"We were hoping that prosecutors would impose some strong measures so that people would see the consequences of getting caught distributing illegal music files, but now they've announced that it's permissible to download music for private listening. People who didn't even think of doing so may start." – Kim Young-ki
"The [police] robots will be empowered by the country's state-of-the-art mobile network." – Oh Sang-rok
"It's not the government's duty to shape our very personal behavior." – Zaman Ahmed
"Mac users demonstrate an indefensible smugness when it comes to the dangers of having their systems compromised by malicious software." – Bill Thompson
"Search engines are at the center of that battle, both here and in other countries. By asserting its power over search engines, using threats of force, the government can directly affect what the Internet experience is." – Tim Wu
"If you have to tell people you're giving a presentation at something called dorkbot, you can't be too serious." – Douglas Repetto
"Chuck Lamb might be the world's chattiest dead guy." – Christopher Maag
January 21st, ’06
Students Want i2hub Operator to Settle Claims
Alex Veiga
Students sued by the recording industry for using the now-defunct i2hub online file-sharing network are demanding that its operator pay to settle music copyright-infringement claims.
Attorneys with the Student Legal Services Office, a student-funded legal group, claimed i2hub placed ads on the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's campus to deceive students into believing the software was approved by the university.
At least 42 students have been named as defendants. The recording industry trade group has offered to settle each case for $3,750, lawyers for the students said.
"Had the students known that they were exposing themselves to copyright infringement liability by using the i2hub service, they likely would not have used the service," the legal group wrote i2hub's founder, Wayne Chang.
Chang started i2hub in 2003 while he was a student at UMass. The network linked people at hundreds of universities over the super-fast Internet2 network. Chang shut down i2hub in November under pressure from the recording industry.
Chang's attorney, Charles Baker, said his client is not liable.
Chang said his software required computer users to accept an "end user license agreement," or EULA, that included warnings about potential liability from using it to swap copyrighted content. The agreements are standard disclaimers found in most software programs though many users don't bother to read them.
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/f...toryId=1146435
Nearly doubled
Hong Kong Peer-To-Peer File Sharing On Rise: Survey
The Intellectual Property Department's 2005 survey shows the number of people who admitted to illegal file-sharing rose from 3.5% a year ago to 6.8%.
Director of Intellectual Property Stephen Selby said today the survey findings have provided a better understanding on Internet file-sharing behaviour among the public. The department needs to focus on public education, enforcement and legislation in this area.
He said while it is encouraging to see an increase in awareness of intellectual property among Hong Kong people, who claim to be buying fewer pirated and counterfeit goods, there is a need to focus on new trends.
"This year, we shall look more closely at legal downloading of files on the Internet to see whether that is gaining more public acceptance," Mr Selby said.
84.7% understand intellectual property issues
The annual survey, in its seventh year, shows public awareness of intellectual property rights has significantly improved: 84.7% of respondents know the rights include copyright, patents, trademarks and registered designs, compared with just 50.6% who claimed to know this in 1999.
Out of 1,206 respondents, only 0.7% said they would often buy pirated or counterfeit goods, and 14.3% said they would sometimes - markedly less than the 24.7% in 1999.
On Internet usage, 51.3% of respondents said they regularly use the Internet, more than half of them going online for one to three hours daily.
More than 70% of respondents know unauthorised Internet file- sharing is an infringement of intellectual property rights, while only 1.7% have engaged in unauthorised Internet file-sharing activities, markedly lower than last year's 10%.
More TV publicity in the pipeline
The survey shows close to 65% of respondents received information about intellectual property protection through television, higher than last year's 51%.
Mr Selby said the TV announcement featuring California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and movie star Jackie Chan broadcast since November has attracted people's attention, adding another series of TV publicity messages is in the pipeline.
In line with previous years' findings, more than 70% of respondents believed intellectual property protection could help the local creative industries and the overall development of Hong Kong's economy.
More than 85% said more resources should be put into developing creative culture and industries to create wealth.
For the survey report, browse the department's
website.
http://www.news.gov.hk/en/category/b...119en03002.htm
IFPI Fallout
Illegal File-Sharing As Popular As Ever
Simon Crerar
Worldwide sales of legally downloaded music tripled to $1 billion last year, according to a report released today by the industry's leading trade body.
But despite 20,000 court actions launched against individuals across the world in 2005, the level of illegal file-sharing remained unchanged.
The International Federation of Phonographic Industry estimates that there are currently 885 million copyrighted music files available on the internet for illegal download.
By comparison, the number of tracks legally available doubled to over two million songs. In total, music fans downloaded 420 million tracks legally last year.
The IFPI warns that the growth in legal sales is powered by new downloaders, not by existing illegal filesharers switching to legal services. It has vowed to lead efforts to contain online piracy.
A wave of court rulings last year gave the recording industry its most significant boost yet in the fight. Judgments against Grokster in the US and Kazaa in Australia made clear that the operators of peer-to-peer networks who encourage the use of their networks for copyright infringement can be held liable for music piracy.
Meanwhile, legal sales were fuelled by the rapid growth of online music stores and the increasing popularity of downloadable mobile phone ringtones.
The Digital Music Report says music is driving digital commerce worldwide. Last year global consumers bought over 60 million portable digital mobile players, worth an estimated $9bn.
The IFPI say shifting pirates to legal services is a long-term challenge. According to the report, 6 per cent of internet users regularly download legally in the UK and Germany, compared to 5 per cent who swap files illegally.
"The challenges we now face are far too big for any complacency," said IFPI chairman John Kennedy. "In particular we need more cooperation from service providers and music distributors, to help protect intellectual property and contain piracy."
The report says that legal downloaders are more likely to be starting from scratch than migrating from illegal websites, and only one in five legal music downloaders is also an illegal file-swapper.
Changing attitudes is a key part of the music industry's strategy. The latest IFPI consumer survey, conducted by Jupiter Research, shows that a combination of education and deterrence can change consumer attitudes. The survey of 4,000 consumers across Europe showed that 35 per cent of illegal file-sharers have cut back or stopped the activity, while only 14 per cent have increased.
Last year was outstanding for digital music in the UK. James Blunt topped the first ever European digital download chart and Sheffield-rockers Arctic Monkeys promoted digital versions of their music online before releasing any tracks offline.
When the Arctic Monkey's released their debut single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor in November, it went straight to No 1. The band's second single When The Sun Goes Down is predicted to reach the top spot this weekend.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....000289,00.html
Intellectual Property State of the Union
Thomas Mennecke
The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) released its 2006 Digital Music Report, which can only be described as one of the most painful reads since the NPD Group's "Illegal Peer-To-Peer Music File Declines After Supreme Court Grokster Decision."
The report does have several merits, but masks the real issues while ignoring the millions of music fans that participate on P2P and file-sharing networks. Much like RIAA president Cary Sherman's dismissal of the P2P community during his interview with college reporters, the IFPI choose to pretend it's winning the war against piracy.
The report does have several interesting details pertaining to the growth authorized music services forecasted for 2006, but presents little new information. For example, the report details that over 400 million music tracks were sold in 2005 - 20 times more than 2003. In addition, the music industry is hopeful the integration of mobile phones and the MP3 player will yield continued success in 2006. According to the IFPI, mobile music downloads account for 40% of all digital revenue.
While the IFPI's report succeeds in its account of the 2005 digital music market, it completely fails on its account of P2P and file-sharing. The problem with the IFPI's report is that it relies heavily on its own research - not to mention findings by the largely discredited NPD Group’s reports on file-sharing.
Of course the problem with publishing a report based on the IFPI’s research is the question of accuracy. Not that the IFPI is publishing false information, but those who are being questioned may not feel comfortable revealing downloading habits to an organization who supports the prosecution of nearly 20,000 P2P users.
In addition, the IFPI’s report demeans its potential consumer base by referring to them as “obstacles.” These “obstacles” are also spending significantly less on CDs, according to IFPI (which backs up its claim with research from organizations like Forrester and Jupiter.) Yet these reports ignore the reasons why “obstacles” are spending less money on CDs. P2P and file-sharing users represent the frontier of the digital age, where relying on physical CDs is less important than having a digital file. It’s impossible to expect an advanced culture of individuals to lug around circa 1978 technology when MP3 players offer cutting edge portability. These reports also fail to examine the possibility that iTunes users spend less on music by purchasing single tracks rather than full albums.
The IFPI report also places a tremendous amount of credence into several court rulings against P2P networks. Most notably, the United States Supreme Court in June of 2005 ruled unanimously that Grokster, LTD could be sued for encouraging copyright infringement. In addition, several other global decisions – such as the South Korean ruling against Soribada and the Australian ruling on Sharman Networks – have been heavily used as propaganda by the music industry. While these ruling do indeed affect commercial P2P operations, they have only served to encourage open source development.
The most interesting, and perhaps most inaccurate, portion of the IFPI’s report is on page 21. Here the IFPI makes a dizzying attempt convince the reader that file- sharing has been “contained.”
“There is a consensus, however, that illegal file-sharing of music files has been held in check within the last two years in the context of a sharp increase in broadband penetration globally.”
Where they received this “consensus” information is unclear, although the NPD Group’s research tends to agree with them. The IFPI does indicate however, their calculations on the fight against P2P networking is based on “IFPI estimates.”
For example, the IFPI states “the simultaneous availability of copyrighted music tracks for illegal download or distribution – at 885 million, of which 775 million are available on P2P networks and the remainder on websites. This is slightly up on the piracy level of January 2005 (870 million) but down compared to the level in June 2005 (900 million).”
“35% of illegal file-sharers have cut back or stopped the activity, while only 14% have increased it. Half of illegal file-sharers who cut back on illegal file-sharing did so because of concern over the legal consequences. 35% did so out of concerns about viruses. 15% could not find the song they wanted on the P2P network.”
Again, these numbers are based on the IFPI’s undoubtedly highly trained crack research group who calculated file-sharing has been kept in check for the last two years. But how seriously can these numbers be taken without third party verification? Its largely apparent that most people who engage in file-sharing will tell an industry backed survey just about anything out of fear of reprisal.
The reality of the situation dictates a much different story for the IFPI. Empirical evidence, in addition to extensive research by third party P2P tracking firms Cache Logic and Big Champagne contradict virtually all of the IFPI’s findings. Over the last two years, the P2P population has jumped from an approximate 5.6 million simultaneous users in December 2003 to 9.6 million users in December 2005. If this represents containment, what represents proliferation?
It’s apparent the IFPI’s report is largely based on its own research and little else. Propaganda? Sure - and that’s fine. It’s more than entitled to push its agenda and business model. But the great failure of the IFPI and indeed the RIAA’s Cary Sherman is its intolerance of the P2P community. Rather than open a dialog with its consumer base, it refers to them as “obstacles” and “thieves”, which represents the great core of their problems. The IFPI and RIAA are in a struggle to win the hearts and minds of the P2P population, as the IFPI readily admits its is failing to achieve. The answer to this problem boils down to respect. If the IFPI can’t respect the needs and wishes of the P2P community, it can’t possibly expect the P2P community to respect theirs.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1058
IFPI File Sharing Report
p2p news / p2pnet:
To read the latest Big Four record label IFPI release, you'd think there's a booming corporate online music business.
Echoing hollowly would be a more accurate phrase, and that's entirely due to the fact the Big Four - Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI – are sticking to their physical 1970s business model in the digital 21st century.
The cartel is trying desperately to compete with independent music sites and the p2p networks by selling low quality compressed digital music tracks at sky-high $1 and up prices. But music lovers continue to get their fixes for free on the networks, or for pennies and cents on one or other of the indie download sites.
But the Big Four must needs keep up their pretence that sales of their cookie-cutter product through the handful of sites they support and supply are significant, hence the outpourings of their IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industries).
"Music fans downloaded 420 million single tracks from the internet last year," it boasts. Moreover, "legitimate digital music business is steadily pushing back on digital piracy," proudly declares IFPI boss John Kennedy.
However, during one month alone in 2005 - September - the average number of files available on the p2p networks for download at any given moment (average simultaneous files) was close to three billion, p2p research company Big Champagne told p2pnet. The exact figure was 2,789,154,393.
On the claimed diminution of file sharing, in a BBC interview Kennedy roundly contradicts himself, admitting his masters are merely "containing" the situation. And as the IFPI report itself states unequivocally, "Illegal activity on peer-to-peer networks has stayed static in the last year ..." In fact, in the IFPI 'report,' Kennedy admits, "The challenges we now face are far too big for any complacency".
In another bit of nonsense, in Europe's "two biggest digital markets, UK and Germany," new IFPI research, "indicates more music fans are legally downloading music than illegally file-swapping," it says.
