Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 22nd, '05

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"The administration has made it clear that they do intend to continue their move to dramatically reduce privacy and constitutional protection for our citizens." – Bob Barr


"It's a mistake to think that privacy is an individualist or atavist right. I really view privacy as a collective right. When someone else is forced to give up their privacy, yours could be the next to go." – Marc Rotenberg


"The part that worries me most is the tremendous amount of money that can be made by tricking people into installing junk on their computers. It's a great business." – Ben Edelman


"Look, we would hope that one or more of the other remaining plaintiffs would also reassess the viability of this litigation." – Bertelsmann attorney Bruce Rich


"At the moment the official chart isn't the most reliable indicator of what people are buying. It will be as soon as they fold in the downloads." – Paul Gambaccini


"Comcast expected to raise broadband speeds." – Jim Hu










The Ranting Classes

I’m always fascinated by the (barely contained) nonsensical rage directed at file-sharers by certain segments of the blogshere, those high-grounders equating swapping with stealing, and swappers with immorality. Snide, none too subtle comments like "I’m sorry if I think people should actually get paid for their labors!" imply without evidence there are legions of starving software, record and movie company execs and creators clogging gutters and welfare offices on unheard of global scales, all because we're sharing media with each other. That is demonstrably false. Artificial anger and dogma aside, with even old-fashioned album sales up two percent last year in the U.S., theater ticket sales up and new products like DVD’ s and for-sale music downloads skyrocketing, and some of the wealthiest companies in the world selling software, the facts are glaringly different: revenues have rarely been better, and not only that, they're continuing to improve, trending in all the right directions. Not that they’ll let that interfere with their poor-house propagandizing, but we shouldn’t take it any more seriously than other mythological musings. Still, if you have to hear real sob stories check out physical goods manufacturers, like car companies, or outfits like once proud Rubbermaid, recently one of the most respected manufacturers in the world, now bankrupt, it's employees watching listlessly as auctioneers sell off it's physical carcass. No victims of “IP theft” among them; globalization perhaps - but with the copyright extremists some of the biggest boosters of free trade don’t expect them to amplify that connection.

I would have thought that after five years of “out-of-control” file-sharing (maybe they should watch somebody who’s good at it like me. I’m very in-control lol) people might realize the so-called “intellectual property” world hasn’t come to end, but we can forgive ourselves that fantasy. Like vampires and zombies, IP scare-mongering is nearly immortal, logic and common sense having little effect against the monster. You can sell books, music, DVDs and software, people still watch commercials (even wonderfully homemade ones) and believe it or not artists still collect royalties on compositions they created years ago, but it makes little difference to the howlings of copyright lunatics. That last one’s a great example of the transparency of the arguments; once deemed the “biggest threat” to IP from peer-to-peer, the threatened “death of royalties” was a complete fabrication. How many times did we hear comments like this? “Sure, musicians might get paid for performing even if they can’t sell records, but how are songwriters going to survive?” Very well thank you. BMI, the songwriters’ big collection society saw revenues increase 9 percent, but you won’t hear that from congress or the media.

It wouldn’t hurt the dialog if the anti-swapping contingent buttressed their hysterics with some actual facts. It could move their rants out of the realm of total fantasy and into something approaching an empirical intellectual discourse. I know, I know. Who am I kidding?













Enjoy,

Jack












Supreme Court Sets Date For File- Sharing Case
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Supreme Court has set a date for oral arguments in a closely watched case that could decide whether file-sharing networks are legal to operate or not. The case will be heard on March 29, the justices said Thursday.

In 2001, companies represented by the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America sued Grokster and Morpheus parent StreamCast Networks alleging copyright violations but have lost in the lower courts. A decision from the Supreme Court is expected by early July 2005.
http://news.zdnet.com/2110-9588_22-5545186.html


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Heil Ahnud

California Bill Could Cripple P2P
John Borland

A bill introduced in California's Legislature last week has raised the possibility of jail time for developers of file-swapping software who don't stop trades of copyrighted movies and songs online.

The proposal, introduced by Los Angeles Sen. Kevin Murray, takes direct aim at companies that distribute software such as Kazaa, eDonkey or Morpheus. If passed and signed into law, it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don't take "reasonable care" in preventing the use of their software to swap copyrighted music or movies--or child pornography.

Peer-to-peer software companies and their allies immediately criticized the bill as a danger to technological innovation, and as potentially unconstitutional.

"State Sen. Murray did not choose to seek out the facts before introducing misguided legislation that effectively would make criminals out of many companies that bring jobs and economic growth to California," Mike Weiss, CEO of Morpheus parent StreamCast Networks, said in a statement. "This bill is an attack on innovation itself and tax-paying California-based businesses like StreamCast depend on that freedom to innovate."

The bill comes as much of the technology world is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legal status of file-swapping technology.

Federal courts have twice ruled that peer-to-peer software companies are not legally responsible for the illegal actions of people using their products. Hollywood studios and record companies appealed those decisions to the nation's top court, which is expected to rule on the issue this summer.

In the meantime, entertainment companies' push for federal legislation on file-swapping issue has been put temporarily on the back burner. A controversial bill that would have put more legal responsibility on the peer-to-peer developers failed to pass at the end of last year's congressional session.

California has taken a lead among states in putting pressure on the file-swapping world. Attorney General Bill Lockyer was a key figure last year in pushing for more state-level legal scrutiny of the companies' actions, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has sought to ban illegal downloading on any state computers, including those owned by the state university systems.

Murray himself sponsored a bill last year--later signed by the governor--that requires file sharers who send a copyrighted work to at least 10 people to provide a valid e-mail address or risk jail time. He has also authored bills on spyware and spam.

The senator said his bill was intended only to encourage companies to take advantage of existing technology for filtering networks, not to impose requirements impossible to meet.

"To the extent that they agree that they can filter, we think it's reasonable to require filters for peer to peer activity," Murray said. "We're only asking for reasonable controls. We're not asking for people to create new technology or recreate the wheel."

Several companies, including Audible Magic and Shawn Fanning's Snocap , have demonstrated technology that could be used to block trades of copyrighted music, although no such tool has yet been publicly shown for Hollywood movies. Some file-swapping companies say these tools would be impractical to use on a widespread basis.

Murray has worked closely with the entertainment companies on this type of issue, but has also been a staunch critic of record labels' accounting practices and the way they treat their artists. He said he did not work with the MPAA or other groups in drafting the new bill.
http://news.com.com/State+bill+could...3-5540937.html


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No More Internet for Them

Fed up over problems stemming from viruses and spyware, some computer users are giving up or curbing their use of the Web.
Joseph Menn

Stephen Seemayer had the first Pong video game system on his block. A decade later, the Echo Park artist was the first in his neighborhood to get a personal computer. And in 1996, he was so inspired by the World Wide Web that he created a series of small paintings for viewing over the Internet.

Now the 50-year-old Seemayer is once again on the cutting edge: Sick of spam clogging his in-box and spyware and viruses crashing his system, Seemayer yanked out his high-speed connection.

"I'm not going to pay for something that I can't use," he said.

A small but growing number of frustrated computer owners are coming to the same conclusion. They're giving up or cutting back their use of the Internet, especially at home, where no corporate tech support team will ride to their rescue.

Instead of making life easier — the essential promise of technologies since the steam engine — the home PC of late has made some users feel stupid, endangered or just hassled beyond reason.

Seemayer's machine, for instance, got so jammed with spam that he stopped checking e-mail. When he surfed the Web, pop-up ads from a piece of spyware he couldn't wipe out spewed sexually explicit images and used so much computing power that the PC would just stop.

"I could be sitting here in the living room reading a book," Seemayer said, "and I'd hear my son scream: 'It froze up on me again!' "

So when his son left for college in September, Seemayer finally unplugged.

Now when he uses his computer, it's to compose letters or organize photos — anything that doesn't require interaction with any other system.

Seemayer is still in the minority. Overall Internet use continues to grow.

But 2004 "was a real turning point in a bad direction," said technology analyst Ted Schadler of Forrester Research. "People are getting really angry. They're angry at Dell and Microsoft and their cable providers, and that's appropriate. They should be."

In a recent survey, 31% of online shoppers said they were buying less than before because of security issues. And though more people are signing up for high-speed, commerce-friendly connections, the proportion of U.S. Internet users paying for things online barely budged in 2004 from a year earlier. It rose to 27% from 26% in 2003 after jumping from 20% the previous year, according to Harris Interactive.

For many, spyware was the last straw. During the last 18 months, the sneaky programs have soared to the top of the list of tech woes, triggering the most tech support calls to Dell Inc., the nation's top PC maker. Spyware lurks on as many as 80% of computers nationwide, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance, a trade group.

Spyware generally transmits information to third parties and sometimes takes control of a PC, usually to display ads. The most pernicious varieties have instructed millions of computers to make expensive toll calls or logged every keystroke on affected machines and sent account numbers and passwords to identity thieves.

No one is immune. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates discovered spyware on his personal machine not long ago.

The aggravation level has reached the point that some in the computer industry believe it threatens to undermine advances of the last decade, during which the Internet has grown from a virtually empty domain to a global community of 800 million souls. They say they need to act before the same early adopters who led mainstream Americans online lead them off.

"If, as an industry, we're not able to provide a safe, reliable computing environment, we do think consumers will get increasingly frustrated," said Michael George, general manager of Dell's U.S. consumer business. "We're concerned, and we want to get to a position where we play an instrumental role in fixing the problem."

It may well be up to private enterprise. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are exploring a crackdown on spyware, but government efforts to stop another online scourge, spam, have had limited results, as many with an e-mail account will attest.

The root cause of the problems is the open architecture of the Internet, initially inhabited and managed by a collaborative community from government and universities.

"The Internet … grew out of a shielded, nice-guy environment in academia," Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen said. Back then, "the worst abuse might have been sending a prank message. Nowadays, the Net reaches everyone in the industrialized world, including large amounts of people with no shame and large numbers of criminals."

Microsoft's dominant Windows operating system also makes it possible for malicious code to spread, in part because it was designed to allow so many functions. Once a weakness in Windows is discovered by hackers, a virus can wreak havoc on millions of computers before Microsoft can offer a patch — which typical users may not take the initiative to download.

And consumer advocates claim that state and federal laws against spam don't help. Courts have protected software vendors from most consumer lawsuits, and some have held that the companies are all but immunized by warnings buried in lengthy user agreements, those boxes with massive amounts of text with the "I agree" button at the bottom.

Whatever the reasons, the threats have evolved from minor annoyances to serious computer risks.

Gerald Stark, 52, trained on computers in school and in the Navy before starting a small cleaning business in Lisbon Falls, Maine. He figured he could use the Internet to find equipment at a good price, track his sales and organize his volunteer activities with the Boy Scouts.

"I thought that the computer was the way to go because it was so much faster," he said. "It turned out to be a nightmare."

A virus killed one machine. Then spyware infested the next one, wiping out a year's worth of receipt records.

Stark read five years' worth of computer magazines just to keep up with how to defend himself.

Even with two firewalls and antivirus and anti-spyware programs running, Stark stopped looking for new business deals online. He said he would buy only from places he had dealt with before, preferably in the physical world rather than the virtual one.

"I'm not letting my guard down again," Stark said. "Never."

Henry Stiegel didn't think he needed his guard up in the first place. Pressed by his stockbroker and friends, Stiegel got his first home computer in 2003.

"I thought it was going to be like a television set — I'm going to sit right in front of it all day and have some control and learn things, scan for airfare and travel," the former Grumman Aerospace Corp. engineer said from Homosassa, Fla.

Even after studying in computing classes, the 77-year-old Stiegel was swamped by hundreds of viruses, other malicious programs and pop-ups.

"I still have windows I can't delete when I want to get rid of them. When I send an e-mail, I get interrupted and have to start all over," Stiegel said. "I have actually pulled the plug out of the wall so I could reboot."

Stiegel now turns the computer on only two or three times a week, mostly to read his e-mail.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., homemaker Peggy Kasul sits halfway between the anxious newcomers like Stiegel and the jaded old pros like Seemayer.

A computer owner for seven years, Kasul did a little shopping online. Her husband used the machine to help manage some rental property, and her 16-year-old daughter wrote term papers for school.

Then her daughter went on the Internet to research a paper on the issue of breast-feeding in public. As if she had typed in a magic word, spyware ads for porn sites popped up and wouldn't go away.

Soon the computer was unusable. It took more than three weeks and $300 to get the thing working again, by which time all the family's data had been wiped out.

Now Kasul sends her daughter to use the computers at school or the library.

"I don't do much shopping online anymore because that scares me," Kasul said. "I go to the store."

The biggest factor behind the rapid increase in spyware is the amount of money at stake. Ads for such blue-chip companies as Motorola Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and JP Morgan Chase & Co. appear in spyware programs.

The businesses most often accused of distributing spyware, including privately held Claria Corp., WhenU Inc. and 180Solutions Inc., say they are providing legitimate "adware" services to customers who approved the installation. But their disclosures are often misleading or buried: A recent Claria license ran for more than 60 electronic pages, first mentioning the phrase "pop-up" on page 18.

Much spyware arrives bundled with programs such as screensavers and file-sharing software.

"The part that worries me most is the tremendous amount of money that can be made by tricking people into installing junk on their computers," said Ben Edelman, a Harvard graduate student who has testified against spyware companies. "It's a great business."

The defenses remain scattered. Windows PCs often don't come with antivirus software installed. Firewalls and spam blockers are usually separate too, and there are dozens of small companies offering what they describe as anti-spyware products — some of which are actually fronts that install spyware.

"Staying safe online has gotten too complicated for the average user to do by buying individual products and making them work together," America Online spokesman Andrew Weinstein said.

Realizing that such fragmentation is making matters worse, some companies are rounding up the pieces of a more complete resistance.

Microsoft recently bought both an antivirus company and an anti-spyware software maker. Time Warner's latest version of AOL checks for spyware and offers to delete it. And where Dell's online guide for configuring a PC used to suggest a combined antivirus and firewall program without saying why, it now explicitly warns buyers to protect themselves or face potentially costly problems in the future.

Legislation that would have required more direct warnings by spyware companies to consumers and ensured that users could delete the programs made headway in the last session of Congress, despite objections from top computer-security company Symantec Corp. and other software providers. Ari Schwartz, an anti-spyware lobbyist with the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, put the odds of some legislation passing in 2005 at better than 80%.

The FTC last fall filed its first case against spyware companies accused of using a security flaw in Internet Explorer to cram system-glutting programs into the machines of website visitors. The companies named were Seismic Entertainment Productions Inc. and SmartBot.net Inc. But current fraud laws allow regulators only to recover ill-gotten gains — no matter how much damage the bad guys have inflicted.

Enacting new federal bills "would be helpful," said Lydia Parnes, acting director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. Spyware "needs to be understandable to consumers, and it needs to be presented in a way that's kind of visible to them."

Even if a strong law passes, Parnes said she didn't know whether the average computer user would be any better off in three years.

