[JackSpratts]

P2PNet Founder and Editor Sued
Jack

Canadian advocacy journalist Jon Newton revealed this week he is being sued for facilitating libel. While tight lipped on the details, a search of court documents by eagle-eyed supporters revealed the plaintiffs in the case may include none other than Nikki Hemming, the president of Sharman Networks, which owns the former file sharing giant Kazaa. Hemming is herself involved in seemingly endless litigation over copyrights and assets improprieties and present bete-noir of the Australian music industry.

The defendants are said to include P2PNet owner Newton and several John Does allegedly accused of further disparaging the already suffering reputations of certain company officials.





Can TV's and PC's Live Together Happily Ever After?
Richard Siklos

HOLY Grails, swirling myths and big lies seem to be in the air these days — and we're not just talking about a certain heavily publicized movie opening this week that is based on a certain megaselling novel. Rather, consider the much-ballyhooed convergence between television and personal computers (a k a the grail), which seems to edge ever closer with every week.

Slowly but surely, it seems that TV programs and movies are finding their way onto the Internet through a growing array of distribution outlets.

Just in the last few weeks, for example, Warner Brothers announced it would make hundreds of its hit films and shows available this summer for paid download via the file-sharing site BitTorrent; Fox Entertainment has joined the other major networks on iTunes with downloadable episodes of "24" and "Prison Break"; TiVo announced a deal with the Web video outfit Brightcove that intends to give people with TiVo boxes access to Internet fare on their TV sets; and ABC and CBS have begun streaming replays of some of their most popular shows on their Web sites, offering a new advertising-supported way to tune in.

Even though no one seems to be making much money yet on these ventures and there are still chewy legal and rights issues to sort out, there is palpable excitement — a sense that the TV and movie industries are going to head off the pirates and file-sharing teens by making their products widely available online in legal ways.

In doing so, it seems the ultimate no-brainer that anyone with a fancy TV monitor and a broadband Internet connection will next be able to pluck their favorite TV programs and movies off the Web (and eventually choose to disconnect their cable or satellite provider, or, as I've written previously, at least force the cable operators to offer smaller and more appealing packages of channels).

Now, this is the kind of convergence that people could really get behind — it makes a whole lot more sense than some of the "benefits" promised earlier, like surfing Web sites on a 60-inch plasma screen or answering e-mail messages while sitting in the La-Z-Boy. All the elements are falling into place: sales of high-definition TV's that can also be used as computer monitors are soaring — they are already in 19 percent of American homes — and, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, sales of digital sets will surpass the sale of analog sets this year for the first time. Meanwhile, more than 40 percent of households in the United States have signed up for high-speed connections, and the number continues to rise.

The consumer electronics industry and technology giants like Microsoft and Intel are working double-time to concoct the next generation of gadgets that will bridge the gap between computers and televisions. Some companies, among them Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems, already have products that make watching Web video on TV possible, though they are cumbersome to use.

Sharp announced last month that it would soon introduce an LCD-screen TV for the Japanese market that will let viewers watch high-definition television, use the remote control to surf the Internet, and store data and TV programs on a built-in hard drive. (One studio executive said he expected these machines would be the rage by this time next year, and that Apple is believed to have the most promising version in development.)

But here is the swirling myth — or is it The Big Lie? — about convergence: It's not as close as all of that activity suggests. For various reasons, watching TV programs delivered by the Internet on regular TV looks like it will remain tantalizingly out of reach for all but the most enthusiastic gadget junkies for some time.

The point of all these new video-content deals being struck by networks and studios is, of course, to avoid making the mistakes of the music industry, which focused too much on rear-guard actions like lawsuits and not enough on figuring out new ways to give the fans what they wanted.

The music analogy only goes so far, however. The way music is promoted and sold and listened to bears scant resemblance to TV and video products. Ventures like the one announced by Warner and the big networks are not really an alternative way of receiving conventional TV, but rather an alternative to buying or renting DVD's coupled with an intriguing new market opportunity to reach viewers on their desktop or mobile devices.

David G. Sanderson, who heads the media consulting practice at Bain & Company, offers four reasons most people won't be downloading their favorite shows onto their TV's any time soon: limitations in broadband infrastructure, the degree of readiness among electronics makers to provide a product with mass appeal, the behavior of consumers and the agenda of the players in the TV ecosystem.

"If you started from scratch, you'd do it differently," Mr. Sanderson said of the fitful process of making television shows available on the Internet. "But we have an entrenched structure in how programming is brought to consumers."

Mr. Sanderson's first two points — basically whether the Internet-based network and devices are ready for prime-time — are where most of the action is and where things could change if businesses keep investing and innovating. Still, for now, there are logjams associated with delivering large quantities of video over the Web and the unresolved "net neutrality" debate over whether heavy users should pay more to telecommunications carriers for the large amount of bandwidth they use.

His second two points — about consumer behavior and the entrenched players — are actually more complex. The consumer question boils down to whether enough people want to give up access to the dozens or hundreds of channels they pay for through their cable providers to buy programs over the Internet. And that is closely related to his point about the industry structure, which is a function of the willingness of cable networks to risk giving up their guaranteed monthly subscription fees in favor of a free-wheeling Internet alternative.

"The reality is that I don't think you're going to see the current cable offering — hundreds of linear channels — replicated on the Internet," Glenn A. Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, told me recently. "One reason is the Internet isn't physically capable of handling that volume, but obviously, with a lot of money and time, that can be alleviated. But the second thing is that we actually provide a very important economic function in the TV distribution chain."

CABLE networks are not about to jeopardize the millions they receive from guaranteed subscription fees each month — and it is probably no coincidence that the versions of TV programs sold through iTunes or Google Video are inferior in picture quality to what is offered by cable companies (while the growing popularity of high-definition TV shows that viewers want higher quality). Even Sharp's new Japanese TV, the Internet Aquos, only accesses online video material from a closed-circuit service, and displays it at inferior quality.

Mr. Britt said his industry was not ignoring the enormous amount of effort being poured into providing alternative ways to get video material delivered to the TV set. But, as he put it, "it's very complicated to set up unless you have a 13-year-old son."

Those seeking true convergence may have to keep the faith for a while yet. On the other hand, those seeking grails don't tend to give up easily.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/bu.../14frenzy.html





High-Definition Video Could Choke Internet
Peter Svensson

Every day, it seems, a new service pops up offering to send you video over the Internet. "Desperate Housewives," Stephen Colbert heckling the president, clips of bad dancers at wedding parties: It's all there.

You may be up for it, but is the Internet?

The answer from the major Internet service providers, the telephone and cable companies, is "no." Small clips are fine, but TV-quality and especially high-definition programming could make the Internet choke.

Most home Internet use is in brief bursts — an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV — for hours at a time — that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive.

To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example.

Internet activists and consumer groups are vehemently against those plans, saying they amount to tilting the Internet's level playing field, one of the things that encourages innovation. They want legislation to guarantee a "neutral" Internet, but prospects appear slim.

At the heart of the debate is a key question: How much would it really cost the Internet carriers to provide a couple of hours of prime-time TV over their networks every day?

The carriers are playing their cards fairly close to their chest, but there are ways to get close to an answer.

One data point: As a rough estimate, an always-on, 1 megabit-per-second tap into the Internet backbone in downtown Atlanta, bought wholesale, costs an ISP $10 to $20 a month, according to the research firm TeleGeography Inc. An ISP's business is carrying data from that tap to the customer.

One megabit per second doesn't sound like that much, but ISPs spread that bandwidth out over their subscribers. Analysts estimate that ISPs sell around 30 times more bandwidth to their end users than they can connect simultaneously to the Internet (the figure probably varies widely from provider to provider).

In this sense, broadband is like old-fashioned telephone service, where there are always more lines leading from homes to the local switching station than there are going from the station out of the neighborhood. If everyone in a neighborhood picks up the phone at once, some calls won't go through because there aren't enough outgoing lines. But that rarely happens, so the system works.

On the broadband network, the oversubscription means that one megabit-per-second connection to the Internet is enough to serve 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second, typical for low-end DSL. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

Of course, the carrier also needs to pay for the equipment that brings data from the Internet connection point to the subscriber, first through fiber-optic lines and then through DSL or cable.

Oversubscription doesn't present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it's not going to work.

"The plain truth is that today's access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect," according to Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications Inc.'s top lobbyist.

The solution, of course, is to make the pipes connecting to the Internet fatter. To illustrate what that would mean, BellSouth Corp.'s chief architect, Henry Kafka, uses the assumption that the cost of providing a month's worth of data to the average user, about 2 gigabytes, costs the company $1. That's a fairly small amount compared to the $25 to $47 a month BellSouth charges for DSL, but then the company has to pay for sales, support, maintenance and a host of other costs.

If that same user were to start downloading five TV-quality movies per month, BellSouth's data cost, not including the cost of maintaining the DSL line, would go up to $4.50 a month. Higher, but perhaps not high enough to break BellSouth's business model.

But if the customer starts watching Internet TV like the average household watches regular TV, 8 hours a day, BellSouth's cost would go up to $112 a month, according to Kafka.

"We don't expect to get to the point where we're charging anyone those kinds of prices for Internet service, but it does reflect the kind of impact that high-quality video could have on the network and business models for providing the Internet," Kafka said.

To deal with that, Kafka said says BellSouth might put caps on the amount of data that a residential user gets for free, and charge extra if the user goes over, much like cell phone users pay overages. Other options include charging content providers extra for guaranteed delivery, the kind of model that has raised the hackles of Internet content providers and activists.

However, Kafka's estimates for these costs aren't really BellSouth's. Like other telephone companies, they don't disclose their actual costs. Instead, Kafka's base figure of $1 for 2 gigabytes of data per month is based on an estimate by Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime newsletter, and Burstein thinks Kafka has it wrong.

"Traffic just isn't moving up that fast," Burstein said. "It will go up and it will go up faster, but not fast enough to be dollars and cents that really matter."

Internet video is still just a small fraction of the total amount of video people watch, and that's unlikely to change overnight, in Burstein's opinion.

In fact, he said, Internet traffic has increased much more slowly than the prices of Internet-carrying equipment like switches and routers have fallen, and that trend is likely to continue.

Burstein believes the danger of letting the carriers charge extra for guaranteed delivery is that they'll put the spending for upgrades into creating that extra "toll lane," and won't reduce oversubscription in the rest of the network even though it would be cheap to do so.

Both Verizon and AT&T Inc. have said they won't degrade or block anyone's Internet traffic. But it's impossible to tell what goes on inside their networks.

The message: Stay tuned, and watch your download speeds.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060514/...net_neutrality





Huawei Unveils Gigabit Broadband Download Technology
Richard Wilson

Huawei Technologies is turning up the pressure as a supplier of next generation broadband telecoms networks with the announcement of a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) with a 1Terabit data switching capacity.

When deployed the GPON system, called SmartAX OFA5920, will allow users to have voice, data, and video services at a downlink rate of up to 2.5Gbit/s and an uplink rate of 1.25Gbit/s.

“This super-large capacity GPON solution provides abundant bandwidth which not only help operators address the requirements of existing services such as IPTV and Triple Play, but more importantly guarantees an evolution towards future high bandwidth services.” said Li Jian, v-p of Huawei’s access network product business.

The Chinese telecoms supplier claimed it is the first passive optical network with terabit non-blocking switching capability and full redundancy design.

