[JackSpratts]

The Original Computer Game

Ask the average person on the street for the name of the world's first video game and chances are they'll tell you it was Pong. It's certainly a reasonable assumption: Pong's simple black-and-white visuals and back-and-forth table tennis gameplay are like the electronic equivalent of cave paintings -- how much more primitive could you get? It stands to reason that such a basic creation must have been the first game ever. Right?

As any student of the medium's history can tell you, though, the answer isn't Pong. Though the identity of the absolute first video game ever is the subject of some contention, Pong didn't come along until ten years after the first fully-realized game had swept the world by storm. Or at least that very small subset of the world which had access to a computer in 1962.

The title of that obscure but vital pioneer? Some claim it was a rather complicated space combat simulation called Spacewar.

Pinning down the identity of the world's first video game can be tricky, as the answer varies depending on a person's given definition of what actually constitutes a video game. Is a video game simply any form of technology which involves manipulating an object on a screen, no matter how dull or uninvolving it is? (Those responsible for much of the CDi's library would certainly have you believe so.) If that's the case, Ralph Baer's untitled invention in the early '50s, which allowed a dot to be bounced around on an oscilloscope, came first. Granted, it was pointless and no fun, but it was first. Alternately, is a video game just any amusement which involves some form of interactive video technology? Chicago Speedway , an arcade game which allowed players to steer a model racecar in front of a video of moving street footage, predates Spacewar by several years. Furthermore, there's significant evidence that the first computer game actually was an obscure direct predecessor to Pong: a 1960 invention by William Higginbotham called Tennis for Two.

Whatever the case, Spacewar was unquestionably the most influential "first" interactive computer game, a game which was enjoyed by a large community of early programmers while the other claimants languished in obscurity. The game was a digital battle in which two players steered tiny spaceships through the inky void of simulated space trying to annihilate one another with minute dots of destruction. A far cry from Pong's primitive take on ping- pong, Spacewar was complex and detailed, and had much more in common with Asteroids and even Descent than with Pong. Granted, it was a monochromatic space adventure with stark graphics and no sound -- a mere shadow of the detailed 3D worlds of contemporary first-person shooters -- but it introduced concepts which guide the game developers and fans alike even 40 years later. For such an early foray into interactive gaming, it was an amazing feat.

http://www.1up.com/media?id=1143070

Largely created in the space of six months by a single student programmer during an era in which computer access was a rare and expensive commodity, Spacewar pitted two players head-to-head with a pair of classic sci-fi rocketships armed with tiny missiles. Controls were limited to thrust, rotate right and rotate left, with a dangerously unpredictable hyperspace panic button reserved for emergency situations. All action transpired on a single screen, the center of which was occupied by a deadly sun that exerted a powerful gravitation pull on the combatants. Clever players were able to make use of the sun's attraction to give themselves an edge by slingshotting through its gravity field -- a solid understanding of Newtonian physics was definitely a boon when playing Spacewar.

Imagine that the film industry had skipped straight from still photos to The Jazz Singer, or that Thomas Edison's first recording had been a Buddy Holly record -- that's how impressive Spacewar was as the debut of a brand new medium. By the time the game was complete in early 1962, it featured an accurate star map of the galaxy, a realistic physics model governed by gravity and inertia, and spaceships which could be rotated through 360 degrees. It even included a hyperspace button, years before Star Trek made "warp speed" a household phrase. In fact, the game was so sophisticated for its time that Nolan Bushnell's blatant copy of it (called Computer Space) was a commercial flop a decade later. Gamers were hopelessly daunted by its intricacy.

The Mod Squad

Though Spacewar was impressive as a technical achievement, the culture that developed around the game is perhaps even more noteworthy. Steve Russell is acknowledged as the mind behind the game, but the final product came to fruition only through collaboration with a number of his contemporaries. Academic computing in the 1960s was a completely new field, and in the true spirit of scientific exploration all discoveries and inventions were shared with the larger computing community. Programmers were not simply allowed to explore the work of others -- they were actually encouraged to refine and improve it.

Russell's original game design was fairly minimal. Pete Sampson added a subroutine called "Expensive Planetarium" to Russell's code to provide the starfield in the background. (Expensive Planetarium was given its name as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the steep cost of early computers -- it was a program which did the work of a simple planetarium on a multi-million- dollar piece of equipment.) Another student by the name of Dan Edwards hacked in the sun and the code necessary to calculate its gravitation effects.

Space is deep.

Thus Spacewar was, in effect, the first open- source video game. And it was the first piece of freeware as well; no one responsible for the game's creation profited from it. Ultimately, the code for the game was distributed by DEC for free with every PDP-1 system they sold.

The principles upon which Spacewar was built are observed even today throughout the industry, and particularly within the PC first-person shooter community. The modern FPS is in many ways a direct descendent of Spacewar; both emphasize multiplayer deathmatch gameplay, and both feature intricate physics models. Some of the most popular FPS titles are the result of clever hacks: Half-Life was built with a heavily-modified Quake engine and then reprogrammed to create Counter-Strike, which in turn has given rise to an enormous community of amateur programmers and designers dedicated to the creation of mods and hacks shared freely with other enthusiasts.

It seems a shame that the most important of the world's first video games is largely anonymous to the general gaming public and that the creator has gone mostly unrecognized outside of historical footnotes, but it's not unusual. How many people can claim to have seen the first-ever motion picture, or listened to the first-ever commercial music recording? In a sense, gaming is fortunate, as its fairly brief history has already been thoroughly chronicled. The spirit of Spacewar lives on in countless modern video games, and it's even possible to play accurate simulations of the game courtesy of kind Java programmers (see sidebar).

Spacewar hasn't been completely forgotten, nor is it likely to be. It's the kernel from which an entire industry has grown, and as long as people use computers to simulate killing their friends and peers, its influence will live on.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3116291

You can now play a Java-based version of Spacewar. You’ll find it here - Jack.


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Innovators

Does the Kid Stay in the Picture?
Gary Rivlin

LONG before his company celebrated its 2002 stock-market debut, and long before he learned that millions of customers also meant head-to-head competition with the likes of Blockbuster and Wal-Mart Stores, Reed Hastings was just another small-business man fretting his way through the 1998 holiday season, wondering if his 14- month-old start-up would survive the winter.

At the time, his company, Netflix, an online movie rental site, had few customers but plenty of skeptics convinced that a service that dispatches DVD's by mail was quaintly absurd.

Mr. Hastings, who had previously co-founded a company that went public, had access to venture capitalists, but "basically that meant I got to hear a lot of people say no," he said. An investment firm agreed to provide him a line of credit to help him the first year, but when the company tried to draw down money, the partners told him "they didn't think we had a workable model." So two days before Christmas, he crammed himself into an airplane seat to fly east from Silicon Valley for a meeting with Lighthouse Capital Partners, a California venture firm with a branch in Cambridge, Mass.

"If I didn't get that money, we were toast," Mr. Hastings said.

Lighthouse provided the cash the company needed to continue, but there were still plenty of heartburn-inducing days ahead for Netflix, including one more near-death experience and an aborted attempt at a public offering in the spring of 2000. "We've always struggled, but in the end I think that's given us character," he said.

Those behind Netflix need all the character they can muster. In the last two years, Wal-Mart and Blockbuster have entered the online DVD rental business, and it seems only a matter of time before Amazon.com joins in. If battling three behemoths were not enough, there is also the threat posed by the video-on-demand market, which, when it is finally embraced by both Hollywood and the public, will allow people to forgo rentals and download movies over the Internet or via cable television.

Mr. Hastings, it seems, has attained every entrepreneur's dream. But his story stands as a cautionary tale for every small business.

By some measures, Netflix has never been more successful. Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, had predicted the company would swell to 2.2 million customers by the end of 2004, but the subscriber base crossed 2.6 million members, growing at an even faster pace, 76 percent, than the impressive 74 percent growth rate the company sustained through 2003. It also exceeded fourth-quarter revenue targets set by Mr. Rashtchy and other analysts.

Yet shares in Netflix are down 68 percent from their January 2004 high. The low point came in mid-October, when the company reported its quarterly earnings. Mr. Hastings announced that because of the anticipated entrance of Amazon in the market, he was slashing the basic subscription fee to $17.99 a month from $21.99, prompting eight of nine analysts who cover Netflix - on a single day - to downgrade the stock.

"I was one of the penguins," said Derek L. Brown, an analyst with Pacific Growth Equities who downgraded Netflix from "overweight" to "equal weight." The lower monthly fees mean the company will be pressed to earn its profits in the short run, say Mr. Brown and Mr. Rashtchy, who both see only uncertainty when considering the company's long-term stock prospects.

"That was a painful day," said Mr. Rashtchy, who changed his rating from "outperform" to "market perform." "It was like all our beliefs in the Netflix growth strategy were shattered."

THE birth of Netflix proves that even if you have a net worth of millions like Mr. Hastings, it is still maddening to pay a $40 late fee for a single video. It was in 1997 that Mr. Hastings paid a hefty fine on a movie he returned weeks late that he thinks may have been "Apollo 13." Earlier that year, the company he helped to found, the Pure Atria Corporation, which made software development products, was bought by its chief rival, the Rational Software Corporation, in a deal worth $525 million. Mr. Hastings, who taught math for two years in Swaziland right after college, had only recently started his studies for a master's degree in education at Stanford, figuring on a life that blended politics, education policy and philanthropy. He was 36.

Yet he couldn't get out of his head the idea that people might resent paying late fees so much that they might prefer to join a DVD rental club the way one joins a health club. "This was 1997 and everything was e-commerce, so I said let's do this over the Internet," he said.

"People thought this idea was crazy that consumers would rent movie through the mail," Mr. Hastings said. "But it was precisely because it was a contrarian idea that enabled us to get ahead of our competitors."

Mr. Hastings now confesses that his service was not much to boast about in the first couple of years. Netflix introduced its Web site in May 1998, but initially it was no different from a video store, except you had to wait for a new movie to arrive by mail. Early adopters rented one DVD at a time - and paid a late fee if the disk was not returned on time.

Sixteen months passed before the company began a subscription service that allows users to keep movies for as long as they liked. Then, as today, users browse the Netflix site and select DVD's they want to view. The company sends new customers the first three DVD's on their list, assuming they are available, in envelopes that are reused to return the disks at no charge. Customers can rent as many DVD's as they like but can't rent more than three at once - unless they're willing to pay more for five or eight at a time.

Today, the company operates 30 distribution centers around the country, but in the late 1990's, it operated a single facility near San Francisco, so DVD's could spend days in the postal system traveling cross-country. "It wasn't a very consumer-satisfying experience, except in the San Francisco Bay Area," Mr. Hastings said. Now, one of every nine residents of San Francisco is a Netflix subscriber, he added.

It was essential that the company set a national goal; but at the same time, staffing and supplying warehouses around the country, so that more customers could get next- day delivery, proved prohibitively expensive, especially when only one in 10 households owned a DVD player in 2000. Revenues were growing, but Netflix was still losing money at an alarming rate - so much that, although it had raised another $50 million in venture capital in early 2000, the company had less than $5 million in the bank 18 months later.

"It felt at the time very touch and go," Mr. Hastings said. By the fourth quarter of 2001, however, Netflix was enjoying positive cash flow, and in May 2002 the company went public, despite an ice-cold market for new stock offerings.

IN retrospect, Mr. Hastings wishes he had waited longer to go public. By the time the investment bankers were willing to sell shares in Netflix, the company was no longer desperate for the $94 million it ended up raising in its initial public offering.

