Gizmodo: surprise

New iPhone Comes Loaded with Photos of the Girl Who Made It

Adam Frucci — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:30:00 EDT

We've seen pictures from the factory coming loaded on new iPhones before, but this is the first time we've seen what appear to be intentional snapshots loaded on a new iPhone. Surprise: the person who put your iPhone together is a cute girl!

The photos were found on a new iPhone shipped to the UK, and one of the pictures was even set as the home screen. Aaaaaaadorable! [MacRumors Forums]

Warner Music Profits and the Sky Are Down, Digital Sales and Pigs Are Up

Matt Buchanan — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:15:15 EST

As much we like to joke about the new music economy stripping rappers of their fourth Bentley and downgrading their 60-inch plasmas to 42-inchers, Warner Music actually did take a hard beating this past quarter, losing almost $7 million in profit versus last year's—more than half, for a take of $5 million. While profits were down, digital sales shot up 25 percent to pull in $130 million, though that didn't particularly mollify the industry-wide 14 percent plunge in CD sales this year. Raise your hand if you're shocked, shocked.

To go all Energizer bunny and keep beating the drum, the only way they're going to right the ship to continuing sailing on oceans of green is take their own CEO's diatribe on the piss-poor state of the industry to heart. His past remarks show he's clearly less clueless than the CEO of the largest record label, and he's managed to keep Warner as the only Big Four label still publicly traded.

On the other hand, for all his acuity, perhaps what he really needs is some common sense and maybe some face-time with us common folk consumers who just wanna be able to buy his product with reasonable terms (no DRM) at decent prices. [Yahoo!/Reuters, Flickr]

"Toolkit" MPAA Offers Schools to Monitor File-Sharing Traffic More Like a Rootkit

Matt Buchanan — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:15:44 EST

The MPAA is such a kind and giving organization. After compiling a list of the top 25 schools for piracy, it sent them a letter last month offering the free, super-helpful University Toolkit to track naughty file-sharing on their networks. It "can produce a report that is strictly internal and therefore confidential to illustrate the level of file sharing on [your school's] network. In addition, we will send a hard copy in the near future to your university's Chief Information Officer." Of course, the first thing it does is call home. That's before the security holes.

The toolkit's actually a modified version of xubuntu rolled up with some network monitoring tools like Snort, which "captures detailed information about all traffic flowing across a network" and ntop, which makes pretty graphs from the data produced by Snort.

After you install it, it sets up an Apache Web server that uploads all of the data and graphs to a web page that displays "not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited." The kicker is that unless it's properly firewalled, the page is open to anyone and easily Googlable if you know the kit's URL conventions. Yet the MPAA's overview explicitly promises "No privacy issues—the content of traffic is never examined or displayed."

It gets better. The person who installs the toolkit isn't prompted to setup a user/pass to block access to the site, and the default setting is to not log outsider views of the page. Like, say, the MPAA's people. And even with the firewall blocking outsiders, tech-savvy university students can still sneak peaks.

To be fair, the MPAA's Craig Winter emphasizes

It can tell you how much traffic is going back and forth on BitTorrent [a popular file-sharing service], but it can't see what's in those files or what the names of those files are, and it doesn't communicate anything back to the Internet.

On the upside, no schools appear to have blindly installed it, and are still "poking and prodding it." You know, I almost admire the MPAA's persistence, if only they weren't such assholes about it. [WaPo's Security Fix via Techdirt, Flickr]

SoundExchange Possibly Overstepping Its Bounds With Illegal Lobbying

Matt Buchanan — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:25:26 EDT

It looks like internet radio's favorite fee-collection organization, SoundExchange, might be playing hard and fast with legal limits on how it can spend collected money. Not on the list of three kosher uses (full legal mumbo-jumbo post-jump) is lobbying and PR. But Listening Post's Eliot Van Buskirk noticed that it appears to be engaged in both.

Under Section 114(g)(3) of the Copyright Act, it's only allowed to use the money for

(A) the administration of the collection, distribution, and calculation of the royalties;

(B) the settlement of disputes relating to the collection and calculation of the royalties; and

(C) the licensing and enforcement of rights with respect to the making of ephemeral recordings and performances subject to licensing under section 112 and this section, including those incurred in participating in negotiations or arbitration proceedings under section 112 and this section, except that all costs incurred relating to the section 112 ephemeral recordings right may only be deducted from the royalties received pursuant to section 112.

Yet, it's a member and financier of the musicFIRST coalition (fairness in radio starting today), a PR group which aims to end the "free ride" regular radio stations get by not paying performance royalties (satellite radio already does and net broadcasters might soon).

Despite my lack of a law degree, I'm pretty sure none of musicFIRST's activities are listed in those provisions. But organizations connected to the music industry specialize in creative legal interpretations (they represent artists after all), so I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for that. [Listening Post]

AppleStore is Down Now, Expect One More Thing

Addy Dugdale — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:02:08 EDT

While everyone is following up His Steveness as he booms everyone with Leopard, the AppleStore is now down. Could this mean new hardware? Holographic displays for the new "holograph" mode in iChat? Magic teleporter with polarity inverter? Ninja sex-bots at last? We can only hope.

It may be just be pre-orders for Leopard, who knows. In any case, we will see really soon now. –Jesus Diaz

Update: The keynote is finished with no new hardware. The AppleStore is still down, so it's probably just for Leopard pre-orders.

Update 2: It's up. Changes? Yes: new Leopard look for the store and the whole Apple site.