Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 16th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































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October 16th, 2010





UPC Wins File-Sharing Action Brought by Record Labels
Ciara O'Brien

UPC has won a legal action taken in the High Court by record labels over illegal downloading and file-sharing.

Warner Music, Universal Music, Sony BMG and EMI Records had been attempting to force internet service providers to adopt a “three strikes” rule to halt copyright infringement and piracy by internet users.

The High Court ruled that laws to identify and cut off internet users illegally copying music files were not enforceable in Ireland.

In a judgment published today, Mr Justice Peter Charleton said recording companies were being harmed by internet piracy.

“This not only undermines their business but ruins the ability of a generation of creative people in Ireland, and elsewhere, to establish a viable living. It is destructive of an important native industry,” he said.

However, the judge said laws were not in place in Ireland to enforce disconnections over illegal downloads despite the record companies’ complaints being merited. He also said this gap in legislation meant Ireland was not complying with European law.

In a statement, UPC said it would work to identify and address the main areas of concern in the file-sharing debate.

"UPC has repeatedly stressed that it does not condone piracy and has always taken a strong stance against illegal activity on its network. It takes all steps required by the law to combat specific infringements which are brought to its attention and will continue to co-operate with rights holders where they have obtained the necessary court orders for alleged copyright infringements," it said.

"Our whole premise and defence focused on the mere conduit principal which provides that an internet service provider cannot be held liable for content transmitted across its network and today’s decision supports the principal that ISPs are not liable for the actions of internet subscribers."

ISPs have been awaiting the outcome of the case against UPC. However, it is not yet known what effect the UPC judgment will have on Eircom's agreement with record labels, which it settled on out of court last year.

Irish Recorded Music Association director-general Dick Doyle said his office would pressure the Government to reform the law in favour of record labels.

“The High Court has acknowledged that Irish artists, composers and recording companies are sustaining huge losses and internet providers are profiting from the wholesale theft of music,” Mr Doyle said. “The judge made it very clear that an injunction would be morally justified but that the Irish legislature had failed in its obligation to confer on the courts the right to grant such injunctions, unlike other EU states.

“We will now look to the Irish Government to fully vindicate the constitutional rights of copyright holders and we reserve the right to seek compensation for the past and continuing losses from the State.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...reaking32.html





Library of Congress: Copyright is Killing Sound Archiving
Cory Doctorow

In 2000, the US National Recording Preservation Act mandated the Library of Congress to conduct an in-depth study on the state of audio preservation and archiving. The Library has finished its study and one of its most damning conclusions is that copyright -- not technical format hurdles -- are the major barrier to successful preservation. Simply put, the copyright laws that the recording industry demanded are so onerous that libraries inevitably have to choose whether to be law-breakers or whether to abandon their duty to preserve and archive audio.

"Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken. Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal," the study concludes, "Copyright laws related to preservation are neither strictly followed nor strictly enforced. Consequently, some audio preservation is conducted."

While libraries supposedly have some leeway in preserving audio recordings, they find it "virtually impossible to reconcile their responsibility for preserving and making accessible culturally important sound recordings with their obligation to adhere to copyright laws". The problem is that the current provisions in law for audio preservation are "restrictive and anachronistic" in our current digitial age.

There are more problems. While the recording industry undertakes some preservation, they will only preserve those recordings from which they think they might profit in the future (what a surprise). For instance, consider a researcher working on vaudeville who may be interested in vaudevillian recordings on cylinders.

"These performers may have been headliners in their time, but today their names are virtually unknown," the study details, "While scholarly interest in these recordings is high, their economic value to the property holder is negligible. However, legal restrictions governing access to a cylinder produced in 1909 are the same as those governing a compact disc made in 2009, even though it is highly unlikely that the 1909 recording has any revenue potential for the rights holder."

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/11...ongress-3.html





How ACTA Turns Private, Non-Commercial File Sharing Into 'Commercial Scale' Criminal Infringement
Mike Masnick

We've already discussed some of the problems of the "near-finalized" draft of ACTA, but the deeper people dig into the agreement, the worse it gets. We had noted, in our original post, that the definition of "commercial scale" matters a lot, and Glyn Moody points us to an analysis that shows how the ACTA negotiators cleverly scaled back their definition of "commercial scale," to make it both vague and incredibly broad. The current text in ACTA reads:

"ACTA 2.14.1: "Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting or copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale. [ACTA footnote 9]

For the purposes of this section, acts carried out on a commercial scale include at least those carried out as commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage."

"Carried out as commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage." Could you be any more inclusive than that? We've recently discussed how the borderline between commercial and non-commercial use can sometimes be very difficult to distinguish. Under ACTA, it appears that when in doubt, it's commercial scale. "

Of course, what's really troubling here is that the EU negotiators had already promised that there would be no definition of "commercial scale." Yet, there is... and it's a lot worse than what the EU Parliament had already determined "commercial scale" to cover. The analysis linked above, first looks at the Max Planck Institute's analysis of "commercial scale" infringement, where it notes that just saying "commercial scale" "fails to provide for an appropriate and sufficiently precise definition of the elements of a crime" under the current laws of the EU. Instead, it says such actions can only qualify as a crime if the following conditions are met:

* Identity with the infringed object of protection (the infringing item emulates the characteristic elements of a protected product or distinctive sign in an unmodified fashion [construction, assembly, etc.]).
* Commercial activity with an intention to earn a profit.
* Intent or contingent intent (dolus eventualis) with regard to the existence of the infringed right.

Note that none of that is found within the ACTA definition. The report also highlights the EU Parliament's own definition of commercial scale, which has important caveats not found in ACTA:

"infringements on a commercial scale" means any infringement of an intellectual property right committed to obtain a commercial advantage; this excludes acts carried out by private users for personal and not-for-profit purposes"

Notice how the ACTA negotiators conveniently left out the exclusion at the end. So for all the talk of how the new ACTA would only focus on "commercial scale" infringement, by subtly changing (mostly via omission) the definition of "commercial scale," ACTA now covers an awful lot that most people would not, in fact, consider to be "commercial scale." We'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether these omissions were done through incompetence or for other reasons.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ingement.shtml





Future of Music 2010: Copyright Czar Outlines File-Sharing Agenda at Odds with How Many Americans Consume Music
Greg Kot

An indication of just how urgent (or how out-of-hand, depending on your perspective) the concern has become over file-sharing was President Barack Obama's recent appointment of the first so-called copyright czar in the nation's history.

The new czar -- Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement coordinator -- visited the Future of Music Policy Summit on Tuesday and offered a brief summation of what's on her agenda. She represents an administration that is showing troubling signs of skewing toward established corporate interests and 20th Century business models and legal practices at a time when technology has fundamentally changed the way fans consume music and interact with artists.

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice approved a controversial merger between North America's largest concert promoter, Live Nation, and ticketing agency, Ticketmaster, creating a powerhouse with the potential to control every aspect of the music business.

A few months ago, Espinel's office released a 33-point agenda after what she said was a thorough inventory of opinion on both sides of the file-sharing debate. In presenting the Joint Strategic Plan to Combat Intellectual Property Theft, Espinel was joined by Vice President Joe Biden, who gave reporters a great sound bite even as he demonstrated an incredibly unnuanced understanding of how file-sharing works:

"We used to have a problem in this town saying this," Biden said. "But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It's smash and grab. It ain't no different than smashing a window at Tiffany's and grabbing (merchandise)."

The intellectual-property plan itself was a bit more balanced, and Espinel provided an overview at Future of Music. She said it's her job is "to protect the creativity of our citizens" because "the protection of innovation ... and creativity is essential for economic recovery."

She zeroed in on music as a particular problem area because "95 percent of (music) downloads are illegal," a figure that is commonly linked to a 50 percent decline in music-industry revenue over the last decade.

While embracing the notion of a "free and open Internet," she echoed policymakers in recent years by saying that such freedom can flourish only once "Illegal and infringing activity" has been cut back. She said her office received more than 1,600 public comments in coming up with its 33-point strategy, and suggested that the majority came from those interested in protecting their copyright -- artists, publishers, record companies and other license holders. But fair-use advocates were also heard, helping to create a distinction between infringers and artists who "build upon the work of others."

That's an enlightened view. But her presentation at FMC was focused on violators. She said the government is starting to pressure the private sector, particularly Internet service providers, "to do more to reduce the flow of illegal content," echoing efforts in some European countries to reduce or even cut off Internet access to customers found to be engaging in illegal file sharing. She also said foreign Web sites pushing illegal content and "dangerous" products were being addressed, though it was unclear how, and that American law was under a comprehensive review "to keep pace with technology on the Internet."

It all came off as sufficiently vague enough not to raise any alarms. But the policy in general sounded as if it was framed in such a way not to ruffle the feathers of established license holders, without acknowledging that if the vast majority of downloads are being considered "illegal," a lot of everyday Americans are engaging in "criminal" activity. In a brief question-and-answer session after her speech, I asked Espinel to address this fundamental disconnect between the government's agenda and the way many citizens interact with their computers and cellphones in their daily lives. They're sharing files, after all, which is what these devices were built to do.

"I don't see an inherent conflict," she said. "The majority of consumers don't want to engage in illegal content."

But, wait, didn't you just say that 95 percent of downloaders are doing exactly that? I didn't get a chance to ask that follow-up question, but Espinel did say that the administration would primarily focus its crackdown on "Web sites distributing illegal content for profit" or those that "mimic legal sites by charging a subscription fee or attracting advertisers." All well and good, but that's a small percentage of the "problem" as defined by the music industry. The real issue is with those tens of millions of everyday citizens doing something that the goverment says could cost them their Internet access, or worse.
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.c...-as-crimi.html





Prosecutor Asks to Keep Pirate Bay Prison Terms

The prosecution in the appeals trial of three founders and a financier of Swedish filesharing site The Pirate Bay demanded that the defendants' one-year prison sentences be upheld.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall said he finds no grounds to change the sentence, which he considers accurate and "extremely solid," during his summation at the Svea court of appeal on Tuesday.

A strong reason not to shorten the sentences is that Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde have continued working with The Pirate Bay even after the initial ruling last year.

The three men were "defying the law," Roswall said in his address to the Stockholm appeals court, which was broadcast live on Swedish public radio.

"The defendants have engaged in contempt of court," he said.

Roswall pointed out that the men intended to facilitate file sharing for the public the entire time.

"Three days after the police's major crackdown on The Pirate Bay, they resumed operations," said Roswall, who began his summation by saying that he did not have much to say because he is satisfied with the verdict.

In April 2009, the district court sided with the prosecution and sentenced Neij, Svartholm Warg, Sunde and site financier Carl Lundström to one year in prison each for abetting copyright infringement and ordered them to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million at the time) in compensation to the movie and recording industries.

All four defendants, who currently live overseas, have appealed the decision and vowed to wage a lengthy legal battle and take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary. They have demanded an acquittal on the charges.

During last year's trial, the defendants maintained that filesharing services can be used both legally and illegally. Earlier this month, Sunde said that The Pirate Bay is now so big that he fears for his creation and suggested that it should perhaps be killed off.

Roswall said they share everything in district court, but he has chosen to comment on new information that has arisen after the sentence. He asserted that a new hearing for Neij strengthened the evidence against him.

According to Roswall, Neij has provided information showing that The Pirate Bay has been accessible throughout the case.

Roswall repudiated Swedish businessman Lundström's assertion that he had nothing to do with The Pirate Bay.

"Lundström had a strong commitment. He participated in the planning and development of the site and acted as an adviser," he said.

Separately, record companies are asking for compensation for the harm The Pirate Bay has caused the industry, according to newspaper Svenska Dagbladet on Tuesday.

The indictment involves 20 albums and three singles, several of which were available on the website before they could be legally downloaded on other sites. The district court ruled in favour of record companies, fining The Pirate Bay over 4 million kronor in damages.

However, record companies believe the damages should be higher than those specified in the district court's ruling.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay, which claims to have more than 23 million users, makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site.

The appeals trial is set to wrap up Friday, with the verdict expected several weeks later.
http://www.thelocal.se/29568/20101012/





Pirates' Lawyers End Trial with 'Facebook Defence'

Defence lawyers for the three founders and a financier of Swedish file sharing site The Pirate Bay warned on Friday of the consequences for popular websites like Facebook and Twitter if their clients’ guilty verdict isn’t overturned.

"Whenever new technology emerges, large corporations especially always say the new technology is life-threatening. And it is the technology the prosecutor is after in this case," defence attorney Peter Althin insisted on the last day of the trial on Friday.

His client, 32-year-old Peter Sunde, was along with co-founders Fredrik Neij, 32, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 25, found guilty in April 2009 of promoting copyright infringement with their website The Pirate Bay.

The verdict, considered an important symbolic victory for the movie and recording industry, handed the three founders along with an important financier of the site, 50-year-old Carl Lundström, sentences of one year in prison.

They were also ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million dollars at the time) in compensation to the movie and recording industry.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay, which claims to have more than 23 million users, makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site.

Neij's lawyer Jonas Nilsson insisted Friday that if the appeals court confirmed the guilty verdict for his client it could potentially threaten the basis for the entire Internet.

"A guilty verdict for Fredrik would imply a threat to other search services on the Internet, like Facebook and Twitter," Nilsson said at the hearing, which was broadcast live by Swedish public radio.

Lundström's lawyer Per Samuelsson was even harsher in his criticism of the lower court's ruling, claiming the guilty verdict against his client was basically illegal.

"The district court's verdict is a mix-match of circumstantial evidence that has been used to get a guilty verdict without basis in law," he said, insisting that "Carl has not contributed one molecule" to the promotion of copyright infringement.

"It is clear as day that the prosecutor is wrong," he added.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall earlier this week called the district court ruling "extremely solid," insisting the three founders were still "defying the law" and that Lundström had also been "very involved."

No appeal was made Friday for Warg, who missed the trial due to illness.

The 25-year-old, who currently lives in Cambodia, has been granted a new, separate trial that will likely begin early next year.

During last year's trial, the defendants maintained that file sharing services can be used both legally and illegally, insisting their activities were above the law. They vowed to wage a lengthy legal battle and to take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

The appeals court verdict is set to fall on November 26.
http://www.thelocal.se/29644/20101015/





Dutch Hotels Must Register as ISPs
Rene Schoemaker

De OPTA doet onderzoek naar het aanbieden van internet door hotels. The OPTA is investigating the provision of internet by hotels. Meer dan tien hotels zijn inmiddels verzocht om zich te registreren als provider. More than a dozen hotels have been asked to register as a provider. De Horecabond is woedend. The Hospitality Association is furious.

De OPTA is de actie gestart naar aanleiding van een klacht van een niet nader aangeduide 'openbare aanbieder' van internet. OPTA is the action triggered by a complaint from an unspecified "public service" on the web. Het onderzoek richt zich in eerste instantie op de vraag of hotels die internet bieden aan hun klanten vallen onder de Telecommunicatiewet. The research focuses primarily on whether Internet hotels offer their customers fall under the Telecommunications Act.

Die wet schrijft voor dat “openbare aanbieders van elektronische communicatie” zich moeten registreren, zegt woordvoerder Cynthia Heijne van de OPTA. This law stipulates that "public electronic communications providers" are required to register, says spokeswoman Cynthia Heijne of OPTA. Dat register moet het de drie toezichthouders, OPTA, Agentschap Telecom en CIOT mogelijk maken om de Telecomwet te handhaven. This register should be the three supervisors, OPTA, and Telecom Agency CIOT allow the Telecommunications Act to maintain. Het register wordt gebruikt om toezicht te houden voor consumentenbelangen, criminaliteit- en terrorismebestrijding, zegt Heijne. The register is used to monitor for consumers, crime and terrorism, says Heijne.

