This link doesn't really work for anyone without a twitter account fwiw. We just see a single message. I think the preferred way to share twitter content these days is to screenshot the full thread. Or just accept that it's not really shareable and move on.
This reminds me of how much I miss watching X-Files back in the days. Such a good show.
If you're in the UK, all X-File episodes are available to stream for free on 4OD. I'm re-watching it too, but I'm so busy I can only do 1 episode every few days.
There goes my weekend lol. Thanks! Are they the remastered versions? I was quite impressed by how good they looked on the whole.
It’s quite impressive how good xfiles looks today when you compare it to other shows around the same period.
Space above and beyond in comparison looks pretty terrible from what I have seen. It’s not even wide screen.
I think X files was shot on film perhaps?
I’m not sure if what we have now on say Disney plus for example is a remastered version but certainly it holds up very well.
If you've got an Internet connection, all the X-files episodes are available for download through torrents.
Unfortunately, I do not have an Internet connection…
The same on SBS OnDemand, for anyone in Australia.
Thank you for this.
That's almost how it was back then, one episode per week. ;) I haven't done a complete rewatch but from time to time I just watch some of my favorite episodes like, "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas", "Field Trip", "Quagmire" to just name a few of them.
Still a good one. I watched it once few years. I'll probably watch it again this year during Christmas. When my son grows up I'll introduce it to him too. I'm not sure what is the appropriate age but I guess 12 is OK? Some of the scenes are definitely 18+ though, I think.
Just don't let him watch the episode called "Home", some other episodes could also be to early at 12, but most should be ok.
Yup. For better or worse, "Home" _almost always_ gets a "Jump to Next Episode."
Oh yeah, now that you reminded me, there are a few episodes that has sort of viewer discretion warning at the beginning.
I'll tell $wifie that I'll have to re-watch the whole X-Files this month to figure out which episodes my son should avoid when he is 12 (that is around 9 years from now). This definitely counts as parenting work.
I fondly remember getting Little Caesars pizza every Friday after soccer practice and coming home to stay up late with my dad and watch the new X-Files. The 90's truly were the best decade.
That’s a lovely reminiscence. It’s a beautiful memory to have.
It's funny how these kind of -maybe mundane at the time- things really are the most important things.
I loved as a teenager but its looks silly now, like a lot of teenager movies. With the exception of the "X-cops" episode which is a little gem.
It has aged better than most other shows from the era. IMO of course.
"Harsh Realm" (another Chris Carter show) may yet become relevant again though.
"The Lone Gunmen" as the sillier cousin of X-Files is as charming as ever.
Millennium is still the best spin off, and the episode parodying Scientology is still amazing
The Lone Gunmen!
For the next exercise, please find the original moon landing tapes.
The ones where we actually did land on the moon?
Yes, the original video recording of the moon landing has been lost. It was broadcast live, but all we have is the grainy, shitty, washed out recording of the national news you see shown everywhere. The actual signal from the moon, which people at Mission Control would have seen, had a FAR better resolution and contrast.
It was recorded with basically the best camera they could send, and digitized and returned to earth with a proprietary signal format invented just for this purpose, to ensure the highest possible resolution and accuracy as 1969 tech could provide. But because it was proprietary, for the media event they piped the high resolution imagery into a crummy TV somewhere in Houston, and pointed a run of the mill TV production camera at this little TV screen, as a low tech conversion just for that night. Like a bootleg movie video.
Unfortunately the primary recording was accidentally destroyed, and the backups are missing. All we have now is that shitty TV camera recording of a TV screen with terrible contrast where you can barely see anything.
It is accurate in that for the billion people watching live, this grainy low contrast video is what they correctly remember seeing. That was the moon landing experience for nearly everyone on earth. But those in Mission Control DID have a nice crisp view, and the rest of us may never get to experience that :(
How did they lose that? Sigh...
It really comes down to “no thought to preserve it”:
In the early 1980s, NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage and it is likely the tapes were erased and reused at this time.
