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As popular uprisings have unfolded across the Middle East this year, much attention has been paid to the both underlying unrest that is causing them and the social media that often helps fuel them. In the background, receiving less of the limelight, lies another phenomenon: the growing community of musicians whose music is inspired by this growing demand for social change
It was this growing creative movement that inspired Esra’a El Shafei to launch MidEastTunes, a website that serves as a central hub for independent artists from throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The site, which went live in 2010, was recently relaunched with a fresh design and new features geared toward making it easer for artists to upload and share their music.
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“If you read the mainstream coverage on underground music during the revolutions and regional protests, it always brings across the idea that somehow, this is a new phenomenon here. But some musicians have been doing this for almost a decade.” -Esra’a El ShafeiThere are a number of things that naturally come to most Western minds when thinking about the Middle East, from conflict and politics to food and culture. Heavy metal is not typically one of them. Yet there exists a growing metal scene in places like Iraq and Bahrain.
After MidEastTunes launched with a handful of profiles for metal bands from Bahrain, it started getting major press, most notably from CNN, at which point the site began to grow into a more popular destination, with more artists submitting their music, which El Shafei and her team would manually vet and post to the site.
The newest version of the site, which went live about a week ago, streamlines that process by giving artists the ability to submit and update their own profiles. It also features a new music player, which stays in place and streams music as you navigate the site.
MidEastTunes is one of a number of projects by MidEastYouth, an organization that uses digital media to advocate for progressive change throughout the Middle East. The team plans on launching new apps for iPhone and Android within the next three months.
For now the focus is on the newly-relaunched website, for which several new features are already being planned. What’s most important to El Shafei and her team is that the artists on their site get as much exposure as possible.
“If you read the mainstream coverage on underground music during the revolutions and regional protests, it always brings across the idea that somehow, this is a new phenomenon here,” El Shafei said. But some musicians have been doing this for almost a decade, some much more than this. It’s time they all get discovered.”
Edit Note: This is a guest post by Dane Jasper, CEO of ISP Sonic.net. The post can also be found on the Sonic.net CEO blog here.
Recently a number of ISPs have been caught improperly redirecting end-user traffic in order to generate affiliate payments, using a system from Paxfire. A class action lawsuit has been filed against Paxfire and one of the ISPs.
This is a serious allegation, but it’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m not sure if everyone understands the levels of sneakiness that service providers can engage in. So, while I’m no expert (as we are an ISP who doesn’t do these things), but as a broad overview, here is my quick guide to the five levels of ISP evil, and the various “opportunities to monetize customers” that we’ve passed on:
5: Improper NXDOMAIN handling, also known as “Domain Helper” applications. When a customer attempts to visit an invalid site, instead of returning the RFC standard “no such domain” response, the servers provide a search result which includes sponsored links. Sometimes the results are not well matched to the mis-typed domain, and they promote ads instead with broad commercial appeal like insurance, which will generate a high payout if the customer clicks. Extra evil points for making it difficult to opt out of this, requiring opt-out via a cookie or browser setting rather than providing “clean” DNS servers. (Paxfire’s system is positioned as a search/helper application, but these systems can be easily converted, even without the ISP’s awareness, to an affiliate pumping system.) Evil score: 2 evil points, somewhat evil, but now every major access provider provides helpful results for address typos.
A diagram showing how Phorm's “Webwise” system creates copies of its tracking cookie in each domain the end-user visits, based on the report published by Richard Clayton. Wikipedia.
4: Clickstream Tracking. An ISP is in the unique position as the point of traffic origination, creating the opportunity for very in-depth analysis of Internet usage behavior. Tracking the user’s Clickstream, the site to site to site movement as they browse using a set of tools like Phorm allows service providers to create cash out of information about private use of the Internet. Clickstream data buyers are generally ad targetting; if you visited Ford.com and looked at F-250 trucks, then CNN.com, it might make sense to place ads for large Chevy trucks on the CNN page rather than an ad for fabric softener. Absent this prior knowledge that you were a potential truck buyer, the ads might be for something of less interest to you, and thus less likely to be clicked, to “monetize”. Over time, analysis of the complete Clickstream can provide lots of insight to advertisers. Extra evil points for selling the Clickstream data without telling customers. Evil score: 5. What you do online is private!
