Wanted: Deep Thinkers
Jack Spratts
I've been wondering if there's any way to estimate the number of Waste users in the world. If it's even possible to know how many times Waste has been downloaded. Well it might be - but you’d first need to ask “Downloaded from where?” Most of the people I know using Waste regularly send the program around themselves - and have since it came out in June of 2003. There may be sites where you can get a copy and many people may do that but it’s not the way we’ve done it and there’re probably of lot of experimenters around like us. So my gut feeling is no, it's not possible to know how many copies are out there, how many are installed and most importantly, how many are actually being used.
Unlikely as it is, even if you found the information you’d only be scratching the surface because soon you’d probably start looking into more detail. Take frequency of use for example; is it monthly, weekly, daily or hourly? Is the program simply running all the time? And what exactly is it used for? Downloading, uploading, chatting? You’d want to know what kind of chatting, what kind of swapping. Are people moving copyrighted content around? Public domain? Open source? Their own works? On the job files? Potato salad recipes? So it gets complicated pretty fast, with plenty of questions and few answers, and then only after spending some serious loot taking surveys and let’s face it, at this point the margins of error would be too high to produce usable statistics. But say somebody gave you a bunch of cash and barked “Do it!” Where would you start? Forums like this one? Schools, IT people, record collectors, hackers? I’m not sure you’d get dependable data even then.
I was asked by a reporter last week, he needed to know and since I don’t know myself my curiosity’s been sparked. So, I’m asking. I’m asking readers for suggestions on how to
begin getting some meaningful user stats for a network that’s defined by it’s privacy. If you have any thoughts PM me here or email me at the Zer0share project (thezer0shareproject (at) lycos (dot) com) - just put “stats” in the subject line. If you’re as stumped as I am well then that’s that, but if you’ve got any good ideas and anything interesting makes it to my inbox I’ll cover it here in a later column. I’ll even mention your nic.
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Circuit Benders Unlock the Long Riffs in Short-Circuits
Matthew Mirapaul
SEEKING NEW SOUNDS - Thomas Uliasz,
top, a circuit bender who makes music
using various modified toys; Reed Ghazala,
who began making circuit-bent instruments
in the 1960's, with one called the Cat Box.
Photo: Ting-Li Wang for The New York Times
and Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times.
DARTH VADER voice changer. A small library of educational Touch & Tell toys. A battery of Happy Rock drum machines.
Thomas Uliasz came to play. But in his hands, those toys were not meant to amuse a roomful of unruly preschoolers. Mr. Uliasz had modified them by adding keyboards and other sound-triggering tools so he could play them as musical instruments.
Mr. Uliasz (pronounced YOU-lee-us), a musician in Danbury, Conn., is engaged in the art of circuit bending, the creative alteration of electronic devices - usually toys - so they can produce new and unusual sounds. Benders delve beneath the sometimes fuzzy underbelly of talking dolls, toy instruments and basic keyboards. They rewire circuits, experimenting until they hear tones, beeps or squawks they like. Then they solder on switches, buttons and knobs to be able to recreate the novel noises on cue.
A member of the duo Burnkit 2600, Mr. Uliasz is playing many of his homemade instruments during the Bent Festival, a weeklong event of circuit-bending concerts and workshops. The festival, which ends on Saturday, is at the Tank, a center for the visual and performing arts at 432 West 42nd Street in Manhattan. A festival schedule is at thetanknyc.com/bent.
Turning electronic toys into musical instruments involves much more work than switching on the synthesizer in his recording studio, but Mr. Uliasz does it, he said, because, "I'm not going to get the same sounds out of that synthesizer."
The Darth Vader toy, for instance, was essentially an audio processor that deepened its owner's voice. Mr. Uliasz added an input jack and a pitch-control knob and renamed it the Dark Side Box. When it is connected to a rhythm machine, the circuit-bent toy can convert a mechanical cadence into a snarling, stomping beat.
Mike Rosenthal, who organized the festival with Daniel Greenfeld, said circuit bending was "a great way to get people excited about electronic music." Because bending relies on exploration rather than engineering or instrumental skills, anyone can do it. Electronic guinea pigs in the form of battery-powered parrots and purple dinosaurs can be found in thrift shops and rec-room closets, so the entry cost is low. There is only one rule: for safety's sake, never bend anything that is plugged in.
On stage, circuit-bent toys can be used in a solo recital or as a part of an ensemble containing conventional instruments. And whether the music is rooted in rock, techno or the classics, compositions are generally free-form. "The performances tend to be somewhat improvised," Mr. Rosenthal said. "What people really enjoy about these instruments is that a lot of them are very unpredictable."
Circuit bending is a hybrid of digital culture and a certain strain of avant-garde music. The practice reflects the creative misuse of technology pursued by hackers, as well as the do-it-yourself ethos of computer-game players who modify popular game titles. At the same time, it is very much in the spirit of maverick composers like Harry Partch, who built new instruments to realize sounds he could not hear elsewhere. Circuit bending can also be viewed as part of the fine art movement in which everyday objects are employed for artistic purposes.
Circuit bending has probably been around for as long as there have been circuits. Lee de Forest, the inventor in 1915 of the vacuum-tube-based audion piano, wrote of the "very weird and beautiful effects" that could be obtained by touching parts of the circuitry. But the genre's leading proponent has probably been Reed Ghazala, a Cincinnati artist who began bending in the 60's after a battery-powered amplifier in his desk drawer accidentally shorted out, generating the sound of an expensive synthesizer. Mr. Ghazala is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. today at the festival.
Derek Sajbel, a Los Angeles artist who will perform during the festival as Dr. Rek ShyBel, said circuit bending has flourished with the maturation of a generation raised on electronic toys. Mr. Sajbel, who is making a documentary film about circuit bending and has put excerpts online at absurdity .biz, said, "A lot of the people who do bending grew up with electronic toys, so there's a certain sense of nostalgia that makes it that much cooler."
Indeed, the toys prized by benders, like various versions of Texas Instruments' Speak & Spell products, date from the 80's and early 90's, when complex, infinitely bendable circuits had yet to be reduced to a single integrated chip.
Tod Machover, a composer and professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab who develops educational musical toys for children, said he understood the urge to find new sounds. But he sees circuit bending more as a subversive commentary on the toys themselves. With sophisticated music-making software so readily available, he said, "I can't help thinking that there's easier ways to make nice music than taking these toys apart."
Such thinking will not deter dedicated benders like Mr. Uliasz. On Sunday, he said, he bought his cats a stuffed toy that purrs electronically as they bat it around. He said, "Of course, I'll be taking that thing apart when the cats' interest wanes."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/te...ts/08bend.html
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Interview
Clay Shirky, Internet Technologist
The Basics
Age and occupation. How long have you lived here, where did you come from, and where do you live now?
39. Professor, writer, and consultant on internet technologies. I came from a state in the Midwest you probably have not heard of. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a lighting designer who worked on big Broadway musicals. My 16th birthday present was a trip to NYC, and after a couple of days here, I swore I'd move here, which I did, 4 days after I graduated from college. I have lived here ever since. I currently live opposite the dolphin in the kid's part of that little park on Congress Street, Brooklyn.
Three Queries
1. Blogs: beloved little observations grouped sequentially. I'm almost afraid to ask the question but what's your brief take on where all this blogging is headed?
It's headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what's important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.
Already blogs are used for groups of teenagers to bitch about their lives, as on many LiveJournal sites; to track gossip, politics, and tech trends, as with Gawker, Wonkette, and Gizmodo; as an adjunct to political campaigns; and as a kind of giant distributed OpEd page. Too much for one little word.
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
2. With all the various projects/papers you work on, the magazine freelancing, teaching at NYU's ITP program, I assume you've seen the future. I'm sure Friendster and blogs won't change the world, so what do you think will? (At least in terms of this technology stuff.)
The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past --- freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.
The narrow sense of freedom, in tech terms, is a freedom to tinker, to prod and poke and break and fix things. Good technologies -- the PC, the internet, HMTL -- enable this. Bad technologies -- cellphones, set-top boxes -- forbid it, in hardware or contract. A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.
And none of this would matter, really, except that in a technologically mediated age, our grand freedoms -- freedom of speech, of association, of the press -- are based on the narrow ones. Wave after wave of world- changing technology like email and the Web and instant messaging and Napster and Kazaa have been made possible because the technological freedoms we enjoy, especially the ones instantiated in the internet.
The internet means you don't have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don't need to be a huge company to change the world. Microsoft gears up the global publicity machine its launch of Windows 98, and at the same time a 19 year old kid procrastinating on his CS homework invents a way to trade MP3 files. Guess which software spread faster, and changed people's lives more?
So while things like FCC regulation of the internet have that MEGO quality (My Eyes Glaze Over), they matter, a lot, because the only way for 19 year olds to change the world in this medium is to give them the freedom to ignore all previous work to date, and come up with something new.
Describe that low, low moment when you thought you just might have to leave NYC for good.
Early 90s. I am separated but not yet divorced, because my then-wife and I don't have $300 for a lawyer. I am also unemployed. I am crashing at a friend's place on 25th and 6th, where she is graciously letting me stay while she's away.
On a hot Saturday night in July, I'm heading back from Brooklyn to "home." It's one of those nights just walking down the street feels like you're wrapped in a warm damp blanket and standing in bus exhaust.
I go down into the Borough Hall Station, where the air is even hotter, stiller, and smellier than the street, and head for the 2/3. When I get to the platform, I've just missed a train, and now the platform is empty, except me and one very tough looking guy.
Who starts walking towards me.
And I panic. (I'd been held up at gun point in Williamsburg earlier that summer, so I was especially jittery.)
I literally run back down the platform, up the stairs, and stop, shivering, just inside the turnstile where the clerk can see me. I can't go through, because I don't have enough money for another token, so I decide I'll ride the 4/5, which I can see from where I'm standing, then get off at 23rd and walk the rest of the way home.
After a long time, the train comes. I get on it, and begin working on two different problems. The first, and larger problem is how to get the fuck out of New York City, which is dirty, dangerous, disgusting, I hate New York, I have to get out. Soon. To anywhere else. Maybe a trailer park in Idaho.
The second, more immediate problem is beer. There is a bodega at 25th and 6th, run by these crazy Iranian guys. I don't know if it will be open (it is by now two in the morning), and if it is, I don't know if they'll sell me beer, as it's technically Sunday. These are minor problems, though, compared to money.
I am sitting on the 4, simultaneously visualizing my new life as an Idahoian and scrounging pennies out of my jeans pockets. "82, 83, 84, 85." Bingo! Budweiser time. Budweiser has the obvious downside of tasting bad, but has the twin upsides of being 5% alcohol and 85 cents a can, which tips the scales.
This realization depresses me even more -- five years busting my ass at my chosen profession, and I'm sitting on the subway at two in the morning counting pennies so I can get a single can of lousy beer and go home alone.
I get out at 23rd, and start walking west, then north on 6th. The bodega is still open, and as I walk in, one of the guys standing by the door holds up his hand to stop me, and says something I will never forget.
"Who is the better designer? Yves St. Laurent, or Bill Blass?" (except it was more like 'Beel Bless'.) These options are presented as if I am facing the Judgment of Paris, and his body language makes it clear that I'm not getting to the cooler 'til I answer.
Now this is jolting, in part because it's so random, but also because I am definitely not the guy to ask. My sartorial sensibilities veer between dress-down Friday and last man out of a mine collapse, and that evening had me closer to the West Virginia end of the spectrum -- ratty sneakers, no socks, paint stained cut-offs, a t-shirt with holes and coffee stains.
