Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 9th, '05

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"DRM is theft." - Richard Stallman


"It's good to be the king." - Steven Van Zandt


"Commercial radio has begun to change." - Lorne Manly


"The answer to this question will have significant ramifications for the music recording industry, as well as these litigants." - N.Y. State Supreme Court


"The state can't condone speeding, but it condemns money-making schemes disguised as safety measures." - Richard Blumenthal


"This is a historic moment for blogs. The point of having free speech and a free press is to have people informed. These information bans are self-defeating for free societies. The politicians know, the media knows, but the Canadian voters are left in the dark and that's a backwards way of doing things." – Edward Morrissey


"We need a free BIOS, because if we don't control the BIOS we don't control our computers. It puts me in an ethically compromised position to have a non-free program in my machine." – Richard Stallman


"The idea of the free software movement is you should be in control of your own computer. Treacherous competing (his term for so-called trusted computing) is a scheme to make sure you're not in control." - Richard Stallman


"We thought about recording them and putting the recording on Grokster, but no one had a tape recorder." - Mike Coenan


February: MGM vs. Grokster at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court. Download the oral arguments courtesy of the EFF. OGG, MP3, WMA. 68 minutes. Read along while you listen.























Witnessing justice

Students Hear MGM v. Grokster Arguments In Supreme Court
Jocelyn Hanamirian

Six students and their teaching assistant grabbed sleeping bags, blankets and tarps from the Outdoor Action supply room and spent the night on the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court Monday, hoping to secure spots inside the courtroom for a landmark technology case.

The students drove to Washington, D.C., on Monday evening after spending four weeks discussing the MGM v. Grokster case in computer science professor Edward Felten's class, COS 491: Information Technology and the Law.

The case, which was argued Tuesday morning before the Supreme Court, pits 28 major entertainment companies and industry associations against the software company Grokster, which is responsible for popular peer-to-peer programs Morpheus, Grokster and KaZaA. Lower courts have ruled that such programs should be legal even though they are often used to infringe copyrights.

The group heard the oral arguments made before the Court, during which lawyers present their case and then answer a series of pointed questions from the justices.

"The questions revealed more about the justices than any sort of new insight about the case," said Dan Peng '05, one of the students who attended. "When you're reading cases you see these names. They really each have their own personality, and from their questions you can tell what they're thinking about."

That gave students "a welcome break from experiencing the case purely through paper," Felten said. "It's a chance to watch and hear how the Supreme Court justices are thinking about the case."

Friend of the court

Earlier this month, Felten, along with three Princeton colleagues and 12 computer science professors from other universities such as MIT and Yale, filed an amicus brief in the case. About 40 briefs were filed by various parties, from songwriters to an association of venture capitalists.

"We wanted to try to convince the court of the importance of leaving a wide field open for research and innovation in technology," Felten said. "The other purpose is to point out to the court several technical errors or incorrect arguments that other parties had made before."

The case has implications for whether a distributor of a P2P software can be held responsible for the illegal actions of its users. A ruling is expected this summer.

"We, as creators and distributors of technology, are worried about how companies could be held responsible for how people use the technology. We think that users who use the system illegally should be held responsible," Felten said. "It is a landmark case for this issue."

Down to the wire

The group — Peng, Stacy Chen '05, Jeff Alpert '05, Mark Melhan '05, Mike Coenan '05 and graduate students Halran Yu and class TA Alex Halderman '03 — left for Washington Monday night at 6 p.m.

When they arrived at about 10 p.m., they found that 40 other people had already camped out — many of them professional line-sitters hired to spend the night. Knowing that fewer than 40 people are typically admitted into the Court, the group was worried.

"It was nerve-wracking, nail-biting, down to the wire," Alpert said. "Crazy that we spent the whole night on the sidewalk and might not be able to see the trial."

Camped out for the night, the group hiked six blocks to the nearest bathroom several times. Halderman and Peng posed for a picture with Jack Valenti, former head of Motion Picture Association of America, who infamously said, "The VCR is to the movie industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."

Protesters for both sides of the case squared off, carrying signs saying, "Feed a musician. Download legally" and "Don't steal my future."

"We thought about recording them and putting the recording on Grokster, but no one had a tape recorder," Coenan said.

Inside the Court

At 7 a.m., two hours before anyone was admitted to court, numbered tickets were distributed indicating everyone's position in line. The Princeton group, which held numbers 32 through 38, was relieved after being told that 40 people would be allowed into the court building.

But because of influx of media attention and the arrival of about 165 people who were on a priority list that guaranteed them admission, only 35 of about 200 people who eventually showed up were admitted.

Coenan was number 36. "It was really frustrating to see all these people cruise in in their taxies and walk right past you into the courtroom," he said.

But even those who did not make it were admitted for the first 15 minutes, then readmitted for short intervals.

"It was a rare opportunity to not only see a Supreme Court case in person, but to have seen it after studying it in depth and to be able to understand the nuances," Halderman said.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/arc...ws/12492.shtml


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Warner Music Gets Another Subpoena from Spitzer

Warner Music Group Corp. has received another subpoena from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer as part of an industrywide probe of the financial relationship between music companies and radio stations, Warner Music said on Thursday.

The company, which is planning a $750 million initial public offering, said in a regulatory filing that it received a subpoena on March 31 as part of the probe, which includes a look at the use of independent promoters and accounting for payments to them.

The investigation is examining the time-honored practice of music companies' paying independent promoters hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help secure valuable radio air time for songs.

Warner Music previously disclosed that it had received subpoenas from Spitzer on Sept. 7 and Nov. 22 regarding the same matter.

The company, in the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said it has been producing documents and expects to complete the process in April.

It said it cannot predict the outcome of the investigation but that the probe has the potential to result in financial penalties or change the way the music industry promotes records.

EMI Group Plc said in October that Spitzer was investigating it as part of an industrywide probe.

Sources have said Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment have also received subpoenas.

Warner Music also disclosed in the filing that it intends to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. It did not propose a stock symbol. The company's previous filing said it planned to list on either the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq stock market.

The company has not yet disclosed how many shares it plans to sell or at what price.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...s/domesticNews


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End of public domain?

Court Rules Common Law Protects Recordings
Michael Gormley

New York's highest court ruled that common law protects the rights of a record company for music recorded before the 1972 federal copyright law in a decision the judges expect to have "significant ramifications for the music recording industry."

The result is that artists, their estates and others involved in recordings made before 1972 should be able to collect royalties in the United States for their performances, said Philip Allen Lacovara, the attorney for Capitol Records that won the state decision released Tuesday.

Currently, those recordings mostly feature classical performances that some companies now are simply copying and marketing without paying royalties, he said. But much of the court argument also centered on British Invasion groups from the 1960s. Many will soon lose copyright protection under British law and wouldn't be protected by the 1972 U.S. copyright law without Tuesday's state court decision, Lacovara said.

"I hope the companies who have been inclined to copy older classical recordings realize the New York court has spoken definitively on this and end any unlicensed copying," he said. "It does have enormous importance."

The case revolved around 1930s classical performances originally recorded on shellac disks in England by The Gramaphone Co. Limited, now known as EMI Records Limited. In 1996, EMI licensed exclusive rights to market the original recordings as compact discs and other products in the United States to EMI.

But in 1996, Naxos of America Inc., another music recording company, began to sell its own restorations of the recordings, competing with Capitol's compact disc and other recordings. Capital sued Naxos for copyright infringement based on the 1972 law.

A federal court dismissed Capitol's suit saying Britain's copyrights expired 50 years after the records were made and that U.S. copyright doesn't apply to recordings made before 1972. The federal court said Capitol had no common-law right, either, under New York state law, where the music industry giants are based.

Capitol appealed the common-law ruling to the New York Court of Appeals to determine whether Naxos is entitled to defeat Capitol's claims for copyright infringement under New York common law.

The state court also rejected the argument that copyright to the old performances of Bach and other masters was a "new product" when restored and recorded to compact discs.

The state's highest court ruled common law in New York "protects ownership interests in sound recordings made before 1972 that are not covered by the federal copyright act." The result is that Capitol can continue to sue Naxos for copyright violation for records made almost 50 years before the federal copyright law.

"The answer to this question will have significant ramifications for the music recording industry, as well as these litigants," the court stated.

Naxos attorney Maxim Waldbaum declined immediate comment.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...sto mwire.htm


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Inside job

Jail for Microsoft Employee Theft

A FORMER Microsoft employee has been sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay more than $US5 million ($6.5 million) for selling the company's products for personal gain.

Richard Gregg, 45, agreed to a plea agreement in US District Court in Seattle, where he admitted to ordering more than $US13 million worth of software meant for internal use and selling it to pay off a mortgage and buy luxury cars.

Gregg, who worked at Microsoft until late 2002, had cooperated with prosecutors in their investigation, a fact that Judge John Coughenour said he took into consideration at the sentencing.

Microsoft cracked down on criminal theft in late 2003 and put in more stringent policies after similar incidents involving employees selling Microsoft's high-end software for personal gain were discovered.

Microsoft hired investigators and made changes to its internal ordering system in order to prevent future incidents.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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Oh, Canada!

Heritage Minister Frulla On A Mission To Outlaw Internet Music Downloads

Canadian Heritage Minister Liza Frulla as a new mission in life and if she is successful, downloading music from the Internet without paying for it will be illegal and the practice subject to criminal charges.

During an interview this past weekend Frulla promised that peer-to-peer (P2P) music file sharing will "be addressed" arming the music industry and song writers with "the tools to sue", according to an article in the Toronto Sun.

The federal government had earler announced several proposed amendments to the Copyright Act by implementing two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties. If passed, the new legislation would force Internet service providers (ISPs) to keep records of those who share high volumes of copyright-protected material including music. At that time, Canada would become the 51st country to make it illegal to distribute and trade music online.

The amendments would force ISPs to monitor individual customer internet connections for suspicious activity in the form of large file downloads and send warnings to home users whom they suspect of illegal file sharing. ISPs would also have to keep records of all warnings that could be used in a court of law if needed.

Minister Frulla stated that she would make it her mission to spread the word especially among children that downloading music without paying for it is wrong.

The reforms and amendments will be introduced in the House of Commons but the proposals have already been approved by all political parties.
http://www.halifaxlive.com/artman/publish/ _040405_77611.shtml


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Frulla Promotes Tougher Copyright Laws

In Winnipeg for the Juno festivities, Canadian Heritage Minister Liza Frulla took the opportunity to address issues such as music downloading and funding for the arts.

Frulla expressed her intention to toughen Canada's "antiquated" intellectual property laws through proposed new copyright legislation to be tabled in June.

"We'll also be addressing the peer-to-peer issue," Frulla told the Winnipeg Free Press Sunday. "It will give the tools to companies and authors to sue."

The music industry has long blamed peer-to-peer file- sharing and music downloading for declining music sales. Frulla said she wanted to persuade children that downloading music for free is wrong.

"Everything starts with the children," she said. "They're the ones who say 'recycle' and 'don't smoke.' The Internet is their world."

Frulla promised, however, that educational uses of material from the internet would be considered differently.

In March 2004, a Federal Court rejected a motion allowing the music industry to sue 29 individuals for sharing music files over the internet. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein said making files available in online, shared directories is within the bounds of current Canadian copyright law. An appeal is scheduled to begin in Toronto later this month.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/04/04/Arts/ winnipeg050404.html


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Acquittal Overturned For 2 Cleared In TV Piracy Case
CBC News

The Quebec Superior Court has reversed the acquittal of two men who imported U.S. cable signals with a grey-market satellite dish.

Justice Wilbrod Claude Decarie found Drummondville, Que., resident Jacques D'Argy and his brother-in-law Richard Thériault guilty of three counts each of appropriating foreign signals.

Judge Danielle Côté cleared the two men in June. She ruled that the federal law that criminalized their actions was unconstitutional because it violated the right to free expression.

The federal government and the Canadian television industry, who consider it theft to use special decoders to capture foreign satellite signals, opposed the decision.

Decarie found that Côté erred in her decision.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that unlicensed providers who sell decoders to capture foreign satellite signals are breaking a federal broadcasting law.

"Grey market" customers can purchase a satellite receiver for about $400 and pay monthly for programming – fed directly from the U.S. and other countries.

The Canadian industry says it has lost $400 million a year in subscriber fees to grey market customers.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/natio...ket050405.html


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Canadian 'iPod Tax' Repeal In Limbo
John Borland

A Canadian appeals court has temporarily blocked last year's ruling that overturned that country's "iPod tax," a fee collected on the sales of MP3 players that was distributed to copyright holders.

Last December, a court ruled that the fee, which is applied to all blank recording media in Canada, should not be applied to digital media players like the iPod. On Thursday, copyright regulators said the appeals court had stayed that ruling pending the Supreme Court's decision of whether to hear the case. The stay means that copyright regulators will not immediately have to return about $4.1 million collected though the program since late 2003.
http://news.com.com/Canadian+iPod+ta...3-5649170.html


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A Blog Written From Minneapolis Rattles Canada's Liberal Party
Clifford Krauss

An American blogger has suddenly emerged as a force in Canadian politics.

Edward Morrissey, a 42-year-old Minneapolis area call-center manager who runs a Web log, or blog, called Captain's Quarters as a hobby, last Saturday began posting allegations of corruption that reached the highest levels of the Canadian Liberal Party. The postings violate a publication ban instituted a few days earlier by a federal judge, Justice John Gomery, who is leading an investigation into accusations of money laundering and kickbacks in a government program from the 1990's that was aimed at undermining Quebec separatists.

The scandal, which involves government payments of up to $85 million to a handful of Montreal advertising firms for little or no work, has dominated national politics for a year and led to the Liberals losing their majority in the House of Commons last June.

But Justice Gomery moved to limit dissemination of information from the otherwise public hearing in Montreal so as not to influence potential jurors for coming trials in which a government bureaucrat and two advertising executives face criminal charges.

According to Mr. Morrissey's blog, recent testimony for the first time links people who have been close to Prime Minister Paul Martin to the scandal.

Mr. Martin has long insisted that he knew nothing of the workings of the program, which was intended to promote the federal government's presence at cultural and sporting events, even though he was finance minister at the time. The prime minister then was Jean Chrétien, who left office in December 2003.

Journalists and anyone else can attend the so-called Gomery commission hearings, and Mr. Morrissey said one of them, whom he would not identify, had approached him and had been passing him information for his blog. Mr. Morrissey has cautioned that he is basing his reporting on that one source, who he has said he believes to be reliable, and that he has not corroborated the information. Canadian journalists who have attended the hearings, or have spoken to those who have, say Mr. Morrissey's postings of the allegations, which have been made by a single witness, are generally accurate, though not complete.

Liberal Party leaders have questioned the veracity of the witness, Jean Brault, an advertising executive, who they note faces criminal charges and whose testimony is covered by the ban.

Mr. Gomery, meanwhile, is considering lifting the ban, now that so many people know so much about the proceedings.

While the Canadian news media have not reported explicitly what Mr. Morrissey is posting, their newspaper articles and television features about his work have led Canadians to visit Captain's Quarters (www.captainsquartersblog.com) to read the latest scandalous details. Mr. Morrissey said his blog had been flooded since Canadian CTV television first reported on its existence and contents Sunday night, and that he was now getting 400,000 hits a day.

"This is a historic moment for blogs," Mr. Morrissey said in a telephone interview. "The point of having free speech and a free press is to have people informed. These information bans are self-defeating for free societies. The politicians know, the media knows, but the Canadian voters are left in the dark and that's a backwards way of doing things."

Mr. Morrissey characterized himself as a libertarian conservative who had written extensively on his blog about Federal Election Commission regulations, free speech and foreign affairs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/in.../07canada.html


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Russia’s Biggest Online Library Found Guilty of Breaching Copyright
MosNews

A Moscow court has found Maxim Moshkov, owner of the biggest and most popular Russian on-line library, lib.ru, guilty of breaching copyright law.

The court ordered Moshkov to pay a 3,000-ruble ($107.7) fine to the plaintiff, writer Eduard Gevorkyan. The writer had initially wanted 1.5 million rubles (about $54,000) from the library owner. The court significantly decreased the fine after Moshkov explained he gains no profit from his library.

It was the only lawsuit brought against Moshkov that has ended in success for the plaintiff. Other writers have been unable to even start their cases. However, Gevorkyan had earlier won cases against two other libraries, edu-all.ru and aldebaran.ru, that were obliged to pay 50,000 rubles each. The writer’s interests were presented by the company KM- online.

Moshkov told the court that all the texts in his library were taken from the Internet or sent by readers. If the author disagrees with the release of his texts, Moshkov removes them. However, over 120 writers have agreed to publish their work on lib.ru. The library owner said he wrote letters to Gevorkyan asking if he would permit the publication of his texts but did not receive permission.

Moshkov’s lawyers intend to appeal the court decision.

Moshkov created his library in 1994. Every day over 20,000 people visit lib.ru.
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/04/...hkowlost.shtml


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Achtung! Speech loses, copyright wins

Court Decision In Music Industry vs. Heise online
Joerg Heidrich

In the legal dispute (reference: 21 O 3220/05) between eight companies from the music industry and German publisher Heise Zeitschriften Verlag, the first-instance district court of Munich I has just presented its written ruling. The matter in dispute was a report by heise online on a new version of software to make copies of DVDs. In the original version, this report not only took a critical view of software vendor Slysoft's claims, but also provided a link to the company's web site.

The Munich court ruled that, by providing a link to the company's homepage, heise online had intentionally provided assistance in the fulfillment of unlawful acts and is thus liable as an aider and abettor in accordance with Section 830 of the German Civil Code just as the vendor in itself is. While no link was provided to download the software, it could be downloaded two clicks later, which the court found to be inadmissible. For the court, it sufficed that readers could directly access the vendor's web site from the link in the report. The court also did not find it relevant that readers were also able to find the product via a search engine. Rather, it ruled that providing a link made finding the software "much easier", thus increasing the danger of violations of copyrights considerably.

The court did not find that the publisher had a right to provide such links in accordance with freedom of the press as defined in Article 5 of the German constitution. Rather, the provisions of copyright law limit the freedom of the press, in particular in the current case in which the music industry's ownership interests had to be preserved.

On the other hand, the court ruled that the music industry did not have the right to prevent the article in question from being published altogether. In these proceedings, the holders of rights had initially attempted to prevent Heise Zeitschriften Verlag in general from stating that software mentioned by name could be used to crack copy protection systems. In the hearing, however, the court proposed that this ban be limited to the article in dispute. However, in the end the court ruled against the music industry in this point.

In its ruling, the court explained that the news ticker report neither constitutes "advertising for the sale of illegal goods" as defined in Section 95a of the German Copyright Act (UrhG), nor does it provide instructions on how to get around technical measures. Instead, this type of reporting is justified by the freedom of the press and is in the public interest. In other words, the court ruled that the press has the right to mention the name of the product, the name of the vendor, and the name of copy protection systems affected by the product.

The court specified the amount in dispute at 500,000 euros. This amount, the court found, reflects the "considerable profit losses" of the music industry and the "great publicity" due to the prominence of heise online among readers of IT information. Each party will have to cover its own costs for the proceedings. The ruling is not yet legally effective. Heise Zeitschriften Verlag is considering appealing the case. (
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/58315


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The AIBO ate it

Lawyers Seek Missing Swiftel Evidence
Andrew Colley

A PERTH internet provider facing copyright infringement allegations over BitTorrent file sharing websites has failed to supply music industry lawyers with evidence that may assist their case, the federal Magistrate's Court has been told.

Music industry lawyer John Hennessy SC told the federal Magistrate that Swiftel had failed to supply music industry investigators with an electronic log of transactions between the ISP's servers and the BitTorrent sites.

Mr Hennessy asked federal Magistrate Rolf Driver to order the ISP to hand over the transaction records.

Music industry investigators attempted to obtain copies of the activity logs when they raided the ISP in accordance with so-called Anton Pillar orders on March 10th.

At the time, the ISP told investigators that the logs could only be retrieved from its Sydney operations and that it would be able to supply them the following day.

However, the court was told that the Swiftel's lawyers later wrote to music industry solicitors claiming that "no traffic" had been recorded at the sites for a number of weeks leading up to the raid, and that therefore, there were no logs.

However, Mr Hennessy argued that the company's explanation was inconsistent with evidence offered by music industry investigators.

The music industry alleged that one of its investigators was able to download music videos from the BitTorrent sites on March 6th; four days before the raids took take place.

He said that at no time had the ISP's technical representatives suggested the material would not be made available.

Swiftel lawyer Stephen Burley SC said he had "grave reservations" about the order. Mr Burely told the court that its original orders did not authorise music industry to subject the material to forensic analysis.

Judge Driver decided to reserve his decision on the order until the court reconvenes. Swiftel's legal team is expected to argue that the music industry does not have a prima facie case against the ISP.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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P2P Technology in the Web Hosting Industry

Currently, the RIAA is suing Grokster and trying to convince the Supreme Court that Peer to Peer or P2P file sharing has little or no legitimate uses and is almost exclusively used as a method to illegally trade music and movie files. The RIAA is complaining that P2P is severely damaging the music industry and this technology should be stopped. Despite that the music industry reacted in the exact same way with the invention of the radio they continue to see the glass as half empty rather than trying to realize the tremendous potential for revenue in not only the music industry but the web hosting industry as well.

Billionaire Mark Cuban has decided to step in and fund Grokster’s legal battle. In his blog he wrote;
"If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only," Cuban wrote. "It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their US digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them."

While the RIAA may be wrong on a lot of points and their intention to illegalize peer to peer may be ill-founded but they are correct that P2P is used in large part for music, movie, and software swapping.

In other words, P2P file sharing has yet to be tapped into and utilized as a fully- fledged technology. Part of this is perhaps history. Products, whether it is news, music, soda pop, or hosting a web site traditionally features the product flowing from a central source to many consumers. Corporate America, like the RIAA, doesn’t take kindly to giving up the ‘control’ that this model provides over the product. However, there is one industry that has taken a peer to peer business model and made it massively profitable and it’s not even legal; spamming. Spammers can’t be stopped and they sell incredible amounts of goods. MCI was said to have made $5 billion a year hosting spammers through resale hosting. Has there ever been a more virile proof of concept?

Why not take the concept that viruses, music swappers and zombie PC spammers use and put it to good use? Why not fight virus and spam with their own weapons? Why not use P2P web hosting?

The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance may be a first step towards this. The FSA is a first-of-its-kind industry initiative aimed at helping network operators share Internet attack information automatically. The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance marks the first time companies are able to share detailed attack profiles in real-time and block attacks closer to the source. This global alliance marks a significant step forward in the fight against Internet attacks and major infrastructure threats that cross network boundaries, continents and oceans.

Global telecommunications companies participating in the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance include British Telecom, MCI and NTT Communications.
And leading carriers, network providers, hosting companies and educational institutions joining the Alliance include among others; Asia Netcom, Cisco Systems, EarthLink, Rackspace, The Planet,University of Pennsylvania and XO Communications.

It’s great that web hosts are sharing security information but it’s not particularly helpful during a DDoS or Denial of Service attack.

Net security and legal expert Ben Edelman described a recent DDoS attack in his website after he posted an article on spamming, “Globat was not particularly responsive in informing me of the problem -- my site was down for one and a half business days before they told me what was going on, and they only told me when I reached out to a personal contact who happened to work there. Then again, they're a $10/month company -- not exactly premium service. I was happy with them otherwise, and for most folks I think they provide an extraordinary value.”

What if, when the DDoS attack hit Edelman’s site, Globat had been able to switch on P2P mode and distribute the files to other web hosting providers and allow them to send the files out in response to requests for the site?

Globat could have changed the downtime from days to minutes. Then, with P2P, the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance or File Sharing Alliance could share attack vector information and shut them down the offending zombies.

How do you fight a million computers barraging a site? With a million servers of course!

This technique could even be used to knock spammers out by sharing spam source information and then spamming the spammers with mail that looks like answers to their ads or at the very least combining to lock them out of the internet.

Of course, all this is predicated on a high level of cooperation among web hosts, or rather, a large peer sharing network.

Web hosts or the web sites they host could also use P2P file sharing for cross site or even cross host advertising. Again, by cooperating, multiple web sites could form advertising cooperatives and share ads. While a single point of access could be developed for the advertising to make it easy for those who want to advertise to send their ads out to as wide a distribution as possible it could work from a many to many P2P model as well.

These are only a couple of ideas to incorporate P2P in web hosting but if the Supreme Court is wise they’ll see that P2P is more than just a music swapper.
http://www.hostsearch.com/news/phillips_news_2878.asp


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Ian Clarke & Steven Star

Dijjer is free P2P software that dramatically reduces the bandwidth needed to host large files.
Website blurb

Bandwidth is a problem for anyone hosting big files. As soon as your music, mp3 blog, or movie gets too popular, either your site goes down or you get hit with a huge bandwidth bill. Worse, the cost and hassle of distributing large media files means that the internet isn't living up to its potential as a democratic medium. Dijjer solves this problem. What distinguishes it from similar P2P tools (like Bittorrent) is how easy it is to use for publishers and users.

Using Dijjer on Your Website is So Simple

You don't need to install anything. Just put a file on your site as you normally do, but add "http://www.dijjer.org/get/" to the beginning of your links:

normal link: http://mysite.com/video.mov
dijjer link: http://dijjer.org/get/http://mysite.com/video.mov

When they click a Dijjer link, users will get some of the file from your website, but most of it will come from other people running Dijjer. That's how you save bandwidth. And when someone clicks on the link who hasn't used Dijjer before, they'll get help installing it. After that, downloads happen seamlessly inside their web browser. Try it! Download one of the videos on the right.

The Dijjer Difference

Downloads happen in your browser. Most p2p clients make you use a separate program. Dijjer doesn't.

Play media files as they download. If you're downloading a song or a movie, you can listen / watch it as it's downloading-- try it!

Works great with RSS & podcasting. Dijjer will work perfectly with ipodder, ipodderx, radio, and every other podcasting "aggregator". More info.

Works for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Everybody can run Dijjer.

No spyware. No adware. No secrets. The Dijjer source code is free, open source, and available to everyone (why this matters).

Copyright friendly. Dijjer only downloads files that are on websites. So for copyright holders, policing Dijjer is exactly the same as policing websites.
http://dijjer.org/


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The Powers Behind the Home-Video Throne
Christian Moerk

WHEN Steven Spielberg directs a movie, he gets final cut. But the last word is more likely to come from Laurent Bouzereau.

Mr. Bouzereau, 43, is barely known to the world at large. But in the clannish, status-obsessed corridors of Hollywood, he has a growing reputation as Mr. Spielberg's personal DVD producer, one of perhaps a dozen players who have mastered the young art of turning the video edition of a film into a sui generis event.

The Paris-born Mr. Bouzereau brings his own crew to film sets and works from a script for the DVD documentary while a filmmaker shoots the feature movie around him, a practice that is gaining in popularity. He is currently producing the bonus features for the disc version of Mr. Spielberg's forthcoming "War of the Worlds" with Tom Cruise (set to open in June), and has served as the director's go-to guy in all DVD matters for the last 10 years. He has added touches of his own to many movies, including "Schindler's List," for which he created the documentary "Voices From the List," featuring interviews with Holocaust survivors.

Mr. Bouzereau agrees that a good DVD producer can persuade directors with a large appetite that less is more. "You'll have 10 hours of extra material," he said. "But not all of it needs to be told."

Where feature films are mostly put together by producers pitching scripts to studios, which then attach a director and stars, the DVD business only has one star: the original film's director. A director's involvement - which means access to the set, extra footage and even ideas for special features - can mean the difference between a passable DVD and a great one.

"You don't say, 'I do everything for this or that producer,' you say, 'I do it for the director,' " said the veteran DVD producer Mark Rowen, who produced the DVD version of the animated comedy hit "Shrek 2," which sold 21.6 million units worldwide, more than any other DVD last year.

Mr. Rowen's job differs from Mr. Bouzereau's in a way that is invisible to consumers. Where a bonus-features expert like Mr. Bouzereau is mostly involved in creative matters, a producer like Mr. Rowen will also be expected to oversee the budget, the menu design that guides the viewer through the options and any interactive features, like online games.

