Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – January 1st, 2005

[JackSpratts]

2005!


Quotes Of The Week


"Personally, it's ludicrous to be suing a tracker for copyright infringement that hosts no copyright material. It's tantamount to suing the highway department for having roads that drug smugglers use. The random pirating of software just doesn't add up to being able to shut down the site." – Edward Webber


"Album sales for the industry as a whole have been spiraling downward for the last 14 weeks, draining a comeback that began last fall around the time the labels began suing people they identified as Internet pirates. Album sales are up about 1.3 percent over last year." – Jeff Leeds


"In this climate, where everyone is bemoaning the death of the CD, and we're all talking about price pressure, there is a growing market, which record companies are hoping to develop, of people that are happy to pay more money for value." – Steve Gottlieb


"If they had priced that U2 thing at $59, a lot of people would look at it as a rip-off and the band would probably have a problem with that, too. If you push it too hard, you're going to break." – Scott Wilson


"The disc includes three media platters, each capable of storing 133GB of data, which is a record for a PC-targeted [hard] drive." – Martyn Williams


"Vioxx unseats porn in list of top 2004 junk email." – Reuters















My thanks to the WiR readers and especially the writers and editors (and search engines) whose efforts help make the Week in Review what it is and give it it’s particular depth. It simply would not be the same without you.

While P2P continues it's inexorable push towards every computer in the world, and independent publishing and personal distribution become ever more commonplace, here's wishing good health and happiness to all.

Have a great New Year,

Jack Spratts












BitTorrent Operator Bites Back at MPAA
Jim Wagner

LokiTorrent, a Web site that tracks and indexes BitTorrent files, says it's setting up a legal defense fund to fight a lawsuit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The site's operators have collected $13,955 of the $30,000 needed to start defending themselves from the MPAA's lawsuit, according to a recent posting on the Web site.

The action was filed against LokiTorrent on Dec. 14. That same day, the movie industry association sent site operators a cease-and-desist order to stop them from hosting trackers that match BitTorrent users with copyrighted movies.

Lawsuits were also filed against the operators of BitTorrent trackers Centraltracker.org and Centraldownload.org.

Edward Webber, owner of LokiTorrent, said it's only a matter of days before he's served a lawsuit specifically against him. The original suit didn't include names -- the defendant's were referred to as "[John] Does 1-10" -- because the MPAA only had IP and Web site addresses in the beginning. It wasn't until a judge allowed lawyers to subpoena Layered Technologies, Webber's ISP, and PayPal that they learned his name.

Finding his name, however, wasn't difficult, since Webber and his contact information is publicly listed on the site's domain name registration, findable through a WHOIS (define) search.

The $30,000, Webber said, will fund the first month's legal expenses in what will likely be a protracted court battle with the MPAA and its deep pockets in Hollywood. He's looking for continued support from the P2P community and is scheduled to talk with lawyers with the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) on Friday in the hopes they will support the case.

"Personally, it's ludicrous to be suing a tracker for copyright infringement that hosts no copyright material," he said. "It's tantamount to suing the highway department for having roads that drug smugglers use. The random pirating of software just doesn't add up to being able to shut down the site."

Unlike the traditional peer-to-peer (P2P) model, where a user downloads a complete file from another user's system, the BitTorrent technology strips torrent files into smaller pieces so that the downloading burden is shared by more people. And while the user is downloading their file, they are also uploading the pieces they've downloaded to other users, vastly improving file- sharing speeds across the board.

Sites like LokiTorrent, which host forums that index the torrent files in use, have been under increasing attack by the content industry. Earlier this month, popular BitTorrent tracking site Suprnova.org -- which hosted hundreds of movies, music, and software applications -- briefly shut down its service, before resuming operations as a "100% Legal" BitTorrent tracker site. Now, Suprnova.org visitors must register their name, e-mail address and pay a monthly fee to use the site.

At any given time, hundreds of copyrighted files are indexed by the sites. LokiTorrent, for example, features BitTorrent downloads for movies like "The Grudge" and PC games like "Half-Life 2."

LokiTorrent's site contains a "terms and conditions" disclaimer for all new site registrants, not taking responsibility for the torrents listed on its site, which are input by BitTorrent users. The disclaimer states users must gain "written permission of the copyright owners" before using any copyrighted material.

The MPAA's legal maneuvering is the latest in a string of moves by the content industry to shut down Web sites facilitating the downloading of pirated movies and music. To date, that effort has been led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the form of hundreds of lawsuits against individual P2P users and the highly publicized Napster affair.

But as broadband use grows so does the ability to download huge movie files, prompting the movie industry to step up efforts. In a move to clarify the so-called Betamax ruling of the 1980s, the MPAA will argue before the Supreme Court next year that software developers should be liable for the illegal use of their applications. In November, the association announced its latest crop of suits against individual file-sharers.

The movie industry's actions have had mixed results. While the MPAA was able to shut down or force compliance with some BitTorrent forums, they are limited to site's hosted in the United States. LokiTorrent is registered by Webber in Portland, Maine, while Suprnova.org's site registration comes from Scottsdale, Ariz., according to domain registration records.

Outside the United States, content companies have been largely ignored by BitTorrent sites. One recent cease-and-desist threat by Dreamworks lawyers from Keats, McFarland & Wilson serves as an example. Lawyers sent the Stockholm-based BitTorrent tracker site Pirate Bay an order telling them to stop because they were liable for infringing on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

One of the site's members, replied by e-mail in August:

"As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe," the e-mail read. "Unless you figured it out by now, U.S. law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated ..."

MPAA officials were not available for comment at press time.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3453321


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MPAA Sues LokiTorrent

MPAA/RIAA sales system
p2pnet.net News

LokiTorrent is yet another BitTorrent site to be targeted in the MPAA crush p2p, sue file sharers vendetta.

The Big Seven movie studios claim they’re being ruined by file sharing and that thousands of ancillary staff are suffering terrible hardships as a direct result.

And yet, at the same time, they’re reporting mind-boggling revenues. For a taste, check out the Big Earners list.

One film, Titanic, raked in more than half a billion dollars and this year, in June alone, the North American movie industry took in $1.03 billion, a 14% increase over June 2003's previous monthly record.

Now LokiTorrent is looking for $30,000 to go towards, “legal and other costs associated with saving peer-to-peer as a whole".

Dominate online environments

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) attacks against BitTorrent servers are part of a concerted effort involving the major software companies, record labels and movie studios to dominate online environments in order to turn them into tightly controlled corporate marketing and sales divisions and enterprises.

Of Suprnova.org, Youceff.com, Lokitorrent.com and Piratebay.org, four popular torrent sites mentioned by Johan Pouwelse in The Bittorrent P2P File-sharing System: Measurements and Analysis, only Piratebay.org has escaped the MPAA’s direct attentions.

We say ‘direct’ because although Piratebay.org hasn’t yet been nailed like the other three sites, it was named in a lamentable MPAA effort to use the purely American DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in an attempt to con site owners in foreign countries.

LokiTorrent's request for donations towards its legal costs epitomizes a major part of the entertainment industry strategy.

In the same way that the RIAA, the MPAA’s opposite number in the recording industry, is suing mom-and-pop p2p users, knowing full well that never in a million years will they be able to match the industry’s financial and legal resources, the studios are counting on the same thing happening with their sue ‘em all campaign.

Guilty until proven innocent
Not one of the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) thousands of victims has ever been found guilty of anything because they’ve never appeared in a court.

They’re all ordinary people who share music with each other not for profit, but for pleasure. They’re not the hard-core crooks the members of the Big Four music label cartel portray them to be.

Big Music knows its victims will never be able to afford a court appearance. So it makes ‘settlement’ offers which, although the payments impoverish many of victims, they’re forced to accept.

This makes a mockery of the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ concept, allows the cartel to imply it's successfully sued rafts of people for ‘illegally’ sharing files online, and wards off the possibility of a court actually hearing a case and deciding file sharing is not, after all, illegal.

In the meanwhile, the real criminals, the organized counterfeiters making their fortunes on world black markets because the labels, studios and software companies continue to churn out easily copied physical CDs and DVDs in their billions, as much as anything else, go largely unscathed.

And everything that applies to the music cartel sue ‘em all campaigns similarly applies to the movie industry onslaughts.

No clue
In The Netherlands, the major studios used their Brein anti-piracy enforcement unit against ED2K and Bittorrent sites.

As Raymond Blijd reported, Brein conned Holland’s FIOD-ECD, the government agency assigned to the criminal pursuit of fiscal, financial and economical fraud, into getting involved.

FIOD-ECD, “can by any constitutional means go after hard-core criminalism,” says Blijd, “So, getting access to and information from an ISP isn't an issue. Simply said, FIOD-ECD can do what Brein can't.”

FIOD-ECD got into it believing investigators would find servers loaded with illegal materials, and “neatly kept balance sheets showing the profits generated by all the 'illegal' activities”.

During interrogations, one investigator, “in obvious frustration, grabbed a random piece of PHP code and offered it up it as a scorecard for keeping tabs on funds. Finally, it became abundantly clear to all that FIOD-ECD were in way over their heads. They had no clue as to what they were dealing with.”

And the criminals they were chasing?

Suspects aged18 to 26 and who, far from being members of an organized conspiracy set up to milk the industry of millions of dollars, barely knew each other and were surviving mostly on donations from site users.

In the meanwhile ------------

· It's never been proven that a downloaded and/or shared file equals even a single a lost sale, let alone millions of them

· RIAA claims that its war against file sharers is having a marked effect have proven to be spurious, and the same will certainly apply to the MPAA's efforts.
http://p2pnet.net/story/3409


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The BitTorrent Effect

Movie studios hate it. File-swappers love it. Bram Cohen's blazing-fast P2P software has turned the Internet into a universal TiVo. For free video-on- demand, just click here.
Clive Thompson

A Better Way to Share Files

"That was a bad move," Bram Cohen tells me. We're huddled over a table in his Bellevue, Washington, house playing a board game
called Amazons. Cohen picked it up two weeks ago and has already mastered it. The 29-year-old programmer consumes logic puzzles at the same rate most of us buy magazines. Behind his desk he keeps an enormous plastic bin filled with dozens of Rubik's Cube-style twisting gewgaws that he periodically scrambles and solves throughout the day. Cohen says he loves Amazons, a cross between chess and the Japanese game Go, because it is pure strategy. Players take turns dropping more and more tokens on a grid, trying to box in their opponent. As I ponder my next move, Cohen studies the board, his jet-black hair hanging in front of his face, and tells me his philosophy of the perfect game."The best strategy games are the ones where you put a piece down and it stays there for the whole game," he explains. "You say, OK, I'm staking out this area. But you can't always figure out if that's going to work for you or against you. You just have to wait and see. You might be right, might be wrong." It's only later, when I look over these words in my notes, that I realize he could just as easily be talking about his life.

Bram Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, one of the most successful peer-to-peer programs ever. BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3. Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet. Cohen showed his code to the world at a hacker conference in 2002, as a free, open source project aimed at geeks who need a cheap way to swap Linux software online. But the real audience turns out to be TV and movie fanatics. It takes hours to download a ripped episode of Alias or Monk off Kazaa, but BitTorrent can do it in minutes. As a result, more than 20 million people have downloaded the BitTorrent application. If any one of them misses their favorite TV show, no worries. Surely someone has posted it as a "torrent." As for movies, if you can find it at Blockbuster, you can probably find it online somewhere - and use BitTorrent to suck it down.

With so much illegal traffic, it's no surprise that a clampdown has started: In November, the Motion Picture Association of America began suing downloaders of movies, in order to, as the MPAA's antipiracy chief John Malcolm put it, "avoid the fate of the music industry."

For Cohen, it's all a little surreal. He gets up in the morning, helps his wife feed their children, and then sits down at his cord-and-computer-choked desk to watch his PayPal account fill up with donations from grateful BitTorrent users - enough to support his family. Then he goes online to see how many more people have downloaded the program: At this rate, it'll be 40 million by 2006.

"I can't even imagine a crowd that big. I try not to think about it," he admits.

How BitTorrent Works

Bram Cohen's approach is faster and more efficient than traditional P2P networking.

1. A single source file within a group of BitTorrent users, called a swarm, spreads around pieces of a film or videogame or TV show so that everyone has a chunk to share.

2. After the initial downloading, those pieces are then uploaded to other needy users in the swarm. The rules require every downloader to also do some uploading. Thus the more people trying to download, the faster everything is uploaded.

3. Before long, the swarm has shared all the pieces, and everyone has their own complete source.

How Traditional Peer-to-Peer works

Sites like Kazaa and Morpheus are slow because they suffer from supply bottlenecks. Even if many users on the network have the same file, swapping is restricted to one uploader and downloader at a time. And since uploading goes much slower than downloading, even highly compressed media can take many hours to transfer.

More http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...w=wn_tophead_2


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Wild Wild East

According to the MPAA, piracy is a big problem. The MPAA sponsors ads showing Joe Gaffer whining about piracy taking away his livelihood, and sues people for hosting crappy copies of their movies on P2P networks. I never bought into that. Watching a downloaded movie will never match the feeling of being in the theater, facing a big screen, with a jazzed audience, the familiar sting of having paid $10 for popcorn and soda, no interruptions, big sound - it's unreproducible at home, unless you're loaded. And even if you did get the whole setup, watching a downloaded DivX version of The Incredibles shot on a handicam is going to be laughably like masturbation - a pale shadow of the real thing.

A friend of mine once asked the CEO of Levi Strauss why he wasn't cracking down on knockoff copies of his jeans across Asia. His answer was that people buying fakes knew they were fake, and that made them want the real thing even more. Having watched several movies pilfered with a video camera, I concur; it was so disappointing, I wanted to go right to the cineplex and get the taste out of my mouth.

DVD piracy is similarly overstated. It takes technical expertise, a powerful computer, and a fair amount of time. Bandwidth isn't up to the task of pushing around full-quality copies, and who wants to watch movies on a laptop, anyway? So what is the MPAA talking about?

Now I know.

I'm living in mainland China for a couple of months. The dearth of English TV and the terrible quality of Chinese shows made me set out, on my very first day, to a local DVD store.

They're on every street. These people must listen to and watch a fair number of movies and CDs. But since the average wage here is, very roughly, US$150 a month, and the average DVD costs about US$15 back home, how can they afford it? Do they get a continental discount?

I walked in and got right to the discount rack. Dozens of American and foreign movies were on sale for 6RMB, about 75¢! The full-price ones ranged from 12- 18RMB ($1.50 - $2.25.) Obviously, these are copies, fakes, pirate booty. But how good are they? For the sake of journalistic thoroughness, I bought 35 of them.

I got movies like Touching the Void, Traffic, the miniseries, SuperSize Me, The Bourne Supremacy, the latest Harry Potter, and Troy. I got a couple of Japanese movies, and City of God. They even had a section of oldies like Gone with the Wind, Singing in the Rain, Some Like it Hot, and tons more. There were also strange movies with familiar faces that skipped American releases entirely. There are a few Stallone movies here I've never heard of. The store had fewer movies than a BlockBuster, but more than a Costco. It was a decent selection.

