[JackSpratts]

Countless Dens of Uncatchable Thieves
Tom Zeller Jr.

YOU'VE probably never met Sergey Kozerev, a former student at the State University of Technology and Design in St. Petersburg, Russia, but it's possible that he's mugged you.

In the online world, he operates under the pseudonym Zo0mer, according to American investigators, and he smugly hawks all manner of stolen consumer information alongside dozens of other peddlers at a Web site he helps manage.

"My prices are lowers then most of other vendors have and I will deliver them in real time," reads a typically fractured Zo0mer post.

At the same forum, another user, "tabbot," offers "any U.S. bank accounts" for sale.

"Balance from 3K and above: $40," he writes. "Regular brokerage accounts from 3K and above: $70."

Tabbot also offers full access to hacked accounts from credit unions. One, with a $31,000 balance, is being sold for $400. "I can try search specific info such as signature, ssn, dob, email access," tabbot writes. "Account with an extra info will be more expensive."

The online trade in stolen financial data is thriving. So the news last week that the United States Secret Service has been Hoovering up identity thieves, document forgers and other members of online "carding" sites — Web forums that have become outposts for peddling hacked account numbers, bank passwords and PIN numbers, as well as the viruses, scripts and phishing scams designed to steal them — seemed a coup.

But however deserving those caught in this most recent sweep might be (20 have been arrested across the United States and one in Britain over the last three months, the agency said), the fact remains that in the transnational, Internet-driven market for stolen financial and consumer data, some thieves are simply easier to nab than others.

And while Russians and Eastern Europeans like Zo0mer have become the top bananas in the stolen data trade, the English-speaking — particularly American — players are really the lowest-hanging fruit.

"I deal with them only from an intelligence perspective," said Gregory Crabb, an investigator with the United States Postal Inspection Service and the economic crimes division of Interpol, referring to English-speaking carders. "And only to know if the big players in Eastern Europe and Russia are recruiting. They are a dime a dozen, and relatively easy to track down and pop."

Not surprisingly, despite ruling like dark knights behind their own cryptic pseudonyms, American traders are often exposed under harsh light as middling rubes or barely post-adolescent power-trippers who were easily duped by undercover agents working the same boards.

Even Operation Firewall, the Secret Service sledgehammer that managed to infiltrate and shatter the largest English-language crime board, Shadowcrew.com, in October 2004, has done little, two years later, to slow the global data trade.

"The Secret Service says the defendants are part of a 'highly organized international criminal enterprise,' " blogged Brian McWilliams, the author of "Spam Kings" and a keen follower of cybercrime, at the time of the Shadowcrew arrests. "But I have a hard time believing that we're talking about a real sophisticated group of criminals here. One of the defendants, 20-year-old Paul A. Mendel Jr., aka Mintfloss, lives with his grandparents in Albany, N.Y."

To be fair, prosecutors estimated that Shadowcrew had done damages in excess of $4 million over its two-year history. That's not pocket change, and the true tally is surely much higher. And those arrests have led to others, which no one can argue is a bad thing.

But consider that just one young American, 22-year-old Douglas Cade Havard, using real contacts with the Russian underworld, managed to steal, along with a Scottish accomplice, more than $11 million in two years, according to investigators.

In one scheme, the pair, now in British prisons, encoded stolen account numbers onto blank cards and withdrew over $1.3 million from various Western banks in just 10 months. Of course, they were receiving the stolen account data from — and were kicking most of the proceeds back to — Russian hackers, who are presumably still at large.

There are other recent American arrests. Seventeen-year-old Hunter Moore of Manchester, N.H., was nabbed in a Secret Service sting and pled guilty in August to identity fraud and making counterfeit credit cards while living with his grandmother.

And a Virginia Tech student, Benjamin W. Pinkston, was among seven people arrested in last week's return of Operation Rolling Stone. According to The Roanoke Times, he was released to the custody of his parents on Tuesday and told to stay off the Internet. A judge eased that restriction, when it was suggested it would make it hard for the young man to do his homework.

Meanwhile, American law enforcement can often only watch the real kingpins like Zo0mer (which he spells with a signature zero) from afar.

"It's a big job to navigate the treaties and the rights to privacy in disclosing information to foreign law enforcement," Mr. Crabb said.

And that's just the beginning. Even when banks and credit card companies are willing to share the details of a breach (and many would prefer to keep mum rather than risk publicity), it is equally daunting to try to win the attention and cooperation of foreign investigators, Mr. Crabb said.

This is particularly true in parts of the former Eastern Bloc, where law enforcement is often facing down more immediate local problems — organized crime, tax schemes, corruption — and might understandably place the plight of American banks and consumers a bit lower on their priority list.

Indeed, in some countries, Mr. Crabb suggested, law enforcement officers responsible for combating online data thieves may have never owned a credit card themselves.

"That is actually one of the first things I tell financial institutions when I'm educating them about this," Mr. Crabb said. "Take that credit card out of the equation. Those law enforcement officials don't have one. They don't understand the power of one. It's a hurdle that we have to overcome."

And even when a big fish is caught, as happened last summer with the arrest in Ukraine of Dmitro Ivanovich Golubov, aka "Script," according to authorities, there is little that can be done when he is released.

Mr. Golubov's capture was described in The Wall Street Journal by Larry Johnson of the Secret Service, as "one of the most significant apprehensions of a high-level Eastern European responsible for criminal activity on the Internet."

Still, to the dismay of American law enforcement officials (and some of their Ukrainian counterparts), Mr. Golubov was quietly released from prison in December while awaiting trial.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03link.html





Live at the Witch Trials
Story by J T. Ramsay

It's hard to believe that more than six years since Shawn Fanning's tête-à-tête with the RIAA introduced the American legal system to peer-to-peer filesharing, so much still remains unclear. While the RIAA v. Napster proceedings polarized the industry and consumers, it also brought to light the tensions inherent in the development of these new technologies and their applications. In some respects, the Napster case revealed that beneath the democratization of new technologies lie complicated legal questions, and the sprawling, powerful tendrils of copyrights, patents, and intellectual property.

Little has been done in the interceding years to change perceptions of the industry. To many, the RIAA is a faceless corporate monolith dedicated to criminalizing consumers and closing black market loopholes. Accordingly, the RIAA rethought its legal strategy and began prosecuting cases very quietly against unsuspecting victims, rather than suffer further public relations disasters in high-profile cases. Last November, defense attorney Ray Beckerman started documenting these cases at his blog Recording Industry vs. The People in an effort to make public the ongoing legal drama as it unfolds.

Steve Gordon, an entertainment lawyer and contributor to Digital Music News, contends that the RIAA needs to make creative concessions and re-imagine its business model to survive in an evolving legal and technological environment. He introduced us to the players behind the lawsuits and what the battle over digital music means for consumers, labels, and artists.

Pitchfork: How many companies own music publishing and production rights?

Steve Gordon: Recorded music consists of two things: musical recordings and songs. The record companies generally control the recordings. The major labels, Universal, Sony BMG, EMI, and Warner, collectively control and distribute more than 80% of the world's recorded music.

There is not as much consolidation with regard to the songs although the major publishers including EMI Music, Warner Chappell, Universal and Sony ATV, BMG, and a handful of others control the majority of popular songs.

Pitchfork: What profits do they earn annually? How have they changed, and what explanation does the industry give for these changes?

Gordon: In terms of record sales, profits have declined precipitously in the last several years. Many people in, and who study, the music industry blame this on the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) music file sharing and CD burning. They argue that these technologies have dramatically diminished CD sales. In fact, the major labels are currently making little if any profits, and in the past five years CD sales have suffered serious declines. Recorded music sales worldwide have dropped by more than 15% since peaking at nearly $40 billion in 2000. Final figures for 2005 have not been released yet, but 2004 sales totaled only 33.6 billion, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And although sales of digital singles on iTunes and other authorized digital services have multiplied in volume, they have not earned nearly enough income to offset lost income from declining CD sales.

The music publishing business has not suffered as much since a great deal of their income has come from sources other than mechanical royalties from record sales. These other sources of income include public performance on radio, TV, and the internet, and licensing "synch" rights to use songs in TV shows and movies. The income from these sources has actually increased in the psst several years.

Pitchfork: What is the RIAA, and what is their function?

Gordon: RIAA stands for the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that represents the interests of the major record companies (Sony BMG, EMI Universal and Warner), plus many of the bigger indies. According to their website, RIAA members create, manufacture, and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.

The RIAA's mission "is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality." In the past they were primarily knows as the people who certified Gold and Platinum sales awards. But more recently they have known for suing thousands of people, including parents, children, and even grandparents for unauthorized music file sharing.

Pitchfork: What is ASCAP? Where do they stand on this issue?

Gordon: ASCAP is a "performing rights organization" (PRO). There are two other PRO's in the U.S. They are BMI and SESAC. And there are PRO's operating in almost every country in the industrialized world. Their function is to license the songs, not the recordings, for public performance on radio, TV, the internet and physical venues including nightclubs, stadiums, restaurants, and every other place where music is publicly performed.

There is no public performance right for musical recording expect for digital transmission such as internet radio. In the United States an organization called SoundExchange provides licenses to internet radio stations to play records.

Pitchfork: Have they been involved in these cases? If so, what has been their role?

Gordon: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC do not approve of unauthorized P2P music file sharing, but they have less to lose from it. Even if P2P does displace record sales, these organizations do not make income from sales of records anyway. They only make money from the public performance of music. And no one has seriously argued that P2P somehow reduces the number of performances of music on radio, TV or at live events.

In fact, in contrast with the record labels, the PROs have taken a relatively enlightened point of view about digital music. They will license any website that requests one and their fees, between 1-3% of income, are reasonable. I recently secured licenses for an internet radio channel client. Altogether the PROs' only wanted about 5% of income for use of all their songs. And by "all their songs" I mean about 99% of recorded music. On the other hand, I recently tried to clear music for an online record store from the labels, and they wanted six figures upfront.

Pitchfork: To what extent has piracy endangered the music industry's commercial viability?

Gordon: A lot! It is estimated that tens of millions of illegally pressed CDs are distributed each year. In China and South America, counterfeit pressings are especially rampant. Although you can say that this form of piracy is old-fashioned as it is not web-based, it has flourished due to the increased availability of low-cost, high-quality digital copying machines.

P2P and CD burning are relatively recent threats to the record business. In 1999, income from sales of recorded music was approximately 15 billion in the U.S. Since then, income has continually declined and in 2004 it amounted to approximately only $11 billion (PDF file).

Although the RIAA has not published the sales and income report for 2005, experts advise that both fell again in 2005. In an article called "Music Biz Laments 'Worst Year Ever'" Rolling Stone reported that:

"It was yet another unhappy New Year for the music industry: Despite hits by Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, and Green Day, 2005 saw album sales drop 7.2% as labels continued to struggle with adapting to the age of the iPod and the internet. Overall, consumers bought 48 million fewer albums than in 2004, marking a disastrous 21% slide from the industry's peak in 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 'It was arguably the worst in the music business's history,' says Steve Bartels, Island Records president."

Although digital-song downloads jumped 150% in 2005-- consumers bought 352 million of them-- since labels only make about 60 cents off a 99-cent download, digital downloads fall far short of compensating the labels for the loss of 48 million albums at about $12 wholesale. In fact some experts think that by allowing music lovers to "cherry pick" popular singles, the labels may be losing album sales because if iTunes and other digital services offering single track downloads.

Pitchfork: Is there a definite link between P2P and declining CD sales and recording industry income?

Gordon: In 1999, the first generation of peer-to-peer music file-sharing (the original Napster) was becoming terrifically popular. P2P has grown every year since and the recording business has been on the decline. Some experts argue that P2P is not to blame. They point to reasons such as the music is not as good as it used to be, that the public is increasingly distracted by other forms of entertainment such as video games and a bad economy. But others argue that the ascendancy of P2P and the decline of the recording business are not coincidental. I tend to believe there is a cause and effect between P2P and declining music sales-- but that the record companies exacerbated the impact of P2P by (a) Overpricing CDs, and (b) Failing to give music lovers a high quality low priced alternative to P2P.

In addition, CD burning's popularity has been spurred by the increased availability of burning software, which is now pre-packaged in most personal computers. Although this software may enhance the value of the computer to consumers, it also enhances the possibility that people will make CDs for their friends and this, I think, does displace record sales. (This is consistent with our discussion later that certain companies, although not the record labels, are making a lot of money from "free" music.)

Pitchfork: So, is this a recapitulation of the "home taping is killing music" scare? If not, how is it different legally speaking?

Gordon: No. Copying tapes was cumbersome and second generation tapes were inferior in quality. Digital provides random access for easy picking of best songs to make compilations and the copies are generally as good as the originals.

Legally, they're more or less the same. Making a copy of recorded music for your own personal use, whether a tape or CD, is generally legally acceptable. But new technology makes it very easy to share music with fiends or strangers on line.

Pitchfork: What does the law actually say in these matters? What precedents exist? Describe the legal/political landscape, giving a brief chronology of the P2P phenomenon.

Gordon: On June 27, 2005, the Supreme Court in MGM Vs. Grokster ruled against the unauthorized P2P services Grokster and Streamcast Networks. The Court noted that file-sharing services violate federal copyright law when they promote and encourage swapping copyrighted songs and movies illegally. "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties," Justice David H. Souter opined.

Although the decision was a victory for the RIAA, it actually confirmed that P2P technology itself is legal so long as not marketed and promoted in such a way as to encourage copyright infringement. This could be very bad news for the recording business. There are new file-sharing program such as BitTorrent, which is even faster than Grokster; its founder, Bram Cohen, doesn't promote the technology in such as ways as to violate the ruling in Grokster. Bit Torrent is also free and can be used without ads. It is therefore unlikely that the record companies can ever shut down P2P using the courts.

RIAA started suing individual music file traders several years ago. They realize that many of these defendants are their own customers, but they have become somewhat desperate as CD sales and income continues to fall.

Pitchfork: Describe the original case against Napster and its impact on P2P.

Gordon: The Napster case preceded the Grokster case by several years. Napster controlled a central database from which all the users took music. Napster could have filtered out copyrighted songs, but they didn't. The courts had no problem finding Napster to be illegal. But the new file sharing services do not control a central database. They merely allow you to download software that enables you to share music with others. The Grokster case stands for the proposition that so as long as these services do not actively promote that you can use it to get copyrighted music for free, the technology itself seems to be legal!

Pitchfork: Define intellectual property law's application to the music business, and, if you can, explain in plain language the rules of ownership and copyright when it comes to music. Also is there a distinction between file sharing and P2P downloading?

Gordon: The copyright law provides protection for music-- both for the songs (musical composition) and the musical recordings (sound recordings). Under copyright law no one but the copyright owners can make copies of either songs or recordings and distribute those copies to others. Without the copyright law the record companies, which own the recordings, and the songwriters and music publishers, which control the songs, could not make a living. The copyright law also affords other exclusive rights, including making derivative works or variations, and public performance. These rights also contribute directly to the income of those who create music.

The distinction to be made is that if you wrote and recorded your own music, rather than other people's music, you don't need permission to share it. So a band that allows people to download their music from their blog or website is not violating any copyrights so long they wrote and recorded the music and did not enter into an exclusive recording contract that gives labels the right to distribute the music.

Pitchfork: Tell us about the RIAA's lawsuits.

Gordon: They are suing people for sharing recordings without the permission of the copyright owners. Generally they demand several thousand dollars and refuse to negotiate. Many defendants are dissuaded from fighting the cases because hiring a lawyer can quickly add up to more than what the RIAA will accept to settle.

Pitchfork: Of what consequence are these sums? How are they to be distributed to all concerned parties? (Is this really about the artists?)

Gordon: That's a great question! The lawyers are definitely getting some of it because the RIAA farms the cases out to private firms. Of course, some it has to pay as salaries to all those new lawyers the RIAA has hired in the past several years. What's left is possibly distributed to the record company members of the RIAA. It is not clear whether the artists share in any of these monies.

Pitchfork: Explain the subpoena power in these cases, and how it has been used to identify alleged downloaders, heretofore referred to as John/Jane Does?

Gordon: The RIAA initially used a provision in the Copyright Act they thought allowed them to demand names of ISP subscribers who uploaded files in unauthorized P2P services. But the ISPs, specifically-- Verizon resisted, arguing that the record companies did not have the right to their subscribers names. The federal court agreed. Although this made it harder and more expensive to initiate law suits, the RIAA forged on and are now suing more individuals than ever.

Pitchfork: Why are children being targeted in these cases?

Gordon: If the ISP addresses belong to children they can be the defendants. This is due to the fact that RIAA can only get limited info on its targets. In addition to children they are suing soccer moms and grandmothers who may not even know what file-sharing is. Their children or their children's friends are maybe using their ISP addresses to grab free music. So a lot of innocent people are being targeted.

Pitchfork: Is a political message being sent with these cases? Are they a witch hunt?

Gordon: The RIAA hopes to send the message that there are negative consequences for unauthorized music file sharing. One problem is that they may be targeting the wrong people and there may be backlash by the public. Music fans are turned off to the labels for life.

In addition to this negative publicity it does not help that Sony recently released anti-copying code on millions of their CDs that allegedly contained spyware that allows them to look at what you are doing online. The code also subjected many computers to hacking. Sony had to recall the CDs and are still fighting court battles including one with the state of Texas for allegedly violating their anti-spyware statute!

Pitchfork: How effective have these cases been for the RIAA?

Gordon: There is some disagreement here. The RIAA has stated that music file sharing has, if not declined, at least has not gone up since they started suing people. But independent monitoring firms such as Big Champagne asset that music file sharing has continued to increase.

Pitchfork: Why do you think "illegal downloading" has proliferated since these cases began?

Gordon: P2P proliferated before the suits started. However, the suits do not seem to have a clear effect in reducing P2P.

Pitchfork: What is the industry doing right and wrong?

