Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, May 28, 2003
17:17 - Pure and Simple Misapprehension http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1010541.html?tag=fd_top	(top)
Aha. Apparently the reason why Apple turned down the screws on iTunes' Music Sharing is simply that they hadn't foreseen what bastards people would be. Apple said in the statement that it was "disappointed" that people had used the new feature in iTunes to copy music with strangers. "Rendezvous music sharing...has been used by some in ways that have surprised and disappointed us," Apple said. "We designed it to allow friends and family to easily stream (not copy) their music between computers at home or in a small group setting, and it does this well. But some people are taking advantage of it to stream music over the Internet to people they do not even know." As AtAT notes, this is a fairly low-risk solution for Apple-- one wonders how the Connect to Shared Music menu option got into iTunes in the first place-- and doesn't really cause any real limitation on legitimate use beyond preventing Joe Shmoe from listening to his home computer's iTunes library from his machine at work. But presumably the solution to that is "getcherself an iPod". And for what it's worth, iTunes 4.0.1 doesn't exist purely for the removal of this feature; it does contain some bug fixes that address some problems that some people have been seeing with sound playback quality. I haven't seen these problems, which are described as "sound fading in and out" and "muffled music"; but evidently some reviewers did, and concluded that AAC was laughably inferior to MP3. This should put paid to those chatterings, because my own observations have been pretty unequivocal in favor of AAC. So I guess the moral of this story is that Apple is still rather charmingly na�ve when it comes to the wide, wide world of geeks and their tinkering with technology; Apple may have scored big with the iPod, but they underestimated the willingness of the public at large to follow the honor system when it comes to exploitable software. Or maybe that implies that the moral is actually that the iTunes Music Store is bound to fail, because it's founded on the premise that people will purchase music that's conveniently available and inexpensive, if it only provides better accessibility than free and non-guaranteed stuff from the P2P networks. Now that it's proved that people will go to just about any lengths to get free music, quality and cheapness and convenience be damned, maybe the whole premise is in doubt. Or perhaps the moral is that this is all a red herring; this was a glaring and beckoning feature that just dared geeks to crack it open, especially because it presented such an elegant engineering challenge to the writers of the leech software. Now that the hole is plugged, people will just say "c'est la vie" and go back to dutifully handing over their pittances for crisp and forever solely owned M4P files to enjoy. Or maybe there is no moral-- it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.