Wow, just wow. That's mind boggling. I actually had no idea. While I get that hindsight is 20/20, it doesn't take too much intuition to realize if you're sharing something worldwide or the rest of the world watched it, you should probably keep the highest quality copy. It's like you filmed Gangnam Style in 8k, downsampled to 720p for YouTube and then threw the original copy away even after you saw the views climbing to 10s of thousands (or in this case, 10s of millions).
I've worked in some cash strapped research labs so I get the need to repurpose when budgets are tight but come on. I don't know how expensive the medium was but I would have caused quite a stir about preserving something like this. Hell, I've preserved news broadcasts of work I've been involved with that made it to the news that I have to this day, and that is only significant to me really.
It may have been accidental. There were storage rooms absolutely filled with data tapes from Apollo. These were mostly recordings of the Apollo science instruments, which were left on the surface and kept broadcasting seismic and other data for years. Of course the first couple of tapes had all the mission data, but it’s likely the people reusing the tapes thought it was just already-processed (and duplicated) seismic data they were wiping. It wasn’t until 2009 that NASA realized the error.
Big reel to reel data tapes didn't have the best labeling and could be stored in cans that might not match the spindle's label. I could imagine it pretty easy for a tape to be stored in a mismatched can and then get sent off to a storage area. The "right" can with the wrong spindle ends up in the archive while the "wrong" can gets sent off to a warehouse or reused or whatever. Apollo was a huge project with a lot of people. All it takes is one person too busy to notice they put a tape in the wrong can.
In my fever dream version of reality the success of something like "For All Mankind" would present an opportunity to fund searching for this footage.
I read an article a while ago that concluded the tapes were almost certainly reused (overwritten).
Sadly they stopped looking when they realized that. In actuality, modern equipment could probably read and recover the previous data from the tapes, if the tapes still exist. It is very hard to fully erase data with equipment from that era.
Also I wonder if there is some Soviet storeroom somewhere that has a copy? They surely would have been listening in.
While obviously the true original would be better, I wonder how closely modern upscaling/de-noising/etc (possibly with AI assistance?) would approximate the lost footage.
The ones that tried to convince you we didn't land on the moon and faked the tapes, despite people in the know being well aware that the "fake tapes" were actually produced on the moon as part of Operation Nonstop Night.
Lone Gunmen forever.
Has anyone asked the estate of Stanley Kubrick?
There seem to be a few articles about it now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/12/06/x-files-son...
An update from one of the songwriters: https://www.joneshouseband.com/about-2
Apparently Dan and Glenn had 4 hours to write and submit the song! Imagine throwing together a song in 4 hours and then finding out that people loved the song so much that they tracked you online 25 year later.
Imagine being so skilled that you can whip up a whole amazing song in four hours! I'm not sure if I could create anything beautiful in four hours.
True. I know a couple people who work with soundtracks professionally for TV, and the crazy thing is that "writing songs fast" is a totally different skill in itself, so it's not enough to be an amazing player with decades of experience, or even an amazing songwriter, it's a different superpower that impresses other musicians too.
Those super-fast soundtrack/jingle composers, session musicians and professional songwriters have this "little bag of tricks" in their heads that they use to move fast and iterate. They know intricacies of the styles they work with, like chord progressions, rhythms, song structures, arrangement conventions and cliche lines. Then, the chord progression often "suggests" a melody (meaning: some notes sound more natural over different chords), and melodies often also "suggests" some lyrics. And they also know the rules well enough to be able to break them.
Naturally, to make something "beautiful" takes more than "speed" and "familiarity with the genre". But it is really cool to see people able to do things fast. I wonder if we could apply this to coding... I guess it's not too different from people able to do game jams, or hackatons.
I recall reading that Bernie Taupin and Elton John first met when they separately answered an ad for a company that wrote jingles and music for commercials. Apparently the two were partnered together at the company and would crank out a high volume of content every day. If true, this gives insight into their prolific output during the late sixties and early seventies.
That and the cocaine, of course.
This is the most beautiful comment I've ever read. Well done, Pavel!
