[JackSpratts]

Teens More Likely To Swap Than “Tweens” - report
David McGuire

Young children are far less likely than teenagers to illegally download music, movies and software from the Internet, according to the results of an online poll that were released today.

Fourteen percent of children ages eight to 12 said they have downloaded music from the Internet without paying for it, according to the poll conducted by Harris Interactive Corp. Three percent said they have downloaded software and 2 percent said they have downloaded movies.

By contrast, teenagers downloaded without paying for it much more frequently. Seventy-six percent have pirated music, 33 percent software and 17 percent movies, according to 621 teens interviewed by Harris. The polling firm collected the results as part of a larger study on children's downloading habits.

Harris conducted the survey between April 14 and 20 for the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a lobbying group that fights software piracy. The BSA's members include Microsoft Corp., Apple Computer and Adobe Inc.

The upswing in piracy once children become teenagers proves that parents, businesses and the government should spend more time and money to teach children that illegal downloading and file-sharing is wrong, said Diane Smiroldo, spokeswoman for the BSA.

The findings suggest that children can learn responsible downloading practices if taught at an early enough age, she said.

Younger children avoid Internet piracy because they are more likely to obey their parents and less inclined to break the law, said Parry Aftab, executive director of Wiredkids.org, a nonprofit group that studies children's Internet habits and teaches responsible computer use. It also has 9,000 volunteers who help victims of online harassment and aid law enforcement investigations into online criminal incidents.

"Eight- and 9-year-olds tend to follow the rules; 10-year-olds -- about half of them -- follow the rules, and by 11 they ignore everything you've told them," Aftab said.

The BSA, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have spent millions of dollars on educating the public on the legal consequences of online piracy. Nevertheless, compact disc sales have dropped from $13.2 billion in 2000 to $11.2 billion in 2003, and the RIAA attributes much of this to piracy. The BSA blames piracy for sapping $13 billion a year away from its members.

There is no demonstrable way to prove that education will make pre-teen children less likely to pirate entertainment and software once they become teenagers, Smiroldo said, but they are trying anyway. "At this point they're certainly more educated about copyright, so we hope they won't."

The RIAA has gained notoriety for suing suspected music pirates, some as young as 12 years old. Although the BSA has joined the record companies and movie studios in taking a hard-line approach to adults who download music illegally, Smiroldo said the group is more interested in educating younger people than suing them.

Preventing piracy is a laudable goal, but companies also see potential profits down the road by convincing younger children to pay for their products once they get older, said Don Montuori, editor of "U.S. Tweens Market, 2nd Edition," a report published in April 2003 by Rockville, Md.-based Marketresearch.com Inc.

In addition to being more likely than the average population to have Internet access, the 8- to 14-year-old age group commands $38 billion in disposable income, Montuori said. "For people who really don't work, that's not chump change. Marketers of all sorts recognize that this is a group with disposable income."

Tina Wells, managing director at New York-based youth-focused consulting firm Blue Fusion, said tweens spend their money on toys, gum and candy, clothes and shoes, computer and video games and music.

"The real tweens are getting their money from mom and dad [and] doing odd jobs," Wells said. "Tweens are very savvy and they're very smart and they know how to get money. They're selling toys on eBay."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004May26.html


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Net Dissident Ends Hunger Strike
Julia Scheeres

A Vietnamese dissident sentenced to seven years in prison for criticizing the communist regime on the Internet ended a three-week hunger strike Tuesday after authorities announced they would reconsider his verdict.

Hanoi's Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Nguyen Vu Binh, 35, who was charged with espionage for communicating with pro-democracy websites, publishing online essays urging political reform and e- mailing written testimony to the U.S. Congress detailing human rights abuses in the Asian country, according to Reporters Without Borders.


The French press freedom group said Vu Binh appealed the verdict -- which included three years of house arrest following the prison term -- but that the Supreme Court upheld the sentence on May 5 in a hearing that was closed to foreign journalists and diplomats. When his appeal was rejected, his wife said Vu Binh told the court that he would begin a hunger strike, saying, "For me, either freedom or death."

Although Article 69 of the Vietnamese Constitution permits free expression, free press and the right to form an association and demonstrate, the law is applied arbitrarily, activists say.

"Nguyen Vu Binh's arrest is plain and simple," said Nam Tran, co-founder of The Democracy Club for Viet Nam. "It shows the world that Vietnam's government is a dictatorship regime that will not tolerate any independent expression."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,63599,00.html


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Online Dissident Trial 'Shocking'
Correspondents in Beijing

INTERNATIONAL press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the trial of Chinese internet dissident Du Daobin as "unfair" and "shocking".

Mr Du was tried on May 18 for "incitement to subvert state power" in Xiaogan city, central Hubei province even though his lawyer Mo Shaoping, who was only notified on May 14, could not prepare for the case and reach the city in time.

Du was appointed another lawyer, Li Zongyi, who refused to enter a not guilty plea, despite Du's demands, and only wanted to argue for a lighter sentence.

The trial was held behind closed doors. Mr Mo said he should have been informed earlier so he could adjust his schedule and Mr Du had a right to have the trial deferred.

RSF ("Reporters sans frontières") condemned the denial of Mr Du's right to a fair trial.

"The authorities forced Du to plead guilty, showing their willingness to employ any means to silence dissident voices," it said in a statement.

It was not the first time Mr Du had been deprived of a lawyer. In November, his counsel Li Qingqiang had his licence withdrawn by his law firm, preventing him from defending his client. Mr Du then chose Mo Shaoping, only to be in turn deprived of his services.

Mr Du, a finance official, was detained in October for posting some 30 articles on the internet arguing for greater freedom of expression in China and calling for the release of university student Liu Di, who was imprisoned for posting articles on online forums calling for democracy in China.

She was released in November after more than a year of imprisonment without trial.

Mr Du's trial is part of steps by the government to clamp down on the use of the internet for what it considers subversive purposes.

His case prompted a petition in February signed by more than 100 Chinese intellectuals calling for Mr Du's release, and demanding official clarification of exactly what activities constitute "incitement to subvert state power".
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15318,00.html


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Webmaster Finds Gaps in China's Net
Philip P. Pan

When Wu Wei's Web site was shut down for the 23rd time, police in the western Chinese city of Chengdu replaced it with one of their own. For a few days last summer, people trying to reach his Democracy and Freedom discussion forum instead found an odd message in large red characters on their computer screens.

"Because this site contains illegal information," the message said, "the webmaster is asked to quickly contact Officer Hu of the Chengdu Public Security Bureau Internet Supervision Department." Helpfully, the officer left a phone number.

Wu, 34, a part-time college lecturer living hundreds of miles away in Guangzhou on China's southeast coast, ignored the request. But users across the country called and berated Officer Hu for closing the site.

Wu said the officer eventually called his cell phone and offered to reopen the site if he turned over data that could help police identify people who had posted essays there.

Wu refused. Instead, he found another company, in another city, selling space on the Internet for personal Web pages. And five days after it was closed, the Democracy and Freedom site was online again.

The authorities have shut down, blocked, hacked or otherwise incapacitated Wu's Web site 38 times in the past three years, repeatedly disrupting the discussions it hosts on political reform, human rights and other subjects the ruling Chinese Communist Party considers taboo. Each time the site has been closed, though, Wu and the friends who help him run it have found a way to open it again.

Their cat-and-mouse game with the country's cyberpolice highlights the unique challenge the Internet poses to the party as it struggles to build a free-market economy while preserving the largest authoritarian political system in the world. It also illustrates how the bounds of permissible speech in China are blurring.

Nearly three decades after the death of Mao Zedong, Chinese enjoy greater personal freedom than ever before under Communist rule, and they routinely criticize the government in private without fear. But people are increasingly using the Internet to broadcast their opinions in public, challenging a key pillar of the party's rule -- its ability to control news, information and public debate.

The party is swift to jail some people who criticize senior leaders or express dissent on sensitive subjects such as Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square massacre; at least 55 people are in Chinese prisons on charges related to their Web postings. But others who express the same views go unpunished, because police officers are sometimes apathetic about tracking them down and local Internet businesses are often more interested in attracting customers than enforcing vague rules.

More than 80 million people use the Internet in China, according to official surveys, and the figure has been doubling every 18 months. Unlike authoritarian governments elsewhere, China's rulers have chosen to promote Internet access, aiming to nurture a tech-savvy workforce, stimulate economic growth and improve government efficiency.

But the Internet has become the most unpredictable and difficult to control of the nation's mass media. While Chinese newspapers, radio and television stations are all owned by the state and must follow the party's orders, the country's most popular Web sites are privately owned, driven by profit to expand their audiences and less strictly regulated by government censors. These Web sites are at the cutting edge of an epic struggle unfolding in China today between the authoritarian state and those seeking more freedom.

Several times, the sites have drawn national attention to incidents of perceived injustice, prompting ordinary people to flood the Internet with angry messages. In a country where public demonstrations are forbidden, the government has felt compelled to respond to these online protests. In one case, after an outcry over the death of a young college graduate in police custody, it repealed a decades-old law giving police wide-ranging power to detain people not carrying their residency permits.

Worried about these challenges, the leadership ordered tighter controls on news Web sites this year. The government has also upgraded the technology it uses to block content from overseas and, according to the state media, has begun to install new surveillance software in Internet cafes. Nationwide, China employs an estimated 30,000 people to enforce vague regulations against using the Web to spread rumors, organize cults or disseminate "harmful information."

"The most important battleground for freedom of speech in China is on the Internet now. The authorities realize that, and they are trying to suppress it," Wu said recently, peering at his smudged computer screen and giving a tour of his Web site. "At the same time, we are continuously challenging their bottom line, and pushing them back. . . . This is a critical time."

A New World

A trim man with a wide, square face and large glasses that sit a little too low on his nose, Wu talks fast, with a thick Cantonese accent. His tiny apartment holds

only a bed and a small desk for a computer he assembled himself. A plastic cup he uses as an ashtray sits near his keyboard, and newspapers are taped on the only window to keep the sun from overheating the room. The neighborhood is a slum, located far from the college where Wu teaches a class on public administration once a week, and even farther from the factory where his wife works. But the couple chose the room because the rent was cheap and the landlord had wired the building for high-speed Internet access.

The eldest son of party officials, Wu joined the Communist Youth League in middle school and had planned to join the party in college because he believed it was China's best hope for a democratic and prosperous future. But as a freshman, he participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations that swept the nation in 1989, and changed his mind about the party after the Tiananmen massacre.

Wu had his own brush with the power of the state. During the crackdown, party officials demanded he identify teachers who led protests at his university, threatening to kick him out of school if he refused, Wu recalled. After several days of questioning, Wu gave them a name. He immediately regretted it, and decided then he would never give in like that again.

After graduating, Wu was assigned a job in a local office in charge of libraries and bookstores. He was frustrated and bored, until one day in 1998 a colleague introduced him to the Internet. Before long, Wu stumbled onto bulletin board sites hosting lively discussions on history, politics and current affairs. At first, Wu said, he only read what others had posted. But he was drawn into a new world.

When a popular discussion site was shut down in June 2001, he and two doctoral students he met online decided to launch the Democracy and Freedom forum, using a free bulletin board site. "I felt if I didn't speak out, I might not speak forever," recalled Wu, who adopted the Internet name Yedu, from a Tang Dynasty poem describing an empty boat on a river in the wilderness.

The new forum drew hundreds of visitors daily. Wu and his friends moderated debates on such sensitive subjects as President Jiang Zemin's plan to allow entrepreneurs into the party, independence for Tibet and whether China deserved to host the Olympics. Every Friday night, users gathered in an online chat room to continue the discussions in real time.

But less than three months after the Democracy and Freedom forum opened, authorities suddenly shut down the Web site hosting it. Neither police nor the site's managers contacted Wu. He simply clicked on his forum's address one day and saw a message on a white screen indicating the page was unavailable.

