Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

As per CNet’s news.com post, Slide Inc, purveyor of useless Facebook fluff applications, has had a security breach and the “Top Friends” application has had its API key and listing pulled from the site. With one fell swoop, the MySpacization of Scary Stalkerbook was paused.

This is just a reminder that the developers of any Facebook application have full access to your profile. Privacy controls do not apply and any information that an app pulls is supposed to only be used for caching and removed within 24 hours. This was obviously not the case with Top Friends. By the way, if you have to provide additional profile information for a third-party application, they own that data and can use it in any way they see fit.

Of course, anyone reading this site will probably be well-informed about how applications work anyway - so you can instead gloat in glee at the fact that an overvalued startup with no useful product got slammed with the banhammer.

From Mashable: America’s Got Talent… on MySpace.

WHAT IS THIS GOD WHY.

Seriously, I’d have a hard time thinking of a worse combination of words. Any takers in the comments?

(If you’re reading this from the front page, click through to see the horrendous image that accompanies this post.)

I was forced into accessing a MySpace page to listen to an upcoming band, and my opinion of the site hasn’t changed. Pages blare music at you; inert backgrounds chew up CPU; and the comments section is filled with “thanks for the add” and fifteen-year old girls that look suspiciously like the one from Your Scene Sucks.

What I find funny… and sad, in a way, is that all external links that aren’t on a whitelist of sites get gated through a splash page at msplinks.com. This is probably old news. It basically says, “don’t give out your username and password.” Are the users really that stupid, or is MySpace’s technology made of that much fail?

I recently had a request from Phil to rip a particular track to MP3 from a band’s MySpace page. While most music on MySpace is shoddily encoded at 96Kbps, sometimes it’s the only place available online to listen to a particular song. To save yourself from the agony of calling up a Web browser, going to the domain, and having ads foisted upon yourself, some technical work will get you set to have a fully unrestricted MP3 copy of the music.

Other solutions exist for this process, including connecting a 3.5mm cable from your sound card line out to sound card line in, and then recording the result, but this introduces even more quality loss to the process.

There are some technical restrictions on this process, and I advise anyone coming here to ask about them to seriously consider their questions before commenting. With a post title involving music and MySpace, I don’t expect the cream of the crop to start posting their wireless packet sniffing instructions or automated Flash extractor Linux tools (although that would be a pleasant change.)

You need a wired connection to the Internet to perform the packet capture. Most wireless card drivers don’t have the ability to capture packets, or they don’t work in this configuration.

1. Download and install Wireshark, which is the newest version of the classic Ethereal network utility. The Windows installer also comes with a driver, WinPCap, that allows the packet capture to take place. Follow all default instructions in the installer.
2. Close any programs that use your Internet or network connection. This includes other Web browsers, instant messaging programs, file sharing utilities and feed readers. While you don’t have to close everything, it’ll help make sure that there’s enough memory to load the MySpace page and capture the MP3 at the same time.
3. Open Wireshark, then resize it to a standard window.
   
4. Start a new Web browser window, resize it to a standard window, and click the Stop button to cancel the page load. You should have Wireshark and your web browser running side by side:
5. Enter the address of the MySpace page in the web browser address bar, but don’t press Enter or Go yet.
6. Switch to Wireshark, and click the Interfaces button - it’s the first one on the left:
7. In the Interfaces window, look for the active wired Ethernet controller in your computer. The numbers for the controller should be slowly increasing:
8. Click the Start button to the right of the controller. Immediately, switch back to your browser and let the MySpace page load. If the song isn’t the one you want, switch to it as quickly as possible. If you resize the Wireshark window, you’ll see packets scrolling past:
9. Wait until the song is done or is almost done playing. (You really only need to wait until the song data is downloaded, though.) Once finished, click the Stop Capture button in Wireshark:
10. Resize the Wireshark window. Copy and paste the following text into the Filter box, then click the Apply button.http.content_type == "audio/mpeg"

    

11. When you click the Apply button, you should only see one entry in the packet list. You may also see two dialog box with progress bars - one filters the captured packets, and the other decodes the MP3 file sequence.
12. Resize the Wireshark window so that you can see the packet overview, as in the dialog below. Click on the Media Type header and cancel the progress windows.
13. Right-click on the Media Type header and click Export Selected Packet Bytes. Enter a filename for the data, ending with the extension .mp3.
14. Open the MP3 or import it into your library. You’ll likely have to provide artist and title information for the track, since it’s not included with the packet stream.

