Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 22nd, '03

[JackSpratts]

Quote of the week: “By 2008, experts say 15-terabyte [home] systems will be common. That's enough to hold every song ever recorded -- about 5 million tracks -- using today's MP3 format.” - Keith Girard



Volume II, Issue Number 1


First Anniversary Issue




A Dozen Or So Stories Would Do It

I hit the “send” button one afternoon at what was then Napsterites and uploaded a little collection of news items I felt might be of interest to the P2P community. It was a particularly inauspicious moment. The “collection” as it were contained just eight items even though I uploaded an update a few hours later. But I was happy with the result. A few people stopped by to have a look, and one person even left a comment (positive) and with that the Week In Review was born. Although it wouldn’t get its nick for a few more issues the basic format I started with a year ago has remained essentially unchanged since that day on November 22nd, 2002.

At the time I was posting a lot of news items, too many really for a bulletin board, but not enough to cover the dizzying array of technical developments, political and legal issues swirling inside the peer-to-peer orbits. I was amazed at the polarization created by file sharing, from those who felt it would change the world (it will) to those who threatened it would destroy it (it won’t). The tension existed because the two sides were a fairly even match. The file sharers having sheer numbers and wild eyed ambition and the media companies though suffering from typical end stage capitalistic cynicism had big time establishment heavyweights in their pockets, and the real power those types can toss around. Neither side gave an inch because each recognized that decisions made in haste would have repercussions for decades. FM radio was hobbled by the monopoly telephone system in the 1950’s and still suffers from that shortsighted technical compromise 45 years later - even though the phone company has been dismantled and long out of any business allegedly threatened by FM’s clear retransmissions. It’s no exaggeration that many, if not most new developments that threaten existing franchises are not allowed their rightful opportunities to succeed. Many are even crushed into oblivion by powerful interests determined to hold at all costs a way of doing business beneficial only to themselves. In that small sense peer-to-peer is no different, it’s just a lot more visible.

There was an awful lot going on last year and I felt a little one or two page digest would go a small way toward helping people get the information they needed quicker and more conveniently than they could by themselves. I thought a dozen or so stories would do it. How little I knew…

Even combing the web was no guarantee I’d find the relevant stories in time for the post date, so sometimes I did my own reporting and wrote them myself, like the one I did on ES5 (the most hits ever) or any of a dozen others that covered mostly political issues. Usually the byline was Jack Spratts, but occasionally I wrote them under the name I was born with, if for no other reason than I found it difficult enough getting politicians and RIAA execs to return my calls without sounding like a nursery rhyme. But whatever name I choose to put over a story I always covered the issue as objectively as possible. The selection of the stories you read each week may indeed reflect a point of view but the stories themselves are taken directly as written, and if edited at all done so exclusively for space requirements - not to change the authors meaning or intent, even if that point of view conflicts with my own, which it often does. There have been many anti P2P articles appearing in WiR over the last year and they’ve been presented without comment or rancor. And while there were those that were not particularly well thought or especially fair to their subject I published them “as is” and uncritically, if for no other reason that I’ve felt it important readers remain acutely aware of how the press covers peer-to-peer, and how biased that coverage often is.

More often than not, but not always, readers will see a story at the top of the Week in Review with no byline or author. That’s mine of course, and it’s an opinion piece about something of interest to me that caught my attention. I’m fortunate that I can take whatever room I need to write about the things I feel are important to the future of file sharing and the Internet. There are so many paid and powerful voices lined up against P2P, blasting out of movie theaters, radios, TVs, magazines and newspapers that anytime one gets a chance to debunk those manipulative myths and talk about the positive aspects of file sharing one should exercise the option with vigor - while the option is still available. That’s the reservation for Jack’s POV, and I try not to stray out of it.

And Now A Word From Our Future

While changeable and flexible, the basic principals laid out that gave rise to IRC and the original Napster and the myriad other protocols used to create sharing clients like AIM, MSN, Groove, Limewire, Soulseek, Blubster, Waste, WinMx, KaZaA and any of the literally scores of applications and systems, will continue to exist and improve regardless of law or technology, because the movement is not about either, although it is influenced greatly by both. Neither is it about getting bits for free although again, the ability to do so plays a part in its present popularity. Peer-to-peer will survive because it fulfills in a pivotal way a basic and fundamental need that individuals have during an all too brief time on earth; the need for connections. As long as there is more than one person on this planet, that need will never vanish. P2P allows me, and you, to join in a way that has never been possible before. Quickly, easily, privately - or in public spaces on grand scales. Whether screaming out at the top of our lungs or sharing something intimate in a quiet corner of a darkened room, whenever two or more people have to merge by proxy Peer-to-peer will allow the moment to pass undisturbed and unseen by corporate, institutional or Governmental interference. The need for such connections and freedom from scrutiny is as much a part of our makeup as the very bones that define us and the skin that contains and protects us, but that separates us permanently from one another throughout our lives. That we can now recreate ourselves as symbolic forms - our thoughts and dreams and our stories and desires, and instantly transpose to others our bits no matter how far apart we may be, makes P2P indispensable and non-negotiable. As long as it fulfills that primary human need for connections across divides peer-to-peer will continue to flourish in whatever form it acquires and will remain as unstoppable as the life forces flowing through the billions of dedicated souls who give it voice.

