Deezer Knows People Are Pirating Its Service But Says It Won't Stop Them * TorrentFreak:
Today's legal music streaming services are providing a service that would've been unimaginable 15 years ago.
Not only do they provide access to tens of millions of tracks, they do so conveniently, on multiple platforms, and at a fair price. In fact, streaming services like Spotify and Deezer go a step further by offering a free-tier that costs nothing.
In many respects and for most people, it's the often-mentioned piracy-busting formula made reality. Of course, there are some outliers.
[...] This week, a number of people using modified Deezer clients received an interesting email directly from the 'Deezer Security Team'. At least one user posted a copy to Reddit, with others confirming they'd received the same communication.
"We see you," the email begins, with a small pirate flag waving alongside.
"We know that you're not using the official version of Deezer, and we're not going to stop you."
As disarming sentences go, this is a pretty big one when it comes to piracy. While Deezer knows that these specific users are pirating its service, has their email addresses (and probably all of their IP addresses too), and could instantly ban them or worse, it says it will do absolutely nothing. Not even the threat of a ban makes it to the email.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday October 26 2020, @12:18PM (24 children)
1. We failed to abide by our contractual agreements with our content providers by not securing our backend so we'd rather not draw attention to it by trying to fix it now or taking legal action against license violations.
2. Pirated traffic is still better than no traffic for advertising and data mining revenues.
3. We spy on our paying user-base despite saying we don't so we'd rather not draw attention to it.
4. We have too many non-techs and not enough programmers on the payroll so we'd rather send threatening emails to users instead of actually fixing the software.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @12:26PM
5. Even one user whose conscience, caution, &c. makes him go legit after such an email, is still better than none.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @12:55PM (13 children)
I don't think that's it. With a modified client, you don't even get commercials - same with Spotify.
While noone knows what kind of deals they made with the labels, one thing is for sure: they got them dirt cheap. Remember the outcry in the record industry when Apple tried to get reasonable deals for itunes? "Why do you want the poor artists to starve, you're bad evil capitalists, we're just trying to feed some creatives, blah blah"
Noone is talking about feeding poor artists these days. The labels least of all. The streaming service ecosystem is currently still in an early phase, not everyone is using them (many still prefer owning their music) and there is competition among providers. There's alternative markets now where artists are selling direct to the customer, cutting out the former oligopolists completely. There's artists making a living without ever having had to sign away their soul in a major label contract.
There's also still more than enough piracy that the labels realized they can't even hope to control by any means. They tried both legal and illegal (i.e. poisoning torrent seeds).
IMO the only rational strategy for the labels now is to give away licenses to any service applying for them without asking too many questions, wait for near-universal adoption and market consolidation, then clamp down with DRM and only then ramp the prices back up as far as they will go without piracy flaring back up too badly.
It's OK though, dear Big Three. We see what you're doing. We'll take the entirely legal downloads (i.e. with deezloader) and store them on our own computers. When you go back to your old ways, we'll have your full catalogues backed up and ready for sharing over torrents or whatever p2p networks will by then work well enough.
I'm happy paying artists for their work. I'm not happy paying execs living like kings while throwing some breadcrumbs to the creatives they keep as indentured servants. I didn't become a pirate because I'm poor, although I was when I did. I could not have afforded paying the ridiculous prices asked then. I became a pirate because it was more convenient, delivered the formats I needed with no bullshit (remember the Sony rootkit? We do...), let me listen to anything I wanted and not what someone tried to force on me and not least, because it cut YOU, dear industry execs, out. Go die already.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 26 2020, @05:09PM (12 children)
I see this as a much larger issue than most realize. It is nothing less than the ancient, millennia old conflict between East and West, that is, between servile Persian Empire and Assyrian Empire ways, and free, democratic Greek ways. Yes, this issue is that big. That conflict has occurred again and again, with the rise of the Roman Republic and its slide from Western ways to Eastern ways when it changed into an Empire, and eventual fall, the centuries long decline of Christianity, the Middle Ages feudalism and monarchy giving way to democracy in the American and French Revolutions, the US Civil War, and most recently, WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. Time and time again, the societies of the masters and slaves, of the liars and their dupes, have lost to the free societies.
To grant these wannabe gatekeepers of information and knowledge "rights" to demand a fee for every single copy of some piece of information, is nothing less than to submit to slavery. Copying belongs to the masses now. I heartily dispute the narrative that claims that copying is somehow immoral. On the contrary, copying is good. Not only is it our right, it is our civic duty to copy. Education is copying. It is only when you get to post-grad levels in education, that it finally shifts from learning and copying what others have discovered and invented, to extending the frontiers of our knowledge. To in any way hinder copying is to hinder education, and to hinder education is to imperil our democracy. In the West, hindering copying is nothing less than Treason! Go forth and copy!
As to the objection that artists will starve without copyright, that, as we well know, is utterly false. Copyright is only a means to compensate artists. There are other means. We've been propagandized plenty to accept the proposition that copyright is somehow the most reasonable, fairest, and even best or only way to compensate artists. I am fully in favor of compensating artists and scientists. I don't agree with copyright as the means. Copyright must go.
Copyright is an evil spell that poisons our thinking, and you can see the effects throughout our art, from the crude and blatant to the subtle. One example of crude and blatant can be found in the Star Trek episode I, Mudd. More subtle is the thinking that is particularly pervasive in fantasy, in which all kinds of property rights are somehow magically enforced. Such as, the elfstones in the quite forgettable and mediocre fantasy novel, the Elfstones of Shannara. Some of the tragic happenings in fantasy are farcical, based upon the notion that precious knowledge can somehow be beyond our ability to record, and therefore is lost, lost forever when the original is somehow lost. How melodramatic. In Tolkien's Silmarillion, nope, Feanor can't make more Silmarils, nor can Yavanna grow more Trees to replace the ones that are dying after the Dark Lord doomed them with poison. Somehow, the reproductive capability that all plants have is not present in these super special Trees, the Trees that are the most important of them all and therefore the most critical of all to protect. Why? Because that just the way it is. Because this tragic event has to be made even more tragic, even if the means is the totally artificial restriction of the sorts found in DRM! Bah. Must make Monsanto proud. And that, folks, is what I mean when I say that copyright has twisted and warped our thinking, and why we'd be better off without it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @06:32PM (7 children)
GP here. I agree with you, which is why everything I publish I put under either a CC license or under one prohibiting only commercial use.
