Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 8th, '05

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"This Circuit has never determined whether music downloaded from P2P systems violates the copyright owner's rights or is a fair use. The RIAA, to our knowledge, has never prevailed in any infringement actions brought against individual downloaders." – United States Court of Appeals FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT (PDF)


"Where Charter acted solely as a conduit for the transmission of material by others (its subscribers using P2P file-sharing software to exchange files stored on their personal computers), Charter contends the subpoena was not properly issued. We agree." – United States Court of Appeals FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT


"For purposes of this appeal, we do not address the constitutional arguments presented by Charter, but do note this court has some concern with the subpoena mechanism of § 512(h). We comment without deciding that this provision may unconstitutionally invade the power of the judiciary by creating a statutory framework pursuant to which Congress, via statute, compels a clerk of a court to issue a subpoena, thereby invoking the court's power. Further, we believe Charter has at least a colorable argument that a judicial subpoena is a court order that must be supported by a case or controversy at the time of its issuance. We emphasize, however, for purposes of this appeal we do not reach these issues and have decided this case on the more narrow statutory grounds.

"Accordingly, it is hereby ordered the November 17, 2003, order of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri enforcing various subpoenas for personal information about Charter's subscribers is hereby vacated. This matter is hereby remanded so the district court may: (1) Order the RIAA to return to Charter any and all information obtained from the subpoenas; (2) Order the RIAA to maintain no record of information derived from the subpoenas; (3) Order the RIAA to make no further use of the subscriber data obtained via the subpoenas; and (d) Grant such other relief not inconsistent with this order the district court deems appropriate in these circumstances." – United States Court of Appeals FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT


"No judge was involved in issuance of the subpoena." – MURPHY, Circuit Judge, dissenting


"It's a very impressive effort, and it speaks to the fact that Torrent users have a very strong sense of community." – Fred von Lohmann


"Exeem has nothing to do with BitTorrent, it's just another warez tool." – Bram Cohen


"People ask what those women saw in me. Let's face it, I wasn't a bad-looking stud. But that's not it. It's the music; it's standing up there under the lights. A lot of women just flip; looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking?." – Artie Shaw










THE INTERNET

To Those Seeking Help and Giving It, Computer Is a Lifeline
Scott Shane And Nicholas Confessore

The news hit like the wave, a flood of images and words streaming over every news channel and on the front of every newspaper. But hours after the tsunami battered coastlines in southern Asia, Lisa Bauman, a nurse in Austin, Tex., had heard nothing from her brother and his family, who were visiting Indonesia.

Like thousands of others worried about relatives and friends in this most global of disasters, she turned to the most global of media. She posted notices on half a dozen Web sites, including one on a message board created by the International Committee of the Red Cross: "Please help me find my brother Thomas Bauman Jr., his wife Vivi Gunawan and their two boys ... We have heard no word. Were you on their flight? Or did you see them at the airport?"

She spent hours on the Internet, scanning lists and photos of victims and survivors posted by hospitals and government offices and calling up the online version of The Jakarta Post for more detailed news.

She received consoling messages from strangers but little hard information. Finally, on Thursday night, her mother reached Mr. Bauman by telephone and learned that all in the family were fine.

Experiences like the Baumans' illustrate the Internet's extraordinary reach, but also its limitations.

On dozens of sites - chat rooms and message boards newly created by travel companies, news sites and relief agencies - individuals can enter brief physical descriptions of lost friends and family members, along with a plea for any scrap of information. Many who post are relatives of Western tourists who were traveling in Asia when the tsunami hit. They take to the Web to decipher unfamiliar place names or find maps of tiny beachside towns they know only from postcards. They comb through lists of the dead, posted at government Web sites and updated by the local authorities, or look up foreign hospitals, some of which have posted pictures of Western children whose parents were swept away.

The Internet has also become the main conduit of private donations for what is shaping up to be the biggest international relief effort in decades. By Tuesday, Amazon.com said it had raised more than $14 million by offering its site as a way to donate to the American Red Cross.

About half of the $92 million in donations to the American Red Cross so far have come over the Internet, a spokeswoman said.

Most of the dead were not tourists but residents of Thailand, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and other places where Internet access is hardly widespread. But even Americans and Europeans using the Internet seemed more likely to find condolences than a loved one: of a dozen people contacted by The New York Times who posted notices seeking missing relatives, none got a reply with useful information.

Esther Dyson, editor of the online journal Release 1.0 and a prominent writer on the Internet's impact, said people should not judge the bulletin boards a failure. They represent an astonishing technological leap beyond what would have been possible in a disaster a decade ago, she said.

"Anyone in the world can put up a bulletin board, and anyone else can search it and find a name," she said. "That's a miracle. The same tools we use to find the best buys on Amazon come into play when we're trying to find out who's alive and who's dead."

Whatever their ultimate value in tracing the missing, the public messages and photographs have turned the Web into a memorial of the catastrophe, marked by diversity and a sense of desperation:

"We're looking for our housemate, Pamella Lim, who is an Indonesian national working in Australia. She traveled to Jakarta over Christmas and was going to Medan in late December."

"Pastor Ruth Snyder who was working in Indonesia as a missionary. She was doing prison ministries."

"I'm looking for my best friend, Lia Schnackenberg. Last time I contacted her she said that she was staying on a bungalow at a beach. I'm not sure where."

"I'm looking for information about my friend Siri Nanda who lives in Habaraduwa (near Koggala) and worked as a beach boy near the Koggala Hotel."

The Web site of the Siam View Hotel in Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka, once displayed room descriptions and copies of the restaurant menu. Now it links to a plain-text page offering disaster updates and a list of the local dead and missing.

E-mail and Web sites are valuable for governments and private agencies coordinating logistics after such a disaster, said Paul Meyer, a Washington entrepreneur who has worked on providing technology in crises from West Africa to the Balkans.

In a crisis like the tsunami, "the fundamental problem is that no one's in charge," said Mr. Meyer, chief executive of Voxiva, which was preparing to offer its communications services in the disaster area. Speaking of the Web, he said, "There's a real role for a shared clearinghouse of information."

But he added: "You have to be realistic about the reach of the Internet. There's no cybercafe in the ruined villages of Sumatra."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/in...5internet.html


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A New Hope For BitTorrent?
John Borland

Just weeks after legal attacks crippled the popular BitTorrent file-swapping community, an underground programmer from its ranks has stepped forward to announce new software designed to withstand future onslaughts from Hollywood.

Dubbed Exeem, the software has already been distributed in a closed beta, or early test format, by the creators of the SuprNova.org Web site, which was until late last month the most popular hub for the BitTorrent file-swapping community.

Last week, the head of that now-defunct site, a man known as "Sloncek," officially announced the Exeem project in an interview on the NovaStream Webcasting network. He said that it would be a modified version of the popular BitTorrent technology, but transformed into a decentralized, searchable network similar to Kazaa or eDonkey.

Reports from some beta testers are now beginning to come in, as the private testing nears its end.

"The system seems to work pretty well," said Simon Bauman, who operates the Mitosis.com Web site and has tried the software for several weeks. "It seems faster than other peer-to-peer programs right now, but with only 5,000 people, it's hard to really gauge it."

Official confirmation of the Exeem program, released at a time when BitTorrent Web sites are under aggressive legal attack from Hollywood, raises the potential of mass migration for the millions of people around the world who have grown accustomed to using the technology to download movies, TV shows, music and software.

The shifting loyalties are now a familiar phenomenon in the peer-to-peer world, as lawsuits from the record industry or Hollywood studios have repeatedly driven users away from other once-popular networks such as Napster, Scour and Audiogalaxy. In each case, new services have eagerly risen to take their place, despite legal risks.

Among modern file-swapping services, BitTorrent has been uniquely vulnerable to legal attacks by copyright owners, because it has required that links to files be posted on Web sites. The Motion Picture Association of America launched an international legal assault on the most popular of those Web sites last month, helping to take some of the biggest ones offline.

SuprNova was one of the sites that vanished not long after the MPAA announcement, along with Youceff.com and several others. Another, dubbed LokiTorrent.com, remains operating despite having been sued by the MPAA in Texas, and has already raised close to $34,000 in donations to a legal defense fund.

Exeem is aimed at eliminating these easily targeted central points. Like other file-swapping applications, a decentralized service would be made up only of individual users, none of whom control the network.

"Basically it is a P2P program with the same specifications as BitTorrent had, but with its own network and its own files on it," Sloncek said in last week's interview, now reposted at the SuprNova site. It's "Kazaa and BitTorrent all together."

However, Sloncek's announcement has raised as many new questions as it has answered.

The program itself is being developed by an anonymous company that contacted him several months ago, the SuprNova administrator said. He's now officially working for that company as its representative, he added.

Some hints may be given by the Exeem.com domain name, which is registered to a Swarm Systems. The listed address for that company is in the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts & Nevis, at the local office of IFG Trust Services, a company that helps set up and administer offshore companies.

