Check out this serial code decoder: http://bit.ly/w0YMuq

(via @gilbertjasono)

iTunes Match Is A Music Pirate’s Dream Service

iTunes Match is a pretty good name for Apple’s cloud music service — simple, evocative, a combination of the words “iTunes” and “Match” — but a better name for it might be iNapster.

If this newfangled iTunes Match thing really will play any song you have in your library, no matter where you downloaded that song from, then Apple’s newest release could do more to encourage rampant, reckless, illegal music downloading than the invention of the high-speed T1 line.

iTunes Match is a pirate’s delight. If you love listening to a lot of music, and you also love mindlessly and illegally downloading gigabyte upon gigabyte of music all at once, grabbing at songs and albums like 20 dollar bills raining fast from an exploding ATM, then iTunes Match is a solid investment at $25 per year.

Here’s the rundown of the Apple music service/pirate’s dream-come-true, released early Monday: iTunes Match allows you to listen to any song in your music library on up to 10 different devices at very high quality. One of the great advantages and selling points of iTunes Match — and even now, no one is quite sure how Apple convinced the labels that this was a good idea for them — is source forgiveness; that is, it doesn’t matter to iTunes Match where you got your music. If a song is in your library, you can listen to it on whatever device you want in 256kbps AAC format (a.k.a. better quality than whatever yours is). You could hold a Talkboy up to your AM radio, and if iTunes recognizes the song you’ve recorded as “Pumped Up Kicks,” you’ll be able to listen to your Foster the People in super clear definition on any of your machines without having actually bought anything except a very cheap yearly service from Apple (and, I suppose, a Talkboy and an AM radio).

While this is good news for thrifty audiophiles, it is especially good news for thrifty audiophiles who are also serial pirates (as opposed to cereal pirates). With this source agnosticism, or blindness, or forgiveness, in place, iTunes Match makes downloading as much music as you can, from any source whatsoever, a totally valid and necessary activity for anyone who has shelled out money for the service.

So let the pirating begin! Get out your PirateBay, your Mediafire, your Rapidshare and your Demonoid shortcuts! Ready your BitTorrent client, your uTorrent software, your Winzip and your 7zip and your BetterZip and your WinRAR! Reacquaint yourself with your favorite torrent-sharing community, your go-to forum or message board for leaks and untraceable downloads, your best search tricks for eluding the Web Sheriff! It is a music piracy renaissance, and it is all thanks to the kindness and ingenuity of the folks at Apple Incorporated!

Most music listeners — not the devoted torrent barons, on one side of the spectrum, nor those upright citizens who chastely pledge their money to the iTunes Music Store one $10 album at a time, on the other — are now faced with an incredibly tempting option to revert to piracy.

Spotify, a rival to iTunes Match that launched in America over the summer, has been widely hailed as a piracy killer and praised for making successful a model that in no way encourages illegal downloads. With Spotify, there is no real advantage to illegally downloading music, since every song you could want exists in the Spotify cloud (unless you’re a fan of Arcade Fire or Coldplay, that is). There is no reason to use BitTorrent because Spotify is your legal BitTorrent: an always-available, seemingly infinite library of high-quality, unedited tunes.

iTunes Match turns that model on its head and forces the customer to provide the infinite library, a catalogue that a certain percentage of people — say, 99 percent of them — cannot responsibly afford to legally obtain. iTunes and iTunes Match still very much represent a stale and antiquated mode of music discovery; that is, paying for music before you hear it and deciding after you part with your money whether or not you like it. Pandora, Spotify and a heckuva lot of others disrupted the model, and now iTunes, with iTunes Match, is trying to win some of its deserters back with the temptation of what amounts to pirating amnesty (not from the RIAA, but from Apple).

Ahoy, mateys! Apple, once the purveyor of absurd music ownership restrictions and the universally-despised, amazingly frustrating DRM system, is welcoming all you pirates aboard. Will you set sail?

