Anxious Times In The Cartoon Underground
John Borland
In early December, a bombshell dropped onto one of the fastest-growing file-swapping communities online, where Nikolai Nolan has made his home for the last several years.
Nolan, a 22-year-old student at the University of Michigan, is one of the leaders of Anime-Faith, one of hundreds of groups that take Japanese cartoons, translate and subtitle them in English, and release them freely on the Net.
For years this "fansubbing" community has believed that Japanese animation studios tacitly condoned their online activities, at least as long as the shows hadn't yet been released in the United States. But in early December, a studio called Media Factory began sending letters to a handful of big anime fan sites ordering them to stop distributing or linking to copies of its works online. News.context
News of the letters helped splinter Anime-Faith and triggered an impassioned debate across the broader community. Some people wanted to stop translating and distributing Media Factory's works immediately, respecting the studio's request. Others argued that the studio hadn't sought out the actual groups doing the translating, and so might still turn a blind eye to their work.
"We decided we should still promote the series," said Nolan, whose group is continuing its translations. "If we receive a letter ourselves, then we'll stop."
With echoes of Hollywood's recent attack on mainstream film-swapping, the Media Factory episode has shaken the complacency of the fast-growing anime file-swapping community. But the event is also triggering broader discussions over the role of the Internet fan communities that have become such a critical factor in the success of some media companies and a thorn in the sides of others.
Hard numbers are always hard to come by. But on one of the most widely used hubs for swapping, which uses the BitTorrent file-distribution technology, more than 120,000 anime cartoon episodes are downloaded a day using the site's tools alone. That amounts to more than 90 terabytes of data a day, the site's statistics show. (For comparison purposes, that's the equivalent of about 22 million MP3 songs.)
But as the Anime-Faith debate showed, this is a very different kind of file-swapping community than the average group downloading the latest Usher song.
Fans of anime--Japanese cartoons that range from the simplicity of Speed Racer to the complex art and storytelling of the more recent film-length "Spirited Away"--are notoriously passionate about their hobby. The borrowed Japanese word "otaku" describes the kindof obsessive fan who can describe in detail the plot threads of series that last for dozens or hundreds of episodes, and can discuss animators' resumes like baseball fans do batting averages.
The culture has its roots in the early 1980s, when few anime series were available in the United States and small groups would meet in college dormitories to watch much- copied videotapes of shows impossible to see any other way. The Internet, and particularly the powerful BitTorrent file-trading software, has now allowed those little fan groups to expand exponentially, giving them access to thousands of episodes at the click of a mouse.
"There's no gray area...It is technically illegal." --David Williams, producer
ADV Films
Anime-Faith is a good example of how one of these modern groups works. It has translators, editors, typesetters for the subtitles, encoders who digitize the video, quality checkers and more, with a product flow as efficient as a professional operation.
Most groups like this fervently believe they are supporting the cause of anime by allowing fans to see otherwise unavailable titles, and building awareness of shows that would otherwise be unknown before their U.S. release. Most take their "fansubs" out of circulation when an American company licenses a title for distribution in the United States.
The only problem is that it's not technically legal.
Fan base growing, but sales flat
"There's no gray area," said David Williams, a producer at ADV Films, one of the largest distributors of Japanese animation DVDs and merchandise in the United States. "It is technically illegal. When we announce a title, if there is a site that is distributing fansubs, then we contract them and ask them to remove it."
ADV is one of the most adamant of the U.S. distributors. Other smaller houses privately say they recognize the promotional value of the online distribution, which can help boost sales for top titles. But there's also a potential downside.
One executive who asked not to be named said the last two years have seen a significant shift in sales patterns. Top titles still sell well, but the middle categories that used to sell respectable numbers of copies are "being forgotten," he said.
In part, this may be because distribution of anime has exploded alongside its online fan base. Many more titles are now being licensed and distributed every year. Anime is widely shown on the CartoonNetwork, and even has its own Anime Network on cable TV.
But even with this new interest, sales of DVDs--which amount to about 5.7 million copies a year, according to internal industry estimates--are holding steady or dropping. Companies worry that the easy prerelease availability of fansub versions means that the otaku class has already seen their products, and no longer need to buy anything but the must-haves.
The result has been growing anxiety in the industry, although little in the way of direct action. Anime distributors don't have the financial resources for protracted copyright lawsuits, and for the most part, the fan communities are diligent about pulling down titles once they are licensed for distribution, leaving American companies diminished ground for legal action.
"I think there are some Japanese companies that really appreciate fansubbing." --Nikolai Nolan, student, University of Michigan
"We certainly haven't prosecuted anybody doing the file sharing," said Chad Kime, director of marketing for Geneon Entertainment, another prominent distributor. "Officially, we don't condone the activity. We do admire their enthusiasm and love for our products, and we're grateful when 90 percent of the fansubbers, once they know titles are licensed, do pull them from the Internet."
That leaves the ball in the original Japanese studios' court, and except for Media Factory, it's not obvious what they think of their English-speaking online fans. Nolan said the directors are well aware that their titles are being translated and distributed here, however.
He pointed to the recent final episode of a series called "Battle Programmer Shirase," in which the director included an apology for having to end the series, addressed to "those who enjoy the show on TV, and to those outside the broadcast area who took special measures to watch the show on their PC monitors, and to everyone who watched it subtitled overseas without permission."
"Nobody expected the Media Factory to send the letter to everybody, but I think things will go on pretty normally," Nolan said. "I think there are some Japanese companies that really appreciate fansubbing."
http://news.com.com/Anxious+times+in...3-5557177.html
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Skype Creeps Under Phone Giants' Radar
Ben Charny
At a time when major U.S. telephone operators are spending billions of dollars to expand, telephone software maker Skype on Tuesday says it's building a global phone network virtually for free.
New renditions of Skype software for Linux and Macintosh operating systems are expected to become available on Tuesday. The new releases are a significant expansion for 17-month-old Skype. Since its debut, Skype's free software only worked on Microsoft devices, though test versions of the Linux and Macintosh software have been available since last year.
Skype's latest software arrives at a time when many elite U.S. phone companies are consolidating with others in multibillion dollar deals that let the communications giants expand into new markets and territories. Using the merger-mania as a backdrop, Skype's new software releases should put even more fright into traditional telecom executives.
The number of new Skype users is increasing at rates not seen since the early days of instant messaging, and at no cost to Skype other than hosting a Web site to make the software available, and "making software tweaks," Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom said in a recent interview. More than 140,000 new users register each day.
It would cost phone companies still using traditional means untold billions in construction, marketing or merger costs to come close to matching Skype's growth rate. And they are running out of companies to buy. Recently, SBC said it plans to spend $16 billion to buy AT&T; while Sprint finds $31 billion to pay for Nextel Communications. Cingular Wireless vaulted to the top of the U.S. carrier heap last year when it bought AT&T Wireless.
Much of Skype's explosive growth has to do with voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the software that lets a broadband line double as a phone line. By virtue of its mechanics, VoIP software doesn't anchor a provider like Skype to certain geographic areas, as traditional telephony does. Rather, VoIP is tied to wherever broadband is available.
Once downloaded, Skype users can talk for free with any of the 22 million other Skypers located on every continent. An Internet connection is required and calls to the traditional phone network costs extra.
A recent report by Evalueserve said traditional local phone operators could lose up to 30 percent of their revenues from people who are replacing them with Skype software.
"We are a software provider," Zennstrom said. "So it's very easy to grow a user base."
http://news.com.com/Skype+creeps+under+phone+giants'+radar/2100-7352_3-5557950.html?tag=st_lh
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HP Says Hits Milestone in Transistor Successor
Hewlett-Packard Co. said on Tuesday that its researchers have proven that a technology they invented could eventually replace the transistor, a fundamental building block of computers.
In a paper published in Tuesday's Journal of Applied Physics, HP said three members of its Quantum Science Research group propose and demonstrate a "crossbar latch," which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.
HP said in a statement that the technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today.
"We are reinventing the computer at the molecular scale," said Stan Williams, one of the authors of the paper, in a statement. "The crossbar latch provides a key element needed for building a computer using nanometer-sized devices that are relatively inexpensive and easy to build."
Phil Kuekes, another one of the paper's authors, said in a statement that transistors would continue to be used for years to come with conventional silicon circuits.
But, he added: "This could someday replace transistors in computers, just as transistors replaced vacuum tubes and vacuum tubes replaced electromagnetic relays before them."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...PACKARD-DC.XML
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Microsoft Unveils Full Release of Search Engine
Reed Stevenson
Microsoft Corp. unveiled the full-release version of its search engine on Monday, turning up the heat on Web search leader Google Inc.
The world's largest software maker also revamped its MSN.com Web portal
www.msn.com to make its search engine more prominent and also tweaked the site's content and
advertising to remove clutter, said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's vice president in charge of content and services at the MSN Internet division.
At stake are advertising dollars as well as bragging rights in one of the technology industry's more interesting growth areas.
"We really are about answers and not about links," Mehdi told Reuters, taking a swipe at MSN Search's nearest competitors, who also include Yahoo Inc.
"There's a huge amount of room for improvement" in online searches, Mehdi said.
To make answers to factual questions more relevant, Mehdi said MSN Search would include the full range of information contained in Microsoft Encarta, Microsoft's electronic encyclopedia.
Users will be able to get definitions, calculations, geographical and historical information, and other information, and also view encyclopedia articles and content for any two-hour session via MSN Search.
"We aim to have an answer for every query," Mehdi said.
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft decided nearly two years ago to build its own search engine after seeing Google take the lead and profit from the billions that advertisers pay to have their own ads displayed alongside search results.
Since then, Google has gone public and Yahoo has beefed up its own search offerings as both company's face the prospect of competing against Microsoft and its deep pockets and army of software engineers.
The launch of MSN Search comes three months after the release of an initial beta, or test version. Microsoft had been using Yahoo unit Inktomi to power its search services, but will no longer do so with the full release of its search engine, which uses Microsoft's own technology to sift through the Web.
Microsoft's new search engine will be culling results from a database index of more than 5 billion Web documents and pages. Google's index database is more than 8 billion pages.
Microsoft has also integrated results that link directly into its MSN Music service, which was launched in September of last year.
One new capability that Microsoft will be introducing with Monday's launch is the ability to create RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, feeds that allows users to track search results through an incoming data feed on their personal computers.
Mehdi also said that Microsoft would market its search engine through a marketing campaign directed at online users as well as television viewers. He did not disclose any projections for advertising spending.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-SEARCH-DC.XML
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Time Warner Cable to Offer Free AOL
Kenneth Li
Time Warner Cable plans to offer its high-speed Internet customers free access to America Online service, in a deal that could potentially add 3 million more high-speed subscribers at the cable division, Time Warner executives said on Monday.
Current AOL dial-up subscribers who live in regions served by Time Warner Cable will be asked to trade up to Time Warner Cable's Road Runner high-speed service, which will now include AOL.
Since the merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2001, one of the thornier issues has been competition between America Online and its corporate cousin Time Warner Cable's Road Runner high-speed service, which were trying to lure subscribers to their respective Internet services.