Meldplicht Hailing

“Aanbieders zijn verplicht zichzelf aan te melden bij de OPTA”, zegt Heijne. "Providers are required to register themselves with OPTA," says Heijne. “Niet alle aanbieders doen dit.” De OPTA heeft een aantal hoteliers aangeschreven met het verzoek een vijftien pagina's tellende verklaring in te vullen. "Not all providers do this." OPTA has a number of hoteliers wrote to request a fifteen pages of the declaration form. De registratiekosten zijn 250 euro. The registration fee 250 euros.

Horeca Nederland, de koepelvertegenwoordiging van alle horecabedrijven, heeft woedend gereageerd. Horeca Netherlands, the umbrella organization representing all catering businesses, has reacted furiously. “Kennelijk heeft de crisis de telecomsector zo hard geraakt dat OPTA op zoek is naar andere bronnen om haar activiteiten te bekostigen”, schrijft de organisatie in een verklaring . "Apparently, the crisis hit the telecom sector so hard that OPTA is looking for other sources to fund its activities," the organization said in a statement . De bond vraagt leden die een dergelijk schrijven van de OPTA hebben gekregen, zich te melden. The union asks members to write a kind of OPTA have received to register.

Regeltjes Rules and regulations

“Het aantal meldingen valt tot nu toe mee”, zegt woordvoerder Anthony van der Klis van Horeca Nederland desgevraagd. "The reporting is so far along," said spokesman Anthony van der Klis Horeca Netherlands asked. “Maar we blijven de zaak scherp in de gaten houden.” Volgens Van der Klis is het een typisch voorbeeld van Nederlandse regelgeving. "But we keep a close eye on the matter out." According to Van der Klis is a typical example of Dutch legislation. “Eerder hadden we natuurlijk al de auteursrechtenorganisatie op de stoep staan.” "Earlier, we already the society on the sidewalk stand. "

Volgens Horeca Nederland werken hotels in dit soort gevallen samen met een telecombedrijf en is het hotel slechts een doorgeefluik. According Horeca Netherlands hotels work in these cases with a telecom company and the hotel is only a conduit. Ook is het alleen voor gasten bedoeld en dus niet openbaar. It is also provided for guests only and not public.

Internetverbinding op slot Internet lock

“Als naar aanleiding van ons onderzoek een hotel wettelijk een openbare aanbieder blijkt te zijn, is het voor een hotel altijd mogelijk zijn dienstverlening zodanig aan te passen dat hij niet meer als openbare aanbieder kwalificeert”, zegt Heijne. "As a result of our research a hotel legally a public aanbieder found to be a hotel is always possible to adapt its services so that he no longer qualifies as a public aanbieder" says Heijne. Dan is registratie a 250 euro niet meer nodig. Then a record 250 million no longer needed. Hotels dienen dus de internetverbinding zodanig af te sluiten, dat het niet vrij toegankelijk is. Hotels must therefore exit the Internet so that it is not freely accessible.

Heijne zegt dat de OPTA inmiddels “van een aantal partijen” informatie binnen heeft gekregen, waaruit nu moet blijken of het hier gaat om openbare aanbieders. Heijne says that the OPTA now "certain parties" got inside, which must now show whether this is public service.
http://translate.google.com/translat...ogle.com&twu=1





The Zombie Network: Beware 'Free Public WiFi'
Travis Larchuk

It's in your airports, your coffee shops and your libraries: "Free Public WiFi."

Despite its enticing name, the network, available in thousands of locations across the United States, does not actually provide access to the Internet. But like a virus, it has spread — and may even be lurking on your computer right now.

Wireless security expert Joshua Wright first noticed it about four years ago at an airport.

"I went to connect to an available wireless network and I saw this option, Free Public WiFi," he remembers. "As I looked more and more, I saw this in more and more locations. And I was aware from my job and analysis in the field that this wasn't a sanctioned, provisioned wireless network, but it was actually something rogue."

Free Public WiFi isn't set up like most wireless networks people use to get to the Internet. Instead, it's an "ad hoc" network — meaning when a user selects it, he or she isn't connecting to a router or hot spot, but rather directly to someone else's computer in the area.

Though it doesn't actually provide Internet access, the network has spread across the country thanks to an old Windows XP bug.

How It Works

When a computer running an older version of XP can't find any of its "favorite" wireless networks, it will automatically create an ad hoc network with the same name as the last one it connected to -– in this case, "Free Public WiFi." Other computers within range of that new ad hoc network can see it, luring other users to connect. And who can resist the word "free?"

Not a lot of people, judging from the spread of Free Public WiFi. Computers with the XP bug that try to connect to the Internet will remember the name, create their own ad hoc networks and entice other users wherever they go.

Microsoft is aware of the issue and says it has eliminated the network in more recent versions of Windows. It also created a fix to the problem for the older version of Windows XP — Windows XP Service Pack 3 — but many people still haven't updated their computers.

How To Protect Yourself

"Free Public WiFi" isn't inherently harmful, but if you connect or unintentionally create the ad hoc network you could expose yourself to hackers. Here are two steps you can take:

Step One: Regardless of whether you're on a Mac or PC, or which version of Windows you're running, resist the urge to connect to "Free Public WiFi" or other unknown wireless networks.

Step Two: If you're still running Windows XP, make sure your computer is up to date so that you won't unintentionally broadcast the ad hoc network in the future. Here's a statement from Microsoft:

"This issue was fixed in Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Customers who wish to install Windows XP Service Pack 3 can do so by visiting this site.

That means, Wright says, the network continues to spread across the country like something from a horror movie — the kind "where a zombie takes a hold of one person, bites them and they become infected by this zombie virus."

It's not the only zombie network out there, either. Others you may have seen go by such alluring names as "linksys," "hpsetup," "tmobile" or "default."

A Trick That's A Treat For Hackers

No one knows for sure where Free Public WiFi began. One theory, Wright says, is that someone may have set it up as a joke. It might have been created to trick a friend into connecting "so he would get a Web page with some kind of a gross image or childish prank."

Unintentionally creating or connecting to the ad hoc network isn't inherently harmful, despite its virus-like spread. It does, however, provide an access point for hackers to come in and check out the user's files.

Part of Wright's job is to hack into a company's wireless network in order to expose vulnerabilities. When he sees Free Public WiFi, he says, "we break out the champagne."

"Because I know at that point I will be able to get unlimited access to internal resources just from that one starting point."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=130451369





Microsoft Wiffler Lets Smartphones Use Free WiFi from Moving Vehicles

Researchers from Microsoft and University of Massachusetts test a promising new protocol to offload 3G traffic to WiFi even from a moving vehicle.

Microsoft Researchers have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle. The technology is dubbed Wiffler and earlier this year, researchers took it for some test drives in Amherst, Mass, Seattle and San Francisco.

Mind you, WiFi was available only about 11 percent of the time for a mobile device in transit, the team discovered, compared to 87% of the time 3G was available. So it would stand to reason that, at best, the mobile device wouldn't only be able to use WiFi a tiny bit of the time. However, the Wiffler protocol allowed the device to offload nearly half of its data from 3G to WiFi.

How so? Wiffler is smart about when to send the packets. It doesn't replace 3G, it augments it and transmits over WiFi simultaneously, allowing users to set WiFi as the delivery method of choice when it is available -- and when an application can tolerate it. Not every application can handle even a few seconds delay in the stream (VoIP) -- and WiFi tends to drop more packets than 3G does. But many apps can handle even a minutes-worth of delay perfectly well (messaging).

Wiffler uses what researchers call "prediction based offloading" in which it determines how likely it is to travel within the area of an acceptable WiFi hotspot within a certain time frame.If the car is moving in an urban area, discovering frequent hotspots, it predicts it will find another one quickly. If it is traveling on a highway and hasn't run across a hotspot in a while, it figures it won't find another one soon. If the the device doesn't find a hotspot within a predicted maximum delay time it goes ahead and fires up the 3G.

"We try to ensure that application performance requirements are met. So, if some data needs to be transferred right away (e.g., VoIP) we do not wait for WiFi connectivity to appear. But if some data can wait for a few seconds, waiting for WiFi instead of transmitting right away on 3G, that can reduce 3G usage," Ratul Mahajan told me in an e-mail interview. Mahajan is a researcher with the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research Redmond. Mahajan worked on the project with two teammates, Aruna Balasubramanian and Arun Venkataramani, both of whom are researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

"The second feature is that we may actually use both connections in parallel instead of using only one. So, if we deem that some data cannot be transferred using WiFi alone within its latency requirement, we will use both 3G and WiFi simultaneously. This parallel use is different from a handoff from one technology to the other, and it better balances the sometimes conflicting goals of reducing 3G usage and meeting application constraints," Mahajan explained.

The results of the test was presented in a paper, Augmenting Mobile 3G Using WiFi, presented in June 2010 at the eighth annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services.

The test consisted of running Wiffler units on 20 buses in Amherst, MA as well as in one car in Seattle and one in San Francisco at SFO. The Wiffler unit itself was a proxy device that included a small-from factor computer, similar to a car computer (no keyboard), an 802.11b radio, a 3G data modem, and a GPS unit. The 3G modem was using HSDPA-based service via AT&T.

Interestingly, the researchers didn't actually use Wiffler with mobile phones during their tests. They ran phone-like applications on the embedded computer. But the project team does envision Wiffler as a technology for smartphones, perhaps embedded directly into the smartphone. It could also be adapted to run in an in-vehicle infotainment system.

While this research focused on using free WiFi in a moving vehicle, Mahajan says Wiffler could be used in other ways. Carriers may want it to for private WiFi services that augment their 3G/4G data networks. It could be used by pedestrians who might get even higher WiFi offload rates if they were wandering in a city with their Wiffler-equipped smartphones. It could be valuable in a stationary setting, too, like hanging out at Starbucks.

"Today, the WiFi/3G combo management is highly suboptimal. Today, smart phones tend to use WiFi connectivity only when they are stationary and not use WiFi connectivity when they are on the move. At the same time, they experience poor application performance when the WiFi connectivity is poor because they happen to be far from the AP (access point) or because the WiFi network is congested. This experience occurs because the devices insist on using WiFi whenever they are connected, largely independent of the performance of WiFi. Our technology provides an automatic combo management that is aware of application performance," Mahajan says.

Next up, the crew plans to test the Wiffler protocol in other uses, including the 3G savings "in a setting when users have Wiffler running all the time rather than just driving. Another is to understand current smartphone traffic workloads to get a sense of how much traffic individual applications generate; this is important because data for some of the applications can be delayed and for some it cannot be delayed," Mahajan explains.

There is no association of Wiffler to Windows Phone 7 at this time. I hope it stays that way. Wiffler could be of best use if it were something that any handset on any phone could have. Plus, by the time a commercial product came to market based on Wiffler, Windows Phone 7 will either have found its niche, or died.

At this time it's unclear how or when Wiffler will formally come to market. Neither the researchers nor Microsoft PR would comment on that, and in truth, I got the sense that it hadn't yet progressed to that point anyway. Despite the long road to commercial use, now that the world knows that WiFi offloading from 3G is worthwhile, even from a car, it's only a matter of time before someone creates the first product.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/67344





Puck Yeah: This 4G Hotspot Can Replace Broadband

Clearwire's ugly little pucker proves itself to be a marvelous addition to a road warrior's weaponry.
Chris Dannen

In the last 24 hours, I've used the Puck to pull down an average of about 6Mbps in airports outside New York, Minneapolis and San Francisco. Clearwire Corporation, mostly owned by Sprint, calls its consumer-facing arm "Clear Wireless," and offers the Rover for direct sale via its website and in retail stores. (It's being piloted in the Midwest to start, but should trickle down to the East and West coasts soon.)

The beauty of the Rover Puck is its prepaid, contract-free billing structure. You buy the device for $150, then pre-pay as you use it: $5 per day, $20 a week, or $50 a month. The monthly fee is $10 less than what you'd pay if you got a contract 4G hotspot like this one directly from Sprint, but the Sprint device is only $100 with a 2-year contract. In other words, the Rover is cheaper, but it can't do 3G like the Sprint device can -- so if you're out of 4G coverage, you're offline. (There are several dozen wireless markets covered so far, and you can see the map here.)

The Puck connects eight devices via Wi-Fi for what the company claims is four hours, but in practice, it has seemed like less. The Puck will stop transmitting data and go into a kind of "sleep" mode if none of your devices talk to it for a while.

No wonder I'm excited about the Rover: it's marketed directly to my 18-36 demographic. The Rover site gives you "the 411" on service, encourages you to "stick it in" and then to "re-up" your prepaid account, "freak on" if you're a "speed freak." Then there's this marketing gem:



Stilted advertising copy doesn't make this device any less impressive, and neither do appearances. While the Puck itself is ugly as hell -- it looks like the anemic sibling of the electronic game Simon -- it's impossible not to feel some kind of primal human attraction to this little disc, which manages to yoke the entire Internet to you as you ramble. The more you think about it, the more it looks like a pucking wonder.

Rover Puck 4G hotspot, $150. Available soon.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1693721/c...ver-4g-hotspot





Wider Streets for Internet Traffic
Anne Eisenberg

OUR taste for the Internet is insatiable — traffic is growing so fast that its transmission systems may soon be filled to capacity. But scientists are coping, finding ingenious ways to satisfy our deep bandwidth hunger.

Of course, they can’t accelerate the speed of light as it flies down the glass fibers of central networks carrying our Internet messages worldwide. The laws of nature limit that. Yet they can tap other characteristics of light to pack layers of information into each optical fiber in the network, so that far more data can flow simultaneously down those glass backbones.

Old systems used light that was either on or off — like flashlight signals — to send information along the fibers in the binary language of zeros and ones. But light is an electromagnetic wave, so it has a whole electrical field that scientists are now putting to work to add to the information on each wavelength.

Alcatel-Lucent recently announced a system for telecommunications service providers that takes advantage of both the polarization and phases of light to encode data. The system can more than double the capacity of a single fiber, said James Watt, head of the company’s optics division. Such a system, for example, can transmit more than twice the number of high-definition TV channels than can now be streamed concurrently.

The new equipment is part of a continued research drive to increase the capacity of each strand of optical fiber, said Keren Bergman, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University and head of its Lightwave Research Laboratory. “We are stuffing more information in the same space,” she said.

A fiber is no thicker than human hair, butt can carry many wavelengths of laser light, with each wavelength adding to the bits transmitted per second. The bit rates now attainable are in the billions (gigabits) per second or even trillions (terabits) per second.

The need for core network improvement is pressing, said Stojan Radic, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. “We are looking at a point soon where we cannot satisfy demand,” he said. “And if we don’t, it will be like going over a cliff.”

Demand is continually growing, somewhere below street level, as details of our e-mail, bank balances and national security zip along on light waves. And consumers can’t get enough video clips on YouTube, television shows on Hulu, and movies streamed to them by Netflix that they watch on their computers and TVs.

But that’s just a fraction of the traffic. Add to it the many demands of cloud computing and countless mobile devices and information data bases, for example, and the totals become even harder to imagine.

Next-generation systems that can handle this future traffic jam are being developed by many companies, including Ciena in Linthicum, Md., and Infinera in Sunnyvale, Calif. Alcatel-Lucent says it has begun to sell equipment that transmits up to 88 channels of information, each operating at 100 gigabits a second, but it has not disclosed customer names.

The new equipment from Alcatel-Lucent is expected to reduce the cost per transmitted bit of information, compared with existing equipment, said Paul Louis Ross, a company spokesman. The systems are based in part on the work of the researcher Gabriel Charlet, a scientist at an Alcatel-Lucent Bell research facility in France, who last year sent data at a rate of 7.2 terabits a second over a single fiber more than 7,000 kilometers long.