"In hindsight, what triggered Amazon and Blockbuster to compete with us is they could see how profitable we were and how fast we were growing," Mr. Hastings said. It has also meant that Mr. Hastings is constantly fending off analysts and commentators who are convinced that long-term survival requires that he sell the company to a large suitor to ward off the competition.

Netflix has $175 million in cash and is carrying no debt, Mr. Hastings noted, and it has "no desire or need to be acquired." Mr. Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray is inclined to agree that Netflix can survive, but wondered if independence is the wisest route.

"They can survive on their own, and there's a good chance they will," Mr. Rashtchy said. "They are, after all, the single biggest player in this area, and singularly focused. It's just that they face a very bumpy road on their own."

Wal-Mart was the first large company to jump into the market, in June 2003. The impetus, said Amy Colella, a Walmart.com spokeswoman, was a spike in DVD sales.

"With clearly more and more of customers moving to that format, we decided on a DVD service for our customers," Ms. Colella said.

Wal-Mart operates 14 DVD distribution centers nationwide, and sells a subscription that allows a customer two, not three, DVD's at one time for $12.97 a month. But Mr. Hastings does not seem concerned that the world's largest retailer has entered his market. "They've been in the market two years, but they haven't been pushing it very hard," he said. Ms. Colella disputed that characterization but would not provide subscription numbers.

Mr. Hastings's reaction to Blockbuster's entry into his market has not been indifferent. "Blockbuster has been tremendously aggressive in competing with us," he said. The company has lowered its price twice and now charges $14.99, $3 less than Netflix for the three-rental plan, and Blockbuster's offer also includes two free store rentals each month.

Five years ago, physical stores were considered a huge drawback in the race for online dominance in a given sector. Yet the presence of Blockbuster stores across the country, coupled with the stores' profits that the company is pouring into a television ad campaign, are proving to be critical so far in penetrating the online DVD rental market.

"We think our in-store passes are a clear differentiator for us," said Shane Evangelist, senior vice president and general manager of Blockbuster.com. The company was building its online service for two years before its debut last July. "Being the market leader in rentals, and having the leading brand, we had the luxury to watch as the market developed," Mr. Evangelist said. The company operates 23 distribution centers.

Amazon.com has no operating centers in the United States, but Mr. Hastings said that he was convinced that it was only a matter of time. Last year, Amazon began an online DVD rental business in Britain, though the company has refused to comment on whether it has plans to enter the American market.

"We're just thankful Blockbuster and Amazon didn't enter four years ago," Mr. Hastings said.

Ultimately, video on demand poses the greatest threat to Netflix - a fact Mr. Hastings is inclined to acknowledge. "Our competitors are a bigger threat next year," he said. "But in 10 years, digital distribution is a bigger threat."

The good news for Mr. Hastings - and for executives at Blockbuster, given that the ability to download any DVD via the Internet or cable could inflict even more damage on video stores - is that video on demand is a long way off, despite more than a decade of promises.

"It'll be at least four or five years away, if not 10 years, before we reach the tipping point on video on demand," said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a research and consulting firm in Bethesda, Md. One major hurdle, Mr. Arlen and others said, has been Hollywood studios' reluctance to accept a new delivery system as long as DVD's are still proving so lucrative.

Mr. Hastings anticipates that it will be 2010, if not 2015, before a lot of the movie-watching public is downloading films over the Internet. Mr. Hastings is convinced that the same features that draw people to his DVD rental service will induce them to use his service to download digitally delivered movies. Netflix has devoted millions of dollars to building an easily navigated Web site while it refines a complex software system that recommends movies based on customer ratings.

"If we differentiate the Web site well enough, with rating histories and other features consumers want, that's our strategic leverage" once people start receiving movies via the Internet, Mr. Hastings said.

Mr. Hastings is used to people counting him out. "To be doubted and be successful is particularly satisfying," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/bu...al/22rivl.html


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AMD To Demo A Dual-Core Desktop Chip
Michael Kanellos

Advanced Micro Devices is expected show off a dual-core processor for desktops at its headquarters Wednesday, but is keeping tight lipped about the details.

The chip, code-named Toledo, will feature two separate Athlon 64 processing cores on the same piece of silicon. It will start appearing in PCs in the second half of 2005, said Theresa DeOnis, desktop brand manager for AMD.

Putting two cores on a chip will allow a computer to perform two tasks at once, she said, or run specially tweaked applications faster. Windows XP Professional will be the operating system of choice for many dual-core desktops as it is already threaded to run two processors.

"We don't have a lot of multithreaded applications on the market yet, but it (Toledo) will perform will in multitasking environments," she said.

The chip will come in the same package and fit in the same PCs as current single-core Athlons, DeOnis said. Nonetheless, she declined to provide the clock speed or other details.

AMD and rival Intel will both start coming out with dual-core chips this year and each can claim to be ahead of the other in different ways. Intel's first dual core chip for desktops, code-named Smithfield, will come out in the second quarter, ahead of Toledo.

AMD, however, will come out with a dual-core version of its Opteron chip for servers in the middle of the year. Intel won't have a dual-core Xeon until 2006, although it will release a dual-core Itanium in the second quarter. IBM has been selling a dual-core chip for servers, The Power4, for a few years.

Dual-core chips are an easier fit for the server market as many servers come with two processors already. However, the number of server chips shipped in a year pale in comparison to the number of desktop chips. Server customers are also notoriously conservative, so adoption won't take place immediately, analysts have said.

In the gamer desktop market, Intel will come out with a dual core-chip for high-end PCs this year that will also sport HyperThreading, which effectively will allow the chip to mimic, to a certain degree, a four-processor system. AMD won't likely do so until 2006, DeOnis said, but that's because most games aren't multithreaded and therefore can't effectively take advantage of two cores.

Intel's first dual-core chip for notebooks, code-named Yonah, comes out late this year. AMD won't have a notebook chip until after Toledo. Toledo can be used in notebooks, DeOnis said, but it has a 110-watt thermal envelope, relatively high for a notebook chip.
http://news.com.com/AMD+to+demo+a+du...3-5586314.html


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Apple Unveils Four New iPod Models
AP

Apple Computer Inc. on Wednesday released four new versions of its popular iPod for users who want either a compact device or a full-color media player that can display photos.

The photo-capable iPod features a high-resolution screen and can hold up to 25,000 digital pictures, Apple said. A 30-gigabyte model carries a price of $349, while the 60-gigabyte version will cost $449.

Meanwhile, Apple also unveiled two news iPod minis with greater storage memory and increased battery life. The 4-gigabyte model will sell for $199, and a 6-gigabyte model will retail for $249.

All four devices require Apple's iTunes software, which is compatible with both Mac and Windows operating systems.

Apple shares rose $1.41 to $86.70 in premarket activity.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T


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The Return of Free Internet
Posted by timothy

from the probably-browser-limited dept.

valdean writes "Remember the days of ad-supported dial-up Internet access from the likes of Netzero and Altavista Free Access? Those days, and the business model that supplied them, are long gone... or perhaps not. A new effort is being explored by California-based FreeFi Networks. Last week, the company launched what will be a nationwide network of ad-supported wi-fi hotspots. Ads will appear in what FreeFi calls a "narrow, persistent band of content" across the bottom of the user's screen. To provide incentive to America's coffee shops, they'll share advertising revenues with the hosting venue. Has 'free Internet access' finally arrived?"
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/02/2...tid=193&tid=95


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Ad Supported FreeFi
Posted by samc

FreeFi Networks, a hotspot provider, has launched a nationwide network of free, advertising- sponsored hotspots in locations such as shopping centers, airports and cafes. It will develop and manage the free hotspots in qualifying locations at no cost to the venue owner other than the cost of a broadband connection.

FreeFi says it will support the network with advertising that appears in what it called a "narrow, persistent band of content" across the bottom of the user's screen.

The gamble: will users reject the use of "adware" on their screens?

The company said that the content bar does not involve adware or spyware and will not be present on the user's laptop when not connected to the FreeFi network. Pushed content could include advertising as well as other types of information, such as information about the local area.

Besides managing the hotspot for free, FreeFi said it will share advertising revenue with venue owners. A California restaurant chain, Togo's Eateries, is currently offering the service.

FreeFi says their service uses 802.11g with a powerfull 251mw radio linked to external RADIUS and SQL servers located at FreeFi’s Network Operations Center (NOC). The hotspot package is used for user authentication, data storage, bandwidth management, and page redirect.

"It's another option for business owners considering offering Wi-Fi as a valuable amenity with zero cost or risk," Larry Laffer, FreeFi's president, said in a statement. Of course it's not really "zero cost" since the owner has to pay the DSL bill.

Other inexpensive managed services are available for businesses interested in offering WiFi, although the hardware and service is not free. Sputnik introduced last week their SputnikNet Premier service, a hosted wireless network management service that can accept online payments for wireless Internet service through credit card billing and PayPal.

It's a hosted service managing both networks and subscribers.

There is no server hardware to maintain and you are always on the latest version of the software, without the hassle of software upgrades or field service visits. SputnikNet Premier is targeting businesses without technical staff or fast-growing ISPs managing multiple networks. It has Modules for Pre- Paid Cards, RADIUS, PayPal and credit card billing.

I'm a fan of Sputnik. Their management system might enable many wide-area networks. Free or pay.

It would be a no brainer from the small business perspective, if someone could offer hardware, broadband backbone and management service at no cost. Revenue from music, videos and games might make it happen - although it would be a challenge. Maybe the first 3 months could be free, then the package costs the venue operator perhaps $25/month.

Whole neighborhoods might be interconnected with news and location-specific advertising. Messaging and local music could be featured.

Neighbornode, an application that allows people to share their Wi-Fi connection, add a community online bulletin board to post "for sale" items and trade gossip. A blogging black box like What Counts can enable "citizen journalists".

Austin Wireless is good at free community nodes with music. They will make more than 175 newspapers and magazine accessible at Austin's hot spots in a deal with NewsStand.

The Austin Wireless City Project, designed to deliver free Wi-Fi access to the public. The project consists of 75 locations in Austin and 117 locations worldwide -- Less Networks helps support the global locations.

Many WiFi enthusiasts in Portland are using the Portless WRT-54G flash software by Irving Popovetsky and Brandon Psmythe. It embeds NoCat software to enable a one-piece WiFi box. No computer is necessary. Just plug the modified WRT-54G ($70) into a phone jack.

Hot spot advertising could help make WiFi free - especially in high traffic areas with lots of eyeballs.
http://dailywireless.org/modules.php...ticle&sid=3682


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Budget Motel Chain Offers Free Long Distance, Wi-Fi

Free HBO and continental breakfasts aren't the amenities that have Microtel Inn & Suites guests chattering, sometimes for hours on end.

It's the free, unlimited long distance calls and wireless high-speed Internet service.

The economy-budget motel chain is now offering those services as well as free unlimited local calling in all its guest rooms at its 265 locations nationwide.

As telecommunications services get cheaper, more hotels and motels will be offer the same amenities, industry analysts predict.

"It's something new to lure more customers in, and it really doesn't hurt a hotel's revenue stream much because telephone revenues are small," said Julian Perlmutter, a lodging analyst for Chicago-based Morningstar.

Free long-distance calling is a big bonus at Microtel considering the chain typically charges less than $50 for a one night's stay — about the cost of a 20- minute long-distance call placed from some upscale hotels.

"We've stayed in a lot of motels and many times you have to pay $10 just to have them turn on the phone services. ... Being able to call home is very important," said Myrtle Smith of Latrobe, Pa., who stayed Tuesday night at a Microtel in Tifton with her husband, Melvin, who travels with his work in asphalt paving.

