Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 7th, 2006

[JackSpratts]

"You can't have a corrupt lobbyist unless you also have a corrupt member and corrupt staff. This was a team effort." – Newt Gingrich


"It's pretty clear who won. We always knew that this free trading of all this copyright material couldn't go on. It just wouldn't work." – Wayne Rosso


"These websites and these businesses were shut down but it doesn't shut down the software, it doesn't shut down the (file-sharing) networks. The open-source community will continue to build new, uncensored versions." – Eric Garland


"Bin the headphones and listen to gentle things like BBC Radio Four." – Uni student with hearing damage




































January 7th, 2006





Here Me Now Or Sue Me Later

What’s the Download creates focus group for the few who listen
Jus Pruitt

You read this rag in print or online? You buy music at Tower Records or iTunes? Wait, you still buy music?

You ain’t heard? There’s a revolution goin’ on. The people are taking the power back, one song at a time. Napster may be gone, Grokster may have lost, but the downloading continues, to the tune of more than a billion songs a month, according to research firm BigChampagne.

In the last four years, the industry has seen its revenue drop 30 percent, but not without attempting to fight back. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has gone after peer-to-peer (P2P) software companies, winning a case against Grokster in U.S. Supreme Court.

They’ve also targeted individual file-swappers. Prior to last month, 17,000 music fans had been issued subpoenas by the RIAA in its attempt to stem the tide.

Effective? Hardly. That’s out of an estimated 51 million P2P users in the U.S. alone.

This November, Sony-BMG also found itself on the wrong side of a poor strategy. The company was forced to recall 50 different CD titles (hundreds of thousands of copies) once it was discovered that the discs’ copy- protection (anti-piracy) software unknowingly exposed users’ computers to viruses. Executives initially tried to play it off, but the negative media coverage was relentless, and Microsoft went so far as to publicly declare Sony’s encryption “spy ware.”

These events have only served to exacerbate tensions between the music industry and its target audience. Music buyers are tired of overpaying for CDs with two good songs and a bunch of filler, while hearing horror stories of their favorite artists getting little or no money because of lopsided major- label contracts. The greedy major labels have been caught flat-footed by P2P and are lashing out to protect their product.

As a whole, record companies don’t seem to be adopting new business strategies for the future, choosing instead to stay the course and fight back. Yet while they may understand copyright law better than most P2P-ers, they have consistently displayed a lack of knowledge about who their customers are and what they want.

Meet Christie Osborne, a 20-year-old junior at the University of San Diego. She’s majoring in biochemistry and English and serves on the student government as the technical director of concerts, which puts her in charge of organizing sound production for all on-campus shows.

Not your typical sorority-girl sexpot, Christie’s attractiveness comes more from a poised confidence and intelligence. She’s the kind of girl who takes pleasure in staring down a room full of record company heads and bragging that she has 11,000 songs on her computer, and never mind where she got them.

This is what she gets to do as a member of the What’s the Download advisory board, a kind of young-consumer consulting group chosen by the Recording Academy. The 12-member group ranges in age from 20 to 25, and was selected based on video applications from 70 semi-finalists.

Sounds geeky, but all they have to do is maintain a website (www.whatsthedown load.com) and give a handful of presentations at industry conventions and they’re closer than most to scoring a “cool” job in or around the music industry. Hopefully that doesn’t mean going all dark- side and shit, but for now these kids are OK.

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on two advisory board presentations, first at the National Association of Recording Merchants (NARM) convention in San Diego in August and, more recently, at the Digital Entertainment Media Expo (DEMXPO) in Los Angeles on Nov. 30.

Conventions are typically somber, boring affairs, even in this line of work, despite catered meals, open bars and the occasional musical performance. It’s all about networking and familiar faces, which can make things strange for a journalist.

On the final day of NARM, following awkward morning performances by the Bellydance Superstars and R&B-er Kieran, an awards show for which no artists were present to claim their trophies and a technology roundtable discussion that would have put a meth-head to sleep, all 12 members of WTD took the stage and proceeded to chide, scold and bash nearly every “accomplishment” the couple hundred attendees had been championing the previous few days.

Not exactly exciting stuff, but it made an unprepared, captive audience tense and uncomfortable just as they were trying to wrap up the weekend. It was also a possible learning experience, as the group members were thoughtful, charismatic, outspoken and, most importantly, music geeks.

At DEMXPO, only five of the 12 were there: Osborne, Matthew Annerino, Robbie Halperin, Joy Mitchell and David Wurzburg. Someone also decided it was best not to have them speak in the keynote dinner spot, which was probably best.

They were set to do their thing in the same room and immediately following one of the more highly attended seminars, “Buzz Marketing.” The seats filled up and the walls were lined, primarily due to the presence of Jamie Kantrowitz, vice president of marketing and communications at MySpace.

If you’re not on MySpace by now, I’m not sure what to tell you. The social networking website has some 40 million members and ranked No. 15 in page hits for the entire U.S. in October. It’s become one of the best marketing tools both for start-up bands and seasoned vets, creating a more personal and consistent-contact relationship between artist and fan.

So MySpace generated some buzz at the convention and Kantrowitz took the opportunity to drop that word approximately 384 times in about 45 minutes. The other panelists alternated between their own self-promotion and strategies for generating and retaining online visitors, mostly things that would increase website advertising dollars. It was, after all, a marketing discussion.

And having the young customers of WTD follow as a sales discussion makes a linear kind of sense. What makes less sense is how much the room had emptied out by the time they took the stage. All day, the conventioneers reeked of a squirmy desire to tap into an unused vein of capital flow. And now, their absence in the room was almost the physical embodiment of their disregard for the product and their patrons.

As it turns out, the five WTD members are more comfortable and confident, less full of bluster and more savvy than the full group was months earlier. But that doesn’t mean they pull any punches.

“CDs should be $10. That’s it.”

“I need to hear more than a 30-second sample of a song.”

“Yeah, I’ve downloaded before. But I spend more money on music than ever.”

“I’ve been to too many shows that weren’t worth my money.”

“There are ways to get around the controls you put on CDs.”

“Dualdiscs suck.”

“The ROKR [music phone] sucks.”

“Radio sucks.”

“I would have satellite radio right now if it wasn’t so expensive.”

The general message they seemed to be getting at was this:

We’re not trying to steal from anyone, and this isn’t a revolution. We want you to do better by us, because we’re your best customers. But you’d better stop trying to sneak things past us, and start paying attention to what we want. Because now we have the tools to ignore you right back.

Problem is, the people who should have been listening were probably at an open bar somewhere.

To see what else the kids are saying, visit www.whatsthedownload.com.
http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=3927





BlazeFS Promises Faster Mac File Sharing
Peter Cohen

Small Tree Communications on Wednesday announced BlazeFS, a new file sharing system the company plans to demonstrate at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Calif., which runs from January 9 - 13, 2005.

BlazeFS is a new high-performance file system designed to work with Macs equipped with Gigabit Ethernet and 10Gb Ethernet networking interfaces, such as those Small Tree sells for the Mac.

Transparent to client systems, BlazeFS works as if the files were on a local disk. Small Tree claims the system can drive data to the maximum speed of a Gigabit Ethernet link.

BlazeFS is aimed at users who need to store and exchange large data files, such as uncompressed HD video, over a network file server rather than locally. Video editors, content creators, print media and rendering farms can potentially benefit from the fast filing sharing technology, according to Small Tree.

Small Tree hadn’t updated its Web site with information on BlazeFS as Macworld posted this article. Pricing was not announced.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/01...zefs/index.php





RIAA Tries Using Grokster As A Fright Tactic
Eric Bangeman

After the media industry prevailed over Grokster in MGM v. Grokster, we knew it was a matter of time before Grokster ceased to be a going concern. That came to pass in November, when Grokster gave up the ghost as part of the settlement in the case. Although the company claimed to have grandiose plans to recast itself as a legitimate service (where have we heard that before?), visitors to its webpage were greeted with the following bit of recording industry propaganda.

The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners...

The RIAA already has my IP address.
Do you think I'm going to let you see it?
Since an admonition from the Supreme Court apparently hasn't been enough to put the fear of God into the black hearts of file sharers, the RIAA is ratcheting up the scare tactics. Visitors to grokster.com are now greeted with the same message along with their IP address. They are told that the IP address has been logged and are left with the ominous-sounding threat:

Don't think you can't get caught. You are not anonymous.

By way of refresher, RIAA has relied almost exclusively on records of IP addresses subpoenaed from ISPs. Naturally, using IPs as a means for positive identification has its limitations, as by themselves, they don't provide substantive clues about the identity of the person behind the IP address. This has led to the now-familiar mistakes involving a 66- year-old Mac-owning sculptor and a deceased grandmother.

By now, most people realize that surfing the web is not an anonymous endeavor. Indeed, web servers log IP addresses by default. Many are even aware of the RIAA's use of IP addresses. Apparently, the hope is that the Grokster page will function as an abbreviated Scared Straight, where would-be IP criminals are confronted with incontrovertible evidence that they can and will be hunted down by the minions of the media industry.

The problem with that approach is twofold. First, there's no evidence that the IP address displayed at grokster.com is actually being sent anywhere. Secondly, even if the IPs are, all the RIAA is going to end up with is a giant list of IP addresses pointing to places like Yahoo, Microsoft, and just about every other company that doesn't filter out sites like Grokster. The IPs have been logged all along, so if the RIAA was going to do something with the list of IP addresses, it has had plenty of time to take action. The fact of the matter is that an IP address alone doesn't amount to much, and we may see that issue addressed soon in court.

Seeing your IP address in 16-point Arial bold might scare off the occasional 13-year-old looking for the latest from Linkin Park, but it seems to me that pursuing a strategy of trying to scare your target market into buying your products is a strategy of debatable wisdom.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060103-5888.html





Korea

Copyright Bill Sparks Protest

New bill strengthening copyright protection of Internet material under fire from Internet companies and consumer rights advocates
Kim Tong-hyung

A move by lawmakers to strengthen copyright protection of Internet-based material has touched off a heated debate on whether content providers should be allowed direct control over what customers can do with their products.

Last month, lawmakers from the National Assembly Culture and Tourism Committee presented a bill designed to toughen the legal and technological protections over copyrighted material distributed on the Internet and reduce unauthorized copying.

According to the bill initiated by ruling Uri Party lawmaker Woo Sang-ho, Internet companies, which provide services that allow "reproduction" and "sharing" of digital contents, will be able to introduce measures, such as anti-privacy programs, that control the access and distribution of copyrighted materials at the individual level.

Furthermore, Internet companies could face punishment if they fail to shut down Web sites, including online communities and weblogs, or personal Internet diaries, that provide unauthorized access to copyrighted content.

In one of its most debated articles, the bill authorizes the Minister of Culture and Tourism the power to erase unlawfully distributed content on the Internet.

Under the bill, law enforcement authorities will also be allowed to investigate and punish individuals or companies that distribute content without authorization, even without a complaint filed by the copyright holder.

Currently, copyright violation is an offense subject to complaint by the content's creator.

Lawmakers supporting the bill have called for stronger restrictions against the huge quantities of copyrighted material illegally circulating on the Internet every day.

However, the bill has drawn a fierce backlash from critics, including consumer rights advocates and Internet companies, who worry content creators would be given unprecedented control over consumers should the bill pass the National Assembly.

"The problem is that the bill loosely defines that Internet services providing 'reproduction' and `sharing' of digital content should be subject to regulation," said Kim Young-hong, an activist from Citizens' Action Network.

"This virtually opens the possibility of an extensive range of Internet services, not only peer-to-peer (P2P) programs but even online hard-disk services and e-mail services, which are increasingly used for sharing multimedia content, being controlled excessively by copyright holders," he said.

Kim also balked at the idea to give the Culture Minister the authority to erase materials from the Internet, saying that the power could be abused as a censorship method.

There are also concerns that the increased control over the use of Internet contents could eventually infringe on people's privacy and make the circulation of works even in the public domain more difficult.

"In short, the new bill is an assault on basic consumer liberties," said Kim.

It is not just the cyber libertarians who are concerned by the newly proposed restrictions. Internet companies, mostly e-mail providers and Web portal operators, such as NHN, Yahoo!Korea and Daum Communications, said the bill could threaten the very base of their business models should it be legislated.

"The bill allows regulation over virtually every kind of Internet-based services. Considering that the Internet companies rely for their development and marketing of services on user patterns, limiting consumer freedom over online contents will have a devastating impact on business," said a public relations official from Daum Commuincations.

The criticism has forced Rep. Woo on the defensive. He has tried to downplay the concerns that his bill on copyright protection might lead to excessive control over a broad range of services.

"The bill covers Internet activities such as peer-to-peer services and online hard-disk services, not basic services such as e-mail or instant messengers," said Woo in a public hearing over the bill he organized last month.

Woo also said, under the design of his bill, the Culture Minister will not be able to erase materials on the Internet without consent from a copyright reviewing panel within the ministry.

Standing on the opposite side of consumer advocates and Internet companies are content creators such as entertainment and publishing companies, which raise concerns that advances in Internet penetration and speed are accelerating the copying and distribution of contents such as text, video images and music, causing irrevocable damage to their industries.

Among the most vocal voices advocating stronger copyright protection is the Korean Association of Phonogram Producers (KAPP), a music industry lobby that last year successfully managed to shut down Soribada, the country's largest file-sharing network, after a lengthy court battle.

Soribada had operated the country's largest peer-to-peer network with more than 5 million subscribers and 400,000 concurrent users.

"The Internet allows unauthorized copying and distributing of works at low cost, which results in infringement of intellectual property. It is about time that policymakers come up with a legal framework to protect it," said KAPP official Park Jae-gap.

