Mayhem & Chaos Blog

Cool Tech

Predixis MusicMagic Mixer

Predixis invited me to play with their latest music tool MusicMagic Mixer. This application analyzes your music collection and generates mixes based on selected artists and/or albums. It also has a moods feature that allows you to select a number of tracks that exemplify a particular mood and use this list of tracks to generate more mixes for your mood.

The machine I tried it on didn't have a full complement of music on it, since I don't keep music on my Windoze machine. This makes it hard to tell exactly how effective this tool is. I suppose I should mount my music collection over the network and let the mixer go to town on it and see what happens.

The one drawback I can see is the speed of analyzing tracks -- some tracks took more than a minute to analyze -- and that is too long if you have a large collection of music to chew through.

Regardless, I am very interested in these types of next generation tools that will free digital music users from the stupid CD player paradigm (having to constantly pick the music you want to listen to). I'd like it to be a lot more automatic, but still tons more personal that just listening to the radio. Check it out!

Music industry watch

MP3s Are Not the Devil

Sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card blasts the record labels in his essay MP3s Are Not the Devil:

So it's pretty hilarious to hear record company executives and movie studio executives get all righteous about copyright. They've been manipulating copyright laws for years, and all the manipulations were designed to steal everything they could from the actual creators of the work.

Nice and elegant synopsis of everthing that is wrong with the music industry today. If you're wondering what all the hub-bub is all about, start with this article -- it's a good introduction for people who want to understand why things are so messed up today.

Music industry watch

MusicMatch & Dell correction

It turns out that Dell's music download service is actually MusicMatch's service cobranded:

In that earlier announcement, the company did not give details on pricing or partners, however. Sources said the company's store would be a separately branded version of the Musicmatch service.

At least then Dell customers and MusicMatch customers will be able to interoperate. It's not much, but its better than yet another incompatible service.

Billboard has a little more info on MusicMatch's service.

File sharing

P2P update

Last week the the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association filed an amicus brief on behalf of Grokster and Streamcast Networks:

A central argument of the brief is that the district court got it right when applying a 1984 Supreme Court decision to the Internet. That decision, Sony v. Universal City, said Sony could continue to manufacture its Betamax VCR because a company "cannot be a contributory (copyright) infringer if, as is true in this case, it has had no direct involvement with any infringing activity."

...

The ACLU said Thursday that the brief argues that peer-to-peer networks are speech-promoting technologies that have many noninfringing uses. If the MPAA and the RIAA succeed in shutting down peer-to-peer networks or making them more centralized, the precedent could create undesirable choke points that could be used to monitor Internet users, the ACLU said.

Having the librarians on the side of the P2P guys should complicate matters for the RIAA and MPAA. I wonder if there is come connection to Cory's analogy of P2P users building the largest library in the world and the RIAA wanting to tear it down?

And RollingStone claims that despite lawsuits, traffic on file-sharing sites is booming. I'm still seeing more articles claiming little to no change in P2P traffic since the Sue the World campaign started.

Music industry watch

Are more online music services a bad idea?

Apparently it's hip to start your own music download service. Apple did it well, buymusic did it badly and now MusicMatch and Dell are doing it. Roxio is bringing Napster back and M$ is rumored to jump into the fray. Roxio/Samsung and Dell are even creating portable devices to work with these services.

A few years ago I would've been overjoyed at so many online services being launched. But now I'm not quite so enthusiastic about it anymore. The problem is that each one of these services has their own custom brewed DRM scheme to keep people from fully enjoying their music. Do you think that a Napster track will run on my iPod? I doubt it. Do you think that the Dell music service will be available to Mac users? I doubt it.

Each of these services lock in their users -- little to no moving files from one machine to another. Few choices for moving files to portable devices. Crappy and complicated download processes that are riddled with bugs. In other words, it's a total mess.