If it's worse, Seemayer probably won't be the only one on his block with a PC cut off from the Internet.

"It's great for anything you can do on your own," he said. "It seems to me an incredible typewriter — and that's it."
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business...ness-headlines


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Coralled

Electronics Firms Form Digital Media Rights Accord
Lucas van Grinsven

The world's four biggest consumer electronics companies have agreed to start using a common method to protect digital music and video against piracy and illegal copying, they said on Thursday.

Japan's Sony Corp and Panasonic-brand owner Matsushita Electric Industrial, South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Dutch Philips Electronics formed the alliance because they want buyers of their products to watch or listen to "appropriately licensed video and music on any device, independent of how they originally obtained that content," they said in a joint statement.

Such interoperability does not exist at the moment. Songs bought in Sony's Connect store on the Internet, for example, can only be played on portable music players from Sony or companies that license its digital rights management (DRM) system.

Digital encoding and decoding formats also differ per store, with Apple using AAC in its iTunes Music Store and Microsoft using Windows Media. The lack of interoperability slows down the success of digital entertainment and the subsequent sales of devices, they feel.

If they do not offer their own protection system, as Sony does, the consumer electronics makers have to chose sides and license someone's DRM system for inclusion into products.

Together, the companies sell consumer electronics worth tens of billions of euros (dollars) every year.

The alliance, called the Marlin Joint Development Association (Marlin JDA), gives the companies standard specifications to build DRM functions into their devices that support commonly used modes of content distribution.

"(This) promotes interoperability while maximizing efficiency (when creating new products)," they said.

Intertrust Technologies, a small United States-based company which owns many of the crucial patents for digital anti-piracy protection, is also part of the alliance.

The technology can be used in all products that get their content via the Internet, broadcast or mobile phone networks.

The Marlin-based DRM systems will be offered alongside existing systems. The statement did not say if members such as Sony would give up their proprietary systems, but senior Sony executives have said in the past they favor interoperability in order to accelerate sales of digital electronics.

A first version will come out by the summer of 2005, and it will support another, longer-term initiative, called Coral, which is aimed at developing a set of DRM-neutral agreements to ensure interoperability between all DRM systems and standards.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7380643


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Recording Industry Sees Growth in Legal Downloads
Ray Bennett

More than 200 million music tracks were downloaded legally in the United States and Europe in 2004, up from 20 million the year before, a music industry trade group said Wednesday.

Releasing its second annual Digital Music Report in London, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said legal music sites had quadrupled to more than 230 in 2004, bringing record companies their first significant revenues from the digital format.

The IFPI said that consulting firm Jupiter Research estimated 2004 digital revenues at $330 million and predicted they would exceed double that in 2005.

IFPI chairman and CEO John Kennedy said at a news briefing that the legal sale of music on the Internet was now established as a viable long-term business.

"The biggest challenge for the digital music business has always been to make music easier to buy than to steal," Kennedy said. "At the start of 2005, as the legitimate digital music business moves into the mainstream of consumer life, that ambition is turning into reality."

Kennedy said the number of tracks fans may now download doubled to 1 million in the year up to January 2005 and the recording industry's goal was to make music as widely available as possible. "The record industry's priority now is to license music to as many services, for as many consumers, on as many formats and devices for use in as many places and countries as it can," Kennedy said.

The IFPI report said legal action had been taken against more than 7,000 illegal uploaders in eight countries in 2004. Kennedy said 61,000 illegal Web Sites had been taken down during the year, up from 41,000 the year before, with 1.6 billion files removed.

Barney Wragg, vp of Universal Music International's new media division, Elabs, told the news briefing that while the U.S. and the United Kingdom were leaders in legal online music sales, other countries were following fast. "They are the slightly more mature markets but more markets are growing with increased rollouts, Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. It's not a two-horse race," Wragg said.

Ted Cohen, senior vp, EMI Digital Development and Distribution, said music's move into the world of telephony had helped alter the public's attitude to paying for digital tracks. "We are making the transition to the mobile culture where people are used to paying for services," he said.

Kennedy declined to claim that the industry had broken the back of piracy. "That's a dangerous thing to say but we have made some progress," he said.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7375587


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Music Download Sales Increase Tenfold in 2004
Adam Pasick

Online music stores broke into the mainstream in 2004, with more than 200 million tracks sold in the United States and Europe, a tenfold increase from the previous year, according to data released on Wednesday.

Among well-known brands like iTunes and Napster, the number of online music stores quadrupled to more than 230 in 2004, according to the report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) trade group. The number of songs available online has doubled to about 1 million songs.

The IFPI said research firm Jupiter expects the $330 million online music market to double in 2005.

The increasing popularity of online music stores is welcome news to a music industry that blames digital piracy for more than two years of precipitous sales declines.

"The biggest challenge for the digital music business has always been to make music easier to buy than to steal. At the start of 2005, as the legitimate digital music business moves into the mainstream of consumer life, that ambition is turning into reality," IFPI Chairman and Chief Executive John Kennedy said.

More than 7,000 legal actions have been launched against alleged uploaders in Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the United States.

"Although piracy has not been eradicated, it may be reaching saturation," investment bank CSFB's media team wrote in a research note this week. "Usage of peer-to-peer networks peaked in the U.S. in 2003 after displaying near-exponential growth beforehand."
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7371795


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Napster Paid Subscribers Up 50 Percent

Napster Inc. said Thursday its paid subscribers jumped 50 percent in the quarter that ended December.

The company said it ended the 2004 calendar year with 270,000 paid subscribers, including 44,000 participating in its university programs.

Napster, which is based in California, offers a subscription service that allow users to listen to an online collection of music of various categories.

The digital-music company said it expects to speed up subscriber growth in 2005 with the upcoming launch of a service for portable music players.

Napster shares rose 1 cent to $7.20 in early trading Thursday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/10636528.htm


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Bertelsmann Settles With Small Music Company in Suit Over Napster
Jeff Leeds

More than four years after Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate, shook up the music industry by providing financial help to the Napster file-sharing service, the company has settled one record label's attempt to hold it liable for aiding online piracy.

Bertelsmann has agreed to pay about $50,000 to settle accusations from Bridgeport Music, a small company in Southfield, Mich., that it had contributed to copyright infringement by lending millions of dollars to Napster in 2000 and 2001.

The settlement, which covers the small label's legal fees, is the first sign of a break in a battle that has taken shape amid the fallout from the collapse of Napster, a file- swapping service based in Silicon Valley, which enabled millions of computer users to trade songs online free.

Because Napster was forced to file for bankruptcy protection, the case is regarded as perhaps the last chance for record companies and music publishers to extract payment for the problems - particularly declining CD sales - that they attribute to file sharing.

A lawyer for Bridgeport, Richard Busch, said the expense of continuing "was just not cost-effective; that's the sole reason." He added that "the decision to settle the case was not based in any way, shape or form on the merits of the case."

Bridgeport is the smallest of the music companies pursuing copyright-infringement claims, and Bertelsmann may still face a protracted battle with the industry's bigger and wealthier players, including the EMI Group and the Universal Music Group, a division of Vivendi Universal. Bertelsmann owns 50 percent of the music giant Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

The companies contend that Bertelsmann, which lent Napster about $85 million to develop a new service that would compensate labels and songwriters, in essence controlled the online company and should be held responsible for the theft of songs. Bertelsmann's lawyers say the company did not hold an equity stake or seats on Napster's board, and lacked the sort of control needed to be found liable.

The federal judge overseeing the case recently denied Bertelsmann's motion to dismiss the case, but Bertelsmann lawyers said they thought the judge's decision established standards that would be difficult for the labels to meet.

Bertelsmann also said that the case could involve taking up to 100 depositions, and that the settlement reflected the cost and time associated with such an undertaking.

"Look, we would hope that one or more of the other remaining plaintiffs would also reassess the viability of this litigation," a lawyer for Bertelsmann, Bruce Rich, said. He said he would entertain discussions of resolving the case with other plaintiffs in a fashion similar to the Bridgeport case, in which his client paid only the plaintiff's legal costs.

Representatives for other plaintiffs, however, said they believed that there was ample evidence of Bertelsmann's control, and that they did not foresee dropping their lawsuits.

"While Bridgeport may not be a deep-pocketed plaintiff who can afford to go through the cost of enforcing its rights, the publishers and the major record companies don't fit in that category," the president of Universal Music, Zach Horowitz, said. "They truly believe there are billions of dollars of damages they will ultimately be entitled to at the end of the process."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/20/bu...20napster.html


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Two Plead Guilty to Online File-Sharing
Alex Veiga

Two men pleaded guilty to federal charges in what authorities said were the first convictions for online file-sharing of music, movies and software over peer-to-peer networks.

William R. Trowbridge of Johnson City, N.Y., and Michael Chicoine of San Antonio, Tex., each pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit felony copyright infringement, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Trowbridge, 50, and Chicoine, 47, also pleaded guilty to acting for commercial advantage or private financial gain.

Each faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. They could also be ordered to pay restitution to victims when they are sentenced on April 29.

Repeated calls to a number listed for Trowbridge rang busy. A phone message left at a number for Chicoine was not immediately returned Wednesday.

The two men were targeted as part of an investigation dubbed "Operation Digital Gridlock," which focused on online piracy over peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks. Such networks enable computer users to access files directly from the computers of other users on the network.

FBI and other federal agents seized computers, software and equipment from residences and an Internet service provider in Texas, New York and Wisconsin.

The probe involved operators of five hubs of the "Underground Network," an organization of about 7,000 users suspected of swapping feature films, music, software and computer games.

Unlike many popular file-sharing networks, the "Underground Network" was managed by centralized computers that limited participation.

From August 2002 through August 2004, Trowbridge and Chicoine each "owned, maintained, operated and moderated" hubs offering various digitized films, songs and software, the Justice Department said.

Investigators downloaded 35 copyrighted works from Chicoine's hub and more than 70 copyrighted works from Trowbridge's hub, the government said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS


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Hard case

P2P File Share Reality Check
Raymond Blijd

"Can’t we just host overseas and avoid all these legal squabbles?" is an often heard question on file-sharing forums.

I've often been asked to help search for file-sharing legal safe haven. I’ve joined the discussions on whether to swarm, unite and fight the ‘Industry’ or just divide, run and hide until this whole thing blows over. And, I've kept looking: Where are we safe?

Well, Torrentz.com seems to have found the answer: China; “a DMCA free zone”

“The timing isn’t that great because of the MPAA attacks on torrent sites, but since we're being hosted in China I’m not all that worried about that” according to Flippy; the site owner [source: www.slyck.com ]

I think is time for a reality check, “Flippy”!

Check one

Question: Where do you live?

If the “Industry” ever finds out where you live, they’ll let the dog’s loose and shit will hit the fan. Your local law enforcement authorities will be all over you and take you down, just as in “Raids on Ed2k and Bittorrent defined”.

And don’t think it won't happen in your neck of the woods. Just ask Jon Johanson or Simon Moon.

Don’t be fooled; the current trend of ID dishing being curtailed in the US and Europe. The 'trend' mostly applies to downloader’s not site operators.

Check two

Just Google News these two key words: “China Piracy” and read the headlines from last week. Pressure on China is mounting to crackdown on Piracy. And we know how China is at cracking down.

China is a member of the WTO (World Trade Organization) and party to the TRIPS treaty. At last check, China should have already implemented the treaty into its own law. This means that according to international laws, China is not safe.

Moreover, it showed that it can crack down on “Pirates” if it wants to.

Final check

Ok “Flippy”; International Commercial Law basically works like this:

You can try hosting your site on Tempel 1 and escape earth's laws.

If your site is on a public network and thus accessible on earth, you live on earth and you will be hunted on earth.

Bottomline: it doesn’t matter where the “infringing” activity is technically-geographically located: what’s relevant is where “infringement” is most likely felt, and who’s behind it.

Fact sheet:

A couple of historical facts:

1) Kazaa first hid in Holland, which most still think is a safe haven. But was still charged, here. Although it won the case, it fled to Australia but then…

2) Film88.com hid in Iran and had servers all over the place. Iran is a country that doesn’t respect any foreign copyright by its own laws. Film88 was charged and convicted California and end up paying a record $ 23.8 million in damages to the Industry.

The list of fallen ed2k and Bittorrent sites and their operators is long and …it will get longer in 2005.

Maybe “P2P: sued around the world” didn’t made this clear enough; there are tremendous forces fueling the Intellectual Property reinforcements around the world.

Don’t easily assume that you’re safe anywhere, and tell it too “Wiak”.
http://p2pnet.net/story/3550


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Cybersleuths Swap Secrets

Department of Defense Considers The Threats Posed By Hackers, Pornographers, And iPods
Paul Roberts

The U.S. Department of Defense is making changes to streamline its response to online threats across the various branches of the military, and deal with a steady stream of new online woes, from hacking attempts to child pornography and threats posed by powerful portable storage devices such as IPods, according to senior DOD officials.

The DOD blocked and traced 60,000 intrusion attempts on its unclassified networks in 2004, and wrestles with spam, illicit pornography, and other common Internet threats. If left to fester, the threats could hamper the massive defense agency, which relies on global, unclassified networks for critical business operations, says Lieutenant General Harry Raduege, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Raduege was speaking at the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Conference in Palm Harbor, Florida, an annual gathering of some of the government's top IT, computer forensic, and research and development talent.

Abroad and At Home

The DOD is taking the threat to its networks seriously, as global information networks now play a crucial role supporting troops abroad, as well as critical logistics, financial, and medical information systems that the DOD relies on to support its employees and to communicate with suppliers in the U.S. and abroad, he says.

"The importance of reliable, accessible networks is growing as we move to a Net-centric world," he says.

Larger, more open networks provide more opportunities for malicious hackers or terrorist groups to infiltrate those networks, stealing sensitive information or wreaking havoc on DOD operations, he says.

The DOD is drafting organization-wide policies to respond to a number of threats that are well known to many private sector network administrators, including peer-to-peer file sharing applications, and vulnerable computer communications ports and protocols, he says.

The DOD is also working to develop a list of IP (Internet protocol) addresses for a "do not block list" so that critical DOD communications are not accidentally blocked by ISPs (Internet service providers) and other organizations, he says.

Networks that contain classified information are not connected to the public Internet and are not affected by the same threats that affect unclassified department networks, he says.

Newly Organized

A reorganization approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in November 2004, should make it easier for the government to coordinate its response to cyberthreats and create more discipline on DOD networks by creating clear lines of command from the U.S. Secretary of Defense, to the DOD's Strategic Command, to the various branches of the military, Raduege says.

Asked whether the U.S. public should feel confident that the government is on top of cyber crime, Raduege says that the government's preparedness to deal with online threats had improved dramatically since the first "Solar Sunrise" exercise in the late 1990s.

"We're good. We're very good," he says.

With the theme of "Cybercrime: overcoming the challenges of new technology," the 4th annual DOD Cybercrime Conference brought together 500 experts in technology, law, and computer forensics to discuss ways to improve computer investigations, protect government networks from attack and coordinate the response to computer threats across the huge military and defense sectors.