The free phone and Internet services are aimed at attracting new customers and adding value and convenience to those who already stay with the chain, said Mike Leven, president and CEO of Microtel's Atlanta-based parent company, US Franchise Systems Inc.

While a handful of hotels offer free long-distance calling to preferred customers, Microtel's approach of offering it to all guests is new to the industry, analysts said.

"They might be the first, but I'm sure with more time it's going to be at least part of everyone's frequent-stay program," Perlmutter said.

Free, unlimited phone and Internet service at hotels makes sense when considering how inexpensive those services have become, said Robert LaFleur, a hotel industry analyst for Susquehanna Financial Group in New York.

"That sounds pretty impressive, but at the end of the day they're not giving away that much," LaFleur

Free local calling has been offered for years at many hotels. However, over the past year, more limited-service hotels have started offering free high-speed Internet access in an attempt to siphon guests away from bigger, more expensive hotels.

The trend will likely continue and force bigger hotels to follow suit, LaFleur said.

"Over time that guest push-back will get to the point where the full-service guys will have to offer free as well," LaFleur said. "High-speed Internet access has become the kind of standard amenity that most people require in the places they stay."

Offered since Feb. 2, the new amenities have been a big hit with guests at the Microtel Inn along busy Interstate 75 in Tifton, about 200 miles south of Atlanta, said the motel's manager, Jana Morrison.

"We're really glad we can offer this," she said. "It's very important to the business travelers to be able to use their laptops. To the family travelers, I think it's important for them to call home. The fact that it's free is an added bonus."

At the Tifton Microtel, they even have a loaner wireless PC adapter for guests whose laptops lack built-in adapters.

John Mascoe, chief executive officer for VanCoe Environmental of Wilkinson, Ind., said he won't stay at a motel that doesn't offer at least a wireless or a DSL connection.

"It's important," he said, as he entered the motel lobby with his laptop and rolling suitcase. "My business revolves around that. The majority of people on the road are business customers and they need to stay in touch."

Mascoe and other Microtel guests said they were more impressed with the addition of wireless Internet service than with free long distance because cellular phones with unlimited calling plans have largely weaned them from hotel phones.

"Most everybody has a cell phone," Mascoe said. "You get free long distance on cell phones and that works well unless the battery dies."

Guest Leon Brown was grateful for the free long distance. The singer from Bayonne, N.J., who is part of a New York-based musical ensemble touring the East Coast was able to save some of his mobile minutes Wednesday by using the motel's lobby phone to call a pharmacy for a prescription refill.

"They make it very easy," Brown said of the free phone service. "I think it's a good feature."

The musical group's Russian-born bus driver, Andrey Stupenkov, had considered calling his sister in Moscow when he heard about the free long distance. However, he was soon informed that overseas charges apply. Calls are only free within the continental United States.

"We're generous, but not that generous," motel manager Morrison said with a laugh.
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/...ree-wifi_x.htm


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3MBPS Data Speeds Predicted As Mainstream In 2006
Mobile Pipeline Staff

HSDPA, a cellular data technology that promises typical speeds of between 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps, will start being widely deployed later this year and will become a mass market phenomena next year, the CEO of Ericsson said Tuesday.

The fast wireless technology is needed because the industry is nearing what Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg called a "triple play;" telephony, Internet access and streaming television. HSDPA is an upgrade to slower GSM- based W-CDMA wireless networks which are already being deployed. Those networks provide typical speeds of between 300Kbps and 400Kbps.

"I think we can say that the first phase of 3G deployments is behind us, and we can confirm that 2005 will be the year for mass-market growth for W- CDMA and the start for mobile broadband," Svanberg said in a speech at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France.

Another Ericsson official, provided more specifics about what the company believes is the roll-out timetable for HSDPA.

"The networks will be upgraded second half of 2005. Initial HSDPA terminals, PC cards, supporting up to 3.6 Mbps, will be available at the same time," Mikael Back, the company's vice president of W-CDMA radio networks, said in a statement. "In early 2006, HSDPA will most likely be introduced in smartphones as well as the second generation of PC cards. We are also confident that we will see HSDPA integrated in laptops in 2007."

HSDPA is necessary to help wireless operators, who are Ericsson's primary customers, sell more services that will generate more revenue, according to Svanberg. The new technology will follow what already has been a robust period of growth, Svanberg said.

"We have experienced the strongest growth of mobile users ever, with 300 million new subscribers in 2004," Svanberg said. "This is exciting for a company with a vision of being the prime driver in an all-communicating world."
http://www.mobilepipeline.com/news/6...CSKH0CJUMEKJVN


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NextNet’s Public Safety Win Strengthens McCaw’s Grand Plans For ITFS
Caroline Gabriel

Public safety is one of the key ‘low hanging fruit’ markets that pre- WiMAX vendors believe they can attack at an early stage, before other sectors like last mile really take off. We have seen companies such as Proxim and Motorola focusing heavily on optimizing their platforms for these applications, and now NextNet Wireless has trumped them with a hugely important agreement to provide the network for a major US emergency response project. This will not only lead to a major contract and act as a valuable endorsement of NextNet’s abilities in this sector, but will be a high profile proof of the concept on which NextNet’s parent company, Craig McCaw’s Clearwire, is building its ambitious business plan – that the underused 2.5GHz ITFS spectrum previously allocated in the US to educational broadcasting is perfect to be the basis of a national broadband wireless network that will disrupt the economics of the US wireless industry.

The NextNet Expedience non-line of sight technology, which will be migrated to the mobile WiMAX standard when that is ratified, is being used in the second phase of the Smart Nets Emergency Communications System. With phase two close to completion, Smart Nets will then transition to the GUARD program, which will provide a national model for adoption in urban areas in many US regions.

The GUARD (Geospatially-Aware Urban Approaches for Responding to Disasters), program is a collaboration between Rosettex Technology & Ventures Group, with Thirteen/WNET, Raytheon, NextNet, KenCast and Grey Island Systems.

GUARD establish an operational prototype in New York City, and follow this with systems in Washington DC, Las Vegas and Missouri. Based on these roll-outs, it will provide an open platform and model for communities around the country to adapt for their local needs.

The Smart Nets phase two capabilities were demonstrated last week in New York City, with satellite uplinks to Washington DC, using spectrum owned by metro area broadcaster Thirteen/WNET. Thirteen/ WNET is itself a pre-WiMAX pioneer, having used Redline equipment to create a link between two studios, and with plans to offer end user wireless television services over WiMAX. It is in a strong position because it was allocated significant chunks of 2.5GHz ITFS spectrum (originally for educational programming) in the New York metro area and now, under changes to FCC rules, can use this for other purposes or lease it to partners such as Smart Nets – or, indeed, Clearwire, when it brings its NextNet-based ISP service to New York.

McCaw has purchased ITFS and MMDS spectrum in many areas but where it is not available, has said he will enter leasing deals with the holders, often regional or local broadcasters. Although the common wisdom is that 2.5GHz spectrum is, apart from Clearwire, almost entirely held by Sprint and BellSouth – which would either sit on their holdings or charge high fees for access – their licenses are mainly in MMDS, while the ITFS spectrum is held by a large number of smaller operators, including television stations and churches. McCaw therefore has the chance to repeat what his previous venture, Nextel, did in sub-1GHz bands, amassing a patchwork of underused and undervalued spectrum to create a national network by stealth and at relatively low cost.

Significantly, a string of ISPs that have ITFS spectrum are adopting NextNet gear, suggesting they are part of the extended McCaw patchwork. They include WatchTV, which controls 33 channels of ITFS and MMDS in Ohio; Speednet, whose licenses cover 500,000 households in north and central Michigan; and Gryphon Wireless, which uses ITFS channels in Nebraska. Clearwire itself, originally a Florida-focused WISP, was also an ITFS holder before being acquired by McCaw.

“Spectrum availability has long been one of the greatest obstacles to effective emergency communications,” said Bill Baker, president of Thirteen/WNET. “The success of the Smart Nets prototype in tests to date supports our belief that the ITFS spectrum is the answer that first responders have been looking for – a robust, dedicated digital pipe, widely available in towns and cities nationwide, and excellently suited for two-way transmission of critical voice, data and video information that can save lives.”

And what is true for emergency response is equally valid for commercial services. The ITFS spectrum (6MHz channels in the 2.5GHz range) provides sufficiently wide bandwidth to support audio, video and data plus mobility.

NextNet, which is owned by Craig McCaw’s Clearwire ISP company, bases its public safety line on its new Mobile Subscriber Unit (MSU). This provides a fully mobile experience – rather than portable, as in previous products – on the Expedience OFDM network, supporting a pre-standard version of 802.16e, to which NextNet will migrate once specifications are ratified. The mobile unit has been tested by some service provider customers but is now being packaged to be targeted specifically at the public safety and transportation sectors. It will provide all the same functions as the fixed subscriber units, said NextNet, including IP voice and video streaming and VPN support, but from vehicles.

“This new technology revolutionizes the economics for delivery of mobile data,” claimed NextNet’s CEO Guy Kelnhofer. “It enables 100% of the mobile data project dollars to go directly to public safety vehicles.”

The MSU is currently in volume production, and is available for sale in the 3.5GHz band and MMDS band (pending FCC approval in the US).

The ITFS frequencies are in licensed 2.5GHz-2.7GHz bands, originally allocated by the FCC to non-profit and educational organizations for one-way analog broadcasting of educational television programming. In the 1980s, the FCC allowed these groups to lease their excess capacity to commercial service operators, and in 1998 allowed two- way digital operation. It is likely to permit change of usage of the whole spectrum, which is suitable for WiMAX services or mobile television.

The appeal of ITFS is that many states already have broadcast networks in these frequencies, complete with towers, even though these are currently restricted to educational programming. Public broadcasting towers could provide national coverage, delivering television and broadband wireless services for a relatively low investment by the operator. The ITFS frequencies are in licensed 2.5GHz-2.7GHz bands, originally allocated by the FCC to non-profit and educational organizations for one-way analog broadcasting of educational television programming. In the 1980s, the FCC allowed these groups to lease their excess capacity to commercial service operators, and in 1998 allowed two-way digital operation. It is likely to permit change of usage of the whole spectrum, which is suitable for WiMAX services or mobile television.

The appeal of ITFS is that many states already have broadcast networks in these frequencies, complete with towers, even though these are currently restricted to educational programming. Public broadcasting towers could provide national coverage, delivering television and broadband wireless services for a relatively low investment by the operator.
http://www.wimaxtrends.com/feature.htm


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Consumer Ultrawideband: Coming Soon
Jeff Goldman

A white paper published by the research firm Parks Associates takes an optimistic view of the prospects for successful deployment of ultrawideband (UWB) technology in the coming year, despite the inability of the IEEE (define) to get the consensus needed to set a single standard. Analyst Kurt Scherf, the author, says significant UWB product announcements can be expected before the end of the year.

The paper, entitled "The Market for Ultra-Wideband Solutions," assesses the hype that has been attached to the technology for the past few years, and examines UWB's potential applications. The unique strengths of the technology, Scherf says, include its low power consumption, high quality of service, and high data rates—all of which make it particularly appropriate for cable replacement in the home between consumer electronics platforms, computer peripherals, and mobile devices.

From 2005 to 2008, Scherf suggests, the UWB market will shift from an initial focus on PCs and peripherals to devices like digital cameras, camcorders, and MP3 players, then finally to fixed consumer electronics platforms like HDTV receivers and set-top boxes. In the meantime, he says, UWB could well become a standard on all PC motherboards in the near future. "As a cable replacement solution, UWB will certainly fill a valued role in creating multimedia 'clusters' that are easier to configure and eliminate the 'rat's next' of cabling associated with the home entertainment ecosystem today," the paper states.

