notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

headlessness:

“A report published by CNet highlights the fact that the account information and email address of the iTunes account holder is hidden inside each and every DRM-free download. I checked, and I found I couldn’t access the information using an ID3 tag editor, but using Notepad I found my email address stored inside the audio file itself.”

Slashdot | iTunes DRM-Free Files Contain Personal Info.

Wait, is this meant to be news? iTunes Plus downloads have been watermarked since the day they were launched, nearly two years ago. The purchaser’s email address shows up if you look at track info, so it’s not really all that “hidden”. Oh, and iTunes downloads are AAC files; ID3 is for MP3s, you want QuickTime metadata atoms instead.

At least the comments at +5 are reasonably sane, and I suppose a reminder of watermarking doesn’t really hurt.

Charlie Stross on the life and death of the PDA. Usually I’d post this on delicious, but there’s a lot I want to quote.

Newton was John Sculley’s pet project, allegedly started after a high-level Apple meeting in which he realized everyone present was using a Cambridge Z88, and said “why don’t we make one of those?”

The sorry truth is, PDAs are a commercial rat-hole. The only folks who really made money at them were Psion (hors de combat) and Palm (whose abject failure to modernize their OS since 2001 amounts to the longest drawn-out suicide in portable computing history

It turns out that people don’t want that stuff in a notepad-shaped machine. What they want is a mobile phone that does the address book/agenda stuff — and is an entertainment gadget besides, with a camera and music player built in.

Folks who use computers and want a mobile device want a real computer that has shrunk in the wash, not some bizarre tablet thingy that forces them to write with a pen. Sculley’s 1989 executives might not have known how to use a keyboard, but it’s 2009 now, and only luddites and geriatrics have failed to come to terms with QWERTY over the intervening two decades.

I’m now looking at my desktop. There are two devices on it: the powerful, grown-up iPaq with a decade of software development behind it, and the new upstart iPhone. And I know where the future lies.

(via binkythedoormat) Some of these look like they’d fit in with the storm of naive design dross that fills up fffound. (Oh, and the Santogold cover sucks.)

This post is much-linked, and usually I’d put it on delicious, but I’m going to dump in some big quotes and vaguely organised thoughts that, even with the new 1000 character limit over there, would probably be a bit much.

Twitter is user-extensible.The @syntax for referring to users, hashtags, and whatever you call the use of $ as a special symbol for reference to financial instruments, were all user-generated innovations that, because of Twitter’s simplicity, allowed for third party services to be layered not just on the API, but on the content.

For a long time, I’ve been annoyed at the cruft of hashtags and the like in Twitter messages. At-replies I’m less annoyed by, because they’re explicitly supported in the user interface I use (I’m one of those strange people who prefer the web interface to twitterrific, twhirl or somesuch). Hashtags, though, seem pointless: search.twitter.com indexes them as if they were ordinary words. The new use of $ for financial symbols also seems trivial.

On the other hand, these innovations all seem to be used far more than “proper” metadata is on other services. For example, Flickr’s tags are fairly well used, but machine tags (which are the most useful sort of hidden metadata) are still pretty rare. Perhaps I’m just going to have to accept that people aren’t good at entering things in complicated ways, and that emerging information from the nuance of conversation (to mangle a Stephenson quote) is the way to go.

In an aside on Twitter’s simplicity, there’s this:

New services likepeoplebrowsr are reframing service aggregation in a richer way, as a way of learning more about the people you follow, browsing the social graph. (Peoplebrowsr is still in alpha, but I think it has real potential as a social graph explorer, rather than as yet another people feed-reader.)

As someone who has wittered about aggregation a bit this year, I’m really curious about peoplebrowsr. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite seem to be doing what I’m looking for; roll on a true social graph explorer/aggregator.

If the US ever gets a decent healthcare system, writers will need a whole stack of new plot devices.