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Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology! |
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Join Date: May 2001
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![]() ![]() ![]() "I feel like a woolly mammoth." - Mark McKinnon "It seems so creepy when it’s put like that. But everybody’s at it. Aren’t they?" – Michael "Why would I sit through all of that if I can get what I like for free online, listen to it on my own time and not be guilted for weeks into giving money?" – JoAnna Michaels "The question we're asking ourselves is, 'Is the business model of public radio prepared for a future where geographic boundaries don't exist?' " – Maria Thomas "The message is clear - companies are telling their employees, 'Behave yourself because we're watching you.' " – Masakazu Kobayashi "I interpret this as a clear decision that individual file sharers, if they don't earn money from file sharing, won't get anything more than a fine. That means we can't trace IP addresses, which means that we can't trace private file sharers." – Håkan Roswall ![]() April 8th, ’06 ![]() Hollywood To Sell Digital Films Online Gary Gentile Hollywood studios will start selling digital versions of films such as "Brokeback Mountain" and "King Kong" on the Internet this week, the first time major movies have been available online to own. The films can't be burned onto a disc for viewing on a DVD player. Still, the move is seen as a step toward full digital distribution of movies over the Internet. Six studios said Monday that sales will begin through the download Web site Movielink. The site is jointly owned by five of the seven major studios. Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and MGM will offer some first-run and older titles on Movielink. New films will be priced similar to DVDs - between $20 and $30 - while older titles will sell for $10 to $20. In a separate announcement, Sony and Lionsgate said they will sell films through the CinemaNow site. Films from The Walt Disney Co. will not be available, although both services say talks are ongoing. "Digital delivery hasn't arrived until the major studios allow home ownership, and now they have and now digital delivery is very real," said Jim Ramo, chief executive at Movielink. Studios will sell some new films online the same day they become available on DVD. Most films will be made available within 45 days. Studios began renting films online several years ago as a way to combat illegal downloading. Movies have been available through the Internet 30 to 45 days after hitting video stores, with rentals lasting just 24 hours for viewing primarily on computer screens. Digital delivery of video grew rapidly after Apple Computer Inc. began selling episodes of TV shows through its iTunes online store last October. This year, devices powered by new Intel computer chips and TV service delivered over the Internet will allow more consumers to watch Web video on their TVs instead of their computer screens, a key factor in downloading to own, analysts said. Studios are being cautious about selling films online in part because DVD sales produce more profit than box office receipts. But studios are also preparing for the day when major retailers such as Wal-Mart and Amazon.com begin offering their own movie download services. "The important thing is to embrace the future, respect the economics of DVD but move forward into digital delivery," said Ben Feingold, president of Worldwide Home Entertainment at Sony Pictures. The films available on Movielink can be stored indefinitely on a computer hard drive or transferred to as many as two other computers. The movies can be played on a TV if the computer is part of a home network. A copy can be burned to a DVD as a backup. Discs can be played on up three PCs authorized by Movielink but cannot be viewed on a standard DVD player because of special security coding. Consumers will not be able to transfer the films from a PC or laptop to a handheld portable viewing device. But that capability should be available sometime within the next year, Ramo said. Films on CinemaNow will be playable on just one computer. The company said it eventually expects studios to allow consumers to burn movies on DVD and transfer them to portable devices. "This is a first step, but it is far from the final model," said Curt Marvis, chief executive of CinemaNow. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT ![]() Vivid Entertainment to Sell Adult DVDs Using Download and Burn Technology Andrew McLaughlin A new service being launched by Vivid Entertainment on April 3rd, 2006 will allow consumers to purchase, download and burn a complete DVD for instant gratification. Always on the leading edge of technology innovation, the adult entertainment industry is again among the first to offer the ability to download and burn a fully functioning DVD complete with menus, chapter navigation and subtitles (do adult entertainment videos even have subtitles?). The initial launch of the service will include 30 movies from the Vivid Video collection and will cost about $25, which is the same price as purchasing the physical DVD. This may not be exactly what Bill Gates was referring to when he said that the format war between Blu-Ray and HD DVD would likely be the last, but this is clearly a step forward for the digital distribution of content. The Vivid download DVDs are using a DRM technology that will only allow the video file to be burned to a DVD once. This technology is an important step in providing Vivid with the confidence to go forward with its plan. It’s not known whether the burned DVDs will be encrypted with CSS and can be unencrypted and replicated using software such as DVD Decrypter or DVDShrink. Mainstream studios will probably pay close attention to this service to see if the initial 30 DVDs start to show up on P2P networks with any greater frequency as an indication of piracy rates of movies distributed in this manner. The benefits of digital distribution are significant since it reduces manufacturing and distribution costs as well as any issues with inventory surplus or shortfall (not to mention personal discretion). Despite these advantages, I don’t think we’ll be seeing any of the major studios following suit anytime soon. http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/23...tertainment_to ![]() Digital Hollywood Mulls Changing Content Rights Laurie Sullivan Consulting firm Accenture LLC is working to develop a cross-platform digital rights business model that would allow consumers to access the content through an unlimited number of devices after paying for license rights once. A maturing industry continues to push the change, an Accenture executive at the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, Calif., told TechWeb on Wednesday. "If these companies don’t make the decision in a timely fashion to adopt this model the consumer will make the decision for them," said Richard B. Le Vine, Accenture senior manager of global architecture and core technologies. Software would identify the consumer rather than the device. Telecommunication companies, cable operators and wireless companies would sort out the billing behind the scenes. Content providers that stream movies into the home, for example, from online or through cable identify "the box" as the valid network device. A consumer can't finish watching the $6 movie in their bedroom that they began to watch in their living room the night prior because the content provider non-repudiates the box rather than the person. Companies are pouring "hundred of millions" into various projects to initiate change, Le Vine estimates. And change already is underway. Telecommunication, satellite, movie studios, and content providers have put together an architectural blueprint that describes the required equipment and processes. Companies have been selected to build software, servers, storage, content management, network infrastructure, authentication digital rights management and conditional access platforms. "There are billions to be made," Le Vine said. "Companies that embrace this disruption will succeed and capture mindshare. Some are marching down the path." Sling Media Inc. offers Slingbox, a device that allows consumers to access their local television content from any location their PC or mobile phone. Widespread deployment of this type of technology could arrive within two years, Le Vine estimates. "Many of today's pirates wear $100 jeans and carry $3,000 laptops and never run out of the restaurant without paying a bill," he said. "So they aren't really looking to break piracy rules, they are just rebelling against the business model because it's broken." In a separate panel discussion on rights-holder options, Le Vine said the model has met with resistance because it excludes many companies, such as those that want to sell portable music services. "I may have music at home," he said. "I've paid for the right. It's in my earphones and I'm not sharing it with anyone else." Fred Davis, founder at Davis, Shapiro, Lewit, Montone & Hayes, moderated the panel. Participants included Steve Manning, director of broadband content at VeriSign; Jason Johnson, director of licensing and business development at Via Licensing, a Dolby co.; Ian Ballon, shareholder at Greenberg Traurig; Christopher Amenita, senior vice president, enterprises group, ASCAP; and Neil Edwards, chief executive officer at .mobi. http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.j...leID=184401388 ![]() Megaplex Owners More Worried About DVDs Than Theaters That Treat Customers Right from the it's-dandy,-now-shut-up dept Mike It's still kind of scary to see that big movie theater owners don't seem to recognize what business they're in. They're so focused on the "threat" of movie downloads, that they don't seem to realize that it's easy to compete with them, if they just offered a better movie-going experience. Going out to the movies has always been a social experience, about more than just the movie itself. While a few smaller theaters have started to recognize this, the big chains still seem confused. The best example of this was how they reacted to the movie Bubble, which was offered on DVD the same day it was released to theaters -- hopefully giving people a choice in how they wanted to watch it. If the theaters were smart, they would have tried to play up the overall experience of the theaters -- but they couldn't, since that experience just hasn't been very good lately. There would be plenty of opportunities to profit from such simultaneous releases. For example, they could have sold the DVD to people leaving the theater who enjoyed the movie. Instead, the theater owners claimed that releasing a move on DVD took away their only competitive advantage. If they really believe that exclusivity is their only advantage, they deserve to die off. However, it's fascinating to see Wired Magazine ask the CEO of AMC theaters some tough questions about this phenomenon, only to see him respond by totally missing the point. The interviewer asks a few times what's wrong with showing simultaneous "day and date" releases -- and he basically responds by saying that, by definition, any such release can't be good. He doesn't comment on the actual quality of the movie -- but simply insists that a studio wants to release it so quickly on DVD it simply has to suck. Then, when the interviewer notes that the high price of attending a movie upsets people, the guy responds by making a bogus comparison, saying that it's cheaper than going to more expensive live events, and then saying the real problem was that movie quality sucked -- a theme the theater owners love to repeat. The final question, basically notes that the overall experience of going to a megaplex sucks, and smaller boutique theaters seem to be much more enjoyable -- which is why their business is booming. The CEO totally misses the point, by bragging about how many millions of people go to his theaters, saying that proves they're doing something right. So, in other words, he's saying that everything is going just great with their product... even though the big theater owners were just saying that something as simple as releasing DVDs simultaneously will ruin their business, and that downloading is a huge threat? Meanwhile, he's complaining about movie quality, while the interviewer pointed out that movie quality doesn't seem to be a problem at all for the smaller theaters that focus on a better movie-going experience. So, his summary seems to be that everything is going great -- and the thing to worry about is not the real competition from smaller theaters that treat their customers right, but those damn people at home. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060330/117239.shtml ![]() Beatles Record Label 'Missed Out' The Beatles' record label has been told it "missed out" in the fight against piracy by failing to sign up for Apple's iTunes downloading service. London's High Court was told that the "genius" of the system is that it provides security for music. But Apple Corps is not distributing the Beatles' back catalogue through iTunes, said Apple Computer's lawyer. The label claims the US computer firm has breached an agreement preventing it from entering the music business. The case is the latest in a long series of legal wrangles dating back to the 1980s when the record label took Apple Computer to court over a logo dispute. 'Very narrow use' Apple Corps is seeking a court order to ban the computer firm from using the logo in connection with its online music store, which recently registered its one billionth internet sale. "Apple Computer has been able to persuade every major content provider to distribute through the iTunes Music Store," said Lord Grabiner QC, acting for the US firm. "But Apple Computer has not been able to persuade Apple Corps in relation to the Beatles catalogue," he added. The company's lawyer also argued that the case "ignored key features" of a 1991 agreement with Apple Corps, saying it is permitted to operate in a wide range of fields including processing and broadcasting. "By contrast Apple Corps' field of use is very narrow indeed, being confined to creative works whose complete content is music," he said. Lord Grabiner denied that Apple Computer was preventing Apple Corps from using the famous logo, and said: "They must not do their business in a way which might cause conflict with our marks." He also claimed that Apple Corps objected to the payment made on every download from iTunes, but there was no reference to this in their agreement, calling the record label's case "inherent nonsense". Apple Corps, owned by former Beatles stars Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, was founded in 1968. Apple Computer, the firm whose home computers helped launch the personal computer industry, was founded in 1976. The computer company's logo is an apple with a section removed out of the side. The record company is represented by a complete green Granny Smith apple. An agreement between the two companies to share use of the Apple trademark was first established in 1981. But as Apple Computer's business increasingly entered the world of entertainment, the company sought a less restrictive trademark agreement and a court battle ensued in 1989. The case continues. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/4861164.stm ![]() Apple Defends Its Use of Logo on iTunes Store AP A lawyer for Apple Computer dismissed as ridiculous on Thursday a long-running trademark infringement claim by another cultural icon, the Apple Corps recording label of the Beatles. "Even a moron in a hurry could not be mistaken about" the distinction between the computer company's iTunes online music business and a recording company like Apple Corps, a lawyer for Apple Computer, Anthony Grabiner, said. At the center of the dispute are conflicting interpretations of a 1991 settlement that ended more than a decade of legal wrangling between the companies, with each of them agreeing not to tread on the other's sphere of business. In the High Court of Britain, Mr. Grabiner rejected Apple Corps' claim that the technology company's iTunes Music Store violated that agreement. He said the computer company had paid the record company $26.5 million as part of the settlement and in return had received "a considerably expanded field of use." The terms of the deal were kept confidential at the time. Mr. Grabiner said the "distribution of digital entertainment content" was permitted at Apple Computer under the agreement. But a lawyer for Apple Corps, Geoffrey Vos, had argued that Apple Computer's music distribution business "was flatly contradictory to the provisions of the agreement." Apple Corps was started by the Beatles in 1968 and is still owned by Paul McCartney; Ringo Starr; Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon; and the estate of George Harrison. Its lawsuit seeks to force Apple Computer to drop its apple logo from the iTunes Music Store and pay unspecified damages. Mr. Vos argued on Wednesday that although services like iTunes were permissible, Apple Computer should stay out of the music business if it uses the logo, a cartoonish apple with a neat bite out of its side. Apple Corps' logo is a green Granny Smith apple. Mr. Vos said the 1991 agreement set out the areas under which each company could operate using its respective apple trademarks and that by selling music under the apple mark, the computer company was overstepping its boundaries. But Mr. Grabiner argued that Apple Computer was not a recording label simply because it distributed music, so it did not violate the agreement. He said no "reasonable person" would assume that Apple Computer created or owned the 3.5 million songs on its hugely successful iTunes Music Store. "It's obvious that Apple Computer is not the source or origin of the content," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/te...y/31apple.html ![]() Judge Rules in Favor of 'Da Vinci' Writer Jill Lawless A judge ruled Friday that best-selling author Dan Brown did not steal ideas from a nonfiction book, ending the suspense about whether the novelist committed copyright infringement in his thriller "The Da Vinci Code." High Court judge Peter Smith rejected a copyright-infringement claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," who claimed that Brown's blockbuster "appropriated the architecture" of their 1982 book. In the United States, the book is titled, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." A film based on Brown's book and starring Tom Hanks opens May 19. "It would be quite wrong if fictional writers were to have their writings pored over in the way DVC (Da Vinci Code) has been pored over in this case by authors of pretend historical books to make an allegation of infringement of copyright," Smith said in his 71-page. "Today's verdict shows that this claim was utterly without merit, I'm still astonished that these two authors chose to file their suit at all," Brown in a statement, adding that he was "eager to get back to writing." "I'm pleased with today's outcome, not only from a personal standpoint but also as a novelist," he said. Both books explore theories that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, the couple had a child and the bloodline survives. Most historians and theologians scoff at such ideas, but Brown's fast-paced mix of murder, mysticism, code-breaking and art history has won millions of fans. "The Da Vinci Code" has sold more than 40 million copies - including 12 million hardcovers in the United States - since it was released in March 2003. It came out in paperback in the United States last week, and quickly sold more than 500,000 copies, an astonishing pace for a paperback release. An initial print run of 5 million has already been raised to 6 million. Random House said the case should have never made it to court. "We never believed it should have come to court and frequently tried to explain why to the claimants," said Gail Rebuck, chief executive of Random House Ltd. Leigh and Baigent may have to pay costs that legal experts estimate will top $1.75 million. A victory by Baigent and Leigh would have challenged the concept that copyright protects the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself. "A victory for Leigh and Baigent would make it very difficult for novelists, particularly historical novelists," Fiona Crawley, a copyright expert with law firm Bryan Cave LLP, said before the ruling. "They go to source books to research the history to incorporate into their novel. It would call into question how they can research a historical novel without being accused of copyright infringement by the historian who has written the key work on that incident in history." The case drew a packed crowd of journalists, Brown fans and theological revisionists to London's neo-Gothic High Court last month. Smith retained an air of bluff good humor during sometimes esoteric hearings that touched on the Roman Emperor Constantine's deathbed conversion to Christianity, the founding of the medieval warrior order the Knights Templar, the Merovingian dynasty allegedly descended from Jesus, and the perfidy of a seventh-century official named Pepin the Fat. The publicity-shy Brown traveled from New Hampshire to testify on behalf of his publisher, and spent three days on the stand. Brown acknowledged that he and his wife, Blythe, read "Holy Blood" while researching "Da Vinci," but said they also used 38 other books and hundreds of documents, and that the British authors' book was not crucial to their work. Baigent and Leigh claimed Brown's novel contains the same central themes as their book. But under cross-examination, Baigent conceded that it had been an exaggeration to say that Brown used "all the same historical conjecture" as their book. Random House lawyer John Baldwin said that while many of the incidents in "The Da Vinci Code" had been described before, "no one has put them together, and developed and expressed them, in the way Mr. Brown did. That is why he has a best-seller." Thanks to the case, so do Baigent and Leigh. Their 24-year-old book is selling 7,000 copies a week in Britain, compared with a few hundred before the case began. Baigent's new book, "The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History," has an initial print run of 150,000 copies in the United States. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT ![]() Future Brightens For Napster Jim Welte Subscription service raises its outlook for the fourth quarter, sending shares up more than 20 percent on the day. Shares in digital music subscription service Napster jumped more than 20 percent today after the company raised its financial outlook for the fourth quarter on better-than-expected revenue gains. The company said strong gains in the number of subscribers for its "all-you- can-eat" download service will push its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue in excess of $26 million, surpassing its previously forecast of revenue of $25 million. That, in turn, will lead to a lower-than-expected quarterly loss. "Napster's premium subscriber growth was extremely strong during our most recent quarter, resulting in revenue that exceeded our expectations," Napster CEO Chris Gorog said in a statement. Napster, one of the most recognized brands in digital music and once synonymous with the peer-to-peer (P2P) free-music bonanza, has hit rough terrain in recent months. The company laid off 10 employees in January and widespread speculation surrounded that the company was up for sale, with Google being mentioned as a possible suitor. But the layoffs have helped the company keeps its costs down, Gorog said today, and the company's pricey marketing campaign during the latter part of 2005 appears to have paid some dividends. As he has in all of his public statements in recent months, Gorog pointed to Napster's forthcoming Web-based initiative as a future driver of the company. The company has yet to release any specific details about the venture, only saying that it will provide music-related content to users and will be supported by advertising. "We believe this will be a unique music destination, unlike anything currently on the Web," Gorog said today. "It is being designed to attract and retain millions of fans and provide them with superb music-oriented content while in turn creating a highly targeted and attractive demographic for advertisers." The company will release its quarterly financial results on May 17. After rising more than 12 percent in early-morning trading, Napster shares kept climbing for the remainder of the day, closing at $4.05, up 68 cents, or 20.2 percent, on the day. http://www.mp3.com/news/stories/4001.html ![]() Fair Use In Hungary p2pnet Warner Music, EMI, Sony BMG and Vivendi Universal, the venal Big Four, classify their customers as marks to be screwed, blued and tattooed as often as possible and the labels' mottos might be, 'Never give a sucker an even break,' to quote WC Fields. With that in mind, it's refreshing to come across an agreement between artists and music lovers in which strenuous efforts appear to have been made by both sides to be fair and reasonable. For example, among other things, it states, "Consumers are to be protected when they copy music for their private needs, even if they use an illegal source in good faith. Private copying is fair and not contrary to the general requirements of copyright exceptions as long as it does not exceed the extent needed for one’s own enjoyment of works and that of the family or close friends, respectively. The private copying exception does not cover the dissemination (communication) of digital copies, e.g. via file sharing. "The private copying levy paid for blank media is an adequate tool for balancing between different interests, as it makes possible consumers’ protection as well. This levy is justified as long as consumer private copying is technically possible." The contract is between Hungary's National Association for Consumer Protection (NACPH) and the Socoiety Artisjus Hungarian Bureau for the Protection of Authors' Rights (ARTISJUS) and was forwarded to us by Nick Bentley. Thanks, Nick. The NACPH is a non-profit, politically independent, non-profit, non-governmental association in Hungary whose aim is, "the general protection of consumers (in this respect, the protection of their fundamental rights). NACPH identifies, represents and protects consumer interests." ARTISJUS is the, "Hungarian civil law association of composers, lyricists and music publishers, dealing with collective management of their rights and carrying out the representation of their interests. It joins authors, in order to strengthen them by exercising their individually unenforceable rights. It grants copyright licenses to the commercial exploiters of music, collects royalties, and distributes collected sums among its more than 1.200 full members, 4.300 mandating authors, and the members of 80 similar foreign composers' societies." We've included the full NACPH / ARTISJUS agreement below. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Cooperation Agreement Between the undersigned: NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER PROTECTION IN HUNGARY (hereinafter referred to as NACPH) and SOCIETY ARTISJUS HUNGARIAN BUREAU FOR THE PROTECTION OF AUTHORS’ RIGHTS (hereinafter referred to as ARTISJUS) Whereas, · consumers and authors of music have many common interests, · both consumers and authors are weaker parties vis-á-vis the commercial exploiters of music, therefore they assert their rights in a similar position. · it is useful for the associations of both groups to cooperate in exercising their rights, NACPH and ARTISJUS conclude the following agreement: 1.) Common interests of authors and consumers in general NACPH and ARTISJUS hereby agree with respect to the following principles: 1.1. If authors can safely subsist on their earnings, which include copyright royalties, it provides them incentive to create additional works. This leads to cultural diversity and wideranging musical supply, which is a primary interest to consumers. 1.2. The commercial exploiters of music should disseminate the works to the public in a way that takes into due account the interests of consumers as well. It is important for composers that consumers – fans and those having an interest – enjoy music without disruption and with great pleasure. 1.3. The commercial exploiters of music should disseminate the works to the public in a way that respects the moral rights of authors as well. The consumer has a right to know not only the performer’s but also the author’s name (subject to the circumstances i.e. to the mode of use or perception). This promotes consumers’ freedom of choice by providing complete information in a lawful way. It is important not only for the author but for the consumer as well, that the work (message) of the author should reach the public in an undistorted, unabridged way. 1.4. The collective management of music authors’ rights is advantageous to consumers as it provides the widest possible musical choice. It affords an opportunity for restaurants, radio,television, record labels, internet content providers and each commercial exploiter of music, to take their pick from almost every musical work of the world, irrespective of its genre and others’ business interests. 1.5. The Parties welcome the adoption of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expression and hope that the Hungarian Republic will also sign this shortly. 1.6. It is becoming increasingly important to protect Hungarian music – particularly at a time of intensive, global expansion of the Anglo-American music industry – and for this reason, there is a need for the protection of Hungarian authors and performers creating quality music. A good means to achieve this goal could be the use of minimal quotas – in line with the acquis communautaire – for the protection of Hungarian music not only on television but on the radio as well. 2.) Common interests of authors and consumers in the digital world (access to music, private copying) NACPH and ARTISJUS jointly declare the following: 2.1. Wide scale and well-ordered online access to culture is a public interest. · The wide access to works of art gives incentives to create new works. This is equally important for consumers and authors as well. · Copyright is not an obstacle to the public for freely using the content of the work for their own private purposes. · Copyright does not prevent creators from freely using the basic building elements of musical art (style, rhythm schemes, harmony, tempo, music ideas). · There is need for inexpensive, legal musical content service of good quality and with wide repertory being available online, that respects both consumers’ and authors’ rights. · 'Free access to culture' is not meant to jeopardize the living of authors. There should be opportunity for inexpensive access to culture in libraries, archives, schools and museums. Local and national governments should make contributions to this end not only by restrictions of authors' rights (which seems necessary in the information society), but much more by organizational and financial means. Consumers being able to pay for technical devices used to enjoy culture, should feel it obligatory to contribute to the costs of the content as well: to the existence of authors and performers and to the continuous creation of works. Consumers should avoid sources which presumably make works available by not observing authors and performers' rights. 2.2. The technical restrictions of access to and copying of musical recordings (the so-called "DRM systems") should not infringe the interests of consumers and authors. · If commercial exploiters of music restrict the playing or use of musical recordings via technological measures, it should only take place by means accepted by consumers as well. This is the only way to communicate music to the widest possible public which is a primary interest of authors. · Commercial exploiters of music should inform consumers in an appropriate manner on the manner in which such technological measures taken restrict the playing or copying of musical recordings. · Technological measures used in restricting access, copying or other use should make it possible for the consumer to enjoy the purchased musical recordings at home on every digital player device ('interoperability'), and to prepare private copies needed for this purpose. · No personal data of the consumers or data on their consumption habits should be collected, processed or shared without the expressed consent of the consumers. Such a practice cannot even be justified by the fight against copyright infringement. · Copyright exceptions mean a real restriction of copyright. They should not be precluded or made valueless by technological restrictions. 2.3. The private copying of works is the unrestrictable freedom of the consumer. · The protection of consumers acting in good-faith is in the public interest. · Consumers are to be protected when they copy music for their private needs, even if they use an illegal source in good faith. Private copying is fair and not contrary to the general requirements of copyright exceptions as long as it does not exceed the extent needed for one’s own enjoyment of works and that of the family or close friends, respectively. The private copying exception does not cover the dissemination (communication) of digital copies, e.g. via file sharing. · The private copying levy paid for blank media is an adequate tool for balancing between different interests, as it makes possible consumers’ protection as well. This levy is justified as long as consumer private copying is technically possible. 2.4. Online service providers taking part in the online dissemination of music should also participate in the protection of consumers’ and authors’ rights, and contribute to royalties as well. · Online service providers take great financial advantage from the online use of music and other works. However, up to now, they have refused to pay any fees for authors. It is desirable that they ensure to associations of consumers and authors the data necessary to exercise their rights efficiently against the adequate person. · Due care should be devoted to the service providers’ obligation of continuously making public their contact data. · The limitation of liability of online intermediaries in the field of copyright and consumer protection civil law is not justified if they make available the content under their own name, by their own electronic commercials. It would be desirable to adjust community and national law to this requirement. 3.) NACPH- ARTISJUS cooperation NACPH and ARTISJUS will contact each other in all matters falling within the aim and scope of activity of the other organization in order to express professionally well-founded opinions, mainly in the field of legislation. NACPH and ARTISJUS will hold regular expert meetings to exchange their experience regarding new phenomena in the commercial exploitation of music and their possible effects on consumers and authors, respectively. NACPH and ARTISJUS shall jointly inform the press from time to time about their opinions falling into the common scope of interests. NACPH and ARTISJUS intend to cooperate in the future in other ways not specified herein, in order that the affected parties and the society at large realize and acknowledge the common interests of authors and consumers. NACPH and ARTISJUS authorize each other to announce this agreement to the public. This agreement is concluded in the Hungarian language, however, thisEnglish version is likewise accepted by both parties and can also be made public by either party. The parties express their consent by undersigning this agreement in two identical copies. http://p2pnet.net/story/8375 ![]() DRM and the Myth of the 'Analog Hole' George Ou There seems to be a persistent myth floating around the board rooms of the movie companies and Congress that analog content is the boogie man of music and video piracy. In fact they're so paranoid about it that they're considering a mechanism called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that punishes law-abiding customers for content that they legally purchased. DRM… has to be better quality and easier to use than bootleg content or consumers won't accept it. It isn't even for something bad that they've done, but for something they theoretically might do which is to copy an HDTV movie at maximum 1920 by 1080 resolution using an analog video connector that doesn't have copy restrictions built in. But ironically, the real content pirates who make millions of bootleg movies have no intention of ever taking advantage of the so called "analog hole" because that is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content. The victim is the consumer who's only crime is that he couldn't afford the latest HDTV set with an HDMI content-protected connector so he or she gets punished with quarter-resolution 960 by 540 output while paying for high definition 1920 by 1080 (1080p or 1080 progressive) content. Copying high definition 1080p content over an analog signal is very expensive, time consuming, and prone to quality loss during the conversion even without ICT restrictions. Even if there was no way to make a high-speed bit-for-bit digital copy directly in a computer because of some DRM mechanism, there will always be some way for determined crackers to intercept unprotected digital content before it's delivered to the video output device. It is simply naive to think that any music or video pirate professional or casual is going to use the so called "analog hole" to pirate content and even dumber to pass laws that make maximum quality analog connectors illegal. Most new HDTV sets don't even have HDMI connectors let alone older HDTV sets so if ICT enforcement is ever adopted, almost everyone will be negatively affected. Most movie companies with the exception of Warner Brothers have already indicated that they would not initially implement ICT because they realize that they would have an uproar because so many people would be adversely affected. But in the future when enough HDMI-capable HDTV sets are on the market, there is no guarantee that the movie companies won't try to sneak ICT enforcement in to future releases. To prove the point that the analog issue or even DVD encryption is moot, anyone who's visited a relatively modern third world country will have seen the $1 bootleg DVDs lining the market. Those bootleg DVDs didn't get there because someone used an "analog hole" nor did they get there because some pirate used a decryption algorithm that may have been printed on someone's T-Shirt. They got there because someone simply made a bit-for-bit copy of the original DVD. There is nothing unique or special about a DVD (or HDDVD or Blueray disk) and it could simply be replicated and mass produced verbatim. But anyone who wanted to make a legitimate backup of their own legal DVD collection because they may have small children who have talent for shredding DVDs wasn't allowed to because the software was made illegal. Perhaps the movie companies are trying to stop casual copying but obviously all their efforts have not worked because it's easy as ever to copy and backup a DVD without ever resorting to expensive and imprecise analog video — so what's the point to ICT? I'm not against the concept of DRM and I view it as a balancing act between the rights of the content creators and the rights of the consumers. At the very least, the music and movie industry need to recognize that they cannot step on their customers rights and expect them to remain loyal paying customers regardless of where the law stands because consumers will either stop buying or simply bypass the restrictions. If we as a society are going to tolerate DRM, it should at least be open enough to allow competing vendors to play even if there is no official standard. Apple for example is notorious for abusing their dominant status in the online music business and will sue anyone who dares to be compatible with iTunes. Apple controls the playback and the distribution of digital music and they're not about to give that up without a fight. Consumers must be able to make legitimate backups and transport their legally acquired content on any device they choose. Ultimately it won't matter what the laws on DRM are because it has to be better quality and easier to use than bootleg content or the consumers won't accept it. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=180 ![]() DRM Key to Linux's Consumer Success? Ingrid Marson A RealNetworks executive has claimed that Linux risks being excluded from the consumer market if it does not add support for copyright protection technologies. But the Free Software Foundation Europe countered this claim on Thursday, saying consumers have made it clear that they do not want digital rights management, or DRM, restricting their use of digital media. Jeff Ayars, a vice president at RealNetworks, said in a talk at LinuxWorld here Tuesday that if Linux does not offer support for DRM, people will not be able to run restricted digital content on the operating system, which will damage its success in the consumer market. "The consequences of Linux not supporting DRM would be that fixed-purpose consumer electronics and Windows PCs would be the sole entertainment platforms available," Ayars said. "Linux would be further relegated to use in servers and business computers, since it would not be providing the multimedia technologies demanded by consumers." He pointed out that Microsoft Vista is implementing a number of digital rights technologies, such as Protected Media Path, Protected Video Path and Protected User Mode Audio. "I would like Linux to be able to do that as well," he said. The support must be included in the Linux operating system, as a DRM system would not be able to trust drivers that were separately installed, according to Ayars. But Georg Greve, the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, disagreed with Ayars' claim that Linux risks being excluded from the consumer market, arguing that users dislike DRM. Georg Greve "The Sony rootkit case made it quite clear why DRM is not accepted by consumers and why there is no successful business case for DRM," he said in an e-mail. "Apple iTunes allows people to burn their tracks on regular CDs, which can then be re-encoded and file-shared easily--so is better described as 'digital inconvenience management' only. eMusic.com offers clean audio tracks without any restrictions. No DRM platform comes close to either of these in popularity." "So fortunately, it is up to the consumer to decide what the consumer market wants. And its answer is clear: It does not want DRM!" he said. "The sooner we bury the foolish notion of putting each and every use of a computer under control of the media industry, the sooner we can start looking for real alternatives." Although Ayars refused to discuss what he termed the "philosophical" objections to using DRM, he admitted that there were "potential" negative consequences of supporting DRM in Linux, such as the risk of innovation being stifled. "There are limits on the innovation that is possible around protected media," Ayars said. "With protected content, you wouldn't be able to create a new business model like TiVo did with time-shifting television--it was able to do that because there was no protection on signal." Although much of the open-source community is likely to object to the addition of DRM to Linux, commercial Linux vendors may be more willing. "When I talk with Red Hat, Novell or Linspire--these distributions are in the business of creating software for consumers--they are interested in people who buy their products being able to (view DRM-protected multimedia)," Ayars said. Linspire's chief technical officer, Tom Welch, agreed that his company would definitely consider DRM. "Linspire has not added DRM into our (distribution) yet but would like to add it if we are given the opportunity, provided it is a DRM that is being used by consumer products (such as Apple's FairPlay or Microsoft's PlaysForSure). If someone comes out with an open-source DRM, we'd be behind it, but we need major content providers to support it as well," Welch said. Novell said it is keen to support more media formats but did not mention support for DRM. "We are looking forward to the time when Linux users will have access to media in all formats. We obviously support open media formats in our offerings now, and we're currently in discussions with vendors who control proprietary formats to include support for them, as well," said Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, Novell's director of Linux product marketing. Red Hat was unable to provide comment at the time of writing. Ingrid Marson of ZDNet UK reported from Boston. http://news.com.com/DRM+key+to+Linux...l?tag=nefd.top ![]() Anti-DRM Flashmob Hits Paris CD Superstore Cory Doctorow A group of technology activists staged an anti-DRM flashmob/protest in a large Paris music-shop yesterday. The group is called STOPDRM, a created by members of the Framasoft.net forum, where free software enthusiasts gather -- this is the same place that created the EUCD.INFO group that's been working on improving the upcoming French copyright law. The activists went to FNAC, a giant record store, and at 7PM, a whistle was blown, whereupon the whole group unfolded anti-DRM signs saying things like "STOP DRM" "SAY NO TO RESTRICTED CDs" "YOU OWN THE MUSIC YOU BUY" and began to hand out leaflets explaining the dangers of DRM to other patrons. After they were all kicked out, they set up an anti-DRM information picket in front of the story. http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/31...shmob_hit.html ![]() Justice Department Subpoenas Reach Far Beyond Google In its effort to uphold the Child Online Protection Act, the U.S. Department of Justice is leaving no stone unturned. In addition to America Online, MSN, and Google, the government has demanded information from at least 34 Internet service providers, search companies, and security software firms, InformationWeek learned through a Freedom of Information Act request. Thomas Claburn In its effort to uphold the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), the U.S. Department of Justice is leaving no stone unturned. Its widely reported issuance of subpoenas to Internet search companies AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo is just the tip of the iceberg: The government has demanded information from at least 34 Internet service providers, search companies, and security software firms. Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by InformationWeek, the Department of Justice disclosed that it has issued subpoenas to a broad range of companies, including AT&T, Comcast Cable, Cox Communications, EarthLink, LookSmart, SBC Communications (then separate from AT&T), Symantec, and Verizon. Asked which companies objected to, or sought to limit, these subpoenas, Department of Justice spokesperson Charles Miller declined to comment, citing that the litigation was ongoing. He also declined to comment on the utility of the information gathered by the government. The documents presented to InformationWeek reveal that some companies did object to the government's demands. In an E-mail sent to the Department of Justice last July, Fernando Laguarda, an attorney representing Cablevision Systems Corp., characterized some of what the government was asking for as "overly broad, vague, ambitious, and unduly burdensome." In a letter sent to the Department of Justice in August, Joseph Serino Jr., an attorney representing Verizon, voiced similar objections. However, he clearly states that his objections are routine and intended to protect the company. The one exceptional objection he cites has to do with the sensitivity of the information sought. Serino said Verizon Online is concerned that documents might be forwarded to people working for entities hostile to Verizon Online, or that are suing the company, including the Justice Department itself and the American Civil Liberties Union. Verizon didn't respond to requests for comment. The subpoenas were issued between June and September 2005. Beyond AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo, the only other search engine subpoenaed was LookSmart. It's likely, however, that the government's interest in LookSmart stems not from the company's search engine, but from its ownership of Internet content filtering software company Net Nanny. LookSmart declined to comment about the information it was asked for and the information it provided. EarthLink likewise declined to comment. The bulk of the subpoenas were directed at Internet service providers and makers of content filtering software. The effectiveness of filtering technology is a critical issue in the COPA case. If the Department of Justice can prove that filters fail to shield minors from explicit material online, COPA may well be reinstated. The full list of companies subpoenaed by the Department of Justice includes: 711Net (Mayberry USA), American Family Online, AOL, AT&T, Authentium, BellSouth, Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast Cable Company, Computer Associates, ContentWatch, Cox Communications, EarthLink, Google, Internet4Families, LookSmart, McAfee, MSN, Qwest, RuleSpace, S4F (Advance Internet Management), SafeBrowse, SBC Communications, Secure Computing Corp., Security Software Systems, SoftForYou, Solid Oak Software, SurfControl, Symantec, Time Warner, Tucows (Mayberry USA), United Online, Verizon, and Yahoo. The subpoenas directed at security software companies asked for a substantial amount of information, including any and all documents that fall into 29 separate categories, including the kinds of content filtering products or services offered, the number of customers using those products or services, how users configure their filters, how filters get updated, R&D spending on such products, the methodology used to generate blacklisted or filtered sites, and pretty much any data gathered that relates to the use of filters. "What they are doing, from our perspective, is engaging in a massive fishing expedition in an attempt to find some shred of evidence that they think can change a result they didn't like, which is that COPA violates the First Amendment," says Aden Fine, an attorney for the ACLU. While the government's demands for information from Internet search engines have privacy implications for individuals, its interest in corporate information raises questions about the rights of businesses. Stephen Ryan, a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Washington D.C., considers the scope of the government's discovery efforts unusual. "I'm not surprised that the Google piece looks like the tip of an iceberg," he says. "But it is sort of surprising that they're using their authority this broadly." Ryan acknowledges that government subpoenas place undue burdens on companies every day, noting that there are probably scores of attorneys at large ISPs who do nothing but process subpoenas. He suggests that as information technology produces more information, the government will want greater access to that data. With regard to the financial impact of subpoenas, Ryan notes, "If you look at the Office of Regulatory Affairs at Office of Management and Budget, there's something called the Paperwork Reduction Act. And there's supposed to be an evaluation of the burden that a government law or regulation will make on the public. I'll bet there's never been a burden analysis of what they're doing." Justice Department spokesman Miller said he would inquire about this, but didn't have an immediate answer. Dan Jude, however, did. Jude, president of filtering software company Security Software Systems, confirms that the subpoena his 12-person company received was a burden. "It was a pain," he says. "I don't have exact figures, but it took 40-plus hours to put stuff together." Jude says the Department of Justice asked for proprietary information about his company's content filtering software. Despite assurances that the information would remain confidential, he says he refused that particular demand, fearing it might be revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request. Jude contends that the government's efforts to prop up COPA are misguided. "It's a waste of time," he says, noting that he testified before the COPA Commission about the prevalence of explicit material online in August 2000. The problem, he says, is that U.S. legislation has no teeth because half of the Web servers with explicit content are located in other countries. If COPA were to be reinstated, Jude suggests that the Department of Justice would have to turn ISPs into content police in order to deal with offshore offenders. As someone who sells a technical solution, it's perhaps no surprise that Jude has faith in filtering. "The great thing about the technology is that it allows parents to make the determination of what they want their kids to be able to do and not to do," he says. "And isn't that what we're supposed to be doing in this country?" http://www.informationweek.com/share...leID=184401156 ![]() Piracy Crackdown Urged In Russia The US movie industry is urging Russia to crack down on piracy to aid the revival of its own business. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said both US and Russian films lost money due to the illegal trade in the country. "I believe that the politicians in Russia need to make this a much higher priority," said MPAA chief executive Dan Glickman on a visit to Moscow. Russian film-makers joined the MPAA's call for a crackdown. 'Dagger in the heart' Russian economy minister German Gref, US ambassador to Moscow William Burns and industry leaders also attend the meeting. Mr Glickman estimated Russian piracy cost the US $266m (£253m) a year while non-US films lost $122m (£70,000). Sergei Selyanov, a producer of the Russian film Brat (Brother), said: "The more Russian cinema becomes successful, the less tolerable this is. "The pirate market does not allow us to make profits and make new films." Mr Glickman added: "Piracy is a dagger in the heart of a growing Russian film industry." Russian has made numerous attempts to stem piracy and counterfeiting but they remain among the sticking points of Russia joining the World Trade Organization. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...nt/4860584.stm ![]() Blacks Turn to Internet Highway, and Digital Divide Starts to Close Michel Marriott African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the "digital divide" that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success. Civil rights leaders, educators and national policy makers warned for years that the Internet was bypassing blacks and some Hispanics as whites and Asian-Americans were rapidly increasing their use of it. But the falling price of laptops, more computers in public schools and libraries and the newest generation of cellphones and hand-held devices that connect to the Internet have all contributed to closing the divide, Internet experts say. Another powerful influence in attracting blacks and other minorities to the Internet has been the explosive evolution of the Internet itself, once mostly a tool used by researchers, which has become a cultural crossroad of work, play and social interaction. Studies and mounting anecdotal evidence now suggest that blacks, even some of those at the lower end of the economic scale, are making significant gains. As a result, organizations that serve African-Americans, as well as companies seeking their business, are increasingly turning to the Internet to reach out to them. "What digital divide?" Magic Johnson, the basketball legend, asked rhetorically in an interview about his new Internet campaign deal with the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln Mercury division to use the Internet to promote cars to black prospective buyers. The sharpest growth in Internet access and use is among young people. But blacks and other members of minorities of various ages are also merging onto the digital information highway as never before. According to a Pew national survey of people 18 and older, completed in February, 74 percent of whites go online, 61 percent of African-Americans do and 80 percent of English-speaking Hispanic-Americans report using the Internet. The survey did not look at non-English-speaking Hispanics, who some experts believe are not gaining access to the Internet in large numbers. In a similar Pew survey in 1998, just 42 percent of white American adults said they used the Internet while only 23 percent of African-American adults did so. Forty percent of English-speaking Hispanic-Americans said they used the Internet. Despite the dissolving gap, some groups like the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network, which introduces digital technologies to young people, say the digital divide is still vast in more subtle ways. Instant messaging and downloading music is one thing, said Marlon Orozco, program manager at the network's Boston clubhouse, but he would like to see black and Hispanic teenagers use the Internet in more challenging ways, like building virtual communities or promoting their businesses. Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which has studied Internet use by race, ethnicity and age, cautioned that a new dimension of the digital divide might be opening because groups that were newer to the Internet tended to use less-advanced hardware and had slower connection speeds. "The type and meaningful quality of access is, in some ways, a more challenging divide that remains," Ms. Rideout said. "This has an impact on things like homework." In addition, Internet access solely at institutions can put students at a disadvantage. Schools and other institutions seldom operate round the clock, seven days a week, which is especially an issue for students, said Andy Carvin, coordinator for the Digital Divide Network, an international group that seeks to close the gap. But not everyone agrees that minorities tend toward less-advanced use of the Internet. Pippa Norris, a lecturer on comparative politics at Harvard who has written extensively about the digital divide, said members of minorities had been shown to use the Internet to search for jobs and to connect to a wide variety of educational opportunities. "The simple assumption that the Internet is a luxury is being disputed by this group," Ms. Norris said. The divide was considered so dire a decade ago that scholars, philanthropists and even President Bill Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address fretted over just what the gap would mean in lost educational and employment opportunities for young people who were not wired. In an effort to help erase the divide, the federal government has provided low-cost connections for schools, libraries, hospitals and health clinics, allocated money to expand in-home access to computers and the Internet for low-income families and given tax incentives to companies donating computer and technical training and for sponsoring community learning centers. As a result of such efforts, "most kids, almost all kids, have a place in which they can go online and have gone online," said Ms. Rideout of the Kaiser foundation. Jason Jordan of Boston is one of the young people closing the divide. Jason, 17, who is black, is getting a used computer from an older brother. He said he had wanted a computer for years, since "I heard about a lot that I was missing." Jason said he had access to the Internet at school, where he is pursuing a general equivalency diploma, but looked forward to having his own computer and Web access at his home in the Dorchester section of Boston. "I can work in my own place and don't have to worry about the time I'm online," he said. Like Jason, almost 9 out of 10 of the 21 million Americans ages 12 to 17 use the Internet, according to a report issued in July by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of them, 87 percent of white teenagers say they use the Internet, while 77 percent of black teenagers and 89 percent of Hispanic teenagers say they have access to it, the report said. The gap in access among young Americans is less pronounced than among their parents' generation, said Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew project. "Age continues to be a strong predictor for Internet use," Ms. Fox said. While, overall Internet use among blacks still significantly trails use among whites, the shrinking divide is most vividly reflected in the online experience of people like Billy and Barbara Johnson. Less than two years ago, the Johnsons, who are black, plugged into the Internet in their upscale suburban home near Atlanta for the first time. Mrs. Johnson, a 52-year-old mother of four and homemaker, said she felt she had little choice because her school-age children needed to use the Internet for research. And then there is e-mail. "No one really wants to take the time anymore to pick up the phone and keep in touch," lamented Mrs. Johnson, who said that so much of the communications with her children's school was done through e-mail correspondence. "I felt like I was pretty much forced into it." Even so, Mrs. Johnson said her husband, an assistant coach for the Atlanta Falcons, still chided her when she neglected to check her e-mail at least every day. Ms. Norris and other experts on Internet use see progress on the horizon. They note that the declining cost of laptop and other computers, and efforts, like those in Philadelphia, to provide low-cost wireless Internet access, are likely to increase online access for groups that have been slow to connect. Philanthropic efforts have also helped to give more people Internet access. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $250 million since 1997 for American public libraries to create Internet access for the public. Martha Choe, the foundation's director of global libraries, said some 47,000 computers had been bought for 11,000 libraries. Today, Ms. Choe said, most libraries in the United States have public Internet access. Education levels remain a major indicator of who is among the 137 million Americans using the Internet and who is not, said Ms. Fox. There is also a strong correlation, experts say, between household income and Internet access. With so many more members of minorities online, some Web sites are trying to capitalize on their new access. For example, the New York/New Jersey region of the State of the African American Male, a national initiative to improve conditions for black men, is encouraging men to use digital equipment to "empower themselves" to better their lives. The site, which includes studies, public policy reports and other information about issues related to black men, promotes using digital cameras, mobile phones and iPods, but mainly computers, to organize through the Internet, said Walter Fields, vice president for government relations for the Community Service Society, an antipoverty organization, and a coordinator of the black-male initiative. Users are encouraged to submit articles, write blogs and upload pertinent photographs and video clips. "What we're doing is playing against the popular notion of a digital divide," Mr. Fields said. "I always felt that it was a misnomer." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/us...rtner=homepage ![]() AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet Connections "Irrelevant" Nate Anderson At this week's Media, Entertainment and Telecommunications conference, AT&T COO Randall Stephenson told his listeners that increased bandwidth was no longer of great importance to consumers. "In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds," he told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown "no discernable difference" between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone. Certainly this is true for general web browsing, which rarely taxes the speed of even a slow DSL connection, but it seems like bandwidth would be crucial for next-generation applications such as IPTV that the telcos soon hope to provide. Right? Not according to Stephenson, who points out that bandwidth is of less importance to IPTV setups because of the switched nature of the system. Generally, only a couple of channels are transmitted at one time, and this does not change no matter how many total channels are offered to the consumer (see our overview of IPTV for more information on how this works). In terms of Lightspeed's ability to push through hundreds of video channels, including high-def video, "we're not constrained by bandwidth. You're not constrained by the size of the pipe anymore," Stephenson said, referring to the switched-video capacity of the network which delivers only one service to a single customer at a time. This is a direct response to the criticism that AT&T has suffered for deploying a fiber optic network that reaches only to the local node, not directly into a customer's home—which means that the "last mile" connection is still copper wire. Verizon, by contrast, is deploying fiber directly into the home, making for much higher speeds. AT&T argues that its model is cheaper, faster to deploy, and just as capable as Verizon's, which currently uses much of its massive bandwidth to distribute RF TV channels. Pressures on satellite In related television news, it looks like the squeeze play is underway against the satellite industry. The telcos, such as AT&T, have generally partnered with a satellite company in order to offer television service. Now that they're getting into the game themselves, these partnerships are dying. Pressure is also coming from the cable companies, which are getting onboard with Cablevision's plan to move the DVR into the headend. This will cut costs for the cable companies, who no longer have to send out trucks to install, troubleshoot, and repair DVRs in homes, but it's a move that satellite operators can't match. He [Comcast COO Stephen Burke] said a network recording service would help cable companies compete against satellite TV operators such as DirecTV and EchoStar, which cannot cut the cost of the DVR box out of their pricing structure. This kind of pressure from the cable companies, combined with the price war which could ensue between cable operators and the telcos, will certainly make it harder for satellite to compete over the next few years. Whether they can carve out a niche and remain a viable proposition remains to be seen, though it should be noted that satellite is not sitting still waiting for the axe to fall. DirecTV, for instance, has been pondering plans to roll out broadband services of its own, and satellite can still claim to offer a higher-quality picture than cable (in most cases). IPTV, though it could spark a price war with both services, won't be coming to most cities for some time, so satellite should have a few years of breathing room before the squeeze is on in earnest. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6498.html ![]() Former Eastman Kodak Manager Sues Company Ben Dobbin An Eastman Kodak Co. manager claims she was fired for protesting a cost-saving proposal that would have quietly compressed millions of digital images stored by customers on the world's leading online photography site. While acknowledging it has discussed ways to cut back on the rising cost of online storage, Kodak insisted Thursday it would never condense images in a lower-resolution format -- and thereby potentially diminish their quality -- "without our customers' knowledge." "It's an issue I'm sure all online photo services are discussing" as the image capacity of newer digital cameras expands, said David Rich, vice president of marketing at the Kodak EasyShare Gallery. "However, we have not made any plans nor any decisions about any compression of existing images within our service." Maya Raber, former director of software development at the online unit in Emeryville, Calif., claimed in a lawsuit that her job was eliminated in August because she opposed a plan to shrink disc space and save Kodak money by compressing more than 800 million photo files owned by about 13 million active members. Raber, 41, said she warned her bosses that doubling the compression of image files already in storage could "irreversibly alter and damage" them. Although the proposal was not carried out, Raber said she was fired for raising a ruckus. Kodak's EasyShare service, which formerly went by Ofoto, is free, though customers must make at least one purchase -- a 15-cent print counts -- to store images beyond a year. Sites such as these make their money primarily by selling prints, mugs imprinted with photos and other items. In October, the photo-storage and printing business began offering its members an option of uploading images 50 percent faster. But that upload program would "still result in the same high-quality image they would expect" for prints as large as 8-by-10 inches, Rich said. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Oakland, Calif., maintained that employees who complained about the compression proposal were told that "this is not a democracy" and that "objection to the project will be noticed." Raber, who is seeking unspecified monetary damages, alleges she was wrongfully terminated and claims Kodak disguised her firing as a restructuring move. Kodak declined to comment on the reasons she left the company. "This is a personnel issue, so we cannot discuss specifics," Kodak said in a statement. Ed Lee, a digital photography analyst at InfoTrends Inc. in Weymouth, Mass., said online sites "should be just one other way of storing your photos. It shouldn't be your only way (because) every time you edit your photo and re-save it, there generally is some re-compression and you are actually losing some quality. "If consumers have the original on their computers, then it's never really a problem," Lee said. "If they want a poster-size print, they could just upload that same image again at the higher resolution." Midway through a four-year makeover, Kodak is struggling to turn profits from its digital businesses. It lost $1.4 billion in 2005 even as digital sales exceeded sales from film and other chemical-based businesses for the first time. Kodak, however, has climbed to No. 1 in sales of digital cameras and digital X-ray systems in the United States and leads the world in sales of photo kiosks, thermal home printers and online photo services. Along with the most online customers, Kodak also leads Shutterfly.com and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Snapfish.com in online revenues, Lee said. http://www.latimes.com/business/inve...ck=1&cset=true ![]() Tempting, Isn't It? It's easy for young people to grab movies and music from the net. Lia Timson reports on why generation tech pays no heed to copyright laws. Rose* is no slouch when it comes to finding her way around the internet. Like most 15-year-olds, she has grown up with computers and has the skills to track down the things that most interest her - and if you know what you are doing, the best stuff on the web doesn't cost anything. Together with her brother, Jonathan*, 13, she regularly downloads illegal music off the internet. Their friend Bob*, 12, also downloads lots of songs to his computer and then onto his MP3 player and mobile phone. The trio knows that copying music that would normally be sold is not legal, but they have no trouble doing so. "Everyone does it because the police aren't going to go after everyone," Rose says. "They can't put everyone in jail,". "If they do track us down, it will be through MSN or Yahoo and no one is going to put their real name on there," Jonathan says. T o these young people, copying songs, and sometimes games and movies, via peer-to-peer networks is a means to an end; a minor indiscretion committed at home in the name of entertainment. "Some movie stars and singers don't really need the money," Bob says. "They get millions and million of dollars. "Initially someone needed to get it from a paid CD anyway [before uploading to a file-sharing network]." Nearby, 12-year-old Simon* is building a library of illegal South Park episodes. He recently fell in love with the cartoon series and now can't get enough of it on free-to-air television. He doesn't see a problem with the copies. Together these children are a sample of generation tech, those young people who have grown up with the internet and with its many jewels and pitfalls at their fingertips. Whether it is copying the latest hit songs to their mobile phone, finding "cracked" versions of games and other software, or downloading full-length feature films before burning them to DVD, just about everything is available to them online and there is very little, if any, attention paid to questioning the morality of their actions. "Our dad does it as well," Rose says. "He [downloads] episodes of Stargate and some movies that haven't come here yet. It doesn't worry us," Jonathan says. "We do it because it's easy," Bob says. But they wouldn't dream of stealing a CD from a shop, hacking into a website to steal content, or plagiarising a school assignment. For them, the ripping mentality does not translate to "physical" crime or cheating at school. "Assignments? No, that's different because the teachers will know that you are cutting-and-pasting and not doing the work," says Rose, with the others in agreement. Besides, if they cheated on school work, a classmate who worked hard to prepare the assignment from scratch might receive a lower mark than them. "I wouldn't be comfortable with that," Rose says. The most recent study conducted for the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) (http://www.aria.com.au), by Quantum Market Research, in 2003, shows illegitimate channels account for 10.7 per cent of all music acquired by the general population in Australia. Illegal file-sharing and CD burning is higher among under-17s (31 per cent) and in the 18-to-24 age group (21 per cent). Industry experts say that's partly because the laws are misunderstood, and partly because until iTunes Music Store (http://www.itunes.com) was launched in Australia in November there were few ways to download legal music. Bob, for example, wasn't aware that Australia's Copyright Act prohibits the copying of one's own CDs onto another storage device, such as an MP3 player. "I thought you just couldn't sell it to people," he says. Lui*, a 20-year-old rugby player, was also not sure if the DVDs his mates make of downloaded movies are illegal. But he thinks borrowing them is not as bad as ripping music. In theory, the act also prohibits people making back-up copies of their DVD collection and copying TV programs to watch later - a practice known as time-shifting. It also prohibits the copying of software, photographs, games and any other authored material without permission. But no record label, film studio or software company is interested in prosecuting individual offenders here at present. "In Australia we have taken the decision to go against the P2P [peer-to-peer] networks," says Stephen Peach, ARIA's chief executive. The association represents music labels such as Sony BMG and Universal. Late last year, ARIA successfully sued Sharman Networks, the owner of the popular file-sharing system Kazaa, for allowing its users to illegally share copyright content. Although Kazaa and similar sites warn members not to use their software for illegal purposes (http://www.au.kazaa.com/eula.htm), the Federal Court held the warnings were ineffective. Sharman is appealing the decision. Other P2P sites have been operating normally. Peach believes the appeal will not succeed, but in the meantime is working with record labels and other content providers to increase the availability of legal content in Australia. These include starting legitimate pay-per-download and subscription websites, and new retail models such as the Sanity (http://www.sanity.com.au) music kiosks. Sanity's kiosks launched in February and let shoppers buy and burn individual songs or compilations onto CD or removable storage device in-store. "Although illegal and causing significant harm to the industry, [illegal downloading] demonstrates preference," Peach says. "Consumers want choice and access to a vast repertoire. The industry must produce compelling alternatives. "The technical simplicity and the sheer volume of readily available online content is very attractive to music lovers." Francine Garlin, a lecturer in consumer behaviour at the faculty of business at the University of Technology, Sydney, says the laws aren't taken seriously because it's human nature to take risks. The low probability of getting caught and peer-group pressure are factors influencing the prevalence of file-sharing. It's the show-off factor, she says. "Consumer psychology has answers for that. We take on roles in groups and we know we can have more or less status [according to the role]. If the glue that binds a group is technology, there could be status conferred to people for what they can [download]. " In a posted comment to the movie chat forum In Film Australia (http://www.infilm.com.au), site administrator Bucky says people use their judgement when interpreting rules. "Certainly in the eyes of the law there is no doubt [it's illegal], but every person with a brain understands that the law is far from a morally pure entity, thus it is always up to our own sense of judgement about which laws we really take seriously and which laws we don't," he says. Meanwhile, some research studies are starting to show a small decline in the number of illegal downloads, in favour of legal online purchases. Jason Juma-Ross, senior research analyst at AMR Interactive, says statistics from recent Australian surveys show a small shift to paid music and video downloads, now that they are available. This is consistent with figures from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (http://www.ifpi.org), which show the number of illegally available music files on the internet is down 20 per cent on the 1.1 billion peak in 2003. That's partly due to new legal sites, and partly due to efforts by some artists, such as Madonna, to stamp out the illegal practice by uploading ruined copies of their songs to file-sharing sites. Adrienne Pecotic, executive director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, says their advertisements screening on rental DVDs and cinemas since mid-2004 are also starting to make a difference to the pirating of movies. The ads start with the phrase: "You wouldn't steal a car." Pecotic says: "A lot more people understand it's a crime. People don't think everything on the internet is free any more, just as it's not true." The ads have encountered cynicism from illegal movie downloaders. Some chat-room users branded the campaign "lame" and wondered how much interest it would spark among people who may not yet share files. "I wonder how many people see that ad ... then get home and look into downloading movies," says one user. Pecotic says it is not a criminal offence to download an illegal file or copy a CD - an individual can be sued but not arrested - but it is criminal to upload illegal files for sharing, distributing or profiting. But in the end, she says, children and their parents must question their morals, while government and the industry must better explain the effect of piracy. "People in chat rooms may not necessarily care, but their children may not get a job in a video store or a role in a movie because of the impact on the business," she says. "Piracy is a direct threat to the creation [of works]." ARIA's Peach is hopeful that online music retailers such as iTunes and Sanity (www.sanitydigital.com.au) and ISPs such as BigPond, which last month launched a movie download service (http://www.bigpondmovies.com), will help make illegal files less attractive. He believes that in time people will come to see that illegal downloading is "a B-class way of acquiring content". * Not their real names. Fair use In the United States a "fair use" provision in the copyright law permits people to make one copy of a CD or DVD they have purchased, or copy a broadcast TV program, for their personal use. This means time-shifting is widely accepted, as is copying an entire CD collection onto an MP3 player or onto CDs to enjoy in the car. The Australian Copyright Council (http://www.copyright.org.au) has suggested amendments to the Copyright Act to include provision for such "private copying". Other alternatives include the introduction of a copyright levy added to the price of hardware such as digital music players and video recorders. Amendments are under consideration by the Federal Government, with no date announced for a decision. Libby Bauch, the council's executive officer, says that in theory until such changes are accepted, copying is illegal. In practice, however, "it's a non-enforceable activity. It can't be stopped," she says. "The levy system is a practical solution." Infofile At http://www.moviepiracy.org.au you can dob in a scurvy movie pirate. Games piracy can be reported to Crimestoppers (http://www.crimestoppers.com.au). http://www.smh.com.au/news/technolog...page=fullpage# ![]() Sling Media: We're Good For Cable Mark Sullivan Sling Media Inc. CEO Blake Krikorian testified before the House Commerce Committee that his video “place shifting” device will help, not hurt, broadcasters and cable providers. Sling Media's “Slingbox” grabs the TV signal at the home and slings it out over a broadband connection to a laptop, cell phone or any other connected device. Where the Tivo allows viewers to “time shift” their programming, Sling allows them to “place shift” it. While Sling is still a young company and the quality of "slung" media is poor given bandwidth constraints, some members of the content and broadcasting communities have already expressed concern over the device. Krikorian points out, however, that the skepticism is unfounded because Sling neither records content nor distributes it to more than one end point at a time. “I think for the cable company this is a great thing, I think a product like this is going to help drive their services,” Krikorian told the Committee Wednesday (March 29). According to Krikorian, Sling helps extend the reach of content owners and broadcasters. “From a local broadcaster perspective, this is one of the technologies that will help broadcasters stay relevant in this day and age,” Krikorian says. “With Sling in the home, you could reach me for 10 hours a day that you couldn’t reach me before.” The National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) declined to comment on the Slingbox, as did Comcast Corp. The House Commerce Committee is holding hearings to decide whether or not to make changes to "fair use" language in the copyright law now that time- and place- shifting technologies have emerged. John Feehery of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said the large studios want to work directly with makers of new technologies on digital rights management issues. “We have to have the protections in place so that it doesn’t get out of hand and lead to massive piracy,” Feehery explained. Krikorian told the committee that fears of copyright infringement have hung over the company since its inception. Investors too, he said, were nervous about backing the idea because of potential legal problems. “It was very difficult to raise money; investors were very nervous,” Krikorian told the committee. “It was tough living under that shadow of possible litigation.” The Slingbox has been selling for just over a year now, Krikorian says. His company won’t reveal how many of the devices have been sold, only that it’s in the six figures. The product is manufactured in a former Sony factory owned by a private company in Singapore, he said. “You need to help preserve a marketplace where new innovation is possible and people can work and develop new products under fair use [law] and not have to ask permission in advance,” Krikorian said. http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s...leID=184416953 ![]() Jailed Chinese Journalist's Family Mulls Filing Court Action Against Yahoo AFX Internet firm Yahoo may face legal action for allegedly providing information which allowed a Chinese journalist to be jailed for 10 years for leaking state secrets, his family said. Zhang Yu, representing the family of Shi Tao, said they were considering taking Yahoo Hong Kong Holdings to court either here or in the United States. 'We believe what (Yahoo) did was illegal so we are considering taking Yahoo to court,' Zhang told reporters, adding that Yahoo had refused to discuss the matter with him. Shi was sentenced in April last year after posting on the Internet a government order barring Chinese media from marking the 15th anniversary of the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown on democracy activists. Yahoo allegedly provided information that proved Shi had emailed the order from his office computer at the Contemporary Business News. Pro-democracy legislator and lawyer Albert Ho showed journalists a copy of the verdict issued by a court in the central Chinese province of Hunan. The document said: 'Yahoo Hong Kong Holdings provided materials that confirmed the user's information.' It also gave the IP (Internet Protocol) address of Shi's computer and his work phone number and address. Ho said a formal complaint has been made to Hong Kong's Office of the Privacy Commission for Personal Data, a privacy watchdog, which told them it will investigate the case. Shi has insisted he is innocent, arguing that the government order was not a state secret. http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/afx...fx2636580.html ![]() Toshiba Launches 1st HD-DVD Player in Japan Martyn Williams Toshiba began selling the world’s first HD-DVD player on Friday in Japan, moving the format battle between the world’s largest consumer electronics makers from the floors of trade shows to retail stores. HD-DVD is backed by Toshiba, the DVD Forum and companies including Microsoft and Intel, and is vying for supremacy with Blu-ray Disc, which is backed by Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Samsung Electronics and others, in the race to replace DVD for high-definition content. Toshiba’s first player, the HD-XA1, is one of two models first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. It’s scheduled to go on sale in the United States in April along with another player, but the Japan launch Friday marks the first time a dedicated player for either format has reached the market. The player was originally due out late last year, but delays in completing a content protection specification meant Toshiba had to push the launch back a few months. The player goes on sale just over a month after a preliminary version of the specification, called the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), was completed. The late finalization of AACS affected content providers as well as hardware makers such as Toshiba. The first video content for HD-DVD isn’t due on sale in Japan until April 7. Toshiba will make about 2,000 of the players per month at first, but expects total worldwide sales in the next year of 600,000 to 700,000 units, said Yoshihide Fujii, head of Toshiba’s consumer electronics unit, at a news conference in Tokyo. The player will sell for 110,000 yen (US$936) in Japan. In the North American market there will also be a cheaper player, the HD-A1, priced at $500. Toshiba said the price in Japan is based on its expectation that video enthusiasts will be first to adopt the technology, while in the United States, the prices are aimed more at average consumers who are more price conscious. Early buyers of HD-DVD and Blu-ray products face the risk that their chosen format might eventually be pushed to the sidelines of the market. There is at least one incentive to purchase now, however: The HD-XA1 has no region coding for the HD-DVD content, meaning it can play HD-DVD discs purchased anywhere in the world. A decision on region codes isn’t expected to be made for several months. http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=19788 ![]() Sony Trounces MSFT & Nintendo In Brand Trust Survey Vladimir Cole Forrester Research has published a new report that examines the trust that American households place in PC and consumer electronics (CE) brands, including the brands of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. The results may be surprising to gamers. In Forrester's analysis, Sony's brand garnered the highest marks of the three companies (Sony also ranked 3rd out of 22 companies), earning an average grade of A plus. Of the companies surveyed, only Bose and Dell ranked higher than Sony overall. Meanwhile, Microsoft's brand ranked 20 out of 22 brands, dragged down by low brand trust. Nintendo's played 17 out of 22, pulled towards the bottom of the ranking by low brand potential and low brand adoption. One figure from the report showed how the companies compared on the dimensions of brand potential and brand trust. In this figure, Sony and Nintendo were clustered together in the middle of the pack, with Sony enjoying higher trust and higher potential. Microsoft, however, was hovering near the origin, a clear outlier position indicating that the company will fight an uphill battle in trying to win consumers over to its CE and PC products. A couple revealing quotes from the study: · "Microsoft faces big consumer defection risk." Approximately 5.4 million households "know they run Microsoft software but would be just as happy to leave it behind -- if they could." · "Sony's current customers are affluent, young, and more likely than the general population to stick with a brand they like." Remember, though, that this survey is based on broad attitudes towards these companies' entire product lines. The applicability of these results to the gaming market is an open question (and perhaps unfair to the gaming brands that Sony and Microsoft have endeavored to build through the PlayStation and Xbox brands, respectively. Intuitively, however, the attitudes expressed in the survey feel close to the attitudes we see on this blog from commenters. Microsoft tends to be afforded very little leeway or margin for error. The company hasn't got a ton of trust, at least amongst Internet communities that have for years now vilified the company for real or perceived exploitation of dominant marketshare in the PC software market. Additionally, Microsoft is also the newest of the big three console makers, so it's had less time than the other two to build trust within the gaming segment. We're all still trying to figure out the company's sophomore effort. That said, perhaps the real insight to be gained from this study is Apple's standing on the brand trust scale. If Apple were to introduce a gaming handheld targeted at the mainstream and designed as well as the iPod, this study indicates that the company would be a strong competitor versus Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. [update 1: replaced the post image with a new image, added URL link to Forrester's report, reduced the size of the quotes in the two bullet points, revised language throughout.] http://www.joystiq.com/2006/03/30/so...-trust-survey/ ![]() Seeking Changes To The DMCA Declan McCullagh Because of a controversial 1998 copyright law, it may be illegal to defang even potentially harmful software, like the anticopying technology found on some Sony BMG Music Entertainment CDs. But those strict legal restrictions should stay in effect, entertainment industry lobbyists said Friday, when they urged the U.S. Copyright Office to avoid making any changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "There are many other avenues to address these questions, and certainly many other laws that may be relevant in this circumstance," said Steven Metalitz, a senior vice president at the International Intellectual Property Alliance. The group represents large copyright holders. Computer security experts have asked the Copyright Office to alter the DMCA to protect their research. Edward Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, said Friday that he and graduate student J. Alex Halderman uncovered the Sony problem a month before the news about it broke in November--but feared a lawsuit under Section 1201 of the DMCA if they disclosed it without the record label's authorization. Because of the lag time, "a great many of consumers were at risk every day," Felten said. "Our exemption request is fundamentally asking for protection for those consumers." Under federal law, the Copyright Office is required to solicit public opinion every few years on whether any amendments--called "exemptions"--to the DMCA are necessary. Section 1201 of the law broadly restricts circumventing "a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a copyright work. Sony rootkit's lesson In the past, security researchers would notify the vendors first of any bugs, but now they're afraid to disclose such flaws without first consulting a lawyer, Felten said. He added that the DMCA has discouraged security researchers from embarking on new projects and has driven some away from the field. (Felten once was threatened with a DMCA lawsuit by the recording industry for exposing weaknesses in a music-watermarking scheme.) After a public outcry last fall, Sony voluntarily said it would halt production of certain copy-protected CDs. Those CDs installed a bundle of software, including a "rootkit" used to mask the presence of copy-protection software--and, if abused, malicious programs as well. The incident prompted one Homeland Security official to suggest banning rootkits. Aaron Perzanowski, a law student at the University of California at Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic, and clinic director Deirdre Mulligan, said that Felten could have been subject to legal liability if he had disclosed his findings about the Sony rootkits. After he found the flaw, Felten said he called lawyers and spent a month in negotiations with them, and decided not to publish his results right away. Programmer Mark Russinovich did instead. Lobbyist Metalitz offered a detailed list of reasons why he said such an interpretation of the DMCA was incorrect. The law already provides sufficient protection in Section 1201 for researchers like Felten to do their work, he said. (That section, 1201(j), permits bypassing anticopying technology "solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting, a security flaw or vulnerability.") But in the Sony BMG incident, the record label's first crack at an uninstaller proved riddled with new problems, Felten said, and even the latest version of the patch won't prevent reinstallation of the rootkit each time the type of copy-protected CD is inserted into a computer. Felten and other security professionals have been able to devise alternative uninstallers that would prevent such reinstallation indefinitely, but are worried that their "unauthorized" methods could get them sued. "It's this uncertainty that creates the very risk," agreed Matthew Schruers, a lawyer for the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Sun Microsystems, Verizon and Yahoo. "So that raises for me a perplexing question: Why on earth are we putting cybersecurity in the hands of copyright lawyers?" Previous DMCA exemptions granted by the Copyright Office include: Researchers into filtering could study blacklisting techniques, and obsolete copy-protection schemes could be legally bypassed. When reviewing the DMCA, the Library of Congress is required to consider the impact that the anticircumvention sections have "on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research (and) the effect of circumvention of technological measures on the market for or value of copyrighted works." The Copyright Office received more than 100 comments on its notice of proposed rulemaking published last year and plans to release its final determinations by the end of October. Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights, said that the office has reached no conclusions yet on any of the exemptions. http://news.com.com/Seeking+changes+...3-6056616.html ![]() Cheap bastards Howard Stern Lashes Out At Some Fans AP Howard Stern is angry more fans haven't followed him to satellite radio. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the 52-year-old shock jock lashes out at those of his fan base who haven't made the transition to Sirius Satellite Radio. In January, Stern moved his popular and bawdy morning show to the subscription satellite radio provider. "I was just at my psychiatrist and I said, `I just got great news: We hit the 4 million mark. And I'm angry. It should be 20 million,'" Stern says in the magazine, on newsstands Monday. "It's insulting to me that everyone hasn't come with me. I take it personally," he says. "I want to say to my audience ... `You haven't come with me yet? How dare you? We're up to wild, crazy stuff, the show has never sounded better. You cheap bastard!'" In February, CBS Radio, formerly known as Infinity Broadcasting, filed a lawsuit against Stern for improperly using airtime to promote his new show on Sirius. Stern has claimed the lawsuit is without merit. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT ![]() Seattle's Shattered Rave 'Family' Seeks Answers to Killings Jessica Kowal The candykids, juggalos, groovers and burners are uniting here with fresh purpose this week. Dancing to the synthesized music that binds them together, planting memorials of candles and their signature beaded bracelets, they join together not to rave, but to mourn slain friends. One woman had a rainbow of yarn woven into her hair. Two men had faces painted in red and black. A man in a suit and tie had a pinkish mohawk. Dozens of others wore baggy clothing or unremarkable dress. All showed up on Tuesday at a spring-green park with a spectacular view of the Space Needle. Exhausted by sorrow and lack of sleep, they seemed dumbstruck that the community of ravers, who follow a mantra of "plur," for "peace, love, unity and respect," had been punctured by senseless violence. Six friends were killed early Saturday, when, the police say, Aaron Kyle Huff, 28, barreled through the front door of a small house on Republican Street, armed with a semiautomatic handgun and a 12-gauge shotgun. At 7 a.m., a few dozen ravers were in the house to talk, drink beer, sleep, watch cartoons or otherwise decompress after attending a zombie-themed rave elsewhere. Mr. Huff, an unemployed onetime pizza deliverer, had been invited to the house party by others at the rave. Without warning, he collected the guns from his truck parked nearby and swiftly killed four men and two teenage girls with gunshots to the head and chest, the King County Medical Examiner said Wednesday. Confronted by a police officer, Mr. Huff committed suicide. The police have not determined his motive. To the mourners in Volunteer Park and to those who lingered at the house on Wednesday with their tents and trinkets, it was unbearable that Mr. Huff had brutalized the self-described "family" of music-loving slackers, students and young professionals who often exchange beaded bracelets, called candy, as a friendship gesture. "These are peaceful people," said Wally Hansen, 24, a rave promoter from Tukwila whose face was drawn and pale, with dark circles under his eyes. "Why would he do this to people who accepted him, who welcomed him into their own home?" The victims, ages 14 to 32 and with rave nicknames like Sushi, Deacon and Chinadoll, were familiar faces at spirited parties attended by hundreds of people in the Puget Sound region. In warehouses, art spaces or nightclubs on Friday and Saturday nights, dressed in clothing that defines them into smaller cliques like candykids and juggalos, they dance energetically to musical genres like house, trance and jungle and stop to rest in "chill rooms" tuned with quieter ambient music. The dancing is powered by energy drinks, candy and snacks, although many ravers concede that alcohol, marijuana and Ecstasy are part of the scene. The rave community here had been mostly invisible to people who were not part of it. After the killings, talk-show hosts and columnists, intent on finding lessons, have focused on the youngest victims, Melissa Moore, 14, a ninth grader from Milton, and Suzanne Thorne, 15, a 10th grader from Bellevue. Many people have criticized what they see as lax gun-control laws, pointing out that Mr. Huff was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2000 after shooting a moose sculpture in his Montana hometown, Whitefish. He was allowed to keep the two guns used in the shooting here. Other critics have faulted what they describe as permissive rave culture, lax parents or lenient laws that allow teenagers into clubs where alcohol is not served. Kyle Moore, Ms. Moore's father, refused to blame anyone but the gunman. He said he and his daughter, nicknamed Chinadoll, trusted other ravers to protect her. "She just loved meeting the different people, seeing the different costumes, and she loved the music, the beat," Mr. Moore said in a telephone interview. "She was brighter than the sun out there. I just would love to know why she felt that she couldn't call me to pick her up." Most likely, the two teenagers were waiting for the county bus to restart its downtown route at 7 a.m., said Nicole Loerke, 17, of Everett, who, like other candykids at the park, had a peach-colored Care Bears backpack. Ms. Loerke started going to raves last year, she said, when she had no friends in high school. "They accept you as a person, the virtues and values you hold," she said of the ravers. She said that she noticed Mr. Huff at the rave and that he stood against a wall with folded arms and did not mingle in a millieu where people greet one another as close friends within minutes of meeting. "I asked him, 'Is there anything wrong?' and he turned his head," Ms. Loerke said. "I said, 'If you need anyone to talk to, I'm here to listen.' He looked right at me, and said, 'Thank you.' He must have had some screws loose." Outside the Republican Street house, the ravers pitched tents on the grass and stayed in shifts to protect a growing memorial of candles and candy bracelets strung with words like "plur" and "luv all." The neighbors have given them hot chocolate and offered the use of bathrooms. Josh McPharlin, 24, a rave promoter, looked at the mementos on the sidewalk and said: "I enjoyed these people. It's just unbelievable that I won't ever be able to spend time with them again." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/na...tle.html?8hpib ![]() CD Sales, Shipments Down in 2005 Thomas Mennecke It's been an era of change for the music industry. After achieving a peak year in terms of total units shipped and dollar value in 1999, these values have been on the steady decline. Perhaps most dramatic is the continued and accelerated decrease in the public's interest in the Compact Disc. In 2000, the total number of CD units shipped was 942.5 million, with a total value of just over 13.2 billion dollars. This represented the CD format's peak year, although combined sales of all formats were already in decline. In sales statistics just released by the RIAA, 2005 faired little better with 8% drop in CD units shipped. Accompanying this decline was an 8.1% drop in dollar value from 2004. In all, the total number of CD units shipped fell from 767.0 million in 2004 to 705.4 million in 2005. Dollar value also fell substantially from 11.4 billion to 10.5 billion. This decline represents the greatest drop since 2002, when shipped units and dollar value fell by 8.9% and 6.7% respectively. Its apparent since 1999, something occurred which suddenly reversed the public's interest in physical media. Some blame Internet piracy, others the brief global recession. Perhaps a more detailed look at the RIAA's statistics reveals a less complex answer. Since digital music's introduction, growth for the music industry has been impressive. Out of all available formats, including DVD Audio, digital downloads have clearly led the charge in the new millennium. The total number of units shipped (downloaded) totaled 139.4 million in 2004, and then skyrocketed to 366.9 million in 2005. Dollar value nearly mimicked this trend, by increasing from 138.0 million in 2004 to 363.3 million in 2005 - a 163.3% increase. With a near limitless demand for MP3 players - rather than bulky portable CD players - it’s becoming apparent that convenience is driving the music industry's recovery. Interest in digital music has become so strong that it continues to reverse the industry's fortunes. Although every physical format continues to suffer with lackluster performance, the digital format generated enough interest to increase total units shipped (CDs, digital, etc) to over 1.3 billion 2005 - a record high. Total dollar value continued to decline however, but only by 0.6% from 2004. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1143 ![]() Windows Hasta La Vista - Ironclad Security Robert Storey Review It has been three long years to the day since we last looked at that unusual distribution called Windows. Although at that time it was considered by many to be little else than a bizarre joke (who on earth would design an operating system that doesn't provide a way to grep files?), a recent rumour about a new release has piqued our curiosity. Developed by a large group of programmers who, believe it or not, all work in one building, the new version is predicted by some journalists to be one of the most secure operating systems ever created. Robert Storey, our ardent distribution reviewer, couldn't hold on any longer and downloaded the most recent beta version of Windows Vista from a nearby mirror to take a look. Introduction Greetings to all! As some of you may recall, it's been a long three years since I last occupied this space, writing a review of Windows XP - An Operating System You Can Trust. Sadly, I must confess that the reason for my prolonged absence from this web site is that I was in trouble with the law once again. As my former readers will no doubt remember, I was previously under the influence of evil Linux hackers. During that time, I committed several serious crimes - in particular, I violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and infringed several software patents. Fortunately, that crime spree was brought to an ignominious end when the Intellectual Property Police raided our Linux Users Group meeting. Being a first-time offender, I was paroled after only eight months in prison. I have since gone on to lead a clean and productive life using only safe and secure Microsoft software installed on my computer. Linux Users Group Meeting Alas, I must confess to backsliding. My downfall came in the form of a computer magazine. Inside the magazine jacket was a CD containing the evil Linux operating system! I foolishly installed the software, and - just like an alcoholic who claims he's only going to have "one drink" - I was hooked again! Fortunately, Windows XP was still installed on my hard drive. Windows correctly detected the presence of a Linux partition, and the built-in Microsoft Snitchware immediately reported the situation to the Department of Homeland Security. Since installing Linux was a violation of my parole, I was arrested by the FBI and sentenced to a further two years in a federal penitentiary. All this might sound tragic, but really, it's not. In the end, things worked out for the best. After only one year in prison, I became eligible for a new experimental rehabilitation program. I am happy to report that it's been a great success! After receiving counselling, medication, electroshock therapy and a prefrontal lobotomy, I am once again a happy Windows user. As a condition of my early release from custody, the parole board has ordered me to perform 300 hours of community service. This I have gladly done. Working in close cooperation with the Business Software Alliance, I have been visiting public schools, lecturing students on the evils of open source software. I can't begin to describe the satisfaction this work gives me, saving impressionable young minds from the temptation of so-called "free software." At the end of my talk, our team hands out T-shirts emblazoned with the motto, "Linux - Just say No!" As a further public service, we then audit the students' computers for pirated software. Just last week we caught three students with unlicensed video games installed on their machines. Since they were minors, the students were not arrested - rather, they were put in foster care and their parents were fined US$150,000 for each pirated program. Considering the seriousness of the crime, this was a mere slap on the wrist. However, since these were first-time offenders, it's understandable that the authorities should be so lenient. Installation This is supposed to be an operating system review, so I apologize for the above digression. Sometimes I just get carried away with my personal issues - it's probably just a side effect of the lobotomy. So let's get back on topic. Today, I am reviewing Microsoft's greatest operating system ever, Windows Hasta La Vista, or WHLV (which is also the name of a talk radio station in Hattiesburg, Mississippi - Microsoft is now suing them for trademark infringement). But to simplify things, we'll just call this OS "Windows Vista" or "Vista" from now on. Those who have been following the latest tech news are well aware of the fact that Vista will not, in fact, be released to the public until early 2007. Fortunately, for techies who just can't wait to get their hands on the latest and greatest offerings from Microsoft, there are two simple solutions - pay the Earth to become a Windows developer, or volunteer to be a beta tester. I chose to do the latter. The beta version of Windows Vista - officially known as the Community Technology Preview (CTP) - can be downloaded through Microsoft's developers' site. Please note that the CTP is a time-limited copy which will self-destruct (along with your data) at a secret predetermined date. I enthusiastically downloaded my copy and began the installation procedure. This might be a good time to mention that the Vista installation program differs from the Windows XP installer in several significant ways. For example, when XP installs, it merely wipes out any Linux partitions on the hard drive. Windows Vista, on the other hand, will go much further - it will mount any Linux partitions it finds and then plant viruses and root kits in /usr/bin. After all, Linux hackers have been doing stuff like this for years to Window users - now it's time for some payback. Just as when you install XP, at the very end of the installation process, Vista insists that you need to type in a user's registration key. However, XP requires a mere 25-digit alpha-numeric key which is not even case-sensitive. Vista, which is far more secure, requires a 250-digit key which is case-sensitive and also includes spaces and various symbols. For example, a valid registration key might look something like this: 5|_4!C|@W/#\r$cw3 r\/1=|\xV|Zb0+aR t3qh h^0w ilE |r_1]n\/x-(pY)5\C 3k&|\|3*j[%=G(.Mx^G$Hd:" 7{OK4"GDe:E &y$C[;}4!s3C|@W/O8@#\r$Uc~w3 r\`/1=|\xV|Z"b>,0+]{*$4%f_b+a@Q=-^.>c#wC|@=}4!+sG$]Hd:C)|@W/0+&]{ qC h=G?(>,0+] \/1?+n]e{f *^j0w@~>n V^"|k\E$ If you make a mistake when typing the key, the installation program will abort and you have to start over from the beginning. Furthermore, users will be required to retype the key every time they restart Windows. Leave it to Microsoft to come up with such a clever method to protect us from the evils of software piracy! All About Security As you can see from the foregoing process, Microsoft is very concerned about security. Indeed, the 250-digit registration key is only the first step in protecting users from depraved software pirates. Microsoft has incorporated many other exciting features to ensure that Vista is the most secure OS ever! Vista comes with built-in support for Microsoft's Software Quality Assurance program. The way it works is that if users inadvertently attempt to install a dangerous open source program such as the notorious OpenOffice, Vista will intervene. The fiendish program won't be installed, and Vista will instead download the equivalent closed source program (in this example, Microsoft Office) and automatically bill the customer's credit card. I can't but express my admiration on this innovative approach to protecting customers, as well as Microsoft's profits. Microsoft's award winning browser, Internet Explorer, has also been beefed up with new security features. For example, attempting to download illicit MP3 files will result in a security alert being emailed to the RIAA. Similarly, any attempt to share movies will be reported to the MPAA. Software pirates will have their activities reported to the Business Software Alliance. All other suspicious activities will be reported to the Department of Homeland Security and Interpol. Only through such diligent cooperative efforts between Microsoft and the relevant authorities can we protect our cherished free society. One frequently requested feature by users is the ability to encrypt the filesystem, and Vista supports this. However, the filesystem is not encrypted by default - the user has to set this up. When you enable this feature, Vista sends an email to inform the US National Security Agency (NSA) that you have done so. Then, using the NSA Back Door, FBI agents can periodically check your computer to ensure that your machine contains no terrorist messages, pornography or open source software. Users might be concerned about having such a back door on their system, but they really shouldn't be. The FBI has assured everybody that they will not abuse this power, and only concentrate on catching terrorists and other miscreants. I see no reason not to believe them. After all, if you can't trust the FBI, who can you trust? Project Cyborg One of Microsoft's most innovative projects yet involves the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. These "tags" - a chip smaller than a grain of rice - have generated much discussion lately. Large supermarkets and department stores are very interested in placing RFIDs inside of products - then a tag reader at the cash register would automatically ring up the purchase without the need to physically handle the merchandise. RFIDs have also been used for electronic toll collection. The chips have also been placed under the skin of dogs and cats in order to identify lost pets. Most recently, several countries have decided to put RFIDs into "biometric passports" - this makes it much easier for criminals and terrorists to identify wealthy foreign tourists in a crowd, which helps facilitate mugging and kidnapping. Further expanding on this great new technology, Microsoft plans to use RFIDs with Window Vista in order to facilitate payment. Here's how it would work. First, Vista users would get the tag surgically implanted in a convenient location, most likely the back of the neck. The RFID would contain an individual's Windows product registration key, so "chipped" users would no longer need to type it. Furthermore, customers with the embedded tag would be able to enjoy online shopping without the need to type credit card numbers - a tag reader on their computer would do all the work. This system is destined to replace Microsoft Passport. Other uses for the embedded RFID tag would be to alert authorities if users attempt to access forbidden web sites, or send emails to shady individuals on a government watch list. Furthermore, thanks to Microsoft's cooperative agreement with with Wal-Mart, chipped customers would no longer need to pay cash or show their credit cards at the checkout stand. Consumers are going to love these great new convenience features. Nevertheless, some whiny so-called "privacy advocates" have made a big fuss over Project Cyborg. Without a doubt, they are a bunch of left-wing Linux loonies who can be counted upon to always oppose the advancement of technology. Needless to say, it's a waste of time trying to argue with these Luddites - it's just best to ignore them. Special Edition As you may have read elsewhere, Microsoft plans to release several editions of Windows Vista, thus catering to specialized markets. For example, several high-ranking government officials and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates would like a special edition that lacks a registration key, does not monitor online activity, and doesn't support Project Cyborg. Microsoft will generously cater to these customers' needs by producing a version that meets their requirements - however, it will only run a rare computer based on a CPU called an Itanium, affectionately known to geeks as the Itanic. Literally dozens of Itanics have been sold so far, and market analysts predict that nearly 100 will be in circulation by year 2010. Conclusion Clearly, with Windows Hasta La Vista, Microsoft has another winner on its hands. With valuable built-in convenience features and ironclad security, Microsoft has definitely responded to customers' needs. Furthermore, erh...ahh, what's this? Sorry everybody, somebody is at the door. Just a moment... It's the Intellectual Property Police. Hmm...they've got a warrant. It seems that by writing this review, I violated the Non-Disclosure Agreement which I clicked on when I downloaded the beta. Damn, I really need to read those 150-page End User License Agreements before clicking on "I Agree." Oh well, you've got hand it to Windows Vista - just look at how efficient it was at reporting my illegal activities to the authorities! What an amazing operating system! I'm about to be arrested, so I guess it might be a few more years before you'll be hearing from me. Given the circumstances, I can't think of a more appropriate thing to say except, Hasta la vista! http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?res...eview-winvista ![]() Late Grateful Dead Leader's Toilet Stolen The long, strange trip continues for Jerry Garcia's toilet. Police say the Grateful Dead leader's commode was stolen recently from a driveway along with three other toilets and a bidet, The Press Democrat newspaper reported Saturday. Garcia's salmon-colored toilet was the subject of a legal battle before it was finally moved to Sonoma, to await shipment to a Canadian casino. It's unclear if the toilet was swiped by a wayward Deadhead or a thief remodeling a bathroom. Police have no suspects or leads. Henry Koltys bought Garcia's Marin County home for $1.39 million in 1997 and removed the toilet and other items he planned to sell to raise money for a charity. After Koltys sold the house to a friend of the band's, the new owner sued to block the auction. The dispute was resolved last year, and Koltys moved the items to his home in Sonoma, about 40 miles north of San Francisco. Last month, Koltys sold the Grateful Dead singer's toilet for $2,550 to online casino Goldenpalace.com, which planned to use it as part of a traveling marketing exhibit. The casino is offering a $250 reward for its return. Henry Koltys said Friday that the toilet once stood in the master bathroom of Garcia, who died in 1995 at age 53. "It would have been his personal head," he said. The casino has made other unusual purchases in the last year - it paid $25,000 for actor William Shatner's kidney stones and $28,000 for a grilled cheese sandwich that reportedly had the image of the Virgin Mary on it, Koltys said. Jonathon Lipsin, who worked for Garcia as a gardener and now owns a Northern California record store, said the toilet might appeal to dedicated Deadheads. "It's a little gross," Lipsin said. "But I could see it at a rock 'n' roll museum, too." http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T ![]() Internet Injects Sweeping Change Into U.S. Politics Adam Nagourney The transformation of American politics by the Internet is accelerating with the approach of the 2006 Congressional and 2008 White House elections, prompting the rewriting of rules on advertising, fund-raising, mobilizing supporters and even the spreading of negative information. Democrats and Republicans are sharply increasing their use of e-mail, interactive Web sites, candidate and party blogs, and text-messaging to raise money, organize get-out-the-vote efforts and assemble crowds for a rallies. The Internet, they said, appears to be far more efficient, and less costly, than the traditional tools of politics, notably door knocking and telephone banks. Analysts say the campaign television advertisement, already diminishing in influence with the proliferation of cable stations, faces new challenges as campaigns experiment with technology that allows direct messaging to more specific audiences, and through unconventional means. Those include Podcasts featuring a daily downloaded message from a candidate and so-called viral attack videos, designed to trigger peer-to-peer distribution by e-mail chains, without being associated with any candidate or campaign. Campaigns are now studying popular Internet social networks, like Friendster and Facebook, as ways to reaching groups of potential supporters with similar political views or cultural interests. President Bush's media consultant, Mark McKinnon, said television advertising, while still critical to campaigns, had become markedly less influential in persuading voters that it was even two years ago. "I feel like a woolly mammoth," Mr. McKinnon said. What the parties and the candidates are undergoing now is in many ways similar to what has happened in other sectors of the nation — including the music industry, newspapers and retailing — as they try to adjust to, and take advantage of, the Internet as its influence spreads across American society. To a considerable extent, they are responding to, and playing catch up with, bloggers who have demonstrated the power of their forums to harness the energy on both sides of the ideological divide. Certainly, the Internet was a significant factor in 2004, particularly with the early success in fund-raising and organizing by Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential contender. But officials in both parties say the extent to which the parties have now recognized and rely on the Internet has increased at a staggering rate over the past two years. The percentage of Americans who went online for election news jumped from 13 percent in the 2002 election cycle to 29 percent in 2004, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center after the last presidential election. A Pew survey released earlier this month found that 50 million Americans go to the Internet for news every day, up from 27 million people in March 2002, a reflection of the fact that the Internet is now available to 70 percent of Americans. This means, aides said, rethinking every assumption about running a campaign: how to reach different segments of voters, how to get voters to the polls, how to raise money, and the best way to have a candidate interact with the public. In 2004, John Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina and his party's vice presidential candidate, spent much of his time talking to voters in living rooms in New Hampshire and Iowa; now he is putting aside hours every week to videotape responses to videotaped questions, the entire exchange posted on his blog. "The effect of the Internet on politics will be every bit as transformational as television was," said Ken Mehlman, the Republican national chairman. "If you want to get your message out, the old way of paying someone to make a TV ad is insufficient: You need your message out through the Internet, through e-mail, through talk radio." Michael Cornfield, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies politics and the Internet, said campaigns were actually late in coming to the game. "Politicians are having a hard time reconciling themselves to a medium where they can't control the message," Professor Cornfield said. "Politics is lagging, but politics is not going to be immune to the digital revolution." If there was any resistance, it is rapidly melting away. Mark Warner, the former Democratic governor of Virginia, began preparing for a potential 2008 presidential campaign by hiring a blogging pioneer, Jerome Armstrong, a noteworthy addition to the usual first-wave of presidential campaign hiring of political consultants and fund-raisers. Mr. Warner is now one of at least three potential presidential candidates — the others are the party's 2004 presidential and vice presidential candidates, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Mr. Edwards — who are routinely posting what aides say are their own writings on campaign blogs or on public blogs like the Daily Kos, the nation's largest. Analysts said that the Internet appeared to be a particularly potent way to appeal to new, young voters, a subject of particular interest to both parties in these politically turbulent times. In the 2004 campaign, 80 percent of people between the age of 18 and 34 who contributed to Mr. Kerry's campaign made their contribution online, Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. Not incidentally, as it becomes more integrated in American politics, the Internet is being pressed into service for the less seemly side of campaigns. Both parties have set up Web sites to discredit opponents. In Tennessee, Republicans spotlighted what they described as the lavish spending habits of Representative Harold E. Ford Jr. with a site called www.fancyford.com. That site drew 100,000 hits the first weekend, and extensive coverage in the mainstream Tennessee press, which is typically the real goal of creating sites like this. And this weekend, the Republicans launched a new attack site, www.bobsbaggage.com, that is aimed at Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and focused on ethics accusations against him. For their part, Democrats have set up decoy Web sites to post documents with damaging information about Republicans. They described this means of distribution as far more efficient than the more traditional slip of a document to a newspaper reporter. A senior party official, who was granted anonymity in exchange for describing a clandestine effort, said the party created a now-defunct site called D.C. Inside Scoop to, among other things, distribute a document written by Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, discussing the political benefits of the Terri Schiavo case. A second such site, http://capitolbuzz.blogspot.com, spread more mischievous information: the purported sighting of Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, parking in a spot reserved for the handicapped. On the left in particular, bloggers have emerged as something of a police force guarding against disloyalty among Democrats, as Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic consultant, learned after he told The Washington Post that bloggers and online donors "are not representative of the majority you need to win elections." A Daily Kos blogger wrote: "Not one dime, ladies and gentlemen, to anything connected with Steve Elmendorf. Anyone stupid enough to actually give a quote like that deserves to have every single one of his funding sources dry up." Asked about the episode, Mr. Elmendorf insisted the posting had not hurt his business, but added contritely: "Since I got attacked on them, I read blogs a lot more and I find them very useful." One of the big challenges to the campaigns is not only adjusting to the changes of the past two years but also to anticipate now the kind of technological changes that might be on hand by the next presidential campaign. Among those most cited are the ability of campaigns to beam video campaign advertisements to cell phones. "All these consultants are still trying to make sense of what blogs are, and I think by 2008 they are going to have a pretty good idea: They are going to be like, 'We're hot and we're hip and we're bloggin',' " said Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos. "But by 2008, the blogs are going to be so institutionalized, it's not going to be funny." Bloggers, for all the benefits they might bring to both parties, have proved to be a complicating political influence for Democrats. They have tugged the party consistently to the left, particularly on issues like the war, and have been openly critical of such moderate Democrats as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. Still, Democrats have been particularly enthusiastic about the potential of this technology to get the party back on track, with many Democratic leaders arguing that the Internet is today for Democrats what talk radio was for Republicans 10 years ago. "This new media becomes much more important to us because conservatives have been more dominant in traditional media," said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the centrist New Democratic Network. "This stuff becomes really critical for us." For all the attention being paid to Internet technology, there remain definite limitations to its reach. Internet use declines markedly among Americans over 65, who tend to be the nation's most reliable voters. Until recently, it tended to be more heavily used by middle- and upper-income people. And while the Internet is efficient at reaching supporters, who tend to visit and linger at political sites, it has proved to be much less effective at swaying voters who are not interested in politics. "The holy grail that everybody is looking for right now is how can you use the Internet for persuasion," Mr. Armstrong, the Warner campaign Internet adviser, said. In this age of multitasking, voters are not as captive to a Web site as they might be to a 30-second television advertisement, or a campaign mailing. That was a critical lesson of the collapse of Mr. Dean's presidential campaign, after he initially enjoyed great Internet success in raising money and drawing crowds. "It's very easy to look at something and just click delete," said Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "At least if they are taking out a piece of mail, you know they are taking it out and looking at it on the way to the garbage can." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/wa...rtner=homepage ![]() Computer Software That Can Turn You Into a Songwriter Michael Walker I'M not a musician, but I recently composed and recorded a song. More than that, in a Paul McCartneyesque fit of post-Beatles hubris, I played all the instruments and produced and engineered the entire thing, even though I have no experience producing and engineering anything more complicated than a Bombay martini. The title is "Eventide," meant to evoke not some ye olde troubadour's serenade but the trademark I glimpsed on a fearsome-looking piece of sound reinforcement equipment backstage at a Ted Nugent concert. "Eventide" is four blistering minutes and 31 seconds long; it features three electric guitars, electric bass, grand piano, electric piano, two string sections, synthesizer, drums, congas, bongos, tambourine and shaker. I think it's smashing, frankly — the old "Avengers" theme smudged with the dark atmospherics of Sigur Ros. There's just one thing: I didn't compose "Eventide" any more than Ashlee Simpson sang "Pieces of Me" on "Saturday Night Live." The song sprang from computer-sampled snippets of musical instruments that I stitched together using Apple Computer's GarageBand software. GarageBand is a denatured version of industry-standard recording software that allows amateurs to cobble together a song using nothing but the program's digital instruments. You preview the samples from a Chinese-menu-like array, drag them into a virtual mixing console, push them this way and that, and voilà! The software automatically renders the composition into a tidy audio file that can be posted to Web sites like MySpace.com, which teems with thousands of MP3 files from would-be Coldplays and Alicia Keyses. The process is so seamless and absorbing that I can't really recall how "Eventide" came together. Did I start with the "80's Pop Beat No. 09"? The "Modern Rock Guitar No. 14.1"? The "Edgy Rock Bass No. 01.1"? All I know is that at some point, "Eventide" began to coalesce around a keyboard figure, "Classic Rock Piano No. 06," and the dreamy "70's Ballad Strings 02." It was like watching a Polaroid photograph develop, except that I could fuss with the image as it came into focus. By then I had stacked up seven instruments I didn't know how to play into a song I didn't know how to write. Given my total inexperience at composing, the result should have sounded ridiculous; instead, it sounded pretty cool. The repeating digital loops could have caused "Eventide" to seem less like a song and more like Booker T. and the MG's vamping until Otis Redding strutted from the wings to wail "Mr. Pitiful." But a click and a drag transposed the key of the song heavenward a couple of notches — an old trick of country music composers, among others, the final chorus of "I Will Always Love You" being an excruciating example. I built "Eventide" a "bridge," a pile-driving chorus of strings, tambourine, piano and scorching guitar. For the finale, I merely copied the opening and pasted it onto the end, fiddled with each instrument until none was too loud or too soft — my ham-fisted equivalent of mixing — and slapped some cymbal crashes onto the last few bars to tart up the climax. And so I was done. Now it was time for the song to meet its public. I uploaded it to MySpace's music section, the Web's largest clearinghouse of self-recorded music with more than 600,000 bands, the majority amateurs. Almost immediately, I got a message from an indie band in Brooklyn asking if I'd add them to my "Friends" list. With 66 million MySpace subscribers, to rise above the fray — and perhaps attract the attention of a record company executive — the goal is to link one's page to as many other MySpace members as possible, called an "add," just like in radio. (The Brooklyn band had already amassed more than 136,000.) Log-rolling is rampant. "hey I'll help promote ur band ... and whoreing u if u would add me," someone forthrightly posted on one band's MySpace page. "Eventide" scored only five listens until I got five other bands to add me to their lists. Thereafter, it scored just two more. My tour of MySpace was beginning to feel suspiciously like the nonvirtual world of agents and editors, the capricious gatekeepers the Internet was supposed to usurp. So I decided to play "Eventide" for Nic Harcourt, the host and musical director of "Morning Becomes Eclectic" on the public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica. I also wanted to discuss with him the implications of songwriting software. Was a song written by a nonmusician using nothing but digital loops as legitimate as one by a traditional composer? "What music software does," he told me, "is enable people who perhaps have a rudimentary understanding of music to flex their creative muscles, even if they don't have any musical training, and I think that's good. I mean, let's be honest: a lot of people who don't have musical training make hit records." "To me it's just another barrier coming down," he added. "We're putting the power back into the hands of the artists." Including an "artist" such as myself? "How a listener chooses to respond to music made with this technology," Mr. Harcourt said, "depends on what they expect from a song. If you don't expect much, then listening to a piece of music that's been sort of thrown together with samples can probably be satisfying. If you expect poetry and composition in the tradition of great songwriters. ..." Well, he had a point. Plus, aside from a bit of haphazard enthusiasm, there was no emotional force behind my song. Maybe it showed. While "Eventide" languished on MySpace, Mr. Harcourt telephoned one afternoon and announced, "We're going to listen to it right now." I'd told him from the beginning that, as a nonmusician, I had no ego attached to "Eventide." I'd told myself the same thing, even as I listened to it over and over, liking it more and more with each playing. But now, I was appalled to realize, I really cared what he thought. Then, through the phone, I heard my song trickling out of Mr. Harcourt's laptop speakers. Now that it was playing outside the Carnegie Hall of my mind, the song suddenly sounded not cool at all but, in fact, ridiculous. I could picture Mr. Harcourt's lip curling in disgust. Thirty seconds passed. He asked, "Is there a vocal on it?" I heard myself bleat, "No, but hang in there — we're coming up to the bridge." "Eventide" clunked away a few seconds more. Then I heard the middle section's keyboard and strings swoosh in. It sounded marginally less awful. Mr. Harcourt announced, "Sounds like you could be on a Windham Hill record." And finally, "It sounded fine." I realized that he had shifted to the past tense. And that I couldn't hear "Eventide" anymore. He'd turned the song off halfway through. I blurted, "But you're missing the big build!" I asked Mr. Harcourt what he'd think if he had heard the song cold. He paused, then said: "I'd be like, O.K., it's a piece of film music. You know what I mean? It's not a song." He added: "It sounds ... O.K. It doesn't sound like a songwriter wrote it. It sort of sounds like a computer generated it." And there he had me. A computer had generated it. I had helped things along but was more of a spectator. Nevertheless, "Eventide" was something I had created, and like all creations was entitled to a measure of emotional exuberance from its creator. So what if it had died on the vine at MySpace and Mr. Harcourt considered it "you know, film music"? And maybe there was hope. Mr. Harcourt had tantalizingly pointed out, "Somebody's going to put together a song this way that's going to find its way around the Internet that will end up becoming a hit." Perhaps "Eventide." Or maybe Windham Hill will go for it. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/ar...c/02walk.html? ![]() Death by Smiley Face: When Rivals Disdain Profit Richard Siklos THE tectonic changes facing media companies are by now the topic of an often-recited sermon. Put briefly, digital technology is placing control over much information squarely in the hands of consumers and creating all kinds of opportunities for new entrants who can push the revolution forward. Understandably, attention in this race is focused on the companies that are, as the management consultants like to say, transferring value from conventional outlets to new disruptors that deliver personalized media more efficiently and hence with greater profitability. In other words, to the victor go the spoils. The obvious standouts are Google and Yahoo with their aggregation software, prominent brands and ability to layer advertisements all over the Internet and perhaps beyond; or Apple Computer with its iTunes and iPod and their utter dominance over portable music. Consider Monster Worldwide, the online employment advertising company, where the numbers tell the story: Monster, the owner of the www.monster.com site, has a stock market value of $6.2 billion, some 40 percent greater than the amount for which Knight Ridder, the newspaper chain owner, is being sold. But Monster has only one-third of Knight Ridder's $3 billion in annual revenue. There is another breed of rival lurking online for traditional media, and it is perhaps the most vexing yet: call it purpose-driven media, with a shout-out to Rick Warren, the author of "A Purpose-Driven Life," for borrowing his catchphrase. These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don't really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium to do something that they feel good about. They would certainly like to cover their costs and maybe make a buck or two, but really, they're not in it for the money. By purely commercial measures, they are illogical. If your name were, say, Rupert or Sumner, they would represent the kind of terror that might keep you up at night: death by smiley face. Probably the best-known practitioner is Craigslist.org, the online listing site. Although it is routinely described as a competitor with — and the bane of — newspaper classified ads, the site is mostly a free listings service that acts as a community resource. When the company contemplates imposing fees for using its site in a particular city, as it has recently in New York, it does so cautiously and thoughtfully, as a means to weed out real estate brokers who are abusing the site by posting their ads over and over. The twist about Craigslist and its ilk is that their egalitarianism could make them very valuable someday — although Craigslist's founder, Craig Newmark, has proclaimed no interest in cashing in. EBay, no doubt sensing the commercial potential, bought a 25 percent stake from a former employee last year. Other examples are the "for sale by owner" Web sites that have cropped up across the country, in which people can sell their homes at a cost that is a small fraction of the usual broker's fee. And let's not forget that Google began life as one of these ventures: it was only a handful of years ago that one of Google's founders quaintly decried the evils of advertising before figuring out a do-gooder way (as they saw it) to sell boatloads of it. Now Google, with its market valuation of more than $100 billion, has drawn the ire of the newspaper and book publishing industries, among others, which argue that its supposedly benevolent search robots have been usurping their intellectual property. Purpose-driven media, by the way, are even more common in the software world. The shining example is the Firefox browser that is available free for download and has emerged as a credible rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. And, for icing on the cake, Firefox makes money for its not-for-profit owners because Google pays to be its search engine. Another example of genius ideas from people who don't seek Internet riches is Chowhound.com. This nine-year-old site features community-generated restaurant review boards in various cities and steadfastly refuses to accept restaurant advertising. Rather than continue to grovel for donations and make a few dollars selling Chowhound books, the founders sold the company last month to CNET Networks, a Web business known for its reviews of technology products, for an undisclosed amount. Unlike Chowhound, whose independence and spirit it has vowed to maintain while helping to spiff up the site, CNET.com is chockablock with ads. A fascinating new entrant in the field is LaLa.com, a music-swapping site introduced last month. Depending on where you are sitting, the LaLa concept is either brilliant (if you are a music fan with a lot of CD's you don't listen to, or if you are an artist) or terrifying (if you are a retailer of new or used music, or perhaps even a music label). Here again, the founders are not in it just for profit. Rather, their idea is that despite all the cool new digital music services, well over 90 percent of the music industry sales are still in the CD format; most people still have CD's and artists don't gain any benefit from the sale of used discs. Many music lovers, the founders contend, feel disenfranchised by the way music is sold. So LaLa is essentially a CD-swapping site that matches people who want one another's old CD's. It charges them a mere $1 a disc and provides the postage-paid envelopes to send them in for 49 cents apiece. Out of each dollar, the company voluntarily pays 20 cents to the performer on the recording; there is no more a legal obligation to do so than there is to pay General Motors a cut every time a used Chevy changes hands. Bill Nguyen, the man behind several Silicon Valley start-ups, who is one of LaLa's founders, said that the service might work just as well at a cost of $4 a CD — still a quite a bit cheaper than a typical used CD on eBay or in an East Village record shop — but that making money wasn't the point. Like those of other purpose-driven ventures, the company's costs are relatively low: it has only 17 employees at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif. So far, the site has been operating by e-mail invitation only because Mr. Nguyen and his partners want to build a strong base of music lovers, and not just people looking for cheap CD's. Mr. Nguyen maintains that the site already has 1.8 million album titles available for swapping. By comparison, Amazon has more than one million different CD's available for purchase, according to a spokeswoman for the company. MR. NGUYEN expects to open the site to the broader public by the summer. And no matter how successful the site becomes, he vows that it will not carry ads for the music industry or for anyone else — except some links to charities. Nor will the company sell singles, although it will sell physical and download versions of entire new albums. He also asks that LaLa members "do the right thing," as he sees it, and erase from their hard drives and iPods any copies of songs from CD's they have traded. "We did a lot of weird things that didn't make sense," Mr. Nguyen said proudly. Or, maybe they do. After all, the company did manage to attract $9 million in financing from the venture capital firms Bain Capital and Ignition Partners. Obviously, these investors believe that there is money to be made in communal efficiency, just as CNET must believe in its purchase of Chowhound or eBay in its investment in Craigslist. Maybe the lesson for media companies is to keep your friends close but to keep these friendly menaces even closer. As far as Mr. Nguyen is concerned, pursuing his labor of love is enough reward in and of itself. "We just dig music," he said. "Karma plays a role, man." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/bu.../02frenzy.html ![]() In a Wired South Korea, Robots Will Feel Right at Home Norimitsu Onishi South Korea, the world's most wired country, is rushing to turn what sounds like science fiction into everyday life. The government, which succeeded in getting broadband Internet into 72 percent of all households in the last half decade, has marshaled an army of scientists and business leaders to make robots full members of society. By 2007, networked robots that, say, relay messages to parents, teach children English and sing and dance for them when they are bored, are scheduled to enter mass production. Outside the home, they are expected to guide customers at post offices or patrol public areas, searching for intruders and transmitting images to monitoring centers. If all goes according to plan, robots will be in every South Korean household between 2015 and 2020. That is the prediction, at least, of the Ministry of Information and Communication, which has grouped more than 30 companies, as well as 1,000 scientists from universities and research institutes, under its wing. Some want to move even faster. "My personal goal is to put a robot in every home by 2010," said Oh Sang Rok, manager of the ministry's intelligent service robot project. Reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, South Korea decided that becoming a high-tech nation was the only way to secure its future. The government deregulated the telecommunications and Internet service industries and made investments as companies laid out cables in cities and into the countryside. The government offered information technology courses to homemakers, subsidized computers for low-income families and made the country the first in the world to have high-speed Internet in every primary, junior and high school. As with robots and most other specific technologies, the government has had a strong hand in guiding businesses and research centers. Failures have occurred — most spectacularly in biotechnology, when the cloning scientist, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, was exposed as a fraud — but the successes are many. South Koreans use futuristic technologies that are years away in the United States; companies like Microsoft and Motorola test products here before introducing them in the United States. Since January, Koreans have been able to watch television broadcasts on cellphones, free, thanks to government-subsidized technology. In April, South Korea will introduce the first nationwide superfast wireless Internet service, called WiBro, eventually making it possible for Koreans to remain online on the go — at 10 megabits per second, faster than most conventional broadband connections. South Korea, perhaps more than any other country, is transforming itself through technology. About 17 million of the 48 million South Koreans belong to Cyworld, a Web-based service that is a sort of parallel universe where everyone is interconnected through home pages. The interconnectivity has changed the way and speed with which opinions are formed, about everything from fashion to politics, technology and social science experts said. Chang Duk Jin, a sociologist at Seoul National University who has studied the effects of technology on society, said it had profoundly influenced domestic politics. Two years ago, after the opposition-led National Assembly impeached President Roh Moo Hyun, a consensus began forming on the Internet that the move was politically motivated — two hours after the vote took place, Mr. Chang said. "That quickly led to mass demonstrations," he said. "That kind of thing had never happened in Korea before. Everyone is connected to everyone else, so issues spread very fast and kind of unpredictably." There has been at least one unpredictable side effect: fierce witch hunts. In a case that caused national soul-searching, a woman riding the subway with her dog last year refused to clean up after it defecated in the car. One angry passenger photographed her with a camera-equipped cellphone and later posted the photos. Soon, all of wired South Korea seemed to be on the hunt for "Dog Poop Girl." Several misidentified women were verbally attacked, and finally the woman herself was identified on the Internet and humiliated as the topic of countless online discussions. Such problems have led the government to consider curbing anonymity on the Internet, a proposal that has drawn strong opposition here. In another response, in February, the government released a 256-page "IT Ethics" textbook for junior and high school students. Teachers are expected to spend 30 hours instructing from the textbook, whose chapters include "Healthy Mobile Phone Culture," and "Protecting Personal Privacy." "Education has lagged behind the technology," said Park Jung Ho, a professor of computer science at Sunmoon University here. The government, though, is pushing ahead relentlessly. It has drawn a precise timetable on specific technologies to develop or invent, one of them robotics. Mr. Oh of the Communication Ministry said South Korea lagged behind American, Japanese and European competitors in robotics but was aiming to be No. 3 by 2013. While other countries have focused on developing military, industrial or humanoid robots, he said, South Korea decided three years ago to develop service robots that, instead of operating independently, derive their intelligence from being part of a network. Late last year, three types of robots were distributed to 64 randomly selected households, as well as two post offices, with mixed results, Mr. Oh said. In October, a second phase in the testing will put robots in 650 households and 20 public places. By 2007, the networked robots are expected to be on the market. Yujin Robot started developing prototypes in 2004 and has sold 100, mostly to universities and research institutes, said Shin Kyung Chul, the company's president. It is the leader in making small, $500 robots that move around the house using sensors, vacuuming or sweeping. They have become popular gifts for newlyweds. One of the networked robots — the two-foot-tall Jupiter with a big monitor in its chest, a round rotating head with big eyes that change shape to emulate emotions — can recognize faces and voices. Jupiter recited a nursery rhyme and danced, as Mr. Shin explained his vision of a robot-centered "intelligent society." Kim Mun Sang, director of the Center for Intelligent Robotics, which groups about 500 scientists in a project by government and industry, said networked robots needed a "killer app" before they could become fully integrated into the wired society. He said the conditions were not ripe yet and would not be for another "5 to 10 years." "But eventually robots could change how we live in a way we can't predict right now," Mr. Kim said. "It's like the PC. No one ever thought the PC and the Internet would transform our society the way they have." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/wo...a/02robot.html ![]() Warped Tour Thrives Even As Music Business Slumps Gelu Sulugiuc When only 800 kids showed up to see 10 bands for the first performance of the 1995 punk rock extravaganza the Warped Tour, founder Kevin Lyman's worst fears about his new venture seemed to be coming true. The tour was a disaster, selling only 56,000 tickets that summer and landing a penniless Lyman back in his regular job of stage manager at a Los Angeles club. But 11 years later, the punk and skateboarding tour employs more artists and crew than there were ticket buyers that first day. The Warped Tour has become the largest and longest running traveling festival in the United States, selling almost 700,000 tickets at $25 apiece last year and spinning off a winter version, the Taste of Chaos tour, even though it seldom features household-name bands. "I never thought it would last this long," Lyman, 44, told Reuters. "I should be a schoolteacher somewhere." As Warped grew, festivals like H.O.R.D.E., Lilith Fair, Smokin' Grooves and Lollapalooza that relied on big name artists but charged up to $100 for tickets disappeared or downsized to one location amid a downturn in the concert business. Last year, the top 100 touring acts sold a combined 36.1 million tickets, down 1.5 million from 2004 as average prices rose to $57 from $52.39, according to trade publication Pollstar. While stalwarts like the Rolling Stones, who sold 1.2 million tickets in 2005, still filled stadiums, newer bands without radio hits looked to Warped for exposure. Ozzfest is the only other festival still on the road, piggy-backing on the perennial popularity of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath. But Ozzfest charges lesser-known bands tens of thousands of dollars for a spot on a secondary stage, while at Warped nobody pays to play. Winning Formula Lyman, a workaholic former weight-loss camp counselor, pioneered the successful integration of corporate sponsorships with music and extreme sports. His tours relied on low costs, marketing savvy, cheap tickets and cooperation between bands. Bands shared buses, equipment and crew, while sponsorships brought in 30 percent of gross revenues. Skateboarding shoe company Vans bought a majority stake in the tour. "Try to do it without these corporate relationships and charge $25 for 100 bands. It's impossible," Lyman said. Bands that only commanded niche audiences and would never be able to get anyone to sponsor their tours came together under the Warped umbrella to reach new fans who otherwise would never see them. The tour propelled artists like Sublime, Blink-182, Atreyu and even Eminem into the mainstream. Now more than 1,000 bands clamor to get on every year. This year's trek will hit 50 venues in two months, with performers like Joan Jett, Buzzcocks, The Germs and NOFX. Record Label Meanwhile, just as U.S. CD sales fell last year to their lowest since 1996 and major labels were dropping artists who weren't delivering instant hits, Lyman started a record company. He teamed up with Bob Chiappardi of Concrete Marketing, the largest U.S. independent music marketing company, to form Warcon Enterprises. They thought the traditional music business model in which a few superstars brought labels massive amounts of cash while most artists lost money was unsustainable. With Warcon, they wanted to slowly guide bands to successful careers even without massive hits. "I want a band to become the next NOFX or Bad Religion," Lyman said. "They've been doing it for 20 years and don't depend on a gold record. With our label, 20,000 (records sold) is break-even, 50,000 to 100,000 is a home run -- the band is making money and we're making money." Among their first signings were Helmet and The Smashup. In a break from the standard practice of giving a band 10 to 15 percent of album profits, Warcon bands got 50 percent after marketing and other costs. In return, they gave up a percentage of merchandise, touring and publishing revenue. "It's about being partners with the bands," Chiappardi said. "We become involved in all aspects of their career." Some critics called the model utopian, others said the bands were being ripped off. Lyman responded by posting contracts on the Internet, telling bands not to contact him if they disagreed with the terms. "It isn't an overnight success," he said. "I'm letting (bands) keep enough so they can all go buy a house and then they can start sharing back with the record label." Lyman himself tries to share back, supporting various high-minded issues every year with his tours. This year he wants Warped bands and crew to build houses for Habitat for Humanity and plans to run all his 40 tour buses on biodiesel. Married and the father of two girls, he hopes eventually to get away from spending half a year on the road. "I'd like to start a nursery and teach kids about gardening," he said. "But I also feel obligated to keep what I'm doing going. It's a great thing for our scene, a big umbrella that everyone works under." http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False ![]() Netflix Hopes Customers Will Fall For "Cowboy" Gina Keating Online DVD renter Netflix Inc. hopes its subscribers will fall in love this week with "Cowboy del Amor," and many other unsung movies it is quietly buying at film festivals to release in arthouse theaters. Netflix will begin offering its customers the low-budget, independent "Cowboy" film as the first title it has backed with a theatrical release under a strategy to be the only place cinephiles can rent some small, critically praised works. Typically, DVD rentals get a boost from the publicity films receive in theatrical release. That is especially true for low-budget and art-house films like "Cowboy," which was released at theaters in a handful of cities for a few days in February . Netflix's publicity department made sure "Cowboy" -- a documentary by award-winning filmmaker Michele Ohayon about an ex-rodeo cowboy who runs what he calls a "woman bidness" to introduce lonely American men to marriage-minded Mexican women -- got noticed by reviewers. For the next month, "Cowboy" will be available only at Netflix. "I was married to an American woman for 17-1/2 years. She spoke perfect English and I never could understand her," begins the film's folksy narration, by "Cowboy Cupid" Ivan Thompson, who Netflix sent out on a media tour, including a visit to Howard Stern's radio show set for Monday. Lonely and unable to find an American wife, Thompson ran an ad in a Mexican newspaper more than 16 years ago and said he was astounded to receive replies from more than 80 women, including one from the gal he married, then divorced -- twice. "I said to myself, 'Self, this will make a good bidness,' and so I started doing it for the public," Thompson explained. The film, shot over three years in Mexico, New Mexico and Texas, traces the varying successes of three of Thompson's customers in finding cross-border love. "To present a woman good, I have to be enthused about 'em and like 'em, so it's a whole lot like the horse bidness," Thompson muses toward the end of "Cowboy." 