Gordon: On the wrong side, I think suing their own customers will backfire. Not only is it terrible publicity, it will also lead people to download more free music out of revenge. It is a well-known secret that if you download without offering your collection to others, you can avoid detection. Therefore people can rely on the more adventurous to feed them music without risking detection.

Another wrong is Sony's placing spyware on their CDs. Not only was that bad PR, it was probably illegal.

Another depressing event was Sprint's recent introduction of Over the Air Downloads of single songs for $2.50 each. Presumably this was done with the record company's collaboration on pricing. It's just stupid to think people would pay 2.5 times more for a song that they could get legally for $1 (or for nothing on P2P) just because it's more "convenient" to buy from the phone directly. Consumers can almost just as easily "sideload" all the music they want into their cell phone from their existing desktop music collection. Verizon's introduction of $2.00 for OTA songs a few weeks ago is almost as depressing. By the way, both services require you to pay an additional $15 per month to access the music service. Plus you need to pay money to upgrade to a special phone. And then you have pay up to $100 or more on a memory card that will hold only a few hundred songs!

Another wrong: some of the labels want to increase the price of front line product on iTunes. Even the labels agree that iTunes is one of the few bright spots for the business in the last several years. Increasing the price might well end that success.

On the right side? At least the labels are actively seeking deals for digital distribution. I just think the deals are being priced wrong and do not provide what the public really wants-- abundant music, reasonably priced.

Pitchfork: Are the artists making money from iTunes and other sources of digital revenue?

Gordon: The artists with the big labels are not seeing much revenue. Although sales of digital music have multiplied in the last year, they still only represent a fraction of the income from CD sales. And the artists are paid on digital sales basically the same way as they are paid for ordinary record sales. Artists usually only receive any recording royalties after "recoupment" of their "unearned balances," that is, production and marketing costs. But only the most successful artists recoup production and marketing costs. Under the standard recording agreements artists only "recoup" at their royalty rate. After deductions, the artists' royalty usually is well less than a dollar per album. So if production and marketing costs (including music videos) are $250,000 (modest in terms of big labels) then they most sell more than 250,000 records to earn any recording royalties. In addition many agreements reduce the artists normal royalty rate for digital sales.

Now compare this to an artist who records and sells an album without a record company. Say an artist records an album for $10,000 and sells the CD for $14 on CD Baby. CD Baby takes only $4. If the artist sold 10,000 units, he or she would make 10,000 x $10 = $100,000 minus $10,000 and gets to keep $90,000. If the artist recorded the same album for a record company and sold the same number of units they would probably receive no recording royalties at all. If the record company produced the album for $10,000 and spent $10,000 on recoupable marketing costs, and the artist's royalty was a dollar, the artist would in fact still owe the record company $10,000.

Pitchfork: Next steps: Is there a compromise that can be reached between the industry and the consumer? If so, what is it?

Gordon: I am in favor of a levy on those who truly profit from "free music," that is the electronics business and the ISPs. In exchange, all music file sharing would be legal. This plan would a. compensate the labels and the artists; b. provide music lovers with access to any music ever recorded any time they wish to hear it; c. eliminate the RIAA's lawsuits against consumers

In order to get "free music" you need a computer. You also need a fast internet connection. In addition, if you want to hear your free music at the gym or on the subway you need to buy an iPod or other mp3 player. So you are paying a lot for "free" music. But the money is going to computer and mp3 player manufacturers, and ISPs rather than music content companies. If we imposed a very small tax on sales of computers, mp3 players, and broadband subscription, we could compensate the record companies and the artists. And the RIAA could stop suing their own customers!

Yet the major labels continue to reject this position. Why? At least one of the majors, Sony BMG is partially controlled by a major electronics company. Another reason is that under this scheme the record companies would have to split 50/50 with the artists. The labels rarely pay artists any royalties now because the artists only generally get 10% to 20% royalty after they recoup production and certain marketing costs.

The record companies are desperately still trying to shut down the free digital flow of music and recapture control over pricing so they can sell music for whatever price they want and people will be forced to buy it. Unfortunately, huge economic forces-- the interests of the electronics and broadband industries-- are allied against them. In addition, the technology itself makes it so easy and fast to share music, that sooner than later the labels may become sufficiently enough to embrace this solution -- even if it means the artist would make some of the profits!

Pitchfork: What is the future of the major labels?

Gordon: When Napster came on the scene in the late-90s, the majors were making money hand over fist selling CDs, including back catalogue replacing all those vinyl and cassette collections. They could have built a low-cost, high-quality alternative to Napster, or as Fanning wanted, licensed Napster and made money from it. But they were desperate to preserve the old and incredibly profitable $18.99 CD business model. By the time they were able to kill Napster in court, faster and ever more popular forms of P2P such as Kazaa and Grokster were thriving.

I think the culture of the labels have been unable to adapt to the impact that new technology, particularly the web, has had on the recorded music. The labels, for many years, combined two basic characters-- Ivy League-trained lawyers and savvy music business types with "ears." Sometimes one executive was both-- Clive Davis, for instance. But the one culture that was never present were techies. They are there now. But they do not call the shots.

The Sony DRM debacle shows they still have no clue. That is why I think that in the foreseeable future, companies such as Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft may buy or become labels-- because knowledge of technology is so important to the new music business.

The recording industry and the great music moguls (such as Clive, Doug Morris, and my old boss Tommy Mottola) have and continue to develop great talent and launch careers. It would be a shame if they folded their tents. But they are running out of time and need a jumpstart into the digital age. One promising sign is that all the majors have now signed on with Shawn Fanning to launch SNOCAP, an authorized P2P service. SNOCAP plans to launch soon. Let's hope the labels can get it right before they run out of time!

Steve Gordon is an entertainment attorney, author, educator and Fulbright Scholar based in New York City. His book, The Future of the Music Business: How to Succeed with the New Technologies, A Guide for Artists and Entrepreneurs, is available on Backbeat Books. For more information visit Steve Gordon Law.
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/featur...h-trials.shtml





Music Industry Unleashes More Europe Lawsuits

The music industry launched a new wave of lawsuits and criminal proceedings against file-sharers across Europe on Tuesday, part of its drive to curb online piracy and encourage the use of legal music services.

About 2,000 cases were launched in 10 countries, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industrysaid in a statement, bringing the total to 5,500 people in 18 countries.

That figure does not include the United States, covered by its sister group, the Recording Industry Association of America, which has filed about 18,000 lawsuits.

Among the countries targeted was Portugal, where sales of physical formats like CDs have slumped by 40 percent in the past four years amid heavy file-sharing usage, especially by college students.

Portugal's sales drop is ``in part due to downloaded digital music, but much more of the loss is caused by people obtaining music illegally,'' IFPI Chairman John Kennedy told a Lisbon news conference.

Though there were more people listening to music, fewer people were buying it, Kennedy said.

``It is a surprise to see the scale of the problem in Portugal,'' he added, and warned that without anti-piracy measures the music industry in the nation of 10 million people would disappear.

Other users targeted for legal action included a Finnish carpenter, a British postman, a Czech IT manager and a German judge, the IFPI said in its statement.

``A large number of cases involve men aged between 20 and 35 and parents who have not heeded successive education and warning campaigns,'' it stated.

In Italy authorities have seized more than 70 computers in the search for evidence of illegal file-sharing.

The IFPI's legal proceedings were aimed not at people who illicitly downloaded music but ``uploaders'' who put copyrighted music onto file-sharing networks.

The IFPI said last week that digital music sales soared in 2005, but not enough to make up for a continuing decline in physical formats like CDs, sending total sales down 3 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...lawsuits.html?





Sinking a Music Pirate

When the FBI came calling, all those 'free' songs suddenly came with a big price tag.
Mickey Borchardt,

I THOUGHT THAT anything would be better than my early morning Spanish class, but I realized I was wrong on that day two years ago when a campus police officer pulled me out of class to inform me that an FBI agent was waiting for me at my dormitory room.

That was the start of the incident that would become the defining moment of my life so far.

As we drove, with me in the front seat, the officer assured me that it was most likely "not a big deal." The FBI, which I would later learn maintains its North Carolina office just down the road from my university, comes to campus "all the time."

There wasn't just one agent in my dorm room but a team. One stood at the door while another wheeled my computer out on a cart. One wearing a rubber glove dug through my trash while another sorted through my closet.

After sitting me down, the first question of my interview was, Is this the screen name you've been using to communicate on the Internet? It was.

In the previous year, I'd joined a private group on the Web whose purpose was sharing free music. In exchange for providing the group with albums, I was given access to a virtual library. In the few months of my membership, I uploaded a handful of CDs. I had no special industry access, so there was very little I could supply that wasn't already available: albums from local bands without national distribution, free music samplers given out in stores, etc.

I knew it wasn't right, but the temptation of endless new noise drowned out the ethical whispers. I knew it was illegal, but I never thought I'd face legal troubles. Although my method for obtaining MP3s was different from the common college pirate (who prefers Kazaa, LimeWire, Soulseek or other peer-to-peer systems), the degree of my infringement was similar.

For the authorities to single you out, you have to sell bootlegs, right? Or leak early versions of music before it is publicly available, or something equally serious, right? Wrong.

The series of events in the weeks after the FBI's visit was as dizzying as it was surreal. I had to find a lawyer; have lengthy, uncomfortable conversations with him in his high-rise office overlooking the city; meet with the dean of students and learn of my punishment on campus (probation, an essay about piracy, exile from student housing and computer labs); and the most intimidating of all: I had to go to the FBI's office downtown for a video teleconference with higher-ups in Washington.

I'm not even sure who was questioning me while I sat there, twiddling my thumbs and fidgeting with my tie, trying not to look as terrified as I was.

THE WORD TO describe it is "shame." The shame in realizing I'd been monitored for months, with paper logs of my online conversations; the shame of begging my university dean to allow me to remain a student; the shame of continuing to squander such a significant portion of my family's savings on legal fees; the shame of pleading with professors to reschedule tests; the shame of desperately searching for landlords on short notice; and, of course, the shame of knowing I'd stolen the property of others like me who are passionate about the art of music.

The other word is "fear." Fear that keeps me awake at night and distracted in class. Fear of my May sentencing date (I pleaded guilty in March) in the same courthouse as Zacarias Moussaoui; fear of the possible prison time I am facing; fear of my job prospects when I graduate college in December with a felony criminal record; and fear for the future I've recklessly damaged.

Everybody wants something for nothing, and I've come to learn that "free" music is anything but. The hidden cost is enormous. Although I am unqualified to opine on the price of piracy for the artists whose work is stolen, I can describe the price I've paid.

Stealing, no matter how little, or how easy, is never right. There is no justification for downloading music without paying. I'm not just saying this to reduce my sentence; I want to get the message out to young people who might not otherwise understand — copyright infringement, whether it is buying a bootleg album from a street vendor or downloading a song from the Internet, has very serious consequences.

I regret what I did. I had a lot of music on my PC that I'd never paid for, and now I have an enormous bill I will be paying for years to come. Is piracy worth it? It wasn't for me.

Mickey Borchardt is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...,1235215.story





Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal
Declan McCullagh

A partisan divide pitting Republicans against Democrats on the question of Internet regulation appears to be deepening.

A Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday defeated a proposal that would have levied extensive regulations on broadband providers and forcibly prevented them from offering higher-speed video services to partners or affiliates.

By an 8-to-23 margin, the committee members rejected a Democratic-backed "Net neutrality" amendment to a current piece of telecommunications legislation. The amendment had attracted support from companies including Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and their chief executives wrote a last-minute letter to the committee on Wednesday saying such a change to the legislation was "critical."

Before the vote, amendment sponsor Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, assailed his Republican colleagues. "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet," Markey said. "Everyone should understand that."

This philosophical rift extends beyond the precise wording of the telecommunications legislation. It centers on whether broadband providers will be free to design their networks as they see fit and enjoy the latitude to prioritize certain types of traffic--such as streaming video--over others. (In an interview last week with CNET News.com, Verizon Chief Technology Officer Mark Wegleitner said prioritization is necessary to make such services economically viable.)

After a day of debate, the committee went on to vote 27-4 in favor of approving the final bill--minus the Democrats' amendment--sending it onward to full committee consideration, expected in late April. The vote on the amendment itself did not occur strictly along party lines, with one Republican voting in favor and four Democrats voting against it.

Leading Republicans have dismissed concerns about Net neutrality, also called network neutrality, as simultaneously overblown and overly vague.

"This is not Chicken Little, the sky is not falling, we're not going to change the direction of the axis of the earth on this vote," said Rep. John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican. He said overregulatory Net neutrality provisions would amount to picking winners and losers in the marketplace and discourage investment in faster connections that will benefit consumers.

Last week, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton said: "Before we get too far down the road, I want to let the market kind of sort itself out, and I'm not convinced that we really have a problem with Net neutrality."

Barton and other Republican leaders of the House panel did, however, offer some modest changes to a telecommunications bill in response to concerns from Internet and software companies.

Their replacement bill would require the Federal Communications Commission to vet all complaints of violations of Net neutrality principles within 90 days. It gave the FCC the power to levy fines of up to $500,000 per violation.

It also contained explicit language denying the FCC the authority to make new rules on Net neutrality. Democrats charged that lack of enforcement power would mean the FCC would be unable to deal with the topic flexibly.

Rep. Charles Pickering, a Mississippi Republican, backed that less-regulatory approach, saying that a "case-by-case adjudicatory process" is the best way to address Net neutrality concerns while ensuring competition in the marketplace.

Democrat's failed proposal
The amendment that was rejected on Wednesday took a similar approach to strict Net neutrality legislation introduced in the Senate last month by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden.

It said that any content provider must be awarded bandwidth "with equivalent or better capability than the provider extends to itself or affiliated parties, and without the imposition of any charge." That would likely prohibit any plans by Verizon or other former Bell companies to offer their own video services that would be given priority over other traffic (video is bandwidth-intensive and intolerant of network delays).

"I think this walled garden approach that many network providers would like to create would fundamentally change the way the Internet works and undermine the power of the Net as a force of innovation and change," said Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat.

Markey warned: '"There is a fundamental choice. It's the choice between the bottleneck designs of a...small handful of very large companies and the dreams and innovations of thousands of online companies and innovators."

By "very large companies," Markey was not referring to Microsoft, which has a market value of $287 billion, but its much smaller political rival Verizon, which has a market value of $101 billion and has opposed Net neutrality mandates. Markey did not appear to be referring to Google, which has a value of $121 billion and has been lobbying on behalf of federal regulations, but to AT&T, which has a value of $105 billion and has opposed them.

A CNET News.com report published last week, however, showed that the Internet industry is being outspent in Washington by more than a 3-to-1 margin.

AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon spent $230.9 million on politicians from 1998 until the present, while Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spent only a combined $71.2 million. (Those figures include lobbying expenditures, individual contributions, political action committees and soft money.)

In the last week, the Net neutrality debate in Washington has spread beyond the circles of lobbyists for telecommunications and e-commerce companies.

A network of conservative and free-market groups has begun warning Congress that Net neutrality regulations are not consistent with Republican laissez-faire principles and protection of private-property rights.

The American Conservative Union, the National Taxpayers Union, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, and Citizens Against Government Waste were among the signers of a letter Friday that said the Democrat-backed proposal would let the FCC "exercise complete discretion over the Internet."

"At the very least," the letter cautioned, "the vague terminology could lead to an explosion of litigation, which would, in turn, deter capital investments in technology and thwart the evolution of the Internet."

Republican insider Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes tax hikes, added in a letter on Tuesday that "a network neutrality provision in any form would begin down the dangerous path of Internet regulation.
http://news.com.com/Republicans+defe...3-6058223.html





Router Man

The creator of the multiprotocol router reflects on the development of the device that fueled the growth of networking.
John Dix

The creator of the multiprotocol router reflects on the development of the device that fueled the growth of networking.

William (Bill) Yeager is 66 and still gets peeved when someone trots out the Silicon Valley fable about how the founders of Cisco invented the router. He was the guy at Stanford University that made it happen. The history of Network World roughly parallels the commercialization of routing, so we tracked Yeager down for a glimpse into the scene back then.

You're credited with developing the first router while you were a staff researcher at Stanford. Tell us the tale.

This project started for me in January of 1980, when essentially the boss said, 'You're our networking guy. Go do something to connect the computer science department, medical center and department of electrical engineering.

What kind of gear did you need to connect?

We had mainframes, of course, DEC10 Systems, a number of Xerox PARC Lisp machines, Altos file servers and printers, and over the next year or so added DEC VAXs, Texas Instruments' Explorers and Symbolic systems. All of these things had to be hooked together, because we were spread across buildings on campus, and people were tired of carrying tapes around.

I thought about this for a bit, and I said, well really what you need is an operating system. So while the cables were being pulled and tested, I developed a network operating system [NOS] and routing code [to run on a] DEC PDP11/05. But the Alan Snyder Portable C compiler generated too much code. So I had to go into the compiler and improve the code generators. And that wasn't even good enough. So then I had to write an optimizer for PDP11/05 assembler so I could reduce the code by about 30%. This was major engineering, because you had your hands into everything. It's important to remember the PDP11/05 only had 56KB of user memory, and was diskless.

The struggle was always a balance between how many input buffers you could have. You really had to squeeze things, because there was no disk and if you ran out of memory for input buffers you weredead in the water. So you had all of these constraints, which actually had a lot to do with how good it ended up being, because I had to do a lot of work to both assure the memory allocation algorithms would never run out of memory, as well as get things scheduled right. I spent an entire summer making sure the NOS scheduling and packet-switching algorithms were optimal.

All in all we had the basic systems put together and working in about three months, and at six months the first router was in place in Pine Hall in a telephone closet. Pine Hall was midway between the medical center and the department of computer science. It was about a 2,000 feet cable run on either side of the router.

What protocols did the box support?

