Surveillance
Feds' Wiretapping Rules Challenged In Court
Declan McCullagh
Universities, libraries and technology companies are asking a federal court to block controversial wiretap rules designed to facilitate police surveillance of the Internet.
In a 71-page brief sent to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, they ask the judges to overturn a wiretap ruling from the Federal Communications Commission that applies to "any type of broadband Internet access service" and many Internet phone services.
The Bush administration claims that last year's FCC rules are necessary to make it easier to catch "criminals, terrorists and spies" that would otherwise be able to evade detection.
But the organizations behind the lawsuit say that Congress never intended to force broadband providers--and private networks at corporations and universities--to build in central surveillance hubs for police convenience. The list of organizations includes Sun Microsystems, Pulver.com, the American Association of Community Colleges, the Association of American Universities, and the American Library Association.
"The brief demonstrates the flaws in the FCC's reasoning and strips away any believability that its legal analysis has any validity," said Albert Gidari, a partner at Perkins Coie in Seattle who co-authored the document.
Even without the FCC rules that are scheduled to take effect in spring 2007, police have the legal authority to conduct Internet wiretaps--that's precisely what the FBI's Carnivore system was designed to do. Still, the FBI says, the need for "standardized broadband intercept capabilities is especially urgent in light of today's heightened threats to homeland security and the ongoing tendency of criminals to use the most clandestine modes of communication."
Unlike most lawsuits that are first heard by a judge, a procedural twist sends this one directly to the appeals court. Thursday's filing was expected; the universities and other groups filed a brief notice of appeal on Oct. 24, and now the Justice Department and the FCC will have a chance to submit their responses.
At issue in this case is the scope of a 1994 called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. It required telephone companies to rewire their networks and switches--at taxpayer expense--to guarantee police access to features such as extracting touch tones pressed during a call, conference call information, call waiting data, and so on.
Opponents of the FBI's demands argue that Congress explicitly said CALEA would not apply to the Internet. A House of Representatives committee report prepared in October 1994 says CALEA's requirements "do not apply to information services such as electronic-mail services; or online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or Mead Data; or to Internet service providers."
According to the brief filed Thursday, the Bush administration is "relying on an interpretation of CALEA that is contrary to the plain meaning of the statute, arbitrary and capricious, and otherwise not in accordance with law."
In an unusual twist, some of the FCC commissioners who unanimously approved the wiretapping rules have acknowledged that the agency was on shaky legal ground. Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy, for instance, said she had "concern that an approach like the one we adopt today is not without legal risk."
http://news.com.com/Feds+wiretapping...3-6032300.html
Putting Intelligence In The Surveillance Box
Noah Shachtman
Management at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco had been suspicious for weeks. A houseman on the graveyard shift was not the most productive worker, and trying to reach him on his walkie-talkie was usually a lost cause. So when the employee could not be found one summer night, his bosses turned to their new video surveillance system.
The camera network - using software from 3VR Security, a San Francisco company - already knew what the houseman looked like; facial recognition algorithms had, over time, built a profile of him. With a couple of mouse clicks, managers combed through hours of videotape taken that night by the hotel's 16 cameras. They found every place he had been, including the back door, through which he slipped three hours after the start of his shift. He became one of 10 employees dismissed from the hotel since the 3VR surveillance package was installed in June.
Until recently, the only place where an employee could have been caught that easily was in a Hollywood script. But real-world video surveillance was stuck in the VCR age, taking countless hours to sift through blurry black-and-white tapes. Stopping a problem in progress was nearly impossible, unless a guard just happened to be staring at the right video monitor.
But surveillance companies, using networks of cheap Web-connected cameras and powerful new video-analysis software, are starting to turn the Hollywood model into reality. Faces and license plates can now be spotted, almost in real time, at ports, military bases and companies. Security perimeters can be changed or strengthened with a mouse click. Feeds from hundreds of cameras can be combined into a single desktop view. And videotape that used to take hours, even days, to scour is searched in minutes.
Some experts question the effectiveness of such "intelligent video" systems - which are also sold by ObjectVideo, Verint and VistaScape - and worry about the privacy implications. But Brian Russell, chief of the Drake's engineering and maintenance departments, is happy with the results. "People know we're watching," he said. "Word travels fast. Fear travels as well."
The first step in setting up the Drake's surveillance system was tying the hotel's cameras together. That has become easier in recent years, now that digital video images can be collected directly from the cameras that record them - through the same closed Internet protocol-based network that links the hotel's computers to one another.
But digital video requires far more space on a network than e-mail or Web pages do - so much that the extra data traffic can quickly cause the whole network to grind to a halt if it is not managed properly. The trick is for the system to send as little high-resolution video as possible, and instead pass on short descriptions about what the cameras are seeing.
That is where 3VR comes in. Every time someone passes in front of a camera connected to the system, the software logs a separate "motion event." The time and location of the event, along with a still picture, are sent to a security guard's desktop computer. The guard can then browse through these pictures instead of staring at a bank of black-and-white monitors showing images that are constantly changing, waiting for something to happen. If a picture catches the eyes of guards, they can click on it to see the video of the scene.
The system shows more than what the cameras see. Often, it can tell who the cameras are watching, too. The 3VR software assigns an identification number to every person a camera spots and establishes a profile based largely on the geometry of the person's face. Whenever the face is captured from a different angle or in a different light, the system creates another mathematical model. Each time a person is taped, another model is added to the profile, increasing its accuracy.
Once the profiles reach a certain critical level of detail, it becomes fairly simple to search the so-called motion events to find out where someone has been. It is essentially the same as entering a name on Google.
The video forensics made possible by such software can be valuable; similar technology was used to trace the suspects in the London terrorist bombing last summer. But 3VR can be set up to do more than retrace a person's steps. The system can also set off an alert almost instantly if someone on a watch list enters a building or a restricted area.
That ability is one reason the Central Intelligence Agency has become interested in the company, said Gilman Louie, who recently stepped down as the chief executive of In-Q-Tel, the agency's investment arm. It took part in a $10 million round of financing for 3VR, a 25-employee company led by former executives at TiVo and Inktomi, an Internet distribution company.
"We've had cameras," Louie said. "But their biggest weakness is being proactive. 'Hey, this guy's been here before, stop him.' And that's because we've had to be 100 percent reliant on the operators. You can't expect a guard to remember a face months after the fact. But put a little intelligence into the recording box, and it can remember for months at a time."
For now, 3VR's system is effective only in small, controlled environments where the lighting is consistent and only a few people pass in front of one camera at a time. Picking out criminal suspects on the street or in a crowd - as the city of Tampa, Florida, tried to do in its Ybor City district from 2001 to 2003 - is still beyond the ability of 3VR and every other surveillance system.
3VR plans no such challenges any time soon, said Stephen Russell, the chief executive. "Stopping Osama bin Laden, it's a sexy application," he said. "But it's just not what people do day-to-day. Enforcing a restraining order, that's more likely."
But Bruce Schneier, a security expert and the founder of Counterpane Internet Security, in Mountain View, California, questioned the real purpose of systems like 3VR's. "These things aren't designed to catch the bad guys," Schneier said. "They're for watching the good and the stupid. The bad guys, they'll just wear a hat and sunglasses the day that they want to avoid the camera." (Russell of 3VR says that his software can see through some disguises.)
To Schneier, the camera networks are part of a larger trend - along with Britain's plans to monitor every car on every major road, and the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program in the United States - toward "wholesale surveillance, the kind of stuff Stalin only dreamed of," he said. "The question is, do we want that?"
But Schneier says that intelligent video systems like 3VR's can fill an important, and less controversial, security need. "The cameras are best in no-man's land: 'If anyone climbs this fence, sound an alarm,"' he said.
Surveillance-software makers may also find a market in retail stores, and not just for catching shoplifters. The algorithms that look for intruders could see how fast checkout lines are moving and which displays are attracting the most attention.
"The cameras are there already," said Dan Bodner, chief executive of Verint, in Melville, New York. "All they have to do is buy the software."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/...ness/video.php
Court Says ID Checks At Airports Constitutional
Airlines and the U.S government have the right to keep passengers from boarding planes if they refuse to show personal identification, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday.
John Gilmore, an early Sun Microsystems employee and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, sued after Southwest and United Airlines in 2002 both did not allow him on board their flights when he refused to show any ID.
In court filing, he argued that requiring identification from airline passengers was unconstitutional, but a three-judge panel of 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.
"We hold that neither the identification policy nor its application to Gilmore violated Gilmore's constitutional rights, and therefore we deny the petition," Judge Richard Paez wrote. "The Constitution does not guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of transportation."
"He was not threatened with arrest or some other form of punishment; rather he simply was told that unless he complied with the policy, he would not be permitted to board the plane. There was no penalty for noncompliance."
The United States has stepped up its scrutiny of identification cards at airports over the past decade, with additional checks added after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when hijacked commercial jets flew into the World Trade Center.
http://news.com.com/Court+says+ID+ch...3-6031936.html
Local news
FBI Agents Back Down When Librarian Refuses to Let Them Seize 30 Computers Without a Warrant
Andrea L. Foster
An e-mail threat that prompted the evacuation of more than a dozen Brandeis University buildings on January 18 led to an unusual standoff in a public library in Newton, Mass., a few miles from the Brandeis campus.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents tried to seize 30 of the library's computers without a warrant, saying someone had used the library's Internet connection to send the threat to Brandeis. But the library director, Kathy Glick-Weil, told the agents they could not take the machines unless they got a warrant first. Newton's mayor, David Cohen, backed Ms. Glick-Weil up.
After a brief standoff, FBI officials relented and sought a warrant from a judge. Meanwhile, Ms. Glick-Weil allowed an FBI computer-forensics examiner to work with information-technology specialists at the library to narrow down which computers might have been used to send the threatening message. They determined that three computers were implicated in the alleged crime.
Late that evening, the FBI received a warrant to cart away the three computers. According to Mayor Cohen, the warrant allows the FBI to view only the threatening e-mail message and the messages sent immediately before and after that message.
Mr. Cohen said in an interview on Monday that he and Ms. Glick-Weil demanded the warrant because the FBI agents did not indicate that anyone at Brandeis faced a "clear and present danger." If there had been such a danger, Mr. Cohen added, agents probably would have seized the computers without even asking for them.
"We were able to both protect public safety and also protect the rights of people, the sense of privacy of many, many innocent users of the computers," he said. "Had we given them the computers, they would have gotten to see e-mails from ordinary citizens doing ordinary things and would not have preserved privacy."
About a half hour before FBI agents arrived at the library, Mr. Cohen had received a call from the U.S. attorney's office in Boston saying that Brandeis had received a credible threat, and that it had come from a computer in a Newton library. Newton and Waltham, where Brandeis is located, are suburbs of Boston.
Ms. Glick-Weil was not available for comment Monday.
Dennis Nealon, a spokesman for Brandeis, declined to disclose details about the e-mail message other than to say that it warned of an impending terrorist attack against the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. The message was sent to the university's office of public safety that day at about 11 a.m.
Local police and FBI agents came to the campus, said Mr. Nealon, and advised the university to evacuate the Heller building and 12 surrounding structures. The buildings, along with a local elementary school, remained empty for six-and-a-half hours.
"Since September 11th, the university's response is to take something like this very seriously," Mr. Nealon said, "and go above and beyond to make sure that there is no threat to anybody on campus."
Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokesman for the FBI's Boston branch, declined to talk about the investigation into who sent the e-mail message.
But she said the FBI had a right to seize the computers because the agents who went to the Newton library thought Brandeis students, professors, and staff members were in immediate danger. "We could have done this," said Ms. Marcinkiewicz. "It is supported by case law."
Nonetheless, she said, the FBI decided to seek a warrant. By the time agents had determined that they needed to seize only three of the computers, about 5 p.m., they realized that people at Brandeis were not about to be killed, she added.
Michael J. Sullivan, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, also said in an interview Monday that the FBI had acted within its authority to ask for the computers without a warrant.
The event prompted talk-show hosts and newspaper columnists in Boston to lash out at Newton officials, arguing that they acted irresponsibly and could have jeopardized people's lives. But Mr. Cohen said he had also received many positive comments from people all over the country supporting his actions.
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php...bddZnqv3qYq6rp
Bush Keeps Privacy Posts Vacant
Ryan Singel
President Bush has moved slowly to fill top civil liberty and privacy posts.
The powerful Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created by the Intelligence Reform Act, must have a civil liberties protection officer who is charged with ensuring that the "use of technologies sustain, and do not erode, privacy protections," according to the law. But it took the Bush administration a full year after passage of the bill to fill the position last Dec. 7.