It’s been a good year.

Thanks for reading,



Jack.









As of 11/20/03 ~

Most hits – 892

Least hits – 80

Most replies – 10

Smallest Issue: 1,770 words

Largest Issue: 52,927 words

Superlative - Holds a funny record here at NU: Thread with the most hits without a reply - 293

DoB: On November 22nd , 2003 at 3:41 in the afternoon

Issues to Date: 53









Enjoy.









DMCA Takes a Hit

Garage gadget wins digital copyright case.
Mike Robinson

In a closely watched technology lawsuit, a federal judge has ruled that a garage-door opener designed as a replacement for a model made by a rival manufacturer does not violate the nation's digital copyright law.

"Consumers have a reasonable expectation that they can replace the original product with a competing universal product without violating federal law," Judge Rebecca M. Pallmeyer said.

Pallmeyer's 10-page opinion came Thursday in a lawsuit filed by Chamberlain Group Inc., with offices in suburban Elmhurst, Ill., against Skylink Technologies Inc., of Mississauga, Ontario.

Chamberlain claimed Skylink garage-door openers that can interact with Chamberlain's digital security technology violated the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.


The dispute has been closely watched because there have been few court decisions to date that outline the limits of protections the digital copyright law affords manufacturers, said Gwen Hinze, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"This is one of the first cases that has actually looked at the language of authority" given to the manufacturer by the law to prevent consumers from using a so-called aftermarket product, she said.

Andrea B. Greene, attorney for privately held Skylink, said a ruling in favor of Chamberlain "would have had serious consequences for all kinds of consumer products."

"This was an attempt to expand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to where it had never gone before," she said. She called the ruling "very good news for consumers." She said she did not know if Chamberlain would appeal.

Chamberlain attorney Karl R. Fink did not return a message left at his office.

Pallmeyer likened garage-door openers to television remote controls.

"Consumers of both products might have to replace them at some point due to damage or loss, and may program them to work with other devices manufactured by different companies," she said.

Attorneys said the other federal court major case being watched for clues as to the limits of the digital copyright law is an effort by Lexmark International Inc. (LXK) of Lexington, Ky., to bar Static Control Components Inc. of Sanford, N.C., from selling computer chips that match remanufactured toner cartridges to Lexmark International printers.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/200...D7URT3TG0.html


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DMCA Again Used To Muzzle Consumer Voices

Message from the FatWallet, inc.

At approximately 11PM CST on 11/14/03, We became aware of a D.M.C.A. notification and subpoena from what appears to be the legal firm representing Best Buy Enterprise Services, Inc. (The email appears to have been sent at 5:20PM)

Due to the late hour and legal counsel not being immediately available, we are taking the action to remove the content we believe the notification is referring to. We ask that FatWallet members do not post further information regarding this matter or links to third party sites containing the information. Under the terms of the D.M.C.A., we will have an obligation to remove such information as we become aware of it.

We will follow up with legal counsel and take further action as appropriate.

Thank you in advance for your patience, cooperation and understanding.

Tim Storm
President
FatWallet, inc
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/mess...hreadid=240555


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Kazaa: 'Hooray for Bollywood'

Sharman Networks, makers of the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer software, is to sell a feature-length Bollywood movie through its service.

The Bollywood thriller Supari will be offered for sale at $2.99 a pop after a deal was struck between Sharman Networks partner Altnet Networks, a peer-to-peer content provider, and Bollywood film maker Aum Creates.

The movie was promoted through Kazaa prior to its release in India. According to the film's director, Padam Kumar, P2P is a suitable way of distributing a low budget feature to a wide audience.

Kumar said in a statement: "Kazaa has already managed to create widespread awareness for Supari. Selling the full movie is a logical next step, and with a relatively low budget movie, it is a very cost effective way to reach the masses."

Sharman Networks chief executive, Nikki Hemming, said the very nature of P2P technology makes mass distribution of large files, such as movies, feasible.

"The Bollywood movie market is growing at twice the rate of Hollywood, in terms of production and revenue," said Hemming in a statement. "Selling large, high quality files online, such as feature films, at low cost to a massive audience across the globe quite simply cannot be done efficiently using traditional websites."
http://www.silicon.com/networks/webwatch/ 0,39024667,39116879,00.htm


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Senators Ask P2P Companies To Police Themselves
John Borland

A group of Washington lawmakers called on Friday for file-swapping companies to help stop distribution of copyrighted materials and pornography on their networks.

In a letter sent to the heads of several leading companies--including Grokster, BearShare, Blubster, eDonkey2000, LimeWire and Streamcast Networks--a group of six senators called for self-regulation of peer-to-peer software companies.