And so, transported from my "I hate New York" funk into an unexpected interrogation, I fall back on two habits of mind common to generations of New Yorkers. First, never let the fact that you know absolutely nothing about the matter at hand stop you from delivering a firm opinion, and, second, when in doubt on matters of culture, go for the French-sounding name.
"Yves St. Laurent." Obviously.
His face lights up, and he turns and backhands his partner in the chest. "See!" Then he turns back to me. "Thank you. You are my friend," and steps aside.
When I get back to the counter to pay, he waves his hand as if pardoning a sentence of death. "You are my friend," he says again. Free beer! From Muslims! On the Sabbath! What could be bad?
A little dazed, I head for the door, and he stops me a third time. "You are my friend. Here, don't get AIDS." (Except it's "Doan ge'Daids", so it takes me a moment to process.) Then I see he's holding a little stack of condoms, and he takes one off the top and hands it to me. I stand there for a minute, and he just smiles and nods. I am free to go.
And so I head out one Bud, one Trojan, and 85 cents to the good, and walk the last half block home thinking how much I love this town.
http://www.gothamist.com/interview/a...chnologist.php
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Recording Industry Crusade Stumbles On
Opinion - ComputerWire
The legal debate surrounding peer-to-peer file-swapping sites has shifted up a gear in the past few months, beginning with the Recording Industry Association of America filing hundreds of lawsuits against serial downloaders, who they claim are costing the industry millions.
But the crusade against copyright infringement has met more than a few stumbling blocks. At the end of March a Canadian judge ruled that use of the Kazaa P2P network didn't constitute copyright infringement, in a case brought by the Canadian Recording Industry Association that was attempting to identify 29 Canadian people who had been downloading music.
The judge opened a whole new can of legal worms by ruling: "No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings. They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service."
More surprising is the action taken by a New Jersey mother, Michele Scimeca, who received an RIAA notice in December after her child used the Kazaa network for a school project. She has countersued labels Sony, Universal and Motown by claiming that the demands for reimbursement of $150,000 per infringement falls foul of the 1970 Organized Crime and Control Act.
Scimeca's attorney explained the reasoning behind the lawsuit to the New Jersey Star ledger: "They're banding together to extort money, telling people they're guilty and they will have to pay big bucks to defend their cases if they don't pony up now. It is fundamentally not fair."
The recording industry's position was further eroded by a report released last week by Harvard Business School associate professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and professor Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina. These two academics claim that music downloads had "no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album" in their research sample.
The professors used data taken directly from file-sharing networks over a 17-week period, comparing them to official US CD sales, and factoring in network congestion, song length and seasonal trends. The research states that it would take 5,000 downloads of a song to reduce sales of the album which it is on by one copy.
Of course, the RIAA has its own research that claims file-sharing is killing the industry and hurting artists. These claims are countered by those that argue CD production has been falling over the past few years, and that record companies need to restructure their business to focus more on artists, and spend less on marketing bad products.
In spite of the rights and wrongs of file-sharing, there must be an underlying belief within the recording industry that the majority of users do want to reward artists and their management for their art. However, the increasingly tough stance taken by organizations such as the RIAA will only work against them, and could increase resentment of the industry and its stranglehold on audible art.
Given that the film and computer games industries are not up in arms despite the large amount of downloading of their intellectual property, the recording industry may increasingly be seen as a spoilt brat throwing a tantrum. Although strong-arm tactics have filled the pockets of the world's biggest recording companies for the past 50 years, the estimated billions of file-sharers in the US, Europe and Asia may be a harder nut to crack.
http://computerwire.info/cwdirection...256E77004AEF8F
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Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Music Of The Fears
Stewart Kirkpatrick
If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture.
If music be the food of love, play on. But if music be downloaded then, oh boy, get ready for a whole heap of trouble.
The music industry is dying, apparently. It is being killed by amoral reprobates who get songs for nothing from the internet. (For a list of the places where you can carry out such nefarious acts, check out afternapster.com.)
The effects of this have been devastating, as can be seen from the obvious poverty of the likes of Madonna, Elton John and Ronan Keating.
Now the industry is going after people who swap music over the net. The Recording Industry Association of America has been serving writs on "file sharers", claiming thousands of dollars for each "pirated" track. Its UK equivalent is also going to target people who make their music collections available to others online.
It's important to note that falling music sales have nothing - repeat, nothing - to do with the quality of the product on offer. The fact that the charts are packed with anodyne, pre-packaged, worthless pap with all the invention, soul and guts of an empty crisp bag is completely irrelevant. Nasty internet bogeymen are solely to blame for falling sales.
The situation has reached crisis point, according to the music industry. Of course, we should take all this very seriously. Downloading unauthorised music files from the net is theft, unlike, say, charging £14 for a CD that costs pennies to make or putting out an album featuring one decent song and packed with filler. That's just sound business.
As is suing your customers, which is bound to win them round.
By the way, does anyone remember the "home taping is killing music" campaign of the 80s? It was remarkably similar to the P2P (peer to peer, aka file sharing) imbroglio and oddly enough the music industry seemed to survive that one.
The whole anti-sharing campaign is doomed anyway. Police forces worldwide have struggled to stamp out genuine criminality on the net. What chance do a few record companies have of tracking down the millions of people who share their songs?
However, if you are worried at the prospect of music industry lawyers crashing through your front door there are many ways to enjoy music for free online without any legal risks.
Sites like ifilm.com showcase music videos. That site gives you free, no- naughtiness-involved access to large number of songs, including decent ones you'd actually want to listen to.
For the more adventurous there are some really interesting music animations created by independents. A good example is a Flash movie by 512kb set to Cranky's Party 4u (holy nite mix) (no I hadn’t heard of it either). It's at
http:// 512kb.net/flash5.htm. Given that it's a trance track (the young people tell me that this is a form of disco music) the Japanese video is fast, furious and trippy, featuring flashing images of animated figures and swirling numbers. It's a really exciting combination of sound and vision.
A rather more sedate aural experience can be found at home.comcast.net/ ~mrartemis/ddautta_play.html, which features Japanese ska and a video that depicts a cat trying not to fall in love with a rabbit. It's rather charming - as well as a bit weird. (OK, it's very weird and very Japanese).
My favourite homemade video, however, deals with the thorny issue of downloading. It samples Apple's famous "1984" commercial that depicted the liberating of users from an Orwellian nightmare and unfavourably compares the company's message of liberation with its involvment in the attack on file sharers. It's at slumdance.com/blogs/brian_flemming/archives/000610.html.
It ends with a shot of a new iMac whose screen shows the same images as the Orwellian telescreen that launched the Macintosh 20 years ago. Beside it are the slogans: "War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery. Don't think different." The last phrase is not Orwell's but a parody of the Apple slogan "Think different".
It's savage but sums up the anger that many users feel about the file sharing crackdown.
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=420142004
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Downloaders Pay Up To Wilco
From Baltimore Sun and Associated Press
Showing that even freeloaders have a heart, fans of the rock band Wilco have contributed more than $3,500 to the band's favorite charity as a token payment for downloading Wilco's new record off the Internet.
The new record, "A Ghost Is Born," won't be released until June 22. But when copies leaked out last month, the band responded in a novel way. Instead of filing lawsuits or issuing cease-and-desist letters — a common practice in the piracy-crazed music industry — Wilco cooperated in setting up a website where downloaders could cleanse their consciences.
The charity site, justafan.org, went up Friday and has brought in almost $4,000 for Doctors Without Borders.
Meanwhile, Wilco singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy has entered rehab for addiction to painkillers, a spokeswoman for the band said.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology
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Interview
Copyright In The Digital Age
Lawrence Lessig
Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig was online to discuss his book, "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity." In his book, Lessig argues that the entertainment industry conspires with Congress to use copyright law to destroy our traditional notion of freedom in culture.
washingtonpost.com reporter David McGuire moderated the discussion.
A transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
________________________________________________
David McGuire: Dr. Lessig, thanks for joining us. In your new book: "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity," you argue that the debate over piracy has obscured a larger movement on the part of the media industry (movie, music and software makers) to "remake the Internet, before it remakes them." How, practically, is that movement unfolding? Where are those battles being fought?
Lawrence Lessig: The content industry has done a good job convincing the world that the internet will enable what they call "piracy." That has obscured the fact that the internet will also enable an extraordinary potential for creativity. And it has obscured the fact that the weapons they use to eradicate "piracy" will also destroy the environment for this "creativity." They spray DDT to kill a gnat. We say: "Silent Spring."
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Bellingham, Wash.: What are your thoughts on the debate on anticircumvention regulations and how they may impact fair use? Do antipiracy concerns outweigh the importance of allowing legitimate uses of circumvention software (for example, by DVD owners making backup copies)?
Lawrence Lessig: The anticircumvention regulations of the DMCA have been interpreted in a way that does plainly restrict any sensible understanding of "fair use." They are therefore regulations that will be found, imho, to violate the constitution. As the Court indicated in Eldred, fair use has a constitutional basis. Congress is not free simply to remove it. Thus whether Congress -- "persuaded" by the content industry -- believes that antipiracy concerns outweigh the constitution or not, no law may outweigh the constitution.
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Washington, D.C.: You are on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has recently volunteered to defend alleged copyright infringers that are being sued by copyright holders, the RIAA.
As a law professor and a copyright holder yourself (Free Culture book), do you feel that the RIAA has a legitimate gripe in protecting what property is legally belongs to them?
Would you support a foundation established to defend literary copyright suits, if professors were to crack down on student text book copying - or even worse, yours?
Lawrence Lessig: I believe that copyrights, properly defined and reasonably balanced, ought to be defended by copyright owners, and organizations (whether the RIAA or others) devoted to defending such rights. I'm sure everyone at the EFF believes the same. But just as a lawyer who defends someone charged with auto theft does not therefore support auto theft, so too with the EFF: They are, rightly, defending the rights of individuals that they believe, rightly, should not be prosecuted in this way under this law.
As a law professor -- and more importantly, as a citizen of the United States -- I absolutely support their actions. We here are supposed to believe in the right to a defense. We are supposed to believe that laws are not to be overreaching in their effect. We are supposed to oppose abuse of the power of prosecution. And I fundamentally oppose those who would question anyone who would defend rights that our constitution was designed to guarantee.
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Washington, D.C.: Good afternoon - Prof. Lessig, will you state once and for all that the widespread theft (or whatever term you wish to apply) of copyrighted works online is illegal? Can the conversation about copyrights in the digital age at least recognize this? Don't you feel that it is a dangerous society that believes that because the Internet lets you do something, it is permissible to do so...whether morally or legally right or wrong? I find that in all of your articulate presentations, you seem to blame the people who create and invest in the creation of music, movies etc. and place no blame on those who take those works without compensating the artists/copyright holders.
Lawrence Lessig: Great question. First, I have "recognized" this. Here's a great derivative work of my book -- permitted because I released my book free under a Creative Commons license. (
http://trevor.typepad.com/blog/free_...e_numbers.html) On that page, each paragraph of my book has been marked by its own url. As you'll see at paragraphs 84, 110, 367, 372, 377, 382, 388, 389, to mark a few. Or go to (
http://free-culture.org) and download the book and look at the section "Why Hollywood is Right" beginning at 124.
But my whole point is that if we as a people can think about only one issue at a time, then we as a culture are doomed. For if we set our policy focused on one end only - - ending piracy -- then we will end a tradition of free culture as well.
