Wednesday News: The Reputation of tattoos, LibraryThing’s security breach, Adobe’s DRM (again), and Duke Ellington’s ‘compiling”
Publishing NewsAdobe / copyright / DRM / intellectual property / LibraryThing / plagiarism / tattoos10 Comments
People always say the same thing about tattoos – File this under: everything old is new again. A brief history, not of tattooing, but of reactions to tattoos, from shocked to scandalized to excited. As Matt Lodder explains, the reputation tattoos have as being associated with certain groups of people is one created by the media, and not by the actual history of tattoo wearing. There are some great old newspaper pieces and photos, along with an interesting commentary from Lodder.
The story – that tattooing has “entered the mainstream” – is just one of a number of tattoo tropes recycled relentlessly over the decades, suggests Dr Matt Lodder, art historian and tattoo expert at the University of Essex.
Others include:
Everybody seems to be getting tattooed, should we not be concerned?
Surprise at women, the young or the old getting a tattoo
The pain during a tattoo
The issue of regret at having a tattoo
–BBC News
Security Notice and LibraryThing Password Reset – In November 2011, LibraryThing suffered a security breach, and is requiring all members to change their passwords (link in the article). They describe the breach as “narrow” and indicate that no names were taken, and that a “minority” of accounts were affected. However, email addresses and passwords were included in the breach, which was somehow accomplished through a weakness in WordPress. (Note: this is why Dear Author no longer allows subscribers to the blog. We preserve no private information other than possible the email address attached to a comment).
All evidence points to this being an email-hacking attack. We have every reason to believe no other LibraryThing data was taken, not even user names. The intent was probably to grab the emails for spam, and break the password hashes, if possible. When broken, the passwords could be used against members who used the same password for their email, or email-based services, as they used on LibraryThing. Using the same password across many services is bad practice, but not uncommon. No financial data could have been taken. We do not get or store credit card numbers or any other financial information.
–The LibraryThing Blog
Adobe: We Didn’t Mean to Use DRM to Break Your eBook Readers – If this were a game of chicken, I’m not sure who’d win. Although I know I’m still shopping at Amazon for my digital books.
After receiving feedback from customers and webinar attendees, Adobe has revised the migration timetable for customers. “Adobe does not plan to stop support for ACS 4 or RMSDK 9. ACS 5 books will be delivered to the older RMSDK 9 based readers”, according to Shameer Ayyappan, Senior Product Manager at Adobe. “We will let our resellers and publishers decide when they wish to set the DRM flag on ACS 5, thus enforcing the need for RMSDK 10 based readers.”
–The Digital Reader
Compiling as a Creative Act: What Duke Ellington’s Remixing Reveals about Plagiarism and Innovation – Apparently Ellington had a practice of purchasing songs from other musicians for $25 and then basically using them to make his “own” song, which would become a very profitable hit. Some musicians sued him, but most did not, and much of his reputation as innovative came from his willingness and ability to effectively “steal” from others and work those bits into hits. Very interesting article on the relationship between creative theft and adaptive genius.
In the altogether fantastic Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (public library) — one of the best biographies and memoirs of 2013 — Terry Teachout reveals that for the beloved composer, who was already a man of curious paradoxes, this creative duality was as palpable as the line between plagiarism and originality was blurred. Ellington, it turns out, made a regular habit of “borrowing” melodic fragments composed by the soloists in his famed orchestra, then transforming them into hit songs — without credit, creative or financial, to the originators
–Brain Pickings
I think my favorite bit of tattoo history was a long lost heir case in the late Georgian period (1830s). A man turned up claiming to be said heir, but was exposed as a fraud because he didn’t have the tattoo that the heir and all his friends had given each other when they were schoolboys during the Regency!
I don’t even know what that tattoo means.
I’m wondering why Library Thing waited almost three years to prompt their users to make changes. A little slow…
@theo: I was wondering the same thing. Did they only just find the breach?
Adobe may be trying to place the responsibility/blame with publishers/retailers now but I think it’s still going to be a big mess. What happens when publishers via OverDrive (which presumably isn’t affiliated with any one device) forces libraries to use the new DRM? How many patrons’ older devices will become incompatible?
One consequence of the LibraryThing thing is that they gave users free lifetimes subscriptions as an apology. Which means I now have one, and am wondering if I consequently want more involvement in LibraryThing. (Current level of involvement: nil.)
@Willaful: I’m wondering the same thing. I miss Goodreads mostly because I liked seeing what my friends were reading (although I can still do that), but LibraryThing looks like an alternative to keep track of the books I read, especially now that I’m trying to be more organized.
@Willaful: That subscription was one of two things keeping me from using LibraryThing. The other is its horrible interface. Until they change that, I’m not using it.
@Moriah Jovan: @Willaful: I’ve been a member (evidently and totally forgot) since 2009 but I don’t remember ever having a subscription cost. I’d remember that! So somewhere along the way from when I joined, they must have started the subscription thing. Shows you how much I paid attention to it.
I changed my password, but I still don’t understand why it took them three years almost to do something about it.
@Willaful: Do I get my $25 back now? :D
@Isobel Carr: Sounds like the plot of a romance novel. :)
Re: tattoos, attitudes run in cycles, I think. I’ve been getting inked since the only females admitting to it were hookers and Dwayne-Allman-era Cher. I cherish each one as illustrating what is important to me…kind of a short-hand that means when you see them, if you take the time to study them, you will know a lot about me. Some involve my husband, my kids, the nationalities of my parents, and the most recent one is a tribute to my late mother, who instilled in me my love of reading, and who always believed I’d be a writer someday. The bittersweet reality is that by the time I had a book to put into her hands, dementia had taken from her the ability to read or the understanding that I had written it. So her name is on a manuscript with a setting sun behind it, all on the cover of a book. A good tattoo artist can listen to the feelings behind the words you tell him/her, and design visuals you will treasure forever. It’s the only thing you can “take with you” when you die. Living art.