Quotes Of The Week
"We find that, if measured accurately, P2P traffic has never declined; indeed we have never seen the proportion of P2P traffic decrease over time." – Thomas Karagiannis
"The issue of democratic citizenship is always there. We know people get political information from TV. It may not always be high quality, but it's there. So there is an argument to be made on a democratic basis that free has to be made accessible." – Jeffrey Hart
"My guess is they’ll generate profiles first for about the first 100 most active users. Within their profile will be logging hours and time stamps. They match those to real people through the ISP’s records. Then that’s it, they’ve got them." – Nameer Kazzaz
"Those that are most likely to be sued are the casual, naive downloaders, young and old who aren’t savvy. Those who do this regularly know how to avoid these efforts and it’s not hard." – Eric Garland
Doing fine, thanks
Is P2P Dying Or Just Hiding?
Presented at Globecom 2004 in November-December 2004
Thomas Karagiannis
University of California, Riverside
Andre Broido, Nevil Brownlee, kc claffy
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis - CAIDA
San Diego Supercomputer Center,
University of California, San Diego
Michalis Faloutsos
University of California, Riverside
Recent reports in the popular media suggest a significant decrease in peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing traffic, attributed to the public's response to legal threats. Have we reached the end of the P2P revolution? In pursuit of legitimate data to verify this hypothesis, we embark on a more accurate measurement effort of P2P traffic at the link level. In contrast to previous efforts we introduce two novel elements in our methodology. First, we measure traffic of all known popular P2P protocols. Second, we go beyond the "known port" limitation by reverse engineering the protocols and identifying characteristic strings in the payload. We find that, if measured accurately, P2P traffic has never declined; indeed we have never seen the proportion of P2P traffic decrease over time (any change is an increase) in any of our data sources.
http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers.../p2p-dying.pdf
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French ISP To Regulate P2P Traffic
Press Release
BIEVRES, France and BASINGSTOKE, England, October 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Sandvine Incorporated today announced that it has entered into a partnership agreement with Telindus France, part of Telindus group, one of Europe's largest and most innovative technology integrators, to deliver Sandvine's full suite of traffic management and worm mitigation products to broadband ISPs in France.
Telindus France has added Sandvine's award-winning Peer-To-Peer Policy Management platform to its comprehensive broadband network solution set, providing end-to-end support encompassing consulting, implementation, and post-sale support.
"Telindus' expertise in the European technology marketplace is a welcome complement to Sandvine's deep understanding of broadband traffic and its underlying DNA," said Dave Caputo, CEO and president of Sandvine Incorporated. "Together we are helping our service provider customers in France protect the broadband experience for their subscribers while identifying new opportunities to improve profitability."
"French broadband ISPs are very keen to manage file sharing traffic, mitigate the impact of worm attacks and better understand how their subscribers utilise broadband access. We are very pleased to be working with Sandvine to address this demand." said Gilles Gaudu, Manager of the ISP Market at Telindus France.
http://www.itnews.it/risorse/EuroNews,Zj0xMTI3Mzk3
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EU Demands Improved Intellectual Property Protection In Israel
Mati Wagner
The European Commission decided Thursday to increase pressure on Israel to adopt more stringent intellectual property protection.
Commercial attaches and counselors from all the European Union embassies met in Ramat Gan to discuss Israel's lax intellectual property legislation.
"We will ask the EU leadership in Brussels to make data exclusivity high priority in relations with Israel," said Daniel Shemi, commercial counselor at the Danish Embassy, after the meeting.
The meeting comes a day before the arrival of US trade representative Robert Zoellick. Ostensibly Zoellick's visit is to mark the 20th anniversary of the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement. He will also visit the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
However, he is expected to express US dissatisfaction with Israeli intellectual property protection laws during his meeting with Industry, Trade, and Labor Minister Ehud Olmert.
In May, the US warned that there are "serious shortcomings" in Israel's proposed legislation that "severely compromise the data protection afforded by Israel, keeping it far short of OECD-level standards for data exclusivity."
The US has announced that it is considering putting Israel back on its priority watch list, after removing it in 2003.
In September, the socio-economic cabinet approved legislation drafted by an interministerial committee that it knew did not meet US and European demands. The legislation is part of the arrangements bill, which, together with the budget, represents economic policy for 2005.
The US and Europe demand that Israel adopt data exclusivity legislation, but the cabinet approved a less stringent market exclusivity bill, international pharmaceutical companies said.
However, Ronit Kan, deputy director-general and director of foreign trade administration at the Industry, Trade, and Labor Ministry, said the cabinet decision provides five years of data exclusivity, not just market exclusivity.
Data exclusivity protects the confidentiality of proprietary tests and clinical trial data used by a pharmaceutical firm while registering a drug. It blocks generic drug companies from using this data to develop the same drug for a specified period, usually five to 10 years.
In contrast, market exclusivity protects pharmaceutical firms' products, but not their data.
Shemi said that NovoNordisk, Lundbeck, and Farring, the three Danish pharmaceutical firms operating here, are reconsidering future operations in light of Israel's intransigence. Pharma-Israel, a non-profit advocate of multinational research-based pharmaceutical companies with operations here, says the economy loses hundreds of millions of dollars in investments yearly due to the government's policy.
"Instead of investing $400 million a year, multinationals invest just $150m. and even that sum is in danger of dropping," said Tomer Feffer, general-secretary of Pharma-Israel.
He said 1,200 Israelis are employed by these firms. Dozens of contractors that employ thousands more provide services.
In September, Yair Shiran, deputy director-general for foreign trade in the Industry, Trade, and Labor Ministry and head of the interministerial committee, told The Jerusalem Post that despite US opposition, no changes have been made in the legislation.
"We have to balance the nation's best interests with the demands of the US and Europe," he said. "We've found the best solution without increasing drug costs to the health funds and without hurting the sales of local generic drug firms."
Teva vice president Haim Hurvitz, chairman of the Manufacturers' Association's chemical and pharmaceutical division, estimates that acquiescing to the US demands would cost the health funds hundreds of millions of shekels a year.
He said Israel already has extensive patent laws that guard the molecules used to develop drugs for 20 to 25 years.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...=1097727860252
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Vietnam To Impose Heavier Penalty On IPR Violators
www.chinaview.cn
HANOI, Oct. 18 (Xinhuanet) -- Vietnam plans to put harsher punishment and higher fines on violators of intellectual property rights, in a move to deal with the rampant piracy in the country, according to Vietnam Investment Review on Monday.
Under a draft decree, organizations or individuals that are involved in intellectual property rights violations may be subjectto temporary or permanent revocation of their business license, while producers and sellers of fake products could face fines of up to 100 million Vietnamese dong (VND) (nearly 6,400 US dollars).
Stiffer fines are expected to reduce the rampant sales of fake products, especially electronic devices and sport brands like Nikeand Adidas, Tran Viet Hung, deputy head of Vietnam's National Office of Intellectual Property, said, noting that penalties stipulated in a decree issued in 1999 are relatively mild.
Under the expected new decree, organizations or individuals giving false information regarding rights ownership of any item will be fined 1-3 million VND (64-191 dollars) instead of the current 0.5-2 million VND (32-128 dollars).
Penalties will also be based on the value of the property in question. A fine of 15-30 million VND (955-1,910 dollars) is proposed for producers of counterfeit goods worth 20-50 million VND (1,274- 3,185 dollars).
Vietnam has made great efforts to combat piracy and comply withinternational rules on intellectual property rights. At the 8th round of negotiations for its entry into the World Trade Organization in Switzerland in June 2004, the country basically pledged to abide by the organization's agreements, including the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.
Recently, Vietnam's Ministry of Culture and Information has released guidelines for the implementation of the Berne conventionfor the protection of literary and artistic works, of which the country is to become full member on Oct. 26. Accordingly, as of Oct. 1, professional organizers of art performances, publishers ofmusic tapes or discs and professional performance troupes are supposed to ask for permission of foreign authors, owners or legalrepresentatives before using their works.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_2104912.htm
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Singapore To Jail Software Pirates
Singapore will next year introduce jail terms and stiff fines for people who break software and internet copyright laws, the government said on Tuesday.
People found to be illegally using software or downloading off the internet will face a maximum six months in jail and a fine of 20,000 Singapore dollars ($A16,395) for their first offence, according to ammendments to the Copyright Act introduced into parliament.
Repeat offenders face three years in jail and a fine of 50,000 Singapore dollars.