Charles Mingus was onstage with his band when he was told that Lester Young had died. He called a short minute break and while his band went and got themselves a drink, wrote and arranged (for an 8-piece band) "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"[1] in tribute. They came back on stage and played it immediately.
Keith Jarrett wrote all the music for a tour of Japan on the plane there. That became the album "Personal Mountains"[2]. Apparently he literally had all the meal trays around him open with scores on them and was scribbling away the whole way.
[1] One of the all-time classic jazz ballads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWWO_VcdnHY
Well, as the saying goes, it took 4 hours, plus a lifetime of study and practice.
It’s survivor bias at play. There would be a million other tracks written and released with the same time constraints that no one heard off.
It’s survivor bias at play
What is the "it" in this sentence referring to? No one made any claims to refute.
The GP just asked you to imagine the feeling of being in that situation.
1) Clear your evening. 2) Do not Google, but rather jump straight to your favorite media platform, and locate a 2012 film named: “searching for sugar man.” 3) Watch alone because it’s impossible to watch without crying tears of joy
They're planning to release it as a single!
Somewhat related, in that involves the X-Files and hidden songs, the CD of X-Files related music had a "Track 0" that can be accessed by rewinding beyond 0:00 of track 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_in_the_Key_of_X:_Music_f...
Producers used the Compact Disc's pregap, so a listener would have to actually manually rewind the first track a full nine minutes to hear two additional hidden tracks, "Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Riverentum" and a cover of The X-Files theme song, both performed by Nick Cave and Dirty Three.[20] This is hinted at in the album's liner booklet, which notes "Nick Cave and the Dirty Three would like you to know that "0" is also a number".[21] The use of these hidden tracks has been described as "just the sort of surprise one might have suspected from a show that deals in unexplainable mysteries".[22] Not all CD or DVD players will allow the album to be "rewound" back to these tracks as this violates Red Book standards.[23]
Whoa, I had no idea. This is one of my favorite albums. I have the FLAC rip of the CD on my phone. Does anybody know how I could actually rip that zero track? iTunes didn’t do it.
The keyword to search is "HTOA" ("Hidden Track One Audio"):
https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=HTOA
I think you also need to find CD/DVD drive which can extract HTOA, not all drives can do it. There were lists (one of them is linked in Hydrogenaudio article), but I think those are severely outdated now.
I haven’t used it for years, but EAC was the gold standard for ripping. This thread mentions a few other options as well:
https://community.metabrainz.org/t/best-way-to-rip-pre-gap-t...
I really thought this thread would be about this. I recently tracked down a copy of the CD, specifically to see if I could export these pre-gap tracks. (No luck so far, but I've only tried modern stuff; I probably need to look for a more retro drive and ripping software.)
There were lists of drives which can extract HTOA (on Hydrogenaudio or dBpoweramp forums), but I couldn't find one now. I have a vague memory that Lite-On had quite a few capable models.
https://github.com/thomas-mc-work/most-possible-unattended-r...
Step 1: find the best cd drive, set offset Step 2: rip drives, uses musicbrainz to find metadata Step 3: it checks the hash it's ripped with AccurateCD
You can alter the script to not abort on unreadable tracks if you wish
I remember finding that secret track based on that "0 is also a number" and being blown away. IIRC there's at least one other secret song in another track's pre-roll.
I want to believe!
Thanks for that, I wasn’t aware of this (it was my sister’s CD back in the day). Things like this are a nice reminder of when I believed in more things, when stuff was done for passion rather than profit and being a nerd meant something other than being dismissed as a techbro or whatever people say now. Ok, taking off my rose-tinted-nostalgia glasses now. Things are always fantastic and things are always broken, only depends on where (and why) you focus.
Another amazing track 0, which is described in the (extensively long) album title as having been “lost”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_of_the_Remixes
Loved that track, and the adventure of finding it.
I'm not sure how "lost" it is, but I always have trouble finding the Foo Fighters cover of Down In The Park off that album.
I find stories about lost media intriguing and I am happy that this one got resolved.