Initially, the code routed Parc Universal Packet (PUP) for the Xerox PARC systems and mainframes. Late in '81 my boss said, 'IP is coming down the pipe. Figure out what you can do with it.' So I put a little IP router in, and I didn't have to worry about things like ARP [Address Resolution Protocol], because it was 3 megabit Ethernet, so your IP address was just 2 bytes, one for the network and the other for the host, and the host byte was also the [media access control] address. But we were ready by '82, when the computer science department started dropping IP in all of these VAX750s, and by 1983 the routers supported XNS - which is Xerox Network Services - CHAOSnet for the TI Explorer and Symbolics Lisp machines, and IP. And it was just about then that Stanford University started to make the big transition to 10Mbps Ethernet.

Is that roughly when you made the shift from the PDP11/05-based router to the device based on the 68000 board developed by Andy Bechtolsheim (who later went on to found Sun)?

Andy was a master's student, and that collision was fortuitous. We had heard about his board, and we talked to him and he said we could have it. We plugged that sucker into a multibus backplane, plugged in some 3Com Ethernet boards and then rattled off a few copies, and I sat down and did a full transition of the code. One of the key aspects of these routers I put together is they really could route. I had a tremendous amount of instrumentation in there. I worked very, very hard to get that right and they could really pass stuff through as fast as the hardware could move. My limitation was the bus speed, that was it. The original Bechtolsheim boards had 256KB of RAM, and that was huge at the time. To me it seemed like paradise.

Is that when the school's network started to take off?

People were skeptical at first, but by 1983 it was clear this was the way to go. Initially, just technical people were hooking up, but then the rest of the campus got wind of it and it was made official and the thing started growing like hell. I completed the serious development around '85.

What happened in the interim? A lot of tweaking and refinement?

It's endless, right? New features, functions. I did a lot of Lisp work where objects were used, and I adapted that approach in C, so a router was a class, and a specific protocol, say IP, was an instance of that class, and the NOS was multitasking. When you added another router, then you ended up putting in an instance as another task or thread. In the network I/O drivers you would look for the link-level type in the packet to determine the protocol, and everything goes into nice queues under these router threads and it all works. That's why Cisco did so well in this, because you could add more and more stuff to the [operating system], no problem. Just add another task.

Speaking of Cisco, when did they enter the picture?

In the spring of 1985 Len Bosack [who was in charge of the computer science department's computer facilities and later went on to co-found Cisco] and another guy knocked on my office door and asked if they could have access to sources for the router code. I said, what do you want to do? They said, we want to improve it, add more features. I said, well that would be great, because I have other research tasks to do, and I gave them the password and away they went. I had no idea Cisco had been founded in '84. I'd never heard of it.

So your understanding was they wanted the code for the betterment of the school network?

Right. So we had weekly meetings and they were indeed working on the sources. The decision had been made to go with pure IP routers, so they took out XNS, CHAOSnet and PUP. And ultimately when they got it going about a year later their version of my code became the official Stanford routers. Things were working well and that was my only concern. We had connectivity.

So I guess sometime in '86 I found out about Cisco. We all found out about Cisco and what Len was up to. And yeah, they were developing that code on Stanford time for Cisco. But this was not exactly bad, because other things had happened like that at Stanford before. But Stanford was deciding it was time to put its foot down. 'Guys, you develop something on Stanford's campus, we want to profit from it,' right?

Who was saying this?

This was just kind of the general tenor. So I was called into Stanford Legal and the lawyer told me to bring my sources on paper. Since [Len's partner] was in the Double E department he had the Double E sources. And I sat down, and the lawyer said, 'Will you do a comparison.' And I said, well let's start with the operating system. That's sort of the heart and soul of this. And it was identical except for changing variables names. I said, can you see this? She said, 'I'm a lawyer and I can see this is identical.'

Let's look at other things. Let's look at this network data logblock (a C structure). Well it's been broken into two pieces, big deal. Any time someone gets a chance to go over code again they refine it. It was refined, clearly, but absolutely the same stuff. Derivative. They changed and added a their new routing protocol, no big deal. If you knew networking you could do it. I only did what I had to do, because I was driven by my boss and he was driven by the department's needs. And when I stopped I stopped.

Well, then Stanford really put its foot down and Len [and his partners, including Cisco co-founder Sandy Lerner] left the university to focus on Cisco.

Did Cisco ever give you any credit, other than the $100,000 in royalties?

The way royalties work, a third goes to the school, a third goes to the department and a third goes to the inventor. I gave my third back to my department because essentially all of this stuff is born out of a great research environment.

But Cisco has always had trouble giving me credit. They had a Web page that I was very irked by. 'Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack were in love and they had to go out and invent routers so they could talk across campus.' What a joke. And I'm like one of these bulldogs, you know, I get a hold of these guys' pant's leg and I won't let go of it.

I'm sort of a persona non grata down there at Cisco. But it was fun. I was very passionate about this stuff. I'm always passionate about what I do. And I learned a lot about how corporations work and these guys were great capitalists and obviously they turned out with a great company.

So you left Stanford after 20 years and went to Sun, right?

I left Stanford because it was getting more difficult to get grant money, so I did a bunch of consulting at Sun to make some extra money. Mostly dealing with IMAP e-mail stuff because there was a very interesting project at Sun called SPARC Station Voyager: a laptop with a fast matrix display, nice little footprint, running Solaris 2.4. Great system. One of the Voyager's special features was that it ran in disconnected mode. You could disconnect it from the network, and it would continued to function. My job was to create an IMAP server and client that worked when the client disconnected. This was tough because, at that time, IMAP2bis did not support disconnected e-mail, and I needed to modify the protocol to do this as well as support low bandwidth (IMAP can be very chatty). After one of the guys I was working with quit, his boss asked me to come save the e-mail part of the project. And I thought, I'm 53. I've been at universities too long. So I said sure.

How would you compare the academic to the commercial world?

I always ran into walls at Sun, company politics, and that never worked out too well. When I was at Stanford there was a rule: The best engineering wins. Simple, straightforward. If your engineering is better than the other guy's, yours got the blue ribbon. Well at Sun, and at companies in general, it's different. It's the politically correct software that gets productized. There are charters and vice presidents and presidents and all of that stuff, and I would find myself embroiled in these battles with people 10 levels above me [laughs], but I just kept battling. I didn't care, because I liked doing good engineering.

So I brought in the IMAP technology, and by '96 IMAP servers I had written were everywhere at Sun. And once that was in place they decided we should do something called mission-critical mail. So I invented something called Sun Internet Mail Servers [SIMS], which is a whole different type of server. We ended up getting hundreds of thousands of in-boxes on a single server.

The four patents I have, out of the 40 I filed, are on SIMS. The rest are really in peer-to-peer, which I did a lot with as I moved through Sun, ending up as the CTO of JXTA, Sun's open source peer-to-peer project.

What was JXTA all about?

The charter was to create an open source project for the creation of peer-to-peer protocols that would yield a virtual layer on top of the TCP/IP stack. That would return end-to-end connectivity to the Internet by making the traversal of NATs and firewalls transparent, and provide host endpoints with globally unique identifiers. Another goal was to work toward peer-to-peer protocol standards. I personally pushed this forward in the IETF and that resulted in an IRTF Peer-to-Peer Research Group that I still co-chair.

Open source was new territory for Sun, and the Project JXTA group were the pioneers. We had a very tight organization and a charter to do disruptive technology, so it was a grand experiment. An engineer was two degrees of separation from the vice president and they were always available for discussions. Amazing! We received an introduction to how to do an open source project from CollabNet and they hosted Project JXTA. Initially, most of the engineering was done by Sun but then the JXTA community began to grow exponentially and great contributions came from non-Sun members.

But then a lot of things happened to the organization. JXTA was put under the product side of things, which kind of gave me the shivers. I mean, you get into product stuff, and you're in a box. You can't get out. I always managed, but just because I was irritating enough for my vice presidents that they would say, 'Go do something else.'

So in 1998 I'm talking to my vice president, and he says go do what you want. And I said I'm doing wireless. It's the next big thing. He says OK, if you believe it, go do it.

I wrote something called the iPlanet Wireless Server, which sat between IMAP e-mail on the back end, and on the other side you could go to [Wireless Application Protocol] servers or any kind of wireless device. It was presentation language stuff so, depending on the device, you put out screens for phones or whatever. It was quite cool. It ended up being probably one of their only money-making wireless projects.

Based on some of the projects I know you've been involved in, a common thread seems to be handheld devices. Do you see particular promise there?

Over the years I've developed a real interest in mobile devices, which was one of my reasons to go to Sun in the first place, to do this mobile laptop, which they ultimately end-of-lifed (in error, but they did it anyway). So I saw the power of these devices, and I saw the power of integrating these devices. You could see wireless moving in, see all of this happening. It was very clear.

I felt we ought to do something to get some decent user interfaces on these devices. That's going to be a big next step. I don't think everybody in the world's going to have a computer, and it's stupid to ask everybody to learn to type. If you can use a mobile phone there are ways around this, and that's part of what I'm working on if I can get this new company going.

What's the focus of the new company?

It's called Peerouette, and it's a new twist on peer-to-peer. I've created what's called a deterministic peer-to-peer network. That is, the peers are never down, because the peers are not your devices. The peers are in the network and hosted by ISPs. Your device just authenticates strongly with public key and gets in there. And all your content lives in the network and is shareable 24 by 7.

You drop your mobile phone in the toilet, it's done, but it's all backed up. Automatically. My colleague says 'Bill, go to this URL.' I do. An image of his mobile phone appears on my laptop. He says 'press the menu key.' I do. I'm looking at his menu. He says 'take a picture.' I do. A picture of him appears. We've really gotten into these operating systems, how they work. We can totally control mobile phones from other devices. This is great for mobile phone people doing IT. All under very strong encryption.

So it's a lot about that and a lot about giving computing back to the people. I'm very big on the garage rock band having a way to sell their stuff. So in my world, you create your community out there in what we call the Peerouette Network, you take your MP3 files, push them out there, we give you billing, give you advertising, and you can sell them for whatever price you want. We'll take maybe 10%, something like that. What we're really doing is giving the user, the wireless ISP and the content provider a fair share of all the content revenue.

That's kind of what I'm up to, if we can fund it and get it going. We are very close. Cross your fingers. The Internet will surely be a better place if we succeed.

Sounds great. Good luck with that. In closing, let's change the subject. I understand you have a wine cave. What's that?

In French a wine cellar is called a cave because originally all the wine bottles were literally stored in caves. So we have a wine cellar and keep a reasonable supply . . . about 500 bottles going back to the '80s. Always fun when you have friends over. Go down to the cave and bring out a bottle or two.

What's your favorite wine?

Pinot Noir. Without any doubt. They are the most subtly complex wines. They have a spectrum of flavors that show a taste of the earth.
http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/200...routerman.html





Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible
Ryan Naraine

In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation.

"When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here.

Offensive rootkits, which are used hide malware programs and maintain an undetectable presence on an infected machine, have become the weapon of choice for virus and spyware writers and, because they often use kernel hooks to avoid detection, Danseglio said IT administrators may never know if all traces of a rootkit have been successfully removed.h

He cited a recent instance where an unnamed branch of the U.S. government struggled with malware infestations on more than 2,000 client machines. "In that case, it was so severe that trying to recover was meaningless. They did not have an automated process to wipe and rebuild the systems, so it became a burden. They had to design a process real fast," Danseglio added.

Danseglio, who delivered two separate presentations at the conference—one on threats and countermeasures to defend against malware infestations in Windows, and the other on the frightening world on Windows rootkits—said anti-virus software is getting better at detecting and removing the latest threats, but for some sophisticated forms of malware, he conceded that the cleanup process is "just way too hard."

Microsoft says stealth rootkits are bombarding Windows XP SP2 machines. Click here to read more.

"We've seen the self-healing malware that actually detects that you're trying to get rid of it. You remove it, and the next time you look in that directory, it's sitting there. It can simply reinstall itself," he said.

"Detection is difficult, and remediation is often impossible," Danseglio declared. "If it doesn't crash your system or cause your system to freeze, how do you know it's there? The answer is you just don't know. Lots of times, you never see the infection occur in real time, and you don't see the malware lingering or running in the background."

He recommended using PepiMK Software's SpyBot Search & Destroy, Mark Russinovich's RootkitRevealer and Microsoft's own Windows Defender, all free utilities that help with malware detection and cleanup, and urged CIOs to take a defense-in-depth approach to preventing infestations.

Are virtual machine rootkits the next big threat? Click here to read more.

Danseglio said malicious hackers are conducting targeted attacks that are "stealthy and effective" and warned that the for-profit motive is much more serious than even the destructive network worms of the past. "In 2006, the attackers want to pay the rent. They don't want to write a worm that destroys your hardware. They want to assimilate your computers and use them to make money.

"At Microsoft, we are fielding 2,000 attacks per hour. We are a constant target, and you have to assume your Internet-facing service is also a big target," Danseglio said.

Danseglio said the success of social engineering attacks is a sign that the weakest link in malware defense is "human stupidity."

"Social engineering is a very, very effective technique. We have statistics that show significant infection rates for the social engineering malware. Phishing is a major problem because there really is no patch for human stupidity," he said.

The most recent statistics from Microsoft's anti-malware engineering team confirm Danseglio's contention. In February alone, the company's free Malicious Software Removal Tool detected a social engineering worm called Win32/Alcan on more than 250,000 unique machines.

According to Danseglio, user education goes a long way to mitigating the threat from social engineering, but in companies where staff turnover is high, he said a company may never recoup that investment.

"The easy way to deal with this is to think about prevention. Preventing an infection is far easier than cleaning up," he said, urging enterprise administrators to block known bad content using firewalls and proxy filtering and to ensure security software regularly scans for infections.
http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/...=174915,00.asp





Another Security Hole Found In IE
Joris Evers

An unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer could aid fraudsters in pulling off phishing scams, experts have warned.

The error could be exploited to fake the address bar in a browser window, security monitoring company Secunia said in an advisory published on Tuesday. This tactic could be used in phishing scams that attempt to trick people into believing they are on a legitimate site, when in fact they are viewing a fraudulent Web page.

Phishing is a prevalent type of online scam that seeks to pilfer personal information from unsuspecting Internet users. The scams typically combine spam e-mail with fraudulent Web sites that appear to come from a trusted source, such as a credit card company or a bank.

The flaw exists because of an error in the way the Microsoft Web browser loads Web pages and Macromedia Flash animations, according to Secunia. The company rates the issue "moderately critical" and has created a special Web page where users can test their Web browser to see if they are affected.

Secunia has confirmed that the vulnerability affects IE 6.0 on Windows XP with all current security patches. It also affects the latest IE 7 Beta release, Secunia said. Other versions may also be affected, it said.

Microsoft is investigating the newly reported flaw, a representative said in an e-mailed statement late Wednesday. "Our initial investigation has revealed that customers who have set their Internet security settings to high, or who have disabled active scripting, are at reduced risk from attack as the attack vector requires scripting," the representative said.

Additionally, Microsoft noted that it has not seen any active attacks that take advantage of this issue, which Secunia has dubbed the "Internet Explorer Window Loading Race Condition Address Bar Spoofing" flaw.

This is the fourth unpatched vulnerability for IE that has become public in the last few weeks. Microsoft plans to release a security update for the Web browser on Tuesday. At least one of the disclosed bugs will be fixed in that update, the company has said. That flaw, related to how IE handles the "createTextRange()" tag in Web pages, has been exploited in attacks to install spyware, remote-control software and Trojan horses on vulnerable PCs.
http://news.com.com/Another+security...3-6058557.html





Players Big and Small Are Sifting Through Pieces of Knight Ridder
Katharine Q. Seelye

With the McClatchy Company set to accept bids, starting as early as tomorrow, for the 12 Knight Ridder papers it is selling, some of the potential buyers are looking at the country as if it were a giant chessboard.

The goal is not to topple a king but to become one — a king of each regional market where potential buyers already own newspapers and can achieve economies of scale by buying pieces of Knight Ridder.

"It's a delicate game of strategy right now," said Thomas Russo, a partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner, a capital management firm in Lancaster, Pa.

The sales are likely to lead to a further consolidation of the newspaper industry around the country. During the last decade or so, newspapers have been "clustering," that is, buying papers near one another, allowing them to save money by combining their advertising sales and printing operations and, in some cases, their news divisions.

Analysts said that clustering was a major motivation for many of the newspaper companies that are now interested in pieces of Knight Ridder. To achieve their ends, these companies could go into partnerships or even swap other papers.

According to analysts, the newspaper companies that are potential buyers include the following:

The MediaNews Group, Dean Singleton's company, which already owns nearly two dozen papers in California and will almost certainly be interested in at least 3 of the 12 Knight Ridder papers: The San Jose Mercury News, The Contra Costa Times and The Herald of Monterey County.

Gannett, the nation's biggest newspaper publisher with operations in 41 states, including Indiana and Ohio, which may want The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., and The Akron Beacon Journal.

Lee Enterprises, which owns dailies in the Midwest and could be looking at The Pioneer Press in St. Paul as well as The Duluth News Tribune, The Aberdeen American News in South Dakota and The Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota.

Forum Communications of Fargo, N.D., which may also be interested in the papers in Aberdeen, Fort Wayne and Duluth.

A single company buyer is less obvious for the two Knight Ridder papers in Philadelphia, The Inquirer and The Daily News. Gannett owns The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., and The Courier-Post in nearby Cherry Hill, N.J. At the same time, Mr. Singleton has a reputation for being attracted to bigger newspapers in difficult markets.

Finally, there is The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., which has direct competition. The paper reported yesterday that Times-Shamrock, which owns The Times Leader's competitor, The Citizens' Voice, would be a logical suitor but that if Times-Shamrock did buy the paper, it would probably have to close one because of antitrust concerns.

One suitor — Yucaipa Companies, a private equity firm working with the Newspaper Guild, which represents employees at many of the 12 papers — is interested in buying all 12. Yucaipa, which says it will make a bid tomorrow, has been in a dispute with McClatchy over getting all the information that it says it needs to make an informed bid.