"Two years ago, few could have predicted the extraordinary developments we are seeing in the digital music business today," says Kennedy in the report, going on, "Already in the UK and Germany - two of the biggest digital markets worldwide - legal buyers from sites like iTunes, Musicload and MSN actually exceed illegal file-swappers."
This is, of course, sheer, unadultrated blarney. But it'll be reported by the mainstream media as though it's accurate information from a credible source.
Meanwhile, "I would love to be sitting here telling you that it [file sharing] had gone down," says Kennedy in the BBC interview. But the Big Four are, "finding it difficult to persuade existing song-swappers to use legal download services such as iTunes instead".
Meanwhile, "A series of court judgements against unauthorised file-sharing services in late 2005 - in the US, Australia, Taiwan and Korea - has helped transform the market environment for digital music and consumer attitudes to illegal file-sharing," says the IFPI's 'study'.
They have indeed.
The publicity generated by the sue 'em all campaign has turned millions of otherwise uninformed people onto the possibilities offered by p2p and file sharing, as confirmed by the Big Four's own Nofree organization in Korea, since it singles Korea out for special mention.
"We were hoping that prosecutors would impose some strong measures so that people would see the consequences of getting caught distributing illegal music files, but now they've announced that it's permissible to download music for private listening," said Nofree's Kim Young-ki .
Instead, "People who didn't even think of doing so may start."
All the signs are, however, that the Big Four will continue their relentless and fruitless attempts to sue their own customers into buying product, and to again attempt to impose the same kinds of Consumer Control that's generating such terrible fallout for Sony BMG and its rootkit spyware DRM.
"Specifically, the music business needs support for Digital Rights Management, which is the key enabler of digital music services allowing new and flexible uses by consumers; it also needs more cooperation from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in protecting music from piracy on their networks," says the IFPI."
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7661
IFPI Switzerland Files Suit Against Users Of Peer-To- Peer Networks
Craig Morris
Switzerland's music industry has terminated its "grace period" for file sharers. According to media reports, the Swiss International Federation of Producers of Phonograms and Videograms (IFPI) is now filing suit to stop the illegal propagation of music files. The industry is thus making good on its promise of March 2004, which was repeated in November of 2005 in the "Game over" campaign, to take legal action.
Anzeige
Originally, the music industry wanted to use its "Game Over" campaign as a way to offer all private "pirates" a way to settle the matter out of court. The people affected would have had to agree to delete all illegal music files and pay costs and damages ranging from 3000-9000 Swiss francs (5800 euros). But this approach proved pointless when Internet providers refused to pass on the cease-and-desist demands to users of peer-to-peer networks. IFPI therefore filed suit against users of peer-to-peer networks with the state prosecutor's office in the Swiss Canton of Zurich. According to reports, the providers are only obligated to provide the authorities with such information by court order.
The Swiss music industry had been sending out "final warnings" since the beginning of November of 2005 as instant messages in the peer-to- peer networks. Just before Christmas, the providers received mail from IFPI Switzerland calling on them to hand over the personal data of any suspicious users of peer-to-peer networks and to send cease-and-desist requests to file sharers who were breaking the law.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/68547
Court Bars Tirade On Malaysian Web Site
A court told a disgruntled car owner he cannot chronicle the alleged defects of his Malaysian-made Perodua and his tirade against the car maker on a personal Web site.
In the first case of its kind in Malaysia, the Appeals Court on Tuesday upheld a High Court order against Richard Fong Khee Choong.
The High Court had ordered Fong on Sept. 17, 2003 to dismantle a personal Web site he had set up in October 2002 after purchasing an allegedly defective Kelisa car from Perodua.
The Appeals Court judges said they agreed with the High Court that the allegations in Fong's Web site, which contained one article about his grievances, "attacked the reputation and integrity of the company."
Fong had purchased a Perodua Kelisa car in August 2002 and contacted the company by email with several allegations about defects in the vehicle. He subsequently set up the Web site, alleging corruption in the company.
In response, Perodua sued him for defamation, and obtained an interim order from the High Court to have the Web site shut pending a resolution of the defamation suit.
The company, the second national car company after Proton, said Fong's allegations implied that Perodua practiced deception and fraud for its own interest instead of the customer's needs.
It also claimed that Fong's allegations meant that the car maker was betraying the public trust and was involved in a conspiracy to cheat the people.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT
Taiwanese Parliament Votes Against Microsoft
Dan Nystedt
Taiwan's parliament has voted to end its dependence on Microsoft software, demanding that the government reduce purchases from the software giant by 25 percent this year.
The resolution, passed on Friday, is an attempt by the island's law-making body to end the near monopoly Microsoft has with local government offices, a legislative aide said.
Local newspaper Commercial Times said however that the resolution may not be binding because it runs against fair trade regulations in Taiwan. Officials at Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission declined to comment.
The case highlights the battle Microsoft is facing in Asia, mostly thanks to the availability of open-source equivalents. Most recently, South Korean anti-trust regulators fined the company 33 billion won (£58m) in December for violating fair trade laws, and ordered it to offer two versions of Windows in the country.
Japan's Fair Trade Commission has also investigated Microsoft, and the Chinese government has expressed its support for wider adoption of Linux, both as an alternative to Windows and as a way to support the development of local software companies.
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/...ID=5162&inkc=0
NYT Editorial
Beijing's New Enforcer: Microsoft
Microsoft has silenced a well-known blogger in China for committing journalism. At the Chinese government's request, the company closed the blog of Zhao Jing on Dec. 30 after he criticized the government's firing of editors at a progressive newspaper. Microsoft, which also acknowledges that its MSN Internet portal in China censors searches and blogs, is far from alone. Recently Yahoo admitted that it had helped China sentence a dissident to 10 years in prison by identifying him as the sender of a banned e-mail message.
Even as Internet use explodes in China, Beijing is cracking down on free expression, and Western technology firms are leaping to help. The companies block access to political Web sites, censor content, provide filtering equipment to the government and snitch on users. Companies argue that they must follow local laws, but they are also eager to ingratiate themselves with a government that controls access to the Chinese market.
Such obvious disregard for users' privacy and ethical standards may make it easier to do business in China, but it also aids a repressive regime. Some in the American Congress are talking about holding hearings. Microsoft has responded to criticism by saying, "We think it's better to be there with our services than not be there." This is a false choice. China needs Internet companies as much as they need China.
A decade ago, consumers began to rebel against the sweatshop practices of Western manufacturers that made clothes and toys in China and elsewhere. The smart businesses cleaned up. They formed associations to adopt codes of good labor practices and set up independent monitoring.
Reporters Without Borders, a group advocating press freedom, recommends that Internet companies also adopt a good conduct code, pledging not to filter out words like "democracy" and "human rights" from search engines and maintaining their e-mail and Internet servers outside China.
Western businesses have always overestimated the price of defending human rights in China. Some have done it effectively - privately and respectfully - and paid no cost. But the beauty of such an industrywide code of conduct for Internet companies is that it would put no company at a disadvantage.
Western technology companies could have a powerful case if they acted as a group in telling China that they are under tremendous consumer and political pressure to stick up for free expression.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/op...rssnyt&emc=rss
In Tiny Arab State, Web Takes On Ruling Elite
Neil MacFarquhar
MANAMA, Bahrain--Ali Abdulemam, this country's most notorious blogger, sat in the boxlike reception room of his father's house in a cramped Shiite village dotted with raw cinder-block houses, trying to log onto the widely popular Web site that he founded.
The government on this flyspeck of an island nation, home to an American Navy base, recently renewed its effort to block dozens of opposition Web sites. So Abdulemam, 28, a computer engineer, had to spend about 10 minutes whipping through various computer servers around the world before finally pulling up his Web site, BahrainOnline.org.
It was National Day, Dec. 16, and some five miles away, the beautifully landscaped boulevards of Manama, the capital, were packed with revelers enjoying bands and fireworks. Pictures of the ruling princes blanketed the city, which was also awash in the national colors, red and white. Red and white lights were even wrapped around the palm trees lining the main thoroughfares.
But most of the couple of hundred people posting messages in the "National Forum" section of BahrainOnline mocked the idea of celebrating the day in 1971 when a Sunni Muslim king ascended the throne to rule over a Shiite Muslim majority.
"In Bahrain, glorifying the king means glorifying the nation, and opposing the king means betraying the homeland and working for foreign countries," wrote one online participant, noting that the formula is the mark of a dictatorship. "Should we be loyal to the king or to Bahrain?"
Bahrain, long a regional financial hub and a prime example of the power of the Internet to foment discontent, bills itself as a leader of political change in the Arab world. It is a claim echoed in praise from the United States, which considers Bahrain crucial for its many regional military ventures because the American Navy's Fifth Fleet is based here.
But in Bahrain, as across the Arab world, those pushing for democratic change want to end minority rule by a family, sect or a military clique.
The royal family here dominates, holding half the cabinet positions and the major posts in the security services and the University of Bahrain.
Sheik Muhammad al-Khalifa, the prince who runs the Economic Development Board, argues that Bahrain should not become a democracy in the Western sense. "As traditional Arabs, I don't think democracy is part of our nature," he said.
"I think all people want is accountability," he added, noting that some form of democracy was needed to achieve that.
So political change in the Middle East rests partly on whether and how the many minority governments will yield power and allow others to participate. So far, the results are anemic.
The al-Saud tribe slapped its name on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where local elections a year ago have not produced active municipal councils, and crucial issues like how much oil wealth the ruling family absorbs are not discussed.
In Syria, the ruling Assad family and its confederates from the Alawite minority sect are in crisis, accused of assassinating Rafik Hariri, a former Sunni prime minister of Lebanon and an important figure who might have been able to rally majority support against the Alawites' monopoly on power.
Of course, Iraq remains the biggest experiment of all in changing the practice of minority rule. The American occupation has yet to answer whether it is possible to forge a democratic government in the Arab world, or if the attempt will drown in a cauldron of sectarian bloodshed. But the results are being closely watched, perhaps nowhere more than in Bahrain, where up to 70 percent of its native population of 450,000 are Shiites, similar to Iraq's Shiite-Sunni split. Shiites here also increasingly look to moderate religious leaders in Iraq for guidance.
Some political change has occurred. Debate is growing through the Internet, satellite television and other forces, and elections this year will replace the Parliament and municipal councils first chosen in 2002 under a new Constitution. Members of the ruling Khalifa family describe this as a vibrant process that will ultimately establish a local strain of democracy. Yet some of its most senior members and their Sunni allies hint that the process is threatened because Bahrain's Shiites disloyally serve outside interests like the Shiites in Iran and Iraq.
Members of the opposition call this nonsense and accuse the ruling dynasty of questioning their loyalty to avoid having to share power. They say King Hamad and his Khalifa clan, descendants of Bedouins from the Arabian mainland who conquered this island, taking it from its Persian masters in the 18th century, will only make cosmetic changes, noting that almost nothing has been done to alleviate the entrenched discrimination faced by the poorest segments of the Shiite population.
"The problem with the royal family is that when they give us any democracy they think that it is a gift and we have to thank them for it," Abdulemam said. "The time when they were the lords and we were the slaves is gone. The new generation is well educated. They won't live like our fathers did in the past, when they said O.K. to whatever the royal family did."
A 'golden time' cut short
Bahrain's first Parliament, elected in 1973, proved too boisterous for King Hamad's father, who dissolved it after 18 months. Opposition demands to restore it increased through the 1990's, marked by bombings and other sporadic violence. The authoritarian government subjected the mostly Shiite opposition political activists to arrest, torture and forced exile.
When King Hamad, now 55, inherited power in 1999, he promised a democracy that he described as "areeqa" or "well rooted."
He announced changes that included amnesty for exiles and the disbanding of the dreaded State Security Courts. Bahrainis enthusiastically approved the new plan in a public referendum.
It was then that Abdulemam established his groundbreaking Web site, determined to give Bahrainis a place to share ideas and develop plans to deepen political change. "It seemed like a golden time, when the country was moving from one period in its history to another," he said. "Everybody needed a place to talk so I provided it."
But King Hamad soon hit the brakes. In 2002 he announced a new Constitution, formulated without public consultation.
The cabinet, led by his uncle, a hard-liner opposing democratic change, would report to him, not the Parliament. Instead of a single 40-member Parliament, he added an appointed upper house. Amending the Constitution now required a two- thirds majority of both houses, giving the monarch full control. Parliament now could only propose laws, not write them. An audit bureau that had previously reported to Parliament was replaced with one that would not subject the spending of the royal court or the 2,500 royal family members to any public scrutiny.
"I had been full of hope that a new era was coming to Bahrain," Abdulemam said. "But what happened next threw us all in the dirt. When the king brought in the new Constitution, everyone was crushed."