And what is even worse is that all these DRM islands are shutting out third party tool/service providers. How can you offer cool high end audio jukebox software/hardware and hope to offer integration to online music services when you need to establish contracts and license crappy DRM tech from multiple vendors? I bet that it would be impossible to setup one machine that uses two competing DRM systems based on Windows Media Player 9.

Speaking of Windows Media Player 9, Philips refuses to play with WMP9:

Philips, which globally ranks No. 3 behind Japan's Sony and Matsushita, has chosen not to support Microsoft's Windows Media Player in its consumer electronics products, a company spokesman said separately. "We need a technology that works, that is available to everyone, managed in a fair way and not constrained to any particular group," Blanford said.

Earlier I posted about David Weinberger's Copy Protection Is a Crime article, and I think the current situation with the online music services is a perfect example of what he was talking about. Sigh.

And one final footnote -- how can EMusic hope to survive in this din of crappy download services??

Music industry watch

The dangers of the music industry

I just started reading meta-roj's blog and Roj pointed to a couple of articles I've remembered reading, but couldn't find for the life of me:

• The Problem with Music by Steve Albini
• Courtney Love does the Math a transcript of Love's speech on Salon.

Both are excellent reads for budding musicians and music lovers alike -- these articles expose the extortion that the labels pass off as business.

Music industry watch

Magnatunes update

I mentioned Magnatunes a few months ago and a couple of days ago John Buckmann posted a complete rundown on a sample track to see how people paid for the tracks given Magnatunes' pay what you feel the album is worth pricing model.

Interesting results -- check out his entire mail.

Posted to the pho list by John Buckmann:

I thought pho-sters would be interesting the results of my tests of a variable pricing scheme on Magnatune.

On Magnatune, for 3 months I've tried a "pay what you feel the album is worth" system for buying downloadable albums. (for example)

People can choose to pay between $5 and $18 for an album, with an $8 default being the 'recommended' price. Note that the buyer gets nothing extra by paying more than the $5 minimum, other than a "warm fuzzy feeling"

Here are the results so far (after 3 months of the site being up)

44% of buyers pay $8 (the default)
32% pay less (between $5 and $7)
24% pay more than $8 (between $9 and $18)

In total dollars earned:
42% of revenue comes from the $8 purchases
21% comes from purchases $5 to $7
37% comes from purchases $9 to $18

The quantity purchased at each price point is:

$5: 21% of purchases
$6: 10%
$7: 1%
$8: 44%
$9: 1%
$10: 9%
$11: 0%
$12: 2%
$13: 0%
$14: 2%
$15: 1%
$16: 8%
$17: 1%
$18: 0%

My analysis:

• more people pay the recommended $8
• $10 is a popular price to pick -- this might be a "sweet spot"
• a fair number of people double the recommended price and pay $16
• Not shown on this analysis is that $5 is a popular price when people buy several albums at once (people seem self-justified in lowering how much they pay per album when they buy several albums)

-john

Legal/Government

Petition to stop VeriSign's SiteFinder

The bastards at VeriSign have really screwed with the Internet when they implemented their SiteFinder service. Fortunately they are getting sued by a number of companies, including GoDaddy who filed suit yesterday.

There is also this online petition to ICANN to stop VeriSign and to punish them:

We hereby demand that ICANN immediately:

...

d) that Verisign be reprimanded for their monopolistic abuse of the DNS system, and return all audited gross revenues from their Sitefinder system to stakeholders, via a payment to the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) of ICANN in the name of the Non-Commercial constituency

Go sign the petition!

Music industry watch

Sue the world update

A couple of RIAA follies for you:

1. The RIAA pulls a suit against a Mac user who supposedly used the Windoze only Kazaa filesharing application. Keep going RIAA, your screwups are undermining your case better than we could possibly do!
2. Sharman Networks is suing entertainment companies for using Kazaa Lite:

   Sharman said the companies used Kazaa Lite, an ad-less replica of its software, to get onto the network. The lawsuit also claims efforts to combat piracy on Kazaa violated terms for using the network. Entertainment companies have offered bogus versions of copyright works and sent online messages to users.

