Step on...

After 15 years of stepping to Drum and Bass I've decided today that it's time to step back and let it pass me by.  I'm not saying that I've fallen out of love with the music, rather that I should stop following the scene and concentrate on more important things in life.  I still love breakbeat, I just don't see myself as one of the scene any more.

The main reason I've reached this decision is due to Hospital Records.  They've been a main player in the D&B world for many a year but over the last year or so I've felt that they have been concentrating more and more upon the youngest section of the raving community and to the exclusion of long-time fans such as myself.  This impression has been exacerbated by their involvement on new technologies like podcasting as well as social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

When I first started listening to the Hospital Podcast it was really amazing, instead of reading about up-and-coming tunes in Knowledge or other D&B magazines I could hear those tunes straight away, I could hear the great Tony Coleman telling us which tunes he liked and I was comforted in the knowledge that there were people like me around.  However Hospital has attracted a lot of young "casual" fans in the last couple of years, middle-class students and emo's who are more interested in getting plastered and moaning about how terrible their cosseted little lives are than actually following and understanding the music which underpins the scene.  Every episode of the podcast has more and more emails read out from kids who think that the odd exam and finishing a month-long relationship is cause for utmost depression and that "D&B has saved their lives" rather than being what it really is, a distraction from life's troubles; instead of being interesting and uplifting it has become more and more onerous to listen to as Tony panders to the little kiddies rather than tell them to stop whinging! (yes, this is me whinging about whinging)

Twitter for me isn't social networking, I don't follow that many of my real friends and instead use it to keep up with the gaming and D&B scenes I love through the eyes and ears of the main players in those scenes.  However I find that those working in the music business find it hard to differentiate between their professional and personal personae, I've faced a constant barrage of irrelevant, personally motivated tweets from DJ's, producers and even record labels when all I want to hear about are tweets related to the business. I'm not interested in hearing that DJ Friction was up til 5am and overslept, that London Elektricity was put in a three-star hotel rather than the four-star ones to which he feels accustomed or that Goldie is watching some football match, I just want to know which tunes are out, which are coming and what they're all playing in their sets.

I recently "unfollowed" accounts used directly by individual producers and DJ's and instead stuck to those run by the labels themselves.  However even this tactic has failed, every tom, dick and harry working for the label seems to use their label's accounts to have conversations with their mates or play TT (trending topic) games such as "Food DJ's".  So rather than have to winnow through the crap I've decided that I'll stop following the scene entirely and become a D&B "casual" rather than the "head" I have been since 1996.

So it's time I sold the decks, uninstalled all of the music production programs from my PC and concentrate upon more important things in my life: my family, my job and my future.  I'll still listen to my back catalogue of amazing albums from Hospital Records, Shogun, Metalheadz and other great labels, but I'm throwing in the towel in thinking I'm still the sort of person who labels, DJ's and producers consider to be their fans.  Sounds extreme but I know where I'm not wanted.  Maybe when D&B ceases to be flavour-of-the-month with the little teeny boppers and proper fans are again seen as the true supporters of the scene I may start listening again, but I won't hold my breath... we'll just have to see...

Wanna ride on camera?

Well I've finally been able to upload a video to YouTube from DiRT 3, I've been waiting to do it since the game came out the other week but have had to wait until the PlayStation Store opened to redeem my online VIP pass.

So the bottom line is that it's not the most impressive video, especially as there are tons of similar videos from others who're equally impressed with their own performance, getting a World Record on the same track with the same car!  I don't care, I'm pretty pleased with it and will be posting some more soon.  Hopefully the next one will be a little more exceptional ;)

Now that I've posted from two different games (see here for my COD: Black Ops upload) I fancy messing about with some captions and audio stuff, so check back soon if you want to see a version with occasional "VRRROOOM" captions and a comedy soundtrack haha

The Store is back!

So I woke up to a tweet from @Playstation at 06:08 saying that the Playstation Store is finally online!  However the Welcome Back downloads (detailed here) are not available yet.

I jumped straight on to redeem my DiRT3 online pass as well as to download the inFamous 2 demo, but have had to leave it running and come to work.  Hopefully I'll get time later to try things out, download some of the Playstation Plus games and see what else may have been published in the meantime.