Yet the content industry has done so well because they've convinced DC that there is really just one issue out there -- piracy. And they certainly are more successful than I in shaping this debate. So it may well be that we as a people can think about only one issue at a time. And again, if so, then we as a culture are doomed.
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Takoma Park, Md.: Is it fair to call pervasive free availability of any copyrighted song anyone can think of a "gnat"? I appreciate your concerns but it seems to me that you're downplaying the impact of file-sharing on creative industries.
Lawrence Lessig: Is it fair? Well, what's the harm. In my book, I assumed there was a substantial harm, and the question I asked is: how might we minimize the harm while not destroying the internet or its potential. So I would push for different policies even assuming the gnat is a lion.
But since my book was published, there has been substantial work -- by independent researchers, not paid by the content industry or anyone else -- to suggest that there is no substantial harm from p2p sharing. More precisely, that when you add up all the effects (people exposed to new content which they buy, etc.), the effect of sharing is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Whether you buy that analysis or not -- and, I think we should remain skeptical about it until it has had a good chance for further peer review -- I do think that relative to what we lose by waging this war, the interests of one particular industry are small.
By this system of federal regulation, we are creating a regime of creativity where the only safe way to create is to ask permission first. You might think that's simple, but just try it someday. But I'm with those who think that there's something fundamentally wrong about this regime, whether it is simple or not. I as an academic don't need anyone's permission before I write an article criticizing someone else. But the same freedom is not accorded a filmmaker, or webmaster, under the rules as they exist today.
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Madrid, Spain: Do you really think there will be a unbreakable technology to protect CD, video or stop MP3 exchanges in the web? In others words, is it possible to protect intelectual property with a piece of software? Do you really think the technological measures will be effective?
Lawrence Lessig: By "do you really think" you make it sound as if I've suggested such a "solution." I have not. Indeed, I think all solutions that rely upon technology to control access suffer important and unavoidable costs. More importantly, an arms race around technologies for locking up and liberating content is a waste. We should push for a regime that helps assure artists get paid without simultaneously breaking the most valuable features of the internet.
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New Orleans, La.: Do you think that the Court's strict constructionist reading of the Copyright Clause in Eldred blows open the door to the continued and expanding success of special interests appropriating the public domain?
Lawrence Lessig: Yes, it absolutely does. By ignoring the original meaning of the constitution's text -- indeed, by ignoring even the text, for the Court does not even try to explain what the words "to promote the Progress of Science" means -- the Court has given Congress, and lobbyists, a green-light to continue what they have done so well over the past 40 years -- extend the term of existing copyrights. It is totally obvious that in 2018, there will be another bill to extend copyright terms. It is totally obvious that all the money in the world will be spent by those who have copyrights that are about to expire. And totally obvious that nothing (yet) in the Court's jurisprudence that would stop such an extension.
Now of course, there's lots that can, and must be done, independent of the Court. PublicKnowledge.org, for example, is doing a great deal of good to get Congress to consider reasonable balances in the field of copyright. They have, for example, taken up the challenge of getting congress to pass the Public Domain Enhancement Act, which would require a copyright owner, 50 years after a work has been published, to register the work and pay $1. If the owner pays the $1, he or she gets the benefit of whatever term Congress has set. If he or she does not, the work passes into the public domain. We know from historical data that more than 85% of copyrighted work would pass into the public domain after just 50 years under such a regime -- clearing away a mass of legal regulation governing the ability of people to reuse culture. But even this reasonable proposal is being resisted by, for example, the MPAA.
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Georgetown: Isn't the source of the problem in copyright law the extension of the copyright to derivative works? This aspect of copyright should be limited or eliminated after, say 50 years. That way Disney would be able keep selling its classics while the others would be able to use the work as the basis for new creations.
Have there been any such proposals in Congress?
Lawrence Lessig: This is a great suggestion. Yes, the one really radical way in which copyright law today differs from the copyright law our framers gave us is derivative rights: They didn't protect them, and we do. And that extension does, in my view, muddy many issues. I understand and support laws which control the ability of A to sell a verbatim copy of B's copyrighted work without B's permission. But whatever wrong that is, it is totally different from the "wrong" of building a work based on B's work. Our law does not adequately distinguish between the two, and it should. A shorter term might be one solution. I suggest others in my book. But it is plainly an area where serious reform could do serious good.
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Washington, D.C.: How is distributing copies of copyrighted works to a stranger without the authorization of the artist, as in P2P, not a violation of copyright? Do you not agree that an artist's ability to copyright his work, if he chooses to, creates incentives for that artist to innovate and create? Without intellectual property protections incentives to innovate disappear.
Lawrence Lessig: So I answered something close to this question before, so I won't repeat what I said there. But in summary:
(1) "How is distributing copies of copyrighted works to a stranger without the authorization of the artist, as in P2P, not a violation of copyright?"
It may be under the law as it is just now. I've not contested that generally.
(2) "Do you not agree that an artist's ability to copyright his work, if he chooses to, creates incentives for that artist to innovate and create?"
OF COURSE I do! Absolutely it does. And most of my work these days is devoted to making it easier for ARTISTS to choose how best to deploy the rights the law gives them. (see, e.g.,
http://creativecommons.org).
(3) "Without intellectual property protections incentives to innovate disappear."
In some contexts, absolutely correct. In other contexts, no. There's plenty of incentive to innovate around Shakespeare's work, even though no one has a copyright in Shakespeare. There's would be plenty of incentive for law professors to blather on endlessly in law review articles, even without copyright protection. In my view, rather than treating (3) as a matter of ideology, we should treat (3) as a question of fact: IP is a form of regulation; regulation makes sense where it does more good than harm. So we should be asking where IP protection does more good than harm.
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David McGuire: Does the pending case of 321 Studios over its DVD X Copy software -- which allows users to make copies of their DVDs -- seem to you a likely vehicle to address some of these fair use concerns before the Supreme Court?
Lawrence Lessig: I don't think the Supreme Court is ready for these issues. I thought it was. I was wrong. I believe 321 should prevail in the case, and I hope it does. But the hysteria around this "war" is too great just now for this Court to consider the matter with the usual balance of judgment it has displayed in (most) copyright cases.
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Alexandria, Va.: If a company has a valuable copyright and it wants to continue making money off it, why should it not be able to renew that copyright forever? I understand what copyright law says, but isn't it naive or even greedy to suggest that everything we create should ultimately be given away?
Lawrence Lessig: Well, first one might point out that the Constitution says Congress can grant copyrights to "Authors" not companies. Second, one might observe that the Constitution says Congress can secure "exclusive rights" for "limited times." And third, one might ask when the term granted corporations is already almost a century, who's being "greedy" here?
Of course one might well say the framers were idiots about this, and we should reject their wisdom and follow the wisdom of corporate lobbyists on this. Maybe.
But I'd rather focus on the agreement we have: you write, "why should it not be able to renew that copyright forever?" I'm all in favor of a renewal requirement. Indeed, I've proposed a relatively long term (75 years) so long as the copyright owner "renews" the copyright every 5 year. No doubt that might sound like a hassle -- and it is, given the way the government typically does things. But imagine one-click renewal. Imagine a system that was simple. In that world, I'd be totally ok with terms as long as they are, so long as terms had to be renewed. We know from history that the vast majority of copyrights -- 85% - 95% -- would not be renewed even after 28 years. So my aim -- to minimize the senseless burden of endless terms -- would be achieved with a renewal requirement.
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Scranton, Pa.: It seems like you think the entertainment industry's endgame is to control all content from the cradle. At that point, presumably, all content would be puerile trash. But the industry likes this idea because we've seen that the average American consumer loves the smell of garbage. Is this the depressing landscape that you see on the horizon based on our present course? Or is this scenario extreme?
Lawrence Lessig: I hope it is extreme. But it is an aspect of what I fear. I think ARTISTS and CREATORS are great. I think our framers intended them to be benefited by copyright law. But I believe our Congress (and FCC) has produced a world where PUBLISHERS (in the broadest sense of that term) are the real beneficiaries of our copyright system. And as they become fat, slogging giants, the stuff they produce (or allow to be produced) will be increasingly awful.
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Anaheim, Calif.: Hello, Dr. Lessig. Is there any way to clearly define the line between fair use and infringement? I am not a copyright expert nor am I a lawyer. Is there a way to explain your answer in plain English?
Lawrence Lessig: No, there is not, and that 95% of the problem. Fair use in America is the right to hire a lawyer -- which is fine for CBS, or NBC, but useless for most creators. That's why I've proposed changes that produce clear lines, rather than lines requiring the services of $300/hr plus professionals. The great thing about the public domain, for example, is that it is a lawyer-free zone. Anyone can use anything in the public domain without asking permission first (except if you use Peter Pan, but that's another story all together...).
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Arlington, Va.: Reps. Boucher and Doolittle have introduced a bill (H.R. 107) that seeks to provide the kind of balance to the DMCA that you suggest is important. Are you familiar with and, if so, do you support their legislation?
Lawrence Lessig: Yes, and yes. Boucher and Doolittle have been rare but important voices of balance in this debate. Zoe Lofgren and Chris Cox too. All who believe in sanity in this "war" should be doing whatever they can to support these few, brave souls. Especially Congressman Boucher, who has a well funded opponent in this race (funded by whom I wonder?)
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Flatland Crest, Mont.: You said earlier that if we can only examine one issue at a time - in this case piracy - then we as a culture are doomed. Doomed to what? Will artists fail to flourish because the entertainment industry has a lockdown on copyright? I doubt that a 13-year-old who set his or her pen to paper and suddenly produces a precocious, beautiful novel even knows what "Fair Use" means.
Lawrence Lessig: I guess it depends on what you think "fail to flourish" means. There were many who thought art flourished in the soviet union, even though the artist couldn't publish or distribute his or her art. Of course, we're not the soviet union, but the same point is true nonetheless: I don't believe we have a FREE CULTURE if creativity is criminal. I don't believe we respect the tradition of FREE SPEECH if the act of remixing culture is an act that requires permission from publishers first. I don't believe we will have a vibrant FREE MARKET if it is so heavily regulated by lawyers. So even if in the dystopian future I describe, a 13 year old is physically able to create an "precocious beautiful novel," we don't live in a free culture unless she can create that work without hiring a lawyer first.
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Washington, D.C.: In a recent article published in Forbes by Stephen Manes, he says that you are going to harm the creator and reward the people doing illegal activity as well as put "the U.S. at odds with international law." How do you respond?
Lawrence Lessig: I've responded at length on my blog:
http://lessig.org/blog. But I'll say that there was no review that more disappointed me than Mr. Manes'. I've got great respect for Forbes the man, and Forbes the magazine. And as, for example, Stu Baker in the Wall Street Journal noted, my argument is not really an argument for the left. Indeed, as he argued quite effectively, it is more powerfully an argument for the right. (Copyright law, as he put it, is the "asbestos litigation" of the 21st century). So I was very surprised both with the substance of Mr. Manes's review (which was unthinking and ill-informed) and with its tone (which was rude and abusive). Both seemed to me to be beneath the quality of the publication. And as I said in my first response to Mr. Manes, it just goes to show how much more work we in this movement have to make to make our ideas understandable.
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Washington, D.C.: Hi Prof. Lessig - with each book that you release on the subject of IP rights and the 'net, I think you've become more readable for the masses. I'm thrilled with this, because I think these issues are of incredible importance for everyone. However, I think that there remains a long way to go before the general public thinks of "fair use" as anything other than an excuse used by those music-stealin' college kids. How can we better present your (our) concerns to the public in a way that helps them better understand the importance of these things to their lives?
