[JackSpratts]

Song Lyrics Stored in Bacteria
Natasha McDowell

A message encoded as artificial DNA can be stored within the genomes of multiplying bacteria and then accurately retrieved, US scientists have shown.

Their concern that all current ways of storing information, from paper to electronic memory, can easily be lost or destroyed prompted them to devise a new type of memory - within living organisms.

"A big concern is the protection of valuable information in the case of a nuclear catastrophe," says information technologist Pak Chung Wong, of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State. The laboratory was set up as a nuclear energy research institute.

The scientists took the words of the song It's a Small World and translated it into a code based on the four "letters" of DNA. They then created artificial DNA strands recording different parts of the song. These DNA messages, each about 150 bases long, were inserted into bacteria such as E. coli and Deinococcus radiodurans.

"The magic of the sentinel is that it protects the information, so that even after a hundred bacterial generations we were able to retrieve the exact message," says Wong. "Once the DNA message is in bacteria, it is protected and can survive." And as a millilitre of liquid can contain up to billion bacteria, the potential capacity of such a memory system is enormous.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993243

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Studio copyright battles worthy of Hollywood script
Stefanie Olsen

The Internet's long-held promise of offering every movie ever made is facing a threat far more powerful than any studio chief, box-office star or pitbull uber- agent: the Hollywood contract.

Although the movie industry is taking steps that signal new seriousness about selling works online, complex matters of intellectual property rights could keep some titles offline for years, according to those negotiating such deals.

"Clearing rights to movies is the biggest single hurdle to Internet video on demand today," said CinemaNow Chief Executive Curt Marvis, whose company struck a deal late last year to sell first-run movies from Warner Bros., including the smash hit "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

"The studios would like to give us more, but can't clear the titles," he said. "There are strange clauses attached to almost every film because the Internet either wasn't contemplated or the contracts were loosely worded."

The movie business is hardly the first industry to encounter problems with online licensing. Internet music retailers are still seeking the rights to sell songs by The Beatles and other major artists, even after hammering out deals with all of the leading record labels. And in 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Internet publishers to pay up or pull work by freelance writers whose articles were republished online without permission.

But those cases pale in comparison to the massive battles looming in the movie industry, which typically include many more legal layers and parties who bring considerable muscle--not to mention ego--to the bargaining table.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks involves rights to popular music played in films. Movie studios typically own the rights to the score of a movie--or music that's specifically written for a film--but popular music of the times played throughout a film must be licensed separately.

"The studios all claim that they are having problems clearing the music rights," Taplin said. "On some levels this is a bit of posturing, as I think they want to release only a small amount of content to IP sites. They seem to have no problem releasing any film to cable systems, so it really becomes a definition of what is the 'TV rights' vis-a-vis IP delivery."
http://news.com.com/2009-1023-979754...g=fd_lede1_hed

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FCC's Powell Calls TiVo 'God's Machine'
Jim Krane

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) is a new convert — to the personal digital video recorder faithful.

"My favorite product that I got for Christmas is TiVo," FCC chairman Michael Powell said during a question and answer session at the International Consumer Electronics Show. "TiVo is God's machine."

If Powell's enthusiasm for digital recordings of TV broadcasts are reflected in FCC rulings, the entertainment industry could find it difficult to push in Washington its agenda for technical restrictions on making and sharing such recordings.

Powell said he intended to use the TiVo machine to record TV shows to play on other television sets in his home, and even suggested that he might share recordings with his sister if she were to miss a favorite show.

"I'd like to move it to other TVs," he said of his digitally recorded programming. A number of products already allow that.

A TiVo competitor, SONICblue, has been sued by top motion picture studios and some television networks over a ReplayTV device that enables users to share digitally recorded shows over the Internet with a limited group of fellow ReplayTV owners.

Powell made the statements during a brief exchange with Gary Shapiro, who heads the Consumer Electronics Association, a lobbying group opposed to government-imposed restrictions on TiVo-like digital recording technology.

Shapiro was clearly delighted, calling Powell's statement "good news" and suggesting to Powell that his regulatory authority might allow him to rule in favor of sharing recorded TV broadcasts.

"That's up to you, actually," Shapiro said. "We're glad. We hope some of your colleagues in Congress buy a TiVo as well."

Many in Hollywood have railed against the machines, saying they could cut into TV advertising revenues if fewer people watch the commercials that underwrite broadcasters' business.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...c_loves_tivo_1

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Excellent Gnutella Hybrid. Shareaza v1.8 released. http://www.shareaza.com/

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Learning Your Limits

You've got to know your limitations. And these cases demonstrate one of them clearly, and show why Hollywood, the record companies and publishers will face big problems if they continue down their current path to protect their works from being copyrighted.

For what Hollywood and other copyright holders are trying to make illegal amounts to taking away the property rights of the very buyers of their wares.

Echoing the sentiments of the ElcomSoft jury, Johansen's lawyer told the Oslo court in his closing argument "The thief who breaks into his own flat is not committing any crime." And the court agreed, saying he was entitled to view DVDs that he had legally purchased in any way he chose and couldn't be convicted of "breaking into" property that he already owned.

Furthermore, as Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argued defending Dimitri Sklyarov, making decryption illegal, as DMCA does, "not only interferes with the legitimate use of copyrighted material, it undermines security more generally. Research into security and encryption depends on the right to crack and report."

And finally, seeking to apply American law and standards to foreign programmers sets a terrible precedent for the future of the Internet.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-010903D

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Sharing Digital Content Is Your Right, Intel Says
James Niccolai

Consumers have a right to share music, videos, and other digital content that they have purchased between their computing devices, and a commercial model needs to be developed that allows them to do so, Intel Chief Executive Officer Craig Barrett said at the Consumer Electronics Show Thursday.

