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Old 11-09-20, 06:25 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 12th, ’20

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September 12th, 2020




Articles that Simply Report on Tenet Piracy are Being Censored from Google Over False Copyright Claims

DMCA abusers are casting a wide net.
Didi Rankovic

Some of the production companies and other copyright holders behind Christopher Nolan’s new movie Tenet are trying to fight off unauthorized distribution of the film by asking Google to remove search results allowing people to see it in that way.

And the takedown requests that have been coming in by the thousands in some cases include not only the demand to remove links to actual pirated copies of the movie, but also to news reports that cover the pirating of Tenet.

Whenever films or TV series are available in one region of the world but not yet in others, it inevitably increases interest of those who are unable to access this content in any other way except through piracy. (Usually these delays are done “strategically” but in this case, it was the coronavirus lockdowns that wreaked havoc on the Warner Bros. release schedule for the movie.)

With Tenet, interest was so great that scammers got very busy posting links to fake copies on websites like Medium and Shopify, among others, TorrentFreak said.

The blog, that monitors the piracy scene, singled out one copyright holder who went not only after real and fake links, but also several news reports about them. It’s ACME Film’s Estonia arm, whose takedown requests have been particularly “sloppy” on at least two occasions, as the Estonian Organization for Copyright Protection on behalf of the company indiscriminately mixed up all three types of links, asking Google to remove them all.

Attempting to get rid of articles on news websites simply for talking about a movie being pirated, alleging that this kind of reporting also infringes copyright, seems overly absurd, even bearing in mind all the shortcomings of the copyright law and the documented readiness of corporations to abuse it.

The report therefore speculates that this particular behavior is accidental (in other words, the result of some automated process without human oversight used by rights holders) rather than a malicious desire to silence reporting.

It would also seem that Google’s own algorithms dealing with copyright takedown notices have gotten better, at least where Google Search is concerned, as “most takedown requests for the news articles were being ignored.”
https://reclaimthenet.org/tenet-dmca-abuse/





Personal Story: My Failed Music Career

I started playing the piano aged four, and was told I had a talent. But when I studied music at university I discovered that it was not, as it had been at school, mine for the taking.
Emily Bootle

I arrived early to my final audition, scheduled at 9.20am one Friday in December 2018. I sat in the entrance hall of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama for an hour before I was sent to warm up on the piano, my programme of Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Glass whirling around my mind.

The two members of the panel were positioned at the top of a bank of seating in an otherwise empty lecture theatre, except for the Steinway on the lowered stage. When I played, chaos reigned. I tend to forget details of performances, but I know there were stumbles, shaking hands, an adjustment of the stool. At one point – though I couldn’t say for sure – I recall a piece coming completely unstuck.

My suspicions of failure were fortified afterwards, when I perched awkwardly on a chair the row below the panel for an “interview” and the conversation lasted less than five minutes. A few days later, I received my rejection – the final result of my auditions to study for a master’s in performance, on the piano, at a conservatoire. I hadn’t got into the Royal College or Royal Academy of Music, but I had one offer from the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. In the days that followed, I knew I had made up my mind. I wouldn’t be going. I would give up my pursuit of a career in music.

I started playing the piano aged four, and was told I had a talent. I was fortunate to have supportive parents and access to instruments and lessons. Music spoke to me in a way that nothing else did, and I felt the feeling was mutual. I discovered that I had perfect pitch. This made me feel deeply and personally connected to the nuances of even the most brash pop, which I listened to as a teenager between obscure CDs (Pat Metheny, Moondog, Imogen Heap) borrowed from my dad, and whatever late Romantic symphony we were playing in youth orchestra.

Though I continued my weekly piano lessons until I left home at 18, and took up the cello and saxophone along the way, I was always less confident in my ability to play before others. I was nervous and too embarrassed to express myself fully onstage. I reconciled this as part of my anxious temperament. It wasn’t helped, though, by always being underprepared. I had never done what one piano teacher told me I should: practise until you cannot play it wrong.

When I studied music at university I discovered that it was not, as it had been at school, mine for the taking. Others shared my passion – and were better at it. The talents of many of my contemporaries had been nurtured not just by loving parents and encouraging teachers but elite establishments (junior conservatoire, the National Youth Orchestra, BBC Young Musician).

Rather than trying to compete, I distinguished myself as someone who would rather write essays than play. In private, I was engulfed by jealousy. I worried that by retreating from the piano I was somehow upsetting my own fate. Equally, I was too scared of failing in front of my invariably successful peers to try.

In my lessons, I needed more and more reassurance. Rather than taking an interest in what I was playing, I just wanted to play it well. I asked my piano teacher at university, a professor from the Royal Academy, if it was worth me carrying on. “There is talent there,” he shrugged, “but it’ll take a lot of work.” When I graduated, I began having lessons with a master’s student at the Guildhall. In my first lesson I enquired anxiously if she thought I was good. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. But I mean” – she laughed, sympathetically – “you’re never going to be Horowitz.”

In early 2018, I was working as an administrator at the Royal Academy of Music, and interacted with students who were studying for performance degrees. I couldn’t let go of the idea that it could have been me. I decided to test the theory. I found a new teacher. I resolved to apply for master’s courses at prestigious conservatoires the following year. My piano teacher at university had suggested that to be as good as I wanted to be, I should start practising for two or three hours a day, at a minimum. I would do as he said, and see how good I really was.

Learning a 45-minute programme of virtuosic music by memory is itself “a lot of work”. By my first audition in November, I was just about prepared, but I never felt completely comfortable. There were tricky passages I would dread, notes in the middle of chords I would bluff and hope nobody noticed. But in between attacks of nerves I felt a thrill, and a sense of harmony, when I managed to make the notes sparkle; when my mind, my hands and my ears were all in sync.

That I would do the practice and the auditions was never in doubt, but I remained unsure of what I was aiming for. Eventually I conceded that even if I went to Royal Northern, it was almost unthinkable that I would end up with a solo career. But nor did I want a solo career enough. Every step had felt difficult. I was tired. Sometimes the piano keys themselves seemed to turn on me, becoming too heavy for me to push down.

As children, we do not understand that the things we love do not belong only to us. Then, I was not prepared to relinquish music to anyone else’s ownership. Now, I have finally loosened my grip.

There is something freeing about rejection. Having an aptitude for something as magical as music had always filled me with a sense of responsibility, and suddenly it was out of my hands. The report from my audition at the Royal College specified that I was “clearly of insufficient standard”. I was playing at the highest level I had in my life, yet the panel still found that my performance lacked “depth”, “nuance”, “bravura” and “dramatic gesture”. I was stung, but the message finally became clear. I wasn’t cut out for this. And though there was loss there, what’s more profound – and hopeful – is that nothing had really changed.
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture...d-music-career





Freda Love Smith and Juliana Hatfield Got Matching Quarantine Haircuts

The Blake Babies bandmates reflect on going grey and growing older.
Juliana Hatfield

Juliana Hatfield and I were bandmates in the Boston indie-rock band Blake Babies. This year marks the 30-year anniversary of our music video for the song “Out There,” which featured us shaving our heads on camera.

