Can Subscription Music Curb Piracy?

What happens when you make it easier to pay for content rather than to steal it?

Subscription music services put massive music libraries at your fingertips for only a few dollars per month. Now you can listen to the latest acts as well as trawl through your favourite artists’ back catalogues. You can even discover new artists based on your music tastes.

If you buy more than half a dozen CDs each year then a subscription music service could make a lot of sense. Services such as Rhapsody have been popular in the US for several years but they only started to take off in Australia last year. Hardware makers such as Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Blackberry and Microsoft’s Zune have all offered Australian subscription music services to run on their various gadgets. Apple has also launched iTunes Match but it’s not actually an all-you-can-eat subscription service. Instead it only lets you stream music you already own.

While hardware makers have been quick off the mark locally, we’ve also seen the rise of device-agnostic subscription music services such as Rdio and Songl. The highly respected Spotify is also expected to launch in Australia soon, which will shake things up. These services let you listen via computers, tablets, smartphones and multi-room audio systems such as Sonos.

What’s really interesting about these subscription services is not just that they grant access to millions of tracks, but that they make it so easy to play them. You can search for your favourite artist, choose an album or song and start listening in under 10 seconds. The sound quality is usually as good as if you’d rip it from CD yourself. That’s a very tempting proposition for people who tend to steal music by waiting for it to download from file-sharing services.

The growth of legitimate online music services proves that there is a market out there. Many people are prepared to pay for content if you don’t make them jump through too many hoops and treat them like a criminal when they’re trying to do the right thing.

Apple’s iTunes store is a great example of how people respond to a good service at a reasonable price. All of the movies and music on the iTunes store are available for free on file-sharing services if you go looking for them. Yet Apple has sold more than 10 billion songs. Apple’s success is not because people don’t know about the illegitimate alternatives. Its success is due to the fact that Apple makes paying for content easier than stealing it.

There will always be some people who steal content, regardless of how easy it is to do the right thing. And there will always be some people who “buy” content, regardless of how easy it is to “rent” it using subscription services. But as the NBN makes high-speed internet access ubiquitous, more and more people will embrace online subscription services — letting them enjoy what they want, where and when they want it.

For now subscription music services are more likely to complement people’s music libraries rather than replace them. But the day will come when owning content, whether you bought it or stole it, will seem like more trouble than it’s worth for most people.

Do big web buyouts indicate we’re on the verge of another dotcom bust?

Facebook, the social network that’s risen above its contemporaries as the success story of the recent social internet age, recently announced that it was purchasing social photography sharing service Instagram. Nothing terribly surprising there; these kinds of business transactions take place all the time.

What made headlines was the purchase price, with Facebook agreeing to purchase Instagram for the rather healthy (if you’re the owner of Instagram) price of one billion dollars. Instagram’s got an estimated 30 million users; that means that Facebook presumably values each user at around 33 bucks a piece. That’s quite high for a service that the users could always opt to stop using straight away. With the news of Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, many threatened to do just that.

One billion dollars for a company that allows people to share photos from mobile devices seems like a lot of money, and it did raise the question in many circles as to whether Facebook had overpaid for Instagram, as well as raising the spectre of the 1999 dotcom “bust”. Back in ‘99, many companies that labeled themselves as “Internet” companies — whether they were selling paperclips or petfood — were massive overvalued, leading to an inevitable bust when the real bottom line of those markets was realised.

Was one billion dollars — a mix of cash and Facebook shares — a lot to pay? It certainly was, but it perhaps wasn’t a matter of overpaying. Facebook wasn’t just buying Instagram in order to get access to its photo sharing users; it was also doing so in order to buy out a competitor. Again, that’s business, and possibly smart business (although only time will tell on that score).

The internet market has matured significantly since 1999, but Facebook’s buyout of Instagram is about more than just a CEO seeing some nice photos and opening up his wallet; it’s also a strategic move around mobile web applications.