In February, Huawei joined with Nortel in a plan to set up a joint venture to develop next generation broadband access technologies such as PONs.

The telecoms firm is looking to increase its telecoms market share outside China, and particularly in Europe. Last year it acquired UK manufacturer Marconi which will help to support its business as a future supplier to BT for its 21st Century Network project.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Art...technology.htm





Web Video Compression Could End Congestion
Brian Bergstein

With more and more video surging across the Internet not just to computers but also televisions and handheld devices, something that could relieve the congestion or improve the quality would be a huge breakthrough.

That is inspiring multiple efforts to chase a long-sought — and often unachieved — goal of better compression, the trick of shrinking a movie, song, picture or other large file so that it can be whisked over the Internet without anyone noticing a difference.

Some compression companies are making some eyebrow-raising promises, such as the ability to squeeze a video file tight enough to facilitate high-definition television over the Internet. Others say their compression schemes will enhance existing video applications such as medical imaging.

"We stand a tremendous chance of becoming a de facto standard," boasts Daniel Kilbank, who founded Bethesda, Md.-based compression-technology vendor Qbit LLC with former Apple Computer Inc. CEO John Sculley in 2003.

Qbit's compression system is considered "loss-less," meaning it can shrink a file without losing a detail from the original file. It uses pattern-recognition algorithms to spot recurring aspects of a scene rather than sending them multiple times.

In contrast, today's top method of video compression, MPEG-4, is considered "lossy" because some quality is sacrificed in shrinking the file. If you see fuzzy or pixelated images online, the faults could lie in the compression.

Consequently, even if Qbit merely matches MPEG-4's ability to shrink files but can do so losslessly, Kilbank argues that his technology "really creates a business argument" for new kinds of portable devices and Internet services with high-definition content.

Qbit figures to find its best success in "professional imaging fields" that generate huge files, such as medicine, defense, movie production and oil exploration, In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold believes. Eventually, however, Qbit expects to be able to shrink files that already have been compressed with MPEG — potentially a boon to cable, satellite and phone-companies pumping out video content.

A different compression approach is in the works at Euclid Discoveries LLC, based in this proudly historic Revolutionary War town.

Euclid recently announced that it can dramatically improve on MPEG-4's ability to render faces, while also shrinking files up to 10 times more efficiently. By focusing on faces first, Euclid hopes to spur "talking head" services, such as news broadcasts or videoconferences, on portable devices.

The compression is not lossless, but Euclid founder Richard Wingard argues that mathematical tricks will make the loss essentially unnoticeable.

For now, it appears Euclid still has far to go. In an April demonstration for The Associated Press, the system presented clearer facial images than files compressed with MPEG-4. But the edges weren't smoothly integrated into the picture, as if the face had been glued on the background for a collage.

Wingard said those problems will soon be fixed. And he said rendering faces is one of the hardest aspects of image manipulation, so having already solved that puts Euclid close to essentially removing bandwidth constraints for high-quality video. Euclid pledges to eventually get a two-hour movie down to 50 megabytes — small enough to fit 20 on a portable USB drive, for example.

Indeed, In-Stat's Kaufhold believes that Euclid has "something valuable at its core" that might lead to delivering HDTV over the Internet.

But other observers are far more skeptical. For one thing, innumerable compression claims have been made over the years only to fizzle.

And while there have been notable compression advancements over the years from such players as Divx Inc. and On2 Technologies Inc., those technologies power niche applications.

One reason is that existing, lossy compression — such as the MPEG-2 format that encodes DVDs — is usually good enough for entertainment purposes, said Predrag Filipovic, an analyst with The Diffusion Group.

He also notes that a startup compression scheme always faces an uphill fight. It must attract the interest of equipment makers who are reluctant to stray from industry standards, and it has to overcome rival offerings from full-service providers such as Microsoft Corp.

"Is there a need for yet-better compression? Yes, you can argue that there is," Filipovic said. "The question is how much better somebody has to be in order to justify the huge cost of marketing this thing and the huge cost to the provider. Those equations usually do not end up in a revolution."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060514/...hkBHNlYwMxNjk1





In Japan, a Provider of Cable Ups the Ante
Ken Belson

The Japanese are among the most avid television watchers on earth, yet most are still pulling their favorite shows out of the air. Just one in five homes here subscribes to a cable or satellite service.

Jupiter Telecommunications, the nation's biggest cable provider, is out to change that. Jupiter, which sells services under the brand name J:COM, has been aggressively signing up customers for its television, broadband lines and digital phones — even going so far as to pitch its wares door to door.

In March, J:COM also started selling mobile phone service, an offering that American cable companies like Comcast are only just developing.

This "grand slam" bundle has made J:COM the company to beat in Japan and is typical of how the company's American owners — led by the cable tycoon John C. Malone — are experimenting with both the latest technology and age-old salesmanship.

J:COM, which is partly owned by Sumitomo, looks like a local company from the outside. But behind its Japanese exterior, J:COM has a heavy American imprint, thanks to its majority owners at Liberty Global, which was formed last year when UnitedGlobalCom merged with the international holdings of Liberty Media International. Microsoft owns a small share in the company, too.

J:COM brings in almost one-third of the sales at Liberty Global, whose overseas holdings stretch from Japan to Chile to the Netherlands, and its advanced services are providing a road map for cable companies in other corners of the globe.

But to sell those services to a public used to getting their TV for free, J:COM must do some hand-holding. The company has 1,900 sales agents who go door to door, signing up new customers and providing technical support.

That extra effort might appear excessive to Americans, who have been buying cable and satellite services for years. But J:COM reckons that the personalized attention is crucial, because about 40 percent of Japan's population is over 50 and reluctant to order new services on their own.

"We have to explain to people why cable TV is important, and face-to-face interaction lets us do that," said Hiroyuki Nakatani, J:COM's manager in charge of sales and marketing.

In addition to offering video-on-demand, digital video recorders and other products that are mainstays in American homes, J:COM is expanding by aggressively buying rivals. Last year it took over cable companies in Kobe and Tokyo to raise its market share above 30 percent. J:COM, which is nearly five times as large than the second-biggest competitor, plans to keep buying some of the hundreds of remaining Japanese cable providers.

The acquisitions, combined with new products, have helped J:COM's sales grow by more than one-third in the last three years and an additional 20.4 percent in the first quarter this year, to 51.1 billion yen, or $464.1 million. Profits in the quarter surged 30.4 percent, to 4.37 billion yen.

"With our new services, we want the entire home entertainment budget to come our way," said Tomoyuki Moriizumi, J:COM's chief executive. "We want to make a one-stop shop for consumers."

J:COM hopes that its extra bulk and new services will help it fend off new kinds of competitors. Companies like Softbank are offering television over the Internet, and Japan's biggest phone companies are building vast fiber optic networks and teaming up with satellite providers like SkyPerfect to offer their own television services.

SkyPerfect, which has more than four million subscribers for its satellite services, is working with NTT, the country's largest carrier, to bundle its television with NTT's phone and broadband services for as much as $18 a month less than J:COM charges. The arrangement is similar to the relationship that Verizon and other American carriers have with DirecTV and Dish.

The fresh competition is a big reason investors remain skeptical about J:COM's prospects. The stock of the parent company of J:COM rose 21 percent in the three months after its debut in March last year, but it has lost all of that in the last few months. On Friday, it closed 5.5 percent below its initial offering price.

Yoshiyuki Kinoshita, an analyst at Merrill Lynch here, said "excessive concerns regarding the company will disappear" once investors focus on the company's growing profits and expanding market share.

All Japanese pay-television providers, though, still must grapple with the country's broadcasters, including the government-owned NHK. Like ABC, CBS and NBC decades ago, they dominate the television industry with big-budget dramas, game shows and sports. Growing numbers of shows are broadcast in high definition.

These networks win most of the advertising dollars spent on television, forcing cable and satellite to rely more on monthly subscriptions than their American counterparts.

Cable and satellite providers also face structural barriers. Many Japanese live in cramped apartments that lack the clear views of the sky needed to hang satellite dishes. The cable industry is dotted with dozens of tiny family-run or municipally owned companies. In big cities, trading companies, electronics makers and utilities and railroads often hold control.

With so many competitors spread across the country, J:COM has a hard time getting large enough to win deeper discounts from set-top box makers and programmers.

Still, J:COM has done a better job than most at selling new services to generate revenue. Almost 40 percent of its 1.8 million television subscribers have digital cable services that allow them to use digital video recorders, video on demand and other premium services. Nearly 23 percent of its customers order their television, broadband and phone service from J:COM.

"Other companies like NTT are trying to offer a triple play with satellite companies," Mr. Moriizumi said. "What's the point? We have one company, and we can give volume discounts of about 1,500 yen to customers with all three products."

Naoki Hiratsuka, a 58-year-old father of two, has had J:COM's triple play for four years. In addition to a basic television package, he gets a digital phone line and a broadband connection with a top speed of 30 megabits a second, about six times as fast as that offered by most American cable companies. He pays about $130 a month for the three services and some premium channels.

"When I saw the price of the package, I had to switch to J:COM," said Mr. Hiratsuka, who used to buy his phone and Internet line from NTT.

Mr. Hiratsuka is also considering whether to get a cellphone from J:COM once the company adds more models. J:COM does not operate its own cell network, but uses the one run by Willcom, a local carrier, an arrangement similar to what American cable companies are developing with Sprint.

In its first two months, J:COM's wireless service attracted 7,000 customers, many of them older consumers and teenagers who prefer a basic, inexpensive service. The company, which hopes to sign up 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year, charges $25 a month for a fixed-rate calling plan that lets J:COM customers call each other free.

Like American cable companies, J:COM wants to develop phones that work on the cellular network outdoors and wireless networks indoors and, ultimately, will let subscribers program their digital video recorders from their phones.

J:COM tailors its offerings for its audience with interactive services like mah-jongg and karaoke for older customers and daily recipes and workout programs for housewives. In a country known for its personal touch, J:COM and its American owners appear to have gone local.

"To the Japanese consumer, it's not only the cost, but also the convenience, so that if something breaks down, there will be a face to call," said Jane Buenaventura, a telecommunications analyst at Pyramid Research. "It's a market that is used to the retail approach, and J:COM knows that very well."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/te...y/15cable.html





Plan for Porn Domain Voted Down
Walaika K. Haskins

ICANN, the Internet's key oversight body, has canned a proposal to create an .XXX domain for pornographic Web sites. The controversial proposal had faced considerable opposition from both conservative groups and Internet porn companies.

The nine-to-five vote by the ICANN board brings to a close a six-year effort by ICM Registry to create and operate the domain. According to ICM, a porn-specific domain would produce a clearly identifiable area of the Internet for purveyors of adult content, and would therefore make it easier to prevent kids from inadvertently accessing that material.

Having a porn domain, ICM has argued, also would help the multibillion-dollar adult industry put an end to some of the major problems plaguing the Internet, including porn-related spam.

Playing Politics

The vote was a 180 degree reversal for the ICANN board, which had given the proposal preliminary approval in June 2005. However, ICANN postponed making a final decision last August after U.S. government officials voiced opposition to the plan. Another vote, scheduled for December, was deferred once again.

The U.S. government's reaction to the plan created the perception that the process has become politicized and had many critics questioning ICANN's independence as a neutral, nonpolitical oversight body.

