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Old 28-10-09, 07:40 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 31st, '09

Since 2002










































"Peer-to-peer is yesterday's Internet story." – Dave Caputo


"Algorithmic creativity demonstrates our understanding of how we create." – David Cope


"We have successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android. Secure, anonymous [cell phone] access to the web is now a reality." – Nathan Freitas






































QNA

Dear Jack:

Help! I don't trust the PirateBay it (too much press, is probably compromised). isohunt.com is where I go to collect malicious activeX and rootkit drivers for work.

Is there a decent tracker site that has a decent selection, but without the crowds that inevitably ruin a site? Demonoid shut down two weeks after I finally got in - I had a 6 to 1 ratio going (fark).




Dear Fark,

Don’t despair. There are a couple of things that come to mind:

Torrentz.com - search aggregation for bit torrent.

Waffles.fm - excellent for music and apps. Try to get an invite and keep a +1 ratio.

Mininova. Clean but read the comments before downloading. Has almost everything and responds to takedown notices. Neat trick.

It's a changing world for P2P these days - but it always is so that just means business as usual. Bit torrent’s had such an extended run users may have gotten a little soft.

It remains to be seen if things are moving back to that post-Napster period where everything was diffuse and swappers needed three apps just to get one album. Indications are it’s true. Something will happen however. It always does. In the meantime there are private WASTE meshes that have been running silently for years. Worth considering.

Whatever you do, don't buy anything.

Good god man, think of the children.










Enjoy,

Jack












October 31st, 2009






Net Pirates to be 'Disconnected'

People who persistently download illegal content will be cut off from the net, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has announced.

He confirmed that it would become government policy, following months of speculation.

It means persistent pirates will be sent two warning letters before facing disconnection from the network.

ISP TalkTalk said the plans were "ill-conceived" and said it was prepared to challenge measures "in the courts".

"What is being proposed is wrong in principle and won't work in practice," the firm said.

"In the event we are instructed to impose extra judicial technical measures we will challenge the instruction in the courts."

Lord Mandelson said that cutting off internet connections would be a "last resort".

Any legislation on the issue is likely to come into affect in the spring of next year.

Initially Ofcom will monitor whether file-sharing is going down with the disconnection policy not brought into force until at least April 2011.

The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills emphasised that there would be a "toolkit" of technical measures employed to encourage illegal file-sharers to desist.

This would include squeezing their bandwidth and imposing download caps.

"I have no expectation of mass suspensions. People will receive two notifications and if it reaches the point [of cutting them off] they will have the opportunity to appeal," Lord Mandelson told the audience at the C&binet Forum, a talking shop set up by government to debate the issues facing the creative industries.

The pay-off for tough penalties against persistent file-sharers would be a more relaxed copyright regime, Lord Mandelson said.

The details of it would need to be hammered out at European level but it would take account of the use of copyright material "at home and between friends", he said.

It would mean that, for example, someone who has bought a CD would be able to copy it to their iPod or share it with family members without acting unlawfully.

Lord Mandelson praised the UK's creative industries, which are worth around £16bn and employs 2 million people.

But it has been eroded in recent years, he said, by new ways of accessing content.

"I was shocked to learn that only one in 20 music tracks in the UK is downloaded legally. We cannot sit back and do nothing," said Lord Mandelson.

The fact that young people now expect to download content for free was "morally as well as economically unsustainable," he added.

Mere conduits

But he emphasised that "legislation and enforcement can only ever be part of the solution".

The long-term answer was for the industry to educate users and to offer new and cheaper ways to download content, he said. In addition, new copyright laws were needed to lift restrictions on how people moved content on to the various different devices that they owned.

In France the government has just approved a so-called three strikes policy.

Under its system, those identified as illegally downloading content would initially be sent warning letters and, if they failed to comply, could be removed from the network for up to a year.

UK internet service providers have argued that it is not their job to police the network, claiming that there are "mere conduits" of content.

They also say that they should not have to bear the brunt of the costs.

In his speech, Lord Mandelson said that the costs of enforcing the policy would be "shared between ISPs and content providers".

The Internet Service Providers' Association thinks rightsholders should shoulder the burden for all costs, including the reimbursement of ISPs.

"This approach is consistent with the principle of beneficiary pays and would serve to incentivise rightsholders to develop new business models and ensure an effective and efficient use of notifications and targeted legal action," read a statement from ISPA.

ISP TalkTalk said that it would "continue to resist any attempts to make it impose technical measures on its customers".

It has set up a campaign called Don't Disconnect Us to lobby against the plans.

it said that it believed the "three-strikes" rule would lead to "wrongful accusations".

"The unintended consequence of Lord Mandelson's plan will be to encourage more wi-fi and PC hi-jacking and expose more innocent people to being penalised."

The firm recently demonstrated how someone could hi-jack unsecured wi-fi connections to download music illegally.

Dark net

The Open Rights Group, a digital rights lobby organisation, has long been opposed to a disconnection policy.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, is disappointed that the UK government is determined to introduce such legislation.

"Even MI5 disagree with Mr Mandelson - they are convinced we will see a rise of a 'Dark Net' of infringers. Nobody at C&binet from an online music service, as opposed to an old media company, thought that peer-to-peer [file-sharing] was a threat to their businesses.

"Yet Mandelson seems determined to push forward with his plans for 'three strikes' - threatening to punish people extremely harshly, threatening their education, businesses and livelihoods for a relatively minor financial misdemeanour," he said.

There has been increasing pressure from the music industry to get tough on pirates.

Lily Allen has been spearheading a campaign against music piracy, with high-profile stars including Gary Barlow and James Blunt behind her.

Music industry group BPI welcomed the move.

"The measures confirmed today by government are a proportionate way of encouraging illegal file-sharers to embrace the new services, and will drive further innovation that will benefit online consumers," said Geoff Taylor, BPI chief executive.

But not all content providers agree. Fast-growing music streaming service we7 thinks the government has missed the point.

"Piracy is a reaction to an unsustainable situation, where reasonable, legitimate access to music has struggled to match demand," said chief executive Steve Purdham.

"A variety of reasonable and sustainable models for providing music to consumers is key to ending rampant piracy. This is the approach that should be taken by the government rather than criminalising consumers and driving pirates further into the undergrowth," he added.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...gy/8328820.stm





UK Will Urge EC To Legalise Mashups, Format-Shifting, Content Sharing

Lord Mandelson’s three-strikes proposal may have gobbled all the headlines. But a parallel package published Wednesday, aimed at liberalising copyright, may prove just as important for some creators…

© The Way Ahead, an Intellectual Property Office paper steered by junior culture minister David Lammy MP, says: “Education and enforcement remain important, but aren’t the whole story ... There is no doubt that overall simplification of the copyright system would be beneficial.”

Broadly, the report concedes: “The digital environment is confusing.” So what is it proposing… ?

—“The copyright system cannot be expected to command public support unless consumers can use works in the ways they want, such as sharing photos with friends on the web. This means rights holders offering works with broader terms of use.”

—It acknowledges that individuals resent restrictions on personal, non-commercial uses of material, and advocates an EU-level distinction between commercial and non-commercial copying...

—That could include legalising more outright copying, the creation of sound/image mashups, format-shifting and sharing material with family and friends, the report says. But: “(This) could impact on revenues for rights holders; (so) an element of fair compensation for any loss would be required” (who will pay?). And commercialising such mashups wouldn’t be allowed under these exceptions.

—In the report, the government calls also calls for a European-level copyright exception that would legitimise “pre-commercial” copying by businesses, because “easier, cheaper access to works would help to stimulate innovation based around those works”.

—The government plans to introduce collective licensing, allowing royalty collection agencies like PRS For Music to license, for example, music even if a musician has not authorised the agency to do so.

—There’s an intention to open orphan works, which currently can’t be re-used, for copying by both cultural bodies and businesses.

Broadly, the report says “the government will examine the evidence for copyright simplification” due to be recommended by a Strategic Advisory Board for IP Policy (SABIP) report due November.

It wants to “move toward a pan-European approach for copyright exceptions in the digital age”, allowing more use of copyrighted works - just one of a range of measures that must be continental because “the UK cannot act independently”.

Lammy, speaking at the C&binet creative industries gathering on Tuesday, put his ambitions full-square in European policymakers’ court.

But the report says it wants to “improve the existing copyright system rather than to devise a radically new one”.
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419...ntent-sharing/





MI5 Comes Out Against Cutting Off Internet Pirates
Patrick Foster

The police and intelligence services are calling on the Government to drop plans to disconnect persistent internet pirates because they fear that this would make it harder to track criminals online.

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, has vowed to use the Government’s forthcoming Digital Economy Bill to introduce new measures to fight illegal file-sharing of music and films. He has also proposed that persistent pirates should have their internet connections suspended temporarily.

But The Times understands that both the security services and police are concerned about the plans, believing that threatening to cut off pirates will increase the likelihood that they will escape detection by turning to encryption.

Law enforcement groups, which include the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and the Metropolitan Police’s e-crime unit, believe that more encryption will increase the costs and workload for those attempting to monitor internet traffic. One official said: “It will make prosecution harder because it increases the workload significantly.”

A source involved in drafting the Bill said that the intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, had also voiced concerns about disconnection. “The spooks hate it,” the source said. “They think it is only going to make monitoring more difficult.”

Enforcement groups are also unhappy that the Government’s change of plans has left them little time to draw up a response. Lord Mandelson’s intervention came two months after the Government’s Digital Britain report, published in June, failed to back disconnection. Instead, it proposed giving Ofcom, the media watchdog, powers to direct internet service providers to block pirate websites or “throttle” connection speeds.

It is understood that the Digital Economy Bill will specify a list of technical measures that can be deployed against illegal file-sharers, but it is not yet clear whether account suspension will be included.

The music industry, which claims that it loses £200 million a year to piracy, is desperate for the Government to adopt the suspension plans. It has mounted a lobbying effort and believes that Lord Mandelson will follow through on his proposals.

However, some industry figures believe that account suspension is a “poison pill” that will have to be jettisoned to get any measures through Parliament in what will be a tight legislative timetable before next year’s election.

Internet service providers such as BT and Carphone Warehouse have said that introducing any technical measures would increase the cost of broadband connections by about £2 a month. Consumer Focus, the watchdog, has also criticised the plans, which it said would violate customers’ rights.

A YouGov poll released yesterday suggested that the public are strongly against the proposals, with nearly 70 per cent saying that someone suspected of illegal downloading should have a right to a trial in court before restrictions on internet use were imposed. Only 16 per cent are in favour of the current plans.

The Government said that any measures would also be backed by a tribunal that would give those caught illegally sharing files the right of appeal.

The film industry, which puts its losses at more than £500 million a year, believes that slowing connections would be enough of a deterrent because of the time it would take to download large film files.

Bob Pisano, the president of the Motion Picture Association, flew to London last week to meet Lord Puttnam, the film-maker, who is expected to be a key voice in building support for the plans.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6885923.ece





Universities in Hot Water Over Students' Peer-To-Peer Sharing
Zack Whittaker

The battle against online piracy is heating up: a new artist led initiative is taking on the diplomatic and negotiation approach whereas governments and legislators are hitting down punitive policies on their citizens.

Jon Newton of p2pnet, alongside Billy Bragg, musician and director of the Featured Artists Coalition, have begun work on a2f2a.com, a campaign started to discuss how artists can cut out the middleman - such as the suicide inducing RIAA - and ensure artists are fairly remunerated.

Along with their mission statement, the efforts seem to be focused towards not only admitting there is no technological solution to the problems artists already face, but that users would be “willing to pay for music if they can be sure that the money is going to the artists whose work they enjoy.”

File sharing itself is not illegal; what is shared, exactly, could be. With BitTorrent being used to distribute emerging artists’ music on a wide and free scale, or services such as BBC iPlayer which rely on peer-to-peer technology to reduce the load on the central services - file sharing technology cannot be simply eradicated.

But universities are now suffering as a result of students taking advantage of the high speeds and the seemingly free access to all network resources. inQuire, the student led newspaper of Kent Union, of which I am an elected officer (see disclosure), reports the implications of students infringing their university’s network regulations.

Many universities are forced to withdraw access to students’ IT accounts to force them to see the IT department, to then explain to the student that what they are doing is against the law.

There are dozens of reports a year from campus to campus from organisations such as Paramount, Columbia, the RIAA and Tristar as a result of students’ copyright infringement. But because students are downloading music, films, software and other copyrighted media from their campus accommodation or the university library, those monitoring (see the video) see the originating IP address dedicated to that university. Unless the university can pin the blame on a student - which, rightfully so - then the university could be sued as a result.

The printed article stated the views of the students are:

Quote:
“…that the issue of illegal file-sharing ‘was just more propaganda’ spread by the ‘big corporations as they are scared senseless that their sown-up distribution network could be threatened’, and wanted to ‘preserve their roles as cultural gatekeepers’”.
Also this week, the European Parliament has pushed through with plans to allow governments of EU countries to cut off persistent file sharers from the web.

As I reported around this time last year, the French government was already enacting this but other member states were holding back on the plans. Now it seems that this is going to be rolled out more further afield across Europe. The unfortunately-rejected amendment was meant to protect citizens from having their Internet access automatically disconnected.

Peter Mandelson, a British cabinet member, remains adamant on tightening up the rules to ensure that those in breach of the law will be cut off. This, even though the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, agrees with not only Finland but also this lowly blogger that, “people are as entitled to Internet access as to gas, water and electricity”.

According to the BBC article:

Quote:
At network level, Internet service providers are able, if asked, to identify the particular machines from which music or other content is being illegally downloaded. But non-network piracy methods, including using instant messaging, e-mail, music blogs, Bluetooth and iPod ripping, are on the rise.

“It is likely that legislation will be too slow to catch pirates”, thinks Forrester Research analyst, Mark Mulligan.
While France’s three-strike system is now in effect, where those caught sharing copyrighted material a third time will have their Internet access disconnected for up to a year, the UK’s file sharing policy will be finalised and published before Christmas this year.

You can bet that this blogger will be sharing his thoughts as and when that happens. For the time being, would you like to share anything?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=3168





Video-On-Demand now 27% of Internet traffic: study

Peer-to-Peer Usage Falls to 20% of Total, vs. 32% In 2008
Todd Spangler

Video and audio streaming from sites such as YouTube and Hulu now accounts for about 27% of the Internet's global traffic -- up from 13% in 2008 -- while consumption by peer-to-peer applications has dropped as a percentage of the total, according to a report by network-management systems vendor Sandvine.

Peer-to-peer file sharing represented 20% of all usage on the 2009 survey of 20 Internet service providers worldwide, compared with 32% in 2008. Even though the amount of traffic consumed by P2P applications continues to grow on an absolute basis, video-on-demand applications are growing more quickly, Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo said.

"Peer-to-peer is yesterday's Internet story," Caputo said. "Every category is growing in aggregate bandwidth, but bandwidth as a percentage is undergoing a massive shift to video."

Sandvine's 2009 Internet traffic trends report is based on data from more than 20 cable, DSL and fiber-to-the-home service provider networks representing 24 million subscribers worldwide.

An Internet-usage survey Cisco Systems issued last week also found P2P traffic had declined from previous levels, although it pegged peer-to-peer at 38%.

According to the Sandvine report, the mean average usage per subscriber is around 8 Gigabytes per month, while the median is about 3 Gbytes per month. The top 1% of Internet users accounts for nearly 25% of consumption, a cohort that uses 200 times the data per month as the average user.

The Internet's peak-usage window shrank by two hours, from 6-11 p.m. in 2008 to 7-10 p.m. in 2009, in Sandvine's analysis. During that "primetime" period, the usage profile among all users was roughly equivalent, whereas the heaviest users (sometimes called "bandwidth hogs") use their connections 24 hours per day. "From 7 to 10 p.m., we're all consumption kings," Caputo said.

Given the 7-10 p.m. usage peak, Caputo noted, service providers have a strong incentive to try to encourage the use of non-real-time application at other times. "If you could shift some of that usage to the other 21 hours everybody would win," he said.

The data for Sandvine's report was gathered between Sept. 1-22 and captured the bits-per-second, per protocol and the number of active hosts per protocol on the network. The data does not include any subscriber-specific information, such as IP addresses.
http://webcast.broadcastnewsroom.com....jsp?id=883568





Seeing How They Run from the Pirate Bay
Jon Healey

Just how big is the Pirate Bay among illegal downloaders? A new report by DtecNet, a Beverly Hills-based firm that tracks online piracy, found that transfers via the Bit Torrent protocol -- the most popular file-sharing application -- fell nearly 80% after TPB's Swedish Internet service provider cut off its bandwidth under pressure from the courts there.

Interestingly, other file-sharing applications didn't gain much traffic in the wake of TPB's cutoff, the report said. Instead, users migrated quickly to other BitTorrent "tracker" sites. Four alternative trackers -- OpenBitTorrent, Denis Stalker, tracker.publicbt.com and pow7.com -- "now comprise nearly 70 percent of all BitTorrent traffic," the report states. It adds that the migration was aided by the Pirate Bay, which altered its software to track files through OpenBitTorrent.

The report's bottom line is gloomy for those who believe file-sharing is killing the entertainment industry:
Though such concentration of traffic would appear to present yet another enforcement opportunity, similar to the Pirate Bay shutdown, it will be more difficult as BitTorrent technologists continue to adapt. Torrent sites now point to multiple trackers, so if one is disconnected or overwhelmed by traffic, pirates can still find the files they seek without stopping to find another tracker.

Meanwhile, TPB continues to jump from Internet provider to Internet provider as more courts try (with no lasting success) to keep it offline. And this week, a Dutch court ordered the company's founders and former spokesman Peter Sunde to remove links to content from the Netherlands, an order that Sunde says they can't comply with because they have no such control.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/tech...irate-bay.html





New Suitors Sought for Pirate Bay Booty

A new attempt to sell the popular file sharing site The Pirate Bay is underway, as the site’s owners are reportedly discussing bids with four potential buyers.

According to the Swedish business newspaper Dagens Industri (DI), Pirate Bay’s ownership foundation, with site founder Peter Sunde playing a leading role, has invited four parties to present bids to purchase the site.

Among the suitors participating in the bidding process is Hans Pandeya, whose beleaguered Global Gaming Factory (GGF) tech firm was recently forced to admit it would most likely not be able to carry out its planned 60 million kronor ($8.5 million) purchase of The Pirate Bay.

But The Pirate Bay’s ownership foundation hasn’t given up hope that it can sell the site, and according to DI’s sources, Pandeya is still in the hunt.

Another reported suitor is Gamers Gate, a Swedish company specializing in online computer gaming.

But the company’s CEO Theodore Bergquist refused to confirm Gamers Gate was among the companies vying to purchase The Pirate Bay.

“We’re looking at a number of potential deals. All I can say is that The Pirate Bay is an interesting brand filled with a lot of potential for those who manage it in the right way,” he told DI.

The Pirate Bay’s 20 million unique visitors a month make it the world’s 106th most visited website, according to the web traffic monitoring service Alexa.
http://www.thelocal.se/22918/2009102...tm_content=119





Two Pirate Bay Founders Banned From Running The Site

The Pirate Bay LogoPirate Bay co-founders, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij have been banned from operating The Pirate Bay. The decision was ordered by the Stockholm District Court. If they fail to act in accordance with the decision, they will each be fined up to 500,000 kronor, or about US$71,600.

Peter Sunde, who also helped co-found TPB, seems to be excluded from the decision. However, he’s irritated by the court’s order and has expressed his dissatisfaction by saying that it’s really troublesome to invest time in with cases like this.

He went on to state the following:

“The Stockholm City Court is located in Stockholm. Stockholm is in Sweden. Swedish borders apply. Frederick and Godfrid live outside Sweden, even outside the EU. The Pirate Bay is outside the EU. How then can the Stockholm District Court, Sweden, get to decide that people abroad must not work on a site in another country?”

Since the two banned TPB co-founders are not really necessary to run the site, ThePirateBay.org is still operating as normal.
http://erictric.com/world/two-pirate...nning-the-site





Publishers Triumph in Anti-Piracy Test Case
David Landes

Sweden’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that broadband provider ePhone is obligated to hand over customer data to five audio book publishers.

The ruling, which overturned an appeals court decision, means the first legal challenge under Sweden's new anti-piracy law has ended in favour of copyright holders.

The decision prohibits ePhone from destroying information about the identity of the person who operates a server containing several audio book sound files.

Five book publishers had requested that ePhone divulge the identity of the person behind an IP address associated with the internet service provider.

The publishers claimed that there were audio book files on the computer that were accessible for downloading by the general public.

At first, Solna District Court ruled in favour of the publishers.

But in a split ruling decided only by the weighted vote of the presiding judge, the Svea Court of Appeal reversed the lower court’s ruling, instead finding in favour of ePhone.

The appeals court ruling was a blow to the entertainment industry, which was quick to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

At stake was the setting of a precedent regarding the application of an anti-file sharing law which came into effect in Sweden on April 1st.

The law, based on the EU’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), requires internet providers to provide data about customers targeted in copyright infringement investigations following a court order.

The book publishers emerged victorious in the final instance, and can now under threat of a 500,000 kronor ($70,000) fine order ePhone not to destroy information about the person targeted in the investigation.
http://www.thelocal.se/22942/2009102...tm_content=119





File-Sharing: Handle Winny at Your Own Risk
Jun Hongo

More than a decade since the heyday of Napster shareware, peer-to-peer file distribution remains a key tool for Internet users exchanging music and movie files online. The leading program in Japan is Winny, an application distributed free of charge since May 2002 by former University of Tokyo researcher Isamu Kaneko.

While Napster creator Shawn Fanning was hit with a series of lawsuits and taken to civil court by the music industry, Kaneko has faced criminal charges for allegedly encouraging Winny users to commit copyright infringement. The software also has been a reason for countless cases of data leaks, varying from private information on personal computers to internal government documents.

Winny most recently made headlines earlier this month, but this time for a controversial ruling by the Osaka High Court overturning a lower court judgment and acquitting Kaneko.

Following are questions and answers regarding Japan's most popular peer-to-peer program and the impact it is having on the country's online community:

What is Winny?

Winny is a file-sharing program that enables users to connect without using a central server.

The software makes it possible for computers connected to the Internet to exchange any digital data, including music, movies, computer software and other files.

Court documents say Kaneko has been interested in computers since he was in elementary school and as a researcher at the University of Tokyo he developed a variety of programs.

Napster, a program developed in the 1990s, kicked off the peer-to-peer file-sharing movement in the United States. But in Japan, it was Winny that started the ball rolling.

"There were file-sharing software programs prior to Winny, but Winny made its debut with a decentralized framework at a time when the crackdown on copyright infringement was beginning," said Toshinao Sasaki, a noted journalist and author of "The Study Guide of the Internet Industry."

It was automatic after that, as the program spread like a virus. The vast amount of shared files on the network created a synergistic effect that attracted thousands of new users, making Winny the standard in Japan.

How many people download files through Winny?

A survey of 20,350 people released by the Association of Copyright for Computer Software in Japan in September 2008 revealed that 10.3 percent of computer users were using file-sharing software, the first time it was more than 10 percent since the survey began in 2002.

It found that 58 percent of file sharers exchange music online, 27.4 percent swap movies, and 21.6 percent use it to download pornography. Of those using peer-to-peer programs, 28.4 percent exchange files using Winny, followed by 18.3 percent who use a program called Limewire.

Approximately 300,000 computers are believed to be sharing files via Winny on any given day.

What was Kaneko accused of doing?

The Kyoto District Court in December 2006 found Kaneko guilty of making Winny available online with the knowledge that it was being used for copyright infringement. The computer whiz was fined ¥1.5 million.

Kaneko, who became the first person in Japan to face charges for creating peer-to-peer software, pleaded not guilty throughout the proceedings. The focus of the trial was on whether the programmer harbored the intention of facilitating Internet piracy, a claim he denied. He said he released Winny as an experiment.

In a rare move, the Osaka High Court earlier this month overturned the lower court ruling and acquitted Kaneko. The presiding judge said the court could not determine whether he encouraged copyright infringement. The prosecutors said Friday they will appeal to the Supreme Court.

What kind of data leaks has Winny caused?

Technically speaking, leaks can't be blamed on the software itself. The true culprits are viruses, which began infiltrating Winny around 2004. The most famous is the Antinny virus.

The leaks have involved classified data pulled from unprotected computers, including those used by police departments, universities, central and local governments, and even the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. But the biggest leak involved military data taken from the Maritime Self-Defense Force in February 2006. The data included personal information about personnel, cipher-related documents and data combat exercises. The information came from the personal computer of a chief petty officer who was using Winny.

The incident prompted then Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe to tell the public "to be on the alert (about the possibility of information leaks), and the best way is not to use Winny."

What can you do to counter a personal information leak?

Not much once the information is out there in cyberspace.

Digital information is easily copied and will drift indefinitely among the users as long as Winny clients deposit the files on their computers.

As a precautionary measure, the education ministry only recommends disconnecting computers from the Internet and checking them for malicious software.

However, one countermeasure described in "Kensho — Winny Joho Ryushutsu Taisaku" ("Verification — Measures Against Information Leaks on Winny") is "poisoning."

According to the book, published by the editors of the computer magazine Ascii, you can deliberately spread large quantities of fake files on Winny bearing the same name as the leaked data. By doing that, end-users seeking the true files will have to dig through all the replicas to get what they want, provided they know what they are looking for. The more replicas out there, the more likely they are to give up, the book said.

What is the government doing to halt data leaks and piracy?

Very little. Statistics released in March 2008 showed that the police have uncovered only 14 cases of copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks since 2001. A revised law that takes effect in January will ban the downloading of material one knows to be copyrighted, but it doesn't carry any penalty for violators. Because users of such software are usually untraceable, critics have questioned the effectiveness of the law.

What lies ahead for peer-to-peer networks?

The negative incidents attributed to Winny have highlighted the downside of the technology, but peer-to-peer networking also has had a positive impact. While expressing concern over copyright infringement, the Association of Copyright for Computer Software states on its Web site that the system "is an essential technology for the Internet." Journalist Sasaki agrees, saying it holds huge potential.

"For example, in a country where an oppressive government controls information, the public can exchange information through a peer-to-peer network without giving up anonymity," he said. "Communicating without a central server could provide the public with its right to knowledge in such cases."
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-b...0091027i1.html





Dozens in Congress Under Ethics Inquiry

AN ACCIDENTAL DISCLOSURE
Document was found on file-sharing network
Ellen Nakashima and Paul Kane

House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July.

The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee said Thursday night that the document was released by a low-level staffer.

The ethics committee is one of the most secretive panels in Congress, and its members and staff members sign oaths not to disclose any activities related to its past or present investigations. Watchdog groups have accused the committee of not actively pursuing inquiries; the newly disclosed document indicates the panel is conducting far more investigations than it had revealed.

Shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday, the committee chairman, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), interrupted a series of House votes to alert lawmakers about the breach. She cautioned that some of the panel's activities are preliminary and not a conclusive sign of inappropriate behavior.

"No inference should be made as to any member," she said.

Rep. Jo Bonner (Ala.), the committee's ranking Republican, said the breach was an isolated incident.

The 22-page "Committee on Standards Weekly Summary Report" gives brief summaries of ethics panel investigations of the conduct of 19 lawmakers and a few staff members. It also outlines the work of the new Office of Congressional Ethics, a quasi-independent body that initiates investigations and provides recommendations to the ethics committee. The document indicated that the office was reviewing the activities of 14 other lawmakers. Some were under review by both ethics bodies.
A broader inquiry

Ethics committee investigations are not uncommon. Most result in private letters that either exonerate or reprimand a member. In some rare instances, the censure is more severe.

Many of the broad outlines of the cases cited in the July document are known -- the committee announced over the summer that it was reviewing lawmakers with connections to the now-closed PMA Group, a lobbying firm. But the document indicates that the inquiry was broader than initially believed. It included a review of seven lawmakers on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee who have steered federal money to the firm's clients and have also received large campaign contributions.

The document also disclosed that:

-- Ethics committee staff members have interviewed House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) about one element of the complex investigation of his personal finances, as well as the lawmaker's top aide and his son. Rangel said he spoke with ethics committee staff members regarding a conference that he and four other members of the Congressional Black Caucus attended last November in St. Martin. The trip initially was said to be sponsored by a nonprofit foundation run by a newspaper. But the three-day event, at a luxury resort, was underwritten by major corporations such as Citigroup, Pfizer and AT&T. Rules passed in 2007, shortly after Democrats reclaimed the majority following a wave of corruption cases against Republicans, bar private companies from paying for congressional travel.

Rangel said he has not discussed other parts of the investigation of his finances with the committee. "I'm waiting for that, anxiously," he said.

-- The Justice Department has told the ethics panel to suspend a probe of Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-W.Va.), whose personal finances federal investigators began reviewing in early 2006 after complaints from a conservative group that he was not fully revealing his real estate holdings. There has been no public action on that inquiry for several years. But the department's request in early July to the committee suggests that the case continues to draw the attention of federal investigators, who often ask that the House and Senate ethics panels refrain from taking action against members whom the department is already investigating.

Mollohan said that he was not aware of any ongoing interest by the Justice Department in his case and that he and his attorneys have not heard from federal investigators. "The answer is no," he said.

-- The committee on June 9 authorized issuance of subpoenas to the Justice Department, the National Security Agency and the FBI for "certain intercepted communications" regarding Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.). As was reported earlier this year, Harman was heard in a 2005 conversation agreeing to an Israeli operative's request to try to obtain leniency for two pro-Israel lobbyists in exchange for the agent's help in lobbying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to name her chairman of the intelligence committee. The department, a former U.S. official said, declined to respond to the subpoena.

Harman said that the ethics committee has not contacted her and that she has no knowledge that the subpoena was ever issued. "I don't believe that's true," she said. "As far as I'm concerned, this smear has been over for three years."

In June 2009, a Justice Department official wrote in a letter to an attorney for Harman that she was "neither a subject nor a target" of a criminal investigation.

Because of the secretive nature of the ethics committee, it was difficult to assess the current status of the investigations cited in the July document. The panel said Thursday, however, that it is ending a probe of Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) after finding no ethical violations, and that it is investigating the financial connections of two California Democrats.

The committee did not detail the two newly disclosed investigations. However, according to the July document, Rep. Maxine Waters, a high-ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, came under scrutiny because of activities involving OneUnited Bank of Massachusetts, in which her husband owns at least $250,000 in stock.

Waters arranged a September 2008 meeting at the Treasury Department where OneUnited executives asked for government money. In December, Treasury selected OneUnited as an early participant in the bank bailout program, injecting $12.1 million.

The other, Rep. Laura Richardson, may have failed to mention property, income and liabilities on financial disclosure forms.

File-sharing

The committee's review of investigations became available on file-sharing networks because of a junior staff member's use of the software while working from home, Lofgren and Bonner said in a statement issued Thursday night. The staffer was fired, a congressional aide said.

The committee "is taking all appropriate steps to deal with this issue," they said, noting that neither the committee nor the House's information systems were breached in any way.

"Peer-to-peer" technology has previously caused inadvertent breaches of sensitive financial, defense-related and personal data from government and commercial networks, and it is prohibited on House networks.

House administration rules require that if a lawmaker or staff member takes work home, "all users of House sensitive information must protect the confidentiality of sensitive information" from unauthorized disclosure.

Leo Wise, chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics, declined to comment, citing office policy against confirming or denying the existence of investigations. A Justice Department spokeswoman also declined to comment, citing a similar policy.

Staff writers Carol D. Leonnig and Joby Warrick and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews





SEC, Homeland Security Need Web Backup, GAO Says
Maggie Fox

Securities exchanges have a sound network back-up if a severe pandemic keeps people home and clogging the Internet, but the Homeland Security Department has done little planning, Congressional investigators said on Monday.

The department does not even have a plan to start work on the issue, the General Accountability Office said.

But the Homeland Security Department accused the GAO of having unrealistic expectations of how the Internet could be managed if millions began to telework from home at the same time as bored or sick schoolchildren were playing online, sucking up valuable bandwidth.

Experts have for years pointed to the potential problem of Internet access during a severe pandemic, which would be a unique kind of emergency. It would be global, affecting many areas at once, and would last for weeks or months, unlike a disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake.

H1N1 swine flu has been declared a pandemic but is considered a moderate one. Health experts say a worse one -- or a worsening of this one -- could result in 40 percent absentee rates at work and school at any given time and closed offices, transportation links and other gathering places.

Many companies and government offices hope to keep operations going as much as possible with teleworking using the Internet. Among the many problems posed by this idea, however, is the issue of bandwidth -- especially the "last mile" between a user's home and central cable systems.

"Such network congestion could prevent staff from broker-dealers and other securities market participants from teleworking during a pandemic," reads the GAO report, available here

"The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for ensuring that critical telecommunications infrastructure is protected."

Blocking Websites

Private Internet providers might need government authorization to block popular websites, it said, or to reduce residential transmission speeds to make way for commerce.

The Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security, a group of private-sector firms and financial trade associations, has been working to ensure that trading could continue if big exchanges had to close because of the risk of disease transmission.

"Because the key securities exchanges and clearing organizations generally use proprietary networks that bypass the public Internet, their ability to execute and process trades should not be affected by any congestion," the GAO report reads.

However, not all had good plans for critical activities if many of their employees were ill, the report reads.

Homeland Security had done even less, it said.

"DHS has not developed a strategy to address potential Internet congestion," the report said.

It had also not even checked into whether the public or even other federal agencies would cooperate, GAO said.

"The report gives the impression that there is potentially a single solution to Internet congestion that DHS could achieve if it were to develop an appropriate strategy," DHS's Jerald Levine retorted in a letter to the GAO.

"An expectation of unlimited Internet access during a pandemic is not realistic," he added.

(editing by Philip Barbara)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lates.../idUSN26207501





Want 50Mbps? Roll Your Own

Regional telco TDS Telecommunications last week issued a press release announcing a major milestone for the company: 50Mbps service over fiber optic cable to residents of Monticello, Minnesota. The Minneapolis suburb became one of the few non-FiOS communities in the country to experience full fiber-to-the-home deployment, and subscribers will all receive a free upgrade from 25Mbps service to the new 50Mbps tier.

Even better is the price, which starts at $49.95 a month for 50Mbps fiber service without the need to buy other services.

TDS is thrilled. "This is a huge first for TDS," said market manager Tom Ollig. "TDS is working incredibly hard to deliver the faster speeds customers want."

But the entire congratulatory press release glosses over a key fact: the reason that Monticello received a fiber network was the town's decision to install a municipal-owned fiber network to every home in town… spawning a set of TDS lawsuits that went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the town.

Screaming to be heard

The saga began in 2007, when the town passed a referendum approving the city-owned fiber network. The city says that it had approached TDS and was told that no such system would be installed in town in the near future, so it went ahead with its own plans.

After the referendum, the city was sued by the telco just before groundbreaking began. The suit didn't seem to have much of a chance under Minnesota law, and indeed judges at multiple levels ruled for Monticello. But in the meantime, TDS rolled into town with nine crews of its own and began installing—you guessed it—fiber to the home.