The laws specifically refer to people who break the law "to obtain a commercial advantage" or infringe significantly, meaning individuals who download a limited number of songs or movies off the internet for personal use may be exempt.
A spokeswoman for the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore said the courts would be left to interpret the definition of "significant".
Although the spokeswoman stressed the courts would set the precedent, she said people who downloaded one song or movie were unlikely to be prosecuted but "1000 could be pushing it".
She said parliament was likely to pass the ammendents by the middle of the next month, with the new laws due to take effect from January 1 next year.
The tougher laws are part of Singapore's commitments to its free trade agreement signed with the United States that came into effect this year.
Previously people who breached software and internet copyright laws in Singapore were only subject to civil action.
Tougher penalties for the illegal manufacturing, sale and distribution of software remain unaffacted by the new laws.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...951733737.html
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American Firm To Crack Down On Irish Music Downloads
Enda Leahy
AN anti-piracy firm in America has been hired to gather evidence against Irish users of online music-sharing networks so they can be prosecuted.
Dick Doyle, the director general of the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) that hired the firm, said he already has evidence against some of the estimated 250,000 Irish users of peer-to-peer file- sharing networks such as Kazaa and eDonkey.
Those caught in possession of illegally downloaded music can be fined ¤1,900 per song or face total fines of up to ¤127,000 and five years’ imprisonment.
IRMA’s recruitment of American expertise is the latest development in a continuing battle between record labels protecting their copyrights and online peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks.
“We have specialists on P2P sites watching what’s going on,” said Doyle. “We’re not only issuing warnings to people but also gathering information about the behaviour of certain individuals. This stuff could be used in litigation in a couple of months’ time.”
Internet service providers (ISPs), which could be required to identify individual customers through court orders, have voiced concerns.
“I don’t think our members feel it right to have private investigations actively going on when the assumption of guilt is the wrong way round,” said Paul Durrant of the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland.
“The methodology and morality of it are very questionable,” he said. “It’s not illegal but it’s what you could call sharp practice. We do not condone pirating of music over our services, but we also have to think about the privacy of our customers.”
Although Doyle refused to name the company carrying out the surveillance, the general manager of Overpeer, an American firm that provides “digital media data-mining and anti-piracy solutions”, admitted that it was operating in the republic.
“If someone in Ireland was trying to download a pirate file that we’re covering, our anti- piracy would impact that, yes,” said Marc Morgenstern at Overpeer. The company boasts that it can target its efforts “to a specific geography”, and has already done so in France, Germany and elsewhere.
Morgenstern said: “We intervene to stop piracy and we literally do that billions of times a month. We gather data of those people offering pirate files for sharing — that includes all the file data as well as the internet protocol (IP) address of the person offering the file.”
Overpeer also introduce “spoof” files to networks, the most famous being Madonna’s Living in America that, when downloaded, was a recording of her saying “f*** off and buy the album”. The company has also been accused of introducing virus files that corrupt copies of copyrighted tracks in users’ hard drives.
The Recording Industry Association of America has brought more than 4,600 suits against users, negotiating settlements of about $3,000 each with more than 900 people.
In a landmark case in Britain last Thursday, an ISP was forced by the British Phonographic Industry to release the identities of 28 customers against whom it had gathered evidence.
“It’s a serious crime,” said Doyle. “You actually are stealing. It’s the same as if you went in and did it in a shop.”
Nameer Kazzaz, an internet security consultant, sees Overpeer’s activities as “white hacking”. “These guys will go for common names and files held by users with Irish IP blocks,” Kazzaz predicted. “If you’re connected in Ireland you’ll be within a certain block assigned by your ISP. They just need some powerful machines to profile so many people at once, and a big connection. They could probably do it in 48 hours or less.
“My guess is they’ll generate profiles first for about the first 100 most active users. Within their profile will be logging hours and time stamps. They match those to real people through the ISP’s records. Then that’s it, they’ve got them.”
Eric Garland at Big Champagne, a company that compiles statistics on P2P network usage, called it a “great shock-and-awe tactic” but whose effectiveness deteriorates as time goes on.
“Those that are most likely to be sued are the casual, naive downloaders, young and old who aren’t savvy,” he says. “Those who do this regularly know how to avoid these efforts and it’s not hard.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...313398,00.html
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Oscar Plan to Encrypt DVDs Hits Glitches
Sharon Waxman
The last thing anybody in Hollywood wants is a rerun of last year's fiasco over Oscar DVD's.
That was when a last-minute ban on the free movies sent to Oscar voters led to anger, confusion, a lawsuit and ultimately a cobbled-together solution that did nothing to resolve the underlying problem of movie piracy.
But it looks as if a sequel may be just around the bend.
Hollywood studios have yet to decide how they will send copies of their movies to Oscar voters and still avoid the piracy concerns of last year.
That's because the solution devised by studio representatives in cooperation with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to experiment with a new technology by Cinea Inc., looks less and less as if it will arrive in time for the Oscar season, which begins in earnest in late fall.
"It's certainly puzzling how slowly things seem to be moving," Bruce Davis, executive director of the motion picture academy, said. "I don't know what's going on. It's certainly mysterious."
By this time Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories based in Reston, Va., was supposed to have sent out more than 10,000 special machines capable of reading encrypted DVD's to people who vote for the Oscars or the Baftas, the British equivalent of the Oscars.
The company volunteered to spend about $5 million to provide their machines free in the hope that studios would then adopt the technology to encrypt their DVD's for the Oscar season and other studio uses. The encrypted DVD's can be played only on Cinea machines.
But so far, academy members have yet to receive a single machine, as have the studios. "We hear every day that they're coming, but we haven't gotten them yet," said Barbara Brogliatti, a spokeswoman for Warner Brothers, the studio most ardently leading the charge against Oscar screening piracy. "Until they come in and until we test them, we can't make a decision."
How long can Warner Brothers wait? "Not much longer," said Ms. Brogliatti, who noted that the studio was quickly coming up with other options.
None of the other major studios have signed on to encrypt DVD's with Cinea technology either, which leaves open the possibility that by the time Cinea sends out the machines, there may not be any encoded DVD's to play on them.
Cinea executives say they are undaunted. "We're committed," said Laurence Roth, a co-founder of the company and vice president for business affairs. "We will be distributing these players. We expect them to be out for the screening season. I can't pinpoint a date. I know we'll have them in people's homes well in time for the viewing season. It's a matter of days and weeks, not more than that."
Mr. Roth acknowledged, however, that the DVD players were late. "The studios need to be making decisions very shortly," he said. "However they want to work it out, the product will be there."
Cinea executives brought earlier prototypes of their machines to some studios for demonstrations in recent months, but problems like one with the pause button sent them back to tinker with the technology.
From the start, Hollywood seemed less than enthusiastic about the Cinea answer to the question of how to keep the Oscar DVD's, known as "screeners," out of the hands of thieves who could illegally sell them over the Internet or make bootleg copies to sell on the street.
The motion picture academy announced at the end of August that every member would get a DVD player, which is valued at $800, in the mail within five weeks. Though some people might be thrilled to get a free, state-of-the-art piece of hardware (the Cinea machines also play non-encrypted DVD's), here in Hollywood this has been regarded as a nuisance.
Who would set them up? How would they fit into high-design entertainment systems? Should voters take the DVD players to their vacation homes in Hawaii and Aspen, or leave them in Beverly Hills?
And as some pointed out: couldn't the system be hacked, and in that case what happens next year? And what if someone steals the DVD player? Is the whole system compromised?
"I can hardly use my DVD player right now," said one academy member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she didn't want to insult the academy. "I can hardly operate gadgets. And given the general age of the academy members, it's not going to be easy. Everyone thinks this is a train wreck."
Cinea promised 24-hour customer service to help even the most technophobic members figure out how to hook up the machines. And the lure for the studios was a major cost savings over watermarked VHS tapes: Cinea encryption costs about $6 a DVD, while the watermarked video costs $12 to $15 a tape.
For this year, anyway, the question may be moot. With Cinea players still on the assembly line in the Philippines, studios are hastily exploring not just VHS tapes, but also another method of encoding known as DVD-R. But that solution holds only up to two hours of film.
The academy, meanwhile, is taking no position on the matter. "I'm watching as a spectator, with fascination," Mr. Davis said. "It's looking really dicey for this year. We may be looking at something we can put into effect next year."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/16/mo...res/16dvd.html
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Cory Doctorow (the EFF) Interview
EFF Outreach Co-ordinator. Published Author. eBook Pioneer. Cory Doctorow is all of those things and more. Ewan catches up with him and in the first part of his interview, he talks about eBooks, publishing online, and how this new market for authors is developing.