During the past six months, pressure on ICANN has increased from several fronts, with groups opposing the domain flooding ICANN's public discussion board with posts critical of the plan.

"The board was certainly very conscious of that [controversy] ... but the heart of the decision today was not driven by a political consideration," Paul Twomey, chief executive of ICANN, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.

Twomey said the vote was based on whether the creation of the domain would put the organization between the proverbial rock and a hard place, compelling it to enforce hundreds of country-specific laws governing pornography.

Porn Segregation

Mukul Krishna, a Frost & Sullivan analyst, said the vote showed that ICANN was willing to stand up to pressure against those who supported the creation of the domain. Right now, Krishna said, the issue is simply too controversial for anyone to approve a plan such as this.

The porn industry doesn't want it and governments don't want it, Krishna said. "ICANN doesn't want it because it doesn't have the resources," he said. "But there are a lot of powerful special-interest groups that kept the proposal alive for a long time."

Krishna expects that the issue will fade into the background, at least for a few of years.

A better idea than creating a special domain for porn, according to Krishna, would be to establish a Web site rating system analogous to the kind used for rating movies and TV programming. "That would arguably be less contentious than confining adult sites [to a specific part of the Internet]," Krishna said.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...11/tc_nf/43246





Porn Maker Allows Downloads for TV Viewing
Gary Gentile

Hollywood has been tiptoeing its way toward letting consumers buy a movie online, burn it onto a DVD and watch it on a living-room TV. While the studios hesitate, the adult film industry is taking the leap.

Starting Monday, Vivid Entertainment says it will sell its adult films through the online movie service CinemaNow, allowing buyers to burn DVDs that will play on any screen, not just a computer.

It's another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat.

"Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff," said Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, a consumer electronics think tank in Plano, Texas.

"The rest of Hollywood stands back and watches and lets the pornography industry work out all the bugs," he said.

There are business and technology factors that make it easier for adult film companies to embrace new technology faster than traditional media.

On the business side, Hollywood makes more money offering films on DVDs than in theaters. As a result, studios are hesitant to anger large retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Blockbuster by selling DVD-ready downloads directly to consumers.

Recently, most of the big studios have started selling films over the Web, including on CinemaNow, which is partly owned by the film studio Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Blockbuster Inc. Consumers can burn a backup DVD, but it can only be played by a computer, not a DVD player.

The adult film industry doesn't face the same business challenges.

"We don't have to divvy up the pie," said Bill Asher, co-chairman and co-owner of Vivid Entertainment, the largest distributor of adult entertainment. "We sell in smaller stores, mainstream chains, but no one dominant component where we're going to get that phone call."

There are also technical issues for Hollywood to resolve.

To prevent piracy, studios now use what's known as the "content scrambling system," or CSS, to keep consumers from copying DVDs and sending the files around the Internet.

The system, which is easily circumvented, is built into every DVD player to block the playing of movies on discs burned by a computer.

That obstacle has been overcome in the design of high-definition DVDs, which are just now becoming available.

Both rival high-def brands, HD DVD and Blu-ray, use new protection schemes that allow DVDs burned in a computer to play on a DVD player. But it will be years before new players that accommodate those discs replace older models.

The studios say they are preparing to allow the online burning of DVDs for playing on TVs once the new high-definition players become widely adopted.

Vivid says its downloads, which will cost $19.95, do not use CSS. Instead, online retailer CinemaNow is using an alternate, proprietary system that it says will protect the adult movies by preventing the burned DVD from being copied to other discs.

"They built a better mousetrap," Asher said of CinemaNow.

Despite the challenges, mainstream studios are taking some risks and inching toward downloadable DVDs.

Both Warner Bros. and Universal Studios have launched hybrid programs overseas in which consumers who download films also get a DVD in the mail.

But the real goal, analysts say, is to pipe major Hollywood movies and TV shows over the Internet directly to TV sets, bypassing DVDs altogether.

"How about I just turn my set on and press 'go,'" Greeson said. "That's the holy grail."

Hollywood is moving slowly in that direction but must first devise ways to placate retailers, broadcast affiliate partners, movie theaters and others with bottom lines threatened by the move.

"The more they champion Internet distribution directly to the consumer, the more it seems they're turning their back on their old media partners, which they can't afford to do," Greeson said.

So yet again, unencumbered by such business roadblocks, the adult film industry could lead the way.

"The vanguard here is porn," Greeson said. "They made a tremendous amount of money on the Web, but they know they can make more if they get to the living room."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060515/...hkBHNlYwMxNjk1





In Tokyo, the New Trend Is 'Media Immersion Pods'
Virginia Heffernan

At the Bagus Gran Cyber Café customers rent so-called media immersion pods. It's not just a solo pursuit; pods for couples, are available too.

ALL cities takes a toll, and at times all city dwellers have to take their leave. When life in Istanbul gets too stressful, people can head to the baths. In Rio there's the beach. In Tokyo, though, the antidote to urban overload is more of the same. In the world's most media-saturated city, people take a break by checking themselves into media immersion pods: warrens cluttered with computers, TV's, video games and every other entertainment of the electronic age.

The Bagus Gran Cyber Cafés are Tokyo's grand temples of infomania. Situated well above retail level, on the odd floor number where in Manhattan you might find tarot readers or nail salons, these establishments contain row after row of anonymous cubicles. At first glance the spread looks officelike, but be warned: these places are drug dens for Internet addicts.

The first Gran Cyber Café opened in 1999. Today there are 10, serving some 5,000 people a day. Each has a slightly different orientation — some are geared to teenagers, some to salarymen — but the atmosphere is the same throughout the franchise: equal parts lending library, newsstand, arcade, Kinko's and youth hostel. An inspired extension of the basic Internet cafe, the Gran Cyber Cafés shift their meaning the more you study them, as if by a trick of their trademark low light.

Sometimes they look like nothing special, only marginally cooler than carrels you might find at a college library. But at other times, especially late at night, they seem visionary, an architectural realization of the social and personal life of the future.

"The Japanese love liminal spaces and gray zones," explained Con Isshow, a writer who has published widely on youth culture, including a collection of letters by abused children called "Letters to Japan's Worst Parents."

"In both the anonymity and role-playing games on offer at the Gran Cyber Café, you don't have to exist in tight social norms," Mr. Isshow told me. "Your identity can be in flux. You go to these places not to present yourself, but to lose yourself. Lose your name, your position, your pride."

Mr. Isshow spoke through a translator, but here he introduced some English: "No-face-man, no-ID-man, no-pride-man."

Although the services offered by Bagus, a company that also runs billiard halls, karaoke dens and spas, are aboveboard, the Gran Cyber Cafés are enshrouded in the urgent, furtive atmosphere of a hot-sheet motel. Eyes averted, customers sign in, head to the library of entertainment options, and load up on fashion magazines, video games and DVD's of "24" as if stocking up on Jim Beam. Then they beetle-brow it to their solitary pods.

What they do there is up to them. Some people channel-surf. Others trade stocks. You can download music, read novels, watch pornography, play video games, have sex, go to sleep.

According to Mr. Isshow, Japan's "petit iede," or little runaways, come for downtime, free lattes and smoothies, and, at some branches, showers. They use the places as trial separations from home — staying a few hours, overnight or a few days, long enough to scare their parents. (A "night pack" allows use of the pod from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. for about $10; some places sell toothbrushes and underwear too.) Periodically the management will remind a customer that the cafe is not a hotel, but above all Bagus respects people's privacy.

ON a recent afternoon, at around 5:30, I visited the Gran Cyber Café in the Shinjuku neighborhood for the first time, to read e-mail and visit a news site or two. Checking in, I was assigned to pod 16-A.

I loved 16-A the instant I saw it. I closed the door, slipped into a low-slung leatherette seat and surveyed the all-you-can-eat tech feast, which includes VHS and DVD players, satellite and regular television on a Toshiba set, PlayStation 2, Lineage II and a Compaq computer loaded with software, all the relevant downloads and hyperspeedy Internet. In the nearby library were thousands of comic books, magazines and novels. On the desk was a menu of oddball snacks, like boiled egg curry and hot sandwich tuna.

The atmosphere is airless and hot, with a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke. Over all the effect is of a low-wattage, low-oxygen casino.

When I spoke to Japanese cultural critics about the Gran Cyber Cafés, most gave high-flown theoretical accounts of their appeal. But Takami Yasuda, a professor at the School of Informatics and Sciences at Nagoya University who writes about virtual reality, shrugged. "I do not know exactly why people, young guys in particular, love to stay in such a dark place," he said.

I don't know exactly why I stayed either. But 10 books, two DVD's, seven magazines, two newspapers and a video game later, I found that eight hours had elapsed.

On my second visit I brought Shizu Yuasa, a married 31-year-old Japanese friend who stays overnight at Gran Cyber Cafés whenever she wants time to herself.

Shizu, the director of 2DK, an arts and media production company, is an avid reader of the Japanese graphic novels known as manga. But because she can read one in about 15 minutes, she doesn't believe in buying them. So she heads to the Bagus shelves and picks out 20 or so.

Around 8 p.m. the place filled up with a reticent and largely male crowd of loners. One nameless man told me he comes on breaks from work, to read the sports news. Naomi Iwasaki, a 28-year-old manager of an Internet portal site, said he was there to read manga. Two boys with hair dyed strawberry blond companionably watched their screens: one was tuned to a cooking show, the other to Yahoo.

Back in the stacks I met Reiko Ishii, a 25-year-old student at Hosei University who lives with her parents in Tokyo. She had tea-colored hair, wore a horn-shaped amulet around her neck, and dressed in the clingy style of early Nicole Richie. She told me she comes to Bagus often, but I was the only other customer she had ever spoken to. There are so few places, she said, where a woman can go out alone, late at night, without having to be sociable. I asked if she'd ever spent the night.

"Sure," she said, looking unfazed. "My parents know I stay here, and it's fine with them." She retreated to her pod. I went to mine too, hit the button that changed the keyboard from Chinese characters to QWERTY, and answered some e-mail.

Shizu was catching up on manga. One was "The Monetary System of Osaka," a left-wing chronicle of graft and usury among the suits of Japan's second city. Another was "Inu," or "Dog," by Haruko Kashiwagi. It's considered clever, fairly high-toned and mainstream, which is surprising because, in part, it's about a woman who has sex with her dog.

The extensive manga library also includes pornography for every taste. But sex at the Gran Cyber Café is not just in the fiction. All around me, couples were making out. Some were watching sex videos. They seemed blasé. Still, in the cubicles that seat two, the walls are a little lower, and the seats don't have a massage option. Meanwhile other customers have taken a more professional approach. The Japanese Web site Tanteifile.com published an article about a freelance prostitute — a "delivery health" girl — who moved into a Gran Cyber Café after her workplace was raided.

Shizu and I got tea and calpis, a sweet, summery drink, and returned to our pod. I leafed through teenage fashion magazines while a Japanese movie about gay samurai, "Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san," played. Shizu, in the meantime, checked out Mixi, the Japanese Friendster. Some people, I had been told, use the site to communicate with other customers who might be just a few pods away, to communicate without having to introduce themselves in person.

Finally an attractive 30-something couple, Kaori Karasawa and Naoya Ohada, settled in the pod across from us. "Will this article be on the Internet?" Ms. Karasawa asked me. "People at the office don't really know we're dating."

