MSN Hijacking

I would normally use the term “phishing”, but there’s no impersonation involved here.

The website mycoolfriends.info asks you to “Login” with your MSN details so they can inform you about “this 100% real and upcomming [sic] service”. For the love of God, don’t. Funnily enough, reading a bit more will give the full details.

We may temporarily access your MSN account to do a combination of the following:

1. Send Instant Messages to your friends promoting this site.
2. Introduce new entertaining sites to your friends via Instant Messages.

In other words, we’ll take your username and password, login to your MSN when you’re not signed-in, and then proceed to spam your contacts with ringtone “offers” (quotation marks because they are the usual subscription services that charge stupid amounts for a crumby ringtone you could get by putting an MP3 on your phone).

Whatever you do people, never ever enter your password onto a site that isn’t meant to have it and without reading the full terms and conditions. This is a cruel tactic by a bunch of morons who are hijacking MSN accounts to try and make money. Don’t help them.

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Top 4 things bands have put on their websites

1. Moby - Free music for free films

Haven’t tried this one, but a genius idea. Not everyone can compile something like the Garden State soundtrack, so it’s nice to see a well known artist providing something like this.

2. Foo Fighters - Tabs

It’s impossible to find decent accurate tabs on the internet, and I don’t remember the last time I saw sheet music in the shops. Not sure how official this is, but it’s linked to on their site so it counts.

3. Bruce Springsteen - Set lists

Why oh why don’t more artists do this?! People are forever looking for set lists on the internet, so compiling them on the artist website is a really handy reminder for the fans

4. Death Cab for Cutie - Band gear

Interesting to see what the band uses, even if it’s not especially useful (I would kill for a set of Ludwig drums with Paiste Series 20 cymbals, but a. I’m not good enough and b. I’d have to sell my family). Interpol’s list is floating around on Wikipedia, but isn’t on their site.

Any more favourites from band websites that you don’t tend to find elsewhere?

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Music for Web Designers?

I just saw the following advert on Facebook

One problem: never, ever, ever use music on a website. Videos, fine. Films, of course. Websites, no. When someone watches a video, they watch that video only and don’t concentrate on anything else. The same goes for a film. When I visit a website, I’m likely to have six different ones open at once. I don’t want them all singing to me.

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Flickr Lolcats

For those who have been following the Lolcat craze (for the uninitiated, essentially pictures of cats with badly spelt captions), I just logged on to Flickr and was presented with this:

Genius.

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Script Frenzy | Your ticket to creative adventure

Script Frenzy | Your ticket to creative adventure

From the randomly generated plot machine half-way down the page:

Dressed as Liberace, a flock of radioactive parrots gets mistaken for Elton John and goes with it.

’nuff said.

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souldrift.net Relaunched

Sarah has relaunched souldrift.net as a more general blog, although all her old music posts are included. Looks promising, with a thoughtful article on feminism as a start.

Disclosure: Sarah published a short review of Interpol’s “Our Love to Admire” written by me.

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LawPath

Comments are heavily encouraged for this post.

3 reasons:

1. Law students are thrown into their first year of a completely new subject, and then in the following year are expected to return and start applying to law firms for vacation placements. This is tough.
2. There’s no proper place to collectively panic about this, and there’s no place to collect all the legal happenings in the UK in a proper manner.
3. Rob needs a new web project.

This is entirely concept at the moment, but you get the gist of it. Ideas in the comments or on the new temporary blog. What I need to know is, what exactly do people want from this sort of website? I don’t mean just law students either: what would any student want from this sort of site?

Note that LawPath is a temporary name while I try and think of something better.

The current format will be a website with logins and accounts. It will start as a news website, similar to Newsvine but less complex and with the stories divided into their appropriate legal sections. This will then expand to talk of vacation placements and training contracts, before moving on to the law course (LLB or BA) itself.

Let me know what you think!

N.B. If you like the idea of this project and have a website, please feel free to mention it on your site. The more comments and feedback I can get the better! Thanks!

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AppleInsider | NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing

Warning: Rambling tech post ahead.

AppleInsider | NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing

“We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99,” he said. “We made that offer for months and they said no.”