A telephone number provided along with the domain name information appeared to be incomplete or out of service. An IFG representative did not return calls seeking comment.

Older file-swapping companies have tried to incorporate themselves outside the reach of traditional legal or tax authorities. Sharman Networks, Kazaa's parent company, is based in Australia but incorporated on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, for example. That hasn't prevented the company from being sued in courts in the United States and Australia, however.

The Exeem technology could find itself in some of the same difficulties faced by other file-swapping networks.

Much of BitTorrent's popularity has come both because of the speed of downloads and the assurance that files were real instead of the decoys or damaged content often found on other file-swapping networks. Indeed, a recent academic study attributed much of BitTorrent's strength to the influence of moderators at the SuprNova Web site, who hand-checked files to ensure they were genuine.

"One of the big advantages of BitTorrent/SuprNova is the high level of integrity of both the content and the meta-data (information such as movie name or file size)," Johan Pouwelse, a Delft University of Technology researcher, wrote in a recent paper. "A decentralized scheme such as in Kazaa has no availability problems but lacks integrity, since Kazaa is plagued with many fake files."

Exeem includes tools to write comments or rate files, which Sloncek said would help eliminate fake files. However, Kazaa has included similar tools, and some researchers have found that up to 70 percent of versions of popular songs are actually fakes.

The software is being launched without any participation from Bram Cohen, the original BitTorrent creator. He dismisses the project as simply the latest in a long line of Kazaa clones that has little to do with his own software, even if it uses some of his technology.

"Exeem has nothing to do with BitTorrent," said Cohen, who is continuing to improve his own technology in hopes of seeing it adopted by big online businesses. "It's just yet another warez (a slang term for pirated content) tool."

In his interview, Sloncek said Exeem would be free, but ad-supported. A public version will likely be available "very soon," he said.
http://news.com.com/A+new+hope+for+B...3-5512230.html


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Court Rules on Music Downloader IDs
Ted Bridis

A second U.S. appeals court ruled Tuesday that the recording industry can't force Internet providers to identify music downloaders under a disputed copyright law.

The decision doesn't significantly affect the industry's continuing campaign to sue Internet users.

The 2-1 ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis affirms another appeals court's decision in Washington in December 2003. Both courts ruled against efforts by the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade organization for the largest labels, to compel Internet providers to identify customers accused of illegally distributing songs over the Internet.

In the Missouri case, judges said that Charter Communications Inc., one of the nation's largest Internet providers, wasn't responsible for 93 of its customers allegedly trading 100,000 copyrighted music files across the Internet and shouldn't have been compelled to identify them under the 1988 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The appeals court said Charter's role was "confined to acting as a conduit in the transfer of files through its network."

Since the earlier ruling, the music industry has filed civil lawsuits nationwide against "John Doe" defendants, based on their Internet addresses, then worked through the courts to learn their names. That process is more complicated - and more expensive - for the record labels.

The RIAA said it will continue to sue thousands of people it accuses of illegally sharing music. "Our enforcement efforts won't miss a beat," spokesman Jonathan Lamy said.

In a dissent, Circuit Judge Diana E. Murphy complained that the rulings prevent copyright holders from easily protecting their works and said repercussions were "too easily ignored or minimized." She wrote that the industry's practice of filing lawsuits against anonymous defendants was "cumbersome and expensive."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT


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Court: No Warrant Needed To Search Your Work PC
Declan McCullagh

Police do not need a search warrant to examine an employee's computer for incriminating files, a Washington state appeals court has ruled.

All that is necessary is the permission of the business that owns the computer, the appeals court said in a 3-0 decision last week.

In April 2003, when Jack Leck briefly worked at a nonprofit organization called the World Peace Ambassadors, he allegedly used an office computer to do Web searches for preteen boys and girls and participate in related mailing lists from his Hotmail account. When police showed up with some questions, the nonprofit group permitted that computer to be seized without a warrant.

Leck was charged with 50 counts of possessing child pornography and sentenced to four years in prison. He claimed the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab's seizure and search of the computer without a warrant was illegal because it violated his Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

The appeals court disagreed. The Washington state Supreme Court has authorized warrantless searches as long as the lawful owner of the property gives consent voluntarily, the court noted. "Leck did not share equal authority with (the nonprofit's director) over the WPA office or computer, thus, Leck's consent to the state's search was not necessary," wrote Judge Marywave Van Deren.

The court upheld Leck's conviction and sentence.
http://news.com.com/Court+No+warrant...3-5513266.html


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Music Industry To Raid Oz Unis Over Online Piracy
Nathan Cochrane

The music recording industry is set to raid several Australian universities by the end of February to ferret out illicit trading of copyrighted digital material.

The move is part of a globally co-ordinated strategy in the week before Christmas in which police and lawyers shut down European websites holding links to files that could help people locate pirated material.

Michael Speck, the lead investigator for Australian recording labels' Music Industry Piracy Investigations, said the planned raids were to protect licensed online sellers of music and other copyrighted content by "clearing out the illegal brushwood". Although he would not name the universities he was targeting, he said they were "across Australia".

Cases by the music industry against the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania are also likely to resume about the same time as the raids.

Mr Speck said several universities had taken no action against alleged pirates, "despite our good faith negotiations to minimise infringing activity".

Copyright industries are engaged in a globally co-ordinated attack to cut down the illicit spread of material across "peer-to-peer" (P2P) networks, in which users directly transfer files such as music, software, films, TV shows and electronic books between each other.

Such P2P traffic is estimated to account for 17 per cent of Australian internet use in October, costing businesses as much as $60 million in bandwidth charges, according to Melbourne-based network management provider Exinda Networks. The likely cost to copyright holders is many times more, the industry says.

An October study by Dr Johan Pouwelse at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands found more than 1.2 million people requested files each day from Bit Torrent, one of the most popular pirate networks at the centre of last month's raids in Europe.

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the major film studios, signalled its intention to get tough with flagrant abusers of its copyrights on December 14, filing civil lawsuits in the US and Britain against the operators of Bit Torrent, eDonkey and Direct Connect servers.

That week, police and lawyers acting for the association in France, the Netherlands and Finland seized equipment and detained more than 30 people connected to websites that host the index files that often point to illicitly shared copyrighted material held on users' personal computers.

Mr Speck said there were "a number of targets in Australia or in the region" soon to be shut down in similar fashion.

Early last month, universities, through the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, signed a $17.5 million deal with copyright collections agency Screenrights to allow students and staff to legally share film and television content over institutions' networks for the next five years. Australian universities spend about $20 million a year on copyright licensing, says the committee.

Despite this, Mr Speck said "universities had shown a complete disregard for music copyright". The music industry maintains that students use university networks to illegally swap material. Vice-chancellors' committee chief executive John Mullarvey countered that the music industry saw universities as a convenient "cash cow".

The industry had unsuccessfully approached several universities seeking to sign separate licensing contracts, he said.

"But it hasn't gone very far because of the constant action by parts of the music industry in suing universities," Mr Mullarvey said. "We don't see that as being conducive to reaching a satisfactory agreement.

"We totally reject the accusations by Mr Speck. These have been ongoing accusations by him over a number of years that are yet to be proven despite legal action taken by the music industry against a number of universities."

The piracy investigations group's proposed enforcement will coincide with two cases before Australian courts due to resume at the end of February and beginning of March, in which Vanuatu-based Kazaa software maker Sharman and, separately, Sydney man Stephen Cooper are alleged to have infringed the rights of intellectual property owners.

But actions such as raiding websites or prosecuting P2P users are unlikely to succeed in the short term, according to Exinda Networks executive director Con Nikolouzakis. Mr Nikolouzakis said P2P users would continue activities elsewhere.

Already piracy activity had shifted to sites not caught in last month's European crackdown, with some dormant sites reactivating after several years. And a new P2P technology, Exeem, is slated for the new year, making it more difficult for copyright holders to police networks.

"I think what (the industry) is trying to do is show their presence and . . . (show) that they are not a soft target and try to deter users," Mr Nikolouzakis said. "But at the end of the day you can't stop the technology."
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...344993138.html

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New Congress, Old Tech Issues
Roy Mark

The 109th Congress convenes at noon today facing the same technology policy questions the 108th Congress was uninterested, unable or unwilling to render judgments on. Leftovers from the last session include the regulation of IP-based network services, stock option expensing and providing more spectrum for commercial wireless broadband providers.

The new, two-year Congress will also face renewed demands to pass anti-spyware legislation, ban the peer-to-peer (P2P) technology used for music and movie piracy and to pass measures curbing Internet pornography.

"I expect we'll see all those issues and more," says Jim DeLong, a senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington think tank.

Deregulation-minded Republicans will again control the Congressional tech agenda, but the majority party in the 108th Congress often failed to follow the legislation of its own technology leaders. A core group of GOP lawmakers that blocked key tech legislation in the last session remains concerned that the rush to deregulate will impoverish state, county and local treasuries.

