Liza Vertinsky, Professor of Law, University of Maryland, and Yaniv Heled, Associate Professor of Law, Georgia State University, writing for The Conversation: Every so often stories of genetic theft, or extreme precautions taken to avoid it, make headline news. So it was with a picture of French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting at opposite ends of a very long table after Macron declined to take a Russian PCR COVID-19 test. Many speculated that Macron refused due to security concerns that the Russians would take and use his DNA for nefarious purposes. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz similarly refused to take a Russian PCR COVID-19 test. While these concerns may seem relatively new, pop star celebrity Madonna has been raising alarm bells about the potential for nonconsensual, surreptitious collection and testing of DNA for over a decade. She has hired cleaning crews to sterilize her dressing rooms after concerts and requires her own new toilet seats at each stop of her tours.

At first, Madonna was ridiculed for having DNA paranoia. But as more advanced, faster and cheaper genetic technologies have reached the consumer realm, these concerns seem not only reasonable, but justified. We are law professors who study how emerging technologies like genetic sequencing are regulated. We believe that growing public interest in genetics has increased the likelihood that genetic paparazzi with DNA collection kits may soon become as ubiquitous as ones with cameras. While courts have for the most part managed to evade dealing with the complexities of surreptitious DNA collection and testing of public figures, they won't be able to avoid dealing with it for much longer. And when they do, they are going to run squarely into the limitations of existing legal frameworks when it comes to genetics.

"I do want to shift the culture away from crypto being associated only with cryptocurrency," Chelsea Manning recently told a digital assets news site named the Block. In a world where celebrities are coughing up more than half a million dollars for a jpeg of a cartoon ape, Manning says that the sector has "unequivocally" been overrun by greed... She says this has resulted in a huge misunderstanding of crypto by critics, drawing it away from its privacy-focused roots.

"Without cryptography, my entire life history wouldn't have been able to take place," she says. In 2010, Manning, then a soldier in the US Army, used encrypted communication services to disclose classified information to Julian Assange, which was later posted on WikiLeaks.

Now, she's a part of privacy blockchain startup Nym as both a security analyst and serving in a hardware optimization role. The Switzerland-based Nym is a decentralized network that uses blockchain technology to mix and scramble packets of metadata — e.g. your IP address, who you talk to, and when and where.... Manning sees Nym as the successor to privacy tech such as the Tor browser and VPNs.

Tor, however, has been used both as a way for people in unstable countries to access information and by bad actors looking to access dark web marketplaces such as The Silk Road. Nym says that there are disincentives put in place to stop such abuse via the validation and verification of actors running the nodes on the network. And while blockchain technology is often associated with transparency as opposed to privacy, Nym says it is only the nodes of the so-called mixnet that are ledger-based — and none of the data itself is stored on the ledger. Manning and her colleagues at Nym hope that its mixnet can act as the infrastructure upon which applications can be built to create a privacy-focused internet.

By doing this, they hope to foster an alternative to surveillance capitalism — a term coined by academic Shoshana Zuboff to describe the tracking and commodification of personal data shared online for profit by big tech.

Sad news from long-time Slashdot reader NormalVisual: Synthtopia reports that Dave Smith, founder of the legendary synthesizer manufacturer Sequential Circuits and creator of the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard, died this past Wednesday.

Some of Smith's notable creations include the Prophet 5, one of the first commercially available digitally-controlled polyphonic analog synthesizers, and the Prophet-600, the first available device to offer MIDI...

Smith, who held degrees in both computer science and electronic engineering from UC Berkeley, was scheduled to appear at this year's National Association of Music Merchant (NAMM), but died suddenly. No cause of death has yet been released.
Smith's Wikipedia entry calls his 1977 Prophet 5 "the world's first microprocessor-based musical instrument" and a crucial step forward as a programmable synthesizer.

And this week Billboad magazine hailed Smith as "a key figure in the development of synth technology in the 1970s and 1980s." With Sequential (originally known as Sequential Circuits), Smith released various sequencers and programmers to be used with the Moog and ARP synthesizers prevalent at the time, before designing his own release: the Prophet-5, first polyphonic synth with programmable memory, to allow sounds to be stored and re-accessed at any time. The Prophet-5 quickly became the gold standard in its field, used in the recording both of epochal '80s blockbuster LPs like Michael Jackson's Thriller and Madonna's Like a Virgin and envelope-pushing scores for era composers like John Carpenter and Vangelis....

Smith's greatest legacy might be the introduction of MIDI to synth technology... Smith's invention (along with Roland pioneer Ikutaro Kakehashi and Sequential engineer Chet Wood) of MIDI allowed unprecedented levels of synchronization and communication between different instruments, computers and other recording equipment, which was previously incredibly difficult to achieve — particularly between equipment designed by separate manufacturers. The innovation of MIDI helped facilitate the explosion of forward-thinking programming and creativity throughout the industry of the '80s, essentially making the future of pop music accessible to all.