What you see is what you see

The DVD cases are works of pirate art. They are all made in the same style from hard glossy cardboard. Cheaply made, but professionally graphically designed. They're so uniform, you can tell they almost all come from one maker. What makes them art, though, are the mistakes: made by a genius dyslexican who flunked the TOEFL. English literacy here is almost zero. A Chinese person picking up a movie to buy would not read the title, the quotes, the description, or the credits if they were in English. But any American movie case has to have English, right?

They copy and paste pieces from cases for other movies, they use graphics they get from the web, they judiciously edit, and sometimes, they just make stuff up. They are very inventive, whoever they are; I'm not sure I'd do as well in a language I didn't know.

On the case for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, there are the credits for Hart's War. For City of God, the front cover is in French, the critic quotes are in German, and the description is in English and Chinese. Several of the boxes say on the top, "Scorpion King - 100% top movie info forfans," just like that. It's not strange to see parts of four or five cases pasted together. On one, the credits were just a block of text, with some letters capitalized to look like actors' and director's names. Nonsense, gibberish, a garbled mess, but it passes the glance test.

Arriving home, I immediately started the process of checking them out. I was worried about region-encoding. DVDs are sold with a flag denoting in what region the disc can be sold and played. Players usually enforce this stupid rule, maintaining the crushing distributional oligopoly, preventing fans like me from watching legitimately purchased copies of Ong Bak at home, and forcing us to wait until they get around to releasing a Region 1 version, if ever. The CEO of BlockBuster recently came out against the region flag, but for now, it's still around.

None of the discs had any region encoding, which doesn't surprise me; why would a pirate include it? Now they can sell them anywhere, in Chinatowns across the world. But there were other problems: One disc had nothing on it; it wouldn't play on my computer or in my DVD player. It was just apparently blank. Another was a handicam job. Mulholland Drive was only one track, meaning you had to watch the whole film in one sitting. A couple others froze up when reaching a certain point. One was fullscreen when it should have been wide. In all, I had to return six out of the original 35. Their replacements worked fine.

There are a few systemic caveats: you will never get a second disc of extras, even if it says you will on the box, and the English subtitles won't always be completely understandable. And if you get a non-English film, it has a 50-50 chance of having no English subtitles at all. So you'd better speak French or German or Japanese.

The rest of the DVDs were real deals, complete with menus, scene selection, and bonus features. The pictures were clear and the sound good. They were bit-for-bit copies, but of what?

On Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a "property of Miramax Films - for screening purposes only" appeared, another said "for award consideration only." The Indiana Jones DVDs were copies of the Laserdisc versions, their barebones menus cobbled together by someone with DVD authoring software. The music that played behind the main menu of Solaris was the Star Wars theme. Lost Highway is from the French DVD. Sometimes it's the USA version with Chinese audio or subtitles tacked on. In most cases, though, they are direct, mass-produced, professional copies of the official Hong Kong DVDs, indistinguishable from the real thing.

Caveat Emptor

This, for me, is the best scenario: I can buy a quality copy of an English language film with Chinese subtitles and an audio track, so my wife can follow along, or so my kid can practice her Cantonese. Where could I ever get that in America? This is also the only way for me to get a DVD of certain foreign films. Who knows how long I'd have had to wait for the new Zatoichi or My Sassy Girl? And where else would I have the balls to pay hard-earned money for Prince of Darkness, Starsky and Hutch, or I, Robot? These are not lost dollars for the MPAA; I NEVER would have bought those movies. I would have waited for the latter two to appear on TBS.

Even so, there is danger here. High quality copies are being mass-produced in mainland Chinese factories for sale worldwide. They might even be the same factories that make the versions that get sold in America. It's so scary to movie companies that they flat-out ignore China; it might as well not exist. Movies are rarely released here and real DVDs are very hard to find. Whether it is because of the bootlegging or the lack of consumer buying power or something else, I'm not sure. But it can't be for lack of demand. These people have a hankering for our American movies, and with their economy growing at almost 10% annually, soon they'll have the power to pay full price. And maybe then Hollywood will pay attention. Until then, they make do with what they can get.

Two years ago, when I was last here, they kept the bootlegged American movies in a drawer. Now they're out in the open, though the store owner mentioned that I might not be able to get the DVDs through customs. Not sure if she meant here or back home. I'll probably leave them in my house here. My friend tried to mail some to me in America last year and the Chinese post office wouldn't let her. She eventually had to remove them from their boxes and hide them in a purse to get them through. So people are aware.

Chinese piracy hasn't hurt DVD sales; it continues to break records. The Chinese copies will get you through the day, but in the end, a solid Special Edition, with an extra disc of material and DTS satisfies much more. Maybe the Levi's CEO was right: maybe all this copying is just serving to build brands and demand. And when the time is right, Hollywood will pounce and cash in. Or maybe, like with the recording industry, piracy is changing the rules of the game.

Hey, if it lets me get The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in Chinese for a dollar, I'm all for it.
http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/visit...11_25_arch.php


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Amazon.com Tops Record for One - Day Sales
AP

Amazon.com Inc. on Monday said sales of consumer electronics surpassed book sales for the first time and was its largest sales category over the Thanksgiving weekend, launching the online retailer's busiest holiday selling season in 10 years.

The company also said it set a single-day sales record during the period with more than 2.8 million units, or 32 items per second, ordered across the globe.

Visitor traffic peaked at an estimated 700,000 users during a 60-minute period, according to Amazon.com's Holiday Shoppers tracking program.

Its top-selling electronics products include Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod media player, DVD players and digital cameras, Amazon.com said.

The retailer added that customers bought more than 1 million items from its music category during each of two back-to-back weeks this month. Its jewelry and watch segment sold more than one watch per minute since Nov. 25.

In premarket activity, shares of Amazon.com gained 2.4 percent, or 95 cents, to $39.88 on the Nasdaq.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

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2004 a downbeat year

Year's Music Offering Ho-Hum; iPod Brings Apple Holiday Cheer
Malcolm X Abram

It wasn't a particularly great or watershed year, unless your name is Usher, Kanye West or Gretchen Wilson, and as always, there was plenty of dreck to fill the increasingly narrow radio airwaves, with dollops of interesting music finding their way to the masses.

Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake (yeah, he was there too, remember?) started the year off with a bang and a flash of nipple at the Super Bowl. Though Jackson's nipple has little to do with music, FCC honcho Michael Powell overreacted. He heaped on fines, tried to enforce a no-tolerance policy and generally scared the bejeezus out of radio programmers, who began editing or simply removing songs such as Pink Floyd's Money that had been in regular rotation for more than three decades.

The business of music continued to play catch-up with the digital age, still crying foul. The Supreme Court upheld the right to exist of peer-to-peer services such as Kazaa, but that didn't stop the RIAA from flinging lawsuits at P2P users who share copyrighted material.

Meanwhile, Apple's iTunes/iPod combo became the undisputed emperor of digital music, recently clocking its 200 millionth download. The business model is quite simply brilliant: Apple controls the means of distribution with iTunes, gussying up its product with exclusives and variety, while positioning the iPod as the standard in digital music players. It caused a rush this holiday season that surely has Apple execs dancing a jig on top of the boardroom table.

In actual music, R&B and hip-hop continued to dominate and influence the mainstream. Usher, whose star has risen with each new release, had an amazing year. His Confessions stayed perched atop the Billboard Charts for nine weeks, sold more than 7 million copies domestically and garnered him numerous awards, including 11 Billboard Music Awards and eight Grammy nominations.

Alicia Keys showed she was no one-album wonder, staying the course with her sophomore disc, The Diary of Alicia Keys, and being rewarded with more hit singles, platinum plaques and eight more Grammy nominations.

The meteoric rise of rapper/producer Kanye West's debut, The College Dropout, represented some hope for hip-hop fans weary of songs about hustling and club- and ho-hopping. The very confident West managed to get a song on hip-hop and R&B radio that not only contained a shout-out to Jesus in its title and hook, but questioned the materialistic focus of other rappers and the black community at large.

The touring business overall was down (witness the slow death of Lollapalooza) but a few artists, mostly of a certain vintage, beat the trend. Despite a new album that tanked by her own impressive standards, Madonna was the year's top-grossing touring act, raking in nearly $125 million.

A revitalized and much more user-friendly Prince played arenas around the country for the first time in more than a decade, selling out 91 of 99 concerts for more than 1.5 million fans. Metal crossover kings Metallica also hit the road behind the film Some Kind of Monster and raked in the dollars, giving fans a healthy dose of the group's early classics mixed in with newer material.

The top 10 was filled out by veterans such as Simon & Garfunkel, Bette Midler and David Bowie, while a few younger acts such as Linkin Park, Usher, Britney Spears' aborted tour and John Mayer landed in the top 25.

R. Kelly and ``retired'' rapper Jay-Z teamed up to tour behind Unfinished Business, an album of leftovers from their earlier pairing that produced Best of Both Worlds, which had been derailed by Kelly's legal woes. Things quickly fell to pieces as the two artists/egos clashed, ending with an alleged mace attack on Kelly by a member of Jay-Z's crew, and Jay-Z kicking Kelly off the tour.

Since then both sides have gone public, each accusing the other of unprofessionalism. Kelly retaliated with a $75 million lawsuit while Jay kept on rolling, finishing out the tour by replacing Kelly with various famous friends, such as Mary J. Blige and Ludacris.

The revival of '80s music continued among hipsters, with buzz bands such as Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Scissor Sisters and The Killers using New Wave and pop synths and grooves from the Reagan era as musical blueprints.

Several new or under-the-radar groups were welcomed into the mainstream, including earthy Tex-Mex trio Los Lonely Boys and Modest Mouse, who after years as indie rock heroes tightened up a sprawling guitar sound and found a hit in Float On.

Young, hip neo-jazzbo pianist/singer Jamie Cullum caused quite a stir with his mix of cheeky originals, standards and recent songs by The Neptunes and Radiohead. Equally hip bands such as The Bad Plus divided jazz fans and critics with a similar formula.

In the '60s, many young people loved that they and their music could change the world. In 2004, Sean ``P. Diddy'' Combs, Outkast and other rap stars told young people to ``Vote Or Die,'' while big-time rock lefties such as R.E.M., Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen believed they could change the outcome of the presidential election with their Vote For Change tour.

They were wrong.

As always, 2004 saw many music luminaries and lesser-known figures shuffle off this mortal coil, including Ray Charles; jazz drum great Elvin Jones; troubled rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard; R&B/funk star Rick James; legendary ska and reggae producer Clement ``Sir Coxone'' Dodd; jazz guitarist Barney Kessell; saxophonist Steve Lacy; former Richard Hell and The Voidoids guitarist and Akronite Robert Quine; Jan Berry of '60s surfer duo Jan & Dean; longtime BBC DJ and champion of new music John Peel; Johnny Ramone, guitarist and co-founder of punk legends The Ramones; and most recently, ``Dimebag'' Darrell Abbott of Damageplan and formerly of Pantera, who died doing what he loved.

May they rest in peace with the knowledge that they are survived by friends, family and their life's work.
http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjourna...0491057.htm?1c


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Stifling File-Sharing Technology Isn't The Right Answer

SUMMARY: When file-sharing is outlawed, only outlaws will share files.

Americans Saturday unwrapped untold numbers of iPods, DVD players and computers designed to beam a world of music, movies and games directly into their pockets, ears and homes. Exactly how and how much they use them could depend on a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court has agreed to rule in coming months on a case challenging the legitimacy of music and movie file-sharing services that make it easy for consumers to violate copyright laws.

This is a fascinating issue with implications for the future of the Information Age. The case also offers no small promise of amusement, as Supreme Court justices born before the invention of the electric typewriter and (we're guessing) have to have help sending a fax grapple with a clash of 21st century technology with 20th century laws and good, old-fashioned situational ethics.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal from movie and record companies seeking to sue Internet file-sharing services Grokster and StreamCast Networks. Those file-sharing services allow their customers to trade among themselves more than 2.5 billion music tracks and more than 10 million movies a month. The appellants contend the services are responsible for copyright violations on such a massive scale that the whole concept of intellectual property is threatened.

There's no question that copyrights are being violated. People who download digital copies of music and movies instead of buying them effectively rob the makers of music and movies of their creative products. The ability to make a buck on the fruits of one's creativity is what makes the world go 'round.

But surely the court will err if it holds the creators and providers of hardware and software useful for many things, including music and movie piracy, responsible for the unlawful use of their wares. We don't shut down auto assembly lines because drunken drivers and bank robbers drive cars. We don't penalize tool companies when burglars use crowbars to break into houses. And - although it's been tried - gun makers aren't held responsible for the illegal use of weapons.

It's foolish to even try limiting new technology to conform to laws devised for old technology. It's hard to imagine life today without such ubiquitous tools as copy machines, tape recorders, video recorders and scanners - all of which can be used to violate copyrights by illegally duplicating writing, art, music and movies. We can't say how, exactly, file-sharing technology is going to fit into our lives and future, but we wouldn't mind finding out.

To paraphrase our friends at the National Rifle Association, computers and software don't violate copyrights. People do. The court should focus on the behavior of people, not things used by people who behave illegally.

Advancing technology does challenge intellectual property rights. But the solution is to evolve laws and contracts to make protection of those rights more effective, not to stifle the evolution of technology.
http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2...n/opinion2.txt


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Want Free, Clean Software?
p2pnet.net News

The Net doesn't merely have info on p2p sharing, apps and activities. It IS p2p – peer-to-peer. Movies and music are but the tip of the iceberg although, thanks to the entertainment industry, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Now, as an example of how it provides people with choice where once there was none, Canada’s Jem Berkes has launched CleanSoftware.org, designed very specifically to help Windows users find the best free daily-use software, free from nasties: adware, spyware, harmful/intrusive components, and threats to privacy.

“You might tell from the software selection I have a soft spot for p2p apps,” Berkes, a former University of Manitoba computer and electrical engineering student, told p2pnet. “I think it's important that people know how sophisticated modern p2p apps really are, and their promise to revolutionize the Internet and data exchange. Whether some people steal stuff is not my problem, nor my worry.

“When I can download the latest Slackware ISO images using BitTorrent at 2 Mbps without killing slackware.com, this is pretty amazing to us network geeks. In fact, for our engineering undergraduate design project we built a novel VoIP system based on p2p that had the ability to get around NAT systems.”

Back to CleanSoftware.org, over the past couple years the Net has become littered with deceptive and borderline dangerous software, says Berkes in a considerable understatement, going on:

“Many ‘free’ programs threaten your privacy; others clutter your computer with intrusive components. Don't settle for software riddled with irritating advertising or harmful spyware. Browse our categories to discover excellent free, clean, software.”

