View Single Post
Old 10-02-05, 08:25 PM   #2
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default

Download or Up?

'Deep Throat' to Be Re-Released in U.S. Theaters

"Deep Throat," the infamous 1972 adult film that led to a government crackdown on pornography, is being re-released in theaters as a new generation of lawmakers wages a renewed assault on smut, trade paper Daily Variety reported in its Tuesday edition.

The release of the Linda Lovelace opus, which was banned at the time in 23 states, coincides with the premiere of the documentary "Inside Deep Throat," which hits theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston on Friday.

The original film, which was made in six days for $25,000 and has grossed over $600 million, will not be ready until at least Feb. 18, the paper said. Las Vegas- based Arrow Prods., which owns the rights to the mob-funded "Deep Throat," started striking 10 prints on Monday, it added. Five of the prints will be edited to garner an "R" rating, which allows admission to children aged under 17 if accompanied by an adult.

The documentary, co-produced by Brian Grazer, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of "A Beautiful Mind," is rated NC-17, which denies admission to anyone aged 17 and under. It is being distributed by Universal Pictures, a unit of General Electric Co. -controlled NBC Universal.

It shows how "Deep Throat" popularized a form of sexual pleasure previously considered taboo. But the Nixon administration was not amused, sending in the FBI to close down screenings, and taking legal action against the film's director, Jerry Damiano, and stars.

Meanwhile, a bill that would increase fines for smutty broadcasts to $500,000 per incident from $32,500, is wending its way through Congress with bipartisan support, inspired in part by Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl last year.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7565284


"Inside Deep Throat" trailer.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Notorious X-Rated Phenomenon Revisited, and Debated
Charles McGrath

History, Karl Marx might have observed had he been more savvy about public relations, repeats itself first as documentary, then as a panel discussion.

On Monday evening, at the New York premiere of "Inside Deep Throat," a movie about the making of the groundbreaking 1972 adult film, the guests - who included Claire Danes, Dana Ivey, Ron Silver, Kurt Andersen, Tina Brown, Erica Jong and Brian Grazer, the documentary's producer - strode boldly into the Paris Theater. They did not hide their faces behind newspapers, as viewers of the original film did until people like Jacqueline Onassis and Truman Capote made going to watch "Deep Throat" chic and almost respectable. Nor did they resort to the old porn watcher's strategy of circling the block a couple of times before sidling into the lobby when no one was looking.

They watched the documentary intently, laughing several times and clapping at the end, and then listened as some experts, including the book publisher Judith Regan and the law professors Catharine A. MacKinnon, of Michigan, and Alan M. Dershowitz, of Harvard, got up and talked about the "Deep Throat" phenomenon, without coming to many conclusions about what it might or might not mean.

Neither Ms. Regan nor Mr. Dershowitz, it turned out, had ever seen "Deep Throat." Mr. Dershowitz, who defended the movie's male star, Harry Reems, in a prosecution for obscenity, said he had not needed to see the film to know that an important First Amendment issue was at stake. And though Ms. Regan had presumably been invited on the panel as a "pornocrat," to use a term that came up a couple of times - as the publisher of both "The Surrender," Toni Bentley's memoir of anal sex, and Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" - she claimed not to be an expert.

As a young woman, she said, she was not one of the thousands of sensation-seekers who dutifully lined up at the World Theater, on West 49th Street, where "Deep Throat" was first shown. She added that she learned about Ms. Jameson from her son, who dropped out of his M.I.T. fraternity because Ms. Jameson's videos were all the fraternity brothers were interested in watching.

Ms. Regan proved a surprising ally, moreover, to Ms. MacKinnon, who for years represented Linda Lovelace, the other star of "Deep Throat," after Ms. Lovelace claimed she had been coerced into appearing in the film and sought to have it suppressed. The new documentary, she said, told only part of the truth. And by focusing on censorship, she went on, it failed to address the fact that pornographic films not only are sexually exploitive of the women who made them but also tend to employ women, like Ms. Lovelace, with a history of being sexually abused.


Harry Reems

Ms. Regan reminded everyone that "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" is subtitled "A Cautionary Tale." She said she thought that despite all Ms. Jameson's financial success, the author was "miserable," and that the writing of the book had caused her to realize how much she had been exploited. Though she was not averse to selling a few copies, Ms. Regan added - which is why "How to Make Love" had a suggestive cover and some topless photographs inside - part of her reason for publishing the book was to encourage Ms. Jameson and women like her to begin exploring their own stories.

The other big issue of the evening was whether watching porn is bad for you. Absolutely not, said Mr. Dershowitz, who cited evidence showing that as pornographic films become more and more available, the incidence of rapes is actually declining. Ms. MacKinnon had some studies of her own, and also some meta-studies - that is, studies of studies - showing that consumption of pornography "does increase acts and attitudes of violence against women."

This was not the first time these two have sparred, and they now appear to have their roles down pat. She discreetly rolled her eyes while he delivered a line so good that it might have been prepared beforehand: "Michigan thinks that everything Harvard can do, it can do meta."

On the evidence of "Inside Deep Throat," which includes scenes from the original and is itself shot in a way that suggests the grainy, lurid look of porn films 30 years ago, the making (if not the watching) of pornographic films may have a strange aging effect. In interview segments, the director, Gerard Damiano (whose oeuvre also includes "The Devil in Miss Jones," "Meatball," "Manbait" and "Manbait 2"), the production manager, Ron Wertheim, and Count Sepy Dobronyi, in whose wine cellar some of the action was filmed, all seem a little raisiny - shrunken and overly tanned. Even former Damiano stars like Andrea True and Georgina Spelvin are, sadly, showing their years.

The one exception is Harry Reems (a k a Herbert Streicher), who, after years of alcohol and drug addiction, pulled himself together and - now trim and silver-haired - works as a real estate broker in Park City, Utah. He was at the premiere, smiling and shaking hands and looking like a guy who never watches anything racier than "Wall Street Week."

"I haven't seen an adult film in 25 or 30 years," he said. "I don't need to. I'm happily married now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/movies/09thro.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Small-Screen Bounty

Easy to find, fast to download and free, it's no wonder television piracy is on the increase - or that broadcasters are desperate to prevent it.
Michael Pollitt

What do Little Britain, Eastenders, Max & Paddy's Road To Nowhere, Spooks, Coronation Street and Casualty have in common? Answer: they are some of Britain's most popular pirated television programmes available on the Net. And they are among many thousands of others available and free to download from the Web, often within hours of their transmission.

Production companies and broadcasters are becoming aware that internet TV piracy is stealing their programming and audiences, and that pirated episodes of the country's favourite programmes threaten DVD sales and overseas deals. Debbie Manners, the head of rights and business affairs at the BBC, says TV piracy has the potential to hurt the commercial side of the industry. "It's a big issue across the industry at the moment. We're not going to ignore it, especially if it's quite widespread," she says. But is the BBC going after the people involved? "I'm not aware that we are. That would depend on the extent of it."

Envisional, a company that specialises in internet monitoring using "asset tracking" software, is all too aware of the extent of such piracy. David Price, an Envisional researcher, likens the internet to a global video recorder (or, more accurately, a personal video recorder such as TiVo, which records programmes based on viewing habits). PC-TV cards capture broadcasts that are encoded, uploaded and then shared. Downloads rely on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems, of which there are many, including BitTorrent, Direct Connect and eDonkey.

Price has seen copies of American television shows appearing on the Web less than half an hour after their initial airing. Programmes are also "ripped" from videos and DVDs. "All the major networks are concerned, though some are only starting to realise the effect it could have on their revenues," he says. Typically, an hour-long episode (the advertising is also frequently removed to save time) might take two hours to download on a broadband connection. That's fast enough to make pirate recording more attractive than paying for DVDs.

"The quality of the encoding is high enough to watch comfortably on a computer monitor or, when burned to a DVD, on a television," says Price. "Indeed, it is as easy to download a television show through a website as it is to schedule your VCR." Discussion forum comments reveal that one downloader is "far too disorganised to remember to set my video recorder" while others crave classic comedy or the latest American episodes rather than films. And those living in other countries (including expatriates) have a hankering for British television.

The Independent contacted one of several BitTorrent sites for an interview. After a lot of deliberation, one site administrator, who we'll call John because he wanted to remain anonymous, agreed (but only after saying "the sad truth is that, if you do this, the site will probably be shut down").

"There's no clear pattern on the most popular downloads," he says. "Recent big hits have included the Royal Institute Christmas lecture on Antarctica, an old Harry Enfield show, a 1980s Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, and Max & Paddy's Road To Nowhere. Soaps, dramas and comedies are all popular - EastEnders and Casualty are downloaded a lot."