One interesting business parallel popped up at the same time as Facebook was buying Instagram, as Microsoft purchased a number of patents from AOL — including most of the patents that revolved around the now-defunct Netscape Navigator browser. Back in 1999, Microsoft was being investigated by the US Department of Justice over anti-trust allegations relating to its own browser and the position of Netscape relative to them; in 2012, Microsoft (in essence) owns Netscape.

Who Deserves To Get The NBN First?

Should the National Broadband Network provide blanket metro coverage before expanding to rural areas?

NBN Co has laid down its plans for the next stage of the National Broadband Network, a Fibre-to-the-Home network designed to offer 100 Mbps internet connections to Australian homes and businesses. The latest rollout plan reveals which towns and suburbs will see the work commence within the next 12 months or three years. You can check the NBN rollout map to see if it’s coming to your street in the near future.

This phase of the NBN is designed to cover roughly a third of Australia’s population, but the grand plan is to reach 93 percent of Australian homes and businesses over the next ten years. Wireless and satellite will be used to fill in the gaps.

While some people will have to wait longer than others, thankfully NBN Co is taking a systematic approach to the rollout. We won’t see a repeat of the hotch potch HFC cable rollouts of the 1990s. Telstra and Optus chased each other through the suburbs with little regard as to who missed out. As a result of the haphazard HFC rollout, some streets got both cables while others got none. ADSL2+ has done a poor job of filling the gaps, as speeds are highly dependent on your distance from the exchange and the condition of the copper line.

The NBN is designed to stop a repeat of the HFC cable fiasco by forcing all of the telcos to share the one network. It’s is one of Australia’s most significant infrastructure projects since the Trans-Australia Railway joined the east and west coasts. Considering the scale of the project, obviously some people will need to wait for the NBN to reach their door.

What’s interesting is the latte-fueled whinging from some trendy inner suburbs about missing out on the next stage of the fibre rollout while supposedly less-deserving country folk get a taste of NBN goodness. Regional Australians have always been treated as second-class citizens when it comes to telecommunications, yet apparently once again they’re supposed to wait their turn while the cities pull even further ahead.

A look at the NBN rollout schedule reveals that it doesn’t play favourites between states or electorates. There is a push to prioritise regional areas, but the big cities still have the lion’s share of NBN deployments — as that’s where most people live.

NBN Co needs the rollout to be as cost-effective as possible, which means that some people will have to wait. Regardless of where they live, who they vote for or how deserving they believe they are. Some of these urbanites complaining about missing out on the next phase of the NBN will be the same people complaining that the NBN costs too much.

Despite their metrocentric sense of entitlement, for once some city dwellers will have to just wait their turn.

Malware Isn’t About Destroying Your Computer Any More

Go back more than a decade, and the phrase “computer virus” had rather specific meaning; it was software that did very, very bad things to your computer, and you generally knew all about it straight away, because the virus writers wanted it that way. Little bleepy messages would play when you started your computer up, letting you know that your files, operating system or (if you were very unlucky or unwise in your choice of software installations) hardware was now corrupt. Fixes were painful and expensive, but you knew you had a problem, and if you’d been stung before, you were far more likely to have backups of your most precious files.

I’ll now pause for a second to remind you: Back up your own files. Do it now — seriously, it’s far cheaper to buy a second hard drive or platter of writeable DVD-Rs than it is to go down the data recovery route by a staggering factor.

Anyway, that was the story regarding viruses, worms and malware more than a decade ago — but it’s not the case today. Today’s malware most definitely doesn’t want you to know that it’s there, because, to drop into a sporting metaphor for a second, the goalposts have shifted. It’s not about malicious programmers causing havoc for the fun of it; it’s about money and identity. If you knew you had malware on your system, you’d get rid of it — and that’d mean that the money trail (whether it’s sniffing around for traces of your bank account details or sniffing around for your identity for different kinds of fraud) would dry up double quick.

For some time Mac users were largely immune from this kind of thing, but the recent outbreak of the Flashback Trojan have shown something that many in the security community have suspected for quite a while. Mac security wasn’t solely a function of its Unix underpinnings, or any other kind of inbuilt security measure; the reasons were more to do with the size of the market that malware writers could target.

