Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 15th, ’05

[JackSpratts]

"We are disappointed that politicians of both parties chose to toss overboard the First Amendment and free artistic and creative expression in favor of political expediency." – Doug Lowenstein


"It's kind of ironic [Schwarzenegger 's] protecting kids from himself." – Jason Della Rocca


"Recording industries on both sides of the Pacific are trying to find all kinds of schemes to make more money. They have this alternative commercial channel, and they're just trying to block it or tax it." – Tim Bajarin


"users are like sheep. they stick to what they know." – Camille Le On


"It's like charging riders when they board the bus, and then again when they get off." – Naoki Koizumi


"It's ridiculous to ban. I'm paying $45,000 a year to go to college and I'm a struggling artist, so if there's free music or movies out there, I'm going to take it." – Jessica Bhargava


"Just say no to DRM." – David Berlind






































October 15th





P2P Activity Doubles In Two Years

Despite the best efforts of the music industry, peer-to-peer activity has more than doubled over the past two years according to the latest figures from a p2p tracking service.

Big Champagne reports that in September the average number of people logged onto p2p networks worldwide was 9,284,558. In September 2003 the figure was 4,319,182. Moreover the increase in the number of users since the 2004 figure of 6,784,574 suggest that there is no slowing in the rate of growth.

Music remains the cornerstone of p2p activity accounting for just over 70 per cent of all traffic while the swapping of movies remains at low levels. However as Big Champagne's tracking method cannot measure BitTorrent traffic the figures for the number of films swapped is likely to be lower than the actual level.

In July John Kennedy, CEO of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), said that the legal campaign against file sharers in 11 countries was being effective in dissuading people from file sharing

'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,' he said. 'Whether it's the fear of getting caught breaking the law, or the realisation that many networks could damage your home PC, attitudes are changing, and that is good news for the whole music industry.'

This may well be the case but if attitudes are changing it has yet to be reflected by statistics. Even in the US, where there have been approximately 15,000 lawsuits, the rise in p2p usage mirrors the global trend.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/78525/p2...two-years.html





Software Pirate To Pay $1.1 Million
Joris Evers

An admitted counterfeiter has agreed to pay Microsoft and Symantec $1.1 million in restitution, a victory in the software industry's fight against software piracy.

The award is part of a plea agreement in a criminal software piracy case in Houston, Symantec said Tuesday. The case came to court after a yearlong investigation by the Houston police and the FBI into the activities of Li Chen, who was found to have 5,100 copies of counterfeit Symantec software at his Houston business, Symantec said.

Chen pled guilty to one count of trademark infringement and agreed to pay Symantec $1,005,000 in restitution, the Cupertino, Calif., software maker said. Microsoft is to get $95,000, according to a copy of the agreement, which was signed on Aug. 29.

Law enforcement officials searched Chen's business, Microsource International, on Nov. 17, 2004. In addition to the pirated software, they found documents showing that Chen had sold counterfeit Symantec products with a retail value of more than $9.9 million, Symantec said.

"This guy was one of the largest distributors of pirated software. He had direct ties to China, where the counterfeit product was being produced," said Cris Paden, a Symantec spokesman.

Microsoft worked with Symantec to support the Houston police and FBI in this case, said Bonnie MacNaughton, a senior attorney at the Redmond, Wash., software giant. "Microsoft is very pleased with the outcome and law enforcement's support for intellectual property protection," she said in a statement provided by Microsoft's public relations agency.

Symantec and Microsoft both have significant ongoing initiatives to fight software piracy. Since September 2003, Symantec has won judgments in criminal and civil court of more than $19.5 million in damages against various entities for selling counterfeit Symantec software, the company said.
http://news.com.com/Software+pirate+...3-5884914.html





Theater Cashier Faces Prison For Bootlegging, Posting Movies

A 19-year-old movie theater cashier faces eight years in prison after pleading guilty to bootlegging movies and posting them to the Web, prosecutors said.

Curtis Salisbury, who worked in a St. Louis, Mo., multiplex theater, admitted that he recorded ``Bewitched'' and ``The Perfect Man'' this summer. He uploaded the movies onto a site created by FBI agents in Northern California as part of ``Operation Copycat,'' a sting to fight movie piracy.

Salisbury pleaded guilty Monday in San Jose federal court to a provision of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, which prohibits using recording equipment to make copies of movies in theaters. The conviction is the first in the sting.

Salisbury and several friends snuck into the projection room after the theater closed and recorded directly from the projector.

He was not paid for uploading the movies, but had discussed payment, said a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office.

Sentencing was scheduled for February. Salisbury also faces a $250,000 fine.

Six people in the Northern District of California have been charged in connection with the sting operation, and investigators have conducted 40 searches.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...printstory.jsp





8 Charged In Illegal Release Of 'Star Wars'
AP

Eight Californians were charged Tuesday with involvement in the illegal release of "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" before the movie appeared in theaters.

Court documents allege the piracy began with a "screener" copy of the film at a post-production facility where one of the defendants worked and ended with the movie being released online the day before its worldwide release. "Screeners" are copies of films made available for such purposes as reviewing or for use by voters in industry awards programs.

The case is the latest attempt to crack down on movie piracy by law enforcement and the film industry.

All are accused of misdemeanor copyright infringement charges that carry up to one year in prison. One of the defendants also faces a felony count of uploading the movie onto the Internet, which carries a sentence as long as three years in prison if convicted.

All eight defendants are scheduled to appear in federal court next month.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/12757257.htm





Hollywood Suits Hit Download Sites
Brooks Boliek

Hollywood filed a new round of copyright-infringement lawsuits Thursday against a half-dozen Web sites, alleging that they attempted to fool consumers into thinking the sites were legitimately offering copyrighted motion picture images for download.

In fact, the suits allege, the sites falsely claim or imply that by using their services, consumers can download movies legally on the Internet. Actually, they merely connect users to peer-to- peer sites that have pirated copies of movies, according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America (MPAA), the trade group representing the major studios. Should they download such movies, the consumer commits copyright infringement, which can bring serious consequences.

"There are plenty of ways to download movies legally online, which is good for consumers and good for the movie industry," MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said. "These scam businesses charge customers for facilitating illegal downloads of movies, which could lure innocent consumers into becoming lawbreakers. We won't tolerate this scam premised on the illegal swapping of valuable movie content."

The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District Court of New York against http://wwwDownloadshield.com, http://www.Full-movie-downloads.com, http://www.MP3eternity.com, http:// www.Moviesadvance.com, http://www.Thedownloadplace.com and http://www.Easydownloadcenter.com.

According to the MPAA suits, these Web sites charge a subscription fee ranging from $20 for a three-month trial to $40 for lifetime membership ostensibly enabling the member to download an unlimited number of movies online from P2P networks, which often include movies still in theaters.

Noting that these downloads are unauthorized and illegal, the MPAA is seeking a court order forbidding the sites to continue operating.

This marks the third round of lawsuits filed against alleged pirate sites and the first such lawsuit following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in MGM v. Grokster, which ruled in June that file-sharing networks could be liable when users copy movies, music and other protected works without permission.

The lawsuits came a day after a federal grand jury indicted three individuals in conjunction with two simultaneous actions, "Operation Remaster" and "Operation Buccaneer." The raids on 13 locations in California and Texas targeted individuals who were suspected of involvement in a large-scale network believed to be illegally manufacturing and distributing millions of pirated CDs and DVDs. It was the largest raid ever conducted against suspected illegal CD and DVD labs in the U.S.

More than 500,000 CDs and more than 1 million CD inserts were seized, along with thousands of DVDs and 3,300 "stampers" -- the metal discs used to press multiple copies.

In addition to the upstate raids, the Los Angeles Police Department's Organized Crime Vice Division this week executed a search warrant at two locations in Los Angeles county supplied by facilities raided in Operations Remaster and Buccaneer. In this action, authorities said, 20,655 replicated CDs were seized from a telemarketing company offering counterfeit CDs to numerous Latin retailers and a connected storage facility.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-PIRACY-DC.XML





Ex-Miramax Chiefs Halfway to Financial Goal for New Studio
David M. Halbfinger and Andrew Ross Sorkin

If all goes according to plan, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the former heads of Miramax, will soon have raised more than $420 million for their movie studio, people briefed on the efforts said Thursday.

And if all goes according to an early version of their business plan, the new movie studio will be profitable by 2007, putting out 25 movies a year, and generating annual revenue of $1.9 billion.

That would give the new company annual sales greater than those of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before it was acquired by Sony and other investors this year. It would also give the Weinstein Company revenue roughly equal to the revenue of Miramax when the brothers ran it for the Walt Disney Company.

While many in Hollywood were skeptical of the ambitions of the Weinsteins, they appear to be closing in on meeting their goals.

In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, Weinstein Company Holdings, the venture of the brothers, reported it had raised $230.5 million from 18 equity investors thus far, out of an anticipated $420 million.

People briefed on the fund-raising - who insisted on anonymity, saying they feared that identification might disrupt the deal - said the equity offering was already oversubscribed, and that the amount raised would exceed the goal. Investors so far, these people said, include strategic partners like the advertising agency WPP Group and the film-processing company Technicolor, which will process and distribute Weinstein Company films. (At Miramax, the Weinsteins had used a Technicolor competitor, Deluxe.)

Other recent investors include Mark Cuban, the owner of HDNet, a high-definition satellite TV network, as well as the Dallas Mavericks; the luxury goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton; and TF1, a French television broadcaster. As previously disclosed, the biggest investors in the Weinsteins include their investment banker, Goldman, Sachs & Company, and Tarak Ben Ammar, a French-Tunisian financier, producer and chairman of Quinta Communications.

The Weinsteins are also still working on a plan to issue what is expected to be some $500 million in securitized debt.

Bob and Harvey Weinstein declined to comment. A company spokeswoman, Sarah Levinson, said by e-mail message that the company was "confident that it has the operational capacity and financial resources to successfully meet its goals and carry out its business plan."