That such people carry weight with filmmakers as powerful as Mr. Spielberg is the mark of a revolution that in a few short years has changed the pecking order in Hollywood, conferring status on those who can tap the potential in a former ancillary business that - with $25 billion in annual domestic DVD sales - has outstripped the take from selling movie tickets.

"Now the tail kind of wags the dog," said Richard Schickel, a film historian and a long-time critic for Time magazine. Like Mr. Bouzereau, Mr. Schickel - no longer content with a seat in the audience - also produces DVD's. He supervised for Warner Brothers the restoration of Samuel Fuller's brutally edited World War II epic "The Big Red One" for theatrical and DVD release.

Mr. Schickel's job resembles that of someone who adds features to DVD releases of new features - both require copious research and complex negotiations with the studio to include favorite pieces of footage within a given budget - but the older the film, the harder it is.

In Mr. Schickel's case, he said, he scoured around an underground vault, finding more than 110 extra reels, or more than 70,000 feet of film. "I try to speculate on what was going through the minds of the Lorimar executives," he said of the company that initially released the film in 1980, after cutting more than an hour of material from it. But Mr. Schickel was luckier than most DVD producers: he found a Warner executive who pushed his case for restoring the Fuller's movie to its former glory.

Some film executives have yet to be convinced that elaborate and increasingly expensive add-ons from the likes of Mr. Bouzereau, Mr. Rowen and Mr. Schickel are always worth the effort. "Our research has shown that less than half the people buying a DVD watch a single extra feature," said Steve Beeks, president of Lions Gate Entertainment.

Still, his company's re-release of "First Blood," the Rambo film, last year included something as rare as an alternate ending, in which the troubled war veteran John Rambo kills himself. And with the average American household now buying 15 DVD's a year, few will risk releasing a major title without hiring a star from the growing fraternity of DVD producers to enhance it.

"We're really a virtual studio," said Michael Gillis, whose DVD production company MogoMedia produced special features for Columbia Pictures' "Groundhog Day" and "Stripes." Like conventional film producers, Mr. Gillis said, DVD producers often land jobs thanks to close relationships with actors and directors, and are frequently represented by major agencies. "We have access due to a track record, or directly to talent," he explained.

Occupying what is, in effect, new space within the film industry, more than a few DVD producers appear to have stumbled into their now-glittering careers. Mr. Bouzereau, regarded by many as the industry's leading light, started in the now-defunct LaserDisc business. He later worked as an executive for Bette Midler's film production company, and entered the bonus-features world when the high-end Criterion Collection contacted him in 1991 to do a voice-over for its LaserDisc of Brian De Palma's "Carrie," because he had written a book about the filmmaker.

The DVD production community has its own list of hits and misses - just as the feature film community does - which has less to do with the value of a director's original work than with what a producer has later done, or failed to do, to amplify it. "You would be surprised at the material coming out of good places," Mr. Bouzereau said, politely referring to the copious amount of lesser DVD material being released.

Some insiders were less than impressed when Columbia TriStar released a remastered DVD of Wolfgang Petersen's seminal submarine drama "Das Boot" in its original German television version in 2004 for $39.95 with a new score and almost an hour of previously unseen, crisp footage, but with little back-up material and a 23-year- old "making of" featurette. Similarly, Warner Brothers put out David Mamet's thriller "Spartan" on DVD last year for $24.98 with only an audio track by Val Kilmer, and with Mr. Mamet conspicuously absent.

For many the art of the extra feature was born in 1999 when Tom Lesinski, then a Warner Brothers home video executive and now president of the home video unit for Paramount Pictures, had the filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski amplify the DVD version of "The Matrix" with two documentaries. The two DVD versions of the big-screen sequels delved even deeper, adding a second separate world, "Animatix," in which animated characters based on the films' actors continued the adventures.

The add-ons helped drive disc sales for the first "Matrix" film to more than a million copies, back when there were only three million DVD players nationwide. (Today, industry experts estimate there are more than 70 million.) Such plain profit logic convinced the film industry to take seriously those whose opinions about movies had been seen as after-thoughts. " 'The Matrix' was exactly the right audience," Mr. Lesinski said. Because the film was conceived as the first in an otherworldly series, he said, "it took over the culture and it happened over a fairly long period of time." He added, "We saw it as an opportunity to take that fascination and create something for the fan."

Using that same model, he explained, Paramount expects to release yet another "Titanic" DVD edition on Oct. 26, produced by Jon Landau, this time with "the most complete body of work completed for a movie," including more than 30 deleted scenes, a one-hour documentary by the director James Cameron, and an alternate ending. A Paramount spokeswoman declined to say how many DVD's will be shipped, but said that the studio had "enormous expectations" for it.

No word yet on whether Jack lives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/movies/03moer.html


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Japanese Record Labels Win Landmark P2P Settlement

Japanese record labels have won a landmark settlement from the MMO peer-to- peer service for breach of copyright.

It is the first time anywhere in the world that a peer-to-peer service has been found liable for the illegal sharing of files using its software.

A Tokyo court rejected MMO's appeal and awarded damages of Yen36.89mn (£183,000) to plaintiffs comprsing 19 labels, the Record Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) and JASRAC, representing song authors.

MMO was also found to have infringed the plaintiffs' right to make their recordings available on the Internet.

The RIAJ applauded the decision and vowed to continue its campaign against file sharing.

'RIAJ will continuously take dratic measures against illegal use of music on the Internet that corrupts the "cycle of music creation" and leads to decline of the music culture,' it said in a statement.

Allen Dixon, general counsel for the International Federation of Phonographic Industries stressed the significance of the ruling.

'This case is important in that it is the first decision world-wide that has found that providing an unauthorised file-sharing service itself constitutes an infringement of record companies' rights to "make available" their recordings on the Internet,' he said.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/71117/ja...ettlement.html


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Impatient TV Viewers Turn To BitTorrent
Kristyn Maslog-Levis

Some Australians are turning to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks for new episodes of their favourite American television shows.

According to an independent study conducted by Alex Malik, a former general counsel for the Australian Recording Industry Association, the popularity of one P2P application -- BitTorrent -- in Australia is driven in part by local television networks which "have adopted a strategy of being slow to air current episodes of popular TV shows".

Malik believes that by delaying the broadcast of these programmes, Australian TV programmers have increased the domestic demand for the shows. "As a result, impatient viewers have increasingly turned to BitTorrent to download their favourite shows," he said.

Malik told ZDNet Australia that online forums dedicated to discussions about popular TV shows revealed that one in three of the conversations touches on where and how to pirate TV programmes on the Web. He said although it was hard to quantify the number of people illegally downloading shows through BitTorrent, there was a "substantial" number of people doing it.

"It's difficult to put a number on it because not a lot of people talk about [online pirating] especially since it's illegal. It's similar to illegal music file sharing ... not a lot of people admit to it but there is a substantial amount happening," he said.

Malik's research showed that Australians have to wait an average of eight months to see first-run episodes of popular programmes from overseas. For instance, it takes an average of four months to watch the latest episodes of top-rated shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives, currently being aired in Channel Seven.

Malik said local networks also delayed the telecast of top programmes during summer [in Australia] so as "not to waste successful programs" during the unofficial non-ratings period.

"These delays provide a window of opportunity for viewers to upload TV programmes after their American broadcast date, thereby making them available to viewers outside of the US, and viewers within the US who may have missed the program.

"In order to download these shows, all consumers require is a broadband connection and BitTorrent software. While download quality is variable, and depending on its source, BitTorrent users have found the quality to be satisfactory," the report said.

"While there are no accurate Australian BitTorrent usage figures, anecdotal evidence and reports from online forums suggest that Australians are downloading TV programmes in large quantities. Australians are also uploading programs like My Restaurant Rules and Rove," he added.

A previous survey released by Web monitoring company Envisional found Australia as the second largest downloader of online pirated TV programmes in the world (15.6 percent), second to the United Kingdom (18.5 percent) and ahead of the US (7.3 percent).

The report said that increased bandwidth, technological advances and a high demand of US-based TV shows are some of the reasons for the boom in online piracy. It also said that around 70 percent of the piracy occurs through BitTorrent.

A spokesperson from Channel Nine told ZDNet Australia that "the major reason other countries around the world -- apart from the US -- are downloading [TV] series from the Internet is because the shows are US-based and are often seen many months after the original airdate".

Ben Coppin, chief operating officer at Envisional previously said in a statement that the number of people turning to piracy to satisfy their TV demands will only increase.

"If TV companies were to offer episodes for download at a small cost at the same time as they air offline they could generate revenue in the same way that Apple’s iTunes does. However, they must be aware of the dangers of losing their core audience to a delivery method that is free, unregulated and open to anyone with an internet connection," Coppin said.

Malik said unless the TV networks devote immediate attention to the problem of unnecessary delays, "the television industry is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the music industry".

FreeTV and other networks have not responded despite repeated queries.

Recently, there has been an effort to clamp down on the use of BitTorrent technology to aid copyright infringement. The recording industry's first scalp was Perth-based Internet service provider Swiftel.

In March, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations Unit took the ISP to court. The hearing will resume on April 7.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communi...9186748,00.htm


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The Whole Future Of Computing At Stake? Sounds Like A Movie
John Naughton

In a high-ceilinged courtroom in Washington last Monday, seven men and two women sat listening to arguments about technology. As far as we know, none of them is especially knowledgeable about technology.

Indeed, one of them disdains even to use a laptop, and writes his judicial opinions by hand on a yellow legal pad. But these are the highest judges in the US, and they are deciding the future of computing and possibly of the internet itself.

This may seem a grandiose claim, but bear with me. The Supreme Court was hearing arguments about MGM vs Grokster, a case which movie studios and other content owners had brought against Grokster, a file-sharing service, on the grounds that it enabled copyright infringement by allowing users to exchange music files freely over the internet.

Grokster's defence was that it provided an efficient technology for sharing files and could not be held responsible if users employed it for illicit purposes - in other words, that its file-sharing technology had substantial 'non-infringing' uses.

This phrase echoes the nub of a landmark precedent set 20 years ago by the Supreme Court in the famous 'Sony-Betamax' case, which held that Sony was not liable for any copyright abuses likely to be perpetrated by owners of video-cassette recorders because there were 'substantial non- infringing' uses of the product. Or, to put it another way, just because the VCR could be used for perfectly legitimate purposes - like viewing a rented movie - it was OK for Sony to sell it, even if some rogues were going to use it to record copyrighted TV programmes.

The core of the Grokster defence rests on this 20- year-old decision - made by a hair's breadth majority of one - and is supported by a range of briefs filed by technology experts. They argue that the 'Peer-to-peer' (P2P) networking technology (of which the Grokster system is a particular type) is a vital technology for a networked world.

A good example is provided by BitTorrent, an ingenious P2P system designed for sharing very large files, which is currently enraging the movie studios. I know of no better way to distribute very large files - for example new releases of operating systems or large industrial software applications - than BitTorrent, and many companies now use it precisely for that purpose. It saves them having to copy the files onto CDs or DVDs which then have to be FedEx'd round the world.

But of course BitTorrent - like the internet itself - is uncensorious about what's in those files: as far as the program is concerned, they're all bitstreams. And it just so happens that some of these bitstreams constitute copyrighted movies - hence Hollywood's ire.

The reason MGM vs Grokster is such an impor tant case is that the principle at stake is fundamental. It is about whether the inventor of a new technology can be held liable for uses that other people find for it at some point in the future. If the 'Supremes' decide against Grokster, the process of innovation in the computing and communications industries will be imperilled - for who would happily engage in the invention of a revolutionary new product or technology if they feared that some aggrieved company might subsequently sue them on the grounds that their work had undermined its cherished business model?

On this principle, the telegraph companies could have sued Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi for inventing (respectively) telephone and radio; the Post Office could have sued the inventors of the fax machine and of email; oil companies could one day sue the inventors of the fuel cell; and telcos will be free to sue the inventors of VoIP, the technology for making telephone calls over the internet.

If you look back over the history of technology, one thing stands out above all others, namely that the inventors of radical technologies rarely foresee the applications that people will find for their inventions.

Marconi conceived of radio as a point-to-point communications technology rather than broadcast (one to many) technology. Henry Ford thought he had invented a way of making motor cars, whereas in fact he invented a way of manufacturing products in huge volumes at low marginal cost.

And the geniuses who conceived the internet thought they were inventing a way of enabling folks to log in remotely to mainframe computers, whereas in fact they designed a technology for enabling us to send email, spin the World Wide Web, girdle the earth with a zillion lines of personal communication - and, yes, share music and video files. Which brings us back to those nine learned men and women in Washington.

They hold the future of technological innovation in their hands. If they get it wrong, we will all be screwed. Let's hope they don't fumble it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists...451089,00.html


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P2P Battle Looms In Sweden
Correspondents in Stockholm

A DRAFT law that would forbid the sharing of copyrighted material on the internet without payment of royalties is raising tensions in Sweden, where legal loopholes make such downloads hard to stop.

Sweden, where the government and industry claim unlicensed use of copyrighted material is rampant, wants to follow the lead from other countries which already prosecute internet file-sharers.But there is much doubt about how such a law could be implemented.

"There is an incredibly tense atmosphere here. I have had a number of threats made against me personally," said Henrik Ponten, legal council at the Swedish Antipiracy Agency.

The controversy began earlier this year when the Swedish government proposed a law that for the first time would make it a punishable offence not only to post stolen copyrighted music and films on the internet, but also to download the material.

"We want to cure the lack of clarity in the law so that regular people know" what is legal and what is illegal, Swedish Justice Minister Thomas Bodstroem told the Expressen daily last month.

"Since 2001, the record industry in Sweden has seen its revenue drop by more than 30 per cent," said Lars Gustafsson, chief executive of the Swedish branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, IFPI.

At least part of the decline reflected illegal downloading, he said.

"The (piracy) problem is bigger in Sweden than in any other country in Europe," Mr Ponten said, claiming that at least 500,000 of Sweden's nine million inhabitants use file-sharing programs to download and post illegal copies of films, music and computer games on the internet.

About 15 million illegal copies of movies are downloaded off the internet each year, Mr Ponten said.

Some 7,000 cases involving the illegal uploading of copyrighted material, are discovered annually per million inhabitants, compared to 2,000 on average in Europe, he said.

Not everyone agrees with the Social Democratic-led government that penalising downloaders will really curb the practice. Three opposition parties have already vowed to vote against the law, which comes up for parliamentary debate on May 25.

"Why should we criminalise the downloaders? It is often impossible for people to know whether what they see on the internet has been put there legally or illegally," Centre Party MP Johan Linander said.

If passed, the new law would go into effect on July 1, but the Antipiracy Agency, not willing to wait that long, has stirred up furore by cracking down on companies and individuals within the foggy framework of the existing law.

In March, the agency helped police conduct a widely publicised raid of internet provider Bahnhof's Stockholm office, confiscating four servers they said were filled with pirated music and films.

In all 450,000 sound files, 5,500 games and computer programs and 1,800 films were seized.

But in a twist, the company has claimed that the pirated material was placed there by an infiltrator from the Antipiracy Agency itself.

"It turned out that a large amount of the material had been uploaded by an infiltrator, or provocateur, working for the Antipiracy Agency. I have the impression that this was just a publicity stunt," Bahnhof chief executive Jon Karlung said, insisting that his company did not condone copyright infringements.

"But we're just a service provider. I mean, you don't blame the postal service for what people write in the letters they send," he said.

Mr Ponten acknowledged that his agency had an "informer" working at Bahnhof, but insisted that such methods are necessary in the fight against internet piracy.

"You can't find the perpetrators (of these crimes) by looking through the phonebook. You have to play the game to prevent crime," he said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...nbv%5E,00.html


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Swedish File Sharing Crackdown Planned

However, the law is not with them
Nick Farrell:

THE SWEDISH government’s plan to crack down on file- sharers pirating illegal music and movies has hit a slight snag.

Although the country knows that unlicensed use of copyrighted material is rampant, there is much doubt about how such a law could be implemented.

There is also considerable anger at the concept of the idea. Much of this anger follows a high profile case where an ISP, Bahnhof's, was raided and four servers where found with pirated material in them.

It turned out that a lot of the pirated material was placed there by an infiltrator from the Antipiracy Agency.

Bahnhof was furious, calling the whole thing a publicity stunt by the Antipiracy Agency.

The incident proved that ISPs who hosted the file-sharing servers were completely unable to stop people from downloading illegal material, it claimed. It seems that the general public might be agreeing. Already three opposition parties have already vowed to vote against the law, which comes up for parliamentary debate on May 25.

Johan Linander, a Center Party MP said that it was bad to criminalise the downloaders when it was impossible for them to know whether what they see on the internet has been put there legally or illegally,
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22301


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Sweden

Parliamentarian Rejects New Copyright Proposal

Johan Linander is a member of Swedish Parliament, representing Centerpartiet ('Center Party') - see http://www.centerpartiet.se/template...ng____2247.asp

"Centerpartiet har idag beslutat att vi tänker avslå regeringens proposition om upphovsrätten. Bakgrunden är att lagstiftningen inte är tillräcklig överskådlig för att ens kunna få godkänt. Den nya lagen kommer att beröra miljontals svenskar och då måste vi kunna kräva att lagstiftningen är tydlig och möjlig att förstå.

Vi har också ställt oss bakom att det ska vara tillåtet att ladda ner musik och annat upphovsrättsskyddat material oavsett om den som gjort det möjligt att ladda ner begått ett brott. Vi kan inte göra miljontals svenskar till brottslingar för att de lyssnar på musik genom sina datorer."

Rough translation:

Center Party has today decided that we intend to reject the government's proposal on copyright laws. The background is that the legislation is not understandable enough to be acceptable at all. The new law will touch millions of Swedes, and therefore we need to require that the legislation is clear and understandable.

We have also taken a stand that it should be allowed for people to download music and other copyright-protected material even if the person who has made the material available has committed a crime. We can not make millions of Swedes criminals just because they listen to music through their computers.
http://johanlinander.se/blog/


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Fury In Land Of Internet Pirates Over Crackdown
Stephen Castle

A copyright crackdown by Sweden's film and music industry has provoked a backlash, with the country's anti-piracy investigators suffering an attempted break-in, computer-hacking attacks and death threats.

Passions are running particularly high in Sweden because the affluent nation has one of the highest numbers of broadband users in the world, giving many people the opportunity to download full-length feature films in minutes.

Globally, piracy is estimated to cost the music and film business billions of pounds, but attempts to curb the scale of the practice in Sweden have provoked fierce opposition. The country's anti-piracy bureau, which is a private company supported by the industry, has been accused of creating a climate of fear and of using infiltrators to get access to groups of computer file-sharers.

Branded by one newspaper as Sweden's most hated man, the bureau's main spokesman, Henrik Ponten, has become the focus of hostility and his mobile phone number is listed on one file-sharers' website which depicts him in Nazi uniform.

Mr Ponten says that in Sweden 15 million films are downloaded illegally each year, almost as many as those that are purchased. He said yesterday: "I have been described as the most hated man in Sweden. I get threats: people call me up and say 'I know where you live'. We have had computer-hacking incidents and they have tried to break into our office. We have a very strange situation in Sweden where, when you try to follow the law, everybody ends up screaming at you."

Tensions reached a new high when the bureau raided the offices of Bahnhof, a major internet service provider. Not only do the two share the same building but the anti-piracy bureau is a Bahnhof customer.

Jon Karlung, the chief executive of Bahnhof, said: "Around 20 people arrived in the office, they turned my keyboard upside down. They were quite aggressive and some of the office clerks were very disturbed; it was like they were making an ambush. It was like a B-movie."

Mr Karlung, who says he does not condone breaking the law, says he has dismissed one staff member for malpractice. However, he claimed that the employee had been acting under the influence of one of the anti-piracy bureau's infiltrators. "It is a kind of Kafka scenario," he said, "they filled the server with material and then called the police. They use scare tactics. It is a kind of witch-hunt."

Mr Karlung dismissed claims that pirated music and film with more than three years of playing time had been seized, and said no charges have been brought by the police.

Whatever the outcome, the dispute has put Sweden's law and its enforcement under the spotlight. Mr Ponten blames politicians for failing to give a lead on the issue of piracy, allowing many people to believe that it is acceptable. "Some of the politicians even say that file-sharing is OK," he says.

Others say the high prices for downloads meanthere is an irresistible incentive to break the law. Mr Karlung says: "The new technological situation makes it impossible to keep the old business model. They should lower the price and maintain profits by selling more."
http://www.ezilon.com/information/article_3202.shtml


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Uni-verse

Some Colleges Falling Short in Security of Computers
Tom Zeller Jr.

If the computer age is continually testing how well institutions protect personal information, the nation's colleges and universities may be earning a failing grade.

Last Monday, administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that a computer laptop containing the names and Social Security numbers of nearly 100,000 people - mostly graduate school applicants - had been stolen. Just three days earlier, Northwestern University reported that hackers who broke into computers at the Kellogg School of Management there may have had access to information on more than 21,000 students, faculty and alumni. And one week before that, officials at California State University, Chico, announced a breach that may have exposed personal information on 59,000 current, former and prospective students.

There is no evidence that any of the compromised information has been used to commit fraud. But at a time of rising concerns over breaches at commercial data warehouses like ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, these incidents seem to highlight the particular vulnerabilities of modern universities, which are heavily networked, widely accessible and brimming with sensitive data on millions of people.

Data collected by the Office of Privacy Protection in California, for example, showed that universities and colleges accounted for about 28 percent of all security breaches in that state since 2003 - more than any other group, including financial institutions.

"Universities are built on the free flow of information and ideas," said Stanton S. Gatewood, the chief information security officer at the University of Georgia, which is still investigating a hacking incident there last year that may have exposed records on some 20,000 people.

"They were never meant to be closed, controlled entities. They need that exchange and flow of information, so they built their networks that way."

In many cases, Mr. Gatewood said, that free flow has translated into a highly decentralized system that has traditionally granted each division within a university a fair amount of autonomy to set up, alter and otherwise maintain its own fleet of networked computers. Various servers that handle mail, Web traffic and classroom activities - "they're all out in the colleges within the university system," Mr. Gatewood explained, "and they don't necessarily report to the central I.T. infrastructure."

Throw in aging equipment, an entrenched sense that information should be as free-flowing as possible, and a long-standing reliance on Social Security numbers as the primary means of identifying and tracking transient populations, and the heightened vulnerabilities of universities become apparent.

"We sometimes battle networks and mainframes in place since the 1960's," said Mr. Gatewood, "and mind-sets in place even longer."

For years, the Social Security number served as the default identifier for students, faculty and staff at nearly every university and college. It was printed on identification cards, posted on bulletin boards along with grades, and used to link bits of information - spread across dozens of networked databases - on each individual.

A handful of states - Wisconsin, California, Arizona, New York and West Virginia - now ban or limit the use of Social Security numbers in this way, according to a compilation of state and federal laws by the privacy advocate Robert Ellis Smith. And many universities have already abandoned or are in the process of moving away from using Social Security numbers as the primary means of identifying students.

But a 2002 survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers indicated that at least half were still using it as the primary identifier for students in their databases. And because the number has been used to link so many records across so many different databases in so many different departments for so long, abandoning it quickly is nearly impossible.

"It's complicated," said Virginia Rezmierski, the assistant to the vice provost for information technology at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. "We started a long time ago, and gave the university seven years to complete the process."

The University of Michigan essentially completed a migration to randomly generated identifier numbers in 2003. But Professor Rezmierski points out that myriad entities both inside and outside the university still use Social Security numbers, forcing universities to continue to handle them. Most of the national testing agencies, for instance, still use Social Security numbers to identify the scores of incoming students, Professor Rezmierski said.

Another problem, according to Jonathan Bingham, the president of Intrusic, a company that develops tools designed to uncover security breaches, is that universities have tended to put too much emphasis on preventing attacks from worms and viruses and too little on capturing troublemakers who quietly stroll through their databases.

The leaking of names and Social Security numbers from all these universities was not the result of noisy, destructive attacks, Mr. Bingham pointed out. "These are all problems that have nothing to do with that," he said. Rather, "someone's been able to get into the network that doesn't want to be detected."

Of course, not all universities are equally vulnerable, and some are more adept at protecting their data.

"Many of the better universities have better security in place than some corporations," said Eugene H. Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University. And because federal laws governing the handling of student data - specifically the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 - have been in place for longer than many other privacy statutes, Mr. Spafford said, data security "has been a concern at universities for some time."

And yet it appears that, on the whole, schools remain comparatively low-hanging fruit for hackers and thieves.

"I think it has shaken people up," said Professor Rezmierski of the University of Michigan, who is conducting a study of computer-based incidents at colleges and universities across the country.

"Often it takes these kinds of incidents to get people to pay attention."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/04/te...gy/04data.html


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File Sharing Is Not The Problem

Conglomerates should try to profit from technology, instead of preserving old business models.
Manuelita Beck

File sharing made its way to the Supreme Court this week, but it’s anyone’s guess as to what the outcome will be.

Justices heard oral arguments in the case, in which the entertainment industry is trying to shut down online file-sharing services. The court is expected to rule on the case in July.

The movie and music industries want makers of file-sharing software to be held responsible if their users download copyrighted material.

According to The Washington Post, hundreds of millions of people worldwide use such programs to trade software, songs and videos. That could be why the entertainment industry sees file sharing as such a threat.

“The Massacre,” 50 Cent’s album, will be Billboard’s No. 1 album next week. Yet, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures, he only sold more than 325,000 albums. In the weeks since the release of “The Massacre,” 50 sold 2.5 million albums, and it’s counted as a great success.

Ashton Kutcher’s film “Guess Who” took the top slot in box-office figures two weekends ago with a $20.7 million opening. When you take into account the price of movie tickets, maybe a couple million people went out to watch Kutcher and Bernie Mac.

Yet, the population of the United States is just less than 300 million, according to the Census Bureau’s population projection.

Despite the seeming pervasiveness of the entertainment industry, its audience isn’t all that large. Given its sales numbers, it’s no wonder the existence of hundreds of millions of downloaders are flashing warning signs at the entertainment industry.

Music sales are down, and if those downloaders could be forced to buy their music instead of getting it for free, record companies could make much more money.

But who’s to say all those people would go out and buy music? Or that they aren’t already doing so?

And let’s not forget all those artists who aren’t in the system. Regardless of what the giants in the entertainment industry like to think, they aren’t the be-all and end-all of music and movies.

The claim by the entertainment industry that “copyright infringement is the only commercially significant use of file-sharing” is ridiculous. File sharing can be beneficial for all kinds of people without violating copyrights.

Plenty of musicians and moviemakers are distributing their work for free and file-sharing software can be a convenient way for them to distribute it.

Of course, that poses its own threat as well. With more choices, consumers don’t have to just choose from whatever artists are signed to big record companies or only watch movies distributed to their local theaters.

For that matter, plenty of people are writing software and want people to trade it. Libraries, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer noted, use the technology to transfer documents. Not all file- sharers are trafficking in copyrighted material. The Supreme Court case is asking for makers of file-sharing software to be put out of business because people might use it to do illegal things.

The Supreme Court ruled on a similar issue in 1984. Under that opinion, Sony couldn’t be held responsible for what people did with its Betamax video recorder. If a product or service is “merely capable” of substantial legal use, a company can’t be held liable for what people do with it.

Grokster and StreamCast Networks, the companies involved in the Supreme Court case, said the “Sony standard” should be applied to them.

Their supporters said the same, claiming that what the entertainment industry is asking for will have a chilling effect on innovation. If inventors have to worry about what people might do with their products, they might not release them.

Even if the court doesn’t agree, the entertainment industry is going to have to come to grips with technological changes. Times change. Even if file-sharing software gets taken out, what happens when someone comes up with some other way to share data?

Maybe the record companies and movie studios need to realize their financial models won’t work in today’s world of DVD-burners and iPods.

They would be better off trying to find a way to profit from new technology, instead of trying to preserve their outdated business models.
http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2005/04/04/63949


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Studios, University Fight Battles Against Illegal File Sharing
Rob Fishman

Last month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of MGM v. Grokster, the record industry's latest attempt to control the uninhibited flow of illegally traded music files over the internet.

Meanwhile, University students continued the illegal exchange of some of the estimated 2.6 billion copyrighted files traded nation-wide each month.