The conference offered a diverse set of mostly closed-door sessions, with topics such as "Cyber Jihad and the Globalization of Warfare" and "Current Trends in Digital Forensics."

Child pornography has become a huge problem for DOD investigators, accounting for as much as 50 percent of the criminal digital evidence processing work done by the DOD's Defense Cybercrime Center (DC3), says Steven Shirley, executive director of DC3.

The proliferation of inexpensive digital cameras and scanners has caused instances of child pornography to mushroom in the military, as elsewhere in society, says Jim Christy, director of the Defense Cyber Crime Institute at DC3.

Other hot topics at the show were techniques for capturing and analyzing data from a flood of new digital storage media, including Apple IPods, GPS (Global Positioning System) devices, and portable USB (Universal Serial Bus) memory sticks, Christy says.

Government investigators working on cases, ranging from homicides to espionage, need to be aware of the wide range of new places that valuable information could be stored, he says.

"Twenty years ago, investigators used to walk right past the desktop computer when they were gathering evidence. Now they know enough to seize that, but we've got to get them to be aware of these other devices," he says.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119308,00.asp


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Major Free Storage
Jack

This week Streamload began offering an unprecedented amount of no-cost online storage. People signing up for the service will receive a 10 GIGABYTE online locker for MP3s, TV shows, short films or whatever, all accessible from any terminal in the world (depending on configurations, and more about that later) and all for free. Although to slow "piracy" downloads and individual uploads will be limited to 100 megs per month, thus making it awkward to store feature films, it still leaves plenty of room for other things.

I opened a free account last Sunday and it was simple and fast, but their locker page is having issues with my browsers which are normally set to high security. Opera 6 won’t load the page at all, it keeps recycling without displaying and IE won’t load it fully but at least I can store content. Streamload takes the files as fast as my upload bandwidth allows (about 350kbs or 40K) which is great. Unfortunately I can’t get to my inbox - I click and nothing happens. This means I may have to create a new browser profile just for this service until they work out the bugs. A small inconvenience I think for the service offered, we’re looking at 10 sharable free gigs after all and for most users the browser conflicts won’t even be issues.

Google started this land rush. Streamload just raised the stakes. Makes me wonder what’s next.

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Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital
Tom Zeller Jr.

There was a time when researching a high school or college term paper was a far simpler thing. A student writing about, say, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, might have checked out a book on the history of aviation from the local library or tucked into the family's dog-eared Britannica. An ambitious college freshman might have augmented the research by looking up some old newspaper clips on microfilm or picking up a monograph in the stacks.

Today, in a matter of minutes, students can identify these and thousands of other potential resources on the Internet - and, as any teacher will attest, they are not always adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Now the Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit group behind the SAT, Graduate Record Examination and other college tests, has developed a new test that it says can assess students' ability to make good critical evaluations of the vast amount of material available to them.

The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen colleges and universities later this month, is intended to measure students' ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms. About 10,000 undergraduates at schools from the University of California, Los Angeles to Bronx Community College are expected to take the test during the first offering period, which ends March 31.

Still, just what is meant by "information" or even "technological" literacy remains a hotly debated topic in academic circles, and there is no widespread agreement on whether such skills can be taught, much less measured in a test. What seems certain, however, is that a lucrative market is emerging for testing companies that are willing to fill the perceived need.

The initial technology test is aimed at midlevel college students, but the Educational Testing Service says it has also received inquiries from high schools and businesses. And while the new assessment is not a high-stakes requirement for academic advancement like the SAT, it seems inevitable that most students will one day need to prove themselves along these lines.

Part of the problem, many educators say, is that the traditional vetting process for information is now so easily bypassed.

"In an earlier time, information came, really, from only one place: the university library," said Lorie Roth, the assistant vice chancellor of academic programs for the California State University system, one of seven school systems that worked with the testing company over the last two years to develop the test. "Now it is all part of one giant continuum, and often the student is the sole arbiter of what is good information, what is bad information and what all the shades are in between."

But not everyone agrees that measuring information literacy can be done, even with a standardized test.

"There is a basic problem with identifying a single set of skills that could possibly relate to all people," said Stanley Wilder, the associate dean of the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester in New York, who wrote a withering assessment of the information literacy movement in The Chronicle of Higher Education two weeks ago. "There isn't a serious critique of any of the assumptions that info-literacy makes," Mr. Wilder said in an interview. "They'll tell you that it teaches critical thinking, but there's never been a study that measures whether students are really lacking this, or whether libraries can impact this."

Be that as it may, it is true that the information literacy movement could prove a windfall for companies like the Educational Testing Service.

Developing metrics for measuring how much students know - or how much they have yet to learn - has become a lucrative market. Eduventures, a research firm in Boston, estimated the assessment market for prekindergarten to Grade 12 - excluding the college years and beyond - at $1.8 billion for 2003. Given President Bush's announcement last Wednesday that he plans to expand the standardized testing mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act - which includes a commitment to "ensuring that every student is technologically literate by the time the student finishes the eighth grade" - the market for assessments is certain to grow.

Beyond the SAT, the Educational Testing Service controls a separate boutique market of higher-level tests like the Graduate Record Examination and the Graduate Management Admission Test. Despite its nonprofit status, it is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization. The company administers and scores nearly 25 million tests annually in more than 180 countries, and posted $825 million in revenues for fiscal year 2004.

In an extensive report, "Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology," published in September, the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit group that is often skeptical of technology in schools, was critical of the new test. "For E.T.S., this is part of a broader global plan to develop and promote international technology literacy standards, and then offer countries around the world a chance to buy a full array of assessment products and services that can be used to implement their standards," the report said.

But if critics see this as an unjustified entry into an already littered field of standardized tests, the company argues that the information age - and a new culture of accountability - demand it.

"I think there's always that tension," said Teresa Egan, the project manager who is steering the test's release at the end of this month. "People feel there's too much testing across the board now. Or they ask whether we are focusing so much time on testing that students don't have time for other educational experiences.

"But the public wants accountability. People want to ensure that colleges are actually preparing students for the future - the future being an information society." The technology test will cost colleges around $25 a student - discounted to $20 for institutions that sign up during the first testing period. Students will take the Web-based exam in classrooms or instruction labs, logging on with access codes purchased by their schools. Scores in the first round will be aggregated for each institution; the company aims to make scoring for individual students available in 2006.

In 2001, the testing company brought together an international consortium of educators, technology specialists and government representatives to begin defining the core characteristics of information consumption at the college level.

Knowing where and how to find information, they agreed, was just the beginning. Interpreting, sorting, evaluating, manipulating and repackaging information in dozens of forms from thousands of sources - as well as having a fundamental understanding of the legal and ethical uses of digital materials - are also important components.

"Critical thinking is a central aspect of the new economy," said Robert B. Reich, the secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, who is now a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University. Professor Reich is also the author of the 1991 book "Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism," which provided a something of a touchstone for the information literacy movement. "Our high school curricula are locked into an industrial age that may have only a tangential relationship to the information age," he said in an interview.

To the extent that efforts like the new technology test help reshape curriculums along these lines, Mr. Reich said, they probably will help.

According to Ms. Egan of the Educational Testing Service, the test is also fun.

"Can you help me find a good source of products and gifts designed for left-handers?" reads a sample question from a fictitious office manager. "I'd like someplace that offers a wide range of merchandise with product guarantees - also that has an online catalog and online ordering. Discounts would also be a plus."

Fictitious colleagues might then make suggestions via e-mail, and the test taker might also get input by instant message from people using screen names like SkyDiver, JJJunior and TVJunkie. The test taker would be asked to consider the various sources and suggestions, and to rank them by relevance to the original request.

Other parts of the test ask students to do everything from the seemingly mundane (like sorting e-mail messages into appropriate folders) to head-scratching tasks like "reordering a table to maximize efficiency in two tasks with incompatible requirements," according to a brochure.

Asked if she had taken the test herself, Ms. Egan responded, "What a cruel question.

"I took it earlier on, when there was no way to produce a score from it. But I knew myself that there was a lot I needed to learn."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/te...gy/17test.html


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TiVo Struggles to Find Its Niche After Quitting a Deal with Cable
Saul Hansell

After months of hard bargaining, TiVo reached an agreement last summer to offer its pioneering video recording system to customers of the Comcast cable system, according to several people involved in the discussions.

It was potentially a critical deal for TiVo, because Comcast is by far the biggest cable system and also because control of DirecTV, the satellite system that has been the biggest distributor of TiVo, had been bought by the News Corporation, which also owns a TiVo rival.

Yet, at the last minute, Michael Ramsay, TiVo's chief executive, decided to pull out of the deal. Comcast was not going to pay TiVo enough money or give it enough control over its service, Mr. Ramsay told the company's board, according to people involved in those discussions.

TiVo's board backed Mr. Ramsay, a brilliant and headstrong Scottish engineer, who wanted to focus on new technologies to attract customers directly - without distribution of the service by cable or satellite TV companies. But a debate about whether the company made the right choice raged in its executive suite and boardroom.

Last week, TiVo announced that Mr. Ramsay was stepping down as chief executive but would remain as chairman. He said the change was his idea and had been under discussion for months. Several board members and others close to the board confirm that. But they also said that the board hoped to hire someone with less of Mr. Ramsay's fierce belief in the power of TiVo's technology. They said they preferred someone with an ability to repair TiVo's relations with the big cable companies.

"They are looking for a guy who can stand up and go belly to belly with the big service providers," said Stewart Alsop, a former member of TiVo's board and a venture capitalist with New Enterprise Associates, which has a financial interest in TiVo. "They need a 'larger than life' personality, a younger version of Barry Diller."

But TiVo's next chief executive will also need considerable skill to navigate an internal political minefield, particularly because Mr. Ramsay intends to stay working full time as chairman.

TiVo's plight resembles that of many technology innovators that never find a way to profit from their elegant and sophisticated inventions. TiVo was one of the first companies to develop a device that used a computer hard drive to store television programs, a method that offered users much more flexibility than videotape. Its software is regarded as the best at helping people find programs to record of particular interest to them, earning it a cult-like following among its 2.3 million subscribers.

"As Kleenex is to tissue and Xerox is to copiers, TiVo is to video recorders," said Jack Myers, the publisher of the Jack Myers Report, a media newsletter. "They have an elegant user interface but it is not sufficiently differentiated that they can build a business on it."

Mr. Ramsay will not talk about TiVo's dealings with Comcast or any other particular company. But he defended the company's choice to go it alone.

"Our motivation is to see if there is any way we can work with cable and satellite companies," he said. But he added, "The cable companies are not willing to pay a lot to companies like TiVo to deliver the services they want."

On the other side of the debate is Tom Rogers, the former chief executive of Primedia and longtime cable executive at NBC, who is a member of TiVo's board. Mr. Rogers, who was named vice chairman of the board last October, has been pressing for more accommodation of the cable industry, several people with knowledge of the board said.

There appears to be no easy answer for TiVo's strategic dilemma. Mr. Ramsay decided to spend $50 million this year to persuade people to buy TiVo's set-top boxes directly, through advertising and rebates that brought the price of the product to as low as $99. (Until then, TiVo had relied mainly on word of mouth, rather than advertising, for its marketing.) The final results for the fourth quarter have not been released, but one person involved in the company said sales had been disappointing.

Doing business with cable and satellite companies offers far less money, but from far more customers. TiVo receives about $1 a month from DirecTV customers (Comcast offered even less, people knowledgeable about the deal said), rather than the $12.95 a month it receives from its direct customers. Then again, customers prefer a single box on top of their TV set rather than two - a cable box and TiVo's box for finding and recording programs. More important, the cable and satellite companies could reach tens of millions of households, allowing TiVo to profit from secondary businesses, like offering premium services and advertising on its service, or by doing audience measurement research.

But now, the opportunity for TiVo to strike a deal with cable or satellite companies is far less than it was a year ago. After TiVo left the negotiations with Comcast, the cable company started distributing a video recorder made by Motorola, its principal supplier of set-top boxes. The service has been so popular that Comcast has little incentive to pay more for TiVo's technology. Similarly Time Warner, the No. 2 cable provider, has been very successful with its own video recorder, made by Scientific Atlanta.

"The risk for TiVo is the market window has closed," said Morgan P. Guenther, the former president of TiVo. He said he was a great admirer of Mr. Ramsay but added that the company should have placed more emphasis on selling its software to cable or satellite companies. "I would have liked to see more focus on the arms supplier model than I was able to achieve when I was there. At the end of the day, you have to achieve distribution for the platform," Mr. Guenther said.

Meanwhile, other companies are racing to develop software with the sort of advanced features desired by Mr. Ramsay, including ReplayTV and Digeo, a company owned by Paul Allen, who also controls the Charter Communication cable system. Both Microsoft and Digeo are testing their software on Comcast systems.

"We view ourselves as an enabling technology and we are not demanding my way or the highway," said Victor J. Pacor, the president of D&M Holdings, a Japanese electronics company that owns Replay.

Mr. Ramsay said that history showed that there was little return from selling software to cable companies, noting the collapse of Liberate Technologies and OpenTV, two companies that were unsuccessful.

"They put all their eggs in the cable basket," Mr. Ramsay said. "They said to their investors the per-subscriber economics aren't great but we will have tens of millions of subscribers worldwide. It is very difficult to make that work."

Moreover, he said the benefits of such distribution may not be as great as the costs, because it was expensive to integrate TiVo's technology into the particulars of each cable company's system. "I could spend $10 million on integration to get 10 bucks a subscriber from a cable system," he said. "But I'd rather spend that $10 million innovating and moving the state of the art."

So now Mr. Ramsay has decided to pull back from the discounting strategy to focus on selling advanced features to more sophisticated users - at higher prices.

"The mainstream of our market going forward is not at $99 but at a higher level," he said. He does not have much choice; TiVo's cash fell from $143 million a year ago to $89 million on Oct. 31, 2004.

His plan - called Tahiti - involves several technological innovations intended to let TiVo thrive without the cooperation of cable companies. Devices will be able to send recorded programs to personal computers and to download programs from the Internet as well, taking advantage of a standard mandated by the government that, in theory, would allow TiVo to directly connect to cable systems. Also, he said TiVo would move beyond video recorders to a broader product line involved in the convergence between computers and television, including software that would allow a home computer to record television programs. This would put TiVo into direct competition with other companies, like Sony, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft.

How much of this plan gets realized depends on how much support it gets from TiVo's next chief executive. Mr. Ramsay said he believed the chief would come to the conclusion that TiVo has no other choice.

"It doesn't take much to pencil out what happens to a strategy that puts everything on mass distribution deals," he said. "That's very high risk."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/te...gy/17tivo.html


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TiVo Faces Threat As Options Multiply
May Wong

TiVo has been synonymous with digital video recording since it pioneered the industry five years ago, controlling an estimated one-third of the market in 2004. That lofty perch is now beginning to crumble.

