An alternative three-click rule.

How about this?

"A user of a website who gets frustrated and leaves if they can't find the information they desire within three clicks is the kind of indolent, spoon-fed scumbag that should be ridiculed and told to grow a fucking attention span, rather than pandered to by ineffectual, moron-enabling web designers."¹

mp3: Ice Water — "Click Click" feat. Raekwon

¹ 'Specially since the three-click rule is a total canard anyway.

YouTube shenanigans: part 1 (beating the system)

Despite the obviously ridiculous assertion that The Waitresses' "I Know What Boys Like" is "terrible" (especially given that the writer in question also uploaded test songs by the pukey likes of Yes and Atreyu)¹, this is nonetheless a pretty interesting piece by Scott Smitelli of the Rochester Institute of Technology, about YouTube's new-fangled Content Identification software, which is intended to flag up audio files users have "illegally" used in videos they've uploaded.

The user took the aforementioned Waitresses song and mashed it up in over eighty different ways to see if they could get it past the 'Tube's audio fingerprinters (ending up successful with quite a lot of them.)

This may not be particularly surprising, but there's a positive correlation between your chances of getting one past the software and the amount the track ends up sounding like Merzbow.²

MP3: Merzbow — "Asagaya in Rain"

¹ And the erroneous description of them as a "one-hit wonder group". So what about "Christmas Wrapping", then, eh? EH?
² This is the second post this month in which i have displayed an animated gif of a shifting waveform, and both of them have also mentioned Merzbow. Hard to say if this is coincidence, and if so, if it's benevolent or sinister. Comment if you've an answer.

Stupid country of the day.

Step forward Thailand, where having 30 – 40,000 child prostitutes is considered de rigueur, but you can get three years in jail for "insulting the monarch".

The monarch in question is King Bhumibol Adulyadej (right), whose 63-year stint in power makes him the longest-reigning monarch in Thai history and the current longest-reigning monarch in the world. He also has a personal net fortune of US$35 billion and is regarded as a literal demi-god by his people as part of Thai law.

You'd think, therefore, that the poor diddums wouldn't be so insecure as to need another law allowing for anyone who insults him to be jailed for between 3 and 15 years. But nonetheless, you can in fact be jailed for "insulting the monarch" in Thailand for a range of offences, down to and including "failing to stand for the national anthem" in cinemas (though you'd think that wearing hats like the one in this pic could be construed as deliberately trying to catch people out — not quite Bozza Johnson running through Trafalgar Square in a Death to Smoochy outfit threatening arrest for anyone who started sniggering, but not far off).

This case is possibly also the biggest Streisand effect i've ever heard of in my life. If you recall, that's when an attempt to suppress a piece of information backfires and the spread of that information, and desire to find out about it, increases exponentially as a result.

Harry Nicolaides' book Verisimillitude, which got King Bhumi's knickers in such a twist, was a vanity pressing that sold precisely seven copies the world over. The only copy known to be still extant sits in the Thai National Library, freely open for viewing by the Thai public. Meanwhile, the story goes around the world.

A bit like the time the silly sausages tried banning YouTube over a video showing the King "with feet superimposed over his head", leading to "YouTube users around the world ... posting a series of Bhumibol-bashing clips, some even more offensive than the originals", each of which "has been viewed tens of thousands of times". D'oh.

MP3: Run-D.M.C. — "Down With the King" feat. Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth

Ayo Technology! (or: King Fiddy Meets Remixers Uptown)

Happy new year to you! A little bit of a delay there, but y'know, that's how i like to roll. Hope y'alls Festivus & New Year period was adequately celebratory.

Anyway, Life Just Bounces begins its 2009 with an interesting little piece of code shenanigans over at the last.fm site, your familiar one-stop shop for all things musically streamable and chart-based. If you're one of the many last.fm users who uploads their own music to the site, you'll know of their Music Manager feature, the "control panel" that lets you add albums and tracks, change titles round, set priority for your "on-demand" tracks (cf. the MySpace player, etc.) that represent your stuff to the world. It's this latter feature that we focus on here.

The interface allows you to upload tracks for any artist — which includes existing artists. You can obviously choose to label these how you wish, but the option to list them under the original artist's name is available. This was the case recently when i uploaded 30KB's melding of 50 Cent's "I Get Money" with Big Pete Gabriel's "Sledgehammer".

Now, another feature of the Music Manager is the ability to select and order your "on-demand" tracks, the four that will appear in the Music Player at the top-right of each artist page to showcase your œuvre to the world. What i didn't realise before was that uploading a track under a given artist name gives the uploader the ability to rearrange or even replace the said tracks.

Which is how the 30KB mix of "I Got Money" ended up in 50 Cent's music player.


