Want a good offer on music? Use Opera!

While Opera users sometimes find sites that discriminates them due to bad browser sniffers, the music site eMusic seems to make its own twist on the situation: According to this article on about.com, eMusic presents different offers depending on which browser you use, and which OS. Opera users get the best offer, and Firefox users the least.

How long will this situation last, now that it’s brought forward in the news? No idea. Maybe I should go and have a look? With Opera, of course.

Hmmm – just had a look. I didn’t get such a good offer as the article writes about, so it may be changed already – but I haven’t tested with other browsers.

UPDATE: It seems to be completely random after all, not dependent on which browser you have. I just saw the same thing mentioned on Opera Watch, and the comments there show very different results.

New browser versions means new information – or?

New versions and updates of the good browsers seem to appear regulary. This may mean aded features, bigs been ironed out, smoother operation – in short, better browsers. Ideally, these changes should be reflected in at least reviews of the different browsers, which in turn may be a part in forming opinions. The question is then: How up to date are the reviewers?

In the online edition of the Indianapolis Star, I read an article dated yesterday about different alternatives to IE, and how it could be nice to try them and make the switch away from IE. A nice, well-informed article that doesn’t try to claim that a browser switch is the end to all problems. However, there were one little detail about one browser, that stated something wrong.

The browser is Opera, the statement was about the banner ads in the free version, and that to get rid f them you’d have to pay $40. This used to be true, but Opera has been completely free without any banner ads for some time now, so an article dated January 22, 2006 should reflect that. On the positive side, those banners were the only negative things said about the browser, so as they’re gone…

Anyway, I mailed the author a friendly (I hope) little correction, but it made me think a bit more about this: How many people base their opinions of the current version of Opera, based on what they know of a previous version, maybe even a much older version? When we see what people write on discussion forums and in comments on blogs, it may be quite a few. This is why I think it should be important that those who write reviews and articles and such are careful not to get anything wrong – there may be a “the newspaper said it, so it must be correct”-effect.

Maybe it will be easier when Opera 9 is released?

A call to boycot CDs

David Byrne is a musician. As a musician, the DRM-schemes are set out to protect his CDs from being pirated, so that he won’t lose any money. Thus, he must love DRM, right?

Well – maybe not. In his journal, he start the latest entry by encouraging us to not buy CDs from the Big 5, because of DRM. Doesn’t sound like he’s too fond of DRM, does it? Quite the opposite, he thinks that it ruins everything for everyone, and ponders about the record companies:

So, first they start off suing their customers, and now they are maliciously making it hard for their customers to even listen to music, and they will cripple your music and media player to boot. These guys deserve to go out of business, they obviously don’t love music, and they don’t understand their own customers. They must have a deathwish or be run by….who? FEMA? Rumsfeld? Bin Laden?

Of course, as we’ve seen, he’s not alone in thinking that.

Browserstats – reliable?

I got to think a bit about this topic after yet another debate about browser statistics, and how Opera may be under represented or not, and how good the statistics programs are at measuring actual use. Well, the one thing that is certain, is that the statistics collected says something about the traffic to those sites, and may give an indication about the traffic to other sites – but what sites are the numbers collected from?

I don’t know what sites are used as basis. I don’t know the location of them either – they could be spread evenly around the world, or mainly in one part of the world. Does it matter? It may.

It’s said that wile Opera doesn’t have that many users in USA, it’s popular in Europe, Russia and Japan. If the web sites that the statistics are collected from are evenly spread around the world, this doesn’t mean anything. However, if the majority of the sites are based in USA, with mainly visitors from USA, then the numbers are skewed.

I set up a small, easy case, completely at random:
There are two areas, A and B, with 100.000 users (of browsers) each.
There are 100 websites, each with 10.000 visits: 10 in area A, 90 in area B.
People visit only the sites in the area where they’re based.
There are 3 browsers: Speeder, Skimmer and Stumbler.
The percentage of users of the various browsers differ by the areas.