AOL had been losing subscribers over the last few years to cheaper dial-up services such as Juno and Earthlink and high speed services such as Road Runner and services from other cable and telephone companies.
But with a resurgence in the online advertising market, AOL has become a more attractive property.
"When I came in 2002, we weren't doing so well in advertising," AOL CEO Jonathan Miller told reporters, who said the business model needed to evolve before such a deal could be struck.
AOL is expected to generate about $1 billion in advertising revenue in 2004.
"If we had tried to do that back then, we wouldn't be here today," Miller added.
Now, Time Warner Cable is betting that by offering AOL's menu of exclusive programing, such as music and videos, as a free add-on to its high-speed offering, it will entice AOL dial- up subscribers to remain a Time Warner customer.
Currently, high-speed Internet subscribers pay an additional $14.95 for AOL's broadband programing on top of the monthly fee charged by the cable or telephone company.
AOL, for its part, will bolster its presence in the high- speed market at a time when its dial-up subscribers are dwindling and provide more eyeballs for its advertising.
Executives said AOL is in talks with other cable operators to strike similar deals.
The pricing of high-speed service for AOL dial-up subscribers has not been set, but it is expected to be somewhere between the $23.90 AOL charges premium dial-up customers and the $44.95 that Time Warner Cable charges high speed data subscribers.
Glen Britt, CEO of Time Warner Cable, said it will also help it tap a new line of revenue from online advertising. AOL will begin selling ads on the Road Runner.com site.
The deal could potentially add more than 3 million new cable high speed Internet customers to Time Warner's cable division, the executives said.
AOL currently serves about 23 million subscribers and about 3 million of these customers fall within a cable territory run by Time Warner.
"A majority of customers within two years we'd like to see as Time Warner Cable customers," Jonathan Miller, CEO of AOL told reporters.
Four years after the rocky union of AOL and Time Warner, the deal signifies its units are seeking more ways to work together. In 2003, AOL struck a landmark deal to help sell more Time Inc. magazines through its service.
A video-on-demand music channel launched last year that offers free music videos at the click of the remote has also become one of Time Warner Cable's most popular free on- demand channels, one Time Warner source said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...DIA-AOL-DC.XML
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Apple Edges Google as Top Brand
Trevor Datson
Arabic media channel Al Jazeera has been voted the world's fifth most influential brand in a poll of branding professionals that gave the top slot to U.S. iPod and computer icon Apple.
In the survey of almost 2,000 ad executives, brand managers and academics by online magazine Brandchannel, Apple ousted search engine Google from last year's top spot, but the surprise to many will be Al Jazeera's entry into the top five.
"With all the news from Iraq and Afghanistan and the 'war on terror', a lot of people are really tuned into the news, and the major news sources have a western bias," Brandchannel Editor Robin Rusch said.
"I think people are tuning in to Al Jazeera and looking at its Web Site because it does offer another viewpoint. For the global community, it's one of the few points of access we have to news from the region with a different perspective."
The annual survey asks respondents to rate the impact of a particular brand on people's lives, and does not attempt to quantify its financial value.
Coca-Cola, the U.S. soft drinks behemoth that regularly tops polls of brand equity value, is nowhere to be found in this year's global or regional top five lists.
Rusch recognizes the professional nature of the magazine's sample can affect the results of the survey, but nonetheless the Al Jazeera brand now ranks in terms of impact alongside giants such as Nokia and Starbucks.
Apple, whose iPod has replaced Sony's Walkman as the personal media player to be seen with, topped both the global and North American rankings in the poll, displacing Google despite the splash caused by the search engine's $1.7 billion auction-style initial public offering last year.
Apple, which launched the iPod three years ago, has sold 10 million of them, but the fact that almost half of these were moved in the final quarter of 2004 suggests an avalanche in demand.
"Apple's just done an extraordinary job with innovation, technology and design. The iPod is what has put Apple in the lead this year," Rusch said.
"Sony has had less luck tying together its products as a lifestyle. From a branding perspective, they haven't caught up with Apple's design and ability to capture the imagination."
Swedish furniture chain Ikea, whose global network now extends to 35 countries, takes third place in the global ranking, while ubiquitous coffee chain Starbucks just shades Al Jazeera in the brand-impact stakes.
Ikea's high ranking reflects its gradual global expansion -- people who have in the past only been able to read about the flat-pack furnisher can now experience the joy of cheap home- assembled wardrobes for themselves.
An interesting entry into the Asia-Pacific regional list is Australian guidebook publisher Lonely Planet, which comes in at number five. But Rusch said it could have a trying time this year as it scrambles to rewrite the Asian regional and country guides on which it built its reputation.
GLOBAL AND REGIONAL TOP FIVE LISTS (1,984 respondents to the question "which brands had the most impact on your life in 2004?")
GLOBAL
1. Apple
2. Google
3. Ikea
4. Starbucks
5. Al Jazeera
CENTRAL & LATIN AMERICA
1. Cemex
2. Corona
3. Bacardi
4. Bimbo
5. Vina Concha y Toro
ASIA-PACIFIC
1. Sony
2. Samsung
3. LG
4. Toyota
5. Lonely Planet
EUROPE & AFRICA
1. Ikea
2. Virgin
3. H&M
4. Nokia
5. Al Jazeera
NORTH AMERICA
1. Apple
2. Google
3. Target
4. Starbucks
5. Pixar
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...RANDING-DC.XML
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The results are in - U.S. Congressional Internet Regulation at work:
Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead
Tom Zeller Jr.
A year after a sweeping federal antispam law went into effect, there is more junk e-mail on the Internet than ever, and Levon Gillespie, according to Microsoft, is one reason.
Lawyers for the company seemed well on the way to shutting down Mr. Gillespie last September after he agreed to meet them at a Starbucks in Los Angeles near the University of Southern California. There they served him a court summons and a lawsuit accusing him, his Web site and 50 unnamed customers of violating state and federal law - including the year-old federal Can Spam Act - by flooding Microsoft's internal and customer e-mail networks with illegal spam, among other charges.
But that was the last the company saw of the young entrepreneur.
Mr. Gillespie, who operated a service that gives bulk advertisers off-shore shelter from the antispam crusade, did not show up last month for a court hearing in King County, Wash. The judge issued a default judgment against him in the amount of $1.4 million.
In a telephone interview yesterday from his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gillespie, 21, said he was unaware of the judgment and that no one from Microsoft or the court had yet followed up. But he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and vowed that lawsuits would not stop him - nor any of the other players in the lucrative spam chain.
"There's way too much money involved," Mr. Gillespie said, noting that his service, which is currently down, provided him with a six-figure income at its peak. "And if there's money to be made, people are going to go out and get it."
Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.
To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules.
"Can Spam legalized spamming itself," said Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, a London organization that is one of the leading groups intent on eliminating junk e-mail. And in making spam legal, he said, the new rules also invited flouting by those intent on being outlaws.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/te... tner=homepage
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Hey kids, your buddy Jack Spratts says "You can swap all you want when you build your own
secret fiber-optic network!"
Dark Fiber: Businesses See The Light
Marguerite Reardon
When Ford Motor Co. decided to upgrade its corporate network in Dearborn, Mich., it sent in the backhoes.
The automotive giant sells cars, not telecommunications services. But, in a move that experts say increasingly makes sense for bandwidth-intensive business operations, Ford found that it would cost less to lay its own optical fiber lines than to subscribe to a service from the local phone company.
"I think it's a strategy that companies need to look at," said George Surdu, director of infrastructure at Ford. "They need to work through the business case themselves. But I don't believe we are the first ones to think of doing this, and I'm sure we won't be the last."
He's right. Bank of America, Bausch ' Lomb and Gannett Co., the publisher of USA Today and dozens of other newspapers across the country, are some of the big names that have built out their own fiber optic infrastructure in the past few years. Google is also supposedly looking for fiber to build its own network.
Analysts say that most companies still find it easier and cheaper to simply rent "lit," activated fiber--and all the networking equipment behind it--from carriers. But falling prices on unlit or dark fiber and newer, cheaper optical equipment mean even many midsize companies can afford to take out long-term leases on dark fiber and buy the equipment to run their own network on it.
The excess of "dark fiber"--fiber-optic cables deployed underground but not put into use--makes it possible. During the 1990s, everyone and his brother laid fiber optic lines. Local phone companies, electric companies, municipalities and water utilities dug up city streets to put fiber in cities and towns. And because they never wanted to dig up the ground again, they jammed the conduits with thousands more strands of fiber than were needed.
When the drunken spending of the dot-com era screeched to a halt in 2000, the telecom industry couldn't find a market for all the fiber it had spent billions of dollars placing.
Oversupply sent prices plummeting. Some industries, such as investment banking, built their own fiber networks even when costs were high because they needed them for stock trading. But the falling fiber prices have made building a fiber network cheap enough even for cost-conscious fields such as education and health care.
"Analysts have long said it's too expensive and requires specially trained optics engineers to build and run these networks," said Gary Gunnerson, IT architect at Gannett, which has already built metro fiber networks in three cities where it has newspapers. "I've found just the opposite to be true. The fiber and the equipment are so cheap now, and anyone who is familiar with IP networking gear can handle a short-distance optical network. I could teach them how in half a day."
Flexing bandwidth muscle
Companies that build their own networks are likely to be technology innovators. Their need to jack up bandwidth is a direct result of ambitious technology initiatives that include converging voice, data, and video onto an Internet protocol backbone, expanding storage area networks or consolidating data centers.
Ford's George Surdu said his company knew it needed a flexible, high-capacity network as it started to move its network toward IP convergence.
"We are definitely saving money by doing it ourselves," he said. "But owning the fiber ourselves also fits in well with our overall telecom strategy. We needed more bandwidth, but we also wanted to be able to deliver additional capacity on demand for whatever new technology initiatives came up in the future."
After Bank of America merged with Nations Bank in the late 1990s, the company started thinking about building a high-speed storage area network and consolidating its data centers. But to accomplish its goals, it needed more capacity. At the time the company was operating an OC-3, or 155 Mbps, asynchronous transfer mode network.
"We can turn up new services in a matter of hours or days instead of waiting months for a carrier to do it." --Bank of America's Larry Schaeffer says flexibility is a key virtue to owning your own network
"We could have gone to a local service provider to lease an OC48 (2.5 Gbps) ATM or a Gigabit Ethernet service," said Larry Schaeffer, senior vice president of network services at Bank of America. "But we would have gotten less bandwidth for more money. And the infrastructure would have been shared with the provider's other customers. It made more sense to build it ourselves."
The new network, completed in 2002, gave Bank of America a lot more flexibility to adapt to industry changes. When the federal government enacted stricture data storage and replication requirements following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bank of America was ready to meet the new demands.
Schaeffer said that relying on a carrier would have been difficult, especially since many of them were laying off staff and cutting budgets at the time.
"Probably the most beneficial aspect of owning the network ourselves is the flexibility we have," he said. "We can turn up new services in a matter of hours or days instead of waiting months for a carrier to do it. All we have to do to add more capacity is change out the electronics."