"Purveyors of peer-to-peer technology have a legal and moral obligation to conform to copyright laws, and end the pornographic trade over these networks," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-N.C., said in a statement. "These programs expose our children to sexually explicit materials and provide an anonymous venue for child pornographers to hide behind the veil of technology."

It's not the first time lawmakers have railed against the unregulated sprawl of file-trading communities. In previous salvos, legislators have called for criminal penalties for people trading copyrighted works online, and blasted file-swapping networks as facilitators of child pornography distribution.

Most recently, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D.-Calif.,--who also signed Graham's letter--introduced legislation that would impose criminal penalties on anyone who distributed a movie before the studios released it to the public. These prereleases often happen online, and the films often find their way to file-trading networks quickly.

The senators signing the letter asked the companies to do several things, including:

• Provide clear and conspicuous warnings to users about the legal risks of P2P software;

• Add filters for copyrighted material and pornography to their software; and

• Change the default setting in file-swapping software programs so that users must actively choose to share material with others.

"We strongly believe that voluntarily taking these three common-sense steps would go a long way toward educating and protecting consumers," the group wrote in its letter. "It also would clearly indicate your companies' desire to become responsible corporate citizens."

Several file-swapping companies have formed a Washington, D.C., trade association called P2P United, partly in the hope of improving their image with skeptical lawmakers. They've created a "code of conduct" that includes features such as ensuring that it's clear exactly what users are choosing to share with other people on a file-swapping network.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5110785.html


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Review: Oritron NPD3117 Networked DVD Player
atkulp

I tried a computer-based setup and found that my wife and younger children had trouble figuring it all out. At that point I decided I needed to wait for a hardware-based solution that would work well without requiring a clunky computer near the TV.

Enter the Oritron

Having decided that nothing was available yet, you can imagine my excitement when I saw a networked DVD player in early October. This was the Oritron NPD3117 Networked DVD Player, also known as their On Media DVD player. This unit plays many audio and video formats -- even photo/JPEG discs. Where it really shines, though, is in its ability to play streaming content over the local network. It can switch between DVD and network content with the click of a button, and is very flexible in supported formats.

What does it do?

But what can this device actually play? Through the disc slot it plays DVD/+-R/+RW, audio CD/-R/-RW, VCD, SVCD, and CDs full of JPEG images or MP3/WMA music. Over the network, it plays MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, JPEG/TIFF/BMP, MP3/WMA, and most AVI files (DivX and XviD for starters). Yes, that's right, it plays DivX over the network! You may ask why it plays AVI-based files only over the network. This is due to the interesting way that the device handles video: any format that is not handled natively is transcoded on the fly on the PC-side. This is why there is a system requirement of 1.2GHz for the PC (though one of my On Media server boxes runs just fine with a 1GHz Athlon). When an AVI file is selected, it converts it to television resolution on-the-fly. No need to pre-convert your files. This means you can watch full-quality on your laptop and desktop (with the higher monitor resolutions), and TV-quality through the unit from the same file. It will not stream DVD's (encrypted or not). It also won't stream a VCD/SVCD per se, but will stream the actual MPEG streams that are encoded for VCD/SVCD when named properly. No proprietary video formats such as Real, QuickTime, or Windows Media Video will play. I do wonder though, if someone were to write appropriate AVI-style codecs for them, if it could be managed somehow ...

Pros:

· Well laid out remote with hotkeys to jump to music/video/pictures
· All the A/V in/out connectors (composite, S-Video, component, digital and 6-channel audio)
· Wide range of streaming content with smart choice of transcoding
· Easy network setup for wired or wireless environments
· Great quality of all supported media - you wouldn't know it's streamed!

Cons

· Would be nice to play even more content types (Ogg Vorbis, Real/QuickTime/WMV)
· Remote feels too light, makes you wonder how tough it is
· Server could be more flexible with scheduling options.

How does it work?

The unit needs to be plugged into your LAN. Instead of providing a CAT5 outlet on the back, it has a PCMCIA slot for a 16-bit wired or wireless 802.11b card. This is not the same as CardBus, which is 32-bit. You must get a 16-bit PC Card and it must be one on the company's approved list. This includes D-Link, Orinoco, Linksys, NetGear, and Microsoft products, so it's not too difficult to find. Best Buy had both the wired and wireless version of the LinkSys cards and may well have had other offerings as well. I was glad they chose this route rather than custom-branded cards at high prices.
http://features.slashdot.org/feature...id=186&tid=188


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Board Box

Soulseek Follies:

"To hell with it. It's just not worth the irritation of being banned for 12 to 24 hours everytime the damn server hiccups or I have to reboot. IMHO, the anti-flood measures have only served to put off good users. I was sharing over 10 thousand files (no - no boy bands or britany shit), but I am voting with my money (yes I was privileged but couldn't connect for shit) and going elsewhere with my files. And I'm betting a lot more users are going too.