All of those added gigabits take advantage of the complex way that light can be used to encode data. In the past, when only the intensity of light was used, the signals could transmit only one bit per time slot, said Govind Agrawal, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester.

By contrast, in the new system from Alcatel-Lucent, two binary digits or bits can be encoded by using four phases of light. And the polarized light can vibrate up and down or sideways. In this way, four bits of data can be transmitted per time slot instead of one, said Andrew Chraplyvy, a scientist and executive at the Bell Labs of Alcatel-Lucent in Crawford Hill, N.J., where fiber-optic research originated in the 1960s.

Scientists have long known how to use polarization and phases of light to encode information, said Dr. Chraplyvy, a winner of the prestigious Marconi Prize for his work in communications and information technology. “Although we could do it, we never needed to before, because the capacities we had were enough,” he said. “Now that capacity is running out.”

Dr. Adel Saleh, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, in Arlington, Va., agreed. “The traffic requirements on the Internet double every two years,” he said. “This is why we are struggling to keep up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/10novel.html





The Average Teenager Sends 3,339 Texts Per Month
Ben Parr

If you needed more proof that texting is on the rise, here’s a stat for you: the average teenager sends more than 3,000 texts per month. That’s more than six texts per waking hour.

According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Nielsen analyzed the mobile data habits of more than 60,000 mobile subscribers and surveyed more than 3,000 teens during April, May and June of this year. The numbers they came up with are astounding.

The number of texts being sent is on the rise, especially among teenagers age 13 to 17. According to Nielsen, the average teenager now sends 3,339 texts per month. There’s more, though: teen females send an incredible 4,050 texts per month, while teen males send an average of 2,539 texts. Teens are sending 8% more texts than they were this time last year.

Other age groups don’t even come close, either; the average 18- to 24-year-old sends “only” 1,630 texts per month. The average only drops with other age groups. However, in every age bracket, the number of texts sent has increased when compared to last year. Texting is a more important means of communication than ever.

In 2008, the main reason anybody got a phone was for safety, even among teenagers. That’s not true anymore; 43% of teenagers now say texting is the number one reason they get a cell phone. Safety is number two, with 35%, while 34% of teenagers say they get cell phones to keep in touch with friends.

Texting is also supplanting voice calls — 22% say SMS is easier than a phone call and another 20% say it’s faster. Voice usage has decreased by 14% among teens and is decreasing in all age groups under 55. Eighteen- to 24-year-olds use the most minutes, but every age group between 18 and 55 talks on the phone more than the average teenager.

While voice may be on the decline, data and app usage is on the rise. According to Nielsen, data usage among teens has quadrupled, from 14 MB to 62 MB per month. In a role reversal, teen males use more data than their female counterparts: 75 MB vs. 53 MB of data. App and software downloads also increased by 12% among teens in the past year.

These stats are eye-popping, but what’s even more amazing is that these numbers only keep rising. Texting, data usage and app downloads are nowhere near their peak, but one has to wonder: how many texts is the average teenager actually capable of sending? What’s the limit?
http://mashable.com/2010/10/14/nielsen-texting-stats/





Web Code Offers New Ways To See What Users Do Online
Tanzina Vega

Worries over Internet privacy have spurred lawsuits, conspiracy theories and consumer anxiety as marketers and others invent new ways to track computer users on the Internet. But the alarmists have not seen anything yet.

In the next few years, a powerful new suite of capabilities will become available to Web developers that could give marketers and advertisers access to many more details about computer users’ online activities. Nearly everyone who uses the Internet will face the privacy risks that come with those capabilities, which are an integral part of the Web language that will soon power the Internet: HTML 5.

The new Web code, the fifth version of Hypertext Markup Language used to create Web pages, is already in limited use, and it promises to usher in a new era of Internet browsing within the next few years. It will make it easier for users to view multimedia content without downloading extra software; check e-mail offline; or find a favorite restaurant or shop on a smartphone.

Most users will clearly welcome the additional features that come with the new Web language.

“It’s going to change everything about the Internet and the way we use it today,” said James Cox, 27, a freelance consultant and software developer at Smokeclouds, a New York City start-up company. “It’s not just HTML 5. It’s the new Web.”

But others, while also enthusiastic about the changes, are more cautious.

Most Web users are familiar with so-called cookies, which make it possible, for example, to log on to Web sites without having to retype user names and passwords, or to keep track of items placed in virtual shopping carts before they are bought.

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user’s hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data. That could include a user’s location, time zone, photographs, text from blogs, shopping cart contents, e-mails and a history of the Web pages visited.

The new Web language “gives trackers one more bucket to put tracking information into,” said Hakon Wium Lie, the chief technology officer at Opera, a browser company.

Or as Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum in California, said: “HTML 5 opens Pandora’s box of tracking in the Internet.”

Representatives from the World Wide Web Consortium say they are taking questions about user privacy very seriously. The organization, which oversees the specifications developers turn to for the new Web language, will hold a two-day workshop on Internet technologies and privacy.

Ian Jacobs, head of communications at the consortium, said the development process for the new Web language would include a public review. “There is accountability,” he said. “This is not a secret cabal for global adoption of these core standards.”

The additional capabilities provided by the new Web language are already being put to use by a California programmer who has created what, at first glance, could be a major new threat to online privacy.

Samy Kamkar, a California programmer best known in some circles for creating a virus called the “Samy Worm,” which took down MySpace.com in 2005, has created a cookie that is not easily deleted, even by experts — something he calls an Evercookie.

Some observers call it a “supercookie” because it stores information in at least 10 places on a computer, far more than usually found. It combines traditional tracking tools with new features that come with the new Web language.

In creating the cookie, Mr. Kamkar has drawn comments from bloggers across the Internet whose descriptions of it range from “extremely persistent” to “horrific.”

Mr. Kamkar, however, said he did not create it to violate anyone’s privacy. He said was curious about how advertisers tracked him on the Internet. After cataloging what he found on his computer, he made the Evercookie to demonstrate just how thoroughly people’s computers could be infiltrated by the latest Internet technology.

“I think it’s O.K. for them to say we want to provide better service,” Mr. Kamkar said of advertisers who placed tracking cookies on his computer. “However, I should also be able to opt out because it is my computer.”

Mr. Kamkar, whose 2005 virus circumvented browser safeguards and added more than a million “friends” to his MySpace page in less than 20 hours, said he had no plans to profit from the Evercookie and did not intend to sell it to advertisers.

“That wouldn’t have been difficult,” he said. Instead, he has made the code open to anyone who wants to examine it and says the cookie should be used “as a litmus test for preventing tracking.”

A recent spate of class-action lawsuits have accused large media companies like the Fox Entertainment Group and NBC Universal, and technology companies like Clearspring Technologies and Quantcast, of violating users’ privacy by tracking their online activities even after they took steps to prevent that.

Most people control their online privacy by adjusting settings in today’s most common Web browsers, which include Internet Explorer by Microsoft, Firefox by Mozilla, Safari by Apple and Opera, which is used mostly in Europe and Asia and on mobile devices.
Each browser has different privacy settings, but not all of them have obvious settings for removing data created by the new Web language. Even the most proficient software engineers and developers acknowledge that deleting that data is tricky and may require multiple steps.

“Now there are so many sources of data storage, it’s very hard for browser manufacturers to handle that,” Mr. Cox said.

Mr. Kamkar and privacy experts say that makers of Web browsers should agree on one control for eliminating all tracking capabilities at once. “There should be simple enough controls to take care of every single thing,” said Ms. Dixon, who added that some browsers automatically collected large amounts of data unless a user told them not to.

Mr. Lie acknowledged that such companies “do have a lot of power.” But he said they worry that the privacy settings they develop could be too strict. For example, he said Opera once tried to put more controls on certain types of cookies, but users in Russia complained that the controls prevented a popular social networking site from working properly.

But software developers and the representatives of the World Wide Web argue that as technology advances, consumers have to balance its speed and features against their ability to control their privacy.

“You can do more, but you need to be aware of how your information might be used or misused,” Mr. Jacobs said. “It’s the human questions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/bu...11privacy.html





Monitoring Employees Online Behavior - When They're Not at Work
Klint Finley

This post is part of our ReadWriteEnterprise channel, which is a resource and guide for IT managers and technologists in the Enterprise. The channel is sponsored by Intel and Microsoft. As you're exploring solutions for your enterprise, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: All New 2010 Intel Core vPro Processors and Microsoft Office 2010: Your Best Choice for Business PCs

Paranoia Mike Elgan at Datamation writes about a social media monitoring company called Social Intelligence. Social Intelligence provides not only social media screening of potential candidates, which seems pretty common these days, but ongoing surveillance of employees. It continuously monitors employees social media behavior - including what they post when they're not at work.

Fear Factor

Social Intelligence is using scare tactics to appeal to managers to use its service. Quoting Elgan:

What happens if one of your employees freaks out, comes to work and starts threatening coworkers with a samurai sword? You'll be held responsible because all of the signs of such behavior were clear for all to see on public Facebook pages. That's why you should scan every prospective hire and run continued scans on every existing employee.

I wonder if Larry Ellison would pass this test? But seriously, is it really HR's job to monitor employees behavior outside of work to scan for signs that the employee may be dangerous? Could someone really win a lawsuit against a company which failed to adequately spy on its employees? Certainly employees behavior outside of work can be grounds for termination. Failing a drug test, for example, can lose you a job even if you weren't using drugs on the job.

Some of the categories of behavior Social Intelligence will monitor for include "Poor Judgment," "Gangs," "Drugs and Drug Lingo" and "Demonstrating Potentially Violent Behavior." Supposedly results will be human reviewed, but who gets to decide what constitutes "poor judgement"? Could you be terminated for throwing gang signs you don't even understand?
Big Data Becomes Big Brother

Elgan is convinced, however, that in the age of big data and business analytics that this sort of data mining and pre-emptive termination is inevitable:

Following the current trend lines, very soon social networking spiders and predictive analytics engines will be working night and day scanning the Internet and using that data to predict what every employee is likely to do in the future. This capability will simply be baked right in to HR software suites.

We've predicted that social media monitoring will only get creepier, and it seems like we were right.
Cloud Security

Social Intelligence's data gathering is undoubtedly creepy, but there's an interesting security issue that something like this could address: the flow of sensitive information outside of corporate networks. Company data is flowing outside the firewall at an unprecedented rate. How could monitoring be turned into a useful security tool?
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpri...monitoring.php





Is the Government Spying On Us Through Social Networks?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously said that "the age of privacy is over." And the government wants to ensure that, it seems.

A privacy watchdog's freedom of information request has revealed a government memo encouraging agents to befriend people on a variety of social networks, to take advantage of their readiness to share -- and to spy on them. Thanks to this request, the government released a handful of documents, including a May 2008 memo detailing how social-networking sites are exploited by the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS).

"Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuel a need to have a large group of 'friends' link to their pages, and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don't even know," stated the U.S. document obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities," it said.

According to the EFF, this memo suggests there's nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation. Other websites the EFF has revealed the government is spying on include Twitter, MySpace, Craigslist and Wikipedia.

Neither Facebook nor the EFF responded to requests for comment from FoxNews.com.

With this revelation, the government joins a growing list of groups using social-networking sites to exploit and prey on people. Scammers and spammers are rampant, and hackers are increasingly turning to networks such as Facebook to spread viruses and Trojan Horses.

Still, the EFF worries that the Department of Homeland Security may be taking things too far. "While it is laudable to see DHS discussing the Fair Information Practice Principles as part of the design for such a project, the breadth of sites targeted is concerning," the watchdog group wrote on its website.

The EFF uncovered efforts by the DHS to monitor social media during the inauguration of President Obama in much the same way. According to these documents, the DHS collected a massive amount of data on individuals and organizations explicitly tied to the political event.

Among the networks specifically cited for analysis "were general social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr as well as sites that focus specifically on certain demographic groups such as MiGente and BlackPlanet, news sites such as NPR, and political commentary sites DailyKos," the EFF wrote.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/...cial-networks/





Texas Schools Track Students with Radio Frequency

Two school districts in the Houston area have begun monitoring students whereabouts on campus by issuing them identification badges with radio frequency identification technology — the same technology used to track cattle.

The Spring school district in Houston has distributed the ID badges to about 13,500 of its 36,000 students since December 2008. The Santa Fe school district, about 30 miles south of Houston, began using the badges this year.

School officials say the devices improve security and increase attendance rates, a figure that's important because some school funding is tied to attendance. The Spring district uses the tracking system to find students counted absent by classroom teachers.

Often, the student is somewhere else on campus, allowing the district to recover $194,000 in state funding since December 2008, said Christine Porter, Spring's associate superintendent for financial services.

The technology easily pays for itself within about three years at secondary schools, she said.

"It's a wonderful asset," said Veronica Vijil, principal of Bailey Middle School in Spring,

The American Civil Liberties Union successfully fought the introduction of these ID badges in California in 2005. The ACLU of Texas told the Houston Chronicle the badges present security risks.

"There's real questions about the security risks involved with these gadgets," said Dotty Griffith, public education director for the ACLU of Texas.

Many students already are used to being electronically monitored. Some campuses have had surveillance cameras for years.

"It feels like someone's watching you at all times," said Jacorey Jackson, 11, a sixth-grader at Bailey.
http://www.newstimes.com/default/art...ncy-697418.php





WikiLeaks to Release 400,000 Secret Documents as Funding Concerns Loom
Ben Parr

Wikileaks is expected to release over 400,000 sensitive documents on Monday in what will be the largest intelligence leak since the Afghan War reports.

The Pentagon is bracing itself for the potential fallout of the release of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the Iraq War. According to multiple reports, the Pentagon has been sifting through the database where the documents originated. A Pentagon spokesperson said that it set up a 120-person task force several weeks ago to determine the potential implications and damage of the military reports being leaked.

The documents are expected to be released simultaneously by The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, the same three media organizations that worked with WikiLeaksWikileaksWikileaks on the Afghan War Diary in July. Those 90,000 logs detailed information on Taliban attacks, civilian deaths, NATO strategy, involvement by Pakistan in the insurgency and more.

The leak brought unprecedented media attention for the whistleblower organization. It also resulted in widespread controversy, both in political chambers and in media circles. The Pentagon even threatened action if WikiLeaks “didn’t do the right thing” and return the stolen documents.

Recently though, the controversy surrounding WikiLeaks has risen to dramatic heights. Founder Julian Assange was accused of rape, and although those charges have been dropped, his handling of the situation has led to internal strife at the organization, enough so that one of its spokespeople resigned in protest.

That’s not all, either; Wikileaks claims that its funding has been blocked because it has been placed on watchlists for both the U.S. and Australian governments. It can no longer accept donations through MoneybookersMoneybookersMoneybookers, the site that collected the organization’s donations. PayPal suspended Wikileaks’ account earlier this year.

Will next week’s Iraq War documents help get WikiLeaks back on track, or will the controversy surround the organization only grow? What kind of impact will the reports have on the Iraq War, world politics and WikiLeaks itself? We’re going to soon find out.
http://mashable.com/2010/10/15/wikil...concerns-loom/





SUGARSYNC NOW SYNCS BETWEEN PEOPLE FOR EASY AND INSTANT SHARING OF FILES

Allows sharing of unlimited data at no cost to the recipient

SugarSync Inc., makers of the award-winning SugarSync file sync, online backup and sharing service, today announced the ability for users to instantly sync folders and files between people. The new feature leverages SugarSync’s flexible structure to enable users to work the way they always work, without extra steps.

The new multi-user sync capability allows for folders shared among an assigned group to be immediately synced between all parties. As soon as shared files are updated by a user, each person will find the most up-to-date information on his/her computer.