Competition in the growing and lucrative industry is intensifying as cable providers, satellite operators and consumer electronics companies push ahead with models of their own, giving consumers more choices while threatening to significantly blunt TiVo Inc.'s edge.

"They're facing a very, very difficult year this year. It'll be increasingly difficult for them to sign up new subscribers," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Why do you need a TiVo when there's a cable DVR (digital video recorder) for free?"

Many agree that TiVo's service remains the best of breed, with its easy navigational controls and advanced search and record functions.

Its subscribers, who tend to be an evangelistic bunch, account for one in three of the estimated 6.5 million U.S. households with digital video recorders.

But the small company based in the south San Francisco Bay community of Alviso is now playing in a land of giants, faced with a mass market of consumers looking for convenience and low prices.

Even with its latest innovations, TiVo will find it difficult to compete against the clones of deep-pocketed cable or satellite operators. Those companies can afford to subsidize hardware costs and already have tens of millions of customers on their rosters.

The rivals also charge consumers less per month for digital recording - about $5 to $10, compared to TiVo's $13.

Consider Alex Wilkas, who appreciates the latest gadgetry but won't hesitate to trade it in if another has a better price or better features.

Wilkas lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where the digital recorder battle escalated in December after the local cable company, Comcast Corp., started rolling out its newest DVR-equipped set-top box to customers.

Comcast heavily advertised the advanced digital service. But while some customers were waiting for the boxes to arrive, TiVo gave away 2,000 of its DVRs to anyone who could show a Comcast bill.

That's right, gave them away.

Then EchoStar Communications Corp. took out a full-page advertisement in a local newspaper panning Comcast and reminding potential customers that the satellite company also offered a DVR service.

So which new set-top box arrived in Wilkas' Foster City home two weeks ago? Comcast's DVR, which allows users to record two channels at once.

The main reason, says the 60-year-old real estate agent, was that unlike the others, there was no upfront cost for the equipment - only the monthly service fee of $9.95. Plus, the Comcast box supports high-definition TV signals.

Score one for Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider.

But there are millions more potential customers to go in the nascent market of digital recording, which lets viewers record shows to a hard drive, fast forward through commercials and pause live TV.

A snapshot of how TiVo is being attacked from many fronts emerged earlier this month at the International Consumer Electronics Show, when a slew of rivals introduced their latest products.

News Corp.'s DirecTV, a longtime partner whose satellite customers accounted for about two-thirds of TiVo's subscribers by the end of October, said that it will introduce later this year a new media receiver that employs the DVR software of its sister company, NDS Group PLC. DirecTV is also expected to continue offering TiVo-based recorders at least through early 2007, when its contract with TiVo ends.

Scientific-Atlanta Inc., a provider of cable boxes whose DVR models made up almost 40 percent of its third-quarter shipments, announced the first deployment of its multi- room DVR to some Time Warner Cable customers.

The company said it would debut a DVR later this year with a DVD recorder so users can take their recorded programs on the road (TiVo itself now offers a similar feature but programs must first be transferred to a computer over a home network).

EchoStar's Dish Network unveiled a DVR receiver that also will have 100 hours of space for video-on-demand content, a fast-growing revenue generator for cable companies. The satellite provider also will introduce a line of portable media players that can connect to the DVRs and download recorded content for playback on the go.

Motorola Inc., another cable box provider whose DVR models are now shipping at a frenzied rate to Comcast and others, has plans to deploy more souped-up versions later this year, including one using Digeo Inc.'s widely praised Moxi platform.

And set-top boxes that will compete with TiVo are moving well beyond basic DVR functions: Telecommunications titan SBC Communications Inc. announced a deal with electronics company 2Wire to build a box to handle music, photographs and Internet video downloads.

Hewlett-Packard Co. introduced a media hub using the Linux operating system, a machine that includes a DVR and two high-definition TV tuners, enabling recording of two channels simultaneously.

Consumer electronics companies also are increasingly adding digital recording features into DVD players and TVs themselves.

All those devices, meanwhile, will spar with PC-based Media Centers, which run Microsoft Corp. software and include digital recording features and the ability to shift content from a PC to TV sets in other rooms.

Other new startups are competing tangentially, essentially doing an end-run around traditional programming distribution.

Among them are Akimbo Systems Inc., a video-on-demand provider specializing in Internet-based content, and Orb Networks Inc., which offers a streaming service that lets subscribers remotely access their digital media files from their home PCs. They also can watch live television on gadgets with Internet connections.

TiVo has so far failed to ally with major cable companies but has announced a number of initiatives, including a service to debut later this year that will let users access video content from the Internet.

Next year, it plans to launch a high-definition digital recorder featuring an emerging CableCARD technology that allows devices to access cable TV programming without the need for cable companies' equipment.

Analysts say it's unclear whether the strategies will pay off.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS


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Is Apple Thinking About Mac TV?
John Markoff

Does Apple Computer have designs on the living room?

Onstage at the Macworld Exposition in San Francisco last week, Apple's chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, proclaimed 2005 as "the year of high-definition video," a strange declaration from someone who was not trying to sell television sets. He kept his laser-like focus on the iPod and the Mac mini, a new low-priced, book-size computer.

But he noted that the giant screen projecting his demonstrations was in high definition, gave a cursory display of several computer video-editing tools and offered an enthusiastic plug for a new Sony high-definition video camera. He also invited Sony's president, Kunitake Ando, onstage for a brief and cryptic appearance and mentioned that the two companies might find other things to cooperate on in the future.

But if Mr. Jobs is thinking about a future role for the quirky computer maker in entertainment beyond digital music, he is holding his cards very close to his chest.

The Mac mini, which sells for $499, is intended to woo Windows iPod users who have been leaning toward a Macintosh but have been put off by the Mac's higher prices. That did not stop speculation that, with a minimum of modification, the Mac Mini would make a compelling interactive television set-top box, placing Apple squarely in competition with TiVo and Windows Media Center from Microsoft.

In an interview after his presentation, Mr. Jobs demurred. The problem, he suggested, was not that Mac TV was not a good idea, but that the cable companies are monopolies. But he did not close the door entirely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/te...y/17apple.html


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Cool Apple Stuff

iPod Shuffle Disassembly

George Masters’ Amazing Homemade iPod Commercial

Put Yourself In An iPod Ad

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Radio Broadcasters Mull Digital Music Stores
Kenneth Li

Radio broadcasters are considering technology and business models that may soon allow listeners to click, listen and buy the tunes they hear on their favorite radio stations.

Top radio conglomerate Clear Channel Communications, technology companies and burgeoning satellite radio companies are aiming to launch such services within 18 to 24 months, executives and analysts say.

"We're looking at a lot of different things. Downloads are definitely on the list," Jeff Littlejohn, executive vice president of distribution development at Clear Channel told Reuters.

XM Satellite Radio filed several patents made publicly available at the end of December, which outlined early plans to develop music downloading services and devices, providing a window into how the radio industry plans to capture a larger piece of the $32 billion music business.

A company spokesman declined to comment on product plans.

Traditional radio companies face lagging advertising sales growth as they continue to grapple with a loss of listeners to Apple Computer Inc.'s iPods and satellite radio services that provide higher fidelity broadcasts uninterrupted by commercials.

Satellite broadcasters, on the other hand, aim to differentiate themselves from free radio. At the same time, analysts say companies like XM and Sirius Satellite Radio could be on a collision course with Apple.

Apple and satellite radio companies have one thing in common: They are attempting to control the way consumers buy and listen to music. Both industries control methods of distribution and the hardware, unlike traditional radio companies, said Phil Leigh, founder of Inside Digital Media, a market research company.

SLEEPING GIANT AWAKENS

Clear Channel is in the process of converting most of its 1,200 radio stations across the nation to new digital high-definition radio broadcast equipment, a move that positions it to debut new services and products in the years to come.

By the end of 2007, about 90 percent of the U.S. population will be served by digital HD broadcasts, according to radio industry estimates.

Littlejohn said the new technology will not only allow traditional radio broadcasters to deliver CD-quality radio sound as well as song title and artist data over the air on a new type of receiver, but also will allow it to deliver up to eight more digital channels over the same amount of radio spectrum.

The new capacity can be used for new products such as subscription services that target audiences not being served by current programing formats, Littlejohn said.

However, Clear Channel said it remains committed to expanding its lineup of free radio channels for now.

Broadcasters like Clear Channel are debuting new digital technology with the help of iBiquity Digital, a Columbia, Maryland, technology company that designed the transmission and receiver equipment employed in upgraded stations.

It is co-owned by 15 top radio broadcasters including Walt Disney Co., Clear Channel and Viacom Inc. .

Bob Struble, CEO of iBiquity, said upgrading radio stations to digital has created an opportunity to find new revenue in services and digital products to complement the radio industry's reliance only advertising sales.

"All the relevant parties are looking at those types of opportunities," Struble said, adding that the ability to actually buy a song off a radio receiver is about 18 months to two years away.

UNPROVEN BUSINESS MODEL

Finding new riches that downloading offers is appealing, however, the economics remain difficult.

"We don't think the business model associated with downloads is nearly as attractive as adding additional audio channels," Littlejohn said.

There is little profit left after paying music labels back more than half of the revenue on a 99-cent song, and subtracting fees for credit-card transactions and investments in new technology.

While digital music proponents have held Apple's iTunes -- having sold some 230 million songs to date -- as a paradigm of success, Apple executives said the business eked out a minor profit.

What drove Apple to record-breaking quarterly profits last year was iTunes' effect on sales of its hardware -- a business category over which broadcasters have little control.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7337802


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Google Wants 'Dark Fiber'
Evan Hansen

Is Google planning to build a global fiber optic network from scratch? And, if so, why?

The question has cropped up in light of a recent job posting on the search engine giant's Web site seeking experts in the field.

"Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in...(i)dentification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network," the posting reads, in part.

Dark fiber refers to fiber optic cable that's already been laid, but is not yet in use. Thousands of miles of dark fiber is available in the United States, but there have been few takers due to the high costs of making it operational.

A Google spokesman declined to elaborate on the job posting. Still, it raises some tantalizing thoughts, including the long-shot chance that the company is laying the groundwork to jump into the telecommunications business. The posting was reported by Light Reading, a Web site that tracks the optical networking industry.

If Google were to build its own global or national fiber network, the project would likely cost billions of dollars and take years to implement, an investment that would be hard to justify based on the networking needs of most companies. Renting "lit" fiber from carriers is generally a cheaper, and therefore preferred, way to go.

Google is thought to be a shrewd judge of computing value, having built its widely-admired infrastructure on the back of low-budget server clusters. At the same time, curious geeks have long pondered the apparent mismatch between its service demands and the reputed scale of its computing resources.

Dark motivations
A handful of dark-fiber projects have been gaining momentum recently, mostly involving large consortia of private companies, universities and medical facilities, sometimes with heavy government backing. Best-known is Internet2's national LambaRail project, which has bought up some 28,000 route miles of dark fiber through its FiberCo subsidiary, according to Steve Corbato, Internet2's director of network initiatives.

"We view this, in a sense, as exploiting a moment in time," Corbato said. The telecom boom of the late 1990s led to a glut in fiber assets, and the subsequent bust put undeveloped fiber on the market at bargain basement prices. "The sense of urgency in acquiring these assets has been tied to the unique opportunity that's been presented...The spot market for fiber is already going up, and most people expect these assets will get gobbled up."

Corbato says he has noticed signs of increasing interest in dark fiber from private enterprise of late, most notably among large financial institutions. Meanwhile, in December, cable giant Comcast signed a $100 million-plus deal to buy long-haul dark fiber to build out its network.

A Level3 spokesman declined to comment when told of Google's job posting.

Corbato also declined to speculate about Google's plans. But he said fiber optic expertise is a natural fit for a company like Google.

"If I were the CIO of an international information technology company, I would think that having these types of skills would be a natural to have within the organization."
http://news.com.com/Google+wants+dar...3-5537392.html


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Closing the door on open source

Microsoft's Gates Wants Meeting with Brazil's Lula
Terry Wade

Microsoft Corp. is lobbying Brazil's government to agree to a meeting between the company's chairman, Bill Gates, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the World Economic Forum next week, a Brazilian official said.

The country has taken prominent role in the so-called free software movement, an effort that champions free computer operating systems like Linux as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows program.

"Brazil wouldn't gain anything from this, but Microsoft would gain a lot," Sergio Amadeu, head of the president's national technology institute, told Reuters. "They want to try to lobby Lula in the other direction."

Tired of paying costly licensing fees to companies like Microsoft, Brazil, the world's eighth-most wired nation, has told agencies in its sprawling federal bureaucracy to move to Linux and free software programs that run on it.

This year, the government will try to get private citizens to make the switch. It will partially subsidize the purchase for lower middle-class people of 1 million computers running Linux along with 25 other open source programs.

An effort by Microsoft to arrange a meeting between Gates and Lula could mark a shift in strategy for dealing with Latin America's largest country.

Last year, it sued Amadeu for saying the company was like a drug pusher who gives free samples to get consumers hooked and then starts charging for the product. Microsoft dropped the suit after Amadeu said he was just repeating what he learned in economics textbooks.

Microsoft's new tactic of conciliation instead of confrontation reflects the country's growing status among the digital elite. It is also a recognition that pushing for open source software is part of a larger set of policies first implemented by Lula's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Worried about growing HIV infection rates in the late 1990s and the cost of treating them, Cardoso's administration threatened to break patents on anti-AIDS drugs unless multinational drug companies cut prices. The strategy worked.

Wired magazine, the bible for technology fans, published a lengthy article in November championing Brazil's growing role in the free software movement.

Although quantifying how much the government could save under the open source guidelines is hard to estimate, Amadeu said it would save the country millions of dollars in coming years.

Lula's press office said a meeting between Lula and Microsoft officials has not been put on the president's appointment book for his visit to the meetings with business and economic leaders in Davos, Switzerland, January 26-30.

Microsoft officials in Brazil declined to comment.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7346992


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What’s On My Refrigerator
Jack

My friend TankGirl who works and plays with me here at p2p-zone does mysterious things that would probably land her in hot water if she lived under the repressive regimes of most modern democracies. Like mine. Not that she’d necessarily mind, plus the long arm of the law would have to be long indeed to make that collar. She lives so far away by the time news arrives of her exploits it’s already more rumor than fact, so there’s some safety in distance. Mostly though I think her exploits concern lots of heat, some liquid and strange wooden huts. And it’s all probably legal. Maybe. Certainly steamy. Anyway, lately for therapeutic fun she’s been exorcising her IP-policy demons through her unique artwork.

Here are a few examples.





She’s stickin’ it to the man. He deserves it.

[JackSpratts]

U.S Album Sales Up

Global music sales slipped again in 2004, but after four years of declines the record publishers will see the return of growing revenues in 2005 due to online stores and music DVDs, a survey found on Monday.