The current DNI is former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte. His deputy is ex-National Security Agency chief Gen. Michael Hayden, who, for the last month, has been vigorously defending the NSA eavesdropping program that circumvented federal wiretapping laws. Alexander W. Joel was appointed to the civil liberties post days before The New York Times revealed that the NSA was spying on Americans' overseas communications.
Bush mentioned the spy plan in his State of the Union address Tuesday, calling it a "terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al- Qaida operatives and affiliates to and from America."
The White House has also failed to nominate a replacement chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security, a post that's been vacant since September when Nuala O'Connor Kelly left the administration to become General Electric's privacy officer. The office is currently being run by O'Connor Kelly's former deputy, Maureen Cooney.
Congress, too, has been slacking in the privacy arena. A five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board mandated by law in 2004 remains in limbo as board members await congressional confirmation. The board is supposed to report to Congress yearly and oversee antiterrorism policies.
The privacy board was also created by the Reform Act, which translated the 9/11 Commission's recommendations into law. According to the 9/11 Commission report, the board should make sure that antiterrorism powers "actually materially enhance security and that there is adequate supervision of the executive's use of the powers."
"The civil liberties board is supposed to be the first contact for the president to talk about privacy and intelligence matters," says Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "We didn't know about the NSA piece when the intelligence-reform bill was put forward, but it would have been helpful to have the experts at the civil liberties board involved at the beginning."
Bush named the board's members in June, but did not forward the nominations to the Senate until late September.
Carol E. Dinkins, a former deputy attorney general under President Reagan and a partner at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former law firm, is slated to head the commission, while Alan Charles Raul, who served under President George H.W. Bush, will be the vice chairman.
Both had confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 8, but the committee will not likely vote on their nominations until at least early February, according to a commission staffer.
The Senate should move quickly, according to Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor and former chief counselor for privacy in the Clinton administration.
"Recent revelations show even more clearly why the board is needed," Swire said. "The White House has had no privacy officials, and having privacy expertise in the White House will reduce the chance of mistakes going forward."
The White House did not return a call for comment.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70121-0.html
Snappers to Defy Police Ban
AAP
POLICE directives about what could and could not be photographed were an abuse of power and should be ignored, Liberty Victoria has said.
The civil liberties body made the statement after a report in a Melbourne newspaper said a member of the Geelong Camera Club received a visit from police after he photographed gas storage cylinders at the city's Shell oil refinery.
Club member Hans Kawitski was told not to photograph industrial installations and was ordered to inform members of the camera club to follow his lead.
Liberty Victoria said its advice to photographers would be to ignore the directive.
"The police have got no place making such warnings," president Brian Walters SC said.
"Merely to threaten is exceeding police powers and is an abuse of power.
"If you were a serious terrorist you wouldn't be openly taking photographs. Taking photos of public objects is a normal and quite understandable part of a modern society."
Mr Walters said police had been spooked by politicians and had acquired "an inflated fear of terrorism".
"We currently have thousands of cameras set up to watch citizens, but if citizens themselves take photos, the authorities take that as some sort of risk," he said.
Geelong Camera Club vice-president Frank Sady said the club was having its first meeting tonight after a summer recess.
He said he would be advising them against following the police orders.
"Until such time as there's a law (we won't be doing anything differently)," he said.
"We're not doing any harm and we're not hurting anybody."
Mr Sady said the directive reminded him of visiting Poland when the secret police were stopping photography.
"No terrorist is going to hang around the front gate (of Shell's refinery) taking photos," he said.
"It's just the freedom to do what's reasonable in our pursuit of photography. We take photos for aesthetic purposes, not for ulterior motives."
The Australian Photographic Society said the incident was sad but not surprising.
Senior vice-president Bert Hoveling said he had been taking a series of photos at Eastland Shopping Centre when he was "hauled off by security to management".
"They said, this is company policy that you can't take photos inside Eastland shopping centre," he said.
"We have to run this fine line now between getting the photos we want for enjoying our photography or entering competition and not transgressing local policies or laws."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117...-28793,00.html
Smoking Out Photo Hoaxes With Software
Michael Kanellos
Dartmouth College professor Hany Farid is no fan of Josef Stalin, but he acknowledges that the photo retouching done during the Soviet era was top notch.
"That was impressive work. I've seen some of the originals," Farid said. The Soviets just didn't airbrush their victims out, he added. They painted in new backgrounds on the negatives.
Farid's interest in photo retouching isn't just historical. The professor of computer science and applied mathematics runs the university's Image Science Group, which has emerged as one of the chief research centers in the U.S. for developing software to detect manipulation in digital photographs.
While some of the group's software is now used by the FBI and large media organizations such as Reuters, a version written in Java will come out soon that will be easier to use and thereby allow more police and media organizations to sniff out fraud. The current software is written in Matlab, a numerical computing environment.
"I hope to have a beta out in the next six months," Farid said. "Right now, you need someone who is reasonably well-trained to use it."
Photo manipulation is a lot more common than you might think, according to L. Frank Kenney, an analyst at Gartner. That Newsweek cover of Martha Stewart on her release from prison? It's Martha's head, but a model's body. Some people believe hip hop artist Tupac Shakur remains alive, in part because of the images that have cropped up since his reported death in 1996.
Although it's difficult to estimate the size of the market for fraud detection tools, the demand is substantial, according to Kenney.
"How much is the presidency of a country worth, or control of a company? People tend not to read the retractions," he said. "Once the stuff is indelibly embedded in your memory, it is tough to get out."
The Journal of Cell Biology, a premier academic journal, estimates that around 25 percent of manuscripts accepted for publication contain at least one image that has been "inappropriately manipulated" and must be resubmitted. That means it has been touched up, although in the vast majority of cases, the author is only trying to clean the background and the changes do not affect the scientific efficacy of the results. Still, around 1 percent of accepted articles contain manipulated images that do significantly affect the results, said executive editor Mike Rossner. Those papers get rejected.
"Our goal is to have an accurate interpretation of data as possible," Rossner said. "These (images) are (of) things like radioactivity detected on a piece of X-ray film."
Law enforcement officials have also had to turn to the software to prosecute child pornographers. In 2002, the Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition overturned parts of the Child Pornography Protection Act for being overly broad, ruling that only images of actual minors, and not computer-generated simulations, are illegal.
Since that decision, a common defense has become that the images found on a hard drive are artificially created.
"The burden is now on the prosecution. These cases used to be slam dunks," Farid said.
How it works
Fraud detection software for images essentially searches for anomalies in photographs that the human brain ignores or can't detect.
Humans, for instance, ignore lighting irregularities in two-dimensional images. While the direction of light can be readjusted in three-dimensional images from video games, it is difficult to harmonize in two-dimensional photographs. The light in the famous doctored photo that puts Sen. John Kerry next to actress Jane Fonda at a protest rally actually comes from two different directions.
"The lighting is off by 40 degrees," Farid said. "We are insensitive to it, but computers detect it."
Although modern researchers have in clinical studies documented humans' ability to filter out lighting incongruities, 15th century painters were aware of the way humans process images and exploited that knowledge to create seemingly realistic lighting effects that would have been nearly impossible to replicate in real life.
"The lighting is totally bizarre in some Renaissance paintings," he said. The software also seeks out areas in photographs where applications like Adobe Photoshop fill in pixels. Every time the photos get mashed together, some modification of one or both of the images is required. Sometimes one person is blown up in size while a second might be rotated slightly. These changes leave empty pixels in the frame.
Photo-retouching applications, through probability algorithms, fill those pixels in with colors and imagery to make them look realistic. Conversely, Farid's software employs probability to ferret out which of these fringe pixels are fill-ins.
"We're asking, from a mathematical and statistical perspective, can you quantify the manipulation," he said. "There are statistical correlations that don't occur naturally."
The quality of forgeries and touch-up jobs varies widely, but it continually improves. Farid gets consulting requests all the time. Some people call him to see if a photo of an item on eBay has been retouched. Others want advice on the genuineness of photos from online dating services. The Image Science Group has also collaborated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to determine if certain drawings were actually made by Finnish painter Bruegel or were forgeries.
One of the most recent celebrated cases of fraud--South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk's claim that he cloned stem cells--actually didn't need specialized software. Spots and artifacts in the background visible to the naked eye showed that the images of cells that came from the supposedly cloned dog were duplicated, Farid noted.
Farid's interest in fraud detection is somewhat random. As a post-doctoral student at MIT seven years ago, he was meandering through the library looking for something to read. He grabbed the Federal Rules of Evidence, a compendium of laws governing the admission of evidence in trials in federal court.
The rules, at the time, allowed digital images of original photographs to be admitted in court as long as they accurately reflected the original. The footnotes that accompany the rules, however, acknowledged that manipulation was a problem and that government did not yet have a way to deal with it.
When Farid started researching the scientific literature, he found little on fraud detection in digital imagery.
Will you be able to get a copy of the Java-based version of the Image Science Group's applications? Probably not. One of the dilemmas of this type of software is that the more widespread the distribution, the more chance forgers will exploit it to their advantage. Police organizations and news media outlets will likely get access to the application, but he's still unsure of how far he will extend distribution beyond that.
And although Farid charges a fee when asked to serve as a consultant, the software will be made freely available under an open-source license. He doesn't even have plans to form a company around his work. A significant amount of the research, after all, was funded by federal grants.
"Taxpayers," he said, "are paying me to do this research and it needs to go back out."
http://news.com.com/Smoking+out+phot...3-6033312.html
'Free' Is The New 'Cheap' For Software Tools
Martin LaMonica
James Gosling, a vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems, once quipped that the average software developer spends more on cafe lattes than on tools.
Two years after Gosling deadpanned that one-liner, software developers appear to have even more spare change to feed their caffeine habits.
Free entry-level products are rapidly become de rigueur in many areas of software, notably in programming tools where there are hundreds of thousands of freely available goods.
On Monday, IBM introduced DB2 Express-C, a free database aimed squarely at software developers. It is a trimmed-down version of its commercial product, and IBM limits its deployment to two-processor servers.
Oracle and Microsoft also recently introduced free versions, joining a number of existing open-source databases, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, that can be freely downloaded.
The moves by the big three corporate database providers--Oracle, IBM and Microsoft--reflect some of the changing economics of the software business, where freely available open-source products are forcing established vendors to adjust the way they do business, analysts and software industry executives said.
"Commercial vendors competing in areas where there are credible, free open-source alternatives are increasingly being pressured to lower the barriers to entry to their product," said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk.
That's true for many programming-related software applications, including database servers--the underpinning of corporate applications that can fetch high prices, according to analysts and industry executives. But having a free item on a company's product list can makes good business sense, software company executives argue.
By releasing a free version of their database, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are trying to lure developers away from open-source alternatives and toward their own products, executives said. In addition, these companies can potentially expand their base of customers.
"The open-source and free database-server providers have done the industry a service by demonstrating that there's a broad opportunity out there, among developers and solution providers that hadn't been taking advantage of a database server because of cost," said Bernie Spang, director of data servers at IBM.
Spang said that the free version of DB2 will foster growth of applications built on top of that database. IBM benefits when it sells higher-end versions. Also, a free product can entice third-party software companies or consultants to standardize application development on IBM's entire line of infrastructure software, including the database, application server and other components.
Developer mindshare
Analysts said that it's still unclear whether these free database versions from the three biggest providers will feed the companies' top line.
But IBM, Microsoft and Oracle need to have free offerings purely for defensive reasons, Forrester Research analyst Noel Yuhanna said.
"The whole notion is to develop the community and to grow the adoption. (Free databases) is one way to stop the open-source database adoption--
it's not really going to generate revenue per se," Yuhanna said.
Forrester estimates that the open-source database market, which includes support, service and license revenue, was about $300 million last year and will grow to $1 billion by 2008. Demand is being driven in large part by lower costs and maturing products, said Yuhanna, who predicts that 20 percent of "mission-critical," or essential, corporate applications will run on open-source databases by the end of the year.
Freely available software has been around for some time. But free products, which encourage developers to try out software, combined with open-source communities around those products, can be very compelling for a software company, noted RedMonk's O'Grady.
Open-source communities tend to spawn the creation of add-on products, such as plug-ins to a browser. They also foster the usage of open-source components in a certain combination, such as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, Python or PHP), he said.
"The real battle here isn't revenue, it's developer mindshare," O'Grady said. "By leveraging open source, (open-source database provider) MySQL and others have been phenomenally successful at capturing developer mindshare."
The prices for development tools, which are often used in tandem with databases, have shrunk down toward zero, as well. The popularity of Eclipse, an open-source framework, has made it difficult to charge for a basic integrated development environment (IDE), analysts have said.
