Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 4th, '05

[JackSpratts]

Early Edition


Quotes Of The Week


"An invocation of terrorism, the trump card of modern American politics, could ease the passage of the next major expansion of copyright powers." – Declan McCullagh


"This is a critical moment in Europe's history." - Jean-Luc Dehaene


"Underneath all this there is a more profound question, which is about the future of Europe and, in particular, the future of the European economy and how we deal with the modern questions of globalization and technological change." – Tony Blair


"If I want to watch a movie I can just rent it on DVD. I want to do things that conform to my time frame, not someone else's." - Matthew Khalil


"When people started using synthesizers, we didn't throw out our pianos." – Stephanie Gray


"The bottom line in this is, this is about a lot more than pornography. It's voluntary until it's not voluntary." - Lauren Weinstein









NON! NON!

Said the French as they buried the European constitution along with their political ennui. From nervous plutocrats to shaky soothsayers everyone obsessed on the meaning of the outcome this week but one thing is clear: Top-Down Government isn’t cutting it these days and the people are – finally – letting their leaders know it loudly and clearly the minute they have the chance to be heard. The French aren’t the only ones. We are witnessing the gradual awakening of a new political consciousness in Western Europe. Just days after French voters exercised their ballot boxes people in the Netherlands rejected the same constitution by an even wider margin with their own chorus of "Nees!" I don’t imagine the specifics of the document are at issue, it seems fairly tame as constitutions go, even if you really ought to have a country if you’re going adopt one. The real issue is anger at a government corrupted by untouchable corporations controlled by powerful families allied against the people. In a sense this weeks vote was a referendum on modern feudalism, glossingly referred to as globalism, and Europeans think that voting for globalization is like voting for hunting – when you’re the duck. The message was one of citizen to clueless leader: Don’t ignore our needs, don’t pass laws that hurt us, don’t take us for granted. Like the arrogance of "copyright reforms" that are nothing but handouts to rich cartels imposing brutal punishments on people for innocuous behaviors such as file-sharing among friends; bureaucrats shoving menacing laws down the throats of the public is a danger we’re witnessing all too often and it’s raising the hairs on the necks of millions of normal citizens who vote in large numbers as can now be plainly seen.

So the heart speeds and the paper drops. The vote is cast, and one thanks God or whatever one thanks that such a thing as Democracy exists and we live under it, and like the other important things in life, is so much the better for us when we give it a good workout.













Enjoy,

Jack












Music Industry Tailed Sharman Boss
Kristyn Maslog-Levis

The Australian music industry's piracy investigations unit conducted extensive surveillance of the Sydney north shore house owned by the chief executive officer of peer-to-peer provider Sharman Networks, the unit's former boss told a court hearing last week.

Michael Speck, a representative of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, told a federal court hearing on Tuesday that the antipiracy unit had been "tailing" Nikki Hemming's premises on a "continuous basis" for several months until 11 a.m. on May 24.

The unit conducted the surveillance as part of its efforts to determine who controlled the peer-to-peer software Kazaa. The issue is key to the music industry's litigation against Sharman Networks, associated companies and individuals over alleged copyright-infringing behavior.

Speck said in an interview that "personal surveillance" of Hemming had been conducted but finished some time ago.

"She personally wasn't a subject, rather the premises associated with her were. Conducting an investigation into a shadowy organization hiding behind a veil of secrecy and surveillance is a normal practice," he said.

Speck told Sharman's solicitors that he ordered the surveillance of Hemming's premises to stop after finding out where the general manager had moved to.

"Given the nature of Kazaa, we conducted a range of investigations aimed at getting to the bottom of who controlled Kazaa. We stopped the surveillance when we confirmed her new address. We're not conducting any surveillance at present," he said.

Hemming sold her house in Castle Cove to Sharman accountant John Myers for $1.6 million (AU$2.1 million) in late February 2005.

Speck said in court that "it serves no purpose" for the unit to keep digging to find out the identity of the true owners of the peer-to-peer organization as it had garnered enough evidence to assert in court who the true owners and controllers were.

"We are not interested, because we have come to a conclusion that we are very confident about. We have consistently asserted that Hemming controls the Sharman companies; we have asserted that to the court," Speck said.

The industry has asserted that while Hemming controls Sharman Networks and Sharman License Holdings, Altnet Chief Executive Officer Kevin Bermeister is the true controller of the Kazaa software. Altnet, which sells music and other digital products through peer-to-peer networks, signed a joint venture with the Sharman companies in 2002.

The record industry plans to continue pressing for an order to put Hemming on the witness stand for cross-examination. The case resumes on June 8.
http://news.com.com/Music+industry+t...3-5726297.html


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The MPAA Really Is Watching You
John Borland

The Motion Picture Association of America said Tuesday that it will fund the installation of 10 new surveillance cameras in downtown Los Angeles--ostensibly to help catch ne'er-do-wells who are selling counterfeit DVDs on the streets.

But don't worry, it will be the city police department watching the close-circuit screens, not Hollywood piracy enforcers. I presume that the resolution on the new cameras will be good enough to detect the subtle differences between actual counterfeits and used DVDs, which are legal to sell under the first sale doctrine.

But why stop there? Since Hollywood is putting up the $186,000 to set up the pole-mounted cameras, studios should own the copyright to the resulting videos. Just think of the opportunities for new reality TV shows, live from the gritty streets of LA. Or pay-per-bust Webcams, perfect for the nation riveted by COPS reruns and OJ's slow-speed Bronco chase. Who said Hollywood was technologically behind the times?
http://news.com.com/2061-10802_3-5726874.html?tag=tb


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A Future With Nowhere to Hide?

This connectedness may lead toward a future where our cell phones track us like FedEx packages, sometimes when we're not aware
Steven Levy

We're all too familiar with the concept of technology as a double-edged sword, and wireless is no exception. In fact, the back edge of this rapier is sharp enough to draw blood. Yes, the idea of shedding wires and cables is exhilarating: we can go anywhere and still maintain intimate contact with our work, our loved ones and our real-time sports scores. But the same persistent connectedness may well lead us toward a future where our cell phones tag and track us like FedEx packages, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes when we're not aware.

To see how this might work, check out Worktrack, a product of Aligo, a Mountain View, Calif., producer of "mobile services." The system is sold to employers who want to automate and verify digital time-logs of their workers in the field. The first customers are in the heating and air-conditioning business. Workers have cell phones equipped with GPS that pinpoint their locations to computers in the back office. Their peregrinations can be checked against the "Geo Fence" that employers draw up, circumscribing the area where their work is situated. (This sounds uncomfortably like the pet-control technology, those "invisible fences" that give Rover a good stiff shock if he ventures beyond the backyard.)

"It they're not in the right area, they're really not working," says Aligo CEO Robert Smith. "A notification will come to the back office that they're not where they should be." The system also tracks how fast the workers drive, so the employer can verify to insurance companies that no one is speeding. All of this is perfectly legal, of course, as employers have the right to monitor their workers. Smith says that workers like the technology because it insures they get credit for the time they spend on the job.

Worktrack is only one of a number of services devoted to tracking humans. Parents use similar schemes to make sure their kids are safe, and many drivers are already allowing safety monitors to keep GPS tabs on their travels (OnStar anyone?). Look for the practice to really explode as mobile- phone makers comply with an FCC "E911" mandate dictating that by the end of 2005 all handsets must include GPS that pinpoints the owner's location.

The prospect of being tracked "turns the freedom of mobile telephony upside down," says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. His concern is government surveillance and the storage of one's movements in databases. In fact, if information from the GPS signals is retained, it would be trivial to retain a log of an individual's movements over a period of years (just as phone records are kept). An even darker view is proposed by two academics who wrote a paper warning the advent of "geoslavery'." Its definition is "a practice in which one entity, the master, coercively or surreptitiously monitors and exerts control over the physical location of another individual to routinely control time, location, speed and direction for each and every movement of the slave."

My guess is that the widespread adoption of tracking won't be done against our will but initially with our consent. As with other double-edged tools, the benefits will be immediately apparent, while the privacy drawbacks emerge gradually. The first attraction will be based on fear: in addition to employers' keeping workers in tow, Mom and Dad will insist their teenagers have GPS devices so parents can follow them throughout their day, a human equivalent of the LoJack system to find stolen cars. The second stage will come as location-based services, from navigation to "friend-finding" (some systems tell you when online buddies are in shouting range) make our lives more efficient and pleasurable.

Sooner or later, though, it will dawn on us that information drawn from our movements has compromised our "locational privacy"—a term that may become familiar only when the quality it refers to is lost. "I don't see much that will bring it about [protections] in the short term," says Mark Monmonier, author of "Spying With Maps." He thinks that that we'll only get serious about this after we suffer some egregious privacy violations. But if nothing is done, pursuing our love affair with wireless will result in the loss of a hitherto unheralded freedom—the license to get lost. Here's a new battle cry for the wireless era: Don't Geo-Fence me in.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5086975/site/newsweek/


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Federal Report Warns Of RFID Misuses
Declan McCullagh

Radio frequency identification is becoming increasingly popular inside the U.S. government, but agencies have not seriously considered the privacy risks, federal auditors said.

In a report published Friday, the Government Accountability Office said that 13 of the largest federal agencies are already using RFID or plan to use it. But only one of 23 agencies polled by the GAO had identified any legal or privacy issues--even though three admitted RFID would let them track employee movements.

"Key security issues include protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data and information systems," the GAO said. "The privacy issues include notifying consumers; tracking an individual's movements; profiling an individual's habits, tastes and predilections; and allowing for secondary uses of information."

RFID is a catchall term for a broad array of technologies that includes everything from battery-powered "active" tags, such as those used in highway toll booths, to "passive" RFID tags that measure a fraction of a millimeter in each dimension, not counting the antenna in the device.

Agencies already are experimenting with passive RFID technology. Among the list of planned or actual uses: the Department of Defense for tracking shipments; the Department of Homeland Security for immigration and baggage tracking; the State Department for electronic passports; the Department of Veterans Affairs for "audible prescription reading."

In addition, under the Real ID Act, the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for designing a standardized ID card that could be RFID-outfitted.

Few privacy concerns exist when RFID is used merely to track warehouse pallets. But when RFID chips are embedded in ID cards or otherwise linked to personal information, the GAO warned, the privacy risks increase dramatically.

"Consumers have raised concerns about whether certain collected data might reveal personal information such as medical predispositions or personal health histories and that the use of this information could result in denial of insurance coverage or employment to the individual," the report said. "For example, the use of RFID technology to track over-the-counter or prescription medicines has generated substantial controversy."

