[JackSpratts]

Prison Sued For Allegedly Selling Pirated CDs

Rolling Stones, Snoop Dogg, and Eminem on hit parade
INQUIRER staff

A US PRISON is being sued by a record company for allegedly selling illegal copies of Rolling Stones, Eminem and other chart toppers for $3 a pop.

The story gives a whole new meaning to Michael Jackson's plea, yesterday, that file swappers shouldn't be gaoled. If the allegations are upheld, and they're already in gaol, perhaps the punishment would be to let them out.

According to The Advertiser, Utopia Entertainment, based in Baton Rouge, Louisana, took out the legal action against the Claiborne Parish prison, alleging that the gaol had a list of 330 titles which it would copy for visitors or for inmates.

Utopia had three titles on the prison list, it alleged, and wants $150,000 in damages, while other record companies might follow suit, in a manner of speaking.

According to the law case, the money from sales of the CD was put into a welfare fund for inmates.

Other titles on the extensive playlist included Elvis Presley and Snoop Dogg, according to The Advertiser.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=10643


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AOL Results Marred by Subscriber Loss and Accounting Questions
David D. Kirkpatrick

AOL Time Warner reported better than expected results for the second quarter today, but they were marred by an unexpectedly steep decline in subscribers at its AOL division and persistent criticism of its accounting from securities regulators.

The strong results reflected the the success of the company's hit films such as "The Matrix: Reloaded," a brisk rebound in advertising at its Turner television networks, including TNT and TBS, and increased subscriptions to digital and high-speed Internet service from its Time Warner cable division.

But shares of AOL Time Warner fell 96 cents, or 5.7 percent, to 15.89 in afternoon trading on The New York Stock Exchange, in part because of the continued uncertainty about the future of its AOL division and federal investigations into the company's accounting.

In a statement today, AOL Time Warner said that the chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission had concluded that AOL Time Warner improperly accounted for part of $400 million in sales of online advertising to Bertelsmann as part of a larger deal to buy out Bertelsmann's stake in AOL Europe. AOL Time Warner had acknowledged three months ago that SEC was questioning those payments, but the company said it still believed its accounting was appropriate.

Today, the company reiterated its views but said that restating its profits from those transactions "may be necessary." It also repeated that the SEC is continuing to investigate other transactions as well, principally relating to the AOL division. AOL Time Warner has already lowered its previously reported revenue by $190 million over a period of 21 months beginning in late 2000, and further restatements increase its vulnerability to potentially costly lawsuits from shareholders alleging accounting fraud.


AOL Time Warner said its second quarter net income doubled to $1.1 billion, or 23 cents a diluted share, from $396 million, or 9 cents a share, in the second quarter of last year. The increase largely reflected one-time gains from the sales of its half-interest in the cable network Comedy Central for about $1.2 billion and a settlement of a lawsuit against Microsoft for a payment of about $750 million. AOL Time Warner had earmarked both gains to pay down its debts.

Excluding accounting charges, those gains and other one-time adjustments, the company's operating income rose 6 percent to $2.4 billion from last year's second quarter, the company said. That amounted to about 12 cents a share, about two cents above an average of analysts' expectations.

The company said its revenue also rose 6 percent to $10.8 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/23/te...ND-AOL.html?hp


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Spanish Firms Target File Traders

Fearing public boycotts, companies remain secret.
Julia Scheeres

In what is being touted as the largest legal action of its kind, a Spanish law firm has announced plans to file a copyright-violation complaint against 4,000 individuals who allegedly have swapped illegal files over peer-to-peer networks in that country.

Thirty-two Spanish companies that manufacture software or other material protected by the country's intellectual property laws have united to report the file traders to the Technological Investigation Brigade of the National Police, according to the plaintiffs' attorney, Javier Ribas.

Ribas, who refused to identify his clients out of fear that angry P2P traders would organize boycotts of their products, said his law firm had pinpointed the IP addresses of 95,000 Spaniards using such programs to exchange copyright material, but narrowed the complaint to 4,000 individuals who had downloaded the most illegal files.

He anticipated the case would be heard by a Spanish criminal court in September, adding that his law firm would demand jail sentences of up to four years for each convicted software pirate -- the maximum under the Spanish legal code -- in addition to compensation equivalent to the market value of each illegal file downloaded.

According to the plaintiffs, P2P piracy in Spain has cost them more than 85 million euros ($96 million) over the past six months.

But the massive computer sweep prompted a Spanish senator to call for an investigation into the tactics used by the law firm to access private machines.

"Article 18.3 of the Spanish Constitution stipulates that private communication can only be intercepted when there is a court order," said Félix Lavilla Martínez, a socialist senator from Soria and a member of the Senate's Commission on the Information and Knowledge Society. "Even if it's only basic data, they'd be breaking the law if they don't have previous judicial authorization (to locate the files)."

In response to the senator's criticism, Ribas said the firm was able to pinpoint the most active file traders by using older versions of P2P software that show the type and number of files downloaded by each user, as well as the users' IP addresses.

"The P2P protocols offer a ton of information," Ribas said. "And the great thing is that they do it publicly if you have an old version of each program. The new versions encrypt, but they still have to negotiate with the old versions. That's the secret. There's nothing criminal about it."

Carlos Sánchez Almeida, a Spanish attorney specializing in Internet law, said the announcement was "propaganda designed to strike fears into users so they stop using P2P programs." He said he doubted the action's viability in a court of law.

"Spanish penal code requires an intent to profit for there to be a crime against intellectual property," he said, mentioning several Spanish lawsuits that ultimately were thrown out after it was determined the defendants were not selling or otherwise profiting from a collection of illegally copied material.

But Ribas stated that any monetary gain, including the mere act of saving money by not paying for the copyright material, could be construed as "intent to profit."

The Spanish Internet Users Association, a group that defends file trading, called the pending complaint an "act of pure and simple cowardice" by a group of businesses "that don't dare show their faces."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59720,00.html


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Professor Develops Network Using Peer To Peer Systems
Doug Elish

With music file sharing receiving loads of attention in the media because of proposed lawsuits by music companies, the fact that the peer to peer networks that make the sharing possible can be used for other purposes is being lost.

Y. Charlie Hu, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, hopes to change that.

Hu recently received a multi-hundred thousand dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, which he is putting toward research on improving computer networking.

As it stands today, computer networks are restricted in reliability and stability by the fact that a network must have a single manager computer, or node, to oversee the network, however, if that manager fails the whole system goes down.

Hu hopes to use the technology that is used in peer to peer networking to create a more stable server where all computers can share with each other freely as opposed to many systems client-server models. Hu said that the technology that is used to download music is much more powerful than what it is being utilized for because until recently it wasn't believed it could be applied to the same functions that the single node network is utilized for.

"This was the first proposal to applying peer to peer to grid computing," Hu said. "Up until this the two have been totally independent."

While peer to peer was used for file sharing the grid computing was used to link supercomputers for scientific purposes. The problem with the grid system is that it is too centralized in case of problems or heavy traffic, Hu believes that using peer to peer technology will allow computers to decentralize.

Basically, Hu's proposed system would allow networks to have a group of nodes working as one to solve problems and run the networks.

Hu said the future of networking lies in the technology he is researching, which is why he believes the National Science Foundation gave him the research grant.
http://www.purdueexponent.org/interf...us&storyid=NSF


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Woman Wrongly Identified
Reed Holmes

Covers.com has learned that a woman depicted in photos circulating across the Internet is being incorrectly identified as the 19-year-old college student who has accused Kobe Bryant of sexual assault.

Covers.com obtained photos of a woman identified as the victim through the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing software Kazaa. According to information associated with the photos, the woman’s name is Katelyn Faber.

Covers.com has learned that the woman in the photos is not the alleged victim. The woman who is being wrongly identified is also 19 years old, has the same first name and attended the same high school as the accuser in Colorado.

There are at least three pictures beginning circulated on the web that misidentify Bryant’s accuser.



One picture shows the woman with her Eagle County High School dance team, a second with her standing next to a young man at a formal event (above), and a third from the same formal event.

The Rocky Mountain News has reported that the woman who has been incorrectly identified has hired a lawyer to try to stop the spread of the photos.

Earlier this week, "shock jock" Tom Leykis identified Faber as the accuser on his syndicated radio show from Los Angeles. Message boards across North America are repeating her name, including boards on ESPN.com.

“We’re told that rape is violence, not sex, and if that’s true there’s no reason she should feel shame or embarrassment,” Leykis said.

Dr. Patricia Saunders, director of Graham Windham Manhattan Medical Center in New York City, was upset with Leykis's disclosure. “It’s an intrusion. It’s an utter violation of her right to privacy. It’s a sadistic thing to do,” Dr. Saunders told NBC.
http://www.covers.com/includes/article.aspx?theArt=8385


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Groove Bundles Project Apps With Its Peer-to-Peer Workspace
Gregg Keizer

Aiming to extend its reach in the desktop collaboration arena, Groove Networks Inc. on Tuesday unveiled Workspace Project Edition, a new version of its flagship software that fuses project management and collaboration tools.

Groove Workspace Project Edition, essentially a collection of three applications, one from Groove and a pair it's reselling, targets work teams that not only need to manage projects, but which also want integrated tools that let members communicate with one another, recognize when they're available, and schedule on-the-fly E-meetings to solve problems, said Groove.

The bundle is composed of Groove Workspace Professional Edition 2.5, which originally released in February; and two products from startup project management maker TeamDirection: Project and Dashboard.

The tools "allow us to share information more easily with our clients, keeping everyone involved and aware of timelines and deliverables regardless of their physical location," said Hamish Davidson, the IT director for the Zyman Marketing Group, which uses the Groove Workspace and the TeamDirection's applications.

TeamDirection, a Groove partner, provides the project-management features of the bundle. Its Project application allows distributed teams to create and plan projects, assign resources, monitor project progress, and share documents in a Groove workspace. Other features of Project include the ability to import and export Microsoft Project files, and synchronize multiple projects--each in a separate Groove collaborative space--to fuel megaprojects from the project components that make them up.

TeamDirection's Dashboard is a console that lets team members view the status of all projects that they belong to, note outstanding issues or tasks, and move directly to discussions held within the Groove workspace.

Groove Workspace Professional provides the peer-to-peer infrastructure, including security, that powers the collaborative aspects of the bundle, including team discussions, integration with Outlook--project team members can share calendars and invite others to ad-hoc meetings from within the Microsoft E-mail client, and instant messaging.

"On the functionality level, these products were already integrated," said Dave Fowler, VP of marketing at Groove Networks. "but now it's easier to administer," he said, adding that IT's workload in supporting a collaborative team deployment will decrease. "From an administration point of view, it's a lot better. There's only one activation mechanism for the products, and users can go to just one place for support."

As part of the rollout of the bundle, Groove now will support the two products from TeamDirections.

Groove's Workspace Project Edition has some stiff competition, primarily from Microsoft, which in early June, unveiled details of its upcoming Project 2003.
http://www.internetweek.com/story/sh...cleID=12802804


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P2P Hide-And-Seek
John Borland

A new technology, anointed by many tech-savvy computer users as an answer to file swapping's network traffic jams, is running into legal and practical problems as it breaks into the mainstream.

Visitors to several of the most popular sites serving as hubs for BitTorrent file downloads last week found them gone, with explanatory messages variously citing legal threats from copyright holders, denial-of-service attacks and simple overloaded bandwidth.

The phenomenon may prove a stumbling block to a technology that many in the online world have quickly adopted as the super-efficient answer to the kinds of slowdowns and download queues that are common with more popular services such as Kazaa or Morpheus. But the issues come as no surprise to the technology's creator, independent San Francisco programmer Bram Cohen, who says his work is badly designed for anyone who wants to trade copyrighted works without being identified.

"Distributing stuff that is clearly illegal with BitTorrent is a really dumb idea," said Cohen, who advocates using the software to distribute large uncopyrighted files such as open-source programs. "BitTorrent doesn't have any anonymity features. There are things about it that make it very incompatible with anonymity."

The recent flurry of sites popping up and down in the BitTorrent-based file-trading scene spotlights a moment of technological and cultural transition in the online world. Pressure from copyright holders is pushing traditional file-swappers to look for networks with more privacy to avoid lawsuits. At the same time developers are creating ways around the inefficiencies of the older networks.

The two goals can work at odds, as increases in privacy often come at some cost in ease of use or efficiency.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5051627.html


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File sharing = bad; Fraud & identity theft = not so bad?
Fred "zAmboni" Locklear

The debate over P2P apps is being played out on websites and courtrooms all over the world. Lawmakers are lining up to bring felony penalties to file sharers, while dissenting opinions are coming from surprising places. Unfortunately, the lawmakers are looking to protect profits for the entertainment cartel when internet fraud runs rampant. A recent Gartner report estimates that 7 million U.S. consumers have been victims of identity theft, and arrests have been exceedingly rare.

Many recent scams have ranged from installation of keystroke logging programs used in capturing user names and passwords to scam e-mail and websites looking to accomplish the same. The scammers can then obtain personal data, credit numbers and other information to create a financial and credit nightmare for victims.

"There is a serious disconnect between the magnitude of identity theft that innocent consumers experience and the industry's proper recognition of the crime," Litan stated in the report. "Without external pressure from legislators and industry associations, financial services providers may not have sufficient incentive to stem the flow of identity theft crimes."

This disconnect is quite apparent when, on the same day as the Gartner report is released, the FTC announced a 17 year old has been charged with using a fake AOL web page to harvest personal and financial information. His penalty for this scam? $3500 and a ban on any future spamming. Yes, the FTC may have been a bit limited in punishment since the person was a minor, but is this sending the right message to other scam artists and identity thieves? Many victims of identity theft have had extended hassles proving their innocence and trying to get their credit rating restored...while an admitted identity thief gets a slap on the wrist. Subpoenas are flying across the country to ISPs for names of file sharers, some have previously agreed to settlements in the 5 figure range while some lawmakers want them to spend up to 5 years in jail. They may have gotten off easier swiping credit card numbers and charging to their heart's content.
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1058936152.html


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BuyMusic.com Offers Tunes for Windows

Nonsubscription service markets copy-protected digital music.
Robert McMillan

Windows users now have a place to go for legal music downloads on the fly.

Scott Blum, the owner of online retailer Buy.com, has launched a new online music service called BuyMusic.com. His company is billing it as "the world's largest legal music download store."

The service will offer about 300,000 tracks from five major record labels and thousands of independent labels. The songs will cost between 79 cents and $1.29 per track. Albums will start at $7.95 and go to approximately $12, a company spokesperson says.

Music will be available for use on Windows Media Player version 9.0 and will come in the digital rights management-friendly Windows Media Audio format. This alternative to the more popular MP3 file format cannot be used for peer-to-peer file sharing on services such as Kazaa or Morpheus.

BuyMusic.com comes nearly three months after Apple's launch of its popular ITunes Music Store, which is averaging 100,000 downloads per day, according to Apple.

However, until Tuesday, no similar service had been available for Windows users. The several services sponsored by music labels require membership subscriptions to participate.

"The race has been on, since ITunes was launched, to produce a similar service for the Windows market," says Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst with Forrester Research.

He expects a dozen more such services will pop up over the next year, including offerings from America Online, Roxio, Amazon.com, and Microsoft's MSN Internet service.

Because it has a variety of different download options--for example, some files offer free streaming of a portion of the song and some do not- -BuyMusic.com is more complex than Apple's ITunes, Bernoff says. "But it's still significant in that it's the first Windows-based service that does not require a subscription," he adds.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111696,00.asp


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RIAA, MPAA - Access Denied

Techfocus ran an interview with EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) spokesman Fred Von Lohmann, and it was good stuff - so good, in fact, that the RIAA decided to use parts of it to 'support' a few of their own contentions in a June 25 Washington Post story.

The interview material was taken out of context. But if you're the RIAA, that's OK.

"The RIAA today also released documents showing that its critics have expressed support for tracking down individual pirates," the story in question reads.

"One document quoted Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney Fred von Lohmann as saying: the Copyright Act, like most of our laws, has been built on the premise that you go after the guy who actually breaks the law.'

"Von Lohmann said he stands by the quote, which came from an interview earlier this year with Techfocus.org, though he added that the RIAA's decision is misguided."

Techfocus' Bill Royle told us, "Considering that we're a low-budget site, the traffic which resulted from their usage of our work required us to take additional steps to manage the burst. As well, because of their manner of reprinting, some viewers were mistakenly led to believe that we supported their efforts, which we categorically do not."

Thus, "Effective immediately, the RIAA and MPAA will need to find another way to get to Techfocus," it says in a notice here. "In response to their legal targeting of individual file- swappers, access from their known networks to this site has now been blocked. While it may still be possible for them to access Techfocus via address ranges which we're not aware of, they'll otherwise have to use non-RIAA and non-MPAA networks to view the site."

It also says, "In a perfect world this wouldn't be an act we'd want to take - but we've had it with the RIAA and MPAA. Their contribution to the internet is stifling programming creativity (see the DMCA, etc), and they are acting in bad faith. As such, they can find their opposition information elsewhere."
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/article/7203


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RIAA Hit List

The subpoenas are flying, and we're naming names. Are you on the list?
Tech Live staff

The recording industry has launched a sweeping effort to identify and shut down individual song swappers, making good on recent threats to expand its legal battle against copyright theft.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has now issued more than 911 subpoenas to Internet service providers across the United States, trying to get the names of people still offering music on file-sharing networks such as KaZaA and Grokster.

Today, "Tech Live" brings you the RIAA Hit List, the user names of file traders targeted in the recording industry subpoenas.

Last month, we brought you the story of Jesse Jordan, a 19-year-old college student who became one of the first to be hit with a lawsuit by the RIAA. Jordan settled his case by paying $12,000 to the RIAA.

The following user names were culled from subpoenas filed with the US District Court in Washington, DC. All subpoenas, incidentally, are being served by the Los Angeles law firm of Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp. A total of 253 RIAA subpoenas were listed as of July 22 through the federal court system's paid online database, PACER. The actual subpoenas are available to view online in about half the cases.

The court documents don't show individual users' real names. They do show file-sharing network user names, the user's ISP, the user's IP address, and a sampling of copyright songs the user allegedly made available for download. To date, many ISPs have been contacted, including Pac Bell Internet, SBC, Charter Communications, Comcast, Adelphia, RCN, and Time Warner.

Following is a list of the first user names from our review of the subpoenas.

