Labels think Apple has perfect pitch
Executives of major record firms believe a speedy, simple online music service for Mac users will be a hit
Jon Healey
Top executives at the major record companies have finally found an online music service that makes them excited about the digital future — but it's only for Macs.
The new service was developed by Apple Computer Inc., sources said Monday, and offers users of Macintoshes and iPod portable music players many of the same capabilities that already are available from services previously endorsed by the labels. But the Apple offering won over music executives because it makes buying and downloading music as simple and non-technical as buying a book from Amazon.com.
"This is exactly what the music industry has been waiting for," said one person familiar with the negotiations between the Cupertino, Calif., computer maker and the labels. "It's hip. It's quick. It's easy. If people on the Internet are actually interested in buying music, not just stealing it, this is the answer."
That ease of use has music executives optimistic that the Apple service will be an effective antidote to surging piracy on the Internet, sources said.
Other legitimate music services have cumbersome technology and pricing plans — motivated in part by the labels' demands for security — that make them much harder to use than unauthorized online services, such as the Kazaa file-sharing system.
As promising as the new service is, however, there is a big limitation. Apple's products account for just a sliver of the total computer market — less than 3% of the computers sold worldwide are Macs. The vast majority of the potential audience for downloadable music services uses machines that run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the service Monday, as did representatives from the five major record corporations — Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment, Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music Group, Bertelsmann's BMG division and EMI Group.
The new service is so important to Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs that he personally demonstrated it to top executives at all five companies, sources said. More than a dozen music executives have visited Apple since last summer and came away enthusiastic.
The executives also like the massive marketing plan designed by Jobs to educate consumers about the service.
http://www.sunspot.net/technology/ba...logy-headlines
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FullAudio Switches the MusicNow
Ryan Naraine
In a week of increasing noise from the digital music subscription sector, Chicago-based FullAudio is fine-tuning plans for a revamped -- and renamed -- service that adds unlimited tethered downloads and streamed songs for $9.95 per month.
With analysts positioning FullAudio as a prime candidate for an acquisition, most likely by Microsoft , the company's rebranded MusicNow service will join competitors in offering song downloads for 99 cents each when it is launched on Friday.
The company is positioning the new MusicNow as a shift away from the "search-and- browse" database model to a complete "entertainment experience," that will feature paid radio channels targeting a grown-up audience.
For $4.95 per month, the company will sell access to 36 radio channels. A channel will let paying subscribers listen to premium radio stations or to play on-demand relevant content like hit singles or programmed bundles of music and entire albums.
FullAudio CEO Scott Kauffman made the announcement at the Digital Music Forum in New York City, making it clear the company was targeting those music fans who are willing to pay to avoid the congestion and intricacies of the illegal file-sharing networks.
"Illegal file downloading services, such as Kazaa and Morpheus, are less effective at meeting the needs [of busy consumers] since these large databases of music require consumers to spend hours 'hunting and pecking' for individual songs," Kauffman said.
"We're going after the consumer with little time and an abundance of money, not the consumer with little money and an abundance of time," he added.
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/2026571
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Rising prices, other diversions lowering CD sales
Dave Larsen
Brian Zuercher made a rare trip last week to Gem City Records in Dayton to buy the latest Dixie Chicks CD as a birthday gift for his mother. Zuercher, 17, doesn't buy CDs for himself.
"I usually burn them," he said, referring to the popular practice of copying CDs on a computer. "I only do this when I have to."
Instead of buying music, Zuercher downloads MP3 files via the Internet to make his own CDs, averaging about 15 to 20 discs a month. He is one of countless fans who use online services such as Kazaa to digitally swap songs for free. In one week in January, Kazaa's service reportedly was downloaded 3 million times. Blank, recordable CDs outsold pre-recorded albums in 2002, for the second year in a row.
The music industry is in decline. CD sales in 2002 fell about 9 percent, from 763 million in 2001 to 681 million last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Music sales this year are expected to be down by an additional 6 percent. Music industry leaders blame the proliferation of free music on the Internet, coupled with an exponential increase in the use of CD-burning technology. Dayton-area music retailers have seen their sales of new-release CDs decline in recent years, in line with industry figures, but they are singing a slightly different tune.
The sluggish economy, the rising cost of new CDs and increased competition for consumers' time and money from new media such as DVDs and video games are among the other possible reasons for the music industry's downturn, according to local retailers.
"For us, the sales slump, if you will, has been almost entirely based on new releases not selling -- nonhit product," said John Huffman, owner of Gem City Records.
It's not because platinum-selling pop stars are not as big as they once were, said Hans Buflod, co-owner of CD Connection, "because that has changed numerous times over the last 15 years we've been here." Buflod points to the astonishing success of rap performer 50 Cent, who in February saw his major-label debut sell 872,000 copies in its first four days in stores. "Music tastes have just kind of changed somewhat," said Buflod, whose local chain has seven area stores.
http://www.saljournal.com/stories/030403/ent_cd.html
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Broadband Internet has become a product for the masses. Most high- speed surfers are young, usually male and use the service mainly to download music and video files using file-sharing programs such as Kazaa.
What are 280,000 high-speed Internet subscribers seeking?
Bezeq announced last week it had reached the 200,000-subscriber mark for its high-speed Internet service. The cable television companies do not usually publish their figures in this area, but industry sources estimate their subscribership at about 80,000.
Israel has now joined the list of countries that have a large broadband Internet subscribership. The age of high-speed Internet in Israel began in late 2000 after a tough struggle, mainly because Communications Ministry officials had difficulty understanding the nature of the new service.
Broadband technologies have existed since the mid-1980s and began to spread rapidly in the mid-1990s. Israel, which is usually quick at adopting new communications technologies, was late in joining the trend. For various bureaucratic and legal reasons the initiative to grant a high-speed Internet license to the cable companies in 1999 failed.
Bezeq, which was relatively late in preparing its infrastructure for the new service, was forced to suffer the Communications Ministry's deliberate bureaucratic foot-dragging because it felt that if Bezeq received a license before the cable companies, it would control the market and stymie effective competition. It was only at the end of 2000, under heavy political pressure, that then-communications minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer consented to grant Bezeq a license and bring Israel into the broadband era.
The beginning was somewhat lame, as Bezeq was marketing an expensive service by any standards. Monthly fees were NIS 149 for a surfing speed of 1.5 megabits per second. Public awareness and demand for the service were much lower than expected, due to the immense efforts that Bezeq and the cable companies had invested in obtaining their licenses.
In the service's first year of operation Bezeq ignored the criticism of the high price, stridently claiming that it would be impossible otherwise, considering that the Communications Ministry refused to allow Bezeq to provide both the infrastructure service and access service directly.
Only in September 2001 was the formula found for springboarding the use of the high-speed network - Bezeq began offering service packages at lower prices. For NIS 90-100 per month high-speed became the logical choice for moderate to heavy surfers (in terms of surfing time). Most surfers would barely notice the difference in the surfing speed between high-speed surfing at 1.5 megabits per second in the expensive packages and 0.25-0.5 mbps in the cheaper packages.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pa...ID=0&listSrc=Y
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Winamp kids -
All Floyd, All The Time http://live.grapeshot.net:8075/
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LP To MP3 Conversions
Wes Stewart
So you have a big old collection of vinyl records that you'd love to convert to CDs or MP3. We never could get that balancing act just right to take vinyl albums on the
road via tape. There's got to be a process to convert the media.