While a fuller picture of the new company and its finances is likely to emerge within weeks with the completion of the equity offering, a working draft of a confidential memorandum to investors, written in June, provides a wealth of previously undisclosed details about the business strategy for the new studio.

The draft, provided by a potential investor who received it, details their inventory of completed, current and still-sketchy projects; the kinds of movies they plan to make; the types of deals they intend to make with distributors like cable operators and pay-cable television networks; and their relationships with directors, producers and screenwriters.

For example, the Weinsteins say in the draft that "it has become critical to control one's own destiny" by owning their own home-video distribution; people close to the brothers' planning confirm that they intend to work out a collaboration with an established video distributor.

One conclusion that jumps out is that if Miramax became known as the house that Quentin Tarantino built, the Weinstein Company, as envisioned back in June, might become known as the house that Michael Moore built.

Two Moore films, one this year and one next, were projected to bring the Weinsteins their largest profits each year: "Fahrenheit 9/11.5," a sequel to last year's blockbuster, would examine the run-up to the 2004 presidential election and is projected to deliver $47 million in profit; and "Sicko," on the health care industry and health maintenance organizations, is projected to deliver $52 million to the bottom line. Neither film was included in a public announcement of coming projects earlier this week.

Under the separation agreement between the Weinsteins and Disney, the brothers were given sequel rights to 15 franchise or potentially franchise projects, including a remake of "Halloween." They also took 13 TV projects from Disney, including future seasons of "Project Greenlight" and "Project Runway"; a pilot called "Emergency Sex," on United Nations aid workers; a potential reality series based on the movie "Rounders;" and "Dangerous Company," a series for NBC based on a novel by Peter Bart, the editor of the trade publication Variety.

Some of the draft's language seems aimed far more at investors than at peers of the Weinsteins in Hollywood and independent film circles: "The Weinstein Company will be less focused on 'prestige pictures' and more focused on the types of films that have made Dimension so successful over the past 11 years," it assures, referring to Bob Weinstein's Dimension label, which has made genre films like the "Scream" and "Scary Movie" series.

As for the new Weinstein label itself, the draft makes clear that Harvey Weinstein intends to continue making "high-quality commercial films" like Miramax's "Good Will Hunting" and "Chicago"; "moderate-budget prestige pictures" like "The English Patient" and "Shakespeare in Love"; English-language acquisitions; and foreign films like "Amelie" and "Like Water for Chocolate."

There is no mention of plans to risk making movies in the vein of high-budget box-office disappointments like "Cold Mountain" or "Gangs of New York."

David M. Halbfinger reported fromLos Angeles for this article and Andrew Ross Sorkin from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/07/bu.../07studio.html





Legitimate Music Hits A Higher Note

The way we listen to music has come a long way from the old days of iconic British pop music show, "Top of the Pops". Popping down to the local shop to snap up the latest vinyl number one in the singles charts is a fading memory as the digital way of doing things takes hold.

Downloading songs either online or to a mobile phone cuts out all the hassle (and some of the expense) of purchasing the physical product. But while the Asian mobile digital music industry is already pretty well served with competition, online services have yet to rival those in the US or parts of Europe, admits Sudhanshu Sarronwala, chief executive officer (CEO) of Soundbuzz, Asia's largest digital online and mobile music retailer. Soundbuzz boasts a digital library of over 300,000 songs, perhaps just 10 per cent of its ultimate size, says its CEO.

Creating an industry

According to Sarronwala, the challenge for Soundbuzz, at least in the short term, is not so much from Apples' ubiquitous iPod and its closed iTunes online store, but in developing an industry partly undermined by illegal and unlicensed websites. Progress is being made, says Sarronwala.

His optimism has been fuelled by a number of legal rulings against P2P (Peer to Peer) websites and consumers in countries across the globe including the US, Australia and South Korea in the last three months. "(The legal rulings) are not going to directly hit business positively straight away, but I think it's one of two or three things that need to happen," says Sarronwala. "There are a remarkable number of people and parents who had no idea that P2P sites were illegal. In many cases there were P2P sites that were even charging money, which sort of legitimizes it for the average consumer. Many people weren't in favour of going to consumers directly and attacking P2P sites that were encouraging the abuse of copyright, but it just had to be done," he adds.

Sarronwala believes that by 2008 or 2009, 25 to 30 per cent of the total music market will be in a digital format. "In the final analysis, one or two generations down the track, is it going to be all digital? I would think that would be a large percentage which would be digital. I think there will always be a physical market, but I don't think that my eight year old son is ever going to buy a CD."

There is still some way to go before this situation is achieved. Of the top ten online digital music retailers last year in the US, just three were licensed. Moreover, there are around 2 billion songs traded illegally each month worldwide, mostly from the US. This figure dwarfs the legitimate industry which trades only 60 million songs per month, though Sarronwala points out that new business models involving a flat fee for unlimited songs have made the figures harder to compare.

Nevertheless, the rapid growth in the legitimate market is encouraging, he says. "A year and a half ago it was 2 billion versus zero. The emergence of a legitimate music market developing 60 million songs a month is fantastic in under two years."

Sarronwala claims to welcome the success of Apple's iPod and iTunes as a key to building momentum for the entire legitimate industry. "We are not talking about fighting for market share. At this point in time we are talking about the creation of an industry, the creation of a distribution mechanism... We still believe that there are not enough legitimate music services. When we look around the region we are still astonished to find that Soundbuzz is still the only legitimate player across multi-cultures. You need more than one player. You need a critical mass." So far, key markets for Soundbuzz's online business include India, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan while the company's mobile business covers 13 markets of Asia minus Japan and South Korea.

Alliance strategy

The growth of the market has seen Soundbuzz outgrow its old strategy. In the early years of the digital and online music industry, companies like Soundbuzz provided the content, licensing, technology platform and then integrated the service with the portal's billing system, leaving the portal to market the product to their subscribers. These days they have become more proactive, looking to strategic alliances with consumer brands like Levis or banks to promote the brand. "Over the last year or so we have started interacting with the consumers directly as Soundbuzz," says Yen Ong, Soundbuzz General Manger in Asia.

In addition, central to their plans is Soundbuzz's forging strategic relationships with MP3 manufacturer Creative Technologies (they hope to have a similar arrangement with iRiver "by early next year"). "We had to go back and ask ourselves what's the music system we want to create in the Asian environment?" says Sarronwala. "The interoperability of the format was pretty much the key to that and the dominant format which is licensed openly across all these formats is Windows Media."

Aside from Apple, all the major device manufacturers, including Creative Technologies, iRiver and Samsung read Windows Media format. The upshot is a system similar to iTunes and with ease of access of critical importance. As soon as the device is connected to a desktop the user is taken directly to the Soundbuzz music store. "All consumers will need the software for sure because they need it to manage the device," says Yen Ong.

Further strategic relationships with IP servers enable the company to sidestep the potentially thorny issue of payments online. Consumers are reluctant to use credit cards for small ticket items and in Asia credit card usage over the Internet is rarer still. Many consumers may also be too young to even own credit cards. Instead, an agreement with IP servers sees charges tagged onto the monthly bill by the IP server in the same way mobile download fees are tagged on to monthly bills. This has been an essential step in Soundbuzz's success, which divides about 50-50 between mobile and online. "Today we differentiate our business as online and mobile. My guess is that by 2007 we won't," says Sarronwala noting that mobile market penetration is much higher, started earlier and technical convergence is likely to make downloading even more widely accessible.

Next step: China's mainland

Meanwhile, Soundbuzz's preparations for a mainland rollout gathers pace. Sarronwala is clearly excited by the 30 million broadband connections and hundreds of millions of Internet users. "The Chinese spend on mobile music, gaming, matchmaking, and all sorts of online services. The culture of paying for products there is not as alien as people would have us believe."

Pricing will have to be got right though, admits Sarronwala. One song in Hong Kong is worth about US$1 while in India it costs about US$0.40 "for you get a full track which you can burn to a CD and port to your device. The pricing for the main China market is going to have to be reflective of that market," says Sarronwala.

Either way, Asia is going to continue to play the central role in the development of the nascent digital music industry. "The new business models in Asia are dramatically different from those in the West." The US$4 billion Ringtone business is being replaced by "Truetones", "Mastertones" and "ring-back tones", all Asian developments. "Interaction with music is changing dramatically. Even ten years ago, the primary aim of music was to entertain. Now with digital music, a lot of music utilization is for expression. Asia is leading that."
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english...ent_482972.htm





RealPlayer, Helix Users At Risk Of Attack
Dawn Kawamoto

Popular media players RealPlayer and Helix Player are at risk of a security vulnerability that could let malicious attackers launch remote attacks on a user's system, security experts say.

A flaw has been discovered in RealNetworks' RealPlayer version 10.0.5.756 Gold and Helix Player 1.0.5.757 Gold running on Linux or Unix operating systems, according to a report released Tuesday by the French Security Incident Response Team, or FrSIRT.

Attack code that takes advantage of the flaw, a so-called exploit, has been posted on the Internet, increasing the security risk to users.

The RealNetworks products are vulnerable because of a format string error that occurs when a malformed .rp or .rt file is clicked and players are launched. Malicious attackers can take advantage of the error to take remote control of users' computer systems.

Bug researcher Contex discovered the flaws and notified RealNetworks about the vulnerabilities, but the company has yet to issue a security update, said Thomas Kristensen, chief technology officer for Secunia, a security firm that rates the vulnerability as "highly critical."

Kristensen, pointing to an advisory issued by Contex on the Open Security Group site, noted that the bug researcher was forced to prematurely publish the exploit code.

"Real has been duly informed about the issue and (they) are fixing (it). Sadly, though, it seems someone is trying to pinch my research. As such, I have been forced to release this advisory sooner than hoped," according to a Contex posting. "Until Real gets a new release out, do not play untrusted media with RealPlayer or Helix Player."

