View Single Post
Old 13-04-06, 12:12 PM   #2
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default

The Videotape Recorder Turns 50

Routine NAB preview event showcased revolutionary technology
James E. O'Neal

In an age when video cameras and recording devices are virtually everywhere, it's difficult to believe that it wasn't always possible to walk into a Wal-Mart or Best Buy store with $50 and leave with a new video recorder.

The science of magnetically recording video images is so mature today that it's taken completely for granted, but that was not always the case. Television broadcasting as we know it appeared in the mid-1930s. Video recording technology lagged by another 20 years.

Breakthrough

Imagine a large meeting room 50 years ago filled with 200 people assembled for a more or less routine briefing. The only thing slightly out of the ordinary is a video camera trained on the speaker and some monitors sprinkled around the room. However, television is no longer a stranger and the presence of even large tube-type cameras of that era had become fairly routine.

The event was a Saturday pre-NAB (then the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters) meeting of CBS affiliate owners and managers. The setting was the Normandie Lounge in Chicago's Conrad Hilton, the speaker was William Lodge, CBS engineering vice president and the date was April 14, 1956.

During his remarks, Lodge mentioned a new technological breakthrough, but was not specific. At the conclusion of his address, he remained at the podium. As the crowd began to murmur and break up, the video monitors went from black to an image of Lodge. Only this time, Lodge was still making his presentation, not standing silently.

This was a seeming impossibility, as the only means for preserving video images was kinescope recording, a process in which a special motion picture camera photographed a television monitor. When the recording was finished, the film had to be removed and sent away for developing. Under normal circumstances, this could take hours.

The crowd, realizing that they were experiencing something very unusual, became hushed and locked onto the monitors, viewing an image of Lodge that was indistinguishable from the video seen just moments before. Again, this was quite uncanny, as even the best "kine" had a distinctive look that set it apart from the live video it had captured.

Then a curtain opened, revealing a strange machine and four individuals hovering around it. The crowd couldn't restrain itself and amid cheers, whistles, back slappings and applause, began pushing and pressing in around the world's first video recorder and part of the team that had made it possible. Some even stood in chairs to get a better look at the device that was making this miracle possible.

That was the scene 50 years ago this month.

Practical video recording had been born. The machine was the Ampex Mark IV VTR prototype, which was to become the VRX-1000, the great-granddad of all video recorders. It was the star of the convention and even though Ampex had set a selling price of $45,000 for production models (more than $320,000 in 2006 dollars), orders were written that week for more than 70 machines. (Market research conducted prior to the show indicated that there would be a demand for no more than a dozen globally.)

CBS got the first delivery and put it on the air in late November that year to air the West Coast feed of "Douglas Edwards and the News."

This eliminated the requirement for Edwards to have to repeat his broadcast for the Pacific Time Zone. However, as the video recording technology was so new, CBS made kinescope recordings as backup and had them at the ready "just in case" during the first month of the new machine's use.

Recording of video goes back to the late 1920s when television pioneer John Logie Baird made recordings of his 30 line images on ordinary 78 rpm phonograph records. What was so special about the Ampex recorder and why did it take so long to come to market?

Those who can't remember a world without VTRs perhaps have little comprehension of the tremendous technical challenges involved in electronically recording television images. To put the problem in perspective, magnetic audio recording evolved over several decades and by the late 1940s was fairly mature when Ampex introduced its first audio machine.

To capture and reproduce high-quality audio, a recording device needs to have a passband of some 20 Hz to 18,000 Hz, or about 10 octaves. To record acceptable video, this had to be stretched to 18 octaves.

Other groups had been working on video recording schemes for at least five years prior to the success of Ampex. All relied on pulling tape past fixed heads at high speeds.

The BBC's efforts resulted in a machine known as VERA (Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus). It moved 1/2-inch tape at 16 feet per second, with a 21-inch reel of tape providing a mere 15 minutes of recording time. Video response was capped off at 3 MHz and heavy leather gloves to provide assistance with reel braking were part of the operator's toolset.

Another U.S. group established by Jack Mullin, the engineer who introduced audio tape recording to America, and funded by singer Bing Crosby, also devised a longitudinal video recorder. This machine spread the video across multiple tracks on a 1-inch tape running at a mere 120 inches per second. It made pictures, but as the response topped off at a bit over 1.5 MHz, it really wasn't up to broadcast applications.

Not one to be left out or outdone, RCA's David Sarnoff mandated that his R&D people build a video recorder. In a rather questionable move, the top audio engineer there, Harry Olson, was given the job. Even though RCA held a patent on rotary head recording, Olson simply tried to scale up a conventional audio transport to do the job.

His first machine used 1/2-inch tape pulled at 30 feet per second. It took 7,200 feet of tape to provide four minutes of recording time and the pictures were not much better than those of the other groups. As relatively crude as the kinescope recording process was, none of these video recording technologies could equal its quality, storage time and ease in handling.

Ampex engineers early on saw the futility of longitudinal recording for video and based their efforts on a rotating head design first patented for audio in 1938 by an Italian inventor. The Ampex work was kept under wraps, and due to changing economics, was actually terminated at one point. This group consisted of Charles Ginsburg, the team leader; Charles Anderson, FM expert; Ray Dolby, then an engineering student and later a household name in the audio field; Shelby Henderson, master machinist and model maker; Alex Maxey, the mechanical genius behind the rotary head design, and Fred Pfost, who solved the problem of making practical high-speed recording heads.

In addition to discarding high-speed longitudinal tape movement for achieving the necessary writing speed, the Ampex team also realized that FM offered some advantages not available with conventional recording technology, and could possibly help in squeezing those additional octaves onto tape. Research was started on an FM system that smacked of heresy--the carrier frequency was very near the highest modulating frequency and conventional wisdom dictated that the carrier frequency must be at least 10 times that frequency.

The carrier frequency was dictated by available tape head technology and this rather revolutionary FM system resulted in some mathematically interesting consequences (sidebands which could fold over into the desired signals). Nevertheless, the thing worked, and worked better than any AM signal system could have, producing a greatly improved S/N ratio and compressing the necessary 18 octaves into the space of three.

The video recorder shown to the crowds in Chicago, and destined to set the standard for all video recording, used a special 3M 2-inch tape, a four-head quadraplex or "quad" rotating head assembly and pulled tape along at a sane 15 inches per second. It could provide up to 90 minutes of recording time and recorded the full 4.2 MHz bandwidth needed for 525-line television.

Far From Perfect

These early machines were bulky (they could not fit through an ordinary doorway), weighed more than 1,000 pounds and the scores of vacuum tubes used consumed a very substantial amount of electricity.

An external supply of compressed air and a vacuum system were necessary for operation. Operational costs were extremely high by today's standards. An hour's worth of 2-inch tape cost hundreds of dollars and the life of the machine's video recording head assembly was measured at best in just a few hundred hours. This figure was sometimes much lower and head refurbishment costs amounted to $1,000 or more.

The recorders were finicky and required a highly skilled operator and a fairly intensive setup and adjustment period before each use. A great deal of heavy maintenance and specialized tools were needed to keep them operational.

Video was not instantly available, as the machines took several seconds to get up to speed and stabilize. This required care on the part of operators and TDs in making sure that the requisite back timing and pre-roll were done. Due to mechanical differences in the rotating head assemblies, none of the early machines produced recordings that were really fully interchangeable.

The networks got around this by making sure that the head assembly used for recording also did the playback. This had to be carried out in the extreme if a show was recorded in Los Angeles and then played back in New York. In such cases, the video head was removed from the recorder and shipped along with the tape. Still, the convenience and video quality made the machine an instant success.

RCA saw the handwriting and scrubbed their longitudinal recorder R&D work, licensed Ampex technology and shortly rolled out their own quad machine, the TRT-1. RCA was the only other serious competitor to Ampex and in the years that followed, a tech war of sorts evolved between the companies.

Improvements were fast and numerous: air bearing heads, rotary transformers to replace slip rings, time base correction technologies, color recording, genlockable servo systems, high band recording, velocity compensation, electronic editing, better head alloys, low-noise tape coatings, vacuum column tape handling... the list of these "one-up-manships" continued right on up until the end of 2-inch recording developments in the 1970s.

Ampex's quad design endured for well over 20 years, until it was gradually displaced by 1-inch type "C" helical scan technology.

An incredible 50 years later, there are some quad machines out there still at work. According to Pat Johnston, director of project management for AheadTek, his company is rebuilding about 200 quad heads per year.

RCA is now just a dimming memory in the broadcasting landscape. Ampex continued to build new VTR models into the dawning of the digital age, but was essentially out of broadcast video recording by the end of the millennium. The company name still exists in connection with data recording and archival storage technology, but isn't seen much in television stations anymore.

With the advent of digital television and the DVD and hard-drive video recording that it spawned, videotape use is on the wane. Some of the biggest producers of magnetic tape pulled out of the market years ago. The phrases "tapeless television station" and "the end of tape" entered the vernacular at least 10 years ago.

With the exception of data cartridges for archival recording, these prognostications may well may come to pass. Even that application appears shaky, as data packing advances in optical disc recording methodologies seem destined to surpass what can be done with magnetic storage.

For decades, video recording quality has been such that it is indistinguishable from live video. Recording devices have become so reliable and commonplace that no one is excited in the least by the words "video recording."

Still there are a few remaining from that crowd, who, 50 Aprils ago, witnessed the first demonstration of real video recording and who remember the electricity and shivers of excitement that went with it. There are many more that recall their initial encounter with videotape and the fascination that came with it--the solid snap as the guide shoe engaged; the pleasing, almost musical "buzz" produced by that massive, yet very delicate, rotary head assembly spinning at its 14,400 rpm rate; and the smell of the tape coating as the heads literally tore into it.

An early video recording textbook described the rotary head recording process as one in which the head's pole pieces "created a localized dimple, moving across the tape." Actually, something far more profound happened as the heads moved. They froze time and left behind moving images for future generations to witness and enjoy. They also launched a business that has become the single largest element in broadcasting and a technology that has become an integral part of hundreds, if not thousands of other businesses.

What Was It Like?

There is a special kind of captivation or fascination that goes along with being witness to an event destined to have historic significance.

John T. Moore, the youngest witness to the Wright brothers accomplishment in December 1903 was reported to have run down the beach at Kitty Hawk yelling at the top of his lungs to anyone listening, "They done it! They done it! Damned if they ain't flew."

This atmosphere was certainly present that Saturday in April 1956 when Ampex showed the world it had perfected a video recorder.

If anyone should know what the situation was like in the Hilton's Normandie Lounge, it would have to be Charles Anderson, one of the Ampex VTR design team members who was there with the Mark IV machine. As Anderson described it:

"The (CBS) affiliates meeting was in the Normandie Lounge, the foyer of a ballroom. We were in an alcove there with the machine, behind a curtain. No one knew we were there. CBS had cameras and monitors scattered around the lounge, but that was nothing unusual.

"There were a lot of people in the room and on cue we started to record. Bill Lodge was explaining to the group that there was something new they wanted to show. On another cue, we rewound the tape and started playing it back.

"All of a sudden, there was a deafening silence.

"Did we screw up somehow?

"Then came a roar. The curtain was opened and people started to swarm back around the machine. Before we knew it, we were knee deep in people."

Anderson recalled that Charles Ginsburg, Fred Pfost and Phil Gumby were with him that day.

"That machine was demo-ed a lot. It was a very successful show for the network. That night, Ginsburg and I went out with Blair Benson from CBS to the Blue Angel to celebrate. Ginsburg was dancing on the tabletop."

Pfost also recalled the silence that initially ensued once the playback started.

"There was total silence for about 15 seconds. Then people began to realize what they were looking at. It made such an impression on me that I get tears in my eyes telling the story. People screamed and clapped for probably 10 minutes."

After that presentation finally ended, Ampex executives realized from the reaction of the crowd that the company had a hit on its hands. The CBS demonstration had been just that--a closed-door session for invited guests. It was hastily decided to rent hotel space to exhibit the VTR for the balance of the show. Anderson remembers that part of the experience as not being so euphoric:

"Very early the next morning [Sunday], the VP was on the phone with orders to move the videotape machine. We weren't at our best from the night before, but we went ahead and moved it there. From then on there was a steady stream of people throughout the rest of the show."

Pfost also recalled relocating the recorder.

"After the demo we took the machine up to the fourth or fifth floor in the hotel. For the rest of the show that room was totally full. At the end of the week, the orders for machines amounted to more money than Ampex had been doing in a whole year. We went back [to Redwood City] and had to figure out how to build all these machines."

Ray Dolby stayed behind in Redwood City to demonstrate video recording for members of the press and Ampex executives. The reaction was similar to that in Chicago, according to Dolby.

"Everyone was enthusiastic, there was a lot of applause and laughing and clapping... but on the other hand, you have to remember this was an engineering lab, not a plush hotel room, as they had in Chicago," he said.

Even so, sales orders were being written on an almost non-stop basis. According to one source, Ampex ran out of sales forms and was writing orders on any scrap of paper they had at hand.
http://tvtechnology.com/features/new..._tape_02.shtml





The Problem with Internet-Based Movie Downloads
TDG Research

The Announcement

As most of you know by now, Monday was a 'watershed moment' in the brief history of online video: six major Hollywood studios announced plans to sell movies over the Internet - not rentals, mind you, but purchases of full-length movies in digital format that a consumer can download and watch any time they chose.

The Model

Two online movie services, Movielink and CinemaNow, will offer consumers a variety of movie titles for purchase and download. Movielink's initial offering spans 300 titles, while CinemaNow will offer around 75 titles (again, these are just initial offerings). Pricing for new movies is expected to be between 20 and 30 dollars per download, while older titles would cost 10 dollars or more.

So Why Won't This Work?

There are a myriad of reasons why this model will prove ineffective and thus require a significant overhaul within the first 12 months of operation. For the purposes of this essay, I'll discuss only three of these reasons.

1. Paying $.99 for a song/$2.50 for a TV program is not analogous to spending 20-30 dollars for a digital copy of a movie.

The studios are only too eager to point to the success of iTunes as proof of concept and to validate market timing. After all, Apple is looking to fill iTunes with a huge library of full-length Hollywood movie downloads, so why shouldn't Movielink and CinemaNow do the same thing? As many of Apple's new media competitors will tell you, that kind of logic can get you in a lot of trouble (and in a hurry).

No doubt the success of iTunes (both from a business model and consumer perspective) offers telling insights into the future of Internet media. In my opinion, the most relevant insight for new media purveyors is the one Movielink and CinemaNow are ignoring even before they sell their first download: determine the lowest price point needed to sustain the business model, and then go one step lower. This holds for almost any Internet vendor, but certainly applies to novel Internet-based media services.

Among the primary reasons consumers use the Internet for shopping is price: in most cases you can get the same item online for much less than you would pay at a retail store. Why pay 2X for a book at Barnes & Noble when you can get the same book at Amazon.com for 1X? Why pay $16 for a new CD at Best Buy when you can get the same 10 songs for $.99 each at iTunes? Why pay 30 dollars for a movie download when you can get the same movie on DVD for 15 dollars at Target? Oops, that didn't work out so well...

Little wonder this strategy appears so counter-intuitive. Movielink and CinemaNow are (a) rationalizing their new services by appealing to a business model which is but dangerously analogous to their own, yet (b) ignoring one of the key assumptions that has made this business model such a success (that is, pricing their content below that of comparable retail products).

2. Usage of these digital movie files is restricted. For example, Movielink allows consumers to download the file, copy it onto a DVD, and download the DVD content to two separate PCs. However, this DVD copy cannot be played on a regular DVD player. CinemaNow is even more restrictive, only allowing the digital movie file to be played on one PC - no copies of any kind allowed.

Are these folks brain dead? Why would I pay twice the price of a DVD to go through the hassle of downloading a digital movie file that can only be viewed on a PC? Think of the collective mindset, the group-think behind this strategy. The studios either (a) believe they can convert their current audience of online movie renters (those who pay 2 to 5 dollars for a rental download) to online movie buyers (at 20-30 dollars a pop); (b) believe that they can attract a new audience of users who, though they are not current online movie renters, will be eager to spend as much as 30 dollars for a digital movie file they can only view on their PC; or (c) don't care if these efforts succeed or fail in the short-term because the end game is about incrementally building a web brand to allow the studios to bypass the TV network owners and sell directly to the consumer.

Hmm....The first two possibilities border on the delusional, especially as the sales model is currently articulated. The third possibility, however, seems to make some sense - at least it did when Movielink and CinemaNow were first set up a few years ago. At that time, most observers believed that the studios were simply carving out a long-term position, preparing for the day when Internet movie distribution became an attractive business model.

Well, it seems the studios believe that the future started on April 3, 2006: no longer content with "short-term positioning" and online rental services, they are convinced it's time to roll a full-on purchase model. This negates the third possibility, leaving us to choose between the first two absurd possibilities, both of which find the studios convinced that this pricing model will work. As previously stated, I give them less than 12 months to radically alter the pricing scheme - and they will.