Monticello had just become one of the only US cities in which twin, parallel fiber networks were being built at the same time. Backers of the muni fiber plan were outraged; not only could TDS build a modern fiber network on a moment's notice when it wanted to do so, but the lawsuits prevented the city from doing much of its installation even as TDS moved ahead.

We spoke to TDS about the situation last year, and its director of legislative and public relations told us that TDS didn't act earlier because it didn't actually know that people really, really wanted fiber; once the referendum was a success, the company moved quickly to give people what it now knew they wanted.

After delaying the town's deployment through lawsuits and rolling out fiber service of its own, TDS issued a statement in June 2009 in which it then called the whole rationale for the government project into question.

"In view of TDS' development of a robust broadband platform in Monticello during the past year, it is questionable whether or not the City's feasibility study supporting its own fiber project, which was premised on no broadband competitors and on which the revenue bond purchasers relied when they secured the bonds more than a year ago, is still accurate, and whether the city fiber project is feasible today."

Now, it has upped the ante by doubling everyone's speeds. The moves all seemed designed to keep the idea of a muni-owned fiber network from spreading, but they might well have the opposite effect; one takeaway from the entire saga is that trying to build a muni fiber network is an excellent way to "encourage" investment and innovation from regional or national companies that might not otherwise have your town's own best interests at heart.

Such stories aren't limited to Minnesota suburbs, either. Just last month Telephony Online ran a piece on how Cox cable prices had "dropped considerably" since Lafeyette, Louisiana lit up a fiber system of its own.

"Cox froze the cable rates in Lafayette, and they didn’t freeze the rates in other areas," said Terry Huval, director of the muni project. "We figured our citizens saved over $3 million in cable rates even before we could offer them service."

Competition

This shouldn't be a surprise, as it's really just a classic case of direct competition—something not seen often enough in the wired broadband market. Unfortunately, getting high-speed Internet to your town isn't always as simple as threatening to start a municipal network. Many times, incumbent providers simply file lawsuits while keeping speeds the same.

If your town is really unlucky, the incumbent will just head right to the state legislature, seeking to pass laws constraining the practice. That's what happened to Wilson, North Carolina, which runs a moderately famous 100Mbps system known as Greenlight (which just happens to be the fastest ISP in the entire state).

When Time Warner Cable (which still tops out at 10Mbps and no DOCSIS 3.0) was asked why it had not stepped up to meet the city's demand for faster access, a company rep told TechJournal South that it hadn't actually heard a citizen outcry over the issue—or it would have acted.

Wilson's Internet manager is having none of it. "We don’t want to run anyone out of business," he said, "but we also don’t want to take the leftover table scraps. If they had offered us what we were asking for, next generation good service, we would have happily stepped aside."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...t-your-own.ars





When Competition Threatens, Try Throwing a Tantrum
Bart Salisbury

There’s a definite object lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is. It could be that competition is a good thing. It also could be that monopolies don’t take kindly to threats to their turf. What is obvious, however, is if you need your local cable provider to do something you got to be prepared to poke them in the eye (preferably with a sharp stick).

The suburban hamlet of Monticello, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis, had a hankering for fiber optic cable for all its residents. The town approached it’s regional telco, TDS Telecommunications, with the request and was rebuffed. TDS didn’t see the need to make such an investment in Monticello now or any time in the foreseeable future. In response, the citizens of Monticello passed a referendum to build their own fiber optic system, which would compete with TDS’s cable service to the town.

That didn’t sit well with TDS, which promptly sued Monticello. Minnesota law sides with the city in this case, and as the lawsuit progressed through the courts the city kept winning. TDS’s intent wasn’t to block Monticello’s efforts, only to delay them. While the lawsuit was underway the city was prevented from starting construction. TDS, however, wasn’t, and began to install its own fiber optic system. When completed, TDS crowed about the technological improvements it rendered in Monticello, saying “TDS is working incredibly hard to deliver the faster speeds customers want.”

TDS wasn’t done there. It also openly questioned Monticello’s decision to build it’s own fiber optic system: “In view of TDS' development of a robust broadband platform in Monticello during the past year, it is questionable whether or not the City's feasibility study supporting its own fiber project, which was premised on no broadband competitors and on which the revenue bond purchasers relied when they secured the bonds more than a year ago, is still accurate, and whether the city fiber project is feasible today.” Way to stay classy TDS.

So why all the rigmarole, why didn’t TDS just build a fiber optic system when first asked by Monticello? Nate Anderson, of Ars Technica, reports TDS’s director of legislative and public relations said TDS wasn’t “really, really sure” the residents of Monticello wanted fiber optic. (TDS hasn’t heard of market research?) Passage of the referendum is what changed their minds. That, and the fact TDS would have a fiber optic competitor.

Anderson suggests the object lesson to be for municipalities to build their own cable networks. (Or, at the very least, inject competition into the system). Everyone in Monticello got their broadband speeds doubled: from 25Mbps to 50Mbps, without seeing a rise in rates. Similarly, the town of Lafeyette, Louisiana has managed to keep cable rates down because it offers competition to Cox Cable. And, if you are jonesing for real broadband, the city of Wilson, North Carolina has a municipal system that offers 100Mbps (while Time Warner Cable is still knuckle-dragging at 10Mbps).
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/new...rowing_tantrum





Telstra to Cut Broadband Price as Customers Drop Off
Stuart Kennedy

TELSTRA will soon cut its broadband prices as it reacts to falling customer take-up of its fixed-line broadband services.

The move comes as Telstra itself faces being chopped up as the federal government attempts to clear the way to build its $43billion national broadband network.

Telstra boss David Thodey admitted at the company's update for investors in Sydney that the drop in new customers coming on to its fixed broadband products was "not good".

Fixed-line internet sales growth dropped from 20.5 per cent last year to 13.3 per cent this year.

Price cuts were "imminent", Mr Thodey said. He would not say by how much or exactly when the telco would get out the red pencil.

It doesn't take much shopping around to find deals way below Telstra's fixed broadband rates.

A broadband customer after a fast ADSL2+ link with a data allowance geared to heavy use would pay $99.95 a month under current Telstra pricing for a 25GB per month data allowance.

Competitors have been offering far sharper pricing. As an example, ISP TPG advertises an ADSL2+ link with a 30GB allowance for $59.99 a month.

The new Telstra chief, who replaced the outspoken American Sol Trujillo in May, is deeply involved in a tough horse-trading session with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy over how Telstra will be sliced and diced to suit the upcoming NBN.

The government plans legislation that would see Telstra either voluntarily split its network assets from its retail operations or face tougher regulation and restrictions on buying fresh mobile spectrum under an enforced functional separation of its businesses.

The telco has put the cost to shareholders of functional separation as high as 10c a share.

Mr Thodey said he believed an agreement in principle with the government was possible by Christmas, but said there would be no deal unless shareholders were fairly compensated.

One critical Telstra asset at the centre of the current wrangle is the copper network. Getting hold of the copper makes the government's job of building the fibre-to-the-home NBN much easier because it would allow much of the NBN to run underground, instead of being strung from telephone poles.

Documents accidentally released by the government earlier this week reveal that the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission estimates the worth of Telstra's fixed-line network assets at anywhere from $8bn to $40bn.

Both Mr Thodey and Telstra finance chief John Stanhope were coy about fixing any sort of numbers to the copper network.

All options around a deal with the government were on the table, the pair said.

The planned legislative reforms are due to be debated in the Senate but the federal opposition will push for a delay to debate until after an implementation study is released early next year.

Meanwhile, to tempt customers back into its broadband fold, Telstra is on the verge of launching a touch-screen telephone called the T-Hub which looks like a giant iPhone.

The T-Hub is about the size of a paperback book and comes with a stereo speaker, recharging dock and an ancillary, conventional cordless phone.

It is designed to be used as a household digital utility device and can surf the web while handling a phone call and double as an internet radio and digital picture frame. The T-Hub comes from French electronics maker Sagem and uses a Telstra-designed touch interface that looks somewhat like Apple's iPhone, with rows of touch-activated icons.
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/...-15306,00.html





Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public
Sarah Lyall

It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.

A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules. Her daughter was admitted to the school. But she has not let the matter rest. Her case, now scheduled to be heard by a regulatory tribunal, has become emblematic of the struggle between personal privacy and the ever more powerful state here.

The Poole Borough Council, which governs the area of Dorset where Ms. Paton lives with her partner and their children, says it has done nothing wrong.

In a way, that is true: under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.

“Does our privacy mean anything?” Ms. Paton said in an interview. “I haven’t had a drink for 20 years, but there is nothing that has brought me closer to drinking than this case.”

The law in question is known as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA, and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies — including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission — powers once held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service organizations.

Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web site visits and enlist undercover “agents” to pose, for example, as teenagers who want to buy alcohol.

In a report this summer, Sir Christopher Rose, the chief surveillance commissioner, said that local governments conducted nearly 5,000 “directed surveillance missions” in the year ending in March and that other public authorities carried out roughly the same amount.

Local officials say that using covert surveillance is justified. The Poole Borough Council, for example, used it to detect and prosecute illegal fishing in Poole Harbor.

“RIPA is an essential tool for local authority enforcement which we make limited use of in cases where it is proportionate and there are no other means of gathering evidence,” Tim Martin, who is in charge of legal and democratic services for Poole, which is southwest of London, said in a statement.

The fuss over the law comes against a backdrop of widespread public worry about an increasingly intrusive state and the growing circulation of personal details in vast databases compiled by the government and private companies.

“Successive U.K. governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world,” the House of Lords Constitution Committee said in a recent report. It continued: “The development of electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information have become pervasive, routine and almost taken for granted.”

The Lords report pointed out that the government enacted the law in the first place to provide a framework for a series of scattershot rules on surveillance. The goal was also to make such regulations compatible with privacy rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights.

RIPA is a complicated law that also regulates wiretapping and intrusive surveillance carried out by the security services. But faced with rumbles of public discontent about local governments’ behavior, the Home Office announced in the spring that it would review the legislation to make it clearer what localities should be allowed to do.

“The government has absolutely no interest in spying on law-abiding people going about their everyday lives,” Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, said.

One of the biggest criticisms of the law is that the targets of surveillance are usually unaware that they have been spied on.

Indeed, Ms. Paton learned what had happened only later, when officials summoned her to discuss her daughter’s school application. To her shock, they produced the covert surveillance report and the family’s telephone billing records.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re within their rights to scrutinize all applications, but the way they went about it was totally unwarranted,” Ms. Paton said. “If they’d wanted any information, they could have come and asked.”

She would have explained that her case was complicated. The family was moving from their old house within the school district to a new one just outside it. But they met the residency requirements because they were still living at the old address when school applications closed.

At the meeting, Ms. Paton and her partner, Tim Joyce, pointed out that the surveillance evidence was irrelevant because the surveillance had been carried out after the deadline had passed.

“They promptly ushered us out of the room,” she said. “As I stood outside the door, they said, ‘You go and tell your friends that these are the powers we have.’ ”

Soon afterward, their daughter was admitted to the school. Ms. Paton began pressing local officials on their surveillance tactics.

“I said, ‘I want to come in and talk to you,’ ” she said. “ ‘How many people were in the car? Were they men or women? Did they take any photos? Does this mean I have a criminal record?’ ”

No one would answer her questions, Ms. Paton said.

Mr. Martin said he could not comment on her case because it was under review. But Ms. Paton said the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners, which monitors use of the law, found that the Poole council had acted properly. “They said my privacy wasn’t intruded on because the surveillance was covert,” she said.

The case is now before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which looks into complaints about RIPA. It usually meets in secret but has agreed, Ms. Paton said, to have an open hearing at the beginning of November.

The whole process is so shrouded in mystery that few people ever take it this far. “Because no one knows you have a right to know you’re under surveillance,” Ms. Paton said, “nobody ever makes a complaint.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/wo...veillance.html





WiFi Direct Will Support Peer-To-Peer Networking

Cut out some routers
Shaun Nichols

AN EMERGING WiFi specification promises to allow users to directly link devices.

Dubbed WiFi Direct, the new specification allows systems to establish peer-to-peer connections and directly connect with other devices without the need for a WiFi router.

According to industry group WiFi Alliance, the new specification is likely to be formally certified by the middle of next year and will support connections between desktops, notebooks, printers, mobile phones and cameras as well as other common peripherals and devices.

The group envisions the new WiFi standard being used not only for conventional networking applications, but also for connecting peripherals and input devices.

"WiFi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a WiFi access point isn't available," said Edgar Figueroa, executive director for the WiFi Alliance.

"The impact is that WiFi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise."

The alliance said that it plans to publish a specification and allow member companies to begin certifying devices after the specification is certified in 2010.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...eer-networking





World’s First BitTorrent Powered Live Streamed Concert
Ernesto

A unique event takes place today in a movie theater in the north of Norway. Using the Swarmplayer software developed by the EU-funded P2P-Next project, for the first time ever a live concert will be broadcasted on the Internet utilizing BitTorrent technology.

The Far North Living Lab was started by the Northern Research Institute (Norut) and aims to create a platform for digital creativity. Earlier this year the lab kicked off with a spectacular experiment in which they used the Tribler BitTorrent client to stream a 2K resolution film onto the big screen.

For that experiment the stream was only broadcasted to a select group of people and not the entire Internet. Today, however, the lab’s researchers will launch their second BitTorrent streaming experiment on a much bigger scale, as they will broadcast a live stream of a live music performance for all the world to see.

“The setup is very simple at the cinema – we have a standard computer connected to audio and video mixers, which then feeds the P2P network,” Dr. Njål Borch, a senior researcher involved in the project told TorrentFreak.

The software they use to stream the performance is from the EU-funded P2P-Next project and several of the partners are also donating bandwidth for the experiment to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

The performance will take place at Aurora Kino in Tromsø as a part of the Insomnia electronic music festival. To spice things up, the lab is also sending a live feed to the Notch festival in Beijing, which is running in parallel with Insomnia, and to Skjervøy kulturhus in the far north of Norway.

However, since the broadcast is public this time, everyone with an Internet connection can tune in. The only thing required to watch the stream is the Swarmplayer software, or a browser plugin (Windows only). Both are linked on the project’s website.

According to Borch, this BitTorrent live streaming experiment is not just a proof of concept, it might eventually play a significant role in the future of live streaming on the Internet.

“If the scalability is good for live streaming, this can increase the amount of viewers without massive bandwidth bills. Another effect, which I am currently very much a fan of, is that adding more bandwidth is very easy – put up a seedbox and hand it the torrent. No administration otherwise necessary,” he told TorrentFreak.

Anyone who would like to be part of this world premiere can tune in at 5 pm CET when the broadcast will start. If all goes well you’ll be able to see a live performance of a new soundtrack to Pudovkin’s 1926 film, “Mother”.

Update: The broadcast ended and it’s replaced by a 5 minute clip of the concert so people can still test the streaming technology. It was a great success with visitors from all over the world.
http://torrentfreak.com/worlds-first...oncert-091024/





Music Service Lala Heralds MP3-Killing iPhone App
Ryan Nakashima

Online music retailer Lala is preparing to launch an iPhone application that its co-founder says paves the way for the end of downloading songs in the MP3 format.

The app allows users to buy the right to stream songs from a digital locker forever for just 10 cents each. The song quality is lower than what Apple Inc.'s iTunes offers, but "intelligent caching" lets the tracks load and play in seconds, with playback possible even outside of cell phone coverage.

An existing iTunes library can be synchronized with one's Lala account, meaning a person doesn't have to repurchase songs to listen to them within the app.

In a demonstration for The Associated Press, songs began playing in about two seconds, compared to the more than two minutes it took to download an iTunes song over the AT&T 3G cell phone network. Consumers are allowed one full-length free preview of each song.

"There's no downloading, no links to click on, it's just there," said Lala co-founder Bill Nguyen, who described the concept as the start of "the end of the MP3."

The advantage of having songs in MP3 files is that they can be downloaded and played on a variety of devices and computers. Meanwhile, streaming services pump music directly to a computer or mobile device, but not in a form that the user can store and play any time, even while offline.

Lala's iPhone app aims to get around that downside of streaming while taking advantage of the device's power as a music player (it has an iPod inside it, after all) and undercutting the prices charged on iTunes, where songs generally cost 69 cents to $1.29.

Once users pay 10 cents to have a song streamed from Lala, they can hear the track essentially any time. The songs that a user listens to most often in the app or designates as favorites are automatically loaded in the phone's memory, which is the step that allows them to be heard any time, even out of cell phone range.

The songs are streamed at as few as 32 kilobits per second, depending on cell phone reception - which is about the same as some smaller radio stations stream online but far lower quality than the 256 kilobits per second common to iTunes. It can lead to a flatter, fuzzier sound. Nguyen said sound quality could improve as cell phone networks become stronger.

Lala will also sell higher-quality versions of the same songs as MP3s for 89 cents each. But that requires hooking the user's phone to an Internet-connected computer.

The app, which itself is free, is set to debut on Apple Inc.'s iTunes app store next month pending approval. Apple had no immediate comment Tuesday.

Lala, a private company based in Palo Alto, Calif., was launched in 2006 with $35 million in venture capital from Bain Capital LLC, Ignition Partners and Warner Music Group Corp.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102701891.html





Algorithm Judges Musical Hit Potential
Robert Lamb

Musicians intent on rock stardom can now turn to a simple file scan that uses an algorithm to improve odds at scoring a chart-topper.

That's the idea behind Music Intelligence Solutions' Hit Song Science (HSS) technology located on uPlaya.com. The technology mathematically analyzes the underlying patterns in a track, including harmony, chord progression and lyrics.

The computer then compares the song's mathematical characteristics against past successful recordings from multiple genres and languages and maps the data on a multidimensional grid.

This matrix, dubbed the uPlaya Music Universe, is populated with "hit clusters," or compact constellations of popular tracks, as well as lone pinpoints of musical obscurity.