Cornell students partake in file sharing through a variety of means, from the publicly available peer-to-peer (P2P) programs like KaZaA or Limewire, to the somewhat more exclusively offered services provided by websites like www.i2hub.com, that operate by using a program called Direct Connect. In either case, there is clear tension surrounding what constitutes "the appropriate use of protected intellectual property," as Kent Hubbell, dean of students, said in the Cornell Chronicle last July.

At issue in Grokster is whether file sharing program makers can be held liable for secondary copyright infringement -- that is, if KaZaA and similar services are responsible for the files exchanged through their programs. MGM, among others in the recording and movie industries, alleges that since the vast majority of information traded among users is illegal, Grokster and other companies are contributing to copyright violations.

Although a major Cornell direct connect hub was shut down after a bootleg video of the Cornell Jon Stewart performance showed up on it, another student, Jae Kwon '05, restarted the file exchange room under a different name. Kwon said a "hub owner doesn't know what files are traded between users."

To counteract the exchange of illegal files, he said, he disconnects users whom he finds sharing copyrighted material.

In contrast to the dark image of file sharing services painted by attorneys for MGM -- B. Verrilli, Jr., a lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court, called Grokster "a gigantic machine that was built on infringement" -- Kwon credited his hub as "fostering a sense of community among Cornell Resnet users." Regardless of intent, though, Kwon said he is "protected by the Sony Betamax ruling, [a 1984 case at issue in Grokster] as well as the current Grokster v. MGM case."

Just as the issues confronting the campus and the court were similar, so too were the opinions voiced. The root cause of file sharing programs like Direct Connect or Grokster, for instance, was attributed in both venues to a basic desire to escape payment. From the bench of the Supreme Court, Justice David Souter said, "I know perfectly well that I can buy a CD and put it on my iPod. But I also know if I can get music without buying it, I'm going to do so."

Likewise, Rajiv Ravishankar '07 said, "Given the price of CDs today, downloading music seems inevitable. For how easy it is to download a CD online ... I don't see the point in paying $15 for music."

The simple fact that music is currently available for free might render the Supreme Court's decision irrelevant: "regardless of the legality of [file sharing] right now, it is still perceived as illegal," said Ben Arfa '08. Since the assumption is that file trading is already an illegal procedure, the Supreme Court's codification of that assumption will, in his mind, have little effect.

There are some indications that the Court's decision might also seek to solve a problem that will ultimately work itself out. Because of recent innovations in legal software, and frequent problems with the software created by companies like Grokster, users may autonomously accept more legal solutions.

Josh Teitelbaum '05 said that "the key is Napster and iTunes ... you can charge people a small amount for each song, and people will use these programs if available. College students aren't necessarily going to steal if they don't have to."

Like Arfa, Teitelbaum acknowledged that "what we're doing is illegal," but predicted a change now that legal -- and relatively inexpensive -- alternatives are available.

In addition, many students have expressed dissatisfaction with Grokster-like services, as these programs are frequently laced with viruses or secondary programs that generate pop- up ads.

"I used to download music from Limewire until my computer began to run more slowly. I was getting pop-ups every couple of minutes," said Chelsea Hall '08.

As the Court's decision in MGM v. Grokster approaches and new techonology becomes available, it is clear that file exchangers are approaching a major crossroads in music downloading. The decision in the case will likely be handed down in June.
http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/disp.../42522b63dc56a


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Extending An Olive Branch To File Swappers?
John Borland

For the last year, a handful of companies has offered college students cut-rate music subscriptions on campus, looking to wean them from the free file-swapping networks.

Cdigix, the lone company wholly focused on this business, is now expanding into video services, hoping that movie studios see the same benefits as record labels in extending an olive branch to file-swapping students.

So far it has been a tough sell. Record labels are giving Cdigix and others wholesale discounts, and that means legal digital music can be extraordinarily inexpensive--and sometimes even free--on campuses. For their part, the Hollywood studios aren't yet proffering the same deals, and that means that downloading a movie online is no cheaper than going to the local Blockbuster.

But Cdigix founder and President Brett Goldberg believes that movie studios are starting to change their tune. He's already cut a few deals with studios and now offers movies from Walt Disney and Turner Broadcasting. Over the next year, he thinks other studios will see the advantages of extending attractive terms to students, and so be willing to offer him better terms.

That wouldn't necessarily guarantee the equivalent of hitting a home run. Some students are quick to adopt subsidized services on campus, but others have protested the use of their fees for online music. Nor is there any guarantee that when they leave campus, they won't be recaptured by the allure of file trading.

For now, however, Cdigix, which has a presence on 21 campuses, may be the closest thing to a bridge between campuses and Hollywood's version of acceptable movie watching. CNET News.com talked to Goldberg about what he's seeing on college campuses today.

Q: You've been doing music services on campus for a while now. What are you learning?
Goldberg: There are a couple of things that are indicative of the trend we're seeing. We offer two components to our services, subscription and per download offerings.

That's pay per download?
Goldberg: That's right. So far, the results seem to indicate that the subscription downloads, the tethered download service, is being used with much more frequency than the permanent downloads. Second, when a university is able to subsidize the service, the usage rates are certainly better.

When a university subsidizes the service it really makes a big difference.
That's particularly true where the student government was the one to subsidize it. That seems to have the potential to work the best, because...the student leaders out there on campus marketing the service for you.

What is the sweet spot in terms of price?
Goldberg: Again, what seems to be emerging is that when a university subsidizes the service it really makes a big difference. That said, our services are typically priced at about $3 per student per month. By and large, we've heard from students and from administrators that that works. It is certainly an acceptable price point, given that we're still in the early days.

To be clear, that's $3 a month for access to all the music they want.
Goldberg: That's right. On a tethered download basis. They cannot burn that music to disc or export that music to a portable device.

My understanding is that you're able to offer that low price because the record companies are cutting you a deal on the wholesale prices. Is that right?
Goldberg: That's right. The music industry, by and large, has been pretty open about the fact that the college marketplace is important to them. They started sending cease-and-desist letters to universities four or five years ago. So that trend has really stressed the importance of the college demographic as part of their strategy for getting people to use the services they should, and getting them away from the services they shouldn't. They've been generous and flexible in the deals they've worked with us.

How much of a discount are they giving you, compared to the commercial services like Napster or MSN Music?
Goldberg: Well, I should hold off on saying specifically, but you can kind of look at it in the sense that the typical standard price of our service is $3.49 per student today. When you look at the mainstream market prices, they start at a minimum of $7.99 and go to $9--if not higher. So the price break on the subscription experience is substantial.

We don't have iPod compatibility, but the deals we're putting together with device manufacturers will be a great response.
You're not getting a price break on per-download songs?
Goldberg: That's right. We offer permanent downloads on an 89-cent basis and albums at $9.99, but that's a choice we're making. It doesn't reflect any scaled-back economics on the label side.

Do you plan to move to portable downloads, with Microsoft's Janus software, like Napster to go?
Goldberg: Absolutely. It's on the very near horizon.

Given how popular iPods are on campus, how will it work for you not having iPod compatibility?
Goldberg: Stay tuned. We don't have iPod compatibility, but the deals we're putting together with device manufacturers will be a great response. I've spent a lot of time playing with these devices, like the iRiver H10 and the Creative devices. These are very strong products and certainly comparable with the iPod today.

To be clear, you're saying that the combination of the downloadable subscription and these new devices will be competitive with the iPod?
Goldberg: That's correct. It's a situation where we are coming up with a response at a period of time when Apple has decided to be proprietary in the way they distribute their files.

The record labels have made a big effort to get into the college market. Now you're moving into video as well. Are the movie studios working with you? Do the movie studios have the same concerns about educating students?
Goldberg: Absolutely. More and more when you talk to school administrators, they say that the letters they're seeing are from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), not the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). That's a trend that's changed this year. In our conversations with the studios, we're finding them to be more and more cooperative and more and more supportive of working with distributors like ourselves.

You have a few deals already with Disney and a few others. What do those videos cost now?
Goldberg: It's $1.99 for direct to video and library titles and $3.99 for new titles.

So it's still pretty comparable to going out and renting a movie?
Goldberg: It is comparable. So far we haven't been in a position where there is any additional discount or different discount being offered because we are a college service. But those conversations are happening, and I'm optimistic that at some point in time there may be some discounts realized, given the importance of this audience, and the potential. The poor college student does seem to be somewhat of a reality.

So you ultimately expect to have a full CinemaNow-type range of content?
Goldberg: That's one of those things we're going to see. I'm pretty focused on not just doing studio deals that would put us in the position of just offering the same catalog that MovieLink does. I'm certainly interested in working with Hollywood, and I'm optimistic we'll get more deals done this year. But the situation with us is doing it on the right terms.

I think it remains to be seen, but given the way conversations have evolved, I think there are several deals that could be done with studios that would not just be deals, but would be deals that would get college students using our service in a high volume.

So the idea is to be cheaper than
Goldberg: I think the cost component is something to consider. I think there are three things that need to be evaluated by studios as well. One is cost. Two is business model. What is the right model? Is it pay-per-view? Is it subscription? What is the right way to package? Then you have other considerations. Our pay-per-view films are available on a 24-hour basis. Is that right, or should there be 48 hours or longer?

So there is an evolution that needs to happen on a price basis, on the business model basis, and on a user experience basis. When all that's combined, those are the kind of deals we want to get into.
http://news.com.com/Extending+an+oli...3-5653861.html


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Students Using New Generation of Downloads
Ted Bridis

College junior Kyle Taylor is downloading hundreds of songs by No Doubt, Bruce Springsteen and others onto the Compaq laptop in his cramped dormitory room. With a few more clicks of his mouse, Taylor is watching commercial-free "Seinfeld" episodes on his computer. In just minutes, he then downloads the entire movie "A League of Their Own." The 20-year-old is not breaking any laws. Nor is he at risk of expensive lawsuits by the entertainment industry over copyright violations.

Taylor and his classmates at American University - and thousands more students at other U.S. colleges - are among the earliest customers of a new generation of legal downloading services approved by the largest music labels and Hollywood studios. Students appear enthusiastic, despite some early kinks that can keep them from loading songs onto iPods.

"You can one-click-download an entire album, and the downloading time is, like, a minute," Taylor said. His laptop holds more than 3,000 songs.

In the search for online customers, entertainment companies are aggressively pursuing college students, who cannot remember life before the Internet.

High Court to Tackle Downloads

This generation works off laptops more than it watches television, plugs into high-speed university networks, uses the Web for homework and headlines - and on average carries around more than 1,000 songs on a hard drive.

Already, dozens of schools are rolling out downloading services from Ruckus Network Inc., RealNetworks Inc., Napster LLC and Sea Blue Media LLC. So important is this university market that Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's largest label, has paid the entire bill at some schools during trial semesters. Sony-backed artists are available for downloading on all the major services.

"We're reaching into our pockets," said Andrew Lack, the chief executive for Sony BMG. "At a certain point, the universities have to step up, too, but this is about an investment in the future."

Sony BMG will not say how much it is spending on the effort. Many private schools will not disclose how they are paying for these services. American University, for example, says only that money came from a generous, anonymous donor to the school in the nation's capital.

The University of North Carolina system got $150,000 from Sony BMG in the fall to offer services in dormitories across five campuses, said Thomas C. Warner, UNC's director of coordinated technology management. Warner said roughly 60 percent of students regularly use the download services.

Most schools ultimately expect to charge students future subscription costs of $5 to $8 per month in dorm fees.

"If kids build a habit to not pay for media, that is a habit that will persist maybe for their entire lives," said William Raduchel, chief executive at Herndon, Va.-based Ruckus Network and a former executive at AOL Time Warner. "We want to be the place where kids want to be when they don't have to be anywhere."

Weary from problems blamed on illegal downloads - piracy lawsuits against students, virus outbreaks and congestion on school computer networks - universities are embracing these new services. Moreover, colleges are in fierce competition to enroll top students and fill empty dorm rooms, so they pitch music downloading to prospective students.

"Who's got music downloading and who's got the most comfortable mattresses really matters," said Julie Weber, American University's executive director for housing and dining programs.

Parents can feel more comfortable, too. At least three students at American were among hundreds nationwide forced to pay thousands of dollars to settle copyright suits by the recording industry.

Already available at eight schools, including American University, Ruckus' service offers unlimited downloads for a flat fee from a library of more than 525,000 songs and a collection of 50 full-length movies and television shows that rotate monthly.

More than 1,000 newer movies, such as "Spider-Man 2," can be downloaded for about $2.50 each. It's convenient enough to lead a student to put off that term paper for a few more hours.

Sophomore Scott Goldstein of Marlton, N.J., watches movies like "Groundhog Day" or "American Beauty" on part of his computer screen at the same time he does his homework. "It's a good distraction," said Goldstein, 19.

"Students spend a lot of time sitting around, spend a tremendous amount of time in their dorms and on their computers," said Kelly Crossett of Westchester, N.Y., a junior at Loyola College in Maryland, which offers music downloads from Sea Blue Media's rival Cdigix service.

"We are very happy with what we have right now. If you give students a legal way to get what they want, who's going to do it illegally?" Crossett said.

There are some frustrations. All-you-can-download subscription services typically offer "tethered" music and movies, meaning students must periodically reconnect to the service from their dorm - once every 30 days for music - to keep watching or listening. If they do not, their song and movie files are rendered useless.

This ensures that students cannot send copies of popular songs or movies to friends who are not subscribers. But it also means a library of music is automatically crippled after graduation unless users keep paying a monthly fee, higher than what a school typically charges, to the downloading service.

Also, college students are caught in the industry's esoteric battle over digital music formats and how record companies can best protect songs from hackers and pirates.

Most songs on these services can be played only on a Windows computer and cannot be transferred to most portable music players, including Apple's popular iPod. A few services, like Cdigix, let students purchase a song for an extra fee - from 79 cents to 99 cents - that can be loaded to an iPod.

"Music is no good to me if I can't get it on my iPod," Goldstein said.

Sony BMG's chief executive promises help is on the way.

"We've got to bust down all those walls," Lack said. "This is really the first year for the program, but we've got to improve and make them better."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT


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My GPX won’t play with my OGG

A Law Mandating Music File Compatibility?
Roy Mark

WASHINGTON -- Congress is toying with the idea of mandating one standard for all online music platforms.

Thanks but no thanks -- the industry can figure it out, said music industry and consumer groups at a congressional hearing about the plan Wednesday.

During a hearing to discuss mandating interoperability standards between competing music platforms such as Apple's iTunes and RealNetworks' Rhapsody, lawmakers sounded off on the lament of some hipsters frustrated by playback snafus when they try to transfer music files from other platforms to their iPods.

Although Real and Apple support Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), a compression format defined by the MPEG-2 standard, RealNetworks has hinted strongly in the past that it might consider using Microsoft's Windows Media (WMA) format because of the playback snafus with iPod devices.

The two companies have also sparred over Real's own DRM (define) translation technology that lets consumers securely transfer purchased music to every popular secure music device on the market, including ones from Creative, iRiver, RCA, Rio, Samsung, palmOne and all four generations of Apple's red-hot iPod. Apple later accused RealNetworks of hacking its DRM system.

"This interoperability issue is of concern to me since consumers who bought legal copies of music from Real could not play them on an iPod," Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) said at a hearing of a House subcommittee on intellectual property.

The ideas floated by Smith and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), who once sponsored an infamous bill that would have allowed music companies to jam the personal computers of illegal downloaders, included a national interoperability standard and warning labels on portable devices about what formats can play on the machines.

Government intervention in the burgeoning online music business, though, brought a unanimous no vote from industry officials who showed up to weigh in.

William E. Pence, chief technology officer of Napster, noted that the government has "historically not been a participant in competition between early-stage consumer technologies" such as between the VHS and Betamax, the cassette and the eight-track tape or USB and Firewire.

"Similarly, it does not seem prudent for government to pick a winner in the continuing marketplace battle between Apple's Fairplay DRM and its competitors," Pence told the panel.

Pence said government intervention "can lead to politicizing and inhibiting" innovation and urged the panel to allow the marketplace to select winners based on actual demand.

"Marketplace forces will continue to drive innovation in the DRM arena with attendant consumer benefits -- new ways to enjoy digital music at a variety of different price points -- while gradually solving the interoperability problem," Pence said.

Dr. Mark Cooper, the CFA's director of research, noted that Apple's early dominance of the download market does not guarantee its long-term success.

"A quarter of century ago a closed platform dominated the computer desktop market," Cooper said in a reference to the Apple II and MacIntosh computers.

"A more open platform quickly replaced it, forcing all platforms to improve compatibility. Given a choice that is not distorted by anticompetitive practices and good information, consumers will prefer and migrate to the interoperable platforms."

Ray Gifford, president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a Washington think tank focused on digital issues and public policy, urged Congress not to give in to "platform envy and mandate some sort of interoperability."

Gifford said antitrust and intellectual property laws are well suited to handle the situation.

"For public policy makers, we can never forget the lessons of public choice theory, which predicts that firms and interest groups will seek government favor in promoting their standards solution and handicapping their rivals," Gifford said.

"Any call for the government to prefer one standard or model over another must be subject to most exacting skepticism."

"Apple was invited to testify today, but they chose not to appear," Smith said. "Generally speaking, companies with 75 percent market share of any business, in this case the digital download market, need to step up to the plate when it comes to testifying on policy issues that impact their industry. Failure to do so is a mistake."

A spokeswoman for Apple declined comment.
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3495791


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Sony Refreshes Its Network Walkman

Hard drive-based device features a new design that more closely resembles the IPod.
Martyn Williams

Sony will soon launch a new member in its hard drive-based Network Walkman family, its fourth so far, and this time the new player is more than an update to the previous model.

The most immediately obvious difference between the NW-HD5 and Sony's previous models is in the design. While the previous players were based on a landscape design that had users holding the player horizontally in their hands, the NW-HD5 is based around a portrait design in which the display sits above the controls. This is more akin to competing products, including Apple Computer's IPod. Sony hasn't abandoned the landscape design completely, as the image on the display can be rotated a quarter of a turn should users want to hold it on its side.

The circular control pad has been replaced by nine buttons. The display has also been changed to an LED (light emitting diode)-backlit 1.5-inch LCD from a similar sized organic LED (OLED) display.

MP3 Support

Like the previous models, the NW-HD5 packs a 20GB hard drive. It supports Sony's ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus compression formats, Windows Media Audio, WAV files, and the popular MP3 format. It also has the same selection of menu languages: Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Good news for people on the move is a removable battery that, according to Sony, lasts longer. It provides enough power for 40 hours of continuous playback when measured with the lowest-fidelity files. Playback of MP3 files encoded at 128 kbps, one of the most common MP3 compression settings, is 30 hours, according to Sony. The equivalent times for Sony's previous model, the NW-HD3, are 30 hours and 22 hours, respectively.

Other changes include the addition of a USB port and power jack on the player; previous models required the use of an adapter.

To top it off, Sony managed to make the NW-HD5 smaller than its predecessor, at 2.4 inches by 3.5 inches by .6 inches. It weighs 4.8 ounces.

The device will also go on sale at a lower price. It will cost around $327 when it goes on sale in Japan on April 21. Sony plans to sell the player worldwide and will announce launch details for other markets shortly, it says.
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/arti...RSS,RSS,00.asp


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Demoted Sony Electronics Guru Is Outspoken
Yuri Kageyama

Ken Kutaragi, whose name is often paired with "geek" and "genius," seemed to many a logical choice to take Sony Corp.'s helm as it struggles to turn around its stumbling electronics business. He is, after all, known as "Father of the PlayStation" for siring the industry's most popular video game console.

And Kutaragi's latest creation, the handheld PlayStation Portable, is hot. An estimated 3 million been sold since it was released in Japan in December and the United States last month.

But instead of ascending in the dramatic management reshuffle last month that put Howard Stringer in the chief executive's chair, Kutaragi was demoted.

Not only was Kutaragi passed over for the Welshman who had overseen Sony's music and movie businesses. He also lost his seat on Sony's board, though he still runs Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc., the company's game subsidiary.

It appears the 54-year-old Kutaragi's outspoken nature, in a corporate culture that's oiled by consensus, may be to blame. Independent and shockingly frank by Japanese standards, Kutaragi hasn't held back from criticizing company decisions.

In January, he told the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo that fellow executives had been overly restrictive in controlling Sony content in a world where consumers of digital movies and music want hassle-free access.

Asked what he would do if he were running Sony, Kutaragi said the company must revive its original innovative spirit, when it boasted engineering finesse with the transistor radio, Walkman and Trinitron TV.

Sony also has been hurt by its insistence on making its content proprietary, Kutaragi said.

Some employees, he said, have been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products similar to Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod portable music player, mainly because Sony's music and movie units were worried about content rights.

Indeed, Kutaragi's comments came about the same time that Sony decided to finally agree to support the open and widely used MP3 digital audio standard on its portable music players.

It's unclear whether Kutaragi, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was punished for speaking out. But it is clear that consensus-builders - though he doesn't speak Japanese, Stringer is known for diplomacy - were chosen over potentially divisive critics.

Kutaragi's blunt manner may have been seen as problematic when the sprawling company, whose core electronics business has suffered amid its expansion into entertainment, desperately needs cohesion and revitalization. Sony's stock has fallen about 70 percent over the last five years.

Ryoji Chubachi, a production and electronics expert who became president in the March 7 reshuffle - making him No. 2 behind Stringer - later publicly praised Kutaragi as a talented engineer but hinted that top Sony executives didn't believe he was suitable for managerial leadership.

"I respect him as an engineer," Chubachi, 57, told journalists recently. "In the area of semiconductors, I consider him my teacher."

Outgoing Sony chief executive Nobuyuki Idei didn't say why Kutaragi was passed up but did characterize Chubachi as "a good listener" at a recent press conference.

Stringer said he still views Kutaragi as a key person at Sony, instrumental in the next- generation video game console dubbed the PlayStation3, or PS3, which is expected to be released next year.

"Obviously PS3 is a vital device for the company going forward. So I am under no illusions about the value and importance of Kutaragi-san," Stringer said, using the Japanese honorific "san."

Kutaragi, who joined Sony in 1975, broke away from Sony's mainstream thinkers in the 1990s to work on the PlayStation. At the time, the company was filled with skeptics about the potential of video gaming, but Kutaragi proved them wrong, turning the business into a cash cow.

Another widely held view about Kutaragi's demotion is that he had to share in the responsibility for Sony's failures.

Battered by competition from cheaper Asian rivals, seen in the dramatic rise of South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sony has been in deep trouble in recent years. It fell behind in flat-panel TV sets and got beaten up by the iPod and Apple's iTunes online music store.

The PSX, which combined the PlayStation2 console with a DVD recorder and player, has bombed since going on sale less than two years ago. It was never sold outside Japan and Sony won't disclose PSX sales figures.

Kutaragi also drew criticism from even devoted Japanese game players over reported glitches in the PlayStation Portable, or PSP, after its initial release in Japan.

Some PSP machines in the initial shipment had a button that tended to get stuck, according to Sony. About 3,000 PSP machines are estimated to have required repairs, which were given for free, although Sony isn't giving exact figures. The glitch was fixed for later shipments.

Like many other Japanese, 47-year-old Kenichiro Usui has recently been disappointed by Sony's problems.

Usui, who works for an engineering company, said he stopped shopping for the Sony brand and just picks whatever he likes, having switching recently to what he thinks is a sturdier IBM computer from Sony's Vaio.

He still owns a Walkman but he also switched from a Sony model to a TV made by Victor Co. of Japan Ltd., a manufacturer allied with Sony's biggest Japanese rival, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., which makes Panasonic brand products.

"It was so great for Japan to have a shining star like Sony," said Usui. "It's sad we may be witnessing its decline."
http://www.forbes.com/technology/fee...ap1923096.html


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Napster Shares Jump After Boosted Guidance

Shares of Napster Inc. soared Tuesday after the online music distributor raised its fourth-quarter revenue guidance, citing strong subscriber growth and better-than-expected sales of downloads. Napster said it now expects revenue of between $16.5 million and $17.5 million for its recently ended fiscal fourth quarter. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial are looking for the company to post a fourth-quarter loss of 63 cents per share on sales of about $14.5 million.

This marks the second time in about five weeks that Napster has raised its forecast for fourth-quarter revenue.

The Los Angeles-based company said its subscriber base grew by 143,000 in the fourth quarter to total more than 410,000, including 56,000 university subscribers. This represents quarterly subscriber growth of more than 53 percent from the third quarter.

Napster has emerged as a chief rival to Apple Computer Inc.'s market-dominating iTunes music store, which charges 99 cents per download. The company has sold more 300 million songs through iTunes.

Napster, on the other hand, offers a subscription service that allows unlimited access to its 1 million tracks. The subscriptions cost about $10 a month. Napster To Go, released in early February, allows those songs to be transferred to a portable player for $5 more per month. Users also have the option to purchase songs for 99 cents each.

Napster shares rose $1.01, or 16 percent, to $7.18 in morning trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock has slowly declined since hitting a 52-week high of $10.40 on Dec. 7, although shares are still well above their 52-week low of $3.35, reached last August.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...stomwire. htm


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Napster Reports Subscriber Spike, Revenue Jump
Elizabeth Millard

One factor contributing to Napster's user spike might be the continuing wrangle over the legalities of peer-to-peer services. In an attempt to distance itself from its past alleged intellectual property infringement, Napster has repeatedly emphasized that its services are legal.

Napster raised its quarterly revenue forecast for the second time in a month, citing a spike in subscriber numbers and robust music download sales.

The company noted that it now has over 410,000 subscribers, with subscriber growth of more than 53 percent in just the fiscal fourth quarter.

Analysts estimated Napster's fourth quarter sales at about US$14.6 million on average, but the company now is predicting revenue of about $17.5 million.

On the Go

The main driver in the fourth quarter for Napster was its "Napster to Go" service, the company has noted.

Unveiled in September, the service allows users to move music from Napster's library onto MP3 players and other portable devices.

Unlike many other similar services, like iTunes, Napster to Go is not based on per-song charges. It promises an "unlimited amount of music" for a flat rate.

Ring a Ding

Napster to Go also was made available for users of one of AT&T's wireless smartphones , which gives the service a foothold in the increasingly lucrative ringtone market.

Called Napster Mobile, the service lets users download ringtones through their computers, and then onto smartphones. The service includes incentives for users to sign on to the company's PC-based offerings as well.

"The ringtone market is growing at a phenomenal rate," said IDC analyst Lewis Ward, who noted that 2004 revenues in the ringtone market were about $325 million. "Napster now has an edge that other music services don't, and that is no doubt contributing to their success."

Courtroom Drama

Another factor for Napster might be the continuing wrangle over the legalities of peer-to-peer services. In an attempt to distance itself from its past alleged intellectual property infringement, Napster has repeatedly emphasized that its services are legal.

Although many experts predict that piracy will continue to be a problem with digital entertainment , some also have noted that the majority of users prefer not to break the law if affordable and legal options are available.

Finally, part of Napster's growth might be simply its name. Although the company was shut down for copyright infringement before being relaunched, the brand name remains fixed in consumers' minds, Ward said.

"Napster is a strong brand, especially among the tech savvy," he noted. "That always helps."
http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xht...story_id=32323


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2nd time’s the charm?

Bertelsmann Launches New Peer-to-Peer Service

GNAP allows users to download and share content, but includes some copyright controls, company says.
John Blau

German media giant Bertelsmann, a former investor in the Napster file-sharing network, is taking another stab at peer-to- peer technology with a new service for downloading and sharing movies, games, and other content over the Internet.

The service, called GNAP, will allow mobile and fixed network operators, ISPs, TV stations, and other content distributors to market large downloadable files both legally and cost efficiently, Arvato spokesperson Gernot Wolf says. Arvato is the services and technology arm of Bertelsmann.

The new service has both centralized and decentralized components, according to Wolf. On the one hand, it uses a central server to store content and process DRM (Digital Rights Management) transactions. On the other, it offers users the opportunity to download and store content on their own computers and share it with others via P-to-P technology.

"In this way, content distributors don't have to invest in huge network capacity to be able to provide, say, 100 downloads at once but rather can take advantage of the storage capacity of its P-to-P customers," he says.