As a company that spends billions of dollars on research and development, and files for thousands of technology patents a year, Intel understands the value of intellectual property, he said. But consumers have an "expectation" that they'll be able to use legally acquired content however they want to.

"There's no simple solution to this," he said. "Law enforcement has a role to play, and anyone who grossly violates anybody's content should be severely dealt with," he said.

Equipment makers can also help by using technology that limits the "retransmission" of content. "There also has to be an acceptable commercial model to let people send content over the Internet," Barrett said.

The digitization of the world will be led by young people, Barrett said.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...pcworld/108695

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New bill calls for drastic changes to DCMA

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the brainchild of the Big Five American record labels and enacted to serve them, the movie studios and book publishers, will be radically amended to protect users if US representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA), John Doolittle (R-CA), Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) have their way.

"The fair use doctrine is threatened today as never before," says Boucher. "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the Fair Use rights of the users of copyrighted material."

Boucher, Doolittle, Bachus and Kennedy have re-introduced the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, originally put forward by Boucher and Doolittle last fall, to, "assure that consumers who purchase digital media can enjoy a broad range of uses of the media for their own convenience in a way which does not infringe the copyright in the work," Boucher says.

It addresses key provisions of the 1998 DMCA which prohibit the circumvention of a technical protection measure guarding access to a copyrighted work - even if the purpose of the circumvention is to exercise consumer Fair Use rights.
http://www.p2pnet.net/issue1/page5.html

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On the prowl for a few files? Don’t forget the Archos Q Disk 60GB external hard drive. http://www.archos.com/lang=en//products/prw_500332.html Better than a moving van.

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Phone Units Join in Effort for Seamless Wireless Net
Barnaby Feder

Motorola, Proxim and Avaya are expected to announce today that they will jointly develop technology to allow wireless communications to jump between networks without interruption.

If the three companies are successful, an executive could begin downloading data using a wireless hub in a Starbucks, airport or other public site and move to a company office without interrupting the transfer. Similarly, a phone call that began over a company's internal voice-over-Internet network could move to a public carrier as the user of the cellphone left the building.

Analysts briefed on the plans said the partnership would face daunting technical hurdles, including reconciling the different security levels and frequency levels in different wireless networks. Analysts called it the most ambitious wireless roaming plan yet to try to take advantage of the spread of communication hubs based on a standard called 802.11, known as Wi-Fi. The hubs, also called hot spots, are either free to any user of a mobile device with a Wi-Fi card who happens to be in the neighborhood or are limited to subscribers, depending on who operates them.

Most Wi-Fi networks have focused on transfer of e-mail messages and other forms of data from laptop computers but the goal of the three companies is to offer seamless transitions to cellphone users as well.

"The way hot spots are evolving, it could take a lot of traffic off of traditional wireless networks," said Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects, who is among the analysts briefed by the companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/business/14MOTO.html

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Resignation May Help Ground a Visionary Medium
Amy Harmon

Anyone checking e-mail on AOL these days will probably be confronted with multiple entreaties to try the company's broadband service, the keystone of America Online's new determination to charge a premium for online information and entertainment.

If there is symbolic meaning to Stephen M. Case's decision to step down as chairman of the world's largest media company this week, it may lie in the message underscored by the insistent marketing: it is time for the online service to start pulling its own weight.

Moreover, some industry analysts argue that while people may well pay cable television companies for on-demand movies, the Internet has never been about mainstream media, and perhaps never will be. In other words, one of the main rationales for the merger of AOL and Time Warner might have been a fallacy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/bu...ia/14ONLI.html

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Music, tech groups give nod to copyright plan
AP

The top trade associations for the music and technology industries, which have been at loggerheads over consumers downloading songs on the Internet, have negotiated a compromise they contend will protect copyrights on movies and music without new government involvement.

Lobbyists for some of the largest technology companies will argue under the new agreement against efforts in U.S. Congress to amend U.S. laws to broaden the rights of consumers, such as explicitly permitting viewers to make backup copies of DVDs for personal use or copy songs onto handheld listening devices. These companies, including Microsoft Corp., IBM, Intel Corp. and Dell Computer Corp., also will announce support for aggressive enforcement against digital pirates.

In exchange, the Recording Industry Association of America will argue against government requirements to build locking controls into future generations of entertainment devices to make it more difficult for consumers to share music and movies. Technology companies have complained that the controls are too expensive and complex.

The agreement, expected to be announced Tuesday in Washington, attempts to head off government intervention in the rising debate over what consumers can do with copyrighted material they have purchased. The battle over copyrights, pitting Hollywood against Silicon Valley, has emerged as a central policy question for this Congress.

The agreement also could affect fledgling efforts such as those by Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Rick Boucher, R-Va., to further define consumers' rights under U.S. laws affecting copyrights. Mr. Lofgren, for example, wants it made clear that consumers would be allowed to resell or give away music or movies they purchase, and would be protected if they deliberately broke anti-piracy controls that interfere with these rights.
http://rtnews.globetechnology.com/se...nology/techBN/

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Dilithium Crystals
Press Release

Dilithium Networks today announced that it is collaborating with Texas Instruments to jointly provide advanced transcoding solutions to enable seamless, real-time multimedia communications between circuit, packet and wireless networks. These transcoding solutions will enable the delivery of cost-effective rich media communications across networks operating under different protocol standards. Through its collaboration, TI and Dilithium Networks will reduce time to market for transcoding solutions based on Dilithium's patent- pending Unicoding technology.

Unicoding is a breakthrough in signal processing technology that transcodes in real time and on the fly between voice and video standards.