Music Intelligence Solutions CEO David Meredith insisted that the technology tends to elevate tracks that break free from established musical trends.

"The songs that score the best include a certain amount of unpredictability in the music," Meredith told Discovery News. "Norah Jones is a great example of an artist who pulled from jazz and pop to create a sound that was different from other artists at the time, but the underlying patterns of her music was strong and the music scored very well."

If a song scores a 7.00 or higher, its creator has a possible hit. Think of the technology as the artificial intelligence counterpart of Simon Cowell, except with more stats and less sarcasm.

So far HSS programming boasts an 80 percent success rate, classifying tracks such as Outkast's "Hey Ya!" and t.A.T.u.'s "All the Things She Said" as potential hits, according to a 2006 study from Harvard Business School. That compares to a 10 percent success rate for songs promoted by record companies as singles, according to the study.

Meredith said his technology can benefit both ends of the musical spectrum -- producers looking to tweak tracks for maximum appeal and struggling artists trying to decide which song to send out as a career-launching demo.

"uPlaya democratizes the music industry, so that no great song goes unheard again," Meredith said. "There are over 12 million artists on the Web, and uPlaya helps them to get discovered in a unique and patent-protected way."

That's certainly a cause Internet sensation Jonathan Coulton supports. Known for his blend of folk music and geek culture, the former programmer likes the idea of connecting musicians and fans, but he's a little concerned about its creative applications.

"I think there's a danger on the creative side in thinking too much about what you're doing and whether it's going to please people," Coulton told Discovery News. "The stuff that always works best for me is the stuff that's honest and true and personal."

Technology doesn't have to be a bossy bedfellow. University of California at Santa Cruz Professor Emeritus of Music David Cope maintains that technology itself is an extension of human creativity.

"For me at least, algorithmic creativity demonstrates our understanding of how we create," Cope, an expert in the fields of algorithmic musical composition and computer music analysis, said. "And understanding something does not demean it, but rather it enhances it."

The use of formal instructions and processes to create music dates back to Ancient Greece. Computers first generated compositions in the mid-1950s. Since then, artists such as Brian Eno and Autechre have explored algorithmic composition.

uPlaya.com currently provides artists with two free track evaluations and offers varying subscription packages. The Web site also includes several social media features aimed at helping fans discover high-scoring artists.

"Honestly, more and more we're seeing the need for new kinds of filters," Coulton said. "We used to have radios to tell us what to listen to but that doesn't work so well anymore. To the extent that a technology like this can steer fans toward artists and vice versa, I think that's a good thing."
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/1...ithm-hits.html





Sens. Pen Letter Opposing Performance Rights Act
FMQB

Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and John Barrasso (R-WY) have sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) expressing opposition to the Performance Rights Act, which was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, October 15. "By many estimations, passage of this legislation would result in potentially billions of dollars flowing from local broadcasters to the recording industry and would have a devastating impact on the local radio broadcasting system as we know it," Sens. Lincoln and Barrasso wrote.

They went on to point out the dire economic times that the radio industry has been facing. "The economic challenges facing the radio industry are daunting, but an even graver threat to free radio's future in currently being pushed in the form of new performance fees," they wrote. "We believe that artists and their labels are currently more than fairly compensated by local radio stations in the form of free and unparalleled promotion."

The Senators said that imposing a fee on local broadcasters would "fundamentally change free radio," and that many music stations would be forced to flip to talk formats rather than paying fees to air music. "At the end of the day, this will result in less music being played on the radio," they wrote.

Lincoln and Barrasso concluded by saying, "This legislation clearly evokes strong opposition that transcends party affiliation. As leaders of our two parties, we ask that you oppose any effort to move this bill, either as a stand alone measure or as part of a broader legislative package."

Lincoln and Barrasso are original co-sponsors of the Local Radio Freedom Act, a resolution opposing the Performance Rights Act, which has gained bipartisan support from 26 U.S. Senators and 251 House lawmakers.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1555787





Warner Music Group Head Bronfman to Stand Trial in France

Former Vivendi boss Jean-Marie Messier and the head of Warner Music Group Edgar Bronfman Jr have been told to stand trial on various charges of financial wrong doing, according to a court document obtained by Reuters.

The charges include divulging misleading information, stock price manipulation and misuse of corporate funds. The decision was made earlier this month by investigating magistrate Jean-Marie d'Huy.

The case dates back to Messier's spell at the helm of the French media group at the start of the decade. Under his tenure, Vivendi embarked on an acquisition spree but ended up racking up massive debts and started to report losses.

Messier now runs merger advisory firm Messier Partners.

Lawyers for both Messier and Bronfman Jr, who used to serve on Vivendi's board, said their clients denied the charges.

"He himself believes that there are no charges to bring against him," said lawyer Olivier Metzner, representing Messier.

"We are just now reviewing the court filing, but as we've said all along Mr. Bronfman's transactions have at all times been proper and at no time did he contravene any French laws or regulations," said Bronfman's lawyer Thierry Marembert.

Other former leading Vivendi executives also will have to stand trial at the main court in Paris. (Reporting by Thierry Leveque and Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Richard Chang and Carol Bishopric)
http://www.reuters.com/article/telco...M5634720091022





Report: Cyberterror Not a Credible Threat
Dennis Fisher

A new report by a Washington policy think tank dismisses out of hand the idea that terrorist groups are currently launching cyber attacks and says that the recent attacks against U.S. and South Korean networks were not damaging enough to be considered serious incidents.The report, written by James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, looks at cyberwar through the prism of the Korean attacks, which many commentators have speculated originated in North Korea. However, there has been little in the way of proof offered for this assessment, and Lewis doesn't go down that road. Instead, he focuses on whether the attacks constituted an act of war and whether they could have been the work of a terrorist group.

The answer is no on both counts.

"The July event was not a serious attack. It was more like a noisy demonstration. The attackers used basic technologies and did no real damage. To date, we have not seen a serious cyber attack. That is only because the political circumstances that would justify such attacks by other militaries have not yet occurred and because most non-state actors have not yet acquired the necessary capabilities. As an aside, this last point undermines the notion of cyber terrorism. The alternative to the conclusion that terrorist groups currently lack the capabilities to launch a cyber attack is that they have these capabilities but have chosen not to use them. This alternative is nonsensical," Lewis writes.

But that's not to say that terrorist groups won't one day be capable of launching such attacks. Just the opposite, in fact. There's no reason to believe that organized, well-financed terrorist groups won't soon acquire the ability to launch sophisticated attacks, Lewis concludes.

"A very rough estimate would say that there is a lag of three and eight years between the capabilities developed by advanced intelligence agencies and the capabilities available for purchase or rental in the cybercrime black market.11 The evidence for this is partial and anecdotal, but the trend has been consistent for more two decades. This suggests that in less than a decade, perhaps much less, a terrorist group could enter the cybercrime black market and acquire the capabilities needed for a serious cyber attack," he writes.

"The implications for the United States are troubling. We have, at best, a few years to get our defenses in order, to build robustness and resiliency into networks and critical infrastructure, and to modernize our laws to allow for adequate security. Our current defenses are inadequate to repel the attacks of a sophisticated opponent."

The report, titled "The 'Korean' Cyber Attacks and Their Implications for Cyber Conflicts," also discusses at length the limiting factors that currently are preventing foreign countries and organized criminal groups from attacking the U.S. Those deterrents, which include political constraints and the possibility of a physical retaliatory strike, have been of use so far, but may not continue to be for much longer. The difficulty of attributing an attack to any specific person or group makes these deterrents far less effective than they might otherwise be.

And the U.S. dependence on digital technology makes it somewhat more vulnerable to cyber attacks than other nations, Lews writes.

"In the Cold War, there was symmetry in vulnerabilities – each side had cities and populations that the other could hold hostage. That symmetry no longer exists. The United States is far more dependent on digital networks than its opponents and this asymmetric vulnerability means that the United States would come out worse in any cyber exchange," Lewis writes.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/cy...-threat-102309





Old Trick Threatens the Newest Weapons
John Markoff

Despite a six-year effort to build trusted computer chips for military systems, the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear.

That shortfall is viewed with concern by current and former United States military and intelligence agency executives who argue that the menace of so-called Trojan horses hidden in equipment circuitry is among the most severe threats the nation faces in the event of a war in which communications and weaponry rely on computer technology.

As advanced systems like aircraft, missiles and radars have become dependent on their computing capabilities, the specter of subversion causing weapons to fail in times of crisis, or secretly corrupting crucial data, has come to haunt military planners. The problem has grown more severe as most American semiconductor manufacturing plants have moved offshore.

Only one-fifth of all computer chips are now made in the United States, and just one-quarter of the chips based on the most advanced technologies are built here, I.B.M. executives say. That has led the Pentagon and the National Security Agency to expand significantly the number of American plants authorized to manufacture chips for the Pentagon’s Trusted Foundry program.

Despite the increases, semiconductor industry executives and Pentagon officials say, the United States lacks the ability to fulfill the capacity requirements needed to manufacture computer chips for classified systems.

“The department is aware that there are risks to using commercial technology in general and that there are greater risks to using globally sourced technology,” said Robert Lentz, who before his retirement last month was in charge of the Trusted Foundry program as the deputy assistant defense secretary for cyber, identity and information assurance.

Counterfeit computer hardware, largely manufactured in Asian factories, is viewed as a significant problem by private corporations and military planners. A recent White House review noted that there had been several “unambiguous, deliberate subversions” of computer hardware.

“These are not hypothetical threats,” the report’s author, Melissa Hathaway, said in an e-mail message. “We have witnessed countless intrusions that have allowed criminals to steal hundreds of millions of dollars and allowed nation-states and others to steal intellectual property and sensitive military information.”

Ms. Hathaway declined to offer specifics.

Cyberwarfare analysts argue that while most computer security efforts have until now been focused on software, tampering with hardware circuitry may ultimately be an equally dangerous threat. That is because modern computer chips routinely comprise hundreds of millions, or even billions, of transistors. The increasing complexity means that subtle modifications in manufacturing or in the design of chips will be virtually impossible to detect.

“Compromised hardware is, almost literally, a time bomb, because the corruption occurs well before the attack,” Wesley K. Clark, a retired Army general, wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that warns of the risks the nation faces from insecure computer hardware.

“Maliciously tampered integrated circuits cannot be patched,” General Clark wrote. “They are the ultimate sleeper cell.”

Indeed, in cyberwarfare, the most ancient strategy is also the most modern.

Internet software programs known as Trojan horses have become a tool of choice for computer criminals who sneak malicious software into computers by putting it in seemingly innocuous programs. They then pilfer information and transform Internet-connected PCs into slave machines. With hardware, the strategy is an even more subtle form of sabotage, building a chip with a hidden flaw or a means for adversaries to make it crash when wanted.

Pentagon executives defend the manufacturing strategy, which is largely based on a 10-year contract with a secure I.B.M. chipmaking plant in Burlington, Vt., reported to be valued as high as $600 million, and a certification process that has been extended to 28 American chipmakers and related technology firms.

“The department has a comprehensive risk-management strategy that addresses a variety of risks in different ways,” said Mitchell Komaroff, the director of a Pentagon program intended to develop a strategy to minimize national security risks in the face of the computer industry’s globalization.

Mr. Komaroff pointed to advanced chip technologies that made it possible to buy standard hardware components that could be securely programmed after they were acquired.

But as military planners have come to view cyberspace as an impending battlefield, American intelligence agency experts said, all sides are arming themselves with the ability to create hardware Trojan horses and to hide them deep inside the circuitry of computer hardware and electronic devices to facilitate military attacks.

In the future, and possibly already hidden in existing weapons, clandestine additions to electronic circuitry could open secret back doors that would let the makers in when the users were depending on the technology to function. Hidden kill switches could be included to make it possible to disable computer-controlled military equipment from a distance. Such switches could be used by an adversary or as a safeguard if the technology fell into enemy hands.

A Trojan horse kill switch may already have been used. A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected partly constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft. Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars.

Separately, an American semiconductor industry executive said in an interview that he had direct knowledge of the operation and that the technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.

The disabling technology was given informally but with the knowledge of the American government, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. His claim could not be independently verified, and American military, intelligence and contractors with classified clearance declined to discuss the attack.

The United States has used a variety of Trojan horses, according to various sources.

In 2004, Thomas C. Reed, an Air Force secretary in the Reagan administration, wrote that the United States had successfully inserted a software Trojan horse into computing equipment that the Soviet Union had bought from Canadian suppliers. Used to control a Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, the doctored software failed, leading to a spectacular explosion in 1982.

Crypto AG, a Swiss maker of cryptographic equipment, was the subject of intense international speculation during the 1980s when, after the Reagan administration took diplomatic actions in Iran and Libya, it was widely reported in the European press that the National Security Agency had access to a hardware back door in the company’s encryption machines that made it possible to read electronic messages transmitted by many governments.

According to a former federal prosecutor, who declined to be identified because of his involvement in the operation, during the early ’80s the Justice Department, with the assistance of an American intelligence agency, also modified the hardware of a Digital Equipment Corporation computer to ensure that the machine — being shipped through Canada to Russia — would work erratically and could be disabled remotely.

The American government began making a concerted effort to protect against hardware tampering in 2003, when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz circulated a memorandum calling on the military to ensure the economic viability of domestic chipmakers.

In 2005, the Defense Science Advisory Board issued a report warning of the risks of foreign-made computer chips and calling on the Defense Department to create a policy intended to stem the erosion of American semiconductor manufacturing capacity.

Former Pentagon officials said the United States had not yet adequately addressed the problem.

“The more we looked at this problem the more concerned we were,” said Linton Wells II, formerly the principal deputy assistant defense secretary for networks and information integration. “Frankly, we have no systematic process for addressing these problems.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/science/27trojan.html





Digital Survival
Rob Fahey

Without the benefit of hindsight, it's tough to say where, exactly, a tipping point occurs. In years to come, we'll undoubtedly look back at this period in the games industry's history and confidently pinpoint the year, or perhaps even the quarter, when the transition became a landslide. Today, however, all we can say with any certainty is that it's either happened already, or will happen in the next two years. Freed from the realms of theory and speculation by dropping storage costs, rising broadband speeds and changing consumer attitudes, digital distribution is reaching a point of no return.

There are, of course, plenty of questions which still need to be answered - both from consumer and industry perspectives - before the digital takeover can truly get underway. Pricing, for example, remains a thorny problem, and there's a strong possibility that right-of-first-sale issues will face not only robust challenges from consumers, but also serious questions at a legal and even governmental level.

For one industry grouping, however, there's a single question which dwarfs all of those concerns. If you're a retailer, your only real question about digital distribution is straightforward - where the hell does this leave me?

The examples from other industries undergoing this transition are not promising, since they tend largely to focus on metaphors involving creeks and a distinct lack of paddles. Bricks-and-mortar retailers of music and movies have largely sat back and grumbled while their businesses were hijacked, first by online retailers of physical product and then by digital distribution services. Music is much further down this path than movies are, but there's no question that they're both headed for broadly the same destination.

Specialist games retailers who follow that model face little more than a decline into insolvency in their medium-term futures. Worse again, they face competing with far bigger companies to retain their slice of an already shrinking pie - as boxed game retail sales fall off in favour of digital distribution (not to mention the downward price pressures I discussed last week putting the thumbscrews on margins), supermarket chains are increasingly seeing high profile games as a worthwhile loss-leaders.

Given that prospect, it's hard to foresee any kind of future for the specialist game retailer. Their figures are presently propped up by second-hand sales, on which they make huge margins (a fact which doesn't endear them to the industry at all, of course, although industry figures have an unfortunate tendency to damage their own case by attacking the second-hand market in general rather than specifically targeting the enormous margins and rather sharp business practices of the specialist retail chains). Initiatives like Sony's decision to create retail boxes for PSP games which merely contain a download code are little more than a sop to the retail sector - it won't delay the fate of game stores by much.

Yet not all media retailers are content to go quietly into the night. Where online retail was once a rival of bricks-and-mortar business, they are now kindred spirits - both selling physical products in an age when consumers increasingly think of media as intangible bits and bytes rather than a lump of plastic. So retailers should consider carefully the importance of Amazon's recent launch of an extensive download store for music MP3s, a direct (and thus far rather successful) challenge to the dominance of Apple's iTunes, and the Kindle, an e-book reader designed to keep the firm on top of the book-selling game even among customers who don't want paper any more.

Even more interesting is this week's move by top US bookstore Barnes & Noble, who have joined Amazon in the e-book race with a fantastic-looking combined hardware and digital retail offering. This is what retailers should really be looking most closely at. Barnes & Noble is not a technology company, or it least it wasn't until this week. Its core competence is running a vast network of retail locations, which has pretty much zero relevance to this new business venture. Yet the move into digital distribution makes perfect sense for one simple reason - brand.

In the minds of countless Americans, Barnes & Noble's brand is deeply associated with book-selling. It's probably a slightly painful realisation for a company which operates so many stores and warehouses, employing so many retail and distribution staff in the process, but in the digital world, that's the only asset it has that's worth just about anything - and for its survival in a new world where it will compete not only with Amazon but with Sony, and quite possibly with Google, Apple and Microsoft as well, it needs to pump that brand for everything it's worth.

The same is true of top games retail brands, and some of them, at least, know it. GameStop, probably the biggest games retail brand on earth, is presently in the market for a digital distribution acquisition. Despite the powerful positioning of brands like IGN's Direct2Drive and Valve's Steam, digital distribution is still an open market - a solid service carrying the GameStop brand could take a major foothold.

