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Free Album from Nine Inch Nails

Several artists, including Coldplay (download leftrightleftrightleft here), have figured out that giving music away is a good thing for them and their fans. NIN released its 2008 album The Slip under a Creative Commons license (see FAQ for more info) and made it freely downloadable (here) in several formats including MP3, M4a, and several "better than CD quality" formats. For anything other than MP3 you will need to use a BitTorrent client such as the original client or many people’s favorite, uTorrent, or choose from this list comparing clients.

See also: This looks like a well thought out abstract by Michael Pfahl on Giving Music Away to Make Money. I have only skimmed it so I’m not entirely sure what points are made.

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WordPress 2.8.3 broken! Upgrade to 2.8.4 immediately!

In case you missed it, WordPress 2.8.3 has a programming error which allows anyone to reset your administrative password and takeover your WordPress blog. With administrative access, the hacker could destroy your content, lock you out, and repurpose your website for wrong doing, spamming, pornography, slander, or whatever they want. Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 immediately! Learn more at darknet.org.uk.

This vulnerability could be prevented by securing the /wp-admin directory.

BlogSecurity has recommended before that the /wp-admin/* directory should be password protected or restricted to IP address. This would mitigate this problem. See our advisory here for details. [Source, BlogSecurity, WordPress <= 2.8.3 Reset Admin Password Vulnerability]

See details of the exploit at milw0rm.

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Dave Winer Hits One Home

From the beginning I’ve described social media (mostly under the guise of Twitter) as a large party. You enter the scene. You hear a lot of noise. You focus on some conversations and it gets exciting. You still hear a lot of noise. You make some friends. You bond. You make some people angry with flippant remarks. You lose some friends. You shout at the crowd. Everyone talks about you. You step off your soapbox and rejoin the conversation. Everyone forgets you. You step out of the room to go to the bathroom. When you return, you find the conversation continued without you. You try to get people to tell you what you missed. Eventually you figure out you just have to pickup where you left off. You learn that you cannot follow everyone in the room. You realize that even though you aren’t following everyone in the room some of those people are still listening to you. Some people get to stand on the stage and everyone follows them. You think it is unfair that you aren’t on the stage. You meet some of the right people but still aren’t lucky enough to get on the stage. You don’t understand. You resent the people on the stage. You decide to ignore them. The conversation goes on. Eventually you follow the people on the stage again because everyone else is talking about what they said. The conversation goes on. Eventually we all return home.

Dave Winer, you know, the guy who brought us RSS, explains here.

So what is, what was, FriendFeed? Let’s say FriendFeed was that room at the party were the people who started the party hung out and other party goers would look in the room and see that it was different but couldn’t really grasp if it was different good or different bad and most would never really enter that room. In the words of Eric Rice, "the punk rock indie era is over." Facebook bought FriendFeed today. I won’t comment further but to say I agree with Think Jose that Facebook bought the staff, not the software. But this was about Dave Winer’s post to Robert Scoble.

Btw, you should follow me on Twitter here.

ps. Not great words of assurance:

What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. [Source, FriendFeed Blog, FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request]

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1994 Was a Long Time Ago – Fix your website!

I need to offer some professional advice to some of you. 1994 was a long time ago. Some things your website should NOT be doing:

  1. do not resize my browser!
  2. do not automatically play music or videos! If you insist on doing this, do not loop the music/video and definitely do give me the ability to stop or pause the obnoxiousness.
  3. do not tell me your website is under construction! Your website should be an ever changing, living, breathing entity. Either hide the elements/pages that are not ready for prime time or put them up as-is and change them when ready. You should have a development server hidden from the public, a staging server which a limited amount of public eyes (testers) can see, and a production server that is live to the world. At the bare minimum you should have a development server and a production server. Never make changes directly on your production server.

Thank you.