There\u2019s this new feature in iTunes 8. It\u2019s called Genius. I tell you what: I don\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m all for this genre based music categorizing and all that stuff. It\u2019s a great concept, really. The thing with Genius is just, that it\u2019s indexing all your music, no matter what. I don\u2019t get the part of creating hash values for all your files. Sure, you could have entered the wrong title, artist or album somewhere, right, very thoughtful, but Genius won\u2019t tell you there\u2019s something wrong with a particular song. It doesn\u2019t even care. However, it does index and hash all your files. I don\u2019t get it why it\u2019s doing that. Since Genius is not intended to tell you which songs have the wrong name, it could just use data that has already been collected from songs, Apple sells in the iTunes store. Genius could simply use artist, album and title information to create the so called Genius playlists. Clearly it\u2019s just the user\u2019s fault if a title is wrong, right? I mean, Genius won\u2019t even dare to correct you anyway. But Genius is hashing all your files. It\u2019s hashing all files, for everyone. I am a little paranoid maybe, but my only explanation for this is file sharing prevention and discovery. There\u2019s online stores everywhere, those files can have been hashed by Apple and indexed as \u2018fine\u2019. Then there\u2019s the other files, users copied from their CDs to their computer. This is where the evil new Genius feature could make it\u2019s turn. It hashes the files on every computer. This also means Apple is collecting the hash values for every file from every user to provide the Genius results directly from Apple. Doesn\u2019t that sound wonderful? Apple uses their servers for the complex algorithm that determines the songs in your library that match each other. It takes ages for huge libraries to collect the hash values and Apple collects them. This means Apple can count how many people have the same file in their libraries. Now there\u2019s the deal:<\/p>\n
Apple collects data from the record companies and the online stores, to determine which files are known to be widely spread. If the Apple Genius algorithm on the Apple servers now discovers a file, that has been shared and that is not amongst the files that are sold in online stores, Apple can guess at a certain amount of copies, that those aren\u2019t based on the fair use scenario. Fair use of that media states that you can make copies, and you can even share them with your friends, however there\u2019s a limit when the sharing with friends exceeds fair use. If Apple discovers such shared files, Apple could report them, or even have some revenue out of that, by selling that particular information. It makes the RIAA happy, doesn\u2019t it? I dare to believe that this would be the case. It\u2019s certainly clear that Apple doesn\u2019t really need to hash everyone\u2019s files for determining matching songs. Microsoft\u2019s Zune service provides this song matching and recommendations as well. However, the Zune software does not feel too much of need to analyze and inspect all your files in your library to provide those recommendations for songs you could want to buy. Speaking of recommendations. All the Genius recommendations do is telling you about albums and songs from the selected song\u2019s artist that aren\u2019t in your library. If you already have everything, or if Genius can\u2019t find the artist or album in the iTunes store, well, you just get the current download sales charts. Now that\u2019s a really awesome feature. Apple Genius, it\u2019s just big brother watching your habits, and dare you to download illegal music, big brother will find you! I don\u2019t like it, because even if I don\u2019t download illegal MP3s I might still have friends that send me music files, because they want me to listen to certain music they like. And maybe I will do the same with exactly the same file. That\u2019s completely legal, and still, I don\u2019t like some people watching every move and every step I take. It might sound paranoid, but we\u2019re soon living in 1984 anyway. I think some people, especially if they work for larger companies like Apple, should consider if a certain approach of doing things is reasonable for their customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s this new feature in iTunes 8. It\u2019s called Genius. I tell you what: I don\u2019t like it. I\u2019m all for this genre based music categorizing and all that stuff. It\u2019s a great concept, really. The thing with Genius is just, that it\u2019s indexing all your music, no matter what. I don\u2019t get the part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[149,181,187,185,189,182,180,183,184,186,136,188],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-it-world","tag-149","tag-apple","tag-big-brother","tag-feature","tag-file-sharing","tag-genius","tag-itunes","tag-mp3","tag-music","tag-riaa","tag-software","tag-spy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dorianmuthig.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}