Meanwhile, the MultiBand OFDM Alliance and the UWB Forum, which supports DS-UWB, continue to fight for conflicting UWB standards. But Scherf says their differences may not have as negative an effect as some expect.

"The perception out there is that this industry is wringing its hands, but I think many, many companies have moved beyond the fact that IEEE standardization is not going to happen at this point in time," he says. "The game right now is getting the products out to market."

Scherf is hesitant to pick sides in the standards battle, though he does say the MultiBand OFDM Alliance appears to have a strategic advantage thanks to the number of chipset manufacturers and consumer electronics manufacturers backing it.

"They should have the leg up, but what all of us analysts are anxiously waiting to see is which manufacturers are going to take the next step to implement and integrate those products," he says. "We can all sit back and say one side should do this or that, but we can always be surprised, too."

Much of Scherf's optimism regarding the technology in general is due to the nature of the specific problems that UWB is intended to solve, particularly cable replacement for short-range connections in the home. "Our take on the market is that portable devices are really going to play a critical part in the multimedia experience that consumers have in and around the home," he says. "For that space, an ultrawideband solution is ideally positioned to be the cable replacement."

Once the first end-user products ship in late 2005, Scherf suggests, the market is likely to grow fast, with annual UWB chipset revenues exceeding $1 billion by the end of 2009.
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3483806


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Volume Lowered on Wimax Hype

Wimax: 3% of broadband users by '09

Responding to the same InStat study, the Enquirer leads with "Wimax Likely to Have Limited Success", while Mobile Pipeline runs the headline "WiMAX Could Alter Telecom Industry." Both are responding to new predictions that the oft-hyped wireless broadband technology will likely only grab three percent of total broadband customers world-wide by 2009 - if all goes well. That's a far cry from the Wimax hype of 2004; many proclaimed it would quickly become a competitor for DSL and cable.
http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/60406


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Ma Bell's Kids Will Live On The Net
Steven Levy

We're seeing the phone call turn into just another Internet tool, like e-mail or instant messaging.

Have telephone companies gone off the hook? In the last few weeks, AT&T has been gobbled by SBC and MCI snapped up by Verizon. It's like some toddler upchucked his alphabet soup.

Part of this ferment comes from the telco struggle to deal with new technologies, but the most disruptive change of all —voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), pronounced by geeks as "v-oy-p"—is only beginning to make its mark. "Telephone service used to be based on a huge infrastructure of high-priced equipment," says Peter Sisson, a former Bell Labs researcher turned entrepreneur. "And now it's just software."

Think about that. All those costly switching stations and all those miles of wire and fiber optic trumped by the ability to plug your telephone into the Internet, where voice is as easily transmitted as e-mail, iTunes songs and pictures of Teri Hatcher. That's why a company called Vonage can sell 400,000 subscribers unlimited long distance service for $25 a month, simply by letting them plug their phones into broadband Internet instead of phone jacks. And that's certainly why the Swedish mavericks who created the Kazaa file-sharing service could use the same kind of digital bucket-brigade-style model to come up with an Internet peer-to-peer-based phone service called Skype.

More than 25 million people talk to each other free, from anywhere in the world, on Skype, a number that grows by 140,000 a day. Businesses are using it for conferencing and friends separated by thousands of miles keep a line open to each other all day. At that price, why not?

What's more, with the pervasiveness of wireless Internet connections, you can use services like Skype pretty much anywhere, without worrying about your allotment of roaming minutes. Vonage, in fact, has just announced a $100 Wi-Fi phone. Just sit at the Starbucks and gab with your buddies in Brazil.

The next step comes from Teleo, a company formed by the aforementioned Sisson and publicly announced last week.

Directed toward the "mobile professional" (a big market, since nobody who's stationary will ever admit it), Teleo is something like Vonage, in that it can replace traditional long-distance service by letting you plug a telephone into the USB port of your computer and call all over the world, for a flat two cents a minute. It's also something like Skype, because it's a peer-to-peer system where the calls you make and receive from others on the Internet are free.

Teleo also claims a more effective means of making itself available to those using the Net behind corporate firewalls. But its most interesting advance is a frank treatment of VoIP as just another digital tool like e-mail or instant messaging. It blends phone calls into your software applications.

For instance, you can specify that calls directed to your Teleo phone number ring your computer, your mobile phone or your voicemail. If the latter, the messages can appear in your Microsoft Outlook in box as e-mail. Also, when you're surfing the Internet, Teleo recognizes when phone numbers appear on Web pages. A single "click-to-call" on the number, and you're connected by voice. The cost for this is $4.95 a month, less money than the taxes most of us spend on our regular phone service.

I mention taxes because right now all sorts of strange tariffs and fees are slapped onto your phone bills. It comes along with the byzantine regulatory structure of the phone system, a construct that has increasingly drifted from the technological reality of the 21st century. Sisson predicts that as Internet calling prevails, "innovation and competition [will drive] prices down to nil." But others fear that regulators—spurred by states that want to keep collecting taxes and lobbyists from the current telephony giants—will inevitably set their sights on VoIP. Another fear is that telco's selling broadband will block the new services, a charge recently leveled by Vonage toward an unnamed provider.

Maybe I'm just overly eager to see my voicemail relegated to my e-mail in box, but my guess is that regulators or not, the VoIP revolution is inevitable. If AT&T can hang up, anything is possible.
http://www.vonage-forum.com/article1687.html


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Satellite ISPs Gain Ground
Paul Korzeniowski

Satellite services have emerged as a good alternative to terrestrial lines for a few niche applications. Satellite television vendors have been broadening their product portfolios with Internet access and telephony services so they can provide consumers with all of their data, voice and video services.

When it comes to high-speed data networks, users tend to focus on cable modems or digital subscriber lines, but they do have a third option: satellite services. Though not nearly as popular as the others alternatives, satellite systems have found a growing number of fans. Approximately 100,000 consumers and businesses in the U.S. rely on them for Internet access.

Interest in these systems is rising for a few reasons, starting with recent technological improvements in satellite networks. Carriers are moving away from proprietary data protocols, which require a great deal of systems integration work and are difficult to maintain, to TCP/IP, where new links can be connected more easily. "It's been a slow process but satellite providers are starting to move to more standard protocols," said Chris Baugh, an industry analyst with Northern Sky Research.

However, the pairing of IP and satellite networks is not a natural one. A satellite link travels from a user's desktop to a network switch to a "very small aperture terminal" (VSAT) -- basically a satellite dish -- that exchanges information with a spacecraft orbiting the earth 22,300 miles away. Each time a data packet is shipped it travels up from the sending system to the orbiting satellite and then back down to a receiving dish. The time needed to make the trip translates into one-quarter of a second. The framing, queuing and switching TCP/IP relies on to ensure that packets arrive at the proper destination can increase that time to as much as half a second.

Off by a Factor of a Hundred

TCP/IP was designed for networks where delays are measured in milliseconds rather than tenths of seconds, so satellite delays can disrupt the acknowledgements and handshaking that is at the core of the network protocol. This problem can decrease network performance: Whenever a line becomes garbled, TCP/IP adapts by slowing down the transmission rate, and satellite network transmission speeds may slow to a crawl.

To address the problem, equipment vendors and service providers devised a variety of workarounds of known problems within the system. Packet spoofing, for example, fools a sending system into thinking it has received acknowledgments for shipped packets so it continues to transmit data steadily.

Another challenge is that satellite systems have to account for the weather. Heavy rain or snow can slow down transmissions and increase the number of dropped packets. Vendors have developed various schemes to address the latency and weather problems, but these techniques often add overhead to data transmissions, and that lowers throughput.

These satellite communications limitations exacerbate another problem with the networks: a lack of bandwidth. Terrestrial carriers are upgrading their fiber-optic backbones to OC-192 links, which transmits data at up to 10 gbps, while satellite lines typically top out at 45 mbps.

Easier Coming Down than Going Up

The bandwidth constraints are most evident when companies try to upload information. Unlike many terrestrial services, satellite services support different transmission rates for uploads and downloads. That's because these networks were optimized for video transmissions, where complex images are shipped to tens -- or even hundreds -- of endpoints and little, if any, data is sent up from those end stations. As a result, download speeds can be 10 to 20 times faster than upload rates. While satellite network transmission rates have been improving, they are not as fast as cable modem or DSL systems.

Users also discover that deployment of satellite networks can be tricky. Customers have to make sure that they have a clear line-of-sight for the transmission; something as innocuous as a tree could block a sight line so that no information flows over the link.

Price has been another hurdle for satellite suppliers. Wireline carriers rely on less costly equipment, possess more network capacity to spread out their operating costs, and have larger customer bases, which means greater revenue than satellite suppliers. Consequently, a satellite link may cost two to ten times as much as a terrestrial line. "There aren't many cases where a satellite option wins a head-to-head competition with a cable modem or DSL service," Northern Sky's Baugh told TechNewsWorld.

New Opportunity Emerges

As a result, satellite services have emerged as a good alternative to terrestrial lines only for a few niche applications. Satellite television vendors have been broadening their product portfolios with Internet access and telephony services so they can provide consumers with all of their data, voice and video services. Hughes Network Systems, Inc., a subsidiary of The DirectTV Group Inc., has been promoting its DirectWay Internet access services as a complement to its satellite broadcasting services.

In rural areas, satellite is often the only communications option. "Satellite is able to offer universal coverage, which is something wired and wireless carriers cannot," noted Victor Schnee, president of market research firm Probe Financial Associates Inc. There are between 20 and 25 million homes in the U.S. that fall into that category, so Starband America Inc., a subsidiary of satellite service provider Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd., has also had some success in this space.

After September 11, 2001, corporations understood that their disaster recovery plans must take into account the possibility that a telecommunications central office could be wiped out. As a result, the traditional technique of relying on alternative landline carriers doesn't provide desired resiliency, but satellite links do.

"Recently, satellite vendors have been aggressively promoting their networks as backups to landline and wireless networks," Probe Financial Associates' Schnee said.

Dot-Bomb Fallout

These successes arose amid a number of high-profile flops. Like other telecommunications segments, the satellite space has had to dig out from the dot-com bust. A few years ago, industry heavyweights including Bill Gates and Craig McCaw backed various ventures that planned to launch new satellites for data communications services. When the dot-com bubble burst, those ventures were canceled.

Given the nature of satellite communications -- vendors have to plan years in advance to take advantage of new spaceship launches -- the recovery process has taken a bit longer than landline and wireless communications.

Still, at least one high-profile venture from the dot-com era remains. As 2004 closed, Wildblue Inc. began testing its high-speed satellite Internet service, which relies on the Anik F2 satellite that went into orbit last fall. Wildblue is planning a nationwide rollout of its services next summer. The company is looking to lower monthly service from the $75 range, where it is now for many services, to the $50 range, which would make it more competitive with cable modem and DSL services.

How much of an impact these new services will have on the market is unclear. "As of now, satellite providers are taking a wait-and-see attitude when it comes to Wildblue," concluded Northern Sky's Baugh. "If the company has a great deal of success, then competitors will be forced to respond, but as of now, they are waiting for the company to deliver on its promises."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40223.html


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Surveillance

Telecoms Feel Heat On Wiretaps

Ottawa wants to toughen 31-year-old rules Violators could face 5 years in jail, $500,000 fines
Tyler Hamilton

Officers and directors of telecom service providers could face fines as high as $500,000 or up to five years in prison if their companies fail to comply with wiretapping rules being considered by the federal government, the Toronto Star has learned.

A service provider that violates or is likely to violate the proposed rules could also be hit with a court order to shut down certain operations.