Counter to what IT executives at Ford, Bank of America and Gannett have said, Sterling Perrin, an analyst at IDC said he sees more companies turning to local service providers for a fully managed service rather than building their own optical networks.
"There will always be a few who choose to do it themselves," he said. "But it won't be a big migration. I think the ones building their own networks will really be limited to very large companies. Most companies don't even need that kind of bandwidth."
How low can prices go?
The decision to build a network from scratch or lease a service from a carrier comes down to price. Gunnerson said companies that spend between $7,000 and $10,000 per month on telecommunication services should consider building their own fiber networks. He estimates that his company saves at least 30 percent on its total network costs.
Equipment companies that make the gear that lights this fiber say the argument for building a fiber network has gotten more realistic in recent years.
"Five years ago, it wouldn't have been feasible for most companies to lease fiber and build their own networks," said Gary Southwell, vice president of segment marketing for optical-equipment maker Ciena. "But prices have come down so dramatically that it really makes sense. It's not a huge market for us, but we see it growing."
"Managed bandwidth services can be expensive," noted Bruce Miller, vice president of Alcatel's optical networks division. "And if a company has enough traffic, then they really have to look at the trade-off between the reoccurring costs of a service and the upfront cost of the equipment and fiber."
Miller gave an example of one customer that had been leasing five DS3 (44.736 Mbps) circuits for its voice and data traffic. These five circuits, which had an aggregate capacity of 223.65 Mbps, cost $2,500 per circuit per month for a total cost of $12,500.
The company was able to negotiate a long-term lease on dark fiber for $7,000 per month. With $50,000 worth of optical equipment, the company built its own gigabit network, increasing capacity over the DS3 service at least 20 fold. The company began seeing savings over the DS3 service in about 10 months.
Building a fiber network is not for everyone. Much of the cost comes down to fiber accessibility. Ford Motor, which actually had to dig the trenches to lay new lines, is more the exception than the rule.
Most companies would not find it cost-effective to undertake such a huge fiber construction project. Companies usually save money when they get a great deal on a 10- or 20-year lease on unused fiber already deployed by someone else. Considering that some experts estimate that roughly 70 percent of fiber-optic lines already in the ground is unused, this should not be a difficult task for companies in urban areas, Gunnerson said.
There's little question that cheap prices on dark fiber have encouraged build-it-yourself networking, but an equally important piece of the puzzle is the equipment used to light the fiber. Prices on optical equipment have also fallen in the past five years. Dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment, used to split light transmitted over a fiber into different wavelengths so that each strand can carry more data, is now in its fourth generation. A new, cheaper class of such products has also come on the scene.
Coarse wave division multiplexing or CWDM, a technology first introduced in the 1980s, works like DWDM. The difference is that CWDM allows for a smaller number of channels--typically eight to 16--as compared to DWDM, but at a 40 percent cost reduction. It also runs at shorter distances. DWDM provides a higher number of channels--usually 16 to 32--but at a higher cost. It is also able to run longer distances.
Because CWDM splits the light into wider channels, it doesn't require lasers as precise as ones used in DWDM gear. As a result, products are cheaper. They also consume less power, which means products are also smaller and can be deployed just about anywhere by almost anyone.
All of this adds up to favorable pricing on equipment for companies that want to build their own fiber networks.
"It's definitely gotten easier and cheaper for companies to deploy and operate their own fiber networks," Southwell said. "We're starting to see a trend, but it's still very early days."
http://news.com.com/Dark+fiber+Busin...3-5557910.html
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Employees To Be Billed For Personal Internet Use?
Munir Kotadia
Employees could receive a bill each month for the cost of ‘stolen’ bandwidth and wasted time if Australian-based Exinda Networks' URL Bandwidth monitoring system takes off.
Exinda Networks claims to have developed a unique system that allows a company to monitor exactly which Web sites are visited by each individual employee and how much bandwidth has been used -- in terms of a cash loss to the employer.
Con Nikolouzakis, director of Exinda Networks, said the URL and bandwidth monitoring system was designed to ensure employees can be held responsible for the cost of misused bandwidth and time.
"If you use your office computer for internet banking and booking theatre tickets, you're fine. If you choose to use it to download illegal software, research personal interests or other non-business uses then you could be issued with a ‘please explain’ and a bill for the costs of the bandwidth and time you wasted," said Nikolouzakis.
According to Nikolouzakis, bandwidth-abusers can have access to certain sites blocked or their bandwidth could be throttled, which would significantly slow that individual's access to the undesirable Web site. Additionally, the employee could be presented with a bill.
"Theoretically individual employees could be charged a fee for non-business related internet usage on a monthly basis if an employer wanted to get tough on staff abusing their Web access but didn't want to block them altogether," said Nikolouzakis.
However, not everyone agrees that charging employees for ‘personal’ bandwidth is a good idea.
James Turner, industry analyst for security & services at Frost & Sullivan, said that charging employees for personal bandwidth usage would stir up a hornet's nest because bandwidth is relatively cheap and employees get a "morale boost" from having some freedom to surf at work.
"Most employees sign an Acceptable Internet Usage policy when they join a new company. After that, there is a level of trust between employer and employee. Companies like Computer Associates already have software that can measure an individual's bandwidth usage, so the technology isn't new and across the market there is not a huge demand," said Turner.
However, Turner did agree that there is a need for employers to spot the employees that regularly abuse the system.
"The tiny minority of bandwidth abusers are most likely downloading illegal material (such as pirated movies) and their employers need to be able to detect and stop this for anti-piracy reasons. No company wants to be involved in trafficking stolen goods and storing illegal digital material is an extension of this," said Turner.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/softwar...9179293,00.htm
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Pay Radio Becomes Personal
David Pogue
THE First Rule of Techno-Pop: Any popular, free medium will eventually be ruined by ads, repetition and lowest-common-denominator junk. It happened to network TV, it happened to the Web and it certainly happened to radio.
The Second Rule: Any free medium that has been ruined by ads will eventually encounter competition from a not-free alternative. It happened with cable TV and, more recently, satellite radio.
It may blow your mind to think that over four million people are now paying $10 or $13 a month just to listen to the radio. (Those are the fees for XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. Discounts are available if you pay in advance, own more than one radio and so on.)
Truth is, though, that what they're getting isn't very much like radio at all. They're getting 65 music channels, free of commercials and endless teenybopper-top-10 repetition, and 40 to 50 talk channels. (The talk channels have some ads, but nowhere near the average of 20 minutes per hour that you'll hear on AM radio.)
Because they don't have to appeal to a mainstream audience to attract advertisers, the expert-fanatic channel hosts can "narrowcast" tightly targeted musical styles (like pop, acoustic, hip-hop, country, movie soundtracks, classical) and nichey talk topics (like comedy, sports, advice, old-time radio dramas, audio books, religion and children).
Satellite radio subscribers can also glance at the radio itself to see the name of the current song, performer and channel name. The sound is better than FM radio, though not as good as a CD or an iPod. And because the signal emanates from space, you don't lose the station as you drive from city to city. (The exception: the signal fades whenever the radio can't see the sky for more than five seconds, like in a long tunnel. The exception to the exception: in big cities, ground-based repeater antennas keep the signal going even in the concrete canyons.)
Until recently, you could buy satellite receivers in several sizes and shapes, like car dashboard installations, stereo components and boomboxes. But now there's a self-contained, hand-held format that offers a whole new set of possibilities.
The first pocket-size satellite radio, available for XM radio only, is called the Delphi MyFi. (It will be joined later this year by additional models for XM and Sirius. That's good, because the rivals offer different services. XM has Major League Baseball and 24-hour traffic and weather reports for 21 major cities; Sirius has the National Football League, some National Public Radio, traffic and weather for 10 cities and, coming soon, Howard Stern.)
Imagine having a gadget the size of an iPod, but with 120 thematic playlists that draw from every song ever recorded. Imagine the freedom of listening in your car, at home or just walking along the street. Imagine having a five-hour radio recorder built in, so that you can listen even indoors without an antenna.
Now keep on imagining; the Delphi MyFi isn't all that.
For starters, it's not the size of an iPod. It's larger and heavier, closer to half a sandwich than to a deck of cards. (On the plus side, that size accommodates a huge, black-and-white screen filled with legible, useful readouts.)
The MyFi is nowhere near as simple and self-contained as an iPod, either. It has 22 brightly illuminated buttons (including 10 numeric keys) and a thumb wheel on the side. Its box contains so many attachments and parts, you feel like you're opening the Sopwith Camel biplane model kit you got for your 10th birthday.
Those 20 accessories include three antennas. One is for use indoors next to a window. One is tiny and magnetic, for use on the roof of your car. The third, if you can believe it, clips to your body so that you can keep the MyFi in your pocket when you're out hiking, mountain climbing or shoveling snow. (You don't always need this human-clipped antenna. The radio's internal built-in antenna is often sufficient, especially if you keep the MyFi upright and exposed to the sky - attached to your belt with the included clip, for example.)
The scuttlebutt online is that a number of people bought the MyFi and then returned it. Their comments make clear, though, that they were primarily unhappy with its reception. Clearly, many didn't understand that the radio doesn't work unless it can see the satellite, meaning that there's generally no reception indoors unless you trail the long antenna wire to a window. MyFi may be billed as a hand-held portable radio, but it still relies on a direct line of sight to the sky.
The accessory cornucopia also includes three ways to attach the MyFi to your car's dashboard, and two ways to play it through your car's sound system: a built-in FM transmitter, which is supposed to send the sound to an unused frequency on your car's radio, and a tape-player cassette adapter. FM transmitters are notoriously iffy - in my case, the MyFi's built-in one never did work - but, although the sound quality may not please the most discerning audiophiles, the cassette-adapter approach works 100 percent of the time.
The MyFi's biggest breakthrough is its built-in recorder, which works something like a TiVo for radio. When you hear a song or a talk show you like, you can tap a button to record it; you can also program the radio to record shows unattended on a timer (maximum: two recordings). The memory holds about five hours of music or six hours of talk, which you can play back later when you're indoors, underground or underwater.
It's a brilliant idea, but it could stand improvement. When you record, say, two hours of music, the radio lists the parade of songs by name, so you can jump directly to your favorites. But there's no rewind or fast-forward, so you can't start anywhere but at the beginning of a tune. You can't delete just one of your recordings, either; erasing the radio's memory is all or nothing. And there's a lag of several seconds after you touch the Record button, so it's virtually impossible to capture a song from the beginning.
Those rough edges are especially peculiar considering how completely Delphi otherwise thought things through. For example, the five-hour rechargeable battery is removable and replaceable. You can opt to have sports scores or stock prices scroll across the bottom of the screen (your choice of teams and companies). The radio doubles as a clock and an alarm, and you can program it to alert you when a favorite song or band is playing on another channel. You even get a remote control, for use when the player is hooked up to your stereo or, presumably, when you've got a finicky back-seat D.J. in the car.