The local recording industry has been arguing that the unauthorized downloading of files has been hurting sales. But critics say that the causal link does not exist.

Online file sharing through peer-to-peer networks has become an increasingly contentious issue in Korea, where more than 70 percent of households have an Internet connection.

According to the Samsung Economic Research Institute, the digital music market first overtook the size of the offline market in 2003, when it reached over 190 billion won.

However, critics are skeptical of how far record companies could push their campaign to reduce illegal music downloads.

They point out that the demise of the CD-based music market has more to do with a loss of the market share than to individual peer-to-peer activities, with sales from Web sites and telecom operators replacing a large part of the traditional market.
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/articl...parentid=36372





Man Convicted Of International DVD Trafficking
Valerie Bauman

A man arrested on charges of running an international counterfeit DVD ring pleaded guilty in federal court in Mississippi on Tuesday, said U.S. Attorney
Dunn Lampton.

Randolph Hobson Guthrie III was convicted of conspiracy to traffic counterfeit goods.

Guthrie was arrested after a joint intellectual property rights investigation by U.S. and Chinese authorities and pleaded guilty before Federal District Judge Louis Guirola, Jr.

He forfeited $823,333 to the U.S. government and faces up to 5 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.

Sentencing is scheduled for March 14.

The probe that led to the charges began in September 2003 when an undercover U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Gulfport bought counterfeit DVDs at a flea market in Harrison County. The investigation grew to be the first undercover operation conducted jointly by ICE and Chinese authorities, said Don Burkhalter, the executive assistant to U.S. Attorney Lampton.

"It was a fairly significant case because it was one of the first times that the Chinese government had cooperated with the U.S. government to address the counterfeit issue," Burkhalter said. "Difficulties are inherent in any operation that involves going into foreign countries and using their law enforcement."

Chinese authorities convicted Guthrie, of New York City, and another man, Abram Cody Thrush, in April of distributing more than $840,000 worth of pirated motion picture DVDs on the Internet.

The DVDs were distributed in more than 20 countries, including about 20,000 discs to U.S. buyers.

Chinese prosecutors said Guthrie has illegally sold some 180,000 pirated DVDs around the globe through eBay.com and a Russian based Web site. Guthrie and five others were arrested in 2004 and more than 210,000 counterfeit DVDs were seized and three warehouses containing the pirated material were destroyed.

"This ... was an extremely large operation," Burkhalter said. "As a result of that, performing artists lost thousands and thousands of dollars."

Guthrie was sentenced to 30 months in Chinese prison, fined approximately $60,000 and deportation upon the completion of his sentence.

But Guthrie was deported before serving any of his Chinese sentence, Department of Homeland Security officials said.

He was expelled to the U.S. in September 2005 and ICE agents arrested Guthrie immediately upon his arrival in Los Angeles.

"I don't think Guthrie will be involved with any counterfeit processes in China in the near future," Burkhalter said. "It's an easy way to make money - you don't have to pay any royalties and the reproduction costs are practically nothing ... he was making money hand over fist."

The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc., an advocate of the film, home video and television industries, has watched Guthrie's international case as it developed.

"I applaud the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Mississippi and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for their diligent effort to bring this ringleader of movie theft to justice and to ensure that the penalties for his crimes are properly assessed," said Dan Glickman, Chairman and CEO of the MPAA, in a statement.

The Southern District of Mississippi issued an 18 count indictment against Guthrie in July 2005. Guthrie was charged with conspiracy, smuggling, trafficking in counterfeit goods, money laundering conspiracy, criminal forfeiture, and criminal copyright infringement violations.

The investigation, entitled "Operation Spring," included ICE agents in China, an ICE Special Agent-in-Charge Office in Houston, the National Intellectual Property Rights Center in Washington, D.C. and the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigations Division.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was established in March 2003. It is the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/mo...s/13543338.htm





Lobbygate

Abramoff Scandal Sends Waves Across Washington
Andy Sullivan

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff's guilty plea in a U.S. corruption probe sent shock waves across Washington on Wednesday as top Republicans sought to avoid being tainted by the scandal and Democrats pressed the issue.

President George W. Bush and House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois were among Republicans who donated to charity campaign contributions they had received from Abramoff, while Democrats said the issue would loom large in November's congressional elections.

Others said the investigation would bring needed discipline to a lobbying industry that has enjoyed a freewheeling culture and record earnings.

"A lot of the relationships around lobbying have been awfully loose and enforcement of existing laws has been fairly lax," said Doug Pinkham, president of the Public Affairs Council, a lobbying-industry trade group.

Officials with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an influential business organization, said the scandal could encourage lobbying-reform legislation and spur lawmakers to work harder to pass substantive legislation this year.

Abramoff pleaded guilty on Wednesday to wire-fraud charges for falsifying loan documents in the purchase of a Florida gambling-ship fleet, one day after he pleaded guilty to a separate set of charges in Washington.

As part of both deals, he will help Justice Department investigators probing whether members of Congress gave Abramoff and his clients favorable treatment in return for campaign contributions, sports tickets and other gifts.

Abramoff's cooperation makes the Justice Department's case much easier, a former prosecutor said.

"The real issue is intent -- what was the intent with which an official committed an act?" said Roma Theus, a Florida lawyer who prosecuted corruption cases with the Justice Department. "Testimony of an insider is critical, because it shows what the actual mind-set was, the thought process was."

However, a Justice Department official cautioned against speculation that the corruption probe might lead to a large number of indictments against lawmakers.

"These are very difficult cases to make," the official said. "We will take the evidence where it goes."

Investigators are examining Abramoff's links to at least four congressional Republicans, including former House Republican Leader Tom DeLay of Texas and Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio. Abramoff admitted yesterday to providing golf trips, sports tickets and other gifts to lawmakers in return for special treatment.

Ney and DeLay have said that they have done nothing illegal.

Though Abramoff personally only gave money to Republicans his Indian-tribe clients contributed to Democrats as well, campaign-finance records show.

Several senators who oversee Indian affairs, including Montana Republican Conrad Burns and North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan, have returned donations from Abramoff or his clients.

National Republican campaign groups received $1.24 million from sources linked to Abramoff since 1999, while Democratic groups took in $844,000 during that same time period, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

Republicans said that proves that Democrats are equally involved in the scandal, but Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Karen Finney said that wasn't the case.

"Jack Abramoff used his Republican contacts to create an extensive pay-to-play system with Republican members of Congress where political money was used for policy outcomes," she said. "I do not think the evidence has shown such on the other side."

Finney said Democrats would highlight the issue in November's congressional elections. A Republican campaign official said voters won't blame their Republican representatives if a member of the same party is found guilty of corruption.

"I don't know of anyone who lost a race because of something another member did or didn't do," said National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Carl Forti.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted that politicians would try to pin the scandal on lobbyists, but that they are to blame as well.

"You can't have a corrupt lobbyist unless you also have a corrupt member and corrupt staff," Gingrich said at the Rotary Club of Washington. "This was a team effort."

(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Deborah Charles, Alan Elsner and Rick Cowan)
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...F-CONGRESS.xml





5 Transmissions From the Post-TV Frontier
Holly Willis

Television has been getting a much-needed makeover this year, thanks in part to the advent of new portable video-playing devices. The networks are scrambling to jump on the bandwagon by offering to sell episodes of various existing shows, and new companies like Lime are forming to create “next generation” media. But far more interesting is the explosion of independently produced video blogs offering lots of surprisingly great amateur video material. Add that to the always-improving peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent and Veoh, which collect and efficiently distribute high-quality video, and video-hosting sites like YouTube and Ourmedia, which help disseminate it easily, and you get an explosion of media made by the people for the people. TV is unidirectional and devoted to its advertisers; post-TV media are made for and distributed among communities of user/producers in many-to-many networks that open things up. Below, five great online “shows” that reference TV in some way but go well beyond it.

This Spartan Life | www.thisspartanlife.com| Damian Lacedaemion’s talk show features his interviews with media artists and pundits. But instead of doing it in text or video, he meets his guests on the battlefields of the Halo online shooter game, and they converse while dodging would-be assassins. Interview subjects in this award-winning machinima show include experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, Future of the Book founder Bob Stein and machinima mavens Ill Clan.

Rocketboom | www.rocketboom.com | Rocketboom is a three-minute variety show made up of material culled from the Internet and organized by themes. The September 27 episode, for example, features a clip from Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ experimental 1987 film The Way Things Go, the 2003 Honda Cog commercial that’s an “homage” to the film, as well as a hilarious spoof of the original, all in a quick sequence with host Amanda Congdon making witty connections.

ACLU’s Freedom Files | www.aclu.tv | In August, the ACLU began hosting a series of 30-minute downloadable videos focused on civil liberties. The first one is about the Patriot Act, and the second is about the Supreme Court, focusing on the case of teenager Lyndsay Earls, who was required to take a urine drug test to sing in the choir. Co-produced by Brave New Films, the series is designed to inaugurate a form of “information activism” by creating a wider context online for considering — and then acting on — the issues raised in each show.

Nerd TV | www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv | This online talk show from PBS.org, hosted by Robert X. Cringely, is about all things geek. And while in terms of form it’s fairly standard talking-heads material, the show is distributed under a Creative Commons license, which means viewers can re-cut and re-mix episodes and share them with others. Interviewees have included Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Hillman Curtis’ Designer Series | www.hillmancurtis.com/hc_web/film_video.shtml | Hillman Curtis recently began making short (five- to seven-minute) profiles of design legends, including Milton Glaser, Paula Scher and David Carson. They’re lovely pieces, with footage that is designed more than photographed.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=71538





BBC Offers Classic News Clips For Free
Jeremy Reimer

The British Broadcasting Corporation has launched a new website that offers a broad selection of classic news clips for download. There are currently 80 news events covering everything from England's last soccer World Cup win in 1966 to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The clips are being offered as part of a pilot trial in the UK, as part of their "Creative Archive" licensing project. This is the second such trial to be offered by the BBC, the first being the release of 100 audio program clips from Radio 1. Paul Gerhardt, the Project Director of the BBC Creative Archive, explained why the program is being unveiled a bit at a time:

This is an entirely new kind of service from the BBC. For the first time we are sharing content with the public, who have already paid for it, and also allowing you to share it with others - as long as it is not used for commercial purposes. The Creative Archive is also about the potential of technology and the ways in which we can now all create moving images, as well as consume them.

So, for the Creative Archive to be a part of the future BBC, there are some important things to find out. How many people are likely to use this service? Are the legal arrangements clear? And with the Creative Archive being free, what is its impact on the existing commercial market for TV, film and sound? How you use these clips, extracts and programmes will certainly have an impact on our research.

The Creative Archive license is a derivative of the Creative Commons license with extra restrictions. It allows anyone to download and use the video clips for any purpose, with the following stipulations:

The derived works must be non-commercial
All derived works must also be licensed under the Creative Archive
All sources must be accredited
No derogatory or politically biased use is allowed
The material is only available for people in the United Kingdom

It is the last of these terms that is the real stickler for the majority of people. The BBC website allows you to browse all video clips but when you go to download them, the server checks your IP address to see if you are coming from outside the UK. If you are, a reminder about the Creative Archive license rules is displayed instead.

The clips are available in three formats: Windows Media 9 (.WMV), Quicktime (.MOV) and MPEG-1 (.MPG) and are not encumbered with digital rights management (DRM).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060103-5889.html





GNU Telephony Stack Opens Up VoIP
Sean Michael Kerner

The GNU (define) Telephony stack is out and aiming to provide users of proprietary VoIP (define) stacks with a free software alternative.

The GNU Telephony stack is backed by support from Tycho Softworks, whose owner is also the maintainer of GNU Bayonne, one of the key components of the stack.

The GNU Telephony stack includes a long list of GNU-sponsored telephony related applications. GNU (which is a recursive acronym for GNU is not UNIX) is an effort sponsored by the Free Software Foundation.

The Telephony stack includes the GNU Bayonne telecommunications application server, the Troll ip/pstn gateway packages, the GNU RTP (define) stack, the Open H.323 stack and the GNU Gatekeeper H.323 call server. The GNU Telephony stack also supports SIP (define) byway of PartySIP. Drivers for Sangoma and Voicetronix are also part of the mix.

David Sugar, owner of Tycho Softworks and the GNU Bayonne maintainer, said the organizational effort behind the stack came has simplicity in mind.

"We had wanted to put together all the current components into a simple to install stack," Sugar told internetnews.com. "The idea had existed for awhile, but there was time recently to organize it currently."

Though to date there hasn't been a stack organizing all the various GNU telephony components, that's not say that those components have not been adopted commercially. Sugar noted that Bayonne is used by over 1000 organizations worldwide, commercial and governmental. GNU Gatekeeper is used by Deutch Telecom for its national VoIP h.323 network.

Still, the fact there was not a simple way to address the complete telephony picture using free software from GNU was a potential barrier to adoption of GNU-sponsored telephony initiatives.

"In GNU, there is individually Bayonne, and there are related and important projects, like GNOME Meeting, GNU Gatekeeper, and sip projects like libexosip2 and partysip (from antisip.com)," Sugar said. "All are freely licensed under the GPL, but none have been presented together for building complete solutions in this way before."

The VoIP world is certainly no stranger to free/open source software solutions. The Asterisk IP-PBX, which recently released version 1.2 has been making headway in the market for over a year and has claimed to be an innovator of VoIP in general.

Asterisk and the GNU Telephony Stack are not necessarily competitive efforts, though they could be.

"Asterisk is a IP-PBX, and tends to be compute bound," Sugar explained. "In GNU Telephony we focus mainly on peer-to- peer, where endpoints directly communicate, and so we are network bound. The GNU Telephony stack is hence targeted first at users who need VoIP or traditional telephone support, with large scalability."