And back to file sharing and media distribution applications, here’s the CleanSoftware.org list:

Azureus


Open source : Java
Checked: version 2.2.0.2
Azureus is a Java (cross platform) client supporting the BitTorrent protocol, which makes use of adhoc peer-to- peer networks to rapidly deliver large media. Azureus has an advanced graphical user interface supporting multiple torrents and embedded trackers. (comments)

BitTorrent

Open source : UNIX, Windows, Mac OS
Checked: version 3.9.0 beta
BitTorrent is a file distribution technology that takes advantage of adhoc peer-to-peer networks to rapidly deliver large media. This original BitTorrent client is written in Python, including a graphical user interface. (comments)

DC++

Open source : Windows
Checked: version 0.668
DC++ is a file sharing program supporting the Direct Connect protocol. Features an easy to use interface, support for multiple hubs, and versatile search. (comments)

eMule

Open source : Windows
Checked: version 0.44d
eMule is a file sharing program that supports the EDonkey2000, Source Exchange, and Kad networks. Features a queue and credit system to help enforce network participation, as well as built in IRC client. (comments)

Gnucleus

Open source : Windows
Checked: version 2.0.5.0
Gnucleus is a file sharing program supporting the decentralized Gnutella and G2 ("Gnutella2") peer-to-peer networks. Features a simple interface and top standards compliance. (comments)

Shareaza

Open source : Windows
Checked: version 2.1.0.0
Shareaza is a file sharing program that supports the EDonkey2000, Gnutella, BitTorrent, and G2 ("Gnutella2") networks. Features multiple source downloading and advanced search capabilities. (comments)

Soulseek

Freeware : Windows
Checked: version 155 (Buld 216)
Soulseek is a file sharing program that uses its own centralized peer-to-peer network. Features highly integrated community chat forums, oriented around musical tastes. (comments)

WinMX

Freeware : Windows
Checked: version 3.53
WinMX is a file sharing program that uses a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Supports multiple source downloading, bandwidth monitoring and throttling, decentralized chat, and OpenNap protocol. (comments)
http://p2pnet.net/story/3399


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Watching Movie Downloads On Your TV
Evan Hansen

Technology researcher Michael Cai saw the promise of media convergence firsthand more than two years ago, when a friend treated him to a home viewing of the hit movie "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."

"The film was pirated off the Internet and broadcast from a PC to a big-screen TV using wireless technology from X10," the Parks Associates senior analyst laughed, referring to the maker of tiny wireless video cameras whose pop-up ads once blanketed the Web. "It worked pretty well."

As 2004 comes to a close, the world is at once very different and much the same for video enthusiasts wanting to take movies from the Internet, store them on their PCs and shoot them over to giant TV screens. What's new is the growing list of devices coming out that can connect the two worlds, either wirelessly or with cables. But one thing that hasn't changed, Cai said, is the dearth of high-quality legally available content that would justify the investment for most people.

"The idea of the digital-media adapter has been around for years through devices like Sony's RoomLink, but they never really took off," Cai explained. "One problem has been a lack of consumer awareness. But the bigger problem is the lack of content--not self-created content like home movies, but premium content, meaning first-run Hollywood movies."

Efforts to make more legal content available are underway, but it will be awhile before they catch up with the hardware.

Prices for home networking gear such as wireless routers dropped in 2004, and consumers reacted by opening their wallets. But consumers are still mainly using the networking products to share broadband connections.

Making it easy and worthwhile to play and stream multimedia content will add a whole new dimension to the consumer electronics world and boost the industry's transition to digital content. While the overall list of devices promising to allow consumers to stream multimedia is growing, sales have been lackluster to date, according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) trade group.

"I don't think we even track it," CEA spokesman Sean Wargo said. "The category is too new."

Disappointing sales aren't for a lack of trying. The consumer electronics industry first began taking a serious run at the market in early 2002, when chipmaker Intel developed a reference design for a media adapter and offered it to manufacturers. There was only limited interest at the time, but more recently, some big PC manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard and Gateway, and wireless router makers, such as Linksys, NetGear and D-Link, have released media adapters that wirelessly connect PCs to TVs using various versions of the Wi-Fi standard.

In addition, several high-end DVD players have come out under little-known brands-- GoVideo, Amoi, KISS--with Ethernet and Wi-Fi-enabled media adapters that allow TVs to access computer files such as photos, MP3s and most major video formats.

Look for the DivX label
KISS, a high-end Dutch audio-video components maker, began producing an Ethernet- enabled DVD player two years ago, and now offers several models ranging from about $250 to $400. These devices, which support the underground DivX file format, could hold special appeal to Net video aficionados who have turned to peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent and eDonkey to stockpile large DivX video libraries.

DivX Networks is working hard to transform itself into a legitimate digital-media technology provider and has struck deals with most major DVD chipmakers to support its video technology, which compresses bulky files, making them more efficient to download over the Net. The company claims consumers have created billions of DivX- encoded files, many of which are available online, with or without the permission of copyright holders. Major brands such as JVC, Panasonic and JVC now sell DivX- compatible DVD players, though some support only DivX DVD playback capabilities and do not offer Ethernet or WiFi options.

Others are moving ahead with multimedia adapters that support video formats that are standard in the industry, but less widely used on peer-to-peer networks, such as MPEG- 1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and Windows Media Video-9.

Just this month, Netgear released a $220 Wireless Digital Media Player (MP115) that streams digital media content wirelessly from the PC or the Internet to both TVs and stereos. The device comes about a year after Netgear introduced a music-only networked player for about $149.

Also targeting the video market is Linksys, which announced its DVD Player with Wireless-G Media Link in January 2004, along with a music-only networked player.

Given the slow uptake for these devices, Cai said they may wind up being bypassed by next-generation convergence devices that bundle broadband directly into the TV set. Some of those devices are now available, including a flat-screen TV from Sony code- named Altair.

Personal video recorders (PVRs) with direct hookups to broadband modems could also short-circuit the need for expensive networked DVD players or stand-alone digital- media adapters. TiVo, for example, has announced plans to create a video download service in partnership with Netflix.

Wireless video: Still workin' out the kinks
Connecting a PC to the TV with cables can be a hassle, but consumers should be wary of manufacturers' claims concerning wireless video streaming over Wi-Fi.

"The Wi-Fi standard does not include any provision for quality of service," Cai said. "That can lead to some problems whenever bandwidth fluctuates."

Video quality on a network promises to be improved with a new wireless specification for Wi-Fi, called 802.11e, that aims to ensure that video streams are not interrupted.

Netgear spokesman Doug Hagan said that while video quality can be a concern, wireless routers are improving on this front. New standards in the wings, such as 802.11n, should address service and bandwidth concerns, he said, with products expected as early as late 2005 in advance of actual standards ratification.

The 802.11n standard is in the process of being finalized. Once complete, it will allow data to be wirelessly transmitted around 100 mbps. Proposals for the 802.11n standard are being considered by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, which makes determinations on standards, and won't be completed for up to three years.

In the meantime, companies such as Netgear are reviving the largely overlooked 802.11a standard to help alleviate video quality issues, he said.

"'A' has popped up as another alternative as we wait for 'n,'" he said.

The 802.11a standard is less susceptible to interference than the 802.11g and 802.11b standards, which use the same radio frequencies as microwaves and some cordless phones, and can use more channels to send and receive data, making it less likely that a video stream will be interrupted.

Other efforts to connect consumer electronics and computing devices are also in the works. The Universal Plug and Play specification, developed by members of the UPnP Forum, allows different devices to interoperate--playing the same files on different types of devices. The forum consists of 500 member companies, including Microsoft, Philips, Sony, Intel, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The companies help promote the specification, and they work on its development so that new devices can use it.

The goal of the UPnP Forum is to keep that growth going by helping to connect new and existing devices within the home and make them easy to use.

"Making multimedia easy to play is hard, and many of the parts needed to make it easy are not in place," said Stephen Baker, an analyst with NPD Techworld. "Playing video has not progressed nearly as much as music."

The convergence world is considerably less friendly to consumers who want to use legally purchased video than it is to those trying to make use of their music. The audiophile's audio file option have taken off, thanks to offerings such as Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, the newly launched Napster service and RealNetwork's online music store and Rhapsody subscription service.

A number of devices have come out to stream tunes from a PC to a home stereo, such as Apple's AirPort Express wireless router and the Roku Soundbridge.

Several video download stores now exist online, including MovieLink and CinemaNow, offering Web surfers a small collection of movies for rental and purchase. The pickings are generally slim, however, putting a $400 DVD purchase on the extravagant side.

Analysts said more content is coming, thanks to the efforts of the Digital Living Network Association (DLNA), an industry group negotiating licensing and technology issues with Hollywood. Cai said the DLNA is expected to make some major announcements by next year that could open up more content and make PC-TV convergence more appealing for average consumers.

Baker agreed that 2005 could shape up as a make-or-break year for Hollywood and electronics manufacturers hoping to cement consumer demand for home networked gear.

"If you've got a digital-entertainment strategy," Baker said, "this year has to be the year you execute on it."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5502622.html


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Got multiple PCs and a network?

New Net-Ready Hard Drives Are A Smart, Affordable Way To Back Up And Share Data
Becky Waring

Network-attached storage (NAS) sounds very big and technical--the term refers to devices that were conceived as a tool for
large organizations--but this is not a geeks-only article. These hard drives with brains are now compact, inexpensive, and easy to use, and they can provide automatic backup and storage for as few as two networked computers. The products reviewed here can be installed and maintained by anyone comfortable with setting up a home or small-office network--no IT training necessary. These ten products range from networked hard drives to more richly equipped NAS units, which in turn possess fewer capabilities than full-fledged servers. Typically each contains an embedded processor, an operating system, and one or more hard drives, often with room to add still more storage capacity. The result is a dedicated storage server that lets users back up and share files.

Because they attach directly to your network via an ethernet cable rather than via your PC, networked hard drives and NAS devices sidestep the limited, relatively insecure file- and printer-sharing features built into Windows. And since NAS devices don't require a host, no PC on your network has to be on all the time or suffer the processor slowdown that file and printer sharing can cause.

For Home and Business

Right now, small businesses are the main users of NAS products, since it's far easier and cheaper to add a NAS device to a network than to add a full server. According to IDC storage systems analyst Brad Nisbet, most small businesses are using NAS primarily for backup and for remote file access among workgroups--even though the products are also designed for file sharing.

NAS, however, has its limitations. The performance of networked drives will never equal that of local hard drives: Network transport speeds (in the range of 11 to 100 megabits per second) are much slower than internal and even external hard-drive transfer rates, which are about 480 mbps for USB 2.0 drives. (The exception would be a gigabit ethernet network, with speeds around 1000 mbps.) Nevertheless, the NAS products we tested are fast enough for backup and printer sharing by a small workgroup.

If you exceed about 25 simultaneous users, you start to tax the performance of even the most capable products in this review. Most of them are intended for smaller networks of 5 to 10 users.

Sharing Entertainment

Devices that fall into that 5-to-10-user sweet spot are perfect for home networks. In fact, half of the products reviewed here are designed for home users who want to share large collections of music, photo, and video files among their networked computers. Some of these devices even include wireless capabilities--a nice option if you don't already have a wireless access point. As in the business environment, NAS at home also functions as a backup device and removes the need to enable Windows file sharing on an always-on host computer.

The Products

The ten NAS devices and networked hard drives here range widely in features and capacity--from the $90 Linksys Network Storage Link, a bring-your-own-drive adapter that we tested with a $380, 300GB Maxtor drive, to the $749, 250GB Linksys EtherFast Network Attached Storage EFG 250, which has extensive security features, print serving, routing, and a second open drive bay for adding storage. All the devices we tested support PCs and Macs, and in most cases, Linux systems.

While most of the products are available in a range of prices and capacities, we found the sweet spot to be about 250GB with a street price around $399, as in the Buffalo LinkStation, our home-use pick (which we also found great for business use). Products vary in their footprint, as well, from book-size devices such as the Ximeta NetDisk to rack-mounted units such as the LaCie Ethernet Disk.

NAS devices for small businesses have one key feature that the home-oriented products do not: password protection of individual folders. The home-oriented networked storage units, such as the Iomega and Ximeta devices, allow anyone with access to the drive to read anything on that drive. In an office environment, private folders are a necessity, and six of the devices in our review are business class: the Buffalo LinkStation, the LaCie Ethernet Disk, the Linksys EtherFast NAS, the Linksys Network Storage Link, the Snap Appliance Snap Server 1100, and the Tritton Wireless NAS.

Business-class NAS devices we looked at tended to cost more and offer more capacity. Our favorite in this class was Snap Appliance's 250GB Snap Server 1100, which has the most sophisticated file-sharing features of the bunch. Next in line was the 250GB Buffalo LinkStation, a feature-packed unit whose cost per gigabyte compares with that of bare-bones models. It offers built-in backup software, print serving, password-protected user accounts for file sharing, and two USB 2.0 ports (one of them for adding an external hard drive). It is so easy to use that it's a good choice for home networks as well.

In the middle of the pack, the 250GB Linksys EtherFast NAS EFG 250 has a second internal drive bay, a print server, and gigabit ethernet. This unit was a top performer when we used it with a gigabit network. LaCie's rack-mountable 160GB Ethernet Disk has USB 1.1 (not USB 2.0) and FireWire ports for adding more storage in the form of external drives.

Linksys's Network Storage Link, a bring-your-own-storage adapter that we tested with Maxtor's 300GB OneTouch II external USB 2.0 hard drive, is a great value. It comes with two USB 2.0 ports so you can add a second drive to expand capacity or to back up the first drive.

Bringing up the rear was the 200GB Tritton Wireless NAS. It's limited to six shared folders that you can't delete, although you can assign individual passwords to them. It has no print serving or expandability, and it comes with confusing documentation. It includes Genie Soft backup software and serves as a Wi-Fi access point, both of which don't make up for its poor usability and performance.

Home Storage

For home use, we looked at five small or medium-size networkable hard drives and NAS units with simple setup, good backup features, reasonable performance, and low cost: the 250GB Buffalo LinkStation (we rated it for small business also); the Iomega Network Hard Drive and Iomega NAS 100d (both 160GB); and the Ximeta NetDisk and Ximeta NetDisk Office (both 120GB). Entry- level NAS devices start at $200 for 120GB. The clear winner was the Buffalo LinkStation, thanks to its low price and ease of use.

The inexpensive and easy-to-use Ximeta NetDisk and Ximeta NetDisk Office were top performers, but they lack the print serving, expansion ports, and password protection that the Buffalo LinkStation offers. With the Ximeta products, all users get access to all files on the disk, although you can write-protect certain folders. The products share the same software and have similar features, except that the NetDisk Office adds an eight-port ethernet switch and a security lock slot; it is also slightly larger than the NetDisk.