California's Senate this month approved a ban on the use of RFID tags in driver's licenses and other state-issued forms of identification.
http://news.com.com/Federal+report+w...3-5723535.html


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Researchers Aim To Protect DVDs with RFID
John P. Mello Jr.

On the drawing board is a system that would embed an RFID tag into a DVD. Today those tags are used for everything from inventory control at Wal-Mart to paying for gasoline at Exxon/ Mobil stations. The tagged DVD would have to be played in a DVD player with hardware for reading the information in the tag.

Ask any box office expert to name the holy trinity of movie attendance and they'll tell you: big screen, big sound and immediacy -- getting to see a movie when it's released.

With improving home entertainment systems rapidly undermining the first two tenets of attendance, how long will it be before the third leg of the triangle falls? No one knows. However, if it does, some researchers at UCLA plan to be there to catch it.

The group -- part of the university's Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC) -- is working on a Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to prevent the unauthorized use and copying of movie DVDs.

Prototype Soon

According to WINMEC Director Rajit Gadh, initial research on the hardware and software system has been completed and a prototype is in the works. "We should have a prototype by the end of the summer," he told TechNewsWorld.

On the drawing board is a system that would embed an RFID tag into a DVD. Today those tags are used for everything from inventory control at Wal- Mart to paying for gasoline at Exxon/Mobil stations.

The tagged DVD would have to be played in a DVD player with hardware for reading the information in the tag. That information would be controlled by the owners of the content on the disc.

The technology, theoretically, would provide a secure way to distribute movies so Hollywood would be able to feel confident about distributing DVDs of movies as they're released in theaters.

How does Hollywood make money: sale of the DVDs, which will cost more than conventional DVDs, and, theoretically, by gaining consumers who would not be going to theaters for first-run movies because they have elaborate home entertainment systems.

Middle Ground Solution

Gadh explained that the proposed system lies in the middle ground of a DRM spectrum running from totally unencumbered use of digital content to use restricted to a single hardware device.

"This solution is a bit tighter than the completely-free-for-all solution, but it's a little looser than being tied down to one player and one user," he said.

Asked if the RFID approach was better than existing DRM schemes or would thwart piracy of DVD content, Gadh replied: "This is yet another technology that can be available eventually to studios that would allow another distribution mechanism of the content. In terms of piracy and all, I don't know what effect it could have on piracy."

Better for Pirates?

However, Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst with the Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif., asserted that while RFID might be tough to crack, it won't make entertainment executives feel less anxious about releasing DVDs of movies as they appear in theaters.

He explained that RFID might foil digital pirates, but not analog ones. Instead of taping a movie off the big screen, they'll tape it off a HDTV or computer display. "That will probably prevent the adoption of this for first-run films as the content owners will be reluctant to provide a media form that will make it easier than filming in theaters currently is," he told TechNewsWorld via e- mail.

Some DRM experts are very skeptical of using an RFID solution to manage the content of DVDs.

"While there are some benefits to such a system, I'm not sure they outweigh the problems," Ray Wagner, research vice president for the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn., told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "I'd say that in my opinion, this solution does not, at first blush, look like a winner."

Waving DRM Flag

Vamsi M. Sistla, director of broadband and digital media at ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y., questioned the viability of the technology in the market. "There are just too many barriers to get this technology to the marketplace," he told TechNewsWorld.

While using RFID as a DRM vehicle is just getting off the ground, he explained, other technologies, such as a DVD version of the "broadcast flag," are already in an advanced stage of development. The flag approach would create DVD players that would only read discs that contained codes proving their authenticity.

Ted Schadler, a principle analyst with Forrester Research in Boston, explained in an e-mail to TechNewsWorld that the next generation of DVD disc will use a technology called broadcast encryption , developed by IBM, Sony, Intel, Microsoft, Disney and others to accomplish the same goal as what's proposed in the RFID scheme.

Too Many Hurdles

Another hurdle for an RFID system, he contends, is the need for a network connection to plug into a database of access privileges. "This eliminates today's DVDs and DVD players from participating," he said. "That means that a new DVD player technology would have to be built -- and networked."

Jarad Carleton, an IT industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan in Palo Alto, Calif., told TechNewsWorld via e-mail, "No matter how I view this proposed solution to the movie pirating problem, I see very high business hurdles that I don't think can be overcome."

"Remember DIVX DVD rentals?" he asked. "If UCLA works out the technology for this and it eventually hits the market, I predict a similar market rejection."

"Pirated movies are prevalent around the world for one reason and one reason only -- money," he declared. "When you pay $10 or more to see a movie and it's a bad film, you feel robbed, and frankly, you have been robbed."
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/43186.html


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EU Commission Says To Propose Phone Data Logging
Huw Jones

The European Commission will propose mandatory logging by phone companies and internet providers of all emails, telephone calls and other electronic communication, Viviane Reding, the Commissioner for Information Society and Media, said on Tuesday.

"In the next coming days there will be a proposal," Reding told a telecoms industry conference.

She will make the legislative proposal jointly with EU Justice, Freedom and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini, but the step could spark a clash with some member states.

France, Ireland, the UK and Sweden made a similar proposal in April last year in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people. The seizure of phone records was credited with helping police make quick arrests.

The European Union's council of ministers, which represents member states, wants all telecommunications data to be stored for a year to help the police solve terrorist and other crimes, and put forward a proposal on this last year.

The actual content of conversations, text messages or emails would not be kept. Records are currently kept for three months by telephone companies for billing purposes.

"We are glad the debate is being reopened again," said Michael Bartholomew, director of the European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association (ETNO).

"There is a question of privacy. All of this costs money and nobody has addressed that properly. If you are going to spend hours and hours tracking down data, who is going to pay for it," Bartholomew said on the sidelines of a telecoms conference.

Internal Market

Reding said she shared the overall objective in the member states' bill, but that EU harmonisation of any data retention obligations should be for the Commission to propose rather than member states as it concerned the EU's internal market.

The member state proposal took no account of views at the Commission, the European Parliament or industry.

A proposal by the Commission would have to be agreed by the European Parliament and member states, making the process more transparent, she said.

"This will help find the right balance not only in terms of privacy and consumer confidence, but also in terms of cost for the industry," Reding said.

The Commission would also request an analysis of the impact legislation would have so that a bill is proportionate, Reding said.

When asked by Reuters if the four member states were now expected to withdraw their data retention bill, Reding replied: "I have no idea. There is no sense to have a proposal made by part of the European Union."

Reding said the Commission was anxious to avoid distorting the internal market by uneven application of the member state bill.

But EU diplomats say justice and interior ministers may agree their own proposals they put forward last year when they meet in Luxembourg this week, if they can agree on some outstanding issues such as how long data should be stored.

Also outstanding is what data must be stored, for example both made calls and unsuccessful calls, data protection and the obligation on member states to share information in cross-border cases, the diplomats said.

Civil rights activists, telecom and Internet firms want the member state bill scrapped or diluted substantially as they say it would be overly intrusive, costly and technically difficult.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050531/80/fk65h.html


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Rule requires destruction of consumer data

Federal Law on Disposal of Sensitive Information Aims to Hinder Identity Theft
Caroline E. Mayer

Be careful how you -- or your company -- dispose of sensitive consumer information.

A new federal rule that took effect yesterday requires all businesses and individuals to destroy private consumer information obtained from
credit bureaus and other information providers in determining whether to grant credit, hire employees or rent an apartment.

Issued under orders from Congress, which was trying to crack down on identity theft, the Federal Trade Commission's new rule requires that personal information be burned, pulverized, shredded or destroyed in such a way that the information cannot be read or reconstructed. The rule also applies to electronic files, which must be erased or destroyed, and covers credit report data, credit scores, employment histories, insurance claims, check-writing histories, residential or tenant history and medical information.

An FTC official said failure to properly dispose of the data could draw a $2,500 federal penalty per violation, as well as lawsuits from people who could seek damages if personal information was misused as a result of improper disposal.

The rule applies to large and small companies -- to lenders and insurers, as well as landlords, car dealers, attorneys and private investigators. Individuals who use credit reports -- to hire nannies or contractors, for example -- also are subject to the new rule.

The agency does not set a time limit for when the data must be destroyed, only ground rules for disposing of it. Nor does the agency set rules on how securely data must be kept until it is destroyed, although some laws already provide such rules for financial and medical institutions.

Privacy advocates applauded the new rules. "This requirement is long overdue and will hopefully make companies think twice about how valuable this information is" in all of their conduct, said Evan Hendricks, editor and publisher of Privacy Times newsletter.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology


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Sweden

First Conviction For File-Sharing

Oslo municipal court sentenced a 36-year-old man from Oppland County for running an illegal file sharing service on the Internet, the first conviction of its type in Norway.

The court ruled that the man had willingly and knowingly made a significant number of film and music files available for at least 300 people at a time and had violated copyright law, newspaper VG reports.

The Sandefjord man placed material on his employer's (telecom company NetCom's) server to facilitate transfer. A police raid revealed more than 60,000 pirated film and music files.

Before the case went to trial representatives for the Norwegian recording industry signaled that they could sue for compensation if a guilty verdict was returned.
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/lo...cle1050773.ece


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Spaniards Stick Sword In P2P Website
Lester Haines

Spanish P2P music website Weblisten is - as of right now - closed by order of the 3rd Criminal Court of Madrid for intellectual property violations.

The judgement, as recorded on Libertad Digital (Digital Freedom), prohibits Weblisten from further music distribution activities, and orders the destruction of those databases which "contain music files and other material pertaining to the offence". The sentence concludes by explaining that it "clarifies the scope of internet music distribution and decisively contributes to the promotion of quality, legal distribution".

Indeed, a notice on the Weblisten website reads: "WARNING: This Website has been closed following the legal procedure at the Juzgado de lo Penal nº 3 of Madrid. For any claim, please contact us at: Weblisten, S.A., Post Office Box nº 6148, 28080 Madrid - Spain."

Weblisten set up shop in 1997 and has on several occasions attracted the attention of Spanish intellectual property outfit AGEDI (That's the Asociación de Gestión de Derechos Intelectuales for those readers who like their watchdogs with an Iberian flavour). Weblisten's demise provoked AGEDI prez Antonio Guisasola to pronounce that "justice has been served by this judgement, stopping as it does the activity of a website which has become rich by illegal and malicious means at the expense of producers and artists, robbing them of their rights and not paying to exploit the fruits of their labours".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06...isten_cerrado/


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Privacy's The Point: File Sharing Decision Stops Big Music From Playing Big Brother
Michael Geist

In an age when the media analyzes legal decisions on the basis of winners and losers, the recent Federal Court appellate decision over music file sharing left many people a bit bewildered. The court described the decision as a divided success, newspaper headlines trumpeted it as a loss for the music industry, while the Canadian Recording Industry Association declared total victory. Actually, years from now this case will be remembered not for who won or lost, but rather for its impact on privacy law and copyright policy.