Final Thoughts

For most of the consumers who use these services, the PC monitor will be the viewing screen. According to Movielink, only 15% of its rental customers currently view their movies on a TV, while one-third use a laptop and the remaining 50% or so use a desktop computer. It seems, then, that being restricted to watching a movie on a PC monitor should not (in-and-of-itself) discourage consumers from purchasing a movie download - so goes the argument.

But if you asked these same consumers if they would rather (a) experience their 30 dollar movie download on a PC monitor, or (b) enjoy their 15 dollar DVD on the flat-panel TV and home theater system sitting in the family room, virtually all of them would prefer the latter. Watching movies on a PC monitor is a last-resort for die-hard PC addicts, not a first-resort for consumers who enjoy watching movies on their TV and who already have number of (less expensive) options for buying movies.

If you want me to use the PC as an entertainment conduit, and the PC monitor as a viewing screen, you've got to (a) make the experience more unique and compelling than my traditional media experiences, or (b) make it virtually risk-free by setting the cost of this new media experience well below my traditional media experiences.

The strategies of Movielink and CinemaNow fail on both accounts. First, the content they offer will not be uniquely compelling (at least not to a large audience) and the movie titles will (not surprisingly) look very similar to what I will see at my local retail store. Second, the 30 dollar price tag is SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER than a DVD from my local retail store yet I am limited my ability to view this content on devices other than the PC. In other words, you're asking me to take on a greater risk (higher cost for lesser experience) to try out this new media service.

These sticking points (among others) will confine the use of such services to a niche-within-a-niche - a small group of consumers who already rent movies from these services and are willing to try the purchase option.
http://news.designtechnica.com/talkback113.html





Free Music? Aggies Sign On For Program
Lanita Withers

Students at N.C. A&T can download music for a price that jibes with any college student’s budget: free.

A&T is one of about 35 campuses nationwide where Ruckus, a digital music service exclusive to college students, is offered. The service — which offers 1.5 million songs — provides a law-abiding alternative to illegal file sharing.

The service is available to on- and off-campus Aggies for free.

Other features, such as the ability to upload the music onto a digital music player or to download movies, are available for a fee.

The company is looking to provide service to more universities in the UNC system, said Brad Vaughn, the vice president of campus sales for Ruckus. East Carolina

University also has the service, according to the company’s Web site.

In recent years, colleges and universities have made efforts to curtail copyright infringement on campus.

The UNC system launched a pilot program in 2004 testing several file-sharing programs on a number of campuses. Ruckus was previewed at A&T. The pilot has since ended, but Marlow Hinton, director of information technology at A&T, said about 1,100 students used the service.

"The students really enjoyed it," he said. "They gained a lot of insight about the functionality of a music service and being able to use one legally was certainly (appealing) to them."

Universities in the UNC system have taken different approaches to sharing legal file-sharing options with students, said David Harrison, associate vice president for legal affairs with the UNC system.

In some instances, the schools themselves have entered into an agreement, he said, noting that Appalachian State University recently signed up with Ruckus.

"Other places have said: 'We’re not going to pay for it. Students, you have to pay for it. This is how you can get it,’" he said.

A&T educates incoming students on do’s and don’t’s of downloading, Hinton said.

Copyright infringement is something that is still a concern.

A national survey issued earlier this month by the University of Richmond’s Intellectual Property Institute found that 34 percent of college students illegally downloaded music from free peer-to-peer networks.

Some of the sites students visit to download music are like back alleys, Harrison said, with lots of viruses and data theft. Alternatives such as Ruckus or iTunes are more secure, he said.

The goal is to "get our kids to get out of habit of peer to peer and into the habit of legitimate services," Harrison said.

The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group , has been involved in efforts to sue college students for copyright infringement.

"Offering students legal music options is a key first step in turning the tide of illegal songlifting on campus," Cary Sherman, the RIAA’s president, said in an e-mail sent by a spokeswoman for the group. "We applaud the universities that have undertaken this important step. We also know that offering a legal alternative alone often won’t reduce the financial burden of excessive peer-to-peer traffic or protect students who download illegally from getting caught."
http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs...0101/604120321





Laptop Thieves Descend Upon Wireless Cafes

Grab-and-run robbers find pricey computers easy to resell
Jaxon Van Derbeken

A San Francisco finance manager stopped in at a Mission District cafe and was tapping on his laptop as he enjoyed his coffee just before noon on a Thursday. Suddenly, he was under siege.

"I looked up, and I saw this guy leaning into me as if he was asking a question,'' he said. "I leaned forward, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone fiddling with the computer cord. I tried to stand up, and as I stepped back, he stabbed me in the chest.''

The attack marked a violent turn in a wave of crime that has hit the city -- the "hot spots" frequented by wireless laptop users are becoming hot spots for laptop robberies.

The 40-year-old San Francisco victim of the March 16 attack suffered a partially collapsed lung and was hospitalized for six days. The two suspects fled with his Apple PowerBook, worth $2,500.

"This poor guy, who got stabbed, all he did was kind of stand up ... and almost instantaneously the guy stabbed him,'' said Inspector Robert Lynch of the San Francisco police robbery detail. "The whole thing was over in 15 seconds.''

Police say normally quiet cafes are becoming hunting grounds for laptop bandits.

"Now that we have these hot zones, people are bringing laptops out in the street, using them in public cafes,'' said police Lt. John Loftus of the robbery detail.

San Francisco police statistics show a disturbing trend. Just 18 laptop computer robberies were logged in 2004, but the figure jumped to 48 last year. There were 18 as of the end of March, a pace that could surpass 70 crimes this year.

"It's a changing culture, and crime is following it,'' Loftus said. "To the criminal element, this is a valuable piece of equipment that they can quite easily cash in on -- even otherwise law-abiding people are tempted to buy $3,000 laptops for $200 to $300 on the street.''

"Where else do you have a thousand-dollar item sitting on a table in a coffee shop?''

So far, San Francisco appears to the only major Bay Area city to be hit by the problem. San Jose has been hit by laptop thefts, but it has yet to experience many of the robberies. "We haven't seen it yet,'' said Sgt. Nick Muyo of the San Jose police.

Palo Alto hasn't had any, and Berkeley, another hot area for Internet cafes, had only one such crime about a year ago, investigators said. Oakland police investigators had not heard of any such crimes, either.

San Francisco's Western Addition area has been hard hit this year, with 11 robberies so far. Park Station Capt. John Ehrlich, who oversees the area, said he has met with the community, giving the message that people need to fasten down their computers and back up their data.

The victim in San Francisco's Mission Creek Cafe stabbing, who requested that his name not be used, said since he was attacked, his friends from New York have urged him to go back there. It's safer, they say.

"I was lucky. It was the only place he could have stabbed me where it didn't hit a heart or other organ,'' he said. Still, he said, his chest cavity filled with blood. As for the information on his laptop, he wisely had backed it up on a disk after he heard a friend had lost data.

Lynch said a videotape at the cafe was not much use in the investigation, and police have little to go on.

"One (suspect) was roughly 15, one was roughly 20, that was it -- it's really frustrating,'' Lynch said.

Lynch said stolen computers are sold on the street and even over the Internet. "They go to U.N. Plaza, where it's like a stolen-goods bazaar. All you have to do is drive by, you see them out there.''

Lynch said people working on the high-priced computers are easy targets.

"You walk by any Starbucks and you see people with a laptop, it's so tempting for the crooks. They walk in, right on top of the person, and the person has all their attention on the laptop. They snatch it right out from underneath their fingertips.

"The word is out with crooks in general,'' Lynch said.

Some cafes have taken precautions, installing security leashes for laptops and even posting employees to act as observers at doors. Lynch said a leash would prevent some thefts. But posting someone at the door could be risky. Lynch said that in Europe, video monitors are posted and signs warn patrons that they are being watched.

Lynch said resisting can be risky.

"It's a tough call -- I would fight to maintain my laptop, but you run the risk of ending up like this guy, getting stabbed.''

"We don't need to scare people,'' Loftus emphasized. "People just need to be careful with their laptops.''

Police are considering using police decoys in hard-hit areas.

"It's hard to do a stakeout,'' Capt. Ehrlich said, "because it's not happening with any regularity in time or place.''

Besides, such operations are costly in resources, he said. "It's a lot of lattes.''
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGE9I686K1.DTL





Nominees Picked for New Emmy for PC and Hand-Held Shows
Laura M. Holson

Two years ago, few entertainment executives would have guessed that the performances of a sexy female detective, a 40-something single guy ordering a steak sandwich and Madonna as a college professor would be worthy of an Emmy.

But those are among the nominees for the first Emmy award to be given by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for outstanding original programming for computers, cellphones and other hand-held devices, including the video iPod.

The academy, which is best known for handing out the Daytime Emmy Awards, announced the nominees on Monday and will name a winner on April 22.

The category was created in November to draw attention to rapidly growing interest in mobile content that consumers have been quick to embrace. The chief executive of the academy, Peter O. Price, said 74 entries were received — including those from newspapers, magazines and movie studios — the most ever in any category.

"In this digital world, everyone is capable of launching video programming," said Mr. Price, whose organization is an affiliate of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which hands out the prime-time Emmys.

To be sure, big media companies were well represented. One of the six nominees was "24: Conspiracy," a series for cellphones based on the television hit "24" and produced by Fox Mobile Entertainment, a division of the News Corporation while another nominee was MTV's mtvU "Stand In," where famous people teach a university class for a day.

The eclectic group of stand-in teachers included Madonna as well as former Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel and the musician Kanye West.

Another Emmy nominee was America Online, which produced "Live 8 on AOL," a selection of live concert music from performances before the G-8 summit last year.

But lesser-known video creators are getting recognition as well. These include "Sophie Chase," an online series based on an attractive detective; "Stranger Adventures," a weekly interactive game where participants get e-mail messages and watch live-action video to help solve a puzzle; and "It's JerryTime!," created by two brothers from Massachusetts, Orrin and Jerry Zucker.

"It's JerryTime!" is based on Jerry's life. "I've been telling these stories to Orrin for years," said Mr. Zucker, whose "Who's That Guy?!" episode was nominated. For the Web, Jerry talks about events in his life that Orrin animates. Jerry then composes the score. Still, Orrin said, joking, it can be challenging to work with his brother.

"Sometimes," he said, "it is even difficult to get us to agree."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/business/11emmy.html





Library of Congress Picks 50 Recordings
AP

A high school band plays Beethoven. President Calvin Coolidge delivers his inaugural address. Fats Domino turns ''Blueberry Hill,'' a hit for big-band leader Glenn Miller, into a rock 'n' roll classic.

They're among the 50 records that the Library of Congress has deemed worthy of preservation this year.

''The National Recording Registry represents a stunning array of the diversity, humanity and creativity found in our sound heritage, nothing less than a flood of noise and sound pulsating into the American bloodstream,'' Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in announcing the choices for 2006.

The library took the occasion to announce a rare find: a 1940 jam session featuring tenor saxophonist Lester Young, The night club couldn't be positively identified, said Gene DeAnna, head of the library's recorded sound section, but it may have been the Village Vanguard in downtown Manhattan.

''It wasn't Carnegie Hall,'' DeAnna said at a news conference. ''At one point you can hear the MC announcing, 'The chili con carne is ready, if anyone wants to order it.'''

Loren Schoenberg, executive director of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, compared it to finding a Shakespeare sonnet or a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

The library also announced that it had recently received 186 test pressings of records made in the late 1950s or early 1960s, among them 25 songs by bluesman Robert Johnson. The pressings, donated by blues collector Tom Jacobsen, were used to make the first Johnson reissue anthology, ''King of the Delta Blues,'' which influenced the Rolling Stones and other groups.

The Modesto, Calif., High School band did well in competitions of the 1920s and 1930s. Few high school bands were recorded until the late 1940s, making the Modesto school's 1930 version of Beethoven's ''Egmont Overture'' a rarity.

Coolidge, known as a man of few words, spoke for 47 minutes in the first broadcast inaugural address. A circuit of 21 radio stations was put together for the event in 1925.

Domino recorded his relaxed version of ''Blueberry Hill,'' adding Creole cadences, in Los Angeles in 1956. He was inspired by a Louis Armstrong version of the song, which Miller had taken to No. 1 in 1940.

Other rock classics being inducted include Jerry Lee Lewis' ''Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On'' and Buddy Holly's ''That'll Be the Day,'' both from 1957; the Jimi Hendrix Experience's ''Are You Experienced?'' from 1967; and Sonic Youth's landmark noise-rock album ''Daydream Nation,'' from 1988.

Other sounds to be preserved include a radio broadcast by Clem McCarthy of Joe Louis' first-round knockout of Max Schmeling in 1938. The audience was estimated at 70 million. ''The symbolism of an African-American defeating a citizen of the political state that proclaimed the superiority of the white race was lost on no one,'' the library commented.

Samuel Barber's ''Adagio for Strings'' was performed the same year by the NBC Symphony, led by Arturo Toscanini. The library noted that the work has been called the ''American anthem for sadness and grief.''

Every year since 2000, the library has registered recordings ''that are culturally, historically or aesthetically important and/or inform or reflect life in the United States.'' Last year it unveiled newly discovered tapes of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane from 1957, a discovery that yielded one of the top-selling jazz CDs of 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...ng-Sounds.html





Are Illegal Downloads On The Way Out?
Nate Anderson

When not producing reports about the state of software piracy in China, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) produces reports about the state of software piracy among children. Their newest report is interesting because it claims that children (ages 8 to 18) are now downloading significantly less music, movies, and software than they were only two years ago.

The study shows that 57 percent of all respondents said that they have never downloaded media from the Internet without paying for it, up from 40 percent in 2004. In every area that the study examined, there has been a sharp drop in the last two years. Gaming downloads among children declined from 32 percent to 25 percent, movie downloads fell from 17 percent to 10 percent, and music downloads plummeted significantly, from 53 percent in 2004 to 32 percent today.

This sounds like great news all around for content creators, but there's a fairly big hitch: downloading increases with age. While most eight-year-olds don't download music, for instance (only nine percent do so), most 18-year-olds do (52 percent). The same trend can be seen in most categories, leading the BSA to argue that "as kids grow older, they begin to view cyberspace as a virtual 'wild, wild West'."

As with many BSA statistics, it's not clear that these are truly representative of the total situation. A recent report from research firm Big Champagne, for instance, found that P2P usage has doubled in the last two years, not declined. As even the BSA admits, as kids grow older, they download much more material. To argue that these statistics signal a "winning of the war" is a pretty tenuous claim, but it does provide some evidence that attitudes among the children are shifting.

The report's fact sheet also shows that most kids care only about consequences, not whether their actions are right or wrong. The greatest worry among those who download software and media is not guilt or getting in trouble with parents, but contracting a virus or spyware. About 40 percent of kids, in fact, don't believe that downloading such material is "always wrong." (Intriguingly, 16 percent of these same kids also don't believe that plagiarizing text from Internet sources without credit is always wrong, which goes a long way toward explaining the rise in Internet plagiarism.)

So how is the BSA going to counter such attitudes among children? It is—seriously—going to employ a small weasel (insert your own joke here).

"BSA also today launched a new website, www.cybertreehouse.com, designed exclusively for young people to learn about appropriate computer usage in a fun and informative way. The site includes Garret the Ferret, BSA's cyber-champion mascot, leading kids through games and activities that illustrate smart cyber behavior."

If you'd like to see what your kids might be receiving, you can check out Garret's copyright adventures in this brief comic that shows kids just how "uncool" copyright violations are. By the way, if you didn't know that corporations could pay to get their message out to kids without going through you first, note that this comic was distributed as a "sponsored supplement" to Weekly Reader that your child may well have received at school.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060410-6565.html





Pentium Computers Vulnerable To Cyberattack

Security experts warn of that and other risks at CanSecWest/core 06
Michael Arnone

The built-in procedure that Intel Pentium-powered computers use to blow off their digital steam could put users in hot water by making the machines vulnerable to cyberattacks, computer security researchers announced at the CanSecWest/core06 conference last week.

When the processor begins to overheat or encounters other conditions that could threaten the motherboard, the computer interrupts its normal operation, momentarily freezes and stores its activity, said Loïc Duflot, a computer security specialist for the French government’s Secretary General for National Defense information technology laboratory.

Cyberattackers can take over a computer by appropriating that safeguard to make the machine interrupt operations and enter System Management Mode, Duflot said. Attackers then enter the System Management RAM and replace the default emergency-response software with custom software that, when run, will give them full administrative privileges.

Every computer that runs on x86 chip architecture may be vulnerable to this attack, including the millions of computers that the U.S. government and industry use, said Dragos Ruiu, the conference organizer. He is a Canadian computer security consultant for businesses, governments and the U.S. military.

CanSecWest is an informal annual gathering for hard-core code gurus who create the software that businesses and governments use. The conference presented the latest in what hackers — both helpful and malicious — are doing in IT security, said Eric Byres, a member of the research faculty at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

A growing number of cyberattacks are targeting Web applications, an area of concern widely discussed during the conference. That ties in to the rapid spread of voice-over-IP technology.

“Have vendors even heard of Web application security?” asked Nicolas Fischbach, senior manager for network engineering security at COLT Telecom, who gave a presentation on VOIP security issues.

VOIP vendors are so driven to beat the competition to market and include new features that they have no idea how to write secure Web applications, he said. He predicted it will take years for such applications to be made secure retroactively.

Among the numerous topics presented at the conference, IPv6 has the most long-term significance because it will probably still be in use 50 years from now, Ruiu said.

IPv6 has 128-bit addresses, a huge step up from IPv4’s 32-bit addressing scheme. That means IPv6 could provide millions of unique addresses for each person on Earth, along with “every toaster, door and window,” said van Hauser, an alias for the security team leader at n.runs, a German security company, and founder of The Hacker’s Choice, a hacker group.

With all those IP addresses, IPv6 resists most traditional worm attacks that rely on randomly finding active addresses, said van Hauser. IPv6 users must enable IP security protocols, he warned, because without them, attackers can use IPv6’s hierarchical structure to get immediate access to Domain Name Servers and other critical system components.
http://www.fcw.com/article94010-04-10-06





Microsoft, EU Clash Over Windows Innovation

Microsoft and the European Commission will clash in court over innovation and intellectual-property rights when the software giant appeals a 2004 antitrust decision, according to court papers seen by Reuters.

Microsoft wants to turn around the Commission's decision that it abused the dominance of its Windows system to muscle out rivals who did not have enough detail of the operating system to create efficient software that could run with it.

Europe's top antitrust authority ordered the company to share information, so-called protocols, so that other software makers could compete.

In a one-week hearing at the European Union's second-highest court starting on April 24, Microsoft will argue that rivals were always able to make interoperable software and that the Commission's demands threaten Microsoft's intellectual-property rights.
Microsoft will essentially argue that it should not have to give away its intellectual property, having spent effort and money inventing it, only because it became successful.

"Microsoft relies on the fact that its communication protocols are technologically innovative and are covered by intellectual-property rights," the document said.

"Microsoft had designed its Windows server operating systems from the outset to interoperate with non-Microsoft server operating systems," it added.

But the Commission says the behavior of companies must change, if their products dominate the market, and that not all of Microsoft's protocols are innovative.

More than 90 percent of the world's personal computers use Microsoft's Windows operating system.

"Nothing in the file shows that the communication protocols in relation to which Microsoft will have to disclose specifications contain innovations," the document said, laying out the Commission's arguments.

While Microsoft argues that the protocols are "valuable trade secrets," the Commission says the company is blurring the line between trade secrets and intellectual-property rights.

"(The) fact that trade secrets can be assigned or transferred does not mean that they constitute intellectual property," the document said.

The Commission will reiterate its original decision that rivals are not able to make interoperable software.

It will reject five alternative ways set forward by Microsoft to achieve this, saying these methods had already been dismissed in the original decision.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft%2C+EU+...3-6059725.html





Microsoft Helped Write Oklahoma Computer Law

Knock, knock. Who's there?
Nick Farrell

THE GOOD people of Oklahoma asked Microsoft to help the State write a new law banning spyware, and the results are amazing.

Apparently the state was so impressed with Vole’s work on the law it plans to bring it before its government for debate under the fairly harmless title "Computer Spyware Protection Act House" Bill 2083.

The law is amazing, not only because it is probably the first written overtly by a major company without bothering with the tedious problem of lobbying, but because… well it is written by Microsoft, what do you think could go wrong?

Under the law, people could be fined a million dollars for using viruses or surreptitious computer techniques to break into someone’s computer without that person’s knowledge and acceptance. OK so far.

Now because Microsoft knows that it sometimes need to get information from their users for upgrades, it has put in a clause to allow software companies to do this. Basically the Vole law demands that a software company licence agreement tells you the sort of data they are taking.

The problem is that if you agree, you give the company you bought upgradable software the freedom to come onto your computer for "detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of or fraudulent or other illegal activities in connection with a network, service, or computer software, including scanning for and removing computer software prescribed under this act."

In other words if you install Vista, Microsoft can come in, snoop around your computer see if you are doing anything illegal and delete it.

Vole can also read your email. More here.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30877





Blogosphere Suffers Spam Explosion
Joris Evers

Boing Boing would allow its readers to leave comments and engage in a discussion on the wildly popular blog, if it weren't for spam.

The editors of the technology and pop culture blog took down the comment option about two years ago. Back then, they wanted to put an end to abusive comments, personal attacks on the Boing Boing crew and some spam. Today, their reason for not bringing it back is simpler: an explosion in junk comment posts on blogs.

"It is like pollution," said Mark Frauenfelder, the founder and co-editor of Boing Boing, who also writes a personal blog at MadProfessor.net. "It reminds me of visible smog, because it obscures what you want to be looking at. You have to waste brain cycles to filter it out, or, if you own a blog, you have to go through extraordinary measures to keep it out."

While technology and legislation may have made spam in e-mail manageable, there is still some way to go when it comes to keeping it out of blogs, people in the industry said. There is some software dedicated to blocking unwanted posts, and there are efforts under way to reduce the economic incentive behind them. But at the same time, spammers are coming up with ways to trick filters or to fool bloggers into allowing the spam.

Keeping out unwanted messages costs bloggers time and bother, at the very least. If it's a commercial blog, it may also cost money for a filtering service. And beyond that, there's a cost to the blog services, which have to develop spam-blocking technology.

Most spam postings on blogs look a lot like unwanted commercial e-mail. Many of them advertise gambling Web sites, online adult entertainment or drugs such as Viagra. The spam operations that target blogs are typically the same ones that send junk e-mail, experts said.

The Mad Professor blog attracts about 3,000 visitors daily, Frauenfelder said. He gets about 20 spam messages a day, which he deletes manually. All comments arrive in his e-mail in-box first. The spam level noticeably started going up earlier this year, he said.

"It is a major hassle," Frauenfelder said. "It is just getting worse and worse. My fantasies of violent revenge against spammers become more lurid every week."

Frying comment spam
Several providers of blogging software and services have introduced filtering to combat the spam problem. Akismet charges enterprise bloggers $200 and upwards a month for its filtering service, for example. "Pro-bloggers," or individuals who make money from their blogs, are asked to pay $5 a month. Some plug-in tools, like Spam Karma, are available for a donation. Many blog hosters have developed their own blocking tools, too.

Frauenfelder uses Six Apart's Movable Type software for his blogs. He does use the filtering features it offers, but spam still gets through, he said.

But Robert Scoble, whose "Scobleizer--Microsoft Geek Blogger" is hosted on the WordPress.com service, said he is happy with the filtering there.

The Scobleizer blog gets around 10,000 visits a day, and about 400 comments are left on the blog daily. Of those, 100 are spam, Scoble said. Most of these are flagged correctly. However, there are also false positives, valid reader comments identified as unwanted postings, he said.

No spam issue
One company that is trying to develop advanced filtering technologies is Culver City, Calif.-based Weblogs Inc., which runs more than 90 commercial blogs, including the popular Engadget site.

"We've built technology to solve the problem, we invest in updating it, and our 160-plus bloggers manage the few spams that get through," Weblogs CEO Jason Calacanis said. "The only spam that can really get through our defenses are the ones that are hand-rolled by a person, and we catch most of those."

Other techniques for limiting blog spam tackles the problem from the other end, making it more of a process to post. Hosters can require visitors to register or use e-mail validation. For example, Weblogs sends the reader an e-mail containing a link that needs be clicked before their comment is posted.

Automated spam software may be thwarted by challenging the commenter to type in wavy or nonstandard text in a box, called a "captcha." Bloggers often can also choose to moderate all submissions, which means approving them for posting one by one. That, however, can be a lot of work for the administrator on popular blogs.

With the right technology in place, blog spam is not a major issue, Calacanis said. "If you want to solve it, you have to make your site harder to spam than the other blogs out there. It is sort of like having The Club (an antitheft device) in your car. It's not perfect, but if you have The Club and next car doesn't, the thief moves on to the next car," he said.

But as with unwanted e-mail, spammers are trying out ways to circumvent these barriers. "I don't think comment spam is under control," Scoble said. Increasingly, junk postings are camouflaged to look like valuable comments, but contain spam links, he noted.

"It used to be pretty blatant: three graphs of porn links," Scoble said. "Some of the latest spam that I have been getting is stuff like: 'I love your blog' and 'Keep it up!'" Instead of linking to a blog, there is a link to a gambling or porn, he said. "People are approving spam, because they are getting fooled by the spammers."

Tricking Google
While junk e-mail is purely an advertisement, creating spam messages on blogs has an additional motive: tricking Internet search engines. Google and other sites arrange search results in part by a Web page's link popularity with other sites. More links to a site can boost a site's ranking--and more important, its traffic.

"The prime actor that made this behavior valuable was Google, which created economics around links," said Anil Dash, vice president of professional products at Six Apart. "Links on the Web have almost direct monetary value because of Google's PageRank system."

Moreover, search engines deem a link on a blog more valuable than one on just any Web site, because of the interlinking bloggers do. Spammers abuse the comment forums to get instant credibility with search engines.

"There are at least dozens of people who have made the economic equation and are developing software to do spamming," Dash said. "The first spammers were manually typing in: 'Here's a link to this site.' Now there is fairly sophisticated and sometimes even commercial software for spamming on both e-mail and blog comments."

Early last year, Google announced a special tag for hyperlinks that tells the search engine to not score the link. Some blog services and software have adopted this "nofollow" to take some of the benefit out of manipulating search rankings by abusing blogs.

The spam is undermining an integral part of blogs. Without feedback, a blog is merely a glorified press release, Mike Cornfield, an adjunct professor in political management at George Washington University, told CNET News.com earlier this year.

"I think it hurts blogs when they have to turn off their comments," Calacanis said. "Large blogs have had to turn off comments a couple of times--we've even turned them off for a day or two during massive spam attacks."

Boing Boing, though, is probably the "saddest or biggest example," Calacanis said, noting that it was taking more time and expense to manage the comments then manage the blogging on the site.

Comments aren't about to return to Boing Boing, Frauenfelder said, though he does appreciate the value of reader input. "But whenever we think about it, we see comment spam as so much of a problem," he said. Boing Boing attracts 400,000 visitors daily. "That would be thousands of comment spams a day," he said.

Spam fighting efforts have focused on keeping blogs clean, for readers and bloggers to enjoy. But spammers are doing an end-run around those shields and taking the fight to the broader Web by joining the blogosphere.

"We have seen them move from sending comments and trackbacks to creating fake blogs," Six Apart's Dash said.
http://news.com.com/Blogosphere+suff...3-6059672.html





Now Showing: Declining Sales at Theater Snack Bars

As more people decide to stay away from movie houses, the drop in attendance is being felt by makers of food for concession stands.
John Horn

Moviegoers tend to stuff themselves full of salty popcorn and sweet candy. When people start steering clear of the multiplex — as audiences have done for three straight years — the manufacturers of those theater snacks are the ones left with a sour taste in their mouths.

Much has been made of how declining movie admissions and box-office grosses have clipped the earnings of movie studios and film exhibitors. But audience apathy also is taking a bite out of the oft-overlooked concession business. Particularly hard hit are those companies that rely on movie theaters for the bulk of their sales.

"It's kind of scary. It's been going downhill for three years," says Paul Bonfiglio, whose Summit Food Enterprises has had to lay off nearly a third of its employees because of steadily worsening sales for its movie theater candy line, which includes P.J. Gummi Bears. Adds Norm Krug, the chairman of the Nebraska farmers cooperative Preferred Popcorn, "Our sales are going down pretty directly with attendance."

As the movie theater industry's annual convention came to a close here Thursday, organizers tried to characterize the box-office slump as more media propaganda than business predicament. Hollywood studios were on hand to offer sneak peeks of the animated features "Cars" and "Over the Hedge" and clips from such live-action fare as "Superman Returns," "Mission: Impossible III" and "Poseidon," all in an effort to rally interest in the upcoming slate of movies.

But on the trade show floor of ShoWest, as the annual convention of theater owners is known, candy and popcorn peddlers trying to drum up business for their products were decidedly uninspired.

It probably doesn't help that theater owners have been raising the prices of those same Gummi Bears and buckets of popcorn in response to the downturn — an astronomical markup that the concession suppliers never see. (Just $30 worth of raw popcorn can translate into as much as $3,000 in sales at the movie theaters.)

"I don't think that raising prices at the concession stand is the way to do it," said Frank Liberto, whose Ricos Products Co. introduced the chips-and-cheese nacho snack at movie theaters nearly 30 years ago.

Several concession makers fear that such price hikes may cause more moviegoers to stop buying snacks at the multiplex and sneak cheaper, store-bought food into the venue.

An audience survey released last week by Nielsen Analytics found that more than 36% of moviegoers polled said they were going to fewer films because "concessions are too expensive." (The top reasons for staying away: high ticket prices and bad movies.)

John Fithian, president of the National Assn. of Theatre Owners, said movie concessions were fairly priced when compared with theme parks and other out-of-home entertainment options. Were it not for concessions, Fithian said, "ticket prices would be twice as high."

Fithian said he was unaware of any study that tracked overall theater concession spending. The National Assn. of Concessionaires did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

For many exhibitors, concession sales can mean the difference between profit and loss and often total more than a third of a chain's box-office revenue. Exhibitors generally return about half of all box-office receipts to movie studios as film rental fees. Conversely, they keep the majority of candy counter income; concession profit margins can run above 85%.

At Regal Entertainment Group, the nation's largest theater chain, with more than 6,200 screens, concession sales last year generated $659.8 million in revenue, more than a quarter of Regal's total income. But Regal was one of the only publicly held chains to show healthy growth for what are often unhealthy snacks.

AMC Entertainment Inc., which runs nearly 5,700 screens, sold $313.9 million worth of hot dogs, soda, popcorn and candy in its most recent three quarters, down 8% from the comparable period a year earlier, when concession revenue totaled $341.8 million. Carmike Cinemas Inc., operator of nearly 2,500 screens, said concession revenue in its last six months was $75.1 million, compared with $82.1 million in the comparable period in 2004, down 9%. Carmike's spending on concessions during those six months slid even faster, from $9.1 million to $8 million, a 12% drop.

Even though Regal's concession sales were up in its most recent fiscal year, the average amount of concessions sold per customer over the last three years has not kept pace with the rise in average ticket prices.

Domestic theater admissions fell nearly 9% last year to 1.4 billion tickets sold, the third consecutive year of decline. After the 1.64 billion admissions in 2002, the turnstile slowed to 1.57 billion tickets in 2003 and 1.54 billion tickets in 2004, the Motion Picture Assn. of America said.

That's why popcorn merchants see few kernels of good cheer. Weaver Popcorn Co. said its theater sales had fallen about 10% over the last several years. But because the company also makes microwave popcorn, it benefits when film fans choose to stay home and rent DVDs instead and cook their own snacks.

"If people are not going to theaters, we can still have people [eating] popcorn at home," said Jim Labas, Weaver's concession representative.

In an attempt to boost slumping sales for the 41 farmers who are part of his cooperative, Preferred Popcorn's Krug has been pushing popcorn in theaters as distant as Japan, India and Russia. The box-office drop "has caused us to be more aggressive in foreign markets," Krug said.

J&J Snack Foods Corp. said only a tiny piece of sales for its snack products (Minute Maid Soft Frozen Lemonade and the new CinnaPretzel, among others) came from theaters. Still, the company feels the downturn.

"We count every penny," said Jerry Law, a J&J Snack Foods representative at ShoWest. "Last year was a bad year. We'll see what kind of movies they have for this summer."

Few theater concessionaires are having as difficult a time as Bonfiglio of Summit Foods. As theater sales for Gummi Bears have slumped, and some of Summit's exclusive theater deals have been voided by exhibition industry consolidation, the company was forced last year to lay off 10 of its 33 employees.

Summit is introducing an array of new theater candies, including Bulls-Eye caramels, and moving into retail stores such as Walgreens to try to improve its fortunes. But Bonfiglio is not convinced that the only thing ailing Hollywood is a recent crop of regrettable releases; he worries moviegoing as a social habit may be disappearing. "There are so many other vehicles for entertainment," he said.

Not all the ShoWest vendors said the slowing sales had hurt their bottom lines.

American Licorice Co., the makers of Red Vines, relies on theaters for 10% of its business and hasn't noticed weakening returns because of the box-office drop. The people behind Dippin' Dots, a snack made from frozen ice cream pellets, say their product's novelty has helped maintain profit. "We just keep growing," said Doug Barwig, manager of western operations.

And Ricos Products' Liberto said that although movie sales "have been softening," the company was diversified enough — it sells nachos at Wal-Mart stores and to theaters as distant as Dubai — to avoid an earnings hit.

Where some see lemons, others see lemonade — or, at least, fruit smoothies. Steve Nilforoushan says that what theaters and their patrons really need is a healthy alternative to all those salty and sugary rations.

Appearing at the convention for the first time, Nilforoushan was launching Smoovies, a frozen drink filled with bananas, strawberries and no high-fructose corn syrup. Nilforoushan says his concoctions would cost just over $1 for exhibitors to make, and retail for as much as $6.50 — a healthy profit for theaters, he says, but not a wallet-gouging increase over what such drinks cost in smoothie stores.

"Look around here. Everything is junk food," Nilforoushan said, surveying the ShoWest tradeshow floor. "Movie attendance doesn't really worry me, because the graph for growth in the smoothie industry is going up exponentially."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ck=1&cset=true




Christians Sue for Right Not to Tolerate Policies

Many codes intended to protect gays from harassment are illegal, conservatives argue.
Stephanie Simon

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.

Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.

With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all.

The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian."

In that spirit, the Christian Legal Society, an association of judges and lawyers, has formed a national group to challenge tolerance policies in federal court. Several nonprofit law firms — backed by major ministries such as Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ — already take on such cases for free.

The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant.

A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 64% of American adults — including 80% of evangelical Christians — agreed with the statement "Religion is under attack in this country."

"The message is, you're free to worship as you like, but don't you dare talk about it outside the four walls of your church," said Stephen Crampton, chief counsel for the American Family Assn. Center for Law and Policy, which represents Christians who feel harassed.

Critics dismiss such talk as a right-wing fundraising ploy. "They're trying to develop a persecution complex," said Jeremy Gunn, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

Others fear the banner of religious liberty could be used to justify all manner of harassment.

"What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn't work?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay rights group Lambda Legal.

Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.

By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.

"Think how marginalized racists are," said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom. "If we don't address this now, it will only get worse."

Christians are fighting back in a case involving Every Nation Campus Ministries at California State University. Student members of the ministry on the Long Beach and San Diego campuses say their mission is to model a virtuous lifestyle for their peers. They will not accept as members gays, lesbians or anyone who considers homosexuality "a natural part of God's created order."

Legal analysts agree that the ministry, as a private organization, has every right to exclude gays; the Supreme Court affirmed that principle in a case involving the Boy Scouts in 2000. At issue is whether the university must grant official recognition to a student group that discriminates.

The students say denying them recognition — and its attendant benefits, such as funding — violates their free-speech rights and discriminates against their conservative theology. Christian groups at public colleges in other states have sued using similar arguments. Several of those lawsuits were settled out of court, with the groups prevailing.

In California, however, the university may have a strong defense in court. The California Supreme Court recently ruled that the city of Berkeley was justified in denying subsidies to the Boy Scouts because of that group's exclusionary policies. Eddie L. Washington, the lawyer representing Cal State, argues the same standard should apply to the university.

"We're certainly not going to fund discrimination," Washington said.

As they step up their legal campaign, conservative Christians face uncertain prospects. The 1st Amendment guarantees Americans "free exercise" of religion. In practice, though, the ground rules shift depending on the situation.

In a 2004 case, for instance, an AT&T Broadband employee won the right to express his religious convictions by refusing to sign a pledge to "respect and value the differences among us." As long as the employee wasn't harassing co-workers, the company had to make accommodations for his faith, a federal judge in Colorado ruled.

That same year, however, a federal judge in Idaho ruled that Hewlett-Packard Co. was justified in firing an employee who posted Bible verses condemning homosexuality on his cubicle. The verses, clearly visible from the hall, harassed gay employees and made it difficult for the company to meet its goal of attracting a diverse workforce, the judge ruled.

In the public schools, an Ohio middle school student last year won the right to wear a T-shirt that proclaimed: "Homosexuality is a sin! Islam is a lie! Abortion is murder!" But a teen-ager in Kentucky lost in federal court when he tried to exempt himself from a school program on gay tolerance on the grounds that it violated his religious beliefs.

In their lawsuit against Georgia Tech, Malhotra and her co-plaintiff, a devout Jewish student named Orit Sklar, request unspecified damages. But they say their main goal is to force the university to be more tolerant of religious viewpoints. The lawsuit was filed by the Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit law firm that focuses on religious liberty cases.

Malhotra said she had been reprimanded by college deans several times in the last few years for expressing conservative religious and political views. When she protested a campus production of "The Vagina Monologues" with a display condemning feminism, the administration asked her to paint over part of it.

She caused another stir with a letter to the gay activists who organized an event known as Coming Out Week in the fall of 2004. Malhotra sent the letter on behalf of the Georgia Tech College Republicans, which she chairs; she said several members of the executive board helped write it.

The letter referred to the campus gay rights group Pride Alliance as a "sex club … that can't even manage to be tasteful." It went on to say that it was "ludicrous" for Georgia Tech to help fund the Pride Alliance.

The letter berated students who come out publicly as gay, saying they subject others on campus to "a constant barrage of homosexuality."

"If gays want to be tolerated, they should knock off the political propaganda," the letter said.

The student activist who received the letter, Felix Hu, described it as "rude, unfair, presumptuous" — and disturbing enough that Pride Alliance forwarded it to a college administrator. Soon after, Malhotra said, she was called in to a dean's office. Students can be expelled for intolerant speech, but she said she was only reprimanded.

Still, she said, the incident has left her afraid to speak freely. She's even reluctant to aggressively advertise the campus lectures she arranges on living by the Bible. "Whenever I've spoken out against a certain lifestyle, the first thing I'm told is 'You're being intolerant, you're being negative, you're creating a hostile campus environment,' " Malhotra said.

A Georgia Tech spokeswoman would not comment on the lawsuit or on Malhotra's disciplinary record, but she said the university encouraged students to debate freely, "as long as they're not promoting violence or harassing anyone."

The open question is what constitutes harassment, what's a sincere expression of faith — and what to do when they overlap.

"There really is confusion out there," said Charles C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, which is affiliated with Vanderbilt University. "Finding common ground sounds good. But the reality is, a lot of people on all sides have a stake in the fight."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...,6596503.story





Meet Hollywood's New Hitmaker — Starbucks Coffee

Hollywood's doors are open for Nikkole Denson, the woman who selects which movies Starbucks will help to promote.
Lorenza Muñoz

Nikkole Denson's name is quickly becoming as familiar in Hollywood as the tall decaf Frappuccinos and caramel macchiatos her company brews up each morning for the town's unemployed actors and aspiring screenwriters.

Two years ago, Denson was one of hundreds of unknown development executives pitching movie projects. Now that she is Starbucks Corp.'s liaison to Hollywood, the same executives who once spurned her are courting her, hoping the coffee chain can become the kind of marketing juggernaut for movies that it has been for music.

"The tables have really turned and it feels great," she said. "All I had to say was 'Starbucks' and the doors were opened."

Denson, 35, whose title is director of business development for Starbucks Entertainment, is charged with sifting through scores of movies to find the ones Starbucks will help market in its 8,300 North American stores.

Starting Tuesday, Starbucks will promote her first pick, Lionsgate's "Akeelah and the Bee," to millions of customers via messages on such media as coffee-cup sleeves. The feel-good drama, which is being released in theaters April 28, chronicles the story of an African American girl in Los Angeles who overcomes a tough neighborhood and bad schools to become a national spelling bee champ.

Starbucks customers won't be seeing horror movies or mindless teen comedies promoted in their local stores. Instead, Denson's mission is to find uplifting, inspirational stories along the lines of "Akeelah," most likely from independent companies such as Lionsgate or studio specialty divisions.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who is well connected in Hollywood with a board seat at DreamWorks Animation SKG, said the company had no plans to finance movie production. But, he added, Starbucks will continue developing entertainment-related ventures, with films a natural extension of the company's successful music venture.

"We can help customers discover entertainment," said Schultz, sitting in his modest office overlooking the Port of Seattle, where shipments of Starbucks coffee are unloaded.

What got Hollywood's attention was how Starbucks turned into hits such albums as Ray Charles' Grammy award-winning "Genius Loves Company." Studio executives now know that a barista's recommendation alongside a latte is as good as gold.

"What they have done with music illustrates that they are a place where they can create buzz," said Toby Emmerich, president of production at New Line Cinema Corp.

"How many other retail environments do you enter five times a week? People used to talk about television shows at the water cooler. But water coolers don't happen anymore. Now you have Starbucks."

Without Starbucks, Lionsgate executives feared that "Akeelah" risked being pigeonholed as a niche film because of its all-black cast, meaning it might not have gotten the exposure it deserved.

"It is a mainstream movie," said Mike Paseornek, head of production for Lionsgate. "But it would have been harder to sell it as one without Starbucks' putting that stamp on."

Denson considered more than 100 movies as Starbucks' first effort, but "Akeelah" struck a personal chord. She had grown up in a tough Oakland neighborhood, the only child of a single mother who worked hard to save enough money to send Denson to private primary schools.

"There is a little bit of Akeelah in everybody," said Denson, who had tried unsuccessfully to develop the script herself. The movie, she said, shows that "you can do things that a lot of folks don't necessarily think you can do. Whether it's going to law school or going to a spelling bee, it's a great inspiration. "

Denson, a petite woman with piercing dark eyes, had planned a career as a civil rights lawyer, graduating from the University of San Francisco law school after undergraduate work at UC Davis.

After stints at several nonprofit firms, Denson grew restless and moved to Los Angeles, landing a job as production assistant for a Paramount television show in 1996.

Three years later, she was offered the chance to build the fledgling movie division of Laker great Earvin "Magic" Johnson, who has his own ventures with Schultz and Starbucks. Denson helped produce such films as Fox Searchlight Pictures' romantic comedy "Brown Sugar" and put her lawyerly skills to work negotiating partnerships with the likes of 24-Hour Fitness and Coors beer.

Denson was lured to Starbucks in 2004 by Ken Lombard, her onetime boss at Johnson's company. Schultz had hired Lombard to oversee Starbucks' entertainment division, where he spearheaded the launch of the company's Hear Music Coffeehouses and a Hear Music Channel on XM Satellite Radio.

"She has a tremendous amount of integrity and the ability to not really be influenced by whoever is in the room," Lombard said.

Coaxing people into going to a movie theater could prove more challenging than selling them a CD at the store counter. And though every Hollywood studio would like its movie backed by Starbucks, most have blanched at the hard bargain the company drives.

For "Akeelah," Starbucks is a producer on the film, although it did not put any money into the production. Starbucks will sell the film on DVD and receive a share of the film's profit.

Denson plans to relocate this summer from Seattle to Los Angeles with the Starbucks entertainment division, returning to Hollywood with considerably more clout than when she left.

Her stint at Starbucks central in Seattle has made her so enamored of her employer that friends tease her about having substituted "drinking the Kool-Aid" for the coffee.

Near her cubicle, employees chat on purple velvet lounge chairs and participate in "coffee tastings" every week. The butternut-squash-colored walls and soft pine floors mask the reality of being in the nerve center of a multibillion-dollar global corporation.

Though Denson prefers chai tea lattes, her staff drinks French-press coffee during meetings. She proudly shows off a black "coffee master" apron hanging on her desk and will eagerly discuss the difference in taste between arabica beans from Guatemala and those from Kenya.

"I am as excited about the next Frappuccino flavor as I am about my next project," Denson said. "It's a unique culture."

Denson is optimistic that the Starbucks culture she has so fully embraced will translate into film dollars.

"We have begun to be tastemakers," she said. "We have earned our customers' trust with the music and we are looking to earning their trust again with film…. We are looking to becoming an entertainment destination."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...entnews-movies





DVD Chips to Comply with Content Protection License
Kyle

This is a press release that we just got direct from the Motion Picture Association. It will be interesting to see what will be the mandated acceptable technology put into place exactly that will not expose DVDs to "piracy." Of course I still fully believe that ripping DVD content that I own for my personal usage is something that should be fully allowable, especially when you are trying to find an accessible space for a couple hundred of them. Anyway, while this is all interesting, do not expect the "end of the world." Still it is quite possible that we will see some fallout and some associated costs passed on to consumers.

**Court Orders World's Second Largest DVD Chip Maker To Comply With Content Protection License**
Press Release

Los Angeles -- The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) today announced that its member companies have successfully resolved yet another breach of contract lawsuit involving non-compliant DVD chips that enable piracy. This is the sixth such lawsuit that has concluded with a court-ordered injunction mandating a DVD chip manufacturer to adhere to the content security features of the CSS license. With the new injunction against Sunplus Technology Co., Inc., the world’s second largest DVD chip manufacturer, all of the major DVD chip manufacturers are now bound by court order to honor the CSS license. The studios now plan to focus greater attention on other products, such as DVD players, that may also violate the license and expose copyrighted material to piracy. Investigations have been underway for months, and the studios are considering appropriate enforcement action.

"Protecting content through the security features that are required by the CSS license is critical to ensuring that creative works are not illegally reproduced. Every company that has signed the CSS license must honor its terms by making secure products that protect DVDs from piracy,” said Dan Robbins, Chief Technology Counsel for the MPAA. "Like any business, we must work to enforce the mechanisms that protect our product, and we will continue to do so.”

The CSS license has provided the baseline protection that enables film studios to provide consumers with over 45,000 DVD titles. The motion picture studios are third-party beneficiaries of the CSS license and may enforce it against licensees who fail to honor its terms.

A federal interagency report published in 2004 estimated that counterfeit and pirated goods, including those of copyrighted works, cost the American economy $250 billion a year. The MPAA estimates its member companies lost $3.5 billion in 2004 due to piracy of hard goods alone, not including losses due to Internet-based activities. A Smith Barney study released in 2003 predicted the movie industry would lose up to $5.4 billion in 2005 due to piracy, including Internet piracy. Working with law enforcement around the world, the MPAA seized more than 76 million illegal discs last year.

For more information, please contact: Kori Bernards - MPAA Los Angeles - (818) 995-6600
http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?new...xobmV3cywsLDE=





Hack Attack: Build Your Own DVR
Adam Pash

Ever since TiVo came around, I was eager to jump on the time shifting bandwagon. After all, nothing makes a productivity junkie happier than turning an hour-long show into forty minutes. But for all its loyal fan base, TiVo never seemed like the right fit for me.

For my money, time, and, let’s be honest, the gratification of a solid DIY project, I’m a big proponent of building your own digital video recorder (DVR). TiVo is pretty good at what TiVo does, but imagine a world where you can also tweak your TiVo to do anything you can do with any other computer.

With all the potential controversy and uncertainty surrounding TiVo firmware upgrades, the time to build your own DVR has never been better. With your own DVR, you can get all the benefits of a TiVo and more without the recurring cost for subscription. This week, I’m going to show you how simple it is to turn your computer into a DVR. After that, I’ll show you a few ways that I use my DVR to take it beyond TiVo.

Whether you’re using your current PC, repurposing an old one, or going all out on a dedicated DVR to put under your TV, you can get so much more out of your own DVR than you could ever get out of a TiVo.

NOTE: Keep in mind that the setup I used here is far from the only way to go. After struggling for a while with how to put together an article that would work for everyone, I decided that I would just go ahead and describe how I do things. The main purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to the world of DIY DVRs, hopefully planting the seed for the possibility of a world beyond TiVo. On the other hand, if you do choose to take a route similar to the route I’ve chosen, this should provide you with a good starting point.
What you need

In order to put together your own DVR, you really only need to add two things to any given computer:
A TV capture card
DVR software

Add the preceding two components to any PC and you’ve got yourself a solid, fully-functional DVR; it doesn’t get much more simple than that.
Choosing a capture card

First things first. If you’re going turn your TV into a DVR, you need a capture card. A capture card is a USB or PCI device that you install on your computer that allows you to plug your TV cable into your computer the same way you would your TV.

There are plenty of cards available, but I’ve had great experience with the Hauppauge PVR-150, the entry card in the Hauppauge line of cards. To ease the load on your CPU, the Hauppauge PCI cards do the video encoding on the card, meaning TV recording will take up very few CPU cycles (perfect for an older PC). After you’ve bought it, you are of course going to have to install your PCI card (the Hauppauge PVR-150 is the card I installed in this feature), which is easy enough to do.
Finding the right software

There are a lot of great software options for homebrew PVRs, like SageTV (Windows and Linux, $80), MythTV (Linux, free), GB-PVR (Windows, free), BeyondTV (Windows, $70), and Freevo (Linux, free), to name a few of the most popular.

Although MythTV is probably the most powerful of these programs (and it’s free), when all was said and done I chose SageTV for its feature set, stability, and Windows/Linux support. Aside from its very active support forums, you can also get support directly from a real company, which is always a nice option. Out of the box, SageTV installs as easily as any Windows program, and configuring your capture card with SageTV is a breeze.

Basically, if you’re looking for a quick and easy, no hassle PVR software, SageTV fits the bill. In short, your PVR will be up and running in no time. [1] However, keep in mind that one of the great parts about building a homebrew PVR is that you do have the option to tweak and fiddle to your heart’s content. If that’s the case, there’s a lot more you can do with SageTV.

Extending SageTV

The following are all tweaks I’ve made to my DVR. Some are specific to SageTV, while others (Remote control tweaking and Commercial skipping) can be used with nearly any DVR software.
Customize your SageTV: If you’re not happy with the default UI of SageTV, there are some beautiful user-designed packages that are easy to install. The best one I’ve found is called SageMC16x9.
Commercial skipping: Automatic commercial detection and skipping is another great feature that’s pretty easy to get up and running, but there are a few different routes you can take. The easiest option is to use the ComSkip program, but you may also want to try Show Analyzer.
Remote control tweaking: SageTV gives you a lot of flexibility for tweaking how your remote control works with SageTV, but there’s a lot you can do to tweak your IR remote to work with any program on your computer by editing the irrremote.ini file. After all, it wouldn’t be much of a DVR if you had to head for your mouse and keyboard every time you want to use a different program. Since virtually every Windows program has keyboard shortcuts that allow for mouseless navigation, you can easily setup your remote to control them. For example, the Hauppauge remote can handle pretty much any keyboard combination.
Launch external programs: With SageMC16x9, you’ve got an added menu option to launch external programs (check post #99). This feature can come in particularly handy if you want to launch your favorite emulator, video game, DVD player, or batch script, again, without heading for your keyboard/mouse.

The cool part about putting together your own DVR is that you’re only limited by your imagination, so with a little tweaking you can put together a DVR that perfectly fits your needs. If you’ve already built your own DVR, let us in on your setup. TiVo users, fight back! What can your TiVo do that my DVR can’t? Add your thoughts to the comments or send an email to tips at lifehacker.com.
Adam Pash is an associate editor of Lifehacker. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
Footnotes:

[1] If you’re looking to take the same route I did, SageTV offers some excellent packages at their online store, bundling, for example, the PVR-150 capture card and the SageTV software at a discount.
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/d...dvr-165963.php





Google Defends Cooperation With China
Joe McDonald

Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt on Wednesday defended the search engine's cooperation with Chinese censorship as he announced the creation of a Beijing research center and unveiled a Chinese-language brand name.

Google is trying to raise its profile in China after waiting until January to launch its Chinese-language site Google.cn. Activists have criticized the company for blocking searches for material about Taiwan, Tibet, democracy and other sensitive issues on the site.

"We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one," Schmidt said at a news conference.

He said Google had to accept restrictions in order to serve China, which has the world's second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with more than 111 million people online.

Schmidt also announced the creation of a research center in Beijing that he said should have 150 employees by mid-2006 and "eventually thousands of people." He said the center is meant to create products for markets worldwide, though he said planning was still in such an early stage that he didn't know what they might be.

Schmidt was speaking at a ceremony to announce Google's Chinese-language brand name - "Gu Ge," or "Valley Song," which the company says draws on Chinese rural traditions to describe a fruitful and rewarding experience.

Talking to reporters later, Schmidt said Google's managers were stung by criticism that they accepted Chinese censorship, but said they haven't lobbied Beijing to change its rules.

"I think it's arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate," he said.

Asked whether Google might try to persuade Beijing to change its restrictions, Schmidt said he didn't rule anything out, but said it hasn't tried to change such limits elsewhere. He noted that Google's site in Germany is barred from linking to Nazi-oriented material.

"There are many cases where certain information is not available due to local law or local custom," he said.

Schmidt said China accounts for only a small portion of Google's revenues because the company has only recently obtain a license to allow it to carry local advertising. But he said the company expects China to be an important part of its future business.

One possible Google project in China would be to make Chinese books available online in digital form or to use translation software to produce English-language editions, Schmidt said.

He said the Beijing technical center could quickly become Google's biggest outside the United States, surpassing its European lab in Zurich, Switzerland.

Chinese universities "are now churning out a very large number of very, very good programmers," he said. "So we are moving quickly now to hire the best and the brightest."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Torrent Sites Advance
tm

The evolution of P2P download websites has shown some interesting trends. As the copyright enforcers succeed in closing down site after site in a futile attempt to kill P2P, the file sharing population will migrate - not only to better sites, but also to more efficient P2P networks.

After the premier eDonkey hashlink site Sharereactor died 2 years ago, there were no other ED2K sites that ever approached its level of popularity. Although the bulk of Sharereactor 'regulars' migrated to ShareConnector, propelling that site to the top spot, it still only grew to a fraction of Sharereactor's size. After ShareConnector was shut down a few months later, no other ED2K site has yet attained more than a very small following.

Because the ED2K network population has continued to grow since ShareReactor's closure, this would suggest that an increasing proportion of ED2K users do not use hashlink sites, but instead take their chances on using the client's network search engine to find files. Network searching is a much riskier method than using verified link sites, due to the increasing number of bogus files being spewed out by anti-P2P hired guns such as MediaSentry and OverPeer. However, because the ED2K network supports file searches, release sites are not critical, as they are with BitTorrent.

In stark contrast to ED2K, the online BitTorrent community has rebounded since the closure of mega-site Suprnova, which left the BitTorrent community wondering where to go or what to do next. After the brief ill-fated fling with the eXeem, the over-hyped spyware-infected application that promised to become "the new BitTorrent", the community returned to its roots and re-absorbed itself in both new and existing torrent sites.

Over time, several popular sites absorbed the Suprnova refugees and more - growing to nearly the size of Suprnova at its peak. Mininova is currently the largest torrent site, with a size that even exceeds that of the once-mighty Suprnova. That's quite an impressive feat for a website that only got started shortly after Suprnova's closure in December 2004.

Although the accuracy of Alexa's statistics might be a subject of debate, this suggests that mininova has become the first torrent site to match Suprnova's size. There is one major difference, though: during Suprnova's reign, it was the undisputed king of the torrent sites and there were no others that challenged its dominance. Today, however, the Torrent community is spread across many websites, and there are several sites actively competing with front-runner Mininova, including The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy.

Although the total population of the BitTorrent "network" is hard to determine, this data suggests that the number of users has continued to increase steadily, with the closure of a dominant torrent site such as Suprnova being just a relatively minor blip in the long-term trend. The copyright cartel's attacks have resulted in a stronger, more diversified BitTorrent community - one which is harder to disrupt with a site takedown, and potentially safer for users than P2P networks that enable users to reveal their list of shared files.

The message is clear: BitTorrent is here to stay and stronger than ever.
http://www.p2pcore.com/stories/334.php





DJ Typing Style Used To Securely Distribute Music
John Leyden

A technique used by Bletchley Park cryptographers to identify operators is being applied to distribute musical recordings to DJs securely using the internet.

During World War II, code breakers found that they could identify particular German Enigma operators by their particular style of typing code or Fist. SRI International (http://www.sri.com), a research spun out of Stanford University, found the same approach could you used to identify modern-day typists. US company BioPassword (http://www.biopassword.com) is attempting to commercialise the technology, creating a system that could uniquely identify individuals on the basis of how they type around nine samples of an eight to 16-keystroke password.

Online digital media distribution company, Musicrypt (http://www.musicrypt.com/), has applied this technology to incoporate biometrics in its Digital Media Distribution System (DMDS). The first application of DMDS replaces the (expensive) physical distribution of new musical recordings by record companies internally and to radio stations by a secure online distribution system. Musicrypt picked the technology in preference to more recognised forms of biometric authentication - such as fingerprint readers - because it could be used from any computer without any additional hardware, Computerworld reports.

Musicrypt's technology is used to distribute approximately half of all new music releases to radio stations in Canada. Canada's three largest broadcasters, Corus Radio, Rogers Media Broadcasting, and Standard Radio, have adopted Musicrypt’s Digital Media Distribution System (DMDS) as an exclusive means to distribute musical files electronically. Musicrypt expended into the US last year. Its technology has been installed at radio stations representing over 35 broadcast chains. In March the firm said its technology had delivered over 3,200 tracks to more than 2.5m destinations.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04...ic_biometrics/





Hi-Fly

Olive Works 400GB Into Opus Digital Music Centre
Tony Smith

Olive has announced the latest version of its latest high-end digital music separate, this time called the Opus and equipped with a 400GB hard drive - enough, the company claims, to hold 660 uncompressed CDs, 1,100 ripped using lossless compression, or 7,230 albums ripped to 128KBps MP3 files.

Past Olive products were developed and made in Germany by Hermstedt, but Olive claims the new model was "designed and custom-made in the USA". In addition to the much bigger storage capacity - up from 80GB and 160GB from, respectively, the Olive Symphony/Hermstedt Hifidelio and Olive Musica/Hermstedt Hifidelio Pro - there are now for Texas Instruments Burr-Brown 24-bit digital-to-analogue converters with 8x oversampling fed by a separate temperature-compensated crystal oscillator and driven by a linear power supply.

Like Musica/Symphony/Hifidelio, Opus has a CD drive ready to play or rip your music collection - and burn custom CDs. There are USB ports to hook up an iPod and copy songs across to the portable player. The unit has 802.11g Wi-Fi and a four-port 10/100Mbps Ethernet switch on board, ready to stream music to and from remote systems such as Macs, PCs and Hermstedt's ST-64 remote controller and speaker combo.

Track details are displayed on the range's usual seven-line, 400 x 160, four-greyscale LCD. Ripped songs are immediately compared to the built-in 2m-track song-title database to populate ID tags.

Olive said the Opus will ship early this month for $2999. It's available in black or silver.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03...ls_400gb_opus/





Sonos Slims Wireless Music Playback Box
Tony Smith

Sonos will this month cut the price of its multi-room digital music system. Its latest ZonePlayer wireless playback device, the ZP80, provides the same core functionality as Sonos' ZP100. However, to get the price - and the size - down, Sonos has stripped out the integrated amplifier used to drive speakers directly from the ZonePlayer.

The ZP80 provides RCA output and auto-detection input connectors, a pair of digital audio output ports - optical and co-ax - and two Ethernet connectors, down from the four on the ZP100.

The player can handled music encoded in the MP3, WMA, AAC, Ogg, Audible, Apple Lossless, FLAC, WAV and AIFF, but as yet there's no support for songs protected using either Microsoft or Apple's DRM technologies. It will pull songs from shared folders on Windows XP/2K, Mac OS X and NAS systems.

The ZP80 fits in with existing Sonos digital music networks. Standalone boxes will be priced at around £269, but for new customers the company is bundling a pair of ZP80s and its colour-screen, iPod-like wireless controller for £779. On its own, the controller, which can select the music playing on any one of up to 32 ZonePlayers on a given network, costs £319. Prices include VAT.

The ZP80 is set to ship in the UK and Europe on 27 April.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/04...neplayer_zp80/





Review

Slim Devices Squeezebox 3 Network Music Player
Tony Smith

I first reviewed Slim Devices' network music player, the Squeezebox, in April 2004. We're not quite two years on from that, but the machine has already undergone two major revisions: first, in March 2005, an upgrade of its networking capabilities and audio engine, and then, just seven months later, a complete case redesign...

I didn't get a chance to check out the Squeezebox 2, and since the Squeezebox 3 upgrade is largely cosmetic, this review is as much about the second-generation product as the third. But it's fair to stay with the new, stylish design, Squeezebox is finally ready for prime time. It's no longer a cute toy for the techies and early adopters, but a quality item ready to sit at the heart of any modern home's music system.

So what's changed? Since Squeezebox's debut, the product has gained Ethernet networking in addition to the wireless connectivity offered since day one. Wireless support has been updated to the latest 802.11g spec, with support for the latest security techniques, including WPA 2. It's now got two antennae and both have been put inside the box.

Gone too is the squat, set-top box look, replaced by an upright design in aluminium and shiny plastic that's frankly more assertive, particularly the black version - there's also a white model. It looks like consumer electronics kit should. The old Squeezebox was far from ugly, but the new one is far, far more stylish, fitting in smoothly with either a modern metallic-look hi-fi or a stack of older, black separates.

Squeezebox 3 sits back at a slight angle, held up by a fixed tubular metal stand. Above it are arrayed the ports: 3.5mm headphone socket, stereo RCA jacks, a digital optical output and a digital co-axial connector, the Ethernet port, and the power pin.

The front of the device is split 50:50 between a brushed aluminium panel and a Ray Ban-black visor behind which sits the familiar crisp, bluey-green, 320 x 32 vacuum fluorescent display. It remains eminently readable across a room, which is more than you can say for a docked iPod - especially if it's a Nano. The Squeezebox uses the same kind of horizontally scrolling user interface, albeit with only one line shown at a time, and I found it spry and responsive.

As before, Squeezebox utilises its own server app running on a Windows, Mac or Linux box to link the player to your music collection. The first time you run SlimServer in conjunction with a Squeezebox, it will index your songs, so you may find they're not all available to you immediately, but it's not too long before they are. While the initial index is being assembled, I found the Squeezebox to be frequently unresponsive and slow, but once the process was complete I had no trouble getting it to do what I wanted. The moral of the story: leave your Squeezebox alone while it's indexing, especially if you have a large music collection.

Once it knows what songs are available, Squeezebox quickly displays the tracks you can play, browsed by genre, artist, album, etc, or located using the first two three characters of the title, composer, band name and so on. Switching songs was effortless and - post indexing - there was no sense of lag between pressing a button on the remote and seeing the result on the screen, or hearing it blast out of the speakers.

Slim Devices makes the SlimServer code available to all, so it's gained a wide array of additional features, most accessed through its HTML front-end. It allows you to control the player and change settings remotely, but most folk will be able to leave it running in the background. The Squeezebox itself can now be augmented with software plug-ins, with an RSS feed reader and even a cute Squeezebox version of Tetris ready to help you pass the time.

All this suggests a strong link to a host computer, but Squeezebox 3 doesn't become redundant if you turn your Mac off or you leave your PC at work. The box can talk to Slim Devices' own SqueezeNetwork servers, using them to relay internet radio streams to your Squeezebox. There's a lag, of course, but unless you're using the station to check the time, that shouldn't matter. In any case, the Squeezebox itself can tell you the hour and the date. There's even an alarm clock.

The upshot is a system you can use all the time, though you still have to use your computer to set up SqueezeNetwork. This is the easiest way to add specific stations' stream URLs to the player, but you can enter them usng the web interface. Slim Devices has added a small selection of suggested stations to get you started.

Squeezebox separate Internet Radio and SqueezeNetwork menu items, which is unnecessary and confusing - which do you use? Slim Devices needs to integrate these near-identical options. Recursion lovers will be interested to know the Internet Radio menu is duplicated within the SqueezeNetwork menu.

Squeezebox has always been focused on music, and it's refreshing that there's been no attempt to shoehorn video in, just for the sake of it, though I'm sure its time will come. While the original model was aimed at the MP3 user, the latest version has support for AAC - made popular in the intervening time by Apple's iTunes - and it's gain the ability to decode compressed formats like Apple Lossless, FLAC, Ogg and WMA, all without the need to do a software decode then stream uncompressed audio across the network. Alas, there's still no DRM support, but on the Apple side at least, that's not Slim Devices' fault.

Squeezebox 2 introduced a new audio processing system centred on a 24-bit Texas Instruments Burr-Brown digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) that's said to be one of the best in the business. Both the DAC and the line-out amplification stages have their own linear power regulators, and the Squeezebox generates a full 6V line-out signal. The result: a signal to noise ratio of over 100dB and a total harmonic distortion of under -93.5dB (0.002 per cent).

That's the audiophile-friendly numbers out of the way - for the rest of us, it means the sound quality is as good as it gets. You're limited by the fidelity of the compressed source material and, of course, whatever audio equipment you connect your Squeezebox output ports to. Streaming over MP3 tracks and Radio Paradise (http://www.radioparaside.com/) internet radio streams to my separates system was a joy. Smooth transmission and excellent audio reproduction made it a real pleasure to use.

Ditto the set-up, which apart from the aforementioned indexing period, was entirely smooth. Choose your WLAN - or LAN, of course - enter your access passphrase and you're away. The box will scan the network for running SlimServers, and connect accordingly.

Re-connection to your SlimServer - it's on your notebook, for instance, and you've taken it out of the building since you last used your Squeezebox - is fast, and so is switching between songs. The search system is quick, and the mobile phone-style text-entry system will not only be immediately familiar to anyone who sends text messages, but thanks the remote control's large, well-spaced keys is easy to use.

With no controls on the Squeezebox itself, you'll need to keep the remote handy. It's the weakest part of the package, having a light, slightly cheap feel. But it's eminently useable, the keys are sensibly laid out and there are short-cut buttons to most commonly viewed menu items.

Squeezebox 3 costs $299 (£172), which is a snip. There's even an Ethernet-only version for $249 (£143). I did ponder a docked iPod as an alternative way of making all my digital music instantly accessible via my hi-fi, but it's way more expensive, and no one else can use it if I happen to be out and about with my portable music player. And there's no way I can sit on my sofa and see what's on the docked iPod's display - with Squeezebox it's no problem at all. And with the SlimDevices product you can send songs from your archive to multiple Squeezeboxes around your home. It's not quite up there with Sonos for large-scale multi-room set-ups, but then it's cheaper. You pay your money, you take your choice.

Flaws? If it can't find an active SlimServer, Squeezebox defaults to its set-up screen, not its internet radio facility, which makes for a less consumer-friendly experience. I understand why it does this - maybe there's a network problem - but I think the box should be more savvy and save the user some button presses. Is the most recently used WLAN up and running? Yes, so get an IP address and either log straight into SqueezeNetwork or go to the Internet Radio section. Only if there's no internet connectivity should it default to a set-up page.

I also experienced some network configuration oddities, but I believe they were due to the fact I kept taking my notebook on and off the WLAN with the effect that the Squeezebox kept having to deal with different IP addresses. None of it stopped me from playing music, either from SqueezeNetwork or my computer. A fixed system - or at least a fixed IP address - makes more sense and is a more likely usage scenario.
Verdict

Slim Devices' Squeezebox remains the best network music system I've tried, delivering exceptional functionality and superb audio quality at a very reasonable, affordable price. It's platform agnostic, working as well on Macs and Linux PCs as it does on Windows machines, and with SqueezeNetwork, it doesn't even need a computer to connect through, at least not once the account set-up's done. The server software is simple to use and as unobtrusive as you want. It supports a fine array of formats, though it's going to have to address the DRM problem sooner or later. And, did I mention it looks fantastic?

Thoroughly recommended.

Slim Devices Squeezebox 3
Summary Excellent sound quality, cross-platform support, eminently affordable price. Looks great too...
Rating 98%
Price $299 (wired and wireless); $249 (wired only)
More info The Squeezebox product page (http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_overview.html)

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03..._squeezebox_3/





A Few From March

Apple TV: Wait And Sue
Ashlee Vance

For worse, the online media market continues to fracture into the haves and the have nots - those that have partnered with Apple and those that have not.

Media companies baffling the public with their ineptitude is nothing new. Apple had to drag the labels kicking and screaming to iTunes. Now, Apple has had to show the mogul crowd how to do a subscription service right by this week offering a discount on TV shows (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) and letting consumers keep their programs. Why Napster, Real and the RIAA think making music disappear at the end of an expensive subscription will prove attractive is anyone's guess.

With that in mind, the media giants who have partnered with Apple - particularly for TV downloads - must thank God that Steve Jobs exists.

The pigopolists would never figure this stuff out on their own. They would never have agreed to meet in one place - iTunes - without the charismatic Jobs showing them the way. Companies like ABC and NBC would have taken years to push their TV shows onto the interweb at a somewhat sensible price.

And it's not like Apple does all that fantastic job of the media delivery in the first place. Apple refuses to open iTunes content to cheaper, non-iPod portable music players. In addition, it hasn't bothered to set up a proper channel for the TV shows, opting instead for a wee link on its Music Store. The format of the TV sales site itself pretty much sucks as you have to fight with iTunes to get descriptions of individual episodes. And, we reckon, the prices for the shows - $1.99 - are a bit high given that the regular, old advertising model on the tube delivers just a few cents per person in revenue to the networks. Why not cut us a break and cut the price down to $1.00 per episode? Have a heart.

Such gripes, however, remain trivial when you look at what the competition has to offer.

CBS, for example, made the mistake of partnering with Google. To this day, you can only buy two episodes of CSI - the most popular show on TV - from Google. You can buy zero episodes of CSI from CBS.

Beyond that, the Google Video Store looks like it was designed by a hemorrhaging five-year-old with a predilection for the small box of crayons and bad code.

While CBS executives scratch their bums wondering why they believed that rocking BusinessWeek story about Google, Apple has teamed with Comedy Central to sell episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as part of a discounted, quasi-subscription package.
The day the bundled cable died

We'll all look back on this deal as the day that TV delivery changed in earnest.

Apple has managed to repeat its tradition not of discovering something new but of doing something obvious first.

Plenty of MP3s players existed before the iPod. Apple just made the obvious better design and the obvious better store and backed it up with the obvious better marketing. That's not to say this is easy. It's just obvious.

Similarly, pushing TV via the internet isn't a new idea. Doing it well is an obvious path to a promising business.

Apple receives great praise for moving at a turtle's pace when the rest of the industry moves at a crippled turtle's pace.

Beyond adding some real glamour to the downloadable TV show market, the Daily Show show deal spells the beginning of the end of bundled cable. We're not going to go BusinessWeek on you and suggest that Apple will somehow undermine decades of TV development overnight. Not at all.

Consumers, however, will grow more and more loathe of the idea behind bundled cable as a result of Apple's work. The subscription price for The Daily Show - $9.99 for 16 episodes - still seems high. But you can imagine a day when you pick, say, 10 TV shows for that price. Apple downloads them for you, burns them to a DVD and off you go.

TV networks could make these packages more attractive by selling longer, commercial-free versions of the shows.

To compete well in the next five or so years, on-demand cable must go a similar route and free up its programming.

If not, it seems Apple will saunter into the TV market and become a major, major player. For unexplained reasons, no one seems to want to do this kind of work themselves. They'd rather let Jobs own them and then bitch about it.

Flounder first, sue later. That, after all, is the Hollywood way.

We imagine that a couple of up-starts will rise and give Apple a real challenge at their own game. That tends to be the way technology-heavy markets operate. Such variety should be welcomed.

If this doesn't happen, the media companies will only have themselves to blame for allowing Apple to control their TV shows as well as their music. Don't depend on a company as woefully inept as Google. Create a joint venture capital arm to develop independent media warehouses. Invent something great and give it away via open source. Do something. Do anything. Just don't whine about your own ineptitude. We've grown so very tired of that.
http://www.theregister.com/2006/03/09/apple_tv/





Universal Music Chief Blasts Slashdot
Andrew Orlowski

DMF The president of Universal Music Group's digital division, Larry Kenswil, dipped into Slashdot to illustrate the kind of laggards who are holding up progress in digital music.

How did he figure that out, exactly?

Kenswil was speaking at the Digital Music Forum in New York, earlier today, where we're in town to take the pulse of the industry. The RIAA director drew attention to three groups he called "pie throwers".

One group was manufacturers - such as Samsung and Helix - who he highlighted for producing hybrid MP3 players and satellite radios that record the streams. Thanks to a loophole in US copyright law, satellite radio recorders are the next big legal battleground - with Apple believed to be in the advanced stages of adding satellite streams as podcasts to its iTunes store.

"It's a great example of how you can lose it all for everyone if you set out to gain an extra cent for yourself," said Kenswil.

The second group were the telcos, who Kenswil said might threaten to bring in tiered internet pricing. When we asked Larry about this later, he said he still wasn't sure how seriously to take the big telcos hints that they wanted to charge differential pricing. "We're probably neutral on net neutrality right now," he joked.

The final group he referred to as "the utopians".

"It's the capitalism-is-evil crowd, the folks who want stuff for free - and you will find them on Slashdot," he said.

Kenswil quoted, to much appreciative laughter from the music industry audience, a Slashdot author called "albertpacino" for the saying that the music industry had "chosen to be blind about the issue."

Alas, when we tried to check the citation, neither Slashdot nor Google could produce any trace of a user with that name. None of the search engines could locate the phrase "blind about the issue". Kenswil's presentation included the quote reformatted for a PowerPoint presentation - so errors may have crept in as it was transcribed by his staff - or your reporter. Maybe the user cited figured out a way to leave and wipe all trace of his comments behind him - but it's all a little odd.

He was on firmer ground with his evidence when he quoted TechWeb editor Fredric Paul, for an article entitled "Why Everyone Hates the Music Industry", which you can find here (http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/172300219).

And we could have provided him with an even better example: the famous "p2p is leagal its in the air (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10...leagal_letter/)" we received from a Kentucky school.

But Kenswil paid particular attention to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "zeropaid", and Downhill Battle Labs.

"One wonders if they haven't got anything better to do," mused the Universal executive.

"With all the crap going on in the world, is Sony BMG the worst corporation in the world? Is it worse than the spammers, or the people who write viruses on purpose?" he asked.

"A lot of this is just fund-raising demagoguery. All they're saying is send us the money. But when you ask them what do they think is going to happen to the industry - the answer is some amorphous 'we'll figure it out eventually'".

All good knockabout stuff for his audience - and it's easy enough to find a copyright extremist in diapers to represent the opposition. There's plenty of intelligent discussion on Slashdot.

But Kenswil does, unfortunately, emphasize a depressing aspect of the debate we've often touched upon (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10...sis_no_crisis/), and he goes on to prove the point himself. Which is that extremists from both sides need each other's caricatures, so they can continue to posture for their own base.

The RIAA needs to present us with extremists who think copyright is dead, or who don't value creativity (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/21/creativity/). In turn these people need an opponent that keeps suing its customers, maintains cartel pricing structures for digital services, and produces irrational arguments against blanket licensing. And, guess what? The RIAA is only too happy to oblige.

Fortunately there is enough material progress, with new services such as Mashboxx and PlayLouder, and sensible talk (largely off the record) to confirm that the extremists of both sides are increasingly irrelevant.

For more reports on the politics of blanket licensing, and the new services, stay tuned.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03...hdot_riaa_pie/





How The Digital Revolution Screwed Songwriters. Twice.
Andrew Orlowski

DMF DMF This may not be news to most of you, but in light of DiMA's Jonathan Potter blaming music publishers for the sorry state of digital downloads, it's a topical reminder.

Music companies - and we blur the distinction deliberately for the moment, for the sake of simplicity - paid songwriters in two ways. For what they called 'licensing' - for masters and movie soundtracks, for example - the artist took home 50 per cent of the deal. For 'royalties', the artist typically gained or 20 per cent of wholesale or 10 per cent of retail. Along came the digital download services. When the labels cut deals for their catalogs with third parties, they considered it a royalty, rather than a licensing deal. That reduced the amount of money going to songwriters overnight.

Now many of these deals were with wholesalers such as Iris, or Orchard, who are essentially intermediaries in the distribution chain.

To you, a deal between a label and a distributor may look like a wholesale deal, and walk like a wholesale deal, but it doesn't quack like a wholesale deal. The labels regarded it as a retail deal.

So overnight the artists' cut fell from 50 per cent to 10 per cent. Attorney and author Steve Gordon, who was at Sony Music at the time, put it quite succinctly: "It's all about fucking the artist." ®

De-obfuscation: By law, the music collection agencies who operate on behalf of songwriters in the US cannot refuse a license. Getting money from the deal is another question. The big four labels own the major publishers, although this is in a state of flux, with the third and fourth biggest labels (EMI and Warner) looking to merge: they own the two largest publishers, and divestment is a possibility.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03...ngwriters_dmf/





BitComet .64 Released
Thomas Mennecke

It's nearly impossible to develop an application or website in the P2P world and not have some controversy or suspicion attached. µTorrent suffered a public relations relapse after its involvement with PeerFactor, while suspicious were raised after ed2k-it.com's change of management. Typically such marks of the beast pass over time, yet they remain an identifiable attribute.

BitComet's turbulent past has actually managed to enhance its popularity. The release of version .60 allowed the client to share peers associated with private trackers with the public BitTorrent population. Although this infuriated private trackers and resulted in BitComet's banishment from many such trackers, it helps exemplify a paradoxal double standard in the BitTorrent community.

The situation was subsequently resolved, with developer RnySmile reverting back to version .59. This version did not contain the bug that allowed the sharing of private peers; however was a technological step backwards from .60. Further resolving the situation, RnySmile upgraded the BitComet application and restoring the features lost in version .60 by releasing .61, .62 and .63.

Contrary to most other P2P development, BitComet continues to set the pace by issuing releases on a consistent basis. Today reinforces BitComet's consistence, as a stable version of .64 has been released. Although mostly cosmetic, there are several core bug fixes that should make this BitTorrent application ever slightly more stable. From the BitComet homepage:

GUI Improved: the optional IE toolbar is removed
GUI Improved: able to read RSS feed
GUI Bugfix: chat user list is removed temporarily
Core Bugfix: fix the bug that the play button doesn't work after click stop button in task preview window
Core Bugfix: fix the bug that unable to seek continuous when preview avi/rm file
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1152





MPAA, RIAA, Naked
p2pnet

Rick Fulkerson lives in Coos Bay, Oregon, where he owns and runs a small computer store north of the city.

But he's also a dedicated amateur movie maker bent on featuring the entertainment cartels as they really are, like in RIAA Porno, among other epics ; )

"One of my main concerns, as I read about the copyright struggles, is what our forefathers intended in the constitution," he told p2pnet a while back.

He was talking about his then latest, Copyright History, and, "They had many of the same copyright debates we have today," he said. "They recognized that individuals who create works of art or inventions needed to have time to make a profit from their work. No one on either side of the issue can dispute it. The constitution guarantees this for a limited time, which was originally seven years from my understanding. This also allows those works to eventually enter the public domain for the enrichment of everyone.

"However, today's mega media giants have tapped into the public domain and profited by it have then locked up those works with their own copyrights.

"This is dangerous and scary to me especially when the governments of the world are embracing these practices.

"I also can't understand why artists support this system."

Fulkerson finally has his own site and we can expect more of his work to show up there, to the continuing embarrassment of the Big Four record labels and Big Six movie studios.

"I've been away for quite a while," he says. "I had a huge family emergency, then dealing with my business. When it rains it pours. I've been checking in, though, and keeping on top of things.


Good to see you back, Ric ; )


Go here to check out his new site. And while you're at it, also have a look at:


RIAA Porn — Say it isn't so!! The music industry has made all kinds of noises about internet pornography and how it subverts our children. This is one argument they use in their attempt to gain control of internet content. Watch this and ask yourself, "do they really care about my kids?"

Copyright History — This short Video gives a brief overview of the intent of copyright law in the U.S constitution and the Entertainment Industry's desire to subvert it. If you don't have the Divx codecs download the larger mpeg file, Copyright History.mpeg.

The Real Pirates —All this constant babbling about pirataes and piracy brings up the question, "who are the real pirates?" Take a look here at industry misinformation and extortion practices and see if teen age children are really hurting industry artists. If you don't have the Divx codecs download the larger Mpeg file, Real Pirates.mpeg.

Music Industry Mafia — This was the first of many videos to come demonstrating the recent history of the orginaized music crime families attempt to stiffle their competition and control the marketplace. It outlines their failed attempt to destroy the digital online music boom by shutting down Napster instead of getting in on the ground floor and embracing it Which (like putting water on a grease fire) just caused filesharing to spread beyond they're control. If you don't have the Divx Codecs then download the mpg file, Music Industry Mafia.mpg
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/8503





China Internet Group Calls For Censorship
Elizabeth Dalziel

China's official Internet industry association is calling on its members to help the government suppress material deemed subversive or immoral.

"Unhealthy information" online has harmed Chinese children and threatens social stability, the Internet Society of China said in a statement. The 5-year-old group is the government-sanctioned association for Internet service providers and Chinese Web sites.

"We should run our business in a civilized way," said the statement issued Wednesday and reported by the government's Xinhua News Agency. "We should not produce, disseminate and spread information that harms state security, social stability and information that violates laws and regulations and social morality."

The group called for its 2,600 member companies to supervise content, delete "unhealthy" information and oppose acts that undermine "Internet civilization," Xinhua said.

China's communist government encourages Internet use for education and business but tries to block access to sensitive material. The country has the world's second-largest Internet population after the United States with 110 million people online.

The Internet Society statement didn't give any examples of material that members should suppress or say what prompted the appeal.

Chinese online filters have blocked access to foreign sites about Tibet, China's pro-democracy movement, human rights and the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. The government also launches frequent crackdowns on China-based sites with sexually oriented material.

The release of the society's statement coincided with a visit to Beijing by the chief executive of Google Inc., who defended the search engine's decision to cooperate with government censorship. Activists have criticized Mountain View, Calif.-based Google for blocking access to banned material from its Chinese-language site, Google.cn.

"We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one," CEO Eric Schmidt said Wednesday at a news conference.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Friction costs

How Immature Production Practices and Poor Quality of Life are Bankrupting the Game Industry
Jason Della Rocca

So much in business is determined by a simple acronym: ROI (return on investment). Obviously enough, as a businessperson, if you make an investment, you'd like to receive a return on that investment. In fact, the need for a return on investment is so pervasive, essentially no decision is made without first measuring it, evaluating it and factoring it against ROI from other opportunities. What's an acceptable ROI? It really depends on the investor. To some, making a modest 5% return is a sound business decision. When we get into the 20% range, many would say that's a no-brainer investment. Where's my checkbook?!

In the game industry, most investments are made into new technologies and tools to ensure games have the latest bells and whistles. Other times, investments are made in areas like licensing rights (e.g., for a longstanding successful movie franchise) or market intelligence. All in all, investments are made in the hopes of generating more revenue: Make more and better products, sell more products, etc.

That's all fine and good, but much of the game industry is ignoring (or is ignorant to) a massive investment opportunity...

Nuts and Bolts
Countless studies performed over decades and across many business sectors have proven time and again that mature project management practices and an emphasis on keeping workers happy can net massive returns. And, we're talking 1,000%-plus massive.

Investing in development practices such as formal code and design inspections, cost and quality estimation tools, and long-range technology planning can bring upwards of 1,000% return on investment over a multi-year time span. Research has shown that improved software practices pay an average ROI of 500% (including false starts) that is sustainable over many years.

A great deal of this return (or more accurately, savings) comes from improving development lifecycle costs. For example, spending more time in early stage planning and prototyping means unexpected changes and rework can be front-loaded in a project - when change is cheap. Formal production methodologies work to avoid changes late in a project, when the trickledown impact can be massive - the dreaded beta crunch.

Returns also come from improved production time and more predictable schedules - the stuff producers dream about. No need to explain the benefits here on the gaming front, with so much riding on a holiday shopping window or simultaneous movie launch.

Another area that drives returns is improved quality. Better and smarter production leads to games with fewer bugs and stronger feature sets. Though this is more subjective to gauge, a less painful production enables developers to infuse the game with more of the "fun bits." More seriously, a front-loaded, iterative pre-production process allows the team to more easily "discover" and fine-tune the fun, as opposed to waiting for everything to miraculously come together at the end of a project.

Lazy Bums
The desired response is, "Where's my checkbook?!" Right?

Wrong. Unlike writing a check to the bank and getting check + x% back in a year, this is the kind of investment that requires work. And most of us are just too lazy. As one anti-motivation poster said eloquently:

"Hard work often pays off over time, but laziness always pays off now."

Additionally, the game industry is so in the dark when it comes to project management, many really can't imagine that another way exists. ("You mean we don't have to crunch from day one?") Indeed, some developers have flatly stated that they had no idea such process improvement tools and techniques - which have been used for years elsewhere in software development - even existed. A related problem is the fact that the game industry has had much success under the current regime, and no one is willing to gamble their career on killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Well, some are, but they are in the minority...

On a more practical level, a major challenge to widespread adoption of such improvements is that much of the production research and knowledge about their benefits is not directly from the game industry. For one, this means developers are too ready to dismiss the research as irrelevant (certainly, some of it is). But, more pragmatically, they don't have the time or ability to "translate" and apply lessons from other types of projects to games. Moreover, the game industry has an ongoing and rather serious case of xenophobia, manifested in an unwillingness to adopt or in many cases even examine ideas from the "outside." This behavior is less likely the result of arrogance, than from hacker ethic roots and of caution bred by constant battery from outside forces.

On the whole, everyone is still fighting too many fires related to today's milestone to be looking at a longer-term pay off.

Churn and Burn
Of graver concern is the widely held view that developers are replaceable cogs in the machine. With a rampant developer-as-commodity attitude, it's no surprise that more isn't done to invest in workers' long-term careers.

No doubt, any discussion of quality of life or saner production schedules framed in an "I don't want to work hard" context is career suicide. Rather, the industry needs to take an approach that proclaims the ROI potential of happy workers running under smart project management.

Ignoring all the massive ROI potential discussed previously, the reality is that driving staff to the point of burnout is bad business. Humanitarian treatment aside, the friction cost of losing, and subsequently finding, replacing and training someone new ranges from $20,000 to $100,000-plus per head (the total is a mix of direct costs, like recruiting fees and relocation expenses, and indirect costs, like lost productivity during training or loss of tacit knowledge). An entire team walking out at the end of a project is not unheard of. Kudos to the producer who got the project out, but at what expense?

Let's not even get into the massive costs buried in health care expenses and lost productivity due to sick leave.

Inside Out
In a nutshell, there are investments to generate money and investments to save money. Both approaches are viable paths to a healthy and profitable company and industry. In that regard, it would be interesting to measure the game industry's actual profitability. We all know about the vast revenue growth ($10 billion in the U.S.A. and counting), but is the industry as whole turning a profit?

I'd wager that we are breaking even, at best. Too much emphasis has been placed on generating gross revenue (i.e., more and more sales) as opposed to driving for a larger net profit. Spending $1 million to make $10 million is better than spending $35 million to make $40 million (or in some cases 50 to make 40).

At a time when next-gen budgets are at the $15 million mark - on the low end of the scale - executives should be salivating at any opportunity to optimize. Simply put, there is an enormous opportunity to generate profits via more efficient production methodologies and treating development staff as investments as opposed to commodities.

The Bigger Picture
More fundamental is the notion that immature practices and extreme working conditions are bankrupting the industry's passion - the love for creating games that drives developers to be developers.

When the average career length of the game development workforce is just over five years and over 50% of developers admit they don't plan to hang around for more than 10, we have a problem.

How can an industry truly grow, and an art form evolve, if everyone is gone by the time they hit 30?

How can we grow beyond an 11.5% female workforce when the level of commitment expected all but negates any hope of raising a family?

Why does this kind of stuff matter?

Ask yourself what movies would be like if they were created mostly by people with five years of movie-making experience - and were typically male. Spielberg would have checked out way before creating E.T. Same for music, art, books - every art form. J.K. Rowling would never have penned Harry Potter. The examples are countless.

Immature production practices and poor quality of life are stealing the industry's ability to innovate and reinvigorate itself with fresh ideas. It's limiting our ability to attract new and diverse talent. It's robbing us of our experienced creators, who leave us with their hard earned tacit knowledge in tow. It's restricting our ability to reach broader audiences and create games with ever more cultural significance.

Investing in developers' careers is investing in the future viability of the game industry and the continued evolution of the medium of games.

What's the return on that investment?

Jason Della Rocca is the executive director of the International Game Developers Association. (Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the IGDA.) If the frequency of posts at his personal blog, Reality Panic, is any indication, he works way too much.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/40/23





Forever and a day

Broussard Updates Duke Nukem Forever Status

The May 2006 issue of Computer Games Magazine, which includes a cover feature previewing 3D Realms and Human Head Studios' long-awaited FPS Prey, has also included fresh information on 3D Realms's epochally long in development Duke Nukem Forever.

The game has been worked on in various forms for almost 10 years, having been originally announced in April 1997, and the update describes the current state of the title, which was viewed at 3D Realms' Texas studios: "mainly just pieces of the game in progress and tech demos", including "an early level, a vehicle sequence, a few test rooms", among others.

Technology-wise, Duke Nukem Forever originally started development on the Quake II engine, before switching to Unreal, and, according to a Wikipedia entry, is now working with a heavily modified custom engine that includes some small elements from earlier iterations of Unreal Engine.

3DR's George Broussard also demonstrated world interactivity that includes Duke standing in front of a computer and emailing the player, if he provides his email address for the game. But, according to the piece, Broussard was bashful, overall, about showing off the game, commenting: "The problem is that when we show it, people are going to be like, 'Yeah, whatever'. Honestly, at this point we just want to finish it."

A recently reported-on Take-Two financial filing shows that the game's long-time publisher has significant interest in the game's completion date, noting: "One other notable payment was the renegotiation of a $6 million charge due [to former publisher GT Interactive, now owned by Atari] upon delivery of the final PC version of Duke Nukem Forever back in March 2005. The epic delay of 3D Realms' shooter has meant that $4.25 million of the final milestone payment has already been paid, alongside the promise of a final $500,000 upon the commercial release of Duke Nukem Forever prior to December 31, 2006."

Further information on the game, alongside the longform Prey preview, is available in the May issue of Computer Games Magazine, more information on which can be seen at the official Computer Games Online website.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...php?story=8878





WAL*MART Rules

One company controls your games – but how much longer?
Allen Varney

Do you buy your electronic games at Wal-Mart? Never mind, doesn't matter. The retail games you buy at GameStop or Best Buy or online are the games Wal-Mart has decided you can buy.

Publisher sales reps inform Wal-Mart buyers of games in development; the games' subjects, titles, artwork and packaging are vetted and sometimes vetoed by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart tells a top-end publisher it won't carry a certain game, the publisher kills that game. In short, every triple-A game sold at retail in North America is managed start to finish, top to bottom, with the publisher's gaze fixed squarely on Wal-Mart, and no other.

But how long will that last?

The Power
By consolidating many manufacturing sources and optimizing its supply chain, Wal-Mart has shifted the center of business power from manufacturing to retail. This has forced most American industries to move offshore, but the software business, and electronic games in particular, have been less affected this way. Though selected art resources are increasingly outsourced to India and Southeast Asia, games are largely still produced in relatively small, integral domestic groups. Is this because North American creators understand their audience better than overseas coders? Because the creators here are better skilled? Or is it simply that Wal-Mart customers, who unfailingly seek the lowest prices for food and appliances and shampoo and garden hoses, will still pay high prices for top-line computer games?

For whatever reason, the game business has so far resisted most competition from lower-wage workers overseas. Compared to physical manufacturing, software profit margins remain comfortable and can support professional-class salaries. Yet make no mistake, Wal-Mart's effect remains powerful.

Tom Gilleland, with the indie developer BeachWare (which has sold casino games through Wal-Mart), says, "Wal-Mart is working from a very strong position that enables them to dictate the content of their software product line. Wal-Mart tells the distributor/publishers what they want, and the distributor/publisher goes and finds it, or has a developer make it. They certainly know what their customers want, or they wouldn't have been so successful. They also have a very complicated situation in terms of public image, so they avoid controversial products."

Thus, because of the company's influence, nowadays it is practically impossible to market a game that contains nudity. "We're not going to carry any software with any vulgarity or nudity - we're just not going to do it," Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams told Reuters in October 2002.

Developers have produced "special Wal-Mart editions" of some games, such as Duke Nukem 3D and Blood, that delete the two principal bugaboos, nudity and excessive gore. Other developers just sanitize their games across the board. As a Ritual Entertainment developer remarked in an online chat promoting their Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2 game (2000), "There's not much nudity other than statues. Wal-Mart is picky about that. When you have to decide between feeding your family or putting nudity in the game, you choose food."

For the U.S. version of Giants: Citizen Kabuto (2000), Planet Moon put a bikini top on Delphi, the game's topless sea-nymph heroine, after Wal-Mart refused to carry the seminude version. In an effort to gain a Teen rating from the Electronic Software Ratings Board (ESRB), Planet Moon also toned down the language and changed the red blood to green - but the game got a Mature rating anyway. (Soon afterward, a patch that removed the changes mysteriously appeared online.)

Of course, Wal-Mart, like other major retailers, pulled Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from its shelves after the "Hot Coffee" fiasco. Take-Two Interactive revised that quarter's financial guidance down by $45 million. Wal-Mart has since resumed selling a modified version.

Wal-Mart has shaped the field in other ways. Remember five years ago, when computer game boxes all got smaller? That was Wal-Mart. "Wal-Mart was a significant force in driving videogame producers (and software producers of all kinds) to dramatically reduce the size of their boxes," says Charles Fishman, senior writer for Fast Company magazine and author of the bestselling book The Wal-Mart Effect. "Wal-Mart's goal is to put as much merchandise on the shelves inside a given store-size as possible. By cutting the box size of games and software, Wal-Mart could easily increase the amount of product it displayed by 20 or 30 or 40 percent. More product in the same shelf-space. That's good for Wal-Mart, and good for customers, and maybe even good, ultimately, for game makers. Smaller boxes cost less.

"And Wal-Mart is increasingly interested in the environmental impact of such changes," Fishman says. "If you literally cut the packaging of gaming software and routine software in half, [...] that eventually comes to forests of trees not cut down. This is something Wal-Mart works on consistently, not just in software boxes." Fishman's book opens with a similar story: Wal-Mart eliminated cardboard boxes for deodorants and antiperspirants to save shelf space and money and to reduce waste. (This is part of a larger Wal-Mart environmental initiative.)

More pertinent than the packaging of games is their content. Wal-Mart and other retailers display an ever- decreasing range of game types. More and more, it is difficult-to-impossible to market an adventure game, or a non-Microsoft flight simulator, or a non-Maxis city-builder, or a non-Civilization turn-based strategy game. Did the audiences for these forms simply wither away? No, they're still out there - but they're not sufficiently profitable for big-box retail chains. The commercial range of games shrinks because of the free market's uncompromising pursuit of the majority at the expense of all minority tastes. We see this most clearly in Wal-Mart's signal triumph in game design, Deer Hunter.

The Audience
In the 1990s, Wal-Mart discovered a previously unrecognized demographic: The mass market gamer, who plays while holding a mouse in one hand and a can of beer in the other.

Game designer Harvey Smith wrote in 2002 about his meeting with Robert Westmoreland, "the cool redneck biz exec behind Deer Hunter":
"He claims that he looked at data on how much software Wal-Mart was selling at the time, thought about the average Wal-Mart shopper, thought about what kind of games the average Wal-Mart shopper would want to play (which, with the exception of Bass Fisherman, was at odds with the kinds of games being sold in the store), and then pitched the concept of Deer Hunter. Multiple publishers turned it down, calling it ridiculous in some cases. It cost about $110,000 to make. The franchise has allegedly sold 10 million copies. I bet Robert drives a really nice truck."

Hardcore gamers derided Deer Hunter (1997) and its many imitators because they were dull and looked like crap. (The most recent version, Deer Hunter 2005, looks better.) So what? The games cost $20 and ran on low-end hardware - and their subjects spoke to far more customers than did Quake or Command & Conquer. Programmer Zac Belado wrote at the time, "It's not just computer nerds and simulation freaks that are buying computers and games. Deer Hunter [buyers] haven't seen a product that directly appeals to them, have been largely ignored by the game market (or, worse, ridiculed by games like Redneck Rampage), and have finally proven that they have not only the desire for software products, but the money to pay for them."

Several publishers, running entirely below the industry radar, have found excellent business catering to the Wal-Mart demographic. Clay Dreslough, former executive producer at Midway Games, now runs Sports Mogul Inc. in Middletown, Connecticut. Dreslough's sports management sims, like the new Baseball Mogul 2007, are sold at Wal-Mart, though most of his sales are online. "I think people in the hardcore market are frustrated with Wal-Mart because they might only carry the very top-selling FPS or [MMOG] titles. But for small companies like us, Wal-Mart creates a lot of upside without much downside. That is, even if Wal-Mart drops us one year, we still have other retail outlets, and we still have a strong fan base online.

"I have heard a lot about Wal-Mart hurting the industry and hurting innovation," Dreslough says, "the theory being that you have to write a specific kind of game to get the scarce shelf space at Wal-Mart, and if you don't get into Wal-Mart, you can't be profitable. My experience has been different. I think there's tons of room for innovation without Wal-Mart.

Specifically, even with retail distribution, we still make most of our money online, through downloads of the product and through our popular Baseball Mogul Online. Publishing online, without worrying about the retail market, gives you more flexibility to innovate."

The whole industry is learning that lesson. Game publishers are working hard to create online services that trump Wal-Mart the way iTunes has trumped the music cartels.

The Escape
Many game publishers are already chafing to move to online distribution, not least because it cuts out the used-game market. They also believe online distribution will reduce file sharing - anyway, hope springs eternal.

As national availability of broadband grows, Valve has already started its Steam distribution network. Ritual Entertainment - which ran afoul of Wal-Mart not only for Heavy Metal, but also for its hyper-gory 1998 shooter SiN, is using Steam to distribute its new SiN Episodes, almost as if it had been waiting for online distribution before making a sequel. Lead designer Shawn Ketcherside blogged, "Episodic gaming, because of its faster turnaround, offers the ability to react to consumer feedback (this has been talked about endlessly already), but it also offers flexibility to try new and really innovative ideas. [...] Basically, it's giving all gamers more choice. Gamers can pick and choose titles, options and gameplay that really appeal to them."

All the next-gen consoles embrace online, to varying degrees. Xbox Live is already up and running, and Nintendo has said the Revolution will offer downloads of classic NES games. Sony's PlayStation Network Platform will offer a free service similar to XBox Live.

On a Gamasutra "Question of the Week" feature about digital distribution, most respondents predicted eventual victory for online distribution. BioWare's Rob Bartel wrote, "The shift to digital distribution is coming to all platforms, and we now find ourselves at the start of that lengthy transition. It will be complete within a decade." And where is Wal-Mart then? "The big players in the Digital Distribution Era will be those who own the unified portals that will serve as the digital marketplace, and those who own the big-budget games that will serve as development platforms and delivery mechanisms for future content."

But don't interpret that to mean Wal-Mart will just fade away. The company owes its current supremacy to its embrace of high tech logistics, and that attitude remains strong; Wal-Mart, along with the Defense Department, is the chief force behind the imminent adoption of radio-frequency ID tags (RFIDs or "arphids"). So it's possible Wal-Mart itself might move into online games.

But in the digital distribution era, Bentonville's unquestioned domination of electronic games will still decline.

It's simply too easy to get online without their approval; online is the realm of the infinite shelf. "New opportunities will open up at the micro-studio level," Bartel says, "where small teams, both casual and professional, first-party and third- party, will be able to develop, market and sell compelling gameplay and new intellectual properties within the frameworks created and supported by the larger players."

Then, like the great trusts and monopolies of the early 20th Century, Wal-Mart's dominion will finally fade.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/40/11





Teenagers Losing Interest in Video Games, Says Survey

Piper Jaffray has announced the results of its 11th bi-annual proprietary research survey on teen spending habits and retail brand perceptions, titled "Taking Stock With Teens", which dealt with fashion and technology but also video game-related questions for North American teenagers.

Senior Retail Analyst Jeff Klinefelter, along with a team of senior research analysts conducted mall research field trips with approximately 700 teens from 12 high schools in nine states across the country and Canada. Additionally, the team surveyed another 1,235 students across the country through a partnership with the national DECA organization in an online survey.