One point though:
> Some of the tragic happenings in fantasy are farcical, based upon the notion that precious knowledge can somehow be beyond our ability to record, and therefore is lost, lost forever when the original is somehow lost.
Historically though, this has been true. In the dark beginnings of civilization, being able to copy knowledge was limited by privilege. Either imposed by lack of general education (school wasn't a basic right not too long ago and only the rich and powerful learned to read and write), by means (I'm not sure about the relative cost of clay tablets, but lugging around a bunch to chisel your knowledge into was never practical except for those designated official scribes. Papyrus and later paper wasn't something you got for free as junk mail, it was an exotic material.) or by language (hello Catholic church, that latin thing didn't work out so well did it?).
Rember the library of Alexandria? When it burned down, knowledge was lost forever because they had the only copy. Roman concrete? Today's companies are still trying to figure out the formula.
The internet in its beginnings promised to change all that. Not only did people share free information for education and entertainment, for the first time different cultures were able to interact and learn about one another without any gatekeepers in between. Then came the capitalists, which weren't entirely sure in the beginning about how to monetize, what they were certain of was a huge new market ripe for the taking. So they too offered good information for free in the beginning.
You know how this ended. On the one end there's surveillance capitalism, which is the worst enemy of free information as it not only wants to analyze your behaviour, it wants to modify it. To be able to do that, they give people a feeling of being connected informed while keeping them in a bubble as small as they will tolerate, their attention away from those people and information they or their masters deem undesirable and putting in front of their eyeballs whatever their actual customers are paying them to instead.
On the other end there's "journalism" icreasingly hiding their ever inferior information and increasingly more overt propaganda behind paywalls.
Most publically funded research is still kept from the public that paid for it by the big journals scamming researchers out of distribution rights.
Even in all the "free" Western countries, censorship is rearing its ugly head as citizens are beginning to question the motives of their "elected leaders".
So IMO we must go further than just copying and sharing. We must become independent from distribution infrastructure, which means becoming independent from service providers and network choke points if we are to realize the true potential of the internet as a tool for the good of humanity.
Overlay networks and P2P are the way forward.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday October 26 2020, @11:40PM (6 children)
While I do not wish to refute these statements, it must be said that they are in some ways counter-productive.
You put "journalism" in quotes as though it is not actually journalism. Perhaps you imagine that there is some kind of "real" journalism that is being suppressed in this day and age. But there is not, at least not in this country. Your options are limited to corporate-controlled sources of information.
You attack the paywall. But paywalled journalism is generally superior in quality to the kind of filth you can get for free online. CNN does not have a paywall. Neither does Fox News. Or Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, or any number of other glorified tabloids.
The problem here is that we don't pay the journalists. The oligarchs do. The journalists themselves would love to report on things that matter, things that we care about, but they can't. It is counterproductive to blame them for the degradation of the quality of the news.
Who is censoring whom, and for what purpose? Facebook doesn't give a shit about left/right politics. In fact, more disagreement and rancor is actually good for their business model. It feeds "engagement".
Rather, social media companies are really just "censoring" the people that make the platform look bad to most consumers. The people whose views are so objectionable to the majority of people that people are threatening to leave the platform because of them, or at the very least force their children to leave the platform.
Naturally, some people are upset about being kicked out. They have a right to be upset! They were promised a platform, and they had followers there! They had engagement!
It's dangerous, though, to project an ideological motivation onto social media companies. They care about one thing and one thing only: money. I promise you, if there was a public outcry over anarcho-marxist propaganda, they'd kick that off their platforms too. But there isn't, because anarcho-marxists just can't get anyone to listen to them anyway. They have no engagement. Nobody cares.
And if you're talking about college campuses, you're not really talking about the free expression of ideas. The people that got kicked out of speaking gigs were trolling, plain and simple. They wanted to get kicked out! It proved their point about free speech! Or did you think that they ever thought they could actually convince broke 20-somethings that the best thing to do is pull up the ladder before the broke people can get a slice of the pie? Conservatism is never going to be a convincing ideology to the young. Getting heckled and kicked out was always the goal.
---
If your solution to these political problems is to "route around the damage", as we say in networking, then I'm all for it. But it's going to take more than P2P. Everyone needs to have a stake in the network, and needs the resources to feed into it.
If you don't have a stake in the design of the network, then it doesn't matter if the network is run by a totalitarian government or a pirate cartel. You are not in control of your own privacy. You are a pawn in their game. Switching chessmasters does not improve your position.
Take Bitcoin as a cautionary tale. It's great that governments don't have special authority to manipulate it for their own secret purposes! But that doesn't mean nobody can. In fact, bitcoin market manipulation is so common that it makes the market to unstable to use for normal commerce. The pirates are doing all of the same nasty stuff that we feared government would do, and they didn't need special authority to do it. Is it really better to live in a world controlled by whomever feels like exercising that control, rather than a world controlled by a few experts who had to spend their lives building careers as economists to get there?
Of course we don't live in a perfect system. Political science tells us that sometimes, a perfect system is logically impossible. But blowing up the system we have will not make things better. In fact, it had made things significantly worse.
I for one do not want to live in the cyberpunk future where government has lost all ability to regulate corporations. In that future, I am no more free to defy my masters than I am in this world. But unlike this world, those corporations have no incentive to even pretend to care about getting my support.