Hit by piracy, Internet song swappers and saturated markets, music sales fell in 2004 by one percent to $32.1 billion. But 2005 will make up for the damage with a one percent increase, said research group Informa.

Over the next six years, the music publishing industry will return to the $39 billion sales levels last seen between the years 1997 and 2000, before the invention of cheap CD burners and file swapping services such as Napster and KaZaa.

Legal Internet song shops such as iTunes from Apple and Connect from Sony Corp have opened in many countries. The services connect easily to portable music players, such as iPod, which have become very popular.

On-line music has not made big bucks yet, contributing just 0.9 percent of total music revenues last year, but have changed the image of the industry, said Informa analyst Simon Dyson.

"It has made the music industry sexy again," Dyson said.

Online music sales will rise to 8.8 percent of sales by 2010, Informa estimates.

Legal clampdowns on illegal song swappers and the growing popularity of music videos also have a big impact.

Already last year, music video sales, DVDs containing video clips or concerts, rose by an estimated 26.3 percent to $2.7 billion. It was not enough to prevent the overall decline as audio- only sales fell in 2004 by 2.9 percent to $29.4 billion.

This year, music video sales will rise again, by 17.6 percent, against a backdrop of stable audio-only sales.

"Music videos are a new catalyst for growth, just like CD was a new catalyst when it came out," Dyson said, recalling that the introduction of the CD eventually trebled sales of the record industry from around $12 billion in the early 1980s.

Much of the music sales growth will occur in less developed markets such as China and Russia, which are forecast to become the fifth and sixth largest CD markets respectively by 2010.

In the United States, album sales rose nearly 2 percent in 2004, after a three-year slump, according to figures from a Nielsen SoundScan survey earlier this month.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7344490


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Video Game Industry Sales Reach Record Pace in 2004
Matt Richtel

The video game industry enjoyed record sales in 2004, despite a shortage of game consoles over the holiday season, according to figures released yesterday.

The data from NPD Funworld, a market research firm, showed that United States sales of video game consoles, portable devices and the games made for those platforms were $9.9 billion in 2004. That figure is slightly below the overall sales figure of $10 billion in 2003. However, the 2004 figure does not yet include sales of games for personal computers. When those sales are included in a report due in the next few days, overall sales for the year will be a record, NPD said.

The 2004 sales include a surge in sales of games for hand-held devices, which hit $1 billion in 2004, up from $903 million in 2003.

The strong overall sales figures are significant, industry executives said, because they come at a time when video game companies and investors had expected a normal cyclical slowdown in the industry.

Such ebbs have historically come as game console models reach the end of their cycles and consumers wait for the introduction of a new generation of devices. Sony and Microsoft, makers of the two most popular consoles, the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Microsoft Xbox, are gearing up to introduce new consoles in the next 18 months.

This growth is occurring in the twilight of the cycle, said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, an industry trade group.

Sales were driven by sequels and games for older players. The two top-selling games were Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which sold more than 5.1 million copies since October, and Halo 2, which sold more than 4.2 million copies since November, NPD said. The top 10 titles sold for game consoles in 2004 accounted for 15 percent of overall sales, NPD said.

The top titles also showed the strength of Take-Two Interactive, a video game publisher and distributor based in New York. It distributed 3 of the top 10 games, including Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and a football game called ESPN NFL 2K5. The only other company to have three Top 10 games was Electronic Arts, the largest independent video game maker.

Over all, sales of games for consoles and portable devices was $6.2 billion. Sales of games for personal computers were $700 million from January through November, with full-year figures expected soon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/te...y/19games.html


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Comcast Expected To Raise Broadband Speeds
Jim Hu

Comcast next week is expected to announce plans to raise its broadband Internet speeds for all customers by at least a third later this year, according to sources familiar with the plans.

The nation's largest cable company and broadband provider will raise its current speed of up to 3mbps (megabits per second) downstream and 256kbps (kilobits per second) upstream to 4mbps and 384kbps, respectively, at no additional cost. Comcast will also offer its more expensive 4mbps customers a 50 percent increase to 6mbps downstream and 768kbps upstream, the sources said.

Comcast has upgraded its speed as part of an overall effort not only to distance itself from slower DSL (digital subscriber line) services but to add more high-bandwidth features, such as video e-mail, for its Comcast.net subscribers.

Other cable companies have taken similar steps to raise their speeds. In December, Time Warner Cable decided to raise its basic download speed to 5mbps from 3mbps for free. Months earlier, Cox Communications said it would raise its speed limit from 3mbps to 4mbps.

A Comcast spokeswoman declined to comment.

Cable companies have ratcheted up their broadband speeds as a defensive maneuver against heightened competition from the Baby Bell phone companies. After years of heel-dragging, the Bells have made an aggressive push to attract the growing number of Americans switching to broadband by offering lower prices for their DSL services.

In contrast to cable's average subscription fee of $45 a month, the Bells are selling DSL for as low as $26.95 a month with a basic phone line. But basic-tier DSL services are slower than cable, typically reaching a limit of 1.5mbps.

Broadband has become the central battleground between cable and the Bells. Both sides are packaging other services, such as video and voice, into their broadband bundles in hopes of keeping subscribers loyal to their systems.

Comcast, for example, recently announced plans to sell phone service over Internet lines--a technology known as voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP--in a competitive move against the Bells.

But the Bells remain laggards in overall broadband market share, with about 40 percent to cable's 60 percent. Comcast remains the largest broadband provider, with 6.5 million subscribers as of Sept. 30.

The latest upgrades will begin in the first quarter of this year. Comcast will update its subscriber numbers when it reports its quarterly earnings Feb. 3.
http://news.com.com/Comcast+expected...3-5537139.html


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Verizon and Yahoo Team Up to Offer Broadband Service
Ken Belson

Verizon Communications, the nation's largest telecommunications company, said yesterday that it planned to work with Yahoo, the Internet search engine, to introduce a portal for its high-speed Internet service.

The venture comes as competition for broadband customers between telephone and cable companies continues to heat up. Yahoo is also looking for ways to attract visitors to its Web sites and reduce its reliance on advertising revenue.

In the multiyear deal, Verizon's 3.3 million broadband customers will be able to use the co-branded portal at no additional charge. Yahoo will receive an undisclosed share of Verizon's broadband subscription fees, and Verizon will get a share of the advertising revenue generated by the portal.

The Yahoo venture comes on top of a similar arrangement Verizon has with MSN, the Microsoft portal.

When the Yahoo portal is introduced this summer, Verizon customers will be offered a choice of Verizon, Yahoo or MSN portal as their home page.

The arrangement is a less ambitious version of the venture Yahoo has had with SBC Communications since September 2002. In that deal, SBC invested $300 million in Yahoo.

SBC and Yahoo are also expanding their partnership. Yahoo is now designing portals for SBC's IP television service and mobile phone service. This will let customers use one ID and password on a variety of electronic devices.

Verizon may ultimately do the same thing. The company is installing fiber optic networks that reach customers' homes in nine states. The service, called Fios, includes high- speed Internet connections and phone service. Verizon also intends to provide television on its network.

In the meantime, Yahoo hopes to increase revenue from its premium services by making a more direct connection to millions of Verizon customers. Yahoo currently charges fees for e-mail accounts with extra storage and antispam software, commercial-free Internet radio and video services streamed to consumers' computers.

"We want to get in front of users in a different way," said Steve Boom, senior vice president for broadband access at Yahoo.

At the end of the third quarter of 2004, Yahoo had 7.6 million subscribers for its premium services, an 81 percent increase from the same quarter a year earlier. Yahoo reports fourth-quarter and full-year earnings today.

For its part, Verizon is battling for broadband customers with cable providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Comcast, which has the most high-speed Internet customers, has increased the speed of its broadband connections without customers paying additional charges. The company has also started offering free video services.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/te...y/18yahoo.html


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10G

First U.S. Campus Production 10 Gigabit Ethernet Broadband Connection

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California announced today that the first production 10 gigabit Ethernet campus connection in the United States was installed from the University of California, San Diego to CENIC’s high-performance backbone network, CalREN.
Press Release

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) announced today that the first production 10 gigabit Ethernet campus connection in the United States was installed from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to CENIC’s high-performance backbone network, CalREN. Upgrading from their one gigabit connection, this new link provides unprecedented wide area network capacity to UCSD’s students, faculty and staff. UCSD chose to pursue this connection as its researchers have extreme needs for ever larger data transfer and more powerful distributed collaboration particularly in the biomedical and ocean sciences.

Now spanning each of California’s 58 counties, CENIC’s CalREN is the nation’s most powerful statewide, education and research-focused network. Serving all educational institutions in California (from K-12 on up), CalREN network connections offer educators and researchers the ability to access and use state-of-the art resources throughout California and the nation. The network enables delivery of advanced curriculum, access to advanced research resources and service to schools regardless of size or location and provides a flexible growth path for continued high-quality, education-focused Internet connectivity. Currently, other major research universities in California are connected at one gigabit.

“UCSD prides itself in offering the best research and education assets to its faculty, staff, and students. Being first with our production 10 Gigabit connection to CENIC’s CalREN backbone network enables our researchers to have the best tools available, right at their desktop,” said Marye Anne Fox, UCSD’s chancellor. “While we have other, faster connections for specialized research projects on campus, the new 10 gigabit Ethernet connection enables every campus member to access the full power of broadband and access the global Internet and Internet2 community at large.”

Other institutions at UCSD that are participating in the high-performance campus network include the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

“This connection represents both a major milestone for California’s research and education community and a revolutionary model for the rest of the nation. CENIC continues to demonstrate success in building out advanced network capabilities and enabling the best research in the nation,” says Jim Dolgonas, president and chief operating officer of CENIC.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/509234/?sc=swtn


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Brave New Era for Privacy Fight
Kim Zetter

As the nation prepares for President Bush's inauguration next week, privacy activists on both sides of the political spectrum are bracing for a White House push to augment controversial domestic surveillance powers gained under the Patriot Act and other legislation passed since 9/11.

"The administration has made it clear that they do intend to continue their move to dramatically reduce privacy and constitutional protection for our citizens," said former Republican congressman Bob Barr, who now works as a speaker and consultant to organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union.

But surveillance legislation isn't the only concern on the minds of privacy advocates. They're also looking at technologies and services coming out of the commercial sector that could seriously affect civil liberties. Some of the important issues to watch this year are:

Patriot Act enhancements

In his state-of-the-union speech last year, Bush urged Congress to renew certain provisions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of this year.

Barr and other civil liberties advocates expect that the administration, believing it has a mandate to gain the powers it wants, will also try to push through new Patriot Act II provisions, which the administration partly abandoned when their existence came to light and caused an uproar in 2003. Barr expects the administration will pass provisions piecemeal in other legislation to avoid controversy, as it did last year with the Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act of 2003, or HR3179.

"This will be a crucial battle over the coming two years to see whether Congress really will stand up for the privacy rights of our citizens," Barr said. "The record so far has not been terribly optimistic."

One possible reason for optimism could be the SAFE Act, introduced in 2003, which Barr sees as a sign that some members of Congress regretted passing the Patriot Act with insufficient checks and balances. The Security and Freedom Ensured Act of 2003, or SB1709, is a bipartisan bill that refines some of the more invasive provisions of the Patriot Act regarding wiretaps, library records and other types of surveillance. The bill has 19 co-sponsors but has been frozen in the Senate for more than a year. A House companion bill (HR3352) has also been stuck.

Data mining

The corporate sector has increasingly been collaborating with government agencies in data-mining projects that whittle away individual liberties. Privacy advocates say this will be the most important issue to watch this year.

Although laws prohibit the government from building dossiers on individuals, they don't prohibit the government from buying information from commercial data aggregators like Acxiom, ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, which collect information about citizens' web surfing, bank transactions, doctor visits and travel itineraries. And there are no laws governing how federal agencies can use the data.

The concern cuts both ways, however. Privacy advocates say there are currently few safeguards governing how private corporations can use information passed to them by government authorities. For example, the Fleet Bank in Boston closed the financial accounts of several customers after law enforcement made inquiries about the customers' transactions in the course of a terrorist investigation. Although authorities never found any reason to charge the customers with a crime, the bank closed their accounts anyway.

Kim Taipale, executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, said that monitoring and battling such corporate/government partnerships takes a concerted effort that has, until now, been lacking.

"When the public spotlight is on it, it creates a lot of concern and attracts a lot of attention, but the battle is getting the public spotlight to shine on these plans," Taipale said.

European and Latin American countries are also looking to establish privacy safeguards for data collected by U.S. companies on foreign consumers. According to Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, U.S. commercial data aggregators have collected information on Latin American consumers and dropped it into border-patrol databases to help officials determine who should be allowed entry to the United States.

"This data from property records and DMV and voter-registration records in those countries should not be going to the U.S. for these purposes," Rotenberg said. "The flow of information around the world will be a very big issue this year."

National ID

Another important issue is the adoption last month of what could become a de facto national ID card. Even though Congress previously nixed a proposal for a national ID card on grounds that it would be too intrusive and prone to abuse, a driver's license provision in the National Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Act, passed before Congress' holiday recess, requires all driver's licenses to be standardized to include machine-readable, encoded data by the end of 2006.

Although the legislation didn't specify what data would be encoded in the cards, it gave authority to the secretary of transportation, in consultation with the Homeland Security secretary, to define the data within 18 months.

Privacy advocates are concerned that rather than just preventing ID fraud, the data on cards could be linked to a national database containing dossiers of information gathered from other sources.

Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of the Privacy Journal, has said the new law "will have more serious consequences for individual liberties of American citizens than any other law enacted in at least two decades."

Privacy legislation and states' rights

Privacy advocates expect ongoing battles between the federal government and states over jurisdiction in privacy matters. California experienced such a scuffle when Congress, bowing to pressure from business lobbyists, passed a law in 2003 that undid a California privacy regulation.

The state law would have let bank and brokerage customers prevent financial institutions from sharing their personal information -- such as bank balances, credit card purchases and stock holdings -- with affiliate companies. California has been a leader in passing privacy legislation, but Rotenberg says the state's moves have made a lot of people inside and outside of corporate boardrooms uncomfortable.

"There's a lot of nervousness in Washington about California's willingness to create privacy laws," Rotenberg said, "and I think you may see some effort to use federal authority to reign in states."

DNA databases

Although Californians have high regard for privacy, this regard didn't extend to criminal suspects last November when residents approved one of the most aggressive DNA measures in the country, which privacy advocates say will likely be copied nationwide.

The DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act allows authorities to take DNA samples from anyone -- adult or juvenile -- convicted of a felony. Currently, it also lets police collect samples from any adult arrested for specific felonies, such as sexual assault and murder, even before they are convicted.

But in 2009, that authority will expand to allow police to collect DNA samples from any suspect arrested for any felony -- including nonviolent crimes like residential burglary -- whether or not the person is charged or convicted. It's expected that genetic data for 1 million people -- including innocent suspects -- will be added to California's DNA databank by 2009, making it the largest state DNA databank in the country.