Last November, Sun Microsystems made all of its development tools free to programmers who sign up for a yearly subscription to the company's developer network. And Borland Software, which traditionally focused on selling IDEs, has revamped its strategy over the past three years to selling suites of lifecycle tools that address testing, modeling and coding.
In another example, Adobe Systems on Wednesday is expected to revamp the pricing for its Flex Flash development tools.
The first version of its Flex tool set was about $15,000, but the price was throttling its adoption, said Jeff Whatcott, senior director of product marketing at Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit.
"The goal is to get to a million developers building rich Internet applications," said Whatcott. "To do that, you need a good product line. But you also need a licensing model that supports viral, development-to-development marketing. That doesn't happen with a $15,000 product."
http://news.com.com/Free+is+the+new+...3-6032986.html
Can 3D TV Put Philips Back On The Map?
Michael Kanellos
White is an appropriate corporate color for Philips Consumer Electronics, the gadget and home electronics unit of Royal Philips Electronics.
It matches the "sense and simplicity" brand and awareness campaign the company is organizing around its products. Second, it implies that the slate is now clean.
The Dutch conglomerate is one of the oldest in the world in electronics. It came out with the compact audio cassette in 1963 and was one of the companies behind the CD in 1983. In the U.S., it sold televisions through the once prevalent Magnavox brand. (The parent company was founded in 1891.)
But the company had trouble keeping up with Asian competitors in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, after a massive reorganization and rethinking of it position in the world, Philips is rebuilding. Royal Philips Electronics reported net profit of 332 million euros ($401.2 million) for the fourth quarter, above the 224 million euros ($270.7 million) expected by analysts.
Rudy Provoost, CEO of the consumer electronics group, has played a major role in changing the course. He sat down with CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos recently to talk about trimming the product lines at Philips, brushing up the brand, and the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD debate.
Q: How did you end up at Philips?
Provoost: I joined Philips in October 2000 and ran the European consumer electronics business until the middle of 2003. Then, Frans (Van Houten, CEO of Philips Semiconductor) and I became sort of twin brothers because he was in charge of the business creation side and I was part of the execution side (for Philips Consumer Electronics worldwide.)
What's different than in the past is that we are reaching out to other companies.
In the fourth quarter of last year, I became CEO of the Consumer Electronics division worldwide and Frans became CEO of Philips Semiconductor, so we are sort of partners in crime.
Before Philips I worked for Whirlpool for nine years, and before that I was with Canon for five years.
Although Philips has been in electronics for years, it hasn't seen the kind of success in recent years as some of its competitors. What was the situation like when you took over?
Provoost: It was a pretty challenging environment. If you look at the track record of consumer electronics at Philips, it has been a journey of ups and downs and all the time struggling to be profitable.
Two to three years ago, we were running on one cylinder--Europe--and now we are running on all four cylinders and all regions are contributing positively to the results. One of the big challenges was turning around North America.
CE is one-third of the business at Royal Philips Electronics. It is a $10 billion company and Royal Philips Electronics is $30 billion. We want to turn CE into a kind of a consistent profitable business and generate a lot of cash for the company.
What did you do to change it?
Provoost: We had to do a number of things differently. For one thing, we had to articulate the brand in a clear way and differentiate between the Philips brand and the Magnavox brand. In that sense, the sense and simplicity (branding) initiative helped a lot.
No. 2, we very much simplified our business models. We reduced the number of retail customers dramatically, by a factor of five. We were everywhere. We sold everywhere. We were a one-size-fits-all company, and that was generating more complexity and confusion than value. We had to get this process going in North America while keeping Europe going while capitalizing on opportunities in Latin America and, more importantly, Asia.
We reduced the number of SKUs (stock keeping units) by a factor of five.
That, to be honest, is what Philips is known for in the United States, an explosion of SKUs (product models) in a bunch of different categories.
Provoost: Well, I can tell you, it is a SKU implosion now. We had close to 600 (product) SKUs. Now it is below 150. It's innovation too. You need innovation that fits the American road map. You need heavy hitters like Ambilight. (Ambilight adjusts the light on the screen with ambient light to optimize viewing conditions.)
In reality, we are running a business right now that in 2002 and 2003 was two-thirds the size it is today. We were doing that with 1,000 people, and now we do it with 250. It is a pretty significant change. The growth in 2005 in the first nine months was 30 percent.
It's interesting that you're going after Asia. It seems like you'd run into a big feeling of "buy local" in a lot of countries.
Provoost: We partner with a lot of ODMs (original design manufacturers) and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). If you want to win in Asia, you have to use your global scale and power. Our Ambilight TVs are sold in Asia. In most Asian markets, we are a prominent top three player and often the most prominent foreign brand.
You also have to customize for local markets. We had double-digit growth in Asia for the past three years. Over the next 24 months, we want to bring China to a billion (euro) level. We want to bring India--total Royal Philips Electronics--to a billion level. The nice thing is that the brand is very powerful in Latin America and Asia.
In North America we had to rebuild that equity, which we successfully did. Now it is no longer an awareness game; it is a preference game, and it is a sales conversion game with retailers. This has allowed us to refocus our marketing investments How does this manifest itself on the product design level?
Provoost: The sense and simplicity brand promise contains three major cornerstones: The product needs to be designed around the consumer; it has got to be a unique experience; and it has got to have an advantage, some innovation, and not tech for its own sake.
If you take a product like an Ambilight TV, the three things merge together. It is a great design. It is a great immersive experience, and you see the results on the screen. If you take our sales right now of all flat TVs above 42 inches, one of two is an Ambilight TV.
Do you license the technology?
Provoost: No, we use it for our own purposes.
What will be the big product categories for Philips?
Provoost: We have four elements. First, connected displays. That is $5 billion of the $10 billion. Then the second part is the entertainment solution. That includes surround sound home theater systems as well as MP3 players and home video. The third part is networking: voice over Internet Protocol and IPTV (Internet Protocol television). We are close to the Microsoft's. That's where we made some inroads with leading operators in Europe--like British telecom. In North America, we work with DirecTV.
At the end of the day, a consumer wants to enjoy HD content. You need a format for that.
And the last area is peripherals and accessories. The Nokias, the iPods of the world, all need accessories. It's high margin and high growth. One example is the acquisition of Gemini. Gemini was a leading cable company in the States, a $200 million company. We acquired the company three years ago.
What's different than in the past is that we are reaching out to other companies. That is different than the Philips of the past. We are working very closely with the studios in the Blu-ray discussions. Companies like Fox and Disney are our partners. We are reaching out to the operators. Over time, you could think about premium downloadable software or prepackaged media.
LCD (liquid-crystal display), SED (surface conduction electron emitter display) or plasma--where do you stand?
Provoost: We are very much believers in LCD. It will be the growth of the market. In the 42-, 47-inch area there will be space for plasma, but with our partnership with LG in LCD we believe we are well-positioned.
LCD will go up in size, and the whole flat TV market will of course will grow. We think LCD will double this year compared to last year in volume. But we do have a plasma offering. A lot of lamplight TVs are plasma.
We also have a pretty aggressive innovation road map. If you want to bring high definition to the next level, we think that might be three-dimensional television.
What's that?
Provoost: You watch TV and get a three-dimensional effect. I don't want to make too much of a promise, but somewhere in the next 24 months we want to bring that to market. The neat thing is that if you have high-definition content, like a Blu-ray disk, then you can enhance that viewing experience with 3D algorithms. So you can you use two-dimensional HD content for 3D viewing. That is the first phase. The second phase is making 3D content. This is the next-generation TV we are working on at the moment.
Why is the fight between the HD-DVD and Blu-ray camps so volatile? Is there more going on here than engineering pride?
Provoost: At the end of the day, a consumer wants to enjoy HD content. You need a format for that. The whole discussion is over which format will prevail. We believe that Blu-ray has a lot of advantages over HD. It has to do with copy protection, capacity, coating, costs, convenience, interactivity, menu management, navigation, affordability, and most importantly support.
It is like in the CD and DVD days. Increasingly, there is so much intellectual property in there, and everyone looks for a fair reward.
What we are very pleased with is the progress in the past few months. Some of the studios have been Blu-ray and always will be Blu-ray. Some of them are HD. But now some of them are saying they will support Blu-ray, too. So if you are a consumer and you know that three and four of the studios are betting on Blu-ray and the fourth is betting on both, then you know which format to choose. Blu-ray will always be there.
I was very pleased that Michael Dell announced that Dell will support the Blu-ray format. What we are trying to do now is get the studios to get their video assets turned into the Blu-ray format.
In the second half we will launch a Blu-ray player, and then in the first half of 2007 we will launch a triple writer than can handle CD, DVD and BD.
OK, but why is there such a fight going on? Is there a large potential for royalties?
Provoost: There are so many players involved, from content creators, to content aggregators, to broadcasters to manufacturers, and ISPs and the Microsofts and Intels of this world. It's tough to get all these parties to agree, and they all have intellectual property interests.
Clearly there is a lot of intellectual property that went into this, so companies like Philips and Toshiba and Sony all look for a return on the investment. That is what is making the debate a challenging debate.
It is like in the CD and DVD days. Increasingly, there is so much intellectual property in there, and everyone looks for a fair reward.
Do you think customers will get confused? In a lot of ways, this is worse than the old debate between Betamax and VHS. When people are buying movies, they can probably remember if they have a Blu-ray or HD at home, but it will also affect what kind of computer they can buy.
Provoost: From a consumer perspective, the best thing would be that there is one format, but I don't know if that will be the reality. You will have to follow the logos.
But this will limit people's choices.
At the end of the day as a consumer, you have to make choices. Look at our MP3 players. They have "plays for sure." If you make a conscious choice about that, and you have Windows XP Media Center, then you have a perfect combination.
With Blu-ray, yes, there are choices that will be made. I guess a year from now at the Consumer Electronics Show a lot of the questions that are still on the table will have to be answered. Today there is polarization. Over the next year some of that polarization will narrow down, I think.
This year we all put our stakes in the ground and said, "Go." Well, let's go and learn and adjust.
Some people claim that Blu-ray players will cost more because of manufacturing issues and other factors. Is that the case?
Andy Siegel of Fox is very passionate about this. There are many ways to look to costs and express costs. In their view, the cost equation over the longevity of the format is absolutely the best with Blu-ray.
There are calculations you can make. We are convinced that over a consumer lifetime perspective, it is the best proposition.
http://news.com.com/Can+3D+TV+put+Ph...3-6033036.html
Time Warner and Bertelsmann Team Up
Bloomberg News
Time Warner and Bertelsmann, the biggest media companies in the United States and Europe, will team up to sell films and television shows over the Internet in Germany to tap the growing market for online movie sales.
The In2Movies venture will use so-called peer-to-peer technology, which allows users to share audio and video files through the Internet, and start in March, Time Warner's Warner Bros. entertainment unit said Monday.
Media companies are seeking ways to harness Internet-based technologies, which have been blamed for facilitating the illegal downloading of music and movies.
In2Movies will offer films and TV shows produced by Warner Bros. including "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and "The O.C.," the companies said.
Bertelsmann's Arvato unit will provide the digital download platform and software for the venture.
In the first half of 2005, 1.7 million Web users illegally downloaded a total of 11.9 million movies in Germany, Warner Bros. said, citing a study by the market researcher GfK.
About 73 percent of people who have illegally downloaded movies in Germany are interested in using a "legal paid for movie download service," the company said.
Arvato this month announced a European digital music-distribution agreement with EMI Group, which is based in London. That agreement covered downloading songs over mobile phones.
Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, last week said that it had teamed up with the pay-TV broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting and the online music service Napster to offer downloads of movies, music and TV shows on personal computers.
"Our initial efforts will focus on the German market, but in the months ahead we will leverage this technology to better serve markets around the world," Kevin Tsujihara, head of the Warner Bros. home entertainment group, said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/...ness/video.php
Road Maps For The Digital Revolution
Thomas Crampton
Built on the basis of owning a press or broadcast license, the world's media empires suddenly seem less potent in the Internet age.
Future revenue models are becoming murky as advertising funds get divided among a multitude of indirect competitors, all of which have instant, inexpensive access to a means of distribution.
Given the opportunity to start a new media empire from scratch, what would be the ideal approach? Four high-ranking media executives who were in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum last week, shared their visions with Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribune.
The interactive empire
To Gerhard Florin, the mass media empire of the future combines a phone company the size of Verizon with a search engine as popular as Google and a video game company with interactive content like the one he works for, Electronic Arts.
"Media will be driven by interactive entertainment that empowers consumers," said Florin, executive vice president and general manager of international publishing at Electronic Arts. "Once consumers interact with a media, they never turn passive again."