On May 19th, the Federal Court of Appeal released its ruling on CRIA's effort to compel five of Canada's largest Internet service providers to reveal the identities of 29 of their customers. Those customers are alleged to have infringed copyright by allowing other Internet users to download songs from their computers on peer-to-peer networks.

Last year, a federal court dismissed CRIA's motion, citing unreliable evidence, privacy concerns, and doubts that the impugned activity violated Canadian copyright law. At one level, the rejection of CRIA's appeal is easy to understand. Quite simply, the appellate court upheld the earlier decision since it was unwilling to rehabilitate what even CRIA has acknowledged was "evidentiary deficiencies."

The court's analysis did not stop there, however. It provided a cursory review of key copyright issues but declined to arrive at any firm conclusions. In other words, claims that the court ruled that file sharing is either legal or illegal are inaccurate. Tthat question has been left for another day.

Next week I will focus on the decision's copyright policy ramifications. Meanwhile, the court's discussion concerning the development of a privacy framework merits further analysis.

Although some parties have sought to downplay the centrality of privacy to the case, the court opened its discussion by calling attention to the tension between privacy and copyright. It noted that "citizens legitimately worry about encroachment upon their privacy rights. The potential for unwarranted intrusion into individual personal lives is now unparalleled. In an era where people perform many tasks over the Internet, it is possible to learn where one works, resides or shops, his or her financial information, the publications one reads and subscribes to and even specific newspaper articles he or she has browsed."

This comment, alongside similar wording last summer from Justice Louis LeBel of the Supreme Court of Canada, sends an unequivocal message from Canada's highest courts that Internet privacy involves highly sensitive information that deserves strong legal protection.

Just how strong became apparent later in the judgment. While the court acknowledged the obvious -- privacy rights are not absolute and must sometimes take a back seat to other interests -- it proceeded to establish a rigorous test designed to provide significant privacy protections.

The test requires a plaintiff such as CRIA to first demonstrate that it has a "bona fide" claim based on evidence that it has obtained (not merely that it intends to file a lawsuit) and that it has no other improper purposes for seeking the identities of subscribers. CRIA must show that the information cannot be obtained from another source and tender evidence that is admissible, timely, and links the Internet protocol addresses of the subscribers to the alleged infringement.

The importance of each of these evidentiary requirements should not be underestimated. In addressing the deficiencies of this particular case, the court warned that relying on faulty evidence created "the risk that innocent persons might have their privacy invaded and also be named as defendants where it is not warranted."

Assuming that the evidentiary hurdles are met, the test then requires courts to determine whether the public interest in disclosure outweighs the privacy interests that are at stake. If the court determines that disclosure is appropriate, it must ensure that privacy rights are invaded "in the most minimal way" such that CRIA must collect no more information than is necessary for the purpose of the claim. The court recommended that judges provide specific directions on how the information can be used and also consider keeping the information from the broader public by issuing a confidentiality order or identifying the defendants solely by their initials.

With CRIA indicating plans to proceed with a fresh round of lawsuits, the effectiveness of these privacy protections will quickly be tested. While federal court judges will ultimately weigh the public interest considerations, other parties share responsibility for protecting Internet privacy.

Internet service providers, many of whom have proclaimed support for customer privacy, have an obligation to play active role in any future lawsuits by rapidly notifying their customers and raising privacy issues with the court. Moreover, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada would do well to consider intervening in future cases since the issues at stake sit at the heart of the Commissioner's mandate.

Ultimately, CRIA should also assess the privacy ramifications of its proposed actions. While it is legally entitled to file these suits, similar actions in other jurisdictions have had no discernable impact on file sharing and put the industry at odds with the growing concern for personal privacy. That makes for a risky strategy with few winners and many losers.
http://www.canada.com/technology/sto...6-0162ce4e080d


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China's Tech Revolution

A special report looks at how technology is driving China's emergence as an industrial powerhouse -- and what that means for the world.

Barely 25 years after emerging from the turmoil of Maoist rule, China today is bestriding the world as a technological colossus, according to a special report in the June 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum.

China's heft is felt worldwide in nearly every sector and along the entire chain of economic activity. The country's ravenous appetite for energy and raw materials is influencing commodity markets in every continent. In the special report, "China's Tech Revolution," the editors of Spectrum focus on how technology is driving this unprecedented boom.

Among the topics explored:

* How a long-overdue upgrade to China's Internet will either aid or thwart the central government's strict censorship policies.
* How consumer electronics companies are racing to roll out digital television by the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
* How electric bicycles are selling by the millions in China, and challenging the country's encroaching car culture.
* How Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers are flocking to the mainland, but could risk losing their lead to domestic chipmakers.

The report also looks at the potentially explosive social and economic problems, any one of which could slow or even halt progress--rural and labor unrest, wholesale intellectual property theft, chronic energy shortfalls and pollution, and volatile relationships with many of China's main trading partners.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/512141/?sc=swtn


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Federal Law Enforcement Cracks Down on P2P Piracy Network
News Staff

On Wednesday, federal officials announced the first criminal enforcement action targeting individuals committing copyright infringement on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks using cutting edge file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent.

Agents of the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed 10 search warrants across the United States against leading members of a technologically sophisticated P2P network known as Elite Torrents. Employing technology known as BitTorrent, the Elite Torrents network attracted more than 133,000 members and, in the last four months, allegedly facilitated the illegal distribution of more than 17,800 titles-including movies and software-which were downloaded 2.1 million times.

In addition to executing 10 warrants, federal agents also took control of the main server that coordinated all file-sharing activity on the Elite Torrents network. Anyone attempting to log on to Elitetorrents.org will receive the following message: "This Site Has been Permanently Shut Down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement."

"Our goal is to shut down as much of this illegal operation as quickly as possible to stem the serious financial damage to the victims of this high-tech piracy-the people who labor to produce these copyrighted products," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Richter of the Criminal Division. "Today's crackdown sends a clear and unmistakable message to anyone involved in the online theft of copyrighted works that they cannot hide behind new technology."

"Internet pirates cost U.S. industry hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue every year from the illegal sale of copyrighted goods and new online file-sharing technologies make their job even easier," said Assistant Secretary Garcia, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Through today's landmark enforcement actions, ICE and the FBI have shut down a group of online criminals who were using legitimate technology to create one-stop shopping for the illegal sharing of movies, games, software and music."

Building on the success of Operation Gridlock, a similar takedown announced by federal law enforcement last August that has already led to the felony convictions of three P2P copyright thieves, Operation D-Elite targeted the administrators and "first providers" or suppliers of copyrighted content to the Elite Torrents network. By utilizing BitTorrent, the newest generation of P2P technology, Elite Torrents members could download even the largest files-such as those associated with movies and software-far faster than was possible using more traditional P2P technology.

The content selection available on the Elite Torrents network was virtually unlimited and often included illegal copies of copyrighted works before they were available in retail stores or movie theatres. For example, the final entry in the Star Wars series, "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," was available for downloading on the network more than six hours before it was first shown in theatres. In the next 24 hours, it was downloaded more than 10,000 times.

Operation D-Elite is being conducted jointly by ICE and the FBI as part of the Computer And Technology Crime High Tech Response Team (CATCH), a San Diego task force of specially trained prosecutors and law enforcement officers who focus on high-tech crime. Federal and state member agencies of CATCH include the ICE, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the San Diego District Attorney's Office, San Diego Police Department, the San Diego Sheriff's Department, and San Diego County Probation.

Operation D-Elite was coordinated and will be prosecuted by the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, with the assistance and support of Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) coordinators in San Diego and U.S. Attorneys' Offices in Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The Motion Picture Association of America provided valuable assistance to the investigation.
http://www.govtech.net/news/story.print.php?id=94129


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Growth Of Stolen Music Continues
Lisa DiCarlo

It's certainly no secret that Apple Computer's iPod is the bestselling digital music player. The company has shipped nearly 12 million iPods in just the last three quarters, representing three consecutive quarters of growth of 500% or higher.

It's also no secret that Apple is a champion of legal downloading. Peer-to-peer (illegal) music downloading didn't grow at 500%, but it does continue to grow steadily despite low-priced music subscription services and an acceleration in sales of the iPod, which which was designed to work with Apple’s proprietary (and legal) iTunes music store.

According to the NPD Group, consumers purchased 25.9 million songs in March 2005, 52% more than they bought a year ago. Consumers also downloaded more than 242 million songs illegally this March, up 25% from March 2004.

It will be interesting to gauge the impact of the low-priced Yahoo! Music Unlimited service on peer-to-peer growth. Yahoo's subscription service has an introductory price of only $6.99 per month, half as much a streaming service offered by Real Networks. Yahoo hasn't disclosed when the price would rise, or by how much.

Pacific Crest Securities believes that Yahoo's service "significantly changes the dynamics of the digital music industry."

Maybe so. But as long as peer-to-peer networking exists, people will steal music. The best music labels and legal services can really hope for is a slowdown in growth, which already appears to be happening.
http://www.forbes.com/digitalenterta..._0601stat.html


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France's Rejection of E.U. Charter Emboldens Opponents
Elaine Sciolino

The shock waves of France's rejection of a constitution for Europe reverberated throughout the Continent on Monday, with Britain suggesting that it might cancel its own popular vote on the document and the naysayers in the Netherlands gaining even more confidence that a no vote will prevail in a referendum there on Wednesday.

In France, the vote plunged the center-right government into crisis. President Jacques Chirac will announce "decisions concerning the government" and make a declaration on French television on Tuesday.

The statement was interpreted to mean that he would dismiss Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and reshuffle his cabinet as a direct result of the repudiation of Mr. Chirac's leadership in a referendum on the European Union constitution on Sunday.

There has been open speculation for months that Mr. Raffarin would be replaced if the constitution failed in France, and after a 30-minute meeting with Mr. Chirac in Élysée Palace on Monday, the affable but unpopular prime minister said, "There will be developments today or tomorrow."

He declined to say whether he had offered his resignation, telling reporters: "I'm going for a stroll around Paris. See you later."

The euro fell sharply on Monday as traders in the United States sold the currency a day after the French vote, slipping to a seven-month low of about $1.25 in late afternoon trading.