The companys acquisition options, however, aren’t quite as extensive as one might expect. In fact, there aren't that many major players in the digital distribution space - not least because at present, it's limited to the PC, with other platforms catered for by first-party stores. Direct2Drive is part of IGN, and as such, belongs to media conglomerate News Corp and is not for sale. Smaller players like Stardock/s Impulse could be of interest, but would require that GameStop effectively build a large part of the content catalogue from scratch - I suspect they'd rather hit the ground running.

That effectively leaves two contenders - Valve's Steam and Metaboli, a French service which bought GameTap from TBS last year and operates a variety of branded outlets on the web.

If you wanted to place a bet, my tip would be that we’ll see an acquisition deal between GameStop and Metaboli in the coming months, which will finally give the retail chain a major footprint in the digital distribution market. It'll also serve as a boost to GameStop’s European ambitions, which have plodded along at a rather slower pace than everyone expected when they first set sights on these shores a few years ago.

However, it's also worth watching closely what happens to Steam in the coming months. Unconfirmed industry scuttlebutt suggests that Zenimax - the parent company of Bethesda, which made headlines back in June when it acquired legendary PC studio id Software - is still on the acquisition trail, and has been making eyes at Half-Life creators Valve across the bar.

Whether Bethesda, a hybrid developer/publisher itself, would want to keep Steam on board, or spin it out to a third party, is unclear - as are many other aspects of a potential deal which would once again raise the awkward question of who, exactly, owns which parts of the Half-Life and Counter-Strike IPs.

Either way, however, it suggests that both Metaboli and Steam - two of the three biggest names in digital distribution - are potentially going to change hands in the coming months. How the landscape looks after those changes could have a powerful impact on which games retail brands survive the coming changes in the industry.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...rvival-article





Browse Anonymously on Your Android Phone With Tor
Lisa Hoover

Many people use the open source application Tor on the desktop for anonymous browsing sessions. Thanks to a grant from the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge and the team behind The Guardian Project, now Android mobile phone owners can use Tor to browse privately on their handheld devices, too.

"We have successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android and built an Android application bundle that installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make it useful to end users…. secure, anonymous access to the web via Tor on Android is now a reality," writes Guardian Project team member Nathan Freitas.

The Tor 0.2.2.6-alpha release uses toolchain wrapper scripts to run Tor without requiring root access. "At this point, we are pretty convinced that the performance and efficiency of the C binary is quite significantly better than the Java-based ports of Tor running within Dalvik… this translate to a better experience for the user, with no noticeable increase in battery drain or lag on the rest of the device while Tor is running in the background," says Freitas.

Orbot, the Android app which manages installation, bundles the Tor binary, and provides the user interface is licensed under the Tor license and contains a built-in HTTP proxy.

Developers would like to get Orbot ready for a 1.0 release as soon as possible and are looking for some volunteers to lend a hand. The team also needs help modifying the privacy-focused Android browser, Shadow to make it work with Orbot's HTTP proxy. If you want to pitch in and help, drop Freitas an email or leave a comment on his blog.
http://ostatic.com/blog/browse-anony...phone-with-tor





The Effects of Leaks: A Candid Interview

We’ve tried to withhold ourselves from sourcing our news from leaky valves in Microsoft as of late (and you can see where that’s gotten us. ahem), but we don’t just stay away for the sake of keeping ourselves out of that eternally stressful race for content. We tend to stay out of it because behind every leak, someone’s job suffers as a result.

I had a very open interview with someone at the launch event. This person frequently deals with product leaks, and as a result, it’s fair to say that the person knows exactly how said leaks impact work, the lives of everyone connected to the project, the public perception of a product, and so forth. My interview with this particular Microsoft employee was fulfilling in the sense that I’m able to offer an uncensored glimpse into what Microsoft has to deal with whenever someone decides to leak a build, leak a screenshot, break an embargo, and what not.

Check the break to read about how it all went down. Keep in mind that there’s no video or audio and that this is, indeed, a long read apparently not as long as some people have seen in the past. Thanks is due to the anonymous commentators who pointed this out.

Anonymous Softie: So, with regards to leaks

Bryant: Yeah

Anonymous Softie: Leaks can affect the public perception of a product. For instance, there’s a reason why we only release specific builds. You know, because we want to release a certain level of quality that people can take a look at, have faith in, and [say] “okay, this is the product, the product is progressing as planned.” Sometimes, interim builds, leaked builds, they often haven’t passed any of our quality checks. They were never meant to be released.

Bryant: Right. They can easily have nasty bugs.

Anonymous Softie: Yeah, exactly, and all of a sudden, you’ve got everyone in the world taking a look at this build; everyone wants to see the leaked build, right? ’cause it’s mysterious. It’s rare. It’s from the inside. So yeah, there could be bugs in it. People [find] bugs in it. They question functionality they find in it. And so when all of that happens, my phone starts ringing [with] people asking for comments. I’m not doing my day job at that point.

Anonymous Softie: And so, one, it’s a huge distraction on all of us. Phones ring off the hook. [People say] “I can’t believe there’s this shitty quality build out there!” It’s like, look, I’m not going to take time to talk to you, first of all, ’cause you, you know, that was an unplanned leak. It’s not representative of what we ultimately want to sanction and release.

Anonymous Softie: So, there’s the distraction, the bugs… if it’s really buggy, people might think that that’s the current state of the product when, in fact, it’s not. Internally, we’re already many many builds beyond the one that’s leaked. We don’t really care about that one. It doesn’t exist.

Bryant: Right.

Anonymous Softie: –for all we care.

Bryant: Right. It never happened.

Anonymous Softie: It never happened! But, you know, everyone is quick to jump to an opinion about that particular moment in time. They often draw incorrect conclusions, “oh my gosh, the product is incomplete, it doesn’t have this, it doesn’t have that.” So that’s one.

Anonymous Softie: And, you know, quite often we have features that come out over time, right? You don’t necessarily have all the features in [Windows 7 Milestone 3], for instance. We didn’t have any [of the new] UI.

Bryant: Right. Well when we posted [the article about Milestone 3], that was it. It was just very bare and everything was hidden by a bunch of switches. I remember when we originally posted the very suggestive “we know what’s coming but we don’t actually… know” article, we got a lot of hits. We really killed your day job with that one.

Anonymous Softie: Yeah. So it’s a big distraction; it causes people to form incorrect opinions which I as a communications professional ultimately have to fix. Right? The world starts thinking “Wow, this is it?” and I go “Wait, wait wait”

Bryant: “Yeah, this was like a few months in the past. We’re much further ahead of this now, and there are different branches [besides the one with the leaked build], etc.”

Anonymous Softie: Exactly. It’s a distraction for developers that are… you know, so we have an enormous [Independent Software Vendor] community that tests various milestones. They test their software. They test their drivers. They test their apps.. and for them it’s a distraction too because they’re wondering “wow, what’s going on? Should I look at this? Should I stop what I’m doing and look at this leaked build?” and so, you know, it tends to slow everything down.

Anonymous Softie: Those are the biggest issues that we have. And then, you know, so many people get sucked into potentially having to respond to all the questions that people are raising about that particular moment in time. We just don’t have time to deal with that, and so, generally, we don’t comment on unreleased builds.

Bryant: There you go.

Bryant: I guess… how does it affect, I mean, you talked about how it affects you guys, what you guys do, but let’s say… how does it affect the actual development of a product itself? Or, on a similar line, how does it affect the timeline? Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of leaks setting things back.

Anonymous Softie: It generally doesn’t affect the timeline. You know, the developers are always heads down; they’re writing code, they’re fixing bugs, but even they will stop and read the reviews of the leaked build. So there’s loss of progress there, potentially. And so, you know, when you add it all up, it really does no one any good. ’cause even all the people that pause to download it– we also have the problem of viruses. People leak builds. They stuff them with payloads, and everyone wants the leaked build. They get a bunch of viruses, and now I have to deal with that problem. So, you know, in some sense it’s “dangerous” as well, and we have no control over what’s out there, what the quality is…

Anonymous Softie: but leaks generally don’t affect the schedule, but they affect the communication. They affect the perception They’re a distraction for all of the outside developers in the world that are trying to be focused on the right builds, and they might see something they didn’t expect, but, you know, when you catch us in between, all bets are off. We establish a contract with developers. We say “here are the APIs.” It’s a contract between Microsoft and the developers. [We tell them] “we’re not going to change these APIs.” and, you know, interim builds could actually have changes, maybe some things that we’re actually just testing out, prototyping. And so, you know, you get some people on the outside that are, you know, wondering “Gosh. Did Microsoft– Did I not– Did I miss something? Did Microsoft not tell me what’s happened?” And so it’s pure theater.

Bryant: Right.

Anonymous Softie: You know, people like to see it because it’s secret and nobody else can see it, but if you download some rogue binary from some site and you get infected, or you download something that, you know… people accuse that, even, of being Microsoft’s fault, and I’m generally the one that has to deal with… you know, whenever press call, my phone rings. I would rather spend my time preparing for that next big real milestone, making sure people have the most accurate information and keeping everyone on track instead of being distracted by all of these external issues.

Bryant: Right. Now that was with regards to, um, actual build leaks. How about news leaks? Like, um, if somebody leaks a screenshot of something in progress– I figure that would possibly be the same ordeal. You know, news leaks, perception leaks [such as reviews], let’s say an embargo is broken about something. How about those? How does that work?

Anonymous Softie: Both a similar and a whole different set of issues as well.

Bryant: Right.

Anonymous Softie: You know, we have a… I have a very professional relationship with all of the professional journalists that I work with. And so, it’s difficult. When I en massé pre-brief journalists and I say “okay, you know, all of the information that I’m telling you under confidence–” professionals embargoed under this certain date. For the most part, people respect that. But then, somebody breaks the embargo, and then all the other journalists look around [and think] “well, they went! I gotta go!” And then it jeopardizes my relationship with other people ’cause suddenly everybody is going. At the end of the day, it often causes a lot of misinformation to be out there because people– I haven’t had a chance to talk to you, Bryant, yet, to let you know what’s our intent, What do we do and what is this about, why are we delivering this thing, who is it for, what’s it capable of doing. And so, if I don’t have that opportunity to kinda frame everything with everybody and put it in context, everybody starts speculating. You know, “maybe it means this. Maybe it means this. Maybe it means that.” Again, huge distractions. The people that need accurate information don’t have that accurate information any longer, and I spend weeks trying to sorta put things back in order so that everyone has the accurate Microsoft view of things instead of 30 different conspiratorial opinions on what may or may not be true.

Bryant: Yeah, of course. And, well I suppose for now that’s all I’m really looking for.

Anonymous Softie: Cool.

Whether this person’s account of how leaks affect things at Microsoft represents the Microsoft way of thinking is beyond me. I didn’t ask, but it’s safe to infer that this person isn’t the only person who thinks along these lines.
http://www.aeroxp.org/2009/10/the-effects-of-leaks/





Amazon Expands Kindle to the PC
Shaun Nichols

Amazon has expanded its Kindle digital book service to the PC.

The company said that its new Kindle Books application will allow Windows PC users to purchase, download and read e-book titles from Amazon's Kindle Store service.

Additionally, the PC application will support Amazon's Whispersync service, which allows users to automatically sync their bookmarks or current pages across PCs, Kindle tablet devices or iPhone/iPod Touch handsets.

"Kindle for PC is the perfect companion application for folks who own a Kindle or Kindle DX," said Amazon's Kindle vice president Ian Freed.

"Kindle for PC is also a great way for people around the world to read the most popular books of today even if they don’t yet have a Kindle."

The PC application will be offered as a free download and will support Windows 7, Vista and XP systems.

The news comes as Amazon is suddenly finding itself with a fresh crop of competitors in the e-book reader market.

Earlier this week hardwear vendor Spring Design entered the market with its Alex device, while publisher/retailer Barnes and Noble presented an even more serious challenge to Kindle when it unveiled its Nook reader device.

Both devices are based on the Android operating system from Google, which is further pressing Amazon with the announcement of its Editions online retail service.
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/1...to-the-pc.aspx





Big Cellphone Makers Shifting to Android System
Saul Hansell

Since 1996, Microsoft has been writing operating systems for little computers to carry in your pocket. It was a lonely business until the company’s perennial rival, Apple, introduced the Web-browsing, music-playing iPhone. But now that smartphones are popular, Microsoft’s operating system, Windows Mobile, is foundering.

More cellphone makers are turning to the free Android operating system made by Microsoft’s latest nemesis, Google.

Cellphone makers that have used Windows Mobile to run their top-of-the-line smartphones — including Samsung, LG, Kyocera, Sony Ericsson — are now also making Android devices. Twelve Android handsets have been announced this year, with dozens more expected next year. Motorola has dropped Windows Mobile from its line entirely in a switch to Android. HTC, a major cellphone maker, expects half its phones sold this year to run Android. Dell is using Android for its entry into the cellphone market.

All four of the largest carriers in the United States have now agreed to offer Android phones. When the first Android handset, the G1 from HTC, was introduced last fall, only T-Mobile offered it. Now, Verizon, the largest carrier, is putting a huge promotional push behind the Droid from Motorola, set to be introduced this week. Even AT&T, the home of the iPhone, recently said it would join the Android party next year.

Google is rapidly introducing updates to Android, each named after a bakery sweet. Version 1.5 (cupcake) came out in April, version 1.6 (donut) appeared in September. Version 2.0 (éclair) is expected to appear on the Droid.

“A lot of manufacturers are walking into our office and talking about how important Android is becoming to them,” said Cole Brodman, the chief development officer of T-Mobile, the first carrier to sell phones with Google’s software. “Android is ramping with more manufacturers and more price points. It is going to have a pretty significant impact.”

Android is on only 1.8 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to Gartner, and Windows Mobile software still dwarfs Android. But Microsoft is slipping. The percentage of smartphones using the Windows Mobile system has plummeted to 9.3 percent, from 12 percent in the second quarter of 2008. Microsoft fell behind Apple, which shot up to 13.3 percent, from 2.8 percent. (Nokia’s Symbian operating system is the world leader, followed by Research In Motion’s OS for its BlackBerrys.)

Android does have its share of doubters. “The industry has decided that Android is going to be a huge hit, but I’m skeptical,” said Tero Kuittinen, an analyst with MKM Partners. “To have legs, you have to be a hit. The first three Android devices didn’t connect with the mass market.”

Nevertheless, Android is free, while Windows Mobile costs manufacturers $15 to $25 a phone.

Google’s software is intended for modern screens you tap with a finger, while Windows Mobile was built for use with a stylus. Android has attracted far more applications for consumers in the first year than Windows Mobile has in a decade. As a result, Android is winning over the world’s largest cellphone makers.

One part of the appeal is that, unlike other operating systems, Android is open source software, so anyone can use or change it.

“We have access to the source code,” said Sanjay Jha, the co-chief executive of Motorola. “To do that on any other platform would be very difficult.”

HTC, the Taiwanese cellphone company that has grown quickly in recent years making only Windows Mobile phones, also finds the customization attractive because Android phones allow users to add apps. “Customers are really embracing personalization, and Android brings that to the forefront,” said Jason Mackenzie, HTC’s vice president for North America.

Windows Mobile, by contrast, appeals more to corporate computing managers who like how it connects to Microsoft’s e-mail and office software.

“A year ago, we significantly changed our strategy,” said Andrew Lees, Microsoft’s senior vice president for the Windows Mobile effort. “Our value proposition is you can get your business and your consumer scenarios on the PC, and in a relevant way for you on the phone.”

But Microsoft has not announced a release date for Windows Mobile 7.

“You will see a speedy set of innovation for us in the next 6, 12, 24 months,” said Robert J. Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division at a news media event in New York to introduce a quick revision of the operating system called Windows Mobile 6.5. “Should we have picked up on the trends a little sooner? It’s hard not to say we should have,” he added.

So far, Microsoft has not been able to answer critics who say its operating system is old, slow and hard to use.

“Windows Mobile is simply dated, and that hasn’t changed in this release,” said Avi Greengart, research director for consumer devices at Current Analysis.

Indeed, a J. D. Power & Associates survey found that Windows Mobile had the lowest satisfaction rating among customers of any smartphone operating system. The iPhone has by far the most satisfying software, the study found. Android is a distant second, followed closely by BlackBerry’s operating system.

Windows Mobile scored below average on every attribute, said Kirk Parsons, director of the study, especially in ease of operation, speed and stability.

Android’s supporters say that in contrast, Google’s software and the devices that run it are evolving very quickly.

“They started with the base layer of capabilities,” Kevin Packingham, senior vice president for product and technology development at Sprint. “What was missing from the first generation was the user interface that really gets to consumers.”

Mr. Packingham said he was confident that Android phones would gain popularity.

“In the next year, there is the potential for Android to have huge growth and market share,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/te...26android.html





The Fire Risk That Clears Security
Christine Negroni

Battery fires in personal electronic devices can be scary. But if a battery catches fire on board an airplane, the risks are much greater.

With more people traveling with an assortment of portable electronics — sometimes there are more devices than passengers on a plane — fires are occurring on airliners with increasing frequency. More than half of the 22 battery fires in the cabin of passenger planes since 1999 have been in the last three years. One air safety expert suggested that these devices might be “the last unrestricted fire hazard” people can bring on airplanes.

This month, the Federal Aviation Administration along with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued special advisories to airlines about yet another gadget: the credit card readers that many have begun to issue to flight attendants to ring up sales of food, drinks and other amenities.

While airlines have been using portable credit card readers for several years, the F.A.A. said earlier this month that they needed approval from the agency’s hazardous materials division. Like the majority of hand-held consumer electronic devices, the readers are powered by rechargeable lithium batteries, which the government considers hazardous and in need of special handling.

“The carriers came and asked if we would allow them to have the credit card readers on aircraft and they wanted spare lithium batteries to allow them to switch out the batteries,” said Christopher Bonanti, director of the office of hazardous materials for the F.A.A. “I was concerned about having spare lithium batteries, and I asked them not to do that.”