In early 2020, my band Sunshine Boys supported Juliana for a few shows on her US tour, and during a backstage chat we discovered we were both sick of dyeing our hair to hide the grey, and had both been thinking about chopping it all off to let nature take its course. Months later, during COVID-19 lockdown, we decided to take the leap together again, making a tidy bookend with the “Out There” video shoot 30 years earlier.

This is an edited transcript of our email exchange as we reflect on now and then, going grey, and growing older.


Freda Love Smith: I just rewatched the “Out There” video for the first time in a long time. That was THIRTY years ago.

I can’t remember — whose idea was it that we cut our hair? Why did we do that?

Juliana Hatfield: I think that was my idea. I wanted us to do something interesting that would make people take notice. Taking scissors to our own hair seemed kind of punk, and I thought it would show that we had guts and integrity, and weren’t selling out. I wasn’t exactly sure of all the motivations or reasons but it felt like a good thing to do.

Freda: I can’t imagine a more perfect expression of our earnestness and commitment. It was punk! Especially for you. It wasn’t as big a deal for John, a dude. My hair was already short and people sometimes mistook me for a guy behind the drums. But you were the front person of the band and under close scrutiny. What was it like for you after the video, moving through the world with a shorn head? Did you feel sad or self-conscious?

I did, sometimes. We played a gig in San Francisco soon after we shot “Out There,” and I met singer/songwriter Barbara Manning. I was a big fan. She rubbed my head and said, “You’re like the ugly little duckling!” Most of the time I didn’t care, and Barbara was being funny, not mean. But that stung a bit.

We also encountered some direct hostility. When we played in Clemson, South Carolina on that same tour there was a group of drunk frat boys in the audience who were really angry about our shaved heads. Do you remember that? One threw a full can of beer at me. I’ve written about that gig a few times, it haunts me. Those dudes are totally Trump supporters today, I just know it.

Juliana: I thought you looked great with a shaved head, Freda. Something about the shape and size of your skull, in relation to your face — good proportions. You were not an ugly duckling at all! You were so pretty. I felt like it didn’t flatter me at all but I didn’t care. I already felt uncomfortable in my skin/body in those days, hair or no hair. I never wore makeup and I always wore loose-fitting clothes.

I wanted our music to be taken seriously. We were both kind of cute and that seemed dangerous, like it could be easily exploited, so I played down my looks, and the shaved head felt like part of that mission.

But, yeah, our heads definitely provoked some hostile reactions in the south. I remember that Clemson show. We were on tour opening for the Connells. The room was big and packed and right from the start of our set there was so much palpable proto-MAGA energy coming from those boys in the front. Probably some girls, too. It was kind of a blur. They were yelling “Dykes!” at us and laughing. That’s how I remember it.

It was shocking to me that that could happen, that people could be so mean without any shame. It didn’t matter that we weren’t lesbians. It was harsh to be targeted like that. And the beer thrown at you!

The experience left me kind of bitter about South Carolina, but I guess it was a good lesson in how to be tough — or to pretend to be — in front of a tough crowd. How to sing and play over the noise.

Also I remember being in a restaurant down there and some old white man coming up to me and getting in my face, really rude, asking me, “What are you? A boy or a girl?”

That tour was an eye-opening experience. I was pretty naive.

Freda: There was never any way for you to hide your beauty, but I admired the way you played it down. When I met you, you were wearing a white men’s t-shirt and the hugest black oxfords I’d ever seen. We definitely refused to present ourselves as “cute girls in a band.” That felt right. When people responded aggressively it shook me up, but also made it feel more right.

I cut my hair short a lot when I was younger and it often signaled a break, a change, a new start. It was liberating. That said, for most of my 30s and 40s, and now 50s, I’ve had longer hair. I’ve been more feminine in middle age — I wear dresses, a little make-up, especially if I’m playing a show. It’s a pleasurable ritual, a means of expression, kind of getting into costume and character.

The thing that started me thinking about all this is our conversation in February about going grey! I’d just colored my hair, a darker brown to cover my grey, something I’ve been doing for the past four years, and I’d been thinking all day about how tired I was of the chemicals and time and expense, how ready I was to just cut it off and let it be. In a moment of mind-melding, you said out loud the exact thing I’d been thinking. We talked about vanity. I’m vainer now that I used to be, but it’s getting exhausting and I’d rather direct my energy to writing and other work. I don’t want to cling to youth. In some ways, I’m ready to reconnect with the punk I was in my twenties.

Now it’s June and because of COVID my hair is insanely long, and I have ten times more gray hairs. My friend Faith wrote to me about how feral she’s become during these months at home. Me too. I haven’t shaved or plucked my eyebrows or worn make-up or antiperspirant since March. Maybe I won’t stay this wild, but I’m in the right state of mind to chop off my hair.

When we talked back in February, you said you wanted to use your aging face as a weapon. I thought that was smart and badass and I want to know more about what you meant by that.

Juliana: That thing you said about reconnecting with the punk you were in your 20s — that’s kind of what I meant when I said I want to use my aging face as a weapon. I want to throw the truth at people, to demand to be seen, as I am, and to actively resist the idea that women should stay “hot,” or “cute,” until death, an idea which is so stupid and which goes against nature.

But I feel like a hypocrite because I, like you, have been dyeing my hair to keep the grey out. I use a brown shade really close to my real color and I mostly just do the roots and don’t bother with the rest. And I, like you, am SO sick of doing it. I hate the smell, the chemicals. It always scares me and feels like something that is really unhealthy.

I’ve been struggling with this, telling myself that coloring my hair is an aesthetic choice, that grey hair won’t flatter my skin tone, but that’s kind of a lame excuse. The thing is, I want to WANT to go grey. I want to enjoy that evolution, not to have to suffer through it. My plan has been to cut all my hair off when the weather turned warm and then just leave it alone and let the grey come in naturally.

Being alone in plague lockdown, I’ve been kind of feral, like you are. I think a lot of people are using this time to see what it’s like to live in the wild, inside. I’m asking myself what is important and why does hair even matter.

You say you’ve been more vain and feminine in middle age, and I think my own resistance to showing my grey has something to do with vanity, with my fear of looking or seeming less vital, less important, less powerful, because older people as a whole — but especially women — are not respected in our culture. Look at how many people have died in nursing homes during this pandemic. There have been so many stories of helpless, discarded, uncared-for people. Left to literally die, alone.

I think both of us look better than we used to when we were younger. Maybe our vanity is keeping us on top of it but it’s more than just surface maintenance; I think that we both are taking better care of ourselves than we did when we were in the Blake Babies. Neither of us is as youthfully self-destructive as we used to be.

Freda: I agree, we’re better now at taking care of ourselves, we’ve come a long way since our destructive and self-loathing 20s. And god yes, I agree, too, about wanting to resist the pressure to stay “hot” or “cute” forever. Have you seen the Amy Schumer “Last Fuckable Day” sketch? It’s hilarious but scathing, speaking right to your point about the loss of power and regard that seems to accompany aging in our culture. I want to look and feel good, but I don’t see why that should involve concealing my age or denying the passage of time. I’m like you, thinking about what’s important, what actually matters.

