The Following/Followers dilemma on Twitter

I usually follow everyone that follows me on Twitter (except when it's clearly spam users), but there are a lot of people that use that nasty little trick to gain some followers: follow a lot of people and once those people follow them back, they stop following the people. This way, they can boost their ego (and maybe their dicks, I'm not sure) by showing off a huge difference between Following/Followers.

I don't really care about the number of followers that I have, but I do have to watch out for the amount of people that I follow, because an overcrowded timeline is useless since I don't have the time to read everything. And a good way to purge the Following list is to start by removing those "non-followers".

Since the Twitter web site doesn't allow having a cross-referenced view of the list of Following/Followers that would allow you to easily discover these "non-followers", I decided to make use of one of the available Java APIs for Twitter, Twitter4J, and create a small program that would give me that information.

So, if you're interested, download the JAR file here. You'll also need the Twitter4J JAR file: you can either download from the official website or you can download it from here.

To run the program, just type on a prompt terminal:

java -cp crossfollow.jar:twitter4j-1.1.4.jar dev.follow.twitter.CrossFollow username password

Just substitute username password with your data and you're ready to go. Also, you can run the program without providing the username and password, in which case, the program will prompt you for it.

Then, you'll get the list of the users that you follow that are not following you and for each user, the corresponding Twitter URL will be provided for you to then use as you pleased. The program does not change anything on your following or followers list. It simply provides the list as described above. It's up to you to perform the necessary changes directly on the Twitter website.

If this program gets successful, I might consider creating a real app for this, with a graphical user interface and all :-)

Any problems/questions/suggestions, please comment...

DISCLAIMER:
This software is distributed here freely and as open-source. It is done so as a means to ensure dissemination of technical work on a non-commercial basis. All rights therein are maintained by the author. It is understood that all persons downloading this software know that the software is provided AS IS and in no way the author is responsible for anything that may happen to your hardware and/or software on your computer or network. This software may not be re-distributed without the explicit permission of the author.

WTF: Microsoft patents Page Up/Down functionalities????

Can someone explain me how this one slipped through: Microsoft has not only filed for, but actually received a patent that essentially amounts to Page Up / Page Down functionality.

And it's not even the 1st of April...

Source: Engadget

Pirate Bay to create the "P2P paradise island"

Pirate Bay, the notorious torrent-based P2P file-sharing website, has responded to all the attacks made to them by copyright holders' representatives: they are going to buy their own island and turn it into a copyright-free piracy paradise.

With that in mind, they launched Buy Sealand website (currently down for maintenance), a campaign to buy the former World War 2 gun platform now known as the Principality of Sealand, located six miles southeast off the UK coast. Hopefully, with the help of their users' donations, Pirate Bay will be able to raise the $2.000.000.000 needed to buy the entire island.

"It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internets access, no copyright laws and VIP accounts to The Pirate Bay," the group said in a statement on the buysealand.com website.

Source: WebUser

Retro-blogging: best posts of February 2007

Previously on the Tech in Me:

• SETI@Home was looking for aliens, but only found a stolen laptop
• The great wall of Norway's censorship
• Water-proof MP3 players
• Control the Earth using lights, with my Google Earth Led Torch Controller
• Vista successor already?
• How to really diagnose and optimize your Windows XP?
• Take your apps with you, with PortableApps
• Steve Jobs says: "No more DRM"
• Play more games: it's good for your eyes!
• Hide data in pictures

Pandora's Box has been opened...again!

On May 2007, Pandora made the unfortunate decision of going "offline" for non-US users. I got very upset because Pandora was my main source for discovering new music (based on my musical taste).

Fortunately, new services appeared (such as Last.fm), which offered similar mechanisms of searching/listening music. However, the engine behind Last.fm was not as good as Pandora's. The Pandora system is connected to the Music Genome Project, a project that has been trying to define the "genes" of music, thus making way to establish more interesting connections between artists and songs.

The project analyzes the similarities of musics by comparing "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony". It's clear why Pandora works much better than other services that basically connect artists by genre, instead of using the intrinsic properties of the musics.

And now Pandora is back (in Portuguese) with a "global" version that makes it accessible to almost everyone in the world.

Enjoy!

P2P leads to more Music CD sales?

It seems that there is a clear link between P2P music sharing and the increase of music CD sales. Well, at least in Canada. A study (available here) shows that the use of P2P applications to share music, helps users get access to new music, which ultimately leads to an increase of CD sales.

