Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 30th, ’05

[JackSpratts]

"Certain sections of the [renewed ‘Patriot Act’] extend far beyond the mission of protecting Americans from terrorism and violate ordinary citizens' constitutional rights, especially the right to privacy." – former Republican Representative Robert Barr


"[The renewal of the ‘Patriot Act’] is an abuse of power by the Republican majority which has deliberately and purposely chosen to stifle a full debate." – Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer


"UK researcher The Leading Question says people who share the music on peer-to-peer networks spend 4.5 times on digital music compared to the Internet users who don't share files." – ZDNet blog


"The research clearly shows that music fans who break piracy laws are highly valuable customers." – Paul Brindley, Director of The Leading Question


"That points to the fact that the [new anti P2P] law has not had any influence." – Sweden’s Peder Ramel


"I'm 11 so I don't know much about this, but I share CDs, too. I don't download anything because I know that's illegal, but as long as you're burning the CDs that one of you bought and only use them for yourself without intent to sell, I think that's OK." – Roxayne (Rocky) Wolf


"A fairly typical scene in one of my classes might look like this: A young woman is sitting with one leg folded under the other, shoes on the floor, with her cellphone on waiting for a text message, her iPod is draped around her neck and during class she may insert her ear phones from time to time.

“On screen, she is surfing CNN, but has open another page for the Speedo bathing suit site, and she is typing a quick email note to her mother to let her know she got back alright from Atlanta last night. She will respond to three quick questions from me by jumping to the Google page she already has open – and before the end of the hour, she will have asked me a couple of questions." – Dr. Gerald Smith, professor of religion at Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee


"All in all, it looks like the used book market creates a lot more value than it destroys." - Hal R. Varian



















July 30th, 2005




Senate Committee Looks At P2P Ruling

Now the fun begins
Nick Farrell

THE US Senate is going to look at the implications of the recent Court’s recent ruling in the case of MGM v. Grokster.

Today, the full Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation will hold a hearing on the potential effects of the ruling to impede technological investment and innovation. The robed, but not wigged, ones at America's highest court have decided that P2P companies can be sued if their software is used to pirate software.

If you have nothing better to do, the hearing, which starts at two o'clock in the afternoon, Washington DC time, can be seen here. You might see and hear P2P United [www.p2punited.org] give its evidence. The outfit represents the developers of Grokster, Morpheus and several other leading peer to peer file-sharing software programs. It will claim that the move will kill off IT "innovation".
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24960





Peer-To-Peer Music Downloaders Spend 4.5 Times As Much On Legal Music
ZDNet

UK researcher The Leading Question says people who share the music on peer-to-peer networks spend 4.5 times on digital music compared to the Internet users who don't share files.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=8489





File Sharers Are 'Biggest iTunes Users'
Jonny Evans

File sharers may be the digital music industry's best friends, new research shows.

Research firm The Leading Question Wednesday revealed new results that showed file-sharers spend four-and-a-half times more on legitimate music downloads than most music lovers.

The survey checked the buying habits of over 600 computer-owning music fans. It found that file sharers who, "regularly download or share unlicensed music and spend less as a result on CD," spend an average of £5.52 (US$9.63) each month on legitimate downloads. In comparison, "the average music fan spends just £1.27 on digital tracks."

Valuable customers

Director of The Leading Question Paul Brindley said: "The research clearly shows that music fans who break piracy laws are highly valuable customers. It also points out that they are eager to adopt legitimate music services in the future."

The firm observes the music industry's move to prosecute offenders, but advises of a need to use "carrots alongside the sticks."

Time to build bridges

"Legal actions are making something of an impact but unlicensed file sharing will never be eradicated. The smart response is to capitalize on the power of peer-to-peer networks them to entice consumers into more attractive legal alternatives," the report adds.

File sharers are characterized as: "Often hardcore fans who are extremely enthusiastic about adopting paid-for services as long as they are suitably compelling," said Brindley.

The report concludes that digital music services should focus on offering "added value" to music buyers in an attempt to "migrate fans away from unlicensed services and towards legitimate ones."
http://www.itworld.com/Net/4087/0507...s/pfindex.html





Online File Sharers 'Buy More Music'
Owen Gibson

Computer-literate music fans who illegally share tracks over the internet also spend four and a half times as much on digital music as those who do not, according to research published today.

The survey confirms what many music fans have informally insisted for some time: that downloading tracks illegally has also led them to become more enthusiastic buyers of singles and albums online.

Unlikely to be music to the ears of record companies, who have previously argued the opposite, the results will raise a question mark over the companies' recent drive to pursue individual file sharers through the courts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/...536886,00.html





Swedish File Sharing Law "Has Made No Difference"

A law introduced a month ago banning the downloading of copyright-protected material without the owner's permission appears to have had no effect on downloaders' behaviour, according to Swedish internet providers.

"Looking at our figures, nothing has happened," said Niklas Jakobsson, an engineer at Netnod, Sweden's biggest internet hub.

Jakobsson told Thursday's Metro that the law "has not influenced the traffic" passing through the company's systems, a message which was confirmed by other providers.

"We have seen no big change either upwards or downwards," said Peder Ramel, the managing director of Bredbandsbolaget.

"And that points to the fact that the law has not had any influence."

One positive change, as far as the copyright owners are concerned, is a significant rise in legal downloads. Robert Gustavsson, managing director at download company Inprodicon, told Metro that his company has seen an increase of 5-8% a week since April.

Part of the problem seems to be that the law is toothless: Sweden's police simply have more important things to be getting on with than checking up on kids swapping music and games files.

"This isn't an area which we are prioritising today," said Anders Ahlqvist at the police's IT unit to Swedish Radio.

"We prioritise other crimes, such as serious violent crime, child pornography and drug crime."

Ahlqvist told SR that while it was possible that investigations would follow after specific reports of illegal downloading, he said it was "highly unlikely" that the police would actively hunt law-breaking file-sharers.

Despite the fact that under the new law illegal downloaders could face a prison sentence, Ahlqvist said that this was not the kind of thing that people would be arrested for.

"This is a cultural thing," he said.

"There's a whole generation which has grown up with file sharing - I don't think it will stop just because there's a new law."
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...&date=20050728





Piracy-Check Mandatory For Windows Add-Ons
Ina Fried

From now on, customers looking to get the latest add-ons to Windows will have to verify that their copy of the operating system is legit.

Beginning Tuesday, the piracy check will be mandatory for all customers worldwide who want to download add-ons for Windows XP.

The only exception is for security-related patches. Regardless of whether a system passes the test, security updates will be available to all Windows users via either manual download or automatic update. The Microsoft Update and Windows Update utilities, which provide notifications of new patches, will require validation.

It's all part of Windows Genuine Advantage, a stepped-up effort by Microsoft to increase the number of Windows users that are actually paying Microsoft for its software. Currently, the company estimates that roughly a third of Windows copies worldwide are not legitimate.

"We really want to cut that rate," said David Lazar, director of the Windows Genuine program.

With Windows' share of the desktop market estimated to be well above 90 percent, cracking down on illegal copies of the OS is seen as one of the few ways for Microsoft to grow its Windows business. The two other main ways that Microsoft has identified are increasing the number of PCs per household and expanding computer usage in emerging markets.

Lazar declined to say how much Microsoft hopes to cut into the piracy rate with the Windows Genuine push. However, he said the company does see a need to create a clearer distinction between genuinely purchased and bogus copies of the OS.

"One of ways we are going to do that is by enhancing the value of genuine Windows," he said.

As part of that, Microsoft is adding a few more freebies to the "carrots" it gives to those whose Windows copies pass muster. Lazar said that Microsoft has also refined its online tool that checks for genuine copies such that customers won't have to enter their Windows product code, as was sometimes the case while the Windows Genuine program was in testing.

Meanwhile, those who fail the validation test will be presented with two options. People who send in their CDs, show proof they bought Windows and fill out a piracy report will be eligible to get a legitimate copy of Windows at no charge. Those who don't have CDs or a proof of purchase but fill out a piracy report will have to pay for a licensed copy--$99 for Windows XP Home and $149 for Windows XP Professional. Those prices are higher than the upgrade cost for Windows XP, but lower than the price one would have to pay for an entirely new copy of the OS.

Microsoft has been testing the Windows Genuine program since last September. At first, the program had neither benefits for those who passed inspection nor any penalty for those who failed or opted not to go through the piracy check. Gradually, though, Microsoft has been adding perks and moving to make the process mandatory.

Lazar said the company has erred on the side of caution, noting that Microsoft does not know of any cases in which its piracy check falsely concluded that software was illegitimate. There has been a hack reported in which customers who have one genuine copy of the OS can pass along a validation code that can be used with nongenuine copies of the OS. Lazar said that method would require someone to get hold of a new code each day he or she wanted to download new software, though.

"It doesn't really scale," he said.
http://news.com.com/Piracy-check+man...3-5804045.html





Tor: The Ying or the Yang?
Johnathan 'mubix' Doe

Tor: The Onion Router is an interesting tool that can be used for good or evil. What the creator of Tor wants you to think is that it is an anonymization tool that allows users to connect to servers free of the worry that those servers are logging every detail of your browser, email address, and other information. In my own opinion, I think they just wanted to create a hacking tool that would allow them, and others not to get caught. But we will get to that later.

After surfing to the Tor website the average user can have a Tor client up and running, surfing the Internet, chatting on their favorite IRC client, or connecting to a Peer to Peer network such as Limewire, Shareaza, Bittorrent or Edonkey, within minutes. He or she would have successfully become, metaphorically, an 'it' to the rest of the Internet.

How does it work? As a user, how do I install and use Tor? And as a network administrator, how do I defend against Tor internally and externally? Or better yet, how do I use it to investigate attacks on my network?

Tor! How do you work?

When you start your Tor client, it downloads into a “cached-directory” file, a list of 'nodes', which is completely dynamic and constantly growing because users are installing and uninstalling servers (nodes) all the time.