   Sharman's lawsuit also revives its previous allegation that the entertainment companies violated antitrust laws by stopping Sharman and its partner from distributing authorized copies of music and movies through Kazaa.

   Man bites dog. I love it.

Legal/Government

Do not call registry put on hold

Seems like the do not call registry has been put on hold by an Oklahoma court.

Apparently 50 millions people speaking out against telemarketers means nothing when 2 millon jobs are on the line. Supposedly the FTC overstepped its bounds (huh?) and it hurts free speech -- free speech? Shouldn't we first worry about other much more grave encroachments on free speech and civil rights like the Patriot Act?

And with the Bush administration erradicating jobs as fast as it can, what are two measely million jobs more?? Chump change!

Cool Tech

Digital audio listening tests

A lot of people claim that their newfangled codec is the same/better at 64kbps than MP3 is as 128kbps. A new listening test shows that no single codec really lives up to that claim. The results from the listening test gives you all the gory details.

This is probably the most objective and realistic comparison between codecs I've seen in a while. These codecs use psychoacoustic models that mimick the human ear and remove portions of the audio spectrum that the human ear cannot perceive in order to compress the audio. For instance, if you have a really loud sound followed immediately by a quiet sound, the human ear will no be able to preceive that quiet sound. So why bother keeping it around if the human ear can't hear it?

This is the basis for modem audio codecs and thus it's imperative that humans listen to the output of the codecs in order to qualitatively judge the codec. A machine can't do it, and that is why I've always had issues with people referring to Rob Leslie's MPEG audio compliance page as an actual measure of the quality of the codec.

Music industry watch

P2P Filesharing alive and kicking

NYT writes that filesharing hasn't really slowed down since the RIAA started its Sue the World program.

Some people say it has slowed down and some say it hasn't. It's probably somewhere in between, I would suspect. And really, if you think about it there is a lot of filesharing going on outside of the US -- so if the US stopped entirely we'd be at at 50%-60% drop, I'd guess.

Microsoft Bashing

Windows to Power ATMs??

The adage A sucker is born every minute still holds true. Apparently banks are building ATMs on windows boxes:

By 2005, 65 percent of bank ATMs (not including free-standing machines in places like convenience stores and casinos) in the United States will use a stripped-down version of Windows. About 12 percent of the machines will use the operating system by the end of this year, according to Gwenn Bezard, an analyst at market researcher Celent.

With the number of worms and the grave number of severe security flaws that riddle Windows, how could a banks use Windows? Seeing crashed display signs in Vegas with the BSOD on them is embarrasing. Standing in line waiting for the teller to reboot their windoze box is embarrasing. Risking to lose a bunch of money out of an ATM due to a windows bug is just plain dumb.

When will people wisen up?

Music industry watch

Dead end for the RIAA??

A federal appeals court is now examining the Verizon supoena case in light of the RIAA's Sue the World program. The Verizon case stated that ISPs must hand over the information about their customers if the RIAA accuses the customers of pirating copyrighted music. The Sue the World program was green-lighted by the outcome of this case. And the RIAA arrived at suing end users because of the setbacks endured in the Grokster case, which said that P2P tools were legal.

While this issue is far from resolved, I have to examine the path this adventure is taking. First the RIAA/MPAA spends tons of money on buying congresscritters to get ass clown laws like the Home Recording Act and the DMCA enacted. These overarching laws are heavily jilted in favor of the RIAA/MPAA and their cronies. But now that the rubber meets the road, these laws are being examined in the courts and the RIAA/MPAA seems to be loosing ground slowly.

Not surprising, really. If these laws are jilted in favor of The Cartel, the judges across america are increasingly scrutinizing these ass clown laws as the RIAA blunders into stupid lawsuits, like suing 12 year old children. If this trend keeps up, the RIAA will be stuck with a set of unenforceable laws, or worse yet, have these laws repealed altogether.

Unenforceable laws are not much good, are they? If things go this way, the RIAA will have its last escape path cut off. They will have not choice but to adapt to the times and embrace the net. Or die.