“SugarSync’s goal has always been to make file sharing and syncing as easy as possible,” said Drew Garcia, SugarSync Vice President of Product Management. “These new multi-user sync capabilities give you access to the most current shared files immediately, effortlessly, and without disruption. It’s all organized and managed the way you want, with the easiest and most effective sharing tools built right in.”

For SugarSync users with existing shared folders, the new multi-user sync is enabled by simply clicking on the button “sync to computer.” Users with multiple computers or devices running SugarSync can select which device they want to sync the shared folder.

SugarSync has many other fine-grained controls that add to the flexibility of multi-user syncing, including:

Share any folder – A user can share any folder in their directory structure, such as a folder within “Documents” or “Pictures.” With SugarSync, users have always had the flexibility to backup any folder on their computer; the new folder sharing functionality also allows sharing of any folder on the user’s computer. There’s no need to move your folders into a separate folder to enable syncing and sharing.

Flexible file structure for different sharing groups – A user can maintain his/her file structure with the ability to share folders and sub-folders with different groups of people. For example, a user can share a high level folder with co-workers and a subfolder with an external client.

Password protection – When sharing sensitive or confidential data, passwords can add an extra layer of security.

Cloud-only shared folders – Cloud-only hosting of shared files frees up space on a user’s computer.

“Read-only” permissions - Setting a folder as “read only” is useful when a user wants to share a folder, but doesn’t want the group to be able change the contents of the shared files.

Stored previous versions - SugarSync stores up to five past versions of every file allowing users to revert to a previous version should someone make a mistake or corrupt the file.

Additionally, unlike other solutions on the market, the storage used in a shared folder counts only towards the folder owner’s SugarSync account, meaning recipients of shared folders can join those folders without using up their own storage limit. For example, if a “Summer Reunion” folder is shared with the entire family, the storage capacity of the photos would only count against the original owner’s SugarSync account. In a business situation, a user can share a folder with a client or colleague at no charge to the recipient.

Recipients of shared folders can get started with a free account to receive unlimited amounts of shared data—be it documents, photos or other files. Those who refer their family, friends and colleagues to sign up for a SugarSync account will be compensated with as much as 10 GB of additional storage via the Company’s “Double Bonus” referral program. (Terms and conditions apply; the offer is time limited.)

SugarSync supports virtually all computer and smart phone operating systems, including Windows and Mac, plus native apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, WinMo, and Symbian.

About SugarSync

SugarSync is a powerful syncing and online backup service providing always-connected consumers and busy professionals a powerful way to organize, manage, share, and access all their files on-the-go, instantly and securely from any Mac, PC or mobile device. SugarSync users may selectively sync files in any folder to all or certain devices to seamlessly match the way people organize their folders and manage their digital lives. SugarSync’s file sharing and collaboration tools also allow users to share any folder or file with a simple URL via social networks, email, instant messaging, and more. The company was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in San Mateo, Calif. For more information, please visit www.sugarsync.com.
http://www.intomobile.com/2010/10/05...ween-people/2/





NY Buyer Gets Assets of Music File Sharer Kasaa

NYC-based Atrinsic, an Internet search marketer and provider of direct-to-consumer subscription products, is acquiring the assets of the music file-sharing service Kazaa from Brilliant Digital Entertainment via a deal that will see Atrinsic issue 7.1 million shares of its stock to Brilliant and assume certain liabilities.

Atrinsic said it believes the acquisition will allow it to grow its subscriber base and enhance and expand recurring revenues.
http://nyconvergence.com/2010/10/ny-...rer-kasaa.html





iPhone Apps Now More Popular than Major TV Shows and Sports Broadcasts
Dean Takahashi

Is iPhone the next American Idol?

The daily audience for apps that run on Apple’s iOS operating system (for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) has now surpassed 19 million users, who spend an average of 22 minutes per day using these apps, according to one measure. That means the audience for the iOS devices is now bigger than NBC’s Sunday Night Football and is just shy of the audience for ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Only 4 million daily viewers separate the iOS audience from that of the No. 1-ranked TV show, Fox’s American Idol, according to data collected by analytics firm Flurry.

Flurry’s chief executive, Simon Khalaf, will talk about this data and more at VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat 2010 conference on Oct. 18.

Flurry also acknowledges that it only sees part of the picture, with its analytics code integrated into 50,000 of the 250,000 apps on the iOS. Based on its own estimates, Flurry believes that the iOS is already bigger than all the TV shows if you consider the entire iOS audience.

That achievement is pretty staggering, considering that Apple launched its App Store only in July, 2008. The mass consumption of apps on mobile devices has since exploded. Given that most TV series air only 22 episodes per season, the allure for advertisers is clear. Apps are available 365 days a year, making their audience accessible to advertisers 15 times more frequently than TV audiences.

“The most obvious [effect] is the impact on the advertisement industry, which has relied on the reach generated by its prime time television slot for years,” said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry.

For instance, on Oct. 5, CBS canceled Guiding Light, the longest-running TV drama (soap opera) in history. That show began in 1952 and ran for 72 years. This year, the show’s audience had dwindled to less than 2.1 million viewers per episode. Also, CBS aired the last episode last month of As the World Turns, another soap opera that ran for more than 50 years. Ad dollars generated by soap operas have fallen 30 percent from 2005 to 2009 and another 20 percent in the first half of 2010.

Of course, the iPhone isn’t triumphant yet. There is no single app whose audience is so big that it can match the audience of a single most-popular TV show such as American Idol. But with the rate of growth of the iOS audience, that day is probably coming. Indeed, some apps such as Angry Birds, which has sold more than 7 million paid copies, are similar to TV shows, with regular updates coming out just as TV shows air new episodes.
http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/11/ip...ts-broadcasts/





CBS Is a Network on a Roll
Bill Carter

Three weeks into a new television season, the usual carnage is becoming apparent, with new shows collapsing and crises appearing all over network prime-time schedules.

Except in one place.

At CBS, a network that unashamedly embraces the supposedly dying notion of being a broadcaster, something close to serenity has settled in. So far, CBS has managed to avoid, on every night, across every hour of prime time, the kind of failure that has visited all of its main competitors.

CBS has always been known for being strong with older viewers, but weak — and often last — with viewers in the category that ABC, NBC, and Fox prize, viewers ages 18 to 49.

Many advertisers pay a premium to reach that group. CBS has missed out on those premiums in that past; but this season looks different. CBS has won that category each week so far.

But then CBS is winning everywhere. Since the Nielsen Company introduced the People Meter rating system in 1987, CBS had never before won the first two weeks of a prime-time season in all the big ratings categories: viewers 18 to 49, viewers 25 to 54 and total viewers.

Though some showed signs of dropping off in their third week, all five new CBS series have so far beaten every other new entry in terms of total viewers. Not one of those new shows encountered the kind of instant rejection that has already sent “Lone Star” on Fox and “My Generation” on ABC to the remainder bin.

Two new CBS shows, the comedy “Mike and Molly” and the revival drama “Hawaii Five-0,” have done so well they are already shoo-ins to be ordered for a full season.

More than that, CBS’s schedule changes this fall — an unusually high number of them, for the normally staid CBS — all worked. “Survivor” slid over to Wednesday with no apparent ill effects. “CSI: Miami” shifted to Sunday and has so far greatly aided a significant comeback for CBS on that night. “The Big Bang Theory” moved to Thursdays and has settled in as one of the strongest comedies on television.

But the real eye-opener involves the overall picture for CBS,which is finishing last on no night of the week. More remarkably, CBS is not finishing last in any of the 22 hours that constitute the prime-time week, and is almost always first or second.

The network’s success has been built around what Leslie Moonves, the network’s chief executive, described as the steady accumulation of programming assets. In virtually every recent season, CBS added valuable pieces. Last season, it added the spin-off “NCIS: Los Angeles,” as well as the solid 10 p.m. drama, “The Good Wife,” and a reality show with across-the-board appeal, “Undercover Boss.”

In 2008, it added “The Mentalist;” the year before, “The Big Bang Theory.”

Kelly Kahl, who is the chief scheduler for CBS, said the metaphor he often uses, though it sometimes confuses nonfootball fans, is “ball-control offense.” CBS runs familiar plays, does not throw wildly downfield and still scores often. He said the most familiar metaphor for the CBS approach was the “big tent” theory: If you get as many people as possible into the tent, he said, some of them will be in those younger age groups and you’ll be competitive there as well.

At the moment, CBS is dominant in every age group from 35 up. And though it still finishes last in the group ages 18 to 24, it is much more competitive than usual — just a tenth of a rating point behind NBC and ABC.

The strong early run by CBS is getting noticed on Wall Street, where several analysts have buy recommendations on CBS stock. The company’s share price, $17.23 at Friday’s closing, has hovered recently near its 52-week high of $17.64.

CBS’s strategy seems to fly in the face of a long-established trend away from the old mass appeal of broadcasters and toward more specialized networks on cable television.

Mr. Moonves argued that “still being the biggest game in town” has more value than ever to advertisers because the audience is getting divided so many ways and broadcasters can still reach the biggest share of audience all at once. “Being a broadcaster means even more today than before,” he said. “We should be even farther away from the cable networks, not trying to get closer to them.”

CBS is achieving its success largely under the radar.

“Mad Men,” on the AMC cable channel, has probably generated more comment this year than all the CBS shows put together. “We don’t get the Emmys,” said Mr. Moonves, “but that’s not as important as getting the audience.”

For CBS, piling up successful shows is all but life and death. Unlike its big competitors, CBS does not have a cache of lucrative cable channels to rely on to generate revenue if the network’s programming hits the skids — as has happened at NBC, for example.

So maintaining a strong roster of shows it can sell at good rates to advertisers is critical — especially, as Mr. Moonves pointed out, if CBS also owns those shows and can market them overseas and in syndication. He cited “Hawaii Five-0,” which he said had already sold to international television outlets for about $2.3 million an episode.

“That could become a billion-dollar property for us,” Mr. Moonves said. CBS already owns two such 10-figure properties in the crime dramas “CSI,” and “NCIS,” both of which CBS extended with spin-off series.

“These shows will be generating revenue for this company 30 years from now,” Mr. Moonves said. “Some idiot will be sitting here looking at this list like I look at ‘The Honeymooners’ and ‘I Love Lucy,’ and saying, ‘Look, they’re still producing revenue.’ ”

CBS’s consistency has allowed it to introduce new shows only in time periods where they are surrounded by other successes. That ensures the new shows will at least be sampled, something that doesn’t happen to new shows tossed against tough competition on their own.

“For at least the past decade, CBS has had the most loyal viewers in the sense that they always seem ready, willing and able to check out the network’s new offerings,” said Steve Sternberg, the longtime television research analyst who runs his own blog, The Sternberg Report.

Mr. Moonves noted, “The philosophy hasn’t changed, and neither has the management.”

The CBS team benefits from a remarkable degree of continuity. Mr. Kahl has worked for Mr. Moonves for almost 20 years; Nina Tassler, the president for entertainment at CBS, has been with him for 25. And, as several CBS executives said, Mr. Moonves, though he has moved up to chief executive of the CBS Corporation, has never ceded control of the network. Everyone still reports to him — and he has final say on everything from scheduling to the casting of roles.

Ms. Tassler, cautious by nature, said “there’s a long way to go” and the strong start only meant CBS should “feel relief, not happiness.”

But even outsiders are impressed. Garth Ancier, who served as chief programmer at two networks in the past, NBC and the old WB network, cited an observation from the former NBC chief executive Grant Tinker who said, “If you do a thousand things right, eventually you win.”

Mr. Ancier said, “No one thing is a game changer for CBS; they just do a lot of things right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/bu...dia/11cbs.html





Sony Unveils "Connected" TVs Using Google Platform
Gabriel Madway

Sony Corp is making its biggest push yet into so-called connected televisions, unveiling a line of Google-enhanced sets that aim to fuse TV and Web content together in the living room.

The electronics giant on Tuesday announced high-definition TVs that also allow users to surf the Internet, use apps, stream online content and better organize and search programing.

It remains to be seen whether consumers will be interested. Previous attempts to bring the online experience to TV have so far failed to impress.

But Sony, with the aid of Google's brand awareness and what it called a massive marketing campaign aimed at younger consumers, hopes to convince buyers that the Web and TV can coexist simply in one device.

"There's a lot of folks out there who want to see something more out of their TV," said Jeff Goldstein, vice president of connected home products and services for Sony Electronics.

"I think the adoption rate on this type of device is going to be very fast," he said.

Forrester Research expects 43 million U.S. homes to have a connected TV by 2015, up from fewer than 2 million in 2010. The research group said earlier offerings have not been powerful enough, and said many people who currently own Internet TVs never bother to connect them.

Sony's Internet TVs, which come Wi-Fi-ready to connect to broadband networks, are built on Google's Android platform and feature Intel's Atom chip.

They start at $600 for a 24-inch model and range up to $1,400 for a 46-inch. Sony is also launching a $400 set-top box that has the same functionality as the TVs, and also includes a Blu-ray player.

The products go on sale Saturday at Sony retail outlets, and will be sold at Best Buy stores shortly after. Until after the holiday season, the Internet TVs will be available only in the United States.

The TVs and set-top box come with a novel hybrid remote control, a two-hand device that features an optical mouse and a QWERTY keyboard.

The key facet of Google TV is a search box that accesses Google's search engine to scan live programs, DVR recordings and the Web, delivering a simple list of results that can be accessed with a push of the button.

Users can toggle between live TV, Web content or apps from familiar names like Pandora, YouTube, Twitter and the NBA. The TV feed can be locked in a corner of the screen, so viewers can surf and watch at the same time.

Apps from the Google's Android Marketplace, optimized to run on TVs, are expected to be available early next year.

Google is partnering with Sony and others as it aims to expand its ad search business beyond its Internet stronghold into the $70 billion TV advertising market.

Last week, Logitech International SA showed off its $300 set-top box for Google TV.

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69B6CT20101013





Report: 3D Televisions Not Selling...Yet

TV manufacturers are trying their best to make 2010 the Year of 3D TV, but according to a report at DisplaySearch, consumers aren't cooperating. I doubt this news comes as a surprise to most of us; I personally can't think of anyone who rushed out to buy a 3D TV.

But the stats are even worse than I thought they'd be. DisplaySearch estimates that 3.2 million 3D TVs will be shipped in 2010 . Note that's shipped, not sold. 3.2 million equates to 2% of all flat panel displays shipped (as far as I can ascertain, that's worldwide shipments). So yeah, there are not many 3D TVs being shipped this year.

But wait, that's not the end of the bad news. In Western Europe (the only region where they offered this data point) sales of 3D glasses are less than 1 per 3D set sold. In other words, a lot of Western Europeans who buy a TV with 3D capability don't even bother to buy the glasses to use that feature. Presumably they're either waiting for better glasses prices, more content, or the TV they picked just happened to have 3D capability but it wasn't a feature they were really interested in.

DisplaySearch is still optimistic about the future of 3D, claiming that by 2014 90 million 3D TVs will ship (that's 41% of the estimated 2014 market share). What makes all of this particularly interesting is when you compare these numbers to an earlier report from July. Just a few months ago figures for this year were larger (3.4 million/5%) and the estimate for 2014 was smaller (42.9 million/37%).

So while the trend this year is headed downwards, their prediction for 2014 is growing. Why? Because the manufacturers are so gung-ho on 3D that more and more sets will include it, while the add-on cost of 3D-enabling a TV will continue to drop. I read this to mean that many of the sets on store shelves will have 3D whether you want it or not, but the price difference between a 3D and a non-3D TV will drop to where it isn't very significant. What would be really interesting is a prediction of how many pairs of 3D glasses will be sold in 2014 (though personally I hope that 3D glasses will be an artifact of the past by then).