Author: Ewan
Those of you who've had even a passing interest of legal issues and copyrights on the Internet will recognise the name of The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Working for them is Cory Doctorow, a noted commentator for electronic civil liberties, technical policies and standards, and he's one of the most well know public faces of the EFF. He's also causing a lot of people to pay attention to his career as a Sci-Fi novelist as he sits on the bleeding edge of eBooks. Ewan caught up with him after a talk at Edinburgh University.
ePostcards From The Edge
It's easy to find out what Cory's doing now, but what are his roots? "I dropped out of four Universities in two years. The last drop-out was when I went to work for a CD-ROM house in New York. The bottom fell out of that market, and I went through some hoops doing commercial programming and some tech services. I was CIO of a film company, then an ad agency, and eventually co- founded a company, doing an Open Source Peer to Peer(P2P) file transfer program. Once the lawsuits started hitting sites like Napster and Audio Galaxy, our financiers freaked out. We sought good legal advice from the EFF, and when I left the company, I went to the EFF and been there ever since."
"All my experiences have come together in the public speaking role I have with the EFF. We're the guys who made sure you could have cryptographic technology in your browser, and made sure your email couldn't be intercepted without legal permission, to name two things."
As well as the EFF, Cory's an honest to god, been published, got a book out, writer, aren't you? "I sure am. My first book was a non-fiction title, written alongside Karl Schroeder. It was called The Complete Idiot's Guide To Publishing Science Fiction. At that point I was doing a lot of short stories, and that book gave me the confidence to go out and do my first full length novel, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom. I've made the short list for the Nebula Award last year for a short story called 0wnz0red and this year for my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and I just won for the Locus award for the best first novel, as well as the Sunburtst Award for best Canadian Book for my short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More" So it'd be fair to say that the novels are a part of your livelihood and not just a little hobby? "Yeah, sure."
Cory's novels are tailor made for those of us living on the technological edge of the 21st century. His third novel (Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town) is an urban fantasy based around wireless community networking in Toronto. And only a tech- head would understand the work in progress title of usr/bin/god. The former will be out in Feb, 2005, the latter in 2006.
"I'm also looking at a joint project with Charlie Stross about the first multi million dollar heist in a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game." So watch out pocket Kingdom fans. "I'm still doing short stories. The next set are all named after famous science fiction novels as a nose thumbing to Ray Bradbury for claiming Michael Moore was stealing Fahrenheit 9/11 from Farenheit 451. For a champion of free expression to go around calling people crooks for riffing on his titles is madness. So I've just finished two short stories, called "Anda's (Ender's) Game" and "I Robot."
eBooks, Sales and the New Frontier
With all the EFF talk of P2P networks and file sharing, Cory must hear the argument "how would you feel about your novels freely circulating on the internet?" What they fail to realise is Cory's personal website carries the full text of his novels and most of his short story collection as plain text files. "ASCII is the new PDF, that's what I say to them. Hundreds of thousands of copies of my books are in circulation. Half a million downloads of the novels from just my website, plus all the emailed copies, the copies on the P2P networks... it's out there, and yes, it does lend a moral authority to the day job."
So the simple question to Cory is why? Settle down folks, because one thing Cory is good at is going on at great depth on subjects he believes in. And the future of eBooks is one of those subjects. "There are answers that cover the short, medium and long term. Everyone needs to realise that the thing the internet is good at is copying files, especially text files, between different locations. It is not a bug that needs cured, it doesn't need fixed, it's what makes the internet work. More people are reading more words from more screens everyday. It's not going to be long before the majority of text people read is in a digital format."
"If I am going to be a writer, earning a living in the era of digital text, I need to understand where the opportunities are. They won't disappear, they'll just be different, and need to be recognised. In the last days of Vaudeville Theatre, they sued Marconi because radio was killing Vaudeville, where you had to pay to go into a relatively small room to listen to music and voice. But it didn't kill music, the outcome was a thousand times more music, making a thousand times more money, reaching a thousand times more people. But in the short term, there was panic. If digital text will result in hundreds more authors, with hundreds more novels, I need to be in the middle of eBooks. I need to be heavily engaged. All those people downloading my text is good news."
Cory is prone to littering his beliefs with clear examples that easily relate to modern legal problems and practices. the overriding idea is that things change, and every time there is a change the old companies rarely adapt in time, and try to use the law against the innovators. The digital age, with everyone carrying a computer in their pocket, has already started.
"There are people already sharing eBooks out there," Cory continues, "and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me."
"And it is promotion. My publisher, Tor Books, have some modern methods that allow them to make a profit on as little as 3,000 copies of a hardcover novel. The traditional methods would need a print run of 50,000 paperbacks. That means Tor can afford to have tons of first novelists every year on much shorter runs. But then the marketing effort is diluted to cover all those authors. It's not possible to make a good living from being a mid-tier author, just selling in the bookshops. I need to promote myself, with all the tools I have."
"is it any different to loaning a book to someone? There was a book in the US (Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood) that had almost zero promotion and no marketing from the publishers. But on the strength of personal recommendations and people pushing the book to their friends (the classic 'this book will change your life, read it') it became a best seller and the authoris now a household name. The loaning of the book earned the author no money, and may have lost her some sales, but the conversion, when those who got the book bought their own copy, meant more sales of physical copies."
"if I want to enable my readers push copies to their friends, and they're in circles like Slashdot, Wired, Boing Boing, who never meet face to face, just online, well i need to give it to them in a suitable format so they can do whatever they need to do with it. SMS, MMS, Email, FTP, Cut and Paste, P2P, all are valid."
"Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks."
"Finally, in the short term it's really obvious. People need to hear about my book, and if they've found out about it and buy it, I make money. The net cost of eBook distribution from my website is approaching zero. With half a million downloads of Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom, it doesn't matter if my conversion rate is a tiny percentage, it's still doing incredibly well in physical sales. The first print run of 10,000 was sold out in months, and so was the second print run. The hardcover was twice the size of a normal run, and it's on it's second run as we speak. The numbers are modest on the scale of the Internet, but that gives you an idea of what the stakes are in science fiction publication. To raise the stakes, you need to go outside the traditional realm. If I rely on just the bookstore sales, I won't make a living. Putting it online does not put my livelihood at risk, you make a living finding new ways to do business."
Phew. Remember all this has come from a single word question, 'why.' It's hard to put over the enthusiasm Cory shows when talking. None of the above appeared rehearsed, it just poured out of him like liquid gold, stutters, pauses, moments of reflection. But one stream of consciousness. When people say eBooks are going to kill publishing, Cory really does makes it sound like they're the Vaudeville acts he mentioned earlier. I wanted to know what his publishers thought of all this. After all, most publishers would want every single right for themselves.
"Tor sat down and said 'the future of text is digital. We don't know what it'll look like or what the market opportunities are going to be. The stakes with Cory are very low, so why not take the risk?' So my editor (who I met online through the GEnie BBS system, many years ago) thought it was definitely the right time when I broached the subject with him. There was no question that I was the right author. The potential upside of the deal was very promising."
"What Tor and I have found now is that we get advanced notice of everything happening in eBook publishing. When people do research, or write new software, or see the interaction of 14 years olds with eBooks, they can use dummy text (lorem ipsum) which is great for testing but not reading. They can look at a Project Gutenberg text - but all that happens then is they get a 14 year olds reaction to Chaucer. Or they can grab a modern text, designed to be put into new formats and eBook readers. I posted the text as .txt, MS-Word and HTML, under the Creative Commons licence. When someone converts to another format, they post it back on my site. You want a list of every eBook format out there? It's on my site. Students the world over email me and say they used that as the almost definitive list. There's even an Apple Newton version!"
Has it been a success though, I ask. "I don't know," replies Cory. "I don't have another first novel that wasn't pushed electronically to compare it to. But the book itself is doing very well. Looking at other publishers, a good example is Baen Books , who do a lot of multi volume series of books. From experience, they know how much volume 13 should sell based on the sales of boook 12. So when volume 13 comes out, they bundled a CD-Rom with eBook versions of the first 12 books. They also hosted these eBooks online for free. When this happens, the sales of volume 13 were beyond expectation, and volumes 1 through 12 see a bump in sales as well."
"What little empirical evidence is out there points to eBooks and free downloading increases sales on a net basis."
