PARENTS WILL NEVER STOP KIDS FROM GETTING CONTROVERSIAL RAP ALBUM

PARENTS WILL NEVER STOP KIDS FROM GETTING CONTROVERSIAL RAP ALBUM

SACRAMENTO, California (AANS) - We can online versions of newspapers all over the world, for stories that we might be tech related. We have picked up two stories from the Sacramento Bee, in the past week, regarding a new rap album from the rapper known as Emininem. Our own research has determined that parents will never be able to COMPLETELY stop their minor children from being able to get the album. The reason is that tracks, from Eminem's latest album, have made it onto the Napster music swapping service. This will make it difficult, at best, for parents to keep the new album out of their households. This is because parents cannot currently block Napster. While unversities and corporations have blocked access to Napster, they have had to write their own software to do it, because the current generation of commercially available filtering software cannot block services like Napster and Gnutella. This means that parents could smash and destroy every Eminem CD in the house, but their children could still download Eminem music from Napster or Gnutella. Napster and Gnutella are such new technologies, that the most popular brands of filtering software, SurfWatch, CyberPatrol, CyberSitter, Net Nanny, have not caught up with being able to block either service yet. Parents could block access to the Napster Web site itself, to prevent download of the actual software. But if a kid already has a copy of the software, there is no way that parents can, with current filtering programs on the market, prevent dowloading of music from the Napster server itself. Hatchet Job's advice to parents is don't try to ban your children from buying the lastest Eminem CD. If you do, they will eventually find Eminem's music on Napster or Gnutella and download it. Also, with "CD rippers", and a rarely-used WAV format, it would be possible for that to hide them on services, such as FreeSpace or FreeDrive, which allow online storage of virtually any file. This rarely used WAV format allows songs to be stored in a file about 1/10 the size of an MP3, and with good sound quality to boot. The TV themes page at Sound America , http://www.soundamerica.com , which also contains a page with rare songs like "Ballad Of The Green Berets" and "Tie Me Kanagaroo Down", uses this super-compressed WAV format. A typical 3 or 4 minute song can be compreseed into a file of only about 500 to 800 kilobytes, a fraction of the space required by an MP3 file. I don't know where you would get the software to use this super-compressed format, but it would be possible to rips the tracks from the CD and store it somwhere in this super-compressed format. It could even be hidden in a computer hard disk, and the average parent would not notice they were there, given the storage capacity of today's hard disks. It is because of all this that we, here at Hatchet Job, feel that parents will be fighting a losing battle, if they try and forbid their children from owning the new Eminem CD Parents, get a grip, your children are going to get this music one way or another. If they don't buy it in a record store, they will download it from Napster and Gnutella. In fact, a search on Napster will come up with over 100 hits on the keyword "Eminem".