Lawrence Lessig: Thanks for the kind words. It is extraordinarily easy as a professor to believe your ideas are clear and obviously right. And the hardest lesson of the last 5 years for me has been the recognition of how many ideas I was sure are right are, it turns out, wrong, and how hard it is to make the rest understandable. That's especially hard for me, and it has taken many years to learn differently.
I agree that it will take a great deal of work to make these ideas even more understandable. But I think the way to do it is by showing people the law, not arguing about it. Show parents the extraordinary creativity the technology of Apple enables. Show them what their kids can do with it -- the music they can make, the films they can produce, etc. And then show them the billion ways in which the law would deem that creativity criminal. When people begin to see that this is a war we're waging against the next generation, they might begin to wake-up to its threat.
(Then again, it's not as if our policy today is really much concerned with our kids at all. We don't tax ourselves so we can tax our kids (deficits); we don't pay to clean up our environment so our kids will; we wage wars that will excite a generation of hatred directed against -- again -- our kids. Etc. So I guess it is not surprising that here again, we wage a war whose primary target and victims will be our kids.)
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Edgartown, Mass.: Good afternoon. Is this the first time that you have permitted your book to be made available for free on the Internet? How are the sales of your latest book stacking up against your previous works?
Lawrence Lessig: It is the first time I've succeeded in convincing my publisher, yes. I have tried before, but am blessed this time to have a great and innovative publisher (Penguin Press) and an astonishing editor. (It was my editor who did the real work convincing the publisher). And sales are going much better than with any other book. But the part that has been the most interesting and surprising to me is not the sales. It is the derivative works. I released my book under a Creative Commons license, which left others free to make derivative works. If you go here
http://free-culture.cc/remixes/ you can see a list of the amazing number of "remixes" of the book that people across the net have made. There are many different formats available now (we released a PDF only). There are audio versions. There is a Wiki (which allows anyone to change or extend the book). I never expected the energy that the net has demonstrated. And as that energy will assure the ideas spread broadly, I am extraordinarily grateful.
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San Francisco, Calif.: During the mid to late 1970's, the music industry be came moribund by it marketing ploys of only promoting large sales music groups who could fill arenas and stadiums. The response of musicians and consumers to the lack of creativity in rock music were the punk movements and new wave which developed on small independent labels. These were later coopted into the larger music industry just as rap was in the '90s. Are such consumer/artist uprisings still possible in our media controlled environment?
Lawrence Lessig: They are possible, but would be more possible if the law was not such a heavy handed regulator in this space. More important to me, it would be possible if labels would be more tolerant of experiments by authors. Creative Commons, for example, has launched a number of licenses that enable authors to mark their content with freedoms -- freedoms that will, many believe, lead to more sales of records. But these artists have been met with strong resistance by the traditional labels. We should all recognize something that no one admits: None of us know what will work best in the future. So in the face of that ignorance, we must depend upon a competitive market offering alternatives, and encouraging experiments. And a room filled with lawyers is not a great way to inspire experimentation.
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David McGuire: Professor Lessig was good enough to take an extra half hour to answer more of the many insightful questions we received. Unfortunately we're out of time. I'd like to thank the professor for taking the time to join us today and our audience for contributing so many thoughtful questions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Apr7.html
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Alleged Israeli Hackers Nabbed
Roni Singer
Police have interrogated four young hackers suspected of gaining illegal access to hundreds of computers in Israel and abroad by introducing a "Trojan horse" that enabled them to gain control of those computers.
The four, aged 14 to 16, are residents of Ashdod and Kfar Saba. The investigation was carried out by computer experts at the Tel Aviv police's fraud division. The four youths reportedly confessed and are likely to be charged soon.
Police were alerted to the racket by SPD, a company that provides Internet storage services. They complained that the Trojan horse had been introduced into one of their less-used servers. The team that conducted the investigation soon tracked down the four youths, who had not succeeded in covering up their tracks very well. Nir Nativ, the officer who headed the investigation, said: "They're kids with limited capabilities. They were not able to penetrate computers of firms they wanted to reach, so they chose those they found did not have good security. They're not very sophisticated."
The four would send a large package of information together to these computers and thus would block their servers and they would fail. Police say that one 14-year-old from Kfar Saba managed to penetrate a certain company and to follow its internal business correspondence on a regular basis. Had these firms been involved in highly secret activities, police said, they would have had better protection against hackers.
The youths managed to access a large number of credit card numbers, particularly from sites abroad, but when they tried to use them, they were unsuccessful.
The 14-year-old told police he had been hacking since he was 12. He said he had set up his own Web site where he explained how to send a "Trojan horse" into various computers.
During the interrogation, the youths are believed to have admitted their guilt and said they were aware that what they were doing was illegal.
The parents, who were surprised to hear what their children were up to, are cooperating with the police.
Police describe this case as "merely the tip of the iceberg." They say there are numerous groups of youth who are illegally hacking, "out of sheer hooliganism and not to make serious money." Some of them, Nativ said, use more sophisticated methods.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/415493.html
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Using Peer-to-Peer to Launch a Music Career
Press Release
How The G-Man Got Played, Got Signed, Got a Publisher, & Got on iTunes... All by Giving His Music Away For Free.
The G-Man is a musician who knows how to "work the Web," perhaps because he's also deeply involved in the worlds of advertising and marketing. Some of his marketing savvy was put to use in launching his music career.
DEFYING THE RIAA:
What did he do that was so extraordinary? Defying the wishes of the RIAA and the major record labels, he offered all the music on his first album for free.
In fact, he went even farther than that: he contacted thousands of DJs and remixers, established peer-to-peer filesharing relationships with them, then offered to send them individual tracks (bass, synth, vocals, drums, guitar, etc.) if they wanted to mix new versions of his songs.
The results have been spectacular, involving reviews, remixes, club play, radio play, a record deal, publishing and licensing agreements, and awards. All three of his albums have been nominated Electronica Album of the Year by the Los Angeles Music Awards, and he won for his "Grin Groove" album in 2002.
INDIE SIGNING & HIS OWN COMPANY:
He is signed to Delvian Records, all of his albums are on Apple's iTunes, his song catalog is administered by Janssongs.com, and he has opened his own company, G-Man Music & Radical Radio, where he creates songs, sonics, radio spots, and music for film, TV, and games.
Perhaps best of all, two of his songs have been remixed by Matt Forger, best-known as Michael Jackson's recording engineer on "Thriller," "Bad," "Dangerous," and four other albums, and who also worked with Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, and many more. These tracks are a part of The G-Man’s "The Platinum Age of the Remix," an album featured on StudioExpresso, home to more than 100 of the world’s best music producers and engineers.
Additionally, The G-Man has become a creative director for NARIP (National Association of Record Industry Professionals), an associate writer for MusicDish.com, and a content supplier for Circle of Songs, L*A*M*P, Bitchin Entertainment, and Venus Music.
RAVE REVIEWS:
Reviewers have compared his songs to such artists as Devo, David Bowie, Art of Noise, Brian Eno, OMD, Gary Numan, Thomas Dolby, Spandau Ballet, and Frank Zappa. From mainstream media like the New York Times and the All Music Guide, to respected Web sites and eZines, music by The G-Man is written about with zeal.
AIRPLAY:
The G-Man is also receiving airplay on college stations in many cities across the United States and Internet radio around the world. Most important from the business aspect, his songs are being licensed for use in radio and TV commercials.
HOW IT BEGAN:
"The 'give it away' approach may be a cool new way of starting a career," G-Man states. "And some people say this method puts me in the vanguard of changes that are overwhelming the music industry. Perhaps it's both," he says with a grin.
"I think that the music business as we know it is splintering into a million shards," he states, "and it is being built up into something new right before our eyes."
SIX YEAR OVERNIGHT SUCCESS:
Six years ago, Scott G was an advertising writer, radio commercial producer, and sometime music critic. But he wanted to make sounds, not just write about them, so he picked up a guitar and began learning to play.
In 2001, he started recording his first album, creating music that fuses today's dance grooves with pop melodies and then adds sly commentary. Some have called it dancebeat, some have called it Zappa-esque, but Scott calls it "grin groove music."
Using "Grin Groove" as his album title, The G-Man did several things that together represent the beginnings of a quantum shift in the way music is created, marketed and disseminated to listeners around the globe.
First, he put up a simple, graphically clean, "100% animation-free" Web site at
http://www.gmanmusic.com . Next, he combed other Web sites for the e-mail addresses of media as well as 25,000 DJs, remixers, and those involved with raves, clubs, electronica, dance, and drum 'n' bass genres. "This took as much time as it did to record the songs, but it was worth it," he says.
KEEPING IT SIMPLE:
Then, two simple e-mail messages were created. He followed the ideas recommended by Indiespace's Pete Markiewicz, namely, put the basic idea in the Subject line, keep the message short, and do not include any graphics.
One e-mail message announced his new genre of music to the media. The other e-mail offered to send tracks for free to anyone who wished to remix his music -- and that is perhaps the most significant part of his approach, as you will see.
IT'S IN THE REMIX:
Remixers have been using his tracks all around the globe. "I have had five songs remixed in Russia by a sonic master called Random Distribution," The G-Man states, "and one of these tracks went to #1 over there. Meanwhile, an Australian DJ known as Zero Point Energy has done a remix that is now showing up on Web sites around the world. A jazz artist known as il moroso has begun remixing more of my songs and we have now agreed to collaborate on an album of acid jazz music."
Perhaps most interesting is the reaction from the European community. A consortium of remixers called The Allianz, led by DJ Insane, created remixes of every song on "Grin Groove." One of the DJ Insane tracks reached #5 on a European dance chart.
PART OF A PLAN:
All of this could be viewed as just a series of fortuitous accidents, but The G-Man doesn't think so. "I believe that the music world is breaking up and is at the same time transforming into something new, and you have to address the peer-to-peer file sharing in order to exist in this new world."
More -
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/4/emw116996.htm
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College Unlikely To Adopt New File-Sharing Filter
Zachary Goldstein
In recent weeks, multiple colleges and universities across the nation have implemented a new network filter promoted by the Recording Industry Association of America in its latest attempt to end illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing. Dartmouth, however, will not join the pack, according to Computing Services director Robert Johnson. The College has not adopted the CopySense Network Appliance, a mechanism that some believe will help schools combat the growing problem of illicit file-sharing on high-bandwidth networks.
Central Washington University was the first school to implement the filter, though "a couple dozen universities are currently in some stage" of implementation, CopySense chief executive officer Vance Ikezoye said. The filter, produced by California firm Audible Magic, examines the "digital fingerprint" of every file transferred over the network it patrols, cross-referencing fingerprints with a 4 million-song database. The appliance can then be set to automatically cancel the transfer of any copyrighted files. It is its ability to differentiate files within the peer-to-peer network that sets the CopySense Network Appliance apart. In addition, the database grows by 5,000 to 10,000 songs per week, Ikezoye said. "Our appliance has the unique ability to say that peer-to-peer file-sharing itself is not bad," Ikezoye said. "We allow peer-to-peer exchanges to continue, except for the ones that are illegal." The product has been received quite favorably by the RIAA, which despite hundreds of subpoenas against individual illicit file-sharers is still in search of a silver bullet.
