Links for 2011-02-09
FareBot: Read data from public transit cards with your NFC-equipped Android phone – codebutler : ‘When demonstrating FareBot, many people are surprised to learn that much of the data on their ORCA card is not encrypted or protected. This fact is published by ORCA, but is not commonly known and may be of concern to some people who would rather not broadcast where they’ve been to anyone who can brush against the outside of their wallet. Transit agencies across the board should do a better job explaining to riders how the cards work and what the privacy implications are.’ (via Boing Boing)
(tags: via:boingboing privacy android rfid security transit mobile encryption mifare desfire farebot)Storymap : great UI for a little Dublin oral-history site — just a GMaps mashup with links to YouTube, but it works very well
(tags: dublin ireland storymap stories oral-history people google-maps mashups youtube video)Spotify Second Largest Source Of Revenue In Europe For Labels : wow. the WinAmp guys were right — ‘on a European level, Spotify is the second single largest source of revenue for record labels. This means that 2010 saw dramatic increase in its usage as well as payouts to record labels and artists themselves.’ this via an IFPI report
(tags: ifpi music spotify streaming revenue record-labels europe sweden isps mp3)Zero stroke – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : ‘With the price of bread running into billions a loaf the German people [...] had to get used to counting in thousands of billions. This, according to some German physicians, brought on a new nervous disease known as “zero stroke,” or “cipher stroke” [...] The persons afflicted with the malady are perfectly normal, except “for a desire to write endless rows of ciphers and engage in computations more involved than the most difficult problems in logarithms.”‘ (via Joe Drumgoole)
(tags: germany zero hyperinflation inflation via:jdrumgoole money brain mental-illness)
dahamsta said,
February 10, 2011 @ 12:48 pm
What did you mean by “the WinAmp guys were right” Justin; what did I miss?
adam
Justin Mason said,
February 10, 2011 @ 6:00 pm
hmm. I can’t find it now — but about 10 years ago, some members of the WinAmp team (possibly just the CEO) gave an interview where they said that the future for legal music listening was to offer a huge collection online, for free streaming playback — ie. Spotify. nobody listened, of course, because the music biz was more into the idea of suing Napster.
dahamsta said,
February 10, 2011 @ 6:25 pm
Thanks Justin. Perhaps I’m old fashioned and/or greedy, but I still kinda like to have my music all neatly organised on a disk somewhere. My only problem now is getting it all from 320kpbs MP3 to FLAC. :)
adam
Justin Mason said,
February 10, 2011 @ 11:03 pm
Join the club. Having said that I’ve been having a pain of a time trying to listen to it easily — you should see the crazy svn-over-ssh synchronization scripts I’ve written to sync my latest music around the place….
dahamsta said,
February 10, 2011 @ 11:16 pm
Oh, I don’t actually listen to it Justin, except for rare occasions I actually remember I have a music collection. :)
What makes me laugh is the young uns, who buy multi-giga music players for silly money because they want to carry every track they’ve ever downloaded around with them. I just don’t get it, but then I guess I am old…