Wu and his colleagues set up the forum again on another free discussion site, and it flourished undisturbed for six months. Then, one day, as a group of users planned to meet in person, agents of the Ministry of State Security visited one of Wu's two partners. They pressured him to stop participating in the forum and threatened to withhold his doctoral degree, Wu said. After the student's wife also urged him to stop, he agreed to quit.

"We all could understand his decision," said Wu, whose own wife has urged him to give up the Web site. "People have to make their own choices."

Over the next six months, the authorities shut down Wu's forum 12 times. On a few occasions, the entire Web site hosting it would disappear. Other times, only his forum was closed, replaced by a message that said, "This forum has already been deleted."

Wu said he was not afraid back then because the government had not yet arrested many people for Internet activities and because he believed he was doing nothing illegal. "I mainly felt angry," he recalled. "We had freedom of speech on the Internet, but now the authorities wouldn't even let us have that space."

Still, Wu began taking precautions. When posting his own essays, he used a software program that allowed him to sign on to the Internet through a proxy server, making it difficult if not impossible for the authorities to track him down.

Despite the shutdowns, his forum continued to attract new users. Each time it closed and opened, Wu sent out a mass of e-mails with its new location, and flooded the Internet with similar notices.

Then, in November 2002, police in Beijing arrested two of his site's regular essayists. The same day, Wu's supervisor at the library and bookstore oversight office accused him of keeping "extremely reactionary essays" on his office computer and suspended him pending a party investigation.

For the first time since setting up the site, Wu was frightened and nervous. He was ordered not to leave his home. "Any time an individual faces the huge state organ, you feel alone and weak," he said. So he stayed off the Internet.

As the months passed, his friends online grew anxious. "We were worried he might have been arrested," recalled Mou Bo, 28, a medical student in Shanghai and one of the site's co-founders. But Mou and others kept the forum running.

In the end, the officials investigating Wu never asked about his Web forum or inspected his home computer, which he used to manage it. Instead, he recalled, they examined the essays he had downloaded at the office from dissident Web sites overseas. That was enough for him to lose his job.

Thriving Underground

In April 2003, after moving to Guangzhou in search of work, Wu finally signed on to the Internet again. To his surprise, the Democracy and Freedom forum was

thriving. Authorities had not shut it down in months. Wu said police appeared distracted by the SARS crisis.

The next time police shut down the site, in May 2003, Wu and his friends changed tactics. Instead of moving to another Web site hosting discussion forums for free, they decided to design a site of their own and rent space from an Internet service provider. More people could sign on simultaneously, and the discussions could be expanded and organized. Most important, they would be able to save a copy of the site so the material would no longer be lost every time authorities pulled the plug.

They named the main forum the Sound of Freedom and set aside another section to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. They also began offering downloads, including the texts of banned books and a variety of video and audio files. Among the recent offerings was footage of the huge anti- government protests in Hong Kong last year and a bootleg copy of the movie "1984," based on George Orwell's novel.

One page on the site, titled "Freedom of Speech is Not a Crime," highlighted the danger of their endeavor. It listed the names of 20 people jailed for expressing their views on the Web, including several who were regular essayists on the site. Wu never deleted their writings after the arrests. Unlike the hosts of most Chinese Web sites, he has also refused to employ a software filter to block messages with sensitive phrases such as human rights.

A dozen other friends scattered across 10 provinces were helping Wu and Mou now. They were civil servants and computer programmers, entrepreneurs and scholars, even a government official and a well-known novelist, all using Internet pen names. Only a few had ever met. Instead they communicated using Microsoft's free instant messaging system, which allowed them to hold conversations and meetings online.

They rented Web space, available in China for about $15 a month, and the new site debuted in June 2003. Two days later, it was shut down. The Internet firm explained that police in Beijing ordered them to do so, Wu said.

Wu and his partners tried again with an Internet firm in Chengdu a few weeks later. The site stayed up about two months before the message from Officer Hu appeared.

Over time, a pattern emerged. Wu used the Google search engine to find a company renting Web space on a monthly basis and using software compatible with his. The process involved clicking on link after link, and could take days. Then he contacted the firm by instant messaging, and a partner would send the payment electronically.

The company usually put up the Web site immediately, without asking questions. Then, within a few weeks, it would shut it down. Often, an employee warned that police had ordered the closure and launched a criminal investigation.

But only once did police follow through and question Wu or his colleagues. Last September, police in Jiangsu province detained the Web manager from Wu's site who had contacted and paid the last Internet firm. At about the same time, officers from the Ministry of State Security detained another of the site's managers.

Wu and the others prepared for the worst. They stopped trying to rent Internet space. They also destroyed personal letters and meeting notes that might be used against them or their friends.

As he waited, Wu began rereading essays written by dissidents who had spent time in prison. "This was the most tense time," he recalled. "We had already lost several Internet friends. We knew what was possible."

But then his two partners were released. Days and then weeks passed without a knock on his door or word of any other arrests. Eventually, Wu and his friends concluded they were safe. And they began renting Internet space again.

Eluding the Police

As time passed, Wu and his colleagues came to a series of surprising conclusions about the men and women shutting down their Web site.

First, the Internet service providers didn't seem to care until police stepped in. State regulations require the providers to monitor the sites they host, save data

about the users who visit them and ensure that discussion sites are registered with the government. But the companies appeared more interested in winning customers than screening them.

There was a pattern to the behavior of the police too. It would have been possible to track down Wu and his partners, given the electronic trail they left by renting the server space and using it regularly. But the police didn't seem interested. The officers were usually in the same city as the Internet service provider, and they rarely left the jurisdiction.

It also would have been easy for the authorities to shut down the site quickly. Wu gave out the new address to anyone who asked. But the site often stayed open for weeks before police acted.

"The party is not a monolithic block," Wu said. "The police may feel, 'If we can avoid the trouble, let's avoid the trouble.' No one wants to go out of their way to hurt people."

Many officers and officials appear more concerned about profiting from the Internet than policing it. For example, a campaign to regulate Internet cafes has faltered because local authorities often look the other way when cafe managers fail to record customers' names or install surveillance software, as long as they pay taxes and fees.

"There are more and more of us mice, but the cat, for various reasons, is less interested in its work," said one of Wu's partners, a woman who helps manage Shanghai's economy. Another partner, a computer technician in Nanjing, added, "The cat is too busy making money."

'We're Not Going to Stop'

Wu said he cannot compete with the government's resources or its access to high technology. When he attempted to establish the site on a server overseas last

year, for example, the authorities blocked users in China from seeing it. But Wu said he and his friends are more committed to their cause.

In December, they took the fight to a new level, organizing a petition drive on the site for the first time. Wu drafted an open letter calling for the release of Du Daobin, a regular writer on their site who had been arrested and charged with "inciting subversion against the state" after posting essays supporting last year's protests in Hong Kong. "This is a case of criminalizing speech," Wu wrote, urging the government to clarify the nation's subversion laws and stop using them to "suppress the people from carrying out peaceful criticism."

Wu circulated the petition among liberal intellectuals and legal scholars, who made improvements, then posted it on his site on Feb. 1. Police were slow to respond, and it quickly drew more than 1,400 signatures.

About two weeks later, Wu noticed that someone had deleted pages from the online petition. Then people began to have trouble accessing other pages on the site. Messages appeared telling users that essays were inaccessible because they contained "illegal phrases." Some indicated "Communist Party" was an illegal phrase.

On Feb. 19, the site was shut down. The Internet firm hosting it said it had acted under orders from the Ministry of State Security. Since the beginning of March, the site has opened and closed five more times.

"We're not going to stop," Wu vowed. "We'll try again in a few days."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer


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U.S. Nearing Deal on Way to Track Foreign Visitors
Eric Lichtblau and John Markoff

The Department of Homeland Security is on the verge of awarding the biggest contract in its young history for an elaborate system that could cost as much as $15 billion and employ a network of databases to track visitors to the United States long before they arrive.

The contract, which will probably be awarded in coming days to one of three final bidders, is already generating considerable interest as federal officials try to improve significantly their ability to monitor those who enter at more than 300 border-crossing checkpoints by land, sea and air, where they are going and whether they pose a terrorist threat.

But with that interest have come questions — both logistical and philosophical — from Congressional investigators and outside experts. Will a company based outside the United States, in Bermuda, get the megacontract? How much will it end up costing? What about the privacy concerns of foreign visitors? And most critical, for all the high-end concepts and higher expectations, can the system really work?

Interviews with government officials, experts and the three companies vying for the contract — Accenture, Computer Sciences and Lockheed Martin — reveal new details and potential complications about a project that all agree is daunting in its complexity, cost and national security importance.

The program, known as US-Visit and rooted partly in a Pentagon concept developed after the terrorist attacks of 2001, seeks to supplant the nation's physical borders with what officials call virtual borders. Such borders employ networks of computer databases and biometric sensors for identification at sites abroad where people seek visas to the United States.

With a virtual border in place, the actual border guard will become the last point of defense, rather than the first, because each visitor will have already been screened using a global web of databases.

Visitors arriving at checkpoints, including those at the Mexican and Canadian borders, will face "real-time identification" — instantaneous authentication to confirm that they are who they say they are. American officials will, at least in theory, be able to track them inside the United States and determine if they leave the country on time.

Officials say they will be able, for instance, to determine whether a visitor who overstays a visa has come in contact with the police, but privacy advocates say they worry that the new system could give the federal government far broader power to monitor the whereabouts of visitors by tapping into credit card information or similar databases. The system would tie together about 20 federal databases with information on the more than 300 million foreign visitors each year.

The bidders agree that the Department of Homeland Security has given them unusually wide latitude in determining the best strategy for securing American borders without unduly encumbering tourism and commerce.

Whoever wins the contract will be asked to develop a standard for identifying visitors using a variety of possible tools — from photographs and fingerprints, already used at some airports on a limited basis since January, to techniques like iris scanning, facial recognition and radio-frequency chips for reading passports or identifying vehicles.

"Each of these technologies have strengths and weaknesses," Paul Cofoni, president of Computer Sciences' federal sector, said of the biometric alternatives. "I don't know that any one will be used exclusively."

Virtual borders is a high-concept plan, building on ideas that have been tried since the terrorist attacks of 2001.

But homeland security officials say making the system work on a practical level is integral to protecting the United States from terrorist attacks in the decades to come. "This is hugely important for the security of our country and for the wise use of our limited resources," Asa Hutchinson, under secretary for border security, said in an interview. "We're talking here about a comprehensive approach to border security."

But the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded in a report in September that "the program is a very risky endeavor," given its enormous scope and complexity. "The missed entry of one person who poses a threat to the United States could have severe consequences," the report said.

An update issued by the accounting office earlier this month found that while homeland security officials had made some headway in meeting investigators' concerns about management and oversight problems, the progress "has been slow." The update said major questions remained about the project's cost and viability. "I don't think there's any less concern today," Randolph Hite, who wrote the reports, said in an interview.

"This program is going to get more and more complex as time goes on, and you can't count on human heroes bailing you out to ensure that the system works," Mr. Hite said. With the program to be phased in over a decade, he said, "the question you have to ask is: What value are we getting for these initial increments, and is it worth it?"

Indeed, the costs are enormous, and Congressional investigators said they did not believe officials had a clear handle on the financing. The bid request set a maximum of $10 billion, but the accounting office found that some of the cost estimates were outdated and the final price tag — when financing from agencies like the State Department is considered — could reach $15 billion by 2014.

The idea of virtual borders originated in 2002 with a group of researchers at the National Defense University's Center for Technology and National Security Policy. The group, led by Hans Binnendijk, the center's director, was trying to find new ways to secure the nation's shipping containers.