Juliana: I have seen snippets of the “Last Fuckable Day” sketch and it is so relatable, yeah. It’s like the video Rachel Lichtman and I made for my “Broken Doll” song, on G’s farm, that idea of a woman of a certain age being put out to pasture.

I remember something my mom once told me about getting older. She said that when she turned 40 she became invisible to men. And at the time she told me this, I thought, “Cool! I can’t wait for men to stop looking at me and objectifying me!” but for her I think it was somewhat dismaying.

I am on a mental-emotional countdown to chopping all my hair off but I do not have an actual date set. Are you going to shave yours all off? I don’t want a full buzz. I just want it really short, like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby or Jean Seberg in Breathless. Enough to get down to the grey roots.

Freda: I’m not going to totally buzz mine, just go really short, something in between classic Twiggy and current Sharon Stone. I think it’s bound to be an improvement over what I’ve got now, which is basically Killer Bob from Twin Peaks.

Thinking about the conversation you had with your mom: I definitely experienced a growing sense of invisibility in my 40s. Mostly it was a relief, but I felt twinges of dismay, too. It’s complicated, that’s why “Last Fuckable Day” and “Broken Doll” resonate. We get it, we’re in our 50s, past our biologically reproductive prime, and we can laugh at it, roll with it, while pointedly rejecting the assumption that we ought to be stripped of power, denied value, and put out to pasture. I’ve read that women often experience a happiness spike in their 60s and 70s that comes from not giving as much of a fuck (to paraphrase the research).

Juliana: My radar lately is so tuned-in to ladies with grey hair. Every time I see one of them out on the street, or in a photo, I really focus in on it. To study. How it looks. How she wears it. How she holds herself. What color patterning or streaking has organically taken hold. It’s the opposite of these women being invisible. I am really SEEING them. Grey is starting to become beautiful to me.

Beauty is lots of things. It isn’t an age. There’s an actress named Meg Foster who is so beautiful and she’s in her 70s. She always had these incredibly striking ice-blue eyes which are even more incredible now that her face has deep lines on it. To me she is more beautiful than ever. She has a face that could be used as a weapon. It’s a powerful face.

Freda: Meg Foster is amazing. Your last email inspired me to take a wild ride across the internet, looking hard at aging faces, grey-haired women, and plastic surgery cases. I don’t blame any individual woman for succumbing to plastic surgery, but I think it’s a sad trap, a symptom of capitalism telling us we can buy happiness and patriarchy telling us we’re only valuable if we look a certain way. And the result is mostly terrible: weird, stretched-out faces.

I’m going to take my cue from you and try to deliberately and nonjudgmentally see women and their aging faces and gray hair. Maybe this will help me as I cross into late middle-age, to look at myself with the same respect and appreciation.

Juliana: I saw someone right after she had had a face lift, just out of the hospital, and it looked like someone had pounded on her face with a baseball bat. It was truly shocking. Then she had to heal for like a month in bed. I don’t want to be judge-y about other women’s’ choices, but I am always surprised at how blasé some people seem to be about altering their faces and bodies with invasive and violent procedures.

Speaking of alterations, I’ve just come back from getting my hair cut!! And I love it SO much; more than I thought I would. The grey is showing here and there but it isn’t uniformly grey. It’s an interesting mix of colors. And it’s ALL-NATURAL! I feel like myself, like maybe this haircut is not only the new me but the more real me. I thought I was going to have to bite the bullet learning how to live with the grey but I actually truly dig it.

Freda: Juliana, I completely love your haircut, you look great, a grown-up and glamorous Joan of Arc! I’m really glad to know you’re feeling good about it, not biting the bullet but truly embracing it. You should.

Dude, I have to say, you are seriously so beautiful!

I got my hair cut too, and I’m surprised by how much I like it! I feel relieved to be rid of the dead weight and happy to be finished with the routine of dying my hair. It’s so much lighter. Without my massive head of hair to hide behind I see more clearly signs of age, the effects of time and gravity. I don’t mind.

I loved having a haircut buddy from afar! The last time I was part of an organized haircutting effort was when we shaved our heads for “Out There.” Happy 30th anniversary of our first music video! If, 30 years from now, there’s still a planet and a country and we’re still alive, let’s write about being badass bluehaired 80-year-olds that never had stupid facelifts.

Juliana: Your new haircut is lovely! I was going to say “adorable” but here I’ve been railing against the cultural disrespect of mature womanhood so I want to avoid any infantilizing language.

I had long hair for so long that I keep imagining it is still there. I keep reaching back for my phantom ponytail. I am still getting used to the lightness of my head; there is not that baggage, that pile that I have to deal with. It’s gone! It’s so refreshing.

Like you I feel a little naked in the face with such short hair. Everything is exposed. It’s not that I fear people can see more clearly my midcentury-modern face and how time has changed it; it’s more just the unease of an introvert who doesn’t really like to be noticed.

Freda, you have always been luminous in my eyes. You glow from within and that is something that you can’t buy from a plastic surgeon or from a hairstylist. There is so much ugliness out there but your light will be shining until humanity as a whole snuffs itself out.

Love always,

Juliana

https://www.talkhouse.com/freda-love...tine-haircuts/





Vinyl LPs Sell More Than CDs For The First Time In 3 Decades

Vinyl LPs are a more important physical format for music than CDs for the first time in more than 30 years, according to the latest revenue figures from the RIAA (pdf).

The supremacy of vinyl over CDs is the result of several factors.

While vinyl revenues have increased steadily over the last few years, CD revenues have plummeted.

Labels and artists have capitalized on the resurgence of vinyl to offer deluxe releases – including reissues, remasters and boxed sets.

Vinyl album revenues of $232 million were 62% of total physical revenues, marking the first time vinyl exceeded CDs for such a period since the 1980’s.

There was also significant impact from music retail and venue shutdown measures around Covid-19. Revenues from physical products of $376 million at estimated retail value for first half 2020 were down 23% year-over-year.

It’s also important to note that digital sales and streaming have made physical sales almost a footnote. Digital media now account for about 93% of music revenues.
http://www.synthtopia.com/content/20...-in-3-decades/





Home Studio Setup Costs Compared - 1980s And Now
Russ Hughes

After my recent article on how good gear is today “The Best Recording Gear In 2020” the team thought it would be fun to see how much it would cost you to set up a decent home recording studio in the 1980s (the beginning of the home recording revolution) and compare it to what it would cost now.

We are going to choose some of the most cost effective favourites from the period and then equivalent products today, much of the hardware used then has subsequently been replaced by software.