Aab@Kazaa
Aboggs2@Kazaa
allstatetide@Kazaa
Amissann2@Kazaa
AngelaMikesell@Kazaa
anon39023@Kazaa
anthonybotz@Kazaa
aoster1@Kazaa
Ariel167@fileshare
asheejojo@Kazaa
Ashley@Grokster
azn_bahamut@Kazaa
B.B.C@Kazaa
badandy@Kazaa
Benchy987@Kazaa
Bigeasssy24@Kazaa
Bigpimpinitopey187@Kazaa
bigjohnhc@Kazaa
blazel@Kazaa
bluemonkey13@Kazaa
Boilermaker1214@Kazaa
brentandjonna@Kazaa
brich410@Kazaa
budman5000@Kazaa
Bush323@Kazaa
cado@Kazaa
Carolyn@fileshare
Casal@Kazaa
cbegalle@Kazaa
cherriie@Kazaa
CLOVER77@Kazaa
Corky101@Kazaa
Cortez1023@Kazaa
CowgirlMDR@Kazaa
crazyface@Kazaa
d-dubb@Grokster
dallass@Kazaa
daredevil@Kazaa
DEFAINCE357@Kazaa
definitely_ditzy@Kazaa
dimples0530@Kazaa
dmadigan@Kazaa
dotzbadger@Kazaa
dubcha@Kazaa
dulfingurl2@Kazaa
Dyellagurl22@Kazaa
Dziion@Kazaa
eddieh@Kazaa
emmi4@Kazaa
enbbarnes@Kazaa
ERIKA@Kazaa
felicia_alvarado@Kazaa
flowerpower0818@fileshare
fox3j@Kazaa
freckles72587@Kazaa
fritzbuilding@Kazaa
Generalby@Kazaa
Ghettobootybabe8@Kazaa
h2ochamp@kazaa
harris@Kazaa
heather_thee_amazing@Kazaa
hoami316@Kazaa
hooterzzz@Kazaa
hottdude0587@Kazaa
HyDang@Kazaa
ilovemydez@Kazaa
indepunk74@Kazaa
inthisroom@Kazaa
jamonie@Kazaa
JE_WV@Kazaa
Jeff@Kazaa
Jessica@Kazaa
jim@Kazaa
joanjett@Kazaa
joe@Kazaa
jomada@Kazaa
JustineRiot@Kazaa
kelney12@Kazaa
kenne007@Kazaa
KrAyZiE@Kazaa
ktgurl13@Grokster
kunstrukter@Kazaa
ladypimp8669@Kazaa
laurelbean@Kazaa
leahpate@Kazaa
LiLHuNnIe1480@Kazaa
Lisweet@Kazaa
Lyssy348@Kazaa
madkirk@fileshare
Marge4131@Kazaa
Marla262@Kazaa
mgokey@Kazaa
mike@Kazaa
Motivator@Kazaa
munkeyspanker21@Kazaa
nikki@Kazaa
Niltiak@Kazaa
Nodopefor2@Kazaa
paulina@Kazaa
pdia@Kazaa
PDJ1846@Kazaa
Playgirlmama@Kazaa
Prtythug23@Kazaa
qjade512@Kazaa
rebecca_m_122@Kazaa
rips42@Kazaa
rochelle@Kazaa
RockOn182@Kazaa
samlionofzino@Kazaa
shakobe@Kazaa
shonga84@Kazaa
sk8boyben@Kazaa
sneil@Kazaa
soccerdog@Kazaa
StolenSi@Kazaa
sus@Kazaa
Sweet3114@Kazaa
sweetthang1421@Kazaa
TheLastReal7@Kazaa
TMONEYNDHIZOUSE@kazaa
Tyler@Kazaa
Unit984@Kazaa
Westly_NoGood@Kazaa
www.k_lite.tk_Kazaa_Lite@Kazaa
http://www.techtv.com/news/culture/s...484600,00.html


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Fasttrack Use At All Time High

On several occasions this week Grokster stats showed the largest amount of users - and files - ever seen on the Fasttrack network since I've been regularly watching.

This beats the previous record set last May.

- Jack.


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Net Access Comes As Standard
BBC

For the first time, UK internet access is being included in the telephone services that all customers should get as standard. The new guidelines also demand that BT and Kingston Communications give all customers this net access at a minimum speed. Users who are not able to access the net via a dial-up account at this speed will be able to demand that their telephone provider do something about it. The new minimum standards come into force on 25 July.

Only two of the UK's fixed line phones firms, BT and Hull's Kingston Communications, have an obligation to meet the universal minimum standards defined by Oftel. These standards require the firms to meet all reasonable requests for the installation of a phone line regardless of where in the UK a customer lives. Phone services offered via that line must also be offered at the same price as any other line. The two firms must also offer reduced rates to people on low incomes and provide a network of pay phones for people to use. Now Oftel has updated these regulations to include a line capable of supporting dial-up net access at a speed of at least 28.8kilobit per second (kbps). The fastest modems run twice as fast as this, but Oftel decided that this was the minimum that people should expect.

"This is significantly faster than the previous requirement of only 2.4 kbps and will lead to real improvements in connection speeds for many consumers," said David Edmunds, director general of Oftel. Any customers who cannot connect at this speed have grounds for a complaint and BT and Kingston must make reasonable efforts to improve the service.

Oftel has also published new regulations that affect other telephone firms that cover the types of service that they must all offer, the publishing of easy to understand information for consumers, minimum contract terms and when they can disconnect a customer.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3089319.stm


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From BNA

Bill Would Require Parental Consent For Children File Sharing
US lawmakers are considering a bill that would require online file-swapping services to obtain parental consent before allowing children to use their software. The Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act is intended to prevent children from downloading pornographic material, which is widely available for free through file-sharing services like Morpheus and Kazaa.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jul24.html

P2P Services Secure Software To Shield File Swappers
An AP article reports that makers of file-sharing software are fortifying their programs to try to mask users' identities. Some of the upgrades reroute Internet connections through so-called proxy servers that scrub away cybertracks. Others incorporate firewalls or encryption to frustrate the sleuth firms that the recording industry employs.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/6374384.htm

RIAA Targeting Mom And Grandpa
The music industry has started to target parents and grandparents in a new campaign to track computer users who share songs over the Internet. RIAA president Cary Sherman warned that lawyers will pursue downloaders regardless of personal circumstances because it would deter other Internet users.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59756,00.html

Evidence Destroyed In Australian Music Case
Lawyers for several Australian universities engaged in a music copyright infringement case involving their students have allegedly advised the music industry that evidence it was seeking regarding online music piracy has been destroyed. The music industry is now seeking a court hearing on the matter.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030725/152/e4xbw.html

ISPS Sue SBC Over DSL Rates
Four ISPs have filed an antitrust suit against SBC Communications, alleging that the Baby Bell unfairly inflated wholesale prices for high-speed Internet access. The suit claims that the rate SBC charged the companies for DSL service was too expensive for them to resell profitably.
http://news.com.com/2100-1034_3-5053604.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/25/technology/25DSL.html

Libraries Must Have Filters In Place By July Of 2004
The FCC has set July 1, 2004, as the deadline for US libraries to comply with CIPA. The controversial law requires libraries to install Internet filtering software if they want to receive federal funding. On June 23, the US Supreme Court reversed the ruling of a three-judge panel in Philadelphia and decided that CIPA did not violate the First Amendment. The requirement comes as concerns grows over overblocking of the filtering software.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5053614.html
http://www.houstonvoice.com/2003/7-2...l/internet.cfm


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US Colleges Fight 'Pirate' Subpoenas
BBC

Two colleges in the United States are challenging legal requests to hand over the names of students who have been accused of illegally downloading music. But Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they are not trying to protect students. They are trying to quash the subpoenas - which mean they must hand over information by law - because they say the requests were not properly filed. The subpoenas are part of the US music industry's new strategy to chase individual "pirates".

Boston College said they were given less notice than is legally required and the subpoenas broke federal law by being filed in Washington DC, more than 100 miles (160 kilometres) from where they were served, in Boston. Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn said: "Once the subpoenas are properly filed, we will comply with the subpoenas."

Professor James Bruce, vice president for Information Systems at MIT, said: "We are required by federal law to disclose student information only if we have a valid subpoena and have given the necessary advance notice."

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the US music industry trade body, issued the subpoenas. It is trying to identify one MIT student and three Boston College students who are suspected of illegally accessing music. The RIAA has already filed a total of 871 subpoenas, with more than 75 subpoenas granted every day, US courts said on Friday. The association has said it would go after the most active downloaders, but some subpoenas related to users who had accessed as few as five songs.

Users charged with piracy could face lawsuits for damages from $750 (£480) to $150,000 (£96,100) under US copyright law. A RIAA spokesman said the association has followed federal law and was "disappointed" that the colleges had chosen to challenge the subpoenas.

Music fans are reacting with a new generation of file-sharing software to prevent monitoring.

A version of "Kazaa-lite" says it can stop outside parties scanning email addresses and listing songs on individuals' hard drives.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ic/3089303.stm


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Anti-Porn Bill Targets File Sharing
David McGuire

Online file-swapping services would be required to get parental consent before allowing children to use their software under a new bill to be introduced today in Congress.

The Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act is intended to prevent children from downloading pornographic material, which is widely available for free through file-sharing services like Morpheus and Kazaa.

Besides requiring parental consent, the bill would allow parents to install "beacons" on their computers that signal their desire to not have file-sharing software. If a child tries to download the software, networks would have to refuse when they see the beacon. The beacons would be developed by the Federal Trade Commission with assistance from the Commerce Department.

It also would require file-sharing networks to warn users about the dangers of file sharing. Several studies have shown that the networks are rife with pornography.

There are 57 million Americans who swap files, according to the Boston-based Yankee Group research firm. Forty percent of them are children, according to the bill's sponsors, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) and Chris John (D-La.).