Users who choose to download a film or game from another user because, say, the central server is already flooded with requests must still pay for the film. "Each transaction within the user community is session controlled," Wolf says. "Our technology knows that customer A, for instance, has received a movie from customer B, so we have a strong control over copyrights."

End users must install GNAP client software to be able to use the software, according to Wolf.

Cutting Costs

In addition to copyright protection, GNAP offers content distributors a cost-efficient way for numerous customers to download large files at once. "It's not economic today for many companies to offer an on-demand download service for movies and games if they have to invest in all the necessary storage and networking equipment themselves," Wolf says. "GNAP makes this service more affordable with P-to-P by allowing users to choose alternative sites to download."

Arvato has completed beta testing of the GNAP service and is conducting "technical due diligence" tests with holders of content licenses "to ensure that all security requirements are met," Wolf says.

The Bertelsmann subsidiary hopes to sign up the first customers at the end of the second quarter, according to Wolf.

Bertelsmann, a co-owner of the Sony BMG music label with Sony, teamed with the former Napster in October 2000, only to see the service sued by the music industry for copyright infringements. Napster was later acquired by Roxio, which has since sold off its software business to become Napster.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120266,00.asp


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Got Playlist Anxiety? You're Not Alone
John Borland

It's the latest way to study natives in their natural habitat: Check their iTunes music libraries.

A group of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Palo Alto Research Center presented a study this week outlining the behavior of the wild cubicle-dweller when using Apple Computers' digital music software.

Sharing playlists on an office network turns out to be something like a peacock spreading his feathers for display. The researchers found that people actively work to create an image of themselves through the music they make available to others, just as they might by buying a new car or showing off a cell phone.

"I just went through (my playlist) and said, 'I wonder what kind of image this is...giving me,'" reported one of the study's subjects. "I just went through it to see if there was stuff that would be...annoying, that I would not like people to know that I had."

The rise of playlist anxiety isn't new. The phenomenon was noted on college campuses shortly after Apple began offering the ability to stream music from other people's hard drives over local networks.

Indeed, public embarrassment may now be the routine lot of the unhappy freshman who gets caught with a collection too heavily weighted toward the collected works of Weird Al. The Georgia Tech study is the first to apply this reasoning to a study of cubicle-dwellers, however.

As yet, the study remains more anthropological than representative. The researchers interviewed 13 people at an unnamed office about their use of iTunes and their perceptions of other people based on playlist-reading.

Along with the culling of personal playlists, the researchers detailed the way that people browsed and judged other people's collections. In general, people reported that music libraries didn't dramatically change their perception of their co-workers--except for one or two people who seemed a little too attached to the most current pop hits.

The researchers did offer some suggestions for future software developers. People didn't tend to try out new music randomly inside iTunes, they said--instead, they would hear recommendations offline, and then check their co-workers' libraries to see whether anyone had the songs to sample. Exploration tools could be improved, they said.

Similarly, researchers said people became attached to other people's libraries, and felt a sense of loss when their computers went offline. iTunes or similar programs could create some kind of ghost playlist information on unavailable music which could turn into purchases, they suggested.

The paper was presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this week in Portland, Ore.
http://news.com.com/Got+playlist+anx...3-5657537.html

[JackSpratts]

File-Sharing War Won't Go Away; It'll Just Go Abroad

Good day and compliments.

I am making this contact on behalf of my sister, Dr. (Mrs.) Mariam Abacha, wife of the late chief of the armed forces of my country, killed in a mysterious spray- painting accident, hoping that you understand our predicament?

Our family recently came into possession of the global digital distribution rights to Best of Bread, of which contains the hit Baby I'm-a Want You. Also found in our library is many Van Halen recordings with David Lee Roth, which are better than the Hagar ones.

We ask you come to our Web site, WholeLottaMP3.com, and download these tracks and many others for pennies. Awaiting with interest your response, which will save our family from torture and death.

Prince Isa Ahmed

Nigerian spam of the future.

Last week, the Grokster case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, highlighting the entertainment industry's battle against unauthorized file-sharing over the Internet.

But even if the music and movie industries stop Grokster and other file-sharing software — which lets users exchange songs and video over the Internet for free — they seem to be fighting a futile war. Every time the content holders knock out one threat, another pops up, over and over again.

You can see it in some of the Web sites that are in the news lately, such as AllofMP3.com and Grouper. Entertainment industry lawyers are playing an eternal game of Whac-A-Mole.

"These issues are not going to go away," says lawyer Andrew Bridges, who has defended file-sharing companies.

Eventually, some entity that's untouchable by U.S. courts is going to hook a server to the Internet, load the hard drive with copyrighted songs ripped from CDs and sell the songs worldwide for a few cents each. Maybe it will be the second act for the Nigerian e-mail scamsters.

In fact, that scenario is only a baby step away from what's already happening. With oodles of cheap bandwidth available on transcontinental fiber, a server halfway around the world is as good these days as one next door. You get a glimpse of what that means from AllofMP3.com, based in Russia.

That site has been giving the music industry fits by cleverly exploiting a loophole in Russian copyright law to sell music to Americans for one-tenth what you'd pay on iTunes.

In late-March, Russian officials decided they had no legal right to shut down AllofMP3. So it's up and running for the foreseeable future.

Here's how the site works: AllofMP3 either buys a license to distribute digital works only in Russia or perhaps just buys CDs and rips them to its server. It's hard to tell from the language in the site's legal disclaimer, but the latter seems more likely. AllofMP3 sells music by artists, such as the Beatles, who have so far refused to let any Web site sell downloads of their music.

Either way, it seems that buying music from AllofMP3 is a bit like buying designer watches from a guy with a card table on a New York street corner. No telling where the goods came from, and don't bother asking.

Users pay by the file size — usually less than 10 cents a song. But here's the key: There's a step in the process where you click a button to encode a copy of the song, and then you download the copy.

It seems that under Russian law, if a user comes to the site and essentially makes his or her own copy, the site does not violate Russian copyright laws. It's comparable to saying that if you go to the library and photocopy a book chapter at 5 cents a page, the library has done nothing wrong.

But not many people are going to photocopy a chapter at a library. Millions of people can and will painlessly download vast quantities of music from a Web site with low prices and a surface coating of legitimacy.

Maybe Russia will close its loophole sometime. But the next AllofMP3-type site could pop up in Uzbekistan or North Korea or just about anywhere.

"When you have transfers across borders, you have a substantive law problem," says Bridges of law firm Winston & Strawn. "You also have a problem figuring out who to sue."

The music industry's challenges won't come just from overseas, either. Grouper is based in Silicon Valley. It just unveiled software that lets up to 30 people, who could be anywhere, connect their computers over the Internet. Then they can all share each other's files, including music.

This means you can listen to any music stored on any of those 30 computers. Grouper blocks downloads — you stream in the songs, but the file remains on the host computer — because it wants to "keep Grouper out of legal hot water," CEO Josh Felser says.

But by letting 30 people share music anytime, Grouper is pushing the bounds of "fair use" in ways copyright law never anticipated. The company is worried enough that it's been ducking the Recording Industry Association of America like a rabbit hiding from a circling hawk.

"We don't want to give them a call," Felser says.

What, then, can the content holders do to make sure they get paid for what they create?

Bridges uses a parking analogy. People don't want to park illegally, he notes, but they do when they can't find a legit spot, or when parking seems ridiculously expensive.

The best way to fight illegal parking is to provide accessible, fairly priced parking, then back up the effort by educating people about why it's better to park legally and by strategically cracking down on egregious scofflaws.

Same with music or movies, Bridges says. The industry needs to make it more attractive for people to buy music legally than risk doing it illegally and back that up with education and enforcement. So far, he argues, that's not happening.

Unless that changes, when Prince Ahmed comes around offering Guitar Man at a wickedly deep discount, it's a good bet consumers are going to go for it.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/indust...-sharing_x.htm


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Suit Seeks To Block Microsoft Acquisition Of Groove Networks

The $120 million acquisition of Beverly-based Groove Networks Inc. by Microsoft Corp. may be delayed by a lawsuit claiming the deal's terms don't include compensation for some Groove employees who hold preferred and common stock.

Microsoft said it would acquire Groove and hire founder Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes software, as chief technical officer, in an all-cash offer announced March 10. He would report to Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Groove makes software that enables file sharing over the Internet.

Former Groove employee Michael Matthews, who sued Groove and its directors and seeks to block the deal, claimed Microsoft and Ozzie "seek to eliminate the interest of junior preferred and common stockholders for no consideration," according to the suit filed March 25 in a Delaware court.
http://www.ecnnews.com/cgi-bin/04/s/...pl?fn-glance05


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This Week in Flags and File Sharing

Content copyright protection played big in the courts this week. The Supreme Court got a dose of file-sharing arguments, while the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals received more briefs on the broadcast flag.

The flag briefs were sought by the Court two weeks ago to determine if the petitioners had a right to challenge the technology that ostensibly prevents mass distribution of digital TV content over the Internet. The petitioners-- the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and several library associations--claim the FCC doesn't have the authority to impose the broadcast flag.

In their brief filed March 29, the petitioners argued they had legal standing to bring the lawsuit because several of their individual members would suffer material harm under the broadcast flag regime.

"The North Carolina State University Library... currently assists its faculty in making clips of broadcast television shows such as Univision's 'El Show De Christina' available for distance-learning students," the filing states. "Because the Internet is used to make the clips available, however, the flag will prevent this educationally beneficial activity."

That may or may not be the case, depending on whether Univision flags the program. The flag itself is merely a bitstream that can be inserted into over-the-air content at a creator's behest. Come July 1, all digital over-the-air TV receivers sold in the United States must be able to detect the flag and limit what content gets spit out to-- either analog outputs or other flag-compliant devices.

(While the flag is intended to circumvent Internet distribution, the analog output provision represents a hole through which a reasonably tech-savvy individual could record HD content and convert it back to HD with little degradation.)

There has been little indication of exactly what content will and won't be flagged--i.e., some or all high-definition programming. However, TV Technology engineering consultants have noted that stations may not be keen on hiring someone to oversee an "on/off" switch on the flag bitstream. Consequently, it's conceivable that news programs will be flagged, which the petitioners cite as a big boot on the back of First Amendment discourse.

Even if only some news content were flagged, for example, Vanderbilt University would be looking at replacing equipment in the $100,000 recording facilities of its Television News Archive, according to the brief. The archive provides licensed news clips to more than 140 subscribers via the Internet.

"The flag would foreclose on this type of use for broadcast news programs," the filing stated.

Only one member among the petitioners could be driven out of business by the flag. Jack Kelliher, president of pcHDTV in Sandy, Utah, makes a $170 Linux-based HDTV card. Making it flag-compliant would boost the price to between $350 and $400, Kelliher said.

"Our targeted market would not respond well to a $350 card," he said.

Internet redistribution of digital content was also the subject of oral arguments Tuesday in the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster. The movie mogul plaintiffs in the case claim that the file-sharing geek defendants are liable for copyright infringement.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco found otherwise two years ago in a ruling that essentially upheld the mother of all content decisions--the Betamax opinion (Sony v. Universal City Studios). In Betamax, the Supreme Court in 1984 found that selling copying equipment did not contribute to infringement. The ruling allowed VCRs into the market.

Jim Burger, an attorney with Dow Lohnes and Albertson in Washington, D.C. who attended Tuesday's presentation, said Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter expressed substantial concern that a ruling against Grokster could stifle innovation--just as a ruling against Betamax could have done. Burger is counsel of record on an amicus brief filed on behalf of Intel, urging the court to uphold Betamax and have the petitioners file instead on the grounds of inducement. Under inducement, the petitioners would have to demonstrate that Grokster instructed users on how to download copyrighted material or otherwise encouraged them to do so. Napster, the predominant file-sharing network five years ago, was vulnerable to charges of inducement because it maintained centralized servers. Grokster does not.

At least one content guy is coming down in support of Grokster. HDNet founder and all-around entrepreneur Mark Cuban owns and/or co-owns a network, a couple of production companies, a movie library, a theater chain, a theatrical distribution business and a basketball team, is not afraid of file-sharing. In fact, he's financing the defense.

"If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only," Cuban wrote in his blog. "It won't be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to get a fairness opinion from a technology oriented law firm to confirm that big music or movie studios won't sue you because they can come up with an angle that makes a judge believe the technology might impact the music business."

The Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion by June or July.
http://www.tvtechnology.com/dailynews/one.php?id=2870


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File Sharing Online: Good Or Bad For The Local Musician?
Shawn MaComber

Major record labels are scared to death of you.

Well, not you, exactly. The fear stems more from your computer, the cable modem line snaking out of it, and the virtually unlimited, free access to the product they put out that becomes instantly available online.

In recent months the release dates of records by superstars such as Snoop Dog, Eminem, and Destiny’s Child have all been pushed up after copies of their records leaked online.

It is clear that major labels are not be happy about downloading, none of them are going out of business tomorrow because of it either.

But how do independent acts in the local trenches feel about downloading? Most are, after all, on a considerably tighter budget than Snoop Dog or Destiny’s Child. They can’t afford to lose sales.

By the same token, electronic dissemination of music breaks down many of the distribution barriers standing before unsigned or unknown bands.

Brian Serven of local hardcore outfit Backstabbers, Inc. said downloading can only help an independent band like his out on the road.

“For us and other underground bands, the important thing is that our music is heard and the energy is reciprocated when we play,” Serven said. “If we go to San Diego and play a show and no one knows us, it’s rough. But if one kid buys our disc and burns it for 20 friends and we go to San Diego and play for 21 kids who love it, it’s so worth it. A bigger, more energetic crowd also helps with selling other merchandise. Kids that come to see you play usually want some sort of trophy, so other records and t-shirts, pins and patches do really well on the road.”

As both a musician in the much-beloved avant garde progabilly band Dreadnaught and the owner of a local label, Red Fez Records, Bob Lord has a unique point of view on downloading that encompasses both ends of the “music business.”

“I see the digital dispersal of music as a positive development in the industry,” Lord said, but added that caveats remained.

“It really cuts to the heart of the issue in a lot of ways: when the playing field is evened out, the stuff left standing is real and not necessarily what some major label has made real by investing truckloads of cash,” Lord explained. “On the other hand, the downside is that the casual trading of music does make it harder for smaller labels to benefit financially in the short term. The music gets out there, which is, of course, the goal. But without a financial upside it becomes more and more difficult to actually get it out there in the first place.”

Marty England of local folk-rock stalwarts Pondering Judd has mixed feelings about downloading, but said people shouldn’t shed too many crocodile tears for the wailing major labels

“A big reason the record industry is suffering right now isn’t because of free music sharing, but instead falls into the fact they’re not into artist development anymore,” England said. “There are few great catalogs of records from the past twenty years simply because artists aren’t given a chance to screw up. Nobody wants to touch someone who has been dumped by a major label. In addition to being a musician, you now have to be an actress or actor as well.

“Our society today is not built on risk takers,” he continued. “It’s a risk to purchase a record by an artist you don’t recognize, or someone you’re not told is good. It’s all about money.”

Aside from that, England said mp3s are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, his band has sold records online in more than 50 countries, which he attributes to listeners being able to sample songs for free before plunking down their hard earned euros, dollars, pesos, whatever. But when fans aren’t conscientious, when their “sense of entitlement” overwhelms them, it can hurt the band’s bottom line.

“Ultimately, I think the free sharing of music hurts independent artists more than it helps,” England said. “I’ve come across web sites in Italy and Russia that have our entire albums posted for free download. We use a great deal of our record sales to record the next CD. People signed to major labels are not hurt by free music sharing simply because they make their money in touring and merchandising.”

Major labels can afford to attempt to combat downloading by throwing heaps of money into CD encryption technology and adding special features to their releases. So if you’ve ever wondered why as of late major music releases have come with a cornucopia of bonus features — DVDs, CD-ROM features, discount concert tickets, free T-shirts— wrack your tired brain no more. It’s not that the record companies have suddenly fallen in love with you. It’s that they desperately want to stay on your payroll.

This adds another layer of merchandising on top of the music, raising the bar to an unattainable level for independent acts. How many locals bands do you know that can afford to add a free DVD and posters to their latest self-produced effort? Nevertheless, Seacoast musicians are ambivalent about the additions by saying, for the most part, these marketing schemes have nothing to do with their musical missions.

“Major labels adding bells and whistles to stem the tide of downloading is a little like trying to apply a tourniquet to Niagra Falls,” Lord said. “Ain’t gonna happen. Short-term, maybe, but long-term is another story: The paradigm has shifted already and it’s only a matter of time. For people like me who still love to open up a big old Roger Dean/Yes gatefold it is kind of bittersweet, but I think making it easier to get the music you want is a good thing, pure and simple.”

Serven said the business of playing in Backstabbers, Inc. is quite far removed from playing in, say, Aerosmith. The ledger is balanced in a completely different way, and royalties don’t play such a big role.

“Most punk/hardcore bands will take a percentage of discs to sell on their own when their CD is released and make their money that way,” he said. “Then we purchase CDs at cost from the label when we run out. So we don’t get royalties or anything like that— the day to day record store sales don’t count for us at all. Mostly, for us, success is gauged by the idea of people actually hearing our music.”

Pondering Judd’s England said he mourned the influence of this marketing outside of the music and only expected it to get worse.

“I think interactive CDs are great, but it’s certainly not a prerequisite for me when it comes to purchasing records,” he said. “I think the industry shift to interactive media speaks to our inability to appreciate music at its core. We are a visual society, and MTV certainly has contributed to the downfall of music as a joy-of-listening art form. It’s the same reason that many of these awards shows are all about big dance numbers and costume changes instead of actually having the artists perform music. If you put an acoustic guitar or piano in front of most of these folks, they’d be lost. It’s all about being able to satisfy multiple markets instead of just being good at playing music.”

Backstabbers’ Serven said he understands the quandary before music buyers.

“I think that if someone was standing at a record store with a BSI disc in one hand, and let’s say an Iron Maiden disc in another, that is almost the same price but Iron Maiden has additional videos, posters, stickers and web-links, it’s a tough call,” he said. “You really do wonder which has more value. I know that I’ve made decisions on which CD to buy based on how many tracks there are.

“But if someone went to a record store with the mind to buy a BSI disc, that’s a rare occasion that would put favor in our hands,” he continued. “And those are the kinds of occasions we’re putting our faith in.”
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll...S1403/50401106


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Sentivist To Get Dynamic Shielding Capabilities
Tan Ee Sze

NFR Security will be incorporating the ability to discover new applications on the network and to dynamically shield the system from attacks, in the next version of its Sentivist intrusion detection and intrusion prevention offerings scheduled for release in July.

NFR Security will be incorporating the ability to discover new applications on the network and to dynamically shield the system from attacks, in the next version of its
Sentivist intrusion detection and intrusion prevention offerings scheduled for release in July. The company will also be releasing multi-gigabit capable offerings during the same time frame.

Discussing the NFR technology roadmap during a recent visit to Singapore, president and chief executive officer Andre Yee pointed out the changes in the enterprise drive security exposure. “In most organisations, changes that occur in the network fly under the radar of the security administrator. For example, someone brings in P2P tool like Kazaa or any file sharing application and starts using it, and often the security administrator is the last person to know. If he is not aware of it, he cannot address it.”

Which is why NFR will be incorporating the open source vulnerability scanner Nessus in its Sentivist offerings, so that the intrusion detection system (IDS)/intrusion prevention system (IPS) will be able to adapt its tuning parameters based on the data vulnerability and network services information that it receives.

For example, if someone decides to take an FTP server and use it as an Apache server, the Nessus scan will discover the presence of the new server. The system will then update the signature packages to make sure it is dynamically shielded from attacks.

Yee also observed that while the promise of IDS/IPS technology is compelling, with its ability to protect systems against the likes of worms and distributed denial of service attacks, adoption rates are relatively low.

One reason for this is that IDS/IPS has traditionally been “high touch, high maintenance” technology. “It takes effort to deploy, tune and maintain the system, and in the attempt to solve a security problem, enterprises are saddled with a management problem.”

NFR is aiming to change this by making the Sentivist family easy to use. One way of doing this is to have default configurations that cover 80 per cent of the use scenarios, and a point-and-click interface to tune the IDS/IPS.

Another challenge, which NFR is aiming to address, is the management of sensors deployed in disparate locations. “We want to provide a central point of control and management, so that software can be updated and refreshed and new signatures pushed out through a single point,” said Yee.

To address the issue of false positives, NFR also bundles OS (operating system) fingerprinting technology and the IDS/ IPS in a single box. What this means is that the traffic can be correlated with the operating system running on the target host. If, say, the system sees a Windows-based attack heading towards a Linux server, it can suppress the alert.

Yee believes that the IDS and IPS markets in this region is currently under-served. “A lot of organisations recognise the need for IDS/IPS technology,” he said.

The company intends to increase its focus here, and to make strategic investments in training and technology support here. “We see this market as being important to us from a revenue standpoint,” said Yee. NFR Security is at www.nfrsecurity.com.
http://computerworld.com.sg/ShowPage...d=3&issueid=38


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ILN News Letter

RIAA Sues Seven In South Carolina

The RIAA has named seven people from across South Carolina in a new round of lawsuits that accuse them of illegal downloads of songs and recordings on the Internet. The federal lawsuits, which usually collect between $3,000 and$4,000 per violator, are part of a national crackdown by the industry against downloading copyright music from artists.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...596359,00.html

MSFT Balks At EU Demands To Share Open-Source Software Info

Microsoft says it is willing to meet European demands that it offer more-flexible licensing terms for certain computer code. However, the company continues to balk at sharing information that will allow open-source software to flourish, one of the chief goals of the long-running antitrust case. The European antitrust authority has demanded that Microsoft share with rivals the computer codes they need to write. software that can communicate well with Microsoft's ubiquitous products.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...497595,00.html

China Blocks Posting On Pope

China's web portals have blocked prayers, blessings and other comment on the death of Pope John Paul II from being posted on the Internet. While popular portals such asSina.com and Sohu.com's on-line discussion forums were flooded with messages about the pope Saturday, no messages could be seen Monday.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050405/323/ffoiw.html

Social Security Numbers Are Widely Available On Net

The Washington Post runs an article about how easy it is to access others' social security numbers on the Internet. Although Social Security numbers are one of the most powerful pieces of personal information an identity thief can possess, they remain widely available and inexpensive despite public outcry and the threat of a congressional crackdown after breaches at large information brokers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Apr3.html

NY Unveils Modem Hijacking Bill

New York State lawmakers have unveiled a bill that is believed to be the first in the nation to target modem hijacking, a practice in which thieves tap into people's computer modems to make international phone calls. If passed, the law would allow telephone companies and the state attorney general to bring lawsuits against modem hijackers and their accomplices.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/11310169.htm

Appeals Court Upholds Ruling On Tenn Child Porn Law

A Tennessee state appeals court has upheld a Knox County judge's ruling that a portion of a state child porn law is unconstitutional. Judge Richard Baumgartner ruled last year that the law would let juries convict defendants for possessing pornographic materials not involving minors.
http://www.volunteertv.com/Global/story.asp?S=3147874

ACLU Ponders Suit Over Utah Porn Law

The ACLU of Utah is considering a lawsuit against the state's new Internet porn law, while the law's sponsor is working to spread the legislation to other states. Rep. John Dougall said last Friday he has a meeting scheduled with state Attorney General Mark Shurtleff this week to talk about how to get other states on board. The ACLU of Utah says the law is not the least restrictive means and the mandatory rating scheme violates the First Amendment and "is riddled with constitutional infirmities."
http://acluutahchallenge.notlong.com/


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The Battle Against Free Music Downloads Continues
Tim Somers

The recording industry claims to have lost 25% of it's revenues since computer, so called thieves, have been using peer-to-peer file- sharing networks to obtain free music downloads.
MusicHoncho.com press release

Movie and record producers alike are saying file-sharing networks that permit its users the ability to make copies from other network member's computers are infringing on the copyright laws and costing billions of dollars in lost revenue.

The recording industry claims to have lost 25% of it's revenues since computer, so called thieves, have been using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to obtain free music downloads.

The two latest file-sharing companies to be targeted by these copyright lawsuits are Grokster Ltd, known for its Grokster file-sharing software and StreamCast Networks Inc. from which the Morpheus free music downloading software is distributed.

Unlike Napster, Grokster and Morpheus put a spin on the popular file-sharing phenomenon. Instead of indexing the shared files like Napster did, these file-sharing products enables it's network members to build their own indexes - thus allowing others within the network to download free music and movie files.

While some musicians are protesting they are being cheated by these illegal free music downloads - others are speaking out backing how music, movies, pictures and copy are being shared over the Internet.

Some music lovers actually use the file-sharing networks to check out an artists latest release before paying up to $18 for a CD that may only have one good song on it. You still will have those that will never make a purchase and continue to take advantage of the free music download networks.

Many file-sharing network users have said that using these networks is good for the music industry. File-sharing can bring listeners to smaller, independent bands that they may not otherwise hear on radio or in the mainstream.

With the likes of Apple's iTunes store many have turned their backs on file-sharing networks paying 99 cents per song - Apple claims to sell more than 1 millions songs everyday. Although iTunes is limited still, thus giving file sharing networks a void to fill the unlimited access to music and movies that may otherwise not be able from iTunes.

In late 2003 record companies started suing individuals that were downloading free music. With file-sharing networks like Grokster and Morpheus it will be much harder for the recording industry to track down files that are uploaded by individual users.

With the Supreme Court now involved they are expected to make some type of ruling in June 2005 on what if any action should be taken against the makers of file-sharing network software.

The wrong decision could discourage the future development of products like the iPod or other file-sharing software programs that could be used for legal purposes.

Since Grokster and Morpheus do not monitor or have any knowledge of who or what is being downloaded, a federal judge in Los Angeles and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the copyright infringement charges against both these file-sharing networks.

Based on the 1984 ruling of the Supreme Court that stated the use of Sony Betamax, which allowed users to make copies at home of copyrighted TV programs, was legal.

The recording industries angle last week was that the approach companies like Grokster and Morpheus are making by advertising their software will provide access to free copies of copyrighted materials should allow them to be sued and shut down.

While the jury may be out on this one for sometime - file sharing networks and free music downloads will continue with most users not really worrying about getting sued, since most do not download free music in excess of a few files per month.
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/view...e.php?rID=4755


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Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Technology -- Dark Horse or White Knight? Counterpoint: Its Positive Impact on the Public Sector
Press release

What: Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technology's negative reputation is rooted in individuals downloading 'bootleg' entertainment from the Internet, but the technology should not be villainized. P2P is also being used to solve critical IT challenges in the public sector, improving access to public information and enhancing the cost effective delivery of vital community services.

P2P is emerging as one of the few feasible technologies available to achieve the depth and breadth of information sharing needed in today's world to further scientific research, streamline government operations and provide people with the information they need to improve their lives.

P2P is the next frontier, providing the massive scalability needed in the public and private sectors. If the Supreme Court rules that software makers are liable for every way in which their product is used, the use of P2P architecture employed for the benefit and welfare of humanity will be curtailed.

Who: Josh Knauer, Director of Advanced Development and authority on P2P, MAYA Design (www.maya.com).

Josh Knauer is a leading technology expert available for commentary on how P2P technology can be used for the common good as it supports the mission of non-profits, community organizations and government agencies. A pioneer in this arena since 1991, he has championed the advancement, development and adoption of the Internet for the empowerment of users in the public sector. He was a nationally recognized commentator on the implications of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Josh's positions in favor of free speech and fair use of the Internet were widely quoted in national media including CNN, Salon, and Wired Magazine. His opinions on Internet advancement have appeared on Fox News, Time and Entrepreneur. Josh is able to discuss these issues and the following three success stories that demonstrate the technology's effectiveness at the city, county and national levels in light of the U.S. Supreme Court hearings this week.

Just in the last two years, MAYA has received in excess of $22 million from federal and local government agencies to address these issues.

Why: Consider the current applications of P2P which support human services, environmental health and neighborhood information systems efforts in the public sector:

-- Human Services - Allegheny County, Pa., (Pittsburgh) has revolutionized its referral and statistical analysis process within the County's Dept. of Human Services, thanks to a community-based GIS system created by MAYA Design. The system gives professionals a central, comprehensive repository of shared data about community resources derived from DHS data, United Way data and other agencies throughout Western Pennsylvania. Professionals can share, rate and comment on information in real-time in the "Information Commons."