There is an online subcommunity both on YouTube and Reddit trying to discover a lost song based on a 17 second audio clip found online a couple of years ago. So far, no luck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_Knows_That_(Ulterior_...
Honorable mention to The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Mysterious_Song_on_th...
If anyone is into musical mysteries, there's a bunch of Zappa fragments that might be quotes from his or others' works, something that he did all the time:
https://www.zappateers.com/fzshows/mystery.html
Every time I hear #4, I think a bit of La donna è mobile, ...
Definitely not. I’ve sung La donna è mobile a zillion times. Also, damn, was his guitar going out of tune or what? Maybe he’s playing one of those 1970s Stratocasters that just wouldn’t behave.
More generally, these are instances of Lostwave: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lostwave/
Is there a subreddit for lost media?
Internet Archive reached out to me (personally?) because there was an audio file from the original Minecraft - the sound of a cow. I had made a comment about the sound on Reddit many years ago, so they reached out asking if I still have it on a hard drive somewhere
That does sound a lot like Darren Hayes, as Wikipedia suggests. Specifically the lower-pitched singing of "you've got"; it sounds exactly like a signature Savage Garden thing.
Every artist has demo tapes with songs they've written but never published, and a lot of obscure stuff got leaked in the heyday of filesharing.
The full song will drop Friday, Dec., 7. Check back for it!
"Friday"?
It is Friday, but I guess not in my timezone (NZ) :P
Friday is the 8th. The 7th is Thursday.
Please notice that they do not say which year. :)
I once was listening to a song in a cafe in Pakistan and couldn't find it. Me and friends did:
- Shazam a few times
- Ask the restaurant folks if they can look at some screen to get us the name, apparently it was on a screenless mp3 player
- I recorded a sample of it
- I tried all fingerprinting services apart from Shazam
- Posted on a few subreddits, found the base song, a daft punk song but not exact one
- I looked up all remixes all over internet, no luck
- Finally someone found the exact soundcloud link, apparently it was a remix with no mention of daft punk anywhere
Well do share! lol
Many songs that I liked on Soundcloud go missing so consider saving it.
There was a remix of a Backstreet Boys song at a club that completely changed my opinion of the band (along with a mix of various other factors...) I recorded it and have scoured YouTube constantly, but no luck so far.
This was wonderful to read. It reminded something that happened to me:
During early 2000s me and my friend used to create custom Counter-Strike maps because we enjoyed mapping. We created several maps but almost none of them got played on internet servers because people liked to stick with more known maps like de_dust or cs_assault.
Maybe 10 years later somebody asked me via some messenger or email if I still had the .bsp file of a particular map of ours. I was very surprised about this message because it was so random at that point in my life, I already moved on to other hobbies than mapping. But apparently the map was a hit among Turkish internet cafes and people were looking for the BSP file to play it after internet cafes lost their popularity and everybody had internet at their homes.
Do you remember the name? Might be fun to play!
The map was cs_filistin (Palestine in Turkish). Note that I wasn't even 18 at that time and had no idea about politics. There was an official CS map named cs_iraq which looked unique to me and I just wanted to create something similar.
I put all the maps I worked on to my web site with some screenshots, comments from me and my friend (in Turkish) and download links.
You can find cs_filistin here:
http://www.canol.info/maps/counter_strike/cs_filistin/ (I need to install an SSL certificate, I haven't updated the web site in years)
You can find my other maps here:
Another aside: I only recently made the connection between the ancient Philistines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines) and Palestine when a speech by Erdogan supporting Palestine was shown on the news and it had a slogan with "something something Filistin" in the background...
o-O thank you for pointing this out. wow and duh. it's kinda sorta obvious, in hindsight.
This makes me miss the ReplyAll podcast. They were the best at tracking down obscurities like this and telling a fun story about them.
Sounds like you would enjoy this podcast, if you haven't listened already:
https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/
A whole 8-part podcast series about the origin of the Scorpions song "Wind of Change". But really a vehicle for lots of interesting cold war history.