Morpheus, Kazaa and other services have attained notoriety in the past several years for allowing widespread music swapping, but they can be used to trade documents, images, videos and any other kind of digital file. A recent study by Ames, Iowa-based Internet security firm Palisade Systems found that users of the Gnutella file-sharing network searched for pornography more often than they searched for music.

Pitts drafted the bill after reading a General Accounting Office (GAO) study showing the high availability of pornography on file-sharing networks, said spokesman Derek Karchner. GAO investigators in a test of the Kazaa network entered search terms including Pokemon, Britney Spears and Olsen Twins. More than 40 percent of the returns for those searches yielded child pornography, and another 30 percent returned adult pornography.

"He couldn't sit by and let that happen unregulated," Karchner said.

Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said he is skeptical about the viability of the beacons.

"I'm a little flabbergasted. I have no idea how you would even begin to build such a thing. The reality is that parents have to supervise their kids online and there is no government provision that is going to replace that supervision," he said. "Undergraduate computer science students can write these [file-sharing programs] in under a week. There's a [mistaken] notion that there might be a company and if there's a company, federal regulators can grab them."

Wayne Rosso, president of West Indies-based file-sharing network Grokster, said children also can find pornography with popular search engines like Google.

Peer-to-peer "should not just be singled out," he said. "There's no more or less of a pornography problem on [file-sharing networks] than there is on the entire World Wide Web. Pornography's only there if you're searching for it. It's not something that just pops up in your face like 'spam' on AOL."

The GAO study noted that there is far more pornography available on the Internet through normal search engine services than on peer-to-peer networks.

Greg Bildson, the chief technical officer of New York-based file-sharing firm LimeWire, said he has no problem forcing users to confirm that they are adults before downloading LimeWire, but said anything more complicated than a simple question with a yes/no answer would be difficult to administer and could compromise customer privacy.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) supports the bill, according to a spokeswoman for the group.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jul24.html


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High-Speed Net Plans Launched
BBC

All of Northern Ireland is expected to have access to broadband internet services within three years, NIO minister Ian Pearson has said. The government has invited tenders to provide broadband throughout the province, as part of its telecommunications strategy. At present, broadband services such as Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) or cable modem are only available in Belfast, Londonderry and a small number of rural cities and towns. The government is making £16m in grants available to encourage BT and other telecommunications companies to make broadband more widely available.

Mr Pearson said on Tuesday that the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment wanted to ensure "comprehensive and equitable provision of broadband services".

"This competition has been primarily designed to address this challenge in order to progress development of both our knowledge based economy and digital inclusion," he said.

The announcement follows a prior information notice given in May to more than 40 interested parties for the opportunity to put forward their views to the department without committing themselves. A shortlist of potential service providers will then be drawn up.

The Federation of Small Businesses welcomed the announcement. Vice chairman John Friel said they had been concerned about the lack of availability of broadband for small businesses in rural areas.

"Small businesses need to be aware of the many advantages that broadband can bring to them," he said. "Broadband is also crucial in developing Northern Ireland's knowledge-based economy."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3087495.stm


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China Bans Lewd Text Messages
BBC

China's Liaoning province has launched an attempt to crack down on insulting or sexually explicit mobile phone messages. Phone users in Liaoning who send "insulting, sexual or fabricated" information could face criminal charges, the state-run Beijing Morning Post newspaper said on Monday. China's communist authorities already screen email messages and online chat rooms, as well as blocking access to a large numbers of foreign websites which they consider subversive. But until now, the newer text messaging technology - short message service or SMS - has not been controlled in this way.

An official from the Liaoning Telecommunications Administration said his department was already able to track down people who sent offensive messages, according to the Associated Press news agency. But the official declined to say how the government would be able to monitor the province's SMS users. An estimated 10 million text messages are sent every day in Liaoning.

Throughout China as a whole, the country's biggest service provider, China Mobile, has estimated that its customers sent 40bn text messages last year.

China is the world's biggest mobile phone market, with 207m phone users.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...ic/3083269.stm


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Perfect Watch For The Sneakernet Set
Roy Furchgott

The Laks memory watch is more than just a pretty face: it incorporates a flash memory chip of up to 256 megabytes in a slim quartz timepiece with a U.S.B. connector cord nestled in the watchband. "A lot of people who are going to buy a stick of memory think they might as well get a watch with it," said Scott Smith, a founder of ThinkGeek (www.thinkgeek.com), which distributes the watch in the United States.

Made in Austria with as little as 32 megabytes of memory, the American versions offer 128 megabytes of storage ($100) or 256 ($150), with prices comparable to those of ordinary flash-memory devices of the same capacities.

The black-and-chrome watch includes a U.S.B. extension cable and comes with a start-up CD with drivers for Windows and Linux systems. Macintosh computer users do not need drivers for the product.

Laks has licensed the watch to BMW and Mini, which sell 128-megabyte versions imprinted with the BMW or the Mini logos (www.bmw-online.com or www.minimotoringgear.com) for $128. You might want to use the watch to store a reminder of where you parked your car.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/te...ts/24watc.html


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Software Rivals Vie for Pain-Free Burning
Wilson Rothman

IN the olden days of CD burning, 1997 or thereabouts, software and hardware were considered good if they burned most discs most of the time, even if they fell short of a perfect score. There was only one really friendly consumer program for Windows, Easy CD Creator from Adaptec (called Toast, on the Mac side). But it was understood that no matter how many special prayers you uttered or lucky talismans you waved, the gods might very well hand you a dud disc.

Today, the burning business is booming. With the rise of digital cameras and camcorders, even DVD creation on the desktop has become commonplace, and it does not take a record executive to tell you that the MP3 format has made burning music CD's more popular than ever. Fortunately, as disc-burning software and the optical drives that do the dirty work have evolved, the fear of duds has dissipated.

Adaptec has spun off its consumer division, Roxio, and Easy CD Creator has blossomed into adulthood. Roxio's formidable Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 "digital media suite" for Windows now offers recording tools in four major categories: music, photos, data backup and DVD video. It includes DVD Builder, with basic video and photo slide-show editing; PhotoSuite, for enhancing, retouching and general photographic goofing around; and AudioCentral, a jukebox, audio editor and music CD maker - all for $100.

Although PC makers typically offer a variety of burning and multimedia programs with their computers, Roxio has found a market among those seeking more integrated tools, and for five months Creator 6 has been relatively unchallenged at retail stores. This week that changes with the arrival of Ahead Software's Nero 6 Ultra Edition, tauntingly promoted as the "ultimate CD/DVD burning suite."

Addressing the same four cardinal categories, and charging the same $100, Nero has packaged more than 10 of its Windows-only media utilities under one umbrella. Like Roxio, Nero even has a label and case-cover designer.

Off the bat, it's clear that Roxio and Nero have different philosophies. Roxio is geared to simple, straightforward tasks and includes colorful animated tutorials, but the program itself is a bit plodding and at times unstable. Nero is noticeably smoother and faster and offers more flexibility in many cases, but it takes more getting used to. (In fact, because Nero's elements have to be installed individually, it's easy to skip over some of its richest offerings; it's best to install it in its entirety and then let Nero's StartSmart point you to the right tools.)

This odd-couple difference is visible in one function after another. When I built DVD menu pages on the two programs, Roxio immediately offered 20 menu template choices, complete with animated backgrounds and pleasant music. The templates are attractive, thematic, at times cute or hilarious - but never customizable. You can change the font and text size of the title and button names, but you cannot change the position of buttons or text, even when they're graphically in the least desirable location.

Nero is the opposite: I could move everything on the menu page, and loop in video and audio. But there were no one-click animated templates. Nero gave me total creative control, but almost no creative assistance.

Both programs met my more basic demands. One way to impress relatives is to combine a home movie with a photo and music slide show, all written to one DVD. Both Nero and Roxio can handle that, from video and photo capture all the way through to burning (and they can burn any format of CD or DVD recordable disc that your PC's disc writer may use). But while Nero's video options are more thorough, including funky effects and text titling, Roxio provides more photo options, like the ability to edit individual pictures and archive all the original photos on the disc along with the slide show's video file.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/te...ts/24stat.html


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Microsoft Finishes Windows P2P

Designed for real-time communications server
Paula Rooney

As it prepares several collaboration software products for debut this year, Microsoft has released a Windows XP update and software development kit to enable peer-to-peer networking across those products.

The Advanced Networking Pack for Windows XP, which is available Thursday as a stand-alone update and will be folded into the Windows XP Service Pack 2 later this year, incorporates the necessary plumbing to enable applications that exploit P2P functionality--realtime communications and collaboration apps, for example, Microsoft executives said on Wednesday.

On Thursday, the company disclosed updated names for its forthcoming Real-time Communications Server and Web conferencing technology: Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2003, formerly PlaceWare Conference Center, and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, respectively.

Microsoft would not elaborate on how the collaboration services will leverage P2P technology, but one company executive said that Microsoft's P2P team has worked closely with the Real-time Communications Server team for some time.

The Windows XP P2P code and SDK will enable developers--including ISVs such as Corel, Groove Networks and Microsoft--to build better distributed applications and Web services that leverage corporate network resources, including the abundant processing power of PCs, executives said. And like Sun's Juxtapose (JXTA) P2P technology, Microsoft's code will allow distributed devices to be connected together.

Corel, for instance, plans to leverage Microsoft's technology to enable collaboration on its Tablet PC graphics program, Grafigo, from various locations, Microsoft said.

The software behemoth's P2P network stack includes enhancements to IPv6 that allow peer-to- peer traffic to traverse network address translators (NATs), a peer-to-peer name resolution tool, and graphing and grouping functionality for enabling more efficient multipoint communication and distributed data management, Microsoft executives said.

To handle security, Microsoft also integrated identity management features for the development of and management of peer-to-peer identities within and outside corporate firewalls.

One Microsoft executive said the technology will ultimately be integrated into Windows and all solutions to connect people together.

"It's a classic Microsoft platform play," said Adam Sohn, product manager for the Platform Strategy Group at Microsoft. "ISVS all want Microsoft to provide the network plumbing so they don't have to reinvent the wheel."

ISVs will also be able to exploit the P2P update and kit to develop enhanced software update sites. That would allow corporate customers to download updates once and redistribute them across their networks rather than exhaust network bandwidth by requiring each user to download it separately. This will be particularly useful for small businesses with 10 PCs or fewer and limited network bandwidth, executives said.

The software giant released a beta-test version of the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer SDK last February.

Sohn said the P2P technology will be tightly integrated and expanded in the company's next Windows client, code-named Longhorn, and will be leveraged by many Microsoft products.

"This is vital glue that enables a new set of applications and opportunities for solution providers and ISVs," Sohn said. "It's a key set of technologies for distributed applications development."
http://www.crn.com/sections/Breaking...rticleID=43448


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60 million cease and desist emails and counting.

Cyber Sleuths

The record industry is using cybercops to gather information on individuals who illegally share music, with prosecutions imminent.
David McCandless

In an air-conditioned room underneath Oxford Street, a black box is clicking away. Streams of numbers pour down its screen: IP addresses, times and dates. A few words fleetingly pass by: Hulk, 50 Cent, Finding Nemo...

These are the offices of NetPD, one of the leaders of a flourishing new arm of the copyright industry: "media defence". Here, and at other companies such as the Wiltshire-based WebSheriff.com, internet research technicians - cyber sleuths if you like - are gathering information on the activities and identities of internet song- swappers: their IP addresses, the search terms they use and the files they are downloading. All major peer-to-peer networks are scanned continually. "Phone directories" of data are generated, collated and filtered. These are then passed to the major record labels.

Until recently, the worst penalty you could expect was a cease-and-desist email, or a threatening instant message from a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spook.

In a change of tactics in its war on file sharing, however, the RIAA has announced plans to sue individuals who distribute illegal files across P2P networks. The goal is to create a climate of fear among users. The lawsuits will use evidence gathered by media defence cybercops.

Prosecutions have already begun. A group of IT students in the US was sued for $29.7bn, later reduced to $57,900. File sharers have also been arrested in Milan and Germany. But no individual in the UK has been sued or prosecuted. Yet.

"I think it's going to come," says Phil White, chief operating officer of NetPD, "but no one wants to be the first one to do it." Record companies will not want to be seen to target customers, he argues. They will leave it to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the RIAA's UK counterpart, to make the first move.

The BPI has made no specific threats against users. This is unusual, since it rarely falls out of step with the RIAA. Differences in US copyright law may be a factor. The industry says it is awaiting UK implementation of the EU copyright direc tive due this summer. The targeting of individuals, however, has not been ruled out.

"If we're faced with an individual who, for example, uploads a million files, and begins to enrich himself," says Peter Jamieson, BPI's executive director, "I would regard him as a perfectly legitimate target."

Other targets are more pressing. All UK universities and the top 100 corporations, for instance, have received BPI circulars pointing out that allowing employees and students to use P2P networks and infringe copyright could result in prosecution. At the same time, the bulk of the industry's anti-piracy resources are being poured into combating counterfeit piracy, which accounts for one in three CDs sold in the UK.

"We've got enough on our plate," says Iain Grant, the ex-Hong Kong police superintendent who heads up the BPI's anti-piracy enforcement division. "We're not looking at consumers. If you take an analogy with drugs, the consumer is a secondary target and somebody who needs help and education."

This education may be late in coming. The number of file sharers in this country is growing. According to the BPI, UK peer-to-peer activity at its peak accounts for nearly 27% of worldwide P2P traffic. More than 1.2m users are exchanging around 287m files every weekend.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/netmu...005252,00.html


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Hollywood's file-sharing plea badly backfires

'Please don't dent our revenues' message angers cinema-goers...

An attempt to appeal to file-sharers and ask them not to download movies from services such as Kazaa has backfired on Hollywood's studio bosses - with cinema-goers deriding their efforts.

An advertising campaign to be run in cinemas shows studio staff such as make-up artists, stuntmen and set painters imploring file-sharers to stop pirating movies because it hits them hardest and not the millionaire studio bosses.

Troy Hoskison, a silicon.com reader, said: "I don't think [this campaign] will make much difference. It will only be people that are paid a share of the takings that will be affected by piracy. The light man will have been paid a wage that will have, in all probability, been set by the union. I doubt very much if these guys have had their wages cut. If they have then even more shame on the movie producers for grabbing this money when films are make making multi millions."

Other feedback we received echoed these sentiments. Robert Burkhill told us: "If the guys on the floor are affected by this, it is because they are employed by people who let them get affected. While I am sorry for this state, I don't believe my attitude towards file sharing is going to change it."

Another silicon.com reader Stuart Charman was even more cynical about the studio bosses' motives. "This story gives me the mental picture of the average 'Joe' being told by studio bosses that if he doesn't appear in the anti-piracy advert he'll be picking up his P45? I can almost hear the conversation. "You don't want to appear in the ads? Are trying to tell me you're not anti-piracy, Joe?'"

Australian reader Stephen McBride believes the ads will have the opposite effect and will actually advertise the fact that films are available to download online. "Of course it won't work," he said. "If anything it will increase by advertising the fact through cinemas."

Ed Neal, another silicon.com reader said: "While I have every sympathy with the ‘hard-up’ set painters, what makes them think that we, the ordinary consumer, are any better off?"

"Nowadays, we get to pay [£10] for cinema tickets - and we’re the ones who’re being accused of doing the ripping off? I don’t agree with file-sharing, but the belligerent attitude being displayed by the music and film companies is doing them absolutely no favours at all in solving the problem. Stop ripping us off and we’ll return the courtesy."
http://www.silicon.com/news/500022/1/5301.html


Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne


Another Complaint To Consumer Watchdog About Emi Music Discs
Sam Varghese

A second Australian resident has lodged a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission against the copy control music discs being sold by EMI.

Russell Waters, a technical officer with an electricity company in Melbourne, said the gist of his complaint was that that the music discs and new, standard CD players were being sold without any warnings that they may not be compatible with each other.

"I also suggested that EMI were engaging in deception by selling products marketed as CDs, when in fact they don't seem to fit the standard definition of a CD and don't work in some standard players (such as my CD-ROM drive at work and my recently purchased portable CD player)," he said.

Waters had complained to EMI some time back when he found that the music discs which had copy-control measures on them would not play on a a Teac PD-P219C CD-player (with anti skip protection).

"I took the CD player to the manufacturer's service department for a replacement in case there was a problem unique to my unit. There wasn't (any problem with my unit), they acknowledged there was a general problem with that model and EMI discs," Waters said.

"However they offered me a replacement player of a different (better) model, which I accepted. The service tech also knew of other brands of brand new CD players being
affected at the moment by the same EMI problem."

EMI introduced the music discs with copy control technology in Australia last November.

One Australian consumer, Tom Dullemond of Queensland, has already lodged a complaint with the consumer watchdog about the low quality sound which the discs generate. The ACCC has not given him a response yet.

Last month, a resident of NSW complained to the Federal MP for his area, Workplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott, about the problems he faced in getting some of these discs to work.

The discs have also irked music buffs, served to turn people off EMI products for life, prevented radio stations from giving artists play-time, raised questions about whether they are fish or fowl, resulted in EMI pulling its copy-control forum off the web, and sometimes the technology has had exactly the opposite effect it was intended to have.

Philips, one of the creators of the CD specs, has expressed concern over the side effects of the technology.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...853178774.html


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Music-Sharing Subpoenas Targets Parents
Ted Bridis

Parents, roommates - even grandparents - are being targeted in the music industry's new campaign to track computer users who share songs over the Internet, bringing the threat of expensive lawsuits to more than college kids.

"Within five minutes, if I can get hold of her, this will come to an end," said Gordon Pate of Dana Point, Calif., when told by The Associated Press that a federal subpeona had been issued over his daughter's music downloads. The subpoena required the family's Internet provider to hand over Pate's name and address to lawyers for the recording industry.

Pate, 67, confirmed that his 23-year-old daughter, Leah Pate, had installed file-sharing software using an account cited on the subpoena. But he said his daughter would stop immediately and the family didn't know using such software could result in a stern warning, expensive lawsuit or even criminal prosecution.

"There's no way either us or our daughter would do anything we knew to be illegal," Pate said, promising to remove the software quickly. "I don't think anybody knew this was illegal, just a way to get some music."

The president of the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the largest music labels, warned that lawyers will pursue downloaders regardless of personal circumstances because it would deter other Internet users.

"The idea really is not to be selective, to let people know that if they're offering a substantial number of files for others to copy, they are at risk," Cary Sherman said. "It doesn't matter who they are."
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...ws/6371621.htm


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Critical Flaw Found In Microsoft's DirectX
Matt Whipp

Microsoft has alerted Windows users to what it describes as a critical flaw in its DirectX graphics and audio environment.