"But now they will," Mr. Ohada said, laughing.

He appeared eager to impress her; he held forth about manga, while she listened. They Googled subjects that came up in conversation, showing each other favorite sites, using the Internet as a kind of third party in their relationship: chaperon, entertainment, common ground. Over their pod the light at the Gran Cyber Café seemed not dim but soft, flattering, romantic.

CHECKING out wasn't going to be easy. I had come to appreciate the shared solitude the Gran Cyber Café provides, as well as the fast, infallible Internet connection.

Hidenori Kimura, a sociologist who writes about intercultural encounters, said he believes the Gran Cyber Cafés fulfill a deep and persistent cultural longing. The Japanese system of competition for education, career and social esteem, Dr. Kimura explained, forces young people to obsess over self-presentation, which costs them both fantasy and anonymity, the privileges of childhood. What Japanese young people want, in his view, are opportunities to be free of their social status.

"Traditionally," he explained, "tea ceremonies and festivals have been fulfilling this role of depriving people of their social status and thus help them become 'nobody.' Tea ceremonies deprived the feudal elites of their status and made them just a person enjoying tea ceremony and tea, while festivals among farmers offered an enclave of anarchy during the festivals where they were free of norms and rules of feudal eras."

The Gran Cyber Cafés now serve this purpose, he said. "Nobody cares what you do, which enables you to be absorbed in whatever fantasy you want to indulge in through Net surfing, Web games or manga. Yet you can satisfy your timid desire to belong." Staying in the Gran Cyber Cafés, he concluded, is now part of jibun-sagashi, or the search for the true self.

Nevertheless there's something a little shameful about spending a solo hour, or two, or seven, on a wanton media bender. It was in Japan that I first heard the word "infomania," a 2005 coinage by Hewlett-Packard, whose study last May showed that compulsive e-mailing and text-messaging do more damage to the I.Q. than regular marijuana use. But, as I read about the study in my pod, I came to doubt that such warnings would ever make people temper their infomaniac ways; maybe these are the I.Q.'s we're stuck with now.

And, really, what's so wrong with getting lost on the Internet; watching soccer or baseball on satellite television; devouring Us Weekly or Time Asia; and organizing solo marathons of Tim Burton or Kurosawa movies? The craving for media sprees runs deep, and, like so many Internet-era developments, Gran Cyber Cafés seem to answer an almost carnal need for uninterrupted access to pixels and screens and Web sites and instant-messaging and iTunes. And when that need is satisfied, you can always return to life in the city, at least for a while.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/ar...pagewanted=all





The Net's Not-So-Secret Economy Of Crime

The people who want to rip you off are very polite with each other when they're buying and selling credit card numbers.
David Kirkpatrick

Raze Software offers a product called CC2Bank 1.3, available in freeware form - if you like it, please pay for it. Raze's attractively designed Web site, registered in Belarus, may suggest a shaky command of English -"I shall pleased any estimation in respect of my programs and this page," it reads - but it displays the classic characteristics of web commerce, like visitor statistics, advertising, and links to Web sites of partners.

But CC2Bank's purpose is the management of stolen credit cards. Release 1.3 enables you to type in any credit card number and learn the type of card, name of the issuing bank, the bank's phone number and the country where the card was issued, among other info.

The ad on Raze's site, in Russian, leads to another Belarus address that appears to be a market for stolen products.

The Internet economy, as we journalists like to write, has a lot to do with sharing. And commerce, at sites like eBay, is based largely on trust. But until recently I didn't realize that these same principles govern online dealmaking among criminals.

My naiveté was alleviated with an eye-popping tour of underground Web sites, conducted by two executives from RSA Cyota, an online security firm that works for banks like Barclays (Research), Citibank (Research) and Washington Mutual (Research). They showed me a variety of sites frequented by people who steal and trade credit card numbers and then use them to steal money.

This infrastructure for online crime is far more multi-layered and sophisticated than I ever imagined.

Says Marc Gaffan, a marketer at RSA: "There's an organized industry out there with defined roles and specialties. There are means of communications, rules of engagement, and even ethics. It's a whole value chain of facilitating fraud, and only the last steps of the chain are actually dedicated to translating activity into money."

This ecosystem of support for crime includes services and tools to make theft simpler, harder to detect, and more lucrative.

Gaffan and his colleague Yohai Einav showed me, for example, a site called TalkCash.net. It's a members-only forum, for both verified and non-verified members. To verify a new member, the administrators of the site must do due diligence, for example by requiring the applicant to turn over a few credit card numbers to demonstrate that they work.

It's an honorable exchange for dishonorable information. "I'm proud to be a vendor here," writes one seller.

'A very nice person'

"Have a good carding day and good luck," writes another seller, who notes "I do replace new cards in case any died." In response, a different poster comments "He delivers fast and he is a very nice person to deal with!" It's as if he was talking about a local florist.

These sleazeballs don't just deal in card numbers, but also in so-called "CVV" numbers. That's the Creditcard Validation Value - an extra three- or four-digit number on the front or back of a card that's supposed to prove the user has physical possession of the card.

On TalkCash.net you can buy CVVs for card numbers you already have, or you can buy card numbers with CVVs included. (That costs more, of course.)

"All CVV are guaranteed: fresh and valid," writes one dealer, who charges $3 per CVV, or $20 for a card number with CVV and the user's date of birth. "Meet me at ICQ: 264535650," he writes, referring to the instant message service (owned by AOL) where he conducts business.

Other discussants on the TalkCash forums politely request login IDs and passwords for accounts at HSBC and National Bank of Canada.

Gaffan says these credit card numbers and data are almost never obtained by criminals as a result of legitimate online card use. More often the fraudsters get them through offline credit card number thefts in places like restaurants, when computer tapes are stolen or lost, or using "pharming" sites, which mimic a genuine bank site and dupe cardholders into entering precious private information. Another source of credit card data are the very common "phishing" scams, in which an e-mail that looks like it's from a bank prompts someone to hand over personal data.

Also available on TalkCash is access to hijacked home broadband computers - many of them in the United States - which can be used to host various kinds of criminal exploits, including phishing e-mails and pharming sites.

RSA's Einav says there are about a dozen marketplace sites like TalkCash in operation at any given time. Unfortunately, he and Gaffan suggest it's unlikely this nefarious activity will end anytime soon (though of course that's good for their business).

"When the FBI shuts down a site they just move to another site," says Einav, "The URL changes but the community stays intact."

RSA doesn't even bother trying to shut down such sites, because by monitoring them it can help banks protect themselves. Says Einav: "If you see abnormal demand for accounts from a specific bank, you can assume an exploit is underway."

That's when it goes into action. RSA Cyota claims to have shut down 10,000 phishing and other schemes since Cyota was formed in 1999. (RSA Security bought Cyota last December.) The company maintains a blacklist of sites, which partners use to warn customers.

Microsoft's (Research) new Internet Explorer 7 browser, for example, uses the blacklist data to warn users that a site they have requested is likely to be fraudulent. RSA also works with ISPs to get them to shut down fraudulent sites.

Don't visit any of these sites. Tapping into them could lead to unpleasant consequences. I only looked at them via the safety of RSA's computers.

But it's worth knowing this ecosystem exists, if only as a cautionary reminder of how woefully unprotected our financial systems remain in the age of the Internet.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/11/tech...rward_fortune/





Never mind the goo

How to Pirate Vinyl

So you thought you've pirated everything huh?

Step 1

Using the wooden strips, make a box around the glass plate. Seal off the edges using the window cement. Make sure everything is air tight.

Step 2

Place your record inside the box making sure that the portion to be copied is facing upward. Squeeze in some window cement to mark where the hole in the record is.

Step 3

Mix the silicone (Smooth On OOMOO 30 or OOMOO 25) for about 3 minutes before pouring in to the mold.

Step 4

Pour in the mixture. Start from one corner and let it fill-up the mold to about half a centimeter. Make sure it's even. Let it dry for 6 hours.

Step 5

Peel off the silicone from the cast. Cut off the excess using a cutter.

Step 6

Pour the liquid plastic (Smooth On Task #4) on top of the silicone cast.

Step 7

Make sure that nothing spills over the round form. You can also brush off any air bubbles that might occur.

Step 8

Carefully loosen the plate from the silicone form. Using a drill press, bore a hole through the center of the plate. You can use the silicone form as a template to make more copies.

There you have it. Your very own pirated record.

Complete with pics
http://gadgets.qj.net/How-to-Pirate-...g/49/aid/39381





MTV Launches Online Music, Video Store
Alex Veiga

For years, MTV Networks Inc. sat on the sidelines while Apple Computer Inc., RealNetworks Inc. and others racked up sales of music downloads. Now the cable network group that helped popularize music videos two decades ago is entering the online music fray with URGE, a new service that makes its public beta debut on Wednesday.

URGE comes integrated into the newest version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Player, which users of Microsoft's Windows will receive in coming weeks as an upgrade. Prior to that, the player upgrade will be available for download at the URGE and Microsoft Web sites.

At launch, URGE will have more than 2 million tracks, which can be purchased individually at 99 cents or as full albums starting at around $9.95.

The service also will offer unlimited downloads at a monthly rate of $9.95, or $14.95 for the ability to transfer songs to any of more than 100 compatible portable music players.

Initially, URGE will also feature streaming videos, with video downloads becoming available for purchase later this year.

URGE will also be the featured music service on Microsoft's media player, which will continue to have built-in links to several other services.

The company has begun clearing content from its vault of exclusive appearances by recording artists on staples such as "TRL" and "MTV Unplugged" for sale on URGE, said Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music Group.

The tie-in to MTV should also help URGE sell consumers on the upside of subscription services better than others have to date, said analyst Phil Leigh with Inside Digital Media.

"The thing that works to their advantage is they have a well-recognized brand that is popular to a demographic that is going to be receptive to purchasing digital music," Leigh said.

Still, URGE enters an online music market struggling to compete with online piracy and the dominance of Apple's iTunes Music Store and its market-leading iPod digital music player.

And like established rivals RealNetworks' Rhapsody and Napster Inc., URGE is not compatible with Apple's Macintosh computers or its market-leading iPod digital music player.

That incompatibility, combined with the availability of music on Internet file-sharing networks, has made subscription music plans a tough sell.

Earlier this year, Napster said it had more than a half-million subscribers. RealNetworks, which doesn't break out the number of Rhapsody subscribers, says it has more than 1.7 million paying customers for the service and its cadre of radio streaming plans combined.

Apple's iTunes Music Store, which doesn't offer a subscription plan, has sold more than 1 billion songs since its launch three years ago, while more than 50 million iPods have been purchased since 2001.

"Whether the consumer really wants a service that's only compatible with non-iPod players is going to be the big issue," said Steve Gordon, entertainment attorney and author of "The Future of the Music Business."

Toffler acknowledges the popularity of Apple's store and player, but argues both the a la carte singles model and the subscription business are still in their infancy.

"Only 5 percent of music sales happen digitally," he said. "Hopefully, through the TV channels we have and the dot-com sites ... we can educate people about the virtues of subscriptions. It's not about selling a million singles."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Alice Cooper Gets Key To Namesake City

ALICE, N.D. (AP) -- The key to this city, with just a feed store, fire hall and a bar, won't open much for rock legend Alice Cooper.