Sugar admits that there may be some overlap between the efforts. However since both are free software licensed (the GPL in most cases), he noted that GNU Telephony would also be willing to use Asterisk in those places where it may fit best.

"Our view is enterprise centric, and how to work with and integrate to other things, rather than PBX centric, and how to make other things work with a specific PBX," Sugar said. "So if or where we do compete, it is probably on the conceptual and architectural level, as well as in the marketplace."
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news...le.php/3574246





CES

Music Players Lead Digital Surge
Alf Hermida

More and more people are buying into the idea of carrying their music, and now video, with them.

According to figures released by the organisers of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), sales of MP3 players soared by 200% in 2005 to $3bn
(£1.73bn).

The trend will continue in 2006, as more video-playing gadgets appear, with sales expected to hit $4.5bn.

Dozens of such gizmos are expected to be on show at CES in Las Vegas, which starts on Thursday.

Phenomenal growth

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, organisers of CES, MP3 players were the most desired gifts for this past Christmas. By contrast, a year ago portable players did not even feature in the top 10 wish lists of many consumers.

"We have witnessed this year a phenomenal growth in MP3," said Sean Wargo, director of industry analysis for the CEA, at a pre-show briefing.

"We have a lot to be thankful to Apple and the iPod in terms of the growth they are bringing to the industry."

While the various iPods account for a large chunk of the market for MP3 players, others such as Creative, Samsung and iRiver are trying to grab a bigger slice of the pie.

As well as music on the go, people are increasingly looking to gadgets that also play video.

Apple kick-started the trend toward portable video in October 2005 when it launched an iPod that could play movies, despite the fact that other devices already handled video.

Last year, 15% of MP3 players sold could also play video, according to the CEA. In 2006, that figure is set to rise to 30%.

Gaming hubs

The idea of being able to listen to music or watch video wherever and whenever you want is also changing the shape of home entertainment.

"We have got consumers used to being time and place independent," said Mr Wargo.

"Since we all have huge digital libraries at home, how can I store and harness my digital content in the home?"

Mr Wargo referred to what he described as a media server explosion. By this he meant the introduction of boxes in the home that can store audio, video or pictures and deliver the content to any screen, anywhere in the home.

Ironically, this long heralded digital entertainment hub may turn out to be not a PC or dedicated device, but one of the new generation of games consoles.

Microsoft has already launched its Xbox 360, and Sony and Nintendo are following suit with their machines this year.

The processing power, storage capacity and online connectivity of the devices are expanding the capabilities of consoles beyond games.

"The console is something more than a gaming device," said Mr Wargo. "Now we are seeing it as a hub for media entertainment in the home. There is also the potential, particularly with Xbox 360, to reach a community."

The new consoles are expected to tempt Americans to spend more cash on video games.

The CEA predicts spending on consoles and games will hit $14bn in the US in 2006, up from $12bn last year.

Flat screens

The new gaming machines are expected to drive more people to invest in new flat screen TVs.

"They want full on entertainment systems to harness their gaming systems," said Mr Wargo.

The CEA predicts Americans will spend $23bn on new digital TVs in 2006, much of these on flat panel displays such as LCD and plasma screens.

In total, spending on consumer electronics overall is set to hit a record $135.4bn in the US this year, according to the CEA.

The huge market in digital entertainment is reflected in the size of CES. The show has more than 2,500 exhibitors spread over 1.6 million square feet

The expo, which is off limits to the public, is expected to attract 130,000 business executives, dealers, journalists and investors from 5 to 8 January.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/4580244.stm





Data, Music, Video: Raising a Curtain on Future Gadgetry
Damon Darlin

The flat-panel televisions will be getting bigger, the MP3 players and cellphones will be getting smaller. And almost everything will be getting cheaper.

But the biggest trend expected at the International Consumer Electronics Show, which begins this week in Las Vegas, is that these machines will be communicating with one another. The theme of this year's show might best be described as Convergence: This Time We Mean It.

For more than a decade, manufacturers of consumer electronics like televisions and audio gear have talked about blending their products with personal computers, so that consumers can enjoy a seamless stream of data, video and music anywhere. It has not happened, because the two industries do not have compatible technology standards and the requisite high-speed Internet connections have not been widespread enough.

This year all that changes, say executives who will be introducing new products at the show. They say that consumers will finally be able to sling images and sound wirelessly around a room or an entire house. The major electronics makers will be showing TV's with computer capabilities and phones that will play video and music, as well as the next generation of digital recording and storage devices.

While technological convergence may now be possible, some fear the industries have not yet made connecting all those devices simple enough for the average user.

"There is still a lot of confusion around the connected home," said Van L. Baker, a market analyst with Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm. "Reducing it will be the challenge to keeping the momentum going."

Getting consumers past the confusion of how to link, say, a PC to a TV will be the next big hurdle.

The show comes after a very good year for consumer electronics. Plasma and liquid-crystal display televisions, MP3 players and digital cameras with five or more megapixels of resolution have been big sellers.

"We don't see any reason that this will slow down anytime soon," Mr. Baker said. "The transition of entertainment from analog to digital, of time-shifting and place- shifting, is just getting under way."

Attendees of the electronics show, the biggest trade show in the country, will be scrambling to get a first glimpse at some of the products that will fuel the growth of the industry, which represents $126 billion in annual sales. The annual exhibition is off limits to the general public, but it is expected to attract 130,000 executives, dealers, journalists and investors.

More than 2,500 exhibitors, a record, spread across 1.6 million square feet, another record, will try to grab their attention. This year, 6 percent of the exhibitors will be from China, illustrating that nation's significance as a major player in the industry. Among foreign attendees, China will rank third, behind Canada and Taiwan.

The show is more than just a display of new technological toys. It is also a forum for industry executives to forge alliances and present new business strategies.

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, will give his vision of the future in a speech Wednesday evening. Sir Howard Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of Sony, will take his turn Thursday morning. On Friday morning Terry Semel, the chairman and chief executive of Yahoo, will speak, followed later that day by Larry Page, a co-founder of Google.

Intel plans a major announcement about its new Viiv (rhymes with drive) multimedia platform, which will power PC's built to deliver digital entertainment. Intel hopes that Viiv will transform the home computer in the same way that its Centrino platform transformed the laptop into a mobile communications device. Paul S. Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, will give a speech Thursday evening outlining Intel's road map.

Manufacturers are expecting another record year in 2006, but with continuing declines in prices. Across a broad swath of categories like cameras and audio and DVD players, consumers will pay less and get more features. Even in the flat-panel TV industry, prices dropped as much as 40 percent in 2005. This trend will translate into slower revenue growth in 2006.

As for new areas of growth, analysts are predicting big sales of game consoles in 2006 as Sony introduces its PlayStation 3 and Nintendo brings out its Revolution console. Both devices, like the new Microsoft Xbox 360, can be used as the central node for a wirelessly networked home.

Electronics companies will also be introducing new home media servers and TV's that can receive digital content wirelessly from a PC or via an HDMI cable (for high-definition multimedia interface). Another hot topic at the show will be IPTV, or Internet protocol television, which sends programming over the Internet through a broadband connection.

Then there are the companies, like Elan Home Systems, that want to get right in the middle and sell devices to control all the networked appliances. Elan will be at the show introducing a control pad for everything in your house, from electronic devices to the drapes.

While major players in the electronics industry continue to squabble over the format of the next generation of DVD's - Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD - both factions will be showing products that consumers can buy this year. The new players will be expensive, some costing more than $1,000. Still, the industry expects to sell about a half- million of the new players in 2006, mostly as components in PC's rather than as stand-alone devices.

In the audio sector, companies are seeking ways to take advantage of the popularity and dominance of the Apple iPod. Several manufacturers are planning to announce products that will work with the iPod to move music to devices around the house.

Another big trend, said Steve Tirado, chief executive of Silicon Image, a semiconductor maker, is bigger storage devices. "People want a place to consolidate their digital media."

Ross Rubin, the director for industry analysis at NPD, a market research firm, said that apart from home networking systems, some new technologies would make their way to consumer markets this year.

Canon and Toshiba will both present televisions with surface-conduction electron-emitter displays. The technology produces crisper pictures than can be offered by existing flat-panel televisions, the manufacturers say. The sets will go on sale later this year.

Other Asian TV manufacturers will also demonstrate sets built with new organic light-emitting diodes that use less energy and could one day be cheaper to produce than liquid-crystal display panels.

Another notable product development to be seen at the show is the miniaturization of cathode-ray tube technology to fit into flat-panel televisions, allowing what could be the best-quality picture yet. "They will be very high end, very expensive," said Mr. Rubin. But like that of so many products at the show, the price will eventually go down.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/te...ectronics.html





D-Link Shows Off Streaming HD Media Server
Rob Squires

ON THE road of pushing networking technology to the limit in my home theater I am hoping that this CES show will raise the standards bar yet again. D-Link has started off by releasing what seems to be the first streaming HD media server. Building on its existing line of MediaLounge products, D-Link has introduced their Wireless HD Media Server (DSM-5210R).

Like the previous models, the unit allows users to conveniently store/ share and play back photos, music. The new features include the ability to stream high definition videos over a home network, as well as a 100GB of built-in storage and a 5-in-1 media card reader.

The Wireless HD Media Server can store content that can be streamed to other MediaLounge devices in the home network. The device supports all the popular media formats, including high-definition video in either Windows Media Video 9, or the MPEG-2 & 4 format up to 1080i resolution. Standard definition video is supported through XVID Video and Ogg Vorbis audio. Microsoft's Windows Media Connect is supported which allows users to access their entire library of content protected by Windows Digital Rights Management. The easy-to-use interface supports picture-in-picture so users can browse on-screen menus while watching videos.

A simplified remote control ships with the Wireless HD MediaLounge and allows users to access media from across the local network or order Internet songs and media from a variety of online music stores

The D-Link Wireless HD Media Server features a 17-inch black aluminum frame with a smoked mirror front panel. A 5-in-1 memory card reader and USB port on the front panel enable easy access to music, photos and videos stored on removable media. D-Link added a one- touch copy feature that transfers the contents of removable media directly to the internal storage. The USB port can also be used to attach a USB hard drive, expanding the available storage that can then be streamed to other MediaLounge devices on the network.

A High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) allows for a single, pure digital audio and video connection for use with compatible high-definition televisions. Users can enjoy videos in up to 1080i resolution. The MediaLounge also included connections for component, S-video composite output, as well as coax and optical digital audio output.

Networking company D-Link announced today at CES an integrated desktop solution that delivers network security from viruses, SPAM, pop- ups, spyware, and other unwanted content. The SecureSpot solution is designed to provide multi-tiered protection from both current and emerging Internet security threats.

By consolidating the firewall, antivirus, intrusion detection, content filtering, pop-up and spyware killers, the D-Link SecureSpot performs multiple security functions with a single plug-and-play device and a web- hosted control center.

D-Link has integrated a personal firewall that is simple to use, and is designed to complement the product's anti-virus solution. Part of the firewall is a built-in intrusion detection system that monitors and logs open connections for suspicious behavior. The Sophos Anti-Virus service based on the SecureSpot protects clients against high-risk viruses, worms and Trojan programs.

The D-Link SecureSpot allows users' to make personal choices in content filtering while not slow down Internet traffic. Content filtering has been divided into 34 categories, with individual site block and unblock features. Selective filtering of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications, Instant Messaging (IM) and other programs (IRC, FTP, etc.) are also supported.

SecureSpot provides a client-server based pop-up killer that eliminates known pop-ups from known adware/spyware sites. Users can also input their own information into the pop-up database for anything that slips through the system. The filter can also be easily bypassed by a hot key override when needed.

D-Link's anti-spyware feature blocks adware and spyware applications based upon a server-based list of spyware sites. It also logs and warns users against intrusion attempts from malicious programs.

SecureSpot's Spam Blocker is an easy-to-use, easy-to-install, self- configuring email filter. Unlike some spam filters/blockers that require changes to your e-mail client, D-Link does not require changes to most email programs.

The solution is designed to be affordable and user-friendly to provide security for the home and small business environment. The browser based control panel simplifies administration of single or multiple PCs. virus scan times and other tasks can be performed anywhere on the network for one or all computers. SecureSpot automatically updates and secures virus definitions, URL databases, spyware and spam server lists and all network tools.

The SecureSpot is designed for the home or small office network. The D- Link SecureSpot supports Microsoft Windows 98 and higher, as well as Apple OSX 10.3 and 10.4.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28723





Internet Lampposts To Be Trialled

Smart lampposts that could provide high-speed internet access are set to go on trial in Scotland.

The idea will be piloted later this month in Dundee but could spread further afield.

Backers of the project plan to install six of the solar-powered, internet-capable lights on a rooftop at the University of Abertay.

Later in the year they plan to install up to 4,000 more in a student village to be built for the university.

The idea will combine lampposts with solar energy and wi-fi wireless internet access.

Compliance Technology

The lamppost will use light-emitting diode (LED) technology to provide bright light using low power derived from solar cells, which use daylight to recharge even in overcast weather.

As the Dundee scheme will be on university property the council is not involved.

However, the company running the scheme, Compliance Technology (CTL), said interest had already been shown by three other councils in Scotland; Orkney, Perth and Kinross, and Dumfries and Galloway.

The firm, whose Scottish arm is based in Kirkcaldy, has European distribution rights for the Singapore-based "StarSight" technology.

The firm argued the idea will have massive potential for local authorities, which could could turn their lighting systems into revenue earners.

'Innovative project'

Calum McRae, of CTL, said: "With only a fraction of the installation and running costs of conventional street lights, councils could use smart lampposts to provide street light while selling internet access to local residents, or even providing it free in areas of need.