Good bye soulseek. It was fun while it lasted, but it isn't fun any more, so hasta lavista." - Anubis2

* * *

"you're doing someone else a favour now. . that someone can now log in

bye bye" - roanfa

* * *

“I don't see how my leaving opens a spot for someone else since I could never log on to start with.” - Anubis2
http://slskboard.savagenews.com/inde...ic=11003&st=15

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Pearl Jam, on Its Own, Seizes the Moment and Sells CD on the Web
Chris Nelson

hen Pearl Jam's contract with Sony Music Entertainment's Epic Records expired earlier this year, how the iconoclastic band would exploit its new freedom quickly became a topic of great interest to music industry executives.

The band's manager, Kelly Curtis, assumed that he had until next year to decide how the band would distribute its work now that it controlled its own master recordings. But the future arrived earlier than Mr. Curtis had expected when the band came up with a new song called "Man of the Hour." Mr. Curtis and the band had to figure out how to get the song to fans.

Two days after the band's Web site, pearljam.com, began accepting orders on Nov. 10, almost 4,800 CD's had been sold, Mr. Curtis said. By way of comparison, the top-selling single for the two weeks ended Nov. 9 has been the Christian band MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine," which sold more than 7,000 copies both weeks, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"Man of the Hour" was also made available for streamed listening on RealNetworks' music Web site (music.real.com) and immediately became the most popular free track on the site, a company spokesman, Matt Graves, said. The single will be available for purchase tomorrow as a download through Apple Computer's iTunes.

"The song kind of happened super-quick, kind of out of nowhere," Mr. Curtis said. In late September, the director Tim Burton asked Pearl Jam to contribute a tune to his film "Big Fish," which will be released in New York and Los Angeles next month.

Pearl Jam is known for raging against the music industry machine with endeavors like taking antitrust action against Ticketmaster in 1994 and releasing scores of live albums from each of its last two tours.

Rather than signing with a single worldwide entertainment corporation, Mr. Curtis said last summer that he would explore an assemblage of deals that could involve major labels in some countries, independents in others and self-releases in the United States.

Making 50,000 copies of "Man of the Hour" and issuing the song for streaming and downloading is an initial step to determine what the band is capable of on its own, Mr. Curtis said. "It's a way for us to get our feet wet and see what works for us and where we need help."

Pearl Jam made its deal for the movie directly with Sony Pictures Entertainment. The song will also be available on the film's soundtrack, which will be released next month - by Epic Records.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/technology/17jam.html


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RealNetworks Says Windows Works Without Media Player
Paul Meller

RealNetworks Inc., one of the participants in an antitrust hearing last week concerning the Microsoft Corporation, disproved claims by Microsoft that its Windows operating system depended on the inclusion of its Media Player.

In a demonstration before European competition regulators on Friday, RealNetworks, maker of a music- and video-playing computer program called Real One, showed how a little-known version of Windows - Windows XP Embedded, which is licensed only for industrial use - can work without Microsoft Media Player attached, three people at the closed-door hearing said.

Microsoft has argued that removing Media Player would harm the way Windows works. No one from Microsoft was available on Sunday to comment about the demonstration.

The European Commission told Microsoft in a statement in August that the software company was abusing the dominance it had with Windows. The commission also said that to restore fair competition among music and video players - like Media Player, Real One and Apple Computer Inc.'s QuickTime - Microsoft must either extract Media Player from the operating system and sell it as a stand-alone product or insert a rival player into Windows to sit alongside its own player.

On Friday, using a laptop hooked up to three giant monitors, RealNetworks demonstrated in front of more than 100 people how easily XP Embedded runs without Media Player. It also showed how Real One, its own media player, worked on the system.

"It was a 'gotcha' moment," said one person present, adding, "Everyone was impressed."

Microsoft's lawyers mentioned RealNetworks' demonstration in summing up at the end of the three-day hearing, another person present said. Someone on the Microsoft team "dismissed the demonstration as false, but they still acknowledged it as one of the more important points made during the hearing," he said.

Settlement talks between Microsoft and the commission are likely to begin in earnest this week. The commission is expected to push Microsoft toward offering to license two types of operating systems to European PC manufacturers: one with Media Player and one without.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/te...gy/17soft.html


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New Cellphone Offers Big Shots Eavesdrop - Proof Call

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A German company launched a new mobile handset on Tuesday targeted at business executives that secures lines are free from eavesdroppers, sparking criticism that it could also make criminals harder to catch.

Berlin-based Cryptophone, a unit of privately held GSMK, developed the phone by inserting an encryption software inside a standard handheld computer phone. This ensures that calls can only be decoded by a similar handset or a computer running the software.

But the phone is seen as a mixed blessing in some European countries. While the benefits for business managers exchanging sensitive information are obvious, such a device could potentially have the side effect of helping criminals.

Security specialists in the Netherlands said the device could threaten criminal investigation by the Dutch police, which is one of the world's most active phone tappers, listening in to 12,000 phone numbers every year.

But privacy lobbyists say the new handset is a ``freedomphone'' much more than a ``terrorphone.''