Officials from this town of about 60 people presented the aging shock rocker with a marble plaque and a gold-plated key Sunday to commemorate Cooper's visit to the city that bears his name.

"There's not a whole lot of buildings to unlock with that key," Mayor Dan Lund said. "But Alice is a cool guy and Alice is a cool city - so it's a fun thing to do."

Cooper arrived in Alice the day before he was scheduled to perform at the Fargo Civic Center. About 1,000 people cheered as his limo rolled into the town, one of several in southeast North Dakota named for the daughters of a railroad surveyor.

"This is bigger than if the governor was coming out here," Councilman Ron Mulder said.

Mulder and his wife, Jill, contacted Cooper's manager a few weeks ago about coming to Alice.

"He shook hands and signed autographs," Jill Mulder said. "He was here 30 minutes tops but it was well worth it. He was grateful."

Lund said the city had not seen so much excitement - or people - since the town's centennial celebration in 2000. But Lund, who at 58 is the same age as Cooper, said he prefers country music.

"He rocked a little too hard for me," the mayor said. "I wasn't quite angry enough to be into his music."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...05-14-23-28-54





Deal Book
Andrew Ross Sorkin

The fund run by George Soros revealed many holdings large and small, but we noticed at least one interesting change in the past three months. Whereas on Dec. 31, Soros Fund Management held about 320,000 shares of Apple Computer, on March 31 that position had changed to put options — a bearish position that pays off if the stock declines — on about 222,000 Apple shares.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=3085





From Russia, With Dread
Andrew E. Kramer


Mike Matthews

Mike Matthews, a sound-effects designer and one-time promoter of Jimi Hendrix, bought an unusual Russian factory making vacuum tubes for guitar amplifiers. Now he has encountered a problem increasingly common here: someone is trying to steal his company.

Sharp-elbowed personalities in Russia's business world are threatening this factory in a case that features accusations of bribery and dark hints of involvement by the agency that used to be the K.G.B.

Though similar to hundreds of such disputes across Russia, this one is resonating around the world, particularly in circles of musicians and fans of high-end audio equipment.

Russia is one of only three countries still making vacuum tubes for use in reproducing music, an aging technology that nonetheless "warms up" the sound of electronic music in audio equipment.

"It's rock 'n' roll versus the mob," Mr. Matthews, 64, said in a telephone interview from New York, where he manages his business distributing the Russian vacuum tubes. "I will not give in to racketeers."

Yet the hostile takeover under way here is not strictly mob-related. It is a dispute peculiar to a country where property rights — whether for large oil companies, car dealerships or this midsize factory — seem always open to renegotiation. It provides a view of the wobbly understanding of ownership that still prevails.

In Russia's early transition days, amid the collapse of authority and resulting lawlessness, organized crime groups wielded great influence. Teams of armed thugs used to carry out takeovers, arriving at a businessman's door with little to back them up but the threat of violence, even murder. Indeed, contract murders reached a frequency of more than one a day in the mid-1990's.

Later, law enforcement, from the tax police to special forces units, played a role in forcing transfers of property in the scramble for assets of the former Soviet state.

In what became known as "masky shows," police officers, their faces often hidden behind ski masks, swarmed into a business to intimidate employees and force concessions from owners. The headquarters of the Yukos oil company, for example, were the scene of a series of high-profile masky shows. .

Now, the trend in business crime in Russia is decidedly white-collar — with the faking of documents, hiring of lawyers or payoff of judges — but no less insidious, Mr. Matthews and other business owners say.

In a puzzling case in Moscow in April, for example, thieves stole a shipping container with thousands of files on company registrations from the yard of a tax inspectorate office, using a crane and a flatbed truck.

"It cannot be excluded that so-called independent raiders, those who seize others' businesses, showed an interest in the tax documents," an article in Gazeta reported.

The article suggested the theft was a coup by corporate raiders who intended to use the papers much as identity thieves in the United States turn documents rifled from trash cans into profits through fraudulent credit card operations. In this type of crime, however, entire companies are at stake.

The tax authorities act as a registrar for small businesses. With the files gone, ownership is anybody's guess, the newspaper reported. Another common tactic of the new takeover artists is faking sale agreements for company shares and then voting out the legitimate management. Tracking down the true owner can be impossible if the authorities have been bribed — or the original papers are mysteriously missing.

The problem has become so pervasive among small and medium-size businesses that it has been discussed in the Parliament, where a committee on state security addressed the issue and cited more than 1,400 cases of fraudulent takeovers in 2005.

Across Russia, the Interior Ministry has opened investigations into the theft of 346 enterprises.

"Dozens of major deals for the purchase and sale of companies take place in Russia every month," Yuri Alekseyev, a chief ministry investigator, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. "The process is ever more frequently accompanied by gross violations of the law."

"Those seizing enterprises are usually not interested in production, and just steal or sell the most liquid assets, in the first place real estate," he added.

Foreigners are not immune. Recently, the Canadian owners of the Aerostar Hotel and the French owners of an auto dealership in Moscow were maneuvered out of their businesses.

Here in Saratov, a river town on the rolling southern steppe, the battle began last autumn when Mr. Matthews received a letter with an offer. For $400,000, a company called Russian Business Estates, or R.B.E., would buy Mr. Matthews's 930-employee factory, called ExpoPul, with a turnover of $600,000 or so a month. Mr. Matthews quickly refused.

Next, a letter arrived warning that the factory would have troubles with its electricity; in March, the power went off. Intruders then came and used jackhammers to raise dust that entered the factory's clean rooms. Strange young men in leather jackets loitered outside the factory gate.

Mr. Matthews, a legend among guitarists as the inventor of the Big Muff guitar pedal, rallied makers of musical equipment who rely on tubes from Russia and promised a fight.

R.B.E.'s director in Saratov, Vitaly V. Borin, said he wanted to buy Mr. Matthews's factory for the building it occupies and then sell it to an unidentified investor. He acknowledged that his company was pressuring Mr. Matthews, but he said it was using only legal tactics. If Mr. Matthews does not agree to sell, Mr. Borin said in an interview, the factory might run afoul of national security rules.

"We have instructions of the F.S.B, where it is written in black and white that a military factory cannot exist beside a company with foreign capital," he said, referring to the Federal Security Service, a successor to the K.G.B. Just near ExpoPul is a factory that makes electronic components for military hardware.

"The F.S.B. hasn't gotten involved only because we haven't gotten them involved," he said. Writing a letter to Moscow would be all he needed to shut the factory, Mr. Borin said, as he pretended to write a letter on a napkin.

For Mr. Matthews, more is at stake than property.

In the hulking pile of brick wrapped in pipes and smokestacks that is the building, most of the employees are women. Dressed in blue robes and hair nets, they join together delicate bundles of wire, wafers of rare metal and glass bulbs with fingers trained by years of work.

"No man would want to make a tube," Lyudmila V. Afanasieva, 54, said, nimbly sliding wires into a glass cylinder. She worked on the same tube model when it went into nuclear submarines that prowled off the coast of the United States.

ExpoPul makes two-thirds of the world's vacuum tubes used for music. Outside the old Communist bloc, the technology nearly became extinct. Vacuum tubes are made on an industrial scale only in China, Russia and Slovakia.

Tuned in to the music industry's needs, Mr. Matthews increased sales to 170,000 tubes a month in 2005, from 40,000 in 1999. The company has more than doubled its work force. It sells to Fender Musical Instruments, a maker of guitar amplifiers based in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Japanese keyboard maker Korg.

While most of the Soviet electronics industry has disappeared, rendered obsolete by Japanese makers and Silicon Valley, ExpoPul, which opened in 1953, is thriving. It is a rare example of a Soviet-era factory that became a success without painful reforms. Hidden in this provincial town, its 1950's vintage technology survived long enough to become a worldwide hit.

If the tube factory dies, so will the future of a rock 'n' roll sound dating back half a century, the rich grumble of a guitar tube amplifier — think of Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" — that musicians say cannot be replicated with modern technology.

"It's nice and sweet and just pleasing sounding," Peter Stroud, the guitarist for Sheryl Crow, said in a telephone interview from Atlanta. "It's a smooth, crunchy distortion that just sounds good. It just feels good to play on a tube amp."

He added: "It would be a catastrophe for the music industry if something happened to that plant."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/bu...s/16cheat.html





Deadline Set for Wireless Internet in Parks
Sewell Chan

New York City officials set a July deadline yesterday for a city contractor to have a wireless network up and running in Central Park, in what would be a major expansion of free Internet access that the city plans to replicate across its vast ribbons of parkland during the next several years.

The effort is part of a larger initiative that would also set up wireless networks by summer's end in parts of three more large parks: Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

All told, the commitment by the Department of Parks and Recreation, which announced the timetable at a City Council hearing, represents a major leap forward for a three-year-old project that has been hobbled by technical difficulties and a lack of interest by major Internet providers. However, it remained far from clear yesterday whether the deadlines could be met.

In pushing ahead, New York is, perhaps, trying to catch up with other cities, including Philadelphia and San Francisco, which have vowed to create citywide wireless networks and to treat Internet access as a broadly available public utility.

While New York's effort is limited to its parks, it is expected to have a huge impact, given the number of parks across the five boroughs and the density of the neighborhoods surrounding them. In many instances, residents and businesses near city parks are likely to be able to tap into the services.

The city is following an example set by private groups like the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, which activated a network in Bryant Park in June 2002, and the Alliance for Downtown New York, which did the same in eight Lower Manhattan sites from 2003 to 2005, including City Hall Park, Bowling Green and the new Wall Street Park.

NYC Wireless, a nonprofit group that did the technical work for those projects, has also set up networks at Union Square, Tompkins Square and Stuyvesant Cove Parks, and is building a network at Brooklyn Bridge Park this year.

So far, the city's own efforts have paled compared with those achievements by private groups.

In June 2003, the Parks Department sought bidders willing to design, build, operate and maintain Wi-Fi networks in all or part of Battery, Central, Flushing Meadows-Corona, Pelham Bay, Prospect, Riverside, Union Square, Van Cortlandt and Washington Square Parks, as well as Orchard Beach in the Bronx.

Three companies responded — Verizon Communications and two tiny start-up companies. Verizon was selected in April 2004, but a month later it backed out of the deal.

The contract was then awarded that October to one of the two smaller companies, Wi-Fi Salon, which is based on the Upper East Side. While the company installed a network last summer at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, it missed a deadline last fall to finish the work at the other parks.

At the City Council hearing, Robert L. Garafola, the department's deputy commissioner for management and budget, said that the city had extended the deadline to August.

"We expect Central Park to be launched in July, and the rest of the parks in the late summer," he said.

After the hearing, however, doubts began to emerge. Asked about the deadlines, Marshall W. Brown, the owner of Wi-Fi Salon, said: "That's the timetable set forth by Parks. Let's see if that's attainable." Later he added, "It's obviously going to be tight, but I'm confident we'll be able to pull it off."

The parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, said his department would probably have to pick another contractor if Mr. Brown could not meet the new deadline.

"All of us want to see it happen," Mr. Benepe said in a telephone interview. "We'll have to make an honest assessment to see, if we can't get it done with this operator, if there's another operator who can and wants to. The technology exists; the willingness to invest in that technology up front may or may not exist."