It would be nice if the MyFi were smaller and sleeker. The menus and controls are designed logically enough, but it would be nice if you didn't need the manual at all. It would certainly be nice if you could transfer your recordings to, say, a computer or a CD. (Yeah, I know - over the recording industry's dead body.)
Above all, it would be very, very nice if the MyFi didn't cost so much: about $300 when bought online, plus $10 a month for the service. For best results, explain it to your spouse as a $200 radio with a $100 superdeluxe accessory kit.
What ultimately saves the MyFi from winding up at the back of your gadget drawer, though, is the amazing entertainment that comes out of it. XM's programming is so rich, so constantly surprising, so far removed from the homogenized glop of broadcast radio, that you can overlook a whole host of hardware hitches. At one point, I actually walked twice around the block in the freezing cold just so I could hear the end of a radio drama on Channel 163.
All of which is just another way of stating the Third Rule of Techno-Pop: In radio, at least, you get what you pay for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/03/te...ts/03stat.html
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Rivals Hope to Sink iPod With Rented Music
Alex Veiga
Is music something you own or something you rent?
How music fans answer that question in coming months will help determine the viability of a new slate of online music services that offer to fill portable music players with an unlimited number of songs for a monthly fee.
While the music subscription approach has grown in recent years, far more music fans have opted to buy songs by the track, a business model popularized by Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store and its hugely successful iPod portable player.
But the release late last year of new copy-protection software from Microsoft Corp. may begin to change that. The software frees subscribers to move their rented tracks from their computers to certain portable music players.
The system works by essentially putting a timer on the tracks loaded on the player. Every time the user connects the player to the PC and the music service, the player automatically checks whether the user's subscription is still in effect. Songs stop playing if the subscription has lapsed. If the user doesn't regularly synch up the player with the service, the songs go dead as well.
"This is potentially the first serious challenge that the iPod is going to face," said Phil Leigh, president of Tampa, Fla.-based Inside Digital Media. "What these devices are going to be able to do is attack iPod where it's weak."
Several online music purveyors see portability as selling point that can lure consumers to their subscription services. Forrester Research projects music subscription revenues will more than double this year to $240 million, largely because of portability.
RealNetworks, MusicNow and MusicNet, which distributes its service through brands like America Online and Cdigix, all have plans to launch portable subscription services this year or early 2006 at the latest.
Napster LLC and F.Y.E., another MusicNet distributor, began offering portable subscriptions late last year through the Windows Media Player software, code named Janus.
Napster plans to turn up the heat on Apple with a $30 million advertising campaign debuting during Sunday's Super Bowl to promote a relaunch of its portable subscription service, dubbed Napster To Go.
"This is really the first subscription service supporting Janus that's going out in a big way," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Napster is charging a lot harder than the rest of them."
Napster's service is $14.95 a month - about $5 more than a non-portable subscription. F.Y.E's service is also $14.95.
Chris Gorog, Napster's chairman and chief executive, said the new service should boost its subscriber numbers, which stood at 270,000 as of December.
Marketing will be crucial to persuading consumers accustomed to buying CDs or owning digital music tracks purchased online to switch to paying a monthly fee for music, like they might do for cable television programming.
"There's going to have to be some education in the marketplace," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director for Jupiter Research in New York. "There's some stuff that consumers watch over the air and on cable but don't actually own and some DVDs consumers actually go out and buy. There's going to be some coexistence here as well."
Alan McGlade, president and chief executive of MusicNet, said consumers will see the value in being able to rent music.
"When you think about it, you can log on Tuesday when the new records are in the stores and download whatever new albums are out," McGlade said. "If you have to pay a la carte, then you have to make a buying decision."
Not everyone is convinced.
Apple has said it has no plans to offer a music subscription service. The iPod players don't support the Janus format.
Microsoft's own music service, MSN Music, has yet to offer any services beyond pay- per-track downloads.
Doubts also linger over whether consumers will be happy with the crop of portable music players that can support portable subscription services.
So far only a handful of players - including ones from Creative, Dell and iRiver - are on the market, although analysts say their number should increase this year.
And then there's the iPod factor.
"The problem is that in the current state of the market, vendors at best have been offering technical equivalents of the iPod, and the iPod itself has transcended from a consumer electronics item to cultural icon," Gartenberg said.
Portable music subscriptions may be a milestone, Gartenberg said, "but it's not something that is likely to displace Apple in the short-term."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS
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The Open-Source Patent Conundrum
Bruce Perens
The latest tactic in the software-patenting battle is the granting of patent rights to open-source developers. But are the grants really the equivalent of wolves in sheep's clothing?
That's not the only movement on the patent front. The possible approval of a software-patenting measure in Europe this Wednesday could bring a barrage of lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic, affecting proprietary software as well as the open-source community.
Let's take a closer look.
Sun Microsystems recently made software patents available for use by open-source developers. But its patent grant came with strings attached: The 1,600-some patents may only be used under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License, which is incompatible with the General Public License used on Linux.
So while claiming to make the patents available to open-source developers, Sun can sue folks who work on Linux rather than Solaris. The irony here is that Sun's open-source license is derived from the same license used for Mozilla.
But Mozilla's developers have made most of their software available under the GPL, as well as under terms of their own license. If Sun wants to be a partner in the open-source community, then shutting out the Linux developers isn't a good start.
Contrast that with IBM's recent patent grant. Big Blue made available patents for use under any of the more than 50 open-source licenses that were recognized by the Open-Source Initiative as of Jan. 11.
The timing is no coincidence. IBM is one of the major forces lobbying for software patenting in Europe. It's possible that IBM's action may help convince European legislators that open source and software patenting are compatible. But IBM's 500 patent grant is tiny next to the 1,500 software patents the company files each year, the 30,000 software patents already granted by the European Patent Office and the hundreds of thousands that annually arise in the United States.
According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association, software patent lawsuits come with a defense cost of about $3 million. Even before the case could be fully heard, a single patent suit would bankrupt a typical small or medium-size applications developer, let alone an open- source developer.
IBM proposed the creation of a patent commons for open-source, which would probably be operated by Open Source Development Labs, an industry organization that has already dedicated a multimillion-dollar legal defense fund for open-source developers. But that sum could be eaten up by one or two patent lawsuits.
OSDL's board and officer roster is dominated by the world's largest software patent holders, including the likes of IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard. Although those deep pockets can mitigate some of the financial burden that might arise, it's unreasonable to believe that the OSDL would work against software patenting in the interests of the broader open-source developer community.
The most poorly represented party is not open source at all, but the community of small and medium-size proprietary software developers and e-businesses. Every significant software program and business Web site today infringes on one or more software patents granted in the United States. These businesses are just beginning to realize how much they have to lose.
Meanwhile, European businesses are being lulled into the belief that theirs is a less litigious society and that the patent suits won't arise. They wrongly assume that their patent office will hold to a much higher standard than the one that prevails in the United States. But the software patents already granted in Europe track the text of the U.S. versions, and the same litigious companies file patents on both sides of the Atlantic.
Earlier this month, 61 members of the European Parliament filed a resolution asking to restart the software patent debate because, they said, the process had been tainted by politics. But appointed bureaucrats attempted an end- run around the elected representatives, twice scheduling motions that would enable software patent approval without a vote by the representatives. So far, Polish representatives have delayed the item, but final approval could come at a Feb. 2 meeting of JURI, the European Parliament's committee on legal affairs.
Many holders of software patents have been holding back on lawsuits until the European software-patenting measure is approved, lest they provide examples against the very legislation they desire. If the legislation passes, expect a rash of lawsuits in both the United States and Europe.
Europeans are starting to realize that the software patent battle can't be caricatured as a battle between open source and the rest of the world. They should support the members of the European Parliament in restarting the patent debate. And this time, they should make sure that they are involved.
At least the Europeans get to have a debate. In the United States, software and business method patenting is the result of two court decisions. And Americans have yet to get started on legislation to solve the problem.
http://news.com.com/The+open-source+...3-5557340.html
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Microsoft Offering Gov'ts Early Warnings
Karel Janicek
Microsoft Corp. offered Wednesday to begin alerting the world's governments early to cyberthreats and security flaws in its attack-prone software.
Microsoft also wants to work with governments to help prevent and mitigate the damage from hacker attacks, said Giorgio Vanzini, the director of Microsoft's government engagement team.
The announcement, in Prague on Wednesday by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, coincides with a mounting threat to the company's global dominance from "open source" software alternatives such as the Linux operating system.
Proponents say open-source software is cheaper to run and less vulnerable to security threats because the underlying code is freely shared and government agencies and municipalities from China and Japan to Germany and France are embracing or investing in developing it.
Microsoft already provides the U.S. government with early warnings. Vanzini said extending the program aims to protect critical infrastructure given that major Internet attacks can affect national security, economic stability and public safety.
The new program intends to complement Microsoft's existing Government Security Program, in which governments and agencies may review Microsoft's proprietary source code for Windows operating systems and Office business software and evaluate for themselves the software's security and ability to withstand attacks.
It supplements the advance but often vague warnings that Microsoft gives the general public on the severity of threats and which particular products are affected.
Governments, for instance, will be able to get information about publicly known vulnerabilities that Microsoft is investigating, he said.
The public warnings, by contrast, are short on details and often don't come until after Microsoft spends weeks or months developing and testing software fixes.
The government program will also provide data on security incidents and foster collaboration such as joint response in emergencies, Microsoft said.
Eligible participants, who must sign confidentiality agreements, include government agencies and ministries responsible for computer incident response, protection of critical infrastructure and public safety, Microsoft said.
So far three countries, Canada, Chile and Norway, as well as the U.S. state of Delaware, have been engaged in the new project, Vanzini said.
"Prevention of cyberdisruptions and improving our capacity to respond to incidents are critical to securing both our economy and public safety," Anne McLellan, Canada's Minister of Public Security and Emergency Preparedness, said in a statement.
Microsoft said it is currently in discussions with a number of countries about their possible participation in the program.
Governments currently under a trade embargo with the United States are not eligible to sign up to the program, which is provided free of charge.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS
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Digital evidence: today's fingerprints
Electronic World Increasingly Being Used To Solve Crimes
Michael Coren
Police and prosecutors are fashioning a new weapon in their arsenal against criminals: digital evidence. The sight of hard drives, Internet files and e- mails as courtroom evidence is increasingly common.
"Digital evidence is becoming a feature of most criminal cases," said Susan Brenner, professor of law and technology at the University of Dayton School of Law, in an e-mail response for this article. "Everything is moving in this direction."
Digital evidence may play a significant role in the trial of pop superstar Michael Jackson on charges of child molestation.
Computers were among the items authorities in California seized during their search of Jackson's Neverland Ranch in November 2003. Once the territory of child pornography and computer fraud, digital evidence figures into every crime that can leave an electronic trail.
The changing world of technology is challenging courts to keep pace with new laws addressing potential evidence and preserving privacy, legal analysts say.
Police officials say that the U.S. war on terrorism may create a shortage of digital analysts at the local law enforcement level.
In the wired world, almost every crime intersects with the digital realm at one time or another.