In the old days, with its monopoly over television and radio and the ability to shut down newspapers, the Khalifa dynasty would have had less trouble controlling the debate. Now, with the Internet and satellite television outside its reach, the government resorts to tactics like tossing Abdulemam and two of his fellow Web masters into jail for a couple of weeks, as it did last year.
At the time, the opposition orchestrated repeated demonstrations and international intervention to help win his release, but legal charges of insulting the king, incitement and disseminating false news remain pending and can be dredged up at any time.
One reason the Internet is so popular--scores of villages have their own Web sites and chat rooms--is that far more can be said about the ruling family online than through any other means.
"Freedom of expression is something you have to take, not something that will be granted to you," Abdulemam said, but he doubts that free speech alone will accomplish much. "Their policy basically comes down to, 'Say what you want and we will do what we want.'"
BahrainOnline is the go-to political site, with princes, Parliament members, opposition leaders and others with an interest in politics saying they consult it daily to find out what the opposition is thinking.
The easiest way to ensure a large turnout for any demonstration, the leader of the main Shiite opposition group said, is to post the announcement for it on BahrainOnline.
"If something happens anywhere in Bahrain, usually within five minutes maximum something about it is happening on my site," Abdulemam said.
Still, the site's Web masters are often criticized for creating a "tabloid" that spreads rumors and demeans those considered enemies. Ghada Jamsheer, a women's rights advocate who criticized the Shiite clergy for opposing a proposed law that would give more defined divorce rights to women, said her face was pasted onto a naked body.
Abdulemam said his site was blamed for trash posted on any site in Bahrain, and his Web masters, monitoring as many as 1,000 posts a day, remove anything that promotes violence. He laughs when he recalls his arrest and how little his interrogators knew about how the Internet works, blaming him for the content of every posting.
Mansour Jamri, editor of a daily newspaper, Wasat, and the son of a famous Shiite opposition cleric, notes that many of those writing on the Web sites are very young.
"If you don't shout with them you are a corrupt person, you are basically a dog used by the government," said Jamri, who has been portrayed as just that.
Part of the issue is that the press remains hobbled. When Abd al-Hadi al-Khawaja, a prominent human rights advocate, was arrested in late 2004 after giving a speech attacking the prime minister over corruption, no newspaper printed what he had said. For that people had to turn to BahrainOnline.
"This pocket of anarchy is a byproduct of half-hearted democracy," Jamri said.
Simmering frustrations
In 2002, BahrainOnline led a fight to boycott the elections. As a result, Shiites mostly stayed away from the polls, and the vote exacerbated the sense among Shiites that the Khalifas and their Sunni allies were not interested in treating them as equals.
Election districts were gerrymandered so that sparsely populated Sunni districts in the south got almost as many members as the heavily Shiite villages in the north. Opposition groups amassed evidence that the government gave passports to various Sunni Muslim groups, including members of a tribe in Saudi Arabia that had once lived on Bahrain, to alter voting demographics.
Ultimately, Sunnis captured 27 of the 40 seats in the election. As in many parts of the Muslim world, fundamentalists were the best organized, and a group of Sunni fundamentalists became the largest bloc in Parliament. They muted any opposition to the government out of concern that it might help spread the influence of Shiite Islam.
The new Parliament spent half its time bickering over religious practice. It won a fight to allow fully veiled women to drive. It proposed a ban on scantily clad window mannequins. It tried to separate the sexes in all classrooms. Last year, alcohol sales were banned during a Muslim holiday--a time when tens of thousands of visitors arrive from Saudi Arabia to drink.
What Parliament did not do was really confront the government over a chronic housing shortage and unemployment, particularly among Shiites. The gap between the largely Sunni haves and the Shiite have-nots grows ever more apparent and feeds simmering frustration.
Abdulemam, for example, earns a decent salary as a computer engineer at an American-owned company. With a wife who is expecting their first child any day, he can not afford $130,000 for a plot of land and does not ever expect to be able to.
He is the youngest of 10 siblings, 4 of whom still live with their children in his father's house. Some 15 people live there, with each nuclear family allotted a room. "I know we deserve better," he said.
Exact numbers are hard to pin down in Bahrain, but about 27,000 applications are pending for subsidized government housing, senior officials concede. Unemployment stands officially at 15 percent but runs as high as 28 percent among Shiite young adults ages 20 to 24, diplomats and Bahraini economists said.
Opposition members accuse the royal family of monopolizing all available land, and say an expatriate community of 250,000--from Asia and other Arab countries--blocks Shiites from most decent jobs. Shiites avoid some tough jobs like construction and are generally barred from joining the security services. Royal family members concede that more needs to be done to improve housing but deny hoarding land. A job training program is to begin this month.
Last spring, the committee in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that monitors racial discrimination rebuked Bahrain. The report said that although Bahrain paid lip service in its laws to barring discrimination, actual practice lagged.
When Abdulemam was arrested in February 2005, he found that his interrogator was an Egyptian, one of hundreds of Sunni Muslims from the Arab world and Pakistan recruited into the security services, given houses and usually citizenship.
"He was asking me whether I was loyal to this country," Abdulemam said sourly. "How can an Egyptian ask me about my loyalty? There are many ways to love your country, and what I do is one of them."
The poverty suffered by many Shiites seems particularly galling to them given the real estate boom. The capital's skyline is dominated by gargantuan luxury office blocs under construction, which Bahrainis contend are all owned by the royal family. The capital is also plastered with ads for housing developments like Riffa Heights, an upscale community with sea views and a golf course in a plush neighborhood already dominated by royal palaces where Shiites cannot buy land.
Senior officials call it all essential development to attract investment to Bahrain, long the Persian Gulf's financial hub but one competing increasingly with far richer emirates like Dubai and Qatar.
The young, American-educated crown prince even used a huge tract to build a $150 million Formula 1 racing circuit. Talal al-Zain, the investment banker who is the raceway's chairman, lauded it as a means of putting Bahrain on the international map. The track seems to baffle Bahrainis. For special races on National Day only about 500 people, most of them foreigners, sat in stands built for 30,000. One Web site mocks the crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, as "Salman Schumacher," a reference to Michael Schumacher, a top racer.
Formally, the Bush administration has declared that it supports democratic change across the region, that the United States will no longer laud despots just because they back American policy. "Hopeful reform is already taking hold in an arc from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain," President Bush said in his 2005 State of the Union address.
Practically, though, the United States has not pushed for sweeping change out of concern for what might happen if states fell into the hands of Islamists.
The Khalifas court the Bush administration particularly well. The foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, noted that a proposed port might provide the deep-water docking space needed for the aircraft carriers that now have to anchor offshore. Such cooperation has earned Bahrain a free-trade deal and praise from Bush.
During a protest march on National Day, some of the participants chanted "Death to Khalifa!" referring to Sheik Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, 69, who has remained prime minister since independence in 1971. They yelled it in Arabic and Persian, the language of Shiite Iran.
With Iraq holding so much of the people's attention here, much the way Iran did after its revolution, the question is whether developments in Iraq will lead Bahrain to more sectarianism or more democracy. Signs of both exist. Some postings on BahrainOnline include portraits of prominent Iranian ayatollahs past and present, particularly Khomeini and Ali Khamenei. Members of the ruling family generally use such displays to buttress the accusation that the basic goal of the Shiites is to establish an Iranian-style theocracy in Bahrain.
But Shiites here respond that the ayatollahs are strictly spiritual guides and that native Shiites have lived in Bahrain longer than the ruling family and have no intention of living under the thrall of yet another foreign power. To counter the accusation that their loyalties lie outside Bahrain, the Shiite activists stopped hoisting such pictures at rallies.
"The new Iraq is the model," said Sheik Ali Salman, the 40-year-old Shiite cleric elected to lead Al Wifaq Islamic Society, the main Shiite opposition group, and a man who once organized rallies denouncing the American invasion of Iraq. The expectation that Shiites will dominate the Iraqi government has given Shiites across the region new confidence.
Speaking fluent English learned during five years of exile in Britain, the cleric ticks off all the steps Iraqis have taken toward choosing their own leaders in the same period that King Hamad has been busy consolidating power while warning against moving too quickly to carry out change.
Most Shiites follow one senior cleric on matters of religious practice in their daily lives. Abdulemam said he used to look to Khomeini in Iran, but recently switched to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the moderate and powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq.
Sunnis in Bahrain are at times incensed when Shiites fax Ayatollah Sistani questions, like asking him whether they must obey traffic laws, because King Hamad is not, in their view, a legitimate Islamic ruler. (He faxed back to say yes, they do.)
Where many Shiites here used to watch Al Manar, the satellite channel broadcast from Beirut by the militant Shiite group Hezbollah, they have switched to the Iraqi-run Euphrates channel. When a bombing kills Shiites in Iraq, some in Bahrain wear black.
Shiites and Sunnis silently assess all events in Iraq, which are both feeding democratic yearnings and deepening the divisions between them.
"If a Sunni area is bombed, the Sunnis wish it was a Shiite area; they don't say it, but they feel it," said Sheik Khalid al- Khalifa, a prince and an academic who serves on the Shura Council, the appointed upper house of Parliament. "It's the same for the Shiites. It's all reflected here."
http://news.com.com/In+tiny+Arab+sta...3-6027380.html
No talk for you!
Bangladesh Orders End to Free Talk Time
Julhas Alam
No more free talk time after midnight for Bangladeshi youths.
In the name of protecting moral values, the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has ordered the country's mobile phone companies to stop providing free talk time, saying it is spoiling the younger generation, disrupting studies and promoting needless chatting.
Three of Bangladesh's five mobile phone firms offer the free calls between midnight and 6 a.m. to mainly young customers.
GrameenPhone, a subsidiary of Norway's Telenor ASA, has more than 1 million youths who use such free-call packages, according to Syed Yamin Bakht, a spokesman for the company.
"It's really shocking," Bakht said. "We don't find any valid reason for such behavior of the regulatory body."
University student Zaman Ahmed, who uses a free-call package, complained that "it's not the government's duty to shape our very personal behavior."
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/s...toryId=1146414
Tokyo
Prosecutors Raid Offices of Livedoor and Home of Its Founder
Martin Fackler
Japanese prosecutors raided the offices of the popular Internet portal, Livedoor, and the home of its founder on Monday as part of an investigation of possible violations of securities trading laws.
It was not immediately clear whether the investigation was focused on the company's 33-year-old founder and chief executive, Takafumi Horie, who has become widely known for challenging corporate Japan's stuffy ways. Mr. Horie is an outspoken entrepreneur whose casual style and confrontational tactics have repeatedly angered the country's business elite.
In a brief statement, the Tokyo district prosecutor's office said that Livedoor was being investigated on suspicion of spreading false information about a security, but it did not elaborate. Media reports in Japan said the company was accused of issuing a false news release to drive up the share price of a marketing subsidiary. Livedoor executives did not immediately comment.
More than a dozen investigators raided Livedoor's offices and Mr. Horie's condominium, both of which are in a complex of luxury high-rises in central Tokyo. The raids were the lead item on local news broadcasts. Investigators searched both locations for several hours.
Livedoor is one of Japan's most heavily trafficked Internet portals, offering everything from news and travel tips to a popular blog written by Mr. Horie. The company has used money raised through stock sales to acquire other companies and expand its business group.
Mr. Horie rose to prominence two years ago, when he was rebuffed in an effort to buy a professional baseball team in Japan. He grabbed headlines again last year when he started a hostile takeover bid, still rare in confrontation-averse Japan, for one of the country's biggest media conglomerates, Fuji Television Network.
He failed in that bid, and in September he lost in parliamentary elections, running as a reform candidate against a prominent old-guard politician.
Despite the setbacks, Mr. Horie became a frequent figure on television talk shows and the lecture circuit. He also stirred controversy for favoring T-shirts and sometimes short pants, instead of the standard dark tie and gray suit of Japan's business world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/bu...7livedoor.html
After Panic, Tokyo Market Rebounds
James Brooke
Takafumi Horie, an Internet entrepreneur in Japan, has captured attention with his unconventional American-style approach to business.
Zipping around Tokyo in a silver-blue Ferrari with his bikini-model girlfriend, Mr. Horie was often on television quiz and talk shows, and enjoyed thumbing his nose at Japan's business elite.
But this week, the flamboyant Mr. Horie was in the spotlight for a more somber reason: An investigation of his business, the Livedoor Company, on suspicion of securities fraud had helped to kindle a near panic in Japan as investors withdrew billions of dollars from the Tokyo stock market in the last two days.
In an attempt to calm the frightened investors, a parade of government officials, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, offered reassurances that economic fundamentals were in order. The chief government secretary, Shinzo Abe said, "It is desirable that stock prices firmly reflect economic fundamentals and move in a stable manner."