Bob starts his Tor client, which automatically refreshes his list of nodes.

Now the fun part, Bob's client maps a 'random' path to his destination server. Whether it is his IRC server such as irc.cad-net.org or his favorite website such as Whitedust.net (I swear, I'm not getting paid for this... promise). Anyways, the server that he is connected to ONLY sees the connection to the last node, or “exit” node, making Bob completely invisible to everyone except for his entry node.

If Bob wants to access another site or IRC server, a new 'random' route is created. Tor is not limited to just to web traffic or IRC traffic, any piece of software that can be configured to connect to the IP address 127.0.0.1 over SOCKS4 or SOCKS5, can be successfully connected through the wonderful world of the Tor network.

I'm a user! How do I install and get this up and running on my system? (RTFM)

1. Download: Tor's website, tor.eff.org, you can download Tor for Windows, Mac OS X, Red Hat Linux, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Gentoo. Other OS users can scour the Internet and most likely come up with a version for their OS.

2. Installation: Once you have Tor downloaded, installation on all of the operating systems is a snap. Next -> Next - > Install -> Finish is all it takes on Windows. Yum, Emerge and Portage take care of it for the Linux and BSD users. Oh, and for you MAC people, follow the Windows instructions. That's gotta hurt.

3. RUN: Run Tor. Be it the executable or the 'shortcut', click it or type it and press your handy dandy carriage return.

4. The Wait: Once it is running, you will get a console screen that has a couple lines on it that is similar to this Windows version screen shot:

Sometimes getting an ‘open circuit’ can take up to 2 minutes. Once Tor has established an ‘open circuit’, it then listens on the local host for traffic over port 9050.

5. Configuration: Now we have to configure your browser to us Tor. Under your browser’s proxy settings, set the IP address to 127.0.0.1, port 9050. This will tell your browser to send its web traffic to your Tor listener. For any other application or service, find its proxy settings and configure it like we just did your browser. Before you connect, check and make sure that Tor has “successfully opened a circuit”, if so start surfing/chatting/ hacking.

The whole process from start to finish took me about 5 minutes, from finding the correct download for my OS, downloading it, installation, and configuration of my browser. Now, I am not going to go too off-topic, but on the Tor site, they tell you to install another piece of software called “Privoxy”. It supposedly catches up all the other traffic that isn’t sent through Tor to make you ‘more anonymous’.

I am the Network Admin. I am God… Help me?

Here is where we have to get into the nitty-gritty. For us, Tor is bad, very bad. What Tor allows is our users the ability to circumvent all of our Firewall, IPS, IDS, and Router configurations, which means they can chat, surf to hotmail, and play Quake online. They can do this all without us knowing or any of our hardware/software ‘protection’ systems knowing. So, how do you defend against a dynamic enemy that never has the same IP address and can communicate all of its traffic over ports 80 and 443? In 4 ways, starting from the bottom up:

1. Administration: Don’t allow anyone local administration on their own computer. Unless they have a specific job related reason to have that access, it is a liability. This is one of the Ten Commandments of Network Administration anyways. But if you don’t know how to lock your systems down enough to not allow the installation of Tor, I have three words for you: WWW GOOGLE COM.

2. Prevention: Block all traffic to the following IP addresses: 86.59.5.130 (asteria.debian.or.at), 18.244.0.114 (belegost.mit.edu), 18.244.0.188 (moria.mit.edu). These are the directory servers. This is where they, the user, get the dynamic list of node IP addresses. When Tor is started for the first time on that local machine, it queries the aforementioned IP addresses and downloads a file called “cached-directory”. These servers are contacted over port 80, 443, 9001, and 9031. Now, a user could actually install Tor at home and download the cached-directory file and bring it to work, but most users won’t take that kind of time, and by the time they figure out to try that you have already got a bead on them.

3. Detection: Say this user is bent on getting around your rules, now they have their cached-directory file in place. When Tor is started, it tries to download a fresh cached-directory file. Blocked. Then it tries the first server on the stored list. Each individual server specifies to the directory servers which ports they want open to Tor users. They could allow only 9001 in and out. This is where you can catch that user. Set your IPS or IDS to trigger on any traffic going out over port 9001 or 9031. These ports do not have normal traffic, which will limit the false-positives you see on your IDS/IPS. So, when that user runs Tor , he might get lucky on the first one, and go over port 80 or 443. But, remember that Tor chooses a new 'random' route with each connection. So, the next website the user goes to, Tor might try a couple 9001 or 9031 servers before it gets a connection through on 80 or 443. When your IPS / IDS detects those signatures you can assume that the user using that internal IP address has installed and is attempting to or successfully using Tor .

4. Protection: Externally there is no way to protect against a hacker that uses Tor . Your best protection is just keeping your firewalls, IDS, IPS, and Router configurations up to date. Tor doesn’t create holes in your network unless an internal user sets it up, and we have already discussed how to prevent that.

I’m Still God. How do I use Tor to ‘investigate’ attacks on my network?

There is an upside to Tor, once we have all of our policies and block in place so an internal user can’t punch holes in our network, we can start to use Tor to our advantage. Say we install a Tor client on our DMZ. Now that we have a clear way out we can use any number of tools to ‘investigate’ an attack attempt. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7333 is a link to an article by Nitesh Dhanjani called “Launching Attacks via Tor”, which details using Nessus through the Tor network.

Are you done yet?

Tor is a perfect way for, a home user to cull his or her need for anonymity, the hacker to not get caught, or the network admin to check out an attacker anonymously, but it creates a big concern for the network administrator, even though it is also a tool for them. I personally hope that the creators of Tor have the decency to keep the directory servers the same to insure that it is easy for the poor, lonely, no-girlfriend network admin to block Tor, so that it stays a useful tool, and not just a headache.
http://www.whitedust.net/article/28/...20the%20Yang?/





Napster Dead, Here Comes Torrent
Samiran Chakrawertti

NEW DELHI: Napster was nothing. Free sharing of movies, music, games and software now accounts for two-thirds of all traffic on the Net.

Driving the trend is the new 'badshah of bandwidth', BitTorrent, an innovative software that allows users to share files online more efficiently and now accounts for 35 per cent of all traffic.

According to Cachelogic, a British web research firm, in Asia, BitTorrent accounts for more than 50 per cent of all Internet traffic. Viewing web pages accounts for no more than 11 per cent of global Internet traffic.

In India, Torrent forums have mushroomed. At one of them, desitorrents.com, apart from the latest movies and music, you can also download hard-to-find classics like Ray and Ghatak movies. Vikram, a movie buff who has been downloading movies for years says, "Torrent links are the easiest way to find the newest movies and music these days. While it would earlier take days to download movies from peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, it’s a matter of a few hours now with the much higher speeds that torrent files make possible."

BitTorrent is a big step forward from the old generation P2P software, which only allowed you to download a file from another user.

Torrent breaks up files into really small pieces, and as soon as you’ve downloaded the first few kilobytes of the file, you’ll simultaneously start uploading that part of the file to other users.

This is significant because in the earlier situation, several people downloading the file from the same source at the same time would slow down the process immensely.

With BitTorrent, each user is downloading different parts of the file from several others while simultaneously uploading to other users.

Further, downloads aren’t sequential, so you don’t download files beginning to end. In fact, even with five users on a particular torrent, all of whom have incomplete files, BitTorrent could piece together one complete copy of the file from different sources and complete the download.

Estimates vary, but the total number of users of P2P networks today is placed at tens of millions. Cachelogic estimates that at any given point of time there are around 8 million users logged on to P2P networks and the total size of the data they’re sharing is 10 petabytes, or 10,000,000 gigabytes. When Napster shut down in 2001, it had a maximum of 1.5 million users online.

So why aren’t the movie and music labels suing Bit-Torrent and getting it shut down? While other P2P networks have been getting shut down — Napster to Gnutella to Grokster — there’s a crucial difference with BitTorrent.

Earlier P2P software enabled users to search for files that they wanted, and hence could be accused of indirectly abetting piracy.

Torrent, in contrast, is simply a software that breaks down a file and pieces it together again. While action can be taken against websites that act as forums for users putting up links to torrents — and action has been taken on the torrent forum that infamously hosted a copy of Star Wars six hours before it released in theatres.

In fact, BitTorrent is widely used for legal purposes too, like distributing free versions of Linux to a large number of users. And it is undeniably the most effective tool to distribute anything, legal or illegal, to a large number of users.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/a...ow/1179610.cms





Media Analysis: Download Pirates On Retreat

Legal download services can seize the initiative following a US court ruling in favour of media owners. Andy Fry reports.

The entertainment industry last week won a landmark victory in the US Supreme Court against the illegal downloading of music and movies from the internet. Although the ruling will not stamp out illegal downloading completely, experts say it will deter enough piracy to encourage more people to pay for legal download services.

With the exception of Apple's iTunes, there are few strong brands in the legitimate download sector, so there is plenty of opportunity for online retailers, portals and search engines to build brands.

Until now, the leading names in film and music have waged their war in the courts against 1000 individuals out of the millions of people who breach copyright rules by sharing online content. But a unanimous verdict in an MGM case against peer-to-peer (P2P) firm Grokster means content owners can now pursue software companies, which provide the networking technology that drives P2P file-sharing.

Illegal downloading is said to have knocked more than $6bn (£3.32bn) off the value of worldwide music sales between 1998 and 2003, or 22% off the entire market. And with broadband penetration on the increase worldwide, downloading is now threatening to take a big bite out of the movie market.

Clear responsibility

Not surprisingly, the film and music lobby is delighted with the court's ruling. John Kennedy, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), calls it 'the most important judgment involving the music industry in 20 years. It destroys the argument that P2P services bear no responsibility for illegal activities that take place on their networks.'

In the aftermath of the decision, there is expected to be a rush of legal suits as MGM, Disney, EMI and Time Warner attempt to shut down P2P technology pioneers such as StreamCast and Morpheus. After that, there could be a boom in legal downloads, according to Peter Jamieson, chairman of UK music industry trade body the BPI.