"We got interested in this soon after 9/11 as a fairly obvious problem," he said.

The group wrote an article discussing the need to inspect cargo long before it arrived in United States harbors. They then briefed a range of government agencies.

The virtual border is similar to the idea of an air traffic control center, officials note. In this case, the system would allow homeland security officials to monitor travel on a national level, shifting resources and responding as necessary.

The air traffic control analogy is significant in part because Computer Sciences and Lockheed Martin have traditionally been the nation's two largest contractors for the Federal Aviation Agency in the development and maintenance of the nation's air traffic control system.

The air traffic control parallel worries some executives. More than $500 million and 15 years were squandered on the effort to modernize the nation's aging air traffic system beginning in the late 1980's and a prime contractor was I.B.M.'s Federal Systems Division, now part of Lockheed Martin.

Another problem the system faces is the potential inability to get access to all needed data from foreign countries and from the United States' own intelligence community. Experts agree that no matter how good the technology, the system will rely on timely and accurate information about the histories and profiles of those entering the country to detect possible terrorists. It will have no direct impact on illegal immigrants.

The system will lead to a broad interconnection of federal databases, ranging from intelligence to law enforcement as well as routine commercial data.

Officials say they will work to ensure that the privacy of foreigners is protected and that the system will not be used to profile travelers, but civil libertarians say they are nonetheless alarmed that databases could be used to monitor both foreign visitors and American citizens, and they have already challenged it in court.

Yet another issue irking some lawmakers is the fact that Accenture is incorporated in Bermuda.

"I don't want to see the Department of Homeland Security outsourcing its business to a Bermudan company," said Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who has pushed to close a loophole allowing foreign bidders on federal contracts.

Federal officials say they are satisfied that Accenture, which has about 25,000 employees in the United States and less than a dozen in Bermuda, meets the definition of a United States company and is eligible for the contract.

Accenture, for its part, sees the issue as irrelevant.

Jim McAvoy, an Accenture spokesman, said, "The real question is: Should the federal government be forced to select an inferior bid because the bidder is incorporated in the U.S.?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/politics/24VISI.html


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Peer-to-Peer VoIP App in Beta -- To Support Open Source
Press Release

ByteEnable

NEW YORK -- Popular Telephony Inc., a telecommunications middleware company, today announced Peerio444™ -- the first Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) application powered by true serverless peer-to-peer technology. Peerio444 marks the company's introduction of a consumer application for serverless peer-to-peer telephony, with plans to introduce a separate enterprise application based on this technology at SuperComm 2004, Chicago, IL, June 22-24, 2004.

Expected to completely transform traditional telecommunication infrastructures by eliminating the need for servers and associated hardware, the patent-pending technology behind both applications will also address previous scalability, security, redundancy and system issues inherent in a peer-to-peer network.

Currently in beta testing on a limited basis and expected to be generally available via free download at www.peerio.com in the coming weeks, Peerio444 turns a PC into a fully functioning telephone that allows users to make unlimited, free calls via the Internet to other PCs, as well as low-cost PC-to-phone calls. Inspired by the principles of peer-to-peer computing, the forthcoming enterprise application will enable companies to create and deploy a wide-scale serverless IP telephony network. Popular Telephony's groundbreaking technology will enable application developers to create VoIP-enabled applications to bring peer-to-peer telephony to a wide audience.

"We anticipate that within ten years there will only be peer-to-peer calls placed over the telephony network, making it the de-facto standard for next generation telecommunications," said Dmitry Goroshevsky, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Popular Telephony Inc. "Built on open standards and inspired by the principles of true peer-to-peer computing, we expect the enabling technology behind Peerio444 to become a basic platform for peer-to-peer telecommunications. Peerio444 will be forever free to consumers and is phase one of Popular Telephony's plan to become the leader in peer-to-peer telephony."

Calls placed using Peerio444 technology will be connected to any PC or telephone number -- including mobile phones, 800 and international numbers -- via a built-in telephony interface. The technology is currently compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems, with plans to add Macintosh compatibility later this year, and provides users with more free features than a traditional landline phone, including voicemail, call waiting, call hold, call transfer, contact management and filters. Unlike existing peer-to-peer VoIP technology, Peerio444 is not monitored by switchboards or Spyware, does not contain Adware or other backdoor profit tools and does not restrict users to call only other standard VoIP applications.
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/articl...40526100146979


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The Future of Online Music
p2pnet.net News Feature

File-sharers believe being able to find any track is more important than the fact the music is free, "clearly demonstrating that p2p network users may be willing to pay for a service which offers the range that only p2p can".

That's one of the findings in a study undertaken by Andrew James Laycock for his thesis The Future of Online Music, part of his submission for a BSc in Music Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University.

"Using the law to curb the file-sharing has seen some short-term success, but overall has actually advertised and improved the activity" is another of his conclusions.

"The publicity surrounding the Napster case essentially informed the world that free music was available in abundance on the Internet," he says in his findings, based on 317 responses to questions aimed at Internet users who download music from P2P networks such as LimeWire, KaZaA and Soul Seek.

"The [more] recent legal action has been severely detrimental to the industry?s public relations image," Laycock, who was using Napster in the early days, states.

"The music industry suing music fans is clearly a problematic route to encouraging legitimate downloading. The development of file-sharing technologies has also been accelerated because of the legal action against it. Problem solving is intrinsic to software evolution, computer programmers are simply trouble-shooters."

Laycock told p2pnet that none of the survey results came as a shock, "although my research into official music industry statistics produced some surprising results.

"In the UK we get headlines in the press about 'falling profits for the music industry' and 'an industry in crisis,' etc etc. But further analysis showed that more albums are being sold than ever before: it's just that prices are falling due to competition with other entertainment industries (eg, the movie industry, which is seeing a boom with DVD sales - exactly like the music industry did when it went digital with the CD in the eighties).

"The music industry don't highlight these inconsistencies obviously. One stat from the survey which I found particularly interesting was that file-sharers found the fact they could find any track more important than the fact the music was free - clearly demonstrating that p2p network users may be willing to pay for a service which offers the range that only p2p can."

Laycock say he finds p2p file sharing fascinating because, "it's so relevant to our time: something which I think will be profoundly important to the future of the intellectual property industries and to the internet."

Laycock told us that as another part of the degree process, since last September, he's been producing an album and so far, "I've produced a six track EP and a multimedia interactive element (featuring photo gallery video interview etc).
http://p2pnet.net/story/1531


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Will Popular Telephony Scare Skype?
Justin Hibbard

Message to Skype Technologies SA: You’ve got competition.

A French startup called Popular Telephony Inc. next month will introduce itself and two peer-to-peer, voice-over-IP (VOIP) software programs, Peerio and Peerio444, at the Supercomm 2004 tradeshow in Chicago, Light Reading has learned. The company’s consumer application, Peerio444, will compete directly with Skype, the highly publicized, free VOIP program from Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies (see Skype Me? Skype You! and VCs Pump $18.8M Into Skype ). But Popular Telephony’s true ambitions lie with Peerio, which is aimed at corporate customers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Peerio444 runs on Windows-based PCs and lets users make free, unlimited calls over the Internet to other PCs. In addition, the software will let users make inexpensive calls to phones on the public switched telephone network (PSTN), including mobile phones, 800 numbers, and international numbers. Free features include voice mail, call waiting, call hold, and call transfer. The product will not contain spyware, adware, or other technologies that have raised concerns about privacy in peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. Popular Telephony plans to release versions for Linux and Macintosh later this year.

Popular Telephony does not expect to distribute Peerio444 as widely as Skype, which has been downloaded over 12 million times and has attracted more than 1 million regular users in eight months, according to Skype Technologies. “We don’t have any plans like we want to conquer the world with [Peerio444],” says Dmitry Goroshevsky, CEO of Popular Telephony. “I’m not saying we have a plan here for 100 million downloads.” The company will offer the program for free through popular download sites and make portions of the source code open for users to modify and redistribute. But it will not spend a lot of money on marketing the product.

Instead, the company hopes Peerio444 will help fuel interest in Peerio, which is based on the same class library as the consumer product. Described as “middleware,” Peerio can be embedded in IP phones, handheld organizers, or other terminal devices used for VOIP calling. Popular Telephony will make money by licensing Peerio to OEM customers, the first of which it will announce at Supercomm (see Mobile Skype: Quality Issues? ).

Popular Telephony is betting that devices equipped with Peerio will appeal to corporate customers because the gadgets can communicate directly with each other over IP networks in P2P fashion, eliminating the need for costly central servers. “You won’t need to pay for the expensive enterprise IP PBX infrastructure to get exactly the same level of services,” Goroshevsky says.

Goroshevsky claims Peerio will scale to support the large numbers of users typically found in corporations, though he won’t explain how, promising more details at Supercomm. He adds that Popular Telephony is addressing the security problems inherent in P2P VOIP software. One of Skype’s most valuable features is its ability to pass calls through firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT) systems. “This is great for users because they don’t need to configure anything, but it is a tremendous security threat,” Goroshevsky says. Popular Telephony is debating whether to include similar technology in Peerio.

Popular Telephony’s pitch to the corporate market “sounds like a tough sell,” says Daryl Schoolar, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR. “Peer-to-peer sounds like too much of a hobbyist, consumer application. They have to do a good job selling quality of service and security. Even with that, you can’t totally replace all of a company’s phone systems.”

Competition will be tough, too. Long-distance providers and regional Bell operating companies already provide VOIP services to businesses by using server-based equipment from vendors like Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO - message board) and Nortel Networks Ltd. (NYSE/Toronto: NT - message board). The potential savings from Popular Telephony’s “serverless” peer-to-peer approach may spark interest among businesses, but Skype Technologies is likely to make the same appeal to them, and it can point to its million active users. “I don’t see how someone else starting from scratch is going to get that kind of traction,” says Jon Arnold, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Popular Telephony is incorporated in the U.S. but maintains headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France, and an engineering team in Israel. The company was started in 2001 with $4 million in seed funding from its founders and angel investors. Originally named CrossOptix, the company had intended to develop ultra-high-speed optical interconnect technology but changed its name and its focus as the telecom industry bottomed out.

Before starting Popular Telephony, Goroshevsky founded Internet Telecom Ltd., a Jerusalem-based maker of VOIP software. In 2000, Internet Telecom sold its assets to Terayon Communication Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: TERN - message board) for $40 million in stock. New York-based investment banker Stewart Rauner arranged the deal and is now an investor in, and a director of, Popular Telephony. In 2001, Terayon management changed its mind about the acquisition, shut down Internet Telecom’s development efforts, and took a $44 million charge.
http://www.lightreading.com/document...m&doc_id=53169


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Comcast Plans Internet Telephone Service

The Comcast Corporation said yesterday that it would offer telephone service over the Internet to more than 40 million households by 2006, as it follows a host of other cable operators challenging local telephone companies.

Comcast also announced that its chairman, C. Michael Armstrong, 64, had stepped down a year earlier than planned. He was succeeded by the chief executive, Brian L. Roberts. Mr. Armstrong was the chief executive of the AT&T Corporation before Comcast acquired AT&T Broadband in 2002.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable television company, said it would begin an aggressive rollout of telephone service with a technology known as VoIP, or voice-over-Internet protocol, which allows phone calls to be transmitted using a cable modem over high-speed data lines.

Comcast follows Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems and Cox Communications in combining phone service with video and Internet service in an effort to take business from the Baby Bells, while giving consumers an incentive not to switch to satellite television.

But with 21.5 million subscribers, Comcast is far larger than its competitors, and analysts say it offers the biggest long-term threat to telecommunications carriers in the areas it serves.

"Comcast will likely become one of the biggest phone companies over the next decade," said John Hodulik, a UBS analyst. "We expect these carriers to see accelerating pressure on residential access lines in 2005 as these deployments occur."