Sure there is. Though it might be a bit time-consuming, we are sure it will save you money in the long run vs. having it done professionally. Still, there are some considerations before starting to dig out the record collection.
As a reference, we found vanishingbones.com/vanishingbones/LPCD.htm, which offered what looks like a very nice service at $20.00 per record plus $6.00 shipping.
The details on professional conversions and the software options themselves could fill volumes. So let's just touch on the principles so you get an idea what you are up against taking on the task yourself.
You need to set up a good quality sound card in you computer that will record the full range of sounds you wish to reproduce. Many sound cards fall off in the lower and upper ranges because their makers presume a PC is going to be playing music through some junky speakers -- a waste of quality. You need one that will record the whole range of human hearing -- 20-20,000hz.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=...8-083631-4102r
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Businesses securing computer files in nuclear bunker
The threat of a terror strike has left businesses racing to secure vital computer files in underground bunkers, it has emerged.
Demand has rocketed in recent months as more and more firms make contingency plans to combat the risk of terrorism, according to a company that specialises in safeguarding company data.
A L Digital, which runs The Bunker in a former RAF nuclear shelter near Sandwich, Kent, offers secure storage of computer network systems.
The site is 30 metres below ground, has three metre thick concrete walls, steel doors weighing more than two tons and 24-hour guards.
Companies are able to base their computer control systems there while continuing their business as normal at the office.
Following the September 11 attacks many companies based in the World Trade Centre went bust because they had no back up or contingency plans in place to salvage business data.
Paul Lightfoot, operations manager for The Bunker, said "hundreds" of companies were now using the service, which can cost up to £36,000 a year.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...ews.technology
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Wealthy users dominate internet
Three times as many well-off families are going online for the first time as those with low incomes, a new report has revealed.
The charity Citizens Online also found more than six times as many homes were online in some parts of the country than in others.
Wokingham in Berkshire was the UK's best connected town, with almost six in 10 households online.
In Blaenau Gwent, South Wales, fewer than one in ten homes had access to the internet.
John Fisher, head of Citizens Online, said: "This research now makes it possible to focus efforts on those areas that need the most help to bridge the internet divide."
The lowest internet uptake was in Wales at 29%, while the region with the most homes connected was south-east England with 45%.
Citizens Online is launching a joint project with BT to increase internet access in disadvantaged communities.
A pilot scheme will first run in St Stephen in Brannel, Cornwall, with a second in Audley and Bignall End in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2819905.stm
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U.S. rethinks porn filters
AP
Pornography is everywhere on the Internet, some of it free for the peeking to anyone with an Internet connection and a bit of on-line know-how. Right alongside the smut is more valuable information than anyone could amass anywhere else, including the best public and university libraries, also free for the asking.
The U.S. Supreme Court is to take another look Wednesday at the fundamental problem of how government can protect the public from the seamy side of the Internet without muzzling free speech. The case is United States v. American Library Association, 02-361, and the question this time is whether Congress can require public libraries to install software to filter out pornography as a condition of receiving federal money.
The Bush administration argued that just as libraries decline to collect X-rated movies and pornographic magazines, they shouldn't have to offer access to pornography on their computers.
"Public libraries may reasonably conclude that it best furthers their missions to use a resource that is effective in keeping out pornography, even if that resource keeps out some material that is not pornographic," U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued in a court filing.
Librarians and civil liberties groups contend that filters are censorship, plain and simple, and that they filter out vast amount of valuable information along with the dirty pictures.
"This is not the answer," said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association.
"It is not the answer because it does not protect children and it is not the answer because it censors ... health information, scientific information, social information and political information."
A three-judge federal panel in Pennsylvania agreed a year ago, ruling that the Children's Internet Protection Act violates the First Amendment because the filtering programs block too much nonpornographic material.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...rn0305/GTStory
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Smokin’
IBM recalls 56,000 monitors
AP
IBM is recalling about 56,000 computer monitors that can overheat and smoke, posing a fire hazard to consumers.
The Armonk, N.Y., company has received five reports of monitors overheating and smoking, including one report of property damage, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said Tuesday. No injuries have been reported.
The recalled monitors include the G51 CRT and G51t Touch Screen CRT models bearing model numbers 6541-02N, 6541-02E, 6541-02S, 6541-Q0N, 6541-Q0E and 6541-Q0S.
IBM, MicroTouch Systems and major retail stores sold the monitors nationwide from June 1997 to September 1997 for about $370 (U.S.).
The U.S. goverment's consumer protection branch has urged consumers to stop using the monitors immediately and contact IBM for a free inspection and repair or replacement.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...mm0305/GTStory
Christianne Carafano
Ruling could threaten content protections
Paul Festa
A controversial case before a U.S. federal appeals court could significantly restrict legal protections that have long absolved Internet companies from responsibility for their customers' actions.
The issue stems from a libel lawsuit filed by actress Christianne Carafano over postings that appeared on the dating site Matchmaker.com. Her suit was filed against the company that operates the site, Metrosplash, which was acquired by Lycos in June 2000 for about $44-million (U.S.) in cash.
Ms. Carafano, whose roles under the stage name Chase Masterson include Leeta on the TV show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, sued Metrosplash after someone posted a personals ad that mixed accurate information, including her name and address, with alleged falsehoods.
In March 2002, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California rejected Ms. Carafano's libel claim, citing traditional defamation law that makes malice difficult for public figures to prove. In his decision, however, Judge Dickran Tevrizian also said Metrosplash was not shielded by Section 230 of the landmark Communications Decency Act, which has long protected on-line companies from being held responsible for material that others post on their sites or send through their servers and networks.
"The language of the statute itself requires this court to determine whether Matchmaker, as a provider of an interactive computer service, is an information content provider, i.e., is partly responsible for the creation or development of the information being provided," Mr. Tevrizian wrote in the decision. "This court concludes that Matchmaker is such an information content provider. Consequently, the immunity of Section 230 does not extend to it as a matter of law."
The ruling is believed to be the first significant challenge to the core protections of the Communications Decency Act, which were drafted seven years ago at the behest of Internet service providers such as America Online. The statute, which granted broad immunity for ISPs and other companies doing business on- line, states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...tcourt/GTStory
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Review
Audigy 2 Platinum sound card
Ian Johnson
The Good: Extremely clean, clear sound; 6.1-speaker Dolby Digital EX capability; large software bundle with solid music creation programs and games; front-panel-mounted Audigy drive gives access to wide array of audio inputs, outputs and level controls, as well as an infrared remote control to help turn the PC into a true entertainment system; card adds Firewire ports to the PC.
The Bad: Ports on card are poorly marked; installation can be tricky for novice computer users.
The Verdict: From the audiophile-level sound quality and full-frequency DVD audio output, to the semi-professional recording capability, to the Firewire ports and Dolby Digital EX 6.1-channel surround-sound capability, the Audigy 2 Platinum is a state-of-the-art audio card that can turn your PC into a true home entertainment centre.
More:
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...igyrev/GTStory
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Movie attendance up in 2002
At ShoWest, MPAA head Jack Valenti laments the price impact of special effects and technology.