John acknowledges the problems with copyright (the site discourages downloading programmes that are available on video or DVD) but emphasises that the site does not actually host files. This is characteristic of BitTorrent technology: the television programmes are held on individual PCs and swapped between "swarms" of users in bandwidth efficient fragments or "torrents". The sites provide a programme index and torrent tracker which means, from a lawyer's point of view, that they are the weakest link.

"We assume that the television companies are aware of us, though we don't believe that they would be overly concerned about what we are doing," says John. Eastenders, which is watched by millions on TV, is downloaded regularly by fewer than 1,000. This compares with 50,000 downloads of one episode of Stargate Atlantis observed by Envisional through two other BitTorrent trackers.

In December 2004, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) threatened legal action against individuals operating servers that contained indices of millions of illegal copies of films and TV programmes. Suprnova.org, the world's largest BitTorrent site, promptly shut down.

John Malcolm, the MPAA's senior vice-president and director of worldwide anti- piracy operations, says: "The operators of these servers exercise total control over which files are included on their servers and even determine if some kinds of files aren't allowed. For instance, some operators won't post pornography on their systems, but they have no compunction about allowing illegal files of copyrighted movies and TV shows to flow through their servers. We are moving to stop that."

If cases go to court in the UK, who is likely to win? David Engel, a media lawyer and partner at Addleshaw Goddard, points to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, and says that those issuing copies of television programmes would fall foul of it. "None of this has been tested yet in this country before the courts," says Engel. "We have a whole generation of young adults who see nothing legally and morally wrong in taking content - music, films and TV programmes - for free on the internet." The legal implications don't bother Mark Sailes, an undergraduate at Leeds University who has developed software to make downloading easier. He understands the question of copyright but denies being involved in TV programme recording and distribution. Buttress is a free program used to download and run torrent files from RSS feeds (commonly used to provide news headlines) without any user intervention. "I was involved in BitTorrent 18 months ago. When I found it, it was being used to distribute American TV shows even then," he says. "Every time a new TV show pops in that I like, Buttress will download it."

Sailes goes on to suggest that TV companies are behind the times in their attitude to downloading. "They're just caught in their history and they haven't opened their eyes yet. If we can do it so successfully without any budget, think what a TV company could do."

BitTorrent's John agrees: "We know that many of our users would welcome a legitimate service to access the content we provide. Many are aware that this is a legal grey zone, and would much rather be able to pay to get these programmes through official avenues." So is that going to happen? Celador, which makes Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, says that it has been unaffected by television piracy, but Simon Gunning, head of interactive media, knows this won't last. "Our approach is to monitor it and to be aware of what we can do to avoid problems," he says. "However, we are aware of the way the world is changing." Celador is looking into "video on demand" technology, backed by digital rights management for tight control. Channel 4 already has a subscription website for broadband viewing.

But the television industry's policy of educate, deter and protect misses the point because the power balance shifts between producer and consumer. There are also lessons to be drawn from the music industry's lengthy dispute with MP3 file sharers. The Slovenian owner of Suprnova.org, Sloncek, is fighting back with a new P2P program called eXeem, which uses a decentralised list and a BitTorrent tracker (thus there's no website for the lawyers to find). The message to the British television industry seems clear: provide what viewers want or they'll continue to help themselves.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...p?story=609112


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Surreal

Getting Real About The Grokster Case
Gigi Sohn

Over the next few months, the Supreme Court and--likely--Congress will resume a debate over rules that could determine whether consumers will continue to enjoy the benefits of many of the gadgets CNET covers.

The debate is specifically about what kind of legal liability--if any--technology manufacturers, financiers, Internet service providers, journalists and others should have if their actions "induce" another to commit copyright infringement.

Last year, Congress considered a bill that would have made it easy for copyright holders to sue these parties for the illegal acts of others and thereby control technological innovation by threat of litigation. The Induce bill was criticized by every sector of the technology and consumer electronics industries, as well as by financiers, technology journalists and consumer groups. After several attempts at negotiation, the parties could not agree on the proper standard for liability.

Congressional action this year will largely be shaped by what the Supreme Court does in the pending case involving Grokster, the peer-to-peer software used by millions. While the case may appear to be simply about illegal file trading, its implications are far deeper.

This case will, in part, decide whether the court's 1984 Sony decision will survive. That case found that the sale of copying technologies, like the VCR, is legal as long as there are "substantial noninfringing uses" for it. That decision led not only to an explosion of new consumer electronics products, but it also helped usher in the computer revolution, opening up a whole new vista of choices for consumers.

Big media companies like the movie studios have been fighting it ever since, despite the fact they have earned millions and millions of dollars from the sale and rental of videotapes and DVDs.

Lawmakers in the fray

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules in the Grokster case, it is almost inevitable that Congress will try to legislate. If the big media companies lose, they will want Congress to reverse the decision. If they win, the companies will want the decision codified in law. We understand that and look forward to the debate.

When that debate arises, nonprofit public advocacy group Public Knowledge will maintain the same core principles it did last year in the many policy battles over file sharing. The first principle is that manufacturers of lawful technologies should not be punished for the wrongdoing of individuals who use those technologies.

That does not mean that we support any specific business model, particularly if that model is built on copyright infringement.

The second principle is that infringement is wrong and that current copyright laws should be enforced against infringers. That is why we have, in most cases, supported civil lawsuits by copyright holders.

The third principle is that because copyright law should benefit the public with new creativity, the file-sharing debate must also focus on viable compensation mechanisms for artists.

These principles are far from radical--indeed, they are shared by the vast majority of the many companies and nonprofit organizations with which we work.

But it is difficult for Public Knowledge, or anyone, to find the elusive "middle ground" in the file-trading tango when both sides are not willing to dance.

While we supported two alternatives to the original Induce Act, the bill's supporters did not put forth any alternatives. Nor did big media companies budge when they proposed five-year prison sentences for uploading just one copyrighted file, along with outlawing technologies that permit skipping video and DVD advertisements.

When you are faced only with one-sided proposals, it is hard to say anything but "no."

But we are in a new year and a new Congressional term. Some media companies are choosing to compete with file-trading networks, sometimes using peer-to-peer technology, and that is a development we applaud.

Public Knowledge believes that online content stores that are easy to use, reasonably priced, permit flexible uses and have large catalogs will win consumers' hearts and pocketbooks, and prove once again that technological development is better left to the marketplace.

Of course, we recognize that issues surrounding who should ultimately control technology will somehow always land in policymakers' laps. When they do, we will look forward to debating their merits and to working toward a solution in which everyone--media companies, equipment and software makers and, most of all, consumers--wins.
http://news.com.com/Getting+real+abo...3-5566243.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Strangling P2P, Uni style

Meeting the P2P Challenge
Matt Villano

Every semester brings new technological challenges to the staff at the University of Florida, and September 2003 was no different from the norm. Students flocked to campus after a summer of freedom, wielding the peer-to-peer (P2P) applications Kazaa, Cheetah, Grokster, and a variety of others. Building on the technology behind the infamous (and moribund) Napster file-sharing application, these alternatives allowed students to share music files, movies, and other digitized content with their compatriots both on campus and off. To do so, they only had to set up their computers to download lists of files, rev up their programs, and head out to class while their machines handled the dirty work.

At the time, UF officials admitted that nearly 90 percent of the school’s outbound bandwidth was being used for P2P. Adding insult to injury, the same officials received 40 notices of copyright violations each month, and reported that in any average 24-hour period, 3,500 of the 7,500 students in residence halls were using P2P services. To put these figures into more straightforward terms, although the campus network had been designed to enhance the educational process, in the end it was serving mostly as a conduit for the latest Modest Mouse songs and Paris Hilton videos. Looking back, Robert Bird, coordinator of Network Services for the school’s Department of Housing, says that peer-to-peer technology basically ground network performance to a standstill.

“To say the problem was rampant would have been the understatement of the century,” he quips. “Even after Napster, we were up to our eyeballs in P2P, and no matter what we did to try to minimize the problems, they just wouldn’t go away.”

UF is not the only school to fall victim to P2P; across the country, at academic institutions large and small, technologists are grappling with ways to fight the evolving challenges of peer-to-peer. While many of these file-sharing applications crimp network bandwidth, they also present huge problems for copyright evangelists at organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA; www.riaa.com), who complain that sharing files without paying for them is illegal. These problems certainly aren’t confined to academia. A recent survey by the Internet research firm IT Innovations & Concepts (ITIC; www.itic.ca) indicates that 81 million Internet users worldwide engage in some form of P2P file sharing. Furthermore, says the study, in 2003, the US downloaded more digital songs (4.4 billion) than any other nation on the planet—an ignominious distinction, to say the least.