Kristensen noted the reasoning behind publishing the exploit code before a patch has been developed.

"By publishing all the details about the vulnerability, it helps people understand they have to be careful when following the links to the media files affected by these vulnerabilities," Kristensen said.

Representatives from RealNetworks were not immediately available for comment.

RealNetworks has issued several security patches for its media players this past year. The latest was in June, when it released fixes for four vulnerabilities in its popular RealPlayer media player.
http://news.com.com/RealPlayer%2C+He...3-5884096.html





Oyez, yoyez, yeegan, yagen

First Swedish File-Sharing Trial Opens

The first trial against a person accused of file-sharing begins here Tuesday.

The new law against downloading copyrighted material went into effect here on July 1st. This first case is against a 28 year old from Västerås, west of Stockholm, accused of making a popular Swedish film available over the Internet through a file-sharing program.

Meanwhile, the Swedish police have asked the Data Inspection Board if it is legal to post recordings from police interrogations on the Internet. Last spring the police in Ljusdal, north of Stockholm, questioned a person over the telephone twice. That person apparently recorded both interviews and has posted the sound on a website, along with extracts from a letter from the police.

The police say the recordings have nothing to do with case investigations, but they wonder if putting the phone call sound on the Internet violates the privacy of the officer involved.

The Data Inspection Board has not responded but a board lawyer tells the newspaper “Ljusdals-Posten” that harmless material can be put on the Net, but it should be removed if someone feels insulted and asks for its removal.
http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/Internation...artikel=710807


File-Sharing Evidence Questioned

The first trial against a person accused of file-sharing here has raised a number of questions about the validity of evidence gathered for the police by private interests.

A 28 year old from Västerås, west of Stockholm, is accused of distributing a popular Swedish film over the Internet. But in court Tuesday, he said he had only confessed to downloading music and films, which did not become illegal until later. He says the police never once asked about the film, which he says he never had on his computer.

The evidence against him was gathered by the Anti-Pirate Bureau, a controversial music and film industry lobby group, which says they found the film offered from a specific IP address. Apparently the only police action was to ask an Internet Service Provider who had that address.

The defence spent several hours Tuesday pointing out the uncertainty of using IP addresses, which can be shared among many users or even hijacked. Critics have charged that the screenshots such as those presented by the lobby group can be easily faked.
http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/Internation...artikel=711619


File Sharing Trial Closes In Confusion

Sweden's first trial concerning illegal file sharing closed on Tuesday having thrown up more questions than answers.

Not only is the old copyright law which the case was based upon unclear and the file sharing technology complicated, but the defendant retracted the admission he made in police interviews.

The 28 year old on trial at Västmanland district court in Västerås admitted to police that he had made the Swedish film Hip Hip Hora available to others via the file sharing programme DC in December last year. Or so investigators thought.

In court, the 28 year old took back his apparent confession and explained that there had been a misunderstanding. He thought he was being charged with downloading copyright-protected material - which was not illegal until 1st July this year, when the new copyright law came into effect.

In the police interview, the man was never questioned directly about the film the case was based upon, but in his evidence to the court he was very clear:

"I have never had that film at home - I have never downloaded that," he said.

The case is founded almost entirely on evidence from the anti-piracy organisation, Antipiratbyrå, (APB), which represents the Swedish film and computer games industries.

APB accessed a local network with the DC programme and found Hip Hip Hora available, recorded the distributor's IP address and reported him to the police. The police turned to the internet service provider Bredbandsbolaget, which was able to confirm that the IP address belonged to the Västerås man.

Torbjörn Persson, the defendant's lawyer, devoted several hours to demonstrating the lack of certainty when an IP address is used as evidence - not least due to the fact that in many blocks of flats there are unencrypted wireless networks which allow anyone to link to the internet.

The judges - who, Swedish media were amused to note, were all in their late middle ages - were treated to a platter of terms such as spoofing, hijacking, sniffer and monkey-in-the-middle, all describing ways of exploiting another user's network connection.

Torbjörn Persson attacked APB which he described as 'informers' and 'provocateurs', and he criticised the police for failings in their investigation.

The case has been front page news in Sweden, where some 800,000 people are said to participate in file sharing, and the outcome was expected to set a precedent for similar cases which are lined up at courts around the country.

But since the old copyright law was in many respects less clear than the new one, the verdict may prove to have the opposite effect.

The prosecutor made no specific demands regarding punishment, saying instead that it was up to the court whether a guilty verdict should result in a fine or a suspended prison sentence.

The verdict is expected on 25th October.
http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?I...&date=20051012





Offering eDonkey Links To Copyrighted Material Constitutes A Violation Of German Copyright Law
Robert W. Smith

Regarding the lawsuit in which the Motion Picture Association of America sought a temporary injunction against the Swiss-hosted website The-Realworld.de (TRW) the opinion of the court has now been made public. Thus in its decision of July 15 2005 the District Court in Hamburg came to the following conclusion: The making available of "edited" links which allow the downloading of installments of TV series via the Internet file-exchange network eDonkey constitutes a violation of the German Copyright Act (UrhG).
Anzeige

The respondent in the case had operated a website which without the consent of the copyright holders in question contained links to eDonkey downloads from a diverse array of TV series such as "Emergency Room," "Sopranos" and "Alf." In the opinion of the judges from Hamburg this particular offer on the Internet gave the copyright holders a claim to injunctive relief in accordance with § 97 UrhG. They alone had the right to disseminate or make public the copyright-protected works of cinematographic art in question, the judges found.

The respondent was to be considered responsible as a disturber, the judges ruled, for as the party responsible for operating the website he had substantially facilitated access to the "pirated movie material." The same applied to the operator of the server on which the website was to be found, the judges noted. The latter had failed to heed a request by the copyright holders to block the website and was therefore also legally answerable. What was more, neither party had taken note of the demand issued to make a declaration of discontinuance with a penalty clause, the judges pointed out.

The ruling by the District Court in Hamburg is one of the first decisions to be reached on this topic. The amount in controversy in the case had been set at 150,000 euros. Whether an appeal against the decision has been filed is not yet known. On his website the operator is still calling for donations to help him fight the lawsuit.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/64375





China To Develop Its Own DVD Format

Announced next-generation standard based on HD DVD

For the second time in two years, China has announced plans to develop its own next-generation DVD standard to break the monopoly of foreign companies and avoid paying heavy licensing fees.

If successful, the move could add a new wrinkle to the battle between HD DVD and the competing Blu-ray Disc formats over which will become the dominant new DVD standard.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the new standard will be based on but incompatible with HD DVD, which is being promoted by Toshiba Corp. and Universal Studios, as well as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., the leading suppliers of chips and software for most of the world's personal computers.

The Chinese standard, not expected to reach markets until at least 2008, would provide higher definition, better sound and better anti-piracy measures, Xinhua quoted Lu Da, deputy director of the government-affiliated National Disc Engineering Center, as saying earlier this week.

"With such format and related standards," Lu said, "We could have our own voice in the DVD industry."

The announcement marks China's latest attempt to leverage its manufacturing muscle to play by its own terms in the home video market. Up to 80 percent of DVD players are made in China, but makers have to cough up around 40 percent of the cost of each player to license holders, according to Chinese reports.

China began developing its own DVD standard in 1999, rolling out EVD, or enhanced versatile disc, in November 2003 with a vow to shake off dependence on foreign standards. Despite strong government backing, the initiative fizzled amid a legal battle between the technology's developer and a consortium of Chinese player manufacturers. Protoype EVD players were introduced in 2004 but never established a presence in the market.

Xinhua didn't give a name for the new HD DVD-based standard, and it wasn't clear whether it had borrowed technology from the EVD standard. No directory listing could be obtained for the National Disc Engineering Center on Friday, which was a holiday in China.

HD DVD's backers say they have made inroads with Chinese manufacturers, whose support is vital to quickly deploying the technology at a low price.

Blu-ray is backed by Sony Corp., Apple Computer Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc., along with a variety of other tech companies and studios.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9618578/





Headline Links Can Be Dangerous In Japan
Mike Yamamoto

U.S. courts, by design or default, have generally taken a laissez-faire approach to the digital republication of printed works as long as it adheres to longstanding brick-and-mortar copyright law. But plaintiffs in other lands don't always agree with American law, of course, and some are taking action to stop what they believe is blatant copyright violation here and abroad.

Earlier this year, Agence France Presse sued Google on charges of unauthorized use of the news agency's photos and stories, a case that's still pending in U.S. federal court. Last week, a Japanese newspaper won a Tokyo court decision against Digital Alliance, a small company that was judged to be publishing its news headlines without permission.

Although the Yomiuri Shimbun was awarded only about $2,000 in damages from Digital, which is also based in Japan, the ruling could have enormous ramifications because it means that unauthorized use of headlines alone could be considered illegal. If this kind of judicial interpretation spreads to other nations, it could jeopardize countless sources of information now taken for granted on the Web, such as blogs, search engines, RSS feeds and a seemingly infinite number of sites that provide some form of headline aggregation.

Blog community response:

"Does the first news source to write a headline get to stop everyone else from using it? Think of the mess that would cause after mergers: 'Company X Buys Company Y.' Whoever gets the story out can then stop everyone else from using that headline."
--techdirt

"Copyright law has two expressions: the state's law (the written-down law backed up by the power of the state) and the natural law (the way things work in the absence of state law). Many people don't understand natural law."
--The Angry Economist

"The DMCA is a bad law written by the wrong people with somewhat decent intentions. Though the goal was to update the outdated copyright code for the online world, it's had a million unintended effects that have done anything but protect copyrights and creativity."
--Plagiarism Today

http://news.com.com/2061-11199_3-5892643.html





Japan's Music Industry Wants Fee on Sales of Latest Digital Players
Martin Fackler

In the United States, recording labels want a bigger slice of Apple's success in digital music by seeking higher prices on downloaded songs. Japan's music industry has a different idea: putting a fee on iPods.

The industry has asked the Japanese government to charge a royalty, to be added to the retail price of portable digital music players like Apple's iPod, which has been explosively popular here. Money earned from the fee, which will be probably be 2 to 5 percent of the retail price, would go to recording companies, songwriters and artists as compensation for revenue lost from home copying.

It is a familiar story of vested interests feeling threatened by new technologies. Like their counterparts in the United States, Japanese recording companies are struggling to catch up with the Internet and the advances in digital recording technology that are transforming their industry.

But in Japan, the proposed fee has also touched off an unusual public battle over the influence that industry groups here still wield over the government and economy.

As a powerful political lobby, Japan's recording industry expected to get its way when it first asked for the fee last fall. Instead, its proposal remains stalled in one of Japan's government committees. The news media, meanwhile, mock the fee as the "iPod tax."

"This is typical of how industry groups try to manipulate government at the expense of consumers," said Hiroko Mizuhara, head of the Consumers Union of Japan. "A lot of things in Japan have changed, but this hasn't."

The recording industry has already succeeded in slowing the arrival of Apple's iTunes music download service to Japan through its reluctance to negotiate licensing deals, people in the industry said.

Apple opened a Japanese version of iTunes in August, two years after its introduction in the United States, but without songs from the major Japanese labels like Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Japan, which still have not signed licensing agreements.

ITunes received a warmer welcome from Japanese consumers, who bought one million songs in the first four days, according to Apple, which declined to comment for this article.

The proposed fees in Japan come as the music industry in the United States appears to be jealously looking at Apple, whose iPod and iTunes dominate their respective global markets. Record executives in the United States have recently said that they wanted to renegotiate and raise prices of songs sold by iTunes when licensing agreements expire next spring.

"Recording industries on both sides of the Pacific are trying to find all kinds of schemes to make more money," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at the Creative Strategies consulting firm in Campbell, Calif. "They have this alternative commercial channel, and they're just trying to block it or tax it."

The proposed fee would affect portable digital players that store data on internal hard-disk drives and flash memory computer chips - which include not only iPods but rivals like the Sony Walkman and other portable devices.

A fee of 2 percent is already imposed on devices using earlier digital recording technologies, like compact disc and minidisc recorders. Japanese manufacturers have been longtime opponents of such fees. The fees are similar to a 2 percent surcharge imposed by the United States government in 1992 on sales of digital tape recorders, the first generation of digital home recording equipment, also to compensate for copying.

The current fight in Japan has particular political significance because it is taking place in a government advisory committee, which helps the powerful bureaucracies set policy. These committees are usually tame panels that reflect vested interests because they are packed with insiders from the industries being regulated.

The committee, under the Agency for Cultural Affairs, is split over the issue of whether royalties included in the price of music at online stores allow users to copy songs to portable players. The recording industry says the royalties only cover transmission to the listener's personal computer, not for copying from there to a player like an iPod. Opponents counter that consumers copying to a player for their personal use should not be forced to pay twice to get a song from iTunes to their iPod.

"It's like charging riders when they board the bus, and then again when they get off," said Naoki Koizumi, a law professor in Tokyo at Keio University who serves on the committee.

The Japanese recording industry complains that the sudden rise of the portable digital players is robbing it of the revenue that used to come from the fees on CD and MD recorders. Earnings from fees have fallen last year to 2.2 billion yen ($20 million) from 3.8 billion yen in 2000, according to the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers. "Now everyone who used to be using CD's and MD's are using iPods," said Koichi Numamura, head of the society's recording rights department. "We can't just sit by silently while we lose money."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/10/te...G2ouS6FUsSYzXw





Friday Morning Quarterback

Adelstein Hosts Town Meeting in Iowa On Deregulation

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein hosted a public forum at the University of Iowa (dubbed "Town Meeting on the Future of the Media"), addressing local concerns surrounding state of media consolidation and deregulation.

The forum, attended by citizens and broadcasters served as a pulpit for the necessity of local news media, with Commissioner Adelstein stating, "What we've done over the years is to pull our own fangs, and we have become basically a toothless tiger. The public is better served hearing many voices rather than a handful of giant voices across a number of outlets they own. There's virtually no coverage of local issues."

"I want your perspective on how well broadcasters are meeting the needs of your community," stated Adelstein before asking a series of questions. "Are they providing sufficient coverage of issues of local concern, including local elections? Do you have enough choice in news sources? Are broadcasters providing sufficient family friendly programming? Are you hearing local artists played on the radio?"

"We need your input on these vital issues. This is an opportunity for all members of the community to give their perspective on how issues of concern to them are treated. I encourage you to speak out and become part of the solution in this new media landscape. Your input will help assure that the commission is more responsive to the public in future media ownership reviews."

Adelstein expressed his desire to see that what the FCC does serves the public interest and corporate bottom lines as they move toward redrafting new rules that can avoid irreversible damage to local ownership at the hands of further corporate consolidation.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=129878


Clear Channel CEO Still Behind Media Ownership Changes
Mark Mays

In a speech given to the Progress And Freedom Foundation, Clear Channel President/CEO Mark Mays called for Congress to further loosen media ownership rules, to allow terrestrial radio stations to better compete with newer musical mediums. "Free radio is struggling. The cost of competing with new technologies and increased listener choice is staggering and profits are down," Mays said

Mays listed iPods, satellite radio, Internet radio and wireless phones as new competition for terrestrial radio stations, all of which he said is unregulated in comparison. "Free radio companies do not have the same freedom and flexibility as our competition, free radio companies are not able to move fast enough," he said.

Mays discussed at length the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated many ownership rules, and called for further relaxing of the rules, calling them "outdated restrictions." He added that broadcasters should be given the option to combine their resources to better roll out HD Radio. Specifically, Mays called for raising the ownership cap from 8 to 10 stations in markets with 60 or more stations. And in markets with 75 or more stations, Mays said the ownership cap should go up from 8 to 12.

Not everyone agrees with Mays' thoughts. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) spoke to Reuters, asking, "How much bigger does one need to get? We already have too much concentration in ownership."
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=123561





P2P File Sharing Declines In September, But Total Usage Up

A new report from BigChampagne shows that while P2P usage saw a slight drop in September, the total amount of users continues to skyrocket. In the U.S., the total number of unique users sharing simultaneously in September to 6.75 million, down from 6.87 million in August, which was the second-biggest number ever recorded. Globally there was a slight dip of 3.5 percent from August to September.

Meanwhile, the overall amount of total P2P users has shot up when compared to data from the past two years. In the States, the average number of simultaneous users jumped up 43.9 percent when compared to September of 2004. And when compared to September 2003, usage is up a shocking 133.3 percent. The global averages are not too far off, though the U.S. still makes up 72.7 percent of worldwide P2P traffic.

The RIAA continues to file lawsuits against illegal file-sharers, though as reported yesterday, many of those being sued are innocent of the charges.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=129521





Streaming Soars Among News/Talk Stations

A new study from News Generation looks at the new, second wave of streaming radio content online. Fifty News and Talk stations were surveyed in the top 50 markets, with 54 percent saying they are now streaming 90 percent of their on-air content. Additionally, 40 percent reported streaming all of their on-air content.

The stations reported that their overall goal with streaming audio is to keep listen drop-off to a minimum, with 54 percent saying their use their Web sites to keep their audience tuned it at all times. Only 26 percent said they were using the Web to bring in new listeners.

And who is maintaining station Web sites nowadays? According to the News/ Talk stations surveyed, 46 percent have their programming department managing their sites, with 28 percent reporting public affairs personnel and 24 percent saying their promotions department.

Stations are also ramping up on-air mentions of their Web sites, with 40 percent saying they require jocks to mention the station's site three times an hour.
http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=129079





Star Wreck - The Free Movie Going Around The Internet...
Seb

Broadband users have for some time been making use of their connections for downloading music, often over peer-to-peer (p2p) networks which have included both legal and illegal downloads, a matter discussed in the press every few days with legal action taken against a few users to make an example of copyright abuse. The Internet however offers many opportunities for new talent to shine whether it is in writing, music, film or any other area.

The open-source community has been developing software for years which has been free to use and modify but now a community has produced a feature length movie which is available for free download via p2p and their website at www.starwreck.com

"Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning" is a movie parody produced by Star Trek and Babylon 5 fans with an almost zero budget, excluding the time and dedication of hundreds of volunteers, the key actors, crew and in particular producer Samuli Torssonen. Much of the equipment was borrowed, scenes shot in Samuli's living room, and computer graphics were used to fill in many of the scenes. Without becoming a film critic, this low budget film is however of surprisingly good quality. In light of the free support received, the producer released the movie under the Creative Commons License which allows you to freely distribute the work.

Although many short movies are available on the Internet, and indeed this is not the first Star Wreck movie, it represents the next step in demonstrating how the Internet and broadband is likely to change yet another industry. We don't predict the end of the traditional film industry, but they will increasingly be challenged by the wider population dedicated to a cause. Having taken six years to produce, dedication is paramount.

Download and watch the movie from here.

Update 09/10/05 23:50 [seb]: The original article linked to the wrong Creative Commons license type for this work. Although anyone can freely distribute it, no derivative work or commercial use is allowed. More details of this can be found here.





The Bold Shall Make The Earth Rethink All Its Business Models

Internet entrepreneur Julie Meyer says gutsy start-ups need investors with vision

In December 2003, Lady Lynn de Rothschild, founder of several successful telecoms firms, addressed the Ariadne third anniversary party on the theme of The Next Big Thing. In her speech, she mentioned a little known start-up called Skype. In the back of the same room was Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype, who looked frankly shocked to have been mentioned.

Skype, now a leading VoIP (voice over internet protocol) provider, had built up a base of 54 million active users by the time it was sold to eBay for $4.1 billion last month.