Shares of Comcast rose 12 cents yesterday, to close at $29.69. Shares of SBC declined 55 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $23.50, and Verizon fell $1.05, or nearly 3 percent, to $34.40.

Comcast's service area encompasses large chunks of the markets of larger carriers, including 30 percent of SBC Communications, 27 percent of Verizon Communications, 23 percent of BellSouth and 28 percent of Qwest Communications International.

The largest Baby Bells have been bracing themselves over the last year for tougher competition, and some have experimented with VoIP offerings of their own.

Verizon is expected to introduce its nationwide VoIP service before the end of June, while Qwest has tested a VoIP service in Minnesota.

A spokesman for SBC, Michael Coe, said that while the company saw cable companies as a long-term threat, SBC had time to respond.

"It's going to take a while for consumer VoIP to take off," he said. "SBC won't be standing still."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/te...y/27cable.html


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Australia Moves To Regulate VoIP
Rodney Gedda

Mid-2005 will herald a new era in voice over IP telecommunications when the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) introduces specific regulations for service providers and enterprises stipulating how the technology must be delivered.

The ACA’s acting chairman Dr Bob Horton said VoIP regulation is “inevitable”.

“VoIP is novel and needs to be treated with flexibility for a while as we are faced with an innovative approach to telecommunications and want to make sure we don’t stifle innovation,” Horton told Computerworld.

“We need to test the boundaries of existing regulation and then fashion something around VoIP. Regulation is inevitable because whoever is carrying it has obligations for data, voice, or whatever and there needs to be a requirement for universal service.”

Horton said a discussion paper covering the regulation of VoIP will be put down as early as December this year when the ACA will allow “a couple of months” for all parties to ponder its implications.

“We will then draw a set of regulatory conditions from that,” he said. “Around February 2005 the recommendations will be put to the industry and the complete regulation guidelines should be finalised by July next year.”

Horton is also adamant that VoIP regulation will not be an impediment to the “due diligence process” already in place between the ACA and industry.

“There is a period of tolerance because we’d like to see experimentation,” he said. “And the ACA thanks the early entrants.

"There is an atmosphere of industry self-regulation so we’re giving them as much flexibility as possible.”

As to the type of conditions VoIP regulations might impose upon service providers, Horton said the three areas of quality of service, call location, and privacy will be considered, along with existing carrier guidelines such as what will happen in the event of a power blackout and how access will be provided for people with disabilities.

“One concern would be to give customers an understanding of what they are buying,” he said. “Many VoIP service providers are positioning [their products] as a telephone replacement so if there is any difference – let them know! VoIP has distinguishing characteristics, for example it’s transportable, so for emergency calls you wouldn’t know where it’s coming from.”

Furthermore, Horton said if VoIP calls are made to non-VoIP phones the regulations may need to stipulate a new number range so end users “can expect a low quality of service” which will be part of the consideration in December.

Regulations for enterprises running VoIP over their internal networks, Horton said are difficult to predict. "It’s like a private network and that’s not something new but if you have a transmission link you have to become a carrier.”

He also stressed that in addition to forthcoming regulations, rogue VoIP operations will not be tolerated.

“The industry would detect odd players and we would move to close them down,” he said. “VoIP will spur a number of new carriers as some 700 [data] service providers are poised to offer voice.”

Individual calls are unlikely to be charged or taxed separately, Horton said, as regulations do not allow for this in keeping with the government’s stance on equal access.
http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php?i...1&fp=16&fpid=0


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Net Traffic Shows File-Sharing Undented
Will Knight

The threat of legal action and hefty fines has done little to stop internet users around the world trading music and video files, according to a new study of network traffic.

The vast majority of shared files are copyrighted music or video, making the sharing illegal. In an effort to stamp out infringements, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) started a legal assault on hundreds of alleged US file-sharers in September 2003.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) followed suit in March 2004, announcing plans to sue prolific file-sharing infringers in Germany, Denmark and Canada. Some reports have suggested that these legal attacks have caused file-sharing to fall dramatically. But the study conducted by network monitoring company Sandvine, based in Ontario, Canada, reached a different conclusion.

"There's been no decline in the number of people file-sharing," says Chris Colman, European managing director for Sandvine.

Overall growth

The company's research indicates that the proportion of total net traffic used for peer-to-peer sharing has declined only slightly in the US over the last year, from 70 to 65 per cent.

Furthermore, file-sharing in Europe has not dropped at all - it now accounts for 70 to 80 per cent of net traffic. And internet usage in both the US and Europe is still growing, meaning that file-sharing is growing overall.

However, Sandvine's study does reveal that many US file-traders have moved away from the most popular service, Kazaa. File-sharing traffic via Kazaa has dropped from 90 per cent of the total to just 20 per cent. Users in the US have shifted to alternative networks, in particular eDonkey.

Colman believes this is because the RIAA has so far only sued users of Kazaa. The RIAA has also sought to undermine Kazaa in particular by uploading thousands of bogus music files, in an attempt to frustrate users. In Europe, Kazaa usage has dropped from 70 to 20 percent.

Deep analysis

Sandvine was able to measure the changing patterns of file sharing directly because it already provides hundreds of internet service providers in the US, Europe and Asia with technology that allows them to monitor the type data travelling across their networks.

The company's hardware monitors passing "packets" of data and determines what type of information they are carrying. This is done by a process known as "deep packet analysis", which looks beyond the packet's header to find identifying characteristics.

This reveals whether a packet is part of an email, a web page or a file-sharing transfer - and, in the latter case, which network the file was shared over.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/pri...?id=ns99995045


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File-sharing legal in Canada
Christian Bauer

Many have watched the long battle dread on by the Canadian music industry and users of popular file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Emule and many others. The large industry lawyers are finding every way to attack the user downloading music. Whether it be to preview before buying or just never paying to use the copyrighted works. This phenomena is seen through the downloading of movies, music and anything else you can think of.

On March 31, a Canadian judge, Konrad von Finckenstein, ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association had no right to ask for personal information about 29 alleged file-sharing users. They were very much prepared to sue for large sums of money and most important of all, make an example of users caught in the battle between file-sharing under siege by the large recording industries around the world.

Five Internet service providers were taken to court, among them was Shaw Cable, the most outspoken of the five. Peter Bissonnette, president of Shaw Communications was very pleased with the outcome. Along with Rogers and Bell. Videotron of Quebec was the only company which complied with the requests of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, although the company has interest in the recording industry.

To understand the situation a little better, one must realize the recent victories by similar organizations around the world, including the Recording Industry of Association America and it's affiliates in Denmark, Germany, the UK and most notably the United States of America. Industry lawyers were able to sue approximately 1500 users in the past for sharing songs and works protected by copyrights.

In a recent times, several children were sued as an example of how far the RIAA will go. Superbowl fans were able to see the commercial by Pepsi-iTunes where children were used as a huge corporate scheme to promote the downloading of music, legally. The general theme of the commercial was "I don't" they say. "I will still continue downloading". Unfortunately for Apple, the statement backfired in a show by enthusiasts making a clear message that using children to fight this battle will not get you far at all. You may view the original Superbowl advertisement at apple.com.

On similar occasions, the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) has made similar attacks on users allegedly sharing copyrighted movies via popular file-sharing clients. Several users have been forced to pay hefty fines in the past as the MPAA has targeted certain films being shared, most prominently, new releases.

In recent happenings, large 'ed2k', or edonkey2000 link sites have been shut down one way or the other. The largest of them, ShareReactor, was shut down by Swiss police acting on the complaints of many large corporations. A small victory by the recording and motion picture industries, but a chance for enthusiasts to regroup and form even stronger links.

As file-sharing right now in Canada is legal, Canadians should be aware of the expected and most certain long thought-out appeal being prepared right now by high-paid lawyers for the recording and probably movie industries in Canada.

Canadians are proud of new found freedoms in contrast to our neighbour southward. Citing cases in same-sex marriage and the decriminalization of marijuana under Canadian constitution... and now freedom to share files over the Internet without the fear of embarrassment and lawsuits.
http://www.canadiancontent.net/commtr/itemid172.html


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Semantic Web Roundup
Paul Ford

According to Tim Berners-Lee's WWW2004 keynote address, the Semantic Web is entering "phase II", a time of "less constraint" when Semantic Web developers are encouraged to build upon the foundations of RDF and OWL to create working applications on both the server and the desktop. And while other topics were discussed at WWW2004, such as mixed markup and XForms, this was definitely the Semantic Web's moment in the sun, with academic and corporate presentations alike focusing on the uses of RDF, triple stores, and data sharing.

The Semantic Web focus was not without its critics. Elliotte Rusty Harold posted the following to his site after listening to one of the many Semantic Web-related presentations at the conference:

I feel like I'm a mechanical engineer in 1904 listening to a bunch of other engineers talks about airplanes, but nobody's willing to show me how they actually expect to get their flying machines into the air. Maybe they can do it, but I won't believe it until I see a plane in the air, and even then I really want to take the machine apart before I believe it isn't a disguised hot air balloon. A lot of what I'm hearing this morning sounds like it could float a few balloons.

Both Berners-Lee and Harold are asking the same question from different vantages: where are the applications? There is a framework, not yet fully proven, for a massively distributed, world-wide database, glued together by ontologies -- and now what?

If the answer to "what can I do with the WWW?" was Mosaic 1.0, the question "what can I do with the Semantic Web" has no corresponding killer app. Indeed, Berners-Lee asked the assembled group to forget about killer apps totally; as reported last week, he said that the proof of the Semantic Web is when new connections are made, and new links between information emerge.

That said, there is a great deal of work going on within corporations and academic research groups, each of them trying to answer the question in its own way. Some are crafting better back-end storage and querying methods, others attempting to give the end-user a better experience. Throughout WWW2004's Semantic Web track, managed by Eric Miller, the W3C's Semantic Web Activity Lead, the conversation shifted from theory to practice as betas and demonstrations of working products were shown.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/05/26/www2004.html


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ClearCube Provides Anytime, Anywhere Computing
Press Release

Switch Manager gives IT administrators the ability to eliminate downtime by immediately switching a user to a hot, spare PC blade in the event of a problem. By quickly switching users to spares in the event of a problem, rather than making them wait for a desk-side visit, Switch Manager enables uptime that exceeds 99.9%. New features include built-in management of ClearCube Cage assets including fans and power supplies, more flexible interfaces to third-party tools, and enhanced security and logon features.

Data Failover is a peer-to-peer backup and recovery tool-for use with PC Blades and standard box PCs. Data Failover is unique in that it virtualizes the unused hard disk space on users' Blades and PCs and makes it available for backing up user settings and data. New features include advanced disaster recovery management and visualization via multi-site backups and more efficient settings capture.