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/featu...cle.php?id=110
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P2P Firm Pitches New Model To Record Labels: Ad-Supported Music Downloads
Ross Fadner
Intent MediaWorks, an Atlanta-based distributor of content over peer-to-peer file- sharing networks, believes that consumers shouldn't have to either pay or face legal trouble for the music and video content they download over peer-to-peer networks. So the technology company presented some major labels with a radical proposal: Let consumers download their clients' music for free, in exchange for receiving ads targeted by their file-sharing behavior.
So far, at least one major record label is in "advanced talks" with Intent MediaWorks, said Les Ottolenghi, Intent's president and CEO. He said that Intent hopes to one day have distribution agreements with all of the major record labels, adding that "the missing ingredient in enabling all of this--until now--was relevant advertising."
Even without major labels, Intent MediaWorks has managed to sign about 500 musicians, videographers, and independent record labels, who have agreed to make their music or videos available for download over peer-to-peer networks, including Grokster and KaZaa. When users request a track by one of Intent MediaWorks' artists, they are prompted by a screen requesting that they either pay for the track or agree to accept sponsored ads.
The program, which started this week, came about after New York-based technology provider Almondnet gave Intent MediaWorks the means to offer peer- to-peer users the choice between paying for ads and accepting targeted advertisements. After users download tracks from Intent's pool of music, Almondnet shows them ads based on their behavior within Intent's peer-to-peer software network. Data is gleaned from user searches and user content downloads only-- Almondnet does not install any software of its own on users' computers. It remains to be seen whether RIAA will encourage its more established members to participate, but Ottolenghi is hopeful that both RIAA and consumers will think that ads are a good exchange for free downloads--especially because so many people continue to download illegally. He reasons that RIAA would rather have music fans see an ad than not pay in any form, and that users would rather agree to view ads than risk prosecution for copyright infringement.
In the last 12 months, the number of households with a member using peer-to-peer to download free music has ranged from 4.7 million to 6.4 million per month, with generally higher levels of activity since March 2004, according to the music industry research firm The NPD Group.
Conversely, the number of consumers paying for downloads reached a peak of 1.3 million in April 2004, and have since fallen. Russ Crupnick, vice president of The NPD Group, said that while the industry had expected steadily increasing demand for paid music services, the number of downloads has now diminished to around one million downloads per month.
"Our research suggests that at this stage of the business, it's not so much about building share as it is about creating demand for paid downloads universally," Crupnick said of the individual paid music service vendors.
RIAA did not respond to requests for comment.
http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_ne...?newsID=273811
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The End User: New Key, Old Tune
Victoria Shannon
PARIS - Now that legal online music downloading services are available, easy, affordable and legally selling tunes around the world, the big tussles over the future of digital music that began with the old Napster are over, right? Wrong.
"We are at the very, very beginnings of what this is all about," Jay Berman, chairman of the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the global trade group for recording labels, said in a chat with journalists this week in Paris.
Hashing out some of the digital rights issues over the past two years only cleared some of the brush away. "We still don't know what the consumer is prepared to do in the way he consumes and pays for music in this environment," Berman said. "What we do know is that technology has made it possible for more people to have more access to more music in more ways than ever before."
Technology and music have long intersected, from the electric guitar and the jukebox onward. But today, the partnership goes deeper. Under-30-year-olds no longer want a stereo system; they want a fat hard drive and smart software. This is how music comes to them.
In this new world, developments are still unfolding. So far this month:
A German peer-to-peer network, eDonkey, has taken over from Kazaa as the world's most populous file-sharing group, according to a report at the geek site Slashdot. These P2P networks are where most of the free trading of copyrighted music takes place. EDonkey has long been one of the most visited Web pages each month in Germany, right up there with Yahoo and Microsoft sites.
Not coincidentally, Germany and users of eDonkey, Kazaa and Gnutella were singled out with new lawsuits in Europe last week by the recording industry against 459 groups and individuals accused of sharing their music collections illegally.
Berman's group, the IFPI, reported the wildly positive news that music sales worldwide fell 1.3 percent, to $13.9 billion, in the first half of 2004 and that unit sales rose 1.7 percent, to 1.22 billion. Not impressed? Compared with an 11 percent drop the first half last year, this is good cheer for record labels. The federation gives some credit to its legal crackdown and the success of official online music merchants.
In Europe, sales declined 7.7 percent. Slight gains in Britain were offset by losses in France, Italy and Spain. Germany fell 5.2 percent.
Apple Computer, the unlikely digital music market leader, said it was expanding its iTunes Music Store in Europe with an English-language site that would accept credit cards from outside Britain, France and Germany, where it already operates local versions.
Napster UK said it would sell, through Dixons consumer electronics stores and other retail chains, scratch-off cards that serve as both credit cards and gift certificates for buying online music.
MSN started a music download site in Japan to compete with an offering affiliated with Sony and is preparing to reintroduce its European service, which is now a partnership with On Demand Distribution.
While some huge hurdles to making money on digitized music have been overcome, the long-term trends in music commerce still aren't clear. Each of these moves is still testing the market - and trying to find an audience of buyers.
Berman also said the trade group was starting to pressure technology companies to make all music sold work with any digital player sold. Right now, many say that incompatibilities are an unresolved conflict that could be holding back a mass market in digital music sales.
There is another mass market on the horizon: Officials at Warner Music and other labels are predicting the first sales of full-length song downloads to mobile phones by year's end.
Eric Daugan, Warner's new media director in France, sees a different audience for this mobile music than for the typical iPod-like player, which can hold thousands of songs. "That's for music nerds like me," he said. "Now we're looking at the 70 percent of the population that always carries a mobile phone."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/...s/ptend16.html
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Google's New PC Search Tool Poses Risks
AP
People who use public or workplace computers for e-mail, instant messaging and Web searching have a new privacy risk to worry about
: Google's free new tool that indexes a PC's contents for quickly locating data.
If it's installed on computers at libraries and Internet cafes, users could unwittingly allow people who follow them on the PCs, for example, to see sensitive information in e- mails they've exchanged. That could mean revealed passwords, conversations with doctors, or viewed Web pages detailing online purchases.
``It's clearly a very powerful tool for locating information on the computer,'' said Richard M. Smith, a privacy and security consultant in Cambridge, Mass. ``On the flip side of things, it's a perfect spy program.''
Google Desktop Search, publicly released Thursday in a ``beta'' test phase for computers running the latest Windows operating systems, automatically records e-mail you read through Outlook, Outlook Express or the Internet Explorer browser. It also saves copies of Web pages you view through IE and chat conversations using America Online Inc.'s instant-messaging software. And it finds Word, Excel and PowerPoint files stored on the computer.
If you're the computer's only user, the software is helpful ``as a photographic memory of everything you've seen on the computer,'' said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products at Google Inc.
The giant index remains on the computer and isn't shared with Google. The company can't access it remotely even if it gets a subpoena ordering it to do so, Mayer said.
Where the privacy and security concerns arise is when the computer is shared.
Type in ``hotmail.com'' and you'll get copies, or stored caches, of messages that previous users have seen. Enter an e-mail address and you can read all the messages sent to and from that address. Type ``password'' and get password reminders that were sent back via e-mail.
Acknowledging the concerns, Mayer said managers of shared computers should think twice about installing the software until Google develops advanced features like password protection and multi-user support.
In the meantime, users of shared PCs can look for telltale signs.
A multicolored swirl in the system tray at the lower right corner of the computer desktop means the software is running. A user can right-click on that to exit the program -- thereby preventing it from recording Web surfing, e-mail and chat sessions.
Users can also surf on non-IE browsers like Opera and Mozilla, although the software may index Web pages already stored before the software gets installed.
Managers of public access terminals can also install software or deny users administrative privileges so they can't install unauthorized programs, such as Google's. In fact, many libraries and cybercafes already do so.
Herb Jones, owner of Herb's Cyber Cafe in Oblong, Ill., tried out the desktop search program on his computer and likes it -- but he won't install it on his two public terminals. In fact, he's written software to prevent customers from installing programs like it.
``Otherwise, they can put on their own files if they want, a worm, a virus, anything, and you're shut down,'' Jones said.
The FedEx Kinko's chain is also taking preventive measures. It's deploying software designed to automatically refresh its public access terminals to a virgin state for each new customer. So any errant software would disappear, as would any personal settings, files or Web caches, said Maggie Thill, a spokeswoman with FedEx Kinko's.