Mr. Benepe defended the decision to rely on the private sector for the project. "We're not paying for this service and the city is not investing any money in it, so we expect the operator to pay for it."

A wireless network involves a complex system of cables, radios, antennas and nodes that allow users to tap into the Internet without a cable. Mr. Brown said he hoped to make money by partnering with a big communications company that would promote its products and also through limited advertising that park visitors would have to read before being able to browse the Web.

Under the agreement, Mr. Brown promised to pay the city the greater of $30,000 a year for three years or 10 percent of gross receipts from the park-based networks.

But since reaching the deal with Mr. Brown, the city has all but abandoned that model for future wireless contracts. In a new request for proposals in February, the city asked for bids to create wireless networks in additional parks — with almost no revenue for the city.

For instance, it has selected a partnership of the Friends of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and NYC Wireless to create a network in the plaza, which is near the United Nations. The partnership will pay the city $1 a year.

Expert Communications/TravelNet Technologies, a Long Island company, has been chosen to build networks at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and at Columbus Park in Downtown Brooklyn. The city expects to receive just $700 a year for each site.

Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer of Manhattan suggested that the city was finally realizing that to put wireless systems in place, it could not expect to make money from the effort.

"I don't mean to say 'I told you so,' but we did have this conversation," Ms. Brewer told Mr. Garafola at the hearing.

Other parks to be covered under the new plan are Carroll, Fort Greene and Cobble Hill Parks, all in Brooklyn.

At one point during yesterday's hearing, Councilman Joseph P. Addabbo Jr. of Queens asked whether wireless service could be established at beaches and pools some day. (He did not get a clear answer.) In any case, Councilwoman Helen D. Foster of the Bronx said she did not look forward to such a day. "I would hope I would never have to have my laptop at the beach," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/nyregion/16wifi.html





Vigilante Trojan Attacks Other Malware
John E. Dunn

A "vigilante" Trojan, that attempts to protect infected PCs from the effects of malware caught while using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, has been discovered.

The Windows Trojan/Erazer-A Trojan looks at default folders for downloading MP3, AVI, MPEG, WMV, Gif, Zip graphic and video files, and wipes anything it finds with these extensions in the target locations.

The assumption is that because the Trojan is only deleting certain file types in specific download directories used by P2P programs -- one of the main sources of inadvertent malware infection -- it is attempting to protect those it manages to infect.

The catch is that the program also attempts to subvert certain security programs to aid its activities, which opens the user to a more general risk of infection or program instability. It also appears to steal information.

The company that first uncovered it spreading among its customers, Sophos, has dubbed it as a "vigilante" Trojan, making it an extremely rare type of malware that could have some beneficial effects.

"The Erazer Trojan is a vigilante worthy of a Charles Bronson movie, taking the law into its own hands. However, it's perfectly possible for the Trojan to aim poorly and wipe out innocent files too," commented Graham Cluley of Sophos.

Vigilante it might be, but the Trojan spreads in the same way as those pieces of malware it appears to be targeting -- via P2P file sharing. It can also, of course, be used for malicious purposes, so this is a beneficial program most users would probably not want help from.

"I don't think this was written with good intentions because it attempts to turn off security," said Cluley. There would be nothing more dangerous than for people to become accustomed to the idea of "beneficial malware" because that might create a false sense of security.

Or is Trojan/Erazer-A the ultimate social engineering Trojan, one which fools people into accepting its beneficial promise, only to cause major problems when in its next incarnation as Trojan/Erazer-B or C?
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index....39;fp;2;fpid;1





MPAA Offers To Settle (Again)
Shawn

There is an "Early Neutral Evaluation Conference" on May 23, 2006 to determine if this matter can be settled. Personally, it seems like an utter waste of time because at this point about the only thing I would settle for is if they dropped the case, paid my attorney fees and then dissolve their whole organization.

They offered me an initial settlement of $2,500 (before they decided to take it to court), which was rejected on the basis of principal. Then today I talked to my attorney and they are offering a settlement of $3,500.

Bahahahahahaaha! So if I refused your $2,500 out of principal, what exactly makes you think I'm going to give you $3,500 now? That's comedy.

From everything I've read online, the MPAA (and RIAA) has been pretty much extorting everyone simply because they can't afford to fight it. This certainly will give me something interesting to blog about. I just pray it goes to a full trial, where they will lose and then give everyone else that is being sued a nice lawsuit they lost as a reference for their lawsuit... "MPAA vs. Shawn Hogan" That has a nice ring to it. Maybe this loss will be the start of their demise. (Hmmm... I seem to have quite the aspirations, eh? haha)

From a purely business standpoint, I think all the lawsuits that the MPAA and RIAA are throwing out are only hurting them in the long-run. From everything I've read, it does not curb piracy at ALL. I would even argue it increases it because all of a sudden people that weren't aware you could download music/movies now realize you can (and some will start). Then you are going to compound this by everyone talking about it and reading other's blogs. I'm a perfect example... from talking my attorney and then researching stuff online as a result of that, I now know that if you have the proper software installed, you can download pretty much any movie (or anything else) you want.

Not only that, but you would think they would be wiser about who they choose to extort.

For as big of an organization they are, my website gets roughly 10,000 times more traffic than theirs (hell, this stupid blog gets more traffic than their site). Then again, digitalpoint.com more traffic than buy.com or adobe.com.. hehe

So what just happened? Well now a few hundred thousands people per day were just educated about 1. about their general extortion and 2. they also now know that you can download whatever you want. I'm starting to think maybe the MPAA might actually kill the movie industry (which this dude shares my viewpoint). If they were smart, they certainly would choose their racketeering targets a little wiser (like maybe someone without the resources to fight and a captive audience of 80 million people per month that will read my viewpoint). This could turn out to be some good/interesting reading though. Reminds me a bit of the Winn and Sims fiasco.

Wanna see something else funny? Check Google's top 10 results for "MPAA"... It seems I'm not the only one that thinks the MPAA is looney.

http://www.google.com/search?q=mpaa

Oh, and just as a side note, they are utter liars... They told me they identified the specific computer that did whatever they claimed and they traced it back to me (of course I knew that was a lie since it never happened). But now they are saying they don't have any such information (MAC address basically). {rolls eyes}
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2...tle-again.html

Preparing For Early Neutral Evaluation Conference
by Shawn

It's amazing how no matter how many times you tell someone something, they don't seem to "get it". Someone from my attorney's office called me letting me know they are preparing whatever paperwork they have to file for next weeks Early Neutral Evaluation Conference. They keep letting me know they are working on getting the issue settled.

But here's the problem... It's not about the money for me, it never was. I've already spent more in legal fees than what I could have settled for.

I will never sign any sort of admission that I did anything (since I didn't) in exchange for them to drop it. There is nothing the MPAA/Universal Studios could say or do that will make me settle (I wouldn't settle for $1). I know technically I can't prevent them from dropping the case, but if I could, I would force it to go to a full trial with final judgement. As far as I've been able to research, out of the tens of thousands of RIAA and MPAA lawsuits, not a single one has gone to a final judgement. Does that seem odd to anyone else? (If anyone knows differently, please let me know.)

The bottom line is I would gladly prefer to spend $1M out of my own pocket, rather than just hand over the $2,500 in extortion money they wanted. Regardless of the money spent, there is always a way to indirectly recoup the costs. For example paid advertising displayed to people reading about my case (which at this point is well over 100,000 people, and we haven't even really begun). Another idea I had was why not put together a website where people could use it to defend themselves from the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits. The only reason people settle with them is because they can't afford the cost of going to court. Maybe put together a site that generates all the filings/forms they need to defend themselves for a couple hundred bucks or something. BTW, if any lawyer(s) want to do a joint venture on something like that, please let me know.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/~shawn/2...onference.html





Screw the Digital-Rights Bugaboo
John C. Dvorak

I have mixed feelings about so-called digital-rights management and its benefits. My concerns don't stem solely from DRM itself, but from the fact that it's not only illegal to crack DRM systems—it's essentially illegal even to think about cracking them. This, of course, stems from the onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It and other laws and structures were pushed into play by lobbyists for the movie and record industries.

These lobbyists argue that this somehow serves the public, by making it safe to put content on new digital media without fearing that one copy can turn into 100,000 copies through P2P copying or whatever. When you look into it, these folks do not even like the idea of personal backups, because they believe that personal backups are nothing more than bootleg copies!

The record industry needs DRM more than the movie industry does, because it needs a surefire way to keep people from copying the one good song from an album. It needs the leverage of that one good song to continue to gouge the public with high prices. In many instances, the one good song per album actually amounts to the user spending $15-$18 for one song, since the other ones are junk. The record industry folks hate iTunes and other single-song distribution mechanisms for this reason. They've even suggested that certain singles be sold for more money than usual. They are trying to recoup all the money they would have made selling albums with one good song and 13 pieces of crap.

For the people who run the movie industry, these DRM systems are important so they can carefully orchestrate the worldwide marketing campaign for a movie and not have to worry about it getting into the hands of, say, the Germans months before its theatrical release in Germany. That would ruin the marketing campaign. Movie-business executives also see themselves as being in the music business, with they themselves being the orchestral directors. They pose as conductors wearing tails, directing a marketing symphony.

The Irony of It All. Now it's fairly well known that each time a new medium comes along for the distribution of content, the sales of that content increase. Book publishers who actually put books online for free, for example, see an increase in book sales. The Grateful Dead during their long heyday became one of the top live acts in the world, making millions on their concert tours. The group allowed and encouraged fans to bring recording gear to tape their shows.

When executives are confronted with these sorts of examples, they brush them off as anomalies. Here's where I like to mention that CD sales actually increased during the heyday of Napster. When Napster was shut down, CD sales fell. Recording executives will tell you that CD sales would have increased even more without Napster and they fell later because, uh, they just did.

Let's not forget the VCR and the fact that the recorded movie ended up becoming the most profitable aspect of the movie business. That happened despite efforts by executives to ban VCRs when they were introduced. So here's the deal: Screw these jokers. They won't listen to reason. They do everything they can to ruin their own business by refusing to change anything and making it difficult for the consumer to do what he or she wants to do.

These industries already make too much money and obviously have too much corruptive influence. Besides that, the products that come from them generally stink. So why give them any more of an edge with logic and good advice? Generally speaking, there is nothing all that important about any particular movie released in any given year. Yeah, this or that product might be fun once in a while, but there are other ways of being entertained. How about having dinner with friends and talking? Or how about going for a walk?

Can't we find alternative ways to be entertained? Do you really need to listen to music all day long? Try classical music. You'll find genuine and sincere musicians who are not there to crank out pop junk. Move to indie bands if you need a dose of rock. Stop going to the movies and go see some plays—even a high-school play. These kids need your money more than anyone in Hollywood. Do you really need to watch a movie? Find an art theater and watch something thoughtful, if you must.

Above all, let's stop complaining about the P2P situation with our mouths, and start complaining with our pocketbooks.
http://www.pcmagazine.com/article2/0...1962437,00.asp





Google Inc. Tweaks Its Video Service
AP

Internet search leader Google Inc. is making it easier to post and share online videos on its site, hoping to widen the appeal of a service that so far has been eclipsed by upstart YouTube.com.

Until the system was changed late Tuesday, uploading a video to Google's site required a special piece of software to be installed on a computer. The Mountain View-based company has retooled its service so that step is no longer required.