I remember that episode! https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx
I was listening to it on a bus and screaming inside because I had that mp3 sitting in my library, obtained years and years ago through questionable means, and had listened to it quite a lot.
Even Olson - So Much Better (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qTESaoSU_8), for the record.
PJ Vogt has a new podcast called Search Engine that is worth a try.
Talking about music Shazam fails to identify, I have a bee in my bonnet about a piece of violin that I found in several trailers [1] [2]. Sounds like Ray Davies but can't find the tune anywhere.
The song appears to be Soiree by Helen Jane Long.The song is recognized by youtube on the second youtube video in the description.
Well, thank you, you made me discover an alternative to shazam! I never thought of looking into the description of a youtube video...
Google Assistant is better these days, in my experiments.
Makes me think of once I was in bed listening to a house mix and suddenly I heard a remix of a track I've been wanting to re-listen since my child hood. No text, just melody. I jumped out, got on the piano and rev-engineered the melody.
Now there are search engines for melodies, I think I used this one:
https://www.musipedia.org/js_piano.html
First 5 hits were not the track (knowing how to read score helps here), but the sixth: bleam!
The track was "Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jElCDsfptVU
Huh, I also recognize that tune from a dj set. Going out on a limb here, but is the one you have in mind The Outrunners at Razzmatazz? It would have been on the VALERIE blog in 2009ish. Here's a link:
https://www.mixcloud.com/pierre-de-la-touche/the-outrunners-...
Nah, different one. I prefer yours :)
There was a trance mix of this in the 90s that charted in the UK: Watergate - Heart of Asia, in case it’s that. You could also check out whosampled.com, that shows who sampled or covered a song.
Lyrics: "have waited for a light-year." What a long time! Wait.
It's just a few parsecs.
An eternity. https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light-experience-time.htm...
: photons don't experience any time at all.
Edit: I think it's appropriate as the lyrics start "in my memory you are moonlight, starlight". Postulating that the subject of the song is light makes the "waited for a light year" more of an "I would walk 500 miles" type of song lyric.
Except.
And I’ll never know. Because X has so severely broken the UX of their product I have no idea how to find out. Or if there even is anything beyond that.
Twitter is becoming a link I don’t bother clicking anymore…
Replace twitter.com by nitter.net
One of the people involved published this nice blog post: https://www.joneshouseband.com/about-2
So... if they forgot about it, are they not making anything at all off of it from the X-Files? That seems so wrong.
I would think they have been getting royalties on episode reruns, since they were tracked down via a cue sheet, which has their names on it. Cue sheet is used by performing rights organizations to pay out royalties to performers. Given the story of the track's composition ("we need a song, you have four hours") my guess is that these folks have produced a large number of songs over the past 30 years that earn relatively small royalties per track. Add on top of that there are multiple tracks called "X-Files" just in this episode and I'd further guess there are plenty of songs that the musicians are getting paid for that they have forgotten over the years!
Works for hire.
I checked the whole thread but don't see a link to the actual song. did it actually get posted yet? and I don't mean a cam of someones TV or something. as others said, logged out Twitter is garbage.
Not yet.
Due to popular demand, writers Dan Marfisi & Glenn Jordan are working to release the song as a single.
Dan Marfisi/Glenn Jordan found the song on a CD but it has not yet been made available anywhere.
Why do people use twitter as a blog post platform? Why can't she write a blog post and share it on twitter?
This is one of the actual great use cases for Twitter, where 1) bite sized statements are easy to spread and be digested, and 2) can attract real-time contributions from other users (who the original author can then share), 3) can instantly spawn separate subthreads not far removed from the original discussion. (The tweet by Michelle St Claire about the song likely being specifically composed for shows inspired a whole different conversation about production music libraries.)
If this was posted on a blog it would be a whole series of posts or perhaps edits to the same otherwise static blog article. Not to mention this is also not an instance of someone writing long-form tweets in an interminable thread, i.e. the classic "why is this not a blog post?" classic anti-use case.
Late to the Shazam show, had not heard of it. Will it work with me playing a melody on the piano or does it need the original record?
