New iTunes steals your ability to turn Apple music into iPod-friendly MP3s: or does it?

New iTunes steals your ability to turn Apple music into iPod-friendly MP3s:

Cory Doctorow: If you’re thinking of downgrading to the new iTunes, stop! The new iTunes breaks the ability to convert the music you’ve bought — even “DRM-free” songs sold at a 30 percent premium — into MP3s that will play on your iPod.

I dunno. I just converted a track I converted from iTunes to iTunes Plus into an mp3 and I don’t see what I’m being warned about. For one thing, as reported elsewhere, the new files have your name encoded in their meta data (I expect there is a simple text replacement to be done there, to replace your name with “Steve Jobs” or “Edgar Bronfman.”) I see that just fine. Don’t like it all that much.

But the mp3 doesn’t have that information.

white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/The Dukes of Stratosphear/Chips from the Chocolate Fireball paul$ strings 13\ Shiny\ Cage.mp3 | grep name
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/The Dukes of Stratosphear/Chips from the Chocolate Fireball paul$ strings 13\ Shiny\ Cage.m4a | grep name
namePaul Beard

I wonder if there is a clean way to transcode these files to remove any other identifying cruft.

And curiously, because I sometimes do things I don’t expect to work, I tried converting this week’s iTunes free single to mp3: it’s doing it right now, no warning, no problem.

white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/The Kooks/Ooh La – Single of the Week paul$ file *
01 Ooh La.m4a: MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding file (AAC)
01 Ooh La.mp3: MP3 file with ID3 version 2.2.0 tag
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/The Kooks/Ooh La – Single of the Week paul$ strings * | grep name
namePaul Beard

Go figure. Looks like another arms race issue to me.

divide and conquer

Junk Science: DDT:

So, in a nutshell: the WHO was about to undertake an initiative that would have harmed the tobacco companies. The tobacco companies, in turn, hired shills to attack the WHO. They presumably hired some to attack the WHO’s tobacco initiative, but they also hired people to attack other things the WHO was doing in order to discredit it more generally. Thus, the attack on Rachel Carson.

The real heavy lifting is here. What won’t these people do for money?

not content with being king: he wants to be emperor

Georgie Anne Geyer: A spreading terror | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Opinion: Viewpoints:

[I]n the long-established Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, out of the blue arose a new al Qaeda-related insurgent group, Fatah al-Islam. Within days and even hours, the recurring hell of the Middle East was loosed, and refugees poured out of the camp in terror.

There had been none of this kind of terror networking in these northern camps. Indeed, since this camp was established in 1949 to accommodate refugees from northern Palestine after the creation of Israel, it has housed one of the more formal and conservative of peoples.

But it was soon established that these new “insurgents” or “terrorists” – or whatever they really are – had arrived at the camp only recently, that they marched in one day with brand-new weapons, ready to fight.

Two points grip you:

•The first is found in the words of French scholar Bernard Rougier, author of Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon. “The main point is that these camps are no longer part of Palestinian society,” he told The Washington Post . “They are only spaces – now open to all of the influences running through the Muslim world.”

•The second is that Iraq, where we were supposed to be “containing terrorism,” is now clearly exporting insurgents to other regions – to Lebanon, to Syria, to Gaza, to Bangladesh, to Kurdistan.

And so, on the one hand, you have weakened societies vulnerable to the “new answers” of “new insurgencies,” and on the other hand, you have Iraq set up as a school for terrorists with American troops and policy providing the constant inspiration for their fight.

Read it and weep. The bottom line is that, as you may have heard, the administration claims that Iraq needs a long-term US presence like the Korean peninsula has enjoyed for the past 50 years. First, the largest embassy, now a permanent US deployment.

experiences in iTunes Plus

iTunes Plus is the new DRM-free offering from the iTunes Music Store: EMI has agreed to sell — rather than license — unencumbered tracks from its artists, at a higher bitrate and a higher price. The ones I got today are encoded at 256 kbits : the price differential is $.30/track or 30% of the album’s price. Once you enable iTunes Plus, your purchase history is sifted for eligible tracks and you get the opportunity to upgrade.

If you haven’t yet taken a look, you need to go to your iTunes Store account and enable iTunes Plus as a feature, but once you do, take a look at what’s on offer.

Obscure artists like Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones have stuff available in DRM-free versions (Dark Side of the Moon for $7.99? May as well, if you don’t have it already. Likewise Sticky Fingers for $9.99). So it’s not like no one will find anything worth buying in the new format.

And the idea that you can replace your DRM-enshackled tracks with free (like beer) versions is a good one: I did that just to encourage good behavior.

I’d like to know what the uptake on this is: are people flocking to Apple’s store to buy unencumbered tracks? I know I am seeing network issues getting the upgraded tracks I bought, so perhaps there is a rush.

So Apple is making a little money re-selling stuff they already sold (perhaps: the increased bandwidth charge for bigger files — assuming they are encoded at higher bitrates — may eat into that). EMI should see some increased sales, if the DRM-loathing hordes put their money where their mouths are.

The best is the enemy of the good, but perhaps, with patience and perseverance, the best will come to pass.

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does this country deserves its heroes, unsung or otherwise?

Imagine having risked your life to go undercover for your country as a CIA operative and then having to listen to the likes of Jonah Goldberg, Fred Barnes and company belittle your work by falsely insulting you as a “desk jockey” and acting as though you were nothing but a worthless file clerk, all in order to protect the Leader and assure his followers that they did nothing wrong.

Glenn Greenwald, doing the work of any number of newspaper ombudsmen/public editors, documents the atrocities that pass for journalism these days.

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