Cool Tech Reviews

I couldn’t resist stealing much of the title from Michael Arrington’s Barenaked Ladies: New Album. Free. No DRM. Now.

I’ve been writing about the Amie Street music site since their launch last July. Their model has the potential to disrupt the music industry from the bottom up: Bands and labels upload music, which is downloadable in DRM-free MP3 format. The price always starts at free, and as more people download the song, the price starts to rise, eventually hitting $.98. Higher priced songs are by definition more popular, and I’ve found that anything over $.50 or so is pretty good music. 70% of proceeds go to the band/label, and Amie Street keeps the rest.

This pretty clever for two reasons. First, even at $0.98 the price per track is fine compared to iTunes or the Zune Marketplace, particularly since there is no annoying digital rights management to keep you from playing the MP3 wherever you want. From What is Amie Street:

Are there any restrictions on the music I buy from Amie Street? Can I play it on my iPod?

* We have no DRM on our mp3’s, so once you buy them, they’re yours. Put them on your iPod, your computer, a CD you made for road trips, or anything else you can come up with. Come up with something good? Send us a picture. The best we’ve gotten so far is an MP3 playing on a “digital” refrigerator.

The second reason makes a strength out of adversity. The major record labels are deeply mired in DRM, so it will only be the smaller, independent labels that put their music on Amie Street. The novel pricing scheme encourages users to download and try new music from the lesser known groups and labels. It’s a win for them as the good stuff gets discovered quickly and eventually rises to the full $0.98 price.

As for the free Barenaked Ladies I promised, the Barenaked Ladies are a moderately well known group published by the Nettwerk Group who has just agreed to put their whole library on Aime Street. Their latest album, Barenaked Ladies Are Men, was just released on Aime Street, but the tracks aren’t free anymore due to the number of downloads. However as I write this some are still below the $.98 max. Probably not for long though.

A number of tech news sites are reporting that AOL will offer 30 movies for free download starting at 6 AM EST on Saturday, Dec. 2. For example, BetaNews:

AOL said Thursday that it would offer 30 movies to users of its AOL Video portal at no cost as a holiday gift. The titles, which would include recent releases like Spiderman 2 and holiday favorites like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation normally sell for $9.99 to $19.99 USD. Users would be limited to one movie download, and would have 24 hours beginning at 6:00am ET on December 2 to download it.

The movies would be delivered in Windows Media format, and require a Windows XP computer running Internet Explorer and Windows Media 10 in order to view them. Once downloaded, the user would be able to view the file offline, as well as on one other PC and two Windows Media-compatible portable devices.

The only difficulty is that I can’t find a direct mention of the offer at the AOL Video site. On the other hand, searching for “Free Today Only” currently turns up 77 results (some are previews) including the movies mentioned above that say “When you download today, your credit card will NOT be charged.” Since there’s a day and half to go before the free offer starts, I’m a bit confused or the folks at AOL are.

In any case, the point for AOL is undoubtedly to get you to sign up and register the credit card that they won’t charge in hopes that you will eventually want something for which they can charge you. Caveat emptor, but if you see a movie you like, nothing beats free.

Matthew Broersma at ZDNet UK:

Hacktivismo, a well-known group of human-rights advocates and computer security experts, this week officially released a Firefox-based browser designed to allow anonymous Web surfing.

The browser, called Torpark, is a modified version of Portable Firefox, and can be run directly from a USB drive, meaning it can be used on public terminals in cybercafés. The browser creates an encrypted connection to the TOR (The Onion Router) network, which supplies a succession of different IP addresses. The browser is available here.

“Torpark causes the IP address seen by the Web site to change every few minutes, to frustrate eavesdropping and mask the requesting source,” said Hacktivismo in a statement. For example, a user could be in London and Web sites would see an IP address from a university in Germany, or other addresses belonging to the TOR network.

The browser is the work of Hacktivismo, which operates under the aegis of the influential hacking group the Cult of the Dead Cow. Developers said the browser is different from other anonymous browsers, such as Anonymizer or SecretSurfer, in that it doesn’t cost anything and is small and portable.

There’s more on The Onion Router Network here and as always, you need to have some idea of what is really going on:

The Torpark browser uses encryption to send data over The Onion Router, a worldwide network of servers nicknamed “Tor” set up to transfer data to one another in a random, obscure fashion.