"Blade computing is one of the leading technologies that is expected to dramatically change the corporate desktop during the next three years," said Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group. "The current generations of PCs do not adequately provide the level of security and reliability required by today's enterprise and as a result, PC blades were created. ClearCube has moved sharply to address these needs by improving remote systems management, using RDP and direct connect solutions at the desktop to address user's needs, and increasing desktop PC reliability to a level consistent with server blades."
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2004,+08:04+AM


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Q ‘n’ A

Firewalls Hamper File Sharing Via Instant Messenger
J.D. Biersdorfer


Q: I TRIED TO SEND a file to a friend using America Online's stand-alone In- stant Messenger program, but it wouldn't work. Why not?
A: In addition to real-time text messaging, AOL Instant Messenger software can transfer files directly between two connected users, including documents that might be too large to e-mail. Firewall protection on either user's computer is one of several factors that can hamper file-sharing. If you suspect that a firewall might be blocking the transfer, select a different port in the AOL Instant Messenger connection preferences or adjust your firewall software settings to allow transfers. If you are trying to transfer files in an office that uses a corporate firewall, you should ask your network administrator which port to use. Next, be sure that you and your friend have configured the AIM program correctly so that you both are set up to receive files. You and your buddy should be using the same version of the AIM software, preferably the most current edition. If your transfer is between a Windows- based PC and a Macintosh, check the program settings on the Mac version to make sure the file-sharing feature is enabled. When exchanging files, even with people you know, it is a good idea to have your antivirus program set up to scan incoming files. Spyware that uses the social aspects of instant-message programs to persuade people to download and install an intrusive program should be avoided.
http://www.sanmateocountytimes.com/S...68419,00.html#


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Is Profiting from P2P Wrong?
Cory Higgins

Let’s delve into some of the moral issues surrounding commercial file sharing clients in these upcoming paragraphs. Most file-swapping junkies would admit that those who sell pirated material are “in the wrong.” How much does Kazaa’s shadow ring of dummy company fronts make each month? And how do they really differ all that much from the large factory in Taiwan that pumps out pirated DVD’s by the hundreds for sale? Kazaa and other large commercial P2P clients like Blubster make big bucks from advertising and adding 3rd party software. People use these networks because of the availability of free, copyrighted material.

File sharers often justify their use of P2P on the grounds of how the RIAA is screwing artist. These swappers are right, and that’s what makes their use of commercial P2P programs hypocritical. When buying a CD, the RIAA gets a huge chunk of the money, leaving the artist only a small portion. That’s wrong. The RIAA is getting way too large of a profit for just for being a distribution tool.

What is P2P to music? Bingo, a distribution tool. What percentage of the profit, in the form of ads and bundled software, is the commercial P2P making off being the distributor? 100 percent, that’s right. Sure they are making less money off the artist then the RIAA, but they are keeping a larger percentage of the profit that should be going to the artists. The argument that P2P results in many new fans for many different bands is very valid. And without a doubt most bands probably sell more concert tickets because of P2P; regardless this doesn’t make the prior point moot.

The moral pitfalls of profiting off P2P may not even end up being the driving source behind the movement to non-commercial P2P’s. Some of today’s most popular file sharing clients are ones I would label non-commercial. eMule and Bit Torrent are two prime examples of the growing popularity of non-commercial P2P. Commercial clients often have “clean” versions of their software circulated. Clean Blubster and Kazaa Lite are usually preferred over the regular users. The fact they have the invasive spyware removed is great. In many cases the software simply works better also. Significant speed and performance are often noticed when stripping out the ad serving portions of the software.

Most the large commercial P2P’s didn’t start off like that. They usually trace their roots back to a smaller, tight community. The addition of investors and ad buyers begins to shift who the developer is accountable to. Where they at one time answered to the user base, they begin to have answering to a different source. They begin to worry about making potential ad buyers mad. Or begin to have to succumb to investor pressure to show profit.

Becoming a profit turning corporation also makes it much easier to be targeted by officials. The music, movie, and software industries, not to mention the government, have a much harder time figuring out whom to go after with a community project like eMule, then something like Optisoft or Sharman.

This has prompted a rise of the new generation of P2P. Communities like eMule, and Bit Torrent have restored faith in the open movement. Many questioned the open movement considering the chaos multiple clients created on Gnutella. Both eMule and Bit Torrent see updates at rates many times that of some commercial P2P’s. Profiting off P2P simply goes against ideals many file sharers hold. File sharing should be a part time hobby by a team of developers, not a job.

Some Examples of Commercial P2P Offenders:

Kazaa/Grokster: The worst offenders ever. These programs are bundled with nearly countless spyware and adware programs. One of the major problems is the lack of actual network development, and getting rich on the backs of those who make creative media. The shining example of what’s wrong with profiting off P2P.

MP2P: A network that started off with the purest of intentions. However with the adding of bundled software and ads; it’s following in the footsteps of Kazaa.

Bearshare: In some ways just as bad as Kazaa, as it is a commercial company riding the wave of an open source network. Sure, Limewire and Bearshare have done tons for the development of Gnutella, however they still make 100 percentage profit off the distribution of creative property.

Some Examples of Non-Commercial P2P’s

Bit Torrent: Open source, freeware, and ad free. All that, plus it’s probably the hottest thing in P2P right now. It is changing not just illicit file sharing, but how information is being distributed by legitimate websites.

eMule: Came along by offering a superior client to and already good network. This client showed the benefits of many individual open source developers working together.

Sharaza: Not open source. Arguments can be made about their methods, but not the motives. Shareaza has offered one of the finest Gnutella clients, and brought a new network into being, G2 is a solid network in its own right. It has also become one of the first good multi network clients. All this without any ads or spyware. Totally non- commercial; so far.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=485


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Philippines

Chikka Builds Up Arsenal Of Intellectual Property Around SMS Applications
Manila Bulletin

One has to, if one is to be a major global player in the wireless space.

Thus, says Chikka Asia, Inc. chief executive Officer Dennis Mendiola as to why the company has spent over a million dollars on global patents.

A total of 12 patents have been filed by Manila-based Chikka and its affiliate companies who together in the last two years blanketed the Philippine wireless space for various uses of SMS - to communicate with someone on the Internet, to bid for a rare product, to register a complaint to government, to make payments, and yes, to find ones romance.

The first of the patents were actually granted by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore with subsequent grants expected from other signatories to International Patent Cooperation Treaty. The patents are employed firstly by the mobile Instant Messaging application popularly known as Chikka Text Messenger. The application unifies ones GSM phone number and PC Instant Messaging account so that: one, your PC log-on ID is nothing but your phone number; and two, messages are forwarded to your phone when you are off-line. "Instant messaging" can thus continue on mobile mode. The patented innovations are in popular use by overseas Filipinos who are able to send text messages from the Internet to any Globe or Smart mobile phone.

An affiliate company Bidshot owns patents particular to Bidshot.com, the world’s only SMS-enabled auction site. The innovation has been certified where one is alerted on the status of his bid and subsequently able to bid on items via SMS. Another patented innovation lies in the fact that buyer and seller are able to interact anonymously.

Sagent, another affiliate leading in "natural language," or SMS’ counterpart of "artificial intelligence" owns patents for "mBrace." M-brace is simply your usual 1-800FLOWERS number, except the numeric digits are text or SMS short codes.

Still another Manilabased company who has filed patents for proprietary technologies is Paysetter International. The company pioneered the "virtual wallet," sending and receiving actual cash via SMS with ones GSM number linked to his bank account.

More recently, the group led by Paysetter partnered with Globe Telecom to give the country its first variable peer-to-peer (p2p) secure credit reloading system dubbed "Sharea-Load." The application, seen as a major development in enabling real mcommerce, again benefits from patented processes, in particular the most natural way by which one sends an amount of call credits to the recipient’s GSM phone number.

‘A love affair with text’

"For everything that has been launched, the patented processes have always translated to giving people more and more things to do with SMS. This, while retaining the simplicity, economy, and ease of use which have been at the very center of the Filipino’s love affair with text," says Mendiola. "We now look to exporting this culture to the whole world."

Audrey and Yu Sarn, Singapore-based counsel for intellectual property of Chikka says that by global standards, the company and its affiliates have assembled by far the most impressive cluster of patents to trip any wouldbe infringer.

Asked about developing applications in an environment where IP rights are frequently violated, Chikka’s Mendiola says: "Respect for intellectual property, I guess starts from within. You tend to respect others intellectual property, when you jealously guard your own. We hope to provide the spark."

Chikka Asia, Inc. is a pioneer in wireless applications services development, having created the world’s first mobile IM and proceeding to launch it in the coveted "SMS Capital" in 2001. The company has since developed multi-platforms including mobile-interactive TV, SMS-enabled auction sites, mobile matchmaking, and mobile versions of Internet Relay Chat. It has fully exploited proprietary "suffixing" technology to bring successful Internet models to the mobile world. It licenses the same patented methods to affiliates and partners who have employed them for their various mobile solutions in turn launched by international carriers.

In 2002, Chikka Asia, Inc., the company’s regional operating entity based in Manila became one of the first mobile data enablers in the world to be ISO-certified under the 9001:2000 series. By aligning its management and software development processes with international standards, Chikka has helped establish the region as a global hub for excellent wireless applications testing and development.
http://www.mb.com.ph/INFO2004052110034.html#


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Are Saudis Using British Libel Law to Deter Critics?
Sarah Lyall

LONDON, May 21 — "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties" (Scribner), Craig Unger's book about the tangled connections between President Bush and his circle and Saudi Arabia's royal family, became a best seller in the United States this spring, and is now being published in Germany, Spain and Brazil, among other places.

But it is not for sale in Britain.

Earlier this year, Mr. Unger's book became the latest casualty of Britain's tough libel laws when his British publisher, Secker & Warburg, canceled publication, saying that it was afraid of being sued. British publishing has long been notoriously hamstrung by the country's libel laws, which place the burden of proof on the defendant and often make it prohibitively difficult for authors to win their cases if they are sued. But what is causing particular consternation in publishing and legal circles now is that Mr. Unger's case may be yet another example of how wealthy Saudis are increasingly using British laws to intimidate critics.

"Some Saudis appear to be using the U.K. as a back door to silence their critics and repress free speech by threatening litigation, persuading publishers to back down rather then face years of expensive litigation — even if what they're publishing might in fact be true," said Trevor Asserson, who specializes in defamation in the London law office of Morgan Lewis & Bockius.

One of Mr. Asserson's clients, Rachel Ehrenfeld, had a British deal to distribute her new book, "Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It" (Bonus Books), canceled because of a legal threat by one of the Saudis she wrote about. Mr. Asserson declined to reveal who that person was.

In the mid-1990's, Charles Glass, an ABC reporter who spent a decade as the network's chief Middle East correspondent, tried to interest British publishers in a book about Saudi Arabia and the corrupting influence of its royal family, but was turned down on libel grounds. "One publisher called me later, very embarrassed, and said that the legal people would not take the risk," Mr. Glass said in an interview.

With Mr. Unger's book, the publishers admitted they were worried about a possible lawsuit from one of the deep-pocketed Saudis who were mentioned, even though none explicitly made such threats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/books/22LIBE.html


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To Quiet a Whirring Computer, Fight Noise With Noise
Anne Eisenberg

THE constant drone of a computer cooling fan can be annoying. But a professor at Brigham Young University has taken an unusual step to mute this noise: more noise, produced in just the right quantities from tiny loudspeakers that surround the fan.

"We make anti-noise," said Scott D. Sommerfeldt, a physicist who created a noise suppression system with his students. It is the latest example of a technology called active noise reduction, or noise cancellation, well known from its use in headphones designed to block out the low rumble of jet engines.

The sound waves engineered by Dr. Sommerfeldt are out of phase with sound waves from the fan and thus they cancel each other out, substantially reducing fan noise.

Dr. Sommerfeldt's system has four miniature speakers and four even tinier microphones set in a ring around the computer fan. The microphones and other sensors detect the noise of the fan blades and, with the help of digital signal processing and algorithms, radiate opposing tones from the speakers. The whole system can be tucked into the same space that a conventional computer cooling fan would occupy.

Noise-cancellation technology has been in development for more than 50 years, Dr. Sommerfeldt said. In typical headphones, microphones in the headset detect noise; the speakers in the earcups counter with anti-noise.

Dr. Sommerfeldt's target was not the roar of aircraft, but the hum of office machinery. To counter this noise, some active noise reduction systems place microphones and related gear in the middle of a room to calculate the amount of cancellation needed.

But Dr. Sommerfeldt wanted to put the system within the computer casing itself so that it might one day become a built-in feature of personal computers.

Trying to cancel noise from within the computer turned out to be tricky, though. "You are asking for trouble if you place the mikes right next to the fan," he said. While it may be possible to reduce the sound substantially at the microphone, he said, the noise level could increase farther away, where someone might be sitting.