Fostex B16 Tape Recorder (£2995 + £300 for remote)

A marvel when launched in 1984, the Fostex B16 gave 16 tracks on half inch tape. Noise was reduced using Dolby C noise reduction. The package was a bargain at £3000, with the remote a further £300. Reviewing it for Home Studio Recording magazine Ian Gilby wrote “the Fostex B16 does represent a formidable package that is both attractive in terms of its facilities and cost. It is well designed, functional and portable. The built-in Dolby C noise reduction maintains a very respectable recording quality that belies its 16 tracks on ½" format. In short, this is a marvellous machine, I only wish I could afford one.” Full review at Mu:Zines

Seck 1882 Mixer (£1500)

The Seck 1882 was often paired with the Fostex B16, offering remarkable value for money. The Seck 1882 took a somewhat unconventional approach to design, mounting the entire console on one circuit board. This made the console incredibly thin. Added to this it was equipped with hundreds of tiny knobs and buttons which made it quite fiddly to use. However it was well equipped and was used in many home studios. In the March 1985 edition of Home Studio Recording Ian Gilby wrote “The Seck 1882 mixer is, without doubt, one of the most versatile and compact units on the market today. Its facilities offer almost everything you would desire including a slightly unorthodox EQ stage that surprisingly, sounds better in reality than it looks on paper. The icing on the cake, however, has got to be the mixer's routing system which has certainly taken a leaf out of the big boys' book; Soundcraft, Harrison and the like.” Full review at Mu:zines

Cabling (£200)

Yes you had to cable the stuff together in the 80s and it soon got costly, even if most of it used phono and jack cables.

Yamaha NS10M (£300)

There’s not much to say about the Yamaha NS10M that hasn’t already been written. Suffice to say they have become the stuff of legend, but not necessarily because of the sound quality. It was often remarked when people asked why people mixed on NS10s that if a mix sounds good on them it will sound good on anything!

Quad 405 Power Amp (£247)

The Quad 405 was a two channel stereo amp, used by many to power their studio monitors. Originally built for the home market, these dull cream coloured blocks that used banana plugs for connection were often the amp of choice for home studios. Although connection was a bugger as well, so if you ever have a desire to buy one be prepared for some cabling gymnastics.

Yamaha REV7 Reverb (£1200)

The Yamaha REV7 was the first affordable professional digital reverb and became an overnight success. Based on its bigger brother the costly REV1, the REV7 offered stereo reverb and effects along with EQ. It had a mind-blowing 30 presets, with the option of another 60 user presets.

Sony DTC1000ES DAT (£999)

We struggled on the team about what to include as the 2 track mastering device. Depending on how much money one had it ranged from the Aiwa 770 pro cassette recorder, but for those willing to stretch the Sony DTC1000ES was mixing heaven. It offered 2 tracks of of 16bit @ 48kHz recording and was the ideal machine to master to for those who were preparing tracks for CD pressing.

Drawmer DL221 Compressor (£370)

In the 1980s Drawmer compressors were a staple of home recording studios, in fact many pro studios used them too. British built, the DL221 was a workhorse compressor with a few tricks up its sleeve including being used as a de-esser, owing to the option to side-chain it with filters. Paul White reviewed it for Home Studio Recording in 1985 and said “For the small studio, the side chain access and monitoring is a significant selling point as it means that the unit can be conscripted into use as a de-esser or a de-popper with the simple addition of any equaliser you have lying around.” Full review at Mu:zines

Drawmer DS201 Noise Gate (£345)

Like Batman and Robin, wherever you found a Drawmer DL221 compressor then you were almost as likely to find the DS201 noise gate in the rack. A real workhorse noise gate, the DS201 is still sold today and described by Drawmer as “A sophisticated dual channel noise gate incorporating a number of features pioneered by Drawmer, which are invaluable to the sound engineer, and not found on conventional noise gates.”

Atari 520ST MIDI Computer and Mono Monitor (£749)

Before the days of Mac and PC wars there was a studio music computer favourite in the form of the Atari ST. It came in two sizes the 520 and 1040, denoting the amount of memory in each one, with the rather larger offering 1040K of RAM - yes you read it correctly, just over 1MB of RAM! What made the Atari so popular for musicians was it had MIDI built in, which meant once you had the software there was no further hardware to buy to make music. Writing for International Musician in 1985 Jeremy Vine said “Where Atari have excelled themselves is in having implemented MIDI on the ST as a standard interface. Situated at the rear of the machine are the two ports, MIDI IN and MIDI OUT (THRU). Beyond that, Atari haven't done any fancy tricks but their mere presence opens up a world of possibilities for the musician. It's the combination of GEM, MIDI, 512k of RAM and the speed of the micro which makes this a real treat.” Full review at Mu:zines

C-Lab Creator (£285)

Back in the day there were two main music sequencer packages used by the masses, Steinberg Pro24 and C-Lab Creator (or Notator if you wanted scoring). Creator was a work of genius that combined multi-length patterns coupled with a powerful Arrange window that made sequencing a track a doddle. In some ways using Creator is still easier and better than most modern DAWs for sequencing MIDI. The MIDI timing was certainly tighter. Creator morphed into different incarnations over its life until it was bought by Apple and became Logic - the rest as they say is history! Full review at Mu:zines

C-Lab Unitor (£349)

If you wanted to mix your MIDI sequences with your audio then you needed to lock your MIDI hardware to tape using SMPTE. For those using C-Lab then the Unitor was the simplest way to do this. The Unitor plugged into the side of the Atari ST and then sent and received SMPTE code via jack leads. It also offered additional MIDI port expansion.

Roland MT32 (£450)

There were several multitimbral sound devices in the 1980s, early low cost units included the Yamaha FB01, TX81Z and the Roland MT32, followed later on by units like the Roland U110 and the EMU Systems Proteus. The MT32 was a small black box based on the Roland D50 and offering 7 channels of audio and drums and was a favourite of Atari ST owners needing sounds for their computer music making. All modern DAWs feature plugins that offer the same if not better quality sounds to use. This is what Martin Russ said in Sound on Sound in 1987 “With a suitable software package, the MT32 will make a very useful expander for the sequencer user. In fact, a single MT32 plus computer-based sequencer could satisfy virtually all the requirements for a simple but complete MIDI set-up for a home recordist: synths, drums, reverb - just add vocals (and creativity) for an instant hit!” Full review at Mu:zines

Akai MX73 (£599)

If you want to record any MIDI then you are going to need a MIDI controller. The Akai MX73 was a good quality well priced MIDI controller and used in many studios during the 1980s.

The Core System

So there we are, the core of any 80s recording studio. Of course you’ll need to add mics, headphones and instruments to record effectively, but the basics come to the total shown below…

TOTAL PRICE = £10,893


What Would You Need Today To Get The Same Features And Quality?

A Computer - Windows or Mac - £500

A new Windows computer or a refurb Apple Mac can be purchased for less than £500 and are powerful enough to run any application to match the performance of old tape and sequencers. An Intel i5 Windows laptop from a reputable brand will cost around £480, or a refurbished Apple iMac, Intel Core i5 2.5GHz - 16GB - 500GB - LED 21.5" can be purchased from a dealer for less than £500.