I don't have a research lab to put to work, but the sense I get among regular consumers (aka my friends and family) is that no one wants to sit in their living room wearing special glasses just to watch TV. As early as this December Toshiba will be selling (small) glasses-free 3D televisions in Japan, and this is the way the tech needs to go in order to really take off. Offer a glasses-free 3D TV with a wide enough viewing angle that a bunch of people can gather round and watch the Superbowl while passing the dip and clanking beer bottle to toast touchdowns and then I think consumers will be interested. At least I know I would be. How about you?
http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech...not-sellingyet





Film Riches, Cleaned Up for Posterity
Dave Kehr

Movies may seem a more permanent medium than ephemeral art forms like theater and dance. But films are fragile things that often exist only fleetingly in their definitive state.

Take “The Leopard,” the opening-night film in To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s festival of recently restored films. It would seem that “The Leopard,” Luchino Visconti’s 1963 epic, has been in an almost continual restoration since it was first released, having been cut, dubbed and printed in an inferior color process during its commercial life. And yet the version in the festival represents a subtle but significant advance over even the superb Blu-ray edition issued by Criterion this year.

This latest version of “The Leopard” is among more than 35 films from around the world in this eighth edition of To Save and Project, which begins Friday night. Almost all the movies are being seen in New York for the first time in their refurbished form; several are being shown in the United States for the first time in complete or expanded versions. “The goal of preservation is to get a film back up on the screen,” said Joshua Siegel, an associate curator at the Modern who, with his colleagues Anne Morra and Katie Trainor, is one of the organizers of the series.

It’s bad enough, to cite a common estimate, that 90 percent of all American silent films and 50 percent of American sound films made before 1950 appear to have vanished forever. But even the films we have often live on in diminished states. An astonishing number of famous titles — like “King Kong” and “His Girl Friday” — no longer exist as original camera negatives, but survive only as degraded duplicates and damaged release prints.

A great deal of important material — not just features but shorts, newsreels, experimental work, industrial films, home movies and so on — remains on unstable nitrate stock, and must be transferred to a more permanent base before the films turn to goo. And once the endangered material has been stabilized (the preservation step), it often must undergo an even more expensive process of restoration to recover its original luster: the removal of dirt and scratches, the replacement of lost footage or missing intertitles, the cleaning up of degraded soundtracks.

“Film preservation is a Sisyphean task,” Mr. Siegel said, an indisputable statement, but not a completely pessimistic one. The rock is always rolling downhill, as chemical decomposition claims more footage each day. But thanks to evolving technology, preservationists possess ever more powerful tools to help them push the boulder back to the top.

A good example is MoMA’s own work on “Sunnyside Up” (being shown Saturday and Nov. 13), an early sound film promoted on its release in 1929 as “the screen’s first original all talking, singing, dancing musical comedy.” The film came to MoMA in the early 1970s, as part of a collection donated by 20th Century Fox. The museum immediately transferred the nitrate film to stable, safety stock. “But laboratory work has improved significantly since then,” said Peter Williamson, a film conservation manager at the museum, “and we thought we could do much better today.”

With money from the nonprofit Film Foundation (which along with Gucci also financed work on “The Leopard”), “Sunnyside” went back to the lab — in this case, Cinetech in Valencia, Calif. — to be processed through a modern “wet gate” printer, a mechanism that immerses the film in a fluid that fills in black scratches and makes them disappear. The new printers, Mr. Williamson said, are also better able to cope with the shrinking and warping, smoothing out many of the jitters unfairly associated with older movies.

Work on the sound was performed by Audio Mechanics in Burbank, Calif. “We were able to improve the soundtrack,” Mr. Williamson said, “retaining the original sound quality but not sanitizing it to the point where you’d think it was produced this morning. A Fox feature sounds different from a Warner Brothers or an MGM film from the same period, and we wanted to retain that peculiarity. That’s our curatorial approach.”

Hollywood is only part of the picture. Studios to some extent underwrite storage and preservation, and that’s not necessarily the case with films made outside the American industrial system, like Carlos Velo’s vivid 1956 documentary on bullfighting, “Torero” (screening Saturday and Thursday) or Manoel de Oliveira’s 1963 “Acto da Primavera,” a provocative restaging of a 16th-century Passion Play (screening Sunday and Thursday).

Avant-garde and independent films face a particular danger, with no corporate sponsorship to protect them and their negatives often lost or damaged. Ross Lipman, a senior preservationist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has made a specialty of rescuing these films and will be present on Oct. 27 to introduce a new version of Barbara Loden’s ground- and heartbreaking “Wanda” (1970), reconstructed from the original 16-millimeter camera rolls, among other films. Dan Streible, who formed the Orphan Film Project at New York University to protect outlying movies, like many newsreels and industrial films that have no copyright protection, will offer an overview of his group’s discoveries on Oct. 23.

The new gorilla in the archival world is digital technology, which makes it possible to reclaim films beyond the reach of photo-chemical restoration but also invites the abuses of over-restoration: silent films from which every mote of dust or vibration of the hand-cranked camera has been eliminated; movies from the ’30s and ’40s retrofitted with stereo surround soundtracks.

But used responsibly, digital techniques have much to offer, as shown by the extended director’s cut of Volker Schlöndorff’s “Tin Drum,” now about half an hour longer than when it was released in 1979. Mr. Schlöndorff will be at MoMA to introduce the new cut, which will be shown in a digital copy, on Nov. 5 and 7.

“We wanted someone who oversaw the digital restoration of his own work to be present,” Mr. Siegel said. “He’ll explain why he thought it was important to add these 30-odd minutes of material to the original and also why he prefers to project it digitally rather than transferring it back to celluloid.”

Mr. Siegel added: “At its heart this is a festival of photochemical, or at least, celluloid preservation. But in 10 years who knows where we will be? It’s a never-ending story.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/movies/15restore.html





Microsoft Issues its Biggest-Ever Security Fix
Jim Finkle

Microsoft Corp issued its biggest-ever security fix on Tuesday, including repairs to its ubiquitous Windows operating system and Internet browser for flaws that could let hackers take control of a PC.

The new patches aim to fix a number of vulnerabilities including the notorious Stuxnet virus that attacked an Iranian nuclear power plant and other industrial control systems around the world.

Microsoft said four of the new patches -- software updates that write over glitches -- were of the highest priority and should be deployed immediately to protect users from potential criminal attacks on the Windows operating systems.

Microsoft said it also repaired other less serious security weaknesses in Windows, along with security problems in its widely used Office software for PCs and Microsoft Server software for business computers.

Microsoft released 16 security patches to address 49 problems in its products, many of which were discovered by outside researchers who seek out such vulnerabilities to win cash bounties as well as notoriety for their technical prowess.

"This is a huge jump," said Amol Sarwate, a research manager with computer security provider Qualys Inc. "I think the reason for it is that more and more people are out there looking for vulnerabilities."

The geeks who report such vulnerabilities to software makers are known as "white hat" hackers. Sarwate warned that there are also plenty of "black hats," or criminal hackers who look for vulnerabilities in software that they can exploit to launch attacks on computer systems.

Indeed, the world's biggest software maker said that the patches released on Tuesday include software to fix a vulnerability exploited by the Stuxnet virus -- a malicious program that attacks PCs used to run power plants and other infrastructure running Siemens industrial control systems.

The virus, which infected computers at Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, was discovered over the summer. Security research Symantec said that it detected the highest concentration of the virus on computer systems in Iran, though it was also spotted in Indonesia, India, the United States, Australia, Britain, Malaysia and Pakistan.

So far Microsoft has patched three of the four vulnerabilities exploited by Stuxnet's unknown creators.

The total of 49 vulnerabilities exceeds the previous record of 34, which was set in October 2009 and matched in June and August of this year.

The constant patching of PCs is a time-consuming process for corporate users, who need to test the fixes before they deploy them to make sure they do not cause machines to crash because of compatibility problems with existing software.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle. Editing by Robert MacMillan, Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69B5IH20101012





European Antritrust Deal With Microsoft Barely Affects Browser Market
Kevin J. O'Brien

When Europe settled an antitrust case over Web browsers with Microsoft in December 2009, it hoped to dislodge the world’s biggest software maker from its dominant position in that market by requiring it to offer rivals’ products.

As part of that, Microsoft in March started sending software ballot screens to 200 million Windows users in Europe. The screens ask users to choose a default from a list of 12 browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Opera and Apple’s Safari.

Six months into the process, the initiative appears to be having only a minor influence on consumers, prompting a renewed debate about the effectiveness of such antitrust remedies.

“I’m sure that it is increasing pressure on Microsoft, which has been losing share anyway,” said Aodhan Cullen, the chief executive of StatCounter, a research firm in Dublin that tracks browser use. “But it hasn’t caused a big upheaval in rankings.”

The agreement was intended to check Microsoft’s advantage of bundling its browser into Windows, a practice that a Norwegian browser maker, Opera, challenged in a complaint to the European Commission in December 2007. While browsers are free, they are the gateway through which companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla, the owner of Firefox, earn revenue through advertising.

According to StatCounter, Microsoft’s leading share of the European browser market fell to 39.8 percent in October from 44.9 percent in January. In 2009, Microsoft’s share declined by 5.5 percentage points; in 2008 by 8 points.

Most of the decline has come amid gains by Google, which introduced Chrome in September 2008. Google’s share of the European market doubled this year, to 11.9 percent in October from 5.8 percent in January.

But it is impossible, browser makers and market researchers say, to isolate the effect of the ballot from general market trends, and there is no way to measure consumer participation in the balloting or its direct outcome.

Debate over the effectiveness of European antitrust remedies is not new.

In 2003, the commission ordered Microsoft to sell a version of Windows in Europe without its own media player, to minimize the company’s advantage in bundling its products. But consumers largely rejected the stripped-down version, which Microsoft sold for the same price as its full Windows software.

Neelie Kroes, who crafted the ballot screen settlement with Microsoft in December 2009 as the E.U. competition commissioner, is now commissioner for telecommunications and the digital economy.

Her spokesman directed questions on the ballot screen remedy to Ms. Kroes’ successor as competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunía.

Amelia Torres, a spokeswoman for Mr. Almunía, said recent market data suggested that competition among browser makers was increasing, which was an indication of the ballot screen’s success.

“I think one can say that the decline in Internet Explorer share can be interpreted as the ballot screen bringing about its intended effect,” Ms. Torres said.

The commission never planned to dictate the market shares of competitors in the browser market, Ms. Torres added. She said the cyber-balloting gave Europeans another option, if they chose, to select one of several browsers.

Brian Rakowski, director of Chrome product management at Google, said it was impossible to quantify the ballot screen’s effect, but he thought the remedy had raised awareness among Europeans about what browser choices were available.

“We are also seeing people responding more and more to Chrome, and starting to tell their friends about it,” Mr. Rakowski said.

Achim Sauerberg, an analyst at Statista, a market research firm in Hamburg, said the ballot screen had only reinforced the status quo among European consumers, many of whom had already chosen a browser before the commission took its action.

“People who tend to care about browsers had already made this decision,” Mr. Sauerberg said. “So this was unlikely to dramatically rearrange the market anyway. But I’m sure it is increasing pressure on Microsoft to defend Internet Explorer.”

Microsoft declined to evaluate the effect of the settlement on its browser presence in Europe. The company agreed to the browser settlement after fighting and abandoning a decade-long antitrust battle with the European Commission over the bundling of its media player and the use of confidential protocols for server software.

Microsoft, which by agreeing to the settlement avoided another round of litigation and potential fines, is planning to release its latest browser version, Internet Explorer 9, this year.

Jesse Verstraete, a Microsoft spokesman in Brussels, said the company was complying fully with the conditions of the commission’s settlement and had distributed browser ballots to about 200 million existing and new purchasers of Windows systems in Europe.
The company that initiated the settlement, Opera, has seen little benefit from the balloting screen, according to StatCounter.

The Oslo-based company’s market share has risen to 4.5 percent in October from 4.3 percent in January.

When Microsoft released the first ballot screens in March, Opera said at the time that it was seeing an increase of 800,000 downloads each month.

Pal Unanue-Zahl, an Opera spokesman, said the company had no more recent data.

“We think the ballot screen solution is definitely making the market more competitive,” he said.

Firefox has seen its share in Europe fall slightly, to 38.8 percent in October from 39.9 percent in January, according to StatCounter.

The market share of Apple’s Safari has risen to 4.5 percent in October from 3.7 percent in January.

Ulrich Börger, an antitrust lawyer at Latham & Watkins in Hamburg, said the market snapshot showed that the browser wars were more competitive than ever.

“When the commission first began looking into this, the market was in a different situation,” Mr. Börger said. “Now, there appears to be a very healthy competition going on.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/te...eubrowser.html





Microsoft Expands Effort to Protect Nonprofits
Clifford J. Levy

Microsoft is vastly expanding its efforts to prevent governments from using software piracy inquiries as a pretext to suppress dissent. It plans to provide free software licenses to more than 500,000 advocacy groups, independent media outlets and other nonprofit organizations in 12 countries with tightly controlled governments, including Russia and China.

With the new program in place, authorities in these countries would have no legal basis for accusing these groups of installing pirated Microsoft software.

Microsoft began overhauling its antipiracy policy after The New York Times reported last month that private lawyers retained by the company had often supported law enforcement officials in Russia in crackdowns on outspoken advocacy groups and opposition newspapers.

At first, Microsoft responded to the article by apologizing and saying it would focus on protecting these organizations in Russia from such inquiries.

But it is extending the program to other countries: eight former Soviet republics — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — as well as China, Malaysia and Vietnam. Microsoft executives said they would consider adding more.

“We clearly have a very strong interest in ensuring that any antipiracy activities are being done for the purpose of reducing illegal piracy, and not for other purposes,” said Nancy J. Anderson, a deputy general counsel and vice president at Microsoft. “Under the terms of our new nongovernmental organization software license, we will definitely not have any claims and not pursue any claims against nongovernmental organizations.”

Software piracy inquiries against advocacy groups and media outlets in other former Soviet republics are less common than in Russia, but they have occurred. This year, the police in Kyrgyzstan raided an independent television station, and its employees said a lawyer retained by Microsoft had played a role.

In China, experts said they were not aware of many cases. They pointed out that if the security services wanted to hound or close advocacy groups, they had many other ways of doing so.

But China has been a minefield for American technology companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, which have grappled with the country’s Internet censorship, and it appears that Microsoft is hoping to avoid new controversies there.

Microsoft’s offer “will surely promote the health of nongovernmental organizations in China,” said Lu Fei, director of a clearinghouse for these groups.

Software piracy is widespread in the 12 countries covered by the new program, and Microsoft has long urged their governments to curb the practice. But in Russia, the company discovered that the authorities used the intellectual property laws against dissenters.

The security services in Russia have confiscated computers from dozens of advocacy organizations in recent years under the guise of antipiracy inquiries. Some of these groups did have illegal software, and the authorities have said they are carrying out legitimate efforts to curtail software piracy. But they almost never investigate organizations allied with the government.

Microsoft had long rejected requests from human-rights groups that it refrain from taking part in such cases, saying it was merely complying with Russian law.

But now, the organizations would be automatically granted the software licenses without even having to apply for them, meaning that any programs that they possessed would effectively be legalized. That essentially bars the company’s lawyers from assisting the police in piracy inquiries against the groups.

Ms. Anderson of Microsoft said the company was trying to quickly prepare the automatic licenses for the 12 countries, a process that includes translating them, ensuring that they comply with local laws and disseminating them to the authorities.