Farmers, workers and the unemployed were among those who led the way to the defeat of the European Union constitution in France, voting no in high numbers largely over concerns about the economy. European leaders who had promoted the constitution as the logical, if revolutionary, next step in the growth and unification of the 25-member bloc could not hide their disappointment.

The most serious potential foreign fallout from the no vote in France came on Monday from Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who called for a "time for reflection," saying it was too early to decide whether a popular vote could go ahead in his country.

"Underneath all this there is a more profound question, which is about the future of Europe and, in particular, the future of the European economy and how we deal with the modern questions of globalization and technological change," Mr. Blair told journalists during a vacation in Italy. Nine European Union members ratified the constitution before the French referendum. But France's no vote is likely to kill the constitution - at least in its current form - because it requires approval by all of the union's member countries.

In a sense, consideration of the constitution by other member countries, including the Dutch vote on Wednesday, is only a political exercise in democracy to allow each of them the right to proclaim approval or rejection. But the Dutch vote is important nonetheless.

At the moment there is no plan to revise the constitution and put it before member states again. If the Dutch also reject the constitution, it would be that much harder to persuade the rest of the member states to go forward with putting any document up for ratification, particularly those that plan to do it by popular vote.

"This is a critical moment in Europe's history," said Jean-Luc Dehaene, a former Belgian prime minister and one of the architects of the constitution, in a telephone interview. "It is clear that the French no brings Europe to a kind of standstill." The French, he said, "are completely without orientation and in a period of complete uncertainty."

The Netherlands, which like France was one of the six founding members of Europe's original union, "will not be in a position to play its leadership role in Europe if it votes no," Mr. Dehaene said. As for Britain, he added, "It is not impossible that the British government will hide behind the back of France to avoid the difficult discussion in Britain."

For the time being, the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said he would announce a decision on whether to go ahead with a vote no earlier than next week.

Mr. Blair's tentative remarks contrasted with the bold approach taken by other European leaders, including Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, who said the ratification process must go on despite the French vote.

"Life continues," Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said at ld a news conference at the union's headquarters in Brussels after France's repudiation of the treaty. "For me, the worst that could happen is if, as a consequence of that, you or the citizens of the European Union or the leaders of the European Union enter into a zone of paralysis psychologically."

In Washington, the State Department, in a brief statement on the vote, emphasized continuity in trans-Atlantic relations, not concern. The administration has remained aloof from the particulars of the constitutional debate.

"We welcome a strong, integrated Europe that is an effective partner for addressing the many challenges we face together," said a spokesman, Noel Clay. "We have such a partnership now with the European Union and expect to continue to build on this relationship, however the E.U. evolves."

The constitution is intended to provide an ambitious, streamlined system for growth and greater unity in the newly expanded 25-country bloc. If the document is abandoned, member states will have to continue working together under a cumbersome and limiting array of existing treaties and rules adopted when the union was smaller.

In an effort to salvage the European unification process, some European figures were sugarcoating their earlier dire predictions of the consequences of the French veto.

Not long ago, for example, Romano Prodi, the former president of the European Commission, had predicted that a French no would mean "the end of Europe." On Monday he called the outcome "a disaster," but insisted that the union would continue to function under current rules and that things could be worse.

"This is still better than a war of secession like the United States once had," he said in a telephone interview. "I'm serious now. We must keep this perspective in mind. We don't have a treaty, but we also don't have wars."

That is certainly true, but the lowest-common-denominator approach was not what the leaders of Europe had in mind when they embarked on the drafting of the constitution, a process that took two and a half years.

After the French vote, the European Commission president, José Manuel Durão Barroso, warned of "a risk of contagion."

Indeed, contagion could come as early as Wednesday, when voters in the Netherlands go to the polls to pass judgment on the constitution.

After the French vote, the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, told reporters, "The Dutch, of course, do not take any orders from France." But a new Dutch poll taken after the French vote and made public on Monday for NOS public television showed an increase in voters intending to vote no to 55 percent, up from 51 percent just two days ago. Only 38 percent said they planned to vote in favor of the constitution.

President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, whose country has yet to decide whether to support the charter, declared it "a thing of the past." He added, "The French referendum, and its result, clearly demonstrated the deep division that exists between the European elite and the citizens of Europe."

That view was underscored by the voting trends in the vote in France.

According to the Ipsos polling agency, 70 percent of farmers voted no, despite the fact that France is the largest recipient of European Union farm subsidies.

Public and blue-collar workers and the unemployed, all low-pay groups vulnerable in a country with more than 10 percent unemployment, voted no by 60 percent to 79 percent.

Although most of the Socialist Party hierarchy lobbied in favor of the treaty, 56 percent of Socialist voters rejected it. On the political extremes, 98 percent of the Communist Party and 93 percent of the extreme right National Front voted no.

Paris and Lyon, two of France's biggest cities, and pro-European regions like Alsace, Brittany and the Loire Valley voted yes, while rural France and smaller cities and towns voted no. Most surprisingly, 55 percent of people ages 18 to 25 rejected the treaty, underscoring what appeared to be a lack of trust in the future of Europe and the leadership of France.

Humiliated and badly weakened in the eyes of both his own citizens and the world, Mr. Chirac is now at one of the lowest points of his 10-year presidency. The French media openly mocked him today.

"Did he manage to sleep so well on Sunday night?" the weekly L'Express asked in its latest edition on Monday. "He must realize to what extent the failure of the referendum is a personal disaster."

Serge July, the editor of the left-leaning daily Libération, referred today to "the disastrous end" of Mr. Chirac's "reign," while the daily Le Monde said the president "begins the end of his mandate discredited."

In Poland, the daily Zycie Warszawy joked Monday about the "Polish plumber who petrified France," a reference to the mythical worker from new European Union members like Poland who is free to move west and willing to work for lower pay than Frenchmen.

On Monday, Mr. Chirac held closed-door meetings, not only with Mr. Raffarin but also with a number of officials who might possibly replace him, including Nicolas Sarkozy, the leader of their ruling Union for a Popular Movement but a political enemy of Mr. Chirac; Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, considered like a political son to Mr. Chirac; Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie; and François Bayrou, the leader of the Christian-right Union for French Democracy.

Mr. Raffarin is being blamed in some quarters for the rejection of the constitution because of opinion surveys indicating that voters used the ballot partly to punish the French government's failure to tackle high unemployment and painful cost-cutting changes.

Mr. de Villepin is considered the front-runner for the prime minister's job, but he is not liked by much of the French political establishment, including deputies in Parliament who consider him distant from the people and complain that he does not bother to consult them.

A CSA opinion poll for France 3 television showed that Mr. Sarkozy, the most popular politician on the right, was the public's choice with 25 percent of voters wanting him to become prime minister. Only 11 percent favored Mr. de Villepin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/in.../31france.html


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Broadcast Flag at Half Mast?
Michael Grebb

A key lawmaker has complicated the movie industry's push for a law to restrict consumers' ability to redistribute digital TV content over peer-to-peer networks and the internet at large.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Commerce Committee, has indicated that he opposes inserting a broadcast flag measure in his newly introduced digital TV bill, which would set a 2008 hard deadline for broadcasters to give back their analog spectrum.

Motion Picture Association of America Executive Vice President John Feehery on Wednesday confirmed that Barton told the MPAA he doesn't support broadcast-flag provisions in his bill, but Feehery said the group hasn't determined its next course of action.

"If that's what he thinks, that's what he thinks," said Feehery. "But we're continuing to educate members on the broadcast flag, and we're not sure where it will go."

The MPAA began its legislative push on Capitol Hill shortly after a May 6 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

In that decision, the court reversed a Federal Communications Commission order that required makers of consumer-electronics devices capable of receiving broadcast digital TV signals to recognize a "broadcast flag" -- code that allows content owners to place limits on redistribution of digital content streams. The rule was to apply to devices manufactured on or after July 1, 2005.

The MPAA had been circulating draft language to lawmakers that would have authorized the FCC to ban "the indiscriminate redistribution of digital television content over digital networks." The most expedient home for the language would be within Barton's bill.

House Commerce Committee spokesman Terry Lane noted that, "We have a draft DTV bill, and there's nothing about the broadcast flag in there," but he and Barton's personal spokesman declined to comment specifically on whether Barton opposes the broadcast-flag concept.

The MPAA could always push for stand-alone broadcast-flag legislation or even attach their draft language to another bill out of Barton's hands.

"Obviously, the MPAA isn't going to just go home," said Mike Godwin, legal director of Public Knowledge, which opposes the broadcast-flag concept. "They'll look for other avenues. But Barton really wants an uncomplicated bill. He wants to keep it simple."

Any controversy in Barton's bill related to the broadcast flag could indeed create fights that complicate its passage.

"Setting a hard deadline is a critical priority," said Michael Petricone, vice president of technology policy at the Consumer Electronics Association. "We would oppose anything that would make that more difficult."

Lawmakers are also concerned about the conclusions of an April 2005 report (.pdf) by the Congressional Research Service that seemed to bolster the arguments of broadcast-flag opponents.

"Current technological limitations have the potential to hinder some activities which might normally be considered 'fair use' under existing copyright law," the report stated. "For example, a consumer who wished to record a program to watch at a later time, or at a different location (time-shifting and space-shifting, respectively), might be prevented when otherwise approved technologies do not allow for such activities, or do not integrate well with one another, or with older, 'legacy' devices."

The report said such limitations could preclude "future fair or reasonable uses.... For example, a student would be unable to e-mail herself a copy of a project with digital video content because no current secure system exists for e-mail transmission."

The report, Barton's opposition and other factors may be presenting the MPAA with fewer options by the day.

"There is a lack of enthusiasm on the Hill for something like this," said Fred Von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That's why the MPAA tried to push this through the FCC in the first place."

Lohmann, however, said no one should count the MPAA out yet.

"It's not the final chapter," he said. "The Hollywood folks will continue to fight for the flag."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,67712,00.html


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With Popcorn, DVD's and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home
Laura M. Holson

Matthew Khalil goes to the movies about once a month, down from five or six times just a few years ago. Mr. Khalil, a senior at the University of California, Los Angeles, prefers instead to watch old movies and canceled television shows on DVD.

He also spends about 10 hours a week with friends playing the video game Halo 2. And he has to study, which means hours on the Internet and reading at least a book a week.

"If I want to watch a movie I can just rent it on DVD," he said. "I want to do things that conform to my time frame, not someone else's."

Like Mr. Khalil, many Americans are changing how they watch movies - especially young people, the most avid moviegoers. For 13 weekends in a row, box-office receipts have been down compared with a year ago, despite the blockbuster opening of the final "Star Wars" movie. And movie executives are unsure whether the trend will end over the important Memorial Day weekend that officially begins the summer season.