``It's a tremendous step forward, because the level of surveillance by authorities is breathtaking,'' said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International in Britain. Cryptophone says unlike rivals such as Sweden's Sectra, Swiss Crypto AG and Germany's Rohde & Schwarz, it has no ties to national security and defense organizations and that there is no back door for government agencies.

``We allow everyone to check the security for themselves, because we're the only ones who publish the source code,'' said Rop Gonggrijp at Amsterdam-based NAH6. Gonggrijp, who helped develop the software, owns a stake in Germany's GSMK.

The Microsoft-based XDA handheld computer phone made by Taiwan's High Tech Computer is selling for 3,499 euros per two handsets.

At that price it is targeting executives, lawyers and bankers who regularly swap market sensitive information on mergers and lawsuits, and for whom privacy is worth paying for.

Eavesdropping equipment, available for around 100,000 euros, is officially only available to government agencies, but suspected criminals have also been able to obtain it, Gonggrijp said.

The strong encryption standards used by Cryptophone can already be applied in e-mails and other computer applications. The advent of more powerful handheld devices such as the Microsoft-based handheld computer phones has allowed Cryptophone to offer the same level of security on mobile phones.

But the high price of the device means few will be able to buy it.

``Not many average consumers will pay that kind of money. The people who will be using it are in businesses,'' said Ian Brown, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research in Britain.

If the high security phones become popular, however, governments could well clamp down on them, Privacy International's Davies said. ``I would not trust governments to leave it alone.''

Cryptophone says on its Web Sitethat exports of the device were unlimited within Europe and to several large economies around the world, but that customer credentials would be checked for a criminal records.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...-security.html


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CMJ Journal

Indie-Structable Rock Scene Smashes Major Labels
Mike Hess

NEW YORK — If Internet downloads, piracy and bootlegging are the blasts that are shaking the very foundation major music labels stand on, indie rock is the cockroach emerging from beneath the rubble —unharmed and even thriving on the surrounding disaster.

It’s quite the ironic twist on the current state of tunes: Major labels hacking jobs and budgets just to stay afloat while tiny independent labels and artists with pea-sized bankrolls are seeing increased sales, exposure and critical recognition.

Granted, this success isn't what most dreamed of while air-guitaring atop their childhood beds. There are no million-dollar tour buses, no lavish after-show parties and no massive pyro or lighting displays. There's just pure, straightforward music.

But in a faltering business, this formula seems to be the adrenaline injection into music's aorta.

"Bands are looking to make a good, solid album that you want to buy rather than an album with two singles and the rest is filler," said Andrew Katchen, a music writer for the Boston Globe. "There's less of an expectation and money funneled into an indie record, as opposed to say a Nelly album that has to sell millions of copies just to recoup marketing costs."

Another reason the independent music world is seemingly bulletproof is because of the relationship between the artist and the fan, which weaves a closely-knit community.

"There's such a sense of community between the fans and the band — you know who the artist is, even though you may not know the musician personally," said Katchen. "After the show they'll go to their own merch table and sell their own disc and you can talk to them, so you know you're supporting them more than the record company."

But why not go directly to the horse's mouth?

Fox News was able to speak with two burgeoning indie rock bands that have seen newfound success during 2003. Both bands recently played headlining shows at the CMJ Music Marathon (search) in New York City — a four-day musical onslaught featuring more than 900 bands at 50 venues spread all over the five boroughs and New Jersey.
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_frien...103194,00.html


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Vision of Personal Computers as Heart of Home Entertainment
John Markoff

If Intel and Microsoft have their way, the personal computer will soon be moving out of the office and den into the living room, kitchen and bedroom.

The two companies have been thwarted for more than a decade by Hollywood, as well as the cable and satellite television industries, in their efforts to put a wired PC at the center of home entertainment. But now, competing directly against many companies in the consumer electronics industry, Intel and Microsoft are mounting a new charge to try to make the personal computer the hearth of the information age.

That vision is on display here in a faux teenager's bedroom just off the lobby at Intel's headquarters, where the sleek all-in-one PC has become part television tuner, part video game machine, part stereo jukebox, part DVD player, part digital photo archive - and the great hope of the nation's computer makers, who are looking for a bright Christmas sales rebound to help lead them to a longer revival.

"This is not your grandma's PC," said Louis J. Burns, the executive in charge of Intel's desktop computer division.

The arrival of the more flexible personal computers, Silicon Valley executives argue, is aimed at permitting the industry to make big inroads into the consumer market as digital television replaces conventional analog TV, a move that is expected to lead Americans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years on things like new big-screen displays and home-theater-in-a-box sets.

"It will define a whole new category," said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, a maker of PC video cards also based here. "In five years it will absolutely reshape the consumer electronics industry."

Leading the computer industry's invasion is a new device known as the Media Center PC, with a processor designed by Intel and software created by Microsoft. It was introduced last year, and new and improved versions are being marketed this season by personal computer giants like Gateway, Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard and Sony.

Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, in a speech prepared for delivery on Sunday evening at the annual Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, underscores the company's Media Center strategy; Mr. Gates describes the idea of "seamless computing,'' emphasizing the importance of software to tie together different consumer and office systems.

The new machines are not just the biggest hope for a computer industry that has been plagued by flat sales and eroding profit margins. They are also the standard bearers for an all-digital crusade the PC industry is waging to break open the satellite and cable industries, undermine powerful consumer electronic giants and restructure both Hollywood and the recording industry.

But consumer electronics makers question whether the PC industry's grand vision is one that many Americans will want to embrace. Even family-friendly personal computers are still far more complex than today's home electronics devices, they argue.

Others challenge the PC makers' centralized "mainframe in the home" vision of the personal computer as a hub for controlling all of the data expected to be flowing into houses to provide information, entertainment and other digital services in the years ahead. Instead, they say that wireless networking will level the playing field by letting any electronic device communicate with any other, allowing the current cable and satellite providers of television signals to control not just how movies are viewed in the home but also to some extent how video games and music are played.

"The seminal change in the home hi-fi market is not whether the console will be replaced by the PC," said Andrew Lippman, associate director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. "The real change will be a home wireless network that will make it possible to put computer intelligence in every device."

And not surprisingly, many consumer electronics companies have a very different vision than Microsoft's and Intel's PC-at-the-center world view.

"PC's come in all sizes these days,'' said Rob Fish, director of the Panasonic information and networking technologies laboratory in Princeton, N.J. "The view that every application in the home will rely on one box, it seems, does not really match the way most people live their lives."

The new computers have yet to win widespread endorsement from digital content providers. Despite extensive additional copy protection features in the machines, Hollywood studios remain worried that the systems, because they are connected openly to the Internet, could lead to widespread pirating of movies and songs.

The campaign is also exposing fault lines within the industry and highlighting differences in strategy between Microsoft and Intel. Both companies, long joined at the hip in a symbiotic "Wintel'' relationship, are jockeying for the upper hand.

Microsoft recently ended its dependence on Intel to provide processor chips for its Xbox video game machine, entering into an alliance with I.B.M. instead. "The Intel- Microsoft marriage has plenty of cracks in it because they both want to be king," said a Silicon Valley chief executive who has done business with both companies.

Until recently, Microsoft's efforts to enter the home entertainment market have gone nowhere, in part because the products proved disappointing and in part because its prospective allies have rebuffed Microsoft's advances for fear of falling prey to the tactics that established its monopoly control over PC software.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/te...l?pagewanted=2


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Hot Sounds From a Cold Trumpet? Cryogenic Theory Falls Flat
Terry Schwadron

Without, er, fanfare, two Tufts University engineering researchers announced results of a study last week rebutting a popular myth among some trumpet players that deep-freezing the instruments will change the sound for the better.

Rather, they told the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Austin, Tex., that scientific testing of cryogenically freezing 10 trumpets showed minimal differences when the instruments were thawed and played by six musicians. After two years of research, Dr. Chris Rogers, an engineering professor, said that he and colleagues determined that freezing trumpets did not make them sound better.

"One of the great things about studying musical instruments, though, is if the player believes it will make a difference, he or she will play better, so it acts as a sort of placebo," Dr. Rogers said.

There has been growing interest among musicians in these treatments for brass instruments of all kind. In experiments, the instruments were cooled with liquid nitrogen to minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit, and then slowly warmed, all in the belief that they would become easier to play. A major flute manufacturer uses the process, and small storefront businesses have popped up for the sole purpose of freezing the instruments.

Chip Jones, a Tufts graduate student involved in the research, said he had recruited six trumpeters ranging in skill from a former high school musician to a New England Conservatory player to member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

They played the same sequence on trumpets that had been frozen and those that had not, and then rated the instruments. They were also asked to identify which trumpet matched the sound that "people say is brighter, freer-blowing or that had more `presence,' " Mr. Jones said.

Differences in the answers, he said, were statistically insignificant. "There was more difference from trumpet to trumpet and from player to player than in the results from treatment of the instruments," Mr. Jones said.

The research was requested by Selmer Musical Instruments, a wind instrument manufacturer, which was considering whether to offer the cryogenic treatments for new instruments sold from the Vincent Bach Stradivarius trumpet line. As a result of the tests, the company has decided to forgo the deep-freeze.

But others who have tried the deep-freeze say there is a difference in ease of playing and in the range of "color" in the tone.

In Arlington Heights, Ill., Wayne Tanabe, owner of the Brass Bow music repair shop, said his advertising was by word of mouth. "Otherwise, people think you're talking about voodoo," he said.

He has a tub-size cryogenics tank where he can fit a tuba and several trumpets. His freeze technique costs about $200 and takes 35 to 50 hours. As Mr. Tanabe explained it, cryogenics accelerates what seems to happen to brass instruments as they age. Sound quality improves because resonance is clearer, he said.