Lorenza Munoz
The price of making a movie soared dramatically last year, with the average major studio production costing nearly $59 million, a 23% increase from 2001, the Motion Picture Assn. of America announced Tuesday. It was the biggest percentage increase since 1997 and a little more than double the $29 million of 10 years ago.
In his address to theater owners at the annual ShoWest convention, MPAA president Jack Valenti lamented the skyrocketing costs of making movies and attributed the increase to the special effects and high technology now used throughout the filmmaking process in many movies.
"Costs are an un-gloried fact of the creative business landscape," he said to nearly 2,000 theater owners in the Paris Hotel's cavernous auditorium. He said all the studios were trying to "put a tight harness" on costs. But with today's major movie stars making more than $20 million a picture, and the back-end deals landing them high percentages off the box-office receipts, it is unclear how those costs will be controlled.
More encouragingly, Valenti noted that in 2002 theatrical admissions reached their highest level since 1957, with 1.64 billion tickets sold in the U.S. alone -- a 10% increase over 2001. Last year the major studios made or distributed 225 movies, 29 more than the previous year.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...2Dtech nology
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Report: Internet Traffic Boom Redux
Past expectations of outlandish telecom equipment revenue growth may have been banished to the land of myth, but the same should not happen to huge Internet traffic growth predictions, according to a new IDC report (see Broadband Drives Internet Growth ).
The report, titled “Worldwide Bandwidth End-User Forecast and Analysis, 2003- 2007: More is Still Not Enough,” counters the speculations by many industry observers and news reports that Internet traffic growth has slowed down. Instead, it expects Internet traffic to nearly double every year for the next five years, with an annual compound growth rate of 96 percent.
“We noticed that people started saying that Internet was slowing,” says IDC analyst and one of the authors of the report, Sterling Perrin. “But we never found any data to support that… That would really indicate an industry at a very mature stage.”
The report, which is based on IDC-generated survey data, forecasts that Internet traffic will grow from 180 petabits per day in 2002 to 5,175 petabits per day by the end of 2007. IDC compares these astronomical numbers to the mere 10 terabytes of information it says exist in the entire Library of Congress. “By 2007, IDC expects Internet users will access, download and share the information equivalent of the entire Library of Congress more than 64,000 times over every day,” according to yesterday's IDC press release.
While Perrin does not forecast a new boom in telecom equipment sales for some time to come, he does say that the massive Internet traffic growth does have important implications for the sector. “The amount of capacity that’s out there will at one point be depleted,” he says, insisting that the need will arise for carriers to buy next-generation optical equipment that can manage the increasing traffic more efficiently and at a lower cost.
The Internet traffic growth also has implications for the kinds of network architectures we can expect to see once new builds start picking up again, according to the report. “The volume of Internet traffic is just starting to swamp the networks,” Perrin says. “When they’re going to build… it will have to be next- gen data-centric.”
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=29062
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Toshiba, Accenture to Offer 'Hot Spots'
Carmen Nobel
Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. on Tuesday announced plans to join with Accenture Ltd. to offer wireless LAN "hot spot" services throughout North America.
By 2003 the companies hope to have launched up to 10,000 hot spots, which are public places where customers pay for wireless access to the Internet.
Toshiba is providing the hardware to potential operators, while Accenture will be handling the support functions, such as billing and help desk support, said officials at Toshiba, in Irvine, Calif.
Meanwhile, hotspot operator Wayport Inc. on Tuesday announced an agreement with CNN Airport Network, the satellite-delivered television service seen in more than 1,775 airport waiting areas in the United States.
Through the deal, wireless Internet service will be available in the 38 airports that run the CNN Airport Network. The service will run over the existing CNN Airport Network infrastructure, said officials at Wayport, in Austin, Texas.
CNN Airport Network is run by Turner Private Networks, Inc.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...,916296,00.asp
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'Black boxes' put rights at risk
Dan Gillmor
DON'T LOOK THERE: One of the most alarming effects of federal copyright law has been the turning of crucial electronic devices into ''black boxes'' -- machines that are closed to scrutiny even when a great deal rides on their robustness and accuracy.
Ed Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor, noted this danger at a ''Digital Rights Management'' conference last week at the University of California-Berkeley. He warned that the trend is not well-appreciated, and that the boundaries of black boxes are growing.
It's not just such outrageous cases as printer maker Lexmark's use of copyright law to prevent the manufacture of cheaper cartridge refills than Lexmark is itself willing to sell. Turning the cartridge into a black box, using software whose purpose is to prevent competition, is bad enough -- and it's part of a growing trend.
But Felten worries about even bigger societal issues.
Consider the ''Total Information Awareness'' proposals from the Pentagon, which wants to collect information about all of us from a variety of public and private databases, and then mine the data to find suspicious people. The program is, for the moment, being slowed by Congress, but you can expect it to resurface.
Advocates of this surveillance say digital locks in the system will keep it from being misused by corrupt law-enforcement people. Yet unless qualified outsiders can examine how the system works, we'll just have to take the word of the police and spies that there's no abuse.
Or, closer to home, consider electronic voting machines. These designs, he said, are ''totally opaque'' to scrutiny. If there was ever a system that should be open to critical examination, this is the one.
''Bans on understanding technology tend to cripple the public debate about these issues,'' Felten said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/5320213.htm
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Can You Reach Your Congressmember Online?
More lawmakers are wired, but a few sites lag, study shows.
Kyle Stock
Only about half of Congress is well-wired, providing useful Web sites to their constituents and using communications technology effectively, according to an annual report card.
Roughly half of the 610 congressional Web sites are rated good or excellent in the George Washington University study, but 25 percent of elected officials' Internet portals are labeled subpar.
Lawmakers have made great leaps in the past year to establish "virtual offices," the study finds. It notes that many Web sites are more informative, interactive, easy to use, and up-to-date than was evident in last year's evaluation.
"Access to legislative information is no longer the exclusive domain of the lobbyists and activists who are physically present on Capitol Hill," the report says. "With just a few clicks of a mouse, citizens can become actively engaged in the work of Congress."
The Congress Online Project gave out more than twice as many gold, silver, and bronze "mouse awards" as last year, when only 10 percent of Capitol Hill Web sites received an "A" or "B" grade.
"Our original campaign was to change their mindset and view of online communication," says Nicole Folk, primary author of the report. "We thought it would be a lot more difficult than it has been, but in the last year it's been quite a shift."
The Web site of Delaware Democratic Senator Tom Carper received a golden mouse for its exceptional focus on constituents. Among other features, Carper's site has an interactive map of Delaware that details news and government allocations by county.
The Web site of Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) received the highest accolade for cultivating dialogue. Reid's site features an online poll, where Internet surfers can weigh in on current legislative topics and sign up for 20 e-mail newsletters designed to inform subscribers on different political issues.
Other sites won praise for such features as detailing the lawmakers' voting records, linking to twin sites written in Spanish, and providing information on how Congress and the federal government work.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,109668,00.asp
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Grokster: Lawsuits good for business
Reuters
The head of the online file-sharing network said on Tuesday that lawsuits by major record labels seeking to shut down the service helped raise its profile and attract millions of users and big-name advertisers.
Grokster is one of three file-sharing services being sued by major music labels and Hollywood. Media executives have decried these outfits as “piratical bazaars,” claiming they let consumers trade all manners of copyright-protected materials for free, a phenomenon blamed for declining music sales.