But the biggest obstacle to the technology agendas of the next two years may simply be time. President Bush's vow to push through Social Security reform and widely expected Supreme Court nominee debates, combined with the Congressional oversight of the war in Iraq, are likely to suck the air out most other debates.

"President Bush has never mentioned telecom reform," DeLong notes. "I'll bet the word 'broadband' will not pass the lips of the president."

Roger Cochetti, the group director of public policy at the IT trade group CompTia, takes a more optimistic view of possible telecom reform in the 109th Congress: "Something will happen, but not quickly. Some revisions or modifications in the original [1996 Telecommunications Act] will happen."

Cochetti's group, with more than 20,000 members, is currently fashioning its own agenda for the 109th Congress, but he says the trade association is initially focusing on "protecting the network economy from needless regulations" and tax credits for IT workforce retraining.

At the corporate level, TechNet, the 150-member lobbying network of CEOs and senior partners, will be pushing to rollback or quash pending stock option expensing rules and expanding broadband penetration rates through both regulatory and legislative means, according to spokesman Jim Hock.

Technology lawmakers and IT trade groups are also quick to note that issues currently in play before the courts and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could further cloud their agendas.

"The Grokster case will put everyone in the deep freezer [on intellectual property issues]," DeLong predicts.

The U.S. Supreme Court said last month it would hear oral arguments in MGM vs. Grokster in March. The music industry contends P2P companies such as Grokster and Kazaa should be held responsible for the illegal distribution of copyrighted material on their file-sharing networks.

The argument has been rejected twice already by a district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion in the case by early summer.

"Whoever loses is likely to go back to Congress screaming," DeLong adds.

At the FCC, an ongoing proceeding on IP-enabled services gives Congress at least six more months to examine Chairman Michael Powell's IT direction. The proceeding so far has resulted in the FCC declaring Voice Over IP (define) an interstate service and not subject to state regulations. It has also ruled that VoIP providers must comply with federal wiretap rules.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3454071


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WMA files some Bad Mojo

Risk Your PC's Health for a Song?

Ads and adware have a new way to get on your computer--through files that appear to be music and video.
Andrew Brandt and Eric Dahl, PCWorld.com

Think you're downloading a new song or video? Watch out--that file may be stuffed with pop-ups and adware.

PC World has learned that some Windows Media files on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa contain code that can spawn a string of pop-up ads and install adware. They look just like regular songs or short videos in Windows Media format, but launch ads instead of media clips.

When we ran the files, we noted over half a dozen pop-ups, some attempts to download adware onto our test PC, and an attempt to hijack our browser's home page. However, you can take steps to guard your PC against this ad invasion.

Off-Key Experience

A reader initially alerted PC World to an ad-laden Windows Media Audio file, titled "Alicia Keys Fallin' Songs In A Minor 4.wma." We then found two other WMA files and two Windows Media Video files that had been similarly modified.

Using a packet analysis tool called Etherpeek, we determined that each media file loaded a page served by a company called Overpeer (owned by Loudeye). That page set off a chain of events that led to the creation of several Internet Explorer windows, each containing a different ad or adware.

Overpeer first made news in mid-2002 by offering its services to record companies looking to stop P-to- P pirates. It creates fake audio files that purport to be popular songs but play only a short loop of the track or an antipiracy message; the file then pops up a window offering the downloader a chance to buy the song. By flooding file-sharing services with spoofed files, Overpeer makes finding real music files more difficult.

Marc Morgenstern, Loudeye vice president and general manager of digital media asset protection, says the files we found come from a different division of the company--one that targets users with promotions or ads based on the keywords those users search for on P-to-P networks or in other venues.

Though the two businesses differ, the result is likely the same--a further reduction in the effectiveness of popular P-to-P networks. Morgenstern characterized Overpeer's actions as just deserts for people who illegally trade copyrighted works for free. "Remember, the people who receive something like (the ad-laden media files), in some cases, were on P-to-P, and they were trying to get illicit files," he says.

Firms Surprised

PC World contacted Microsoft and the seven ad-serving companies whose ads popped up when we ran the Keys audio file. "We're looking into exactly what's going on with this file and checking to see if this particular model is in keeping with the licensing terms for Windows Media [Digital Rights Management]," says David Caulton, group product manager for Microsoft's Windows Digital Media Division. "We wouldn't want to endorse anything that involved delivery of content that appears to be one thing, and then something else is delivered."

Only one of the advertising firms, Kanoodle, responded to us. "Kanoodle stringently vets all prospective partners to determine in advance how they will distribute our sponsored links," Lance Podell, the company's president emailed PC World. "As in this case, upon detecting or discovering any prohibited distribution activity, we eliminate it immediately." Indeed, Kanoodle's ads no longer appear when we relaunch the file.

DRM Loophole

A loophole in the Windows Media DRM process allows companies to create ersatz media files and link them to adware. Normally, when you download a protected Windows Media file, you also receive a license that lets you play it. According to Caulton, if Windows Media Player can't find a valid license on your PC, it checks in with a remote system running Microsoft's Windows Media DRM Server.

You'll rarely see that happen. Some files, though, are set up to ask you for information before playing. They do this by displaying a URL in a dialog box labeled License Acquisition. Normally that dialog box is used to check for a user name or offer a chance to purchase the file that's being played.

For example, a legitimate DRM-encrypted file might let you play it three times, then bring up a window asking if you want to buy it. Or a band might offer a song to you for free if you agreed to sign up for its mailing list or view a 15-second commercial. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work.

But since the license dialog box acts just like an Internet Explorer window, it can display whatever is on the page it points to--whether a legitimate call for license information or a series of pop-up ads.

When we played the modified files, the License Acquisition dialog box showed a page containing ads and quickly spawned more IE windows, each containing a different ad.

Not only did we get bombarded with unwanted ads, but one of the ad windows in a video file tried to install adware onto our test PC surreptitiously, while another added items to our browser's Favorites list and attempted to change our home page. And a window from the original music file asked to download a file called lyrics.zip, which contained the installer for 180search Assistant, commonly categorized as an adware program.

The media files appear to run once the ads load, but they were devoid of video or music.

First Wave?

The ads in Overpeer's disguised media files may annoy some users. But malicious agents such as hackers and thieves could exploit the DRM loophole to do far worse. Security experts fear that, for example, criminals could load their own modified media files with keystroke loggers or other software for taking over your PC, and thus steal your passwords or other sensitive information.

According to Microsoft's Caulton, "It's possible that someone could modify [an existing audio] file after it's created to point back to their http server." If that's the case, virus and malware writers would gain a powerful platform for launching their attacks.

Writing the code to infect computers is the easy part, according to Johannes B. Ullrich, the chief technical officer for the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, a computer security watchdog group. "With a lot of these Internet Explorer exploits, the big question is how to get people to visit [the site that executes that code]," he says.

Hacked audio files could provide the perfect incentive. The songs we found gave no warning before launching their string of pop-ups, and before being played they gave little or no indication that they were anything but normal WMA files.

Senior Reporter Tom Spring contributed to this report.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119016,00.asp


Protect Yourself From Audio Adware

Not all files on peer-to-peer networks are genuine. Here are tips to help you dodge the fakes.
Andrew Brandt and Eric Dahl, PCWorld.com

Worried about downloading the wrong file and messing up your PC?

For the moment, you don't have to fret much. Even though PC World found files that purported to be music but, when opened, spawned a flock of pop-up ads, audio and video adware isn't widespread. And malicious hackers haven't yet figured out how to craft files that do the same thing. But to be on the safe side, you should think a little more carefully about the files you download from peer-to-peer networks.

The easiest solution is to simply stop downloading WMA files from P-to-P services. But with legitimate, music-industry-sanctioned P-to-P services preparing to launch early next year, that may not be an option for everyone.

Prevent bogus files laden with adware or spyware from infiltrating your PC by taking the following steps:

· Change windows Media Player setting to give you more warning. Select Tool, Options, Privacy and turn off 'Acquire licenses automatically for protected content'. A dialog box then will warn you each time a protected file attempts to get a license, and it will display the URL from which the file intends to request the license. If you have any doubts about the site, choose 'No.' Changing this setting in Windows Media Player will affect any other players you use that support Microsoft's DRM scheme.
· At a minimum, set your browser to prompt you prior to downloading any ActiveX controls (in IE, choose Tools, Internet options, Security and click 'Custom Level'.) No matter what you have set as your default browser, you'll see Internet Explorer windows if you play one of these bogus files.
· Use a pop-up blocker. This won't prevent the initial ad or the first IE window spawned, but it will prevent further pop- ups from appearing on your PC.
· Turn on automatic Windows updates to make sure IE holes are plugged quickly.
· Run a firewall, and monitor outgoing and incoming Internet requests.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119063,00.asp


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Oh no, there goes Tokyo


A new collection of "Godzilla," celebrating the
series' 50th anniversary, offers dubbing and subtitles.