Internet traffic, such as Web site requests, carries information on where it came from and where it’s going. But that’s muddled using Tor, which has been endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and is hard to trace back to a source.

One minor downside is that surfing with Torpark is slower than with a typical browser over the same connection.

Torpark cautions that data sent from the last Tor server to the Web site is unencrypted. Since only the user’s connection is anonymous, Torpark advises that sensitive data such as username and passwords should only be used when the browser displays a golden padlock, a sign that a Web site is using encryption.

Not everyone needs anonymous browsing but for those that do, Torpark is an excellent option.

Last week when we mentioned the upcoming “free” music service, SpiralFrog, they had just inked a deal with Vivendi Universal to offer downloads of the music from their list. Now SpiralFrog has added EMI to their catalog:

SpiralFrog has reached an agreement with EMI Music Publishing, one of the largest music publishers in the world, to use its songs and lyrics for a music download service scheduled to roll out in a beta version by November.

SpiralFrog, which announced its first deal with Universal Music Group last week, plans to offer free song downloads, with the service funded through advertising.

“This is just the start of signing major labels and music publishers to offer their catalogs to the users of SpiralFrog,” said Neville Hobson, SpiralFrog spokesman.
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It’s planned that songs will be playable on a user’s computer and transferable to two portable devices.

But the songs can’t be burned to a CD, and they can’t be shared with other people, he said. The songs will remain playable only as long as a person regularly logs into their SpiralFrog account.
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SpiralFrog’s deal with EMI will also allow users to search and display the lyrics from EMI’s catalog, the companies said.

EMI holds more than one million copyrights, it said, and publishes artists including James Blunt, Eminem, Jay-Z and the Arctic Monkeys.

As I mentioned last week, I’m suspending judgement until I see how onerous the ads are. I guess I’m finding it hard to believe that the record labels are leaving any money on the table. Whatever the SpiralFrog plan, though, it seems to be music to the record labels’ ears.

Mark McSherry at Reuters:

SpiralFrog, a new music download service, on Tuesday said it would make Vivendi’s Universal Music Group’s catalog available for free legal downloading in the United States and Canada.

The new advertising-supported service, due to launch later this year, joins the ranks of rivals battling for a piece of the digital music market in the shadow of Apple Computer Inc’s dominant iTunes music store.

New York-based SpiralFrog said it would offer users of its free, Web-based service the ability to legally download music of Universal’s roster, which includes U2, Gwen Stefani and The Roots.

“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” SpiralFrog Chief Executive Robin Kent said in a statement.

Kent said SpiralFrog’s business model is based on sharing income from advertising with content partners like Universal.

The company’s research revealed that consumers are willing to “pay” for their content by watching non-intrusive, contextually-relevant, targeted advertising, Kent said.

The SpiralFrog Web site won’t be ready to serve tunes until December, but it will be interesting to see how they define non-intrusive. The record companies are very insistent on getting their money so SpiralFrog is going to have to ensure that the ads get watched.

Update: Some pertinent details from Louis Hau at Forbes:

There’s a catch, of course. Actually two of them: First, consumers won’t be able to burn songs downloaded from SpiralFrog onto a blank CD. More important, all downloads will be formatted in Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio, or WMA, format. That means they’ll be playable on virtually any portable music player except the one that matters most: Apple Computer’s market-dominating iPod.

Well, you’ll be able to play them on your Windows PC at least.

Update 8/30: More details from Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch:

Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker - you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads.

Sounds like the ads are getting more intrusive by the second.

Spiral Frog will also offer far more than just music, but also video and other digital content. The selling point here is that users will be able to access media legally, without the malware, bad network connections and pirate’s shame that comes from other online media sources.

Well, it’s a dream.

From the Sophos Web site:

Removing rootkits without compromising system integrity is particularly challenging and needs to be done with care. Our free software, Sophos Anti-Rootkit, finds and removes any rootkit that is hidden on your computer.
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Using Sophos Anti-Rootkit is straightforward. Whether you use its simple graphical user interface or run it from the command line you can easily detect and eliminate any rootkits on your computer.

Get more information and download it by following the link.