'Disruptive' technologies and business models that require gutsy entrepreneurs and ambitious investors are back on the agenda. What Skype did well was become a phenomenon through massive PR, and by having a downloadable free application that offered a built-in incentive to get others to use it. Just like with fax machines, if you're the only one with one, you can't fax anyone. The Skype 'early adopters' encouraged friends and family to download Skype so that they could call up.

Skype's success was founded on Zennstrom's decade of experience in the telecoms industry. The emergence of mass- market broadband made the time right for Skype, although there were many start-ups that had been facilitating free phone calls over the PC through the internet. Skype linked the free internet calls over your PC with a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, giving it an inherent advantage over major telcos in terms of cost structure and customer benefit.

What lessons does Skype's success have for us?

First, Skype suggests to European investors who want to blame their poor financial results on a lack of good entrepreneurs that their lack of vision and ability to help start- ups scale their businesses globally might be the problem - rather than the dearth of the right people to back.

Second, Skype reminds us that the bold inherit the earth. One of the most amusing meetings I've ever attended was with Zennstrom and 12 executives from a big US telco who were eager to meet Niklas in early 2004; Skype was getting better known, but the US telco was still not realising how threatened it should be by Skype. Instead, it presented very elaborate details of what it thought it could offer Skype in terms of a partnership. Gradually, it started to dawn on it that Skype simply did not have to pay for the development of its network. In other words, Skype had an inherent structural advantage by virtue of being a P2P application. Because of this, Skype was rolling out a business model of free phone calls and paid-for services that would force telcos to change their business models forever.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, everyone was fêting the Google founders - the new billionaires who had taken the concept of internet search to a new level. Few seemed to know Zennstrom at Davos. That will change next year: the impact of the acquisition by eBay has had the effect of a tsunami throughout the European business community.

The point is that great internet entrepreneurs do exist in Europe; and indeed, it is possible to become one if one chooses an industry one knows about, understands how technology can make it more efficient or deliver a better customer benefit, has the right capital partner and addresses a global market.

Something global for the internet has finally come out of Europe post Tim Berners-Lee, who is considered the father of the world wide web. And lots of investors missed it. Skype chose a strategy of becoming ubiquitous rather than profitable. Many investment committees of venture capital firms in Mayfair will be thinking hard about that as they evaluate their start-ups this week.

Merger rumours were swirling all summer as talks with Murdoch and Google came and went. As one investor in Skype said to me recently: 'It was a good deal for eBay.'

Whether you believe that eBay over- or underpaid, value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. You can count on one hand the number of companies that started from scratch in Europe over the past 30 years and have become billion-dollar businesses, let alone the ones that have achieved this status in three years. Skype enlarges that elite group, and will inspire a new group of men and women to live unbalanced lives for a couple of years, being unreasonable about success as they work to change the world.

· Julie Meyer is CEO and founder of investment firm Ariadne Capital, which was an adviser to Skype.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/busin...587849,00.html





MLDonkey
Jason Norwood-Young

Before I get into a review of peer-to-peer (p2p) software, a disclaimer: Please only use this software to download legal files. Tectonic does not support the pilfering of copyrighted content in any way. It's quite unfortunate that such a great technology's main use seems to be to break copyright laws, as it undermines the usefulness of p2p as a way to share legal content for all of us.

But if you're going to go trolling through the massive p2p networks for juicy open source and creative commons-licenced material, the best place to start would be MLDonkey. While there are hundreds of p2p clients out there, nothing comes close to this one. Some p2p applications span one, two, or even three types of file sharing networks – MLDonkey covers a staggering 12 protocols which represent even more networks. The eDonkey protocol, the KAD network (Kazaa's file sharing system), Open Napster, Bittorrent, Gnutella, Gnutella2 and more ... MLDonkey isn't a p2p client, it's a p2p super-client.

It started life in 2001 as a Linux client for the eDonkey network as a project by Fabrice Le Fessant from French computer science research institute INRIA. By using a client-server architecture programmed in Objective Caml (MLDonkey is actually a server in its own right), it proved flexible enough to incorporate the other protocols, some of which were reverse-engineered for MLDonkey.

Since MLDonkey is truly a server, there are a host of clients that offer an interface to control this hungry beast. The easiest way to control it is with a web browser. Just point your browser at your own computer on port 4080 and you have a fairly ugly but super-functional interface. Alternatively you can telnet to the server on port 4000 for more technical but very powerful control.

For those of us who like flashy graphical user interfaces, Mldonkey has numerous gui's, including its own Mldonkey-gui. Clients are also available for KDE, Gnome, X11, Mac OS X, Palm OS, Windows, Web-based clients and Java. The server itself runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BeOS and Mac.

Although you would typically run the server on the same machine as the client (default security will only allow the host machine to connect as a client), it is technically possible to run Mldonkey on remote machines and control it from your desktop through one of the many available clients. If you happen to have an offshore server at your disposal, this makes for an interesting exercise in avoiding South African bandwidth limitations – you can simply log on when a file is done and download it, without using South African bandwidth for uploading or for failed downloads.

Mldonkey is licensed under the GNU public license, and we encourage you to use its infinite power for good, not evil.
http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=637





Targeted Attacks Increase on Instant Messaging Networks

The IMlogic Threat Center, the industry's first global consortium to provide threat detection and protection for instant messaging (IM) and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, today issued its Third Quarter 2005 threat report on the rise of IM security threats. The report highlights a 3295 percent increase in Q3, 2005 over Q3, 2004 bringing the year-to-date increase to 2083 percent over 2005 YTD.

The report released today provides key metrics on the continued attacks IM networks are experiencing from malicious code and worm writers. Key data points released include:

713 unique IM and P2P threats including IM-specific attacks and blended threats, which target IM and P2P applications
87 percent of reported incidents include IM worm propagation; 12 percent are known to hijack IM file transfer capability to deliver viruses; one percent of reported incidents utilize known client vulnerabilities or exploits
62 percent of reported incidents over IM networks targeted the MSN Messenger Client, Windows Messenger Client and MSN Network
seven percent of reported incidents over IM networks targeted the Yahoo Messenger Client and Yahoo Messenger Network
31 percent of reported incidents over IM networks targeted the AOL Instant Messenger Client, AOL Instant Messenger Network, ICQ Client and ICQ Network
The IMlogic Threat Center Forecasts Accelerated IM Threat Growth Through the Remainder of 2005.

Trend analysis provided in the IMlogic Threat Center Q3 2005 report suggests that IM-borne attacks will continue to increase as hackers capitalize on the growing popularity of IM in both consumer and corporate environments. The increasing popularity of consumer IM networks, combined with the emergence of federated enterprise IM environments, continues to drive IM as a popular medium for attacks.

The IMlogic Threat Center encourages consumers to protect themselves by keeping operating system patches and anti-virus software up to date, and to exercise caution when using embedded links or file transfer capabilities over the IM channel. Corporate IT departments can additionally leverage IM management and security technology to protect their networks from the risks associated with unmonitored and uncontrolled IM usage.
http://www.govtech.net/magazine/channel_story.php/96927





Securing IM To Improve Communications
Dr Horst Joepen

Instant Messaging (IM) has triumphed in the past two to three years among personal Internet users as well as within companies. There are now few school children not in touch with their friends via ICQ, MSN or AOL Messenger - but also stockbrokers, currency dealers, and the IT department are constantly 'chatting' with their most important contacts via Messenger software.

According to a recent Gartner poll, instant messaging is used today in 70 per cent of all companies. According to the Yankee Group, however, only 15 to 20 per cen of companies operate a solution for IM administration. In the remaining 50 per cent, IM constitutes a huge, rampant infrastructure usage that poses a severe security risk for firms. The same is true for the use of peer-to-peer services, such as music exchange services, which have also become pervasive in many organisations, but lack any administrative supervision whatsoever. These Peer-to-Peer (P2P) services entail both security and legal risks.

IM is suitable for all areas where quick, immediate contact among a known and manageable group of people is crucial. As with SMS, short messages can be swapped and, for instance, a deal team can finalise and authorise the terms of an offer. Technicians helping a customer on location can send queries back to company headquarters via IM, and obtain immediate answers from customer support specialists, without their queries being buried under an avalanche of e-mails or suffer from constantly engaged phones. Stockbrokers can also instantly swap the latest market rumours via IM and act upon what they learn.

In companies with more complex and clearly defined workflows and processes, where flexible decision-making and coordination timed to the minute play a lesser role, it is questionable whether instant messaging is beneficial. Private chat sessions, and the constant distraction from larger tasks by incoming instant messages, can bring about a drop in productivity. A derogatory comment made by IM can be just as much of a legal problem as one made by e-mail so there could also be exposure to potential litigation. However, what is decisive is not the question of whether your company needs IM, as much as the answer that your company very probably already has IM without your knowledge.

Speaking technically, instant messaging tools, similar to peer-to-peer exchanges, function as 'wild', non-standard protocols, which mount on HTTP or HTTPS protocols. They are capable of transferring not just active technologies such as scripts and macros but also all kinds of data attachments (word files, zip archives, and so on), and thus can transfer all currently known carriers of viruses and worms. Content exchanged via peer-to-peer services also entail a considerable legal risk.

A study of Gnutella P2P traffic showed that 47 per cent of requests related to pornography and 97 per cent infringed existing copyright. It is also evident that such content is often infected with viruses. Thus instant messaging and P2P exchanges pose threats every bit as dangerous as the flow of data into the company from e-mail or Web. By contrast, however, IM data flow cannot be controlled by firewalls, simple Web filters and URL blockers.

So is your company helpless in the face of instant messaging? No! The use of special IM and P2P filters allows instant messaging to benefit the company while controlling the security risks that it involves. In order to implement a uniform security policy simply and consistently, the IM filter should preferably be part of a comprehensive, integrated Content Security Management Suite.