"Dilithium Networks' Unicoding technology dramatically reduces the processing power and memory required to do transcoding between common voice and video standards while maintaining a high level of quality," said Brian Glinsman, executive director, infrastructure solutions at Texas Instruments. "This is a unique technology that will have a big impact on driving down the cost for multimedia services."
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=26821

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He Really Wants to Know
Is Broadband a Natural Monopoly?
Bill St. Arnaud

One of the ongoing debates in broadband is the role of government, particularly municipalities, in its regulation and deployment. Some argue that broadband is a natural monopoly like water and roads and therefore it should be delivered by municipalities or be heavily regulated as with electric power and gas. Others argue that there is a number of competitive broadband suppliers and therefore it is not a natural monopoly and governments should have no role in its deployment or regulation.

One of the fundamental questions is what constitutes a "natural monopoly" ? A Natural monopoly should not be confused with "market monopoly". Although cable modems and DSL may dominate the broadband marketplace that does not necessarily imply a natural monopoly. The common economist's tool for measuring degree of market monopoly is the Hefindahl index. (It is interesting to note that a duopoly can in effect be a monopoly - but in some cases a market monopoly may not be necessarily a bad thing). A high score on the Herfindahl index may indicate the presence of a natural monopoly, but it does not differentiate whether that monopoly is natural or market driven.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=26786

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Egyptian Builds Long Range Wi-Fi. So Can You
“A lot of aimless browsing brought me to ‘I, Cringly’. This man is a genius.”

Genius mebbe but hardly aimless. So this guy thinks “how tough can it be?” and then goes out and does it. Get this – it’s good for one kilometer. Photos, links included.
http://www.d128.com/wireless/

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Ma B. Cuts The Cord
Ben Charny

BellSouth said Monday that it began testing a powerful wireless network it believes can help bridge the nation's digital divide.

The telephone and broadband provider will use "fixed wireless" equipment to deliver high-speed Web access to 100 customers in Daytona, Fla., for the next three months, according to a BellSouth representative. The trial run is a crucial step before a full-scale launch.

Verizon Communications and Sprint PCS are testing similar so-called fixed wireless equipment, which can wirelessly deliver 1.5mbps of Web access up to 20 miles at a time.

Fixed wireless works by directing Internet access from an underground fiber-optic cable to an antenna on a 1,000-foot-high tower, which then directs the signal through the air to rooftop antennas. Newer generations of fixed wireless technology, which BellSouth and others are testing, use an antenna that compresses the radio waves into a smaller, more precise beam. The result is a system that can blast a signal through trees or even a stucco wall. The first versions of fixed wireless networks were "line of sight." If a neighbor were to grow a rooftop garden that blocked the antenna's line of sight, for example, Net access would be cut off.

"The fact that someone has come up with non-line-of-sight solutions" has helped spur interest, Verizon Communications spokesman Mark Marchand said. "It's helped move (fixed wireless technology) from the lab to the field."

Some high-speed Web providers think fixed wireless is a more cost-effective way to expand broadband to rural areas, where wired networks like digital subscriber lines (DSL) and cable broadband Web access cost too much to build.

But so far, none of the carriers have gone beyond test trials of the gear. Verizon is testing a fixed wireless network in Fairfax, Va., and may do a trial run in Baltimore, using equipment from Beam Reach Systems, Marchand said.

Sprint PCS is doing a trial run of a fixed wireless network in both Houston and Montreal, a representative said. The company is using equipment from start-ups Navini Networks and IPWireless.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-980396.html

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Apple shuts down 3rd Party P2P/Streamer for iTunes. http://www.icommune.net/

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World’s Longest Wi-Fi Connection Made by The Swedish Space Corporation
Press Release

Wireless broadband connectivity achieved over 310km using equipment from AlvarionThe Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) announced today that they have transmitted information via a broadband wireless link over a distance of 310km. They believe that this is the longest distance achieved using wireless connectivity.

The link was made between a stratospheric balloon that was launched from Esrange near the town of Kiruna in northern Sweden and a base station located near Esrange.

Onboard the balloon was an antenna supplied by Alvarion, the world’s most successful provider of broadband wireless products. The antenna was connected to a high-power amplifier with 6 watts power output, a camera and a server. Data, such as environmental conditions and weather patterns, was collected and the information was sent back to Esrange via an Alvarion base station which measured 2.4 meters with 6 watt power output and automatic tracking of the antenna using GPS technology.

Information received at the base station was then sent back to Esrange via the internal network. The information between the balloon and the base station was transmitted over the 2.4GHz spectrum (2480 Mhz which the SSC is allowed to use with higher ERP) with a stable signal strength of -68 dBm.

The round trip ping response at 300Km was 300-500 mSec.

The weather balloon reached a maxium height of 29.7 km and drifted steadily. It finally touched down east of Sodankylä in the northern part of Finland, having travelled approximately 315 Km.

Lars-Olov Jonsson, System engineer RF and microwave, at SSC Esrange commented: “This is an amazing technical achievement, the difficulty of which should not be underestimated. Alvarion has developed extremely robust equipment capable of operating in a very harsh environment. Its technology has helped us save money, time and energy.”

Zvi Slonimsky, CEO of Alvarion, said: “Time and time again, wireless is proving to be a genuine option in the broadband arena for enterprises, incumbent and alternative operators looking for alternatives to fibre and satellite to be continued.”
http://www.alvarion.com/RunTime/Corp...=281&type=item

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MPAA Spurns Digital Copyright Plans
Ted Bridis - AP

Hollywood spurned a high-stakes agreement disclosed Tuesday between leading music and technology companies aiming to protect copyrights on digital movies and music without new government involvement.

The unusual compromise, brokered among the music industry and some of the largest computer companies, lists seven "guiding principles" that the companies hope lawmakers will take into account as Congress develops future technology policies.