How is that for some rose colored lens idealism??

Cool Tech

Compulsory licensing

AaronSw has written about compulsory licensing, the idea that a small tax is levied on CD-ROM burners, ISP fees and other toll booth type taxes to levy on the file trading community. Aaron stated the problem succinctly without offering a solution.

Now Aaron has a written up his proposed solution in his blog entry Fixing Compulsory Licensing. LawMeme ran a response, calling his idea ProtoWhuffie. Gojomo also has a response.

Aaron's solution suggests that everytime someone pays the license tax they would get a voucher that they could send to their favorite artists, and the artist could redeem the voucher for money. LawMeme suggested that the solution was ahead of its time and that a lot of fake artists would crop up to cheat the system, which has been my main objection to such systems for a long time. Artist authentication is hard unless you are the recording industry and you have all the recording contracts in hand to determine who the real Buttney Spears is.

But, my main objection to Aaron's idea is that he suggests that the government oversee this process and make sure that everyone is playing fair. I'm not sure which government he is thinking of, but the US government would be unable to create an entity that would be fair, fast and flexible enough to handle such a difficult problem. Take ICANN and VeriSign as an example -- these two lovely organizations are screwing the general public. Especially VeriSign and the DNS redirect crap they are pulling. I can't see a single governmental agency or government sanctioned private enterprise to even get close to doing this right.

I think I have to agree with LawMeme -- I like the idea but its ahead of its time.

Music industry watch

RIAA Phonepranking

Best hack I've heard of all week: Prank calling the RIAA:

 JH:  But I don't have a pee service.  Someone
 just e-mailed me a song and I listened to it.  
 Am I going to jail?
 
 RIAA:  Sir, I don't know.  I'm not in a position 
 to offer you legal advice on this.
 
 JH:  Legal advice?  Do I need to get a lawyer?
 
 RIAA:  You might want to.  As I said, your best 
 possible route is to go to musicunited.org.  
 Beyond that, I'm not in a position to offer you 
 additional legal advice.
 
 JH:  Can I write a check to someone?  
 
 RIAA:  Has your service provider told you 
 that you've been subpoenaed?
 
 JH:  A penis?

Something to laugh about -- finally.

Cool Tech

Micropayments and the gift economy

I just wrote a reaction to Clay Shirky's latest essay "Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content" on my O'Reilly weblog:

Finally, Shirky argues that micropayents present unreasonable mental transaction costs -- if you're constantly thinking about the worth of a piece of content in terms small fractions of a dollar, it does get pretty tedious. In a gift economy the content consumer can decide how much to donate to the content producer, since the consumer is not held to some arbitrary price. I can see creating systems where the mental transaction costs can be shrunk to a small one time mental transaction cost.

For instance, when the user sets up their gift economy based micropayment account the user should be able to set a standard donation price for various pieces of content. A weblog entry could be 1/100th of cent. An image 1/10th of cent. An article a nickel. A song $.25. A movie could be priced at at $1. Whatever the user decides.

After the user ingested piece of content, the software/website/whatever could ask the user: "Was this article what you expected? (Totally, mostly, marginally, not at all)" If the user responds with totally the entire predetermined amount gets donated to the content creator. 66% for mostly, 33% for marginally and nothing for not at all.

Check it out!

Music industry watch

RIAA Subpoenas under the microscope

A good buddy of mine, Lisa Rein has a great analysis on the RIAA supoenas on openp2p2:

A recent decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals finds that a party using "patently unlawful" subpoenas to obtain access to another party's stored electronic communications could be liable for violations of electronic privacy and computer fraud statutes. This could have serious implications for the RIAA's mass subpoena campaign in that, if such subpoenas were also determined to be "patently unlawful," for whatever reason, the organization could be held liable under electronic privacy and computer fraud statutes for accessing user data under false pretenses.

