Gary Robinson's Rants

Most realistic phishing page yet.

For paypal. This one that I have to assume would fool me if I wasn't already sensitized to emailed phishing scams, and/or if I wasn't technically knowledgeable enough to read the URL and know the site is at some unknown IP address. Note that all the links work, by linking through to the real paypal site.

I received multiple copies of this scam at a different email addresses within a period of a few minutes today... I assume they're going to try and make as much money as they can in a few hours and see how much money they can take before they cut all traces. It'll be interesting to see if the phishing page is still operational on Monday.

Update: I didn't check up on this for a while, but on Nov 22, 2004 a commenter to this post mentions that it's gone now.

Do I really have to?

Well, I -- I think that, you know, it's an awful situation. I don't -- certainly things are not going to become -- I mean, Kerry will be like Clinton or maybe worse. He's -- people don't usually -- you know, they rarely surprise you in a good way; but I think that, yeah, it's important to tell the world that, you know, we didn't like this, the things that have happened under Bush. I think we have to make the statement -- that, you know, we don't want to go on that road anymore. So, you know, for me it's humiliating to vote for Kerry, because I don't respect him; but I would -- I will -- it's unpleasant, it's like killing a big rat that is running around your apartment. It must be done. But you're not proud of it. But you have to do it. So, we have to tell other people, I think, that, you know, we didn't approve. [Democracy Now interviewing playwrite/actor Wally Shawn]

I know what he means. The latest final word on the missing explosives almost did it for me. It now seems pretty conclusive that they WERE still there when our troops got there. And we did nothing to protect them because Bush hadn't supplied enough troops, and now they're being used against our troops and innocent Iraqis. That particular cache of explosives isn't the issue -- it's that the same situation must have played out many, many times in Iraq. If there weren't enough troops to protect one, there weren't enough troops to protect others.

Rumsfeld can say what he wants, and have his own reasons, but in the end it doesn't seem very smart to me.

I was mildly startled to see The Economist, a conservative magazine, endorsing Kerry. (Headline of the endorsement: The Incompetent or the Incoherent?) And they aren't alone. Bush's base appears to be slowly and painfully giving up on him, and embracing the alternative because there's no other option. By the way, the Economist's endorsement is well worth reading. It's the best writing I have seen yet on the choice for this election. I'm not even going to quote from it; click and read it yourself. There's too much excellent material there to choose.

Also see Kerry Haters For Kerry.

"Report: Explosives already gone when U.S. troops arrived"

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC. [CNN]

Well, I deserved it. That's what I get for imagining that a major, front-page NY Times report on the mistakes of the Bush administration might have journalistic integrity. I.e. thinking they might have actually checked other sources, etc.

Someone brought out a good point in a letter to Andrew Sullivan. Basically, it seems I've been coming to assume that the problems in Iraq are because there aren't enough troops, and if would Bush just put them in, the problems would go away. In other words, hostility of regular Iraqis seems to largely come from the fact that we never provided adequate security, so if we had provided more troops, and more security, the problems would disappear.

The flaw in that reasoning, of course, is that there is no magic number of troops that would make the problems disappear. With twice as many troops, there would still be security gaffes, just fewer. But it is unknown how much smaller the number would be. Would the gaffes be 95% reduced? 50%? 5%? Who knows? If the answer is 5%, it wouldn't be worth it. 50% is probably more reasonable... would it be worth it? Maybe the administration is simply making an intelligent calculation about what's worth it and what is not. That is the alternative hypothesis to the one I stated yesterday in this blog, that Bush lacks the political courage to do the right thing.

In fact in another NY Times article, part of the administration's thinking was described thusly:

In a Feb. 14, 2003, speech titled "Beyond Nation Building," which Mr. Rumsfeld delivered in New York, he said the large number of foreign peacekeepers in Kosovo had led to a "culture of dependence" that discouraged local inhabitants from taking responsibility for themselves.

The defense secretary said he thought that there was much to be learned from Afghanistan, where the United States did not install a nationwide security force but relied instead on a new Afghan Army and troops from other countries to help keep the peace.

I'm not endorsing one argument or the other. What do I know? I'm just trying to get my mind around the question of what the arguments are.

Kerryland, here I come?

380 tons of explosives have been stolen in Iraq. They were supposed to be under U.S. control. One of the main reasons for the war was to keep Iraqi weapons away from terrorists. Ha, ha. The other reasons for the war run deeper, and have to do with changing hearts and minds in the mideast. But that won't happen either if terrorists have the military means to prevent the democratic Iraqi government from supplying security to innocent Iraqi civilians.

