Archive for November, 2005
HPL Laboratories: Music Distribution for the Eldritch-at-Heart
November 29th, 2005
In January of 2007, HPL-Laboratories.com will finally - and I do mean FINALLY - be officially launched. I am currently in the process of designing the website, doing the necessary legal research to properly support it’s goals, and working out technical issues concerning bandwidth limits and assorted other background chores. When the website goes public, I will of course announce it here and everywhere else that’ll give me a shout-out, but in the meantime, I can give you a reasonable accounting of what to expect.
Many a long and eerie year ago (in 1993, to be exact), HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania was born. At the time, I’d just begun to investigate the world of electronic (a.k.a. “computer”) music utilizing an ancient DOS tracker called MODEdit on a Packard Hell 286 PC with a brand new, top-of-the-line SoundBlaster 16 jammed into its uncooperative guts. I had put together a few techno-ish .mods and posted them to various BBSes around Uniontown (like the late, lamented SurfBoard, Wildcat’s Lair, and DangerBase) for the listening pleasure of fellow computer geeks. I was releasing the files under my standard BBS handle, Nyarlathotep–later expanded to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos for no good reason whatsoever. The .mods quickly gained a lot of attention–why, I’ll never know, ’cause they were all pretty bad Skinny-Puppy-meets-LA-Style learning experiments–and the next thing I know, the musical project that would consume every following year of my life, that would eventually evolve to include virtually every fellow electronic musician I ever met, that would completely define my musical identity, was born.
Every good musician needs to name his/her/its studio, so naturally, I pondered a good name for my setup - which was basically a cruddy computer stuffed into a corner of my bedroom - and eventually hit on “HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania,” a somewhat humorous but perfectly apropos Lovecraftian pun on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL). As time went on and I did more and more and more work under the moniker Nyarlathotep–and began to branch out an explore other musical styles and creative avenues under a number of other crazy monikers - HPL Laboratories became less and less my ever-evolving production suite: it was evolving into a general semantic umbrella under which I released music.
Thus, a sort of label was born. A vanity label, basically. An aegis under which I could release all of my own stuff.
In the course of the past three years, three CDs have been issued under the HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania copperplate: Nyarlathotep’s Our thoughts make spirals in their world and A self-contemplating shadow, both EPs of music intended to be soundtrack accompaniments to two different works by Caitlin R. Kiernan, each distributed by Subterranean Press along with special editions of their associated works; and Illusion of Joy’s third full-length album, Division. Yes, that’s right: that last album was entirely the work of an artists who is NOT ME masquerading under any of my many guises.
You see, when I’d heard Illusion of Joy’s work, I wanted to release it - to provide the artist with a means of getting his excellent oldskool goth rock music Out There. But CDs are, honestly, too expensive and time-consuming to make (even when just burning CD-Rs). Getting wide-ranging distribution for them is difficult as well. I realized there had to be a better way of doing this…especially considering my growing loathing of the American music industry (which includes not only labels but also distributors, retailers, and the bloodthirsty legal hordes that back them).
Well, obviously, there was only one answer: the Net. I decided last year that HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania had finally found a direction: not as a vanity sticker for my work alone (though I still unashamedly use it for such), nor as a traditional record label…but more like a production studio/label/distributor combine that would work entirely through the Internet, providing artists’ music to fans via downloads. Naturally, given my abject HATRED of Digital Rights Management and copy-protection of ANY kind, these mp3s would be offered entirely free of restrictions. But how? I’d entertained setting up a small EMusic-like pay-per-download store using DownHillBattle.org’s free BattleCart software…but that seemed like too much of a logistical nightmare. All I want to do is get artists’ work Out There for people to enjoy.
I also wanted to protect artists by giving them complete and utter control over the ownership of their own productions. No way in hell was I going to own the copyrights to their works as any major label would: if anything, HPL Laboratories would just exist as an electronic means facilitating the digital distribution of artists’ works - the artists themselves would retain total ownership of their music and would determine entirely for themselves how they would offer that music to the public. But you can’t really do that with the way United States copyright law currently exists. Enter Creative Commons, a flat-out brilliant - and 100% legal - method allowing artists to release their works under licenses that specifically state what rights those artists wish to retain for themselves and their work, and what rights they give up to the public. Creative Commons licensing allows artists alone to determine exactly how their works are being offered. HPL Laboratories, then, would facilitate the downloading and exposure of these bands.
Free of charge.