Yucaipa is not the only bidder lacking financial information. McClatchy issued a statement yesterday saying that it had not provided such information to any of the "dozens of parties" who have contacted McClatchy since the company won the bidding for Knight Ridder and put 12 of its papers on the market.

Local investors in several of the 12 cities have emerged as possible buyers for papers in their own markets. But McClatchy said that the only potential buyers to receive information so far were those that had signed nondisclosure forms leading up to the bidding for all of Knight Ridder, and that McClatchy had given them nothing further. This could complicate the process for some.

"It takes the market some time to get to know each paper as an individual entity," said Susan Casey, an investment banker at Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin, based in Los Angeles.

It also puts newspaper companies like MediaNews and Gannett at a distinct advantage, because they were the only ones big enough to pursue Knight Ridder when it was intact. On March 13, McClatchy agreed to buy Knight Ridder for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock.

Analysts have estimated the total value of the 12 papers at more than $1.4 billion and said the publications could probably bring a higher price individually or in small bundles than as a whole.

Gary B. Pruitt, chairman and chief executive of McClatchy, said in an interview that he remained open to all bids, whether for a single paper or all 12. He said he expected the bidding to continue beyond tomorrow and that he would announce each deal as it was completed, with the goal of selling all the papers by the time he closes on Knight Ridder sometime this summer.

"As we strike the final definitive agreements," Mr. Pruitt said, "we would prefer to announce them so that we can end the uncertainty for those employees and also let Wall Street know we're getting this done."

Mr. Pruitt himself is still selling his own deal to Wall Street. He plans to be in New York this week to talk to Standard & Poor's and Moody's, the ratings agencies, which are assessing McClatchy's creditworthiness after it took on additional debt to buy Knight Ridder, the nation's second-biggest newspaper company. Wall Street's reaction so far has been tepid, with McClatchy stock dipping nearly 10 percent since the deal was announced.

Mr. Pruitt said that McClatchy was not spending any money on a new headquarters to accommodate its larger place in the media universe. McClatchy's corporate offices occupy a small area on the second floor of the low-rise brick home of The Sacramento Bee, located in a neighborhood of houses and small businesses. It is a far cry from the gleaming office tower that Knight Ridder began leasing in San Jose, Calif., a few years ago.

"We'll add people to corporate, but tens of people, not hundreds," Mr. Pruitt said. "We don't have a big corporate staff, and we don't feel we need a big fancy building. That's not McClatchy's style."

Analysts said that newspaper companies in particular were looking at how they could add Knight Ridder papers to their clusters without violating antitrust rules.

Craig A. Dubow, president and chief executive of Gannett, told analysts at a meeting in New York last week that Gannett, which owns television stations in some markets where Knight Ridder had newspapers, had been interested in Knight Ridder but did not bid for it partly because of antitrust and cross-ownership concerns.

"We had a number of markets that were in direct conflict," he said, according to a company Webcast of the meeting.

As for the coming round, he said, Gannett was looking for "positive synergies."

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said that because of its sheer size, the acquisition of Knight Ridder by McClatchy "is something we would be interested in looking at."

But the department has not scrutinized a newspaper merger since 2000, in San Francisco. The absence of action raises questions about where clustering ends and monopolies begin.

"Since 2000, the antitrust division has taken a pass on legitimate newspaper consolidation and restructuring," said Stephen Calkins, who teaches law at Wayne State University and specializes in antitrust. "In part this reflects the absence of proposed mega-mergers. But it also reflects the division's perception of competition in the Internet age, and the division's focus on price and output without regard to editorial diversity."

The department was silent, for example, on an unusual deal last year in Detroit: Gannett sold The Detroit News to Mr. Singleton and bought the larger Detroit Free Press from Knight Ridder. The deal allowed Knight Ridder to exit the troubled Detroit market and allowed Gannett and Mr. Singleton to enter into a profit-sharing relationship, their third.

The deal gave Gannett a 95 percent controlling interest in joint operations in Detroit, and just the year before the company bought papers in the Detroit suburbs.

"Is Justice interested in watching?" asked Kurt Luedtke, the former editor of The Detroit Free Press. "If it is, why did it do nothing in Detroit? And if it isn't, do all the players know this?"

As of last year, only 45 cities in the United States had more than one daily newspaper, according to The Editor & Publisher International Yearbook. These include 12 with joint operating agreements aimed at allowing both papers to survive while avoiding antitrust challenges.

"The antitrust people never seemed to catch on that suburban monopolies act in the way that urban monopolies do," said John McManus, director of GradetheNews.org, at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University.

He said that if Mr. Singleton bought The San Jose Mercury, for example, it would be comparable to one person's owning all the grocery stores around San Francisco, "and there would be no reason for them to compete on either price or quality."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/bu...mcclatchy.html





China Firm Wants Internet Calls Blocked
Peter Svensson

A U.S. maker of network management systems said Wednesday it had received an order from Shanghai Telecom Co. for a system that can detect and block telephone calls placed over the Internet.

Shanghai Telecom, which has 6.2 million landlines, plans to use Narus Inc.'s system to improve its ability to block "unauthorized" Internet calls that connect to its phone system, bypassing its toll structure.

Use of Internet calling, also known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is growing quickly across the world, threatening the business models of some telephone companies.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission fined a small telephone company that prevented its Internet subscribers from accessing competing VoIP service, but some countries with state-owned telecommunications companies are taking a different tack.

In China, the government has sided with carriers and allowed them to block VoIP services that compete with the carrier's own products. A recent report in the Financial Times quoted an executive with a Hong Kong company as saying that the government would not issue new licenses for computer-to-phone calling services until 2008.

The Chinese government and major phone companies have refused to confirm that account.

Steve Bannerman, a spokesman for Mountain View, Calif.-based Narus, said carriers in several countries, including Egypt, are using its software to block gateways that connect VoIP calls to the phone network.

VoIP-blocking software from another U.S. company, Verso Technologies Inc., is being tried out by an unidentified Chinese carrier.

Narus' and Verso's software can be configured to block the use of Skype, eBay Inc.'s popular VoIP application. However, Shanghai Telecom has not bought the module from Narus that blocks Skype calls, Bannerman said. The Chinese version of Skype does not connect to the phone network, unlike the international version.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T





Child Sex as Internet Fare, Through Eyes of a Victim
Joshua Brockman

The sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad, overwhelming attempts by the authorities to curb its growth, witnesses said at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday.

The witnesses, who testified at a hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, part of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said that sexual predators were preying on victims as young as 18 months by using instant messaging and Web cameras to meet, lure and digitally stalk children and to share pornography.

Internet technologies have the capacity to drive a wedge between children and their families, they said.

"Online predators befriend adolescents," said Dr. Sharon Cooper, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was one of the witnesses. "They become closer to them than some family members are."

Dr. Cooper compared the new forms of online exploitation, which involve constant surveillance of subjects, to security cameras in convenience stores. "We're seeing real-time sexual exploitation of children." She cautioned that predators were using online child pornography not just for sexual gratification, but as "a plan for action."

The lead witness at the hearings was Justin Berry, who was molested as a teenager by people he had met online, and then went on to run a pornographic Web site for five years, featuring images of himself.

Mr. Berry was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times in December by an investigative reporter, Kurt Eichenwald. The article detailed Mr. Berry's experiences and his efforts to assist in the prosecution of some of the 1,500 people who had paid him to perform on camera.

Mr. Eichenwald spent six months on the investigation and was subpoenaed to testify before the committee. He sat alongside Mr. Berry, 19, who delivered his remarks in a measured tone to the committee.

"There are hundreds of kids in the United States alone who are right now wrapped up in this horror," Mr. Berry said in his testimony. "Within each of your Congressional districts, I guarantee there are children who have used their Webcams to appear naked online, and I guarantee you there are also children in your district on the Internet right now being contacted and seduced by online sexual predators."

Child exploitation investigators in the Justice Department came under fire from lawmakers at the hearings, who questioned whether officials had responded too slowly to leads provided by Mr. Berry. These included clients' names and credit card numbers, which could presumably help investigators identify children entangled in the online pornography industry. The department denied that contention.

"The Department of Justice uses every resource available to quickly protect and remove children who are being exploited from dangerous situations, and to prosecute those responsible for their abuse," a spokesman, Bryan Sierra, said.

The hearing was the first of several on this topic. On Thursday, the committee is to address law enforcement efforts. A representative from the Justice Department is expected to testify.

"Justin Berry stepped forward at a time the government did not know he existed," Mr. Eichenwald said. "He is, to experts' knowledge, the first such teenage witness to ever turn over this kind of vast evidence to the government."

Still, he added, "important data offered to the government by Justin has, even at this late date, not been collected and has only been reviewed by me."

At issue is how to handle the companies involved in these crimes, from Internet service providers to credit card companies to banks.

"At a minimum what we can do is follow the money," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "If we take away the profitability, it is going to be very difficult for these sites to maintain themselves."

U.S. Official Is Arrested

MIAMI, April 4 (AP) — The deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was arrested on Tuesday and accused of using the Internet to seduce someone he thought was a teenage girl, the authorities said.

According to the sheriff's office in Polk County, Fla., where the charges were issued, the official, Brian J. Doyle, 55, of Silver Spring, Md., had a sexually explicit conversation with a person he believed was a 14-year-old girl whose profile he had seen on the Internet. In reality, the sheriff's office said, Mr. Doyle was talking with an undercover sheriff's detective.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/wa...on/05porn.html





Testimony of Special Agent Flint Waters

Lead Agent for the Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force

WYOMING DIVISION OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION for the UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE

"Sexual Exploitation of Children Over the Internet: What Parents, Kids and Congress Need to Know About Child Predators"

Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the Committee, I welcome this opportunity to appear before you to discuss how the Internet is used to commit crimes against children. Chairman Barton, as an advocate for child protection and I commend you and your colleagues for your leadership and initiative.

The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force shares your concern for the safety of our children and we thank you for bringing attention to this issue.

Child Pornography

This isn’t about a movie or picture. This is about the ongoing sexual abuse of a child. This isn’t about pornography. These are not images of consenting adults in a private setting. These are not "baby in the bathtub" movies. These images are crime scene photos depicting the most horrifying moments in the life of a child. These are not innocent images. These are images depicting the complete destruction of innocence.

Who are these children?

Frequently, the children depicted in these pictures are sexually abused by someone they should be able to trust. Hundreds of children across the United States are attending school, participating in youth clubs and playing on sports teams. They are then sexually abused in the living rooms and bedrooms of American homes. These are the children appearing throughout the file sharing networks and on the commercial web sites.

Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force

Let me provide you with some background information about the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. ICAC includes forty-six (46) regional Task Forces working in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. These Task Forces are composed of state and local law enforcement agencies throughout the United States focused on investigation, education and prevention matters related to the exploitation of children by means of the Internet. The National Task Force has a strong relationship with our federal colleagues and we collective strive to bring to bear the strengths of each entity in our mutual goal to protect children.

The Wyoming ICAC, which I represent, has been an active participant in the national Task Force program for five years. Our Task Force consists of three state agents operating under the authority of the Attorney General. We are also fortunate to have a Department of Homeland Security Special Agent assigned and residing with our Task Force. In Wyoming, we have a close working relationship with the United States Attorney and our Federal partners.

Challenges

In the last three years we have witnessed a monumental change in the trafficking of material related to the sexual abuse of children. Five years ago, tens of thousands of people were identified using credit cards to purchase child sexual abuse images. Due to efforts in the area of eradication of commercial sales of this material we have seen considerable success in reducing this type of distribution.

While the cooperative efforts of everyone is placing increasing pressure on attempts to profit financially from the abuse of children, technology has created an entirely new "economy" in child sexual abuse images.

Advances in Peer to Peer file trading has generated a completely new barter system, rewarding people to move from using sexual abuse images to validate their own interests in harming children to spreading the material to as many other people as possible.


Three years ago national ICAC efforts identified over 2600 transactions involving the trafficking of still images of child sexual abuse. At the time this operation was one of the largest proactive Internet investigations ever. We thought we had made a significant impact in the networks used to trade this material. We were mistaken.

Working with the lessons learned the ICAC Task Force program designed a completely new methodology to investigate the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing environment.

In under 24 months, Our investigative effort in this area has identified over 4.4 million transactions involving the trafficking of movies and images depicting the sexual abuse of children.

By Country



· France 80,000
· Germany 262,000
· Canada 294,000
· United Kingdom 305,000
· United States 1,900,000



These file-sharing networks have created an efficiency level unprecedented in previous distribution technologies. Millions of computers are linked together creating a load balancing, fault tolerant system that could rival many commercial backbones. It should not be surprising to us that child predators in the United States have found a way to leverage the technology to their benefit.

In Wyoming, our small team has over 250 search warrants we could pursue if manpower were not an issue. The demand on the local resources from these investigations is overwhelming.

These investigations often lead ICAC investigators to homes where children are subject to physical and sexual abuse. These efforts allow us to disrupt the pattern of abuse at an early stage, sometimes before the child is even old enough to reach out for help.

However, this is not always the case. During undercover operations an ICAC investigator in Florida was sent a movie depicting the rape of a two-year-old child. In accordance with ICAC policy the movie was sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited children. The abuse was so horrible it even shocked the seasoned analysts at the center. The ICAC investigator received the movie in August 2005. A check of previous ICAC investigative efforts led law enforcement to a computer in Colorado where it had been made available for distribution in April 2005, several months prior to any other known location on the Internet. Just as ICAC investigators thought they were getting close to the potential origin of the movie all hope was destroyed. The Internet service provider used to trade this movie did not maintain any records related to the use of the account. Efforts to find this child fell short and there was nothing law enforcement could do about it.
I ask you to imagine the situation where a law enforcement officer can see the rape of a child taking place live on a web camera and having an Internet service provider respond that they don’t keep records to help us rescue that child.

While the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force has worked diligently to investigate, educate and prevent crimes against children we recognize that we are not going to be able to arrest our way out of this problem. We recognize the need to engage our partners to continue efforts in addressing this problem. We must continue to reach out to enhance our efforts:

How can we be more effective?

We need an honest dialogue and an understanding by the American people of the challenges that we all face. We are standing on the edge of a precipice. We can now see that technology has allowed us to lift the rock and see what was underneath. The magnitude of the trafficking of child sexual abuse images is staggering.

More effort is needed to recognize and respond to the risks facing our children.

ICAC would ask that everyone: lawmakers, law enforcement and the public make an honest assessment of the dangers threatening our children today and to help us place ourselves between the predators and our children.

We are their only hope.

Thank you.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drm...601112,00.html





Software Out There
John Markoff

THE Internet is entering its Lego era.

Indeed, blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on the Web and developers are joining them together to create a potentially infinite array of useful new programs. This new software represents a marked departure from the inflexible, at times unwieldy, programs of the past, which were designed to run on individual computers.

As a result, computer industry innovation is rapidly becoming decentralized. In the place of large, intricate and self-contained programs like Microsoft Word, written and maintained by armies of programmers, smaller companies, with just a handful of developers, are now producing pioneering software and Web-based services. These new services can be delivered directly to PC's or even to cellphones. Bigger companies are taking note.

For example, Google last month bought Writely, a Web-based word-processing program created by three Silicon Valley programmers. Eric Schmidt, the Google chief executive, said that Google did not buy the program to compete against Microsoft Word. Rather, he said, it viewed Writely as a key component in hundreds of products it is now developing.

These days, there are inexpensive or free software components speeding the process. Amazon recently introduced an online storage service called S3, which offers data storage for a monthly fee of 15 cents a gigabyte. That frees a programmer building a new application or service on the Internet from having to create a potentially costly data storage system.

Google now offers eight programmable components — elements that other programmers can turn into new Web services — including Web search, maps, chat and advertising. Yahoo offers a competing lineup of programmable services, including financial information and photo storage. Microsoft has followed quickly with its own offerings through its new Windows Live Web service.

Smaller companies are also beginning to share their technology with outside programmers to leverage their competitive positions. Salesforce.com, a fast-growing company that until recently simply offered a Web-based support application for sales personnel, published standards for interconnecting to its software not too long ago. That made it possible for developers inside and outside the company to add powerful abilities to its core products and create new ones from scratch.

One result is that sales representatives using Salesforce's customer relationship management software to organize their workday can now make telephone calls using Skype, the popular Internet service, without leaving the Salesforce software.

The idea of modular software, where standard components can be easily linked together to build more elaborate systems, first emerged in Europe during the 1960's and spread to Silicon Valley in the 70's.

Despite its promise, however, modular software has generally been limited by corporate strategies that have held customers and other programmers hostage to proprietary systems.

Those limitations have eased almost overnight, mostly because of the open-source software movement, which promotes making information available to everyone.

The shift toward sharing, which in its grandest conception has been termed Web 2.0, has touched off a frenzy of software design and start-up activity not seen since the demise of the dot-com era six years ago.

"These tools are changing the basic core economics of software development," said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems and one of the designers of a powerful set of Internet conventions known as Extensible Markup Language, or XML, which make it simple and efficient to exchange digital data over the Internet.

By lowering the cost of software development and thus the barriers to entering both existing and new markets, modular software is putting tremendous pressure on the corporations that have dominated the software industry.

It is also affecting Silicon Valley's venture capitalists. Start-ups have begun to bypass the venture capital firms, relying instead on individual investors, called "angels," or out-of-pocket financing, largely because new ventures are not as expensive.

In many cases, the start-ups do not even require the traditional Silicon Valley garage. The new companies are "virtual," and programmers work from home, relying on nothing more than a personal computer and a broadband Internet connection.

Early examples of the trend were tiny companies with significant ideas, like the consumer Internet software start-ups Flickr, a Web-based photo-sharing site, and Del .icio.us, which makes it possible for Web surfers to categorize and share things they find on the Internet. Both were acquired last year by Yahoo.

For some, the new era of lightweight, lightning-fast software design is akin to a guerrilla movement rattling the walls of stodgy corporate development organizations.

"They stole our revolution and now we're stealing it back and selling it to Yahoo," said Bruce Sterling, an author and Internet commentator.

Even more striking is the suggestion that a broad transformation of software development might reverse the trend of outsourcing to India, where highly skilled but low-paid programmers are plentiful.

"Transforming the economics of software development completely transforms the rationales for outsourcing," Michael Schrage, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, wrote in the current issue of CIO magazine.

The new economics of software development poses a fresh challenge to the dominant players in the industry. In 1995, when Microsoft realized that the Netscape Internet browser created a threat to its Windows operating system business, it responded by introducing its own free browser, Internet Explorer. By doing so, Microsoft, which already held a monopoly on desktop software, blunted Netscape's momentum.

Last November, Microsoft introduced a Web services portal called Windows Live and Office Live.

But as the world's largest software publisher, it still faces the delicate challenge of creating free Web services. Many of Microsoft's standard PC applications, in the new world of on-demand software, are migrating to the Internet.

At the Emerging Technologies Conference, held in San Diego last month, Ray Ozzie, one of Microsoft's three chief technical officers, showed a prototype effort that uses the Windows clipboard, which moves data among different desktop PC programs, to perform the same function for copying and transferring Web information.

Mr. Ozzie, who used the Firefox browser (an open-source rival to Internet Explorer) during his demonstration, said, "I'm pretty pumped up with the potential for R.S.S. to be the DNA for wiring the Web."

He was referring to Really Simple Syndication, an increasingly popular, free standard used for Internet publishing. Mr. Ozzie's statement was remarkable for a chief technical officer whose company has just spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars investing in a proprietary alternative referred to as .Net.

Moreover, the balance of power is shifting, Mr. Ozzie said. "For years, vendors like Microsoft have put huge resources into tools to build composite applications," he said. "With mash-ups, the real power becomes the people who can weave the applications together."

Microsoft is not the only company threatened by the simple tools of the Web 2.0 movement. Adobe Systems, which recently acquired Macromedia, publisher of the widely used Flash graphics standard, is under pressure from Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a new development technique for creating interactive Web applications that look and function like desktop programs.

At the technology conference, Adobe showed a bridge between Ajax and Flash, making it possible for Ajax programmers to easily add Flash graphical abilities.

America Online has made a similar strategic shift by adding a set of "programmers' hooks" to its AOL Instant Messaging service to attract independent software developers to connect to its previously proprietary messaging platform.

Many technologists agree that as software development moves online, the risk will be particularly intense for large software development organizations like I.B.M.'s Global Services, the consulting arm to the company, according to Mr. Bray of Sun.

I.B.M. is testing a faster development system based on Ajax, Web services and XML, said Rod Smith, the company's vice president for emerging technologies.

"We're testing it with customers now to see how disruptive it is," he said.

Mr. Smith acknowledged that the new software development trends present challenges. "Inside I.B.M., do-it-yourself software is an oxymoron," he said.

Another new idea comes from Amazon, whose Web Services group recently introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk, an homage to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that was actually governed by a hidden human chess player.

The idea behind the service is to find a simple way to organize and commercialize human brain power.

"You can see how this enables massively parallel human computing," said Felipe Cabrera, vice president for software development at Amazon Web Services.

One new start-up, Casting Words, is taking advantage of the Amazon service, known as Mturk, to offer automated transcription using human transcribers for less than half the cost of typical commercial online services.

Mturk allows vendors to post what it calls "human intelligence tasks," which may vary from simple transcription to identifying objects in photos.

Amazon takes a 10 percent commission above what a service like Casting Words pays a human transcriber. People who are willing to work as transcribers simply download audio files and then post text files when they have completed the transcription. Casting Words is currently charging 42 cents a minute for the service.

Other examples are also intriguing. A9, Amazon's search engine, is using Mturk to automate a system for determining the quality of photos, using human checkers. Other companies are using the Web service as a simple mechanism to build polling systems for market research.

The impact of modular software will certainly accelerate as the Internet becomes more accessible from wireless handsets.

Scott Rafer, who was formerly the chief executive of Feedster, a Weblog search engine, has recently become chairman of Wireless Ink, a Web-based service that allows wireless users to quickly establish mobile Web sites from anywhere via Web-enabled cellphones.

Using modular software technologies, they have created a service called WINKsite, which makes it possible to use cellphones to chat, blog, read news and keep a personal calendar. These systems are typically used by young urban professionals who are tied together in loosely affiliated social networks. In London, where cellphone text messaging is nearly ubiquitous, they are used to organize impromptu gatherings at nightclubs.

Recently, Wireless Ink struck a deal with Metroblogging, a wireless blogging service, to use its technology. Metroblogging, which already has blogs in 43 cities around the world, lets bloggers quickly post first-person accounts of news events like the July 2005 London bombings.

"Here are two tiny start-ups in California that care about Karachi and Islamabad," Mr. Rafer said. "It's weird, I'll grant you, but it is becoming increasingly common."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/te...l4/05lego.html





Out of Consumers' Sight, Radio Tags Gain Ground
Barnaby J. Feder

The television advertisement from I.B.M.'s "Help Desk" campaign that began running this winter shows a big rig skidding to a halt in front of a desk, blocking the road in a desolate landscape. There, a young woman at the desk calmly informs the astonished truck driver headed for Fresno, Calif., that he is lost.

"This is the road to Albuquerque," she says. How does she know he is off course? "RFID radio tags on the cargo. Helps track shipments."

Experts in RFID (radio frequency identification) wince at I.B.M.'s plug for its inventory-tracking abilities. It appears to confuse RFID with different radio-based technology, which can track the location of a truck (but not its contents) via satellite.

In reality, the RFID tags on boxes and shipping pallets cannot convey information reliably for more than a few feet. And grabbing that information requires special scanning devices far more likely to be found at loading docks than inside a truck. The big advantage of the tags, however, is that they can contain more information than standard bar codes and several hundred can be scanned at once.

Still, misleading as the ad was technically, it told a larger truth: RFID is still obscure to most consumers, but it is approaching commercial viability fast enough that I.B.M. wants the world to know it is a player. So do software giants like SAP, Microsoft and Oracle, and hardware heavyweights like Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems, which recently bought a minority stake in ThingMagic, a start-up manufacturer of RFID readers.

Perhaps more tellingly, Texas Instruments, a leading vendor of radio tags, hung on to that fast-growing $120 million-a-year segment of its business when it sold the rest of its sensors and controls operation in January for $3 billion.

"Vendors are starting to see how they can make this into a real business," said Reik Read, an analyst who follows RFID for Robert W. Baird & Company in Milwaukee. For now, Mr. Read said, the field is still too new to be a major factor in the valuation of any of the publicly traded companies he follows other than Intermec of Everett, Wash., which owns important RFID patents. That will change by 2008, he added.

The RFID world is still dominated by pilot projects, but the line between research and standard practice is getting hazier. Wal-Mart used such tags to track more than 10 million cases of goods through distribution centers in Texas by the end of last year, to make its vast supply network more reliable and efficient. Tesco, the British retailer, has said investments in the technology to prevent theft of CD's and DVD's are paying off. And Pfizer has begun putting tags on every package of Viagra it sells in the United States to combat counterfeiting and in anticipation of growing pressure from regulators to use the technology in the prescription drug industry.

Manufacturers like Gillette and its new parent, Procter & Gamble, are using RFID data captured by retailers like Walgreen to study the effectiveness of promotions. Among other things, the data highlights how much profit is lost when items scheduled for a promotion are sitting in warehouses when they should be on shelves. This month, the shipping company DHL will begin a program for an Asian electronics manufacturer to ship RFID-tagged boxes to customers returning goods for repair, pick up the products and track the items through the repair process.

"We are now seeing a lot of business applications being developed to use the data," said Erik Michielsen, an RFID specialist at ABI Research, a market research firm in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

RFID technology comes in two forms. Passive tags consist of paper-thin microchips that are attached to equally thin antennae; they use power captured from signals broadcast by scanning devices to respond with the chips' encoded data. Active tags, which are larger, have a longer range and are more expensive, come with a small battery or other power source. They are widely used in toll collection systems like EZ Pass and for tracking valuable goods or animals.

While the roots of the technology are decades old, interest mushroomed when leading retailers and manufacturers came together in 1999 to begin working toward open standards that, like bar codes, could be used throughout the economy. The pace accelerated in 2004 when Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense announced they would require suppliers to begin using passive RFID tags on cartons and pallets of goods.

Those mandates generated unrealistic expectations in some quarters about the technology's ability and how rapidly it could expand. Many suppliers delayed investing and numerous obstacles emerged, including intellectual property battles, confrontations with privacy advocates and vendors failing to figure out ways to cut tag and reader costs as quickly as expected. There have also been delays in agreeing on standards, and many systems have not worked reliably.

Hurdles continue to come up. In mid-March, researchers disclosed that RFID tags could be tampered with to spread viruses through distribution networks.

There is also the sobering reality that nearly all the most promising results so far could have been achieved at similar cost - or more cheaply - with older technology or better management.

But a growing number of businesses say they can now see how RFID could become more economical and powerful over time. "RFID is entering its adolescence," said Christine Overby, an RFID expert at Forrester Research, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/te...4/05radio.html





Overheard

<@Wally> stupid muslims promise virgins
<@Wally> if they promised lightsabers i’d be on my way to mecca
<@Wally> i can hang out with virgins on IRC

via bash http://elitrix.net/fear/portal.php





Apple Allows Windows on Its Machines
Vikas Bajaj

Turning a decades-long rivalry on its head, Apple Computer introduced software today that it says will easily allow users to install Microsoft's Windows XP operating system on Apple's newest computers.

The software, Boot Camp, is available as a free download on Apple's Web site and will be part of the next version of Apple's operating system, Leopard. It works on Apple's three lines of computer that run on Intel chips — the Mac mini, the iMac and the MacBook Pro.

Apple's move is a recognition of the growing interest among some users in running Windows on Macintosh computers now that they are using Intel processors, which power the majority of Windows-based personal computers. Many technology enthusiasts have already been sharing software and tricks on the Internet to allow Mac users to add Windows to their new machines, although those approaches involve a far more complicated installation than Apple's new software does.

Apple said it did not intend to support Windows for customers who install Boot Camp and run Windows XP on their machines. Still, the company said it was providing the software because it recognized a sizeable demand — and opportunity.

"We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement.

Investors seemed to think the strategy would help Apple expand its share of the personal computer market beyond the 3 percent to 5 percent level where it has stood at for many years.

Wall Street was enthusiastic about Apple's move. Shares of Apple jumped $5.12, or 8.4 percent, to $66.29 this afternoon in Nasdaq trading. Shares of Microsoft were trading up 16 cents, to $27.80.

After years of stagnant or declining computer sales, Apple has seen a steady and significant rise in its desktops and laptops in recent years as more consumers have purchased its iPod music player and bought songs through its online iTunes music store.

Though Apple's shift to Intel's chips from those made by I.B.M. and a former division of Motorola has been considered risky from a technical and business standpoint, the move could help the company capitalize further on the so-far modest gains it has made in the computer business.

Many personal computer users have been reluctant to switch to Apple, because they cannot use software that is written to run exclusively on the Windows operating system, said Charles Wolf, a longtime technology industry analyst at Needham & Company. By making it easy for users to run Windows software on its machine, Apple has taken away "one of the most significant barriers to switching," he said.

(Until now, users who wanted to run Windows applications on a Macintosh have had to run emulation software that tend to slow down computers and have other glitches.)

The key test will be whether computer buyers will be willing to spend more money to buy an Apple computer to run the same software they can run on a far cheaper Windows-based machine from manufacturers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard. While prices for Apple computers have become more competitive in recent years, they remain more expensive than the cheapest Windows machines, which are often less powerful than Apple's basic models.

Mr. Wolf calculates that Apple's biggest market share gains will be among users at home, who are more likely to be swayed by Apple's design and media savvy, than among corporate and government customers, who will likely to stick with cheaper hardware and software configurations.

The shift could mean an increase in sales for Apple over time, especially after Leopard becomes the standard Mac operating system late this year or early in 2007. But the company's gains do not have to mean big losses for other hardware makers, Mr. Wolf said, because they will only lose a small fraction of their market share.

"You are starting out with a market share of 2 or 3 percent and maybe going to a market share of 6 or 7," he said. "Apple is not going to take over the world."

Still the announcement was not universally cheered by Apple users. Some loyal Macintosh users are worried that software developers like Adobe, which makes the popular Photoshop software, will have less incentive to develop versions of their applications for Apple's operating system if Macintosh computers can run Windows operating system.

"I think it's good to have choice, it's better for the consumer," said Alexandros Roussos, a student at University of Paris and a founder and editor of the MacCulture.com network, a Macintosh enthusiast and rumor Web site. "But I'll feel sad if developers go away from the platform."

"I love the Mac platform, I just hope I won't have to boot Windows even for Photoshop in a few years," he added.

Users who download and install Boot Camp must buy a copy of Windows XP software, which starts at $141.98 for the home edition. The Boot Camp software serves as an intermediary that creates an installation disk (users will need to provide a blank compact disk for this step) that lets the Windows software operate the Apple hardware, including its networking, audio and graphics devices and controls. Certain other features like a remote control for Apple's media software will not work with Windows software.

Once the installation is complete, users can select which operating system, Apple or Windows, they want to use each time they start the computer.

John Markoff contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/te... ner=homepage





Microsoft: Don't sell PCs Without Operating Systems
Graeme Wearden

Microsoft has urged UK PC vendors not to give customers the opportunity to buy a PC without a pre-installed operating system.

Supplying base systems, or 'naked PCs', is a missed opportunity, according to Michala Alexander, Microsoft's head of anti-piracy.

Writing in Microsoft's Partner Update magazine, which is distributed to computer dealers, Alexander estimated that 5 percent of computers sold in the UK in 2006 would not include an operating system.

Alexander is keen to bring that number down, even though customers could want a base system because they want to install Linux, or because their firm already has a licensing agreement for an operating system such as Windows.

"We want to urge all system builders — indeed, all Partners — not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business — with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services," wrote Alexander.

Linux vendors and free software supporters, though, believe these base systems can play an important role in supporting the open source market. Some are concerned that Microsoft may be attempting to use its powerful position in the market to hamper competition.

The European branch of the Free Software Foundation hopes that PC vendors will not be swayed by Microsoft.

"We would be happy to see any kind of hardware being shipped without an operating system, or pre-installed with free software. Furthermore, we would be happy to get in contact with any hardware vendor who wants to free his customers this way," said Joachim Jakobs, of the FSF Europe.

Alexander's role is to combat the use of counterfeit and unlicensed versions of Microsoft's software. In February, Microsoft launched an initiative called Keep IT Real, in which "feet on the street" investigators would visit technology vendors suspected of installing counterfeit software on PCs before selling them.

In the article, Alexander appeared to reveal that these investigators will also have a role in clamping down on the sale of base systems.

"Microsoft is recruiting two 'feet on the street' personnel whose role will be to provide proactive assistance during customer visits, and help you get the value proposition for pre-installed software and related services. Give us a call and let's get those feet walking," Alexander wrote.

The FSF Europe is alarmed by the prospect that customers who request a base systems would risk a visit from Microsoft's investigators.

"It looks like a private sniffing service which is supposed to spy on these who do not want to pay the Microsoft tax anymore. It is an incredible piece of impudence which any politician, customer and journalist should recognise carefully," said Jakobs.

When contacted by ZDNet UK, Alexander denied that operatives would be dispatched into the premises of customers who attempted to buy a PC without Windows.

"I can confirm that the... personnel are not participating in customer visits. This is an error in the copy and will be amended in future material on the subject," Alexander claimed.

Alexander also insisted that Microsoft was simply trying to help its reseller partners by explaining how they could grow their businesses by selling its software and services. But she did reiterate that the software giant is concerned that the sale of base systems may be linked to the use of counterfeit software.

"There will be a concern if we see an increase in businesses selling PCs without Windows and piracy goes into the sky," said Alexander, who also rejected the suggestion that Microsoft was attempting to use its powerful position in the market to hamper rival operating systems.

Both Red Hat and Novell argue that naked PCs can be an important part of the overall market.

"Microsoft is clearly concerned about the threat of Linux on the desktop and is trying to protect its base. Naked PCs provide customers with choice and lower the price of commodity PCs," said a Novell spokesman.

"Customers want to have choice and they don't want to be locked in by one vendor, such as Microsoft," said Red Hat's Dirk Kissinger. "We would like to see more hardware vendors give their customers the choice of pre-installed operation systems, be it Microsoft or Red Hat or other options, or raw hardware without an operating system."

Several PC vendors contacted by ZDNet UK were reluctant to comment on the issues surrounding base systems. One, though, did say that they hadn't encountered any difficulties.

"We've had no pressure from Microsoft, yet," said a representative from Chillblast, a UK PC vendor that sells some computers without operating systems.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/win...9261437,00.htm





RIAA to Uni student: Drop out

Run Over by the RIAA Don...t Tap the Glass
Cassi Hunt

Either since the day I visited my first aquarium or the day Goldie came into my family’s life, our parents have told us not to tap the glass of the fish tank. It’s cruel to Goldie — I understand and respect that. I mean, heck, I am a vegetarian. But would we have many qualms over a little water perturbation if Goldie were, say, a bloodthirsty shark? I’d knock on that glass to the near-cracking point. And in that spirit, I decided to call up my new friend at the RIAA negotiation hotline again. (Hereafter I’ll refer to her as Bowie, which means “yellow haired,” as I’m pretty sure that’s the case.)

