Letters and blogs | 19 November 2009
Changing connections "Green Card Lawyers" [Usenet spam] and "My Naked Wife" [email virus] arose ( War beneath the web , 12 November) because they could. Both Usenet and email were successful among early adopters, but neither could really adapt to their eventual parasites. The web has become popular too, and also has issues with accepting candy from strangers. Fortunately, the internet – the network of all networks – is bigger than the world wide web and its hyperlinks. Our connectivity is expanding from the desktop to the pocket and the wall. It's time to change again. blogs.adobe.com/jd This why we favour Linux servers, and bespoke builds to off-the-shelf scripts! http://www. twitter.com/4legs Email's primacy sank after we realised you couldn't trust whoever wanted to send you things. WWW's got same problem today twitter.com/jdowdell AN APP FOR WHAT? It seems to me that in the same way that online Amazon-type ordering replaced Kay's and Littlewoods, the Blackberry Apps generation have found an online Innovations' catalogue: loads of stuff that looks impressive but ultimately gets used once and then forgotten about. Can't wait for the "handy'" app. slippersock. Rob Carthy, Bromley Acta-ing up The opposition to Acta centres around the bureaucratic imperative of NGOs of dubious funding sources that are used to bullying creators in Geneva, and who have been excluded from the Acta negotiation process at the drafting stage ( Newly asked questions , 12 November). As with any other treaty, these groups will be able to lobby to the full extent of the law when Acta is ratified by the member states: a mix of economic players
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Letters and blogs | 19 November 2009
Ask Jack: March 19 2009
A tale of two PCs I have a desktop PC in one location and a laptop in another and am having problems keeping the two in phase. GoToMyPC sounds useful, but the price is high . Vicki Eves JS: The simplest solution would be to keep "master copies" of your files on a portable hard drive, then copy the contents to your local PCs for backup. There are lots of USB hard drives designed for portable use, including Western Digital's My Passport series, Seagate's FreeAgent Go drives, Freecom's ToughDrives and Iomega's eGo models. You can use Google's Gmail or similar to keep email in sync. Programs such as GoToMyPC and LogMeIn are useful if you need to access files remotely, and the basic level of LogMeIn is free. (If you want File Sync, you have to pay for LogMeIn Pro.) In the longer term, Microsoft Live Mesh could be the answer for automated synchronisation across multiple devices, including PCs, Macs and mobile phones. However, at the moment it is still in beta. Work safe I have all my PhD research on an external hard drive. Is there some kind of password-protection program that I could use to protect it? David B Roberts JS: The most obvious answer is to encrypt the data with True Crypt ), which is free, open-source software. You could encrypt the whole drive or a partition and access it transparently. You could also look at commercial alternatives CD-Lock , which works on most removable storage devices, and Folder Lock . You should also burn your data to CD-R and consider uploading it to an online storage site such as ADrive or Mozy. Floppy rescue I have an archive stored on dozens of floppy disks created on an old Mac circa late 80s/early 90s. I remember that the Mac's floppy drive ran at variable speeds. How would I read these files on to my current PC running Windows XP
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Ask Jack: March 19 2009
Technophile: Charles Arthur on Spotify’s universal jukebox
Once upon a time there was a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called Napster, and it caught the record labels completely unawares. For years people had been ripping their CDs into MP3s, but Napster showed them how to get tracks they didn't have (illicitly). And so the universal jukebox was born – though it was quickly extinguished by lawyers. Now Spotify is here, a completely legal service which tries to get close to that universal jukebox idea, where all you have to do is either pay a monthly fee (£10 in the UK) or listen to some ads at the start of a track (and see them on the application's interface) and you can get at a huge range of music. It's not quite every song ever made - give the folks a chance - but it's a big start. The application you download (for Windows or Mac; or in Wine on Linux) connects to the net and streams the songs. You can create your own playlists, listen to the "radio", or – perhaps most interesting – create collaborative playlists that anyone can add to (or subtract from) once they know the URL. (In the picture, the collaborative ones are green.) And when you're playing a track, there's a link - not yet implemented - to let you buy that song from Amazon or iTunes. Logically, Spotify would get a cut of any such transaction. The files are high-quality - Ogg Vorbis (the open-source codec) at roughly 160kbps; you need about 256kbps bandwidth to get it all working. It all sounds like Napster version 1 done right. So is there anything that doesn't work right? I asked on Twitter and found that what people wanted most was a mobile-phone version (I understand that's in the works, though it might be some way off); better recommendation; better collaborative information (so you can see who has added a track to a playlist, say); and streaming to other devices such as hi-fis. Oh, and more songs - though the classical repertoire is good - and better filtering in the searches, which tend to be overly broad - my search for King Crimson turned up tracks that ex-members had made.
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Technophile: Charles Arthur on Spotify's universal jukebox