"Not long ago, people said we would only collect for felony convictions of sex crimes where there is a high level of concern about recidivism," Rotenberg said. "Now it's dramatically expanded to non-sex crimes and even misdemeanors. I can now imagine the world of perfect DNA matching that (the film) Gattaca depicted."

RFID tags

Radio-frequency ID tags will become a bigger issue in 2005 as their use expands into new areas. Currently, stores and companies embed RFID tags in the packaging of drugs and commercial products to help track product supplies and update orders. But privacy advocates say the tags will soon be embedded in clothing and other products, raising concerns that the tracking might not stop when consumers leave a store with the product.

"The problem is not only about tracking the whereabouts of people but about linking associations," Rotenberg said. "Students with RFID student cards can be grouped and monitored in terms of who they're with."

Chips embedded beneath the skin will also become a larger issue.

Last October, the FDA approved an implantable computer chip that would contain medical information to assist with health care. The military has discussed implanting the chips in soldiers to speed up medical care, and Rotenberg said it's likely the chips will soon be used in prisoners, parolees and eventually children. The concern is with forced chipping, which would take away choice from individuals receiving the chips.

Rotenberg expects 2005 to be a busy year for privacy advocates. But he hopes that individuals won't leave it to organized activists to do all the work to protect privacy rights or think that because a specific right doesn't pertain to them that it's OK for others to lose it.

"It's a mistake to think that privacy is an individualist or atavist right," Rotenberg said. "I really view privacy as a collective right. When someone else is forced to give up their privacy, yours could be the next to go."
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,66242,00.html


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Speak Easy Plan For Media Players
BBC

Music and film fans will be able to control their digital media players just by speaking to them, under plans in development by two US firms.

ScanSoft and Gracenote are developing technology to give people access to their film and music libraries simply by voice control.

They want to give people hands-free access to digital music and films in the car, or at home or on the move.

Huge media libraries on some players can make finding single songs hard.

"Voice command-and-control unlocks the potential of devices that can store large digital music collections," said Ross Blanchard, vice president of business development for Gracenote.

"These applications will radically change the car entertainment experience, allowing drivers to enjoy their entire music collections without ever taking their hands off the steering wheel," he added.

Individual song

Gracenote provides music library information for millions of different albums for jukeboxes such as Apple's iTunes.

The new technology will be designed so that people can play any individual song or movie out of a collection, just by saying its name.

Users will also be able to request music that fits a mood or an occasion, or a film just by saying the actor's name.

"Speech is a natural fit for today's consumer devices, particularly in mobile environments," said Alan Schwartz, vice president of SpeechWorks, a division of ScanSoft.

"Pairing our voice technologies with Gracenote's vast music database will bring the benefits of speech technologies to a host of consumer devices and enable people to access their media in ways they've never imagined."

The two firms did not say if they were developing the technology for languages other than English.

Users will also be able to get more information on a favourite song they have been listening to by asking: "What is this?"

Portable players are becoming popular in cars and a number of auto firms are working with Apple to device interfaces to control the firm's iPod music player.

But with tens of thousands of songs able to be stored on one player, voice control would make finding that elusive track by Elvis Presley much easier.

The firms gave no indication about whether the iPod, or any other media player, were in mind for the use of the voice control technology.

The companies estimate that the technology will be available in the fourth quarter of 2005.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/4185667.stm


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Jack Spratts

Elvis Still King with Britain's 1,000th No. 1
Jason Hopps

Elvis Presley notched another musical milestone Sunday when a re-release of his 1959 hit "One Night" became the 1,000th song to top the British pop charts.

The limited-edition re-issue quickly sold out across Britain and was fetching as much as $74 a copy on auction Web sites such as eBay even before it hit No. 1.

The growling, bluesy song became the 1,000th chart topper more than 50 years after Al Martino crooned his way to No. 1 with "Here In My Heart," the first song to top Britain's popular music charts.

The "One Night" re-issue was Elvis's 20th British No. 1 -- more than any other solo artist -- and came just a week after a re-release of his 1957 thumping classic "Jailhouse Rock" topped the UK chart.

Elvis's record label is re-releasing 18 No. 1's in consecutive weeks, in time to cash in before the 50-year copyright protection on sound recordings in most European countries expires on his earlier hits.

The King of Rock and Roll's latest No. 1 comes more than 27 years after his death.

"He was the best and there'll never be anyone like him," said Sid Shaw, who has written several books on Elvis and runs an Elvis memorabilia shop in London.

"He's as popular as he ever was, especially in Britain. There's something in his voice, his songs, his moves, you just can't forget him," Shaw told Reuters.

Welsh band Manic Street Preachers fell just shy of taking the 1000th number one from Elvis, entering at No. 2 with "Empty Souls."

PAUL MCCARTNEY

The memorable, forgettable and plain awful have topped the chart since Martino went to number one in 1952.

Paul McCartney, with the Beatles, Wings and as a solo artist, is the all-time chart topper with 22 No. 1 hits.

Canadian singer Bryan Adams holds the record for most consecutive weeks at No. 1 with "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)," which held the top slot for 16 weeks in 1991.

A poll for Sky Television listed the worst-ever No. 1's as Aqua's "Barbie Girl," children's favorites The Teletubbies' "Teletubbies Say E-OH" and Mr. Blobby's "Mr. Blobby."

While original rockers like Elvis can still grab the No. 1 spot, the pop industry and the charts are facing their biggest shake-up in decades thanks to the boom in Internet downloading.

For the first time, the Official UK Charts plans to combine record sales with legal downloads to present a clearer picture of what's turning listeners on.

"At the moment the official chart isn't the most reliable indicator of what people are buying," said Radio DJ and pop music historian Paul Gambaccini.

"It will be as soon as they fold in the downloads," he said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...N-ELVIS-DC.XML


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FBI Tosses Carnivore to the Dogs
Ted Bridis

The FBI has effectively abandoned its custom-built internet surveillance technology, once known as Carnivore, designed to read e-mails and other online communications among suspected criminals, terrorists and spies, according to bureau oversight reports submitted to Congress.

Instead, the FBI said it has switched to unspecified commercial software to eavesdrop on computer traffic during such investigations and has increasingly asked internet providers to conduct wiretaps on targeted customers on the government's behalf, reimbursing companies for their costs.

The FBI performed only eight internet wiretaps in fiscal 2003 and five in fiscal 2002; none used the software initially called Carnivore and later renamed the DCS-1000, according to FBI documents submitted to Senate and House oversight committees. The FBI, which once said Carnivore was "far better" than commercial products, said previously it had used the technology about 25 times between 1998 and 2000.

The FBI said it could not disclose how much it spent to produce the surveillance software it no longer uses, saying part of its budget was classified. Outside experts said the government probably spent between $6 million and $15 million.

The congressional oversight reports were obtained last week under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act by the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group that criticized the surveillance software after it was first disclosed in 2000.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the bureau moved to popular commercial wiretap software because it was less expensive and had improved in its ability to copy e-mails and other communications of a targeted internet account without affecting other subscribers.

"We see the value in the commercially available software; we're using it more now and we're asking the internet service providers that have the capabilities to collect data in compliance with court orders," Bresson said.

The FBI said last week it was sending back to the drawing board its $170 million computer overhaul, which was intended to give agents and analysts an instantaneous and paperless way to manage criminal and terrorism cases.

Experts said the life span of roughly four years for the bureau's homegrown surveillance technology was similar to the shelf life of cutting-edge products in private industry.

"It's hard to criticize the FBI trying to keep pace with technology," said James Dempsey of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology. "There is just a huge amount of innovation and development going on in the private sector."

Henry H. Perritt Jr., who led an oversight study of Carnivore in 2000 for the Justice Department, said the FBI originally built its own surveillance system because commercial tools were inadequate. Perritt, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, said he was unaware of any commercial wiretap software that includes audit features robust enough to convince a federal judge that e-mails from innocent internet users weren't captured by mistake.

"You'd like to have a package that supervisors within a field office and in Washington could do an audit and make sure they're using the tools compliant with the court order," Perritt said.

The FBI laboratory division, which produced Carnivore, was headed by Donald M. Kerr, who left the FBI in August 2001 to become the CIA's chief gadget-maker as head of its science and technology directorate. Kerr told lawmakers in 2000 that Carnivore was "far better than any commercially available sniffer."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...stomwire.ht m


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Heartaches of Journalist Bloggers
Adam L. Penenberg

After Chris Allbritton returned to New York from Iraqi Kurdistan, he raised $15,000 and headed back to Iraq in 2003 as the first independent journalist-blogger sponsored by his readers. There he risked life and limb covering the war and its messy aftermath, detailing his experiences on his blog, Back-to-Iraq 3.0.
With 25,000 readers a day checking out his dispatches, Allbritton was able to build on this success by securing a plum assignment as Time magazine's Baghdad correspondent. As a result, Allbritton has had to change his approach to blogging.

"I'm just very, very careful," Allbritton said. "I never scoop Time, for instance. And I've become much more miserly in parceling out my opinions. I place a whole lot more emphasis on the reporting on the blog, rather than taking a stance. This has alienated a significant number of my readers, who have accused me of selling out, going corporate, whatever. But, I came to Iraq to become a full-time foreign correspondent, so them's the breaks."

He also doesn't post as often on his blog anymore, and says he is thinking of shutting it down.

Allbritton isn't the only journalist-blogger who serves two competing masters. Om Malik, a senior writer at Business 2.0, pens two online columns a month, as well as contributing features to the magazine, while operating a blog on broadband that attracts 350,000 unique visitors a month. But it's his day job that pays the bills.

"My first commitment is to my publisher, my magazine," said Malik, who is also the author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist. "Last month I earned $9 in net profit (on my blog). Thank God for Google AdSense -- they let me break even now. Last year, I spent a lot of money out-of-pocket, when my bandwidth costs went through the roof."

For all the press that bloggers have received for revolutionizing journalism by bringing Gutenberg's printing press to the digital masses, when push comes to shove, journalists who operate personal weblogs face an inherent conflict of interest. In the end, it's the blogs that usually get short shrift.

And according to some, that's the way it ought to be. As Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs and publisher of the defunct Silicon Alley Reporter, put it in an e-mail: "Blogger + reporter = big problem. I wouldn't do that, and I'm sure it will end in tears. I know as an editor of a magazine or newspaper I wouldn't want my paid editors putting scoops out on their blog when those scoops could be driving and growing the print product."

But it's not just about who gets the scoops. A more serious question is how can bloggers, whose success depends largely on sharing unvarnished opinions, also work as so-called objective journalists?

There are no easy answers, and many media outlets find it easiest to avoid perceptions of bias by simply issuing blanket restrictions on what their reporters can say and do outside of work. In the past, for example, CNN pressured correspondent Kevin Sites to shut down his blog from Iraq. Time put the kibosh on freelancer Joshua Kucera's personal blog, and the Hartford Courant strong-armed one of its columnists, Denis Horgan, to stop him from blogging. (With the exception of Kucera, they have all returned to the blogosphere.)

Wall Street Journal staffers agree to follow a code of conduct that restricts certain activities to ensure "the independence and integrity" of its publications, services and products. I imagine the Journal is particularly sensitive after an e-mail from Farnaz Fassihi, one of its reporters based in Baghdad, made the rounds last year, portraying life in Iraq as much more dire than her published work suggested.

The New York Times (.pdf) requires its staffers to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, and requires that no newsroom or editorial employee "do anything that damages the Times's reputation for strict neutrality."

Although the policy doesn't specifically cover blogs (yet), the Times prohibits staff from marching or rallying "in support of public causes or movements," and from signing "ads that take a position on public issues ... if doing so might reasonably raise doubts about their ability or the Times's ability to function as neutral observers in covering the news." Timesians may appear on radio and TV but "they should avoid expressing views that go beyond what they would be allowed to say in the paper." (Of course, Op-Ed columnists like Maureen Dowd and William Safire "enjoy more leeway than others in speaking publicly because their business is expressing opinions.")

But this whole idea that so-called objective journalists should hide their true feelings may be misguided. Reporters are people, too (really), and just because they express opinions doesn't mean their reporting should be dismissed out of hand, as long as they arrive at their conclusions honestly, through rigorous reporting. In fact, when journalists give two opposing viewpoints equal weight in an attempt to be even-handed, they are engaging in superficial "he said, she said" journalism that may actually be undermining the search for truth, since one side might be completely without merit.

Readers "know journalists have opinions," said blogger Ed Cone, who also writes for CIO Insight. "A writer who expresses an opinion in a weblog, and explains how that opinion relates to the subject he or she covers at work, might seem more credible, not less."

Another member of the blognoscenti, Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, agrees. "I think that the openness of opinions helps, rather than hurts, since it allows you to make adjustment for known bias, rather than guessing at unknown bias."

And Peter Rojas of Engadget thinks the entire issue should be flipped on its head. "It's a mistake to think that we're making a choice between objectivity and honesty, with traditional media on one side and blogs on the other," he said. "The larger issue here is trust, and whether or not readers trust the media outlets they're relying on for news or information. If anything, being forthright and honest on blogs might have a positive effect on how people perceive the rest of their reporting."

So perhaps publications shouldn't worry that reporters who maintain personal blogs will undermine their organization's objectivity. After all, the Times has been hit with accusations of bias for years, well before the advent of blogs.

Meanwhile, blog readers shouldn't worry that mainstream publications get the primo stuff either. Blogs are "a value-added proposition," Malik said. "I used to print out articles, stick them in a file and review them later. Now I just blog it. It's a repository for my thought process."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66251,00.html


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From July

P2P Company Not Going Anywhere
Michelle Delio

It seems logical that the headquarters of a file-sharing network would be located offshore, far from the reach of the long legal arm of the Recording Industry Association of America or Republican Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch.

Hatch's latest foray into file sharing, the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560), backed by the RIAA, would hold liable anyone who "intentionally aids, abets or induces'' others to violate copyright laws. The penalties for copyright infringement can be up to $30,000 per infringement, and up to $150,000 per instance of willful infringement.

Major technology companies such as Sun, Intel and Google have released or signed statements saying that the broad wording of the bill could lead to litigation aimed at every company that produces consumer devices devoted to any type of digital file access or storage.

But Jed McCaleb, founder and CTO of file-sharing network eDonkey, and Sam Yagan, president of the company, don't have to wonder whether the Hatch bill will affect their business. They already know that if SB2560 passes they'll be one of the first against the wall.

Still, they plan to continue to be very public about the location of their New York City office -- on 14th Street between Fifth and Sixth, just west of the famed Union Square Greenmarket, in a brightly painted room that looks a whole lot like the nursery of a particularly geeky toddler.

Yagan and McCaleb said they do worry about lawsuits, but they try to stay focused on getting their message out to content owners instead of fretting that the copyright police might show up for coffee some morning.

"We thought about incorporating offshore, and many attorneys tell us that we made a huge mistake not doing so," said Yagan. "But we look at it differently. Going offshore would have given the impression that we had something to hide. We hope that our status as a New York company sends a strong signal that we see ourselves as a legitimate, tax-paying software company, a technology company that the entertainment industry can do business with."