Electronic Arts had revenue of more than $3 billion last year from games - like "The Sims," the "Madden NFL" series and "FIFA Soccer" - to which dedicated players devote hours of attention.
"Media companies should learn from games because we totally absorb our players," he said. "Unlike music, for example, people playing our games are not also reading a newspaper."
The game element of Florin's idea of a new media empire would bring expertise in producing the interactive content that he thinks will be demanded by the coming generation.
"You can see from our customers that the interactive generation is growing older," Florin said. "Those playing our games were about 17 years old on average in 1995, and now, 10 years later, the average age of our players has increased to 25 and keeps rising."
News and information would be part of the content in Florin's empire, but only at the fringes.
Revenue would come from micro transactions collected by the mobile phone arm of the company and would make up about 40 percent of the imagined empire's revenue. Pricing for content would vary around the world and, to encourage newcomers, the first level of entry would be very inexpensive.
Nearly half the revenue, however, would come from slick packages purchased at stores or online - these would include printed materials, a DVD or other physical items.
"You may be able to do everything online, but we find people are still very attached to the idea of getting something physical," Florin said. "Downloading simply does not give people the same satisfaction."
Advertising would only be a minor source of revenue, mainly in the form of credible product placements.
"Our players react very strongly against obvious advertising," Florin said. "But, interestingly, our players are quite positive about branded items placed in credible situations."
The local empire
The Internet may reduce the cost of distributing content on a global basis, but Michelle Guthrie, chief executive of the Asian broadcaster STAR Group, is convinced that the next-generation media empire will be built using highly localized content.
"I know this sounds strange in the era of global communication, but you can already see this localization trend among our viewers," Guthrie said. "The top 10 television programs in every one of our markets are locally produced about local stories."
STAR, the largest regional broadcaster in Asia, operates television channels in 53 countries in eight Asian languages and claims 100 million viewers a day.
"In the past, only a few people could afford to be in production," Guthrie said. "Now that content can be produced by more people, only things that really touch people will succeed."
Guthrie was skeptical that users would generate a large portion of the content but said audience interaction has already become an important part of content and revenue for STAR.
"Audience interaction has become central," Guthrie said, adding that STAR had received more than 100 million SMS text messages via mobile phone since the Hindi-language version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" came out in August. "Since just two years ago, our nonsubscription, nonadvertising revenue such as SMS and new media has gone from zero to 5 percent in some countries," he said.
The clash of empires
Shelby Bonnie, chief executive of CNET Networks, a technology-focused online news organization claiming more than 110 million unique visitors a month, said future media empires would center more on a broad brand name than on a means of distribution.
"The very concept of a magazine, newspaper or television station is determined by the means of distribution," Bonnie said. "You can already see those definitions blurring.
"Media companies will find new competitors in the media industry," Bonnie said. "Consumers don't care whether they get the feed from CNN or The Washington Post."
But even as they face new competitors, media companies will increasingly make reference to those competitors in their effort to engage readers, he said.
"The successful media empire of the future will regularly send their audience to the best stories by their competitors," Bonnie said. "The three-legged stool of content will be original, user-generated and aggregated."
Sending readers to competitors has been a hallmark of CNET since 1996, Bonnie said, and has generated a lot of controversy.
"The competition thought we were helping them grow their business by sending readers," Bonnie said. "Instead, the readers came to us and only went to our competitors when we recommended their stories."
As for the source of revenue for the future media empire, Bonnie said it remained unclear where the money would come from.
"Advertising will not go away, but it will take time to see what consumers accept," Bonnie said. "We may find that consumers are willing to pay extra for content without advertising."
In Bonnie's future media empire, producers of good content will be rewarded.
"When consumers have full flexibility to choose when and what they watch, the need for mediocre content disappears," Bonnie said.
The mobile empire
Not only will the future media empires clash with seemingly unrelated industries, but, according to Rick Kim, head of global business at the South Korean Internet company SK Communications, the battle has already begun.
A price war that SK Telecom, South Korea's largest mobile phone company and owner of SK Communications, recently started against television broadcasters hints at what will come in other markets, Kim said.
"Mobile phone companies like us will increasingly enter the media space as we see the need to add value to attract customers," Kim said. "When everyone has a mobile phone, you need to look for new ways to get revenue."
The battle that started late last year in South Korea involves the distribution of television programming over mobile phones. SK Telecom launched a satellite and offered its own content for a monthly charge of about $30. Three national television broadcasters then teamed up to offer similar television-to-telephone service for free to customers of KTF, an SK Telecom rival.
Television is not SK Telecom's only push into content. Kim's main responsibility is running the Cyworld online community, which claims 90 percent of Koreans ages 18 to 24 as active members.
"We are erecting the building blocks for the next-generation media empire," Kim said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/...ey/mogul30.php
Freescale Banks On New Transistor Design
Betsy Schiffman
Freescale Semiconductor Inc. said Sunday it has produced the first commercially viable gallium arsenide MOSFET device, a transistor that could dramatically improve the performance of chips used in consumer electronics.
MOSFETs (metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistors) are predominantly made with silicon, and while the performance of silicon semiconductors has improved vastly over the years, GaAs, or gallium arsenide MOSFETs are said to conduct electrons up to 20 times faster than traditional silicon MOSFETs.
"We've been doing research on this for the past 10 years, and the industry in general has been researching this area since the 1960s, but most of the devices made have performed at less than one percent of what was required to make them commercially applicable" said Karl Johnson, director of Freescale's Microwave and Mixed Signal Technologies Laboratory. "We feel comfortable that what we've produced is a manufacturable, high yielding technology that can be implemented in our products. We have addressed what we believe are many, if not all, of the technical issues."
Historically, leakage, or uncontrolled current, has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the development of gallium arsenide MOSFETs, but Freescale said its GaAs MOSFET suffers minimal leakage.
Another problem with gallium arsenide MOSFETs is cost: Gallium arsenide tends to be more expensive since it's less abundant than silicon.
"We're trying to address the issue of cost," Johnson said. "We're very aware of cost sensitivity and we're looking at ways to make this technology affordable."
It may be a technical milestone for the semiconductor industry, but it could be years before consumers reap the benefits. Freescale estimates that it may be three to five years before the MOSFET is manufactured, and even then, it may be used predominantly in specialty applications.
Until then, the Austin, Texas company will look for ways to commercialize the device, which could include licensing agreements.
"We're going to first and foremost start working with customers to commercialize the technology, that's the first priority, and to the extent that we can find companies in complementary markets, who don't compete with us head to head, we may look at licensing agreements with them," said Sumit Sadana, Freescale's senior vice president of strategy and business development and acting chief technology officer.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...ech_up&chan=tc
House Panel to Press Cellphone Industry on Improving Protection of Customer Records
Matt Richtel and Ken Belson
The cellphone's emergence as a primary communications device has spawned a cottage industry of con artists seeking to trick mobile phone companies into giving away the phone numbers and calling records of unwitting subscribers.
That is the premise of a Congressional hearing, scheduled today, into the extent of the problem, whether carriers are doing enough to protect subscriber data, and the possibility of enacting tighter regulations to thwart thieves.
In the last two weeks, the nation's four biggest cellular carriers — Cingular, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile — have filed lawsuits against so-called cellphone data brokers. In one case, a federal judge in Trenton issued a preliminary injunction yesterday against the owners of LocateCell.com, prohibiting them from trying to obtain information about Verizon Wireless customers and providing information on Verizon Wireless customers to any third parties.
In general, these brokers, several of whom operate Web sites, reportedly dial customer service centers, pose as subscribers and obtain calling records, which are then sold to private detectives, divorce lawyers and others. In some cases, these brokers also offer to retrieve land line data, which can also be vulnerable.
While these activities have elicited lawsuits and calls for action on Capitol Hill and from state attorneys general, cellphone companies say that the problem is limited and that they are beefing up measures to counter it.
"We've stepped up the awareness of the issue in the company and we've stepped up the alertness of our representatives," said Mark Siegel, a spokesman for Cingular, the country's largest cellphone company.
But security experts say that imposters posing as cellphone customers are only as successful as the gaps they are able to expose in the carriers' call centers. Some cellphone companies may do a poor job of training their call center operators, particularly if the workers are overseas. Other companies may lose company records left unprotected on laptops and other hardware.
In still other companies, employees may be funneling call records to these Web site companies, something the carriers maintain would result in the employee's dismissal.
On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission, citing concern that call records can be obtained by unauthorized users, recommended fining AT&T and Alltel $100,000 each for failing to certify that they complied with rules to protect customer records.
The methods that these unauthorized users are said to employ are more an old-school swindle than a high-tech security breach.
Lawsuits filed by carriers like Sprint Nextel accuse a handful of brokers of calling customer service centers, posing as customers by presenting personal information like Social Security numbers, or persuading operators to bypass security measures to give away call records.
On the Web site of LocateCell, customers can pay $110 for an individual's call records.
LocateCell could not be reached for comment. A company called All Star Investigations, which was sued on Monday by Sprint Nextel, says on its Web site that it caters to "attorneys, insurance companies, corporate clients and private individuals."
All Star Investigations could not be reached for comment. In some cases, the people buying the call records may have legitimate need for them. Lawyers, for instance, may need records as part of an investigation. The question is whether the companies obtaining the records have systems in place to confirm that the person requesting the information has a right to it.
"People who sell this data need to have a verification system, and they don't," said John Pescatore, a security analyst at Gartner. "The enforcement is lax."
At the same time, consumers may expect more protection for their cellphone numbers and records than for their traditional phone lines because there is no public directory of cellphone numbers.
"Wireline numbers are in reverse directories and other places, but because there aren't similar wireless directories databases, there is a market opportunity, and entrepreneurs and crooks go after market opportunities," said Bob Atkinson, director of policy research at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information and a former director of the Common Carrier Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission.
Betsy Broder, assistant director of the Federal Trade Commission's division of privacy and identity protection, said the agency had the authority to force companies to forfeit gains received from using deception to get private information. She said the F.T.C. had used that authority in cases in 1999 and 2002 to go after swindlers who got individual records from financial institutions.
As for companies seeking cellphone records, "we're investigating companies right now," Ms. Broder said. She declined to give any specific information about the inquiries.
Laws are in place to prohibit the use of deceptive tactics to obtain phone records, according to Terry Lane, a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which scheduled today's hearings. Mr. Lane said that the F.T.C. could impose civil penalties for the deceptive trade practices, but that Congress might want to strengthen those penalties.
"I mean to make it very illegal," Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement. He added, "Telephone companies may not be doing enough to protect consumer privacy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/te...gy/01cell.html
Cingular Offers Thin Phone with iTunes Music Player
Cingular Wireless, the No. 1 U.S. mobile provider, has started offering its customers the Slvr, an ultra-thin phone from Motorola Inc. loaded with the popular iTunes music-playing software from Apple Computer Inc., the companies said on Tuesday.
The Slvr takes its cue from Motorola's hit-selling Razr cell phone, and is the company's second take on a device that includes Apple's music software.
Cingular already sells the Rokr, Motorola's first iTunes music phone, which disappointed some fans of Apple's iPod music player and Motorola's flagship Razr phone as it resembled neither.
Music is seen in the wireless industry as one of the hottest new cell phone features as service providers aim to attract new subscribers and boost revenue with services beyond voice.
Motorola, which had said it was disappointed with how the Rokr phone was marketed, plans to focus more on the design than the music player in marketing the candy bar-shaped Slvr.
"The first thing that's going to attract people to this phone is the form factor," said Steve Lalla, Motorola's general manager for mass market products. "We think its going to start with the design and consumers will double-click to look deeper at the features."
Cingular is charging customers who sign up for a two-year contract $199.99 for the phone.
Cingular, which enjoyed a sales boost as the first U.S. provider to sell the Razr at the end of 2004, has a similar agreement to be the only U.S. operator to sell the Slvr for an undisclosed period.
Cingular, unlike its biggest rivals, Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Wireless, does not yet have a service that offers wireless music downloads. To use the music feature consumers would need to transfer songs from their computer via cable.
But while Cingular has been behind these rivals in the development of high-speed networks for advanced services such as music and video downloads, it has been able on occasion to secure new devices earlier because of the network technology it uses.
The Slvr currently works only on networks based on GSM, the world's most popular cell phone technology standard, which is used by Cingular and European and Asian operators.
Verizon Wireless, which uses CDMA wireless technology, waited about a year before it began selling the Razr.
But Motorola's upcoming Q phone and e-mail device, whose tiny computer-like keyboard makes sending e-mails easier, is expected to be launched on a CDMA network first. GSM users will have to wait.