Now the even better news about the software…

PreSonus Studio One Prime/Pro Tools First/Garageband - Free

Any of the DAWs shown above are free. All have 16 tracks of high quality audio, MIDI and a mixer with built in effects.
PreSonus StudioLive AR16c - £530

StudioLive AR16c: 16 channel USB-C™ Compatible Audio Interface / Analog Mixer / Stereo SD Recorder.

• 18-channel hybrid USB-C mixer

• Integrated 2x2 SD card stereo recorder

• Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity

• 16 built-in, premium-grade digital effects

• Complete with comprehensive software bundle

Arturia KeyLab Essential 61 MIDI Keyboard - £230

61 note full sized keyboard controller with MIDI hardware control. It includes Analog Labs 2 and UVI grand piano.

• Can Be Used To Control External Hardware Via MIDI

• Velocity Sensitive Keys For Capturing Every Little Nuance

• Includes Ableton Live Lite, Analog Lab 2 & UVI Grand Piano Model D

Adam Audio T5V Studio Monitor - £270

The T5V is a highly affordable two-way nearfield monitor and optimized for small control rooms. It will sound far better than the beloved NS10 speakers do and give a much more accurate sound. Check out our review of the Adam T5V studio monitor

That’s all you need to replace the gear shown above and get comparable results, with a total cost of…

TOTAL PRICE = £1530

Summary

As you can see, the cost of entry to get the same, if not better results than those afforded by recording setups of the 1980s, is around a 10th of the price, as a community member pointed out, if you account for inflation then the cost today would be an eye watering £33,580.65. Furthermore, modern systems are more flexible, take up far less space, burn far less electricity and use far fewer user serviceable parts.

Gear has never been cheaper or been as flexible and powerful. The next time you want to moan because a piece a software or a plugin doesn’t do everything you wished it did then you may want to remind yourself of how lucky we are to record and mix today!

Modern recording gear is a bloody miracle, there is no other word to describe it. Now go and make some music!
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/pro...-1980s-and-now





AT&T’s Current 5G is Slower than 4G in Nearly Every City Tested by PCMag

AT&T phones often get just 5MHz of 5G spectrum, slowing them down in speed tests.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T smartphone users who see their network indicators switch from "4G" to "5G" shouldn't necessarily expect that they're about to get faster speeds. In PCMag's annual mobile-network testing, released today, 5G phones connected to AT&T got slower speeds than 4G phones in 21 out of 22 cities.

PCMag concluded that "AT&T 5G right now appears to be essentially worthless," though AT&T's average download speed of 103.1Mbps was nearly as good as Verizon's thanks to a strong 4G performance. Of course, AT&T 5G should be faster than 4G in the long run—this isn't another case of AT&T misleadingly labeling its 4G network as a type of 5G. Instead, the disappointing result on PCMag's test has to do with how today's 5G phones work and with how AT&T allocates spectrum.

The counterintuitive result doesn't reveal much about the actual differences between 4G and 5G technology. Instead, it's reflective of how AT&T has used its spectrum to deploy 5G so far. As PCMag explained, "AT&T's 5G slices off a narrow bit of the old 850MHz cellular band and assigns it to 5G, to give phones a valid 5G icon without increasing performance. And because of the way current 5G phones work, it often reduces performance."

AT&T's 4G network benefits from the aggregation of channels from different frequencies. "The most recent phones are able to assemble up to seven of them—that's called seven-carrier aggregation, and it's why AT&T won [the PCMag tests] last year," the article said.

5G phones can't handle that yet, PCMag analyst Sascha Segan wrote:

“But 5G phones can't add as many 4G channels to a 5G channel. So if they're in 5G mode, they're giving up 4G channels so they can use that extremely narrow, often 5MHz 5G channel, and the result is slower performance: faux G. For AT&T, using a 5G phone in testing was often a step backward from our 4G-only phone.”

More specifically, "at locations with both 4G and 5G, our 5G phone was slower than our 4G phone in 21 out of 22 cities," the article said. While AT&T 5G phones often accessed just 5MHz of spectrum, Segan wrote that his analysis shows it "takes at least 50MHz of dedicated 5G spectrum to make a real difference."

The difference was stark in some cities. In Baltimore, where AT&T provided average speeds of 117.1Mbps, "kicking into 5G mode... reduc[ed AT&T's] average download speeds by a shocking 61 percent across the city," PCMag wrote.

T-Mobile 5G wasn't always faster than 4G. In Austin, T-Mobile had the most 5G availability of any carrier, but "its 5G results were 17 percent slower than its 4G results at locations where both networks were available."

PCMag has been testing mobile networks for 11 years and had to adjust how it reported results this year because of the curious 5G results, Segan noted on Twitter:

The shocker this year was how to cope with 5G networks that were SLOWER than 4G networks in the same place. We had to use a "best of" rule and not count pure 5G availability in our overall scores. But ALL 5G networks were less available than they claim to be.

— Sascha Segan (@saschasegan) September 8, 2020


PCMag said it conducted tests with Samsung Galaxy S10 and S20 phones, chosen "because they offer the best 4G and 5G performance available, with the S20 supporting all the different types of 5G US carriers have to offer."

AT&T said early 5G would be similar to 4G

We asked AT&T if it plans any changes, such as assigning more than 5MHz to the 5G channel or switching phones back to 4G when it's the fastest option, and will update this article if we get a response.

In November 2019, AT&T said its early 5G deployments on the 850MHz band would only offer speeds that are similar to LTE-Advanced, a form of 4G that AT&T has misleadingly called "5GE" or "5G Evolution."

Despite the 5G slowdown in PCMag tests, AT&T's strong 4G performance helped it achieve an average download speed of 103.1Mbps, ahead of T-Mobile's 74Mbps and behind Verizon's 105.1Mbps. AT&T also provided speeds above 10Mbps in 95 percent of tests, the highest of the three carriers. PCMag testers were able to get an AT&T 5G signal 38 percent of the time, compared to T-Mobile's 54 percent and Verizon's 4 percent. (Verizon 5G uses only millimeter-wave spectrum that has a much smaller reach than low- and mid-band spectrum.)

AT&T won the overall speed title in 12 out of 26 cities, compared to 13 for Verizon and one for T-Mobile. AT&T offers 5G in 22 of the 26 cities tested.

PCMag didn't test rural areas this year because it had to adjust procedures for the pandemic. Instead of a travel schedule involving flights, rental cars, and hotels, PCMag said it hired "two dozen drivers to each test their own cities."

Verizon 5G network “mind-blowing” but tiny

The lack of rural tests means the averages found by PCMag are likely higher than the nationwide reality. OpenSignal, which relies on user-initiated speed tests, recently found average download speeds of 32.6Mbps for AT&T, 28.2Mbps for T-Mobile, 27.4Mbps for Verizon, and 25.4Mbps for T-Mobile subsidiary Sprint. Those speeds include all networks, not just 5G.

OpenSignal found average 5G speeds of 494.7Mbps for Verizon, 60.8Mbps for AT&T, and about 49Mbps for both T-Mobile and Sprint.