Last time I spoke with Bowie, the conversation was pretty much over after she named $3750 as the settlement amount. (I haven’t actually agreed to settle yet.) So when I called her again, I asked — again — about how to negotiate that amount. I counted on the fact that self-important types wouldn’t be inclined to remember a lowly pirate like me. Bowie didn’t disappoint. She launched into her spiel about how the RIAA doesn’t negotiate settlements. I told her that it was too much to ask for thousands of dollars from a college student who only makes just enough from term and summer employment to still come out a couple thousand in debt.

Bowie replied that the RIAA was oh-so-kind enough to offer a six month repayment plan. At this point, I was beginning to speculate on Bowie’s hair color, and decided to switch tactics. I concisely and calmly explained how the situation was ridiculous: they weren’t offering a settlement, they were issuing an ultimatum! Let us screw you over gently now, or with chains and whips in court. Surely there must be some flexibility for individual cases.

Well, she replied, they do make allowances if something like a medical emergency comes up. Now we’re getting somewhere. “And who would I talk to about a situation like that, because I’d like to talk to them now.”

“Me,” she replied. Ever feel like your nose has just been flattened by something large and solid? I mean, besides the doors at 77 Mass. Ave. “But you’re not in a situation like that.”

Oh, but I am. The Institvte has left me with severe bouts of p-set-induced insomnia and a case of stuck-to-desk-itis that recurs two to three times in a semester, then again just before break. And my wallet certainly takes a hit for it.

But as much as I tried to argue that I was in as unique a situation as someone with medical expenses, there was no getting through. Bowie even had the audacity to say, “In fact, the RIAA has been known to suggest that students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford settlements.”

Are. You. Shitting. Me.

There you have it, fellow Techsters: proof of the fantastic levels of absurdity to which the RIAA attack has sunk. The Recording Industry of America would rather see America’s youth deprived of higher education, forever marring their ability to contribute personally and financially to society — including the arts — so that they may crucify us as examples to our peers. To say nothing of wrecking our lives in the process. I finally understand what the RIAA meant when they told me “stealing music is not a victimless crime” — the victims hang for all to see.

Please, RIAA — if any competent representative happens to enjoy flipping through The Tech — please tell me Bowie is a moronic tool who can’t help what the Superior Gray Coverage Golden Blonde hair dye does to her mental facilities. Please tell me you actually care about the futures of the age demographic that buys most of your music (http://www.riaa.com/news/marketingda...merprofile.pdf). Your evil pirates are people too, people who enjoy music and almost always still purchase it legitimately. Each has an individual life and circumstances that deserve consideration, if not for the sake of empathy for your fellow man, then for the sake of business sense.

Sure, if you commit a crime against someone, you should be held accountable. But I find it horrifying that anyone would single-mindedly and without compassion process people like a meat grinder set to purée. So while the RIAA continues to play the part of shark, I’ll continue to stand behind the glass, tapping away, wondering which of us is on display.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N15/RIAA1506.html





Bye, bye, Miss American Pie (chart)
Trajce Cvetkovski

New release CD singles are all but dead, and CD albums are dying. Yet the sale of chartable albums (the "Top 40" especially) forms the bulk of revenue in the pop music industry. The exclusive club of a few multinational major recording companies (majors) are very worried. They control most (80 per cent) of the revenue in this highly concentrated, well-organised mode of pop cultural production. But since 1998, the majors have posted unprecedented losses in profits from chart sales generally.

Why the sudden disruption to a well-established and extremely advanced form of commercial exploitation? And what does this great rock 'n' roll fire sale mean for the heavy weights of the music industry?

Eight years ago, albums retailed for up to $30.95. The small club of audience- targeting majors (Sony-BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner) were laughing all the way to the bank because, on average, CDs cost as little as one dollar to manufacture. The industry was valued at nearly $100 billion internationally.

The music business has a number of advantages in comparison to other modes of capitalist production. Generally speaking, there are such small interaction costs attached to producing pop music products and yet they have so much surplus value as they are capable of perpetual exploitation (via the copyrights attached to them). Rummage through your record collection and you will probably discover you have the same song recorded on more than one format. For all its sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the music business is really quite clever.

In this well-established environment, sycophantic, music-obsessed, "pocket money" punks (teenagers) used to rock up to HMV, Sanity and other major stores to buy up big on the latest, over-priced CDs. This passion for music consumption has meant, historically, that music is the most popular form of en masse, "first- line" culture consumption for young people (products purchased primarily before another competing product, for example video or magazines). The pop music circus has been omnipotent in the minds of young ones. And the majors have masterfully maintained such consistent and spectacular returns throughout the 20th century.

But currently, chart CDs retail for as little as $20.95. On average, the price of Top 40 albums appears to be dropping at a rate of more than one dollar a year. (Who knows, in the year 2018, albums may have a zero sale sum dollar value.) Yet, paradoxically, there is a direct correlation between the downward spiral of prices and a downturn in traditional music consumption. This truly is a peculiar trend because, if anything, album sales should be increasing.

So why is the music industry in Australia, or in the rest of the Western world for that matter, in a "spin"? The majors' representatives would have us believe the answer to that question is based on a combination of unfavourable legislative change and emerging technologies which have caused a diminution in the value of music products.

They are partly right in identifying the obvious challenges; but they appear to have failed to recognise that the significance of other important pop cultural developments, such as a genuine lack of consumer interest (or perhaps boredom) in CDs as primary cultural products. This has largely stemmed from emerging but competing pop products (DVDs, music DVDs, ringtones, computer games, SMS services, and this list of cultural pleasures goes on).

Through an intriguing mix of illegitimate and legitimate technological challenges, and in conjunction with legislative reform and pop cultural developments, the Australian music scene has demonstrated how, internationally, a fistful of industry media moguls has had its closed-shop cage rattled.

So what happened eight years ago, when the current trends became apparent? First, in Australia, there were significant amendments to the Copyright Act 1968 that allowed for the parallel importation of locally licenced products. For example, a retailer was now free to purchase from Sony Indonesia rather than Sony Australia. Due to the significantly different economies of scale between the two regions, the price differences at the wholesale dealer price were stark.

Not surprisingly, strenuous lobbying by the majors' "keepers" followed, alleging the death of the industry due to a flood of inferior and possibly pirated copies. Resistance to change and acrimonious litigation appear to be fundamental tenets espoused by the majors.

Nevertheless, these legislative measures have been instrumental in setting new pricing standards. It might be fair to conclude, therefore, that imported CDs are capable of driving prices down, but ironically, cheap imports are seldom sourced by major retailers. That is, stores continue to order domestically manufactured albums from the majors. Legislative reform in Australia assisted in this process but the majors cannot blame parallel importation per se. Similarly, the legislature should not take the credit for the price drop. So what else happened some eight years ago?

Computer and Internet technologies have also been blamed for the drop in revenue, and the majors insist music piracy ("burning") is the core problem. Combined with Internet downloads, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing ("ripping"), the industry's politico-legal representatives estimate music piracy now costs the industry in excess of $US5 billion. To some extent the representatives are correct (I do not know of too many people who have not dabbled in illegal music consumption).

To add final insult to injury, MP3s and related P2P technologies were not devised by the majors and neither were MP3 players. In the world of music evolution this break in the chain is very significant. The majors have always dictated the terms in which records are delivered. They invented vinyls, cassettes and CDs. The devices for these formats have also either been invented or produced en masse by the majors' sister manufacturing subsidiaries. The cause for concern is obvious.

To combat the issue of a slump in music consumption, the majors have implemented four main strategies:

· drop in price of CDs to make them more attractive;
· educate the public that it is wrong to "steal" (intellectual) property;
· anti-piracy protection measures; and
· police and prosecute copyright infringers (minors included).

The merits of these campaigns have been viewed with mixed results, and in any event, CD prices continue to drop. People continue to consume music at a significantly discounted or illegal rate.

So why is this "music for free" or "small fee" attitude so unprecedented and now so ingrained in modern popular culture and everyday life? I found some clues to the answer while representing an applicant spouse on a de facto property settlement. The respondent was a 72-year-old man who purported to itemise his MP3 music collection (which he had also backed up onto CDs) as part of the couple's joint assets pool. He had valued these downloads at $8,000 (which apparently was at a significantly reduced rate to what they would ordinarily retail, he opined.).

However, all the songs had been illegally downloaded from the original Napster website over several months. The absurdity of his proposition to value his illegal "record collection" highlighted three important issues to me. First, accessing music illegally is a relatively simple task open to all ages. Second, ignorance or flagrant disregard of copyright generally is probably quite prominent. Third, however, and equally significant, is that this person placed a quantifiable value on what these products ought to cost.

That is, had this man in fact purchased these products from a retailer, he would only have been prepared to pay a fraction of their retail price. There appears to be a widespread feeling that the majors have been exploiting consumers for too long. There is strong consensus between the "young" and "old" on this point (especially since, in the case of the former, most parents finance pop culture consumption).

It is this third consideration that, by and large, has been ignored by the majors. On this point, perhaps parents feel so exploited that they turn a blind eye to ripping and burning. And it is not as if illegal copying is a new phenomenon. I do not know of too many people who have not dabbled in illegal music consumption. The parents of teenagers copied cassettes, their older siblings copied CDs and now they compare the size of their iPods.

Technically it is illegal in Australia and the UK to make even back-up copies yet it was more or less tolerated by the majors during the reign of the cassette and to some extent the CD. But when Napster arrived and the first wave of decent Rio MP3 players hit the high streets in 1998, the issue became about control because these were external challenges to the status quo.

I believe the spending downturn in CDs will continue not necessarily because of legislative reform and or the proliferation of burning and ripping per se but because there is a genuine lack of interest in purchasing CDs as consumers spend money on these other more "exciting" goods. Consumer lack of interest (and or distraction) in the delivery of current music products as promoted by the majors is something which has been continually ignored.

What the majors are not prepared to concede is that CDs have simply become second-line cultural products. The ritual of rocking up to HMV and obsessively trawling through stacks of CDs has been substituted for MP3 downloading (ripping) and CD burning. Music consumption has become just another thing to do and the art of prioritising for the purchase of the latest chart music is dead. Consequently, if money can be spent elsewhere on other pleasures, then it will be.

Interestingly after several years of literally doing nothing, the majors have adopted the Internet in their business model in order to address the issues. It is now quite common to purchase music files from hundreds of legal websites. However two significant developments have occurred. First, albums are not necessarily being downloaded, but rather single songs - and some for as low as 10 cents (a far cry from the current $5 CD single price tag). Second, despite the proliferation of legal websites, P2P platforms such as Azereus which use "bit torrent" software make it all too tempting for young and old alike to download whole albums illegally.

Illegal and legal technological challenges, combined, have caused traditional music products to become so diminished in value that it is doubtful whether commodified pop music as peddled by the majors will ever again become the leading mode of cultural consumption. More problematic for the majors is that the Internet has permitted new musical discoveries - truly independent music completely unfettered by the majors' control and the need for chart music.

If these trends continue, then it would be safe to assume that music products will become third-line cultural products or probably entirely "de-commodified" (that is, the consumption of music in any recorded form would always have intrinsic worth, but its ability to be sold as "units" may not have any commercial potential).

I do not suggest music will ever die. For example, concert attendance could not be better, and the proliferation of truly independently released music in recent years has had an almost emancipatory effect on the industry. Rather, the commodification of chartable pop music will be a thing of the past. Even if the sale of Top 40 chart music survives, its life will be meaningless in real commercial terms.


Dr Trajce Cvetkovski has recently completed a doctoral thesis that examined the impact of technological change in the music industry. He is a practising barrister and was the first in-house Counsel for Tiny Computers in England and Wales. He also composes electronic music and has released for Sony, Sirius Music and Marski Music.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4331





New Trends In Online Traffic

Visits to Sites for Blogging, Local Information and Social Networks Drive Web Growth
Leslie Walker

While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information.

The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year.

Top-ranked sites growing the most, ComScore's data showed, were Blogger.com, a personal publishing site; MySpace.com, where young people do virtual preening and share musical tastes; Wikipedia, an open reference site jointly edited by millions of people; and Citysearch, a network of local guides focused on cities.

The number of monthly visitors to each site rose at rates ranging from 185 percent (Citysearch) to 528 percent (Blogger.com) between February 2005 and February 2006. Their growth far exceeded the 4 percent increase in overall Internet visitors in the United States during that period.

The traffic analysis shows the Internet is still a space where new brands such as MySpace can suddenly break into the upper ranks, where older brands such as Citysearch can revive themselves after languishing for years, and where established outfits such as Google often wind up as beneficiaries because they buy or copy services pioneered by upstarts.

Google Inc., for instance, bought Blogger.com in 2003; the number of people posting or reading material at that site jumped to 15.6 million last month from 2.5 million a year ago.

"The growth in blogging reminds us the Internet is fulfilling its original promise about participation," said Gary Arlen, a research analyst and president of Arlen Communications Inc. "This medium empowers users in such a way that they can do what they want and be heard."

Peter Daboll, president and chief executive of ComScore Media Metrix, said one notable recent traffic trend is increased popularity of sites helping people find local information: "Things having to do with local search are really gaining momentum."

In addition to Citysearch, a network devoted to local entertainment and commerce, Daboll said, two local directories made the Web's top 50 last month, WhitePages.com and Verizon's Superpages.com.

Citysearch, which is owned by IAC/InterActive Corp., recently announced its first full year of profitability, thanks to its increase in ad sales. And the Kelsey Group, a Princeton, N.J., consulting firm specializing in local advertising, projects that ads relating to locally focused Internet searches will become a $6.1 billion market within five years.

Greg Sterling, an independent analyst, said local Internet services lagged behind their national counterparts for years but are finally coming on strong because they are much better today and people are more aware of their utility. "This is stuff people need and want in their everyday lives," Sterling said, "and to the extent they can find it online, they are starting to use these tools."

ComScore usually lumps together sites owned by the same firm in its Internet traffic reports, so AOL's visitors, for example, would be merged with those of other sites owned by Time Warner Inc. But The Washington Post asked ComScore to break out traffic for the Web's top 50 individual sites to get an idea of which were gaining and losing momentum.

The analysis showed that the Internet's biggest brands have plenty of staying power or at least are keeping pace with growth in the overall online population. Yahoo retains the largest audience in the United States, though its visitor growth slowed to about 5 percent last year.

Google was the only mega-site bucking the trend, with its users shooting up 21 percent in the past year. Not only has Google steadily expanded its share of the market for Web search, ComScore found, but it also has been attracting new users by expanding into other services offered by rivals, such as e-mail, mapping and personal publishing. If you combine traffic to all the properties it owns, including Blogger.com, Google's total audience jumped 27 percent last year, ComScore found.

The total audience for all of Time Warner's Internet properties, including AOL's various online services, showed little or no growth. Neither did the total audience for Microsoft Corp.'s collective Internet services, though some discrete services did well.

AOL's Mapquest.com, for example, pulled 7 percent more visitors in February this year compared with last.

One of the more dramatic growth stories was MySpace, which pulled 37 million visitors last month, 28 million more than a year ago. That gave it a ranking of No. 10 among all sites in the United States, according to ComScore.

Usage data for MySpace suggests an even higher popularity ranking: Based on total pages viewed and the time spent by each visitor, MySpace ranked No. 2 on the entire Internet, right behind Yahoo.

After Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million last summer, the site made headlines when some men were arrested and charged with assaulting girls they had identified on the site. Since then, News Corp. has been working feverishly to improve safety on MySpace by screening photos for pornography and removing profiles of underage users.

Joining MySpace on the fast track was Wikipedia, the open encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Its traffic soared 275 percent last year following widespread media play over the posting of fake biographical material and similar controversies regarding the site's accuracy.

For a chart showing all top 50 Web sites and their number of visitors last month, go online to http://washingtonpost.com/technology.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040301692.html





Editor’s note: For the last three months I’ve been listening to the NPR headline news feed several times a day with Media Player Classic and this link - rtsp://real.npr.na-central.speedera.net:80/real.npr.na-central/news.db.rm. Where I used to have wait until the top of the hour to get the news from WCBS in New York, the local network affiliate, I no longer do so. The reasons are twofold and instant availability is the big one: NPR Internet news is "click on demand" and I don’t need to fit myself to the media distributor’s schedule, which is very liberating. I’ll have it on whenever I eat breakfast, or when I’m on hold or even in the yard. I can catch up to the world anytime. The absence of irritating announcements is the second big bonus. I hope the trend continues – Jack.


Podcasting Roils NPR Fund Raising
Steve Friess

JoAnna Michaels is an inveterate listener of National Public Radio, but she won't be tuning in as much this month.

Her local Las Vegas affiliate, KNPR, kicked off its spring membership drive last week with program interruptions pleading for donations, so Michaels is bypassing that semiannual annoyance by loading up her MP3 player with various National Public Radio programs available in whole or in part for free as podcasts.

"Why would I sit through all of that if I can get what I like for free online, listen to it on my own time and not be guilted for weeks into giving money?" says Michaels, a real estate agent who says her husband donates to the station on behalf of her family. "I've even found a whole bunch of NPR shows online that aren't on NPR here, which is so great."

That kind of thinking reflects both the blessing and curse presented by podcasting. On the upside, the medium is expanding NPR's overall audience and boosting some shows previously unavailable in many markets. While most NPR programming has been streamed online for several years, the portable, time-shifted, on-demand nature of podcasting affords a new level of convenience and access.

Yet, at the same time, it can turn ears away from local stations -- possibly for good -- which could be a problem for affiliates that rely heavily upon member donations to pay the dues to air some of the same programming listeners can now get free as MP3s.

"Unfortunately, in a typical market only 8 percent of the audience become members of their station, so if you erode that even to 7 percent or 6 percent because they're not getting the shows through the terrestrial station, that's not a good business model," says Paul Marszalek, a radio industry expert who consults with dozens of public and private radio stations. "There is not a single person on the local affiliate level who has not expressed some level of trepidation."

Indeed, KNPR program director Flo Rogers says the impact of podcasting was a major topic at a January retreat for local NPR station executives.