To solve the problem, Dr. Sommerfeldt built an aluminum enclosure that mimicked a typical computer chassis and put a standard cooling fan within. He and his students placed microphones and speakers around the fan, analyzing the nature of the sounds they would have to suppress and modeling systems to counter this sound.

"The fan is not an easy source of noise to control," said Gerald C. Lauchle, a professor of acoustics at Pennsylvania State University and a colleague of Dr. Sommerfeldt. "Many interacting mechanisms create the noise."

The specific sounds Dr. Sommerfeldt decided to counter were those made by the blades of the fan as they rotate and push air past obstructions like fan supports. The pushing is periodic, dictated by the number and speed of the blades.

In the experiments, sensors mounted near the blades of the fan recorded the motion, and the information was fed to the digital signal processor along with the data from the microphones that were monitoring the overall noise. Then algorithms developed by the group adjusted the amount of canceling sound waves sent to the speakers so that the basic tone of the blades could be suppressed, as well as overtones or harmonics of the basic tone.

"The basic tone is distinct," Dr. Sommerfeldt said. "It sounds like one you could hear if you hit a piano key."

To find the pattern that worked best, the experimenters set up systems with one, two, three and four speakers. "We went with smaller loudspeakers and more of them," Dr. Sommerfeldt said. "The best configuration turned out to be four speakers spaced around the fan."

The group measured the reduction in sound at the fan and at various points at a distance, said Brian B. Monson, a graduate student of Dr. Sommerfeldt.

The experiments used two fan sizes, with blade diameters of about three inches and two-and- a-half inches. The smaller unit allowed the researchers to fit the entire assembly of fan, speakers and mikes into the space that would normally be occupied by a standard cooling fan.

Both systems resulted in a substantial reduction of sound, Dr. Sommerfeldt said, ranging from about 10 to 20 decibels for the basic tone and for the three harmonics.

"This work is marvelous," Dr. Lauchle said of Dr. Sommerfeldt's results, "because it's a new way of controlling that tonal fan noise."

Although the noise of the fan has been toned down considerably, it still emits a faint hum. "We've dealt with the constant pitch sounds," Dr. Sommerfeldt said, "the tonal noise that sticks out above the smear of frequencies you get from random excitation" of acoustic waves. But the random noise remains.

"We've taken the process a good step," he said, "but there are still improvements to be made."

Robert L. Clark, a professor of engineering at Duke University who is an expert in active noise control, said he was pleased with Dr. Sommerfeldt's success. "Those fan tones tend to be very annoying," he said. "It's good that he's reducing them significantly with this new method."

Still, it remains to be seen whether consumers will accept the additional costs should the system be developed commercially, Dr. Clark said. "It's not an overly expensive system," he said, "but there are the prices associated with all those components."

"It's going to be a matter of what the consumer will be willing to pay for a quiet computer," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/te...ts/27next.html


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Add 'Cut' and 'Bleep' to a DVD's Options
David Pogue

THIS column is rated PG-13. It contains salty language, dripping sarcasm and descriptions of some really gross movie scenes.

All that is unavoidable, really, because the topic is RCA's new DRC232N, a DVD player that automatically skips cinematic violence, sex, swearing and drug use.

Its scene-cutting technology, called ClearPlay, comes from a Utah company of the same name. Its executives maintain that by sanitizing movies, they're actually doing Hollywood a favor by building a broader audience.

Hollywood begs to differ. Actually, it sues to differ; eight movie studios and the Directors Guild of America have taken ClearPlay and a group of similar companies to court. "ClearPlay software edits movies to conform to ClearPlay's vision of a movie instead of letting audiences see, and judge for themselves, what writers wrote, what actors said and what directors envisioned," the Directors Guild says.

Meanwhile, the RCA player is available for $70 at Wal-Mart and at a few online stores. It's a sleek black super-thin machine with progressive-scan outputs (connections to high-end TV sets for superior color). The only misfire is the remote, whose buttons don't light up and are mostly the same size and shape.

The machine plays regular, unmodified commercial DVD's. It skips objectionable scenes based on software filters created by human editors and stored in its memory. (It does not filter DVD bonus materials, homemade DVD's or copies of DVD's.)

The filters for 100 recent movies come installed. You have to pay for access to the other 500 filters the company has released so far: $1.50 for a single movie, $50 a year for the entire library, and so on.

Installing new filters is a hassle. You feed them to the player on a CD that you've either burned yourself using a computer (after downloading the filters) or ordered from ClearPlay for another $3 each (one-shot, weekly or monthly). As for movies that the company hasn't yet edited, you can set up the RCA player to play them, refuse them, or play them only if they're "below," say, PG-13.

You, the password-wielding parent, can specify just how zealously you want the player to filter four kinds of material: Violence, Explicit Scenes & Nudity, Language, and Other (which turns out to mean "explicit drug use").

For example, the Language category offers checkboxes for screening options like these (shown here with ClearPlay's own onscreen descriptions): Cursing ("Profane uses of 'h*ll' and "d*mn"'), Strong Profanity ("Swear-words, including strong profanities such as 'a**' and 's***'), Ethnic and Social Slurs ("Ethnically or socially offensive insults"), Crude Language and Humor ("Crude language and bodily humor"), and Vain Reference to Deity ("Vain or irreverent reference to God or a deity").

To mask bad language, the player momentarily mutes the soundtrack. As you know from watching cleaned-up TV movies, it's usually not hard to guess what you've just missed, thanks to the context and the lip movements. (When Steven Seagal says, "Go to [beep]," it's a pretty good bet he didn't say "bed.") But if you're worried about young children in attendance, this bleeping may be better than nothing.

To filter out violence, sex and "disturbing images," on the other hand, the player simply skips ahead. A quarter-second video freeze, a discontinuity in the music and, sometimes, bizarre holes in plot or staging make you quite aware when ClearPlay's magic scissors are at work. (Among its most ham-handed edits: In "The Matrix Reloaded," Neo and Trinity kiss longingly, and then - blink! - instantly appear, sweaty and tousled, chatting in bed. ClearPlay just sent three and a half minutes to the cutting-room floor.)

The funny thing is, you have to wonder if ClearPlay's opponents have ever even tried it. If they did, they would discover ClearPlay is not objectionable just because it butchers the moviemakers' vision. The much bigger problem is that it does not fulfill its mission: to make otherwise offensive movies appropriate for the whole family.

For starters, its editors are wildly inconsistent. They duly mute every "Oh my God," "You bastard," and "We're gonna have a helluva time" (meaning sex). But they leave intact various examples of crude teen slang and a term for the male anatomy.

In "Pirates of the Caribbean," "God-forsaken island" is bleeped, but "heathen gods" slips through. (So much for the promise to remove references to "God or a deity.")

Similarly, in "Terminator 3," the software skips over the Terminator - a cyborg, mind you - bloodlessly opening his abdomen to make a repair. Yet you're still shown a hook carving bloody gouges into the palms of a "Matrix Reloaded" character.

The second problem is that the editors wield their scissors differently according to their view of the characters' righteousness. When Americans are shot in "Black Hawk Down," the editors carefully omit the bullet's moment of impact. But when Somali gunmen are blown apart, you see the whole twitching, gruesome scene.

ClearPlay's most ridiculous assumption, however, is that excising only the split second of central violence somehow makes the overall scene less traumatic. In "Spider-Man," you're spared the three frames of film in which the Green Goblin is impaled by the razors on his own flying skateboard - but you see the entire painful, lingering death that follows. (Maybe ClearPlay assumes that your first grader is numb by now, having already seen Uncle Ben's ClearPlay-approved sidewalk death, his assailant's fall from a six-story window, a test pilot's midair incineration and a grenade blowing several city elders into glowing skeletons.)

Similarly, in "The Ring" (caution: plot spoiler ahead), ClearPlay doesn't want us to see a disturbed woman murder her own daughter by throwing her down a well. So instead, we see the two of them march up to the edge of the well, and then - snip! - we see the girl falling down its shaft and drowning. What are we supposed to think, that she got tossed in by a sudden gust of wind?

Then in "Terminator 3," the editors excise the naked Terminator's exit from his "arrival sphere": a back-lighted nighttime shot that revealed nothing personal about his anatomy to begin with. Good thing, too; a shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger's shadowy flank would surely be more upsetting than the scenes of global nuclear Armageddon - "three billion lives, wiped out in an instant," as the narrator helpfully puts it - that ClearPlay leaves for you to explain to your youngsters.

Pervading the editing is an infuriating literal-mindedness, a squeamishness about sex and language but an astonishing indifference to violence, destruction and pain. In "Terminator 3," for example, a man learning that he has unwittingly triggered the annihilation of mankind is not allowed to say "Dear God" - but you won't miss a frame of the movie's hyperviolent fight sequences. (In one of them, the Terminator smashes a urinal on his cyber-opponent's head and shoves her head into a toilet; she slams him through a marble wall, hurls him across the room using his groin as a handle, and blasts his face with a flamethrower.)

ClearPlay says that it won't try to create filters for movies like "Kill Bill" or "The Passion of the Christ," which are more or less nonstop violence. Good call.

So why, then, does it even bother with horror movies like "Gothika" and "28 Days," tales of incessant brutality like "Amistad" and "Gladiator," and disturbing films like "The English Patient" and "The Pianist"?

Every parent's tolerance is different, of course. But even if you cut out everything but the credits, only Gomez and Morticia Addams would consider these movies suitable for young children.

ClearPlay works fine on movies that might, in fact, be considered family-friendly if relieved of the occasional gory injury or strong language - say, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or "Freaky Friday." And for any movie, you can press the right-arrow button twice on the ClearPlay welcome screen to see a list of things the filter will make no attempt to skip (Intense Life/Death Situations, Intense Battle Sequences, Murder and so on). Nonetheless, had ClearPlay done a little filtering of titles and not just scenes, its arguments might have been a bit more persuasive, and the current court battle more meaningful.

But as it is, the evidence suggests that ClearPlay's technology is not intended for families at all. It's for like-minded adults, specifically those who are offended by bad language and sexual situations but don't mind brutality, destruction and suffering.

Maybe every ClearPlay-sanitized movie ought to begin with a message: "This film has been modified as follows: It has been formatted to fit the taste, sensibilities and religious beliefs of a couple of guys in Utah. That'll be $1.50."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/te...ts/27stat.html


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Encrypted File Sharing: P2P Fights Back
Jack Germain

Masking the user's IP address is the Holy Grail of file- sharing networks. With a hidden IP address, Web surfers can visit Web sites, post messages and send e-mail without leaving a traditional trail that can link the communication with a particular Internet connection to a computer's physical location.

Is it possible to end the investigations and prosecutions that the RIAA, the music download police and similar entities use to prosecute users of file-sharing networks? The answer depends, say online security experts, on which next-generation technology proves to be more successful. So far, enforcement investigators hold the upper hand.

"Everybody now knows you can't download stuff for free," said Mark Ishikawa, CEO and founder of BayTSP, a leading security firm for the record industry. People who participate in file sharing through networks, he said, sooner or later will get caught. "It's like playing Russian Roulette."

But that could change soon. An innovative software product recently released by Syncodea could eliminate concerns about getting caught and sued for sharing music and data files. Syncodea CEO Leo Lee told TechNewsWorld that his product does not hide the IP address. Rather, it allows users of peer-to-peer shareware networks, such as Kazaa , to share files and data in encrypted transmissions on the open-swapping networks.

"This will end any technology that tries to monitor or duplicate files flowing in the P2P networks," Lee said.

Anonymity Is the Goal

Masking the user's IP address is the Holy Grail of file-sharing networks. With a hidden IP address, Web surfers can visit Web sites, post messages and send e-mail without leaving a traditional trail that can link the communication with a particular Internet connection to a computer's physical location. Existing technology provides some degree of online anonymity.