Google also is shortening the wait for uploaded videos to appear on its site.

Users occasionally have had to wait as long as 24 hours for a video to show up on the service, said Peter Chane, a product manager for Google Video. Videos should now be available to share shortly after they are transmitted to Google, Chane said.

As online video becomes more popular, Google is trying to gain ground on much smaller company in San Mateo, Calif-based YouTube.

Since its debut a year ago, the video-sharing site has blossomed into a cultural phenomenon. YouTube says viewers watch more than 40 million videos daily on its site.

Google doesn't disclose how many videos are watched on its site.

In April, YouTube attracted 12.5 million unique U.S. visitors, surpassing all other video services, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. Google is ranked fourth in the video category with 7.3 million visitors, trailing Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and News Corp.'s MySpace.com besides YouTube.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Hope, Saved on a Laptop
Dan Barry


An undated picture of Ann Nelson

For a long time, Ann Nelson's laptop computer remained dark.

It had been returned to her family in North Dakota, along with the other belongings she left behind in that great city 1,750 miles to the east. She was 30, lively, working near the very top of the World Trade Center, and — you already know.

In the small town of Stanley, halfway between Minot and Williston, a fog thick enough to blur time's passing enveloped the Nelson home. Amid the many tributes to Ann, amid the grieving and the absence, it became hard to remember just when and how the laptop wound up in the basement of the one-story bank that the family owned.

There the laptop sat, for years, tucked away from sight in a black case. It was a Dell Inspiron 8000, bought shortly before Ann called home that day in early 2001 to say she had gotten a job as a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald — in New York! Soon she was living near the corner of Thompson and Spring, and working in an office 104 stories in the air.

Ann's parents, Jenette and Gary Nelson, say the laptop remained unopened because they are not computer savvy. But it was more than that, Mrs. Nelson admits. "To tell you the truth, it was just too painful."

Three summers ago, during an art class Mrs. Nelson was teaching in that basement, a couple of students showed her how to use the computer. After the class, she says, "I just left it there."

Who knows why never becomes someday, and someday becomes today. One day last fall — "when I got to feeling stronger," she says — Mrs. Nelson finally opened her daughter's computer. She pushed its power button and started by looking at the photographs stored in its memory.

Soon Mrs. Nelson was learning how to play the computer's games, including solitaire and hearts. These distractions both relaxed her and reminded her of the games she used to play with Ann. Somehow, this little black machine made Ann seem present, there beside her.

Getting lost in the computer became part of Mrs. Nelson's after-work ritual, though she never bothered to open a file that said "Top 100"; probably some music, she figured. Then, two months ago and who knows why, click.

What she found was a catalog of goals, humanly incomplete: a list that reflected a young woman's commitment to the serious, to the frivolous, to all of life. That night, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson sat down with the list, and were with their daughter again.

1. Be healthy/ healthful. 2. Be a good friend. 3. Keep secrets. 4. Keep in touch with people I love and that love me. 5. Make a quilt.

Mrs. Nelson used to sew all the time, until it simply became too hard to guide a needle properly with a joyous little girl frolicking in her lap. Then, when Ann grew older, mother and daughter decided to sew a tablecloth.

"I don't think we ever finished," Mrs. Nelson says, laughing. "She had to be doing 100 things at a time, and consequently some of them didn't get finished."

As for this goal of making a quilt, she adds, "I'm sure that I would probably have been deeply involved in this process."

6. Nepal. 7. Buy a home in North Dakota. 8. Get a graduate degree. 9. Learn a foreign language. 10. Kilimanjaro. 11. Never be ashamed of who I am.

"Ann was in many environments where being a girl from North Dakota may not have been the most sophisticated label to wear," Mrs. Nelson says, recalling that her daughter had traveled to China and to Peru, and had worked in the high-powered environments of Chicago and New York.

Even so, Ann always conveyed pride in who she was, who her parents were and where they came from — though never in a boastful way. "It's an important point about her personality," her mother says.

12. Be a person to be proud of. 13. Always keep improving. 14. Read every day. 15. Be informed. 16. Knit a sweater. 17. Scuba-dive in the Barrier Reef. 18. Volunteer for a charity. 19. Learn to cook.

By her late 20's, Ann had actually become a fairly decent cook. Still, her mother laughs in recalling late-night calls, like the one that began: "Mom, what's drawn butter?"

20. Learn about art. 21. Get my C.F.A. 22. Grand Canyon. 23. Helicopter-ski with my dad.

Then Ann Nelson's list repeats a number.

23. Spend more time with my family. 24. Remember birthdays!!!!

Birthdays loomed large in Ann's life. She would celebrate her birthday not for a day, but for a week — in part because her father's birthday came the very next day, in part because she was proud to have been born on Norwegian Independence Day — which is May 17, today.

"Ann would have been 35," says Mr. Nelson, who turns 65 tomorrow.

25. Appreciate money, but don't worship it. 26. Learn how to use a computer. 27. Visit the New York Public Library. 28. Maine. 29. Learn to write. 30. Walk — exercise but also see the world firsthand. 31. Learn about other cultures. 32. Be a good listener. 33. Take time for friends. 34. Kayak. 35. Drink water. 36. Learn about wine.

Ann was supposed to attend a wine class the evening of Sept. 11, in keeping with Nos. 13, 19, 31, 36 — the whole list, really.

After 36, there is a 37, but it is blank.

Mr. Nelson reads the list as an inventory of his daughter's values. "You don't see any Corvettes in the garage or any of those material things you might expect from someone that age," he says. "She recognized that you appreciate a few things and kind of live your life wisely."

Mrs. Nelson interprets the list as another way in which Ann seems to communicate with her when she is most in need. So, just about every day in a small North Dakota town, halfway between Minot and Williston, the screen of a laptop computer goes from darkness to light.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/17...n/17about.html





Chief Says Sun Plans to Offer Open-Source Version of Java
Laurie J. Flynn

The new chief executive of Sun Microsystems said on Tuesday that the company was working toward making its Java programming language available free as open-source software, providing further evidence that Sun's new management sees it as more of a services company than a network computer maker.

In one of his first appearances since taking the helm of the struggling company three weeks ago, the executive, Jonathan Schwartz, told a gathering of software developers here that Sun viewed open-source software as a major part of its turnaround strategy. Turning Java into open-source software would allow outside programmers to examine and modify its underlying code.

Java has been one of the dominant programming language of the Internet since its release more than a decade ago and is used in millions of cellphones. But for years Sun's focus was on providing cheaper hardware to compete at the low end of the computer server market with Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other rivals.

Last month Sun reported that it lost $217 million in its third quarter, compared with a loss of $28 million a year earlier. On April 24, Sun's board announced that Mr. Schwartz would succeed Scott McNealy, a founder, who will remain chairman and continue to work with large corporate and government customers.

Mr. Schwartz has suggested over the years that Sun's future lies in its ability to offer services and fundamental technological tools, rather than just software and hardware.

By making more and more of its Java technology open source, Sun hopes to increase the number of Java developers and programs and raise Java's profile in the technology industry. The more prevalent Java becomes, the more customers there will be for Sun's support services as well as its hardware, which runs Java programs, Mr. Schwartz said.

"The question is not whether we will open-source Java; the question is how," Mr. Schwartz said in a speech to developers.

Mr. Schwartz declined to provide a timeline for delivering an open-source version of the Java programming language, saying the company still faced the considerable challenge of ensuring that it remained compatible with other software programs while inviting participation from the large base of independent Java developers.

While the notion that Sun would eventually offer open-source Java came as no surprise, the disclosure was welcome news to developers, whose fortunes are tied to Sun's. Still, developers seemed to agree that turning things around would not be an easy task for Sun.

"With the arrival of Schwartz, who's long been a champion of open source, you can see they are trying to build a defensible business model," said Brian Behlendorf, chief technology officer at CollabNet, one of the earliest Java developers.

Mr. Schwartz said Sun had had considerable success with an open-source version of Solaris, its once-proprietary operating system for server computers. In the year since it began offering Open- Solaris, there has been a surge in paying customers who still need additional support and service, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/te...gy/17suns.html





P2P Phone=Free=Good

Skype Offers Free Calls to Regular Phones

Skype, eBay Inc.'s Internet telephone subsidiary, has stopped charging users for dialing up people on traditional landline and mobile phones in the U.S. and Canada.

The Internet telephone service, which has always offered free PC-to-PC calls around the world, said Monday it will offer its SkypeOut service for free until the end of the year. Previously, Skype users paid about 2 cents a minute for calls to landline and mobile telephones.

"Millions of consumers around the world are flocking to Skype every month, and we believe free SkypeOut calling will rapidly accelerate Skype adoption in the U.S. and Canada," said Henry Gomez, general manager of Skype North America.

Users who make outgoing calls to and within countries outside the U.S. and Canada will continue to incur per-minute charges. The company also said it will continue to charge for traditional phone numbers that can be dialed from any phone to reach Skype users.

Skype, which was acquired last year by online auctioneer eBay for $2.6 billion, recently announced it has 100 million registered users worldwide.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060516/...ype_free_calls





Blu-Ray Makes Unexpected, Three-Way DRM Choice For High-Def DVD
Scott M. Fulton

Hollywood (CA) - In an announcement last night, the Blu-ray Disc Association, led by Sony, representing one of two competing high-definition DVD formats, stated it will simultaneously embrace digital watermarking, programmable cryptography, and a self-destruct code for Blu-ray disc players.

The BDA statement is unprecedented not only because its solution to the nagging problem of digital rights management is to embrace every option on the table, but also because Blu-ray appears to have developed its own approach - in some cases, proprietary - to each of these three technologies. Knowledge of this impending fact may have been what tipped movie studio 20th Century-Fox last week to throw its support behind Blu-ray, in a move that experts believe balanced the scales in Blu-ray's ongoing battle with competing format HD DVD - backed by a forum led by Toshiba - to become the next high-def industry standard.

The digital watermarking technique, which will be called ROM Mark, is described in the statement as "a unique and undetectable identifier in pre-recorded BD-ROM media such as movies, music and games." "BD-ROM" is the proposed writable version of the Blu-ray format. Little else is known about ROM Mark at this time, except that the statement describes it as being undetectable to consumers. This is noteworthy in itself, since a previously heralded watermark applied to first-generation DVDs was notoriously defeated by someone writing over it with a permanent marker.

One part of the announcement that had been anticipated by experts was Blu-ray's embrace of Advanced Access Content System (AACS), one version of which has also been adopted by the HD DVD Forum. This controversial technology would require that disc players maintain permanent connections to content providers via the Internet, making it possible for discs that fail a security check to trigger a notification process, enabling the provider to send the player a sort of "self-destruct code." This code would come in the form of a flash ROM "update" that would actually render the player useless, perhaps unless and until it is taken to a repair shop for reprogramming. The Blu-ray statement noted that certain elements of AACS have yet to be formally approved by the BDA.

The third part of the announcement that is perhaps most surprising, is Blu-ray's adoption of a third DRM technique that appears to embrace some of the ideals of one of the technologies that had been considered, without actually licensing its methodology or its existing tools. The BDA statement introduces what it calls "BD+," described as "a Blu-ray Disc specific programmable renewability enhancement that gives content providers an additional means to respond to organized attacks on the security system by allowing dynamic updates of compromised code."