The agreement attempts to head off government intervention in the rising debate between Hollywood and Silicon Valley over what consumers can do with commercial music or movies they purchase.

The powerful movie, television and home video industry, represented by the Motion Picture Association of America, spurned the agreement. The MPAA has aggressively supported new government requirements for built-in locking controls on new devices, such as DVD recorders.

The MPAA also complained Tuesday about promises by the music and technology companies to participate in "constructive dialogue." It cited plans by the technology industry to spend $1 million over the next six months on a new organization, the Alliance for Digital Progress. A bid proposal for public-relations companies said the group's ambition was to "counter Hollywood" on the debate over copyrights.
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...N&SECTION=HOME

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United We Stand (Against the Pirates)
Cynthia L. Webb

Entertainment and technology heavyweights yesterday announced a united front to stop the piracy of digital content -- a front that explicitly eschews government mandates. The Recording Industry Association of America, the Business Software Alliance and the Computer Systems Policy Project announced a "core set of principles" outlining how the groups plan to lobby congressional leaders about the issue of distributing digital content.

Included in the plan: Allow the private sector to control digital distribution decisions and a direct message to lawmakers that "government-dictated" technology mandates are not welcome. At the same time, the groups do want government to enforce copyright laws and to commit to funding public awareness efforts to fight digital piracy. The tech groups represent big players including Intel, Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard. "The agreement seems to oppose legislation from the likes of Senator Fritz Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat, whose Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act calls for embedding copy protection technology in all high-tech devices. Hollings introduced that bill last year, but it made little progress" before the 107th Congress adjourned, wrote InfoWorld in its coverage of the pact.

Of course, not everyone is happy with the "united we stand" digital piracy plan. "It is not good news for the consumer," Wendy Seltzer, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Wired. "They are trying to take the legislative process out of the legislature and put it in the hands of a few industry groups. There's a lot of public debate that has to go on and we do need Congress to step in and undo the mess that has been created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Noticeably missing from yesterday's announcement was the Motion Picture Association of America, a traditional ally of the RIAA in fighting digital piracy. The New York Times explained the absence this way: "The motion picture industry is worried mainly about the future, concerned that digital television broadcasts and movies copied from DVD's will soon be traded over the Internet in the same high volumes as music is currently. Hollywood movie and television studios view federal intervention as a crucial element in avoiding the same fate as their record industry colleagues."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jan15.html

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If the point was to deliver a robust client resistant to attacks including legal ones, then how tough is Ian Clarks’ Freenet really? UCLA Law takes a look. http://www.lawtechjournal.com/articl...229_roemer.php

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Phony Advisory Attacks RIAA
Dennis Fisher

A hoax message posted to two security mailing lists Monday suggests that the Recording Industry Association of America has hired a group of hackers who have developed a worm capable of infecting and shutting down peer-to-peer file-sharing software. The hackers claim to have released the worm, on the RIAA's orders, and that it now controls almost 95 percent of "all P2P participating hosts."

The RIAA said the message was a total fabrication.

"It's a complete hoax," said an RIAA spokesman in Washington. "Someone forwarded the message to us and that was the first we heard or read about it."

Although the existence of the worm and the RIAA's involvement are clearly a hoax, there is a working exploit for a vulnerability in the Mpg123 media player attached to the message. Several sources verified that the code does in fact exploit a buffer overrun in the player.

The outlandish claims are part of a "security advisory" supposedly written by a group called Gobbles Security. The group is known for publishing humorous advisories on serious software vulnerabilities, many of which are posted with exploit code.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,827970,00.asp

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A Corporate Victory, but One That Raises Public Consciousness
Amy Harmon

The Supreme Court's decision to uphold a 20-year extension on the copyright term handed a major victory to the entertainment and publishing industries, which stand to make billions of dollars by keeping control over lucrative properties for up to 95 years.

But the public domain advocates who had challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 law might claim a measure of success in the court of public opinion. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/bu...ia/16IMPA.html
Nick: bobbob
Pass: bobbob
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Discussion
Joab Jackson

COLLABORATION TOOLS

Value to integrator: This software allows remote partners to work on documents. Vendors include eRoomSystem Technologies, Inc., St. George, Utah.; Groove Networks Inc., Beverly, Mass.

Petchon: Collaboration is a very hot area for us. A lot of our clients are looking for Internet and extranet portals that provide collaboration capabilities for employees.

Boese: To us, this isn't a new area. We've been using collaborative tools in our integrator offerings for six years now. From our perspective, especially with some of the transformational programs coming in the Defense Department, collaboration tools pretty much need to be part of the offering. It does not make sense to do the kind of things the Defense Department is doing without them.

Fritzson: The collaboration tools that we use most often are moving to the peer-to-peer platform. Peer-to-peer implementation means that everything in the shared space -- the calendars, documents, discussions -- are replicated on each machine [in contrast to] the thin-client server, where everything is based on one server. We have people who travel a lot, their connectivity is still intermittent.

In the coming year, we expect to be bridging these two types of platforms. There's a huge push on in the government for a concept called "power to the edge," which comes from [Defense Department CIO] John Stenbit. It means having a bridge between the edge and center-based architectures, bringing peer-to-peer and thin-client [platforms] together.

Richards: There are a lot of what we call external referrals, where one agency needs to send an action item to another agency. I think peer-to-peer computing is the technology to do that.


WIRELESS FIDELITY (WIFI)

Value to integrator: This hardware can set up wireless local area data networks. Vendors include Linksys Group Inc., Irvine, Calif.; Netgear Inc., Santa Clara, Calif.