'Data-Driven Hunches' Data collected on Netflix's 4.2 million subscribers' movie tastes help the company find an audience for hidden gems like "Cowboy," Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said. "We do fill a unique niche around small-market films," Sarandos said. Netflix often recommends little-known films to subscribers based on ratings customers give to earlier movies they have rented. Netflix's practice has built a level of trust among subscribers who believe the company is recommending a movie they will like. The company, which pioneered online DVD rental, began dabbling in distributing small films in 2004 with DVD releases of films such as "Born Into Brothels", a documentary on the children of prostitutes in Calcutta, which later won an Academy Award for best documentary. From "Brothel," Netflix learned "the importance of making the film an event for a particular audience but not trying to make one film for everybody," Sarandos said. "Being able to identify what niche wants a particular film and marketing that film (to them) ... is really valuable." Sarandos said he and his staff plan to secure rights to 100 more titles per year based on what he called "data-driven hunches." Sarandos saw "Cowboy Del Amor" at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, and realized it was made by Ohayon, whose previous two films, "The First Year" and "It Was A Wonderful Life," were distributed exclusively by Netflix. "As far as I'm concerned everything I have done with Netflix has been successful," Ohayon said. "I know that every film has a long shelf life if you handle it right. There was complete respect for the filmmaking behind it, which is a filmmaker's dream." http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False ![]() Sony Goes Prime-Time With "LocationFree TV" Nathan Layne Sony's dream of freeing TV from the confines of the living room is looking more like reality with a gadget that allows you to watch local broadcasts on a PC even if you are thousands of miles from home. Imagine checking out your local news channel during an international flight or enjoying your favorite baseball team live while on a business trip in Dubai. Sony Corp. is notching up strong sales of a small black box that can do just that, providing that the airplane is Wi-Fi enabled and your hotel in Dubai has a broadband connection. The book-sized device plugs into your home TV antenna, converts the signal to the MPEG-4 digital standard, encrypts it for security and streams it over the Internet to your PC. It also works with Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld video game device and compatible mobile phones will be out soon. "I want to put it into any electronics device that has communications ability and a display," Satoru Maeda, head of Sony's "LocationFree TV" business, said in an interview. This is not Sony's first try at what the industry calls "place-shifting TV." Over five years ago, Sony launched the Airboard -- a wireless flat screen device designed to be carried around the house to view television or the Web. But it failed to gain much traction with consumers, who were excited about the idea but not happy about paying more than 100,000 yen ($852.20) for the device. Sony's new LocationFree Base Station, which retails for about 32,000 yen ($272.70) in Japan, including proprietary software, seems to have struck a sweet spot. It is a hit with Japanese men in their 30's and 40's, especially those stationed overseas who want to watch their favorite programing from Japan. The gadget can also be hooked up to a DVD recorder, allowing for viewing of prerecorded shows. "People come into the store asking for the product by name. It practically sells itself," said a salesman at a major retailer in Tokyo's famous Akihabara electronics district. License To Sell Location Free TV has the full backing of chief executive Howard Stringer, which created a buzz around the technology at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by showing how the PSP can show live television from anywhere in the world. Sony currently sells the base station in Japan, the United States, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea, and plans to launch it in Europe later this year. It is aiming for global sales to clear 100,000 units in the business year ending on Friday. Maeda said he expected sales to at least double in each of the next few years, but that Sony would actively look to license its technology to other electronics and software makers as a source of income and to ensure that the industry grows. Earlier this week, Sony announced that it would license its location free software for Windows Mobile and cellphones to Japan's Access Co. Ltd., aiming to encourage the development of compatible mobile phones. "We cannot develop this market on our own," Maeda said. Sony only has a handful of competitors, the main one being U.S.-based Sling Media Inc., but several new players are expected to pile into the market, which should boost competition and drive prices down. Maeda said Sony's main advantage was its prime mover status and the fact that it held many key patents on the technology. Still, he acknowledged there were hurdles to overcome. In a demonstration of the technology at Sony's office, the quality of the picture on the PC was noticeably below regular TV viewing, while the picture on the PSP was very sharp and clear. But indications are that many consumers don't care if the picture is perfect or not. "People seem to be satisfied even if the picture quality is not great. They are just happy if they can see what they want even if they aren't at home," the Akihabara salesman said. http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-PLUGGEDIN.xml ![]() Apple Faces Second Attack Of The Clones Alan Kohler APPLE Inc's iTunes music store seems to be rapidly becoming one of the most powerful retailers in the history of the world. Never before have we seen global domination by one retailer in a product category. Apple is also possibly the most secretive retailer on Earth. What is happening is fascinating and scary, and anyone in the entertainment business anywhere in the world — nowhere more than in Australia — needs to understand it. Unfortunately Apple will not talk, so the profit margins and the process of deciding who gets to sell through the iTunes store is a mystery. Here is what we know: music and video are going entirely digital. It won't be long before CDs and DVDs are obsolete as storage. The new device of choice is the iPod, which is in the midst of an incredible global boom that is enriching Apple and its shareholders. The only place you can easily buy material for your iPod, as opposed to stealing it, is the iTunes online store. The free file-swapping sites that started with Napster (which the courts shut down) and continued with Limewire and the various Bit-torrent sites, are still seeing plenty of pirate traffic, but a growing number of people are queasy about that. Also, the free files are often mangled and it is hard to find what you want. As the iPods/digital music phenomenon goes mainstream, so legitimate sales of digital entertainment via the internet are booming as well. With iPods and iTunes, Steve Jobs and his team at Apple have created a beautifully functional closed system for selling and consuming digital music and video that looks to be heading for total dominance. The music industry fled into Jobs' arms in desperation as it watched piracy erode its sales, so Apple signed great distribution deals with all the major labels. The people who manage the iTunes inventory are developing a stranglehold over digital music distribution that is giving iTunes enormous power. The record labels have to deal with iTunes or face oblivion as the iPod population grows. In fact there is a good chance the whole thing will end up like the Macintosh computer: early dominance through its beautifully designed integrated package of hardware and operating system, but later obliterated by Microsoft Windows, which was licensed to any manufacturer. More on that later. iTunes is efficient and seductive. You register with Apple and provide your credit card details. Then you browse the store or search for the song or artist you want. One song is $1.69, albums $16.99 or $17.99. You click it, and — zip — you've bought it, credit card debited. Plug your iPod into your computer and the music is automatically loaded. I no longer use a stereo that plays CDs — I just stick my iPod in the top of a box of speakers that I bought from Apple. The sound quality is great and my entire record collection is now in the iPod, and growing every day at $1.69 a song. As well as its incredible inventory of all kinds of music, iTunes in the US is selling TV programs for $US1.99, just one hour after they go to air on the networks. You can buy a cable that connects your iPod to your TV set, or a cradle that allows the iPod to sit on top of it; the quality of both sound and vision is fine. Americans don't need to have a computer in the lounge room to buy one-off TV shows and play them on their plasma — they just carry them in the iPod. I tried to buy a TV show on the US iTunes site, but a message told me I wasn't allowed to because I live in Australia. I rang Apple in Sydney and asked when Australians will be able to buy TV shows on iTunes as Americans do. No comment. I asked around the TV industry and it seems the local networks are in some disarray about this and don't know what to do. We should never underestimate Australian TV networks' ability to block something new — Kerry Packer kept pay TV out for five years — but it will come. I might be wrong, but it seems to me the ability to easily buy a single, new episode of a TV show (and repeats), as well as single songs, albums, movies and music videos in a form that is easy to watch or listen, will change everything. The key is the device — the beautiful iPod — and the simplicity of buying stuff through iTunes, which is why Apple is becoming such a powerful retailer. That is, until Microsoft and/or Google come along, which will be soon. The shock troops for Microsoft's victory over Apple in personal computers in the 1980s were Intel, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Toshiba and so on — that is the chip manufacturer and the cheap PC makers that licensed the Windows operating system. With digital music and video it will be Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson — the mobile phone manufacturers. This year they will start releasing phones with the same storage as iPods — up to 30 gigabytes. iPods themselves will have to become phones. Microsoft's software will power the new generation of phone/music players, and the business of selling digital songs and TV shows will open up. Google will probably run the most popular online store, but there will be thousands. The iPod/iTunes system will move into a niche with Macintosh computers because Steve Jobs has again stuck with closed architecture and total control. This will happen quickly because mobile phones are being turned over about every year. It is quite a thrilling time to be alive. We will witness the creation and destruction of a market dominance in the time it used to take to work up a business plan. http://theage.com.au/news/technology...441370852.html ![]() The State of Digital Music in 2006 Chris Nickson Digital Music Demand is Greater than Ever With the start of 2006, digital music has started its growth from infancy into adolescence. In the week between Christmas 2005 and New Year’s, 20 million tracks were downloaded in America, and another million in Britain. Those are some seriously healthy numbers. Not only do they reflect the huge amount of iPods and other portable devices sold, but also the spread of broadband connections, and the fact that people are now comfortable consuming their music digitally, on a track-by-track rather than album-by-album basis. Long predicted, the listening habits of the general population are beginning to shift. It’s seismic, but it’s still small—digital music accounted for only six percent of total music sales in 2005. Yet even that is a massive increase over the year before, a whopping 194 percent, which is fiscally valuable as the sales of CDs continue to decrease (although even with digital sales, the record labels experienced another downturn in 2005). While the young, usually the first to adopt and adapt to new technology, have been downloading and swapping music for quite some time, there’s been a ripple effect into the older, warier area of the population, one that will only increase. Thank—or blame—Apple and its iPod, or any of the many other makes selling like hotcakes in the stores. As a real indicator that digital demand has moved beyond the young, music giant Universal recently announced plans to digitize 100,000 tracks from its vaults over the next four years. That’s a big move, but it’s more important for its implications. They’re not talking about music for teenagers, so they obviously believe there’s a burgeoning market among baby boomers, now quite happy and very willing to part with money to download obscure songs from their youth. But if digital music is now a teenager, it’s one with a number of issues, and one of the biggest and trickiest is digital rights management (DRM). In essence, it’s a limit on what you can do with the tracks you buy and download. In some cases, you can share the track between a limited number of computers and portable devices. In other cases, as with material purchased from Apple’s iTunes store, if you want to send the tracks to a portable device, it has to be an iPod (which will only play unprotected mp3s and material from iTunes). Given that iTunes is now one of the largest music retailers in the world, this could cause potential long-term problems. After all, having paid for the track, shouldn’t you be allowed to do what you want with it? With digital music and the portable player becoming ever more widespread, this is a question that’s only going to become more vexing. The early adopters were willing to accept the limitations, but things are going to have to change as everything rapidly reaches critical mass. The whole concept of DRM is going to have to be rethought. That’s going to cause a lot of tension with record labels, who guard their product very closely. Some encode their own players on a disc to prevent copying. Indeed, the idea of DRM has already caused one major furor, when it was discovered that Sony BMG went far beyond a player and used a virus-like system, XCP, to stop piracy and copying of some of its CDs, while other CDs were protected by a system called MediaMax. The XCP system was hidden deep in the Windows operating system, and the row and consumer lawsuits followed its discovery. Those were resolved in December 2005, when a judge approved a deal involving Sony BMG giving cash refunds and free downloads to consumers who bought CDs with the XCP technology (those with MediaMax only received free downloads). Privacy and Security That leads easily into privacy issues, which have also been tripping up iTunes lately. A new version of the software features a Mini Store, which searches for similar tracks and brings up recommendations when a person clicks on a track in iTunes. According to some bloggers who investigated, data is being sent back to Apple containing not only details of the music, but also the unique identifiers for the computer and the iTunes account (in fairness, the license for iTunes does state that it contacts the Gracenote music database to discover which album is being played via the program, and Apple says it doesn’t save any information collected, and that when the Mini Store is hidden, no data is passed). One thing the coming year might decide is the future of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing services, such as Kazaa, where people share music and video files for free. Organizations like the RIAA have been bringing lawsuits against individuals and demanding compensation from heavy P2P users, and trying other tactics such as posting empty or misleading files in an attempt to discourage people. To an extent, it’s been working, although not as well as they’d hoped; a survey shows that 51 percent of those who download music have done so illegally at some point. But like prostitution, it’s unlikely to ever vanish completely—whatever happens, there will always be a hard core who want music for free, and who seek the obscure that they can’t find elsewhere. However, as more tracks, both the most recent and the older, are digitally easily available via pay services, fewer people will use P2P. For the most part, P2P interfaces are awkward. You never know what’s going to be available for download, or whether you’ll be able to grab it before it vanishes offline. And, for many, it raises the query of virus transmission. What the industry needs to address isn’t so much going after illegal downloaders but rather why they’re doing it in the first place, and to change that. People are willing to pay for music. That much has been amply demonstrated in the last year. If they can do it in a secure environment and at a reasonable price, they’re happy. Digital Music Pricing Yet this, too, raises another question—equitable pricing. Depending on where in the world you are, the cost of downloading the same track can vary. Understandably, that makes a lot of people—certainly the ones paying higher prices—angry. England pays more than the rest of Europe for a track on iTunes, for example, and it’s a price significantly higher than that for U.S. consumers. While it’s supposedly because of rights issues in different countries, the fact is that that cyberspace is meant to be a global economy. And as digital music continues to expand, that’s an issue that going to have to be faced. So, too, is the idea of subscription versus purchase models. For now, subscription seems to work well enough. But the question is, how much of a future does it have? Basically you’re renting the music, and as long as you keep up the payments, you can play it. But once you stop, it’s all gone. How long that can really satisfy people remains to be seen. Those who follow the charts might be happy as the music is ephemeral, but most people prefer to own the music they pay for, and that could well cause a shift in thinking for many of the services, placing less emphasis on subscriptions and more on ownership. And this, too, feeds back into pricing. In the near future, the biggest factors to draw customers will be the depth of a library and the price per track. A high profile helps (as iTunes shows), but as the market changes, it might become less of a factor as competitors become more aggressive to claim their share of a growing pie, and many services get essentially equal libraries. After all, it’s in the interests of record labels to have their product as widely available as possible—you couldn’t imagine Sony selling only to Borders and ignoring every other chain, for example (at the same time, it’s not uncommon to see services offering limited-time exclusives on tracks to lure in customers). As people become savvier about the different services, they’ll shop around for tracks, taking some here, some there, much as they might flit between Target and Wal-Mart, for example. Although popular music remains the biggest and most lucrative market, the smaller niches have shown a rise in digital sales. It gives curious consumers a chance to taste without a significant investment. And even in areas that require more commitment from the listener, such as classical music, the increase in digital demand has been staggering—up almost a hundred percent in the U.S. during 2005 (and this, interestingly, among a group generally seen as audiophiles, whom you wouldn’t imagine going for the relatively low-fi mp3s). It’s not yet a panacea for declining CD sales, but it’s a big help in plugging the gap. The big players in the game are already established, on both first and second tiers. A couple more might join the fray, but the lines have essentially already been drawn, with everyone gunning for iTunes to take chunks out of its share. That could well happen; the ongoing supremacy of Steve Jobs’s baby is far from guaranteed. Once someone else figures out a model that works better for the consumer, actually listening to and providing what customers really want, all bets will be off. And, sure as eggs is eggs, it’ll happen. Although digital music is essentially home-based—you download onto your computer—some people are betting it can become a public commodity. The number of digital music kiosks in stores is growing, where you can download tracks onto a CD or your mp3 player. A number of chains have experimented with them, such as McDonald’s and Starbucks, which currently offers a million song catalog and a seven-track CD burned for $8.99, with each additional track 99 cents. There are plans to put them in other coffee shops, airports, and convenience stores—basically anywhere people gather. But there’s one big problem: The tracks sold by the kiosks are protected by Microsoft Windows technology, which means they won’t play on an iPod. In other words, it comes back to DRM, one of the main labyrinths that will need to be explored this year. What we’re really seeing is a market that’s growing almost too rapidly. The baby steps have become longer strides, but right now it remains rather confused about its future. The only thing that’s certain is that there’ll have to be a lot of change if the growth is to continue. Digital music is undergoing its teenage angst. As any parent can tell you, those are difficult times, when the youth are finding themselves through a series of identity crises. It’ll come out the other side, more mature, stronger, and ready to face the future. But 2006 is going to be a critical year in its development. http://news.designtechnica.com/print...article52.html ![]() Prisoner of Redmond: Yet Another Way Paul Allen Isn’t Like You or Me Robert X. Cringely There are hundreds of Microsoft millionaires (and even a few Microsoft billionaires) in the suburbs of Seattle. For the most part, these are people who no longer work for Microsoft, but still own company shares. They worked very hard for years and are now reaping the rewards of that work combined with their good luck. Most of them are proud of their careers, but a few are secretly ashamed. Climb high enough in the organization, and it becomes clear that Microsoft’s success has not always been based on legal or ethical behavior. The company is, after all, a convicted monopolist, and the exercise of those monopoly powers wasn’t just through a Gates or a Ballmer, but also through dozens of top managers, at least some of whom had to have known that what they were doing was wrong. These are smart people, but also people trapped by their own success. Some are in denial, some are just quiet. Nobody wants to risk what they have accumulated by talking about it. You would think great wealth would be freeing, but it isn’t always. Sometimes it is a trap. Paul Allen is one week older than me. I have more kids but he has more toys -- a LOT more toys -- including professional football and basketball teams, SpaceShipOne, lots of planes and a HUGE boat. Allen is an enthusiast of epic proportions, but one of my fondest images of him was from the 20th anniversary party for the Altair 8800 computer (arguably the first PC), when Paul Allen-the-billionaire wanted some fast food late at night and -- not having a car -- WALKED through the drive-through as part of a long line of cars. There was a time when Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, was the boss at Microsoft. When it came time to visit Albuquerque to demonstrate that first BASIC interpreter to the folks at MITs, Allen made the trip, not Gates. It was Paul Allen, not Gates, who was later offered the job as head of software for MITs -- a job I have in the past characterized as the single most expensive position in the history of employment because accepting that job meant that Allen got only 36 percent of Microsoft’s founders shares, compared to Bill Gates’ 64 percent. There’s an irony in that stock differential, and it is that Gates argued HE was working 100 percent for Microsoft while Allen was working for both Microsoft and MITs, Microsoft’s only customer, and therefore deserved less stock because of his divided duties. The irony is that shortly after they divided the shares, Gates went to MITs founder Ed Roberts asking for a job, too, which Roberts gave him, paying $10 per hour. A more aggressive Paul Allen would have demanded a share adjustment at that point, but the real Paul Allen let it slide. “I made out okay,” he told me when I asked about it. Four years later, when Microsoft had left New Mexico for offices in a bank building in Bellevue, Washington, and Jack Sams came from IBM looking for an operating system for the secret Project Acorn -- the IBM PC -- Allen was still the guy in charge. Sams mistook Gates for the office assistant. Though both Gates and Ballmer took part in those first talks with IBM, Sams recalled that the authority figure was definitely Paul Allen. These roles changed over time, of course, and what clearly precipitated the change was Paul Allen’s health. He contracted Hodgkins Disease, a form of cancer, in 1982 when Allen was in charge of the development of MS-DOS 2.0, a complete rewrite of PC-DOS 1, which was itself mainly derived from Seattle Computer Products’ Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) that Microsoft had acquired when Digital Research was unable to come to terms with IBM about using CP/M for the original PC. QDOS was simply not a very good product, and DOS 2.0 was intended to overcome the earlier products’ many problems. It would also eliminate that nascent rumor that QDOS was riddled with code “borrowed” from CP/M. So DOS 2.0 was the most important Microsoft product to date and vital to cementing the company’s relationship with its biggest customer, IBM. It was also by far the most complex product in Microsoft’s young history, which again is why Paul Allen was put in charge. As development continued, Allen’s health began to deteriorate, so much so that the IBM team was worried that Allen might not survive. “He looked like death,” Sams told me. “But still they pushed him.” In the Boys’ Club that was Microsoft in those days, maybe the concept of mortality was too abstract, maybe Allen’s poor health wasn’t as obvious to those around him every day as it was to the IBM team that visited from time to time. To his credit, Allen stayed long enough to finish the job, delivering DOS 2.0 then leaving the company forever, eventually to have a bone marrow transplant that cured him completely. But during one of those last long nights of working to finish-up DOS 2.0, something happened. I have heard this story from two people, each of whom was a friend of Allen’s and in a position to know. Each told me the same story the same way. I am not staking my reputation on the accuracy of the story, but I am saying I have it from two good sources. Paul Allen certainly won’t confirm or deny it, so I’ll just throw it out for you to consider. During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die. Maybe that’s just the sort of fiduciary discussion board members have to have, but it didn’t go over well with Paul Allen, who never returned to Microsoft, and over the next eight years, made huge efforts to secure his wealth from the fate of Microsoft. He sold large blocks of shares on a regular basis no matter whether the price was high or low. Then in October and November of 2000, just as he was finally leaving the Microsoft board, Allen did a series of financial transactions involving derivative securities called “collars,” that are a combination of a right to buy and a right to sell the stock at different prices such that both his upside and downside financial potential are limited. By the end of 2000, though Allen technically still owned 136 million Microsoft shares, his wealth was for practical purposes separate from that of Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft. I confirmed this with Peter Newcomb, the editor at Forbes whose job includes keeping track of the world’s 400 richest people and their money. Calling-up Allen’s financial information on his computer screen, Peter pointed to the sports teams, valued together at about $1 billion, the huge investment in Charter Communications, Allen’s Dreamworks stake, another $1 billion in real estate, and, oh yes, that Microsoft collar. “He’s worth a total of about $14 billion at this moment and while he has more than 100 million residual Microsoft shares,“ Peter said, “does Paul Allen care what happens to Microsoft? Only tangentially.“ Peter and Forbes were available in this case through the help of Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, who is an old friend. What do you do when your wealth is immense but completely tied to people whom you inherently do not trust? If you are Paul Allen you watch your tongue and spend eight years getting out from under that burden. My reason for bringing up this topic at this time is because it will all shortly be back in the news as Microsoft goes to court later this year in what might well be its last-ever anti-trust trial. Remember those 19 states and the District of Columbia that settled over time for software vouchers and promises from Microsoft to no longer do evil? Well only Iowa remains, represented by a lady lawyer from Des Moines named Roxanne Conlin whom I have met. Roxanne is not in any way impressed with Microsoft vouchers, no matter how many there are. Looking for real money for the people of Iowa, Ms. Conlin is about to dredge-up all this old news and put a new spin on it. Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down. It should be interesting. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060330.html ![]() NASA HQ Raided In Kiddie Porn Probe Feds: "Skin tone filtering system" helped nab space agency executive The Washington headquarters of NASA was raided this week as part of a kiddie porn probe targeting an executive with the space agency, The Smoking Gun has learned. On Wednesday morning, federal investigators seized a laptop computer, a hard drive, CDs, and other material from the office of James R. Robinson, who was present when agents with NASA's inspector general executed a search warrant at his E Street office. According to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court, Robinson, 42, used his office computer (and another in his Virginia home) to trade and examine illegal image and videos. An excerpt from the affidavit, sworn by agent Paul Danley, can be found below. Robinson, a program executive with NASA's In-Space Propulsion, Mission and Systems Management Division, was snared last year in an online operation run by postal inspectors. In correspondence with a series of undercover agents, he described his preferences as, "probably priority right now would be boy-on-boy or boy-with-Man, and girl-on-girl. But really, anything is of interest." Robinson, who has not been arrested, wrote that he was "Not a cop," and explained that he amassed his child porn collection via downloads "via Kazaa and usegroups." The affidavit also indicates that Robinson, who traded via a Yahoo! mail account using the alias "Jim Saron," trolled "alt.chxld.mxlexter.com." In December, after being contacted by postal agents, NASA's inspector general opened its own probe of Robinson, which included a review of reports from the space agency's "web activity monitoring application." The NASA system, dubbed Web ContExt, is apparently a state-of-the-art application that used a "skin tone filtering system" to determine that Robinson was viewing child porn from his office computer, most recently in January, according to the affidavit. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0331061nasa1.html ![]() Homeland Worker Allegedly Boasted To 'Girl' In Porn Sting Nick Timiraos Washington -- Sheriff's detectives in Polk County, Fla., never know what they're going to find when they fish for sexual predators by creating bogus profiles on adult Internet sites. But they were stunned last month when they ran across a man representing himself as an official of the Department of Homeland Security -- complete with lapel pin and a government telephone number -- and looking to connect with a 14-year-old girl. Prosecutors prepared Wednesday to extradite Brian Doyle -- a senior public information officer in the Homeland Security Department in Washington who faces 23 felony counts of using a computer to seduce a child and transmitting harmful materials to a minor. Homeland security press secretary Russ Knocke said the department is cooperating fully with the criminal investigation in Florida, adding that Doyle's security clearance, employee badge and facility-access permissions have been suspended. The sheriff's office, which serves an area in central Florida east of Tampa, alleges that Doyle, who turns 56 Friday, used the Internet to start conversations with what he thought was a 14-year-old girl about sexual activities he said the two would engage in. Doyle also allegedly sent pornographic movies and nonsexual photos, including one of himself wearing a Homeland Security lapel pin and a lanyard that says "TSA." Doyle previously worked for the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Homeland Security Department. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Doyle bragged to the "girl" that he worked for Homeland Security and in later conversations provided his office phone number and the number of his government-issued cell phone. The arrest led to calls on Capitol Hill on Wednesday for tighter employee screening at the Department of Homeland Security. "What if the person on the other end had been a member of al Qaeda or a similar terrorist organization and used this information to blackmail Mr. Doyle?" House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., asked in a statement Wednesday. He promised to investigate the department's hiring policies next month. Colleagues expressed shock over the news of Doyle's arrest and described him as a friendly co-worker who loved telling stories and spouting sports scores. "There's not a person I know who doesn't like him," said Dennis Murphy, who supervised Doyle for two years before leaving Homeland Security. The arrest is the second of a department official recently on a sex offense. Frank Figueroa, 49, who oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Florida, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he exposed himself to a girl at a mall last year in Tampa. While most investigations of online predators take months, Judd said his office made the arrest just weeks after the first conversation on March 12 because "of his high-profile position and us not knowing how much information he had access to or who he could share that with." He also said Doyle would sometimes call the girl a different name, "which leads us to believe he may have had other chats with other girls." Running stings against Internet users interested in child pornography has become a regular part of operations, a Polk County Sheriff's Office official said. The county has a zero-tolerance policy on all adult-oriented businesses, including strip clubs and pornographic bookstores. Agents in the U.S. Secret Service, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and the department's inspector general served a search warrant with the Montgomery County police and the Polk County Sheriff's Office. No bail was set Wednesday. Doyle was joined at the hearing by a woman that his attorney, Barry Helfand, identified as Doyle's life partner of 15 years. Each felony carries a maximum five-year jail sentence. Doyle was hired by the federal government, at the Transportation Security Administration, in 2002. He previously worked, for 26 years, as a reporter for Time magazine in Washington. A former colleague said Doyle is divorced. People in Doyle's neighborhood said they were surprised that the mild-mannered security employee was nabbed in the sting. Doyle's house is just behind an elementary school yard. "I was shocked, because I didn't think it was something he would do," said Asha Andreas, a neighbor. "He was gone a lot working. It worries me, too, because I have three kids." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGKMI47P01.DTL ![]() Mitsubishi Harnesses Colored Lasers to Produce New-Generation Lightweight HDTV Michel Marriott As if shopping for new flat-panel, high-definition television is not hard enough, Mitsubishi is scheduled to announce this week that it has developed commercial television that uses colored lasers to display bright, deep images on large, thin, lightweight screens — surpassing images seen on film. The television sets, which Mitsubishi is calling the first of their kind, are expected to reach stores sometime late next year. At the heart of the first generation of this new television is an existing rear-projection technology called digital light processing. In the past, this technology, developed by Texas Instruments, used white-light mercury lamps as the television's light source. With laser television, separate red, green and blue lasers are used in conjunction with an HDTV chip, said Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi. He and Mitsubishi engineers said this provided a new look in large-screen units, signaling a move to lighter, slimmer profiles for rear-projection television. In terms of performance, Mr. DeMartin said, laser television promises a greater range and intensity of colors. He said the new sets would be made with compact, sculptured cabinets and remain relatively light because the screens would be advanced plastics rather than the glass common in plasma television flat-panel units. The screens will be so lightweight that the need for frames will be significantly lessened, Mr. DeMartin added. This will give the television a cleaner, practically all-screen look. Its lighter weight, about half that of plasma models with comparable screen sizes, will also have a smaller footprint, he said. For example, a 50-inch plasma or L.C.D. television requires stands up to 17 inches deep to rest securely, Mr. DeMartin said. Laser television technology is not new. For years, engineers have experimented in laboratories and research centers, seeking to illuminate television images with lasers. But the most optimistic outlook had been for laser television to be available in two to three years. Power and costs were barriers to bringing the technology to the marketplace. But Marty Zanfino, the director of product development for Mitsubishi, said those issues had been resolved, resulting in large-screen laser television that is expected to be competitively priced with plasma television in sizes of 52 inches and larger. Mr. DeMartin said laser television would use about a third the power of conventional, large-screen models that depend on high-power lamps. In such television, he said, the lamps are required to be on at full power whenever the sets that use them are on. But Mitsubishi's new lasers, which are based in semiconductors, turn on and off when needed. For example, Mr. DeMartin said, when black is required in an image — still a challenge for some plasma-based television — the laser switches off. These solid-state lasers, he added, will greatly outlast lamps. As a light source, he said, they are practically "permanent," meaning that the lasers should last for the set's lifetime. A 52-inch model of the Mitsubishi laser television is scheduled to be demonstrated when the company shows its new lines on Friday in Huntington Beach, Calif. Mitsubishi is showing the new product at a time consumers are expressing interest in high-definition, flat-panel units. Industry statistics show that consumers in the United States are buying large display television at twice the pace they did three years ago. Mitsubishi executives said Americans were buying five million high-definition television units a year, urged on by increased high-definition programming, the move to high-definition video consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, and high-definition DVD players coming to market. But unlike old technologies based on the cathode-ray tube, or C.R.T., which remained basically unchanged for decades, flat-panel television is continuing to evolve rapidly. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Toshiba and Canon demonstrated their jointly developed S.E.D. (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) televisions, new flat-screen units that essentially combine the best of C.R.T. emitter technology with digital flat-panel technology. The two companies recently postponed their introduction until next year. "It's a story of complexity," Ted Schadler, a Forrester Research analyst, said of the dizzying array of choices prospective buyers face. He said there were more technologies, more shapes and sizes and more competing manufacturers' agendas. While he said the S.E.D. and laser television technologies had "characteristics that are extremely interesting," he warned that consumers and retailers were going to have to do their homework as the flat-panel choices grew more complex. "Television used to be very, very simple," he said. "You bought a big one or a small one that was black and white or color." That has all changed, Mr. Schadler said. "Now we've got complexity like buying real estate or buying a car or something," he said. "It's just gotten tremendously complicated." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03hdtv.html ![]() Critic's Notebook Now Playing on YouTube: Web Videos by Everyone Virginia Heffernan Skinny guys with moppy hair in modest houses have officially staked their claim to the latest medium for short, loud adolescent messages: YouTube. It's not semi-nudes or celebrity satire or kittens' antics that dominate the most-viewed list at YouTube.com, the popular clearinghouse for international homemade video. So exactly what videos are drawing viewers to this ascendant site, which, less than a year after its launch, averages around 25 million hits each day? YouTube makes this question easy to answer by giving users several ways to sort the videos, including by "most discussed," "most recent" and, handily, "most viewed." It turns out that most of the videos that get millions of looks are humorous posturings by kids who in other places and at other times might be collecting near-mint X-Men comics, or practicing Metallica licks. Take the most-viewed YouTube video of all time. Though it has been up for only four months, the "Pokémon Theme Music Video" has accumulated 6.8 million views, according to the site's counter. (You can go to www.youtube.com and search for all of these.) The video, a lip-sync duet by Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox of smosh.com, is a fine example of YouTube's charming two-housebound-handsome-guys genre. Judging from the effusive if subliterate comments section, it's not disliked by anyone, which is rare. The comments section can be harsh. Mr. Padilla and Mr. Hecox are viral video's Matt and Ben, but they short-sell their good looks by capering around to — in this case — the theme to the Pokémon game that so many American teenagers grew up playing. The song underscores both the insidious pleasure and mental isolation of the popular game. Mr. Padilla and Mr. Hecox, who post somewhat more sophisticated videos on smosh.com, make the most of the lyrics, fiercely hitting their marks without cracking up as they bound around what looks like a messy suburban bedroom. It's a testament to the unimpeachable humor of this video that even its blasphemy — at one point, Mr. Hecox sucks on a Jesus figurine — hasn't provoked a credible backlash in comments. "This is an awesome video," a typical comment reads. "The only negative criticism I have is DON'T EAT JESUS!!!" Another ventured, tamely: "aw por Jesus." David Lehre, whose video "Myspace: THE MOVIE!" has just slipped from second to third most views of all time, with 4.9 million, gives Mr. Padilla and Mr. Hecox a run for their money. Just as the smosh guys did with Pokémon, Mr. Lehre attracts a huge viewership by exploiting an obvious sideline obsession of YouTube fiends: MySpace. Mr. Lehre sends up various conventions of the overexposed online Place for Friends. In the first section, a kid is photographing himself from odd angles for his profile. Right when he's trying to get a sexy shot of himself in undershorts, his mother walks in. Later, in the second section, we learn that MySpace participants who show "the angles" — photographs of various body parts rather than a full-body pose — are concealing ugliness. Or so goes the Generation M rule of thumb. The joke drags after that, but it has made its point. At No. 2 is a meticulous, live-action staging of the intro to "The Simpsons." It has attracted around five million views. At first, "The Real Simpsons" looks like a brilliant D.I.Y. project, but actually it's a full-dress trailer for the new "Simpsons" season by Britain's Sky One channel. If you didn't catch it at the beginning of the "Simpsons" episode shown on Fox on March 26, here's your chance to see a human Bart skateboarding over Homer's car, or a real Maggie being passed through a supermarket checker. Beware, though: there's something unsettlingly British about it. Did they get every frame but miss the Simpsons' American spirit? After that, the most-viewed videos include some professional work, including lackluster music videos and evocative commercials for Nike ("Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold") and Sony Bravia. Advertisers take note: apart from movie trailers, the commercials that are currently the most successfully viral — passed around by e-mail — are tender and recessive, like ballads. Fans seem to like their brasher stuff homemade. Videos with Asian and Asian-American themes get heavy play. Anime clips and trailers, weird work like "Korean Madness," and the much-emulated comic stylings of "two chinese boys," who have multiple entries on the site, are the bread and butter of YouTube. One Chinese-American contributor seems to have discovered a reservoir of humor that he and others might draw on for years to come. This is "Crazy Asian Mother," which has the subtitle, "how asian parents really act when childrens get B+." The spelling error seems to be deliberate. The sketch is amateurish, but it comes together. The comments are almost all amens: "It's soooo true," "reminds me of my own mother," and so on. The most beautiful video, by far, is called simply "guitar," and it has drawn, according to YouTube, nearly two million views. (It's also the No. 2 most-discussed video on the site.) Like the Nike commercial, and the mesmerizing, disturbing "Knife Skills," in which a sullen young woman wields a butterfly knife at high speed, "guitar" is a display of unalloyed physical virtuosity that preempts criticism. After a black screen, the opening bars of Pachelbel's Canon begin, and title cards identify the piece, adding, "Arranged by JerryC," and "Played by funtwo." Funtwo, presumably, then shows up: he's a young-looking guy in a T-shirt and a baseball cap that obscures his face. He's sitting by a computer and holding an electric guitar. He looks like any introverted kid with frontman fantasies. Still, the anonymous image is arresting. Bright light shines through a window behind him, surrounding him with a glow; the effect is dreamlike. Funtwo then plays JerryC's rock embellishment over the classical piece with amazing dexterity, managing to enliven the music and create a lasting work of pop art. As the comments say: "dude teach me how to play," "it is undeniably one of the best solos ive ever see," "u could go up against jimi hendrix." What's most impressive about the performance is the combination of funtwo's shyness and his aggressive, guitar-god fingerwork. Some posters try to suggest that the performance is fake; but someone called fablesoftherest seems to silence most of the skeptics: "I'll end the guesswork-the kid is for real," adding, "Funtwo's is the definitive version. This kid is destined to be one of the great guitarists of all time." Finally, an extremely funny video that deserves more views on YouTube is "Leprechaun in Mobile," a local Alabama news segment that seems too hilarious to be real. (Is it a hoax? Does it matter?) Yes, the video is nothing more than its title says, a Leprechaun in Mobile. But if you're into short video, that's more than enough. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/arts/03tube.html ![]() Not Tonight Darling, I’m Online Adrian Turpin On a winter afternoon in Trafalgar Square, Michael (”Please don’t use my second name”) is trying to explain how the internet has changed his life and the lives of thousands like him. “How many men are there here?” he asks, standing on the steps of St Martin in the Fields church. He surveys the tableau of anonymous office workers muffled against the cold. “Say there are 100, 200, 500...? How many will go home tonight and, with or without the knowledge of their partners, look at porn on the internet? You’d be surprised. Timothy Leary said about Sixties drug culture, ‘tune in and drop out’. The modern equivalent is ‘log on and get off’.” He draws a line in the air between Nelson’s Column and the National Gallery. “You might think they don’t look the sort. Well, I don’t look the sort - but I’ve spent whole weekends with the curtains drawn, sitting in the dark apart from the blue light of the screen. It seems so creepy when it’s put like that.” He laughs and shrugs. “But everybody’s at it. Aren’t they?” The question is all the more unsettling for being rhetorical. Can it be true that a great swathe of the UK population is spending its spare moments surfing for naked flesh and, if so, what effect might that have on the nation’s collective psyche? What does it say about our emotional lives? You don’t have to look far to find evidence that Michael’s “everyone’s at it” contains more than a kernel of truth. Dr Marios Pierides is a consultant psychiatrist with the Capio Nightingale hospitals in London, who specialises in treating patients with addictions. “The man who tells you he hasn’t looked at pornography on the web is the man who tells you he hasn’t masturbated,” he says. According to the internet filter company N2H2, its database of pages identified as pornography grew from 14 million in 1998 to 260 million in 2003, a 1,800 per cent increase. Type “XXX” into Google - a rough and ready reckoner of the number of adult sites - and you will get millions of results, while in January this year, The Washington Post reported that the online porn business was worth $2.5bn a year, compared with just $1.1bn for music downloads. “One of my colleagues calls internet porn the crack cocaine of the internet,” Pierides says. “It would not be unreasonable to call it an epidemic. In the past 12 months, I’ve seen an explosion in the number of people referred to me with issues about it. It has tripled. This is causing real problems. “I’ve had many wives complaining about it and simply going along with it, and the number of people in offices is startling. It’s now not at all uncommon for me to be consulted by high-flying professionals who fear their addiction will lead to them losing their jobs.” The psychiatrist’s views find accord in the US. According to Mark Schwartz, the clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St Louis, “Pornography is having a dramatic effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways - and nobody outside the sexual behaviour field and the psychiatric community is talking about it.” Statistics about internet usage are often sketchy and raise as many questions as they answer. Still, the dots are there to be joined. In 2001, the internet tracking company Netvalue made headlines when it reported that more than a quarter of Britons who had access to the net from home had looked at adult websites over the course of a month. Of those, students (23 per cent), manual workers (15 per cent) and professionals (almost 13 per cent) were the most frequent visitors. Now consider the near exponential increase in internet access in the past decade. The Office for National Statistics recorded that just 9 per cent of UK households were online in 1998; by 2004 that figure had risen to 52 per cent. The amount of time spent online seems to be expanding too. Last month, Google claimed that the average Briton now spends more time trawling the web (164 minutes a day) than watching television (148 minutes). It seems fair to assume that not all this time was spent innocently shopping on eBay or doing homework. Given such growth, talk of pornography flooding into Britain’s homes as never before is neither hyperbolic nor judgmental; it’s a statement of fact. The internet has released a genie from the bottle. Once pornography had to be actively sought; now it is accessible and affordable for the majority of the population, anonymity guaranteed at the click of a mouse. The consequences are staggering. In 2004, the American internet tracking service ComScore revealed that more than 70 per cent of men aged 18-34 visit a pornographic site in a typical month. “It’s a high number,” one of the company’s analysts told The New York Times, “but it won’t shock anyone who’s worked in the industry.” Michael is not shocked either. But nor is he entirely comfortable with his own situation. “When I talk to you about this for the first time, I feel queasy. It’s not quite a moral queasiness. I’m not talking about the ethics of pornography or the exploitation of women. Whatever I ought to feel about that, that’s the easiest bit for me to rationalise. “It’s not sexual guilt. It’s more a sense of waste and puzzlement. What am I lacking in my life and my marriage that I need this? You are meant to get to know yourself as you get older. I’m 32 and sometimes I think I’m getting more confused, lost in cyberspace. But the most baffling thing is that I can say all this to you, but when I go home tonight I’ll probably boot up my machine and start all over again.” I had found Michael through a friend of a friend, and e-mailed him a couple of weeks before our London meeting. I told him I was writing about how the internet had affected people’s relationships - more specifically about how the online revolution had brought the guilty secrets of pornography into men’s erotic lives. His first response was: “Why me?” His life was so ordinary. “Exactly,” I replied. “That’s the point.” Michael was right about not seeming “the sort”. At first, we exchanged e-mails. For someone who spent so much time on line, he seemed awkward, cool to the point of terseness. It took a while before he told me his background: a happy childhood; two degrees - a bachelor’s from a red brick university and an Oxbridge PhD; a relatively high-flying job in academia that he liked rather than loved. The really personal stuff was left until we met face to face - a face that seemed the antithesis of the pasty-faced onanist: shaven head, broad smile, good-looking in a slightly ruddy way with a self-deflating sense of humour. Had he ever had problems establishing relationships with women? “I wasn’t Casanova,” he deadpanned. “Eight or ten relationships, flings, whatever, since I left university.” He met his wife five years ago, marrying in 2003. They have no children. “It’s a comfortable relationship,” he said. “But I would never tell her about the porn. It’s something I’d dabbled in occasionally for a long time. When I lived in London I would occasionally get magazines from a news stand outside Victoria station, always at night. But it was only really when I got the internet that I got serious.” In the days before broadband, downloading pictures was painfully slow. He instead turned to MSN’s chat rooms, which have since closed down after the internet service provider became nervous about their ability to police paedophile activities. “I can’t remember the first time. But I can still remember the feeling. There was a sort of tingle of expectation - adrenaline - perhaps as the modem started to whine. I once read that some people get turned on just by hearing that sound. I can believe it. “I’d be seeing a girlfriend but I’d choose to spend time getting aroused online rather than with her. It wasn’t always the case. Sometimes I’d go for weeks without logging on. But I’d always relapse in little bursts. A couple of hours a night for a week, if I got a chance.” By the time he was married the sessions sometimes lasted until three or four o’clock in the morning, after his wife had gone to bed. “Was it a sign that something was wrong with my relationship or that something was wrong with me?” These days, Michael spends little time in chat rooms and more downloading pornographic pictures and videos from websites (he says that he prefers websites that show more natural, less silicone-enhanced women). His wife’s absence on business trips gives him time and opportunity to seek them out. Has his online life changed the way Michael relates to her? “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I know I love her, although our sex life seems to have tapered off as I watch more. On a bad day, I feel it’s gnawing away at some human part of me.” Jane Haynes knows all about the vagaries of human behaviour. For almost 20 years, she has practised as a relational psychotherapist, having trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst. Her consulting room at the Group Analytic Practice in London is discreetly tucked away in a mansion block near Marylebone Road. A box of tissues on the arm of the sofa suggests the hidden dramas that take place here, but Haynes radiates a soothing calm. Never judgmental, she expresses wry wonder at the tangles in which people find themselves over sex. She used to be an actor. Now she often comes out of sessions with the words of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ringing in her head: “Lord, what fools [we] mortals be!” She stresses that she speaks as a clinician rather than an academic, and she tells it as it is rather than as it ought to be: “In the last few years, the issue has come up more and more among the women I see professionally. I’m generally talking about women aged 30 to 40 who are outraged to find out that their husband is looking at some website or other. I hear it so often I sort of want to smile. “In my work, I find it’s men who are bored by straight sex and women who say, ‘Why on earth, when I’ve only been married for a year, does my husband want me to take another woman to bed with us?’ So for me the big question is: what is the easy availability of porn doing to people’s minds and expectations?” She is reluctant to take an ideological stance, pro- or anti-porn: “In my line of work I try to get people to understand that there are differences between men and women. And it may be that that, in the sexual arena, those differences are very profound. “I have mainly found pornography to be a male problem. Unlike men, for example, very few women have problems that they’re more turned on by porn than by their partner. But then I don’t think men are naturally monogamous. So perhaps for them pornography is an attempt to come to terms with that without rocking the boat of their relationship. Domesticity is an enemy of the erotic life. I should also say there’s an important distinction to be made between porn used alone and pornography used together as a couple: sometimes consensual porn can actually enhance a relationship because it is shared and not split off into a private world.” To some men, Haynes argues, clicking on porn is simply a way to pass the time. “It’s a hobby. Once they’d idly play solitaire; now they idly click on a porn site.” Others, though, succumb to addiction: “It isn’t just lonely, perverse men this happens to. It doesn’t just hit because men haven’t got a relationship. A man can be interacting well with his partner, but at the same time he’s addicted to these sites. That can be very distressing for him. Most addictions are to do with internal emptiness, wanting to fill up dead space, and addiction is always destructive.” One problem is defining where normal behaviour ends and addiction begins - especially when so many people seem to be indulging. One much-quoted American survey labelled someone who looked at internet porn for more than 11 hours a week as a compulsive user. Using a similar benchmark, a study in 2000 by psychologists concluded that 200,000 people in the US were internet sex addicts. Testifying to a US Senate committee in 1999, Dr Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s sexual trauma and psychopathology programme, said that “even non sex-addicts will show brain reactions on PET [Positron Emission Tomography] scans while viewing pornography similar to cocaine addicts looking at images of cocaine.” The implication is that the human brain is hardwired to crave porn. Given the opportunity, we may all have the potential to become addicts. I phone Michael. Does he think he’s addicted? “I haven’t bankrupted myself with subscriptions to porn sites. I’m still in a relatively stable relationship. And I’m not seeing a therapist, although I’ve thought about it,” he says. “But, yes, I know there’s an element of compulsion there.” I tell him about how Pierides’ colleague described pornography as the crack cocaine of the internet. “I don’t feel like a crack addict, more like a binge drinker,” he replies, speaking low so that his wife can’t hear him in the other room. “I know it’s not doing me good or making me happy at some level and I’d be embarrassed to let anyone know how much time I was spending online looking at porn. It’s like when the doctor asks how many units you’re drinking and you halve it.” In the US, the debate about porn’s effect has been energised by the publication of Pamela Paul’s book, Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families. Paul, a contributor to Time magazine and The New York Review of Books, describes herself as a liberal who had never really given pornography much thought before she came to write about it. “I set out to do a book that wasn’t politicised because I felt that people’s perceptions of the subject were set in stone.” Her conclusions, however, echo many of the concerns of old-school feminists and the Bible-bashing right. “In America at least, a veil of political correctness has fallen over the subject. People think it’s either harmless entertainment or that it’s empowering or good for a relationship.” What gives Paul’s polemic weight is the number of interviews she has done with users and those around them. “My starting point was that we knew about the supply but very little about the demand,” she says. If she thought that porn fans would be another species, she was soon disabused. One of the author’s first finds was Jonah, a religious school teacher who enjoyed looking at images of genital torture. “I found him on the internet absolutely anonymously,” she says. “But it turned out that he used to work with me. He would have been the last person who I’d have thought would have been into that kind of thing.” The words of Pornified’s female interviewees make uncomfortable reading. There is Ashley, whose boyfriend is quite open in his use of pornography but finds it hard to maintain an erection. Every man she has dated fixates on porn: “Their view of sex is really skewed. It’s gotten dirtier, raunchier. They want you to do a lot of degrading things.” Bridget, a 38-year-old accountant from Kentucky, feels rejected by her partner: “When I found out he was looking at all this porn I just felt thrown away.” Variations on this story recur repeatedly in Paul’s book - and are echoed on hundreds of websites about the subject. Typical are such women as marriedlove, who logged on to the “Husbands and internet porn” discussion board at www.aphroditewomenshealth in February. “I’m often struck in these (increasingly common!) debates over porn, how often female frigidity is referred to as cause for frequency of male porn use,” she writes. “I’d be happy to engage in some form of sexual play or another with my partner multiple times per day, but he still looks at porn alllllll the time. Maybe I’m unique in this, but I don’t think so.” In Pornified, however, it’s the testimony of the men that is most striking. “Overall one of the surprising things was the extent to which men would talk to me,” Paul said. Kevin, a 32-year-old photographer from Colorado, describes how, having broken up with his fiancee, he began to go online looking for porn almost daily: “I would want more and more. It wasn’t enough to see bare breasts, it had to be bottoms, then it had to be couple, anal and group sex, multiple men and multiple women, bisexual.” “More than anything else it was making me jaded,” Kevin tells Paul. “I wasn’t finding pleasure in the little things, with women or with life in general. Things that used to be erotic bored me.” Harrison, a graphic designer, finds his appetite for porn interfering with his libido: “I’ve gotten used to a certain heightened level of stimulation, and when compared with porn, real sex just isn’t that exciting.” (Jane Haynes knows this pattern only too well: “I see it time and again clinically. Porn doesn’t enhance libido, it tends to drain it, which is what drives thinking men to despair.”) Pornified is subtle enough not to depict the world in black and white. There are men, couples and occasionally even solo women who profess to love porn, use it, and believe they have no problem controlling any demons it might unleash. But the overwhelming tone of the book is of male melancholy, best summed up by Kevin. “I don’t know if porn was an addiction for me,” he tells Paul, after deciding to stop looking at adult material online. “I don’t think so. But it was certainly a depressant.” For Paul, the problem with porn is as much about self-harm as it is about objectifying women. “It’s like before [Eric Schlosser’s book] Fast Food Nation or [Morgan Spurlock’s film] Super Size Me people didn’t know junk food was bad. They just thought it tasted good. They didn’t know about the odd chemicals and cooking processes that go into a chicken nugget.” The difference is that where McDonald’s or Burger King can only be found on the high street, the majority of homes now offer the means to view internet porn. For Michael, however, ease of access is only part of the problem. “It’s easy to think of the internet as just another medium,” he says, “a high-tech version of dirty magazines or films. I think that’s fundamentally wrong. “To me, the most disturbing thing about the internet is that it has the perfect structure to promote dissatisfaction. You click on an image, it’s not quite right. So you click on another, then another. It’s completely open-ended. If you just keep looking there’ll be that image that’s just right. But the more you look, the less you get turned on by the stuff you did before. So, you have to search harder.” You don’t have to be a moralist to see a downside in millions of men regularly seeking oblivion in an activity that is doomed to disappoint them and which (if Paul’s interviewees are typical) frequently depresses them. However you judge it, the scale of this flight into fantasy is strange. To some it may look like both symptom and symbol of a wider malaise, marking a collective failure to connect with one other and engage with reality. Has an addictive, acquisitive society lost sight of what makes it happy beyond the next serotonin-inducing surfing session? Pornified’s most memorable quote pursues a similar train of thought. “The metaphor of a man masturbating at his computer is the Willy Loman of our decade,” says Mark Schwartz of the Masters and Johnson Clinic, referring to the spiritually rudderless protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman. “In a sociologist’s terms, it’s anomie - the completely lonely, isolated man having sex with an airbrushed woman on a computer screen. It’s truly pathetic, even tragic.” What might this mean for children and adolescents learning about sex? Pamela Paul quotes the feminist writer Naomi Wolf: “Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training - and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.” Certainly, familiarity with adult material appears to be starting earlier. “It’s not uncommon for children to be talking about internet pornography in the playground,” says Dr Pierides. A 2003 study for the London School of Economics (LSE), “UK Children Go Online”, found that 75 per cent of nine- to 19-year-olds have accessed the internet from home. Of these, 57 per cent say they have seen pornography online, 36 per cent have accidentally found themselves on a sexually explicit website, and 25 per cent have received a pornographic e-mail. But the effect of such exposure is almost impossible to quantify. “There just isn’t the data,” says Sonia Livingstone, who co-authored the LSE report. “The ethical problems of conducting research involving children are so great it’s hard to identify the areas for concern.” Unflappable as ever, Jane Haynes counsels against a moral panic. “To some degree, where there is more openness about sex, boys are probably less driven in wanting to explore it. My 14-year-old grandson has seen a lot of porn on the internet and he is completely dismissive of it. “You could say, though, that we are undergoing a huge experiment. This is the first generation who are flicking on pornographic websites in front of their parents - when it comes to 18-year-olds, you’ll find that a lot in professional families. I think it will take years to know what the implications are of young people having absolutely easy access to this material.” If the genie of instantly accessible porn can’t be recorked, what can be done about it? For Haynes, used to picking up the pieces, that question is about as useful as asking what to do about the weather. “You can stop people watching pornography in offices,” she says. “You can stop people watching it in schools. But it’s there and it’s only there because there’s such a huge demand for it.” Marios Pierides - dealing with the sharp end of addiction - prescribes psychotherapy and sometimes drugs. “Interestingly, a number of studies show that some antidepressants can have an effect on the problem,” he says. Pamela Paul advocates what she terms “censure not censor”. The tub-thumping conclusion to her book is a call to arms against liberal relativism. “Pornography,” she declares, “is a moving target and it’s time we catch up with it. For years, the pornography industry and the pornified culture have told women to shut up or turn a blind eye. They have accused anti-pornography activists, or even those who have dared question their profit equation, of being anti-sex and anti-freedom... Those who are quiet must now speak out.” For Michael, at least, the process of speaking seems to have been therapeutic. A couple of weeks after our meeting in Trafalgar Square, an e-mail from him arrives. “Cold turkey”, reads the header. With his wife trying for a baby, he’s been thinking about his online pursuits and it seems like a good time to stop. For the immediate future, he intends to keep his study door open and avoid working at home while she is out of town. The credit card subscriptions have been cancelled and the history of the internet sites visited erased from his computer for the last time, or so he hopes. “One down, several million to go,” Michael drily concludes. “Failing that, same time, same place next year?” http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c65a4966-bf...0abe49a01.html |
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,017
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![]() Countless Dens of Uncatchable Thieves
Tom Zeller Jr. YOU'VE probably never met Sergey Kozerev, a former student at the State University of Technology and Design in St. Petersburg, Russia, but it's possible that he's mugged you. In the online world, he operates under the pseudonym Zo0mer, according to American investigators, and he smugly hawks all manner of stolen consumer information alongside dozens of other peddlers at a Web site he helps manage. "My prices are lowers then most of other vendors have and I will deliver them in real time," reads a typically fractured Zo0mer post. At the same forum, another user, "tabbot," offers "any U.S. bank accounts" for sale. "Balance from 3K and above: $40," he writes. "Regular brokerage accounts from 3K and above: $70." Tabbot also offers full access to hacked accounts from credit unions. One, with a $31,000 balance, is being sold for $400. "I can try search specific info such as signature, ssn, dob, email access," tabbot writes. "Account with an extra info will be more expensive." The online trade in stolen financial data is thriving. So the news last week that the United States Secret Service has been Hoovering up identity thieves, document forgers and other members of online "carding" sites — Web forums that have become outposts for peddling hacked account numbers, bank passwords and PIN numbers, as well as the viruses, scripts and phishing scams designed to steal them — seemed a coup. But however deserving those caught in this most recent sweep might be (20 have been arrested across the United States and one in Britain over the last three months, the agency said), the fact remains that in the transnational, Internet-driven market for stolen financial and consumer data, some thieves are simply easier to nab than others. And while Russians and Eastern Europeans like Zo0mer have become the top bananas in the stolen data trade, the English-speaking — particularly American — players are really the lowest-hanging fruit. "I deal with them only from an intelligence perspective," said Gregory Crabb, an investigator with the United States Postal Inspection Service and the economic crimes division of Interpol, referring to English-speaking carders. "And only to know if the big players in Eastern Europe and Russia are recruiting. They are a dime a dozen, and relatively easy to track down and pop." Not surprisingly, despite ruling like dark knights behind their own cryptic pseudonyms, American traders are often exposed under harsh light as middling rubes or barely post-adolescent power-trippers who were easily duped by undercover agents working the same boards. Even Operation Firewall, the Secret Service sledgehammer that managed to infiltrate and shatter the largest English-language crime board, Shadowcrew.com, in October 2004, has done little, two years later, to slow the global data trade. "The Secret Service says the defendants are part of a 'highly organized international criminal enterprise,' " blogged Brian McWilliams, the author of "Spam Kings" and a keen follower of cybercrime, at the time of the Shadowcrew arrests. "But I have a hard time believing that we're talking about a real sophisticated group of criminals here. One of the defendants, 20-year-old Paul A. Mendel Jr., aka Mintfloss, lives with his grandparents in Albany, N.Y." To be fair, prosecutors estimated that Shadowcrew had done damages in excess of $4 million over its two-year history. That's not pocket change, and the true tally is surely much higher. And those arrests have led to others, which no one can argue is a bad thing. But consider that just one young American, 22-year-old Douglas Cade Havard, using real contacts with the Russian underworld, managed to steal, along with a Scottish accomplice, more than $11 million in two years, according to investigators. In one scheme, the pair, now in British prisons, encoded stolen account numbers onto blank cards and withdrew over $1.3 million from various Western banks in just 10 months. Of course, they were receiving the stolen account data from — and were kicking most of the proceeds back to — Russian hackers, who are presumably still at large. There are other recent American arrests. Seventeen-year-old Hunter Moore of Manchester, N.H., was nabbed in a Secret Service sting and pled guilty in August to identity fraud and making counterfeit credit cards while living with his grandmother. And a Virginia Tech student, Benjamin W. Pinkston, was among seven people arrested in last week's return of Operation Rolling Stone. According to The Roanoke Times, he was released to the custody of his parents on Tuesday and told to stay off the Internet. A judge eased that restriction, when it was suggested it would make it hard for the young man to do his homework. Meanwhile, American law enforcement can often only watch the real kingpins like Zo0mer (which he spells with a signature zero) from afar. "It's a big job to navigate the treaties and the rights to privacy in disclosing information to foreign law enforcement," Mr. Crabb said. And that's just the beginning. Even when banks and credit card companies are willing to share the details of a breach (and many would prefer to keep mum rather than risk publicity), it is equally daunting to try to win the attention and cooperation of foreign investigators, Mr. Crabb said. This is particularly true in parts of the former Eastern Bloc, where law enforcement is often facing down more immediate local problems — organized crime, tax schemes, corruption — and might understandably place the plight of American banks and consumers a bit lower on their priority list. Indeed, in some countries, Mr. Crabb suggested, law enforcement officers responsible for combating online data thieves may have never owned a credit card themselves. "That is actually one of the first things I tell financial institutions when I'm educating them about this," Mr. Crabb said. "Take that credit card out of the equation. Those law enforcement officials don't have one. They don't understand the power of one. It's a hurdle that we have to overcome." And even when a big fish is caught, as happened last summer with the arrest in Ukraine of Dmitro Ivanovich Golubov, aka "Script," according to authorities, there is little that can be done when he is released. Mr. Golubov's capture was described in The Wall Street Journal by Larry Johnson of the Secret Service, as "one of the most significant apprehensions of a high-level Eastern European responsible for criminal activity on the Internet." Still, to the dismay of American law enforcement officials (and some of their Ukrainian counterparts), Mr. Golubov was quietly released from prison in December while awaiting trial. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03link.html ![]() Live at the Witch Trials Story by J T. Ramsay It's hard to believe that more than six years since Shawn Fanning's tête-à-tête with the RIAA introduced the American legal system to peer-to-peer filesharing, so much still remains unclear. While the RIAA v. Napster proceedings polarized the industry and consumers, it also brought to light the tensions inherent in the development of these new technologies and their applications. In some respects, the Napster case revealed that beneath the democratization of new technologies lie complicated legal questions, and the sprawling, powerful tendrils of copyrights, patents, and intellectual property. Little has been done in the interceding years to change perceptions of the industry. To many, the RIAA is a faceless corporate monolith dedicated to criminalizing consumers and closing black market loopholes. Accordingly, the RIAA rethought its legal strategy and began prosecuting cases very quietly against unsuspecting victims, rather than suffer further public relations disasters in high-profile cases. Last November, defense attorney Ray Beckerman started documenting these cases at his blog Recording Industry vs. The People in an effort to make public the ongoing legal drama as it unfolds. Steve Gordon, an entertainment lawyer and contributor to Digital Music News, contends that the RIAA needs to make creative concessions and re-imagine its business model to survive in an evolving legal and technological environment. He introduced us to the players behind the lawsuits and what the battle over digital music means for consumers, labels, and artists. Pitchfork: How many companies own music publishing and production rights? Steve Gordon: Recorded music consists of two things: musical recordings and songs. The record companies generally control the recordings. The major labels, Universal, Sony BMG, EMI, and Warner, collectively control and distribute more than 80% of the world's recorded music. There is not as much consolidation with regard to the songs although the major publishers including EMI Music, Warner Chappell, Universal and Sony ATV, BMG, and a handful of others control the majority of popular songs. Pitchfork: What profits do they earn annually? How have they changed, and what explanation does the industry give for these changes? Gordon: In terms of record sales, profits have declined precipitously in the last several years. Many people in, and who study, the music industry blame this on the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) music file sharing and CD burning. They argue that these technologies have dramatically diminished CD sales. In fact, the major labels are currently making little if any profits, and in the past five years CD sales have suffered serious declines. Recorded music sales worldwide have dropped by more than 15% since peaking at nearly $40 billion in 2000. Final figures for 2005 have not been released yet, but 2004 sales totaled only 33.6 billion, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And although sales of digital singles on iTunes and other authorized digital services have multiplied in volume, they have not earned nearly enough income to offset lost income from declining CD sales. The music publishing business has not suffered as much since a great deal of their income has come from sources other than mechanical royalties from record sales. These other sources of income include public performance on radio, TV, and the internet, and licensing "synch" rights to use songs in TV shows and movies. The income from these sources has actually increased in the psst several years. Pitchfork: What is the RIAA, and what is their function? Gordon: RIAA stands for the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that represents the interests of the major record companies (Sony BMG, EMI Universal and Warner), plus many of the bigger indies. According to their website, RIAA members create, manufacture, and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States. The RIAA's mission "is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality." In the past they were primarily knows as the people who certified Gold and Platinum sales awards. But more recently they have known for suing thousands of people, including parents, children, and even grandparents for unauthorized music file sharing. Pitchfork: What is ASCAP? Where do they stand on this issue? Gordon: ASCAP is a "performing rights organization" (PRO). There are two other PRO's in the U.S. They are BMI and SESAC. And there are PRO's operating in almost every country in the industrialized world. Their function is to license the songs, not the recordings, for public performance on radio, TV, the internet and physical venues including nightclubs, stadiums, restaurants, and every other place where music is publicly performed. There is no public performance right for musical recording expect for digital transmission such as internet radio. In the United States an organization called SoundExchange provides licenses to internet radio stations to play records. Pitchfork: Have they been involved in these cases? If so, what has been their role? Gordon: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC do not approve of unauthorized P2P music file sharing, but they have less to lose from it. Even if P2P does displace record sales, these organizations do not make income from sales of records anyway. They only make money from the public performance of music. And no one has seriously argued that P2P somehow reduces the number of performances of music on radio, TV or at live events. In fact, in contrast with the record labels, the PROs have taken a relatively enlightened point of view about digital music. They will license any website that requests one and their fees, between 1-3% of income, are reasonable. I recently secured licenses for an internet radio channel client. Altogether the PROs' only wanted about 5% of income for use of all their songs. And by "all their songs" I mean about 99% of recorded music. On the other hand, I recently tried to clear music for an online record store from the labels, and they wanted six figures upfront. Pitchfork: To what extent has piracy endangered the music industry's commercial viability? Gordon: A lot! It is estimated that tens of millions of illegally pressed CDs are distributed each year. In China and South America, counterfeit pressings are especially rampant. Although you can say that this form of piracy is old-fashioned as it is not web-based, it has flourished due to the increased availability of low-cost, high-quality digital copying machines. P2P and CD burning are relatively recent threats to the record business. In 1999, income from sales of recorded music was approximately 15 billion in the U.S. Since then, income has continually declined and in 2004 it amounted to approximately only $11 billion (PDF file). Although the RIAA has not published the sales and income report for 2005, experts advise that both fell again in 2005. In an article called "Music Biz Laments 'Worst Year Ever'" Rolling Stone reported that: "It was yet another unhappy New Year for the music industry: Despite hits by Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, and Green Day, 2005 saw album sales drop 7.2% as labels continued to struggle with adapting to the age of the iPod and the internet. Overall, consumers bought 48 million fewer albums than in 2004, marking a disastrous 21% slide from the industry's peak in 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 'It was arguably the worst in the music business's history,' says Steve Bartels, Island Records president." Although digital-song downloads jumped 150% in 2005-- consumers bought 352 million of them-- since labels only make about 60 cents off a 99-cent download, digital downloads fall far short of compensating the labels for the loss of 48 million albums at about $12 wholesale. In fact some experts think that by allowing music lovers to "cherry pick" popular singles, the labels may be losing album sales because if iTunes and other digital services offering single track downloads. Pitchfork: Is there a definite link between P2P and declining CD sales and recording industry income? Gordon: In 1999, the first generation of peer-to-peer music file-sharing (the original Napster) was becoming terrifically popular. P2P has grown every year since and the recording business has been on the decline. Some experts argue that P2P is not to blame. They point to reasons such as the music is not as good as it used to be, that the public is increasingly distracted by other forms of entertainment such as video games and a bad economy. But others argue that the ascendancy of P2P and the decline of the recording business are not coincidental. I tend to believe there is a cause and effect between P2P and declining music sales-- but that the record companies exacerbated the impact of P2P by (a) Overpricing CDs, and (b) Failing to give music lovers a high quality low priced alternative to P2P. In addition, CD burning's popularity has been spurred by the increased availability of burning software, which is now pre-packaged in most personal computers. Although this software may enhance the value of the computer to consumers, it also enhances the possibility that people will make CDs for their friends and this, I think, does displace record sales. (This is consistent with our discussion later that certain companies, although not the record labels, are making a lot of money from "free" music.) Pitchfork: So, is this a recapitulation of the "home taping is killing music" scare? If not, how is it different legally speaking? Gordon: No. Copying tapes was cumbersome and second generation tapes were inferior in quality. Digital provides random access for easy picking of best songs to make compilations and the copies are generally as good as the originals. Legally, they're more or less the same. Making a copy of recorded music for your own personal use, whether a tape or CD, is generally legally acceptable. But new technology makes it very easy to share music with fiends or strangers on line. Pitchfork: What does the law actually say in these matters? What precedents exist? Describe the legal/political landscape, giving a brief chronology of the P2P phenomenon. Gordon: On June 27, 2005, the Supreme Court in MGM Vs. Grokster ruled against the unauthorized P2P services Grokster and Streamcast Networks. The Court noted that file-sharing services violate federal copyright law when they promote and encourage swapping copyrighted songs and movies illegally. "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties," Justice David H. Souter opined. Although the decision was a victory for the RIAA, it actually confirmed that P2P technology itself is legal so long as not marketed and promoted in such a way as to encourage copyright infringement. This could be very bad news for the recording business. There are new file-sharing program such as BitTorrent, which is even faster than Grokster; its founder, Bram Cohen, doesn't promote the technology in such as ways as to violate the ruling in Grokster. Bit Torrent is also free and can be used without ads. It is therefore unlikely that the record companies can ever shut down P2P using the courts. RIAA started suing individual music file traders several years ago. They realize that many of these defendants are their own customers, but they have become somewhat desperate as CD sales and income continues to fall. Pitchfork: Describe the original case against Napster and its impact on P2P. Gordon: The Napster case preceded the Grokster case by several years. Napster controlled a central database from which all the users took music. Napster could have filtered out copyrighted songs, but they didn't. The courts had no problem finding Napster to be illegal. But the new file sharing services do not control a central database. They merely allow you to download software that enables you to share music with others. The Grokster case stands for the proposition that so as long as these services do not actively promote that you can use it to get copyrighted music for free, the technology itself seems to be legal! Pitchfork: Define intellectual property law's application to the music business, and, if you can, explain in plain language the rules of ownership and copyright when it comes to music. Also is there a distinction between file sharing and P2P downloading? Gordon: The copyright law provides protection for music-- both for the songs (musical composition) and the musical recordings (sound recordings). Under copyright law no one but the copyright owners can make copies of either songs or recordings and distribute those copies to others. Without the copyright law the record companies, which own the recordings, and the songwriters and music publishers, which control the songs, could not make a living. The copyright law also affords other exclusive rights, including making derivative works or variations, and public performance. These rights also contribute directly to the income of those who create music. The distinction to be made is that if you wrote and recorded your own music, rather than other people's music, you don't need permission to share it. So a band that allows people to download their music from their blog or website is not violating any copyrights so long they wrote and recorded the music and did not enter into an exclusive recording contract that gives labels the right to distribute the music. Pitchfork: Tell us about the RIAA's lawsuits. Gordon: They are suing people for sharing recordings without the permission of the copyright owners. Generally they demand several thousand dollars and refuse to negotiate. Many defendants are dissuaded from fighting the cases because hiring a lawyer can quickly add up to more than what the RIAA will accept to settle. Pitchfork: Of what consequence are these sums? How are they to be distributed to all concerned parties? (Is this really about the artists?) Gordon: That's a great question! The lawyers are definitely getting some of it because the RIAA farms the cases out to private firms. Of course, some it has to pay as salaries to all those new lawyers the RIAA has hired in the past several years. What's left is possibly distributed to the record company members of the RIAA. It is not clear whether the artists share in any of these monies. Pitchfork: Explain the subpoena power in these cases, and how it has been used to identify alleged downloaders, heretofore referred to as John/Jane Does? Gordon: The RIAA initially used a provision in the Copyright Act they thought allowed them to demand names of ISP subscribers who uploaded files in unauthorized P2P services. But the ISPs, specifically-- Verizon resisted, arguing that the record companies did not have the right to their subscribers names. The federal court agreed. Although this made it harder and more expensive to initiate law suits, the RIAA forged on and are now suing more individuals than ever. Pitchfork: Why are children being targeted in these cases? Gordon: If the ISP addresses belong to children they can be the defendants. This is due to the fact that RIAA can only get limited info on its targets. In addition to children they are suing soccer moms and grandmothers who may not even know what file-sharing is. Their children or their children's friends are maybe using their ISP addresses to grab free music. So a lot of innocent people are being targeted. Pitchfork: Is a political message being sent with these cases? Are they a witch hunt? Gordon: The RIAA hopes to send the message that there are negative consequences for unauthorized music file sharing. One problem is that they may be targeting the wrong people and there may be backlash by the public. Music fans are turned off to the labels for life. In addition to this negative publicity it does not help that Sony recently released anti-copying code on millions of their CDs that allegedly contained spyware that allows them to look at what you are doing online. The code also subjected many computers to hacking. Sony had to recall the CDs and are still fighting court battles including one with the state of Texas for allegedly violating their anti-spyware statute! Pitchfork: How effective have these cases been for the RIAA? Gordon: There is some disagreement here. The RIAA has stated that music file sharing has, if not declined, at least has not gone up since they started suing people. But independent monitoring firms such as Big Champagne asset that music file sharing has continued to increase. Pitchfork: Why do you think "illegal downloading" has proliferated since these cases began? Gordon: P2P proliferated before the suits started. However, the suits do not seem to have a clear effect in reducing P2P. Pitchfork: What is the industry doing right and wrong? Gordon: On the wrong side, I think suing their own customers will backfire. Not only is it terrible publicity, it will also lead people to download more free music out of revenge. It is a well-known secret that if you download without offering your collection to others, you can avoid detection. Therefore people can rely on the more adventurous to feed them music without risking detection. Another wrong is Sony's placing spyware on their CDs. Not only was that bad PR, it was probably illegal. Another depressing event was Sprint's recent introduction of Over the Air Downloads of single songs for $2.50 each. Presumably this was done with the record company's collaboration on pricing. It's just stupid to think people would pay 2.5 times more for a song that they could get legally for $1 (or for nothing on P2P) just because it's more "convenient" to buy from the phone directly. Consumers can almost just as easily "sideload" all the music they want into their cell phone from their existing desktop music collection. Verizon's introduction of $2.00 for OTA songs a few weeks ago is almost as depressing. By the way, both services require you to pay an additional $15 per month to access the music service. Plus you need to pay money to upgrade to a special phone. And then you have pay up to $100 or more on a memory card that will hold only a few hundred songs! Another wrong: some of the labels want to increase the price of front line product on iTunes. Even the labels agree that iTunes is one of the few bright spots for the business in the last several years. Increasing the price might well end that success. On the right side? At least the labels are actively seeking deals for digital distribution. I just think the deals are being priced wrong and do not provide what the public really wants-- abundant music, reasonably priced. Pitchfork: Are the artists making money from iTunes and other sources of digital revenue? Gordon: The artists with the big labels are not seeing much revenue. Although sales of digital music have multiplied in the last year, they still only represent a fraction of the income from CD sales. And the artists are paid on digital sales basically the same way as they are paid for ordinary record sales. Artists usually only receive any recording royalties after "recoupment" of their "unearned balances," that is, production and marketing costs. But only the most successful artists recoup production and marketing costs. Under the standard recording agreements artists only "recoup" at their royalty rate. After deductions, the artists' royalty usually is well less than a dollar per album. So if production and marketing costs (including music videos) are $250,000 (modest in terms of big labels) then they most sell more than 250,000 records to earn any recording royalties. In addition many agreements reduce the artists normal royalty rate for digital sales. Now compare this to an artist who records and sells an album without a record company. Say an artist records an album for $10,000 and sells the CD for $14 on CD Baby. CD Baby takes only $4. If the artist sold 10,000 units, he or she would make 10,000 x $10 = $100,000 minus $10,000 and gets to keep $90,000. If the artist recorded the same album for a record company and sold the same number of units they would probably receive no recording royalties at all. If the record company produced the album for $10,000 and spent $10,000 on recoupable marketing costs, and the artist's royalty was a dollar, the artist would in fact still owe the record company $10,000. Pitchfork: Next steps: Is there a compromise that can be reached between the industry and the consumer? If so, what is it? Gordon: I am in favor of a levy on those who truly profit from "free music," that is the electronics business and the ISPs. In exchange, all music file sharing would be legal. This plan would a. compensate the labels and the artists; b. provide music lovers with access to any music ever recorded any time they wish to hear it; c. eliminate the RIAA's lawsuits against consumers In order to get "free music" you need a computer. You also need a fast internet connection. In addition, if you want to hear your free music at the gym or on the subway you need to buy an iPod or other mp3 player. So you are paying a lot for "free" music. But the money is going to computer and mp3 player manufacturers, and ISPs rather than music content companies. If we imposed a very small tax on sales of computers, mp3 players, and broadband subscription, we could compensate the record companies and the artists. And the RIAA could stop suing their own customers! Yet the major labels continue to reject this position. Why? At least one of the majors, Sony BMG is partially controlled by a major electronics company. Another reason is that under this scheme the record companies would have to split 50/50 with the artists. The labels rarely pay artists any royalties now because the artists only generally get 10% to 20% royalty after they recoup production and certain marketing costs. The record companies are desperately still trying to shut down the free digital flow of music and recapture control over pricing so they can sell music for whatever price they want and people will be forced to buy it. Unfortunately, huge economic forces-- the interests of the electronics and broadband industries-- are allied against them. In addition, the technology itself makes it so easy and fast to share music, that sooner than later the labels may become sufficiently enough to embrace this solution -- even if it means the artist would make some of the profits! Pitchfork: What is the future of the major labels? Gordon: When Napster came on the scene in the late-90s, the majors were making money hand over fist selling CDs, including back catalogue replacing all those vinyl and cassette collections. They could have built a low-cost, high-quality alternative to Napster, or as Fanning wanted, licensed Napster and made money from it. But they were desperate to preserve the old and incredibly profitable $18.99 CD business model. By the time they were able to kill Napster in court, faster and ever more popular forms of P2P such as Kazaa and Grokster were thriving. I think the culture of the labels have been unable to adapt to the impact that new technology, particularly the web, has had on the recorded music. The labels, for many years, combined two basic characters-- Ivy League-trained lawyers and savvy music business types with "ears." Sometimes one executive was both-- Clive Davis, for instance. But the one culture that was never present were techies. They are there now. But they do not call the shots. The Sony DRM debacle shows they still have no clue. That is why I think that in the foreseeable future, companies such as Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft may buy or become labels-- because knowledge of technology is so important to the new music business. The recording industry and the great music moguls (such as Clive, Doug Morris, and my old boss Tommy Mottola) have and continue to develop great talent and launch careers. It would be a shame if they folded their tents. But they are running out of time and need a jumpstart into the digital age. One promising sign is that all the majors have now signed on with Shawn Fanning to launch SNOCAP, an authorized P2P service. SNOCAP plans to launch soon. Let's hope the labels can get it right before they run out of time! Steve Gordon is an entertainment attorney, author, educator and Fulbright Scholar based in New York City. His book, The Future of the Music Business: How to Succeed with the New Technologies, A Guide for Artists and Entrepreneurs, is available on Backbeat Books. For more information visit Steve Gordon Law. http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/featur...h-trials.shtml ![]() Music Industry Unleashes More Europe Lawsuits The music industry launched a new wave of lawsuits and criminal proceedings against file-sharers across Europe on Tuesday, part of its drive to curb online piracy and encourage the use of legal music services. About 2,000 cases were launched in 10 countries, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industrysaid in a statement, bringing the total to 5,500 people in 18 countries. That figure does not include the United States, covered by its sister group, the Recording Industry Association of America, which has filed about 18,000 lawsuits. Among the countries targeted was Portugal, where sales of physical formats like CDs have slumped by 40 percent in the past four years amid heavy file-sharing usage, especially by college students. Portugal's sales drop is ``in part due to downloaded digital music, but much more of the loss is caused by people obtaining music illegally,'' IFPI Chairman John Kennedy told a Lisbon news conference. Though there were more people listening to music, fewer people were buying it, Kennedy said. ``It is a surprise to see the scale of the problem in Portugal,'' he added, and warned that without anti-piracy measures the music industry in the nation of 10 million people would disappear. Other users targeted for legal action included a Finnish carpenter, a British postman, a Czech IT manager and a German judge, the IFPI said in its statement. ``A large number of cases involve men aged between 20 and 35 and parents who have not heeded successive education and warning campaigns,'' it stated. In Italy authorities have seized more than 70 computers in the search for evidence of illegal file-sharing. The IFPI's legal proceedings were aimed not at people who illicitly downloaded music but ``uploaders'' who put copyrighted music onto file-sharing networks. The IFPI said last week that digital music sales soared in 2005, but not enough to make up for a continuing decline in physical formats like CDs, sending total sales down 3 percent. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...lawsuits.html? ![]() Sinking a Music Pirate When the FBI came calling, all those 'free' songs suddenly came with a big price tag. Mickey Borchardt, I THOUGHT THAT anything would be better than my early morning Spanish class, but I realized I was wrong on that day two years ago when a campus police officer pulled me out of class to inform me that an FBI agent was waiting for me at my dormitory room. That was the start of the incident that would become the defining moment of my life so far. As we drove, with me in the front seat, the officer assured me that it was most likely "not a big deal." The FBI, which I would later learn maintains its North Carolina office just down the road from my university, comes to campus "all the time." There wasn't just one agent in my dorm room but a team. One stood at the door while another wheeled my computer out on a cart. One wearing a rubber glove dug through my trash while another sorted through my closet. After sitting me down, the first question of my interview was, Is this the screen name you've been using to communicate on the Internet? It was. In the previous year, I'd joined a private group on the Web whose purpose was sharing free music. In exchange for providing the group with albums, I was given access to a virtual library. In the few months of my membership, I uploaded a handful of CDs. I had no special industry access, so there was very little I could supply that wasn't already available: albums from local bands without national distribution, free music samplers given out in stores, etc. I knew it wasn't right, but the temptation of endless new noise drowned out the ethical whispers. I knew it was illegal, but I never thought I'd face legal troubles. Although my method for obtaining MP3s was different from the common college pirate (who prefers Kazaa, LimeWire, Soulseek or other peer-to-peer systems), the degree of my infringement was similar. For the authorities to single you out, you have to sell bootlegs, right? Or leak early versions of music before it is publicly available, or something equally serious, right? Wrong. The series of events in the weeks after the FBI's visit was as dizzying as it was surreal. I had to find a lawyer; have lengthy, uncomfortable conversations with him in his high-rise office overlooking the city; meet with the dean of students and learn of my punishment on campus (probation, an essay about piracy, exile from student housing and computer labs); and the most intimidating of all: I had to go to the FBI's office downtown for a video teleconference with higher-ups in Washington. I'm not even sure who was questioning me while I sat there, twiddling my thumbs and fidgeting with my tie, trying not to look as terrified as I was. THE WORD TO describe it is "shame." The shame in realizing I'd been monitored for months, with paper logs of my online conversations; the shame of begging my university dean to allow me to remain a student; the shame of continuing to squander such a significant portion of my family's savings on legal fees; the shame of pleading with professors to reschedule tests; the shame of desperately searching for landlords on short notice; and, of course, the shame of knowing I'd stolen the property of others like me who are passionate about the art of music. The other word is "fear." Fear that keeps me awake at night and distracted in class. Fear of my May sentencing date (I pleaded guilty in March) in the same courthouse as Zacarias Moussaoui; fear of the possible prison time I am facing; fear of my job prospects when I graduate college in December with a felony criminal record; and fear for the future I've recklessly damaged. Everybody wants something for nothing, and I've come to learn that "free" music is anything but. The hidden cost is enormous. Although I am unqualified to opine on the price of piracy for the artists whose work is stolen, I can describe the price I've paid. Stealing, no matter how little, or how easy, is never right. There is no justification for downloading music without paying. I'm not just saying this to reduce my sentence; I want to get the message out to young people who might not otherwise understand — copyright infringement, whether it is buying a bootleg album from a street vendor or downloading a song from the Internet, has very serious consequences. I regret what I did. I had a lot of music on my PC that I'd never paid for, and now I have an enormous bill I will be paying for years to come. Is piracy worth it? It wasn't for me. Mickey Borchardt is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...,1235215.story ![]() Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal Declan McCullagh A partisan divide pitting Republicans against Democrats on the question of Internet regulation appears to be deepening. A Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday defeated a proposal that would have levied extensive regulations on broadband providers and forcibly prevented them from offering higher-speed video services to partners or affiliates. By an 8-to-23 margin, the committee members rejected a Democratic-backed "Net neutrality" amendment to a current piece of telecommunications legislation. The amendment had attracted support from companies including Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and their chief executives wrote a last-minute letter to the committee on Wednesday saying such a change to the legislation was "critical." Before the vote, amendment sponsor Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, assailed his Republican colleagues. "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet," Markey said. "Everyone should understand that." This philosophical rift extends beyond the precise wording of the telecommunications legislation. It centers on whether broadband providers will be free to design their networks as they see fit and enjoy the latitude to prioritize certain types of traffic--such as streaming video--over others. (In an interview last week with CNET News.com, Verizon Chief Technology Officer Mark Wegleitner said prioritization is necessary to make such services economically viable.) After a day of debate, the committee went on to vote 27-4 in favor of approving the final bill--minus the Democrats' amendment--sending it onward to full committee consideration, expected in late April. The vote on the amendment itself did not occur strictly along party lines, with one Republican voting in favor and four Democrats voting against it. Leading Republicans have dismissed concerns about Net neutrality, also called network neutrality, as simultaneously overblown and overly vague. "This is not Chicken Little, the sky is not falling, we're not going to change the direction of the axis of the earth on this vote," said Rep. John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican. He said overregulatory Net neutrality provisions would amount to picking winners and losers in the marketplace and discourage investment in faster connections that will benefit consumers. Last week, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton said: "Before we get too far down the road, I want to let the market kind of sort itself out, and I'm not convinced that we really have a problem with Net neutrality." Barton and other Republican leaders of the House panel did, however, offer some modest changes to a telecommunications bill in response to concerns from Internet and software companies. Their replacement bill would require the Federal Communications Commission to vet all complaints of violations of Net neutrality principles within 90 days. It gave the FCC the power to levy fines of up to $500,000 per violation. It also contained explicit language denying the FCC the authority to make new rules on Net neutrality. Democrats charged that lack of enforcement power would mean the FCC would be unable to deal with the topic flexibly. Rep. Charles Pickering, a Mississippi Republican, backed that less-regulatory approach, saying that a "case-by-case adjudicatory process" is the best way to address Net neutrality concerns while ensuring competition in the marketplace. Democrat's failed proposal The amendment that was rejected on Wednesday took a similar approach to strict Net neutrality legislation introduced in the Senate last month by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. It said that any content provider must be awarded bandwidth "with equivalent or better capability than the provider extends to itself or affiliated parties, and without the imposition of any charge." That would likely prohibit any plans by Verizon or other former Bell companies to offer their own video services that would be given priority over other traffic (video is bandwidth-intensive and intolerant of network delays). "I think this walled garden approach that many network providers would like to create would fundamentally change the way the Internet works and undermine the power of the Net as a force of innovation and change," said Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat. Markey warned: '"There is a fundamental choice. It's the choice between the bottleneck designs of a...small handful of very large companies and the dreams and innovations of thousands of online companies and innovators." By "very large companies," Markey was not referring to Microsoft, which has a market value of $287 billion, but its much smaller political rival Verizon, which has a market value of $101 billion and has opposed Net neutrality mandates. Markey did not appear to be referring to Google, which has a value of $121 billion and has been lobbying on behalf of federal regulations, but to AT&T, which has a value of $105 billion and has opposed them. A CNET News.com report published last week, however, showed that the Internet industry is being outspent in Washington by more than a 3-to-1 margin. AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon spent $230.9 million on politicians from 1998 until the present, while Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spent only a combined $71.2 million. (Those figures include lobbying expenditures, individual contributions, political action committees and soft money.) In the last week, the Net neutrality debate in Washington has spread beyond the circles of lobbyists for telecommunications and e-commerce companies. A network of conservative and free-market groups has begun warning Congress that Net neutrality regulations are not consistent with Republican laissez-faire principles and protection of private-property rights. The American Conservative Union, the National Taxpayers Union, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, and Citizens Against Government Waste were among the signers of a letter Friday that said the Democrat-backed proposal would let the FCC "exercise complete discretion over the Internet." "At the very least," the letter cautioned, "the vague terminology could lead to an explosion of litigation, which would, in turn, deter capital investments in technology and thwart the evolution of the Internet." Republican insider Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes tax hikes, added in a letter on Tuesday that "a network neutrality provision in any form would begin down the dangerous path of Internet regulation. http://news.com.com/Republicans+defe...3-6058223.html ![]() Router Man The creator of the multiprotocol router reflects on the development of the device that fueled the growth of networking. John Dix The creator of the multiprotocol router reflects on the development of the device that fueled the growth of networking. William (Bill) Yeager is 66 and still gets peeved when someone trots out the Silicon Valley fable about how the founders of Cisco invented the router. He was the guy at Stanford University that made it happen. The history of Network World roughly parallels the commercialization of routing, so we tracked Yeager down for a glimpse into the scene back then. You're credited with developing the first router while you were a staff researcher at Stanford. Tell us the tale. This project started for me in January of 1980, when essentially the boss said, 'You're our networking guy. Go do something to connect the computer science department, medical center and department of electrical engineering. What kind of gear did you need to connect? We had mainframes, of course, DEC10 Systems, a number of Xerox PARC Lisp machines, Altos file servers and printers, and over the next year or so added DEC VAXs, Texas Instruments' Explorers and Symbolic systems. All of these things had to be hooked together, because we were spread across buildings on campus, and people were tired of carrying tapes around. I thought about this for a bit, and I said, well really what you need is an operating system. So while the cables were being pulled and tested, I developed a network operating system [NOS] and routing code [to run on a] DEC PDP11/05. But the Alan Snyder Portable C compiler generated too much code. So I had to go into the compiler and improve the code generators. And that wasn't even good enough. So then I had to write an optimizer for PDP11/05 assembler so I could reduce the code by about 30%. This was major engineering, because you had your hands into everything. It's important to remember the PDP11/05 only had 56KB of user memory, and was diskless. The struggle was always a balance between how many input buffers you could have. You really had to squeeze things, because there was no disk and if you ran out of memory for input buffers you weredead in the water. So you had all of these constraints, which actually had a lot to do with how good it ended up being, because I had to do a lot of work to both assure the memory allocation algorithms would never run out of memory, as well as get things scheduled right. I spent an entire summer making sure the NOS scheduling and packet-switching algorithms were optimal. All in all we had the basic systems put together and working in about three months, and at six months the first router was in place in Pine Hall in a telephone closet. Pine Hall was midway between the medical center and the department of computer science. It was about a 2,000 feet cable run on either side of the router. What protocols did the box support? Initially, the code routed Parc Universal Packet (PUP) for the Xerox PARC systems and mainframes. Late in '81 my boss said, 'IP is coming down the pipe. Figure out what you can do with it.' So I put a little IP router in, and I didn't have to worry about things like ARP [Address Resolution Protocol], because it was 3 megabit Ethernet, so your IP address was just 2 bytes, one for the network and the other for the host, and the host byte was also the [media access control] address. But we were ready by '82, when the computer science department started dropping IP in all of these VAX750s, and by 1983 the routers supported XNS - which is Xerox Network Services - CHAOSnet for the TI Explorer and Symbolics Lisp machines, and IP. And it was just about then that Stanford University started to make the big transition to 10Mbps Ethernet. Is that roughly when you made the shift from the PDP11/05-based router to the device based on the 68000 board developed by Andy Bechtolsheim (who later went on to found Sun)? Andy was a master's student, and that collision was fortuitous. We had heard about his board, and we talked to him and he said we could have it. We plugged that sucker into a multibus backplane, plugged in some 3Com Ethernet boards and then rattled off a few copies, and I sat down and did a full transition of the code. One of the key aspects of these routers I put together is they really could route. I had a tremendous amount of instrumentation in there. I worked very, very hard to get that right and they could really pass stuff through as fast as the hardware could move. My limitation was the bus speed, that was it. The original Bechtolsheim boards had 256KB of RAM, and that was huge at the time. To me it seemed like paradise. Is that when the school's network started to take off? People were skeptical at first, but by 1983 it was clear this was the way to go. Initially, just technical people were hooking up, but then the rest of the campus got wind of it and it was made official and the thing started growing like hell. I completed the serious development around '85. What happened in the interim? A lot of tweaking and refinement? It's endless, right? New features, functions. I did a lot of Lisp work where objects were used, and I adapted that approach in C, so a router was a class, and a specific protocol, say IP, was an instance of that class, and the NOS was multitasking. When you added another router, then you ended up putting in an instance as another task or thread. In the network I/O drivers you would look for the link-level type in the packet to determine the protocol, and everything goes into nice queues under these router threads and it all works. That's why Cisco did so well in this, because you could add more and more stuff to the [operating system], no problem. Just add another task. Speaking of Cisco, when did they enter the picture? In the spring of 1985 Len Bosack [who was in charge of the computer science department's computer facilities and later went on to co-found Cisco] and another guy knocked on my office door and asked if they could have access to sources for the router code. I said, what do you want to do? They said, we want to improve it, add more features. I said, well that would be great, because I have other research tasks to do, and I gave them the password and away they went. I had no idea Cisco had been founded in '84. I'd never heard of it. So your understanding was they wanted the code for the betterment of the school network? Right. So we had weekly meetings and they were indeed working on the sources. The decision had been made to go with pure IP routers, so they took out XNS, CHAOSnet and PUP. And ultimately when they got it going about a year later their version of my code became the official Stanford routers. Things were working well and that was my only concern. We had connectivity. So I guess sometime in '86 I found out about Cisco. We all found out about Cisco and what Len was up to. And yeah, they were developing that code on Stanford time for Cisco. But this was not exactly bad, because other things had happened like that at Stanford before. But Stanford was deciding it was time to put its foot down. 'Guys, you develop something on Stanford's campus, we want to profit from it,' right? Who was saying this? This was just kind of the general tenor. So I was called into Stanford Legal and the lawyer told me to bring my sources on paper. Since [Len's partner] was in the Double E department he had the Double E sources. And I sat down, and the lawyer said, 'Will you do a comparison.' And I said, well let's start with the operating system. That's sort of the heart and soul of this. And it was identical except for changing variables names. I said, can you see this? She said, 'I'm a lawyer and I can see this is identical.' Let's look at other things. Let's look at this network data logblock (a C structure). Well it's been broken into two pieces, big deal. Any time someone gets a chance to go over code again they refine it. It was refined, clearly, but absolutely the same stuff. Derivative. They changed and added a their new routing protocol, no big deal. If you knew networking you could do it. I only did what I had to do, because I was driven by my boss and he was driven by the department's needs. And when I stopped I stopped. Well, then Stanford really put its foot down and Len [and his partners, including Cisco co-founder Sandy Lerner] left the university to focus on Cisco. Did Cisco ever give you any credit, other than the $100,000 in royalties? The way royalties work, a third goes to the school, a third goes to the department and a third goes to the inventor. I gave my third back to my department because essentially all of this stuff is born out of a great research environment. But Cisco has always had trouble giving me credit. They had a Web page that I was very irked by. 'Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack were in love and they had to go out and invent routers so they could talk across campus.' What a joke. And I'm like one of these bulldogs, you know, I get a hold of these guys' pant's leg and I won't let go of it. I'm sort of a persona non grata down there at Cisco. But it was fun. I was very passionate about this stuff. I'm always passionate about what I do. And I learned a lot about how corporations work and these guys were great capitalists and obviously they turned out with a great company. So you left Stanford after 20 years and went to Sun, right? I left Stanford because it was getting more difficult to get grant money, so I did a bunch of consulting at Sun to make some extra money. Mostly dealing with IMAP e-mail stuff because there was a very interesting project at Sun called SPARC Station Voyager: a laptop with a fast matrix display, nice little footprint, running Solaris 2.4. Great system. One of the Voyager's special features was that it ran in disconnected mode. You could disconnect it from the network, and it would continued to function. My job was to create an IMAP server and client that worked when the client disconnected. This was tough because, at that time, IMAP2bis did not support disconnected e-mail, and I needed to modify the protocol to do this as well as support low bandwidth (IMAP can be very chatty). After one of the guys I was working with quit, his boss asked me to come save the e-mail part of the project. And I thought, I'm 53. I've been at universities too long. So I said sure. How would you compare the academic to the commercial world? I always ran into walls at Sun, company politics, and that never worked out too well. When I was at Stanford there was a rule: The best engineering wins. Simple, straightforward. If your engineering is better than the other guy's, yours got the blue ribbon. Well at Sun, and at companies in general, it's different. It's the politically correct software that gets productized. There are charters and vice presidents and presidents and all of that stuff, and I would find myself embroiled in these battles with people 10 levels above me [laughs], but I just kept battling. I didn't care, because I liked doing good engineering. So I brought in the IMAP technology, and by '96 IMAP servers I had written were everywhere at Sun. And once that was in place they decided we should do something called mission-critical mail. So I invented something called Sun Internet Mail Servers [SIMS], which is a whole different type of server. We ended up getting hundreds of thousands of in-boxes on a single server. The four patents I have, out of the 40 I filed, are on SIMS. The rest are really in peer-to-peer, which I did a lot with as I moved through Sun, ending up as the CTO of JXTA, Sun's open source peer-to-peer project. What was JXTA all about? The charter was to create an open source project for the creation of peer-to-peer protocols that would yield a virtual layer on top of the TCP/IP stack. That would return end-to-end connectivity to the Internet by making the traversal of NATs and firewalls transparent, and provide host endpoints with globally unique identifiers. Another goal was to work toward peer-to-peer protocol standards. I personally pushed this forward in the IETF and that resulted in an IRTF Peer-to-Peer Research Group that I still co-chair. Open source was new territory for Sun, and the Project JXTA group were the pioneers. We had a very tight organization and a charter to do disruptive technology, so it was a grand experiment. An engineer was two degrees of separation from the vice president and they were always available for discussions. Amazing! We received an introduction to how to do an open source project from CollabNet and they hosted Project JXTA. Initially, most of the engineering was done by Sun but then the JXTA community began to grow exponentially and great contributions came from non-Sun members. But then a lot of things happened to the organization. JXTA was put under the product side of things, which kind of gave me the shivers. I mean, you get into product stuff, and you're in a box. You can't get out. I always managed, but just because I was irritating enough for my vice presidents that they would say, 'Go do something else.' So in 1998 I'm talking to my vice president, and he says go do what you want. And I said I'm doing wireless. It's the next big thing. He says OK, if you believe it, go do it. I wrote something called the iPlanet Wireless Server, which sat between IMAP e-mail on the back end, and on the other side you could go to [Wireless Application Protocol] servers or any kind of wireless device. It was presentation language stuff so, depending on the device, you put out screens for phones or whatever. It was quite cool. It ended up being probably one of their only money-making wireless projects. Based on some of the projects I know you've been involved in, a common thread seems to be handheld devices. Do you see particular promise there? Over the years I've developed a real interest in mobile devices, which was one of my reasons to go to Sun in the first place, to do this mobile laptop, which they ultimately end-of-lifed (in error, but they did it anyway). So I saw the power of these devices, and I saw the power of integrating these devices. You could see wireless moving in, see all of this happening. It was very clear. I felt we ought to do something to get some decent user interfaces on these devices. That's going to be a big next step. I don't think everybody in the world's going to have a computer, and it's stupid to ask everybody to learn to type. If you can use a mobile phone there are ways around this, and that's part of what I'm working on if I can get this new company going. What's the focus of the new company? It's called Peerouette, and it's a new twist on peer-to-peer. I've created what's called a deterministic peer-to-peer network. That is, the peers are never down, because the peers are not your devices. The peers are in the network and hosted by ISPs. Your device just authenticates strongly with public key and gets in there. And all your content lives in the network and is shareable 24 by 7. You drop your mobile phone in the toilet, it's done, but it's all backed up. Automatically. My colleague says 'Bill, go to this URL.' I do. An image of his mobile phone appears on my laptop. He says 'press the menu key.' I do. I'm looking at his menu. He says 'take a picture.' I do. A picture of him appears. We've really gotten into these operating systems, how they work. We can totally control mobile phones from other devices. This is great for mobile phone people doing IT. All under very strong encryption. So it's a lot about that and a lot about giving computing back to the people. I'm very big on the garage rock band having a way to sell their stuff. So in my world, you create your community out there in what we call the Peerouette Network, you take your MP3 files, push them out there, we give you billing, give you advertising, and you can sell them for whatever price you want. We'll take maybe 10%, something like that. What we're really doing is giving the user, the wireless ISP and the content provider a fair share of all the content revenue. That's kind of what I'm up to, if we can fund it and get it going. We are very close. Cross your fingers. The Internet will surely be a better place if we succeed. Sounds great. Good luck with that. In closing, let's change the subject. I understand you have a wine cave. What's that? In French a wine cellar is called a cave because originally all the wine bottles were literally stored in caves. So we have a wine cellar and keep a reasonable supply . . . about 500 bottles going back to the '80s. Always fun when you have friends over. Go down to the cave and bring out a bottle or two. What's your favorite wine? Pinot Noir. Without any doubt. They are the most subtly complex wines. They have a spectrum of flavors that show a taste of the earth. http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi http://www.networkworld.com/supp/200...routerman.html ![]() Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible Ryan Naraine In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation. "When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here. Offensive rootkits, which are used hide malware programs and maintain an undetectable presence on an infected machine, have become the weapon of choice for virus and spyware writers and, because they often use kernel hooks to avoid detection, Danseglio said IT administrators may never know if all traces of a rootkit have been successfully removed.h He cited a recent instance where an unnamed branch of the U.S. government struggled with malware infestations on more than 2,000 client machines. "In that case, it was so severe that trying to recover was meaningless. They did not have an automated process to wipe and rebuild the systems, so it became a burden. They had to design a process real fast," Danseglio added. Danseglio, who delivered two separate presentations at the conference—one on threats and countermeasures to defend against malware infestations in Windows, and the other on the frightening world on Windows rootkits—said anti-virus software is getting better at detecting and removing the latest threats, but for some sophisticated forms of malware, he conceded that the cleanup process is "just way too hard." Microsoft says stealth rootkits are bombarding Windows XP SP2 machines. Click here to read more. "We've seen the self-healing malware that actually detects that you're trying to get rid of it. You remove it, and the next time you look in that directory, it's sitting there. It can simply reinstall itself," he said. "Detection is difficult, and remediation is often impossible," Danseglio declared. "If it doesn't crash your system or cause your system to freeze, how do you know it's there? The answer is you just don't know. Lots of times, you never see the infection occur in real time, and you don't see the malware lingering or running in the background." He recommended using PepiMK Software's SpyBot Search & Destroy, Mark Russinovich's RootkitRevealer and Microsoft's own Windows Defender, all free utilities that help with malware detection and cleanup, and urged CIOs to take a defense-in-depth approach to preventing infestations. Are virtual machine rootkits the next big threat? Click here to read more. Danseglio said malicious hackers are conducting targeted attacks that are "stealthy and effective" and warned that the for-profit motive is much more serious than even the destructive network worms of the past. "In 2006, the attackers want to pay the rent. They don't want to write a worm that destroys your hardware. They want to assimilate your computers and use them to make money. "At Microsoft, we are fielding 2,000 attacks per hour. We are a constant target, and you have to assume your Internet-facing service is also a big target," Danseglio said. Danseglio said the success of social engineering attacks is a sign that the weakest link in malware defense is "human stupidity." "Social engineering is a very, very effective technique. We have statistics that show significant infection rates for the social engineering malware. Phishing is a major problem because there really is no patch for human stupidity," he said. The most recent statistics from Microsoft's anti-malware engineering team confirm Danseglio's contention. In February alone, the company's free Malicious Software Removal Tool detected a social engineering worm called Win32/Alcan on more than 250,000 unique machines. According to Danseglio, user education goes a long way to mitigating the threat from social engineering, but in companies where staff turnover is high, he said a company may never recoup that investment. "The easy way to deal with this is to think about prevention. Preventing an infection is far easier than cleaning up," he said, urging enterprise administrators to block known bad content using firewalls and proxy filtering and to ensure security software regularly scans for infections. http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/...=174915,00.asp ![]() Another Security Hole Found In IE Joris Evers An unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer could aid fraudsters in pulling off phishing scams, experts have warned. The error could be exploited to fake the address bar in a browser window, security monitoring company Secunia said in an advisory published on Tuesday. This tactic could be used in phishing scams that attempt to trick people into believing they are on a legitimate site, when in fact they are viewing a fraudulent Web page. Phishing is a prevalent type of online scam that seeks to pilfer personal information from unsuspecting Internet users. The scams typically combine spam e-mail with fraudulent Web sites that appear to come from a trusted source, such as a credit card company or a bank. The flaw exists because of an error in the way the Microsoft Web browser loads Web pages and Macromedia Flash animations, according to Secunia. The company rates the issue "moderately critical" and has created a special Web page where users can test their Web browser to see if they are affected. Secunia has confirmed that the vulnerability affects IE 6.0 on Windows XP with all current security patches. It also affects the latest IE 7 Beta release, Secunia said. Other versions may also be affected, it said. Microsoft is investigating the newly reported flaw, a representative said in an e-mailed statement late Wednesday. "Our initial investigation has revealed that customers who have set their Internet security settings to high, or who have disabled active scripting, are at reduced risk from attack as the attack vector requires scripting," the representative said. Additionally, Microsoft noted that it has not seen any active attacks that take advantage of this issue, which Secunia has dubbed the "Internet Explorer Window Loading Race Condition Address Bar Spoofing" flaw. This is the fourth unpatched vulnerability for IE that has become public in the last few weeks. Microsoft plans to release a security update for the Web browser on Tuesday. At least one of the disclosed bugs will be fixed in that update, the company has said. That flaw, related to how IE handles the "createTextRange()" tag in Web pages, has been exploited in attacks to install spyware, remote-control software and Trojan horses on vulnerable PCs. http://news.com.com/Another+security...3-6058557.html ![]() Players Big and Small Are Sifting Through Pieces of Knight Ridder Katharine Q. Seelye With the McClatchy Company set to accept bids, starting as early as tomorrow, for the 12 Knight Ridder papers it is selling, some of the potential buyers are looking at the country as if it were a giant chessboard. The goal is not to topple a king but to become one — a king of each regional market where potential buyers already own newspapers and can achieve economies of scale by buying pieces of Knight Ridder. "It's a delicate game of strategy right now," said Thomas Russo, a partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner, a capital management firm in Lancaster, Pa. The sales are likely to lead to a further consolidation of the newspaper industry around the country. During the last decade or so, newspapers have been "clustering," that is, buying papers near one another, allowing them to save money by combining their advertising sales and printing operations and, in some cases, their news divisions. Analysts said that clustering was a major motivation for many of the newspaper companies that are now interested in pieces of Knight Ridder. To achieve their ends, these companies could go into partnerships or even swap other papers. According to analysts, the newspaper companies that are potential buyers include the following: The MediaNews Group, Dean Singleton's company, which already owns nearly two dozen papers in California and will almost certainly be interested in at least 3 of the 12 Knight Ridder papers: The San Jose Mercury News, The Contra Costa Times and The Herald of Monterey County. Gannett, the nation's biggest newspaper publisher with operations in 41 states, including Indiana and Ohio, which may want The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., and The Akron Beacon Journal. Lee Enterprises, which owns dailies in the Midwest and could be looking at The Pioneer Press in St. Paul as well as The Duluth News Tribune, The Aberdeen American News in South Dakota and The Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota. Forum Communications of Fargo, N.D., which may also be interested in the papers in Aberdeen, Fort Wayne and Duluth. A single company buyer is less obvious for the two Knight Ridder papers in Philadelphia, The Inquirer and The Daily News. Gannett owns The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., and The Courier-Post in nearby Cherry Hill, N.J. At the same time, Mr. Singleton has a reputation for being attracted to bigger newspapers in difficult markets. Finally, there is The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., which has direct competition. The paper reported yesterday that Times-Shamrock, which owns The Times Leader's competitor, The Citizens' Voice, would be a logical suitor but that if Times-Shamrock did buy the paper, it would probably have to close one because of antitrust concerns. One suitor — Yucaipa Companies, a private equity firm working with the Newspaper Guild, which represents employees at many of the 12 papers — is interested in buying all 12. Yucaipa, which says it will make a bid tomorrow, has been in a dispute with McClatchy over getting all the information that it says it needs to make an informed bid. Yucaipa is not the only bidder lacking financial information. McClatchy issued a statement yesterday saying that it had not provided such information to any of the "dozens of parties" who have contacted McClatchy since the company won the bidding for Knight Ridder and put 12 of its papers on the market. Local investors in several of the 12 cities have emerged as possible buyers for papers in their own markets. But McClatchy said that the only potential buyers to receive information so far were those that had signed nondisclosure forms leading up to the bidding for all of Knight Ridder, and that McClatchy had given them nothing further. This could complicate the process for some. "It takes the market some time to get to know each paper as an individual entity," said Susan Casey, an investment banker at Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin, based in Los Angeles. It also puts newspaper companies like MediaNews and Gannett at a distinct advantage, because they were the only ones big enough to pursue Knight Ridder when it was intact. On March 13, McClatchy agreed to buy Knight Ridder for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock. Analysts have estimated the total value of the 12 papers at more than $1.4 billion and said the publications could probably bring a higher price individually or in small bundles than as a whole. Gary B. Pruitt, chairman and chief executive of McClatchy, said in an interview that he remained open to all bids, whether for a single paper or all 12. He said he expected the bidding to continue beyond tomorrow and that he would announce each deal as it was completed, with the goal of selling all the papers by the time he closes on Knight Ridder sometime this summer. "As we strike the final definitive agreements," Mr. Pruitt said, "we would prefer to announce them so that we can end the uncertainty for those employees and also let Wall Street know we're getting this done." Mr. Pruitt himself is still selling his own deal to Wall Street. He plans to be in New York this week to talk to Standard & Poor's and Moody's, the ratings agencies, which are assessing McClatchy's creditworthiness after it took on additional debt to buy Knight Ridder, the nation's second-biggest newspaper company. Wall Street's reaction so far has been tepid, with McClatchy stock dipping nearly 10 percent since the deal was announced. Mr. Pruitt said that McClatchy was not spending any money on a new headquarters to accommodate its larger place in the media universe. McClatchy's corporate offices occupy a small area on the second floor of the low-rise brick home of The Sacramento Bee, located in a neighborhood of houses and small businesses. It is a far cry from the gleaming office tower that Knight Ridder began leasing in San Jose, Calif., a few years ago. "We'll add people to corporate, but tens of people, not hundreds," Mr. Pruitt said. "We don't have a big corporate staff, and we don't feel we need a big fancy building. That's not McClatchy's style." Analysts said that newspaper companies in particular were looking at how they could add Knight Ridder papers to their clusters without violating antitrust rules. Craig A. Dubow, president and chief executive of Gannett, told analysts at a meeting in New York last week that Gannett, which owns television stations in some markets where Knight Ridder had newspapers, had been interested in Knight Ridder but did not bid for it partly because of antitrust and cross-ownership concerns. "We had a number of markets that were in direct conflict," he said, according to a company Webcast of the meeting. As for the coming round, he said, Gannett was looking for "positive synergies." A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said that because of its sheer size, the acquisition of Knight Ridder by McClatchy "is something we would be interested in looking at." But the department has not scrutinized a newspaper merger since 2000, in San Francisco. The absence of action raises questions about where clustering ends and monopolies begin. "Since 2000, the antitrust division has taken a pass on legitimate newspaper consolidation and restructuring," said Stephen Calkins, who teaches law at Wayne State University and specializes in antitrust. "In part this reflects the absence of proposed mega-mergers. But it also reflects the division's perception of competition in the Internet age, and the division's focus on price and output without regard to editorial diversity." The department was silent, for example, on an unusual deal last year in Detroit: Gannett sold The Detroit News to Mr. Singleton and bought the larger Detroit Free Press from Knight Ridder. The deal allowed Knight Ridder to exit the troubled Detroit market and allowed Gannett and Mr. Singleton to enter into a profit-sharing relationship, their third. The deal gave Gannett a 95 percent controlling interest in joint operations in Detroit, and just the year before the company bought papers in the Detroit suburbs. "Is Justice interested in watching?" asked Kurt Luedtke, the former editor of The Detroit Free Press. "If it is, why did it do nothing in Detroit? And if it isn't, do all the players know this?" As of last year, only 45 cities in the United States had more than one daily newspaper, according to The Editor & Publisher International Yearbook. These include 12 with joint operating agreements aimed at allowing both papers to survive while avoiding antitrust challenges. "The antitrust people never seemed to catch on that suburban monopolies act in the way that urban monopolies do," said John McManus, director of GradetheNews.org, at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University. He said that if Mr. Singleton bought The San Jose Mercury, for example, it would be comparable to one person's owning all the grocery stores around San Francisco, "and there would be no reason for them to compete on either price or quality." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/bu...mcclatchy.html ![]() China Firm Wants Internet Calls Blocked Peter Svensson A U.S. maker of network management systems said Wednesday it had received an order from Shanghai Telecom Co. for a system that can detect and block telephone calls placed over the Internet. Shanghai Telecom, which has 6.2 million landlines, plans to use Narus Inc.'s system to improve its ability to block "unauthorized" Internet calls that connect to its phone system, bypassing its toll structure. Use of Internet calling, also known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is growing quickly across the world, threatening the business models of some telephone companies. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission fined a small telephone company that prevented its Internet subscribers from accessing competing VoIP service, but some countries with state-owned telecommunications companies are taking a different tack. In China, the government has sided with carriers and allowed them to block VoIP services that compete with the carrier's own products. A recent report in the Financial Times quoted an executive with a Hong Kong company as saying that the government would not issue new licenses for computer-to-phone calling services until 2008. The Chinese government and major phone companies have refused to confirm that account. Steve Bannerman, a spokesman for Mountain View, Calif.-based Narus, said carriers in several countries, including Egypt, are using its software to block gateways that connect VoIP calls to the phone network. VoIP-blocking software from another U.S. company, Verso Technologies Inc., is being tried out by an unidentified Chinese carrier. Narus' and Verso's software can be configured to block the use of Skype, eBay Inc.'s popular VoIP application. However, Shanghai Telecom has not bought the module from Narus that blocks Skype calls, Bannerman said. The Chinese version of Skype does not connect to the phone network, unlike the international version. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T ![]() Child Sex as Internet Fare, Through Eyes of a Victim Joshua Brockman The sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad, overwhelming attempts by the authorities to curb its growth, witnesses said at a Congressional hearing on Tuesday. The witnesses, who testified at a hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, part of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said that sexual predators were preying on victims as young as 18 months by using instant messaging and Web cameras to meet, lure and digitally stalk children and to share pornography. Internet technologies have the capacity to drive a wedge between children and their families, they said. "Online predators befriend adolescents," said Dr. Sharon Cooper, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was one of the witnesses. "They become closer to them than some family members are." Dr. Cooper compared the new forms of online exploitation, which involve constant surveillance of subjects, to security cameras in convenience stores. "We're seeing real-time sexual exploitation of children." She cautioned that predators were using online child pornography not just for sexual gratification, but as "a plan for action." The lead witness at the hearings was Justin Berry, who was molested as a teenager by people he had met online, and then went on to run a pornographic Web site for five years, featuring images of himself. Mr. Berry was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times in December by an investigative reporter, Kurt Eichenwald. The article detailed Mr. Berry's experiences and his efforts to assist in the prosecution of some of the 1,500 people who had paid him to perform on camera. Mr. Eichenwald spent six months on the investigation and was subpoenaed to testify before the committee. He sat alongside Mr. Berry, 19, who delivered his remarks in a measured tone to the committee. "There are hundreds of kids in the United States alone who are right now wrapped up in this horror," Mr. Berry said in his testimony. "Within each of your Congressional districts, I guarantee there are children who have used their Webcams to appear naked online, and I guarantee you there are also children in your district on the Internet right now being contacted and seduced by online sexual predators." Child exploitation investigators in the Justice Department came under fire from lawmakers at the hearings, who questioned whether officials had responded too slowly to leads provided by Mr. Berry. These included clients' names and credit card numbers, which could presumably help investigators identify children entangled in the online pornography industry. The department denied that contention. "The Department of Justice uses every resource available to quickly protect and remove children who are being exploited from dangerous situations, and to prosecute those responsible for their abuse," a spokesman, Bryan Sierra, said. The hearing was the first of several on this topic. On Thursday, the committee is to address law enforcement efforts. A representative from the Justice Department is expected to testify. "Justin Berry stepped forward at a time the government did not know he existed," Mr. Eichenwald said. "He is, to experts' knowledge, the first such teenage witness to ever turn over this kind of vast evidence to the government." Still, he added, "important data offered to the government by Justin has, even at this late date, not been collected and has only been reviewed by me." At issue is how to handle the companies involved in these crimes, from Internet service providers to credit card companies to banks. "At a minimum what we can do is follow the money," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "If we take away the profitability, it is going to be very difficult for these sites to maintain themselves." U.S. Official Is Arrested MIAMI, April 4 (AP) — The deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was arrested on Tuesday and accused of using the Internet to seduce someone he thought was a teenage girl, the authorities said. According to the sheriff's office in Polk County, Fla., where the charges were issued, the official, Brian J. Doyle, 55, of Silver Spring, Md., had a sexually explicit conversation with a person he believed was a 14-year-old girl whose profile he had seen on the Internet. In reality, the sheriff's office said, Mr. Doyle was talking with an undercover sheriff's detective. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/wa...on/05porn.html ![]() Testimony of Special Agent Flint Waters Lead Agent for the Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force WYOMING DIVISION OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION for the UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE "Sexual Exploitation of Children Over the Internet: What Parents, Kids and Congress Need to Know About Child Predators" Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the Committee, I welcome this opportunity to appear before you to discuss how the Internet is used to commit crimes against children. Chairman Barton, as an advocate for child protection and I commend you and your colleagues for your leadership and initiative. The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force shares your concern for the safety of our children and we thank you for bringing attention to this issue. Child Pornography This isn’t about a movie or picture. This is about the ongoing sexual abuse of a child. This isn’t about pornography. These are not images of consenting adults in a private setting. These are not "baby in the bathtub" movies. These images are crime scene photos depicting the most horrifying moments in the life of a child. These are not innocent images. These are images depicting the complete destruction of innocence. Who are these children? Frequently, the children depicted in these pictures are sexually abused by someone they should be able to trust. Hundreds of children across the United States are attending school, participating in youth clubs and playing on sports teams. They are then sexually abused in the living rooms and bedrooms of American homes. These are the children appearing throughout the file sharing networks and on the commercial web sites. Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Let me provide you with some background information about the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. ICAC includes forty-six (46) regional Task Forces working in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. These Task Forces are composed of state and local law enforcement agencies throughout the United States focused on investigation, education and prevention matters related to the exploitation of children by means of the Internet. The National Task Force has a strong relationship with our federal colleagues and we collective strive to bring to bear the strengths of each entity in our mutual goal to protect children. The Wyoming ICAC, which I represent, has been an active participant in the national Task Force program for five years. Our Task Force consists of three state agents operating under the authority of the Attorney General. We are also fortunate to have a Department of Homeland Security Special Agent assigned and residing with our Task Force. In Wyoming, we have a close working relationship with the United States Attorney and our Federal partners. Challenges In the last three years we have witnessed a monumental change in the trafficking of material related to the sexual abuse of children. Five years ago, tens of thousands of people were identified using credit cards to purchase child sexual abuse images. Due to efforts in the area of eradication of commercial sales of this material we have seen considerable success in reducing this type of distribution. While the cooperative efforts of everyone is placing increasing pressure on attempts to profit financially from the abuse of children, technology has created an entirely new "economy" in child sexual abuse images. Advances in Peer to Peer file trading has generated a completely new barter system, rewarding people to move from using sexual abuse images to validate their own interests in harming children to spreading the material to as many other people as possible. Three years ago national ICAC efforts identified over 2600 transactions involving the trafficking of still images of child sexual abuse. At the time this operation was one of the largest proactive Internet investigations ever. We thought we had made a significant impact in the networks used to trade this material. We were mistaken. Working with the lessons learned the ICAC Task Force program designed a completely new methodology to investigate the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing environment. In under 24 months, Our investigative effort in this area has identified over 4.4 million transactions involving the trafficking of movies and images depicting the sexual abuse of children. By Country · France 80,000 · Germany 262,000 · Canada 294,000 · United Kingdom 305,000 · United States 1,900,000 These file-sharing networks have created an efficiency level unprecedented in previous distribution technologies. Millions of computers are linked together creating a load balancing, fault tolerant system that could rival many commercial backbones. It should not be surprising to us that child predators in the United States have found a way to leverage the technology to their benefit. In Wyoming, our small team has over 250 search warrants we could pursue if manpower were not an issue. The demand on the local resources from these investigations is overwhelming. These investigations often lead ICAC investigators to homes where children are subject to physical and sexual abuse. These efforts allow us to disrupt the pattern of abuse at an early stage, sometimes before the child is even old enough to reach out for help. However, this is not always the case. During undercover operations an ICAC investigator in Florida was sent a movie depicting the rape of a two-year-old child. In accordance with ICAC policy the movie was sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited children. The abuse was so horrible it even shocked the seasoned analysts at the center. The ICAC investigator received the movie in August 2005. A check of previous ICAC investigative efforts led law enforcement to a computer in Colorado where it had been made available for distribution in April 2005, several months prior to any other known location on the Internet. Just as ICAC investigators thought they were getting close to the potential origin of the movie all hope was destroyed. The Internet service provider used to trade this movie did not maintain any records related to the use of the account. Efforts to find this child fell short and there was nothing law enforcement could do about it. I ask you to imagine the situation where a law enforcement officer can see the rape of a child taking place live on a web camera and having an Internet service provider respond that they don’t keep records to help us rescue that child. While the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force has worked diligently to investigate, educate and prevent crimes against children we recognize that we are not going to be able to arrest our way out of this problem. We recognize the need to engage our partners to continue efforts in addressing this problem. We must continue to reach out to enhance our efforts: How can we be more effective? We need an honest dialogue and an understanding by the American people of the challenges that we all face. We are standing on the edge of a precipice. We can now see that technology has allowed us to lift the rock and see what was underneath. The magnitude of the trafficking of child sexual abuse images is staggering. More effort is needed to recognize and respond to the risks facing our children. ICAC would ask that everyone: lawmakers, law enforcement and the public make an honest assessment of the dangers threatening our children today and to help us place ourselves between the predators and our children. We are their only hope. Thank you. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drm...601112,00.html ![]() Software Out There John Markoff THE Internet is entering its Lego era. Indeed, blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on the Web and developers are joining them together to create a potentially infinite array of useful new programs. This new software represents a marked departure from the inflexible, at times unwieldy, programs of the past, which were designed to run on individual computers. As a result, computer industry innovation is rapidly becoming decentralized. In the place of large, intricate and self-contained programs like Microsoft Word, written and maintained by armies of programmers, smaller companies, with just a handful of developers, are now producing pioneering software and Web-based services. These new services can be delivered directly to PC's or even to cellphones. Bigger companies are taking note. For example, Google last month bought Writely, a Web-based word-processing program created by three Silicon Valley programmers. Eric Schmidt, the Google chief executive, said that Google did not buy the program to compete against Microsoft Word. Rather, he said, it viewed Writely as a key component in hundreds of products it is now developing. These days, there are inexpensive or free software components speeding the process. Amazon recently introduced an online storage service called S3, which offers data storage for a monthly fee of 15 cents a gigabyte. That frees a programmer building a new application or service on the Internet from having to create a potentially costly data storage system. Google now offers eight programmable components — elements that other programmers can turn into new Web services — including Web search, maps, chat and advertising. Yahoo offers a competing lineup of programmable services, including financial information and photo storage. Microsoft has followed quickly with its own offerings through its new Windows Live Web service. Smaller companies are also beginning to share their technology with outside programmers to leverage their competitive positions. Salesforce.com, a fast-growing company that until recently simply offered a Web-based support application for sales personnel, published standards for interconnecting to its software not too long ago. That made it possible for developers inside and outside the company to add powerful abilities to its core products and create new ones from scratch. One result is that sales representatives using Salesforce's customer relationship management software to organize their workday can now make telephone calls using Skype, the popular Internet service, without leaving the Salesforce software. The idea of modular software, where standard components can be easily linked together to build more elaborate systems, first emerged in Europe during the 1960's and spread to Silicon Valley in the 70's. Despite its promise, however, modular software has generally been limited by corporate strategies that have held customers and other programmers hostage to proprietary systems. Those limitations have eased almost overnight, mostly because of the open-source software movement, which promotes making information available to everyone. The shift toward sharing, which in its grandest conception has been termed Web 2.0, has touched off a frenzy of software design and start-up activity not seen since the demise of the dot-com era six years ago. "These tools are changing the basic core economics of software development," said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems and one of the designers of a powerful set of Internet conventions known as Extensible Markup Language, or XML, which make it simple and efficient to exchange digital data over the Internet. By lowering the cost of software development and thus the barriers to entering both existing and new markets, modular software is putting tremendous pressure on the corporations that have dominated the software industry. It is also affecting Silicon Valley's venture capitalists. Start-ups have begun to bypass the venture capital firms, relying instead on individual investors, called "angels," or out-of-pocket financing, largely because new ventures are not as expensive. In many cases, the start-ups do not even require the traditional Silicon Valley garage. The new companies are "virtual," and programmers work from home, relying on nothing more than a personal computer and a broadband Internet connection. Early examples of the trend were tiny companies with significant ideas, like the consumer Internet software start-ups Flickr, a Web-based photo-sharing site, and Del .icio.us, which makes it possible for Web surfers to categorize and share things they find on the Internet. Both were acquired last year by Yahoo. For some, the new era of lightweight, lightning-fast software design is akin to a guerrilla movement rattling the walls of stodgy corporate development organizations. "They stole our revolution and now we're stealing it back and selling it to Yahoo," said Bruce Sterling, an author and Internet commentator. Even more striking is the suggestion that a broad transformation of software development might reverse the trend of outsourcing to India, where highly skilled but low-paid programmers are plentiful. "Transforming the economics of software development completely transforms the rationales for outsourcing," Michael Schrage, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, wrote in the current issue of CIO magazine. The new economics of software development poses a fresh challenge to the dominant players in the industry. In 1995, when Microsoft realized that the Netscape Internet browser created a threat to its Windows operating system business, it responded by introducing its own free browser, Internet Explorer. By doing so, Microsoft, which already held a monopoly on desktop software, blunted Netscape's momentum. Last November, Microsoft introduced a Web services portal called Windows Live and Office Live. But as the world's largest software publisher, it still faces the delicate challenge of creating free Web services. Many of Microsoft's standard PC applications, in the new world of on-demand software, are migrating to the Internet. At the Emerging Technologies Conference, held in San Diego last month, Ray Ozzie, one of Microsoft's three chief technical officers, showed a prototype effort that uses the Windows clipboard, which moves data among different desktop PC programs, to perform the same function for copying and transferring Web information. Mr. Ozzie, who used the Firefox browser (an open-source rival to Internet Explorer) during his demonstration, said, "I'm pretty pumped up with the potential for R.S.S. to be the DNA for wiring the Web." He was referring to Really Simple Syndication, an increasingly popular, free standard used for Internet publishing. Mr. Ozzie's statement was remarkable for a chief technical officer whose company has just spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars investing in a proprietary alternative referred to as .Net. Moreover, the balance of power is shifting, Mr. Ozzie said. "For years, vendors like Microsoft have put huge resources into tools to build composite applications," he said. "With mash-ups, the real power becomes the people who can weave the applications together." Microsoft is not the only company threatened by the simple tools of the Web 2.0 movement. Adobe Systems, which recently acquired Macromedia, publisher of the widely used Flash graphics standard, is under pressure from Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a new development technique for creating interactive Web applications that look and function like desktop programs. At the technology conference, Adobe showed a bridge between Ajax and Flash, making it possible for Ajax programmers to easily add Flash graphical abilities. America Online has made a similar strategic shift by adding a set of "programmers' hooks" to its AOL Instant Messaging service to attract independent software developers to connect to its previously proprietary messaging platform. Many technologists agree that as software development moves online, the risk will be particularly intense for large software development organizations like I.B.M.'s Global Services, the consulting arm to the company, according to Mr. Bray of Sun. I.B.M. is testing a faster development system based on Ajax, Web services and XML, said Rod Smith, the company's vice president for emerging technologies. "We're testing it with customers now to see how disruptive it is," he said. Mr. Smith acknowledged that the new software development trends present challenges. "Inside I.B.M., do-it-yourself software is an oxymoron," he said. Another new idea comes from Amazon, whose Web Services group recently introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk, an homage to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that was actually governed by a hidden human chess player. The idea behind the service is to find a simple way to organize and commercialize human brain power. "You can see how this enables massively parallel human computing," said Felipe Cabrera, vice president for software development at Amazon Web Services. One new start-up, Casting Words, is taking advantage of the Amazon service, known as Mturk, to offer automated transcription using human transcribers for less than half the cost of typical commercial online services. Mturk allows vendors to post what it calls "human intelligence tasks," which may vary from simple transcription to identifying objects in photos. Amazon takes a 10 percent commission above what a service like Casting Words pays a human transcriber. People who are willing to work as transcribers simply download audio files and then post text files when they have completed the transcription. Casting Words is currently charging 42 cents a minute for the service. Other examples are also intriguing. A9, Amazon's search engine, is using Mturk to automate a system for determining the quality of photos, using human checkers. Other companies are using the Web service as a simple mechanism to build polling systems for market research. The impact of modular software will certainly accelerate as the Internet becomes more accessible from wireless handsets. Scott Rafer, who was formerly the chief executive of Feedster, a Weblog search engine, has recently become chairman of Wireless Ink, a Web-based service that allows wireless users to quickly establish mobile Web sites from anywhere via Web-enabled cellphones. Using modular software technologies, they have created a service called WINKsite, which makes it possible to use cellphones to chat, blog, read news and keep a personal calendar. These systems are typically used by young urban professionals who are tied together in loosely affiliated social networks. In London, where cellphone text messaging is nearly ubiquitous, they are used to organize impromptu gatherings at nightclubs. Recently, Wireless Ink struck a deal with Metroblogging, a wireless blogging service, to use its technology. Metroblogging, which already has blogs in 43 cities around the world, lets bloggers quickly post first-person accounts of news events like the July 2005 London bombings. "Here are two tiny start-ups in California that care about Karachi and Islamabad," Mr. Rafer said. "It's weird, I'll grant you, but it is becoming increasingly common." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/te...l4/05lego.html ![]() Out of Consumers' Sight, Radio Tags Gain Ground Barnaby J. Feder The television advertisement from I.B.M.'s "Help Desk" campaign that began running this winter shows a big rig skidding to a halt in front of a desk, blocking the road in a desolate landscape. There, a young woman at the desk calmly informs the astonished truck driver headed for Fresno, Calif., that he is lost. "This is the road to Albuquerque," she says. How does she know he is off course? "RFID radio tags on the cargo. Helps track shipments." Experts in RFID (radio frequency identification) wince at I.B.M.'s plug for its inventory-tracking abilities. It appears to confuse RFID with different radio-based technology, which can track the location of a truck (but not its contents) via satellite. In reality, the RFID tags on boxes and shipping pallets cannot convey information reliably for more than a few feet. And grabbing that information requires special scanning devices far more likely to be found at loading docks than inside a truck. The big advantage of the tags, however, is that they can contain more information than standard bar codes and several hundred can be scanned at once. Still, misleading as the ad was technically, it told a larger truth: RFID is still obscure to most consumers, but it is approaching commercial viability fast enough that I.B.M. wants the world to know it is a player. So do software giants like SAP, Microsoft and Oracle, and hardware heavyweights like Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems, which recently bought a minority stake in ThingMagic, a start-up manufacturer of RFID readers. Perhaps more tellingly, Texas Instruments, a leading vendor of radio tags, hung on to that fast-growing $120 million-a-year segment of its business when it sold the rest of its sensors and controls operation in January for $3 billion. "Vendors are starting to see how they can make this into a real business," said Reik Read, an analyst who follows RFID for Robert W. Baird & Company in Milwaukee. For now, Mr. Read said, the field is still too new to be a major factor in the valuation of any of the publicly traded companies he follows other than Intermec of Everett, Wash., which owns important RFID patents. That will change by 2008, he added. The RFID world is still dominated by pilot projects, but the line between research and standard practice is getting hazier. Wal-Mart used such tags to track more than 10 million cases of goods through distribution centers in Texas by the end of last year, to make its vast supply network more reliable and efficient. Tesco, the British retailer, has said investments in the technology to prevent theft of CD's and DVD's are paying off. And Pfizer has begun putting tags on every package of Viagra it sells in the United States to combat counterfeiting and in anticipation of growing pressure from regulators to use the technology in the prescription drug industry. Manufacturers like Gillette and its new parent, Procter & Gamble, are using RFID data captured by retailers like Walgreen to study the effectiveness of promotions. Among other things, the data highlights how much profit is lost when items scheduled for a promotion are sitting in warehouses when they should be on shelves. This month, the shipping company DHL will begin a program for an Asian electronics manufacturer to ship RFID-tagged boxes to customers returning goods for repair, pick up the products and track the items through the repair process. "We are now seeing a lot of business applications being developed to use the data," said Erik Michielsen, an RFID specialist at ABI Research, a market research firm in Oyster Bay, N.Y. RFID technology comes in two forms. Passive tags consist of paper-thin microchips that are attached to equally thin antennae; they use power captured from signals broadcast by scanning devices to respond with the chips' encoded data. Active tags, which are larger, have a longer range and are more expensive, come with a small battery or other power source. They are widely used in toll collection systems like EZ Pass and for tracking valuable goods or animals. While the roots of the technology are decades old, interest mushroomed when leading retailers and manufacturers came together in 1999 to begin working toward open standards that, like bar codes, could be used throughout the economy. The pace accelerated in 2004 when Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense announced they would require suppliers to begin using passive RFID tags on cartons and pallets of goods. Those mandates generated unrealistic expectations in some quarters about the technology's ability and how rapidly it could expand. Many suppliers delayed investing and numerous obstacles emerged, including intellectual property battles, confrontations with privacy advocates and vendors failing to figure out ways to cut tag and reader costs as quickly as expected. There have also been delays in agreeing on standards, and many systems have not worked reliably. Hurdles continue to come up. In mid-March, researchers disclosed that RFID tags could be tampered with to spread viruses through distribution networks. There is also the sobering reality that nearly all the most promising results so far could have been achieved at similar cost - or more cheaply - with older technology or better management. But a growing number of businesses say they can now see how RFID could become more economical and powerful over time. "RFID is entering its adolescence," said Christine Overby, an RFID expert at Forrester Research, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/te...4/05radio.html ![]() Overheard <@Wally> stupid muslims promise virgins <@Wally> if they promised lightsabers i’d be on my way to mecca <@Wally> i can hang out with virgins on IRC via bash http://elitrix.net/fear/portal.php ![]() Apple Allows Windows on Its Machines Vikas Bajaj Turning a decades-long rivalry on its head, Apple Computer introduced software today that it says will easily allow users to install Microsoft's Windows XP operating system on Apple's newest computers. The software, Boot Camp, is available as a free download on Apple's Web site and will be part of the next version of Apple's operating system, Leopard. It works on Apple's three lines of computer that run on Intel chips — the Mac mini, the iMac and the MacBook Pro. Apple's move is a recognition of the growing interest among some users in running Windows on Macintosh computers now that they are using Intel processors, which power the majority of Windows-based personal computers. Many technology enthusiasts have already been sharing software and tricks on the Internet to allow Mac users to add Windows to their new machines, although those approaches involve a far more complicated installation than Apple's new software does. Apple said it did not intend to support Windows for customers who install Boot Camp and run Windows XP on their machines. Still, the company said it was providing the software because it recognized a sizeable demand — and opportunity. "We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement. Investors seemed to think the strategy would help Apple expand its share of the personal computer market beyond the 3 percent to 5 percent level where it has stood at for many years. Wall Street was enthusiastic about Apple's move. Shares of Apple jumped $5.12, or 8.4 percent, to $66.29 this afternoon in Nasdaq trading. Shares of Microsoft were trading up 16 cents, to $27.80. After years of stagnant or declining computer sales, Apple has seen a steady and significant rise in its desktops and laptops in recent years as more consumers have purchased its iPod music player and bought songs through its online iTunes music store. Though Apple's shift to Intel's chips from those made by I.B.M. and a former division of Motorola has been considered risky from a technical and business standpoint, the move could help the company capitalize further on the so-far modest gains it has made in the computer business. Many personal computer users have been reluctant to switch to Apple, because they cannot use software that is written to run exclusively on the Windows operating system, said Charles Wolf, a longtime technology industry analyst at Needham & Company. By making it easy for users to run Windows software on its machine, Apple has taken away "one of the most significant barriers to switching," he said. (Until now, users who wanted to run Windows applications on a Macintosh have had to run emulation software that tend to slow down computers and have other glitches.) The key test will be whether computer buyers will be willing to spend more money to buy an Apple computer to run the same software they can run on a far cheaper Windows-based machine from manufacturers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard. While prices for Apple computers have become more competitive in recent years, they remain more expensive than the cheapest Windows machines, which are often less powerful than Apple's basic models. Mr. Wolf calculates that Apple's biggest market share gains will be among users at home, who are more likely to be swayed by Apple's design and media savvy, than among corporate and government customers, who will likely to stick with cheaper hardware and software configurations. The shift could mean an increase in sales for Apple over time, especially after Leopard becomes the standard Mac operating system late this year or early in 2007. But the company's gains do not have to mean big losses for other hardware makers, Mr. Wolf said, because they will only lose a small fraction of their market share. "You are starting out with a market share of 2 or 3 percent and maybe going to a market share of 6 or 7," he said. "Apple is not going to take over the world." Still the announcement was not universally cheered by Apple users. Some loyal Macintosh users are worried that software developers like Adobe, which makes the popular Photoshop software, will have less incentive to develop versions of their applications for Apple's operating system if Macintosh computers can run Windows operating system. "I think it's good to have choice, it's better for the consumer," said Alexandros Roussos, a student at University of Paris and a founder and editor of the MacCulture.com network, a Macintosh enthusiast and rumor Web site. "But I'll feel sad if developers go away from the platform." "I love the Mac platform, I just hope I won't have to boot Windows even for Photoshop in a few years," he added. Users who download and install Boot Camp must buy a copy of Windows XP software, which starts at $141.98 for the home edition. The Boot Camp software serves as an intermediary that creates an installation disk (users will need to provide a blank compact disk for this step) that lets the Windows software operate the Apple hardware, including its networking, audio and graphics devices and controls. Certain other features like a remote control for Apple's media software will not work with Windows software. Once the installation is complete, users can select which operating system, Apple or Windows, they want to use each time they start the computer. John Markoff contributed reporting for this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/te... ner=homepage ![]() Microsoft: Don't sell PCs Without Operating Systems Graeme Wearden Microsoft has urged UK PC vendors not to give customers the opportunity to buy a PC without a pre-installed operating system. Supplying base systems, or 'naked PCs', is a missed opportunity, according to Michala Alexander, Microsoft's head of anti-piracy. Writing in Microsoft's Partner Update magazine, which is distributed to computer dealers, Alexander estimated that 5 percent of computers sold in the UK in 2006 would not include an operating system. Alexander is keen to bring that number down, even though customers could want a base system because they want to install Linux, or because their firm already has a licensing agreement for an operating system such as Windows. "We want to urge all system builders — indeed, all Partners — not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business — with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services," wrote Alexander. Linux vendors and free software supporters, though, believe these base systems can play an important role in supporting the open source market. Some are concerned that Microsoft may be attempting to use its powerful position in the market to hamper competition. The European branch of the Free Software Foundation hopes that PC vendors will not be swayed by Microsoft. "We would be happy to see any kind of hardware being shipped without an operating system, or pre-installed with free software. Furthermore, we would be happy to get in contact with any hardware vendor who wants to free his customers this way," said Joachim Jakobs, of the FSF Europe. Alexander's role is to combat the use of counterfeit and unlicensed versions of Microsoft's software. In February, Microsoft launched an initiative called Keep IT Real, in which "feet on the street" investigators would visit technology vendors suspected of installing counterfeit software on PCs before selling them. In the article, Alexander appeared to reveal that these investigators will also have a role in clamping down on the sale of base systems. "Microsoft is recruiting two 'feet on the street' personnel whose role will be to provide proactive assistance during customer visits, and help you get the value proposition for pre-installed software and related services. Give us a call and let's get those feet walking," Alexander wrote. The FSF Europe is alarmed by the prospect that customers who request a base systems would risk a visit from Microsoft's investigators. "It looks like a private sniffing service which is supposed to spy on these who do not want to pay the Microsoft tax anymore. It is an incredible piece of impudence which any politician, customer and journalist should recognise carefully," said Jakobs. When contacted by ZDNet UK, Alexander denied that operatives would be dispatched into the premises of customers who attempted to buy a PC without Windows. "I can confirm that the... personnel are not participating in customer visits. This is an error in the copy and will be amended in future material on the subject," Alexander claimed. Alexander also insisted that Microsoft was simply trying to help its reseller partners by explaining how they could grow their businesses by selling its software and services. But she did reiterate that the software giant is concerned that the sale of base systems may be linked to the use of counterfeit software. "There will be a concern if we see an increase in businesses selling PCs without Windows and piracy goes into the sky," said Alexander, who also rejected the suggestion that Microsoft was attempting to use its powerful position in the market to hamper rival operating systems. Both Red Hat and Novell argue that naked PCs can be an important part of the overall market. "Microsoft is clearly concerned about the threat of Linux on the desktop and is trying to protect its base. Naked PCs provide customers with choice and lower the price of commodity PCs," said a Novell spokesman. "Customers want to have choice and they don't want to be locked in by one vendor, such as Microsoft," said Red Hat's Dirk Kissinger. "We would like to see more hardware vendors give their customers the choice of pre-installed operation systems, be it Microsoft or Red Hat or other options, or raw hardware without an operating system." Several PC vendors contacted by ZDNet UK were reluctant to comment on the issues surrounding base systems. One, though, did say that they hadn't encountered any difficulties. "We've had no pressure from Microsoft, yet," said a representative from Chillblast, a UK PC vendor that sells some computers without operating systems. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/win...9261437,00.htm ![]() RIAA to Uni student: Drop out Run Over by the RIAA Don...t Tap the Glass Cassi Hunt Either since the day I visited my first aquarium or the day Goldie came into my family’s life, our parents have told us not to tap the glass of the fish tank. It’s cruel to Goldie — I understand and respect that. I mean, heck, I am a vegetarian. But would we have many qualms over a little water perturbation if Goldie were, say, a bloodthirsty shark? I’d knock on that glass to the near-cracking point. And in that spirit, I decided to call up my new friend at the RIAA negotiation hotline again. (Hereafter I’ll refer to her as Bowie, which means “yellow haired,” as I’m pretty sure that’s the case.) Last time I spoke with Bowie, the conversation was pretty much over after she named $3750 as the settlement amount. (I haven’t actually agreed to settle yet.) So when I called her again, I asked — again — about how to negotiate that amount. I counted on the fact that self-important types wouldn’t be inclined to remember a lowly pirate like me. Bowie didn’t disappoint. She launched into her spiel about how the RIAA doesn’t negotiate settlements. I told her that it was too much to ask for thousands of dollars from a college student who only makes just enough from term and summer employment to still come out a couple thousand in debt. Bowie replied that the RIAA was oh-so-kind enough to offer a six month repayment plan. At this point, I was beginning to speculate on Bowie’s hair color, and decided to switch tactics. I concisely and calmly explained how the situation was ridiculous: they weren’t offering a settlement, they were issuing an ultimatum! Let us screw you over gently now, or with chains and whips in court. Surely there must be some flexibility for individual cases. Well, she replied, they do make allowances if something like a medical emergency comes up. Now we’re getting somewhere. “And who would I talk to about a situation like that, because I’d like to talk to them now.” “Me,” she replied. Ever feel like your nose has just been flattened by something large and solid? I mean, besides the doors at 77 Mass. Ave. “But you’re not in a situation like that.” Oh, but I am. The Institvte has left me with severe bouts of p-set-induced insomnia and a case of stuck-to-desk-itis that recurs two to three times in a semester, then again just before break. And my wallet certainly takes a hit for it. But as much as I tried to argue that I was in as unique a situation as someone with medical expenses, there was no getting through. Bowie even had the audacity to say, “In fact, the RIAA has been known to suggest that students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford settlements.” Are. You. Shitting. Me. There you have it, fellow Techsters: proof of the fantastic levels of absurdity to which the RIAA attack has sunk. The Recording Industry of America would rather see America’s youth deprived of higher education, forever marring their ability to contribute personally and financially to society — including the arts — so that they may crucify us as examples to our peers. To say nothing of wrecking our lives in the process. I finally understand what the RIAA meant when they told me “stealing music is not a victimless crime” — the victims hang for all to see. Please, RIAA — if any competent representative happens to enjoy flipping through The Tech — please tell me Bowie is a moronic tool who can’t help what the Superior Gray Coverage Golden Blonde hair dye does to her mental facilities. Please tell me you actually care about the futures of the age demographic that buys most of your music (http://www.riaa.com/news/marketingda...merprofile.pdf). Your evil pirates are people too, people who enjoy music and almost always still purchase it legitimately. Each has an individual life and circumstances that deserve consideration, if not for the sake of empathy for your fellow man, then for the sake of business sense. Sure, if you commit a crime against someone, you should be held accountable. But I find it horrifying that anyone would single-mindedly and without compassion process people like a meat grinder set to purée. So while the RIAA continues to play the part of shark, I’ll continue to stand behind the glass, tapping away, wondering which of us is on display. http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N15/RIAA1506.html ![]() Bye, bye, Miss American Pie (chart) Trajce Cvetkovski New release CD singles are all but dead, and CD albums are dying. Yet the sale of chartable albums (the "Top 40" especially) forms the bulk of revenue in the pop music industry. The exclusive club of a few multinational major recording companies (majors) are very worried. They control most (80 per cent) of the revenue in this highly concentrated, well-organised mode of pop cultural production. But since 1998, the majors have posted unprecedented losses in profits from chart sales generally. Why the sudden disruption to a well-established and extremely advanced form of commercial exploitation? And what does this great rock 'n' roll fire sale mean for the heavy weights of the music industry? Eight years ago, albums retailed for up to $30.95. The small club of audience- targeting majors (Sony-BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner) were laughing all the way to the bank because, on average, CDs cost as little as one dollar to manufacture. The industry was valued at nearly $100 billion internationally. The music business has a number of advantages in comparison to other modes of capitalist production. Generally speaking, there are such small interaction costs attached to producing pop music products and yet they have so much surplus value as they are capable of perpetual exploitation (via the copyrights attached to them). Rummage through your record collection and you will probably discover you have the same song recorded on more than one format. For all its sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the music business is really quite clever. In this well-established environment, sycophantic, music-obsessed, "pocket money" punks (teenagers) used to rock up to HMV, Sanity and other major stores to buy up big on the latest, over-priced CDs. This passion for music consumption has meant, historically, that music is the most popular form of en masse, "first- line" culture consumption for young people (products purchased primarily before another competing product, for example video or magazines). The pop music circus has been omnipotent in the minds of young ones. And the majors have masterfully maintained such consistent and spectacular returns throughout the 20th century. But currently, chart CDs retail for as little as $20.95. On average, the price of Top 40 albums appears to be dropping at a rate of more than one dollar a year. (Who knows, in the year 2018, albums may have a zero sale sum dollar value.) Yet, paradoxically, there is a direct correlation between the downward spiral of prices and a downturn in traditional music consumption. This truly is a peculiar trend because, if anything, album sales should be increasing. So why is the music industry in Australia, or in the rest of the Western world for that matter, in a "spin"? The majors' representatives would have us believe the answer to that question is based on a combination of unfavourable legislative change and emerging technologies which have caused a diminution in the value of music products. They are partly right in identifying the obvious challenges; but they appear to have failed to recognise that the significance of other important pop cultural developments, such as a genuine lack of consumer interest (or perhaps boredom) in CDs as primary cultural products. This has largely stemmed from emerging but competing pop products (DVDs, music DVDs, ringtones, computer games, SMS services, and this list of cultural pleasures goes on). Through an intriguing mix of illegitimate and legitimate technological challenges, and in conjunction with legislative reform and pop cultural developments, the Australian music scene has demonstrated how, internationally, a fistful of industry media moguls has had its closed-shop cage rattled. So what happened eight years ago, when the current trends became apparent? First, in Australia, there were significant amendments to the Copyright Act 1968 that allowed for the parallel importation of locally licenced products. For example, a retailer was now free to purchase from Sony Indonesia rather than Sony Australia. Due to the significantly different economies of scale between the two regions, the price differences at the wholesale dealer price were stark. Not surprisingly, strenuous lobbying by the majors' "keepers" followed, alleging the death of the industry due to a flood of inferior and possibly pirated copies. Resistance to change and acrimonious litigation appear to be fundamental tenets espoused by the majors. Nevertheless, these legislative measures have been instrumental in setting new pricing standards. It might be fair to conclude, therefore, that imported CDs are capable of driving prices down, but ironically, cheap imports are seldom sourced by major retailers. That is, stores continue to order domestically manufactured albums from the majors. Legislative reform in Australia assisted in this process but the majors cannot blame parallel importation per se. Similarly, the legislature should not take the credit for the price drop. So what else happened some eight years ago? Computer and Internet technologies have also been blamed for the drop in revenue, and the majors insist music piracy ("burning") is the core problem. Combined with Internet downloads, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing ("ripping"), the industry's politico-legal representatives estimate music piracy now costs the industry in excess of $US5 billion. To some extent the representatives are correct (I do not know of too many people who have not dabbled in illegal music consumption). To add final insult to injury, MP3s and related P2P technologies were not devised by the majors and neither were MP3 players. In the world of music evolution this break in the chain is very significant. The majors have always dictated the terms in which records are delivered. They invented vinyls, cassettes and CDs. The devices for these formats have also either been invented or produced en masse by the majors' sister manufacturing subsidiaries. The cause for concern is obvious. To combat the issue of a slump in music consumption, the majors have implemented four main strategies: · drop in price of CDs to make them more attractive; · educate the public that it is wrong to "steal" (intellectual) property; · anti-piracy protection measures; and · police and prosecute copyright infringers (minors included). The merits of these campaigns have been viewed with mixed results, and in any event, CD prices continue to drop. People continue to consume music at a significantly discounted or illegal rate. So why is this "music for free" or "small fee" attitude so unprecedented and now so ingrained in modern popular culture and everyday life? I found some clues to the answer while representing an applicant spouse on a de facto property settlement. The respondent was a 72-year-old man who purported to itemise his MP3 music collection (which he had also backed up onto CDs) as part of the couple's joint assets pool. He had valued these downloads at $8,000 (which apparently was at a significantly reduced rate to what they would ordinarily retail, he opined.). However, all the songs had been illegally downloaded from the original Napster website over several months. The absurdity of his proposition to value his illegal "record collection" highlighted three important issues to me. First, accessing music illegally is a relatively simple task open to all ages. Second, ignorance or flagrant disregard of copyright generally is probably quite prominent. Third, however, and equally significant, is that this person placed a quantifiable value on what these products ought to cost. That is, had this man in fact purchased these products from a retailer, he would only have been prepared to pay a fraction of their retail price. There appears to be a widespread feeling that the majors have been exploiting consumers for too long. There is strong consensus between the "young" and "old" on this point (especially since, in the case of the former, most parents finance pop culture consumption). It is this third consideration that, by and large, has been ignored by the majors. On this point, perhaps parents feel so exploited that they turn a blind eye to ripping and burning. And it is not as if illegal copying is a new phenomenon. I do not know of too many people who have not dabbled in illegal music consumption. The parents of teenagers copied cassettes, their older siblings copied CDs and now they compare the size of their iPods. Technically it is illegal in Australia and the UK to make even back-up copies yet it was more or less tolerated by the majors during the reign of the cassette and to some extent the CD. But when Napster arrived and the first wave of decent Rio MP3 players hit the high streets in 1998, the issue became about control because these were external challenges to the status quo. I believe the spending downturn in CDs will continue not necessarily because of legislative reform and or the proliferation of burning and ripping per se but because there is a genuine lack of interest in purchasing CDs as consumers spend money on these other more "exciting" goods. Consumer lack of interest (and or distraction) in the delivery of current music products as promoted by the majors is something which has been continually ignored. What the majors are not prepared to concede is that CDs have simply become second-line cultural products. The ritual of rocking up to HMV and obsessively trawling through stacks of CDs has been substituted for MP3 downloading (ripping) and CD burning. Music consumption has become just another thing to do and the art of prioritising for the purchase of the latest chart music is dead. Consequently, if money can be spent elsewhere on other pleasures, then it will be. Interestingly after several years of literally doing nothing, the majors have adopted the Internet in their business model in order to address the issues. It is now quite common to purchase music files from hundreds of legal websites. However two significant developments have occurred. First, albums are not necessarily being downloaded, but rather single songs - and some for as low as 10 cents (a far cry from the current $5 CD single price tag). Second, despite the proliferation of legal websites, P2P platforms such as Azereus which use "bit torrent" software make it all too tempting for young and old alike to download whole albums illegally. Illegal and legal technological challenges, combined, have caused traditional music products to become so diminished in value that it is doubtful whether commodified pop music as peddled by the majors will ever again become the leading mode of cultural consumption. More problematic for the majors is that the Internet has permitted new musical discoveries - truly independent music completely unfettered by the majors' control and the need for chart music. If these trends continue, then it would be safe to assume that music products will become third-line cultural products or probably entirely "de-commodified" (that is, the consumption of music in any recorded form would always have intrinsic worth, but its ability to be sold as "units" may not have any commercial potential). I do not suggest music will ever die. For example, concert attendance could not be better, and the proliferation of truly independently released music in recent years has had an almost emancipatory effect on the industry. Rather, the commodification of chartable pop music will be a thing of the past. Even if the sale of Top 40 chart music survives, its life will be meaningless in real commercial terms. Dr Trajce Cvetkovski has recently completed a doctoral thesis that examined the impact of technological change in the music industry. He is a practising barrister and was the first in-house Counsel for Tiny Computers in England and Wales. He also composes electronic music and has released for Sony, Sirius Music and Marski Music. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4331 ![]() New Trends In Online Traffic Visits to Sites for Blogging, Local Information and Social Networks Drive Web Growth Leslie Walker While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information. The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year. Top-ranked sites growing the most, ComScore's data showed, were Blogger.com, a personal publishing site; MySpace.com, where young people do virtual preening and share musical tastes; Wikipedia, an open reference site jointly edited by millions of people; and Citysearch, a network of local guides focused on cities. The number of monthly visitors to each site rose at rates ranging from 185 percent (Citysearch) to 528 percent (Blogger.com) between February 2005 and February 2006. Their growth far exceeded the 4 percent increase in overall Internet visitors in the United States during that period. The traffic analysis shows the Internet is still a space where new brands such as MySpace can suddenly break into the upper ranks, where older brands such as Citysearch can revive themselves after languishing for years, and where established outfits such as Google often wind up as beneficiaries because they buy or copy services pioneered by upstarts. Google Inc., for instance, bought Blogger.com in 2003; the number of people posting or reading material at that site jumped to 15.6 million last month from 2.5 million a year ago. "The growth in blogging reminds us the Internet is fulfilling its original promise about participation," said Gary Arlen, a research analyst and president of Arlen Communications Inc. "This medium empowers users in such a way that they can do what they want and be heard." Peter Daboll, president and chief executive of ComScore Media Metrix, said one notable recent traffic trend is increased popularity of sites helping people find local information: "Things having to do with local search are really gaining momentum." In addition to Citysearch, a network devoted to local entertainment and commerce, Daboll said, two local directories made the Web's top 50 last month, WhitePages.com and Verizon's Superpages.com. Citysearch, which is owned by IAC/InterActive Corp., recently announced its first full year of profitability, thanks to its increase in ad sales. And the Kelsey Group, a Princeton, N.J., consulting firm specializing in local advertising, projects that ads relating to locally focused Internet searches will become a $6.1 billion market within five years. Greg Sterling, an independent analyst, said local Internet services lagged behind their national counterparts for years but are finally coming on strong because they are much better today and people are more aware of their utility. "This is stuff people need and want in their everyday lives," Sterling said, "and to the extent they can find it online, they are starting to use these tools." ComScore usually lumps together sites owned by the same firm in its Internet traffic reports, so AOL's visitors, for example, would be merged with those of other sites owned by Time Warner Inc. But The Washington Post asked ComScore to break out traffic for the Web's top 50 individual sites to get an idea of which were gaining and losing momentum. The analysis showed that the Internet's biggest brands have plenty of staying power or at least are keeping pace with growth in the overall online population. Yahoo retains the largest audience in the United States, though its visitor growth slowed to about 5 percent last year. Google was the only mega-site bucking the trend, with its users shooting up 21 percent in the past year. Not only has Google steadily expanded its share of the market for Web search, ComScore found, but it also has been attracting new users by expanding into other services offered by rivals, such as e-mail, mapping and personal publishing. If you combine traffic to all the properties it owns, including Blogger.com, Google's total audience jumped 27 percent last year, ComScore found. The total audience for all of Time Warner's Internet properties, including AOL's various online services, showed little or no growth. Neither did the total audience for Microsoft Corp.'s collective Internet services, though some discrete services did well. AOL's Mapquest.com, for example, pulled 7 percent more visitors in February this year compared with last. One of the more dramatic growth stories was MySpace, which pulled 37 million visitors last month, 28 million more than a year ago. That gave it a ranking of No. 10 among all sites in the United States, according to ComScore. Usage data for MySpace suggests an even higher popularity ranking: Based on total pages viewed and the time spent by each visitor, MySpace ranked No. 2 on the entire Internet, right behind Yahoo. After Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million last summer, the site made headlines when some men were arrested and charged with assaulting girls they had identified on the site. Since then, News Corp. has been working feverishly to improve safety on MySpace by screening photos for pornography and removing profiles of underage users. Joining MySpace on the fast track was Wikipedia, the open encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Its traffic soared 275 percent last year following widespread media play over the posting of fake biographical material and similar controversies regarding the site's accuracy. For a chart showing all top 50 Web sites and their number of visitors last month, go online to http://washingtonpost.com/technology. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040301692.html ![]() Editor’s note: For the last three months I’ve been listening to the NPR headline news feed several times a day with Media Player Classic and this link - rtsp://real.npr.na-central.speedera.net:80/real.npr.na-central/news.db.rm. Where I used to have wait until the top of the hour to get the news from WCBS in New York, the local network affiliate, I no longer do so. The reasons are twofold and instant availability is the big one: NPR Internet news is "click on demand" and I don’t need to fit myself to the media distributor’s schedule, which is very liberating. I’ll have it on whenever I eat breakfast, or when I’m on hold or even in the yard. I can catch up to the world anytime. The absence of irritating announcements is the second big bonus. I hope the trend continues – Jack. Podcasting Roils NPR Fund Raising Steve Friess JoAnna Michaels is an inveterate listener of National Public Radio, but she won't be tuning in as much this month. Her local Las Vegas affiliate, KNPR, kicked off its spring membership drive last week with program interruptions pleading for donations, so Michaels is bypassing that semiannual annoyance by loading up her MP3 player with various National Public Radio programs available in whole or in part for free as podcasts. "Why would I sit through all of that if I can get what I like for free online, listen to it on my own time and not be guilted for weeks into giving money?" says Michaels, a real estate agent who says her husband donates to the station on behalf of her family. "I've even found a whole bunch of NPR shows online that aren't on NPR here, which is so great." That kind of thinking reflects both the blessing and curse presented by podcasting. On the upside, the medium is expanding NPR's overall audience and boosting some shows previously unavailable in many markets. While most NPR programming has been streamed online for several years, the portable, time-shifted, on-demand nature of podcasting affords a new level of convenience and access. Yet, at the same time, it can turn ears away from local stations -- possibly for good -- which could be a problem for affiliates that rely heavily upon member donations to pay the dues to air some of the same programming listeners can now get free as MP3s. "Unfortunately, in a typical market only 8 percent of the audience become members of their station, so if you erode that even to 7 percent or 6 percent because they're not getting the shows through the terrestrial station, that's not a good business model," says Paul Marszalek, a radio industry expert who consults with dozens of public and private radio stations. "There is not a single person on the local affiliate level who has not expressed some level of trepidation." Indeed, KNPR program director Flo Rogers says the impact of podcasting was a major topic at a January retreat for local NPR station executives. "There is a sense that this is a fabulous opportunity but that the threat of bypass is real," says Rogers, who is on the board of the Public Radio Program Directors Association. "How do we gain ownership of this? If the affiliates start to fade, then the network itself starts to fade." Last summer, NPR started offering podcasts of some of its most beloved programs, including selected stories from Morning Edition and All Things Considered as well as entire episodes of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me and On the Media. In addition, several programs distributed by American Public Media and Public Radio International that air on NPR affiliates are now available as podcasts. NPR Vice President Maria Thomas says the organization has logged more than 18 million downloads of NPR programs since the podcasts began in August, although some of those are internet-only offerings not played on any terrestrial NPR stations, like music show All Songs Considered. Eight NPR-related titles are presently in iTunes' Top 100 rankings. Aside from the fear that listeners won't bear with the fund drives at local stations, podcasting also presents the prospect that fans of certain shows will give to stations in other markets instead of their own. When folks download On the Media, for instance, they hear a plea for donations from the show's originating station, WNYC, which has garnered the New York City station more than 200 new, mostly out-of-market, members, says Mikel Ellcessor, WNYC's senior director for programming operations and distribution. That's not a huge number and it's unclear whether those folks have changed their giving levels at local stations, but Marszalek says this could be the start of a trend in which "the rich stations get richer and the poor stations get poorer. That gap is going to widen." Thomas agrees that the potential for harm to local stations is real, but she says NPR is working on meeting the new challenges of the podcast era. She's invited any stations creating new content to list the podcasts they're offering in a centralized directory NPR has created, an offer that 35 stations are taking advantage of to list a total of 292 podcasts. NPR sells underwriting sponsorships to all its podcasts en masse -- currently, the sponsor is Acura -- and slips the sponsor's message into the files automatically. Local stations receive some revenue from that, although Thomas did not disclose the precise sharing arrangement. The result, she says, is that NPR fans like Michaels are discovering shows from other markets produced by stations whose websites they were unlikely to ever browse. "The question we're asking ourselves is, 'Is the business model of public radio prepared for a future where geographic boundaries don't exist?'" Thomas says. "That's where our podcasting project comes into the picture. I don't have a silver-bullet magic answer. What we're trying to do is work with the stations to invent new business models. "Our aim is not to get stuck in a place where we're saying, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.'" Marszalek believes more steps need to be taken, including agreements that shows won't be available as podcasts until they've aired on terrestrial stations. NPR also should charge a small fee for podcasts to create a new, potentially huge revenue stream that could help show producers lower the fees they charge to stations for airing the shows, he says. Some of NPR's biggest programs, including Fresh Air and Car Talk, have been sold on Audible.com for a few years, but usage is low. Car Talk producer Doug Berman says that's largely because the $3 per show fee is out of whack in the era of $2-per-episode charges on iTunes for Lost and The Office. He says he plans to discuss lowering the cost with Audible. Marszalek says the NPR ad-sharing arrangement described by Thomas largely benefits stations that produce content of interest to folks beyond their localities, and only a few of the largest stations do that. "It is the local affiliates who popularize these programs at their expense, and then the producers are going to reap the benefit on podcasts," he says. "All of the new delivery systems are great for the stations that produce the content. It's not good for the local affiliate in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They're really, really reliant on programs from elsewhere to draw listeners and members." KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour disagrees. Seymour's Santa Monica, California-based station was the first NPR affiliate to leap into podcasting a year ago with such programs as To the Point and Left, Right & Center. She says she's seen few new donations from out-of-market listeners but that the expanded audience helps her sell larger underwriter sponsorships. She also insists podcasting levels the playing field between big and small stations: "Suppose down there in Las Vegas, they created a smart show about gambling and they put humor in it and it was really interesting and entertaining. And say this thing becomes hot because everybody's interested in gambling these days. It becomes a podcast and it takes off. It can take the Las Vegas station out into the world in a way that was never possible before. Suddenly, certain businesses may want to underwrite for them. You can go around and say the sky is falling, or you can see it as an opportunity." Rogers is quick to insist she doesn't see the sky falling. "It is the mission of public radio to make programming as widely available as possible," Rogers says. "But it's fair to say this is a high-priority issue. How do we make sure that we don't stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's a fad that will go away? That's what we have to do." http://www.wired.com/news/culture/media/1,70583-0.html ![]() Vice squad Coolest Product at Storage Networking World (so far) Robin So here I am in a cloudy and rainy San Diego, visiting Storage Networking World. This is a show for big data center types. Typical opening question: “So how many data centers do you have?” But there is frequently some interesting stuff presented amidst the vendor driven chaff that might have meaning for the SMB market. With a 25x data compression factor, the winner, yesterday, is Diligent Technologies (are all the good names are taken?). They claim their technology enables data volume compression that is over 10x what ordinary data compression achieves — a real breakthrough. Common compression algorithm are lucky to get 2x compression. So if you have 100 GB to back up, their product, Protectier (see name comment above) can turn it into 4GB, something you could burn onto a DVD in a few minutes. All in all, a wonderful product for SMB’s — but they aren’t selling it to SMB’s (good marketers must be scarce too). Having spent some time looking at compression algorithms in my mis-spent youth, I was very sceptical of the 25x reduction claim. I was gradually cornering the charming but less-technical than me Melissa, when up walked Neville Yates, Diligent’s CTO, whose movie-star good looks and English accent give no clue to his manly technical chops, which are impressive. The way Diligent achieves it exceptional compression ratio is by comparing all incoming data to the data already arrived. When it finds an incoming stream of bytes similar to an existing series of bytes it compares the two and stores the differences. The magic comes in a couple of areas, as near as I can make out given Neville’s natural reticence on the “how” of the technology. First, one has to be smart about how big the series of bytes before worrying about trying to compess it, since if it’s too short there won’t be much or any compression. Secondly, the system needs a very fast and efficient method of knowing what is has already received so it can know when it is receiving something similar. And it all has to be optimized to run in-line at data rate speeds on a standard server box — which runs the cool and reliable Linux OS. The big plus to this technology besides the compression ratio, is its reliability. Since there is no assumption that two files are the same just because their metadata is, the problem of not backing up something you mistakenly thought was already backed up (a problem with file-based de-duplication software) is eliminated. Further, since the software operates on byte-streams, it can compress anything: email, databases, archives, mp3’s, encrypted data or whatever weird data format your favorite program uses. So naturally I am a bit disappointed that this wonderful technology is targetted to large data centers, even though I understand Diligent’s thinking. A viral marketing, disruptive technology approach would be to release a consumer version, that maybe offers just 10x compression, but proves to hundreds of thousands of people in a few months that the technology really works. Then the data center guys — the smart ones anyway — will be calling Diligent. http://storagemojo.com/ ![]() Big Easy to Telcos: Stick It AP A showdown may be looming over a free wireless internet network that New Orleans set up to boost recovery after Hurricane Katrina pummeled the city. Calling the network vital to the city's economic comeback, New Orleans technology chief Greg Meffert is vowing to keep the system running as is, even if it means breaking a state law that permits its full operation only during emergencies. He says he's ready to go to court, if necessary. "If you can get to the net, you can do business," Meffert said. The system, established with $1 million in donated equipment, made its debut last fall in the wake of the hurricane disaster. It's the first free wireless internet network owned and run by a major city. The system uses hardware mounted on street lights. Its "mesh" technology passes the wireless signal from pole to pole rather than through Wi-Fi transmitters plugged directly into a physical network cable. That way, laptop users can connect even in areas where the wireline phone network has not been restored. Touted at first as much for its symbolism of New Orleans' recovery as for its utility, the system's usefulness now far exceeds early projections, Meffert said. He estimates that the network gets thousands of users a day. Hundreds of similar projects in other cities have met with stiff opposition from phone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at blocking competition from government agencies. In New Orleans, the network operates at 512 kilobits per second, much faster than dial-up connections but slower than high-speed services offered by private companies. But a state law, passed two years ago in response to other attempts to establish government-owned internet systems, dictates the network can run at 512 kbps only as long as the city remains under a state of emergency — a declaration still in place more than seven months after the storm. Once the state of emergency is lifted — and no one has said when that might take place — state law says the bandwidth must be slowed to 128 kbps. Meffert says the reduction will make the service virtually useless for businesses and others trying to re-establish commerce in the city. Bills to allow New Orleans to keep the network operating full-time at 512 kbps failed during a recent special legislative session. Several similar bills are pending in the current regular session, but Meffert says city lobbyists give them little hope of passage because of opposition from the telecommunications lobby. "We've been told in no uncertain terms those bills are going to get shot down," Meffert said. David Grabert, a spokesman for Cox Communications, a major telecommunications provider in New Orleans, said the company backs the state's Fair Competition Act, which would end the city's legal authority to continue operating the system at full speed after the state of emergency ends. "We believe the Fair Competition Act was established to provide safeguards for private industry," Grabert said. "Efforts to repeal it do raise concerns." BellSouth says it does not comment on pending legislation, but its regional director for southern Louisiana, Merlin Villar, denies the company's trying to shut down the city's system. "The law does not prevent New Orleans or any other local government from providing Wi-Fi service," Villar said in a statement. Meffert said many devastated areas of the city likely will not have private internet service for years. He said the city is prepared for a showdown — new law or not. The system will stay up, regardless, though Meffert said he expects court challenges. "In the end, it takes a federal judge to issue a restraining order," he said. "Until that point, if that point ever comes, we'll keep running it. It's a lifeline to these people." http://www.wired.com/news/technology...l?tw=rss.index ![]() Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off AP The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who hopes to give $100 laptops to the world's children dismissed recent criticisms Tuesday and said his project could begin distributing the computers by early next year. Kicking off the LinuxWorld conference in Boston, Nicholas Negroponte said he was undeterred by skepticism from two of the leading forces in computing, Intel and Microsoft. "When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you're doing something right," Negroponte said, prompting applause from the audience of several hundred open-source software devotees. Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit association, also revealed a few new tweaks to the design of the computers. One distinctive element of the original design was for a hand crank to provide power to the laptops where there is no electricity. To compensate, the devices are being engineered to use just 2 watts of electricity, less than one-tenth of what conventional portable computers generally consume. But having a hand crank stuck to the device likely would have subjected the machine to too many wrenching forces, so it will now be connected to the AC electrical adapter. In fact, because the adapter can rest on the ground, the power generator might take the form of a foot pedal rather than a hand crank altogether. Negroponte had previously said the flexible devices will have a 7-inch screen that can be read in sunlight. It will save on costs by using the Linux operating system, peer-to-peer wireless connectivity and a 500-megahertz processor — which was top of the line in the late 1990s. One Laptop Per Child has big-name partners, including search leader Google Inc., chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices, Linux distributor Red Hat, laptop maker Quanta Computer and News Corp., the media company led by Rupert Murdoch. All have helped finance the project, which Negroponte said has raised $29 million. However, skeptics have questioned whether the device can meet Negroponte's goal of inspiring huge educational gains in the developing world. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has criticized the computers' design, including its lack of a hard disk drive — though many people in the tech world believed he was more irked by the laptops' use of Linux, the free, open-source system that competes with Gates' proprietary Windows systems. Intel executives, meanwhile, have suggested that Negroponte's laptop is a mere gadget that will lack too many PC functions. Last week, Intel announced its own plans to sell an inexpensive desktop PC for beginners in developing countries. Negroponte expressed frustration with Gates in particular, saying that the $100 laptop designers are still working with Microsoft to develop a version of the Windows CE operating system that could run the machines. "Geez, so why criticize me in public?" Negroponte said. Microsoft did not immediately return calls for comment. Negroponte's current plan is to begin distributing 5 million to 10 million of the laptops in China, India, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Nigeria and Argentina by early 2007. Governments or donors will buy the laptops for children to own and use in and out of school, and the United Nations will help distribute the machines. Eventually, Negroponte expects many other governments — and not just those in technology-deprived places — to come onboard. For example, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has expressed interest in buying the machines for schoolchildren here. In time, Negroponte expects the $100 laptop to be a misnomer. For one thing, he believes the cost — which is actually about $135 now and isn't expected to hit $100 until 2008 — can drop to $50 by 2010 as more and more are produced. He also said the display and other specifications could change as enhancements are made. In other words, he seemed to be saying to his critics: Don't get too hung up on how this thing operates now. "The hundred-dollar laptop is an education project," he said. "It's not a laptop project." http://www.wired.com/news/technology...l?tw=rss.index ![]() Can’t wait! Smart Glasses Switch Focus In An Instant Stu Hutson ![]() Glasses that change from "long distance" to "reading" mode at the flick of a switch could prove a revelation for many wearers. Researchers have developed a prototype that uses liquid crystals to change focus in an instant, thus preventing the eye strain induced by wearing conventional bifocal glasses. Focusing through specific portions of a bifocal lens causes many users to become dizzy or disoriented, while others report increased eye fatigue. "Bifocals effectively work the same way they have since they were invented by Benjamin Franklin," says Nasser Peyghambarian, a professor of optical sciences at Arizona State University, US, who helped develop the "dynamic" glasses. "But as any of more than 40 million people in America who need bifocals know, they're a pain." Fresnel lens The dynamic glasses change focus using a 5-micron-thick layer of nematic liquid crystal, sandwiched between two pieces of glass. Molecules of the liquid crystal reorient themselves when exposed to an electric field and the researchers used this to create a type of dynamic Fresnel lens. In a normal Fresnel lens, concentric rings are carved into a piece of glass causing light to become focused in a similar way to a conventional lens. Dynamic glasses mimic the Fresnel effect using concentric circles of clear electrodes on the pieces of glass containing the crystal. Activating these electrodes causes the liquid crystal to align into rings and focus light passing through the lens. A company called PixelOptics, based in Virginia, US, plans to sell glasses containing dynamic lenses commercially within two years. "The prototype is pretty bulky, but when these hit the streets they’ll be virtually indistinguishable from other, very stylish glasses," says Ronald Blum, CEO of PixelOptics. Infrared laser PixelOptics first developed the idea of dynamic focusing while working on large lenses for computer screens. Ideally, these would have allowed near-sighted and far-sighted people to read their monitors without their spectacles. "As screens got thinner and thinner, though, the idea became less practical," Blum says. "So instead we decided to move the technology from the computer to the computer user." The first commercial dynamic glasses will only be able to switch between a person’s normal vision and their "reading" prescription. However, by applying different voltages and by changing the number of current-carrying rings within each lens it should be possible to produce different magnifications using the same lens, researchers say. Peyghambarian is now working on glasses that can dynamically refocus on whatever the wearer is looking at. These will most probably use an infrared laser built into the bridge of the glasses to determine how far away an object is. "The idea is to put the focusing power found in the lens of a camera on your face all the time," Peyghambarian told New Scientist. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0600850103) http://www.newscientisttech.com/arti...n-instant.html ![]() Japanese Cos. Check Employee Computer Use Hiroko Tabuchi For many years now, companies have been able to keep track of every Web site visited, e-mail sent and file accessed by their workers through readily available tracking software. Now a growing number of Japanese employers are monitoring their staff with the help of homegrown programs designed to spy on their workers' every move, a specialist said Thursday. A recent study has shown that over 30 percent of large Japanese companies monitor PC use among their staff, according to Masakazu Kobayashi, an associate professor at Tokyo's Institute of Information Security. Heightened concerns over a spate of data leaks - especially those involving the file-sharing software, Winny - is likely to drive that percentage up, Kobayashi said. "It's scary," Kobayashi told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. "In five years, most companies will be doing this." Tracking software, which first appeared in the U.S. in the mid-nineties, have become increasingly sophisticated in Japan, Kobayashi said. A piece of software by SEER Insight Security Inc., for example, allows bosses to visually monitor employees in realtime through mini web cameras, zooming in when a worker acts suspicious. Other recent programs produce reports on an employee's moves on a computer down to the minute, or analyzes inter-worker relationships through e-mails exchanged between each employee - letting employers identify cliques or loners within the work force. Such tactics by employees aren't prohibited by Japanese law, and past attempts by employers to sue their bosses over excessive monitoring have been unsuccessful, Kobayashi said. "The message is clear - companies are telling their employees, 'Behave yourself because we're watching you,'" Kobayashi said. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFA ULT ![]() Rolling Stones Arrive for China Concert Christopher Bodeen The Rolling Stones arrived in Shanghai Thursday for their first concert in mainland China. But although the Stones may now be welcome in China, the country may not be ready for "Honky Tonk Women." "Let's Spend The Night Together?" Maybe not. The group's 2002 greatest hits collection, "40 Licks," was cut by the censors to just 36 after those songs plus "Brown Sugar" and "Beast of Burden" were cut from the mainland Chinese release, apparently due to their suggestive lyrics. It wasn't clear if the songs would be featured when the group performs on Saturday. A sellout crowd was expected for Saturday night's show in the relatively intimate setting of the 8,000-seat Shanghai Grand Stage in the heart of China's biggest city. The Stones had planned to play in China three years ago, but the SARS epidemic forced them to call off the tour. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts smiled and waved at reporters after stepping off a chartered flight from Japan on Thursday, the latest stop on their marathon "A Bigger Bang" tour. Though famous around the world for such classics as "Satisfaction" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash," the Stones are relatively unknown in China, which was mired in Maoist isolation at the height of the band's fame in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, relaxed cultural restrictions and the rise of a Chinese middle class have attracted many international acts to the country. Recent years have seen performances in Shanghai by Elton John, Whitney Houston and heavy-metal group Deep Purple, among others. Shanghai was a late addition to the tour's schedule, but singer Mick Jagger was quoted in the Shanghai Daily newspaper last week as saying the band considered the city a must-see. "We all know that Shanghai is a big important city, so we wanted to make sure it's on our itinerary," Jagger said. The Stones were booked for a pair of concerts in 2003, just as China's outbreak of the deadly virus severe acute respiratory syndrome was raging. Those shows were called off, though the Stones did play in Hong Kong late in 2003 in a concert series meant to lift spirits following the end of the outbreak. The band's current tour started in the U.S. in August, and has wound its way through Central and South America and Japan, including a free concert for more than 1 million people on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Despite their famed loyalty to the band, some Stones fans couldn't help tweaking them over their Shanghai visit. A suggested setlist posted on the group's Web site, including such twisted takes on Stones classics as "Let's Spend the Night Together in a Workers' Paradise." http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T ![]() AT&T Whistleblower Claims To Document Illegal NSA Surveillance Declan McCullagh Evidence provided by a former AT&T technician proves that the telecommunications company secretly and unlawfully opened its networks to government eavesdroppers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Thursday. Alert readers may remember that EFF sued AT&T in January, alleging it illegally cooperated with the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping program. Then, in an odd twist last week, the Bush administration objected to EFF including some internal AT&T documents in court (the Feds claimed they might be classified). Now EFF seems to have cleared that up and has filed them in court, although they're still under seal. EFF claims that it has a sworn statement by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician -- and several internal AT&T documents -- that show a "dragnet surveillance" has been put into place to facilitate the NSA's controversial surveillance scheme. (Here's our survey of telecom companies regarding NSA cooperation.) Alas, we likely won't know details until the judge decides to release them. Even if the documents prove everything that EFF claims, it's not a slam dunk for the group. The state secrets privilege, outlined by the Supreme Court in a 1953 case, permits the government to derail a lawsuit that might otherwise lead to the disclosure of military secrets. In 1998, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals elaborated on the state secret privilege in a case where former workers at the Air Force's classified Groom Lake, Nev., facility alleged hazardous waste violations. When requested by the workers' lawyers to turn over information, the Air Force refused. The 9th Circuit upheld a summary judgment on behalf of the Air Force, saying that once the state secrets "privilege is properly invoked and the court is satisfied as to the danger of divulging state secrets, the privilege is absolute" and the case will generally be dismissed. That "absolute privilege" case is still good law and is binding on the judge that will hear EFF's case. http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-605...8346&subj=news ![]() Helping Batteries to Keep On Going and Going Peter Wayner What good is a tiny thin sliver of electronic gadgetry if the battery dies in your pocket after a few minutes? Not much, and now that manufacturers have mastered the building of pocket-sized wonders that are often too small for our fingers, they are starting to pay closer attention to battery life. New machines come with smarter batteries and miserly circuitry that works longer. In some cases, the manufacturers are even making the gizmos a little bit bigger to accommodate a battery with more capacity. The designers are working within the limits of several laws of physics. They all want their latest gadgets to offer bright screens, faster action, infinite range and long battery life while weighing next to nothing, but there's no way to escape the fact that the flashiest features consume more power. So some designers are cutting features while others are adding fatter batteries as they try to satisfy the demands of consumers. Of course, others are continuing to pile on features for customers who don't mind frequent trips to the recharger. One of the biggest challenges for designers and consumers is the fickle nature of batteries. Temperature, age and use patterns affect life span, and it is possible for two people to get widely differing performance from the same device. While keeping batteries cool and well charged helps, all batteries wear out. Gadget designers are combating this challenge by building in more intelligence that regulates the power consumption with all of the zeal of someone raised during the Depression. Most devices now have dedicated chips that shut down parts of the device when they are not needed. Some even have special chips that watch the battery and simulate the internal chemistry to optimize the charging process. Laptops The laptop marketplace is separating into the world of so-called heavier and cheaper desktop replacements: the ultraportable notebooks that are optimized to run long and weigh little. The Lenovo ThinkPad X60 ($1,400 to $2,000, depending on options), the latest in the well-regarded laptop line, weighs close to three pounds, but it can last longer than eight hours on a single charge. The secret is the ability to add more batteries. You can pry out the DVD drive and replace it with a battery that adds several more hours. If that's not enough, you can add a flat battery that weighs about a pound to the bottom of the laptop and adds several more hours of use. The extra batteries are just one part of the equation. The X60 would not be able to live as long if it was not careful with the power. Howard Locker, Lenovo's chief architect for the ThinkPad line, says the laptop comes with a separate chip inside that constantly audits the power used by all components. There are other features, like dual antennas for Wi-Fi, making it easier to pick up a signal. "If you have poor antenna design, you can overcompensate by giving it more power," he said. "We are so focused on our antenna design, and that can save a lot of power." Panasonic, another competitor in the ultraportable world, is actually adding a bit of weight in its latest offering. The Toughbook T4 ($1,980 to $2,300) is now 3.4 pounds, about half a pound heavier than its predecessor, the W4. The electronics are lighter, but the battery pack is bigger, providing about three extra hours of work. The shell of the T4 is made out of magnesium, a choice that Panasonic made because the designers found it to have five times the strength of titanium for the needs of its designers and 20 times the strength of the plastic found in most laptops. The metal conducts so well that some of the slower Panasonic laptops can be sealed up to run without a fan, a feature that saves more power and keeps dust and other contaminants out of the inside. Kyp Walls, a manager in the laptop division, also says Panasonic is quite proud of its displays because they are among the brightest in the market without consuming too much extra power. Mr. Walls said the company identified five factors that were each worth a 10 percent improvement in brightness. "It's a different kind of fluorescent bulb," he said. "It's a different kind of gas." And it is all a result of "a lot of investigation." Digital Cameras From the beginning, Kodak realized that good batteries were a crucial part of ensuring that consumers enjoyed its products. Digital cameras often draw power for short, intense peaks after the shutter button is pressed, a pattern quite different from the slow, steady drain of laptops and flashlights. James DeJager, the technical director of Kodak's battery division, says Kodak began by building a special line of batteries, Kodak Max, with a slightly different chemistry designed to handle the peak demands. One model (Kaardc), for instance, is rechargeable and uses a nickel-metal-hydride chemistry to take four times the pictures of a standard alkaline cell. These cells are available in standard sizes (AA, AAA) for their cameras, a feature that Mr. DeJager says makes it easy for customers to replace batteries while on the road. They cost $2.69 to $10, depending on type. While many of the lower-end cameras from Kodak use the standard cells, there is a growing demand for the high power densities and thinner profile of the lithium-ion batteries. The Kodak EasyShare P880 ($459 to $560), a new digital model, uses a larger lithium-ion cell that is expected to fuel about 320 pictures on a full charge. Cellphones The Nokia 1100 cellphone ($50 at www.nokiausa.com) may not offer Bluetooth networking, a camera or even a color display, but it can go up to 16 days without being recharged. Colin Bullock, a senior engineer at Nokia in Dallas, says that stripping away the extras and using a black-and-white display sharply reduced the slow drain on the battery, something the engineers call the "quiescent current." "There is really only one gadget on 1100, and that is the flashlight," Mr. Bullock said by e-mail message, meaning that the phone, offered by Cingular and some smaller carriers, "only draws comparatively small current when on." The engineers are also working on reducing the power consumed by the phones during calls. Wayne Ballantyne, an engineer at Motorola's lab in Plantation, Fla., says the newer phones scan the air less often, allowing them to shut down transmitters and receivers for several milliseconds longer than in the past. The company is even experimenting with using tiny accelerometers to measure whether the phone is going anywhere. A motionless phone does not need to use power searching for the closest towers again and again. MP3 Players One way for other manufacturers of MP3 players to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer wider options for batteries. Apple drove some users to sue when capacity of the lithium-ion battery in their iPods dropped sharply. The early iPod batteries were not easily replaceable, and customers complained that they felt forced to buy an entirely new iPod. Today, Apple offers detailed notes on battery care (www.apple.com/batteries) and a program that replaces a worn battery for $59. Creative took a different tack with its Zen Nano Plus ($99). The flash player uses a standard AAA cell, a feature that lets the user swap out alkaline or rechargeable batteries while on the road. The standard forms may be convenient, but they have limitations. The Apple Nano may be wider and longer than the Zen Nano, but it is also much thinner because the lithium-ion cell is thinner than a AAA cell. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/te...y/06power.html ![]() Eagle Cam Jack Mom, Dad and the two eggs, high atop the Canadian wilderness. Thanks OMB! ![]() DoJ interest in RIAA case The Top Cop p2pnet. The Big Four Organized Music cartel has accused New York social worker Tenise Barker of being a 'thief' who's committed a non-existent 'crime'. Actually, she hasn't stolen anything and she's accused of copyright infringement by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), owned by Warner Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Vivendi Universal. Now the US Department of Justice is wondering whether or not to get in on the act. "The United States Attorney's Office has written to the judge in Elektra v Barker, indicating that the Department of Justice may wish to file a 'Statement of Interest' in the case in order to 'express the views of the United States regarding the scope of the distribution right embodied in sec. 106(3) of the Copyright Act'," says Recording Industry vs The People. What views could the DoJ possibly want to express, one wonders? Could it have anything to do with US attorney general Alberto Gonzales' entertainment cartel road show? He starred in a week-long entertainment industry, US taxpayer-funded extravaganza, "in which the kids studied Internet dangers as well as the moral, social and legal implications of Internet piracy". "I am the top cop in the United States,'' he warned school-children along his route. "I hope you never have the misfortune to deal with me ………" Nor is the DoJ alone in showing an interest in the case. Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney used their MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) to enter an amicus brief supporting RIAA arguments that merely "making available" comprises copyright infringement. Stay tuned. http://www.p2pnet.net/story/8445 ![]() Radiohead Call Music Industry 'Retards' Radiohead's Thom Yorke calls the music industry "a bunch of fucking retards" in this week's issue of NME. The singer has launched a scathing attack on record companies and radio stations as he believes they are only just now looking at the internet for new talent. Speaking about Arctic Monkeys' rise to fame, Yorke said: "A good thing for new music would be more of the mainstream loosening up a bit and letting stuff through. Radio 1 won't play anything fucking decent. You need to sort the radio out." He added: "The fact that poor Arctic Monkeys are getting so much attention is purely based on the fact that the mainstream music business is such a bunch of fucking retards as far as I'm concerned." http://www.nme.com/news/radiohead/22692 ![]() Like to Tinker? NASA's Looking for You Noah Shachtman STEVE JONES doesn't have a workshop, exactly, for his miniature space elevator; he is designing it in his dorm room and in four labs scattered across the University of British Columbia. He doesn't have a staff, either; a collection of friends and fellow space enthusiasts volunteer to help. And his budget, in the low five figures, comes mostly from the school activities fund, although Red Bull is donating some energy drinks. But he might soon have a chance to join the ranks of the aerospace establishment by getting money from NASA and, in his own way, helping explore the solar system. To get ready, he is spending 60 hours a week on his elevator, which is meant to haul people and gear into orbit without a rocket. He has even put off graduation until the project is done. Until recently, the chances that a college senior like Mr. Jones would contribute to the NASA space program were remote. Contracts belonged mostly to the Boeings of the world. Tinkerers and students were kept at the far edge of the periphery. But with budgets tightening and the obstacles to human space exploration looking more daunting, NASA is enlisting the expertise of outsiders. For example, the agency is offering 13 contests, which it calls Centennial Challenges, that anyone can enter. The prizes range from $200,000 to more than $5 million, for building gear as diverse as solar sails, lunar excavators and the tiny elevators. But more important than the cash prizes, contestants and administrators say, is the opportunity to sidestep the traditional ways NASA has done business and bring some fresh faces to its ranks. "With a regular contract, a small group of students like us wouldn't have a chance," Mr. Jones said. "This way, anyone with a good idea can contribute." Mr. Jones hadn't thought much about contests until the X Prize, the $10 million competition to get private spacecraft into suborbital flight. He was drawn to the idea that entrepreneurs could go into space. So when NASA announced its first Centennial Challenges, Mr. Jones signed up. Competitors in the Beam Power Challenge — which includes the elevator component — had to make a two-foot-tall machine powered by light or microwaves that could crawl up a 200-foot rubber-coated fiber ribbon. Space enthusiasts hope that such a machine — an elevator, of sorts — could one day reach 62,000 miles into the sky, delivering people and packages into orbit at a fraction of the cost of today's launchings. The winner would be, in effect, one of the space elevator's earliest drafts. When the contest was held last October, none of the eight entrants made it all the way up the ribbon. But Mr. Jones's Snowstar machine traveled farthest, all of 20 feet. The hexagonal array of solar cells, powering two pairs of rollers that shimmied up the ribbon, was judged Most Likely to Win in the 2006 challenge, set for August. The prize has been increased to $250,000 this year, from $50,000. To win, the climbers must make it up the ribbon in less than a minute. So far, 19 teams have signed up, nearly twice as many as in 2005. Another well-known high-tech contest, the Darpa Grand Challenge, also had disappointing results when it started in 2004. The all-robot off-road rally, sponsored by the Pentagon's fringe science arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, attracted dozens of competitors. But none of the vehicles made it past the seventh mile of the 150-mile course, largely because of navigation problems. A year later, five unmanned cars crossed the finish line. That included robots from leading universities like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon as well as one from the Gray Insurance Company, which had no experience in robotics but whose owners had a personal interest in the competition. The Gray team was one of the last to enter the contest, and it had a major setback when Hurricane Katrina wrecked its New Orleans workshop. Nevertheless, it beat out vehicles built by leading computer-science researchers and backed by defense contractors. It did so well that it has pulled some employees from the insurance side of the business, allowing them to focus on the company's new venture: robotic cars for the military and other entities. "I never thought I'd work in defense," said Paul Trepagnier, a software development manager at Gray. "I'm a Tom Clancy fan. But that's the extent. I mean, I'm just a programmer in an insurance company." Many of NASA's contests also center on robotics. The Telerobotic Construction Challenge, scheduled for August 2007, requires a team of machines to assemble items with minimal human supervision. The idea is to let robots, instead of astronauts, build shelters and machinery on the moon and Mars. In the Regolith Excavation Challenge, set for May 2007, an autonomous machine will have to dig through 24 square meters of simulated moon rock. A separate Regolith Oxygen competition, scheduled for 2008, will be held for robots that can extract oxygen from the stones. Some contests will be held annually; others will be one-time events. NASA funds robotics research through conventional contracts too, and it uses Small Business Innovation Research grants to back companies outside the industry's mainstream. But the paperwork involved in the innovation research grants, called S.B.I.R.'s, can be intimidating. "I don't have the grant-writing experience to get one of those," said Matthew Abrams, one of the competitors. "The contest seemed like a better deal. And winning something like this can give us the credibility and the contacts to go after S.B.I.R.'s." The competitions offer economic benefits to NASA as well. The contestants, not the space agency, pay for the development. The winner of a big technology prize usually spends three times the purse value, said Carl E. Walz, a former astronaut who works in NASA's exploration systems mission directorate. "Typically in R. & D., you pay as you go," Mr. Walz said, referring to NASA's outlays for research and development. "You pay for failures and you pay for successes. Here, you don't pay until someone wins." NASA officials say that some of their contractors are worried that the contests could undermine their work for the space agency. NASA already has companies working on gloves for its space suits; why, then, does it need an Astronaut Glove Challenge? Exactly how good ideas from the competitions will be integrated into the space program isn't entirely clear. "We're still writing the book on this," Mr. Walz said. But within NASA, enthusiasm for the challenges seems to be growing. The agency announced six more contests in February, including $5 million for the first team that can store or produce rocket fuel in orbit and $2.5 million for the builders of a working solar sail. If they win, both Mr. Jones and Mr. Abrams said they hoped to use their prize money to enter some of these more complex challenges, like the lunar lander competition being held by NASA and the X Prize Foundation. Gregg E. Maryniak, executive vice president of the foundation, said he looked forward to having them enter. "One of the biggest reasons to do this is to bring in people outside the existing ecosystem," he said. "Look, a hundred years ago, a couple of pesky bike mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, bested, in effect, the government-funded player, to become the first to fly," he added. "That's why you put on these things: to attract the bicycle mechanics." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/te...l4/05nasa.html ![]() Hunt For Private File Sharers Is Over – Prosecutor A Swedish appeal court decided on Wednesday not to hear the case against a man who illegally shared a film via the internet. The prosecutor said that the decision effectively puts an end to the hunt for private file sharers in Sweden. "I interpret this as a clear decision that individual file sharers, if they don't earn money from file sharing, won't get anything more than a fine. That means we can't trace IP addresses, which means that we can't trace private file sharers," said prosecutor Håkan Roswall to TV4. The question of punishment is decisive in determining how police and prosecutors may investigate file sharing. If only fines are imposed, then the crime is not so serious that IP addresses, each computer's unique identifier on the internet, can be requested from internet service providers. The particular case turned away by the Svea appeal court concerned a 27 year old man who was given a fine amounting to 80 days' salary by Sollentuna district court for breaking copyright laws. He admitted making the Swedish action film 'The Third Wave' accessible to others through a file sharing programme. The prosecutor wanted the punishment reconsidered and appealed against the judgement. After Wednesday's decision in the high court, he said that a change in the law would now be required if legal proceedings were to be brought against individuals. But Adrian Engman, an assessor at the Svea appeal court, told TV4 that the court did not see the decision as a precedent. "This case was about one person who one day made one film accessible on a file sharing network. The preliminary process is very clear on these points - only in bigger cases should there be a punishment of the degree of a prison sentence," he said. "There were no commercial interests here either." Henrik Pontén, a lawyer at the industry organisation Antipiratbyrån, said the punishment of 80 days' fine per film was satisfactory. "We think it's a fair and balanced penalty. We are not surprised that this was not granted a hearing," he told TT. "It doesn't cause any problems for us since the cases we report today relate to many more films. It's impossible to hunt file sharers who just share one film - but most of them have many more films that that," said Henrik Pontén. http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...59ef04db97ae5a Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - April 1st, March 25th, March 18th, March 11th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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