(by @triciad)

There are a lot of similarities between Amazon and Apple. The secrecy, the dedication to the consumer, the focus on devices and digital media, and now this: Siri.

Amazon has not returned calls or emails seeking comment, but we have confirmed independently that Charlotte, N.C.-based Yap has been acquired by Amazon.

Reports of the acquisition surfaced earlier today afterCLT, a Charlotte-based blog, connected a couple of obscure dots. First, it tracked down an SEC filing that shows that as of Sept. 8, Yap was acquired by Yarmuth Dion. Then, it discovered that Yarmouth Dion has the same mailing address as Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

Media reports immediately jumped to the conclusion that Amazon was interested in the company’s speech recognition technology so it could compete with Siri, the voice-controlled assistant found on Apple’s newest iPhone.

And, from what we dug up, that sounds about right.

Most recently, Yap’s servers were being used by Sprint and others to convert voicemails to text. It was being shipped on a majority of Sprint’s Android handsets. Yap also had an iPhone app.

On Oct. 20, Yap voicemail was discontinued.

But the company, founded by brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, started out in a different direction. Four years ago, the company was eager to build technology that allowed people to interact with Web services using speech recognition. The company, which raised about $10 million, presented at the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.

At the time, the idea was a little far-fetched.

Wireless networks weren’t very fast, not many people owned smartphones and distribution was tough because of the lack of app stores. With many of those problems resolved, we heard the 50-employee company was beginning to return to its roots. Now, it works for Amazon.

We can hear it now:

– “Yap, what are this season’s most popular boots?”

– “Yap, buy me the first Harry Potter novel.”

– “Yap, what’s the new hit song from Justin Bieber?”

Flagship Apple store on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan got a $6 million face lift — supposedly one Apple founder Steve Jobs’ last requests

Features sleek, soaring new rennovation of 32-foot glass cube entryway

Apple has unveiled the sleek new design of its flagship Fifth Ave. store, drawing rave reviews from fans and tech experts.

“It’s magnificent, very modern. I love it!” said Marcus Thompson, 22, a tourist from Dallas. “The design screams out, ‘We are Apple!’ ”

The centerpiece of the $6.7 million renovation, started in June, is the iconic 32-foot glass cube entrance. It is now comprised of 15 massive panes of glass rather than the 90 in its original design, giving it a cleaner, more seamless look.

“The results are quite staggering,” said a review in The Verge, a tech-focused publication. “What’s especially impressive is that the 24/7 store never closed during the renovations.”

Along with the redesigned cube, upgrades have been made to the surrounding plaza. The store’s face-lift was unveiled Friday.

Among the swelling crowd snapping photos outside the store Saturday was an awestruck Marcus Barnes, of Harlem.

“I came just to see it,” said Barnes, 29. “It’s impressive because the glass panes are so enormous. It’s Apple’s way of showing mastery of design and construction.”

The renovation was the result of a collaboration between Apple and Boston Properties, the firm that owns the landmark General Motors Building which houses the store.

“Sometimes when you think something can’t get better, it does,” said Robert Selsam, of Boston Properties, which was founded by Daily News Chairman and Publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

“This amazing New York City icon at the GM Building is now an even greater magnet for tourists and New Yorkers alike.”

rschapiro@nydailynews.com

SAN FRANCISCO — Fans of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs will get a chance to see previously unreleased interview footage of him when “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” hits theaters later this month.

The 70-minute interview was recorded in the `90s before Jobs returned to Apple Inc. He and co-founder Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976 and left in 1985. Jobs returned in 1997 and is credited with rescuing Apple from financial dire straits.

Ten minutes of the interview appeared in the 1995 PBS miniseries “Triumph of the Nerds.” The master tapes disappeared but an unedited interview copy was recently found.

The interview will be shown at Landmark theaters in 19 cities around the country beginning Nov. 16.

Jobs died Oct. 5 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56.