Microsoft already provides actual copies of software free to some nonprofit groups. It said that in its last fiscal year, it gave out half a billion dollars worth of programs in more than 100 countries. But it has also found that this policy is not well known in some countries.

In Russia, nonprofit groups said they had already noticed a striking change in Microsoft’s attitude toward these piracy cases. In one notorious inquiry, plainclothes police officers raided a group in Siberia, Baikal Environmental Wave, and seized its computers in January.

Baikal Wave’s leaders said they had used only licensed software, but they were unable to gain any help from Microsoft.

The case was a focus of the article last month in The Times. After it was published, Microsoft gave Baikal Wave free updated versions of software for all its computers and asked the police to drop the inquiry.

The police have not yet formally done so, but Baikal Wave said it was pleased with Microsoft’s reaction and the new program of automatic software licenses.

“The security services will now know that they will not be able to harass nonprofit and human rights organizations and take their computers,” said Galina Kulebyakina, a co-chairwoman of Baikal Wave. “It is outrageous what they did, and now that will no longer happen to others.”

Jing Zhang contributed research from Beijing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/wo.../17russia.html





Oracle-IBM Pact Cuts Android Off at the Knees

If you have only a passing interest in Java development, you probably didn't think of much of yesterday's announcement that Oracle and IBM will cooperate on an open source implementation of Java [1]. But any tech observer knows Google's Android platform is big news, and that Oracle's lawsuit against Google over the Java components [2] underlying the platform is a wild card that could change the way the mobile and embedded landscape develops.

Nobody at Oracle said the word "Android" in the announcement, but the pact with IBM has the potential to seriously undermine the Android platform, no matter how the courtroom struggle turns out.

[ InfoWorld's Martin Heller calls Oracle's Android lawsuit a Pandora's box of serious evils [3]. | Also on InfoWorld: Developers are unhappy over Oracle Android suit [4]. | Keep your Java skills sharp with our JavaWorld Enterprise Java newsletter [5]. ]

Here's the story in a nutshell: Android apps are written in a restricted dialect of the Java language, which meant the platform had a vast and skilled developer community from the moment it was released. The components of Android that allow it to run Java code are based on the Harmony project [6], an open source implementation of Java created under the aegis of the Apache Software Foundation. The vast majority of the code in Harmony was actually written by IBM employees, because Big Blue decided Harmony would be where it would direct its Java development efforts.

But that's no longer the case; the core of the IBM-Oracle deal is that those employees will now switch their attention to OpenJDK, Oracle's in-house open source Java implementation. The move completely sucks the wind out of Harmony's sails, with Tim Ellison, one of Harmony's senior developers, essentially conceding the project will probably fold in short order [7].

That would be a disaster for Android. Apache developer Stephen Colebourne, who's been following the minutiae on his personal blog, believes IBM cut this deal because Oracle agreed to unblock a logjam in the Java Community Process that controls the platform [8]. As a result, new versions of Java with long-awaited features should arrive in 2011 and 2012. But with no major financial backing for the development of its Java libraries, Android could slip behind and lose the love of its Java-savvy developer base.
What's Google to do? Interestingly enough, Google also contributes to the OpenJDK project -- in fact, Google has more developers working on OpenJDK projects than Oracle does [9]. By using a Java implementation from a neutral, reputable source like the Apache Foundation, Android was able to exploit Java's popularity but keep itself at arm's length from much of the platform's byzantine politics. But that didn't keep Oracle's lawyers at bay, and now Google may have no alternative but to inject development resources into Harmony -- and take ownership of a bigger role in this struggle.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/languages...-the-knees-487





‘Hi, Grandma!’ (Pocket Zoo On Hold)
Hilary Stout



THE bedroom door opened and a light went on, signaling an end to nap time. The toddler, tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed, clambered to a wobbly stand in his crib. He smiled, reached out to his father, and uttered what is fast becoming the cry of his generation: “iPhone!”

The iPhone has revolutionized telecommunications. It has also become the most effective tool in human history to mollify a fussy toddler, much to the delight of parents reveling in their newfound freedom to have a conversation in a restaurant or roam the supermarket aisles in peace. But just as adults have a hard time putting down their iPhones, so the device is now the Toy of Choice — akin to a treasured stuffed animal — for many 1-, 2- and 3-year-olds. It’s a phenomenon that is attracting the attention and concern of some childhood development specialists.

Natasha Sykes, a mother of two in Atlanta, remembers the first time her daughter, Kelsey, now 3 1/2 but then barely 2 years old, held her husband’s iPhone. “She pressed the button and it lit up. I just remember her eyes. It was like ‘Whoa!’ ”

The parents were charmed by their daughter’s fascination. But then, said Ms. Sykes (herself a BlackBerry user), “She got serious about the phone.”

Kelsey would ask for it. Then she’d cry for it. “It was like she’d always want the phone,” Ms. Sykes said. After a six-hour search one day, she and her husband found the iPhone tucked away under Kelsey’s bed. They laughed. But they also felt vague concern. Kelsey, and her 2-year-old brother, Chase, have blocks, Legos, bouncing balls, toy cars and books galore. (“They love books,” Ms. Sykes said.) But nothing compares to the iPhone.

“If they know they have the option of the phone or toys, it will be the phone, ” Ms. Sykes said

Brady Hotz, who will be 2 at the end of this month, was having a hard time getting out the door of his family’s home near Chicago the other day. He’d woken up late — 6:45 instead of 6:15. His mother, Kellie Hotz, was in a rush. She got him dressed, gave him milk and cereal, and announced, “We’re ready to go.”

Brady, not budging from his position near the couch, dug in. “Mickey!” he said plaintively. “Mickey!” (Translation: I’m not going anywhere till I get to watch “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” on TV.)

Ms. Hotz, a veteran of such standoffs, switched instantly to what she called her “guaranteed success tool.”

“What about Mickey on the phone?” she suggested.

That’s all it took. Mother swept up the now entirely cooperative toddler, cued up the show (via YouTube) on her little iPhone screen, and strapped him into her car, where he sang happily along with the video for the 15-minute ride to day care.

Then trouble began again. Brady wanted to stay in his seat with the iPhone. Finally he put it in his coat pocket and went inside — where Ms. Hotz was able to surreptitiously reclaim her gizmo and leave for work. But it’s not always that easy. “Sometimes I’ll need it because someone is calling, and he is not at all willing to give it up,” she said.

Apple, the iPhone’s designer and manufacturer, has built its success on machines so simple and intuitive that even technologically befuddled adults can figure out how to work them, so it makes sense that sophisticated children would follow. The most recent model is 4.5 inches tall, 2.31 inches wide and weighs 4.8 ounces: sleek, but not too small for those with developing motor skills. Tap a picture on the screen and something happens. What could be more fun?

The sleepy-eyed toddler who called for the iPhone from his crib is one of hundreds of iPhone-loving tykes starring in videos posted throughout the Internet, usually narrated by parents expressing proud wonderment at their offspring’s ability to slide chubby fingers across the gadget’s screen and pull up photographs and apps of their choice.

Many iPhone apps on the market are aimed directly at preschoolers, many of them labeled “educational,” such as Toddler Teasers: Shapes, which asks the child to tap a circle or square or triangle; and Pocket Zoo, which streams live video of animals at zoos around the world. There are “flash cards” aimed at teaching children to read and spell, and a “Wheels on the Bus” app that sings the popular song in multiple languages. Then there’s the new iGo Potty app (sponsored by Kimberly-Clark, maker of Huggies training pants), with automated phone calls reminding toddlers that it’s time to “go.”

Along with fears about dropping and damage, however, many parents sharing iPhones with their young ones feel nagging guilt. They wonder whether it is indeed an educational tool, or a passive amusement like television. The American Academy of Pediatrics has long advised parents not to let their children watch any TV until they are past their second birthday.

Dr. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, a pediatrician who is a member of the academy’s council of communications and media, said the group is continually reassessing its guidelines to address new forms of “screen time.”

“We always try to throw in the latest technology, but the cellphone industry is becoming so complex that we always come back to the table and wonder should we have a specific guideline for cellphones,” she said. But, she added, “At the moment, we seem to feel it’s the same as TV.”

Jill Mikols Etesse, a mother of two daughters, aged 3 and 8, outside of Washington, believes her younger daughter is further along in vocabulary, reading and spelling than her older daughter was at the same age, and she attributes this progress to the iPhone and iPad. The 3-year-old has learned to spell compound words like “starlight and fireworks” through an app called Montessori Crossword, her mother said. “She uses words that I don’t use, so I know it isn’t coming from me,” Ms. Etesse said. “She says ‘That’s peculiar.’ I don’t use the term peculiar.”

But Jane M. Healy, an educational psychologist in Vail, Colo. said: “Any parent who thinks a spelling program is educational for that age is missing the whole idea of how the preschool brain grows. What children need at that age is whole body movement, the manipulation of lots of objects and not some opaque technology. You’re not learning to read by lining up the letters in the word ‘cat.’ You’re learning to read by understanding language, by listening. Here’s the parent busily doing something and the kid is playing with the electronic device. Where is the language? There is none.”

Despite Ms. Etesse’s generally positive experience, she and her husband decided to set limits when their two daughters spent six hours straight staring at the iPhone during a car trip. Now they allow each child no more than one hour a day of screen time. (That means the iPhone and the iPad; neither girl is interested in TV, she said.)

Tovah P. Klein, the director of Columbia University’s Barnard College Center for Toddler Development (where signs forbid the use of cellphones and other wireless devices) worries that fixation on the iPhone screen every time a child is out and about with parents will limit the child’s ability to experience the wider world. “Children at this age are so curious and they’re observing everything,” she said. “If you’re engrossed in this screen you’re not seeing or observing or taking it in.” (Though some, like Renee Giroux-Nix of Cedar Park, Tex., a suburb of Austin, applaud the iPhone’s photo function. She said her 3-year-old, Bella, took a series of photos during a shoe-shopping trip, focusing on her mother’s feet and legs. )

As with TV in earlier generations, the world is increasingly divided into those parents who do allow iPhone use and those who don’t. A recent post on UrbanBaby.com , a popular and often contentious parents’ Web site, asked if anyone had found that their child was more interested in playing with their iPhone than with “real toys.” The Don’t mothers pounced:

“We don’t let our toddler touch our iPhones ... it takes away from creative play.”

“Please ... just say no. It is not too hard to distract a toddler with, say ... a book.”

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychology professor at Temple University who specializes in early language development, sides with the Don’ts. Research shows that children learn best through active engagement that helps them adapt, she said, and interacting with a screen doesn’t qualify.

Still, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek, struck on a recent visit to New York City by how many parents were handing over their iPhones to their little children in the subway, said she understands the impulse. “This is a magical phone,” she said. “I must admit I’m addicted to this phone.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/fa...7TODDLERS.html





Apple Patents Anti-Sexting Device
Alexia Tsotsis

Today the US Patent and Trademark Office approved a patent Apple filed in 2008, which, get this, prevents users from sending or receiving “objectionable” text messages. The patent’s official title? “Text-based communication control for personal communication device” which actually doesn’t use the pretty ridiculous noun/verb “Sexting,” but come on, we all know what they mean.

The “Sexting” patent background info states that the problem it solves is that there is currently “No way to monitor and control text communications to make them user appropriate. For example, users such as children may send or receive messages (intentionally or not) with parentally objectionable language.”

And the patent itself:

In one embodiment, the control application includes a parental control application. The parental control application evaluates whether or not the communication contains approved text based on, for example, objective ratings criteria or a user’s age or grade level, and, if unauthorized, prevents such text from being included in the text-based communication.

If the control contains unauthorized text, the control application may alert the user, the administrator or other designated individuals of the presence of such text. The control application may require the user to replace the unauthorized text or may automatically delete the text or the entire communication.

Ladies and gentlemen this means that Jobs and company have just sealed the deal on a solution to the number one fear of parents across America, kids sending “unauthorized texts.” As it looks like whatever algorithm or control the system is comprised of will basically censor the transmission of R-rated content on iPhones, is this the first sign of the end of “Sexting” as we know it?

Yes and no, as those interesting in “Sexting” will probably find some clever workaround to express how much they want to bang, screw, hit it or a myriad of other words that don’t immediately set off the censorship sensors.

On a positive note, it looks like whatever it is preventing kids from sending salacious texts will also help them learn languages, just not the perverted words.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/12/app...exting-device/





F.C.C. Wants to Stop Cellphone ‘Bill Shock’
Edward Wyatt

The Federal Communications Commission will propose rules on Thursday requiring mobile phone companies to alert customers by voice or text message when they are have reached monthly usage limits and are about to incur extra charges, the commission’s chairman said Tuesday.

Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, will propose what he calls the commission’s consumer empowerment agenda, aimed at ensuring that users of new technologies do not have to worry about hidden costs, confusing billing practices and what the commission calls “bill shock.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Genachowski said that the five-member commission would consider proposed rules that also would require cellphone and mobile Internet companies to notify customers when they were about to incur roaming charges or other higher-than-normal rates that were not covered by their monthly plans.

The proposals, which have been strongly opposed by mobile phone companies and their trade groups, are expected to be approved by a majority of the commission at its monthly meeting Thursday. The chairman’s office rarely brings matters to a commission vote without the support of a majority of the board.

“The data is clear that there is a significant consumer issue,” Mr. Genachowski said, one that has not diminished as mobile communications technology has become more ubiquitous. A November 2009 study by the Government Accountability Office found that one in three users of wireless phones and data networks had received unexpected charges on their bills.

“The solution is a 21st-century solution — one that is workable, one that is nonburdensome and one that is a terrific example of a 21st century consumer policy,” he said. Mr. Genachowski plans to outline his consumer agenda on Wednesday in a speech in Washington.

The mobile phone companies are less enthusiastic. In a filing with the F.C.C. opposing new billing and notification regulations, Verizon Wireless said that it agreed that consumers should have “access to clear information regarding their wireless usage.”

But, the company added, “intense competition has led wireless carriers to provide consumers with usage information” and many mobile phone companies “have developed tools that allow customers to monitor and control their usage in various ways,” including on their mobile devices and online.

Still, the commission has received hundreds of complaints from consumers who say they have received bills with unexpected charges, sometimes amounting to thousands of dollars. The charges are often caused by the misunderstanding of contract terms, F.C.C. officials say, rather than fraud on the part of mobile phone companies.

The F.C.C. has in recent months highlighted several of the more spectacular complaints it had received, including a retired 66-year-old marketing executive in Dover, Mass., who said he had received an $18,000 bill after his mobile service’s free data downloads expired without warning. The F.C.C. got involved after an article in The Boston Globe highlighted the incident, and the company agreed to zero out the balance.

Experiences like that have convinced the F.C.C. that phone and Internet companies should make their contracts and usage limits easier to decipher, clearly spelling out how limits can be reached and instructing customers on how to know when new, steeper fees are likely to apply.

That particularly applies to data usage, an application that has increased exponentially with the advent of smartphones and devices like Apple’s iPad. Even so-called unlimited data plans often have a cap limiting the amount of information that a user can download each month to a certain number of megabytes.

“Most people still don’t know what a megabyte is,” Mr. Genachowski said. “So it’s hard to expect them to know when they have reached their limits.”

Mr. Genachowski praised the system put into place by AT&T that warns iPad users with a message when they are reaching their monthly data usage limit. AT&T warns iPad users when they have reached limits in their plans, as well as when they reach the monthly limit.

“But that has been the exception and not the rule,” Mr. Genachowski said. “The magnitude of consumer complaints about bill shock has been very significant.”