-- Environmental Health - Using P2P, the Heinz Foundation, with the Carnegie Library System and MAYA Design, created a groundbreaking research tool that enables users to query EPA data on toxic release events, study a map of local health problem incidences, and display an unlimited number of other health indicators. The core of the technology fuses data from a vast array of disparate databases into the "Information Commons."

-- Community Information System - P2P technology has been employed to help Pittsburgh's urban revitalization efforts. MAYA Design, working with the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and local community agencies created the Community Information System, which offers a unique way to understand the forces affecting local neighborhoods such as mover migration, crime statistics, abandoned properties and more.

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...&newsLang =en


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No Lack Of Contradictions In MGM-Grokster
Brooks Boliek

A few days after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the MGM v. Grokster P2P file-sharing case, I drove up the California coast with my family on our version of the California Adventure. It was much more interesting than the one the Walt Disney Co. has manufactured in Anaheim. As we wound north on the Pacific Coast Highway, when I wasn't white-knuckling it around the switch backs, or gasping over the beauty of the craggy shore, I found myself thinking about the case.

This is one of those arguments where I can't make up my mind. Sometimes I think it depends on who I talked to last. If it's one of the entertainment industry types, whether a songwriter or a studio suit I believe them. If it's someone in the technology arena, whether it's a software designer or one of the consumer electronics suits, I believe them.

Being wishy-washy isn't one of those traits for which I'm known. But in this instance I feel like, well, the state of California. I never knew the world-famous California state of mind was actually schizophrenia. Somewhere between L.A. and San Francisco the state seems to turn from anti-Grokster to pro- Grokster as the state changes from the entertainment capitol into the tech Mecca of Silicon Valley.

The whole case is fraught with the same kinds of contradictions. They really are two sides of the same coin.

While the entertainment industry is built on a series of technological inventions to manufacture and deliver content, it has fought fiercely to maintain its hegemony over newer technical innovations.

Peer-to-peer networks, on the other hand, are a technological invention that depends on the content as its driving force. It's an incredibly efficient means to deliver content, whether it's a group of college professors trading papers or kids downloading songs. No matter what you can't hold back technology.

The music industry couldn't stop the player piano. The movie industry couldn't stop the VCR, though it tried to, fighting its case all the way to the landmark 1984 Supreme Court decision that is sure to weigh heavily on the court's thinking about Grokster.

At the same time, It's hard for me to see the P2P technology as anything but the Internet version of an illicit pawn shop whose owner is fencing items he knows are stolen. Does that mean that all pawn shops as a business should be made illegal?

Pawn shops provide a valuable service. They provide the needy with ready cash, while they can provide the discriminating shopper with cheap goods. That doesn't mean they aren't seedy, but just by opening their doors they aren't illegal.

MPAA chief Dan Glickman told me he liked what he heard at the court last week.

"All through the court's questioning, the base word was balance," he said. "They were worried about technology, but they were also worried about illegal activity."

I don't envy the Supreme Court. The justices have a balancing act that's at least as daunting as those old-time jugglers who spun plates on poles. How they keep all the plates spinning will have ramifications that are likely to last far longer than the high court's 1984 ruling in the Betamax case that determined that even though VCRs had the potential to be used for copyright- infringing purposes, the technology also had "substantial non- infringing uses" to offer consumers.

But no matter what the court decides, I can't help but keep thinking it might be irrelevant. In the back of my mind I keep replaying the words of Mike Weiss, CEO of StreamCast Networks, the parent company of Grokster.

"No matter what decision the court makes, the technology doesn't stop," Weiss said. "There are 130 million copies of Morpheus (P2P software) already downloaded, and they will continue to work no matter what."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr..._id=1000865922


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P2P Web Hosting Could Solve Bandwidth and Security Problems

This article takes a look at some uses P2P could be put to in the web hosting industry as a defense of innovation and as a creative stab at solving some common problems web hosts face.

While the RIAA may be wrong on a lot of points and their intention to illegalize peer to peer may be ill-founded but they are correct that P2P is used in large part for music, movie, and software swapping.

In other words, P2P file sharing has yet to be tapped into and utilized as a fully-fledged technology. Part of this is perhaps history. Products, whether it is news, music, soda pop, or hosting a web site traditionally features the product flowing from a central source to many consumers. Corporate America, like the RIAA, doesn’t take kindly to giving up the ‘control’ that this model provides over the product. However, there is one industry that has taken a peer to peer business model and made it massively profitable and it’s not even legal; spamming. Spammers can’t be stopped and they sell incredible amounts of goods. MCI was said to have made $5 billion a year hosting spammers (SendSafe) through resale hosting. Has there ever been a more virile proof of concept? Why not take the concept that viruses, music swappers and zombie PC spammers use and put it to good use? Why not fight virus and spam with their own weapons? Why not use P2P web hosting?
http://www.warp2search.net/modules.p...icle&sid=22781


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P2P Web Hosting Could Solve Bandwidth and Security Problems

Currently, the RIAA is suing Grokster and trying to convince the Supreme Court that Peer to Peer or P2P file sharing is a technology that has little or no legitimate uses and is almost exclusively used as a method to illegally trade music and movie files. The RIAA is complaining that P2P is severely damaging the music industry and thus this technology should be stopped. Despite the fact that the music industry reacted in the exact same way with the invention of the radio they continue to see the glass as half empty rather than trying to realize the tremendous potential P2P technology presents.

Billionaire Mark Cuban has decided to step in and fund Grokster’s legal battle. In his blog he wrote;
"If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only," Cuban wrote. "It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their US digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them."

This article takes a look at some uses P2P could be put to in the web hosting industry as a defense of innovation and as a creative stab at solving some common problems web hosts face.

While the RIAA may be wrong on a lot of points and their intention to illegalize peer to peer may be ill-founded but they are correct that P2P is used in large part for music, movie, and software swapping.

In other words, P2P file sharing has yet to be tapped into and utilized as a fully- fledged technology. Part of this is perhaps history. Products, whether it is news, music, soda pop, or hosting a web site traditionally features the product flowing from a central source to many consumers. Corporate America, like the RIAA, doesn’t take kindly to giving up the ‘control’ that this model provides over the product. However, there is one industry that has taken a peer to peer business model and made it massively profitable and it’s not even legal; spamming. Spammers can’t be stopped and they sell incredible amounts of goods. MCI was said to have made $5 billion a year hosting spammers (SendSafe) through resale hosting. Has there ever been a more virile proof of concept?
Why not take the concept that viruses, music swappers and zombie PC spammers use and put it to good use? Why not fight virus and spam with their own weapons? Why not use P2P web hosting?

Although there are multiple issues to confront in terms of serving up a site with a P2P model the advantages are speed and ubiquitous availability.

While a static web site could easily be served through a P2P model, and quite effectively at that, a dynamic data base driven page simply can’t exist without reproducing databases on supernodes which raises very large security issues not to mention the feasibility of recreating databases. Even login DBs can hold quite a lot of data as well as being quite sensitive.

At the very least though a P2P model could be used much like a browser’s image cache with the most common pages and images being distributed around a network of users of the site.

Here again a problem occurs in the issue of version management. Suppose peers checked with the central server to see if they had the latest version before sending out a file. A situation might occur where many peers were checking so often with the server to see if they were correct or not it would end up having the same effect as a DDoS attack. A sports ticker tracking the score of an ongoing game for example might cause a web host to use more bandwidth answering peer questions about versions and updating versions than simply serving up the new score for the game itself.

On the other hand, when a lovely model goes on the Howard Stern show and causes Google and Yahoo searches for her images to go up 2,000% it could keep a host from crashing horribly to have a peer network help serve up the same 5 image files.

The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance may be a first step towards P2P hosting in terms of security. The FSA is a first-of-its-kind industry initiative aimed at helping network operators share Internet attack information automatically. The Fingerprint Sharing Alliance marks the first time companies are able to share detailed attack profiles in real-time and block attacks closer to the source. This global alliance marks a significant step forward in the fight against Internet attacks and major infrastructure threats that cross network boundaries, continents and oceans.

Global telecommunications companies participating in the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance include British Telecom, MCI and NTT Communications.
And leading carriers, network providers, hosting companies and educational institutions joining the Alliance include among others; Asia Netcom, Cisco Systems, EarthLink, Rackspace, The Planet, University of Pennsylvania and XO Communications.

It’s great that web hosts are sharing security information but it’s not particularly helpful during a DDoS or Denial of Service attack.

Net security and legal expert Ben Edelman described a recent DDoS attack in his website after he posted an article on spamming, “Globat was not particularly responsive in informing me of the problem -- my site was down for one and a half business days before they told me what was going on, and they only told me when I reached out to a personal contact who happened to work there. Then again, they're a $10/month company -- not exactly premium service. I was happy with them otherwise, and for most folks I think they provide an extraordinary value.”

This is not to criticize Globat as Yahoo and Google have been taken offline and even the website for industry giant Microsoft was taken down by troubled teen Jeffrey Lee Parson’s Blaster B virus. If Microsoft is at the mercy of a teen hacker and neither Yahoo or Google can completely defend themselves then who can be expected to be able to? This highlights the obvious need for a higher level of overall security on the internet. i.e. a need for innovation.

What if, when the DDoS attack hit Edelman’s site, Globat had been able to switch on a P2P mode emergency system and distribute the files to other web hosting providers and allow them to send the files out in response to requests for the site?
No one may have even noticed Ben’s site was being attacked. Then, with P2P, the Fingerprint Sharing Alliance or ‘File Sharing Alliance’ could share attack vector information and shut down the offending zombies.

How do you fight a million zombie computers barraging a site? With a million servers of course!

This is perhaps an oversimplification in that database driven pages, and ecommerce sites would not be easily transferred on a P2P network although for a static site like Edelman’s this would have been ideal.

For a more dynamic site a P2P backup plan would only allow a limited amount of a site to be displayed but it’s a lot easier for a web host to explain to a customer why functionality is limited than to explain why a site is down completely.
A P2P technique could even be used offensively to combat spammers and hackers. The FSA could combine to knock spammers out by sharing spam source information and then spamming the spammers with mail that looks like responses to their ads or at the very least combining to lock them out of the internet.

Of course, all this is predicated on a high level of cooperation among web hosts, or rather, a large peer sharing network.

Press releases work much like a P2P form of news sharing so why shouldn’t smaller web hosts ban together to create advertising cooperatives? Web hosts or the web sites they host could also use P2P file sharing for cross site or even cross host advertising. Again, by cooperating, multiple web sites could form advertising cooperatives and share ads. While a single point of access could be developed for the advertising to make it easy for those who want to advertise to send their ads out to as wide a distribution as possible it could work from a many to many P2P model as well. When an advertiser wanted to change an add they could access their ad campaign with whatever site or host they are working through and then P2P could be used to distribute their ads through the ad sharing network. Of course, P2P would only be a small part of such a complicated project.

These are only a couple of ideas to incorporate P2P in web hosting but if the Supreme Court is wise they’ll see that P2P is more than just a music swapper.
http://hostsearch.com/news/globatcom_news_2895.asp


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Satellite Radio Takes Off, Altering the Airwaves
Lorne Manly

Just a blink after the newly emergent titans of radio - Clear Channel Communications, Infinity Broadcasting and the like - were being accused of scrubbing diversity from radio and drowning listeners in wall-to-wall commercials, the new medium of satellite radio is fast emerging as an alternative. And broadcasters are fighting back.

The announcement on Friday by XM Satellite Radio - the bigger of the two satellite radio companies - that it added more than 540,000 subscribers from January through March pushed the industry's customer total past five million after fewer than three and a half years of operation. Analysts call that remarkable growth for companies charging more than $100 annually for a product that has been free for 80 years.

Total subscribers at XM and its competitor, Sirius Satellite Radio, will probably surpass eight million by the end of year, making satellite radio one of the fastest-growing technologies ever - faster, for example, than cellphones.

To keep that growth soaring, XM and Sirius are furiously signing up carmakers to offer satellite radio as a factory-installed option and are paying tens of millions of dollars for exclusive programming. On Sunday, XM began offering every locally broadcast regular-season and playoff Major League Baseball game to a national audience, having acquired the rights in a deal that could be worth up to $650 million over 11 years. And Howard Stern is getting $500 million over five years to leave Infinity and join Sirius next January. Each company offers 120 or more channels of music, news, sports and talk.

Though satellite radio is still an unprofitable blip in the radio universe, it is pushing commercial radio to change its sound. Broadcasters are cutting commercials, adding hundreds of songs to once-rigid playlists, introducing new formats and beefing up their Internet offerings. A long-awaited move to digital radio could give existing stations as many as five signals each, with which they could introduce their own subscription services - but with a local flavor that satellite is hard pressed to match.

"At the end of the day, people want to hear what's going on in their local market," said Joel Hollander, chairman and chief executive of Infinity Broadcasting, owned by Viacom and the country's second-largest broadcaster behind Clear Channel. "People are emotionally involved with local radio."

That emotional connection - to music, personalities, information - has always translated into strong feelings about radio. Twenty-seven years ago, in "Radio, Radio," the singer Elvis Costello ranted about the medium's programming choices, singing that "the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools, tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel."

But such criticism pales beside the complaining unleashed by Washington's deregulation of radio, beginning in 1996. The loosening of ownership restrictions set off a frenzy of acquisitions, transforming what was essentially a mom-and-pop business into an industry dominated by a handful of giant broadcasters.

To satisfy Wall Street, station owners cut costs by combining station operations in a given market and pumping up the number of advertisements per hour; meanwhile, programming formats became narrower and more uniform. All these moves nearly doubled the industry's revenue in five years, but they also gave satellite radio its opening.

"In many cases, radio almost killed the golden goose by getting it to lay too many eggs," said Sean Butson, an analyst with Legg Mason. "If you're going to have a third of an hour of commercials, you're going to turn a lot of people off, and they're going to look for an alternative." (Legg Mason owns stock in XM.)

Founded in the early 1990's, XM and Sirius endured tough financial times while waiting for the Federal Communications Commission to divide up the satellite bandwidth and while preparing to launch their satellites. XM finally began offering its subscription service in late 2001, Sirius in mid-2002.

Car owners - the companies' prime targets - have clamored for the service once they have been introduced to it.

Joseph O'Neal of Royal Palm Beach, Fla., is a self-proclaimed Elvishead who laments that his local stations do not play enough of the King. So Mr. O'Neal, a 44-year- old drywall contractor, is a zealous convert to Sirius, the home of Elvis Radio.

Mr. O'Neal installed the service in his truck in January. Between Elvis, blues and Sirius's six country music channels, he said, "I haven't listened to regular radio since - not once."

That kind of devotion was eye-opening for Mel Karmazin, a longtime radio executive hired last year as chief executive of Sirius after he stepped down as president and chief operating officer of Viacom. "The thing that surprised me the most was the passion the subscribers had for the product," Mr. Karmazin said.

Both companies offer stations devoted to the most popular songs, but it is their national reach and dual revenue streams - subscriptions and advertising sales on nonmusic channels - that allow them to offer niche programming. Genres that receive little exposure on commercial radio, like bluegrass, reggae or talk devoted to African-American affairs, get their own channels on satellite services. Individual ratings matter little; listener satisfaction counts for much more, because it determines how long subscribers will keep paying $12.95 a month.

Indeed, formats ignored by commercial radio or relegated to its wee hours have emerged as some of the most popular.

For instance, XM Comedy, a channel that features the often raunchy stylings of Chris Rock and others, is among the company's 10 most-listened-to.

"Comedy - who knew?" said Hugh Panero, XM's chief executive.

A glimpse of how these channels are programmed highlights the differences between satellite and commercial radio. Even satellite radio executives say that tales of corporate automatons determining every record played on local radio are overblown, but a level of autonomy exists at XM and Sirius that would rarely be tolerated by broadcasters.

Michael Marrone, who programs the Loft, XM's channel focusing on singer-songwriters, finds it difficult to define precisely why Elton John's "Your Song" makes the cut while Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville" does not. "I'd rather lose an arm than play it again," he said of "Margaritaville," chatting in a control room in the company's Washington headquarters. (He quickly added that he likes and plays many other tracks by Mr. Buffett.)

Ultimately, Mr. Marrone's tastes determine his selections. He also enjoys inserting connective tissue between songs. Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" segues into a Grateful Dead song because Mr. Henley sings about "a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac."

"Ninety-five percent of the audience won't get it," Mr. Marrone said. "The other 5 percent will never change the channel."

Steven Van Zandt, who plays in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and is in the cast of "The Sopranos," programs two music channels for Sirius. He supplies a slightly more detailed explanation of his programming philosophy. On "Underground Garage," which borrows the name and concept of Mr. Van Zandt's syndicated show on commercial radio, the idea is to juxtapose tracks and styles from 50 years of guitar-driven rock 'n' roll, never playing two songs of the same genre (like punk) in a row. A recent morning, Iggy Pop coexisted nicely with the Monkees, the Mooney Suzuki and the Byrds.

"In the end, I don't pretend," Mr. Van Zandt said. "It's my opinion. And it's good to be the king."

Satellite radio has ridden that unconventional thinking to its current size, and both XM and Sirius expect to begin making money in the next two years. How big the market can become remains debatable. By 2010, analysts estimate, subscriber levels will hover anywhere from 30 million to 45 million. Some think the totals could eventually rival or surpass the 90 million people who pay for cable and satellite television.

Still, satellite radio is also unlikely to inflict fatal damage on commercial radio, which has about 230 million listeners, according to Arbitron, the radio ratings provider. Profit margins for stations in big markets can surpass 50 percent.

But commercial radio has begun to change. Radio stations in the Top 10 markets played, on average, 11 minutes of commercials an hour during daytime broadcasts in February, down from 11.7 in October, when Leland Westerfield, a media analyst at Harris Nesbitt, began tracking spots.

Strict formats have also loosened a bit. Infinity, like a number of radio chains, has changed some of its stations to the "Jack" format, a Canadian import that broadens the play list across rock genres. Instead of 300 or so songs, these stations' program directors are allowed more leeway in choosing from more than 1,200 songs.

Commercial radio, which also is combating the growth of digital music players like iPods, is making investments in technologies like Internet and digital radio as well as podcasts, audio programs that can be downloaded to computers or portable devices.

But satellite radio is rushing to innovate, too. It is planning, for example, video services that would beam cartoons and music videos to children and teenagers watching television in the back seats of cars.

All this technological and corporate ferment promises that the battle between commercial and satellite radio will only intensify.

"This book won't be written for another 10 years," Mr. Hollander of Infinity said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/na...satellite.html


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Web Radio Contest

hello space traveler

so you are a DJ ? you think you got the best mixing technique? why not mess with other DJ's around the globe? why should you take part at the lounge in a mix contest? should we talk about the prizes or about your fame first? let's start with a teaser of the prizes: airplay on lounge-radio.com, portrait on hopez.com, some lounge cd's, some rare records, and an interview by soulage.de (a german online lounge mag). doesn't that sound nice? we got enough and good prizes for the first 3 places! well, we show off your mixes and your name to the lounge scene worldwide if you win.

for more information and all the details use the following link to our forum : http://www.c-o-e.de/hopezcom/showthread.php?t=1150


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Collectors

Canned Goods as Silent Caviar: Rescuing a Film on Nitrate Stock
Gregory Crouch

Even perfectly scripted Hollywood love stories can, literally, turn toxic with time.

What happened leading up to the scheduling of Tuesday night's showing of the long-lost silent film "Beyond the Rocks," starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, arguably the silver screen's first male sex symbol, is a case in point.

Film fanatics, historians and Swanson herself had feared the only motion picture to feature two of the biggest stars of the 1920's - a romantic melodrama in which love triumphs over money - was gone forever.

"Does anyone know of a print anywhere of 'Beyond the Rocks,' the film Rudy Valentino made with me in 1921?" Swanson asked in her 1980 autobiography, "Swanson on Swanson," lamenting its disappearance. "That, after all, was supposed to be the great virtue of pictures - that they would last forever."

Just another Hollywood illusion, as it turns out.

Silent movies like "Beyond the Rocks" were recorded on flammable nitrate film that can dissolve and emit toxic gases. Some studies indicate that about 80 percent of all silent films made in the United States have either been destroyed or have disintegrated into potential health hazards.

That is why archivists at the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam donned gas masks and protective garments before sifting through an eccentric Dutch collector's donation of 2,000 or so rusty film canisters, which ultimately yielded "Beyond the Rocks," a 1922 release.

"Since we were the first ones to open these cans, we didn't know what was really in there," said Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, a Filmmuseum archivist. "That's why we had to wear gas masks."

Decked out in their protective gear, she and her colleagues watched in delight as snippets of pent-up glamour flickered before them: Swanson in lavish beaded gowns and and a fortune in jewelry; Valentino once again oozing his legendary sex appeal as the other man in a classic love triangle.

"He is very charming, nobody can deny this," Ms. Rongen-Kaynakci said with a giggle. "Seeing him move in the film, he's charming, he's sweet, he's just great."

Over a three-year period, the Filmmuseum's archivists waded through a virtual hazardous waste site of decaying film before they discovered all seven reels of "Beyond the Rocks." Researchers say they believe that the 80-minute film they have reconstructed is nearly complete, based on comparisons with the script, with only about seven minutes missing. The Filmmuseum restored its sepia tint, stabilized some images, repaired scratches and tears as best it could.

Ms. Swanson plays Theodora Fitzgerald, a young woman who marries a rich, older man for the sake of her family, which has fallen on hard times. However, fate (in the form of the screenwriter Elinor Glyn) throws her into the arms of Valentino as the English aristocrat Lord Hector Bracondale.

He plucks her from two perilous situations - an overturned boat and a tumble down a mountainside - before pursuing her to the ends of the earth, which in those days were filmed in the Rocky Mountains and greater Los Angeles area.

Milestone Film and Video Company, a New Jersey distributor, hopes to rerelease "Beyond the Rocks" this fall at film festivals and in theaters around the United States.

The film was not a huge success at its premiere in 1922. The New York Times panned it as a tale of two clotheshorses. But its discovery is considered significant today because so many silent films have vanished.

"Outright destruction, neglect and basic deterioration" is to blame, lamented Patrick Loughney, curator of motion pictures at the George Eastman House in Rochester, one of the largest film archives in the United States. In the 1920's, many studios considered movies products that could be discarded once they had earned money.

Mr. Loughney applauded the discovery of "Beyond the Rocks" because it gives "context to one of the least understood eras of American film history."

As the director Martin Scorsese says in a videotaped introduction to Tuesday night's showing, it was one of the first movies to feature two major stars. "That alone makes the discovery of 'Beyond the Rocks' a noteworthy event," he says.

The film's unlikely savior was the collector Joop van Liempd, himself something of a legendary figure in his home city of Haarlem.

Van Liempd was a loner who has remained as much of a mystery to curators as many of the crumbling films he collected. By the time of his death in 2000 at the age of 87, he had amassed an enormous collection of film canisters that, fearing for their safety, he spread out over at least five locations, friends said.

But few of the canisters were labeled and many, archivists say, had never been opened. Some were, surprisingly given their flammability, stored next to a gas heater, museum officials said.

Jan van den Brink, a Filmmuseum curator, now suspects that van Liempd might never have seen "Beyond the Rocks," at least not the copy in his collection.

"With 2,000 cans of film, you can't see them all," Mr. van den Brink said. "It would have taken a lifetime."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/movies/05rudy.html


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New Monk-Coltrane Performance Discovered
Carl Hartman

The discovery of a previously unknown recording by jazz masters Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane was announced Tuesday by the Library of Congress as it revealed this year's additions to its National Recording Registry.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong's first words from the moon, speeches by President Wilson and Gen. Douglas MacArthur and songs by Al Jolson, Muddy Waters and Nirvana are among 50 recordings being set aside for special preservation.

There's plenty of music, from Victor Herbert's "Gypsy Love Song" of 1898, through Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" in 1939, to Nirvana's 1991 album "Nevermind." Performances must be 10 years old to qualify. This is the third group of recordings to be added to the registry.

The newly discovered performance by pianist Monk and saxophonist Coltrane at Carnegie Hall was never commercially recorded, the library said. The collaboration is not one of the 50 recordings being added to the registry.

News broadcasts being inducted include Wilson's speech of Nov. 11, 1923, celebrating the fifth anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. It is the earliest surviving recording of a regular news broadcast.

Other inductees include an NBC broadcast of Charles Lindbergh's arrival and reception in Washington after his solo flight to Paris in 1927; an Edward R. Murrow broadcast from a London rooftop during the Battle of Britain in 1940, and MacArthur's "Old soldiers never die" speech in 1951 after President Truman recalled him from duty in the Korean War.

Jolson is heard singing George Gershwin and Irving Caesar's song "Swanee" - Gershwin's first hit. Waters contributes "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" from 1954. The library sponsored archivist Alan Lomax's 1941 expedition to Mississippi, where he originally recorded Waters.

Classical recordings include Sergei Rachmaninoff playing his Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1929; a 1939 Boston Symphony performance of Sergey Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," and a 1958 performance of Handel's "Messiah" by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Inductees from the rock era include James Brown's 1965 "Live at the Apollo," the Beach Boys' 1966 "Pet Sounds," 1971's "The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East" and Public Enemy's 1989 "Fear of a Black Planet."

One of the odder selections is a collections of sounds made by Asian elephants. Some of the elephant sounds are infrasonic - inaudible to the human ear - but were nevertheless recorded by Katharine Payne of Cornell University in 1984.

Outer space buffs can listen to Armstrong's famous "one small step for man" speech from the moon in 1969 - and follow that up with John Williams' soundtrack to the 1977 movie "Star Wars."
http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/n...celebrity_heds


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Court: Man Can Disparage Company on Web
David Kravets

A man can disparage a hair-restoration company on a Web site using the company's name without violating copyright law, an appeals court ruled Monday.

Bosley Medical Institute in Seattle sued former client Michael Kremer after he created a Web site in 2000 in a "bald-faced effort to get even" with the company, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.

Kremer, who had been unhappy with the outcome of his hair restoration, used the company's name in the Web site address, www.bosleymedical.com. The company claimed his use of the name was trademark infringement.

But the appeals court disagreed, saying the Web site was not created to make a profit or to confuse Bosley's customers and potential clients. There were no links on the site to other hair-restoration providers, the court noted.

Kremer's attorney, Paul Levy, said the decision "is an important victory for free speech on the Internet. It makes clear that consumers can use a trade name for a company they want to criticize."

The appeals court, however, reinstated part of the lawsuit in which Bosley alleged that Kremer is violating a so-called cybersquatting law by allegedly attempting to sell the site to Bosley in exchange for removing the disparaging material.

Bosley's attorneys did not return phone calls seeking comment.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...rss_technology


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Feds Complete Internet Traffic Report
Ted Bridis

Talk about turning in your homework late: The government just finished a report on Internet traffic that Congress requested seven years ago.

Lawmakers had demanded the $1 million study, ultimately called "Signposts in Cyberspace," under a 1998 law. Passed almost at the dawn of what became the Internet boom, the law required the Commerce Department to seek a study about Web addresses and trademarks by the National Research Council and wrap up the report within nine months.

The council published its findings Thursday - two presidential administrations later and years after the implosion of what had been a bustling Internet economy.

"Time got extended," said Charles Brownstein, director of the research council's computer science and telecommunications board.

In the intervening period, Google emerged to dominate the Web, technology executives made and lost billions, lawyers shut down Napster over music piracy, high-speed Internet connections soared and the number of Web addresses climbed from 2.2 million to more than 65 million. The job of commerce secretary, the top U.S. official responsible for overseeing the study, turned over three times.

"This was eagerly awaited 6 1/2 years ago," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., who ordered the study in 1998 as chairman of the House Science Committee.

"Technology has marched on. The National Academy of Sciences just wasted one million of the taxpayers' dollars. I guess they get an 'F' on this one," said Sensenbrenner, now chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The National Research Council is part of the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization chartered by Congress to advise the government of scientific matters.

Leading experts, including several who participated, defended the 283 pages of conclusions as significant and relevant. But some acknowledged so much time had passed - especially given the blistering pace of the Internet - that few people still eagerly awaited the report.