'The growth of illegal file-sharing networks has acted as a disincentive for companies to invest in legal services,' he says. 'This ruling should allow new services - including P2P - to develop.'

While the decision will aid the content business, it is unlikely to spell the end for pirates, however. 'I don't think the Supreme Court decision will be much of a disincentive to someone determined to launch the next Grokster,' says John Enser, senior partner at law firm Olswang. 'But actions against it and (Australian company) Kazaa are part of an ongoing commercial battle to ensure piracy doesn't destroy the business.'

With that in mind, Enser believes the IFPI and BPI's policy of suing individuals who distribute copyright material via P2P will remain a key weapon in controlling piracy. In April, IFPI launched its biggest ever wave of legal actions, against 950 individuals in 11 countries. The BPI, meanwhile, has taken action against 90 people in the UK.

The success of this strategy is borne out by findings in the 2005 Digital Music Survey, put together by online research group Entertainment Media Research (EMR) in partnership with Olswang. According to the survey, the number of people legally downloading music has grown by 75% in the past year. All told, the number of legal downloads passed the 200m mark in 2004, underlining the fact that there is a growing market of people willing to pay for digital content.

EMR chief executive Russell Hart says the main reason for this shift is fear of legal redress, cited by 44% of survey respondents. 'The prospect of prosecution is a deterrent. It also has a knock-on effect when webmasters tell users they'll be banned from sites if they upload unauthorised content.'

However, Hart shares Enser's view that piracy is not defeated. 'The industry has yet to work out what to do about teens who often don't have the money or means to buy legal downloads.'

In PR terms, teens are a headache for the content industry, which portrays pirates as virtual shoplifters rather than kids short of cash. So IFPI's legal shock tactics are reinforced by a more positive line about piracy being unfair on artists and reducing investment in discovering and launching new talent.

Developing loyalty

EMR's survey suggests these concerns are less effective in dissuading illegal downloading than purely functional considerations, such as fear of viruses or spyware and poor quality. This is significant, says Hart, because there is scant evidence of brand loyalty in the legal download arena. The standout exception to this is Apple's iTunes, which has gained traction on the back of iPod.

With the pirates in retreat, Hart believes now is the time for legal download firms to seize the strategic initiative. 'They have to focus on consumer benefits. If they offer unlimited access to music via a monthly rental scheme, freedom to share it with friends, album samples, exclusives and discounts, they could build a strong position.'

The question now is who is best placed to compete with Apple and Napster. Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon, it seems, will be the key challengers.

Data File - Downloads

Impact of illegal downloads

- Between 2000 and 2004, singles spending has declined by 37.6% among 12- to 19-year-olds, primarily due to the availability of free music files on the web.

- The number of people downloading illicit film and TV files in the UK fell in 2004 to 1.3m from 1.6m in 2003. Trade body the British Videogram Association says this could be a result of the length of time it takes to download an audiovisual file and the PR surrounding civil actions in the US against illegal file-sharing.

Source: IFPI/BVA.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulleti...rates-retreat/





Teens' Use Of Internet And Online Services Documented In New Book

What adults don't know about teens' use of the Internet and other high-tech services could fill a book.

And has.

In "I Found It on the Internet: Coming of Age Online" ( American Library Association ), readers learn, for example, how teens use online jargon like "Leetspeak" to jockey for status; blogs to display their wit and uniqueness; instant messaging to exclude others but also to collaborate on homework projects.

We also learn that teens use technology in ways that developers haven't anticipated, and that teens are expert multi-taskers, able to juggle any number of online services -- most of this behavior in the name of growing up.

"What teens do to one another online and the uses they make of technology for personal and social development are issues that have not received the attention they deserve," writes Frances Jacobson Harris in her preface to "I Found It."

According to Harris, the popular press has focused on "problems that arise from the controversial digital content that teens can now easily get their hands on, including pornography and hate literature."

"But the focus on content misses the point by oversimplifying the complex issues that are involved," she wrote.

In her experience as a longtime high school librarian, the problems that arise as a result of communication technology "are just as serious as those spawned by information technology."

In her book, Harris leads readers through the maze of services that millions of youngsters are plugging, tapping and dialing into -- and millions of their parents, teachers and librarians are clueless about.

She guides readers through the thicket of thorny issues technologically savvy teens are facing these days, including hacking, cheating, privacy, harassment and access to inappropriate content.

And along the way, Harris dispenses a fair amount of common sense about growing up in general, and growing up in the technological age in particular.

A librarian for nearly 20 years at the University Laboratory High School of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Harris team-teaches a computer literacy course for eighth and ninth graders that has a major focus on the ethical use of information and communication technologies. Her writings have appeared in such publications as School Library Journal, Knowledge Quest and Library Trends.

In her book, Harris explores the rapidly morphing world of "ICTs," or information and communication technologies -- "environments in which people use communication technology to access information, manipulate it, transform it, and exchange it." This includes one-to-one ICT environments, such as e-mail and instant messaging; personal ICT environments, including personal Web pages, blogs and online diaries; and collaborative ICT environments, such as usenet and message boards, electronic discussion lists, chat rooms and peer-to-peer ( also called P2P ) file sharing.

She also outlines what she believes should be the future role of librarians with regard to technology and teens.

"We have come a long way," Harris writes, speaking of librarians. "Our professional literature is replete with how-to manuals for teaching with technology and running technology-based libraries. But we still must come to terms with the way kids perceive the world as a result of growing up with digital technology."

In her considered opinion today's teens experience a "ubiquitous connectedness" that was impossible to imagine even 10 years ago. "By listening to teens and learning from their native perspectives, we stand a much better chance of harnessing the power of technology in ways that enhance core library services and systems."

Other observations:

ICTs afford an independence to teenagers that is otherwise difficult for them to achieve, and can give them control over their discretionary time;

Even though the Web has a reputation for hosting sexual predators in chat rooms and other online places, "It is more likely that teens will find safe and healthy places to conduct their social experimentation and information gathering";

While much of teen activity revolves around sharing, ICTs also are being used to exclude people from teen community by way of online blocking and bullying;

Teens manipulate their social standing in various ways, including adopting different language styles and adjusting the subject matter;

Online jargon, for example, is used to establish credibility as a member of the community, to elevate one's status in it or to reveal one's "utter cluelessness."
One form of jargon uses numbers and symbols for letters, phonetic spelling and the substitution of letters; "d00d" means dude, "pr0n" means porn, but among teens, "the overuse of certain conventions is as big a sin as their misuse," Harris wrote.

A great deal of "ICT-enabled life" is less than desirable, some is merely annoying and some is "outright abhorrent." Hatemongering, conducted by extremist hate groups, is one example of the abhorrent.

"While there is as yet no concrete evidence that online hate speech has made significant strides in recruiting teens to extremist organizations, hate-based music "might be another story," she wrote. White power music, such as that delivered by Resistance Records, "is enjoying an unprecedented level of success."

Above all else, Harris hopes to convey the idea that technologies can help teens do their job, which is "to develop a sense of identity and of community."

"To put it another way, information and communication technologies give teens access to information and to others -- two key elements in their critical search for personal identity and their place within the larger community."

Harris also hopes that parents, teachers and librarians see the importance of educating themselves about the technologies teens are using, even incorporating some of them into their own lives.

"By doing so, they'll have more credibility with their kids, they won't respond inappropriately to phantom problems and they'll be able to recognize genuine problems.

"Today librarians have the power to make the merge of information and communication technologies work for people in ways that are humane and enriching. Teenagers are our partners in this endeavor. They are the innovators whose imaginations we must value. We will not succeed without their vision and energy, and they will not become library users without our skill and passion. It's a marriage made in heaven."
http://i-newswire.com/pr38805.html





Don’t touch that dial

Video Game Pirate Headed To Slammer
Daniel Terdiman

A Maryland man has been sentenced to four months behind bars for helping to organize a software and hardware piracy scheme out of a chain of video game stores.

Hitesh Patel, one of a group of employees and managers from the three-store Pandora's Cube chain in Maryland, pled guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison, said Rick Hirsch, senior vice president for intellectual property enforcement at the Entertainment Software Association. According to the ESA, Patel was charged with conspiracy to commit felony copyright infringement and for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Hirsch said that Patel and several colleagues, including Pandora's Cube owner Biren Amin, had been selling modified Xboxes that let players use pirated console games. Hirsch said Pandora's Cube was also selling modified Xboxes preloaded with pirated games.

Amin, who was also convicted and faces his own sentencing in the coming weeks, would not comment about his case or Patel's.

But a clerk for the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland confirmed that Patel had been sentenced on July 19, though the judge in the case, Peter Messitte, had yet to formally put through the sentencing papers.

Hirsch said the ESA, a Washington, D.C.-based group that lobbies for the video game industry, complained about the piracy to the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. That agency, along with the U.S. Department of Justice's Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section, or CCIPS, then conducted a months-long investigation for raiding Pandora's Cube stores in December, Hirsch said.

A CCIPS employee contacted on Wednesday declined to comment on the case.

Hirsch said he wasn't surprised that Patel had pleaded guilty.

"They pretty much were caught red-handed," he said. "I don't think there was any dispute of the facts of what they were doing."

Hirsch said that the Pandora's Cube defendants were hardly the only ones in the United States selling Xboxes modified to allow the storage or playing of pirated games.