Meanwhile, sales of DVD's and other types of new media continue to surge.

With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained - a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood.

Studios have made more on DVD sales and licensing products than on theatrical releases for some time. Now, technologies like TiVo and video-on-demand are keeping even more people at home, as are advanced home entertainment centers, with their high-definition television images on large flat screens and multichannel sound systems.

"It is much more chilling if there is a cultural shift in people staying away from movies," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Exhibitor Relations Company, a box- office tracking firm. "Quality is a fixable problem."

But even if the quality of movies can be improved, Mr. Dergarabedian said, the fundamental problem is that "today's audience is a much tougher crowd to excite. They have so many entertainment options and they have gotten used to getting everything on demand."

Last year Americans spent an average of 78 hours watching videos and DVD's, a 53 percent increase since 2000, according to a study by the Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry's trade group. DVD sales and rentals soared 676.5 percent during the same period, and 60 percent of all homes with a television set now also have a DVD player. DVD sales and rentals alone were about $21 billion, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

Discs are now released just four months after a film's debut, and the barrage of advertising that accompanies the opening in movie theaters serves ultimately as a marketing campaign for the DVD, where the studios tend to make most of their profits.

By contrast, movie attendance has increased 8.1 percent from 2000 to 2004, according to the association. Many in the movie industry point to that figure as a sign of overall health. But attendance was down in three of those five years, and the sharp increase in attendance in 2002 is attributed to the overwhelming success of "Spider- Man" and "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones."

More recently, the number of moviegoers has dropped, sliding 4 percent in 2003, 2 percent in 2004 and 8 percent so far in 2005.

Time spent on the Internet has soared 76.6 percent and video game playing has increased 20.3 percent, according to the association. Last year, consumers bought $6.2 billion worth of video game software, an increase of 8 percent from 2003, according to the NPD Group, which tracks video game sales.

This does not mean that the $9.5 billion theatrical movie business is anywhere near its last gasp. It still plays a crucial role for the studios in generating excitement. But movie makers recognize they have to be more on their toes if they want to recapture their core audience.

"There are a lot of distractions," said Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced the "Pirates of the Caribbean" in 2003 as well as the successful "CSI" television franchise. "You need to pull them away from their computers. You need to pull them away from their video games."

Consider Matt Cohler, a 28-year-old vice president at Thefacebook.com, a Silicon Valley company that creates Internet student directories on college campuses. Mr. Cohler likes movies, but lately, he said, little has grabbed his attention.

He liked the new "Star Wars" and a documentary about the collapse of Enron. But of the Nicole Kidman-Sean Penn big-budget thriller, "The Interpreter," Mr. Cohler said, "It was only O.K." He has few plans to see anything else this summer, and said he was content to spend his free time online or writing e-mail.

"I feel quite strongly that, with a few exceptions, the quality of movies has been declining the last few years," he said.

Amy Pascal, the chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment's motion picture group, said, "We can give ourselves every excuse for people not showing up - change in population, the demographic, sequels, this and that - but people just want good movies."

She predicted that "Bewitched," a romantic comedy about a producer who unwittingly hires a "real" witch for the lead role in a remake of the television show, would have a broad appeal. "If it was a straight-ahead remake of the show," she said, "we would have been guilty of doing the ordinary."

Jill Nightingale, 37, who works at IGN Entertainment in ad sales, is the type of moviegoer - older, female and important to studios - that "Bewitched" should appeal to. But video games increasingly have taken up time she otherwise might spend watching television or going to the movies. The last two theater showings she said she attended were "Star Wars" and "Sideways," which she viewed in December.

She plays a video game for 30 minutes each night before bed. Two weeks ago, five friends joined her at her San Francisco condo to drink wine and play "Karaoke Revolutions" on her Sony PlayStation, where the would-be American Idols had a competition, belting out everything from Top 40 hits to show tunes.

"Party games are great for dates," she said. "A few years ago I would have been at a bar or at a movie."

But what could well have the greatest impact on theater attendance is the growing interest in digital home entertainment centers, which deliver something much closer to a movie-style experience than conventional television sets.

Brian Goble, 37, a video game entrepreneur, said he had not been to a movie theater in two years, except to see "Star Wars" with his wife and four friends. Instead, he stays at his home in a Seattle suburb, where he has turned the basement into a home theater with a 53-inch high-definition television screen and large surround-sound speakers. He no longer has to deal with parking and jostling crowds, he said, a relief now that he has two children.

" It's really just not as comfortable and fun as being at home," he said. "You can pause, go to the bathroom, deal with a crying kid."

Mr. Goble rarely watches video-on-demand ("The quality is poor," he said.) Instead he has an account with Netflix and orders his movies online. When the Nicholas Cage movie "National Treasure" was released last November, for instance, he added it to his Netflix list so he would be sent a copy when it came out on DVD.

His prime regret about seeing the final installment of "Star Wars" was that he could not watch it at home. "The only reason to go to the theater these days," he said, "is because it is a movie you must see now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/bu...a/27movie.html


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TV's Future Is Here, but It Needs Work
David Pogue

YEARS ago, our futuristic fantasies involved robot butlers, video wristwatches and flying cars. These days, we would be happy to have a cellphone with no dead spots, e-mail without spam and the ability to watch any TV show, anytime we want it.

Actually, they are making progress on that last item. A company called Akimbo has a tantalizing idea. What if you had a TiVo-like set-top box, complete with a hard drive that could hold 200 hours of video - but instead of recording live broadcasts, you could tap into an enormous library of shows, stored on the Internet, and watch them whenever you liked?

It's a great concept. TV executives would benefit, because they would gain a meaningful afterlife for all the shows they have spent millions to produce - and then broadcast only once. You would benefit, too, because if you missed some episode of "Desperate Housewives" or "The Amazing Race," you could just hop over to your set-top box and download away. It would be like the video-swapping made possible today by software like BitTorrent, but the service would be legal.

Unfortunately, Akimbo can offer only what the networks and cable channels are willing to contribute. And these days, just hearing the phrase "Internet downloads" generally sends television executives into paranoid fits. As a result, the Akimbo library is so puny and overpriced that the enterprise is interesting only as a "what not to do" case study.

The Akimbo box ($200, but on sale at Akimbo.com for $100 until June 30) is a VCR-size unit with an 80-gigabyte hard drive. It requires a high-speed Internet connection, either wired (Ethernet) or wireless (with a specific Linksys U.S.B. adapter).

You connect the Akimbo box to your TV, using standard red-white-yellow RCA cables or, for slightly better color, an S-Video cable (not included). Activating your account involves a few minutes in front of the TV, another few at a Web site and a few more in front of the TV. The Akimbo downloading service, without which the box is useless, costs $10 a month or a one-time $170 fee.

Now for the moment of truth: using the remote control, you peruse the library of 2,000 programs available for downloading.

And then reality slaps you hard: Akimbo's library is laughable. As Akimbo's Web site puts it, the list includes AdvenTV, "the first on-demand Turkish station in the U.S."; Veg TV, "vegetarian cooking instruction"; and Skyworks, "helicopter flights over the most spectacular landscapes of Britain."

Here is the entire list of sports categories: Billiards, Extreme Sports, Golf, Martial Arts, Documentaries and Yachting.

You will not find "Desperate Housewives," "The Amazing Race" or any other network show. The catalog largely consists of shows from no-name networks, productions from overseas networks and even short video clips that can already be seen free on the Web.

Some cable networks have contributed material, including Turner Classic Movies, CNN, A&E, Cartoon Network, Food Network, the BBC and National Geographic. The selection is limited to a few series from each network, but at least they are not Turkish sitcoms.

But that is not even the worst of it. If you drill down far enough into the menus to arrive at the description page for a certain show, you often come upon the chilling words: "$2.99 (30-day viewing period)."

That's right: not only do you pay for the Akimbo box and its monthly $10 fee to get no-name shows, you also have to pay per show. And even then, the show you buy will erase itself after a month!

This is piracy paranoia run amok. It's insane to think that anyone would pay so much for cheesy cable reruns and oddities like three-minute how-to videos for new mothers.

To make matters worse, the rental terms are different for every show. Some are free. (Akimbo says 40 percent are free, but that tally includes movie trailers, video blogs, two-minute CNN snippets and other free stuff from the Web.) The rest cost 50 cents to $5; pornographic movies are $10 (parental controls are available). Some stay on your hard drive forever, some self-destruct after 7 or 30 days, and some give you only a two-day window to watch.

Some channels charge per month rather than per show. For example, you can pay $2 a month for a channel dedicated to Latin culture, $10 for an all-boxing channel or $13 a month for a children's science channel.

Some of this is not Akimbo's fault. It desperately needs material for its catalog, so it has to comply with what the networks demand. (This flailing, of course, is exactly what the music-downloading business did before Apple broke through the chaos, set the price standard at 99 cents a song and included a copy-protection system. Where's Steve Jobs when you need him?) But some of Akimbo's failings are all its own.

Downloading to the Akimbo box usually takes at least as long as the show itself, and you can't begin watching until the show is fully downloaded, so it's not exactly video- on-demand. (The speed of your Internet connection drops during downloading, so it's best to stick to tasks like reading and sending e-mail.)

The box stores video in Windows Media Player format, which freezes and drifts out of audio sync from time to time. The box takes about 8 to 12 seconds to begin playing any show. Nothing happens until several seconds after you press Rewind or Fast Forward, and there's only one speed: Excruciatingly Slow.

Fast-forwarding 30 minutes into a show takes two and a half minutes. But that's warp speed compared with rewinding, which is not even half that fast - and sometimes crashes the machine, shutting it down. You pine for the days when you could rewind tape by hand.

There are also some subtle bait-and-switch tactics. For example, you have to drill down four screens deep before discovering that a show requires a fee or a monthly membership, or is only two minutes long.

And despite Akimbo's claim to be "the first digital quality video-on-demand service over the Internet," the video quality is erratic. None of it is high-definition, none of it looks as good as a DVD, and some of it has the blockiness and pixellation of a Web cam. One children's series is so obviously a transfer from a VHS cassette, you can actually see the white streaks of the VCR's dirty heads.

Then there are the poor design decisions, like a remote with no illumination and listing screens so small that they cannot show the full names of shows and their descriptions.

In short, Akimbo is a train wreck. But there are a few points of light.

The box is very quiet. You cannot transfer any of your shows to a computer but you can copy them to a VCR or a DVD recorder's analog inputs. And there are some offbeat gems of programs among the chaff.