BD+ appears to be Blu-ray's version of a concept previously under consideration called SPDC, which enabled the method for encrypting a disc's contents to be included on the disc, rather than on the EPROMs of the disc player. One of the perceived failures of first-generation DVD was that its encryption mechanism of choice, called Content Scramble System (CSS), was spectacularly defeated, with the result being that the industry was forced to permanently and irreversibly support a now-worthless encryption scheme. With SPDC, new encryption algorithms could be adopted as old ones are cracked, enabling successive generations of high-def DVD to be stronger than earlier ones.

Two months ago, the HD DVD Forum considered a coupling of AACS with SPDC. But a scientifically accurate though politically imbalanced white paper released by the creators of SPDC technology, Cryptography Research, Inc. (CRI), soundly rebuked alternative DRM technologies, and thus may have unintentionally played a role in SPDC's falling out of favor with the original supporters of CSS, some of whom were HD DVD Forum members. The Forum rejected "AACS+SPDC" for undisclosed reasons, leading many to speculate that Blu ray would respond by embracing SPDC.

However, as SPDC was originally discussed, there would only have been one encryption standard in use throughout the industry at any one time. According to yesterday evening's BDA statement, BD+ would follow SPDC's core principle, but instead allow each content provider to utilize whatever encryption standard it sees fit at the time. "With these enhancements," the statement reads, "content providers have a number of methods to choose from to combat hacks on Blu-ray players. Moreover, BD+ affects only players that have been attacked, as opposed to those that are vulnerable but haven't been attacked and therefore continue to operate properly."

This last sentence is important, because one key objection that experts raised to the pairing of AACS with SPDC was the possibility that, once the single SPDC encryption scheme was broken, AACS could trigger a signal to all players using that encryption scheme, rendering all discs that use this scheme unplayable, perhaps prior to a system upgrade. The BDA statement appears to distance itself from the CRI approach to SPDC, perhaps to calm consumer fears that entire libraries of perfectly legitimate content could be rendered useless due to someone else's illicit activities.

The CRI white paper, incidentally, distinguished SPDC by contrasting it with other DRM techniques such as watermarking. "Although some progress is being made at improving robustness and efficiency," the white paper states, "we are not optimistic that a practical and secure public watermarking scheme is possible." Such comparisons may have worked against SPDC's eventual adoption by Blu-ray in method as well as in principle.

On behalf of the HD DVD Forum this morning, Toshiba's advisor to the Forum, Mark Knox, released a brief statement: "Today's announcement by the BD Group should not confuse anyone," states Knox. "HD DVD's content protection system provides the highest level of advanced copy protection to meet content owner's needs and the rigors of consumer demand." Knox goes on to say that AACS - which now singularly forms the crux of HD DVD's DRM - is the most advanced such scheme yet devised, and that HD DVD's own membership continues to back that approach.

"We will continue to promote further penetration of the format," Knox added, "while simultaneously seeking ways to eventually realize a single format that delivers optimized benefits to all concerned industries and, most important, to consumers."

Tom's Hardware Guide will present an in-depth analysis of the Blu-ray/HD DVD format combat Thursday morning in its Business Reports section. There, we'll speak with industry experts, including one prominent media pioneer, in examining how the participants in this struggle may actually have always been planning for its eventual resolution, and what form the fruits of that resolution may take.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/08/10/blu/index.html





Total Computer Security Could Result From Unbreakable Optical Code
Richard Wilson

Researchers at Mitsubishi Electric, NEC and the University of Tokyo claim to have made a breakthrough in a new technique for very secure data communications.

The firms have implemented a technique known as quantum cryptography which codes the data optically and have for the first time transmitted information between systems uses this technique.

According to the companies, it is hoped that using this technology it will be possible to realise networks with unbreakable codes within five years.

Security of most modern data cryptography is based on codes of evermore computational complexity. But with processing performance of computers increasing dramatically, cracking these data codes becomes more achievable.

Optical cryptography makes computational power of would-be hackers irrelevant by using quantum-state photons to carry the secure data. It also detects any eavesdropping.

“This results in a physically unbreakable, ultimate code,” said the companies.

However, since there has been no standardisation in the details of the encryption algorithms or the construction of optical devices necessary in communication, it has not been possible to interconnect different systems or build a communication network between different users. “We have now developed a technology that can interconnect Mitsubishi Electric and NEC’s cryptography systems,” said the companies.

The work was carried out on a NICT-developed JGN2 test bed network at the Akihabara access point. “The results verify the potential for our system to be the foundation for the next generation of secure networks,” said the firms.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Art...icalcode.h tm





IBM Breakthrough Multiplies The Amount Of Data That Can Be Stored On Tapes

IBM scientists have found a way to cram unprecedented amounts of information onto magnetic tapes in a breakthrough it heralded Tuesday as a data-storing boon to businesses for years to come.

Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California packed 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch (645 square millimeters) on magnetic tape developed with the help of Fuji Photo Film Company of Japan, IBM reported.

That was 15 times as much data as can fit on similar space on magnetic tapes considered the current industry standard, IBM spokesman Mike Ross told AFP.

A cartridge half the size of a typical VHS tape cartridge used in home recorders will be able to hold the text from eight million books that would fill 57 miles (92 kilometers) of bookshelves, according to researchers.

Scientists from IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory created a new data coding method to enhance the accuracy of reading the tiny magnetic bits, the company reported.

IBM estimated that the new technology and tapes should be on the market in five years.

"This is really going to improve magnetic tape storage for years to come," Ross said. "The field of magnetic tape, which a lot of people thought was stodgy and old, isn't withering at all."

IBM first introduced it first magnetic tape, in reel-to-reel form, in May of 1952, according to Ross

Businesses use magnetic tape to store large volumes of data that doesn't need to be accessed instantly, such as archives, backup files, replicas for disaster recovery, and information required for regulatory compliance.

Calculated on a per-gigabyte basis, tape systems are about one-fifth to one-tenth the cost of hard-disk-drive storage systems, depending on their size.

"This is a major milestone in our program and gives magnetic tape the density boost that we gave hard-disk drives in the 1990s," said Spike Narayan, senior manager of advanced technology concepts at IBM Almaden.

IBM was reported to have been the top earner in the 4.82 billion dollar (US) global tape drive and tape library automation market.
http://www.spacemart.com/reports/IBM..._on_tapes.html





Revolutionary Japanese UV LED Makes Light Work

A trio of Japanese scientists say they have invented an ultraviolet light-emitting diode (LED) that could open the way to a new generation of optical discs with very high data-storage capacity.

The LED operates deep in the ultra-violet range of the energy spectrum, with a wavelength of only 210 nanometres (210 billionths of a metre), the shortest of any device of this kind, they report in Thursday's issue of the British journal Nature.

LEDs are semiconductors that emit light when they are electrically stimulated. They are widely used in consumer gadgets, providing the light source in many of today's up-market flat-screen televisions.

LEDs that emit ultraviolet light, which is not visible to the human eye, could have biological and public-health applications, such as killing germs in contaminated water.

They could also eventually replace lasers, which gobble up more energy and use toxic gases, as the tool for reading disc-stored data.

Engineers are cramming more and more information on disks, which thus throws down the challenge of finding a source of coherent light that is fine enough to read between ever-tighter tracks of data.

To do this, they have been working progressively farther down the light spectrum, from the wider wavelengths of red towards the narrower wavelengths of blue and violet.

For instance, the latest industry standard in commercial lasers is Blu-Ray, whose 405-nanometre wavelength enables 27 gigabytes of storage on a single-layer DVD. This compares with ruby lasers, whose wavelength of 4.5 gigabytes enables storage of 4.5 gigabytes.

The new LED devised by Yoshitaka Taniyasu of NTT Basic Research Laboratories and colleagues is based on "doping" aluminium nitride, a substance not previously used in LEDs, with silicon or magnesium.
http://www.physorg.com/news67096129.html





Back Up Your Phone, Not Just Your Computer
Seán Captain

By now you have probably received at least one mass e-mail message from a friend that said, "Lost my cellphone — Please send me your contact info." To save irritation for both absent-minded phone owners and their friends, Sprint has introduced Sprint Wireless Backup, which synchronizes the contact list on a phone with a copy on Sprint's servers. Software on the phone automatically uploads changes made on the handset, and if the original phone is lost or broken, a new phone can automatically download the data.

For now the service is available on two new Sprint phones — the Samsung A580, shown here, and the LG LX350 — for $2 a month. Subscribers can also log onto a Web site to view their contact list or make changes that are then sent to the phone. Using a full computer keyboard is easier than entering letters using the multiple taps required on a standard phone's numeric keypad.

The service cannot, however, exchange data with other online address books like those offered by Yahoo and Google, or with desktop information managers like Microsoft Outlook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/te...y/18phone.html





Cell Phone Data Eraser
Website copy

Now you can sell, donate or recycle your old cell phone worry free! The Cell Phone Data Eraser gives you all the tools you need to remove personal information like contact names and phone numbers from your cell phone. To begin, simply:

· Select your phone manufacturer
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New phone models are added every month – keep checking in if you don’t find your model! For more information, go to our Frequently Asked Questions page.
http://www.wirelessrecycling.com/hom...er/default.asp





Review

A 'Da Vinci Code' That Takes Longer to Watch Than Read
A. O. Scott

It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. Recent history — "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" — suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business. "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation.

The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?

Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)

To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"

Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is above all a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Mr. Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Mr. Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along.

Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to accelerate, popping the clutch and leaving rubber on the road as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing and why.

Briefly stated: An old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile Robert Langdon (Mr. Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policemen who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.

Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer and also — Bezu Fache! — the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.

A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the nighttime streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, with side trips to a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way the film pauses to admire various knickknacks and art works, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father).

There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.

Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.

In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life. He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh Teabing. (I will give Mr. Brown this much: he's good at names. If I ever have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for sure.)

Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment, barking mad the next. Sir Ian, rattling on about Italian paintings and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers, who should be having and providing a lot more fun.

Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin comic, is a marvelously absurd creature, and Sir Ian, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this — a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness — would have given "The Da Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller.

But of course movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Mr. Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness.

So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/05/1...7cnd-code.html





And if It's a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?
Jennifer 8. Lee

Chances are you don't have any friends named Nevaeh. Chances are today's toddlers will.

In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.

The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls' names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.

Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional.

Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward.

The name has hit a cultural nerve with its religious overtones, creative twist and fashionable final "ah" sound. It has risen most quickly among blacks but is also popular with evangelical Christians, who have helped propel other religious names like Grace (ranked 14th) up the charts, experts say. By contrast, the name Heaven is ranked 245th.

"Of the last couple of generations, Nevaeh is certainly the most remarkable phenomenon in baby names," said Cleveland Kent Evans, president of the American Name Society and a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska.

The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. "Heaven spelled backwards," he said.

Among the many inspired by Mr. Sandoval's appearance was Jade San Luis, who named his first daughter Nevaeh two years later. "It felt original," said Mr. San Luis, 26, of Cerritos, Calif. "Now, not anymore."

Today Mr. Sandoval is introduced to and photographed with baby Nevaehs all the time. His own Nevaeh, now 6, skateboards and, when introduced, pipes up that her name is Heaven spelled backward. Does she understand the meaning of heaven? Mr. Sandoval replied, "She knows that is where her grandmother is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/us...rtner=homepage


















Until next week,

- js.


















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