Unlike other products here, the Ximeta devices use a proprietary file-transport technology that requires installing a utility on each PC with access to the drive. You can't add standard hard drives to these Ximeta units, but you can put multiple Ximeta disks on a network, and they will appear as one large drive to the user. You can also attach them directly to a PC via USB 2.0. The principal strike against both products is that they allow only one user at a time to have write access to a drive in its Multi-OS mode; this may be fine in a two-computer household, but it is an unacceptable limitation in most other situations. Multi-Write mode requires all users to have either Windows XP or Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4, and the same version of the Ximeta driver.

Iomega has offerings on both ends of the networked-storage spectrum, the Network Hard Drive and the NAS 100d. The NAS 100d comes in a bigger box than the Network Hard Drive and includes a Wi-Fi access point and two USB 2.0 ports for adding extra hard drives. The relatively inexpensive Network Hard Drive provides two modes of operation: You can attach the device directly to a computer via ethernet or to a network router.

More: http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/artic...,118796,00.asp


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Seagate Ships 400GB Hard Drive

Device uses NCQ technology to prioritize a PC's requests.
Martyn Williams

Hard drive maker Seagate Technology has started shipping a drive targeted at personal computers that offers 400GB of storage space, it says.

The increasing popularity of PC-based multimedia applications, particularly home video editing and downloading of movies and TV shows, is driving demand for larger capacity hard drives in the PC space.

In addition to high-storage capacities, such drives need to be able to read and write data to the drive fast enough to keep up with real-time video.

The drive is the fourth member of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 series of drives and is available in two versions, one with an Ultra ATA/100 interface and one with a Serial ATA interface. The rotational speed of the disc is 7200 rpm (revolutions per minute), with an average seek time of 8 milliseconds.

Managing Multiple Commands

The latter version supports a Serial ATA technology called Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which allows the drive to manage multiple commands from the PC in whatever order it deems most efficient. Until now, drives have handled read and write requests in the order they have been received.

The NCQ technology means users of the Serial ATA version of the Barracuda drive with systems that support NCQ will see performance closer to that of a 10,000 rpm drive than that of a 7200 rpm, according to Seagate.

The disc includes three media platters, each capable of storing 133GB of data, which is a record for a PC-targeted drive, according to the company. Pricing was not announced.

Plans for the drive were first announced by Seagate in June this year when it presented its upcoming product plans at a news conference in Tokyo.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118618,00.asp


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Intel's Army of Chip Makers Fights for Dominance
Daniel Sorid

From a wind-swept industrial site in the Sonoran Desert, Intel Corp. (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , appears to be gearing up for battle.

Construction crews hammer away at an unprecedented $2 billion upgrade to one of Intel's two Arizona factories, preparing the world's largest chip maker to safeguard its lead in manufacturing from resurgent rivals and to put recent costly missteps behind it.

The stakes are high: If Intel can pull off its complex renovation of the 8-year-old Fab 12 plant, it could pioneer a much cheaper alternative to building chip fabrication facilities from scratch.

For Intel's top manufacturing executive, Robert Baker, the challenge is also to show that a technology powerhouse with a manufacturing staff of 45,000 -- six times the entire payroll of rival AMD -- can be a nimble innovator.

"Part of what I do is put the emphasis on how fast we respond," Baker, 49, said in a recent interview.

Intel needs to move faster than ever in its 36-year history after a series of product blunders in 2004, including a recall of defective desktop computer chips.

Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , Intel's smaller rival that made its name by making bargain-basement Intel knockoffs, has been gaining in consumer niches like chips for PC gaming and computer servers. And with help from partner IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , AMD has honed its manufacturing, especially in factory automation.

"AMD is the perceived leader on the automation side, not Intel," said Risto Puhakka, vice president of industry forecaster VLSI Research.

But AMD is not the only threat. South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (005930.KS: Quote, Profile, Research) has been spending billions on chip factory equipment and has impressed the engineering community with its manufacturing research. Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , which competes against Intel in cellular phone chips, is at work on a $3 billion advanced factory of its own.

From his office in a nondescript building overlooking alfalfa fields and dairy farms, Baker, Intel's senior vice president in charge of manufacturing, turns out strategies to keep Intel's factories in the lead.

Baker's group will lead the industry forward on three new technologies; the move to dual-core, or two-chips-in-one, microprocessors; the shrinking of chip feature sizes to 65-nanometers, small enough to be on the same scale as viruses; and the move to more productive 12-inch silicon wafers.

His challenge is to make the new ideas work in the real world. A team in Oregon develops the technologies, but Baker's group puts them to work in factories. Inside the engineering community, Intel's ability to churn out hundreds of millions of chips a year is half the basis of its reputation.

"Intel's biggest strength has been their manufacturing," said Charlie Glavin, an analyst with Needham & Co.

In an environment where an errant speck of copper or a faulty circuit layout can ruin millions of dollars worth of goods, the stakes are high. "If Intel's able to do this, they will get higher (profit) margins," Glavin said.

DESERT FAB

Part of Intel's gamble in Chandler is to try to convert an older plant to new technologies. Building new is easier -- but more expensive. The upgrade could save costs, but potential losses for a miscalculation are also high. If Baker gets it right in Arizona, factories around the world -- including Fab 22 next door -- could get similar treatment.

Fab 12 (fab is industry shorthand for fabrication facility) was one of the world's most advanced production facilities when it was built eight years ago. But the drumbeat of Moore's Law, the maxim named for Intel's founder that predicts the constant shrinking of transistors, the building blocks of microchips, had made it nearly out of date.

To upgrade the factory, the interior structure and layout of the entire facility must be changed, new tools installed, and the supporting infrastructure above and below the factory reworked. All new automation tools that shuttle pods of 12-inch wafers -- each worth up to $70,000 -- have to be installed.

The missteps in 2004 taught Baker a few lessons, mostly about the processes for decision making, internal communication, and planning -- all of which were changed in the interest of getting Intel "to not act like a big company, but act like a small company," Baker said.

But he is still committed to big changes, and he says that such a road always has rough spots.

"When you try to do state-of-the-art stuff, you're going to run into things," he said.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7179551


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New Battery Lasts Nearly Twice As Long
Yuri Kageyama

Americans and Europeans will soon be able to buy a more powerful battery that promises enough juice for twice as many digital pictures as regular batteries.

The Oxyride battery, developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., maintains higher voltage and output longer because its electricity-producing materials can be packed more closely inside the cell.

Matsushita, which makes the Panasonic brand, also developed techniques for stuffing the cell with more electrolyte, a key ingredient that leads to longer battery life.

The growing popularity of digital cameras, portable music players, handheld video game machines and other gadgets is boosting demand for powerful batteries.

The Oxyride battery will be available in the United States and Europe in April, a year after it was first sold in Japan. AA and AAA Oxyride batteries will cost about 10 percent more than regular, alkaline batteries, Matsushita officials said.

Currently, Oxyride batteries comprise about a third of Panasonic AA battery sales, or 7 percent of the overall AA battery market in Japan.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/st...122403843.html


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I.B.M. Division Headed to China Has Made No Profit in 3 1/2 Years

I.B.M. said yesterday that the personal computer business it was selling to the Lenovo Group of China had not made a profit for three and a half years.

I.B.M.'s personal computing division had a loss of $139 million in the six months ended June 30. It had losses of $258 million in 2003, $171 million in 2002 and $397 million in 2001, I.B.M. said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During that period, the PC division had sales of $34.1 billion.

I.B.M., which is based in Armonk, N.Y., does not typically reveal results for its PC division, which is part of its hardware group. That group includes more profitable servers. I.B.M. wants to improve its profit margin by selling the PC unit to Lenovo for $1.25 billion, vaulting Lenovo to third from eighth among global personal-computer makers.

Dell Inc., the world's biggest maker of PC's, has said it is the only large company that is consistently profitable in the computer business. I.B.M. is the third-largest PC maker, behind the Hewlett-Packard Company.

Shares of I.B.M. climbed 12 cents to close at $98.30 on the New York Stock Exchange and have risen 6.1 percent this year. Shares of Lenovo, China's biggest PC maker, dropped 5 cents to close at 2.38 Hong Kong dollars, or 31 cents, on Dec. 30. The shares have fallen 11 percent since the deal was announced on Dec. 7.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/te...1computer.html


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Europe May Be Gaining in Smart Home Tech
Sarah Andrews

From the outside, it looks like just another house on an upscale residential street outside Barcelona. But inside this "smart house," its creators say, is the most advanced domestic technology in Europe.

The home can clean itself, adjust to changes in the weather and cut energy consumption.

A family of four lives in the Eneo Labs showcase home, a sprawling two-story abode with an impeccable garden and green, spongy grass.

A weather monitor on the roof knows the temperature and climate conditions, and can shut off the sprinkler and cover the pool when it begins to rain, or unfurl the awnings when the sun is too bright.

Inside, lights turn off automatically when there is enough natural lighting, reducing energy consumption. Small black vents along the baseboards are automatic vacuum cleaners, and with the touch of a button will suck up everything in reach.

Most of these technologies have been used for a decade or more in the United States or Japan. But Europe's smart house industry has caught up rapidly in recent years, and experts say European companies have an edge on helping homes conserve energy.

"Though smart houses are more widespread in the U.S., Europe is far ahead in terms of researching and commercializing energy-efficient practices," said Volker Hartkopf, a professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert in smart house technologies.

The house created by Spain's Eneo Labs is full of luxuries, but its focus is on the occupants' basic needs. At the front door, electronic keys help keep the family that lives here safe. Security cameras are scattered throughout the house, and owners can monitor any room from the Internet or mobile phone.

A trash chute for organic waste leads to a compost pile outside, making the home more environmentally friendly.

Entertainment is not overlooked. Large television screens are scattered throughout the house and can tap into a central hard drive where movies, recorded TV shows, Mp3 files and family photos are stored.

And with a flick of a switch, it's possible to create a scene perfect for a given activity or time of day.

For instance, the "good morning scene" turns on the radio, opens the blinds, runs a hot bath and starts the coffee pot. The "watch a movie scene" will dim the lights, lower the blinds, forward calls to voice mail, and prepare the TV screen.

"Our vision is that technology become a part of daily life, and that it be something that truly helps people," said Javier Zamora, the general manager of Eneo Labs.

But many researchers question how smart a smart home can be.

"There are still so many external factors that a smart house can't take into account. To cool itself, a smart house may choose to open a window. But it won't take into account the fact that construction is going on next door. ... Basically, a smart house will never be as smart as a human brain," said Mark Younger, a researcher at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering.

Wiring your home to make it a smart house will amount to about 1 percent of the total cost of your house, Zamora said, but the necessary hardware such as alarm systems, TV and computer screens and cameras can drive up the price.

Despite the costs, Eneo Lab's commercial director predicted that smart homes won't always be restricted to the wealthy.

"I'm completely sure than in just five years smart houses will be much more common," he said. "By the year 2007 we foresee having 10,000 homes connected in Spain alone, and within a decade we could see this being much more mainstream. It's definitely going places."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...20Smart%20Home


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$10 for a Plain CD or $32 With the Extras
Jeff Leeds

Shoppers heading into music retailers this holiday season have been confronting the same issue they face at the car dealership: the product now comes either stripped-down or fully loaded.

Interscope Records, for example, released three different versions of U2's hit "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb." The first, from $10 or less, is the basic 11-track CD. But for roughly $32, you can buy the "collector's edition," which is packaged with a DVD and a 50-page hardcover book of the bands' sketches and photos. (A medium-priced version had the DVD but no book.) "Miracle," Celine Dion's new album about motherhood on Epic Records can be had for $14, but there's also an edition for devotees that includes the CD, a 60-page book featuring pictures of Ms. Dion with sleeping newborns by photographer Anne Geddes, and a price tag of $27.

While the major record companies continue to discount new releases or even slash prices to try to counter file-sharing and widespread CD-burning, some music executives are quietly trying to expand the top end of the market. The average retail price of an album slid 4 percent in the third quarter to $12.95 - a new low, according to NPD Group, a research company. Yet some labels are pushing tricked-out versions of big titles that carry their highest prices ever.

There's a basic business logic behind the move to test the upper limit, executives say. If labels must cut prices and sacrifice profits on the mass market, they must try to cover the difference by targeting niches of hard-core fans who are willing to shoulder higher prices for their favorite acts.

"In this climate, where everyone is bemoaning the death of the CD, and we're all talking about price pressure, there is a growing market, which record companies are hoping to develop, of people that are happy to pay more money for value," said Steve Gottlieb, chairman of the independent powerhouse TVT Records, which released twoversions of Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz's rap hit "Crunk Juice," one with a single CD and one with two CD's and a DVD.

In music stores, a deluxe version of Green Day's "American Idiot" sells for about $25 and includes a 52-page hardcover book. Metallica threw in a band t-shirt with the $24 version of "Some Kind of Monster." The collector's edition of Eminem's Encore album, which sells for about $27, comes with 25 glossy photos depicting the rapper firing a gun into his theater audience, and a bonus disc that allows access via the Internet to an Eminem cellphone ringtone.

The prospect of raising prices on items targeted toward die-hards may seem appealing at a time when there are mixed views on whether continued price cuts will have much impact. Declining average prices aside, album sales for the industry as a whole have been spiraling downward for the last 14 weeks, draining a comeback that began last fall around the time the labels began suing people they identified as Internet pirates. Album sales are up about 1.3 percent over last year, and while the industry is expected to end 2004 showing an annual sales increase for the first time in four years, it is a far cry from the surges of 8 percent or more registered earlier this year.

The release of a limited run of CD's with bonus offerings has long been used by record labels as a strategy to add sizzle to an album debut. Faced with continued pressure from mass retailers to slash prices, however, the more elaborate packages are being regarded as a way to wring more cash from a weak marketplace. Sales vary, but a deluxe edition commonly accounts for 10 to 20 percent of an album's overall volume, executives say. And they usually carry much higher profit margins, depending on the additional cost of the included bonuses.

There have been other indications of how labels plan to tap deeper into the biggest fans of their artists. Warner Brothers has been selling its artists' ringtones, T-shirts and other merchandise directly to consumers though its corporate Web site. TVT is designing a section of its Web site to let fans buy music downloads, merchandise and perhaps even concert tickets, all in one transaction.

Many releases also are enhanced with software that lets buyers view exclusive content online. But moves to establish more direct relationships with fans may irk some retailers. In 2000, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers sued Sony Music Entertainment for including Internet links in CD's that connected buyers to Web sites where they could buy additional music or other content, a move they said cut traditional music stores out of the market. The trade organization later dropped the lawsuit after the Justice Department filed a brief in the case arguing that the merchants' allegations failed to show antitrust violations.

For their part, executives say refining their pursuit of devout fans with variations of an album makes sense, given that diehard fans account for the bulk of sales. They are also regarded as the most likely to purchase related products like ringtones, videos, concert films on DVD or other items the label may sell. Research conducted for the Handleman Company, which distributes music to Wal-Mart and Kmart stores, shows that just 23 percent of music buyers account for an estimated 62 percent of album sales, buying an average of a CD every month.