Help, however, is on the way. New technologies from a variety of network management vendors have enabled schools to take a proactive approach toward shaping network traffic and restricting the amount of it available for file sharing at any given time. At UF, where P2P once crippled the network daily, technologists have refused to restrict Internet use, but have built a system that monitors illicit P2P activity and responds accordingly (details on this in “Clipping their Wings,” below). And at Pennsylvania State University, IT officials are spearheading an open source movement to create the mother of all P2P networks, a new approach that combines decentralized file sharing with identity management, in a strategy that could completely revolutionize computing.

“The tides are turning in our battle against P2P abuses,” says Michael Halm, senior strategist for Teaching and Learning Technologies in the Information Technology Services department on Penn State’s main campus at University Park. “Academics like me used to be powerless against this stuff. Now, finally, we’re gaining the capacity to fight back.”

Clipping Their Wings

At UF, the key to overcoming the morass of P2P file-trading was innovation. After the school’s network performance first plummeted in 2003, Bird and campus programmer Will Saxon decided to develop a solution. The duo already had been working on technology to limit P2P usage; a few months later, with two grants from the university, they devised Integrated Computer Application for Recognizing User Services, or ICARUS. The system, which considers P2P capability a privilege, declines to restrict file-swapping completely but instead attempts to educate students about exchanging files in a manner that is both legal and unobtrusive to network performance overall. So far, it appears to be working: Usage of legitimate systems such as iTunes and Napster is now through the roof, and the average number of nightly illicit P2P users has dropped from 3,500 to 300, a decline of more than 90 percent.

The thinking behind the system is simple—essentially, it is a generic strategy to automate identity management and network compliance. When a student first registers on the campus network, he is required to read about peer-to-peer networks and certify that while he can share academic files, he will not share copyrighted ones. ICARUS then scans the student’s computer, and detects any worms, viruses, or programs that act as servers, such as Kazaa, Cheetah, and Grokster. If the system finds one of these offending programs, it gives the student instructions on how to disable it. After this, if the student logs on and tries to share files, ICARUS automatically sends him an e-mail and a pop-up window warning, then disconnects him from the network.

What is P2P?

Peer-to-peer technology, aka P2P, is, essentially, a computing session that takes place directly from one user to another. The technology’s very name implies that either side can initiate a session and has equal responsibility. As such, a P2P network is a communications environment that allows all desktop and laptop computers in the network to act as servers and share their files with all other users on the network. On a larger scale, peer-to-peer computing is the process of sharing CPU resources across a network so that all machines function as one large supercomputer.

The phrase “peer-to-peer,” however, is a somewhat confusing term, because it always is contrasted with a central system that initiates and controls everything. In practice, with the exception of the decentralized Gnutella P2P technology, two users on a peer-to-peer system often require data from a third computer or third-party server. For example, the Napster file-sharing service was always called a “peer-to-peer network,” but its use of a central server to store the public directory made it both centralized and peer-to-peer.

Today, programs such as Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh, and others operate on what has become known as the FastTrack network. This decentralized approach utilizes something called super-peers to create temporary indexing servers that would allow the network to scale to unparalleled heights. Any client may become a super-peer if the user’s computer and Internet connection are powerful enough. While this approach raises certain security risks (how do you know a user isn’t spreading spyware or other malicious programs?), programs such as DietK can strip the official P2P clients of malware (viruses, worms, spyware, and other forms of security threats), while adding functionality across the board.


“You’d be amazed how many students stopped illegally sharing files just because they know ICARUS is always watching and they’ll get caught,” says Bird, doing his best to channel Orwellian ideals. “We didn’t try to break down the doors, so to speak, we just wanted to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got law enforcement here and we’ll detect you speeding.’”

Still, it’s not just the specter of getting fingered that has students toeing the line; UF programmers built a number of responses into ICARUS targeted specifically toward policy enforcement. A first violation of campus P2P policy disables a student’s network access for 30 minutes; the second cuts off access for a full five days (a lifetime, in teen years). Third-time offenders are subject to the school’s hearing-based judicial process, and their network access is restricted to campus-only access for seven to 30 days, depending on the severity of the infraction. While the system’s ability to detect violations almost instantaneously deters many students from abusing P2P privileges, Bird says it’s the consequence for three offenses that scares users the most—life without Internet use on campus today is like music without an MP3 player; possible, but practically unbearable, no matter what the circumstances.

Actually, this “no file servers” policy has been in place at UF for several years, and dates back to the mid-1990s, when the campus put it into place to curb the use of free university network bandwidth by students using it to run their own commercial Web sites. ICARUS isn’t designed to prevent all forms of file sharing, though—just illegal usage. With this in mind, Bruce Block, senior VP of Technology at the RIAA, says his organization deems it an admirable program, and adds that other colleges could learn a lot from ICARUS. If all schools enacted similar systems, he points out, higher education might be able to reduce the estimated $34 billion in pirated music copyright fees lost to P2P last year alone, and even keep some of those dollars on campuses.

At Penn State, a group of open source programmers have created LionShare, a new P2P architecture.

“What the University of Florida has done in its combination of policy, student education, and technology is an excellent example of what can be done in the university system [to combat illegal file sharing],” he opines.

Turning to Vendors

Still, not every college has the luxury of innovation. Other schools, pressed for programming resources and time, have opted instead for out-of-the-box solutions from a variety of network management vendors. At Juniata College (PA), for instance, technologists responded to P2P-fueled network bottlenecks with the PacketShaper software solution from Packeteer (www.packeteer.com), which enables network administrators to control bandwidth utilization and application performance by limiting all campus P2P applications to no more than 384 kilobytes of bandwidth. According to David Fusco, director of Technology Operations and an assistant professor in the school’s IT department, for an initial investment of about $12,000, and annual maintenance of roughly $1,000, the PacketShaper product has enabled him to “eliminate the activity by choking it.” What’s more, he adds, while P2P abuses still occur at the school’s Huntingdon campus, they no longer impact performance of the network overall.

Technologists have employed the very same solution at Cazenovia College (NY), where P2P abuse was so rampant that CTO James Van Dusen says he had to dispatch a network administrator every few hours to reboot campus routers. At Cazenovia, however, Van Dusen further secured the network against P2P by investing another $12,000 in a one-way firewall solution from Vernier Networks (www.verniernetworks.com).

Today, when students connect to the network, they broadcast one-to-one to the firewall, and other students have no ability to track down anyone’s machine but their own. Beyond this, each student is allowed 500MB of free space in a home file on a campus file server, where he or she can download files of any kind. Cazenovia scans the file server nightly for material that has been downloaded illegally.

“We’re not going into student machines, we’re just investigating the file server to keep ourselves out of trouble,” Van Dusen says. “While we don’t prohibit P2P, we watch it closely and limit our liability completely, solving the issue that groups like RIAA complain about.”

At DePauw University (IN), network administrators yanked the purse strings a bit harder, and took a more complicated, three-pronged approach to controlling P2P. First, they employed Packeteer’s PacketShaper to limit P2P bandwidth overall. Second, they implemented Quality of Service (QoS) measures on Cisco switches (www.cisco.com) to block certain traffic ports and divide the network into various segments, or Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs). Finally, they are using endpoint compliance capabilities from Perfigo (purchased by Cisco in October 2004). Dennis Trickle, CIO and VP for Academic Affairs, says that the heart of this cumulative, $60,000 solution are the QoS capabilities, which ensure that users in academic buildings have priority over users in residence halls to use peer-to-peer technology of all kinds. Beyond that, for an additional $16,000 per year, Cisco keeps the routers up to date with all of the latest security patches, and the institution relies upon the very same technology to prevent the propagation of viruses and other threats, as well.

Finally, there’s the Health Science Center at Texas Tech University, where Security Systems Analyst Lane Timmons says he has successfully fought peer-to-peer problems via a completely different approach. The Timmons plan doesn’t block P2P file sharing internally; instead, the Health Science Center blocks it from the Internet. To facilitate this, Timmons spent $140,000 to combine a UnityOne-2000 Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) from TippingPoint (www.tippingpoint.com), with a traffic redirection tool, QRadar from Q1Labs (www.q1labs.com). At the network perimeter, Timmons has programmed the TippingPoint box to drop all packets involved with file sharing. In the event that these packets somehow make it through the gateway, the QRadar technology kicks in, redirecting users into a “quarantine” VLAN that instructs them to curtail all peer-to-peer activity with the outside world.