I set up a table:

Area: A Area: B Total
Users 100.000 100.000 200.000
Speeder 10,0% 1,0% 5,5%
Skimmer 15,0% 10,0% 12,5%
Stumbler 75,0% 89,0% 82,0%
Web sites 10 90 100
Number of visits
Speeder 10.000 (10,0%) 9.000 (1,0%) 19.000 (1,9%)
Skimmer 15.000 (15,0%) 90.000 (10,0%) 105.000 (10,5%)
Stumbler 75.000 (75,0%) 801.000 (89,0%) 876.000 (87,6%)

Now, we see that the statistics collected from the sites show a different percentage of users on the browsers than the actual numbers. Thus, we see it would be necessary to know more than just that number to tell what the statistics actually says.

Had the number of websites used to collect the statistics been evenly spread, with 50 in each area, the statistics would have shown the real usage.

Back in the real world, the interesting question isn’t whether Opera is under counted for some reason, or Firefox over counted, or something like that. The interesting questions are: What sites are used to collect the data for the statistics? Where are they based, and where are their visitors based? Are users from certain areas more likely to use certain browsers than visitors from other areas?

It’s a lot of questions, but necessary to see whether the figures are skewed or not.

DRM

DRM is:
Digital Rights Management (Whose rights?)
Digital Restrictions Management (It certainly restrits me from doing what I want with my own property.)
Digital Rights Mismanagement (Now we’re talking about my rights – but not my management.)
Disastrous Rootkit Mistake (Indeed!)
Digital Restraining Methods (That’s the whole point, right?)
Delibrately Ruined Music (The reality.)
Dense, Retarded Mindset (Just to sum it up.)

With the continuing saga of the Sony Rootkit blunder going the rounds on internet and other media, DRM is being scrutinised again. But, what is DRM?

No matter which words we’d like to substitute the letters in DRM with, it’s all about one thing: Control. Not protection from piracy, but control – a lot of control. First of all, it’s control over competitors: If you can control which equipment your music can be played on, or ripped to, you can prevent your customers from using your competitors equipment, be it CD players, mp3 players or whatever. And what do we get then? “You can’t rip our CDs to your mp3 player from our competitor? Too bad – you’d better ask our competitor to fix their stuff then.” Replace relevant words and passages with Sony, iPod and Apple, if you like.

Fun isn’t it, to have to take into consideration which music player you can play which music on? Following the above aspect of DRM to its end, we’d have to buy different equipment to play music from the different providers – and we don’t need too much of an imagination to see how this will be: It’s here already! Buy music from iTunes, and you need an iPod. Buy from a different music store, which provides DRM’ed music in WMA format, and you need a different player. And so on.

Technically, there’s nothing in the way of it all being playable in all players – but there are obstacles put in the way for you and for the competitors. But that’s not all – when you’ve got the music, you’re not allowed to do all what you might like with it. Different DRM schemes varies, restricting you in different ways. You may discover that you can’t make a backup of your music files, that you can’t mix your own party CDs, can’t play in the car stereo, or brand new home entertainment studio – if you’re real unlucky your equipment may even be damaged – sharing with friends are out of question of course, and – well.

What happened to our rights as consumers? They’re soon gone, if this continue. Who will benefit from this? After all, it’s all justified with the artists and how they risk being deprived of their income if there’s no DRM, as otherwise they would be pirated rampantly.

Not all artists see it this way; more and more feel that pissing off their fans – who don’t like DRM – is worse than letting more people learn about their music through sharing for free. Several studies have shown that this usually is an advantage for the artists, and that the sharers buy more music, not less. And artists have experienced renewed interest in their older albums from new fans, due to the sharing.

The exception seems to be the top artists that are heaviy marketed by the music companies.

So if it’s not the artists that benefit from DRM, it may be the record companies? Many seem to think so, and that DRM is a way to hold off the inevitable change that the internet and broadband has brought about, so they can keep their current business model. DRM may help for a while, at the expense of us – the consumers. Because as we see, DRM is a way to let others make decisions on our behalf about what we can do with what we buy (not just music, even if that’s the example here.)