Williams (Micro Warehouse): We will probably sell twice as much WiFi equipment this year as we did in 2002. Public-sector sales wasn't a huge success in 2002. Agencies were still setting up labs for testing. But tools for data integration and encryption have come online in this last quarter, so we see a lot of growth in this arena.

Manchise: It is almost a commodity now. It has gotten so easy to implement. I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing wireless access kits being sold in hardware stores and pharmacies.

As an integrator, we do not propose using the WiFi by any of our customers until the security problem is solved. We do implement WiFi in limited cases for our customers only after we discuss the pros and cons on the lack of security and privacy. When there is some guarantee of privacy, then it will be easier to justify implementing WiFi into comprehensive solutions. *
http://www.washingtontechnology.com/...h/19793-1.html

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“Wi-Fi Hamming” Could Be the Next Big Thing
Press Release

NEWINGTON, CT, High-speed multimedia hamming via "The Hinternet" could be the next big thing for Amateur Radio. That's the hope of the ARRL High Speed Multimedia (HSMM) Working Group, which is adapting the highly popular IEEE 802.11b Part 15 wireless Internet protocol to Part 97 amateur operating.

"We expect it to be nothing less than revolutionary!" says John Champa, K8OCL, who chairs the ARRL HSMM Working Group--a subset of the League's Technology Task Force.

The term "Hinternet" (ham + Internet), Champa says, is a user-friendly way to refer to the development of high-speed Radio Local Area Networks (RLANs) capable of simultaneously carrying audio, video and data signals.

In addition to emergency communication, Hinternet applications could include two-way streaming video, full-duplex streaming audio, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications such as eQSO, EchoLink, iLink and IRLP, and digital voice. As on the wired Internet, communication can be point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and multicast at high bandwidth.

Antenna manufacturer M2 already is planning to produce an antenna designed specifically for amateur 802.11b work. Champa says the new M2 antenna will be a adaptation of an experimental HSMM antenna built by Ernst Kiefer, N8EK, for the ARRL HSMM Experimenters Team. It will consist of four horizontal turnstile antennas protected by a radome.
http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2003/01/10/3/?nc=1

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Vienna’s The Champ. With 136 WLAN hot-spots, Vienna is the world champion of wireless internet, according to a ranking by Austrian Wi-Fi provider Metronet. http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=14449

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Nevada CES: Media Company Jitters Slowing Progress, Some Say. Other Manufacturers Excited By Prospects
Saul Hansell

At the Consumer Electronics Association's annual trade show, which was held here Wednesday through Saturday, the industry was jubilant over its success with digital products. Despite economic uncertainty, sales of consumer electronics in the United States increased by 3.7 percent in 2002 to set a record of $96.2 billion, according to the association. The trade show, with 2,200 exhibitors and 100,000 attendees, has become the largest convention in North America, eclipsing the Comdex annual computer show.

At the show here, SonicBlue introduced a $249 device that will let people watch a DVD playing in one room on a television in another by way of a wireless network. Most other companies prevent their devices from making copies of recorded DVD's or sending them anywhere — to the next room or over the Internet — for fear of angering the movie studios, which do not like the prospect of the rampant file sharing that has afflicted the music industry.

Patrick Lo, chief executive of Netgear, a leading maker of home networking equipment, said that such concerns over copyrights were substantially slowing the development of home entertainment systems.

"The studios will not let us copy movies onto servers, and so we can't distribute them around the house," he said. "The media PC will not fly because without content, there is no reason to use it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/13/te...rtne r=GOOGLE
nick: bobbob
pass: bobbob

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Handheld networks faster than DSL/Cable on drawing boards.
Bouncing Signals Push the Limits of Bandwidth
Ian Austen

It is a phenomenon well known to people who drive through urban high-rise canyons. Just as you stop at a traffic light, the car radio loses its signal. Once the light turns green, the car only has to creep forward a few feet to restore the radio reception.

Those dead spots, which can also cut off cellphone calls and mobile computer communications, are often caused when signals bounce wildly off the surrounding buildings. This scattering creates pockets in which two reflections of the same signal collide and cancel each other out.

Avoiding the undesirable effects of multipath, as this scattering effect is formally known, has long been a preoccupation of people who design wireless communications systems. Now, however, a system developed by Bell Labs actually embraces radio reflections not only to improve reception but also to boost the speed of wireless networks. Prototypes of the system, called Blast, can send data over third-generation, or 3G, cellphone networks at rates about eight times those of 3G.

"Normally multipath is the source of confusion, it's the enemy," said Robert W. Lucky, who recently retired as vice president for applied research at Telcordia Technologies and is familiar with the Bell Labs work. "Here you put the confusion back together Humpty Dumpty style. It's like getting something for nothing."

Bell Labs has made prototype chips that would allow Blast to operate at speeds of 19.2 megabits per second over a 3G wireless network.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/te...ts/16next.html

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Laptop Sends Network Cruisers Into 802.11a Overdrive
J.D. Biersdorfer

Laptop speedsters on corporate Wi-Fi networks can surf even faster with a new notebook computer from Toshiba. The top model in the company's new Satellite Pro 6100 series comes not only with built-in wireless 802.11b networking for data transfer at a fast 11 megabits per second, but also with 802.11a networking capability.

With maximum data-transfer speeds of 54 megabits per second, the 802.11a wireless technology is almost five times as fast as the 802.11b standard (also known as Wi-Fi and operating on the 2.4-gigahertz frequency). It operates at the 5-gigahertz frequency and is designed to carry heavy loads of video, audio and images across wireless networks.