"The new photovoltaic technology which will be showcased in Dundee will mean that no local community needs to be without reliable, economic street lighting, with the added benefit of wi-fi technology outside their front doors."

Mary Cowie, director of the University of Abertay Centre for the Environment (ACE), said: "The pilot scheme will involve not only ACE but students from the University of Abertay who will be able to play a hands-on role in shaping the technology of tomorrow."

The centre will be involved in testing the technology and assessing its social, environmental and economic impact.

Green MSP Robin Harper said: "This is a truly exciting and innovative project with huge possibilities in sustainability terms, and in reducing environmental impact."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nd/4579718.stm





RaySat SpeedRay 3000

Turn Any Vehicle Into A Wi-Fi Hotspot

The idea of an internet hotspot on wheels might sound far- fetched. But one of the products on show at CES can turn any vehicle into a wi-fi zone.

The SpeedRay 3000 by RaySat is a round, low profile antenna designed to go on the roof of a vehicle and access satellite TV and broadband.

The system is said to provide an always-on connection on the move, using GPS technology to track the location of a satellite. Inside, the antenna rotates and tilts to adjust its position.

"As long as you have line of sight to the satellite, you are fine," said RaySat's Lynette Henley, adding that the signal would drop somewhere like New York because of the skyscrapers.

People who own motor homes are seen as the main audience for the system, as well as the emergency services and the military.

But communication on the go comes at a high price, with the antenna costing $7,000, together with monthly subscription costs. It is due to go on sale in the US in the summer.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4580332.stm





Japan's Chip Makers Search for a Strategy
Martin Fackler

In the late 1980's, Japan dominated the global computer chip industry, overtaking the United States in what was seen as a symbol of American economic decline and Japanese ascendance.

Those roles have been reversed. Japan's global market share is now half of what it was then, while Intel of Santa Clara, Calif., has risen to become the world's largest and most profitable chip maker. Indeed, Intel and Samsung Electronics, a South Korean company that was not even in the picture in Japan's glory days, together have a market share as large as the combined shares of the 20 large Japanese chip makers tracked by the research firm iSuppli.

Japanese chip makers are trying to snap out of this decline by joining forces, either by sharing factory construction costs or through outright mergers. The latest move came Dec. 28, when the Japanese chip makers Hitachi, Toshiba and Renesas Technology announced they were in talks to jointly build a semiconductor factory, a project that would be backed by the government. The media has called the plant the Rising Sun chip factory, after Japan's flag.

Efforts to combine forces have failed in the past: a wave of mergers two years ago produced companies as unprofitable as their predecessors.

At their height in 1988, Japanese companies produced 51 percent of the world's semiconductors, and the top three chip makers by market share - NEC, Toshiba and Hitachi - were all Japanese. Now, Japanese companies have a combined share of 23.4 percent of the $237.3 billion global semiconductor market, according to iSuppli. Just three Japanese companies made the Top 10.

"This has been a lost decade and a half for Japanese semiconductor companies," said Yoshiharu Izumi, an analyst at J. P. Morgan Securities. "Japan has been caught between the United States and Asia, and this middle ground keeps shrinking."

The chip makers' woes have spurred much soul-searching in Japan, where the industry had been a source of national pride. But analysts say an intense sense of national mission in Japan's chip industry has been one cause of its undoing.

For years, chip makers helped the country's export machine by supplying consumer electronics companies with every type of semiconductor imaginable, often at little regard for profits. Much of this was done in-house, as many of today's chip companies started life as divisions of Japanese electronics giants.

Chip sales rose while Japan's consumer electronics were globally dominant, but plunged when the world started buying cheaper televisions, laptop computers and other products made elsewhere in Asia. As losses mounted, many Japanese electronics companies could no longer afford their chip operations and spun them off as separate companies. These new companies lacked the cash to keep pace with the billions of dollars that rivals like Intel and Samsung were spending on new factories and production lines.

Now, many analysts here say, the only way the industry can save itself is by learning from American chip makers like Intel and Texas Instruments, which reinvented themselves two decades ago in response to Japan's strength. These United States companies succeeded by building strong overseas sales networks and concentrating their resources on a small number of products that they made well. Intel focused on building microprocessors, the brains of personal computers, and now dominates the global market. Texas Instruments specialized in chips used in cellphones.

"In the 1980's, the United States figured out a new business strategy," said Toshio Nakajima, president of NEC Electronics, the chip subsidiary of the Japanese electronics giant NEC. NEC fell from being the world's largest chip maker in 1988 to the 10th-largest today. "It is remarkable how these American companies learned to compete."

Mr. Nakajima said his company might eventually focus production on just three types of chips, though it had not decided which three. "It's a big risk to limit yourself to a small number of products. Those have to be very strong products," he said.

Toshiba is doing well focusing production on a specialized product, advanced NAND flash memory chips that are used in digital cameras and music players like the Apple iPod. Toshiba's chip revenues are expected to have grown a healthy 7 percent in 2005, according to iSuppli. (Like most companies, Toshiba does not break out its chip sales figures.)

The picture is not so rosy for the rest of Japan's industry. Of the 20 Japanese chip makers tracked by iSuppli, 12 are expected to report reduced revenues in 2005, including NEC Electronics and Renesas, which was created by the 2003 merger of the chip operations of Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric.

The Japanese chip makers' problems are not the result of a lack of technology but an overdependence on their home market. Even the three biggest chip makers - Toshiba, Renesas and NEC - still sell about 60 percent of their chips within Japan, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. By contrast, Intel, Samsung and Texas Instruments do about 80 percent of their business outside their home countries.

Another problem is high costs, partly because of outdated and inefficient factories. As sales fell, companies had to cut back on buying new facilities and equipment. In 2002, such spending by all Japanese chip makers totaled 266 billion yen (about $2.3 billion), a third of its level in 1989, according to J. P. Morgan. It is now back up to 741 billion yen ($6.3 billion), still barely enough to keep pace with the $33 billion that Samsung alone plans to spend over the next six years to build nine new semiconductor production lines.

Japan's powerful bureaucrats, who originally helped guide the industry to preeminence, have been urging companies to pool money and technology, with limited success. They originally pressed the largest half-dozen companies to cooperate in building the Rising Sun semiconductor factory, which could cost as much as $3 billion. But the effort was delayed for years as companies failed to agree on what kind of chips Japan should focus its resources on. In the end, just three companies announced that they would join the project.

"Japanese companies have been looking hard for a winning strategy," said Tatsuya Fujiwara, deputy director in charge of the semiconductor industry at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. "They still haven't found one yet."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/te...y/02chips.html





Gold 'Glitters' Differently at the Nanoscale
Argonne National Laboratory

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have found that gold “shines” in a different way at the nanoscale, and the insights may lead to new optical chips for computers or for switches and routers in fiber networks.

The nanoscale refers to a size one-billionth of a meter, or about 70,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Materials that small exhibit entirely different properties from conventional materials. Specifically, temperature, electricity and magnetism are completely different from that of conventional materials, and could form the basis of new technologies.

The Argonne researchers examined the characteristics of photoluminescence – the emission of light when electrons are stimulated – in gold nanorods, and found that they could control the wavelength of the light emitted by the material, making it possible to use as a light source inside an optical chip, allowing transmission of information through light. “The light emitted is dependent on the shape of the gold nanorods,” said Gary Wiederrecht, Argonne scientist and leader of the research team.

The gold nanorods are about 20 nanometers wide and range from 70 to 300 nanometers long. The rod-like shape of the material is important, Wiederrecht explained, because the rod shape determines the energy of the collective electronic excitations that radiate light. Thus, photoluminescence at different wavelengths is achieved in nanorods of differing lengths. The rod shape also produces enhanced absorption of the illumination, increasing the light intensity and also concentrating that intensity to levels high enough to create luminescence. “The rods have strong absorption characteristics in the near-infrared range,” Wiederrecht said. The experimenters used an ultrafast titanium-sapphire laser beam at 800 nanometers to create the photoluminescence.

The research is published in the December 31, 2005, of Physical Review Letters.

While the research has future implications for technological advances, Wiederrect is quick to explain that his group has done basic research – an examination of the material for a fundamental understanding of its characteristics. The longer-term implications of the work include the ability to produce nanoscale light sources for faster and smaller optical devices and novel photoluminescent sensors.

“Because materials at the nanoscale behave so differently from conventional materials, we’re starting all over again, in a way, to understand how and why these nanomaterials function,” Wiederrect said.

Other members of the research team are lead author Alexandre Bouhelier of Argonne’s chemistry division and the Center for Nanoscale Materials and Renaud Bachelot, Gilles Lerondel, Sergei Kostcheev and Pasal Royer, all of the Laboratoire de Nanotechnologie et d’Instrumentation Optique in Troyes, France.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/517093/?sc=swtn





Toshiba to Launch First HD DVD Players in US

Japan's Toshiba Corp. said on Wednesday it plans to start selling its "HD DVD" player in the United States in March, becoming the first electronics manufacturer to roll out a player for next-generation DVDs.

Toshiba and Sony Corp., leading rival camps, have waged a three-year battle to have their different standards adopted for the new DVDs, which promise much greater capacity for high-definition movies.

"HD DVD represents the future of HD digital video," Yoshihiro Matsumoto, president of Toshiba America Consumer Products, said at a news conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

"It gives consumers a clear migration path from DVD."

Toshiba, along with NEC Corp., has been promoting HD DVD, while Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic brand products, have been championing a technology known as Blu-ray.

Toshiba, the Japanese electronics conglomerate, said it was confident it would have the backing of content providers when it comes to the market.

The company said it will start shipping two models of HD DVD players -- which are also compatible with the current generation of DVDs -- to U.S. retailers starting in March.

Toshiba said it would offer two HD DVD player models, HD-XA1 and HD-A1, for $799 and $499, respectively.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...BA.xml&src=cms





A Screen First: Scorsese and Jaaack
David Carr

MOVIE fans are so busy picking among the Oscar-ready riches on display for the holidays that they probably haven't noticed that 2006 is shaping up as a banner year for film intrigue, much of it on the set.

Most deliciously, Martin Scorsese and Jack Nicholson, two of the not-so-enfants terribles of American cinema, have been working together for the first time. "The Departed" is a cop/Mafia drama set in Boston, with a potboiler of a plot and buckets of blood. Both Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Nicholson came of age along with independent film in this country, and even though neither has exactly captivated audiences lately, the combination of their heavyweight résumés and respective histories of getting their own way should lead to combustion on screen and off in a movie that will create months of chatter in 2006.

In "The Departed," a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller "Infernal Affairs," Mr. Nicholson will be joined by Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg - two guys who know their way around a Boston accent - but all eyes will be on Mr. Nicholson. He reportedly rewrote the script on many days and - steadfast Lakers fan that he is - banned all Celtics merchandise during shooting. Later this year, movie fans will see what all the creative tension produced.

Pixar and Disney, historically combative partners, have been busy making nice ever since Michael Eisner left the top slot at Disney. The partnership's last project, "Cars," will hit the road this year. And with Robert A. Iger in the driver's seat at Disney, it may not be the last movie they make together. His soothing bedside manner, along with a willingness to sell programs like "Desperate Housewives" on iTunes, may heal a partnership that looked to be headed for a ditch.

The cinematic version of the red and the blue will also show in 2006. Michael Moore teamed with Harvey Weinstein's new company for "Sicko," which could be the "Fahrenheit 9/11" of the health care industry.

Mel Gibson will be back with yet another monumental bit of religious adventure, this time starring the Mayans in "Apocalypto."

A version an apocalypse come and gone, Sept. 11, will visit the cineplex in two films, an untitled one from Oliver Stone and an airborne one from Universal about Flight 93.

Oh, and don't forget to watch two institutions, Tom Hanks and the Catholic Church, go to war over "The Da Vinci Code."

Politics, which has historically been discussed in smoke-filled rooms, will be a dominant theme in many darkened ones as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/we...ew/01carr.html





Maybe the Stars Have Gotten Small After All
Sharon Waxman

IT was months before the cameras were set to roll on one of 20th Century Fox's most ambitious projects for 2005, a $140 million historic epic about the Crusades by the director Ridley Scott. And still there was no one to play the leading role of Balian.

Mr. Scott had at first envisioned Russell Crowe, the scowling, muscled star of his "Gladiator" hit, to play the role of a blacksmith and reluctant Crusader in the Holy Land. But Mr. Crowe had other projects on his slate, and would not alter them to fit the director's timetable.

It took four more months of searching by casting agents and Mr. Scott to settle on Orlando Bloom, the long-haired, doe-eyed young British actor who was high on Hollywood's list of hot new stars in the making. Mr. Bloom, who had won a fan base of teenage girls with his performance in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and who was fresh off the set of another historical epic, Warner Brothers' "Troy," was the favored choice of Fox executives.

But as it turned out, "Troy" did not catch fire with the audience (not even the teenage girls), or with critics. And Mr. Bloom's next major outing, in Mr. Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven," was a bust, taking in just $211 million in ticket sales around the world, hardly enough to justify its production and marketing costs.

Next came the lead in Cameron Crowe's comic romance, "Elizabethtown," which pancaked at the box office when Paramount released it in the fall, and exposed Mr. Bloom to a withering verdict by movie critics. Just a month later, moreover, the 28-year-old actor was sued by his former management company, the Firm, for breach of contract and failure to pay management fees, over the defection of his manager to another firm.

By the end of 2005, what just a year earlier had looked like the start of an upward climb toward Hollywood stardom began instead to read like a cautionary tale about the difficulty of minting movie superstars from the ranks of a 20-something generation.