“We’d like to think that when it comes to P2P, we take a kinder, gentler approach,” he says. “Inside our secure campus network, students can do what they want. As long as none of the P2P files make it to the Internet (or vice versa), we feel we’re doing our job well.”

Looking Ahead

Similarly laissez faire approaches to file sharing inside a campus network may be on the horizon elsewhere, too. At Penn State, where Halm works his magic, a similarly enterprising effort is underway to combine the talents of a variety of open source programmers into an entirely new kind of P2P architecture. The effort, part peer-to-peer and part identity management, is LionShare, and it offers an authenticated environment in which users are known both to their institution and to each other. Under this system, users will be able to share personal and community collections with efficiency and without the threat of unauthorized access or undesired content. What’s more, because LionShare simply does not permit the transmission of content that cannot be linked to its original copyright holder, officials at the RIAA and other copyright industry organizations are quite literally jumping for joy, hailing the technology as a great way to eradicate many of the previous concerns about P2P all together.

Version 1.0 of LionShare is expected to be released in late September 2005. When it goes live, Lionshare users will log on with digital identities they receive from their home institutions. At any time, users will be able to see who is sharing what— a form of openness designed to deter illicit activity from the get-go. Users will upload information to the LionShare PeerServer, and will be able to utilize Access Control Lists to designate which other individual users are allowed access to the data. Theoretically, anyone will be able to search for information, but only those users who previously have been authorized to download data off a user’s peer server will be allowed to go ahead and take it. The system also will let users designate file-sharing capabilities for finite periods, enabling institutions to control copyrighted material in much the same manner they would offline.

“What sets LionShare apart from pretty much every other approach to date is the fact that there’s a real sense of accountability here,” says Halm, adding that LionShare servers provide a persistent mirror for content, to ensure that designated files can be available for sharing when a personal peer (such as an instructor’s laptop) is disconnected. “We’re trying to teach responsibility without relying on heavy-handed types of technology.”

As Halm explains, the LionShare effort developed out of PSU’s Visual Image User Study (www.libraries.psu.edu/vius), a 26- month project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and tasked to assess how academic communities use digital images for teaching research and service. The study, conducted between 2001 and 2003, determined that a new application would need to provide more flexible, user-controlled tools, and expanded capabilities for the discovery, management, and sharing of multimedia files. To bring these goals to life, LionShare partner organizations (including Internet2, Canada’s Simon Fraser University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) decided to base their code on the Limewire 4.0 Open Source Project’s implementation of the widely utilized Gnutella P2P protocol. Because the LionShare application needs to perform many tasks beyond basic file search and retrieval, however, programmers are developing additional capabilities on top of the Gnutella protocol, to support the overall goals of the project.

Some of these additional capabilities will eventually facilitate interoperability between LionShare and other collaborative academic efforts such as Shibboleth (for more on Shibboleth, see “The Power of Who” in January Campus Technology; www.campus-technology.com/authentication). LionShare features international interoperability protocols that provide access to a growing mass of content stored in networks of institutional repositories at individual schools around the world (see “Book ’Em,” page 36). As Halm explains, LionShare 1.0 also will allow publishers to describe their resources using a relevant metadata schema, and will encourage searchers to query against these high-level classifications. This, he says, ultimately could enable a sharing of institutional knowledge that truly enhances the educational process across the board.

“If I’m a department head in entomology, who’s to say that I can’t create a departmental repository of all faculty publications for students to access and use as a resource?” he asks rhetorically. “When we finally use peer-to-peer technology the way it was designed to be used, the possibilities for improving the way we approach education today really are without boundaries.”
http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=10562


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Record Labels Tells School They May Subpoena Names

Industry targeting suspected illegal music sharing
Jessica T. Lee

Dartmouth College officials have been notified that the nation's largest record labels intend to subpoena the names of students, faculty and staff suspected of illegally sharing copyrighted music.

The Recording Industry Association of America sued more than 700 people two weeks ago, including computer users at 23 universities and colleges, and could include Dartmouth students in its next wave of lawsuits. RIAA is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry.

The members of the Dartmouth community allegedly involved in six illegal copyright infringements have been informed of RIAA's intent, said Robert Donin, general counsel for Dartmouth College, who sent an e-mail to college administrators on Wednesday alerting them of the potential subpoenas. Most of the RIAA lawsuits have been settled for amounts between $3,000 and $15,000, according to Donin.

"Assuming the subpoenas are legally sufficient, the College will be required to produce this information," Donin wrote.

The issue involves file-sharing, which is when people allow other people to access their files. This is illegal when people share copyrighted material they don't have the rights to distribute. What happens is people can download songs from other users' computers without paying for them, and could even copy, or burn, them onto a CD. In this way, people can obtain entire albums without ever making a purchase, effectively pirating the music, RIAA says.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for RIAA, would not confirm or deny whether Dartmouth had been notified, but agreed to speak about the process in general. Lamy said that notifying schools before serving them subpoenas is a general practice RIAA tries to follow.

"After obtaining the individual's identity, we send that person a letter to offer the opportunity to settle the case before it goes any further,"Lamy said. "Many, many people take us up on that opportunity."

The settlement requires the individual to abstain from illegal file-sharing and to pay some monetary compensation depending on the egregiousness of the infraction, judged by factors including how many files a user shares, according to Lamy. Under law, RIAA would be entitled to seek legal damages of $150,000 for each act of infringement, and the defendant could also face criminal penalties as high as three years in prison and a $250,000 fine for first-time offenders, Donin wrote.

The RIAA did not specify a date for the subpoenas in its communications with Dartmouth, Donin said, only that it would "soon" subpoena the names and contact information that correspond to the Internet addresses alleged to be sharing files illegally. RIAA has filed more than 4,000 lawsuits in the last six months, but Dartmouth network users have not been among those pursued in legal action.

The college does receive about 25 notices a month of a network user sharing copyrighted material. For example, the RIAA informs Dartmouth that a student is illegally sharing music files. Called "take down notices," the student would then be required to remove the files from public circulation, but does not have to pay damages, as in a lawsuit. The college is required to take action "when it is on notice of a violation in order to preserve" its legal protection, Donin said.

In those cases, Dartmouth contacts the user and sends a "cease and desist" message if it is a first offense. If the student does not stop sharing files, or does it again later, it could result in disciplinary action by the college.

There have not yet been any cases of disciplinary action for file-sharing at Dartmouth, Donin said, but there have been instances when students have been disconnected from the network until they have convinced school administrators they would not share copyrighted files again.

Dartmouth student Dan Moynihan, class of 2006, said he sees file-sharing as serving the same purpose as the radio, in that people can try out artists without spending money.

"My opinion of file-sharing . . . is that in general, people don't use file- sharing and downloading as a replacement for buying music -they use it as a kind of sampling tool," said Moynihan, who is a DJ at Dartmouth's radio station WFRD, known as 99Rock, as well as music director and production director. "They download one or two songs by an artist and if they like them, they go out and buy the album."

That is not the perspective of many in the music industry. RIAA estimates that the music industry loses $4.2 billion per year worldwide because of piracy, according to its Web site.

RIAA has unleashed waves of lawsuits during the last year, suing computer users at dozens of universities across the country, including the University of Michigan and Harvard Medical School most recently. Colleges and universities have been targeted because their fast Internet connections spawn a lot of file-sharing, but RIAA has not limited its lawsuits there.

RIAA tracks illegal file-sharing much the way people share files illegally by going onto a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, such as Direct Connect, the classic KaZaA or the new Wirehog, and looking for people sharing songs.

They could search for Elvis Presley, for example, and get a list of users who are sharing copyrighted Elvis songs, and then get a list of every file one individual user is sharing. People looking for music often use this feature to copy someone's entire collection, if they like that person's taste. RIAA uses it to find the people who are sharing the most files, the big distributors who have several hundred or even 1,000 files offered to millions of users.
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/p...58/1001/NEWS01


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Go Bulldogs

Student Writes Video File-Sharing Program
Heather Richels

For better or worse, one of the favorite pastimes of Yale procrastinators has just been taken to a whole new level. Now, instead of wasting a few minutes browsing through someone's iTunes music library, students can waste hours browsing through other students' video collections.

The new program, called Lanovision, is a file sharing tool that allows students to stream others' videos, much like OurTunes for videos rather than music. Patrick Fitzsimmons '06 created the program over winter break, and Morse and Stiles colleges already have a strong network of video-sharers.