With particular reference to video games, results of the survey point out that 81 percent of surveyed student households have at least one video game platform, and 59 percent of students state that they are occasional game players (playing at least monthly).

Interestingly, almost 80 percent of teens indicated that they intend to spend less time playing video games in 2006 and nearly 70 percent indicated that their interest in playing video games is decreasing.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...php?story=8843





Vista Won't Show Fancy Side To Pirates
Ina Fried

Windows Vista plans to offer you spiffy new graphics, as long as you're not a pirate.

With the new operating system, Microsoft is offering plenty of new graphics tricks, including translucent windows, animated flips between open programs and "live icons" that show a graphical representation of the file in question.

But before Vista will display its showiest side, known as Aero, it will run a check to make sure the software was properly purchased.

"Those who are not running genuine Windows will not be able to take advantage of the Windows Aero user experience," a Microsoft representative told CNET News.com on Wednesday.

The move is the latest salvo in Microsoft's broad attack on those who use unauthorized copies of its operating system. In the fall of 2004, Microsoft began testing the Windows Genuine Advantage program, designed to verify that a particular copy of Windows is legitimate.

At first an optional program, the piracy check eventually became mandatory for many types of Windows XP downloads, but was not required to run any aspect of the operating system itself. Microsoft has identified reducing piracy as a key way for the company to grow its sales of Windows, which is already used on more than 90 percent of personal computers.

But it's not just pirates who will be blocked from Windows' fanciest graphics. The Aero display also won't be available to those who buy Windows Vista Basic, the low-end consumer version of the operating system. And even those with higher-end versions won't be able to see the fancy graphics if they don't have enough memory, lack sufficient graphics horsepower or have a graphics chip that doesn't support a new Vista driver.

Microsoft has not issued the final hardware requirements for Vista itself, which is due to go on sale to consumers in January. However, the company has issued some guidelines for Aero, as part of a draft product guide that was briefly posted on the Internet this week.

What's needed

To run Aero, a system will need to meet some pretty specific and arcane requirements, including memory bandwidth of at least 1,800MB per second, Microsoft said in the document. The product guide said that Vista would include a tool for measuring this, but Microsoft did not offer further details on how consumers with existing PCs will be able to see if their machines meet the standard.

The system will need a graphics chip with a Vista-specific driver, as well as a varying amount of minimum graphics memory, depending on the size of the monitor. A computer with a single display of 1280-by-1024 pixels or less, for example, must have 64MB of graphics memory. For a larger screen, 256MB may be needed, as well as additional memory for secondary displays.

Flying Aero

To get the best out of Vista's graphics, you'll need at least four things, according to tentative Microsoft guidelines.


1. A legitimate copy of one of Vista's higher-end versions: Home Premium, Business, Enterprise or Ultimate

2. A Vista-specific (WDDM) graphics driver

3. A minimum of 1,800MB per second of graphics memory bandwidth

4. Enough graphics memory (amount needed varies based on monitor size)

Source: Tentative guidelines inadvertently posted online by Microsoft this week.

A PC with shared memory--that is, memory that is used both by the main system and by the graphics chip--can also work with Aero. But it needs to have 1GB of dual-channel memory, with at least 512MB of that memory available to the main system.

Microsoft said that the Aero requirements stated in the product guide are not final. The Redmond, Wash.-based company has so far only released guidelines for machines that will display a logo indicating their Vista-readiness.

"A draft version of the Windows Vista Product Guide was posted inadvertently and includes information that is not yet final," the Microsoft representative said in an e-mail. "To date, we have only provided hardware guidelines as part of our Windows Vista Capable PC efforts. The Windows Vista Capable PC Program provides information to customers about PCs they can buy today that will be able to run Windows Vista."

Those Aero requirements are not easily understood by buyers or computer salespeople, said Michael Cherry, an analyst at market research firm Directions on Microsoft. He said, for example, that he has no idea how much memory bandwidth his computer has. "I wouldn't even know how to begin to measure it."

Cherry said that Microsoft still has work to do to translate these requirements into something that is understandable to the average PC user.

"I don't want to be an electrical engineer to figure this out," he said.
http://news.com.com/Vista+wont+show+...3-6060700.html





AT&T Seeks to Hide Spy Docs
Ryan Singel

AT&T is seeking the return of technical documents presented in a lawsuit that allegedly detail how the telecom giant helped the government set up a massive internet wiretap operation in its San Francisco facilities.

In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn't be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.

The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.

The EFF filed the class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Northern California in January, seeking damages from AT&T on behalf of AT&T customers for alleged violation of state and federal laws.

Mark Klein, a former technician who worked for AT&T for 22 years, provided three technical documents, totaling 140 pages, to the EFF and to The New York Times, which first reported last December that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on citizens' phone calls without obtaining warrants.

Klein issued a detailed public statement last week, saying he came forward because he believes the government's extrajudicial spying extended beyond wiretapping of phone calls between Americans and a party with suspected ties to terrorists, and included wholesale monitoring of the nation's internet communications.

AT&T built a secret room in its San Francisco switching station that funnels internet traffic data from AT&T Worldnet dialup customers and traffic from AT&T's massive internet backbone to the NSA, according to a statement from Klein.

Klein's duties included connecting new fiber-optic circuits to that room, which housed data-mining equipment built by a company called Narus, according to his statement.

Narus' promotional materials boast that its equipment can scan billions of bits of internet traffic per second, including analyzing the contents of e-mails and e-mail attachments and even allowing playback of internet phone calls.

While AT&T's open filings did not confirm the details of Klein's statement, they did not dispute the legitimacy of his claims, and the company's filing included a sealed affidavit attesting to the sensitivity of the documents.

The company asked for a hearing Thursday to determine whether the documents could be used in the class-action lawsuit, whether they would be unsealed or whether the EFF would have to return them. The EFF filed a rebuttal, calling that time frame unworkable and accusing AT&T of not following normal court rules.

AT&T's lawyers also told the court that intense press coverage surrounding the case, including Wired News' publication of Klein's statement, was revealing the company's trade secrets, "causing grave injury to AT&T." The lawyers argued that unsealing the documents "would cause AT&T great harm and potentially jeopardize AT&T's network, making it vulnerable to hackers, and worse."

The EFF filed the documents last week under a temporary seal when it asked the judge to force AT&T to stop the alleged internet spying until the case goes to trial.

Klein's statement and documents are the only direct evidence filed so far by the EFF, and without them its case could be weakened.

It is not clear whether AT&T has served legal papers to Klein.

As of last week, Klein was represented by Miles Ehrlich, who until January served as a U.S. attorney in San Francisco, prosecuting white-collar crime. Klein is now also represented by two lawyers from the powerhouse law firm Morrison & Foerster, including James J. Brosnahan, who is best known for representing John Walker Lindh, the Marin County, California, man found fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The EFF declined to comment on the filing, while AT&T did not return a call seeking comment. The case is Hepting v. AT&T.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...l?tw=rss.index





Secrets! Get cher genuine Pentagon secrets!

Afghans Selling US Army 'Files'

US forces in Afghanistan are checking reports that stolen computer hardware containing military secrets is being sold at a market beside a big US base.

Shopkeepers at a market next to Bagram base, outside Kabul, have been selling memory drives stolen from the facility, the Los Angeles Times newspaper says.

The disks reportedly contain personal details about US soldiers, military defences and lists of enemy targets.

A US spokesman said an investigation had been ordered into the reports.

Lt Mike Cody said the military was looking into "allegations that sensitive military items are being sold in local bazaars".

"Coalition officials regularly survey bazaars across Afghanistan for the presence of contraband materials, but thus far have not uncovered sensitive or classified items," he said.

The Los Angeles Times report said disks on sale at the market outside Bagram contained the names of allegedly corrupt Afghan officials, reports on enemy targets and details about US defences.

A separate report by the Associated Press news agency appeared to confirm sensitive information could be acquired from the market.

The agency said its reporter bought several disks from the Bagram market, some of which contained confidential information about US soldiers.

One file reportedly described the type of training a group of soldiers had received. Another file is said to have contained a manual for flying the US military's Chinook helicopter.

'Stolen by workers'

According to the reports, the computer drives were on sale alongside other items, apparently also from the Bagram base.

These included US military uniforms and equipment such as compasses and binoculars.

A shopkeeper interviewed by the Associated Press news agency said he was not interested in the worth of the information on the memory drives.

He reportedly said he was selling the items for their value as hardware alone.

"They were all stolen from offices inside the base by the Afghans working there," he told the agency.

"I get them all the time."

Hundreds of Afghans are said to be working as cleaners, labourers and auxiliary staff at the Bagram base.

The base has been used by US forces since their invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

US and Nato troops are in the country fighting insurgents linked to the ousted Taleban militia.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ia/4905052.stm





'Steve Lightspeed' Walks the Line Between Porn Business and Family
David Kesmodel

In the online pornography business, just about everybody has heard of Steve Lightspeed.

He runs an ever-growing network of more than 30 adult Web sites, and throws lavish parties for models and business partners -- at one Las Vegas convention, he hired stunt planes to fly partygoers around.

But few in the porn world know much about Steve Jones, the 39-year-old married father of two behind the Lightspeed persona – and that's the way he wants to keep it.

Outside the industry, Mr. Jones and his wife, who manages the company's books, maintain a low profile. When chatting with strangers at cocktail parties, Mr. Jones says that he's in "Internet marketing" or "computer consulting." The couple also don't tell others in their posh Phoenix neighborhood what they do, and they keep some relatives in the dark.

Of paramount concern, Mr. Jones said, is shielding the couple's grade-school-age children from the industry, as well as any criticism they might encounter. A few years ago, Mr. Jones relocated his family after some neighbors learned of his profession, and forbade their children from playing with his. "It was kind of heartbreaking," Mr. Jones said. He added: "My kids have no clue what we do."

Few Americans dealt with such issues until the late 1990s, when the number of adult Web sites exploded along with the Internet boom. The issues are gaining more attention in the industry. Last year, a couple who operate adult sites launched a group called Parents In Adult to provide support and legal resources for owners of pornographic Web sites. The issues were also the subject of a seminar at a national porn-industry convention this year.

Mr. Jones said he's not ashamed of his vocation. "The problem is public perception," he said. "There's so much misconception about what we do. Everyone thinks we're all involved in every dirty piece of the business. It's really not like that."

Keeping a Low Profile

Trying to lay low is getting tougher for Mr. Jones. His company, Lightspeed Media Corp., has been growing – it now has 15 employees, and is moving into new markets like DVD sales. Last year, Lightspeed Media earned about $5 million in revenue and $1 million in profit, Mr. Jones said.

Mr. Jones and his company are regularly subjects of articles by adult news sites. Such articles generally quote him as Steve Lightspeed, though some have also noted his real name. An entry for "Lightspeed Media Corporation" on Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, identifies Mr. Jones by his real name as the company's founder.

Mr. Jones's effort to stay out of the spotlight is complicated by the type of porn he offers. Lightspeed Media publishes photos and videos of youthful models, and has long used terms such as "barely legal" and "barely 18" in its marketing. Users pay between $30 and $40 a month, depending on how many sites they want to access.

"He's caught a lot of flak because some people feel he makes them look younger than" 18, said Farrell Timlake, president of adult-video publisher Homegrown Video.

Mr. Jones said his standard reply to such criticism is: "I'm sorry my porn stars don't look used up yet." He added: "The federal government says 18 is the legal age, and if they don't like it, they should petition the government."

'A Little Extra Money'

Mr. Jones developed an interest in computers as a teenager, and attended Arizona State University to study computer engineering. But he said he was expelled from the school's engineering department in the fall of 1985 after he was accused of cheating. He said the allegations were related to his tutoring of a female classmate; the school confirmed his attendance, but declined to comment on the circumstances of his departure.

Mr. Jones returned to his home state of Washington, where he earned a degree in computer programming at a trade school. After working for a software company, he launched his own consulting business, which helped retailers set up their computer systems.

By the late 1990s, Mr. Jones was an avid viewer of online porn, and decided to start dabbling in a second career. He placed an advertisement for amateur models in an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle. He hired three girls and began shooting nude photographs of them in secluded settings around town. "I really had no idea what I was doing," said Mr. Jones. "Our goal was to make a little extra money for our kids' college fund."

In April 1999, he launched his first paid-subscription site, called Lightspeed University (the name "lightspeed" came from an alias Mr. Jones adopted in computer chat rooms in the early 1990s). By 2000, the site was generating enough income that Mr. Jones was able to shut down his consulting business. "He went quickly to the top in an industry where that doesn't happen often," said Lawrence G. Walters, a Florida adult-entertainment lawyer who represents several rival porn sites.

The Lightspeed Persona

Executives in the adult-entertainment industry said Mr. Jones has a reputation for sparing no expense when taking on the Steve Lightspeed persona at conventions.

"He markets his personality," said Scott Coffman, chief executive of AEBN Inc., a large adult-video Web site. "That helps build your brand. Everyone wants to do sort of what Steve does."

The stunt-plane promotion – at a Las Vegas convention a few years ago – cost about $40,000, Mr. Jones said, and earlier this month he sponsored a dodgeball tournament at a gathering in Tempe, Ariz. The bar tab was about $50,000, he said.

"The Steve Lightspeed character is a little bigger than life," said Mr. Jones, who often sports a baseball jersey emblazoned with "Lightspeed" in capital letters. "I heard people say we once raced helicopters down the Las Vegas strip."

Mr. Jones declined to reveal details about his own salary, but said his showmanship often makes him appear wealthier than he is. "I don't have a jet," he said. "I don't have a yacht. I have a nice house. I tell everybody, 'I work for a living.' I don't drive a $100,000 car. I drive an old, beat-up minivan."

When not traveling to promote his business, Mr. Jones says he works seven days a week, often 12 hours a day, focused on marketing and managing relationships with business partners and models. He still photographs some models, he said, but most of that work is done by three staff photographers.

He said he and his wife mostly socialize with others inside the porn business, in part because it avoids the awkwardness of explaining his line of work. "Most of our friends tend to be in the industry," he said. Relationships with family members can also be tricky. Mr. Jones's mother works for Lightspeed Media, handling customer service duties, but he said some relatives don't know about his work and likely wouldn't approve.

Mr. Jones said he has been particularly worried about shielding his children. The Joneses installed software to block illicit content on both of their kids' PCs, and Mr. Jones has password-protected his and his wife's computers. "Being in this industry has made us more sensitive to how available on the Internet this material is to kids," he said.

As his children get closer to adulthood, he said, he'll explain what their parents do. "I wouldn't mind if my kids get involved in this business," he said. Then he added: "Behind the scenes."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





The Pirate Party

Who Are We?

We are a newly formed party aiming to pass the four-percent barrier to entry in this fall's general Swedish parliamentary elections. To do this, we need about 225,000 votes.

Our core values are that the right to privacy must be guaranteed, and that copyright and patents hurt culture and innovation, rather than promoting them.


The Right to Privacy

We are quickly progressing toward a society where every citizen is electronically monitored 24 hours a day, in case they do something that is against the will of the politicians.

The latest example of this is the European Union's Data Retention Directive; our minister of justice, Thomas Bodström, has been one of its chief proponents. This directive means that the people who handle your communications will be required by law to track and store information about the calls you make, when you made them, whom to, and exactly where from (cellphones); which SMS messages you send and to whom; the e-mails you send and to whom, et cetera. Only a few weeks passed after this Directive, before Thomas Bodström introduced yet another act for increased covert surveillance powers.

For a society to grow, culturally and technologically, its citizens must be guaranteed the right to a private life. We want to stop, turn back from, and never go back to the current trend.

We also want each citizen to have complete and exclusive control of information pertaining to his or her private life; objective information, such as residential address, and private facts, such as food habits.


Copyrights And Patents

Copyright has been said to be necessary for the creation of culture, and patents have been said to be necessary for innovation to happen. This has been repeated so often, that nobody questions it. We do, and we say that it's just a myth, perpetuated by those who have something to gain from preventing new culture and technology.

When push comes to shove, copyright PREVENTS a lot of new culture, and patents PREVENT a lot of innovation. Above all, today's copyright laws has no balance at all between the creator's economic interests and society's cultural interests: it stands to no reason that somebody needs to be paid for 70 years after their own death.

The Pirate Party wants a right for every citizen to gather, use, derive from, and distribute any culture, knowledge and public information, as long as it is for non-commercial use. Patents are counteracting their original purpose, and need to be abolished completely. Copyrights need to return to a fair and balanced level, so the creator can have a short but long enough time of protection - say, five years - to make money off creative works in commercial environments.


No Other Issues

These two issues are the most important ones to us. In fact, they are so important, that we have chosen to unite on these two issues, and put all our other differences aside.

Therefore, the Pirate Party actively chooses to not hold an opinion on any issue except for these two.

https://www.piratpartiet.se/English.aspx

















Until next week,

- js.


















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

April 8th, April 1st, March 25th, March 18th,

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote