Category: media-and-expression
Hallam Foe bloggers film screener
On Thursday night I went along to the Hallam Foe screener which was opened to London bloggers. According to imdb.com the film is in post production and the summary goes something like this…
Hallam, a confused and sweetly old-fashioned teenager, has chosen an unusual way of following life on his father's estate – voyeurism. He convinced that his stepmother is responsible for his mother's suicide. His voyeurism becomes dangerous, but Hallam is eventually redeemed by love.
Anyway, I thought the film was excellent and really suprised me. When this hits the cinemas or picture houses I urge you all to see it. Good work Hugh.
Zune all about sharing of media?
I'm watching a video about the Microsoft Zune. Its quite interesting but there's not enough to make it much better than a ipod. The sharing has been talked about a lot but the thing which I think Microsoft missed is the loud speaker. Yes sure it would be very ignoying but its what the kids are doing with there phones now. And if the Zune is all about sharing, it would make sense to have a loud speaker too, imho.
2 hour special Cracker tonight (october 1st 2006)
Cracker is back for one more special episode. Hopefully to sort out that terriable mess of a special episode which they called White Ghost. The story line goes something like this.
Fitz returns to Manchester for his daughter's wedding, but is soon involved in another murder investigation when an American comedian is killed, apparently without motive.
Just incase you don't know what Cracker is, from Wikipedia
Fitz is a classic antihero, unfaithful to his wife, alcoholic, a chain smoker, overweight, addicted to gambling, manic, foulmouthed and sarcastic; and yet cerebral and excellent at his speciality: getting into the heads of violent criminals. As Fitz confesses in “Brotherly Love”: “I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble too much. I am too much.”
Moo’s Flickr minicards
Found via Ben Hammersley's blog
Moo.com's Flickr Minicards service has launched and lordy is it good. Get up to a 100 of your Flickr images on the front of business cards, for $20? 10 free for all Flickr Pro users?
Free did you say? Yes and you know what its better that free? Free delivery to the UK too. I've already ordered my cards and if there any good I might just go for a 100. I've been looking for something different to my normal BBC business card for a while now. Oh they have a Flickr pool if your interested in seeing more.
Games Gore on MobuzzTV
A future without DRM
I wasn't sure if I should title this post with a ! or ? So I decided to leave it for now. Anyway with DRM getting worst than ever according to BoingBoing, I found this post about Bittorrent's future without DRM a breeze of air. If you don't know, Bittorrent made a deal with a few movie studios to distribute there content across the bit torrent network. Then everyone shouted fowl because its content included Windows DRM. Well Bittorrent Inc have come out and said they see DRM as a current solution but they expect Add supported content will eventually win over.
The reason its bad for content providers is because typically a DRM ties a user to one hardware platform, so if I buy my all my music on iTunes, I cant take that content to another hardware environment or another operating platform. There are a certain number of consumers who will be turned off by that, especially people who fear that they may invest in a lot of purchases on one platform today and be frustrated later when they try to switch to another platform, and be turned off with the whole experience. Or some users might not invest in any new content today because theyre not sure if they want to have an iPod for the rest of their life.
Boing Boing Boing
Quick heads up to say Boing Boing is now also podcasting. Like Cory says, its sounds something like the round table conversation of This week in Tech and This week in Media. So far it sounds good except the sound levels need normialising, keep up the great work guys.
Windows Media DRM cracked, no one cares?
Well I've just installed Napster and tried out the Fairuse4WM application. I'm pleased to say it worked for me just fine. But you know what, browsing through Napster's quite small catalogue of dance music, I've quickly come to the conclusion that Cory and Derek are correct
Last night, I got a tip that the WM DRM was cracked; Endadget has now confirmed that the tool exists and works. While interesting news, it's rather irrelevant to online media services using WM DRM. Most users won't care about these decryption tools, not because the DRM is 'consumer-friendly,' but rather because there are already easily-accessible alternatives for acquiring unencrypted copies of practically any song or movie. Thus, users already could readily get around the DRM's unfriendly limits, without any actual decryption tool.
Its actually getting really tired thinking about new tunes to download. See, unlike a torrent site or something like last.fm, there's no creditable community recommendations. The Amazon like recommendations are ok but not actually very useful when finding new music because there based totally on artists. Anyways, the fact remains that Windows play for sure DRM is broken and easily taken apart. This in my mind is still quite amazing and proves that – #59, DRM does not work because the customer/user has the key, cipher and ciphertext in the player. Now Napster, MSN music, etc with there all you can eat pricing are the playing grounds of everyone with a little knowledge.
Steal this film – thePirateBay movie
Quoting from Torrent Freak
Steal this film is a series of documentaries about filesharing, and p2p networks. The first part is about the Piratebay, and their vision on the things that went down the end of May.
Steal this film has full details and a selection of torrent which can be used to download it in ipod, dvd and quicktime formats. I'm sure someone will transcode it into divx, xvid, mpeg4, etc soon.
In other Bittorrent news, Disney's very senior Anne Sweeney admits to downloading pirated desperate housewives. Yes and it turns out that, at that point she realised that she was also competing with Digital pirates. Oh did I mention there is a new version of Azureus too? Yum, yum!