I have this uplifting jazzy song in my head that was used for the basketball intro in Spain a very long time ago. It sounded much like a Sousa march played by an electric jazz band. Tried all kind of tricks to find it, but no luck so far.
It needs the original record, or something close to it (it can recognise some live versions at a different speed, maybe cover versions). The Google app on iOS or android has a thing where you can hum a melody so that might be better.
Somewhere I saw a clip of David Duchovny revealing the never-before-heard lyrics of the X-Files theme song:
The X-Files is a show
With music by Mark Snow
The X-Files is a show
With music by Mark Snow
...I wonder who's the author, and if they did a Rodenberry on the theme (Rodenberry, in addition to everything else, was the author of lyrics for the Star Trek theme. Despite them never being used, he made a tidy sum in royalties.)
best of the internet
Kinda similar, I've been forever looking for this classical song played at the end of Stargate Atlantis S05E03 https://youtube.com/watch?v=ostmot-zVDs
I think I read somewhere the guy died who made the song (and was going to release it), but probably lost forever now :( https://forum.gateworld.net/stargate-atlantis/episodes/seaso...
There is another track in X files which they never officially released by I absolutely love it.
The rightful conclusion will be when someone can watch the X-Files episode, query Shazam, and it returns the song!
I'm glad they figured it out, the song was way too on the nose to be a random library track. I'm surprised people were saying that after hearing the lyrics.
This thread inspired me to watch an X-Files episode last night. I had to search for what episode to watch because I remember them getting pretty scary and creepy, which I don't want right now. I found a mild and comical one that was perfect: Jose Chung's "From Outer Space", season 3, ep. 20
That was one of the most interesting and captivating rabbit holes I've read in a long time.
I’ve been on a similar rabbit hole looking for a proper release of this song https://youtu.be/Oom_s1mu-Ks from the movie The Funeral
I found out that it was written by Abel Ferrara (the director of the movie) but no proper recording that I could find
Coincidentally there’s another song in an x-files episode that has been sought out over the years. In that case though, it’s a rendition by the original performers that seems to have never been made public: https://www.reddit.com/r/XFiles/comments/1zthzq/can_we_pleas...
I love this kind of thing. A lot of times I will have to write a composer or bother a sound engineer for something uber-rare, something that was never officially released. Many of them are only too happy to share.
this reminds me of that one really in-depth article that I read about git about 10 years ago, it put in parallel the different git commands, the effects it had on the data structures stored on disk (i.e. .git internals) and the associated DAG operations
it was absolutely beautifully done and I've been looking for it ever since, but I am now afraid of the fact that it was only a composite of several other articles recreated by my brain from different blog posts, articles and various pieces
That was a really enjoyable thread, and what a great resolution. Not really my type of music but I'll ha e to give the song a listen in a couple of days when it becomes available.
So I used to Shazam songs from shows all the time, but Shazam “expanded” a few years back to being able to identify the episode of a tv show from a sample and that killed Shazam for me because it would return the episode and show I already knew I was watching instead of the song playing in the background of the dialog I was sampling.
Noticed this one a few days ago randomly as it was developing and as an old X-Phile it intrigued a bit ... particularly because it actually was going somewhere very fast after years of people pondering about it. (even had me searching some old usenet archives for clues)
TL;DR:
A song that appeared in a country bar scene in an X-Files episode (the 25th anniversary of the first airing of said episode in 1998!) has been a mystery for years. Allured by its on-topic country lyrics etc, many have wondered for years. After this thread, the music production guy and some others have come out of the woodwork and are working on finding the lost song which was produced/played custom for the show. A cue file has been found and the music guy thinks he might have a cd backup of it somewhere (which requires more help because he doesn't have a cd player to play it apparently!). They are going to work on a public release of the song if it comes together.
Finally, a case where the platform's rebrand makes sense.
the public (open?) internet is dying
i wonder if there are any nuances between public and open
I've never used Twitter in my life. Twitter is not "the internet" nor is it essential in any way. Get a hold of yourself.