"There will be some people in the industry who argue this takes it a little too far," said Kirsten Embree, a lawyer with Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP's communications law practice.

Ottawa has argued new wiretapping, or "lawful access," rules are needed to keep pace with technological advances, such as Internet-based phone services, and for Canada to move forward with international cyber-crime initiatives.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has lobbied hard for a change, arguing existing rules created in 1974 hinder public safety. The group wants to make it easier for police to snoop on the BlackBerry emails, text messages and phone conversations of Canadians.

Ottawa appears to be inching closer to draft legislation. After a 30-month consultation process and more than 20 closed meetings with stakeholders, officials from Industry Canada, the Department of Justice, and Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada met on Feb. 7 with members of the telecom industry to discuss some of the government's plan.

Among the proposed rules:

A requirement that service providers, within 72 hours of a lawful access request, be able to intercept all types of communications in real time, and to have the capability of doing simultaneous interceptions of one or more customers. Unclear is whether "simultaneous interceptions" means a few, dozens or hundreds at the same time.

Interception would also include the full content of a communication, not just the time, location and nature of the communication.

Companies, public schools, hospitals, churches and retirement homes that run internal telecommunications networks to serve their employees or clientele could be exempt from the rules, while service providers with less than 100,000 subscribers would get partial exemption.

All service providers affected by the new rules would have to file a report with the justice minister within six months of the law going into effect, detailing their degree of compliance.

The government has maintained from the outset that lawful access requests would be subject to the same scrutiny as a search warrant.

Michael Geist, an Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, said penalties of up to five years in prison for non-compliance ensure the co-operation of service providers.

"There's no question if this is put into place the telcos will comply," said Geist, hinting the days of service providers standing up for privacy rights of customers could be short-lived. "Things like real-time interception capabilities ... raise up those Orwellian fears of a Big Brother society."

The government is expected to have one-on-one consultations with service providers and equipment manufacturers this week and next. On March 9, government officials are scheduled to meet with consumer groups, privacy advocates, academics and civil libertarians. A day later, Jennifer Stoddart, the federal privacy commissioner, will be formally briefed. "At this stage, it's too early for us to comment on the proposal," a spokesperson for Stoddart said.

Embree, who is representing the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance, said a big concern for telecom-service providers and equipment makers remains the cost of compliance.

According to government documents, older "transmission apparatus" will be grandfathered, but any new network switches, routers, email servers, access nodes, voicemail servers, voice over Internet servers or software would need to comply.

Embree said there is an assumption in the proposal that service providers pay for this intercept capability in new equipment and software. And because Ottawa's proposed rules are broader than U.S. interception rules, gear makers will need to customize equipment for Canadian service providers.

"We have to make sure we are not asking our service providers and equipment manufacturers to build to standards that are going to be different elsewhere, otherwise we'll be out of step," Embree said.
http://canadalawfulaccess.notlong.com/

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On the Net, Unseen Eyes
Patrick Di Justo

ACCORDING to the complaint filed in United States District Court in Nashville, members of a girls' basketball team visiting Livingston Middle School in Tennessee spotted the camera right away. "It was high up in a corner, near a ceiling tile in the visitors' locker room," said the girls' lawyer, Mark Chalos. "It seemed to look out over the changing area."

The girls were wary at first, Mr. Chalos said, but ultimately didn't believe the camera would be recording them, so they continued changing their clothes. Later, one girl mentioned the camera to her coach, who confronted Livingston's principal. The coach was told that the camera was not positioned to observe dressing and undressing, the court papers contend. But after parents pressed the point, a school district official reviewed the video and reported that it showed the girls in "bras and panties."

That was enough to enrage the parents. But what they learned as they questioned school authorities outraged them even more. Logs from the server holding the school's video show that the images were available, unsecured, over the Internet, Mr. Chalos said, and indicate several instances of access by unknown outsiders.

With the proliferation of surveillance cameras in everyday life and Webcams at home computers, the ease with which unsecured cameras can be detected on the Internet has become an increasing cause of concern. Last month bloggers began reporting on the ability to tap into thousands of raw Webcam feeds with a few simple Google searches, and the Spanish police arrested a suspect on charges of developing a computer virus that can activate a Webcam without the owner's permission.

The Yankee Group, a market research firm, estimates that as many as 13 percent of American households have a Webcam attached to one of their computers, often sitting on top of a monitor in a living room or a bedroom.

Like each Web page, each camera on the Internet has an address, and unless the cameras have been concealed behind software firewalls, their addresses make them specifically searchable and identifiable.

A Google search one day last week indicated more than 10,000 such Web cameras, showing everything from bedrooms and living rooms to coin-operated laundry businesses and shoe stores to plasma reactors and mountain ranges. (Some of the cameras required passwords for access to the video.)

Other video sources are mostly security cameras that have been fed onto the Net, either deliberately to make them available to the public, like traffic or weather cams, or simply because putting the camera online was the easiest way to get the video signal into the building's security office.

If a Webcam image is deliberately displayed as a part of a public Web site, then the image is obviously intended to be seen by whoever visits that site. But a search for specific video camera signatures allows users to skip the Web site and view the camera image outside its intended context.

It is illegal to gain access to a secured computer without the proper authorization, even if the computer's password is publicly known. But is it legal to look at unsecured Webcams discovered as a result of a Google search, through the back door, so to speak? "It's probably not illegal, but you never know," said Annalee Newitz, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. "That would be the court case - would a reasonable person consider these cameras to be public?"

Jennifer Stisa Granick, executive director of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, agrees that it is a gray area. "The law states you have to know that you're not authorized to look at this information," she said. "But if it's available through Google, most people would reasonably think that it was all right. But what if a person didn't realize that their Webcam image was going out over the Internet? Do they have an expectation of privacy?"

That, Mr. Chalos said, is the crux of the case that the Tennessee girls' families brought against the Overton County school board, which administers the Livingston school. "You should never, ever, ever put cameras in locker rooms, period," Mr. Chalos said. "Any student undressing in a locker room has the right to privacy. And the school has to protect that."

But not everyone understands the difference between installing a "secure" camera system and making it truly secure. Axis Communications of Sweden specializes in establishing and maintaining Internet-based surveillance camera systems around the world. Fredrik Nilsson, Axis's general manager for the United States, points out that Axis cameras are installed with a default password, and it is up to the owners to make the cameras more or less secure.

"Just to give some perspective, we have delivered close to half a million cameras, and a Google search produces only a few hundred of them," Mr. Nilsson said. He acknowledges that default passwords to many camera systems, including those of Axis, are frequently traded over the Internet. Nevertheless, he maintains, Axis cameras are secure against accidental intrusion.

But protecting against accident is not the same as protecting against a deliberate invasion, Mr. Chalos said. "The images were protected only by the software's default username and password, which the school had never changed," he said. Lists of default passwords for many different types of computer systems are available on almost any "hacking" site on the Internet. "You've got to believe that pedophiles prowling the Internet, they're going to know that password," Mr. Chalos said.

The cameras at Livingston were installed over the summer of 2002 by EduTech of Dyersburg, Tenn., a company specializing in school security cameras. Twice every second, the cameras took high resolution color images of the school's hallways, exits and, as it turned out, the changing area of the visitors' locker room. The school's lawyers maintain that their clients wanted the locker room camera to face the door and that the camera was mounted incorrectly. EduTech maintains that it put the camera where it was told.

Images from the system, including those of the locker room, were fed into a video server that sat in an assistant principal's office. That server was a part of the school's internal network, which was in turn plugged into the Internet.

A lawyer for the school acknowledged in court papers that school officials never changed the video server's password from its default setting. But the lawyer said school officials had "insufficient information either to admit or deny" whether there was access to the images over the Internet.

Mr. Chalos's complaint, originally filed in District Court in June 2003, five months after the initial incident, asserts that someone outside the school gained access to the video server over the Internet several times over a six-month period. There is no way to tell precisely which video images might have been viewed by outsiders, but Mr. Chalos appeals to common sense.

"In theory, whoever broke in could have gotten onto the server, looked at pictures of hallways and classrooms, and that's it," Mr. Chalos said. "But my suspicion is, if they kept coming back, they had a more directed purpose."

The Internet visits, through computers in Clarksville, Tenn., Gainesboro, Tenn., and Rock Hill, S.C., came late at night or early in the morning, Mr. Chalos said. But the server holds not only live video, but also archived files as well. The unknown viewers are named in the suit as John Does and are cited for having potentially violated federal law on sexual exploitation of minors, Mr. Chalos said.

The original complaint listed 17 students and their parents as plaintiffs. Since then, Mr. Chalos said, he has determined that at least two other visiting teams had been captured on the locker-room camera, which was dismantled within days after the initial complaint. He filed a modified complaint last week on behalf of 34 students, seeking millions of dollars in damages.

Whether or not the cameras' video had been made available on the Internet by negligence, it has long been understood that people in the workplace or schools have little or no expectation of privacy from their teachers or employers. Having a supervisor monitor one's workplace activities, sometimes by video, has become a way of life for many Americans. But can employers, either deliberately or through neglect, make those images accessible for the world to see?

"The real scandal is why these Webcams are insecure," Ms. Newitz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. "This is just really, really sloppy. It is one thing for an employer to place employees under surveillance, but to take no effort to keep the Webcam access limited just to the workplace is really reprehensible."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/te...ts/24camm.html


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ISPs Forced To Report Child Porn

INTERNET service providers (ISPs) will face fines of up to $55,000 if they can be used to access child pornography and do not refer the information to the police.

Justice Minister Chris Ellison said today ISPs and internet content hosts (ICHs) would have strict obligations to report online child pornography to the Australian Federal Police from March 1.

"It can not be emphasised enough that behind every horrid piece of child pornography is a tragic case of an abused defenceless child, somewhere in the world," Senator Ellison said.

Under the new laws, an ISP or ICH will face penalties of $11,000 for the individual and $55,000 for body corporates if they are made aware that their service can be used to access material that they have reasonable grounds to believe is child pornography or child abuse material and they do not refer details of that material to the AFP within a reasonable time.

It will also be a federal offence, carrying a penalty of 10 years' jail, for a person to use the internet to access, transmit or make available child pornography or child abuse material.

This is on top of the current state and territory penalties.

Senator Ellison said it was hoped that internet providers would work closely with the AFP's online child exploitation team and the Australian High Tech Crime Centre to crack down on child exploitation and paedophile networks.

The AFP last month announced it was also taking part in an international task force to prevent online child abuse.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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Censorship

Operators Weigh How To Shield Kids From Phone Porn
Laurence Frost, AP Business Writer

Wireless companies are under pressure to police the services they carry amid mounting concern that today's increasingly versatile cell phones can be gateways to a lot more than football highlights and pop videos.

As governments and parent groups wake up to the problems posed by an expected global boom in mobile pornography and gambling, a few operators are taking action to restrict such content to over-18s.

"We've learned from fixed-line (Internet) that if you leave it too late the genie gets out of the bottle," said Al Russell, head of content services for Vodafone UK.

Parent Vodafone Group PLC, which has operations in 26 countries, backed voluntary age checks and content filtering in Britain and is urging partners and rivals to avoid heavy-handed regulation by supporting similar moves elsewhere in the world.

Russell was speaking at the annual 3GSM World Congress on the French Riviera, which ends Thursday. This year, the four-day mobile industry gathering was abuzz with the arrival of a plethora of third-generation phones and services offering speedy connections to a widening array of multimedia content.

Alongside the handset makers displaying their "3G" products in Cannes, there were almost twice as many content exhibitors listed as last year _ companies from Anxa Europe, an interactive software developer, to the self- explanatory XXX Providers.