Smith would also develop the world's first computer synthesizer as president of Seer Systems in the '90s, and launched the company Dave Smith Instruments, an instruments manufacturer, in 2002. He has won many lifetime awards for his work in the field of musical technology, including a Technical Grammy for MIDI's creation in 2013 (an honor he shared with Kakehashi).

An anonymous reader shares a report: "To wake up to one of these things is pretty special -- to have a Leonardo at home," said Joe Kennedy, the director of the contemporary art dealership Unit London, enthusing recently about an elaborately framed LED screen with a digital replica of Leonardo da Vinci's "Portrait of a Musician" glowing on his gallery wall. The original was 800 miles away in the Ambrosiana museum in Milan. The Leonardo was one of six ultra-high-resolution copies of famous paintings from across the centuries in Unit's moodily lit "Eternalizing Art History" exhibition, which closed on Saturday. The show was the latest attempt by cash-poor museums to generate money by selling nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, usually pegged to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the market for art and collectibles by storm, with sales estimated in the tens of billions.

Pandemic-related lockdowns and reprioritized government spending have put the world's public museums under financial pressure. Yet so far, despite the formidable sales figures being achieved by NFTs, few institutions have explored this digital asset as a fund-raising mechanism. Unit and its Florence-based technology partner Cinello forged licensing agreements with several prominent Italian museums to create a hybrid offering of limited edition LED reproductions in period-style wooden frames, each accompanied by a unique NFT. Same-size digital versions of the Leonardo portrait, Caravaggio's "Bowl of Fruit" (also in the Ambrosiana) and Raphael's "Madonna of the Goldfinch" (in the Uffizi in Florence) were offered in editions of nine, ranging in price from 100,000 euros to $549,000 per piece (around $110,000 to $550,000). Fifty percent of sales proceeds went back to the licensing museums. By the Friday after the show closed, seven sales had been confirmed up to $274.5,000, which included at least one of the Leonardo NFTs.

theodp writes: Developers! Developers! Developers! To make good on the proposal that snagged it a share of the Amazon HQ2 prize, the State of Virginia is also apparently on the hook for doubling the annual number of graduates with computer science or closely related degrees, with a goal to add 25,000 to 35,000 graduates (Amazon's HQ2 RFP demanded info on "education programs related to computer science"). To do that, the state will establish a performance-based investment fund for higher education institutions to expand their bachelor's degree programs, and spend up to $375 million on George Mason University's Arlington campus and a new Virginia Tech campus in Alexandria. The state will also spend $50 million on STEM + CS education in public schools and expanding internships for higher education students.

Amazon is certainly focused on boosting the ranks of software engineer types. Earlier this month, Amazon launched Amazon Future Engineer, a program that aims to teach more than 10 million students a year how to code, part of a $50 million Amazon commitment to computer science education that was announced last year at a kickoff event for the Ivanka Trump-led White House K-12 CS Initiative. And on Wednesday, Amazon-bankrolled Code.org -- Amazon is a $10+ million Diamond Supporter of the nonprofit; CS/EE grad Jeff Bezos is a $1+ million Gold Supporter -- announced it has teamed with Amazon Future Engineer to build and launchHour of Code: Dance Party, a signature tutorial for this December's big Hour of Code (powered by AWS in 2017), which has become something of a corporate infomercial (Microsoft recently boasted "learners around the world have completed nearly 100 million Minecraft Hour of Code sessions"). Students participating in the Dance Party tutorial, Code.org explained, can choose from 30 hits like Katy Perry's "Firework" and code interactive dance moves and special effects as they learn basic CS concepts. "The artists whose music is used in this tutorial are not sponsoring or endorsing Amazon as part of licensing use of their music to Code.org," stresses a footnote in Code.org's post. So, don't try to make any connections between Katy Perry's Twitter endorsement of the Code.org/Amazon tutorial later that day and those same-day follow-up Amazon and Katy Perry tweets touting their new exclusive Amazon Music streaming deal, kids!

An anonymous reader shares a report: GTA V and its multiplayer GTA Online mode has already proven itself a thriving game and money maker for both developer Rockstar and publisher Take-Two -- with sales approaching 100 million copies and bringing in more than $6 billion, now one of the most successful video games in history is also becoming something else, perhaps not too unexpectedly: A powerful tool for music discovery. Use of music has always been something video game makers Rockstar prides itself on. From the Billy Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington songs found in L.A. Noire, a detective action-adventure game, to the mix of 1970s rock in The Warriors game, music is one of the more important elements of pop culture that the developers use to help create memorable times and places for its titles.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the long-running Grand Theft Auto series. While the franchise has always featured some sort of working, in-game radio stations, each new iteration expanded on the concept. By 2013 and the release of GTA V, the game's 15 unique radio stations, packed with 240 fully licensed songs and pre-recorded on-air talent, had become nearly as important as the game itself. [...] In the five years since launch, GTA V and GTA Online gamers have listened to more than an estimated 75 billion minutes of music from the game's 18 radio stations, according to Rockstar's own analysis provided to Rolling Stone.