The tactic appeared to work on Thursday. With the market rebounding, buyers came in, seeking to scoop up stocks they saw as undervalued. The benchmark Nikkei index of 225 stocks was up about 350 points, or about 2.3 percent, by late afternoon.
Trading was extraordinarily heavy and was close to being suspended by late Thursday in order to avoid overloading its computers, which happened Wednesday when the market closed 20 minutes early.
The frantic quality of the last several days took on a grim aspect when an executive of a securities firm suspected of involvement in corporate takeover deals by Livedoor was found dead on the southern island of Okinawa, apparently having committed suicide, the police, quoted by the Kyodo news agency, said.
The executive was identified as Hideaki Noguchi, 38, a vice president of HS Securities, one of the companies raided by prosecutors this week in connection with the investigation.
Analysts watched the market closely Thursday, afraid that the earlier tumult could return and threaten the Nikkei, which soared more than 40 percent last year, and perhaps undercut the nation's fragile economic recovery after years of stagnation.
In a blow to the nation's pride, the Tokyo Stock Exchange closed early on Wednesday because an old computer system failed to keep up with the rush of trading orders. The exchange operated on a shortened schedule on Thursday, and was nearing the trading limit - four million transactions - that would trigger an early close.
On Wednesday, markets around the world fell, ending down 1.2 percent in Frankfurt and 0.6 percent in London. In New York, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index market slipped 0.39 percent.
The development that set off "Livedoor shock," as the Japanese news and entertainment media call it, occurred on Tuesday, after prosecutors marched into the home and the office of Mr. Horie, who has endeared himself to admirers with a boyish pudgy face and spiked hair, but has enraged Japan's financial establishment with his aggressive tactics. The raid was carried live on the evening news.
Senior Japanese officials sought to minimize any potential impact on the recovering economy, as well as embarrassment to a country trying to regain leadership in critical fields of advanced technology.
James Fiorillo, an American who advises the Japan Natural Selection Fund, one of many foreign funds that heavily expanded its investments in this country last year, commented: "This thing has taken on greed, panic and fear. Banks and trading companies are getting hammered, and their businesses are doing well in this economy."
In the meantime, Japanese regulators widened their investigation into Mr. Horie and Livedoor. The company is reportedly being investigated for violating Japan's security laws by spreading false information. According to Japanese newspaper reports Thursday, prosecutors are also investigating whether Livedoor's parent company falsified figures for financial statements in 2004 to make an $8.7 million loss look like a $12.2 million gain.
Livedoor issued a statement just before trading started on Thursday morning, saying its own investigation had found no problems in two areas thought to be under investigation, an affiliate's takeover of a publisher and its stock split.
In the last two years, Mr. Horie has made headline news with a success story that has turned him into the Bill Gates of Japan. He seemed to revel in tweaking the country's clannish business elite, whom he once dismissed as a "club of old men."
He especially raised hackles by attempting a hostile takeover of a radio network and by trying to buy a baseball team. Hostile takeovers are rare in Japan. Though the radio network, the object of a bid last spring, was small, it was an affiliate of the Fuji Television Network, the country's largest private broadcaster. Both attempts failed. But they did not seem to dent his ability to make money from his conglomerate comprising a popular Internet portal and about 40 related ventures.
Mr. Horie has built Livedoor into one of Japan's most heavily trafficked sites, offering everything from free e-mail, travel reservations, consumer financing, lists of used cars for sale and even a blog he wrote. In five years, Livedoor's stock value soared 150 times, to $6.34 billion at the beginning of the week.
Livedoor shares did not trade on Wednesday or Thursday. Still it shares were marked down Wednesday by the daily 100-yen limit, to 496 yen. At that price, more than $1.8 billion of the company's market value was wiped out.
"We need more updated information and better disclosure," Taizo Nishimuro, president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, said of Livedoor.
On Wednesday, Mr. Nishimuro raised the possibility of delisting Livedoor.
Mr. Horie's casual style and bold business practices have alienated many old hands in this country. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the business daily, said this week, "Since listing his company in 2000, Horie has been accruing a reputation as an eccentric, aloha-shirted president who dodges questions from analysts."
By some accounts a geek version of Donald Trump, Mr. Horie wrote an ode to greed, titled, "Earning Money Is Everything: From Zero to 10 Billion Yen, My Way."
While he ruffled some, he enchanted many small investors, who accounted for half the trades on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last year. That enchantment snapped on Wednesday. Investors put in a vast number of trade orders stretching Tokyo's computer-based market. Part of that high volume was a result of Internet trading, a popular pursuit enabled by one of Mr. Horie's companies.
Compounding investor anxiety, exchange officials announced in advance on Wednesday that the order volume was expected to reach the system's capacity of 4.5 million trades a day, forcing an early close. After normally instantaneous trades started to take five minutes and more, exchange officials closed the market 20 minutes before the normal 3 p.m. closing time.
"The recent spike in orders is extraordinary," Mr. Nishimuro said. As long as these extremely high volumes last, he said, Tokyo's trading day will be cut by 30 minutes.
Last week, the exchange increased the market's order capacity by 20 percent, to nine million orders a day. On Jan. 30, trading capacity is to increase by 11 percent, to five million trades a day. On Wednesday, when the market closed 20 minutes early, the exchange had recorded 4.38 million trades and 7.3 million orders.
Belying Japan's high-tech, clockwork image, the exchange lost almost an entire day of trading in November because of a computer breakdown. In December, computers stymied a brokerage firm's attempt to reverse a botched trade, an error that led to $350 million in losses and brought down the president of the exchange, Takuo Tsurushima, who resigned to take responsibility.
To settle investors before Thursday's trading began, government officials made comments timed for the Wednesday evening television news. "I think it's of a temporary nature as economic conditions are solid over all," Prime Minister Koizumi said.
Kaoru Yosano, the financial services minister, reassured investors at a news conference: "We do not fear a chain reaction."
Hours earlier, the alarm over Livedoor had spread to other Internet stocks. Yahoo Japan fell by almost 10 percent. Softbank fell by 13 percent, both near their maximum allowable price movement.
"Our fund managers think that the next couple of days will be choppy," Alexander M. Prout, president of Invesco in Japan, said after trading ended Wednesday. Mr. Prout, who said he managed $5.3 billion in Japanese equities, blamed "media hysteria" for the turmoil.
"Anytime there is a quick run-up in the marketplace, there is that breathing pause," he said, referring to the Tokyo market's recent surge. "But because there is nothing fundamentally wrong, when the lull settles you will see buying opportunities."
Wall Street traders said Wednesday that there was little noticeable concern in New York over the shutdown of the Japanese market, which came on top of a sell-off over disappointing results from American technology companies. They noted that the Tokyo exchange has a limited capacity to handle orders and that Livedoor has a large number of small individual investors and many of them were trying to sell shares. Some traders saw the two-day drop in Tokyo as a buying opportunity.
But many feared that they might be hearing the popping of a miniature Internet bubble.
"If Livedoor did not disclose correct data for their financial statement, that is big, sort of a similar situation to Enron," Nobuo Sayama, a business professor at Hitotsubashi University, said after the market closed Wednesday.
Referring to the Internet companies that have clustered in a new Tokyo hotel and office tower, he predicted: "This event is a start of big problem that will expand to other Roppongi Hills companies. They will be attacked later on."
But Mr. Sayama, like the Americans interviewed, said he believed that Japan's economic fundamentals were sound.
Some analysts said Tuesday and Wednesday would eventually be seen as a speed bump on the way to the Nikkei breaking 20,000, a level substantially below its high of 38,915 in December 1989.
G. Thomas Sims, in Hong Kong; Martin Fackler in Seoul, South Korea; and Jenny Anderson in New York contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/bu...9livedoor.html
Korea
Anti-Piracy Body Looks In Horror At A Plan Gone Awry
Wohn Dong-hee
A group working to halt the rampant piracy of music on the Internet has gotten some unexpected and unwelcome results from its efforts.
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors Office yesterday announced guidelines for its handling of intellectual property rights complaints, especially those involving pirated music being traded on the Internet. The office said it would press charges against persons who downloaded music for resale, but not against those who copied it for their personal use.
"We would have to investigate more than 10,000 people, and if prosecutors start investigating Internet users nationwide, it may start controversies about infringements of human rights," an official at the office said.
That was not what Nofree, a music industry organization, had in mind when it filed a complaint with the prosecutors against about 13,000 persons and two Internet sites. An official at the agency, Kim Young-ki, said yesterday that the intent was not to put those 13,000 people in jail, but to make the illegal downloading of music a social issue here. He added glumly that those plans had backfired.
"We were hoping that prosecutors would impose some strong measures so that people would see the consequences of getting caught distributing illegal music files, but now they've announced that it's permissible to download music for private listening. People who didn't even think of doing so may start," Mr. Kim continued. "Also, musicians will feel that their own rights are being violated when people download illegal music files - regardless of the intent behind the downloads."
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/20060...090409041.html
France Softens Copyright Bill
Jack Kapica
The government of France is loosening restrictions in its proposed digital copyright protection bill, says a report from Agence France-Presse.
The change was made after politicians and consumer groups raised a dramatic outcry, forcing amendments lightening restrictions on copying CDs and DVDs and handing out milder penalties to small-time downloaders.
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin issued the order to change the bill to enshrine the right of consumers to make private copies of music and film disks.
The bill will distinguish between those who download for profit and those who just add to their own music and movie collections using peer-to-peer technologies.
An estimated eight million people in France use the peer-to-peer sites.
The government withdrew a harsher version of the bill after a number of members of the ruling party and opposition benches managed, in a middle-of-the-night vote, to legalize peer-to-peer file sharing in December.
The vote stunned the government, and forced it to rethink the vote, especially after consumer groups argued that private users should continue to enjoy the right to make copies of CDs and DVDs for, say, second homes or family members.
According to Le Journal du Dimanche, the bill would initiate a phased penalty system for small-time downloaders, starting with a warning e-mail, then a formal letter and finally fines ranging from 300 to 1,500 euros ($425 to $2,000 Cdn.).
Thos who download for profit would face fines of 300,000 euros ($425,000) and as much as three years in prison.
The bill could support the notion that individuals who bought their music or movies legally would be allowed to make as many as five copies.
Until an election was called, Canada was also entertaining a harsh new copyright bill, which died on the order paper. But the bill became an election issue as its backer, Liberal MP Sarmite Bulte, scheduled a fund-raiser hosted by a number of copyright stakeholders.
On Monday, South Korea followed the French example by increasing fines for people who share music files for commercial purposes and not prosecuting those who do it for personal use.
A story in the Korea Tomes said the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office has set the guidelines, under which Internet users who swap music files for commercial purposes will be subject to criminal charges.
However, the Korea Times said, individuals who download for personal entertainment law will not be charged.
The changes were made after NoFree Corp., a copyright protection group, sued 13,000 Internet users last year for illegally swapping and distributing music files on the Internet. Under the new guidelines, the 13,000 charged will be free from criminal prosecution.
The French bill would be at odds with many CDs and DVDs sold there that contain copy-protection management software, to digitally block efforts to copy them. If the bill becomes law, the copy-protection measures would have to be removed.
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act currently outlaws the removal of digital blocks, such as the notorious "rootkit" installed on a number of CDs by Sony BMG, which had a spyware component and could not be easily removed.
French prosecutors would not, under the new bill, pursue someone who broke such protection to put a movie from a disk onto a pocket video player or Apple's iPod. And someone who copies a friend's disk would face only a fine of only 150 euros ($210).
Under the bill, Apple's Music Store in France would also have to change its practices: the Journal du Dimanche says the government is looking at ensuring that all music sold on that site can be played on MP3 players other than Apple's bestselling iPods, which is not currently the case.
"If Apple refuses, the matter could be taken to the Competition Council," an unidentified government official was quoted as saying.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ory/Technology
Fears Raised Over Digital Rights
A UK consumer watchdog has called for new laws to protect users' rights to use digital music and movies.
The National Consumer Council (NCC) said anti-piracy efforts were eroding established rights to digital media.
The NCC had little faith that industry self-regulation would adequately protect consumers' rights.
It made its comments to a parliamentary inquiry into technologies that limit what people can do with CDs, DVDs and downloaded media.
No faith
In its submission to the inquiry, the NCC said many consumers were regularly running up against the restrictions record companies and film makers put on their products.
The consumer group said people were finding that they could not make compilations for their own use or easily move digital copies between different
devices.
In its statement to the inquiry it said the digital locks put on content were "constraining the legitimate consumer use of digital content".
Also being undermined were rights established by consumer protection and data protection laws, it said.
"Consumers face security risks to their equipment, limitations on their use of products, poor information when purchasing products and unfair contract terms," said Jill Johnstone, the NCC's director of policy.