"The concept of holding on to a fan was eroding for a lot reasons - other interests, the digital world," said Tom Whalley, chairman of Warner Brothers Records. "We've sold the CD as if there's one type of buyer for 15 years. There are different kinds of buyers."

Warner Brothers Records released three versions of last year's Josh Groban album "Closer," including a "fan edition" that was sold only through the singer's Web site and fan club. The basic CD included 13 songs, the limited edition included two extra songs and a DVD, and the fan version, listed for $29.98, included two songs more and the DVD. Sales ranged from more than 4.1 million copies for the regular CD to about 15,000 of the top-of-the-line version.

The deluxe editions also underscore how the labels are determined to preserve sales of full-length albums even though consumers at online outlets like Apple Computer's iTunes service have been showing a strong preference for unbuckling the CD and purchasing only the individual tracks they choose.

"The CD is still viable," said Steve Berman, head of sales and marketing for Interscope Records, which released multiple editions of recent albums from Eminem, U2 and Gwen Stefani. "It's important to keep that business exciting. How do you keep it interesting for artists and consumers?"

In their recent moves to push the upper boundaries of CD packaging - and prices - the labels "found that there's not a ceiling," said Jennifer Schaidler, vice president of music for Best Buy, the electronics retailer based in Richfield, Minn. "If you put the right value to the consumer you can charge more."

Other retailers insist there is a limit, and that there is more potential for bolstering the market with lower prices that may draw impulse buyers.

"With anything, consumers still look for value," said Scott Wilson, a vice president at Handleman. "If they had priced that U2 thing at $59, a lot of people would look at it as a rip-off and the band would probably have a problem with that, too. If you push it too hard, you're going to break."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/bu...a/27music.html


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CD Retailers Playing It Safe
Kirsty Needham

Consumer choice in the music store has fallen dramatically, with a new study showing a 50 per cent drop in the number of CD albums released annually.

The analysis of new music released in Australia between 2001 and 2004 also found a 30 per cent fall in CD singles released. Although the number of music DVDs doubled in this period, it was not enough to counter the decline in CD variety, and overall the number of music products released fell by 43 per cent.

A former in-house lawyer for the Australian Recording Industry Association, Alex Malik, conducted the research as part of his PhD into music copyright enforcement. He argues that internet file-sharing is not to blame for falling music sales, but reduced musical choices.

Record company mergers that took place this year will mean choice is further narrowed as artists are culled from labels, he said.

"If you go into a typical CD store these days, there's the new Australian Idol CD and of course there's the other new Australian Idol CD. You'll also find more DVDs and accessories than ever before ... But if your tastes are a little eclectic or go beyond the top 40, you may be in trouble," he said.

Mr Malik said consumers are being forced to purchase CDs from offshore internet retailers.

"In many circumstances, fans of particular genres of music may well have had no choice but to obtain music through peer-to-peer services such as Kazaa and eDonkey because their musical demands were simply not being met by Australian record companies and retailers," he said.

Country music, world music, contemporary Christian and folk music were particularly hard to find locally.

Mr Malik said record companies were under greater pressure to meet profit targets set by head offices overseas and are "largely concerned about the bottom dollars rather than choice for the consumer".
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Music/CD-...96608131.html?


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Local news

DEPT. OF ENDANGERED SPECIES

Disc Diggers Goes Online
Camille Dodero

This past Tuesday, the only indicators that Davis Square’s Disc Diggers wouldn’t be open in 2005 were inconspicuous fliers for a farewell show at Johnny D’s on Saturday, and a sign in the front window encouraging customers to exhaust their store credit before the 30th. Despite the subtle postings, word of the used-CD store’s demise had spread far enough to draw eight shoppers at 11:30 a.m., many of whom were asking about the impending closure. "This is what it used to look like," said the dreadlocked counter clerk, glancing at the middle-aged customers flipping through the fusty store’s wooden CD bins. "But there used to be college kids," he added, gnawing on a twig carved into a toothpick. "Look — now, there’s no one here under 30."

The prolonged absence of college students — particularly Tufts University kids, formerly a sizable percentage of Disc Diggers’ patronage — is one of the major reasons why the store is shuttering after 19 years in the retail business. When owner Robert Hart opened the shop in the fall of 1985, back when Davis was still "a sleepy townie place," he rented the Somerville location specifically because of its proximity to undergrads. "I figured the best thing a used store can have is a subway stop and a college — and Davis Square had both," says Hart, who lived in Somerville for many years until relocating to New Hampshire. But in the past five or six years, largely due to the pervasiveness of Internet file-sharing, Disc Diggers’ in-store sales have fallen 15 percent every year. In 2004, its retail revenue was only a quarter of what it was six years ago. "We’ve seen the mean age of our clientele go from about 23 to 38 or so," Hart explains. Watching his customer base dwindle has been like "a sociological study in computer adroitness," he adds. "We watched various elements of our public fade away and it was like, ‘Oh, now those guys have learned how to download stuff. And then those guys. And then those guys.’ It was tough."

For the past few years, Disc Diggers hadn’t been a shiny, tidy record store. In truth, the place often smelled like a moldy dish towel. The décor was record-store chic: haphazardly arranged old magazine pages, rock-show fliers, audiophile bric-a-brac. CDs and tapes still came in those tall plastic cases reminiscent of the late ’80s, and were separated by dividers with handwritten labels. Clerks scrawled receipts on carbon copies. Finding quality music required patience; but, as the name indicated, the disc digging was half the fun.

The secondhand store’s real charm was its role as a fossil of a bygone era — that of old-school record-shopping culture and the old Davis Square. "We tried to be efficient and do a high volume, but never lose that touch of being a neighborhood used-record store," Hart says. The rock-show- flier wallpaper always reflected the local community: posters for the Darlings at Toad, a WMFO benefit show at the Abbey Lounge, a June CD-release party for a Cock ’n’ Roll compilation at the Middle East. On Tuesday morning, one of the two clerks wore a hooded blue sweatshirt with the logo of the Someday Café, the comfy coffee shop around the corner.

Although Disc Diggers won’t open its doors for customers after Friday, Hart plans to continue the business online. As the staff catalogues all the retail merchandise for the Web, the stock will remain in the space likely through the spring. So far, there’s no confirmation about what business will usurp the space, but restaurateurs have already made inquiries.

Despite its continuing online presence, Hart says, the business really won’t be the same without the interpersonal interactions. "I’m going to miss them more than I can tell you."

Disc Diggers’ Farewell Sendoff will take place this Saturday at Johnny D’s, 17 Holland Street, Davis Square, with the Darlings, the Punk Monkeys, Tony Goddess, Rachael Cantu, and Simon Ritt. Call (617) 776-2004. Visit Disc Diggers online at www.discdiggers.com.
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/...s/04366087.asp


Bosses Keep Sharp Eye on Mobile Workers

DANBURY, Conn. (AP) -- Ciro Viento commands a platoon of 110 garbage trucks, so when a caller complained after seeing one of the blue and white trash tanks speeding down Route 22, Viento didn't know which driver to blame. Until he checked his computer.

With a few taps on the keyboard, Viento zeroed in on the driver of one particular front-loader -- which, the screen showed, had been on that very road at 7:22 a.m., doing 51 miles per hour in a zone restricted to 35. Gotcha.

More employers are adopting technology like the system used by Viento's company. As they do, many workers who have long enjoyed the freedom of the road are rankling over the boss' newfound power to watch their every move -- via satellite.

The technology, global positioning systems, is hardly new. But using GPS to track workers and vehicles is catching on with a growing number of business and government employers, bent on improving productivity and customer service, and keeping tabs on labor costs.

``If you're not out there baby-sitting them, you don't know how long it takes to do the route. The guy could be driving around the world, he could be at his girlfriend's house,'' said Viento of Automated Waste Disposal Inc., a commercial and household trash hauler doing business in western Connecticut and neighboring New York counties. ``Now there's literally no place for them to hide.''

Some long-haul trucking companies have used GPS to manage their fleets for several years. But the range of employers adopting GPS -- usually fitted in vehicles or in cell phones and other devices workers carry on the job -- is broadening, particularly among companies dispatching large numbers of service technicians, in the building trades and others whose workers span wide territory.

UPS Inc., for example, will distribute new hand-held computers to its 100,000 U.S. delivery truck drivers early next year, each equipped with a GPS receiver. The company says the feature will not be used to monitor workers, but to alert them when they're at the wrong address or help them identify an unfamiliar location.

But for many of the employers adopting the technology, including many smaller firms, the primary benefit is not just the ability to smooth business operations. They want to keep closer track of workers who aren't always doing what they're supposed to be doing, even though they're on the clock.

This past summer, for example, managers at Metropolitan Lumber & Hardware in New York worried when a new driver dispatched to a delivery just six blocks away still hadn't arrived after 3 1/2 hours. But using GPS, dispatchers soon tracked him down, ``goofing off'' on the other side of Manhattan, said Larry Charity, the company's information technology manager.

``There's less of that now that they know they're being tracked,'' he said.

Other employers are taking a similar approach, not just to track workers, but to influence their behavior.

``The capabilities of people at the dispatch level are becoming more and more, I'd say, almost omnipresent,'' said Ron Stearns, an analyst who follows the GPS industry for consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. ``Not only to monitor an employee in the field, but to govern what they do.''

GPS, developed for the military in the 1970s, keys off a constellation of satellites transmitting signals from space. At its most basic, GPS allows a user to locate a person or object carrying a receiver.

But the systems being installed by employers can do much more. Companies are harnessing GPS to tell them how long their employees and vehicles have been at a specific location, what direction they're heading in and how fast they're moving. Workers are expected to use GPS-equipped systems to clock in away from the office, and log the time spent and activities performed at each stop along the way.

Most of the systems can be set to alert a company if their employee spends too much time at a given location, drives too fast, or strays into an area that an employer designates off-limits.

Some employers say GPS has delivered immediate dividends.

At Automated Waste Disposal, Viento says that before he installed the system this past spring, drivers of his 22 front-loaders were clocking about 300 hours a week of overtime at 1.5 times pay. Once the company started keeping tabs of the time they spent hanging out in the yard before and after completing their routes and the time and location of stops they made along the way, that plummeted to just 70 hours -- substantial savings for a company whose drivers make about $20 an hour.

The company has also installed the GPS receivers, roughly the size and shape of tuna cans, in its salesmen's cars. Using his computer, Viento has set digital boundaries around a local bar he says some of his company's salesmen have been known to frequent around 4 p.m., when they're supposed to be calling on customers.

Some workers have grumbled openly about the new technology, but accept that it's not their choice to make.

``It's kind of like Big Brother is watching a little bit. But it's where we're heading in this society,'' said Tom McNally, a driver for Automated Waste Disposal. ``I get testy in the deli when I'm waiting in line for coffee, because it's like, hey, they're (managers) watching. I've got to go.''

Other workers see it is as more invasive.

In Boston, 200 snowplow operators staged a protest last winter after the Massachusetts Highway Department said it would require all such independent contractors to begin carrying cellphones with GPS, as a way to track their efficiency. The city's school bus drivers also objected to a plan to install the receivers after a spate of complaints about late pickups.

The Chicago local of the Teamsters union complained to the National Labor Relations Board in 2001, after trucking firm Roadway Express Inc. installed GPS in rigs manned by unionized drivers.

The parent union says it is wary of employers who use GPS.

``These systems could be used to unfairly discipline drivers, for counting every minute that they might or might not be on or off duty and holding that against them,'' said Galen Munroe, a Teamsters spokesman. ``There is that concern that if, down the road, GPS is used widely in fleets that that could become a genuine problem.''

Companies that sell GPS services say employers have every right to track their workers while they're on the clock. But the systems are designed so that privacy can otherwise be maintained.

``If you start a lunch break, we stop tracking,'' said Ananth Rani, vice president of products and services for Xora Inc., whose worker monitoring software runs off cellphones. ``At the end of the day, we stop tracking because what you do after the shift ends is private and what you do before the start of the day is private.''

GPS can be a boon to workers, documenting claims for overtime pay that employers might previously have disputed, said Krish Panu, president and CEO of At Road Inc., a service provider. Some employers, using the systems to track how many assignments a worker completes, use it as a means of awarding incentives rather than punishment, he said.

``This is not about tracking people. It's about managing the business,'' Panu said.

But worker and privacy advocates, while acknowledging the value of GPS for some business purposes, say employers are already stepping over the line.

``We're talking about monitoring employees in every facet of their lives, and monitoring behavior that is more often than not, personal and not business related,'' said Jeremy Gruber, legal director for the National Workrights Institute, an advocacy group.

He cites instances of employers who have reportedly required some workers to carry GPS-equipped cell phones at all times, even when off work.

Then again, drawing clear lines between some jobs and workers' private life is becoming increasingly complex. More people now work from home or on the road, and more employers expect their people to remain on call at any hour.

Still, workers know perfectly well they're supposed to focus on the job during their regular shift, employers say. And GPS gives companies a means to make sure they maintain that focus.

``If you come to work here, and I pay you and you're driving one of my vehicles,'' Viento says, ``I should have the right to know what you're doing.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...ing-Watch.html


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Note to author: Don’t use IE

Terminating Spyware With Extreme Prejudice
Rachel Dodes

THE end of the year is a time when people sit down, rethink their priorities and sometimes change their ways. Some quit smoking. Others join a gym. I chose to erase my hard drive and reinstall my operating system.

Sure, it was a drastic move, but my two-year-old I.B.M. ThinkPad - equipped with a 1,000-megahertz Pentium III processor, a high-speed Internet connection and 256 megabytes of memory - was running about as fast as the Apple IIE I used in the mid-80's.

After six months engaged in mortal combat with spyware - parasitic software that tracks your browsing habits, sends out pop-up ads and can even send your private information to an organized crime ring in Guam - I had two options: shell out $1,200 for a new ThinkPad, or wipe my hard drive and start from scratch - a huge production with potentially cataclysmic results.

Since I enjoy new challenges (and more important, since I lack the funds to buy a new laptop), I decided to shoot for the moon and delete, delete, delete.

It did not have to be this way. I can trace the decline of my computer's performance to an ill-advised download over the summer. In a pop-music-induced frenzy, I am embarrassed to admit, I went to www.kazaa.com, downloaded and installed the free file-sharing service, then proceeded to download (a k a steal) Britney Spears's and Madonna's collaborative effort, "Me Against the Music."

I was about to get my karmic retribution.

In downloading Kazaa, I had inadvertently opened the floodgates to all manner of spyware. By the end of the summer, even after I had deleted Kazaa and installed Norton AntiVirus 2004 - which took care of the virus-related part of the problem - I was unable to open Internet Explorer without being deluged with pop-ups enticing me to buy everything from herbal weight-loss pills to obscure business publications.

My home page would mysteriously try to redirect itself to a site called badgurl.grandstreetinteractive.com. Little gray dialog boxes would pop up in the center of my screen to inform me, shockingly, that my computer might be infected with spyware. Then it would crash.