"Digital evidence is simply a number of rows of ones and zeros ... whenever a computer is used to facilitate a crime," said Fred Demma, an expert on computer crime at the U.S. Air Force's computer research laboratory in Rome, New York.
Laptops, digital cameras, phones and hard drives provide mountains of raw data for experts to sift through, part of the expanding field of computer forensics.
A single file, credit card purchase or stray e-mail message can provide the proof that clinches a case.
"It's incredibly important," said Jeffrey Toobin, senior legal analyst for CNN. "Data such as e-mail has become indispensable, particularly in the prosecution of white- collar crime."
Digital search
Law enforcement officials hope to become as technologically savvy as the criminals they pursue.
"In modern day era of crime ... what you're going to find is a room full of computers, telephone lines and a network address and that's about it," Demma said. "In many cases, that's what you start with."
That may be enough, some investigators say.
The NYPD's computer crime squad, founded in 1995, has taken on a wide range of criminal activity -- from pedophilia to corporate espionage -- using a team of technicians and specially trained detectives.
Every year, it has put more and more people behind bars, said John Otero, the squad's commanding officer.
"If I were to tell you we are 100 percent caught up to the bad guys, I'd be lying," said. Otero. "We're always in a catch-up situation. The key is to be so close to their tail they don't have the chance to breathe ."
One section of Otero's 32-member squad scours the Internet for potential child molesters, drug dealers and others who may engage in illegal activities.
Another investigates suspicious activity by setting up electronic wiretaps and sifting through data logs that detectives can investigate within hours -- the shelf life for many electronic clues.
In one recent case, the NYPD seized a computer of a child pornographer, assumed his identity and continued the ruse to launch 43 spinoff investigations and arrests across Europe and North America.
"Ultimately, it's still an investigation and it comes down to good police work," Otero said. "All NYPD is using are the tools available to us to keep up with these guys."
Legal strategy
Law governing digital evidence still lags behind the reality of cyber-crime. There are few legal precedents to guide judges who often have little experience in the mercurial world of digital technology.
"It makes life difficult ... because law changes very slowly," said the University of Dayton's Brenner. "We have judges who did not grow up with computers and so many do not understand the technology and issues it raises."
There is also a bottleneck of highly trained personnel to comb through evidence. Police report an acute shortage of detectives and lawyers trained in electronic police work.
"Part of the biggest obstacles we've had to overcome is having to get savvy lawyers and judges to understand what we do," Otero said.
The fight against terrorism means people with these skills will remain at a premium, potentially depriving smaller police departments of such personnel.
The demand is only likely to increase as the volume of cases with digital evidence increases, according to the Department of Justice.
"Cyber-crime is obviously something that is a national priority," said Steve Bunnell, chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., which recently established a cyber-crime division.
"Computer crimes are something that crosses borders. ...There is really a premium on getting the right and left hand working together," Bunnell said.
Courtrooms and universities are welcoming more lawyers specializing in electronic crime. They are setting the stage for the evolution of "cyber-law" as the debate over digital evidence -- and what limits may be put on it -- is raging among legal scholars and law enforcement, Brenner said.
"Our search and seizure laws evolved in a bricks and mortar era and therefore are not well suited for a digital environment," she said.
Police must now re-evaluate how they obtain evidence. Information obtained in an electronic search can be thrown out if it violates the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
But how far does protection extend on a computer hard drive? What about e-mails and files sent over the Internet?
Some judges at the state and federal level have restricted the conduct of electronic searches by law enforcement, insisting officers follow certain procedures or methodologies. Police and prosecutors disagree, arguing that a judge can only issue warrants, not dictate its terms.
"This is a new issue," Brenner said. "In the real world, police go execute a warrant to find stolen tires ... and bring them back, end of story.
"In digital searches, police search for a computer, find the computer, bring it back and then subject the data on it to various kinds of searches."
The thorny questions about privacy and the sanctity of personal data loom as digital technology is inextricably linked to our daily lives.
Brenner predicts we will need to revisit the laws designed during an earlier, simpler age.
"I'm not sure you can say we 'choose' to use technology today," she said. "And I think the situation will only become that much worse."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/01/28/di...ce/index.html#
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Carnivore Redux
Declan McCullagh
Robert Corn-Revere clearly remembers the day he became the first person to tell the world about the FBI surveillance system once known as Carnivore.
In late 1999, Corn-Revere, a partner at the Davis Wright Tremaine law firm, had been fighting on EarthLink's behalf to keep a government surveillance device off the company's network. A short while later, though, a federal magistrate judge sided with the FBI against the Atlanta-based Internet provider.
Worried about the privacy impact, Corn-Revere revealed the existence of Carnivore in testimony before a House of Representatives subcommittee on April 6, 2000. "They were using a technology called Etherpeek, which was off the shelf," Corn-Revere told me last Friday. "When we challenged it, they said, 'We're not using that. That would be wrong. We have our own software developed. It's called Carnivore.'" (Etherpeek is a Windows surveillance utility from WildPackets that can decode protocols used with e-mail, Web browsing and instant messaging.)
Now history is repeating itself. A flurry of press reports this month noted that the FBI has ceased using Carnivore, which had been renamed DCS1000. But not all of them mentioned that the government is hardly calling a halt to Internet wiretaps--instead, it's simply buying its surveillance tools from private companies again.
A review of the government's self-reported wiretap statistics from 2000 to 2003, the most recent data available, shows that the total number of "electronic" wiretaps has stayed between 4 percent and 8 percent of all reported wiretaps each year. (In 2003, for instance, there were 1,442 reported non-terrorism wiretaps in total that intercepted 4.3 million communications or conversations.)
That figure, though, is an underestimate. First, it doesn't cover terrorism-related wiretaps, which spiked after Sept. 11, 2001, and last year surpassed the general category for the first time. Second, it doesn't count illegal wiretaps, such as the hundreds unlawfully performed by the Los Angeles Police Department starting in 1985.
Third, those numbers don't include "pen register" and "trap and trace" devices, which tend to be about five to six times as popular as traditional wiretaps. Those awkward names, which hail from the days of analog phone taps, refer to capturing only the addresses of Web sites visited and the IDs of e-mail and instant-messaging correspondents rather than the complete content of the communication.
Translated: The concept of Carnivore isn't going away. If anything, police surveillance of the Internet is increasing over time.
The good ole days?
Whatever its flaws, Carnivore offered one undeniable benefit: It had been the subject of intense scrutiny.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, for instance, carefully monitored how the Justice Department was using it. "I respectfully ask that you consider the serious constitutional questions Carnivore has raised and respond with how you intend to address them," Armey wrote to Attorney General John Ashcroft in June 2001. "This is an issue of great importance to the online public."
At one point, political pressure had grown so great that Attorney General Janet Reno reluctantly ordered an outside review of how Carnivore had been used. The review concluded that Carnivore didn't snatch more from networks than it should, but that it had "no auditing" and "significant deficiencies in protection for the integrity of the information it collects."
A group of well-known technologists, including Steven Bellovin of AT&T Labs and Peter Neumann of SRI International, reviewed that report, prepared by IIT Research Institute. Their own conclusions: "Serious technical questions remain about the ability of Carnivore to satisfy its requirements for security, safety and soundness."
The public and the press also were more interested a few years ago. CNET News.com published dozens of articles. A Nexis search turned up 1,334 matches for FBI and Carnivore or DCS1000 between July 2000 and July 2001. But the same search for between July 2003 and July 2004 reported only 45 articles.
Unfortunately, the public knows virtually nothing about how the FBI is conducting Internet eavesdropping today. We don't know the name of its interception technology. We don't know if it vacuums up far more conversations than it should when attached to a network. We don't know if it creates a security risk by permitting secure portions of an Internet provider's network to be accessed from afar. We don't know if it has benefited from any of the outside technical review that Carnivore did.
"The need for oversight these days is much greater than when the FBI picked particularly bad names for its surveillance projects," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "There's a lot of money slushing around the federal government's dark budgets."
He's right. Congress should demand more public accountability from the Bush administration. Otherwise, we might end up fondly reminiscing about the good ole days of Carnivore.
http://news.com.com/Carnivore+redux/...3-5555323.html
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Anti-Piracy Software from MPAA Draws Mixed Reviews
John P. Mello Jr.
"In making enemies with every P2P service out there, the only method of piracy prevention that remains is parents," said Edward Webber, operator of Loki Torrent. "There are many [ways] peer-to-peer technology could be adapted to aid in the sale of MPAA title works; all they have to do is stop making new enemies long enough to listen to their rapidly shrinking consumer base."
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A free software program to help parents police illegal movie and music files on their household computers is garnering mixed reviews.
The application, called Parent File Scan, was unveiled last week by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) -- alongside an announcement of the organization's intent to file more lawsuits against people who illegally trade copies of movies over the Internet.
"We cannot allow people to steal our motion pictures and other products online, and we will use all the options we have available to encourage people to obey the law," MPAA President and CEO Dan Glickman said in a statement.
"We had to resort to lawsuits as one option to help make that happen," he continued. "But at the same time, we are making a new tool, 'Parent File Scan,' widely available to parents and other consumers."
Parental Tool
"This free and widely available program may be of particular use to parents, who may be unaware that their children have been using their computers to illegally download copyrighted material, exposing the family to lawsuits and other negative consequences," Glickman added.
According to the licensing agreement for the software, which is made by DtecNet Software, of Copenhagen, Denmark, the application searches a computer for well-known file-sharing programs and files in the most popular music and film formats. That doesn't mean, the agreement cautions, that the program will find all file sharing applications or music and film files on a computer.
"You must determine yourself whether music or video files on your computer were acquired legally or illegally," the agreement reads. "The SOFTWARE does not verify or report the source of files found. You must clarify this question yourself by discussing with the persons who have used the computer where the music and video files are found."
Moreover, using the software doesn't create a security blanket for parents worried about process servers knocking on their doors. "You are responsible for anything illegal taking place or stored on your computer," the agreement cautions. "Using the SOFTWARE may provide you an overview of how your computer is being used, but this does not imply any exemption of liability on your part."
Unexpected Kudos
Praise for the software came from an unusual quarter. "Parental oversight is a critical part of any young person's use of computers," Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a Washington, D.C.-based group representing members of the file-sharing industry, told TechNewsWorld. "Any product that assists parents in defining the kind of computer use they'd like to find in their own homes can only be a good thing.
"The makers of peer-to-peer software have been criticized for somehow surreptitiously subjecting people to liability," he said. "Nothing could be further for from the truth.
"What the MPAA is doing," he continued, "represents a marketplace solution to a concern expressed by some that needs to be dealt with at the level of the individual household and consumer."
Better Alternatives
However, some critics cast doubt on the usefulness of the program to parents. Mike Sauter, in his Mike's Minutiae blog, wrote sarcastically: "[T]he program, called Parent File Scan, returns ALL media files -- including Windows' own event sounds -- as potentially illegal. This will be extremely helpful to parents (or 'rents,' as the kids say)."