3: Ad Swapping. Transparently proxy all web traffic, and when ad banners are in transit, perform real-time swaps of the ads for other ads for which the ISP is getting a cut of the revenue. Legitimate advertiser ads are sometimes fetched so that no one notices the decline in impressions. The pitch to ISPs from companies like NebuAd sometimes included claims of “partnerships” with content sites to better target ads. Extra evil points for ISPs who provide demographic data to the firm running the ad-swapping system. Evil score: 6.
Our reply: “No, not interested, thanks. -Dane” Email reply to Mark Lewyn, President, Paxfire Inc., Wednesday, October 29, 2008 3:35 PM
2: Affiliate Program Pumping. As alleged in the Paxfire scheme, ISPs or their accomplices take incomplete or incorrect domain entries into the URL bar and direct them to an intermediate page, which redirects transparently to a URL which includes an affiliate tag. So, a consumer types “amazon”, and rather than returning an NXDOMAIN, or even a search result, the ISP DNS server directs them to an IP address which does a content reload toward a URL of the form amazon.com/affiliate-id=XYZ. Purchases made subsequently are compensated as if it was legitimate traffic from an affiliate. Evil score: 8, with a bonus point for poisoning the affiliate ecosystem.
1: Rolling Over. In an attempt to avoid costs or under pressure from government or content creators, ISPs have handed over customer information, and even subjected customer traffic to broad snooping. Allegations range from service providers simply quietly handing over customer info to law firms with improperly filed lawsuits and incorrectly served supoenas, to the physical wire-tapping of major fiber optic lines. We’ve got your back. Evil score: 10. Potential for human rights violation.
I’ve got more to say on this last topic, but there is a clock that must run out before I am permitted to write. Tick-tock, a couple days to go.
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Growing Mobile Data Use Turned Up Heat on Carriers in Q3U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008Flash analysis: Collaborative consumption – a first look at the new web-sharing economy
At the risk of stating the obvious, I’ll say this right up front: The patent system in both Europe and the United States is the biggest threat to innovation in the world today.
Rather than competing with each other on price and features, the biggest tech companies want to fight it out in court where some Luddite judge—rather than the market—can decide who wins and loses. By claiming that another company has violated some vague patent, one vendor can use the legal system to either block rival products from the market or demand hefty kickbacks (a.k.a. licensing fees) from their makers.
This long-simmering problem reached a boiling point this week when a German court ordered Samsung to pull the Galaxy Tab 10.1 from all European shelves immediately, based on Apple’s claim that the Korean electronics giant was violating its design patents. If you take a look at the design patent in question, it looks like it could apply to just about any tablet on the market today and many that existed in past—even before the iPad came out in 2010.
My fellow journalists are understandably outraged at the German court’s decision. “Tablets and its smaller sibling smartphone are devices that are similar no matter who makes them,” writes ZDNet’s James Kendrick. “The function of these devices leaves little room to make the appearance of them distinctive, and that’s why this injunction is insane.”
“How can Apple patent an entire product category?” asks Nicole Scott in a column on Netbook News. “At any moment Apple could decide that any tablet is too much competition and file a suit!”
The problem here isn’t Apple, which managed to block the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and is also pursuing similar injunctions against Samsung in the U.S. and against Motorola for the Xoom, among other competitors. It’s a broken system that allows the paper-pushing patsies at U.S. and European patent offices to arbitrarily hand out industry-crushing weapons to whomever draws the best line drawing and hands it in first.
So many patents cover ideas that any monkey could write up if locked in a room with a typewriter for a weekend. In 1999, some technophobic tool in the government approved Amazon’s application to patent the concept of one-click ordering. As a result, competitors such as Barnes & Noble had to add superfluous clicks to their shopping systems, and others such as Apple’s iTunes Store had to pay licensing fees just to use the idea of clicking a single time to buy something.