In recent months, the RIAA has promoted Audible Magic's product as one possible option. "Our role has been to help inform law makers and higher education leaders about the fact that this kind of technology does exist," RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said. "It is a viable and really promising new technology because it is neutral. There is nothing wrong with peer-to-peer, except when it is hijacked." However, the new technology comes with an important caveat that is of concern to privacy-oriented network operators. Because the appliance analyzes the content of files on the network, some are concerned about its invasion on users' privacy. "That's a level of surveillance that I think is just completely unacceptable," Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. The EFF is the primary opposition force against the RIAA in its recent lawsuits. "If we searched every house in America, we could find out more evidence about who the bad guys are, but we don't tolerate that." These same privacy concerns have made Dartmouth network operators leery of such a device. "Dartmouth takes privacy concerns very seriously," Johnson said. "Anything that would begin to look at the content over the network would be very difficult to implement here." Ikezoye, on the other hand, claims his device does not interfere with privacy at all. Though some versions of the appliance -- those for businesses, according to Ikezoye -- have the ability to track which users were caught sharing illegal files, the version he sells to colleges and universities does not keep a record of who is trading songs, but rather monitors anonymously. Instead, the appliance monitors the number of blocked transfers and a list of the content that was blocked. "We know privacy is a big concern for academic communities, but what we've done is provide a product that provides a good balance between privacy and legality," Ikezoye said.
Though it unlikely that Dartmouth will look into such a filter, it would be possible and, in fact, "quite easy and cheap" to set up on the campus network, according to Ikezoye. For a network of Dartmouth's speed and capacity the cost of the appliance would be approximately $16,000 for the hardware appliance and approximately $3,500 for the database subscription and technical support. Most colleges that have employed Audible Magic's product did so to monitor peer-to-peer traffic over the network border which would catch students sharing or downloading files over clients such as Napster or Kazaa. However, such a set-up would not regulate intra-campus file-sharing which has become popular at many schools across the country because of the almost-unlimited capacity of colleges' internal bandwidth and the emergence of network clients like Direct Connect. Ikezoye said he expects that his appliance would work equally well regulating internal sharing, but noted that it has not been tried.
http://www.thedartmouth.com/article....=2004041301020
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What is Nodezilla?
From the site.
Nodezilla is a secured, distributed and fault tolerant routing system (aka Grid Network). It's main purpose is to serve as a link for distributed services built on top of it (like File Sharing, chat, efficient video multicasting streaming, secured file store ...). Nodezilla provides cache features; any server may create a local replica of any data object. These local replicas provide faster access and robustness to network partitions. They also reduce network congestion by localizing access traffic. It is assumed that any server in the infrastructure may crash, leak information, or become compromised, therefore to ensure data protection redundancy and cryptographic techniques are used.
Introducing persistant sharing
Persistant sharing is the ability to share a file and makes it persist (i.e. available to other users) even after the sharing node disappears from the network (or the file disappears from the original node). The way File Sharing Service is implemented over Nodezilla's distributed router also allows to download at very high rate (theoretically), as all parts pertaining to the requested file come from numerous nodes, no easy bandwidth bottleneck should popup. To achieve this the Nodezilla Network needs of course some room to store the persistent files, this room will be found in a space provided by each Nodezilla user (like 30MB by node). This storage place will be used to store blocks of persistent files.
In Nodezilla's Persistent File Share Service (NPFS from now on) a file is not made persistent as soon as it is made shared, it's only when this file has been downloaded several times (i.e. gains some popularity) that the persistent process starts. The file is split into blocks, which are encoded using an information dispersal algorithm. Blocks are then disseminated all around the nodes, the more download they are the more nodes will cache blocks. The blocks will be cached in the storage size made available to the whole network by each user, i.e. on a 20 Meg storage size you can store around 78 blocks of 128K. This cache will be managed by the NPFS and will hold blocks of popular files. When the original sharer goes offline (or the file disappears from the original node), all blocks or at least enough of them should be available from other Nodezilla nodes to reconstruct the original file. Over time, the least popular files will see their cache rate decrease to finally completly disapear, making space available for other blocks.
What about free-loaders ?
A free loader is a person who downloads files from other people, but does not share files (i.e. doesn't contribute back to the network content). They consume bandwith and CPU power selfishly, and that is Bad. To try to reduce the impact of freeloaders, the NPFS introduce the notion of credits. A minimum amount of credits is required to download a given file. The credits available are determined by the disk space you give to the NPFS to store cached blocks, the running time of your node and some other things. This way a "regular" user will have no problem to download whatever he wants, and free loaders will give some room to cache making them effectively share files (even if its not their files) through the cached blocks.
Anonymity and cryptography
Cryptography is a very important part of Nodezilla's router and services. From communication between nodes (through TLS) to object identifcation and signatures, all important data is encrypted and signed using current algorithms (no home made weak crypto algorithms). Cryptographic certificates are used all over Nodezilla, more details in the Nodezilla Architecture Document. Anonymity is also an important thing, no user names, no identifiers, no file names. Someone spying the network can't tell what you're doing on the Nodezilla network. A node can't know what files are downloaded from him (it is only capable of recognizing blocks and not the file to which they belong) and a node can't know which nodes share a file.
http://membres.lycos.fr/nodezilla/
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Via's Padlock Tightens Up Security
Review Network chastity belts
LAST YEAR Via integrated some hardware security features into its range of C5P-Nehemiah based C3 CPU's (stepping 8) , Via Eden (ESP), Via Antaur (notebook) and the recently demonstrated nano-ITX motherboard. This feature, incorporating the Via Padlock ACE (Advanced Cryptography Engine) and Via Padlock RNG (Random Number Generator), is part of Via's Padlock Security Initiative.
So, what use is hardware-based security without software to take advantage of it? CeBIT 2004 saw the release by Via of the Padlock SL Utility that takes advantage of these new hardware security features. It is not only a good demonstration of these features, but highlights an often overlooked security issue with today's Instant Messaging products – that of secure messaging. This utility is not restricted to Via CPUs – it works on any x86-based machine running Windows 2000/XP or Red Hat Linux V9.0, with further Linux distribution support on the horizon. On Via CPU- based hardware it automatically detects and takes advantage of the hardware-based security features, on older Via CPU's, Intel or AMD- based machines then all encryption features are done in software.
Its software features include: · Instant messaging
· Group chat/secure meeting
· Remote/Local file browsing
· File Transfer
· Automatic exchange of public keys
OK, so it is not abundant with snazzy features/gimmicks, or indeed, adverts found in other popular IMs like Yahoo, AOL, MSN and the like, nor does it have a wonderfully fine-tuned user interface - this is not the point of the software. It is built from the ground up to solely work over point to point or point to multipoint secure links over a user-configurable IP port and will only establish a connection with someone else running the same messaging client that you a) know and b) have exchanged public keys with. This in itself can be a barrier, but what price security or privacy? In the current climate of “internet anonymity”, this messaging client authenticates that the two (or more) parties involved in the conversation do actually know each other and wish to communicate securely over an encrypted link – without expensive, difficult to implement, support and maintain VPNs.
Most "text-based" methods of communication – email, instant messaging software etc generally leave an abundance of "evidence" behind, if not complete conversations or mail messages in log files (firewalls, proxies, email servers, local machine logs etc) as well as being transmitted "in- the-clear" to be potentially eaves-dropped on “over the wire”. Most people, business as well as private, do not often think that this is an important consideration until it is too late, when they have been personally or professionally compromised. How many ministers rue the day they sent that email? How did it leak? How did the employees find out the company was in take-over talks before it was announced? Do we realise how much we actually rely on those "unseen" and poorly paid techies we employ to support or maintain segments of networks? Are they tempted to analyse or have a good laugh at the odd log file from time to time? The odd CEO's mailbox? Shuurely not …. After all, your system is only as secure as the people who've set it up … right?
How about you taking control of what is important, private or requires a secure file transfer safe in the knowledge that it is only to be seen by the person you trust? Or in a school for example, how can you let your students communicate solely between themselves without worrying that email addresses, personal information and at worst conversations being compromised? How can a CEO collaborate with his CFO and another CEO interested in taking over his business without anyone else in the organisation being privy to the conversation? The Padlock SL utility claims to do just that.
Installation is fairly simple and to see the hardware acceleration in action, or rather a Via C3 1Ghz Nehemiah outperform a 2.4GHz P4, you enter a display name and user information screen followed by "Create a key pair" and enter your own private password. This is used in the key pair generation and to be used whenever you use the software client, followed by the required encryption level. The default level (1536 bits) sees an EPIA-M10000 based system create the key in 10 seconds, my Sony 2.4Ghz P4 Vaio Laptop in 28 seconds … a dual-Xeon 2.4Ghz in 24 seconds. Playing around with some of the higher encryption levels (2048/ 3072 or 4096 bits) does even things out a bit but the C3 is still no slouch. At the highest level the software does warn you it may take up to 30 minutes to generate the key pair, but on the EPIA-M 10000 2 minutes 30 was the maximum time it took to generate. You then select a download directory i.e. where you want to store any files that you download from another user or get sent, and a share directory if you want to share any of your files.
The C5P hardware security features are then called into play during data transfer between clients, taking the load off the rest of the system in encrypting and decrypting the data streams. In machines without this hardware, all is done in software on the client PC
. A quick check-list of how to check two systems can communicate:
1) Check software is using the same port (by default the software uses port 1337)
2) Check you have exchanged each others' public keys
3) Connect via IP address or via hostname (if setup in either internal or external DNS or local hosts file)
If connecting through firewalls or proxy servers then some rules may need to be added to allow port-forwarding for the port being used to allow both incoming calls and to make external connections. Like most software of this kind corporate networks will need more advanced setup and configuration.
As it is not directory-based a little more knowledge from the end-user is required to "roam" and still communicate – however this can be overcome with a little thought. Setting up a workgroup comprising several users in disparate locations can be reasonably straightforward, it just depends on the network scenario.
An immediate use I found for the software is using its secure peer-to- peer file sharing capabilities. As in my day to day existence I support multiple web servers for various clients invariably on the move, setting the software up as a secure "ftp" server without messing with web ftp/SSL settings was a great boon. It's a very simple use, but effective nonetheless. Setting up multiple copies listening on different ports is also possible.
As the software, source code, an SDK and more detailed documentation are available from Via, it is possible for serious corporate customers or 3rd party development companies to overcome some of the shortcomings of this initial release of Padlock SL and extend the functionality into such areas as Voice over IP and video conferencing. Dr Brian Gladman has already posted an updated version of his code incorporating support for the Via Padlock ACE (Advanced Cryptography Engine), along with performance results. He concludes "with the aligned data the Via engine provides spectacular performance. It is also spectacularly fast even with unaligned data….. will make the Via range of processors highly attractive in a wide range of security applications". His site (including code for download) can be found here.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15191
Via "Violates" GNU GPL With Padlock
But Via says it does comply
Inquirer staff
THE SOURCEFORGE project administrator has claimed that Via's "Padlock" software violates the GNU general public licence (GPL).
Via Padlock, said Eric Harmon, breaks the conditions of the GPL in three ways.
He said that Via has removed Nullsoft and AOL copyrights, as well as Sourceforge's. "Copyrights are always standing, even in open source, so it breaks international copyright laws to remove these," he said. Further, he claims that the source code for the entire application is not available, and the GNU GPL requires the entire source code to be released.
He points to this this page and this page to underline the points. This latter URL says that source code should be included in the distribution, the copyright notice of the holder should be included, and the source code should be available.
