Dan Hon has learned the hard way that purchases made through the iTunes Store are subject to the whims of the rights owners, with Apple acting much as Amazon did after losing the rights to publish a particular edition of 1984 three years ago:

Why you can't trust iTunes in the Cloud

At some point, it looks like Apple lost the rights to distribute Anchorman. Unfortunately, this happens all the time because the movie industry is shitty and doesn't care at all about what you, the person who wants to watch movies, does. What the movie industry cares about is maximising its profit, and that means release windows. This is why Netflix gets things for a while and then they disappear and then they (maybe) come back. And yes, I realise that sale windows are different from VOD/streaming windows. But the general idea is this:

Studio sale windows trump iTunes in the Cloud.

The business of Apple removing the sale of the item from your Purchase History if they no longer hold the rights to offer it for sale/download is a bit unfortunate. I don't doubt that it grants itself permission to do so somewhere in the dozens of pages of terms & conditions that you're required to claim you've read and understood when setting up an iTunes account on a device, but it's still not good: Apple shouldn't be making retrospective alterations to records of purchases like that.

Basically, a purchase isn't a purchase when it's made online, and we shouldn't ever forget it.

When Paul Rosenblatt answers the phone, he says "Bananas!", or, All you ever wanted to know about the science of making bananas ripen at the right time in the right place, on an industrial scale. Fascinating stuff.

[Via Pruned]

BERG have been rethinking the receipt.

It's along the same lines as their ideas about rethinking what you could do with a train ticket, but a little less useful IMHO.

But perhaps that's just because the last thing I want to see printed in large, bold letters on my receipt is the percentage of my Recommended Daily Allowance of calories that will be accounted for by the sticky bun and sugary drink that I've just bought.¹

1. Which, some would say, is exactly why that figure should be on there in large, bold letters. ↩

Andrew McAfee has found a hole in the iTunes Store privacy model: if you try to gift music (or an App, or a Tv programme or film) to an iTunes Store user, iTunes warns you if the user already has that item.

This snooping process is iterative and cumbersome, but I'm pretty sure it could be at least somewhat automated. It's also a little fluky; to learn what I have, [the snooper] has to gift media to me in the same form I bought it. For example, if he sent me only a single episode of "Breaking Bad" season 3 iTunes wouldn't send him a message like the one above. This is because I bought the whole season at once, so [the snooper] has to gift me the whole season to learn about my purchase. Similar rules appear to hold for music.

Even though [the snooper] has to work a bit, I'm not thrilled that he (or anyone else) can so easily learn about my media purchases and tastes. If I want to share my iTunes holdings with my friends or broadcast them to the world Apple gives me tools to do so, but if I want to keep them private I can't.

McAfee says that Amazon handles this sort of problem differently; it simply converts duplicate items to store credit, informing the recipient of the duplicate items but not the gift-giver, and suggests that Apple would do well to adopt this approach. My online gift-giving is usually selected from users' wishlists so I've never encountered this problem in the wild, but if I were giving a gift I think I'd prefer to be given the chance to choose a different item rather than have my gift silently converted to an impersonal store credit: if I'd wanted to give an iTunes Store credit I'd have chosen that option. However, I can see that both approaches have their merits.¹

My feeling about this is that whilst it's technically a privacy breach, it's not a terribly scary one. The would-be snooper needs to:

1. Guess the email address I use with my iTunes Store account.²
2. Guess what music/apps/ebooks etc I might own and whether I bought them as individual items or as part of an album/season purchase.³
3. Automate this process so that Apple won't notice that some rabid fan of mine has made X attempts to gift me Y different tracks/apps/ebooks without ever going through with a purchase and throttle or block their access.

Having successfully negotiated those hurdles, the snoop is now in possession of … a listing of a small portion of the contents of my iTunes Library. Given that I display ample evidence of my taste in music on the internet for the whole world to see as a matter of course, you'll understand if I'm not terribly worried by this potential attack vector.

That being said, I do take the point that users who wish to keep their music choices to themselves should have the ability to do just that: Apple should probably get right on it.⁴

[Via Risks Digest]

1. Perhaps iTunes Store users should be allowed to specify in their account settings whether gift-givers should be warned of duplicates. ↩
2. Admittedly not everyone sets up a distinct email address to use just for iTunes, so this could be straightforward in some cases where the snooper already has your email address. ↩
3. Which raises another question: what if I have a track that I ripped from a CD in MP3 format and the potential snooper tries to gift me the iTunes Store version of that track in AAC/m4a format. Does iTunes recognise that it's the same track despite the format difference? ↩
4. Interestingly, McAfee points out that in the US it an offence to give out details of an individual's video rental/purchase history and suggests that if the iTunes Store makes it possible to find out what films a user has purchased this might leave the firm open to legal action. That sounds more like the sort of motivation Apple will need to close this hole. ↩

It turns out that if you look closely enough at trading patterns on the world's stock exchanges, interesting patterns emerge:

Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation's stock exchanges.