Apparently the Welcome Back package is still undergoing testing.  I for one am glad it's still not available, because it means I've got chance to use the Store without it being bogged down with all the "vultures"; people who have never shown the slightest interest in the Store but are now circling, waiting for their free stuff.  I thought it would be fairer to allow proper customers (i.e. PS+ subscribers and people who had bought stuff prior to the outage) first access to the Store, but by delaying the freebies Sony have done exactly that.  To be honest the freebies are a bit naff, they are all games I've either bought or passed on already, so to know that all the beggars have to wait a little longer fills me with glee.

I can't wait to post my first DiRT3 video to my YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/andy9beans).  Sounds sad, but when you're told to upload one after every completed race it starts to get annoying that you can't!

Anonymous still anonymous?

The "hacktivist" group Anonymous have themselves fallen foul of hacking!  Cited by Sony as responsible for the current PSN outage, at least in part, the group have had to issue a warning to their members (and I use the word in it's most pejorative sense) that two of their sites have been "compromised" and should not be used for fear of identity theft.

According to the Financial Times and GamesRadar, the sites have been vandalised with obscenities and the supposed details of 500 individuals who have taken part in Anonymous activities have been posted. As to who did this and why:

• Anonymous have said that an ex-member, who was know through IRC (Internet Realtime Chat) as "Ryan" was responsible.
• Someone calling themselves Ryan have posted on Thinq.co.uk that "he was acting because the old group had become too centralised and hungry for media attention".

However this should be taken with a pinch of salt as the internet is rife with spoofs.  Just like Anonymous claim to represent the general public in their illegal activities, this "Ryan" is likely to be another interested but uninvolved person wanting to contribute their opinions.

Speculation is that this situation could have been orchestrated by Anonymous themselves to deflect any blame for the theft of the personal details of millions of PSN users, but security professionals have been monitoring the common "watering holes" of Anonymous members and report that this indicates that Anonymous is returning to their usual fragmented, bickering state after a period of exceptional unity.  Some of these professionals have been passing the information they have found to the FBI to assist in the investigation into Anonymous as a result of the PSN attack.

My views are that this is in the least poetic justice enacted upon Anonymous.  In freely arming people with the weapons to commit crimes against organisations they take exception to they have fallen foul of exactly the same practices, perhaps by those they previously armed.  They want to be taken seriously and recognised as a legitimate threat to targeted organisations, well finally the authorities are giving them that recognition by launching a criminal investigation into their activities.  I hope the Anonymous leadership are found and the book well and truly thrown at them.

The only downside to this is that now the US government will react by creating legislation to give agencies such as the FBI even further access rights to ISP user traffic than given as a result of post-2001 anti-terrorism laws.  I don't have anything to hide and am all for curbing internet crime, but by attacking Sony (and by extension 70+ million innocent PSN/SOE users) they have kicked over a hornet's nest which may lead to even more abuses of the individual privacy and human rights for which they claim to be fighting.

Sounding off

So PSN is still down and I'm trying to see it as a positive, a chance to catch up with and diversify the range of interests I have outside online console gaming.  The last time I remember being cut off from playing the games I love for such a period was when I was 10 and my parents banned me from playing "Elite" on my BBC B for a month (because I was sleep-talking about it haha).  My reaction to that crisis was to learn to knit, so I'm thankful that quarter of a century later I've got a bit more to distract me!

I've been dabbling in music production since 2002 when I started messing about with Fruity Loops and Sony Acid.  I do have copies of some of the rubbish I churned out in those days, under the name "DJ 9-Beans", but I'm keeping such "gems" out of the public domain for fear of being prosecuted for crimes against music (and probably copyright infringement as well).  Since those days I've moved to using Reason and have collaborated with my friend Vega (@vega_uk), under the revised moniker "Momentum", to produce some good if not releasable tunes.

Vega recently got himself a computer to start producing his own stuff and by the sound of it he should have something ready to put out soon.  I've not done much since except change my name to Machievel (because a change is as good as a rest, "Momentum" is too similar to that of DnB pop-idols Pendulum and I felt a bit Machiavellian at the time).  However I'm posting up the last thing I worked on properly to give you a taste of what is to come, hopefully!