Stardom came easier to the young only a decade or two ago. At 23, Tom Cruise grasped it with the release of "Top Gun" in 1986, and flaunted it two years later by turning a vehicle as slight as "Cocktail" into a major hit. Julia Roberts was a superstar at 22, after the success of "Pretty Woman" in 1990, and Leonardo DiCaprio was just 23 when "Titanic" turned him into an international screen presence in 1997.

All quickly rose into Hollywood's top salary tier - the ranks of the $20 million actor, or thereabouts - and achieved bankable status with nervous executives who were willing to make a costly film because these actors were in it.

That kind of glitter has remained out of reach for Mr. Bloom's generation, notwithstanding a new crop of talent in the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, 25, who was featured in this past season's "Jarhead" and "Brokeback Mountain," or Heath Ledger, who co-starred in "Brokeback" and headlined in the just-released "Casanova."

YET none of them have proven their box-office clout with anything close to the certainty of their recent predecessors. And the calculus of the $20 million Hollywood equation has eluded them, as they have so far proved incapable of drawing the kinds of audiences that can justify the rising costs of producing and marketing movies. (One exception may be Daniel Radcliffe, the 16-year-old who recently signed on to star in the fifth "Harry Potter" film for a reported $14.4 million, but he has yet to test his drawing power outside that franchise.)

"The comfort level of hiring a star isn't what it used to be," said Jim Gianopulos, Fox's co-chairman. "I think people have recognized that there's a folly in allowing yourself to fall prey to the expectation that talent will always recover its value in the kinds of numbers we're playing with."

If new stars are born more rarely, it is partly because American audiences have been turning their backs on star-driven pictures. Of last year's top dozen box-office events, only three - "Hitch," with Will Smith; "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; and "Wedding Crashers," with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson - relied more on celebrities than computer wizardry to achieve their success. And several expensive movies with proven stars fell flat, among them "Bewitched" with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, and "Cinderella Man" with Russell Crowe.

"There's a shrinking number of dramatic stars who can guarantee an opening-weekend audience," said Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios and a former agent for A-list talent including Mr. Cruise and Tom Hanks. "They must be in the right vehicle at the right time."

So, what is the state of Hollywood stardom? Mr. Bloom's recent career experiences show that it is more difficult to achieve than it once was.

Agents and managers and a publicist for Mr. Bloom declined to discuss for the record his recent choices and the growing wariness toward stars on the part of audiences and film executives.

Mr. Bloom wrote in an e-mail message that he was focused on his craft, rather than on achieving stardom. (He declined to be interviewed further). "I am proud of my two films that came out this year, 'Kingdom of Heaven' and 'Elizabethtown,' " he wrote. "I learned so much from both Ridley Scott and Cameron Crowe, and view both experiences as the opportunities of a lifetime."

Still, court documents and interviews with colleagues provide a telling glimpse of a young actor in an era that has a new, more austere take on Hollywood stardom.

Born in Canterbury, England, in 1977, Mr. Bloom came to show business with an unconventional background. His father, Harry Bloom, was a famed political activist who fought for civil rights in South Africa and died when Orlando was 4. The boy was brought up, along with his older sister, by his mother, Sonia, and a family friend, Colin Stone. But when Orlando was a young teenager, his mother revealed that Mr. Stone was actually his biological father.

Suffering from dyslexia as a student, Mr. Bloom was drawn to the arts and poetry in school in the English county of Kent. At 16 he moved to London and joined the National Youth Theater, where he had a scholarship to train in a drama academy. He won a few television roles and had a small role in a 1997 movie about Oscar Wilde titled "Wilde."

Mr. Bloom went on to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where his first big break occurred during a student performance one night in 1998. The director Peter Jackson happened to be in the audience, and he came backstage to ask Mr. Bloom to audition for a set of movies he was preparing based on the J. R. R. Tolkien trilogy, "Lord of the Rings."

The fledgling actor's career quickly took hold as he gathered the accoutrements of Hollywood's star-making machinery. He was signed by International Creative Management in London, where he worked with Fiona McLoughlin, and in Beverly Hills, with Chris Andrews, both agents for young actors.

He made his Hollywood debut at 24 as the dashing Elvish archer Legolas Greenleaf in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," in December 2001. Mr. Bloom became an instant teenage idol - in 2002 he was chosen one of Teen People's "25 Hottest Stars Under 25" - and his following grew through the two Tolkien sequels.

In time-honored fashion, Mr. Bloom's entourage grew as well. He hired a manager, Aleen Keshishian, whose management company, the Firm, had just acquired the apparatus and ambitions of the faltering Hollywood powerbroker Michael Ovitz. He also hired a publicist, Robin Baum, from the high-profile company PMK/HBH.

Led by its chairman, Jeff Kwatinetz, the Firm had eyes for creating big stars and was busy building up the careers of performers like Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Cameron Diaz. Mr. Kwatinetz saw Mr. Bloom as a prime candidate to grow into a $20 million player, especially when Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," in which Mr. Bloom played a supporting role with Johnny Depp, became a surprise hit.

When the role of Paris in "Troy" came along, Mr. Kwatinetz clashed with Ms. Keshishian. He felt that the role presented too weak an image for an actor aspiring to the position of virile leading man. Ms. Keshishian felt differently. Mr. Bloom was slowly building a career, she believed, and a prominent part in a major international epic was a smart move.

Ms. Keshishian prevailed. But the dynamics of the star game were already changing. One star vehicle after another was coming up short at the box office - "Troy" with Brad Pitt," "The Terminal" with Tom Hanks, "The Manchurian Candidate" with Denzel Washington, "The Stepford Wives" with Nicole Kidman - and Hollywood was beginning to edge away from its commitment to high-cost talent.

This shift seemed at first to work in Mr. Bloom's favor. When Russell Crowe, a $20 million actor, bowed out of "Kingdom of Heaven," Mr. Bloom was briefly perceived as a bargain: an actor with a huge fan base among teenage girls, and one who would take a cut in his fee in exchange for the opportunity to have a leading role and work with Mr. Scott. He was paid just $2 million.

But when it opened in May, "Kingdom of Heaven" had disastrous ticket sales of just $47 million in the United States. While it did considerably better abroad, the film seemed to prove that Mr. Bloom was not ready to deliver a mass audience, at least not outside the framework of his earlier fantasy films.

The downward slide continued in another failed test of Mr. Bloom's drawing power, this time in a romantic comedy. Cameron Crowe, the acclaimed writer-director of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous," had run into casting troubles with "Elizabethtown," about a young, successful sneaker designer who undergoes an identity crisis when his father dies. Mr. Crowe originally cast the 25-year-old television star Ashton Kutcher in the lead. But as the director said in a recent interview, he "didn't feel the movie coming together" during two months of work on location in Kentucky. The two parted ways, and Mr. Crowe looked for a replacement.

He thought of Mr. Bloom, whom he had met three years before when Mr. Crowe wrote and directed a commercial for the Gap in which Mr. Bloom and Kate Beckinsale were chased down the street by fans.

"I needed the same thing from both those actors," said Mr. Crowe, referring to Mr. Kutcher and Mr. Bloom, explaining why he chose a dramatic actor for a comic role. "It was an interior, whimsical thing. It was Bud Cort in 'Harold and Maude.' Ultimately Orlando got me closer."

The studio resisted. Sherry Lansing, then chairwoman of Paramount, wanted Owen Wilson. But Cameron Crowe got his choice, and Mr. Bloom was paid $3 million, which his representatives described as another finnancial compromise made for the chance to work with the director.

Cost, it turned out, was the least of the problems with "Elizabethtown." The film was made for about $70 million, but has taken in just $50 million in ticket sales, making it a calamity for the filmmaker, the studio and, most of all, the star, who was perceived by more than a few critics as having gotten in over his head. (In The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote, "Mr. Bloom distinguishes himself, in this performance as in most of his others, by his steadfast reluctance to explore his range as an actor.")

"You can't blame the actor," Mr. Crowe now says of the movie's failure. "It's not math. It's like catching lightning in a bottle."

And he said that he still believed in the possibility of Mr. Bloom's success: "Stars arrive on their own timetable."

That may be true; just a few years ago Mr. Ledger was written off after the double disasters of "The Four Feathers" and "A Knight's Tale." But that timetable is often of Hollywood's own making, as the inner machinery of the entertainment industry - the agents, managers, lawyers, publicists and movie executives - continually seek the stuff of which stardom is made, and on which their livelihoods depend.

As for Mr. Bloom, he is in the Caribbean, trying to recover his footing with roles in back-to-back sequels to "Pirates of the Caribbean," alongside Mr. Depp. At least in this case, Mr. Bloom has seen his salary rise nicely; he is being paid $11.9 million for the pair of movies.

But Hollywood is most likely already on the march, hunting for its next new naif. The other day Mr. Cameron Crowe heard from a screenwriter friend whose new script calls for a leading man of 25. "He called me and said, 'I'd love to pick your brain,' " Mr. Crowe recalled. "And I said, 'You better get an ax and start working the hard road, my friend. You've got a long journey ahead.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/movies/01waxm.html





Not Just Another Half-Dozen Pretty, Floating Faces
Christian Moerk

SINCE the dawn of film marketing, studios have relied on posters featuring "floating heads": as many movie star faces as can be crammed onto a single page. In 1927, for instance, state-of-the-art ads for "The Jazz Singer" featured two disembodied Al Jolson heads - one in blackface, one without makeup.

Since then floating heads have become an industry cliché: the formula that once guaranteed success is now so ubiquitous that posters in that vein are nearly invisible. So what does it take to get noticed some 80 years later, especially when you're selling yet another horror film, without the luxury of big stars?

Surprisingly, the answer may be fine art.

Tim Palen, the executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Lionsgate - the company responsible for the gory "Saw" movies - was recently looking for a fresh campaign to introduce "Hostel," a slasher film that is to open on Jan. 6. Directed by Eli Roth, it is about a group of gullible and horny American males who find themselves in a Slovakian hostel, where promises of easy sex turn to gruesome snuff.

Mr. Palen said he figured that a poster with mangled bodies wouldn't do the trick.

So he dropped by the airy, tastefully decorated Chelsea studio of the Australian photographer Mark Kessell. A soft-spoken former physician who practiced medicine in Sydney for what he calls "several unsatisfying years," Mr. Kessell, 49, now takes pictures of things he's fully aware the larger public may not appreciate. One collection of daguerreotypes, "Perfect Specimens," shows the human body in its physical extremes; there are several shots of fetuses and old people near death.

But it was Mr. Kessell's "Florilegium" (or "collection of floral images") daguerrotypes that caught Mr. Palen's eye: each image is close-up of a surgical instrument, so poetically rendered that it seems almost organic. Some of the macabre implements resemble exotic flowers. One, from a distance, could be mistaken for the horns of a gazelle. "We were sort of blocked, and all the pieces fell into place once I saw that image," Mr. Palen explained. A deal was made to use that daguerreotype, which actually shows a surgical clamp. It now appears in theaters and on widespread promotions. (Billboards for "Hostel" rely on a more conventional image of a masked tormentor with a chain saw, which, a Lionsgate spokeswoman explained, translated more easily to the horizontal format.)

Mr. Kessell may seem an unlikely choice to sell unapologetic horror to a large youth audience; he has no interest whatever in popular culture. Over tea in his loft, the elegantly dressed Mr. Kessell confessed to not having seen "Hostel" or, indeed, to remembering the last film he had seen.

"It may have been 'Dogville,' " he finally allowed. With a grin, he said that in selling his work to Lionsgate, "I am prostituting myself." But he added: "The money has to come from somewhere." And, he said, that money would be poured right back into an art project. In the process, his work is placed before an audience of millions.

"I have a lot of trouble as an artist getting people to either look at my work or know my name," said Mr. Kessell, who generally finds that his pictures repel as much as they fascinate, much like the horror genre. "I'm interested in what makes us human," he said, "what makes our sex drive and the drive to violence the way they are. And what happens at the other end when we die."

Bill Sienkiewicz, an illustrator, writer and director who has worked on movie posters for more than 20 years, said the tide was turning toward more provocative designs. "If there are any floating heads, it will have to be a decapitation," he said by telephone from his studio in Stamford, Conn., where he was working on a poster for the horror movie "Evil Aliens."

Mr. Sienkiewicz, whose work has included posters for Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" and "The Green Mile" starring Tom Hanks, pointed out that some classic posters, like the one for Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," found a more artful way to use actors' faces.

"It had headshots," Mr. Sienkiewicz said of the "Apocalypse" poster. "But it also had the ambience and the heat of the jungle, and the levels of desperation. There was lots of information in the poster that set the tone. You don't see that today."

Universal Pictures' president for marketing, Adam Fogelson, agrees that a saturated marketplace has forced everyone to think differently about poster ad campaigns.

"I would say that there is a mistake in equating artistic with distinct," he said, citing Lionsgate's creative use of two strategically hacked-off fingers to sell its "Saw" sequel as a good example of an approach that managed to do both. "Making something different or artistic for its own sake is not the answer I advocate. I am not in the business of creating art, I am in the business of creating advertising."

Mr. Fogelson pointed to his studio's use of Steve Carell's incredulous face for the "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" campaign as an example of a floating head that worked because of the actor's connection to the audience.

Using fine-art images to promote movies isn't entirely new: the practice has been common in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. Charles Evans Jr., a film producer whose credits include "The Aviator," recently displayed his personal collection of Polish film posters at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, including a prized one for Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) in which an infant hand is clearly seen to be demonic - a plot spoiler, which would never allowed in this country.

In Communist Poland, Mr. Evans noted, poster art wasn't so much about commerce as about expression. "An artist could turn in whatever he wanted," he said. "They were allowed freedoms the other Eastern bloc countries were not."

By contrast, the current trend in the United States is largely about getting people in seats. But once trained to expect a more compelling vision on their billboards and buses, audiences aren't likely to settle for less imaginative, traditional advertising.