PCMag and OpenSignal tests agree that Verizon's 5G network is the hardest one to find. Users of OpenSignal's speed-test app were able to get a Verizon 5G signal just 0.4 percent of the time, compared to 22.5 percent for T-Mobile, 14.1 percent for Sprint, and 10.3 percent for AT&T.

"Verizon's 5G is often mind-blowing, but very difficult to find," PCMag wrote. Though it can offer "speeds up to 2Gbps and latencies well under 10ms," Verizon 5G was often available in only two or three percent of locations in individual cities.

Verizon 5G's ultra-high speed and sparse availability are not surprising because it uses the 28GHz spectrum band, which offers plenty of capacity but without the ability to cover long distances or penetrate walls and other obstacles. AT&T and T-Mobile 5G use the same low-band spectrum bands they use for 4G, ensuring wider coverage but without huge speed boosts.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...sted-by-pcmag/





U.S. Company Faces Backlash After Belarus Uses Its Tech to Block Internet
Ryan Gallagher

• U.S. firm promotes ability to ‘blacklist’ 150 million websites
• Senator calls on Treasury Department to investigate company


Sandvine Inc., the U.S. company whose technology helped Belarus block much of the internet during a disputed presidential election last month, promotes its wares with a stark selling point: it can be used to “blacklist” as many as 150 million websites.

The private-equity-backed technology firm demonstrated its equipment to a government security team in Belarus in May, two people with knowledge of the matter said, and its marketing materials boast of the blacklisting capabilities, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. The Sandvine equipment is also used to manage and secure networks, and its website blocking feature can prohibit users from accessing content deemed illicit, such as terrorist propaganda or child pornography, according to the documents.

For several days in August, however, Sandvine’s “deep packet inspection” equipment played a central role in censoring social media, news and messaging platforms used by protesters rallying against President Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election, Bloomberg reported last month. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the Aug. 9 election “fraudulent.”

The documents and product demonstration, as recounted by the people familiar with the company’s affairs, lend added insight into Sandvine’s work in Belarus, showing that company representatives met directly with officials in Belarus and later shipped the equipment, via a contractor, to be installed at data centers in Minsk.

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin called on the Treasury Department to investigate Sandvine for potential violations of U.S. sanctions on Belarus. For more than a decade, those sanctions have imposed restrictions on U.S. companies from providing funds, goods or services that benefit Lukashenko or others engaged in “actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions,” according to Erich Ferrari, a Washington-based sanctions expert.

Sandvine declined to comment. A company spokesman had previously directed a Bloomberg reporter to its corporate ethics policy, which says that a committee reviews sales to determine the risk of its products being used in a manner “detrimental to human rights.” In 2017, Sandvine was acquired by California-based private equity firm Francisco Partners in a deal worth $444 million. Francisco Partners then merged Sandvine with Procera Networks, a U.S. company. Francisco Partners didn’t respond to a request for comment.

During a Sandvine conference call on Thursday, which sought to address employee concerns about its work in Belarus, executives said they had been working with a government organization in the country for more than a year. Sandvine had provided Belarus with technology that is filtering about 40% of all internet traffic moving in and out of the country, the executives said. They said the work didn’t violate U.S. sanctions. A recording of the call was shared with Bloomberg.

Alexander Haväng, Sandvine’s chief technology officer, acknowledged during the call that Belarus may be using the company’s equipment to block websites and messaging apps, but he said that Sandvine had concluded that the internet, and access to specific material on websites, wasn’t “a part of human rights.”

“We don’t want to play world police,” he said. “We believe that each sovereign country should be allowed to set their own policy on what is allowed and what is not allowed in that country.”

The revelations about Sandvine have prompted criticisms from U.S. senators, a human-rights organization and Belarusians now living in the U.S., and it has also ignited internal protests within Sandvine, according to the two people familiar with the matter.

“It would be deeply troubling if American technology is being used by the last dictator of Europe to block Belarusians from the internet just as thousands peacefully protest a stolen election and brutal political arrests,” said Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, in a statement to Bloomberg. “It doesn’t take much research to realize which potential autocratic clients should not have access to such technology. As such, I have asked the Treasury Department if there might be any violation of existing U.S. executive orders or sanctions with regard to this question.”

Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, offered similar criticism.

“Reports that technology from a U.S. company is being used by the Lukashenko regime to censor and restrict citizens’ access to the internet in Belarus is troubling,” he said. “The recent sham presidential elections were marred by violence and repression against the Belarusian people and political opponents. The U.S. and the international community should stand in support with the people of Belarus in their fight for freedom and democracy.”

Belarus’s Interior Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Deep packet inspection can be used to inspect and manage internet networks, filtering out viruses and blocking hackers and prioritizing some types of traffic over others. It can also be used for eavesdropping and online censorship, according to Christopher Parsons, a senior research associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. The rules are sometimes determined by the Internet Service Provider or the relevant network administrator, Parsons said, but often the equipment also comes equipped with predefined blacklists.

Sandvine shipped its equipment through a primary contractor, Russia-based Jet Infosystems, which finalized a technology deal with Belarus in early 2019 for $2.5 million, the documents state. Jet Infosystems didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

The Sandvine technology has been installed at two sites in Minsk, where the National Traffic Exchange Center, a state-controlled organization, uses it to help manage the country’s internet activity, according to the documents. The National Traffic Exchange Center declined to comment.

The equipment gave the center the ability to blacklist as many as 150 million website URLs -- stopping people in the country from visiting them, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter.

The government used Sandvine’s technology to block people from accessing social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and international news websites, Bloomberg reported last month.

On Tuesday, a group of U.S.-based Belarusian citizens wrote to Francisco Partners requesting that it “immediately withdraw and recall all supplied equipment, goods, funds or other services that were used or will be used by the Lukashenko government.” The letter, seen by Bloomberg, calls on Sandvine “to show the world that your company chooses to stand with Belarus and other nations that fight for democracy and freedom.”

Peter Micek, general counsel at the human rights group Access Now, called on federal authorities to investigate Sandvine and Francisco Partners and questioned the effectiveness of Sandvine’s business ethics committee.

“Their services appear to have been used in Belarus to silence people and to cover up egregious human rights violations,” Micek said. “The outcomes here speak for themselves. Whatever reviews they had were not sufficient and don’t give us any faith that the company takes its human rights obligations seriously.”

Pressure on Sandvine’s leadership has also mounted within the company, causing unrest among employees, some of whom didn’t know about the work in Belarus until it was revealed last month by Bloomberg, according to the two people familiar with the company’s affairs.

In the last two weeks, the people said, Sandvine employees at offices in Canada, Sweden and the U.S. have complained to their managers and circulated messages and videos discussing the situation in Belarus. The employees have questioned whether technology they helped design is aiding the Belarusian government’s crackdown on peaceful protests, which has resulted in more than 6,000 people -- including journalists and passersby -- being detained and hundreds of cases of torture and ill treatment, according to the United Nations.

During Thursday’s conference call, employees questioned asked about the company’s business in Belarus and raised concerns about damage to Sandvine’s reputation. Mark Driedger, the chief operating officer, said the company planned to keep all information about the work in-house and warned that any employees who spoke publicly about it could face termination.