"To be honest, most people forgot it was ever going to happen," said Michael A. Froomkin, an Internet law professor at the University of Miami who reviewed two early drafts since 2001. "When it started, it seemed important; then it faded completely from sight."

Added Steven Crocker, a respected Internet pioneer: "It shouldn't have taken that long."

The council concluded that the Internet's behind-the- scenes address scheme, called its domain name system, is remarkably robust and suitable to meet the Web's future needs. The report urged minor technical improvements to secure the system from hackers and prevent outages from natural disasters, such as moving some of the Internet's 13 key traffic- directing computers outside Washington and Los Angeles.

It also recommended those traffic-directing computers continue to be operated by volunteers, organizations and corporations around the world rather than governments. And it advocated dozens of new Internet address suffixes - similar to ".com" and ".net" - be introduced each year to allow for new Web sites and e-mail addresses.

Brownstein said the government report was delayed substantially as the authors noticed dramatic changes in the same issues they were studying. These included improvements to Internet search engines, better protections for safeguarding Web trademarks and questions about the role for governments and the United Nations in the Internet. He also said the U.S. government did not open its wallet as promised to pay for the study until 2001.

"I don't think there was any sense by the people on this committee that it would take this long," said Paul Vixie, another leading technologist who reviewed a confidential draft of the report two years ago. "But the Internet will do that to you."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...stom wire.htm


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Cell Phone Songs Prompt Control Questions
Bruce Meyerson

It's been the great "Whodunit?" of two big technology shows: Who put the gag in Motorola Corp.'s mouth just as it was going to unveil a new cell phone featuring the iTunes music download service from Apple Computer Inc.?

Motorola initially said it acted alone, then quickly pointed to Apple, citing the computer company's long practice of never unveiling new products until they're actually available to buy.

Many industry players, however, suspect that a wireless service provider intervened, essentially telling Motorola that, `I'll be darned if I'll sell your phones to my customers if it means they can buy songs through Apple and Motorola without giving me a piece of the pie.'

Or, some surmise, perhaps a wireless carrier who planned to offer the iTunes phone balked at the last minute?

This mystery, which played prominently this month at both the CeBit show in Germany where the phone was to be unveiled and then the CTIA Wireless show in New Orleans, drives right to the heart of an uneasy dynamic simmering in the cellular industry.

The rush is on to deliver music and video to mobile phones, with wireless providers and device makers jockeying for position to grab their share of the payday, all parties mindful of the surprising billions being spent on musical ringtones.

At the same time, the media companies who produce the entertainment, which also includes video games, are approaching cautiously, determined to avert any Napster-like, file-sharing bonanza among cell phone users.

In fact, Motorola also plays a role in a second drama involving these choppy uncharted waters.

Earlier this year, a class-action lawsuit was filed in three states involving a Motorola phone sold by Verizon Wireless. The v710 handset was equipped with a short-range wireless technology called Bluetooth and was configured to work with cordless headsets. Only one problem: Its file-transfer capabilities had been disabled.

The suit insinuates that Verizon Wireless is obliging subscribers to use its cell network if they wish, for example, to send a photo taken on a camera phone to a computer or another cell phone.

Verizon charges extra for such transmissions, while a direct Bluetooth transfer would cost nothing.

Verizon says the Bluetooth function was not disabled to prevent picture transfers but rather to satisfy the demands of media companies who don't want their content shared with non-paying customers.

"I know why we all loved Napster. It was free. When it comes to the cell phone I have to abide by the rules of the content houses," said Jim Straight, vice president for wireless data and Internet services at Verizon Wireless. He said the mobile media market is so new that it will take time before all the technologies and content relationships fall into place in a secure, smooth-running manner.

"Customers get frustrated because they don't see what they want day one. That's understandable. Unfortunately, we have bad guys out there who want to do other things" such as illegal file-sharing.

Verizon's explanation jibes with statements by several producers and aggregators of mobile entertainment.

Walt Disney Co., for one, won't allow its wireless partners to deliver any of its ringtones, video games and other content to phones with Bluetooth or infrared, another technology for direct connections between devices, until the industry adopts a more secure format to prevent unauthorized sharing and copying.

The early obstacles have blocked many mass-media properties from getting onto cell phones. Buongiorno Vitaminic of Italy, a top mobile content distributor, says it sells 750,000 ringtones per month through one European carrier. Only one-tenth of them are "truetone" snippets taken from full-length songs because copyright issues have limited the selection. The rest are recorded specifically for phones without the legal hassles.

A new standard for locking content or requiring payment to use copied files, developed by the Open Mobile Alliance industry consortium, is expected later this year.

That might clear the way for more mobile content, and more potential friction among wireless carriers, device makers and media companies - and with their customers.

Larry Shapiro, general manager of North American mobile content for Walt Disney Internet Group, says consumers understand that they're buying wireless entertainment for a specific device so they're not rankled by limitations on other uses.

"That's like saying, `If i have an XBox video game, why can't I play it on my PC?' You buy a game to play on your XBox, and you buy a game to play on your cell phone," said Shapiro.

But in practice, ringtones and video games aren't terribly fertile ground for copying and sharing anyway.

Unlike the Windows-dominated computer world, there are hundreds of customized operating systems for cell phones, many designed for the unique physical characteristics of a specific handset.

That means, at least for now, every ringtone needs to be customized to play on different devices and the custom content for one phone likely won't run optimally on another phone, if at all, particularly when it comes to video games.

However, this deterrent may not carry over to what all expect will be the next big thing in cell phones. That's music, a product where consumers may not be as accepting of limitations on whether they can play a song on a portable music player or computer just because they bought it with a phone.

"We feel strongly that music, unlike ringtones, is something you want to carry with you and have a strong sense of ownership about," said Charles Grimsdale, president of international business operations for Loudeye Corp.

The Seattle-based provider of technology for secure distribution of digital media recently teamed with Nokia Corp. to create a complete platform for a mobile music store, including a full catalog of songs, which wireless carriers can license to launch a download service under their own brands.

Eventually, even if consumers don't revolt, the carrier-controlled approach to selling mobile entertainment may meet resistance from media companies, who don't want their content lost among dozens of other brands deep in a cell phone's menus.

Ultimately, while its unclear whether it was in fact a wireless operator who blocked the debut of Motorola's iTunes phone, it's hard to imagine that consumers won't find ways to bypass the carriers.

Despite the recent setback, Motorola introduced last week a new cell phone equipped with the high-speed technology being deployed by Verizon and Sprint Corp. The E725, Motorola said, will enable quick wireless music downloads, storing up to 2 gigabytes worth on a removable memory card.

In other words, it's another phone with capabilities not unlike the mysteriously unappearing iTunes phone.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinv...l_x.htm?csp=34

[JackSpratts]

Take a deep breath…

Expert Finds Dandruff in Air Pollutants
Randolph E. Schmid

A researcher has discovered unexpectedly large amounts of dandruff and other flaking skin, fur, pollen and similar materials in air pollutants known as aerosols.

Aerosols, tiny particles in the air, are widely studied because they are an important factor in regulating climate, variously absorbing heat to warm the air and reflecting sunlight to cool it. They are also important in forming rain and snow.

But the amount of cellular material - bacteria, plant fragments, spores, fungi and so forth - had been thought to be only a small proportion compared with mineral dusts, clay and sea salt.

Now, Ruprecht Jaenicke of the Institute for Atmospheric Physics at Mainz University in Germany has studied air samples and discovered that biological materials can range up to 25 percent of aerosols in some areas, and as high as 40 percent in others.

His findings are reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The source of many aerosols has been unexplained and this could provide the answer, Jaenicke said.

Jaenicke reported that the percentage of biological materials in aerosol pollution topped 40 percent in Mainz in September and 30 percent in October. And a study at Lake Baikal, Russia, showed more than 30 percent in September.

He said he did similar studies of the air over ocean environments, on mountains and in ice cores. There was no strong annual cycle, he said, although pollen was more abundant in spring while decaying cellular matter was more common in fall and winter.

He estimated that the amount of biological particles in the air, worldwide, annually is 1,000 teragrams. A teragram is somewhat more than a million tons.

By comparison, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Environmental Program, estimated biological particles at 56 teragrams, compared with 3,300 teragrams of sea salt and 2,000 teragrams of mineral dust.

The new finding means researchers should take biological materials seriously in climate modeling, in cloud physics and in hygienic questions such as allergies, Jaenicke said.

"Don't regard that as a minor contribution," he said.

The implications for the global climate are unclear, said Murray V. Johnston, a chemistry professor at the University of Delaware.

"The number concentrations of (biological particles) reported here are much higher than previously thought and merit follow-up research," said Johnston, who did not participate in Jaenicke's research.

James J. Schwab, an atmospheric chemistry research professor at the State University of New York at Albany, isn't so sure Jaenicke's figures are correct.

"He may very well be right. His paper does not convince me that I should believe his estimate, however. He needs to present a more detailed and convincing argument first," said Schwab.

If Jaenicke's estimate is right, Schwab said, "It will have small but important effects on global climate change. It will have a bigger effect on air pollution and air quality for regions of the country and the globe that are out of compliance with air quality standards."

The research was funded by the German Science Foundation.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...stomwi re.htm


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Yahoo Raises Profile With Hollywood Push

Five years ago, a handful of companies with names like Pop, Pseudo and Icebox promised a future when original shows produced for the Internet would replace traditional TV viewing. The dot-com bust deflated those grand ambitions. But the vision of creating unique, interactive multimedia programming for a generation weaned on video games is very much alive at Yahoo Inc.

The giant Internet portal isn't talking about its plans for content. But analysts suggest a profound shift may be at work, with Yahoo using its enormous reach to force Hollywood studios, among other video creators, to produce programming with the Internet in mind.

Yahoo can offer up a worldwide audience of more than 300 million _ a number that some analysts say could reach 1 billion by the end of the decade.

"Those are numbers that are sufficient to make the likes of Rupert Murdoch salivate and turn green with envy," said David Garrity, an Internet and media analyst with Caris & Co., referring to the man whose News Corp. owns the Fox network and other media outlets.

Yahoo has already forged partnerships to webcast content from other media. It showed the entire debut episode of the Showtime series "Fat Actress," starring Kirstie Alley, at the same time the episode was broadcast on cable.

It also features exclusive behind-the-scenes footage from the Mark Burnett- produced NBC shows "The Apprentice" and "The Contender," and offers material from JibJab, the two guys who created the animated short cartoon that lampooned presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry.

America Online has similarly broadcast the first episode of the WB Television series "Jack & Bobby" and features exclusive musical performances in its "Sessions AOL" series.

Yahoo chairman and chief executive Terry Semel said recently that 75 percent of users access the portal using high-speed connections, making it possible to stream video of all sorts, including content by individual users.

"Our great attributes are interactive," said Semel, the former co-CEO of Warner Bros. "We have huge audiences who themselves are the programmer."

Among other moves, Yahoo recently signed a deal to buy Canadian photo- sharing startup Flickr Inc., which lets people upload digital photos, publish photos in their blogs and share digital photo albums. Another recently launched Yahoo site lets users search for writings, lyrics, photos and other content authored by people who want others to use their ideas as the basis for new creations _ the so-called "Creative Commons." Then there's the newly announced social networking service, Yahoo 360.

It all speaks to Yahoo executives' excitement about "micropublishing" _ letting the portal's users create content attractive to fellow users that will encourage people to hang around in Yahoo's virtual world.

It's a vision shared by others who see a future where people aren't just passive viewers of content but participate in creating the "TV shows" of tomorrow.

One company built on the concept is Brightcove, a startup that envisions a day when "Internet Television" offers thousands of channels of content, some produced by traditional TV companies and much produced by individuals as the cost of digital cameras and editing tools drops.

Yahoo fueled speculation that it might try to produce its own original content when it hired former ABC primetime program chief Lloyd Braun in November to run its media group and moved all its content units under one new roof into the former MGM headquarters in Santa Monica.

Yahoo executives insist they don't suffer from Hollywood envy or the desire to take the multimillion-dollar gambles regularly taken by studios.

"When I wanted to move our media companies all into one place, and hire ... creative executives, the intent was not for them to either make movies or start making big television productions," Semel told the investors conference.

"It would be ridiculous and it's not what Yahoo is going to do," he said.

Lauren Rich Fine, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, says Yahoo is attractive to investors for its diversified revenue stream from paid search, advertising and social networking ventures. It simply doesn't aspire to the business model of the traditional Hollywood studio, where only six out of 10 movies make back their investment.

Yahoo says it's in the earliest stages of developing its entertainment strategy and thus would not make an executive available to discuss it with The Associated Press.

But the company has made it clear that one of Braun's mandates is to find new ways for Yahoo's music, games, news, sports, kids and other divisions to draw more visitors.

Moving content off the computer onto cell phones, portable media players and other devices is likely a key goal, many in the industry believe.

"The video experience online and on wireless devices is getting much better," said Bernard Gershon, senior vice president, ABC News Digital Media Group. "People's willingness to pay to access some of that content is definitely improving, and content creators, like us, are actually looking at this medium as a way to produce new and different content."

But it remains too early to tell exactly what direction companies like Yahoo and rivals AOL, MSN and Real Networks will take.

Ultimately, whether Yahoo morphs into an online TV network or produces its own content its strategy all boils down to keeping visitors within Yahoo's virtual walls as much as possible.

Said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Janco Partners Inc.: "The more content and interesting things they put there, the longer they keep you there, the more opportunities they have to monetize you through advertising."
http://www.obviousnews.com/breakingn...ws-552437.html


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IPTV's Revolution May Be on Hold

The Internet technology could transform home entertainment. Problem is, what's the point of unlimited channels if studios won't provide content?
Burt Helm

When Disney's (DIS ) The Incredibles hit theaters last fall, it got a helping hand from SBC (SBC ). The telecommunications giant threw in its own marketing dollars, sponsoring Incredibles giveaways linked with phone service and using the speedy character, Dash, to promote its high-speed Internet service. Now, at the end of this year, SBC will unveil an incredible debut of its own: IPTV, a form of TV that uses Internet technologies. So, Disney would be happy to help out there, right?

Maybe not. And that's unfortunate because SBC has a lot riding on its IPTV project. Indeed, the entire telecom industry is hoping IPTV will be the next great frontier for its business. Thanks to new broadband technology, telecom outfits and cable companies can deliver TV, phone, and Internet access over the same high-speed pipes into customers' homes.

PLAYING HARD TO GET. The new capabilities could lead to entirely new ways of watching TV. Because IPTV uses huge centralized servers to deliver video into consumers' homes, it can support a nearly unlimited number of channels and allow customers to pick from an à la carte channel selection. It can even offer multiple camera angles for sporting events and make thousands of old movies, TV shows, and events available "on demand" at the push of the button.

IPTV differs from earlier forms of Internet-based TV in that, while the video signal is encoded just like data over the Web, it travels solely over SBC's own servers and network. Viewers will find the experience akin to watching digital cable, rather than streaming video on the Web.

But improvements like these can happen only if content providers -- media companies and movie studios like Disney -- play along. So far, it seems, they're not. Disney didn't return calls from BusinessWeek Online seeking comment, and it hasn't signed with any outside distributor to provide its movies for video-on-demand. Most studios have agreed to only limited video-on-demand distribution, fearing it could cut into revenues from rentals and DVD sales -- now generating bigger income streams than the box office itself.

ANXIOUS STUDIOS. So far, the telcos are moving ahead with their plans and say they'll make final agreements with studios later. SBC, Verizon (VZ ), and BellSouth (BLS ) are planning three of the biggest IPTV deployments in the world. When completed, SBC's service will extend to 18 million homes in 13 states and cost an estimated $4 billion. It also puts the telecom in direct competition with cable companies who are, in turn, venturing onto Baby Bell turf by offering phone service (see BW Online, 5/10/ 04, "Telecom Turmoil").

But SBC's challenges highlight the difficulties telecommunications and cable players face as they converge on potential dollars in the high-tech TV market. At this early date, no one can tell how many subscribers will sign up for IPTV, but roughly 100 million households now subscribe to some sort of digital TV, either satellite or cable. With the big studios and other content providers uneasy about jumping on board, it may be impossible for the new technology to truly come into its own.

SBC is learning that the hard way. Capabilities -- such as à la carte channel selection -- promoted by Chief Executive Ed Whitacre in the fall of 2004 have fallen by the wayside, at least for the initial launch of the new service, according to Lea Ann Champion, senior executive vice-president of IP operations and services at SBC. And it could be some time before video-on-demand reaches its full potential.

IDEAL IN THEORY. Not that SBC isn't working overtime to round up content for the fledgling TV service. On Mar. 22, it added five TV executives to its new programming department: Chris Lauricella and Richard Levine from DirecTV (DTV ), Richard Wellerstein from iN Demand Networks, and Amy Friedlander and Martin Sansing from Intertainer, one of the pioneers of video-on-demand technology. They join division head Dan York, a former programming exec from iN Demand Networks, and John Penney from HBO, who were both hired in the fall of 2004.

While SBC acknowledges it has completed no programming agreements, York says deals for basic-channel programming are "very far along," and he expects to pay rates comparable to what a small or midsize cable company pays providers for basic channel carriage -- a 15% premium on rates paid by huge cable companies like Comcast (CMCSA ), according to two industry analysts.

Working out deals for higher-tech services like video-on-demand is tougher. In theory, this model seems ideal for movie and TV studios: Each could dump its film and TV- show archives onto SBC's massive servers and gain revenue from programs they never before had a way to showcase.

FAMILIAR BATTLEGROUND. But it doesn't come so easily. Thirty-three years ago, HBO was founded on such a concept. Now it creates its own programming and maintains its own powerful presence in TV, apart from the studios.

"The studios feel that HBO became successful owing largely to their [movies]," says Joe Boyle, a former vice-president for communications at iN Demand who now runs his own New York City-based public relations firm. More recently, the studios have considered the success Apple Computer (AAPL ) has had with its iTunes service for digital music. They hesitate to help another company create a dominant consumer brand in digital video.

SBC's new hires know this story all too well. Three of the five, as well as York, have backgrounds in video-on-demand. And the histories aren't exactly pretty. Current video-on-demand agreements, like those worked on by iN Demand Networks, where York and Wellerstein come from, carry significant restrictions.

RUPTURED PARTNERSHIP. Nearly all studios refuse to release a movie for on-demand until 45 days after its DVD debut. And iN Demand, along with other video-on- demand distributors, has seen its share of video-on-demand revenues slip from a 50-50 split with the studios to a 60-40 split.

The situation was equally rough at Intertainer, Friedlander's and Sansing's former employer. IT had pioneered video-on-demand technology in the mid-1990s and had worked out a 50-50 revenue split with Sony (SNE ), Time Warner (TWX ), and Universal, which were also investors in the company.

But in 2002, the three companies decided they would rather control their own content. They severed all ties with Intertainer and partnered instead with Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer Studios (MGM ) and Paramount Pictures to create their own service, called Movielink. In September, 2002, Intertainer shut down and is currently in the early phases of a $1.6 billion antitrust suit against its three former shareholders.

SWEET WORDS, SMALL GAINS. With the exception of Friedlander, who negotiated Intertainer's initial agreement with Sony, this marks the first time that any of these executives, including York, have taken a lead role in negotiating with the providers. In their previous positions -- according to representatives at DirecTV, Intertainer, and iN Demand -- all operated primarily as liaisons with studios to maintain established agreements.

SBC has been doing its best to soften the toughest partners, like Disney, as demonstrated by its 2004 promotion of The Incredibles. York says SBC will have a similar cross-promotion with a Fox movie this summer.

Disney is apparently slowly warming up to the idea of video-on-demand. So far, it has made content from ABC and ESPN available through a partnership with privately held TVN Entertainment Networks, which manages video-on-demand for several cable companies.

"VIRTUAL VIDEO STORE." But aside from a partnership with the Web site CinemaNow to stream video over the Web, Disney has kept its movies to itself. And since 2003, it has used its own video-on-demand network, called Moviebeam. The service works only on special hardware that consumers must rent directly from Disney, in addition to paying a per-movie fee.

But SBC's plans for a "virtual video store" of on-demand content, as one executive called it, seem less certain. At January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, York told analysts that SBC wants to "reinvent television" with never-before-seen on-demand options -- but he now says SBC is still deciding whether to negotiate the deals on its own or go through an aggregator like iN Demand or TVN Entertainment Networks when it makes its debut at the end of the year. That's what Verizon did. On Feb. 21, it announced it will partner with TVN for a similar service.

While SBC has the technology and money to create one of the largest "virtual video stores" in history, it will take some tricky footwork with partners to accomplish that ambitious goal. Otherwise, many of those virtual shelves may end up sitting empty for some time to come.
http://businessweek.com/technology/c...3428_tc206.htm


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Sony Preparing Movie Downloads For Mobile Technology
Chris Richardson

Sony Pictures is preparing to offer a download service featuring the company's top 500 movies for mobile technology users. The company's goal is to have this upcoming service ready by next year.

The movies will be downloaded and stored on Flash memory, a preferred storage format for mobile technologies. The movies will be available through legal download services like Movielink.com.

Not only is Sony doing this to improve usability of the mobile industry, they also have eyes on disrupting the various P2P clients, which they feel will discourage movie piracy. Techtree.com reports,

According to Michael Arrieta, senior vice president of Sony Pictures the company was aiming to become the iTunes of movie downloads. He also said that they wanted design business models, pricing models and distribution models similar to the way Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO had done for music.

Sony's announcement comes at a time when movie studios are joining hands to fight illegal file-sharing on peer-to-peer networks. Motion Picture Association of America is also currently taking legal action against service providers like BitTorrent and eDonkey.

Whether or not Sony can duplicate iTunes' success remains to be seen. It is doubtful the movie downloads, whether in mobile format or not, will be the same price as an iTunes $.99 song purchase. Sony has not released any information concerning movie download prices.
http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusi...echnology.html


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Microsoft Launches Portable TV Service
AP

Television addicts rejoice: Now you can take more shows on the road. Microsoft Corp. has launched a $19.95-a-year service that lets people download certain TV shows to portable devices such as media players and advanced cell phones.

The Redmond-based software company has already let customers watch free short clips of some shows on Windows-based portable devices.

With the new service, MSN Video Downloads, customers will have access to more content - sports highlights and some shows from Fox Sports, news and business headlines from MSNBC.com and children's programming from Cookie Jar Entertainment.

Users simply log onto a Web site using a traditional laptop or desktop computer. They can download the shows and transfer them to portables.

The service marks Microsoft's latest effort to get people interested in Portable Media Centers and other devices that use its Windows Media Player technology for watching movies and listening to music.

The company's competition includes Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iPod music player.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...sto mwire.htm


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TiVo Beefs Up Patent Portfolio
Richard Shim

Digital video recorder company TiVo has increased its stake in television intellectual property by purchasing six patents from IBM.

The Alviso, Calif.-based company on Tuesday filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosing its purchase of six U.S. patents from IBM on March 31. The patents relate to audience research and measurement, integration of television signals with Internet access, automatic rescheduling of recordings, content screening, enhanced program information search and electronic program guide interface enhancements. Expiration dates for the patents range from December 2015 to February 2020.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

The DVR pioneer has been amassing a patent portfolio to boost its licensing business and fend off new entrants to the DVR market. However, TiVo hasn't yet been able to turn its intellectual property into significant financial success.

Early last month, TiVo was granted five patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The company has 70 patents, with 106 still pending.

Many industry watchers say the value of TiVo's overall patent portfolio lies in the potential muscle it brings to its ongoing patent infringement lawsuit against satellite television company EchoStar Communications.

The case has been slow moving, but recently made public progress, with jury selection set to begin Oct. 4. TiVo brought the suit against EchoStar in January of last year, alleging that EchoStar and its affiliated companies are violating TiVo's time- warping patent.
http://news.com.com/TiVo+beefs+up+pa...3-5657506.html


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Hybrid-Car Tinkerers Scoff at No-Plug-In Rule
Danny Hakim

Ron Gremban and Felix Kramer have modified a Toyota Prius so it can be plugged into a wall outlet.

This does not make Toyota happy. The company has spent millions of dollars persuading people that hybrid electric cars like the Prius never need to be plugged in and work just like normal cars. So has Honda, which even ran a commercial that showed a guy wandering around his Civic hybrid fruitlessly searching for a plug.

But the idea of making hybrid cars that have the option of being plugged in is supported by a diverse group of interests, from neoconservatives who support greater fuel efficiency to utilities salivating at the chance to supplant oil with electricity. If you were able to plug a hybrid in overnight, you could potentially use a lot less gas by cruising for long stretches on battery power only. But unlike purely electric cars, which take hours to charge and need frequent recharging, you would not have to plug in if you did not want to.

"I've gotten anywhere from 65 to over 100 miles per gallon," said Mr. Gremban, an engineer at CalCars, a small nonprofit group based in Palo Alto, Calif. He gets 40 to 45 miles per gallon driving his normal Prius. And EnergyCS, a small company that has collaborated with CalCars, has modified another Prius with more sophisticated batteries; they claim their Prius gets up to 180 m.p.g. and can travel more than 30 miles on battery power.

"If you cover people's daily commute, maybe they'll go to the gas station once a month," said Mr. Kramer, the founder of CalCars. "That's the whole idea."

Conventional hybrid electric cars already save gas. But if one looks at growth projections for oil consumption, hybrids will slow the growth rate of oil imports only marginally, at best, with the amount depending on how many hybrids are sold. To actually stop the growth of oil imports and potentially even reduce consumption, automakers have focused on developing cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

But fuel cells would require a complete reinvention of the automobile, not to mention the nation's gas stations, and the technology to put them on the road is still a long way from fruition. Advocates of plug-in hybrids say the technology for these vehicles is available now to the point that people are building them in garages.

"All of the relevant technology is at hand," said Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy and an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration. His group was among a coalition of right-leaning organizations that released an energy plan this year promoting plug-ins as one way to increase fuel efficiency in light of the instability of the Middle East.

"If you're thinking about this as an environmental issue first and foremost, you're missing the point," Mr. Gaffney said. Curbing dependence on foreign oil, he added, "is a national security emergency."

Toyota, however, says the plug-in is not ready for prime time.

"They say this is the next great thing, but it just isn't," said David Hermance, an executive engineer at Toyota. "The electric utilities really want to sell electricity and they want to sell it to the transportation sector because that expands their market. They have an agenda."

But the plug-in hybrid is not just coming out of the garages of enthusiasts in California. DaimlerChrysler has developed several dozen plug-in hybrid vans in cooperation with the Electric Power Research Institute, a group financed by more than 300 utilities, including the New York Power Authority and Southern California Edison. Testing of the vans will start this year, and one will be used by The New York Times on a newspaper delivery route in Manhattan. Several small companies are also developing or have developed plug-in hybrid prototypes.

"We think it's the only way to rekindle interest in electric transportation," said Robert Graham, who manages research into electric vehicles for the Research Institute. "There are no technology hurdles at all. It's simply a matter of getting the vehicle built out on the street and getting people to recognize its value."

For power companies, the notion of people plugging in cars overnight represents not only a new way to make money, but the vehicles would also draw power mostly during off hours which would improve efficiency, because power plants cannot simply shut down at night as demand diminishes.

As it stands, though, modifying a hybrid like the Prius to enable it to plug in would add perhaps $2,000 to $3,000 to the cost of a car that is already roughly $3,000 more expensive than conventional gas cars. Advocates say the costs would be much lower if such cars were mass-produced by a major automaker.

But Nick Cappa, a spokesman for DaimlerChrysler, was cautious, calling the technology one of many the company was exploring. Among its current drawbacks is that the added batteries take up space and make the company's Sprinter van several hundred pounds heavier.

"This is part of a small program investigating these technologies," Mr. Cappa said.

And Mr. Hermance of Toyota said that batteries today were not durable enough to handle the wide range of charging up and charging down that a plug-in hybrid would need, calling that the most damaging thing you can do to a battery.

Edward Furia, the chief executive of AFS Trinity Power, a privately held company in Bellevue, Wash., that develops mechanical batteries called flywheels, agreed with Mr. Hermance, but said that a secondary energy storage technology like a flywheel could solve the problem.