But policies do vary, and no precaution is foolproof, warned Carol Brey-Casiano, president of the American Library Association and director of public libraries in El Paso, Texas.
``We do our best to protect our patrons and computers and network, but as you can imagine, thousands of people can use public computers in a given week,'' she said.
The new Google tool would not only aid people in spying on past patrons on public PCs. At home, users could record their kids' instant messaging conversations or view a spouse's e-mail. In the office, employers could index what their workers are up to.
If each user has a separate logon to Windows, Google Desktop Search will be stymied, however. That's because only one person can install and use the software on a given computer.
The power of Google's software relies on centralizing what's already saved on computers; most browsers, for instance, have a built-in cache that keeps copies of Web pages recently visited. The difference is that Google's index is permanent, though users can delete items individually. And the software makes all the items easier to find.
The software can also betray users, said Annalee Newitz, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Delete an e-mail or file, yet a copy remains on Google's index.
Neel Mehta, leader of the X-Force research and development team at Internet Security Systems Inc., said the threats are real, though there are plenty of other products available for spying -- ones better at doing the recording secretly.
``It's not designed to be an illicitous tool,'' Mehta said of the Google software. ``It's designed to be a search engine.''
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...0with%20Google
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Peer-To-Peer Comes Clean
They're not just for file-sharing anymore: P2P networks are transmitting phone calls, blocking spam, backing up hard drives, and spreading scholarship.
Simson Garfinkel
Despite ongoing efforts to blackball it, peer-to-peer technology is fast gaining ground. P2P gets its bad reputation for being the mechanism that powers those massive copyright-violation systems like Kazaa and Morpheus. But as I wrote a year ago in this space, this technology can be used for good: It has the power to strengthen the Internet against terrorist attack, allow even the smallest publishers to distribute information to the multitudes, and protect controversial information against censorship and suppression.What I did not anticipate a year ago was that the most important peer-to-peer application to emerge in 2004 would be telephony. Yet that's what happened with Skype, the bandit Internet voice telephony system that has served more than 1.7 billion minutes of peer-to-peer telephone calls since its debut in August 2003.
But Skype is just one of several emerging peer-to-peer systems. Another is LionShare, a project started by Penn State University with a grant from the Mellon Foundation to create a series of networks for sharing scholarly information among academics. The system is designed to let individuals index and otherwise manage their personal files, then make these files available throughout a P2P network.
“Many instructors, scholars, researchers, and librarians across higher education institutions have ‘hidden' repositories of digital content used for teaching, research, and outreach stored on their networks or even individual hard drives,” reads the LionShare grant proposal. The goal of LionShare is to open up this content into a federated search system so that “a single search query [could] reach all available repositories,” allowing academics to share photographs, sounds, instructional videos, and even PowerPoint presentations to a degree never before possible.
Of course, professors could just put their materials on websites and let Google handle it all. But as anybody who has tried this knows, there is no easy way to specifically ask Google for contemporaneous photographs of Victorian houses in New England, authenticated by architectural experts, and available for royalty-free use in academic publications. The problem here is that Google does a lousy job with metadata and other kinds of catalog information--the sort of stuff that makes and breaks academic careers. LionShare will give researchers a tool for cataloging their own collections and then export those catalogs throughout academia.
There are a number of other potentially great P2P systems out there as well. BitTorrent, by Bram Cohen, is designed to let small software publishers distribute their wares to a large eager audience. Instead of hosting popular downloads on hugely expensive server farms, the idea of Bittorrent is to replicate popular downloads across hundreds or thousands of individually owned PCs. Think of it as Akamai for the little guy: in theory there shouldn't be any danger in copying files to multiple machines that you don't own, provided that every file is digitally signed. Unfortunately, it's beginning to look like the project has stalled. Still, the idea is fundamentally sound and it's sure to be extended in the coming years.
And then there's a clever peer-to-peer system called Vipul's Razor, which is being used to filter spam. A small software agent runs on every computer attached to the network. This agent detects when e-mail arrives. The theory is that if the same message appears in multiple locations at more-or-less the same time, it's probably spam. This approach is an excellent complement to content-based anti-spam systems: the content systems identify spam that looks like spam, while Razor identifies mail that is sent the way spam is typically sent, no matter what it looks like. Support for Razor is built in to the popular SpamAssassin anti-spam system. In an examination of my spam from September, Razor identified one out of three spam messages--pretty good considering that it doesn't use any keywords at all.
Peer-to-peer has been an active area of academic research as well. Much of the research has focused on trying to create so-called “distributed hash tables,” or DHTs—databases that are shared between multiple computers all over the Internet. The best systems automatically find the computers on the Net that are part of the DHT, store data on redundantly on multiple machines, use digital signatures and encryption to protect the information, and even include distributed reputation, trust, and payment systems to keep all of the participants honest and motivated. This sounds like just the sort of technology that companies like Kazaa should be gaga over. Strangely, however, most of the bandit MP3 networks have stayed away from the academic DHTs and have installed their own systems.
Fortunately, many academics are trying to push their research more toward real-world applications. In August, for instance, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers held its Fourth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing in Zurich, Switzerland. Among the highly technical presentations were papers on how to make unstructured peer-to-peer networks really big, more techniques for securing peer-to-peer systems against attack, techniques for squeezing more functionality out of less bandwidth, and how to build P2P networks that respond to changes in the underlying Internet. Though highly technical the papers nevertheless make interesting reading—especially if you are an entrepreneur looking for a new company idea.
Indeed, there are plenty of other peer-to-peer applications waiting out there in the wings, perhaps getting ready to be the next Skype. A few weeks ago, for instance, MIT graduate Tim Macinta put out the first beta version of Magic Mirror Backup, a peer-to-peer system that automatically backs up computers throughout your home or office to each other. (Various alpha versions of Magic Mirror have been in circulation for about a year.) The idea is to put all of those unused gigabytes on your various hard drives to use backing up each other. And last year Microsoft published a “Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Software Development Kit,” which, the company says, “contains all software required to create decentralized applications that harness the collective power of edge of the network PCs.” I haven't yet heard of anything that was created with it, but perhaps next year we will all be astonished.
Most people who use the Internet today are accustomed to the idea that there are low-cost clients on people's desktops and expensive servers closeted away in expensive “telecom hotels” with high-quality power and lots of bandwidth, there is nothing inherently client-server in the Internet's underlying architecture or design. As Internet service providers deliver more bandwidth to homes and small businesses, and as desktop hard drives grow ever larger in size, we are sure to see more approaches for harnessing these underutilized resources.
In the future, peer-to-peer may be the norm, and we may look back at today's client-server systems as some sort of weird, unreliable, transitory technology.
http://www.wtov9.com/technology/3832595/detail.html
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Digital Movie Forecast: BitTorrential Downpour
Use of a peer-to-peer program called BitTorrent is way up--and that could be bad news for opponents of file sharing.
Eric Hellweg
It’s been pretty busy on the digital music front of late, with the U.S. Supreme Court declining to hear a case that might have forced Internet Service Providers to expose the identities of people sued by the recording industry. Most of these lawsuits are now filed against “John Doe.” The decision was a big blow to the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry’s lobbying group. The RIAA downplayed the news, however, saying that the court’s decision “will not deter our ongoing anti-piracy efforts. The John Doe litigation process we have successfully utilized this year continues to be an effective legal tool.”
Despite the music industry’s tireless efforts to litigate away the file-sharing threat, a new group of peer-to-peer (P2P) programs is replacing the older, lawsuit-targeted models—and none are growing as fast as a program called BitTorrent. According to CacheLogic, a P2P traffic-monitoring company based in Cambridge, England, more data is now being transferred via BitTorrent than by any other P2P network worldwide—and its share is rising.
BitTorrent was created three years ago by programmer Bram Cohen, who came up with the idea while working on an open source content-distribution project called Mojo Nation. BitTorrent relies on a concept called “swarming distribution,” in which files such as movies and songs aren’t transferred in one piece from one person’s hard drive to another. Rather, small bits of a file are pulled from many users’ hard drives and reassembled by the program on the requester’s computer.
Say you wanted to download the film “Donnie Darko.” You’d find a BitTorrent-related website such as Filesoup or TVTorrents and click on the movie’s link. Instead of that click facilitating a transfer of the file from one user’s computer to your own (how Kazaa and others work), BitTorrent swarms its network to pull small pieces of the file from sometimes thousands of computers. This enormous collection effort is invisible to the user—there’s no assembly required, you might say. The only difference the user would notice is that the file arrives a lot faster than on most file-sharing services, since it comes as a collection of short bursts instead of in one laborious transfer. It’s as if a thousand people put together a jigsaw puzzle, with each person knowing exactly where his or her piece went.