Flashback is a nasty little trojan that tries to get your Mac connected up to a network of other machines for illicit purposes; the current outbreak relates to weaknesses in the default version of Java that ships with the current version of the Mac operating system.

Apple’s growth in the home PC space has made it a larger target, and in some ways an outbreak like Flashback — which is said to have infected around 600,000 Macs worldwide — was to be expected. It’s a stark reminder, however, that we live in an age where this kind of computer security problem is very real; bear in mind that a Flashback-infected computer didn’t need any kind of authorisation; it asked for it but if refused used a different channel for infection, and installed essentially invisibly via browser based attack.

So what’s the sensible end-user approach? For a start, an anti-malware package — no matter your choice of computer — is an absolute must. It does still pay to be wary about what you’re installing; while there are more bits of malware that are installing silently, it cannot hurt to not let the more obvious pieces in. Running software updates that you trust from your operating system provider — whether that’s Apple or Microsoft or any of the countless Linux variants out there — should also be a must-do kind of activity; in the case of the Flashback outbreak, Apple released an update to its Java package that blocks further infections, but if you’re not updated, you’re simply not protected. Likewise, an AV package is only as good as its updates, which should be frequently applied.

On the cash side of things, Internet banking is a fine invention, but logging into your internet banking application from a system you don’t control — such as those in public libraries or internet cafes — is a very poor choice. Equally, checking your account regularly is a good idea, simply because if you do spot money going out in suspicious fashion, it can be an early warning sign that lets you put the brakes on any dodgy dealings.

Oh, and backup your files. You did remember to do that, right?

The NBN Rollout Gets Serious

NBN Co — the company created to roll out Australia’s National Broadband Network — made a major announcement recently, revealing its rollout plans for the next three years. It’s an ambitious plan that will — if things go to plan –  see fibre rolled past more than three million premises, both businesses and homes.

The question of when a given home or business premises might be getting the NBN did become a lot easier with the announcement of the three year plan; you can check the specifics of your location here.

The NBN remains, and is likely to remain a contentious political issue no matter what side of the political fence you sit on, and that makes it hard to write any kind of article without stepping — or appearing to — step on somebody’s toes. For what it’s worth, I’m not in the three year rollout plan, allied with any given political party or on NBN Co’s payroll. Just thought I’d get that out there in case anyone was confused.

Confusion’s a good word to use in relation to the NBN, because there seems to be a wide gulf between the technologically inclined, who generally get the potential benefits of an NBN (even if we don’t always all agree on some of the finer details) and the mass market image of the thing. NBN Co’s gotten a little better at communicating to the larger audience, especially via launching a series of explanatory videos — you can view them here — and a blog written by a well respected former IT technology journalist at http://nbnco.com.au/blog/.

That having been said, there’s bound to be confusion regarding who gets on the three year plan and who doesn’t, especially as you drill into a given map. It’s a complex process — imaging having to lay down a fresh set of roads for all of Australia, critically without disrupting existing roads too badly — and you’ll start to get an idea of the complexity of the project.

In theory, new developments are higher on the priority listing, as are those areas that were used as trial locations for the initial rollout. In twelve month’s time there’s a planned “update” to the three year plan that may reflect the first year’s work, and potentially embrace areas just outside the current planning zones. One factor that should — hopefully — see rollouts move a lot more swiftly than they have done to date is the fact that Telstra’s now signed up its conduits and cabling for NBN use; this will not only see the gradual retirement of the copper network that our current ADSL and telephony relies on — a copper network that costs in excess of $1 billion a year just to maintain, for those who like figures — but also allow for less intrusive NBN installation as new trenches and pipes don’t need to be dug in areas where Telstra’s already got a presence.

Will the NBN see out its three year plan? That’s a matter for politics writers, not technology blogging, but certainly we’re already seeing a host of capabilities in ehealth, teleworking, teleconferencing and simple data shifting that an NBN would be ideal for providing, and there’s a lot of historical data to suggest that this kind of large scale infrastructure project isn’t one that big business will undertake by itself; the copper network it’s replacing was, after all, a government infrastructure project itself.