Under voluntary British rules drawn up with groups including the National Family and Parenting Institute, wireless networks bar adult services to new handsets by default and lift the restrictions only after receiving proof that the user is 18 or over.

Industry initiatives are also under discussion in the United States and France, while Germany already has statutory rules and the Australian government has published a draft bill it plans to introduce in parliament.

Attempts to label and filter content for global consumption remain fraught with technical and civil liberties problems, as well as cultural differences. Even within the industrialized world, some countries are much less tolerant of explicit imagery than others.

Not far from the beachfront auditorium where Russell spoke, at a booth in the exhibit hall, a French company named 1633 Publishing was showing off its licensed Playboy phone content and celebrating its recent acquisition of the exclusive global rights to distribute Pamela Anderson images over mobiles.

At the next booth, Andreas Adami of Italy's Princess Productions was talking visitors through the pornographic film maker's lucrative sideline in mobile screensavers, videos and other content.

"We also have wallpapers and some spicy cartoons, even for younger people.... Bikini babes, lingerie, non-nude stuff," Adami said, holding up a demo phone. On the screen, five carefully chosen frames from one of the Milan-based company's productions ticked over in an endless loop.

Adami said there was no doubt 3G networks will be fertile ground for the porn industry as handsets with full video-streaming capability become more commonplace.

"Last year mobile sales accounted for about 20 percent of our revenue," he said. "This year it will probably be 60 percent."

Vodafone is pressing rivals in countries such as Spain and Italy to adopt filtering, said Tina Southall, the group's head of content standards.

"In Spain there's some pretty explicit content without any form of age verification," she said. "Given what's happening in other markets I don't think that's a sustainable position."

Mobile operators fear being cast as pornographers, but they also want to avoid being seen as censors by the providers of lucrative wireless services _ a key business opportunity in an industry where the main source of revenues, phone calls, is afflicted by price wars.

The strict regime they accepted in Britain is the exception rather than the rule. Elsewhere, networks are overwhelmingly choosing not to bar adult services unless requested to do so by users.

Southall said Vodafone plans to use only ``opt-in'' filtering outside Britain, Ireland and Sweden. That means most of its handsets will have no out-of- the-box access restrictions on pornography, violent games or online casinos.

Stephen Balkam, head of the nonprofit Internet Content Rating Association, said parents often don't know how to block access to services on a child's phone, or may not even realize that inappropriate content might be accessible on the devices.

"The fear is that younger people, who tend to be the early adopters of these technologies, will gain access to content that parents aren't aware of," he said.

The ICRA, funded by the European Union and by the industry, is fighting an uphill battle for filtering standards capable of screening out indecent or violent Web content. As such, the group prefers to see the stricter default- bars and age checks on mobiles.
http://www.mobilepipeline.com/news/6...GCKH0CJUMEKJVN


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IWF Reports On Illegal Content On The Net

The Internet Watch Foundation has reported that the number of cases in which it took action against illegal online content increased last year.

However the total number of complaints processed by the group’s hotline staff dropped for the first time. According to the IWF’s 2004 Annual Report, of the 17 255 reports received in 2004, the number of reports relating to potentially illegal content where action was taken by the IWF increased to 20% of all reports, compared to 17% in 2003. According to the IWF, 50% of the sites containing potentially illegal content were Pay-Per-View sites, an indication of the high level of commercialisation of abusive images of children on the Net, reports Out-Law.com. The report showed a geographical shift in the locations of where Web sites containing illegal content are apparently hosted. Russian servers hosted 31% of the sites; up from 23% in 2003, while US servers saw a reduction in hosted material – 40%, compared to 55% in 2003.
http://www.legalbrief.co.za/article....05022117151156


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Google "Library" Sparks French Warcry
Timothy Heritage

France's national library has raised a "warcry" over plans by Google to put books from some of the world's great libraries on the Internet and wants to ensure the project does not lead a domination of American ideas.

Jean-Noel Jeanneney, who heads France's national library and is a noted historian, says Google's choice of works is likely to favour Anglo-Saxon ideas and the English language.

He wants the European Union to balance this with its own programme and its own Internet search engines.

"It is not a question of despising Anglo-Saxon views ... It is just that in the simple act of making a choice, you impose a certain view of things," Jeanneney told Reuters in a telephone interview on Friday.

"I favour a multi-polar view of the world in the 21st century," he said. "I don't want the French Revolution retold just by books chosen by the United States. The picture presented may not be less good or less bad, but it will not be ours."

Jeanneney says he is not anti-American, and that he wants better relations between Europe and the United States. But like French President Jacques Chirac, he says he wants a multi- polar world in which U.S. views are not the only ones that are heard.

His views are making waves among intellectuals in France, where many people are wary of the impact of American ways and ideas on the French language and culture.

But he says he has heard nothing from politicians in Paris or Brussels, days before U.S. President George Bush visits the European Union's headquarters and NATO.

"On the eve of George Bush's arrival in Europe, the president of the National Library of France is sounding a warcry ... he is seeking a French and European crusade," Le Figaro newspaper said on Friday.

California-based Google Inc. said last December it would scan millions of books and periodicals into its popular search engine over the next few years.

Its partners in the project are Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library.

Google says the project will promote knowledge by making it more easily and more widely accessible. It aims to make money by attracting people to its Web site and to its advertisements.

The impact this might have on attendance at world libraries is not yet clear. But Jeanneney expressed his concerns in an article published by Le Monde newspaper late last month.

"Here we find a risk of crushing domination by America in defining the idea that future generations have of the world," he wrote, urging the EU to act fast.

He pushed his campaign forward this week by announcing the national library would make editions of 22 French periodicals and newspapers dating back to the 19th century available on the Internet.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050218/80/fcskz.html


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Sixth Circuit Rules in Favor of Static Control Components ... Again

The United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, responding to a request by Lexmark International, Inc. for a re-hearing, ruled against the Lexington-based company in a decision announced Wednesday.

In late October, the Sixth Circuit vacated an order by Judge Karl Forester, who granted a preliminary injunction in February of 2003 banning the sale of Smartek replacement chips by Static Control Components for the Lexmark cartridges.

Immediately following the ruling, Lexmark filed a motion for re-hearing. The Sixth Circuit denied that request on February 15th.

"This is a very gratifying decision," said SCC CEO Ed Swartz, on the latest setback for Lexmark. "We feel that the public interest has been served by a knowledgeable court to not allow a greedy OEM to use the law to perpetuate an electronic monopoly. Consumers and justice have been served."

On December 30, 2002, Lexmark filed a lawsuit against SCC. In the suit Lexmark claimed that SCC's Smartek 520/620 chips violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

"We have asserted from the outset that this is a blatant misuse of the DMCA. The Sixth Circuit's ruling and the court's decision not to hear Lexmark's request for another hearing solidifies and supports our position that the DMCA was not intended to create aftermarket electronic monopolies," said Swartz, who pointed out that such monopolies could cost consumers billions of dollars each year.

According to SCC General Counsel William London, "The case is scheduled for trial in December of 2005 on what remains of Lexmark's claims, and on Static Control's claims against Lexmark for violating several state and federal antitrust and anticompetitive statutes."

Static Control Components, which employs over 1,300 people in Sanford, North Carolina, accounts for over $300 million in annual sales. The primary market for Static Control Components is the laser toner cartridge remanufacturing market. Static Control supplies over 3,000 replacements parts to over 10,000 remanufacturers all over the world.
http://press.arrivenet.com/bus/article.php/594050.html


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Suit Calls HP Printer Cartridges Defective

A Georgia woman has sued Hewlett-Packard, claiming the ink cartridges for their printers are secretly programmed to expire on a certain date, in some cases rendering them useless before they're even installed in a printer.

The suit, filed in Santa Clara Superior Court in Northern California last Thursday, seeks to represent anyone in the United States who purchased an HP inkjet printer since February 2001. HP, which recently endured the high-profile ouster of former CEO Carly Fiorina, is the world's No. 1 computer printer maker.

An HP spokesman said the company does not comment on pending litigation.

HP ink cartridges use a chip technology to sense when they are low on ink and advise the user to make a change. But the suit claims those chips also shut down the cartridges at a predetermined date regardless of whether they are empty.

"The smart chip is dually engineered to prematurely register ink depletion and to render a cartridge unusable through the use of a built-in expiration date that is not revealed to the consumer," the suit said.

The suit, which seeks class action status, asks for restitution, damages and other compensation.
http://news.com.com/Suit+calls+HP+pr...3-5585902.html


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Threat to BBC as EC Investigates German Public Broadcasters
David Gow

The European commission will launch a formal inquiry next week into German public television and radio's use of licence fee money to fund internet and other services, the Guardian has learned.

The investigation could have serious consequences for other publicly funded broadcasters such as the BBC and comes after complaints from private channels two years ago that their state-owned rivals, ARD and ZDF, used illegal subsidies.

Last week senior officials from four German states - Bavaria, the Rhineland-Palati nate, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony-Anhalt - sought to avert the investigation in talks with Neelie Kroes, the competition commissioner.

It is understood that Ms Kroes conceded that the licence fee itself was not an illegal subsidy under EU rules - partly because that is a matter for national authorities alone. The Dutch Liberal and her advisers believe, however, that using public money to fund internet-based services and win a slice of the growing market appears to be unlawful. ARD.de and ZDF.de, which offer sports and financial news as well as advice, are expanding.

The four German states have shown Ms Kroes the financial details of ARD and ZDF, which are undisclosed even in Germany, but she, according to Der Spiegel magazine, wants more transparency over funding subsidiaries, including internet services.

Carl Eberle, ZDF's lawyer, said the commission's view that broadcasting based on licence fees limits competition "undermines the principles on which Germany's broadcasting system is based".

The two channels, set up after the second world war, are in effect under party political control. The system was set up to ensure pluralism after the Nazi dictatorship, but the channels are now moving into sponsorship. Some politicians believe they should be pared back to their core broadcasting role. The BBC has won Brussels' backing for its expansion into digital radio and television.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/new...420022,00.html


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OASIS Patent Policy Sparks Boycott
Paul Festa

A who's who of the open-source and free-software movements on Tuesday took aim at a leading Web services standards group, escalating pressure for mandatory royalty-free licensing policies with calls for a boycott of its specifications.

Open-source and free-software advocates including Mitchell Kapor, Lawrence Lessig, Tim O'Reilly, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, Lawrence Rosen, Doc Searls and Richard Stallman signed an e-mail urging the community not to implement certain specifications sent out by OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). OASIS this month revised its patent policy in a way it claimed offers better options for open-source software development.

"We ask you to stand with us in opposition to the OASIS patent policy," states the e-mail, which was sent Tuesday morning. "Do not implement OASIS standards that aren't open. Demand that OASIS revise its policies. If you are an OASIS member, do not participate in any working group that allows encumbered standards that cannot be implemented in open-source and free software."

In an interview, one signatory said the campaign would not target individual specifications, but the organization as a whole.

"We want organizations like OASIS to develop policies so any group that wants to use an industry standard can know in advance whether or not someone's going to come along and reach into their pocketbook," said Rosen, a lawyer with Rosenlaw & Einschlag and author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law."

OASIS defended its revised policy and launched a counterattack against the e-mail campaign.

"This policy from OASIS is as strong as the W3C policy in terms of specifying work to be royalty-free," said OASIS CEO Patrick Gannon in an interview. "Our policy states that standards may incorporate work that is patented, but that they have to disclose it. And in almost all cases, that results in a royalty-free license for that work."

OASIS revised its policy to specify three modes for standards work: RAND, or reasonable and nondiscriminatory licensing; RF, or royalty-free, on RAND terms; or RF on limited terms.