What's more, another detractor noted, if a parent is really concerned about what their kids are stashing on their computers, there are more effective programs in the market than the MPAA offering.
"(I)t appears that the MPAA is trying to reinvent the horse," Jarad Carleton, an IT industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan in Palo Alto, California, told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "Why use MPAA software if you are really concerned about what your children are downloading and viewing on the Internet. Why not use a more robust piece of software such as Cyber Patrol?"
Appeal to Last Allies
By releasing Parent File Scan, the MPAA is making an appeal to the only ally it has left in the marketplace, asserted Edward Webber, operator of Loki Torrent, one of several Bit Torrent hubs being sued by the movie industry.
"In making enemies with every P2P service out there, the only method of piracy prevention that remains is parents," he told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "There are many [ways] peer-to-peer technology could be adapted to aid in the sale of MPAA title works; all they have to do is stop making new enemies long enough to listen to their rapidly shrinking consumer base."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40191.html#
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Thai chicken sauce
File Sharing Thwarts Govt Attempts To Control Porn Sites
Government attempts to close down pornographic websites are virtually useless, with young people simply turning to file sharing as a means of distributing pornographic pictures, members of the Senate Committee on Women, Children and the Elderly heard today.
Speaking to an audience of over 100 students and committee members for a seminar on youth and pornography this morning, popular television presenter Mr. Sama Kamonsing noted that young people were taking advantage of high-speed Internet connections at their places of study to download pornographic files, which they could then share with friends.
This file-sharing technology had rendered government attempts to shut down pornographic sites completely useless, he said.
But he also accused the government of inadvertently encouraging access to pornographic materials, and of promoting images which portrayed young people in sexual ways.
"The government has policies to ensure that all homes have computers, but no measures to protect young people from pornographic websites", he said.
"Moreover, pornographic images are on the covers of newspapers every Sunday, while news on rape is reported in details as if it were a sex story".
He also noted that scantily-clad women were used to promote motor shows as a means of attracting customers, while fashion shows and cheer leading contests also encouraged women to wear provocative clothing.
At the same time, the fashion for web cams was leading to a phenomenon in which young women were being secretly videoed in the nude or while having sexual intercourse, and these pictures were then published on the Internet or copied for distribution at large computer outlets such as Panthip Plaza.
Another emerging trend was the sale of used women's underwear, in line with similar trends in Japan, he added.
Young people attending today's seminar warned of the ease of procuring pornographic videos, saying that they could be found cheaply and without trouble at large city centre stores.
They also blamed newspapers for the way in which they sensationalized stories involving sex and pornography.
http://www.mcot.org/query.php?nid=35367
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Big Music's Ambitions
Jon Newton
Jane and John Doe would gladly pay any reasonable amount for online music they could play on their mobiles or in their cars. But the labels are interested in marketing only heavily compressed, low-fidelity MP3 copies of original CD tracks. These are worth only a few cents, not the $1 per download being charged.
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Last Thursday the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) boasted it had launched another 717 lawsuits against people who share music online, bringing the total number of those victimized to a shocking 8,423. By the weekend, however, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) had indexed a only a handful of links on the story, which didn't even rate a headline on the main news page.
Is it that no one cares that Big Music is raging through America in a hopeless effort to sue people into buying "product," as it correctly tags the formulaic tunes it churns out by the millions?
The RIAA is wholly owned by the Big Four record labels, who controlled what the world heard and bought -- until the Net came along, bringing freedom of choice and reintroducing the archaic notion that the customer is always right.
Big Music Bullies
The cartel is nailing university students, school kids, moms, pops and grandparents in America, but of the big four labels only Warner is American. The others are from Japan and Germany (Sony BMG), France (UMG) and Britain (EMI).
Big Music tries to claim that a download equals a lost sale and that file sharing is theft. But MP3s aren't exchanged for money, and it's never been vaguely demonstrated, let alone proven, that a download represents one or 10 or 1,000 lost sales.
Britain's The Economist has lambasted the music industry for failing to acknowledge the new, digital era in which the old business models based on physical sales don't work. Academic studies in the U.S. and Canada have made it plain that Big Music's "sue 'em all" campaign just isn't happening.
Of the 8,423 file sharers pilloried so far, not one has been proven guilty of anything. Nor has it been shown in a court of law that sharing music online is a crime. That's because those held up by the music industry as hardened criminals are in fact ordinary people who can't afford to stand up to the industry's teams of highly paid lawyers.
The labels always make its victims an offer: Settle out of court and we'll go away. And the victims always settle. They can't do otherwise, and this suits the labels. The RIAA can imply it's successfully sued close to 8,500 people for the crime of violating copyrights.
In fact, it's not a crime. "Infringe," not "violate," is the accurate term, and "infringe" doesn't convey the sense of criminality.
Jane and John Doe would gladly pay any reasonable amount for online music they could play on their mobiles or in their cars. But the labels are interested in marketing only heavily compressed, low-fidelity MP3 copies of original CD tracks. These are worth only a few cents, not the $1 per download being charged.
The record labels were once in complete control. But not anymore.
P2P is here to stay. The sooner the people who run the companies accept that, the better for them, the better for their shareholders and the better for consumers, who will return to the fold as soon as the cartel acts on the reality that this is the digital 21st century and not the physical 1970s.
Plenty of Power
They'll have lost the control they once had, but given their enormous political and financial resources, they'll still be at the top of the corporate ant hill.
They've succeeded in turning a substantial number of American universities into sales and marketing divisions with senior staff acting as willing and unpaid assistants.
Police forces and other law enforcement agencies around the world now routinely put aside matters of national importance to look after Big Music's interests.
Politicians accept money to act for it. School teachers are scammed into "educating" even the youngest children according to the labels' desires.
Surely that's enough?
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/B...ons-40179.html
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BitTorrent Remains Powerhouse Network
Thomas Mennecke
The month of December 2004 was an ill-fated month for BitTorrent. First, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) began a worldwide campaign to eradicate BitTorrent and eDonke2000 indexing and listing sites. On the surface, the effort seemed successful as Youceff Torrent (BitTorrent), ShareConnector (ED2K) and many others were forced off line.
The second blow came on December 19, 2004, when Sloncek announced that SuprNova.org would discontinue its existence as a BitTorrent listing site. Many feared this would spell the end of BitTorrent and the exchange of large files. The MPAA's plan is and was to eliminate or seriously damage the trading of movie files over the BitTorrent network.
After the initial success of placing fear into BitTorrent tracker operators and forcing several sites offline, the mainstream media heralded these events as a great victory for the MPAA and impending doom for file-sharing.
However, after a month and half since the fall of SuprNova.org and the MPAA's anti- piracy campaign, the BitTorrent network not only remains fully intact, it still is by far the largest file-sharing network.
While such an inference is clearly supported by examining the number of Torrent sites available, Slyck decided to speak with CacheLogic's founder and CTO, Andrew Parker. CacheLogic's comparison and analysis of the BitTorrent network from December 2004 to present yielded no appreciable change in the size of the network, despite the loss of SuprNova. Andrew explains this phenomenal occurrence.
"I believe the situation is quite simple. There is a lot of demand from subscribers to access content via P2P. The MPAA took a decision to pursue the weak point in the BitTorrent architecture (i.e. pursuing the most popular trackers) and the developers and user community resisted by looking for methods to work around that - i.e. tracker search sites, eXeem etc. Every time a weak point in architecture has been exploited by the RIAA/MPAA a technical solution to work around it has been created. I don't see this trend changing."
"I believe that the MPAA needs to consider P2P as an opportunity rather than a threat. I think that we need to learn from the past. The introduction of the photocopier didn't result in people trying to photocopy entire books, VCR's didn't result in the death of the cinema or home rental market."
"By taking advantage of the enormous savings possible in their distribution costs the MPAA should treat P2P distribution as an additional step in the Cinema -> Pay Per View -> DVD Rental -> DVD Purchase - > Broadcast TV lifecycle."
"iTunes (and similar offerings) hasn't eradicated the distribution of MP3 via underground channels but it has given users the choice of how they obtain content and a way for the music industry to harness online distribution, its now time they looked at something similar for video as the consumer electronics industry has already started making portable video playback devices which will only drive people's desire to get video content."
While CacheLogic demonstrated consistence regarding BitTorrent's fortitude, BigChampagne's CEO Eric Garland suggests that BitTorrent has actually grown since December 2004. BigChampagne is an online media-tracking firm that monitors the trends of major file-sharing networks.
"Lokitorrent.com, Torrentbits.org, and Torrentz.com are all on the rise. Donations to sites are up. Even SuprNova has active mirrors up (Bi-Torrent)....I think it is not unreasonable to conclude at this point that given all of the attention in the media, there is now greater access to media via BitTorrent than before the campaign.
This is the unintended consequence of very high profile anti-piracy campaigns, and we have seen the same effect time and time again, starting with the original Napster lawsuit."
The interaction from the copyright industry has done more to promote file-sharing rather than destroy it. When the RIAA caused Napster to implode, P2P rebounded to heights never thought possible. Now, the MPAA is learning a similar lesson, as BitTorrent continues to reign supreme.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=649
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Strangling P2P, con’t
Cable strategists seek fatter, smarter pipes
Cable Engineers & Tech Vendors Aim to Make Up To 1 Gbps Available
Alan Breznick
Seeking to counter the ambitious fiber-network construction plans of the Baby Bells and the powerful next-generation satellites of satellite TV providers, cable engineers and tech vendors are plotting ways to make cable's fat broadband hybrid-fiber coax (HFC) pipes faster, smarter and more efficient.
Speaking at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers' (SCTE) annual Emerging Technologies (ET) conference in Huntington Beach, CA last month, cable strategists proposed several ambitious ideas to make better use of the industry's vast untapped HFC bandwidth. Among other things, they outlined plans to create new tech protocols, bond together multiple DOCSIS channels, apply service control software, use switched broadcasting and share QAM channels to make more bandwidth available to customers and use the same bandwidth for different purposes.
John Chapman, a distinguished engineer at Cisco Systems Inc., made the biggest splash with a presentation near the end of the three-day conference. As part of a session called "Smart Pipe/Dumb Pipe," Chapman called on cable operators to set a five-year goal of providing 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) per fiber node for downstream use by broadband subscribers. He also challenged his fellow cable engineers to make 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) per fiber node of upstream capacity available to high-speed data subscribers by 2010.
"This is all about increasing the amount of bandwidth on the plant or taking advantage [of what's there] and using it better," said Chapman, who has co- authored several key cable broadband specs. "The plant we have is very, very bandwidth-rich. It's bandwidth there for the taking."
Sensing a promising opportunity for the industry, Chapman and other Cisco executives urged cable executives to adopt a new "wideband protocol" for DOCSIS to achieve this goal. In briefings and demonstrations throughout the show, they argued that their wideband solution would enable cable operators to deliver up to 640 Mbps of bandwidth per subscriber by bonding 16 or more 6 MHz channels using 256-QAM modulation, a strategy that does not require any changes to the existing HFC infrastructure. That would provide plenty of bandwidth for multiple standard-definition digital and HDTV channels, IP telephony offerings and more than 100 Mbps of high-speed data traffic, among other things.