And that's the real problem with your pessimistic tone. The more we expect the oligarchs to behave like dictators, the more free they are to step out of the shadows. They are more free to be evil, because they are unconstrained by the need to appear good.
It is important to understand that they are evil by default. It is more important to believe that it is possible for them to be good, and choose the ones that at least appear to be. Otherwise, evil becomes so normal that we don't even notice it anymore, and even the powerful enemies of the evil oligarchs will have no power to stop them.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @12:50AM
A glaring case of extreme naivety.
Money is a means to buy power. Power is a means to acquire more money. Those who failed to amass enough power, get sucked dry by those who got more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture [wikipedia.org]
What you think a government is in the present, if not an enforcement arm of some cartel of corporations or another?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:59AM (1 child)
> Perhaps you imagine that there is some kind of "real" journalism that is being suppressed in this day and age.
I'm not. What I have been observing since I first came online in the 90s is a gradual decline of formerly "quality" journalistic outlets and there's a few explanations for this:
Ever since they started offering their content for free on the web, with legacy dead tree subscriptions declining as more readers shifted to getting their news online, publications have been bleeding money. In a market of free information, none dared trying to ask their readers a subscription fee until it became too obvious to deny that advertising only worked out as an economic model for the big ad networks, which all those publishers had flocked to. Why had they done this? Newspapers and magazines used to sell ad space direct to customers. Was i it like this because they were too technically illiterate to set up their own ad-serving infrastructure? Was it because everyone else did and they were afraid of missing out?
No matter the reasons, the ad networks kept escalating the intrusiveness of their ads in total disregard of viewers with ever more annoying techniques. Popups, popunders, animated or FMV Flash content with sound blaring immediately on page load, CSS divs hiding content until you ackknowledged the ad by clicking on it... I'm sure I missed something but that's all I remember now.
In response the first wave of ad blockers came into being. The ad networks dialed it back down a notch, but only barely enough, testing how much of their shit people would tolerate. Between intrusive ads, malvertising and ginormous privacy issues, there really is no reason today not to block syndicated ads and I don't think I know anyone who still doesn't.
I know literally zero big publishers who even tried hosting their own, customer-respecting ad content in response, even though their metrics must have told them they were not getting their money's worth from the ad networks (on top of the shitty deals they agreed to in the first place). The real crappy ones among them instead implemented adblock detection, showing their visitors a message along the lines of "you are a fucking freeloading bastard and either you turn off your adblocker right now and let us shove annoying ads, malware and tracking down your throat or you're not getting any of our valuable news". Are you fucking kidding me?
For the publishers, this was a downward spiral as instead of getting to the root cause (the ad networks), they restructured their staff and editorial policies. Today, AFAIK most journalists work as freelancers so they're under pressure to constantly churn out content that sells instead of accurate reporting. Some get paid by the number of page impressions their "articles" generate, as apparently that's the only metric the publishers care to look at in their steadfast hope of making the ad-network business model work somehow.
A side effect of publishers going into the red was market consolidation. Buying whole portfolios of newspapers while they were cheap was what enabled the oligarchs to really irreversibly take over. Those that were also die-hard capitalists applied their darling management principles, further reinforcing the detrimental effects on newsrooms - less staff to write more, licensing external content or citing competing publications with no further fact checking to fill pages wherever possible, hiring specialists to put clickbaity headlines on even serious articles...
These days, few journalists have the luxury to pursue a lead on a whim, get away from the keyboard and meet actual sources or even do basic fact checking. Most longer articles by "star" journalists these days are "stories" centered on dramatically enacted protagonists instead of well-researched background info on events. Sometimes these stories are complete fabrications but noone really cares as long as it sells. Ever more "journalists" no longer self-identify as neutral reporters, but rather as activists in the service of a "good cause" (the reasons for that are diverse).
Do you remember when the New York Times was a "newspaper of record"? These days they're an openly partisan party propaganda bullhorn and they're far from alone in this kind of transformation. Apparently this has spared them from going extinct, for now.
Your assertion that paid content is better is bullshit. It's the same shit, just written by bullshit artists targeting a different demographic, using more distinguished vocabulary and citing a different set of "experts", using actual numbers instead of football fields as unit of measurement and forgoing car analogies if at all possible. Their audience is much smaller, so the ad-network business model does not even begin to work for them. Subscriptions are their only option and they're counting on you and your demographic believing that because you're paying for it, you are entitled to better information. That's called elitism BTW.
> college campuses
Don't even get me started. Did you know that in Harvard these days, a dean and director of the so-called Data Privacy Lab pushes quasi-mandatory tracking of location, medical records and other highly personal information on students under the guise of "enabling research"? This service has basically the same evil TOS as Google and Facebook, tracking by which this so-called Privacy Lab is exposing their students to on top of what they themselves share with "partners".
For all the issues opinionated rich students introduced into the university system, the universities seem to be doing their part to keep up in an effort to raise servile consumer drones incapable of independent thought. Remember, this is Harvard, a so-called elite institution that is really fucking expensive and selective in who they accept.
I've been asking myself where future leaders get their education in the US these days. My best guess: the CIA. Mull over this for a bit. It makes more sense than may initially appear.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday October 30 2020, @10:04PM
Regardless, the news is crafted to suit its audience. They don't prioritize citations because their readers don't look for them. It's how newspapers have always operated.
The point isn't whether the language is crude or refined. The point is that some news sites, like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, invest in stories that may surprise their readers with new information, while most news sites simply regurgitate the same garbage we already read on Twitbook.
Bottom line is, you want quality journalism, you need to have a stake in how your news sources define "quality". On ad-driven news sites, the stakeholders are the advertisers. In the national takeover of local news sources, the stakeholders are the national partisans who stand to profit from controlling the conversation.