I would like nothing more than to have the RIAA get into hot water over this whole Sue the World bullshit. Between this and the EFF petition the RIAA has got to start feeling the heat on this.

And it's good too -- I'm still amazed how many Americans think that downloading music off the net is legal. But if the average consumer on the street has no clue about the illegality of this, how can we ever change something?

The shortest path to peace in the music world is not to educate everyone in the world about copyright -- its too complicated for most educated people to understand -- myself included. Wouldn't it be easier if all filesharing programs required a subscription key to be entered when you started the application? The RIAA could sell these subscription keys for $25/year and make a buttload of money, without ever having to do anything for it!

[ That's only wishful thinking -- its great from a users perspective, but from the artist's perspective, how do you figure out who gets paid what and then make the system crook proof? ]

Music industry watch

Stop the RIAA!

The EFF has a petition up to Stop the RIAA:

Brianna, and hundreds of other music fans like her, are being forced to pay thousands of dollars they do not have to settle RIAA-member lawsuits -- supporting a business model that is anything but rational. This crusade is generating thousands of subpoenas and hundreds of lawsuits, but not a single penny for the artists that the RIAA claims to protect.

Copyright law shouldn't make criminals out of 60 million Americans, and it's time for a change. Congress is going to hold hearings; we need your help to make sure that the public's voice is heard. Tell Congress that it's time to stop the madness!

I urge you to go and sign this petition!

Blogging

Blogger Pro now free!

In light of the recent announcement that Google will now offer Blogger Pro for free, I gotta wonder what that will do to other blogging companies like TypePad who are building serious business models around offering blogging services.

I've never used Blogger Pro, but I somehow doubt that the TypePad service and is that much more advanced than Blogger Pro to gather a serious amount of users over Blogger. The browser wars, open source and Napster have shown us that free is hard to compete with.

I suppose TypePad will have to work hard to differentiate themselves from Blogger. I'm curious to see how this will pan out in the end -- unlike the browser wars I'm fond of both sides of this face-off...

Music industry watch

RIAA hates P2P eh?

A company called BigChampagne crawls the P2P networks to see what people are downloading and then sells that data back to the RIAA for marketing purposes.

And the RIAA claims that P2P networks are pure evil. Hypocritical bastards!

Music industry watch

RIAA lawsuit sillyness

The RIAA sued a 12 year old girl this week, and now her single mother has settled the suit for $2000. The Slashdot article sums it up real well:

It looks like the RIAA has rushed to settle with 12-year-old Brianna LaHara, after serving her with a lawsuit on Monday. It looks like her single mother will be paying a $2,000 fine to the RIAA for her daughter's song-swapping, which they had thought was legal. Said Brianna: 'I am sorry for what I have done. I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love.' What a relief this must be for the Rolling Stones.

Heh! Emmet Plant, of Xiph.org fame, has taken up a collection to cover the $2000 for the mom. So far he has collected over $700. Not bad, and thanks for taking the lead on this!

Makes me wonder -- if the community bands together to pay the lawsuit settlement for a fellow file trader, isn't that some indirect form of licensing the music from the labels?? Maybe we should make a giant fund that pays out the settlements for the suits -- everyone pays in $10/month and keeps using Kazaa or whatever. When its your turn to get nailed by a suit, you settle and the fund pays the settlement.

A little too silly, I'm afraid. :-)

Music industry watch

RIAA roundup

While I've been in the desert the RIAA has started offering amnesty to file traders if they sign their life away -- this was timed just right with the first wave of lawsuits to hit the courts. The lawsuits are aimed at filetraders, including 12 year old kids and 71 year olds:

A 71-year-old Texas man, Durwood Pickle, told the Associated Press yesterday that his teen-aged grandchildren must have downloaded songs during visits to his home, then left the sharing features enabled so other Internet users could access them. He said his grandchildren had explained the situation to the RIAA in an e-mail.

"I didn't do it, and I don't feel like I'm responsible," Pickle said. "Dadgum it, got to get a lawyer on this."