50th-Anniversary Collection of 'Godzilla'

When Godzilla first rose from the Pacific Ocean in 1954, a giant, mutant lizard awakened by the atomic bomb blast in Japan, he was a pure, starkly black-and-white expression of Japanese fear of nuclear war.

But as the series developed, the big green guy become something of a national pet, reliably stomping in to Tokyo to defeat attacks from other, less appealingly doglike monsters (the snaky Ghidorah, for one) who threatened his Japanese brethren. In the folksy "Son of Godzilla" (1967), old Green Eyes reproduced, introducing a cuddly, big-eyed son who officially confirmed the series transformation from adult horror to brightly colored children's adventure.

Columbia Tri-Star Home Entertainment, perhaps prompted by the national pride of the studio's parent company, Sony, has been pumping out Godzilla films in astounding profusion. (With more than 40 titles to choose from, there is no shortage of material.) The latest group to come from Columbia, which was released on Dec. 12, leaps from "Son of Godzilla" to "Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla" (1974) and concludes with "Godzilla Tokyo S.O.S." (2003).

For viewers who saw the earlier films at children's matinees or on television in the 1970's, it's a revelation to see the impressive production values brought to most of these films, values obscured by the notoriously awful dubbing and sloppy printing processes to which the films were subjected in the United States.

The new discs offer both dubbing and subtitles (and it is amazing how much more professional the films seem when the characters are allowed to speak with their own voices). They are presented in a full, widescreen format with excellent detail and color.

Unchanged, though, are the playful special effects, which continue to resist digital developments in favor of grand scale puppetry, which is to say guys in rubber suits stomping through meticulously detailed models of the Ginza. Even after 50 years, the big fellow hasn't learned to duck when he approaches high-tension power lines - though maybe he just likes the sparks. $24.96 each. PG.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/movies/04dvd.html


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HP to Offer TV Media Hub

Hewlett-Packard will introduce a new device this fall meant to record and play back television as well as organize digital media, including photos, music and video, the company said yesterday.

Hewlett already offers similar devices based on Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition. The device, called the HP Media Hub, will be based on the Linux operating system.

Carleton S. Fiorina, the chief executive, said that by using Linux, rather than Windows, Hewlett can reduce the cost of the device, which has not been set, she said.

"The real motive is not the cost," she added, but "the ease of use and simplicity."

Ms. Fiorina will present a keynote address on Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where she will outline Hewlett's broad push into entertainment.

She will show the hub, several new devices that use the Windows Media Center software and 17 new high-definition television models, including some using plasma, liquid crystal and projection technologies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/te...05hewlett.html


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Samsung Launches Wide TVs, Long-Life MP3s

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. will release an 80-inch plasma television set, a portable music player that runs for 42 hours on one battery and a DVD recorder that copies one disc directly from another, the company said on Wednesday.

Those products are among a broad range of media devices Samsung plans for 2005, all on display at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week.

Samsung plans to release the 80-inch plasma TV in May but did not name a price. It bills the display as the world's largest plasma TV, though Samsung has actually demonstrated a prototype 102-inch set.

The long-life MP3 music player, with prices ranging from $120 up to $200 for a 1 gigabyte model, supports systems to copy-protect music and includes popular MP3 player add-ons like an FM radio tuner and voice recording capabilities. It will be available this month.

The dual-tray DVD recorder, permitting direct disc-to-disc copying, is set for the third quarter with a $500 price tag. Samsung says it can copy two hours of video in 30 minutes.

The world's electronics companies have descended on Las Vegas this week to showcase the latest in home entertainment and productivity technology, and the buzz created by new products at CES can make a major difference at retail, particularly among heavy-spending "early adopters," as consumers who rush to buy the newest products are known.

Other new products in Samsung's lineup include a camcorder with a five-megapixel camera lens, wide-screen LCD TVs up to 57 inches, and a number of home theater systems.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7245244


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TiVo Unveils Portable Transfer Service
May Wong

TiVo Inc. pioneered digital video recording as a new way of watching television - when you want it. Now it could be TV where you want it, too.

The long-awaited service feature called TiVoToGo, set to launch Monday, will give users their first taste of TiVo untethered.

No longer confined to TiVo digital video recorders in the living room or bedroom, subscribers will be able to transfer their recorded shows to PCs or laptops and take them on the road - as long as the shows are not specially tagged with copy restrictions. That's also the case for pay-per-view or on-demand movies, and some premium paid programming.

Users also will be able to copy shows onto a DVD - soon after but not immediately at the service launch, company officials said.

The mobile feature is a key step in TiVo's long- term vision of giving consumers more freedom with how and where they enjoy their favorite TV. TiVo plans to extend TiVoToGo so it will work on other portable media gadgets, as well.

The company, based in the south San Francisco Bay community of Alviso, eventually hopes to expand its service so video can be accessed anywhere via the Internet.

"It lays the foundation of moving content out of the living room," TiVo spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said.

For now, the feature sets TiVo apart from its growing list of competitors, such as cable operators that are introducing digital video recording features into their set-top- boxes.

"Right now, TiVo is trying to build a culture of letting consumers move their content around the home and beyond, and as long as they're doing it within the copyright concerns, it's a good idea," said Vamsi Sistla, analyst with market researcher ABI Research.

Digital video recorders let viewers record TV shows onto hard disks, fast-forward through commercials and pause live broadcasts. TiVo subscribers account for about a third of the estimated 6.5 million of the nation's households that have DVRs.

TiVoToGo will be an automatic, free service upgrade for subscribers who own standalone Series2 TiVo DVRs. It will not work for subscribers owning DirecTV-TiVo satellite boxes. Also, the technology will work only with computers based on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP or 2000 operating systems, although a version for Macintosh computers is planned, TiVo officials said.

The recorded shows are transferred to PCs or laptops via a home computer network. Users would have to download free desktop software from the TiVo Web site onto the computers. A media access code and password is assigned to each user's account, essentially restricting the transferring and playback of shows to household members with the same access code.

TiVo officials have tried to strike a balance between what they consider consumers' rights and Hollywood's copyright concerns. They say the video files being transferred are encrypted and need the corresponding media access code for playback.

If users try to e-mail the files to others or send the files over the Internet, their accounts could be revoked, Kelly said.

"We're trying to send a clear message that TiVoToGo is for personal use only," said Jim Denney, director of product marketing at TiVo. "And we're putting appropriate safeguards in place to keep people from rampantly sharing the content."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT


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Trouble Can Be Downloaded Along With Music
Don Oldenburg

Some of this year's hottest gifts, especially for teens, are those tiny, portable digital music players such as the pack-leading Apple iPod (estimated holiday sales -- 4 million) and competitors like Creative Zen Micro and Rio. About the size of cell phones, MP3 players can carry music anywhere and store thousands of songs copied from CDs or downloaded from the Internet.

But technology security experts warn that many of this holiday season's millions of newbie MP3 player owners don't know what dangers lurk behind some music.

"The risk has skyrocketed," says Kraig Lane, group product manager at the computer-security products manufacturer Symantec. "The bad guys are putting evil agents into music files and even videos that we are downloading. Music files especially. And you don't know it's there."

The big problem is that some music services -- particularly the free and legally questionable peer-to-peer (P2P), file-swapping networks like Kazaa, BearShare and LimeWire that connect millions of home-computer users -- deliver something in addition to free software and music. They sneak in adware -- or, even worse, viruses and spyware.

Even reputable online music stores sometimes install adware. Considered the most benign of such programs, adware hides in the background of a computer to track user online behavior and report it to advertising companies so they can target ads. It's legal, and users often grant tacit permission to receive it when accepting licensing agreements at Web sites.

Such downloading has become big business for those sites. Apple announced last week that music fans had downloaded more than 200 million songs from its iTunes Music Store since its launch in 2003. Featuring more than 1 million tracks at 99 cents each, iTunes now sells nearly 5 million songs a week. The online service eMusic said recently that it is selling 1.5 million downloads a month. And there are more than a dozen other online sites either selling or sharing, free of charge, millions of downloaded music files. Even Wal-Mart now sells music online to download.

More sinister and malicious than adware is spyware, which scours the hard drive for personal and financial data, such as credit card numbers, and reports it to crooks.

"Kids are attracted to the file-sharing Web sites where they share little music snippets with each other -- but those snippets can now carry these evil agents imbedded in them," says Lane, adding that the problem has bumped up in scale and severity over the past year. "It's like a Trojan horse."

What to do about spyware?

Not downloading files from disreputable or questionable sites is a start. Then there are several free online programs that scan your hard drive and eliminate spyware, such as Spybot and Ad-Aware. At its Web site, Symantec offers a free service that searches a computer for spyware.

And, says Lane, it's essential in these dangerous times online to protect home computers with an up-to-date firewall, antivirus and anti-spam program, such as Symantec's Norton Internet Security. Other top-rated programs include McAfee's Personal Firewall and VirusScan, and Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security.