On SoylentNews, the stakeholders are the readers. That's it. We're too small to be worth the time of the big political operatives, and we're too smart to be substantially affected by the trolls. Do you realize how strange that is? Most groups this small don't have the technical skill to run an independent web site. Most groups this small have an IQ averaging closer to 100 than the 120 average I'd estimate for this place.
And if most groups this small were this smart? That would imply that the trolls are that much smarter, too.
That's why we have gigantic social networks. They provide the platform, and now they're trying to provide the troll filter. Is it possible for them to be as effective as a self-maintained group like Soylent? Not in a million years.
Does complaining about partisan censorship fix anything? I guess it might, if it leads to breaking up the big platforms. But I doubt it will. More likely, it will give the partisans power to reshape the law and swing the pendulum back in their direction.
Republicans may make a world where it is safe to express right-wing conspiracy theories, but they will destroy the world where it is safe to express gender nonconformity. Do I have a preference for one of those? Absolutely. Most people do, especially those in Congress. That's why the government shouldn't be in the business of deciding what is and is not political bias.
I think the path out of this hellhole is decentralization. I don't know how to get there, and I don't know how to keep it from turning into a new hellhole. But we have to be constantly focusing our 120 average IQ on solutions, not simply on defining the problem. Real solutions, the kind that don't make anybody completely happy because nobody can figure out how to work it to their exclusive advantage. Not bitchy partisan solutions that overcorrect from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia and back again, over and over and over again.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @09:52PM (1 child)
> Who is censoring whom, and for what purpose?
While there is, as you have noted, censorhip imposed by the actors of surveillance capitalism, this is incidental - Most visibly as the natural endgame of our era'ss hip and ecological version of mob justice, also known as cancel culture. I don't really wanna talk about this though because it's just capitalism doing what it does.
Quick tangent:
Luckily those who have something of value to say are often prudent enough not to make themselves dependent on the tiny virtual soapboxes offered to us by the social networks in exchange for our souls. Recent example: J.K. Rowling. While she is on Twatter, she doesn't pretend it's a venue for serious debate. It's a bullhorn. Her well reasoned reply to those accusing her of being an itolerant radical she put on her own website [jkrowling.com], untouchable for the professional victims and crybabies on social media wishing to "cancel" her. While getting a whiff of this particular shitstorm, I wonder how many of participants of the Twitter hatemob actually clicked through and read her statement. This particular sort of "activists" tends to self-censor, insisting on having their "safe space" so that offensive ideas won't make them cry.
Buck back to surveillance capitalists. There's a form of censorship happening at Google, carried out by its employees. Best of the best, hand-picked for their matching tastes in soy lattes and political beliefs. Manipulating search algorithms isn't censorship in a strict sense, there is much overlap with disinformation. Some might say is worse than censorship because Google is trying to influence your behaviour by feeding you a very distorted version of reality, all in the name of guiding you back onto the path of divine truth and and moral elightenment of course [usatoday.com]). NB: the account from the link may be one-sided, but there have been independent studies as well as whistleblowsers corroborating the allegations. They're out there, just Google for them!
Still, let's not get into this. At its core, it's just US partisan politics bullshit and as the 2016 presidential election has shown, not all that effective at mind control :)
What I do want to discuss is nation states imposing censorship on the internet.
Prelude:
Certain forms of speech are considered illegal in certain countries. Just a few years back, the concept may have appeared bizarre to most Westerners soaked in the internet's culture of free speech. The revelation of Facebook developing censorship tooling for their platform in a bid to legally re-enter the Chinese market was universally considered outrageous and an appalling example of capitalist pursuit of profit having crossed a line [bbc.com]. Do you remember your own reaction at the time? Would you have considered such tooling being brought to bear on the free internet of The West?
After all, free information makes free societies, right? We've seen it happen in Ukraine [wikipedia.org] and the Middle East [wikipedia.org]. The media narrative resonated well with many Westerners - if only we could get the truth out to those poor people being subjugated by their authoritarian governments, they would manage, by themselves to peacefully transition to open and democratic societies like our own.
We all watched it happen live on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Grassroots movements with no shenanigans. Power to the people! [1]
Maybe some had already forgotten what was one of the viral internet's greatest hits...
Example 1:
Wikileaks payments blockade [theguardian.com]. Not much to say really, you probably remember this. The narrative then was that what Wikileaks was doing was simply and plainly illegal, so the payment processors could not offer service. No censorship here, move along citizen [bbc.com].
While mainstream media were protesting then, they subsequently changed their tune. Assange was a criminal hacker, a spy and a rapist. So whatever had happened back then with those payment processors was morally justified, right? This shitlord just needed some cancelling so that's what he got. We've all done it. No censorship involved.
Example 2:
NetzDG in Germany [wikipedia.org]. Just read the wikipedia article. It's a collossal pile of shit dumped onto the German constitution. The EU thinks it's illegal under EU law, Facebook thinks it's illegal under German law. They're all happily playing along though. Censorship has become socially acceptable again here, as long as it's for a "righteous cause". You know, something something Nazis.
The European Commission realized such a boondoggle would never make it into EU law so instead they did what all the good SJWs are doing: they put up a Code Of Conduct [europa.eu]. The platforms are "voluntarily" and privately censoring according EU guidelines. There is not even legal recourse because it's not the EU legally imposing the censorship. If you have a problem with this, you can take Facebook to a civil court and argue their TOS. Lol.
I'm not a fan of the verbiage because of its association with certain political groups, but talk about a slippery fucking slope...
Example 3: Github banned everyone they were able to identify as being from a place on the US sanctions [bleepingcomputer.com]. When asked why they don't simply incorporate Github in a different jurisciction as is their SOP for evading taxes, Microsoft's spokesperson's official statement (on Twiter, LOL) was basically "the law is the law, sorry folks".