She added that the group had little faith that self-regulation by media makers would protect consumer rights.
Sony woes
As a case in point, the NCC referred to the furore over the methods Sony BMG used to stop some of its CDs being copied.
The music maker suffered a long bout of bad publicity following the discovery that its anti-piracy system used virus-like techniques to hide itself.
The row led to Sony BMG being sued by many consumers and many US states. Eventually Sony recalled the CDs using the most controversial anti- piracy software and offer refunds to consumers who suffered.
It has also stopped using some copy protection systems following the row.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/4617176.stm
New Open-Source License Targets DRM, Hollywood
Martin LaMonica
The new version of the most widely used open-source license takes a "highly aggressive" stance against the digital rights management software that's widely favored in the entertainment industry, said Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation.
At a two-day event here to launch the General Public License version 3, which governs use of countless free and open-source programs, Moglen said the license includes anti-DRM provisions that could put it in conflict with movie studios and even digital video recorder maker TiVo.
On Monday, the Free Software Foundation published a draft of the GPL version 3, which is expected to be completed in about a year. The draft states that GPL software cannot use "digital restrictions" on copyright material unless users can control them.
Moglen said that DRM technology, which places limits on how consumers can play movies, music or other digital content, is "fundamentally incompatible" with the principles of the Free Software Foundation. Moglen and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman are co-authors of the GPL version 3.
"Mr. Stallman made perfectly clear that his point of view is: It's enough. It's enough that the world has to pay attention to that (DRM) problem the way the world needed to pay attention to the patent problem 10 years ago," Moglen said in an interview with CNET News.com.
"I recognize that that's a highly aggressive position, but it's not an aggression which we thought up. It's a defense related to an aggression which was launched against the people whose rights are our primary concern," he added.
Moglen said DRM systems that take control out of people's hands or violate their privacy do not respect free software users' rights and therefore are in conflict with the forthcoming GPL provisions.
The planned anti-DRM changes to the GPL are significant because the entertainment industry regularly uses Linux-powered computers in the production process, notably for special effects and animation. In general, movie studios support DRM technology to prevent piracy.
It's not clear whether the Linux operating system kernel will be governed by version 3 of the GPL when the new license is released; creator Linus Torvalds specifically didn't follow the Free Software Foundation's recommendation to describe a software project as governed by version 2 or "any later version." However, many other components of the operating system, such as the GLIBC library of supporting software and the GCC compiler, are expected to move to GPL 3.
Moglen and Stallman have voiced concern specifically with TiVo, which uses Linux, because the company collects information on consumers' actions. Moglen said TiVo complied with version 2 of the GPL "by the skin of its teeth" and said the company will find more difficulty complying with GPL version 3's anti-DRM provisions.
"Having a personal video recorder which reports every button you push to headquarters when you use the remote control--and which won't run software if you modify the box so it snoops on you a little less--is not user-respecting conduct," he said.
"What TiVo needs to do--what everybody needs to do who makes electronic devices--is to stop injuring users to help movie companies. We don't want our software used in a way which batters the head of the user to please somebody else. Our goal is the protection of users' rights, not movies' rights," Moglen said.
He said Hollywood studios that use free software, namely Linux, to create animated movies yet deny users' freedoms are "flat unfair."
Separately, Moglen sought to allay concerns that the GPL version 3 requires application hosting companies to provide the source code for software delivered as a service over the Internet.
"It is clear that in this draft we have not changed those rules at all," he said.
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
http://news.com.com/New+open-source+...3-6028284.html
GPLv3 Draft
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Discussion Draft 1 of Version 3, 16 Jan 2006
THIS IS A DRAFT, NOT A PUBLISHED VERSION OF THE GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Preamble
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your
freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public
License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. We,
the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for
most of our software; it applies also to any other program whose
authors commit to using it. (Some Free Software Foundation software
is covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License instead.) You
can apply it to your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not
price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you
have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for
this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it
if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it
in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make requirements that forbid
anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.
These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you
distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights.
Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1)
assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License which
gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.
For the developers' and author's protection, the GPL clearly explains
that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is
modified by someone else and passed on, the GPL ensures that recipients
are told that what they have is not the original, so that any problems
introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors'
reputations.
Some countries have adopted laws prohibiting software that enables users
to escape from Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is fundamentally
incompatible with the purpose of the GPL, which is to protect users'
freedom; therefore, the GPL ensures that the software it covers will
neither be subject to, nor subject other works to, digital restrictions
from which escape is forbidden.
Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. We
wish to avoid the special danger that redistributors of a free program will
individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program
proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL makes it clear that any patent must
be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and
modification follow.
http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft
U.K. Judge Frowns On Software Patents
Ingrid Marson
A U.K. judge has questioned whether software patents should be granted, and has criticized the U.S. for allowing "anything under the sun" to be patented.
Sir Robin Jacob, a judge at the U.K.'s Court of Appeal who specializes in intellectual-property law, spoke about the potential problems surrounding software patents at a seminar for the Society for Computers and Law on Thursday evening in London.
"Do we need patents for computer programs? Where is the evidence for it?" Jacob asked.
The need for software patents has been questioned by campaigners such as the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, but few studies have investigated this issue. The European Commission has funded a study on the legal, technical and economic effects of software patents on innovation, but the study is not due to be finished until 2007.
Last year, the European Parliament rejected the directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions, which became widely known as the software patent directive. Many claimed that this directive could lead to the widespread patenting of software, as is the case in the U.S.
"The United States takes the view that anything made by man, under the sun, can be patented. And they have granted patents for business methods, mainly computer business methods. But as far as I can see, it would cover a new and improved method of stacking oranges on a barrel," Jacob said.
Jacob said that IP rights are often justified on the "pragmatic grounds" that they encourage research and development, but that people have "got to look at all IP rights critically and say, 'Do we need them?'"
One aspect of the patentability of computer programs that Jacob said gives him "considerable concern" is the searching for prior art.
"It's been said that (searching for prior art) is all going to be sorted out and will be very easy in due course--I don't believe it," he said. "And some of the fuzzy patents that have emerged from the United States tell you that it's going to be very difficult to stop very ordinary things from being patented."
This is a question of policy, rather than a legal question, according to Jacob. However, he admitted that he was glad he hasn't had to consider any software patent cases in the appeal courts yet.
Jacob claims to have also noticed a change in the attitude toward patents and intellectual property in general.
"IP rights themselves may have reached a bit of a swing of opinion. One is detecting public disquiet in a number of areas of intellectual property, asking: Are we going too far? There's a serious worry about patent offices and how you stop them from granting pretty ropey patents," he said.
http://news.com.com/U.K.+judge+frown...3-6027097.html
Big in Saunnas
Firefox 'Passes 20 Percent Market Share' In Europe
Ingrid Marson
Mozilla Firefox has achieved an market share of over 20 percent in Europe, according to the latest figures released by French Web metrics firm XiTi.
XiTi, which based its figures on a sample of 32.5 million Web site visits that took place on Sunday 8 January, said that Finland has the highest proportion of Firefox users, followed by Slovenia and Germany. It found that the open source browser is used by 38, 36 and 30 percent of users in these countries respectively.
The UK has one of the lowest proportions of Firefox users in Europe, accounting for only 11 percent of Web site visits. The figure of 20 percent across Europe was obtained by calculating an average from the figures obtained for each European country, according to XiTi.
But XiTi's figures should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, as Firefox usage tends to be highest over the weekend, according to Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe.
"We should emphasise that these measures have been done on a Sunday, when Firefox' usage peaks. The Firefox browser is less used during the week, as enterprises are more conservative when it comes to using a newer browser," said Nitot, in a blog posting that commented on earlier figures released by the Web metrics company.
Other Web metrics companies produce more conservative estimates of Firefox' market share. In November, OneStat.com reported that Firefox had achieved a global market share of 11.5 percent, although it found that only 4.9 percent of people were using it in the UK.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/app...9247539,00.htm
Music Sales Are Booming On Internet
AP
Sales of music via the Internet and mobile phones continued to boom in 2005, the recording industry reported Thursday, reaching 6 percent of global record company revenues.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, also called on Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, to join the fight against music piracy, which it claims severely erodes the profits of its 1,450 member record companies across the globe.
The London-based IFPI said that record company revenues reached $1.1 billion in 2005, up from $380 million in 2004. Music fans around the globe downloaded 420 million single tracks in 2005, more than double the 156 million downloaded the previous year.
"2005 was the year that the digital music market took shape," said IFPI Chairman John Kennedy.
The IFPI added that the legitimate music business was gradually gaining ground on digital piracy. It said research showed that in Europe's two biggest digital markets - Britain and Germany - more music fans are now legally downloading music than illegally file-swapping.
A series of lawsuits against piracy by the IFPI have so far largely targeted individual song swappers for breach of copyright rather than ISPs which can claim that they have no knowledge of any piracy occurring on their networks.
Kennedy, who said he approached prominent ISPs a year ago about a coordinated response and has received "effectively a zero response," put them on notice Thursday that the IFPI would consider litigation if they did not join the fight against piracy.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=D EFAULT
Store Closings Bring Up Questions
Kari Jordan
The issue of store closings in the Copper Country Mall has been preeminent in the Houghton/Hancock Community for years. Hallmark, Payless and Radio Shack are just a few stores that have closed over the years. Recently Sam Goody and Rex Electronics have closed their businesses as well. Where is everyone buying their music now?
First year Construction Management major Gary Hudgins (Detroit native) buys his CDs from Wal-Mart. “I like music and find that when you buy the CDs you get the lyrics as well and nice album covers,” he said. Isaiah Cunningham, a transfer student in the Mechanical Engineering department likes to purchase his music at Target.
Are more students using the option of downloading their music at 88 cents per song? With the illegal downloading issues apparent on many campuses, how can you stay safe?
According to the Michigan Tech Telecommunications Department, MTU students are now able to “enjoy affordable alternative to illegal peer-to-peer files sharing on and off campus,” through a partnership with the Ruckus Digital Entertainment Network. Through this service students are allowed to legally download music and movies. The cost for this service for students is $14.95 per semester for music and $19.95 per semester for movies, or $29.95 for both music and movies. Other entertainment services available include NetFlix, Columbia House and BMG Music Services.
Are these services or others like them ridding us of the need of Blockbuster, Family Video or the electronics department in Wal-Mart or ShopKo?
According to CNet.com a study by researchers at Harvard University tracked music downloads over 17 weeks. Over this period, 1.75 million downloads took place from two OpenNap servers. The study showed that file sharing has a limited effect on record sales. On the contrary, downloads could possibly have a slight positive effect on the sales of the top albums since people use downloading to “sample” a song and tend to buy the entire album if they like it.
With many options available, there are no certain trends presently. Information on any of the above-mentioned services is available via the Internet.
http://www.mtulode.com/index.php?iss...=12&artid=4986
Advocates of Wi-Fi in Cities Learn Art of Politics
Glenn Fleishman
The idea of building citywide wireless networks from the community level was suspiciously simple back in 2000, although the plans sounded like the work of underground revolutionaries. "All of us were very idealistic, and all quite strongly opinionated," said Adam Shand, founder of Personal Telco, which had visions of such a network in Portland, Ore.
There as elsewhere, it was seen as a three-step process.
First, build home-brew Wi-Fi antennas and develop software to make outdoor wireless networks affordable and practical.
Second, persuade thousands of people in each city to stick Wi-Fi antennas out their windows, on their roofs or in their places of business to serve collectively as the nodes of a network. (Some groups sought to share existing commercial broadband Internet access - often regardless of whether an Internet service provider allowed that kind of sharing - while others wanted to build a separate community network.)
Third, link those thousands of nodes into neighborhood networks that would themselves connect into a cloud of free citywide Wi-Fi coverage. That's free as in free beer as well as free as in freedom: most advocates envisioned no restrictions on content or participation, and no access charges. In contrast, almost all early Wi-Fi hot spots were pinpoints of service, had fees attached and restricted use.
Step 2 was never completed, which is why victory speeches seem, at first glance, out of place. Nonetheless, "community wireless accomplished spectacularly well what it set out to do," said Dana Spiegel, president of NYCwireless, a volunteer wireless advocacy group in Manhattan.
While attendance at some community networking groups has plummeted and some smaller groups have disappeared, their technical and political impact has never been higher. Wireless advocates no longer dangle dangerously from rooftops mounting antennas built inside potato-chip cans, although some still provide technical help to business owners and nonprofit groups in creating free Wi-Fi hot spots.
"The problems that were hard in 2001 were technical ones," Mr. Spiegel said. "Now, they're personal and relationship and political ones. The technology, we almost don't even think about it anymore."