"It's been really great so far," said Fitzsimmons, who announced the new program to Morse students earlier this week. "In the past few days, the program has had 75 downloads. Once people download it, they share their videos, and there's a whole network going."

Fitzsimmons had the idea for the program last spring, while he and his roommate were working on an all-purpose file-sharing program called Coffeeshop. The program circulated music and photos, but Fitzsimmons said students had no need for it because of programs such as iTunes and Webshots.

"We found that the one thing that didn't exist was a way to view your friends' videos," he said. "I was wondering if you could actually stream movies and watch them and I had this eureka moment. It was a lot of random stuff I pieced together."

Fitzsimmons said he spent about 200 hours working on the program over winter break. So far, the program has spread through Morse and Stiles, and Fitzsimmons plans to e-mail everyone at Yale to expand it further.

"From there, I'll try to contact friends at other schools, and try to get them to spread it," he said. "Maybe I'll even spend a little, do a little advertising, publicize it and see what happens."

Kean Hsu '06 has already started using the program, and he said that he has seen a decent selection of videos on the network.

"The more people that get on it, the better it will be," he said. "It's a program that's very dependent on the number of people who are on the network."

Hsu said he is interested in seeing how movie companies respond to the program as it spreads.

"I'm curious to see whether the companies consider it something worth investigating or even consider it a bad thing," he said. "Since it involves streaming video files and not buyer transmission, it's not like Kazaa or Napster. It's not really the same issue."

Matthew Boelig '06 said he can see the program spreading within Yale because iTunes has become so popular on campus.

"A lot of people have laptops and have limited space for videos, so streaming online is a great way for people to watch media," he said.

Boelig said his primary complaint with the program so far is the VLC media player program that plays many of the videos.

"It's hard to use, you can't fast forward or rewind easily through the movies, and sometimes it makes the video player freeze," he said.

Fitzsimmons said he is still working the bugs out of the PC version of Lanovision, while also developing a version for Macs. He said a Mac version will be available in three or four weeks at the latest.

When Boelig logged onto the network at 5 p.m. Wednesday, there were 25 people connected, and about half were sharing videos. Among the videos available to stream were "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "The Big Lebowski," "Forrest Gump" and several episodes of "The OC," he said.

Chuck Powell, Yale's director of academic media and technology, said that he had not yet heard of the program but was pleased to see students experimenting with technology.

"We're happy in a general way to see the student population putting their talents, interests and skills to work in the IT area," Powell said.

Jessica Blick '07 said she thinks the new program will be a lot of fun if more people start using it. So far, she has avoided being distracted from her work.

"I watched the first five minutes of a movie and then realized I should do my homework," she said.

Only time will tell if Blick's fellow students will follow her responsible lead, or if movie marathons will replace study marathons as the primary weeknight activity for Yalies.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=28327


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What can Brown do for you?

Thefacebook.com Releases Peer File-Sharing Network
Jonathan Sidhu

Wirehog, a file-sharing program from the makers of Thefacebook.com, has been released in beta form for testing by Brown University users. The program's creator says the innovative software will usher in a new era of more "personal" file sharing.

Unlike other peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, such as Kazaa and Limewire, Wirehog allows only users of TheFacebook.com to share files with designated friends on the intercollegiate directory. "It's like normal file-sharing programs, but it's only for people you designate as your friends," said Wirehog founder, CEO and president Andrew McCollum,

"Not only do you not know who you are getting files from (on other file-sharing services), but you don't care. The only things you can search for are mainstream media, and there's no reliable way to get to those files. You can't guarantee that anyone is going to have them," he said.

McCollum distinguishes Wirehog from other services by highlighting the personal nature of this file swapping. Because only friends can access each other's Wirehog collections, users are more likely to share personal videos or photos in addition to music, said McCollum. For musicians as well, Wirehog is an invaluable source for sharing recordings. "When it's things that you have made yourself you can share them as you want," he said.

But, like many other programs that facilitate the exchange of digital media, Wirehog could potentially be used to transfer copyrighted music or movies. Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America subpoenaed Brown for the names of two network users who were suspected of illegal file sharing. In light of these and other apparent crackdowns on college music-swappers around the country, McCollum stressed the safety of sharing files with Wirehog.

"If you're sharing files, only you and your friends can see them," he said. "There's a degree of safety for users, the rest of the world can't see what they're sharing. We take that pretty seriously," he said.

Stephanie Birdsall, communication specialist at Computing and Information Services, told The Herald that CIS does not look for copyright infringers. "We're not looking for copyright violations. We are looking to see if this person is taking up too much bandwidth," she said.

"We have no idea how the RIAA comes up with their list of violators. They are very careful about explaining how they get that list," Birdsall said.

McCollum added jokingly, "Unless you invite the RIAA to be your friend, you're probably all right."

Wirehog is now in beta testing and still in development, said McCollum. Currently, there are upwards of 10,000 users of the software. The service is also available for Thefacebook users in the Ivy League, New York University, Stanford University, and University of California Berkeley. Additionally, users of Wirehog may invite friends not at these universities to join the service.

McCollum and the founder of Thefacebook, Mark Zuckerberg, brainstormed the concept of Wirehog last spring. Development of the service began in mid- July and is ongoing.

Wirehog will eventually be available to upwards of 1.6 million facebook users. "The eventual goal is to offer it to everyone," said McCollum. "There's no reason we should restrict it."
http://www.browndailyherald.com/news...k-855935.shtml


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Review

Sigur Rós – Von
Ramona_A_Stone

I picked up Von the other day thinking it was a new release. (there's nothing legible printed on it as usual, including a date.) My exact thought on the initial listen was that a band this young and in the pressurized bubble of cult status could exhibit this much freedom gives me hope for the future of music.

The first ten minute track, Sigur Ros, is somewhere between a soundtrack for a horror film and the sound that just about any group of musicians will make after smoking opium for three days straight in total darkness. I frankly doubt that many of you reading this would care for the work, but I strongly admire this kind of rare organic truth in bands that have "made it"--the overwhelming tendency being rather generally to listen to the suits who are chanting "give us something with a beat and hook, you know, like Svefn-G-Englar" and most bands it seems are docile enough to follow through, lamely repeating variations on some frozen spark of an idea.

Well, of course now I realize I was wrong. Von was Sigur's first release, originally printed in an edition of 500 copies, and eventually selling about 500,000 copies in Iceland, (a goodly number on the island I'd reckon). Von was released here in the states about 3 months ago and a single copy just made it to my local store. (can you tell I don't spend much time p2ping these days?)

On subsequent listens I began to discern that some of the highly strange production values are in fact probably a result of a low budget. All the more beautiful and rare to my ears.

At any rate, rather than feeling dumb, my original observation was simply compounded: it's almost inconceivable that a band this young can display this much originality--an originality oddly steeped in tradition, for while it reminds me of absolutely nothing that's gone before it (other than jamming in total darkness after a three day opium binge that is), one could, if one wished, draw a straight line between early Pink Floyd and Sigur Ros that would traverse more than three almost completely forgotten decades. (Though they look like 14 year olds to your elderly narrator, I assume they are old souls. Come to think of it, Iceland may be transmigrationally reserved for old souls.) And with three albums and a number of EPs under their belt, I'd say if this band realizes their potential for several more decades they will in fact subtly bend the course of music back toward the human every bit as much as the Floyd did. I will await their Dark Side of the Moon.

Download the whole album and save it for a relaxed, attentive moment when you don't need to have your all your conventional musical buttons jammed down at once for three minutes at a time. Opium optional.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...816#post228816



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Internet changing everything

Competition Is Forever
Tracie Rozhon

Michael Smyth, who works for a pharmaceutical company, was peering not long ago at three large diamonds perched on the tops of metal rods, balanced above pure white paper in a shop in the Manhattan diamond district. Like countless young men in the generations before his, Mr. Smyth was looking for an engagement ring.

But Mr. Smyth is different from earlier suitors, who often trembled at the approach of a salesman. Before he started out, he had carefully researched diamond sizes, cuts and quality on the Internet. He knew the wholesale prices, and he was ready to bargain.

Plenty of his friends actually bought their rings on the Web, he said, "but since I'm here in New York, I figured I'd take a look."

"If I were in Iowa, I'd probably buy it online."

From mine to merchant to customer, the diamond business is changing while it expands like never before - and the Internet is only part of it. Consumers, both men and women, are demanding better stones, often for lower prices, in a wider variety of locations.