Do We Really Pay More For Technology?

Labor MP Ed Husic’s made something of a name for himself as a consumer rights advocate, and over the last couple of years he’s had his sights firmly on the issue of IT products and the relative cost we pay for equipment and software in Australia.

The issue of pricing in Australia has a long and largely sorry history; for an awfully long time Australians had to put up with quite high prices for most technology gear; while companies were happy to laud Australians as “early adopters” for years, they were equally happy to hit us hard in our hip pocket nerves for the same technology sold overseas for much lower prices.

Often this was put down to the relatively weak position of the Australian dollar relative to other currencies — most of the time the US dollar. The only problem with that theory is that Australian dollar has been at parity — or slightly above it — for quite some time now.

Husic’s calling for an inquiry into IT equipment and software prices, but it’s worth being aware that not quite everything is overpriced. Often prices quotes in US dollars ignore local taxes — because each US state has its own varied tax base and rules for such products. In Australia all IT purchases are subject to a flat rate GST. If you see a price that’s within ten per cent of the US price, that’s pretty much GST right there — and that’s ignoring allowing any local merchant a small markup.

I reckon there’s a fair ground somewhere in the middle of all this, and in recent years some products — especially larger hardware computing purchases — have come close enough for me to fit them in a comfortable zone. It used to be much cheaper to buy laptops overseas; these days it’s often a matter of a dollar or two, and I’d trade a local warranty for a few dollars any day of the week.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t products that are still unfairly overpriced. A lot of digital camera equipment — especially in the high-end DSLR space — still command an Australian premium. At least with cameras there’s a physical product to ship; what particularly irks me are downloaded software products purchased from an Australian web site. There’s no storefront space to rent, no sales attendants to pay wages and superannuation for — just a few web developers and a backend to deliver the software that’s often the same the world over anyway. You’re paying for the actual data download through your ISP as well, just to twist the knife a little more, and prices can be more than double.

It’ll be interesting to see where Husic’s call for an inquiry goes, if anywhere, and whether it effects real change. In the meantime at the consumer end, it’s worth checking the price you pay instore versus the price you pay online, keeping in mind that a small margin is perhaps to be expected — but price gouging should be stopped at the simplest way we’ve got open to us — by shopping elsewhere.

Does Valve’s rumoured “Steam Box” make sense?

Would gamers buy a standardised PC to play Valve games such as Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead?

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a major philosophical schism in the gaming community. It separates those who play games on PCs from those who play on consoles such as the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Each group looks on the other with a certain amount of disdain, especially when the obligatory “PC gaming is dead” stories emerge with the launch of each new console.

Of course these powerful game consoles are really computers under the bonnet. The point is that they’re a standardised hardware and software platform — for better or for worse. The beauty of buying a game for the PlayStation 3 is that you know it will run happily on any PlayStation 3 and you’re generally freed from PC-esque hassles (apart from large software updates).

Meanwhile PC gamers are busy tinkering under the bonnet. They trick out their high-performance gaming rigs to offer razor sharp resolution, exquisite detail and mouth-watering frame rates. They generally like to see the whites of a zombie’s eyes before they splatter its brains across the footpath.

Of course for PC gamers there’s always a faster processor, more powerful graphics card and larger monitor around the corner. Last year’s high-end graphics card might not do justice to this year’s high-end games. Living on the upgrade cycle might sound frustrating, but it’s the price that PC gamers are prepared to pay to escape the shackles of static console platforms.

The debate rages but gamers have voted with their wallets, as sales figures indicate the majority of people prefer the convenience of console gaming over the flexibility of PC gaming. When you combined PS3 and Xbox 360 games sales, they outnumber PC games sales by around 10 to 1.

So we come to Valve’s rumoured “Steam Box” games machine. Valve’s Steam platform lets you purchase PC games online and download them rather than heading off to the shops for a disc. Last year Valve also embraced the PlayStation 3, letting console owners interact with the Steam network and engage in cross-platform play and instant messaging.