What they do doesn't show up in Google Finance, let alone in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. No one really knows how they operate or why. But over the past few weeks, Nanex, a data services firm has dragged some of the odder algorithm specimens into the light.

[...]

In fact, it's hard to figure out exactly what they're up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we're witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it's really bizarre. [...]

I reckon it's Skynet, flexing its muscles.

[Via Snarkmarket]

Sometimes the sight of multinational corporation embracing social media ain't pretty. In the midst of a discussion about a controversy over the environmental practices of some of Nestle's suppliers, a company spokesperson told posters to the company's Facebook page not to use amended versions of the company's logo as their profile picture on the company's page, on pain of having the offending icons deleted:

Paul Griffin: Not sure you're going to win friends in the social media space with this sort of dogmatic approach. I understand that you're on your back-foot due to various issues not excluding Palm Oil but Social Media is about embracing your market, engaging and having a conversation rather than preaching! Read www.cluetrain.com and rethink!

Nestle: Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.

"Consider yourself embraced." Someone give that spokesbot a pay rise.

[Via The Browser]

The terms & conditions for using iTunes include a boilerplate clause¹ barring persons in embargoed countries, or who are on various US government lists, from downloading and installing iTunes, or using that software for "any purposes prohibited by United States law." Or, to put it another way:

[All] the Al-Qaeda operatives holed up in the Northwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan, dodging drone attacks while listening to Britney Spears songs downloaded with iTunes are in violation of the terms and conditions, even if they paid for the music!

[Via Bruce Schneier]

1. Prompted, most likely, by the fact that iTunes uses encryption to protect some of the content it downloads. Since the 1970s, encryption software has been in the same class as munitions – i.e. something that shouldn't be exported to hostile powers. ↩

Ross Anderson on how the banks and credit card companies have pulled a fast one by pushing customers to use the 3D Secure system to 'protect' their online purchases:

Online transactions with credit cards or debit cards are increasingly verified using the 3D Secure system, which is branded as "Verified by VISA" and "MasterCard SecureCode". This is now the most widely-used single sign-on scheme ever, with over 200 million cardholders registered. It's getting hard to shop online without being forced to use it. In a paper I'm presenting today at Financial Cryptography, Steven Murdoch and I analyse 3D Secure. From the engineering point of view, it does just about everything wrong, and it's becoming a fat target for phishing. So why did it succeed in the marketplace? [...]

Surprisingly enough, it's got very little to do with security and a great deal to do with shifting liability for losses onto customers.

[Via Bruce Schneier]

Bopaboo plans to let people sell used MP3s:

[Bopaboo...] – still in private beta – now allows you to keep the music files after someone else has purchased them, although you can sell each song only once. First, the service's spider figures out what music you have on your computer, and uploads the songs into an account. From there, you can sell your collection to the Bopaboo community at large, at prices determined by a demand-based algorithm, generally lower than what the same music costs on Amazon or iTunes.

Given that the music industry's preferred strategy is to try to get laws passed that force ISPs to monitor their users' internet traffic for unlicensed content, or at the very least to stigmatise any transmission of media files over the internet that doesn't involve buying from a reputable online store, I'd be astonished to see the major labels greet a scheme like this with any great enthusiasm.

In any case, I'm not sure I'd trust the company to keep the data collected by the service's spider about the contents of my hard disk to itself. I'm not suggesting that Bopaboo are intentionally acting as a data collection service for the music industry, but it's easy to envisage a scenario where Bopaboo – whether as a consequence of doing really well, or of failing to make a go of their original business plan – ended up wholly or partly owned by a conglomerate with media interests¹ and all that lovely data about the contents of users' hard disks, tied to details of their user account² being combed for unlicensed files, false positives and all. Then the lawyers' letters start arriving, offering you the choice between paying compensation and going to court, where you can spend even larger sums on lawyers…

Or am I just being paranoid?³

[Via The Browser]

1. Think Last.fm starting out as an independent company and ending up owned by CBS. ↩
2. Including bank or credit card details that can be linked to a real person. ↩
3. Can you be too paranoid about the music industry? ↩

If this story of a futures trade gone awry isn't true, it damn well should be:

As the senior trader at ̠xecor, Brad made it very clear that no one Р"not even His Holiness, the Pope" Рshall question his trades. After all, Brad makes complex trading decisions that no one else could possibly comprehend. Sometimes he buys high and sells low. Sometimes he holds in a decline. Sometimes he refuses to sell at any price. Brad works in mysterious ways, and if he said "do it", then it better get done.

Just this once, it might have been better if it hadn't got done.