Mr. Jones said studies had shown that while steel, for example, did undergo change through freezing, brass did not. Heating, by contrast, does soften metal, potentially changing its acoustics.

The trumpet research is part a musical instrument engineering program at Tufts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/science/18TRUM.html


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In Utah, Public Works Project in Digital


Salt Lake City and 17 other cities in Utah are planning to construct the largest ultrahigh-speed data network
in the country, using fiber optic cables, at a cost of $470 million.
Photo: Tom Smart for The New York Times

Matt Richtel

When it comes to the Internet, residents of Utah are taking matters into their own hands.

In a 21st-century twist on Roosevelt-era public works projects, Salt Lake City and 17 other Utah cities are planning to build the largest ultrahigh-speed digital network in the country.

Construction on the project is scheduled to start next spring - if the cities can raise the money to pull it off. The network would be capable of delivering data over the Internet to homes and businesses at speeds 100 times faster than current commercial residential offerings. It would also offer digital television and telephone services through the Internet.

With a $470 million price tag, the project is considered one of the most ambitious efforts in the world to deploy fiber optic cables, which carry data in bursts of light over glass fibers. Though it has not received much attention outside the area, the project has raised questions here about the role of government, particularly from telecommunications companies, which are starting to complain about the prospect of competing against a publicly sponsored digital network.

The cities involved argue that reliable access to high-speed data is so important to their goals of improving education and advancing economic growth that the project should be seen as no more controversial than the traditional public role in building roads, bridges, sewers and schools - as well as electric power systems, which are often municipally owned in the Western United States.

Data infrastructure "is not a nicety,'' said Paul T. Morris, executive director for the project, which he has named Utopia, a stylized acronym for the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency. "It's an essential economic growth issue," he added. "The best network in the U.S. will be in Utah - not in New York, not in Chicago, not in Los Angeles."

Its advocates say that Utopia will give participating cities a leg up in attracting sophisticated companies and highly educated, technology-minded individuals. The network is expected to be available to 723,000 residents in 248,000 households and 34,500 businesses. Prices would vary considerably depending on the service, though basic high- speed Internet access is expected to cost about $28 a month.

Depending on the kind of equipment used, fiber can deliver data at speeds of 100 megabits a second - even as much as 1,000 megabits under some circumstances - enabling the lines to be used simultaneously to send voice, video, Internet and other data traffic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/te.../17utopia.html


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P2P Set To Cause 3G Meltdown
Robert Jaques

"The potential for problems is enormous should the technology continue to develop in this area."

Peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic that consumes as much bandwidth as is available, resulting in saturated networks and poor quality of service, has the potential to devastate future third-generation (3G) networks, industry watchers have warned.

The warning comes as a song-swapping service that allows music lovers to download songs directly onto their mobile phones is unveiled.

Although the creator of the technology behind the offering, Beep Science AS, has conceded that its service is more suited to higher bandwidth, 3G environments, the company says it currently allows MMS phones to send and receive music using a restricted P2P network.

But with network capacity limited, 3G operators may well not be able to deal with the potential glut of P2P traffic downloads, cautioned Bryn Teasdale, director EMEA at IP service control firm P-Cube.

"The potential for problems is enormous should the technology continue to develop in this area," he said.

"As 3G operators broaden their services to include messaging, browsing, gaming and now P2P applications, it is vitally important they plan ahead, investing in the ability to manage and control IP services on a per-application basis.

"This will enable them to extract maximum revenues for P2P traffic while managing and shaping bandwidth to safeguard the quality of service for standard voice and more profitable premium content services."
http://www.wirelessnewsfactor.com/perl/story/22706.html


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KaZaA to P2Pers: Speak Up!
Charles Farrar

KaZaA's parent company is urging peer-to-peer file swappers, its own and others, to lobby music companies and film studios to knock off the animosity toward KaZaA and other popular file-swap services.

"It's a call to action," said Sharman Networks chief executive officer Nikki Hemming to CNET, unwrapping a new print ad campaign aimed for major newspapers and Rolling Stone magazine this week. "We want to cut through the clutter, put our money where our mouth is and remind everybody of the opportunity being missed here."

CNET said this is the first major ad campaign from Sharman since they opened KaZaA for business two years ago, with the ads also aiming for college campus newspapers in the U.S., Great Britain, and Australia, as well as on Yahoo and other Websites. Sharman has been trying to convince the music and film industriies to distribute their authorized versions of their works through KaZaA by way of new technology from Altnet, CNET said.

No major such company has agreed to such a partnership so far, while several are suing Sharman for copyright infringement. "Altnet and Sharman have experienced deafness on the part of the industry for way too long, and there's a point where you have to take action," Hemming told CNET.

One of the ads in the campaign is an open letter to media leaders saying the music and film companies are making a big mistake trying to close the P2P services. "Sixty million people have embraced this technology as a new and better way to get their entertainment," says the ad, as described by CNET. "They are not pirates. They are your customers."

