Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive

Quick mental notes on the big three cloud file sharing/syncing services:


Dropbox: the incumbent, easiest to use, waaay more expensive than the newcomers, worst customer support, best cross-platform operation, depends on Amazon to keep the servers up. 

Skydrive: sort of clunky and Microsoftesque on OS X and iOS (I'm sure it's slicker on Win/Winmo), cheap, 25Gb free space is nice if you got in early. 

Google Drive: reasonably cheap, incredibly user-unfriendly, Google's Terms and Conditions are a privacy disaster, no iOS client (seriously, wtf?), feels like "beta 1" quality not a released product (hey, it's Google, what did you expect).

Google and Microsoft's offerings are cheap and unfriendly with a big company vibe. Dropbox is expensive with a small-company vibe and three vital features that Google and Microsoft haven't offered yet: 

LAN sync: with GDrive and Skydrive if I move 50gigs of data into the shared folder of my iMac, my iMac uploads that 50gigs into the cloud over my DSL connection and then my Macbook downloads that 50gigs from the cloud over my DSL connection and then my old PowerMac downloads that 50gigs from the cloud over my DSL connection. Dropbox will just copy the 50gigs to the other machines over the gigabit ethernet they're all plugged in to since they're all in the same room. 

Differential upload: with GDrive and Skydrive if I change one byte in an 8gig DVD image then that 8gigs gets uploaded into the cloud. Dropbox uploads the one byte. 

Get public link: right click on a file in Dropbox, get link for sharing with people. Killer feature that GDrive and Skydrive have omitted for some reason.

Steve Albini on "music piracy"

I reject the term "piracy." It's people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it's good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn't like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that's nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.

The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I'll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example.

There won't ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that's fine with me because that industry didn't operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That's fantastic.

Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.

Android US market share - imaginary?

Over the past few days, both comScore and NPD have put out data showing that Android still has a healthy hold on the U.S. smartphone market with their best market share numbers yet. According to comScore, Android controls 51 percent of the market. According to NPD, it’s more like 61 percent.

For comparison, Apple is the number two player with 30.7 percent of the market according to comScore, and 29 percent according to NPD.

On the surface, there’s one big glaring problem with these numbers. Actual sales data from the three largest carriers in the U.S. doesn’t seem to back up the comScore and NPD numbers. At all.
...
(The) rapid swing in favor of the iPhone seems to have exposed some serious flaws in the way these market analysts get their data. They’re hiding behind vague technicalities on how their numbers could be what they say, but they still don’t add up. Their problem is that we have actual numbers from the three largest carriers in the U.S., all of which are finally selling the iPhone and boasting about those numbers because they’re huge.

So how do the other guys get their numbers?

Surveys.

In comScore’s case, their MobiLens data comes from “an intelligent online survey of a nationally representative sample of mobile subscribers age 13 and older”. They don’t disclose the number of people surveyed, but you can bet it’s not a massive number. In NPD’s case, they survey 12,811 people.

Which numbers do you trust? Millions upon millions of actual sales reported in a legal manner by public companies or surveys of thousands of people?

Further, as Ethan Kaplan points out, “NPD and the like are incentive based surveys so naturally skew a certain way. Teens, college students, etc.

Iinet wins AU High Court battle against AFACT

Iinet is Australia's largest "small" ISP. 

AFACT = Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft = the MPAA,  Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Roadshow Entertainment, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Warner Brothers.

This is a big deal.

The High Court of Australia has unanimously dismissed the film industry's appeal against a lower court decision, absolving iiNet's liability for copyright infringement by its users.

In a comprehensive dismissal by all five judges hearing the case, the High Court held the initial Federal Court judgment by Justice Dennis Cowdroy in 2010 that iiNet had not authorised the infringement of copyright by its users.

An appeal to the Federal Court last year also held that iiNet was not liable for copyright infringement but provided reasons it might be if warning notices prepared by rights holders were deemed sufficient.

The High Court said iiNet had "no direct technical power to prevent its customers from using the BitTorrent system to infringe copyright in the appellants' films".

Instead, it said iiNet's powers to prevent infringement only extended to its ability to terminate that customer's internet service.

It said the notices served by the film industry - represented by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft - were not sufficient for warning users over alleged infringement.

The decision is expected to set the first legal precedent in 37 years on a company's liability for user actions.

iiNet entered a trading halt on the Australian Securities Exchange this morning ahead of the judgment.

Chief executive Michael Malone welcomed the judgment as the "end of more than three years of legal argument and challenges".

"We have consistently said we are eager to work with the studios to make their very desirable material legitimately available to a waiting customer base - and that offer remains the same today," he said.

The High Court's dismissal included that AFACT pay iiNet's costs in the most recent hearings. iiNet had incurred approximately $9 million in legal costs over the long-running battle.

You get NOTHING. You LOSE. Good DAY SIR.

Fuck yeah.