"They'd turn on you like a pack of wolves," said Mr. Palen, of Lionsgate. "These campaigns are arduous, and finding people like Mark Kessell is harder than doing floating heads. But it's absolutely necessary."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/movies/01moer.html





File-Sharing Barons Face Day Of Reckoning
Alex Veiga

Weeks before the original Napster shut down for good in 2001, Internet users were flocking to alternative song-swapping programs. Nearly 20 million people used Morpheus in its first four months, for example, to trade music and other files for free online. But the man behind Morpheus was worried. Michael Weiss figured popularity could bring its own perils.

As he feared, the notoriety led Hollywood studios and recording companies to sue Weiss' StreamCast or copyright infringement. It was part of the entertainment industry's wider effort to contain Morpheus and other Napster clones such as Kazaa and Grokster from taking up where Napster left off.

Now, like Napster founder Shawn Fanning before them, Weiss and other file-sharing barons are facing their own day of reckoning after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last summer.

Over the last four months, several Napster heirs have shut down and others are contemplating what they once couldn't abide — doing business by the entertainment industry's rules to survive.

"We can take a look at another four years of legal battles and spending millions of dollars on both sides, (but) is that where I want to spend the next four years of my life?" said Weiss, 53. "It's better to focus the company's energy on creating new technologies."

StreamCast hasn't shut down Morpheus, but the company recently approached the entertainment industry to pursue talks about settling a lawsuit against the company, according to court documents.

Wayne Rosso, who built a reputation criticizing the recording industry as head of Grokster Ltd., is also pursuing a decidedly more cordial relationship with music labels as he prepares to launch a copyright-friendly file-sharing service.

"It's pretty clear who won," Rosso said. "We always knew that this free trading of all this copyright material couldn't go on. It just wouldn't work."

Such capitulation was once unheard of among the file-sharing operators who lobbied against Hollywood and the recording industry. They billed themselves as defenders of technological innovation who shouldn't be held liable because some people used their software for piracy.

But the high court's ruling in June opened file-sharing operators to potential liability — something the entertainment industry underscored when it sent notices to seven file- sharing software operators in September warning them to shut down or prepare for court.

Companies behind once-popular file-swapping programs like i2hub and WinMX shut down after receiving the notice. LimeWire, BearShare and others also put on notice have yet to make their decisions public.

Separately, an Australian court ordered Sharman Networks Ltd., which distributes Kazaa, to ensure that new versions of the software filter out unlicensed copyright material.

Still, the amount of file-sharing has continued to increase since the days of Napster, and that's not likely to change much, said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne LLC, which tracks activity on file-sharing networks.

"These websites and these businesses were shut down but it doesn't shut down the software, it doesn't shut down the (file-sharing) networks," Garland said. "The open- source community will continue to build new, uncensored versions."

Mitch Bainwol, head of the music industry trade group Recording Industry Association of America, concedes some file-sharers will find other means of obtaining pirated music online.

"There will always be new technological challenges," Bainwol said.

But he noted a sea change since Napster fell: Propelled by the success of Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, young music fans now have more legal options for obtaining music in digital form than they did back in 2001.

Ultimately, the entertainment companies are banking that the new-look file-swapping services that emerge from the ashes of Napster's heirs will draw computer users away from illegal services. To persevere, file-sharing providers that seek to steer clear of copyright lawsuits will have to hope for the same.

"I don't think anybody wants to see a replay of what happened to the entertainment industry when Napster shut down," Weiss said. "The company or companies that find the most effective method for transforming downloaders into consumers will be the biggest winners in 2006."

So far, iMesh has been the only to complete the transition from being sued by the recording industry to relaunching as a new service with the music labels' seal of approval. But others are hoping to follow.

Rosso's new industry-blessed file-sharing venture, Mashboxx, has been in the works for more than a year and is now expected to launch in early 2006.

Grokster settled its long-running copyright lawsuit for $50 million and is slated to re-emerge as a licensed service, while executives at MetaMachine's eDonkey have also opted to transform.

"We're going to go legit," said chief executive Sam Yagan. "The eDonkey of the future will be very much different from what it has been and will be largely dictated by what the recording industry wants."

Rosso, Weiss and other file-sharing proponents insist that over the years, they have sought the recording industry's blessing in one form or another. But such offers were often rejected by major labels that saw the unfettered sharing of their artists' songs as unacceptable.

"We were always in the background trying to get licenses and in those days we would get one of two responses — either, 'We're not going to reward pirates,' or 'Shut down and we'll talk about it,'" Rosso said.

Still, despite millions of dollars in legal costs and often public acrimony between music companies and file-sharing executives, people on both sides are playing up the spirit of cooperation.

"For most of the participants in this drama, this isn't about personal relationships. It's about our ability to sustain a marketplace," Bainwol said. "Those folks that are helping to power this transition are doing the right thing."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/te...g_x.htm?csp=34





Vongo Offers Downloadable Movies On Portables
Anders Bylund

For quite a while now, we've been expecting someone to roll out a legal movie download service that goes beyond a couple of TV series episodes and short clips, and also goes beyond the PC so you can watch the content on the go or on your TV. The time seems right for a move like that. Not only do we (well, the richer among us anyway) have video iPods and video cell phones, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are meant to become the hubs around which our entire living rooms revolve. It looks like Starz has seen the signs too, as they're rolling out a new video on demand service that seems to target the portable market. And guess what, they're doing it with Microsoft's help. For a low, low US$9.99 a month, you have unlimited viewing rights, although some movies require an additional $3.99 pay-per-view fee. On initial inspection, we estimate that roughly 20 percent of the catalog is pay-per-view, but it does not appear to be the case that all of the "hit movies" are pay-per-view.

Vongo is taking the place of the deprecated Starz Ticket service, which was more tightly tied to your PC. The new service makes a format switch from Real to WMV with all its DRM goodness, meaning that any device running True Blue Windows™ derivatives will be able to play Vongo files. The library it draws from has also been expanded, and Starz claims to have proper licenses to offer over 800 feature-length movies through this online service. Vongo also looks like an improvement over Starz On Demand, which requires you to pay through the nose for the most expensive Starz package through DirecTV, and then only gives you access to five movies a week, the selection of which you have no control over. Vongo lets you download to your little heart's content, though the WMV files will only play on up to three machines. If you need to play Spice World on a fourth device, you must first uninstall the Vongo application from one of the first three, and then set it all up on your girlfriend's laptop.

The agreements with the Disney/Miramax/Touchstone and Columbia/Revolution/Screen Gems entertainment conglomerates cover those studios' entire back catalogues, and Vongo subscribers will also have access to all the fairly recent movies showing on the regular Starz TV channels. In all, Vongo is kind of like subscribing to Starz, except that you're running the scheduling with your PC in place of the usual DVR, and you get to take the movies with you on your handheld. Both Starz and Vongo draw their content from the same library. Each downloaded file will only work for as long as the Starz license for it is valid. You're not buying movies, you're renting them. Laura Behrens of the Gartner group thinks Vongo will work:

"I think portability is one of its potential strengths, but ... it isn't primarily for portable video. In fact, I think that's one of the things that Starz is getting right. It isn't just about portable video, and it isn't just about downloading movies, but it seeks to meet the need of consumers to have whatever medium they want, where they want it, when they want it."

And that, as we've said before, is what it's all about. But the future isn't all in Starz' hands. Success will come only if Windows-compatible, portable video players or perhaps home networking with some sort of receiver at the main screen become commonplace. That's where Sony and Microsoft stand to profit. Microsoft has several fingers in this particular pie: not only do they provide the protected file format, but they have several products of their own that can benefit from a demand for entertainment hubs. There's the brand spankin' new Xbox 360 of course, but also the Windows Media Center Edition. The company is vested enough in Vongo that Bill Gates will mention the service in his 2006 CES keynote speech. Sony, on the other hand, have their upcoming launch of the PS3 to hype up, and the PSP seems well positioned to step in and try to be the Walkman of the portable video era. Vongo is also supposed to feature prominently in Sony Connect when that service expands from music only to also include movies. The good folks at Liberty Media (the parent company of Starz) must be excellent negotiators who can pull off balancing the interests of two 800 pound gorillas who happen to be bitter rivals.

It's probably a mistake to give Starz a medal and call them winners just yet, as there are lots of players waiting to enter the field. Fellow premium cable heavyweight HBO is said to have the same sort of licensing deals as Starz, though there's no HBO on demand quite yet, and then there are companies like Netflix, Amazon, Google, and Blockbuster, who seem to be on the other side of the equation: there's a plan and a platform, but not enough negotiated licenses. The client is also slow and prone to crashing when run on the Orbiting HQ mainframe, so there are clearly some kinks left to work out. But with both Sony and MS on their side, Vongo looks like a contender from the start.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060103-5883.html





Verizon to Offer Phones That Can Download Music
Matt Richtel

Verizon Wireless announced today that it would begin selling cellphones that let people download songs over the airwaves, a development that further expands the capability of mobile devices and sets up a potential collision with the makers of portable music players.

More immediately, Verizon's move creates competition for Sprint, which last October introduced a phone that allows consumers to download songs for $2.50. Verizon's service will charge $1.99 and include software to let people download songs from their personal computers for 99 cents, the same price charged by Internet music stories like the one run by Apple Computer.

Music players like Apple iPod have relatively big memories that allow consumers to store thousands of songs and that dwarf the storage capacity of phones. But Verizon's basic offering, permitting consumers to store 250 songs, is expandable and its makers assert that falling costs of memory will let them quickly ratchet up the device's capacities.

The biggest hurdle for Verizon and its peers (Cingular Wireless is also planning a music offering) is not one of technology but perception. In an effort to convince consumers that the phone is a worthy music device, and even a substitute for an iPod, Verizon plans an all-out marketing campaign in the coming months.

"On the one device that 200 million Americans won't leave home without, you can have your music player," the company's chief executive, Denny Strigl, said at a product introduction event in Las Vegas. "We're not after the narrow music player market; what we have created is a whole new world of content distribution."

John Stratton, Verizon's chief marketing officer, said the new development puts the cellphone squarely in the category of a multimedia device that lets people download songs via phone and PC and also share them between the devices.

"This is a real marriage of the PC and the mobile device," Mr. Stratton said, adding the new service is "without question and by a pretty substantial margin the most significant product launch we've ever had."

The stakes are high for Verizon Wireless and its peers, which are trying to figure out where their next generation of growth comes from, given that a solid majority of Americans already have basic cellphone service. To be sure, a growing amount of carrier revenue is coming from selling such data services as text messaging, but that market has not grown the United States as quickly as overseas.

The carriers "are scrambling for a story that makes sense to investors on how they'll grow revenue and earnings," said Ed Snyder, a telecommunications industry analyst with Charter Research.

Mr. Snyder does not doubt that technology makes it possible to turn a cellphone into a capable music device. In fact, he said it is less difficult and expensive than adding a camera to phones, as the big cellphone companies have already done.

But he said the easy availability of these devices did not mean consumers will begin using them to download songs over the airwaves. Rather, he expects consumers to transfer their existing music collection onto cellphones or other portable music players, or to download free songs over the Internet.

A possible result, he said, is that cellphone companies may market cheap MP3 devices that would challenge makers of portable music players, like Apple, but that these devices do not wind up developing a meaningful revenue stream by charging $1.99 for downloading songs.

This development means "Apple gets hurt and the carriers don't get helped," Mr. Snyder said.

For its part, Sprint declined to say how many songs consumers have downloaded over the air using its service. The Sprint library has 300,000 songs available; Verizon said that it would have one million songs available within a couple of weeks and that the number should grow soon.

The cost for consumers does not just include that of the phone and the individual songs. They must also pay for the network time they spend downloading data - a cost paid either on a piecemeal basis or through the purchase of monthly download plans.

Another challenge for makers of cellphones is that they may become too complicated and multifunctional to the extent that the many ancillary uses soak up processing power and battery life from conventional telephone use.

Mr. Stratton conceded that the question about battery life was a "good question," but he said the company was selling new cellphones that have ample power even when doubling as music players. Initially, Verizon will sell three music-capable phones, the least expensive being $99 for consumers who sign up for a two-year service contract. The phones come with nominal memory and an expansion slot to add additional capacity, with a one-gigabyte memory card costing $100 (and holding 250 songs).

Mr. Stratton said some existing Verizon cellphones could be upgraded to make them music-download capable.

For $299, consumers can get an iPod with 30 gigabytes, holding tens of thousands of songs. Mr. Stratton said that memory for phones would grow quickly and that, aside from the memory difference, a phone should be able to compete head-to-head with portable music devices.

"When you leave your house in the morning, what do you take with you? Your keys, wallet and phone," he said. "To the degree that we can deliver a great music experience, we take away the necessity to carry" a portable music player.

Roger Entner, an analyst with Ovum, a market research firm, said a key challenge for the cellphone companies is creating a user-friendly program used to store songs, navigate the menu and play music. While other companies have sought to emulate Apple, none have done so successfully, Mr. Entner said.

Whether the phones appeal to consumers "comes down to usability," Mr. Entner said.

"We're in the early days of the mobile music world," he said. "With MP3 players they played around with it for two to three years before Apple finally got it right."

That, too, is the party line of Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest cellphone company, which has not yet introduced an over-the-air music service. The company is planning one for sometime this year, said Mark Nagel, the company's director of entertainment services.

Last September, Cingular and Apple made a big splash when they introduced the Rokr phone, which consumers can use to transfer, store and listen to up to 100 songs from their personal computers.

Over-the-air download capability "is an offering every carrier is going to have," Mr. Nagel said. "The real question is what the timing of" consumer interest will be.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/05/te...cnd-music.html





Motorola Starts Radio Service for Cellphones
AP

Motorola yesterday introduced a music radio service for cellphones that also plays in car and home stereos.