Mom-and-pop stores are being squeezed by giant chains like Wal-Mart Stores, now the world's largest jeweler, and Costco, which increasingly sells diamonds over two carats. Department stores, too, are upgrading their jewelry counters. (Jewelry did much better than clothing in many of them over the holidays.)

And sales of diamonds, for all the predictions from critics that the industry has long been riding for a fall, are continuing to thrive. In 2003, the last year for which data are available, $20.5 billion in diamonds and diamond jewelry was sold in the United States, according to the Jewelers of America, up nearly 10 percent from $18.7 billion two years before.

Eighty-three percent of the brides in the United States say that they want a diamond engagement ring - and their grooms, in turn, spent $4.3 billion last year on them. And diamonds have spread well beyond engagement rings.

Right-hand rings are promoted to women looking to flaunt their independence. Pop stars like Sean Combs wear watches with 1,200 cut stones on their faces that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

While the number of stones sold is increasing, complex changes are taking place. Wholesalers in the diamond district, on 47th Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, which was once the epicenter of diamond wholesaling in the United States, are laying off dozens of stone-cutters, commissioning the work in India and China, and using the former factory space as showrooms for jewelry they never sold before.

Everyone is trying to cut out the middlemen distributors, who are now regarded as extraneous. Most of the Internet sites do not even buy the diamonds; they act as a clearinghouse for dealers.

The prices, meanwhile, have gone to two extremes. At the low end, the discount chains and many online diamond sites are offering prices that - even the Main Street jewelers admit - are at least 20 percent lower than in their own shops. At the other end, to satisfy the cravings of rock stars, Russian millionaires and others with bottomless pockets, prices for the much bigger, much rarer stones have soared as supplies have tightened.

For diamond retailers, branded diamonds and new cuts have become hot. Luxury retailers like Tiffany, and even some 47th Street dealers, are patenting cuts to differentiate their diamonds from other retailers' and, they hope, add cachet.

To give more guidance to an increasingly confused marketplace, the Gemological Institute of America, the industry's lead rating service, plans to update this year its 1950's-era grading system for diamond cuts. As part of the effort, the institute will for the first time use computers to define what gives a diamond its beauty, measuring the light patterns that create "scintillation" and the color flashes that make "fire."

Some dealers are doing their best to capture both the wholesale and retail ends of the business. Aber, a Canadian diamond company that owns 40 percent of the Diviak mine not far from the Arctic Ocean, bought the controlling interest last spring in Harry Winston, the Fifth Avenue jeweler.

De Beers, the world's largest diamond producer, has opened a shop on Old Bond Street in London and three locations in Tokyo, and now plans to open its first shop in the United States, on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, in mid-June, according to a spokeswoman.

Kwiat, with offices in the diamond district, used to confine itself to importing and polishing diamonds. Now, the family-owned company, like many on 47th Street, is branching out. It has begun selling diamonds laser-branded with its own crown logo; two weeks ago, the company introduced its own diamond earrings, brooches and rings.

"If you are 'just' a diamond dealer, everyone is trying to get rid of you," wrote Martin Rappaport in The Rappaport Diamond Report, an influential newsletter that he publishes.

For 100 years, the diamond business was closed to outsiders; for those who knew the trade, handed down from generation to generation, it was a hard but predictable business. De Beers, the South African conglomerate, had a lock on the market, supplying about 80 percent of the world's diamonds.

But within the last decade, De Beers's grip has loosened. It now controls less than 50 percent of the market, analysts say, and no longer has a firm grip on prices. New and independent mines in Australia and, most recently, Canada, have begun producing diamonds, small and large. Yet supplies from the new mines can be unpredictable. In the last year, there has been a 50 percent drop in production at the Argyle mine in Australia, according to The Rappaport Report.

Dana L. Telsey, a Bear Stearns analyst who covers the diamond market, said in a report in December that while "industry sources estimate that rough diamond prices have grown as much as 25 percent over the last year," gemstone prices are up only about 8 percent at retail. Besieged by competition, jewelry stores have not felt they could pass on the full markup, their owners said in interviews.

Jewelers say that traditional ring buyers like Mr. Smyth are no longer shy and insecure. If they still visit the small-town jewelry store, they have probably done their homework on the Internet: 90 percent of those who log on to bluenile.com, a popular diamond site that says it sells as many engagement rings in America as Tiffany does, do so just to become educated, not to buy.

Still, online sales of all jewelry rose to $1.9 billion during the 2004 Christmas season, more than doubling from $900 million the year before, according to Bear Stearns.

While it may seem risky to buy jewelry sight unseen, consumers appear satisfied. Cecilia Gardner, counsel for the Jewelers' Vigilance Committee, an industry watchdog group, said she had not received a greater number of complaints about Internet purchases than about jewelry bought in stores. The most complaints about online diamond purchases, she added, are about eBay, the auction site.

Jeffrey H. Fischer, a diamond cutter and importer and president of the International Diamond Manufacturers Association, said some buyers find the Internet less threatening.

"They don't want to deal face-to-face with the salesperson where they feel at a disadvantage because they're not as knowledgeable." He paused. "There is a tremendous debate, a confrontation, on how to cope with the Internet presence. It's a very, very hot-button topic."

In January, the International Jewelry Show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan featured a panel discussion titled "Threat: Internet Diamond Supersellers."

Mr. Rappaport said that merchants "know that the diamond business is changing in ways that threaten their very existence, but they don't know what to do about it."

The discounters and Internet sites do not sell just cheap diamonds. The average price for an engagement ring on bluenile.com is close to $5,000 - about twice the national average - and one sold for $257,000 last fall, said Mark Vadon, Blue Nile's founder and chief executive. To combat the competition from the Internet and discount chains, traditional retailers are introducing branded stones. Successful brands can generate exceptionally high profit margins - an average of 55 percent, Ms. Telsey, the analyst with Bear Stearns, said.

Within the last two years, new diamond cuts - like Lucida from Tiffany, the Crown of Light from Premier Gem and Dream from Hearts on Fire - have been developed in an effort to differentiate one diamond from another. The new types of diamonds seem to be selling: the Leo diamond, introduced in 1999, has already sold $100 million at retail, while the Hearts on Fire brand has sold $250 million, Ms. Telsey said.

Yet John Green, the chief executive of Lux, Bond & Green in Hartford, was dismissive of many of the new branded diamonds. "It's a lot of smoke and mirrors with the branding - hearts and arrows, an ideal cut, Hearts on Fire, whatever," going through his sales pitch. "Our own Lux, Bond & Green diamond is no different" from the branded ones, he added, asserting the high quality of his own company's stones.

Some diamond dealers are trying a little bit of everything.

"If you're making only a few dollars at each level, the more levels you have, the better," Mr. Fischer, the diamond importer, said. "You make a little on the jewelry, a little bit on the diamonds."

Like the Kwiat family, Mr. Fischer has just started producing his own line of diamond jewelry, in partnership with a designer. "I am indicative of what's going on," he said. "Ten years ago, I could never have envisioned - What, me? Making jewelry?"

And the old owners of Harry Winston may not have envisioned themselves catering to the walk-in customer. Until a few months ago, customers were ushered through wrought- iron double doors into a reception room with only one desk, where a beautifully groomed associate asked if they had an appointment. The stores are now more approachable. Entering the reception room, customers are free to browse through showcases featuring several pieces priced under $5,000.

The industry recently sought to dispense with one of its biggest scandals: introducing a warranty program aimed at cutting off the retail supply of "blood diamonds" or "conflict diamonds" - those mined in Angola and Sierra Leone by revolutionaries bent on using diamond profits to buy bombs and guns.

Yet even with all the industry's travails, some retailers are unconcerned. Take Jacob Arabo, a jeweler to the stars, who just moved from a shop on West 47th Street to East 57th Street near Buccellati, one of the world's most expensive jewelers.

He recently showed a visitor a flawless, 16.51-carat, canary yellow diamond ring, with a price of $920,000.

But Mr. Smyth, the soon-to-be fiancé, was not looking for canary yellow. Or 16 carats. Or a great investment.

He was buying a ring for an entirely different reason. "I never thought I'd get married, even though my parents were married for 40 years," he said. "She swept away all my resolve, and now I want to buy her something - not gaudy and huge - but something she'd be happy to wear for a long time."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/bu...9diamonds.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Science

Whistle While You Squirt

Superfluid Heliun-4 whistle


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Postscript to a merger

Fiorina Steps Down At HP
Martin LaMonica

Carly Fiorina, the embattled leader of Hewlett-Packard, stepped down as chairman and CEO on Wednesday as HP tries to redefine itself for a new era.