This enables company, group and user specific configuration of the security profile, and its consistent application to the entire data flow and all standard and 'wild' application protocols. A typical 'policy' could, for instance, block all IM clients who send requests to unauthorised, public messaging servers, and permit requests only to the company's own messaging server(s).

As was also the case with the wave of spam, IM-connected security problems first occurred in the US. As a result, for instance, Sarbanes Oxley made mandatory the permanent monitoring and protocolling of instant message traffic in all US financial institutions. In current US tenders for content security solutions, the filtering of instant message data flows is a standard requirement. US companies' were triggered into action by very real breaches of security.

Instead of waiting for the wave to break here as it did in the US, companies in this country should take advantage of the 'early warning system' and have their content filtering systems upgraded now - not least because the cost of improving IT security is more than offset by the ensuing increase in productivity.
http://www.biosmagazine.co.uk/op.php?id=290





Messaging Agreement Expected by 2 Rivals

Microsoft and Yahoo plan to announce Wednesday that their competing instant messaging systems will interconnect, making it possible for users to send messages between the previously incompatible systems, according to a person involved in the announcement.

Until now the major instant messaging systems have been isolated from each other. Time Warner's America Online service has the dominant share of the instant messaging market, with MSN Messenger from Microsoft and Yahoo Instant Messenger ranked second and third.

Although Microsoft and Yahoo both offer voice as well as text chat services, the two systems will not initially offer interconnection for voice calls.

In August, Google entered the instant messaging market with a service called Google Talk, which is based on an industry standard known as Jabber and which has been widely promulgated by the open source software movement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/12/technology/12aol.html





The $761 Million Deal: Microsoft, Real To Work Together

With antitrust settlement, ex-rivals plan media interoperability
Dean Takahashi

Ending its last major private antitrust case, Microsoft will pay $761 million to settle a lawsuit with RealNetworks and created a multi-pronged partnership to collaborate in digital entertainment.

Under the deal, Microsoft will pay cash or the equivalent of it in free marketing services to Seattle-based RealNetworks, which will end its antitrust litigation on a global basis and support Microsoft with music services that will help the Redmond software giant compete with rivals such as Apple Computer and Google.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser joined each other on stage at a press conference to announce the settlement and said that the deal will be lead to more choice for consumers on how to access digital entertainment.

``We're ending one chapter and starting another in our relationship with Microsoft,'' said Glaser, who worked at Microsoft for a decade before founding Real in 1995. He said he has long admired Gates as a businessman and philanthropist.

Gates, calling Glaser a ``good friend,'' said, ``This goes beyond a settlement. We see this as just the beginning.''

Both said that they needed to make their products work together to take advantage of the explosion of digital music, with the unsaid subtext that rivals are doing a better job exploiting demand from consumers.

``Both companies are seeing digital media explode and recognize it's in our interests to have interoperable services so that we can give consumers the most choice,'' said Dan Sheeran, senior vice president of consumer services, in an interview.

The two companies have been working for weeks on integrating RealNetworks' Real music player into Microsoft's own software. The companies are also integrating Real's Rhapsody subscription music service so that it can be promoted through Microsoft's search software, its MSN web site, and its MSN Instant Messenger service. Real will provide games and other entertainment for Microsoft's web sites as well as its upcoming Xbox Live Arcade online gaming service for the Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console.

Real will throw its support behind Microsoft's digital rights management technology, which is key to Real's efforts to expand beyond PCs and cell phones to other portable devices. With Microsoft's DRM, it is much easier for Real's music subscribers to take their music and move it to any device, whether it supports Real or Microsoft formats.

Microsoft will pay Real $301 million in cash and provide services over 18 months in support of Real's entertainment products. For every customer who originates from Microsoft's web sites and signs up for Real's subscription service, Microsoft gets credits toward the $301 million. Also, Microsoft will pay $460 million in cash for damages related to the antitrust claims.

RealNetworks filed the antitrust lawsuit in 2003, alleging that Microsoft used its Windows operating system monopoly to favor its own Windows Media Player, which was available for free with Windows, to freeze out RealNetworks' competing Real media player technology. But Real's business has been evolving. The company launched its music subscription service, Rhapsody, two years ago and now music, game and other subscriptions are 60 percent of its business.

As a result, RealNetworks need to promote the subscription businesses. That hasn't been easy since Apple has sold more than 20 million iPod music players with its iTunes music service. Since Apple has 70 percent of the music player market, Real needed marketing help from Microsoft, whose MSN portal draws millions of visitors a month. Consumers will start seeing the benefits of the alliance starting in the fourth quarter and through the first half of next year, Glaser said.

``Clearly, this is a coordinated attack against Apple's dominance in the digital music arena,'' said Aram Sinnreich, an analyst at Radar Research.

The settlement follows similar deals with Time Warner, Sun Microsystems, and others who tangled with Microsoft on antitrust issues in the 1990s. And as with the Sun and Time Warner deals, the partnership allows Microsoft to turn a one-time foe into an ally against other rivals.

``The enemy of my enemy is my friend,'' said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research. ``A competitor from the last century is joining ranks of IBM, Sun, Netscape and others and Microsoft can now focus on going forward against competitors for the next century like Google, Yahoo and Apple.''

It remains to be seen if the European Union will continue with its investigation of Microsoft. That last major investigation was instigated with the help of RealNetworks, but Sheeran said Real would no longer participate in that investigation.

``Our industry is very dynamic and it's an important milestone to put the issues from the 1990s behind us,'' said Brad Smith, general counsel at Microsoft, who said he expected European regulators to review the settlement but make their own decision on continuing.

Sheeran said that the deal to promote Real's subscription services is set for 18 months, but both companies will try their best to make the relationship mutually profitable so the agreement can be extended.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...y/12875727.htm





In a Challenge to TiVo, DirecTV Promotes Its Own Box
Jane L. Levere

DIRECTV, the satellite television operator, is introducing a $30 million advertising campaign on Monday to promote its highly anticipated digital video recorder.

The campaign, created by the New York office of BBDO Worldwide, is DirecTV's first widespread public effort to distance itself from TiVo. Of DirecTV's 14.7 million customers, 2.3 million now subscribe to TiVo. DirecTV, which pays TiVo a monthly fee of $1.13 per TiVo subscriber, hopes those users will switch to its own service.

The software for the new service is provided by NDS, a subsidiary of the News Corporation, which also owns a controlling interest in DirecTV.

DirecTV's standard DVR, originally set to be released this past June, will be introduced in late October, and another model featuring high-definition service will be introduced in mid-2006. The standard DVR will feature up to 100 hours of recordable space, compared with TiVo's 70 hours.

DirecTV will continue to support the TiVo service without marketing it, and both services will be priced at $5.99 a month. The company's current contract with TiVo is set to expire in early 2007. DirecTV has not said if it will continue the contract after that.

Bruce Leichtman, a media analyst based in Durham, N.H., said of DirecTV, "They're doing this for the bottom line, to save over $1 per TiVo subscriber per month."

Another motive for the new service, according to Laura Behrens, a media analyst for Gartner, is the desire of News Corporation's chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, to "have his companies work for his companies."

"It's been an important strategic goal ever since he took over DirecTV."

Eric Shanks, a senior vice president of DirecTV, said the company viewed the introduction of its own DVR as a kind of "silver bullet" to "attract, satisfy and addict customers."

"The longer someone stays with us, the less we have to spend to get new customers. It costs us $650 - for hardware, installation and marketing - to get one subscriber, so we prefer keeping subscribers as long as we can so we don't have to spend that kind of money to get new ones."

Yet another factor is increased competition from cable companies. Many of them also offer DVR service; in fact, some, including the No. 1 cable operator, Comcast, and the No. 6 cable operator, Cablevision, recently made a deal to offer their subscribers TiVo's DVR.

"Cable operators are trying to focus consumers' attention on buying video with data or video with data and voice, and the Bells are trying to get into video to do the same thing," said Douglas Shapiro, a media analyst with Banc of America Securities. Since satellite providers can offer only one of these three services - video - DirecTV's strategy must be to "offer the best possible video product it can," he said.

The new ad campaign strives to explain the benefits of DirecTV's new DVR service in language easily understood by people who are not early adopters of technology, said Tracy Devine, vice president for advertising at DirecTV.

"We've taken everyday real situations, and are balancing people's passion for TV with their passion for their families and other things in their lives," said Al Merrin, vice chairman and executive creative director of the New York office of BBDO, which is a unit of the Omnicom Group.

To that end, a print ad shows the roof of a house against a starry night sky; one arrow in the sky points up to the DirecTV satellite that "broadcasts the amazing hole in one" of a golf game while another arrow points down to the DirecTV DVR in the house that "lets you watch it over and over without missing the next hole." The ad also describes features including the ability to record a whole season of shows, and to pause and rewind live TV.

One TV spot depicts a child asking his father, who is watching a football game on TV, to read to him; the father can do this and record the game simultaneously, thanks to his DVR. In another spot, a teacher asks a student to name her favorite person; the student says it is her "daddy, because he lets me watch cartoons all the time, even during the game."

The tagline on all the advertising is "Somebody up there loves you, DirecTV."

The campaign is running on network and cable television on shows like "Desperate Housewives," "CSI: NY" and "SportsCenter," and in magazines like Entertainment Weekly, Men's Journal and Cargo. Ads will also run on radio and in newspapers in the Top 20 markets in the United States.

DirecTV, which is based in El Segundo, Calif., plans to spend $30 million on the DVR campaign in the fourth quarter. According to TNS Media Intelligence, the company's advertising expenditures have increased annually since 2001, growing from $175 million that year to $237 million last year.

Media industry observers had mixed reactions to the campaign. Mr. Leichtman, the media analyst in New Hampshire, said the TV spots resemble previous TV advertising for DVR's by Time Warner Cable and others. He also said that the campaign seemed to try too hard. "What people like most about DVR's is that they're an easier way to record programs," he said. "They're trying to explain too much."