Analysts expect Verizon Wireless will be first to sell the Q and note that its high-speed network would be more suitable for downloading e-mails than the Cingular network.
Motorola's Lalla said the company plans to expand the Slvr, which is already being sold in several European countries, beyond GSM technology but did not give a time frame.
Cingular is a venture of AT&T Inc. and BellSouth. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc..
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False
Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders
Steve Krause
Over the past week, there has been some blog talk (Fred Wilson, TechCrunch, David Porter) comparing music-recommendation services Pandora and Last.fm. I've been using both for the past couple months, making notes along the way with the idea that I'd eventually have something to say. That might as well be now.
Both services allow you to specify a favorite artist, based on which you immediately receive an Internet audio stream of similar music. When I tell people that this is possible—that you can have a personalized streaming radio station—most are astonished. So let's start by saying that what these and similar services do is cool. How Pandora and Last.fm do it is an interesting compare-and-contrast.
Nature versus Nurture
Algorithmically, Pandora versus Last.fm is something like the nature versus nurture debate. Taking the nature side, Pandora's recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music. Give Pandora an artist or song, and it will find similar music in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, orchestration, vocal character and so on. Pandora likes to call these musical attributes "genes" and its database of songs, classified against hundreds of such attributes, the "Music Genome Project."
On the nurture side (as in, it's all about the people around you), Last.fm is a social recommender. It knows little about songs' inherent qualities. It just assumes that if you and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, you will probably enjoy other artists popular with that group.
Like Last.fm, most music-discovery systems have been social recommenders, also known as collaborative filters. Although much of the academic work in the area has focused on improving the matching algorithms, Last.fm's innovation has been in improving the data the algorithms work on. Last.fm does so by providing users an optional plug-in that automatically monitors your media-player software so that whatever you listen to—whether it came from Last.fm or not—can be incorporated into your Last.fm profile and thus be used as the basis for recommendations. Compared to relying on users to manually provide preferences, this automatic and comprehensive data capture leads to far better grist for the data mill.
A side note: In my years of analytics and data mining, a recurring theme is that better algorithms are nice but better data is nicer. That's because a large number of smart people have evolved the best data-mining algorithms for various scenarios; thus, further improvements tend to be incremental. By contrast, whatever data you happen to be using in a project has probably had no priming for analytical use. Thus, improving how you acquire, clean, and transform that data can have disproportionately large benefits. The catchphrase for the negative version of this is "garbage in, garbage out," although one could just as easily say, "the more signal in, the more signal out."
Surfacing New Artists
Pandora and Last.fm are both about helping people discover new music, so let's consider their approaches in terms of discovering truly "new" music—that is, artists who are just appearing on the music scene. If we assume that both services put new artists into their database at the same rate, Last.fm will be slower in surfacing them as recommendations. This is due to the "cold start" problem that afflicts social recommenders: Before something new can become recommendable, it needs time to accumulate enough popularity to rise above the system's noise level. In contrast, because Pandora is only comparing songs' inherent qualities—not who they're popular with—it should be able to recommend a new artist the first day that artist is in the system. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Pandora did a little biasing of recommendations by popularity, which it measures as people use the service.
Partisans of Last.fm might retort that, in practice, Pandora will be slower at getting new artists and music into its datbase because of Pandora's classification bottleneck—that is, the time necessary for a Pandora employee to classify each song on the hundreds of musical attributes. With that bottleneck, Pandora can't just classify everything as it comes in the door. By contrast, Last.fm does not need to do manual classifications. With its software plug-in continually updating people's preferences, Last.fm has a virtual army of talent scouts constantly finding new things, which Last.fm can integrate into its database automatically.
(Leaky) Locked Loops
Pandora people might counter that Last.fm's army of talent scouts is compromised by its relative uniformity. That is, a social recommender tends to reward people who are like those who already use the system. If there are already many people in Last.fm with similar tastes to you, you'll get good recommendations; if not, then maybe not. And if you don't get good recommendations, are you going to keep feeding the system data? Probably not, and thus we have a self-perpetuating in-group/out-group situation. The result is a "locked loop," whereby a social recommender gets stuck in certain genres and styles.
But with a social music recommender, a truly locked loop is unlikely. The reason is "leakage": A population that shares the same core musical tastes will have enough variance in secondary tastes to allow for a continually expanding spectrum, albeit with much slower expansion in certain genres than others. Here's an example of the problem. When I checked Last.fm's similar artists to the reggae legend Bob Marley, first on the list was James Brown, followed by The Chemical Brothers, then Aerosmith. (If you're reading this well after January 30, 2005, beware that Last.fm's system is continually evolving, so the lists these links point to will probably have changed.) Other reggae acts appear further down, but the unlikely top choices suggest that Marley has been brought into the system more as a distant secondary choice than as a primary choice with other acts in his genre. A quick check of Aerosmith's similar artists confirms this: Marley is 41st on the list, way behind various likelier suspects.
While better non-reggae recommendations are easy to imagine for Marley, they probably won't appear until Marley's primary fans are better represented on Last.fm. Then the quality non-reggae choices can emerge from his core fans' secondary choices.
For the sake of comparison, when I put Marley into Pandora, I got something like a reggae radio station at first, which then drifted into other stuff over time.
Why versus What
Pandora is less subject to the echo chamber of overly like minds, but it has its own fundamental challenge in its reliance on matching songs' "genes." This rules out connections between songs or artists that don't fit Pandora's modeling and matching of musical qualities—which, in turn, puts enormous pressure on Pandora's specific approach to be correct. In other words, Pandora's success hinges on a theory, and a specific implementation of that theory, about why music recommendations work. By contrast, Last.fm simply describes what goes together according to its audience and then makes relatively simple inferences from that. So if there are hidden factors that Pandora isn't explicitly capturing, Last.fm is at least capturing them indirectly.
It's not hard to find cases where Pandora's approach runs aground, although the system's lack of transparency makes it difficult to know where the problem lies. For example, it's hard to explain Pandora's initial choices for Gary Numan (he of "Cars" fame). With Numan as the seed, Pandora gave me syrupy pop tunes by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark and the Human League. Yes, each artist's most famous material was from the same time and was primarily electronic, but the latter two really miss the Numan aesthetic, which is more like supercooled liquid metal than warm syrup. Pandora went on to do somewhat better, but not great, with subsequent tunes.
In comparison, Last.fm immediately delivered Numan-appropriate songs from Assemblage 23, Killing Joke, Kraftwerk, and Skinny Puppy, eventually drifting into less relevant territory. Still, Pandora partially redeemed itself with an inspired connection: "Out of Control" by Ric Ocasek (former leader of the Cars), an obscure cut from an artist that is far from obvious as a connection for Gary Numan.
Last.fm's Delivery versus Pandora's Promise
I raise the Numan example because it exemplifies my experiences with Last.fm and Pandora. Having used a wide range of artists as seeds, I found Last.fm better than Pandora at delivering songs that I liked or at least didn't feel compelled to skip, which is the most important thing when I'm listening while doing something else. The exception was when the seed artist had not hit critical mass in the Last.fm system, per the Marley example. Meanwhile, Pandora had more misses but was more likely to surface something truly out of left field, as with the Ric Ocasek example.
As a result, both Pandora and Last.fm have maintained a place in my music-listening world. However, ultimately I think Pandora has greater promise because it is far easier for Pandora to incorporate Last.fm's functionality than the other way around. This point is important because, just as with the nature versus nurture argument, the best answer is likely to involve elements of both camps. That said, Pandora's advantage comes at a significant cost to its business, with all the manual work it entails. At this point, Pandora is not delivering proportionally more benefit for that cost—which is why I used the word "promise" above.
Pandora Possibilities
The key to Pandora's changing the game is to take better advantage of its exclusive, hard-to-replicate metadata about music. Users may never be able to objectively judge the quality of recommendations among different services, but they can definitely tell the difference between services with unique ways of getting to recommendations. For example, I'd like to see Pandora expose some of its internal attributes as dials for the user to control. If I put in the singer Paul Westerberg (former leader of the Replacements), I'd like to tell the system to match more strongly along his lyrical style rather than by the fact he has a "gravely male voice" (which is one of the things Pandora said it was matching on). It's easy to picture many other creative uses of Pandora's metadata, both in terms of a recommender and other applications.
Finally, I wonder why Pandora continues to employ hundreds of attributes. In the world of modeling preferences, hundreds of variables typically can be consolidated down to a much smaller number with nearly the same predictive power. Typically, you start with a large number of variables as a kind of fishing expedition and then, over time, reduce the set down to those that are doing most of the work. The reduced set can be part of the original set and/or new variables derived specifically for predictive power. For a manual-labor-intensive business like Pandora's, being able to cut the number of variables in half (or a lot more) would help contain the costs. And if there's good reason not to consolidate attributes, I would still be wondering how to innovate in streamlining the production process just as much as how to innovate in the customer-facing part of the business.
Bowling or Batting?
A final thought: What Last.fm and Pandora do is hard, and the people who built these services deserve a lot of credit. Given the ambitious scope, it's easy to find examples where each of the services comes up short. However, it's worth considering what the yardstick should be. Should we expect spot-on recommendations like a pro bowler expects a strike every time? Or is this more like the baseball batter, who is happy to get a hit one in three times? Whatever the metaphor, the fact that these services do enough right to retain a substantial number of users is good news, because the features and quality will only get better. So when you try Last.fm and/or Pandora, be sure to give them enough time—and enough different starting points—to show their best stuff.
http://www.stevekrause.org/steve_kra...a_and_las.html
Newspapers Take Aim At Google In Copyright Dispute
Adam Pasick
A group representing global newspaper publishers has launched a lobbying campaign to challenge search engines like Google that aggregate news content.
The move comes as the newspaper industry's traditional business model is under pressure with advertising spending shifting away from print and toward the Internet.
The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper trade bodies, said it is exploring ways to "challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners."
Web sites like Google and its specialized Google News service automatically pull in headlines, photos and short excerpts of articles from thousands of news sources, linking back to the publishers' own site. Google News does not currently carry advertising.
"They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content," Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview.
"The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not."
The campaign comes as a pending U.S. court case pits Agence France Presse against Google. AFP sued the company last year, alleging that Google News carries its photos, news headlines and stories without permission.
"Everybody will be watching that case very closely," Rahnema said.
The World Association of Newspapers said it would seek a meeting with European Commission officials and look into whether the news aggregators are infringing on their copyrights or brands.
"It's not intended to shoot one over the bow, it's to take a group of people to look at the issue, and look at what options are open to our members," Rahnema added. "The purpose of this isn't to attack Google, but to say that as an industry we don't feel OK with you taking the content and seeing what happens."
Google -- which is facing a similar copyright dispute with the book publishing industry -- has worked in partnership with some newspapers, serving ads to the Web site of the New York Times and selling classified ads for the print edition of the Chicago Sun-Times in a pilot project.
Reuters Group Plc is an associate member of the World Association of Newspapers.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsar...GLE.xml&rpc=22
Toshiba, Sony, NEC Elec to Co-Develop 45-NM Chips
Japan's Sony Corp., Toshiba Corp. and NEC Electronics Corp. said on Wednesday they had agreed to co-develop cutting-edge microchips with a circuitry width of 45 nanometres. The move was expected as NEC Electronics had said last week an official agreement between the three was likely.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False
Talkman Makes Debut As Latest Language Assistant Software
Masato Inoue
A new software named Talkman is the latest addition to an assortment of translation devices marketed in Japan to help people traveling abroad or those who want to rely on machines to strike up a conversation with foreign visitors.
The software put on sale by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc in November for Sony's PlayStation Portable gaming system is designed to enable better communication between Japanese people and visitors who speak English, Chinese or Korean.
About 3,000 conversation patterns that could take place during the course of shopping or visiting holiday destinations are recorded on Talkman. A user may speak the words "Koko-wa-dokodesuka?" (Where is this?) in Japanese, for example, into the device's microphone, upon which a cartoon bird acting as an interpreter will pop up and start talking in the user's language. The bird is also able to translate the reply into Japanese.
Yoshiteru Yamamoto of Sony Computer Entertainment said Talkman cannot translate everything but it can create a chance for communication. Its emergence demonstrates to what degree electronic devices have become able to recognize and analyze voices so they can be used as aids to communicate in foreign languages.
Obviously, translation tools can still not compete with human interpreters, and robots acting as interpreters to humans are still the stuff of movies or fiction. Specialists say the importance of non-Japanese languages is growing in the wake of the rising numbers of people traveling abroad and of visitors Japan.
More than 17 million people took trips to other countries during 2005, surpassing a level of 17 million for the first in five years and marking the second highest number on record since 2000, according to the Immigration Bureau of the Justice Ministry. Tourists to Japan totaled more than 7 million for the first time in 2005.