Spyware is "definitely the most annoying problem," said Tim Lordan, staff director of the nonprofit Internet Education Foundation, which joined with Dell Computer this year to mount a spyware awareness campaign (www.getnetwise.com). Spyware is also ubiquitous: in October, a study by America Online and the nonprofit National Cyber Security Alliance found that 80 percent of computers were infected with it.

As my frustration mounted, I sought the advice of fellow spyware sufferers. My friend Jesse, a lawyer at a large New York firm, told me he was forced to wipe his hard drive when his Dell Latitude laptop transmogrified into a purveyor of pornography advertisements. He sheepishly confessed that against his better judgment, he had downloaded a virus- and spyware-addled copy of the Paris Hilton sex video.

"I contracted a sexually transmitted computer virus from Paris Hilton," said Jesse, who requested that his last name not be printed. (He feared his law firm - and his wife - would not be too happy about the download.) "It was chronic."

Downloading dubious files is a surefire way to get spyware, but it can also be transmitted through seemingly innocuous e-mail, by clicking on a banner ad, or from wholesome Web surfing. The programs install themselves in several places on your computer, making it difficult to find and delete them.

What's worse, even if you do delete them, many are programmed to reinstall themselves automatically when the computer is rebooted.

What really distinguishes spyware from other computer security threats (viruses, worms and Trojans) is that it often seems to defy the products meant to exorcise it. McAfee introduced an anti-spyware program - aptly called McAfee AntiSpyware - in February, but it has met with mixed reviews.

Symantec, the maker of Norton security software, will release its first anti-spyware product early in the new year. (Norton AntiVirus can detect some forms of spyware, but cannot get rid of it.) Microsoft also announced that it would release new anti-spyware software by the end of January.

For now, though, computing experts recommend what they call a "multilayered approach" - translation: ad hoc, complicated and largely ineffective.

I tried everything the experts suggested. I switched my default browser from Internet Explorer - the target of most spyware programmers - to Mozilla Firefox (available free at www.mozilla.org) and downloaded and ran free expert-sanctioned software with all sorts of renegade names (CWShredder, Spyware Search & Destroy, AdAware and HijackThis).

I submitted my "HijackThis log" - a three-page list of potentially dubious files - to a reputable online help forum and, following the experts' advice, manually performed a perilous bit of surgery on my computer's vital organs, deleting several keys from its Windows registry.

The pop-ups continued unabated. A Norton AntiVirus scan informed me that despite my efforts, 77 spyware programs were still lurking on my hard drive. (Before this daylong production, I had more than 100 pieces of spyware on my computer, so indeed, it was an improvement.)

Erasing my hard drive, long considered a last-ditch measure, was becoming more and more appealing with each passing virus scan. My friend the bankruptcy lawyer finally convinced me: "The catharsis cannot be understated."

He recommended I talk to his friend Larry Wagner, an independent technology consultant who has become a self-styled sherpa in hard-drive erasure. At last count, he had helped six other people (including his in-laws, his parents, a colleague from work and my friend) deal with spyware problems. Mr. Wagner is particularly enthusiastic about deleting - and upon hearing my sordid tale, requested that I wipe my hard drive under his auspices.

"It's like a baptism for your computer," Mr. Wagner said. "You cannot truly live a good life until you've taken that first step."

I arrived at Mr. Wagner's Upper West Side apartment on a December evening with my laptop, a list of my computer's components, my original Windows XP Pro installation discs, a 20-gigabyte iPod and a bottle of Cabernet.

It is important to note that some computers, including my own, contain a hidden, manufacturer-installed hard drive "partition," which houses operating system software that can be deployed in an emergency. But since not all computers have this feature, I chose to use the XP installation disks instead. (Some people will want to upgrade their operating system in the process - from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, for example - which requires installation disks anyway.)

The first thing Mr. Wagner and I did, since my computer lacked a CD or DVD burner, was to save everything to an external hard drive. (You can buy a plug-and-play keychain drive for $20 to $250, depending on how much storage you want, but an MP3 player also doubles as a nice portable hard drive.) I decided to use my iPod, which was only half full.

I simply plugged it into my laptop (it shows up as an "E" drive under My Computer), and copied onto it all of the files contained in My Documents, My Pictures and My Music. I then transferred the contents of my iPod to Mr. Wagner's desktop, on which we created a folder called Backup. The process took about 90 minutes.

Then, using Mr. Wagner's DVD burner, I saved the entire Backup folder onto a five-gigabyte DVD. (If you are not so lucky as to know someone with a DVD burner, you can do the same thing using a regular CD burner and several CD's, which typically hold about 700 megabytes each, or many, many Zip disks, which hold 250 megabytes each.) I could have simply kept my files on the iPod or another external hard drive and transferred them back to my pristine hard drive after the procedure was over, but it would have been riskier, and I would have ended up with no backup discs.

Now I had a backup of everything. Make that two: Mr. Wagner believes in what he refers to as "Noah's archiving," saving two copies of everything, just in case.

Then I took a deep breath, toasted the New Year, and inserted the XP Pro CD-ROM installation disks into my own computer. My computer asked me if I wanted to reformat my hard drive (yes), and warned me that if I continued all files would be deleted (good). It took about an hour for XP to reformat my hard drive and install itself, and I just sat back and watched while the screens became progressively more colorful.

When my computer rebooted, it had total amnesia. It was like the Kate Winslet character in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," who has brain surgery to erase the memories of a painful relationship. My computer asked me to enter my time zone, country and type of Internet connection I would be using (LAN, dialup, etc.). It thanked me for buying an I.B.M. and asked if I wanted to register my product. (I said I would do it later.)

Now that I had a clean slate, I went online and downloaded all of the XP patches and updates from Microsoft's Web site (windowsupdate.microsoft.com). I made sure I connected to the Internet using an external router with a built-in firewall - after all this, I did not want spyware to sully my pristine hard drive.

I plugged my computer into Mr. Wagner's network, and downloaded all of the necessary Microsoft updates, including Service Pack 2, and restarted my computer. This step took about 40 minutes. Now it was 12:30 a.m., so I thanked Mr. Wagner for his help and went home.

The following morning, I was ready to reinstall all of my software. In keeping with the hypervigilant theme, I started with Norton AntiVirus. After installing it, restarting, and scanning my computer, I was elated to discover I had a clean bill of health. Not a rogue program in sight!

Emboldened by this development, I reinstalled all of my programs - Microsoft Office, iTunes, FinalDraft - and all of my external components, like my printer, camera, CD burner and iPod. Fortunately, I had all of my software discs and their necessary registration codes in a file cabinet next to my desk. The drivers for the external components were not even needed because XP can recognize just about anything and procure the necessary driver online.

The software installations took about eight hours over the course of two days, and involved downloading certain things, like Adobe Reader and Mozilla Firefox, from the Web. Between each installation, I restarted my computer, which made this process annoying and time-consuming. (For those who have tons of software, the prospect of reinstalling everything might be worse than the idea of peacefully coexisting with spyware.)

Finally, it was time to upload all of my saved files. I plugged in my iPod, and just for good measure, deleted "Me Against the Music" from my music library before putting my songs back on iTunes. After all, it's almost 2005, and I did not want any ill-gotten gains to taint my perfect computer.

Two weeks later, still no spyware. Yes, it was a huge production, but after struggling with spyware for the last six months, I have to say it was well worth it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/te...ts/30hard.html


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Defining Visions: MPAA Changes Hands
Joel Brinkley

Welcome to another month in the copy-protection wars.

Dan Glickman, a former secretary of agriculture, took over leadership of the Motion Picture Association of America in November. As the New York Times described him, Glickman is "about as bland as Jack Valenti is colorful."

Valenti, of course, was the longtime president of the MPAA, Hollywood's powerful lobbying arm. He fought the copy-protection wars with the ferocity of a holy warrior—and the vision of horse wearing blinders. He could see nothing but straight ahead, nothing to the left or right, and certainly nothing to the rear, though that is where he might have learned something.

It was Valenti who famously declared, in 1982, "The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology" threatened his industry's "economic vitality and future security." In fact, he added, the technology "is to the American film producer and the American public what the Boston strangler is to the woman alone."

He was, of course, referring to the VCR, which grew to be a huge profit engine for MPAA members.

Valenti used a similar flamethrower strategy as he fought to protect the viability of Hollywood's movies by hobbling the equipment we use in our homes to view them.

Glickman seemed to promise a softer approach. But shortly after taking over, he flew out to Hollywood to meet with his employers and promptly announced that, during his time in office, "The overlying issue is piracy and how we fight it." The day before, he had announced plans to sue anyone who illegally downloaded a movie from the Internet.

Glickman said lawsuits were only part of his new strategy. The other major part was "embracing new technologies"—such as requiring digital video recorders to automatically erase pay-per-view movies after a set period of time.

In the fall, TiVo and ReplayTV caved in under the pressure, agreeing to build circuits into their receivers that would allow Hollywood to limit the amount of time a movie can be kept on their devices before they are automatically erased. Hollywood has considerable powers of persuasion in this area. The studios can and do simply refuse to release movies to certain outlets if they are unhappy about the copy-protection setup.

Remember how slowly certain studios released movies on DVD back in the mid- to late 1990s, during the technology's infancy? One big concern then was copy- protection. But after a very few years, the stampede of buyers rushing to stores to buy DVD players forced all of the studios to change their minds. Now they make bundles of money, not just from renting DVDs but from selling them, too—a new, highly profitable market. Jack Valenti's old ghost story about the VCR has repeated itself with the DVD.

I'm not sure why Hollywood believes a pirate will be less likely to "steal" a digital, pay-per-view movie from a PVR, and somehow market it, if he has only 48 hours to make the copy before the movie is automatically erased.

Fred von Lohmann, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which lobbies against Hollywood in the copy-protection wars, said he hoped consumers would respond to this decision by TiVo and ReplayTV by "punishing" the two companies. But as the Frontier Foundation knows all too well, the copyright fight is a multifront war, and so the group joined several other consumer organizations to file suit against another new copyright rule, this one to impose copy restrictions on over-the-air television.

As anyone with any knowledge of television knows, Hollywood movies are not aired on TV until they are at the end of their profit life. Movies have a well- established profit schedule. First they show in theaters. Six months later they are sold and rented on DVD and videocassette, pay-per-view, and other paid formats. Later they show up on HBO and other cable channels. Finally, in the last step, they air on broadcast television.

The Frontier Foundation joined eight other consumer groups in a filing to a federal appeals court in November accusing the Federal Communications Commission of "arbitrarily and capriciously promulgating" broadcast copyright rules "in the absence of substantial evidence that it is needed." The public explanation for the new copyright technology, known as the "broadcast flag," is to prevent the distribution of digital programming over the Internet. But the consumer groups argued that the FCC mandated the technology "without any proof that DTV programs have ever been placed on the Internet."

Copyright battles are popping up in every corner. Also in November, the movie studios announced that they would file suit against thousands of consumers who use peer-to-peer Internet file-sharing networks to swap movies.

The record industry used lawsuits to try to stop the similar file-sharing of music. However, a recent study by the University of California Riverside and the San Diego Super Computer Center showed that the music-industry suits have had no effect on the popularity of file sharing. So what does Hollywood hope to gain?
http://www.guidetohometheater.com/joelbrinkley/105jb


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Carriers, Step Up Your Game
Chris Somerville

Blowing away enemy combatants online may be just the thing to force broadband service providers to upgrade their networks and focus on quality of service, according to a white paper released by Internet traffic-monitoring company Sandvine Inc. (see Broadband Gaming Traffic Soars ).

The release of Microsoft Corp.’s (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) first-person, real- time shooting game “Halo II” quadrupled network traffic on Xbox Live when it was released on November 9, Sandvine says. The company believes that such a large increase in the number of users gaming online will put pressure on service providers to increase the quality of their service to retain gamers who demand reliability and low latency.

Current broadband networks are not optimized in the data plane (Layer 7), which makes it difficult for service providers to provide premium services. “Service providers lack the ability to meter, bundle, individually charge, or guarantee QOS for specific applications because they can’t adequately identify or control the evolving myriad of broadband traffic types,” the paper states. “This is particularly true of gaming traffic, but also relates to other popular broadband applications like VOIP, streaming media, and peer-to-peer file sharing.”

Laurel Networks Inc., an edge router vendor, sees gaming as one of many bandwidth- intensive applications that will force service providers to upgrade their networks. “Because gaming is so latency-sensitive and susceptible to packet loss, carriers are going to have to deal with it as gaming becomes more widespread,” says Laurel Networks VP of marketing, Steve Vogelsang.

“They are either going to have to upgrade their access lines -- which most of them are already doing -- or create a gaming-specific network overlay dedicated to gaming and other high-bandwidth services.”

While nearly everyone agrees that better, faster networks are needed, there's some debate about what will prompt consumers to pay more for premium services. Laurel's Vogelsang doubts the end user is going to pony up much more cash for an enhanced gaming network. “Halo II customers already have to pay for the game and a subscription to play online,” he says. “They’re probably not going to want to shell out more money. It’s more likely that the content provider will pay for a special connection from the RBOCs or cable providers to guarantee access.”

Since access providers aren’t receiving revenue from the sales of online games, the cost of an upgraded infrastructure that guarantees low latency and low packet loss will fall to content providers or end users, Vogelsang says (see Online Games Pose Carrier Conundrum ).

“People buying the game expect it to work as advertised,” he says. “Online gamers just want to be sure that when they’re about to shoot an enemy online, a dropped packet won’t delay the game and have them getting killed instead.”
http://www.lightreading.com/document...g&doc_id=65177


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The Year Digital Music Became Cool
Jane Wakefield

It has been an exciting, if strange, year for digital music as it continues to lead a double life, finally embraced by the mainstream music industry while continuing to thrive in the underbelly of illegitimate downloads.

Digital music players are selling faster than hot cakes and MP3, a once obscure audio file format, is on everyone's lips and made many Christmas lists.

An MP3 player became a must-have, due largely to the cool value of Apple's iPod.

"It has attained iconic status even though it is nowhere near the best player on the market," said Paul Myers, founder of music download site Wippit.

Dirty word

With everyone wanting a bite out of the Apple pie, there are plenty of alternatives and Mr Myers cited the Archos and Creative's Zen Micro as his must- have buys.

"Music somehow got cooler when people knew it was being played on an iPod," he said.

Wippit is one of the few legitimate sites to support the MP3 format but it remains a dirty word for the music industry desperate to eradicate file-sharing which they regard as its ultimate bete noir.

"It is ironic that MP3 is so successful but the main legitimate services aren't using it," said Mark Mulligan, an analyst with Jupiter Research.

So anyone who unwrapped an iPod this Christmas will not be able to download tunes from Wippit, Napster or any of the other services that support the Windows Media Audio format.

And anyone who opened an Archos or one of the other digital players on the market will not be able to visit Apple's iTunes, because it uses a proprietary format.