This is almost enough to get me to vote for Kerry. Maybe it is enough. The problem is that there are not enough troops to secure the peace. Period. For all his posturing as the macho, can-do candidate, Bush apparently doesn't have the political courage to risk unpopularity by sending the necessary human resources to Iraq.

Kerry won't do it either -- but on every issue other than whether the Iraq was was worth doing, I agree with Kerry more than Bush. Kerry's lack of belief in the war makes me fee, for a number of reasons, that he can't prosecute it properly. The problem is, Bush is proving he can't either.

Apple vs. Microsoft, weapon: subscriptions

Here's the deeper

Subscriptions as a weapon in the music-player wars

This is a significant edit of an earlier post. I made this edit because I realized I'd missed the real reason Apple isn't supporting subscriptions.

Another important new feature expected in the Microsoft music software will be the ability to play music on portable devices based upon a monthly subscription fee rather than on simpler pay-for-download basis like Apple does. For a monthly fee, subscribers will be able to listen to music available from the Microsoft store not only on their PCs, but on portable music players, selecting what they want, and changing the music they put on their players regularly.

...

Apple Computer has generally dismissed the music subscription model. Chief Executive Steve Jobs has often been heard to say that "people want to own their music," likening the sale of per-song downloads--what the music industry often calls "a la carte"--to traditional sales of music CDs and records. Its iPod player doesn't support files encoded in Microsoft's Windows Media format. [Forbes]

Usually I tend to agree with Steve Jobs, but this is a case where I think he is wrong. In fact, I think it is fairly likely that he doesn't even mean what he's saying in this case, but rather is saying it for tactical reasons. Apple doesn't yet have technology equivalent to Microsoft's ability to transfer music to portable players in such a way that it will only play while a subscription is paid for. (For good reasons, as we will see...)

Here are some reasons a subscription model is superior:

• With a subscription, you don't end up finding out you don't like something only after you buy it. You can try anything you want, and delete it from your player if you don't like it.

• With a subscription you don't have to worry about technology issues destroying the value in one's collection. For instance, the tracks I've purchased from the iTunes Music Store would become worthless to me if I stopped using an iPod, because those tracks don't work on other players. That's one reason why I mostly still buy music on CD.

• Downloaded tracks don't have the sound quality of CD's because of bandwidth issues. But the sound quality of downloaded tracks can be expected to steadily increase over time. So that a major reason why tracks I buy now will be of less value later; I'll want to download tracks with better quality when they are available. With a subscription, both of these issues disappear, because I just get the tracks I want at the time I want them, in whatever form is most convenient and sounds best at the time.

• This is more important than it may seem at first: with a subscription model, no mental energy need be expended expended deciding what to buy and not to buy. You can focus on enjoying music, without that "tax" on the experience.

• Finally, a subscription service that makes most of the world's recorded music available (something that will happen) makes the consumer's experience virtually identical to the situation where his personal collection includes most of the world's recorded music, although he doesn't have to pay for more than the equivalent of a tiny fraction of that amount of music.
  

My personal first guess about the reason Apple is sticking to the item-by-item model was that the major labels are so used to selling music on a item-by-item basis that at the time the iTunes Music Store started, Apple couldn't get the broad range of music it wanted unless it made music available on that basis. So it sells music item-by-item.

But the real reason is the simple fact that, if Apple embraced a subscription model, then iPod users could switch to another brand at any time, drop their iTunes subscription, sign up for a Microsoft-compatible subscription, buy a player that supports Microsoft DRM, and go merrily on their way. Whereas with the current item-by-item FairPlay model, combined with a licensing strategy where FairPlay sales are iPod sales, the customer is locked into Apple's line. If iTunes Music Store users buy a portable player other than an iPod, they lose their investment in downloaded music.

Microsoft does not sell music playing hardware, so they can be agnostic about hardware brands. It doesn't matter to them if a consumer switches brands. And, as seen above, the subscription model is inherently superior and gives a fundamental advantage over item-by-item-only solutions. So, it's in Microsoft's interests to support subscriptions, as that gives people more reason to buy hardware that supports Microsoft's DRM, and for which Microsoft is paid.

And there we have it. A perfect explanation for the difference in approaches. It isn't that "people want to own their music," it's that Apple wants to promote customer lock-in.

And, by the way, this view is also consistent with the obvious explanation of why Apple won't allow non-FairPlay DRM'd music to play on the iPod. If it did, smart consumers would buy Microsoft- (or perhaps even Real-) DRM'd music so that they would have a choice in hardware, and avoid the lock-in described above. So it would would be totally against Apple's strategy to allow competing DRM software to work on iPods.