"I think there are a number of similar operations around the country, most of them doing it on a more covert basis than Pandora's Cube," he said. "But I think this creates a message for people engaged in these operations who think they are not really vulnerable to having anybody do anything about this."
http://news.com.com/Video+game+pirat...3-5807547.html





DOJ Announces Eight Charged In Internet Piracy Crackdown; First Indictments Arising From Charlotte FBI Undercover Investigation for Operations FastLink and Site Down

Press Release

Contact: U.S. Justice Department Public Affairs Office, 202-514-2008 or 202-514-1888 (TDD) Web: http://WWW.USDOJ.GOV

WASHINGTON, July 28 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Acting Assistant Attorney General John C. Richter of the Criminal Division; Gretchen C. F. Shappert, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina; and Robert F. Clifford, FBI Acting Special Agent-in- Charge of the Charlotte Division, today announced that eight individuals were charged with criminal copyright infringement in Charlotte, North Carolina, as part of an ongoing federal crackdown against the organized piracy groups responsible for most of the illegal distribution of copyrighted movies, software, games and music on the Internet. These are the first federal indictments arising from the Charlotte-based FBI investigation that identified targets in both Operations FastLink and Site Down - the two largest and most aggressive international enforcement actions against criminal organizations involved in the illegal online distribution of copyrighted material.

Charged by indictment with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and copyright infringement were: David Lee Pruett, 34, of Auburn, Washington; Alexander C. Von Eremeef, 30, of Belmont, Massachusetts; George C. Stoutenburgh, 48, of Bennet, Colorado; and Jerry M. Melvin, Jr., 24, of Roanoke, Virginia. Charged by Information with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement were: David Chen Pui, 26, of Fountain Valley, California; Shawn W. Laemmrich, 30, of Calumet, Michigan; Scott John Walls, 45, of Spokane, Washington; and Franklin Edward Littell, 48, of Martinsville, Indiana.

"Today's charges strike at the top of the copyright piracy supply chain-a technologically-sophisticated, highly organized distribution network that provides most of the copyrighted software, movies, games, and music illegally distributed over the Internet," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Richter. "Cases like these are part of the Department's coordinated strategy to protect copyright owners from the online thieves who steal and then sell the products they work so hard to produce."

Operations FastLink and Site Down resulted in a total of more than 200 search warrants executed in 15 countries; the confiscation of hundreds of computers and illegal online distribution hubs; and the removal of more than 100 million dollars worth of illegally-copied copyrighted software, games, movies, and music from illicit distribution channels. Countries participating in these U.S.-led operations included: France, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Hungary, Israel, Spain, Australia, Singapore, Belgium, and Germany. Both Operations FastLink and Site Down were the culmination of multiple FBI undercover investigations, but only one of those investigations participated in both operations: the Charlotte undercover investigation responsible for today's charges. The charges announced today reflect the commitment of the United States Attorney's Office to aggressively protect intellectual property rights which are increasingly important in today's information age.

"Operations FastLink and Site Down reinforce the commitment of federal law enforcement agencies to protect intellectual property rights and to maintain the integrity of our copyright laws. Agents of the FBI and their Department of Justice counterparts are to be commended for this extraordinary effort," said U.S. Attorney Gretchen C. F. Shappert.

The defendants charged today were leading members in the illegal software, game, movie, and music trade online, commonly referred to as the "warez scene." They acted as leaders, crackers, suppliers, distribution site hosts or site administrators. All were affiliated with organized warez groups that acted as "first-providers" of copyrighted works to the Internet -- the so-called "release" groups that are the original sources for a majority of the pirated works distributed and downloaded via the Internet. Once a warez release group prepares a stolen work for distribution, the material is distributed in minutes to secure, top-level warez servers throughout the world. From there, within a matter of hours, the pirated works are distributed globally, filtering down to peer-to-peer and other public file sharing networks accessible to anyone with Internet access.

"This FBI Charlotte undercover operation was very successful in identifying and collecting evidence against those individuals who were the primary source of pirated digital material around the globe," said Acting Special Agent-in-Charge Clifford. "This investigation illustrates the FBI's ability to conduct sophisticated and complex technical investigations, where those committing the cyber crimes can be identified and located anywhere in the world."

These warez groups also supply the for-profit criminal distribution networks that cost the copyright industry billions of dollars each year. Illegal warez copies of software or movies are easily and cheaply converted to optical discs and distributed throughout the world from factories in Asia and elsewhere. Spammers regularly advertise cheap software that can be downloaded from websites or shipped from overseas, usually bearing the signature mark of the warez group that released it.

Today's charges are the latest in a series of actions taken by the Department of Justice to crack down on illegal online piracy. In the past four years, beginning with Operation Buccaneer in 2001, Operation Fastlink in 2004, and Operation Site Down last month, the Department's prosecutions of top piracy organizations have been unprecedented in size and the degree of international cooperation achieved. Operation Buccaneer alone has yielded a total of 30 U.S. felony convictions and another 10 convictions overseas, and Department prosecutors are still seeking the extradition of the Australian leader of one of the principal warez groups dismantled by that operation. Operation FastLink has yielded 12 felony convictions to date, but that number is likely to increase significantly as a result of today's actions. Earlier this month, four individuals were indicted on felony copyright charges in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, as part of Operation Site Down.

These cases are being prosecuted by Senior Litigation Counsel Eric Klumb and Trial Attorney Corbin Weiss of the Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, in coordination with Assistant U.S. Attorney Corey Ellis of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of North Carolina.

The charges contained in the indictments and informations are allegations only and the defendants are presumed innocent until convicted at trial.
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=51033





Oz

Couple Fined Over Illegal DVDs
Staff writers

A couple from the NSW Central Coast has been fined $75,000 over trademark and copyright infringements in Wyong Local Court for selling illegal copies of DVDs in their local community.

Police charged Allan and Lesa Anne Glandian of Toukley with the offences after seizing 494 illegally copied DVDs and disk duplication equipment from the couple's home in October last year.

The court heard that the pair imported hundreds of unauthorised copies of DVDs from Malaysia and sold them through an informal network of friends and acquaintances.

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) said that some of the movie titles the couple made available were yet to be released via authorised retail channels at the time the offences occurred.

"They were selling Prisoner of Azkaban when it was not available on genuine DVD anywhere in the world," AFACT spokeswoman Adrianne Pecotic said.

"We are pleased with the court's decision and believe it sends a powerful message to other movie pirates that piracy doesn't pay," AFACT said in statement.

It's not clear how much money the company made from its pirate movie distribution operation but AFACT said it was collecting profit.

"The sale of pirate DVDs in Australia is more profitable than an equivalent weight of something like cannabis," Ms Pecotic said.

AFACT statistics suggest that the couple had the capacity to make nearly $300,000 worth of illegal DVDs each year. Over a year, a single DVD burner could generate a haul of pirate movies valued at $149,000 on the street, the federation said.

Police seized two burners from the couple in raids last year but the couple were not charged with manufacturing offences.

Ms Pecotic said that an increasing number of Australians were using decryption software freely available on the internet to make exact copies of DVDs.

AFACT said that Malaysian organised piracy rings were investing "millions of dollars" in illegal DVD factories to produce counterfeit films.

"The piracy rate in Malaysia is over 80 per cent. It's a huge enterprise over there," she said.

Australian Customs seized 40,000 illegal DVDs imported into Australia during 2004, according to AFACT records.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html




Recording Industry Says Number Of Legally Downloaded Tracks Triples In First Half Of 2005
AP

The number of digital music tracks legally downloaded from the Internet almost tripled in the first half of 2005 as the use of high-speed broadband connections surged around the world, the international recording industry said Thursday.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries said that 180 million single tracks were downloaded legally in the first six months of the year, compared to 57 million tracks in the first half of 2004 and 157 million for the whole of last year.

The federation credited the increase to a 13 percent rise in the number of broadband lines installed around the world, along with an industry campaign to both prosecute and educate against illegal downloading.

It said there was just a 3 percent increase in illegal file-sharing to 900 million in July, from 870 million at the start of the year.

``We are now seeing real evidence that people are increasingly put off by illegal file-sharing and turning to legal ways of enjoying music online,'' said John Kennedy, the IFPI's chairman. ``Whether it's the fear of getting caught breaking the law, or the realization that many networks could damage your home PC, attitudes are changing, and that is good news for the whole music industry.''

The IFPI, which has filed hundreds of lawsuits worldwide accusing people of putting copyright songs onto Internet file-sharing networks and offering them to millions without permission, said that the legitimate market is responding to the increased demand.

There are now more than 300 digital sites available worldwide -- three times the number a year ago, and 2.2 million people now subscribe to digital services, compared to 1.5 million in January, it said.

The IFPI claims piracy is behind a global slump in music sales that began in 2000. Worldwide sales were flat last year as a drop in audio sales was offset by increases in DVD and digital music sales. U.S. music sales have been on the rebound since fall 2003.

Kennedy warned that the campaign targeting music pirates is not over.

``We are not there yet. Many still appear to be gripped by a bad habit they are finding hard to break,'' he said. ``These people are now increasingly likely to face legal actions against them.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/12187540.htm





RIAA Looking To "Significantly Expand" Piracy Crackdown

The RIAA has announced that a new round of copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed against 765 illegal file sharers. These “John Doe” lawsuits cite individuals for sharing copyrighted music via unauthorized P2P services such as Grokster, eDonkey, KaZaA and LimeWire. The litigations were filed in federal district courts across the country, including California, Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

"In the coming weeks and months, we will significantly expand our anti-piracy efforts for those who have ignored the Court’s message,” said RIAA President Cary Sherman. “Enforcing our rights against the businesses and individuals engaged in music theft is a critical component of our overall effort to discourage illegal downloading and encourage music fans to turn to legal services. We know that our education and enforcement efforts have made a real impact. With broadband penetration skyrocketing, use of legitimate services continues to surge, while the wildfire-like growth of illicit services has been arrested.”

RIAA executives have said that redoubling efforts to level the playing field for all legal services is essential. “Last month, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that businesses that encourage the theft of music can be held accountable for their actions,” said Sherman. “For businesses and individuals alike, the authority and credibility of the Court’s decision could not be more clear: downloading without permission is ‘garden variety theft.’ We will continue to send a strong message to the users of these illicit networks that their actions are illegal, they can be identified and the consequences are real.”
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=103929





XM, Samsung and Napster Form Download Alliance
Annys Shin

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. said yesterday that they will introduce a satellite radio receiver and digital music player that will let XM subscribers buy and download songs through an exclusive arrangement with online music store Napster.