Greg Richardson, president of Civitium, a consulting firm, says that movement was the impetus for government-run citywide wireless Internet plans. Mr. Richardson has been a consultant on municipal wireless policy and technical issues for Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities.
Community wireless gave municipal planners "the validation that a lot of those ideas could work," Mr. Richardson said. Early and continuing municipal efforts to provide small areas of free access in parks and downtown districts were and still are often created in conjunction with these community groups.
The move from building physical networks to building political influence, many advocates say, stems in part from an August 2004 forum organized by the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network in Illinois.
At the event, many community wireless leaders met for the first time. Sessions were conducted with politicians and members of nonprofit groups interested in diversifying media ownership. Sascha D. Meinrath, the network's project coordinator, said he saw a political awakening hit the technically focused participants.
"We could develop all of these technologies, we could come up with the holy grail of wireless technologies, and then it would be illegal to deploy it," he said. After they returned from the conference, several wireless advocates became involved in the political debates over municipal broadband. These debates intensified after Philadelphia announced in late 2004 that it would build a citywide Wi-Fi network.
In quick succession, other cities announced their own plans, including Minneapolis; San Francisco; Anaheim, Calif.; and Tempe, Ariz.
Much of the advocates' involvement has centered on stressing network neutrality, in which a network operator has little say over what devices are used on a network and for what purpose.
The issue became more prominent after recent statements by the chief executive of AT&T (the former SBC) suggesting that content providers like Google might be required to pay fees to reach AT&T's Internet access customers. Scattered reports also indicate that some access providers may be blocking or interrupting Internet phone services.
Michael Oh of NewburyOpen.net, a commercially sponsored free Wi-Fi zone on Newbury Street in Boston, said, "I don't think anyone in the SBC world or the policy-making world would have anticipated that there would have been anyone at the table like us when it came to municipal wireless."
Many wireless advocates said they already had relationships with local politicians, and now were stepping up to the state level; some were contacted by officials trying to make sense of broadband policy. Richard MacKinnon, founder of the Austin Wireless City Project, testified at state hearings in Texas and joined in a successful fight against a bill to restrict municipal broadband service.
Wireless advocates "have done more to bring forward the concerns of network neutrality as well as open access" than anyone else in the political process, Mr. Richardson said. "They have a very loud voice in an advocacy role."
A policy statement by NYCwireless lists several principles that define network neutrality: a city or network builder must resell service to other Internet service providers, avoid restrictions on content or types of service (like Internet phone service) and allow all legal devices to be connected to the network - meaning that Internet telephone adapters and wireless cameras would be as legitimate as laptop Wi-Fi cards.
Because of concerns over neutrality, many community groups have focused on how to create independent networks that require neither government support nor an Internet connection to be useful.
The Champaign-Urbana network is developing software that allows computers and Wi-Fi gateways to organize into a larger network as they find other nodes. The approach is called mesh networking; the software would be open sourced and distributed at no cost. (Mesh networks are to be the basis of all the municipal Wi-Fi networks currently planned, but are to use commercial equipment and proprietary software.)
Seattle Wireless is taking a different approach to creating fixed networks using wireless equipment. Since 2000, its founder, Matt Westervelt, and other members have planned to create a central point that would act as a relay medium for local groups seeking to connect their offices, create temporary networks for events or offer Internet connections to others.
His organization raised $2,500 for a climber to place network equipment on a cellular tower on Capitol Hill, one of the highest spots in Seattle. The cost of upkeep is to be donated by a private company.
Community advocates want to use both these independent networks and municipal broadband to carry new kinds of locally focused services and data.
Mr. Oh and The Boston Globe (a division of The New York Times Company) are experimenting in locations around Boston with what they call Pulse Points: freestanding Wi-Fi nodes with no Internet connections. These nodes carry only local discussion boards and information.
At a Pulse Point in the South Station train terminal, every other board posting in the early days "was a flame about why there was no free Internet access," Mr. Oh said. Now, the spot is routinely used to exchange information and personal stories.
Mr. Spiegel said that the transition from hardware and networks to the higher level of programs and politics was inevitable as networks spread.
"In the end, what all of us were trying to do was to change the way people thought about communications," he said. "The Internet wasn't something that you sat down at the computer to use, but that it was something that permeated our lives - it just didn't have the distribution to permeate our lives."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/te...ts/19wifi.html
Researcher: Sony BMG "Rootkit" Still Widespread
Robert Lemos
WASHINGTON D.C. -- Hundreds of thousands of networks across the globe, including many military and government networks, appear to still contain PCs with the controversial copy-protection software installed by music discs sold by media giant Sony BMG, a security researcher told attendees at the ShmooCon hacking conference this weekend.
Building on previous research that suggested some 570,000 networks had computers affected by the software, infrastructure security expert Dan Kaminsky used a different address used by the copy protection software to estimate that, a month later, 350,000 networks--many belonging to the military and government--contain computers affected by the software.
"It is unquestionable that Sony's code has gotten into military and government networks, and not necessarily just U.S. military and government networks," Kaminsky said in an interview after his presentation at ShmooCon. The researcher would not say how many networks belonged to government or military top-level domains.
The latest research results comes as Sony BMG is attempting to finish up this particular embarrassing chapter in the company's use of digital-rights management software. Earlier this month, a New York district court judge gave the nod to a settlement penned by Sony BMG and the attorneys for six class-action lawsuits in the state. More than 15 other lawsuits are pending against the media giant, according to court filings.
The controversy surrounds several flaws in two types of copy-protection software used on Sony BMG music CDs and the company's previous practices of hiding the software from a computer's user and making removal of the software extremely inconvenient. The two practices--considered unfair by the Attorney General for the State of Texas, whose office sued Sony BMG--resemble "rootkit" techniques used by malicious Internet attackers.
Sony BMG uses two types of digital-rights management (DRM) software: the Extended Copy Protection (XCP) program created by First 4 Internet and the MediaMax program created by SunnComm.
Kaminsky's research uses a feature of domain-name system (DNS) servers: The computers will tell whether an address has recently been looked up by the server. The security researcher worked from a list of 9 million domain-name servers, about 3 million of which are reachable by computers outside their networks. Kaminskly sent DNS requests to the 3 million systems, asking each to look up whether an address used by the XCP software--in this case, xcpimages.sonybmg.com--was in the systems' caches.
During his first survey, carried out over three days in mid-November, he found 568,000 DNS servers had previously been asked to look up three different server addresses used by the XCP software. Another 350,000 servers had to be thrown out from the data set because they did not obey commands to only look in their cache, and instead asked for information from other servers on the Internet.
The most recent survey, which lasted between December 15 and December 23, he found 350,000 servers had the unique address in their caches. While other factors may increase or decrease the number, Kaminsky continues to stress that the experiment is about finding out the magnitude of the impact of Sony BMG's software.
"The data shows that this is most likely a hundreds-of-thousands to millions of victims issue," Kaminsky said.
The data might also show how widespread piracy has become. The 52 music titles released with the XCP software were only released in North America, he said. However, the network apparently affected by the Sony BMG issue covered 135 countries. About 4.7 million discs were manufactured and about 2.1 million had sold, according to Sony statements.
"The global scope is the big mystery here," he said. "It is fairly likely that a lot of the discs were pirated."
In December, Sony BMG changed the banner ad that displays on PCs that play a CD to a graphic that requests them to download the uninstaller. The graphical reminder showed that Sony BMG is taking the threat seriously, Kaminsky said, and could be responsible for much of the decrease in his numbers. Sony BMG could not be reached for comment on Monday.
While the security issues related to the copy-protection software have apparently affected U.S. government and military computers, the Department of Justice will not likely get involved, said Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.
"I don't see the federal government suing a big company like Sony," she said. "The fact that military networks have likely been affected by this won't change that."
http://www.securityfocus.com/print/news/11369
Windows Wireless Flaw a Danger to Laptops
Brian Krebs
At the ShmooCon gathering in Washington, D.C., today, old-school hacker and mischief maker Mark "Simple Nomad" Loveless released information on a staggeringly simple but very dangerous wireless security problem with a feature built into most laptop computers running any recent version of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Laptops powered by Windows XP or Windows 2000 with built-in wireless capabilities (these includes most laptops on the market today) are configured so that when the user opens up the machine or turns it on, Windows looks for any available wireless connections. If the laptop cannot link up to a wireless network, it creates what's known as an ad-hoc "link local address," a supposed "private network" that assigns the wireless card a network address of 169.254.x.x (the Xs represent a random number between 1 and 254).
Microsoft designed this portion of Windows so that the address becomes associated with the name or "SSID" of the last wireless network from which the user obtained a real Internet address. The laptop then broadcasts the name of that network out to other computers within a short range of the machine (which may vary depending a number of things, including the quality of the laptop's embedded network card and things that may obstruct the signal, like walls, e.g.).
What Loveless found was that by creating a network connection on his computer that matches the name of the network the target computer is broadcasting, the two computers could be made to associate with one another on the same link local network, effectively allowing the attacker to directly access the victim's machine.
I followed Loveless up to his hotel room to get a first hand example of how this attack would work. I set up an ad hoc wireless network connection on my Windows XP laptop named "hackme." Within a few seconds of hitting "Ok," to create the network, my laptop was assigned a 169.254.x.x address. A few seconds later, Loveless could see my computer sending out a beacon saying it was ready to accept connections from other computers that might also have the "hackme" network pre-configured on their machines. Loveless then created an ad hoc network with the same name, and told his computer to go ahead and connect to "hackme." Voila! His machine was assigned a different 169.254.x.x address and we both verified that we could send data packets back forth to each other's computer.
Here's the really freaky part about all this: No more than five minutes after I had deleted the "hackme" network ID from my laptop, Loveless and I spotted the same network name being broadcast from another computer that didn't belong to either of us. Turns out, someone else at the hacker conference was trying to join the fun.
As Loveless pointed out, this "feature" of Windows actually behaves somewhat like a virus. Think of it this way: If you connect your Windows laptop to the wireless network at the local Starbucks, for instance, your computer will indefinitely store the name of the Starbucks network (invariably these are named "T-Mobile" for the wireless company that provides the service). Should you at a later date happen to open up your laptop in the vicinity of another Windows user who also had recently gotten online at Starbucks, those two machines may connect to each other without any obvious notification to either user.
This is precisely what was happening for a client of Bruce Kyes Hubbert, a systems engineer I met at Shmoocon who works for a company called Airmagnet, which develops wireless security products (companies often use Airmagnet and other such tools to ensure employees aren't setting up unauthorized wireless networks that could compromise the organization's security.) Hubbert said he smacked his forehead while hearing Loveless give his presentation because it explained weird behavior one of his company's clients has been seeing a lot more of lately.
Hubbert said this particular client -- a very large company that he asked me not to name -- was complaining that Airmagnet's products were setting off a bunch of false-positives, detecting rogue wireless networks throughout the client's company. He said the odd thing was that there appeared to be more of these networks being set up every day within the company, at the rate of two or three additional ad-hoc networks each day.
"They kept telling us, 'we've been seeing more ad-hoc networks showing up in our building every day,' and most of them were for local hotel hotspots," Hubbert said. "So we'd see multiple machines all associating with the same network SSID, and meanwhile the user is refreshing their PowerPoint presentation and has no idea this is going on in the background."
As it turns out, the specifications for this Windows feature -- detailed in a technical document entitled "RFC 3927," were actually written in part by a Microsoft employee -- one B. Aboba, according to the document. Strangely enough, the developers of that spec foretold of the dangers of configuring things the way Microsoft ultimately decided to do with their wireless system in Windows. This from section 5, paragraph three of the RFC:
"NOTE: There are certain kinds of local links, such as wireless LANs, that provide no physical security. Because of the existence of these links it would be very unwise for an implementer to assume that when a device is communicating only on the local link it can dispense with normal security precautions. Failure to implement appropriate security measures could expose users to considerable risks."
Whoops. Anyway, you might be wondering now how you can make sure your Windows laptop is protected from this.....er, feature. First of all, if you are running any kind of network firewall -- including the firewall that comes built in to Windows XP -- you won't have to worry about some stranger connecting to your laptop. In fact, I had to shut down my firewall for both of us to successfully conduct our test.
Also, many laptops have a button you can push that disables the built-in wireless feature until you hit that button again. Turning off the wireless connection when you are not using it also prevents this from being a problem.
Another good idea is to change the setting on the computer's wireless card to connect only to "infrastructure networks" -- real wireless access points that actually allow you to surf the Web. To do this, go to "Start," "Control Panel," "Network Connections," and then right click on the entry labeled "wireless network connection" and select "Properties" from the drop down menu. Then click on the "Wireless Networks" tab, and then on the "Advanced" tab at the bottom of that window. A box should pop up that gives you three buttons to choose from: Select the one next to "Access point (infrastructure) networks only."