Now, in reality, Apple's approach seems unlikely to win in the long run. The advantages of subscriptions are large enough, and there are enough people who are not heavily invested in iTunes Music Store music collections, that the advantages of Microsoft's approach has a very strong chance of eroding Apple's customer base to the point that Apple will have to give up and support subscriptions.

However, Apple can start supporting subscriptions at any point that it suits them. It doesn't suit them now. At this point, they have 92.1% of the hard-drive-based portable player market. The more locked-in those customers are, the more money they will make on hardware sales.

And, no doubt, they have a hope that they will maintain that lead, analogously to Microsoft's lock on the OS market.

Goombah updated

We've released a bug-fix update. It's a good idea for all Goombah users to download it. It fixes a problem that can cause a crash, and a couple of smaller problems as well.

iPod market share update

Research company The NPD Group said in a report released Tuesday that various versions of the iPod accounted for 92.1 percent of the market for hard drive-based music players, up from 82.2 percent a year ago. Players from Creative Technology and Digital Networks North America's Rio were a distant second and third, with 3.7 percent and 3.2 percent of the market, respectively.

NPD analyst Stephen Baker attributed the results to a strong launch for new fourth-generation versions of the iPod, which arrived on the market just at the right time to dominate back-to-school buying. [CNet News]

Way to go, Apple! Now if you'd only implement subscriptions...

Steve Jobs vs. Subscriptions

Another important new feature expected in the Microsoft music software will be the ability to play music on portable devices based upon a monthly subscription fee rather than on simpler pay-for-download basis like Apple does. For a monthly fee, subscribers will be able to listen to music available from the Microsoft store not only on their PCs, but on portable music players, selecting what they want, and changing the music they put on their players regularly.

...

Apple Computer has generally dismissed the music subscription model. Chief Executive Steve Jobs has often been heard to say that "people want to own their music," likening the sale of per-song downloads--what the music industry often calls "a la carte"--to traditional sales of music CDs and records. Its iPod player doesn't support files encoded in Microsoft's Windows Media format. [Forbes]

Usually I tend to agree with Steve Jobs, but this is a case where I think he is wrong. In fact, I think it is fairly likely that he doesn't even mean what he's saying in this case, but rather is saying it for tactical reasons. Apple doesn't yet have technology equivalent to Microsoft's ability to transfer music to portable players in such a way that it will only play while a subscription is paid for.

My personal guess is that the major labels are so used to selling music on a item-by-item basis that at the time the iTunes Music Store started, Apple couldn't get the broad range of music it wanted unless it made music available on that basis. So it sells music item-by-item. It isn't really that "people want to own their music," it's that the labels have been most comfortable making their music available that way. But they are coming around and will continue to, as current and coming subscription services, such as MSN's, demonstrate.

Here are some reasons a subscription model is superior:

• With a subscription, you don't end up finding out you don't like something only after you buy it. You can try anything you want, and delete it from your player if you don't like it.

• With a subscription you don't have to worry about technology issues destroying the value in one's collection. For instance, the tracks I've purchased from the iTunes Music Store would become worthless to me if I stopped using an iPod, because those tracks don't work on other players. That's one reason why I mostly still buy music on CD.

• Downloaded tracks don't have the sound quality of CD's because of bandwidth issues. But the sound quality of downloaded tracks can be expected to steadily increase over time. So that a major reason why tracks I buy now will be of less value later; I'll want to download tracks with better quality when they are available. With a subscription, both of these issues disappear, because I just get the tracks I want at the time I want them, in whatever form is most convenient and sounds best at the time.

• This is more important than it may seem at first: with a subscription model, no mental energy need be expended expended deciding what to buy and not to buy. You can focus on enjoying music, without that "tax" on the experience.
  

Overall there's really no contest. Apple should get on the ball here if they want to maintain their lead. I love my iPod, but I found myself today considering getting a non-Apple portable player so that I could benefit from the advantages of a subscription service.

iPod Marketshare

From Digital Music News' Daily Snapshot email:

Just how much market share does the iPod actually have? Numbers seem to
vary, with a recent report from the NPD Group asserting a 41.9% market share
in the US, with an 82% figure for hard-disk devices. The 82% figure was
mistakenly published by Bloomberg for the entire portable mp3 market,
leading some to conclude that Apple had a virtual lock over competitors. In
terms of overall mp3 devices, Rio placed in second with a 10% share, iRiver
ranked third with 9.3%, and RCA was fourth with 9%. Meanwhile, market
research firm In-Stat/MDR estimates that total sales of hard-disk players
will rise from 18 million units this year to 52.4 million units by 2007.