Still, AT&T and most other mobile phone companies oppose government mandates on how they communicate with customers. “To the extent that the commission adopts a static rule ‘defining’ part of the customer experience, it was serve as an obstacle to attempts to improve it,” AT&T said in a F.C.C. filing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/te...y/13shock.html





Congress To Investigate Abusive Debt Collection By Wireless Providers
Julie Bort

The House Oversight Committee wants to put the kabosh on abusive debt collection practices by wireless service providers. It is launching a probe, lead by committee chairman Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), into a contract clause that forces customers to waive their rights to sue and instead agree to forced arbitration.

With forced arbitration, the parties agree that they will abide by the decision of the arbitrator, no matter what that decision is. The probe is an extension of a similar investigation by Kucinich's Domestic Policy Subcommittee into the credit card industry. Last week, the 16-month-long probe resulted in nine banks removing forced arbitration for debt collection, seven of them dropping the forced arbitration from their contracts altogether.

Kucinich is now turning his attention to the debt-collection practices of the major cell phone service providers, he said in a statement released Thursday by the Oversight Committee. He did not name the providers.

"Most wireless service providers have forced their customers to settle disputes through a process called mandatory arbitration. Providers require consumers to give up their Constitutional right to use the court system in service contracts that consumers sign as a precondition of receiving wireless service with that company," the statement said.

“The Domestic Policy Subcommittee investigated the practice of debt-collection arbitration and found that forced arbitration is arbitrary—the results depend more on the arbitrator to whom the case is assigned than the facts or the law that applies,” said Kucinich.

It's been a heck of week for the poor wireless companies. This probe follows news that the FCC is looking into new rules to prevent "wireless bill shock" which would require phone companies to warn users when they've gone over their contractual minutes and are about to rack up what I like to call "penalty fees."

The two actions combined could be nice protection for consumers. The FCC rules would help mobile phone users avoid the big bills causing a debt-collection problem in the first place. If Kucinich's probe succeeds, wronged users will be given back their right to fight the situation in court.
http://hothardware.com/News/Congress...ess-Providers/





Mobile Phone Battle Over FM Chips Continues
FMQB

The fight over FM tuners in mobile devices continues, as the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has again ripped the radio industry for pushing FM radio on cell phone makers. According to the Los Angeles Times, CEA President/CEO Gary Shaprio said in a letter, "We believe that product design is the domain of innovators in the marketplace -- not the government. As such, we will vigorously oppose any effort to force manufacturers by legislative fiat to include legacy technology in devices."

The letter adds that, "Government mandates are unnecessary for our two industries to meet consumer demands. As with the nation’s transition to digital television, the advent of broadband-enabled devices affords broadcasters and manufacturers a unique opportunity to work collaboratively to ensure that consumers enjoy all the benefits of new technology."

ZeroPaid also reports on a CEA survey, claiming 70 percent of those surveyed would not use their mobile device to listen to FM radio, if the option was available. Also, 80 percent said they opposed a government mandate forcing FM tuners on mobile device manufacturers. The study also found that 75 percent of adults surveyed agreed that manufacturers, and not the government, should design electronics products.

"With broadcasters asking Congress to force consumers to buy mobile phones with FM radios built in, we thought it was time to ask consumers what they want. This study proves there is little consumer demand for radio-capable cell phones and consumers don’t want the government telling them what features their phones should have," said CEA President/CEO Shapiro. "For those few consumers who want a radio in their mobile phones, manufacturers offer several dozen such devices that are already on the market."

The newest CEA push against mandatory FM tuners comes as Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 hits the market. The new platform launched this week and becomes the only smartphone currently on the market to include an FM radio tuner.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1983137





NPR Applauds Public Radio Music Enhancement Act
FMQB

NPR has announced its support of the Public Radio Music Enhancement Act of 2010, H.R. 6307, introduced last week by Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill will improve the audience experience provided by public radio music stations in communities across America by easing restrictions on public radio stations' music streams imposed by the performance complement.

"My legislation offers a narrow fix that has broad implications for the music-loving public in my home state of Wisconsin and across the country," said Congresswoman Baldwin. "I look forward to working with NPR to further enhance its programming and better serve its listeners,"

"We are enormously grateful for Congresswoman Baldwin's leadership on this issue. Music is a critical element of public radio’s community service, connecting audiences with the performers, songwriters, musicians, lyricists and composers who enhance their lives. Congresswoman Baldwin's common-sense legislation would allow public radio to improve that service and enhance audience enjoyment in the digital age," said Vivian Schiller, NPR President/CEO.

Included as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, the performance complement limits the number of times stations can stream songs online from the same artist, album or compilation within a three hour period. NPR claims that "this prevents public radio stations—some of the last free sources of music in quintessential genres like classical, jazz and folk—from streaming symphonies in their entirety, promoting local and emerging artists, or properly educating their listeners about the lives and careers of American musical masters."

"We look forward to working with Congresswoman Baldwin on this important legislation as the process moves forward," Schiller added.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1974084





France Music Download Subsidy Gets EU Commission Approval
James "Dela" Delahunty

France music download subsidy gets EU Commission approval A plan by the French government to subsidize the cost of music subscription services to cut the amount of illegal music file sharing in the country has gotten a nod of approval from the European Commission. The commission must ensure that programs such as this do not damage competition in the marketplace.

Under the scheme, French residents can buy a card to access a music subscription service. The card is worth 50 euros of "credit", but the government will pay half the cost. The scheme is aimed at 12-to-25 year olds. It is expected to cost about €25 million a year, and will run for two years.

"We welcome initiatives ... to increase the availability of music online at a lower price for consumers and through legal distribution channels," EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement. "The scheme will contribute to preserving pluralism and cultural diversity in the online music industry," the EU body said.

Websites that benefit from the subsidy must cut the price, extend the length of the subscription and contribute to the cost of advertising the card system. The benefit for each site will be capped at €5 million.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/articl...ssion_approval





Music Industry Dismayed by Failure in Irish Filesharing Case

Failed attempt by record companies to enforce 'three strikes' rule against illegal filesharers 'a setback for Irish music business' - but judge backs tracking method
Josh Halliday

The process of pursuing and penalising illegal filesharers in Ireland has been thrown into uncertainty after a failed attempt by four of the world's largest record companies to legally enforce the "three strikes" rule.

Warner Music, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI on Monday lost an Irish high court bid to establish a controversial legal precedent that would force internet service providers to temporarily cut off illegal filesharers' internet connections. Influential music industry bodies say the judgment is "a setback for the Irish music business".

It could also complicate the situation in the UK, where the Digital Economy Act offers similar provisions to discover and warn – and potentially throttle the connections of – people who illicitly access copyrighted content.

The high court judgment ruled that laws enabling illegal downloaders to be disconnected from the internet after being warned three times were not enforceable in Ireland – while noting that piracy is "destructive" to the creative industries. The ruling was a victory for UPC, Ireland's third-largest broadband provider, which was appealing against an injuction requiring it to block access to filesharing website The Pirate Bay.

A "substantial portion" of UPC's 150,000 customers were shown to have shared copyrighted content during the court case; Judge Justice Peter Charleton said it was acknowledged that illegal filesharing "undermines their [the creative industries] business but ruins the ability of a generation of creative people in Ireland, and elsewhere, to establish a viable living".

But in what might be a significant development for future UK cases, the same method was used to detect copyright infringement by UPC customers – tracking based on IP address – as has been used in thousands of claims being pursued in the UK by ACS:Law, a London-based solicitors firm, against Britons over music and films. In Ireland the evidence was accepted as proof of access and infringement.

However the judge ruled that the injunction could not be upheld. Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry, which represents UK record labels, told the Guardian: "It is a setback for the Irish music business that due to Ireland's inadequate implementation of European directives, the judge did not believe he had the power to order UPC to implement a graduated response solution which the judge considered to be both proportionate and effective.

"In making his ruling, the judge made a number of interesting findings. First, he agreed the recording industry – locally in Ireland and more broadly – is being devastated by piracy. He also found that the Irish ISP, UPC, knowingly profits from illegal downloads."

UPC disputed Taylor's claim that Ireland inadequately implements EU directives on copyright. But it said it would not be adding to the statement issued following the court judgment.

The broadband provider said then that the ruling supports the principle that an ISP cannot be held liable for content transmitted on its network, and in court disputed the claim that the three strikes rule was a workable solution to piracy.

"UPC has repeatedly stressed that it does not condone piracy and has always taken a strong stance against illegal activity on its network," the company said on Monday. "It takes all steps required by the law to combat specific infringements which are brought to its attention and will continue to co-operate with rights holders where they have obtained the necessary court orders for alleged copyright infringements."

The Irish Recorded Music Association, which forced Ireland's largest broadband provider, Eircom, to adopt the "three strikes" policy after an out-of-court settlement in February 2009, said it is considering whether to appeal to the Irish supreme court or to lobby the Irish government for a change in legislation.

Taylor also noted that the high court had deemed the methods used to identify illegal filesharers were accurate enough to be used as evidence.

The evidence put forward by DTecNet, a piracy-tracking software supplier, which linked the IP address – rather than the physical address – to a person suspected of sharing copyrighted content, was deemed to be reliable as a means of identifying infringers. Industry bodies from pressure groups to internet service providers have consistently warned that this evidence could easily wrongy implicate someone of a crime they have not committed.

Taylor said: "The judgment made clear that the methods rightsholders use to gather evidence are reliable and accurate, and that solutions to illegal downloading such as graduated response and network filtering would be effective. Furthermore, the judge found that implementing these solutions would not impose disproportionate costs on ISPs."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...and-high-court





Timberlake 'Understands File Sharing'
Naomi Rainey

Justin Timberlake has admitted that he sympathises with people who illegally download music.

Timberlake, who currently stars as Napster co-founder Sean Parker in The Social Network, told NME that while he does not get involved in file sharing, he would likely have participated had he gone to college instead of pursuing his musical career.

He said: "[Illegal downloading] didn't affect me so much – when it came out I was probably about 19, so I understood both sides of it.

"If I hadn't dropped out of school I probably would have been at university and I probably would have been downloading music if it was that easy to.

"So I identify very emotionally with the defendants, being college kids, that these labels were going after."

The 29-year-old added that the music industry is also responsible for some of the negative impact that websites such as Napster had on commercial record sales.

Timberlake explained: "The record companies should take responsibility for not being of the time and not paying closer attention to what was going on. I don't think one person sitting in a dorm room killed the music industry.

"On the other side I know songwriters who had to take up different jobs because they don't get to perform on stage, they don't have endorsement deals. They get a small piece of the small pie to begin with."
http://www.digitalspy.com/music/news...e-sharing.html





Album Price 'Should Drop to £1'
Ian Youngs

The price of music albums should be slashed to around £1, a former major record label boss has suggested.

Rob Dickins, who ran Warner Music in the UK for 15 years, said "radically" lowering prices would help beat piracy and lead to an exponential sales rise.

Mr Dickins was in charge of the label from 1983-98, working with acts like Madonna, REM and Simply Red.

But his "revolution" in album prices has been met with scepticism from many in the music business.

Speaking at the In The City music conference in Manchester, Mr Dickins said album prices had already been pushed down by price wars and declining demand, and were likely to fall further.

"What we need is a revolution. What we've got is an erosion. When I was running Warners, a chart CD could be £12.99. A chart CD now can be £6.99, maybe even £5.99."

Some major album downloads currently sell for as little as £3.99 through retailers such as Amazon.

If record labels made the decision to charge much less, fans would not think twice about buying an album on impulse and the resulting sales boost would make up for the price drop, he predicted.

Making the comments during a debate with REM manager Bertis Downs, Mr Dickins advocated a "micro-economy" in which fans would make many small payments.

He said: "If you're a fan of REM and you've got 10 albums and there's a new album coming out, you've got to make that decision about whether you want it or not.

"If we lived in a micro-economy, that wouldn't be a decision. You'd just say 'I like REM' and you'd buy it."

Major albums would sell 200 million copies, he predicted. Last year's global best-seller, Susan Boyle's I Dreamed A Dream, sold eight million.

He added: "To a degree it solves piracy because if it's such a small amount people are more likely to pay it than [download for] free."

In his scenario, record labels would be able to make "big money" from other sources such as gig tickets and merchandising.

Mr Dickins said Prince went down this route when he gave his album Planet Earth away with the Mail on Sunday newspaper in 2007.

Fans had to pay a relatively small amount - the cost of the newspaper - but it generated enough interest to sell out 21 nights at the O2 arena in London.

Mr Dickins chaired the BPI, which represents UK record labels and stages the Brit Awards, four times between 1986 and 2002 and was made a CBE when he stepped down.

But he was dismissed by some at In The City as being out of touch and his idea is unlikely to be embraced by the current music industry.

Paul Quirk, chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, said: "Rob Dickins is part of the generation of executives who benefited from the age of £14 CDs and gave the music business a bad name.

"So it is ironic to hear him espouse the cause of the £1 album. Basic arithmetic indicates that this is a non-starter."

Jonathan Shalit, who discovered Charlotte Church and manages N Dubz and Russell Watson, described it as a "totally ridiculous suggestion".

"Right now if you buy a bottle of water it's £1," he said. "A piece of music is a valuable form of art. If you want the person to respect it and value it, it's got to cost them not a huge sum of money but a significant sum of money."

Chris Cooke, editor of music industry newsletter CMU, predicted that the major labels would "resist it hugely".

"It is a gamble," he said. "Once you've slashed the price of an album you can't really go back. It's a big risk and the record companies will resist it. But he's not alone, outside the record companies, in saying perhaps that is the future."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11547279





eBooks And The Ease Of Self-Publishing
J.A. Konrath

October 19th is the release date for "Draculas," a horror novel that I wrote with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson. How four guys were able to collaborate on a single narrative is an interesting story, but not as interesting as the way "Draculas" is being released.

Though together we have over sixty years of experience in the print industry and have worked with dozens of publishers, we've decided to make "Draculas" a Kindle exclusive. Not only that, but we're publishing it ourselves.

The choice to circumvent Big New York Publishing was easy. We all have print deals, and probably could have sold this project to a major publishing house, but the reasons to go the indie route instead of the traditional one were numerous.

First was an issue of time. We wanted "Draculas" to launch before Halloween, but we'd only finished writing and editing the novel in September. There was no possible way a major publisher could go from first draft to live within three weeks. But we did.

With Amazon's assistance, we were able to put up a pre-order page and a free teaser last month, though we'd only written the first few chapters by that point. Like a traditionally published book, this allowed us to build buzz and accrue some advance sales.

Based on some of my experiments on Kindle, we're pricing "Draculas" at $2.99--something no Big Publisher has done for a new release (except for AmazonEncore, who is releasing my thriller novel "Shaken" next week at that price point.) We're also releasing it without DRM (digital rights management), which is another thing no publisher will allow (except for AmazonEncore.)

"Draculas" will be exclusive on Kindle for a year, as a favor to Amazon since they've been so helpful. But those with other brands of ereaders will be able to buy "Draculas" from Amazon and convert it to the format of their choice with free ebook software like Calibre or Stanza. We have instructions for doing this on our website, www.draculasthebook.com. We also plan on doing a print release later in the year, using Amazon's CreateSpace.

Since professionalism is essential, we hired a cover artist and an ebook formatter. A publisher providing these services takes 52.5% of an ebook's cover price, and the retailer gets 30% through the agency model. That leaves only 17.5% for the author. By absorbing these sunk costs ourselves, we're able to earn the full 70% royalties and not have to share them with anyone. Though we're splitting the profits four ways, we're each earning only slightly less per copy sold (51 cents each) than we would on one of our own paperback books (64 cents each), and still only charging the reader $2.99.

Of course, a publisher provides more services than cover art and formatting. For one thing, they edit. But among the four of us we've written over eighty novels, and we were able to edit each other and do our own copyediting with relative ease. What we missed, our beta readers caught.