And unlike Kazaa, or Napster before it, BitTorrent has no central interface through which users can search for files. “Programming a good search interface was pretty tough,” says Cohen, who lives in the Seattle area. “I decided to make it someone else’s problem.” As a result, a burgeoning network of websites provides the list of files available. Instead of calling up a program like Kazaa and typing in “Planets West” to find that band’s music, a BitTorrent user searches through BitTorrent-related sites. Once the desired file is found, the user starts downloading it from multiple other users at once. Another interesting feature of BitTorrent—as soon as you download a piece of a file to your computer, that piece becomes available for others to download as well. This element increases the size of the network, and the speed of downloading.
BitTorrent’s growing popularity, and the way in which it works, may bode ill for the entertainment industry’s efforts to crack down on file trading. Perhaps most troubling for Hollywood: “BitTorrent is optimized to handle large files,” says Jim Graham, a spokesperson for BayTSP, a firm that monitors and analyzes peer- to-peer networks. “And that’s code for movies and software.” Most P2P services allow individuals to swap files with other individuals. If the sought-after file is a 2-gigabyte movie, it can take an awfully long time to upload from an individual’s computer for transfer. With BitTorrent, each user only has to upload a small segment of a file. This approach not only takes far less time, it is also less prone to encountering an error along the way--such as a user turning off his computer mid-transfer.
The music and movie companies have yet to launch an anti-BitTorrent effort on the scale of the wars waged against Napster and Kazaa. But don’t expect the industry to let BitTorrent go unlitigated for much longer. When asked via e-mail if the RIAA had any plans to go after the service or had a message for its creator, a spokesperson for the group said only, “We don't discuss (or handicap) our future enforcement strategies or plans.”
According to Cohen, the BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 10 million times. While the predominant use of the program thus far has been for swapping copyrighted material, legitimate uses of swarming distribution are appearing as well. Game companies are using BitTorrent, says Cohen, to distribute demos ahead of an official release to generate interest in a title. Given the lack of a searchable interface, BitTorrent isn’t optimized for wide-spread illegal distribution. “It’s poorly suited to be a warez tool,” says Cohen (warez is slang for copyrighted digital content illicitly distributed online). “You have to be very obvious. It’s easy to track you down. The website you download from is quite visible.” The lack of BitTorrent-related busts to date may be a result of the RIAA’s interest being elsewhere. But with the advantages BitTorrent technology brings to file transfers, expect to see content companies co-opting it in some form.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...lweg101904.asp
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Power on a Chip
Batteries are heavy and inconvenient. Their successors could be tiny jet engines that provide more than enough power for cell phones and PDAs.
David H. Freedman
Alan Epstein is quick to tell you he's a "jet engine guy" - just in case you haven’t guessed as much from the turbine engine parts strewn around his office or the museum on his lab’s ground floor, which includes a rare example of a 1944 German engine that helped kick off the jet age. For the director of MIT’s Gas Turbine Laboratory, who stands a slightly stooped five foot six, the fascination has to do with raw power. “The engines on a Boeing 747 shove air through at Mach 1 with 120,000 pounds of force,” says Epstein. “The engines on three 747s put out as much power as a nuclear power plant.”
Gas turbines powered much of 20th-century technology, from commercial and military aircraft to the large gas-fired plants that helped supply U.S. electricity. But these days it isn’t the hulking machines in the lab’s museum that capture Epstein’s enthusiasm. Instead it’s a jet engine shrunk to about the size of a coat button that sits on the corner of his desk. It’s a Lilliputian version of the multiton jet engines that changed air travel, and, he believes, it could be key to powering 21st-century technology.
Though the turbine’s blades span an area smaller than a dime, they spin at more than a million revolutions per minute and are designed to produce enough electricity to power handheld electronics. In the foreseeable future, Epstein expects, his tiny turbines will serve as a battery replacement, first for soldiers and then for consumers. But he has an even more ambitious vision: that small clusters of the engines could serve as home generating plants, freeing consumers from the power grid, with its occasional black- and brownouts. The technology could be especially useful in poor countries and remote areas that lack extensive and reliable grids for distributing electricity. A comparison to how the continuous shrinkage of the integrated circuit drove the microelectronic revolution is tempting. “Just as PCs pushed the computing infrastructure out to users, microengines could push the energy infrastructure of society out to users,” says Epstein.
Epstein’s immediate goal, however, is to use these miniature engines as a cheap and efficient alternative to batteries for cell phones, digital cameras, PDAs, laptop computers, and other portable electronic devices. The motivation is simple: batteries are heavy and expensive and require frequent recharging. And they don’t produce much electricity, for all their size and weight.
The consequences of these failings go beyond consumer inconvenience. Today’s soldiers are often forced to lug around brick-sized batteries to power their high-tech gear. And hamstrung by short-lived power supplies, designers of next-generation electronics are frequently forced to leave out energy-hungry improvements and features like bigger, brighter screens and more powerful processors. Take, for example, the “ultimate PDA” from Frog Design, a Sunnyvale, CA–based firm specializing in industrial design. The device combines multiple cell-phone and Wi-Fi radio protocols, GPS location, a projection screen, the functionality of a laptop, and the ability to browse through video libraries and play full-length movies. But it exists only as a mock-up; it would drain any reasonably sized battery in half an hour. With functions like GPS location and radio communications, “you’re just eating through batteries,” says Valerie Casey at Frog Design.
A micro gas turbine engine would change all that. It could run for ten or more hours on a container of diesel fuel slightly larger than a D battery; when the fuel cartridge ran out, a new one could be easily swapped in. Each disposable cartridge would pack as much energy as a few heavy handfuls of lithium-ion batteries. As a result, a small pack of the cheap and light cartridges could power a PDA or cell phone through several days of heavy usage, no wall-outlet recharging required—a highly attractive feature for soldiers in remote locations or travelers. What’s more, the miniature turbine takes up about a quarter of the volume of a typical cell-phone battery.
Not that a micro engine is without drawbacks. It would shoot a tiny stream of hot exhaust gas, for one thing, making it more suitable for devices clipped to belts or carried in briefcases than for those stuffed in pockets. The engine itself would get hot, though an exhaust suppressor would easily keep devices from getting much warmer than they do today. But for many energy-hungry applications, says Epstein, a tiny turbine’s remarkable power output would far outweigh any disadvantages. Suggests Epstein, “You don’t need a very good jet engine to do better than batteries.”
Grounded
Epstein started thinking about building a jet engine on a chip nearly a decade ago. At the time, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) were picking up speed. Techniques had emerged for carving new types of features into the surfaces of slabs of silicon, including sealed chambers and pipes and moving parts like spinning wheels—most of the parts needed for a gas turbine engine. Less clear at first was what one would do with a miniature fuel-burning engine. “We thought we’d be able to get the cost way down if we could figure out a reason for needing a lot of them,” says Epstein. “But the only thing we could see doing with tiny engines was flying tiny airplanes, and that seemed stupid. Of course, we hadn’t counted on the DoD.”
Sure enough, the U.S. military was suddenly gung ho over the idea of 15-centimeter-long planes that could carry small cameras for surveillance. The engineers at Epstein’s lab were somewhat less enthusiastic; they suspected that getting jet chips that were airworthy would take a couple of decades. Then Epstein latched onto a more immediate military need: freeing soldiers from the batteries that many of them have to lug around to power radios, GPS receivers, night-vision goggles, and other gadgets. And unlike a miniature aircraft engine, a battery-replacing jet chip would have enormous commercial potential.
Other materials scientists and engineers were already beginning to work on ways to shrink power-producing machines to supplement or replace batteries, creating a new field called “power MEMS.” The most popular approach involved shrinking fuel cells, which typically pass hydrogen through a membrane that pulls electrons out to create an electric current. But Epstein was convinced gas turbines were a better way to go, because of their unmatched ability to wring power out of hydrocarbon fuels. The technology becomes even more appealing where minimizing weight and volume is critical, as with portable devices. A jet chip would be at most half the size of a micro fuel cell of equal energy capacity. A gas turbine should also be relatively easy to fabricate, figured Epstein, because it could be built entirely out of silicon, using standard fabrication techniques.