More Smile reflections

OK, I've listened to Smile 2 1/2 times so far. Mostly not in the best acoustic setting: twice during long drives with my family, playing through my iPod via a cassette adapter.

So far I can honestly say two seemingly contradictory things about it: a) I have a mixed reaction, and b) it's absolute genius.

The mixed reaction is due to the things like distorted bits of tin pan alley songs ("You are My Sunshine" strikes me most prominently). I mean some of it is so experimental that it while it may be music in some abstract sense, I don't think I'm going to need to listen to those sections over and over. Some of it seems to be just fun, and not much more.

But other aspects of it are truly incredible. For instance, "Wonderful" is one of the most harmonically amazing melodies I've ever heard. In some ways it sounds more like Bach than a pop song, while still clearly being a pop song. There are a incredible musical moments on Smile, and by the time I got to the remake of Good Vibrations (many different words, many modifications to the music), I literally was experiencing waves of chills running through my body and tears streaming down my cheeks.

I've had a few listening moments like that in my life, and in truth, they've 90% been due to Brian Wilson. The absolute best three Wilson tracks are, in my view, Wouldn't It Be Nice, Good Vibrations (I still think I like the original version best), and God Only Knows. Paul McCartney once claimed that God Only Knows is the best song ever written. Certainly I think that it's a better love song than any of the Beatles', and in fact I can't think of a better one, period. It does truly fascinating things musically that I have never heard anywhere else. (For a much better technical analysis of it as composition than I have the know-how to present, see this essay.) And the lyrics, by Tony Asher, are also among the most beautiful ever put on record.

My wife is a classical music buff. I went through a period when I listened mostly to classical. (Now I listen to more jazz and pop because other than going to occasional classical concerts with my wife, I rarely have the time these days to give classical music the full attention I like to give it for full enjoyment. Between my work and two small kids, I just can't spend hours lying on the floor with headphones on in total immersion at this stage of my life. The 3-minute duration of a pop song, or a jazz improv that one can intermittently pay attention to, are right for me for now). After listening to Smile, we tried to rate Wilson as a potential classical composer. We agreed that if he had lived in the right time period and had the standard training, and psychological problems hadn't effectively put him out of commission for many years, he probably would now be at least as respected as Scarlatti, and very possibly more so. Certainly I think that his best moments go deeper than Scarlatti's. As a pop composer whose mission is not just to entertain but to enlighten and move people, I think you have to go back to the best of Gershwin to have a chance at finding a real peer.

I say that recognizing that in the real world, his output is very constrained. As I said, he was effectively out of commission for many years, and his best work was done when he was not only very young (early 20's). And then he simply fell apart (during the production of Smile) and nothing emerged for a very long time. His new work has its moments, but to date hasn't reached the same level of quality. If you look at someone like Beethoven, the early works (such as his 1st Piano Concerto) have a youthful exuberance, and the later works such as the late string quartets have at least as much quality, but also the reflective (and sometimes melancholy) wisdom of long life experience. In the pop world, the same could be said of Bob Dylan, whose latest work is arguably as good or better than his early albums, but explores shadowy areas that were unknown in his early work. And similarly for Paul Simon. Wilson's later work seems more like he's trying to unsuccessfully recapture the early work, rather than translating the same full-force talent into a new language of experience.

So there isn't much full-force Wilson to hear. But what there is, is worth hearing. Check it out, if you never have. And really give it a chance to reach you.

Given the fact that Dylan's quality level dropped significantly (at least in my view) for a couple of decades and then came back very strongly, perhaps we can still hope it will happen with Wilson too.

A piece in the Oregonian is the best story I've seen about Smile's background.

A moment in pop history...

...I'm just now beginning to listen to Brian Wilson's Smile. An album the world has been waiting for since it was shelved 38 years ago. Just released, but with the Wondermints rather than the Beach Boys supplying the harmonies. So far, sounds great...

Thanks Matt

Matt Goyer blogged about Goombah today. Extract:

Goombah, and it's predecessor, Emergent Music were both built because of our belief in 'The Long Tail' and niche music markets. The idea of niche music markets sounds great in theory, but how do you as an end user find your niche markets? That's where Goombah comes in. Of course I'm not a professional writer so I urge you to read Chris Anderson's Wired Magazine article, The Long Tail which does a much better job of explaining the concept:

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

Goombah .5 released

Well everyone, this is it. The Big Day. At least for me!

We have finally released Goombah version .5. The last update, version .22, was released on 12/18/03. That's a long gap. What are we, lazy?