The music and film industry's high-profile crusade against such services has been good for business, Grokster President Wayne Rosso told attendees of the FT New Media and Broadcasting Conference in London.
“Grokster has more than 10 million unique users worldwide every month accessing the network,” said Rosso. “That's a pretty big window of opportunity to market goods and services to a highly desirable affluent mass audience.” According to Rosso, Grokster advertisers include the U.S. Air Force, AT&T Wireless, Dell Computer and French cosmetics firm L'Oreal's Lancome brand. He told Reuters the surge of interest by advertisers has helped Grokster return a profit, though he declined to disclose figures.
“Every time they attack file-sharing software in any way, users rush to download the program, just to see what's going on, and become hooked. As a result, we prosper and revenues grow,” Rosso said.
Cashing in
Grokster and its rivals Kazaa and Morpheus have begun to cash in on their enormous user base, selling advertising space to companies pitching products ranging from antivirus software to mobile phone contracts.
Grokster and its rival file-sharing networks have been vilified by the media establishment who accuse them of facilitating rampant unauthorized trade of film, music, software and video games. The music and film industry are seeking a ruling from a Los Angeles Federal Court to have Grokster, Kazaa and Morpheus shut down. In 2000, the music labels succeeded in bringing a U.S. federal court injunction against Napster, the original song-swapping service, which ultimately led to its demise.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-991003.html
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As secrets go, it wasn't very technical.
Matt Blaze, a respected security expert and research scientist at AT&T Labs Research, in Florham Park, N.J., published a paper last fall describing how to make a master key for an office building or a school. The method required one key for any lock in the building, access to that lock and a small number of blanks. "Although a few people have confused my reporting of the vulnerability with causing the vulnerability itself, I can take comfort in a story that [scientist] Richard Feynman famously told about his days on the Manhattan Project. Some simple vulnerabilities and user interface problems made it easy to open most of the safes in use at Los Alamos. Feynman eventually demonstrated the problem to the Army officials in charge. Horrified, they promised to do something about it. The response? A memo ordering the staff to keep Feynman away from their safes."
http://security.ziffdavis.com/articl...02TTX1K0000556
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Beaming Video at Speed of Light By Kim Griggs
Kim Griggs
On the large television screen, a Kiwi singer strummed a guitar and sang an old country favorite. Looking away from the monitor, the audience could barely pick out a tiny red light in the tall building 1.4 kilometers -- a little less than a mile -- away.
It was this light that brought the singer's performance to the 100 or so in the audience this week in what is believed to be the first live broadcast of high-quality television images over visible light spectrum.
The free-space optics system developed by New Zealand company Power Beat International works by modulating a beam of visible light -- the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be seen by humans -- to carry a digital or analog signal.
"When a video recorder is looking at something, it is reading the voltages that are being transferred from light onto a surface of photo cells. We take all of those voltage changes and use them to modulate our light," said Peter Witehira, managing director of Power Beat.
Free-space optics has had uses elsewhere: After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Merrill Lynch used an FSOlink provided by Terabeam to connect two offices 2.6 kilometers apart. AirFiber helped transmit images of the 2002 MTV European Music Awards from the stadium to the telecommunication provider's headquarters using a 1.65-kilometer laser connection.
One of the technology's key benefits is the amount of data that can be transmitted over short distances: The Merrill Lynch link transmitted data at a rate of 1 Gbps, nearly 1,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection. The lack of bureaucracy is another plus -- there are no spectrum licenses to buy. There are also no cables to lay, making installation cheap and simple relative to the potential connection speeds.
"Say you want to get it across the motorway, even if it's only a hundred meters, digging a trench under a motorway to put a fiber-optic cable in costs you nearly a million dollars, but the cost of deploying this thing (FSO) is next to nothing," said John Harvey, professor of physics at the University of Auckland. "Some one rigs it up on a power pole and it's done."
http://www.wired.com/news/infostruct...,57860,00.html
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Senate hearings urged over FCC decision
Ben Charny
Two consumer groups on Wednesday demanded that lawmakers overturn a recent Federal Communications Commission decision to deregulate the broadband industry.
FCC commissioners voted 3-2 last month to eliminate rules forcing broadband network owners to dramatically discount what they charge competitors to use their high- speed Web networks. The FCC kept in place the same rules, which are meant to spur competition, for telephone network owners.
The Consumer Federation of America and the Consumers Union on Wednesday demanded the Senate's Commerce Committee conduct hearings about the decision. Both Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., the committee's chairman, and Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., the committee's leading member, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.
"For the first time in our history, communications could end up operated by private carriers on a closed, proprietary basis with no obligations to interconnect, interoperate or provide nondiscriminatory access for the public," the groups wrote in letters to the two senators.
The consumer groups argue that Congress, which represents a broader range of interests than the FCC, should make the decision. "Public policy decisions with such massive implications should flow directly from Congress and not be conjured up through 'legal jujitsu,'" they wrote to lawmakers.
The two consumer groups are the latest to opine about the FCC's decision. Major telephone companies are unhappy with the decision as well. The Bells will likely turn to the court system to get the FCC decision overturned, believing it doesn't go far enough to deregulate telephone and broadband networks.
Broadband providers that relied on the rules, including Covad Communications, stand to lose most of their consumer business.
http://news.com.com/2100-1037-991216.html
Broadcast industry addresses FCC
Washington Internet Daily via NewsEdge.
The broadcasting industry as it's known today will cease to exist if the FCC and Congress don't mandate implementation of the broadcast flag proposal made by the nation's major
content providers, some of those producers told the Commission. Those joint reply comments were made by more than 15 industry groups and companies, including the MPAA, ABC, CBS, Fox, the NAB, the American Federation of TV & Radio Artists (AFTRA), Belo, the Directors Guild of America, Dreamworks SKG, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the AFL- CIO. High-quality programming will be withheld from broadcast TV and given instead to other, protected distribution channels if adequate protections aren't adopted "in parallel with the rapid expansion in broadband connections and DTV equipment," the groups said.
Reply comments originally were due Tues., but because of the huge snowstorm in the Northeast, the FCC Media Bureau extended the deadline until Fri. In its rulemaking, the Commission seeks comments on, among other things, whether a broadcast flag, which would prevent copying and distribution over the Internet, is necessary, whether it should be mandated in consumer electronic (CE) devices, whether it would affect consumer privacy and whether the agency has the legal authority to impose any mandates in that area.
The content producers contend that, as technology improves to allow perfect copies of programming to be traded freely over the Internet, "television programming will be as susceptible to piracy as music is now, unless a solution is already in place." They said the threat of unauthorized redistribution over wide area networks was "qualitatively different" from any other previous technology, such as the VCR. The broadcast flag solution already proposed should be adopted and any delay will allow device manufacturers "to create a huge legacy of noncompliant products that may stymie the broadcast flag," they said.
The groups also sought to allay some fears, saying the flag wouldn't: (1) Affect existing equipment in consumers' homes. (2) Restrict the number of copies a consumer could make. (3) Prevent content transfer within the home. (4) Require approval of a content owner for transfers in the home or for use in a school project. (5) Apply to every device, nor to Internet service providers, but only to DTV receivers, DTV modulators and "a very limited number of related DTV consumer products."