"At first blush, that seems like a lot of data," Chapman said. "But I actually think it's conservative. I think we'll need more bandwidth five years from now."
Cisco officials also argued that a wideband protocol, which is under evaluation for inclusion in the pending DOCSIS 3.0 specification, would allow cable operators to make the leap to IP video faster and cheaper than the phone companies by bundling multiple downstream channels. The strategy would allow cable operators to add downstream channels independently of upstream channels, leveraging previously deployed DOCSIS CMTS (cable modem termination system) devices and taking advantage of declining prices for external Edge QAM devices.
"This is a way to one-up fiber to the home," said John Mattson, director of Cisco's cable product business unit, in a briefing for reporters and analysts at the start of the show. "The cost model is a lot better than fiber-to-the- home."
Along similar lines, Thomas Quigley, a senior director of Broadcom Corp., advanced the idea of "bonding multiple DOCSIS channels" to deliver data to cable homes at far faster rates than today's broadband speeds. With channel bonding, cable systems would spread data packets across four or more separate 6-MHz channels and then recombine the packets once they reached their destination. The bonded channels wouldn't even have to be contiguous within the spectrum.
To make the system work, Quigley said, cable operators would have to install new modulators in their headends and new cable modems in their customers' homes. But, he said, relatively little other equipment and few other changes would be necessary.
"Technically, it's a solvable problem," he said. "There's no new science here. It's really the nuts and bolts of making it happen."
Quigley contended that the channel bonding concept offers several advantages over a "wide-channel" approach, which has also been proposed. Among other things, he said, channel bonding would provide higher throughput rates to individual cable modems, use existing 6-MHz channels and be compatible with older equipment. He also noted that the approach could be used for upstream packets as well as downstream packets.
In questioning from the audience, Chapman and Quigley fended off a complaint that vendors are trying to impose hefty new silicon and equipment costs on cable operators by proposing expensive "bandaids" for DOCSIS. "I think we can scale DOCSIS to get the cost down considerably," Chapman said.
Other SCTE ET show panelists recommended using PacketCable Multimedia specs, service control software and other increasingly sophisticated bandwidth tools to shape, steer and manage the growing data traffic on cable HFC networks, especially the increasingly heavy peer-to- peer (P2P) traffic. They also called for breaking down the separate "silos" of video, data and voice channels so that cable systems could use the same equipment, software and tech standards to offer converged services over a single IP-based network.
"Things are starting to converge at the networks," said Susie Kim Riley, founder and CTO of Camiant Inc., a PacketCable Multimedia software vendor. "Applications are converging as well... Quality-of-service is not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have."
Addressing the purely video side of the business, two speakers promoted the notion of using "switched broadcast" service to deliver different types of digital programming over the same bandwidth, rather than broadcasting the same shows continuously. This bandwidth-saving idea calls for sending scores of programs to different homes over the same 6-MHz cable channels by transmitting the shows only when subscribers ask for them.
Ran Oz, CTO of BigBand Networks, and Nishith Sinha, an ITV systems engineer for Cox Communications, said two MSO trials of the system last year showed that the technology can be quite efficient, particularly with programming that's not very popular. In fact, they said, the tests by Cox and Time Warner Cable showed that the technology's efficiency rises with the number of switched programs.
"The stats actually were pretty good," Sinha said. "We observed no blocking in either trial. They never came close to not having enough streams."
http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/feb05/feb05-3.html
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FBI Recovers Folk Singer Yarrow's Missing Guitar
Jane Sutton
When folk singer Peter Yarrow's hand-built Larrivee acoustic guitar turned up for sale on eBay last week, no one was more surprised than Peter Yarrow.
He had been looking for it since it vanished during a flight from Washington to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2000 while he traveled with bandmates Noel "Paul" Stookey and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary on their 40th anniversary tour.
The loss was widely publicized at the time and Yarrow had offered a $500 reward for its return.
When the ad went up on Friday, a friend alerted Yarrow, who had a deputy sheriff friend contact the FBI. Knowledgeable bidders tipped the on-line auction company that the guitar may have been stolen, and it pulled the ad the same day, with bidding at $2,600, FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela said on Tuesday.
The FBI traced the ad to a Sunrise, Florida, musician who surrendered it to the agency.
The unidentified man told the FBI he was selling it as a favor for a friend and had no idea it may have been stolen, even though it was advertised as Yarrow's and was still in the original case with Yarrow's name on it.
"It was so blatant, it's obviously naivete," said Yarrow, who is not pursuing charges. "My only interest was to get the guitar back ... I don't want anybody in handcuffs."
Yarrow said he was never sure if the airline lost the guitar or if somebody stole it off a baggage carousel. He had played it in every concert and on all 11 albums the group released between the guitar's creation in 1973 and the day it vanished.
"It's an extraordinary guitar and I love it a lot," Yarrow told Reuters. "A musical instrument becomes so much a part of your body when you're very involved with it over a period of years."
Peter, Paul & Mary, best known for performances such as "If I Had a Hammer," "Puff (The Magic Dragon)" and "Leaving On A Jet Plane," hope to resume touring soon, when Travers is fully recovered from treatment for leukemia, Yarrow said.
"Mary is in remission," he said.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7504446
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Big Fine For P2P Teacher
A SCHOOLTEACHER has been fined €10,200 ($17,000) for uploading and downloading music on the internet in France's first big case designed to deter other peer-to-peer (P2P) pirates.
The 28-year-old teacher was ordered by a court in the Paris suburb of Pontoise to pay the money to copyright companies after being found guilty of illegally transferring 30GB of music files - the equivalent of around 10,000 songs, or 614 albums.
The fine was less than half the €28,400 the companies had demanded.
The teacher also had his computer confiscated and was ordered to take out advertisements in two newspapers to publicise the verdict.
Prosecutors said the teacher had been arrested because he had been one of the biggest uploaders of music online in France.
The judgement came the eve of an appeal by 70 musicians, academics and politicians calling for an end to legal action against individuals who download for their own use.
"Like at least eight million other French people, we have also downloaded music online and are thus part of a growing number of 'criminals'. We ask that these absurd lawsuits stop," said the petition due to be published in the Nouvel Observateur news magazine.
It suggested the Government, music companies, artists and consumer groups get together to strengthen copyright on musical works and work out "fair" ways to adapt the changes wrought by internet.
France's music industry has since last year adopted the tactics of their US counterparts in going after downloaders and making an example of them.
Those caught risk up to three years in jail and a €300,000 fine.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...nbv%5E,00.html
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Encryption
Graduate Cryptographers Unlock Code of 'Thiefproof' Car Key
John Schwartz
Matthew Green starts his 2005 Ford Escape with a duplicate key he had made at Lowe's. Nothing unusual about that, except that the automobile industry has spent millions of dollars to keep him from being able to do it.
Mr. Green, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, is part of a team that plans to announce on Jan. 29 that it has cracked the security behind "immobilizer" systems from Texas Instruments Inc. The systems reduce car theft, because vehicles will not start unless the system recognizes a tiny chip in the authorized key. They are used in millions of Fords, Toyotas and Nissans.
All that would be required to steal a car, the researchers said, is a moment next to the car owner to extract data from the key, less than an hour of computing, and a few minutes to break in, feed the key code to the car and hot-wire it.
An executive with the Texas Instruments division that makes the systems did not dispute that the Hopkins team had cracked its code, but said there was much more to stealing a car than that. The devices, said the executive, Tony Sabetti, "have been fraud-free and are likely to remain fraud-free."
The implications of the Hopkins finding go beyond stealing cars.
Variations on the technology used in the chips, known as RFID for radio frequency identification, are widely used. Similar systems deduct highway tolls from drivers' accounts and restrict access to workplaces.
Wal-Mart is using the technology to track inventory, the Food and Drug Administration is considering it to foil drug counterfeiting, and the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, plans to implant chips in cadavers to curtail unauthorized sale of body parts.
The Johns Hopkins researchers say that if other radio frequency ID systems are vulnerable, the new field could offer far less security than its proponents promise.
The computer scientists are not doing R.&D. for the Mafia. Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science who led the team, said his three graduate students did what security experts often do: showed the lack of robust security in important devices that people use every day.
"What we find time and time again is the security is overlooked and not done right," said Dr. Rubin, who has exposed flaws in electronic voting systems and wireless computer networks.
David Wagner, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviewed a draft of a paper by the Hopkins team, called it "great research," adding, "I see it as an early warning" for all radio frequency ID systems.
The "immobilizer" technology used in the keys has been an enormous success. Texas Instruments alone has its chips in an estimated 150 million keys. Replacing the key on newer cars can cost hundreds of dollars, but the technology is credited with greatly reducing auto theft. - Early versions of in-key chips were relatively easy to clone, but the Texas Instruments chips are considered to be among the best. Still, the amount of computing the chip can do is restricted by the fact that it has no power of its own; it builds a slight charge from an electromagnetic field from the car's transmitter.
Marty Katz for The New York Times
From left, Prof. Aviel D. Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, Matthew Green and Stephen Bono working with cards programmed
to conduct an assault on a car-key chip.
Cracking the system took the graduate students three months, Dr. Rubin said. "There was a lot of trial and error work with, every once in a while, a little 'Aha!' "
The Hopkins researchers got unexpected help from Texas Instruments itself. They were able to buy a tag reader directly from the company, which sells kits for $280 on its Web site. They also found a general diagram on the Internet, from a technical presentation by the company's German division. The researchers wrote in the paper describing their work that the diagram provided "a useful foothold" into the system. (The Hopkins paper, which is online at
www.rfidanalysis.org, does not provide information that might allow its work to be duplicated.
The researchers discovered a critically important fact: the encryption algorithm used by the chip to scramble the challenge uses a relatively short code, known as a key. The longer the code key, which is measured in bits, the harder it is to crack any encryption system.
"If you were to tell a cryptographer that this system uses 40-bit keys, you'd immediately conclude that the system is weak and that you'd be able to break it," said Ari Juels, a scientist with the research arm of RSA Security, which financed the team and collaborated with it.
The team wrote software that mimics the system, which works through a pattern of challenge and response. The researchers took each chip they were trying to clone and fed it challenges, and then tried to duplicate the response by testing all 1,099,511,627,776 possible encryption keys. Once they had the right key, they could answer future challenges correctly.
Mr. Sabetti of Texas Instruments argues that grabbing the code from a key would be very difficult, because the chips have a very short broadcast range. The greatest distance that his company's engineers have managed in the laboratory is 12 inches, and then only with large antennas that require a power source.
Dr. Rubin acknowledged that his team had been able to read the keys just a few inches from a reader, but said many situations could put an attacker and a target in close proximity, including crowded elevators.
The researchers used several thousand dollars of off-the-shelf computer equipment to crack the code, and had to fill a back seat of Mr. Green's S.U.V. with computers and other equipment to successfully imitate a key. But the cost of equipment could be brought down to several hundred dollars, Dr. Rubin said, and Adam Stubblefield, one of the Hopkins graduate students, said, "We think the entire attack could be done with a device the size of an iPod."