BATTLING THE THREAT

For a free test of your computer's exposure to spyware, viruses and other Internet threats, visit Symantec's Web site at www.symantec.com/homecomputing/ and click

"Security Check" at the bottom of the page.

Apple's Web site at www.apple.com has information about iPods and links to its iTunes Music Store.

For a roundup of free and trial anti-spyware tools that scan for and destroy spyware, including the popular Ad-Aware and Spybot, visit PC World's download Web site at http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/col...id,1332,00.asp.

Visit www.spywareinfo.com for up-to-date information about threats to your computer and for free tools to check for spyware.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Dec27.html


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Bootleggers Compete For Bragging Rights On The Quality Of Pilfered Movies, With Extra Points For Beating A Release Date
Alex Veiga

In not-too-secret online forums, Wesley Snipes' latest movie, "Blade: Trinity," is the subject of intense discussion and evaluation.

But unlike the comments on typical movie fan sites, the chatter from visitors to Web sites like VCDQuality.com doesn't key on the vampire film's plot, acting or bloody visual effects.

Instead, computer users dish out praise or criticism of the caliber of video and sound achieved by online groups whose sole mission is to make available unauthorized copies of Hollywood films within a day or two of a movie's debut, if not before.

For these online bootleggers, who authorities say represent the top of a distribution pyramid for pirated movies, software and music, it's all about bragging rights for being first to copy a hot title or releasing the best-quality replica.

"On the top sites, on those really private sites, the sport is about the next film and the next game," said Marc Morgenstern, vice president and general manager of Overpeer, a unit of Seattle-based Loudeye that combs the Internet for pirated content on behalf of entertainment companies. "That's where those gangs put feathers in their cap. They score even more points if they do it before the release date."

Members of these so-called ripping groups, also known as warez groups, have created a community referred to as "the scene." It exists primarily on the Internet's back alleys - in private Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, which is a precursor to the modern instant messaging software, or Usenet newsgroups that function like bulletin boards.

Years to get access

Unlike the case with popular file-swapping networks where millions of files - mostly for music - are shared relatively easily, it takes more than a casual effort to even begin to find the right place to download a movie.

"The scene is a very close network. Everybody knows everybody else, but they haven't met them," said Bruce Forest, a Norwalk, Conn., digital media consultant who says he belonged to the scene for years and now advises entertainment companies. "It can take years until you can get access." Typically, large movie files are broken down into text that appears to the naked eye as gibberish. Files are distributed through newsgroups or made available through so-called top sites or private computer servers accessed by File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, an early conduit for exchanging data on the Internet.

Only trusted members of the scene or those who help get early copies of movies, software and music are granted access to private FTP links where the newest and highest- quality bootlegs are available. The use of online nicknames and anonymous e-mail accounts is common.

These files eventually trickle down to file-sharing services such as BitTorrent, and from there titles can be copied further given the higher number of users.

Trading large movie files isn't as much of a problem as swapping far smaller music files, but Hollywood film studios want to focus attention on it now, before the problem gets worse as broadband usage grows.

They prefer to stem it at the source. Once movies migrate from the scene to P2P (peer to peer), the entertainment companies have few options: sue computer users, and follow the music industry's tactic of flooding the P2P networks with spoofed, or bogus, files to make bootlegs tougher to find and download.

On VCDQuality and other Web sites, ripping groups with names like "Pirates of The Theater," "The Empire Group," and "VideoCD" advertise the movies they have available.

Individual groups even sport their own logos or tags, images often reminiscent of the low-quality gray and black graphics used on old online bulletin boards more than a decade ago.

The groups are typically very hierarchical, with tiers of leadership, said John Malcolm, head of the Motion Picture Association of America's antipiracy unit.

"There are many of them out there, highly organized, very clandestine," Malcolm said. "They're tough nuts to crack." The groups often are dedicated to converting video shot inside movie theaters or copied from studio screener DVDs into a certain format, such as video CDs. Others focus on acquiring and copying pre-release DVDs.

To get the latest film or software, the groups seek out and maintain contact with Hollywood studio insiders, employees at CD and DVD pressing plants, marketing staff with access to early copies and anyone else who can get them pre- release movies, openly advertising for them on bulletin boards, Forest said.

While entertainment companies have targeted popular file-sharing services and their users with litigation in recent years, they have not been able to discourage insiders who supply the ripping groups with their crop of advance film screeners, DVDs and other content.

In one highly publicized case in April, an Illinois man pleaded guilty to copyright infringement for distributing online the screener copies provided by a Hollywood insider.

Delicate discussions

Many of the Web sites, newsgroups and associated IRC discussion boards openly discourage any overt mention of bootlegging, banning people who do. Discussions are typically framed as advice for making legal backups of DVDs or software.

Web sites like VCDQuality advertise themselves as information clearinghouses and don't host any files.

Nonetheless, a recent scan of the movies listed by groups at VCDQuality turned up several films released within the past four weeks, including "Meet the Fockers," "Ocean's Twelve," "Fat Albert" and "Finding Neverland." The site's administrator did not reply to repeated e-mail queries seeking comment.

While users of file-sharing programs like Kazaa, eDonkey and LimeWire are relatively easy to track and identify, the covert nature of the scene has made going after warez groups more of a challenge. To gather evidence, investigators must peel away the layers of technology the groups hide behind.

Authorities don't have a fix on how many groups exist.

"There are a lot of similarities with the drug war," said David Israelite, chairman of the U.S. Justice Department's Intellectual Property Task Force. "You never really are going to eliminate the problem, but what you hope to do is stop its growth."
http://www.nynewsday.com/entertainme...adlines-movies


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Canadian Teen Sentenced In Randex Virus Case

The RCMP works with Scotland Yard to crack down on an international malware gang. A member of the technology crime unit explains the offender's motives -- and possible job prospects
Shane Schick

The sentencing of a Canadian teenager late last year for writing the Randex virus will officially end an investigation into an international gang that involved a collaboration between the RCMP and Scotland Yard, an officer said Wednesday.

The 16-year-old Mississauga, Ont., male pled guilty to charges of mischief against data and fraudulent use of a computer in November. A judge sentenced him to nine months' probation. Another 16-year-old based in the U.K. was given only six months for his role in creating and distributing Randex, which believed to be behind a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which crippled ISPs in October 2003.

Randex-infected computers could be controlled by spammers through an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client, which authorities believe was used to spread the virus, as well as file-sharing networks such as Kazaa. Police estimate that 30,000 computers were infected with Randex over a seven- or eight-month period.

Constable Chris Lonnee of the RCMP's Integrated Technological Crime Unit in London, Ont., said a tip regarding the Randex author came from Scotland Yard, who were able to identify a teenager who was distributing the virus in Germany based on leads from a local computer hobbyist. The RCMP then conducted a series of interviews which led to the arrest of the Mississauga teen.

"Everything leaves a footprint on the Internet," Lonnee said. "It doesn't take much for one person to say something about someone else."

Sophos security analyst Gregg Mastoras said Randex offered "back door" access to Windows systems, and spawned approximately 60 variants, which were also used for malicious purposes.

"My sense is with this many variants, the base code was fairly successful," he said. "Either he or someone else was taking his code. Each one of those variants is a virus itself, so they all did different levels of harm."

The convicted Mississauga teen, who cannot be named under the law, was not given any restrictions around use of a computer or the Internet during his probation, Lonnee said.

"The courts don't want to penalize somebody for their future, especially at that age," he said. "We talked to the boy, and he seemed like a good kid. He's not out for profit or to damage large corporations. It was more for his own personal knowledge. They get caught up in it and it's too far gone."

Lonnee said young people like the Randex author often pursue legitimate careers in computing when they get older.

"The people that do this type of thing, most if the time they're doing it for recognition in their peer group. Most of the time it's done for nothing other than bragging rights," he said. "They don't realize who they're hurting or what's happening until it's actually shown to them."

CTC Training Centres is one of a few institutions in Canada to offer an "ethical hacking" course, in this case developed by the International Council of E-Commerce Consultants. Amanda Strong, the branch manager for the Vancouver CTC location, said the organization recently sent out an e-mail blast promoting the course and has had considerable response.

"The only thing we have them sign is a form saying they're not going to use what they learn as illegal," she said, adding that few of the applications indicate a previous history of virus writing. "Most of the ones we have've gotten an interest in are employees of established companies."

Although the conviction ends the RCMP and Scotland Yard's Randex investigation, Lonnee said an American fugitive used the virus to commit DDoS attacks in the United States. The FBI is currently pursuing the fugitive, who is believed to be somewhere in Morocco, he said.

The search warrant used to arrest the Mississauga teen also led to another investigation and charges against an adult male for possessing child pornography.
http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?t...d=1&sid=57779#


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BitTorrent Loyalists Donate Cash To Fight MPAA
John P. Mello Jr.