"If you've got a flywheel with your chemical battery, you can draw down the chemical battery, but when it's time to do a heavy lift, to accelerate or absorb energy, the flywheel is doing the acceleration or the absorption, not the chemical battery," said Mr. Furia, whose company is developing its own plug-in hybrid that it says will get several hundred miles per gallon.

While many environmentalists support the technology, some say in terms of emissions, electric cars would only be as good as the power plants that produce electricity.

"The concern on plug-in hybrids is that we not substitute addiction to one polluting fuel for addiction to a more polluting fuel," said Dan Becker, the head of the Sierra Club's global warming and energy program. "Coal is more polluting than gasoline, and nearly 60 percent of U.S. electricity is generated by burning coal."

Roger Duncan, a deputy general manager of Austin Energy, a utility owned by the City of Austin, Tex., said that "it's hard to say what impact it will have on the nation as a whole," but that in regions that use cleaner-than-average power sources, like Austin or California, it would provide a clear emissions benefit. Mr. Duncan even imagines a day when drivers could be paid to return energy to the grid during times of excessive demand.

Plug-in hybrid prototypes have been around for several years, but the idea of modifying a Prius stemmed from the curiosity of some Prius owners in the United States, Mr. Kramer said. They were aroused by a mysterious unmarked button on their Prius and discovered that in Priuses sold in Europe and Japan, the button allows the car to drive for a mile in electric-only mode. Mr. Hermance said the feature was disabled in Priuses sold in the United States because of complications it would have created in emissions-testing rules.

Mr. Kramer said "a bunch of engineers reverse-engineered it in the United States and figured out how to hack it."

But they soon wanted to travel on batteries for more than a mile and began to collaborate through CalCars on adding batteries to the Prius that would allow for longer pure electric travel. With the help of dozens of volunteer engineers collaborating online, the group retrofitted a Prius in Mr. Gremban's garage to travel about 10 miles on nothing but battery power.

Mr. Duncan said the plug-in hybrid was "very realistic, because it's not that big a leap in technology."

"Look what Felix has done with Prius off the street," he added. "This isn't rocket science."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02plug.html


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New, Cheap Battery Outshines Alkalines
David Pogue

Panasonic will introduce AA and AAA disposable batteries in June that the company calls the "most significant developments in primary battery technology in 40 years."

According to Panasonic, these Oxyride batteries last up to twice as long as premium alkaline batteries like Duracell Ultra ($5 for four), yet cost the same as regular alkalines ($4 for four).

Astounded yet? Then get this: Oxyride batteries are also supposed to deliver more power. The result, the company says, is that battery-operated toothbrushes spin faster, flashlights shine brighter, camera flashes are quicker to recharge and music players produce richer sound.

Play your cards right, in other words, and these batteries might just clean out your gutters, wash the car and do your taxes.

Those are pretty fantastic claims, but Panasonic is certainly right about one thing: The time is right for some technical improvement in batteries. Technology has marched on in just about every other corner of modern life, but people still tiptoe nervously through birthday parties and weddings with their digital cameras, anxiously rationing shots so they'll have juice left for the big moment.

No wonder, then, that in Japan, the Oxyride batteries have captured 10 percent of the battery market in the one year they've been available. In fact, Panasonic predicts that Oxyride will eventually wipe out alkalines just the way alkalines blew regular "heavy-duty" batteries off the map.

Skeptics are surely entitled to scoff, especially at that part about brighter flashlights, faster fans and better-sounding music. Aren't these gizmos somehow voltage-controlled so that they shine, spin or play at a certain rate, regardless of the battery?

Armed with a stopwatch, I spent several exceedingly boring days conducting battery-drain tests with identical pairs of flashlights, screwdrivers, cameras, handheld fans and swimming bathtub fishies. (Note to the neighbors: You can call off the nice men in the white jackets. It was all in the name of science.)

As it turns out, the power-boosting effect is no marketing concoction; it's real. In identical flashlights, Oxyrides produce an obviously wider, whiter circle of light than Duracell Ultras. You can immediately tell the difference in portable fans, too, because the Oxyride fan hums at a higher pitch, a musical step higher than the Duracell one. The Oxyrides even make power screwdrivers spin faster: 364rpm, compared with 316rpm for the Duracell Ultras.

Then there's that bit about Oxyrides making MP3 players and CD players produce richer, fuller sound. Panasonic cited a test in Japan in which 80 percent of the players in an orchestra said they preferred the sound from an Oxyride-powered music player. (Panasonic doesn't include sound-quality claims in its official marketing, but it does say it's investigating.)

This one's a tougher call. In blind tests, most people couldn't tell any difference between a CD player with Oxyrides and one with regular alkalines. A few identified the Oxyrides as maybe being a bit richer-sounding, but said that the difference was awfully subtle. All participants confessed, though, that they were not members of a Japanese orchestra.

Amazingly, then, Panasonic Oxyrides do deliver more power, for the same price as ordinary alkalines. To be precise, they deliver 1.7 volts, which is 13 percent more juice than the 1.5 volts of alkalines. (In both cases, the voltage diminishes as the batteries empty.) According to Panasonic, Oxyrides get their power not only from an improved chemical makeup, but also from a vacuum-assembly machine that packs more ingredients into the same space.

But what about the primary claim, that Oxyrides last longer than alkalines? Here, the answer is more complicated.

In rundown tests (put the batteries in, run nonstop till they're dead), Duracell Ultras, and even regular alkaline Duracells, actually beat the Oxyrides. In a krypton-bulb flashlight, the Oxyrides ran for two and a half hours; Duracell Ultras lasted 35 minutes longer. An Oxyride handheld fan died after an hour; Duracell Ultras had another 25 minutes in them. And in a really cute swimming fish bathtub toy, the Oxyride fish gave up the ghost after 8.5 hours; a pair of ordinary alkalines kept finding Nemo for an amazing 25 hours, nearly three times as long.

Now, battery companies generally hate it when well-meaning journalists conduct rundown tests, for a very good reason: nobody uses batteries that way. In the real world, people play, pause and put aside their electronics for days or weeks. Properly conducted battery tests, experts say, are repetitive, expensive and computer-controlled. A battery that's designed to last a long time under real-world conditions may not do well in rundown tests. ("We'd be delighted to help you design valid tests," a battery company representative once told me. "And we'll look forward to reading the results around Christmas.")

And sure enough, when the flashlight test was repeated in a more realistic regimen - one hour on, followed by 30 minutes off for good behavior - the Oxyrides lasted 4 hours 14 minutes. The Duracells still won, but this time by only 10 minutes, and the light produced during the flashlight's final 20 minutes was so feeble it probably shouldn't count. (The Oxyrides tend to die more suddenly than alkalines.)

Panasonic further protested that the Oxyrides were designed to shine in high-drain gadgets (cameras, LED flashlights, remote-control toys, portable televisions and photo flash units) and moderate-drain gizmos (Game Boys, CD and music players, electric razors), not in low-drain devices like flashlights, fans, radios, clocks, remote controls and bathtub fishies. (So out came the Game Boy and the LED flashlight, and in went the Oxyrides. Test results: pending. After three days, both of them are still running strong.)

All of this brings us to the World Series of battery competitions: the digital camera test. These days, most digital cameras come with rectangular, proprietary rechargeable battery packs. But if your camera takes disposables, you're already aware of their pathetic battery-consumption record.

The challenge: See how many shots a pair of AA's can take in a digital camera. The test: 50 consecutive shots, alternating flash and nonflash, followed by 10 minutes turned off so the batteries could rest. Then another 50 shots, and so on until "Change the batteries" appears on the camera's screen. (I set the camera to capture low-resolution images, so they'd all fit without having to change or erase the memory card.)

Because this isn't a constant-drain test, you'd expect the Oxyrides to win--and this time, they do. The final score: Regular alkalines, 354 shots; premium alkalines, 566; Panasonic Oxyrides, 844. That's not exactly twice the longevity of premium alkalines, as Panasonic promises (and as PC World magazine found in its own Oxyride battery tests). But it's 2.4 times the life of regular alkalines, for the same price.

Now, even Panasonic admits that Oxyrides aren't the most economical, environmentally friendly, powerful batteries you can buy. That honor goes to rechargeable nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, which cost under $15 including charger. You can recharge NiMH batteries hundreds of times, and each charge lasts longer than Oxyride or any sort of alkaline.

But NiMHs aren't widely available in stores, they lose their charge quickly on the shelf, and the recharging and swapping process requires planning and discipline. Alas, not everybody has the patience; the road to the abandoned-gadgets drawer is paved with good intentions.

(Another Oxyride rival is AA disposable lithium batteries, offered by Energizer in a four-pack for about $23. Five times the power of standard alkalines, at six times the price. You do the math.)

The bottom line: Oxyride batteries may not quite live up to Panasonic's enthusiastic claims in all kinds of gadgets in every situation. But penny for penny, they deliver more power and, in power-hungry gadgets like digital cameras, last a lot longer than alkalines. Don't look now, but the Energizer bunny may soon be squashed by the Panasonic elephant.
http://news.com.com/New%2C+cheap+bat...3-5658376.html


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Marketers Get Technology To Block User Attempts To Delete Cookies

"The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works," said Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, which developed the technology.

Antone Gonsalves

United Virtualities is offering online marketers and publishers technology that attempts to undermine the growing trend among consumers to delete cookies planted in their computers.

The New York company on Thursday unveiled what it calls PIE, or persistent identification element, a technology that's uploaded to a browser and restores deleted cookies. In addition, PIE, which can't be easily removed, can also act as a cookie backup, since it contains the same information.

Cookies are small files often uploaded to people's computers as they visit websites run by retailers, entertainment companies, newspapers and other businesses. The text files contain information that's used to track visitors' behavior, or to offer visitors products or services based on information gathered during previous visits, a process called personalization. In addition, cookie-gathered information is often pivotal for advertising campaigns and e- mail marketing.

According to JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corp., 58 percent of Internet users have deleted the tiny files, essentially making many consumers anonymous during site visits. In addition, 39 percent of consumers are deleting cookies from their primary computer monthly.

United Virtualities's PIE helps combat this consumer behavior by leveraging a feature in Flash MX called local shared objects. Flash MX is a Macromedia Inc. application for developing multimedia Web content, user interfaces and Web applications. The technology runs on a Flash Player that the company says is deployed on 98 percent of Internet-capable computers.

When a consumer goes to a PIE-enabled website, the visitor's browser is tagged with a Flash object that contains a unique identification similar to the text found in a traditional cookie. In this way, PIE acts as a cookie backup, and can also restore the original cookie when the consumer revisits the site.

While consumers have learned to delete cookies, most are unaware of shared objects, and don't know how to disable them.

Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.

"The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works," Tanembaum said.

While United Virtualities, as well as marketers and publishers, focus on the benefits of cookies, consumers often see them as an invasion of privacy and resent having them loaded into their computers without permission, experts say. In addition, unscrupulous marketers can abuse the tracking capabilities of cookies.

Fear is also a factor. Consumers are constantly reminded about the risks on the Internet posed by spyware, phishers and viruses, so deleting cookies makes them feel more secure, even though it's unlikely to make them safer.

Using technology like United Virtualities's to circumvent consumers could cause a backlash, JupiterResearch analyst David Schatsky said. The research firm found that many consumers understand cookies, and may be willing to allow some in their computers, if they are given the choice upfront.

"(PIE) sounds like it flies in the face of what consumers are telling us," Schatsky said. "They're seeking privacy and control, and if this is denied, then they won't be happy."

Tanembaum also warned against using PIE to thwart consumers.

"Any abuse of this technology is not welcomed by us," Tanembaum said. "We believe people should use this technology responsibly. If people don't want cookies in place, then (their browsers) shouldn't be tagged."

Consumers can make PIE inoperable by raising the security settings in their browsers to its highest level, Tanembaum said. But he acknowledges that such a high setting would also hamper consumers' ability to visit non-PIE websites.

For its part, Macromedia has posted on its website instructions for disabling shared objects uploaded to browsers.

In addition, the San Francisco-based company is discussing with Microsoft Corp., the Mozilla Foundation and other browser makers the possibility of letting consumers control the use of cookies and shared objects from one location in a browser, Jeff Whatcott, vice president of product management for Macromedia, said.

"Our goal is to always put the user in control over their own data and machine," Whatcott said. "That's the approach we've always taken."

Flash-built websites often use shared objects in gathering information from visitors. Besides data on how the sites are being used, retailers, for example, can track what visitors place in their shopping carts, or store a list of previously purchased products.
http://www.securitypipeline.com/show...leID=160401022


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Laws Must Keep Up With Technology

Our position is: Supreme Court should balance copyright protection with importance of allowing advancement in technology.

In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Sony Corp. couldn't be sued for copyright infringement just because consumers might use VCRs to illegally copy movies.

The ruling gave rise to recording TV shows, renting videotapes and, yes, no small amount of pirated material. But VCR technology not only created new industries, it also increased profits for moviemakers and television studios.

Two decades later, the Supreme Court faces a similar decision in connection with computer technologies that enable copying of DVDs and CDs.

At immediate issue are software makers such as Grokster Inc. that have created software enabling computer files to be stored and shared anywhere on the Internet. It's no secret that many of these files contain copyrighted material such as songs or movies. But laws against copyright infringement enable anyone harmed by such misuse to go after those responsible for the pirating without impeding creators of the technology.

File sharing has made thousands of classic books with no copyright protection freely available to the public. It allows 98 percent of musicians who don't have recording contracts to have their music sampled by the public. And file sharing is preventing totalitarian regimes around the world from controlling Internet content.

As 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Sydney R. Thomas wrote, "The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well- established distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine or an MP3 player."
http://www.indystar.com/articles/8/234196-7008-021.html


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Tech Companies Back EU in Microsoft Fight
AP

Five leading technology companies are supporting European Union regulators in their legal battle with Microsoft Corp., a lawyer for the group said Wednesday.

International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp., Red Hat Inc., RealNetworks Inc. and Nokia Corp. have applied to intervene against Microsoft in its court appeal of last year's EU antitrust ruling, lawyer Thomas Vinje said.

Vinje said the companies' stance countered Microsoft claims that the European Commission's case was without industry support.

"The Commission does not stand naked. It has solid support from the information technology industry," Vinje said in a telephone interview. "The bottom line is that we think the Commission's position is correct."

The intervention against Microsoft of all these major tech companies _ with the exception of RealNetworks, which has sued Microsoft separately _ is noteworthy because they have tended to be reluctant to take such a public stand.

Red Hat is a major distributor of the open source Linux operating system, which IBM also widely promotes. Oracle's Chief Executive Larry Ellison is a longtime nemesis of Microsoft, and Nokia faces a growing threat from the company in mobile software.

Microsoft didn't immediately return calls for comment Wednesday.

The company has appealed at an EU court against the March 2004 ruling in which the Commission fined the company euro497 million (US$640 million) and obliged it to share technology with competitors who make server software so their products can better communicate with Windows-powered computers.

The regulators also ordered Microsoft to produce a Windows version minus its multimedia player to provide a more level playing field for competitors such as RealNetworks Inc.

Vinje said the companies had no clear idea yet when the Luxembourg-based European Court of First Instance would reply to their application to join the case.

The EU's head office played down the impact of the companies' support.

"The commission has regular contacts with many companies, many market players in the sector, we are always pleased to have their point of view," said spokesman Jonathan Todd. "It's not really relevant or determining in terms of the outcome of a particular antitrust case."

Seattle-based RealNetworks Inc., maker of a rival to Microsoft's Media Player, is Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft's last big commercial opponent in the case. Microsoft reached settlements with four of the five major parties that had intervened against it in the EU case _ Novell Inc., the Computer and Communications Industry Association, Time Warner Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Microsoft shares rose 20 cents to close at $24.67 in trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock has been trading at a 52-week range of $23.82 to $30.20.
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/arti.../d89a4mhg0.txt


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File-Sharing Is the Latest Battleground in the Clash of Technology and Copyright
Hal R. Varian

LAST week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster, a case that has important implications for the future of online innovation.

Grokster makes software that enables Internet users to share computer files on peer-to-peer networks. The technology has been used to distribute many kinds of content, including copyrighted digital music.

MGM and other entertainment companies want to hold Grokster liable for the copyright infringement that occurs when users download copyrighted music without paying for it. Grokster argues that there are many legitimate uses for its technology and that it is not responsible for those who use it to violate copyrights.

This is just the latest installment of a longstanding battle between technology companies and copyright holders. It is useful to look at the history of some of these past innovations in trying to understand what policies may be appropriate today.

In the early 1900's, the disruptive technology was player pianos. Manufacturers of player piano rolls purchased a single copy of the sheet music of a song, hired someone to record the music and then sold these mechanical reproductions to consumers. The songwriters held that this was copyright infringement, while the piano roll manufacturers pointed out that they had paid the appropriate copyright fees when they purchased the sheet music.

In 1908, the Supreme Court found in favor of the piano roll manufacturers, but practically invited Congress to consider new legislation on the issue. Congress responded with the Copyright Act of 1909, which created a new form of intellectual property, mechanical reproduction rights.

The new law required piano roll manufacturers to pay songwriters a fee for each song. Subsequently, mechanical reproduction fees have been extended to new technologies like phonographs, audio tapes, CD's and online streaming digital music.

In the 1908 case, songwriters did not try to ban player piano technology. They clearly recognized that the additional distribution of their songs was potentially advantageous. Their goal was simply to get a fair share of the proceeds from the piano roll sales.

Another directly relevant Supreme Court decision is Sony v. Universal City Studios, a 1984 case involving the use of video recorders in the home. The film studios argued that Sony should be liable for copyright infringement since its video recorders could be used to copy movies and television programs illegally.

The Supreme Court held that Sony was not liable since the VCR technology had "substantial noninfringing uses."

This phrase has since become the legal test of whether liability can be imposed. Under this doctrine, a company that sells a technology whose only use is to violate copyright could potentially be liable for infringement, but as long as there are substantial noninfringing uses there would be no liability.

The studios lost the Sony case, but it forced them to take the home video market seriously.

Their first instinct was to set a $50 to $60 price for videocassettes. But by choosing a high price, they stimulated the development of the video rental market, giving users inexpensive access to movies.

On the other hand, the availability of rentals stimulated the demand for VCR's. As VCR prices declined, more people bought them and the video rental industry flourished, creating a new, rapidly growing outlet for studio productions.

In the late 1980's Disney began to experiment with lower prices for videos, hoping to bypass the rental stores and sell directly to home users. Disney's 1987 video release of "Lady and the Tramp" was priced at $29.95 and sold over 3.2 million copies, making it the best-selling video as of that date. Its record was soon eclipsed by "E.T.," which sold 14 million copies at $19.95 apiece.

These examples convinced Hollywood that if it priced its product low enough it could successfully compete with the rental market. When DVD technology came along in 1996, Hollywood understood that pricing under $20 was critical. DVD technology has been hugely successful because the prices of the players and discs have continued to decline, making it highly affordable and widely used.

The critical lesson from the history of the VCR is this: If consumers have ways to share content, either via rental markets or via the Internet, you will have to set low prices to induce them to buy. But low prices may well stimulate enough volume to make up for the lost revenue.

Apple's iTunes, with its 99-cent price for songs, has driven this lesson home, but there are those who argue that prices should be even lower.

In 2004, RealNetworks experimented with charging 49 cents for digital songs and sold more than three million downloads in a three-week period. The chief executive of RealNetworks, Rob Glaser, says that "the pricing that will result in the biggest overall market for music will involve some kind of tiered pricing," with "new mainstream songs for 99 cents retail, and up-and-coming artists and back catalog artists at a lower price."

It is worth observing that this is similar to the pricing strategy used in the video industry in the 1980's: a high price for the videos that were likely to be viewed only once, making them natural candidates for the rental market, and a low price for videos that warranted repeat viewing, making them candidates for purchase.

So what should the policy be for new technologies like Grokster? I advocate the Pizza Principle: If you want everybody to get as big a slice as possible, you first have to figure out how to bake as big a pie as possible. Once you have a nice big pie, you can let people fight over how they slice it up.

With respect to technology, the Sony decision got it right: encourage technologies that create more total value. Then, let companies fight to find business models that deliver that value to consumers. They can be awfully creative when they are forced to be.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/07/business/07scene.html


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AOL Rolls Out Net Phone Business

America Online is jumping into the crowded market of Internet telephone service.

Called simply, A-O-L Internet Phone Service, the product is being offered initially in 40 metropolitan areas. The company says its new service offers the regular features of traditional telephony and combines them with advanced services that are accessed on a P-C over the Internet. A-O-L is offering its phone service after dozens of companies have already entered the market. The competition ranges from start-ups like Vonage Holdings to traditional telecom players like Verizon Communications. Most major cable operators are also developing or rolling out services.
http://www.kesq.com/Global/story.asp?S=3179292


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Tunneling

MSN Adds VoIP, Video Calls to Messenger
Sean Michael Kerner

Microsoft launched the latest version of its MSN Messenger client, version 7.0, which boasts a long list of new features including full screen video calls, VoIP and shared search functionality.

Microsoft also updated its MSN Spaces blogging service, which it claims is one of the fastest growing blogging communities on the planet.

The new MSN Messenger 7.0 IM client's video features were first announced in early March. MSN Messenger 7.0 users will now be able to have full screen video conversations with other users as well as new enhanced synchronized audio that improves the audio quality of IM video conversations.

"We've seen video phones for years at CES [Consumer Electronics Show] and other events and I think video conversations are going to become mainstream," Phil Holden, director of MSN global business and product management, told internetnews.com.

MSN has also improved the method by which video IM connections are made, which promises to improve overall user experience.

"One of the problems we find today is that often times when people are making a connection, the connection fails, and that is often because of firewalls that are in the way," Holden said. "So what we're doing now is making a peer-to-peer connection and that goes through for the most part. But if, for example, there is a situation where it can't get through on P2P, we've actually built what we think of as a reflection service. The video connection will actually go to the [Internet] cloud and tunnel in behind the firewall to enable people to make a connection. We think that is going to dramatically improve the number of times people can get connected."

MSN Messenger 7.0 will also introduce the concept of shared search on the IM client. Using integrated MSN Search capability, users will be able to search and share results of search queries while having an IM conversation. According to Holden, MSN did a lot of research into how people use PC-to-PC calls and they specifically looked at upstart VoIP vendor Skype. As part of that analysis, officials looked at how users made use of the service and also how many users used the service to connect to the legacy PSTN telephone network.

"People tend to do a regular text conversation over IM, be it MSN Messenger, Yahoo! or AOL and then they flip over to Skype to do a PC to PC audio conversation," Holden said.

According to MSN's data on usage of the Skype-Out, PC to PSTN service quoted by Holden, the number of people that are actually using Skype-Out functionality is less than 10 percent. Skype was not immediately available to comment.

"From our initial research, the main driver for people is really PC to PC audio, but obviously we're definitely investigating PSTN termination," Holden said. "We don't have any short term plans at the moment but its definitely on the investigation path."

MSN Messenger 7.0 will also include a feature called "winks" which Holden described as "emoticons on steroids." When a user "winks" at another user an animated image with sound is played on top of the IM dialog box and then disappears into the background.

A new "photoswap" feature has also been built in, which allows users to swap photos and other media files with other users during a conversation. The latest twist on photo sharing, however, comes through integration with MSN Spaces integration, MSN's blogging initiative that launched in December as an active Beta.

MSN Spaces service has now bumped up its photo storage capability from 10 MB up to 30 MB. Over 4.5 million blog spaces have been created since the introduction of the service, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft claims that over 2.5 billion instant messages currently traverse the MSN Messenger network every day. The service also boasts over 155 million users each month.
http://www.instantmessagingplanet.co...le.php/3496086


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The Need for Feed(s)
John Gartner

Online news aggregators like Google News are a blessing and a curse for the newspaper industry.

On one hand, news aggregators can deliver big traffic when they link to a site. On the other, consumers are turning to Google and Yahoo for their news, rather than to the individual newspapers the aggregators link to.

But now several newspapers are about to take on news aggregators at their own game, offering their own branded newsreaders.

The Los Angeles Times, the Denver Post and British newspaper the Guardian will soon offer stand-alone newsreader software for reading stories on their own websites and those of their competitors.

At the end of this month, the Denver Post will offer News Hound, a Denver Post-branded newsreader based on NewsGator, a newsreader that displays stories syndicated through RSS.

Gil Asakawa, executive producer of DenverPost.com, said the newspaper is developing its own newsreader software to make stories syndicated through RSS more accessible to average readers.

Whereas newsreaders require users to build news libraries by locating an RSS feed from each website they want to follow, News Hound will bundle several news feeds organized into categories. "The consumer benefit is that not all newspaper readers are early adopters," Asakawa said. "We want to make RSS available to people that are not technically savvy."

Asakawa said News Hound will include targeted feeds from the newspaper and other sources, including other news organizations. Readers will be able to track interests such as a college or pro sports team, or a local company, Asakawa said.

Since readers already graze for news from many sources, providing a Denver Post-branded application gives the newspaper increased visibility, according to Asakawa. "It increases the utility of the newspaper," he said.

News Hound will enable the Denver Post to establish a "stickier relationship with readers," said Greg Reinacker, founder and chief technical officer of NewsGator, which is co-developing the newsreader.

Publishers will use newsreaders to increase revenue through targeted advertising, according to Xavier Ferguson, CEO of software company Consenda, which is working with the Los Angeles Times on its newsreader application.

Ferguson said the Times' application, which is in beta testing, can match advertisements to content in the news feed. "If someone is linking to a blog that discusses cell phones, the newsreader could deliver ads about the latest camera phone," he said. Ads will appear between the links and can include pictures, according to Ferguson.

Media companies will also use newsreaders to enable readers to more easily scan and search their classifieds, Ferguson said. Readers will be able to sign up for alerts about new listings, such as a car from a particular model year, he said.

Yahoo will soon add newsreader capability to its news page, according to Neal Budde, director of Yahoo News. He said that later this month Yahoo would unveil a beta that enables users to integrate any RSS feed into their news page. "We recognize that adding RSS feeds is a way to expand traffic to the site," Budde said. Yahoo has also begun to add RSS feeds specific to current events, such as the death of the Pope, which integrate content from several publishers.

But not all publishers are interested in delivering RSS feeds or having their headlines displayed on other websites. In March, Agence France-Presse filed suit against Google for displaying headlines and article summaries on the Google News site.

Ferguson said publishers fall into two camps. Those who view syndicating headlines as a revenue opportunity and are setting up RSS feeds, and those such as Agence France-Presse who are worried about controlling how and where their headlines appear.

While these publishers "have their heads in the sand" about online news, Ferguson said, they are missing out on providing a useful service to readers for the viewing of content.

Newspapers have been bleeding subscribers for the past decade as readers increasingly go online for their news fix. Between 1994 and 2003, the percentage of adults who read a newspaper during the week dropped by 12 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The total circulation of daily newspapers also decreased every year during the same time period.

Publishers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle "are excited about RSS but are concerned if it will bring them more or less of an audience," according to Susan Mernit, principal of digital media consulting firm 5ive.

"RSS is a huge opportunity for all publishers. It is just a matter of finding the right audience," Mernit said. "Is the headline in a digest somewhere else enough to get people to come? That is a trade-off for companies" in deciding whether or not to provide an RSS feed, she said.
http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,67152,00.html


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Tomorrow's Net Speeds Could Be Up To 1,600% Faster
David Lieberman,

If you think that today's high- speed Internet connections are fast, wait till you see what cable operators plan.

The industry's standard-settings unit, CableLabs, plans to endorse this month technology that will let operators boost speeds 400% to 1,600%, over their existing lines.

Motorola and Cisco are among the companies offering alternative methods to increase broadband speeds by linking together the bandwidth used for four or more conventional TV channels.

What would the faster speed bring?

"The sky's the limit," says CableLabs CEO Dick Green. "There are a lot of high-data-rate services lurking out there — including a lot that we haven't even thought of."

While cable operators now usually transmit broadband at 3 million bits per second (3MB), a download of "a billion bits per second is completely doable," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told the industry's annual convention here this week. "The network could do this quite easily."

That could dramatically affect how people use the Internet when the new modems to handle the speeds arrive, which is expected to be in 2008.

"This will change our lives well beyond entertainment," says Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers. For example, when speeds allow quick sending of detailed images. such as X-rays, he says, "You'll do the majority of your health care straight from the home."