The complexity of competing download formulas could add MP3 rage to the list of stresses people face over the festive season.

"The message boards are likely to be awash with complaints in January as people realise there are lots of interoperability issues," said Mr Mulligan.

Their frustration is likely to send them straight into the arms of the file-sharers which primarily use MP3, a format handily supported by most music players on the market.

Good year ahead

Legitimate digital music sales have had a good year. Apple's iTunes music store says it has an average of 25 downloads per customer.

Digital music, it seems, has come of age this year but there is no doubt that it had a somewhat hampered start.

"In Europe at the beginning of the year it wasn't so much stuck in the starting block as having its feet nailed to them," said Mr Mulligan.

While digital music has grabbed more than its fair share of headlines over the last year, it still only accounts for a tiny percentage of music profits.

According to Jupiter Research, digital music in Europe will make £90m in 2005, which is only 1.3% of the music industry's total profit.

While digital music players are flying off shelves there are still four times as many people that own a portable CD player.

Wippit's Mr Myers remains optimistic that 2005 could be a very good year for digital music.

"I reckon that by the end of the year, download sales could be outstripping singles," he said.

This will partly be driven by a convergence between downloads and ringtones, which will increasingly merge, he believes.

Wippit is due to launch a service next year that will allow users to download a complete song and then edit it themselves to create a personalised ringtone.

Experts say it is likely that mobile phones will increasingly have MP3 decoders fitted as standard and makers of digital music players will enter the telephony market.

Featured players

If 2004 was the year music became cool, with iPods marketed as a must-have style accessory, then 2005 could see functionality creep back into the picture.

"Historically, MP3 players have either been good-looking, or fully loaded with functionality," said a spokesman for Creative.

"The new generation of MP3 players combine cool design with extensive features. Add to that the choice of a wide range of colours, and you have the blueprint for any successful MP3 device in 2005," he added.

Whatever happens with the players, the file-sharing networks are likely to still be providing millions with the music.

"It has been next to impossible for the music industry to beat file-sharing via the legal route, as the legal process moves a lot more slowly than the file- sharers," said Mr Mulligan.

The music industry is desperate to beat them at their own game and has been inundating networks with spoof files to slow the systems down.

File-sharing has proved remarkably resilient and innovative and it is perhaps this that scares the music industry the most, said Mr Myers.

"The killer network, the Google of the peer-to-peer world, could happen next year," he warned.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/4118751.stm


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International Crackdown Scores Warez Victory
Matt Hines

The US Department of Justice has landed its first conviction against an American defendant caught via Operation Fastlink, a multinational law enforcement effort undertaken against online software piracy.

The US Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa said that Jathan Desir, 26, of Iowa City, has pleaded guilty to charges related to his role in a criminal enterprise that distributed pirated software, games, movies and music over the Internet.

Appearing in the US District Court in Des Moines last week, Desir pleaded guilty to a three-count felony that charged him with copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. Desir will face a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison when he is sentenced on 18 March, 2005.

The Department of Justice said that Desir will be the first American citizen convicted as part of the plan that was introduced by outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft in April 2004. Since the debut of Operation Fastlink, law enforcement investigators have conducted more than 120 searches in 27 US states and 11 countries, resulting in the identification of nearly 100 people considered by the investigation to be leaders or high-level members of international piracy organisations, according to the agency. Three people were arrested in the UK during the crackdown.

In one past sweep, Operation Fastlink officials seized 200 computers, 30 of which were alleged to have been used as storage and distribution servers containing thousands of copyrighted works, including newly released movies and music. The Justice Department estimated that the seized copyright material alone was worth $50m.

The global effort specifically targets so-called "warez" groups, members of which are believed to distribute unauthorised copies of material to previously identified clientele over secure servers. Those files typically end up on an Internet Relay Chat network or a peer-to-peer file-sharing service.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/leg...9182751,00.htm


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Vouchers To Tap Into The 'iPod Generation'
Jo Twist

Christmas, besides being an important religious festival, is also the season of good will and gift-giving.

In the days before the net, young things strapped for cash looked forward to receiving the obligatory record vouchers from various absent aunties.

Now, with legal digital domestic download services jostling for supremacy in a market dominated by peer-to-peer file-sharers, they too are turning to
gift certificates and vouchers to entice the "iPod generation" into their online shops.

A social anthropological understanding of gift-giving reveals much about what the act of giving actually means.

It can be a gesture which does not require something in return. However, in many cases, there is a type of reciprocity

So-called digital anthropologists who have been using the theory of gift-giving to understand file-sharers and open-source software communities see why gift-giving is crucial for certain groups.

Some give to gain respect or to be a part of a group, to strengthen emotional bonds or to build community loyalty.

Gift guilt

Gift certificates and vouchers themselves are well-known marketing tricks used to entice and keep customers tied to a brand.

They are part of the strategy that online music services, like Apple iTunes and Napster, are keen to exploit particularly when they lack physical visibility on the High Street.

"Gift giving generates a sense of guilt. I feel obliged to go and see and maybe I should reciprocate with a purchase," Markus Giesler, professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business, explains.

He has researched and written extensively on gift-giving in file-sharing networks, the open-source community, as well as legal music download contexts.

"Providers do this in the hope that the guilt generated means people will reciprocate with a purchase," Dr Giesler told the BBC News website.

Indeed, gift vouchers could be considered as a way in which legal services try to entice illegal file-sharers into joining up.

A recent report on file-sharing warned that 2004 was a critical year for the legal digital music services; converting illegal file-swappers was crucial for the survival of legal services.

Yet the number of people using peer-to-peer programs to download music had not fallen since the previous year, the Informa Media report said.

Clearly, millions still preferred to download for free.

Back for more?

In order to take advantage of a digital music gift voucher, in most cases, the receiver has to pro-actively get the program which goes with the download service.

This is an investment in non-financial terms: if the effort is made to download the software, you might as well join the community there.

It is a different proposition to walking into a record shop, handing over a voucher, and walking out until next year.

It is the community aspect that legal services are keen to exploit. Community encourages loyalty amongst members and loyalty means they should return.

"It is interesting because it has become pretty fashionable to try to build communities," says Dr Giesler.

"But you cannot just engineer a community in the same way as a car. It is a complex social phenomenon.

"For the new Napster and iTunes it is part of the lingo and vernacular, yet what my empirical findings show is that these services are pretty individualistic."

For Napster, building a community is "massively important", says Leanne Sharman, head of Napster UK.

"The biggest part of our pre-launch research was the ability to share and the P2P elements because of our legacy and history, so we have carried that P2P feel into our service.

"You can hold onto a community base today by creating tools for community base," she says.

Along with gift vouchers and pre-pay cards, e-mailing songs, sharing playlists, message boards, and looking at what other people are listening to are all the kinds of community-building tools used.

Virtual sounds

The refashioned record vouchers can come in a virtual form to be e-mailed to friends, or printed out and handed over physically.

iTunes even has "recurring" gift certificates, which act like a piggy bank to be topped up regularly.

For iTunes, encouraging existing members to evangelise via gift-giving strategies is important in drawing in new members; gift-vouchers are a "very cool and trendy gift" for the iPod generation, says Oliver Shusser from the iTunes Europe team.

"We see them as very important as they are essentially a great way for people to extend our community and invite other people into the community.

"Giving music has a long history. It used to be the CD, but now there are more and more things like this.

"For our customers, most of them are really excited about the service. They want to share that excitement and let other people know what their experience is."

But much of this, says Dr Giesler, is "wishful thinking" when it comes to the real issue.

According to his research, the file-sharers that legal services want to convert are not particularly interested in being part of this sort of community.

"When you talk about community, you have to talk about power," says Dr Giesler.

"What is really important is to see the way consumers are becoming more powerful through the technology that connects them.

"The challenge for companies is not to engineer communities but to accept that in the future they have to tolerate community building outside of them."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/4086971.stm


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Some Wired hysteria

The Shadow Internet

They start with a single stolen file and pump out bootleg games and movies by the millions. Inside the pirate networks that are terrorizing the entertainment business.
Jeff Howe

Just over a year ago, a hacker penetrated the corporate servers at Valve, the game company behind the popular first-person shooter Half-Life.
He came away with a beta version of Half-Life 2. "We heard about it," says 23-year-old Frank, a well-connected media pirate. "Everyone thought it would get bootlegged in Europe." Instead, the hacker gave the source code to Frank - it turned out that he was a friend of a friend - so that Frank could give Half-Life 2 to the world. "I was like, 'Let's do this thing, yo!'" he says. "I put it on Anathema. After that, it was all over."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...w=wn_tophead_8


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Israeli Ministry to Restrict Porn on Mobile Phones

Israel's Communications Ministry said Sunday it amended licenses for mobile phone operators to restrict access to pornographic services following complaints that too many children were exposed to erotic material.

The ministry said in a statement that it would restrict the transmission of porn through video clips and movies on cell phones that use high-speed third-generation networks.

Adults would still be allowed to access the services by entering a code and only after being identified as an adult, the ministry said.

Communications Minister Ehud Olmert said he wanted to expand the restrictions to long- distance telecommunications providers.

Israel has four mobile phone operators: Cellcom, Partner, Pelephone -- owned by Bezeq Israel Telecom -- and Mirs, owned by Motorola and Ampal-American Israel Corp..

The operators combined have nearly 7 million Israeli subscribers -- many of them children and teenagers.

Olmert decided to take action after receiving complaints about the exposure of minors to erotic and pornographic material, and following hearings with the mobile providers and Bezeq.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7179592


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Vioxx Unseats Porn in List of Top 2004 Junk Email

Porn ads slipped down the list of top junk e-mails in 2004, replaced by offers for arthritis drug Vioxx, ID theft scams and stock pick information, America Online said.

Although "HOT LESBIAN ACTION" made the list of most frequently sent junk e-mails, or spam, lurid displays of pornography are now more easily blocked by filters offered by AOL and other Internet service providers.

Harder to block were the ubiquitous penis enlargement ads that were classified as online medication and not as sex ads. Porn ads were defined as "strictly skin and sex," an AOL spokesman said.

Spam has also changed considerably and now features deceptively simple text messages and Web addresses that link to sites, according to AOL, the world's largest Internet service provider and a unit of Time Warner Inc. (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) .

Junk e-mail senders have also gotten more sophisticated and are now generally controlled by several top "king pin spammers," the company said.

"This year's list was tilted more toward fraudulent and dubious scams and schemes," said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham. And despite the decrease in volume, the ads were "much more malicious and harmful to consumers."

AOL on Tuesday said junk e-mails received by its subscribers had dropped 75 percent, largely due to better built-in filters and blocks, based on a poll of complaints it compiled.
http://www.reuters.com/audi/newsArti...toryID=7201536


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Internet Use Cutting Into TV Viewing And Socializing
John Markoff

The average Internet user in the United States spends three hours a day online, with much of that time devoted to work and more than half of it to communications, according to a survey conducted by a group of political scientists.

The survey found that use of the Internet has displaced television watching and a range of other activities. Internet users watch television for one hour and 42 minutes a day, compared with the national average of two hours, said Norman H. Nie, director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, a research group that has been exploring the social consequences of the Internet.

"People don't understand that time is hydraulic," he said, meaning that time spent on the Internet is time taken away from other activities.

A 2000 study by the researchers that reported increasing physical isolation among Internet users created a controversy and drew angry complaints from some users who insisted that time they spent online did not detract from their social relationships.

However, the researchers said they had now gathered further evidence showing that in addition to its impact on television viewing, Internet use has lowered the amount of time people spend socializing with friends and even sleeping.

According to the study, an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes, lowers the amount of time spent watching television by 10 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes.

The researchers acknowledged that the study data did not answer questions about whether Internet use itself strengthened or weakened social relations with one's friends and family.

"It's a bit of a two-edged sword," said Nie. "You can't get a hug or a kiss or a smile over the Internet." Many people are still more inclined to use the telephone for contact with family, he said.

The latest study also found that online game playing has become a major part of Internet use.

Over all, 57 percent of Internet use was devoted to communications like e-mail, instant messaging and chat rooms, and 43 percent for other activities including Web browsing, shopping and game playing. Users reported that they spent 8.7 percent of their Internet time playing online games.

The study also found that although the Internet is widely employed for communications, users spend little of their online time in contact with family members.

Of the time devoted to communication, just a sixth was spent staying in touch with family members, significantly less than the time spent on work-related communications and contact with friends.

The study found that as much as 75 percent of the population in the United States now has access to the Internet either at home or work.

"It is remarkable that this expansion of use has happened in just a decade since the invention of the Web browser," Nie said. That rate of growth is almost as fast as the spread of the telephone, and is impressive because the computer is more complicated to use, he said.

The study, titled "What Do Americans Do on the Internet?" also found that junk e-mail and computer maintenance take up a significant amount of the time spent online each day.

Respondents reported spending 14 minutes daily dealing with computer problems. That would suggest that Internet users spend a total of 10 workdays each year dealing with such problems.

The study, the latest in an annual series, was based on a survey of 4,839 people between the ages of 18 and 64 who were randomly selected. Respondents were asked to create detailed diaries of how they spent their time during six randomly selected hours of the previous day.

Data collection was performed by Knowledge Networks, a survey research firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. The researchers plan to release the study on Monday on their Web site.

Thirty-one percent of the survey sample reported using the Internet on the day before they were surveyed. Researchers classified this group as Internet users.

The researchers found that the amount of Internet use does not differ by gender. But women on average use e-mail, instant messaging and social networking more than men, while men spend more time browsing, reading discussion groups and participating in chat rooms.

Younger people in the sample tended to favor immediate forms of online communication, while older people used e-mail more frequently.
http://news.com.com/Internet+use+cut...3-5507547.html


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Deep thoughts

Life Interrupted

Plugged into it all, we’re stressed to distraction
Richard Seven

DAVID LEVY, A PROFESSOR in the University of Washington's School of Information, believes he may have witnessed the first-ever interruption-by-e- mail. It happened back in the '70s, when he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a think tank at the forefront of today's computing world.

He and about 25 other technologists were watching a visiting scientist demonstrate how to make use of multiple parts of the computer screen. The visitor was typing and talking when a text popped up on one side of the screen. "Oh look," he said, "I've received a message!" He typed a response, sent it into cyberspace and went back to his presentation.

It was stagecraft intended to highlight one of those ta-da! moments. But not everyone was impressed — or even pleased.

"I remember a visiting senior computer scientist from another country got very angry about it," says Levy. "He said programming requires focus and shouldn't be interrupted. He basically said, 'You call this the future!' "

The future? Well, yes and no. E- mail, as it turns out, was just one drop in a dam-breaking flood of technology that has inundated our lives. Today, the constant pinging of your e-mail can be like the drip- drip-drip of water torture. We're swimming in doodads and options — text messaging and search engines, Blackberries and blogs, Wi-fi, cell phones that try to do all of the above, and the promise that we haven't seen anything yet.