Gannon claimed that people who had signed the e-mail hadn't read the policy.

"Does it represent an accurate description of our policy? Absolutely not," Gannon said. "Have these people read the policy? Or are they just reacting to someone's claim? Had any of these people come to us, we would have been more than happy to open a dialogue. This isn't the best way to open a dialogue between communities, through the press."

Gannon said that even without the new policy, OASIS standards with royalties attached to them are comparatively few.

Out of 20 formalized OASIS standards, Gannon said he was not aware of any that required a royalty to implement them. Fewer than a half dozen of the 101 specifications still working their way though committee had royalties, he said.

On the firing line

The call for an OASIS boycott is the latest in a series of skirmishes between industrial interests that claim intellectual property rights and open- source and free-software advocates.

The most significant conflict to date launched in 2001 after the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) floated a proposal. The plan would have made the W3C's rules friendlier to member organizations that wanted to introduce patented technologies into standards.

The resulting row led the W3C into a highly public re-examination of its commitment to royalty-free standards. In 2003, it produced a revised patent policy, which made it all but impossible to standardize patented technologies that bear royalties.

OASIS billed its revised policy, set to take effect April 15, as a compromise to make its system more amenable to open-source advocates. Tuesday's e-mail campaign--and particularly the noteworthiness of its signatories--indicate how its move was received.

"The intellectual property policy seems to be a sop that they threw us," said Bruce Perens, a longtime open-source advocate. "There's the option for standards to be royalty-free but there's no strong incentive."

OASIS bristled at the claim that it hadn't considered open-source developers in revising its policy. Gannon said the group had numerous members involved in open-source development that had approved the revision and that OASIS had taken special care to vet the policy with intellectual property lawyers.

Gannon suggested it was possible but unlikely that OASIS might revise its policy again anytime soon.

"We looked at the needs of the open-source community in coming up with this revision, and therefore I cannot see what else they are advocating," Gannon said. "If a group of these people want to engage in a detailed review and make additional suggestions after considering how this is implemented, then they should submit that to our staff and we'll put it before the board. We have a process for continuing revision. But it's not clear to me what other changes need to be made."

The open-source industrial complex?

The conflict between open-source and intellectual-property demands has become particularly acute now that many technology giants have embraced open-source products such as Linux.

Last week, IBM pledged $100 million for Linux support in its upcoming Workplace software, a Microsoft Office competitor, for example. IBM routinely files more software patents every year than any other company and holds more than 10,000 of them.

Last month, Big Blue extended an olive branch to open-source developers, designating 500 of those patents royalty-free. Sun Microsystems made a similar offer to certain developers, and Computer Associates followed suit last week.

When it comes to standards-setting bodies like the W3C and OASIS, standards advocates call patents unfair, in light of open-source contributions to the industry.

"We don't see why, given that the open-source community is providing the operating systems going forward for a good deal of e- business, that we should be excluded from standards," Perens said. "OASIS needs to resolve to be an open standards organization, because open source and software patents don't mix."

Defenders of RAND-tolerant standards policies say standards suffer from exclusion of royalty-bearing technologies. OASIS saw substantial new involvement by companies including Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems after the W3C's revised patent policy sent those companies to OASIS to develop Web services standards.

Perens attacked OASIS for having become a refuge for those companies.

"There's always going to be some standards organization somewhere that accommodates people who want to have royalty-bearing patents in their standards," Perens said. "With Microsoft, it's a competitive strategy and it has no place in a standards organization. We feel that for OASIS to have any stature as a standards organization, rather than something that just panders to the patent holders, it needs a better policy."
http://news.com.com/OASIS+patent+pol...3-5585711.html


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Oz

Piracy And Payment

Kristyn Maslog-Levis

Q&A Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) head Michael Speck -- the controversial champion of the music industry's efforts in Australia to curb unauthorised obtaining and sharing of music -- is set to vacate his position for a quieter life. He leaves with public awareness of the illicit nature of music piracy at new highs -- but not without disquiet over the music industry's hardline legal pursuit of the parties allegedly involved. Here he shares with ZDNet Australia his views about life bringing pirates to account.

Q: What are your expectations for this year in terms of MIPI's fight against music copyright infringement?
A: MIPI's focus will continue to be on the facilitators of piracy. The pirate online services and physical piracy operations. This strategy has been particularly efficient for us to date and there is no reason to think that will change. I expect that MIPI will continue to meet its obligations to the industry and public by preventing or detecting piracy and effectively prosecuting it.

Do you think Australia's copyright law is obsolete? What changes would you make, if any, especially in terms of the "fair use" right? (or the right of people to copy their music collection to another format for personal use)
I believe we have some of the best digital / copyright laws in the world. There can be no doubt that these laws do not suit online pirates, or commercial operations that would also want to adopt the "content should be free" aspect as part of their business model. Markets, even online ones, can only survive if there is a regulated marketplace. Laws to recognise and protect property are paramount if the online market is to flourish. Even the pirates recognise this in their rush to prosecute those that infringe their rights and to get licences.

The "fair use" argument has become a little dated in the current market. A consumer can now clearly decide in what form they buy their music. You can already go to a legitimate online service and buy your music in a portable format as an alternative to the compact disc if you wish. In fact buying a compact disc now and complaining about the lack of portability would be as absurd as complaining that the tarpaulin you bought was a lousy parachute.

Aside from the illegal sharing of music files through peer to peer networks, what else threatens the music industry here in Australia? (e.g. markets selling pirated CDs etc)
Australia remains an attractive market, online and physical, for both legitimate operators and pirates. Online piracy attempts will continue but little will change on their technological approach. The linchpin of the digital revolution the online pirates talk about is their exculpatory language, they don't make proceeds from their crime - they commercialise opportunities! I expect two significant Federal Court judgements this year that will go a long way to exposing the true nature of online pirates and their real motivations.

Pirate activity here is, moving forward, focused in three areas; online, cottage industry counterfeiting and commercial (and largely imported) counterfeiting. Fortunately through legislation and action we have a relatively low level of piracy and I don't see that changing!

In terms of traditional piracy (CDs as opposed to the online music kind), what statistics do you have on that in Australia?
Piracy here is at about 9 percent of the market by volume far as we can tell. Our statistics are based on identifiable activity only.

What can you say about a report stating that Australian consumers have no choice but to obtain music through P2P services because their music demands are not met by the limited resources of retail and online stores?
I am aware of the report in question and am surprised it's given any credence. You've got to remember that the P2P services don't produce music, they misappropriate the music the legitimate industry develops, produces and promotes. Not one of the P2P services has an artist repertoire function locating new artist, developing them, promoting them, in fact they just don't make the music consumers want - the legitimate industry does! The proposition is part of the sham the pirate online industry perpetrates on consumers and doesn't withstand analysis. They have been counting on no-one noticing how much money they make from someone else's property and reports such as this one can only serve these millionaires, not the consumer.

You mentioned that this year, MIPI will be intensifying their pursuit of universities that allow copyright infringing activities through their systems. Will students be part of that pursuit? Or even individual Australians infringing music copyright?
Our primary concern is the facilitators of piracy, not individuals. This strategy has been particularly successful for the industry and there is nothing to suggest we need to change this strategy. I cannot be any more direct than to say to you -- we will not be suing individuals. Our current approach has been exceedingly effective and efficient.

Should Universities and ISPs who are not directly involved in copyright-infringing music behaviour really be dragged into legal actions over the issue? Should we expect more ISPs to be in the in the line of fire this year?
I would respond by asking you, "Should an organisation or business not be prosecuted simply business it belongs to a particular set?". There is something completely unfair about a business like an ISP or University having as a defence to proceedings that it is simply an ISP or University. How do you get on a list like that? It has never been the case, despite the protestations that a University or ISP is prosecuted if it is not "directly" involved in an infringement. There can be no doubt that the ISP industry's dirty little secret is how much revenue they derive from the traffic in unauthorised sound recordings. I think it is telling that every time we've raided an ISP we've found evidence of their knowledge and participation in the industry of online infringement. You can expect more ISP prosecutions this year.

You're probably public enemy number 1 to a generation that has, for many years, grown up believing they can download music for free online. Do you have a message for those who believe you are robbing them of a right?
I think you're over-rating my relevance if you think I'm public enemy number 1. However, no-one out there genuinely believes that there is no cost in downloading free music, that it is right or fair and that this misappropriation can last forever. No-one can honestly believe they have a right to take someone else's property without their permission. I would say to them, even the pirates want you to pay for the download so get used to the idea that you will be paying. But remember you will only see the continuing development of musical product if you pay the people it belongs to.

Why are you retiring? What were the rigours of the job that forced you to do so (i.e. the working hours, pressure from P2P companies, even the death threats that you mentioned previously in your affidavit) What capabilities and personality does your replacement need to have?
I've had an usually long run in this job. The best job I've ever had I might add. The accepted wisdom is that you turn over these types of positions every five years or so, and I accept that wisdom. Having this position has been a privilege for me and I'll certainly take my experiences on to anything I do in the future.

I recently met six potential candidates for the position and I don't think I could compete with them if I were applying for the job now. I would not be so presumptuous as to think I should determine the capabilities of a person taking this job.

Some commentary has suggested you've had to take the heat while [ARIA boss] Stephen Peach hasn't put in his fair share. Does ARIA need to step up its profile in this area? What about the record company multinationals themselves? Some might say that MIPI is a unit that allows them to disperse the heat that they would otherwise get for the often unpopular issue of curbing free music downloading.
There is no point having a dog and barking yourself! MIPI is the "anti-piracy" unit and it should come as no surprise that MIPI would take the heat as you say. A great investment of resources and support is made by the record companies and ARIA in MIPI, they established the unit to provide their anti-piracy services. Stephen Peach takes an a great deal of the heat directed at MIPI and its to his great credit that he has remained professional about it.

The record companies have never resiled from their public positions and are committed to their consumers not only on the development of music but also protecting then from piracy.

What are you planning to do next?
I've got six weeks left and will be conducting at least one more raid ....I'll get back to you.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/0,39023165,39181964,00.htm


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Africa, and Its Artists, Belatedly Get Their MTV
Sharon LaFraniere

For as long as anyone can remember, it has taken a rare stroke of luck for an African recording artist to be heard outside Africa. Pino di Benedetto, the marketing director for EMI Africa, a major recording company here, remembers how the South African rock band Watershed got the cold shoulder throughout Europe until one German disc jockey named Gregor happened to hear its lyrical hit single "Indigo Girl" on the radio while vacationing in South Africa in 2000.

He picked up the CD at a store, packed it in his suitcase and played it on his station, SWR3, when he got home to Stuttgart. "Indigo Girl" hit Germany's Top 10 chart, Mr. di Benedetto said. "There is a lot of music that comes out of Africa that would be easily marketable in the States and in Europe," he said. "Nobody gives us a chance. We just are not seen as hit-makers."

Until now, perhaps. On Tuesday night, in a snazzy nightclub in Sandton, a well-heeled suburb outside Johannesburg, MTV opened its first local music channel in Africa, bringing one of the world's best-known consumer brands and its global dominance of music television to one of the few remaining untouched markets. For viewers in 48 nations in sub-Saharan Africa, the opening belatedly offers what young music fans in other nations have long watched on MTV's 43 other music channels - their favorite local artists, showcased in a slick, fast-paced music-video format with contests, music news, viewer-request lines and behind-the-scenes features.

For the continent's artists - those bands with talent and drive but lacking a road map out of Africa or even out of their own country - the channel, called MTV Base, could offer the kind of break they long for, says Bill Roedy, president of MTV Networks International. The best of those artists, he said, may be able to jump from the newly begun local channel to other MTV channels around the world, giving them the global exposure that has eluded all but a precious few African musicians.