Though Epstein envisioned his micro version working roughly the same way a conventional gas turbine does, much about micro jet engines was a mystery. Would silicon crumble under 1,300 °C temperatures? Could microscopic bearings handle a million-plus revolutions per minute? With funding from the U.S. military, Epstein tapped into the expertise of neighboring MIT labs in fluid mechanics, materials science, structural engineering, and microfabrication. The project team eventually swelled to dozens of researchers, including Mark Spearing, a materials engineer charged with finding ways to keep the silicon microstructures intact under furious heat and pressure. “Most MEMS chips involve etching small structures up to 10 microns tall,” says Spearing. “We were going to parts that are hundreds of microns tall.”
In Hand
Earlier this year, Epstein and his coworkers finished making engines in which each of the individual parts functions: the combustion chamber burns fuel, and the turbine blades spin. The resulting device is sealed all around, with holes on the top and bottom for air intake, fuel intake and exhaust. One shortcoming: it doesn’t run continuously. The obstacle, says Epstein, is imperfections that imbalance the blades and cause them to wobble. “We think we know what to do to correct it,” he says. “The problem is that it takes three months to get new parts when you make an adjustment, so we’re just waiting for the new parts.” Epstein predicts the chip will be functioning within months—a little ahead of schedule. Spearing estimates a version capable of putting out enough power to run devices would take two to three years more, with another year or two beyond that to produce a marketable version.
That means conceding an early lead in the power MEMS race to fuel cells, which are already hitting the market. Albany, NY–based MTI Micro Fuel Cells is preparing to launch one the size of a deck of cards for use in handheld industrial devices such as radio-frequency ID-tag readers and has plans to roll out a slightly smaller version for cell phones, PDAs, and digital cameras. Medis Technologies of New York City intends to sell a $20 disposable micro fuel cell next year.
“Our competition is fuel cells, absolutely,” says Epstein. But he insists that turbine chips can make up any lost ground. “Up to now a few million dollars has been invested in microturbines, compared to the billions invested in fuel cells,” he points out. Epstein’s faith is fueled by the inherent advantages he sees in turbines. Even micro fuel cells are larger, and they’re much more finicky about fuel than a turbine engine. But in the end, it all comes down to power. Most micro fuel cells struggle to put out a watt or two, while Epstein’s prototypes could provide 15 to 20 watts, more than enough to keep a power-hungry handheld device going. Laptop computers can require 50 watts, but a few turbines working together could easily pump that much power out. Likewise, Epstein envisions that a cluster of tiny engines, each capable of producing up to a hundred watts, could supply a home with an efficient and reliable source of electricity.
That switchover will surely take time. But Epstein sees it as the natural extension of the remarkable progress jet engines have made throughout the second half of the 20th century, from the novel fighter planes that appeared in World War II to the behemoth engines that power today’s jumbo jets. And though Epstein predicts that, from an engineer’s point of view, his tiny chip-based turbines will initially perform more like the pioneering jets of the 1940s than like today’s superefficient gas turbines, he is fully confident in the technology’s vast potential to evolve. Indeed, the aging engines in his lab’s museum are an ever present reminder of the gas turbine’s awesome power.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...eedman1104.asp
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Digital TV Finds It Hard to be Free
Broadcasters have spent billions on the technology--but is free over-the-air digital TV a viable alternative to cable and satellite?
Deborah Asbrand
FCC chairman Michael Powell's once-in-a-blue-moon halftime appearance on ABC's Monday Night Football was a bid to publicize the commission's new website promoting digital television. But Powell's cameo was also notable for capturing the dilemma of broadcast DTV. The push for digital TV originated with broadcasters as a quest for a marketing edge—a way to endow over-the-air offerings with features like multicasting and on-demand programming and thus better compete with cable and satellite. But with the decreasing importance of the networks and their local affiliates, broadcast digital TV remains a multibillion-dollar venture in search of an audience.
Take Monday Night Football. ABC broadcasts the popular show in high-definition. But most of the high-definition viewers caught Powell's appearance on the October 4 broadcast over cable or satellite. A mere four million of the nation's 110 million television sets are equipped with the HDTV tuners that can receive digital broadcasts over the terrestrial airwaves, says Gerry Kaufhold, an analyst who covers converging markets and technologies for In-Stat/MDR in Scottsdale, AZ. Those sets are HDTV models equipped with built-in receivers, or TV sets connected to set-top boxes that are either standalone models capable of tuning in local over-the-air broadcast HDTV, or boxes sold by satellite operators that include an antenna input to pick up local HDTV.
To broadcasters, who Kaufhold estimates have spent $10 billion to build out digital infrastructures that will transmit their programming signals in bits, four million is a puny audience. The tiny number of viewers capable of receiving the sharp sound and crisp picture of broadcasters' swank new digital offerings helps explain why broadcasters are reluctant to abandon their analog programming--and the analog channel over which they broadcast it.
Critics say the broadcasters' efforts to delay the handover are creating a spectrum logjam that prevents public-safety communications and wireless carriers from acquiring much needed additional bandwidth. Overshadowed in the policy debate and digital TV's slow start is the question of broadcasters' relevance. With 90 percent of households now subscribing to cable or satellite service, many question whether broadcasters still play the essential role that was conferred on them long before shopping for a TV required being able to sift through aspect ratios and nuances of the ATSC standard.
From any point of view, broadcasters have a sweet deal. They are considered trustees of the public airwaves, and so--unlike broadband carriers--they don't pay for the vast amounts of spectrum they use. Nor do they pay for the additional channel, or 6 megahertz of spectrum, that the FCC loaned each station for use while it completes its transition from analog to digital programming.
In recent weeks the broadcasters' position has clashed with the Federal Communications Commission, the Senate Commerce Committee, and even the 9/
11 Commission. The FCC is anxious to recover the loaned spectrum so it can divvy up the channels. The commission plans to parcel some to public-safety networks -- an imperative seconded by the 9/11 Commission Report -- and auction off the rest to wireless broadband carriers in a bid to both spur new technologies and bring much needed revenue to federal coffers. Auctioning off the publicly owned analog spectrum could reap $30 billion to $40 billion, according to the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.
Legislation filed last month by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) sought to set a 2008 end-date for the digital handover--that is, the point at which conventional analog TV sets would go dark. To ensure that no analog TV owners were left behind, McCain's bill reserves a portion of the resulting auction proceeds as a subsidy toward the purchase of conversion devices. Broadcast lobbyists diluted the bill with an amendment that voids the end date if too much "consumer disruption" will ensue – a loophole big enough to push a 52-inch TV set through. The FCC still hopes to see the handover occur Dec. 31, 2006, the date set by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.
But for all the billions of dollars that broadcasters have spent and the controversy over their copious use of public airwaves—former FCC chairman William Kennard referred to it as "spectrum squatting"—there’s still doubt about whether broadcast digital television has a viable future. Skeptics say that the dominance of cable and satellite TV services makes the fuss over broadcast DTV moot. They point out that subscribers already receive digital signals, though the picture-quality benefits are diminished when viewed on sets without digital or HDTV tuners.
Believers in broadcast DTV think there is room for a free, or at least inexpensive, alternative to cable and satellite. Already 1,315 broadcast stations are offering digital programming, according to the National Association of Broadcasters. Broadcasters are especially interested in multicasting, which uses data compression technology to transmit several programs over a single digital channel, and on-demand programming. "In some cases, they're already experimenting with local cable companies," says Phillip Swann, publisher of TVPredictions.com. "NBC is doing on-demand experimentation with Comcast in certain cities." But at this point, says Swann, it's too early for the networks and their local stations to develop and launch a full-fledged DTV business, and it might preempt partnerships with cable.
Finding new revenue models beyond advertising is also a challenge for broadcasters. But digital TV's two-way and clickable channels will entice new targeted advertising beyond the traditional one-to-many style, says Jeffrey Hart, a professor of political science at Indiana University and author of Technology, Television and Competition: The Politics of Digital TV.
Will broadcasters consider a subscription model for some of their enhanced digital terrestrial TV services? Swann says the combination of the networks' television libraries along with the digital format's versatility puts broadcasters in a position to do just that. NBC, for example, could package access to its inventory of shows, letting viewers choose to watch, say, the first episode of the "Tonight Show" and then the 1988 summer Olympics in Seoul. "There's potentially a huge amount of revenue that could be generated from that one digital feed," says Swann. "Local broadcasters are more relevant than they every have been. And in ways more powerful because they have more feeds and more influence" through the strength of the broadcast lobby.