"There is a sense that this is a fabulous opportunity but that the threat of bypass is real," says Rogers, who is on the board of the Public Radio Program Directors Association. "How do we gain ownership of this? If the affiliates start to fade, then the network itself starts to fade."

Last summer, NPR started offering podcasts of some of its most beloved programs, including selected stories from Morning Edition and All Things Considered as well as entire episodes of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me and On the Media. In addition, several programs distributed by American Public Media and Public Radio International that air on NPR affiliates are now available as podcasts.

NPR Vice President Maria Thomas says the organization has logged more than 18 million downloads of NPR programs since the podcasts began in August, although some of those are internet-only offerings not played on any terrestrial NPR stations, like music show All Songs Considered. Eight NPR-related titles are presently in iTunes' Top 100 rankings.

Aside from the fear that listeners won't bear with the fund drives at local stations, podcasting also presents the prospect that fans of certain shows will give to stations in other markets instead of their own. When folks download On the Media, for instance, they hear a plea for donations from the show's originating station, WNYC, which has garnered the New York City station more than 200 new, mostly out-of-market, members, says Mikel Ellcessor, WNYC's senior director for programming operations and distribution.

That's not a huge number and it's unclear whether those folks have changed their giving levels at local stations, but Marszalek says this could be the start of a trend in which "the rich stations get richer and the poor stations get poorer. That gap is going to widen."

Thomas agrees that the potential for harm to local stations is real, but she says NPR is working on meeting the new challenges of the podcast era. She's invited any stations creating new content to list the podcasts they're offering in a centralized directory NPR has created, an offer that 35 stations are taking advantage of to list a total of 292 podcasts. NPR sells underwriting sponsorships to all its podcasts en masse -- currently, the sponsor is Acura -- and slips the sponsor's message into the files automatically. Local stations receive some revenue from that, although Thomas did not disclose the precise sharing arrangement.

The result, she says, is that NPR fans like Michaels are discovering shows from other markets produced by stations whose websites they were unlikely to ever browse.

"The question we're asking ourselves is, 'Is the business model of public radio prepared for a future where geographic boundaries don't exist?'" Thomas says. "That's where our podcasting project comes into the picture. I don't have a silver-bullet magic answer. What we're trying to do is work with the stations to invent new business models.

"Our aim is not to get stuck in a place where we're saying, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.'"

Marszalek believes more steps need to be taken, including agreements that shows won't be available as podcasts until they've aired on terrestrial stations. NPR also should charge a small fee for podcasts to create a new, potentially huge revenue stream that could help show producers lower the fees they charge to stations for airing the shows, he says.

Some of NPR's biggest programs, including Fresh Air and Car Talk, have been sold on Audible.com for a few years, but usage is low. Car Talk producer Doug Berman says that's largely because the $3 per show fee is out of whack in the era of $2-per-episode charges on iTunes for Lost and The Office. He says he plans to discuss lowering the cost with Audible.

Marszalek says the NPR ad-sharing arrangement described by Thomas largely benefits stations that produce content of interest to folks beyond their localities, and only a few of the largest stations do that.

"It is the local affiliates who popularize these programs at their expense, and then the producers are going to reap the benefit on podcasts," he says. "All of the new delivery systems are great for the stations that produce the content. It's not good for the local affiliate in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They're really, really reliant on programs from elsewhere to draw listeners and members."

KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour disagrees. Seymour's Santa Monica, California-based station was the first NPR affiliate to leap into podcasting a year ago with such programs as To the Point and Left, Right & Center. She says she's seen few new donations from out-of-market listeners but that the expanded audience helps her sell larger underwriter sponsorships.

She also insists podcasting levels the playing field between big and small stations: "Suppose down there in Las Vegas, they created a smart show about gambling and they put humor in it and it was really interesting and entertaining. And say this thing becomes hot because everybody's interested in gambling these days. It becomes a podcast and it takes off. It can take the Las Vegas station out into the world in a way that was never possible before. Suddenly, certain businesses may want to underwrite for them. You can go around and say the sky is falling, or you can see it as an opportunity."

Rogers is quick to insist she doesn't see the sky falling.

"It is the mission of public radio to make programming as widely available as possible," Rogers says. "But it's fair to say this is a high-priority issue. How do we make sure that we don't stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's a fad that will go away? That's what we have to do."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/media/1,70583-0.html





Vice squad

Coolest Product at Storage Networking World (so far)
Robin

So here I am in a cloudy and rainy San Diego, visiting Storage Networking World. This is a show for big data center types. Typical opening question: “So how many data centers do you have?” But there is frequently some interesting stuff presented amidst the vendor driven chaff that might have meaning for the SMB market.

With a 25x data compression factor, the winner, yesterday, is Diligent Technologies (are all the good names are taken?). They claim their technology enables data volume compression that is over 10x what ordinary data compression achieves — a real breakthrough. Common compression algorithm are lucky to get 2x compression.

So if you have 100 GB to back up, their product, Protectier (see name comment above) can turn it into 4GB, something you could burn onto a DVD in a few minutes. All in all, a wonderful product for SMB’s — but they aren’t selling it to SMB’s (good marketers must be scarce too).

Having spent some time looking at compression algorithms in my mis-spent youth, I was very sceptical of the 25x reduction claim. I was gradually cornering the charming but less-technical than me Melissa, when up walked Neville Yates, Diligent’s CTO, whose movie-star good looks and English accent give no clue to his manly technical chops, which are impressive.

The way Diligent achieves it exceptional compression ratio is by comparing all incoming data to the data already arrived. When it finds an incoming stream of bytes similar to an existing series of bytes it compares the two and stores the differences. The magic comes in a couple of areas, as near as I can make out given Neville’s natural reticence on the “how” of the technology.

First, one has to be smart about how big the series of bytes before worrying about trying to compess it, since if it’s too short there won’t be much or any compression. Secondly, the system needs a very fast and efficient method of knowing what is has already received so it can know when it is receiving something similar. And it all has to be optimized to run in-line at data rate speeds on a standard server box — which runs the cool and reliable Linux OS.

The big plus to this technology besides the compression ratio, is its reliability. Since there is no assumption that two files are the same just because their metadata is, the problem of not backing up something you mistakenly thought was already backed up (a problem with file-based de-duplication software) is eliminated. Further, since the software operates on byte-streams, it can compress anything: email, databases, archives, mp3’s, encrypted data or whatever weird data format your favorite program uses.

So naturally I am a bit disappointed that this wonderful technology is targetted to large data centers, even though I understand Diligent’s thinking. A viral marketing, disruptive technology approach would be to release a consumer version, that maybe offers just 10x compression, but proves to hundreds of thousands of people in a few months that the technology really works. Then the data center guys — the smart ones anyway — will be calling Diligent.
http://storagemojo.com/





Big Easy to Telcos: Stick It
AP

A showdown may be looming over a free wireless internet network that New Orleans set up to boost recovery after Hurricane Katrina pummeled the city.

Calling the network vital to the city's economic comeback, New Orleans technology chief Greg Meffert is vowing to keep the system running as is, even if it means breaking a state law that permits its full operation only during emergencies.

He says he's ready to go to court, if necessary.

"If you can get to the net, you can do business," Meffert said.

The system, established with $1 million in donated equipment, made its debut last fall in the wake of the hurricane disaster. It's the first free wireless internet network owned and run by a major city.

The system uses hardware mounted on street lights. Its "mesh" technology passes the wireless signal from pole to pole rather than through Wi-Fi transmitters plugged directly into a physical network cable. That way, laptop users can connect even in areas where the wireline phone network has not been restored.

Touted at first as much for its symbolism of New Orleans' recovery as for its utility, the system's usefulness now far exceeds early projections, Meffert said. He estimates that the network gets thousands of users a day.

Hundreds of similar projects in other cities have met with stiff opposition from phone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at blocking competition from government agencies.

In New Orleans, the network operates at 512 kilobits per second, much faster than dial-up connections but slower than high-speed services offered by private companies.

But a state law, passed two years ago in response to other attempts to establish government-owned internet systems, dictates the network can run at 512 kbps only as long as the city remains under a state of emergency — a declaration still in place more than seven months after the storm.

Once the state of emergency is lifted — and no one has said when that might take place — state law says the bandwidth must be slowed to 128 kbps.

Meffert says the reduction will make the service virtually useless for businesses and others trying to re-establish commerce in the city.

Bills to allow New Orleans to keep the network operating full-time at 512 kbps failed during a recent special legislative session. Several similar bills are pending in the current regular session, but Meffert says city lobbyists give them little hope of passage because of opposition from the telecommunications lobby.

"We've been told in no uncertain terms those bills are going to get shot down," Meffert said.

David Grabert, a spokesman for Cox Communications, a major telecommunications provider in New Orleans, said the company backs the state's Fair Competition Act, which would end the city's legal authority to continue operating the system at full speed after the state of emergency ends.

"We believe the Fair Competition Act was established to provide safeguards for private industry," Grabert said. "Efforts to repeal it do raise concerns."

BellSouth says it does not comment on pending legislation, but its regional director for southern Louisiana, Merlin Villar, denies the company's trying to shut down the city's system.

"The law does not prevent New Orleans or any other local government from providing Wi-Fi service," Villar said in a statement.

Meffert said many devastated areas of the city likely will not have private internet service for years. He said the city is prepared for a showdown — new law or not. The system will stay up, regardless, though Meffert said he expects court challenges.

"In the end, it takes a federal judge to issue a restraining order," he said. "Until that point, if that point ever comes, we'll keep running it. It's a lifeline to these people."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...l?tw=rss.index





Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off
AP

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who hopes to give $100 laptops to the world's children dismissed recent criticisms Tuesday and said his project could begin distributing the computers by early next year.

Kicking off the LinuxWorld conference in Boston, Nicholas Negroponte said he was undeterred by skepticism from two of the leading forces in computing, Intel and Microsoft.

"When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you're doing something right," Negroponte said, prompting applause from the audience of several hundred open-source software devotees.

Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit association, also revealed a few new tweaks to the design of the computers.

One distinctive element of the original design was for a hand crank to provide power to the laptops where there is no electricity. To compensate, the devices are being engineered to use just 2 watts of electricity, less than one-tenth of what conventional portable computers generally consume.

But having a hand crank stuck to the device likely would have subjected the machine to too many wrenching forces, so it will now be connected to the AC electrical adapter.

In fact, because the adapter can rest on the ground, the power generator might take the form of a foot pedal rather than a hand crank altogether.

Negroponte had previously said the flexible devices will have a 7-inch screen that can be read in sunlight. It will save on costs by using the Linux operating system, peer-to-peer wireless connectivity and a 500-megahertz processor — which was top of the line in the late 1990s.

One Laptop Per Child has big-name partners, including search leader Google Inc., chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices, Linux distributor Red Hat, laptop maker Quanta Computer and News Corp., the media company led by Rupert Murdoch. All have helped finance the project, which Negroponte said has raised $29 million.

However, skeptics have questioned whether the device can meet Negroponte's goal of inspiring huge educational gains in the developing world.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has criticized the computers' design, including its lack of a hard disk drive — though many people in the tech world believed he was more irked by the laptops' use of Linux, the free, open-source system that competes with Gates' proprietary Windows systems.

Intel executives, meanwhile, have suggested that Negroponte's laptop is a mere gadget that will lack too many PC functions. Last week, Intel announced its own plans to sell an inexpensive desktop PC for beginners in developing countries.

Negroponte expressed frustration with Gates in particular, saying that the $100 laptop designers are still working with Microsoft to develop a version of the Windows CE operating system that could run the machines.

"Geez, so why criticize me in public?" Negroponte said.

Microsoft did not immediately return calls for comment.

Negroponte's current plan is to begin distributing 5 million to 10 million of the laptops in China, India, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Nigeria and Argentina by early 2007.

Governments or donors will buy the laptops for children to own and use in and out of school, and the United Nations will help distribute the machines.

Eventually, Negroponte expects many other governments — and not just those in technology-deprived places — to come onboard. For example, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has expressed interest in buying the machines for schoolchildren here.

In time, Negroponte expects the $100 laptop to be a misnomer. For one thing, he believes the cost — which is actually about $135 now and isn't expected to hit $100 until 2008 — can drop to $50 by 2010 as more and more are produced.

He also said the display and other specifications could change as enhancements are made. In other words, he seemed to be saying to his critics: Don't get too hung up on how this thing operates now.

"The hundred-dollar laptop is an education project," he said. "It's not a laptop project."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...l?tw=rss.index





Can’t wait!

Smart Glasses Switch Focus In An Instant
Stu Hutson



Glasses that change from "long distance" to "reading" mode at the flick of a switch could prove a revelation for many wearers.

Researchers have developed a prototype that uses liquid crystals to change focus in an instant, thus preventing the eye strain induced by wearing conventional bifocal glasses. Focusing through specific portions of a bifocal lens causes many users to become dizzy or disoriented, while others report increased eye fatigue.

"Bifocals effectively work the same way they have since they were invented by Benjamin Franklin," says Nasser Peyghambarian, a professor of optical sciences at Arizona State University, US, who helped develop the "dynamic" glasses. "But as any of more than 40 million people in America who need bifocals know, they're a pain."

Fresnel lens

The dynamic glasses change focus using a 5-micron-thick layer of nematic liquid crystal, sandwiched between two pieces of glass. Molecules of the liquid crystal reorient themselves when exposed to an electric field and the researchers used this to create a type of dynamic Fresnel lens.

In a normal Fresnel lens, concentric rings are carved into a piece of glass causing light to become focused in a similar way to a conventional lens. Dynamic glasses mimic the Fresnel effect using concentric circles of clear electrodes on the pieces of glass containing the crystal. Activating these electrodes causes the liquid crystal to align into rings and focus light passing through the lens.

A company called PixelOptics, based in Virginia, US, plans to sell glasses containing dynamic lenses commercially within two years. "The prototype is pretty bulky, but when these hit the streets they’ll be virtually indistinguishable from other, very stylish glasses," says Ronald Blum, CEO of PixelOptics.
Infrared laser

PixelOptics first developed the idea of dynamic focusing while working on large lenses for computer screens. Ideally, these would have allowed near-sighted and far-sighted people to read their monitors without their spectacles. "As screens got thinner and thinner, though, the idea became less practical," Blum says. "So instead we decided to move the technology from the computer to the computer user."

The first commercial dynamic glasses will only be able to switch between a person’s normal vision and their "reading" prescription. However, by applying different voltages and by changing the number of current-carrying rings within each lens it should be possible to produce different magnifications using the same lens, researchers say.

Peyghambarian is now working on glasses that can dynamically refocus on whatever the wearer is looking at. These will most probably use an infrared laser built into the bridge of the glasses to determine how far away an object is. "The idea is to put the focusing power found in the lens of a camera on your face all the time," Peyghambarian told New Scientist.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0600850103)
http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...n-instant.html





Japanese Cos. Check Employee Computer Use
Hiroko Tabuchi

For many years now, companies have been able to keep track of every Web site visited, e-mail sent and file accessed by their workers through readily available tracking software.

Now a growing number of Japanese employers are monitoring their staff with the help of homegrown programs designed to spy on their workers' every move, a specialist said Thursday.

A recent study has shown that over 30 percent of large Japanese companies monitor PC use among their staff, according to Masakazu Kobayashi, an associate professor at Tokyo's Institute of Information Security.

Heightened concerns over a spate of data leaks - especially those involving the file-sharing software, Winny - is likely to drive that percentage up, Kobayashi said.

"It's scary," Kobayashi told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. "In five years, most companies will be doing this."

Tracking software, which first appeared in the U.S. in the mid-nineties, have become increasingly sophisticated in Japan, Kobayashi said.

A piece of software by SEER Insight Security Inc., for example, allows bosses to visually monitor employees in realtime through mini web cameras, zooming in when a worker acts suspicious.

Other recent programs produce reports on an employee's moves on a computer down to the minute, or analyzes inter-worker relationships through e-mails exchanged between each employee - letting employers identify cliques or loners within the work force.

Such tactics by employees aren't prohibited by Japanese law, and past attempts by employers to sue their bosses over excessive monitoring have been unsuccessful, Kobayashi said.

"The message is clear - companies are telling their employees, 'Behave yourself because we're watching you,'" Kobayashi said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFA ULT





Rolling Stones Arrive for China Concert
Christopher Bodeen

The Rolling Stones arrived in Shanghai Thursday for their first concert in mainland China. But although the Stones may now be welcome in China, the country may not be ready for "Honky Tonk Women." "Let's Spend The Night Together?" Maybe not.

The group's 2002 greatest hits collection, "40 Licks," was cut by the censors to just 36 after those songs plus "Brown Sugar" and "Beast of Burden" were cut from the mainland Chinese release, apparently due to their suggestive lyrics. It wasn't clear if the songs would be featured when the group performs on Saturday.

A sellout crowd was expected for Saturday night's show in the relatively intimate setting of the 8,000-seat Shanghai Grand Stage in the heart of China's biggest city.

The Stones had planned to play in China three years ago, but the SARS epidemic forced them to call off the tour.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts smiled and waved at reporters after stepping off a chartered flight from Japan on Thursday, the latest stop on their marathon "A Bigger Bang" tour.

Though famous around the world for such classics as "Satisfaction" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash," the Stones are relatively unknown in China, which was mired in Maoist isolation at the height of the band's fame in the 1960s and 1970s.

Since then, relaxed cultural restrictions and the rise of a Chinese middle class have attracted many international acts to the country. Recent years have seen performances in Shanghai by Elton John, Whitney Houston and heavy-metal group Deep Purple, among others.

Shanghai was a late addition to the tour's schedule, but singer Mick Jagger was quoted in the Shanghai Daily newspaper last week as saying the band considered the city a must-see.

"We all know that Shanghai is a big important city, so we wanted to make sure it's on our itinerary," Jagger said.

The Stones were booked for a pair of concerts in 2003, just as China's outbreak of the deadly virus severe acute respiratory syndrome was raging.