While accepting subscription fees from foreign nationals on the sanctions list would not make M$ a whole lot of $$$, instituting Apartheid on the largest community of open source developers in the world by enforcing those sanctions is some seriously bad publicity. If the M$ execs are not entirely retarded, they are aware that shenanigans like this may well cost them any good will they had built up with the Open Source movement and spell the beginning of the end for Gihub being the community's go-to venue. The social capital and mindshare tied to the site was what made it worth 7.5B to them, why would they risk that foolishly?
It only makes sense if you assume that they're are not acting as capitalists in this case, but as Economic Hit Men [wikipedia.org]on behalf of the US state department. Can't let Iran and North Korea have Free Software, especially not of the encrypting kind. More dangerous than WMD! How will we wiretap all their comms?
Censorship is by no means a new tool for nation states to deny their enemies knowledge. Historically, censored information flows have been unidirectional (think public research that was retroactively classified) so it was not often obvious to an observer when censorship was happening. Thanks to the collaborative nature of the internet, the censorship in this case is very obvious as it denies an entire global community the contributions of those on the blacklist.
IMO, this must be seen as an opportunity to raise awareness and mobilize opposition to censorship before it becomes pervasive.
"Hey M$ here... Look, over there! Actic Code Vault! Saving invaluable Open Source Software to tape FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANKIND! WE'RE THE GOOD GUYS!!!11"
So in summary, a few years back censorship was something that only the bad guys did. Like China and Russia and Iran and North Korea. How do their poor citizens endure this ordeal? Human Rights are being trampled!!!1
I do not think it's by accident that we have so many moralists and do-gooders being very loud on social media. It's the perfect substrate to enable all the surveillance and censorship those in power have ever been dreaming of. People are cheering because it's "for the good cause", "to protect vulnerable minorities", "for the children". Something something Nazis. Cancel! Deplatform!!11
If you think Trump is the fascist you haven't been paying attention. Trump is a stooge. It's those "intellectuals" claiming morals and righteousness for their cause that will fuck us all.
[1] Just in case: In the event that an ungly "truth" should come out in the US, say during a presidential election, then that's disinformation by evil Russian hax0rs. Never forget this! Don't believe those Commie bastards' lies!
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday October 30 2020, @10:43PM
I wish you hadn't brought Rowling into this. But since you did, I have to say that I find her descent into bigotry incredibly disappointing, before I can say that I ultimately agree with your argument. I did not participate in the "Twitter hatemob", I read her screed on her web site. It's not a venue for serious debate, either. It's a billboard she can put up because she has money, she has power, she has influence. She is untouchable. If this particular situation proves anything about cancel culture, it's that it is completely ineffective at canceling the people that actually deserve it. That does actually mean that cancel culture's negatives can't be outweighed by its positives, because apparently its positives amount to zero.
HoW vErY sElF-aWaRe Of YoU.
Yes, I fully expected Facebook to simply wait for the outrage to subside and then proceed with their plans to implement censorship for the Chinese market. I never for a moment thought that Facebook has any particular love of free speech.
Let's not confuse what the MSM does with cancel culture. Cancel culture is when little people with no real power harass people out of the platforms they like to spend time in. What happened to Assange was big people with big power harassing someone out of a platform they didn't build, didn't spend any time in, and would rather like to not exist at all thank you very much.
It would be more similar if liberals were DDoSing conservative platforms to shut them down. Still, that's not cancel culture.
BTW, Fox News likes to bitch about cancel culture and Julian Assange. That much should tell you that one of these issues is an attempt at partisan mind control, and the other is part of a gentlemen's agreement between the two sides of the deep state coin.
Of course it is! Why do you think the Democratic party only talks about social issues anymore? They are extremely popular, and they distract from how they are actually conservative on economic issues!
It would be wrong, of course, to assume that just because it's a distraction means it's bad policy. Far from it. Sure, if there's a huge problem with lead in the drinking water, that's more important than making sure the park benches are comfortable for everyone.
That's actually a terrible analogy though, because the fact is that the social issues Democrats campaign on (and then subsequently fail to follow up on 90% of the time) are more like making sure that everyone has access to lead testing and has a political stake in fixing the problem.
If you're a white, gender-normative Christian man, you probably have access to lead testing, and you probably have a political stake in fixing the problem, so you might not be able to see how people of color, LGBT people, religious minorities, and women often do not have these things. Many of these people are experiencing the same problems that you are, and would be your allies if you let them. Hell, it's one of the worst kept secrets in politics that recent immigrants and people of color are actually politically conservative, and they only don't vote Republican because it's the party of hating immigrants and people of color.
Actually, the best thing we can do to end the distraction is to let the SJWs win. Don't you know what happens to a leftist organization when it gets what it wants? It fractures into subgroups over tiny ideological differences until the entire movement is composed of nothing but little covens with no more power.
If that happened, if social progress was Solved for a generation, the Democrats would have no hold over immigrants, people of color, LGBT people, etc. They would perhaps become actual liberals, willing to dismantle the systems of state power that result in the kind of censorship we're talking about. But it won't happen as long as they are able to claim the populist banner in the culture war.
The shadow masters are not so easily defined. There is definitely a minority of hyper-wealthy people that claim morals and righteousness in their quest to reshape society to their advantage. There's also a majority of hyper-wealthy people that don't claim anything and just quietly reshape society behind closed doors. If you think you're immune to propaganda just because you can see leftist propaganda what it is, you are a fool.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @07:09AM
PS: Fuuuuuck we're already a lot further down that slope than I had expected. Almost missed this:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/orders-top-eus-timetable-dismantling-end-end-encryption [eff.org]
Welp... time to start preparing for armed insurrection...
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday October 26 2020, @11:46PM (3 children)
I would direct this not at copyright, but degeneration theory [wikipedia.org]. This idea that there are things which can never be replaced, things which come from a more perfect past and must be preserved, was a powerfully influential idea when many of these works were created and many of our genre conventions were first established.