The new device, which could go on sale this fall, is XM's first attempt to integrate its subscription radio service with the fast-growing market for portable MP3 players.

"Napster is excited to work with XM to create a cutting-edge product that merges the best of online and satellite music into one great, integrated experience," said Chris Gorog, Napster's chief executive, in a press release. The new service, called "XM+Napster," will be "nirvana for passionate music fans," Gorog said.

The deals with Samsung and Napster are part of a larger strategy to "enhance the ability to listen to XM in different environments," XM chief executive Hugh Panero said in an interview.

XM's more than 4.4 million subscribers pay $12.95 a month to receive more than 150 channels of news, entertainment, sports and music. XM also works with electronics manufacturers to develop receivers for automobiles and home stereo systems. Last year, Delphi Corp. introduced the first personal satellite radio receiver called the Delphi MyFi. The device XM is developing with Samsung will allow consumers to listen to live XM content when the device is plugged in to an XM- ready car stereo or to a home antenna. Consumers can mark songs they hear for purchase. When they return it to a docking station connected to a computer, the device will download the music from the XM+Napster service. Consumers also will be able to record live XM content, but they will not be able to transfer those songs to other devices or burn them onto compact discs. Currently, consumers can buy satellite radio receivers that also play content in the MP3 format, but don't offer the ability to download. Or they can buy satellite radio receivers that can record what they hear on XM but that can't be transferred to another device.

XM officials said they do not yet have detailed pricing for the device or for music purchased through the XM+Napster service.

Sean P. Butson, an analyst with Legg Mason Inc., called XM's deal with Samsung "groundbreaking," in a research note he published yesterday. Citing the fact that Samsung is also a leading manufacturer of cell phones, Butson said the deal "looks like an important first step towards a mobile phone/satellite radio."

When asked if XM and Samsung are working toward mobile phones with satellite radio receivers, Panero said, "We're looking forward to having the relationship evolve into other devices."

Financial terms of the agreement with Samsung and with Napster were not disclosed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072601754.html




Administration Appointment Addresses Copyright Piracy

The Bush administration said Friday it created a new position to coordinate government efforts to combat the foreign theft of copyrighted products.

President Bush selected Christian Israel, currently a deputy chief of staff at the Commerce Department, to fill the new post of coordinator of international intellectual property
enforcement.

Israel will head an interagency panel covering five government agencies and will report to Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

``Intellectual property theft costs U.S. businesses billions of dollars and weakens our economy,'' Gutierrez said. ``This new position will help us be more aggressive.''

Gutierrez said that one of Israel's early priorities would be helping to monitor recent pledges made by China to crack down on the piracy of American movies, music and computer software.

China announced earlier this month after officials met with Gutierrez in Beijing that it would file more criminal charges in copyright cases, crack down on Chinese exports of pirated products and focus special attention on movie piracy.

``We had a good session but we will find out how good it was as time transpires and we see results,'' Gutierrez said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press.

He said the pledge to intercept pirated products intended for export was especially significant because it was estimated that 70 percent of pirated products coming into the United States originate in China.

``It is a long list of tangible actions that can be measured and that we will be monitoring very closely,'' Gutierrez said of the new agreement reached with China.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/12198837.htm




House Reauthorizes Patriot Act

The House of Representatives, ignoring protests from civil liberties groups, on Thursday renewed the USA Patriot Act mostly along party lines.

Sixteen provisions of the 2001 law, hastily enacted in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, are due to expire at the end of this year unless renewed by Congress. President Bush, who has repeatedly called on lawmakers to make the entire law permanent, commended lawmakers for approving the measure.

"The Patriot Act is a key part of our efforts to combat terrorism and protect the American people, and the Congress needs to send me a bill soon that renews the act without weakening our ability to fight terror," the president said in statement.

The House reauthorized the act 257-171 with several changes designed to increase judicial and political oversight of some of its most controversial provisions. In the Republican-controlled chamber, 44 Democrats supported the bill while 14 Republicans opposed it.

Republicans repeatedly argued throughout the 11-hour debate that the latest explosions in London showed how urgent and important it was to renew the law.

"Passage of the...act is vital to maintaining the post-9/11 law enforcement and intelligence reforms that have reduced America's vulnerability to terrorist attack," Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner told lawmakers.

Republicans also added a new provision to apply the federal death penalty for terrorist offenses that resulted in death and another establishing a new crime of narco-terrorism to punish people using drug profits to aid terrorism. These offenders will now face 20-year minimum prison sentences.

The original act allowed expanded surveillance of terror suspects and gave the government the ability to go to a secret court to seize the personal records of suspects from bookstores, libraries, businesses, hospitals and other organizations. This provision is known as the "library clause."

House Republicans agreed last week that this clause--perhaps the most contentious--and another allowing so-called roving wiretaps, which permits the government to eavesdrop on suspects as they switch from phone to phone, would be renewed for only 10 years instead of being made permanent.

The Senate judiciary committee on Thursday voted unanimously to recommend its own version of the act, which included only four-year renewals of these two clauses. The full Senate is expected to take its bill up in the fall.

The House also passed an amendment requiring the director of the FBI to personally approve all requests for library or bookstore records and a number of other amendments designed to add civil liberty safeguards to the bill.

'Grave threat'
However, Democrats, who mostly supported the original law in 2001, were not mollified and said the law still poses a potentially grave threat to personal freedoms.

"The bill before us fails to assure accountability," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. "Today, we are deciding whether the government will be accountable to the people, to the Congress and to the courts for the exercise of its power."

Republicans said there had been no documented instances of civil liberty abuses since the act was originally passed in 2001. But Democrats said the government had requested individuals' library records more than 200 times.

Democrats also complained that the Republican leadership refused to allow debate on several of their key amendments and opted instead to ram the law through on a party-line vote.

"This is an abuse of power by the Republican majority which has deliberately and purposely chosen to stifle a full debate," said Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer.

A coalition of liberal and conservative civil liberties groups, formed to oppose reauthorization of the law in its current form, this week called on lawmakers not to rush to reauthorize the bill without further debate.

"Certain sections of the law extend far beyond the mission of protecting Americans from terrorism and violate ordinary citizens' constitutional rights, especially the right to privacy," said former Republican Rep. Bob Barr.

Leading opposition from the left, the American Civil Liberties Union said the bill gave the FBI extraordinary power to obtain personal records, search individuals' homes or offices without their knowledge and obtain personal data on ordinary Americans.
http://news.com.com/House+reauthoriz...3-5799213.html





German Court Overturns Law Allowing Preventive Phone- Tapping

Germany's highest court overturned a law that allowed police in the northern state of Lower Saxony to tap telephone calls with the aim of preventing future crimes.

The state law, which did not require the police to have concrete reasons to suspect that a crime would be committed, violated a guarantee of privacy in telecommunications, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe said today in a statement e- mailed to news organizations.

``The loss of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms must not be disproportionate to the aims served by the limitation of basic rights,'' the court said. It said Lower Saxony lawmakers had also gone beyond their powers, as German federal law already lays down rules under which phone calls can be monitored.

Today's court ruling will affect other German states such as Thuringia, which has a similar law in place, and Hamburg and Bavaria, which were planning legislation.

The Lower Saxony law, which took effect at the end of 2003, allowed police to intercept phone calls, text messages and Internet connections.

The law failed to guarantee the protection of ``the core area of personal living arrangements,'' the court said. There was no provision for personal information that had been collected to be deleted, nor did the law define sufficiently enough the criteria under which police could tap phones to prevent what were defined as ``crimes of considerable importance.''

The case number is 1 BvR 668/04.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...&refer=germany





Privacy Guru Locks Down VoIP
Kim Zetter

First there was PGP e-mail. Then there was PGPfone for modems. Now Phil Zimmermann, creator of the wildly popular Pretty Good Privacy e-mail encryption program, is debuting his new project, which he hopes will do for internet phone calls what PGP did for e-mail.

Zimmermann has developed a prototype program for encrypting voice over internet protocol, or VOIP, which he will announce at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas this week.

Like PGP and PGPfone, which he created as human rights tools for people around the world to communicate without fear of government eavesdropping, Zimmermann hopes his new program will restore some of the civil liberties that have been lost in recent years and help businesses shield themselves against corporate espionage.

VOIP, or internet telephony, allows people to speak to each other through their computers using a microphone or phone. But because VOIP uses broadband networks to transmit calls, conversations are vulnerable to eavesdropping in the same way that e-mail and other internet traffic is open to snoops. Attackers can also hijack calls and reroute them to a different number.

Few people consider these risks, however, when they switch to VOIP.

"Years ago, people kind of stumbled into e-mail without really thinking about security," Zimmermann said. "I think that what's happening today with VOIP is that we're kind of stumbling into it (as well) without thinking about security." People don't think about it, he said, because they're used to phone calls being secure on the regular phone system -- known as the Public Switched Telephone Network.

"The PSTN is like a well-manicured neighborhood, (while) the internet is like a crime-ridden slum," Zimmermann said. "To move all of our phone calls from the PSTN to the internet seems foolish without protecting it."

Interest in VOIP is growing rapidly because the user pays less for the service and pays no long-distance toll charges. Some services are free. According to one recent survey, 11 million people worldwide use a subscription VOIP service, compared to only 5 million in 2004, and at least another 35 million use free VOIP services. That leaves a lot of people potentially open to eavesdropping.

It's not as easy to eavesdrop on VOIP as it is to intercept and read e-mail. Phone conversations aren't stored or backed up where an attacker can access them, so the conversations have to be captured as they occur.

But a program available for free on the internet already allows intruders to do just that. Using the tool, someone with access to a local VOIP network could capture traffic, convert it to an audio file and replay the voice conversation. The program is called Voice Over Misconfigured Internet Telephones, a name clearly chosen for its catchy acronym -- VOMIT.

Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security and author of the Crypto-Gram newsletter, said that the need for VOIP encryption is a given.

