Listening to Napster

I’ve long believed that the music industry was incapable of hearing what the success of the original Napster service was telling them — that there was a huge demand for online music, but it was a demand that the industry simply wasn’t willing to satisfy. (Lots of theories about the reasons for this incapacity.) In the event, it took half a decade for the record companies to get it — and even now most of them are half-hearted about online music. So hooray for a thoughtful study of why people go in for file-sharing — and what lessons it holds for the movie and music industries.

A day in the life of a spam detective

Interesting account of the work of an ISP employee whose job is to identify and disconnect spammers.

Iraq

So, finally the hunt for WMD is over. We will be officially told next week that there were no WMD. According to today’s Guardian:

“The comprehensive 15-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has concluded that the only chemical or biological agents that Saddam Hussein’s regime was working on before last year’s invasion were small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations.

A draft of the Iraq Survey Group’s final report circulating in Washington found no sign of the alleged illegal stockpiles that the US and Britain presented as the justification for going to war, nor did it find any evidence of efforts to reconstitute Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme.”

Secondly, there are strong indications that Blair was warned by the British Foreign Office of the likelihood of chaos following a military campaigh to oust Saddam.

And finally, we have discovered that Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, thinks that the war was illegal — and that he thought so all along. If this had been known in Britain at the time of the House of Commons debate about going to war, I’m absolutely certain that Blair would not have received the backing on Parliament for the adventure. So why the hell did Annan not speak out at the time? (We know the answer: the US would have withdrawn its financial support for the the UN.)

Garrison Keillor on the Republican party

“The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.”

This is a wonderful essay. I don’t know where it was published — it came to me in an email. [Update: Thanks to Richard Earney, who found it here.] It’s distilled moral fury. And it’s spot on. Listen to this:

“Our beloved land has been fogged with fear – fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich. There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.”

Are the American people so stupid that they will re-elect this crew? If the opinion polls are to be believed, they probably will. Stop the planet, I want to get off.

Fox-hunting men

Looking at the pro-hunting demonstraters in Parliament Square, one was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s wonderful description of hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”.

Photo (c) Associated Press