By the way, Microsoft has acknowledged this vulnerability and says it plans to change the default configuration in the next service packs released for Windows, whenever that will be.
As a sidenote, Loveless described in delicious detail for a rapt audience at ShmooCon how he used the trick on various airline flights to gain access to Windows machines that other passengers were using. Referring to a previous conversation he had with Jennifer Grannick, a lawyer who represents accused hackers (and who also gave this morning's ShmooCon keynote), Loveless said he believes that since the attacks were mostly carried while the plane was over international waters that U.S. law enforcement might have a hard time making the case that he was violating any laws. The real answer to that very interesting question, he said, would probably not be evident until someone gets sued in court for it.
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/secu...s_feature.html
Mac Users 'Too Smug' Over Security
Technology commentator Bill Thompson is worried about the lack of herd immunity among his fellow Apple Mac users.
The first known computer virus, the Elk Cloner, is 25 years old. Since its appearance we have seen hundreds of thousands of malicious programs and their impact on our computer use has been immense.
Millions of people have lost work, had their private information stolen or simply had to waste precious hours cleaning up their computers after infection.
A small number of companies have grown rich on the sales of anti-virus software, while organised crime is believed to commission many of today's viruses as a money-making venture, selling services to spammers or using them to blackmail websites.
That first virus was specific to the Apple II computer and spread by inserting itself into the operating system files that were installed on every boot floppy, since this was in the days before hard drives in personal computers and few of us had network connections.
Slipped disk
Those halcyon days when you only had to remember to scan every floppy disk for infection are long gone, of course.
Now the broadband internet connection that keeps me always online leaves me always vulnerable, and regular virus scans are the order of the day.
And viruses are only one of the ways that malicious software spreads. Worms and Trojans are just as dangerous, and often harder to protect against.
These days Apple users are almost unbearably smug when the subject turns to malware. I was invited to appear on Radio Four's You and Yours this week to talk about viruses and other malware and our focus was on issues with Windows since it is the most commonly used operating system.
After the show we got dozens of e-mails from complacent Mac users pointing out that they were safe and suggesting that people simply abandon Windows if they want to be secure.
Mac users demonstrate an indefensible smugness when it comes to the dangers of having their systems compromised by malicious software and opened up to exploitation by others
It would certainly be wonderful if the Macintosh computer and its operating system were immune to attack but this is just wishful thinking. Mac OS is certainly a lot better than Windows, but being better isn't nearly enough.
Mac OS may not have the gaping holes that let viruses spread, but worms, spyware and even keyloggers are out there.
They can't spread as easily, and most would only be installed by a careless user clicking "Accept" on a dodgy install dialog, but the regular stream of security fixes from Apple's software update service makes it clear that there are real dangers.
After all, Mac OS is built on top of the Unix operating system and it, like its close relative Linux, has many well-known security problems that can allow it to be compromised.
Owner occupier
Sometimes Apple make things worse. For example, widgets, small programs that can do things like search online dictionaries or let you listen to streamed BBC programs, can be installed without your permission when you visit a website using the Safari browser, just like Windows does with ActiveX controls. It took Apple weeks to fix this.
And though Microsoft's tribulations over the recently-discovered vulnerability in the way Windows Meta File images are handled made the papers, accompanied by howls of protest from those who wanted the company to rush out an untested fix, a similar flaw in Apple's own QuickTime received very little publicity.
Any Mac user who believes they are totally safe is being reckless with their files and personal information. What's worse, they are also being reckless with mine.
One reason why there aren't many malicious Mac programs is that there are fewer Mac users out there, but the fact that some have been written shows that they are possible in principle.
If the millions of internet-connected Macs are left open to attack then this increases the chance that an effective Trojan or piece of spyware will reach critical mass and spread rapidly, and it also increases the incentive for a bright programmer to write Mac-specific malware that could affect me.
It's exactly like the spread of infectious diseases, and one of the reasons why we vaccinate our children against many illnesses that are now uncommon. If we maintain what is called "herd immunity", then even if there is an outbreak, it will not spread and become an epidemic.
There may not be any Mac viruses at the moment, and the way the system handles user accounts and security means that they are unlikely, but we need to take steps to safeguard ourselves against other malicious software.
As things stand, the Mac community has no herd immunity because most users seem to assume that they don't need to take preventive action.
Although the risk of a malicious Mac program spreading as quickly as any Windows one is very low, it should not be ruled out. After all, the very first internet worm, back in 1988, affected Unix systems with a security model very similar to Mac OS.
The Mac ships with a good firewall, and it should be used. There are tools to scan your system for known malicious programs or to check whether it has been hacked into, and they should be used too.
Mac users demonstrate an indefensible smugness when it comes to the dangers of having their systems compromised by malicious software and opened up to exploitation by others. It's time they started behaving a bit more responsibly.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4609968.stm
Mac Security Concerns Answered
Bill Thompson
Technology commentator Bill Thompson responds to the feedback he received over his column suggesting that Mac users are too smug about computer security.
The vehemence with which the Mac community greeted my modest suggestion that the security of Mac OS might not be absolute did not surprise me.
I knew when I started to write the column, and please let's be clear that this is a personal, by-lined column and does not claim to be a news report, that I was about to step into dangerous waters.
However the piece is not a troll, and I didn't write it just to get slashdotted and have my name traduced all over the comments pages and the blogosphere.
I wrote it because I'm a Mac user, among other things, and I worry that we do not take security seriously enough as a community.
Despite what some people seem to think having read the piece, I don't believe that Mac viruses already exist, and I think it's very unlikely that they ever will.
The security model in Unix-based operating systems like Darwin means that it is very hard to see how an infection could spread, even if an executable could be compromised.
But viruses aren't the end of the problem. There are lots of other malicious programs out there, and the Mac is vulnerable to some of them.
If we ignore this then when an effective piece of Mac malware does emerge, many will be defenceless, and that will damage individual users and the Macintosh ideology.
Issues tackled
Let's deal with the bits that are weak in my article.
First, I mentioned that my broadband connection means I have to scan for viruses, but failed to point out that I scan my Windows desktop and my children's Windows PCs.
I don't have anti-virus software for my Mac, and I don't think I need it.
I hope I achieved that goal, even if I did upset a lot of people who seem to feel that anything but fawning admiration for Apple is an act of betrayal by an apostate
I have never claimed there are Mac viruses out there, and I said in the piece that they are unlikely, but I should have made that clearer.
If a Mac virus emerged then I imagine we would all hear about it pretty quickly, and defensive measures could be taken then.
Second, I pointed out that Safari can install widgets without any user intervention, and didn't make it clear that Apple fixed this issue some time ago.
This was an editing error on my part, and I apologise.
And finally, I didn't give details of where to go for more help. For example, SecureMac.com has details of the Saint vulnerability scanner and Corsaire has a white paper on securing your Mac and I should have pointed to these.
Outstanding concerns
However the wider point, that there are exploitable vulnerabilities and sometimes Apple puts them there, remains.
Even if I'm careful to apply updates when they are made available, some people might not and their systems could be compromised. And there is always a gap between the discovery of an issue and an available fix, a gap which could be exploited.
Several people asked me for examples of worms, spyware, keyloggers and even viruses for the Mac.
As I've said - let me say it again - there aren't any viruses and I don't think there will be.
But spyware and keyloggers are written for Mac OS as for other Unixes, and could be installed on a compromised system by a worm or even by a Trojan that is installed with user permission.
The Sans vulnerabilities listing shows clearly that Darwin, the Mac kernel, has the same sort of security vulnerabilities as any Unix system.
Apple's update policy means that many security fixes are bundled together, but we have to rely on their assessment of what counts as a critical bug.
There isn't much Mac-specific malware apart from Opener, which disables the firewall and can destroy data, but there are many programs which attack Unix installations and these should be taken more seriously than they are by the Mac community.
Obscurity versus security
While the first response to all of this will be that none of these spread in the wild and all require some degree of user intervention to be installed, surely we can all agree that if a way around that protection could be found, then these exercises would become real threats.
The Corsaire white paper, Securing Mac OS X, talks in detail about how to improve the security of a Mac system. It takes work, because there are issues to be dealt with.
I believe that security through obscurity is no security at all, and that unless we have an open debate about the threats facing the Mac using community then we expose ourselves to danger.
We also expose those who know little about computers but chose the Mac because of its ease of use and elegance a disservice by encouraging them to think that they don't need to think about security at all.
When I write for the BBC I'm writing for a general audience with an interest in technology, not for the Slashdot crowd. I try very hard to be accurate and when I explain technical matters I will simplify but endeavour not to misrepresent.
In this article, I was speaking to an audience of Mac users of all skill levels, some of whom know nothing about computers. They need to understand that security matters to them just as much as it matters to Windows users.
I hope I achieved that goal, even if I did upset a lot of people who seem to feel that anything but fawning admiration for Apple is an act of betrayal by an apostate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4620548.stm
Label follows Moore’s law into history
Intel Drops "Pentium" Brand
Wolfgang Gruener
Intel has made a final decision to get rid of one of its oldest and most valuable brands, sources told TG Daily: "Pentium," unveiled in 1993 for its P5 processor generation, will begin to quietly disappear in the current CPU generation such as the single-core 600 series as well as the D 800 and D 900 families.
Sources indicated that Intel will drop the Pentium name without making a major announcement, but simply transition to processor names such as "Intel D 920" or "Intel 672" without introducing a new brand. Apparently, the transition is planned to begin in the immediate future. The company declined to comment on the possibly fading Pentium brand.
The decision to depart from an established brand always is risky, but Kevin Krewell, principal analyst with In-Stat/MDR and editor in chief of the
Microprocessor Report, suggests that the Pentium naming tradition was becoming old, confusing and desperately needed a refreshment. "In my opinion, Intel should have introduced a new name after launching Pentium II. It was getting quite confusing already back then," he said. After having squeezed more than a dozen variations of Pentiums under one roof since the brand's introduction in 1993, a shift in Intel's marketing and product strategy may have been the decisive impact to kick out Pentium.
According to Krewell, the processor is becoming less important in Intel's product line-up: "Intel downplays the processor brand. The spotlight is on platforms such as Centrino," he said. He expects that the loss of Pentium will have a financial, impact, but believes that it will not large enough to hurt Intel: "They can throw an amazing amount of cash at branding as soon as a new product is announced."
Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, told TG Daily that Intel has informed OEM's some time ago that the Pentium brand will be going away. "Those OEM's are very upset about this decision. Pentium kept the product line-up somewhat in order. The complexity of Intel's products creates too many possibilities to put a system together. It's a nightmare," Enderle said.
While companies that command the chain from building and selling a system, such as Dell, may benefit from Intel's decision, traditional system builders are left behind, Enderle believes: "The more choices you have, the more problems arise at the retail level," he explained.
Enderle goes as far as saying that AMD may benefit from the outgoing Pentium brand and attract even more system builder attention. While AMD typically closely watches what OEM's are asking for, Intel on the other side "has a history of not listening to OEM's," he said. "Their approach typically is "it's ok if you disagree, but we are going through with this anyway," according to Enderle.
Still, Enderle found Intel's decision surprising. "Pentium was not a damaged good that would have forced Intel to such a departure. I cannot really remember when GE the last time threw out such a brand. It is like General Motors not selling Chevrolets anymore."
A brief history of the Pentium brand
The Pentium brand was created by Lexicon Branding - a branding firm that is responsible for other tech logos such as Apple's PowerBook, RIM's Blackberry, Palm's Tungsten and Zire, or Adobe's InDesign - in 1992. Intel introduced the brand in March of 1993 with the first Pentium processor, which originally should have been named i586. The fact that numbers are not able to be trademarked, reportedly prompted Intel to switch to a dedicated name for its processors.
The first Pentium CPU debuted as a 60 and 66 MHz chip, integrated 3.1 million transistors and was built in an 800 nm production process. The original Pentium carried a now famous floating point flaw referred to as the "FDIV bug," which ended up costing Intel an estimated $450 million in recall cost and prompting the company to create its "Validation Labs (
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/05/02/pr...ss_production/)," a 3500-employee organization that tests processors before their release into mass production.
The second generation Pentium was the "Pentium Pro," which was based on the P6 architecture and released in November 1995. The chip was built in 350 nm, carried 5.5 million transistors and initially ran at clock speeds of 150 and 200 MHz. Just about a year later, Intel introduced the Pentium MMX, the first chip to receive significant components from Intel's development team in Haifa, Israel. Also produced in 350 nm, the MMX (http://
http://www.tomshardware.com/1997/01/..._expectations/) ran at 166 and 200 MHz.