The other good news is that Akimbo is well aware of its problems. "We don't tell everyone to buy it," said Steve Shannon, the company's founder. "We say, try it out; we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. It's meant to appeal to people who have an interest in a particular channel. If you're really into billiards, you might want this thing."

Later this year, the company intends to replace the box's current operating system with one that will offer faster (and multiple-speed) rewinding and fast-forwarding. Akimbo also says that it is talking to several movie studios about offering reasonably current movies. (They'll be available 30 days after their release to video stores.)

The company also hopes to add year-old network shows eventually, but don't expect current mainstream fare. "The big networks don't want to experiment," Mr. Shannon said.

If Akimbo can fix the problems and, more important, bring its partners to their senses on pricing and time limits, maybe there's hope.

But in its current incarnation, Akimbo will not win any awards for value or selection. On the other hand, it might just walk away with High-Tech Turkey of the Year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/te...s/02pogue.html


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The New Video Libraries

Once TV shows would disappear into thin air. No longer. New search engines are pushing us toward a world where all programs are stored on the Net, all the time.
Joy Wang and Michael Hastings

Suranga Chandratillake spent the last two years developing software to make sure fans won't ever miss another episode of "The Apprentice." Or any other television show, for that matter. As the founder of Blinkx, a search engine for audio and video files, he designed a computer system for the television networks to permanently archive their broadcasts online. He's taking his clients' shows—including Fox News, MTV and other TV networks—and making them accessible by a simple word search. It'll be a handy tool for viewers who want to find their favorite programs in a hurry. For the networks, it's the first step toward managing how their programs wind up on the Internet. "In the case of FoxNews.com," says Chandratillake, "our computers sat there and listened, as though with little headphones, to two and a half years of clips and made it all searchable."

The success of Blinkx—in the last five months, the number of users has doubled to 1 million—is the latest sign that television programs are headed toward becoming just another Internet application, like music files or pornography. Advances in file- compression technologies, which make video files small enough to be transferred quickly and easily on the Web, have made TV programs increasingly vulnerable to piracy. Audiences now regularly turn to so-called file-sharing software to get shows for free, as they initially turned to Napster for free songs. The most popular TV shows have been downloaded tens of thousands of times—each episode of the Fox show "24", for instance, was downloaded about 95,000 times after it was first aired, according to Envisional, a U.K.- based peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic monitor. The Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, reports 17 percent of those online—about 23 million people—now download video files in the United States. A report earlier this year by the Informa Media Group says file-sharing costs TV and film companies $858 million annually. Television-industry executives fear that the trend will only get worse.

The strategy of the TV industry is not to fight the pirates so much as beat them at their own game—by making their television programming available, for a fee, on legitimate Internet-based video libraries. The key is to offer a service that's so much better than the rogue peer-to-peer networks that customers don't mind paying. "There's this general assumption that people will always steal content if they can, but I don't think that's true," says Chandratillake. "The success of the new Napster and iTunes demonstrates that people are very —interested in downloading broadband content online and paying for it, if it's priced right and available easily."

The need to provide searchable video libraries has created an alliance between the networks and search firms. In May, Yahoo signed a deal with 13 companies, including CBS and MTV. Google lined up PBS and C- SPAN in January. Blinkx has taken on 16 clients, recently adding A&E and The New York Times, which produces news video on its Web site, to its roster. The search firms have been scrambling to position themselves as marketplaces for movies and television programs. Google Video, a search service launched in January, wants eventually to offer videos and movies for sale, just as songs can be bought on iTunes. Yahoo launched a similar service, Yahoo! Video, last December. The search firms expect to attract advertisers to their sites, offering another attractive spot to market products. (The idea would be to run brief, 30-second clips before the TV show or movie starts.)

Despite the recent dealmaking, however, video search seems to have gotten off to a slow start. As the networks realize, video libraries will attract fee-paying customers only if they're easy to use and provide a wide variety of programming. Being able to make quick and accurate searches is vital. The technology, however, remains crude. Google Video, for instance, relies mainly on keyword searches of show transcripts, which tend to be riddled with errors, such as incorrectly spelled proper nouns, like names and places. Yahoo! Video has the networks provide the searchable information on the video files, either as transcripts or audio files. "It's very early going at this phase and we're not at the stage where videos are being bought and sold," says Bradley Horowitz, director of Media and Desktop Search at Yahoo! In the next few years, he says, the technology should develop to the point where users have extensive—and legitimate—access to videos online.

Experts say the fee-based search engines could be tempting to consumers, mainly because they have the potential to offer an unlimited video library. At present, the Yahoo and Google services fall far short of this goal—they provide mainly clips from TV broadcasts, not even complete shows. Both companies are wooing TV and movie studios to give them full access to content. A handful of smaller search-firm companies, such as Blinkx, Streamsage and Virage, have developed voice-recognition software that combs through video files, interprets the speech and comes up with key words and summaries that are searchable. Such a capability gives much more accurate search results than those that rely on error-laden transcripts. The challenge now for the search firms is convincing TV and movie executives that it's in their best interest to fork over all their videos.

The networks, of course, would clearly love to shut down the video peer- to-peer networks, as the audio industry did to Napster and Kazaa. But they can't. New file-sharing applications like BitTorrent and eDonkey are difficult to regulate. Video pirates have eschewed the use of centralized servers in their file-swapping networks, relying instead on decentralized networks that are virtually impossible to bust. Legal measures haven't worked so far. In May, a U.S. federal appeals court struck down anti- piracy regulations put in place by the Federal Communications Commission and supported by networks. TV executives from Europe, Asia and elsewhere are closely watching the the litigation surrounding Grokster, a file-sharing site. They believe the U.S. courts will set the tone for how emerging markets like China and India treat intellectual-property rights.

Thus far, a U.S. trade group—the Motion Picture Association of America— has spearheaded the charge, filing lawsuits in dozens of countries, including China, France and the Netherlands. "We want to make sure copyrights are protected and copyright owners are paid," says Jason Hirschorn, senior VP for MTV's media division. At the moment, the video pirates still have the advantage. But if Google and Yahoo and the other search firms succeed in doing for video what iTunes has done for music, Chandratillake should be able to watch "The Apprentice" any time he wants. For a fee.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8018603/site/newsweek/


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As TV Moves to the Web, Marketers Follow
Nat Ives

TELEVISION programmers are looking to make the Web a lot more like TV.

On Tuesday, the emerging-media group at Scripps Networks, part of the E. W. Scripps Company, plans to introduce an all-video Web site that will use programming from its Food Network, Fine Living, HGTV and DIY Network brands, as well as new clips.

A major advertiser in Scripps offline media, General Motors' GMC division, has paid for a video showroom on the site and a presence throughout it.

Others are likely to follow, as advertisers show a growing interest in the approach. "One of the biggest drivers for online advertising the first time was Web sites advertising on other Web sites," said Peter Petrusky, director for advisory services at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "This time it's being buoyed by the offline brand builders like Coke, Honda, Nike, Visa and Nestlé."

Alexia S. Quadrani, a senior managing director at Bear Stearns who follows the publishing and advertising industries, predicted more traditional publishers would follow the lead of Scripps. "You are seeing a lot more content go online because there is a demand for it," she said.

Web video - once too halting to bother with - is much easier to look at now, as high-speed Internet access spreads.

More than 34 million homes in the United States, representing 29.9 percent of households, had broadband connections last year, according to eMarketer, an online research provider. By 2008, eMarketer projects, broadband will be in 69.4 million homes, or 56.3 percent of households.

Web surfers have proved their willingness to watch live sports online for more than an hour at a time, said Bart Feder, president and chief executive at FeedRoom, a provider of broadband video technology to clients like NBC, Reuters and Telemundo.

The people who visit a Telemundo site to find video synopses of its Spanish-language telenovela soap operas watch for an average of 20 minutes at a time, he said. "That suggests that the quality is such that people are very happy to consume video content on their computers," Mr. Feder said.

GMC spent $241.5 million last year to advertise in major United States media, only $4.7 million of that on the Internet, according to estimates by TNS Media Intelligence.

The share of GMC's budget devoted to nontraditional advertising has been growing at a "very fast rate" over the last five years, said Steve Rosenblum, its marketing director.

"We first considered the Web as we would any media," Mr. Rosenblum said. "Let's take a static ad, put it on someone else's Web site, draw people to our Web site, increase traffic and eventually increase sales."

With broadband and the video clips, the company's products can be seen in vignettes on the new Scripps site. "The more seamlessly you're integrated into a site, the greater the relevance is to the consumer," Mr. Rosenblum said.

The home page at www.living.com, which is labeled "driven by GMC," shows six categories for visitors to choose from, like "Remodeling" and "Food." Clicking on a category leads to pages where visitors can again select from several videos - like "New Ceiling Fan."

Most of the videos in the Web showroom feature specific GMC products. Scripps plans to update the library of video clips, which last two to four minutes, every two weeks.

Other advertisers may sign up, but the site will remain relatively uncluttered, said Susan Canavari, senior vice president for marketing at Digitas, which handles interactive, promotion and relationship marketing duties for GMC. "The intent is not for this to become a site that's full of product placement and advertising," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/bu...ia/27adco.html


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Tivo Quarterly Net Loss Narrows, Stock Rises
Franklin Paul

TiVo Inc., a developer of television recording technology, on Thursday posted a significantly narrower quarterly loss on increased subscribers and lower costs, and the stock rose 19 percent.

TiVo, whose digital video recording (DVR) service lets users pause live TV and save massive amounts of programing, also said it expects to be profitable by the fourth quarter of its fiscal year, which ends in January 2006.

For the first quarter ended April 30, it posted a net loss of $857,000, or 1 cent a share, compared with a net loss of $9.1 million, or 11 cents a share in the year ago period.

Service and technology revenues for the quarter increased 59 percent to $40.0 million. Total revenue, including hardware sales, climbed to $46.9 million, from $34.5 million.

Analysts were expecting a loss of 9 cents a share, on revenue of $38.4 million, according to Reuters Estimates.

TiVo added a total of 319,000 subscribers in the quarter. So-called "TiVo-owned" customers, whom the company gains outside of its partnership with satellite TV provider DirecTV Group Inc, rose by 72,000. In all, TiVo ended the quarter at 3.3 million subscribers.

"It was a very good quarter, with a very bullish outlook about the future," said Hudson Square Research analyst Daniel Ernst, adding that TiVo executives appear very confident about its subscriber growth, distribution and profitability plans.