A Via representative said that his firm had posted the full source code on its Arena web site, here, and that, he said, meant there is full compliance with the GPL.
He said: "If people feel we should also post the source code on sourceforge we are more than happy to do this; we do have other projects there already"
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15329
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Valenti Seeks Hollywood Perspectives on Screener Issue
Gregg Kilday and Ian Mohr
Keeping to a promise he made in the heat of last year's screener battle, MPAA president Jack Valenti met Monday in Los Angeles with a broad cross section of the Hollywood film community to discuss the piracy concerns that led the MPAA to institute a screener ban in September.
"It's the meeting that should have been held before they ever announced the screener policy," said Jean Prewitt, president and CEO of AFMA, the trade association that represents the independent film and television industry worldwide. She, like a number of the other participants, called the meeting "very informative."
The 1 hour, 45 minute meeting, held at the Peninsula Hotel, drew representatives from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., AFMA, the guilds, the British Academy of Film and Television Artists, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and various film critics associations. Also present were IFP and several independent producers, who had joined together to successfully overturn the ban. Publicists from both the major studios and several specialty divisions also attended.
Valenti, who has announced his pending retirement, was accompanied by Frank Harrill and Ken McGuire of the Los Angeles field office of the FBI and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Arif Alikhan and Christopher Johnson, all of whom have been active in the fight against piracy.
"It was educational," Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. president Jean Oppenheimer said of their presentation.
According to the MPAA, in 2002 its member companies and their subsidiaries sent out 69 titles for awards consideration, and 31 screeners were pirated.
Last year, according to several sources at the meeting, 52 titles were sent to awards groups, and 16 of them fell into the hands of pirates.
Watermarking, which was introduced last year, appeared to have had an effect in curtailing piracy, a number of those present argued.
"The FBI found watermarking as an important enforcement tool," said IFP/New York executive director Michelle Byrd. "It just seemed like the first time that we heard that watermarking is without question an effective enforcement tool for finding out (who leaks screeners)."
In the discussion that followed, Valenti argued that if piracy is allowed to cut into film profits -- including DVD earnings, which can contribute as much as 40% to a film's profitability -- then there will be less risk capital to fund new production.
"Even after all we've seen and all the arguments, people had very different perspectives," said Prewitt, who explained that from her perspective at AFMA, she could see both sides of the screener debate. AFMA opposed the ban, arguing that decisions about screeners should be made on an individual basis "in the best interests of each film." At the same time, she described how piracy affects independent producers in their business dealings abroad because a single instance of piracy in a foreign territory can lead a distributor to refuse to pay agreed-upon guarantees.
"Frankly, our members feel the impact of piracy," she said. "There isn't such a thing as piracy that doesn't affect smaller independent films."
According to sources, the awards bodies present at the meeting said they will each individually start to introduce the concept of a "code of conduct" by which members would be asked to sign a commitment to not contribute to piracy.
That, however, already began to occur last year, said Joey Berlin, president of the Broadcast Film Critics Assn. and executive producer of the Critics Choice Awards, when other awards groups began to follow the signed agreements pioneered by the Academy.
Speaking at the meeting, he urged the studios to maintain the aggressive screening schedules they adopted last year. Having created a new membership list by metro area to encourage studios to hold screenings outside of Los Angeles and New York, he suggested that other awards groups with members across the country coordinate their membership lists to facilitate such screenings.
But the bitter battle between the MPAA and the indies still had some leaving the meeting arguing over the ideology of how best to fight piracy.
"The meeting was hopeful and fruitful just given the fact that all the parties were in the same room," producer Jeff Levy-Hinte said. "There was some very useful discussion. But the tenor of the meeting was for the MPAA to try to promote and reinforce (the concept) that piracy must be seen from a law enforcement perspective. That closes off (some) avenues of discussion."
He said he would like to see a discussion about how to make "peer-to-peer file sharing remunerative to copyright holders."
"It was encouraging to hear that watermarking was a quantum leap forward -- we all agreed on that," Hudson said. "What is frustrating is that the MPAA's view on how to fight piracy is so narrow. (The policy only deals with) prosecuting pirates and not how to coexist with new technologies."
Ironically, when Hudson suggested forming a new group to continue discussing the issue, an MPAA attorney interjected that because of the federal antitrust ruling that struck down the ban, the MPAA's member companies, which must decide future screener policy individually, could not join together to recommend future policies.
http://www.backstage.com/backstage/n..._id=1000485718
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P2P Faces the Addressing Problem
Andy Oram
The peer-to-peer movement had to face the problem of addressing head on because people at individual PCs had to be reached in a wide variety of environments. One of cleverest ways to solve the addressing problem is to design applications so that user addresses don't matter. This is the solution chosen by Gnutella and many related file-sharing systems: you just broadcast that you want a certain file. The request passes from your system to a few systems you know and then to a few systems each of them knows; eventually some system comes back saying, "Here is the file." Another way of saying this is that the addressing problem is moved from the user to the desired resource. Individual users are free from the addressing problem.
It's interesting how many applications can function with anonymity. As we have seen, the Web requires the client to identify the server, but the server does not have to identify the client (except to obtain a temporary IP address); the server is happy to display its home page to anyone. Once someone wants to view sensitive data or buy something, the server will put up a password dialog box or require a credit card; that's a more advanced situation.
On the other hand, anonymity is currently being allowed in many places where it's creating trouble, largely because of the rise of wireless networks and the risk of drive-by intruders. For instance, corporate file servers routinely put up public sites that anyone on the network can read; it's assumed that everybody behind the firewall can be trusted. This was always a bad assumption, but if the network adds a wireless hub, the administrator has to worry constantly about who's sneaking up to it and snooping around. In a similar fashion, many corporate mail servers accept mail from anyone on the LAN. That problem has been highly publicized because intruders have been using such hubs to send unsolicited bulk email. So more and more, we are discovering the need to assign persistent identities to users. In the case of wireless, organizations are doing so by making them log in before using the network.
Sender Policy Framework, which has been in the news a lot as email software designers and ISPs call for its adoption, works on a slightly different level. It doesn't identify end users. Instead, it provides checks to ensure that mail messages correctly identify the hubs and relays through which they pass. This is more of a routing issue than an addressing issue; the basic form of addressing (DNS) is no different when SPF is used.
Solutions to the addressing problem fall into a few categories. In the case of a wireless LAN, the first solution is simply to make users authenticate themselves with a central repository that contains their identities and to record their addresses for a single session. This is what most instant messaging systems do. It was also the quick-and-dirty solution chosen by Napster, which is why it could easily be dismantled for vicarious and contributory copyright infringement while modern Gnutella-based file-sharing systems cannot.
This dependence on central servers scales well. AOL Instant Messenger shows that such a system can serve millions of users. Still the system suffers from a flat namespace (once someone chooses the name John, no one else can use it), and it puts control in the hands of the people who run the servers.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/04/07/p2p-ws.html
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Apple
RealNetworks Seeks a Musical Alliance With Apple
John Markoff and Steve Lohr
RealNetworks made a direct appeal last week to Apple Computer, its Internet music rival, suggesting that the two companies form a common front against Microsoft in the digital music business.
The offer to create a "tactical alliance" was made on April 9 by Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, the Seattle-based Internet music and video service, in an e- mail message to Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chairman.
But if an alliance with Apple could not be struck, Mr. Glaser strongly hinted in the e-mail message that he might be forced to form a partnership with Microsoft to pursue "very interesting opportunities" because support for Microsoft's media-playing software seems to be growing.
A pact with Microsoft would be a startling reversal for RealNetworks, whose complaints about Microsoft's business tactics form a major part of the European Commission's antitrust case against the company.
Mr. Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, is a former executive of Microsoft who left on friendly terms but later became a bitter rival after Microsoft decided that media- playing software would be crucial to its long-term growth. The overture from Mr. Glaser to Mr. Jobs also reflects the scramble among major technology and media companies to jockey for advantage as the market for music - and eventually movies - distributed legally over the Internet is starting to take off.
Apple is clearly the early leader with its iTunes online music store, which downloads and plays songs only on Apple's popular iPod handheld devices. Besides RealNetworks, a pioneer in software for distributing and playing music and video, major companies are entering the market.
Microsoft is gaining ground and making deals. This week, it agreed to pay $440 million to settle a private suit over patent claims and to strike a licensing deal with InterTrust Technologies, an early developer of copyright protection software.
Microsoft is expected to offer its own digital music store before long. And Sony has said it will start a music store later this year. It is developing its own media-player devices, which, given Sony's reputation for stylish design and clever marketing, could prove to be strong competition for the iPod. Sony has not announced when its devices will be introduced.
It is against this backdrop that the timing and details of Mr. Glaser's offer to Mr. Jobs are particularly intriguing. In his message, which was obtained by The New York Times from a person close to Apple, Mr. Glaser asked Mr. Jobs to consider licensing Apple's Fairplay digital rights management system to RealNetworks to permit customers of the RealNetworks music service to play their digital music collections on iPod players.
In exchange, RealNetworks would make the iPod its primary device for the RealNetworks store and for the RealPlayer software.
The message notes that both RealNetworks and Apple support the same digital music technology standard, known as AAC. But because it is not possible for RealNetworks' encrypted music services, Rhapsody and the Real music store, to be played on iPod, RealNetworks is considering switching to Microsoft's competing WMA format, which would make the RealNetworks services work seamlessly with Microsoft's technology.
"We are seeing very interesting opportunities to switch to WMA," Mr. Glaser wrote. "Instinctively I don't want to do it because I think it leads to all kinds of complexities in terms of giving Microsoft too much long-term market momentum."
Apple executives would not comment on the message. But it seems likely Mr. Jobs will rebuff the offer. Mr. Glaser said he had not received a response from Mr. Jobs, and in his e-mail message Mr. Glaser said he was going to be in Silicon Valley this week and suggested that he meet with Apple executives today.
Mr. Glaser has been vocal in his condemnation of what he considers Apple's proprietary strategy and he has said he believes the strategy is a mistake. Apple is running the risk of following the same path it took in its development of its personal computer, he argued.
It is widely believed in the PC industry that Apple's refusal to license its Macintosh operating system in the late 1980's contributed to the operating system monopoly of Microsoft's Windows.
Mr. Glaser has recently tried to act as a neutral broker in the competition between different hardware standards, while Mr. Jobs has been pursuing a more proprietary approach, making digital music from Apple's iTunes store playable only on iPod.
Apple, however, notes that it is open to deals with other companies. It recently formed a partnership with Hewlett-Packard, allowing Hewlett to distribute iPod devices and load Apple's iTunes software on its consumer PC's.
Subscribers to AOL, Apple adds, can also download music from the iTunes music store. Still, these deals are mainly distribution agreements with other companies, and do not require Apple to open its technology so that other music services and devices can work with the Apple offerings.
"Apple is not into interoperability," said an industry executive with connections to both the computer and music industries. "Steve's bet is that he can beat the big guys, Sony and Microsoft - with better marketing."
A number of industry executives said, however, that Mr. Jobs was under increasing pressure from both his music industry partners and from Hewlett-Packard to open up his digital music service.
The situation in the digital music industry is complex and changing very rapidly. Events like the European ruling against Microsoft's bundling of its media player into the Windows operating system could force the company to rethink its digital media strategy.
At the same time Microsoft has clearly been moving to settle as many of its legal entanglements as quickly as possible. In recent weeks it has settled lawsuits with Sun Microsystems and with InterTrust.