Motorola expects iRadio, featuring 435 channels, to be sold by wireless service providers to their subscribers for between $7 and $10 a month - a few dollars cheaper than the satellite radio networks that would be among the phone-based service's immediate rivals.

No wireless carriers have signed on yet to carry iRadio, which may also be adapted for non-Motorola phones if carriers request it, company officials said. In some ways, iRadio more closely resembles a vast podcast network than a traditional radio broadcast.

Motorola expects about 90 percent of its content to be loaded on phones from the Internet over a personal computer, rather than broadcast over the air, in this case a cellular network. That would mean less of a strain on the limited capacity that wireless operators have for mobile calls, e-mail and Internet services.

IRadio is a rare foray into consumer services for Motorola, one of the world's top producers of mobile devices and network equipment.

While the service may help sell Motorola phones, headsets and other wireless gear, the company also views the system as a new business model for radio, much as Apple Computer broke the mold for selling music with its iTunes online store.

Motorola has developed a Bluetooth wireless adapter for car radios so that a cellphone can broadcast its content over a car's speakers. Motorola said the device and installation were expected to cost $200 or less.

Motorola is also selling a Bluetooth adapter to connect phones with home stereos.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/04/te...y/04radio.html





Expo-Crown Castle's Modeo Aims TV at Gadgets, Cars
Sinead Carew

Crown Castle International Corp said on Wednesday it plans to launch live television in several top U.S. markets this year and hopes to deliver video and audio services to a range of products from cellphones and portable media players to laptop computers and cars.

As cellphone operators develop streaming video and music services, wireless broadcast tower operator Crown Castle and wireless technology firm Qualcomm Inc are both building their own live TV networks that aim to complement mobile providers' efforts.

In 2007 Crown Castle said its newly renamed mobile TV subsidiary Modeo LLC will expand the service, which will include about 10 video channels and at least 24 audio channels, to 30 U.S. markets covering about half the population.

It has not signed programming deals or named cellphone provider partners so far but said that four leading mobile phone makers including Motorola Inc and Nokia will support the live TV technology it is using.

Crown Castle also said chip maker Intel Corp. and Kenwood Corp, a maker of car radios and other consumer electronics, as well as Microsoft Corp., which provides software to run the service, all plan to show it off at the Consumer Electronics Show here.

Crown Castle also aims to have its service run on portable media players such as Apple Computer Inc's video iPod device as well as laptops and backseat car video players.

"Anybody you can imagine with a mobile device, we've talked to," said treasurer Jay Brown, who noted that the service will allow wireless downloads of Internet video or audio files, known as podcasts, to store on mobile devices.

Brown said he expects combined video and audio subscriptions to cost about $15 to $20 a month and separate audio subscriptions would incur monthly fees of $7 to $9.

Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, which will demonstrate Qualcomm's MediaFlo technology at CES this week, are also expected to support the rival technology known as DVB-H, or Digital Video Broadcast for Handhelds, that Crown Castle will use.

Qualcomm, which aims to launch its MediaFlo service in October this year, has already signed up Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc as its first mobile operator customer.

While developments in advanced mobile services such as wireless video are attracting a lot of attention, the jury is still out on whether consumers will accept them en masse.

Harris Nesbitt analyst John Bucher believes mobile TV may just appeal to high-end consumers who always want the latest gadgets and are willing to pay higher monthly fees.

"It's going to be top-tier users," said Bucher. But he considers that the services would be a success if roughly 10 percent or about 20 million U.S. subscribers signed up for wireless television.

"I don't think it has to go mass market to be successful," Bucher said.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...LE.xml&src=cms





School Laptop Policy Creating Digital Divide
Ken "Caesar" Fisher

The Fullerton, CA public school system is aggressive in its push to educate children in the ways of silicon. The school district is aiming to give laptops to select elementary and middle school kids, and they are developing a curriculum centered around students having access to their laptops. So why are some parents putting up a fuss? The plan requires parents to pony up almost US$1,500 for the privilege, and if you can't afford it, you don't get to participate in the program. Participating parents would pay about $500 each year for three years, and their children would receive an Apple iBook G4 laptop and entrance into the special program.

The move raises plenty of questions. One parent who contacted me expressed financial concerns. He wonders why he is expected to pay $1,500 for laptops that can be bought for around the same price directly from Apple. What if he doesn't want to buy an Apple laptop? And shouldn't there be some kind of volume discount?

More serious, some parents believe that this will create unfair financial hardships on lower-income parents, and spawn new social divisions in the classroom. Heather Sutherland said that "I think it's unfair that the (school district) is requiring us to 'pay to learn'," and she opted to keep her 11 year-old daughter out of the program. She called it a "horrible form of financial segregation," inasmuch as it could create a kind of school within a school. Currently public education is free in California, and some parents view this as a backdoor for some children to receive specialized education from the state.

The superintendent, Cameron McCune, claims that the school district can and will assist low-income families, but some parents have expressed unease with the program, feeling that is is inappropriate to have the public school system sifting through parents' financial records to determine eligibility. They believe instead that the school system should provide access for everyone, or access for no one. As a public institution charged with educating children, it should provide the same basic opportunities to all children, they argue.

In the end, it's a difficult balance. Computers, for all their ubiquity, are still not cheap by everyone's standards. That holds especially true for laptops, which are traditionally more expensive (although MIT may have a solution for that). To date, most schools have embraced technology by either establishing computer labs or putting computers in the classroom. Private schools, of course, are free to require students to have laptops.

In all of this, one question that's rarely asked is: does it really produce a benefit? Some argue that kids are, for the most part, getting familiar with computers on their own time, and others worry that computers are a distraction for young kids learning the basics.

"It was fun to have around and to use for my own purposes," says Riley Hall, 13, who was in the program last year but transferred to another school for eighth grade. "But it didn't make school any better or more challenging. ... A lot of it at school was to show off what you know about computers."

Most schools require students to come to class prepared, and that means pencils, pens, paper and books. Are school systems right to start thinking about adding laptops to that list?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060103-5884.html





The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts
George Johnson

Uneasily sharing space on the top ledge of my computer browser are two buttons I click almost daily for an information fix: Encyclopaedia Britannica, as old and steadfast as the ligature in its name, and a mercurial upstart called Wikipedia, in which almost anyone anywhere can fiddle with the prose.

It may seem foolish to trust Wikipedia knowing I could jump right in and change the order of the planets or give the electron a positive charge. But with a worldwide web of readers looking over my shoulder, the error would quickly be corrected. Like the swarms of proofreading enzymes that monitor DNA for mutations, some tens of thousands of regular Wikipedians constantly revise and polish the growing repository of information.

Sometimes there are abuses. An uproar last month over a prank article implicating a distinguished journalist in the Kennedy assassinations caused Wikipedia to tighten up the rules a bit. But for the most part, the utopian experiment has been a surprising success.

Wikipedia's rough-edged entries on science are often more detailed and current than the ones in Britannica, which still credits Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean stem cell researcher accused of fraud, with successfully cloning human embryos. But can I really be sure, as Wikipedia tells me, that Dr. Hwang was born Dec. 15, 1952, when Britannica insists on Dec. 15, 1953? The question is whether to trust an encyclopedia that evolves like an organism or one that was designed like a machine.

A study last month in Nature showed that the decision is far from clear-cut. Calling on experts to compare 42 competing entries, the journal counted an average of four errors per article in Wikipedia - and three in Britannica. That is not much of a difference, and a look at the details only adds to the anxiety. A fact is surely a fact, but what constitutes an error can be as hard to pin down as a bead of mercury.

A high school student looking for information on Dmitri Mendeleyev (also spelled Mendeleev), the Russian chemist renowned for the periodic table of the elements, would have learned from Wikipedia that he was the 14th child in his family instead of the 13th surviving child of 17 - what Nature's reviewer, Michael Gordin, a Princeton University science historian, said was one of 19 mistakes in the article.

But it wouldn't have helped to defer to the competition: Dr. Gordin gave Britannica a demerit for describing the chemist simply as the 17th child. It is an imprecision one might easily commit. Dr. Gordin was surprised when I told him, in an e-mail message, that his own book, "A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table," uses the same number. "That's curious," he said. "I believe that is a typographical error in my book. Mendeleyev was the final child, that is certain, and the number the reliable sources have is 13."

These, he said, are in Russian, and they apparently were not consulted by "The Norton History of Chemistry," by William H. Brock, which like Wikipedia says there were 14 children, or "The Development of Modern Chemistry," in which Aaron J. Ihde goes with 17. In his book "Galileo's Finger: The 10 Great Ideas of Science," Peter Atkins, an Oxford University chemist, says that the number, "according to one's source," is 11, 14 or 17.

Wikipedia seems determined to try them all. Scrolling through the various versions of its article - more than 300 at last count extending back to July 5, 2002 - one can watch as the number oscillates between 14 and 17, stopping briefly at 15 (with the explanation from an anonymous editor that "a child was recentely [sic] discovered to exist") then to 16 before returning to 14 again.

For several minutes on Nov. 10, before the vandalism was quietly corrected, Mendeleyev was "the oldest of five hundred million children," and in October some numbskull scrawled at the top of the page, "IM COOL: IM DOING A REPORT ON DMITRI MENDELEEV AND YEA IM COOL AND HES COOL." Three days later the graffiti was swabbed away.

After the Nature report, Wiki's entry, like the others deemed to have flaws, was flagged at the top with a warning label ("This article has been identified as possibly containing errors") and retreated temporarily into the safety of imprecision - Mendeleyev is "one of many children of Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleyev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleyeva (nee Kornilieva)" - before adopting, in an act of faith, Dr. Gordin's number, 13.

Britannica clings to 17, as it has apparently done since the online article was reproduced from the 15th Edition, first printed in 1974.

Misstating the size of a 19th-century scientist's family is not exactly a howler, but what about the other mistakes Nature enumerated? Some were unambiguous - Britannica's writing that the theory of the strong nuclear force, called quantum chromodynamics, was formulated in 1977 instead of 1973, or Wikipedia's noting that the deadline for receiving proposals for the Nobel Prize is Feb. 1 instead of Jan. 31. (Again, the Wiki error was quickly fixed.)

But many of the purported blunders seem open to debate. Wikipedia was wrong, one reviewer decided, when it said the embittering agent used to denature ethanol is denatonium, instead of identifying it more precisely as denatonium benzoate. But all a reader had to do was click on the word to call up an entire article on the substance, which noted that it also comes in the form of denatonium saccharide.

Britannica, on the other hand, was taken to task for writing that "Croton (now Crotone, Italy)" was the home of the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his number-worshiping cult. "The Italian town is Crotona, not Crotone," a reviewer objected. But not so fast.

The name has appeared in history as Crotona and, for that matter, Kroton (when it was part of Greece), but Crotene is the modern name. In an ideal world the Britannica editors might have included these etymological details. But at worst, this is an imperfection, and when you start looking for those there is no end.

Just as forgivable are some of the sins of omission. Should an error really have been scored against Britannica because its entry on Agent Orange does not mention that there were also Agents Purple, Pink and Green? There is always more you can put in an article, and part of the editorial art is deciding what to leave out.

Whatever their shortcomings, neither encyclopedia appears to be as error-prone as one might have inferred from Nature, and if Britannica has an edge in accuracy, Wikipedia seems bound to catch up.

The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure of Marx.

It seems natural that over time, thousands, then millions of inexpert Wikipedians - even with an occasional saboteur in their midst - can produce a better product than a far smaller number of isolated experts ever could.

Meanwhile the competition has some catching up to do. While Wikipedia includes a good, balanced article on the history of Britannica, Britannica has not a word to say about Wikipedia, as it rapidly becomes one of the most significant phenomena on the Net.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/science/03comm.html





What I Would Like To See With The Publishing Industry
Taran Rampersad

I'm sitting here, reading some Gutenberg Project books, and having just transcribed Edison's, 'Electricity and Progress' (a feat that was really crazy although short in sound), and then thinking about the shipping costs of books... and that people who listen to audio books are rewarded by less weight in shipping - putting audio learners at a financial advantage.

Huh? Yes. Visual learners read, which means that they have to order books, read stuff online, or play the P2P file swap game - which a few years ago was very much in full swing on IRC channels. The latter just can't be stopped, it's a simple rebellion against the high prices of books and shipping to parts of the world. If costs were lower, it would still happen of course - there are people with larceny in their hearts all the time - but it got me wondering:

Why don't those audio books also contain the text of the books?

It seems like it should be intuitive that people who listen to books might also want to... be able to find stuff in them, read them physically... and be able to find stuff on their hard drives. The people who buy books aren't likely to buy the CDs then; I am one of them (and I admit, I hate audiobook CDs) - but wouldn't that be useful? Why aren't publishers doing that? Fear of piracy? Look, piracy will happen no matter what you do - but people who can afford it will continue to buy stuff.

There will be people that share with their friends, but that's usually a social contract: one person buys a book, another buys a book, they swap when they are done. More than 90% of the books I have read I do not have in my bookcase (and 80% of that 90% were given freely; 20% of that 90% keep me from lending out books now).

People look at my bookcase and say, "Wow, Taran, you have a lot of books."
And I say, "You should have seen the ones that got away!"

So... for someone like me... you know, I would buy an audiobook CD if it had the text on it, as I am now used to reading things on my computer. I'm computer literate in the broadest senses of the term now. But I won't buy an audiobook without it because of the same reason I hate when people read their presentations to me: I can read English faster than anyone - even a New Yorker - can speak English.