Time and money are essential to learn a foreign language, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology is directing its energies into lessons for students. However, officials said the ministry has no special measures for those who have left school.
Meanwhile, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in the town of Seika, Kyoto Prefecture, has developed an interactive interpreting system that translates from Japanese into English or Chinese using a PDA. The system's eight microphones can pick up voices unhindered by noise and transmit the words to computers, which in turn send a translation back to the PDA. The whole process takes about 3 seconds, and the institute said its commercialization is imminent for use in translating simple conversations that contain no technical terms or complicated expressions.
NEC Corp has succeeded in developing a technology capable of conducting simultaneous interpretation at a practical speed by using three central processing units of the type used in mobile phones. The technology is said to be able to translate some 50,000 Japanese words and 25,000 English words.
Akitoshi Okumura, chief of voice and language research at NEC's Media and Information Research Laboratories, said voice interpretation devices have already reached a level that would allow their commercialization for use in a certain limited range of areas.
http://www.crisscross.com/jp/feature/1046
Books
“The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal.” — AKA Where’s the 45MB/s I Already Paid for!
I was lucky enough to be able to look over an advance copy of Bruce Kushnick’s new book, “The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal” — it’s a powerful critique documenting the trail of broken promises and misinformation perpetrated by many broadband service providers in order to get favorable treatment, special dispensation, and competition-free access to residents across the United States. One of the most damning indictments, that United States residents have already paid for upgrades to our existing broadband infrastructure — being charged for services never delivered — and not a small amount either, but actually to the tune of $200,000,000,000. When you break it down, that’s roughly a $2,000 refund for every household that’s due for contractual obligations never fulfilled.
Here’s more from today’s official release:
New investigative ebook offers micro-history of Verizon, SBC, Qwest, and BellSouth’s (the Bell companies) fiber optic broadband promises and the consequence harms to America’s economic growth because they never delivered and kept most of the money, about $200 billion.
New York: This is one of the largest scandals in American history. America is 16th in the world in broadband and the US DSL current offerings are 100 times slower than other countries such has Japan and Korea. How did we go from Number 1 in the web to 16th in broadband and falling?
But more importantly, are customers owed $2000 for a fiber optic service they paid for but never received? Did towns and cities, libraries and schools, government agencies, and every residential and business customer subsidize new networks that never showed up?
And did America lose $5 trillion in economic growth, $500 billion annually, because of these missing networks?
Broadband Scandals is a well-documented expose, 406 pages and 528 footnotes. Using the phone companies’ own words (and well as other sources), the book outlines a massive nationwide scandal that affects every aspect of state of the Internet. Not only the web but broadband, municipalities laying fiber or building wifi networks, not to mention related issues such as such as VOIP, cable services, the cost of local phone service, net neutrality, the new digital divide, and even America’s economic growth.
The fiber optic infrastructure you paid for was never delivered.
Starting in the early 1990’s, with a push from the Clinton-Gore Administration’s “Information Superhighway”, every Bell company — SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest — made commitments to rewire America, state by state. Fiber optic wires would replace the 100-year old copper wiring. The push caused techno-frenzy of major proportions. By 2006, 86 million households should have had a service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions, (to and from the customer) could handle over 500 channels of high quality video and be deployed in rural, urban and suburban areas equally. And these networks were open to ALL competition.
In order to pay for these upgrades, in state after state, the public service commissions and state legislatures acquiesced to the Bells’ promises by removing the constraints on the Bells’ profits as well as gave other financial perks. They were able to print money — billions of dollars per state — all collected in the form of higher phone rates and tax perks. (Note: each state is different.)
ADSL is not what was promised and paid for. It goes over the old copper wiring, can’t achieve the speed, has problems in rural areas and is mostly one-way.
0% of the Bell companies’ customers have 45 Mbps residential services.
Harms and Outcomes
This investigative book isn’t just a history, but a warning — the Bell companies can not be trusted with our digital future. Worse, what they have done has resulted in serious repercussions to local, state and national economy.
The public subsidies for infrastructure were pocketed. The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household.
The World is Laughing at US. Korea and Japan have 100 Mbps services as standard, and America could have been Number One had the phone companies actually delivered. Instead, we are 16th in broadband and falling in technology dominance.
Harm to the economy. Five trillion dollars was lost because new technologies and services that America would have developed, happened in Korea.
Municipalities around America are waking up to the fact that the phone companies failed to deliver and are now doing Wifi and fiber-based work-arounds.
Broadband Scandals delivers serious revelations. In fact, the book has been designed as the data source for Teletruth’s complaint to the FTC against SBC and Verizon.
The promised networks couldn’t be built in 1993 and state laws were changed based on “deceptive speech”. The technology today still has problems delivering 500 channels.
The phone companies pulled a bait and switch. In order to offer DSL over copper, it was not necessary to have state regulation changed. Their plan was to get rid of regulations and enter long distance.
The Bell mergers resulted in the death of the state plans for fiber optic broadband. Over 26 states had fiber optic projects closed when the mergers of SBC and Verizon were completed. That affected almost 80% of all phone customers in the US.
Broadband Scandal contains some additional special chapters.
20th Anniversary Summary of the Bells’ Financials. The core of the book is a 20-year analysis of revenues, profits, construction, etc.. Starting in1984, their own data shows revenues up 128%, and concludes profits shot through the roof on the promise of broadband. Meanwhile, compared to revenues, employees are down 65%, construction down 60%. Why did prices increase?
Case Studies: New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. — State-by-state the book outlines the same pattern of deception. By 2010, 100% of New Jersey is supposed to have 45 Mbps service; by 2000, California should have had 5.5 million homes completed, and each state paid billions for services they never received.
Verizon’s “FIASCO” and SBC’s’ “Dim-Speed” — Verizon and SBC are rolling out new fiber optic services but want the laws changed again. These services are crippled, closed networks that do not fulfill the state obligations, like New Jersey and can’t compete globally. FIOS’s top speed is only 35% of the Asian standard, and yet it cost $199 vs Korea, $40 for 100 Mbps.
Fake and co-opted consumer groups, biased non-profit think tanks are now the major force in broadband regulation and policy. The book goes into groups like Consumers for Cable Choice, TRAC, APT, Issue Dynamics and New Millennium Council and how these groups are attempting to block municipalities from offering new services to harming new services, like VOIP. These groups are sending out deceptive messages that make the formulation of the policy that is in the public interest impossible.
Broadband Scandal’s conclusion: Publicly paid for infrastructure is being held hostage and needs to be freed. Customers funded the fiber optic networks and the Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN) should be opened to ALL competition with strict rules of Net Neutrality. The Bells have harmed America’s economic growth and our global competitiveness. Investigations into all of the monies collected in the name of fiber optic broadband in America should start immediately. These investigations should include how the Bells improperly funded their DSL and long distance rollouts. The Bells should be forced into refunds or giving the money to municipalities. This would be a better solution than allowing the companies who have harmed our digital future to control America’s digital destiny.
Author. According to Broadband Reports: “Bruce Kushnick has been dubbed everything from the ‘Leading Visionary in the Telecom Industry’ to a ‘Phone Bill Fanatic’; but what’s certain is that nobody in the industry is ignoring him.” Kushnick has been a telecom analyst for 24 years, and is one of the founders of Teletruth, an independent customer advocacy group focusing on broadband and telecom issues, as well as executive director of New Networks Institute, a market research firm.
Teletruth was a member of the FCC Consumer Advisory Committee in 2003-2004 and has active cases with the IRS, FCC and FTC pertaining to broadband and the cost of the networks. Research through Teletruth’s phone bill auditing services has led to class action suits and major refunds for phone bill overcharging, Reporters and reviewers, email us for a complimentary copy. For a Table of Contents, roadmap, a chapter, the introduction, and more…
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
Read what the pundits and experts are saying, “talented, persistent, honest”… “brilliantly documented this fraud” … “stunning in its implications.” “Anyone who wants the U.S. to thrive in this connected future should read Kushnick’s book.”
Ebook only: $20 406 pages, 528 Footnotes, 72 Exhibits.
Contact:
Kelly Deegan,
kelly@teletruth.org Bruce Kushnick,
bruce@teletruth.org , 718-238-7191
http://muniwireless.com/community/1023
From 2002
Ohio Uncappers Face Legal Nightmare
Karl Bode
Ohio police this past summer shocked broadband users nationwide by engaging in an unprecedented and frighteningly severe crackdown of area customers who had uncapped their cable modems. In conjunction with the FBI, 17 Buckeye cable users were served warrants, seven of whom had their possessions taken, face fifth-degree felony charges (punishable by up to one year in prison), and have had their lives changed forever.
For the record, uncapping ( hacking your modem in order to gain access to untapped bandwidth) is not legal. Those who perform the practice can expect retaliation from their broadband provider, and should expect serious repercussions for doing so. That said, one Ohio ISP has taken punishment for the practice to an unprecedented level that should raise the eyebrows of providers, customers, and concerned citizens alike.
The Block family is the Rupert Murdoch of Toledo, Ohio. The company controls several major area newspapers (including The Toledo Blade), one of the area's television stations (TV5 Toledo), a dial up provider, Buckeye Cable, and much more. As such, their control over the political system in the area is considerable, a fact that may under-ride the horrifying journey several individuals are taking through the area's legal gauntlet because they uncapped their cable modems.
Paul Shryock, vice president of information technology at Buckeye Cablesystem, discovered that twenty three of his subscribers were getting more juice from their connections than they paid for. According to an interview in a recent Cable World article, Shyrock noted that one subscriber had "altered his modem to handle 100 megabits per second, up and downstream", though the company could never realistically even obtain such speeds.
Shryock also confirmed the company wasn't sure how customers were getting the extra speed. "We don't fully understand how they're pulling this off just yet, but we're learning more every day."
While the methods Shryock used to discover the offenders who weren't going download crazy is somewhat of a mystery, a greater mystery is how Shyrock came up with the cost impact numbers he would later use to nail subscribers to the wall with the help of the FBI.
The FBI's computer crime department needs computer offenses to total over 250,000 dollars before they'll get involved in local crimes. Conveniently for Buckeye cable, Shryock "guesstimated" that the 23 total offenders contributed to more than that amount in bandwidth theft, nearly eleven thousand dollars worth of bandwidth theft per offender.
Instead of disconnecting service for uncapping (as is the case with nearly every provider in the U.S.) Buckeye Cablesystem decided to get the FBI involved. Of the 23 who were to be served search warrants, 17 actually received visits from the FBI and local law enforcement. Seven actually found themselves indicted by the local grand jury and currently face fifth degree felony charges.
One of several defendants we spoke to places his estimated lost income and hardware at over half a million dollars. Brandon Wirtz, who operates more than one business out of his home, was on the verge of releasing a Smartcard based DRM solution for Windows Media Player to several different companies before his life was turned upside-down. Wirtz is a respected young writer, consultant and tech wiz in the industry, and In April will be Awarded a Microsoft MVP award for his involvement in the Windows Media Community.
Thanks to local construction, Wirtz, who never signed a contract with Buckeye, claims his broadband connection was incapable of achieving speeds higher than 128kbps down. By utilizing a Cisco configuration file, he uncapped his Motorola Surfboard modem to 2.5MBps, for what he estimates was no more than a total of 16 hours, and only when he needed to move large files. The worst that could happen to him, he figured, was that his ISP got angry and disconnected his service. He couldn't have been more wrong.
It wasn't long before twelve plain-clothed officers greeted Wirtz at his front door with a search warrant and a smile, coyly asking "Is there anything interesting about your cable?" The officers wound up taking every computer in the house, ironically excluding the PC in his living room that actually installed the uncapping software. Wirtz and his roommate lost at least 8 PC's total, even those who were behind firewalls and incapable of benefitting from the uncapped modem. Law enforcement confiscated all of the hardware from the companies Wirtz built, which contained his work, client contacts, and a book he had written.
Wirtz even lost his VCR in the deal, and Sylvania Township police debated confiscating his Xbox gaming console, but decided to leave it behind. The officers confiscated his legitimate CD copies of Windows Office and several operating systems, all of his burned CD's, and a security card writing machine instead.
Wirtz and several others now face a December 13 court date to determine if they qualify for "diversions", a twelve step program for non-sexual criminal offenders. If Wirtz passes a series of background and substance abuse checks, he may be qualified to pay $3400 in fines and have his record wiped clean if he attends the program. His possessions, client contact information and computers may never be returned, and Wirtz finds himself in a serious financial hole thanks to frightened clients and mounting legal fees, though he's yet to give up on broadband. He's now a happy Wi-Fi customer.