Not sure if this is an intentional feature, but it's certainly jolly decent of last.fm to enable upcoming remixers to display their talents in this way. i eagerly await the overwhelming torrent of praise the mix will surely garner from Fiddy's 605,414 listeners.

Joe McCarthy meets the Brass Eye paedophile special

A shady self-appointed group of six censorious zealots are trying to prevent you from seeing anything on the internet that THEY don't like. What's more, anyone with access to an internet connection (though critical thinking skills and a brain are not deemed necessary) can report any website they like to this unelected, unaccountable Ministry of Truth and they will zap it.

Yesterday, the intervention of this body of six individuals, the Internet Watch Foundation or IWF (so far, so Orwellian), over a 30-year-old album cover by naff German hard rock group The Scorpions, left (warning: potentially NSFW) the album's Wikipedia article and corresponding image page blocked and 95% of the United Kingdom (warning: also has the image) completely unable to edit the encyclopaedia. The rationale for this block was that the IWF deemed the image to be "potentially illegal".

The problem with this reason is, virtually anything you can name is "potentially" illegal. Cars. Pieces of wood. Icicles. A leg of lamb when wielded (in)correctly. Steak knives. Prescription medicine. Any electrical equipment. And so on. The category of things that are "potentially illegal" is either based on such skewed semantics as to be unworkable, or so broad as to be completely nonsensical.

Anyhow, the image isn't illegal. Not even the IWF assert that it actually is, not to mention any credible sources. It has never been banned. The album, and its cover, are still freely available on amazon.com. Multiple copies are two clicks away, by simply typing "Virgin Killer" into Google Image. The cover is on the band's website. It was reissued uncensored as part of the In Trance/Virgin Killer collector's edition box set in 2004, with no fuss from anyone. It is regularly reprinted in rock books and encyclopaedias, and even appears in many an online article, ironically, on the topic of Worst Ever Album Covers. And presumably, at least some people bought it when it came out and at least some of those still have it, so there are actual real-world tangible copies going about in 12" vinyl and CD sleeve formats in attics and the backrooms of second-hand record shops the country over.

In short, while the image is crass and in poor taste (then-guitarist Uli Jon Roth now concurs, regretting the album cover), it has never been deemed even remotely close to any of the five categories of child pornography in the UK.

(Incidentally, the IWF is also keen to eliminate the actual term "child pornography" in favour of "child sexual abuse images", on the basis that the inclusion of the word "pornography" in the former term somehow legitimises CP images. Erm, what? Since when has a reference to pornography conferred respectability on anything? If that were the case, deeming something to be CP would be enough to placate the rabid morons of the News of the Screws/Scum reader ilk, and not precisely the other way around. Dunno what any other linguists reckon of the IWF's argument here, but as a holder of an MA (Hons) in English, i think it makes about as much sense as eating your own shoes.)

The point of the image's widespread availability elsewhere, both on the web and in meatspace, was put to IWF spokeswoman Sarah Robertson by Jim Naughtie on yesterday's Today programme, where their unconvincing defence was "oh, well no-one reported any of the other sites, just Wikipedia". Hmm. Does that sound like a system that could be open to... i don't know... abuse, at all? Their description of the decision elsewhere as "pragmatic", as noted by WP spokesman David Gerard, seems to basically translate as "it's easier to go after Wikipedia than Amazon as they are a user-funded educational charity and not a corporate behemoth with a phalanx of lawyers that would put Monty Burns to shame".

Meanwhile, thanks to the Streisand effect, page views for Virgin Killer went from less than 1,000 a day in early December to over 126,000 on December 7. The Scorpions' band page went up sixfold. No doubt the lion's share of those 126,000 hits were from people who had never heard of Virgin Killer, or maybe even The Scorpions, before the controversy. Heartening proof of the law of unintended consequences, but something of an own goal, one might think, for an organisation trying to limit the spread of images they deem objectionable. In fact, pleasingly, two Australian ISPs have apparently since opted out of content-filtering because of the pig-eared fiasco this has become.

Anyway, watch out for this, and be prepared for what these clowns might try to nuke next. (Indeed, the dependable wags over at 4chan have already started a contest among themselves to determine the most innocuous thing they can get the IWF to block). The law they tried to break Wikipedia with only applies to "photographs and pseudo-photographs", so Michelangelo's David and Lolita are safe (for the moment, presumably until someone decides they "potentially" aren't). But Blind Faith might not be. Nor might Pretty Baby. Nevermind? Kids? Houses of the Holy? The first Bow Wow Wow album? Hard Candy? Thirteen? The original cover of Yesterday and Today? Quoting J Biafra, "where do ya draw the line?"

It'd be nice to wake up just one morning in the UK these days without having to seethe at another news item on either more hysterical "will-somebody-think-of-the-CHIL-dren!" bollocks or another attempt to curtail our civil liberties by some unaccountable malcontents.

But until then, beware...