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FCC Votes to Begin Dismantling Net Neutrality

Jason Tate

Karl Bode, writing for TechDirt:

Surprising absolutely nobody, the FCC today voted 2-1 along strict party lines to begin dismantling net neutrality protections for consumers. The move comes despite the fact that the vast majority of non-bot comments filed with the FCC support keeping the rules intact. And while FCC boss Ajit Pai has breathlessly insisted he intended to listen to the concerns of all parties involved, there has been zero indication that this was a serious commitment as he begins dismantling all manner of broadband consumer protections, not just net neutrality.

As you might have expected, the FCC was quick to release a statement claiming that gutting the popular consumer protections would usher forth a magical age of connectivity, investment, and innovation.

Travis Barker Appears on “The Doctors”

Travis Barker
Jason Tate

Travis Barker of Blink-182 appeared on the TV show “The Doctors” on Monday to talk about recovering from a deadly plane crash in 2008. Some clips from the show can be seen on Huffington Post:

“The doctors said, ‘You’re probably going to be on most of these drugs for the rest of your life because you went through such a horrific experience, and you’re dealing with bipolar disorder. You’ll probably never play drums again, you’ll never run again,’” he recalled on the program this week.

“Then the challenge was in my mind just to prove them wrong,” he said. “I had to wean myself off of every drug, start playing the drums immediately, run, and then I became even healthier than I ever was before the plane accident.”

An Oral History of ‘No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls’

Simple Plan
Jason Tate

Simple Plan did a little oral history of No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls over at Alt Press:

That record could have taken, at the most, two months to make; it took a year. We were living in very close quarters, sleeping in a windowless room with bunkbeds. We were cooking for ourselves, which is normal, but nobody knew how to cook, so it was horrible. It was a tedious process. Arnold had this vision where he would say, “You guys record yourself, I’m going to come back and criticize and edit it,” and that’s exactly what he’d do. He would leave us days at a time in the studio, I would record the whole album, he would come back and be, like, “Yeah, you could do better,” and scratch everything I did. It was frustrating.

Reset was still better.

Matt Skiba Talks with Ultimate Guitar

Blink-182
Jason Tate

Matt Skiba talked with Ultimate Guitar about writing and recording with Blink-182:

I would bring a song into the studio, we’d work on it or I would send a very crude demo to Mark and Travis and then go in the next day and kind of learn it and everybody bring their own thing to it. We would track it at Travis’ studio.

We were doing this for several months. The songs were good. It was cool but it didn’t sound like Blink. The songs I was bringing in sounded like [Alkaline Trio].

Facebook’s Anti-Fake News Initiative May Not Be Working

Facebook
Jason Tate

Sam Levin, writing for The Guardian:

“A bunch of conservative groups grabbed this and said, ‘Hey, they are trying to silence this blog – share, share share,’” said Winthrop, who published the story that falsely claimed hundreds of thousands of Irish people were brought to the US as slaves. “With Facebook trying to throttle it and say, ‘Don’t share it,’ it actually had the opposite effect.”

Pete Wentz Goes Behind the Scenes of Their Latest Video

Fall Out Boy
Jason Tate

Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy talked with ET about their new video for “Young and Menace.”

“The concept of the video is realizing that your place in the world is maybe not just what you thought it is, or thought it was growing up,” he says. “I grew up as a weird kid in a place where I felt like I didn’t fit in. It wasn’t until finding punk rock and stuff, that I felt like I found other people who similarly felt like they didn’t fit in.”

The MP3 Isn’t Dead

Jason Tate

The MP3 format is about to have the patents surrounding it expire. Here’s Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors on what that means:

One of the companies who held patents covering some uses of the MP3 format has terminated its licensing program because its patents have run out. What this means is not that the MP3 format is about to evaporate, but rather, that lots of audio software that previously avoided encoding files into MP3 will now be free to support it without paying a tithe to Fraunhofer.

This is great news for everyone. I’ve spoken to several developers of audio and MP3-related software who have been watching the clock run out on MP3 patents so that they could release MP3 features into the world—both in brand-new apps as well as existing ones—without buying into Fraunhofer’s expensive licensing regime.

And Marco Arment:

Until a few weeks ago, there had never been an audio format that was small enough to be practical, widely supported, and had no patent restrictions, forcing difficult choices and needless friction upon the computing world. Now, at least for audio, that friction has officially ended. There’s finally a great choice without asterisks.

MP3 is supported by everything, everywhere, and is now patent-free. There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3, it’s good enough for almost anything, and now, over twenty years since it took the world by storm, it’s finally free.

I still remember the first MP3 I downloaded (it was The Simpsons’ theme song) and not understanding how it was such a small file. I was blown away.

Inside the New Apple Campus

Jason Tate

Steve Levy goes inside Apple’s new spaceship campus:

We drive through an entrance that takes us under the building and into the courtyard before driving back out again. Since it’s a ring, of course, there is no main lobby but rather nine entrances. Ive opts to take me in through the café, a massive atrium-like space ascending the entire four stories of the building. Once it’s complete, it will hold as many as 4,000 people at once, split between the vast ground floor and the balcony dining areas. Along its exterior wall, the café has two massive glass doors that can be opened when it’s nice outside, allowing people to dine al fresco.

Instagram Launches Selfie Filters

Instagram
Jason Tate

Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch:

Today Instagram Stories adds a more subtle and mature but error-prone copycat of Snapchat’s beloved augmented reality selfie filters. The eight initial “face filters,” as Instagram calls them, work exactly like Snapchat, and let you add virtual koala ears, nerd glasses, a butterfly crown or wrinkle-smooth makeup to yourself and friends in photos or videos.

Instagram, like their parent company Facebook, have the whole “just copy your competitor’s idea” thing down to a science at this point.