Subscription music service Tidal has been accused of faking the streaming numbers for Kanye West and Beyonce. "Kanye West's 'The Life of Pablo,' which was the first album to go platinum primarily from streaming, and Beyonce's platinum record 'Lemonade' were released exclusively on Tidal for periods in 2016," reports Quartz. "By placing their albums on the fledgling platform, which was relaunched in 2015, both artists risked losing big paychecks." From the report: West's album was said to have been streamed 250 million times in the first 10 days on the service. And Beyonce's record was reportedly played 306 million times in 15 days. While it's not hard to believe Bey and Yeezy could hit those numbers, they rang false to some, as Tidal said it had 3 million members then. However, according to an in-depth investigation by Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv (DN), Tidal has reportedly manipulated those streaming numbers, to potentially make the company appear more profitable or increase royalty payments to the artists at the expense of others on the service. This is something Tidal vigorously denies and says the DN report is part of a "smear campaign."

The DN's report investigated streaming numbers since 2017, when it reportedly obtained a hard drive of internal Tidal data with more than 1.5 billion of rows of user play logs. Those logs were from two periods -- from late January to early March, and mid April to early May -- totaling 65 days in 2016. Its reporters tracked down subscribers from the logs, and presented them with their apparent listening history, which the users said didn't add up. "We have through advanced statistical analysis determined that there has in fact been a manipulation of the data at particular times. The manipulation appears targeted towards a very specific set of track IDs, related to two distinct albums," found the researchers (pdf) at NTNU's Center for Cyber and Information Security. "The manipulation likely originates from within the streaming service itself."

HughPickens.com writes: NBC reports that defending World Cup champion Marcel Hirscher, who won silver in the slalom at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, had a lucky escape after he narrowly avoided being hit by a falling drone. Hirscher was on his second run in a World Cup slalom race at Madonna di Campiglio in Italy when a remote-controlled drone with a mounted camera slammed down on the piste inches behind him. "This is horrible," Hirscher said after the event. "This can never happen again. This can be a serious injury." The International Ski Federation (FIS) released a statement on its website apologizing for the "unfortunate accident." But some saw the lighter side announcing that the drone wars had shifted to the ski slopes. "Man, I'd watch a lot more winter sports if this was a standard part of the game," tweeted Marc Andreessen. The company responsible for the drone, sports marketing agency Infront, said its initial investigation "indicates a malfunction of the drone." "The most likely reason is a strong and unforeseen interference on the operating frequency, leading to limited operability," Infront said in a statement. "The pilot followed the official security procedure, purposely flying the drone as close as possible to the ground before releasing it. The aim was to destroy the drone, in order to prevent it from losing control."

cagraham writes "BitTorrent has released a new file format called Bundle into closed alpha-testing today, according to VentureBeat. The format allows artists to embed a paywall inside of their work, and then distribute the art for free over BitTorrent. When users open the work they can listen or view part it for free, and are then prompted to either pay a fee, turn over their email address, or perhaps share the work over social media, in order to see the rest. The new format may ease artists concerns about releasing work for free and having to hope for compensation in the future. Artists who have already signed on include Madonna, The Pixies, and author Tim Feriss."

The NY Times has an opinion piece that makes starkly clear the financial decline of the music industry. It's accompanied by an infographic that cleverly renders the drop-off. The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming. "Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna's 60th birthday. ... 13- to 17-year-olds acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent. ... [T]he percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music 'regularly' and nearly a third listen to it every day."

NoisySplatter writes "Ernesto, founder of TorrentFreak, reports that a new trojan, 'Troj/Qhost-AC,' has been distributed on The Pirate Bay. The virus was disguised as a serial key generator, and the offending torrent has since been removed, but the source has not been identified. Troj/Qhost-AC makes changes to the user's hosts file that redirects The Pirate Bay, Suprbay, and Mininova to 127.0.0.1. In addition to making three popular torrent sites inaccessible, the virus also plays a sound file that says: 'downloading is wrong.' It looks like someone has finally stepped up to the plate to challenge Madonna for the title of 'Most Obnoxious Anti-Piracy Stunt.' Of course, this could just be the software industry's attempt at outdoing the RIAA and MPAA."

