My Music and Spam

Two fairly unrelated subjects, I know.

I don’t know how many people have actually come across the earthlink and mindspring system of requiring that unapproved e-mail addresses must enter a short message and fill out a little “image verifier” before you can send e-mail, but they exist. They probably work pretty well, too—but the thing is, the little image codes aren’t very variable.

In doing my work this summer (disclaimer: I do not work for a spamming company. Yech) I do a fair amount of e-mailing, and I’ve had to fill out the little “what random combination is hidden in this picture of a pig” thingies quite often. So often, in fact, that I don’t even have to type them in anymore—basically all the codes are in my auto-complete. Seems like it’d be fairly simple to write a program that checked the most frequent ones and then moved on. I bet some spammers will start doing that soon, and get a good 60% through.

Music.

I’m an “it’s my music” type of guy. I guess because of this mindset, I’m a little upset with iTunes on principle. Just earlier today, I learned that the music I’ve purchased and downloaded from the iTunes music store is kept in a proprietary “m4p” format, which fooled me for a while because it looks like “m4a.” The difference is that the m4p format is locked in to iTunes, and amongst the available portable mp3 players, *only* compatibile with the iPod.

While this isn’t essentially a problem for me since I can still listen to the song, and i use an iPod, the fact remains that should a better mp3 player come out, or should I have more than 10 computers in my life (I can’t decide if this is likely or not), I will at some point lose the ability to play this song despite the fact that I’ve paid for it.

The truth of the matter is that no song file will ever be completely secure; if you can listen to it, you can record it. But that doesn’t mean that breaking DRM protections are going to remain very simple for long…and providers of digital media software need to realize that the content production companies aren’t their only customers. Give the user some freedom.