Don't Blow It by Machievel

PSN Delay ongoing

So I woke up this morning to a tweet from @PlaystationEU about the latest PSN update (available here).  Apparently during testing they have discovered that the hack of SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) was more extensive than first thought:

"We were unaware of the extent of the attack on Sony Online Entertainment servers, and we are taking this opportunity to conduct further testing of the incredibly complex system."

I'm happy that Sony are doing everything they can, and by the book, to ensure PSN is as secure as possible following the idiotic acts of "GeoHot" (George Hotz), his bunch of hackers failOverflow and the self-professed internet activist protectors of the human race Anonymous.  However I can't help but be slightly peeved that PSN restoration is being delayed by that of SOE.

As far as I see it, PSN and SOE are different entities and I woud have thought that they could have been addressed as such.  I don't own any SOE games (and don't play Facebook games) so it's a bit gutting to find I'm still offline because of support work for those games.

There's also the question of what new damage Sony has found within the SOE system; information so far indicated that a legacy set of credit card information from 2007 had been stolen, will we be looking at another update soon saying that the hackers have accessed more recent and/or widespread user data?  Alternatively, have the security firms they have contracted found other weak spots in security that have not been exploited to date?  Only time will tell.

Back to my primary concern, PSN; Anonymous have denied they had anything to do with the theft of personal information and have alleged they've been framed by the real culprits, calling Sony incompetent and citing various other pseudo-altruistic catch-phrases to try to appear to hold the higher ground.  They haven't really proved anything to me though, it's all well and good for their leadership to state they did not sanction any theft, but they cannot prove that a subset of their "Anons" haven't done so without such approval.  They provided the tools and knowledge to carry out attacks, if they have taught the person who stole the data then they must share the blame for their actions, with power comes responsibility. Sony have hinted in their letter to the US House of Representatives (see entire letter here) that there should be more done to curtail the actions of such groups, and I for one would support a strenghening of legislation to effect this.

In my opinion, Anonymous should be viewed as a terrorist organisation and treated as such in the eyes of the law, because of the following traits:

• They are organised in a semi-autonomous, cell-like way, where the upper echelons can only advise their members how to act, not control their actions.
• Recruitment targets the same demographic as terrorist organisations; disaffected and rebellious boys and young men who intuitively resist any authority.
• Their intent is always to attack those they see as the enemies of the general public but their methods usually incur collateral damage to the public whose interests they are claiming to be fighting for.

The US has no proper data protection legislation, which is why organisations can freely collect, trade in and exploit personal information.  If the US and other countries which also condone the abuse of personal information changed their stance to legislate against such abuse then surely groups such as Anonymous would not need to launch "operations" against companies such as Viacom and Google.
 

Hopefully there will be reviews into this situation and the wider spectrum of information/internet legislation.  I for one would be happier if information I shared with US companies was protected in a real sense by proper legal sanctions, not by self-professed saviours who are breaking the law to protest against the currently legal actions of those who abuse information.  Hackers such as Anonymous could then concentrate upon getting jobs and girlfriends ;)

Hello Whinge World

Hi there, after a few years reading through various news, social networking and blog sites I've decided that it's time to start my own.  Not that I have much to say really, or more truthfully anything of any importance, but I thought it would be nice to have somewhere to rant where nobody's going to pay much attention... my own little online isolation chamber as such.

So what am I intending to post on here then? (nobody actually asked but hell, that's never stopped me spouting my poorly informed opinion). Well the answer is "a bit of everything"!  I'm a renaissance geek, a nerd-of-all-trades, so I'm not really going to constrain myself to anything specific and will be posting anything which has got my goat at any point I feel like whinging about it.

My interests are as follows:

• Computing (programming and web design mostly)
• Gaming (PS3 only, I have "opinions" about t'other two consoles)
• Fitness (martial arts and general training, not sports)
• Music (I've been a DJ and produced some urban tunes, can't play an instrument to save my life) 
• Graphics (celtic art and 3D modelling)

Expect a little bit of everything to filter through to here.  I'll be posting links to my tunes on SoundCloud, hopefully some tattoo designs from Flickr (when I get my arse into gear) and watch this space for news of my planned forays into developing mobile Android apps.

Anyway I better leave it there for now, hopefully you'll see me before I see you ;)