It used to be part of the internet. As in, people publishing stuff there weren't isolated, I could send you a link and you'd "just read it" as it were. This is increasingly untrue. Just like with facebook and the others, I might add.
In the end, I think Jake Applebaum was right: the established social media are the real darknet. Stuff that's posted there eventually gets cut off for fun^Wprofit and dies a silent death...
This is very true. As an exmaple, Ian Hickson's blog post explaining the real reason behind DRM was posted on Google+ and is now completely unavailable (at least I can't find the original text anywhere).
Here is an open web page describing what he wrote (with some quotes), but the original text ? Gone along with G+.
https://www.techdirt.com/2013/03/26/true-purpose-drm-to-let-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20131108215400/https://plus.goog...
I can get the internet archive to display the original text when I view source. The reply to this comment of mine appears to be the original text (minus some of the formatting and bolding), and doesn't include the comments. I think it's complete, but only grabbed and reformatted a chunk of the view source.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131108215400/https://plus.goog...
Discussions about DRM often land on the fundamental problem with DRM: that it doesn't work, or worse, that it is in fact mathematically impossible to make it work. The argument goes as follows:
1. The purpose of DRM is to prevent people from copying content while allowing people to view that content,
2. You can't hide something from someone while showing it to them,
3. And in any case widespread copyright violations (e.g. movies on file sharing sites) often come from sources that aren't encrypted in the first place, e.g. leaks from studios.
It turns out that this argument is fundamentally flawed. Usually the arguments from pro-DRM people are that #2 and #3 are false. But no, those are true. The problem is #1 is false.
The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations.
The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices.
Content providers have leverage against content distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted content without the permission of the content's creators. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, what would happen is that users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it, letting them do so in whatever manner they wanted.
Here are some examples:
A. Paramount make a movie. A DVD store buys the rights to distribute this movie from Paramount, and sells DVDs. You buy the DVD, and want to play it. Paramount want you to sit through some ads, so they tell the DVD store to put some ads on the DVD labeled as "unskippable".
Without DRM, you take the DVD and stick it into a DVD player that ignores "unskippable" labels, and jump straight to the movie.
With DRM, there is no licensed player that can do this, because to create the player you need to get permission from Paramount -- or rather, a licensing agent created and supported by content companies, DVD-CCA -- otherwise, you are violating some set of patents, anti-circumvention laws, or both.
B. Columbia make a movie. Netflix buys the rights to distribute this movie from Columbia, and sells access to the bits of the movie to users online. You get a Netflix subscription. Columbia want you to pay more if you want to watch it simultaneously on your TV and your phone, so they require that Netflix prevent you from doing this.
Now. You are watching the movie upstairs with your family, and you hear your cat meowing at the door downstairs.
Without DRM, you don't have to use Netflix's software, so maybe just pass the feed to some multiplexing software, which means that you can just pick up your phone, tell it to stream the same movie, continue watching it while you walk downstairs to open the door for the cat, come back upstairs, and turn your phone off, and nobody else has been inconvenienced and you haven't missed anything.
With DRM, you have to use Netflix's software, so you have to play by their rules. There is no licensed software that will let you multiplex the stream. You could watch it on your phone, but then your family misses out. They could keep watching, but then you miss out. Nobody is allowed to write software that does anything Columbia don't want you to do. Columbia want the option to charge you more when you go to let your cat in, even if they don't actually make it possible yet.
C. Fox make a movie. Apple buys the rights to sell it on iTunes. You buy it from iTunes. You want to watch it on your phone. Fox want you to buy the movie again if you use anything not made by Apple.
Without DRM, you just transfer it to your phone and watch it, since the player on any phone, whether made by Apple or anyone else, can read the video file.
With DRM, only Apple can provide a licensed player for the file. If you're using any phone other than an iPhone, you cannot watch it, because nobody else has been allowed to write software that decrypts the media files sold by Apple.