On the other side, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the FCC to "set aside Hollywood's latest bid to undermine fair use and stymie innovation by requiring all manufacturers of digital television devices to seek Hollywood approval... and by banning the use of open source software in DTV applications." The EFF reminded the agency that those were the same people who had tried to ban the VCR. The EFF's Cory Doctorow said the threat of DTV piracy was "both nonexistent and implausible" hyperbole and Hollywood's solution would only slow the DTV transition. "Hollywood's own admissions about the 'analog hole'... mean that the broadcast flag will do nothing to slow down such unauthorized copying as may occur, while setting the stage for even more restrictive mandates," Doctorow said. The EFF said that had nothing to do with Internet piracy, but with a desire by Hollywood to control the future of TV technology.
http://www.computeruser.com/news/03/03/02/news1.html
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From the Inquirer…
Woman wins porn e-mail discrimination case
Damages to be decided later
A WOMAN HAS WON a sexual discrimination and harassment case after she complained that porn emails made her ill, causing her to go sick for months.
Sarah Sadler was sent a series of images by her boss over a two day period, reports the Southampton Daily Echo. And she claimed to an employment tribunal that the firm she worked for, Portsmouth Publishing and Printing, failed to take action quickly enough after she complained.
A Southampton tribunal found in her favour and will award her damages at a future date, the Echo says.
She was off sick for six months suffering from depression and stress, the tribunal was told.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8137
Windows "makes people clench their buttocks"
Harta Glass
WEB PIONEER Salon has made a case for the Linux operating system and described the difference between it and Windows in broadly anatomical terms.
The magazine quotes a chap called Sam Hiser as describing the "Windows pucker", which happens when end users are ready to launch program number five and pull their buttocks in because they're afraid of a system crash.
And Salon reckons that sometimes applications blow up, sending megapixels flying into your vicinity and turning you into a quivering heap of protoplasm. (We made the second part of that sentence up).
But the magazine says there's no danger of Linux causing you to feel like a humanoid who has eaten something dodgy and has two seconds to get from pint a to point b. The article reckons that Lindows and Lycoris will stop your bum cheeks from crinkling, and you can buy them from Wal-Mart, unless you're one of the few countries that doesn't have a Wal-Mart, that is.
Personally, we find that just as long as we don't install any critical updates at all, Windows XP doesn't crash. Also, if you don't switch a machine on, it doesn't crash either.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=8091
Sandisk intros 1GB Flash card
Claims it's the fastest too
Mike Magee
MEMORY FIRM SANDISK introduced a 1GB CompactFlash card with a wire speed of six MB/s and a read speed of 9MB/s, a bit of a breakthrough in the market, we think.
The first IBM PC clone we used had a staggering 20MB of hard drive storage and IBM's first hard file was an even more staggering 10MB, described as "massive storage" capacity in those far off days.
The Sandisk card is compatible with all cameras using the CompactFlash storage, and with readers and adaptors, but the firm said the speed is twice that of its Ultra line.
The high end card will cost $329 but given the state of the memory business and the speed the technology is changing, that price can only drop.
Sandisk also said it is introducing an Ultra SD card line which will range in capacity between 128MB and 512MB, and prices will range from $79 to $199.
The cards are expected to be available in the second quarter of this year, and use Sandisk's NAND flash technology.
Be that as it may, we also learn that you can get 3GB CompactFlash cards from Pretec. Even better, probably.
These advances in memory technology, we think, are exciting developments, managing to escape the built-in Mageek Cynicism Filter (CNF). Yeah, I know storage is supposed to be boring, but everyone needs it whether it's a garden shed, a cupboard, an attic or a flash card
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=8111
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For PC Buying, a New Picture
Michel Marriott
GERRIT VOOREN braved an icy Manhattan morning last week to press his search for just the right new computer. It had to be powerful, crammed with hundreds of megabytes of memory, and have enough hard-drive space to hold a vast music library and hours upon hours of digital video.
For Mr. Vooren, a 40-year-old native of the Netherlands who moved to New York 16 years ago to pursue acting and visual art, his new computer essentially had to do what his old one could barely manage: handle the latest high-performance programs to help him edit short films in his Brooklyn apartment, where he recently started a business, Reels 4 Artists. A DVD burner was essential, too, to save the video onto disks.
"Smoke was coming out of the back of my computer," at least in the figurative sense, he recalled. "What I was doing with it was more than it could. It was just too much for it."
He replaced his aging Apple PowerBook G3, which ran on a single 400-megahertz processor, with a $2,000 Apple Power Mac G4, which uses two processors, each running at more than twice the power of his old computer's central processor. A 17-inch, $700 flat liquid crystal display replaced his old tube-based monitor.
It is shoppers like Mr. Vooren, and their demanding needs, that personal-computer makers hope will end their sales doldrums.
Just as digital recording and mixing have invaded professional recording studios, digital music studios in a box are steadily finding converts among home-computer users who are learning that they can make music with the click of a mouse.
Mr. Bond said that while many of the newest music studio programs would run on Pentium III computers as well as more powerful Pentium 4's, users should "be prepared to wait" to hear the results on a slower machine. Multitrack mixing and recording are especially power-hungry, he cautioned, adding that some of the newest software takes advantage of the latest processor designs, including Cakewalk's Home Studio and Sonar 2.0 (for more advanced users), Steinberg's Cubase and Nuendo (for more advanced users).
For best results, Mr. Bond recommends using music-creation software on the PC in conjunction with U.S.B.-connected external digital-recording devices - sleek boxes that include high-performance sound cards and pre-amps like Aardvark's Q10 and M-Audio's Duo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/te...ts/06upgr.html
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Internet as Jukebox, at a Price
David Pogue
Befuddlement (n.): 1. Confusion resulting from failure to understand. 2. Loss of sense of direction, position, or relationship with one's surroundings. 3. The state of the recording industry as it tries to sell music on the Internet.
THE only thing record companies know for sure is that they want to kill off the insanely popular Sons of Napster: free music-sharing services like KaZaA, Gnutella and Morpheus. After all, the millions who use these services are in effect stealing music, depriving the five major labels of perfectly good money. But watching the record companies as they try to find a formula for a successful paid alternative is like watching five people play blindman's bluff on stilts.
At least they're generally crashing in the right direction. This is a busy time for improvements in the music-downloading services: America Online unveiled its MusicNet service last week; Pressplay has launched version 2.5 of its software; Rhapsody has unveiled a 49-cents-per-song special; and a new service called MusicNow, which offers a fresh approach to finding music, will make its debut later this month. With each development, these companies (and another MusicNet affiliate, RealOne MusicPass) are gradually lowering prices, filling the holes in their catalogs and loosening the restrictions on what you can do with the music you've bought.
Unfortunately, one thing that has not changed is the complexity of their price plans, which make choosing a cellphone plan look like child's play. Each company offers several degrees of freedom for the music it sells, each priced differently.
The most basic freedom is listening to songs while your Windows PC is online. It's a lot like one of those free Internet radio stations, except that these "stations" are commercial-free and, in some cases, customizable.
The next level of freedom is the most bizarre. In some plans, you are allowed to download songs to your PC's hard drive for playback even when you're not online. (Companies call these temporary, conditional or tethered downloads.) But you're only renting these songs, not buying them. If your subscription to the music service expires, your music files expire too, turning into worthless kilobyte carcasses on your hard drive. It's like having a landlord blow up your apartment if you miss a month's rent.