So far, so good, but do the rumours of a Valve games machine make sense? Reports indicate the Steam Box could actually be a range of PCs built to meet Valve certification, rather than just one box. It might also bring the PC gaming experience to the big screen in your lounge room.  Admittedly this could impact on the traditional keyboard/mouse interface used with PC games, considered by some to be a strength compared to console controllers.

Valve has denied the existence of the Steam Box, but the rumours persist. A standardised design should offer stability, although this would be jeopardised if owners could use it for other tasks and install extra software. Of course a static, stable gaming platform is what already attracts some people to consoles and drives others to PCs. Gamers on both sides of the divide are likely to scoff at a PC locked down to mimic a console — potentially offering the worst of both worlds.

Apple’s New iPad Review

The most surprising thing about Apple’s new iPad when Tim Cook unveiled it in early March wasn’t anything to do with the technical specifications; it was the fact that Apple had dumped the idea of a suffix; the followup to the iPad 2 wouldn’t be the iPad 3, or even as some pundits had tipped, the iPad HD. Instead, it’s just the iPad, although in deference to its current status, it’s the “new” iPad, as distinct from the one released two years ago. Look long enough at the technical documentation, and you’ll sometimes find it referred to as the iPad (3rd Generation).

Whatever you call it, the demand for it was certainly on par with previous years; at launch, the queue at Sydney’s main George St Apple store stretched around the block. Which was odd, given that there were any number of other retailers selling exactly the same thing, but many came for the social experience, presumably.

All that aside, the new iPad isn’t a radical reinvention of the tablet concept; rather like Apple’s moves with its iPhone brand, it’s more of a gradual evolution. The key feature that you’ll spot right away is the high definition 2048 by 1536 pixel display screen. Apple uses the hideous marketing term “resolutionary”, as well as referring to it as a retina display, but advertising aside, the key thing that the new screen brings with it is very crisp text and visuals — on applications that support it. Put lower resolution video on the new iPad, and the higher resolution screen will make it look a little worse, in the same way that a VHS tape played back on a modern LCD flat panel looks grainy; the screen’s simply better at showing all the detail, good or bad.

As with previous generations, you can buy an iPad with only onboard WiFi connectivity, or one that can handle mobile data, but here you’ve got to be careful. Apple labels the mobile data capable iPad as the Wi-Fi+4G model, but here in Australia, the frequencies used by Telstra (and shortly by Optus) aren’t compatible with the 4G chip inside the new iPad. It’ll still connect to 3G wireless — and it’s dual channel HSPA+ compatible, so there’s some overhead there for decent speeds. But what it isn’t, and won’t be under current Australian 4G implementations for some time, is actually 4G compatible. For US and Canadian travellers, you should be able to connect there to 4G networks with an Australian iPad, for what that’s worth.

The new iPad’s internals have been beefed up as well, with a dual-core A5X ARM processor and quad-core graphics, although again Apple’s marketing rather fudges things here. The important part here is that it is noticeably faster when using processor intensive applications compared to the older iPad models. The speed difference is there, but as yet, there’s no applications that explicitly require the new iPad.

So what’s the final verdict? Apple’s still largely leading the market when it comes to tablet implementations, and it’s clearly got a lead in terms of applications for tablets. The new iPad is better than the old one, but those with an existing iPad — especially last year’s iPad 2 — shouldn’t rush out to upgrade. Those after their first tablet would be well advised to put it on the top of their shopping list.

The Future’s Full Of Holes

If you’re like most of the population, you only upgrade your computer every couple of years, if that. I was recently surprised (and, I’ve got to admit, more than a little pleased) to discover that the computer shop closest to home still sold old-style PS/2 style keyboards. Sure, they were only two bucks a pop, which suggests they’re not exactly a high-demand item. Still, USB supplanted PS/2 as a connection methodology more than a decade ago, and their retail presence does suggest that most of us are getting a lot of wear and tear out of our expensive IT purchases. That’s a good thing, both from a value for money and environmental standpoint.