John Weglian, chief of the special units division of the prosecutor’s office, offers no apologies for Buckeye's unusually harsh treatment of the uncappers. "Cyber crime is potentially very damaging to society. We are taking a firm position on that type of criminal activity. We hope these cases will have a deterrent value, given the cost factors for the defendants in successful prosecutions."
But not everyone in the region agrees that the case is entirely about bandwidth theft.
George Runner, among those indicted by the grand jury, has had a long history of disagreement with area officials, the Block family included. Runner, a former Lucas County assistant prosecutor, left the area after being accused of stealing county supplies, an act which was caught on videotape by a hidden camera.
That camera, which was illegally placed, forced the resignation of village police chief Lance Martin, and added fuel to the fire of disagreement between Runner and regional officials. According to area locals, the Block family patriarch Paul Block had always disliked George Runner, who the Blocks claimed was overly secretive of details in cases he was prosecuting for the county.
Runner will most likely not be offered the chance to attend the diversions program, and was one of the only offenders forced through booking (mugshots, fingerprints). While it's pure speculation to link Runner's legal problems with his area disagreements, it's something that begs asking. Calls to Runner's attorney's office for comment were not returned by press time.
When the Block family first came to Toledo, Paul Block was rumored to have said he was going to "rip down Toledo and rebuild it in his image". The behavior of Buckeye Cablesystem has many wondering exactly what kind of image he had in mind.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/23727
Tech Experts Urge Cable to Embrace New Technologies
SCTE ET Speakers Challenge Operators to Learn from Music Industry's Mistakes
Alan Breznick
In two strongly worded public warnings last month, a leading international futurist and a senior MSO executive separately urged cable operators to plunge into promising new technologies instead of fearing or fighting them.
Speaking at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers' (SCTE's) Emerging Technologies conference in Tampa last month, futurist Jim Carroll and Comcast Media Center COO Gary Traver both challenged MSOs to maintain their competitive edge by constantly pursuing innovative technological products and services. Envisioning an even faster paced, more competitive future, they contended that cable operators could no longer take their sweet time to enter new markets and develop new product offerings.
"The idea cycle has collapsed," Carroll said. "We are now witnessing a sort of infinite idea loop, in which new ideas, inventions and innovations occur faster than ever before... We're getting into the olden days almost overnight."
In his breathless keynote address kicking off the conference, Carroll warned cable officials against making the same kinds of mistakes that the music industry made when it fought tooth-and-nail against unauthorized MP3 downloads from the Internet. Instead, Carroll called on cable executives to embrace such new products and services as portable media players, peer- to-peer file-sharing and Internet-delivered telephony. Contending that "the geeks will always win because they can always rewrite the code," he urged cable officials to view the new technologies as market opportunities to be exploited rather than competitive threats to be squashed.
"Do you really want to go to war with your customers?" he asked. "The music industry went to war with its customers and look where it got them. Do you want to repeat that history?"
Carroll also argued that the long-awaited era of media convergence has finally come to pass, albeit about a decade later than was originally forecast. "We're talking about convergence again," he said. "The difference is that it's real today."
The futurist jokingly likened convergence to "teenage sex" because no one's quite sure what it is but everybody thinks it's great, everybody thinks everybody else is doing it, no one's terribly good at it and it takes lots of time to figure out how to do it well. "The future of your industry is being found and being developed today in the back seats of automobiles," he quipped.
In a more serious vein, Carroll asserted that today's rapid pace of change will only become more furious over the next few years as Baby Boomers reach retirement age and their far more tech-savvy children take their place in the world. He also contended that tomorrow's consumers would be "far more demanding" and "far less loyal" users of technology brands than their parents have been.
"By 2020, we'll be witnessing the retirement of the change-averse," he said. "What will emerge into purchasing power, and into your customer base, is this generation that thinks differently, is wired differently."
In addition, Carroll predicted that consumer demand for media bandwidth and storage would soar over the next few years as more technology choices blossom and Web users start exchanging video files online. Just a few years after the introduction of digital cameras, he noted, consumers are already snapping 80 billion pictures a year and are increasingly sharing them with friends and family through the Internet.
http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/feb06/feb06-4.html
Might be cheaper just to buy it
Hack Can Upgrade XP Home to XP Pro Lite
It does take a bit of doing but here are the steps in more accurate detail.
1> Copy all the xp home(OEM or Upgrade) files off the disc to a local drive.
(to get xp sp2 (
download me here) slipstreamed into the oem folder I simply used a program called Nlite More about this program later.)
2> Next I opened the "I386" folder looked for "winnt.sif" and edited it.
Here is how I run automated installs using this file.
[Data]
Autopartition = 0
MsDosInitiated = 0
UnattendedInstall = Yes
[Unattended]
UnattendMode = FullUnattended
UnattendSwitch = No
OemPreinstall = Yes
OemSkipEula = Yes
FileSystem = *
WaitForReboot = No
NoWaitAfterTextMode = 1
NoWaitAfterGUIMode = 1
TargetPath = Windows
ProgramFilesDir = "C:\Program Files"
CommonProgramFilesDir = "C:\Program Files\Common"
DriverSigningPolicy = Ignore
NonDriverSigningPolicy = Ignore
[Display] Xresolution = 1024
Yresolution = 768
BitsPerPel = 32
Vrefresh = 75
[GuiUnattended]
EncryptedAdminPassword = No
AdminPassword = "Whatever You Want"
TimeZone = 010
OEMSkipRegional = 1
OemSkipWelcome = 1
[Shell]
DefaultThemesOff = Yes
DefaultStartPanelOff = Yes
[LicenseFilePrintData]
AutoMode = PerServer
AutoUsers = 20
[Components]
iis_common = On
iis_inetmgr = On
iis_pwmgr = Off
iis_doc = Off
iis_www = On
Iis_www_vdir_printers = Off
Iis_www_vdir_scripts = Off
[UserData]
ProductKey = "*****-*****-*****-*****-*****" ---THis will enable you to install without putting your product key in!
ComputerName = RENAME_ME
FullName = "Your FUllName"
OrgName = "Your OrgName"
[RegionalSettings]
Language = 0409
[Networking]
InstallDefaultComponents = Yes
[Identification]
JoinWorkgroup = workgroup
Here is the file if you want to just edit it yourself. (open in notepad only) winnt.sif .
You can also use
Nlite to automate this also.
4>Then I edited the "setupreg.hiv" This was the most tricky part. To do this you need to open up regedit and go to
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" Highlight it and click on file and load hive.
Load "i386\Setupreg.hiv". regedit will ask for a name
name it "Homekey".
Drill down throught this key untill you find "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Homekey\ControlSet001\Services\setup dd"
all you have to do is edit the binary key "default" and change all "01" and "02" to "00".
Once you have done this you can save it and go back and highlight "Homekey" entry and go to file and "unload hive"
it should ask to where and save it to "i386\Setupreg.hiv". It will ask you to overwrite the existing. Go ahead and do so.
If you do not feel comfortable with doing this yourself you can down load my Setupreg.hiv.
5>Now run Nlite to slipstream xp sp2 into the "I386" folder
Nlite will also allow you to tweak your install and delete unnessasary language files as well as help files.
Nlite will ask you to create an ISO of your new install wherever you would like it to go.
****With Nlite you can also disable activation!!!*** VERY KEY feature....
Here is the WPA.DB_ that will kill activation. (right click and choose "save as")
A great thing about Nlite is it will also include the much needed boot img and files you need to do the oem install
Thats it.
You now have a fully usable windows xp pro lite.
a drawback that I have found!
The Usermanagement software found in pro is not included.(I am looking for a way to hack this).
http://mikedopp.com/hackxphome.html
Code Warriors
Free culture takes flight at NYU
Carla Blumenkranz
Inga Chernyak and Fred Benenson
Over a cup of tea on Carmine Street, NYU junior Inga Chernyak explains how to break current copyright law. All it takes, Chernyak explains, is one finger on the Shift key while you put a CD in your computer, disabling corporate-installed software designed to prevent you from copying music. Just downloading a fairly purchased, DRM-protected CD from a laptop to an iPod amounts, in most cases, to a federal misdemeanor. "If I bought a CD that had DRM"—the software that blocks duplication—"I would obviate it," Chernyak says, carefully. "If there are laws I believe are wrong, I will break them." And she's just talking about Shift keys.
In fact, just explaining this maneuver may constitute aiding and abetting. "And for you to publish it!" Chernyak gasps. In response to cyberspace logistics, which create a copy each time a user takes a listen online, music industry corporate interests are bearing down hard on individual users, with a vast array of copyright protections on their side. It's a familiar story, and one that usually places the blame on "piracy," which supposedly robs artists of their due profits. But new ideas about the bounds of "fair use" are slowly shifting the blame to antiquated notions of intellectual property, for making copies a crime. Contrary to popular logic, there's an argument to be made that access to our common culture has never been as restricted as today, when the simple act of circulating a song comes with the threat of a lawsuit.
Chernyak and her friend Fred Benenson, a recent NYU graduate, make this argument at length, eyes widening. For them, the freedom to download music, as well as art in any medium, doesn't just mean sticking it to Sony: It's about maintaining a national tradition of grassroots cultural development. And if artists don't have access to our natural resources—if all digital copies are crimes—then that tradition, Chernyak says, is at risk. She and Benenson are the founders of Free Culture NYU, one chapter of what they predict will be the next great student movement. The man this time is RIAA, and Chernyak and Benenson are gearing up, cautiously, for a revolution.
Fittingly, they cribbed their arguments from the work of copyright lawyers— specifically, a popular 2004 nonfiction book called Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. In the book, Lessig, a Stanford law professor, argues that piracy as we know it is just the latest development in technology distribution, and that this development makes it worth rethinking how we protect intellectual property. The American public shouldn't let corporations stifle our creative culture, he argues, simply because copyright legislation is working on outdated terms. Lessig says, in retrospect, that he never expected his book to inspire a student movement, but of course he's "thrilled." He had a hint, though, when he first came onto the campus scene in 2003 to help Free Culture's eventual founders, Swarthmore students Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, take on Diebold, a voting-machine manufacturer. (Pavlosky and Smith had posted online some of the company's internal e-mails, and Diebold had responded by invoking copyright protections.) College campuses, Lessig notes, are natural incubators for Free Culture ideology. Today, a national network of chapters hosts websites, wikis, and blogs, as well as conventional meetings and protests. (The first regional Free Culture conference is scheduled for January 13 and 14 at Columbia.)
Despite some similarities, the movement hasn't lent itself easily to free-property ideology on the left, or free trade on the right. (This lack of partisan staging may be why Free Culture takes so much flack, from both sides, for not tackling more "important" problems.) Lessig remembers arriving at Swarthmore and finding "one self-acknowledged socialist," and "one self-acknowledged libertarian"; Chernyak proclaims herself a free-market radical, while Benenson broaches vague objections to American internationalism. What holds the group together is its consumer rights orientation: a broad and well-considered objection to the way copyright restrictions make most listeners and viewers into "passive consumers." Free Culture's mission is to convince students that the law, and not just their downloading habits, ought to work otherwise. "In a sense, we're a copyright reform organization," Chernyak explains. "What we aim to do is give direction to the way copyright reform is going to evolve."
At a recent meeting, Free Culture NYU, a dozen members strong, was exploding with responses to the latest in blogs. (Benenson says, "That in itself is tremendous, to have a weekly forum where you're talking about the cutting edge of copyright.") Then it was on to the group's best prospects for civil disobedience. Benenson, an aspiring digital artist, was advocating for a Free Culture–sponsored film-remixing contest: Tisch students would be presented with a feature film or two and, within a short time frame, encouraged to figure out what they can make of it.
As usual, the problem is copyright. Offer access to studio films too freely, and risk a lawsuit; then again, isn't risk, for these supposed rabble-rousers, just the point? An adult agitator who's been showing up lately—Trina Semorile, a former Ph.D. candidate at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education— keeps trying, clearly, to pull the group back to reality. Instead, what she's exposing is a generational gap. There are things worth being jailed for, she says—"a draft card," for example. It's the rhetoric of 20th-century activism. Benenson and Chernyak, however, are operating on different planes: not as part of a bottom-up, top-down struggle, but as a multi-dimensional network of players. Challenging copyright law isn't "about absolutes," Benenson tells Semorile. It's "about harm reduction": minimizing penalties and maximizing opportunities, for artists and audiences alike. More often than not, they have the same interests; they may even be the same people. And as the youth soccer league saying goes, when everyone plays, everyone wins.
http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/ind...kranz&id=71635
Take A Stand Against DRM? Get Fired From Your Day Job.