"It's a very impressive effort, and it speaks to the fact that Torrent users have a very strong sense of community," said Fred von Lohmann, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

A call for financial support by the operator of a BitTorrent server that's been targeted by the motion picture industry as a hub for pirated films has achieved initial success.

Edward Webber, operator of Loki Torrent, posted a plea for money at his Web site last week to fight a lawsuit slapped on his outfit by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which claims Webber's site provides links to purloined movies through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network.

According to information posted at Webber's site, he needs US$30,000 a month to pay lawyers to defend Loki Torrent from the MPAA. As of this morning, Webber, who is collecting donations via PayPal, had exceeded his first month's goal for his defense fund, raising more than $33,000.

Landmark Case?

"Loki Torrent is fighting for your rights to freely share on the Internet," Webber contends on his Web site .

"The MPAA is a large organization and this battle will not likely be easily won, even knowing that we are in the right," he continues. "They have deep pockets and many attorneys and we are not a large corporation. We are one site taking the risk of standing up for everyone's rights."

"This is looking to be a landmark case concerning your rights on the Internet," he adds, "and we need to be able to fight them through [to] victory."

Expensive Litigation

Fred von Lohmann, who, as a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, knows a thing or two about trading briefs in court with the likes of the MPAA and their music industry counterpart, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), praised Loki Torrent's efforts. "It's a very impressive effort, and it speaks to the fact that Torrent users have a very strong sense of community," he told TechNewsWorld.

Nevertheless, Webber might be assuming a Sisyphean burden by going it alone against the MPAA. "You have to realize just how expensive lawsuits are in our civil system," von Lohmann observed. "Last time I checked, they had raised $28,000. That wouldn't be enough money to see you through even the preliminary stages of a civil suit, much less all the way to trial."

But the MPAA might not be looking to go to trial. It might angle to settle its cases out of court. Under those circumstances, it will be interesting to see the size of the settlements sought by the organization, von Lohmann noted. "In the recording industry lawsuits, they obviously chose numbers that were low enough that it really didn't make any sense to fight," he said.

"If the MPAA offered the guy at Loki Torrent a settlement number that was equal or less than the amount of money he's raised so far, it might be very difficult for him to decide to fight, knowing it would cost him more to defend himself whether he won or not."

Not Looking for Settlement

Thus far, the MPAA hasn't dangled any settlement terms in front of Loki Torrent, Webber told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "The only settlement we see in the future is the MPAA dropping their case."

Attempts to reach the MPAA by TechNewsWorld for comment were unavailing.

Although the most recent wave of lawsuits by the MPAA suggests irreconcilable differences between the entertainment industry and the P2P community, there are those who believe the groups will find mutually beneficial ground.

Big Bets on P2P

"It's time for the entertainment companies to embrace the noninfringing uses of P2P," Travis Kalanick, CEO of Red Swoosh, an online entertainment content deliverer based in El Segundo, California, said.

"There is no need to make a particular kind of technology to be the villain," argued Kalanick, the former operator of Scour, a Napster-era file sharing network sued into oblivion in 2000 by the entertainment industry.

"If they [the entertainment industry] want infringement and piracy to subside, the best thing that they can do is start to embrace the noninfringing uses of the technology," he said.

"What you will see in 2005," he predicted, "is that the big technology companies are going to make huge bets on P2P because everybody gets it now. They understand the power of P2P and what that means for a very low cost, very broad selection, on-demand media experience."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/39366.html


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Creators

Planetary Society Art Contest Winner Wins Trip to Huygens Mission Control in Germany
Young artist envisions a tumultuous encounter with Saturn's moon Titan



Describing her winning entry, "Chaos Beneath the Veil," Chelsey Tyler states; "I started on the picture wanting to make a very dark and gloomy landscape, having read that the probe will not be able to use solar power on the surface because of the thickness of the atmosphere. When I realized that dark and gloomy can also translate to boring and indistinct, I began to create contrast. In the end, I had a more chaotic and much more interesting picture than what I had originally envisioned."



http://planetary.org/news/2005/titan_art_0106.html


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WhatHelps? announces new file-sharing tool
Press Release

WhatHelps?, a global provider of social networking and online communication tools, recently released a new file sharing tool that allows people to share files of almost any kind quickly and easily, using only a web browser. People may upload, store, preview, and download nearly all file types. The new file sharing tool has a Windows(r)-like feel, which makes it easy to setup and use. Files may be organized within folders and subfolders, and may be password-protected to prevent unauthorized access.

The newly released file sharing tool allows people to share almost any kind of file up to 15MB in size, quickly and easily, using only a web browser. Customers may add file sharing to their web sites and/or use it within their communities and work groups. Web site users, community and work group members can then upload, store, preview, and download files. The Windows(r)-like interface makes it familiarly easy to setup and use. Files may be organized within folders and subfolders, and may be password- protected to prevent unauthorized access.

"File Sharing has proven to be a very popular social networking tool among our customers and their members, and not just for music," said Tracey Kozelka, of WhatHelps? Extreme Support. "The sharing of photos is extremely popular within many of our communities. Another popular use is the sharing of HTML templates and other site-building code among community members who are using their free web space to put up their first web site. File Sharing, especially when used in conjunction with our other communication tools such as discussion groups, message boards, and chat rooms, can be a powerful learning tool."

WhatHelps? initially developed a File Sharing product to be one of the main components of the new Work Group package. It had been envisioned as a tool to be used primarily in project collaboration. As such, originally it was only available in the Work Group package. "Very soon after launch of File Sharing, feedback from customers and prospective customers indicated we were wrong in our assumptions about how this product would be used," said Michelle Wilbers, CEO. "We were asked so many times to include in the Online Community package and offer it A la Carte for web sites, that we almost had no choice but to rethink distribution. We ended up adding it to the Online Community package for free and pricing it individually for A la Carte purchases. Although not one of our most glamorous or complex products, its simplicity, ease of use, and multifariousness make it one of our most popular products."

For additional information or to try the File Sharing demo, go to http:// filesharing.whathelps.com.
http://i-newswire.com/pr1580.html


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Shrinking Big Music Catalogues
p2pnet.net News

Alex Malik is a former ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) in-house lawyer and ex-senior legal officer at the Australian Communications Authority, Canberra. And he's had an interesting thought on why his analysis of new music released in Australia between 2001 and 2004 found a 30% fall in CD singles released.

"Although the number of music DVDs doubled in this period, it was not enough to counter the decline in CD variety, and overall the number of music products released fell by 43 per cent," says a story in the Sydney Morning Herald.

But, Malik argues, a reduction musical choices, not p2p file sharing, is to blame and, "Record company mergers that
took place this year will mean choice is further narrowed as artists are culled from labels, he said."

He's also quoted as saying Aussie record companies are under greater pressure to meet profit targets set by head offices overseas and are "largely concerned about the bottom dollars rather than choice for the consumer".
http://p2pnet.net/story/3469


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Artie Shaw, Big Band Leader, Dies at 94

Artie Shaw, the jazz clarinetist and big-band leader who successfully challenged Benny Goodman's reign as the King of Swing with his recordings of "Begin the Beguine," "Lady Be Good" and "Star Dust" in the late 1930's, died yesterday at his home in Newbury Park, Calif. He was 94.

He apparently died of natural causes, his lawyer, Eddie Ezor, told The Associated Press.

In the Royalty of Swing
John S. Wilson

Artie Shaw's virtuosity on his instrument, his groups' highly original arrangements and his explosively romantic showmanship made him one of the most danced-to bandleaders of swing and one of the most listened-to artists of jazz. He quit performing in 1954 , but the many re-releases of his discs, a ghost band, and his informed but often sardonic comments on music and many other subjects kept him in the public ear.

Although his musical career closely paralleled that of Benny Goodman, his archrival, who died in 1986, the two men had little in common in their approaches to music.

"The distance between me and Benny," Mr. Shaw said several years ago, "was that I was trying to play a musical thing, and Benny was trying to swing. Benny had great fingers; I'd never deny that. But listen to our two versions of 'Star Dust.' I was playing; he was swinging."

Mr. Shaw impressed and amazed clarinetists of all schools. Barney Bigard, the New Orleans clarinetist who was Duke Ellington's soloist for 14 years, said he considered Mr. Shaw the greatest clarinetist ever. Phil Woods, a saxophonist of the bebop era, took Charlie Parker as his inspiration on saxophone, but he modeled his clarinet playing on Mr. Shaw's. John Carter, a leading post-bop clarinetist, said he took up the instrument because of Mr. Shaw.

And in 1983, when Franklin Cohen, the principal clarinetist of the Cleveland Orchestra, was to be featured playing Mr. Shaw's Concerto for Clarinet, he listened to Mr. Shaw's recording of the work and said he found his playing unbelievable.

"Shaw is the greatest player I ever heard," he said. "It's hard to play the way he plays. It's not an overblown orchestral style. He makes so many incredible shadings."