A simple Internet search using the keyword "anonymity" results in several pages of information on service providers and software products that claim to mask a user's online identity. Choices range from simple pseudonymous servers, such as anonymizer.com, to not-quite-completely impregnable anonymity offered by remailers.

Search results include directions for setting up privacy options and databases with hundreds of anonymous proxy servers located around the world. Also readily available are lists of anonymous proxy servers and directions for chaining connections through multiple proxy servers to further bury one's Web-surfing tracks.

"We see developers trying to come up with tools that will give anonymity. But it doesn't work," Ishikawa told TechNewsWorld. "You can't make IP addresses completely disappear. There are always tracks of activity on the Internet left behind."

Ishikawa said IP address tracking is the nature of the beast and won't change. He also does not see any hope for file traders who seek anonymity on peer-to-peer networks.

"We just don't see a method for peer anonymity," he said, adding that his company can even track dynamic addresses with state-of-the-art algorithms. Dynamic IP addresses are assigned by ISPs to a single user for a one-time logon. They are common for dial-up connections over telephone lines.

File Encryption Falls Short

Encrypting files before swapping them isn't a reliable method to mask online activity, according to Internet security experts. Decryption keys are readily available, especially to experts whose jobs involve intercepting encrypted data that is part of file-swapping activities.

Experts say it is quite common for investigators to trap encrypted files from peer-to-peer networks and determine the content.

"Encryption might be used between nodes in the delivery process, but public keys are available to investigators. So that's no solution for file swappers," said Ishikawa of BayTSP.

BayTSP is one of only two companies that seek to identify individuals who are illegally sharing movies, music and software online. Its service is used by three of the five top record labels, six of the seven top movie studios and some of the largest software makers in the world. Those companies use data provided by BayTSP to pursue file traders, have them remove infringing material and, in some cases, prosecute them in the courts.

Fear of Getting Caught Big Deterrent

BayTSP logs 3.5 million to 5 million unique infringement attempts per day. The company publishes a monthly incident report on P2P usage. The report for the latest period available shows that use of Kazaa and its underlying Fast Track protocol held steady in April. Kazaa had an average of 2.9 million users daily, following several months of decline. eDonkey, which had been adding users for several months, also held steady during April with an average of 2.2 million users daily, according to that report.

File-swapping investigators work much like law-enforcement investigators who catch those who use false identities in chat rooms to talk to youngsters. The online investigator logs on to a P2P network and requests a specific file or song. When the file is downloaded to the investigator's computer, the security company has the evidence needed to file charges.

Ishikawa said his company uses a three-step process to get users to stop sharing illegal files and music. One, investigators identify the file sharer. Two, the company that owns the intellectual property sends out a cease-and-desist notice. Three, investigators go to the file sharers' ISP with a request that their Internet access accounts be terminated.

Typically, court-imposed fines range from US$5,000 to $150,000 per case. The average settlement is $3,000, according to Ishikawa.

Next Generation Solution

Leo Lee is confident that his innovative software creation, MyGudio, will turn the tables on investigators who hunt down file-sharers on P2P networks.

During a recent phone interview at a conference in Taiwan, Lee said MyGudio is designed to provide users with privacy while downloading every type of file through the Kazaa file- sharing network. The program is available as trialware from mygudio.com and download.com.

Next month, Lee plans to release a version of the program tweaked to work on the Morpheus file-sharing network. He said he doesn't know yet if users will need a network-specific version of MyGudio or if a later version will work on multiple networks.

According to a mission statement on Lee's Web site , the software is a solution for giving file sharers a defense against assaults on their online privacy. It says the developers believe P2P network users should have the tools to defend themselves against organizations that invade their privacy and online sharing activities.

How It Works

Lee said MyGudio doesn't try to mask users' identities. Instead, it blocks all monitoring software. "There is no perfect way to hide your identity online, so our solution blocks all monitoring software to protect file-sharers," he told TechNewsWorld.

The software allows users to detect each file's signature acronym. Much like a fingerprint, the signature acronym is the main source used by investigators to trace and verify the legitimacy of files being shared online.

MyGudio allows users to modify this signature to form a new acronym set. The result is that file-hunting software is disabled and cannot intercept and compare the origin of the file. As a result, the files selected for sharing are invisible or unrecognizable to organizations that search files based on file fingerprints stored in an investigating company's database.

File encryption technology is a major strategy in the product's design. MyGudio uses one of the most advanced security measures in the world: AES 256-bit file encryption keys. The 256-bit structure makes encrypted content virtually ironclad.

The Digital Encryption Standard (DES) keys are about 56 bits long. This provides 7.2 x 1,016 possible DES keys. With AES 256-bit keys, there are approximately 1,021 x 2 more keys possible than DES 56-bit keys provide. According to product information, it would take more than 8 million years for today's fastest supercomputer to crack 256-bit AES encryption.

Shakeout Period

Lee said the initial version of MyGudio has a design limitation: It requires that both parties to a file-sharing exchange have an installed copy of the software. The software links up and periodically changes the decryption key.

Also, the software is designed for private rather than commercial use.

"This is the first stage. There are a lot of things we will have to improve upon," Lee said.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/34052.html


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A New Wave For Computing

The IT revolution of the past two decades has moved into a new phase, with a trio of developments that could bring many changes to the way we live.
Clive Akass

Three developments are accelerating changes that have finally forced the music industry to come to terms with the internet and their effects will spread far beyond the record companies.

Always-on fast web links, cheap high-capacity storage and ubiquitous wired and wireless networking will change profoundly how we work, communicate and obtain information or entertainment.

The three aspects of this new wave of IT are the marriage of the handheld and Digital Audio Broadcasting (Dab); the larger untethered computer, as exemplified by the smart display; and the changing face of broadband.

Today's entry-level broadband hardly lives up to its name by delivering just 500Kbps. It's 10 times faster than dial-up, yet barely fast enough for a video stream.

I have been trying Telewest's pilot 2Mbps cable service, which is more like the web should be, delivering pages for the most part as fast as flicking through a book.

This should be the entry level, and it surely will be one day when the economies of access allow. Danes typically use links twice as fast, and Swedes commonly enjoy 10Mbps access, but their compact populations are said to be easier to mesh than in Britain.

Of course, a slow server, or a sluggish link en route, stays slow however fast your own line, so you are never immune from the world wide wait.

And today's content is designed for slow lines, which will not always be the case; pages are likely to pack more kilobytes as delivery speeds rise, so we will be clawing for faster links for a long time.

Currently, the problem is rather the reverse. There is little content available that needs 2Mbps, and little incentive for people to pay a premium for the extra speed.

This is a reprise of the Catch 22 that has long plagued the web: you won't get the content until you get the users, and you won't get the users until you get the content.

"This is why we are offering this service for the first time to consumers. Someone has to make a start," said Telewest web consultant, Fergal Butler.

It has to be said that 2Mbps is also available from some ADSL operators, at a price. A second reason for the Telewest pilot (which was offered free on a first- come basis to 1,500 subscribers to its 1Mbps service) is to establish how much people will be willing pay.

Not that these early adopters - keen online gamers, teleworkers, or people sharing a connection - are a typical slice of web users.

In the long run, broadband operators are likely to move away from a flat-rate charge. The very mention of the possibility sends ripples of fury through web discussion groups, yet it seems a perfectly sensible move that could be good for all involved if properly implemented.

You would probably get a flat-fee basic service much like you do today (better, one might hope), though perhaps with a cap like the 1GB-a-day limit imposed two months ago by NTL.

If you wanted a faster link for a while, perhaps to watch a film, you would pay a little extra and if you visit an online shopping mall, say, the faster access might be paid for you.

But you'd pay for quality of service as much as speed. Indeed you do already when you make a dial-up phone call rather than messing with telephony over the internet, which is not good at the timely delivery required.

Operators, for a price, could set up an IP link of the required quality and it could be used for video phoning as well.

This touches a sore point, as videophones require bandwidth upstream, which is restricted to 250Kbps even on the 2Mbps pilot. It is likely to remain so.

Butler blames peer-to-peer (P2P) users swapping audio and video files: "If we increased the upstream speed they would simply swallow up the bandwidth."

P2P users tend to blame greedy operators, record companies, movie companies - everyone, that is, except greedy P2P users.

The problem lies not with their own downloads, so much as the fact that their machines act as file servers for others, crowding out local traffic.

The cap on upstream speeds is one reason for the relatively slow take-up of videophones (or video messaging) and remote surveillance, which are sure to become major web applications.

They could be seen as intrusive and oppressive but on the plus side they could transform the lives of housebound people by easing their isolation. Working parents could check up on their children, or see whether it was a thief or the cat that tripped the burglar alarm.

Fast downstream speeds give the operator a chance to establish a potentially profitable portal that gives users much better transfer rates than the wider web. Dial-up users won't know the difference because their local link is usually the slowest in a connection.

With 2Mbps links and fast local servers, we have the start of a system in which you can have any amount of programmes, films, music and other material on tap.

The BBC, which has one of the world's best content archives, already has this in embryo on its site where you can listen to recent radio programmes. Clearly, people will want scheduled programming too, but even this is changing with the advent of high-capacity storage.

Low-cost hard disks can easily store the equivalent of 25 movies, and allow you to time-shift TV to the extent that some in the industry believe that within 10 years only 10 per cent of programmes will be seen at the time they are put out.

Storage at the user end also gives operators the option of providing programmes as a single file on a low-quality IP stream, rather than broadcasting or streaming them in real time.

There are many possibilities here for a flexible pricing: you might pay more for an instant video streamed movie, slightly less to have it sent as a file within a few minutes, or less still to have it delivered in the slack night hours.

Butler reckons a content-on-tap system like this will be functioning within five years.

Over at NTL Broadcasting, head of product development Simon Mason stresses that for a mass market such systems will have to be "easy enough for my grandmother to use".

It wouldn't be hard to design a graphical interface friendlier than that of the average video recorder. But there is a wider point here: some of the trickiest problems of this new wave of IT could turn out to be ergonomic rather than technical.
http://www.vnunet.com/analysis/1142034


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Music, Film, Gaming Converge to Address Alternatives for Distribution of Talent
Press Release

WEBSITE: www.globalentertainmentnetwork.com

KEYNOTES: Miles Copeland (Ark 21 Records,) Larry Kasanoff (Threshold Entertainment,) Derek Sivers, CD Baby, Andre Fischer, Producer

WHO: The Global Entertainment & Media Summit (GEMS Los Angeles) is dedicated to helping artists and industry promote their projects and make valuable connections. GEMS features more than 40 seminars, workshops, clinics, and keynotes presented by industry visionaries and leaders who are helping define the future of the entertainment industry.

WHAT: From idea to distribution, immerse yourself in an audience featuring: Film and Music Companies, Producers, Directors, Videographers, Performing Artists, Filmmakers, Songwriters, Music Video Directors, Managers, A&R Executives, Agents, Talent Directors, Entertainment Attorneys, Digital Cinema Companies, Video Companies, Engineers, Cross Platform Entertainment Solution Providers, Developers & Programmers, Media, New Media, Gaming Companies, Advertising & Public Relations Professionals, Venture Capitalists & Advisors, Entrepreneurs.

WHEN: Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13, 2004; Opening night V.I.P. Party Friday, June 11 at 8 p.m.

WHERE: Los Angeles Hilton and Conference Center, 5711 West Century Blvd, Los Angeles.