"If you're concerned about eavesdropping, then encryption is how you defend against it," he said. "And it's not that hard to do. It's just a matter of writing the code."

But David Endler, chairman of the VOIP Security Alliance industry group and director of security research at TippingPoint, said a protocol for encrypting and protecting VOIP data already exists and companies are starting to make VOIP phones that support the protocol. But he said that people typically don't enable the encryption option.

"Probably because we're not seeing attacks yet," he said.

He said most users are less concerned with eavesdropping than with having VOIP service that provides the same quality and reliability that they expect from regular phone service.

"Some people can see clearly that there's a need for this, and others wonder if anyone cares about protecting phone calls," Zimmermann said. "But those are the same people who wondered why anyone would want to protect e-mail. I think as people gain experience with VOIP they're going to have a great appreciation for the need to come up with extra measures to protect it."

Endler also said that companies using VOIP are reluctant to implement encryption because of the overhead involved in managing the public key infrastructure, or PKI.

"You have to be able to store a key on most of these end points," he said.

PKI requires two keys for encryption: a public key that a user gives to anyone who wishes to communicate with him or her, and a private key, which decrypts messages that the user receives.

That won't be a problem with Zimmermann's system, which doesn't use PKI. Zimmermann said PKI is unnecessarily complex for VOIP.

"There's no need to centrally manage public key infrastructure to make a phone call, in my view," he said.

He won't elaborate on how his system works but is preparing a protocol document that will describe it in detail, which he'll post on the internet when the program is ready.

The program is currently only a working prototype and still has non-security bugs that need to be worked out. For example, sometimes the program fails to hang up after a call, forcing the user to exit the program to end the call.

It's designed for a Mac, but will be adapted for PCs before Zimmermann makes it available for download. He's looking for investors to back a startup company that will support the product and oversee its distribution.

Zimmermann envisions it both as an add-on for manufacturers to put into VOIP phones and as a software client that users can install on their laptop to use when they don't have a VOIP phone with them. Both parties in a conversation will need to have the software on their phone or computer. If only one person has it, the call will still go through but it won't be encrypted.

It's been a while since Zimmermann came out with a new encryption product. He released PGP in 1991; it was another five years before he released PGPfone to encrypt data passing between modems.

Who could blame him for laying low for a while after the Justice Department launched a three-year criminal investigation of him in 1993? Officials accused him of violating a ban on exporting cryptography when he made PGP available for download on the internet. The government finally dropped its investigation in 1996.

The export laws were relaxed in 2000, so at least they're no longer a problem.

"There's a lot more crypto in the computer industry now than there was in the '90s," Zimmermann said. "And there's not much authorities can do about it now because we went through this struggle with them in the '90s and we won."

Zimmermann isn't taking chances, however. He worked closely with a law firm that specializes in export controls and filed the required paperwork with the Commerce Department notifying the government that his product exists.

Still, he delayed producing VOIP encryption after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, because the climate wasn't right.

"I was concerned that maybe this would attract some criticism," Zimmermann said. "I just felt that maybe the government had their hands full with enough problems, and I also needed to concentrate on other consulting projects to make money."

Zimmermann received hate mail after 9/11 from people who accused him of aiding the attackers by creating a program that allowed terrorists and criminals to shield their correspondence from authorities.

The Washington Post erroneously reported shortly after the attacks that Zimmermann was overwhelmed with guilt over the possibility that terrorists might have used PGP to plan their attacks.

What he actually said was that he was sorry if al-Qaida used the program, but that this was the trade-off for having a tool that could protect everyone's privacy -- some people would use it with malicious intent. Overall, he said, the world was better off with cryptography in the hands of the masses rather than just in the hands of government.

Zimmermann is hoping people will accept his new program with the spirit in which he created it.

"Because there are a lot of people who are concerned about the erosion of civil liberties that the Patriot Act brought," Zimmermann said. "I'm hoping that more people would approve of this project than disapprove."

Ultimately, however, he said that his encryption program was not about politics, but about the need for protecting critical infrastructure.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,68306,00.html





Secret List Of Australians
James Riley and Selina Mitchell

A SECRET database of suspect financial transactions by tens of thousands of Australians is being maintained by federal regulators.

The database is being shared with state and federal law enforcement agencies, privacy advocates claim. The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac) had built a database of more than 50,000 suspect transactions in the past 10 years, they said.

While individuals were denied access to details about any suspect transaction for which they were reported, the database had been opened to an unprecedented number of government departments and agencies, the Australian Privacy Foundation warned.

Because the suspect transaction database is excluded from material available under freedom of information laws, individuals were not even allowed to find out if they had been reported for a suspect transaction, APF spokesman Nigel Waters said.

"This has really turned into a secret blacklist," he said. "It has been building up for more than 10 years. People would be horrified if they knew just how big this blacklist has become."

Nicola Roxon asked whether Austrac should be forced to open its suspect transaction database to public scrutiny.

"It's worthy of a closer look to see whether individuals should be given access to this sort of information that government has on them," Ms Roxon said.

The Privacy Foundation is concerned that scope creep in recent years had meant data held by Austrac was now being used for purposes for which it was never intended.

Mr Waters, a member of the Austrac Privacy Advisory Committee, said Austrac had been intended as a financial intelligence unit to fight major and organised crime, with just a handful of federal agencies – including the Taxation Office, Federal Police and old National Crime Authority – allowed to access its databases online.

In recent years the number of state and federal agencies with online access to the Austrac databases had grown to 28 – including state police and anti-corruption authorities and Centrelink, according to the latest Austrac annual report. The number of suspect transactions being reported to the agency had also grown dramatically in recent years.

The 11,400 suspect transaction reports to Austrac in the 2003-04 financial year was 42 per cent higher than for the previous year.

Austrac activity had increased since 2001 as the agency was used as a tool to fight terrorist financing in addition to its existing role as government's anti-money- laundering authority.

Under the proposed anti-money-laundering legislation, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents and jewellers will be forced to report suspicious cash transactions of more than $20,000.

Draft AML legislation was expected to pass through parliament in the middle of last year, but is still in the drafting phase.

Justice and Customs Minister Chris Ellison last week briefed a joint industry- government roundtable on the AML measures to discuss recommendations of the international Financial Action TaskForce on money laundering.

The Privacy Foundation has complained that it was not invited to the briefing.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html





New York Judges Refuse To Say Internet Obscenity Law Is Unconstitutional
Larry Neumeister

A special three-judge federal panel on Monday refused to find unconstitutional a law making it a crime to send obscenity over the Internet to children.

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 had been challenged by Barbara Nitke, a photographer who specializes in pictures of sadomasochistic sexual behavior, and by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, a Baltimore- based advocacy organization.

They contended in a December 2001 lawsuit brought in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that the law was so broad and vague in its scope that it violated the First Amendment, making it impossible for them to publish to the Internet because they cannot control the forum.

A judge from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and two district judges heard the facts of the case and issued a written decision saying the plaintiffs had provided insufficient evidence to prove the law was unconstitutional.

The panel noted that evidence was offered to indicate there are at least 1.4 million Web sites that mention bondage, discipline and sadomasochism but that evidence was insufficient to decide how many sites might be considered obscene.

The judges said the evidence also was insufficient for them to determine how much the standards for obscenity differ in communities across the United States.

The court said it was necessary to know how much the standards vary to decide if those creating Web sites would be graded for obscenity unfairly when compared with those who market traditional pornography and can control how they distribute the material.

As the law stands, a communication is obscene if according to each community's standards it appeals to the prurient interest, depicts or describes sexual conduct in an offensive way and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

The law requires that those sending the communications take reasonable actions to restrict or prevent access by children to obscenity, sometimes by using a verified credit card, debit account or adult access code as proof of age.

Nitke, who has exhibited her work for more than 20 years, said she will appeal the ruling.

"I'm appalled," she said. "I think it's vitally important to keep the Internet free for education, the arts and open discussion on sexual targets."

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom also was disappointed with the ruling, spokeswoman Susan Wright said.

"Personal Web sites and chat groups that include discussions and images of explicit sexuality are at risk of prosecution," she said. "Basically, we proved we're at risk of prosecution, and speech has been chilled because people are afraid to put anything sexual on their Web sites."

Group lawyer John Wirenius said in a statement that the court declined to find the law unconstitutional "by setting a standard so high that no plaintiff could have met it."

"They required us to prove facts that the government has refrained from making a paper trail on for 30 years," he said.

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom works to change antiquated laws, oppose censorship of consensual sexual expression and help people who are facing the threat of prosecution or legal action, its Web site says.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wi...,6680266.story





PORN: Law Pushing Smut Overseas
Simon Hayes

AUSTRALIA's tough internet censorship regime is driving pornographers overseas, according to Electronic Frontiers Australia, which opposes censorship online.

The communications regulator issued just one takedown notice for Australian- hosted content during the latest reporting period.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority's 2004 second-half report was issued last week by the Department of Communications.

Before its merger with the Australian Communications Authority, ACMA operated as the Australian Broadcasting Authority.

ACMA, which is responsible for investigating complaints under the Broadcasting Services Act, received 598 complaints between July and December last year, and identified 430 overseas-hosted prohibited items.

Content hosted overseas is either notified to the makers of filters, or if it is believed to be illegal, is referred to the Australian Federal Police.

ACMA found complaints referring to US-hosted content dropped but complaints concerning content hosted in Russia and China increased.

Electronic Frontiers Australia said the figures showed that internet content regulation in Australia had simply pushed offensive content overseas.

"There's a dramatic increase in the amount of foreign-hosted content," EFA executive director Irene Graham said. "They can't do anything more about it than they did before, which was, if you don't like it, use a filter."

Ms Graham said her organisation objected to the law because it prevented adults from seeing content that was freely available in other media.

"Adults should be able to view Australian content that has been produced and hosted in Australia," she said.

"If you're allowed to view it on video, you should be able to see it on the internet.

"This just makes Australians use overseas sites to see this material and Australian money is going to overseas content hosts."