Because let’s face it, people: I know I’m never going to make Metallica-sized money from my own works, and virtually every artist I’ve approached with the HPL Labs idea realizes the same thing. We’re not in it for money. We’re in it for exposure. We’re in it to get our stuff heard because we’re proud of it and we believe there are people Out There in InternetLand who will appreciate our works and make our efforts worthwhile. What better way to do that than by just making our works available to them in the simplest, most convenient form possible: the BitTorrent download?
But, of course, if people want to give us money…there’s always PayPal donations! Each artist released via the HPL Labs website would have his/her/their/its own donation link so any money that appreciative fans may want to donate to their cause will go directly to them. Not me. The only money I plan to make from this will come from donations to my musical projects. Everyone else deserves EVERY SINGLE PENNY they make.
So here, then, is what HPL-Laboratories.com will be. Consider this a preliminary mission statement:
HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania exists solely to provide artists working in strange musical forms (primarily, but not necessarily, electronic) a means of getting their works released through a common outlet.
HPL Labs exists to allow artists complete control of their own work via Creative Commons licensing.
HPL Labs provides fans access to DRM-free, unencumbered, everyday mp3 downloads of their favorite artists’ music, as well as convenient means to freely contact those artists concerning donations, other merchandise, and so forth.
HPL Labs is, for all intents and purposes, the musical equivalent of the amateur press circles that my greatest inspiration, H. P. Lovecraft was involved in during his heyday.
The site will be there for our enjoyment, and yours. The music industry can kiss our collective asses. Take your rootkits and your Digital Milennium Copyright Act and shove them up your colons where they belong, with the rest of the bullshit.
WordPress for the Domainless
November 21st, 2005
WordPress.com has gone live, and will no doubt be giving other free blogging services such as Google’s Blogger.com, the venerable LiveJournal, and MySpace a run for…well, not their money, because they’re all free…but you get the point.
Heretofore, WordPress has been available only as a downloadable open-source software package that you can install–again, for free–on any webserver configured to support PHP and MySQL. Kitty Time News is powered by WordPress software, as is my personal blog, Pegritz.com, and it’s a joy to work with: it’s ridiculously easy to set up (with some caveats, to be presently explained), extraordinarily configurable and tweakable, and just flat-out fun to use…but, of course, one must have a certain knowledge of PHP, MySQL, and XHTML/CSS coding to be able to really rock with it - and, of course, one must have server space to install it in the first place. But what happens if you’re not knowledgeable in certain aspects of web development or don’t have your own domain?
Now, all you need to do to create your own WordPress blog is go to WordPress.com and sign up for one! The site does all the hosting for you, and will help you set up your blog and get everything running comfortably. Whether you’re a web-coding nerd or a total n00b, you’ll be on deck in no time - and for you fellow Flock afficionados, you’ll find that WordPress.com is very amenable to access via Flock’s blogging functions.
So go forth and subject the world to your thoughts, dreams, ideas, opinions, and babble whether the world likes it or not!
(This article is cross-posted on Kitty Time News as well.)
The Sad Saga of Sony BMG
November 18th, 2005
Everywhere you look on the Web these days, you will no doubt find the words “Sony,” “copy-protection,” and “rootkit” floating around–but what is all the babble about? Malicious corporate Digital Rights Management bullshit, in a few choice words. Bullshit that may very well have affected you without your knowing.
Perhaps within the last month or two you’ve bought a new CD by…Celine Dion, let’s say (we’ll leave the question of why in hell you’d ever buy a Celine Dion CD in the first place for another day), on the Sony BMG label. You may or may not have noticed printed on the CD’s spine the words “Content Protected” and a few little graphics. Big deal, right? Even if you noticed it–you are, after all, a Smart Consumer wise enough to keep your eyes peeled for these things–you may have thought: “Oh, well, just another anti-CD-copying scheme that can be defeated by drawing on the CD with a Sharpie.” But then, when you inserted the CD into your Windows machine in order to rip the tracks that you legally bought having purchased the CD so you can copy them onto your iPod or just add them to your iTunes library for convenient listening, a little autorunning window perhaps popped up asking you to install certain software in order to listen to your CD. If that happened, and you stupidly clicked YES, you’ve been infected by Sony’s “XCP” rootkit - which isn’t a copy-protection scheme so much as it is a malicious piece of software “intended to conceal running processes, files or system data, which helps an intruder maintain access to a system without the user’s knowledge”.
OK…maybe it didn’t work that way. Maybe you just heard about the hub-bub and realized, “Oh, shit - I own a Sony computer! Maybe they just installed that crap on their by default!” like I did. Well, there are a few simple commands you can use to determine whether you’re infected. (Fortunately, I was not: Sony computers are manufactured by a completely different wing of the megaconglomerate, completely unrelated to Sony BMG.)