It’s a good thing that nobody at McDonald’s patented the idea of single request ordering in restaurants or else you’d have to say “I want fries with that. Yes, I’m sure I really want fries with that” when filling up at Burger King.
Another patent licenses simply the idea of an online backup system. What will you dream up next, captain obvious? And how much power will the lame-brained lackeys at the patent office grant you?
It’s bad enough that big-time industry players such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft stifle their competitors, but there are now a host of “patent troll” companies who don’t make or invent anything, but hold large portfolios of broad patents and use them as licenses to sue or collect licensing fees. When it comes to protection rackets, La Cosa Nostra could learn a thing or two from companies such as Lodsys, which is now demanding licensing fees from app developers, claiming that it owns a patent on in-app shopping.
Unfortunately, it’s not the Samsungs of the world who are most hurt by putrid patents. It’s you. Large companies have the resources to fight these battles out in court, to use the threat of enforcing their own ridiculous patents as leverage in a cold war with other vendors, or to pay licensing fees such as the one HTC gives to Microsoft for every Android phone it sells.
Ultimately, you bear the burden of these lawsuits, patent acquisitions, and protection kickbacks in the form of higher device prices. Even worse, you lose your freedom of choice as smaller players are forced out of the market and larger players are discouraged from innovating. If you’re an entrepreneur that has dreams about building a better mousetrap on your own, forget about it. Someone else has probably already patented the idea of “mousetraps that are better than previous ones.”
If you’re a software developer, a hardware engineer, or even a mailroom worker who might be employed by a technology company, the patent system could cost you a job as companies spend more money on lawyers and less on producing new products. Do we really need fewer job opportunities in this economy?
A consortium led by Apple, RIM, and Microsoft just spent $4.5 billion to acquire Nortel’s patents. That’s enough money to pay 45,000 people a $100,000 salary for a year (not counting benefits or taxes). That’s enough developers and engineers to advance these companies’ core products by light years. Apple could shoot up to the equivalent of the iPad 6, Microsoft could fast forward to Windows Phone 10, and RIM could finally release a phone that’s only a few months, rather than years behind the competition. Instead, they’ll use the money to stockpile IP for patent wars they should never have to fight.
This week, entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban strongly suggested that the U.S. eliminate software and business process patents. He writes:
If you create a new process, use it. The benefit is from creating the idea and using it in a business to your advantage. Afraid that some big company might steal the idea ? That is life. When you run with the elephants there are the quick and the dead. That is a challenge every small company faces. A process patent is not going to make your business successful. The successful execution of business processes will.
I wish the world would listen to Cuban, but sadly the very people who agree with him are arming themselves with even more patents. Last week, Google’s David Drummond wrote a blog post, criticizing the patent bubble and competitors for trying to “strangle” Android with licensing fees, but then promising “to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio.”
You really can’t blame Google for arming itself when there’s no sheriff in town to protect its interests. But barring a massive change in patent laws in both the U.S. and Europe, you’ll continue to fund the armory.
This post originally appeared at Laptopmag.com.
Online Editorial Director Avram Piltch oversees the production and infrastructure of LAPTOP’s web site. With a reputation as the staff’s biggest geek, he has also helped develop a number of LAPTOP’s custom tests, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. Catch the Geek’s Geek column here every week or follow Avram on twitter.
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See Also:
Apple Blocks Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 In The Entire European Union Except For The NetherlandsIs A Patent War Between Apple And LG Brewing?Apple Is Also Suing Motorola In Europe Over The Xoom Tablet’s Design
Start your own Design Contest today and choose from 50–200+ custom design made just for you.
As popular uprisings have unfolded across the Middle East this year, much attention has been paid to the both underlying unrest that is causing them and the social media that often helps fuel them. In the background, receiving less of the limelight, lies another phenomenon: the growing community of musicians whose music is inspired by this growing demand for social change
Edit Note: This is a guest post by Dane Jasper, CEO of ISP Sonic.net. The post can also be found on the Sonic.net CEO blog here. 