It is a cruel irony that copyright enforcement threatens to make real one of the ideas that is most subversive to the kind of peaceful society that makes art possible in the first place.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 27 2020, @09:15AM (2 children)
How interesting. I had no idea that what I thought of as a Goth theme present in Lord of the Rings was a part of a widely known and coherent enough collection of ideas-- fears, really-- to have been named and described. Yes, LOTR is full of degenerate notions. Ruins everywhere, lost secrets of the ancients, as expressed in Gloin's statement that the dwarves still can't match their fathers' skill and knowledge in metalworking, elves in decline, Theoden saying that in the mighty Shadowfax, a horse from the morning has returned and none shall do so again. (How the f*** can Theoden know that?) I always took all that as the effects of evil, the all too successful efforts of the Dark Lord to knock everyone and everything down. Another rather improbably silly feature of many fantasies is that thousands of years can pass without any social or technological change whatsoever occurring. Fantasy societies are incredibly static that way.
Yet I think we can differentiate between the poisons of degeneracy thinking and copyright. In LOTR, copyright thinking is a mere means of adding to the overall degenerate thinking that pervades the work. It's one particular flavor of degeneracy.
Science fiction is a genre that would seem the least likely to lend itself to degenerate thinking, but it's there too. As are ridiculous plot points rooted in the assumption that copyright not only still exists in the future, but like those static fantasy societies, is practically unchanged from the 20th century.
I have come up with my own pet notion of degeneracy: the Stupidity Cycle. It goes like this: 1. smart people make life easier. 2. easier living means everyone can dumb down. And they do. Just like unexercised muscles will atrophy. 3. everyone being dumb again makes life hard. 4. In the spirit of "Necessity is the Mother of Invention", people have to get smarter to survive. Maybe when parents moan about the next generation going to Hell and "kids these days", maybe sometimes they were on to something, it was an era of being at stage 2 of the Stupidity Cycle?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday October 27 2020, @01:50PM (1 child)
A lot of the reason for degeneration theory is that Europeans looked back on the last 2000 years and wondered, why did our ancestors spend half of that time stick in the dark ages? The theory is primarily constructed to explain the fall of Rome. For the thousand years after that, society really didn't change very much, just like in archetypical fantasy.
But we don't live in the Renaissance, and neither did the thinkers of the 19th century. And they had a lot of other shit to think about that really had no place in the fall of Rome. Specifically, white Europeans had to justify their ruthless exploitation of colored people. That's why it seems like Middle Earth is mainly in decline because of Sauron: he represents a racial evil that can only be stymied for a time, but is ultimately inevitable. The Morlocks [wikipedia.org] will consume us all in time.
I think you'll find Strauss–Howe generational theory [wikipedia.org] very interesting. It's basically an extension of your Stupidity Cycle. It gives some hope that Millennials like me can and will rebuild America like the Greatest Generation did. It also offers a grim prediction that we must watch our grandchildren systematically dismantle it.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:47PM
> Millennials like me
You don't seem like most Millenials I've had the misfortune of meeting. Please do take this as a compliment. It gives me hope that even though those who consider themselves the gatekeepers of the information age have tried their best to turn your entire generation into fearful, unquestioning subjects submissive to authority, they have not succeeded in eliminating curiosity and reason in all of you.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Keep on searching, never stop questioning your beliefs and assumptions. Our human perception may be flawed, but observation and logic are the antidote to disinformation. Trust your instincts first, then try to prove or disprove. Make a plan. Double check your plan. Triple check it. Verify who's friend and who's foe, don't fall for divide and conquer tactics. Bide your time until your chance presents itself, which it will. Then act and don't stop until you're done.
Good luck.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday October 26 2020, @05:15PM (8 children)
Wow, you're really cynical, and that's usually my thing. In this case, I think they're more or less sincere, and they definitely could have been harsher. Spotify has the same obligations and has banned such clients in the past.
Personally, there are obvious legitimate uses for a third-party client. For example, Pithos for Pandora on Linux without a big heavy browser tab open. I use that one myself. I suspect a lot of the third-party client people are doing so not to skip ads, but for reasons such as portability or evading lag/bloat. If more clients would respect the ads, perhaps they wouldn't lock down their stuff so much.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday October 26 2020, @05:28PM (6 children)
If more ads would respect the clients, perhaps clients would not work so hard to evade them. I don't know about Spotify or Pandora or such, but I have seen too many sites with ads that pop up, cover content, open new tabs, etc. The mindset that these sites are there to deliver clients to advertisers is what has to go.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday October 26 2020, @11:37PM (5 children)
You're underestimating the issue. Ads aren't simply inconvenience. The mined data is sold to political groups and is used to gerrymander borders and operate targeted disinformation social media campaigns.
Ad networks... The anti-trust against Google and Facebook... The 2020 census questions... Encrypt Now... The surveillance state... It's all part of the fight between the parties over the data they need to gerrymander.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday October 27 2020, @05:39PM (4 children)
It's probably even worse than you state. Maybe there isn't evidence of it yet, but I cannot imagine a future where this information is not sold for "background checks" and such, so applying for credit or a job or an apartment, etc. will be affected by this data. And good luck getting erroneous data purged.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Tuesday October 27 2020, @08:13PM (1 child)
Credit scoring based on mined social networks activity has been documented as a fairly common practice at least since 2014: https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1309&context=marketing_papers [upenn.edu]
Same goes for the usage of census and social media data for gerrymandering and civic engineering. Back in 2010/2 when Gillespie and the RSLC won the state legislature seats for the Republicans, their analytics partners were advertising their usage of social media data on their web sites as they do now. Those early years even produced the first major real world social media opinion shaping experiment designed to target specific groups to go vote: https://newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-fiduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering [newrepublic.com]
Anyhow, the nomenclature is a bit off since the journalists refer to public opinion shaping as "digital gerrymandering" while the research calls the field of analytics and opinion shaping as "computational politics"... But it's all well known and generally done in the open as this 2019 survey of the field shows: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335233362_A_Survey_on_Computational_Politics [researchgate.net]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2020, @04:55PM
So I was right! I would LOL, but it's not funny.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @08:55PM (1 child)
My personal nightmare scenario is Google offering a "pre-crime" prediction service based on a "certified unbiased, impartial" AI. Or rather, what people are calling "AI" these days... neural nets applying bayesian statistics seeded with models generated from human-selected training data.