The company's board said the change is effective immediately. Robert Wayman, HP's chief financial officer, has been named interim CEO and has been appointed to the board.

"We thank Carly for her significant leadership over the past six years as we look forward to accelerating execution of the company's strategy," board member Patricia Dunn said in a statement.

Dunn, who has served on the board since 1998, has been named chairman.

Fiorina's departure apparently stems from a disagreement with the board over the direction of the company.

"While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision," Fiorina said in a statement.

HP is scheduled to report its fiscal first-quarter results on Feb. 16.

The departure of Fiorina, who came to the company in 1999 from Lucent Technologies, comes as HP struggles to achieve consistent growth in its financial performance, particularly in its enterprise group. The company reorganized last month, combining its PC and printer units.

Fiorina has resisted calls to break HP, a Silicon Valley icon, into two separate companies, one focused on business customers and another focused on consumers.

HP's merger with Compaq, which was spearheaded by Fiorina, has also been criticized. Although the merged company has managed to wring out costs by combining operations, it has lost market share in certain areas, according to analysts.

Just two weeks ago, HP denied reports that it was planning to redistribute some of Fiorina's day-to-day responsibilities.

HP's stock was up about 10 percent before the market opened.

On Tuesday, Sanford Litvack resigned from the company's board of directors. He was replaced by venture capitalist and former board member Thomas Perkins.
http://news.com.com/Fiorina+steps+do...3-5568951.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No DRM in Mr. Robertson's Neighborhood
Ashlee Vance

There is a shallowness to Southern California culture that can make you question the authenticity of anything coming out of the place. The boobs are fake. The faces are fake. The water is fake - pumped in from far away reservoirs. The cities are filled with bland, repetitive strip malls loaded down with chain restaurants not local cuisine. Half of the people aren't even real people at all - they're actors.

This doesn't make So Cal a bad place. It just raises immediate questions about someone like Michael Robertson of Linspire, MP3.com and SIPphone fame. Can you trust the authenticity of this blond haired, laid back executive who was raised in Los Angeles and does business in San Diego? Can you trust the motives of his battles with the likes of Microsoft and the recording industry? Is this altruism, capitalism, entrepreneurism or greed? We sat down this week here at the Linspire- sponsored Desktop Summit to try and answer some of these questions and to talk to Robertson about his latest venture - a DRM-free online music shop called MP3tunes.

"I definitely would not down play that I am an entrepreneur, Robertson said. "When everyone is zigging, that's when you want to zag. I would not downplay that.

"But I am a businessman in a unique situation. I was 34 and had a $100m when we sold MP3.com to Vivendi (Universal in 2001). To me, you say, 'How can I make the world a better place?' I don't want to sound too much like an altruistic cheerleader. It's just that I have a nice car and a nice house and then what? Let's go impact the world some, so that is what we are trying to do."

Robertson's best known battle has been waged on the desktop where his Linspire - formerly Lindows - operating system is pitched as a competitor to Microsoft's Windows. The SIPphone venture is a VoIP attack against the slow-to-move telcos. And now with MP3tunes, Robertson is going up against the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), Apple, Real and Microsoft.

The executive admits that some of these ventures have not taken off at quite the clip he had once hoped.

"As technologists, people like Register readers, our universe revolves around technology," he said. "We research our own technology and are comfortable around it. That's not the way the rest of the world works. It has been one of my frustrations. You have to have marketing, a channel and strong distribution. These things take time. (Linspire) has been an exercise in patience for me."

Still, Robertson holds out hope that Version 5.0 of Linspire - out in beta this week and shipping sometime in the first quarter - will finally win over more consumers.

Not making life easier, Robertson has just launched a new music store that doesn't have songs from any major artists, doesn't have the DRM infection demanded by the RIAA and doesn't have serious profit prospects.

"You don't do an online music store to make money," he said. "You can't even think about making money until you have a massive scale and even then it isn't a high margin business."

MP3tunes charges 88 cents a song or $8.88 per album and sends 65 cents per song or $6.50 per album back to the artists. Companies like Apple and Napster also manage just a few pennies per song sale from their online stores.

"But I think backing the MP3 format is the right thing to do for consumers," Robertson said. "Today, desktop Linux is locked out of almost all of the online music stores. That's because we don't support DRM, and I think DRM is the biggest threat to open source, no question about it."

Robertson points to past success with MP3.com as one reason he might be able to sway the major music labels once again. That store started out with no major artists and ended up being courted as a channel by the pigopolists. Should consumers flock to MP3tunes, the labels may realize that DRM hampers sales in a big way, according to Robertson.

"Most of the people call these things music stores, but they are more like rental shops," he said. "A company is telling you how you can use the music. You don't really own it. That is a bad idea for consumers and a bad idea for the industry.

"That's why I am getting back into this and stressing MP3s. Don't rent your music. Own it.

"We don't have U2. We don't have the major record labels. I know that. When I started MP3.com, I didn't have the major labels either."

Robertson expects the upcoming Supreme Court hearings on P2P file sharing to make or break the music industry's battle against consumers.

"If the Supreme Court sides with the lower courts, then even the most ardent DRM fan has to concede that file-sharing networks and by extension MP3 content on those networks will be part of our culture as far as the eye can see," he said. "I don't see how you can arrive at any other conclusion."

And if the labels win?

"That wouldn't help my position, but I still think you can convince (the labels) that the discussion is not about DRM. It's about making money."

So there you have it - a money-hungry, freedom fighter. A millionaire who holds meetings in a small room tucked away at the back of an equally small conference center. No handlers. No pomp.

Is the whole show authentic? Hard to tell. But it's fun to watch.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02...son_interview/


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Surveillance

What happens in Vegas…is logged in Vegas

Vegas Casino Bets On RFID
Alorie Gilbert

Casino mogul Steve Wynn has pulled out all the stops for his new $2.7 billion mega-resort in Las Vegas: an 18-hole championship golf course, a private lake and mountain, and a bronze tower housing 2,700 plush guest rooms.

But when its doors open in April, the Wynn Las Vegas will have one unique feature that few visitors are likely to notice--high-tech betting chips designed to deter counterfeiting, card-counting and other bad behavior.

The fancy new chips look just like regular ones, only they contain radio devices that signal secret serial numbers. Special equipment linked to the casino's computer systems and placed throughout the property will identify legitimate chips and detect fakes, said Rick Doptis, vice president of table games for the Wynn.

"Security-wise, it will be huge for us," Doptis said.

The technology behind these chips is known as radio frequency identification, or RFID, and it's been used for years to track livestock, enable employee security badges and pay tolls.

The casino industry is just the latest to find new uses for RFID technology. Retail chains, led by Wal-Mart Stores, are using it to monitor merchandise. Libraries are incorporating it into book collections to speed checkouts and re-shelving. The United States and other nations are incorporating it into passports to catch counterfeits. One company even offers to inject people with RFID chips linked to their medical records to ensure they receive proper medical care.

In casinos, RFID technology is still relatively rare and in search of a killer application to spur adoption. Yet some tech-savvy casino executives envision RFID transforming the way they operate table games, including blackjack, craps and roulette, over the next four or five years.

For one thing, there's the counterfeiting problem, on which there is scant data. The Nevada Gaming Commission gets about a dozen complaints every year related to counterfeit chips, said Keith Copher, the agency's chief of enforcement. Last year, a casino in Reno quickly lost $26,000 in such a scheme--one of the biggest hits reported to the commission in recent years. And counterfeiting is on the rise at overseas casinos, Copher noted. The RFID technology would let dealers or cashiers see when the value of the chips in front of them don't match the scanners' tally.

However, financial losses due to counterfeit chips are usually minor, and few perpetrators get away with it, Copher said.

Perhaps that's why the Wynn has found a dual purpose for the high-tech chips: The casino is also using the chips to help account for the chips they issue on credit to players, since managing credit risk is a huge part of any big casino's operations.

The Wynn plans to take note of the serial numbers of the chips they lend and of the name of players who cash them in. If someone else returns the chips, it could signal that the original player is using their credit line with the casino to make loans to others--something casinos generally frown upon.

That sort of security doesn't come cheap: The Wynn is spending about $2 million on the chips. That's about double the price of regular chips, and doesn't include addition equipment the Wynn will need to purchase, such as RFID readers, computers and networking gear.

Eye in the sky
The technology could also help casinos catch card players who sneak extra betting chips onto the table after hands are dealt or players who count cards. That's one reason the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas plans to switch on a new set of RFID- equipped betting chips and tables next month.