Some airlines have agreed to special training for handling batteries and were given permission to carry spares, Mr. Bonanti said. But other airlines, like Delta and JetBlue, figured it was safer to avoid carrying extra batteries altogether.

“They’re not charged onboard the aircraft and batteries aren’t removed from these devices while onboard,” Bryan Baldwin, a JetBlue spokesman, wrote in an e-mail message.

While no fires from portable credit card readers have been reported to the F.A.A., the list of spontaneous combustion events with other portable devices reads like a thriller. Last month, a portable DVD player was dropped on an American Airlines flight, causing a fire in the first-class cabin. In March 2008, a United Airlines employee placed a flashlight in the storage compartment of a Boeing 757 at the Denver airport. A report later said the flashlight exploded “like gunshots” turning the on-off switch into a projectile. On a flight to Miami that same month, eight people were injured when a small battery fell against a metal seat frame. In the ensuing explosion, debris singed a passenger’s ear and hair and the smoke sickened seven crew members.

In 2004, an ABC News camera exploded on an airplane being used by the presidential candidate John Edwards. A seat caught fire, causing the pilot to make an emergency return to the airport. Even more events go unreported, the authorities said.

“If you have an issue in the air there’s not a whole lot you can do to recover from it,” said Gerald McNerney, a vice president at Motorola, which provides hand-held devices to airlines. “You put your brand at risk if one of your devices has an issue with the battery. What we’ve done is look at creating backups, duplicity in development so that you’re not going to have an explosion.”

Figures from the Consumer Product Safety Commission Web site show that at least 400,000 portable device batteries have been recalled so far this year, an indication that manufacturing problems are sometimes to blame. Batteries are also becoming more powerful, so that even the smallest have the potential to unleash a lot of heat.

“The battery industry is trying to squeeze more juice into these batteries for longer life,” said Joe Delcambre, a spokesman for the hazardous materials agency. “Smaller battery, more life, with a terminal that can overheat the product — it’s a risk.”

“We have to get people aware of the safety factors to reduce the risk of traveling with batteries.” Mr. Delcambre said.

Considering that problems with batteries are occurring on passenger planes at a rate of one every four months, Merritt Birky, formerly a fire and explosions expert with the National Transportation Safety Board who is now a private consultant, suggests they should be kept where passengers can keep an eye on them and out of overhead storage bins.

“Any time you have a fire on board it’s alarming, especially in the overhead bin,” Mr. Birky said. “That area is chock full of luggage and coats so you have lots of fuel for a fire and it’s going to go undetected for quite some time.”

The Transportation Department has created a Web site that includes the rules on traveling with lithium batteries, and it works with the manufacturers of portable electronic devices to spread the word about the hazards. But the transportation safety board estimated that only one person in every 170 to 190 travelers had actually visited the Web site.

“Most air passengers and flight crews are likely unaware of the fire risks posed by rechargeable lithium batteries,” the board wrote in 2008 in recommending a more aggressive approach to educating the public. The F.A.A. plans to follow that suggestion when it begins broadcasting public service announcements in airports next year, Mr. Bonanti said.

“There’s a whole slew of things that can go wrong with a lithium battery,” he said, adding that no matter how comfortable people are with their hand-held devices, caution is the best course of action.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/27fires.html





Misinformed on Net Neutrality

The Net Neutrality fight is going to be easy to win, but irritating to fight.

Read a sample of the right-wing blogosphere's blitzkrieg against Net Neutrality and you too will conclude that they simply don't understand what Net Neutrality is. Not only do they not get it, they consistently fuck it up in the same way. Don't think this is a coincidence. There's a herd of conservative bloggers who feed from the same trough and fertilize the blogosphere with identical bullshit.

Take this passage from ill-informed blogger MADISONCONSERVATIVE's hit piece against Net Neutrality (note how similar this argument is to a FreedomWorks blog post I blasted a few weeks back)

Quote:
For those unfamiliar with what net neutrality is, I’ll try to explain in a more coherent way. Internet providers like Comcast, Charter, Road Runner, etc. sell access to the internet through their networks. If you subscribe to their services, everything you access on the internet first goes through their private property. Now, theoretically, as it is their private property, and you’re choosing to pay to use it, they can make the rules on what you can access. However, historically, they haven’t. Why? Well, they know that if you can’t access what you want using their service, you can go find another.

...the proposed solution is to have the government dictate what private internet providers can or cannot do with their private property
This is not Net Neutrality. Private internet providers are already controlling their networks. If you want faster service, you can buy a more expensive plan with access to increased internet bandwith. The argument MADISONCONSERVATIVE is making on behalf of the telecommunication companies is that they should have it both ways - control over the consumer of internet content and control over the producers of it.

What MADISONCONSERVATIVE wants is for Internet service providers to be allowed to control what content can be requested from the internet. Right-wingers love to sing the praises of the founders of the United States, so I'll put this in terms they'll understand... This is a fundamental betrayal of the founding principles of the internet.

The founder of the Internet is Tim Berners-Lee. Here's what he has to say on the matter:

Quote:
"When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data.

Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor.

It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing."
Net Neutrality regulations are nothing more than a means to preserve the Internet as we've always known it - as an open platform from which anybody can innovate. Any attempt to argue otherwise is merely an effort to mislead on behalf of the telecommunication industry.

However, if MADISONCONSERVATIVE and his right-wing friends want to continue revealing their ignorance on the topic of Net Neutrality by arguing private property rights, they should feel free to do so. Maybe when conservatives are done shilling for the telecommunication industry's Net Neutrality interests, they can argue for Greyhound's right to not just run a bus service, but their right to determine where certain types of people can sit.
http://intershame.com/on/MADISONCONSERVATIVE/





Revolution in a Box

It's not Twitter or Facebook that's reinventing the planet. Eighty years after the first commercial broadcast crackled to life, television still rules our world. And let's hear it for the growing legions of couch potatoes: All those soap operas might be the ticket to a better future after all.
Charles Kenny

"The television," science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury lamented in 1953, is "that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little." Bradbury wasn't alone in his angst: Television has been as reviled as it has been welcomed since the first broadcasts began in 1928. Critics of television, from disgusted defenders of the politically correct to outraged conservative culture warriors, blame it for poor health, ignorance, and moral decline, among other assorted ills. Some go further: According to a recent fatwa in India, television is "nearly impossible to use … without a sin." Last year, a top Saudi cleric declared it permissible to kill the executives of television stations for spreading sedition and immorality.

So will the rapid, planetwide proliferation of television sets and digital and satellite channels, to corners of the world where the Internet is yet unheard of, be the cause of global decay such critics fear? Hardly. A world of couch potatoes in front of digital sets will have its downsides -- fewer bowling clubs, more Wii bowling. It may or may not be a world of greater obesity, depending on whom you ask. But it could also be a world more equal for women, healthier, better governed, more united in response to global tragedy, and more likely to vote for local versions of American Idol than shoot at people.

Indeed, television, that 1920s technology so many of us take for granted, is still coming to tens of millions with a transformative power -- for the good -- that the world is only now coming to understand. The potential scope of this transformation is enormous: By 2007, there was more than one television set for every four people on the planet, and 1.1 billion households had one. Another 150 million-plus households will be tuned in by 2013.

In our collective enthusiasm for whiz-bang new social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, the implications of this next television age -- from lower birthrates among poor women to decreased corruption to higher school enrollment rates -- have largely gone overlooked despite their much more sweeping impact. And it's not earnest educational programming that's reshaping the world on all those TV sets. The programs that so many dismiss as junk -- from song-and-dance shows to Desperate Housewives -- are being eagerly consumed by poor people everywhere who are just now getting access to television for the first time. That's a powerful force for spreading glitz and drama -- but also social change.

Television, it turns out, is the kudzu of consumer durables. It spreads across communities with incredible speed. Just look at the story of expanding TV access in the rural areas of one poor country, Indonesia: Within two years of village electrification, average television ownership rates reached 30 percent. Within seven years, 60 percent of households had TVs -- this in areas where average surveyed incomes were about $2 a day. Fewer than 5 percent of these same households owned refrigerators. Television is so beloved that in the vast swaths of the world where there is still no electricity network, people hook up their TVs to batteries -- indeed, in a number of poor countries, such as Peru, more homes have televisions than electricity.

As a result, the television is fast approaching global ubiquity. About half of Indian households have a television, up from less than a third in 2001; the figure for Brazil is more than four-fifths. (In comparison, just 7 percent of Indians use the Internet, and about one-third of Brazilians do.) In places like Europe and North America, 90-plus percent of households have a TV. Even in countries as poor as Vietnam and Algeria, rates are above 80 percent. But the potential for real growth in access (and impact) is in the least-developed countries, like Nigeria and Bangladesh, where penetration rates are still well below 30 percent.

If an explosion of access is the first global television revolution, then an explosion of choice will be the second. By 2013, half of the world's televisions will be receiving digital signals, which means access to many more channels. Digital broadcast builds on considerably expanded viewing options delivered through cable or satellite. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of households in India with a TV already have a cable or satellite connection. And in the United States, a bellwether for global television trends, the spread of cable since 1970 has meant an increasing number of broadcast channels are sharing a declining proportion of the audience -- down from 80 percent to 40 percent over the last 35 years. The average American household now has access to 119 channels, and a similar phenomenon is spreading rapidly around the globe.

The explosion of choice is loosening the grip of bureaucrats the world over, who in many countries have either run or controlled programming directly, or heavily regulated the few stations available. A 97-country survey carried out a few years ago found that an average of 60 percent of the top five television stations in each country were owned by the state, with 32 percent in the hands of small family groupings. Programming in developing countries in particular has often been slanted toward decidedly practical topics -- rural TV in China, for example, frequently covers the latest advances in pig breeding. And coverage of politics has often strayed from the balanced. Think Hugo Chávez, who refused to renew the license of RCTV, Venezuela's most popular TV network, after it broadcast commentary critical of his government. He regularly appears on the state channel in his own TV show Aló Presidente -- episodes of which last anywhere from six to a record 96 hours.

But increasingly, the days when presidential speechmaking and pig breeding were must-see TV are behind us. As choices in what to watch expand, people will have access both to a wider range of voices and to a growing number of channels keen to give the audience what it really wants. And what it wants seems to be pretty much the same everywhere -- sports, reality shows, and, yes, soap operas. Some 715 million people worldwide watched the finals of the 2006 soccer World Cup, for example. More than a third of Afghanistan's population tunes into that country's version of American Idol -- Afghan Star. The biggest television series ever worldwide is Baywatch, an everyday tale of lifesaving folk based on and around the beaches of Santa Monica, Calif. The show has been broadcast in 142 countries, and at its peak it had an audience estimated north of 1 billion. (Today, the world's most popular TV show is the medical drama House, which according to media consulting firm Eurodata TV Worldwide was watched by 82 million people last year in 66 countries, edging out CSI and Desperate Housewives.)

Ghulam Nabi Azad, India's health and family welfare minister, has even taken to promoting TV as a form of birth control. "In olden days people had no other entertainment but sex, which is why they produced so many children," he mused publicly in July. "Today, TV is the biggest source of entertainment. Hence, it is important that there is electricity in every village so that people watch TV till late in the night. By the time the serials are over, they'll be too tired to have sex and will fall asleep." Azad is certainly right that television helps slow birthrates, though experience from his own country and elsewhere suggests that it is by example, not exhaustion, that TV programs manage such a dramatic effect.

Since the 1970s, Brazil's Rede Globo network has been providing a steady diet of locally produced soaps, some of which are watched by as many as 80 million people. The programs are no more tales of everyday life in Brazil than Desperate Housewives is an accurate representation of a typical U.S. suburb. In a country where divorce was only legalized in 1977, nearly a fifth of the main female characters were divorced (and about a quarter were unfaithful). What's more, 72 percent of the main female characters on the Globo soaps had no kids, and only 7 percent had more than one. In 1970, the average Brazilian woman, in contrast, had given birth nearly six times.

But the soaps clearly resonated with viewers. As the Globo network expanded to new areas in the 1970s and 1980s, according to researchers at the Inter-American Development Bank, parents began naming their kids after soap-opera characters. And women in those parts of the country -- especially poor women -- started having fewer babies. Being in an area covered by the Globo network had the same effect on a woman's fertility as two additional years of education. This wasn't the result of what was shown during commercial breaks -- for most of the time, contraceptive advertising was banned, and there was no government population-control policy at all. The portrayal of plausible female characters with few children, apparently, was an important social cue.

Cable and satellite television may be having an even bigger impact on fertility in rural India. As in Brazil, popular programming there includes soaps that focus on urban life. Many women on these serials work outside the home, run businesses, and control money. In addition, soap characters are typically well-educated and have few children. And they prove to be extraordinarily powerful role models: Simply giving a village access to cable TV, research by scholars Robert Jensen and Emily Oster has found, has the same effect on fertility rates as increasing by five years the length of time girls stay in school.

The soaps in Brazil and India provided images of women who were empowered to make decisions affecting not only childbirth, but a range of household activities. The introduction of cable or satellite services in a village, Jensen and Oster found, goes along with higher girls' school enrollment rates and increased female autonomy. Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn't just birthrates that changed as Globo's signal spread -- divorce rates went up, too. There may be something to the boast of one of the directors of the company that owns Afghan Star. When a woman reached the final five this year, the director suggested it would "do more for women's rights than all the millions of dollars we have spent on public service announcements for women's rights on TV."

TV's salutary effects extend far beyond reproduction and gender equality. Kids who watch TV out of school, according to a World Bank survey of young people in the shantytowns of Fortaleza in Brazil, are considerably less likely to consume drugs (or, for that matter, get pregnant). TV's power to reduce youth drug use was two times larger than having a comparatively well-educated mother. And though they might not be as subtly persuasive as telenovelas or reality shows, well-designed broadcast campaigns can also make a difference. In Ghana, where as few as 4 percent of mothers were found to wash their hands with soap after defecating and less than 1 percent before feeding their children, reported hand-washing rates shot up in response to a broadcast campaign emphasizing that people eat "more than just rice" if preparers don't wash their hands properly before dinner.

Indeed, TV is its own kind of education -- and rather than clash with schooling, as years of parental nagging would suggest, it can even enhance it. U.S. kids with access to a TV signal in the 1950s, for instance -- think toddlers watching quality educational programming like I Love Lucy -- tended to have higher test scores in 1964, according to research by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago. Today, more than 700,000 secondary-school students in remote Mexican villages watch the Telesecundaria program of televised classes. Although students enter the program with below-average test scores in mathematics and language, by graduation they have caught up in math and halved the language-score deficit.

Similarly, evidence that television is responsible for the grim state of civic discourse is mixed, at best. Better television reception in Javanese villages in Indonesia, according to research by Ben Olken, comes with substantially lower levels of participation in social activities and with lower measures of trust in others. Villages with access to an extra TV channel see a decline of about 7 percent in the number of social groups. Similar outcomes have been found in the United States. But improved television reception did not appear to affect the level of discussion in village meetings or levels of corruption in a village road project undertaken during Olken's study. And an examination of the early history of television in the United States by Markus Prior suggests that regions that saw access to more channels in the 1950s and 1960s witnessed increases in political knowledge, interest, and turnout, especially among less-educated TV viewers.

What about television's broader impact on governance? Here, it's the level of competition that seems to matter -- a hopeful sign given that the future of global TV is likely to be considerably more competitive. If the only channel that viewers watch is biased in its coverage, then, unsurprisingly, they are likely to be swayed toward that viewpoint. Brazil's Globo channel, for all its positive impact on fertility rates, has played a less positive role in terms of bias-free reporting. It has long had a close relationship with government, as well as a dominant market share. In Brazil's 1989 election -- a race in which Globo was squarely behind right-leaning presidential candidate Fernando Collor de Mello -- the difference between people who never watched television and those who watched it frequently was a 13 percentage-point increase in the likelihood of voting for Collor, scholar Taylor Boas found. But with channels proliferating nearly everywhere, television controllers may have much less power to sway elections today. In the choice-rich United States, for example, there is no simple relation between hours watched and voting patterns, even if those who watch particular channels are more likely to vote Republican or Democrat.

Then there's corruption. Consider the bribes that Peruvian secret-police chief Vladimiro Montesinos had to pay to subvert competitive newsmaking during the 1990s. It cost only $300,000 per month for Montesinos to bribe most of the congressmen in Peru's government, and about $250,000 a month to bribe the judges -- a real bargain. But Montesinos had to spend about $3 million a month to subvert six of the seven available television channels to ensure friendly coverage for the government. The good news here is that competition in the electronic Fourth Estate can apparently make it more expensive to run a country corruptly.

Corruption is one thing, but could television help solve a problem we've had since before Sumer and Elam battled it out around Basra in 2700 B.C. -- keeping countries from fighting each other? Maybe.

U.S. researchers who study violence on TV battle viciously themselves over whether it translates into more aggressive behavior in real life. But at least from a broader perspective, television might play a role in stemming the global threat of war. It isn't that TV reporting of death and destruction necessarily reduces support for wars already begun -- that's an argument that has raged over conflicts from Vietnam to the Iraq war. It is more that, by fostering a growing global cosmopolitanism, television might make war less attractive to begin with. Indeed, the idea that communications are central to building cross-cultural goodwill is an old one. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels suggested in the 19th century that railways were vital in rapidly cementing the union of the working class: "that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years," they wrote in The Communist Manifesto. If the Amtraks of the world can have such an impact, surely the Hallmark Channel can do even better.

