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The Weblog of Brett Singer. Bringing the world what it needs most - a blog.

Note: Sorry about all of the 'hot deals' entries (someone referred to this blog as CorporateShill.com).
The deals and things are being fed into Multineedia.com. We will soon move the deals category over to Multineedia so you don't have to read it, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

The Things They Do To Obscure URLs

This is getting stupid.

On this page, which is about video game music (you can hear some classic video game music on Webjay), there is a link to a video from the Beastie Boys, who have a song in an upcoming game. They want you to play the video in a pop-up window, presumably so you can look at ads. Here's the URL one sees if one right-clicks on the embedded Windows Media Player on the pop-up page and selects 'Properties':

http://www.mp3.com/stream_asx.html?path=mms%3ASLASHSLASHa588DOTmDOTakastreamDOTnetSLASH7SLASH588SLASH13345SLASH1SLASHmp3comDOTdownloadDOTakamaiDOTcomSLASH13345SLASHmp3SLASH2005SLASH02SLASHbeasties_openletter_300DOTwmv&speed=300

Stupid looking, right? But a simple search/replace operation yields this:

http://www.mp3.com/stream_asx.html?path=mms://a588.m.akastream.net/7/588/13345/1/mp3com.download.akamai.com/13345/mp3/2005/02/beasties_openletter_300.wmv&speed=300

Remove this part (http://www.mp3.com/stream_asx.html?path=) and voila, you have an mms link, suitable for playlisting.

Here's my question. Why bother with all of this nonsense? Wouldn't it be a better overall experience for the user if it were easier for them to play the video? This particular method probably excludes Mac and Linux users, although maybe not. The use of Windows Media Player is meant to keep people from downloading the video, which I guess is understandable, although not really, since the quality isn't really good enough for broadcast, and most music videos can be watched online anytime, so why not let us download it for offline viewing? The point is that there is clearly some effort being made to hide the actual URL from the user, and there's no point. In this case, they're not even doing a very good job of hiding it, you can't easily save an mms file, and it only makes it harder to watch the video. So what's the point?

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Dude, where my Thunderbird?

From CNN:

E-mails 'hurt IQ more than pot'
Friday, April 22, 2005 Posted: 8:08 AM EDT (1208 GMT)
Half of workers respond to an e-mail within an hour, survey found.
LONDON, England -- Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows.
The constant interruptions reduce productivity and leave people feeling tired and lethargic, according to a survey carried out by TNS Research and commissioned by Hewlett Packard.

Oooo, I've been replying to email for an hour and now I have a bad case of the munchies...

I actually agree with the notion that contact interruptions all day long makes me feel sluggish. Wait, hang on, someone's at my door... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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