In all three cases, nobody has been stopped from violating a copyright. All three movies are probably available on file sharing sites. The only people who are stopped from doing anything are the player providers -- they are forced to provide a user experience that, rather than being optimised for the users, puts potential future revenues first (forcing people to play ads, keeping the door open to charging more for more features later, building artificial obsolescence into content so that if you change ecosystem, you have to purchase the content again).
Arguing that DRM doesn't work is, it turns out, missing the point. DRM is working really well in the video and book space. Sure, the DRM systems have all been broken, but that doesn't matter to the DRM proponents. Licensed DVD players still enforce the restrictions. Mass market providers can't create unlicensed DVD players, so they remain a black or gray market curiosity. DRM failed in the music space not because DRM is doomed, but because the content providers sold their digital content without DRM, and thus enabled all kinds of players they didn't expect (such as "MP3" players). Had CDs been encrypted, iPods would not have been able to read their content, because the content providers would have been able to use their DRM contracts as leverage to prevent it.
DRM's purpose is to give content providers control over software and hardware providers, and it is satisfying that purpose well.
As a corollary to this, look at the companies who are pushing for DRM. Of the ones who would have to implement the DRM, they are all companies over which the content providers already, without DRM, have leverage: the companies that both license content from the content providers and create software or hardware players. Because they license content, the content providers already have leverage against them: they can essentially require them to be pro-DRM if they want the content. The people against the DRM are the users, and the player creators who don't license content. In other words, the people over whom the content producers have no leverage.
In the same way that sugared cereals used to be advertised as "part of this complete breakfast!" showing it next to fruit, eggs, toast, etc. that made a perfectly good breakfast without the cereal.
Commercial internet content providers have become more closed to those not logged in over the years. Twitter is just the latest instance.
No the public internet is doing just fine. I can still send packets to where ever. However, the machines connected to it aren't playing nice with each other anymore.
You're purposefully misinterpreting the contextual meaning of "internet" as used by GP.
It’s frustrating because some of Musk’s first moves were to make logged-out Twitter a ton better, but then a while ago he reversed course hard and made it entirely unusable. It’s the worst it’s ever been, I’m not employing “unusable” flippantly, it’s in fact almost pointless to follow a Twitter link while logged out now.
Yeah, in my circle if people want to share Twitter stuff, they’ve taken to using screenshots.
I think it is a move to try and force people to sign up.
And then when you do your account gets locked immediately for 'suspicious activity' and they ask for phone details and/or photo ID. X is going to be WeChat with payments etc, they need real people's details.
I've stopped sharing Twitter links at this point and just send screenshots to people. I can never know if they have a Twitter account. He supposedly did this to stop "bots."
My suspicion has been that the well-publicized removal of many servers that used to be part of Twitter's infra had a negative performance impact, and the series of changes to how anonymous users and/or tweet embeds worked are a band-aid on that.
For an anonymous viewer, they still don't show you the rest of a thread a tweet is in, or even any indication of the fact that there is a thread that you're not seeing. This doesn't even make sense as a nudge to join Twitter, so load reduction feels like the most likely reason to me.
What if we talked about the X-files in a post about the X-files, and talked about Elon Musk... Anywhere else?
When sufficiently broken links hit the main page, the brokenness is gonna be part of the discussion. Whatever the intentions of HN, it’s always the case, even for ones that are broken for boring and predictable paywall reasons rather than slightly-more-interesting walling-off-the-“town square” reasons.
Besides… “The Twitter Files”… Twitter renamed X… yep, that checks out, still on topic.
The worst part is that it's not apparent _why_ the link sucks. If they would at least have a message "Log in to view the rest of the thread" it would be much better. But I have clicked around in futility several times before to try to find where the rest of it is.
If you want to watch the presidential debate, you'll need to log in to Twxtter, is the gut check I'm getting with the push to streaming, but not adding clips.
You can go from there depending on how optimistic/pessimistic you want to be, but ultimately I do feel like I can see that being the path forward foe Twxtter.
The "town square" in action.
Nitter instances work: https://nitter.net/laurenancona/status/1731900441800155459
Can we just automatically replace twitter links with nitter links here? Please.
It's free speech.