Mr. Shaw and Mr. Goodman were born a year apart (Goodman in 1909; Mr. Shaw on May 23, 1910); both had Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in the ghettos of major American cities. Mr. Shaw grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Goodman on the west side of Chicago. They began playing professionally as teenagers, and by 1926 they were both far from home performing with major bands of the day: Goodman in Venice, Calif., with Ben Pollack; Mr. Shaw in Cleveland with Austin Wylie.

In the Depression era, they settled in New York City and were the top two choices for the woodwind sections of radio-network and recording-studio orchestras. Frequently, they sat side by side in these ensembles.

By then, however, Mr. Shaw had decided music was a dead end. He intended to be a writer, and he had become a voracious reader. At band rehearsals, his music rack often held a book he was reading along with the compositions he was playing.

But his interests reverted to music after he was asked to play at a concert at the Imperial Theater in New York in May 1935. It was called a swing concert, and it included well-known swing bands like the Casa Loma Orchestra and the bands of Tommy Dorsey and Bob Crosby. Although Mr. Shaw was not yet known to much of the public, he was asked to put together a small group to play while the band onstage was changed.

"Just for kicks, I thought I'd write a piece for clarinet and string quartet, plus a small rhythm section," Mr. Shaw recalled. "Nobody had ever done that, sort of a jazz chamber-music thing."

An Instant Hit

His Interlude in B flat brought down the house. The audience refused to stop applauding, but Mr. Shaw had nothing else to play because this was the only thing he had written for the group. Finally, they played it again.

On the basis of this success, he was urged to form a band. He was not interested until he learned that with a successful band he could earn as much as $25,000 in six months, which was the amount he needed to complete his education.

The band he formed was an enlargement of the group he had used at the concert: a string quartet and his clarinet, with one trumpet, one saxophone and a rhythm section. But when he arrived in the real world of dance halls and nightclubs, he found himself bucking a tide that clamored for what he later described as "chewing drummers and loud swing fanaticism." So he formed a new band with the same instrumentation as Goodman's, promising it would be "the loudest band in the whole damn world."

With the new ensemble, he got a new name. Originally named Arthur Arshawsky, he had already shortened that to Art Shaw professionally. But when he became a bandleader on radio, there were complaints that an announcement of his name sounded like a sneeze. So he made one more change, to Artie Shaw.

As this band developed during a long run at the Roseland-State Ballroom in Boston, the original concept changed to a concentration on smoothly swinging treatments of the music of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Vincent Youmans and others.

What 'The Beguine' Began

This new concept was epitomized in an arrangement by Jerry Gray, a violinist in Mr. Shaw's original string-quartet band, of "Begin the Beguine." Released in the fall of 1938, Mr. Shaw's recording of the Porter song became a classic of swing era jazz and allowed him to take over the swing band pre-eminence that Mr. Goodman had held for three years.

Mr. Shaw, however, was not prepared to put up with the demands of his fans, the bobby-soxers who mobbed him and tore his clothes, and whom he called morons. In December 1939, the tension finally made him walk off the bandstand at the Cafe Rouge of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City and disappear.

"I wanted to resign from the planet, not just music," he said later. "It stopped being fun with success. Money got in the way. Everybody got greedy, including me. Fear set in. I got miserable when I became a commodity."

He disappeared to what was then a little-known village in Mexico - Acapulco - where he was ignored for three months until he rescued a woman from drowning and reporters found out who he was. Then he returned home to Hollywood.

He owed RCA Victor six more recordings on his contract, so he formed a 31-piece studio band with 13 strings and recorded, among other things, a tune he had heard a group playing on a wharf in Acapulco. It was called "Frenesi" and, like "Begin the Beguine," it set off a new career for him just when he was trying to get out of an old one.

The success of "Frenesi" meant he had to form a traveling band once again. This one included a small group, the Gramercy Five, a variation of Goodman's small groups except that it added a jazz harpsichord, played by John Guarnieri.

Playing in the Jungles

In December 1941, Mr. Shaw flew to California and married Elizabeth Kern, the daughter of Jerome Kern, before enlisting in the Navy. After an initial period of anonymity in the service, he became a chief petty officer and was ordered to form a band. When he heard the band members he had been given, he went AWOL ("tacitly," as he said) in order to see the Secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal.

"I want to get into the war!" Mr. Shaw told him. "And if I have to run a band, I want it to be good."

Mr. Shaw left the meeting with permission to enlist a band to be taken to the Pacific. He recruited some of the best musicians he had worked with in civilian life, including Claude Thornhill, Dave Tough, Sam Donahue and Max Kaminsky. The band played up and down the Pacific, on tiny islands and in jungles. It played so relentlessly that in 1943 it was sent to New Zealand to rest, and a year later it was dissolved. Mr. Shaw received a medical discharge.

In the next 10 years he formed several short-lived bands, including one that played modern classical music in a New York jazz club called Bop City, and one that was in tune with the bebop era but that was scorned by audiences who had come to hear "Begin the Beguine" and "Frenesi."

In March 1954, after a playing with a small group at the Embers in New York, he announced his retirement at age 43. He never performed again, although in 1983 he formed an Artie Shaw Orchestra to play his old arrangements and some newer music. It was directed by Dick Johnson, a saxophonist and clarinetist, and Mr. Shaw appeared with it occasionally as a nonplaying conductor.

"I did all you can do with a clarinet," he said in a 1994 interview. "Any more would have been less."

A Writer's Ambition

Two years before his retirement, he wrote a well-received autobiography, "The Trouble With Cinderella."

He continued to write, and published two books of short stories, "I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!" and "The Best of Intentions," and had begun a three-volume novel about a troubled young musician. He became a cattle farmer, a producer and distributor of films, a successful competitor in shooting high-powered target rifles, and a lecturer on the college circuit offering a choice of four subjects: "The Artist in a Material Society," "The Swingers of the Big Band Era," "Psychotherapy and the Creative Artist" and "Consecutive Monogamy and Ideal Divorce," in which he presented himself as "the ex-husband of love goddesses and an authority on divorce."

His source material for this last lecture came from his experience with eight wives, who included, in addition to Miss Kern, three movie stars (Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Evelyn Keyes) and an author (Kathleen Winsor, who wrote the 1940's best-seller "Forever Amber").

"People ask what those women saw in me," Mr. Shaw said in an interview with The New York Times. "Let's face it, I wasn't a bad-looking stud. But that's not it. It's the music; it's standing up there under the lights. A lot of women just flip; looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking?"

All his marriages ended in divorce.

John S. Wilson, jazz critic of The New York Times, died in 2002.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/ar...rtner=homepage


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TiVo Adds Portability to the Mix
David Pogue

IN the high-stress halls of Hollywood, executives are wrestling with three burning questions. First, how can the industry avoid an era of unfettered online video swapping like the one dogging the music industry? Second, as portable video becomes ever more popular, how far can the studios take copy protection without looking like the bad guy?

And third, who the heck green-lighted "Catwoman"?

Answering any of these questions is, of course, a difficult and delicate job. But as 2005 dawns, you can already find some answers to the first two.

For example, you can buy either a PC add-on circuit board or a whole new Media Center PC that can record TV shows and then, for your time-killing pleasure later on, burn them onto a DVD. You could also spend $200 or more for a personal DVD player, although that limits your out-of-home viewing to what's available on DVD. Or you could spend $500 for a hard-drive-based portable video player, as long as you're prepared to enjoy the sweeping majesty of "The Lord of the Rings" on a three-inch screen.

But beginning this week, you may have another attractive option that doesn't involve any new hardware. It lets you watch recorded TV or movies on the nice big screen of your laptop. And here's a pleasant surprise: it's free, more or less, to those subscribing to TiVo.

The new technology, called TiVoToGo, is neither a product nor a service. It's a software feature that TiVo, in a phased rollout, is beaming into existing TiVo recorders. TiVo intends for TiVoToGo to be one of several perks that give it a new advantage over the less sophisticated recorders offered by cable and satellite companies for lower monthly fees.

TiVo, of course, is a digital video recorder - a box that records cable, satellite or antenna-based TV broadcasts onto a built-in hard drive. As a result, it can perform amazing time-shifting stunts like auto-recording your favorite shows, week after week; pausing or rewinding live television; playing back the first part of a movie while you're still recording the last part; and zooming past blocks of commercials. TiVo effortlessly bends TV broadcasting to suit your schedule instead of the other way around, which explains why its customers tend to be wide-eyed TiVo boosters.

Simply put, TiVoToGo lets you transfer recordings from your TiVo to a computer, thereby making them watchable anywhere you go. For example, you can copy the shows onto a laptop for plane or train viewing, or even burn them onto a blank DVD for playback almost anywhere.

That may seem like a simple goal, but reaching it wasn't simple at all for TiVo. TiVoToGo infuriates Hollywood executives, who have visions of file-sharing anarchy dancing in their heads.

The Federal Communications Commission ruled, however, that TiVoToGo protects recordings enough. For example, you can view each recording on up to 10 computers on the same home network. That's more than enough for the average household, but not enough to allow rampant file swapping online. (Also, you can't transfer recorded pay-per- view movies.)