Hart notes that both money and democracy will always leave room for broadcast DTV. "Local TV broadcasting, to the extent it remains an important part of U.S. life, will continue, but the economic models will have to change a bit,” he says, adding that the idea of free local TV is part of the fabric of U.S. communications policy. "The issue of democratic citizenship is always there. We know people get political information from TV. It may not always be high quality, but it's there. So there is an argument to be made on a democratic basis that free has to be made accessible."
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...rand101404.asp
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DAVETV Announces Internet TV Broadcast Network; New Set Top Box and PC Software Platform First to Bring Mainstream & Original P2P Content to Your TV
Press Release
As the rush continues to bring the Internet's vast catalogue of audio-visual content from your computer monitor to your television screen, one company today takes the burgeoning industry a step farther by combining mainstream programming with original, end-user-generated content. An acronym for Distributed Audio Video Entertainment, DAVETV is a new kind of television broadcast network offering not only traditional programming such as movies, music, music videos and sports, but also new original content self-published by end users using DAVETV's secure peer-to-peer networking system.
The first part of this unique approach to couch based Web entertainment is a PC-based software package called the DAVE Media Center
(DMC), that will be available for free download this November at
www.dave.tv. The DMC is DAVETV's content publishing center and is used to download and catalog thousands of rights secured videos, films, photos, songs and games for playback on your PC or on your TV via DAVETV's digital media receiver, the Xport(TM).
With the DAVE Media Center, publishers can choose from a wide variety of business and DRM rules to publish, protect and monetize their content. The network has the potential for a virtually unlimited number of channels, in the same way the Internet has spawned millions of websites. "Publishers can set their own price or serve their own market-targeted ads, it's up to them," says Oliver Eberle, DAVETV's Executive Vice President & CIO. Eberle, a software developer and entertainment industry veteran, founded ShowBIZ Data and produced several successful feature films, including "Stargate" and "Universal Soldier."
Bringing traditional and self-published content into the living room is DAVETV's set-top Xport digital media receiver that connects between your television and an existing broadband connection. The Xport is the first device of its kind to use a secure peer-to-peer networking to deliver on demand content with High Definition quality directly from the Internet and will offer more than 30,000 hours of content upon release Jan. 6th at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The Windows CE 5.0 device incorporates an 80-gig hard drive that stores 200 hours of TV quality video, with no expected monthly service fees -- all content will be available "a la carte."
Ken Lipscomb, the former CEO of ZapMedia, developed the DAVETV Internet-to-TV broadcast system. Lipscomb, who created the industry's first Web/TV convergence device, the ZapStation(TM) back in 2000, says, "Ours is the first copyright friendly distributed network that is designed around Windows Media 9 and Microsoft DRM. Our P2P networking system not only delivers content faster and more efficiently than centralized content delivery platforms, but was designed with the content owners' rights in mind.
"Creating worldwide content communities empowered to monetize their creations is our overarching mission," adds Lipscomb. "Providing the means to self publish is as crucial as our efforts in securing commercially viable and popular content."
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en
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Saved!
There are plenty of ways to back up your data. So no more excuses.
Simson Garfinkel
My twins love cd-roms but don’t know how to take care of them. They destroyed their prized copies of Dr. Seuss’s ABCs and Arthur’s Birthday, two discs that Broderbund’s wizards made back in the 1990s. I tried polishing the CDs and largely failed. So I threw them away and burned myself new ones.
Copying CDs is an activity that most people associate with illegal music distribution and downloading. But there’s nothing wrong, morally or even legally, with making backup copies of my own CD-ROMs for my own use—provided that I don’t start sharing those backups with all of my friends.
The easiest way to back up a CD or CD-ROM is to copy its contents onto a recordable CD (CD-R). The danger with this approach is that CD-Rs are more fragile than commercial CD-ROMs: many have thinner-than-paper labels that are easily damaged, especially by little hands. Moreover, most CD-Rs are not archival, meaning that they can lose data as they age and deteriorate. But the biggest danger with archiving a CD on a CD-R is that it is simply too tempting to use the backup when the original dies—rather than making a copy of the copy.
Instead, I prefer to “rip” the CD-ROM, making a byte-for-byte copy of the entire disc on a 200-gigabyte hard drive that I keep specifically for this purpose. There are several disk-imaging tools available to do the copying; on my Mac, I use Apple’s own Disk Utility, while on Windows, I use WinImage 6.1. These programs create a single file that’s several hundred megabytes long. When the CD-ROM is inevitably damaged, I burn the image onto a fresh CD-R.
Computer hard drives die as well, of course. In the old days the standard way to back up a disk drive was onto magnetic tape. These days if you’re storing less than a few terabytes, it’s cheaper per gigabyte to buy external hard drives with USB or Firewire interfaces than to buy high-capacity magnetic tapes and drives. Although tape should be cheaper, disk drives have economies of scale in their favor. So I actually have two 200-gigabyte hard drives; each backs up the other.
Children’s CDs are just a few of the CD-ROM images that I have sitting on these drives. I also image practically every piece of commercial software that I
buy, as well as those “installers” that I download when I purchase software over the Internet. That way I can uninstall and reinstall the software if something goes wrong—or when I buy a new computer system. (It’s also important to save the corresponding activation codes.)
One of the problems that I’ve noticed with children’s old CD-ROMs is that many of them won’t run under Windows XP, Mac OS 10.3, or other modern operating systems. So in addition to archiving the CD-ROMs themselves, I’ve also taken to archiving all of my old Microsoft and Apple operating systems. When the hard drive on the kids’ computer died last year, I reinstalled a copy of Windows 98, and they were up and running by the end of the weekend.
Backups are a problem for information stored not just on CD-ROMs but also on computer hard drives. Back in the bad old days of computing—say, ten years ago—most small-business users and many home computer owners religiously made backups of their data. But in recent years, hard drives have become so reliable that many people have simply stopped making backups. Alas, living without backups is living dangerously, as there are many potential ways to lose your data: fire, flood, thieves, software crashes, errant spyware—and, of course, the biggest threat of all: human error.
Now that we are all living in the 21st century, backing up computers is a chore that no one should be forced to remember. I’ve taken care of this by programming all of my computers to back themselves up automatically. A script that runs every night copies the contents of my documents directory to a different Zip file on that same oversized external hard drive. This backup proved to be invaluable this past summer, when my computer crashed while I was running Quicken, and the program’s database was corrupted. And my Zip archives, in turn, are automatically copied from my home computer to a computer sitting under my desk at MIT—just in case my home and its contents are suddenly wiped out.
A few years ago I designed a peer-to-peer backup system based on this concept. The idea was to let businesses back up their servers, desktops, and laptops onto the spare disk space scattered throughout their offices. The network would automatically keep track of what had been backed up and where— and, of course, everything backed up would be encrypted to prevent accidental data compromises. Home users could arrange for backups between their desktops and laptops or, even better, could back up their systems to those of their friends next door.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anybody to fund my idea. Nevertheless, many similar systems are now under development. Within a few years, it’s likely that we’ll all be using disk images and peer-to-peer backups to archive our most important information—and probably everything else, as well.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...el1104.asp?p=1
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HD DVD
Toshiba To Sell High-Definition DVD Notebooks Next Year
Japan's Toshiba Corp. said on Wednesday it would introduce notebook computers with HD DVD technology in the last quarter of 2005 in a move to pressure rivals in the battle over formats for next-generation DVDs.
Toshiba's move comes after Sony Corp. said in September that its next-generation PlayStation console, tentatively called PlayStation 3, would support Blu-ray technology, giving a boost to the competing Blu-ray camp.
Both HD DVD and Blu-ray technologies use blue laser light, which, with a shorter wavelength than the red light used in conventional DVD recorders, can handle data at the higher densities needed for high-definition recordings.
Toshiba, along with NEC Corp. and Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd., support HD DVD as the next-generation DVD format.
A global consortium including Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. promotes Blu-ray technology.
Sony's PlayStation 2 is the world's most popular videogame console, and Toshiba is the world's third-largest notebook computer maker.
The HD DVD-equipped notebook computers will retail for between 200,000 and 300,000 yen ($1,845-$2,770), in line with the current prices of Toshiba's high-end notebook PCs, a spokeswoman for the company said.
Toshiba also plans to launch HD DVD players and recorders in the last quarter of 2005.
Shares in Toshiba closed morning trade up 0.99 percent at 408 yen, outperforming the Tokyo stock market's electric machinery index, which fell 1.22 percent.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6549423