By putting many legal problems behind it, Microsoft would be freer to compete aggressively with Apple in the music market, analysts said.
"Real understands how incredibly powerful the Microsoft music initiative will be," said Richard Doherty, a computer industry consultant and president of Envisioneering. "I don't think that Jobs understands this. He doesn't realize how big the juggernaut is about to get."
In his e-mail message to Mr. Jobs, Mr. Glazer said that he was reaching out to Mr. Jobs before making a move to switch camps. Mr. Glaser said he was surprised that the proposal had been leaked.
"Why is Steve afraid of opening up the iPod?" he asked in a telephone interview. "Steve is showing a high level of fear that I don't understand."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/15/bu...15real.html?hp
Profit at Apple Almost Triples on a Sharp Rise in iPod Sales
Laurie J. Flynn
Apple Computer Inc. said Wednesday that its profits nearly tripled in its second quarter because of continued strong sales of the iPod portable music player and notebook computers.
For the three months ended March 27, Apple reported a net profit of $46 million, or 12 cents a share, compared with $14 million, or 4 cents a share, in the quarter a year earlier. Revenue was $1.91 billion, a 29 percent increase from $1.48 billion.
"We feel great," Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, said in an interview. "We sold a lot of Macs, but we've sold more iPods in the quarter than all the Macs put together."
Mr. Jobs said the company sold a record 807,000 iPods in the quarter, a 900 percent increase from the period a year earlier. The company sold 749,000 Macintosh computers in the quarter, up 5 percent.
The earnings beat Wall Street's forecast by a significant margin. Analysts polled by Thomson First Call had forecast earnings of 10 cents a share on $1.8 billion in revenue. Excluding a restructuring charge of $7 million, the company had a profit of 14 cents a share.
The company also forecast third-quarter revenue of $1.93 billion and earnings of 12 to 13 cents a share.
Apple announced its results after the close of regular trading. Shares of Apple closed down 29 cents, at $26.64, but rose as high as $27.07 in after-hours trading.
In the last year, several major new players have entered the market for portable music devices, including Dell. But Mr. Jobs said that the iPod had a 40 percent share of the MP3 player market and that the company had seen little pressure from competitors. In only two years, he said, Apple has sold 2.9 million iPods. In January, Hewlett- Packard announced a partnership with Apple that calls for Hewlett to resell the iPod and offer its iTunes service to its customers.
But the company's latest entry in the digital music market, the iPod mini, has been in tight supply since it was introduced in February, and Apple executives said that problem would continue in the third quarter. "The demand is a lot higher than we thought, and we're limited in how many we can manufacture," Mr. Jobs said.
Executives said they expected to solve the supply problem before the end of the fiscal year. "We feel we will reach a supply balance in Q4," said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's senior vice president for finance and its corporate controller, who will become the chief financial officer on June 1 with the retirement of Fred Anderson. As a result of the supply constraints, the introduction in Europe of the iPod mini, which weighs about as much as a cellphone and sells for $249, has been delayed until July from April.
Apple executives also denied that reports of problems with iPod minis were serious or widespread. In the last few weeks, some customers have described problems with static in the earphones. "We're highly confident with the minis we're shipping," Mr. Oppenheimer said. "The number of complaints we've had through AppleCare tech support is extremely small."
Mr. Jobs also pointed to success in the iTunes business and said the company recently reported that it had sold 50 million songs. During the last year, new rivals have entered the music download business as well, including low-cost notables like Wal-Mart Stores, which is offering songs for 88 cents each compared with 99 cents for iTunes.
William R. Fearnley, an analyst with FTN Midwest Research, said the company had strong momentum in several product areas and should focus on expanding its core Macintosh business. The company, he said, was on the right track with its introduction of a major upgrade to the Macintosh operating system, OS X, as well as with the G5, a powerful version of the Mac.
"We continue to like what they're doing," Mr. Fearnley said. "Now they need to grow the Macintosh sales and Macintosh's share."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/15/te...y/15apple.html
Apple Probes Reports of IPod Mini Static
AP
Apple Computer Inc. is investigating complaints that its popular iPod mini is prone to static and other sound distortions when playing back music.
The diminutive music players, which have been shipping since February, sometimes generate the noise when users touch areas around the headphone jack, according to a handful of reports posted at iPodlounge.com and Apple's own discussion forums.
``Apple is aware of a few isolated reports online of iPod mini audio static and is looking into it,'' Apple spokeswoman Natalie Sequeira said Tuesday. She urged users with any problems to contact the company's technical support.
The devices come with a one-year warranty.
Last month, Apple delayed the gadget's international release to the end of July, citing extremely strong demand in the United States. In February, the company reported receiving more than 100,000 pre-orders for the $249 mini since its January unveiling.
The waiting list is now between one and five weeks, Sequeira said. The company is expected to reveal more information when it posts its latest financial results Wednesday.
The iPod minis, which weigh less than most cell phones and are slightly larger than a business card, have a tiny 4-gigabyte hard drive and are available in a variety of colors. Apple also continues to sell its regular iPods, which are physically larger and have drives up to 40 gigabytes.
Shares of Apple were down $1.11 to close at $26.93 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...ni-Static.html
Apple To Halt Production In Sacramento
Ina Fried
Apple Computer said on Wednesday that it is shuttering its Northern California manufacturing operations and transferring the work to an outside contractor in the southern part of the state.
"As part of an ongoing effort to make our operations more efficient, Apple is closing its Sacramento manufacturing operation and moving most of its California-based manufacturing activities to a supplier in Southern California," the company said in a statement.
Apple would not say how many workers are affected by the closure, but the company had told local government officials it planned to cut 235 jobs, according to The Sacramento Bee.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based computer maker will continue to employ workers at the facility in nonmanufacturing areas. Apple also has a call center operation at the 752,000-square-foot facility, according to its most recent annual report, filed in December with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
"Employees from various other functions of the company will continue to work in Apple's Sacramento facility, and while this action will result in a reduction in operations staff, Apple's overall headcount worldwide continues to grow," the company said.
The plant, which once cranked out Apple's fruit-flavored iMacs, opened in 1992, according to the Bee.
The company has gradually reduced the number of manufacturing workers in the Sacramento area in recent years. In 2002, Apple cut some manufacturing jobs at its Elk Grove plant. In 1999, the company let go 25 to 50 full-time employees and about 300 contractors.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_210...3-5191453.html
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Toppan and Sony Develop 25GB Paper Disc
Press Release
Toppan Printing Co., LTD and Sony Corporation today announce the successful development of a 25GB paper disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology. Details will be announced at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18th to April 21st at Monterey, California.
Using the disc-structure of Blu-ray Disc technology, the new paper disc has a total weight that is 51% paper. The two companies jointly began this optical disc project approximately a year ago. Blu-ray Disc is commonly known for allowing more than 2 hours of high-definition program recording.
Hideaki Kawai, Managing Director, Head of Corporate R&D Division, Toppan CO., LTD commented: "Using printing technology on paper allows a high level of artistic label printing on the optical disc. Since a paper disc can be cut by scissors easily, it is simple to preserve data security when disposing of the disc".
Masanobu Yamamoto, Senior General Manager of Optical System Development Gp., Optical Disc Development Div., Sony Corporation said: "Since the Blu-ray Disc does not require laser light to travel through the substrate, we were able to develop this paper disc. By increasing the capacity of the disc we can decrease the amount of raw material used per unit of information."
The worldwide production of optical discs is approximately 20 billion per year and optical discs are being adopted widely. The combination of paper material and printing technology is also expected to lead to a reduction in cost per disc and will expand usage.
Toppan and Sony will continue development of the disc for practical use.
http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=7101
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The Humble Hard Drive, Transformed Into a Video Grab Bag
J.D. Biersdorfer
Digital video and computers may go together like a horse and carriage, but getting the video out of the camera and onto the PC is where many people get tangled up in the reins - especially those whose computers lack the FireWire connection common to digital video cameras. There is equipment that can help you burn that footage of the peewee hockey game onto a DVD, including video-capture cards that can be installed in your computer to connect the camera directly to the PC and bulky external decoder boxes that can connect it via a U.S.B. port. The new AVerMedia UltraTV USB 300 External TV Tuner gives you a pocket-size solution, and it can also play and record live television on your laptop or desktop PC.
With a coaxial cable or antenna connection and the UltraTV software, the TV tuner built into the AVerMedia unit can turn your hard drive into a digital video recorder to catch your favorite shows, including recordings scheduled in advance. In addition to TV recording, the device can capture video from digital and analog camcorders as well as VHS tapes. The UltraTV USB 300, which is roughly 3.5 inches square and slightly more than a half-inch thick, uses a high-speed U.S.B. 2.0 connection.
The UltraTV USB 300 has a suggested price of $130 and works with computers running Windows XP on at least a Pentium III one-gigahertz processor; full specifications are at
www.avermedia.com. And no worries about what to do with the footage once you have recorded it onto the computer: $150 worth of software, including Ulead DVD MovieFactory, is included to get you on the road to moviemaking.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/15/te...ts/15code.html
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You’ll watch those commercials and you’ll like them!
Liberty Eyes Digital TV Security
Clint Boulton
Emboldened by consumers' desire for more control over broadcast programming, the Liberty Alliance Project on Wednesday agreed to work with the TV-Anytime Forum to hash out digital identity requirements for the digital video recorder (DVR) market.
Liberty, a consortium of companies working to preserve the identity of Internet service users, hopes the initiative with DVR standards body TV-Anytime will pave the way for new markets and lower costs for content holders, broadcasters, advertisers and equipment providers.
Liberty will look to apply its Federated Identity Architecture to privacy, security and interoperability requirements in TV-Anytime's upcoming Phase 2 specifications, which address how games, enhanced TV, graphics, music files are transferred and stored in home networks.
While DVRs, such as the popular TiVO service have produced more choice and convenience for consumers, who can record, store and playback live TV, it has created a number of technical challenges for broadcasters and manufacturers, the groups said in a statement.
"For example, the lack of a universal format means delivering content across various types of DVRs has become an expensive proposition," the companies said. "In addition, DVRs' limited ability to network with other devices makes it difficult for consumers to fully realize the benefits inherent in the technology."
TV-Anytime needs Liberty's help to secure the management of content within compliant devices, including DVRs, as well as ensure the privacy and security of data associated with user identity and interaction.
Launched by Sun Microsystems, (Quote, Chart) AOL (Quote, Chart) and American Express (Quote, Chart) in 2001, the Liberty project has been since viewed as a standards group whose goal is to provide open single sign-on services as an alternative to proprietary software from Microsoft or other companies looking to grasp the federated identity space.
Originally, Liberty was seen merely as a group that would enable Web services on PCs and mobile computing devices and an alternative to work being done in the IBM/Microsoft-led Web Services Interoperability organization.
But by partnering with TV-Anytime, Liberty seems assured of breaking free from the perception that it caters strictly to the enterprise, and is simply interested developing an open standard for network identity that supports all network devices -- including DVRs.
The timing seems ripe. Industry experts have said they see a convergence of digital television, Internet and communication technologies creating an overabundance of programs and personalization options from which the average consumer can choose.
This has caused the popularity of DVRs to skyrocket. Market research firm IDC said worldwide DVR shipments reached over 4 million in 2003, fueled by strong demand in the United States and Japan.
Moreover, the firm said shipments could increase at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 50 percent over the next five years, reaching over 28 million global shipments by 2008.