I feel like I'm being fined because I prefer to read, courtesy the postage on books. Do publishing companies think we visual learners have more earning capacity than audio learners? The technology is there. I don't get it. And the environmental catastrophe... visual learners are eating the Amazon forest one word at a time! So publishing companies are indirectly creating global warming. Amazon. Books. Trees. Global Warming. Coincidence?

Save some trees, send me CDs!

What? I have to do the thinking for the marketing departments at publishing companies too? Geez...
http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/Ta...ew?PostID=9874





Safety: With Harry Potter, Injuries Dip Like Magic
Eric Nagourney

Is Harry Potter making the world safer for children?

British researchers report that on the weekends when the last two books of the series came out, young people made far fewer visits to an Oxford emergency room. The study, led by Dr. Stephen Gwilym of John Radcliffe Hospital, appears in the final 2005 issue of the journal BMJ, which tends toward the tongue-in-cheek in its year-ender.

The books, by J. K. Rowling, sell millions of copies in the days after their release, leading the researchers to compare them to other popular pursuits like skating and riding motor scooters. But the similarities go only so far, the authors wrote.

"Given the lack of horizontal velocity, height, wheels or sharp edges associated with this particular craze," they said, "we were interested to investigate the impact the Harry Potter books had on children's traumatic injuries during the peak of their use."

(In fact, one of the study's authors "conjured up the original idea," after a quiet on-call weekend, "then witnessing three of his children 'petrified' on the sofa.")

The effect, it turns out, was significant. The researchers looked at how many children ages 7 to 15 went to the E.R. with musculoskeletal injuries on the 2003 weekend after "The Order of the Phoenix" was published, and on the 20o5 weekend of "The Half-Blood Prince." They compared these numbers with admissions in a three-year period.

On the Harry Potter weekends, they found, the admission rates went down by almost half - even though each was a pleasant summer weekend when business in the E.R. would ordinarily be good.

The authors see the possibility of broadening the benefit. "It may therefore be hypothesized," they wrote, "that there is a place for a committee of safety-conscious, talented writers who could produce high-quality books for the purpose of injury prevention."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/health/03safe.html





It’s a business

Rejected by the Publishers
Lawrence Van Gelder

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/04/books/04publ.html





Songwriter Says Columbia Dropped Her in Fight Over Album
Alan Light

Nellie McKay, a young singer-songwriter whose 2004 album, "Get Away From Me," was one of the most acclaimed pop debuts in recent years, says she has been dropped by Columbia Records just as her follow-up was scheduled to reach stores. While Ms. McKay had been negotiating for some time with the label over the length and final song selection of "Pretty Little Head" - which was supposed to be released today - she says the decision not to put out the album was a result of a recent executive shake-up at Columbia, and "had more to do with my personality" than with the album itself.

The London-born, Harlem-based Ms. McKay had been fighting with the label over her insistence on a 23-song, 65-minute version of the album; Columbia was pressing for a 16-song, 48-minute version. (The two-CD "Get Away From Me" has been called the first double-disc set ever released by a debut artist.) At recent shows, Ms. McKay had given out the personal e-mail address of the Columbia chairman, Will Botwin, from the stage, encouraging fans to lobby him for the release of the longer album. "I thought we had resolved things favorably," Ms. McKay said. "We were just finalizing the artwork."

But last month the Sony Label Group, which owns Columbia, underwent a corporate restructuring; Mr. Botwin left the company and was replaced by the former Epic Records chairman Steve Barnett. After that, Ms. McKay said, her lawyer received a phone call informing them that Columbia would not be releasing "Pretty Little Head" in any form. (Representatives from Columbia said that no one could be reached for comment because of the holidays.)

"Whoever called to tell us said that she hadn't actually heard the album," Ms. McKay said in a telephone interview on Sunday, "and said that 'this isn't about the music' - which I thought was really funny. The conventional wisdom is that the music industry is money-driven, but this actually had nothing to do with money, it was an artistic disagreement." Ms. McKay, in fact, fronted the money for the album's recording sessions as a way to keep her record company at arm's length.

"Pretty Little Head," which features duets with Cyndi Lauper and K. D. Lang and songs addressing gay marriage and animal rights, had already been provided to the press, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Spin magazine called the 21-year-old artist "a sharp-eared satirist" and said the album was "not only a testament to McKay's talent, it's also a tribute to her artistic sense." In a four-star review, Blender described Ms. McKay's sound - which is inflected with both cabaret style and hip-hop flow - as "indie musical comedy," and said that "McKay is pushing forward the craft of the song, connecting Tin Pan Alley to Ben Folds and De La Soul." (Ms. McKay said that getting such press without actually having an album for sale is "kind of nice, because people can just read the reviews and then not be disappointed.")

Adding to the complications is the fact that Ms. McKay (pronounced Mac-EYE), who recently contributed several songs to the soundtrack of the Jennifer Aniston film "Rumor Has It," will be co-starring alongside Alan Cumming, Ana Gasteyer and Ms. Lauper in a new production of "The Threepenny Opera," opening on Broadway in March. Rehearsals begin later this month, which would severely restrict her ability to promote "Pretty Little Head"; she recently joked that she took the role as a way to get out of touring. Ms. McKay said she assumed that this also played a part in Columbia's decision, saying it was "a combination of things, adding up to irreconcilable differences." Billboard reported late last month that the singer had left the label voluntarily.

Columbia's sister label, Epic, went through a similar situation with another young female artist last year, when Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine" was leaked on the Internet after a lengthy delay amid widespread rumors that the label didn't think the album was sufficiently commercial. Though Ms. Apple has repeatedly denied any artistic pressure from the company, she has said that miscommunication with Epic did slow down the album's completion and even led to her considering leaving the music business. When "Extraordinary Machine" was released in September, it became one of the year's most highly praised albums.

As for "Pretty Little Head," for now its future is in limbo. Ms. McKay is trying to buy back the rights to the 23 songs and determine what to do with them. "There's lots of legal stuff," she said. "We're just trying to get it out as soon as we can."

Meanwhile, the politically outspoken and slyly acerbic Ms. McKay (whose "Get Away From Me" was a slap at Norah Jones's breakthrough album, "Come Away With Me") said that her feelings about the split with Columbia were decidedly mixed. "I think for both sides, it's liberating," she said. "You have no idea how much of a pain I can be."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/ar...ic/03nell.html





Diversity Revealed in Records' First Years
Margo Jefferson

"Study the past if you ever hope to transform it into something present and vividly new, something that disturbs the complacency of the old order, while becoming the newer, wiser order."

I came upon these words, by Jonathan Sheffer, just as I began listening to a CD called "Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry: 1891-1922" (Archeophone). Mr. Sheffer was writing about classical music; the passage is from "Eos: 1995-2004," a chronicle of the daring orchestra he founded and led.

Popular music has entrenched orders, too. Traditions are defined too narrowly. Canons dismiss what scholars and critics who make them dislike. I've already fallen into that old trap: I've implied that all the music on "Lost Sounds" is popular. But there is classical music here too, right alongside vaudeville, ragtime, musical theater and early intimations of jazz. "Lost Sounds" is a bold anthology that helps transform complacent ideas of what black American music and culture are.

The history of blacks in the recording industry is often seen as having roared in with the Roaring Twenties. But as the musicologist Tim Brooks writes in his liner notes: "A roadmap to evolving black culture is preserved in the fading grooves of cylinders and discs made during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though precious little of it has been studied or reissued. These are the pioneers upon whose work the Jazz Age, and all that followed, were built." (This two-volume CD is a companion to Mr. Brooks's book, which won a 2005 Ascap Deems Taylor Award.)

Many recordings have disappeared, of course. Often, history is like archaeology: only fragments and remains can be found.

But what wondrous remains! Famous men speak at last. In an age of grand oratory, that master politician Booker T. Washington was a masterly performer. In 1908, he recorded his famous 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech with the sonorous rolled R's and musicality of a stage actor playing a Southern gentleman. Jack Johnson describes his defeat of the boxer Jim Jeffries, who was crowned "The Great White Hope" by journalists and fans. Those who still think of Johnson as a boxing-ring hustler will be startled by his stately vowels and crisp consonants.

Do I like him better for that? No. What I like is the cultural complexity. There was no one kind of black speech. (I'm sure Johnson had more than one voice.)

Even the minstrel and vaudeville numbers contain revelations. The tired old insults and breezy slurs are here in tunes like "The Laughing Coon" and "The Whistling Coon." (He's a "colored individual" who's double-jointed, knock-kneed and "black as any black crow.") But the dialect is much suppler than song transcriptions and period writing suggest.

Take George W. Johnson, a New York street busker who might have been the first African-American to record. He rose to fame singing these very tunes. But you hear none of the wearisome minstrel-ese that dominated movies and early television. You know it well: the lips poke out, the mouth stretches and every word slithers out or plods along. Johnson is brisk and jaunty. Versatile, too: he delivers a comic Irish number, "Carving the Duck," in a flawless brogue.

Will Marion Cook was a sophisticated composer. His songs and choral arrangements helped inaugurate the mix of white classical and black vernacular music we know from "Porgy and Bess." Scott Joplin must have studied Cook while working on his opera "Treemonisha."

It's such fun to hear the gusto of pioneering World War I-era dance bands. James Reese Europe's orchestra barnstorms through Wilbur C. Sweatman's "Down Home Rag" in 1913. (Europe played for Vernon and Irene Castle; they credited him with inventing their celebrated fox trot.) In 1916, Sweatman does the tune with a trio. His clarinet swoops and glides exuberantly; le jazz hot is on the way.

And what a variety of male quartets. Here are the austere harmonies of sacred harp singing; the vigorous, tempo-shifting call-and-response form that evolved during slavery. The Fisk University Jubilee Quartet introduced audiences to spirituals in classical form. The Dinwiddie Colored Quartet forecast the eventual mating of gospel and R&B; the Four Harmony Kings show that the smooth polish of the barbershop quartet did not begin or solely reside in small-town white America.

A pall hangs over the history of blacks in classical music, partly because of the resistance white society put up for decades. The opportunities to perform were denied or cruelly limited. The great tenor Roland Hayes (represented here by "Vesti la Giubba" from "Pagliacci") had to pay Columbia to record classical music. (This after being turned down by every other major company). I had never heard of Florence Cole-Talbert, but here she is, with a beautifully trained, quicksilver soprano.

There is still a lingering sense in some quarters that for blacks, classical music is the racial equivalent of social climbing or self-hatred, that it is a betrayal of so-called authentic black music. On those grounds I have to quibble with the excellent liner notes, which title this section "Aspirational Motives." Blacks certainly aspired to prove they could excel on all cultural fronts. They wanted their success to help rebut charges of racial inferiority. But artists are driven by passion and individual taste. Whites from Gershwin and Harold Arlen to Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin have aspired to learn black musical styles. A passion for good music can lead one anywhere. It led the black composer Harry T. Burleigh to study with Antonin Dvorak, and to introduce that Czech composer to the spirituals he would incorporate into his "New World" Symphony.

There is a lot of talk today about "cultural hybridity" and how traditions blend, mingle, borrow and steal from one another. I'd like to add another term: cultural mutation. Artists change tradition by instinct and design. The results: fresh styles and altered forms; new variations on old themes. Some are rejected; others last. But no restrictions - social or intellectual - can stop the process.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/ar...ic/03jeff.html





An Investigation Into Anti-Spyware
Jeremy Reimer

A report by Mark Russinovich has raised serious concerns about the seedier side of anti-spyware. He investigated a number of programs that claimed to be spyware removal tools, and found that some of them not only do a poor job of detecting spyware, but may in fact be hazards themselves.

Spyware has become big business in recent years, bringing in as much as US$1.6 billion in 2004. As spyware proliferates, the market for anti-spyware also grows, and many products such as Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy have arisen to combat this threat.

However, it appears that some programs are now attempting to straddle both sides of the fence. Many of these are advertised by familiar banner ads that mimic Windows error dialog boxes, and say things like "Your computer may be infected. To scan, click 'Yes' below." The entire banner, however, is hotlinked to a website which instructs the user to download and run an alleged anti- spyware program.

When several of these programs were tested on a clean, freshly-installed Windows XP partition, they erroneously reported several Windows components (such as cookies left by MSN.com and the Windows Remote Desktop Service control) as being spyware. The program offered to clean these "infections" after the user had entered his or her credit card data to unlock the full functionality of the software.

A closer examination showed signs that this so-called anti-spyware package was in fact exhibiting many of the same behaviors as the spyware it claimed to be fighting against. When viewed in Process Explorer, the processes associated with these programs have no company name or description, no digital signature to confirm their authenticity, are compressed to prevent easy tracking, and often mimic internal Windows system process names.

Who are these companies that are producing fake anti-spyware packages? Domain traces on the websites they promote lead to a confusing trail:

Not surprisingly, the SpySheriff website reveals little about the company behind it. A Whois of the domain points to Popandopulos Ltd in Greece as the owner, but the associated email address is crystaljones@list.ru, which is a Russia-based domain. List.ru appears to be an ISP from its Whois information, so it's doubtful that the Spysheriff domain registration is accurate.

So how does one guard against these digital mimics, who pretend to be treasure chests but turn into snapping horrors? A list of the worst offenders has been compiled:

Spyware Bomber
SlimShield
WinAntiVirus and its companion WinAntiSpyware 2005
SpywareNo and its clone SpyDemolisher
Razespyware
Spy Trooperv
WorldAntiSpy
PSGuard
SpySheriff
SpyAxe

Ultimately, however, the responsibility for identifying the fake software lies with the end user. However, as the spyware companies get more and more tricky and insidious, this becomes an increasingly difficult task. Hopefully, the upgraded and bundled Microsoft Anti-Spyware that will ship with Windows Vista will help mitigate the problem.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060103-5887.html