Let me explain... The .2-series releases were for the purpose of letting us know whether people would like the concept of Goombah and would enjoy it. And, of course, to test that the features worked as they were supposed to.

But, it was inherently unscalable. Too much data had to go from user to user, and it was all going through the server. So we limited the number of downloads of the software to 500. That wasn't enough for a "critical mass" of community to be attained, though it did allow us to receive a lot of valuable feedback.

The big thing we've been working on all this time is a p2p foundation that will make Goombah hugely scalable. It hasn't been easy to get right. But we've done it. As long as it doesn't blow up in our faces. We'll see... that's the main reason it's still a .5 beta, not .9 or even 1.0.

User reviews of the .2 series based on a poll we conducted of our users were very positive. Public reviews on the tracking sites were mixed. On VersionTracker, we got a 5-star-in-every-category review. I suspect the reviewer -- NOT someone we know! -- was basing his review partly on the potential he sees in the concept. But we also got a 2-star review there, in the first couple of hours after the original launch, when a server problem turned up and it basically didn't work.

On MacUpdate we got a 2 star review where the writer complained that it "took ages to start" and gave terrible recommendations. Ow, that hurts. The startup time was a very valid criticism, which we have addressed in a number of ways since then. But regarding the recommendations... of course the recommendations sucked: collaborative filtering systems need a sizeable population of users, and we had intentionally limited that release to only 500 downloads. (And for all I know, that reviewer may have complained when there were still only 10.) The new release is inherently scalable. Gradually, the recommendations will get better and better...

In fact, the actual megalomaniacal intent is to produce the most accurate recommendations the world has ever seen. There are very specific technical reasons why I think we can actually do it. That's one of the main design goals behind Goombah. But it is a simple fact that the recommendations will get asymptotically better and better as the community grows.

The way to look at the recommendation accuracy question is as follows. For a collaborative filtering system to make good recommendations for a particular user, there need to be other users like him in the system. The more similar they are, and the more of them there are, the better the recommendations will be.

So people's whose tastes are somewhat mainstream will get good recommendations from Goombah now. People with highly unusual tastes will get steadily improving recommendations as there are more other people like them in the community. But we have to start somewhere... if all goes as we hope, we'll grow steadily over time and meet the needs of more and more people.

Goombah isn't only about recommendations. It's about seeing what other people have in their collections and how much they tend to play each track. That way you can explore new music... it's also about blogging, and communicating with other people whose music collections interest you...

So, we don't ever expect to be "all things to all people", and particularly not at the beginning. And today is really the beginning. We expect to get all sorts of positive and negative feedback as we grow. We'll take to heart all the negative feedback and do our best to address any problems. And we'll take heart from the positive feedback. We'll keep on truckin, and getting better, no matter what.

I hope that you'll download Goombah and give us your feedback.

Kodak's Java patent

Eastman Kodak has won a controversial lawsuit in which it claimed Sun Microsystems had infringed several of its patents with its Java programming language.

A federal jury on Friday ruled in favor of Kodak, and the photography giant is now seeking damages of $1 billion from Sun.

The case has outraged some opponents of software patents, who claim it is a textbook example of why software should not be patentable. [CNet News]

I haven't had time to look at these patents yet but I do agree that on the surface this seems like a pretty scary case -- is it likely that Java is the only important industry technology that could be held to infringe on this set of patents? No, it seems more likely that this could be just an opening salvo.

Kodak's Java patent

Eastman Kodak has won a controversial lawsuit in which it claimed Sun Microsystems had infringed several of its patents with its Java programming language.

A federal jury on Friday ruled in favor of Kodak, and the photography giant is now seeking damages of $1 billion from Sun.

The case has outraged some opponents of software patents, who claim it is a textbook example of why software should not be patentable. [CNet News]

I haven't had time to look at these patents yet but I do agree that on the surface this seems like a pretty scary case -- is it likely that Java is the only important industry technology that could be held to infringe on this set of patents? No, it seems more likely that this could be just an opening salvo.

A couple of links about the debates

The best explanation seen to date on why some people, such as myself, are drawn to Bush despite Kerry's likely intellectual superiority. And it's totally fair-minded, not giving Bush (or Kerry) more credit than he deserves. An article by David Brooks in the NY Times. Registration required, but it's free, and you can keep on getting Times articles in the future once it's done.

The truly essential resource: FactCheck.org. What about the 100,000 "trained" troops Bush referred to? Well, referring to them as trained troops might be a little more than a tad optimistic. They've had 3 weeks of training... On the other hand it has been elsewhere disputed that most of them exist at all, and FactCheck.org seems to settle that question. As well as plenty of others on other subjects.