EDonkey currently averages approximately 2 million concurrent users, about 10 percent fewer than front-runner Kazaa.

"I think P2P networks will continue to expand," said McCaleb. "They are very useful tools, and it is obvious that people want to use them. I believe and hope that the recording and movie industry will come around to see what great potential lies in P2P networks and will start using them to their advantage rather than fighting against them."

Yagan points out that currently P2P users don't have the option of paying for content, even if they were inclined to, and said that it seems obvious that such an option should be provided, since legislation may change but won't stop the development and use of P2P systems.

"I don't know of a single precedent in which legislation or litigation stopped technological development," said Yagan. "Let's say, though, that the labels shut down the major peer-to-peer networks. Would P2P go away? Not at all. The networks would continue to operate even if the companies themselves go out of business. It's like if you put Xerox out of business, its copy machines will still work.

"Then what will happen is networks will spring up in jurisdictions that don't recognize U.S. laws or judgments. My favorite example is Earthstation 5. Here's an excerpt from its website:

"'Please take notice: EarthstationV Ltd., a Palestinian corporation, does not accept any legal process via e-mail, nor will we accept any attachments via e-mail. For service of process, you must serve our legal department located at our offices in the Jenin refugee camp, Jenin, Palestine.'

"Whether P2P networks can offer paid downloads is exclusively up to the major record labels and movie studios who would need to issue us the license to do so," Yagan continued. "What I do know, though, is that unlike Earthstation 5, we want to do business with the entertainment industry. The execs in L.A. might not like the prospects of working with me, but I've got to be better than the guys in Jenin."

EDonkey's software was written by McCaleb, who was and is captivated by the "interesting technical problems" specific to P2P systems. The first version was released in September 2000.

McCaleb is currently in the process of developing a new application called "kdrive," which will provide a way to securely share files and chat with friends and colleagues. McCaleb said it's an attempt to make a "secure virtual global hard drive," and though kdrive is still in early beta form, he's very excited about its potential.

"We're not really in this for the profits or because we're P2P zealots," Yagan said. "We're in this because P2P is the future of digital media distribution and we want to be a part of it. It's like when Fred Smith founded FedEx and bought his first plane -- he saw the future and an opportunity to help transform an industry."

Of course, Fred Smith didn't have anti-FedEx legislation and litigation to contend with. Yager and McCaleb, members of P2P United, a lobbying group that represents peer-to-peer software companies, said the entertainment industry outspends P2P United 300-to-1 in lobbying efforts, according to their best estimate.

"Through P2P United I've gotten an up-close look at how the legislative process works, and I have to say, it's a lot like the proverbial sausage factory -- it's a really ugly process," said McCaleb.

"Orrin Hatch's Induce Act proposed upending a century of copyright law without holding a single hearing. Not a single hearing -- one has to ask why not. Then there's the Pirate Act. The Pirate Act would direct John Ashcroft (who must have something better to do) to prosecute individuals who violate copyright law. And any judgments Ashcroft would win against U.S. citizens would go directly to the record labels -- the government would not even be reimbursed for its expenses.

"Think about it: The government would spend money prosecuting its own citizens and then send big checks to the entertainment industry. Where's the outrage?"
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64233,00.html


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Genome Model Applied to Software
Danny O'Brien

What does uncovering the secret language of DNA have in common with reverse-engineering Microsoft software?

Quite a lot, according to Marshall Beddoe, a security analyst who is turning to algorithms used in bioinformatics research to understand the arcane mysteries of closed, proprietary software.

Beddoe explained his methodology in a presentation at ToorCon, last week's San Diego security and hacker conference, showing how biologists' work can make the often tedious task of reverse- engineering network software a little simpler. In his presentation, Beddoe noted that over the last 30 years, biologists have developed an impressive battery of algorithms to spot commonalities between samples of DNA.

"It suddenly became very obvious to me I could use the algorithms used in genomics in protocol analysis," said Beddoe. "So obvious, that I've been having real problems explaining to other engineers how it works."

Beddoe calls his approach "Protocol Informatics."

For years, reverse engineers have struggled to understand the arcane mysteries of proprietary software from the only clues they had: the way the code communicates over open networks. Groups like the open-source Samba project, whose code lets Unix systems interoperate with Windows file servers, have spent hundreds of volunteer hours laboriously probing and analyzing data packets emitted by Microsoft's software.

Reverse-engineering these protocols generally consists of looking through dozens of separate computer conversations, scouring patterns that repeat themselves and working out what those sequences might mean.

The trick, according to Beddoe, is to make the right connections between the terminology of genetics and protocol analysis. Much of bioinformatics is devoted to finding DNA sequences separated by long gaps of unknown data, then a continuation of a known sequence. Since much of DNA is filled with repeating, seemingly irrelevant noise, eliminating these gaps is a common problem in genomics.

The same is true in protocol reverse-engineering. To researchers like Beddoe, network conversations are full of "junk" -- usually the actual data being sent -- which interferes with the analysis of the occasional command sequence that controls what to do with that junk. Beddoe dug up some of the oldest algorithms in the bioinformatics' armory, and used them to eliminate junk data among patterns of repeated commands.

Geneticists have also spent many years analyzing the rate of mutation between different DNA samples. Given two pieces of DNA, biologists have devised complex algorithms to discover whether they're descended from the same ancestors. The method works by comparing the genetic differences with the known mutation rates of certain DNA components.

Beddoe applied the same principles to his mutating network conversations. He notes, for example, that ASCII text is much more likely to "mutate" into other text than it is to mutate into something else. By feeding in probabilities about text instead of DNA nucleotides, Beddoe discovered that he could more easily spot related fields in network exchanges.

The genetics algorithms told him that some chunks of data were close relations; in fact, they were bits of the network protocol that were performing similar actions.

Geneticists have also had a head start in visualizing unimaginable heaps of data. Beddoe took the equations used by geneticists to display a species' family tree and created a family tree of his analyzed protocols. The result: a phylogenetic tree of Microsoft's SMB protocol, clumping interesting fragments together for further investigation.

Beddoe isn't the only one in the computer security world casting an envious eye over the bioinformatics sector's research. Dan Kaminsky, senior security consultant for Avaya, said he has been investigating using genomic pattern analysis for identifying and clustering "mutant" machines on a corporate network: PCs whose variation from the company's standard installation might make them vulnerable to compromise.

Kaminsky thinks this is only the beginning for the spread of bioinformatics ideas into other fields.

"Generating an ordered, hierarchal breakdown of interrelationships from huge piles of information is a problem that crops up everywhere. I'm not surprised to see bioinformatics solutions finally being applied to the rest of our poorly understood, oversized networks."

On the biology end, Terry Gaasterland, associate professor of computational genomics at Rockefeller University, agrees that there's a wide field of uses for the algorithms her discipline has developed -- and tricks to be learned by biologists from other fields, too.

"The problem of decoding the language of networks and the problem of finding signals in DNA are really two related instances of machine learning problems. We're almost bound to discover universal principles of information communication by investigating both," she said.

For the time being, though, Beddoe and others have one more decoding problem to battle: understanding the jargon of another field's documentation.

Justin Mason, the creator of SpamAssassin, is investigating bioinformatics approaches to spam identification. He said that to outsiders, the genomics world can seem more closed than the world of network engineers.

"A lot of the interesting research takes place in expensive journals and seminars that we can't really get hold of. It's a bit of a difference from the free exchange you get between coders online," he said.

Beddoe himself deduced much of the algorithms he used from downloading PowerPoint slides from biologists' websites.

Gaasterland disagreed with Mason's assessment and said many bioinformatic papers become freely available six months after publication. She added that the publication of Beddoe's work might provide him with more assistance from the bioinformatics community.

That'll come as a relief to Beddoe, who until now assumed that biologists wouldn't pay much heed to his project.

"They're working on uncovering the mysteries of life itself; we're just hacking network protocols," he said. "Which sounds more important to you?"
http://www.wired.com/news/infostruct...,65191,00.html


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The Coming DVD Format War
Michel Marriott

JORDAN GREENHALL sat before a flat-panel television that glowed with remarkably crisp, bright images, offering it as evidence that he could put a full-length movie in high-definition quality on a standard DVD, with room to spare.

Neat trick.

So neat, in fact, that it would seem to upstage the efforts of the biggest consumer electronics companies and Hollywood studios, which are choosing sides in a battle between two high-definition DVD formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD. Those formats, expected to reach North America late this year, will require ultra-high-capacity DVD's and a new class of expensive players.

The advent of Blu-ray and HD DVD may give rise to a format war reminiscent of the Betamax-VHS contest in the early days of videocassette recorders. At stake are potentially billions of dollars in hardware and discs as the demand for high-definition content grows.

In the midst of the battle, for which the two sides mounted elaborate floor displays this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Mr. Greenhall is asking, Why wait for the giants to sort it all out? There's a little guy, he said, with a high-definition solution right now: his own company's DivX 6 software.

"We're just going straight to market," said Mr. Greenhall, the 33-year-old co-founder and chief executive of DivXNetworks. "It's cheap. It's great, and it's going to be in the DVD players."

The first DivX-capable DVD player is the $250 Avel LinkPlayer 2 by I-O Data. Mr. Greenhall and his DivX team, based in San Diego, said the company hopes to see DivX high-definition players for as little as $100 by late fall. ( Toshiba, in contrast, recently announced an HD DVD player to be brought market late this year for about $1,000.)

In short, Mr. Greenhall said, he wants high-definition DivX to be to video what the MP3 audio format was to music: a "grass-roots movement that breaks above ground." But if you're thinking about joining the movement, there is a major vulnerability: no major studio is marching along. That means those buying DivX players, for now at least, will lack prerecorded high-definition discs - like major Hollywood movies - to play in them.

All the talk of high-definition DVD's, no matter which approach ultimately prevails, may seem premature in a marketplace saturated with standard-definition DVD's. According to industry analysts, most consumers indicate that they are satisfied with the picture and audio quality of standard DVD's, and they are growing accustomed to finding the players an inexpensive commodity, priced as low as $40.

Nonetheless, as television picture quality evolves with high definition, many consumer electronics makers expect substantial demand for DVD's and players that can use that quality to advantage.

Consider, for example, the consumer who just spent thousands of dollars for the latest big-screen high-definition television, only to find that a Bon Jovi concert on a high- definition cable television service looks vastly better than a standard DVD of Zhang Yimou's color-drenched "Hero."

Besides, said Andy Parsons, senior vice president for advanced technology at Pioneer Electronics, a major backer of Blu-ray technology, consumers are already outgrowing traditional DVD's, which were first introduced in 1996.

"If you look at most of the 'A' titles coming out now - 'Spider-Man 2,' these sorts of things - they're two discs," Mr. Parsons said. "There's one for the movie and there is usually one for the bonus features."

Mr. Parsons said next-generation DVD's must offer much more storage than today's five to nine gigabytes. HD DVD, backed primarily by Toshiba, NEC and a number of studios - including Paramount Home Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema - is capable of storing 15 gigabytes of data on a single- layer disc. A Blu-ray DVD can store up to 25 gigabytes on a single layer and 50 gigabytes on a dual-layer disc. Both formats use blue lasers rather than the regular red one.

"It would be, I think, foolish to limit ourselves in terms of capacity unnecessarily," Mr. Parsons said. "Why not do the very best we can do as far as today's technology?"

Backers of HD DVD say making discs in their format will be much less difficult and expensive than Blu-ray DVD's, which are supported by Sony, Samsung, Hewlett- Packard, Panasonic, LG Electronics, Sharp, Mitsubishi, Dell, Walt Disney Pictures and Television, 20th Century Fox and others.

For Mr. Greenhall of DivXNetworks, much of the debate between Blu-ray and HD DVD misses the immediate point.

"The essence is that DivX makes you realize that high definition and blue laser are not linked at the hip," he said. "Blue laser means lots of storage; high definition means good quality. With DivX you don't need lots of storage to get quality."

Blu-ray and HD DVD partisans would disagree. In all these approaches, a significant factor is the way the video file is compressed to make it fit on a disc. While DivX can compress video to a greater degree - hence its use of conventional DVD's - it makes compromises in picture quality, its rivals say.

Mr. Greenhall said his company was pursuing an aggressive DivX certification program to help more DivX-capable players get to market this year. It has also received an investment from Samsung.

But, he added, he has no illusions. While DivXNetworks says that more than 160 million people worldwide have downloaded and used its video-compression software since the company was founded in 2000, the lack of studio support is a major handicap. "Very frankly," he conceded, "the studios are tough to crack on the high-definition front. They're kind of standing away."

Meanwhile, he said, DivX is "concentrating on all the other content in the universe," notably independent movies. He also noted that consumers with high-performance personal computers could record high-definition television broadcasts in DivX 6, then burn the broadcasts onto blank DVD's. High-definition home movies can also be burned onto DVD's using DivX, available as a free download at www.divx.com.

"They have begun to build a significant presence among PC users," P. J. McNealy, an analyst for American Technology Research, said of DivX. "They have become a nice alternative to HD DVD and Blu-ray, and more readily available. But the question is, can they get significant content from the major studios and television networks?"

The reputation of DivX (which is unrelated to a defunct video-rental format of the same name) has also suffered because of its early use for pirating. And after having their content on commercial DVD's illegally copied and distributed, studios have said they are less willing to take additional risks with next-generation DVD's.

So far, the studios have entrusted DivXNetworks with a few high-definition movie trailers, available from the DivX site; they can be played on a PC if a free DivX software player is downloaded and installed.

Mr. Greenhall said he was aware of whispers of the use of DivX as a piracy tool, but said it would take time to distance DivX from that image. "Dastardly deeds were done," he said, adding that such incidents happened long ago. "We've been getting away from that image for almost five years now."

He said DivX 6 provides strong digital-rights-management safeguards. He attributes the studios' caution to DivX's late entry into standards talks that gave way to the adoption of the Blu-ray and HD DVD technologies. Blu-ray players are being sold in Asia.

"We were very late to the game," Mr. Greenhall said of DivXNetworks. "A lot was going on before we matured enough to know what was going on in this world. They were in the endgame by the time we were ready."

Nonetheless, he said, as DivX high definition becomes more available in players there will be more content, and more content will help usher in more DivX-capable players. "Ten million people later," he said, pausing, the studios will have little choice but to take DivX seriously.

But Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at the NPD Group, a research firm, said there was probably no rush to adopt any of the formats. For consumers to play high- definition DVD's, they need high-definition-capable televisions.

"The installed base right now is quite small, certainly under 10 percent of the population," Mr. Rubin said. "Consumer electronics makers probably don't want to confuse the marketplace, which is already confused enough."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/20/te...ts/20blue.html


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Picture Tube TV's Try a Slimmer Strategy
Eric A. Taub

STANDARD picture-tube TV's, the kind that the vast majority of Americans still buy, have long been video non grata at the Consumer Electronics Show. Seen as yesterday's technology, they have been relegated to the back room of the show, the industry's biggest gadget festival, where flat-panel liquid-crystal-display and plasma sets take center stage.