Publishers also do promotion and marketing, though I haven't seen much of this for ebooks. Drawing on our fan bases, we sent out 260 advance reading copies of "Draculas." Come October 19, if only half of them come through for us, we'll launch our ebook with over a hundred reviews on Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, and dozens of blogs. We're also doing some niche advertising, and our combined newsletters reach over twenty thousand readers.

"Draculas" includes many bonus extras, which could only be done with a digital version. The more pages a paper book has, the more it costs to print and deliver. Ebooks have no such restrictions. So besides the 80,000 word novel, readers who buy "Draculas" will also get another 80,000 words of supplemental features, including interviews, deleted scenes, alternate endings, short stories, excerpts, and an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the writing of "Draculas" delivered through a collection of over seven hundred emails between the writers while we were brainstorming and writing the book.

Putting this project together was an exercise in speed and simplicity. We did the majority of the writing and the marketing within an eight week timeframe, while we were each working on other projects. By releasing it ourselves, we were able to maintain full control over the entire process, set our own price, eliminate DRM (which readers hate) and earn four times the royalty rate we would have through a publisher. By going ebook-only, we could add a bunch of fun supplements for no extra cost, while also releasing it super-fast.

Is this the future of publishing? Are publishers still needed in an ebook world when authors can do it on their own?

We'll see. We own all the rights to "Draculas," so any subsidiary rights are 100% ours to exploit. My agent has already sold audio rights to thirteen of my self-published books, and film rights to one of them, and the burgeoning foreign and translation markets for ebooks will no doubt become lucrative as the market expands worldwide.

Because we self-published "Draculas," we control the rights. Not just for now, but forever.

Forever is a very long time. Authors need to decide if they want to keep forever to themselves, or share forever with a publisher who takes over half the cover price.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ja-kon..._b_764516.html





News Corp. Shareholder Objects to G.O.P. Donations
Michael D. Shear

A private foundation that owns a small amount of stock in News Corp. has written a letter to the company’s board objecting to its political contributions to Republican causes.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation, which promotes progressive causes, owns 3,820 shares of News Corp., with a value of about $52,000. The foundation is described on its Web site as being “rooted in the Jewish tradition and committed to democratic values and social justice, including fairness, diversity, and community.”

In the letter, obtained by The Caucus, the foundation calls for complete disclosure of all political spending by the News Corp. before Friday, when the company’s board of directors meets for its annual shareholders meeting.

The officials at Nathan Cummings note that their concerns were sparked by reports that Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman and CEO, had directed News Corp. to make $1 million donations to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Governors Association.

The letter reads, in part: “The apparent lack of a strategic rationale for News Corp. raises very serious concerns for shareholders as to whether Mr. Murdoch and the rest of the News Corp. Board of Directors are truly taking shareholder interests into account when they approve political payments made with shareholders’ assets.”

The letter concludes that without full disclosure, “there are clear reputational risks involved in political expenditures – particularly for a news media company – and unnecessary potential for abuse of corporate treasury funds to further the personal political agendas of corporate management.”

Teri Everett, a spokeswoman for News Corp., declined comment after receiving a copy of the letter.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...-donations/?hp





Why the Web Mustn't Become the New TV
Leo Porter

Will the open-ended internet ride become a buckled-down train journey...?

A consortium of rivals are gathering to impede media tycoon Rupert Murdoch's bid to gain total control of cable outlet BSkyB. Murdoch's News Corp enterprise currently owns 39% of the pay TV platform, but has been publicly challenged by rivals the BBC and Channel 4, in association with Brit newspaper The Guardian, known to wear its tin-foil hat proudly.

The anti-Murdoch consortium wrote to the British government last week protesting the possibility that Murdoch could gain so much control over UK TV content, not least because he arguably has deeper pockets than any of the contrary parties as far as purchasing sports and first-run rights on popular foreign (i.e. US) shows. Producer David Putnam added his voice to the protest along with The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and British Telecom.

The fact that such a disparate and opposing group of interests have united so solidly in this cause indicates a deep level of feeling, but more importantly a terrible fear that a superpower PayTV channel driven by an impetuous billionaire could turn all practical British alternative TV outlets into a second-class ghetto in terms of rating and the influencing of public opinion.

Murdoch's history of cutting the price of his newspapers is behind the press's contribution to the cause, and to a certain extent this is all reminiscent of the furore in the sea-change from practical to digital newspaper production in London's Wapping in the early 1980s, engendering protracted but ultimately futile strikes from the pre-digital technicians who were made jobless by new, computerised automation of magazine and newspaper production.

The most interesting aspect of this is where Murdoch sees future audiences re-gathering. With an increase of video content on the internet and the phenomenon of the BBC's iPlayer and rival equivalents, it could be that the locus of pending change in media delivery is not a direct shift from hard-print to web-print, but from hard-print to the increasing diminution of print in any form, digital or otherwise.

Current worries among publishing houses that magazines and newspapers will succumb to the digital written word on the internet are perhaps analogous to Victorian fears about mechanical horses taking over from real horses in the drawing of carriages. The point is being missed, the wrong fear being indulged. And someone of Murdoch's status need not have an instinct for the media trends of the future - he is quite capable of creating them.

One obvious example of the linearisation of previously 'browsable' internet content is the almost ubiquitous transformation of 'top ten'-style lists from complete, single page chunks of information into 'slideshows' that present no possibility of skipping straight to the No.1 entry without clicking all of the intermediate entries.

Many assume that this is solely to increase page impressions in the site's user statistics, and certainly that does no harm in term of the site's demographics. But since the most valuable figure in web stats is 'unique users' (where an individual may read one article on the site or a hundred), it makes relatively little difference if one person clicks through ten pages or fifty - they still make only a single contribution to the 'unique users' list in that day's site statistics.

Instead, the value of making web content 'linear' is to present interstitial ads to the 'unique user' between (in this case) list items, or between over-paginated features or web galleries. Even when interstitial ads are not used, the ad modules surrounding each piece of content (the ad-campaign of which changes on each new page) presents the 'unique user' browsing a 'slideshow' list (or highly-paginated feature) ten or twenty targeted ad campaigns surrounding the core content , instead of just one - if the feature had been presented on one single page.

Personally I find the increase of the use of video in web content (particularly features and news) to be another depressing trend. The consumer-value of internet-based content to date has been the fact that it is browsable, skippable, 'zappable'. But it's in the interest of big business that this genial versatility be put firmly back in the bottle, and that information be returned to the linear model that made commercial TV viable.

Also discouraging is the increasing use of video interviews. Every journalist knows that transcription is the worst task their job presents them. You can't easily listen to music whilst doing it, you can't 'space out', and - unless you happen to have been interviewing one of your heroes (a fairly rare occurrence) - the content you're transcribing is often tedious, recycled junket fare. Transcription is almost always sheer hell, particularly for longer interviews.

But at least it can be indexed by Google once done, or be found in the obligatory copy to the British library (or US national archives) and at least it adds something, however small, to the literary body of world knowledge, if the interview turned out to be a good one.

Junket timeWhich is why it is depressing to see an increasing number of popular websites sending their reporters to junkets with video crews instead of MP3 recorders. For one thing, any revelation of exceptional interest by the interviewee will already have been extracted and syndicated in advance as a 'hot' news piece, complete with a trailing ad for the forthcoming 'full interview'. Little incentive then to bother with the video interview itself when it arrives. It's essentially 'trim' by that point, except for rabid fans of the interviewee.

The same thing happens with transcribed interviews, admittedly, but at least you can scroll down the page to find headings or paragraphs that catch your eye and your interest, but may not have seemed important to the publication's editor. With a video interview, you just have to buckle up and enjoy the ride as best you can, hoping to hear something of interest at some point.

With current technology, there's nothing to stop a Flash-based video interview starting off with a list of subject sections, to increase the level of browsability at least a little. But why would a publisher do that when they want the viewer/consumer to consume the entire product, ads, animated logos and all?

Google and other companies have experimented with voice recognition on the audio track to make video interviews available with subtitles, but this process is currently about as effective as Google Language Tools in terms of accuracy (and in fact Google uses Language Tools in the auto-subtitling process). And if you're going to pay someone to transcribe the subtitles properly, why do a video interview in the first place? Also, for obvious reasons, this is not a piece of drudgery that can be farmed out to cut-rate Asian companies, whose employees often have a tenuous grasp of English.

Another negative aspect of video interviews is that there are a huge number of potential interview subjects that are too vain, too shy or too (by their own admission) inarticulate 'in real time' to be willing to undergo the process. Removing forty or fifty instances, of 'umm' and 'ahh', or twenty instances where the interviewee restarted a sentence from the top because they began talking a few seconds before the answer was properly framed in their own mind...it's no betrayal to the fidelity of an interview to omit these instances in transcription. If the interviewee let something crucial slip in such an instance, that's different - but then, they can simply tell you not to print it, and you're obliged to comply anyway.

Additionally, interview subjects will potentially 'open up' to one reasonably friendly and competent interviewer in their own living room in a way that they never will when booms are hanging over them and a crowd have gathered to watch. Intimacy breeds revelation.

Since the Reagan/Thatcher era, 'consumer choice' has been the magic mantra, and the proliferation of TV channels and (later) highly-rated websites seems superficially to have delivered on that promise. The front page of many popular sites, much like TV listings, seem to present you with a smorgasbord of potential things to read, watch or listen to. The problem is, if the internet develops into a TV-based paradigm, the front page, just like TV listings, will be the only non-linear item available to consumers. Everything within it risks to become a one-click, buckle-up linear journey through highly controlled content.

How this potential media dystopia plays out depends on what happens to so-called 'consumer journalism', which is perhaps the one thing temporarily impeding the linear media-empire that I believe Rupert Murdoch sees as the future not only of TV but of print and the internet. Right now there are smaller, non-corporate sites that are extremely popular alternatives to mainstream, linear-obsessed internet channels.

But if a small site is unpopular, it's no threat in any case. And if it becomes increasingly popular, it will inevitably adopt the 'linear model' in order to compete and monetise. Only a new 'Howard Hughes'-style media mogul could sidestep the syndrome, fully financed by completely separate business concerns and indulging his or her own ethical standards in the running of a major media channel on the internet.

Until they drive past some grassy knoll...
http://www.shadowlocked.com/index.ph...orld&Itemid=86





Paywall Will Not Remove NYT from 'Online Conversation', Says CEO
Laura Oliver

The New York Times will not retreat from the "online conversation" when it goes behind a paywall next year, the New York Times Company president and CEO has said.

Speaking to the World Editors Forum in Hamburg, Janet Robinson said the site will remain part of the "open web ecosystem" and will have millions of users referred to it by third-party sites by employing a "first click free" strategy, such as that offered by Google, where readers can view one page on the site for free before being prompted to register or subscribe.

The decision to offer some articles for free and remain open to blogs and social networks via "first-click" is in stark contrast to News International's decision to take the Times out of Google News' index and to introduce a site-wide paywall in July.

More details of the forthcoming metered model, its pricing point and the subscription packages involving print and online to be offered by the New York Times will be announced later this year, she said, adding that readers will have access to a set number of free articles a month.

Robinson said that "a great deal of thought has gone into our preparation for this conversion", involving analysis which has shown a willingness to pay for quality content among readers.

The New York Times' paid content plans for next year will not be its first foray into charging for online access. In September 2007 it ended its TimesSelect paywall, through which 227,000 users were paying $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month for online access

"TimesSelect was a pioneering programme that generated significant revenue and reader support. We ended TimesSelect because of the growing dominance of search usage on the web," said Robinson.

The New York Times will expand to all new digital devices as they are developed in the hope of diversifying its reader and revenue base, she added. But news companies must use new technologies to establish a "human connection" with readers and their content, emulating their relationship with print, she said.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/540891.php





NYT Replaces Editors’ Choice iPad App With Full Version—Free For Now
David Kaplan

You expected more from The New York Times on the iPad? You’re getting it—and eventually, you’ll have to pay to get all of it. The NYTCo (NYSE: NYT) flagship is updating its Editors’ Choice iPad app with an expanded version that will include more content from the website, such as constant breaking news, video and other multimedia as well. The app will hit Apple’s App Store tomorrow.

The new NYTimes App for iPad will be free at the start. But once the metered paywall kicks in for NYTimes.com early next year, the app’s users will be required to pay a subscription for full access. In the meantime, registration is still required for most content.

Full access: Readers will be able to access the entire app—more than 25 sections of NYT content and content from roughly 50 NYTimes.com blogs—only by logging in with an existing NYTimes.com account or by completing the free in-app registration. Unregistered users can view top news, most e-mailed, business and video. How much will it cost for full access? The company isn’t saying yet. However, as Yasmin Namini, SVP, marketing and circulation/GM, reader applications for the NYT Media Group, told me during a demo of the new iPad app, the company will probably offer a choice of monthly or annual subscriptions.

As the iPad goes, so does iPhone: The iPhone, too, will likely be covered by a similar type of subscription model as the iPad when the website paywall comes. That means total free access will soon be coming to an end for the iPhone as well. “When we go to the pay model, there will always be something you can access without having a paid subscription,” Namini said. “Whether it will be the free four sections you get without registering or something different, that’s to be determined later. But to access everything in full, a paid subscription will be required.”

Inventory sold out: For those who say that charging could diminish advertiser interest, Denise Warren, SVP/chief advertising officer for the NYT Media Group and the NYTimes.com’s GM, seemed confident that advertisers’ support of Editors’ Choice would carry over to the subscription-based app. “We have three advertisers lined up for the launch and we’re completely sold out for the rest of the year,” Warren said; two of the marketers are Microstrategy and Fox Searchlight, which began running ads on Editors’ Choice this past week. The newest one is Mercedes Benz, which unveiled a richly produced ad that includes a Quicktime video. “The range of advertisers we have for the rest of the year includes financial services, airline/travel, luxury.”

Getting in, getting out: The iPad app promises improved navigation. Users will be shown a “popover section” that lists news in other areas of the app. On article pages, a navigation bar beneath the article lets users swipe through and select other articles within the section. Even when the app is closed and a user is in another app, users can set “breaking news” alerts to pop up as well.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-n...-free-for-now/





Everybody Can Get the New Yorker iPad App for Free

If traditional media want to find a new life (and new money) on the iPad, they better be more careful about security: Many newspaper apps can be fooled, making it easy to get free issues readers are supposed to pay for.

Italian news website Il Post was showed by "hacking research center" Dark Apples how to do it, and we can confirm that it is a very simple task. We tried it on a couple of important Italian dailies -- il Corriere della Sera and la Gazzetta dello Sport -- and two Condé Nast US publications: the New Yorker and Wired (we informed people at RCS, Condé Nast and Adobe about the issue and our story). No need for hard core hacking and cracking: All a moderately-skilled iPad user has to do is connect the iPad to his laptop, search inside the iPad files with a common managing software (we used iPhone Explorer), copy the .plist file that manage the download information and correct a single field. This boils down to changing a single word: Where it says "purchasable" you write "viewable" instead, and copy back the file on the iPad. Now all you need to do is click on "delete" the magazine issue on the iPad app and a "download" button will appear instead of the "buy" button. It means you can download the magazine for free.

Vulnerability issues affect many different apps, but these ones are the easier to confront. Managers of the Italian dailies told us they are investigating the problem, while people at Adobe -- which manages the ipad apps of the New Yorker and Wired -- wrote us they are "very concerned by piracy issues". ""We have confirmed that it is possible for experienced users with detailed instructions to access some digital publications on the iPad that have not been purchased. We are working on a fix and expect to deliver a new version of our Digital Content Viewer to publishers on Friday, October 8", an Adobe sposkesperson said.

But today, the new issue of the New Yorker is still "viewable".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/luca-s..._b_757661.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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