The casino is installing RFID readers and PCs at game tables. With antennas placed under each player's place at the table, dealers can take a quick inventory of chips that have been wagered at the push of a button. The PCs display all the initial bets, deterring players from sneaking extra chips into their pile after hands are dealt.

Yet the benefits of RFID go beyond security. It may also help casinos boost profits through savvier marketing.



Take the Hard Rock Hotel. In addition to monitoring wagers, the casino plans to use its new RFID system to "rate players"--monitor gamblers to reward them with free rooms, meals and other perks based on how much and how often they wager. As the technology advances, RFID could also help track how well they play. The casinos generally reserve the most enticing rewards for their most "valuable" players--those that bet and lose the most--to keep them coming back.

At the moment, these incentive programs are somewhat limited, because the process of rating players is so labor-intensive. Casinos employ special staff to observe the tables and take note (by hand) of how much players bet and how well they play--typically focusing on high-stakes players. In addition, such ratings are often inaccurate. As a result, casinos overshoot the perks they lavish on players by 20 to 30 percent.

RFID could change that by giving casinos a more accurate and efficient tool to rate players and by allowing them to enlist more table-game players to participate in incentive or "comp" programs. Such programs are roughly the equivalent of an airline's frequent flyer program or a grocery chain's loyalty card, encouraging repeat business.

"It will allow casinos to be more aggressive from a marketing standpoint," said Tim Richards, vice-president of marketing at Progressive Gaming International, a supplier of the next-generation betting chips.

Many in the gaming industry point to the lowly slot machine--which has evolved into a fancy computer--as the desirable model. With slots, casinos have made a science over the last decade of monitoring players and keeping them interested in the machines with a constant stream of rewards and freebies.

In part, that development has helped slots generate the lion's share of casinos' revenue--up to 80 or 90 percent in a typical casino, according to Richards.

"We're trying to bring that same kind of thinking to table games," said Bart Pestrichello, vice president of casino operations at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. "It's to reward players based on their actual bets and decisions."

Keeping a closer eye on table wagers could also help casinos crack down on card counting. Armed with all kinds of data, RFID systems could analyze game activity against statistical models and alert management of a suspicious winning streak. The technology can also be used to catch dealer mistakes, check dealer productivity and deter chip theft.

Still on the drawing board
Despite all the promises of RFID, few casinos have yet to put it to use. Part of the problem is that the technology is expensive. The cost hovers around $8,000 per table, Progressive Gaming's Richards said. That's just for the chips and readers, and doesn't include the extra computers and networking equipment.

Then there are technical problems. It takes about seven seconds for an RFID-equipped game table to read 100 chips--far too slow to capture quick table action.

But Progressive Gaming and a competitor called Shuffle Master are developing systems that take closer to two or three seconds per reading--fast enough to capture the outcome of each hand. This year, the companies each plan to release new versions of their RFID systems that are faster and more affordable than today's models.

"Vegas has a little bit of a wait-and-see attitude," Richards said. "They very much view themselves as the primetime casinos, and they want to make sure the product is bulletproof."

Progressive Gaming's goal is to sell at least 5,000 RFID-enabled gaming tables by 2010. It's wiring up the Hard Rock--one of the first casinos in Las Vegas to adopt RFID betting chips.

Shuffle Master is making big bets too. The Las Vegas company acquired key two RFID-related patents last year for $12.5 million and has teamed up with RFID equipment maker Gaming Partners International to develop new products. Gaming Partners is supplying the Wynn with its RFID system.

Executives at both companies say broader adoption is coming but is about five years off.

Yet another potential barrier to RFID at casinos is concern over privacy. Wherever it goes, RFID seems to generate objections from consumer activists, who worry that the technology will give corporations and governments too much power to pry into people's lives.

But few people expect total privacy at casinos, where surveillance cameras might easily outnumber the cocktail waitresses roaming the floor. With casinos already keeping such a close eye on their visitors, would RFID chips really be much cause for concern? In addition, RFID systems only recognize people who use player's cards. The cards are part of complimentary programs, which are completely voluntary.

Still, you can imagine some disturbing scenarios. For instance, an RFID reader might make a nifty tool for a thief, who could covertly scan people strolling along the Strip for his next hold-up victim. Could casinos be setting their patrons up for this kind of trouble?

The question seemed to stump Rick Doptis at the Wynn. "I would have no idea as to that," Doptis said. "We go to great lengths to protect customer safety. Our parking lots and grounds are surveyed like no other on the planet. We do everything we can to protect our guests. But theft is a factor."
http://news.com.com/Vegas+casino+bet...3-5568288.html



The Flip Side Of Database Snooping
Declan McCullagh

Adm. John Poindexter, the Bush administration official responsible for the Total Information Awareness project, is not exactly chastened by Congress's pulling the plug on his idea.

"One of the remarkable things about ideas is that once you surface an idea, and it is a good idea, in the long term there is very little that can be done to stop it," Poindexter says of his proposals for aggressive data mining. "So I am convinced that research and development will continue, one way or another." Poindexter even hints that money for similar efforts remains buried deep within the Pentagon's budget.

Those candid remarks appear in Robert O'Harrow's "No Place to Hide," a new book that probes beneath the surface of the growing "databasification" of modern life.

O'Harrow, a reporter for The Washington Post, landed a series of interviews that capture how the federal government and its contractors have labored to compile digital dossiers on Americans in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "Law enforcement and intelligence services don't need to design their own surveillance systems from scratch," O'Harrow writes. "They only have to reach out to the companies that already track us so well."

The book's tone isn't shrill. Instead, it offers a reasoned and unparalleled glimpse into the minds of the bureaucrats and CEOs who are bent on creating a surveillance-industrial complex--not to monitor Americans for spying's sake, but to ward off future terrorist attacks. The problem, as O'Harrow notes as he profiles companies like Acxiom and ChoicePoint, is that a system created for one purpose can readily be turned into another.

Data collection and information sharing emerged not through chance but because they result in lower prices and more choices for consumers.
That ominous warning also appears in a new book by Dan Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, called "The Digital Person."

Where O'Harrow is descriptive, Solove is prescriptive. He includes a nearly encyclopedic analysis of the current state of privacy law relating to "digital dossiers" and argues that it falls short. For proper legal protections in modern society, Solove argues, "our understandings of privacy must be significantly rethought."

One suggestion he offers--to amend the Privacy Act of 1974 to curb unchecked police use of outsourced databases--I also made in a September 2003 column. Others are more sweeping, such as increasing the legal protection for personal information that's in the hands of a third party such as a bank, bookseller or Internet service provider. A new federal law could go a long way toward repairing the damage to "third-party privacy" inflicted by a pair of Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s, Solove says.

Both O'Harrow and Solove do their topics justice when warning of police perusal of databases, the perils that secret "Do Not Fly" lists can hold for innocent travelers with unlucky names, and the shadowy surveillance-industrial complex. O'Harrow's book reveals the growing role of private-sector databases in government surveillance plans better than any other treatment so far.

If the books have any fault, it would be overlooking the unsung benefits that have accompanied the databasification of American society. While unchecked police snooping through databases is worrisome, lawful information-sharing in the private sector accelerates economic activity and helps consumers.

Data collection and information sharing emerged not through chance but because they result in lower prices and more choices for consumers. The ability to identify customers who are not likely to pay their bills, for instance, lets stores offer better deals to those who will.

These consumer benefits are given short shrift in privacy debates, which tend to be driven by anecdote and emotion and not by an appreciation of how businesses work in the real world.

Whatever its flaws, the credit-reporting system is a marvel of efficiency; just a few decades ago, if you wanted a loan, you'd have to visit a bank's loan officer in person and wait weeks while he or she checked your references before finally reaching a decision. Thanks to massive databases that sweep in credit histories, addresses, phone numbers, and public records such as bankruptcies and lawsuits by creditors, credit can be obtained in seconds today and at far cheaper prices.

Walter Kitchenman, an economist at Purchase Street Research, estimates that because of information sharing among financial companies, "mortgage rates in the United States are as much as two full percentage points lower" than they would be otherwise. That saves Americans at least $80 billion a year.

Unfortunately, the very features that make credit reports and other databases useful to businesses make them even more attractive to law enforcement. A more interesting question to answer could be: How can government access to these data stores be better controlled without curbing beneficial uses as well?
http://news.com.com/The+flip+side+of...3-5563897.html


European Working Union On eSurveillance

Issues White Paper
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote