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Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology! |
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,023
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![]() ![]() ![]() "Web-surfing worker can't be fired." – AP "For the above reasons, the Court hereby ORDERS that the Plaintiffs’ [RIAA’s] cause of action against Defendant Brittany Chan be DISMISSED." – United States District Court, Eastern District Of Michigan, Southern Division "The library is pretty much full with people on MySpace, and with them banning it you won't have anything to distract you." – Paul Martinez "That was a zero-day rootkit to us, so we decided to throw it at CoPilot as part of the operational tests. We detected the Sony rootkit in all its vectors, in real-time." – Jamie Butler "This IP lookup process does not include any information that is used to identify you or contact you, and only gives a rough geographic representation of where users are located." – Microsoft "The reason the recording industry is now insisting on a different standard has nothing to do with fairness. XM and the record industry are in the middle of renegotiating their performance license. By changing the standard now, the recording industry hopes to stack the deck in its favor." – Gary Parsons "'It's not a pod. It's a mother ship.'" – Mitch Bainwol All Aboard A new item on the hardware scene is an everyman PC from Chinese manufacturer Yellow Sheep River. They call it the Municator, and at $150.00 retail this box is the perfect example of why it's getting harder and harder for first time buyers (the majority of the world's population afterall) to justify the expense of DRM-laden Wintel/Apple systems. With open source email, instant messaging, Word and PowerPoint type office apps, or access to such via websites like Thinkfree, with good sound, fast video and Skype telephony, it does basically what the corporate boxes do and does it with more freedom, more privacy and for far less money, and all this without reporting your IP back to Redmond or Cupertino. Imagine that. The general price trend in desktop computers has been moving south but now that magic 99 dollar tag seems to be hovering right over our heads. Out of reach at the moment, but probably not for long and when it arrives - watch out. After seeing this news eye-opener I’ll bet more than a few Wintel/Apple execs will be checking their retirement investments. What’s going to be eye-opening for the rest of us though is the effect these ultra affordable machines will have on the population of the internet, and P2P in particular, when some 4 billion people finally log in. "Welcome to the Ubernet. So glad you could join us." Won’t that be interesting? Enjoy, Jack. ![]() April 29th, ’06 ![]() MS Expands Anti-Piracy Program, Reissues Patch Brian Krebs Microsoft today began expanding its anti-piracy program by quietly pushing out a software update that in many cases automatically scans Windows computers and reports on whether they are powered by unlicensed software. The "new pilot program" is a fairly broad expansion of Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage program, under which the anti-piracy check was required only for users who wish to download security updates or other free programs from Microsoft's site. Under WGA, users who chose to receive fixes via Automatic Updates were not prompted to install and run the anti-piracy software. Starting today, however, Windows XP users in the United States who have set up automatic security updates will receive the anti-piracy tool. After installation and reboot, they may find their computers popping up an alert that reads: "This copy of Windows is not genuine; you may be a victim of software counterfeiting." Microsoft also is pushing the new tool out to auto-update users in Britain, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. I hadn't heard about this program until today, when my laptop -- which of course is running a legitimate copy of XP Home Edition -- received this update today and prompted me to restart. When I rebooted the machine and went to "Add Remove/Programs," the hyperlinked Microsoft Knowledge Base article that was supposed to describe more about this patch was not available, so I sent a few questions over to Microsoft. Below are their answers: How does Microsoft plan to disseminate this? Through automatic updates?: "Yes. As part of the pilot program, some customers in the U.S. U.K., Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand will be invited to receive WGA Notifications through Automatic Updates (AU) to learn whether or not they are running genuine Windows. Customers who opt in to the pilot and learn they are using non-genuine versions of Windows will receive a message during logon that their copy of Windows appears to be non-genuine and will be directed to the WGA Web site to learn more. If they choose not to obtain a copy of genuine Windows at that time, the customer will receive reminders until they are running genuine Windows. While the pilot is presently opt-in, as it expands later in the year, AU and WU customers may be required to participate. Users who have not validated their machines as genuine through WGA will not be able to download IE 7 and Windows Defender among other downloads and updates. However, they will not be denied critical security updates" (my emphasis added). Will the Windows customer who uses auto-updates have the opportunity to decline this update and still install other updates?: "The pilot is opt-in, so all participants are given a choice about whether or not they wish to participate. The opt-in is via a License Terms dialog, and users can chose to accept or decline. Only users who accept will receive the software. Once installed, participants will have the option to suppress notifications for some length of time. Users will not have the option of uninstalling WGA Notifications. Customers [already] running genuine Windows Advantage will be unaffected by WGA notifications. Users running non-genuine Windows will see the notifications at boot time, login time, and periodically to via a system tray bubble notification. Messages are displayed until the system is running genuine Windows. Users can choose to suppress the notifier. The notifier will remind such users that they are not running genuine Windows and direct them to the WGA failure page, where they can learn more about the benefits of genuine software and take advantage of the Microsoft genuine Windows offers designed to help victims of counterfeit software. All users are able to receive High Priority Security & reliability updates regardless of their validation status. Users will not have the option of uninstalling WGA Notifications" (again, my emphasis). What has been the rate of acceptance among Windows users to the Genuine Advantage program so far? How many potentially pirated versions of Windows has Microsoft received reports of thus far through the WGA program and installed tools? "To date, we have already validated more than 150 million systems worldwide with WGA. As of March 2006, the WGA notifications program has been offered to more than 13 million users and we estimate an additional 13 million customers will receive the program with the present expansion. The ultimate goal of WGA is to differentiate genuine Windows software from non-genuine software. WGA also helps Microsoft learn more about counterfeit resellers and their illegal practices. We don't have specific numbers to share." What exactly happens in the event that the tool finds a PC that is suspected of running a counterfeit version of Windows (what info, if any, is then shared with Redmond)?: "WGA Notifications is for Windows XP users. Our client software does not collect any information that can be used to identify or contact a user. We use the same process used by many popular search engines and Web sites to determine where their users are from -- a form of IP lookup. This IP lookup process does not include any information that is used to identify you or contact you, and only gives a rough geographic representation of where users are located." Microsoft also said it is planning to expand the anti-piracy pilot to Microsoft Office products. Initially this will affect users of various foreign language versions of Office, including Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Greek, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Spanish. Microsoft has every right to defend its intellectual property rights, and I don't for a single second begrudge the company for trying to quash software piracy, which is a very costly and global problem. But I'm a little concerned that this action could cause a number of Windows users to turn off automatic updates completely, and as such leave their systems unpatched and sitting ducks for would-be attackers who might use those machines for criminal purposes. For my part, I turned off Automatic Updates several months ago, mainly because I got sick of telling Windows not to install its "malicious software removal tool," (even though I checked the box next to "don't ask again" or something to that effect, Windows asks permission to reinstall the program every time other updates are available). Microsoft also released today an update to fix a Windows security patch (MS06-015) it issued a week ago that caused problems for some users of Hewlett-Packard hardware and software, as well as some Windows users who have certain Nvidia graphics cards installed. Microsoft said that if you are configured to receive automatic updates, you don't need to do anything: "It will detect if you have the problem and deliver the update to you. If you have not yet installed MS06-015, the revised version will be offered to you." Automatic update users will also get a complimentary copy of the new Windows anti-piracy tool as well. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...ipiracy_p.html ![]() How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows Bill Gates may not be entirely dismayed by software thieves. They seed the world market and make Microsoft a standard. Charles Piller Microsoft Corp. estimates it lost about $14 billion last year to software piracy — and those may prove to be the most lucrative sales never made. Although the world's largest software maker spends millions of dollars annually to combat illegal copying and distribution of its products, critics allege — and Microsoft acknowledges — that piracy sometimes helps the company establish itself in emerging markets and fend off threats from free open-source programs. The gist of the beneficial piracy argument is that the retail price Microsoft charges for signature products such as Windows and Office — as much as $669, depending on the version — can rival the average annual household income in some developing countries. So the vast majority of those users opt for pirated versions. The proliferation of pirated copies nevertheless establishes Microsoft products — particularly Windows and Office — as the software standard. As economies mature and flourish and people and companies begin buying legitimate versions, they usually buy Microsoft because most others already use it. It's called the network effect. "The first dose is free," said Hal Varian, a professor of information management at UC Berkeley, facetiously comparing Microsoft's anti-piracy policy to street-corner marketing of illicit drugs. "Once you start using a product, you keep using it." Even as the Internet makes global piracy easier than ever, Microsoft's revenue and profit have risen steadily. It earned $12 billion on $41.4 billion in revenue in calendar '05. That record of success has led many experts and software companies to regard piracy as less of a problem than initially assumed or even part of a comprehensive strategy, said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee and the former chief counsel of a Silicon Valley Internet firm. "Is widespread piracy simply foregone revenue, a business model by accident or a business model by design?" he asked. "Maybe all three." Of course, Microsoft executives prefer that people buy, but theft can build market share more quickly, as company co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates acknowledged in an unguarded moment in 1998. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." That's exactly what has happened around the globe, according to the Business Software Alliance, a Microsoft-backed anti-piracy group. Even Vietnam, which at more than 90% has the highest piracy rate in the world, has improved from 100% in 1994. The No. 1 software firm in Vietnam: Microsoft. Closer to the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters, the decline of piracy in the United States has tracked Microsoft's rise. Stratospheric 25 years ago, the U.S. piracy rate dropped to 31% in 1994, then to 21% in 2004 — the lowest in the world. Microsoft's public posture on piracy is one of zero tolerance. "We're all working five days a week and getting paid for three," said Cori Hartje, the company's director of license compliance. "We do everything we can to stop piracy." The company sues online auctioneers and computer makers that supply pirated products, including Windows, the operating system for more than 90% of the world's personal computers. It cooperates with law enforcement agencies to seize pirated discs and warns users around the globe that counterfeit programs may destabilize their systems. The effort even prompted Islamic clerics in Saudi Arabia and Egypt to declare fatwas, or religious edicts, against software piracy. Microsoft, like most other software companies, has experimented with technical tricks to prevent copying, such as discs that could be used only once and hardware "dongles" that had to be connected to the PC before a software program could run. Legitimate users complained bitterly. Such methods caused software bugs and prevented customers from reinstalling programs when their computers malfunctioned, yet hackers quickly subverted each new attempt. "Copy protection is a balancing act because it always reduces the value of your product," said Bruce Schneier, chief technical officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. "State-of-the-art copy protection makes your customers hate you." By 1986, like most other software companies, Microsoft abandoned copy protection. Now it attacks piracy with technical and legal carrots and sticks. In 2004, it launched the Windows Genuine Advantage program, which offers special features and updates for legal users. It also requires a product activation key — a string of letters and numbers the retail buyer of Windows or applications such as Word must enter to install the product on a computer. Experts applauded the approach as thoughtful, given past problems with copy protection. But it does little to deter piracy, because thousands of activation keys — stolen or generated by software programs — can be found easily on the Web. Microsoft's legal approach differs sharply with that of the music industry, which sues as if it were in the fight of its life, said John G. Palfrey Jr., director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. "They put Napster out of business and sued Grokster to the Supreme Court," he said. Like Microsoft, the music industry sees network effects from piracy. For little-known artists who have trouble getting airtime, piracy can be crucial to create buzz. But instead of generating revenue growth, pirated music generally replaces a CD purchase. In most countries, music revenue is falling. In a loudly public campaign, music publishers have pressed more than 15,000 suits against individual pirates worldwide. Microsoft and the Business Software Alliance have rarely sued individuals, instead making claims against dozens of distributors and institutional users of illicit products. More commonly, according to industry observers, Microsoft has cut pragmatic deals to convert institutional piracy into standard sales. Instead of suing, it asks organizations found to use illicit copies to replace them with licensed, paid versions. Microsoft wares become entrenched without competitive bidding, via piracy, and formal forgiveness cements the commercial relationship. Microsoft declined to comment on how often it uses this approach. Piracy also prevents free, open-source alternatives such as Linux from chipping away at Microsoft's monopolies, especially in developing nations. China, for instance, promotes Red Flag Linux — a local, open-source competitor to Windows. As Gates concluded in 1998, piracy may be the only way Microsoft can stay in that market, embracing the opportunity to gradually convert pirates to payers. If Microsoft launched a draconian crackdown, UC Berkeley's Varian said, it would provoke the obvious reaction: "People would just switch to open source." In China, pirated versions of Windows are easy to find on the street for 5 yuan, or about 62 cents. Why doesn't Microsoft put the thieves out of business by giving away or deeply discounting local-language versions of its products? The strategy would offer network benefits while providing better data on users. Consistent global pricing reduces confusion for multinational buyers, Hartje said. Experts believe high prices encourage piracy but offer the company offsetting advantages. If Microsoft sold Windows for, say, $10, it would lose money on every copy because of manufacturing, distribution and support costs. At zero cost to Microsoft, piracy enhances network effects by getting Windows out to users who can't or won't pay, without undercutting normal prices. "Microsoft benefits from piracy, then says, 'If you think prices are high, blame the Chinese, because they are the thieves,' " said Ariel Katz, a law professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on the economics of piracy. "They like us to feel guilty — to think that piracy is wrong and immoral. Economically, it's not necessarily true, but it resonates with the public." http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...0,414067.story ![]() No steps forward, two steps back Congress Readies Broad New Digital Copyright Bill Declan McCullagh For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law seen by CNET News.com would expand the DMCA's restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers. The draft legislation, created by the Bush administration and backed by Rep. Lamar Smith, already enjoys the support of large copyright holders such as the Recording Industry Association of America. Smith, a Texas Republican, is the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees intellectual-property law. A spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee said Friday that the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 is expected to "be introduced in the near future." Beth Frigola, Smith's press secretary, added Monday that Wisconsin Republican F. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the full House Judiciary Committee, will be leading the effort. "The bill as a whole does a lot of good things," said Keith Kupferschmid, vice president for intellectual property and enforcement at the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington, D.C. "It gives the (Justice Department) the ability to do things to combat IP crime that they now can't presently do." During a speech in November, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales endorsed the idea and said at the time that he would send Congress draft legislation. Such changes are necessary because new technology is "encouraging large-scale criminal enterprises to get involved in intellectual-property theft," Gonzales said, adding that proceeds from the illicit businesses are used, "quite frankly, to fund terrorism activities." The 24-page bill is a far-reaching medley of different proposals cobbled together. One would, for instance, create a new federal crime of just trying to commit copyright infringement. Such willful attempts at piracy, even if they fail, could be punished by up to 10 years in prison. It also represents a political setback for critics of expanding copyright law, who have been backing federal legislation that veers in the opposite direction and permits bypassing copy protection for "fair use" purposes. That bill--introduced in 2002 by Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat--has been bottled up in a subcommittee ever since. A DMCA dispute But one of the more controversial sections may be the changes to the DMCA. Under current law, Section 1201 of the law generally prohibits distributing or trafficking in any software or hardware that can be used to bypass copy-protection devices. (That section already has been used against a Princeton computer science professor, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov and a toner cartridge remanufacturer.) Smith's measure would expand those civil and criminal restrictions. Instead of merely targeting distribution, the new language says nobody may "make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess" such anticircumvention tools if they may be redistributed to someone else. "It's one degree more likely that mere communication about the means of accomplishing a hack would be subject to penalties," said Peter Jaszi, who teaches copyright law at American University and is critical of attempts to expand it. Even the current wording of the DMCA has alarmed security researchers. Ed Felten, the Princeton professor, told the Copyright Office last month that he and a colleague were the first to uncover the so-called "rootkit" on some Sony BMG Music Entertainment CDs--but delayed publishing their findings for fear of being sued under the DMCA. A report prepared by critics of the DMCA says it quashes free speech and chokes innovation. The SIIA's Kupferschmid, though, downplayed concerns about the expansion of the DMCA. "We really see this provision as far as any changes to the DMCA go as merely a housekeeping provision, not really a substantive change whatsoever," he said. "They're really to just make the definition of trafficking consistent throughout the DMCA and other provisions within copyright law uniform." The SIIA's board of directors includes Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intuit and Red Hat. Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University, views the DMCA expansion as more than just a minor change. "If Sony had decided to stand on its rights and either McAfee or Norton Antivirus had tried to remove the rootkit from my hard drive, we'd all be violating this expanded definition," Litman said. The proposed law scheduled to be introduced by Rep. Smith also does the following: • Permits wiretaps in investigations of copyright crimes, trade secret theft and economic espionage. It would establish a new copyright unit inside the FBI and budgets $20 million on topics including creating "advanced tools of forensic science to investigate" copyright crimes. • Amends existing law to permit criminal enforcement of copyright violations even if the work was not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. i • Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000. • Creates civil asset forfeiture penalties for anything used in copyright piracy. Computers or other equipment seized must be "destroyed" or otherwise disposed of, for instance at a government auction. Criminal asset forfeiture will be done following the rules established by federal drug laws. • Says copyright holders can impound "records documenting the manufacture, sale or receipt of items involved in" infringements. Jason Schultz, a staff attorney at the digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the recording industry would be delighted to have the right to impound records. In a piracy lawsuit, "they want server logs," Schultz said. "They want to know every single person who's ever downloaded (certain files)--their IP addresses, everything." CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report. http://news.com.com/Congress+readies...3-6064016.html ![]() Bill Seeks Music Royalties For Satellite Downloads Brooks Boliek A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced legislation that would require satellite radio companies to compensate the music industry for downloads, industry and congressional sources said. The legislation, by U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and majority leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., is aimed at compensating copyright holders as satellite radio services become distribution services. The "PERFORM Act" or the "Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act of 2006" would require satellite, cable and Internet broadcasters to pay fair market value for the performance of digital music. Additionally, the bill would require the use of readily available and cost-effective technological means to prevent music theft. "The birth of the digital music place has been a boon for businesses and consumers. However, these new technologies and business models have become so advanced that the clear lines between a listening service and a distribution service have been blurred," Feinstein said. "I believe that the PERFORM Act would help strike a balance between fostering the development of new technologies and ensuring that songwriters and performers continue to be fairly compensated for their works." Record industry executives want so-called "parity" among the different download platforms. They argue that the new devices XM Radio is bringing to the market that allow customers to save songs on the receivers without paying for the download rip off the copyright holder. "Digital sales are finally replacing physical losses," said Mitch Bainwol, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, which lobbies for the major labels. "If someone gets a distribution right without paying for it, that blows a hole in the digital marketplace." Warner Music Group chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. endorsed the legislation in testimony prepared for a hearing on the issue scheduled for Wednesday. "When I see a device that permits consumers to identify the specific tracks they want from a satellite broadcast, record them and library them for future use, I call that device an iPod and I call the satellite service making that device available a download service," Bronfman said. "What is clear to everyone is that these services no longer resemble and will increasingly stray from our collective understanding of what constitutes a traditional radio service." The bill protects copyright holders by ensuring that "the same rules apply to all of the satellite, cable and Internet services, which avail themselves of a compulsory license under" the nation's copyright laws. Sirius Satellite Radio has reached deals with the major record companies that compensate them for downloads on its S-50 receiver that allows customers to record content, but XM has not. A pair of devices, the Pioneer Inno and Samsung NeXus, allow customers to record programming. XM executives contend that the devices are nothing more than a high-tech way to record radio programming, which is protected. In XM chairman Gary Parsons' prepared testimony, he said that the Feinstein-Graham bill, tentatively known as the Perform Act, will "lead to a new tax being imposed on our subscribers." The company already pays millions in copyright royalties to the record companies, and said their push for a new royalty is a negotiating tactic designed to push those rates higher. The copyright office is currently reviewing those rates. "The reason the recording industry is now insisting on a different standard has nothing to do with fairness," Parsons said. "XM and the record industry are in the middle of renegotiating their performance license. By changing the standard now, the recording industry hopes to stack the deck in its favor." Bainwol denied the charge. "Competition should be based on the offering. Their license is for a performance, not a distribution," he said. "I was struck by the power of their slogan: 'It's not a pod. It's a mother ship."' http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...042600054.html ![]() Piracy Worse Than Child Pornography Society's new perspectives Nick Farrell THE NEW look Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) seems to be giving the world an unusual moral code. Details of the upgraded act, which has the blessing of the music and film industry and the Bush administration, are now coming to light. It appears that the DMCA will have a maximum sentence of ten years inside for the crime of software and music piracy. It will also give the FBI the powers to wiretap suspected pirates. Although sentencing varies in the US, the new law does send a very strange message as to what the government considers 'bad' in the 21st century. For example assaulting a police officer will get you five years, downloading child porn will get you seven years, assaulting without a weapon will get you ten years and aggravated assault six years. So in other words if you copy a Disney CD and sell it you will be in the same league as a paedophile who is distributing pictures of sexual attacks on children. If you copy Craig David's CD you get ten years, but if you punch him in the face and pummel him into a seven day coma you will only get six. You are more likely to get the respect of the prison population with your six year sentence as well. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=31256 ![]() Senator Plans Net Taxes But No Net Neutrality Anne Broache More Americans would be forced to pay taxes subsidizing broadband service in "unserved" locales, and cities would be free to go into the Wi-Fi business under an upcoming U.S. Senate bill. Later this week, Sen. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, plans to introduce a legislative package called the Broadband for America Act of 2006, he said Tuesday morning at a conference here hosted by the National Telecommunications CooperativeAssociation, which represents small and rural carriers. Conspicuously absent from the bill, however, is any mention of Net neutrality, which refers to the idea of the federal government forcibly preventing broadband providers from favoring some Web sites or video streams' connection speeds over others. The concept has generated significant controversy in the House of Representatives' version of a telecommunications reform bill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is scheduled to take up its own proposal again on Tuesday evening, with a vote expected later in the week. A copy of the 41-page bill seen by CNET News.com is essentially a combination of existing proposals introduced by Smith and his colleagues on the Senate Commerce Committee. That committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, has also been readying what Smith called "an even more comprehensive bill" intended to overhaul the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which has been criticized as outdated for failing to account for the Internet's vast new influence. Smith's bill is not intended to rival Stevens' proposal, he said, but he hopes that its "targeted" nature will allow it to pass more speedily through committee and to the Senate floor. "The bigger it is, the more comprehensive it is, the more likely it is to get bogged down," he said. As network operators roll out more advanced broadband services, particularly video, they've argued that they should be able to finance those efforts by charging bandwidth-hogging content providers extra fees for the privilege of faster transmission or other preferential treatment. Net neutrality supporters say they're concerned such a practice would amount to unprecedented Internet "gatekeeping" that could raise consumer costs and inhibit innovation, and they've called on Congress to legislate against it. Smith, for his part, told reporters after his speech that he'd rather "wait and see whether there's a problem before we legislate (on Net neutrality). I'm not convinced we're there yet." Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Stevens has also voiced reluctance to include Net neutrality in his broad telecommunications reform bill. A committee aide said Tuesday that Stevens is still wrestling with whether to include any such language. Smith's bill instead focuses on four major areas. It would require the FCC to establish rules requiring that all companies "capable of supporting two-way voice communications" pay into the Universal Service Fund, a multibillion-dollar pool of money that's currently used to subsidize telecommunications services in rural and other high-cost areas, schools and libraries. Right now, long-distance, wireless, pay-phone and wireline telephone services are required to pay a fixed percentage of their revenues to the fund, which they typically do by tacking an additional fee onto their customers' bills. A number of the larger voice over Internet protocol providers, including Vonage, have said they already pay into the fund, but there doesn't appear to be a formal regulation requiring them to do so. Smith's bill also proposes allocating up to $500 million per year for supplying broadband service in areas where private investors are "reluctant" to set up networks. Certain users, such as low-income households, would be exempt from the fees under Smith's proposal. A second portion of the bill, rooted in two earlier proposals, would give the Federal Communications Commission 180 days to establish rules for unlicensed use of so-called "white spaces" on the broadband airwaves--that is, empty, unused channels in the broadcast TV bands. Consumer advocates say using those slices of the radio spectrum would enable cheaper and easier setup of broadband networks, but the broadcasting lobby has voiced fears that such uses would muddle their stations' reception. A third provision comes from the Community Broadband Act introduced last summer by Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. That bill, aimed at preventing states from blocking public-sector entrants into the broadband business, appears to be targeting more than a dozen states that have already passed laws bearing such restrictions or prohibitions. Another provision is designed to relieve new entrants to the video services market from negotiating franchise agreements with individual cities and towns--a matter that has sparked controversy among cable companies, which have historically had to negotiate such deals, and phone companies seeking relaxed regulations so that they can roll out their own video services more quickly. http://news.com.com/Senator+plans+Ne...3-6064743.html ![]() Senator Refuses iPod; Fears It Might Influence His Pro-RIAA Views? from the can't-have-divided-interests dept Earlier this year, we noted that Senator Ted Stevens had been suggesting that his views towards the RIAA and copyrights might be changing... in part because he now owned an iPod. It appears that IPac, the political action committee formed to push for public interest cultural and technology issues realized that perhaps more of our elected officials need iPods. So, they began a campaign to raise money to buy Senators iPods, hoping that perhaps a few more would see the same light Senator Stevens saw. On the list was Senator Conrad Burns, who in the last year appears to have accepted just shy of $60,000 from the entertainment industry -- putting him in 4th place on the list of who has received the most money from the entertainment industry. IPac (whose website is unfortunately down) did everything by the book and sent Burns an iPod -- as a perfectly legal contribution valued at $316.94. Burns, however, can't have any of that, and sent the iPod back, claiming he couldn't accept it (found via Digg). Obviously, this is a bit of a publicity stunt by IPac, but it would be nice of Burns gave a more thorough explanation for the money he's taken from the industry -- and why he feels a little contribution from the "other side" for balance is problematic. http://techdirt.com/articles/20060424/2244256.shtml ![]() Computerless Family Sued By Record Companies Lowell Vickers A Rockmart family is being sued for illegal music file sharing, despite the fact that they don’t even own a computer. A federal lawsuit filed this week in Rome by the Recording Industry Association of America alleges that Carma Walls, of 117 Morgan St., Rockmart, has infringed on copyrights for recorded music by sharing files over the Internet. The lawsuit seeks an injunction and requests unspecified monetary damages. The lawsuit states, “Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Defendant, without the permission or consent of Plaintiffs, has used, and continues to use, an online media distribution system to download the copyrighted recordings, to distribute the copyrighted recordings to the public, and/or to make the copyrighted recordings available for distribution to others.” This came as shocking news to the Walls family, who were notified of the lawsuit Friday afternoon by a newspaper reporter. James Walls, speaking on behalf of his wife and family, said they have not been served with legal papers and were unaware of the lawsuit. After being shown a copy of the court filing, Walls said he found the whole thing bewildering. “I don’t understand this,” Walls said. “How can they sue us when we don’t even have a computer?” Walls also noted that his family has only resided at their current address “for less than a year.” He wondered if a prior tenant of the home had Internet access, then moved, leaving his family to be targeted instead. However, the RIAA’s lawsuit maintains that Carma Walls, through the use of a file-sharing program, has infringed on the copyrights for the following songs: “Who Will Save Your Soul,” Jewel; “Far Behind,” Candlebox; “Still the Same,” Bob Seger; “I Won’t Forget You,” Poison; “Open Arms,” Journey; “Unpretty,” TLC; No Scrubs,” TLC; and “Saving All My Love for You,” Whitney Houston. The lawsuit follows similar wording as in some 3,500 other lawsuits filed by the RIAA in the United States since June 2003. Typically, the lawsuits have targeted users of Kazaa, Grokster and other peer-to-peer Internet services – most of which have since been shut down by RIAA lawsuits. With these services, users typically have an open folder on the computer that allows other users of the service access to any songs that have been saved in a digital format, such as MP3 files. The RIAA lawsuits have come under fire, with critics calling the effort a “scare tactic” meant to intimidate the public from file sharing activities. However, in a public statement defending the litigation, the RIAA says its efforts have been effective in dissuading illegal activity. “The industry’s anti-piracy efforts have deterred a sizeable number of would-be illegal downloaders,” the RIAA statement reads. “Although a significant online problem undoubtedly persists, particularly with hard-core, frequent peer-to-peer users, absent action by the industry, the illegal down-loading world would be exponentially worse.” http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v...yID=11575&on=1 ![]() Dutch Anti-Piracy Group BREIN Takes Action Against Major Illegal File Sharing Service Press Release Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN handed over a claim at the private address of an operator of an illegal bittorrent site on 12th April. The 20-year old from Helmond, Netherlands operates the p2p file sharing service Torrentit.com, formerly known as 123torrents. The site offered almost 2000 confirmed links to movies, television series, music, computer games and other copyrighted content. Many of the films come from well-known groups that are dedicated to making available illegally the latest films on the Internet soon after, or even before, their legitimate release date. Torrentit has 27,000 registered users and last week the site ceased its file-sharing activity, announcing that it will be back. BREIN has demanded and immediate end to the illegal activities and undertakings with significant financial penalties attached. The operator will be summoned if he does not comply with BREIN's demands and a complaint may be put to the criminal authorities. BREIN reserves the right to claim damages and profits. Torrentit had previously been taken down by its Dutch service provider, in response to a notice from BREIN. However, it had been relocated to a server in Malaysia and continued its infringing activities. Meanwhile the operator tried to sell the site for 30,000 euros. Tim Kuik, managing director of BREIN, said: "This case sends a strong message to people engaged in illegal file-sharing and shows our determination to track down illegal music distributors on whatever network they are operating. Other p2p filesharing services such as eDonkey will also be targeted again and we will expand our enforcement to newsgroups which offer copyright protected content. Our enforcement is not about technology, but about what you do with it." http://www.ifpi.org/site-content/press/20060420.html ![]() CEA Launches Its Own Pirating Awareness Campaign Chris Thilk The Consumer Electronics Association has created an ad that will run in a couple of Washington, D.C. print publications dealing with music piracy. The difference between these ads and those that have been created by the Recording Industry Association of America, though. Where the RIAA labels individuals who copy music as pirates, the CEE says it's the music labels and the RIAA that are the real pirates. The ad spotlights the legislation and technologies that would restrict people's rights to copy their own music for their own purposes and labels it as unfair and intrusive. http://www.adjab.com/2006/04/27/cea-...ness-campaign/ ![]() Judge: Web-Surfing Worker Can't Be Fired Rules it's equivalent of reading newspaper, talking on phone AP Saying surfing the web is equivalent to reading a newspaper or talking on the phone, an administrative law judge has suggested that only a reprimand is appropriate as punishment for a city worker accused of failing to heed warnings to stay off the Internet. Administrative Law Judge John Spooner reached his decision in the case of Toquir Choudhri, a 14-year veteran of the Department of Education who had been accused of ignoring supervisors who told him to stop browsing the Internet at work. The ruling came after Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a worker in the city's legislative office in Albany earlier this year after he saw the man playing a game of solitaire on his computer. In his decision, Spooner wrote: "It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work." He added: "For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes." Spooner dispensed the lightest possible punishment on Choudhri, a reprimand, after a search of Choudhri's computer files revealed he had visited several news and travel sites. Martin Druyan, Choudhri's lawyer, called the ruling "very reasonable." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12462332/ ![]() Oklahoma Senate OKs Violent-Games Bill Leslie Katz The Oklahoma Senate on Monday unanimously approved a controversial bill that would make it a crime to sell violent video games to children under 18, according to The Oklahoman (registration required). HB3004, by Senate Republican leader Glenn Coffee, adds violent video games to a list of products--including outdoor advertisements for sexually explicit businesses--described in Oklahoma state law as harmful to minors. Coffee said studies have shown that violent games can make kids more aggressive. The bill passed 47-0 in the state Senate, but is being held on a motion to reconsider the vote within three legislative days before being sent back to the House to vote on Senate amendments. Earlier this month, a federal judge overturned a Michigan law restricting the sale of violent video games, the most recent in a series of decisions that have gutted similar laws on free-speech grounds. http://news.com.com/2061-10797_3-606...5106&subj=news ![]() Texas Community College Bans MySpace.com Popular site blocked after complaints of slow network performance AP Del Mar College students now have to use computers outside the school's system if they want to visit the popular Web site MySpace.com. The community college has blocked the site in response to complaints about sluggish Internet speed on campus computers. An investigation found that heavy traffic at MySpace.com was eating up too much bandwidth, said August Alfonso, the school's chief of information and technology. Forty percent of daily Internet traffic at the college involved the site, he said. "This was more about us being able to offer Web-based instruction, and MySpace.com was slowing everything down," President Carlos Garcia said. MySpace.com — a social networking hub with more 72 million members — allows users to post searchable profiles that can include photos of themselves and such details as where they live and what music they like. Paul Martinez, 20, is a frequent visitor to MySpace.com and finds the site to be addictive. Restricting access to the site could be a good idea, he said. "The library is pretty much full with people on MySpace, and with them banning it you won't have anything to distract you," he said. Some though, disagree with Del Mar College's decision. "We pay for school and the resources that are used," said Zeke Santos, 20. "It's our choice, we're the ones paying for our classes. If we pass or fail, it's up to us." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12459826/ How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows ![]() Government-Funded Startup Blasts Rootkits Ryan Naraine A startup funded by the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is ready to emerge from stealth mode with hardware- and software-based technologies to fight the rapid spread of malicious rootkits. Komoku, of College Park, Md., plans to ship a beta of Gamma, a new rootkit detection tool that builds on a prototype used by several sensitive U.S. government departments to find operating system abnormalities that may be linked to malicious rootkit activity. A rootkit modifies the flow of the kernel to hide the presence of an attack or compromise on a machine. It gives a hacker remote user access to a compromised system while avoiding detection from anti-virus scanners. The company's prototype, called CoPilot, is a high-assurance PCI card capable of monitoring the host's memory and file system at the hardware level. It is specifically geared towards high-security servers and computers. Gamma, meanwhile, is a separate, software-only clone of CoPilot that will target businesses interested in a low-assurance tool for protecting laptops and personal computers. Komoku launched quietly in 2004 with about $2.5 million in funding and rootkit detection contracts from DARPA, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Navy. The company has its roots at the University of Maryland, where computer scientist William Arbaugh worked on what he calls a "unique approach" to finding rootkits. "Security technologies depend on the correctness of the system they're actually checking," said Arbaugh, who now serves as president of the five-employee outfit. "If something changes the system at the operating system level, it can't be reliably detected via the OS itself or through applications running on the system," he said in an interview with eWEEK. "We have this notion of what the operating system is supposed to look like and we look for deviations [from] that. We aren't initially looking for the rootkit; we look at the side effects of the infection." Komoku has partnered with security vendor Symantec to handle disinfection and restoration after rootkits and other sophisticated forms of malware are detected. Symantec's LiveState product combines with CoPilot and Gamma to restore the system to its original state. Jamie Butler, a renowned rootkit researcher who works as Komoku's chief technical officer, said Gamma will have limited clean-up capabilities because it is software-based and susceptible to direct attack, much like any application running on the operating system. "Clean-up is a very difficult goal while maintaining a running system. When you find a rootkit, you essentially have several choices. The easiest choice is to halt the system. But, that means that you'll lose any evidence that might be in memory. It also means that the services provided by that system are made unavailable," Butler explained. Another choice might be to eliminate the effects of the rootkit, but this could be very difficult because of the complicated nature of an operating system. A third choice would be to allow the rootkit to remain active while you attempt to discern its motives, Butler added, noting that both Gamma and CoPilot will allow all three of these choices. The plan is to have both the hardware and software versions collect forensic data when a compromise is detected. Butler said products are able to capture hidden malware in memory and send it back to a central management station where the products are running in enterprise mode. The company is also exploring potential partnerships with other security companies that have offline malware analysis tools, he said. Pricing details have not yet been worked out, but Arbaugh expects to ship CoPilot to high-end enterprises with super-sensitive data. Gamma, on the other hand, is a lower-assurance product and is aimed at protecting business assets that don't require high-end security protection or are unable to install hardware. Arbaugh said Gamma has been built with two modes of operation: an enterprise mode where it communicates with a central server to receive updates and incident reports, and a stand-alone mode where incidents are reported locally. Updates will be available via a subscription service similar to those in the anti-virus space, he said. Citing confidentiality issues, Arbaugh declined to discuss the severity of the rootkit threat on government networks. However, he said that during actual CoPilot tests, it was "very clear that the government shares the same problems like everyone else." The product was in the midst of testing on the U.S. Navy networks when news of the Sony rootkit issue made headlines in November 2005. "That was a zero-day rootkit to us, so we decided to throw it at CoPilot as part of the operational tests. We detected the Sony rootkit in all its vectors, in real-time," Butler said. According to statistics from Microsoft, rootkits account for more than 20 percent of all malicious programs removed from Windows machines. The stealthy technology has been found in a variety of threats, including spyware, Trojans and DRM (digital rights management). http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895...06dtx1k0000599 ![]() Warner Tackles Chinese Piracy With Cut-Price DVD Mure Dickie Warner Home Video has begun trial sales in China of a movie DVD priced at just Rmb12 ($1.50), a move likely to anger consumers in developed markets such as Europe and the US, who typically pay $20-$30 for a recently released film on DVD. The test sales of the modestly packaged edition of the The Aviator mark one of the boldest efforts yet by an international film company – WHV's Chinese joint venture, CAV Warner – to adjust its marketing strategies to the potentially huge but piracy-plagued Chinese DVD market. The "simple pack" edition of the Oscar-winning epic, which comes in a cardboard folder rather than the standard DVD plastic box, went on sale earlier this month in selected Chinese cities, said Christine Hu, CAV Warner public relations manager. "This is a first step to see if the consumer can accept this product at this price," Ms Hu said, adding that it was too early to judge the results of the experiment. Hollywood studios have struggled to establish significant businesses in China because of tight government controls on the number of foreign films approved for release and rampant piracy in the DVD market. Pirate producers have long benefited from loose enforcement of intellectual property laws in China and from state censorship that complicates DVD imports. However, local distributors say that the best way to combat the pirates would be for international companies to cut both the time lag between the release of their films at the cinema and on DVD and the gulf in prices between legitimate products and pirated discs. Pirate DVDs can easily be bought for prices starting at about Rmb6. WHV has established itself as perhaps the most innovative of the foreign film companies since launching its joint venture with China Audio and Video Publishing House, a state company controlled by the Ministry of Culture, in February 2005. Shanghai-based CAV Warner already sells recent-release films on DVD in a number of different packages. "Silver releases" cost about Rmb22 and are often issued in all-Chinese versions that can go on sale in China a month before their US DVD release. CAV Warner later issues "gold releases" at about Rmb35 that include a number of extras. Low prices are vital for a mass market used to cut-price pirate discs, but Ms Hu said there had been surprising demand for pricey box sets. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12425693/ ![]() Winners Take All In Rockonomics Robert Plummer As Madonna fans in the UK know to their cost, tickets for rock and pop concerts keep getting more expensive. The price of a seat for the London gigs in the singer's forthcoming Confessions On A Dancefloor tour ranges from £80 to £160, with an additional £13 booking fee. Judging from e-mails received by the BBC News website, there are plenty of people who are prepared to pay. For every person denouncing the ticket costs as an "outrage", there is a fan who feels the show is "worth every penny". Of course, veteran Madonna-watchers will be used to such high prices by now. It's been just two years since her Re-Invention tour, which saw UK tickets selling for up to £150 and grossed $125m (£71m) worldwide - more than any other star's concerts that year. In fact, Madonna is one of the key beneficiaries of some powerful economic forces that have re-shaped the world of live music - for better or for worse. Since the start of the 1980s, the superstar effect has become more pronounced in rock and pop, with a small number of performers taking an ever larger share of the spoils. Research into the market in the US, where the trend started, has found that in 1982, the top 1% of artists received 26% of concert revenue. By 2003, that figure had gone up to 56%. Rock professor Over the same period of time, the cost of US concert tickets has been outpacing the country's inflation rate. From 1981 to 1996, gig-goers found prices going up by 4.6% a year, while the consumer price index increased by 3.7% annually. Since then, ticket prices have soared. From 1996 to 2003, they rose by 8.9% a year, as against inflation of just 2.3%. Similar sharp increases have been noted in Europe, including the UK. These insights come from the work of an economist at Princeton University in the US, Alan Krueger, who has been described as "the world's first and foremost professor of rockonomics". He based his conclusions on an analysis of information provided by US trade publication Pollstar, which has collected data from venue managers since 1981. In a paper he wrote with Princeton graduate student Marie Connolly, he says concerts are now a much bigger source of income for major-league stars than CD sales. "Only four of the top 35 income-earners made more money from recordings than live concerts," the paper says. "For the top 35 artists as a whole, income from touring exceeded income from record sales by a ratio of 7.5 to one in 2002." Businesslike Professor Krueger told the BBC his interest in the subject began when he took his father to the US Superbowl in 2001 after buying tickets on the "secondary market," as he put it. "I had to pay $2,500 a ticket, but the list price was just $325," he said. A newspaper article that he wrote about his experience brought him to the attention of Pollstar, which gave him access to its database. He soon found out that rock concerts and American football games were subject to the same market forces. Both had become more businesslike over the years, he said. "Early on in the entertainment industry, it's in the interest of the business to think of themselves as throwing a party, not selling a product. I think they attract more of a following that way," he said. "But over time, the industry takes more the form of a market and is driven by market forces. The Superbowl initially felt like it was rewarding its fans. But then it becomes established and the League finds it in its interest to push up prices." 'Bowie Theory' But why has the rise in ticket prices been so sudden? Professor Krueger says there is no simple answer - but one explanation could be what he calls "Bowie Theory". He points out that sales of recorded music fell from 1999 to 2002, causing artists' income to decline. He believes record sales are down because many potential customers frequently download music free from the Web or copy CDs, either legally or illegally. Professor Krueger said his view had prompted a mixed reaction. "I got some critical e-mails. There are some people who are big defenders of the free availability of the internet. But the general reaction that I got has been agreement." LONDON TICKET PRICES Welsh National Opera's Tosca (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden) - £45-£180 Royal Ballet's Giselle (as above) - £4-£77 Billy Joel (Wembley Arena) - £50-£75 Bruce Springsteen (Hammersmith Apollo) - £47.50 Red Hot Chili Peppers (Earls Court) - £40 Take That (Milton Keynes Bowl, moved from Wembley Stadium) - £35-£40 Chas & Dave (Amersham Arms, New Cross) - £17.50 Before the advent of illegal downloads, artists had an incentive to underprice their concerts, because bigger audiences translated into higher record sales, Professor Krueger argues. But now, he says, the link between the two products has been severed, meaning that artists and their managers need to make more money from concerts and feel less constrained in setting ticket prices. Professor Krueger says this tendency was spotted by David Bowie, who told the New York Times in 2002 that "music itself is going to become like running water or electricity". Bowie has advised his fellow performers: "You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring, because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left." Creativity These days, the biggest concert draws tend to be performers such as Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney - artists whose latest albums are often greeted with indifference, but who can still make money by singing their greatest hits. Does that mean an end to creativity in popular music? Not necessarily, says Professor Krueger. "It should lead to more creativity in terms of live performances," he says. "A concert is more than just an artist at a microphone. Look at all the light shows at a U2 concert." And, of course, the increasing sophistication of such shows is another factor putting upward pressure on concert ticket prices. But as Professor Krueger points out, the internet is ultimately going to lead to even bigger economic changes in the music industry. "There will be a good deal of shaking out. There will be new modes of distributing music - more diversity and more competition. But technological innovations continually cause change, ever since Edison. The industry has to change and it is changing." http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ss/4896262.stm ![]() RIAA Increases Profits After Piracy Bust Drew Wilson Latin music rose 15 percent in value according to a report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. This is despite alleged piracy rates. The RIAA claims that the rise in sales was a result of anti-piracy movements. Physical commercial piracy is a concept that has brought the scorn of many internet users. The RIAA would be more then willing to put both file-sharing users and physical pirates in the same boat. However, a recent report states that the RIAA has recently targeted physical pirates in an anti-piracy effort dubbed "Operation Remaster". "Operation Remaster" targets physical pirates. The result was two guilty pleas which was reported earlier this month. It was reported that Ye Teng Wen and Hao He, both 30 years of age, pleaded guilty on five counts of piracy. The two, along with a third man, Yaobin Zhai, 33, were indicted in October. 200,000 pirated Latin music CD's were seized according to Kevin Ryan of the U.S. Attorney for Northern California. Over 500,000 CD's were seized. According to the RIAA, it was the biggest domestic piracy bust ever. While it may be debatable on whether or not three indictments would make any difference in the Latin music marketplace, the RIAA claims that the 14 percent increase in shipments was partially the result of the anti-piracy operation. The other part was because of big hits from Latin artists including Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Wisin & Yandel, and Hector "El Father" along with Latin Pop artists including RBD, Juanes, Alejandro Sanz, Bebe and Shakira. RIAA stated that 55.6 million units shipped in 2005 which is compared to 48.6 million in 2004. The press release states, "The total suggested list price for the industry was $753.7 million. The total wholesale value of the industry was $463.8 million." Additionally, the RIAA claims that Latin music piracy is running rampant. Interestingly, the report states, "Latin music accounts for about 6 percent of the overall U.S. music market, yet nearly 40 percent of all pirate product seized by RIAA investigators." The RIAA controls 80 to 90 percent of the Latin music market. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1156 ![]() EMI Finally Sees Music Sales Increase Eric Bangeman Over the past several years, the music labels have pointed the finger at illicit downloads in response to their declining sales. Nevermind the fact that they hadn't adapted their marketing strategies or business models to account for changing consumer habits and desires. Nevermind the fact that they kept prices on CDs artificially high. It wasn't their fault. Really. For the first time in five years, EMI is reporting an increase in sales from the pervious years. One of the factors in the increase was sales of downloaded music. Revenues from sales via online music stores doubled from the previous year, and now account for over 5.5 percent of the label's sales and £110 million in sales. Having some of the more popular acts as part of its portfolio helps, as EMI is the home of Coldplay, Norah Jones, and The Rolling Stones, among others. However, sales via online music stores are big profit centers for the labels, as they can avoid the costs associated with creating and distributing physical inventory (i.e., CDs) in favor of the much cheaper downloads. That's why they are so anxious to raise prices on more popular tracks, whether they can do so and avoid angering their customers any further is another question. EMI's financials should come as no surprise to those who don't share the labels' myopic views. Earlier this month, we looked closely at the RIAA's claims that they were in dire straits because consumers are buying fewer CDs. What we discovered is exactly what EMI reported: digital downloads are skyrocketing faster than CD revenues are falling, meaning that the industry is poised to reverse years of lackluster performance. There's one caveat. The RIAA and individual labels have shown an amazing ability to shoot themselves in the foot. Witness the Sony-BMG rootkit foulup, price fixing investigations, and lawsuits. That kind of history doesn't do much to inspire confidence, at least not in the Orbiting HQ. The golden goose could easily be killed by another DRM disaster, price hikes, and the labels' usual general slowness to adapt to changing market conditions. If the record labels can avoid those and other missteps, the next ten years will look a lot better than the last ten did. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060421-6646.html ![]() Did EMI and UMG Lie to Antitrust Investigators? Fred von Lohmann Did EMI and Universal Music Group lie to the Department of Justice in order to throw federal investigators off the scent during the antitrust investigation involving the major labels, MusicNet, and pressplay? According to a ruling issued last week, the evidence suggests they did. This is the latest chapter in the Napster case. Yes, that Napster case. Years after the original company went bankrupt and sold their name to the highest bidder, the Napster case continues to drag on. The record labels, you see, are still pressing their case against Hummer Winblad and Bertelsman for investing in Napster years ago. The defendants, however, argue that the RIAA companies forfeited their copyright claims thanks to their coordinated and illegal effort to monopolize digital music distribution through MusicNet and pressplay, the ill-fated joint ventures set up by the major labels back in the days of the Napster revolution. The DoJ launched an antitrust investigation in 2001, but ultimately found no evidence of wrong-doing. But were the antitrust investigators fed misleading information by the labels? Discrepancies have come to light in the Napster case, where the defendants are reviewing all the documents relating to the DoJ investigation. The documents reveal that the major labels included "MFN" (most favored nation) clauses in all of their licenses with MusicNet and pressplay, resulting in a de facto coordination of terms. They also show that the labels used "independent consultants" and "side letters" to share information regarding licensing negotiations and coordinate their positions. During the DoJ investigation, EMI and UMG apparently misled the investigators about these activities. In the words of Judge Patel: "[T]he documents provided by Hummer provide reasonable cause to believe that the statements in the [labels' report to DoJ] were deliberately misleading, if not completely false." The judge has ordered UMG and EMI to hand over previously withheld documents relating to the DoJ investigation, overriding the attorney-client privilege because "the court ... finds reasonable cause to believe that the attorney's services were utilized in furtherance of the ongoing unlawful scheme." The labels have 30 days to comply. Stay tuned. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004584.php ![]() NZB Zone Closes Due to MPAA Legal Action Drew Wilson While it was only untill recently that NZB sites and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) locked horns, NZB sites seemed to be able to keep out of the sites of legal pursuit. Now it appears that NZB sites are becoming no more immune than BitTorrent sites. NZB Zone has shut down allegedly because of MPAA action. Recently, NZB Zone has shut down. A note was left stating, "no details other than what I heard from admin, MPAA involved" It was only earlier this year that NZB sites were under possible legal threat of copyright authorities. While TVNZB has merely changed ownership and despite claims that they'll be open in a week, TVNZB has yet to re-open. According to a press release earlier this year, NZB-Zone.com BinNews.com and DVDRs.net were all named in a list of sites that were under legal pressure from the MPAA. Why only recently NZB-Zone has closed is a question that is thus far unanswered. Details are currently scarce, as Slyck is currently looking into the situation. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1157 ![]() Patent Awarded to RealNetworks May Give It a Competitive Edge John Markoff RealNetworks has received a patent on a way to stream multimedia content over the Internet, and the company said last week that it believed the patent would give it leverage as companies rapidly expand their efforts to turn the Internet into a broadcast medium. RealNetworks competes against Apple, Adobe, Microsoft and other companies in developing and selling software to media businesses that use the Internet to broadcast audio and video. The patent could allow the company to demand royalty payments from those competitors or from media companies. In a telephone interview Friday, Robert Glaser, the founder and chief executive of RealNetworks, said the patent was related to an invention that the company first sought protection for in 1994. Mr. Glaser called it a "foundation" patent, giving RealNetworks a strong position that it would seek to use to help it sell its Helix media server product, which streams video and audio in several formats. Mr. Glaser described what he referred to as a Kafkaesque struggle to persuade the patent office that RealNetworks' "click to stream" invention was a novel one that deserved patent protection. The company, which now has 35 patents in the interactive multimedia field, went back and forth with the patent office for five years before it filed the 1999 patent in its current form. Mr. Glaser, who left Microsoft to found what was first called Progressive Networks in Seattle in 1994, said the company would probably not use the patent against its direct competitors. Many of the companies it competes with use patents as defensive protection, like the needles on porcupines, he noted. "We're an operating company and we're not likely to go after big hairy porcupines," he said, "but we want our intellectual property to be respected." The patent, which is described as being for a "multimedia communications system and method for providing audio on demand to subscribers" (No. 6,985,932), describes the idea of permitting a PC user to play back audio, video and other information on a PC. RealNetworks executives said the technology was distinguished from other similar systems by the fact that it permitted "intelligent" streaming of data in potentially congested networks. "We're hoping that people will say, 'Oh, I get it,' and that this will boost the identity of Helix," Mr. Glaser said. The patent lies at the heart of one of the commercial Internet's most competitive arenas. Thousands of companies are now offering multimedia services over the Internet, from AOL, Yahoo and ABC to newer video storage and distribution services like Google Video and YouTube. The new patent is known as a continuation patent, with additional claims based on an original filing in November 1994. One of the challenges that will confront RealNetworks in enforcing the patent is an earlier one owned by Apple Computer. Apple applied for a patent related to its QuickTime technology for streaming media in May 1994, before RealNetworks' first filing. The Apple patent, No. 5,561,670, for "method and apparatus for operating a multicast system on an unreliable network," was issued in October 1996. It appears the patent office examiners did not consider it in their evaluation of the RealNetworks patent. Several analysts said they believed that the RealNetworks patent, coupled with the company's other patents related to broadcasting multimedia, could be used to help it expand its market share. "The timing is pretty interesting," said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner, a market research firm. "Streaming has always been important in the media world. However, with the creation of a significant number of services, streaming is the hottest thing around." The issue facing RealNetworks will be how to turn this into an opportunity, Mr. Weiner said. "This is less about who they can go after legally, and more about how they can turn their business in a new direction and make themselves attractive to all of these media companies." Several industry veterans said that Mr. Glaser, whose name is listed first on the patent, had been early to happen upon the idea of the Internet as a broadcast medium. "At the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in 1995, he came up to me like a madman and asked me if I wanted to a listen to a baseball game broadcast over the Internet," said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, a consumer electronics consulting firm based in Seaford, N.Y. "I had never heard audio on the Internet." But Mr. Glaser was not the first one to think of the idea. One pioneer who proceeded him was Carl Malamud, an early member of the community of Internet researchers who explored new uses for the technology before it was commercialized. In 1993, Mr. Malamud, who was then a writer and an economist based in Alexandria, Va., began broadcasting a weekly 30-minute radio talk show over the Internet. In an interview last week, Mr. Malamud, who is now a fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, said he thought Mr. Glaser had been an innovator. "Rob, to his credit, did make some innovations," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/te.../24patent.html ![]() Gonzales Calls For Mandatory Web Labeling Law Declan McCullagh Web site operators posting sexually explicit information must place official government warning labels on their pages or risk being imprisoned for up to five years, the Bush administration proposed Thursday. A mandatory rating system will "prevent people from inadvertently stumbling across pornographic images on the Internet," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at an event in Alexandria, Va. The Bush administration's proposal would require commercial Web sites to place "marks and notices" to be devised by the Federal Trade Commission on each sexually explicit page. The definition of sexually explicit broadly covers depictions of everything from sexual intercourse and masturbation to "sadistic abuse" and close-ups of fully clothed genital regions. "I hope that Congress will take up this legislation promptly," said Gonzales, who gave a speech about child exploitation and the Internet to the federally funded National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The proposed law is called the Child Pornography and Obscenity Prevention Amendments of 2006. A second new crime would threaten with imprisonment Web site operators who mislead visitors about sex with deceptive "words or digital images" in their source code--for instance, a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs. A third new crime appears to require that commercial Web sites not post sexually explicit material on their home page if it can be seen "absent any further actions by the viewer." A critic of the proposal said that its requirements amount to an unreasonable imposition on Americans' rights to free expression. In particular, a mandatory rating system backed by criminal penalties is "antithetical to the First Amendment," said Marv Johnson, legislative counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. During his speech, Gonzales also warned that Internet service providers must begin to retain records of their customers' activities to aid in future criminal prosecutions--a position first reported by CNET News.com--and indicated that legislation might be necessary there as well. Internet service providers say they already cooperate with police and appear to be girding for a political battle on Capitol Hill over new regulations they view as intrusive. An idea once proposed by Democrats The Bush administration's embrace of a rating system backed by criminal penalties is uncannily reminiscent of where the Clinton administration and a Democratic member of Congress were a decade ago. In the mid-1990s, the then-nascent Internet industry began backing the Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS. The idea was simple: let Web sites self-rate, or let a third-party service offer ratings, and permit parents to set their browsers to never show certain types of content. Netscape and Microsoft soon agreed to support it in their browsers. At a White House summit in July 1997 hosted by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, the head of the Lycos search engine proposed that only rated pages would be indexed. (Bob Davis, the president of Lycos at the time, said: "I threw a gauntlet to other search engines in today's meeting saying that collectively we should require a rating before we index pages.") Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, suggested that misrating a Web site should be a federal crime. And Australian government officials began talking about making self-rating mandatory. The popularity of the idea of rating eventually faded, though, thanks in no small part to the knotty problem of labeling news sites. News articles can feature sexually explicit content (when reporting on a rape trial or sexual education), and major online publishers decided in August 1997 that they were going to refuse to rate themselves. Because of those and other problems, courts have tended to take a dim view of mandatory rating systems. In a 1968 case called Interstate Circuit v. Dallas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Dallas' ordinance requiring that movies be rated was unconstitutional because the criteria for rating were unclear and vague. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA who has written a book on the First Amendment, said the Bush administration's proposal may be more likely to survive judicial scrutiny. Because the definitions of sexually explicit material have been used elsewhere in federal law, Volokh said, "it has the virtue of relative clarity. I think that's probably constitutional." But David Greene, director of a free-speech advocacy group called The First Amendment Project, thinks it wouldn't survive a court challenge. "I believe the law would be struck down as impermissible compelled speech," Greene said. "The only times courts allow product labeling is with commercial speech--advertisements." For the rating system's definition of sexually explicit material, the Bush administration proposal borrows language from existing federal law. It covers: sexual intercourse of all types; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; or lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person. In practice, courts have interpreted those definitions quite broadly. In one case, U.S. v. Knox, the Supreme Court and an appeals court ruled that the "lascivious exhibition" of the pubic area could include images of clothed people wearing bikini bathing suits, leotards and underwear. That suggests, for instance, that photos of people in leotards and bathing suits would have to be rated as sexually explicit if the commercial Web site owner wanted to avoid going to prison. There is one exception: Sexual depictions that constitute a "small and insignificant part" of a large Web site do not have to be rated. In an unusual twist, Gonzales' remarks this week represent a high-profile reversal of two of the Bush administration's previous positions. First, James Burrus, the FBI's deputy assistant director, told a Senate committee in January that there was no need for new laws to deal with child exploitation on the Internet. Second, the Justice Department has previously expressed (Click for PDF) "serious reservations about broad mandatory data retention regimes" such as the one that Gonzales proposed on Thursday. http://news.com.com/Gonzales+calls+f...3-6063554.html ![]() First-Instance District Court Of Hamburg Says Forum Operators Are Liable For Comments Craig Morris After more than four months, the first-instance district court of Hamburg has handed down its written statement on its widely reported ruling of December 02, 2005 on liability for forums. The statements refers to web forums as an "especially dangerous feature." Those who operate such a source of trouble, the court argued, must be held especially liable. Anzeige The previous legislation held that forum providers were only liable for illegal content that they had knowledge of and were not obligated to actively search for such; now, the judges in Hamburg have overruled that interpretation. Providing Internet forums is, they argued, a type of business operation. Operators therefore have to be able to hire enough staff with legal training to be able to handle such operations. "If the number of forums and comments in them is so great that the opposing party does not have the staff or technical means to review comments before they are published, they either have to expand their in-house resources or [...] reduce the scope of their business operations," the first-instance district court of Hamburg argued. In the case at hand, Universal Boards and its director Mario Dolzer believe that their rights were being violated. Some participants in a forum for a report published at heise online about the business practices of Universal Boards made a script public that was designed to limit the operation of the company's download services. The company's lawyer, Bernhard Syndikus, promptly sent a letter to the publisher demanding that it refrain from "actively disseminating 'reader comments' whose letter or gist incites other users to download files, in particular the program 'k.exe', as often as possible from my client's servers to overload my client's servers." The publisher immediately deleted the offending comments in the forum but refused to sign the formal obligation as it did not believe it had to take action if it did not know about potentially illegal comments. Although no other comments were posted with calls to overload the company's servers after this deletion, Universal Boards nevertheless had the first-instance district court of Hamburg issue a temporary restraining order. The publisher protested against this restraining order, but the court was not to be swayed. The court sees the publisher as the party that is "disturbing the peace" because it allowed inadmissible campaigns to be propagated in its forum. The court held that a publisher would have been able to prevent such incitations by "reviewing the content of the comments before publishing them." The court clearly did not believe Heise Zeitschriften Verlag's argument that constant reviewing of the content of more than 200,000 comments per month would be an unreasonable burden on the publisher. The court did not clearly state its opinion on whether every Web forum could be held liable or only the services of the press. Its statement speaks of "people who operate facilities in which content is disseminated as in the press." The court further stated that this "also applied for companies that disseminate content via the Internet." Heise Zeitschriften Verlag was thus found to be propagating statements in its Web forum "as in the press." Consequently, every Internet forum probably falls under this category because the judges did not make any further distinctions. Even before the written statement on the ruling had been handed down, lawyers had been sending out fines to operators of forums they claimed were breaking the law. Such actions will probably now become common. Heise Zeitschriften Verlag is appealing this ruling. As the publisher's legal adviser Joerg Heidrich put it, "Moderation of user comments would mean the end of the fledgling forum culture in Germany. We believe that this ruling is grossly unfair. If it stands, it will have severe consequences for all forum operators." http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/72085 ![]() Probation Over Web Site AP A man who ran a pornographic Web site that included grisly photographs of war dead taken by U.S. troops was sentenced Friday to five years' probation, his attorney said. Chris Wilson, 28, a former Eagle Lake police officer, pleaded no contest in January to five misdemeanor charges of possession of obscene materials. The state dismissed 296 other similar charges. Wilson's Web site gave soldiers free access to pornography in exchange for posting pictures from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Polk County sheriff's officials said Wilson's arrest in October stemmed from the site's sexually explicit content, not the pictures of war dead. "He agreed to stay out of the adult Web site business for the term of his probation," defense attorney Larry Walters said. Though the Web site launched a Pentagon investigation into how war zone photos of charred and dismembered bodies described as victims of U.S. attacks could have surfaced, military investigators did not pursue criminal charges against Wilson http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT ![]() New Law Requires Some Businesses To Secure Their WiFi Networks Eric Bangeman One New York county has solved the "problem" of unauthorized access to unsecured wireless networks by passing a new law. Businesses operating in Westchester County will soon need to turn on security settings for their WiFi networks if they are used to access financial information for their customers. Calling it the first law of its kind, Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano said the new law would cut down on identity theft while allowing businesses to avoid the "public relations disasters" that accompany data breaches. He's right about the second part, anyway. When CardSystems was hacked after deciding to contravene its agreement with Visa and keep names and credit card numbers used in transactions it processed, the result was an avalanche of bad press along with a lot of lost business. According to the county's CIO, county officials found that almost half of the 248 WiFi networks discovered during a 20-minute wardriving session were wide open. That led to the new mandatory security measures for certain businesses, along with a requirement that businesses operating open WiFi networks to post signs to warn their customers about the perils of surfing unprotected networks. "For your own protection and privacy, you are advised to install a firewall or other computer security measure when accessing the Internet." Unauthorized access of WiFi networks—especially wide-open ones—have been making news lately. Last month, an Illinois man was fined US$250 for using a business' unprotected wireless access point to surf the Internet from his car. That followed last year's indictment of a Florida resident for felony unauthorized access to a computer network for using an open WAP. I have mixed feelings about the law. It's always good to remind people to be careful when they're using the Internet. Many of us here at Ars as well as a sizable portion of you readers are often called upon to do tech support for family and friends. How many times have you had to perform a malware exorcism because of a user's carelessness? On the other hand, identity thefts from businesses via open wireless networks aren't exactly common. In fact, it's highly debatable whether the law will have any discernible effect on identity theft at all. Yes, packet data sent over an unsecured WiFi network can be read by anyone with the know-how. In fact, some commonly used 802.11b/g security settings aren't all that secure, period. Having said that, if someone wants to get ahold of your personal data, there are other, simpler ways of doing so. Securing your wireless network is a trivial matter, given the ease with which most WAP can be configured. Check out our Wireless Security Blackpaper if you need a refresher. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060421-6647.html ![]() C.I.A. Employee Fired for Alleged Leak AP The CIA has fired an employee for leaking classified information to the news media, an agency official said Friday. A federal criminal investigation has also been opened. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said an officer had been fired for having unauthorized contacts with the media and disclosing classified information to reporters, including details about intelligence operations. ''The officer has acknowledged unauthorized discussions with the media and the unauthorized sharing of classified information,'' Gimigliano said. ''That is a violation of the secrecy agreement that everyone signs as a condition of employment with the CIA.'' Citing the Privacy Act, the CIA would not provide any details about the officer's identity or assignments. It was not immediately clear if the person would face prosecution. Justice Department officials declined to comment on the firing and whether the matter had been referred to federal prosecutors for possible criminal charges. One law enforcement official said there were dozens of leak investigations under way. A second law enforcement official confirmed there was a criminal investigation under way and said the CIA officer had provided information that contributed to a Washington Post story last year saying there were secret U.S. prisons in Eastern Europe. Both of those officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The Washington Post report caused an international uproar, and government officials have said it did significant damage to relationships between the U.S. and allied intelligence agencies. CIA Director Porter Goss has pressed for aggressive investigations. In his latest appearance before Congress, Goss condemned the unauthorized disclosure of information. ''The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission,'' Goss said in February, adding that a federal grand jury should be impaneled to determine ''who is leaking this information.'' ------ Associated Press Writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...n er=homepage ![]() Spymaster Tells Secret of Size of Spy Force Mark Mazzetti John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, said Thursday that the United States' global spying apparatus now numbered nearly 100,000 people assigned to stealing secrets and analyzing information to help protect national security. The total number of personnel who report to the 16 disparate intelligence agencies and departments has until now remained secret, an effort by the government to mask the size of its spying operations. Mr. Negroponte disclosed the figure at a lunchtime speech here, calling those who serve in the intelligence field "patriotic, talented and hard-working Americans." The disclosure came just months after another American intelligence official divulged, apparently by accident, another closely guarded secret: that the budget for American intelligence agencies last year totaled $44 billion. That disclosure was made by Mary Margaret Graham, a top deputy to Mr. Negroponte who served previously as a senior official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Negroponte's office was created a year ago to overhaul American intelligence operations after multiple intelligence failures, including the faulty reports about Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which the intelligence chief referred to Thursday as the "W.M.D. fiasco." Defending his office against critics, some of them senior lawmakers, Mr. Negroponte said the intelligence reforms had not been an "exercise in bureaucratic bloat" but an effort to create an intelligence culture that "closes the breach in our defenses" that were revealed by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Negroponte was asked after his speech whether the new intelligence structure had brought the government any closer to catching Osama bin Laden. He said that while he wished the United States had already found Mr. bin Laden, the government had made great progress in capturing or killing several other members of the high command of Al Qaeda. "I think we've dealt them a number of body blows," he said, "but we haven't yet dealt a knockout blow to Mr. bin Laden himself." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/wa...n/21intel.html ![]() No Proof of Secret C.I.A. Prisons, European Antiterror Chief Says Dan Bilefsky The European Union's antiterrorism chief told a hearing on Thursday that he had not been able to prove that secret C.I.A. prisons existed in Europe. "We've heard all kinds of allegations," the official, Gijs de Vries, said before a committee of the European Parliament. "It does not appear to be proven beyond reasonable doubt." But Mr. de Vries came under criticism from some legislators who called the hearing a whitewash. Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch member of Parliament from the Green Party, said that even without definitive proof, "the circumstantial evidence is stunning." "I'm appalled that we keep calling to uphold human rights while pretending that these rendition centers don't exist and doing nothing about it," she said. Many European nations were outraged after an article in The Washington Post in November cited unidentified intelligence officials as saying that the C.I.A. had maintained detention centers for terrorism suspects in eight countries, including some in Eastern Europe. A later report by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch cited Poland and Romania as two of the countries. Both countries, as well as others in Europe, have denied the allegations. But the issue has inflamed trans-Atlantic tensions. Mr. de Vries said the European Parliament investigation had not uncovered rights abuses despite more than 50 hours of testimony by rights advocates and people who say they were abducted by C.I.A. agents. A similar investigation by the Council of Europe, the European human rights agency, came to the same conclusion in January — though the leader of that inquiry, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, said then that there were enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation. A number of legislators on Thursday challenged Mr. de Vries for not taking seriously earlier testimony before the committee of a German and a Canadian who gave accounts of being kidnapped and kept imprisoned by foreign agents. The committee also heard Thursday from a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who said: "I can attest to the willingness of the U.S. and the U.K. to obtain intelligence that was got under torture in Uzbekistan. If they were not willing, then rendition prisons could not have existed." But Mr. Murray, who was recalled from his job in 2004 after condemning the Uzbek authorities and criticizing the British and American governments, told the committee that he had no proof that detention centers existed within Europe. He said he had witnessed such rendition programs in Uzbekistan, but he seemed to back up Mr. de Vries's assertion when he said he was not aware of anyone being taken to Uzbekistan from Europe. "As far as I know, that never happened," he said. While he was ambassador, Mr. Murray made many public statements condemning the government of President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan for its poor human rights record. At the time, the Bush administration was using Uzbekistan as a base for military operations in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Murray, who has remained an outspoken critic of American and British policy toward Uzbekistan, has since been criticized by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain for breaching diplomatic protocol. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/wo...rendition.html ![]() China's President Ends U.S. Visit With Yale Speech John O'Neil President Hu Jintao concluded his first trip to the United States with a speech today at Yale University aimed at reassuring Americans about his country's rise. But he made clear that China would remain "focused wholeheartedly" on economic growth and would move only "prudently" to expand political rights. Mr. Hu also appeared to take up Mr. Bush's call in their White House meeting for China to become a "stakeholder" — a word meant to convey that it must use its new power for more than economic gain. "We must not only become stakeholders," Mr. Hu said. "We must become partners in constructive cooperation." Mr. Hu said China's need for rapid growth was the best reason for it to promote peace. "We need to concentrate our energy and resources on resolving those problems, and that's why we hope to see a peaceful international environment," he said. "China's development will not compromise the interests of other nations nor will China's development threaten anyone," he said. Speaking before an invited audience of about 600 students, faculty and administrators — a sizable portion of whom seemed to understand Mr. Hu's jokes before they were translated — Mr. Hu stressed repeatedly that China remained a poor country despite its rapid economic progress. "Although China has become, comparatively speaking, stronger, it has a population of 1.3 billion," Mr. Hu said, after quoting figures on the rise in gross domestic product. "Any figure divided by 1.3 billion will necessarily become a smaller one." He noted that on a per-capita basis China does not rank among the 100 richest nations, and said that its official development plan called for it to become "moderately prosperous" by 2020. A portion of his speech was devoted to a history lesson that traced China's troubles from the time of the Opium War, when European countries gained ascendancy. China's growing trade imbalance and soaring use of oil have both been points of tension with the United States. But while Mr. Hu promised Mr. Bush that he would try to stimulate more consumer demand at home, he has also rebuffed calls for changes in China's currency that Washington has sought as a way of curbing its export growth. The demonstrators whose presence has irked Chinese officials at every stop of his trip were out in force on the streets of New Haven today, but were offset to some extent by supporters of the Chinese government who arrived on buses from New York. A truck cruised around the perimeter of campus with a giant poster bearing a photo of Mr. Bush shaking hands with Mr. Hu. The New Haven police estimated the size of the crowd at one of several protest sites as more than 1,000. Several streets running through the downtown campus were closed to traffic, and police officers in riot gear guarded campus entrances. The chants of demonstrators could be heard outside Sprague Memorial Hall, the site of the speech, but apparently not inside. At a private gift exchange ceremony in Mr. Levin's office, a CNN producer was thrown out by school officials after asking Mr. Hu whether he had seen the demonstrators gathered just one block away, said Helaine Klasky, a Yale spokeswoman. The producer, who officials declined to identify, was part of a pool of journalists at the ceremony, which Ms. Klasky said was a photo opportunity, not a news conference. "One journalist broke all ground rules, behaved in rude and disorderly conduct and was escorted out of the private meeting," Ms. Klasky said. The New Haven police reported one arrest in connection with Mr. Hu's visit. Jianyin Peng, 41, of New York, was arrested on a charge of assaulting a peace officer after throwing a water bottle. He was released after promising to appear in court. In a brief question-and-answer session after his speech, Mr. Hu was asked about restrictions on political freedom. The written questions from the audience were read by Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico and now the director of Yale's Center for the Study of Globalization. "I believe that the development of the political infrastructure must be compatible with the economic foundation," Mr. Hu said, adding that he did not think it was fair to say there had been no political progress since modernization began in 1978. During his speech, Mr. Hu repeatedly mentioned the traditional cultural emphasis on social harmony, and described China as pursuing a path of "scientific development" that "put people first." Demonstrators with the Falun Gong spiritual sect began protesting at 6 a.m. just outside Yale's Old Campus quadrangle, reciting the Nine Commentaries over loud speakers. Pro-government demonstrators responded by blaring the Chinese national anthem, to the dismay of Yale freshmen sleeping in nearby dormitories. Waving Chinese and American flags and holding banners written in Chinese and English, the demonstrators assailed Mr. Hu's record on human rights and called for the Chinese government to end prosecution of Falun Gong practitioners. "As a righteous person, he should do something about the atrocity in China," said Min Deng, 33, a postdoctoral student in biology and president of Yale's Falun Gong club. "There are innocent people who are dying for their beliefs and this shouldn't happen in a modern society." On Thursday, Falun Gong organizers presented the office of Yale's President, Richard C. Levin, with a petition signed by 2,517 people calling on Mr. Levin to raise the issue of human rights in his meeting with Mr. Hu. Jane Zhizhen Dai, a 43-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, said she had come to the edge of Yale's campus with her 6-year-old daughter to protest Mr. Hu's visit. Ms. Dai said her husband was killed in 2001 after writing a letter calling on the Chinese government to stop killing Falun Gong practitioners. "I want to speak out for all the orphans because their voices cannot be heard," Ms. Dai said, as her eyes teared up. Some supporters of Mr. Hu's government came on buses this morning from New York to support the president. "This government is good now," said Fong Wa, 42, a native of Hong Kong who lives in New York. "Maybe 10 or 20 years before it was different from now." Mr. Hu's visit to Yale marks only the second time a Chinese president has addressed an American university. The first was in 1997 when Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin, spoke at Harvard University. Mr. Hu is speaking at President Bush's alma mater, and when Mr. Bush traveled to China earlier this year he spoke at Mr. Hu's alma mater, Tsinghua University. Today, the Chinese represent the largest group of foreign students at Yale, accounting for more than 300 of Yale's 11,000 students. More than 300 undergraduates are taking Chinese language courses, with many more participating in Yale's 80 academic collaborations and exchanges with Chinese universities. In a lift for managers of Yale's $15 billion endowment, the Chinese government this week authorized the university to trade domestic stocks and bonds, making Yale the first foreign university granted access to China's closely restricted securities market. Students filing out of Sprague Hall after the speech said they were impressed by Mr. Hu, but not surprised by his message. Minhua Ling, 25, a doctoral student in anthropology from Shanghai, said she thought Mr. Hu was more direct today than he had been at the White House. "The message was very clear: China will do its own democracy in a very Chinese kind of way," Ms. Ling said. Philip Rucker contributed reporting for this article from New Haven. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/ny...ner =homepage ![]() 'United 93' Actor Says Entry to US Denied An Iraqi actor who plays a hijacker in a new film about the September 11 attacks on the United States has been denied entry into the country for the movie's premiere, he told a newspaper on Friday. in Britain since 1995, stars in "United 93," which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York next week. Directed by Briton Paul Greengrass, the film about the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania has sparked debate about whether Americans are ready to see an on-screen portrayal of the events. Alsamari, 30, said he may have been denied entry by the U.S. embassy in London because he served in the Iraqi army in the early 1990s. "I think this was because I am still an Iraqi citizen and fought in the army -- but that was only because I was forced to," he told London's Evening Standard newspaper. "It would be so disappointing not to be able to go because I still have not seen the film. I have only seen footage and it would have been amazing to be in New York for the premiere." A spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in London said she was aware of the case, but did not have any immediate comment on the status of Alsamari's application to travel to New York. Alsamari added: "I hope I am not going to have to wait until the film comes out in Britain to watch United 93. It seems strange that I cannot go over for the premiere." He said he escaped from the Iraqi army in 1993 and stayed in neighboring Jordan until 1995, when he moved to Britain seeking asylum. According to the Standard, he was granted asylum in Britain in 1998. In February, actors starring in Michael Winterbottom's politically charged "The Road to Guantanamo" were held by British police under anti-terrorism legislation on their return from Berlin where the film premiered. One of them said a police officer abused him verbally at Luton airport. http://news.aol.com/entertainment/mo...21075609990001 ![]() TSA: Computer Glitch Led To Atlanta Airport Scare A bomb scare that led authorities to evacuate security checkpoints at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Wednesday was the result of a "software malfunction," Transportation Security Administration Director Kip Hawley said. While screening carry-on luggage, a TSA employee identified the image of a suspicious device but did not realize it was part of routine testing for security screeners because the software failed to indicate such a test was under way, Hawley said. Authorities evacuated the security area for two hours while searching for the suspicious device, causing flight delays and forcing travelers who could not get through to the terminals to wait outside the airport. (Watch what happens when the world's busiest passenger airport shuts down -- 2:30) Willie Williams, the airport's federal security director, said the screener saw something suspicious and notified a supervisor. The two manually rechecked all the bags on the conveyor belt but could not find anything resembling what was seen on the screen, Williams said. The information was passed on to the security director, who made the decision to ground flights and call in the Atlanta Police Department's bomb squad. Hawley said TSA screeners are given tests around the clock to check their alertness. Images of bombs and other suspicious devices that are hard to detect are put up on the X-ray machine, followed after a brief delay by an alert that reads, "This is a test." After reviewing a tape of the images, Hawley said the software failed to alert the screener of the test. Hawley said all procedures were followed correctly. The Atlanta facility was the nation's busiest passenger airport in 2005. The airport's general manager, Ben DeCosta, said he was not satisfied with the way passengers were notified of the incident. CNN's Rusty Dornin, Jeanne Meserve and Deanna Proeller contributed to this report. http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/04/20/atl...ort/index.html ![]() Disney and CBS Explore Univision Deal Andrew Ross Sorkin Several big media companies, including the Walt Disney Company and CBS, have held meetings with Univision's management over the last week about making a takeover offer for the company, people involved in the talks said yesterday. Univision, the largest Spanish-language television and radio company in the nation, put itself up for auction in February. The latest negotiations appear to demonstrate that there may be more interest in Univision than some rivals have so far let on. Just yesterday, the chief executive of CBS, Leslie Moonves, told investors on an earnings conference call that "we're not looking for an acquisition of that size." Disney, which had not been identified before as showing an interest in acquiring Univision, has been spending considerable time with Univision's management poring over the company's books in recent days, these people said. Of course, these people cautioned, it remains possible that both companies could decide against making a final bid. Exact terms of preliminary bids could not be learned, but Univision has long suggested internally that it is not willing to sell itself for less than $40 a share, or about $14 billion. Shares of Univision closed yesterday at $34.84, up 16 cents. The negotiations with Disney and CBS come as Grupo Televisa, Mexico's biggest media company, which provides much of Univision's most popular programming, is planning to join the auction formally in the next week with its own investor consortium, these people said. Last month, The New York Times reported that Grupo Televisa had joined with Providence Equity Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners, the Cisneros Group of Venezuela and the media entrepreneur Haim Saban. People close to the group said the Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company are expected to join the consortium, though they said a final decision had not been made and it was possible the composition of the group could change again. Another bidding group, which includes the Texas Pacific Group, Thomas H. Lee Partners and Goldman Sachs's private equity arm is also pursuing an offer, these people said. The Blackstone Group, which had been talking about being a partner with Kohlberg Kravis, could end up joining any one of the groups or might possibly team up with CBS, these people said. Time Warner, which expressed interested in Univision early on, seems to have cooled to the idea of joining the auction, these people said. And EchoStar Communications, which unexpectedly expressed interest in Univision early in the process, no longer appears to be pursuing the auction seriously, these people added. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/bu...ia/27deal.html ![]() Television Stations Are Urged to Break a Few Rules Stuart Ellott THE expression "think outside the box" has been overused enough to become jargon. But for a few hours yesterday it was appropriate, as local television stations were urged to diversify beyond their boxes, i.e., TV sets, to remain relevant — and profitable — in the new digital age. "Conventional wisdom, it's an enemy at a time like this," said Beth Comstock, president for digital media and market development at NBC Universal, part of General Electric. "In media today, I don't think there is a single rule that can't — and frankly, probably shouldn't — be broken. "This isn't just about driving growth," she added. "It's about staying in business." Her call to action came at the annual marketing conference sponsored by the Television Bureau of Advertising, an organization that promotes broadcast TV as a medium. For the fifth year in a row, the conference was held during the New York International Auto Show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, reflecting the status of automakers atop the list of America's largest marketers. For the first time, the conference was devoted to a single topic: the importance of the "multiplatform" — that is, offering content and advertising not only on local broadcast stations but also online, on cellphones and other wireless devices, through video on demand and on video iPods. The sole topic was intended to underscore that "advertisers and their agencies are increasingly asking for — make that demanding — a multiplatform strategy from all their media partners," said Christopher Rohrs, president of the bureau, in a speech he gave to almost 1,200 attendees to begin the conference. To address that, Mr. Rohrs said, the bureau has selected a dozen members to serve on a committee devoted to multiple-media platforms, which plans to hold its first meeting today. The committee members include executives from ABC, CBS, Gannett Broadcasting, Meredith Broadcasting, NBC, the New York Times Company Broadcast Media Group and Pappas Telecasting. There are two principal reasons that TV stations are seeking to broaden their horizons. One is "consumers will increasingly choose what they want to see, when they want to see it, on whatever device they want to see it," said Alan Frank, president and chief executive at the Post-Newsweek Stations division of the Washington Post Company. The other reason was offered by David Rehr, president and chief executive at the National Association of Broadcasters: "Every new stream of programming is potentially a new source of revenue. Most distribution channels will create more value for our content." Those prospects were the subject of a panel discussion led by Gordon Borrell, president and chief executive at Borrell Associates, a consulting company specializing in the local online advertising market. Mr. Borrell discussed a new report from his company showing that local television stations more than doubled their Internet ad revenue last year compared with 2004, to $283 million from $119 million. And, he predicted, the figure would climb to $410 million by the end of 2006. But ad revenue last year for Web sites operated by local newspapers totaled $2 billion, according to the report, or more than nine times what the Web sites of the local TV stations took in. Local television "has the power to significantly drive traffic to the Internet" by cross-promoting with the contents of station broadcasts, Mr. Borrell said, "yet it hasn't in many cases." "You have a tremendous opportunity in front of you," he added. "All media are in flux, and flux is a great time to institute change." As an example, Mr. Borrell cited the Web site operated by WRAL-TV, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., that is owned by the Capitol Broadcasting Company. The ad revenue for the site (www.wral.com) exceeds the ad revenue for www.newsobserver.com, the Web site operated by the leading local newspaper, The News and Observer, published by the McClatchy Company. When it comes to capitalizing on additional methods of delivering content and ads, Mr. Borrell said, "we are where television was in the late 1950's." That outlook was echoed by the announcement yesterday of the final figures for Internet ad revenue last year, released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The results set a record at $12.5 billion, up 30.2 percent from $9.6 billion in 2004. "We must be like Google, in a constant beta state," said Christine M. Di Stadio, senior vice president for marketing and new media at the New York Times Broadcast Media Group. Her reference was to the myriad test products and services offered on the Google Web site. Local stations ought to offer opportunities for social networking on their Web sites, Ms. Di Stadio suggested, to compete with popular services like MySpace; streaming video, to compete with Web sites like YouTube; and mobile marketing. As an example, Ms. Di Stadio described a "mobile physician finder" she is developing, listing doctors and their telephone numbers. Cellphone users will be able to "click on the phone number and dial, using click-to-call technology," she said. "Guys, we needed all these screens to come along to make us exciting and vibrant again," Ms. Di Stadio said, laughing. Brian Wheelis, vice president and group media director on the giant AT&T account at GSD&M in Austin, Tex., part of the Omnicom Group, cautioned the attendees against worrying that they will be competing against themselves. "If you think about the Web as cannibalizing, you've already given up and you're not ready for it," Mr. Wheelis said. He praised the Web site of KXAN, the NBC affiliate in Austin, owned by LIN TV, which offers blogs, podcasts, streaming video and other new media at www.kxan.com. Another member of Mr. Borrell's panel, David Buonfiglio, advised local TV stations to take part in the nascent trend known as user-generated or consumer-created content, which is meant to build emotional connections between customers and brands. Mr. Buonfiglio, vice president for local sales at Internet Broadcasting Systems, cited a contest sponsored by the Web site of WPTZ, an NBC affiliate owned by Hearst-Argyle Television that broadcasts to Burlington, Vt., and Plattsburgh, N.Y. The contest on the site (www.thechamplainchannel.com) "invited viewers to write the next commercial" for a local car dealer, Mr. Buonfiglio said, and drew twice as many entries as had been forecast. Mr. Buonfiglio also offered some advice in a humorous vein. "You really should go out and tell agencies what you can do," he said. "Get a capabilities presentation. If you don't have capabilities, get some of them first." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/bu...ia/21adco.html ![]() Microsoft Loses in Patent Suit Matt Slagle A federal jury in East Texas returned a $133 million verdict against Microsoft Corp. and Autodesk Inc. for infringing on two software patents owned by a Michigan technology company. The lawsuit, filed in 2004 by z4 Technologies of Commerce Township, Mich., claimed Microsoft and Autodesk used two z4 patents in their Office and AutoCad software programs without paying royalty fees. After deliberating for 19 consecutive hours, jurors agreed Wednesday, ordering Microsoft to pay $115 million and San Rafael, Calif.-based Autodesk $18 million. The patents were created and owned by David Colvin, owner of privately held z4. U.S. patent 6,044,471 refers to a method and apparatus for securing software to reduce unauthorized use, while patent 6,785,825 involves a method for securing software to decrease software piracy. Autodesk and Microsoft had argued during the six-day trial in federal district court in Tyler that the patents were invalid. But the jury said Autodesk and Microsoft were never able to clearly show that was the case. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company was disappointed in the jury's decision, which could be appealed. Separately, Microsoft is appealing a $521 million judgment in a case involving patents owned by Eolas Technologies Inc. and the University of California. "We continue to contend that there was no infringement of any kind and that the facts in this case show that Microsoft developed its own product activation technologies well before z4 Technologies filed for its patent," Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans wrote in an e-mail. Evans said Microsoft believes z4 knowingly withheld information from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when the patents were submitted and is waiting for the court to rule on the issue. Ernie Brooks, lead attorney for z4, declined to comment on the verdict. Telephone messages left with an Autodesk spokeswoman weren't immediately returned. Jurors began deliberating about 5:15 p.m. Tuesday and continued through the night before returning a verdict at 12:15 p.m. Wednesday. Companies often file patent cases in federal courts in East Texas because they are known for handling patent cases quickly. Last week, a federal jury in nearby Marshall, Texas, awarded TiVo Inc. nearly $74 million after deciding that EchoStar Communication Corp. had copied key technologies from the digital video recording pioneer. Shares of Microsoft fell 19 cents to $27.03 and Autodesk stock dropped 31 cents to 43.31 in the close of trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT ![]() WSJ: eBay Looking For Allies Against Google Anders Bylund A report in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) today talks about how eBay is looking for partners to defend against the growing threat of Google. Specifically, Google Base and the payment system in the works in Mountain View are seen as possible dangers to eBay's auctions and PayPal payment operations, says the report. Google Talk just throws some salt in the wounds by looking for a toehold in Skype's turf. "After years of working closely with the search giant, eBay last year became alarmed as Google started assaulting its turf in multiple ways," the report said. The multitude of ways to infringe on eBay's core business makes Google look dangerous. With an ally like Yahoo! or Microsoft, eBay hopes to stave off the threat and prevent Google from making any significant inroads to the auction and private payment markets. eBay may be doing the right thing if it hitches its wagon to someone other than big G, though it remains to be seen how much damage Google could inflict on Meg Whitman's crew. eBay has an impressive lead in mindshare and expertise when it comes to selling people's old trinkets online. Whether it's Yahoo! or MSN, the WSJ reports that advertising through the chosen partner could be boosted significantly, and in return for favorable advertising rates, eBay could provide access to consumer data collected over the years. But it won't be easy to make a major change. The two companies have come to rely on each other rather heavily: The auction giant gets about half of its traffic from some form of online advertising, making it very dependent on Google. "If eBay reduced its spending on Google, revenue at eBay would take a hit," says Jim Friedland, an analyst with Cowen & Co. "If eBay stopped spending on Google, the revenue decline would be dramatic and it would be disastrous for the stock. For better or for worse, eBay needs to continue to spend and grow its relationship with Google." On the other hand, the eBay revenue is very significant to Google as well. "Most" of eBay's annual US$400 million marketing budget goes to Google, and shareholders would surely notice the loss of that large a sum. So the two giants are locked into a dance neither one necessarily wants to dance; eBay needs Google to drive traffic, and Google needs eBay dollars. Even if eBay does form a partnership of some kind with another big online player, the advertising cash will continue to flow to the online advertising market leader. Google hasn't trumpeted a desire to muscle eBay out of business or anything like that, but online auctions represent yet another method for Google to extract a few pennies from us consumers. Give Google a finger and it might rip you to pieces and mulch its petunias with your remains. If anybody still thinks of Google as a mere search engine, that impression isn't likely to last much longer: Industry observers have also noted that Google, which has a cash pile of $10 billion, has recently begun to act as a venture capital firm, investing in a string of projects and placing bets in a number of areas. Julie Meyer, chief executive of technology VC firm Ariadne Capital, said: "Google is undertaking the biggest landgrab the world has ever seen. We are seeing it exercise its market power, its cash and its brand. It probably would take a coalition of major players, a kind of super-union, to stop it and I would not be surprised at all to learn of a whole host of discussions behind the scenes." Such is the power of a strong brand name backed by a lot of cash. There's really no reason why Microsoft couldn't do what Google is doing, apart from a couple of decades of bureaucratization and a brand people think of as ruthless and old school rather than progressive and "not evil." Somebody will eventually mount a serious effort to challenge the power of Google, and a confederation of Google's peers would probably stand a better chance than one company going it alone. Why not eBay; why not now? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060421-6649.html ![]() Google Posts 60% Gain in Earnings Saul Hansell Google returned to favor among investors yesterday as its profit for the first quarter increased 60 percent, well above expectations. Three months ago, the company disappointed investors, even though its profit grew 82 percent, and its stock sagged. This time, Google's ascent was enough to satisfy. "Investors, surprisingly, acted rationally this quarter and had low expectations," said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Company. Google's stock rose about 8 percent in after-hours trading after the announcement, recouping its losses since the last earnings report. Pointing to particulars behind its successful quarter, the company said its share of the search market continued to grow around the world, as did the money it earned from advertising for each search result displayed. Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said the market share increase might be related to the use of some of the company's new products, like Google Video, Google Earth and Google Maps, as well as the introduction of Google News in several countries. These services attract people to Google's site, where they may also conduct searches, he said in an interview. "All of a sudden Google is top of mind again, over and over again." Google continued to make substantial capital investments, mainly in computer servers, networking equipment and space for its data centers. It spent $345 million on these items in the first quarter, more than double the level of last year. Yahoo, its closest rival, spent $142 million on capital expenses in the first quarter. Google has an enormous volume of Web site information, video and e-mail on its servers, Mr. Schmidt said. "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis." Jordan Rohan, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, called Google's capital spending "unfathomably high," noting that it spent the same percentage of its revenue on equipment as a company in the telephone business, an industry traditionally seen as far more capital-intensive than the Internet. He said investors would tolerate this high spending level as long as Google's results continued to be so strong. "If Google's market share continues to increase, and its position as the central hub of the Internet is reinforced, an extra $1 billion is a worthwhile investment," Mr. Rohan said. "The day market share peaks, we have a problem." Investors saw little problem in the latest numbers. Google earned $592 million in the first quarter, compared with $369 million in the year-earlier period. Excluding charges for stock-based compensation and payments to the plaintiffs' lawyers in the settlement of a class-action lawsuit, earnings were $2.29 a share, well ahead of the $1.97 that analysts had anticipated. Gross revenue was $2.25 billion, up 79 percent. Analysts prefer to look at Google's revenue after deducting the payments it makes to services like America Online, which display its advertisements and keep most of the money from them. Using this measure, Google's revenue was $1.53 billion, compared with the $1.44 billion that analysts had estimated. The company's stock, which ended regular trading at $415, up $4.50, rose after hours to $448.31 It reached a high of $475.11 in January and was at $432.66 before its last earnings report, then fell back as far as $337.06 in March. Google saw faster growth on the Web sites it owns, which are far more profitable because it does not have to share advertising money. Google's sites posted revenue of $1.3 billion, up 97 percent. Revenue from partner sites was $928 million, up 59 percent. Google kept 22 percent of the revenue for ads shown on partner sites, compared with 21 percent a year ago. Revenue is growing faster overseas. Revenue from outside the United States was 42 percent of total revenue, compared with 39 percent a year ago. The company said that it noted particular growth in Britain, France and elsewhere in Northern Europe. Mr. Rohan said that in the first quarter, Google's search revenue in the United States grew 10 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005, about the same growth as Yahoo. Google has long grown substantially faster than Yahoo, and it is still increasing its share of user searches, he said. That means Yahoo is starting to catch up on technology to generate more advertising revenue for each search, he said. Google added $825 million to its cash hoard, giving it $8.4 billion in cash at the end of the quarter. In April, it raised another $2.1 billion by selling shares to the public and spent $1 billion to buy 5 percent of AOL. The company also continued to hire at a breakneck pace. It added 1,110 workers in the quarter for a total of 6,790 full-time employees. In a conference call with investors, Mr. Schmidt highlighted several areas for future growth. One was advertising from local businesses on the company's main search service, as well on its local search and maps products. The delivery of such advertising is based on an inference of the user's location from the search query or Internet protocol address. "Locally targeted ads are an increasingly meaningful contributor to revenue, and much more is coming," Mr. Schmidt told the investors. Mr. Rashtchy, the Piper Jaffray analyst, estimated that 10 percent of Google's advertising was local. Mr. Schmidt also said the company saw great opportunity in developing services for mobile phones. It has developed a system called a transcoder that will reformat Web pages for display on the small screens of cellphones. The company has started delivering advertising on its mobile service in Japan and it is negotiating with wireless carriers to put advertising on its services in other countries as well, Mr. Schmidt said in an interview. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/te.../21google.html ![]() Intel Posts Sharp Fall in Profit Laurie J. Flynn Intel, accustomed to riding high, is getting more practice in delivering bad news. Intel, the world's largest chip maker, reported a 38 percent decline in quarterly profit Wednesday in the face of stiff competition from Advanced Micro Devices and a general slowdown in the personal computer market that caused inventories to swell. The downturn included a decline in revenue for the first quarter and lower-than-expected revenue forecasts for the current quarter and full year. But investors' expectations seem to have been so diminished that Intel's stock price, driven down more than 20 percent since the start of the year, actually rose after the announcement, to $19.77, up from $19.56 at the end of regular trading. Apjit Walia, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, called the quarter "a disaster," though certainly not a surprise. The slowdown in PC growth rates and the resulting inventory problems have analysts concerned that the road to recovery could be bumpier than Intel is predicting. Paul S. Otellini, Intel president and chief executive, acknowledged in a conference call with analysts that PC growth had "moderated somewhat" from the double-digit rates of recent years. Intel executives, however, insisted the company would work down its inventory by the end of the second quarter. "The first half of 2006 has been a time to reset our business," Mr. Otellini said. He added that he expected Intel to return to "normal seasonal patterns" in the second half of the year. In lowering its revenue forecast for the full year, Intel said it now expected revenue to decline 3 percent from last year's revenue of $38.8 billion, rather than increase 6 percent to 9 percent, as the company had said in January. It said revenue for the second quarter would be $8 billion to $8.6 billion, below Wall Street's forecast of $8.85 billion. To help address the problem, Mr. Otellini said Intel was cutting its costs by more than $1 billion for the year, while maintaining its current product plans. In the third quarter, Intel is expected to roll out a new chip design, the "core microarchitecture," which the company hopes will help it gain back market share. Intel has lost some ground as Advanced Micro ramped up its new dual-processor server line faster than Intel, giving it an early-lead advantage. But perhaps just as significant for investors is that Intel's gross profit margin has shrunk to 55.1 percent, substantially below the 59 percent the company forecast in January. Intel executives said margins were hurt by lower microprocessor revenue and higher inventory write-downs. Andy D. Bryant, Intel's chief financial officer, defended the company's performance against Advanced Micro during the quarter, asserting that Intel did not lose any additional market share after conceding last month that it had experienced a "slight" loss in the fourth quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2005, Intel's share of the overall microprocessor market was 76.9 percent, compared with 82.2 percent a year earlier, while Advanced Micro rose to 21.4 percent, from 16.6 percent, according to Mercury Research. Intel's net income declined 38 percent during the first quarter, which ended April 1, to $1.35 billion, or 23 cents a share, compared with $2.18 billion, or 35 cents a share, a year earlier. Without a change in accounting to reflect stock options, Intel said the first-quarter earnings would have been 27 cents a share. First-quarter revenue fell 5.2 percent, to $8.94 billion, roughly the midpoint of the revised guidance the company issued in March. Analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call had forecast earnings of 23 cents a share on revenue of $8.91 billion. In March, the company lowered its revenue forecast to a range of $8.7 billion to $9.1 billion, down from a previous estimate of $9.1 billion to $9.7 billion, citing a "slight" loss of market share and weaker sales of microprocessors. Mr. Walia, the RBC analyst, said he wished that Intel would be more realistic in its assessment of how long its turnaround was going to take, adding that the worst might not yet be over. "For all the things Intel needs to work out, you've got to have a perfect scenario," he said. "They're being hit from all sides." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/business/20chip.html ![]() Apple Reports Sharp Climb in Both Sales and Earnings Steve Lohr The ascent of Apple Computer continued in the most recent quarter with the company reporting a sharp increase in sales and profit. In a conference call yesterday, Apple executives offered a conservative outlook for the current quarter that fell short of Wall Street's projections. But investors seemed reassured by the strong quarterly results, showing that iPod sales were healthy in the postholiday quarter and that the sales of Macintosh computers held up. Macintosh sales, executives said, are expected to be soft as customers put off purchases until later this year when Apple completes its transition to machines powered by Intel microprocessors and software written for the Intel-based Macintosh computers is ready. In after-hours trading, Apple shares rose $2.95, or 4.5 percent, to $68.60 a share. In regular trading, shares fell 57 cents, at $65.65. Apple's profit in its second quarter, ended April 1, increased 41 percent, to $410 million, compared with $290 million a year earlier. Earnings were 47 cents a share, up from 34 cents a year ago. Sales rose 34 percent, to $4.36 billion, compared with $3.24 billion a year ago. Sales were slightly below the Wall Street consensus estimate of $4.52 billion. The challenge Apple faces on Wall Street, it seems, is mostly in managing high expectations. For example, Apple sold more than 8.5 million of its popular iPod portable music and video players, or 60 percent more than in the quarter a year ago. Still, most analysts estimated that Apple would sell 9 million and 10 million in the quarter. "People come up with all sorts of numbers, but I think 8.5 million of anything is pretty great," the chief executive of Apple, Steven P. Jobs, said in an interview yesterday. Wall Street analysts, Mr. Jobs said, will have a tricky time projecting quarterly iPod sales because "no one has ever done this before," meaning sold digital music players at the pace that Apple has recently. Sales, as expected, fell off from the holiday quarter, when Apple sold 14 million iPods. But Apple pointed to industry figures showing its share of digital music player sales in the United States market rose to 78 percent in March. Apple switched half of its Macintosh models to Intel microprocessors in the quarter, replacing PowerPC chips supplied by I.B.M. "We're moving rapidly and we're thrilled with how it's going," Mr. Jobs said. Macintosh sales in the quarter were about the same as a year ago, rising slightly to 1,112,000 machines. "People are postponing the purchases of Macs, especially professionals in advertising, publishing and design who are waiting for specialized software programs to be ready for the Intel-based Macs," said Charles Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, who owns Apple shares and has a hold recommendation on the stock. "It's going to be difficult to get a real sound sense of underlying demand for most of this year," Mr. Wolf said. "But Apple has dodged the Intel transition bullet so far. And sales could really take off, once the shift is complete and the software is ready." Apple's profit margins, executives said, were lifted by lower-than-anticipated prices for some parts, notably the flash memory in iPods. In the current quarter, Apple said it expected sales of $4.2 billion to $4.4 billion and earnings of 39 cents to 43 cents a share, after charges for stock-based compensation. Both the sales and profit guidance were below analysts' expectations. If cautious about the current quarter, Apple is optimistic for the long term. In a sign of that optimism, Mr. Jobs announced plans Tuesday evening to build a 50-acre corporate campus near company headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. At a meeting of the Cupertino City Council, Mr. Jobs said that Apple's rapid growth meant it needed more room. The complex will probably take four or five years to design and build. When completed, it would accommodate up to 3,500 workers. The campus will be in addition to the headquarters in Cupertino. "We'll occupy both of them," Mr. Jobs said in an interview. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/te...y/20apple.html ![]() Native Speaker: There May Be an End-run for Apple Around Windows After All Robert X. Cringely Dave Winer, in his NerdTV interview several months back, said that he viewed his software developer job as giving customers whatever they want. It wasn't his job to say "no" to customers, but rather to say "yes," adding features and capabilities as needed to delight the people who were ultimately paying Dave's bills. It is an enlightened and unusual position to take, especially for an engineer, because engineers typically say something can't be done at all before they eventually say that doing it is trivial. Dave, who has plenty of ego in his own right, claims to have eliminated ego in his quest for customer delight. I hope he has. But even if Dave, himself, hasn't reached that level of Nirvana, he presents an interesting question of how best to give the customer what he or she says they want? In this, our third consecutive week of, "What the heck is Apple really doing with Windows?" we can try to ask this same question about Apple and see if there is an obvious answer emerging. I think there is. To recap, Apple has now officially endorsed the idea of people running Windows on their MacIntel computers using a dual boot loader called Boot Camp. I wrote last week that drunken Microsoft engineers had confirmed that Vista would run on Mac hardware and Apple might even become a Windows OEM like John Dvorak has been predicting. But I also wrote last week that the better route for Apple to take would be true operating system virtualization with Windows Vista running atop OS X for greater security. Finally, I wrote that OS X might be getting a new kernel now that Avie Tevenian is leaving Cupertino. As usual, hundreds of readers weighed-in with new facts and opinions, promoting various virtualization schemes and products from Vmware, Altiris, Parallels and others. Some said virtualization wasn't even needed and that Apple might just use Wine to run Windows apps atop OS X, or maybe they'd use dual-core chips to run one OS per core. I'm beginning to think I know what's up, but first let's tackle that OS X kernel issue. Why would Apple want a new kernel? Speed. Quite simply, a monolithic kernel like the one used in Linux or most of the other Open Source Unix clones is inherently two to three times faster for integer calculations than the Mach microkernel presently used in OS X 10.4. That's why the world hasn't embraced xServes, for example, because for simple web or database service they are slower and serve fewer users. Apple has evidently reached the point where they need to trade claimed performance, -- typically based on floating-point operations that aren't a part of much web or database service -- for real performance. Speeding-up performance is great, but normally a system vendor won't want to do that for older hardware, which might encourage some users to keep their old box and just add a new OS. But in this case, Apple HAS NO installed base of Intel Macs to worry about having to compete with, so speeding up the OS becomes a no-brainer, especially if it simultaneously encourages PowerPC owners to upgrade so they can share in the fun. For this reason alone, I'm guessing that the new OS X Kernel won't be backward compatible to PowerMacs. But this is just a guess. Speeding-up performance is important, too, if you intend to compete in a broader market and not just with your own installed base. Apple has plenty of experience emulating old operating systems to maintain compatibility, whether it was 680X0 emulation on early PowerPC machines, System 9 or Classic emulation under OS X, or even today's Rosetta on-the-fly conversion of PowerPC apps to run on MacIntel boxes. But in all three cases, the performance result was slower than users would have liked. Apple could get away with that when it was an Apple-versus-Apple contest, but now we are talking about Apples running Vista (or Windows apps) versus Dell or HP computers running native Vista. To win, Apple has to be more secure, easier to use, more solid, and not too much slower, so every hardware tweak they can find is great, thanks. So I think it safe to say that whatever Apple's overall strategy, we're likely to see a new kernel in OS X 10.5, though the look and feel and underlying functionality shouldn't change at all. Those who think the kernel change will have to wait for 10.6 forget that Apple has had parallel versions of OS X in development for years, so who's to say they haven't had a monolithic-kernel version running in the lab since 10.3? Apple will most likely offer more than one way to satisfy Big Business's desire to run Windows or at least Windows applications. I think Apple is sincere, for example, in their interest in allowing Apple hardware to boot straight into Vista. Not even Steve Jobs would go for months pretending to be a Vista OEM then give that up the night before. (Now watch him prove me wrong.) So for those who absolutely must have Windows, then let them have Windows, with which the new kernel ought to make performance quite snappy. Another option for Apple would be full OS virtualization like I championed last week. I'm sure it will be available, though maybe not from Apple, since there are plenty of third party applications ready to fight for that business. These applications, probably even more than running straight Vista on Apple hardware, could use the extra oomph of a faster kernel. But what I believe Apple will push as its core strategy is what's behind Door Number Three -- something completely different for those who may not want to run Windows Vista, but want to run Windows XP, instead. XP is strangely compelling on Apple hardware, primarily because most users will already have XP licenses they can transfer and applications they not only own but are familiar with as well. Many people might argue, too, that OS X 10.4 (or 10.5) has many features slated to be coming in Vista, so running XP atop 10.4 could be as good or better than moving to Vista at all. Now for the interesting part: I believe that Apple will offer Windows Vista as an option for those big customers who demand it, but I also believe that Apple will offer in OS X 10.5 the ability to run native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all. This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OS X 10.5. Huh? Wine is great, but it is also a moving target subject to Microsoft meddling. If Wine gets too good, Microsoft can "accidentally" break it at will. But Microsoft can't afford to do that with its own Windows API. The courts will no longer allow checking for a different underlying OS as Redmond did back in the days of DR-DOS. Besides, unless we are strictly talking about Microsoft apps, there isn't even much code involved here that Microsoft CAN meddle in. The wonder is, of course, that Apple could even dare to do such a thing? Oh they can dare. Not only that, this is one dare Apple can probably get away with. Remember Steve Jobs' first days back at Apple in 1997 as Interim-CEO-for-Life? Trying to save the company, Steve got Bill Gates to invest $150 million in Apple and promise to keep Mac Office going for a few more years in exchange for a five-year patent cross-licensing agreement? The idea in everyone's mind, of course, was that Microsoft would grab lots of Apple technology, which they probably did, and it quite specifically ended an Apple patent infringement suit against Microsoft. But I'm told that the exchange wasn't totally one-way, that Apple, in turn, got some legal right to the Windows API. That agreement ran for five years, from August, 1997 to August 2002. Even though it has since expired, the rights it conferred at the time still lie with the respective companies. Whatever Microsoft grabbed from Apple they can still use, they just aren't able to grab anything developed since August 2002. Same for Apple using Microsoft technology like that in Office X. But Windows XP shipped October 25, 2001: 10 months before the agreement expired. I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me. Think of the implications. A souped-up OS X kernel with native Windows API support and the prospect of mixing and matching Windows and Mac applications would be, for many users, the best of both worlds. There would be no copy of Windows XP to buy, no large overhead of emulation or compatibility middleware, no chance for Microsoft to accidentally screw things up, substantially better security, and no need to even take a chance on Windows Vista. I think Dave Winer would see it as Apple saying "yes," to its customers. Alternately, it could be Apple saying, "Hell no" to Microsoft. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060420.html ![]() Apple Ready To Steal Market Share Jonny Evans Needham & Co analyst Charles Wolf is maintaining a 'Hold' rating on Apple stock - but has hopes that Mac sales will surge once the entire range move to Intel. He expects the full product transition to complete by the first quarter of 2007. And he thinks that Boot Camp will be integral to future success. "Mac shipments could surge on the strength of the ability of Macs to run Windows applications," he wrote. No Photoshop for Intel slows sales The transition isn't without risks, the analyst said, citing the non-availability of Adobe Photoshop for Intel processors as an example. "MacBook Pro and forthcoming PowerMac sales could experience sale postponements that extend into 2007," he wrote, "because Adobe is unlikely to introduce native versions of Photoshop and other design programs until early 2007. Apple's professional audiences, which are heavy users of these products, are likely to postpone their upgrades until they arrive," he observed. Windows open on Apple However, Apple's secret market share weapon - Boot Camp - could be integral to the company's future fortunes: "The driver of the sales upside will be the ability of the Mac to run Windows applications either through dual-booting or virtualisation," the analyst explained. Wolf adds that he thinks Apple will extend Windows support in its future Leopard OS by adding a virtualisation engine that lets Mac users run Windows at the same time as OS X. At present users can only choose to boot into Mac or Windows operating systems. "In our opinion, we believe there is a reasonable chance that Apple itself will build virtualisation into Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, which should ship soon after MacWorld San Francisco in January 2007," he explained. iBook imminent Wolf sees Apple's Q2 as a good result in which the company "escaped" too much impact from its Intel transition. "An inkling of postponed purchases reduced December quarter shipments. Postponements were undoubtedly higher in the March quarter. And they should continue at least through the September quarter and possibly into December," Wolf warned. Products drive success, particularly in the consumer markets, and Wolf echoed industry consensus, saying: "We expect Apple to introduce a new iBook with an Intel processor in time for the K-12 school-buying season, which begins in June. Without the new model, the season could be quite short." Speaking during this week's Apple Q2 conference call, chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer warned that gross margins would decline slightly in the current quarter, attributing this to the beginning of the K-12 buying season. Wolf translates this as evidence of the debut of a consumer notebook that's set to capture education sales on the basis of price. A 'moral victory' in Q2 Overall, it was a good quarter: "Apple shipped 1.11 million Macs in the March quarter, in line with our 1.15 million forecast. In view of the fact that Apple introduced three new Intel Macs during the quarter and a significant number of customers most likely postponed purchases, we regard this number as something of a moral victory. Shipments could have been far lower," he said. Looking into the future for iPod sales, Wolf observed a slowing in sales growth for the product, and surmised that this would leave the iPod more susceptible to seasonal changes in buying patterns. http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...ge=1&pagePos=1 ![]() Apple Pushes To Unmask Product Leaker Declan McCullagh A California court in San Jose on Thursday is scheduled to hear a case brought by Apple Computer that eventually could answer an unsettled legal question: Should online journalists receive the same rights as traditional reporters? Apple claims they should not. Its lawyers say in court documents that Web scribes are not "legitimate members of the press" when they reveal details about forthcoming products that the company would prefer to keep confidential. That argument has drawn stiff opposition from bloggers and traditional journalists. But it did seem to be sufficient to convince Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg, who ruled in March 2005 that Apple's attempt to subpoena the electronic records of an Apple news site could proceed. "Unlike the whistleblower who discloses a health, safety or welfare hazard affecting all, or the government employee who reveals mismanagement or worse by our public officials, (the Macintosh news sites) are doing nothing more than feeding the public's insatiable desire for information," Kleinberg wrote at the time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the Apple news site PowerPage.org, is hoping the appeals court will pull the plug on a subpoena that could yield details about who leaked information about a FireWire audio interface for GarageBand that has been codenamed "Asteroid." The subpoena is on hold during the appeal. "The California Court of Appeals has a long history of protecting freedom of the press," Kurt Opsahl, an EFF staff attorney who is arguing the case, said on Wednesday. "We're hopeful they'll continue to do so." In the lawsuit, filed in late 2004, Apple is not suing the Mac news sites directly, but instead has focused on still-unnamed "John Doe" defendants. The subpoena has been sent to Nfox.com, PowerPage's e-mail provider, which says it will comply if legally permitted. Even though the AppleInsider site also published information about the Asteroid device, it operated its own e-mail service and would have been able to raise a stronger First Amendment claim if it had been sent a subpoena. (In a separate case, Apple directly sued another enthusiast site, Think Secret, alleging that it infringed on Apple's trade secret in soliciting inside information.) The types of articles about Apple that Jason O'Grady, PowerPage.org's creator, posts every few days don't seem that different from those that many news organizations produce. They include reports on Apple's patent disputes, benchmarks of software performance, reviews of software and news about upcoming products that have not officially been announced. Being the first to publish news about forthcoming products--as long as the information is accurate--is generally regarded by journalists as a coup. CNET News.com was the first to report, for instance, that Apple was switching from PowerPC processors to Intel chips last year. (Full disclosure: O'Grady has begun writing a blog for ZDNet, also owned by CNET.) Free speech vs. trade secrets... A coalition of bloggers, law professors and journalist-rights groups has filed a legal brief (click for PDF) siding with the EFF, saying that "the medium though which reporters communicate is simply unrelated to the Constitutional mandate of the protecting the free flow of information and the freedom of the press." For purposes of this appeal, Apple has agreed that O'Grady can be viewed as a reporter. But the coalition wants the California appeals court to go even farther and say that bloggers and other online writers "may invoke the protection of the newsgatherer's privilege" of protecting their sources when they act as journalists. The brief's signers include The First Amendment Project, Reporters Without Borders, and Gawker Media. The Associated Press, Hearst Corp., the Los Angeles Times and other major media companies filed their own brief arguing that the Mac sites should not be forced to divulge their confidential sources. Free speech vs. trade secrets To Apple and its allies, though, the case is about something much more straightforward: how to protect intellectual property rights in the age of the Internet. "The First Amendment cannot trump a property right," said Ian Ballon, an intellectual property attorney in the East Palo Alto, Calif., office of Greenberg Traurig. As long as the courts agree that Apple is protecting a legitimate trade secret, Ballon said, intellectual property should trump free speech rights. "The law is certainly on Apple's side on this issue," he said. A slew of other large software and hardware companies have lined up behind Apple. Intel and the Business Software Alliance (which counts Microsoft as a prominent member, along with Adobe, Apple and Symantec) said in their own filing that trade secret laws "are vital to the health of California's high technology businesses" and that there is no public interest in having trade secrets "stolen and plastered on the Internet." The Information Technology Industry Council took a similar position, saying that EFF has "greatly exaggerated" the threat that the subpoena poses to "legitimate First Amendment interests." It involves no wrongdoing by government officials, or muckraking, or corporate waste, but simple disclosure of trade secrets, the council says. Intel is scheduled to participate in Thursday's oral arguments, along with the actual litigants, an attorney for mainstream media organizations, and the Bear Flag League--a group of conservative bloggers that is siding with PowerPage. CNET News.com's Ina Fried contributed to this report. http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/busine...9353413,00.htm |
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,023
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![]() PC For The Road
Jack It’s not the first and it won’t be the last, but this new in-car computer pulls ahead of the pack with a touch screen display and some clever software designed to make a distracting surf to work a bit less dangerous. ![]() Portable Satellite Radio? MP3 Player With News? All That, and a Recorder John Biggs Pioneer is best known for in-car stereos and speakers, but that doesn't mean it can't step out a bit. The Pioneer Inno is a portable XM satellite radio and MP3 player that lets you listen to and even record XM content on the go. The huge antenna can pick all of XM's 170 channels, and a gigabyte of built-in storage space allows you to record up to 50 hours of programming at any time. The Inno has a full color 180-by-180-pixel display and weighs about 4.5 ounces. The Inno also has an FM transmitter for playback on any radio, including a car stereo. Finally, there are sports and stock tickers for keeping abreast of the news while out and about. Available in May at many retailers, the $399 Inno will require a monthly subscription to XM for $12.95. The Inno can also act as a stand-alone MP3 or Windows Media file player and is compatible with the Napster music service. With satellite radio in your pocket, it may be time to turn in the portable FM radio. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/te.../20player.html ![]() TiVo-lution From Purpose-Built Systems Jim Barton, TiVo The challenges of delivering a reliable, easy-to-use DVR service to the masses One of the greatest challenges of designing a computer system is in making sure the system itself is “invisible” to the user. The system should simply be a conduit to the desired result. There are many examples of such purpose-built systems, ranging from modern automobiles to mobile phones. As these products are enhanced over time, however, they often stray from invisibility, imposing new burdens on the user. The two burdens that are probably most annoying to the user are a complex and difficult control interface and lack of reliability. Reliability is not just about whether a computer system functions or not. It encompasses expected behavior, lack of ambiguity, and recovery from unusual events, such as loss of power or network connectivity. As we began implementation of the TiVo service, we kept these ideas in mind. Our goal was giving viewers a new level of control over their television viewing, while keeping within the context of consumer expectations of a television experience. In this article I touch on many design facets of the iceberg that is the TiVo service, and the tip of that iceberg most people think of when they hear the name TiVo is the TiVo DVR (digital video recorder). Background Several trends in electronic and computer technology were under way in late 1997 that we thought would enable creation of a DVR service that could be provided at a reasonable price to consumers: · Rapidly increasing amounts of hard-disk storage for the same (or lower) price. This was occurring because of brutal competition between hard-disk suppliers to the PC market. This meant that television viewers could have enormous amounts of video stored locally, creating their own, personal, video-on-demand systems. · Rapidly increasing sophistication—and declining cost—of integrated chip components. For example, the first inexpensive realtime single-chip MPEG2 encoders were then just coming to market. This allowed our first products to address the largest market at the time, viewers of analog television programming. · Availability of sufficient open source software components to construct an adequate platform for development of DVR-class software. This meant we could focus our engineering efforts on building the right television experience for the viewer, and thus shorten the development cycle. · Inexpensive commodity (hardware and software) server technology allowing the deployment of an expansive distributed system architecture. · Large-scale dial-up Internet access at affordable prices. Interestingly, there was a great deal of resistance to the concept of a DVR service. Examples include: · Television networks and other distributors were fearful of the impact the DVR would have on advertising revenues, since it would now be possible to skip through the commercials. · Major cable television distributors, and industry pundits in general, were dismissive, claiming that video-on-demand would quickly make the DVR obsolete. · Consumer equipment vendors and industry pundits were skeptical that a subscription service model would find traction with consumers. · Program guide suppliers and those hoping to turn the program guide into the “front page to the living room” dismissed the idea that the grid-like program guide was suitable as the main interface for controlling television. · Most consumers, long trained to watch appointment television and live with commercials, didn’t know they wanted a DVR service until they used it, making consumer education a significant challenge. Why A Subscription Service? A number of considerations led us to implement our technology as a subscription service rather than as a single-sale, stand-alone product. First, the DVR required constant updating with new program guide information to keep up with changing schedules and lineups. At that time, this had to be done via dial-up access, which has a number of inherent costs. The data itself had to be purchased on an ongoing basis and continuously processed into a form suitable for download. These ongoing costs had to be covered in some way, and a subscription fee seemed both simple and straightforward. Second, despite our best design work, the DVR would be difficult to set up, and the complexity of television distribution meant that program guide accuracy issues could arise over time. We felt this was best addressed through a professional customer service organization that subscribers could contact as needed. Ongoing customer service became another benefit of the subscription fee. Third, the subscription revenue stream would allow us to fund ongoing software updates and enhancements to the service. Finally, a subscription model allowed us to subsidize the cost of the DVR hardware itself, bringing the service within the price range of a much broader audience. Service Design Principles We followed a number of core principles in the initial design of the TiVo service. “Simple,” “reliable,” “easy to use,” and other stock phrases are not specific enough to drive system architectural choices. Instead, we started with a set of more concrete philosophies in designing the overall system. These included the following: It just works. This means that the product itself should always work as expected. No surprises. No ambiguity. Not “works most of the time.” Not “mostly works.” It just works. In the consumer experience, if something doesn’t work right the first use, it is usually abandoned. So you need to get it right the first time. Remember, it’s television. Everybody knows how television works (even those who claim not to watch it). Television never stops, even when you turn off the TV set. Televisions never crash. You never need to reboot your television. Television always has perfect lip-sync. The main interface to a television is the remote control. Especially with a DVR, the remote is something you use all the time. Part of the simplicity and usability of the product is a result of how easy it is to use the remote. AC power is unreliable. There is no power switch on a TiVo receiver. The receiver must be able to survive the loss of power at any time without losing track of its state, so a power switch is superfluous. Connectivity is unreliable. We can’t assume that we are able to connect to the service back-end at any given instant. Thus, the basic functionality of the DVR should work whether connected or not, transparently to the viewer. As a corollary, we could not build in a dependency on network bandwidth available to the DVR. All data transfer, including eventually video, would be handled through download. We must control the cost per subscriber of the service. Addressing the average consumer means achieving an extremely low cost of entry to the service. The hardware platform must allow the software to approach 100 percent utilization of the hardware for a given set of functions, allowing for the lowest possible hardware cost. The service back-end must allow us to operationally manage utilization and marginal costs in the same way. Privacy must be fundamental to the design. People are understandably concerned about their viewing habits being exposed to others or used in unexpected ways. On the other hand, anonymous viewing information can be used to measure general behavior and to improve programming. Therefore, the system must be designed to protect the viewer’s privacy while allowing for collection of relevant information. Security must be fundamental to the design. TiVo provides a service to its subscribers through the TiVo receiver. Because TiVo takes no hardware margin, and in fact loses money on the hardware, it needs to ensure that it receives the subscription fee to cover costs. This makes it necessary to guard against theft of service and against the use of alternative service providers. It should also be possible, when necessary, to protect stored programming from arbitrary redistribution. Platform Design Principles Given these directives, TiVo embarked on the creation of the platform infrastructure that would deliver an embodiment of these ideals to the user. At the same time, we had to make choices that TiVo would live with for a very long time—possibly for the life of TiVo as a company.1 The Source Code We wanted to avoid dependence on outside software suppliers at all times by having control of each and every line of source code. This would ensure that TiVo would have full control of product quality and development schedules. When the big bug hunt occured, as it always does, we needed the ability to follow every lead, understand every path, and track every problem down to its source. As a corollary, we needed to specify every byte of software that is used in the production system. That meant being able to build the software in the way we wanted, whenever we wanted, over and over and over again. This path led us to use open source software as a foundation for the system. There are trade-offs for this choice. Open source software is neither the savior of software engineering nor the scourge of capitalism. Instead, it is a wide field of source-code options, ranging in quality from dismal to the finest kind, and ranging in copyright licensing terms from draconian to devil-may-care. Support is seldom dependable, build strategies vary, coding styles may be impenetrable, and changes can be fast and furious. The main DVR application is implemented separately and kept proprietary to TiVo to maintain its competitive advantages. This means paying careful attention to the borders between open source and proprietary software and carefully evaluating licensing terms before incorporating open source packages. The DVR Hardware The software complexity needed to deliver the simplicity we were pursuing dictated the choice of a sophisticated operating-system approach. We were going to write a huge amount of software, and we needed to manage it, debug it, measure it, and so forth. We also wanted to have a great deal of flexibility for future upgrades, so choosing an embedded approach targeted to run in a fixed amount of nonvolatile memory was undesirable. In fact, since a disk drive was necessary for the product, and was the most expensive component, we wanted to achieve maximum utilization of the drive. This meant we would be able to lower the hardware cost in another way. Instead of burdening the platform with a large amount of programmable or flash memory to hold the software, we stored the software on disk and provided only enough boot ROM to contain the self-tests and a disk boot loader. This is in contrast to most other DVR implementations, which still operate in an old-style set-top mode, keeping all executable code in flash memory and treating the hard disk as simply an add-on module. The Security Foundation There are two aspects of managing security within the TiVo service. The first is authentication. Any individual DVR should be able to authenticate itself to the service back-end, while the service back-end should be able to authenticate itself to any DVR. Once authenticated, security policies and encryption can be reliably managed. A public-key encryption system is the obvious choice. We wanted to make it as difficult as possible, within the economics of the DVR platform, to corrupt the security of any particular DVR. Specifically, even if an exploit is found, it should be equally difficult to perform the exploit on the next DVR, and so forth. Practically, this means that the security system should be based in hardware, and modification of the hardware using “expert” tools should be required to perform the exploit. Each TiVo DVR includes a secure microprocessor to which are delegated all public-key-based operations. This secure microprocessor contains a unique public/private key pair for each DVR, so that there are no global secrets for DVR authentication. The second aspect of system security is establishing the “chain of trust” for software running in the DVR (i.e., ensuring that no software executes on the DVR except software that has been tested and certified by TiVo). Starting with the TiVo Series2 DVR, this is accomplished by using a secure ROM for the boot code of the system. The boot code includes a copy of a public signing key held by the TiVo service. The boot code first verifies its own integrity and loads the operating system, which must be signed with the private signing key. Once the operating system is authenticated, it is started. The operating system contains signatures for all executable files (and certain other critical files) that it may execute; before starting any application, it checks that each file is unmodified. If so, then the application code can be loaded. Network Connectivity The obvious choice was to depend on standardized protocols within the Internet protocol suite. TCP/IP is the foundation for all communications, PPP for dial-up connection management, and so forth. This also allows us to take advantage of improving technology and the declining cost of IP-based equipment and networks, easing future scaling of the service. Software tool chain The tool chain used for building the software is critical, as it determines the productivity of the engineering team and many aspects of code quality and performance. GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) was our choice, running on a RedHat Linux distribution. Operating system kernel Here we chose to use Linux. Many readers may confuse the operating system kernel with the overall package of software that makes up an operating system; in this case we are referring only to the memory-resident kernel itself. Linux has many advantages for the TiVo DVR platform: virtual memory and paging support; integrated TCP/IP protocol support; support for many different microprocessor implementations and drivers for most common hardware components, allowing for a great deal of flexibility in hardware implementation; adequate realtime features for a DVR platform; and full source code with an acceptable license (GNU Public License, version 2). System software We use system software to refer to all other software that is not part of the TiVo proprietary application that is used in the system. Each of these components was specifically chosen based on requirements and licensing, and incorporated into the software build and deployment process. TiVo does not rely on any particular GNU/Linux distribution; instead, it handcrafts its own distribution with just those components required for the DVR platform. Application Design Principles When TiVo began, broadband penetration in the United States was limited. Yet, to provide a satisfying experience to TiVo subscribers, we needed to provide a large amount of data to each TiVo receiver about what television was available, preferably updated on a daily basis. The obvious choice was downloading data over a phone line, but there were serious drawbacks to that approach. Most people do not have a phone jack near their televisions, and this was (and still is) a serious barrier to installing a TiVo DVR. From the TiVo service perspective, dial-up connections can also be costly. Despite the drawbacks of dial-up networking, we chose this path. We also believed that eventually broadband and home networks would be available to most subscribers, which would simplify installation of the DVR. This led us to create a distributed application in which a central server facility synchronized information about available programming with each DVR, using a short, periodic dial-up connection. The DVR then used that data offline to make local decisions about what to record and when. As we expected eventually to scale the number of receivers in use into the tens of millions, the server architecture had to be highly scalable. At the same time, it had to be incredibly efficient; since TiVo would pay for the phone calls, we needed to minimize the amount of data transferred and ensure that most calls were successful the first time. Even when broadband access is used, there are still overhead costs for bandwidth and equipment that must be managed. Programming Abstractions Aside from the disk drive, the best way to control hardware cost is to limit the amount of semiconductor memory needed in the system. This includes ROM, flash, and precious DRAM. For performance-critical software, which in TiVo means all software involved with user interaction and video recording or playback, minimizing memory use and processor cycles forces the choice of a low-level optimizing programming language. We chose to use a subset of GNU C++. We did not use exception handling, which generates a great deal more code—code that should be rarely executed in a well-designed application. Exceptions can be thrown for many reasons, and the proper path for recovery from them is not always obvious at different abstraction levels. This makes designing a predictable application difficult. Instead, all object methods that can fail for some reason must return a status code, and the caller must check this code and properly respond to it. A method returning a failure code must leave the object in a well-defined state, such that the caller can respond to the failure in a predictable way. Our testing framework includes ways to inject failure codes and to check for proper handling of them. In fact, we modified the C++ compiler to verify that callers actually do something with the status code. Our fundamental abstraction layer is called the TMK (TiVo Media Kernel). This body of software provides for typical functionality: memory management, threading, synchronization, interprocess communication, etc. It also provides the fundamental object abstractions from which all other application software is derived; examples include templates for lists, arrays, and hashes. Memory management is a particular focus of the TMK. Memory is the most important resource in the system and key to performance. Mismanagement of memory is also the most likely source of software failures. To minimize memory usage, using shared memory operated on by multiple threads is desirable whenever possible. This raises many issues, however, with synchronization, cleanup, allocation algorithms, etc. Unbounded memory allocation is certainly possible in a virtual memory-with-paging environment such as Linux, but must be avoided; paging should be a rare event. TMK manages all memory within bounded allocation areas dedicated to various functions. TMK objects are reference-counted and managed with smart pointers, (i.e., template classes that behave as regular pointers, but incorporate reference counting). This relieves much of the memory management burden on the programmer. These allocation areas are themselves objects and incorporate extensive debugging support and consistency checking, including shutdown checks that ensure no dangling objects are left behind. TMK applications are further required to start up and shut down in a regular and consistent manner. This allows incorporation of extensive automatic consistency checking and ensures that memory leaks are found very early in the development process. Using the TMK abstraction, we ideally expect to be able to create application code that can run forever without crashes and without memory leaks. In practice, we continue to asymptotically approach this unobtainable ideal. Remembering Things The soul of a DVR is remembering things: when shows come on, what channels a user receives, how long shows should be kept around, and so on. Remembering has to occur reliably, even when the power can drop at any time and the receiver may be offline for days or weeks. The number of things it needs to remember is enormous. A subscriber using a satellite receiver can potentially receive 1,000 channels; stretched over 24 hours a day for 14 days, this is a lot of program information. Obviously, this data could always be re-acquired from the service; however, that process would be expensive and time-consuming, and it would be visible to the subscriber. It is also critical that the subscriber’s information—channel lists, recording queues, recordings on disk, and viewing preferences—be properly remembered as well. The structure of the data we need to remember is naturally object oriented. For example, a particular program might appear on several different channels at various times. Popular series can exist as new episodes on major networks or live for years in syndication on local broadcast channels. It is also important that we have strict control over data versioning. A broadcaster at any time might update a show’s program information, such as the showing time or episode. We expect the database always to be functional and to run with constant updating as long as the receiver is in use. The database must reliably discard old information and never “lose” any storage capacity. Because we knew the different object types and their characteristics and relationships in advance, our implementation approach could be optimized for size and speed. We chose to implement a simple object database with auto-generated C++ wrapper classes for every object. Support for simple transactions allows reliable updates of object collections; retrying failed transaction commits is the responsibility of application code. Garbage collection is used to ensure recovery of database memory. These choices give us complete control over functionality and performance, allowing us to create an optimal database implementation for the TiVo DVR. Media Storage Most of the capacity of the disk drive is dedicated to storing programming. Here, the constraints are very different from those for the database or application software, which typically deals with small transactions with the disk. The most extreme example is high-definition television signals, in which a single minute of video occupies more than 140 MB of storage. In the TiVo/DirecTV HDTV satellite receiver, the DVR must manage recording two HDTV signals at the same time it plays back a third from the disk. In the worst case, this must continue flawlessly in parallel with all other possible functions that the DVR may be performing (e.g., searching for programming using a program guide, downloading program information from the service, writing log files, and paging). Media storage is managed through a simple file system design that is focused on efficient allocation and performance. The file system is application-managed, not part of the operating system. Special adaptations have been made to the operating system to support direct input and output to application buffers, bypassing any normal buffering. The disk driver was modified to incorporate hooks to allow the application to specify how disk operations should be prioritized and to allow the specification of deadlines for media storage operations. This way, the application can ensure that the most important operations happen when necessary, but the driver is allowed to interleave other operations so that forward progress is made on all aspects of the application. User Interface It was very important that the user interface to the TiVo DVR be both simple and powerful. Following our core principles, it also had to be a natural extension of a television viewing experience. The first expression of this was the use of video loopsets as backgrounds to each navigation screen. A video loopset is simply a segment of video that is designed to be seamlessly repeated, giving the appearance of constant, smooth movement. These loopsets are carefully rendered to be nonintrusive, yet give the impression of a system that is always active. The loopsets, and the overlaid informational graphics, are designed not to be abrasive or pushy; thus, the viewers could take as much time as they wanted to make choices. The navigational model used throughout is based on a simple list, navigated with a four-direction control: up, down, left, and right. Up and down move a position indicator through the list, moving right provides additional information about the item selected, while moving left takes the viewer to higher-level or previous lists. Appurtenance icons are drawn on the screen, matching icons on the remote control, indicating what actions are available; we called these the whispering arrows. An innovative feature that has been especially popular is the addition of sound cues triggered by remote-control key presses. This affords another way that the viewers can be assured that their key presses are seen and provides instant feedback if a key press is not allowed or an action has been initiated. We focused a great deal of attention on the design of the remote control.2 When watching television using a DVR, viewers naturally use the remote often, perhaps even holding it the whole time. It is important that viewers not have to take their eyes off their television screens, so the layout and feel of the keys has to be carefully structured to allow navigating the keys by feel. In fact, it should be possible to use the remote control easily in a darkened living room. Another important aspect of the user interface is that it should be dynamic. For example, if the viewer is perusing the list of recorded programs, and a new recording begins, that should be immediately reflected in the interface. This is naturally achieved by implementing the user interface as a view into the object database. The user interface code is informed by the database when items in the current view change. It can then update the presentation for the viewer. Home Networking And Broadband Extensions Since 2003, TiVo has been integrating networking-based features into the TiVo service as part of a continual process of upgrading the subscriber experience. The central challenge we face is how to continue providing the best interface for accessing and controlling networked services while providing the “TiVo-like” reliability that the viewer expects. This is especially difficult in a networked environment because of the complexity of home networks and broadband access. Ideally, the consumer should be able simply to plug the DVR into the home network and access available services through obvious extensions to the user interface. Wireless networking based on the IEEE 802.11 standard is an especially thorny issue; despite the impression given by equipment manufacturers and the news media, such networks are difficult for the consumer to get working properly and have a great deal of connectivity and bandwidth variability in the home environment. We again rely on Internet protocol standards for configuring the DVR to operate properly on the network, supporting Zero Configuration Networking (Zeroconf) standards for IP address configuration and service discovery (http://www.zeroconf.org). To lower the cost of the DVR hardware, we chose not to provide built-in networking interfaces in early generations of the Series2 DVR. Instead, we provide a low-cost USB interface. This is because we believed that the percentage of DVRs attached to networks would be modest and grow slowly over time. Instead of burdening every hardware platform with an expensive interface, those subscribers wishing to connect the DVR to a home network could buy inexpensive USB network adapters that match their network facilities. Broadband penetration has increased sufficiently that all future TiVo DVR platforms will include some form of built-in network interface. Opening up to network-based services means opening up to network-based attacks on the DVR or the data flowing on the network. These threats can take several forms: Attacks on services the DVR exposes to the network, subverting weak protocols or causing some form of DOS (denial of service). We handle this by carefully selecting which services we will expose and testing each extensively. We also implement a standard Linux firewall, with rules to limit DOS attacks. Data-based attacks on the DVR—for example, using carefully selected MP3 streams or JPEG images that might cause a buffer overflow in the decoder, thus crashing the application and causing some form of service denial. Another familiar example is sending corrupted URLs or content metadata. Here, the best avoidance strategy is through rigorous testing and, when leveraging open source developments, choosing stable, widely used, and well-tested packages. Network snooping of sensitive data, such as personal viewing information or passwords. We use SSL for access to most network services. Security certificates are distributed through the secure chain of trust from the service back-end. DVR-to-DVR program transfers being snooped off the network. The transfers are encrypted, and the encryption keys are exchanged using the public keys of the DVRs involved, requiring use of the embedded security microprocessor to decrypt the keys. Our ultimate goal is that the interfaces to network services should be as invisible and reliable as other functions of the TiVo service and integrate with the user interface in a clean and obvious way. As part of implementing network services, we chose to provide to our subscribers a free PC-based application3 that makes the PC appear on the home network as a media server. The subscribers, in addition to services delivered directly over the Internet from TiVo, can publish their own content for playback on the DVR. Network services implemented to date include: streaming of MP3 audio, display of images in various formats (i.e., digital photos), DVR-to-DVR transfers of recorded programs, Web-based scheduling of recordings, DVR-to-PC and PC-to-DVR transfers of recorded programs, and DVR-to-mobile device transfers using the PC as an agent. A Work In Progress TiVo has been successful, acquiring more than 4 million subscribers since the company was founded. The company has also been successful in another way: in proving that both a DVR platform and a subscriber business could be created. As a result, the company faces increasing competition from alternative suppliers, especially the digital television distributors such as cable and satellite operators. The basic principles used in first developing the TiVo service are still sound. In fact, TiVo is creating a new implementation designed to work within the OCAP (Open Cable Application Platform), targeted at cable television distributors. Comcast has agreed to deploy this new TiVo service as an alternative to its own DVR service solution, an acknowledgment of the perceived quality and value of the technology. TiVo continues to advance its original service platform with new software functionality. This includes further integration with PCs and mobile devices, new ways of selecting programming, and tighter integration with remote scheduling. The distributed design of the TiVo service has proven to be an effective vehicle for deploying these new services. http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?...owpage&pid=381 ![]() American Spam Slowing; Europe, Asia Taking Over Anders Bylund The most recent global spam study conducted by Sophos shows China closing in on the US when it comes to relaying spam, and the Asian markets together have put some distance between itself and former spam leader North America. In 2004, over half of all spam was sent through the US, but today, that number has dropped to just 23.1 percent according to the report. China relays 21.9 percent of the junk e-mail traffic, and South Korea rounds out the top three with 9.8 percent. Asian spam adds up to 42.8 percent of the total, and North American runs neck-and-neck with Europe at 25.6 and 25 percent, respectively. A Sophos spokesman explains that the American drop in the rankings is due to the intensified efforts to find spammers within US borders and slap them with high fines. By contrast, some European countries such as Poland and Spain have seen their spam totals increase, presumably due to a lack of governmental effort to control the problem. It's important to note that this study does not talk about where the spam messages were first conceived of, composed, and scheduled for delivery. It looks at the mail relay point, which can be quite different as spam kings try to cover their tracks. They often do this by operating through networks of virus-infected computers. "It's imperative that computer users worldwide put better defences in place to prevent their computers from being converted into spam-spewing zombies," said the Sophos spokesman. "South Korea has a fantastic Internet structure with immensely fast connections, and so it is a goldmine for spammers wanting to create botnets. The top 10 viruses in the past 10 months are really old, which suggests the human race isn't winning the war against viruses and spam. Some people just simply aren't bothered, and they are the ones bombarding the rest of us." That means a couple of things. First, high connectivity leads to high numbers of spambots on a per-capita basis. Second, old machines running less secure versions of Windows are more susceptible to virus infection, pushing the spam relay numbers higher. Taking all of that into account, the former spam overlord that is the United States drop to fifth place among the 12 countries listed in the study reports with 0.17 percent of worldwide spam per million US Internet users. China, with less spam but still fewer 'Net denizens clocks in a #3 (0.22), the highly connected South Koreans secure second place (0.30), and the worst offender per online resident is—Poland! A combination of lax to nonexistent governmental spam control and a preponderance of old hardware and software lets 0.32 percent-per-million-netizens of all spam bounce through Polish machinery. On the flip side of things, many countries seem to be doing a much better job of spam control than the US: Germany and the UK, for example, both have spam PPIM ratings of 0.06, but Japan might be the most impressive case of all. If high connectivity is a problem, Japan seems to have figured out how to control it. With 89 percent of its 127 million citizens reportedly connected to the Internet, Japan contributes just 2 percent of the spam for a microscopic rating of 0.02. The spam study is an ongoing project, wherein Sophos collects spam via junk mail honeypots around the world and generates periodic reports from the data. With more than 13 billion pieces of spam sent daily, and with spambot networks providing incentives for virus writers to crank out new creations, spam has become more than a mere annoyance. If these numbers show us anything, it's that slowing the beast down will take a global effort. In other words, get your spam filters in order, because the problem won't go away anytime soon. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060421-6648.html ![]() Teens Say They Like Vinyl Records Over CDs UPI A Canadian scientist says teens who used to view CDs as superior to older vinyl records now consider vinyl superior to the newer format. David Hayes of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto says the growing popularity of vinyl might be a form of resistance against the music industry's corporate taste-makers. While conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation, Hayes was surprised to discover the young music enthusiasts he was interviewing were fans of vinyl. "This made me wonder why they were interested in something that is, for all intents and purposes, a dead medium," he said, noting the teenagers had switched from buying CDs to collecting LPs, often seeking obscure recordings. Hayes research subjects said they liked the visual appeal of LP jackets and the challenge of seeking hard-to-find releases. In yet another turnaround, teens overwhelmingly insisted the sound quality of LPs was superior to that of modern formats. They characterized LPs and the LP artists of the past as more authentic than the barrage of youth-oriented music being aggressively marketed to them today. Hayes detailed his research in the February issue of Popular Music and Society. http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=64807495 ![]() File swapping is thirsty work How To Hack A Soda Machine Skatter Tech Most modern soda machines have little computers in them. The tiny RED LCD usually displays the data. The computer can be controlled by using certain buttons on the soda machine in different combinations. This can be used to check the temperature, see the amount of money (load and dump), and dump certain sodas. Will usually only work on newer machines that look like the one on the right. They need to have an LCD and also need to have some type of message on it “ICE COLD SODAS” This tells you it is running something. 1) Accessing the Menu: Press the buttons [4][2][3][1] one after another. It will be left to right in some machines and up and down in some so try both methods. Once you press these keys you will be in the “debug menu.” It should display ERROR or something similar. 2) Once you are in, button [1] becomes the back/exit type of command. Button [2] becomes scroll up. Button [3] becomes scroll down. And Button [4] becomes select/enter. You can now scroll through the features. 3) As you scroll through the menus you will see items such as SALE, CASH, VER, ERROR, and RTN. 4) What each item means: Cash- displays the amount of money in the machine. You will also be able to find more info on what was purchased how much for each item and are arranged by slot #s. SALE- shows how many drinks have been sold and how many from each slot. (slots are in same order as buttons so if button 1 is coke then slot 1 is coke as well.) VER- the machine firmware version. (pointless) ERROR- COLJ (Column Jam), VEnd (Vend Mechanism), Door (Door Switch), Sels (Selection Switch), CHAR (Changer Errors), Acce (Acceptor Errors), Sts (Space 2 Sales), and bVal (Vill Validators). (can’t do anything w/ this either, except clear the errors!) RTN- Returns back to normal menus, you can also do this by pressing on the coin return button or the back button. Also by holding a coin at the tip of the coin slot it will display the current temperature of the inside of the soda machine. 5) There above are the options that are usually enabled, but most other options are usually disabled if the owner (or maintenance dude) is smart. But if they happen to be enabled here they are: CPO- Coin payment mode, which will dump coins out of the machine. You will be able to specify the type (dime, nickel, ect.) and the amount. tvFL- tube fill mode, which lets you fill the machine w/ coins. (retarded huh) PASS- allows you to change the default password from 4231 to something else. PrlC- change the price of a drink! (1 cent!) StOS change what each button links to (so if some1 presses coke you can make it go 2 sprite.) COn- are machine configuration settings too much to tell just experiment. TIME- Set TIME. LANG- change language. http://www.skattertech.com/soda-machine-hack/ ![]() Apple's iTunes Pricing To Stay At 99 Cents Marc Perton Apple Computer's Steve Jobs has apparently won his long-running battle with the record industry over the pricing of songs in the iTunes Music Store. Jobs has long insisted that the store's 99-cents-per-song price point should stay in place, while record companies had argued for more flexible pricing, with newer songs going for a higher price, and catalog material selling for less. The record companies had also pushed for a subscription option similar to that followed by most other online music stores. Now, according to The New York Post, the record companies have largely thrown in the towel, and will allow Apple to keep pricing flat. The victory is, however, somewhat Pyrrhic for Apple; the company makes very little money (proportionately) from iTMS, and uses the store largely as a way to lure customers into buying iPods and lock them into its FairPlay DRM, which we all know works only with one audio player. (Why do you think the French are giving them such a hard time?) Keeping pricing simple is part of Jobs' strategy to avoid losing customers to competing platforms, which have access to music stores that offer unlimited download subscription packages for as little as $8 per month. Level pricing may help stanch defections -- but it's not likely to produce any increased revenue for Apple, which is apparently just how they like it. http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/21/a...y-at-99-cents/ ![]() The Corporate Toll On The Internet Telecom giant AT&T plans to charge online businesses to speed their services through its DSL lines. Critics say the scheme violates every principle of the Internet, favors deep-pocketed companies, and is bound to limit what we see and hear online. Farhad Manjoo To say that AT&T was once the nation's largest phone company is a bit like describing the Pentagon as America's leading purchaser of guns and bullets. Until its government-imposed dissolution in 1984, AT&T, which provided a dial tone to the vast majority of Americans, enjoyed a market dominance unlike that of any corporation in modern history, rivaling only state monopolies -- think of the Soviet airline or the British East India Tea Company -- in size and scope. In commercials, the company encouraged us to reach out and touch someone; the reality was that for much of the 20th century, you had no choice but to let AT&T touch your loved ones for you. Now -- after a series of acquisitions and re-acquisitions so tangled it would take Herodotus to adequately chronicle them -- AT&T is back, it's big, and according to consumer advocates and some of the nation's largest technology companies, AT&T wants to take over the Internet. The critics -- including Apple, Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo -- point out that AT&T, along with Verizon and Comcast, its main rivals in the telecom business, will dominate the U.S. market for residential high-speed Internet service for the foreseeable future. Currently, that market is worth $20 billion, and according to the Federal Communications Commission, the major "incumbent" phone and cable companies -- such as AT&T -- control 98 percent of the business. Telecom industry critics say that these giants gained their power through years of deregulation and lax government oversight. Now many fear that the phone and cable firms, with their enormous market power, will hold enormous sway over what Americans do online. Specifically, AT&T has hinted that it plans to charge Web companies a kind of toll to send data at the highest speeds down DSL lines into its subscribers' homes. The plan would make AT&T a gatekeeper of media in your home. Under the proposal, the tens of millions of people who get their Internet service from AT&T might only be able to access heavy-bandwidth applications -- such as audio, video and Internet phone service -- from the companies that have paid AT&T a fee. Meanwhile, firms that don't pay -- perhaps Google, Yahoo, Skype, YouTube, Salon, or anyone else -- would be forced to use a smaller and slower section of the AT&T network, what Internet pioneer Vint Cerf calls a "dirt road" on the Internet. AT&T's idea, its critics say, would shrink the vast playground of the Internet into something resembling the corporate strip mall of cable TV. The fears have been deepened by AT&T's new heft. Early in March, AT&T announced that it will spend $67 billion to acquire BellSouth, the phone company that serves nine states in the Southeast. The merger will make AT&T the nation's largest telecom company, and the seventh-largest corporation of any kind. According to one study, the new AT&T will take in almost a quarter of all money American households spend on communications services. In addition to maintaining a near monopoly on local phone and DSL service in 22 states, the new AT&T would provide land-line long-distance service throughout the country; cellular coverage through its subsidiary Cingular, the nation's largest wireless carrier; and soon, even television broadcasts to millions of Americans. The government is expected to approve the AT&T-BellSouth deal, but the merger has already prompted debate in Congress and at the FCC over how this new behemoth may control content online. Currently, there are few rules governing what broadband companies can do on their network lines; if AT&T wanted to, for instance, it could give you only slowed-down access to the iTunes store unless Apple paid it a cut of every song you buy. To fight back, online companies like Apple and Amazon, along with Internet policy experts and engineers, are pushing the government to draw up a set of rules to ensure what they call "network neutrality." The rules, debated this past February in a Senate hearing, would force broadband companies to treat all data on the Internet equally, preventing them from charging content companies for priority delivery into your house. AT&T and other broadband companies oppose laws to restrict how they operate online -- the free market, they say, will ensure an even playing field. In 2005, phone companies poured nearly $30 million into lobbying to ensure that the telecom industry remains free of regulation. The battle may sound wonky but its outcome could well determine the shape of tomorrow's media universe. Increasingly, we're all using the Internet for much more than surfing the Web; film, music, TV and phone companies are looking at the network as the primary channel for delivering media into our homes, and AT&T and other telecom firms are spending billions to deploy deliciously fast fiber-optic lines to handle the expected traffic. The regulatory tangle between broadband providers and Web companies over network neutrality reflects a more fundamental fight over precious communications real estate -- a battle for control of the lines that will serve as our main conduit for media in the future. Each side predicts dire consequences if its opponents win. Jim Ciccone, AT&T's senior executive vice president for external affairs, says that if broadband service is regulated, AT&T won't be able to recoup its costs for building these new lines -- "and then we don't build the network." The Web firms say that if the big broadband companies are allowed to charge content firms for access to your house, we'll see the Internet go the way of other deregulated media -- just like TV and radio, where a small band of big companies used their wealth to swallow up consumer choice. If broadband companies get their way, says Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, the Internet will one day feature nothing much more exciting than "the digital equivalent of endless episodes of 'I Love Lucy.'" In 2003, when Internet policy experts first began discussing network neutrality, their primary worry was that broadband providers would strike deals with certain Web sites to block people's access to competing sites or services online. For instance, what if Comcast worked with Barnes and Noble so that every time a Comcast Internet user pointed his browser to Amazon.com, he was instead redirected to BN.com? FCC officials have frowned upon the possibility of ISPs blocking certain Web sites, but they have not regulated against it; Paul Misener, the vice president for global public policy at Amazon.com, argues that "under current rules," a company like AT&T "would be able to block us without punishment." Although such actions are theoretically possible, most experts concede that broadband firms wouldn't do something as brazen as blocking customers from going anywhere on the Web; such actions would probably prompt immediate regulation. Now Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo and others argue that broadband firms like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are looking to institute a more subtle kind of discrimination. They're looking to "prioritize content from some content companies over others," Misener says. In fact, AT&T is not at all secret about its plans. In an interview with BusinessWeek magazine last year, Edward Whitacre, AT&T's CEO, took a hard line against Web companies that oppose paying for high-speed access to AT&T's customers. "What they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," he said of Google and Microsoft. "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!" The pipes Whitacre is referring to are those his company is building under a plan it calls Project Lightspeed, a multibillion-dollar initiative to install high-capacity fiber-optic Internet lines into thousands of residential neighborhoods across AT&T's service area. The company expects to serve about 18 million households with fiber-optic lines by 2008; Verizon has similar plans to roll out fiber lines. The new pipes will dramatically improve Internet speeds to home customers. Today a typical DSL line downloads data at about 1 or 2 Mbps, and cable modems run about double that rate. Advanced fiber-optic systems will see download speeds of at least 25 to 30 Mbps. Today's DSL can barely download a single standard-quality video stream in real time. In tests AT&T recently ran in San Antonio, Project Lightspeed lines carried three standard-quality streams and one high-definition stream down the line simultaneously. What will customers do with all this broadband capacity? As the phone companies envision it, we'll use it to watch a lot of TV. Both Verizon and AT&T are betting heavily on a technology called IPTV, a service that delivers television signals into people's homes over the new fiber-optic Internet lines. According to the phone companies, IPTV will be a boon to consumers, delivering high-quality video and advanced services like TV shows "on demand," and providing much-needed competition to cable companies. What's not clear, though, is what else -- besides watching TV -- customers will be allowed to do with the new lines. This is the heart of the fight over network neutrality. If you subscribe to AT&T's Project Lightspeed service, will you be able to use the 30 Mbps line coming into your house for, say, downloading high-definition movies from Apple, high-definition home videos from YouTube, or some other bandwidth-heavy application we haven't yet dreamed of? Or, instead, will AT&T reserve the line for its own TV service and for data from other companies that pay a fee -- thereby making AT&T the arbiter of content in your home? At the moment, phone companies are cagey about their plans. What they will say is they're not going to stop their customers from getting to any site or service on the Internet. "Let me be clear: AT&T will not block anyone's access to the public Internet, nor will we degrade anyone's quality of service," Whitacre said in a speech to a trade conference in Las Vegas recently. "Period. End of story." But just because AT&T won't block people from accessing Google's videos doesn't mean it will give Google's videos the same status on the broadband pipe as other content -- meaning that while AT&T's TV service may come in at high-definition quality, those from competing firms might only run at standard-definition. Indeed, AT&T and other network operators are building their networks in a way that would make it possible to split up network traffic into various lanes -- fast, slow, medium -- and then to decide what kind of data, and whose data, goes where, based on who's paid what. Broadband companies argue that engineering their networks in this way will benefit customers in two ways. First, they say, splitting up the Internet into several lanes will generally improve its efficiency -- the network will simply run better if it's more logically managed. The phone companies' second argument concerns cost. If AT&T builds a blindingly fast new Internet line to your house but only allows some firms -- firms that pay -- to get the fastest service, it can significantly offset the costs of the build-out. And that's good for you, AT&T says, because if the company can charge the likes of Apple and Google to pay for the line, it doesn't have to charge you. "I think what we're saying is friendly to the consumer," Ciccone says. "If we're building the capacity, what we're doing is trying to defray some of the cost from consumers to the business end of this." AT&T's critics don't buy this claim. They argue that by slicing up the Internet into different lanes, broadband companies are violating one of the basic network design principles responsible for the Internet's rise and amazing success. They add, too, that there's no proof that AT&T's plan would result in reduced broadband costs for home customers. Instead, consumers could lose out in a big way. If AT&T's plan comes to pass, the dynamic Internet, where innovation rules and where content companies rise and fall on their own merit, would shrivel. By exploiting the weaknesses in current laws, telecom firms would gain an extraordinarily lucrative stake in the new media universe. In the same way that a corporation like Clear Channel controls the radio airwaves, companies like AT&T could become kingmakers in the online world, granting priority to content from which they stand to profit most. Britney Spears, anyone? To understand why critics worry about the future of the Internet in the absence of what they call network neutrality, it helps to look at the underlying philosophy of the ubiquitous network. Engineers are fond of describing the Internet as a "dumb network," a designation that's meant to be a compliment. Unlike other large communications systems -- phone or cable networks -- the Internet was designed without a specific application in mind. The engineers who built the network didn't really know what it would be used for, so they kept it profoundly simple, making sure that the network performed very few functions of its own. Where other networks use a kind of "intelligence" to define what is and what isn't allowed on a system, the various machines that make up the Internet don't usually examine or act upon data; they just push it where it needs to go. The smallest meaningful bit of information on the Internet is called a "packet"; anything you send or receive on the network, from an e-mail to an iTunes song, is composed of many packets. On the Internet, all packets are equal. Any one packet hurtling over the pipe to my house is treated more or less the same way as any other packet, regardless of where it comes from or what kind of information -- video, voice or just text -- it represents. If I were to download a large Microsoft Word e-mail attachment at the same time that I were to stream a funny clip from Salon's Video Dog, the Internet won't make any effort to give the video clip more space on my line than the document, even if I may want it to. If the connection is too slow to accommodate both files at the same time, my video might slow down and sputter as the Word file hogs up the line -- to the network, bits are bits, and a video is no more important than a Word file. The notion that the Internet shouldn't perform special functions on network data is known as the "end-to-end principle." The idea, first outlined by computer scientists Jerome Saltzer, David Clark, and David Reed in 1984, is widely seen as a key to the network's success. It is precisely because the Internet doesn't have any intelligence of its own that it's been so useful for so many different kinds of things; the network works consistently and evenly for everyone, and, therefore, everyone is free to add their own brand of intelligence to it. Today's largest broadband firms, though, aren't accustomed to running dumb networks built on the end-to-end principle. AT&T ran the phone network at its own behest -- and the company usually benefited from it. Historically, in the telecom industry, "there's been this instinct toward control," says Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and a co-author of "Who Controls the Internet?" At firms like AT&T and Verizon, both of which have roots in the monopolistic old AT&T, there's now an effort afoot to reengineer parts of the Internet by introducing more intelligence to manage and control data. One firm that has been a vocal proponent of prioritizing data is Cisco, the giant network equipment company whose products currently power much of the Internet. "We think that as people use their broadband connections more intensively, the need to manage traffic is going to increase," says Jeff Campbell, director of government affairs at Cisco. The company has designed an array of products that allows service providers like AT&T and Verizon to scrutinize everything on their networks extremely closely. One Cisco brochure (PDF) touts a system called the Cisco Service Control Engine, which is described as "a deep packet inspection engine that helps enable service providers to identify, classify, monitor, and control traffic" on the network. "Deep packet inspection" refers to the practice of looking at each slice of data on the network and determining exactly what kind of information it is -- whether it's part of an e-mail message, or a bit of a video file you're trading over Bittorrent, or perhaps a New York Times news story on the Web. After examining each packet and deciding which user asked for it, where it's coming from, and what application it's meant for, the Cisco system allows network operators to assign various network privileges to the data. During a time of network congestion, data that is "delay-sensitive" -- like part of a voice phone call or a streaming video -- can be moved along the network in a hurry, while packets that represent less urgent data -- peer-to-peer file transfers, or downloads of e-mail attachments -- might be put on a slow lane. In this sort of network, were I to download a video file and a Word file at the same time, the network would notice it, and may decide to slow down the Word file so that the video file plays smoothly. Many Web entrepreneurs and network policy experts think that giving priority to some traffic is good for the Internet. In February, Mark Cuban, the billionaire media entrepreneur and sports-team owner, posted a rant on his blog decrying the current state of network traffic management, and calling on broadband firms to offer high-speed service for some kinds of data. "There are some basic facts about the Internet that remind me of driving on the 405 in Los Angeles," Cuban wrote. "Traffic jams happen. There is no end in sight for those traffic jams. The traffic jams are worse at certain times of the day. Whether it's the 405 or the Internet." If we use carpool lanes to allow some cars to bypass traffic on our freeways, Cuban asked, why not add HOV lanes to the Internet, so that media that needs fast service can get to its destination more quickly? Cuban is a co-founder of HDNet, a high-definition cable and satellite TV network, and has a particular interest in seeing the Internet give special treatment to certain files. In fact, the new Internet schemes are specifically designed to boost audio and video on the network. If your Word file slows down for a half-second during download, you're not going to notice it; but if your Internet phone call has a half-second interruption, it would annoy you to no end. Opponents of neutrality regulations say other applications currently being designed for the Internet will only work well if the network is improved. For instance, imagine if you were watching an Internet TV broadcast of a basketball game that allowed you to switch to different camera angles during the game. That program would be only useful, says Campbell of Cisco, if the camera angles appeared instantly, not seconds after you switched. Other advocates point to new medical diagnostic devices with which hospitals can monitor the status of patients at home; in that situation, it would seem obvious to give such traffic priority. "I guess we could leave the Internet in the dark ages and leave everything as an unprioritized, unorganized mass where all bits are treated the same," says Campbell. "But we think good network management technology will improve overall performance and consumers will have a better experience in the long term." Despite Cisco's position, there is fractious division among network engineers on whether prioritizing certain time-sensitive traffic would actually improve network performance. Introducing intelligence into the Internet also introduces complexity, and that can reduce how well the network works. Indeed, one of the main reasons scientists first espoused the end-to-end principle is to make networks efficient; it seemed obvious that analyzing each packet that passes over the Internet would add some computational demands to the system. Gary Bachula, vice president for external affairs of Internet2, a nonprofit project by universities and corporations to build an extremely fast and large network, argues that managing online traffic just doesn't work very well. At the February Senate hearing, he testified that when Internet2 began setting up its large network, called Abilene, "our engineers started with the assumption that we should find technical ways of prioritizing certain kinds of bits, such as streaming video, or video conferencing, in order to assure that they arrive without delay. As it developed, though, all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth. With enough bandwidth in the network, there is no congestion and video bits do not need preferential treatment." Today, Bachula continued, "our Abilene network does not give preferential treatment to anyone's bits, but our users routinely experiment with streaming HDTV, hold thousands of high-quality two-way videoconferences simultaneously, and transfer huge files of scientific data around the globe without loss of packets." Not only is adding intelligence to a network not very useful, Bachula pointed out, it's not very cheap. A system that splits data into various lanes of traffic requires expensive equipment, both within the network and at people's homes. Right now, broadband companies are spending a great deal on things like set-top boxes, phone routers and other equipment for their advanced services. "Simple is cheaper," Bachula said. "Complex is costly" -- a cost that may well be passed on to customers. Expensive as they may be, the new network schemes will allow for myriad moneymaking opportunities. The new technology will allow AT&T and company to reserve the fast lane for the highest bidders. And AT&T says such a plan is perfectly fair. "It costs a lot to maintain and operate a network," says Ciccone of AT&T. "You don't pay for that by offering a raw pipe. We didn't build a copper line network a hundred years ago so people could do whatever they want on it. We offered a phone service. And you don't build networks so that somebody else can necessarily use them for free. We have the capability through dedicated lines of service for offering a high-quality product. There's a service there. We should be able to offer that in the market." Ciccone is particularly galled by the fact that those who are the most opposed to AT&T's plans are enormous firms -- such as Google -- that want to make money by offering video services online. "This really is just coming from a couple companies who have plans to stream movies," he says. "They hide behind the guise of the innovator in the garage who's building the next big Google. That's a lot of hooey because the little guy is not streaming movies. This is about the companies that want to stream movies, and they want to not just compete with us but with cable companies in doing so. What disturbs them is that we're building network capacity to be able to accommodate ourselves with a very high-quality product, and the Googles won't be able to deliver the same quality." Technology companies do say they fear AT&T's network won't provide a level playing field, and that AT&T's competitors won't be able to deliver videos that work as well as AT&T's content. Networks have finite space, and it is a fact of network engineering that when some data is given a priority on the network, other data will be pushed aside. At the Senate hearing, Stanford Law professor and Internet policy expert Lawrence Lessig argued that this will put companies or individuals that can't pay for high-quality service at an enormous disadvantage, "reducing application or content competition on the Internet." In the past year, streaming-video Web sites have proliferated on the Internet, and some of the most popular services have come from start-ups like YouTube. Under AT&T's plan, flush firms like Google would be able to pay for all the space on the line, leaving the smaller guys out of luck. The Internet has long been a meritocracy, where smart and creative companies can act quickly and beat out established players. That wouldn't be so on AT&T's Internet. Broadband operators respond by declaring they will offer high-speed services to all companies, big or small, and anybody will be able to pay for a spot in the fast lane. "Generally companies shy away from doing exclusive deals," says AT&T's Ciccone. "You don't say I'm only going to provide telephone service to only one bank." But as Amazon's Misener points out, "This is a zero-sum game. If you prioritize anyone's content you necessarily degrade someone else's. That's how it works." When you convert one lane on a freeway into a toll lane, it's true that you make traffic better for cars that can pay. But you also make traffic worse for cars that cannot. Indeed, that's what makes AT&T's plan so lucrative. The company can't offer fast service to everyone. If it did offer all companies access to the fast lane for a low fee, the lane would soon become congested and nobody would have an incentive to pay. To make the most money, the network operators may charge just a few firms huge sums to ride on the pipe. This means that one or two companies could lock in a preferred position on the network. And AT&T's own services could benefit greatly from the new plan. For instance, AT&T offers a voice-over-the-Internet phone plan called CallVantage that competes with Skype, a free service owned by eBay. "Let's say there's a certain amount of revenue in voice services, maybe $125 billion in voice," explains Wu. If AT&T determines that letting Skype onto the fast lane will cause it to lose customers and, thus, revenue, it could decide to only let Skype ride the slow lanes. "If you're going to lose $10 billion to Skype by letting them on, why give them that money?" Wu says that under current regulations, this practice would be perfectly legal. While such deals may be legal, AT&T says, they would be bad for business. If a broadband company didn't allow a popular service like Skype a spot in the fast lane, consumers would choose a different provider. "If you do make dumb decisions, your customers go somewhere else," Ciccone says. "Nobody wants to offer half a service with only special deals or arrangements for something of that nature. You're competing against other companies that may do it differently." But if you don't like your Internet provider, would you really be able to go elsewhere? Cerf, who is now Google's chief Internet "evangelist," pointed out in the Senate hearing that only 53 percent of Americans now have a choice between cable modem and DSL high-speed Internet service at home. According to the FCC, 28 percent of Americans have only one of these options for broadband Internet access, and 19 percent have no option at all. Moreover, phone and cable companies have been trying to reduce competition in the broadband business even further. They convinced the FCC to allow them to prohibit rival Internet service providers -- such as Earthlink -- from offering high-speed net access on phone- and cable-company-owned lines. (Phone and cable companies do lease their lines to independent ISPs like Earthlink, but under current rules they can decline to do so at any time.) AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have also pushed hard to stop cities across the country from launching free or low-cost municipal wireless Internet systems. In this marketplace, if your DSL or cable modem provider begins to favor some content over others, you will have very little recourse. Even if you could choose another provider, doing so isn't easy. "It's not like there are two supermarkets in town and if you don't like one you can go to the other," Amazon's Misener says. He adds that "every economic theory we know suggests that when there's a duopoly" -- in this case between cable broadband and phone broadband -- "there will be tacit collusion in the market." So even if you could choose between broadband or cable service, eventually, like radio stations in any metro area, you will find they all sound the same. Or think about your cable lineup. When your provider doesn't carry the TV network you like, what choice do you have? Almost none. At the moment, there are very few regulations that outline what broadband companies can and cannot do with content on their lines. So far, the FCC has only been willing to outline some principles to which firms should adhere. In a speech in Boulder, Colo., in February 2004, Michael Powell, the former FCC head, said that he didn't see the need for regulation. Instead, he set out a list of "Internet freedoms" that he "challenged the broadband network industry to preserve." Specifically, Powell called on high-speed network providers to allow their customers to access any legal content on the Internet, use any legal applications, and plug in any devices to their networks. The FCC later outlined these principles in a "policy statement," and imposed these conditions on Verizon and AT&T as temporary conditions of the mergers the companies underwent last year. But while these "freedoms" allow customers access to any services, they don't outline whether AT&T can give some content priority on the network. In addition, there is a debate about whether Powell's "challenge" is enforceable at all. Last year, when one small North Carolina ISP began blocking Internet voice calls on its network, the FCC quickly stepped in and fined the firm. Telecom firms say the incident proves that the FCC has enough authority to block egregious behavior. But AT&T's Ciccone also acknowledges that adhering to the FCC's vision is a "voluntary commitment. It's not a rule or a regulation of the FCC. They laid out the broadband principles and our compliance is purely a voluntary act on our part." Wu explains the issue this way: "Right now it's like the ghost of Michael Powell has his finger in the dike" protecting us against the worst behavior of big companies. But if you were starting a new service on the Internet, "do you want to bet your business on the ghost of Michael Powell?" Today, as numerous proposals for reforming telecom law float around Congress, broadband firms are fighting hard against a neutral network, and apparently winning. (AT&T may certainly be on the government's good side, as it has been secretly allowing the National Security Agency to monitor its phone and Internet lines, according to a retired AT&T technician, as reported by Wired News.) In a party-line vote last week, Republicans on a House subcommittee defeated one neutrality proposal. According to many observers, another bill in the Senate, offered by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, faces similar dim prospects. In addition to lobbying, broadband firms have launched a campaign aimed at urging Americans to join their fight. Large telecom firms back a "coalition" called Hands Off the Internet, which argues that instituting network neutrality amounts to government "regulation" of the Internet. On its Web site, the group -- which is funded by, among other companies, AT&T, and is headed by former Bill Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry -- beseeches, "Join us and say NO to government regulation of the Internet!" Opponents say that regulation is the only way to save the Internet from the likes of AT&T. "They would have the pipe split between the public Internet -- which might get 1 Mbps speeds -- and a toll lane on the rest of the 100 Mbps pipe they're laying," Tod Cohen, the director of government affairs at eBay, says of the AT&T's plans. By "public Internet," Cohen is referring to today's Internet, the Internet of Google, Blogger, Skype, YouTube and Flickr, services that came out of nowhere and are now indispensable. "They're saying, 'We'll leave the public Internet to be like the public-access station. But if you want to be on one of the fast channels, you have to pay.'" Consumer advocate Chester sees a dark future for the Internet if big companies like AT&T gain unregulated control. "I think the public requires a serious national debate about what this means and what it's going to look like," he says. "There's a basic assumption that the Internet is going to remain forever open and diverse and affordable. I'm saying we should be cautious. We should really understand what these proposals mean for the kind of diverse voices we would want to see online." http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/04/17/toll/ ![]() Deface A Torrent Site: A Cool Howto! Today we are going to show you how to deface any torrent site with minimal effort. The designers of a lot of torrent sites blindly trust the content of a torrent file. Reason being is because both Windows and Linux dont allow tags in filenames. But what if there was a program that allows you to manipulate the internal files in a .torrent file? Well I can tell you this: When a torrentsite does not clean the output (htmlentities) then they are fucked (snatch: proper fucked). I can also tell you that almost none of the big torrent site uses clean output when it comes to displaying a torrent’s internal files (ie” mininova). So lets get started then, here’s what you need: * A torrent editor (or a hex editor) * Linux (or a hex editor) * A torrent file (or more) Open the torrent file with the program and locate the internal files, replace their names with something like this: matrix<h1>H@xor OwnZ y0 M0mM@</h1>.avi and save the torrent file. Next thing to do is upload the torrent to any torrentsite that has this vulnerability and your done. Next time someone opens that page they will see your message loud and clear. Think what you could do with javascript. http://www.devnova.org/2006/04/22/de...-a-cool-howto/ ![]() RIAA Chan Case Dismissal p2pnet The Big Four Organized Music cartel's mis-named Recording Industry Association of America created a nasty mess for itself in Michigan. Fronting for Vivendi Universal (France), EMI (Britain), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and the only American company, Warner Music, it went after the Chan family, there, trying various ploys in fruitless bids to pillory schoolgirl Britanny Chan, now 14, and her mother, Candy, as file sharing thieves. With file sharing, nothing has been stolen and no one has been deprived of anything they own or owned, but for the Big Four, that's a minor detail, just as claiming they're being ruined by file sharing when in fact they're raking it in, is considered to be accepable PR. They failed with Mrs Chan, represented by John Hermann, so they turned their attentions to her daughter Britanny, who was 13, at the time. They wanted a Guardian Ad Litem appointed. Why would they want that? Their reasons weren't clear but a guardian ad litem's fees could have reached many thousands of dollars. Given that the RIAA was also demanding an order to force Brittany's parents to pay for the guardianship, it may have amounted to yet another terror tactic. But all to no avail. The RIAA, which has gone through three law firms to date, blew it there as well. It didn't bother to provide documents that had been asked for, despite efforts by the court, "to work with the Plaintiffs in advancing this case". In that light, the RIAA's failure to do so was, " inexplicable," wrote judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff. Below is the full March 27 court dismissal document from the link on Ray Beckerman's Recording Industry vs The People. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN SOUTHERN DIVISION PRIORITY RECORDS L.L.C., ELEKTRA ENTERTAINMENT GROUP INC., MOTOWN RECORDS COMPANY, L.P., WARNER BROS. RECORDS, INC., SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT INC., UMG RECORDINGS, INC., and ARISTA RECORDS, INC., CASE NO. 05-CV-73727-DT HON. LAWRENCE P. ZATKOFF Plaintiffs, vs. BRITTANY CHAN, Defendant. / OPINION AND ORDER I. INTRODUCTION This matter is before the Court on Plaintiffs’ Response to the Court’s Opinion and Order Regarding the Appointment and Payment of a Guardian Ad Litem for Defendant Brittany Chan (Docket #8). For the reasons that follow, Plaintiffs’ cause of action is DISMISSED. II. BACKGROUND This is the second cause of action that Plaintiffs have filed against members of the Chan family. The first cause of action was filed in late 2004 against Defendant’s mother, Candy Chan. Plaintiffs eventually asked the Court to dismiss Candy Chan with prejudice, and in May 2005, the Court dismissed the case against Candy Chan, with prejudice. Four months later, Plaintiffs filed the instant action against the current Defendant, Brittany Chan, who is now 15 or 16 years old. The Summons and Complaint (together with a motion to appoint guardian ad litem) were served on Brittany Chan c/o Candy Chan. To date, no answer to the Complaint nor any response to the instant motion has been filed by Brittany Chan or anyone on her behalf. On January 5, 2006, the Court heard Plaintiffs’ arguments with respect to its Motion to Appoint Guardian Ad Litem. On February 13, 2006, the Court issued an Opinion and Order denying Plaintiffs’ request to have the Saginaw County Probate Court appoint a guardian ad litem from its alleged revolving list of guardian ad litems. In finding that it was not feasible to use a guardian ad litem appointed from Saginaw County Probate Court, and expressing the Court’s concern with how a guardian ad litem would be paid during the pendency of this action, the Court ordered “Plaintiffs to submit to the Court, in writing within 15 days of the date of this Order, a functional proposal for the appointment of a guardian ad litem for Brittany Chan, as well as a manner of paying such guardian ad litem during the pendency of this action.” On March 13, 2006 (within the extension period subsequently granted by the Court), Plaintiffs filed their response. III. ANALYSIS In the course of Plaintiffs’ actions against the Chan family members, the Court has exercised great care to ensure that the rights and claims of all parties involved are respected. To that end, the Court held a hearing on Plaintiffs’ Motion for Appointment of Guardian Ad Litem in January 2006 and called the Saginaw County Probate Court to determine whether the appointment of a guardian from its revolving list was possible. In learning that it was not, the Court denied Plaintiffs’ motion without prejudice and ordered that Plaintiffs provide the Court with “a functional proposal for the appointment of a guardian ad litem for Brittany Chan, as well as a manner of paying such guardian ad litem during the pendency of this action.” The purpose of doing so was to enable the case to proceed and assist the Plaintiffs in ensuring that it did so. In its response, Plaintiffs respectfully declined the Court’s suggestion to have Plaintiffs pay into escrow Defendant’s guardian ad litem fees and asked the Court to look to the Defendant and her parents for payment first. In support of that argument, Plaintiffs argue: (1) Plaintiffs have already been damaged as a result of Defendant’s conduct (the Court notes, however, that such conduct is alleged and not proven); (2) Plaintiffs would be victimized a second time if they had to pay her fees now because if they did so, it might be tantamount to having them pay her fees at the end of the matter; (3) Plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits and thus not legally responsible for the costs of the guardian ad litem; (4) There is no reason at this point to believe that Defendant could not pay the fees herself, as neither Defendant nor her parents have indicated that she lacks the resources to pay for the guardian ad litem; (5) The parental responsibilities of Defendant’s parents for their daughter’s actions outweigh any responsibility to pay for her defense that Plaintiffs have and Defendant’s parents have the means to pay for such defense; (6) In some states, parents that are financially able are required to reimburse the court for the cost of guardian ad litem services (interestingly, the only cases cited are those involving child custody or visitation cases where no third party is involved); and (7) Although a guardian ad litem may provide desired advice and assistance to Defendant, it is ultimately a decision for Defendant and her parents as to whether she has that assistance. The Court shall not address the merits of Plaintiffs’ argument regarding the payment of a guardian ad litem for Defendant, however, because Plaintiffs have failed to respond to the Court’s order to submit a functional proposal for the appointment of a guardian ad litem for Defendant. In fact, other than in the caption of Plaintiffs’ response, the Plaintiffs have not even acknowledged that such an order was issued. The Court finds Plaintiffs’ failure to respond to the order inexplicable in light of the efforts of the Court to work with the Plaintiffs in advancing this case and the fact that Plaintiffs were ordered to provide a proposal. Accordingly, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs’ failure to comply with an order of the Court justifies the dismissal of Plaintiffs’ action. IV. CONCLUSION For the above reasons, the Court hereby ORDERS that the Plaintiffs’ cause of action against Defendant Brittany Chan be DISMISSED. Judgment shall be entered accordingly. http://p2pnet.net/story/8603 ![]() Daewoo Electronics Uses LabVIEW FPGA and CompactRIO to Develop the World’s First Holographic Storage Device Press Release - Byoungbok Kang, Daewoo Electronics The Challenge: Overcoming the technological limitations of traditional two-dimensional storage devices to achieve greater capacity and faster data retrieval. The Solution: Developing the world’s first servo motion control system for three-dimensional holographic digital data storage on continuous rotation disks using the National Instruments LabVIEW FPGA Module and National Instruments CompactRIO. Daewoo Electronics has developed the world's first holographic storage device using LabVIEW FPGA and CompactRIO. Holographic digital data storage (HDDS) technology is one of the most promising new technologies on the horizon for the optical storage industry. Traditional data storage technologies, which store individual bits of information as magnetic or optical variations on the surface of the medium, are approaching physical limits. However, holographic storage promises to accelerate data transfer rates to about one billion bits per second, reduce access times to just tens of microseconds, and increase storage densities toward a theoretical maximum of one trillion bits per cubic centimeter. By encoding data throughout the three-dimensional volume of the storage medium and performing recording and retrieval using large parallel memory blocks called pages, holographic data storage overcomes the limitations of traditional two-dimensional technologies such as DVD. Using CompactRIO to Prototype the Daewoo HDDS System Our HDDS prototype consists of two main subsystems – an electro-optical motion control system based on the NI CompactRIO 3M gate FPGA series and a video decoding system based on an 8M gate Xilinx FPGA board. The CompactRIO system controls a linear motor, a stepper motor, a galvo mirror, and a CMOS camera. Each motion control loop requires precise control, so we use feedback signals to control and detect data. Unlike a traditional computing board, CompactRIO lets us customize pulse generator timing to the resolution of a single FPGA clock using the NI LabVIEW FPGA Module. To eliminate slipping, we developed complex motor control algorithms by creating custom mathematical functions for acceleration and deceleration. We separately produced and connected the drive circuitry for each of the three motor types to the CompactRIO I/O modules. In addition to motion control, CompactRIO communicates with the video decoding FPGA board developed with our own signal processing technology for video retrieval and CMOS camera control. CompactRIO also controls the data transfer rate by checking the quantity of data accumulated in the buffer in front of the MPEG decoder, which varies greatly with speed. The system performed reliably during demonstrations at the 2005 Korea Electronics Show (KES), without any communication or operational errors among devices and boards, giving Daewoo a demonstrable technological edge in the emerging field of holographic digital data storage. Reaping the Benefits of the HDDS Prototype System Our prototype HDDS system is the first of its kind. Most of the system’s components required independent research and development, because no other such systems exist for reference or imitation. The cost estimate of our original option – using a DSP board – was in the tens of thousands of dollars, with many months required for development. Using flexible LabVIEW software, together with CompactRIO hardware, we developed our system for only a few thousand dollars without compromising performance. Furthermore, the development period was only one month, earning the system industry commendation at its first display at KES 2005. Rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars and many months of development to design a custom DSP board, our team was able to develop this groundbreaking HDDS system quickly and economically using NI CompactRIO, high-speed FPGA technology, and easy-to-use NI LabVIEW software. We were amazed that the project could be completed so quickly and efficiently. http://sine.ni.com/csol/cds/item/vw/p/id/685/nid/124300 ![]() Radio CBS Is Said to Be Seeking to Replace Stern's Replacement Ben Sisario CBS Radio and XM Satellite Radio are in talks to replace David Lee Roth, the morning host on seven CBS stations, with Opie and Anthony, the foulmouthed talk team that has been marquee talent on XM for the last 18 months, according to executives at both companies. In an unusual arrangement that is being closely watched in the radio industry, the deal would split Opie and Anthony's show between satellite and terrestrial stations. For three hours each weekday, Opie and Anthony would do a cleaner version of their usual show — one acceptable under broadcast standards — for the CBS audience, produced in the Midtown Manhattan studios of WFNY (92.3 FM), a CBS station. That portion of the show would also be heard on XM. After that show, the two hosts — whose real names are Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia — would travel to XM's studios nearby for two additional hours of the show, unrestrained. As part of the deal, Opie and Anthony would be allowed to use the end of the CBS show to plug their satellite program, said the executives, who were granted anonymity because the negotiations are still under way. The deal, expected to be completed as early as next week, would provide a needed relief for CBS Radio for the critical morning-commute hours in seven big markets: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and West Palm Beach, Fla. In January, after Mr. Stern moved to Sirius Satellite Radio, CBS introduced his replacements, who included Mr. Roth — the former lead singer of the rock band Van Halen — as well as the radio and television host Adam Carolla and assorted guy-talk teams in other cities. But all of Mr. Stern's replacements have struggled with lower ratings, and Mr. Roth's tenure has been particularly rocky. He has complained on the air of scolding by CBS executives, and he said that he was ill prepared to take on the mantle of a major morning talk show. His program has featured conventional macho chat backed by a constant low-volume buzz of electronic dance music. "In the radio industry, people that heard it just thought it was a train wreck," said Paul Heine, the executive editor of Billboard Radio Bulletin. A full ratings report on Mr. Roth's time at WFNY will not be available until next week, but preliminary data from Arbitron, the radio ratings service, indicate that audiences have shrunk significantly since Mr. Stern left. In New York, the No. 1 radio market in the country, WFNY's ratings on weekday mornings dropped more than 40 percent from the fall of 2005 to the period of December through February. Before going to satellite radio, Opie and Anthony had one of the most popular shows on WNEW-FM in New York. But they were canceled in August 2002 over complaints of indecency when they broadcast a live account, delivered via cellphone, of a couple who were said to be having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral. The news of the talks was first reported on the Web site for Inside Radio, a trade publication. Some analysts saw the deal between XM and CBS as a possible harbinger of more content-sharing deals between terrestrial and satellite radio. "From the beginning," said Sean Ross, a radio analyst with Edison Media Research, "there was always a long view that one day satellite radio could be not a competitor, but an extension." Bill Carter contributed reporting for this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/bu...a/21radio.html ![]() U.S. Presses Payola Inquiry After Settlement Talks Stall Jeff Leeds The Federal Communications Commission intensified its investigation this week into accusations of pay-for-play practices at four of the nation's biggest radio station owners after settlement talks collapsed, agency officials said yesterday. F.C.C. investigators issued requests for documents from the four companies — Clear Channel Communications, CBS Radio, Citadel Broadcasting and Entercom Communications, agency officials said. The F.C.C.'s enforcement unit is looking into accusations that broadcasters violated the law by accepting cash or other compensation in exchange for airplay of specific songs without telling listeners. The information requests illustrate "that the chairman and all of us are fully committed to enforcing the law," an F.C.C. commissioner, Jonathan S. Adelstein, said. Representatives of the radio companies declined to comment or were unavailable yesterday. The requests for information indicate that the inquiry is moving to a more active stage, and it comes after negotiations with the radio companies broke down early this month over the question of penalties. Some broadcasters had offered to pay penalties in the $1 million range, but at least one F.C.C. commissioner was seeking fines as high as $10 million, according to people involved in the talks. Officials said a settlement remained possible. The commission had been criticized by the New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who initiated an investigation of pay for play, or payola, in the recording industry in 2004. Mr. Spitzer's office has reached multimillion-dollar settlements with two of four major record companies, and had been seeking as much as $20 million from Entercom to resolve accusations of payola. After the talks with Entercom stalled, New York officials filed suit against the company last month. Entercom has denied the accusations and is seeking to have the case dismissed. Kevin J. Martin, the F.C.C. chairman, asked investigators to look into the matter of payola in August, after Mr. Spitzer's office announced a settlement with Sony BMG Music Entertainment. More recently, Mr. Spitzer, whose investigators had shared some evidence with F.C.C. officials, criticized the agency for entertaining settlements with the radio companies that amounted to nothing more than a slap on the wrist before investigating more thoroughly. In an interview yesterday, Mr. Spitzer, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor of New York, said he felt gratified by the F.C.C.'s latest action. "Until we have determined the scope of the impropriety," he said, "it is impossible to understand the magnitude of the appropriate remedies that should be in place." The last time the F.C.C. investigated payola accusations, in 2000, it fined two Clear Channel stations a total of $8,000. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/bu.../21payola.html ![]() A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery Kenneth Chang For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else. The sculpture, titled "Kryptos," the Greek word for "hidden," includes an undulating sheet of copper with a message devised by the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, and Edward M. Scheidt, a retired chairman of the C.I.A.'s cryptographic center. The message is broken into four sections, and in 1999, a computer programmer named Jim Gillogly announced he had figured out the first three, which include poetic ramblings by the sculptor and an account of the opening of King Tut's tomb. The C.I.A. then announced that one of its physicists, David Stein, had also deciphered the first three sections a year earlier. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect. Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said. Mr. Sanborn's admission was first reported Thursday by Wired News. Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages online to Chris Hanson, the co-moderator of the "Kryptos" e-mail group. Within an hour, Ms. Dunin figured out what was wrong. The last eight characters of the second section, which describes something possibly hidden on C.I.A. grounds, had been decoded as "IDBYROWS" which people read as "I.D. by rows" or "I.D. by Row S." In an interview yesterday, Mr. Sanborn said he had never meant that at all. To give himself flexibility as he carved the letters into the copper sheet, he had marked certain letters that could be left out. In the second passage, he left out an X separator before these eight letters. "It was purely an act of aesthetics on my part," he said. He said he expected that the encryption method, which relies on the position of the letters, would transform that part of the message into gibberish, and that the solvers would know to go back and reinsert the missing separator. But "remarkably, when you used the same system, it said something that was intelligible," Mr. Sanborn said. He decided to let the code breakers know about the error because "they weren't getting the whole story," he said. When Ms. Dunin reinserted the X, the eight characters became "LAYERTWO." She called Mr. Sanborn again, who confirmed that was the intended message. "It's a surprise, and it's exciting," Ms. Dunin said. That is the first real progress on "Kryptos" in more than six years. Now to figure out what it means. In an e-mail interview, Mr. Gillogly said that the corrected text, "layer two," is "intriguing but scarcely definitive." He added, "Like much of the sculpture, it can be taken in many ways." Mr. Gillogly, who has not worked much on the puzzle in recent years, said he would go back to see if the answer was now apparent. One possibility is that "layer two" is the crucial key for solving the rest of the puzzle. Or it could be a hint that the letters need to be layered atop one another. Mr. Sanborn and Mr. Scheidt have said that even when all of the text is unraveled, other puzzles will remain in "Kryptos." "This new discovery could possibly make it easier to crack and possibly not make it easier to crack," Mr. Sanborn offered unhelpfully. "It may be a dead-end diversion I like to send people on, a primrose lane to nowhere." Mr. Scheidt said it had taken only three or four months to devise a puzzle that has lasted nearly 16 years, adding that only he, Mr. Sanborn and "probably someone at C.I.A." know the answer. For everyone else, the remaining 97 letters of the fourth section remain baffling (the slashes indicate line breaks): ?OBKR/UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO/TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP/VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/us/22puzzle.html ![]() A Battery-Powered Book That You Can Listen to as Often as You Like John Biggs In a world filled with complicated MP3 players and online audio stores, it's a wonder that anyone gets any listening done at all. Playaway hopes to change all that by making an audio book purchase as easy as plopping down a credit card at the airport gift shop. Playaway's MP3 players, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, each contain one unabridged audio book. Titles include "The Da Vinci Code" and "Anansi Boys," with more on the way. The devices come with headphones and a triple-A battery. When you're ready to listen, simply pull a protective tab to get the battery going. The Playaway cannot be loaded with a different book, but you can add it your library and listen to it again and again. A small screen shows the elapsed time, and the device has buttons for fast-forwarding, rewinding, adding bookmarks and skipping chapters. There's even a Voice Speed button, which compresses the audio slightly, reducing the total playing time without sacrificing audio quality. The devices are available at bookshops, retail stores and online for $35 to $50. Owners of iPods may smirk at a one-book-only device, but Playaway may be the simplest and quickest way to get from the store to Chapter 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/te...audiobook.html ![]() Then it oughta be open source Bush: Government Research Developed iPod Marc Perton Apple has long boasted of its culture of innovation, and how this led to such products as the original Mac and the iPod. However, it turns out that, at least in the case of the iPod, Apple had a hidden ally: the US government. During a speech at Tuskegee University, President (and iPod user) George W. Bush told his audience, "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod." While we have to gratefully acknowledge the efforts of government agencies such as DARPA in some of the fields mentioned by the President, we also feel obligated to point out the accomplishments of private companies in the US and abroad, including IBM, Hitachi and Toshiba -- not to mention the Fraunhofer Institute, which developed the original MP3 codec, and codeveloped (with Sony, AT&T and others) the AAC format used by Apple in the iPod. Still, we have to bow down before his Steveness; we knew he was well-connected, but until now we had no idea of his level of influence in the area of government research. Hey, Steve, while you're at it, why not get the government to resolve the display problems plaguing the next-gen video iPod? We're sure they'll get their best minds on it and fix it in no time. http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/20/b...eveloped-ipod/ ![]() Microsoft to Reissue Problem Patch to Fix Lockup Glitches Ryan Naraine For some Windows users, there will be two Patch Tuesdays in April. The Redmond, Wash. software maker plans to rerelease the problematic MS06-015 update on April 25 to correct an issue that has caused system hangs, Windows crashes and the appearance of strange dialog boxes after the original patch was installed. "[We have] re-engineered the MS06-015 update to avoid the conflict altogether," said Stephen Toulouse, program manager in the Microsoft Security Response Center. The company's plan is to target the rerelease only to Windows users who are affected. In a blog entry, Toulouse said the company's patch deployment technologies will have "detection logic" built into them to only offer the revised update to customers who don't have MS06-015 or are having the problem. The glitches, which Microsoft claims affect only a tiny fraction of the 120 million installations of the patch, stem from a new binary called VERCLSID.EXE that validates shell extensions before they are instantiated by the Windows Shell or Windows Explorer. On systems running Hewlett-Packard's Share-to-Web software, Sunbelt's Kerio Personal Firewall and some NVIDIA Drivers, users complained that the new binary stopped responding. This caused some applications to hang when conducting certain operations, like opening a file from the "File open" dialog in an application. Windows users deploying the critical MS06-015 update have also complained about problems accessing special folders like "My Documents" or "My Pictures." Click here to read more about lockups and system crashes caused by the original MS06-015 patch. In addition, the update is causing Microsoft Office applications to stop responding when Office files are saved or opened in the "My Documents" folder, system freezes when opening a file through an application's file/open menu, and lockups when typing a URL into IE. "What the new [re-engineered] update essentially does is simply add the affected third-party software to an 'exception list' so that the problem does not occur. The revised update automates the manual registry key fix," Toulouse explained, referring to a workaround released in a knowledge base article earlier this week. "I want to be real clear about that. When the update is rereleased, it's going to be very much targeted to people who are having the problem, or people who have not installed MS06-015 yet. That means if you have already installed MS06-015 and are not having the problem, there's no action here for you," he added. Click here to read more Microsoft's struggles with the quality of security patches. Separately, a Microsoft spokesman said the company is investigating new reports of patch-related glitches with the MS06-016 cumulative security update that fixes a remote code execution flaw in Outlook Express. He said the company will provide customer guidance once it figures out the reasons for the problems. According to Kent Woerner, a network administrator responsible for managing 300 workstations, the Outlook Express patch caused major breakages. "The address book wouldn't function at all, and users couldn't read or send messages. After I uninstalled [the update], the systems all went right back to normal," he said in an e-mail exchange with eWEEK. Users affected by the Outlook Express glitch have flocked to Microsoft's help and support discussion groups to complain about address book and other associated errors caused by the MS06-016 update. http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/...=176364,00.asp ![]() High-Speed P2P Via Proxyserver p2pnet A small revolution in file-sharing was announced about three years ago: Proxyshare was meant to store data on proxyservers of various ISPs. Once uploaded, files should be available for multiple downloads. The attempts to realize the technique failed 2003 and 2004, now the project returns with completely rewritten code and public testing has started. A few test files are already shared via several proxies. The developer behind the ambitious project have coded eMule-Mods (eg, Hardmule), but Proxyshare will be a standalone file sharing client whose main purpose is to reduce the upstream-bottleneck by using ISPs' fast proxyservers, which usually cache popular web sites, reducing lags and bandwidth usage. gulli.com talked with the developers after they released Build 1.018 for Windows (actual build: 1.020, releases appear in quick sequence, usually several times a week). A linux version will follow soon. gulli.com: Could you explain how Proxyshare works? ProxyShare: I developed a p2p network from scratch. We achieve the maximum speed even with asynchronous DSL as T-DSL 6000, being very popular in Germany. We also reached maximum speed with faster DSL connections. (Note: Asynchronous DSL ist the most popular broadband internet access in Germany, though its not well liked in filesharing networks, upload speed being typically much slower than download). The goal was to combine the best of most filesharing networks: 1) Search as easy as on the eDonkey net 2) Download faster than BitTorrent 3) Very few connections necessary (<10) 4) Only one port necessary 5) Immunity against leechers 6) Security through asynchronous data transfers 7) Easy usage through Sancho GUI 8) Autoconfig of all preferences, assumed the eDonkey default port 4662 is open 9) Runs on WindowsXP and Linux 10) Separate Core and graphic user interface (GUI can be closed in order to save system resources) 11) Supported: Lan, WLAN, ISP-Proxy Transfer, Direct Transfer (Tier1, Tier2, Tier3) Links are formed following the eDonkey-standard, though the eDonkey-network is not used. We use all usable ISP-Proxies (viev the list http://www.proxyshare.com/page.php?1 here), and via our test page everyone can check his ISP after login whether he supports proxyshare or not. gulli.com: Do you think the network will scale? How many uppers are needed for a properly working network? What about storage times on the proxies, do you think ISPs will take measures against the system? ProxyShare: One upper per provider will do the trick. Our traffic is very ISP-friendly, because proxy-traffic usually doesn't need to be paid for, eg, upload/download in Europe doesn't make usage of fibre overseas to the US and vice versa. gulli.com: At least for those having access to the proxyserver of the uploader. How is the file being copied to other proxies? ProxyShare: When a user tries to download from a proxy, he's not directly connected; a copy of the files will be created on the proxy of the downloading user. Then all other users from the same ISP can download the file from this proxy at full speed. Upload or copy is necessary just once - afterwards the file is cached for all downloaders using the same ISP. gulli.com: That's how download works when someones connected via AOL and the file upped is just available on, let's say, proxies from T-Online? ProxyShare: The data transfer between ISPs is slowed down to tier3 speed, but this works without any problems, Yes. gulli.com: What about security? There are some popular features integrated regarding security - local encryption of shared files, the announced stealth options. On the other hand, you recently said users were suspicious, wondering how the fast download actually work, suspecting legal enforcers behind the software. Are there security features like anonymous upload, and why should one trust your code while the sources are kept secret? ProxyShare: Proxyshare uses Truecrypt, generating an encrypted virtual device on the users harddisk where shared files are stored. Shared and downloaded files are secure this way, allowing no third person to get access to these data in case your computer is seized. Security on the network is comparable to eMule or BitTorrent. Downloaders are not visible to the uploader. More security features are planned and will be implemented soon. gulli.com: I don't see any ads integrated into the client. Do you plan advertisements, are there other reasons why you are developing this network? ProxyShare: We're planning to integrade banner-ads in the future. But our main goal is to create the "perfect" file sharing system. I dislike any existing p2p for some reason. eDonkey is slow. Torrent usually only offers a small number of files. Freenet is unusuable. gulli.com: As things are now, how do client and network perform? ProxyShare: Actual disadvantage: we've just started. We haven't got many users, nor do we share many files. Yesterday, I loaded a testfile, 350 MB at an average speed of 510k, in 11 minutes - to give some numbers. It's a new feeling, using p2p, which can't be compared to eMule or torrent. gulli.com: Well, thanks for the interview, and we wish you successful development and many beta testers. This sounds quite promising - sources will be kept closed, though. People were sceptical on the capability of the network to scale - more users means more data, and Proxyspace is limited. Documentation is rare, as it is in most of the cases of beginning projects. Growing numbers of users should help each other with hints and tricks – using Proxyshare, the usual problems of file sharing occur: connection problems, firewalled ports, as discussed in the support forums on the Proxyshare homepage. Actual version: Build 1.021 (download): http://www.proxyshare.com/download.php Support forum: http://www.proxyshare.com/e107_plugi...iewforum.php?2 Extended version of this interview (German): http://www.gulli.com/news/proxyshare...ed-2006-04-19/ http://p2pnet.net/story/8609 ![]() US Steps Up Fight On Child Porn The Bush administration is pushing for tougher measures to combat child pornography online. The proposals were announced by US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, who said that the net had created an "epidemic" of child pornography. He said the internet encouraged paedophiles to create "new and increasingly vulgar material". The comments were made in a speech at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia. Mr Gonzales highlighted the problem of adults preying on children in chat rooms and networking sites with the purpose of making sexual contact. He quoted a study that said one in every five children is solicited online. "It is simply astonishing how many predators there are, and how aggressive they act," he said. Out of control In his speech, Mr Gonzales also detailed examples of graphic sexual and physical abuse investigated by the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. It included what he described as "molestation on demand", where a child is abused as others watch live through streaming video. Some of the offences were committed abroad but viewed by people in the US. New technology such as file-sharing meant that law enforcement agencies are no longer able to control child pornography. "Sadly, the internet age has created a vicious cycle in which child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more sadistic, using younger and younger children," he said. Legal action In response, he announced proposed changes in the law under the Child Pornography and Obscenity Prevention Amendments of 2006. The proposals have been sent to Congress and include new laws that will require ISPs to report child pornography and bolster penalties for those companies that fail to do so. Mr Gonzales also said that he is also investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders. "The investigation and prosecution of child predators depends critically on the availability of evidence that is often in the hands of internet service providers," he said. "Unfortunately, the failure of some internet service providers to keep records has hampered our ability to conduct investigations in this area." In the UK some ISP's have already taken the initiative on this issue. Companies like BT already block access to sites it believes contain child pornography. The telecoms giant says that its servers block 35,000 attempts to view child porn each day http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/4929578.stm ![]() Toon will get you 20 Man Sentenced To 20 Years for Child Porn Convictions AP A man who used a public computer at state offices to receive child pornography depicted in highly stylized cartoons will spend 20 years in prison. Dwight Whorley, 52, was sentenced Friday. He's the first person convicted under a 2003 federal law that criminalizes the production or distribution of drawings or cartoons showing the sexual abuse of children. A court found Whorley guilty on November 30 of using a computer at a Virginia Employment Commission office in March 2004. Authorities say he received 20 Japanese anime cartoons that graphically depicted minors engaged in sex with adults. Whorley's child pornography conviction was the first under the statute that was NOT based on actual photographs of children. Whorley was convicted on 74 counts. http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0306/309600.html ![]() New Chip Delivers Better Performance, Longer Battery Life For Cell Phones, WiFi, Wireless Press Release Anyone who uses a cell phone or a WiFi laptop knows the irritation of a dead-battery surprise. But now researchers at the University of Rochester have broken a barrier in wireless chip design that uses a tenth as much battery power as current designs and, better yet, will use much less in emerging wireless devices of the future. Hui Wu, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester, a pioneer in a circuit design called an "injection locked frequency divider," or ILFD, has solved the last hurdle to making the new method work. Wireless chip manufacturers have been aware of ILFD and its ability to ensure accurate data transfer using much less energy than traditional digital methods, but the technique had two fatal flaws: it could not handle a wide range of frequencies, and could not ensure a fine enough resolution within that range. Wu, together with Ali Hajimiri, associate professor of electrical engineering at California Institute of Technology, surmounted the first problem in 2001, and has now found a solution for the latter. When a cell phone or a laptop using WiFi or Bluetooth communicates wirelessly, the data is transmitted at very specific frequencies. One person can talk on a cell phone at a frequency of 2.0001 gigahertz, and someone else nearby can talk at 2.0002 gigahertz, and neither one will pick up the other's conversation. In order to make sure it is both listening for and sending information on exactly the right frequency at all times, the phone must maintain a very accurate and stable clock, which is generated by a special circuit called "phase-locked loop." This circuit consumes a dramatic portion of the battery usage on wireless devices. Wu's ILFD method uses less power than conventional digital methods because the tiny "ones" and "zeroes" that comprise digital information waste energy. Digital circuitry checks the frequency by counting each pulse of the clock one at a time. When a one is needed, the system sends electricity to the right node on a chip, and that node then represents a one. When the system then calls for a zero, that stored energy is simply released from the circuit as heat, and the node resets to a low-energy state. Do this several billion times a second, and quite a bit of energy in the form of those dissipated ones is simply wasted. An ILFD device, on the other hand, does not use a brute-force approach of counting each pulse. To gauge and stabilize the generated frequency, a phase-locked loop multiplies the pulse from a highly-stable reference clock, such as a quartz crystal oscillator, up to the desired frequency. To check if the output frequency is correct, a frequency divider essentially undoes the multiplying process, and the result can then be compared to the initial clock, with adjustments made as needed. ILFDs use an analog method that requires less power, but the Achilles' heel of ILFDs has always been their inability to efficiently and reliably divide the frequency by anything but two--a serious drawback to achieve fine frequency resolution, which is a must for modern communication systems. This is where Wu's new design makes the practical application of ILFDs possible. He introduced a new topology into this circuitry--instead of the old three-transistor design, his has five transistors--creating what he calls "differential mixing." The new circuitry topology allows the ILFD to divide by three as well as two. This tiny change has huge ramifications. A circuit design that can divide by two or three can, for instance, divide 9,999 clock pulses by two, and the 10,000th by 3, giving an average of 2.0001, which could be the frequency at which the cell phone is trying to communicate. Should the phone need to communicate at 2.0002 gigahertz, the ILFD could divide 9,998 clock pulses by two, and the 9,999th and 10,000th by three, yielding an average of 2.0002. By varying how many clock pulses are divided by two or by three, any frequency can be selected, making the power-saving ILFD method viable for the first time. Wu has demonstrated another benefit of his "Divide-by-Odd-Number ILFD." In an effort to move more data faster, wireless manufacturers are looking to move to ever-higher frequencies. A 900-megahertz cordless phone, for instance, was once considered state of the art, but soon cordless phones migrated to 2.4 gigahertz, and now 5.8 gigahertz. Likewise, WiFi and other wireless networking devices will soon be pushing into the proposed 60 gigahertz band. At such high frequencies, a digital frequency divider will be hard pressed to keep up such speed, and will demand ever-more power to do so, but Wu's ILFD will be much less demanding and will use proportionately less power as the frequency increases. Wu's group has designed and fabricated several prototype chips, and the results successfully demonstrated his concepts. One of them, an 18 gigahertz divide-by-3 ILFD, was recently presented at this year's International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the premiere technical conference in semiconductor industries. Wu is also working on other power-saving aspects of chip design that he hopes can be used to stretch the battery life of wireless devices even further. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-ncd041906.php ![]() How Much Do You Google? Joe Schmidt Just about one year ago today, the Google personalized homepage started recording your Google search history while you were logged into their site. For some that might be a scary proposition but for this blog, eh, not so much. Here at JoeSchmidt.com we throw caution to the wind, I figure they've got enough data on me now between this blog, my gmail account, and Google Calendar why not throw a few more megabytes of data onto the pile. Though I have to say, the Search History is a nice feature. Not only does it record what search terms you queried but it also keeps track of the links you clicked on (if any) in the results for each query. And of course it wouldn't be Google unless they made your entire history searchable, which makes it easy to go back in time to search for something from the past. So, how much did I Google in one year's time? 6357 Google search queries in one year. Yeah that's right. I used Google Six Thousand Three Hundred and Fifty Seven times last year. And that doesn't even account for the times I used Google while searching on someone else's computer or if I wasn't logged in to my Google homepage. So it's probably safe to say the actual number could be pushing close to 7000. Let me break it down for you a little more. That's an average of 17.4 unique searches a day. Every day. For an entire year. If I had a nickel for every time I used Google last year I'd have $317.85. (not even enough money to buy one share of GOOG) And to make matters worse, they give you a month-to-month graphical break down of how much you searched each day. So you can visually see how much time you wasted. Hold on, there's more. They also give you Trends, which lists your top repeat search queries. Also, they provide a bar graph which shows the number of Google searches you performed by month, or by each hour of the day. Who the hell uses Google at 4am? Apparently this blog does. Well I guess it's that time. Let me stand up here and clear my throat. *ahem* ... *cough*... *cough* pffft, pffft. Is this thing on? Uhh, Hi. My name is Joe. And I'm a Googleholic. http://www.joeschmidt.com/archives/2...uch_do_you.php ![]() For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher. Saul Hansell ALMOST on a lark, Chris DeWolfe bought the Internet address MySpace.com in 2002, figuring that it might be useful someday. At first, he used the site to peddle a motorized contraption, made in China and called an E-scooter, for $99. Selling products online comes naturally to him. Having jumped into the Internet business in the early days, Mr. DeWolfe had become a master of the aggressive forms of online marketing, including e-mail messages and pop-up advertising. After the Internet bubble burst, he even built a site that let people download computer cursors in the form of waving flags; the trick was that they also downloaded software that would monitor their Internet movements and show them pop-up ads. Very quickly, however, Mr. DeWolfe's tactics for MySpace changed. He had noticed the popularity of Friendster, a rapidly growing Web site that let people communicate with their friends and meet the friends of their friends. What would happen, he wondered, if he combined this type of social networking with the sort of personal expression enabled by other sites for creating Web pages or online journals? He convinced the executives of eUniverse, the company that had bought his own marketing firm, ResponseBase, to back his plan. As soon as the site was reintroduced, in the summer of 2003, Mr. DeWolfe saw it grow quickly with little marketing. And although his scrappy backer was hungry for cash, he resisted pressure to flood MySpace with advertising and to turn all of its members into money. "Chris came from ResponseBase, and they knew all the direct marketing tactics to get money out of almost anything," said Brett C. Brewer, the former president of eUniverse, which was later renamed Intermix Media. "But I give him credit: from literally the first or second month, he realized MySpace could be something we really need to protect because user confidence in the site was paramount." Now MySpace has a new owner — Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which bought MySpace and Intermix last year for $649 million — and the pressure on Mr. DeWolfe to find a way to make much more money from MySpace is far greater. But the opportunity is greater, too. More than 70 million members have signed up — more than twice as many as MySpace had when Mr. Murdoch agreed to buy it — drawn by a simple format that lets users build their own profile pages and link to the pages of their friends. It has tapped into three passions of young people: expressing themselves, interacting with friends and consuming popular culture. MySpace now displays more pages each month than any other Web site except Yahoo. More pages, of course, means more room for ads. And, in theory, those ads can be narrowly focused on each member's personal passions, which they conveniently display on their profiles. As an added bonus for advertisers, the music, photos and video clips that members place on their profiles constitutes a real-time barometer of what is hot. FOR now, MySpace is charging bargain-basement rates to attract enough advertisers for the nearly one billion pages it displays each day. The company will have revenue of about $200 million this year, estimated Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital, a brokerage firm in New York. That is less than one-twentieth of Yahoo's revenue. In buying MySpace, Mr. Murdoch also bought a tantalizing problem: how to tame a vast sea of fickle and unruly teenagers and college students just enough to notice advertising or to buy things, yet not make the site so commercial that he scares off his audience. At the same time, he must address the real and growing concerns of parents and teachers who see MySpace as a den of youthful excess and, potentially, as a lure for sexual predators. Mr. Murdoch's initial strategy seems to be to do nothing to interfere with whatever alchemy attracted so many young people to MySpace in the first place. So he has embraced Mr. DeWolfe, 40, and Tom Anderson, 30, the company's president and co-founder, and their close-knit management team. And he is providing them with the cash to reinforce MySpace's shaky computer system and to hire armies of sales representatives to bring in more money from the banner ads and sponsored pages that MySpace sells. He also gave them multimillion-dollar bonus payments to smooth the feelings that were ruffled when Intermix was sold, dragging MySpace along with it against the will of its founders, who received only a small portion of the sale price. Still, change is coming. In Beverly Hills, nine miles and worlds away from MySpace's beachside office, the News Corporation is assembling its overarching online unit, Fox Interactive Media. Run by Ross Levinsohn, the longtime manager of FoxSports.com, Fox Interactive Media is stitching together several Web properties into a big Internet company focused on youth. The top priority is MySpace. "We have some very aggressive goals on how to build this thing into a real contributor to News Corp. financially," Mr. Levinsohn said last month. Mr. Murdoch, he added, "is focused on that, and he rightfully holds my feet to the fire." To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the Fox TV sales department. He wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe's advertising ideas — turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers' — so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become "friends" with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants. Young people can link to the profiles set up for these goods and services, as they would to real friends, and these commercial "friends" can even send them messages — ads, really, but of a whole new kind. Mr. Levinsohn is also developing plans for MySpace to be paid by some of the bands and video producers whose songs and short films are woven into its gaudy profiles like so many electronic stickers on a high-school locker. And he sees a chance for MySpace to rival eBay and Craigslist as a place where nearly anything is bought and sold. Mr. Greenfield, the Pali Capital analyst, says that these moves have potential — especially if MySpace can convince members to put clips from Fox movies, television programs and other youth-oriented "content" on their profile pages. "I don't know how big a business this can be, but it can clearly be a lot bigger than it is today," he said. "The question is: Can you take it to the next level by making a business that leverages all the consumers who are telling you what they want to do?" Another question is this: Can the News Corporation achieve these goals if the executives in charge don't agree on how to do so, or even on whether they want to? Mr. Levinsohn, for example, said he saw opportunity in the one million bands that have established profiles on MySpace; he said MySpace could charge bands to promote concerts or to sell their songs directly through the site. In an interview the next day, however, Mr. DeWolfe dismissed the idea. "Music brings a lot of traffic into MySpace," he said, "and it lets us sell very large sponsorships to those brands that want to reach consumers who are interested in music. We never thought charging bands was a viable business model." Mr. Levinsohn brushed aside the discord, saying it was appropriate for the people running MySpace to be more concerned at this point about serving users than making money. And, for now, Mr. DeWolfe and Mr. Anderson say they are happy working for the News Corporation and Mr. Murdoch, its 75-year-old chairman and chief executive. "Rupert Murdoch blew me away," Mr. DeWolfe said. "He really understands what youth is doing today." BY many accounts, the MySpace culture reflects the style of Mr. DeWolfe, who has a hard-nosed business approach under a laid-back exterior. "Chris is a very strong personality," said Geoff Yang, a partner in Redpoint Ventures, which invested in MySpace last year as part of an effort to separate it from Intermix; the News Corporation's acquisition of Intermix thwarted that effort. "He will listen to a lot of ideas, make up his mind and be laser-focused to get a few of them done." Mr. DeWolfe, who focuses on business affairs, and Mr. Anderson, who designs features for the site, have deliberately kept MySpace rudimentary, with an almost homemade feeling, to give the most flexibility to users. In spirit, the site reflects its Southern Californian home with all of its idiosyncratic performers, designers, demicelebrities and other cultural hustlers, many of whom the founders recruited to be early members. Mr. DeWolfe, in particular, is a fan of Los Angeles nightlife and has become something of a public figure himself. "Chris has become this living persona of MySpace," said Mr. Brewer, who recalled a trip to Aspen, Colo., with Mr. Anderson and Mr. DeWolfe last December. "Chris is wearing an awesome leather jacket, some sort of designer shirt, with his hair all over the place. He has this whole rock-star persona. And you hear people going: 'Psst, psst. That's the MySpace guy.' " When he is not basking in the MySpace spotlight himself, Mr. DeWolfe has begun using it to promote music events around the country. MySpace members can become "friends" with a profile for "MySpace Secret Shows," for instance, and they will receive tips about free concerts — sponsored by companies like Tower Records — in their hometowns. On a recent Friday in Manhattan, several hundred people trekked through drizzling rain to the Tower Records store in the East Village for free tickets to a concert by Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish postpunk band, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Heather Candella, a college student from Sloatsburg, N.Y., was among those at the show. She said the shows were "a really good idea because it's kind of a secret kind of thing — it's not so commercial." She added that MySpace had become a main way to stay in touch with her friends. While she does not use the site to meet people, it has become part of the dating ritual. "When you meet someone, the question is not 'What's your number?' " she said. "It's 'What's your MySpace?' " By checking out a guy's profile, she said, "you can actually get a feeling for who they are." MySpace users pepper their profiles with their own photographs, musings and poetry, and with their favorite music and video clips. That maximizes the individuality of each profile but turns the typical media-company business model upside down, which is one reason that it is so hard for the News Corporation to use the audience to sell ads or to promote its own programming. The best way to get, say, a television show in front of the MySpace audience is not to cut a deal with a programming czar at a Hollywood restaurant, but to win the hearts, one by one, of thousands of members who will display the show to all of their friends. "We can't look at this as a media property," said Peter Chernin, the News Corporation's president. "This is a site programmed by its users." For that reason, MySpace is only gingerly pushing users into other Fox properties. Right now, Fox's relationship to MySpace is not explicit, although Fox movies and television shows are frequent advertisers. Ultimately, the News Corporation will make it easy for MySpace members to put clips from its television programs and trailers for its movies on their profile pages. But there will be nothing to stop them from using material from other companies. Mr. Levinsohn calls MySpace the antiportal. "It's not about a central hub, because that's not where things are going," he said. "The under-30 set wants choice. It's not about one destination; it's about 65 million." Indeed, rather than squeeze all its Internet ambitions into MySpace, Fox Interactive is assembling a network of Web sites, including IGN, a collection of sites focused on video games, and Scout, which runs Web sites for about 200 local sports teams. The News Corporation is also developing a portal devoted to entertainment, drawing from its Fox network programs, the Page Six gossip column of The New York Post and show-business reporters at the 35 local television stations it owns, Mr. Levinsohn said. AT MySpace, the first challenge is to raise advertising rates. Because its supply of pages so greatly outstrips demand from advertisers, it has offered deep discounts. Indeed, the average rate paid for advertising is a bit over a dime for 1,000 impressions, Mr. Levinsohn said, far lower than rates at major competitors. "If we can raise that by 10 cents, think of the upside," he said. One way to coax more money from advertisers is to build special sections — areas devoted to music and independent filmmakers — that provide a neutral home to advertisers that want MySpace's youthful audience but don't want their ads associated with the risqué content of some members' profiles. A sign of that challenge is seen in Mr. Levinsohn's effort to expand the use of text ads — the rapidly growing format pioneered by search engines. He has been running tests with Yahoo, Google and several smaller ad providers and has sought proposals from them for longer-term deals. The answer he received was a shock. Not one of them, not even the mighty Google, was sure that it could provide enough advertisements to fill all the pages that MySpace displays each day, Mr. Levinsohn said. The search companies did not want to dilute their networks with so many ads for MySpace users, whom they said were not the best prospects for most marketing because they use MySpace for socializing, not buying. Mr. Levinsohn says he also hopes to raise ad rates by collecting more user data so advertisers can find the most promising prospects. To use the site, people need to provide their age, location and sex, and often volunteer their sexual orientation and personal interests. Some of that information is already being used to select ads to display. Soon, the site will track when users visit profile pages and other sections devoted to topics of interest to advertisers. People who put information about sports cars in their profiles or who frequent MySpace message boards about hot-rodding, for example, would be shown ads for car parts, even while reading messages from friends. The bigger opportunity, however, is not so much selling banner ads, but finding ways to integrate advertisers into the site's web of relationships. Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers, for example, created a profile for the animated square hamburger character from its television campaign. About 100,000 people signed up to be "friends" with the square. Fox officials wonder whether this sort of commerce, built on relationships, can be extended to small businesses. A Ford dealership in, say, Indiana could create a profile, said Mark A. Jung, the chief operating officer of Fox Interactive. The profiles themselves, he said, would probably be free, but MySpace would sell enhancements to help businesses attract customers and complete transactions, Mr. Jung said. Yet here is another place that executives at Fox and MySpace don't see eye to eye. Mr. DeWolfe discounted the idea of people creating profile pages for small businesses. "If it was a really commercial profile — the gas station down the street — no one is going to sign up to be one of their friends," he said. "There is nothing interesting about it." For now, Mr. DeWolfe said, he has more down-to-earth plans. With the News Corporation's help, he is opening an office in London to coordinate MySpace's expansion in Europe. He is cutting deals to let members connect to MySpace over cellphones. The News Corporation, he said, is helping MySpace achieve his goals sooner than it could on its own. So far this year, MySpace has spent $20 million of the News Corporation's money, in part to nearly double its staff of 250. About one-third of its employees focus on customer service and, increasingly, on responding to parents' concerns about what teenagers do on the site and what else they can see there. In the last six months, there has been a torrent of letters from schools to parents — as well as newspaper articles — about the glorification of drinking, drug use and sex on many MySpace profiles. MySpace has long had rules that forbid anyone under 14 to join and that ban pornographic images and hate speech. Beyond those, however, the site is very open to frank discussion, provocative images and links to all sorts of activities. It didn't stop Playboy magazine, for example, from creating a profile page on its site to recruit members to pose in the magazine. Nor does it object to Jenna Jameson, the pornographic film star, maintaining a profile with links to her hard-core Web site. Ms. Jameson "is more than a porn star," Mr. Anderson said. "She is an author and a celebrity and has been on Oprah." He added that "if we had a site that was 'My name is so-and-so and this is my porn site,' we would delete that." Mr. Levinsohn, Mr. DeWolfe and others at the News Corporation say the site has no more or fewer problems than any other community on the Internet, and their primary response to parents' concern is a campaign to educate users about safe surfing techniques. "There are a couple of basic safety tips that can make MySpace safe for anyone over 14," Mr. DeWolfe said. "Just like you tell kids not to get in the car with strangers and to look both ways before you cross the street." A sign that MySpace can play a role in some of the most distressing experiences of growing up came last week, when five teenage boys were arrested in Riverton, Kan. Law enforcement and school officials there said that the group planned to go on a shooting spree at their high school but were stopped after one of them discussed the plot on MySpace. IN some ways, MySpace has assumed the role America Online held a decade ago when it introduced e-mail services and Internet chat to the masses. But AOL's example is a cautionary one. For many reasons, largely its failure to keep up with trends, AOL lost its place in the social lives of young people. Mr. DeWolfe argues that MySpace won't suffer that fate because, in just two years, it has already become so entrenched in so many lives. "People are truly invested in the site," he said. "All their friends are on it. They spent months building their profiles. And so the cost of switching is too high. If we keep building the features they want, they will stay on the site." If he is right, MySpace will be more than just a trendy toy to be discarded like last year's E-scooter. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/bu...23myspace.html ![]() Committing MySpacecide Momus Briefly, on November 13th, 2005, I was a friend of Tom. I'm talking, of course, about Tom Anderson -- male, 30-years old, based in Santa Monica, California, and founder of MySpace. The man with $580 million and nearly 50 million "friends." The iMomus MySpace page was online for just 48 minutes. Barely long enough to tell the world my relationship status, sexual orientation, body type, ethnicity, religion, zodiac sign, smoking and drinking habits, income and company affiliations. To receive a message telling me to "read the FAQ and give Tom a break." To upload the most flattering photo I could find. To notice that Tom had been added automatically as my first friend, and that Tom's favorite music included Billy Joel, Oasis, Guns & Roses and Whitney Houston ("particularly The Bodyguard soundtrack"). I don't know what made me delete it. It just looked ugly: the page layout, the blue writing. I felt like a sheep, letting social pressures, memes and fads herd me around. I wondered why I needed yet another social networking website to check: After all, I was already on Friendster and Japanese network Mixi, not to mention LiveJournal, a network organized around daily content rather than mere profiles and links. Mostly, I just wondered why I needed to affirm tenuous affiliation with a new set of ghosts. I didn't know at that point that just four months earlier, on July 19th, MySpace had been bought by Rupert Murdoch's News International. That's where Tom's $580 million came from. I think if I'd known that, the MySpace iMomus page wouldn't even have lasted 48 minutes. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, isn't my favorite guy. I do have something in common with him, though. We both have spoof MySpace pages impersonating us. The Spoof Murdoch page says "I aspire to become the most powerful man in the world.... There are many important benefits to fascism." The Spoof Momus page automatically loads a song I deleted from one of my albums, a song I've signed legal agreements never to play again. The real Rupert Murdoch has presumably left his fake pages up to show that he supports freedom of speech. I've left mine up because I can't really do much about it. But it is pretty annoying seeing all those people thanking "me" for adding them, or telling "me" how much they love my music, unaware that they're talking to someone merely pretending to be me. I can't even leave a message on the page telling people it's not mine; I'd have to join MySpace to tell MySpace users I'm not on MySpace. So the page stays, with a banner advertising Napster, a bad photo of me in a lilac shirt snapped at some ancient concert, and the lie that I'm based in Metropolitan France. A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with an old friend of mine, an early pioneer of multimedia who used to be a kind of digital exhibitionist. He once put online a highly provocative autobiography. After falling victim to identity theft, he's had a change of heart. "The thing to be now is untraceable," he told me. "Wipe every reference to yourself off the internet. Make yourself ungoogleable. Why tell criminals, corporations or the government all that stuff about yourself? Why do the spies' job for them?" A bit later, I heard about someone who'd committed "Friendstercide." He'd killed his Friendster page, announcing that from then on he'd only be contactable by phone and e-mail. So I guess you'd call what I did last November "committing MySpacecide." It sounds radically self-destructive, but the opposite situation would be much worse. Imagine dying for real, dying physically, but lingering on as a digital ghost, a presence on a MySpace page collecting obituaries and tributes. It's already happened to quite a few MySpace users. A website called MyDeathSpace, for instance, collects dead MySpace users' pages. It has over a hundred, and adds more each day. There are gaps in the MyDeathSpace collection. Indie rocker Nikki Sudden hasn't yet shown up there, despite dying recently after playing a show at New York's Knitting Factory. (His MySpace page lingers on, attracting digital tributes in the form of embedded YouTube video clips.) Neither have the Seattle rave kids who died in the Capitol Hill massacre, whose MySpace pages collected a series of incongruously casual high fives and "peace outs." See you on the other side of the internet, dude! The sad fact is that more and more of us, as we invest ourselves in the web, entrusting intimate personal information to garish pages, are destined to leave hastily-constructed, poorly-designed memorials online when we die, trivial shrines whose guest books and comments sections will continue to grow even as we rot, puffing up slowly with hackneyed, repetitive, ghoulish, unintentionally funny tributes. Eventually, of course, these pages, too, will follow us into oblivion. Tribute activity will level off, some administrator or relative will delete us, the networking brand itself will fall out of favor, its elderly owner will also die, and even his satirists will stop maintaining their spoof page about him. Out of fashion, replaced by new technologies as yet unimagined on infrastructure as yet unbuilt, the network will change hands a few times and close. Then, thank God, that wretched novelty song we threw up in a whimsical moment will stop loading. Then, finally, our digital ghosts will find peace, and escape the great cycle of humiliation. There's a short cut to the same nirvana, though: You could make today the day you commit MySpacecide. http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...?tw=wn_index_4 ![]() Web Sites Set Up to Celebrate Life Recall Lives Lost Warren St. John Like many other 23-year-olds, Deborah Lee Walker loved the beach, discovering bands, making new friends and keeping up with old ones, often through the social networking site MySpace.com, where she listed her heroes as "my family, and anyone serving in the military — thank you!" So only hours after she died in an automobile accident near Valdosta, Ga., early on the morning of Feb. 27, her father, John Walker, logged onto her MySpace page with the intention of alerting her many friends to the news. To his surprise, there were already 20 to 30 comments on the page lamenting his daughter's death. Eight weeks later, the comments are still coming. "Hey Lee! It's been a LONG time," a friend named Stacey wrote recently. "I know that you will be able to read this from Heaven, where I'm sure you are in charge of the parties. Please rest in peace and know that it will never be the same here without you!" Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users in recent years, especially the young, who use them to expand their personal connections and to tell the wider world about their lives. Inevitably, some of these young people have died — prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems — and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time. The pages offer often wrenching views of young lives interrupted, and in the process have created a dilemma for bereaved parents, who find themselves torn between the comfort derived from having access to their children's private lives and staying in contact with their friends, and the unease of grieving in a public forum witnessed by anyone, including the ill-intentioned. "The upside is definitely that we still have some connection with her and her friends," said Bob Shorkey, a graphic artist in North Carolina whose 24-year-old stepdaughter, Katie Knudson, was killed on Feb. 23 in a drive-by shooting in Fort Myers, Fla. "But because it's public, your life is opened up to everyone out there, and that's definitely the downside." It's impossible to know how many people with pages on social networking sites have died; 74 million people have registered with MySpace alone, according to the company, which said it does not delete pages for inactivity. But a glib and sometimes macabre site called MyDeathSpace.com has documented at least 116 people with profiles on MySpace who have died. There are additions to the list nearly every day. Last Thursday, for example, a 17-year-old from Vancouver, Wash., named Anna Svidersky was stabbed to death while working at a McDonald's there. As word of the crime spread among her extended network of friends on MySpace, her page was filled with posts from distraught friends and affected strangers. A separate page set up by Ms. Svidersky's friends after her death received about 1,200 comments in its first three days. "Anna, you were a great girl and someone very special," one person wrote. "I enjoyed having you at our shows and running into you at the mall. You will be missed greatly ... rest in peace." Tom Anderson, the president of MySpace, said in an e-mail message that out of concern for privacy, the company did not allow people to assume control of the MySpace accounts of users after their deaths. "MySpace handles each incident on a case-by-case basis when notified, and will work with families to respect their wishes," Mr. Anderson wrote, adding that at the request of survivors the company would take down pages of deceased users. Friends of MySpace users who have died said they had been comforted by the messages left by others and by the belief or hope that their dead friends might somehow be reading from another realm. And indeed many of the posts are written as though the recipient were still alive. "I still believe that even though she's not the one on her MySpace page, that's a way I can reach out to her," said Jenna Finke, 23, a close friend of Ms. Walker, the young woman who died in Georgia. "Her really close friends go on there every day. It means a lot to know people aren't forgetting about her." More formal online obituary services have been available for a number of years. An Illinois company called Legacy.com has deals with many newspapers, including The New York Times, to create online guest books for obituaries the papers publish on the Web, and offers multimedia memorials called Living Tributes starting at $29. But Web pages on social networking sites are more personal, the online equivalent of someone's room, and maintaining them has its complications. Some are frustratingly mundane. Amanda Presswood, whose 23-year-old friend Michael Olsen was killed in a fire in Galesburg, Ill., on Jan. 23, said none of his friends or family members knew or could guess the password to his MySpace account, which he signed onto the day before he died. That made it impossible to accept some new messages. "There's a lot of pictures on there that people haven't seen," Ms. Presswood said. "His parents have been coming to me for help because they know I know about the Internet. They even asked if I could hack it so I could keep the page going." The Walkers correctly guessed the password to their daughter's page, and used it to alert her friends to details of her memorial service. They also used it to access photographs and stories about their daughter they had missed out on. "It's a little weird to say as a parent, but the site has been a source for us to get to know her better," Mr. Walker said. "We didn't understand the breadth and scope of the network she had built as an individual, and we got to see that through MySpace. It helped us to understand the impact she's had on other people." At the same time, Ms. Walker's mother, Julie, wrote in an e-mail message, the family was overwhelmed by unsolicited e-mail messages from strangers offering platitudes and seeking to advise them on how to handle their grief. The family found such offerings unwelcome, however well intentioned. "The grief of our own friends and family is almost more than we can bear on top of our own, and we don't need anyone else's on our shoulders," Mrs. Walker wrote. Mr. Shorkey said he and his wife remained in touch with their daughter's friends through MySpace. And they visit her Web page daily. "Some days it makes me feel she's still there," he said. "And some days it reminds me I can never have that contact again." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/te...cPZ/tIYYvpWmbA ![]() The Student Body Jodi Rudoren SCANNING proofs from a nude photo shoot, Charlotte Rutherfurd and her fellow student editors struggled to select a portrait for "Hot Girls Reading Books," a feature in the spring issue of their magazine, Vita Excolatur. One pose seemed more sleepy than sexy, with the model, a public policy major, splayed on her back under an open paperback. Another caught hardly any cleavage above "The Craft of Research." The student looked washed out. She looked scared. She looked, well, not particularly hot. Such is the challenge — and, to some extent, the point — of publishing an X-rated magazine at the University of Chicago, a campus renowned for intellectual rigor rather than raw libido, and where, according to a popular T-shirt, "fun comes to die." "We're the ugly campus, and damn it, we're hot too!" declared Ms. Rutherfurd, 21, a junior and Vita's editor in chief. "It's distinctly U. of C. There's no Miss January. There's a hot girl — and she's reading a book!" Vita Excolatur, Latin for, loosely, "life enriched," is the rare smut rag with extensive footnotes. Yet alongside dense treatises on interracial relationships and asexuality are riffs on what music should accompany a menu of lewd activities. Straddling the boundary between pornography and art, Vita is one of a spate of sex magazines to emerge on elite campuses since Squirm, at Vassar College, broke the buff barrier in 1999. The newest made its debut on Valentine's Day and takes its name from Sex Week at Yale, a biennial assortment of panels and parties. H Bomb, at Harvard, also carries the occasional footnote but shows much more skin than Vita and Sex Week at Yale: The Magazine. Then there's Boink, which was started by a Boston University student with a professional photographer. Boink is proud of being pornographic as it builds a brisk business online as "the college guide to carnal knowledge." "We're not trying to be very highbrow about it," said Christopher Anderson, 39, the photographer. "I think it's kind of silly that there are elements in society that want to position sex as something that's taboo or dirty. What our publication does is put out the message that it's all good." SINCE its inaugural issue in October 2004, Vita has been a constant challenge for a university trying to balance ideals of academic freedom and its role in loco parentis. The magazine, which runs mainly on student activities fees (about $6,000 a year), can show full-frontal nudity but not an erection or intercourse, according to an agreement with the administration. Its pages are reviewed three times by administrators before publication, and student models must sign releases before they shed their clothes and again on seeing the photos, when many balk. Editors selling copies on campus are supposed to check identification to make sure readers are at least 18. And Ms. Rutherfurd is desperate to start a Web site to expand the magazine's reach — and purse — but so far has been stymied by the university. "We've been working with them to be sure that they, and we as a university, are being thoughtful on any concerns we have about student safety," explained William Michel, the University of Chicago's assistant vice president for student life. "If a student chooses to have photos printed like this, depending on future career choices and other activities they want to engage in, it may have some implications there." Squirm and H Bomb have also received money from their student governments, but their respective institutions, Vassar and Harvard, take a hands-off approach, with no censorship or requirements for releases. Judith Kidd, Harvard's associate dean for student life and activities, said that the hubbub generated by H Bomb's emergence did lead her to change procedures for establishing student organizations so the faculty has more time to review applications. Boink has encountered more aggressive opposition: B.U. doesn't give it any money, doesn't recognize it as a student group and has blocked sales at a bookstore near campus. Alecia Oleyourryk, who graduated from B.U. in 2005 and is Boink's editor, said that when the magazine started about half the staff and models were students but that it's now more like a third. Before the magazine's unveiling in February 2005, Kenneth Elmore, dean of students, released this statement: "The university does not endorse, nor welcome, the prospective publication Boink, nor view its publication as a positive for the university community, because of our concern for the treatment of serious sexual health, relationship and related issues." With how-tos on oral sex, advice columns on hiding condoms at home during spring break and essays about summer jobs as erotic dancers, the magazines are not always highlighted on student résumés or sent home to mom and dad. "My mother said, 'I'm so proud of you' and my dad threw it out," Ms. Rutherfurd said. "My mother said 'I'm so proud of you' kind of awkwardly." Ming Vandenberg, a Harvard junior who is president of H Bomb, said her parents "always want to encourage me to do whatever I want to do," but quickly added, "They're happy as long as I'm not in it." The parent factor helped guide the content of Yale's new magazine, which is underwritten by a company that sells sex-enhancing products. Its most explicit photo is the cover shot of a student in nothing but red Yale panties, her back to the camera so barely a hint of breast shows. "If we can justify it to our moms every step of the way then we know that we're in good shape," said Dain Lewis, a junior who is director of Sex Week. But what the magazine lacks in nudity it makes up for in risqué articles on choosing the right condom and taming a wild date. "I wouldn't be entirely comfortable with my mom reading it," Mr. Lewis allowed. There have been no complaints from parents at Harvard or the University of Chicago, officials said. Then again, Tynan Kelly, an 18-year-old freshman at Chicago who was featured on the cover of Vita's fall issue, did not tell his parents about his modeling experiment, though, he said, "I made sure all my friends would get it." Mr. Kelly and other models, who do not get paid, said posing for Vita had given them a kind of sexual cachet on campus. And Ms. Rutherfurd said she rarely had trouble recruiting for photo shoots. But Emma Bernstein, a photographer for Vita and other campus publications, said she got a lot of strange looks after shooting a spread on sadomasochism. "I had to keep explaining myself to people at parties," she said. "People saw my name associated with that, and their entire perception of me changed." Ms. Bernstein, a junior, said she liked working for Vita because it is the "most widely read, most creative, most fun" and has the "most artistic freedom." STUDENT editors, administrators and experts on adolescent sexuality see the explicit magazines as the inevitable outgrowth of a sex-crazed media culture in which many feminists are adopting a "sex-positive" approach that views pornography as expression, not exploitation. A few years ago, sex columnists sprung up in scores of college newspapers, from Yale to the University of Kansas to the University of California, Berkeley, tackling previously taboo topics like fake orgasms and favorite positions. The new publications take things more than a few steps further, and bear warnings on the covers that the material is inappropriate for underage readers. Said Dean Kidd of Harvard: "They're far more open about sexuality. I would not say they're more sophisticated about it than anybody has been, but they seem to be more casual about it, and they talk about it more." Today's students were weaned on Jimmy Smits's exposed backside on "N.Y.P.D. Blue" and scantily clad dancers on MTV. Mainstream magazines like Maxim show ever more everything, while junior-high-schoolers bare their souls and more on MySpace.com, and the shirt-lifting gimmick of "Girls Gone Wild" videos seems a rather tame spring-break stunt. "To me it's like the floodgates have been opened," said Natalie Krinsky, who wrote the Sex in the Elm City column in The Yale Daily News before graduating in 2004, and has recently moved to Los Angeles to adapt her book, "Chloe Does Yale," for the screen. "When you're 18, you're always going to want to push the envelope a little bit more, see what you can get away with." Robin Sawyer, who has been teaching human sexuality courses at the University of Maryland for two decades, described a pendulum swing from the political correctness of the 1990's and the repression it caused. Pamela Paul, author of the 2005 book "Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families," said the sex magazines represented a 180-degree shift in college women's attitudes toward pornography in just the 15 years since she attended Brown University. "Porn is cool, porn is hip, porn is not something to get upset about on college campuses today," Ms. Paul said. "College women have really bought into both the pornography industry's way of spinning porn — this is hip, sexy, harmless entertainment and women should really get in on it — and the new academic perspective on pornography — as long as we own our sexuality and it's our choice, then, great, more power to us." She describes the trend as "pathetic." Dean Kidd imagines what would happen if an H Bomb model "was running for governor of California" someday. "Students as a whole don't tend to think about what the impact of what they do now is going to have on what they do later," she said. Dean Kidd, of course, is not the target audience (though she flips through it with fellow administrators to see which students they know). Readers are the least of the magazines' worries. Boink sells 20,000 copies at $7.95 a pop, most far from the Boston campus. H Bomb prints 10,000; 2,500 are distributed free to students, the rest sold for $5 each. Even Vita's tiny circulation of 700 (at $2 a copy) makes it the most widely read student publication on campus. And 25,000 copies of Sex Week at Yale were distributed, free, on 18 campuses across the country. Boink, which also sells hats, T-shirts and monthly pinups, signed a deal this year for a book, expected in September 2007. H Bomb may soon follow suit. Given the campus newspaper's 1999 book of successful Harvard application essays, "we thought it'd be funny to publish a book of Harvard undergrads about how they lost their virginity," said Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg, 22, a senior and H Bomb's editor. The working title, she added, is "The Hardest Part Is Getting In." AT the University of Chicago, a Vita idea session blended the academic and the erotic. Someone proposed a film noir theme with the detective and the girl on the office table. Mr. Kelly, the freshman model, offered "Robert Mapplethorpe meets International Male." "Just something really gay," he said. "A lot of bodies, not a lot of faces. Really hot, too." Ms. Bernstein, the photographer, suggested "the sexuality of redheads," inspired by late-19th-century Victorian Britain. "Something in Jackson Park, before the leaves come up," she said. "Redheads — pale, almost sickly. Almost dead, but I swear it will be sexy." The current issue features an online student poll — more than one of four respondents said they had cheated on a significant other, and those surveyed claimed an average of four partners since losing their virginity at an average age of 17 — accompanied by a series of photographs, "Classroom Fantasies," showing students stuck in their books while classmates have sex around them. One of the models is wearing the signature University of Chicago death-of-fun T-shirt. Others were really doing homework during the shoot. Really, Ms. Bernstein said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/ed...MAGAZINES.html ![]() Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional Dinitia Smith Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel, acknowledged yesterday that she had borrowed language from another writer's books, but called the copying "unintentional and unconscious." The book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," was recently published by Little, Brown to wide publicity. On Sunday, The Harvard Crimson reported that Ms. Viswanathan, who received $500,000 as part of a deal for "Opal" and one other book, had seemingly plagiarized language from two novels by Megan McCafferty, an author of popular young-adult books. In an e-mail message yesterday afternoon, Ms. Viswanathan, 19, said that in high school she had read the two books she is accused of borrowing from, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," and that they "spoke to me in a way few other books did." "Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel, 'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,' and passages in these books," she said. Calling herself a "huge fan" of Ms. McCafferty's work, Ms. Viswanathan added, "I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words." She also apologized to Ms. McCafferty and said that future printings of the novel would be revised to "eliminate any inappropriate similarities." Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, said that Ms. Viswanathan planned to add an acknowledgment to Ms. McCafferty in future printings of the book. In her e-mail message, Ms. Viswanathan said that "the central stories of my book and hers are completely different." But Ms. McCafferty's books, published by Crown, a division of Random House, are, like Ms. Viswanathan's, about a young woman from New Jersey trying to get into an Ivy League college — in her case, Columbia. (Ms. Viswanathan's character has her sights set on Harvard.) Like the heroine of "Opal," Ms. McCafferty's character, Jessica Darling, visits the campus, strives to earn good grades to get in and makes a triumphant high school graduation speech. And the borrowings may be more extensive than have previously been reported. The Crimson cited 13 instances in which Ms. Viswanathan's book closely paralleled Ms. McCafferty's work. But there are at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar. At one point in "Sloppy Firsts," Ms. McCafferty's heroine unexpectedly encounters her love interest. Ms. McCafferty writes: "Though I used to see him sometimes at Hope's house, Marcus and I had never, ever acknowledged each other's existence before. So I froze, not knowing whether I should (a) laugh, (b) say something, or (c) ignore him and keep on walking. I chose a brilliant combo of (a) and (b). " 'Uh, yeah. Ha. Ha. Ha.' "I turned around and saw that Marcus was smiling at me." Similarly, Ms. Viswanathan's heroine, Opal, bumps into her love interest, and the two of them spy on one of the school's popular girls. Ms. Viswanathan writes: "Though I had been to school with him for the last three years, Sean Whalen and I had never acknowledged each other's existence before. I froze, unsure of (a) what he was talking about, or (b) what I was supposed to do about it. I stared at him. " 'Flatirons,' he said. 'At least seven flatirons for that hair.' " 'Ha, yeah. Uh, ha. Ha.' I looked at the floor and managed a pathetic combination of laughter and monosyllables, then remembered that the object of our mockery was his former best friend. "I looked up and saw that Sean was grinning." In a profile published in The New York Times earlier this month, Ms. Viswanathan said that while she was in high school, her parents hired Katherine Cohen, founder of IvyWise, a private counseling service, to help with the college application process. After reading some of Ms. Viswanathan's writing, Ms. Cohen put her in touch with the William Morris Agency, and Ms. Viswanathan eventually signed with Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, an agent there. Ms. Walsh said that she put Ms. Viswanathan in touch with a book packaging company, 17th Street Productions (now Alloy Entertainment), but that the plot and writing of "Opal" were "1,000 percent hers." Alloy, which referred questions to Little, Brown, holds the copyright to "Opal" with Ms. Viswanathan. In the Times profile, Ms. Viswanathan said the idea for "Opal" came from her own experiences in high school "surrounded by the stereotype of high-pressure Asian and Indian families trying to get their children into Ivy League schools." Tina Constable, a spokeswoman for Crown, said a reader had noticed the similarities between the books. That person, she said, "told Megan. Megan alerted us. We've alerted the Little, Brown legal department. We are waiting to hear from them." It was unclear whether Harvard would take any action against Ms. Viswanathan. "Our policies apply to work submitted to courses," said Robert Mitchell, the director of communications for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. "Nevertheless, we expect Harvard students to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty at all times." Ms. Walsh, the agent, said: "Knowing what a fine person Kaavya is, I believe any similarities were unintentional. Teenagers tend to adopt each other's language." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html ![]() Aggrieved Publisher Rejects Young Novelist's Apology Dinitia Smith A day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying parts of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," from another writer's works, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology "troubling and disingenuous." On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan, in an e-mail message, said that her copying from Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," both young adult novels published by Crown, a division of Random House, had been "unintentional and unconscious." But in a statement issued today, Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, "based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act." He said that there were more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book "that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books." Mr. Ross called it "nothing less than an act of literary identity theft." On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan and her publisher, Little, Brown, had said that future printings of the novel would be revised to "eliminate any inappropriate similarities" and that an acknowledgment to Ms. McCafferty would be added. But Mr. Ross, in an interview, questioned how quickly that could be accomplished. The planned revisions, he said, would take several months, and "during those intervening months this original edition would still be in bookstores. That's one of the issues that is of great concern to us." Ms. McCafferty has a new book, "Charmed Thirds," in stores now, and Mr. Ross called the incident "an enormous distraction and disruption." Mr. Ross added that Crown had not ruled out legal action. "Right now this is in the hands of our lawyers," he said. "We're waiting to see what their recommendations are." Ms. McCafferty's agent, Joanna Pulcini, also reacted to Ms. Viswanathan's apology. "It is understandably difficult for us to accept that Ms. Viswanathan's plagiarism was 'unintentional and unconscious,' as she has claimed," she said in a statement. Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, said in response to Mr. Ross's statement, that the company was looking forward to "a speedy and amicable" solution. He added, however, he had not yet seen the 40 similarities that Mr. Ross has said existed between the books. "We look forward to hearing from the author and from Random House and to resolving this." The Harvard Crimson first reported the plagiarism charges on Saturday. Meanwhile Harvard would not say what, if any, disciplinary action it might take against Ms. Viswanathan. Robert Mitchell, the director of communications for Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in an interview, "We would not discuss any individual situation that might or might not come before the administrative board." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/bo... tner=homepage ![]() Publisher to Recall Harvard Student's Novel Motoko Rich and Dinitia Smith Just a day after saying it would not withdraw "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" from bookstores, Little, Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer's books, said it would immediately recall all editions from store shelves. In a statement issued last night, Michael Pietsch, senior vice president and publisher of Little, Brown, said that in an agreement with Ms. Viswanathan, the company had "sent a notice to retail and wholesale accounts asking them to stop selling copies of the book and to return unsold inventory to the publisher for full credit." The publisher had announced an initial print run of 100,000 and had shipped 55,000 copies to stores. Ms. Viswanathan, 19, a Harvard sophomore, has been under scrutiny since The Harvard Crimson revealed on Sunday that she had plagiarized numerous passages from "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," two novels by the young-adult writer Megan McCafferty. "We are pleased that this matter has been resolved in an appropriate and timely fashion," said Crown Publishers, which publishes Ms. McCafferty's books, in a statement. "We are extremely proud of our author, Megan McCafferty, and her grace under pressure throughout this ordeal." Ms. McCafferty, who until now has remained silent, also issued a statement last night. "In the case of Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarizing of my novels 'Sloppy Firsts' and 'Second Helpings,' " she said, "I wish to inform all of the parties involved that I am not seeking restitution in any form. "The past few weeks have been very difficult, and I am most grateful to my readers for offering continual support, and for reminding me what Jessica Darling means to both them and to me. In my career, I am, first and foremost, a writer. So I look forward to getting back to work and moving on, and hope Ms. Viswanathan can, too." Ms. Viswanathan, reached last night, declined to comment. The similarities between "Opal" and Ms. McCafferty's books were striking in some cases, with many passages in Ms. Viswanathan's novel — Crown cited more than 40 — echoing Ms. McCafferty's works almost exactly. Nevertheless, Ms. Viswanathan maintained throughout the week that her copying of the passages was "unintentional and unconscious." She said she was a fan of McCafferty's novels and had read them several times, but not while writing her own book. Ms. Viswanathan worked with Alloy Entertainment in developing the concept for the book and its first four chapters. But she said Alloy was not responsible for any of the copying. Alloy has declined to comment. Little, Brown published Ms. Viswanathan's book recently to widespread publicity. It had been part of a two-book deal with the publishing house. This Sunday, it will be No. 32 on the online extended New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list. Little, Brown and Ms. Viswanathan had said that she would revise the book to remove the copied passages and that they would reissue it. The extent of the plagiarism in "Opal" recalls some previous, notorious cases, including Jacob Epstein's "Wild Oats," a debut novel, that was published in 1979 and was later found to have been extensively copied from Martin Amis's "The Rachel Papers." Mr. Epstein's book was also published by Little, Brown. This will not be the first time that a book has been recalled because of controversy. In 1999, the publishers of a biography by a Scottish author withdrew and destroyed all copies of the book after a historian called it a "spectacular and sustained act of plagiarism." Grove/Atlantic, which was scheduled to publish the book in the United States, junked 7,500 copies of the book before they even went on sale. That same year, St. Martin's Press shredded or burned thousands of copies of a biography of George W. Bush that included anonymous claims that Mr. Bush, then running for the Republican presidential nomination, had been arrested on cocaine possession charges in 1972. In that case the publisher discovered that the author had concealed a criminal conviction and was no longer trustworthy. Also that year, the publishers of an award- winning memoir by a man claiming to be a Latvian Jewish orphan who had survived two concentration camps recalled the book when it discovered that the author was Swiss-born. The withdrawal of Ms. Viswanathan's book could make it easier for Ms. McCafferty to begin promoting her third novel, "Charmed Thirds," published by Crown earlier this month. On May 7, it will appear on the online extended New York Times Hard Cover Fiction Best Seller list at No. 30. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/books/28author.html ![]() First, Plot and Character. Then, Find an Author. Motoko Rich and Dinitia Smith The books' spines bear names like Cecily von Ziegesar, Ann Brashares and, most controversially, since plagiarism charges were leveled against her on Sunday, Kaavya Viswanathan. But on the copyright page — and the contracts — there's an additional name: Alloy Entertainment. Nobody associated with the plagiarism accusations is pointing fingers at Alloy, a behind-the-scenes creator of some of the hottest books in young-adult publishing. Ms. Viswanathan says that she alone is responsible for borrowing portions of two novels by Megan McCafferty, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." But at the very least, the incident opens a window onto a powerful company with lucrative, if tangled, relationships within the publishing industry that might take fans of series like "The It Girl" by surprise. In many cases, editors at Alloy — known as a "book packager" — craft proposals for publishers and create plotlines and characters before handing them over to a writer (or a string of writers). The relationships between Alloy and the publishers are so intertwined that the same editor, Claudia Gabel, is thanked on the acknowledgments pages of both Ms. McCafferty's books and Ms. Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." Ms. Gabel had been an editorial assistant at Crown Publishing Group, then moved to Alloy, where she helped develop the idea for Ms. Viswanathan's book. She has recently become an editor at Knopf Delacorte Dell Young Readers Group, a sister imprint to Crown. Ms. Gabel did not return calls for comment. But Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, the publishing company that owns Crown, said Ms. Gabel, who worked at Alloy from the spring of 2003 until last November, had left the company "before the editorial work was completed" on Ms. Viswanathan's book. "Claudia told us she did not touch a single line of Kaavya's writing at any point in any drafts," said Mr. Applebaum, who added that Ms. Gabel was one of several people who worked on the project in its conceptual stage. Leslie Morgenstein, president of Alloy, declined to comment. In an e-mail message, he wrote: "We're still trying to get clarity on the allegations. We're not prepared to comment until we have more information about the ongoing situation." Alloy owns or shares the copyright with the authors and then divides the advances and any royalties with them. This Sunday, books created by Alloy will be ranked at Nos. 1, 5 and 9 on The New York Times's children's paperback best-seller list. "In a way it's kind of like working on a television show," said Cindy Eagan, editorial director at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, a sister imprint of Ms. Viswanathan's publisher, and the publisher of the "Clique," "A-List" and "Gossip Girl" series. "We all work together in shaping each novel." Depending on the series, some writers have more freedom to develop plot and characters than others. Ms. von Ziegesar, who created the concept, plots and characters for the "Gossip Girl" books while an editor at Alloy, went on to write the first eight books of the series. She said that while at Alloy she crafted carefully plotted packages for other series and recruited writers who were told to follow her directions closely. But other writers on different series received very broad-stroke outlines. Ms. Viswanathan was, in some ways, an unusual Alloy author. She was not recruited by the packager, but rather, was introduced to it by William Morris, the agent. In an interview yesterday Ms. Viswanathan said that after an initial meeting with the book packager, "They asked about my life, who I was." She added, "Basically, it was like, 'Send us an e-mail writing about yourself that seems most natural.' " Ms. Viswanathan said that she wrote about not having a boyfriend, about the pressure her friends were feeling to get into good colleges and about being an Indian-American girl. "They liked that," Ms. Viswanathan said. Alloy then worked with her on the book's first four chapters, making what Ms. Viswanathan described as very minor suggestions. Once Little, Brown decided to buy the book, Ms. Viswanathan said that she worked almost exclusively with Asya Muchnick, an editor there. But the publishing contract Little, Brown signed is actually with Alloy, which holds the copyright to "Opal" together with Ms. Viswanathan. Neither Little, Brown nor Alloy would comment on how much of the advance or the royalties — standard contracts give 15 percent of the cover price to the author — Ms. Viswanathan is to collect. The company that eventually became Alloy was founded in 1987. It had its first hit with the "Sweet Valley High" series. The company, then known as 17th Street Productions, was sold in 2000 to Alloy Inc., a large media company that owns the teenage-oriented retailer Delia's, and changed its name to Alloy Entertainment. Since then it has become a 'tween-lit hit factory. Alloy works for many of the biggest publishing houses. The "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series has generated three best sellers for Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, while Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, publishes Alloy's "Au Pairs" and "Private" series. Packagers have been around for decades, dating at least as far back as the Stratemeyer Syndicate, creators of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery series. Today, packagers work not just in the teenage market, but on all kinds of titles, from illustrated coffee-table books and toddler series to self-help tomes and graphic novels. But the market for young-adult fiction is undeniably hot for book packaging. The financial stakes are much higher: Carolyn Keene, the pen name for the writers of the Nancy Drew books, never earned a $500,000 advance, which Ms. Viswanathan received, The Boston Globe and others have reported. (Little, Brown said the amount was less than that.) For publishers, the appeal is that the packagers will take care of jobs like copy-editing and designing book covers. Despite the books' assembly-line production, their authors are still held to many of the same standards as more traditional authors. Ms. von Ziegesar said that her contract with Alloy stipulates that she "give them my own original material." She added, "In the end it really is the writer's responsibility." That the rampant copying in Ms. Viswanathan's manuscript — more than 40 instances have been cited by Crown — went unnoticed seems surprising to outsiders. But within the genre "there are certainly similarities across the board," said Bethany Buck, a vice president and editorial director at Simon Pulse. "The teenage experience is fairly universal." Little, Brown, for one, was not blaming Alloy. "Our understanding is that Kaavya wrote the book herself, so any problems are entirely the result of her writing and not the result of the packager's involvement in the book," said Michael Pietsch, the publisher. Even officials at Random House, the parent company of Ms. McCafferty's publisher, said they did not consider Alloy responsible. "Most relationships with packagers and book producers have been relatively free of the kinds of problems cited in the coverage of this story," said Mr. Applebaum, the spokesman, "and beneficial for all concerned." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/bo... tner=homepage ![]() Artist's Family Asks Google To Take Down 'Painted' Logo Elise Ackerman After angering authors last fall with a wide-ranging book-copying project, Google may now be alienating some visual artists as well by allegedly reproducing famous works in drawings on the search giant's home page. Today, the family of Joan Miro was upset to discover elements of several works by the Spanish surrealist incorporated into Google's logo. Google has since taken the logo off its site. The Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miro family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, had asked Google to remove the image early this morning. ``There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miro, and they are putting it up without having the rights,'' said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society. In a written statement to the Mercury News, Google said that it would honor the request but that it did not believe its logo was a copyright violation. ``From time to time we create special logos to celebrate people we admire,'' the statement said. ``Joan Miro made an extraordinary contribution to the world with his art andwe want to pay tribute to that.'' Google has changed the logo on its homepage to commemorate events such as the Olympics or Albert Einstein's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Miro's birth in 1893. He died in 1983. In September, the Authors Guild sued Google for reproducing works in its ``library project'' that were still under the protection of copyright. In a news release, Authors Guild president Nick Taylor called the project ``a plain and brazen'' violation of copyright law. ``It's not up to Google or anyone other than authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied,'' Taylor said. According to the company's Web site, the library project aims to create a virtual card catalog for ``all books in all languages'' while ``carefully respecting authors' and publishers' copyrights.'' Feder said the society had raised the issue of copyright violation with Google at least once before when the Mountain View-based company incorporated work by Salvador Dali into its logo in May 2002. Feder said Google removed the Dali images soon after it was contacted by the society. As of mid-afternoon today, however, he had yet to receive a response from the company. ``It's a distortion of the original works and in that respect it violates the moral rights of the artist,'' Feder said. Google's logo allegedly incorporated images from Miro's ``The Escape Ladder,'' 1940, ``Nocture,'' 1940, and ``The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers,'' 1941. Feder said the society receives hundreds of requests each day from media organizations who are interested in reproducing a copyrighted work in some form. He said the authorization process is simple: all Google needed to do was send an e-mail asking permission to use the images. ``We would have asked the estate or the family, and they would have said yes or no,'' he said. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/14389478.htm ![]() The Bottom Line on E-Textbooks Edward Wyatt REMEMBER the paperless society? That was the world that would emerge once there was a computer on every desktop. Well, there are computers in every dorm room and laptops in every lecture hall, but even at the front lines of the digital revolution, the printed textbook still rules. Few students have warmed to electronic textbooks, despite their increasing flexibility and much cheaper price — typically 40 percent less than a new textbook and 20 percent less than a used one. In one of the largest pushes to date, electronic versions of assigned textbooks are being made widely available for the first time, right next to their print counterparts at campus bookstores (before, you mostly found them through online specialty stores or directly through publishers, if at all). MBS Direct, which sells some 700 college textbooks in digital form, started the program at 10 campuses last fall and 31 this spring. Interest has been modest — about 5 percent of the total sales for a given text — but that's encouraging enough to expand to more than 300 campuses next semester, says Dennis Flanagan, chief executive of MBS Direct. The electronic versions are easy to locate and operate. Instead of picking a book off the shelf, the student picks up a card that is scanned at the register, alerting MBS that the digital book has been bought. The card contains a scratch-off section with a registration number that the user types into a personal computer for access to the book, which can be downloaded. So what are the roadblocks? Some of the biggest complaints registered by early users have already been addressed. Students wanted to keep texts as reference material, but most e-books expired after a year. Six of the seven publishers that supply books to MBS responded by eliminating expiration dates; now most buyers have permanent access to the books they buy. Students can also make margin notes and highlight text, making them more like their print cousins. Even better, the text contains search functions, hypertext links from the index and can be used with programs that read the text aloud — allowing students to listen to a book while ironing their shirts or exercising. There are limits, however. Only 100 pages can be printed a week, a restriction meant to prevent copying and sharing with classmates. And while a digital book can be saved onto a disk, that copy can only be transferred to a computer registered to the same user via Microsoft's Passport Network. Students do like to share. According to a 2005 national survey by a college bookstore trade group, 47 percent don't buy all their assigned texts, and more than half of them borrow books to do the work. E-textbooks may also be lagging because the economics, on closer inspection, make less sense. About half of textbooks are sold back to stores or to other students, the trade group reports, but electronic textbooks can't be resold. A student who sells back a print textbook can expect to get 50 percent of the cover price. For a new $60 book, that's a net cost of $30 at the end of the semester. For a used book, which might sell for $45 (75 percent of the price when it was new), the net cost is $15 if sold back. An electronic version would cost $36. Given that students who get money for books from their parents might "forget" to return those end-of-semester refunds, an e-textbook user faces a far bigger potential loss of pocket money. Until that problem is solved, the future of digital textbooks could well be dim. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/ed.../innovate.html ![]() Plugged In: Filesharing Is No Longer About Snatching A Few Songs Off The Internet. It's The Business Model Of The Future. Chris French and Chris Megerian You may not realize it, but for years you lived at the mercy of entertainment corporations. You watched their movies and listened to their music, when and where they wanted you to. For movies, you were a prisoner to the schedule of your local theater or cable channel. And there was no way to get a certain song off that hot new CD without driving to your local music store and dropping $15 on the entire disc. Well, no more. You now control your entertainment. You download the music you want when you want it. You watch "24" on your iPod instead of having to sit in front of your TV at 9 p.m. on Mondays. You have entered the on-demand world of content distribution. This is no small change. It hasn't been since the arrival of television sets in living rooms in the 1950s that the entertainment industry has been so profoundly impacted by technology. Many college students' first encounter with filesharing was the music downloading service Napster, which went online in 1999. Since then, a variety of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks - in which files are transferred between two parties electronically - have capitalized on high-speed broadband connectivity. In the digital world, anything can be copied an infinite number of times with no loss of quality, allowing for the easy proliferation of entertainment content. For many people, filesharing has become almost synonymous with music - and rightfully so. The introduction of CD burners and MP3s sent music companies around the world scrambling to adapt to the changing market. But as filesharing has matured, savvy entertainment businesses have introduced legal alternatives. Movies didn't enter the digital realm until 15 years after music, so the film industry had time to prepare for the shift. Movie companies are rolling with the punches, utilizing filesharing as a new means of content distribution instead of holding on to archaic business practices. But filesharing is about more than entertainment - it's a mode of changing education, communication and business. Apple Computer's new service, iTunes U, allows individual universities to upload lectures, student productions and academic material. And the service may soon be coming to Emory.Teachers have been using programs like Blackboard for some time, but now the classroom is going online in a big way. Welcome to the world of filesharing. Illegal filesharing has expanded into film, but the original entertainment-based purpose of the technology was the distribution of music. According to Nielson SoundScan, an information system that tracks the sales of music and videos across the United States and Canada, physical CD sales fell 8 percent from 2004 to 2005. But digital music sales rose dramatically, and track downloads were up 150 percent. Digital album downloads went up 194 percent. Total music purchases, including all tangible and online sales, went up 22.7 percent. But is this a good thing for the industry? Not really. Booming digital sales still lead to a decline in overall profit. According to Nielson SoundScan, each downloaded track yields no more than one-tenth of the revenue of a physical CD. The music industry has been hit hard by illegal filesharing and has been firing right back. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been making examples out of illegal downloaders with thousands of lawsuits. As of June 2005, the RIAA had filed a total of 11,050 lawsuits against people suspected of illegally downloading music. The 2,484 suits that were settled out of court fetched an average of $3,000 to $4,000 per pirate, according to Rolling Stone. And the RIAA continues to target downloaders with litigation, filing 750 different lawsuits in February of this year. Although the association refuses to give up its right to protect material, some artists and listeners have voiced their disapproval of the RIAA's legal actions. "First of all, [the suits] are not really going to change anything," says Dennis Lyxzén, vocalist for the punk band The (International) Noise Conspiracy. "The RIAA is just doing what people in authoritarian position have always done - they are using the scare tactic. Logically, there is no possible way to put in the resources to get all the filesharers, even though they make an example of a couple of them." While the RIAA continues to use litigation as a primary weapon against illegal filesharers, the online filesharing network itself may remedy the problem through legal alternatives. Mike Shea, founder of Alternative Press magazine, says filesharing has given rise to positive programs like pureVOLUME, MySpace and iTunes. "It has actually improved music and improved the potential careers of bands, because ... it has forced technology to take the lead in how music will be distributed and listened to," he says. Furthermore, Shea insists that filesharing is bringing about the end of corporations' monopoly over bands and their music. Instead of being told what to listen to via the radio, individuals can choose what music is best suited for them through the Internet. Shea says this is increasing consumer satisfaction and popularizing small-time artists. It's taken several years of setbacks for the music industry to realize the on-demand market is not worth fighting. But those in the movie business began taking a more proactive approach much more quickly. On April 4, "Brokeback Mountain" became the first movie released simultaneously on DVD and for download at movielink.com. The online service allows the "renting" (the file disappears from your hard drive after 24 hours) or purchase of hundreds of movies. So why is the industry embracing filesharing? The movie business has also suffered staggering losses from illegal downloading. A 2005 study by Smith Barney, a global investment banking firm, showed that the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) had lost approximately $1.9 billion because of illegal filesharing via the Internet. Coincidentally, U.S. box office revenue was down $550 million, and actual theater admission rates have decreased 8.7 percent since 2004. While eight films grossed more than $200 million in 2005, setting a record high, only 60 percent of these movies were able to recoup their production costs, which often rise above $100 million. While the loss of these millions - maybe billions - of dollars cannot be solely blamed on illegal filesharing, its impact has been enough for the MPAA to establish a multifaceted plan for stopping the theft of intellectual property. Like the RIAA, the movie industry also files lawsuits against illegal downloaders with the aim of "educating" potential digital thieves. "We use [individual lawsuits] as well as an education effort whenever we file suits in different towns or different court districts," Gayle Osterberg, vice president of corporate communication for the MPAA, says. "We will send out news releases to the local media in an effort to have stories written about them, so that that one individual suit will raise awareness to a broader degree to the fact that there are consequences for illegally downloading movies." Warner Brothers Entertainment, which is responsible for such blockbusters as the "Matrix" trilogy and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," has implemented a similar plan to dealing with illegal downloading. The most important aspect of the plan is the pursuit of legal alternatives, says Yotam Ben-Ami, vice president of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations at Warner Brothers Entertainment in the United States. "Competing with pirates on their own turf," Ben-Ami says. "For example, in the case of online piracy, this consists of offering video-on-demand services, building a legitimate alternative to piracy." Such a preventative measure is an example of using filesharing technology to combat illegal filesharing. "We want people to see our movies," Osterberg says. "We invest a lot of money into making them, and we want people to be able to see them in a range of different ways. ... Whether you are talking about ABC and its partnership with iPod, or CBS that's providing programming to Google Video; Sony providing movies to PlayStation Portable - they're all exploring these new delivery channels." NBC Universal signed a deal with peer-to-peer downloading service Wurld Media in November of 2005 to allow the online distribution of certain movies. Like the Movielink service, each movie can be "rented" for 24 hours. Warner Brothers is hopping on the technology bandwagon as well, affirming its desire to embrace new advancements as a way to promote legal means of viewing films. "The digital world has opened a lot of possibilities for us - it's not something that we are trying to catch up to, it's something that we've been embracing," says Craig Hoffman, director of Worldwide Anti-piracy Corporate Communications for Warner Brothers Entertainment. "We just want to be able to use it in a way that's safe and fair." Ben-Ami pointed to Warner Brothers' partnerships with America Online and Arvato Mobile in Germany as an indication of the corporation's desire to seek new forms of content delivery. Both of these companies will begin hosting P2P networking for those interested in swapping legal movie files. And what does all of this mean for you, the consumer? More content, when you want it. College campuses have started to utilize filesharing as well. Currently, schools like the University of Rochester, George Washington University and Cornell University offer Napster to students. When Pennsylvania State University signed on with Napster in the spring of 2004, 10,000 students joined in six weeks. For $2 a month, each student can download an unlimited number of songs. But they can only store them in a maximum of three hard drives and the songs disappear from their hard drives once they end their subscription. For more than a year, Emory junior Kevin Rosenbaum discussed with administrators the prospect of bringing a music downloading service to campus. The idea was pitched as a way to make Emory more enjoyable for students and as a means of keeping the University from being held liable for how students use its network. "We'd like to help keep our students out of trouble and help keep Emory out of trouble," says Senior Vice President and Dean for Campus Life John Ford. But after winter break, Director of Academic Technology Services at Emory Alan Cattier suggested to Ford that filesharing could bring more than just music to Emory. Cattier is responsible for examining ways technology can be used to further academic programs at Emory, and he sees iTunes U as a door to a world of electronic opportunity. The question is, he says, "How can filesharing be used legitimately for an academic purpose?" iTunes U was released late in 2005, starting out at Stanford University and the University of Michigan Dental School. Since early March of this year, Apple has begun accepting applications from other schools to expand the service. Essentially, iTunes U allows each school to manage its own free music store. It functions differently than just a prettier version of Blackboard. Anybody can upload audio, video or text files to specific "containers." Containers can be created by professors for their classes, by student musicians for their music, or by campus groups to share files. Imagine Emory's undergraduate e-mail system, LearnLink, Ford says, "But multiply that by sound, video, information of all different types. The mind boggles." By dragging the file into a drop box, material can be uploaded to the massive Apple server, which has enough hard drive space to hold up to 2,500 hours of video. An Emory staff person would approve all content to make sure it isn't copyrighted or inappropriate. For Ford and Cattier, filesharing has become a community-building tool. "The radical thing is what we enable for the campus," Cattier says. "You see the opportunity for the campus to better communicate some of the things they're involved in." For now, the pursuit of a regular music downloading sevice at Emory has been put on hold. The iTunes U proposal is currently in the evaluation phase, says Cattier, as he gauges faculty and student interest. He hopes to bring it to a vote in the Information Technology Governance Committee before the summer. Cattier says some faculty could be wary that too much technology may hurt the traditional in-class experience. But that's not the case for Carol Herron, director of Emory's Language Center. A large part of teaching a language is immersing a student in it, she says, and making language files available through iTunes U would be another step in that direction. "Anything you do to make education materials accessible to students is positive," she says. Language files now kept on a Web site could be stored on a student's iPod and listened to anywhere the student wanted. Ford says the idea's benefits far outweigh any potential negatives. "This idea is so exciting to me, I can't see anyone standing in the way of it," he says. Much like filesharing has revolutionized the entertainment industry, it could play a large role in redefining higher education. It's not a stretch of the imagination to picture a situation in which the physical essence of a college community is placed online. As Ford says, "If you really push the idea, it could change a lot of traditional perceptions of what a university is." http://media.www.emorywheel.com/medi...epublisher.com |
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,023
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Falling Drops Land Without Bursting Jack Exploring what happens when liquids impact solid surfaces, Lei Xu and other researchers from the University of Chicago removed air from an environment and wound up removing the splash effect as well. In this super slo-mo movie a drop of alcohol hits a sheet of glass, both in air and in a vacuum (760 vs.140 torr). In air, the drop ruptures on impact, forming a wildly chaotic crown. In the airless environment the surface of the liquid remains strangely cohesive, the drop never breaking but flattening smoothly into a wider and wider circle like some mysterious alien substance. Beyond the wow factor, practical applications may include improved printer technologies. ![]() Blows or sucks? Intel's Hard-to-Define Viiv Doesn't Live Up to the Hype Rob Pegoraro In January, Intel told the world that digital media would never be the same again. During a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, chief executive Paul S. Otellini unveiled Viiv -- a combination of hardware and software that would combine functions of the TV, the DVD player, the VCR and the videogame console. Viiv (pronounced like "five") would make possible such novel feats as watching new movie releases online, catching South Africa's evening news in London and beaming video from one TV to another within your house. In April, Viiv doesn't look much like that vision. On a typical Viiv box, Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion m7360y, it amounts to a smattering of free Web video clips and discounts on online music, movie and game rentals -- plus a nifty rainbow-hued Viiv sticker on the front of the computer. Intel says that Viiv ( http://www.intel.com/viiv ) is still developing, that an update in the second half of this year will bring more features, and that the best Viiv devices are yet to come. But considering all the hype Intel ginned up around Viiv -- and the news coverage devoted to it -- this ranks as a phenomenally ho-hum product. It's hard even to define Viiv. This brand amounts to a recipe Intel has prepared for computer manufacturers to follow on their own, which means that Intel's idea of Viiv may not coincide with what appears in stores. Viiv's ingredients start with a dual-core Intel processor, which allows the computer to handle demanding video playback while also taking care of other chores, such as burning a CD or running a spyware scan. Then comes one of a handful of Intel digital-media chipsets equipped to play high-definition video and at least six channels of surround sound, plus Intel's Ethernet wired-networking hardware. On the software end of things, Intel requires Microsoft's Media Center 2005 edition of Windows XP and its own "Quick Resume" feature, advertised as offering "instant on/off" capability, and Matrix Storage Technology backup software. Problem is, the same basic hardware already exists on many non-Viiv desktops. Dual-core processors are standard fare on high-end computers, and those intended for media-center use have offered powerful graphics cards and surround sound for years. (HP's machine doesn't even use Intel's graphics chipset; as it turns out, Viiv manufacturers can make substitutions like that if they still meet overall performance requirements.) Other Viiv ingredients are even less remarkable. The idea of mandating Intel or any other company's Ethernet hardware is a joke: Ethernet ports are commodity parts. Quick Resume doesn't actually put a Viiv computer in any sleep mode; it just turns off the display and speakers while barely affecting the rest of the machine. (You can provide a decent approximation of it by pressing the power button on your monitor.) And the Matrix backup software can only be used if your computer has a second hard drive, internal or external, as big as or larger than its primary drive. HP, in turn, has taken Intel's recipe and stuffed it into a numbingly unoriginal package that buries any inherent Viiv-aciousness. The m7360y (starting at $800) employs the same tower-case design as HP's other Media Center desktops, which in turn differ from most other Media Center desktops only by including WiFi wireless networking, LightScribe label-printing CD/DVD burners and bays for HP's removable Personal Media Drives. So if you can't tell a Viiv machine by its appearance or its operation, what's left? Intel has signed up content providers to offer online exclusives to Viiv owners. But once you're online with a Viiv computer, it's far easier to find ads touting this wealth of Viiv bonuses than any of these extras. That's because they can only be viewed through the Media Center interface's "Online Spotlight" screen-- traditionally a dumping ground for random marketing links. All of the Viiv-exclusive content that I found on this HP required lengthy program installations that temporarily punted me out of the remote control-driven Media Center interface. (Apparently the concept of preloading this software eluded the folks at Intel and HP.) The rewards for this work were surpassingly lame. For example, ESPN.com's lure of high-definition video turned out Friday morning to consist of three short clips -- one of which kept looping back to the start after a minute or so -- that filled only a fraction of the screen, as well as nine low-resolution clips taken from the previous night's SportsCenter. Yawn. The worst experience of all came when I tried to view Intel's own showcase of Viiv content. At first, clicking this button yielded a "Windows Media Center Edition required" error. After rebooting the computer to try again, I was presented with a lengthy license agreement and an ActiveX installation dialog. The subsequent download seemed to stall out when the HP-bundled Norton Internet Security firewall warned that "EntriqMediaServer" was a high-risk program that it should always block. Naturally, that was a Viiv component. After allowing it to proceed, I could see what I'd been waiting for: pointers to Viiv content that I'd already seen and discounts and coupons (such as $20 of free rentals at the Movielink site) that combined would not add up to the premium you'd likely pay for a Viiv machine. Intel says Viiv will mean much more in the future. For example, the coming movie "10 Items or Less" will be sold as a digital download to Viiv owners within weeks of its debut in theaters. And in the second half of this year, Intel says Viiv computers will be joined by Viiv set-top boxes and networking devices, allowing people to watch Web video on their TVs. And we may also see smaller Viiv computers that depart from standard-issue PC design. But in the meantime, Intel is only embarrassing itself with its half-witted hucksterism for Viiv. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...12.html?sub=AR ![]() One Day Soon, Straphangers May Turn Pages With a Button Doreen Carvajal In the Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller "Minority Report," a subway passenger scans an issue of USA Today that is a plastic video screen, thin, foldable and wireless, with constantly changing text. The scene is no longer science fiction. This month, De Tijd, a Belgian financial newspaper, started testing versions of electronic paper, a device with low-power digital screens embedded with digital ink — millions of microscopic capsules the width of a human hair made with organic material that display light or dark images in response to electrical charges. This is only one test of new e-paper devices competing to become the iPod of the newspaper business. Other e-paper trials are being undertaken by the paper Les Echos, which is based here, by the newspaper trade group IFRA in Germany and, in the United States, by The New York Times. The International Herald Tribune, which is owned by The New York Times Company, is also in discussions to make subscriptions available later this year for the same e-paper devices used by De Tijd, according to Michael Golden, the International Herald Tribune's publisher. The devices used by De Tijd, called the iLiad E-reader, are made by iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics. Sony will introduce its version of an e-reader with the microcapsule technology later this year. The devices, which will be able to download books, newspapers and podcasts, are expected to cost about $400. For publishers confronting declining newspaper circulation in most parts of the world, the devices offer the tantalizing promise of reaching more readers while saving on printing and distribution costs. But after some highly publicized e-book machines failed to take off in the late 1990's, those long-held hopes have remained elusive. The difference this time, developers and supporters say, is that the screens on the new hardware are made to reflect rather than transmit light, making them more like paper. The devices weigh about 13 ounces (light enough to be held in one hand while reading) and can be updated in Wi-Fi hot spots or through Internet connections (although they cannot be used to surf the Web yet). Their touch screens are also capable of doubling as notebooks to jot down information or to download books. Pages are turned with the touch of a button. De Tijd, with 40,000 readers in Belgium, is essentially fitting its traditional print format to the device's screen, meaning that it is not changing the style of its newspaper. Twenty-five De Tijd readers received free e-paper devices on April 14, the start of a three-month trial that ultimately will reveal the habits of 200 readers, mostly highly educated men selected to match the demographic profile of its print readers. "We know that our readers like to have their newspaper before they go to work, and we offer them paper newspapers before 7:30 a.m. But that's not enough," said Kris Laenens, De Tijd's manager of the project, who added that it needed to offer service to readers wherever and whenever they wanted it. At this point, the e-paper cannot display color, offering just 16 shades of gray, and the screens are rigid. Those weaknesses have soured some newspaper publishers, according to e-paper developers like Plastic Logic in Britain, which said that there were more sophisticated devices in preparation that were bendable and weighed little more than a piece of paper. While the devices may display only in grays, they are interesting enough to attract some advertising agencies to participate in the tests. "How do we deal with the lack of color?" asked Johan Hermans, a managing director of Agency.com in Brussels. "Can you advertise linked to the profile of the user — for example, if they're interested in the automobile sector?" One advantage is that advertisements could change with the time of day, he said, letting agencies avoid showing beer ads in the morning or coffee ads in the evening. "All these types of things we're trying to examine," Mr. Hermans said. Les Echos, which is owned by Pearson, the London-based parent company of The Financial Times, is taking a different approach. Instead of shifting the print format directly to a device, the company is customizing information with a look different from its traditional newspaper format, much as it would for its Web site version. The newspaper plans to test Sony's e-readers first, but the intention is to make the newspaper readable on a variety of devices. The plan is to offer the device "to our subscribers if they subscribe to Les Echos for a period of years," said Philippe Jannet, director of electronic publishing for Les Echos. IFRA, based in Darmstadt, Germany, is pursuing an "eNews initiative" with 21 newspapers from 13 countries, including the Times Company, which will be testing electronic devices as part of the project. Toby Usnik, a spokesman for the company, said that the company joined the consortium of newspapers from Japan, Spain, Germany and France last year, and was pleased with the e-paper devices, which he called "impressive." In May, the group will meet to plot the first phase of e-paper testing, said Jochen Dieckow, who is in charge of business and news media research for the newspaper trade organization. The group's goal is simply to evaluate the new market for e-newspapers. "Many publishers take it seriously and we see it as a new media channel," Mr. Dieckow said. "Our impression is that there's a momentum now and many publishers want to be there at the start so they can form the market. One of the major issues is whether this will be a niche product or a mass product." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/bu.../24epaper.html ![]() Trying to Halt A.M.D., Intel Plays to Business Market Laurie J. Flynn Less than a week after disappointing investors with a sharp drop in quarterly earnings, Intel plans to announce a fresh assault on the business computing market Monday as part of a plan to stem its loss of market share to Advanced Micro Devices. The company is planning to introduce a new brand for a line of business products that will include technology intended to make it easier for companies to manage and maintain fleets of personal computers. Nathan Brookwood, editor of Insight64, an industry newsletter that focuses on the microprocessor industry, said, "They're trying very hard to protect their dominant position and create some differentiation from A.M.D." The business desktop market, where Intel still has a share of more than 90 percent of the market, is considered one of the last reliable bastions for Intel, which has been slowly losing share to Advanced Micro in the last year. With the new brand, Intel hopes to repeat the success of Centrino, the name it gave three years ago to a set of components that provide built-in wireless capability for notebook personal computers. The program became a huge success. But the business market is more about a set of customers than a specific technological capability, and analysts are not convinced that business customers will see enough value in the Intel package to switch. Users so far have shown lackluster interest in Viiv, the name Intel gave to a set of technologies for multimedia computing. But even if Intel is successful in establishing the new business brand, the landscape of the chip industry has been transformed. Where there was once a single preferred source of chips for personal computers, there are now two competitive suppliers: Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. "Before this, A.M.D. was a wannabe, with inconsistent quality and enhancements," Mr. Brookwood said. "But they've changed the dynamics of the industry." How much the momentum of the two companies has diverged became clear in recent earnings announcements. Last week, Intel reported a drop in profit and gross profit margin. And it lowered its forecast for the full year, saying it now expected revenue to decline 3 percent from last year's $38.8 billion, rather than improve 6 percent to 9 percent. Advanced Micro's results, announced a week earlier, painted a different picture. For the first time, its first-quarter gross margin, at 58.4 percent, surpassed Intel's 54.9 percent — reflecting the price-cutting that Intel has undertaken to try to win back sales. And A.M.D. executives put the company's target for gross profit margin at 55 percent to 60 percent for this quarter, compared with Intel's 50 percent, plus or minus a couple of points, excluding share-based compensation effects of approximately 1 percent. (The expected reduction from first-quarter levels is primarily a result of a higher proportion of lower-margin products in the overall mix, along with higher microprocessor unit costs.) Advanced Micro's first quarter represented its 11th consecutive period of significantly better sales growth than Intel. Investors have taken notice. Advanced Micro's stock, though it has recently given up some gains, has risen 43 percent in the last six months and 117 percent in the last year, closing Friday at $31.73. Intel shares have dropped 18 percent in the last six months, to $19.06. How much market share Intel lost in the first quarter on either a per-unit or dollar basis will not be known for a week, when market research companies release updated figures. But it remains much the larger company. During the fourth quarter of 2005, Intel's share declined to about 78 percent of the overall microprocessor business, from 82 percent a year earlier, while Advanced Micro's share rose to 21 percent, from 17 percent, according to Mercury Research. Both companies are expected to benefit from pent-up demand that will be generated by the release of the Windows Vista operating system at year's end. But even more significant to Intel's effort to regain momentum is a fundamental new chip design that the company says it will begin to roll out in the third quarter. "The new core microarchitecture is incredibly important," Mr. Brookwood said, "because the old architecture is what got them into this problem. Intel thought clock speed could drive performance for a decade, but they were wrong." Instead, Intel discovered that gains in processing speed came at the price of greater power consumption and heat, forcing it to rethink its design approach and find other ways to achieve performance. Advanced Micro was able to address the same goal more quickly, without having to overhaul its basic chip architecture, and as a result managed to leapfrog Intel in performance. While Intel says it will have its problems under control in the second half of the year, not all analysts are convinced that it will meet its goal of returning to normal seasonal growth. Mr. Brookwood is among the optimists. "As this year unfolds, Intel will become more competitive," he said. "The company is completing a two-year program digging out of the hole it got itself into." But Eric Ross of ThinkEquity Partners, said, "I'm not convinced they will see the growth they're expecting in the second half." For its part, Advanced Micro is trying to take advantage of every opportunity afforded by Intel's missteps as an opportunity to gain more of the market. "Our share gains continue," the chief executive, Hector Ruiz, said in a conference call with analysts after the company's earnings release. "We believe that once again, we took dollar share across server, notebook and desktop product offerings." Andy D. Bryant, Intel's chief financial officer, said last week that Intel did not lose market share in terms of units during the first quarter, ended April 1, though he acknowledged that it might have lost market share as measured by revenue — again a reflection of Intel's price-cutting. In the American retail market for personal computers — excluding direct-to-consumer sellers like Dell — Advanced Micro surged slightly past Intel last October, with its processors in 49.8 percent of all desktop and notebook computers sold, compared with 48.5 percent for Intel. A.M.D. has forged an ever-closer relationship with some of its best customers, notably Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M. Some analysts have speculated that Dell, long a loyal Intel customer, may choose to increase its use of Advanced Micro chips, which are typically less expensive than Intel's. Dell's share of the worldwide PC market fell slightly in the first quarter of 2006, to 18.1 percent, from 18.6 percent in the period a year earlier, according to the market researcher IDC. Today, the only Dell computers that do not use Intel chips are those marketed under the Alienware label, which Dell acquired last month. Henri Richard, Advanced Micro's senior vice president for worldwide sales, took issue with those predicting an Intel comeback. "For some reason, analysts think history will repeat itself," he said in an interview. "I would argue that things are different now. We didn't have the breadth and depth of success we have now." Things will not be the same inside Intel either. Paul S. Otellini, who took over as chief executive last spring, said last week that the company had begun undergoing the most significant analysis of its efficiencies since the 1980's. To help the bottom line, Mr. Bryant told analysts, Intel planned to cut more than $1 billion this year, taking about $400 million from research and development and $600 million out of administration and marketing. Advanced Micro asserts that one of the few things holding it back is Intel's "monopolistic" business tactics. That, Advanced Micro hopes, will be addressed by a three-judge panel in California that is hearing its case in an antitrust suit it filed against Intel last summer. Lawyers for the two companies have already met in court to begin establishing a timetable for the case, and are expected to do so again in September. Advanced Micro has asked that the trial begin in the first quarter of 2008, while Intel is asking for a start in September 2008. Litigation over one matter or another has been a constant factor in the two companies' relationship over several years. If Intel's new chip initiative succeeds, the competitive equation could look different by then. And Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Raymond James & Associates, says investors are jumping too quickly to the conclusion that Intel's troubles cannot be repaired in the next few quarters. "Things are in place for Intel to roll back A.M.D.'s gains," Mr. Kumar said. "Last year was unique. But it's just one bad year out of many for Intel, and one good year out of many for A.M.D." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/te...gy/24chip.html ![]() B*B*B*Beta Microsoft to Unveil New Internet Explorer AP Microsoft Corp. is releasing a new test version of Internet Explorer, the market-leading Web browser that is facing competition from smaller players. The new beta, available Tuesday for free download to English-languages customers, includes fixes for problems that were causing Internet Explorer 7 to stop working, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager in charge of Internet Explorer development. With the previous test version, Hachamovitch said the most common problems reported involved banking and news sites, in part because of security changes. Improving security can be tricky since any changes can cause legitimate Web sites to stop working, frustrating users. Microsoft also added more guidance to help people using IE's new browser tab functions, which let a user view more than one Web site from within one window, using multiple "tabs." This is Microsoft's third beta of Internet Explorer 7 made available to the general public, and Hachamovitch said there are plans for one more. The new version comes amid growing competition from browsers such as Firefox, which has long offered functions such as tabbed browsing. Some also consider other browsers to be more secure, since IE, with its market dominance, is a popular target for attacks. The final version of Internet Explorer 7 is expected to be released in the second half of this year, around the time a version of Microsoft's new Windows operating system is expected to be available for business users. Microsoft is releasing the new Windows, called Vista, to consumers in early 2007. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine..._Internet.html ![]() Nokia Puts Your Digital Life in Your Hand Jack Ewing The handset maker introduces phones designed to do everything your video camera, computer, and iPod do. And they're always nearby Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's director of design strategy, sometimes begins the day by diving into a Finnish lake still partly covered in ice. He calls that a disruptive experience, and it's a metaphor for what Nokia (NOK ) is trying to do in the consumer electronics business. On Apr. 25, Nokia introduced new versions of its N series handsets, which mark the company's latest encroachment onto turf now occupied by outfits such as Sony (SNE ), Canon (CAJ ), and Apple (AAPL ). If you are old fashioned enough to call these devices "phones," Nokia people will politely correct you. They are multimedia computers, which offer features and picture quality to rival digital cameras or camcorders, and music quality to challenge an iPod. And because they can connect to the Internet you can check e-mail, download songs, or even update your blog while on the go. (Thought the world already had enough blogs? Think again.) The high-end N93 will hit stores in July and retail for $660. (Wireless service providers may offer deals to get that price down.) An upgrade of the existing N90, it moves Nokia further into camcorder territory. The new version can record 90 minutes of video and adds features such as the ability to connect directly to a TV for full-screen viewing. SPECIAL FOCUS. Purchasers will also get a free copy of Adobe (ADBE ) Premier Elements 2.0 video editing software. Along with Carl Zeiss optics, image stabilization, and DVD-quality pictures, the software could encourage many casual users, at least, to use the N93 as their primary video camera. "It's a disruption of existing industries," says Anssi Vanjoki, a member of Nokia's executive board who is responsible for multimedia products. Makers of digital cameras and MP3 players should also take note. All three new devices introduced at a Berlin press conference play music, take pictures, and browse the Internet. But Nokia gives each one a specialty, which it calls a "lead experience." The new $480 N73, with Zeiss optics and 3.2-megapixel resolution, is focused on amateur photographers, while the sleek-looking $380 N72 is aimed at the music and fashion crowd, particularly in Asia. Should anyone miss the point, Nokia's press extravaganza in a spiffed-up Berlin warehouse ended with a video in which the camera slowly panned across a tableau of dusty, discarded electronic equipment -- including digital cameras and a cobweb-covered iPod. The message: Nokia plans to make these products obsolete. EASE OF OWNERSHIP. But will people really forsake their specialized cameras and music players for a device that, deep down, is still a telephone? Maybe. Nokia devices have a couple of important advantages. One is their omnipresence. People always have their phones with them. "When you need your video camera, it's never with you. It's in a box under your bed," says Vanjoki. Camcorders have been around for years, but amateur news video has exploded in the few years since video-recording phones hit the market. Most important may be the devices' connectivity, including a browser that can handle normal Web sites. In Berlin, Nokia also announced a partnership with Yahoo's (YHOO ) Flickr photo-sharing site. Built-in software will make it easy for owners of N series devices to upload photos to Flickr, where they will be accessible to friends and family. The new devices are also designed to connect to online music sites, PCs, and printers via wireless connections. Nokia is trying to ride along with the Internet's evolution into a space where people conduct their lives, letting them do so on the go. Another element that justifies calling the N series phones "computers," is that users can add their own software programs. Given Nokia's marketing power, outside software developers have plenty of incentive to develop specialized applications, including custom spreadsheets that people in emerging countries are already using to keep track of street-market transactions. GLOBAL CONVERGENCE. Design Director Ahtisaari has even heard of people in tropical climates modifying their phones so that they emit an insect-repelling tone. "People using multimedia will continue to surprise us," says Ahtisaari. Nokia has shipped 5 million N series phones since their introduction last year, a fraction of the 100 million camera-equipped phones the company sold last year. But it predicts the market for "converged devices" will reach 250 million in 2008. Naturally, Nokia is already thinking about the next features to add, such as global positioning and search capability, so people can find restaurants or other services close to wherever they happen to be. Small mobile tablets, which connect via the user's standard mobile handset, could challenge laptop makers. WATCH YOUR BACK. The new devices also threaten telcos. Devices that can connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi networks can bypass the traditional voice infrastructure altogether. Vanjoki sees opportunities for telcos that offer the right content, such as video programs that can be viewed on mobile devices. And he points out, people who use their phones as computers are less likely to switch operators since they will also have to transfer all their stored personal data. That's one positive thing for companies such as Vodafone (VDO ), Deutsche Telekom (DTE ), and France Telecom (FTE ). But given Nokia's global marketing might, the telcos as well as makers of consumer electronics should prepare themselves for some tough going ahead. http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...425_598756.htm ![]() Video Handsets Mostly Just Used as Phones Alex Mindlin Cellphone companies, especially Sprint and Verizon Wireless, have been aggressively promoting mobile video services, which cost an average of $10.70 a month for access to sports, news and weather clips. More than a quarter of cellphones now in use can play such videos. But only 1 percent of wireless subscribers are using their phones to watch them, according to a recent survey by the NPD Group, a market research firm. Worse for the industry, most of those who do watch video on their cellphones have been with their current service provider for at least three years, meaning that they were not drawn by the availability — or the marketing — of mobile video. Wireless providers have been banking on video's ability to draw new customers. "Many, many people just use their phones as a device to make and receive calls," said Drew Hull, research director for mobile content at the NPD Group. Until the price of video service drops, he said, "they still have no interest in paying extra for that service." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/te...y/24drill.html ![]() AT&T Earnings Jump 63 Pct. On SBC Merger Peter Svensson APR. 25 8:11 A.M. ET AT&T Inc. said Tuesday its earnings rose 63.3 percent in the first quarter, the first period it reported combined results after SBC Communications Inc.'s acquisition of AT&T Corp., which closed late last year. Net income was $1.445 billion, or 37 cents a share, for the January-March period, up from SBC's earnings of $885 million, or 27 cents a share, in the same period last year. Excluding the costs of SBC's acquisition of AT&T Corp. and Cingular Wireless LLC's acquisition of AT&T Wireless, earnings were 52 cents a share, beating the average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Financial by 3 cents. Revenue came to $15.8 billion, up 55 percent from $10.2 billion the previous year. As expected, results were strong at Cingular, which reported its first-quarter earnings last week along with Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., which owns 40 percent of the venture. San Antonio-based AT&T Inc. owns the rest. Cingular, already the country's largest cell-phone carrier, ended the quarter with 55.8 million subscribers, up 5.5 million from a year ago, and contributed $287 million to AT&T's income. Its revenue of $9 billion was not counted in AT&T's revenue. Revenue in the traditional wired phone business was $14.7 billion, down 5.5 percent from SBC's and AT&T's combined results a year ago. The decline was due mainly to the continued free fall of the former AT&T Corp.'s consumer long-distance business. Even before the merger, AT&T stopped marketing the service due to dwindling margins and competition from regional phone companies like SBC. The number of phone lines served also declined, to 49 million phone from 52 million, due to competition from is, cable and Internet calling. However, this was offset by added revenue from data services. AT&T added 511,000 broadband digital subscriber lines, for a total of 7.4 million. AT&T chief executive Ed Whitacre said the integration of AT&T Corp. and SBC was going according to plan. The front-line sales force has been combined, and plans for integrating the networks are in place. Whitacre still expects the merger to save $600 million to $800 million this year. Even as the former SBC is digesting its acquisition of AT&T Corp., it has announced another mega-merger. In March, AT&T announced a deal to buy BellSouth for $67 billion. The deal was initially expected to close by March 2007, but the companies said last week that they now expect the deal to close by the end of this year. A major reason for the deal is that it would give AT&T full control of growth engine Cingular. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...h_down&chan=tc ![]() AT&T to Slow Down Fiber Rollout? Eric Bangeman Project Lightspeed may be slowed down considerably, according to one industry analyst. His reasoning? It's not going to be fast enough. AT&T's fiber network strategy differs substantially from rival Verizon's in that it is only laying fiber to the node. The primary implication is that bandwidth to the end user will be limited by the existing copper wire infrastructure that runs to individual homes. It also means that AT&T fiber customers will have their broadband speeds capped at 6Mbps, as AT&T will be reserving the rest of the 25Mbps node-to-home link for its IPTV programming. In contrast, Verizon's Fios initiative is a fiber to the premises (FTTP) solution, which means that the beautiful optical stuff goes right to your doorstep. That enables Verizon to offer speeds of up to 30Mbps down/5Mbps up (albeit starting at US$179 per month) to its optical fiber customers. Even with those high speeds, Verizon will be using only about 20 percent of its network capacity for broadband. The rest of the roughly 4.2Gbps will be reserved for TV. AT&T has countered, saying that the high speeds of Fios are "irrelevant" because of problems elsewhere on the backbone. As Nate pointed out in his coverage, that can definitely be the case for general web browsing, the speed of which is often dependent on factors other than the width of your bandwidth pipe. Of course, there are many other applications where the speed of your broadband connection is the limiting factor. Industry analyst Anton Wahlman believes AT&T will in the short term begin to focus more on its Homezone package. Homezone is a partnership with DISH Networks parent EchoStar that combines AT&T phone and DSL service with DISH networks satellite programming. In the interim, AT&T may scale back Project Lightspeed deployment, running fiber to the premises in some locations (e.g., new developments) and bypassing others altogether. "We believe the fundamental reason is that AT&T is likely realizing that 25 megabits isn't going to do the trick, but rather that it needs to plan for 100 megabits or more to the home today, with a path to Gigabit Ethernet to every home in the next five to 10 years at the most." Since AT&T is casting its lot with IPTV, which is a switched system that only transmits a couple of channels at a time to the customer, it doesn't need the kind of bandwidth Verizon requires. Running fiber to the node instead of the home is also significantly cheaper. But if customers aren't going to bite, it makes sense to scale back on the next-gen network deployment until FTTP becomes cheaper. That is especially true if AT&T finds itself hard pressed to explain to current cable customers why its brand-new 6Mbps DSL + IPTV offering is better than the faster package they already have. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060425-6669.html ![]() Raising the Bar at Samsung Martin Fackler Thirty-seven years ago, 36 employees began assembling electric fans in a small workshop in this city, just south of Seoul. That company was Samsung Electronics, and it is now the world's largest and most profitable consumer electronics company. Its 123,000 employees make a range of products as diverse as cellphones and flat-panel televisions, washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Last year, it unseated Sony as the world's most valuable consumer electronics brand, according to a survey by the Interbrand Consulting Group. So why is Kim Byung Cheol, a senior executive at Samsung, so anxious about his company's future? Because, Mr. Kim and others fret, Samsung still has not mastered one crucial factor: originality. With deep pockets, Samsung has won over consumers with clever designs and multifunction gadgets, like camcorders that download songs and refrigerators that also surf the Internet. It has swept up awards for cellphone designs that look like dashboards, tuxedos or pebbles in a stream. Last year, the company had $59.2 billion in sales and reported profits of $7.9 billion, 13 times as much as the 2005 earnings forecast by its rival Sony. But Samsung executives worry that the company, while excellent at refining other people's inventions, is relying on an outdated strategy that worked fine only as long as the company was climbing to the top. Now that it is the leader, they say, Samsung has to set itself apart by creating novel products of its own, especially if it wants to stay ahead of fast-rising rivals from China and Korea and fight off the comeback efforts of its Japanese competitors. This means coming up not just with minor hits, but with breakthrough inventions like the Apple iPod or the Sony Walkman. Otherwise, Samsung risks the same fate as many of the once-formidable Japanese electronics giants it overtook on its way to the top. "We are at a pivotal moment for the company," said Mr. Kim, a vice president in charge of long-term research and development. "If we don't become an innovator, we could end up like one of those Japanese companies, mired in difficulties." Mr. Kim is helping lead Samsung's push to reach this goal, which the company is pursuing with the same ferocity and determination that it has used to conquer global markets. The company plans to invest $40 billion in research and development during the next five years, double what it spent in the preceding five years. It has more than doubled its number of researchers, to 32,000, from 13,900 six years ago. Nowhere is Samsung's effort to reinvent itself more apparent than here in Suwon, where the company has built what it calls the largest research and development center in Asia. In recent years, it has erected towering glass offices and sprawling laboratories with space for 15,000 engineers. The center stands on the site of the company's original 1969 electric fan factory. Suwon's newest facility is the Digital Research Center, completed in September, with the floor space of 30 football fields and audiovisual labs big enough for 9,000 researchers, though it has so far hired only 5,200. Of those, 150 are from foreign countries, including China, India and the United States. Mr. Kim said the new labs reflected Samsung's shift from simply developing products toward basic research to find the next big idea. "If you look at Samsung's R.& D. 10 years ago, we had a lot more D. than R.," Mr. Kim said from his office here. "Today, R. is getting much more attention." If any company can transform itself, analysts say, Samsung can. With a market value exceeding $96 billion, Samsung has done well, they say, because it is the rare corporate giant that remains nimble on its feet. It excels at identifying new technologies and business opportunities early, and then seizing control of the market with overwhelming production volume. It did this perhaps most successfully with a new form of rear-projection TV, which replaced the first generation of bulky, dimly lighted sets that were the original big-screen televisions. The company saw its chance to break into the American market when Texas Instruments approached it at a 2001 trade show in Tokyo, Samsung executives said. Texas Instruments gave Samsung information about a computer chip it had developed that used millions of microscopic mirrors embedded in a rotating disk to project bright full-color images onto screens. The American company had already shopped the chip to the Japanese makers Hitachi, Matsushita and Mitsubishi Electric, who were each developing a single TV model, the executives said. Samsung jumped on the new technology, producing its first prototype within 12 months, in January 2002. Over the next months, Samsung introduced three models using the technology, called digital light processing, with prices for TV's ranging from $3,500 to $5,000, less than half the Japanese makers' prices at the time. By December 2003, Samsung had produced a million of the TV's, becoming the market leader. "This new technology was the chance we needed," said David Steel, a vice president in Samsung's digital media division in Suwon. "Then we ruthlessly executed by moving faster than the competition, not only to catch up but to pass." Mr. Steel says one secret to Samsung's speed is that it makes almost every major electronics component itself, from computer chips to plasma screens. Often, building new products means simply assembling these components in new combinations. He said this also permitted Samsung to go in new directions, building multifunctionality into household electronics and other consumer goods. Samsung offers a camcorder that can also serve as an iPod-like music player, voice recorder, portable TV set and computer flash drive. One refrigerator model has a built-in tablet computer that not only controls temperature but also permits users to surf the Internet, watch television and send e-mail messages. One cellphone model works like a full-fledged digital camera and also plays music. "We think big trends like convergence, and the move to wireless and networking, will play to our strengths," Mr. Steel said. Mr. Steel, a British citizen with a doctorate in physics, exemplifies a recent push by Samsung to attract foreign talent. Hired in 1999, he was the first non-Korean to reach top management. Samsung's rivals see it as a formidable competitor but not yet a trailblazer. But that could change soon, they say. "Our TVs are better," Nobuyuki Oneda, Sony's chief financial officer, said in an interview earlier this year. "But Samsung's cash flow is amazing. It is hard to invest in and develop products" at the same pace as Samsung. Another new Samsung strength, analysts say, is design. The company has design centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo, Shanghai and Milan. Recent designs for flat-panel TV's are based on trends from furniture shows in Italy. At headquarters in Seoul, designers are told to find inspiration outside the office, and are given Wednesday afternoons off to do so, said Christian Collins, a senior manager in Samsung's cellphone division. One popular cellphone was modeled after the dashboard of a German sports car, said Mr. Collins, an American hired away from Verizon Wireless to work for Samsung. Executives also note that Samsung has reinvented itself before. When the company was founded as part of the Samsung industrial group, it was so little known that the only market where it could sell its first black-and-white TV sets was Panama. By the early 1990's, Samsung had become a successful producer of cheap commodity electronics, many of them sold under different brand names. Then Lee Kun Hee, Samsung group chairman, started a sweeping makeover, pushing the company to focus on quality instead of quantity. "Change everything but your family," Mr. Lee told his work force. Samsung pushed its way up the technological ladder, elbowing aside previous incumbents, most of them Japanese. In 1992, it became the world's largest producer of memory chips. In 1995, it made its first liquid-crystal display screen, a technology it eventually mastered to the point that the former front-runner, Sony, joined it in a joint venture to build L.C.D. screens. Samsung has also tried hard to improve its international image. It has spent more than $6 billion since 1998 on marketing, helping sponsor the last five Olympics and erecting a large video sign in Times Square in 2002. But for all its accomplishments, Samsung has failed to win the sort of brand recognition enjoyed by companies like Apple and Sony. Stepping up to the next level of corporate advancement, analysts say, requires inventing a product that reshapes an entire industry and serves as an icon for a generation. Apple did it with the iPod, as Sony did a generation earlier with the Walkman, a 1979 product that still gives the company a technological cachet of cool that Samsung lacks. "Samsung is a great company, but its products are still basically identical to everyone else's," said J. J. Park, an electronics analyst in the Seoul office of J. P. Morgan Securities. "Samsung is still waiting for its Walkman." While acknowledging that it has not had such a hit product yet, Samsung says its push to turn itself into a research powerhouse is already showing results. Last year, Samsung registered 1,641 patents in the United States, ranking fifth among companies, behind Matsushita of Japan but ahead of Intel. Executives say it is only a matter of time before Samsung comes up with a hit that will catapult it into the pantheon of global innovators. "Those sort of innovative products come once in a generation," said Mr. Collins, of Samsung's cellphone division. "We've had lots of semi-iconic products, and we will have an iconic product soon enough." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/te...25samsung.html ![]() Chinese $150 Linux Mini-PC Races OLPC to Market A Chinese company is touting an inexpensive Linux-based computer as a way to close the "digital divide." YellowSheepRiver's $150 "Municator" appears to be available now, with a three-month leadtime, suggesting it could reach market well ahead of MIT's $100 "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) device. The OLPC project was announced last fall, with laptop manufacturer Quanta Computer of Taiwan stepping forward to offer its manufacturing services shortly afterward. However, no specific delivery commitments appear to have been reached. Additionally, the performance potential of the OLPC's $100 laptop design has drawn taunts from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, as well as Intel Chairman Craig Barret, who called the design a "$100 gadget." If the Municator lives up to YellowSheepRiver's promise of Pentium III-like performance, the Chinese device could enjoy a performance edge, in addition to its apparent time-to-market lead. Chinese chips inside YellowSheepRiver says it saved cost in its Municator YSR-639 design by sourcing the CPU, RAM, and other key chips from Chinese companies. China is now the world's third-largest producer of new semiconductor designs, according to research firm iSuppli. According to YellowSheepRiver, the Municator is based on a 64-bit Godson-2 CPU from BLX Semiconductor. The Godson-2 chip, codenamed "Dragon," uses an instruction set based on the MIPS architecture; however, BLX is not a MIPS licensee. The Microprocessor Report suggested last summer that BLX could face legal challenges from MIPS if its chips reach the U.S., although some other sources suggest that the Godson chips do not include patented portions of the MIPS ISA (instruction set architecture), such as unaligned 32-bit load/store support. The Municator's Godson-2 processor offers performance similar to a Pentium III, YellowRiver claims; however, a more useful comparison might be to MIPS's four-way superscalar R10000 processor, which shipped in 1995, and powered Silicon Graphics Unix workstations such as the O2, pictured at right. The Godson-2 also has a four-way superscalar design. The Godson-2 chips in YellowSheepRiver's YSR-639 are clocked at 400MHz or 600MHz. They connect to a Marvel MV64420-BDM1C133 northbridge via a 133MHz FSB (front-side bus). The Marvel northbridge supports DDR RAM at 166MHz, via an SODIMM slot, and offers a 32-bit, 33MHz PCI bus. A VIA VT82C686B southbridge with 133/100/66MHz ATA bus completes the chipset. YellowSheepRiver says it hopes one day to use an "SoC" (system-on-chip) version of the Godson-2 chipset that will integrate the processor and northbridge into a single chip, and save additional cost and power. Other features The OLPC design eschews a hard drive, to keep cost down, but has an LCD display. The Municator, in contrast, offers an S-video port, in order to support television displays, and comes with a 40GB external USB drive. The Municator also has rear-mounted IDE and power connectors that support the attachment of optional optical drives. Other interfaces, according to YellowSheepRiver, include four front-mounted USB 2.0 ports, IrDA, and audio I/O. Additional rear-mounted interfaces include S-video, VGA, 10/100 Ethernet, serial, PS/2 keyboard/mouse, and IDE. The Municator measures 7 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches (180 x 145 x 37mm), and weighs one pound, six ounces (0.65kg). It requires five amps of 12-volt power, and comes with a 45-watt auto-sensing 110/220 adapter. A lithium-ion battery pack is optionally available. Other options include WiFi and a modem. The Municator runs "Thinix 3.0," a Linux variant that features support for user interfaces based on a keyboard, mouse, or both, according to YellowSheepRiver. Thinix is based on RPLinux, a distribution created by the China Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion (CSIP). Availability YellowSheepRiver says orders for its "Fitness Computer," possibly a codename for the YSR-639, can begin production within three months of order confirmation. A video demonstrating the Municator is available here. http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6301677114.html ![]() Look, No Hard Drive: Flash Only Martyn Williams Samsung's solid-state disk drives are clear pointers to the way ahead, so it was with more than a little interest that we checked out a laptop equipped with flash memory instead of spinning platters at CeBIT. — Samsung has developed a higher-capacity version of its solid-state disk (SSD), a flash-memory based replacement for hard-disk drives, and is showing it at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, this week. The drive packs 32Gb of flash memory into a case the same size as a 1.8in, hard-disk drive. That capacity is double the 16Gb of a prototype device announced by Samsung last year and was made possible by the continuing miniaturization of flash-memory chip technology. At CeBIT the solid-state disk is being demonstrated inside a Samsung laptop computer. Because the SSD is the same size and shape as the computer's hard drive it was relatively easy to replace the hard drive with the SSD, said Yun Mini, a spokeswoman for Samsung. The SSD technology has three major benefits over hard drives, said Yun. The first is that data access is faster. This could be seen when the SSD-based laptop was booted up alongside the same model machine with a standard hard drive. The desktop appeared on the screen of the SSD laptop in about 18 seconds while the hard drive-based computer took about 31 seconds to reach the same point. The second advantage comes in durability. Because there are no moving parts in the SSD it is much better at withstanding shock and unlikely that data will be lost if the laptop is dropped. The third major advantage is that it works silently, said Yun. But for all these advantages there is a major hurdle that needs to be overcome before SSD can reach mass market — price. Flash memory costs around $30 per gigabyte so the memory needed for the 32Gb drive works out to about $960, before any other costs are taken into account. Samsung thinks there are some military or industrial customers that have specialist applications that would benefit from the SSD and so might be more willing to pay a premium. "At this moment it would be very expensive," said Yun, "but technology is moving very fast so in the near future it could be cheaper." Prices for flash memory are coming down. In May last year, when Samsung first announced the technology, the flash memory price was about $55 per gigabyte. So it might just be a matter of time before such disks hit the mass market. http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/200...flash_only.php ![]() Review ThinkFree Online Michael W. Muchmore While web-based office apps seem to be popping out of the woodwork almost daily—ajaxWrite, Writely, zoho, Num Sum—ThinkFree has been trying to take the productivity software market online since 1999. Today ThinkFree releases a major update to its suite, upgrading free online storage space from 30MB to 1GB and adding a new lightweight AJAX-based collaboration feature and the ability to apply folksonomy to a document through "tagging" (very Web 2.0). Another Web 2.0 feature of the suite is Mashup—when a web application incorporates functionality with other web services. In ThinkFree's case, the combination is with Flickr for inserting pictures into documents now, and later the company plans integrating Google and Yahoo for maps, and with del.icio.us for shared bookmarking. ThinkFree uses both AJAX and Java. The company admits that AJAX is more portable in that it doesn't require a plug-in, but they contend that Java is needed to provide true Microsoft Office compatibility and functionality. Solutions like ajaxWrite can mimic an installed word processor interface with some success, but ThinkFree's take is that they don't want to limit users to one browser, as ajaxWrite does. And ThinkFree goes a lot farther than ajaxWrite in mimicking Microsoft Office functionality. Note that the office suite doesn't include a database app, so it's not really a complete replacement for Microsoft Office. ThinkFree Online will be free; it's supported by banner ads, contextual ads based on what's in your document (similar to Google's Gmail ad strategy), and search ads. The company also hopes to lure users into upgrading to premium services like additional storage and ad-free operation. Now let's take a look at this revamped webware in more depth. Continued... When you first start using ThinkFree Office Online, the first page you'll see is the "Webtop." This is the page with buttons for the three office applications, recent files, your online document folders, messages, and information on your account, such as used disk space and "points." The page also offers buttons for uploading files to your gigabyte of free online storage, and for sharing, publishing, and deleting documents. Even while writing this article, the advantage of having your document stored online is very evident. Since the article was written partly at home and partly at the office, having it live in one place, without the need to send it back and forth in email attachments, was a definite boon. And if you're mostly working with word-processing documents or spreadsheets, ThinkFree's free 1GB of online storage can go a long way. For presentations, the file size becomes more of an issue. You can upload any kind of file you want in your disk space—even an .exe file. Recent files is a handy shortcut on the ThinkFree home page. A company rep said they're still working on the details of the "points" program. Users will be able to exchange points for services, such as more storage space, template and clip art downloads, or even additional features in future releases. Users will also be able to gain points by being good citizens, publishing popular files to others, commenting, tagging, rating, inviting others to join. You get a thousand points for signing up, and 100 points for getting an acquaintance to sign up; you can also buy points in increments of one thousand per dollar. You can add as many folders as you want, but there's no hierarchical nesting: All the folders are visible at the same level on the Webtop. It would be nice if each of the areas on this management page and your My Office page had some associated help links. Perhaps the folks at ThinkFree will add this as the product evolves. You can start a new document in any of the three "power edit" tools—Write, Calc, or Show—or you can choose Quick Edit. The Quick edit button launches a popup prompting for a filename, then launches the Quick Editor. If you just click on the file, you'll get the third mode of display: Preview. This lets you see any of the three document types without any editing capability. If you click on your user name, you get to your account settings: Clicking on one of the office application buttons yields this dialog, allowing you to choose whether you want to use Quick Edit or Power Edit, which brings us to a discussion of the apps themselves. Continued... The first time you start any of the "power edit" tools, there's about a half-minute delay while the java code is downloaded to your system. After this initial delay, starting up the apps takes only a couple of seconds. The new version of ThinkFree gives you two ways to edit documents: With the AJAX-based Quick Edit tool, or through Power Edit, which opens the appropriate fuller-featured java-based application, Write, Show, or Calc. Quick Edit lets you do quite a few things in word processing documents, such as drag-and-drop editing, inserting tables and pictures, and formatting text font, size, and color. There's even a separate Search and Replace—which already puts it ahead of ajaxWrite. You can also print and add symbols to a document in Quick Edit. But here too there's no help option—a definite usability drawback. We tried adding images in this tool, but they didn't appear until after we saved and reopened the document. Another time when trying to open one of our documents, we occasionally got this error: The full java word processor adds a menu bar and a far more Word-like interface: When you look at the same file in Power Edit, you get the familiar squiggly red lines under words the spell checker doesn't recognize. You also get a ruler, and a help feature. But the help is pretty linear without searching for topics offered. You also get the ability to wrap text around pictures, and to export to PDF. Unfortunately, when you click on the New Document icon, ThinkFree doesn't sprout up a new window and leave your current doc in place: You have to close the current document. You can get around this by going back to your Webtop and starting a new doc from there, but it would be nice if the button worked this way by default. A word about cutting and pasting: There's no Paste Special command, and when you paste, for example, a formatted table from a web page into a Write doc, you lose any formatting, unlike in Word, where you have a choice to keep formatting or paste text only. ThinkFree's autocorrect feature is welcome and quite complete, and shortcut keys like Ctrl-F, Ctrl-B, and Ctrl-I do just what they do in Word. Find and Replace, however, doesn't offer searching on formatting, for example finding any instance of text in italics. You can insert fields (but no mail merge), text boxes, symbols, bookmarks, hyperlinks, and references, but not diagrams or objects as Word allows. There are some drawing tools at the bottom of the window for creating basic diagrams. Formatting options are pretty robust, with styles like headings, bullets and numbering, multicolumn layouts, and dropcaps available. There's no Autoformat or Themes that Word has, but very few people probably use those anyway. Spell checking is there, but not grammar. Continued... At the time of our testing, the AJAX-based Quick Edit versions of Calc and Show were not yet available. We'll be sure to update this article if we find any interesting variances in these tools from the Quick Edit version of Write. Calc offers full Excel compatibility: We even checked that its columns go up to IV and rows down to 65,536 as Excels do. This support includes multi-tab spreadsheets and named areas. There are enough functions, accessible from a function toolbar, to satisfy all be the most deeply technical Excel users. Strangely, the Calc app offers a user dictionary, whereas Write doesn't. In Calc, displayed graphs with no problem and offered most formatting and other chart options, but little things like making labels opaque or transparent missing. There's no Error Correction, but there aren't Excel's Goal Seek or Scenarios, and the Data menu of Excel, with all its database-like features such as Filtering and Pivot Tables, is completely absent. But again, these will only be missed by advanced users—not the vast majority of us who use Excel for general computation and charting. Save As… lets you open from and save anywhere on your local disk as well as from your web storage space. As in the other ThinkFree apps, the Open dialog doesn't have the choice of recent documents, but of course you can see these on your Webtop. Browsing network drives just as fast as in Windows, if not sometimes faster. Finally, you can save your spreadsheets as Scalable Vector Graphics and PDF, and even XML in addition to XLS. Continued... A side-by-side comparison of ThinkFree Show and Microsoft PowerPoint shows a remarkable similarity: In fact, the only major features missing from Show are the ability to insert movies and sounds into your presentations and to use a macro language. Show even offers a few nicely designed presentation templates, and a good choice of transitions and animations. There are some collaboration features that Microsoft takes advantage of its NetMeeting, and PowerPoint's Set Up Show dialog offers a lot more options than Show does. But all in all, we feel that most PowerPoint users won't miss much by switching to ThinkFree Show. Continued... You can share a document online with anyone through email by clicking on the Share button at the top of the edit window—they needn't join ThinkFree too. An even simpler way to make a ThinkFree creation available to anyone on the planet is the Publish feature. This lets you assign any file a URL that you can send to folks who might like to see your work. But these methods don't allow for collaborative editing. For that, everyone who is to participate needs to sign up for a ThinkFree account. But when you do send a file the simple way, if the user who gets the preview clicks one of the Edit buttons at the top of the window, he'll be sent to the main ThinkFree page where he can join. At present, ThinkFree can save multiple revisions of a document a team is working on, but you can't see revisions in a single document as you can in Microsoft Office with the color-coded text. A ThinkFree company rep stated that they were planning to add this capability. Comments are supported, which will be visible to other members of the team sharing a doc. There's also a basic messaging feature, but we think this is not a huge plus, as you'll already have the email of your collaborators, since they're required to use an email to sign up. iCdocs Part of ThinkFree's philosophy of making documents viewable on the web without the need for installed office applications is its iCdocs product. This basically lets any webmaster put code on his or her site that can display Office documents using JSP pages and APPLET tags so that users can view .doc, .xls, and .ppt files in their browser. So, if you wanted to put a PowerPoint presentation somewhere on your blog, iCdocs would allow you to do this. ThinkFree even has a dynamic page that automatically generates the code you need to put on your site to display the Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. The document doesn't even have to be in a ThinkFree storage area, it can be on any FTP server, too. Continued... ThinkFree plays well with some other web services, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and several blogging services. We tried to get it to post to our LiveJournal, but that seemed to be the one major blogging API not supported. The company says that later versions of ThinkFree (which, remember, can be updated seamlessly at any time as a web-based service) will support LiveJournal. Here's an example of how you can add a Flickr picture into your document: We were unable to test the integration with Google Maps or with del.icio.us at this time, but the company states these will be available soon, and we'll update this article to report any future findings. Continued... ThinkFree's fairly full support of Microsoft Office file formats—and the fact that it's free—is great for anyone who needs to edit an Office document on the fly and to those who want to access docs from different locations without having to continually send updated email attachments. The collaboration features, especially the ability to share a file through email, will appeal to teams that need to co-edit documents and presentations. We would wait a bit, however, before choosing ThinkFree as a company-standard business tool. ThinkFree Corp. needs to iron out some functionality and add an in-depth help feature with searching for topics. Another oddity of using this type of application is that occasionally you'll get a right-click menu for browser operations when you're not interested in, for example, going back one web page in your browsing history, but rather you just want some information about a button your mouse is over. Some, too, may hesitate to put their private documents on a web service. Read more software reviews in our Software and Development section. Editing in ThinkFree is by no means as snappy as with an installed program, occasionally there's the need to interact with the server over the Internet, and that always presents the possibility of delays. And finally, there's no equivalent to Access in the suite. But we applaud all of the office functionality, the gigabyte of free space, and the collaboration features ThinkFree is offering for free, and their iCdocs service should prove useful to some webmasters. Product: ThinkFree Online Company: ThinkFree Corp. Price: Free. Pros: Free; excellent Microsoft Office compatibility; includes most useful Office features; 1GB online storage; works with web services like Flickr and map sites; nice document sharing features. Cons: Slower than installed office apps; no database app; occasional interface quirks; no in-document revision marking; point system unclear. Summary: ThinkFree gives you a lot considering you don't need to pay anything for it: A gigabyte of storage, Microsoft Office-compatible editors, a way to share documents and to have access to and the ability to edit them from anywhere. It's not going to put Microsoft Office out of business, but if you don't need that Office's advanced features, this free webware can be a godsend. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1952434,00.asp ![]() A Red Flag In The Brain Game America's dismal showing in a contest of college programmers highlights how China, India, and Eastern Europe are closing the tech talent gap Steve Hamm Ben Mickle, Matt Edwards, and Kshipra Bhawalkar looked as though they had just emerged from a minor auto wreck. The members of Duke University's computer programming team had solved only one problem in the world finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in San Antonio on Apr. 12. The winning team, from Saratov State University in Russia, solved six puzzles over the course of the grueling five-hour contest. Afterward, Duke coach Owen Astrachan tried to cheer up his team by pointing out that they were among ``the best of the best'' student programmers in the world. Edwards, 20, still distraught, couldn't resist a self-deprecating dig: ``We're the worst of the best of the best.'' Duke wasn't the only U.S. school to be skunked at the prestigious computing contest. Of the home teams, only Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked among the 12 highest finishers. Most top spots were seized by teams from Eastern Europe and Asia. Until the late 1990s, U.S. teams dominated these contests. But the tide has turned. Last year not one was in the top dozen. WAKE-UP CALL The poor showings should serve as a wake-up call for government, industry, and educators. The output of American computer science programs is plummeting, even while that of Eastern European and Asian schools is rising. China and India, the new global tech powerhouses, are fueled by 900,000 engineering graduates of all types each year, more than triple the number of U.S. grads. Computer science is a key subset of engineering. ``If our talent base weakens, our lead in technology, business, and economics will fade faster than any of us can imagine,'' warns Richard Florida, a professor at George Mason University and author of The Flight of the Creative Class. Software programmers are the seed corn of the Information Economy, yet America isn't producing enough. The Labor Dept. forecasts that ``computer/math scientist'' jobs, which include programming, will increase by 40%, from 2.5 million in 2002 to 3.5 million in 2012. Colleges aren't keeping up with demand. A 2005 survey of freshmen showed that just 1.1% planned to major in computer science, down from 3.7% in 2000. For young Americans, a computing career isn't the draw it was even a few years ago. Never mind that experienced programmers make upwards of $100,000 and that the brainiest of them are the objects of heated bidding wars (YHOO ). Students fear that if they become programmers they'll lose their jobs to counterparts in India and China, who work for a fraction of the pay. Analysts say those worries are overblown: Programmers with leadership and business skills will do just fine. But the message isn't getting through. Then there's the thrill factor, or lack thereof. Given the opportunity to make a mint on Wall Street or land a comfortable academic job, many math and science students are turning away from software. ``I couldn't really get excited about sitting in front of a computer and just writing programs,'' says Duke junior Brandon Levin, who has taken computer courses but is majoring in math and plans a career in academia. You might think the influx of eager foreign students would make up for the deficit, but that's not happening. While about 25% of students enrolled in graduate computer science programs are foreign, many won't be able to stay in the country after graduation because of restrictive post-9/11 immigration policies. That's if they even want to work here anymore. Foreign students are increasingly returning to their home countries after graduation. Duke's Bhawalkar, 19, from Pune, India, plans to go back after getting a degree in math and computer science and attending grad school in the U.S. ``In the past, people from India stayed here after they got their degrees,'' she says. ``But now India is at a turning point. It's getting to be a leader.'' The foreign students have a palpable determination to succeed. Bhawalkar's role model is Srinivasa Ramanujan, an early 20th century Indian mathematician who became famous worldwide in spite of an inferior education. This year, as a Duke sophomore, Bhawalkar placed 70th among 2,500 top North American university students in the prestigious Putnam math competition. Her life goal is ``to make a mark in some discipline so people will say, 'That's Kshipra. She did this.''' Bhawalkar is inspired by her entrepreneur parents. Her father, a chemical engineer by training, invented breakthrough water-purification systems that use biological processes. Mom runs the business. Bhawalkar showed signs of being a math prodigy in sixth grade and fixed on science after a family friend read her palm and told her she would be a scientist when she grew up. Says her mother, Vidula: ``She has seen us achieve something that's a first in the world, and she wants to do something better than her father.'' At Duke, Bhawalkar spends much of her time in a dorm room doing 35 to 40 hours per week of homework and extra reading. It's not that foreign students are any smarter, say U.S. university leaders. They just have relentless discipline. The team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which finished first last year and fifth this year, uses past participants to train each successive team. ``We pile up experience year after year,'' says coach Yong Yu. The team practices year-round and puts in three hours a day during the months before the contest. U.S. teams typically spend much less time preparing. ``ARE WE HUNGRY ENOUGH?'' Some tech-industry leaders are concerned that U.S. students have become complacent. ``There has to be a passion to be innovative,'' says Nicholas M. Donofrio, executive vice-president for innovation and technology at IBM (IBM ), which sponsors the ACM contest. Donofrio's father was an Italian immigrant who worked three jobs to feed his family in Beacon, N.Y., then a gritty factory town. Donofrio questions whether Americans still have that kind of drive. ``Are we hungry enough?'' he asks. ``Or are we going to amble along and take our time? If so, the Indians and Chinese will close the gap and perhaps even surpass us. You can see the passion in their eyes. They're people on a mission.'' When BusinessWeek visited Duke on a Saturday in early April, it was clear why many American students don't have the intensity of their overseas counterparts. There are a zillion distractions. The campus was like a carnival, with concerts, outdoor parties, and sunbathing on the grass. Meanwhile, the programming team was sequestered in a concrete-and-steel computer science building writing algorithms on whiteboards and tapping out C++ code on a PC. Sample problem: You have a population of Tribbles (the furry Star Trek beasts) who live for a day. Each Tribble has the potential for producing a number of offspring. What's the probability that, after a certain number of generations, every Tribble will be dead? Bhawalkar's teammates are no slouches. A year ago, Duke's ACM programming team (she was not yet on it) solved four problems in the world finals. Mickle, now a 21-year-old senior, got job offers from Google and Microsoft (MSFT ), and chose Microsoft. Edwards landed a Microsoft internship this summer. But they acknowledge that they don't have the dedication to programming that some overseas aces do. During a break, Edwards ticked off his list of college activities. In addition to classes and homework, he plays tennis four times a week, practices with the Ultimate Frisbee team, and sings in a choir. ``We're like pickers and choosers at a buffet rather than concentrating on one thing. Some of the other countries, they focus more,'' he said. Is the answer to turn American students into programming-obsessed drudges? Even if you could do that, it would just make the field less popular. Duke coach Astrachan, the computer science department's director of undergraduate studies, says the way to reverse the decline in interest is to make computer science more compelling to students by linking it to practical, real-world situations. He has proposed two new double majors, computational biology and computational economics, applying programming to medicine and business. He's also developing a course on social networking Web sites such as MySpace, where students will build and manage Web sites -- learning about programming along the way. Other academic and tech-industry leaders also are striving to make computing more exciting. The University of California at Berkeley and Georgia Institute of Technology, among others, are developing multidisciplinary programs linking technology, business, and social sciences. Intel (INTC ) and Microsoft sponsor student science and technology contests. Yet computer science advocates say that unless the government enacts sweeping legislation aimed at improving the nation's technology competitiveness -- legislation now bogged down in Congress -- there's a limit to what can be done. ``The attitude in the House is very toxic, and I don't see much chance of them coming together,'' says Deborah L. Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness. While Congress was fiddling, the kids from Saratov State were marching toward victory in San Antonio. The 83 teams sat at tables that were gradually festooned with color-coded balloons signaling which group had solved which problems. After an announcer ticked off the last 10 seconds in the contest, Saratov's players, coaches, and hangers-on shouted with joy and gave each other back-pounding bear hugs. ``I feel euphoric,'' said team member Ivan Romanov. Victory was especially sweet, he added, because it came on the anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's 1961 voyage into space. Gagarin's rocket ride shocked Americans out of their postwar complacency, sparking a national quest for tech superiority that led to such breakthroughs as the moon landing and the microchip. A trouncing in a programming contest doesn't inspire the same kind of response today. Truthfully, Americans just don't feel threatened enough to exert the effort. But if we wait too long, we might find ourselves playing catch-up again. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...gn_id=bier_tca ![]() Potheads and Sudafed John Tierney Police officers in the 1960's were fond of bumper stickers reading: "The next time you get mugged, call a hippie." Doctors today could use a variation: "The next time you're in pain, call a narc." Washington's latest prescription for patients in pain is the statement issued last week by the Food and Drug Administration on the supposed evils of medical marijuana. The F.D.A. is being lambasted, rightly, by scientists for ignoring some evidence that marijuana can help severely ill patients. But it's the kind of statement given by a hostage trying to please his captors, who in this case are a coalition of Republican narcs on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Drug Enforcement Administration. They've been engaged in a long-running war to get the F.D.A. to abandon some of its quaint principles, like the notion that it's not fair to deny a useful drug to patients just because a few criminals might abuse it. The agency has also dared to suggest that there should be a division of labor when it comes to drugs: scientists and doctors should figure out which ones work for patients, and narcotics agents should catch people who break drug laws. The drug cops want everyone to share their mission. They think that doctors and pharmacists should catch patients who abuse painkillers — and that if the doctors or pharmacists aren't good enough detectives, they should go to jail for their naïveté. This month, pharmacists across the country are being forced to lock up another menace to society: cold medicine. Allergy and cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine, a chemical that can illegally be used to make meth, must now be locked behind the counter under a provision in the new Patriot Act. Don't ask what meth has to do with the war on terror. Not even the most ardent drug warriors have been able to establish an Osama-Sudafed link. The F.D.A. opposed these restrictions for pharmacies because they'll drive up health care costs and effectively prevent medicine from reaching huge numbers of people (Americans suffer a billion colds per year). These costs are undeniable, but it's unclear that there are any net benefits. In states that previously enacted their own restrictions, the police report that meth users simply switched from making their own to buying imported drugs that were stronger — and more expensive, so meth users commit more crimes to pay for their habit. The Sudafed law gives you a preview of what's in store if Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, succeeds in giving the D.E.A. a role in deciding which new drugs get approved. So far, despite a temporary success last year, he hasn't been able to impose this policy, but the F.D.A.'s biggest fear is that Congress will let the drug police veto new medications. In that case, who would ever develop a better painkiller? The benefits to patients would never outweigh the potential inconvenience to the police. Officially, the D.E.A. says it wants patients to get the best medicine. But look at what it's done to scientists trying to study medical marijuana. They've gotten approval for their experiments from the F.D.A., but they can't get the high-quality marijuana they need because the D.E.A. won't allow it to be grown. The F.D.A. actually wants to know if the drug works, but the D.E.A. is following the just-say-know-nothing strategy: as long as researchers can't study marijuana, they can't come up with evidence that it's effective. And as long as there's no conclusive evidence that medical marijuana works, the D.E.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill can go on blindly fighting it. Representative Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who's the most rabid drug warrior in Congress, has been pressuring the F.D.A. to crack down on medical marijuana. Last week the agency finally relented: in return for not having to start busting anyone, it issued a statement stressing the potential dangers and lack of extensive clinical trials establishing medical marijuana's effectiveness. The statement was denounced as a victory of politics over science, but it's hard to see what political good it does the Republican Party. Locking up crack and meth dealers is popular, but voters take a different view of cancer patients who swear by marijuana. Medical marijuana has been approved in referendums in four states that went red in 2004: Nevada, Montana, Colorado and Alaska. For G.O.P. voters fed up with their party's current big-government philosophy, the latest medical treatment from Washington's narcs is one more reason to stay home this November. http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/25...ierney.html?hp ![]() Wi-Fi Consumers Cautioned To Wait On New Gear Marguerite Reardon Two different groups testing new wireless products based on a draft standard of next-generation Wi-Fi technology caution consumers against buying pre-standard gear. On Monday, the Fairpoint Group and the technology trade publication eWeek released results of tests conducted on new products using draft versions of the 802.11n standard. While eWeek's assessment is not nearly as negative as the analysis of the testing from the Fairpoint Group, both groups said they felt it was still too soon for consumers to buy products using 802.11n. "I've always been a harsh critic of selling equipment that is compliant with a draft," said Craig Mathias, an analyst with Fairpoint Group. "But besides that I was reasonably underwhelmed in terms of the throughput and range of the draft compliant products." eWeek was also critical of the new products. "It is not advisable to invest in these products lock, stock and barrel," eWeek said in its article. "Enterprise-grade WLAN manufacturers continue to wait for the standard to fully bake, and enterprise customers should do the same." The new 802.11n standard, which is expected to be finalized later this year, will allow notebook users to connect to wireless access points at much faster speeds than currently available with 802.11g technology. 802.11n will use a technology called MIMO (multiple-in, multiple-out) , which should improve the range and throughput of 802.11n products so that it can be used as a replacement for Ethernet cabling in an office and as a way to transmit video around a house without interrupted playback. In January, the IEEE approved a draft version of 802.11n, after much controversy and infighting among chipmakers. In the last few months, several products have emerged on the market claiming to comply with the 802.11n draft. Problems with the technology But now that products are out in the market, groups testing draft 802.11n are finding that the technology has some problems. The Fairpoint Group compared the performance and interoperability of Buffalo Technology's AirStation Nfiniti router and client, which use Broadcom's draft 802.11n Intensi-fi chipset, and both versions of Netgear's RangeMax Next client and routers, which use draft 802.1n chips from Broadcom and Marvel, with Linksys' Wireless G and SRX400 equipment. What the Fairpoint Group found during the testing was that the Linksys SRX400, which uses Airgo's third-generation MIMO technology that isn't compliant with the draft version of 802.11n, offered higher throughput at longer distances than all three of the other products tested, which used draft N technology. The report also indicated that the "draft compliant" products did not connect at any faster speed or across any greater distance than existing 802.11g products, which typically transmit data between 20 and 24 mbps. eWeek tested Linksys' new WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router and the WPC300N Wireless-N Note-book Adapter, which both use Draft 802.11n chip technology from Broadcom. The article said Linksys' draft 802.11n gear was the fastest wireless equipment at short distances the magazine had tested to date, "besting even a pair of products based on Airgo's Gen 3 True MIMO chipset." But when it came to long distances, a key reason for developing the 802.11n standard, eWeek, like The Fairpoint Group, found gear based on the draft standard fell short. eWeek said that performance at 50 feet lagged considerably when compared with the products using Airgo chips. "I wouldn’t read too much into these early tests," said Bill Bunch, director of marketing for wireless LAN for Broadcom. "The testing we have done has gotten results more like the eWeek test." Bunch said the true value of Broadcom's draft 802.11n technology is that it interoperates with equipment from other draft N suppliers. But the Fairpoint Group found in its testing that this was not the case. Mathias said that he was unable to get equipment from Netgear and Buffalo Technology to talk to each other. What's more, he wasn't even able to get the two versions of the Netgear products to work together. Bunch said the Fairpoint Group's results are flawed. "I can guarantee you that it's a problem with the test," he said. "I have tested this myself at home, and it works. I look at these results and can see right away something was wrong with this test." Mathias said that companies such as Broadcom are overhyping the capabilities of their products. "These products have not been verified by the Wi-Fi Alliance," he said. "It's all marketing right now, and it's marketing out of control." http://news.com.com/Wi-Fi+consumers+...3-6064605.html ![]() Nokia Pushes Hard On Multimedia Phones Handset giant Nokia, which said Tuesday that it has sold more than 5 million N-series multimedia phones since last year, plans to launch three new models this summer. Anssi Vanjoki, the head of Nokia's multimedia unit, said the Finnish company expects the multimedia phone market worldwide to grow to 100 million units in 2006 and exceed 250 million in 2008. "It is not a small market," he said at the launch of the new phones. Research firm Canalys said about 50 million multimedia phones were sold in 2005, Vanjoki added. The new N93 video camera model, with optical zoom, and the new N73 camera phone, which has a 3 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens, are both expected to hit the shelves in July. The new N72 music phone is expected to be available in June. The unsubsidized retail prices will range from about $400 for the N72 to about $680 for the most expensive, the N93, Vanjoki said. "I think the N72 and N73 will be successful phones that will sell well, but the N93 will be a niche product," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst with market researcher Gartner. She said that the new N-series devices were bulkier than those of rivals but that through design improvements, they had become small and thin enough to be acceptable. Nokia reported stronger-than-expected first-quarter sales and earnings last week and singled out the success of its N70 model as its biggest revenue-generating handset in the quarter. Nokia said the N70 camera phone was the biggest-selling third-generation mobile in the world in the first three months of the year, making up about 10 percent of the 3G market on its own. Nokia also said it has agreed on cooperation with Yahoo's popular photo-sharing site Flickr. http://news.com.com/Nokia+pushes+har...3-6064632.html ![]() Mafia Insiders Infiltrating Firms, U.K. Cops Warn Dan Ilett Employees are still one of the greatest threats to corporate security, as "new-age" mafia gangs infiltrate companies, the U.K.'s crime-fighting agency has said. Speaking on Tuesday at the Infosecurity 2006 conference in London, Tony Neate, e-crime liaison for the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), said insider "plants" are causing significant damage to companies. "We have fraud and ID theft, but one of the big threats still comes from the trusted insiders. That is, people inside the company who are attacking the systems," he said. "(Organized crime) has changed. You still have traditional organized crime, but now they have learned to compromise employees and contractors. (They are) new-age, maybe have computer degrees and are enterprising themselves. They have a wide circle of associates and new structures," he added. Neate's comments are some of the first from SOCA, which so far has tended to shy away from press attention. The British agency was formed earlier this month, and combines the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and experts from HM Revenue & Customs and the U.K. Immigration Service. The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, which previously dealt with Internet crime in the U.K., has also been rolled into SOCA. The agency is chaired by Sir Stephen Lander, a former director general of British internal counterintelligence agency MI5, and will have a budget of more than 400 million pounds ($706.3 million) and around 4,200 staff. According to SOCA's annual plan, around 40 percent of its efforts will be directed toward combating drug trafficking; 25 percent toward organized immigration crime; and 10 percent toward individual and private sector fraud, including identity fraud and electronic fraud from Internet banking and e-commerce. Dan Ilett of Silicon.com reported from London. http://news.com.com/Mafia+insiders+i...3-6064954.html ![]() Why Don't We Do It on the Internet? Steven Levy Go to iTunes or Rhapsody and search for "Beatles" and where do you wind up? Nowhere, man. The greatest rock group ever doesn't sell its songs online. That's why the managing director of the Beatles' record label, Neil Aspinall, made a stir recently when he revealed that the Fab Four were finally planning to sell their songs on Internet stores—but only after a long-term project of remastering the songs was completed. Though Aspinall's comment made news, the impact was mitigated by the fact that the digital music world has already established itself, with no help from John, Paul, George and Ringo. It is telling that his remarks were made in the context of a London court case charging Apple Computer with violating the trademark of the Beatles' record label, Apple Corps, by selling music online. Instead of working with the Net's flagship of legal downloading, the band is suing it. During their heyday, the mop tops could get away with anything (like selling watered-down versions of their U.K. albums in America, or "Revolution No. 9"). But the Beatles today (the living members and heirs of George and John) don't seem to understand that even they can't control the Internet. A glimpse of their thinking came in 2004, when the group considered going online with a service other than iTunes. Microsoft was building an Internet store to compete with iTunes, and the Fab Four's people actually discussed terms with the Softies. According to a source close to the negotiations (who would not be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue), the Beatles wanted $15 million for starters—not as an advance against royalties, but a cash payout—for a window of exclusivity that would end after 90 days. After that the Beatles would be free to sell their songs everywhere else on the Net. Even worse, the Beatles demanded that their tunes be treated differently from any other songs in the store. "It would be a walled garden, a Beatles store within the store," the source told me. "If you bought a Beatles song, you'd go immediately to checkout and wouldn't be able to add anyone else's songs to the purchase." This approach is antithetical to what makes an online music store successful—it must be so convenient and delightful that people pay for what is available on the file-sharing services free of charge. Microsoft walked away. The Beatles' stance only hurts the band. Their obstinacy has not deterred millions of fans from loading Beatles music on computers and MP3 players—it just means that no one pays for the songs. Even George W. Bush has figured out how to get Beatles songs on his iPod. People simply rip the CDs they already own into iTunes or other jukebox software. Or they use their friends' CDs. Or they grab the songs online; according to the market-research firm NPD Group, the Beatles are the fifth most popular band among illegal downloaders. The buzz among digital-music insiders is that if the two Apples settle the court case, part of that arrangement would be a deal that lets the Beatles sell their work on iTunes. (Neither party would comment on that.) The wrong way to do it would be the walled-garden approach, with premium prices for albums and restrictions on buying songs à la carte. The right way would be to follow in the path of another great band, U2, whose iTunes relationship has been a boon for both sides. Put the entire catalog online—as a pricey package for those who want it all, or available by the album or single song for everyone else at standard rates. A Beatles-branded custom-made iPod would be a huge seller. And a cool iTunes commercial with the band in silhouette would be a sensation. During the mania years of the 1960s, John Lennon once described the Beatles as being bigger than Jesus. But in 2006, the Internet is bigger than the Beatles. Instead of fighting the Net, the Beatles can use it to reinvigorate their glory. What happened to "We can work it out"? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12440798/site/newsweek/ ![]() The Great Microsoft Blunder Internet Explorer is a dead albatross. John Dvorak I think it can now be safely said, in hindsight, that Microsoft's entry into the browser business and its subsequent linking of the browser into the Windows operating system looks to be the worst decision—and perhaps the biggest, most costly gaffe—the company ever made. I call it the Great Microsoft Blunder. It looks like a whopper that keeps whacking the company. The most recent bash came from the Eolas v. Microsoft patent suit over aspects of the ActiveX usage in Internet Explorer. Microsoft lost and was slapped with a $521 million settlement. If the problem is not weird legal cases against the company, then it's the incredible losses in productivity at the company from the never-ending battle against spyware, viruses, and other security problems. All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised. All of Microsoft's Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column—billions. The joke of it is that Microsoft is still working on this dead albatross and is apparently ready to roll out a new version, since most of the smart money has been fleeing to Firefox or Opera. This means new rounds of patches and lost money. Continue reading… This fiasco and the great Microsoft Blunder began when Marc Andreessen, then of Netscape, made some silly, off-handed remark about how the browser would become the next platform for applications and suggested, in so many words, that Microsoft would be destroyed. Instead of the boys at Microsoft laughing out loud and then ignoring this remark, they started scrambling around like ants on a hot stove. The next thing you know, Microsoft went Internet slaphappy. Besides cobbling together a browser from any code it could license, it rolled out all sorts of Internet magazines and various Internet-centric ideas to the point where it was obvious to anyone watching that the company itself was believing all the hype coming from outside. The main piece of propaganda among the Internet-centric ideas was that the personal computer is dead. "There'll be no computers in a few short years, as everything will be embedded and become appliances," said all the experts. This appliance malarkey comes and goes, but always goes. We still have computers, we still need operating systems, and we still need Microsoft Office. Yes, there are alternatives to everything, but the gold standards for all these basics make most of the money, no matter what anyone idealizes to the contrary. But Microsoft buys the fear. It must have some of the lowest corporate self-esteem for any dominant company in the history of modern business. The company is like the panicky old woman wondering how she lost a penny in her purse while giving exact change in the express line at the grocery store. Hey lady, you are holding things up! So what can Microsoft do about its dilemma? First, it needs to face the fact that this entire preoccupation with the browser business is bad for the company and bad for the user. Microsoft should pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately. It should then bless the Mozilla.org folks with a cash endowment and take an investment stake in Opera, to influence the future direction of browser technology from the outside in. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer. Of this I can assure you. People will not stop buying Microsoft Windows if there is no built-in browser. Opera and/or Firefox can be bundled with the OS as a courtesy, and all the defaults can lead to Microsoft.com if need be. Of course we already know that this will never happen, since Microsoft is a creature of habit. So it will forever be plagued by its greatest blunder ever. Have fun, boys. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ZDM/story?id=1884077 ![]() Beatles Set to Join Online Music Revolution The Beatles are preparing to sell their songs online after years of refusing to take part in the Internet music boom, according to testimony given by the head of their record company. Neil Aspinall, a former Beatles road manager and managing director of Apple Corps, was a witness in the company's trademark lawsuit against Apple Computer. He said that the company was digitally remastering the entire Beatles catalog, which would pave the way for selling the songs online. "I think it would be wrong to offer downloads of the old masters when I am making new masters," he said in a written statement submitted to the High Court in London earlier this month. "It would be better to wait and try to do them both simultaneously so that you then get the publicity of the new masters and the downloading, rather than just doing it ad hoc." A spokeswoman for Apple Corps confirmed Aspinall's statement, and said that the company is preparing to make the Beatles catalog available through online music services. "There's no firm date on any of this at the moment. There are a lot of projects that Apple are working on at the moment," she said on Thursday. The Beatles have been high-profile holdouts from the booming online music sector, which saw sales triple to $1.1 billion in 2005. Apple Corps, owned by Beatles Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and the estate of George Harrison, have accused Apple Computer of violating a 1991 agreement by using the Apple name and logo to sell music downloads through its market-leading iTunes Music Store. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1949261,00.asp ![]() 'Da Vinci Code' Movie Upsets Catholic Leaders Elizabeth Putnam Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks star in the movie version of the controversial book “The Da Vinci Code,” which will be released May 17. When the novel "The Da Vinci Code" hit the shelves in 2003, the book and its author, Dan Brown, also hit a theological nerve. Religious scholars and critics held meetings, wrote books and launched Web sites to debunk several aspects of the book's story line, most notably that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene had a child and the Roman Catholic group Opus Dei would do anything – including kill – to keep that secret. Now, with the film adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code" scheduled to open in theaters May 19, a resurgence is afoot among Roman Catholic leaders to once again counter the book's view of Christian history. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, which includes the Danbury area, has joined in on the renewed efforts and is holding several events to answer questions the movie is expected to raise. These events, hosted by clergy, will educate parishioners that "The Da Vinci Code" is not an historical representation or an accurate theological depiction of Christian history, said Joseph McAleer, diocesan spokesman. "We are being proactive. This is an opportunity to remind and refresh Catholics about the teachings of our church," McAleer said. "The Da Vinci Code" takes fictional characters and weaves them with real artwork, architecture and institutions, such as Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings and the Opus Dei organization. And it raises questions about Jesus' relationship with Mary Magdalene, the role of women throughout the Catholic Church's history and the purpose behind the Catholic organization Opus Dei. This makes many Catholic leaders fear that the book creates an unclear message about the Catholic Church and Jesus Christ, but at the same time, many agree that it has created constructive dialogue about the church's past and an opportunity to educate. The Rev. Albert Audette, pastor of St. Peter Parish in Danbury, said he might host his own forum about the book and movie, but he's uncertain if many people still have questions about the controversial 2003 book. "But the church can be complicated. When you are 10,000 miles from Rome and the Vatican, the way it all operates can be confusing," he said. Audette, who has read the book, has addressed it in sermons and said it's a marvelous book "It sounds so factual, with institutional things, names and places. It's rather exciting," he said. "But it is fiction, and some people can get wrapped up into those things and read it as fact." Monsignor Stephen DiGiovanni, pastor at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Stamford, will present a forum for young adults May 1 to underscore the book's inaccuracies. And Monsignor Kevin Wallin, pastor at St. Augustine Cathedral in Bridgeport, will hold a talk, discussion and question and answer session May 4 in Bridgeport. "The book created quite a stir in the minds of people about what the church has taught and what it believes. With the movie, those issues will resurface again," said Wallin, who visited sights in Scotland during the shooting of the film and has given numerous presentations on the accuracy and theological claims of the book. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also launched a Web site, www.jesusdecoded.com, in March to answer questions about "The Da Vinci Code" and to advertise an hour-long documentary called "Jesus Decoded" that will air on NBC stations in mid-May. Recognizing the controversy surrounding the book, Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is producing the Tom Hanks-Ron Howard thriller movie, has given viewers a forum to discuss the questions raised by the book and upcoming movie. The site www.thedavincidialogue.com offers users essays, quizzes and a discussion room about "The Da Vinci Code." The author, Dan Brown, has acknowledged the book's controversial material. "While it is my belief that some of the theories discussed by these characters may have merit, each individual reader must explore these characters' viewpoints and come to his or her own interpretations," Brown says on his Web site. "My hope in writing this novel was that the story would serve as a catalyst and a springboard for people to discuss the important topics of faith, religion, and history." http://news.newstimeslive.com/storyprint.php?id=83154 ![]() Microsoft Complains Rivals Get 'Free Ride' Aoife White and Matt Moore Microsoft Corp. complained Wednesday that the European Commission had forced it to hand over trade secrets to rivals, effectively giving them a "free ride" on the work the software maker did to acquire new customers and develop new technologies. But Microsoft's rivals said the company was trying to turn the case into a debate over intellectual property rights and skirt the commission's argument that Microsoft has abused its monopoly. The European Commission's order for Microsoft Corp. to share its code so rivals' software can run smoothly with Windows took center stage Wednesday in the third day of the company's bid to have a landmark antitrust ruling against it overturned. Microsoft lawyer Ian Forrester said the order had been an attempt "to handicap the (market) leader in perpetuity." "The decision condemned a company for not saying yes to a company who requests a huge amount of secret technology for the future," he said. "The Windows source code is copyright. It is valuable, the fruit of lots of effort," he said, adding that were it printed on paper, it would take up 12,650 pages. Thomas Vinje, a lawyer for an industry group supporting the commission - the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, or ECIS - said Microsoft was blowing its patent rights out of proportion. "Microsoft are trying to turn this into an intellectual property case when it's not," he said. "This is a case about abuse of a dominant position, about refusing to provide information to vendors." Microsoft broke an informal agreement with EU advocates when it brought up the recent dispute over the company's compliance with the order to share its code- earning them a stern reprimand from Judge Bo Vesterdorf, who told Forrester to stick to the issue at stake. Forrester had claimed that Microsoft was being threatened with 2 million euros ($2.4 million) in daily fines, backdated to Dec. 15, for not creating "a new copyright work" derived from Windows' secret source code. EU regulators had asked Microsoft to supply a "complete and accurate" support manual for developers to help them make compatible software. Last December, they charged Microsoft with not obeying the order after an independent monitor branded Microsoft's 12,650-page technical manual as "unfit at this stage for its intended purpose." The world's largest software maker says it has the right to guard its valuable intellectual property, and maintains that it has worked strenuously to comply with the 2004 EU ruling that told it to pay a record 497 million euro ($613 million) fine. The ruling was handed down after a five-year investigation concluded that Microsoft had taken advantage of its dominant position to damage rivals who offered server software and media player programs. Forrester said Microsoft's server software was compatible with products made by other companies, such as those from Novell and Sun and using Linux and UNIX-based servers. Microsoft executive John Shewchuk gave a presentation that showed the company's contention that server compatibility was a reality and worked with the Windows operating system, which runs on 95 percent of the world's personal computers. "Microsoft spends an enormous amount of effort attempting to achieve interoperability," he said. Lawyers for both Microsoft and the commission will expound on why the ruling should be lifted, or left unchanged, using evidence from IBM Corp., Novell Inc., Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. on systems compatibility. None of those companies is currently involved in the legal battle, although they are members of two broad industry coalitions - the ECIS and the Software & Information Industry Association - that have backed the commission. In a new complaint filed in February, ECIS said times have changed, but Microsoft's behavior has not. It claimed Microsoft is up to the same tricks - but on a wider scale. Wednesday's focus differs from the first two days of the five-day hearings. On Tuesday, the company brushed off the claims that it tried to squeeze competitors, including RealNetworks Inc., out of the streaming media market. Instead, it argued before the 13 judges of the Court of First Instance that it merely added extra functions to its operating systems to meet likely demand from consumers - part of a natural process of evolution in the technology sector. While a court decision on the ruling is not due for months, a decision backing the commission could force Microsoft to change the way it does business in the future and endorse the EU's ability to hold back aggressive corporate behavior. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT ![]() Mick Jagger Joins a New ABC Sitcom Bill Carter Trying to conjure some way to make a new television series stand out, show creators sometimes come up with pie-in-the-sky notions, like getting Jerry Seinfeld to come back and star in a sitcom, or inducing Vince Vaughn to quit movies. But Mick Jagger? By far the most unlikely star of a prospective fall situation comedy is that still-active lead singer of the Rolling Stones, who has signed on to an ABC pilot for its fall schedule. Just to increase the degree of unlikelihood, Mr. Jagger shot his scenes for the New York-based pilot in a hotel room in Auckland, New Zealand, last week. That was the culmination of a saga at least as whimsical as the premise of the show, which, for now, anyway, is titled "Let's Rob Mick Jagger." The writing team that came up with the idea, Rob Burnett, long David Letterman's executive producer, and his partner, Jon Beckerman, had previously created the NBC comedy-drama "Ed." As Mr. Burnett outlined the tale in a telephone interview, he and Mr. Beckerman "wondered if there was a way do a serialized comedy — something like a comedy version of 'Lost' or '24.' " Hatched in numerous meetings, the concept centered on a janitor for a prominent New York building, to be played by the character actor Donal Logue. Down on his luck, the janitor sees a celebrity on television wallowing in his wealth during a tour of his new Manhattan penthouse. Enlisting a crew of similar ordinary but frustrated accomplices, the janitor conceives a plot to rob the big shot's apartment, a story line that would unfold over a 24-episode television season. Mr. Burnett said that the series would track the plotting of the robbers, who would eventually ingratiate themselves with the apartment's glamorous owner. That would entail actually seeing the real-life celebrity interact on occasion with the fictional thieves. The question was: Who could the celebrity be? "We didn't want it to be too on the nose, like Tom Cruise," Mr. Burnett said. "Not that he would have done it anyway." The creators decided that they had to have the name before they could pitch the series effectively to network programmers. Finally they came up with it: "Jeff Goldblum seemed silly, just right," Mr. Burnett said. Not that the writers bothered to inform Mr. Goldblum that he had been selected by their imaginations. "He was just the place holder," Mr. Burnett said. Until a network committed to this goofy idea, the creators were not going to write a script to be sent to Mr. Goldblum to test his interest. They just wanted to pitch his name. If a deal was made, they would write in Mr. Goldblum. If he declined to sign on, Mr. Burnett said, "we'd just rewrite it with another celebrity." Not at all sure what reaction they would get, Mr. Burnett and Mr. Beckerman journeyed to Los Angeles from New York, accompanied by Mr. Logue, and met with the four major networks. "We realized that we would know where we stood about one second into the meeting," Mr. Burnett said. "As soon as we said 'Let's Rob Jeff Goldblum,' we'd know. And we did. They all laughed." Every network made an offer, but Fox and ABC went the extra mile, committing not just to a script, but to also guaranteeing that a pilot would be shot. Mr. Burnett said that he was impressed with Peter Liguori at Fox and Stephen McPherson at ABC, the top program executives at those networks. Eventually they chose ABC. A script was written and a supporting cast secured, all except the guy with his name in the title. Mr. Goldblum was intrigued, Mr. Burnett said, but he had already committed to a pilot at NBC. With time running short — all the auditioning actors were still talking about knocking over Jeff Goldblum's place — the producers pondered a list of famous names, seeking one that might catch the nation's fancy and their own. Finally Mr. McPherson threw out a name no one had considered: Mick Jagger. It was far-fetched, but the writing team loved the idea. They were more excited when Mr. Jagger's representatives sent word they enjoyed the script and would run it by the singer. "We were thrilled, but we still didn't think it was real," Mr. Burnett said. The pilot was shot, with the celebrity's scenes left out, but with the other characters using Mr. Jagger's name as their target. Finally Mr. Burnett got word that Mr. Jagger, then on tour with the Stones in Japan, had read the script himself and liked it very much. He would be calling Mr. Burnett directly on March 24. "I was a little scared to leave the house," Mr. Burnett said. Mr. Jagger called at 2 a.m. "He was enthusiastic," Mr. Burnett said. "He asked all the right questions. How was the series going to build? Could the idea sustain? He seemed like a guy who cared a great deal about the quality of work he gets involved with." The answers satisfied Mr. Jagger. He agreed to join the pilot. The only trouble was he would be halfway around the world for weeks. Mr. McPherson at ABC pressed to get the pilot completed with enough time for ABC to give it full consideration for its fall schedule. Mr. Burnett and Mr. Beckerman flew to New Zealand on April 17. They first had to find a location that might pass as a Manhattan apartment, then hire a film crew. Finally they had to direct Mr. Jagger in his American sitcom debut. A luxury hotel in Auckland stood in for the penthouse. The crew was professional. As for Mr. Jagger, he threw himself enthusiastically into the project, Mr. Burnett said. "He did a lot of ad-libbing. Some of the funniest stuff in the pilot came from him. He's just a smart, funny guy." He is also now a star of an ABC pilot for the fall 2006 television season. Mr. Burnett, not wanting to jinx what has been a charmed project so far, said, "We just hope to be one of the ones they pick up." If ABC does order the series, Mr. Jagger is expected to appear regularly, though not in every episode. "We'll work around his schedule," Mr. Burnett said. Not much has been worked out as to how successful the band of thieves might be in their heist, and like the serialized shows that inspired this one, a big question remains about how the series will continue after its first season. Most likely Mr. Jagger's participation will end, one reason the title will almost surely not end up "Let's Rob Mick Jagger." Mr. Burnett said the first season of the prospective series might culminate in a twist that sets up a second season. "They could come up with a different scheme," Mr. Burnett said, referencing the many get-rich schemes of Ralph Kramden in "The Honeymooners." Or "they could just rob someone else completely different," he said. "How about: 'Let's Rob Tiger Woods' ? " http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/ar... tner=homepage ![]() Who axed you Vista Firewall Shackled Due To Customer Demand: Microsoft Munir Kotadia The firewall in Windows Vista will, by default, have half its protection turned off because that is what enterprise customers have requested, according to the software giant. When Windows Vista is released early next year its firewall will be set to only block incoming traffic even though it will be capable of blocking outgoing traffic. According to a statement from Microsoft, the firewall's protection will be curbed in order to make life easier for the company's enterprise customers. "Because the nature of an outbound firewall is to restrict the traffic sent to specific ports, the outgoing access in the Windows Vista firewall is open by default," a Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet Australia. "The reason for this is Microsoft has received strong feedback from its customers, especially from large organisations and government departments, saying that they would like to manage this feature from an administrator level." Microsoft claims that configuring the Vista firewall to block outgoing connections from rogue applications and malware will require a varying degree of technical knowledge, depending on each user's security requirements. "Users need to understand how their applications undertake communication and connections and the associated threats and risks. This security requirement will vary amongst users and Microsoft is providing the capability to allow users to determine how they wish to leverage this security capability," the Microsoft spokesperson said. Firewall specialist Zone Labs claims that users will require a "fairly high level of sophistication" in order to properly configure the Vista firewall. For consumers, the company said the task will be nothing less than "challenging". "Outbound protection requires a fairly high level of sophistication to engage, and reports indicate that Microsoft expects that functionality to be used by IT professionals in a business networking environment," Laura Yecies, general manager at Zone Labs told ZDNet Australia. "For consumers, it is challenging at best," she added. Security specialist Michael Warrilow, director of Sydney-based analyst firm Hydrasight, believes that Microsoft has found it too difficult to create an all encompassing firewall. However, he said that by throttling the capabilities of the firewall the company is not ignoring its non-technical customer base. "In effect, Microsoft is putting outbound [protection] in the 'too hard basket' for the time being," Warrilow told ZDNet Australia. "The firewall is to protect against inbound attacks -- instead of protecting the rest of the world from you." The Microsoft spokesperson said that Vista's firewall is just one layer of security in the new operating system: "New features such as User Account Control (UAC), Windows Defender, and Internet Explorer Protected Mode along with improvements to Windows Firewall and Windows Update work together to help shield Windows Vista PCs from malware." http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/securit...9252954,00.htm ![]() Cost Per Minute: Are Compact Discs A Good Value? Bryan Dailey You’ve heard many times on the pages of AVRev.com about how the woes of the music industry can’t be placed solely on the shoulders of peer-to-peer file swapping or piracy. The fact that the compact disc is still a poor value was never more evident to me than when I was at the mega electronics store WOW! in Long Beach, California this weekend. This staggeringly large store features a fully stocked Tower Records/Video, along with the newly merged CompUSA/Good Guys! I went in to pick up some toner for my laser printer and, for some reason, the once familiar but long forgotten desire to browse the CD racks came over me. I realized that in my collection of “must have” music, I had a gaping hole. I didn’t have the Metallica CD … And Justice for All, and I wasn’t about to break out my worn-out cassette version or download the album from Limewire for fear of Metallica’s strong-armed legal team, so I figured I’d pick up a copy at Tower Records. I wandered up and down the aisles, remembering the days when I would actually care and get up for the upcoming release of a new album by a band I thought was amazing. Perhaps I’m showing my age as I hit my early thirties, but I just found it hard to get excited about anything I saw on the “new releases rack.” Then again, finding the next big thing wasn’t my goal. I wanted one of the best metal albums of all time and before I knew it, I was at the Metallica rack. Flipping through the CDs, I found that oh so familiar album cover with the crumbling statue of the Lady of Justice on the cover and almost didn’t flip the disc over to check the price, assuming it would be somewhere in the $11.99 to $14.99 range. Curiosity got the best of me and I flipped over the disc. To my amazement, the price tag read a staggering $18.99 and there was not the typical yellow “sale” sticker that I am so accustomed to seeing. If I wanted to rock to some “Shortest Straw” and “Harvester of Sorrow” in my car, I would have to plunk down quite bit of dough. I have never considered myself cheap, but I found myself with a little case of sticker shock. In retail, there is a price where almost anything will sell. List your house at $50,000 over market value and, unless it’s a scorching hot market, the offers won’t come pouring in. For me, with this CD purchase, the decision came down to something simple: the $20 bill in my wallet. To go along with my craving for this Metallica disc was also craving for a strawberry smoothie at Jamba Juice. Had Tower priced the disc at what I felt to be a fair amount for a back catalogue record ($9.99 to $13.99), I would have bought it without hesitation. Because they swung for the fences, I left the disc in the bin, doing the retailer, the label and a reportedly financially starving Lars Ulrich no good whatsoever. I did buy the over-priced drink and then went home to purchase the exact disc I wanted, used, from eBay, for a little bit over $5 with $2 shipping. I know arguing over $10 here and there seems like I might be cheap, but I am not. I lunch in Beverly Hills every day, paying easily what the album would have cost me. I was making an economic protest about the value of the album. I understand overhead and royalties with the best of them, but at the same time the label has long ago paid for the production costs of such a great, multi-platinum heavy metal record. With CDs in jewel cases costing about $0.50, I was getting ripped off and I wasn’t going to stand for it, nor was I going to do anything illegal or immoral in response. This lost “brick and mortar” sale due to an overpriced disc is becoming a common occurrence. I have often heard my friends saying, “ I just don’t buy music any more, because it’s too expensive and just not worth it,” or “Why don’t you just get it used?’ People are still buying DVDs by the millions each week, with “King Kong” selling a reported 6.5 million copies in its first week. A number-one-selling compact disc might be lucky to do 10 percent of that amount. Of course, this number could be a little skewed, as there are many more music releases in a given week than there are mainstream DVD releases, but the days of N’Sync or Eminem having first week sales well north of a million copies seem to be a thing of the past. It seems lately that even the biggest-selling albums in a particular year barely sell more than Peter Jackson’s big-budget thriller did in seven days. Going back to a point we have always stressed at AVRev.com, the music industry, retailers included, needs to take a hard look at their prices and put their products better in line with the pricing structure of DVDs and videogames. When shopping for items at the grocery store, the price tags on the racks give a “price per ounce” breakdown. Although people don’t specifically realize it, many consumers do a mental “length of entertainment per dollar” equation in their heads. A jam-packed CD might clock in with 72 minutes of music. Priced at a respectable $15, that would come to a little over 20 cents a minute. On the other hand, I have frequently seen DVDs priced at $19 that on their covers say “featuring over five hours of bonus footage, deleted scenes, commentaries and bloopers.” Combine that with a feature movie length of 1.45 hours on average and you are looking at cost of less than five cents per minute. From a purely mathematical standpoint, the average CD just can’t compete with a DVD for value. http://www.avrev.com/news/0406/20.metallica.shtml ![]() Most Web Users Unable to Spot Spyware Aviran Mordo McAfee SiteAdvisor , which is pioneering Web safety by testing and rating nearly every trafficked site on the Internet has news for Internet users who think Web sites with clean, appealing graphics and national advertisers on the home page are always safe: “Think again.” According to the first-ever Spyware Quiz conducted by SiteAdvisor, a staggering 97% of Internet users are just one click away from infecting their PCs with spyware, adware or some other kind of unwanted software. Even though the threat of spyware has received extensive media coverage, just 3% of the 14,000-plus consumers who took SiteAdvisor’s spyware quiz received perfect scores. The survey challenged Web surfers to test their ability to detect which sites in a number of popular categories were free of adware or spyware. The examples in the quiz are taken from more than three million Web sites which SiteAdvisor has independently tested and rated for Web safety issues like spyware and spam. The first part of the quiz presented users with pairs of sites and asked them to pick which one of the pair was safe. The second part presented a series of file sharing software sites and asked which ones were spyware and adware free. The test has been available since March. Among the survey’s most sobering conclusions: Based on their choices, a majority of users (65%) would have been infected with adware or spyware many times over The presence of national advertisers and a clean, uncluttered design seem to trick respondents into thinking a site is safe Even users with a high “Spyware IQ” have a nearly 100% chance of visiting a dangerous site during 30 days of typical online searching and browsing activity Users often miss the fine print that allows a dangerous Web site to claim it installs unwanted software legally To take McAfee’s SiteAdvisor Spyware quiz, go to http://www.siteadvisor.com/spywarequiz . http://www.aviransplace.com/index.ph...-spot-spyware/ ![]() Mind Games Intellectual Ventures happily invests in invention, while the tech world trembles in fear. An inside look at Nathan Myhrvold's $400 million IP experiment. Lisa Lerer Last January a dozen of the world's most respected scientists gathered in a nondescript conference room at an office building outside of Seattle. They sat around a table cluttered with laptops and papers, snacked on bowls of beef jerky and Chex Mix, and plotted the next technological revolution. The brainstorming session, practically unintelligible to those with a less-than-Mensa-level IQ, took place at the offices of Intellectual Ventures, a start-up founded in 2000 by former Microsoft Corporation chief technologist Nathan Myhrvold. No intellectual slouch himself, Myhrvold not only led the discussion, but was an eager contributor, sketching out flow charts on a large whiteboard at the front of the room. A handful of patent prosecutors, charged with translating "aha moments" into patent applications, desperately tried to follow along, noting every reference, pulling up obscure theorems on their computers, and snapping photos of Myhrvold's scribblings. Finally, after two days of discussion--over the merits of using new technologies in medical treatments--the group had a breakthrough. Jumping out of his seat, Myhrvold exclaimed, "This is Star Trek-level medicine!" This is the friendly face of Intellectual Ventures. At the Bellevue, Washington-based company, the science hails from Star Trek but the business plays out like Star Wars. For the past six years, Myhrvold and his Jedi inventors have been brainstorming, developing, and patenting their best ideas. The company doesn't plan on manufacturing, or commercializing, a product. "We are a pure play about invention," says Myhrvold with prototypical passion. "Really big ideas have to come from somewhere." But at Intellectual Ventures, not all the big ideas come from the Jedis. Another arm of the 100-employee company, headed up by former Intel Corporation in-house counsel Peter Detkin--a Darth Vader figure to many--has been buying up thousands of patents through shell corporations. A $400 million investment from some of the biggest technology companies, including Nokia Corporation, Intel, Apple Computer Inc., Sony Corporation, and Microsoft, funds the shopping spree. (None of these companies would comment for this story.) Some in the IP asset management field estimate that Intellectual Ventures has amassed 3,000-5,000 patents. As the patent stockpile grows, so does the speculation--and the fear. IP lawyers and tech executives worry that Intellectual Ventures is less interested in changing the world with big ideas, and more focused on becoming an Ÿber-troll, wreaking litigation havoc across industries with its patents. So far the tight-lipped company hasn't revealed much about its plan. "We don't proactively tell our story." says Myhrvold, "There's little in telling our story that benefits us." But this winter Myhrvold seemed to change his mind, inviting IP Law & Business up to Bellevue. Intellectual Ventures promised candor, but delivered something a bit more translucent. While company management filled in some blanks in the Intellectual Ventures story, they refused to discuss financials or reveal details about licensing deals, citing confidentiality agreements. Still, these details may not have been enough to end the speculation. After only a few years in business, Intellectual Ventures may simply be too young to know whether it will turn to the dark side. For now, Myhrvold's happy to strike back at critics who are crying troll. "They can't quite bring themselves to believe we are doing what we are doing," says Myhrvold. "[Critics think], 'They can't be screwing around with a bunch of ideas for that long,' " he adds with a quick laugh. But that, he says, is exactly what Intellectual Ventures is doing. The company focuses on creating new technologies. The rest--product development, commercialization, manufacturing--will be handled by joint ventures, licensing, and spin-off companies. Intellectual Ventures represents a natural economic evolution, says Myhrvold. As the United States changes from a manufacturing to an ideas-based economy, making patents more valuable to businesses, a company based solely around IP seems almost inevitable. But coming up with marketable ideas might take ten years, he says. Intellectual Ventures plans on keeping the creditors at bay by becoming the Wal-Mart of the licensing world--a one-stop patent shop. To do that, the company needs a whole lot of intellectual property, says Myhrvold: "IP is a game where scale really matters. One patent could be worth nothing or $1 million. It's hard to plan on the economic value of a single patent." While Myhrvold acknowledges that Intellectual Ventures has "a lot of patents," he shies away from an exact number. Few besides Myhrvold could lead a company with such a grand focus. The 47-year-old millionaire has had an intellectual life that would delight Da Vinci. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics, M.S. degrees in mathematical economics, geophysics, and space physics. As a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University, Myhrvold researched quantum physics with Stephen Hawking. He's also a published nature photographer and has had his state-of-the-art kitchen--and his recipes--featured in New York Times magazine. Intellectual Ventures' offices reflect his fanatical inquisitiveness: Antique microscopes and typewriters line the halls and a model of a full-scale Tyrannosaurus Rex head greets visitors in the lobby. But even Da Vinci needed help. Along with cofounder and former Microsoftie Edward Jung, Myhrvold's recruited an all-star staff, including Detkin and Greg Gorder, previously a partner at Perkins Coie, who has more than 100 venture capital financings under his belt. According to a former Intellectual Ventures executive, who agreed to speak anonymously, these four managers get a little under 2 percent of the money they've raised--including the $400 million brought in from the company's investors. Right now, Intellectual Ventures only has one homegrown patent. In November, the Patent and Trademark Office granted Myhrvold's company a patent for an image sensor that allows greater depth of field in photographs--not exactly a big idea, but as the company is patenting a mix of ideas from "bold and risky," says Myhrvold, "to less ambitious, incremental ones." More are coming: Intellectual Ventures has filed about 400 applications at the PTO, as well as several dozen international applications, says chief patent counsel Casey Tegreene. Many of the patent applications come out of the company's invention sessions. Intellectual Ventures has held about 60 over the past three years. The majority of participating scientists work for the company as outside consultants, including Leroy Hood, inventor of the DNA sequencer; W. Daniel Hillis, chair of R&D consulting firm Applied Minds, Inc.; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Robert Langer. After each session, a team of in-house patent lawyers comb through all the notes, papers, digital tapes, and photos from the session looking for promising ideas. The review is detailed and confidential: Lawyers and patent agents spend two to eight hours per hour of tape. To prevent the recordings from being used as evidence in future trials, they're automatically erased after six months. Intellectual Ventures then examines the market potential of the flagged ideas. One session can lead to as many as 80 applications. And only about 10 percent of the patent prosecution work gets outsourced--mostly to solo and small practitioners like Washington, D.C.-based Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox. With 15 in-house patent lawyers, Tegreene says that Intellectual Ventures is one of the biggest patent prosecution firms in the Northwest. To figure out how to turn patents into profits, Myhrvold hired vice president Brent Frei, founder of Onyx Software Corp. and a former Microsoft programmer analyst. So far, Frei hasn't come up with much that he's willing to discuss. He speaks in generalizations, writing business school-type theories on his office whiteboard. The plan, he says, is to "invent across the spectrum." The hulking 6-foot-7-inch former Dartmouth football player draws a large graph, explaining Intellectual Ventures's business philosophy. At the bottom are emerging markets, like bioinformatics, and at the top, mass markets, areas like wi-fi, software, and cell phones. Presumably, Intellectual Ventures wants to be in all these spaces. "We're trying to get as much technology as possible and then figure out the best way to commercialize," says Frei. "We're not seeking $1 million to hold someone hostage," he says, instinctively answering the troll criticisms. With so much energy devoted to creation, Frei estimates that the first actual Intellectual Ventures-created business won't launch for at least six months to a year. "It's a long-term play," says Myhrvold. "Having patient investors is a key aspect." Inventors won't have to be too patient. While the creative juices flow, the patent stockpile will pay the bills. "Today it's all about numbers and bulk," says Frei. Intellectual Ventures seeks out key patents in converging areas, like software, semiconductors, wireless, consumer electronics, networking, lasers, biotechnology, and medical devices. For example, says Frei, a company working in online banking also needs security and e-commerce technology. Theoretically, Intellectual Ventures would offer them freedom to operate with a licensing package covering those key areas. Ideally, says Frei, Intellectual Ventures will collect a huge patent library and, for a fee, license a variety of different technologies. Most licenses will be nonexclusive, an offer made particularly to the investors. Some industries, like biotech, will require more expensive, exclusive licenses. "We reserve the right to be smart," says Myhrvold, describing how Intellectual Ventures will tailor licenses to individual industries. Of course, a patent licensing strategy only works when backed by the threat of litigation. And the company's critics are only too happy to speculate about that threat. Some have theorized that Intellectual Ventures is just a front for its investors--a shield designed to protect them from patent suits. The tech giants can use Intellectual Ventures to buy small patent portfolios cheaply and pull them off the market, avoiding future litigation. Intellectual Ventures denies that its investors steer its acquisition strategy. "We are not controlled by anyone," says Frei. "We are amassing things that are valuable and going to get a market rate for them." The former Intellectual Ventures executive claims that his former employer plans to hold entire industries hostage with high licensing fees, and the management team will be rewarded with a cut of the licensing revenue. Any company that refuses to take a license, or invest in Myhrvold's vision, says the executive, will face a lawsuit funded by some seriously deep pockets. Others paint a less nefarious picture, but fear that if Myhrvold's innovation model fails, the company, desperate for cash, will turn into an licensing monster--and no one but those investors will be safe: "If the business model starts to fail, then they're sitting there with a huge portfolio and a relatively straightforward way of getting return by sending letters to a lot of people who aren't investors," says Dewey Ballantine patent litigation partner Anthony Shaw. "These are the trolls that call other people trolls," says Raymond Niro, name partner at Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro, who is known for representing clients considered by many to be trolls. Calling Peter Detkin a troll is like challenging a Grand Master to a quick game of chess. Detkin coined the term in 1999, after Intel was sued for infringing the patents of TechSearch, a small patent-holding company (now a subsidy of Acacia Technologies Group). When Detkin referred to TechSearch as a "patent extortionist," the company sued for libel. So the Intel team swapped in "troll," and an industry swear word was born. In 2001 Detkin told our sibling publication The Recorder "A patent troll is somebody who tries to make a lot of money off a patent that they are not practicing and have no intention of practicing and in most cases never practiced." Intellectual Ventures easily fits the bill. Over dinner, at a trendy Silicon Valley restaurant a couple of blocks from his home, Detkin makes it clear that he doesn't like the tables being turned. "There's just no clear definition at this point," he says, pausing for a tortilla chip. "A troll has become just a word for 'A plaintiff I don't like.' " Detkin's updated definition: someone who takes a single patent or small portfolio of questionable value and asserts it purely for "nuisance value." That's not Intellectual Ventures, which seeks out quality patents, offering good inventors another avenue to monetize their work, he says. Intellectual Ventures, caring only about patents, has more alternatives to offer inventors than corporations. The company will incorporate royalty sharing, additional payment terms, and clauses that allow inventors to continue to invent into deals. While not much is known about Detkin's patent shopping, the former Intellectual Ventures executive gives some details. Intellectual Ventures, says the executive, forms a new shell corporation each time it acquires a new patent portfolio. A special computer program names the companies, making them difficult to hunt down. The former executive pointed us to past monikers, including Thalveg Data Flow, Orange Computer, and Maquis Techtrix--all were traceable only to Seattle-area post office boxes [see "Patents Under Cover."]. Using fake companies to conduct real business isn't new to Detkin. "This is a Detkin trademark," says Niro, who represented TechSearch in the Intel litigation. During that case, Detkin created a shell corporation, Maelen Ltd., which offered TechSearch $325,000 for its patent, a price far lower than the millions at stake in the trial. The ploy failed when a judge realized that Maelen was really operating in Intel's interest. Detkin, who joined Intellectual Ventures in 2002 after spending a week helicopter skiing in backcountry Canada, says that using shell corporations is just good business practice. "When you acquire assets you want to hold them separately," he says. "There's nothing nefarious about it." Companies often buy all kinds of assets under shell corporations to limit potential liability, he says. Two years ago, Detkin set up a shell corporation called Brissac Electronic Holdings, and, under that name, bid on a portfolio of e-commerce-related patents at an auction in a California bankruptcy court. But Detkin dropped out after bidding crossed the $14.9 million line, and the portfolio went to Novell, Inc. [see "Going Once," October 2005]. "To date, I've found Intellectual Ventures to be professional and not overly aggressive," says James Malackowski, head of IP merchant bank Ocean Tomo, which ran the patent auction. But if Intellectual Ventures starts firing off lawsuits, says Malackowski, it will face a backlash and possibly even legislative regulation. If that happens, Intellectual Ventures is ready: The company has already set up a lobbying presence in Washington, D.C., and is playing an active role in the legislative debate over patent reform. Myhrvold testified on the issue to the House subcommittee on the courts, the Internet, and intellectual property in April 2005, and last year Detkin submitted a written report on reform to the Antitrust Modernization Committee of the Federal Trade Commission. Both have spoken at industry group meetings and universities across the country. Intellectual Ventures, naturally, argues that patents protect ideas, not just products. Patent holders of all stripes should be able to get a court-ordered injunction, stopping the business operations of an infringing company. On March 10 Intellectual Ventures, Myhrvold, and 20 inventors filed an amicus brief (written by lawyers from Susman Godfrey) with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting MercExchange, L.L.C. in its patent case against eBay Inc. A lower court ruled that the online auction company's Buy It Now feature infringed patents held by MercExchange, a small holding company. The court awarded damages, but refused to issue an injunction. EBay argues that it shouldn't be subject to an injunction, because MercExchange can't offer a competing service. Intellectual Ventures disagrees: "The right to exclusivity means nothing without injunctive relief," says Intellectual Ventures's filing. Briefs filed by Intellectual Ventures investors Intel, Microsoft, and Nokia took the opposite position, supporting eBay and weaker injunctions. The high court heard the case on March 29, and a decision is expected this month. For now, patent injunctions are a theoretical matter for Intellectual Ventures, although the company isn't ruling out future patent lawsuits. "In some cases we'll have to sue," says Frei. But a suit is less lucrative, Frei maintains, than a small running royalty on a key patent paid by a lot of companies for ten to 15 years. Besides, Myhrvold's curiosity (and funds) seem to have limits. "If I sue everyone, I spend all the money on lawyers," says the invention king, exasperated. "I still spend all my money on lawyers because of filing those damn things." http://www.ipww.com/display.php/file...s/0506/venture ![]() Judge Embeds a Puzzle in ‘Da Vinci Code’ Ruling Sarah Lyall Justice Peter Smith's 71-page ruling in the recent "Da Vinci Code" copyright case here is notable for many things: the judge's occasional forays into literary criticism, his snippy remarks about witnesses on both sides, and his fluent knowledge not only of copyright law but also of more esoteric topics like the history of the Knights Templar. But there is more to it than that. Embedded in the first 13½ pages of the ruling is Justice Smith's very own secret code, one that when partly solved reveals its name: the Smithy Code. "The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC," the judge writes in the 52nd paragraph of the ruling, alluding to his code and referring to the two works at issue in the case —"The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code" — by their initials. (In the United States, the book is called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail.") On April 7 Justice Smith ruled that Random House, publisher of the megaselling "Da Vinci Code," did not violate the copyright of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," a nonfiction work published in 1982 that spins an elaborate theory about how Jesus married Mary Magdalene and how their descendants still live in southern France. Two of the book's authors contended that Dan Brown, who wrote "The Da Vinci Code," lifted the central "architecture" of their book and had thus violated their copyright. (The third author of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," Henry Lincoln, did not participate.) The decision was a resounding slap in the face to the two plaintiffs, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. But it was also an opportunity for Justice Smith to indulge in a flight of judicial and cryptological fancy. The first clue that a puzzle exists lies in the typeface of the ruling. Most of the document is printed in regular roman letters, the way one would expect. But some letters in the first 13½ pages appear in boldface italics, jarringly, in the midst of all the normal words. Thus, in the first paragraph of the decision, which refers to Mr. Leigh and Mr. Baigent, the "s" in the word "claimants" is italicized and boldfaced. If you pluck all the italicized letters out of the text, you find that the first 10 spell "Smithy Code," an apparent play on "Da Vinci Code." But the next series of letters, some 30 or so, are a jumble, and this is the mystery that needs to be solved to break the code. In a brief telephone interview on Wednesday, Justice Smith declined to provide a solution for a puzzled reporter. Nor would he explain how he had put the code in his ruling, or how long it took him to figure out how to do it. "I can't discuss the judgment until after I retire," he said. But in a series of brief and ultimately frustrating e-mail messages during the last couple of days, the judge provided a series of intriguing clues. First he said that the different ways codes are broken in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code" should be considered. The idea for the italicized letters, he suggested, came from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." He then suggested moving on to "The Da Vinci Code" and applying one of the code-breaking methods used by its protagonists to solve the mystery of the jumbled letters. "Think mathematics," he wrote at one point. He drew attention to his own entry in Who's Who — in which he lists an interest in the history of Jackie Fisher, an admiral who modernized the British Navy, a possible reason that his e-mail address contains the word "pescator," implying fisherman — and said that the date 2006 was significant. He even mentioned a page number in "The Da Vinci Code" by way of trying to help. But he declined to go further, saying that "anything else gives it on a plate." It has been nearly three weeks since he handed down the ruling. Probably disappointingly for Justice Smith, nobody seemed to notice anything unusual about it when it was first released. But he alluded to the possibility that there was something more soon afterward as a throwaway line in an e-mail exchange with a reporter for The New York Times, saying, "Did you find the coded message in the judgment?" On vacation in Florida, the judge then declined via e-mail to elaborate much further, other than to refer to anomalies in the typeface. "Start with 's' and keep looking up to Page 18 approximately when the fonts stop," he wrote. Meanwhile, back in London, Daniel Tench, a partner at the law firm Olswang, was reading the ruling and noticed something odd about the type. "At first I thought it was a mistake," he said on Wednesday. "It's not usual practice for a High Court judge to issue a ruling in which he has hidden an encrypted message." Not knowing if there was anything there, though, Mr. Tench mentioned it to a reporter who compiles a column about legal affairs for The Times of London. After that paper printed a small item quoting him discussing the typeface, Mr. Tench was nonplussed to receive an e-mail message from Justice Smith confirming that yes, there was indeed a code, but that Mr. Tench had missed the first letter "s." "It is always best to start at paragraph 1!" the judge wrote. Speaking to the Bloomberg news service late on Wednesday, Justice Smith once again declined to provide any answers. Explaining why he made up his own code, he said it was "a bit of fun." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27code.html ![]() A NEW VOICE We are a growing coalition of Canadian music creators who share the common goal of having our voices heard about the laws and policies that affect our livelihoods. We are the people who actually create Canadian music. Without us, there would be no music for copyright laws to protect. Until now, a group of multinational record labels has done most of the talking about what Canadian artists need out of copyright. Record companies and music publishers are not our enemies, but let’s be clear: lobbyists for major labels are looking out for their shareholders, and seldom speak for Canadian artists. Legislative proposals that would facilitate lawsuits against our fans or increase the labels’ control over the enjoyment of music are made not in our names, but on behalf of the labels’ foreign parent companies. It is the government’s responsibility to protect Canadian artists from exploitation. This requires a firm commitment to programs that support Canadian music talent, and a fresh approach to copyright law reform. Canadian music creators have identified three principles that should guide the copyright reform process. 1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against our will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in our names. We oppose any copyright reforms that would make it easier for record companies to do this. The government should repeal provisions of the Copyright Act that allow labels to unfairly punish fans who share music for non-commercial purposes with statutory damages of $500 to $20,000 per song. 2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. The government should not blindly implement decade-old treaties designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers. Laws should protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies. Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice. 3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists The vast majority of new Canadian music is not promoted by major labels, which focus mostly on foreign artists. The government should use other policy tools to support actual Canadian artists and a thriving musical and cultural scene. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms like the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent. http://www.musiccreators.ca/ Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - April 22nd, April 15th, April 8th, April 1st Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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