by SHANE SINNOTT

Holy fuck! First off, let’s address the fact that the winter is finally, definitively over and that spring is here to stay. Let’s make the M.I.A. track “Paper Planes” the official song of the season (tinyurl.com/4kx5or), and I suggest you listen to it 40 or 50 times over the course of the next week. If you end up pining for variety, you can mix it up (get it?) with remixes by Holy Fuck (tinyurl.com/69g3ew) or DFA (tinyurl.com/4lcp8a). Sound good? Okay. Onto the business, then.

MediaSentry, the douchebag Web security company whose primary business is spying on your Internet activities and logging what files you share, to pass on to the major labels, is starting to get its comeuppance, finally. Defendants are getting wise to the fact that MediaSentry doesn’t have a licence to “investigate” Web users in the way that it does, and so far the Massachusetts State Police have more or less banned the company by sending a cease and desist letter, and it looks like a handful of other states are about to follow suit. If the logs generated by MediaSentry eventually become inadmissible evidence by precedent, it will make a serious dent in record companies’ ability to sue music downloaders.

While no foolproof way to block MediaSentry from spying on you seems to exist, you can install software called PeerGuardian, which is available here: phoenixlabs.org/pg2/. The application tries to block incoming connections to your PC from MediaSentry and other companies affiliated with the RIAA. It’s interesting to try, even if it’s just for the creep-out factor—install it and start downloading a popular copyrighted torrent, and instantly you’ll see MediaSentry trying to connect to your PC like crazy. The idea that they have logs of most of what you’ve been downloading is unsettling, to say the least. Yikes.

Okay, I have time for one more, quickly: “Hard Feelings,” the first track from the Constantines’ just released Kensington Heights, at tinyurl.com/6dyk9v. If you like it, you can see ’em this Saturday, May 3, at Lambi, dig?