Finally, for an extra fee, most services let you download selected songs - called portable or permanent downloads - directly onto a blank CD. At that point, you own them forever. You can mix and match songs from different bands, dictate the playback order or build your own versions of hit CD's, minus the annoying songs.
You still can't move these files to another computer or e-mail them. Nonetheless, this approach is the closest the music services have come to a compromise between what music fans want (flexibility to use what they have bought) and what the record companies want (preventing file swapping).
Yet the music services don't mind admitting that if you have the time and the right music utility program, you can "rip" the songs from the newly burned CD right back onto your hard drive. Presto: standard MP3 files that you can back up, share with others or copy to a portable music player.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/te...ts/06stat.html
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Pro P2P Maker Groove Announces Layoffs And $38 Million In Aid
Alliance strengthened as Microsoft, Sun debut Windows, Java P2P code, protocol
Paula Rooney
Groove Networks is getting a little help from its friends--in high places.
The Beverly-based peer-to-peer (P2P) software concern announced Wednesday a corporate restructuring and layoff of 20 percent of its 278 employees. At the same time, the company revealed that it had captured a fifth round of financing--$38 million--from existing investors Microsoft, Intel Capital and Accel Partners.
Groove, which has raised a total of $155 million since being founded by Lotus Notes developer Ray Ozzie in fall 1997, is viewed as Microsoft's strategic partner for its ambitious P2P and collaboration software portfolio for .Net and Longhorn version of Windows in 2004, according to CRN sources.
Late last month, Groove unveiled a major upgrade of its intra- and cross-organization collaboration platform, Workspace 2.5. It also announced an add-in toolkit for Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net, which is due in April.
P2P technology, which promises to connect devices, users, servers and applications in realtime, remains one of the hot technologies originally cultivated by Napster and others for the consumer market but eyed for corporate use. While adoption has been slow, major software vendors Microsoft and Sun in recent days have touted products and protocols to make P2P plumbing more widely available in Windows and Java platforms.
Last week, for instance, Microsoft announced the release of its Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Software Development Kit (SDK) and its plans to release a Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Update next quarter.
http://www.crn.com/sections/Breaking...rticleID=40335)
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Three Degrees: A peek behind the curtain
Christopher Saunders
While it seems simple enough, threedegrees asks for some hearty requirements: broadband and Windows XP (with Service Pack 1 and the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Networking Update), for starters. Oh, and a MSN Passport account.
The need for those exacting requirements are clear, since threedegrees uses some pretty new Microsoft technology to work its file-sharing magic. In fact, it's one of the first live applications using Peer-to-Peer Networking Update services exposed in the beta-version P2P SDK introduced by the company last month.
APIs exposed in the SDK helps developers tackle a number of the common, often difficult tasks inherent in P2P applications. For instance, the SDK addresses peer name resolution -- handling the "finding peers" aspect of P2P networking -- as well as distributed data management, which manages how users' machines inform each other of updated content, and distribute that content.
The P2P technology also provides support for dealing with Network Address Translators and IPv6 -- which is growing in importance as networks require more than 32-bit IP addresses; IPv6 support also thus provides key support for unique device addresses.
Most importantly, the P2P Update and APIs aim to enable these functions on a wide scale -- "to support incredibly large groups," said Passport Product Manager Pete McKiernan.
"The SDK takes advantage of the new benefits of the P2P programming model, where in the past, there have been a lot of things that have held people back from doing that," he said. "We've heard that it's too complicated to solve things like NAT traversal, or writing your own distributed data management protocols, and how you solve those problems."
In the long-term, McKiernan said the P2P technology is viewed by Microsoft as a complement to server-based collaboration initiatives, like the company's upcoming "Greenwich" product. From that perspective, threedegrees seems not only a pure teens- only play, but more like a testbed for more advanced presence- and P2P-based collaborative enterprise products.
And that's where things get interesting -- especially in light of Microsoft's recent preoccupation with communications and collaboration. Today, the company dropped an additional $30 million into Groove Networks, a leading player in enterprise P2P applications.
http://www.instantmessagingplanet.co...le.php/2105671
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Sinapore: Illegal movie shipping hub?
Winston Chai
Singapore has been a success story in fighting pirated movies, but an industry association warns the city-state could just be shipping the problem out of the country.
Singapore is the third lowest in terms of losses due to piracy in Asia-Pacific, ahead of only Vietnam and New Zealand,? said Michael Ellis, vice president and regional director of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a U.S.-based film rights advocate.
But he warned that Singapore acts as a transshipment center for pirated DVDs produced in Indonesia and Malaysia. About 13 percent of counterfeit seizures made in the United Kingdom last year were shipped from the republic, he said.
Singapore has the busiest air and sea port in Southeast Asia and serves as the region?s most important transport hub, so its role in pirated DVD re-distribution occurs as a by-product.
According to statistics released by the MPA, Singapore?s domestic DVD piracy losses in 2002 totaled US$8 million, dwarfed by losses of US$168 million in China and US$110 million in Japan.
http://star-techcentral.com/cnetasia...0&sec=cnetasia
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Australian ISPs raided in MP3 probe
Simon Hayes
FEDERAL police have executed search warrants on Telstra and internet company Eftel in one of Australia's largest investigations into alleged music piracy, which could be worth up to $60 million.
Warrants were also executed at several other un-named internet service providers, with more warrants possible as the investigation continues. It's understood the police were seeking information about the identities of particular subscribers, as well as music files that may have been stored by them on servers.
According to sources, the wholesale value of the allegedly pirated music may be as high as $60 million - making it one of Australia's largest copyright infringement investigations.
A police spokeswoman confirmed that officers, accompanied by computer forensics experts, visited a Telstra facility in Melbourne and Eftel's Perth offices, as part of ongoing investigations. Search warrants were also executed at several other ISPs, which she declined to name. She said the execution of these warrants was part of "related investigations".
The Australian understands that the investigations are at an early stage, and that more ISPs may yet be searched.
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...nbv%5E,00.html
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Not Just Music: Auto Sales Fell to Lowest Rate in 4 1/2 Years
Danny Hakim
Sales of the lucrative, gas-guzzling giants of the auto industry — the Escalades, Excursions, Suburbans and other big sport utility vehicles — are sliding, according to figures released today.
Analysts said that rising gas prices and a drumbeat of criticism of S.U.V.'s figure in the slowing sales. But the biggest culprit, they said, is a new wave of small and medium-size sport utilities from Asian automakers that are chipping away at a crucial profit center for the domestic auto industry.
Sales fell 6.7 percent from a year earlier, to a seasonally adjusted annual sales rate of 15.4 million vehicles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/business/04AUTO.html
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'Next' up on the Internet
New Web technology showcases live concerts by cutting-edge acts.
Andrew John Ignatius Vontz
Before the dot-com dream imploded, visionary twentysomething chief executives promised to bring innovative broadband entertainment programming to life on the Internet.
RealNetworks and Venice's Gigantic Entertainment recently launched an original series of music videos of live performances called "The Next," which breathes new life into the temporarily deferred broadband entertainment dream.
Each biweekly installment of "The Next" is a video of a live-music performance from a cutting-edge act on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough. The first episode was a performance by L.A. hip-hop group Blackalicious from the Christmas concert by KCRW-FM (89.9) at Universal Amphitheater.