Ms. Behrens of the Gartner Group said "a lot of factors argue in the campaign's favor."

"DirecTV is doing more marketing and it's been quiet for a while. Consumers will buy as high in the line as they can afford. DirecTV will stop marketing the TiVo box and drive new subscribers to its model. And it's the fourth quarter, when people buy electronics for the holidays."

One factor that could affect DirecTV is a suit that TiVo has filed against EchoStar Communications, which offers its own DVR service. TiVo claims EchoStar's DVR infringes on its patents.

The judge hearing the case issued a preliminary ruling in August that TiVo has said it believes supports its position; the trial begins later this month. Should TiVo win, that could set a precedent for future DVR patent infringement suits.

Edward Lichty, vice president for corporate development at TiVo, said that "if we believed the NDS product violated TiVo's intellectual property, one course of action we would have would be to sue NDS and possibly DirecTV."

"I imagine the lawyers for DirecTV are paying close attention to what happens with the EchoStar case."

Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research, predicted that if TiVo won the EchoStar suit, "it will go after DirecTV."

"The most likely outcome would be payments to TiVo for every DirecTV unit shipped. They could end up getting almost as much money as they do now."

Both DirecTV and EchoStar declined to comment on the suit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/07/business/07adco.html





Winning the Gadget Wars
Daintry Duffy, CIO

CIOs and CISOs will need smart policies, good awareness programs and judicious enforcement to manage risks presented by the latest techno-trends.

A double-sided painting by Wassily Kandinsky plays a prominent role in John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation. One side, called "Chaos", is a vivid mix of colour; all splashes and slashes of paint. The flip side of the painting, titled "Control", is dour, geometric and restrained. The canvas is designed to be set at an angle and spun so that the viewer experiences it as a single work. In one scene, the painting's owner spins it for a guest, chanting, "Chaos, Control, Chaos, Control".

This mantra should feel familiar to CIOs; because it's a spin cycle they are all too frequently stuck in.

Technologies - particularly those marketed to the individual - are evolving rapidly and in unpredictable ways, which places CIOs and security executives in the uncomfortable position of trying to set controls on a constantly shifting and mutating target. Need an example? Then look no further than the new mobile phone in your hand (or the hands of the sales and marketing types in your organization), which has morphed into a multifunction device incorporating a PDA, camera and MP3 player.

The trickiest aspect of the problem is that many of these technologies are valuable business tools when used with the appropriate security controls. However, all too often, eager employees purchase, download or otherwise acquire these groovy gadgets and programs, and enthusiastically integrate them into their work environment, heedless of the holes they are punching in the company's security net.

Take Skype, the free, downloadable Internet telephony system that launched in August 2003. Skype users can make free phone calls to other computers all over the world. A great idea, right? Not if security is a high priority, because Skype encrypts all of its traffic and skirts firewalls. That's a bonus for users, but a nightmare for CIOs who can neither monitor nor stop the traffic. In the 51 days following Skype's launch, the company registered an impressive 1.5 million downloads and 100,000 simultaneous users. When programs like this catch on, they spread like dandelions in spring. At its one-year anniversary, Skype boasted approximately 9.5 million subscribers and 1.5 million users per day.

So how do CIOs and security heads kill the weeds without burning the grass? We took a look at four rowdy technologies: camera phones, portable data storage devices, wireless computing and the joint threat posed by peer-to-peer technologies (P2P) and Web-based services. They are well-meaning and widely used tools that can be office assets, but also can wreak havoc when used carelessly or maliciously. We sought the advice of security executives and other experts on the best steps to take to establish some control in the midst of the chaos.

Camera phones

Prying eyes. At many companies, a camera phone - great for office party snapshots or for capturing an interesting presentation slide - wouldn't raise an eyebrow. At Cardinal Health, mobile phones equipped with cameras are a physical security threat.

Cardinal Health has its hand in almost every facet of a drug's life cycle - from development, manufacturing, packaging and delivery to pharmaceutical distribution. To allow photographs of how valuable drugs move through these stages could create security vulnerabilities. Cardinal Health also handles personal medical information that falls under the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. "To allow cameras anywhere near the process, from when we receive [the product] to when we deliver it to the end users, would be a huge vulnerability, and it's not one we're willing to accept," says Tim Gladura, the company's CSO.

That said, camera phones are particularly challenging to contain because they're not connected to any platform that the company controls. Gladura says that a "no cameras" policy and an ongoing awareness campaign that conscripts employees into the security ranks works best. "I'd rather have 55,000 sets of eyes out there than just my department," he notes. But even that is not enough. His department also has enacted other policies that help to keep cameras out of sensitive areas. For example, employees at the distribution facilities are discouraged from taking lunch in the parking lot - to allow security to better discern if other, unauthorized individuals are sitting in the lot to observe loading dock operations. The doors that cover employee lockers are grated, offering security personnel a view of the contents. And random security searches are not unheard of.

At Tommy Hilfiger USA, camera phones pose a different kind of threat: the potential loss of intellectual property. David Jones, vice president of corporate loss prevention and security, worries about visitors who enter the company's design studios. "For anyone in our business, the design patents are the innovations that the company lives off," says Jones. A covertly snapped picture of a dress for the new summer line that is e- mailed to a competitor represents a real loss.

Jones also relies on a no-camera policy to protect the design areas, but he worries about the increasing prevalence of camera phones and their shrinking forms. His fears are well-founded. According to InfoTrends/Cap Ventures, research suggests that by 2009, 89 percent of all new mobile phone handsets will include a camera. And the technology is advancing so quickly that it is harder and harder to tell which mobile phones can take snapshots. "On older phones you could tell if there was a camera; now you can hardly tell, so we have a policy that we can't really enforce beyond awareness and training," Jones says. He adds that to his knowledge a theft by camera phone has not yet occurred, "but the threat is always there for it to happen".

CIOs and security execs also need to worry about protecting their employees' privacy when camera phones are around. One security executive, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation, recounted a case where employees using the company's shower facilities after lunchtime workouts became concerned about a man who always seemed to be talking on his mobile phone in the changing area. Public locker rooms and gyms frequently have "no mobile phone" rules, and locker rooms provided by an employer should be no different.

"Information about people [photographic or personal data] is way more valuable than information about anything else," says Stephen Cobb, author of Privacy for Business (Dreva Hill, 2002), a book that offers executives advice on safeguarding privacy of customer data. "Companies often focus on protecting financial secrets, but information about people can cost the company more."

At First Data, which specializes in money transfers and credit card processing, CISO Phil Mellinger has an employee dedicated to examining mobile devices and other technologies that employees want to bring into work, and who gives written approval from security where appropriate. Without that approval, the device is banned. "We used to approve general security configurations," says Mellinger. "For example, if someone used a wireless device, there were two approved configurations for security. But now each device has its own security configuration, so we have to get down to the device level." Mellinger also notes that camera phones are not just a security issue but an HR issue and a procurement issue as well. "You have to get so many different entities in the company focused on the problem and approach it from different perspectives, but it is a massive problem," he says.

According to industry sources, the Pentagon and defence contractors have long had mobile detection equipment, but that kind of technology is now going mainstream. Companies that offer mobile phone detection technologies - such as Phoenix-based Cellbusters - are gaining traction in corporate markets. The CellBuster device can detect a mobile phone that is switched on (even if it is not in use) within a range of 30 metres, and it issues an audio alert that tells the user to shut off her phone. It can also operate in a silent mode, alerting security personnel with a flashing light. This kind of product is ideal for companies that have certain targeted areas within their facility that should be camera phone-free, whether it's the boardroom or the locker room.

Keychain storage drives

Data a-go-go. The threat posed by USB mini-drives has burgeoned during the past year. Plug one of these keychain-size storage devices into a USB port and any information you can access just became portable. Employees can download gigabytes of data off your network and simply walk out the front door. Just 1GB of data is roughly comparable to a pickup truck loaded with documents, notes Dan Geer, vice president and chief scientist at data security vendor Verdasys. Some of these devices can hold up to 60GB. But thumb drives aren't the only form of digital storage media giving CIOs and security executives heartburn. MP3 players and even iPods, the ubiquitous cool gadget of the moment, can be used to download and store any kind of file (not just music).

Marcus Rogers, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Technology at Purdue University, works with the Centre for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) to study iPod forensics. "You can have an entire bootable drive on your iPod and, depending on the operating system, you can carry your entire workstation around with you," he says. "Also a lot of times if you hook an iPod to your system it's not going to show up on the network. Because it's at the local machine level it doesn't get an IP address. Only if [security] is doing active probing 24/7 might they find that extra storage device." Rogers notes that the iPod comes with the Windows file system, so the problem isn't limited to Apple systems.

"USB has absolutely exploded in the last year," says Michele Lange, a staff attorney with Kroll Ontrack, which offers software and services for data forensics and electronic discovery. "I've been doing this about four or five years," says Lange, "and I would say that [USB storage devices] are now an issue in a large majority of our cases." Lange adds that most of those cases are employment-related situations where an employee has tried to harm a company by stealing trade secrets. Of course, intellectual property leakage can happen just as easily when one of these tiny drives is lost or stolen.

However, there are steps CIOs and security heads can take. The first is to practise rigorous file security; employees should have access only to the information that they need. But since many employees have access to valuable information, companies have taken steps to deal with the issue more emphatically. Some have chosen to disable all of the USB ports on every system at the BIOS level and have taken away administrative privileges so that savvy users can't re-enable the ports.

Cobb, the privacy book author, says he knows companies that have a locked-down configuration and don't allow the user to change anything. "This can be quite effective on two levels: on a practical level, and on a psychological level by making it clear computers can only be used for company business and won't work if you try to use them for anything else." Some companies have taken more drastic steps. Geer recounts a story of one company that tried to address the problem by filling each USB port with hot epoxy glue (before eventually realizing the impracticality of the strategy - most notably that it would take forever).