They'll have it certified BY SCIENTISTS that the algorithm is correct 99.999% of the time and then they'll start sending people to jail, in the name of the good cause, "to prevent terrorism and serious crime". With their track record, I don't want to imagine how such a model would be trained. One thing is for sure though: it will not discriminate by skin colour or gender.
Opting out of the Google/Cloudflare/Facebook panopticon becomes ever harder. In a few years there might simply be a law passed declaring it illegal to try to hide from the tracking, "for the children" or "because of Corona"...
In the EU right now, politicians are in a data gold rush. They're 20 years too late but they don't even realize this. They want a European Google, they want European AI, they want to enable a European economy built on monetizing Big Data... They have no clue how to achieve all this other than throwing some money at universities and expecting them to go innovate already. At the same time they're very happily tearing down all those supposed protections of the GPDR because "data is the new oil". Lol.
Once they realize the talent required to build them their own wet dream surveillance infrastructure is either unwilling to be part of it or out of their budget, they'll probably just make a deal with Google as long as there are "guarantees" to keep data "inside the EU".
As a society, we're pretty fucked.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday October 29 2020, @05:04PM
It's hard to be optimistic about the future. I could say I'm glad I don't have kids, but I have nieces and nephews I'm fond of and I have friends with kids I wish the best for (the friends and the kids). I can say I'm glad I grew up when I did, I see almost all the things I grew up enjoying are pretty much unavailable now, and the replacements are under constant attack trying to make them worse for people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @05:41PM
I run a modified Spotify client on mobile, to skip the seriously annoying ads. At first, I let it only connect over Tor because location privacy. At some point I got a message "you're don't seem to be connecting from home, so we can't offer service".
I figured "fuck it" as there's nothing they can do but ban me. I don't build playlists I would care to lose. As for location privacy, as long as the upcoming 5G doesn't change this, my IP is mixed in with an area of coverage large enough that I don't worry too much about one provider tracking it. They can track my taste in music if they like, I hope they don't miss that a substantial number of artists or tracks I'm searching for they just don't have. Which is among the reasons I would never give them any money. I would have to pay for multiple providers to gain access to most of the major label content and then still be without all the indie stuff.
120 bucks a year for music they say I can only listen to as long as I pay but can't keep also still is not a good enough deal IMO.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 26 2020, @12:23PM (1 child)
This is only, or mainly, really interesting if there is a follow up to see if this actually had any kind of effect, or conversion of pirated users to proper users.
But I guess it takes some kind of special muppet to use and provide an actual, worker and personal email-address while at the same time using a pirated product. Perhaps the term pirated is a bit off those since from the article it appears that they are mostly just using unofficial or alternative clients that offer features the real client doesn't such as not having to watch endless ads and the ability to store the music offline. So they might be more of some kind of hybrid-pirates or power-users instead of just being plain old pirates.
Perhaps Deezer just realized that it was futile to block and ban all these non-proper clients. Perhaps they are actually minuscule as far as the user-base goes so it's not really worth their time and effort to go after it. After all banning one just moves it someplace else and then it pops up again.
If one wants to I guess one could take a more dim view of it, they only said that they (or we) won't do anything about it. They could just store it and outsource it to some other kind of blackmail outfit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @12:35PM
I.e. you can expect exactly that behaviour from 80%+ of humanity.
What is stopping muppets from muppeting in droves, is inability to find a pirated product, therefrom the interest of "rightsholders" in removing low-hanging fruit from search listings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @01:10PM
Or worse? Like what? Even by the ludicrous US laws applicable to copyright and "hacking", since the DRM-free files are freely available from the Deezer or Spotify servers, there's jack shit they can do.
Use a modified client? You might have been violitating their TOS. Good luck to them getting a judge signing a subpoena for the real address of the IP in question. Good luck enforcing that TOS anywhere but their home jurisdiction (that they picked because it's the only one in the world where their ridiculous terms might be considered lawful, pending a review by a sympathetic judge).
Yarr!
(Score: 2) by progo on Monday October 26 2020, @01:54PM (14 children)
I don't use any of these consumer enslavement systems, so maybe I'm out of the loop. What is there in this Deezer or Spotify thing that was unimaginable 15 years ago?
I wouldn't be surprised if Cory Doctorow imagined pretty much exactly these thing in one of this novels between 2000 and 2010.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 26 2020, @02:02PM (13 children)
"... that was unimaginable 15 years ago?"
Not sure really. Perhaps that someone would pay to rent music or pay to listen to radio? Perhaps it's more that nobody believed people would be stupid enough to "want" this.
That said even Fanning and Parker tried to monetize Napster didn't they? So I guess perhaps it wasn't so unimaginable after all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @03:13PM (2 children)
> That said even Fanning and Parker tried to monetize Napster
They did so because they basically had no choice. I don't think they were operating as a LLC when they got hit with the lawsuit, so they were probably personally liable for at least part of the settlement [wikipedia.org]. They would have probably walked away otherwise while making a pretty penny selling their tech to any of a room full of investors hungry to disrupt some markets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @03:17PM
Correction: I'm not sure about how they were incorporated a the time of the suit, they most certainly were not at the time they started the project. Enough of a legal chokehold I guess.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 26 2020, @04:34PM
As noted I didn't actually remember cause it was so long ago now but I have some vague memory of there being some ads on display or something in the client program, not sure if it was there from the start or if it showed up later on. But I guess it could have appeared later on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @03:26PM
As music rental stores have been popular in Japan since the early 1980s and are still around to this day, this is unlikely to be it.