But at this year's show in Las Vegas, picture tubes made a small comeback in thinner televisions designed to appeal to Americans' penchant for all things slim.

Over the next year, new high-definition picture-tube televisions from LG Electronics, RCA and Samsung that are about two-thirds as deep as today's picture-tube sets will go on the market. Those companies expect the new sets to be successful for one reason: price. While many industry observers predict the imminent demise of picture-tube televisions (also known as cathode-ray-tube TV's) in favor of L.C.D. and plasma models, the higher cost of flat TV's means that there may be years of life left for the venerable tube set.

While a 30-inch L.C.D. television can cost $3,000, a slim-tube model the same size will be $1,000. Those who lust after a flat-panel TV may also like the new tube versions because they will mimic the look of plasma and L.C.D. sets, with aluminum or black bezels surrounding the screen.

"It's the aspiration to a flat screen that's the driving force behind these new TV's," said Dave Arland, vice president of Thomson, the company that owns the RCA brand. "This is affordable HDTV."

Next year, the company plans to introduce two thinner-tube televisions in 26- and 30-inch models. This year, Thomson Displays, a subsidiary that makes tubes for other manufacturers, will offer the industry thinner-tube televisions in 29-, 30- and 32-inch screens.

In addition to RCA, Samsung will market three thinner SlimFit tube models this year in 26-, 27- and 30-inch sizes. And LG Electronics will introduce a 30-inch slim-tube set in August.

All models have similar depth advantages. For example, including the cabinet, Samsung's new 30-inch SlimFit model will be 16 inches deep, compared with 24 inches for its standard-tube set. (The actual tube depth has shrunk to just over 14 inches from 19.5 inches.)

That may still seem considerably deeper than an L.C.D. or plasma flat panel at that size, but the effective difference is much less to most people. While consumers love the idea of mounting a flat TV on a wall, few actually do so. Most prop the set on a shelf, using a 12-inch deep stand to hold it.

The slimmer picture-tube sets still weigh substantially more than their flat-panel counterparts. Samsung's 30-inch C.R.T. weighs 122 pounds, while the slightly larger 32-inch wide screen L.C.D. model weighs 50.

The new slim-tube TV's use a modified version of tube technology to reduce depth. To create an image with a cathode ray tube, a filament at the back narrow end of a vacuum tube is heated, which causes electrons to be emitted. A positively charged anode pulls the electrons through the thin tube. Wire coils along the tube create electromagnetic fields; by varying the charge along the field, electrons are steered out of the narrow part of the tube and then to the screen, where they excite phosphors to create the image.

To make the tubes shallower, new technologies were needed to increase the maximum deflection angle of the electrons from the standard 110 degrees to 125 degrees, allowing them to reach the farthest corners of the screen.

Techniques were also developed to ensure that all parts of the image were of uniform brightness and sharpness.

The result, executives from the three companies say, is an image that is as bright and sharp as, and possesses the same contrast levels as a standard-tube TV.

In fact, many people in the television industry acknowledge that the standard-definition image quality produced by a picture tube remains superior to the newer flat panels.

Unlike L.C.D. televisions, tube sets do not suffer from image lag, the smearing of rapidly moving images on the screen. Nor are they prone to image burn-in, as has plagued some plasma screens. "Video purists love a good cathode-ray-tube TV," said Jim Sanduski, vice president of marketing for Samsung's visual display products group.

Picture-tube TV's can also reproduce a wider range of colors than L.C.D. sets. And when transmitting poor quality images, tube televisions are more forgiving. Standard- definition television, which still makes up the bulk of television broadcasts, often looks worse on costly digital L.C.D. and plasma flat-panel televisions. Circuitry in these TV's attempts to improve the image quality by doubling the scanning lines. But if the image has a lot of imperfections, it doubles those as well.

"In today's environment, a C.R.T. television is the best all-around product," said Mr. Arland of RCA.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/20/te...ts/20tube.html


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ILN News Letter


Appellate CT Upholds Webcasting License Rates

The U.S. Court of Appeals for DC ruled that last week to maintain copyright license rates for webcasters. The RIAA had argued that the rates set in 2002 were too low and based on faulty market data. Decision at http://caselaw.findlaw.com/data2/circs/DC/021244A.pdf


National Israeli Poet's Work Enters Public Domain

Haaretz runs an interesting story on the entry into the public domain of the work of Haim Nahman Bialik, a national Israeli poet. A volunteer group has been working to upload all of Bialik's work on the Internet. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/527933.html


French Court Refuses To Disconnect P2P USERS

A French court has dismissed arguments to shut down Internet access for P2P users. The court ruled that an expedited process could not be used, noting that the law did not allow the courts to cancel a service contract between an ISP and its customer. <http://soufron.free.fr/soufron-spip/article.php3?id_article=78>


Korea Launches New Copyright Law

Korea's Culture and Tourism Ministry has launched a new copyright law that gives singers, instrumentalists, and record producers greater authority over their work. Users who upload or download music files via the Internet without the consent of the copyright holders will be found in violation of this law and be required to pay a fine of W50 million, roughly US$48,000, or serve a maximum prison term of up to five years.
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/ht...501180011.html


Two Americans On Trial In China For Selling Infringing DVDS

Two US citizens accused of selling almost $1 million worth of illegal movies online are on trial with two alleged Chinese accomplices, in China. News reports said each could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/10673807.htm


New Study Mutes Online Music Stores

A new study by market research firm Shelley Taylor & Associates blasts music stores for confusing navigation and locking users into proprietary formats and music players. The study gave British retailer HMV the lowest marks among online music stores for being difficult to access, providing scant artist information, and confusing navigation.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5540135.html


Court Rules Pirating Directv Signals Violates DMCA

BNA'S Electronic Commerce & Law Report reports that a federal court in Illinois has ruled that a defendant's online boasting about his signal theft coupled with other telltale signs of pirate tradecraft are sufficient to establish an unlawful "circumvention" of DirecTV's encryption technology. The court concluded that although the copyrights to DirecTV programs are owned by third parties, the works are nonetheless "protected" works, and unauthorized access to them violate DirecTV's DMCA rights. Case name is DirecTV v. Borow (03-cv-2581). Decision at http://www.ilnd.uscourts.gov/RACER2/index.html Article at <http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/eip.nsf/is/a0b0g4q9d6> For a free trial to source of this story, visit http://www.bna.com/products/ip/eplr.htm


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Silly Server

Soulseek Follies

System Message
[server]: You have been banned for 30 minutes. This is usually the results of doing too many operations at once. Do not flood chat rooms or private chat with many messages. Do not repeat the same text several times in a row. Do not repeat quickly a search. Do not connect and disconnect quickly. Do not connect many clients at once from the same IP. This list is by no mean exhaustive. You will be able to reconnect to the service in 30 minutes. (Repeated)

Response
[member] WTF are you talking about? I’m not in chat, I’m not IM’ing, I’m not flooding, I’m not searching. I wasn't even here; I just got back from dinner. Besides UPLOADING (contributing to your network), I wasn’t doing anything at all you nimrods.

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Music Like Water

People should pay for their music the way they pay for gas or electricity.
David Kusek

More people are consuming music today than ever before, yet very few of them are paying for it. The music recording industry blames file sharing for a downturn in CD sales and, with the publishing companies, has tried its best to litigate this behavior out of existence, rather than try to monetize the conduct of music fans. These efforts are fingers in a dike that is about to burst. Digital media are interactive, and people want music that they can burn to CDs, share and use as they wish. The music industry should instead look at turning this consumer phenomenon into a steady stream of cash--lots of it.

The industry ought to establish a "music utility" approach to the distribution and marketing of interactive digital music, modeled after the water, gas and electricity utility systems. It should be done voluntarily to work best for all parties, or it may eventually be legislated through a compulsory license provision.

Under a plan colleague Gerd Leonhard and I propose, con-sumers would pay a flat music licensing fee of $3 to $5 a month as part of a subscription to an Internet service provider, cellular network, digital cable service wireless carrier or other digital network provider. This fee would let people download and listen to as much music as they care to, from a vast library of files available across the networks.

These fees would result in a huge river of money. With approximately 200 million people connected to a digital network in the U.S., the potential annual revenue stream for a music utility model could be somewhere between $7 billion and $12 billion for the basic service. That is already comparable in size to the existing U.S. recorded music market, which in 2003 was $12 billion at retail, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. This basic service would be augmented with various opportunities, including packages of premium content, live concerts, new releases, artist channels, custom compilations and more. The revenue potential of these premium sources is enormous, too.

How would this money be divvied up? We propose that the industry voluntarily establish a "music utility license" for the interactive use of digital music. This license would compensate all rights holders, including the record labels and artists (for the master recording) as well as publishers and composers (for the underlying composition), with the license fee to be split in half between the owners of the sound recording and the owners of the composition, after deducting a percentage for the digital network providers. This license would be available to anyone willing to implement its terms. The digital network companies would be required to track and report which music had been used, by employing existing digital identification and tracking technologies.

There is already precedence for such a flat-fee system in cable television and in the utility-like models of public broadcasting in Europe. Streaming digital music is already provided in basic cable plans. Cable television itself at first resisted this model, but its economics eventually led to a larger market, providing more consumer choice and more revenue streams overall. Old media almost never die. Cable television did not replace broadcast television; instead, it expanded the market dramatically, by letting video flow like water into new revenue streams--instead of down the drain.

Certainly a music utility would be a radical and complex undertaking, and there are many important details to negotiate, such as the exact nature of the license, how the funds would be administered, the specific tracking method, what collection of technologies would be employed and others. Yet there are inventors and technologists outside the mainstream music business hard at work trying to figure out how to make this happen. It's time for the main players in the music business today, namely the large record publishers, to cooperate with the inventors and jointly create a future for music where the money really flows and the global market for music can grow from $32 billion to as much as $100 billion.
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/fre.../0131/042.html


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Peer-To-Peer Nets 'Here To Stay'
Jo Twist

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are here to stay, and are on the verge of being exploited by commercial media firms, says a panel of industry experts.

Once several high-profile legal cases against file-sharers are resolved this year, firms will be very keen to try and make money from P2P technology.

The expert panel probed the future of P2P at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier in January.

The first convictions for P2P piracy were handed out in the US in January.

William Trowbridge and Michael Chicoine pleaded guilty to charges that they infringed copyright by illegally sharing music, movies and software.

Since the first successful file-sharing network Napster was forced to close down, the entertainment industry has been nervous and critical of P2P technology, blaming it for falling sales and piracy.

But that is going to change very soon, according to the panel.

Control and cash

The music and film industries have started some big legal cases against owners of legitimate P2P networks - which are not illegal in themselves - and of individuals accused of distributing pirated content over networks.

But they have slowly realised that P2P is a good way to distribute content, said Travis Kalanick, founder and chairman of P2P network Red Swoosh, and soon they are all going to want a slice of it.

They are just waiting to come up with "business models" that work for them, which includes digital rights management and copy-protection standards.

But, until the legal actions are resolved, experimentation with P2P cannot not happen, said Michael Weiss, president of StreamCast Networks.

Remembering the furore around VCRs when they first came out, Mr Weiss said: "Old media always tries to stop new media.

"When they can't stop it, they try to control it. Then they figure out how to make money and they always make a lot of money."

Once the courts decided that the VCR in itself was not an illegal technology, the film studios turned it into an extremely lucrative business.

In August 2004, the San Francisco-based US Court of Appeals ruled in favour of Grokster and StreamCast, two file-sharing networks.

The court said they were essentially in the same position that Sony was in the 1980s VCR battle, and said that the networks themselves could not be deemed as illegal.

Legal too

P2P networks usually do not rely on dedicated servers for the transfer of files.

Instead it uses direct connections between computers - or clients. There are now many different types of P2P systems than work in different ways.

P2P nets can be used to share any kind of file, like photos, free software, licensed music and any other digital content.

The BBC has already decided to embrace the technology.

It aims to offer most of its own programmes for download this year and it will use P2P technology to distribute them.

The files would be locked seven days after a programme aired making rights management easier to control.

But the technology is still demonised and misunderstood by many.

The global entertainment industry says more than 2.6 billion copyrighted music files are downloaded every month, and about half a million films are downloaded a day.

Legal music download services, like Apple iTunes, Napster, have rushed into the music marketplace to try and lure file-sharers away from free content.

Sales of legally-downloaded songs grew tenfold in 2004, with 200 million tracks bought online in the US and Europe in 12 months, the IFPI reported this week.

But such download services are very different from P2P networks, not least because of the financial aspect.

Creating their own

There are several money-spinning models that could turn P2P into a golden egg for commercial entertainment companies.

Paid-for-pass-along, in which firms receive money each time a file is shared, along with various DRM solutions and advertiser-based options are all being considered.

"We see there are going to be different models for commoditising P2P," said Marc Morgenstern, vice president of anti-piracy firm Overpeer.

"Consumers are hungry for it and we will discover new models together," agreed Mr Morgenstern.

But many net users will continue to ignore the entertainment industry's potential controlling grip on content and P2P technology by continuing to use it for their own creations.

Unsigned bands, for example, use P2P networks to distribute their music effectively, which also draws the attention of record companies looking for new artists to sign.

"Increasingly, what you are seeing on P2P is consumer-created content," said Derek Broes, from Microsoft.

"They will probably pay an increasing role in helping P2P spread," he said.

Looking into P2P's future, file sharing is just the beginning for P2P networks, as far as Mr Broes is concerned.

"Once some of these issues are resolved, you are going to see aggressive movement to protect content, but also in ways that are unimaginable now," he said.

"File-sharing is the tip of the iceberg."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4191581.stm


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Homerun
Jack

A great modern pleasure is the technical ease in which artists can commit their ideas to form and share them with the world. That it changes everything in the creator-corporation equation and obviates 100 years of Intellectual Policy laws is beyond dispute. It's truly a wonderful thing. One aspect that's inspired me is the extent people will go when expressing themselves, and the work and passion they’ll apply, even if the object of their affections is a company or product. Enjoyment can be found in many ways, from a deep sense of personal satisfaction when expressing oneself, to the sheer pleasure of doing something well.

Here’s a paean to a product: the creator is 36-year-old schoolteacher George Masters and the merchandise an Apple iPod. It’s a homemade commercial, done in Masters’ spare time and the first of its kind that I’m aware of. In spite of its pedigree or perhaps because of it it’s brilliantly done and as good - or better - than what's on TV now. If I’d first seen it without knowing its history, I would have accepted it completely, so thoroughly does it capture the Apple zeitgeist.

So the next time you’re cornered by IP trolls posting negative nonsense like "We have to stop program swapping and the commercial-blocking features of DVR’s in order to save TV", tell ‘em to take it someplace else. If the products are good enough to deserve commercials we’ll make our own, and share them. Then show them this, George’s out of the park debut.

















Until next week,

- js.














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