One of the benefits that you get when upgrading if you’ve held onto your current computer for any decent length of time is the jump in system and processor speeds that will have happened while you were getting a useful service life out of your old PC. It’s not a new idea, but it’s still true today; when buying new IT equipment it pays to buy at the top of the speed curve relative to your budget. You might not need that new speed today, but it’ll ensure that your purchase remains current for quite a bit longer as the applications of tomorrow are still well suited to the speeds your system can maintain. Conversely, buying as cheap as possible will get you yesterday’s technology, and while you may be able to run things today, you may find some of tomorrow’s applications beyond the grunt of a simple system. It’s a fine balancing act — it’s certainly possible to spend too much on a system with components you won’t use as well.

So what’s current and upcoming in the PC world, anyway? On Intel’s schedule for the very near future are its next generation “Ivy Bridge” processors; these feature improved onboard graphics, USB 3.0 support, better power management — and naturally they’re claimed to be faster. AMD’s continuing on its path of “Fusion” processors — systems where the processor has a full DirectX11-compatible graphics processor built in, making them highly competitive with Intel’s processor parts, although in pure market terms Intel’s still the big shark to AMD’s minnow. Looking even further forward into the types of optical chips that high end servers use, IBM’s just revealed a technology it’s calling “Holey Octochips” — and that’s not just a prototype name that somebody drew out of a hat. IBM’s Holey design quite literally takes a chip wafer and blasts forty-eight holes into it so that laser light can pass through it; IBM’s claim is that this gives the eventual chip data processing capabilities of up to one trillion bits per second. Fast, in layman’s terms. You won’t be using a holey octochip on this or even next year’s PCs — it’s still a product pitched for high-end supercomputing, and IBM’s hoping to licence the design out to other companies — but within the next five to ten years, it’s entirely possible we could all be flinging bits around at speeds that are all but unimaginable right now.

Will Tablet Owners Jump On The Upgrade Merry-go-round?

Are we ready to abandon two year-old iPads?

Apple strangely decided not to call its new tablet the iPad 3. However you describe it, this “new iPad” is hitting the shelves, making the iPad 2 look old and the original iPad look ancient. Of course that’s the same old original iPad that was the most desired object in the world only 24 months ago.

We live in a throw-away society and most of us happily abandon a perfectly good phone every two years because our telco gives us a new one for free. It’s not really for free, as the cost is built into the monthly bill, but it feels free because we’ll keep paying for the same plan regardless.

That old phone might get handed down to family or friends, but sooner rather than later it will end up in landfill (although you really should investigate recycling options). People don’t value things if they don’t feel they paid for them, so they have no qualms about casting old phones aside.

That’s not the case with tablets, regardless of your devotion to Apple, Android, Windows or even the ill-fated BlackBerry PlayBook. If you own a tablet, chances are you bought it outright and plonked down your cash (or at least added it to your growing credit card debt). Even if you’ve got a Wi-Fi/3G model which uses a SIM card to access the mobile broadband network, you probably bought your tablet outright and slipped in a pre-paid SIM.

Your telco isn’t going to turn around after a year or two and hand you a shiny new tablet for free. If you want the latest and greatest wundertablet, you’ll need to pull out your wallet again. Unless you’re a devoted fanboy with deep pockets, that hip pocket pain should make you wonder if your old tablet is still up to the job.

Gadget makers have been relying on rapid technological advances to quickly make last year’s model soon feel obsolete. Yet as products mature the technological leap between models will lessen, as we’ve seen with incremental upgrades such as the iPhone 4S. Truth be told, last year’s iPhone and iPad are still up to the job.

The way to maintain sales could be to encourage the hand-me-down mentality by personalising gadgets to the point where we can’t share them. Tablets are already so tightly integrated into “your” world that it’s awkward to hand them over, even to family members (or especially to family members, depending on your privacy concerns). Once you Vulcan mind meld with your tech, you want it constantly by your side.

The lack of desktop-esque fast user switching on tablets is frustrating, but that’s all part of the plan. If you’re sick of wrestling back your gadgets from family and friends, it’s much easier to justify surrendering your perfectly good tablet and buying yourself a new one. Next thing you know, you’re trapped in the upgrade cycle.

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