The Satellite Pro 6100 with dual-band wireless networking comes with standard Ethernet and modem connections, a 2.2-gigahertz Pentium 4 processor and 512 megabytes of memory. It has a 60-gigabyte hard drive, a 15-inch screen, an integrated DVD burner and other features for a list price of $2,687 at www.shoptoshiba.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/te...ts/16tosh.html

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Wireless Bill Introduced
(NYT)

Senators George Allen, Republican of Virginia, and Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, have introduced legislation to promote wireless broadband deployment. The bill, the Jumpstart Broadband Act, calls for the Federal Communications Commission to allocate at least 255 megahertz of spectrum in the 5-gigahertz band for unlicensed use by wireless broadband services. The measure seeks to support the expansion of wireless technology known as WiFi, which allows users of personal and hand-held computers to connect to the Internet at high speed without cables. Mr. Allen said the legislation would create an environment that embraces innovation and encourages the adoption of next-generation wireless broadband Internet devices. In addition, he said, such action would build confidence among consumers, investors and those in the telecommunications and technology industries. "This is really the next revolution in the whole communications area," Ms. Boxer said. "It's going to make it easier to get your information, make it quicker, make it less hassle."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/te...y/16TBRF3.html

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Getting Onto the Internet at 30,000 Feet or So
Edward Wong

For many air travelers, flying has become an escape from the modern-day cyclone of phone calls, e-mail and instant text messages.

But some of the world's largest airlines are now rolling out technology that allows passengers to surf the Internet, check e-mail and beam text messages to the ground.

Lufthansa Airlines, the German carrier, begins flying a Boeing 747-400 today between Frankfurt and Washington outfitted with Internet connectivity developed by the Boeing Company. Next month, British Airways plans to start a trial flight with the same technology between London and New York. Japan Airlines and SAS, the Scandinavian carrier, have signed contracts with Boeing to outfit nearly a dozen planes each to offer Internet service next year.

Later this month, Cathay Pacific, the airline based in Hong Kong, will offer e-mail service on 40 planes using technology developed by Tenzing Communications, a small company based in Seattle that is partly owned by Airbus, Boeing's rival.

For broadband, each plane has to be fitted with various hardware and two large antennas that shoot data back and forth between satellite transponders, similar to the transmission of satellite television. Boeing leases the transponders for $2 million each, said Bill Richards, Connexion's chief engineer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/15/business/15AIR.html

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Yahoo Plans Big Expansion of Broadband
Saul Hansell

Buoyed by its growing sales and profits, Yahoo is planning to take its high-speed Internet access service nationwide.

Yesterday, the big Internet portal announced better-than-expected financial results for the fourth quarter of 2002. It was able to expand its sales of online advertising, even as it added new services that generate monthly fees from users.

One of the fastest-growing of those services is high-speed, or broadband, Internet access, which Yahoo now offers as a co-branded service with SBC Communications, the phone company that serves about one-third of the nation.

"Sometime this year, if you are a Yahoo user, you will have the ability to be part of Yahoo broadband all over the country," Terry S. Semel, Yahoo's chief executive, said in an interview yesterday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/te...gy/16YAHO.html

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DMCA Invoked by Maker of Garage Door Openers http://www.burstnet.com/cgi-bin/ads/...44/RETURN-CODE

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Consumers: RIAA still not thinking of us
Grant Gross

The Recording Industry Association of America Inc. (RIAA) and two major IT trade groups have agreed on the direction public policy for copyright projection should take, but representatives for a couple of consumer groups say the agreement may still hurt Internet users.

On Tuesday, the RIAA, the Business Software Alliance, and the Computer Systems Policy Project announced an agreement on how they want the U.S. Congress to deal with copyright protection. Members of the three groups have warred in the past over how best to kill unauthorized song sharing, but the new agreement calls for the government to stay away from mandating copy protection.

However, Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association, said the agreement is less than a "landmark" move, as BSA president and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Robert Holleyman called it.

"I think it was essentially a non-event," Potter said. "The only meaningful change would be the RIAA's agreement not to support government-imposed technical mandates that are intended to protect copyright owners."

But the RIAA and the other groups still support the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal for consumers to circumvent copy-protection devices, Potter said, and the agreement supports marketplace copyright protection efforts. While the RIAA is now asking the government to lay off, it's still threatening consumers with legal action if they share files illegally, he noted.

"If Hollywood and RIAA get technology companies to work in collusion with them to put any kind of restrictions into the hardware we buy that Hollywood and RIAA wants, then the public is still hurt, because we can't bypass those restrictions legally," added Brett Wynkoop, a member of New Yorkers for Fair Use and a free software advocate.

Wynkoop remains concerned that the RIAA may try to take away such consumer rights as making copies of songs for their own use, he said, and that copy-protection technology, including Microsoft Corp.'s Palladium security initiative, may eventually keep consumers from using software not approved by Hollywood or IT giants.

"Apparently, we've shown Hollywood that they're not going to be able to get Washington to do things, because Washington now realizes that the public has other opinions," Wynkoop said. "The public isn't going to stand for their rights being blatantly taken away from them, but that doesn't mean the content cartel has given up on trying to tell us how the digital world should run."
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0301/16.riaa.php

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Copyright truce excludes key corporate voice
Declan McCullagh

The key detail about a digital-copyright agreement announced here on Tuesday was who was not in the room at the time.

The peace accord was designed to show a unified front linking the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and a pair of computer industry groups, thus persuading Congress that new regulations are unnecessary. But absent from the press conference were influential lobbyists who have been far more aggressive--and who show no signs of relenting.

Take the Motion Picture Association of America, which worked with Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., to craft a bill that would require implanting copy-protection technology in PCs and consumer-electronics devices. Though the plan is anathema to Silicon Valley, Hollywood seems convinced that such extreme measures are the only way to prevent movies from becoming as widely traded as MP3 files currently are.