Pete Philips, a penetration tester with S3 at Integralis, told us the flaw may be particularly tempting for attackers. 'Most people don't consider multimedia files to be hostile, and would be more likely to click on them than, say, an executable file.'

The flaw exists in a DirectX API which checks for audio content in a multimedia file. The DirectShow technology that performs this function is vulnerable to two buffer overruns that could be exploited by a specially created MIDI file.

If successful, an attacker could cause code to be run in the security context of whoever is logged into the system at the time.

It would be possible to host such a MIDI file on a website and tempt users to it, or via an HTML email that would execute the file in the preview pane or if fully opened. It could also be accessed through network shares. Peer-to- peer file-sharing services, such as kaZaA, present an attractive location to host a malicious file that might tempt victims disguised as the latest top ten hit.

The flaw was discovered by E-eye, a security consultancy in the US.

Patches for a variety of DirectX version and Windows version is available at the end of this Security Bulletin.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/news_story.php?id=45274


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Windows Passwords Broken In 13.6 Seconds

Swiss researchers have refined a technique to crack alphanumeric Windows passwords in 13.6 seconds.
Brian Osborne

Cryptographic researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne have developed a way to crack an alphanumeric Windows password in 13.6 seconds. The "faster time- memory trade-off technique" developed by Philippe Oechslin utilizes a 1.4 GB look-up table and a computer with over a gig of memory. A paper describing the technique, along with an online "Advanced Instant NT Password Cracker" which utilizes the technique, is available at the Security and Cryptography Laboratory website (LASEC).

This is not a new vulnerability in Windows passwords. The technique has been around since 1980, but has been refined by these Swiss researchers. The paper detailing the technique claims a 99.9% success rate in cracking alphanumeric Windows passwords.

The technique can only be used by someone who has control of a computer or has administrator privileges to view password files. Users can increase the time it takes to crack their Windows passwords by including a non-alphanumeric character.
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/20...0724020975.htm


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RIAA Subpoenas.. It's Been Done Before
Angry_Babs

So, a major corporation is trying to sue you in civil court. What grounds do they have? Lets look at that. Some guy, working for the RIAA, indescriminately browses P2P networks looking for songs distributed under their organization. He then downloads the song, records your username and does a trace on your domain name at the time at which you were logged on.

The then does a tracert and gets your IP address.
Next, he sends a subpheona to your ISP asking for the information about who was logged in with this IP at said time.

They then try and sue you in civil court.

Do they have a leg to stand on? Not really. How did they get money from the college students who were sharing files? They used scare tactics. They made them think their whole future was in jeopardy, and thus they should settle monitarily out of court. They cant fight it, they are broke college students, they can't afford a 2000 retainer for a lawyer to fight a civil case that could last for a long time. Settling is the only way out, the RIAA knows this.

DirecTV, the satellite TV company, has been doing this for a few years now. They get the federal marshalls to raid a suspected "dealer" of "illegal" equipment and the records of shipment are sent to a set of lawyers. These bottom feaders then send a blanket letter to everyone involved with the business, claiming they have proof you have received equipment to receive illegal TV, and thus you must contact them.
By contacting them you are basically admitting guilt. They then add you to a "responded list" and eventually you get a second letter, followed by forms that look like civil suit filing forms, but are really just BS they made up to threaten you into it.

DTV has sent out close to half a million of these letters. They have successfully sued NO ONE (at least not the purchasers, the dealers usually cut deals.) They are making a killing off of harrassing people into paying them money. The blanket effect falls down when you simply ignore the letter. Ive researched the class action lawsuit in California pending now. People are suing BACK for harrassment. Some people purchased other items from these sites, have the records to prove it, and are thus feeling bullied into giving money.

The real funny part about this whold blanket effect is that they are making money hand over foot by doing it. The average settlement as reported by "www.legal-rights.org" is around 3000 dollars. This equates out to about 7 years of 40 dollar a month programming. On top of that, they must subscribe to the service for 2 years at Platium. Im not sure of the price of that, but it gives you every channel except pay per view, so it's not cheap.

Now, the RIAA is trying a similar tactic. They will get anyone who shares anything, trace then through their ISP, and threaten to sue them. They wont immediatly sue them, as this is high profile and would certainly turn many people against them. They will harrass, and claim they have all this evidence to prove you are infringing on copyright.

Most people will want a way out and will settle.

The history of record sales proves one thing: Lowering production lowers sales. It has been proven many times. Well, the RIAA is trying to show that "sharing is hurting record sales" claiming that this is a major reason they must crack down. Well, they lowered production the last two years running. They started lowering production before the economy went to shit. Now, in these times when unemployment is higher than it has been in 10 years, they wonder why people aren't buying records.
http://www.geeknews.net/?info=214


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Comcast May Enter Vivendi's Auction
Martin Peers and Bruce Orwall

As Vivendi Universal SA's auction of its film and television businesses drags on, the French media and telecom conglomerate may be close to attracting a deep-pocketed potential bidder that could shake up the contest.

Comcast Corp., the biggest cable-television operator in the U.S., has decided to take a preliminary look at Vivendi's assets, which include Universal Studios and the USA cable channel, people familiar with the matter said. If Comcast decided to make a bid, it would join a field that includes Liberty Media Corp., General Electric Co.'s NBC unit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and an investor group led by former Seagram Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman Jr.

Vivendi has been hoping to attract more bidders, unhappy with the level of bids received in the first round. Most bids are thought to have been in the range of $11 billion to $11.5 billion, which Vivendi believes is too low. It has indicated it will abandon a private sale and sell stock in the assets in an initial public offering if it doesn't end up getting a higher price.

Whether Comcast is serious is hard to determine. People familiar with the matter insisted Comcast's interest is preliminary but genuine. The company is considering putting together a proposal and has informed Vivendi of its interest. Aside from operating cable systems that serve nearly 22 million subscribers, Comcast owns part or all of cable networks such as E! Entertainment and the Golf Channel. It recently agreed to sell its majority stake in the QVC home shopping cable channel to Liberty for roughly $8 billion, although that money has been earmarked to reduce the debt Comcast took on when it bought AT&T Corp.'s cable operations last year.

Vivendi's assets are "relevant" to Comcast's business, said one person familiar with the situation. Indeed, Comcast often has been the subject of speculation about its interest in acquiring content companies such as Walt Disney Co., for example. Buying Vivendi's entertainment assets would make Comcast a fully integrated media company — with cable distribution, cable networks and a film studio — that would compete more directly with AOL Time Warner Inc. and News Corp.

Until now, for example, GE or Liberty have been seen as the front-runners in the auction — a scenario that would radically change with Comcast in the picture. The move also would pressure some of the auction's more aggressive bidders, such as MGM, to step up with more lucrative proposals. MGM has submitted an $11.5 billion bid, the richest proposal for the assets yet.

Vivendi Chairman and CEO Jean-Rene Fourtou was in New York over the past week, where he talked with most of the bidders. Vivendi executives are expected to meet with bidding groups over the next few days to discuss in more detail the price that Vivendi wants to get, as well as other issues, such as how much upfront cash the French company is hoping for.

Vivendi is hoping to get another round of bids by mid-August, allowing it to narrow down talks to one or two players and get a deal by Labor Day.
http://www.mediareform.net/news.php?id=736


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U.S. Senate Votes To Keep Feds Out of IT Databases
James Maguire

"The problem is, [TIA] leeches into hundreds of different areas," says EPIC deputy counsel Chris Hoofnagle. "All of a sudden, you get into every database in the world, and everything is suspicious, and all sorts of innocent behavior comes under scrutiny."
Responding to pressure from privacy advocates, the U.S. Senate has voted to stop funding for a controversial computer surveillance program that would have allowed government access to a broad array of private and public records.

Called the Terrorism Information Awareness, the program would have used advanced data-mining technology to comb through a massive database of information -- from credit card bills to school and medical records -- in an attempt to ferret out terrorist activity.

The provision that cut off TIA funding was part of a military bill the Senate passed unanimously. In the provision, the Senate forbade the Defense Department from using any of its US$369 billion budget on TIA.

"TIA is, in many respects, a metaphor for the growing surveillance society, said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty program. "We have been warning for some time that there are no longer any technological bars to the creation of a surveillance society."

Therefore, he told NewsFactor, "The Senate's vote is a historic and positive step forward in combating the surveillance of society."

The Bush administration contends that TIA is necessary for homeland security, and TIA supporters say that new technology is needed to meet the new threats to security.

But the program has drawn criticism from both Republicans and Democrats. It "changes the role of law enforcement from one of reacting to criminal events to a system focused on prospective crime -- that's a very dangerous avenue for our government to enter," Hoofnagle said. "TIA treats everyone as suspicious all the time."

Steinhardt said the technological approach itself is flawed. "This is the theory that you can find the needle in the haystack by pouring more hay on the stack.

"This is not going to combat terrorism, it's going to divert resources and attention away from following up in more traditional ways on real evidence we have," he said. "It could result in the creation of dossiers on 300 million Americans."
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21929.html


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Electronics takes huge hit.

Sony Reports 98% Drop In Profits

Hardware profits down 73% while music off less than 9%.
AP

Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony reported a 98% decline in profit for the April-June quarter as sales faltered in key businesses such as electronics, video games, movies and music.

Sony said Thursday it earned 1.1 billion yen ($9 million) in the first quarter of its fiscal year, down from 57.2 billion yen for the same period last year.

Sales for the Tokyo-based company fell 6.9% to 1.6 trillion yen ($13.5 billion) from 1.7 trillion yen.

Sony set off a plunge in Tokyo share prices in April after it reported a loss in the final quarter of fiscal 2002, setting off worries about the state of Japanese industry, which has been struggling to cut costs and switch strategies amid competition from Asian rivals.

Its earnings report Thursday was released after the Tokyo stock market closed. Its U.S. shares were up 26 cents at $31.67 in midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Sony has pledged to turn itself around by investing in computer chip production and other research to offer broadband network gadgets and cutting-edge products that rivals can't easily imitate at lower prices.

But analysts say Sony may have fallen behind in popular products including flat- panel TVs and DVD recorders. Sales of its Vaio computers are lagging.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinv...sony-2q_x.htm#


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Internet Tops TV In Battle For Teens' Time
Janet Kornblum

"The reality is the media landscape has changed," said Wenda Harris Millard of Yahoo, which commissioned the study with media agency Carat North America. "It's not that it's about to change; it has."
Teens and young adults spend more time on the Net than they do watching TV, a study says today.

Several studies have chronicled the increasing amounts of time spent online by teens and young adults weaned on computers and cellphones. But this time, the Internet seems to have a solid lead.

The study of 13- to 24-year-olds, by Harris Interactive and Teenage Research Unlimited, finds that young people spend an average of 16.7 hours a week online (not including e-mail), compared with 13.6 hours watching TV.

It also confirms something other studies have shown: Young people like to multitask, watching TV while instant messaging and e- mailing or surfing the Web. In addition to the Net and TV, they spend an average of 12 hours a week listening to the radio; 7.7 hours talking on the phone and six hours reading books and magazines.

"This has been a trend that's been building," says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which chronicles Internet trends. "This has been a generation that has grown up with these multiple technologies."

The Net is better than TV, says Brooke Avery, 14, of Mountain View, Calif., who participated in the study. She spends about three hours a day, off and on, e- mailing, instant messaging with friends and checking out Web sites such as mtv.com and seventeen.com.

She doesn't have cable TV, but if she did, "pretty soon I'd just get bored of it," she says. On the Internet, "you can actually interact with it. TV, you can't really do anything but watch."

And you can't talk to your friends on television, she adds.

"The reality is the media landscape has changed," says Wenda Harris Millard of Yahoo, which commissioned the study with media agency Carat North America. "It's not that it's about to change. It has."

The study included an online questionnaire of 2,618 respondents ages 13 to 24 in June and a focus group.
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31185.html


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Wi-Fi To Overtake Broadband

Wi-Fi is set to boom according to new research. But broadband providers will make more money.
Peter Judge

Five years from now, Wi-Fi will have left broadband in the dust, according to a new study by Pyramid Research.

Penetration will shoot upwards until it is more than double that of broadband, and stand comparison with mobile phone usage, according to the research.

However, fierce competition will mean that most wireless service providers will go bankrupt, and revenues from Wi-Fi services will be much lower than for broadband or mobile.

By 2008, there will be 707 million Wi-Fi users worldwide, 2 billion mobile phone users, and only 262 million users of fixed broadband says Pyramid. Wi-Fi will generate only $21 billion as against fixed broadband’s $80 billion and $586 billion for mobile.

Average revenue per Wi-Fi user will drop from $30 per month this year, to $3 per month in 2008, Pyramid predicts.

“Price erosion is going to force the majority of ISPs under,” said the report’s author, analyst John Yunker. “The ones that survive will have to provide localized solutions - likely targeting enterprise segments where the margins are better.”

Wireless service providers will survive, doing installation and site surveys, he said, but the users will all deal with the usual suspects: “The consumer-facing Wi-Fi businesses will almost certainly be the major carriers.”

Despite the pressure on price, most road warriors will use commercial services, rather than relying on the free Wi-Fi hotspots which are currently available.

“Free Wi-Fi is nice for the casual user,” said Yunker, “but for road warriors I think you'll find that companies will stay pay for Wi-Fi access - using companies such as iPass and GRIC. They're paying for a consistent interface, customer support and possibly the support of their company's security policies.”

The same consolidation will happen to equipment makers: “The decision by Intersil, the leader in Wi-Fi chip sales, to sell its Wi-Fi business to GlobespanVirata for $365m is a clear sign that this is a low-margin game that only the major players [Intel and Cisco] can survive in,” said Yunker.

“We expect the established infrastructure providers, such as Ericsson, Alcatel, and Lucent, to gobble up the nascent Wi-Fi software and device manufacturers. Those that don’t get eaten are going to struggle to survive on their own.”
http://www.techworld.com/news/index....ews&NewsID=293


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Shareaza 1.9 RC (1.8.9.17)
Beta Version

Author: Shareaza
Program Type: Freeware

File Description:

Shareaza is a p2p file sharing program that delivers more Gnuetella firsts. It gives you the power to take advantage of all the latest Gnutella features, and keeps you in control every step of the way. Partial file sharing, real live upload queuing, ultra-friendly home tab, library organizer, more stability, more compatibility, power user features, automated upgrade system, and heaps more.

Changes in Current Version:

· New Navigation Bar replaces the old toolbar
· New distributed ghost ratings and smart delete function
· Other GUI fine-tuning and streamlining
· eDonkey/eMule ratio system
· Fixed hangs when browsing users
· Fixed BitTorrent tracker access that affected some sites
· Image viewer plugin registered properly once again, and enumeration of all non- generic plugins
· Faster skin/language selection
· Fixed inability to resume "Moving" downloads
· Reduced the number of wizard steps

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail...fid=1027497542


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EFF's Cindy Cohn, on the MIT/Boston College motion to quash RIAA subpoenas:

"It's very troubling that the RIAA's position is not only that they can throw out our basic privacy rights but that they can force all ISPs nationwide to respond to subpoenas out of a single court rather than a local court. In other words, we can add basic notions of jurisdiction to the long list of things that the RIAA is willing to set aside in their crusade."
http://www.copyfight.org/20030701.shtml#45858


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Play Your Tunes Away From Home
Katie Dean

The funny thing about covering the music beat for Wired News is that I rarely listen to music while I work.

That's why it was such a treat to poke around Muse.Net. The service plugs people in to their digital music collection through any Internet connection.

So for the past few days, I've been quietly humming "Possibly Maybe" by Bjork and bobbing my head to "Begin the Beguine" while typing. Yes, there was even a little chair dancing to Michael Jackson.

"Your media should move with you," said Ian Rogers, president and CTO of Mediacode, the parent company of Muse.Net. "Muse.Net provides the ability to play back from anywhere, to anywhere. That might be as simple as having one machine at home where you store all your music that you want to access at work."

Sure, listening to music at work is not unique. People do it every day and pull their toe-tapping tunes from a variety of sources. Still, the site is a cool way to organize and play your songs that reside in remote locations.

Plus, it's easy to use, legal and doesn't allow music to be shared.

To use Muse.Net, a listener downloads the software onto any broadband-connected PC. The media files on that computer are then pooled together and can be accessed whenever the user logs in to Muse.Net. The desktop acts like a server hosting the music.

The service does not know where the files originated. It will play anything in your collection -- whether the tracks are MP3s ripped from a CD or MP3s downloaded from peer-to-peer sites like Kazaa. You can also play video files from your remote PC.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59646,00.html


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Lessons from Apple
Danielle Iuliano

There are some good things that may come out of Apple’s foray into the online music business to teach us some digital music lessons. Lesson 1: We do not need a single security format decided by an industry consortium and the government as suggested last year in the Senator Hollings’ bill and painfully attempted by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) in 1999. Rather, we need clarification of what fair use means for technology, e.g., no more than 10 CD burns of the same playlist. Apple launched its iTunes service with its own ‘homemade’ security to prohibit users from making unlimited copies of a specific playlist or album. Lesson 2: The technology and entertainment industries should specialize in what they do best. Both will benefit if they play within their strengths: the music industry finds, develops and creates great content, and the tech industry builds technology that encapsulates customer service, delivery of content in new ways and mechanisms to track usage to compensate parties. Apple did a good job of creating an easy to use consumer interface and simple service in contrast to label-backed services such as Pressplay and MusicNet that had technical difficulties, were expensive and had strict limitations on use of content. Lesson 3: Congress must take another look at copyright law and the processes of examining new technologies to protect and encourage the large and the small. Small companies and individual users have been beaten and bullied in court. We need guidelines for any technology company to innovate new and cost-effective digital media services so that it is not just the Apples and Microsofts of the world that are allowed to use their market power to play a tune.
http://www.empoweramerica.org/stories/storyReader$829


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Respect Copyright, Says a Pious Hollywood
Dan Gillmor

Sony, Disney, AOL and the other big movie studios have set up a cleverly named site, Respect Copyrights.org, as part of a campaign (also including TV commercials and in-theater pitches) aimed at persuading us all of a single point -- that it's wrong to infringe on copyrights.

Well, of course it is, especially when the purpose is to get something of value for nothing or deprive someone else of what he or she has legitimately earned. But in its typical overstated way, the film branch of the entertainment cartel is demanding a whole lot more, too.

The industry insists that its customers bow to copyright holders' absolute control over how buyers may use what they've bought. It demands a veto on innovation with entirely benign uses, if that innovation might also be used to infringe. And it sneers at the bargain that copyright holders once made with society -- a deal that would reward creativity while constantly refilling the well of public knowledge and art.

The dishonesty on this website isn't so much in what it says, though there are more than a few howlers. It's in what the Motion Picture Association of America doesn't say.

The site is, as you'd expect, totally slanted in a single direction. It offers no hint that customers or users of copyrighted materials have any rights beyond those the copyright holder decides to grant.

The mega-corporations that own the studios, through their MPAA front, piously quote the Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. Congress has the power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries..." -- but the cartel has turned "limited times" into the near-permanance, and the exclusivity has always been circumscribed.

The point of copyright is not solely to pay creators. It's equally designed to get ideas and inventions -- arts and sciences and scholarship -- first into the the public sphere, and ultimately into the public domain, where other creators build on them to make new art, new science, new scholarship.

Part of the process involves "fair use," the ability to quote in limited ways from copyrighted works. Fair use, in the modern world, has also come to include our right to make backup copies of what we have purchased; to "time shift" entertainment so we can watch TV programs when we, not the networks choose; and (among other things) the right to copy a song we've bought into a format that plays on another device (such as a car cassette player).

But the cartel believes it has the right to allow or forbid any and all of those uses if they involve digital copying. It plans to enforce these regimes through "digital rights" (read: "digital restrictions") technology, which has the ugly by-product of destroying customers' privacy, and harsh, frequently abused laws like the rigid Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The cartel believes -- and basically says -- that fair use is something copyright holders may provide or withhold at their whim.

This stance tells customers they have no rights, except to spend or not spend. This stance abrogates two centuries of tradition and common sense. It steals from our heritage -- and dims our future.

The cartel wants us to respect copyrights. Fine. But when will the cartel respect our rights, and the public good, as well?
http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/colu...6.shtml#001216


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House Asked To Power Up Digital TV
Declan McCullagh

The Federal Communications Commission would be required to accelerate the transition to digital television under a bill introduced Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The measure, called the Consumer Access to Digital Television Enhancement Act, would require the FCC to adopt a December 2002 proposal for a digital TV standard inked by dozens of cable operators and consumer electronics companies. The bill envisions a national "plug and play" standard for digital TVs that would not require set-top boxes.

The proposal, or memorandum of understanding, covers the reception of analog basic, digital basic and digital premium cable television programming in the United States. Enhanced services such as pay-per-view or video-on-demand would be included in a future specification.

"This bill provides a clear blueprint to move the television medium into the 21st century," said Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., who introduced the bill with Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va. "This flexible legislation provides a path to ensuring digital TV services for all American households."

Their legislation says the FCC will implement the proposal "within 30 days after the date of enactment of this act." It also requires that all television receivers marketed as "digital cable-ready" follow FCC regulations.

In January 2003, the FCC began the process of asking for public comment on the memorandum of understanding drawn up by cable and consumer electronics industries.

Some of the companies that have signed the proposal include Hitachi America, JVC Americas, Philips Consumer Electronics North America, Sony Electronics, Comcast Cable Communications, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable.

Last August, the FCC said that beginning July 1, 2004, TV sets with screen sizes of 36 inches and larger must include digital receivers.
http://news.com.com/2100-1031-5053436.html


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Will MP3 Downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The Evidence So Far

Stan J. Liebowitz, University of Texas at Dallas - School of Management

Abstract:

This paper investigates the impact of unauthorized downloading of MP3 files on the recording industry. Although the no longer extant Napster was the most famous system used for such downloading, its progeny have continued to allow millions of music listeners to download music (and other) files without remuneration to the copyright owners. Using data on the historical sales of prerecorded music I examine in detail the recent decline in record sales and attempt to gauge the importance of various alternative factors that have been put forward to explain this decline. I conclude that the evidence supports a claim that MP3 downloads decrease sales.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=414162


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RIAA Is 'Fighting For Survival'

We asked Reg readers for their thoughts on the RIAA's aggressive pursuit of college students, and answers have poured in. Many people out there suggest that the RIAA is moving with such incredible speed in its litigation because the organization is fighting to justify its existence before artists get wise. Imagine that.

Others take a, um, slightly more aggressive tact, saying the RIAA is part of an intricate government conspiracy. Whatever your opinion on the matter may be, the RIAA's pursuit of grandparents and children has some people concerned.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/35/31950.html


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Aural Intercourse: See Ya In Court, Kids
Mike Prevatt

There's a knock at the door. You just got home from SAT prep class, you're tired, and all you want to do is grab the iPod and blast some AFI. Who could it be?

A tall man in a suit towers over you. "Are you the Kazaa user of the household, young man? This is for you, straight from Washington." And, lo and behold, your first subpoena.

Essentially, this has happened--in fact, more than 1,000 file sharers will be sued by the Big Five record companies' lobbying arm over the next few weeks. Looks like the Recording Industry Association of America wasn't kidding around. Just when you thought it was solely after the most prolific uploaders, downloaders and freeloaders--because the RIAA said as much a few months back--it has been reported that lawsuits have been drawn up for users with as few as five copyrighted songs available for sharing. Which, at maximum penalty per illegally ripped song, could come to $750,000. Quite a step up from that $278 fine for parking in a handicapped spot while running into 7-Eleven for a pack of Camels, huh?

The media is all over the story like Dave Matthews fans on leaked pre-release MP3s. The cover of last week's U.S. News & World Report featured a picture of a young boy with headphones, with "WANTED" shouting across his forehead. The subhead reads, "Got a Digital Pirate in Your House? Got a Lawyer?" The RIAA, fighting against piracy activity on which it blames a 25 percent drop in sales, is through trying to scare headstrong teens and college students assuming cyberspace anonymity. They're now threatening the parents--y'know, the ones who can afford the settlements.

And speaking of online secrecy--a thing of the past in John Ashcroft's America--you were once protected by your Internet service provider (AOL, Verizon, et al). But, through legal channels, the labels won the right in June to force those companies to fork over the names of Net identities such as "indepunk74." Worse, some lawmakers are suggesting they break into your computers, or even digitally damage them should you freely download something you should be buying.

It's certainly taken the RIAA--and the Motion Picture Association of America, which claims to be losing about $3.5 billion a month thanks to online pirates--long enough. Before recent settlements with four college students in May, the last time it won against file trading was when Napster was shut down by a federal judge in 2000. It may have been waiting for other developments that would stave off suing its customers. That has proved futile.

Many believe the genie has been let out, so to speak, and hackers will keep these digital bootleg copies in circulation indefinitely, and/or thwart the efforts of the RIAA. Furthermore, the idea that downloaders were trying to send a message to the labels seems true enough when looking at upcoming plans for protest. There are already plans for action to take place Aug. 1-2 (www.boycott-riaa.com/action/action.php), on top of peer-to-peer trading advocates blacklisting companies associated with the RIAA.

For now, the online community scrambles to clear its shared music folders and caches, and erase its P2P programs. How the other 59,999,000 music fans not yet subpoenaed fight back is sure to keep the single biggest revolution in entertainment and technology raging longer than the download time for a copy of 8 Mile on a dial-up connection. To paraphrase that flick's star, they won't give up that easy, no, they won't have it.
http://www.lasvegasmercury.com/2003/.../21774939.html


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Son of Napster

One Possible Future for a Music Business That Must Inevitably Change
Robert X. Cringely

When I mentioned in last week's column that I would this week be writing about a legal way to do a successful music downloading business -- a business that would threaten the Recording Industry Association of America and its hegemony -- dozens of readers wrote to me trying to predict what I would write. Some readers came at the problem from a purely technical perspective, ignoring the fact that the real issues here aren't technical but legal. Some readers took a legal approach, but they tended to ignore the business model. Some were looking solely for the business model. Interestingly, nobody even came close to my idea, which makes me either a total loon or a diabolical genius. Truth be told, I'm probably more of a diabolical loon.

The reason I am even writing this column is two-fold. The biggest reason is simply because I would like people to consider lateral solutions to problems. I am pushing the concept of problem solving in a new way. There is no particular methodology here, just the underlying concept that if things aren't working the way you like, think of something different. Too often, people restrict their thinking or they somehow expect the world to change just for them, which it won't. But taking a lateral approach often yields interesting results. And once you've found an approach, maybe it can be applied to a different problem. What I am about to describe as a model for music distribution might be even better for something else. You tell me.

The second reason I am doing this is because I don't like the current situation in the recording industry where power is concentrated in the hands of executives who are doing all they can to stop the rotation of the Earth. Technology has already changed the economics of music creation and distribution, but the record companies are resisting with every weapon they have. I would too if I was in their position, which is fat, rich, and having everything to lose. But times do change, and I think the music business is ready to adopt new ways of moving forward. And once that happens, it will resume growing. But what is needed for that to happen is a catalyst, which I am attempting to provide right here.

If anyone actually does this business, don't forget where you first heard it. Of course, if you actually spend the $2 million as I suggest and lose it all, please forget my name.

The business I am about to describe has not been legally tested. I have run it past a few lawyer friends of mine, but a true legal test can only be done in the courts. Having said that, the universal response I have received from lawyers can best be described as giddiness. They get it. And the implications of this idea -- the sheer volume of trouble it could create -- gets their billing glands working.

Without having been truly tested, so far I have yet to find a lawyer who sees a serious flaw in my logic. What I am about to propose is apparently not illegal under current law, which of course means that the RIAA will throw their lobbying muscle into making it illegal, getting Congress to pass a new law specifically against my technique. The trick then is to establish the business before that can happen. Gentlemen, start your engines!

I call my idea Son of Napster, or Snapster for short.

Read On - http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030724.html











Until next week,

- js.









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Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16975 July 19th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16893 July 12th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16830 July 5th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16759 June 28th





The Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.