NBC misses the point completely here.

To illustrate:

An iPod is the complete opposite of a printer. My printer for example, an Epson Photo R220, was bought for roughly £40. If you want to buy a complete set of ink cartridges for it, that will set you back around £30. The printer came with a set of cartridges, so that puts the value of my printer at roughly £10. Possibly the stupidest pricing model ever conceived, but one that makes Epson a fortune.

The iPod on the other hand, is quite an expensive bit of kit (iPod Classic Black 80Gb - £152 from Amazon), but the songs are incredibly cheap at 79p each.

You get the impression, even if it is just an illusion, that once you have an Apple product such as an iPod, Apple do actually care about you as a consumer. They want you to be able to say “I just heard this really cool song, I can go and buy it now for less than a quid”. NBC are clearly in it for the short term money.

Apple don’t rely on the necessity that something like a printer imposes. I need ink for my printer to work. I don’t need iTunes music to run my iPod (although it’s always a big plus).

Television episodes are the same, if not worse. You can watch an episode of Scrubs on television and think it was awesome (and you’d probably be right), and then go and pay to download a different episode which was terrible. You don’t want to risk wasting money on a bad episode. Whilst you might get potentially hooked on a series, it’s pretty unlikely your work depends on it.

NBC appear to be working on the basis that users will just pay for episodes which they’ve missed and jacking the cost up won’t affect the number of sales.

Yes it will, and more to the point, people won’t trust Apple and NBC. Apple have other products to sell, which is why they want to gain the trust of their customers with pricing that reflects what they’re selling. It’s partly because of trust that people like me will get an iPod and then consider getting a MacBook.

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Ron Paul

It might be appropriate to say a few words about the internet’s new political obsession, Ron Paul.

He appears to have been getting a lot of coverage lately in his campaign as well as having truly phenomenal support on the internet. This, as 1066 And All That would say, is a good thing. As far as I can tell he seems fairly rational, and pretty much anything is better than the current state of things.

Even better is the way in which the internet campaign has picked-up momentum. Take from his own website, Ron Paul’s reference to:

our Revolution

Quite.

Arguably the internet is one of the most free forms of media available in that anyone can contribute. Essentially, it is like one giant Wikipedia without having to conform to strict facts and with opinions. Some have pointed to the technophiles who have taken part in the campaign so far and argue that their dominance over the issue isn’t a truly democratic representation. Perhaps not. But, there are a lot of politically minded people who aren’t technophiles and have their say on the internet. To ignore what’s going on would be fairly daft.

Nevertheless, there is a different cause for concern. For the moment, no spam comments have gotten through onto this site due to moderation and Akismet, but I just received one which was the usual incomprehensible nonsense and a link to an article praising Ron Paul.

I’m not for one second saying that this is indicative of all his supporters, but the fact that people will try and spam as part of the campaign should be worrying for both supporters and foes of Ron Paul. The internet is a very free medium, but that means it is open to abuse.

Perhaps what this is more a sign of is the zealous way in which the internet campaign is being run. The campaign is easily dominating talk of the future presidential elections, and good for the supporters, but they need to be careful that it doesn’t become intimidating. Just because enough people vote a Ron Paul story up on Digg doesn’t mean they’ll vote for him at an election. The incredible support for Ron Paul might well be one of the most damaging things to happen to his campaign.

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Safari 3 for Windows

I’m working on a new PHP project temporarily nicknamed Cobalt, and have just been messing about with the layout in IE and Firefox. For fairness, I also downloaded and installed the new Safari 3 for Windows and tested it in that.

Suffice to say, apologies to Safari users, but Cobalt’s going to look terrible in Safari. They’ve done something really weird and despite 15 minutes of messing about with one header I still can’t get it to work properly with all three browsers.

To be fair, fonts look a lot nicer and are more readable in Safari, but it doesn’t quite seem as standards-compliant as it claims to be.

Anyone else tried this thing? Looks like the speed claims have also been exaggerated as the content for the Apple homepage loads faster in Firefox.

EDIT: It’s still not as bad as Internet Explorer

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