Those shows were called off, though the Stones did play in Hong Kong late in 2003 in a concert series meant to lift spirits following the end of the outbreak.

The band's current tour started in the U.S. in August, and has wound its way through Central and South America and Japan, including a free concert for more than 1 million people on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.

Despite their famed loyalty to the band, some Stones fans couldn't help tweaking them over their Shanghai visit.

A suggested setlist posted on the group's Web site, including such twisted takes on Stones classics as "Let's Spend the Night Together in a Workers' Paradise."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T





AT&T Whistleblower Claims To Document Illegal NSA Surveillance
Declan McCullagh

Evidence provided by a former AT&T technician proves that the telecommunications company secretly and unlawfully opened its networks to government eavesdroppers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Thursday.

Alert readers may remember that EFF sued AT&T in January, alleging it illegally cooperated with the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping program. Then, in an odd twist last week, the Bush administration objected to EFF including some internal AT&T documents in court (the Feds claimed they might be classified).

Now EFF seems to have cleared that up and has filed them in court, although they're still under seal.

EFF claims that it has a sworn statement by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician -- and several internal AT&T documents -- that show a "dragnet surveillance" has been put into place to facilitate the NSA's controversial surveillance scheme. (Here's our survey of telecom companies regarding NSA cooperation.)

Alas, we likely won't know details until the judge decides to release them.

Even if the documents prove everything that EFF claims, it's not a slam dunk for the group.

The state secrets privilege, outlined by the Supreme Court in a 1953 case, permits the government to derail a lawsuit that might otherwise lead to the disclosure of military secrets.

In 1998, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals elaborated on the state secret privilege in a case where former workers at the Air Force's classified Groom Lake, Nev., facility alleged hazardous waste violations. When requested by the workers' lawyers to turn over information, the Air Force refused.

The 9th Circuit upheld a summary judgment on behalf of the Air Force, saying that once the state secrets "privilege is properly invoked and the court is satisfied as to the danger of divulging state secrets, the privilege is absolute" and the case will generally be dismissed.

That "absolute privilege" case is still good law and is binding on the judge that will hear EFF's case.
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-605...8346&subj=news





Helping Batteries to Keep On Going and Going
Peter Wayner

What good is a tiny thin sliver of electronic gadgetry if the battery dies in your pocket after a few minutes? Not much, and now that manufacturers have mastered the building of pocket-sized wonders that are often too small for our fingers, they are starting to pay closer attention to battery life.

New machines come with smarter batteries and miserly circuitry that works longer. In some cases, the manufacturers are even making the gizmos a little bit bigger to accommodate a battery with more capacity.

The designers are working within the limits of several laws of physics. They all want their latest gadgets to offer bright screens, faster action, infinite range and long battery life while weighing next to nothing, but there's no way to escape the fact that the flashiest features consume more power.

So some designers are cutting features while others are adding fatter batteries as they try to satisfy the demands of consumers. Of course, others are continuing to pile on features for customers who don't mind frequent trips to the recharger.

One of the biggest challenges for designers and consumers is the fickle nature of batteries. Temperature, age and use patterns affect life span, and it is possible for two people to get widely differing performance from the same device. While keeping batteries cool and well charged helps, all batteries wear out.

Gadget designers are combating this challenge by building in more intelligence that regulates the power consumption with all of the zeal of someone raised during the Depression. Most devices now have dedicated chips that shut down parts of the device when they are not needed. Some even have special chips that watch the battery and simulate the internal chemistry to optimize the charging process.

Laptops

The laptop marketplace is separating into the world of so-called heavier and cheaper desktop replacements: the ultraportable notebooks that are optimized to run long and weigh little.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X60 ($1,400 to $2,000, depending on options), the latest in the well-regarded laptop line, weighs close to three pounds, but it can last longer than eight hours on a single charge.

The secret is the ability to add more batteries. You can pry out the DVD drive and replace it with a battery that adds several more hours. If that's not enough, you can add a flat battery that weighs about a pound to the bottom of the laptop and adds several more hours of use.

The extra batteries are just one part of the equation. The X60 would not be able to live as long if it was not careful with the power. Howard Locker, Lenovo's chief architect for the ThinkPad line, says the laptop comes with a separate chip inside that constantly audits the power used by all components.

There are other features, like dual antennas for Wi-Fi, making it easier to pick up a signal. "If you have poor antenna design, you can overcompensate by giving it more power," he said. "We are so focused on our antenna design, and that can save a lot of power."

Panasonic, another competitor in the ultraportable world, is actually adding a bit of weight in its latest offering. The Toughbook T4 ($1,980 to $2,300) is now 3.4 pounds, about half a pound heavier than its predecessor, the W4. The electronics are lighter, but the battery pack is bigger, providing about three extra hours of work.

The shell of the T4 is made out of magnesium, a choice that Panasonic made because the designers found it to have five times the strength of titanium for the needs of its designers and 20 times the strength of the plastic found in most laptops.

The metal conducts so well that some of the slower Panasonic laptops can be sealed up to run without a fan, a feature that saves more power and keeps dust and other contaminants out of the inside.

Kyp Walls, a manager in the laptop division, also says Panasonic is quite proud of its displays because they are among the brightest in the market without consuming too much extra power.

Mr. Walls said the company identified five factors that were each worth a 10 percent improvement in brightness. "It's a different kind of fluorescent bulb," he said. "It's a different kind of gas." And it is all a result of "a lot of investigation."

Digital Cameras

From the beginning, Kodak realized that good batteries were a crucial part of ensuring that consumers enjoyed its products. Digital cameras often draw power for short, intense peaks after the shutter button is pressed, a pattern quite different from the slow, steady drain of laptops and flashlights.

James DeJager, the technical director of Kodak's battery division, says Kodak began by building a special line of batteries, Kodak Max, with a slightly different chemistry designed to handle the peak demands. One model (Kaardc), for instance, is rechargeable and uses a nickel-metal-hydride chemistry to take four times the pictures of a standard alkaline cell.

These cells are available in standard sizes (AA, AAA) for their cameras, a feature that Mr. DeJager says makes it easy for customers to replace batteries while on the road. They cost $2.69 to $10, depending on type.

While many of the lower-end cameras from Kodak use the standard cells, there is a growing demand for the high power densities and thinner profile of the lithium-ion batteries. The Kodak EasyShare P880 ($459 to $560), a new digital model, uses a larger lithium-ion cell that is expected to fuel about 320 pictures on a full charge.

Cellphones

The Nokia 1100 cellphone ($50 at www.nokiausa.com) may not offer Bluetooth networking, a camera or even a color display, but it can go up to 16 days without being recharged. Colin Bullock, a senior engineer at Nokia in Dallas, says that stripping away the extras and using a black-and-white display sharply reduced the slow drain on the battery, something the engineers call the "quiescent current."

"There is really only one gadget on 1100, and that is the flashlight," Mr. Bullock said by e-mail message, meaning that the phone, offered by Cingular and some smaller carriers, "only draws comparatively small current when on."

The engineers are also working on reducing the power consumed by the phones during calls. Wayne Ballantyne, an engineer at Motorola's lab in Plantation, Fla., says the newer phones scan the air less often, allowing them to shut down transmitters and receivers for several milliseconds longer than in the past. The company is even experimenting with using tiny accelerometers to measure whether the phone is going anywhere. A motionless phone does not need to use power searching for the closest towers again and again.

MP3 Players

One way for other manufacturers of MP3 players to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer wider options for batteries. Apple drove some users to sue when capacity of the lithium-ion battery in their iPods dropped sharply. The early iPod batteries were not easily replaceable, and customers complained that they felt forced to buy an entirely new iPod. Today, Apple offers detailed notes on battery care (www.apple.com/batteries) and a program that replaces a worn battery for $59.

Creative took a different tack with its Zen Nano Plus ($99). The flash player uses a standard AAA cell, a feature that lets the user swap out alkaline or rechargeable batteries while on the road.

The standard forms may be convenient, but they have limitations. The Apple Nano may be wider and longer than the Zen Nano, but it is also much thinner because the lithium-ion cell is thinner than a AAA cell.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/te...y/06power.html






Eagle Cam
Jack

Mom, Dad and the two eggs, high atop the Canadian wilderness.

Thanks OMB!



DoJ interest in RIAA case

The Top Cop
p2pnet.

The Big Four Organized Music cartel has accused New York social worker Tenise Barker of being a 'thief' who's committed a non-existent 'crime'.

Actually, she hasn't stolen anything and she's accused of copyright infringement by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), owned by Warner Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Vivendi Universal.

Now the US Department of Justice is wondering whether or not to get in on the act.

"The United States Attorney's Office has written to the judge in Elektra v Barker, indicating that the Department of Justice may wish to file a 'Statement of Interest' in the case in order to 'express the views of the United States regarding the scope of the distribution right embodied in sec. 106(3) of the Copyright Act'," says Recording Industry vs The People.

What views could the DoJ possibly want to express, one wonders?

Could it have anything to do with US attorney general Alberto Gonzales' entertainment cartel road show?

He starred in a week-long entertainment industry, US taxpayer-funded extravaganza, "in which the kids studied Internet dangers as well as the moral, social and legal implications of Internet piracy".

"I am the top cop in the United States,'' he warned school-children along his route. "I hope you never have the misfortune to deal with me ………"

Nor is the DoJ alone in showing an interest in the case.

Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney used their MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) to enter an amicus brief supporting RIAA arguments that merely "making available" comprises copyright infringement.

Stay tuned.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/8445





Radiohead Call Music Industry 'Retards'

Radiohead's Thom Yorke calls the music industry "a bunch of fucking retards" in this week's issue of NME.

The singer has launched a scathing attack on record companies and radio stations as he believes they are only just now looking at the internet for new talent.

Speaking about Arctic Monkeys' rise to fame, Yorke said: "A good thing for new music would be more of the mainstream loosening up a bit and letting stuff through. Radio 1 won't play anything fucking decent. You need to sort the radio out."

He added: "The fact that poor Arctic Monkeys are getting so much attention is purely based on the fact that the mainstream music business is such a bunch of fucking retards as far as I'm concerned."
http://www.nme.com/news/radiohead/22692





Like to Tinker? NASA's Looking for You
Noah Shachtman

STEVE JONES doesn't have a workshop, exactly, for his miniature space elevator; he is designing it in his dorm room and in four labs scattered across the University of British Columbia.

He doesn't have a staff, either; a collection of friends and fellow space enthusiasts volunteer to help. And his budget, in the low five figures, comes mostly from the school activities fund, although Red Bull is donating some energy drinks.

But he might soon have a chance to join the ranks of the aerospace establishment by getting money from NASA and, in his own way, helping explore the solar system. To get ready, he is spending 60 hours a week on his elevator, which is meant to haul people and gear into orbit without a rocket. He has even put off graduation until the project is done.

Until recently, the chances that a college senior like Mr. Jones would contribute to the NASA space program were remote. Contracts belonged mostly to the Boeings of the world. Tinkerers and students were kept at the far edge of the periphery. But with budgets tightening and the obstacles to human space exploration looking more daunting, NASA is enlisting the expertise of outsiders.

For example, the agency is offering 13 contests, which it calls Centennial Challenges, that anyone can enter. The prizes range from $200,000 to more than $5 million, for building gear as diverse as solar sails, lunar excavators and the tiny elevators.

But more important than the cash prizes, contestants and administrators say, is the opportunity to sidestep the traditional ways NASA has done business and bring some fresh faces to its ranks.

"With a regular contract, a small group of students like us wouldn't have a chance," Mr. Jones said. "This way, anyone with a good idea can contribute."

Mr. Jones hadn't thought much about contests until the X Prize, the $10 million competition to get private spacecraft into suborbital flight. He was drawn to the idea that entrepreneurs could go into space. So when NASA announced its first Centennial Challenges, Mr. Jones signed up.

Competitors in the Beam Power Challenge — which includes the elevator component — had to make a two-foot-tall machine powered by light or microwaves that could crawl up a 200-foot rubber-coated fiber ribbon. Space enthusiasts hope that such a machine — an elevator, of sorts — could one day reach 62,000 miles into the sky, delivering people and packages into orbit at a fraction of the cost of today's launchings. The winner would be, in effect, one of the space elevator's earliest drafts.

When the contest was held last October, none of the eight entrants made it all the way up the ribbon. But Mr. Jones's Snowstar machine traveled farthest, all of 20 feet. The hexagonal array of solar cells, powering two pairs of rollers that shimmied up the ribbon, was judged Most Likely to Win in the 2006 challenge, set for August. The prize has been increased to $250,000 this year, from $50,000. To win, the climbers must make it up the ribbon in less than a minute. So far, 19 teams have signed up, nearly twice as many as in 2005.

Another well-known high-tech contest, the Darpa Grand Challenge, also had disappointing results when it started in 2004. The all-robot off-road rally, sponsored by the Pentagon's fringe science arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, attracted dozens of competitors. But none of the vehicles made it past the seventh mile of the 150-mile course, largely because of navigation problems.

A year later, five unmanned cars crossed the finish line. That included robots from leading universities like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon as well as one from the Gray Insurance Company, which had no experience in robotics but whose owners had a personal interest in the competition. The Gray team was one of the last to enter the contest, and it had a major setback when Hurricane Katrina wrecked its New Orleans workshop.

Nevertheless, it beat out vehicles built by leading computer-science researchers and backed by defense contractors. It did so well that it has pulled some employees from the insurance side of the business, allowing them to focus on the company's new venture: robotic cars for the military and other entities.

"I never thought I'd work in defense," said Paul Trepagnier, a software development manager at Gray. "I'm a Tom Clancy fan. But that's the extent. I mean, I'm just a programmer in an insurance company."

Many of NASA's contests also center on robotics. The Telerobotic Construction Challenge, scheduled for August 2007, requires a team of machines to assemble items with minimal human supervision. The idea is to let robots, instead of astronauts, build shelters and machinery on the moon and Mars. In the Regolith Excavation Challenge, set for May 2007, an autonomous machine will have to dig through 24 square meters of simulated moon rock. A separate Regolith Oxygen competition, scheduled for 2008, will be held for robots that can extract oxygen from the stones. Some contests will be held annually; others will be one-time events.

NASA funds robotics research through conventional contracts too, and it uses Small Business Innovation Research grants to back companies outside the industry's mainstream. But the paperwork involved in the innovation research grants, called S.B.I.R.'s, can be intimidating.

"I don't have the grant-writing experience to get one of those," said Matthew Abrams, one of the competitors. "The contest seemed like a better deal. And winning something like this can give us the credibility and the contacts to go after S.B.I.R.'s."

The competitions offer economic benefits to NASA as well. The contestants, not the space agency, pay for the development. The winner of a big technology prize usually spends three times the purse value, said Carl E. Walz, a former astronaut who works in NASA's exploration systems mission directorate.

"Typically in R. & D., you pay as you go," Mr. Walz said, referring to NASA's outlays for research and development. "You pay for failures and you pay for successes. Here, you don't pay until someone wins."

NASA officials say that some of their contractors are worried that the contests could undermine their work for the space agency. NASA already has companies working on gloves for its space suits; why, then, does it need an Astronaut Glove Challenge? Exactly how good ideas from the competitions will be integrated into the space program isn't entirely clear. "We're still writing the book on this," Mr. Walz said.

But within NASA, enthusiasm for the challenges seems to be growing. The agency announced six more contests in February, including $5 million for the first team that can store or produce rocket fuel in orbit and $2.5 million for the builders of a working solar sail.

If they win, both Mr. Jones and Mr. Abrams said they hoped to use their prize money to enter some of these more complex challenges, like the lunar lander competition being held by NASA and the X Prize Foundation.

Gregg E. Maryniak, executive vice president of the foundation, said he looked forward to having them enter. "One of the biggest reasons to do this is to bring in people outside the existing ecosystem," he said.

"Look, a hundred years ago, a couple of pesky bike mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, bested, in effect, the government-funded player, to become the first to fly," he added. "That's why you put on these things: to attract the bicycle mechanics."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/te...l4/05nasa.html





Hunt For Private File Sharers Is Over – Prosecutor

A Swedish appeal court decided on Wednesday not to hear the case against a man who illegally shared a film via the internet. The prosecutor said that the decision effectively puts an end to the hunt for private file sharers in Sweden.

"I interpret this as a clear decision that individual file sharers, if they don't earn money from file sharing, won't get anything more than a fine. That means we can't trace IP addresses, which means that we can't trace private file sharers," said prosecutor Håkan Roswall to TV4.

The question of punishment is decisive in determining how police and prosecutors may investigate file sharing.

If only fines are imposed, then the crime is not so serious that IP addresses, each computer's unique identifier on the internet, can be requested from internet service providers.

The particular case turned away by the Svea appeal court concerned a 27 year old man who was given a fine amounting to 80 days' salary by Sollentuna district court for breaking copyright laws. He admitted making the Swedish action film 'The Third Wave' accessible to others through a file sharing programme.

The prosecutor wanted the punishment reconsidered and appealed against the judgement.

After Wednesday's decision in the high court, he said that a change in the law would now be required if legal proceedings were to be brought against individuals.

But Adrian Engman, an assessor at the Svea appeal court, told TV4 that the court did not see the decision as a precedent.

"This case was about one person who one day made one film accessible on a file sharing network. The preliminary process is very clear on these points - only in bigger cases should there be a punishment of the degree of a prison sentence," he said.

"There were no commercial interests here either."

Henrik Pontén, a lawyer at the industry organisation Antipiratbyrån, said the punishment of 80 days' fine per film was satisfactory.

"We think it's a fair and balanced penalty. We are not surprised that this was not granted a hearing," he told TT.

"It doesn't cause any problems for us since the cases we report today relate to many more films. It's impossible to hunt file sharers who just share one film - but most of them have many more films that that," said Henrik Pontén.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...59ef04db97ae5a
















Until next week,

- js.


















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