The rosy results come only months after some analysts said they doubted TiVo's future as a viable enterprise, due to growing competition from cable providers and its expensive drive to boost subscribers. Since then, the company has reeled in spending and signed a key distribution deal with Comcast Corp. (CMCSA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , the No.1 cable TV provider.

The company said its spending on expenses such as rebates, which help lower the cost of units that customers buy at retail stores, fell to $3.6 million, from $5.0 million.

Subscribers Up, Spending Down

Wall Street analysts said they were impressed by the solid growth in subscribers, whose recurrent fees of up to $13 per month increase TiVo's revenue.

"They were in line with their subscriber guidance and spent a lot less than they expected, so they are getting some efficiencies on their marketing," said analyst Rob Sanderson of American Technology Research.

On a call with analysts, chief executive Michael Ramsay spoke optimistically about TiVo's burgeoning advertising software system, which the company believes may be attractive to other cable providers. However, he did not announce any new deals.

"We've got advertising capabilities for DVR that are unique," he said. "We have the potential ... to make this a standard across the entire industry."

Looking ahead, TiVo said it sees second-quarter growth of 40,000 to 60,000 "TiVo-owned" subscribers, and a total increase of 200,000 to 260,000 new users.

In addition, it narrowed its fiscal 2006 guidance to a loss of $10.0 million to $20.0 million, from its previous range of $10 million to $25 million, and reiterated its range for service and technology revenues to $155.0 million to $165.0 million.

Michael Ramsay, who said earlier this year that he would step down as CEO once a new one is found, said TiVo is still searching. In the meantime, Ramsay told analysts on a conference call he feels "fully in charge."

TiVo shares climbed to $8.00 on the Inet electronic brokerage, from its Nasdaq close of $6.94.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=8627195


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Something in the Air

Here's what we're learning with our cell phones, sensors and Wi-Fi: losing the wires is only the beginning. What happens next is unpredictable, empowering and sometimes a bit unnerving
Steven Levy

In the '90s, people went bananas over wireless. Electronic communications once thought to be permanently bound to the world of cables and hard-wired connections suddenly were sprung free, and the possibilities seemed endless. Entrenched monopolies would fall, and a new uncabled era would usher in a level of intimate contact that would not only transform business but change human behavior. Such was the view by the end of that groundbreaking decade—the 1890s.

To be sure, the sepia-toned hype of those days wasn't all hot air. Guglielmo Marconi's "magic box" and its contemporary inventions kicked off an era of profound changes, not the least of which was the advent of broadcasting. So it does seem strange that a century later the buzz once more is about wireless. And once again the commotion is justified. Because changes are afoot that are arguably as earth shattering as the first wireless transformation.

Certainly a huge part of this revolution comes from untethering the most powerful communication tools of our time. Between our mobile phones, our BlackBerrys and Treos and our Wi-Fi'd computers, we're always on and always connected—and soon our cars and appliances will be too. While there's been considerable planning as to how people will use these tools and how they'll pay for them, the wonderful reality is that, as with the Internet, much of the action in the wireless world will ultimately emerge from the imaginative twists and turns that are possible when digital technology trumps the analog mind-set of telecom companies and government regulators.

Wi-Fi is a shining example of how wireless innovation can itself shed the constricting cables of conventional wisdom. At one point it was assumed that when people wanted to use wireless devices for things other than conversation, they'd have to rely on the painstakingly drawn, investment-heavy standards adopted by the giant corporations that rake in the dough through your monthly phone bill. But then some geeks came up with a new communications standard exploiting an unlicensed part of the spectrum (which the wonks at the FCC called "junk band," stuff designated for techno- flotsam like microwave ovens and cordless phones). It was called 802.11 and only later sexed up with the Wi-Fi moniker.

Though the range of signal was usually no more than a few hundred feet or less, Wi-Fi turned out to be a great way to wirelessly extend an Internet connection in the home or office. A new class of activist was born: the bandwidth liberator, with a goal of extending free wireless Internet to anyone venturing within the range of a gratis hotspot. Meanwhile, Apple Computer seized on the idea as a consumer solution, others followed and now Wi-Fi is as common as the modem once was.

Another unplanned bonus: more powerful variants of Wi-Fi, with exotic descriptors like WiMax or mesh networks, have now emerged as top contenders to finally hook up the recalcitrant or remote areas that have so far resisted broadband. As Kevin Werbach, former FCC counsel for new technology policy, notes, because "it's low cost and doesn't require a big upfront infrastructure investment," wireless technology is the means by which previously unwired chunks of civilization will get plugged in to the cyberaction. Consider the MIT Media Lab project to install Wi-Fi base stations on intervillage buses in India: when the vehicles stop to pick up passengers, computer users within range can use the signal to download files or send e-mail.

Wi-Fi is only one of dozens of variants of wireless in this spiraling movement. You might know GPS and satellite radio, Bluetooth and RFID, but do you know ZigBee? Got you there. (It's a way to network lots of appliances.) The important thing to remember is that as these methods pile up, the result is less and less about losing the wire and more and more about making way for activities that were previously unimaginable.

When you install cameras in telephones, for instance, photography shifts from a producer of flat illustrative artifact into a means of communication. The ease of distribution becomes a force in itself, pushing networks to handle more bandwidth. And the sudden addition of hundreds of millions of instant eyes to the global network provides its own challenges (thus the devices are banned in locker rooms and at the U.S. Supreme Court).

All over the planet, wireless is making waves, from the text-message-mad teenagers outside Tokyo's Shibuya station to a Wi-Fi-equipped McDonald's in New York City to Everest climbers calling home from the summit. With dizzying rapidity, wireless innovations move from the cutting edge to the routine. Just like what happened with Marconi's magic box during the first wireless revolution.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5092820/site/newsweek/


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Young Mobile Users Most Interested In Music-Survey

Commercial-free radio over mobile phones and the ability to download music to phones are the two most interesting advanced mobile services to young adults, according to a recent study. The survey, conducted by the Management Network Group consulting firm, also showed greater interest in a free ad-supported mobile video service than a subscription video service, such as those offered by Verizon Wireless and Sprint.

Many wireless service providers hope to boost their revenue with services like streaming music or video clip and music downloads to mobile phones, but there are still questions about demand for the new services. About 40 percent of 1,000 phone users between 13 and 34 years old would be very interested in commercial-free radio over their mobile phone, the survey said. Nearly 35 percent of those surveyed showed an interest in wireless music downloads.

It also said 40 percent of users showed strong interest in ad-supported video services, while less than 20 percent of respondents would be very or extremely likely to pay either a monthly mobile video subscription of $4 a month or a fee of 30 cents per video clip, it said. Verizon, the No. 2 U.S. mobile provider, and its next biggest rival, Sprint, both charge roughly $15 a month for their video packages. U.S. operators are widely expected to provide full download services to phones in the coming year but pricing such services for broad demand could also be tricky.

Paul Petersky, TMNG's vice president of market research, said that survey respondents preferred the idea of paying 99 cents per song for music downloads rather than $19.95 monthly for up to 30 song downloads. Petersky said that while only 21 percent of respondents said they were very interested in playing multiplayer video games on their phones he noted that teenage respondents were most interested in these services.
http://today.reuters.com/sponsoredby...-SURVEY-DC.XML


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'Kodak, Don't Take My Kodachrome'
Spencer Morgan

Paul Simon sang about it. Film students shot on it. Now, advocates are signing up to save Kodachrome, or at least its Super 8 motion-picture version, a 1965 technology that the Eastman Kodak Company would very much like to do without.

Earlier this month, Kodak, based in Rochester, N.Y., delivered a shock to experimental, underground and just plain old-fashioned filmmakers when - one day after a May 8 celebration called Global Super 8 Day - it announced plans to discontinue its low-speed, fine-grained Kodachrome Super 8 film in favor of a new Ektachrome Super 8 product.

For those caught up on the digital revolution, the announcement was easily missed. But to film geeks around the world, Kodak might as well have declared the death of color.

"Kodachrome is larger than life," said Andrew Lampert, a filmmaker and film archivist at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan. "Its colors are brighter than your imagination's. And what's amazing is, the film simply does not fade. It's irreplaceable."

Message boards hummed. An online petition materialized. Then, at the Cannes Film Festival, a Kodak executive, Robert Mayson, agreed to a meeting with Pip Chodorov, a principal member of Paris's thriving Super 8 filmmaking scene - the city is home to several Super 8 film festivals - and the administrator of frameworks.com, one of a number of online message boards dedicated to experimental film.

Mr. Chodorov, who also owns a video distribution company specializing in experimental and independent film, said the company blinked, at least a little. By his account, Mr. Mayson agreed that Kodak might produce more Super 8 Kodachrome, if the format's enthusiasts can find a way to process it. At present, the film is largely processed on a money-losing basis at the Kodak laboratory in Switzerland - where Super 8 Kodachrome processing is scheduled to cease in December 2007. Mr. Chodorov, in an telephone interview from Paris on Friday, said he now plans to petition the French government for a grant to help with processing.

He said he thought Mr. Mayson was "getting a lot of hate mail right now," adding, "I see it as my job to help find a solution, not send hate mail." Kodachrome Super 8 became a favorite thanks to the film's complex emulsion, the gelatinous solution that helps capture an image. It requires an elaborate developing process but produces striking, unique colors and unparalleled archival virtues, making it a favorite with Super 8 artists.

Kodachrome was the film of choice for avant-garde filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and Jonas Mekas, who were renowned in the film world though largely unknown outside it. A much larger population has most likely seen the film's fine-grain quality and lurid pigments in the form of old home movies. Indeed, the most famous image caught on Kodachrome film was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, caught by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas dressmaker who happened to be wielding an 8-millimeter camera that day.

In the last 20 years, video has all but eclipsed Super 8's practical use for amateur filmmakers and doting parents, who can now record images on a high-definition digital video camera, feed the footage directly onto a computer, edit it and e-mail it to a prospective producer or the grandparents in Michigan.

Super 8 cameras and projectors are now the stuff of specialty shops, eBay and flea markets, and Kodak alone continues to produce Super 8 film.

The company continues to produce Kodachrome in 16 millimeter and 35 millimeter formats, but it is discontinuing the Super 8 version largely because a steadily declining market has made processing unprofitable.

While the market may be small and shrinking, its constituents are passionate about their art. Small theaters in cities around the country, including Anthology Film Archives Millennium Film Workshop in New York, still regularly play Super 8 films. And when a theater isn't available, a white wall and a projector will suffice.