CIOs and CISOs have to ensure they're not preventing employees from conducting their regular business duties. USB ports are, after all, there for a reason. USB flash drives are not all bad news either. They can be incredibly useful tools and some are available with advanced encryption standard, or AES, data protection. For an executive who can't live without his USB drive, the best solution might be to provide him with one handpicked by the security team.

Policy also has a role to play here. Dev Bhatt, director of corporate security for Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) - a company owned by the airlines that handles aspects of ticketing as well as data and analytical services - has crafted his company's acceptable use and enterprise security policies to focus on the forbidden acts of removing corporate data or connecting an unapproved device, rather than on the device itself. The emergence of new, small, multifunction devices is happening so rapidly that companies must ensure that their policies are broad enough to include emerging technologies. If the policy is too device-specific, the CIO or CSO will end up having to rewrite the rules every few months.

Wireless

Roaming hazard. It's a sign of the times that in some cases security teams have to behave like hackers to be successful. Sniffing out ad hoc wireless networks in a "no wireless allowed" work environment is one such case. Most of the security executives we spoke with have found unauthorized wireless networks at their companies. These networks are so cheap and easy to set up that they will continue to be a problem in many companies. But detecting a clandestine Wi-Fi network two floors down is a breeze compared to the problem security executives encounter when their employees utilize wireless networks outside the office.

Wi-Fi is built into most laptops, and wireless computing is so liberating that few untethered employees can resist the lure of a coffee shop or hotel access point. But unless users are educated about the specifics of wireless security, they could be laying the corporate network bare to any curious or malicious bystander. Security policies must spell out who can access the network, how, when and where. A software-based firewall and encryption technology - whether it is wired equivalency protocol (WEP), Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) or ideally WPA2 (the latest version of 802.11i) - must be used to ensure that casual roamers aren't hopping aboard.

Employees also need education about the different scams that can affect wireless users. Christopher Faulkner, founder and chief executive of Web hosting firm C I Host, has also launched "The Wi-Fi Guy" travel blog that tracks Wi-Fi and cultural information in cities across the US. He warns CSOs in particular about the dangers of "evil twin" wireless networks. An evil twin is a rogue wireless access point that a hacker-type sets up near a legitimate Wi-Fi access point. Unwary wireless users can wind up with their computers connecting to the strongest signal available; in the evil twin scenario, the users think they're on the legitimate network but are actually connected to the hacker's machine, allowing him to capture whatever data they transmit. "I tried this at an airport, and within four minutes had three people connected to my laptop doing unsecured computing in plain text," says Faulkner. In a variation of that scenario - a sort of Wi-phishing - a hacker sets up another access point near a legitimate one, lures a user to connect and then prompts him for his user name and password. When providing that info doesn't lead to a connection, the mystified user usually reboots and logs onto the real network, but the hacker has already siphoned off what he wanted. Later he'll be able to log onto the network with the user's ID.

These kinds of scams frequently snare people who are in a hurry and will disregard something that looks a little unusual in their haste to get online. Educate employees to use wireless carefully and to avoid sending company confidential or sensitive information over wireless unless it is absolutely necessary and the system's safeguards have been approved by corporate security.

Peer-to-peer and Web-based services

The casualties of convenience. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies and Web-based services are different animals, but they have three important qualities in common. These tools and programs are easily downloaded by employees, they frequently offer what workers see as a useful productivity-enhancing service, and most of them tunnel right through the corporate firewall, bypassing all security measures.

Take GoToMyPC, a Web-based service owned by Citrix Online. An employee can download the GoToMyPC software to his office PC, and it allows him to access the contents of his office workstation remotely from any PC connected to the Internet by typing in a user name and password. The GoToMyPC folks have published a 10-page white paper touting their security, but some basic control issues exist that should concern security executives. First, no matter how secure the program is, the security and network data are out of the CIO's direct control. Second, security executives have no control over the machine that the employee uses to remotely access the corporate network. It could be an Internet cafe where a hacker has installed keystroke loggers, or it could be a home PC using an unsecured wireless network. P2P technologies such as Instant Messenger and Skype are just as alluring and raise the same questions.

At First Data, Mellinger uses a proxy server from Blue Coat Systems to limit these kinds of external connections. Blue Coat enables Mellinger to control certain kinds of connections and provide appropriate warnings for others. Of course Mellinger doesn't want to interfere with the regular course of business, so he cautions that you have to work through the kinks with any product to ensure that employees can still access all the tools they need. "We have lawyers who need to go out and look at certain sites that we would otherwise not allow employees to visit," he says. Mellinger and his team are fine-tuning Blue Coat to match their exact needs.

At ARC, Bhatt has found that communicating with his employees is an effective way to deal with a lot of the P2P and Web activity. "Almost 100 percent of the time, people are just trying to get something done," says Bhatt. He tells employees that he wants them to feel comfortable asking questions about new products and online services without fear that they will be frowned on. If there is a cool new service that an employee wants to use, security will check it out; if they're not comfortable with that system, they'll seek a secure alternative. If there is none, security will explain why not and why that kind of activity puts the company at risk. "When users know what the danger is, it works well," says Bhatt.

First Data has also taken an added step that Mellinger believes insulates the company from many of the problems that these services can let in. The company has separate firewalls protecting each of its business units so that if a virus or breach occurs in one unit it can be easily unplugged from the others to prevent the damage from spreading. "A lot of times a company looks at itself as a monolithic entity," says Mellinger, "and we don't want to put ourselves in a position where anything that makes it into the company can impact the whole company. We use the same security controls between business units that we use between business units and the outside world."

Stay on top of trends

One key to dealing with all of these developments is for CIOs and their security teams to commit themselves to an ongoing learning process focused on new tools and technologies and the novel ways they will affect corporate security. Companies tend to go overboard with overly draconian security measures when a trend takes them by surprise. "There's a line of sensibility here," says Mellinger. "The object is to stay ahead of the people who aren't doing anything [malicious], who just have no security awareness at all. As long as I can stay ahead of that crowd, I'm in good shape." v

Security Measures for Camera Phones

· Educate and remind employees about your company's policy on cameras and other audiovisual equipment. Enlist their help to report violations.

· Consider mobile detection technology for particularly sensitive areas such as executive suites or areas with ready access to intellectual property.

· Ensure that your camera policy protects employee privacy as well as corporate assets.

· Work with corporate procurement to ensure that employees who should not have camera phones are not buying or being provided with those devices.

Security Measures for Mini-Storage Devices

· For employees who need a USB drive, look into drives with built-in encryption.

· Disable USB ports and take administrative privileges away from the user.

· Make acceptable-use policies general enough to include emerging technologies. They should focus on the unacceptable behaviours rather than the kind of device that is used.

· Ensure that your security team members track new portable storage devices so that they can recognize unapproved devices.

· Educate employees about what devices are forbidden and why.

Security Measures for Wireless

· In the workplace, take steps to securely authenticate users and control network access.

· If you don't want wireless used at the office, keep sniffing, don't buy laptops with Wi-Fi and educate workers about unsecured wireless hazards.

· Educate employees who use wireless about scams like evil-twin networks.

· Build security policies around how and when users can access wireless networks.

· Use the best encryption standards available.

· Equip mobile devices with a software-based firewall and isolate connecting devices on the corporate network.

Security Measures for Peer-to-Peer and Web-Based Services

· Look into tools such as proxy servers that allow the security team to block access to undesirable services.

· Explain why some tools are dangerous, and look for ways to provide the same service securely.

· Design your security knowing that some of these programs will slip through your defences.

http://www.cio.com.au/index.php/id;1...8;fp;16;fpid;0





Researcher, Qynergy Corp. to Develop Long-Lasting Power Source

For years scientists who have studied areas in the far reaches of space or remote areas on the earth have had a problem with providing power to a variety of sensors and electronic equipment needed to accumulate the data. That problem is now solved, thanks to a partnership between scientists at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Research Reactor (MURR) and Qynergy Corporation, who have devised a power cell that will provide continuous power for years.

MURR scientists and researchers from Qynergy Corporation developed an optimum design of betavoltaic power cells, an alternative power source for electronic devices. The partnership has yielded the highest energy conversion efficiency ever recorded for such cells. This discovery will create new capabilities for applications that require longer power life in compact, low volume containers. The cells have the potential for continuously generating small amounts of electricity for nearly 20 years.

“In our research, we were able to obtain an energy conversion efficiency of 11 percent, while the highest success to date had only been 5 percent,” said David Robertson, associate director of research and education at MURR. “Our previous research at MURR that developed isotopes for radiopharmaceuticals made it an ideal place to develop and produce the isotopes needed for these compact power sources for homeland security, defense and other applications.”

The technology used in betavoltaic power cells is similar to solar power generation, but uses radioisotopes as the energy source rather than sunlight. The cells use isotopes that are fully contained within the power cell—similar to the radioactive source found in many household smoke detectors—and can be used without external risk.

The technology transforms the energy of beta particles into electrical power—with the capacity to generate electricity for months or years, depending on the energy and half-life of the isotope used. The power cells, called QynCells™, are rugged, safe and portable, and are capable of operating in harsh environments and extreme temperatures with no required maintenance.

The project was funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Space Vehicles Directorate. The QynCell™ can be used as a stand-alone power source or coupled with a variety of power storage and power generation technologies, either to extend the overall power system lifetime or to generate extra power. Future work might lead to integrating the QynCells™ with super capacitors and rechargeable lithium ion batteries and using the technology for micro and nano systems.

The Air Force is extending funding for the development of QynCell™ designs for specific Department of Defense applications using two isotopes, promethium-147 and krypton-85, for devices with lifetimes ranging from one to 20 years and for power ranging from microwatts to tens of milliwatts depending on the needs and requirements of the specific application.

Editor’s Note: For reference, a “milliwatt” is 1,000 times greater than a “microwatt.” Additional information about MURR and Qynergy follows.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/515211/?sc=swtn