“We are open to a debate internally on how to improve,” said Haväng, the chief technology officer. “Nobody really feels good about the situation in Belarus.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...taff-lawmakers





Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web

A decade before the Internet went mainstream, French citizens were interacting via Minitel, a computer network open to anyone with a telephone
Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll

It was the late 1970s. Former French presidents Charles de Gaulle and George Pompidou had recently died. The Arab oil embargo caused energy prices to quadruple for a time. Marseille remained gripped by drug lords. And France had to face the fact that its telephone network was one of the worst in the industrialized world. Fewer than 7 million telephone lines served 47 million French citizens, and the country’s elite felt that the domination of U.S. firms in telephone equipment, computers, databases, and information networks threatened their national sovereignty. Or at least it damaged their cultural pride.

In an influential 1978 report to President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, titled The Computerization of Society, government researchers Simon Nora and Alain Minc argued that the solution to France’s telecom woes lay in “telematics”—a combination of telecommunications and informatics. They outlined a plan for digitizing the telephone network, adding a layer of interactive teletext video technology, and providing entrepreneurs with an open platform for innovation.

Taken with Nora and Minc’s vision, the nation’s leadership began to lay the groundwork for France’s computerized future. In 1983, on orders from the president, computer engineers within the Post, Telegraph & Telephone (PTT) ministry began to roll out throughout France a telematics system that came to be known as Minitel. It allowed ordinary people to obtain and share information online, launching the country into the digital age and leapfrogging the United States by more than a decade.

The story of how Minitel came to be is a fascinating but largely forgotten one. To the extent that it’s remembered today, Minitel is portrayed as a closed, centralized system encumbered by government bureaucracy that failed to change with the times. But back in 1983 it was like nothing anyone had seen before, eventually growing to have more than 20,000 online services before the World Wide Web even got off the ground.

In Silicon Valley today, those who lived through the Minitel era tend to view it as the epitome of how not to build and operate an online system: They believe that letting the government design and run it just invited disaster. In truth, Minitel was never fully controlled by the state. It was a hybrid system—a public platform for private innovation. And it worked pretty well.

To initiate a connection, a user manually dialed a local gateway using a telephone handset. The call, carried over the public switched telephone network, was answered by software running on the switch—typically a CIT-Alcatel E-10—which played an audible carrier signal back over the line. Hearing this tone, the user would place the handset back on its cradle and begin using the Minitel terminal, which would be carrying out a special handshake protocol with the switch.

The gateways, known as points d’accès videotex, or PAVIs, provided an interface to a directory of known Minitel services, identified by short mnemonic codes. For example, rail travelers bought tickets from 3615 SNCF (SNCF being an acronym for Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer, the French railroad), news junkies gathered at 3615 LEMONDE (Le Monde being a leading Parisian newspaper), and dudes (mecs in French) browsed the personal ads at 3615 MEC. Like URLs today, these codes were printed in magazines, shown in television commercials, and plastered on the sides of buses.

Once the user typed in the desired destination, the switch created a virtual circuit over a public data network known as Transpac, and data could begin to flow from the client’s terminal to the host server and back. These virtual circuits used the X.25 network protocol, the paradigmatic packet-switching technique developed largely by researchers at the French Centre Commun d’Études de Télévision et Télécommunications.

At the start, though, Minitel advocates faced a chicken-and-egg problem. Why would anyone adopt the system unless there were interesting things to do with it? And yet how could they convince entrepreneurs to create services unless the platform already had users? Somehow, Minitel needed to attract both users and service providers at the same time.

To kick-start the process, the PTT ordered millions of Minitel terminals (built by French manufacturers such as Telic-Alcatel and Matra) and made them available at no cost to everyone in the country who had a telephone line. Anyone curious about the new system being promoted on TV could simply go to the post office and return home with a shiny new Minitel box.

Minitel designers made the system fully plug and play: All you had to do was plug the terminal into the wall, dial the local gateway, et voilà, you were transported into cyberspace. Meanwhile, would-be cybernauts in the United States who wanted to get online had to buy expensive computer equipment, install confusing software, pay hefty long-distance phone bills, and prepay a separate subscription to each service provider they wanted to use.

The first service available on Minitel was an electronic phone book, or annuaire électronique. Equipped with a natural-language interface for search, this oft-used resource was an easy way to explore Minitel for free. Later, the government began to require that people use Minitel for certain administrative tasks such as university registration. These modest public services stimulated adoption of Minitel on France’s fast-expanding telephone network. Whether from home, work, or at a public terminal on the street, by the end of the 1980s, every adult living in France had access to the network.

Prompted by the growth of Minitel’s user population, entrepreneurs jumped at the opportunity to create new services. These startups benefited from a novel payment system built into the Minitel platform that lowered the barrier to entry. Named after the newsstands that line the boulevards of Paris, the PTT’s Kiosk system handled the accounting, collecting money from users at one end, cutting checks for service providers at the other, and keeping a tidy slice for itself. Small service providers could thus design lean information systems that generated profit without having also to manage customer relationships, take credit cards, or chase down past-due bills. Indeed, the app-store model employed by Apple, Steam, and others now is little more than a privatized version of the Minitel Kiosk.

Providers were allowed to use any hardware or software they liked so long as its output conformed to guidelines published by the phone company. As demand for Minitel grew, the market for server hardware became fiercely competitive. Providers built their systems on any machine capable of running a multiuser operating system, from proprietary mainframes and Unix-friendly minicomputers to Commodore Amigas and IBM PCs.

Beyond the iconic terminal equipment, France hoped to jump-start domestic production of server hardware as well. This part of the telematics project did not go as planned: Hacker-entrepreneurs demanded more Unix support, but French manufacturers such as Groupe Bull failed to provide it. As a result, Minitel services were often hosted on machines built by U.S. corporations such as AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, and Texas Instruments, and so, ironically, Minitel broadened rather than curtailed the U.S. presence in French telecom.

Those administering the system encouraged service providers by offering high-quality documentation for free. Over the course of two decades, France Telecom published dozens of brochures on user-interface standards, terminals, PAVIs, protocols, and so on. A quarterly newsletter, La Lettre de Télétel, informed industry participants of the latest technical improvements and business experiments.

French companies extended the Minitel platform with new kinds of terminals and peripherals. Terminals with built-in memory functions, chip-card readers, and high-resolution color displays began appearing on the market. Most Minitel terminals featured a serial port and multiple display modes, enabling users to connect the terminal to a printer, credit card reader, or PC. For small business owners, this flexibility transformed the Minitel terminal into a low-cost point-of-sale system. And long before the Internet of Things, Minitel was incorporated into a variety of home-automation schemes, allowing remote control of heaters, VHS recorders, security alarms, and sprinklers.