"I just showed one of my films at a small gallery out in Williamsburg," said Stephanie Gray, a 33-year-old filmmaker from Queens. "It was actually the backroom of someone's apartment." Ms. Gray, who bought her Super 8 camera for $25 at a flea market, said the medium lends itself to a poetic, personal kind of filmmaking that cannot be achieved with digital filmmaking. Judy Doherty, director of communications at Kodak's entertainment imaging division, argued that such poetry is well within reach of contemporary technology. If people are partial to shooting Super 8, she said, they can simply transfer the film onto digital and "achieve any kind of effect they want."

But enthusiasts contend that it simply isn't the same.

"When people started using synthesizers, we didn't throw out our pianos," Ms. Gray said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/arts/31koda.html


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How to

Turn Your Win XP Home Edition Into Pro With A Hidden Trick
Softpedia

Bill Gates is ready to compete with Harry Potter

Are you the owner of a Windows Home Edition which doesn’t suit your needs anymore and you would like to switch to the Pro version without investing any money? No problem.

According to the German C’T computer magazine, all you have to do is change 2 bytes from the file setupreg.hiv which can be found in Windows’s XP Home kit. In this way, you will have access to certain functions, such as ‘Remote Desktop’, ‘User management’ and benefit from enhanced security features.

However, if you do this, you won’t be able to install Service Pack 2 and considering the countless security problems it solves, maybe it would be best to just purchase the Pro Edition of the system.

Leaving the technicalities aside, let’s analyze for a moment Microsoft’s policy. For a certain amount of money, Bill Gates offers you a vulnerable operating system stripped of several features. Pay a few dollars more, and you get the same operating system, theoretically harder to hack (and I emphasize theoretically) which is added the missing features.

And all that Microsoft has to do is change the install kit. You have to admit it’s absolutely brilliant.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Turn-...ick-2514.shtml


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Sony Performs Vasectomy On CDs
Softpedia

Sony BMG is testing a British technology allowing the users to make only a limited number of copies of a CD, and the respective copies cannot by any means be reproduced. The technology comes from the First4Internet company, specialized in producing anti-piracy solutions and is known as "sterile copying".

Sony declares that this solution represents a tough blow on worldwide piracy, seeing that the copying for personal use represents a major problem for the production companies. In fact, the ripping and ulterior rewriting of CDs represents two thirds of the worldwide piracy, and that is the reason why finding a solution to assure the security of CD formats is vital.

The new anti-copying technology has already been included in the CDs’ production process, until now about 1 million original disks produced by Sony BMG being protected by it, with the titles yet to be announced.

First4Internet is not the only company Sony will work with, the manufacturer intending to also get other partners involved in this effort of promoting sterile copying. SunnComm is the owner of MediaMax technology, a DRM solution that fulfills perfectly Sony BMG’s copyright protection requirements. However, in the past, Sony entrusted MediaMax with several titles, and in a short time the respective contents could already be found on p2p networks. Despite this, there is hope that a procedure by means of which Sony will be able to at least slow down the piracy rate will soon be available, either from MediaMax, or from First4Internet’s XCP.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Sony-...CDs-2466.shtml


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The Other Side of BitTorrent
Patrick Gray

Film and television executives no doubt wish the increasingly popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing system never saw the light of day. Thousands of consumers are using the software to download hundreds of movies and hours upon hours of television programming.

But one industry's threat is another's opportunity. There's an upside to allowing viewers to transfer copyright material content over BitTorrent.

As noted by Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series.

The relatively obscure program has spawned a global following in online forums, internet relay chat channels and fan sites.

With box sets and special edition DVDs, Ito wrote, the copyright holders can make a tidy sum from fans prepared to "spend thousands of dollars on one show."

However, not everyone is convinced BitTorrent will level the playing field. Heavy.com, a New York-based independent online content provider and marketing outfit, said cheap and easy distribution is only a part of the equation.

Heavy already distributes some content over peer-to-peer networks to "get the word out," said co-CEO Simon Assaad. But he doesn't expect an immediate content shake-up to overthrow the majors.

"People assume that because it's open to everyone there'll be this mass movement of people making quality content that everyone can access, and I don't think that's true," he said.

Even if independents can produce quality content, the marketing clout required to generate an audience will make it harder for smaller players. "Marketing is getting harder as people's attention gets fragmented," Assaad said.

Still, Assaad said word of mouth and community building can work. "You could be a smart marketer and spend a thousand bucks if you spend it in the right places," he said.

So, as far as Assaad is concerned, don't expect the TV and cable stations to close their doors just yet. Controlling the means of mass distribution, it seems, isn't as important as controlling the means of mass marketing. Still, Assaad said, we're in for some changes.

"Technology is forcing people to continuously evolve," Assaad says. "It's being like a shark: If you stop, you die."

Peer-to-peer, however, won't be dying any time soon. Vint Cerf, one of the original developers of the Internet Protocol, says the technology is here to stay, despite the prolonged legal attacks from copyright holders.

"This is an environment where ideas that work typically propagate," Cerf said. "It doesn't matter if they started out in a way that were unsatisfactory to some folks."

That BitTorrent works so well is making Hollywood and the television networks mighty uncomfortable. Peer-to- peer is all grown up, and the war against movie and television piracy is ramping up.

Until recently, BitTorrent piracy was a free-for-all. Suprnova.org, a website started by Adrej Preston, then a 16- year-old Steiner school student in Slovenia, offered millions of torrent files for download, free of charge.

"With BitTorrent you can distribute one file to one thousand people in almost the same amount of time as you would to one person on (the) Kazaa network," said Preston, now 19.

It didn't take long for copyright owners to catch on, and they've been busy suing everyone. SuprNova.org is gone, along with many other torrent trackers offering links to copyright files. That hasn't stopped Preston.

He and his cohorts have released eXeem, a trackerless, Kazaa-like application that lets users search for downloads from a decentralized database.

"EXeem is made so that we do not host any info (about) what is on the network," Preston said. "Even the nodes are made so that they change all the time."

Preston is likely expecting legal hassles. He won't admit to having a stake in Swarm Systems, the company that controls eXeem, describing himself only as "a representative."

Swarm is incorporated in the Caribbean money-laundering haven of Saint Kitts and Nevis. Either way, eXeem seems well placed to cause a few more headaches for Hollywood.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67641,00.html


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Gpic Worm Hits AIM
Jim Wagner

UPDATED: In an advisory posted by enterprise IM vendor IMlogic Wednesday, officials warned of a new worm (define) spread by old means: getting users to click on a URL (define) that purports to come from a friend on their buddy list.

The latest threat to AOL's instant messaging (IM) platform, AIM, again targets users' penchants to blindly click on links supplied by friends. The Gpic.aol worm comes with a message saying, "damn this looks just like me lol" and a link to what is displayed as pictures.google.com.

In reality, the displayed URL obscures the real Web site at newpeople.no- ip.info, which then downloads onto the user's system, collects the names in the buddy list and sends the same message to all of them.

Gpic.aol is considered a medium-level risk threat; it doesn't actually deliver a payload that allows the malware (define) writer to gain remote access to the computer or corrupt or erase data on the hard drive.

For the time being, IM worms are merely a nuisance, propagating from one AIM buddy list to another. But Francis deSouza, IMlogic CEO, said he fears it's only a matter of time before virus writers start delivering damaging code as well.

IM, replete with functionality, such as file transferring, video and audio, is at risk from malware writers gaining access to those features, he said.

"Your e-mail client can only do so many things," he said. "Your IM client is actually much more functional and much more powerful, and because much of the functionality is real-time functionality, threats can propagate over IM much faster than over e-mails."

According to an April report by the company, the first three months of 2005 found a 271 percent increase in the amount of reported IM and peer-to-peer threats from the previous year. Of the reported incidents, the report found 82 percent dealt with IM virus or worm propagation.

DeSouza said AIM, up until a couple of weeks ago, has been relatively spared from the worms encountered in the IM world compared to those of Yahoo Messenger and Microsoft's MSN.

In the past two weeks, AIM has become a fertile ground for worm writers and has contributed to seven new AIM-targeted worms, according to the company's list of IM and P2P threats.

In all cases, the worms display a skillful degree of social engineering, getting people to click on links they would never do visiting a strange Web site or in an e-mail.

A recent AIM worm capitalized on the popularity of Star Wars III and reports of a leaked copy of the movie on P2P and BitTorrent sites, telling victims to click on the link to download the movie.

In related news, e-mail security firm MessageLabs has tracked more than 850,000 copies of a new Bagle downloader that started making its way through e-mail inboxes Tuesday afternoon, according to officials.

Like the majority of viruses, the user needs to be tricked into installing the file onto the computer. When that's accomplished, the virus harvests e-mail addresses on the hard drive and forwards a copy of itself to the the e-mail addresses.

According to a report by Postini Wednesday, the Bagle virus was the ninth-largest for the month of May, but figures show Bagle is coming back strong.

Postini's real-time virus-tracking site Wednesday reports the Bagle virus was the No. 1 virus threat, with nearly 1.5 million reported instances.
http://www.internetnews.com/security...le.php/3509321


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Paper

DDLS: Extending Open Hypermedia Systems into Peer-to-Peer Environments

Zhou, J. (2004) DDLS: Extending Open Hypermedia Systems into Peer-to-Peer Environments. PhD, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

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Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is primarily characterised by decentralisation, scalability, anonymity, self-organisation and ad hoc connectivity. It attracted considerable attention in open hypermedia research due to its potential for supporting collaboration among a community of people sharing similar knowledge background. The aim of this research is to investigate the feasibility and potential benefits of corporating the P2P paradigm in open hypermedia systems to support resource sharing-based collaboration. This is accomplished by utilising a distributed dynamic link service (DDLS) as a testbed, addressing issues that arise from implementing the paradigm, and demonstrating the efficiency of proposed techniques through simulation.

This research begins with the development of a prototype DDLS using the open hypermedia paradigm for storing and presenting resources and a centralised P2P model which adopts a central service directory for publishing and discovering resources in a well-arranged environment. This is enhanced by an operational analysis and feature comparison between prototypes based on the traditional client-server and the centralised P2P models. Various P2P models are analysed to identify the key characteristics of and requirements for the DDLS using an unstructured P2P model which empowers collaboration in an ad hoc environment.

The second phase of this research concentrates on overcoming the challenges of resource description, publishing and discovery posed by the unstructured P2P DDLS: using RDF to encode information about resources, developing a clustering technique to group resources and form the information space; and creating a semantic search mechanism to discover resources; respectively. Finally, this research proposes re-organisation techniques based on the exponential decay function and the naive estimator to enhance the performance of resource discovery in resource sharing-based collaboration.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10917/