XM and Sirius both offered pay-for-access radio service in North America since the early 2000s; these companies barely survived the 2008 financial crisis but the service continues to this day (as Sirius-XM), so this is unlikely to be it.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday October 26 2020, @05:01PM (8 children)
I see music streaming differently. I have a private library of music close to my heart, and then I have a Pandora Premium subscription that I use for everything else. I'm paying around $13 a month to listen to a TON of music on-demand from a bunch of atrists, I get my money's worth.
I think there will be a place for permanent libraries, and a place for streaming stuff that you just kind of want. Imagine how much it would cost to own EVERY song you sort of liked. Now, you don't even do pay-for-play, you pay monthly to access the vast library, and it's unlimited usage.
Stupidity would be renting per-son or per-album, or worse yet, "buying" a copy on some DRM-locked Orwellian hellhole.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @05:19PM (3 children)
I tried Pandora when they first started. Their service is IMO the only one offering a real benefit over owning your music: Their recommendation tech is actually worth calling it that. It's a great tool to discover new music you might like.
No comparison to youtube on autoplay, which will keep showing you more of the the same until at some point it loops around back to where you started at or Spotify which either keeps playing songs you have already "hearted" or ventures off to play completely random shit with no connection whatsoever to the song you used to "seed" "radio mode".
Thanks for reminding me, this is a streaming service I might consider giving money. How's their catalogue these days, missing many of the favourites from your personal collection?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Subsentient on Monday October 26 2020, @08:14PM (1 child)
Their catalog is quite good. I'm a metalhead, so that might skew results, but they have an excellent selection. It's rare that they don't have what I want.
I'm wary of Pandora nowadays though, since they were acquired by Sirius XM. Once companies start changing hands, the values/policies often deteriorate. Haven't seen any of that yet, thankfully.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @09:42PM
Metal is not exactly mainstream any more is it? I'd say that's a good sign then :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @12:17AM
Be wary of Pandora. I had several playlists cultivated since they started that just magically disappeared one day, paying for the service didn't matter for anything when they couldn't restore my playlists. They tried to blame me for a compromised password but failed to provide any detail on when the alleged compromise happened. No logs apparently either and no backups of the user created playlists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @05:27PM (2 children)
Music rental stores are a thing in Japan and have been for about 40 years now. They remain popular to this day, I don't think it's fair to call the patrons who rent CDs from these stores "stupid".
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday October 26 2020, @08:14PM
Depends on how much they're paying, but definitely not my cup of tea.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 26 2020, @10:06PM
How come they have not stopped that then since I doubt they had very good DRM protection for their music about 40 years ago, I gather everyone can make a copy of what they rent. SONY should be all over that or is it only bad to copy their music when it's gajin that does the copying?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 26 2020, @10:12PM
I have my private collection, I still buy a CD or so every now and then from artists that I do like. The last few once was from Marsheaux, a female greek (I think they are both greek, but I don't really care all that much as long as the music is nice) duo that does Depeche Mode covers -- the recorded the entire A Broken Frame album which was the last album I ordered. It took a while to get here tho, the Greek postal system must be horrific. But they are quite good actually.
For everything else I just put down the one time fee to buy an actual Radio. It's free after that. There is a station I get good reception for that plays a good mix of music that I tend to like and once an hour there is a short news update. I kind of like it that way. They don't know anything about me, and I don't have to submit any information to them to listen to it either. I never really got into the streaming music as a rental service and I doubt I'll ever will.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by MIRV888 on Monday October 26 2020, @03:49PM (9 children)
I have been keeping all my media stored locally for a very long time (almost 20 years). I don't know a single person besides myself that does it, but I work in IT and having a server at the house was kind of a byproduct of that.
Music - 338 GB 52392 files
Video - 8.6 TB 28557 files
It's like having your own TV / Radio station. No commercials - ever.
Anyone else do this?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @04:12PM
Yes I rip my CD collection and for playback, I have a netbook running MPD [musicpd.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @04:26PM (1 child)
You're far from alone.
Check out r/datahoarder [reddit.com]
(Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Monday October 26 2020, @06:36PM
Thx
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday October 26 2020, @04:43PM
Same here.
Too bad big HDDs are still too expensive for me.
I'm stuck with 3TB, and around 1TB of it is occupied by my own photos, so there's little space left for the video (movies/series mostly) collection.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday October 26 2020, @09:33PM (2 children)
I paid about £20 for a Serviio license 5 or 6 years ago which I consider amazing value for money.
Music, movies and photos all streamed anywhere. Works really well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @09:49PM (1 child)
Thanks, this option had eluded me so far. What exactly does the service do besides giving your remote client a DNS name to connect to and NAT traversal? Does the stream go through their servers? Do they track your contents and playbacks? Can the "media browser" feature be turned off?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday October 26 2020, @11:48PM
No, they don't have any. If you pay them £20 they give you one to run though.
The rest your questions would be better directed at their forums. [serviio.org]
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday October 27 2020, @06:05PM (1 child)
Same. I've got most of it on a Synology NAS which has apps for streaming locally. Heck, in combination with a VPN it might stream anywhere, but I can't be bothered to DDNS. I don't generally go far enough that I want more than what I can transcode and copy to my phone anyway.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Wednesday October 28 2020, @06:55AM
JRiver Media Center here. It has a server app and the client is nice.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 26 2020, @05:16PM
People have also been pirating service from The Pirate Bay.
But TPB doesn't seem to mind.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Zinnia Zirconium on Tuesday October 27 2020, @01:58AM
I've been deep linking to audio files on Jango Radio for at least 10 years that I can remember. Jango doesn't make it obvious how to get deep links but doesn't make it difficult either. I never received any communication from Jango.
Guess I won't switch to Deezer. Too much drama.