer any other audio export format... pity.

Oh, and regarding my last article: I'm told I'm full of shit.

(Just found this in my notes, written a couple of weeks ago, just days after coming to London.)

london is quite interesting. in a way it's similarly divided as berlin is, with the west of the city as the "establishment", clean, rather wealthy, predominantly white (at least the places I've been to), and the east more interesting, racially mixed, culturally diverse, council houses and poverty everywhere, but also more "creative", shoreditch as hipsterpartytown central, the rest of southern hackney mostly lower middle class/upper lower class (which is it? dunno).

interesting to move around in this city. the local dialects alone are plenty, but if you add all the foreign languages spoken everywhere it's amazingly diverse. once listened to a black girl talking on the bus, cockney with a distinct slant towards jamaican. really interesting.

however I'm told that the real divide is between north and south, with the river thames as a border -- dunno if I'll make it to the south yet, might take a while to find the time, and I'm not that curious yet.

most people, london-bred or new londoners, seem to constrain their movements within the city to a rather small area. I guess that makes sense because you mostly have everything everywhere, every couple of kilometers there's another self-sufficient area with complete infrastructure, or even a new cultural climate.

but I think I'd like to move around more, to explore. let's see if I can make the time to do that.

Jef told me that buses are the under-appreciated medium of transport in this city, and it's true -- the tube is mostly awful, packed and hot, and not that fast in the first place. buses can get just as packed, and they're not as easy to navigate if you're moving around a lot, the system of buses is quite complex, and they don't announce stops. but you get to see more of the city, and it's a little more relaxed, and you're usually more flexible once you get over the initial threshold of understanding the system.

and: the oyster card rules! it's basically a top-up system for public transport (or "prepaid", as Germans like to call it), with the added guarantee that you'll never pay more than a day ticket for the areas you traveled. once you topped-up your card it's the most convenient way to travel besides having an actual travel pass.