The study concluded that about half of all P2P downloads were done because users wanted to hear an album before purchasing, or because they did not want all of the songs of an album.

Even though I may relate to that (because the 30 seconds available for each song on iTunes are just not enough), I hardly believe that this is the behavior of the common P2P downloader. It may be the case for the Canadian P2P file-sharing community, but then again maybe that's why Canada is such a great place :-)

Source: Michael Geist

Are you a heavy P2P-downloader? Maybe you should be insured!

Apparently, a company in Sweden is offering file-sharing insurance. But what's "file-sharing insurance", anyway? It's simple, you pay around $19(13€)/year and the insurance company will pay your fine in case you get sued by a copyright-holder company or representative such as the RIAA in the USA.

This might actually be a good business for both sides, since the probability of being sued by RIAA is 1 in 1840. So, the insurance company may end up with a lot of money but you pay only a small yearly amount and you have a "jail free" card, just in case...

Source: boingboing

The multiple personalities of Prince

From now on, Prince will be known as The-Artist-who-formerly-liked-the-Internet-but-decided-to-sue-the-fans-for-copyright-issues-
-and-that-now-offers-them-a-song-as-a-peace-offer.

Catchy, isn't it?

Retro-blogging: best posts of November 2006

Previously on the "Tech in Me":

• Don't sell your (illegally) downloaded musics and you won't be arrested ... in Spain
• Wikipedia doesn't spread only knowledge
• Check your Internet addiction
• Google spreading worms
• The PS3 Madness: part I, II and III
  
• GMail is a virus...according to Microsoft
• Control your computer with hand gestures
• Get a refund for your pre-installed Windows copy that you won't be using
• One commercial application for free every day
• Fingerprint locks are not that safe
• My visit at IST2006
  

Was it really worth it for Radiohead?

So Radiohead decided to "take out the middleman" and put their latest album directly available on the Internet. Furthermore, they let fans decide how much to pay for it. Was this really a good idea? Definitely a good idea for us, the fans. Pay less, get more.

But what about Radiohead? Was this really worth it for them? Well, the latest numbers on the digital selling say that in average each person paid $5 (around 3.5€) for the album. The problem seems to be that Radiohead in general receive $6 (around 4.2€) for each album sold in the "old" business model.

So, taking into account that the $5 share they get on the digital business model is not the final value they receive (since there are still some people they need to pay like webmasters, web designers and production studios) I would say Radiohead are taking a big leap of faith with this choice.

The question is now this: did they do this because they thought that they were going to get more money or did they do this for the fans, to allow us to get access to their art for less money?

I wonder if other musicians will follow their lead, now that the truth has been revealed...

"GooTube" is testing anti-piracy tools

Google has announced that it will test a new anti-piracy tool on YouTube to help detect video uploads of copyrighted material. The newly developed software identifies pirated video on YouTube as it gets uploaded, but the system puts the burden on movie studios and other content owners to provide YouTube copies of the content first.

The reason for this is that the anti-piracy tool uses a comparison method between the uploaded video and the previously provided copyrighted material, so as to find similarities that would prevent the video from being publicly available.

However, content providers can actually decide whether or not content can be duplicated and in what terms. For example, a content owner while providing the video to YouTube can specify whether he wants to block anyone else from uploading copies of it, or can also ask YouTube to allow others to post it and put ads next to it.

Source: CNET News.com

Retro-Blogging: Best posts of October 2006

Previously on "The Tech In Me":

• Google Maps on your phone - How to view Google Maps on your cellphone
  
• New short-range wireless standard - Wibree was starting to get discussed
  
• Fading Windows with Jedi Concentrate - A nice application to help you concentrate on specific windows
  
• Multi-touch Interface Screens - The beginning of Perceptive Pixel
  
• Invisible Clothing - Futuristic clothing that allows you to stay invisible-ish
• Google Code Search - Search for millions of lines of code in C++, Java, PHP and other languages
• Google will buy YouTube? - when the rumours started
• Online Media Converter - Convert multimedia files between formats
• J2ME Polish - Java Mobile Programming made easy
• McDonald's and Coca-Cola's MP3 Players "play" malware - When two of the world's largest companies join together to bring malware to the world
• "GooTube" won't be the next Napster - Google's naive view of YouTube copyright problems
• A Trojan that keeps you safe from virus? - The world was shocked at this "benevolent virus"
• Wireless Internet for free on Lisbon's parks - Lisbon just got greener for the Internet Geeks
  

No personal data will be handed-over by the ISPs in Europe

The European Court of Justice, the top court in the European Union, has set its position on a "fight" between Telefonica (a Spanish telecommunications company which provides Internet services) and Promusicae (entity that represents musicians and record companies in Spain) regarding the request Promusicae made to Telefonica for it to hand-over the personal data of users of P2P networks that were allegedly downloading illegal music.