The proliferation has turned to a potential cash cow for some companies eager to capitalize. For example, Time Warner Cable, and Direct TV have built the DVR capabilities into their cable and satellite boxes.
And as the convergence of TV, Internet and communications continues to tighten in consumers' homes, it's not a stretch to think consumer-minded companies like Microsoft, (Quote, Chart) Dell (Quote, Chart) or Gateway (Quote, Chart) might come knocking in search of ways to sink their teeth into the DVR technology and service pie.
In the meantime, Liberty Alliance and TV-Anytime said they will forge business use cases and address technical issues for scenarios such as permission-based sharing of viewer information, television commerce, compliant advertising distribution, and peer-to-peer transfer of personal content.
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news...le.php/3340121
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Set-Top Boxes May Put A Lid On Rewritable DVDs
Rick Merritt
"Rip, Mix, Burn" will apparently not become the mantra of set- top box makers.
The slogan used by Apple Computer is anathema among cable companies that specify set-top boxes, according to Ken Morse, vice president of client architecture at Scientific-Atlanta Inc. (Lawrenceville, Ga).
At a Digital Hollywood panel here on Tuesday (March 30), Morse said cable companies want rewritable DVDs in future set-tops to archive video. However studios are lobbying the network providers to build a security mechanism into the DVD players.
The current scheme under discussion is preventing disks made on a set- top burner from being played on any other system by linking the content to the serial number of the set-top using triple DES encryption.
That's the approach current digital set-tops already use with content stored on their hard disk drives.
Morse said no one has made a formal proposal for a security mechanism yet, but he expects rewritable DVD players will appear in set tops in about a year.
http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/show...e ID=18700235
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Court Lets Cable Off The Hook--For Now
Reuters
A court ruling that could have forced cable companies to offer customers a choice of Internet service providers has been suspended while regulators and cable companies appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco on Friday said it would grant petitions from the Federal Communications Commission and cable companies for a stay, pending consideration of the case by the high court.
The appellate court ruled in October that the FCC should have classified high-speed Internet service over cable as a telecommunications service instead of as an information service--including requiring a choice of Internet service when customers sign up for cable broadband.
The appeals court last week refused to reconsider its decision that regulators improperly insulated cable companies from strict regulations.
The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents major cable operators like Time Warner and Comcast, welcomed Friday's order.
"We will now turn our attention to developing our formal appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and look forward to having this case decided on its merits," NCTA Senior Vice President Dan Brenner said in a statement.
The FCC decided in March 2002 that high-speed Internet service from cable companies was an information service, and therefore not immediately subject to access requirements.
The FCC has asked for comment on whether it should require cable companies to give consumers a choice of Internet service providers. Some cable companies already do provide some choice.
ISPs like EarthLink hailed the appeals court's original decision as finally giving consumers a choice.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5189485.html
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ISPs Look For The Value-Add
Steve Hill
Providers push security, spam busting and antivirus services to increase revenues per user
Internet service providers (ISPs) are shifting from simply growing subscriber numbers to the longer- term goal of increasing revenues per user by developing new services.
Broadband value added services revenues are running at the rate of $3.3bn a year globally. But a relatively small number of services account for the majority of value- added revenue.
Tim Johnson, publisher at broadband market research firm Point Topic, told vnunet.com: "Broadband has been sold to consumers based around the benefits of 'speed' and 'always-on'.
"But this is no longer enough. Consumers want to do a lot more with their connections."
He added that existing value added services often had lots of users, but do not generate much revenue.
For example, peer-to-peer file sharing services places high demand on networks, yet provides ISPs with little in the way of revenue.
Security is the most lucrative value added service, generating $1bn in revenue worldwide, followed by online gaming ($839m) and home networking ($778m).
Teleworking services were found to be generating very little revenue. "Lots of people use broadband for teleworking, but we found few ISPs offering value added services," said Johnson.
"Most teleworkers would really appreciate a company that came along and solved all their problems."
Nick Godsell-Fletcher, sales and marketing manager at ISP Proweb, said that his company offers services including security, anti-spam and antivirus.
"We offer services to Boots, Derbyshire Constabulary and solicitors, and many of these are data sensitive," he explained, adding that after-sales is also an important value-added service.
http://www.whatpc.co.uk/News/1154367
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Verizon to Add Internet Surcharge
Matt Richtel
Verizon Communications announced plans yesterday to add a $2 to $3 monthly surcharge to the cost of its high-speed Internet connections, a move that could fuel further debate over the taxation of online services.
Verizon said its new charge would start appearing next month on the bills of roughly 2.5 million subscribers to its high-speed data line service in Eastern states. The company said that, because of logistical problems, the surcharge would not be levied on high-speed Internet customers in Western states until June.
Verizon and other providers of digital data lines say they are required by federal regulations to pay into the Universal Service Fund that subsidizes telecommunications service in rural areas, schools and libraries. Verizon said that until now, it had paid the surcharge, rather than passing the cost on to customers.
BellSouth, another large regional phone company, also said yesterday that it would add $2.97 in fees to the bills of its 1.4 million high-speed Internet customers starting April 15.
The fee is 85 percent of the combined amount of the surcharge and administrative costs that the company currently bears, Joe Chandler, a BellSouth spokesman, said.
In February, SBC Communications began levying a monthly charge of $1.84 on the bills of new customers and existing customers who sign new contracts for high-speed Internet service, a company spokesman said.
The phone companies already include the Universal Service Fund fee on bills for lines used for telephone service. But they had hoped that politicians, regulators or the courts would relieve them of having to pay the fee on high-speed Internet lines.
"We've been hoping it would go away," said Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman. Verizon charges $34.95 for high-speed Internet service, but customers who also use Verizon for long-distance and local telephone service pay $29.95 a month for the Internet line.
The fate of the federal fee - along with other state and local taxes levied on Internet access - is being debated on Capitol Hill and is the subject of litigation.
Telephone companies, like Verizon, point out that cable companies that offer similar high-speed Internet connections are not required to pay the surcharge. As a result, the telephone companies say, they are at a competitive disadvantage.
Complicating the matter, some states and cities levy additional taxes on phone lines used for Net access, while other states do not.
Cable and telephone access to the Internet are treated differently for tax purposes because the Federal Communications Commission has defined telephone data lines as a telecommunications service, thus subjecting it to certain surcharges. But cable Internet access has been defined as an "information service," a category that has been shielded from taxes under federal law.
Two competing bills in the Senate are seeking to address the issue and the larger question of taxation of Internet services. One bill, sponsored by George Allen, a Republican from Virginia, would eliminate all tax on Internet access, whether provided by telephone or cable companies.
A competing bill, sponsored by Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, would allow states that collect taxes on phone companies for high-speed Internet access to continue doing so.
John Reid, a spokesman for Mr. Allen, said the senator hoped to see his bill voted on the Senate floor later this month or in early May.
The courts have had to address the discrepancy of treatment for telephone and cable services as well. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling in October that vacated the F.C.C.'s determination that cable Internet services were entirely information services, and said they had elements of telecommunications services. Last Friday the appeals court stayed its ruling pending an appeal by the commission and the cable industry to the Supreme Court.
If the Supreme Court does not take the case, or the appeals court decision is left in place, cable companies could be required to pay the surcharge, Mr. Rabe of Verizon said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/14/te...14verizon.html
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Music Industry In Uproar Over UNC Research
Jonathan B. Cox
Koleman Strumpf, of UNC-Chapel Hill, was
surprised by the reaction of his economic research
on file sharing.
Staff Photo by Harry Lynch
Koleman Strumpf, associate professor of economics at UNC-Chapel Hill, finished a paper last month that was sure to bore.
The title, "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis," was enough to send laymen scampering. The mathematical formulas, tables and appendices would lure only other academics, he figured.
He was wrong.
The paper lit the fuse on a volatile topic, music downloading, and touched off a firestorm of controversy. Strumpf, 35, and a Harvard University colleague concluded that online file sharing doesn't hurt music sales, contrary to contentions of the nation's recording industry executives.
The industry's trade group began a counteroffensive, blasting the paper as incomplete and flawed. National news organizations, including The New York Times, wrote stories about the study. Strumpf received hundreds of phone calls and e-mail notes. Countless Web users and music fans posted their views online.
"I wouldn't have guessed anything at all like this" Strumpf said of the response. "Being a Monday-morning quarterback, I can understand because people are very passionate about this."
The Recording Industry Association of America has long bemoaned declining sales, which it blames on illegal downloading. According to the association, the industry shipped almost a third fewer units in 2003 than in 1999. The industry is suing consumers to stop the free downloads.
"If illegal downloading is not the cause of the precipitous decline in sales of recordings, what is?" asks a six-page paper the recording industry group released in response to the study by Strumpf and Harvard's Felix Oberholzer-Gee. "The results are inconsistent with virtually every other study."
There could be many causes for the decline, Strumpf said. The economy is weaker. More entertainment choices might be drawing consumer dollars. Radio consolidation has reduced variety.
He says the industry's response amounts to, " 'We have 20 studies, they have one.' If 20 or 100 or 1,000 people say the sun revolves around the earth, it doesn't make it so."
Two years ago, Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee set out to research the matter. Strumpf's interest was piqued by the Napster trial, where the recording industry alleged copyright violations that led to the demise of the pioneering Web site in 2001. In the testimony, experts argued that music downloads had to be the cause of slumping sales.
Strumpf read the studies they cited. They were horrible, he said.
"I was like, 'Boy, this is pretty amazing,' " said Strumpf, a Philadelphia native. "Nobody has done a serious study."
Plus, Strumpf had a personal interest in the topic. He owns several hundred CDs and a 20-gigabyte digital music player that is almost full. He tells visitors seeking his office to simply listen for the music.
Instead of relying on user surveys, as other studies have done, Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee got logs for two computers servers belonging to OpenNap, a file-sharing community. They were able to see what files users searched for and which ones they downloaded over a 17-week period in late 2002. They compared that activity with sales numbers from Nielsen Soundscan, which tracks music purchases.
By the recording industry's logic, sales of popular albums should decline as song downloads increase. That wasn't supported by the researchers' findings.
The pair concluded that file sharing doesn't hurt sales because those who do it wouldn't buy music anyway, Strumpf said. For the most part, those who download music don't have much money.
While they might download 20 CDs' worth of music, they wouldn't have bought 20 CDs, he said. "At most, file sharing can explain a tiny fraction" of the decline in music sales, the professors' paper said.
Of the phone calls and e-mail he has received, Strumpf says about two-thirds favor the findings. When he surfs the Web in search of comments on the paper, about half support the results.
Those who disagree, however, are equally vocal. Some people have told Strumpf he is stupid or killing their business. He's satisfied to have the dialogue.
"It's good to see people thinking a little more carefully," said Strumpf, who doesn't typically download tunes.
But some of the attention is flattering. Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks who cemented his fortune with a site that pioneered online broadcasts, wrote saying he was glad the paper confirmed views that he has long espoused. Harry Shearer, a comedian and the voice of Monty Burns on "The Simpsons," mentioned Strumpf recently on National Public Radio.
But Strumpf concedes that the paper might not be perfect. It was released so the two researchers could get feedback and make tweaks before it it is published in a journal, a process that could take years. It gained attention after it was posted on Web logs and floated by some in the recording industry.
And no matter the ultimate fate, the industry should take note, Strumpf said. "There are huge numbers of people who think the record industry is trying to pull the wool over their eyes," he said. "These are their customers, and I would be awful concerned."
http://www.newsobserver.com/front/st...-3114131c.html
Until next week,
-
js.
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