Getting TiVoToGo going may not be so simple for you, either. First, you need a Windows XP or Windows 2000 computer. (TiVo says a Mac version is in the works.)

You also need a stand-alone TiVo Series 2 box ($100 after rebate for the basic model, plus a $13 monthly fee or a one-time $300 charge). TiVoToGo doesn't work on integrated satellite-TiVo boxes, original TiVo units (pre-November 2002) or boxes with the free TiVo Basic service. And if you have a TiVo model with a built-in DVD burner, like those from Pioneer, Toshiba and Humax, you won't get the TiVoToGo feature until "later in 2005." Of course, those machines already offer a pretty good way to take your recordings on the road.

Your TiVo and your PC must be connected to the same home network, either wirelessly or - what's the term? - wirefully. (You have to buy your own inexpensive U.S.B. network adapter for the TiVo box in either case.) That's a simple task for the technologically inclined, but an almost hopeless prospect for anyone who blanches at the phrase "802.11b U.S.B. adapter."

(If you're in the latter category, consider inviting a local middle-schooler to your house to help you; you'll be glad you did. A networked TiVo is capable of some other delicious stunts, like presenting a slide show of the photos that reside on your Mac or PC, or playing the music files stored there. Also, when you're away from home, you can instruct a networked TiVo to record a show, right from www.tivo.com.)

Once the networking is done, the final step is downloading a free program called TiVo Desktop 2.0. It lists all the shows currently on your TiVo and offers you a simple Transfer button that copies the ones you want onto your computer.

In other words, there's no visible trace of the TiVoToGo feature on the TiVo itself. That's a nice touch. It means that non-networked, non-PC-owning people don't have to wade through irrelevant new software options on their TV screens.

So what can you do with a show that you've liberated from your TiVo? First, you can watch it on your PC, using Windows Media Player 10 as the playback software. Few people watch TV at their desks, so unless you have an unusually comfortable desk chair, this option is primarily interesting to laptop owners.

Second, you'll soon be able to burn the transferred show to a blank DVD, which will thereafter play in any ordinary DVD player. This feature requires that your PC has a DVD burner and that you have Sonic Solutions' MyDVD Studio 6.1 ($50 for TiVo subscribers), which comes out next week. (A two-week trial version will be available at the TiVo Web site.) MyDVD also lets you edit your recordings before burning them - to snip out the commercials, for example - which will come as great news to everyone except advertisers.

According to TiVo, all this is only the beginning. TiVo and Microsoft are collaborating on software that will let you copy your shows to hand-held Portable Media Center players. And TiVo is also exploring a version of TiVoToGo that will let you shuttle shows to another player that you own (at a vacation house, say) over the Internet.

A few annoyances mar the simplicity of the TiVoToGo system. First, copying shows takes a long time - longer, in fact, than the running time of the shows themselves. At high quality (the second-best of TiVo's four recording settings), a half-hour show weighs in at 800 megabytes, which takes 50 minutes to copy across a wireless network. (Lower- quality recordings take much less time. So do wired networks.) Fortunately, you can start watching a show on your PC before the copying is finished.

Second, you're obligated to type your TiVoToGo password into your PC every time you open Windows Media Player to play back your shows. Sure, that requirement was a concession to the Hollywood worrywarts, but it gets old fast. Why can't TiVo Desktop 2.0 memorize your password the way good Web browsers do?

Now, unauthorized programs are already available for TiVo and its rival, ReplayTV, that let you unshackle your recorded programs in similar ways.

But what's so welcome about TiVoToGo is that it's authorized, it comes with technical support, it's very simple to use, it's free and it's 100 percent legal. You don't have to worry about finding certified letters in your mailbox from scary Hollywood law firms.

There's no question that as high-speed connections grow more popular, moving video from place to place will soon be as convenient and common as swapping audio is today. Hollywood, electronics companies, the government and consumers are all staking out positions on the great policy spectrum that extends from Willy-Nilly Copying Freedom on one end to Intrusively Oppressive Copy Protection on the other.

Settling on a mutually agreeable position will take some time. But TiVoToGo offers one reasonable approach. In fact, if it weren't for that accursed password business, you might never even realize that your shows are copy-protected at all.

The bottom line is that if you have a TiVo and a home network, TiVoToGo is good to go.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/te...ts/06stat.html

Dorky video report: pnm://audio.nytimes.com/videosrc/technology/20050106_POGUE_11_VIDEO_hi.rm

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WE’RE NUMBER ONE!!!

U.S. Leads World In File Swapping
Brendan Sullivan

The U.S. makes up the majority of the world's peer-to-peer (P-to-P) file sharing population according to a new study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), although experts say that the findings do not represent the entire file sharing picture.

While 55 percent of Internet P-to-P file sharers originate from the U.S., according to the study, "Peer To Peer Networks in OECD Countries", the numbers of file sharers in Germany (10 percent) and Canada (8 percent) continue to grow. However, the study also points to data that shows the U.S. share in the global P-to-P user base plummeted nearly 24 percent between January 2003 and January 2004, as P-to-P software has become more popular in Europe. The data comes from a wide variety of sources including polls conducted by Pew Internet and American Life, a nonprofit Internet research project, and BigChampagne LLC, an online media measurement company.

Although he has yet to examine a final copy of the OECD study, which was released Dec. 3, BigChampagne co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Eric Garland pointed out several factors that are key to comprehending and interpreting P-to-P statistics that the OECD study does not mention. The study says that "owing to increasing lawsuits by the record industry and the rapid adoption of commercial on-line music sales, the number of people in the United States swapping music has declined by half since mid-2003." Garland said that there was not a huge drop in P-to-P file swapping following the lawsuits, but instead file sharers have become more savvy and download files without sharing them.

Fred Von Lohmann, the senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting civil liberties on the Internet, agreed with Garland. Lawsuits are not substantially decreasing popularity of file sharing because file sharers know how to avoid lawsuits, he said. "It is hard to measure who is just downloading, or 'leaching', and peer-to-peer measurements do not give a picture of how many people are pure downloaders," Von Lohmann said. Both Garland and Von Lohmann estimated that there could be upwards of 100 million P-to-P file swappers worldwide. However, the definition of P-to-P is itself elusive.

BigChampagne only measures the activity of file-sharing communities of at least 50,000 people, and therefore users sharing files over smaller LAN connections such as on small college campuses are not included in the research. "The definition of the file sharing universe is editorial -- what really constitutes as peer-to-peer? I don't know," said Garland.

Indeed the definition of P-to-P file sharing is rapidly changing according to the OECD study, as file sharers are now commonly trading full movies and software programs, whereas pioneering P-to-P programs such as Napster only allowed for the trade of MP3 audio files. While audio files made up 63 percent of P-to-P shared files in 2002, that number was down to 49 percent in 2003, largely as a result of the higher bandwith available to download larger movie and software files faster, the study said.

Among those who are still sharing files on major P-to-P communities according to the OECD study, Canadians are increasing in number at the most rapid pace, as their share in the global P-to-P user base jumped by 4.5 percent from 2003 to 2004. Canada is also the only country included in the OECD study in which over 1 percent of the total population uses P-to-P networks.

Yet despite the hike in P-to-P usage outside the U.S., Von Lohmann doubts that Canadian and European recording industries will follow the lead of their contemporaries in the U.S. by filing large-scale lawsuits against individual file sharers. "Europeans are more comfortable with taxing P-to-P systems than filing lawsuits" he said.
http://www.itworld.com/Net/4087/050105oecdfilesharing/


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Or maybe not…

Music Piracy More Common in Canada

Canadians are significantly more likely than Americans to download music files from the Internet and use peer-to- peer, file-sharing networks, according to Global Digital Living, a new multinational survey conducted by Parks Associates. Over 40% of all Canadian households with broadband download music files on a monthly basis, compared with 28% of similar American households. Likewise, one-third of all Canadian broadband households use a peer-to-peer (P2P) network each month, but in the United States, this figure is just 16%.

"In Canada, the recording industry has had a harder time fighting piracy, and so these data quantify the impact of the RIAA's legal efforts in the United States," said John Barrett, director of research for Parks Associates. "Using Canada as a benchmark, it would appear the lawsuits in the U.S. have gotten about 15% of the population to stop pirating music."

File sharing is considered legal in Canada, and Canadian ISPs are not required to divulge the identity of online pirates. These circumstances present a relatively "risk- free" environment for music piracy.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/Jan/1105977.htm

















Until next week,

- js.














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"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

[TankGirl]

Originally Posted by JackSpratts

U.S. Leads World In File Swapping
----
Or maybe not…

My personal impression has been that both U.S. and Canadian filesharers have been fulfilling their patriotic duties (as representatives of their nations on the global sharing scene) with great determination and characteristic generosity.

Thanks again, Jack, great work!

- tg