The Texas Instruments chips are also used in millions of the Speedpass tags that drivers use to buy gasoline at ExxonMobil stations without pulling out a credit card, and the researchers have shown that they can buy gas with a cracked code. A spokeswoman for ExxonMobil, Prem Nair, said the company used additional antifraud measures, including restrictions that only allow two gas purchases per day.
"We strongly believe that the Speedpass devices and the checks that we have in place are much more secure than those using credit cards with magnetic stripes," she said.
The team discussed its research with Texas Instruments before making the paper public. Matthew Buckley, a spokesman for RSA Security, said his company, which offers security consulting services and is developing radio frequency ID tags that resist unauthorized eavesdropping, had offered to work with Texas Instruments free of charge to address the security issues.
Dr. Wagner said that what graduate students could do, organized crime could also do. "The white hats don't have a monopoly on cryptographic expertise," he said.
Dr. Rubin said that if criminals did eventually duplicate his students' work, people could block eavesdroppers by keeping the key or Speedpass token in a tinfoil sheath when not in use. But Mr. Sabetti, the Texas Instruments executive, said such precautions were unnecessary. "It's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist," he said.
Dan Bedore, a spokesman for Ford, said the company had confidence in the technology. "No security device is foolproof," he said, but "it's a very, very effective deterrent" to drive-away theft. "Flatbed trucks are a bigger threat," he said, "and a lot lower tech."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/29/national/29key.html
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Group to Distribute Earplugs at Concerts
AP
The motto of the Norwegian Rock 'n' roll Federation could well be "Turn it up!" but the group fears increasing numbers of members might respond to that request with an uncomprehending "What?"
The group plans to distribute 100,000 earplugs at rock concerts, so fans can enjoy the loud music and still hear what's said after the show.
"We can state, with great concern, that an increasing number of young Norwegians suffer from hearing damage," the group said Thursday. "This project will put the spotlight on the noise damage sustained by young people in their free time, and encourage concert audiences to take responsibility for their own hearing."
It said about 500,000 people in this country of 4.6 million people periodically suffer from tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, including 20,000 chronic sufferers.
The campaign, called "Rock against Ringing," is being organized by the rock federation in cooperation with the national association of the hearing impaired, HLF, and has sought government support.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT
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The Year of Living Indecently
Frank Rich
LET us be grateful that Janet Jackson did not bare both breasts.
On the first anniversary of the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction that shook the world, it's clear that just one was big enough to wreak havoc. The ensuing Washington indecency crusade has unleashed a wave of self-censorship on American television unrivaled since the McCarthy era, with everyone from the dying D-Day heroes in "Saving Private Ryan" to cuddly animated animals on daytime television getting the ax. Even NBC's presentation of the Olympics last summer, in which actors donned body suits to simulate "nude" ancient Greek statues, is currently under federal investigation.
Public television is now so fearful of crossing its government patrons that it is flirting with self-immolation. Having disowned lesbians in the children's show "Postcards From Buster" and stripped suspect language from "Prime Suspect" on "Masterpiece Theater," PBS is editing its Feb. 23 broadcast of "Dirty War," the HBO-BBC film about a terrorist attack, to remove a glimpse of female nudity in a scene depicting nuclear detoxification. Next thing you know they'll be snipping lascivious flesh out of a documentary about Auschwitz.
This repressive cultural environment was officially ratified on Nov. 2, when Ms. Jackson's breast pulled off its greatest coup of all: the re- election of President Bush. Or so it was decreed by the media horde that retroactively declared "moral values" the campaign's decisive issue and the Super Bowl the blue states' Waterloo. The political bosses of "family" organizations, well aware that TV's collective wisdom becomes reality whether true or not, have been emboldened ever since. They are spending their political capital like drunken sailors, redoubling their demands that the Bush administration marginalize gay people, stamp out sex education and turn pop culture into a continuous loop of "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."
With Sunday's Super Bowl, their crusade has scored a touchdown. MTV has been replaced as halftime producer by Don Mischer, the go-to guy for a guaranteed snoozefest; his credits include the Tony Awards, the Kennedy Center Honors and the 2004 Democratic National Convention at which the balloons failed to drop. (His subsequent cursing was heard on CNN, but escaped government sanction because no Republicans were watching.) Fox Sports Net has changed the title of its signature program "Best Damn Sports Show Period" to "Best Darn Super Bowl Road Show Period." The commercials, too, will "be careful" and in "good taste," according to the head of marketing for Anheuser-Busch. Fox, which recently pixilated the bottom of a cartoon toddler in a rerun of the series "Family Guy," now has someone on full-time rear-end alert: it rejected a comic spot for Airborne, a cold remedy, showing the backside of the 84-year-old Mickey Rooney as he leaves a sauna.
This might all be laughable were the government not expanding its role as cultural cop. But it is. The departures of Michael Powell, the Savonarola of the Federal Communications Commission, and John Ashcroft, whose parallel right-breast fixation was stimulated by a statue in the Justice Department, are red herrings. "Thank God he's gone, but God help us with what's next," said Howard Stern upon learning of Mr. Powell's imminent exit. He's right. After all, L. Brent Bozell of the Parents Television Council condemned Mr. Powell for "four years of failed leadership" in fighting indecency. (Mr. Powell's commission had the temerity to actually reject some Parents Television Council jeremiads, which are distinguished by their inordinate obsession with the penis.) Mr. Bozell, whose organization has been second to none in increasing the number of annual indecency complaints from 111 in 2000 to a million-plus last year, is angling for a tougher successor and may well get one.
His wish has in effect been granted even before Mr. Powell's chair is filled. The second Bush term began with the installation of a powerful new government censor in another big job, Secretary of Education. Margaret Spellings hadn't even been officially sworn into the cabinet when she took on "Postcards From Buster," threatening PBS with decreased financing because one episode had the show's eponymous animated rabbit hobnobbing with actual lesbian moms while visiting Vermont to learn how maple syrup is made. Though Buster had in previous installments visited Muslims, Mormons, Orthodox Jews and Pentecostal Christians, gay couples (even when not identified as such on camera) are verboten to our new Secretary of Education. "Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode," Ms. Spellings wrote in her threatening letter to Pat Mitchell, the C.E.O. of PBS.
The letter, as it happened, was unnecessary: Public broadcasting says that it had decreed on its own only a few hours earlier that it would not distribute the offending show - the most alarming example yet of just how cowardly it has become and how chilling the Janet Jackson effect has been. (Since then, some two dozen member stations out of a total of 349 have rebeled and decided to broadcast the episode anyway.) But the story won't end with this one incident. Ms. Spellings' threats against PBS are only the latest chapter in a continuing saga at an education department that increasingly resembles an authoritarian government's ministry of information.
A month before the election, The Los Angeles Times reported on its front page that the department had quietly destroyed more than 300,000 copies of "a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history" after Lynne Cheney, who has no official government role, complained about its contents. The booklet burning occurred under the watch of Rod Paige, the education secretary who, we would later learn, was simultaneously complicit in another sub rosa exercise in heavy-handed government information management: the payment of $240,000 in taxpayers' funds to Armstrong Williams, a talking head and columnist, to plug Bush administration policies on radio and TV.
Mr. Paige fled his post last month without adequately explaining what he knew about these scandals. Enter Ms. Spellings, previously a White House aide who by some accounts had been a shadow administrator of the education department during Mr. Paige's out-to-lunch tenure. With all the other troubles in public education, why would she focus on a single episode of a single children's program on her second day in the job? We don't yet know. But her act was nothing if not ideologically synergistic with still another freshly uncovered Bush propaganda effort. Just as Ms. Spellings busted Buster, two more syndicated columnists copped to receiving taxpayers' dollars, this time siphoned through the Department of Health and Human Services, to help craft propaganda for a Bush "healthy marriage initiative" that disdains same-sex couples as fervently as Ms. Spellings did in her letter to PBS.
What makes this story more insidious still is the glaring reality that the most prominent Republican lesbians in America are Mary Cheney, a former gay and lesbian marketing liaison for Coors beer, and her partner, Heather Poe, who appeared as a couple in public and on TV during the presidential campaign. That Ms. Spellings would gratuitously go after this specific "lifestyle" right after taking office is so provocative it smells like payback specifically pitched at those "pro-family" watchdogs who snarled at the mention of Ms. Cheney's sexual orientation during the campaign whether it was by John Kerry or anyone else. Surely Ms. Spellings doesn't believe in discrimination against nontraditional families: by her own account, she was a single mother who had to park her 13-year-old and 8-year-old children in Austin when she first went to work at the White House. Then again, President Bush went on record last month as saying that "studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is being raised by a man and a woman" (even though, as The New York Times reported, "there is no scientific evidence that children raised by gay couples do any worse").
That our government is now both intimidating PBS and awarding public money to pundits to enforce "moral values" agendas demonizing certain families is the ugliest fallout of the campaign against indecency. That campaign cannot really banish salaciousness from pop culture, a rank impossibility in a market economy where red and blue customers are united in their infatuation with "Desperate Housewives." But it can create public policy that discriminates against anyone on the hit list of moral values zealots. Inane as it may seem that Ms. Spellings is conducting a witch hunt against Buster or that James Dobson has taken aim at SpongeBob SquarePants, there's a method to their seeming idiocy: the cartoon surrogates are deliberately chosen to camouflage the harshness of their assault on nonanimated, flesh-and-blood people.
This, too, has its antecedent in the McCarthy era. In his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," Michael Chabon was extrapolating from actual history when one of his heroes, a gay comic book artist, is hauled before Congress to testify about pairing up "strapping young fellows in tight trousers" as superheroes. A Senate committee of the time did investigate the comics. Its guiding force was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's fear-mongering 1954 tome "Seduction of the Innocent," which posited that Batman and Robin could corrupt children by inducing a "wish dream of two homosexuals living together." The decency cops of that day, exemplified by closeted gay right-wingers like J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, escalated a culture war into one with human costs by conflating homosexuality with the criminality of treason.
One big difference between that America and ours is that the culture industry, public broadcasting not included, has gained much more power since then. Should Sunday's Super Bowl falter in the ratings, its creators will lure that missing audience back next year with wardrobe malfunctions that haven't even been invented yet.
But gay parents whose "lifestyle" is vilified by a cabinet officer don't have that power. They're vulnerable even in a state like Vermont that respects their civil rights. "I feel sick about it," Karen Pike of Hinesburg, Vt., told The Burlington Free Press, after learning that PBS had orphaned the "Buster" episode showing her, her partner and their three children. "I understand they get public funding, but they should be the one station we feel confident in, in knowing that what we see there represents our country."
No one had told her that some stories are no longer welcome. You have to wonder if anyone has told Mary Cheney: Focus on the Family could not have been pleased to read last week's New York Post report that she has hired Bill Clinton's high-powered literary dealmaker to peddle her own story as a book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/arts/06rich.html
Until next week,
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js.
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