The fact that Kobe Bryant (born in Philadelphia, plays for the Los Angeles Lakers) sees his basketball shirt considerably outsell those of Yao Ming (born in Shanghai, plays for the Houston Rockets) in China suggests something of that growing global cosmopolitanism at work. The considerable response of global television viewers to images of famine in Ethiopia, or the tsunami in Asia, also shows how TV is a powerful force for shrinking the emotional distance between peoples within and between countries. In the United States, an additional minute of nightly news coverage of the Asian tsunami increased online donation levels to charities involved in relief efforts by 13 percent, according to research from the William Davidson Institute. And analysis of U.S. public opinion indicates that more coverage of a country on evening news shows is related to increased sympathy and support for that country.

Of course, the extent to which television helps foster cosmopolitanism depends on what people are watching. People in the Middle East who only watched Arab news channels were considerably less likely to agree that the September 11 attacks were carried out by Arab terrorists than those exposed to Western media coverage, researchers Gentzkow and Shapiro found, even after taking into account other characteristics likely to shape their views such as education, language, and age. Similarly, the tone and content of coverage of the ground invasion of Iraq was notably different on Al Jazeera than it was on U.S. and British network broadcasts in the spring of 2003 -- and surely this helped sustain notably different attitudes toward the war. But with the growing reach of BBC World News and CNN in the Middle East, and the growing reach of Al Jazeera in the West, there is at least a greater potential to understand how the other side thinks.

Just because soap operas and reality shows can help solve real-world problems doesn't mean the world's politicians should now embrace TV as the ultimate policy prescription. There are of course a few things governments could do to harness television's power for good, such as supporting well-designed public service announcements. But for the most part, politicians ought to be paying less attention to TV, not more. They shouldn't be limiting the number of channels or interfering in the news. A vibrant, competitive television market playing Days of Our Lives or Días de Nuestras Vidas on loop might have a bigger impact even than well-meaning educational programs. And competition is critical to ensuring that television helps inform voters, not just indoctrinate them.

In the not-too-distant future, it is quite possible that the world will be watching 24 billion hours of TV a day -- an average of close to four hours for each person in the world. Some of those hours could surely be better spent -- planting trees, helping old ladies cross the road, or playing cricket, perhaps. But watching TV exposes people to new ideas and different people. With that will come greater opportunity, growing equality, a better understanding of the world, and a new appreciation of the complexities of life for a wannabe Afghan woman pop star. Not bad for a siren Medusa supposedly giving so little.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article..._box?page=full





Ipsos/PHD Study Shows Resistance to Paid Content
Lucia Moses

Sorry, Rupert. Despite the News Corp. chairman’s hopes (along with all publishers) to charge for online content, consumers are loathe to pay, new research from Ipsos Mendelsohn and PHD reveals. Simply put, they’ve been trained to equate online with free.

The Ipsos/PHD collaboration confirms as much: 55.5 percent of survey respondents indicated they would be very or extremely unlikely to pay for online newspaper or magazine content. Only 16.5 percent agreed they are extremely, very or even somewhat likely. At the same time, 81.5 percent of online users of The Wall Street Journal’s and Consumer Reports’ sites—both pay sites—considered them to be a good, very good or excellent value. “The message that came out is that you can charge, but you better have incredibly compelling and unique data,” said Bob Shullman, president of Ipsos.

Other Ipsos findings didn’t bode well for the future of paid online content. There was little crossover between a publication’s online and print content, with 40.7 percent saying they looked into a print pub exclusively and only 3.1 percent saying they read the print and online version of the same publication. Respondents spent almost half the time (8.9 minutes) reading a publication’s Web site as they do reading print, and they visited magazines’ sites about half as often as they read the issues. (The frequency was a bit higher for newspapers’ sites.)

Not all the news was discouraging. The survey found online and print readers are younger and better educated than print-only readers. Their satisfaction level with print publications’ sites was 71.4 percent, almost as high as that of the pubs themselves. And readers’ overall likelihood of taking action was higher with the site than the print edition.

Also of relevance at a time when many print pubs are folding: Nearly 38 percent said that if a title stopped publishing but remained available online only, they would seek out its Web-only form. The rest were roughly split in between saying they would substitute another print publication or do something else.

The survey was conducted in July of 2,404 U.S. adults who were asked about 40 newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek, Cosmopolitan and Cooking Light.

Survey Says…

1. 55.5 percent are very or extremely unlikely to pay for online print content. Only 16.5 percent are likely.

2. Only 3 percent read a publication’s print edition and its site.

3. In good news, more than a third say they would follow an online version of a shut-down print publication.

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_...366eea87f231c8





Disney Hopes ‘Christmas Carol’ Lives Up to Its Blockbuster Marketing
Brooks Barnes

Most Hollywood marketers would balk at selling a movie about winter in the dead of summer. But not Walt Disney Pictures, which arrived in New Orleans in August to promote its new 3-D version of “A Christmas Carol.”

The scene was certainly Dickensian. Drenched in sweat, hundreds of people waited in a muddy field for hours to tour a train filled with exhibits about the film. “This is beyond miserable,” said Kimberly Serpas as a squadron of dragonflies dive-bombed her 2-year-old son.

Still, the event did its job. “We’ll go see it,” Ms. Serpas said. “The exhibits ultimately made it look interesting. It’s on my radar now.”

What does it take to persuade the world it needs yet another “Christmas Carol” adaptation? Apparently, a whole lot of hard sell. Under pressure to deliver a big hit after losing money in the most recent quarter, Disney’s studio is backing the movie’s Nov. 6 release with one of the most elaborate and expensive marketing campaigns in its history, at least for a live-action film.

By the time that five-car train rolls into Grand Central Terminal in New York on Friday, it will have visited 40 cities, logging about a million visitors and generating a mountain of news media coverage. Costumed carolers unveiled footage at the Cannes International Film Festival in May. Fake snow will blanket the London premiere, an affair that will accommodate 4,000 guests.

The studio is also pulling out all the new-media stops it can. There is a Scrooge iPhone application, a “naughty or nice” Facebook quiz and a themed video game on Disney.com.

A Web site where people around the world can make virtual ornaments and decorate a communal online tree was unveiled last week.

Add in an omnipresent television and billboard advertising campaign and myriad merchandising tie-ins, and Disney will have bombarded most of the moviegoing souls on the planet with its message by the time the movie opens.

“Its success is very important to the company,” said Mark Zoradi, president of the Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Group.

More than the fortunes of a hugely expensive film is at stake. The media giant is betting that the movie, “Disney’s A Christmas Carol,” estimated to cost about $175 million to produce, can become an annuity.

If people like the movie, which stars Jim Carrey in several incarnations and was directed by Robert Zemeckis, Disney could rerelease it every year, generating a steady stream of holiday-driven DVD and merchandising sales. Deeper in its life cycle, annual television runs could produce meaningful revenue.

“The Polar Express,” which Mr. Zemeckis directed for Warner Brothers in 2004, is one model. Warner has rereleased the movie every November to solid results, selling more than $300 million in tickets at the global box office. The DVD has become one of the studio’s best sellers; more than nine million copies have been sold in North America alone, according to the research company SNL Kagan.

Disney has had niche success in this area with “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” the Halloween-themed film that was conceived by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick in 1993. But its version of “A Christmas Carol” carries significant risk.

For starters, the studio is replowing perhaps the most overplowed piece of intellectual property in history. The 1843 novella about a greedy curmudgeon who is visited by three apparitions on Christmas Eve is old enough that it is public domain, and it has been adapted for stage, television and film more than 50 times in recent decades, including an all-dog version.

“It has never been done with modern technology and with the acting talent of Jim Carrey,” Mr. Zoradi said, adding that the visual style was “very new and very hip. It’s a 3-D thrill ride from start to finish.”

Mr. Carrey plays Ebenezer Scrooge (at various stages of his life) and the three ghosts. Gary Oldman stars as Bob Cratchit, Marley and Tiny Tim. Mr. Zemeckis has called the dark movie a “graphic novel version” of the classic tale.

Mr. Carrey has a strong holiday track record — his “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” in 2000 was a global hit — but his overall drawing power has weakened in recent years. Attempts to stretch beyond slapstick (“The Number 23”) have proved ill-fated, and even some family movies (“Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”) have been softer than expected.

Mr. Zemeckis, who won an Oscar for “Forrest Gump” and was responsible for the “Back to the Future” trilogy, certainly knows how to deliver box office dynamite. But his remake of “A Christmas Carol” involves a style of filmmaking — motion capture — that audiences are still chewing over.

While moviegoers responded to “The Polar Express,” which served as a kind of major-league debut for the technology, they largely rejected it with “Beowulf,” which Mr. Zemeckis directed for Paramount in 2007 to weak results. Cinema buffs complain that the technology, which essentially turns live actors into computer-animated figures, can deliver a creepy “dead eye” effect.

Mr. Zemeckis has said repeatedly in interviews that the technology has evolved to the point that such complaints are moot. “We fixed the eyes,” he told the fan Web site Ain’t It Cool News in July.

“Disney’s A Christmas Carol” finds itself in the awkward position of arriving in theaters without its cheerleader in chief: Dick Cook, who was ousted as studio chairman last month after clashing with Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive. His approach to the marketing — namely the much-ballyhooed train tour — worsened the relationship.

Mr. Iger has been vocal in pushing the studio to cut marketing costs and worried the train was too big a drain on company resources. While the six-month, 16,000-mile train tour was sponsored by Amtrak and Hewlett-Packard, among others, it required a heavy personnel commitment on Disney’s behalf to plan and manage.

A busload of staff members followed the train from place to place, including the Grand Canyon; Whitefish, Mont.; and Charleston, S.C. Disneyland executives consulted on crowd control; air-conditioning units were trucked in for sweaty summer stops. Mr. Cook himself took time to appear at the train’s introduction in Los Angeles and again in Chicago; he had planned to be in New York for the finale.

As far as the studio is concerned, the train has been a smash success, bringing the 3-D message to the heartland and generating deep audience awareness. About 40,000 people turned out over three days in Los Angeles; in some cities, people have come dressed in Santa costumes. A spokeswoman said the experience in New Orleans was an unfortunate consequence of bad weather and not representative of other stops.

“It has proven very Twitter-friendly,” said Mr. Zoradi, comparing the marketing gimmick to a circus coming to town. “People have been talking like heck about it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/bu...a/26carol.html





Movie Fans Might Have to Wait to Rent New DVD Releases

Some major studios, grappling with sharply declining DVD revenue, are considering a policy to make new releases initially available for purchase only.
Ben Fritz

For those who like renting movies, Hollywood may soon have a message: Prepare to wait.

In an effort to push consumers toward buying more movies, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would block DVDs from being offered for rental until several weeks after going on sale.

Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster Inc. and Netflix Inc. would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers. The move comes as the studios are grappling with sharply declining DVD revenue, which has long propped up the movie business.

Reed Hastings, chief executive of DVD-by-mail company Netflix, revealed that he had discussed delayed-rental proposals with several of his biggest suppliers. People close to the situation at several studios confirmed that such plans were under consideration and probably would take effect next year.

"The studios are wrestling with declines in DVD sales while the DVD rental market has been modestly growing," Hastings said on a conference call Thursday with analysts after Netflix reported impressive 24% revenue growth last quarter. "One of the mitigating steps some are considering is introducing a DVD retail sales-only window for a few weeks."

DVD sales have been hurt by the recession, which has caused tapped-out consumers to opt for cheaper rentals. But Hollywood studios prefer that consumers buy DVDs because that generates significantly higher profits than rentals.

20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. have all tried to impose a no-rental period of about a month on Redbox, the operator of kiosks that rent movies for $1 per night. Those studios believe Redbox's steeply discounted price undercuts DVD sales.

Redbox has responded by suing the studios, seeking to force them to sell it DVDs simultaneously with competitors. Meanwhile, the company is stocking its kiosks with DVDs it can't otherwise obtain by buying them from retailers.

Hollywood's concern about Redbox is heightened by the company's rapid growth. In the first six months of the year, Redbox's revenue soared 113%. Industrywide DVD sales, however, were down 13.5% in the same period, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, in part because consumers are embracing low-cost rental offerings.

There is also growing concern among studios with Netflix, which reported Thursday that subscribers increased 28% from last year to 11.1 million as of Sept. 30. Netflix and Redbox account for virtually all of this year's growth of about 9% in DVD rental revenue.

Studios considering the plan are betting that a sales-only window would push some consumers who currently rent DVDs into buying them, thus boosting profits.

"The studios might try to implement something like this to increase demand for sales," said Wade Holden, an analyst at SNL Kagan, "because they need to protect that revenue stream the best they can."

Such a move would undoubtedly decrease revenue for DVD rental companies. That might not only crimp the growth of Netflix and Redbox, but also further depress struggling rental chain Blockbuster, whose revenue fell 20% in the first half of the year.

Depending on the details, however, a sales-only window might not hurt the bottom line of major rental companies. To get them on board, studios probably would have to offer them a lower wholesale price than that paid by retailers, currently $18 for most standard DVDs and $25 for high-definition Blu-ray discs.

"If we can agree on low-enough pricing," observed Hastings, "delayed rental could potentially increase profits for everyone."

A universal delay for all rental companies might also end the ongoing dispute of three studios with Redbox. A company spokesman implied that Redbox would go along with a sales-only window if it wasn't singled out: "We must have a level playing field and the right to buy movies at the same time as any of our competitors," he said.

Whether consumers go along with it, however, may be another matter entirely.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,1148449.story





Digital Cinema Still a Work in Progress
Carl DiOrio

The movie industry seems almost embarrassed about the prospect of promising too much too soon regarding digital cinema.

Too late.

A decade into a planned industrywide conversion to digital projection, the effort remains a work in progress, with the protracted credit crunch reducing the rollout of d-cinema hardware to a snail's pace for the past year. That's also hampered the related introduction of 3D projection.

But with the financial community finally beginning to rebound, d-cinema proponents here Tuesday politely asked movie theater owners attending the exhibition industry's annual ShowEast conference to keep the faith.

"The reason you do this is to add to your business," Bud Mayo, CEO of d-cinema integrator Cinedigm, said during a panel discussion. "It's not just to have cool technology up on your screens. We've seen the incremental increase in revenue that 3D allows."

JPMorgan managing director Andy Sriubas said bankers helping integrators and studios to underwrite installation costs also want to see that "exhibition has some skin in the game." In an earlier round of digital installations, studios footed the bill almost 100%.

Exhibitors seem OK with shouldering a modest portion of installation costs. In fact, some self-financed digital conversions as integrators waited out the credit crunch.

"We didn't want to wait," said Henry McCalmont, who converted half of the six screens in his Mountain Home, Ark., multiplex to digital and added 3D capability to some.

Art Gordon of AG Theatres also jumped quickly into digital and 3D for his two theaters in Guam. "I'm a believer," he said with a shrug.

Even bigger exhibitors have continued to convert a select number of screens. But the U.S. big three -- Regal, AMC and Cinemark -- have had to wait for Wall Street support before proceeding with more ambitious rollouts.

"We're really ready to get going," said Travis Reid, CEO of big-three integrator Digital Cinema Implementation Partners.

DCIP and JPMorgan recently went to market with a $525 million loan syndication to fund the rollout of 15,000 screen installations during the next several years.

The bigger circuits already had marked considerable progress before the economic troubles set in. But digital screen counts can be confusing, as estimates by any three industryites are likely to yield at least four numbers.

Consensus estimates put movie-quality installations at roughly 13,000-14,000 screens globally, with 6,500-7,000 auditoriums boasting 3D capability.

In the meantime, with the industry's conversion to digital and 3D projection going so slowly, Technicolor recently came forward with a stopgap proposal: The film lab is pushing a newly developed format for film-based 3D projection.

The film-processing giant will on Wednesday demo the technology for exhibitors here amid broad skepticism. Technicolor is positioning the system as a lower-cost alternative to digital 3D, but Cinemark International president Valmir Fernandes summed up sentiment among skeptics.

"We don't like it," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "We think it's a step backward."

A handful of studios have lent endorsements, but they are much more bullish on digital 3D, which eventually will do away with the studios' print costs.

For exhibitors, every theater operator who opts to go with the Technicolor system would be one less participant in so-called VPF plans, the virtual-print-fee agreements that studios have signed to fund the rollout of digital systems. The way such pacts are written, VPF terms are more generous to exhibs if more theaters participate in the conversions.

Technicolor has yet to begin signing up theaters to its plan, so its ShowEast promos could prove key if its technology is to gain traction. But some industryites question even the notion of significant cost savings from film-based 3D.

Certain kinds of 3D glasses will only work with polarized screens of the sort installed in digital auditoriums. So to avoid that $10,000-per-screen conversion cost -- and after all, low cost is the whole appeal of film-based 3D -- exhibitors might have to absorb greater upfront costs to buy nondisposable 3D glasses of the kind required with nonpolarized screens.

To overcome such concerns, Technicolor will on Wednesday announce an initiative by three film-oriented companies to cover screen-conversion costs for the first 500 auditoriums outfitted with film 3D systems. Kodak, Fuji and Deluxe will contribute to the Silver Screen Fund, which will be managed by Technicolor.

ShowEast continues through Thursday at the Marriott Orlando World Center.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...59R0MC20091028





Shrimp's Eye Points Way to Better DVDs
Ben Hirschler

The amazing eyes of a giant shrimp living on Australia's Great Barrier Reef could hold the key to developing a new type of super high-quality DVD player, British scientists said on Sunday.

Mantis shrimps, dubbed "thumb splitters" by divers because of their vicious claws, have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom.

They can see in 12 primary colors, four times as many as humans, and can also detect different kinds of light polarization -- the direction of oscillation in light waves.

Now a team at the University of Bristol have shown how the shrimps do it, using remarkable light-sensitive cells that rotate the plane of polarization in light as it travels through the eye.