The Pentium II came in May of 1997 (
http://www.tomshardware.com/1997/04/..._strikes_back/) with 7.5 million transistors and initial clock speeds of up to 266 MHz. The successor Pentium III (250 nm to 130 nm) (
http://www.tomshardware.com/1999/08/23/performance/) followed 18 months later in February of 1999 with 450 MHz, but eventually took Intel above the 1 GHz mark in 2000. The chip was first to introduce a much criticized serial number and was Intel's processor in the "Gigahertz race" with AMD. Pressured by its competitor, Intel lost the race to launch the first GHz chip by a few days and was not able to ship Pentium III-based GHz chips in large quantities initially. In July of 2000, Intel announced a 1.13 GHz Pentium III chip that was described as "the most unreliable and instable CPU Intel has ever released (
http://www.tomshardware.com/2000/07/31/intel/)" in a review of Tom's Hardware Guide, which prompted Intel to recall the processor.
The Pentium 4 introduced the "NetBurst"-architecture in November of 2000 (
http://www.tomshardware.com/2000/11/20/intel/). It was the firm's first new design since the P6 generation, and has lead Intel from the 180 nm "Willamette" chip to today's 65 nm Pentium D dual-core CPUs (http://
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/...ing_out_party/). Willamette debuted with 42 million transistors, 1.4 and 1.5 GHz. Today's 65 nm Pentium D 900 carries 376 million transistors and is expected to reach speeds up to 3.6 GHz, while the single core Pentium 600 series (
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/02/...cott_reworked/) is up to 3.8 GHz.
NetBurst not only took Intel through its greatest phase of clock speed increases, but also to a stage which highlighted excessive power consumption and heat dissipation. More recently Intel announced a shift in design strategy: Instead of accelerating the growth of GHz, Intel said in August of 2005 that it will focus on chip designs that balance power consumption and speed. The first new desktop processor design that will not listen to the Pentium name will be based on the Merom core, which is expected to debut in September of this year (
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/11/ merom_to_be_launched_in_september/).
While it remains to be seen, how Intel will be impacted by the Pentium going away, chairman Craig Barrett may have personal rebranding issues: Barrett reportedly owns a ranch in Darby, Montana, and gave his horses rather unique names: Among these names are Nasdaq, Itanium Ingot - and Pentium Princess.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/15/in...pentium_brand/
Intel Misses Fourth-Quarter Forecast
Intel Corp's fourth-quarter profit and sales missed Wall Street's expectations today as the world's largest chip maker faced lower-than-expected average selling prices and continued difficulties in meeting demand.
For the three months to December 31, Intel's profit was $US2.45 billion ($A3.25 billion)or 40 cents a share compared with a profit of $US2.12 billion, or 33 cents a share, in the same period in 2004.
Sales jumped 6 per cent to $US10.2 billion ($A13.53 billion) from $US9.6 billion ($A12.73 billion) in the last quarter of 2004.
Analysts expected the company to earn 43 cents a share on sales of $US10.56 billion ($A14 billion), a survey by Thomson Financial said.
In December, the company narrowed its forecast to $US10.4 billion to $10.6 billion.
Chief financial officer Andy Bryant said Intel's tight capacity was probably leading to marketshare gains by rival Advanced Micro Devices.
"Although we fell below our expectations for the fourth quarter, we enter 2006 with exciting new product," said Intel CEO Paul Otellini.
Intel shares fell 1 per cent, to close at $US25.52 in trading on the Nasdaq stockmarket.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/breaki...467031579.html
The Low Down on Downloading
Carla Wintersgill
Which of the 14 million iPods sold in the holiday quarter are spinning legitimate tracks?
It's impossible to say how many songs are downloaded, but Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) chairman, Mitch Bainwol, estimates the monthly number exceeds two billion.
Apple's iTunes Music Store has sold 850 million songs since its 2003 introduction. The sales have paralleled a surge in popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading programs such as Limewire, Soulseek, and Kazaa.
Record companies are feeling the squeeze of lost revenue as a result of the popularity of such P2P networks. The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) estimates a loss of $250 million Cdn in sales over the past three years -- a 20 per cent drop for the industry.
In the United States, where file sharing costs record companies an estimated $300 million US per year, the RIAA is cracking down on illegal downloading. It has pursued legal action against anyone found to have downloaded copyrighted material.
The CRIA is having less luck fighting copyright infringement. In March 2004, a court ruled that internet service providers were not required to identify users who post songs on file-sharing databases.
The ruling means Canadians can continue to upload music anonymously without fear of legal action from irate record labels. Even if Canadian parliament passes Bill C-60, strengthening copyright laws, the court has established the precedent that Canadians are free to download songs without being identified.
Many up-and-coming artists, however, don't see downloading as a bad thing. They post songs on the Internet for people to download, hoping to cultivate a fan base through sites such as Myspace.com.
Amy Elderkin, 21, is a Toronto-based aspiring singer/songwriter. She has a page on Myspace where she posts her songs, and credits the site with giving her much-needed exposure.
"People want me to play gigs, people want to buy my stuff, people want to do collaborations with me," she says.
"It's a simple way to get people to listen to your music. You're not pushing them and it's there if they want it."
Although Elderkin puts her own music out there, she has a problem with people downloading albums from artists for free.
"When you burn an entire album, you're not supporting the artist that you're listening to and enjoying," she says. "Go out and support (the artist), otherwise they're not going to be able to keep going because they won't have any money to do it."
Antonello Di Domenico, a consultant at Bumstead Productions Ltd., a management company whose roster includes the Canadian band The Trews, also sees sites such as Myspace as a useful promotional tool.
"People go to Myspace. Why fight it?" he asks.
Di Domenico currently manages a new band, Rocketface, who have a profile on Myspace. He encourages people to add them to their list of friends, and Di Domenico sees those people showing up for gigs. Rocketface has more than 3000 people on its friends list.
"If you're a fan, you'll support the band. Even if you download it, you'll buy it," says Di Domenico.
"It's a tough industry to crack," he says. "There are only one or two Franz Ferdinands a year."
For incessant downloaders, Charles Coleman, a computer technician at Geek Squad, has a word of warning. "People that are tech savvy can take the connections the programs use to attach to your computer," he says.
Coleman describes a computer as a house. The house has different doors: Some are locked, some are opened. Hackers and spyware programs know which doors are easy to get into, giving them free reign over a victim's computer. Downloading sites -- Coleman names Kazaa among the worst -- can leave a user's files vulnerable.
"Kazaa forces you to install adware and spyware tools that track your internet usage, lets the parent company know what websites you visit, and allows them to target you to what products you would be interested in," he says.
For Coleman, the debate between legal downloading and file sharing boils down to practicality.
"You're better off getting it from an official download site. It's worth spending the money for a good quality song rather than getting something else and finding you have a credit card bill for somewhere in Rwanda."
Downloading isn't illegal for Canadians, but fans should be aware of the technical risks -- and moral issues -- streaming out of those pretty, white iPod earbuds.
http://www.theeyeopener.com/storydet...m?storyid=2503
p2pnet talks to mininova
p2p news special / p2pnet: Peer-to-peer, person-to-person, people-to- people, p2p, is here. And it's not going away. Nor will it be scarfed up and regurgitated by vested corporate interests as a wholly commercial technology meant to keep cash-cow consumers mindlessly swallowing whatever the music, movie and software cartels care to dish out.
Rather, p2p is allowing the Net and the people who use it to be truly free, sharing with each other in a way that's never been possible before.
Bram Cohen's BitTorrent is a primary p2p technology that's now been locked up solid by the Hollywood establishment. But that's OK because it continues to thrive as ever was, outside of corporate bottom line constraints, and in original form.
Given that, directories are of obvious, and vital, importance and mininova has become firmly established as a leading torrent site.
It had its first birthday a couple of days ago and we checked in with Niek, Erik, Jos, Matthijs and Rob >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
p2pnet : Running a torrent site might be considered by some to be an occupation fraught with risk. What makes you do it?
mininova : We run mininova because we believe in the future of p2p file sharing technology and we want to provide a extensive and easy to use torrent directory for users.
p2pnet : There's a perception that what you do is illegal - that it's in some way against the law. What's your response to that?
mininova : Hosting torrent files and providing a directory of torrent files is 100% legal. Google is indexing warez and serials sites, so does that make their service illegal? Of course not. The technology is completely legal, although it'll take some time for people to get used to new technologies. Remember the first days of audio casettes? The music industry was afraid this would destroy their market, but the opposite was true.
p2pnet : The major movie and music cartels are trying to nail BT sites. Do you expect mininova to eventually be targeted? Or do you have a survival plan?
mininova : We don't suspect mininova to be ever taken down by legal actions. Unlike most BitTorrent sites, we've got a strict copyright policy. And we've got a quite good relationship with companies like Microsoft regarding copyright issues.
p2pnet : The RIAA, MPAA, BSA and other 'trade' organizations claim sites such as yours in effect feed criminal counterfeiters whom they've labeled 'pirates' Do you think these kinds of people really do use torrent sites to find material they can they sell illegally?
mininova : The commercial-pirate scene is much more hidden. They get their stuff from different places - warez/fxp sites, etc.
p2pnet : What's your perception of mininova users and the users of sites like it?
mininova : Our regular visitor is a home user who visits mininova daily and looks for new content he or she likes, for example tv shows which only air in other countries.
p2pnet : When you were getting started, you had help from ThePirateBay and isoHunt. Did this surprise you?
mininova : Yes, it was a nice surprise to see that the administrators of the (at that time) biggest BT sites were so helpful to starters like us. We still cooperate closely with those sites, of course in a whole other way than one year ago.
p2pnet : What's been your most noticeable high and most noticeable low in your first year?
mininova : In the beginning, our site went down quite often due to technical issues. Mininova simply grew too
fast for our servers to handle the load. So we had quite some down time, sometimes several days. But that moment our site was up again, our forum was flooded by "thank you, you're still alive!" posts, that's something you're not going to forget.
p2pnet : What would you say to someone thinking about starting a torrent site of their own?
mininova : Don't start a torrent site just because it's cool to have such a site. Think about new ideas, listen to the community, try to discover what people actually want on a torrent site. If your site is unique, if it has new, cool features, if it is actually something people really want, then it'll be a guaranteed success.
p2pnet : What are your predictions for the coming year vis-à-vis p2p and the entertainment and software cartels?
mininova : We're sure that p2p is here to stay. Maybe the form will change, maybe an enhanced BitTorrent protocol will be the next big thing, but p2p is not going away. Hopefully, the cartels will realize they can't fight p2p by hiring expensive lawyers, but that they need to work together with the community to find a solution that's satisfactory for everyone.
p2pnet : So you'd like to be able to sit down and discuss ways to work with the entertainment and software cartels?
mininova : Definitely. We're always open for discussion and we'd say, Feel free to contact us.
And there's one final thing we'd like to say: If you, as a BitTorrent user, want to see new features at mininova that you think might be useful, please contact us.
p2pnet : Thanks. And all the best for your second year : )
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7632
Wilson Pickett Dies of Heart Attack at 64
Wilson Pickett, the soul pioneer best known for the fiery hits "Mustang Sally" and "In The Midnight Hour," died of a heart attack Thursday, according to his management company. He was 64.
Chris Tuthill of the management company Talent Source said Pickett had been suffering from health problems for the past year.
"He did his part. It was a great ride, a great trip, I loved him and I'm sure he was well-loved, and I just hope that he's given his props," Michael Wilson Pickett, the fourth of the singer's six children, told WRC-TV in Washington after his death.
A member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Pickett _ known as the "Wicked Pickett" _ became a star with his soulful hits in the 1960s.
"In the Midnight Hour" made the top 25 on the Billboard pop charts in 1965 and "Mustang Sally" did the same the following year.
Pickett was defined by his raspy voice and passionate delivery. But the Alabama-born picket got his start singing gospel music in church. After moving to Detroit as a teen, he joined the group the Falcons, which scored the hit "I Found a Love" with Pickett on lead vocals in 1962.
He went solo a year later, and would soon find his greatest success. In 1965, he linked with legendary soul producer Jerry Wexler at the equally legendary soul label Stax Records in Memphis, and recorded one of his greatest hits, "In the Midnight Hour," for Atlantic Records. A string of hits followed, including "634- 5789," "Funky Broadway" and "Mustang Sally." His sensuous soul was in sharp contrast to the genteel soul songs of his Detroit counterparts at Motown Records.
As Pickett entered a new decade, he had less success on the charts, but still had hits, including the song "Don't Let The Green Grass Fool You."
In later years, he had legal problems and battled substance abuse; in 1994 he served jail time on an assault charge.
Besides his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, he was also given the Pioneer award by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation two years later.