PANELS AND SESSIONS: Cutting Edge and Thought Provoking Panel Topics Include: The Record Company of the Future, DV or Not DV, New opportunities for entertainment in gaming, Celebrity Branding, Alternative placements for music and film, The Pro-active Artist, ASCAP Presents Music, Money and the Movies, Alternative ways of financing your project, Creative Alternatives for Exposure and Distribution, Intergrity in the Media, Redefining Success, The Legal Panel, How Multimedia is Helping you sell product, New Opportunities for Filmmakers and Distribution, Heavy Hitters Publishing Presents: Placing your music in films and television, The American Federation of Musicians Presents, The Latin Revolution, Creative Marketing and Promotion, Actors Network Presents, P2P: How Peer to Peer File Sharing is Helping the Industry, Producers on Artist Development, Cutting through the clutter.

SPONSORED BY

Music Connection, Billboard, MovieMaker Magazine, Disc Makers, The American Federation of Musicians, AFTRA, ASCAP, BMI, Insite Interactive, Production Hub, SongsAlive!; LA Music Productions, The Producers Guild, Association of Independent Feature Film Producers, What is Enlightenment Magazine, LA411, Music Business Registry, LA Music Productions, Starpolish, Indie911,Sonic Bids, Crack the Code, Seagoddess Entertainment, California Lawyers for the Arts and The Indie Contact Bible
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...lease_id=67706

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Viewers Upset Over Digital TV Taping Restrictions

Measures implemented by NHK and private TV broadcasting companies to control the copying of digital television programs have drawn a flood of complaints from TV users, with some saying they have been deprived of certain editing freedoms.

On April 5, NHK and the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan began airing their programs with a special transmission signal that allows only a single copy of the program to be made.

Because programs that have been copied once cannot be duplicated or edited digitally, editing the programs via a personal computer has become impossible.

In addition, the broadcasters' move has made it necessary for viewers to insert a special user identification card, known as a B-CAS card, into their digital TV sets to watch programs.

These duplication controls are being applied to digital TV programs aired by both digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasters.

In the week after the measure was implemented, NHK and the grouping of private broadcasters received more than 15,000 inquiries and complaints about the scheme.

With the Olympic Games in Athens coming up, mass retailers of home electronic appliances are stepping up their sales pitch for large-screen digital TVs.

"Customers often ask me about 'duplication control' but I have difficulty in helping them understand it," said store manager Yuki Kanno.

Hot-selling flat-screen TVs are priced at 300,000 yen or higher; the main buyers of these models are older people.

"But the duplication control is difficult for elderly people to understand," a sales clerk said.

With digital images or sounds, repeated copying does not cause a deterioration in picture or sound quality.

It is partly for this reason that pirated editions of popular TV dramas have been mass-marketed in Asia and other regions.

The duplication controls have been adopted to protect broadcast copyrights, an NHK official said, adding, "Easy violation of copyright would make movie and music copyright holders reluctant to provide their works and prompt actors and singers to refuse to appear on TV."

The posts and telecommunications ministry plans to terminate analog terrestrial and satellite broadcasting and have companies switch to digital broadcasting completely by 2011.
http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/ge...20040525a2.htm


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Download Too Much, Lose Your Broadband

ISPs are imposing transmission rate caps, limiting how much data customers can download or upload in a fixed time period.
Scott Spanbauer

Cable and DSL offer blazing-fast Internet connections, but they're not unlimited founts of data. As more and more subscribers exploit the speedy throughput times that make downloads a snap and media streaming smooth, ISPs are placing limits on how much you can download and upload within a set time period.

These transmission-rate caps are intended to prevent bandwidth-hungry customers from gobbling more than their share of pipeline from the ISP's back-end connection to the Internet. If you keep your file-sharing programs, streaming media players, and media downloads pumping data to and fro 24 hours a day at your bandwidth limit, your cumulative bandwidth consumption can be staggering. As your monthly Internet traffic increases to 100GB, so do your chances of receiving a nasty letter from your ISP regarding your bandwidth consumption.

Judging from customer reports posted on BroadbandReports.com's forums, usage caps run from 5GB to 50GB a month.

Broadband Internet is the ultimate PC comfort food: An always- on cable or DSL connection's speedy downloads and snappy response times seldom disappoint. But if bandwidth-use limitations burn you up, look for a broadband provider or subscription plan that doesn't restrict your downloads. Though Bell Canada's Bell Sympatico DSL Basic Internet service limits you to 2GB of combined upload and download traffic per month, the company also offers plans (at a higher price, naturally) with unlimited bandwidth.

If no other provider or plan looks better than the one you have already, you may be forced to moderate your Internet traffic to fit within your ISP's acceptable-use policy. Of course, few broadband providers explicitly publish what their acceptable monthly download limit is. Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy, for example, states that your online activity must not "represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an unusually large burden on the network." Cox Communications maintains a similar policy. To determine your ISP's bandwidth limitations--if any--contact the company's customer service department, or check the forums listed at BroadbandReports.com to see what other people in your area have to say about the provider.

Track Your Downloads

Just because you're saddled with a bandwidth-usage cap doesn't mean that you have to give up your file-sharing and streaming programs completely, however. Most peer-to-peer applications have settings that let you throttle back uploads to more moderate levels to help keep you under any usage limits imposed by your ISP. Visit Salisbury University's Help Desk page, which offers a quick summary of the relevant settings you need to adjust in the leading peer-to-peer programs.

If you use Windows XP, you can monitor your own bandwidth hogging via Task Manager's Networking monitor tab. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to open Task Manager, and select the Networking tab. To introduce downloads to the display, choose View, Select Columns, check Bytes Received, and click OK (you may have to adjust the window and column size to see the new column). If you'd like to make the data cumulative, choose Options, Show Cumulative Data (see FIGURE 1). Close Task Manager and go about your normal Internet activity (but don't shut down or restart Windows--that resets the counter). To see your total downloads a day, week, or month later (if you've left your PC on continuously and it hasn't crashed), just press Ctrl-Alt-Del again.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116037,00.asp


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Beat the CoolWebSearch Hijacker--For Free

You may have noticed that the amount of spam and viruses bombarding your PC has increased sharply over the last year or so. The same is true of yet another Internet plague: spyware. I've been recommending a couple of free anti-spyware tools for the last few years--Lavasoft's Ad-aware and Patrick M. Kolla's Spybot Search & Destroy. Even the combination of these two great spyware and adware cleaners can't stop some versions of an insidious and viruslike pest called CoolWebSearch. Fortunately, a Dutch student who goes by the name Merijn has written a tiny (128KB) free tool called CWShredder that removes dozens of CWS variants.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/...37,pg,2,00.asp


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California County Ditches Diebold e-Voting Machines
Robert Lemos

The Board of Supervisors for Solano County, Calif., decided on Tuesday to break with Diebold Election Systems and accept a contract with Election Systems and Software to provide electronic voting machines for the November presidential elections. Solano is one of four counties whose Diebold-made systems had been banned in April by an order from California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.

The county has not paid Diebold for any election machines and plans to thoroughly test ES&S's systems before accepting the contract, said Ira Rosenthal, chief information officer and registrar of voters for Solano. Other counties have taken a different tack toward the November elections: Kern County, another of the four counties whose systems were banned, has joined a lawsuit against the secretary of state.
http://news.com.com/2110-1028_3-5221145.html


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North Korea Operates Hacking Unit
Ryu Jin

With South and North Korea seeking ways to ease tensions along the heavily militarized border guarded by 1.7 million troops from both sides, the two Koreas are bracing themselves for the warfare of the future, often characterized as the `cyber war’.

In the midst of a paradigm shift in the future of warfare, largely determined by capabilities to break down information systems of the enemies, the North was found operating a high-quality military unit to hack into the South’s computer networks and secret information.

Lt. Gen. Song Young-geun, chief of the Defense Security Command (DSC), said on Thursday that the crack contingent of hackers had been set up under orders from North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

``The unit is under operation with a view to stealing a wide range of information from our government agencies and research bodies,’’ he said in his opening address to the Defense Information Security Conference 2004, hosted by the DSC.

It is the first time for the defense agency to officially confirm the existence of such a hacking unit in the North, though an opposition lawmaker had made a similar allegation last year.

According to the DSC, the North selects graduates from a top military university and gives them intensive training of computer-related skills to later appoint them as commissioned officers of the hacking unit.

``The hacking capability of the unit is assessed as equivalent to that of the CIA of the United States,’’ Song explained.

The drastic development in science and technologies, spurred mainly by the advances in IT technologies, have brought about a paradigm change in warfare; the mass killing and destruction in the wars of the industrial age are giving ways to precision targeting and paralysis of intelligence systems in the new era.

The more a nation’s defense relies on information technologies, however, the more vulnerable its security will be, said Chung Koo-don, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis (KIDA).

``We understand the North’s hacking skills stand at a high level, having little difficulty in paralyzing Internet networks by spreading virulent computer viruses or penetrating the online systems,’’ Chung told The Korea Times.

In regard to the defense area, he added, it would be not easy for them to get into the military network since the nation’s armed forces use an intranet, which is not connected to the worldwide web.

``But what we should know is the vulnerability of the online computer network. It can collapse at any given moment if a single figure operating the system is infiltrated into the enemy’s side by spies,’’ the expert stressed.

Earlier this month, a rank-and-file soldier was investigated by the military security agency after leaking confidential information by accident through an Internet file-sharing service. The soldier let slip second-grade secret information in March while using peer-to-peer (P2P) software offered by a private Internet portal service provider.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/2004...7193710160.htm


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U.S. Govt Computer Surveillance Rings Alarms
Andy Sullivan

Nine months after U.S. Congress shut down a controversial Pentagon computer-surveillance program, the U.S. government continues to comb private records to sniff out suspicious activity, according to a congressional report obtained by Reuters.

Privacy concerns prompted Congress to kill the Pentagon's $54 million (29 million pounds) Total Information Awareness program last September, but government computers are still scanning a vast array of databases for clues about criminal or terrorist activity, the General Accounting Office found.

Overall, 36 of the government's 199 "data mining" efforts collect personal information from the private sector, a move experts say could violate civil liberties if left unchecked.

Several appear to be patterned after Total Information Awareness, which critics said could have led to an Orwellian surveillance state in which citizens have little privacy.

"I believe that Total Information Awareness is continuing under other names, and the (Defence Department) projects listed here might fit that bill," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor who served as the Clinton administration's top privacy official.

Defence Department officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Data-mining software has been used by the government and private businesses for years to make sense of large piles of information. Banks use data-mining tools to sniff out possible credit-card fraud, for example.

Most government data-mining projects aim to improve service or cut down on waste and fraud, the report said.

The U.S. Navy tracks each ship part ordered since 1980 to see which ones fail most frequently, while the Department of Education checks its student loan records against those held by the Social Security Administration to make sure it is not loaning money to dead people.

Others projects raised red flags for privacy experts.

The Pentagon agency that handled TIA is not working on any data-mining projects, but another agency is mining intelligence reports and Internet searches "to identify foreign terrorists or U.S. citizens connected to foreign terrorism activities," the report said.

That description prompted Electronic Privacy Information Centre general counsel David Sobel to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out more about the project.

"Congress now needs to take a close look at ways to oversee and regulate the use of data-mining technology within the government," he said.

Hawaii Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka said he had asked the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, to examine some projects more closely.

"The federal government collects and uses Americans' personal information and shares it with other agencies to an astonishing degree, raising serious privacy concerns," Akaka said in a statement.

The report shows that data mining can be a useful tool for the government, but safeguards should be put in place to ensure that information is not abused, said Nuala O'Connor Kelly, chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security.

Swire said the report did not appear to list any Justice Department programs that use information from data aggregators ChoicePoint Inc. and Acxiom Corp., even though the agency has signed contracts with those companies.

The Justice Department did not return a call seeking comment.

The report also failed to note a planned airline passenger-screening system that has drawn widespread criticism from lawmakers and air travellers.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040527/80/eulz2.html

















Until next week,

- js.














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