Kinky and Beth Orton are currently featured, with the Vines, Pete Yorn, Fischerspooner, Zero 7 and more to follow. While RealNetworks has long provided music and music video content on its Web site, "The Next" is a fresh venture using state-of-the-art technology aimed at providing a 30-minute concert music video experience tailored toward users with DSL or cable modems.
"We really thought about what the end-user experience was going to be here: Let's get the sound right, let's make the images something that makes sense in this format, let's optimize for broadband and make something that's a showcase and get as good a dose of these bands as you can get," says Erik Flannigan, RealNetworks' vice president of media programming.
The driving creative force and director of each episode is Gigantic's Kevin Kerslake, who has directed commercials, action sports movies and music videos for groups including the Rolling Stones, Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Kerslake shoots the episodes utilizing improvements in Web-based video technology.
"In the past you had to be much more tentative stylistically and cautious about pace and exposures," says Kerslake. "The new technology lets you get back to the aesthetic that is called for when you're shooting bands that are more energetic.... The computer's not going to freak out because there are too many cuts per minute."
After quickly downloading the free Real Player and restarting my computer -- a PC with DSL modem -- I visited RealNetworks' Web site,
www.real.com, to check out the Blackalicious concert. I was immediately impressed by the site's intuitive interface and ease of use. In a few clicks, I found "The Next" section of the site and clicked on the broadband viewing option; the video launched without any delay.
In the first few seconds, it was clear that I was having the best video-viewing experience I'd ever had on the Web. There were no buffering delays, I didn't have to download the video, and the sound mix immediately jumped out at me. Gigantic optimizes the sound mix for the Web -- and you can tell. The mix was crisp and the low-end tones so crucial to the hip-hop experience were there in abundance, booming out from even my puny stock speakers.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...s%2Dtechnology
BigChampange
Linksys releases dual-band Wi-Fi card
Paul Festa
Wireless networking company Linksys on Wednesday released a PC card that supports two nascent Wi-Fi standards.
Linksys's Wireless Dual Band A+G Wireless PC Card for notebook computers supports not only 802.11b--the prevailing IEEE standard for wireless networking--but its newer cousins 802.11a, which sacrifices bandwidth for range, and 802.11g, which is supposed to be backward-compatible with 802.11b.
The company, based in Irvine, Calif., is not alone in producing an 802.11a/g-compatible card. Hardware maker NetGear last month announced it would soon ship dual- band 802.11a/g PC cards for $129, with dual-band 802.11a/g access points and routers to follow next quarter.
Linksys announced some future plans of its own, saying this month it would release a wireless A+G router, access point and PCI adapter for desktop computers.
The new PC cards carry a $99 price tag.
In a statement, Linksys compared its March contributions with the introduction of the AM/FM radio.
"With its universal dual-band A+G solutions, Linksys eliminates once and for all any potential confusion or incompatibilities caused by having three separate wireless standards," the company said in a release. "Like the world's first AM/FM radio, the customer will be able to buy a single device for wireless networking that guarantees universal IEEE standard compatibility."
http://news.com.com/2100-1039-991309.html
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Pseudo spins hip-hop TV show on Kazaa
Stefanie Olsen
Digital broadcaster Pseudo.com plans to release a weekly TV show hosted by rap star Ice-T on the Internet file-sharing network Kazaa, in attempts to start a new model of advertising-supported television.
Pseudo President Edward Salzano said Thursday that the show--a feature on hip-hop culture called "One Nation"--will be available exclusively to Kazaa's roughly 60 million registered users beginning in the next two weeks. People using Kazaa to trade video, audio and text files will be able to download a new episode of the hour- long show weekly and watch it anytime.
Free to Kazaa users, the show will be supported through advertising in the form of commercials and product placements, Salzano said. Pseudo.com, which is owned by New York-based INTV, has already signed on soft-drink maker Red Bull as a sponsor.
"We believe there's a lot of money that is going to people it shouldn't be going to such as studios, producers and advertising agencies," Salzano said. "But that money should be going directly from the fans to the artist, so we're trying to come up with ways to make it legitimate and affordable to do that."
The move flies in the face of the entertainment industry's long history of fighting file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and former highflier Napster, which are thought of by Hollywood as black markets for Web surfers to trade pirated music and film files. As a result, many major film studios and music labels have filed lawsuits against the networks, which resulted in successfully shutting down Napster.
Still, others are trying to find a way to use peer-to-peer communities for legitimate business and marketing because of the wide reach among media-obsessed audiences. For example, Microsoft partnered last year with film studio Lions Gate to release a trailer for the movie "Rules of Attraction" through Kazaa. Brilliant Digital Entertainment-owned Altnet also has developed a way to package content on Kazaa so that rights holders can receive revenue through the sale of products featured in the content, among other sales opportunities.
"There's a legitimate content market developing on peer-to-peer networks," said Ben Reneker, associate analyst with Kagan World Media, a research firm based in Carmel, Calif.
"Pseudo's idea is a powerful concept because peer-to-peer networks have such lucrative demographics in terms of media consumption," he said. "The question and reason that this may not take off is because the content owners are the most opposed to these networks because they see them as major hemorrhage for revenues."
Still, Pseudo's Salvano said, it's time for the entertainment industry to embrace new forms of distribution.
"The entertainment industry has to get it together and use the technology to their advantage," he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-991396.html
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How bad can it be?
Vivendi rumoured to keep hold of music business
Vivendi Universal might not be about to dispose of its music business after all, according to widespread rumours that have circulated in the press over the last few days.
Directors of the media group are said now to favour a reorganisation of assets that would enable it to keep hold of its largest music company, Universal Music.
Though Vivendi had been contemplating oil tycoon Marvin Davis’ E20bn offer for all of its entertainment assets – including Universal Studios and theme parks – it is now thought the company seek to retain its music business whilst collaborating with alternative investment partners for its other entertainment assets.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=15220
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Net speed record smashed
Dr David Whitehouse
Scientists have set a new internet speed record by transferring 6.7 gigabytes of data across 10,978 kilometres (6,800 miles), from Sunnyvale in the US to Amsterdam in Holland, in less than one minute
Using a quantity of data equivalent to two feature-length DVD-quality movies, the transfer was accomplished at an average speed of more than 923 megabits per second, or more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.
Les Cottrel, of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Slac) Computer Services, said: "By exploring the edges of internet technologies' performance envelope, we will bring high-speed data transfer to practical everyday applications."
He added that potential uses included: "Doctors at multiple sites sharing and discussing a patient's cardio-angiographs to diagnose and plan treatment; or disaster recovery experts sharing information across the globe in near real-time to develop recovery and relief plans."
Next generation
The data were sent across the Internet2 network. This is operated by a consortium of 200 universities working in a worldwide effort to develop and deploy tomorrow's internet.
It is intended to connect and serve research and educational institutions at transmission speeds that allow near-instant transfer of hundreds of megabytes of data.
The motivation for the record was the need to transfer and analyse the vast amounts of data produced by particle physicists studying the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Raymond Orbach, director of the US Energy Department's Office of Science, said: "It underlines the tradition in particle physics of groundbreaking work in manipulation and transfer of enormous datasets."