That's why MPAA President Jack Valenti says he's not about to sign a truce. "We are not prepared to abandon the option of seeking technical protection measures via the Congress or appropriate regulatory agency," Valenti said in a statement Tuesday.

Perhaps the biggest impact of Tuesday's announcement is to zap any momentum that Hollings' proposal would have if he chose to reintroduce it in the new Congress that convened last week. With the Republican control of the Senate, Hollings lost his chairmanship of the commerce committee, but he's still in a position to try again.

By demonstrating that copyright holders are divided on what legislative approach is best, foes now stand a better chance of bottling up bills in committee. In addition to Hollings' approach, a proposal backed by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., that would allow peer-to-peer hacking is now more likely to meet the same fate.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980671.html

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As Goes Canada
James Adams

There is general agreement that 2003 will be a watershed for the Canadian music industry -- a year that could either set the industry on a course of renewed viability, or make it as moribund as those dust-covered eight-track cartridges piled in the furnace room.

A lot will happen on a variety of fronts, not all of it necessarily complementary or synchronized. Consumers are going to be cajoled, taxed, dissuaded, tracked and stroked, all in an effort to reverse or compensate for a three-year sales slump of 25 per cent in Canada alone. (In fact, Nielsen Soundscan recently reported that CD album sales in 2002 were down almost 17 per cent over the year before, to 50 million units from 60. In 2000, sales were about 62 million units)

You can thank Shawn Fanning for all this. He's the Massachusetts teenager who, in the summer of 1999, wrote the Internet source code for the music file-sharing program that came to be known as Napster.

It was another revolutionary, Lenin, who observed that capitalism would be hung by the very rope it manufactured and sold. And so it has been in the case of the music industry: When it forced the compact disc onto the marketplace in the mid-1980s, supplanting vinyl as the dominant medium of sound reproduction, it gave listeners undoubtedly crisper sound, but at significantly higher cost. Consumers at first seemed willing to pay $15 or $18 for a single shiny CD, instead of the $7 or $10 charged for a vinyl LP, on the understanding that they were getting a sonically superior product and paying down the steep start-up costs apparently attendant on any new technology.

By the late 1990s, though, every new recording was being released on digital while previous analog recordings of all the world's most significant music had been copied onto unencrypted CDs. Not a few consumers began to wonder why, 10 or so years after the onset of the CD, in an era of low inflation, retail prices still seemed to be very, very high.

It was, in short, a situation ripe for young Mr. Fanning. He realized that digital's universality and its portability via computers made it possible for huge numbers of music files to be swapped directly among fans, at virtually no cost -- without going through a centralized file-server or a middleman like Sony.

Now, almost four years after the invention of Napster, the major Canadian labels are set to introduce their own on- line, on-demand services of downloadable music this February. It's a phenomenon that's coming more than a year after Warner Music, BMG and EMI combined forces to introduce their digital subscription service, MusicNet, to the U.S. It was followed a month later by the Universal/Sony Music on-line service Pressplay. However, until last fall, neither service cross-licensed each other's content, meaning that for almost a year a music fan had to subscribe to both if he wanted the full panoply of downloads available from the five majors.

Even with this cross-licensing, as well as more on-line content (and more exclusive on-line content), and the recent introduction of label-approved permanent downloads, the U.S. experience has not been a salutary one. There are probably no more than 600,000 American consumers who are subscribers to MusicNet, Pressplay, Rhapsody and other label-approved services. By contrast, Kazaa, one of the "person-to-person" rogue services that arose in the wake of Napster's shutdown in 2001, has an estimated 11-million home users.

Still, Canadian on-line subscription services are hoping the U.S. example has worked out the kinks in what they plan to deliver in 2003. If they can get 50,000 to 70,000 subscribers in their first 18 months, they feel they have a good shot at eventually "driving the on-line train" within three to five years. But, as in the U.S., these services still face the hurdle of competing against popular Kazaa-type services that provide virtually limitless content for free.

Of course, it's not really free. Since 1999, the Canadian Private Copyright Collective (CPCC), a nonprofit organization representing recording artists, songwriters, record companies and music publishers, has quietly collected between $24-million and $32-million from levies approved in 1998 by the Canadian Copyright Board.

The fees have been compensation of sorts for the wear and tear caused by the digital revolution in Canada where, since 1997, private copying, albeit with some limitations, has been legal. Thus, each time a consumer has gone into a store to buy, say, a package of 50 blank CDs, he's helped pay $10.50 to the CPCC, or 21 cents a CD. The same goes for blank cassettes: A Canadian buying any cassette with 40 or more minutes of recording time on it has, in the last three years, contributed to a tariff of 29 cents per tape.

So far, none of this largesse has found its way into the hands of any of the CPCC's stakeholders. It's currently sitting in an escrow account, says David Basskin, executive director of the CPCC, because, "you can't hand out random amounts to random individuals. You need to create a prioritized or weighted list from thousands and thousands of claimants that accurately reflects use. Quite simply, it takes time."

Basskin expects artists, songwriters, record companies and other CPCC signatories will start to see some cheques in 2003. Meanwhile, the CPCC is going before the Copyright Board in Ottawa on Jan. 21 to ask for sizeable increases on levies on blank CDs (to 59 cents per CD, a 55 per cent hike) and cassettes (to 60 cents per cassette, a 71 per cent increase).

More controversially, the CPCC also wants Ottawa to let it charge and collect new levies in 2003. These include $2.27 on sales of individual recordable DVD discs; 2.1 cents per megabyte for recording media permanently installed on computer hard drives ("burners"); and $21 for each gigabyte available in MP3 players.

Unsurprisingly, the CPCC's ambitions are meeting stiff resistance, notably from the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access (CCFDA), created in September last year. It's a hodgepodge of 20 or so retailers and manufacturers of digital hardware and software, including Wal-Mart, RadioShack, London Drugs, Apple Canada, Costco and Hewlett-Packard.

The Coalition thinks the CPCC's levies are "worse than a tax" because they're indiscriminate, affecting consumers who may be using blank CDs to store, say, photographs or data, not unauthorized downloads of music. Moreover, unlike a provincial sales tax or the GST, they're collected by a private agency and hidden in the cost of what the consumer pays. That MP3 player that's now going for $300? According to the CCFDA, it's going to sell for $500 by this spring if the CPCC gets its way.

Barbara Caplan, general counsel with Hewlett-Packard Canada and head of the CCFDA, thinks the CPCC's aims are "absurd" and, in fact, "just the tip of the iceberg. Unless we see significant changes in the law, Canadian consumers and businesses had better be prepared for the CPCC to seek levies on all current technologies capable of recording sounds," including cellphones, hand-held computers and digital cameras.
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...s_temp/5/5/11/

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Music products sales up despite recorded music turmoil
Sue Zeidler

Tough times may have hit the record business, but sellers of musical instruments and products are humming.

"It looks like we got back to the high water mark of $7 billion in annual U.S. sales in 2002, and I'm very bullish about the next 10 years," said Joe Lamond, president and chief executive officer of International Music Products Association, representing nearly 8,000 retailers and makers of musical instruments and products in 85 countries.

The estimated 2002 U.S. level would represent an uptick from $6.7 billion in 2001, which had fallen from the industry's record $7 billion in 2000. The latest global figures available peg industry sales worldwide at about $16 billion in 2001.

Lamond thinks 2002 global sales will match the 2001 figures, with gains in the U.S. and elsewhere potentially offset by economic weakness in Japan, which is the No. 2 musical products market behind the United States.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2052812

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Supreme Court Endorses Copyright Theft
Dan Gillmor

Swipe a CD from a record store and you'll get arrested. But when Congress authorizes the entertainment industry to steal from you -- well, that's the American way.

We learned as much on Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress can repeatedly extend copyright terms, as it did most recently in 1998 when it added 20 years to the terms for new and existing works.

The law, a brazen heist, was called the Copyright Term Extension Act. It was better known as the Sonny Bono act, so named after its chief sponsor even though Disney and other giant media corporations were the money and muscle behind it.

Who got robbed? You did. I did.

Who won? Endlessly greedy media barons will now collect billions from works that should have long since entered the public domain.

Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one -- a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries.

The Constitution talks about granting rights to creators of ''science and useful arts'' but only for limited periods. After that, the works can be used freely by anyone.

Walt Disney understood the value of the public domain, and used it precisely as other great artists had done. He updated an out-of-copyright character to create Mickey Mouse, for example, and launched an empire.

The company he founded later used French writer Victor Hugo's work, which was also no longer owned by anyone, to create a cartoon based on the Hunchback of Notre Dame saga. The Disney animators had every right to build new works on old ones -- and the public also got the benefit. Try the same thing with Mickey Mouse and you'll be hauled into court faster than you can say ''Goofy.''
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/colu...0.shtml#000730

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The Coming of Copyright Perpetuity

In 1998 Congress was the scene of a battle over public domain, the public right of common, free and unrestricted use of artistic works whose copyright has expired. Corporations like Disney, organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America, and dead artists' families wanted to extend copyright. Advocates of public domain wanted to leave copyright protection as it was, which would have allowed many early 20th-century works, including corporate creations like Mickey Mouse, to slip into the public domain. The copyright owners won, and yesterday they won again when the Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 2, decided that Congress was within its constitutional rights when it extended copyright. The court's decision may make constitutional sense, but it does not serve the public well.

Under that 1998 act, copyright now extends for the life of an artist plus 70 years. Copyrights owned by corporations run for 95 years. Since the Constitution grants Congress the right to authorize copyright for "limited times," even the opponents of an extended term were not hopeful that the Supreme Court would rule otherwise. This decision almost certainly prepares the way for more bad copyright extension laws in the future. Congress has lengthened copyright 11 times in the past 40 years.

Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work, and so do the corporate owners of copyright. But the public has an equally strong interest in seeing copyright lapse after a time, returning works to the public domain — the great democratic seedbed of artistic creation — where they can be used without paying royalties.

In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment. – The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/opinion/16THU2.html

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“So I’ve got to go get onto a plane to go to my least favorite city (DC). My inbox is filling with kind emails from friends. Also with a few of a different flavor. It’s my nature to identify most closely with those of the different flavor. David Gossett at the law firm of Mayer Brown wrote Declan, “Larry lost Eldred, 7-2.” Yes, no matter what is said, that is how I will always view this case. The constitutional question is not even close. To have failed to get the Court to see it is my failing.

It has often been said that movements gain by losing in the Supreme Court. Some feminists say it would have been better to lose Roe, because that would have built a movement in response. I have often wondered whether it would ever be possible to lose a case and yet smell victory in the defeat. I’m not yet convinced it’s possible. But if there is any good that might come from my loss, let it be the anger and passion that now gets to swell against the unchecked power that the Supreme Court has said Congress has. When the Free Software Foundation, Intel, Phillis Schlafly, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Kenneth Arrow, Brewster Kahle, and hundreds of creators and innovators all stand on one side saying, “this makes no sense,” then it makes no sense. Let that be enough to move people to do something about it. Our courts will not.

I will always be grateful to Eric Eldred, and our other plaintiffs, for putting his faith in this case. I will always regret not being able to meet that faith with the success it deserves.

What the Framers of our constitution did is not enough. We must do more.” - Lawrence Lessig




Until next week,

- js.



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