So, what can we do about it? There are two alternatives:

  1. If having others control what you can do with what you’ve bought and own, by all means, buy DRM’ed music and other DRM’ed stuff; e-books, films, and more. This is saying “I don’t mind transferring control over my stuff to you, and pay you for it.”
  2. If you want to decide for yourself what you can do with your stuff, don’t buy into DRM. It can be hard if your favourite artists are released with DRM, but maybe it would help writing to those artists, saying you won’t buy their albums if they’re DRM’ed? Artists want people to buy and enjoy their albums, not alienate them and turn them away. Previously DRM’ed albums may be rereleased without DRM – I believe this happened with Switchfoot.

Personally, I’m going with the second option.

I’d like the full text, please

Up until now, I’ve just served part of the full text in the feeds from this blog, so that you would have to visit to read it all. Why did I do it this way? Well – I’m not sure… Getting visits to my pages are nice of course, and there’s always chances you’d see and try links to other parts of my site, maybe even the store (which I of course heartfully recommend ;))

Then again, if you should become interested in what I have to write, you’d have to read it first, and to be tempted to read me you’d better get a real taste, and… Well – from now on, it’s full text feed. I hope you’ll enjoy.

Opera’s New Year Celebration: Wow!

New Year in Times SquareWow. Just… Wow! we knew that Opera planned a surprise for the new year – a big surprise – but I guess the surprise is bigger than most of us could think. One user in the Opera community will, together with a guest, spend New Year in New York, and tickets to the ABC New Year’s Eve party. And not only that: Said Opera user will have his/her face shown on the ABC SuperSign in Times Square!

Old and new members of the Opera community have the chance of being picked, so hurry up. If you haven’t converted to Opera yet, go download it (and use it, of course ;)) become a member in the community, and upload your picture and hope to be picked. (Or beg, or try to convince everyone in some way that you are the one that deserve this.) You have 9 days.

72 Hidden Bands

Image where 72 bands are hidden
This seem to be all over the place now, but as far as I can see, the image linked to is very often the wallpaper at Virgin Digital – and this lacks some vital hints at the left, where the image is cut off. So, I cloned it back in.

Have a look at the high resloution picture, and see if you can find all 72 bands. (Hey, maybe it’s possible to find some that the artist(s) didn’t think of, too? ;))

That Sony rootkit – and its side effects

Not many days have passed since Sony got negative attention for its DRM protection of Copy Protected CDs, to which they were quickly issuing an update to remove it.Or – did they? The update is 3.5 MB, seems to update all the files, and leaves some more files there, according to Ed Felten, who had looked a bit closer at it:

The update is more than 3.5 megabytes in size, and it appears to contain new versions of almost all the files included in the initial installation of the entire DRM system, as well as creating some new files. In short, they’re not just taking away the rootkit-like function — they’re almost certainly adding things to the system as well. And once again, they’re not disclosing what they’re doing.

No doubt they’ll ask us to just trust them. I wouldn’t. The companies still assert — falsely — that the original rootkit-like software “does not compromise security” and “[t]here should be no concern” about it. So I wouldn’t put much faith in any claim that the new update is harmless. And the companies claim to have developed “new ways of cloaking files on a hard drive”. So I wouldn’t derive much comfort from carefully worded assertions that they have removed “the … component .. that has been discussed”.

But, there’s more – related to the rootkit, unrelated to the “fix”.

Use the rootkit to cheat other companies

Players of World of Warcraft don’t like the game makers, and the controversial tactics to avoid cheating in the game. (To my limited understanding – I don’t play it myself.) The program ‘Warden’ scans the players’ PCs, to make sure there’s no processes running tohelp cheating in the game.

Sony to the rescue – their rootkit DRM helps War of Worldcraft hackers to fool the Warden. After all, with the DRM rootkit installed, all that is needed to hide a process is to start the filename with $sys$ – right?