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Posts Tagged ‘Music Files’

16-yr old launches Vye music-sharing site. Another Napster?

With the help of close friends and family, 16-year-old Charles Allatt, has launched Vye Music, an online meta search app for music files around the Net.

The site pulls search results from other music sites — including Skreemr, MP3Codes, and 4Shared Music, sites which in turn index hundreds of thousands of sites, blogs and artist pages.

Vye collates all of this content for the user and applies a simple, AJAX-based interface to let you build playlists, stream songs, and download them.

Letting users share and download music for free is what got Napster in trouble for copyright violations back in 2001 and led to the end of that free service. But Allatt claims that the distinction between his website and Napster is that his site is legal, despite the download availability. (An inability to download music has been the legal distinction that other sites in the music-sharing space have used to stay out of court. Streaming is considered a broadcast — as in radio — whereas downloading is a product, something that was well-defined during the Napster trials.)

Allatt says that as a search engine, “Vye Music permits users to download the content, operating under the premise that exterior copyright controls (ie. the copyright compliance of our APIs and content hosters) as well as users’ own judgment will let users stay well within the law.”

In other words, Vye doesn’t actually have any direct control over the content that appears on the site. The control is with the ultimate host of the music being streamed or downloaded. Vye merely links to those hosts through a search index. Allatt does say he plans to comply with copyright law: “DMCA takedown notices are forwarded to the relevant API providers, and the direct hosts of content wherever possible.”

It remains to be seen how well Allatt’s legal claims might hold.

The site interface and features are, however, nicely done. You can use the simple, intuitive interface without login, but you’ll need a username if you want to access more advanced sharing and storing features. Supposedly DRM-free music tracks can be downloaded directly from their links as well. I say “supposedly” because a search for Metallica brings up several download-able tunes whose only connection to Metallica is that it was the front band for the RIAA lawsuits that covered the news a couple of years ago.

As with most search tools of this nature, some of what is returned is not what you asked for and, I found, is also often not the full song. Worse yet, songs are often “Rick Rolled” to be something entirely different from their titles. This, of course, is not necessarily Vye’s problem, but it is a problem endemic to search-based apps.

As for potential competitors, the site’s closest competitors are the very same sites it pulls content from.

Allatt, who’s Australian and based on Australia’s Gold Coast, developed and maintains the site under the auspices of his company VEXiS Media. He self-funded the company, and several friends and family members assist him with the site for free.

He previously started failed music site iZaRia.us. It’s possible he’ll have better luck with this newest venture, since there are some indications the music industry may take more kindly to free online downloads than it has in the past.

Many around the Web have been saying that the RIAA lawsuits were a turning point in which the paradigm of artist-label-distributor was broken and shown to be outdated. Some artists, most notably Pearl Jam, have foregone the larger record label almost entirely, pursuing a more open approach. Up-and-coming bands often put free copies of entire albums online for download and dissemination, making money through paying gigs, concerts, and donations. The Isosceles Project in Canada is an example of that model. With the advent of high-speed data connections for most of the modern world, the days of the album and record label may be coming to a close. These new models of music distribution are likely the early versions of the new paradigm. So, perhaps Vye Music is part of those beginnings.

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How to Secure Your Jailbroken iPhone

Earlier this week, the news of the first iPhone worm made its way around the net. Since the worm only targeted jailbroken devices and then only those which had the SSH program installed, there wasn’t a need for concern on the part of most iPhone users. However, a second worm which uses the same security hole as the so-called iKee worm has reared its head and this one is far more dangerous. According to security firm Intego, the new worm goes after personal data stored on the device including email, contacts, SMS messages, calendars, photos, music files, videos, and any other data recorded by any iPhone app.

In other words, if you’re the owner of a jailbroken phone, you should now be concerned.

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New iPhone Worm Discovered

Unlike the relatively innocuous iKee worm which the creator designed more as a “public service” to alert users to the potential for malware on the iPhone, the new worm, dubbed “iPhone/Privacy.A,” is the real deal. Where iKee simply switched the iPhone wallpaper to display a photo of singer Rick Astley (a nod to the internet meme of rickrolling), Privacy.A gives the user no indication that it is running on the device.

The new worm also operates a bit differently than iKee does, as it doesn’t have sit on the iPhone itself in order to inflect its damage or spread. The hacker can either load the worm onto their personal device and then monitor the network for jailbroken devices to attack or they can load the worm onto a computer. As Intego points out in their post, this computer could be on a public network at an Internet cafe or retail store. In that scenario, the worm would then scan for any other jailbroken iPhones that came within range of the Wi-Fi network and attack them.

How to Secure your iPhone

Although many jailbreakers are tech-savvy enough to know how to lock down their devices to protect themselves from attack, there are quite a few who have simply followed online instructions such as these to perform the jailbreak. This group, while arguably somewhat tech-savvy, doesn’t necessarily know all the nitty-gritty details about the iPhone filesystem or its security mechanisms.

To make it easy on these users, we’ve provided steps on how to change your iPhone’s root password – the common denominator required in order for the malware to gain access to your device.

While some may argue there’s no need to change your root password if you haven’t also installed the SSH program, another necessary element for these attacks to work, we think that’s a little short-sighted. It would be easy enough for a malicious hacker to trick jailbreakers into installing SSH by bundling it with some other third-party application offered through underground App Stores like Cydida or Icy. By masquerading as something innocent like a wallpaper-changer or ringtone bundle, a hacker could easily set up a number of jailbreakers with SSH without the victims even being aware that it has been installed. Although we haven’t heard of anything like this happening yet, if we thought of it then you can bet that the hackers out there have thought of it too.

Changing the Root Password

The best protection is to simply change your iPhone root password. That will keep you safe from the current iPhone malware…as least for now. Here’s how:

1. Install the MobileTerminal application from Cydia.
2. Reboot your iPhone.
3. Launch MobileTerminal and type in the command: passwd
4. At the prompt which asks for the “Old Password,” type in: alpine
5. At the new password prompt, type in a new password of your choosing, making sure to pick something strong.
6. Re-enter the password to confirm.
7. You’ll then be returned to the Mobile$ prompt which means the change was successful.
8. Now you’ll need to change the password for the secondary admin. Type in the command login root.
9. Again, you’re prompted for the old password. Type in alpine.
10. Now type in the command passwd
11. You’ll then go through the change password routine a second time, entering in alpine as the old password, creating a new password and then re-entering it to confirm.
12. When you are finished, close the application.

Note: these instructions assume you are running iPhone OS 3.0 or higher.

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