Harvey Newman, professor of physics at Caltech, said: "The largest high-energy experiments are already dealing with data stores approaching the petabyte range and we expect this to increase by a factor of 1,000 over the next decade."
During its research, Slac has accumulated the largest known database in the world, which grows at one terabyte per day.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2822333.stm
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European Hacker Laws Could Make Protest a Crime
Law could make online protests a crime
Paul Meller
The justice ministers of the European Union have agreed on laws intended to deter computer hacking and the spreading of computer viruses. But legal experts say the new measures could pose problems because the language could also outlaw people who organize protests online, as happened recently, en masse, with protests against a war in Iraq.
The agreement, reached last week, obliges all 15 member states to adopt a new criminal offense: illegal access to, and illegal interference with an information system. It calls on national courts to impose jail terms of at least two years in serious cases.
Critics from the legal profession say the agreement makes no legal distinction between an online protester and terrorists, hackers and spreaders of computer viruses that the new laws are intended to trap.
Last Wednesday, protesters against a possible war against Iraq barraged the White House and Senate offices with tens of thousands of messages by phone, fax and e-mail, as part of what was billed as the first-ever "virtual protest march."
Under the new agreement, if European Union citizens undertook a similar electronic bombardment of the e-mail, fax and phone lines of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, they might be liable for prosecution, said Leon de Costa, chief executive of Judicium, a legal consultancy based in London. The new code "criminalizes behavior which, until now, has been seen as lawful civil disobedience," Mr. de Costa said.
Ulrich Sieber, a professor of law at Munich University, urged lawmakers to amend the code to add a specific reference to the right to free expression as outlined in the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Human Rights.
Marco Cappato, a European Parliament deputy from Italy, said he failed to persuade the ministers to insert wording that differentiates between the online equivalent of trespassing and someone breaking and entering. The role of the European Parliament is consultative, so it cannot force changes to the law.
A European Union diplomat involved in the drafting of the measures agreed that protection mechanisms in the code are soft and said that amendments could still be made.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/in...pe/05BRUS.html
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Bill Would 'Protect' American Consumers from DMCA
Effort seen as uphill fight in Congress
Grant Gross
A congresswoman from Silicon Valley is hoping to "protect" consumers of digital content from the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by introducing a bill that spells out what kinds of copies they are allowed to make.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday reintroduced a bill she authored in late 2002. But some of her big-business neighbors in the Business Software Alliance, and her cross-state neighbors at the Motion Picture Association of America, immediately opposed her efforts.
Lofgren's office acknowledged that passage of her bill would be an uphill fight in the U.S. Congress. The last version of the bill didn't get a hearing before Congress adjourned for the winter holidays. A spokesman for Lofgren said the bill's chances may depend on what anticopying initiatives the entertainment industry takes in Congress.
"I think our chances for a hearing are better than the ultimate chances for passage," the spokesman said. "Only time will tell."
The spokesman admitted that those in Congress pushing for consumer-rights changes to the DMCA were in the minority, but bills like Lofgren's raise awareness of the consumer issue. "It is now part of the debate, and people know about it," the spokesman said. "Consumers need a voice. This is not just a technology versus Hollywood fight."
Lofgren's bill, renamed the Benefit Authors without Limiting Advancement or Net Consumer Expectations, or BALANCE Act, would clarify consumer rights under the much-protested DMCA, passed in 1998. The bill would allow buyers to make backup copies and display digital works on devices of their choice. It would also prohibit non-negotiable, "shrink-wrap" licenses on digital content that "limit consumer rights," according to Lofgren's office, and it would allow consumers to bypass copy protection technologies if those technologies "impede" their fair-use rights under copyright law.
One of the most controversial sections of the DMCA outlaws most attempts to circumvent copy controls on digital content. Several companies have used the DMCA to stop programmers from creating copying software or competitors from creating products that interact with their own products.
"There is wide agreement to fight piracy, and it is something that needs to be stopped," Lofgren said in a statement. "But individual consumers are being denied their legitimate rights in the digital age. We can solve this problem, but lawsuits and locking down content are not the solutions."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/03/05/HNdmca_1.html
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Sex, the Constitution and the Net
Declan McCullagh
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday considered a new twist on the old question of restricting sexually explicit material while preserving First Amendment rights. At issue is a 2000 law called the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which says that schools and public libraries receiving federal funds must filter the Internet. In May, a special three-judge panel unanimously ruled the CIPA was unconstitutional and blocked it from taking effect for libraries. The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court in June.
In the center of this high-stakes legal struggle is Judith Krug, a lifelong First Amendment advocate and director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom since it was founded in 1968. The ALA sued to overturn the law last year but because only the library-related sections of CIPA were challenged, it remains in effect for schools.
CNET News.com caught up with Krug in Washington, D.C., to discuss the case and the proliferation of Internet filtering throughout the nation's libraries.
Q: The three-judge panel in Philadelphia last year based its reasoning on the technological problems of the current crop of blocking software. Even if you win this case, might you lose a future case if the technology improves?
A: The problem with filtering software that is never going to be solved is the fact that it's a mechanical device. It's a thing. No matter how good they make the thing, it's never going to be able to think or to make judgments or to discern between the various meanings of words and contexts. The fact that any mechanical device is ever going to do that on its own is ludicrous.
Why do you think you won in Philadelphia? What made those judges so leery of the Justice Department's defense of CIPA?
I think we had a really solid case. I think that we're not pulling any punches. We're saying this is the reality of libraries today, to provide ideas and information. What the government wants to do is put on devices that will limit access to information on the Internet. The people who are going to be most affected will be the very people who most need the information and most need the library to secure the information.
What I keep coming back to is that the First Amendment provides the mechanism that allows us to govern ourselves effectively. In this post-9/11 environment, when so many people are trying to limit the amount of information and ideas that are readily accessible because these ideas and information may be misused, it becomes even more important that libraries stand their ground.
The Justice Department's brief to the Supreme Court says that libraries always make "content-based judgments in selecting material for their collections" and that CIPA is nothing new.
It seems that whoever was writing the brief hasn't been in a public library for years. Their idea of what a public library is for is so far removed from reality. They're going back to what we call material selection or collection development. Every library has a material selection policy that determines what kind of material should be in the collection, given who they're serving, where they're serving and so on.
The problem is that these collection development policies and procedures arose because libraries, up until the beginning of the 1990s, have always been limited in terms of money and bricks and mortar. In other words, every librarian had a certain amount of money to spend on physical materials and this was tempered by the amount of space they had in which to keep these physical materials. Now, for the first time in the history of the world, we have access to information that is not dependent on either (funding) or a physical space
The government argues that "The Joy of Sex" and "The Joy of Gay Sex" may be available in libraries, but XXX videos and Hustler magazine usually aren't. Yet it's not difficult to find that content on the Internet, right?
Yes, but so what? It goes back to the fact that there are graphic materials in libraries--but the government may or may not want to recognize this. They mention "The Joy of Sex" and "The Joy of Gay Sex," and there are a lot of materials that talk about sexual relations. I imagine the Kama Sutra is available in many libraries.
Just because the government says certain things doesn't make them true. I guarantee you that the government has not looked at every library in the U.S. I guarantee you they have not tried to get materials via interlibrary loan if they're making that kind of statement.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-991006.html
Until next week,
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js.
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