Mad Generation Loss is a project exploring media encoding and the ways in which imperfect copies can descend into a kind of digital madness. It takes an audio file—here, a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading an excerpt from his seminal poem “Howl”—and adds another layer of mp3 encoding to each second of the sound. That is to say, the first second is encoded directly from the original, the next second is re-encoded from that first lossy copy, and the third encoded again.
That sort of re-encoding from lossy originals, known as transcoding, is supposed to be avoided. The generation loss builds on itself, and the quality degrades quickly. That effect is exaggerated here by its second-by-second compounding. By the end of the 3:18 recording, Ginsberg’s voice is nearly impossible to pick out among the background noise.
The last seconds of the recording have been transcoded nearly 200 times. All together, the recording represents nearly 20,000 individual mp3 encodes.
This project takes inspiration from earlier efforts to explore generation loss. “I Am Sitting In A Room” (1969) by Alvin Lucier was perhaps the earliest, and featured a 4-sentence narration recorded on taped, and re-recorded over and over to hear the tape loss. As the narration notes, that process “smooths out” the irregularities of speech, reflecting instead the rhythm and resonant frequencies of the room of the recording.
Unlike those projects, Mad Generation Loss shows the effect of transcoding and loss on a linear recording, not a repeated phrase. The degredation is apparent not from comparing identical inputs and diminished outputs, but from hearing the creep of the telltale white noise and the regular pulse of the mp3s getting stitched together.
The code to create the Mad Generation Loss audio is freely available under the GPLv3. It is written in Ruby and depends on free software like lame, mp3splt, and mp3wrap. Thanks are due to Eric Mill and Ben Gleitzman for technical assistance (though please do not attribute my sloppy code on them), and to Caroline Sinders and Ethan Chiel for their encouragement.
I. You used to call me
A. on my cell phone
B. late night
C. when you need my love
II. I know when that hotline bling, that can only mean
A. one thing
III. Ever since I left the city you:
A. Got a reputation for yourself now
Everybody knows
I feel left out
B. Got me down (and I feel stressed out)
C. Started
Wearing less
Going out more
D. (Having) glasses of champagne on the dance floor
E. Hangin’ with some girls I never seen before
F. And me just don’t get along
G. Go places where you don’t belong
H. Got exactly what you asked for
I. Run out of pages in your passport
IV. These days all I do is wonder
A. If you’re bending over backwards for someone else
B. If you’re rolling backwoods for someone else
C. Doing
Things I taught you
Getting nasty for someone else
V. You don’t need
A. No one else
B. Nobody else
VI. You
A. Should just be yourself
B. Right now you’re someone else
I spoke last weekend at Wikicon USA about the several months I’ve spent learning about—and making more publicly available—the pomological watercolor collection I wrote about in these pages last April. The talk is now online, and is about 20 minutes (and a bit frenetic).
I’m a Firefox user, but I was very interested to read Chris Palmer’s guide to privacy and security settings in Chrome. One thing he did that really intrigued me was enabling Javascript only on secure sites. It ends up being a pretty good default not just because it prevents attacks that rely on Javascript injection—like the ads that Comcast and AT&T have inserted into pages accessed on their hotspots, or the massive man-on-the-side attack the government of China apparently conducted against Github—but also because a site going through the effort to authenticate itself is also a reasonable proxy for the kind of stuff I’d allow anyway.
As far as I can tell, on Firefox that means installing NoScript, a powerful extension that I’d previously disabled because manually turning on Javascript where I needed it was too much of a hassle. After a few hours of browsing with these settings, it seems to strike the right balance: not exactly no fiddling with permissions, but greatly reduced manual intervention with a lot of unnecessary scripts getting blocked.
The option is in NoScript’s preferences, under Options > Advanced > HTTPS > Permissions. As long as the global block is on (which it is by default), I found that setting the drop-down menu, “Forbid active web content unless it comes from a secure HTTPS connection” actually works best when set to “Never”—or if you’re a frequent Tor user, to “When using a proxy”.1 Then the checkbox below, “Allow HTTPS scripts globally on HTTPS documents”, should be checked.
Of course, this isn’t a perfect guarantee of privacy or security. If you don’t trust the Javascript being served from the authenticated site—because the site operators may be malicious or just incompetent—then this technique won’t help. But it does make browsing much faster across much of the web, and preserve the rich interactivity you’re used to on pages your browser trusts.
This setting is pretty counter-intuitive to me, but if it is set to “Always” I experienced some funny interactions with manual permission changes. ↩
In Pushing For Perfect Forward Secrecy, an Important Web Privacy Protection, I worked with our tech folks to explain a property that actually really matters for cryptography, but at that point—in August 2013—hadn’t really been set out for lay people. Since then it’s been described even better, but for a while this post had the honor of being one of the more widely-shared explainers on the topic.
The post In the Silk Road Case, Don’t Blame the Technology was published the day the criminal complaint against Ross Ulbricht was released. It goes through some of the technologies that he was alleged to have used, talking about how essential they are for enabling important speech, and how they’ve been demonized before.
It’s more specialized, but Mobile Tracking Code of Conduct Falls Short of Protecting Consumers was a fun combination of legal and technical talk. One of the points I got to make in there was how the space of MAC address hashes is possible to brute force, alongside general concerns about people finding retail mobile tracking creepy.
Remembering Aaron was a difficult one to write, emotionally. It’s become an important thing for me to look over the work I’m doing, and see how it lines up with his ideals. This post was a chance to do that across the whole organization, and speculate what he might have thought about the developments in this space in the year since his death.
A pair of articles about TPP written 18 months apart are favorites for different reasons. The TPP’s Attack on Artists’ Termination Rights was the first thing I co-wrote with Sarah Jeong, and was both obviously correct and intensely aggravating to people who set up camp on “the other side” of copyright issues from EFF. TPP’s Copyright Trap is a long look at copyright terms that is one of the most widely shared things I’ve written.
Finally, Who Really Owns Your Drones? is so far my most thorough look at one of The Big Questions about DRM and connected devices. It builds on earlier posts like How DRM Harms Our Computer Security and that weird news story from February about the drone downed on the White House lawn.
This project takes inspiration from earlier efforts to explore generation loss. “I Am Sitting In A Room” (1969) by Alvin Lucier was perhaps the earliest, and featured a 4-sentence narration recorded on taped, and re-recorded over and over to hear the tape loss. As the narration notes, that process “smooths out” the irregularities of speech, reflecting instead the rhythm and resonant frequencies of the room of the recording.