With this open platform for innovation, telematics electrified the country, making France of the 1980s a place of tremendous digital experimentation and excitement. And, unlike ventures during the speculative boom and bust of the dot-com years in Silicon Valley, the Kiosk system provided a reliable business model for Minitel entrepreneurs, enriching a relatively large number of service providers in the process. The technical infrastructure of the Minitel ecosystem enabled the French to benefit from a wealth of online services at a time when the online landscape in the United States was limited to local BBSs and fledging walled gardens like CompuServe.

Although it wasn’t the only network to use X.25 or videotex technology during the 1980s, Minitel was unique in allowing the many service providers to operate their own machines. France Telecom oversaw only the network, whereas in most other countries, a single organization had centralized control of both the network and servers for the videotex system.

In the United Kingdom, for example, all content on the Prestel videotex system was hosted on an IBM mainframe housed at the General Post Office. Germany’s BTX system was similarly arranged. In the United States, all of the content from The Source, an early private provider of online information, was served up from a single computer center in McLean, Va. Even 101 Online, a Minitel spin-off that operated briefly in the San Francisco Bay Area, stored its data in an office on California Street. That degree of centralization ultimately hindered innovation by excluding the kinds of garage and college-dorm startups that made the Internet what it is today.

Minitel gave service providers considerable freedom over their systems, a feature that would become a staple of the Internet. Minitel’s administrators also abided by an early form of net neutrality. The network did not favor one service over any other or otherwise discriminate. Occasionally, a service would be barred for breaking the law (by serving as a marketplace for prostitution, for example), but any such exclusion was subject to due process, and the system’s administration could be sued if it acted arbitrarily. These guarantees of fairness stood in stark contrast to the situation in the United States, where private network operators could exclude content on a whim to serve their business interests.

Of course, the advantages of the Minitel design came at a cost. The network used a nonstandard implementation of the X.25 protocol that prevented privately run servers from connecting directly to one another. Instead, all connections were routed through the public data network, effectively centralizing communications between hosts. This constraint was necessary for implementing the Kiosk system, but it also required each host to be individually approved by the state.

Routing all traffic through the central network also enabled the state to attempt to implement a censorship policy on Minitel. Because of intense lobbying by existing print industries, only incumbent publishers got access to the Kiosk. In short order, however, would-be service providers began to route around this bureaucratic obstacle by printing fake newspapers, known collectively as the “ghost press,” which qualified them for recognition by the state. Others bought and sold their access on a secondary market. In most cases, the Minitel administration was happy to connect these entrepreneurial mavericks, capturing one-third of their revenue in the process.

Minitel was thus hardly the rigid, static system imagined by many Internet advocates of the 1990s. The hybrid architecture—bridging public and private, open and closed—provided a rich platform for innovation and entrepreneurship at a time when online services elsewhere in the world were floundering.

For a generation of French citizens, Minitel wasn’t about hardware, switches, or software. It was about the people they chatted with, the services they used, the games they played, and the advertisements for these services they saw in newspapers and on billboards. Many of the services that we associate with the Web had predecessors in Minitel. Before there was Peapod, there was 3615 TMK (Tele-Market), a service that enabled Parisians to order groceries for same-day delivery. Before there was Cortana or Siri, there were Claire and Sophie, services that provided personalized information using natural-language interfaces. Before there was Ticketmaster, there was Billetel. And before there was telebanking, there was Minitel banking.

The services that most stand out in the popular memory of Minitel, though, were undoubtedly the messageries roses. These “pink chat rooms” were sites of flirtatious exploration that ranged from rather conventional online dating to discussions that were downright lascivious and crude. Pink Minitel services were not only popular, they were also most lucrative. The profitability of these adult-oriented services led to an advertising war among pink providers in print media, on television, and over billboards, so the phenomenon was hard to escape, even if you never used Minitel. Telematics advocates were by turns thrilled by this enthusiastic embrace of the new technology and concerned by its rosy hue. One PTT minister lamented, “[I do] not want telematics to have its image tarnished by the exclusive use of fornicatory fellowship!”

The emergence of pink Minitel was the result of both low- and high-tech innovation. On the low end were the animatrices, a new type of information worker whose job was, in the words of one popular song of the period, to “digitally undress” users. Animatrices were often young men posing as women. Their task was to keep unsuspecting customers online for as long as possible. While many animatrices were paid, others were self-described Minitel addicts who bartered their services for free connection time.

The entrepreneurs behind these pink chat rooms, some of whom would later dominate France’s telematics industry, also developed more sophisticated tools to maximize their revenue. PCs rigged up with software allowed animatrices to handle multiple conversations at once. Another practice—frowned on by many in the community but nonetheless widespread—was to use bots to engage in online solicitation. Minitel tycoon Xavier Niel deployed such automated animatrices, inviting users to “come hang out with me in another chat room.”

The runaway popularity of adult-oriented services depended on certain privacy protections built into the network itself. Starting at the local gateway, all Minitel connections were anonymized. No usernames or credit card numbers were required, so the chat-room providers never knew the real identities of their customers, nor did they need that information to make money. Because billing was handled by the PTT, service providers received one lump sum per billing cycle, rather than dealing with thousands of individual accounts. This payment system, which effortlessly charged the user, is also the reason why Minitel was relatively free of advertising.

Privacy and anonymity extended to the user side as well. Consumers’ telephone bills did not reveal which sites they had visited. Instead, the telephone company aggregated all activity for the billing period into a single charge. So it was easy for an employee assigned work-related Minitel tasks to sneak into a chat room, pink or otherwise. To some, the messagerie became the new water cooler (to the dismay of many business owners).

Minitel enthusiasts cherished the network’s privacy and anonymity. In late 1984, Minitel engineers added a feature to the terminal that saved the last page visited and made it easier for the user to pick up an interrupted session—as a browser cookie does today. The public outcry was swift and brutal. Editorials in newspapers, which (rightly) saw Minitel as a competitor, warned that Big Brother had arrived. Some 3,000 terminals were returned in protest. The PTT soon dropped this feature.

Minitel use peaked in 1993, when users logged more than 90 million hours at their terminals enjoying various Kiosk services. In the years to follow, usage declined as home computing and dial-up Internet access spread. Dedicated users could continue to access Minitel using terminal-emulation software, but many others simply moved on. The easy-to-use Minitel terminal and its straightforward videotex interface, once so groundbreaking but now proving inflexible, stymied further development.

Although hundreds of thousands of users continued to access the system each month through the 1990s and beyond, Minitel no longer seemed a shining symbol of France’s telematics future. Rather, it was an unremarkable part of everyday life, no more dazzling than the radio or telephone. In 2012, after nearly 30 years of continuous operation, the PAVIs were shut down, and the Minitel era came to a close.

But it would be wrong to view Minitel as a failure. Indeed, it offers an intriguing model for fostering innovation without sacrificing the public’s interests in fairness and privacy. The millions of curious minitélistes and risk-taking entrepreneurs who flocked to the platform during the 1980s were among the first people to confront the problems of trust, intimacy, privacy, and civility that characterize life online today. That grand telematics experiment is over, but it still has lessons to teach the many engineers and computer scientists struggling to make the Web a better place.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-histo...before-the-web

















Until next week,

- js.



















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