The EFF has spoken out against this amnesty in their usual eloquence, but Paul Boutin wraps up this whole mess in his article An offer you can refuse:

To those determined to make an end-run around the music biz's lack of attractive online offerings (Apple's iTunes Music Store is still the best of a weak lot), the lawsuits just mean it's time to abandon KaZaA by moving their game of keep-away to the next playground. KaZaA rose to prominence only after Napster was shut down. Now that RIAA lawyers have proved they can subpoena the names of KaZaA users from their ISPs, expect a mass migration to anonymous, encrypted P2P networks designed specifically to fix the known vulnerabilities in KaZaA. Earth Station 5 is the most outrageous example. It uses a mesh of proxy servers, encrypted data, and other identity-hiding tricks to keep copyright owners from tracking who's downloading what. To top it all off, the company—which recently issued a press release declaring itself "at war" with the entertainment industry—is headquartered in Palestine.

Did anyone say Cat & Mouse game?? This is too painful to watch...

Music industry watch

Copyprotected CD considered defective in .fr

A woman in France managed to sue EMI and got the court to state the EMI cannot sell defective CDs:

A Nanterre court has ordered the music label to refund a woman who could not play her new Alain Souchon CD on her car CD player. Alternatively, EMI is to provide a full-working copy. The ruling applies to all people who have bought CDs which they cannot play on some CD players, computers and Walkmans.

But EMI was not forbidden by the court to sell copyright protected CDs per se, merely that it must not sell defective CDs. So it appears like it could be back to the drawing board for the anti-piracy measures it uses.

This is good news, since by definition copyprotected CDs are not redbook compliant and therefore defective in at least some of the players out there. It won't take much longer for EMI and the others to realize that copyprotecting CDs won't be worth it. Software manufacturers figured that out in the late 80s.

Microsoft Bashing

When will M$ customers wake up?

The SQL Slammer worm was bad. The blaster worm was slower, but worse. I kept thinking that eventually enough people will be getting pissed off about this crap that M$ keeps putting out. I'm still not really seeing these signs on the horizon.

What I am seeing is beyond scary and these events may soon lead to people dropping M$ en masse -- I hope. Check these out for yourself:

The recent power outage back east is getting a lot of people to look at the US power grid. (Off Topic: I've for many years suspected that it's performance is less than stellar. When I lived in Germany for 13 years I saw one power outage the entire time and that was because the city was half way underwater in the midst of a big storm. Here in CA we probably see 1 power outage per quarter, without bad weather. And when the weather does get bad, there are lots more.) Besides that fact that the power network is fragile, they have also discovered that a lot of power management system are running on M$ boxes. Unpatched, unfirewalled M$ boxes at that:

Just such a problem surfaced in January at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant operated by FirstEnergy, the Ohio utility under close scrutiny for its role in the East Coast's largest-ever blackout. The Slammer worm penetrated the plant's internal network and lodged in an unpatched Windows server. The worm's scanning slowed the internal network to a crawl, eventually crashing the plant's Safety Parameter Display System, according to reports.

I won't be sleeping well tonight. This is scary stuff!

And next up we have a tech war between China and Twaiwan where Chinese hackers are attacking Taiwanese computers with Trojan Horses aimed at M$ servers:

"National intelligence has indicated that an army of hackers based in China's Hubei and Fujian provinces has successfully spread 23 different Trojan horse programs to the networks 10 private high-tech companies here to use them as a springboard to break into at least 30 different government agencies and 50 private companies."

I think Taiwan will soon be looking hard and carefully at Linux. At least I sure hope so.

How many more of these whacked incidents will happen before people get wise to this crap? Will a boatload of people have to die before someone pays serious attention to this problem? I guess so, since Bill Gates is undoubtely all chummy with Shrub.

Rubbish. It's all rubbish.

Dumbshit Dept.

SLO county voter records exposed on the Internet

Wired News has a story about how a Diebold Election Systems computer that contained SLO county voting information was on a wireless network and someone download a bunch of voting data. Democracy Now says:

The file, she claims, proves that Diebold has the ability to keep track of election results as they come in. More concerning she says technology exists that would allow Diebold to alter election results.