Fun as it is to poke fun at a Master of the Universe when he comes a cropper, this particular foul-up isn't really down to Brad at all. It's a reminder of the importance of the Robustness Principle, as expressed by the late Jon Postel in RFC 793: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."

Jay Rosen has a few thoughts about funding journalism:

I was asked to speak recently at a conference organized by Yale University with the title "Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?" This irritated me. The question should have been "who will subsidize news production?" because news production has always been subsidized by someone or something. Very rarely have users paid directly the costs of editorial production. [...]

Rosen goes on to list a total of 19 sources of subsidy. There's no single source of funding that'll fix the problems of the newspaper business – not that those problems are entirely financial in nature anyway – but there are a lot of ideas out there that need to be tested to destruction, preferably before we resort to item #1 of Rosen's list.¹

[Via Memex 1.1]

1. Government subsidy. ↩

Paul Slade relates the fascinating story of London's Treasure Hunt Riots:

Thomas Wright, a West London barrister, came home from his Lincoln's Inn chambers one evening in January 1904 to find a mob of treasure hunters wrecking his front garden. One of them had already dug down to the base of the garden railings and was busy trying to dislodge them to see if a £50 medallion had been buried beneath. Glancing up and down Westbourne Terrace, Wright could see that many of his neighbours' gardens had been invaded too. This had been going on for four days. [...]

[Via Kevan Davis]

Context is for the weak:

Repent Harlequin Said the Ticked Off Band

(Post title borrowed from this comment earlier in that same discussion.)

Probably the worst Father's Day promotion in the history of retailing:

High street chain WH Smith apologised today after promoting a book on cellar rapist Josef Fritzl as a Father's Day gift.

Shoppers at the Lewisham branch were shocked to see a non-fiction book on the Austrian, who kept his daughter captive for 24 years, in a "Top 50 Books for Dad" display.

[Via Prog Gold]

There's good customer service, and then there's Daniel Fleisch:

Many authors would claim to be committed to their readers, but academic Daniel Fleisch has gone that extra mile and then some. The scientific writer, it has emerged, flew more than 900km on Christmas Day to hand deliver his book to a customer who had posted a negative review on Amazon complaining that he'd been sold a flawed copy. [...]

Opening Times takes your UK postcode or town name and tells you the times local shops are open. In my neck of the woods this amounts to listing the opening hours for local branches of some¹ national supermarket chains, but perhaps that's a just a feature of my locale retail landscape.

It would be good if the site covered more stores, though I appreciate that this is a really difficult problem given that it's probably really difficult to gather all that information; when I was looking at various retailers' web sites over Xmas trying to work out when they'd be open over the holiday season I found wide variations between chains, with some giving detailed opening hours for every branch and others not listing any variations on their normal opening hours. I think this is the sort of site that is better done locally, perhaps with information collated and published by a local council or newspaper or chamber of commerce.

I'll be interested to see how the site deals with public holidays; I don't have trouble remembering what time the various nearby supermarkets are open on weekdays and weekends, but I nearly always manage to misremember which ones are open at any given point over a Bank Holiday weekend. If come Easter weekend Opening Times tells me correct opening hours for the local Tesco and Morrisons supermarkets then it'll be somewhat useful.²

[Via Kevan Davis]

1. Not all – for example, there's a Co-op supermarket in North Shields town centre that it doesn't pick up. ↩
2. In fairness, the site's creator mentions that he's aware of the issue of variations in opening hours. Whether he can get the requisite information to update the site in plenty of time is a whole different question. ↩

Greg Beato ponders the enduring popularity of the calendar:

According to Publishers Weekly, there were fewer than 200 calendars for sale in 1976. Today, there are more than 6,500 from which to choose. Part of this proliferation is due to the fact that we once got the bulk of our calendars for free, from banks, insurance companies, and other businesses eager to keep their phone numbers in front of their customers' eyes throughout the year. But it's not as if those businesses were giving away more than one copy to each customer, or offering them in multiple formats. And yet, as we shift gears from 2008 to 2009, how many among us are not tacking up a Sarah Palin 2009 calendar in our kitchen, and clearing off a space on our desk at work for the Insult-a-Day 2009 calendar, and jotting down the year's first doctor appointment in our New Yorker Cat Cartoons weekly engagement calendar? Clearly, we are far more concerned about the passing of each day, each week, each month, than our carefree, calendar-lite counterparts in the 1970s.

I never buy calendars myself,¹ but it seems to me that as often as not the primary function of the modern calendar is to serve as a collection of posters (Be it of images of the buyer's favourite musician, actor or movie series, or of a sequence of works by their favourite artist.)), with the use of the calendar to mark the passing of time of at best secondary significance.

1. I've been carrying round some form of electronic device that serves as my calendar for longer than I care to remember. ↩