Others envision a host of other applications. For example, businesses could easily arrange video conferences with high-definition TV. Consumers could download an entire HD movie in about five minutes vs. today's 22 minutes.

And, "There will be a need for higher speeds as games become more graphics-intensive," says Adelphia Chief Technical Officer Marwan Fawaz.

Hospitals and schools also may be among the first to take advantage of the additional transmission capacity, which is expected to cost more than current high-speed Internet services.

Operators want to get moving to keep ahead of phone companies, led by Verizon, that are building communications systems with more fiber-optic lines — and therefore more transmission capacity — than cable.

"There'll be a speed arms race," says RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser.

But the new cable standard, known as DOCSIS 3.0, also will make it easier for operators to handle other chores.

"I could take a cell phone and program my digital video recorder," says Richard Doherty, who is with The Envisioneering Group. "Quality of service is a big part of it."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...eed-usat_x.htm


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Groups Predict More Songs Over Internet
Ted Bridis

The music and film industries will continue to offer digital copies of songs and movies online for a price even if they lose a landmark Supreme Court case focusing on consumers who steal copyrighted material over the Internet, those industries' chief lobbyists said Monday.

"Consumers want a legal, hassle-free, reasonable-cost way to get their products online," said Dan Glickman, head of the Motion Picture Association of America. "There's no question you'll see a lot more opportunity for people in their homes to enjoy music and movies and other creative material."

Glickman and Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, met with editors from The Associated Press on the eve of arguments in the upcoming Supreme Court case, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster.

Glickman also discussed Hollywood's increasing emphasis on family movies, noting that four of last year's top five films were rated either PG or PG-13; he said last year's fifth top film was "The Passion of the Christ," which was rated R for its graphic portrayal of the crucifixion.

"You don't want to offer a product that American families find they can't tolerate," Glickman said. "Family movies are big sellers. The free market works wonders; the marketplace is the big factor in what the studios decide to go after."

Regardless of the outcome of the Supreme Court case, Bainwol predicted a rise among Internet music-subscription services, which permit consumers to listen to more than 1 million songs for a flat monthly fee.

"We are doing all the things we should be doing to move into this digital age," Bainwol said. "That is true no matter what the outcome of Grokster."

In the Supreme Court case, entertainment companies want the court to permit them to sue manufacturers of file-sharing software popular among computer users for trading music and movies over the Internet.

Lower U.S. courts have twice ruled that such file-sharing software can be used for "substantial" legal purposes, such as giving away free songs, free software or government documents. Citing a 1984 case involving videocassette recorders, they reasoned that the software's manufacturer was protected from copyright lawsuits based on acts by their customers.

Critics of the entertainment industries said the fast pace of technology will continue to force companies to confront piracy as programmers find methods to defeat the digital locks protecting songs and films from being copied illegally.

"No matter what happens in this case, they're going to be competing with free from now on," said Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group that sided with Grokster. "It's just the nature of the digital world."

Gigi Sohn, head of Public Knowledge, a Washington-based consumers group, said entertainment companies should aggressively offer electronic versions of movies and music over the Internet with digital locks that can prevent indiscriminate copying. But she said consumers will reject versions that too severely limit how they can watch movies or listen to songs.

"If it's too restrictive, it's just inviting people to break the law," she said.

The lower court rulings — effectively shielding the manufacturers of file- sharing software — have compelled entertainment companies to sue thousands of people caught illegally distributing songs and movies over the Internet.

"There's no question it's far more efficient and far more sensible to go after the people whose business is built on infringement," said Cary Sherman, the president of the recording industry association.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...nloading_music


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Lessig Preaches Openness To Flash Faithful
Paul Festa

Copyright reformer Lawrence Lessig gave Flash developers an earful Wednesday about how their platform of choice is perceived in the free software world.

"Flash is the enemy," said Lessig, a Stanford University professor and board member of the Free Software Foundation, as he described the opinions of leading free- and open-source-software advocates. These advocates "hate Flash. They think that by participating in the Flash community, you are feeding the devil."

Lessig, addressing attendees of the Flashforward2005 conference here Wednesday, sounded familiar themes in his talk, titled "The Costs of Copyright." He argued that the digital age has created new demands for the sharing of content that old-media copyright law cannot meet. As a result, he said, outdated copyright law is casting a pall over creative expression and education.

Despite the antipathy to Flash prevalent in open-source circles, Lessig called himself a Flash fan and implored designers and artists using the technology to free their work from conventional copyright protections.

Lessig chairs the Creative Commons organization, which offers a variety of intellectual property licenses less restrictive than the standard "all rights reserved." He cited a recent surge in Creative Commons licenses, as well as Yahoo's launch late last month of a search engine specifically for content released under such licenses.

Macromedia's Flash animation software--.swf--has long had an open file format. That means that other developers can create software tools that produce Flash content.

But the technology itself remains under Macromedia's proprietary control. And unlike HTML, which lets anyone inspect a Web page's underlying source code, Flash movies keep that information under wraps.

On that note, Lessig said Macromedia should study the explosive growth of HTML, which created a vast community of Web developers by allowing them to "steal" from one another and expand on each others' work, as compared with the less spectacular growth of Apple Computer's AppleScript scripting language, which hides its code.

"Flash has got to learn this lesson," Lessig said.

Lessig argued that proprietary platforms like Flash had a rightful place on the Internet, but that developers of such technologies ought to loosen restrictions on their creative property.

"It is absolutely critical that we begin to support the development of free content built on proprietary platforms," he said.

He applauded Adobe's Extensible Metadata Plaform (XMP), which allows developers to embed creative commons licenses in every format the company supports.
http://news.com.com/Lessig+preaches+...3-5657975.html


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U.K.-Funded Initiative To Push Open Source
Ingrid Marson

A government-funded initiative in the United Kingdom aims to accelerate the use of open-source software within the public sector by creating a code repository and a directory of open-source providers, among other efforts.

The initiative, known as the Open Source Academy, is funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's e-Innovations investment program. It is due to be formally announced later this month.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, one of the organizations involved in the initiative, said the U.K. public sector is lagging behind other European countries in terms of open-source adoption, but he says this project is likely to change that.

"This project is critical to allowing us to crack the public sector in the U.K.," Taylor said.

The academy will include various projects, including a platform based on open-source technologies that will allow local authorities to collaborate on software projects. This project, which will be run by Shepway District Council, will be similar to Sourceforge.net, a Web site that catalogs thousands of open-source applications. "It will be a Sourceforge for councils," Taylor said.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister had not responded to requests for comment at the time of writing.

Local authorities can already share code through Web sites such as the Local Authority Software Consortium, but Taylor says the collaborative effort is limited as it runs on proprietary Microsoft technology.

Councils will also be encouraged to share their experiences on deploying open-source software.

"One of the things we're doing is pushing out news on open-source deployments," Taylor said. "For example, did you know that Powys has been using open-source software for eight years, and is running Linux on 100 servers?"

Taylor said the project would disprove the theory that only poorer councils adopt open source. "This is not true," he said.

Other projects included in the initiative are a portal for government agencies to find information on open-source suppliers, and a professional accreditation scheme for open-source consultants.

Various organizations are involved in the Open Source Academy, including the Bristol, Cheshire, Birmingham and Shepway councils, the National Computing Centre, the University of Kent, the Institute of IT Training, OpenForum Europe, the Open Source Consortium and public sector IT user group Socitm.
http://news.com.com/U.K.-funded+init...3-5658354.html


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Open-Source Group To Corral Licenses
Stephen Shankland

The Open Source Initiative has begun an effort to pare down the number of open-source licenses in widespread use.

The OSI, a group that bestows official open-source status on licenses, will promote a small number of licenses as preferred options, according to a position paper it adopted on Wednesday. The group hasn't yet decided which of the more than 50 licenses it's so far approved will get the status.

OSI also adopted three new administrative provisions designed to screen out new licenses that don't add much usefulness. The provisions, proposed in March, require licenses to be clearly written, simple and understandable; reusable; and not duplicative of existing licenses.

License proliferation has been a widely discussed issue in the software industry in recent months. Hewlett-Packard's top Linux executive, Martin Fink, in particular has pressed for a radical reduction in the number of licenses, to avoid needless confusion and expense.

Open-source licenses determine whether software from one project may be shared with another. That in turn affects whether there are numerous islands of incompatible source code or fewer, larger collections. License proliferation also makes more work for company lawyers evaluating open-source software; a product such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes software employing several licenses.

Sam Greenblatt, a senior vice president at Computer Associates, agrees there's a license proliferation problem, though he disagrees with Fink's approach to reducing the number. In a speech at the conference, he said CA would be willing to scrap its own open-source license if the right replacement can be found.

Sun Microsystems' Community Development and Distribution License is a step in the right direction, he added. "Sun's CDDL is a great starting point in stopping proliferation," Greenblatt said.

And simply removing licenses can be difficult. Intel removed its own open-source license from OSI's list, but the license remains alive as long as the software it governs exists, Greenblatt said.

The license changes were adopted at the first meeting of a newly expanded OSI board, held here in conjunction with the Open Source Business Conference. Five existing board members were joined on Friday by five more, most from outside the United States: Joichi Ito, vice president of international operations at blog indexing Web site Technorati and a board member of Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers; Bruno Souza, a senior consultant at Summa Technologies and president of Brazil's largest Java user's group; Chris DiBona, an open-source program manager at Google; Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, the managing editor of the online journal First Monday and a program manager at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands; and Sanjiva Weerawarana, a former IBM programmer and founder of the Lanka Software Foundation to promote open-source software in Sri Lanka.

"OSI is institutionalizing itself," making a transition to avoid pitfalls that afflict many organizations that can't survive the loss of founders' charisma or skills, group founder Eric Raymond said.
http://news.com.com/Open-source+grou...3-5657788.html


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China

Halting Online Copyright Violations

Online copyright violations have been running rampant in the country in the recent years. Cui Ning finds out what measures the government is considering to battle Internet IPR piracy.

The draft of the Regulations for Protecting Copyrights on the Internet will be formulated late this year, with the goal of better protecting copyrights of online works, China Daily has learned from National Copyright Administration.

The draft will be submitted to the State Council for approval before it officially takes effect.

"To develop our information industry with independent intellectual property rights (IPR) and on the basis of meeting international standards is the general principles stipulated in the regulation," said administration official Xu Chao.

Internet-based services in the world are divided into two categories: ICP (Internet content provider) and ISP (Internet service provider).

The regulation will provide relevant articles on how to protect copyrights on Internet works and how to deal with violations, within the scope of the two categories, said Xu.

China revised its Copyright Law in 2001 and the issue of copyrights for Internet-related material is only briefly mentioned in the revision. It stated that violators should be responsible for the copying of online arts and literature works. The revised law also specifies in what situations violators should be held to civil or criminal liability.

In 2003, the Supreme People's Court implemented a judicial interpretation for trying cases on computer-based copyright disputes.

Late last year, China issued a new judicial interpretation to facilitate the government's efforts in fighting IPR crimes.

Relying on the revised Copyright Law and judicial interpretations alone is not enough for administrative supervision on Internet copyright protection. It is necessary to work out an independent regulation to help slash rampant online copyright violations in the country, said Xu.

To further improve copyrights protection, Xu said China is ready to join two conventions of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) -- the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performance and Phonograms Treaty.

Voices from judges and experts

Courts across the country are receiving an increasing number of cases related to disputes over the Internet-based copyrights, as computerized networks have deeply influenced various aspects of people's lives, according to Jiang Zhipei, chief-judge of the Intellectual Property Rights Tribunal of the Supreme People's Court.

Wang Liren, a senior judge with the Intermediate People's Court in Yichang of Central China's Hubei Province, suggested that a national online centre for protecting Internet-based copyrights and handling appeals be set up, so as to supplement the traditional way of handling lawsuits.

The centre can be authorized with the rights of supervision and enforcement. For those websites, which wink at copyright violators plagiarizing articles of others on websites, the online centre can fine them or require them to close down. If cases are serious, the centre can ask violators to make apologies on their websites and tell all websites to ban the violators from publishing articles during a certain time period.

Wang said the centre can build a database that reveals the blacklist of copyright violators.

He said Internet-based copyright violations are very serious in China.

Wang himself is a victim of copyright infringement. In recent years, Wang found that his articles, especially his research on stealing crimes, have been frequently copied by others.

"Copyright violators sometimes copy paragraphs by paragraphs, or sort out main subjects, without giving original sources," said Wang. "Sometimes they even copy a whole article and only change a new headline."

Last November 15, Wang found that his article about convictions and measurements of penalties on stealing crimes, was published, under the name of Huang Wei, on a website operated by the Supreme People's Procuratorate. Wang sent an email to the website, asking the duplicated article be deleted and also asking for the address or work unit of Huang Wei. But the website has neither deleted the faked article nor given Huang's address.

"Currently, any legal way of protecting the Internet-based works is limited, costly and complicated procedurally. I had to give up as I had no time to persist with the case," Wang sighed.

Copyright owners cannot control the Internet-based media. When finding their articles are plagiarized, most copyright owners usually demand deletion of their works and ask for apologies. They seldom ask for compensation and seldom resort to court with complicated procedures for a simple deletion of an article. If their demand fails,concerned copyright violation can exist for a very long period, said Wang.

Zheng Chengsi, a senior researcher with the Intellectual Property Rights Centre of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said copyright violations through the Internet have gone beyond copying written articles to computer software, music, film and television works.

"If these violations are not curbed in a timely way, our efforts in the past few years to fight against piracy in the market will be in vain," Zheng said. "If we let plagiarism on websites just run its course, domestic software, audio and video industries will be badly influenced."

Zheng said most websites operate by abiding by the Copyright Law. They ask for permission from thousands of copyright owners before publishing relevant works.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english...ent_430627.htm


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Green Light For 2nd Reading Of Software Patent Directive
Robert W. Smith

The European Parliament has dropped its objections to the way the "common position" of the EU Council on the planned Directive on the Patentability of "Computer-implemented Inventions" was adopted. The Legal Committee of the European Parliament had initially insisted on examining the protocols of the decisive meeting of the Council of Ministers at the beginning of March. A number of parliamentarians along with a number of software patent critics had entertained the suspicion that the Luxembourgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, a.k.a the Council of Ministers, had neglected the objections raised by representatives from a number of member states to the highly controversial position, thereby committing a breach of the Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament. According to a parliamentary spokesman the Legal Committee had now decided, however, no longer to take into account the "small irrelevant errors" committed.

"We are now embarking on the 2nd reading," Eva Lichtenberger, a prominent opponent in the Legal Committee to the decision reached by the Council, declared in a talk with heise online. So as to prepare for the vote in the plenary session of parliament Ms. Lichtenberger, who is an Austrian member of the EU Parliament, has demanded from the Council that the supplementary declarations by the eight "dissidents" in this body of representatives of national governments be made available unabridged and in complete translation to the peoples´ representatives.

The Federal Ministry of Economics and Labor has meanwhile once again defended its assenting to the Council of Ministers´ position, regardless of the fact that in so doing it was unambiguously at variance with a unanimous resolution reached by the Bundestag, Germany's lower chamber of parliament. The purely formal adoption of a text already decided upon was in light of the "multitude of languages in the EU a fairly common step, almost a necessity," a further standard written reply by the spokesman of the ministry, Thomas Zuleger, states in response to questions by enraged software patent opponents. The German software industry had moreover "developed well in a legal framework to date that includes computer program patents," Mr. Zuleger adds in an attempt to calm tempers.

In Brussels meanwhile the battle of the lobbies is again heating up in view of the approaching 2nd reading, which in all likelihood will take place before the summer recess. "The lobbyists are once again creeping through the undergrowth," Ms. Lichtenberger reports. In many instances only "meager arguments" such as the saga of the "small inventor" who needed to be protected, could be heard, she said. "This even though it is well know even from traditional areas of technology that success with patents is confined almost exclusively to large companies," the Green Party member averred.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/58240


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Call Of The Wild For BIOS
John G. Spooner

As computer makers move to embed security features deep within the viscera of PCs, a fight is erupting over the BIOS, a rarely noticed but crucial application that controls a machine before the operating system can take over.

If the operating system is the equivalent of a computer's brain, then the BIOS, or Basic Input Output System, might be compared to the medula oblongata, the place where the brain meets the spine. The most primitive reflexes are governed here, well below the level of conscious thought. Typically, the BIOS announces its presence on start-up by flashing lights and whirring drives as it prepares a machine to receive higher level instructions.

Despite its little-seen role, the BIOS is a vital part of a PC, and its construction and installation are closely guarded by a small number of PC makers, such as Dell, and speciality BIOS programming firms for hire.

Now, some critics are for the first time seeking to force the industry to abandon its hallmark secrecy. As the BIOS becomes more powerful, these critics argue, consumers must be allowed to freely develop their own alternatives to ensure they keep control of their devices--and that means the industry must open up.

"We need a free BIOS, because if we don't control the BIOS we don't control our computers," said Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, a Boston-based organization dedicated to promoting the use of, modification and redistribution of computer programs. "It puts me in an ethically compromised position to have a non-free program in my machine."

The free BIOS initiative comes at a time when the BIOS is undergoing the first major change in its history--a transition from machine code-based BIOS to a new framework dubbed the Extensible Firmware Interface, or EFI. At the same time, efforts to secure PCs through hardware-based defenses are leading critics like Stallman to warn of a pending loss of consumer control over their devices.

The FSF has spearheaded numerous campaigns lobbying for greater consumer control over software. The group now plans to mount a campaign to open up specifications required to write BIOSes. The free BIOS movement that Stallman advocates would let people install, modify and redistribute BIOS software--although not necessarily free of charge. Significantly, that would allow people to circumvent some pending security enhancements, including pending digital-rights management features aiming to prevent unauthorized use of confidential corporate documents and other copyright materials, if they chose to do so.

Given the closely held nature of the BIOS business, Stallman and the FSF are likely to face resistance from hardware and BIOS makers. Many already contend that creating free BIOS software just for the sake of it being free has limited value to computer users. Executives at BIOS makers and Intel argue instead that the tightly controlled BIOS model used today helps maintain PCs' security and stability, as well as foster competition by protecting companies' intellectual property.

"Neither you nor I, as a user of a computer, has any reason to change the BIOS...unless it's broken," said Jonathan Joseph, CEO of BIOS maker Insyde Software. "You're not going to type any faster in (Microsoft) Word because you have a new BIOS. The only thing you hide in BIOS is broken hardware."

Others cite guarding against hackers as a reason to keep BIOS closely held.

"The one thing we have to worry about first is security. What do you think would happen if there was a virus that started reflashing PCs" BIOS software, said Mike Goldgof, senior vice president of marketing at Phoenix Technologies. "If it ever happened on a large scale, I think a lot of PCs would start turning into bricks. What people take for granted...is the reliability of the (BIOS) firmware today."

Intel, for its part, has proposed a middle ground of sorts by open sourcing technology it calls Tiano. Tiano is its implementation of a framework for creating a BIOS replacement, with its own set of drivers to turn on elements of the PC such as the processor, based on EFI. Committing it to open source means others will be able to download it from a Web site called TianoCore.org and use it to make products under the Berkley Software Distribution, or BSD, license. The BSD will allow anyone who uses it to change it and create products out of it. But it does not require they provide the changes they made to others via open source, which provides the means to help companies protect intellectual property.

The effort by Intel creates a framework for a BIOS replacement, and thus could become the basis for free BIOSes. But it leaves the work of writing the code that initializes PC components to the downloader. One licensee likened it to having to build a race car. Intel, he said, provides race rules and the car's frame but leaves licensees to do their own engine, suspension, body work and other elements if they want to enter a race.

'Evil' companies?
Stallman argues instead that Intel is not doing enough and BIOS makers are not needed. Instead, he wants information.

"We're not wanting to do anything with the BIOSes from Phoenix or any of the others," he said. "We're not asking them to do anything, any more than we're asking Microsoft to do anything. These (companies) are evil. You can't expect them to do anything just because you ask them to. Our goal is to escape from them."

Thus, the free BIOS effort, as Stallman sees it happening, will essentially bypass traditional BIOS makers and instead focus on appealing to hardware manufacturers. The campaign will ask those companies, including PC makers and motherboard makers, to make available specifications on their products to allow free software writers to create BIOSes for them.

Stallman also dismisses rebuttals that free BIOS would compromise a PC's security, stability or reveal companies' proprietary chip, motherboard or other product information.

"Each one could be saying, 'If the others knew what we were doing, it would help them tremendously.' It might be true in a few cases, but it's impossible in all cases," Stallman said. "They can't all be sitting on secrets that are beyond the ken of their competitors. They can't all be the ones that know more than everybody else."

Moreover, detailed chip and motherboard information will not be required to create a free BIOS, he said. Instead, free BIOS makers would need access to closely held instructions, such as how a BIOS loads and how it initializes various devices inside a PC.

A free BIOS would also help circumvent, if necessary, digital-rights management, allowing people to run any software they choose on their PCs. In theory, the BIOS can be used to aid security technology, as it initializes hardware such as security chips.

Although BIOS makers and Intel say the BIOS' role is limited to helping get those elements of a system up and running along with the rest of it, a BIOS writer could write around them in order to shut them off, if needed, Stallman said.

"DRM is theft," he said. "The idea of the free software movement is you should be in control of your own computer. Treacherous competing (his term for so-called trusted computing) is a scheme to make sure you're not in control."

Ultimately, the free BIOS would emulate software such as the LinuxBIOS-- a free BIOS that's already in existence for Linux, but does not work with a large number of PCs--on a much broader scale.

"It's generally known that free software is very secure and very reliable," Stallman said. "If there's a bug in the BIOS, the only thing that will happen is some part of your machine won't work and that bug would be quite noticeable and it would be fixed, presuming that the information was available."

But that's the rub. Detailed specifications on cutting-edge PC hardware may be tough to come by. The information given to BIOS makers now is granted under nondisclosure and it's not clear whether companies such as Intel, PC makers like Dell, or motherboard makers would reveal even a little bit of information.

"You'd need to know the confidential information about the chips to write" a free BIOS, Insyde Software's Joseph said. Right now, "that info is only available on old hardware that nobody really cares about anymore."

That, however, won't stop Stallman from asking.
http://news.com.com/Call+of+the+wild...3-5654272.html


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Surveillance

Microsoft System Tracks Pedophiles
Sean Michael Kerner

In January 2003, a Toronto Police detective sent an e-mail to Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates asking for help in the fight against child exploitation.

Today that plea was answered with the official launch of the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS). Development of the CETS system began in 2003 and involved the Toronto Police Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other global law enforcement bodies.

CETS is a Microsoft-developed, security-enhanced database that works with existing offender tracking systems in various global jurisdictions to allow investigators to tap into the data and make connections that help them more effectively track, locate and ultimately arrest offenders.

CETS is based on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL, though according to Microsoft Canada President David Hemler the system won't force authorities to migrate to Windows and/or other Microsoft products.

"The system was designed to be able to integrate with the offender management systems around the world," Hemler explained in a morning press conference. "We didn't want them to have to migrate off those systems. A lot of design went into the interoperability and open standard of this."

Police services are able to tap into the CETS system via an Internet portal over a secure connection. The system has been in active beta testing since at least October 2004, and the Toronto Police Service together with the RCMP claim it has helped in the arrest of at least four alleged criminals.

CETS was rolled out in Canada but has not yet seen time in the U.S., though the goal is to roll the system out globally. Hemler and RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli stressed that collaboration with the DHS was a critical aspect of the development of CETS. "One of the key design point we had is that we had great collaboration from the department of Homeland Security early on in our process up here to give us input into how they could use and how they might use it and how it might be applicable in the U.S.," Hemler said. "We're actively working with law enforcement agencies within the U.S. to take what we've learned with CETS and make it available there."

To date, Microsoft has donated the software and services behind CETS to the Toronto Police Service and Canadian authorities. Microsoft has also pledged to continue to support it both locally and on a global basis making it available for free to authorities that want to use the service.

"We've given away all of our software and service in the development of CETS, roughly $2.5 million to date; we've additionally committed $2 million around this project office to ensure that deployment within Canada and on a global basis continues and we're committed to give this software away to any police or law enforcement organizations on a worldwide basis that want it," Hemler said.

Microsoft will not directly be making any money from the CETS initiative; rather it is seen as part of the software giant's commitment to being a good citizen.

"There is no additional revenue for Microsoft," Hemler said. "What's in it for Microsoft is a safer Internet upon which we all live and work, which is a huge aspect of what we believe is important in society.

"Frankly it amounts to doing the right thing."
http://internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3496066


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Blue Coat(R) Systems, Inc. , a leading provider of proxy appliances, today announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is conducting a formal, nonpublic investigation of the Company.
Press Release

The Company believes that the Commission is investigating whether certain present or former officers, directors, employees, affiliates or others made intentional or non-intentional selective disclosure of material nonpublic information, traded in the Company’s stock while in possession of such information, or communicated such information to others who thereafter traded in the Company’s stock. The Company is cooperating with the Commission. Although the Company cannot predict the outcome of this investigation, the costs of the investigation or an adverse result could have a material adverse effect on the Company’s results of operations and financial condition.

About Blue Coat Systems

Blue Coat enables organizations to keep "good" employees from doing "bad" things on the Internet. Blue Coat proxy appliances provide visibility and control of Web communications to protect against risks from spyware, Web viruses, inappropriate Web surfing, instant messaging (IM), video streaming and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing -- while actually improving Web performance. Trusted by many of the world’s largest organizations, Blue Coat has shipped more than 20,000 proxy appliances. Blue Coat is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and can be reached at 408-220-2200 or http://www.bluecoat.com/
http://www.mysan.de/article73656.html


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Local News

Speed Fees On Rental Cars Illegal, State High Court Says
Lynne Tuohy

James Turner was on vacation in Virginia when he learned his bank account had been drained and his debit card was no good. Sean Dickerson had his credit card rejected at a store because he had exceeded his credit limit.

What they had in common was renting the same minivan from the same New Haven-based rental agency, Acme Auto. And both became unwitting victims of what the state Supreme Court agreed Monday was an illegal penalty of $150 automatically charged against their credit and debit cards for driving that rental vehicle over 79 mph.

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the findings of the state Department of Consumer Protection that the car agency, owned by American Car Rental Inc., could not justify the $150 penalty - sometimes levied multiple times against the same driver - as legitimate damages for the additional wear and tear high speeds cause on the car.

"The $150 collected by [American Rental] was more than 400 times the potential damage incurred," Justice David M. Borden wrote. "Using the [consumer department] hearing officer's calculation, a customer would have to travel more than 1,070 miles at high speeds, without decelerating below 80 miles per hour, to cause $150 of excess wear on the vehicle."

The global position systems installed in all of Acme's rental cars were programmed to fax the agency notice any time a car was driven at 80 mph or more for two minutes or longer. For each occurrence, the car agency charged the patron $150, usually levied immediately against whatever credit or debit card they had used to secure the rental.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who represents the consumer protection department, lauded the high court's ruling.

"You cannot secretly track drivers' speeds and gouge them under the guise of safety or vehicle expense," Blumenthal said. "No logic or law warrants a private company ambushing consumers with a $150 fee for exceeding a random speed limit."

Attorney Richard Marquette, who represents American Car Rental, did not return calls seeking comment Monday.

Court documents indicate Acme began using GPS to track speeding by drivers of its rental cars in October 2000. From October to December of 2000, those who rented cars in 32 of 400 contracts written were charged the speeding fee. In all, 76 Acme patrons paid in excess of $22,000 in fees that ranged from $150 to $750 per driver.

Several of those drivers who were assessed the penalty fee challenged not only its amount, but the lack of notice given by the rental agency that the global positioning systems would be used to monitor speed and what penalties would attach.

Several of the contracts in evidence do make reference to fee, but the reference is in the midst of a paragraph about accident reports. The sentence states, "Vehicles driven in excess of the posted speed limit will be charged $150 per occurrence."

The Supreme Court in a footnote to Monday's ruling stated it did not need to reach the issue of whether the notice to patrons was adequate, because it had deemed the fee to be an illegal penalty.

"The state can't condone speeding, but it condemns money-making schemes disguised as safety measures," Blumenthal said.
http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc...,6212252.story
















Until next week,

- js.














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