Diebold has long claimed it does not track votes on Election Day but Harris said this file of election data from San Luis Obispo County, California shows otherwise.

“It is impossible for this file to have existed if there wasn't some sort of illicit electronic communication going on for remote access,” Harris said.

Oooops.

Music industry watch

Universal drops music prices

Todd pointed out the P2Pnet article that covers Universal cutting their prices on all new CDs to $12.98. They've finally realized that you can't overcharge people anymore and are now hoping to stem the hemmoraging of customers.

I wonder how much this has to do with the price fixing suits in .us and .au as of late?? If the cartel can't maintain the price fixing, the only thing left is competition. Gasp! Not that!

I further have to wonder if this is the tip of the iceberg. Are there more radical changes afoot at circle U?? What if they have actually managed to hire some people with a clue? History suggests that the media companies usually come around (e.g. home video rental/sales are a large part of the the studio's income nowadays, and the studios resistet video heavily).

Wishful thinking or a light at the end of the tunnel? We'll see!

Burning Man

Law Enforcement in BRC

[ I hope I'm not boring you all with this Burning Man crap. If it does, please bear with me -- it will die down soon. ]

I wanted to give law enforcement a thumbs up this year. In previous years we saw small armies of surly cops on all sorts of overbearing vehicles. This year you had cops on sadly underdecorated Gator ATVs patrolling the streets. With seating for 2, no air conditioning, and no vast arrays of communication toys, computers and weapons on board. This felt a lot more equal to the burners who always have open cars that provide little to no shelter from the environment -- not to mention the bikes and pedestrians.

Law enforcement seemed much friendlier and approachable yet there were only a handful of them -- they were not on every streetcorner. This was a nice change, really. The BLM stuck to their trucks with AC and all their gadgets, but they were working the open playa and that is what they are equipped for so that seems reasonable to me. I just wish they would not tear-ass across the playa at high speeds when people are walking in the dark. I witnessed a couple of BLM (non emergency) vehicles driving a little too fast for community standards.

Nevertheless, as far as law enforcement is concerned, BRC is like any other city now. BRC used to fly below the radar -- it was never above the law. So, If you plan to take drugs or do other "illegal" activities: Don't get caught. Whatever precautions you take in the real world should also be taken at Burning Man. Its really as simple as that.

And if BRC is like any other city, the police force will be present in the appropriate form. The amount of crime perceived by the police force determines how much police will be present. The law enforcement has overdone it in the past and little results to show for and are now being held accountable for their actions. Thus they've toned it down and it seems that a good balance was reached. Burners should keep a low profile and keep their heads about themselves and that will maintain a balance that works for everyone.

Example:

Someone in a neighborhood camp left some paraphenalia out in public view and was visited by the BLM. The BLM did not arrest him, which is a marked improvement from previous years. The burner in question got a $250 fine (compared to a $600 fine for setting off fireworks that another burner got) and his stash confiscated. They left mumbling something about making frequent stops in this camp and took off.

Rookie move by the burner, no doubt. But the police was reasonable considering the offense and didn't ruin the burner's week.

And on the topic of undercover cops: There was a rumor of a guy in blue body paint looking to score some drugs. Asked lots of questions and turned out to be an undercover cop. In the past the undercover cops would show up in clean gap clothes and wonder why they were spotted so quickly. Blue body paint on an undercover cop shows that they are getting smarter. And, they have undercover cops in other cities, so why not at Black Rock City? Doesn't seem unreasonable to me; now how I feel about undercover cops altogether is another matter, but we gotta remember that BRC is no different than any other city.

I want to give the police force props for finding the right balance this year. And burners, please remember to keep your basic city survival instincts when you're in BRC -- our fine city is no longer immune to the bigger city downfalls.

Does that make Burning Man less cool?

Yes.

