It seems as if there won’t be any more Trancer’s Guide magazines published from now on:

After five editions of our magazine we have decided to stop the project. This means that there will be no Trancer’s Guide 2009. The reason for this action is the difficult economic situation of the trance scene which makes it difficult to finance the project.

The Trancer’s Guide was supported primarily through the sale of advertising space. With rates ranging up to 1,000 € for a full page ad, it must have been too much for high profile festival organizers and major labels interested in something more focused and timely. The Guide, published once a year, was not able to keep up with the quicksilver pace of psytrance culture.

Whatever the reason for its unremarkable ending, I don’t think the Trancer’s Guide was a bad idea. In fact, I really like the concept! The Guide offered an overview of psytrance activity all around the world while celebrating the multiculturalism of the global movement. The accompanying compilation CDs weren’t anything special but the idea was excellent, and there certainly was room for it to grow. So what happened?

The Guide was doomed by the economics of atoms. Print publications, although they carry a certain prestige, are bulky, slow, and expensive to produce. Then you have to ship them all over the place! What a hassle. Sure, there was a PDF version of the guide, but it was always released long after the print version. The publishers simply weren’t committed to digital media. I wonder if it even occurred to them to push the Guide online and leave the dead trees alone. Of course, it might be tough to profit from an online version of the Guide, but if they aren’t interested… someone else will be.

Update: the Trancer’s Guide has been resurrected by the fine folks at Psytraveller. Now this is how it should be done!

I woke in the early morning hours to discover the site under attack once again. What else is new? This has been going on for months now. Today the server logs indicate that nearly 50,000 bad requests came through in a single hour. The site did not bomb, however; the attack was unsuccessful. It would appear that the security measures I’ve deployed in the last week are holding up! I have AskApache and PerishablePress to thank for that. I hesitate to say we’re in the clear but the clouds are certainly starting to break up.

With that said, there is a chance that legitimate traffic is being blocked or redirected in unexpected ways. If you happen to run into any problems downloading files or surfing the site, please let me know. I am limited in how I can test things on my end so any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

On a somewhat related note, I am happy to report that Ektoplazm visitors have donated 50 € since the beginning of August! Thanks everyone!!

Cato Unbound published an interesting issue entitled The Future of Copyright back in June of 2008. The lead essay, written by Piratbyrån co-founder Rasmus Fleischer, offers insight into the consequences of increasingly severe copyright legislation:

Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses. This development undermines the freedom of choice that Creative Commons licenses are meant to realize. It will also have seriously chilling effects on innovation, as the legal status of new technologies will always be uncertain under ever more invasive rules.

Fleischer astutely remarks that “to use digital information is to copy it.” Everyday computer usage is inextricably linked to the ever-expanding reach of copyright law. The outcome seems virtually preordained, however; industry forces will fight for tighter restrictions on digital media, but the pace of technological development will always supersede that of legislation, and social patterns of media usage become increasingly entrenched each passing month. It seems highly probable that more people are violating intellectual property laws than are not! But if the future of copyright doesn’t involve artificial scarcity, DRM (digital rights management), or other forms of protection, what will ensure cultural productivity? Why produce if you cannot profit from your creation?

The file-sharing explosion beginning around the year 2000 marked not only the start of a falling trend in sales of recorded music, but also of a drastic rise in spending on live music experiences. Only ten years ago, live music was widely conceived of as merely a way to market recordings. Today that strange equation seems to have been turned on its head.

The live music experience offers something that an MP3 file cannot–and people are more than willing to pay for it. Fleischer references an excellent article while discussing this point: Better Than Free, by Wired editor Kevin Kelly, who defines several “uncopyable values” after making this succinct argument:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

This goes far beyond the argument that musicians will need to live from the proceeds of live gigs in a future without copyright. In fact, there are many more options for the forward-thinking creators and content providers out there. The opportunities, as I see it, are nearly endless–particularly in a niche subculture such as psytrance, where the leading innovators are not yet well-defined.

If this piques your interest, be sure to check out the full-length essays: The Future of Copyright and Better Than Free.

Operating a web site isn’t always easy. I’ve had to deal with all sorts of unforeseen problems over the years. In the last couple of months I’ve been dealing with a new irritant: the steady background hum of malicious bots and other unidentified assailants making repeated requests for large media files. For the last couple of months the site has been weathering an invisible storm of bad requests more often than not. These requests eat up CPU cycles, memory, and bandwidth–finite resources that I pay for and share with other users on my hosting plan. At times the onslaught has been heavy enough to slow the site down to a crawl, even making it virtually unusable on a couple of occasions. By some definitions, this is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. Of course, the word “attack” implies a certain amount of intent, and I am not personally convinced that some shadowy adversary is out to crash the site. It seems more likely that the problems the site has been experiencing result from something more prosaic: spam bots, for instance. Anything more complex would imply a conspiracy.

So, what can be done? The Internet is both the cause of and solution to problems like these. Spend a bit of time with a search engine and you will turn up just about anything. This particular issue is common, and I would have expected there to be a robust solution readily available. Well, if you have root access to your server there are some powerful software packages that you can install and configure, but I don’t have the requisite permissions. For users on shared hosting, the widely cited solution is dumb as a rock: manually scan access logs and ban offending IPs by hand. Seriously. And that is exactly what I had to do at the beginning. Since then, I’ve coded up something a little more automated. Much of the unwanted traffic gravitates toward the big ticket items so I’ve deployed basic flood protection functionality. Some users have experienced problems downloading in the last few weeks–this is why. I had to fine tune things to get the balance just right–to ward off unwanted requests while letting legitimate traffic through. This effort appears to have been a success: the storm has died down, fewer people are reporting problems with the downloads, and the site itself is running smoothly. Overall, it feels like a serious improvement over the stressful and uncertain days of August.

Oh, and if anything in this entry seems vague, it’s on purpose. Part of security is not letting any potential adversaries know all the cards you hold. And while I did say that I doubt I’m being targeted, you never can be too careful!

Photo credit: Don Solo.

Ektoplazm will be hosting a small one-off event in the Junction neighbourhood on Saturday, November 8th. We’ve done a few events here in the past so hopefully you will know what to expect; it won’t be a raging party… just an easygoing night out in the basement of a pub with some deep and funky sonic selections. Expect to hear an eclectic mix of psytrance, progressive, techno, trip-hop, downtempo, dubtep, funk, and world music styles.

The line-up for this event:
VAS (Will from Repeat Customer) – original trip hop compositions
Davey Boom – worldbeat, ethno-chill, electro
Basilisk – techno, psytrance, downbeat, whatever
Wuzzle – visuals
Paul Zulauf – artwork

Celts Pub (Downstairs), 2872 Dundas Street West, Toronto; 10pm – 2:30am, 19+
No outside alcohol; no smoking inside!
$5 or PWYC (pay what you can).

Check out the Facebook invite for more.