Tech of the day: anti-censorship tool

Unfortunately, this post is not introducing any. On the contrary, I just want to help debunk the myth of Haystack, which is a piece of software that was supposed to achieve this goal for people in countries in which the government heavily censor their citizen's internet usage. Check out this article, titled "The Great Internet Freedom Fraud". This is yet another case of hype over substance. To be a hero, you don't need to act like one. Instead, just sound like one.

Music of the day: Public Domain Music

I am listening to music from the MusOpen project right now. The goal of the project is to "set music free." A lot of recorded music are protected, meaning you can't just use them wherever you like (say, as the background music of a movie you shot) You might think it's OK if the music was written way back but it's not. It's because a piece of recording is protected by at least 2 copyrights: one for the underlying composition and one for the performance. For example, if you have the mp3 of a Beethoven Sonatina, you still might not be able to use it because even though the composition is not protected, the performance might still be. Currently the project is raising money to hire orchestra to record music such that both the composition and the performance itself are free. I saw someone criticized that the project should not focus on old/established works (aka warhorses) because one could easily buy such recording real cheap online but they missed the point. No matter how cheap those recordings are, you can't use them freely.