Inga
On January 10th 2006, the Village Voice ran an article called Code Warriors, detailing the efforts of the Free Culture movement, and those of the NYU chapter in particular. The reporter, Carla Blumenkranz, quoted FC co-founder Fred Benenson explaining that our efforts are about “harm reduction”; she noted, quite aptly, that our mission is to aid in “minimizing penalties and maximizing opportunities, for artists and audiences alike.” But what about the muckrakers? The conscientious objectors? The free culture activists? What protection from penalty do we have? What opportunity?
On Thursday, January 26th, I was fired from my job as a legal clerk at a medium sized IP law firm in midtown, NYC. When I inquired as to the reason, I was shown the Code Warriors article and told that my views about what the firm does were incompatible with…what the firm does. In so many words, I was told that the firm could no longer employ me due to my aberrant views on copyright law—although I was feverishly reassured of my right to hold those views. This assurance had relatively little value, however, as I was still fired for expressing the views in question.
As an active member of FreeCulture.org, and the president of the NYU chapter, I feel both obligated and prepared to stand behind the organization’s stance on where copyright is headed, and where it should be. I can not, in good conscience, renounce my beliefs in the hopes of gaining a rung on the corporate ladder. Still, I would like to say a few words in my own defense.
First, my taking a job in an IP firm was neither a subversive attempt to wreak havoc “from the inside”, nor a hypocritical denial of my Free Culture values. I was, and still am, a student interested in the scope of copyright law, and determined to pursue a career in the field. I wanted to gain an understanding both of the theory of copyright, which my work with FC provided, and its practice. The firm exposed me to the day to day operations of an IP lawyer, and I was nothing if not receptive to these lessons. I was baffled that someone saw fit to fire me over an expression of dissenting views. Doesn’t the field become richer when the wider spectrum of legal thought is explored and encouraged? Certainly, it is wrong to eject someone from their field of interest simply for exercising her first amendment rights and speaking out against the current.
What leapt out at me in rereading the article was my statement about breaking the law. I’d like to clarify that when I said “if there are laws I believe are wrong, I will break them,” I was not making a general statement. FC does not endorse reckless lawbreaking; nor do I. I made that comment in the specific context of CD’s with DRM encryption: I would hold down the shift key and download my CD onto my laptop without a twinge of guilt toward the RIAA executive sitting in his corner office and “getting squeezed.” That does not, however, make me an internal threat to a major law firm. And it’s a sad commentary on the autonomy of law firms that if one is rumored to represent Sony, it must keep its employment policy in check with the politics and business models of its clients.
Still, as a member of the Free Culture movement, and a young woman of 19 without children to support, I can afford to take this blow in the name of progress. The more people are made aware of this story, the less likely it is that firms will be able to maintain their practice of thought-policing without fear of public outcry. If legal reform is going to happen–if Free Culture is to gain enough mastery of legal tools to bring about with action the change we are forever advocating–then its members cannot live and work in fear of the consequences of their free speech. FC will continue to dream of a world where culture and creativity thrive–free of unnecessary restraint–and I will continue to dream of the days when I am a legal scholar capable of enacting those dreams.
http://www.freeculturenyu.org/2006/01/31/drm-fired/
CableCARD Certification Rules Out Home-Built Windows MCE Boxes, Possibly Other DIY Solutions
Nate Anderson
If CES has left you salivating over Vista's upcoming support for CableCARD, pay attention, because important details are emerging—and they could well affect your purchasing decision. For those not in the know, CableCARD is a PCMCIA type II card that handles the decryption of digital cable signals. Vista will support the technology (including two-way CableCARD v2.0 devices when they become available), which means you can at last use your PC as a high definition digital video recorder. Unfortunately, a few obstacles stand between you and the nirvana that is 1080i.
First of all, you will need some new equipment, including Vista and a new monitor. Vista will only display high definition content in its full resolution on a monitor that supports link encryption such as HDCP. If you've been following this issue, this doesn't come as news. But what might surprise you is that upgrading your current rig with a copy of Vista and a brand-spanking-new monitor won't actually do the trick.
CableLabs, the research and development consortium funded by the cable industry, requires that all devices which use a CableCARD be certified. Although Vista as a platform is licensed, this apparently won't be good enough for CableLabs, which wants to vet the actual computers involved. Blogger Thomas Hawk had dinner with Microsoft bigwig Jim Allchin recently, and he asked Allchin about the certification issue and what effect it would have on consumers. The answer?
"Although as a platform Vista has been approved by CableLabs at this point, an important step that will still be necessary for the PC/CableCARD reality is CableLab's approval for finshed individual OEM PCs as well. Although Vista has been approved, OEMs will in fact still need to get their individual machines certified by CableLabs as well. Central to this certification according to Jim is the idea of a 'protective path.'
Getting something approved through CableLabs is no easy task and this will very much favor the larger OEMs who have the funds, resources and clout to get this done. Jim said to expect to see the CableLabs approved PCs out from the big guys first but reiterated his commitment to smaller OEMs in fighting for them to also get their machines CableLabs approved as well. Jim said that Microsoft would fight clawing and scratching for these smaller OEMs."
So, not only will you not be able to upgrade your current machine to take advantage of CableCARD's benefits, you won't be able to by a new machine from a local or boutique builder and have it work, unless the builder gets the actual system certified. And building it yourself is definitely, absolutely out.
This will certainly be a blow for MythTV and other DVR projects aimed at the DIY crowd, since there won't be any more "doing it yourself." Sure, you can continue to use freeware DVR software with over-the-air signals, and possibly with unencrypted digital cable, but every PC capable of recording from HBO will already come with Vista's own DVR software installed. How many people will install and use a second product on Windows, or build Linux boxes that can only record a few channels?
And if you're planning to record from that Firewire connection on your cable box, remember that the FCC has ruled (PDF) that cable companies cannot offer the traditional, "integrated" set-top box to customers after July 2007. Set-top box functions are increaingly being rolled into the TV itself, and you can forget about your television set offering an unencrypted Firewire link. While CableCARD was designed to promote a more competitive market, it also has given the cable industry more clout. Anyone who wants access to HD digital cable has to play by their rules to get a license, which means that they can require a "protected path" system in TVs, PCs, and DVRs.
Turning your box into a high definition DVR now means that you need both a new monitor and a new, brand-name PC—an expensive proposition when you consider that most cable companies lease such boxes for US$10 or US$15 a month.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060131-6081.html
File-Swapping Leaders Nearing D-Day
John Borland
The young chief executive of MetaMachine, distributor of eDonkey file-sharing software, appeared six months ago before a U.S. Senate committee and said his network--the world's most popular--was ready to turn over a new leaf.
Now Sam Yagan and his company are nearing the point when they'll have to deliver on that promise.
Music industry insiders say that pressure is building for eDonkey's makers and other peer-to-peer software companies to reach a final deal with record labels, turning off the free music and movie swapping that has gone on long after Yagan said it would stop. Yagan himself declined to give details on negotiations, but says he's hoping to have a final deal soon.
"I honestly had expected everything to move more quickly," Yagan said. "We look forward to a settlement (with the record industry) very soon. It's not months away, that's for sure."
eDonkey is the largest of the peer-to-peer software companies that have yet to make official peace with entertainment companies. But many others, such LimeWire and BearShare, are at the same critical juncture, and the decisions their executives make over the next month could transform the face of file swapping.
The companies are facing recording and movie industry attorneys emboldened by last summer's Supreme Court ruling saying that file-swapping services could potentially be held liable for people who use their software to download movies, music and software illegally.
In September, the RIAA sent a round of cease-and-desist letters to big file-swapping software companies threatening imminent litigation if they didn't agree to settle and change their business models. A few, including Grokster, WinMX and I2Hub, have since closed their doors.
But the 28-year-old Yagan is among the few who have tried to keep their services alive while figuring out how to morph into industry-approved businesses.
It hasn't been easy.
Narrowing options
With the threat of an expensive lawsuit looming in the not-so-distant future, eDonkey and its peers have only a few choices in front of them. They could shut down. They could sell the company or merge with an existing or planned online music service. Or, as Israel-based iMesh has done, they could try to build a service that filters out unauthorized swaps and charges consumers fees.
eDonkey has been in talks with existing and planned legal peer-to-peer services, according to sources familiar with the discussions. iMesh Chairman Bob Summer declined to comment on specific negotiations but said his service is eager to acquire the user bases of other file-swapping companies, such as eDonkey.
http://news.com.com/File-swapping+le...?tag=nefd.lede
Early 2009 Set For End Of Analog TV
Anne Broache
It's finally official: American households must ensure their televisions are equipped to receive solely digital TV broadcasts by Feb. 17, 2009.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday cleared the deadline for shutting down analog broadcasts. Part of a broader budget reconciliation bill that passed by a narrow 216-214 vote, the measure heads next to the White House for President Bush's signature.
The approved bill's language on digital television is identical to a version cleared by the Senate just before its winter recess. The broader bill had been bogged down because of disagreements among politicians over some of its other myriad provisions.
The 2009 deadline will not affect the vast majority of Americans who already subscribe to cable or satellite TV. But households relying on an antenna to receive "over the air" analog broadcasts--an estimated 15 percent of American households--must acquire a digital tuner to continue receiving TV shows.
The final legislation includes up to $990 million for a government subsidy program under which eligible households would be able to apply for up to two $40 vouchers to use toward buying digital-to-analog set-top converter boxes. According to industry estimates, those devices will likely cost between $50 and $60 by 2009.
The bill's approval won speedy praise from the High Tech DTV Coalition, a group of 19 trade associations and technology companies including AT&T, Dell, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Texas Instruments, which has been lobbying fervently for the transition.
"Now that Congress has freed the 700MHz band, we expect that both the giants of the tech sector and its talented rookies will have room to innovate--to the benefit of American consumers and our economy," said Janice Obuchowski, the group's executive director.
She was referring to the government's ultimate auction of the freed-up analog spectrum, which is scheduled to occur no later than Jan. 28, 2008 and is projected to raise about $10 billion to offset government spending. Technology companies have been clamoring for the 700MHz analog band because it has inherent scientific properties that could allow for more affordable, easily deployable broadband networks.
http://news.com.com/Early+2009+set+f...3-6034105.html
Internet May Morph Into Corporate Greed
Courtney Farr
What if your Internet service provider charged for every song you downloaded off Kazaa?
Welcome to the two-tiered, segregated and controlled Internet.
The death knell of unlimited Internet freedom — and your favorite peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network — could be around the corner if certain powerful Internet service providers have their way.
According to the Boston Globe, AT&T and BellSouth have been lobbying Congress to create a two-tiered Internet — one tier for regular traffic and another for high-priority traffic.
To create their new Internet, companies will tag information to define at what speed it should travel.
These companies want to do away with network neutrality, the overriding principle that has governed the Internet. This concept states that information on the Internet should transfer as quickly as possible without regard to content. Congress is now debating whether to make network neutrality the law or do away with it and allow the new tiered Internet to develop.
If Congress abolishes network neutrality, they hand network operators the legal power to define how data moves through the Internet. These companies would have the power to control other companies’ services, determine how fast we can download data, and potentially what we can download at all. But they sincerely promise not to abuse that power. Not even when tens of billions of dollars in revenue is at stake. Nope, scout’s honor, they swear to play nice.
Kiss Kazaa goodbye folks. Delete eDonkey off your machines. Why? There is no money in those file sharing programs for the ISPs. They want to charge more money for data passing through their network.
P2P networks soak up hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth with no one to bill. That is, no one except the users. Either P2P networks will be slowed to a point of being worthless or customers will have to pony up extra dollars based on how much bandwidth they use. Either way, the file sharing networks will suffer.
Your entire Internet experience may be the final victim of corporate greed.
SBC CEO Edward Whitacre, in a Business Week interview, said that he wants to be able to charge companies like Google or Yahoo for sending information over his company’s network.
“Why should they be allowed to use my pipes,” asked Whitacre. “The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”
Never mind that data on the Internet is already paid for twice; once by the sender and once by the receiver. Network operators wants it paid for 3, 4 or 10 times over if possible.
In a letter to Congress, Vinton Cerf, a Google vice president, warned that current legislation “would do great damage to the Internet as we know it.”
“Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.”
Network operators could effectively hold the Internet hostage by determining who gets to run the fastest. How much would Google, Yahoo or MSN pay to be the fastest search engine?
Whitacre and his ilk have missed a major point. The only reason Internet traffic exists at all is thanks to the content providers.
Without content, there is no Internet. Without content, ISPs couldn’t charge anyone to move data over their networks. In their shortsighted greed, they may chop off the hand that feeds them.
Until next week,
-
js.
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