So….What do you do if you are infected? A quick Google search will show that Sony has caved to negative pressure and is offering an uninstaller for download. DON’T EVEN THINK OF USING IT. Sony’s online uninstaller leaves you vulnerable to even greater security holes than those of the damned rootkit itself.
Now here does that leave you? In a word: fucked. As of 18 Nov 2005, Sony has yet to offer its many, many, many dissatisfied customers any kind of safe, reliable recourse for removing their rootkit. The best you can do is sit and wait for them to act before some trojan-writer decides to release his/her-own little fourth-party piece of software to take advantage of it. It’s only a matter of time.
Oh, and Mac people? Don’t give me your smug, Steve-Jobs-fellating “Macs are better than Windows” schitck. You’re at risk, too. Fortunately, you can reassure yourself that it will be a lot harder to infect your machines - but that only makes sense, considering that OS X is a more secure OS, by default.
Nonetheless, if you are NOT infected, then your only option is to avoid being infected in the first place! First of all, it would only make sense for you not to buy ANY CDs bearing the Sony BMG label, period. But, if you must, for some reason, buy a CD from the Sony BMG label, at least make sure it isn’t any of the CDs listed here. (Be aware that a number of Sony CDs are also infected with DRM software produced by SunComm, which is somewhat different than the XCP rootkit, but still Bad Business.) I strongly suggest boycotting any and all Sony BMG offerings, however, as any company as contemptuous of your consumer rights as Sony Music is does not deserve a penny of your hard-earned money.
It’s also a smart idea to turn off Windows’ stupid autorun feature, Just In Case. For those of you who don’t know, autorun is a feature of Windows that automatically starts certain programs on CDs when they are inserted into your CD/DVD drive. You’ve almost certainly encountered autorun programs when inserting driver or software installation CDs into your drive. Shutting off autorun will not leave those installation CDs unusable: you’ll just have to navigate to the appropriate drive via Windows Explorer and doubleclick “Setup.exe” or whatever in order to launch the installation routines. It’s the only way to be sure a malicious software package hiding in the depths of an audio CD doesn’t automatically install itself on your hard-drive.
And finally, if you want the full scoop on the whole Sony XCP rootkit fiasco, Buce Schneier has an excellent summation of the Whole Story.
Invasion of the Innocuous
November 17th, 2005
Recently, users of AOL’s Instant Messenger service - and I am one of them (well, actually, I use Trillian, but I digress) - discovered that their buddy lists had swelled by two new names: MovieFone and ShoppingBuddy. The two new friends you mysteriously made are in fact little ‘bot’ programs that respond to cues with predetermined replies. In the case of the MovieFone bot, for instance, you could send it your zip code and receive a rundown of showtimes at the local cineplexes. Pretty innocuous, right? After all, when AOL debuted the system, every user got a message from the AIM System informing them just what was going on - including specifically telling users that the bots could be deleted from buddy lists if unwanted just like any other presence.
Well, some folks are having a conniption about AOL’s addition of these bots to their friends lists. Quite frankly, the naysayers have somewhat of a point: AOL added these bots to every user’s buddy-corral without asking the users’ permission first, which is a little impolite but not exactly shady or particularly harmful–after all, the bots by design do not collect any information from users: they only respond to direct queries users post to them. But nonetheless, just in terms of courting consumer goodwill, it would’ve been smarter for AOL to announce the Coming of the IMBots and offer users a link to check them out before adding them.
Nonetheless, there they are - and some people are reacting as though AOL has installed a Sony-style rootkit on their machines. I am a complete security freak, so of course I was a bit alarmed and cautious about the mysterious new presences that just appeared on my buddy list…so I checked them out. Once I got the lowdown on them, I considered deleting them not because they freaked me out or represented any kind of possible security or privacy infarction, but just because I didn’t think I’d ever need them. After all, I’ve got Movies at Yahoo.com for film information and the only person I ever shop for anymore is myself….But, their little icons are so cute! And it’s not like they’re taking up any systems resources on my machine just sitting there. So I let them stay.
So here’s a little heads-up to all you security nerds shittin’ kittens Out There in Internetland: if you don’t want the AOL bots there, just remove them. They’re not going to commandeer your computer like some malicious cyberphantom from the depths of Sony BMG headquarters, nor are they the frontend for SKY_NET. They’re just the Instant Messenger equivalent of IRC bots, and can be handled and ignored just the same. Calm down. And go and change your pants, for the Other Gods’ sakes.