Is it going to keep me from going to Burning Man?

No!

Because Burning Man is still the best place to be for the week before memorial day. Period.

Burning Man

Dear Artist

On saturday I went out to the Fishing Buddha to refill the hurricane lanterns and to pick up some MOOP (matter out of place). While I was adjusting the fishing net next to the Buddha, I noticed that someone had left us a note in the net. The note read:

Dear Artist:

I wanted to drop you a note to let you know how much I love your display! I'm at F2M + I've come out here pretty much every night to enjoy the view + listen to the chimes and the "crickets". It's nice and relaxing + peaceful and I just love it. So I wanted to let you know how much I've enjoyed + appreciated your work.

-- Todd, Seattle, WA

That warms my heart. I always feel like an engineer and to have someone call me an Artist makes me really happy. Thank you Todd for writing the note -- I appreciate hearing from you. And thank you Jack, Zoe and Jean for being the partners in crime on this project. It was a success once again!

Burning Man

Afterburn thoughts

This year I'm hearing lots of old time burners gripe about how Burning Man has changed and how Black Rock City LLC is alienating so many of its core artists and supporters. Sure, things have changed since the early days of Black Rock City -- no doubt about it. But if you look at the changes that have been made and why they have been made you can see that BMorg (BRC LLC) is trying to find a path through a maze of conflicting external demands.

The BLM demands a long list of things. Washoe and Pershing Country Sheriffs have a long list of demands. Nevada sanitation people have a long list of demands. And the only way to cope with that is to create a corporaton (namely Black Rock City LLC) that can arrange permits, get insurance, hire porta-potties and all the things that need to be done to meet the requirements of the various agencies that demand to be involved.

Thus BMorg is a political organization that cannot make everyone happy. Intense compromises must be made by everyone. I don't like not being able to burn things on the playa, but I understand that we must protect mother earth, so I play along. I don't like being on the edge of the desert, but in order to appease the BLM we have to play along. Its a continual shifting of requirements, compromises and solutions. Burning Man has always been about overcoming adversity, and if the old burners are getting burned out (ha!) then move out of the way and let new people join the fray and help out. This is what happened after 96 and Burning Man flourished -- it will happen again this year.

BMorg has a tough job, no doubt about it. But I also think they bite off a bit much to chew each year. Does the cafe need to be so big? Does the base for the man need to be that large? I think if BMorg would not plan to make everything so large it might be easier to tackle. But how often was this desire to have something large and absurd that you can be proud of part of your own plans? I've been there, and I have to struggle against it every year.

Personally, I will continue to go to Burning Man as long as BMorg continues to make good decisions while faced with a near impossible set of conflicting demands. This chore gets more difficult each year, but BMorg is still doing a good job, IMHO. Once they fall down and start sputtering garbage rules that do not further the event towards a compromising goal, I'll stop going. It's too bad that some old time burners can't change with the changing requirements of Burning Man. But I do look forward to smaller regional events that have the old time Burning Man feel.

Junkmailman is in 9 months, and I am looking forward to it already.

Burning Man

Back from BRC

We're finally back from Black Rock City. I'm in the process of digging out from under the massive pile of dirt that I've brought back from the playa. It was a really good year at Burning Man -- things wen't really smoothly.

With one exception -- I had a real tough time getting net access to blog about Burning Man. Sometimes when I sat on top of our RV I could get wireless net access. But even then only sometimes. The only other choice was to blog from center camp, where it noisy, dusty, hot, loud and bright -- so bright that you can't see the laptop screen. I could've attempted to blog at night when I could see the screen, but really -- there were many more important things to do at night. :-)

I will catch up in the next few days and post the most thoughtful impressions and experiences from the playa. I'm sorry I didn't have a running commentary as I had hoped. Ahhh, perhaps next year.

For next year I may setup a point to point link to center camp and have a strong omnidirectional antenna for our camp. Along with a public login laptop for people to communicate with the outside world -- I'll add that to the long list of things that I want to do next year. :-)