Sockatume writes "MTV thinks 2007 was the year the music industry broke, and provides a hefty pile of examples to justify it. Unsurprisingly, most of them revolve around the collapse of CD sales and the rise of digital distribution (authorised and otherwise). Be advised that many of the examples are the continuations or repercussions of old favourites (RIAA suits, the Sony rootkit fiasco)."

madonna writes "CNET extensively explains why the new We7.com download service — which offers ad-embedded free music downloads without DRM — is doomed to failure. 'This service absolutely, categorically will not succeed. You can quote us on that. It's true the best way to combat piracy is to provide a realistic and affordable alternative, and free is certainly affordable. But music downloaders are not going to switch to using a service that costs the same as using BitTorrent or Limewire, but comes with abominable disclaimers or advertisements.'"

BDPrime writes "Here's a good look at the iPod's five-year existence and how, it can be argued, the device saved Apple from rotting away. From the story: 'It's hard to overstate the impact of the iPod on the computer, consumer electronics and music industries since it was introduced in 2001. The iPod, arguably, is the first crossover product from a computer company that genuinely caught on with music and video buffs. It's shown how a computer can be an integral part of a home entertainment system, and it's led pop stars from U2's Bono to Madonna to trade quips with Apple's own rock star, CEO Steve Jobs.'" Just to give a little bit of the other side of the story, not everyone loves the iPod. An anonymous reader wrote in with a link to research on unhealthy iPod listening levels at New Scientist. Additionally, Achromatic1978 writes to mention that the iPod has won a Shonky award from the Australians. I don't know what Shonky means, but I think that's bad.

melonman writes "According to an article at BBC News, $250 tickets for the latest Madonna tour are the fault of P2P file sharing. 'Before the advent of illegal downloads, artists had an incentive to underprice their concerts, because bigger audiences translated into higher record sales, Professor Krueger argues. But now, he says, the link between the two products has been severed, meaning that artists and their managers need to make more money from concerts and feel less constrained in setting ticket prices.' And it seems David Bowie agrees. Is 'the fans always get fleeced' the rock industry's equivalent to Moore's Law?"

An anonymous reader writes "Eminem, Madonna and Kylie Minogue are just some of the popular artists whose songs are to be blocked from being illegally distributed on the peer-to-peer network Kazaa following Federal Court orders in Australia yesterday. Sharman Networks, the owner of Kazaa, was ordered by the courts to modify the file-sharing software to block a list of search terms -- primarily artist and song names. The search terms are also to be supplied by record companies. The directive follows the record companies' court victory in September against individuals and organizations associated with Kazaa."

theodp writes "Unsatisfied with $2.49 ringtones and as much as 70 cents of each 99 cent iTunes download, Newsweek reports that record labels want a bigger cut of digital music profits. One example: If you type in 'Madonna' - a Warner act - at the Google Video site, and the results are accompanied by ads, Warner wants a share of those ad dollars." Even more ridiculous demands than those put forth in previous stories.

Nick Weidner writes "Indie music website Pitchforkmedia.com asks, 'What if John Cage had owned an XBox?'. The article compares today's game soundtrack composers to ambient artists such as Brian Eno, and discusses experimental soundtrack techniques with Jesper Kyd (the Hitman series), Peter McConnell (Psychonauts) and Russell Shaw (Black & White, Fable)." Meanwhile over at Wired News they are reporting on the suppression of musical creativity the designers had to build into Star Wars Galaxies, for fear that copyrighted works would be played in the galaxy far, far away. From the article: "If we allowed someone to play anything they want, they could play a song by Madonna and then we'd have licensing issues...We don't want to give them the option to try, because the bottom line is, if we open that gate, they will go through it".

AdamBa (Adam Barr) writes "Juiced is not a great book. The writing is workmanlike but not particularly entertaining, none of the stories are more than slightly amusing, and its protagonist projects an unappealing mixture of vanity and whining. There is a bit of dirt on players, and a couple of nuggets about Madonna and the sex lives of baseball players (and the intersection of those two), but as a baseball autobiography, it pales besides better competition. And yet, Juiced may be one of the most important baseball books ever written." Specifically, the book provides an insider's account of one aspect of biotech that has achieved widespread use, if not acceptance. Read on for the rest of Barr's review.

bettiwettiwoo writes "In its 'What's Next' issue, Time has a charmingly silly piece called What's Always Next? , in which is provided '[a] sampling of the future that wasn't': things that have been predicted since day dot, but have somehow never materialized. The examples they give are: videophones; moon colonies; food in pills; cars that drive themselves; jet packs; and moving sidewalks. ... There are, after all, so many and varied things -- ranging from the very serious to the down-right silly -- that are predicted time and again, yet seem curiously absent in our daily lives. Examples: global catastrophies of the Armageddon kind (be they population overload, total environmental disasters, plagues, asteroids, or nuclear wars); a secure and bug-free Windows; the end of Madonna's singing career (her 'acting' career was, I believe, still-born)." So what are you waiting for?