Online Shopping Safer Than Brick-And-Mortor?

I just ordered shoes from Shoes.com (where else?). In checking out, they included this reassuring note:

Using your credit card at Shoes.com is safer than using it in a store. All information is encrypted and transmitted without risk using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.

First, it is funny I am posting this, about 10 Internet years after this discussion was first had. Second, I do not understand how it is safer than visiting a store, unless the store being visited is doing something blatantly wrong. At best, I see online shopping as secure as adventuring into the real world.

DLing Under The Radar

Here is one more example of the mismanagement of the music industry and its inability to grasp the money possible through accepting and promoting file-based music (remember, CDs are digital, too):

Apple Isn’t The Only One With 1 Billion Downloads

Posted Feb 26th 2006 4:11AM by Sharky Laguana
Most of us couldn’t help but notice thenews this week that Apple had just completed it’s one billionth download, certainly a milestone in the digital music industry. But what about the other company that just celebrated the same? Perhaps you weren’t aware that TouchTunes, a maker of digital jukeboxes since 1998, has also downloaded over 1 billion tracks, and they did it with just 16 thousand jukeboxes, as comapred to Apple’s customer base of 42 million. Like iTunes, TouchTunes is a dominant player in it’s chosen niche, and is said to have an estimated 75 per cent share of the digital jukebox market. Learn something new every day, dontchya?

Two points to be made: (1) I am certain these boxes make more money per machine than non-downloading machines because they have access to so many more tracks; that means more money for the artists (ha) and music industry; (2) Here is a solid example of why the music industry should have recognized the profit potential of file-based music and why it should continue to push the direction.

Revolutionary Music In Revolutionary Iran

Fly focuses on covering music around the world. The articles are usually only so-so, but I find it worthwhile to keep tabs on what is on the site. For London people, they have a Gigs Guide I suspect is useful.

A new article, “Persian Electronica: Musical Subversion and Children’s TV”, quickly discusses some of the music used on television following the 1979 revolution in Iran. It is a quick and amusing read; here’s the highlight:

Sometimes interesting things occurred as well. There was a programme called ‘The Analysis of the Week’s Politics’ on Iranian TV and they occasionally talked about Germany and France helping Iraq in the war. The sound themes were works of Klaus Shulze and Jean Michel Jarre! Anyway, for years, we were surrounded by psychedelic tunes in our radio and television. Years later, I found out why those things happened.

One day, I was chatting with the owner of a teaching institute I was working at and he told me that he had a friend in Iranian TV, whose job was to choose the music for TV programmes. I asked my life-long burning question; did that guy knew what he had chosen for the TV or not? Then I was told that the gentleman knew exactly what he was doing. That his entire life had been spent on electronic music and he had plans to go to Europe and collaborate with Tangerine Dream. As I was told, nobody in the TV organization even knew who those tunes’ composers were and basically nobody ever questioned his music picks.