"We are looking to Africa to be a huge contributor," he said in a telephone interview from London. "It is going to enrich our channels around the world. We work very hard to develop local artists. It is something we passionately believe in. It's not just a natural evolution. It's a commitment."

Many would snicker at that, arguing that MTV's ubiquity these days - the seamless broadcasts of Outkast in Pskov, or Maroon 5 in Hokkaido - fosters cultural homogeneity, not originality. Rather than promoting indigenous, original music, they say, MTV's global reach simply encourages foreign artists to mimic the American formats that the mass market seems to crave. To its critics, MTV is the classic example of what President Jacques Chirac of France called the threat of a worldwide invasion of American pop culture. If unchecked, Mr. Chirac warned in Hanoi in October, "all other countries would be stifled to the benefit of American culture."

Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, said, "MTV represents a wing of American youth culture that has a following - and also arouses contempt and loathing."

Still, more than a few African artists laboring in impoverished anonymity see MTV as a possible ticket to fame. Indeed, their hope is that the trend will go in the opposite direction - that MTV will help Africa export its music to the United States.

Other markets are crucial because Africa's own market is minuscule, amounting to less than 1 percent of global music sales, industry studies show. If a South African recording artist sells 50,000 copies, it's a platinum record. "In terms of the United States, that's a joke," said David du Plessis, general manager for the music industry's trade association, the Recording Industry of South Africa. He blames piracy problems, in part, for crippling the industry.

How to break out of Africa is the perennial question here. Miriam Makeba, a legendary singer known in the United States for hits like "The Click Song" and "Pata Pata," managed by hooking up with Harry Belafonte in the early 60's. Ladysmith Black Mambazo, winner of two Grammy awards, was virtually unknown outside Africa until the group collaborated with Paul Simon on his groundbreaking "Graceland" album, which made so-called World Music a phenomenon among American artists.

Artists all over the world complain there is no room for them in a market dominated by Americans and Europeans , said Steve Harris, Africa's international marketing director for the recording company Universal South Africa. But Africans struggle especially hard, he said, because outside South Africa, there is a real dearth of studios, record companies and producers capable of turning out a sophisticated music video.

The hope, he said, is that MTV will give talented African artists a springboard to local fame that is the prerequisite for international interest. "In Brazil, MTV really did create a demand and help music at the local level," he said. "That's what I am hoping will happen here."

MTV Base was a long time coming. The network's first music channel made its debut in the United States in 1981, and its first international channel began in Europe six years later. In the ensuing 18 years, MTV's local channels have spread almost everywhere except Africa, which until now had been offered only MTV's European channel.

It is easy to understand why: In much of the continent, televisions are only slightly more common than ice rinks. Americans own one television set for every one person, according to United Nations surveys. Africans own one for every 16. Pay television, MTV's platform here, is the staple of barrooms here, not the one-or-two room block urban homes where millions of young Africans live.

MTV now reaches 411 million homes worldwide, counting Nickelodeon and its various other channels. In Africa, MTV will add 1.3 million subscribers, more than two- thirds of them in South Africa, according to DS-TV, the satellite broadcasting service. Some industry experts question how much that viewership can grow.

"Considering the average household income, I don't believe you are going to see millions of people rush out and buy a decoder just because MTV is available," Mr. du Plessis said.

Still, the continent is home to nearly 900 million people, more than a third of whom are between the ages of 15 and 34, MTV's target audience. Now that it is more politically stable and on a path toward economic growth, Mr. Roedy says that Africa fits in MTV's plan to span the globe.

Eighty-one percent of MTV's viewers live outside the United States, but they still account for 16 percent of MTV's revenues.

Unlike Britain, where MTV is fighting hard to ward off challengers, its competition in Africa is confined to dead-of-the-night music fillers on free television stations and to Channel O, a pay television channel that is devoted to local music but lacks MTV's name recognition or glittering appeal.

Even South Africa's radio stations have had to be forced to play more local music. Outraged at broadcasters' slavish devotion to American and European music, musicians and record companies demanded that local songs be given one-fifth of the music airtime on the nation's radio stations. State regulators agreed, instituting the quota in 1997.

Lebo Mathosa, a Johannesburg singer with a powerful voice and provocative dance style reminiscent of Tina Turner, thrilled the hip, racially mixed crowd invited to celebrate MTV's new channel with a live performance Tuesday that cellphone cameras snapping wildly. Like most popular artists here, she said that she is starved for broader outlets, especially those with global reach.

Mr. Roedy says that local programmers at the network's other channels decide on their own what songs in MTV's international inventory merit airtime. But having seen Latin American artists take off in the mid-1990's, he said, he has high hopes for the musical form of kwaito, as well as the Zulu form of hip-hop and other distinctly African genres.

Initially, Mr. Roedy said, MTV's new channel will devote 30 percent of its airtime to local music, and programming will be coordinated out of London. But after the channel establishes itself, local and international music will divide the airtime 50-50. By the end of next year, the channel's entire operation will operate out of Africa, an MTV spokesperson said.

Mr. Roedy says the individual personalities of its local channels is the secret of MTV's dominance of the world market. MTV Indonesia includes a daily call to prayer for its Islamic audience; MTV Italy offers food programs; MTV Japan has a sharp, techy edge.

And MTV Africa? "Good question," he said. "It will evolve."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/ar...on/24MTVA.html


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Book review

Sue The Reader Of This File Sharing Book
Ashlee Vance

When the drugs begin to wear off, and the sun starts to rise, an unnamed music executive shudders at the thought of its existence. In that painful moment of desperation, he wonders, "How could it happen?" "How could that rat write this book?"

Steal This File Sharing Book by Wallace Wang must be the worst nightmare of deluded music big boys everywhere. It's a guidebook to trading music, movies, photos, software and just about any other type of file. More than that, it's a guidebook for trading as anonymously as possible and via methods the big media companies would prefer the average person not know about. It's this rich content - not the writing or lack of a clear audience - that makes the book a treat. Why not give the mogul a heart attack before the coke gets a chance?

"The bottom line is that the corporations, who currently hold all the power and make most of the money, are going to have to change, and that's something they aren't willing to do," Wang writes. "Unfortunately for them, their fate is already sealed and out of their hands in the same way that buggy whip manufacturers, slide rule makers, and whale-oil lamp companies found themselves wiped out by technological change.

"The question isn't whether file sharing technology will put today's corporate powerhouses out of business. The question is when, and that future is closer than they think."

This lucid declaration appears on p. 258 of the book. That's the last page, and the above is the last paragraph. This, however, isn't they type of book you read for the surprise ending. Nor is it the type of book you read to discern the author's position on the pigopolist scum/media geniuses - take your pick - trying to crush the file trading industry.

Wang deals with the central debate surrounding file trading hardly at all. That last paragraph is one of just a handful providing much point of view on who might be wrong or right - mankind, or the music/movie industry - about file trading.

Instead, the book delivers a roadmap for finding and trading files - just as its title promises. In fact, it provides such a thorough list of file trading techniques that Wang only needs that final conclusion on p. 258 to make his point. There's no way the media companies can fight the technophiles and win this battle. After all, it's not even clear that shutting down music and movie swapping sites is really in Hollywood's best long-term interests.

The first half of the book will appeal more to the computer-curious than savvy geeks. It covers all the forums where files are traded and does so in the most basic, straightforward language possible. "A computer file can be anything from a single song to a photograph, a full-length motion picture, the complete text from a book, or a computer program that sells for thousands of dollars." "Email lets you send a message to a particular address on the Internet." "File sharing networks have soared in popularity because they make it really easy to find tons of files and download multiple files at one time." See? You get the idea.

If you know what a newsgroup, FTP, instant messaging and eDonkey are, then you're going to want to skip to Part II of the book and do so fast. Definitions of email can ruin any self-respecting geek's day. If you have no idea what any of the above terms stand for, then Part I is a blessing. It's kind of like Computing 101, telling you all the main file types, the main ways to send files via the internet, where to find content and where to find general computing information. Wang does an excellent job of filling the book with useful links, and Part I ends up as a top-notch resource for making your way around the internet.

Given that most Register readers are Part II types, that's where we're going to spend the majority of our time.

Kicking over the traces

Part II kicks off with one of the juicier subjects - protecting your identity. Wang gives out solid advice for masking your email and IP addresses and for setting up proxy servers. The author dutifully warns readers that many identity protectors don't work quite as well as billed. Still, he provides comprehensive lists of sites and types of technology that can help anyone protect their identities whether they are file trading or not. The methods laid out by Wang will trigger many moans at the RIAA and MPAA, as they make it much harder for the pigopolists to identify big time file swappers.

"Remember, don't break the law; just creatively skirt around the legal boundaries like any law-abiding politician would do," Wang writes.

Along with protecting your person, Wang lays out some basics for protecting you PC from viruses, worms and trojan horses. This section is a must for anyone who thinks clicking on britneylove.jpg is safe. More advanced readers will find advice for blocking spyware/adware, creating virtual PCs and encrypting files.

With these basics taken care of, you get to the good bits: sharing music, movies, TV shows, porn, software and books.

Even people who consider themselves above average file-traders will cherish these sections. Wang charges right past the popular file-trading sites and lists a host of new locales. It may be tougher to find the exact file you're looking for on these sites, but they're mostly free of legal eagles and can turn up hidden gems. For the serious geeks, Steal This File Sharing Book then opens up the world of warez.

Last but certainly not least is a penetrating analysis of the porn file trade. The book lays out places to find porn and handy programs for downloading and viewing porn safely. You can never be too safe. In addition, it points out that porn makers embraced file trading technology before it even become popular. The porn companies long ago figured they couldn't beat the geeks, deciding to join them instead. Losing a few dollars here and there to downloads is just part of doing business. Retailers often hold a similar attitude about shoplifting. Don't like it, but can't avoid it.

Overall, the book covers a lot of ground in a brisk fashion. It's an excellent resource for the bored file-trading stud looking to expand his game and for the up and coming geek.

AOL meets Debian

The book, however, suffers from its breadth. Is it directed right at geeks? Well, no. Right at newbies? Nope. It can be a frustrating read at times. You're being told what email is on one page and then digging through the inner-working of warez file- trading on the next. Think AOL meets Debian.

This means that those readers starting from technical scratch get more for their money. They can, over time, use the entire book. Above average geeks will want to turn right to the second part of the book for the juicy stuff.

And while Steal This File Sharing Book is clear and simple to follow, it's not the most entertaining read on the planet. Wang uses a style close to that of the author of your first Macroeconomics text book. This is a bit frustrating since the back of the book tells you that Wang is a "successful stand-up comic." Hard to believe unless you laughed at the one about the supply curve, the demand curve and the duck.

You'll want to read Steal This File Sharing Book in the near future, since much of the information in it will likely have a shelf life of about two years.

The book gets the highest of marks for content, clarity and usefulness. If every file- trader on the planet gave it a read, the media moguls would have a much tougher time fingering prolific swappers for lawsuits. And even if stealing songs by the gigabyte isn't your thing, you'll find Steal This File Sharing Book makes using the internet more interesting. Have a go at protecting your identity of traveling to newsgroups you never knew existed.

Steal This File Sharing Book

Rating

85%

Pros

The pigopolists will hate it. You'll find it to be a great resource for doing all kinds of naughty and not so naughty things. Porn.

Cons

Too geeky at times not geeky enough at others. So clear it's bland. As Homer said, "Be more funny."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02...haring_review/

















Until next week,

- js.














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