Manmade devices do a similar thing in DVD and CD players but they only work well for one color, while the shrimp's eye operates almost perfectly across the whole visible spectrum from near ultra-violet to infra-red.

Transferring the same multi-color ability into a DVD player would result in a machine capable of handling far more information than a conventional one.

"The mechanism we have found in this eye is unknown to human synthetic devices. It works much, much better than any attempts that we've made to construct a device," researcher Nicholas Roberts told Reuters.

He believes the "beautifully simple" eye system, comprising cell membranes rolled into tubes, could be mimicked in the lab using liquid crystals.

Details of the mantis shrimp research were published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Just why the mantis shrimp needs such a rarefied level of vision is unclear, although researchers suspect it is to do with food and sex.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...59O1DJ20091025





World’s First “4k” Laparoscopy Performed- Surgery in 4X HD!
Steven F. Palter, MD

I am so excited to report that I have performed the world’s first laparoscopy in 4K - using cameras with a resolution 4 times that of HD. I presented the details and shared the images with a crowd of 3500 at the 65th Annual Meeting of the ASRM this week in Atlanta in my invited plenary lecture. We showed the audience how the digital technology being developed to transform movies could be directly applied to take surgical performance to tthe next level.

“Dr. Palter’s research and vision of surgery’s technological future opened the eyes and minds of the audience to fantastic treatments beyond what can be done today” said R. Dale McClure, MD President of ASRM.

What was New This Year:

Last year the same team worked togother (along with FotoKem) on our proofof concept project. Then we took the camera into the OR and shot with the Hollywood version on a tripod looking around the OR– but it was not used for the surgery itself. This year we directly attached the camera to an operating laparocope and used it for the surgery itself.

What we Did: Laparoscopic, or keyhole, surgery is when telescopes are used to perform minimally invasive procedures with faster recovery and no major incisions. The surgeon works by remote looking on a television monitor. Usually this is in regular standard definition and lately high definition systems are being used. As detail and resolution increases surgeons will see and perform better. For this reason I set out to see if images 4 times the resolution ofHD could be obtained through our surgical scopes and if the next generation of Hollywood 4k cameras could be used for surgery. In a pilot project we successfully connected the camera of the future to our surgical scope and obtained the highest resolution surgical images of body ever directly in the procedure. The audience nicknamed me Dr. Steven Spielberg.

Since these scopes had never been attached to such a digital creature as this camera we had to create a coupling system. We went back to models and systems used in the 1940’s when film was just invented to devise a system. Thanks to brainstorming and testing by USC’s Richard Weinberg in the School of Cinematic Arts and Karl Storz Endoscopy we figured out and developed a system.

Why we did it- the Hollywood connection: New cinematic technologies are transforming the film business today. The two major revolutionary developments are 1) beyond high def “4k” technology - which brings resolution to 4 times that of HD and 2) realistic immersive high definition 3D. I set out to introduce these technologies to the medical world and to see if we could for the first time directly perform surgery in 4k. Setting the goal to once again use technological innovation to improve our patient outcomes.

The Equipment We Used

Offhollywood is the uber-cool NY Soho-based masters of the Red One camera and digital post production house. The head of the facility in NY Mark Pederson immediately signed onto the project to try to figure out with me and Red how to do 4K through the scope. He sent out the cameraman Eric Camp who ran the Red and the 4 foot jib arm we needed for stabilization. We then spent a late night in post production color correcting and editing the footage in Assimilate’s Scratch. Finally Pliny produced the DCP (4K digital file format) file that the digital theaters could play. It only took 8 hours to render… Not to mention the XML packaging that the players require and the Hard drive that had to be deliverd via courier. BTW– the photo here is me with mark and Ted from Red with the full Hollywood camera and a prototype of the 3K handheld Scarlet version…

For 3D in HD we used the Sony SRW Deck and 3D circular polarized theater glasses matched to theatrical lenses from RealD. Amazing collaborations from 3Ality allowed us to get Hollywood footage including U2 in 3D in concert! Followed that with 4K Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Julia Roberts, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and Ben Stiller among others in cameo blew the audience away. We shifted for each technology from Hollywood to medical use showing the overlap in technical development… Andrew Stucker from Sony Digital Cinemas helped make it all happen and secure rights… We projected the largest high definition (HD) 3d surgical images ever. We used the same system as the 3D Hollywood blockbuster Cloudy With a Chance of Meatball to allow the surgeons to feel as if they could “reach out and join the operation”. These images were enabled by converting Sony’s ultrahigh definition and 3d theatrical systems to show medical footage. For medical footgae we use Intuitive Surgical’s DaVinci robot which images in resouding HD 3D.

Background

Virtually all of my surgery is endoscopic- performed through tiny telescopes and viewed on a TV monitor. In 2000 I performed the world’s firs HDTV surgery and demonstrated how increased resolution improved the surgeon’s visualization and performance of procedures. For those interested in the history of HDTV surgery and the details of its development further details of my work are here from the New York Times and here from Science Daily and here from MIT Technology Review. Over the past two years I refined this work with even better performing camera systems and this work was featured on 20/20 and on the National Geographic Channel’s first ever HD medical show - Inside the Living Body (as reported in Wired).

Hollywood is embracing its digital future by adopting (with $1 billion in financing and a follow-up deal by Sony) planned conversion of 20,000 theaters to ultrahigh definition 4k (4096x 2048) video. The revolutionary Red One camera is one of the few that can natively record this type of file. Having heard about it I went to vegas for NAB and saw with my own eyes the amazing realistic movies being made with it. While there I met with Ted Schilowitz, Red’s “Leader of the Rebellion” and we began our collaboration to take surgery into imaging’s future.

I also partnered with Sony’s Electronics Medical and Broadcast Divisions who make the best highest resolution 4k and 3D projectors in the world– usually used for next genertion digtal movie theaters.

By increasing resolution to this level we allow the surgeon to be actually immersed in images that surpass the live surgical experience. The resolution approaches that of the human eye but it is combined with 10 fold magnification through the telescopes which operate just inches away from the disease. The progress from regular surgical film technology is like comparing sitting in an HD home theater to watching a video on a cell phone.

Ultra high resolution digital cameras are transforming the art of cinema. Leading Hollywood directors such as Peter Jackson and Stephen Soderbergh today have just started filming the next generation of cinema blockbusters using cameras with “4K” resolution, four times the resolution of High Definition (HD) with 4096 lines of resolution to give audiences unprecedented realism. The Red One digital cinema camera is the at the forefront of the revolution. Director Soderberg previously described this technology as “This is the camera I’ve been waiting for my whole career: Red is going to change everything….Shooting with Red is like hearing The Beatles for the first time. Red sees the way I see.”

Amazingly, the surgeons in the conference were able to visualize the surgery they were watching better than if they had been in the operating room live. If it can transform the immersive experience of the movies with unprecedented realism wouldn’t you want that degree of vision in your surgeon’s hands? By combining unprecedented resolution and magnification the surgical images were beyond what a surgeon would have standing live in the operating room. Those in the audience predicted this technology would further revolutionize minimally invasive surgery as it becomes incorporated into the OR of the future.

The 4K system, manufactured by RED Digital Cinema Camera Company, was used to film Jumper, Crossing the Line, and The Argentine. This recording represents its first direct use for a surgical procedure in the world.
http://docinthemachine.com/2009/10/2...t4klaparoscop/





USB 3.0 and SATA 6G Performance Preview
Marco Chiappetta

Just the other day, we gave you a sneak peek at a couple of motherboards Asus had coming down the pipeline that featured USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support, the P7P55D-E Premium and the P6X58D Premium. If you haven't seen the original post, be sure to check it out here. In it, we talk about the boards' PLX PCI Express Gen 2 switch implementation and how it connects to the NEC USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6G controller chips.

It turns out that one of the boards we showed you, the P55-Express based P7P55D-E Premium is very close to hitting the market. In fact, we already have on in house were able to run a few quick tests on it. In addition to the motherboard, we got our hands on an external USB 3.0 hard drive and one of Seagate's new 2TB SATA 6G hard drives.

First up, we thought we'd show you what kind of impact USB 3.0 has on performance. The two images above show ATTO Disk Benchmark runs with the USB 3.0 hard drive connected to the P7P55D-E Premium. The test on the left was run with the drive connected to a USB 2.0 port, the one of the right with it connected to a USB 3.0 port. Be sure to click on the images to pop larger versions because the graphs look to have a similar trends. You'll see that when connected to a USB 3.0 port, the drive was about 5 - 6x faster. Although these are just quick, preliminary tests, it appears that USB 3.0 will be an absolute must for users in need of fast, cheap external storage as it becomes more prevalent.

Next up, we have some benchmarks using the Seagate Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive. The ATTO and HD Tach tests on the left were conducted with the drive connected to a common SATA 3G port, the tests on the right were conducted with it connected to the Marvell SATA 6G controller present on the P7P55D-E Premium. Save for one part of the HD Tach testing, there isn't much of a performance difference here. Due to an aggressive cache algorithm that utilizes a portion of system memory with the Seagate Barracuda XT SATA 6G connected to the Marvell SATA 6G controller on the P7P55D-E Premium, it offers a burst rate that is off the charts in HD Tach. In the remaining portions of the HD Tach test though, performance remains largely unchanged. According to ATTO, there are some slight performance benefits to be had by connecting the drive to the SATA 6G controller, but the deltas were quite small--somewhere in the neighborhood of 5MB/s.

As it stands today, it's obvious that its going to take something much faster than a current-gen, spinning-platter hard disk to tax a SATA 6G connection. Perhaps next-gen products and future SSDs will show a larger benefit.
http://hothardware.com/News/USB-30-a...mance-Preview/





EFF Fights 'Censorship' with Takedown Hall of Shame

Electronic Frontier Foundation's new specialty site targets bogus copyright claims
Paul McNamara

The Electronic Frontier Foundation today has aimed a demonstrably potent weapon -- the spotlight of public shame -- at those corporations and individuals who abuse copyright claims to stifle free speech.

From an EFF press release:

"Free speech in the 21st century often depends on incorporating video clips and other content from various sources," explained EFF Senior Staff Attorney and Kahle Promise Fellow Corynne McSherry. "It's what The Daily Show with Jon Stewart does every night. This is 'fair use' of copyrighted or trademarked material and protected under U.S. law. But that hasn't stopped thin-skinned corporations and others from abusing the legal system to get these new works removed from the Internet. We wanted to document this censorship for all to see."

EFF's Takedown Hall of Shame at www.eff.org/takedowns focuses on the most egregious examples of takedown abuse, including an example of a YouTube video National Public Radio tried to remove just this week that criticizes same-sex marriage. Other Hall of Shame honorees include NBC for requesting removal of an Obama campaign video and CBS for targeting a McCain campaign video in the critical months before the 2008 election. The Hall of Shame will be updated regularly, as bad takedowns continue to squash free speech rights of artists, critics, and commentators big and small.

Other hall inductees include: radio blowhard Michael Savage; election bungler Diebold, Inc.; endlessly discredited "paranormalist" Uri Geller; and even the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, which apparently has donned a black hat on such matters.

The Hall of Shame is part of EFF's "No Down for Free Speech" campaign.

The EFF has been exceptionally active of late when it comes to launching Web sites that focus on specific issues; for example: TOSBack, which tracks changes in Web site terms of service so that you don't have to; Surveillance Self-Defense, which offers advice on keeping prying eyes off of your electronic information; and, of course, its longstanding and highly effective Patent Busting Project.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/46783





Denying Physics Won’t Save the Video Stars

Technology is making file sharing easier and easier. It will take more than unfair laws and harsh punishments to stop it
Cory Doctorow

Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement. We’ve had 15 years of dotty entertainment industry proposals designed to make computers worse at copying. It’s time that we stopped listening to big content and started listening to reason.

Since 1995 — the year of the WIPO copyright treaties — the entertainment industry has won extrajudicial powers to enforce its rights without the need to prove a case in court. “Notice and takedown”, as the system was called, was supposed to stop copyright infringement on the web. It gave rights holders the power to compel internet service providers to take down material simply by stating that it infringed their rights, and obliged those providers to act or face liability.

A decade and a half later there is no indication that this has reduced copyright infringement online (certainly there is more today than there was in 1995). And, predictably, a system that allows for legalised censorship without penalties for abuse has itself been abused.

Rights holders big and small, from the Church of Scientology to Uri Geller, who tried to use takedown notices to make YouTube remove a video that showed the trickery behind his “psychic” stunts, have successfully silenced their critics. So small is the value of each individual customer that it doesn’t justify even their first call to a lawyer.

So big rights holders have signed up sloppy hired guns to send takedown notices to universities who host MP3 recordings of faculty lectures (because the faculty member shares a name with a pop musician). They hire them to accuse a mother of infringement for uploading a short clip of her toddler dancing in the kitchen because a few seconds of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy can be heard in the background.

Fifteen years of draconian copyright regimes show that when you create powerful enforcement tools without any consequence for misuse, they get misused. And half a century’s worth of evidence on digital technology shows that no amount of enforcement will make computers and the internet worse at copying. Hard drives won’t get magically bulkier and more expensive. Networks won’t get less accessible, slower and harder to use. General technological literacy won’t decline. If you want copying to stop, physics is not on your side.

The takedown policy hasn’t reversed physics, so now we have new proposals. Viacom, the media company, has accused YouTube of facilitating infringement by allowing users to flag their videos as private, visible only to friends and families (and invisible to Viacom’s enforcement tools). Under Viacom’s theory, I shouldn’t be allowed to upload videos of my one-year-old for my parents — and only my parents — to see. My rights take a back seat to Viacom’s power to bulk-mail threatening letters to possible infringers.

Even more radical is the Mandelson proposal to disconnect entire families from the internet if a single member — or a neighbour who uses their internet connection — is accused, without proof, of violating copyright. Leave aside the fundamental injustice of collective punishment, a practice so abhorrent that it is outlawed in the Geneva Convention; think instead of the utter disproportionality of this.

The internet is an integral part of our children’s education; it’s critical to our employment; it’s how we stay in touch with distant relatives. It’s how we engage with government. It’s the single wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. It isn’t just a conduit for getting a few naughty free movies, it is the circulatory system of the information age.

To understand just how disproportionate this is, consider the corollary: what if Peter Mandelson proposed a rule to terminate the internet access of any movie studio or record company accused of three baseless copyright claims against the public? We could go down to all Universal offices and data centres with a huge pair of boltcutters and snip its net wires at the junction box.

It would be a corporate death penalty. Families that receive this penalty — without a judge or trial — will face a similar terminal fate, cut off from the system that connects them to life and livelihood.

The net is full of artists thriving on copies. My latest novel, Makers, came out this week from HarperVoyager, and is also available as a free, freely copyable download (as was my last book, Little Brother, which also sold well). Musicians such as Madonna are moving from record labels (who lose money on uncontrolled copying) to concert promoters (who make more money when copies drive up the price of tickets). It is not the job of government to guarantee that the business model enabled by last year’s technology will go on for ever. If it were, we would have outlawed radio to save vaudeville.

Proposing to terminate your access to the information society because you share living quarters with an accused copyright infringer is madness. The entertainment industry has mistaken the net for an apocalyptically uncontrolled entertainment medium. It wants to take charge of it so that it can be made into a medium more hospitable to its interests.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle6896049.ece





TalkTalk Threatens Legal Action Over Mandelson's Filesharing Plan

Carphone Warehouse-owned internet service provider attacks plans to cut off connections of persistent filesharers
Mark Sweney

TalkTalk, the second largest internet service provider in the UK, has threatened to launch legal action if business secretary Peter Mandelson follows through with his plan to cut off persistent illegal filesharers' internet connections.

Carphone Warehouse-owned TalkTalk, which has more than 4 million ISP customers and owns the Tiscali and AOL brands, claimed the government's plan was based on filesharers being "guilty until proven innocent" and constituted an infringement of human rights.

"The approach is based on the principle of 'guilty until proven innocent' and substitutes proper judicial process for a kangaroo court," said Andrew Heaney, the executive director of strategy and regulation at TalkTalk. "We know this approach will lead to wrongful accusations."

The government plans to look at increased action against illegal downloaders, including potentially suspending the accounts of persistent offenders, from July 2011 if a 70% reduction in online piracy is not achieved by sending warning letters. Customers will have the right to appeal if they are targeted and their connection subjected to technical measures.

"If the government moves to stage two, we would consider that extra-judicial technical measures, and would look to appeal the decision [to the courts] because it infringes human rights," Heaney said. "TalkTalk will continue to resist any attempts to make it impose technical measures on its customers unless directed to do so by a court or recognised tribunal."

BT, the largest ISP in the UK, said it "remains concerned" about some of the government's proposals and is "interested to hear whether or not customers will have some form of fair legal hearing before their broadband supplier is required to take any action against them".

Chris Watson, the head of telecoms law at legal firm CMS Cameron McKenna, said that the opportunity to appeal was "very different to the legal safeguards that normally apply to the determination of the infringement of intellectual property rights and it may be incompatible with the European convention on human rights".

However, Tony Ballard, partner at media and entertainment law firm Harbottle & Lewis, said that Mandelson's plan to suspend internet connections did not breach human rights regulations.

"This issue over whether removing someone's internet access breaches some fundamental right has been quite clearly settled by the European court of justice," Ballard added. "It ruled in a Spanish filesharing case last year that a user's fundamental rights are not absolute but have to be weighed against the rights of others, including copyright owners."

Ballard said that it is for the "individual states and their courts to hold the balance". He added that Mandelson clearly had an eye on France where a tough "three strikes" cut-off policy has been implemented and approved by the French legislature.

"The key questions are going to be around how the ISPs will manage the burden of proof, who is going to be responsible for the final decision to deny someone access to the internet and how that denial can be challenged in court," he added.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009...tion-mandelson


















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