EFA argues the internet content regime is just one symptom of a conservative attitude towards media content.

"We object to stuff being banned," Ms Graham said. "You only have to see the sort of films they want to ban to understand that."
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html





Denmark To Get Child Porn Filter

Danish police and Internet suppliers are planning to introduce a national child porn filter. The filter will make it harder for Danish paedophiliacs to access child porn on the Internet. It will block access to most child porn sites while at the same time informing people who try to enter these sites that they are breaking the law. In Sweden, a national child porn filter was introduced in May with great success. Here, some 10,000 attempts to access child porn on the Internet are currently blocked every day.
http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/fremmedspro...ticleID=265777





Parliament To Discuss Child Porn Regulations
Ingrid Marson

ISPs may be forced to reveal whether or not they are blocking paedophilic Web sites

A Labour MP has proposed a bill to force ISPs to declare whether they have taken steps to prevent access to paedophilic Web sites.

Margaret Moran, the Labour MP for Luton South, has introduced the bill under the 'Ten Minute Rule', which allows a brief discussion on the issue, but is unlikely to lead to an immediate change in the law.

This bill is inspired by the success of BT's Internet filtering technology, according to Roger Darlington, a member of Ofcom's Consumer Panel, in a blog posting. This technology, called Cleanfeed, prevents BT Retail customers from accessing a list of Web sites identified by the Internet Watch Foundation as containing images of child pornography.

An AOL spokesman gave the bill cautious support, but said ISPs should not be forced to provide too much information to prevent criminals from using this information to avoid the filters.

"Anything that's a step towards child safety and reducing the number of child abuse images on the Internet is by-and-large a good thing," said the AOL spokesman. "Any information that we give away might help people putting this information online."

AOL also questioned if this bill was needed as most ISPs are already open about whether or not they have taken steps to prevent access to paedophilic Web sites. AOL has an in-house system that blocks some content, according to the spokesman.

The bill, called the Control of Internet access (child pornography), will be discussed on 26 October.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050726/152/fo6py.html





Sales Of DVD Duplication Software Blocked
Jan Libbenga

Dutch Anti piracy organisation BREIN (http://www.anti-piracy.nl) has won its battle to prevent distributor Teledirekt distributing the controversial DVD X Copy family of utilities in the Netherlands.

Teledirekt refused to follow orders from BREIN to stop selling the software, despite the fact that DVD X Copy developer 321 Studios went bankrupt last year and stopped making the software.

Injunctions entered against 321 Studios by three US Federal courts last year resulted in 321 Studios no longer being able to continue operating the business.

Since last year selling DVD duplication software that allows users to make backup copies of copy protected DVDs is illegal in the Netherlands. Teledirekt has to hand over all remaining copies of the software, and provide BREIN with a list of individuals or companies that bought the software. BREIN also intends to press for compensation over lost revenues.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/25/dvd_copy/





Dutch Music Copyright Agency Seeks Compensation From Podcasters

Buma/Stemra, the agency that represents the interests of music composers, lyricists and publishers in the Netherlands and collects royalties on their behalf, is asking podcasters for compensation for lost royalties.

Podcasting is a method of subscribing to downloadable audio content over the internet. It enables producers to publish audio content and potentially offers broadcast radio programmes a new distribution method. Listeners may subscribe to feeds using software that checks for and downloads new programmes automatically.

As a temporary measure until 1 January 2006 [when presumably Buma/Stemra will announce a more definite one], the agency is asking professional podcasters to pay a monthly charge of €85, and non-professionals could pay as much as €35 a month.

Buma/Stemra views podcasting as a ‘delayed’ form of webcasting, and therefore subject to the same copyright rules, meaning that podcasters are required to seek permission from the relevant music recording companies and report details to Buma/Stemra before publishing their music content, said the agency.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=9214





Tasty, And Sonically Pleasing
Jack



This miniature music box will be the talk of the summer’s best beaches. If you could freeze it the MobiBLU 1 GB Digital Audio Player would make the perfect ice cube. Available at a fine Wallyworld near you.
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/produ...uct_id=3756864




Payola redux

Sony BMG Called Close to Settlement With Spitzer
Jeff Leeds

Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, is close to a settlement with one of the world's largest record companies to resolve accusations that it used improper tactics to influence radio programmers to play its songs, people involved in the discussions said last night.

The agreement between Mr. Spitzer and the record company, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, one of four music conglomerates under investigation, is expected to be announced on Monday, these people said. They cautioned, however, that the talks were continuing and could still break down.

The settlement is expected to establish a blueprint for agreements that Mr. Spitzer will probably seek with the other three major record companies, which have all received subpoenas.

Late last year, investigators in Mr. Spitzer's office served subpoenas on Sony BMG, a unit of Sony and Bertelsmann; the Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal; the EMI Group; and the Warner Music Group seeking copies of contracts, billing records and other information detailing their ties to independent middlemen who pitch new songs to radio programmers in New York State. Investigators have also reviewed e-mail messages and internal memos and have questioned senior executives at Sony.

As part of the settlement, Sony BMG is expected to admit to misconduct in its radio promotion practices and agree to changes that would limit attempts to influence airplay, according to people involved in the discussion.

For instance, the company is expected to end its use of independent promoters - middlemen who are paid to persuade programmers to add new songs.

Sony BMG will also probably forgo future use of "spin programs," in which labels pay stations to broadcast songs repeatedly, usually with an eye toward manipulating a song's appearance on industry airplay charts.

The company, whose roster of artists includes Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé Knowles, is also expected to agree to a multimillion-dollar fine.

Spokesmen for Mr. Spitzer's office and Sony BMG, which was created last year as a joint venture of the music units of Sony and Bertelsmann, declined to comment last night.

Representatives for the other three companies also declined to comment.

Mr. Spitzer's investigation has echoes of the "payola" scandals that roiled the music industry early in the rock n' roll era, when cash bribes were paid to disc jockeys in exchange for playing certain songs. In the decades since, federal law has prohibited broadcasters from accepting money or anything of value in exchange for airplay unless the transaction is disclosed publicly.

But record companies have long used less-subtle means for currying favor with programmers, including sending them on junkets or providing tickets to concerts and sports events. The companies also employed middlemen who paid the radio stations annual fees, which they say are not tied to airplay of specific songs.

Many companies have, however, scrambled to update their promotion policies during the last year in the wake of receiving subpoenas from Mr. Spitzer, in part to pre-empt charges. The labels now typically require more complete documentation to show that cash and prizes sent for radio promotions are used as intended.

The companies also took steps to reduce practices that might be construed as bribery, according to people briefed on the policies.

Sony BMG, for example, said executives could buy only a personal gift, with a cap on the value, for a radio programmer for a "life event," like a wedding or the birth of a child, according to people briefed on the policy.

The companies have also terminated the use of certain middlemen, many of whom may have been losing influence for years as individual stations were swallowed up by big corporations.

Still, Mr. Spitzer's inquiry represents the most significant investigation of radio promotion in many years, and it has been divisive in the industry, with some saying it will bring about needed changes and others saying it is merely a quest for headlines.

In the late 1990's, the Justice Department began a broad investigation of payola that eventually encompassed dozens of Latin and urban-music radio stations across the nation.

It won convictions against two top executives at Fonovisa, the biggest independent record label in the Spanish-language market, and a top radio executive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/bu...tml?oref=login





Reading Between the Lines of Used Book Sales
Hal R. Varian

THE Internet is a bargain hunter's paradise. Ebay is an easy example, but there are many places for deals on used goods, including Amazon.com.

While Amazon is best known for selling new products, an estimated 23 percent of its sales are from used goods, many of them secondhand books. Used bookstores have been around for centuries, but the Internet has allowed such markets to become larger and more efficient. And that has upset a number of publishers and authors.

In 2002, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sent an open letter to Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com, which has a market for used books in addition to selling new copies. "If your aggressive promotion of used book sales becomes popular among Amazon's customers," the letter said, "this service will cut significantly into sales of new titles, directly harming authors and publishers."

But does it? True, consumers probably save a few dollars while authors and publishers may lose some sales from a used book market. Yet the evidence suggests that the costs to publishers are not large, and also suggests that the overall gains from such secondhand markets outweigh any losses.

Consider a recent paper, "Internet Exchanges for Used Books," by Anindya Ghose of New York University and Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang of Carnegie-Mellon. (The text of the paper is available at ssrn.com/abstract=584401.)

The starting point for their analysis is the double-edged impact of a used book market on the market for new books. When used books are substituted for new ones, the seller faces competition from the secondhand market, reducing the price it can set for new books. But there's another effect: the presence of a market for used books makes consumers more willing to buy new books, because they can easily dispose of them later.

A car salesman will often highlight the resale value of a new car, yet booksellers rarely mention the resale value of a new book. Nevertheless, the value can be quite significant.

This is particularly true in textbook markets, where many books cost well over $100. Judith Chevalier of the Yale School of Management and Austan Goolsbee at the Chicago Business School recently examined this market and found that college bookstores typically buy used books at 50 percent of cover price and resell them at 75 percent of cover price. Hence the price to "rent" a book for a semester is about $50 for a $100 book.

Ms. Chevalier and Mr. Goolsbee found that students were well aware of industry practices and took resale value into account when they bought books. (The study, "Are Durable Goods Consumers Forward Looking? Evidence from College Textbooks," is available at Mr. Goolsbee's Web site, gsbwww.uchicago.edu/fac/austan.goolsbee/ website/.)

Back to Amazon. Professors Ghose, Smith and Telang chose a random sample of books in print and studied how often used copies were available on Amazon. In their sample, they found, on average, more than 22 competitive offers to sell used books, with a striking 241 competitive offers for used best sellers. The prices of the secondhand books were substantially cheaper than the new, but of course the quality of the used books (in terms of wear and tear) varied considerably.

According to the researchers' calculations, Amazon earns, on average, $5.29 for a new book and about $2.94 on a used book. If each used sale displaced one new sale, this would be a less profitable proposition for Amazon.

But Mr. Bezos is not foolish. Used books, the economists found, are not strong substitutes for new books. An increase of 10 percent in new book prices would raise used sales by less than 1 percent. In economics jargon, the cross-price elasticity of demand is small.

One plausible explanation of this finding is that there are two distinct types of buyers: some purchase only new books, while others are quite happy to buy used books. As a result, the used market does not have a big impact in terms of lost sales in the new market.

Moreover, the presence of lower-priced books on the Amazon Web site, Mr. Bezos has noted, may lead customers to "visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads to higher sales of new books." The data appear to support Mr. Bezos on this point.

Applying the authors' estimate of the displaced sales effect to Amazon's sales, it appears that only about 16 percent of the used book sales directly cannibalized new book sales, suggesting that Amazon's used-book market added $63.2 million to its profits.

Furthermore, consumers greatly benefit from this market: the study's authors estimate that consumers gain about $67.6 million. Adding in Amazon's profits and subtracting out the $45.3 million of losses to authors and publishers leaves a net gain of $85.5 million.

All in all, it looks like the used book market creates a lot more value than it destroys.

Hal R. Varian is a professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/te...y/28scene.html





Wireless in the Classroom: Necessity or Distraction?

Wireless has been an academic boon to most students and faculty. Students can access course materials, do research and contact professors. But it also permits – or even invites – a style of multi-tasking unavailable just a few years ago.

Walk across the back quad at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, or through the dining hall at Loyola University in New Orleans, and students – sunning themselves between classes or grabbing a snack – will still have their minds plugged into the World Wide Web.

And that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on who you ask.

“Wireless technology brings the internet to the discussion no matter where they are,” says James Dalton, executive director of information technology at Roanoke. “The barriers to where you use the internet have been broken. The domain of internet connectivity is extended to the entire campus. Students can do research, check email or send instant messages while they are eating lunch, working in the library or sitting outside.”

Since the late 90s, college campuses have been installing palm-sized antennas around their campuses. Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale was a pioneer, outfitting wireless areas in 41 buildings in Florida. Its law school was the first in the nation to go wireless in 1997.

Now nearly every college campus has at least a few wireless areas, resulting in increasing numbers of students toting laptops to class.

The new technology has been an academic boon to most students and faculty. Students can access course materials, do research and contact professors. But it also permits – or even invites – a style of multi-tasking unavailable just a few years ago. Students can play video games, instant message friends and even watch movies – all while faculty are lecturing.

“In the last couple of years it’s become an issue that none of us were expecting,” says Lisa Smith-Butler, law library director at NSU, who directs a program the law school has been using that lets professors monitor their students’ Internet use more closely.

“A fairly typical scene in one of my classes might look like this,” says Dr. Gerald Smith, professor of religion at Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee, “A young woman is sitting with one leg folded under the other, shoes on the floor, with her cellphone on waiting for a text message, her iPod is draped around her neck and during class she may insert her ear phones from time to time.

“On screen, she is surfing CNN, but has open another page for the Speedo bathing suit site, and she is typing a quick email note to her mother to let her know she got back alright from Atlanta last night. She will respond to three quick questions from me by jumping to the Google page she already has open – and before the end of the hour, she will have asked me a couple of questions.”

Opinions differ on how extensive digital doodling has become. Smith argues that “goofing off” is a highly-charged token in the ongoing inter- generational culture wars.

“Basically, the problem over wireless in the classroom comes down to – as trite and commonplace as it may sound – a generation gap,” he says. “My faculty colleagues, as a rule, do not download music, play computer games, play with Gameboys, Xbox or Game Cube, do not blog, use ICQ or IM, do not text message on their cellphones, and seldom surf the ‘Net for fun. More importantly, they do not bring these things into their classrooms or into their instructional styles.”

“Profs simply do not know how to relate to someone who is looking at them, typing, and listening to music at the same time they are lecturing,” he says. “They simply cannot believe that people can learn while doing three or four things at the same time.”

He sees only opportunity to evolve a new style of teaching that adapts to the digital environment today’s students are used to. For instance, he asks his students to use their computers a dozen or more times in class – asking them to “Google” answers, look up illustrations, take notes via an email they’ll send to themselves after class, and surfing the ‘Net for news.

The wireless trend may tread a fine line between asset or distraction, but without it, today’s digital generation “would have been bored to insanity by now,” says Smith. “Wired or wireless is all the same; it is the recovery of learning and its redemption from the drudges.”
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/513376/?sc=swtn





Local News

Should I Be Downloading Music For Free?

We asked for your advice on the following question:

My friends and I all like to burn our music CDs and share them. Why pay $15 for a CD when you can get it for free, right? Also, we always download music for free and put it on our iPods. I've been feeling kind of guilty about this lately, because I guess technically we're stealing. Do you think what we're doing is wrong?

Getting free music off the Internet can be illegal, and in some cases, you can even go to jail for doing that! So instead of getting your iPod's music for free, you have the option of going to Web sites and buying the music. Therefore, you will not only have a reason to not feel guilty, but you also will not be getting a free ride, meaning you won't be taking the easy way out of things. When you grow older and you get a job, you'll learn that no one gets a free ride, so on the bright side, this experience can gear you up for that.

To answer your concern about burning CDs, instead of doing that, you can just save up your money to buy one. CDs are not that expensive, and even if you don't have enough for one, I'm pretty sure there are places in your neighborhood where you can buy used ones for a reasonable/inexpensive price. You can also earn the money from your parents by doing cleaning around your house, or baby-sitting.

Another option is to pitch in with your friends to get enough money for the CD. When you all earn enough for the CD, then after it's bought you can all share it. You can compromise and decide who gets to take it home on the weekends, or the weekdays, and so on. Finally, you have the option of buying it from your friend if he/she does not like it, or is not satisfied with it. There are many, many more options, but these are just a few to help you out. I hope I helped a bit!
By Ayisha Arowolo, Middletown

Well, it is breaking federal law to burn and share CDs. You don't always have to pay $15 a CD to get music. Some things, like Napster, are perfectly legal. You pay only $9.99 a month to have access to unlimited songs. Another place like that is iTunes, which is good for an iPod. It is your choice to do this, but if you get caught, you may have to pay a hefty fine, or even go to jail.
By Jenna Quaranta, Goshen

Downloading music is free and easy, but it gives no support to the artists. On the other hand, you can go to the store and actually buy the music, but CDs aren't cheap. But if you really like certain artists, downloading the music for free is no way to help support them. Perhaps if you are stuck on downloading music, find a P2P (peer-to-peer) file- sharing Web site that costs money to subscribe. This way, you're paying for the songs you download (and in most cases, it's a bit cheaper than buying a whole CD) and it's legal. This should give your conscience a bit of a break, and let you get the music you want.
By Emily Curry, Goshen

Legally speaking, you are wrong, since downloading/sharing music is against the law. Neither record companies nor music artists are receiving proper compensation when this occurs. I wouldn't encourage you and your friends to continue illegal downloading, but if you choose to, just be aware of the possible (but rare) consequences you might face.
By Samantha Mascia, Milford, Pa.

It depends from what point of view you're looking. I myself tape CDs that I like onto a tape, or tape songs off the radio, and have done it forever. I guess technically it's wrong, but ... even my grandparents have always done it. I believe that $15 for a CD is too much. I guess you shouldn't feel too guilty; a lot more people do it than you even may imagine. Just use your head in whatever you pick.
By Nicky Giroux, Montgomery

I don't think it's wrong because it's new technology that's enabling us to do this and music artists make plenty of money selling CDs anyway; they don't need any more extra money. If you wanna download music, do it!
By Rachel Matsil, Monroe-Woodbury High School

You guess you're technically stealing?! Please, you are stealing! Ask your parents to get you a NapsterCard. It allows you to download music legally. Haven't you seen that recent commercial about downloading music illegally? You should know better. You're asking if it is wrong, and yet you're answering yourself by saying it's basically stealing. Use your head – it comes in handy!
By Sierra-Danae Wheeler, Maybrook

I think that you and your friend are doing no harm by downloading music off the Internet. You should keep on doing it. To tell the truth, I sometimes download music myself. Technically it is not stealing 'cuz it is free. You shouldn't feel bad about it.
By Amanda Jahn, Forestburgh

I'm 11 so I don't know much about this, but I share CDs, too. I don't download anything because I know that's illegal, but as long as you're burning the CDs that one of you bought and only use them for yourself without intent to sell, I think that's OK.
By Roxayne (Rocky) Wolf, Bloomingburg

Technically, downloading music for free is stealing, but many just see it as an easier way to listen to their favorite music without having to buy the CD at full price. You, on the other hand, are realizing that maybe what you and everyone else is doing isn't right. It seems that finally your moral values are starting to kick in. Since many do see downloading as stealing, music sites have been constructed where you still can find all your favorite music and download it for a small fee. This is still better than having to buy a CD. By taking this route you are showing that you respect the hard work that goes into the making of the music and feel that it should be rewarded. Think about it: If everyone just downloaded music for free, who would want to still keep working so hard to make it if everyone was just going to steal it from them?
By Alexis Bogart, Slate Hill

Next week's question:

First dates are the worst. I never know where to take a girl or how to act. How can I get a conversation started to get her to feel comfortable with me? Where are some good places to go around here? Any suggestions to make sure I'll get a second date?
http://www.recordonline.com/archive/...8/kidsadvi.htm

















Until next week,

- js.





















Current Week In Review



Recent WiRs -

July 23rd, July 16th, July 9th, July 2nd, June 25th, June 18th

Jack Spratt's Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black

[floydian slip]

Next week's question:

First dates are the worst. I never know where to take a girl or how to act. How can I get a conversation started to get her to feel comfortable with me? Where are some good places to go around here? Any suggestions to make sure I'll get a second date?

LOL! just have fun and she will too, be yourself, treat her like a friend and dont stare at her tits. try indian(eastern) food