As a special bonus, I’ve also recorded a Wink tutorial on the process. The video takes the shortcut of applying the audio/mpeg filter before stopping the packet capture, so that you can save your song file immediately after it’s downloaded from MySpace.

Other possibilities to reduce processing time would be to set a filter, only capturing HTTP packets on port 80 following the audio/mpeg chain, and changing various configuration settings in Wireshark.

The band that I demoed the capture from is Stalling Dawn, who also have much higher quality tracks available to download directly from their PodShow page if you create an account. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have an official album released yet, but I’d definitely buy it if one ever comes out.

I’ve made a few statements in the past - both in real life and online - about how certain Web sites seem to attract certain types of users and commenters. There’s a very clear relationship between the audience a site attracts and the comments contributed by users. One can clearly go from quality, interesting comments to spambots and txt-speak in a few clicks.

I may update this list as necessary, as new sites appear every day, but here’s my definitive Hierarchy of Internet Commenting. Rankings go from quality at the top to “I am dumber for having tried to read this” at the bottom.

1. Popular Web standards or technical discussion sites, such as A List Apart or flagship sites in the 9rules network. Sometimes the comments can definitely stray into pretentious quibbling, but for the most part they’re insightful and offer decent advice to Web designers and developers:
2. Something Awful Forums: The content of discussion at SA may be highly ridiculous, but it’ll be written well and intelligently. There’s a reason that several industry insiders post there. A $10 registration fee acts as an initial gatekeeper, and a few ban-hammer wielding administrators take care of anyone foolish enough to use ‘lulz’ in a post or reply.
3. Newsgroups: general discussion. Most newsgroups take a bad reputation because of the inherent community of trolls, but even the troll posts are generally well-written. People may be fairly snippy, as per below, but you’ll generally get the correct answer if you’re thick skinned.
4. Slashdot. Posts without merit are taken care of by the moderation system, and the standard of written English is very high even though there’s no specific enforcement of it. There are some Internet memes present in most discussions, but these posts are likely lead to genuinely funny responses. Posters on Slashdot also have a significantly higher degree of technical knowledge than the average bear (or Internet user), so responses to questions are likely to receive a correct response in a shorter timespan.Comical or humorous posts - even the first one in a discussion - have likely already analyzed the situation and provided commentary on it:

   

5. General-interest blogs. Sites like Gizmodo, Engadget, Kotaku, Joystiq and all others owned by Gawker Media and Weblogs, Inc. have dedicated staff policing their comment fields. Unfortunately, there’s not much enforcement of post quality - simply that there’s no trolling and people tend to stay on topic. Additionally, it’s clear that certain topics attract people without the technical knowledge to respond properly. These people respond anyways, forking the discussion and causing needless debate, when a snappy “You’re an idiot and here’s why, with proof” response would curtail the issue. A certain amount of sarcasm is necessary, in my opinion, to separate the idiots from people who actually do know something.
6. Facebook popular applications walls: This is where we start devolving into really horrible discussions of who is popular and who is clearly not. The picture alone should be sufficient to tell you that the quality of discussion definitely has gone down a bar:
7. Digg: I thought the site’s newly introduced ranking system would keep discussions a bit more technically involved.I thought wrong - apparently that damn “cheezburger” meme is still worth displaying:

   

8. YouTube comments are filled with the most ignorant, racist invective I’ve ever seen online. I found these attached to a “most popular” video on the front page of the site:
9. And last but not least, any MySpace comments - simply because they’re 90% ads for “free” ringtones or profile tracking scripts. I’ll leave the image off this site here, but you know where to look for examples.

Have any other sites with good or horrible comments? Disagree with my ordering? Feel free to comment here, but please keep it at a Kotaku-or-above level.