On CNET: "Telefonica maintained that Spanish law required it to turn over these addresses only in criminal cases or matters of national security. The Spanish court overseeing the case asked for an opinion from the European Court of Justice, which essentially backed Telefonica, saying that this information did not need to be turned over in civil cases.

This opinion's not a legally binding ruling, but if the Spanish court accepts the opinion and rules accordingly, this could form the basis for similar decisions throughout the EU."

This measure will mean a lot more work for the record companies and copyright entities since this was the most effective way to catch the illegal downloaders. These entities will now have to come up with some other technical method without violating the EU's stringent privacy laws.

I think there are some judges in the European Court of Justice that really like BitTorrent, eMule or Kazza. It's just a theory :-)

Source: CNET News

AllOfMP3 out, MP3Sparks in

For those of you that use the AllOfMP3.com website to get (fairly illegal) MP3 tunes, you might have noticed that it is no longer available. Whether it was the pressure of copyright companies or just a willing shutdown from the owners, we can't know for sure.

However, the shutdown didn't last long as a new website (basically a mirror of the original one), MP3Sparks.com, is now up offering the same service.

The music industry is killing itself

I've just received an email from Pandora stating that I'll no longer have access to their streaming services because I'm a non-US citizen (for those of you who don't know what Pandora is, check out their website here - but only if you're on US).


Pandora is a free on-line streaming service for music based on the tastes of the User. It's really simple to use, all you have to do is choose some artists you like and then Pandora will create playlists based on those choices, allowing you to know similar/related artists.

I already got to know 4 or 5 artists that were completely unknown to me and that are about to make me spend several 0,99€ on iTunes to buy their musics.

Now, can someone explain me how blocking non-US citizens will help the music (copyright) industry? What's the point of restricting use to a service that is, in fact, a good business model, which brings some revenue by helping Users discover new artists, thus spending more money on music?

Even though the restriction against users with foreign IP addresses can be easily removed by using some proxy service (such as ProxyBlind), it is still sad to see that the music industry is shooting itself on the foot.

CD2Web: potential law suit?

Who hasn't created a CD with a fancy presentation of your organization/project and then placed some hyperlinks to web sites or on-line documents? Every company or organization has done it and apparently, now is the time to face the "charges".

Remember Acacia? It's the patent hoarder that buys up random questionable patents and then sues lots and lots of companies. The latest is about to get a lot more attention. It's officially a patent for an information distribution system, but which Acacia claims actually covers having a hyperlink on a CD-ROM that links to a database, such as the web.

Acacia has a subsidiary, called Disc Link, who is "monetizing" this patent by suing a ton of software companies, such as Oracle, SAP, Borland, Business Objects, Compuware, Corel, Eastman Kodak and Novell among others. Considering how many companies distribute CD-ROMs with links to the web, you can imagine how many companies can now be sued.

From: Techdirt

Earn some money with your YouTube videos

YouTube has confirmed to the BBC that it will share the revenue it makes for videos in an attempt to reward creativity. However this revenue will only be "shared" only with those users that are the videos' true copyright owners.

But how will YouTube distinguish between the real copyright owners and those who are just using the content without any permission from among its 70 million users? Perhaps by putting new daddy Google's image-recognition technology to work.

It hardly seems feasible. But let's wait and see...

Source: CNET's Media Blog

DRM for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray cracked already!!

The "straight from Hollywood" DRM standard AACS (Advanced Access Content System) which is used both in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was already cracked, according to a post in Engadget.

At this time, only the HD-DVD implementation of AACS cracking can be confirmed, but there are already some rumors that the Blu-Ray AACS implementation was cracked as well.

So, the search for an "uncrackable" DRM standard continues...
The question is: will these events affect in any way the acceptance of these new High Definition standards?