We're shooting through technological rapids that have opened doors and changed the dynamic of work, how we communicate and live, and sometimes even think. All these tools have made our lives easier in many ways. But they're also stirring deep unease. Some are concerned that the need for speed is shrinking our attention spans, prompting our search for answers to take the mile-wide-but-inch-deep route and settling us into a rhythm of constant interruption in which deadlines are relentless and tasks are never quite finished.

Scientists call this phenomenon "cognitive overload," and say it encompasses the modern-day angst of stress, multitasking, distraction and data flurries.

In fact, multitasking — a computing term that involves doing, or trying to do, more than one thing at once — has cemented itself into our daily lives and is intensely studied. Research has shown it to be consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and in the case of gabbing on the cell phone while driving, relatively dangerous. Yet it is also expected, encouraged and basically essential.

Do you have never-ending deadlines? Job uncertainty? A dual-income family life with kids? A do-more-with-less workplace? Then you multitask.

Now, add holiday shopping to the list.

Today, we can do more. And do more, faster. And do more, faster, from anywhere, all the time. You can work at home or the coffee shop or even the beach. Is this a good thing? How do we navigate these rapids without eventually drowning? Are we allowing life to be the sum of tasks, the short term always the priority? Are we so connected that we're actually disconnected? And has anyone had enough time to focus long enough to mull a question that requires a long, complicated answer — if there is one?

Levy, whose Ph.D work at Stanford was in computer science and artificial intelligence, has made it his mission to ask these questions.

He's already hosted a conference — titled "Information, Silence and Sanctuary" — that pulled together an unlikely roster that included not only technologists and sociologists but a storyteller and a cardiologist, a poet, an economist, a monk and a CEO. Now he is working to create the Center for Information and the Quality of Life — a living laboratory where work and workspaces are constantly studied, redefined and redesigned so that well- being is an equal to labor. He has chosen the perfect place for such an ambitious plan in Seattle, which is part technology, part caffeine, part rolled-up-sleeves simplicity.

"Part of what's missing from our discussion about technology, even the technology in relation to our lives, is a more positive vision of where we're trying to get to," he says. "What are the measurements and criteria of well- being in the workplace? How do we even begin to talk about that? How about someone who answers all his e-mail and makes all his sales calls, but develops a heart problem? What is that?"

THE FEAR THAT machines are taking over our lives is hardly new. Levy and others note its roots at least as far back as the Industrial Revolution, when the Luddites came to fame. To be called a Luddite today is to be called hopelessly behind the techno-curve, but they weren't anti-progress so much as they were pro-jobs, especially their own. They protested mechanization in textile factories, lower wages and what they perceived as shortcuts in quality.

When our technological dreams began becoming reality, some pundits predicted we would be swamped by leisure time. That didn't happen. We're working longer and harder, and seem more stressed over downsizing and outsourcing and expectations than ever.

David Kirsh, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California-San Diego, says cognitive overload is a way of life at the office now.

"Workers can turn the ringer off the phones, possibly close doors, auto- filter e-mail, and personalize search engines, and ask people to honor privacy, but blocking out sacred time segments or sealing ourselves off from outside contact, even e-mail, isn't a real option with most organizations."

Gloria Mark, a UC-Irvine professor, has been studying attention overload and multitasking among workers in a financial-services office. So far, she's found that the average employee switches tasks every three minutes, is interrupted every two minutes and has a maximum focus stretch of 12 minutes.

Multitasking and angst about its necessity have been studied for several decades, and Roman philosopher Publilius Syrus himself uttered in 100 B.C., "To do two things at once is to do neither."

Yet, multitasking is constant now. We do it because it is expected, but also because we believe we can — sort of. The truth, says, David Meyer, a Michigan psychologist and cognitive scientist who has run several studies on the subject, is we don't and can't do it well. We can if the tasks are simple and virtually automatic (think walking and chewing gum at the same time) but true, effective, efficient, meaningful multitasking is akin to jamming two TV signals down the same cable wire. You get static, not high-definition.

Studies show that driving and talking on your cell phone at the same time dull reaction time when you need a split-second decision. Yet most of us do it. A recent PEMCO Insurance poll on driver distraction in Washington showed that although 58 percent of 600 responding drivers said they chat on the phone while they drive, it came in second to driving while eating; 65 percent of the respondents admitted doing that.Women are commonly thought to be better multitaskers than men. They at least seem to have more practice. But Meyer says the sexes about tie in his studies. (Researchers at the University of Edinburgh do say tropical fish apparently have multitasking down, enabling them to concentrate on shoal-mates and predators at the same time.)

Closely related to trying to do two things at once is "task-switching," which is when you flit between functions. Meyer, who heads the University of Michigan's Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory, has tested this practice and says the results are clear: Constant nibbling from one task to another both slows and dumbs you down. It also is fatiguing and potentially harmful in terms of long-term health, and the cost of that split second you lose when you're talking on the phone and a traffic obstacle arises.

When we switch from one task to another and back again, our brain is pushing pause and play buttons, something that appears to make us unique, says neuroscientist Jordan Grafman. The frontal cortex acts as the main boss, assessing tasks, ranking importance and ordering what comes when. Yet, what to do next isn't always its decision. Your boss wants something now, a co-worker barges into your cubicle, your kid's soccer game just got moved.

"We're stressing people out with multitasking demands over time," says Grafman of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Maryland. And it will cause further decline in our health and performance, he says, if we keep it up. "The brain gets confused and looks for default mechanisms. It becomes hard to focus; we take shortcuts."

IN LEVY'S VIEW, technology is not the culprit. The problem is the imbalance we've allowed it to perpetuate. His office offers a glimpse of his own balancing act. Computer, scanner and printer on one side, a bookshelf crammed with titles like "The Saturated Self" and "The Digital Dilemma" on the other.

Levy understands the ambitiousness of his plans to insert balance into the American imperative of productivity. The author of an evocative book, "Scrolling Forward," in which he examines how documents and information have morphed in the digital age, Levy meditates daily and, as a practicing Jew with a rabbi for a wife, honors the Sabbath, keeping unplugged one day a week. Yet he is also an "e-mail junkie" and will rush back to his inbox, thinking he might find great news or something that needs urgent attention — even though what often waits is SPAM.

"I take issue with the view that technology has a life of its own, that television came along, and bammo, you've got 'Survivor.' Technologies are constantly modified by human-interaction aspects of our nature. We're complex beings. To say the computer or Internet is good or bad is not helpful.

"I think it is safer to look at technologies as they are being incorporated into social use and communities. What are the economic and social questions here? Certainly more profit fits into this, and the ways technology is being sold, in the spirit of trying to go faster and faster."

Indeed, complaining about technology itself can easily sound like whining. Your parents had to shop the hard way. They didn't have a search engine at their fingertips. They didn't have the flexibility that laptops and the like afford. They even had to use pay phones!

Technology helps connect us to friends and, on occasion, soul mates. It prevents phone tag. It sorts and recalls massive amounts of information, simplifies writing, and even aids those who want to mellow out by working from the boonies.

Yet, some who study this modern phenomenon say the speed and ubiquity cause problems for those who are either psychologically ill-equipped or ill- trained to face dogged expectations that come with the package. Some of us get obsessed, checking e-mails while on vacation or late at night. We will e-mail to avoid talking and expect prompt reply, or fire off text- messages or gab on cellphones not because we have something to say, but because we can. (What? Am I interrupting?) We get lost browsing and sinking down one rabbit hole after another, dodging pop-ups and never quite focusing. Some of us hang around chat rooms trusting people who often are not what they seem, and "flaming" — harshly criticizing — people we will never meet.

This is such a topic of study that it has sprouted a number of terms, from "online compulsive disorder" to "data smog." Two Harvard professors see evidence of what they call "pseudo-attention deficit disorder" — shorter attention spans influenced by technology and the constant waves of information washing over us. When the brain gets excited over some rapid data and is stimulated, it releases a "dopamine squirt," they say.

"We have so many options, reward centers that we never had before," says John Ratey, who teaches at Harvard and is a psychiatrist specializing in attention deficit disorder. "I think that's why we're seeing more of this. There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death."

This is of particular interest when it comes to children who have grown up in the fast lane where Web pages that take more than five seconds to load are considered lame. Is the speed and ease compromising their attention spans? Their perspective? Their humanity? Even their work ethic? Or are we just threatened that they will lap us old fogies?

Little is understood about the Information Age's effect on this generation, but it is a burgeoning area of research. Ratey wonders if kids would read "The Red Badge of Courage" to complete their homework or simply comb the Internet for essays explaining it all for them.

If nothing else, thumbs — the digit of choice for text-messaging — will be the next carpal tunnel victim. Sixty-two percent of Americans between 18 and 27 have sent instant messages, and 46 percent of those say they IM more than e-mail, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The medium is so prevalent among youths in Japan that they are sometimes called "The Thumb Generation."

John Seely Brown, who was director of the Palo Alto center when Levy worked there, says so much attention has been put into computing firepower that little has been done to factor in human bearings and texture. He says we have been victims of "tunnel design."

"Suppose you tape two empty toilet-paper rolls and take them over your eyes. Walk around like that, only looking through them for 30 or 40 minutes," he says. "I guarantee you will collapse into a sniveling heap after a while because everything is a surprise. It's our peripheral vision that keeps us located and ready for what may come at us."

You don't even need a computer to overload. Try waking up to 24-hour all- news TV channels and see if your brain can handle it. You'll get a video loop of some trauma somewhere along with unrelated news crawling along the bottom. Sometimes a third nugget will be sandwiched between them. And logos and slogans are buzzing about the corners of the screen. You'll get two advocates screaming at one another, settling nothing. Information packages may be more prevalent, but the bites are smaller in proportion. Consumers get more of less, but they must be entertained or they'll turn the channel, put down the paper.

Blogs — personal Web sites where people share information, commentary and feelings — have filled part of the void, keeping their audience current on topics of specific interest. But as Brown says, if all your information is tailored to what you want to know, you may miss that which you don't know you want to know, and should.

THE IRONY AND SHAME of this age of efficiency is the time squeeze it has cost many of us.

The Seattle-based Take Back Your Time organization, through its Web site and book of the same name, says we're working more than ever and more than workers in any other industrialized country. Many don't take earned vacations. The bottom line, says John de Graaf, the movement's national coordinator, is compromises in health, marriages, parenthood, community and social activism. Productivity made possible by technology has inordinately been applied to work and consumption, he says, at the expense of leisure.

"We are not only working faster but even longer, and filling our limited leisure with busy activities, leading to an increasing sense of time poverty," he says. "We have let the new technologies become a technological leash, leaving us always on call and constantly subject to interruptions and new work requirements."

It's hard to take time off. Competition on a global level — the company's bottom line and your job — is fierce. So you don't stray too far, you check in. You get used to being alert.

Shelly Lundberg, a labor economist who teaches at the University of Washington, studies how families behave. The economy is about time, she says, not money. And as an economist, she takes a dispassionate view.

"If you're feeling pressed for time and too busy, well, that's your choice," Lundberg says. "This isn't a poverty-stricken country; there is freedom of action. Time is of the essence . . . And what you spend your time on reflects your values."

Some people have made choices, leaving salaries and insurance plans and new car payments for a pace that best suits them. But the choices get tougher if you have kids in college, aging parents to help, or a disease that requires expensive medical care.

Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas economist, studied time-stress perceptions among higher-income households in the U.S. and four other industrialized countries. His study — "Stressed Out on Four Continents: Time Crunch or Yuppie Kvetch?" — found that the better off one is, the more he or she seems to complain about the time pinch. How can this be? Your opportunities and expectations grow as you grow wealthier, he theorizes, but time, which is finite, doesn't keep up.

On the other hand, people working two jobs to stay out of poverty don't have a lot of time, either, and that's real time.

You could be more efficient. Kathy Paauw, who owns Paauwerfully Organized in Redmond, works to de-clutter desks, schedules and minds, urging people to draw priorities and say no once in a while. She is a master of handling an issue, or a piece of paper once, and moving on. Yet, she sees a life coach periodically to make sure she stays focused.

"I'm organized," she says, "not perfect."

BETWEEN HIS STANFORD Ph.D work and his research job in Palo Alto, Levy spent three years in London studying calligraphy and bookbinding. He found calligraphy and its slow, body-oriented focus a spiritual practice.

"I was entering into the Arts & Crafts Movement, which was this movement in the late 19th century that began as a reaction against industrialization," he says. "I was actually going back to where the Industrial Revolution began, joining forces with a movement that said, 'We don't want to turn into machines.' "

Once he arrived at Palo Alto, though, he thought he'd never leave. Where else could he be so challenged? He showed signs of his internal debate when he went to an international symposium in 1995 to present a paper, "I'm Not Here Right Now To Take Your Call: Technology and the Politics of Absence."

"The pace and density of modern sub/urban life work against mindful presence," he wrote. "Indeed, at times modern life almost seems engineered to obstruct it. The word that often comes to mind is 'fragmented.' "

Ultimately, his interest in this phenomenon is what brought him to the UW, where recruiters support his pursuit of the question of balance between people, work, things, health and time. He spent nearly three years pulling together the conference on "Information, Silence and Sanctuary," splicing hands-on crafts and contemplative moments between the speeches and panel discussions. He paid special attention to the title. He thought the concept of "silence" would be shocking at a conference where overload was Topic A and that "sanctuary" would evoke the spirit of a library, a human place he believes people will fight for.

It helped that the conference was funded by the MacArthur and National Science foundations, not exactly out-there organizations, and had the avid support of the UW's School of Information. The MacArthur Foundation and the university have given him planning money to continue his quest, and earlier this month he led a retreat to plan the next step.

Levy has begun to link the issue in terms of the environmental movement. The 1962 book "Silent Spring" ignited controversy about the use of pesticides and spurred action. People were mobilized by events such as Earth Day. Money poured into research. The Environmental Protection Agency was formed, and kids started learning about the environment.

"Perhaps we're at a similar beginning with our information requirements," Levy says. "We're just beginning to notice that something is out of balance. Perhaps we could be at the beginning of research, social activism, consciousness-raising and education that would help us not just identify the problem but find solutions."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pac...128/cover.html
















Until next week,

- js.














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Current Week In Review.





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December 25th, December 18th, December 11th, December 4th

Jack Spratt's 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

[multi]

Hey, if it lets me get The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in Chinese for a dollar....

good article on china...
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
...eh?

[JackSpratts]

across the 8th dimension...

one of the funniest, most overlooked movies ever. if anything deserves a sequel that one's it. paging new jersey, penny priddy, dr lizardo, john smallberries and the evil lectriods at yo-yo-dyne.

- js.

[TankGirl]

Thanks for the WiR, Jack!

Bram Cohen's interview on Wired (and the rest of the story) is very interesting.

Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with "content people" from the record and movie industries, he realized that "the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate." Cohen said as much at the conference's panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen's audacity.

- tg