CNET said the ad campaign may have partial funding through a deal between Sharman and eUniverse, which revealed last week they agreed to give Sharman $2.3 million in nonrefundable advances in a co-marketing deal.
http://www.avnonline.com/issues/2003...111703_8.shtml


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File-Sharing Goes To The Next Level
Jefferson Graham

Michael Halm, a senior research programmer with Penn State University, admits that file-sharing among students has gotten out of hand. Yet that hasn't stopped his school from co-developing a new academic peer-to-peer, or P2P, sharing system.

"We don't even use the P2P word because it has such a bad connotation," he says. "We're trying to create legitimate applications that enhance the way people work. And that's P2P. It's faster than a Web site or internal network and puts control into the hands of people who want to collaborate."

P2P has come a long way since 1999 when then-18-year-old Shawn Fanning invented Napster in his dorm room as a tool to find music MP3 files. Now music, movies, games and other huge — and usually copyrighted — files that once were impossible to trade between users flow freely among millions of powerful PCs being linked together.

Halm would like to replicate that ease of use with academic data. That's why Penn State is working with MIT and British Columbia's Simon Fraser University on developing LionShare, an exchange of academic materials, using P2P for faster and more reliable sharing.

"Many people think P2P is equivalent to downloading MP3 files, but that's not all it's about," says Niklas Zennstrom, creator of Kazaa, the world's most-downloaded (nearly 300 million copies) P2P software. Zennstrom's new company, Skype, offers free phone calls over the Internet via P2P. Some banks already are using internal P2P to transfer data to branches.

Eric Garland of BigChampagne, a market research firm, predicts P2P will become the "go-to platform, a way to share proprietary information for banking, insurance, all industries. It's so efficient and robust, it will be applied to all types of online information."

Marty Lafferty, CEO of the newly formed Distributed Computing Industry Association, calls P2P "an incredible form of super distribution, not just for entertainment, but in ways to benefit humanity."

Hype or reality? Some examples:

•Data distribution. Companies including Contiki and Akamai use P2P technology to help companies deliver sales presentations and multimedia content.

•Grid computing. By linking a host of computers together to solve a problem, "You break the data into 1,000 pieces and solve the problem in a few days," says Andy Oram, an editor at computer book publisher O'Reilly & Associates. (Story, 7E.)

•Distributed file systems. The files on a company network are broken into pieces and put into the P2P system, so if the server does go down, everyone's computers can work together to reassemble the files.

•Collaboration software. BadBlue allows home users to set up their own P2P networks starting at $29.95 per user, $59.95 for businesses. Groove Networks is similar, targeted to business. Its software starts at $149.95. "With a Web server, anyone who needs a piece of data has to contact one particular machine," says Adam Allison of BigChampagne. "With P2P, the media goes on multiple locations and can be accessed more quickly and efficiently."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/te...14-peer_x.htm#


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Think Tank Wants Public's Help in 'Spyware' Fight
Brian Krebs

A Washington-based technology think tank wants Internet users to join its crusade against invasive "spyware" programs that let their authors eavesdrop on people's online activities.

The Center for Democracy and Technology today urged Americans to submit details about their encounters with spyware, which often comes packaged as an unwanted addition to popular downloads like software for trading music files. The group said it will compile those experiences and submit them to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as part of its campaign to spur the federal government to take action against businesses that do not clearly tell people that they are opening their personal online lives to strangers.

"We have read many stories about consumers who did not know that these programs were on their computer and then, when they went to delete them, found that they just wouldn't go away," said CDT Associate Director Ari Schwartz. "We are asking computer users to tell us the problems they have encountered and we'll test the programs ourselves and file complaints where warranted."

Hijacking an Internet connection or intercepting online communications is a federal crime but people often unwittingly install spyware on their computers when they download other kinds of useful software applications without reading the legal disclosures usually buried deep in the user agreement, the CDT report said.

Once people find the programs on their computers, they discover that it's almost impossible to delete them without a high level of technical expertise.

Spyware can cause sluggish PC performance and system instability, and can unleash a barrage of pop-up ads and unsolicited bulk e-mail, popularly known as spam. In the most egregious cases, spyware can be extremely invasive -- it can track what Web sites people visit and the keywords they enter in search engines. It also can hijack their Internet connections.

Some well known spyware programs often show up in peer-to-peer (P2P) file-swapping software that people download to trade digital music and video files on the Internet. P2P software often contains programs like Bonzi Buddy and Gator, which collect data on users' surfing and shopping habits and send it to a third party that develops profiles for targeted pop-up ads.

In April 2002, privacy experts discovered that Kazaa -- the most popular file-sharing software -- is bundled with a program called "Altnet."

Sharman Networks, Kazaa's parent company, said it would use Altnet to harness small amounts of the processing power on Kazaa users' computers which it would then sell to other Altnet customers that need the power. Computer users would not be compensated. Sharman said the network is not active and that users can disable the program.

The FTC has investigated reports of spyware privacy violations but has not found anything illegal, said spokeswoman Claudia Bourne-Farrell.

"Allegations about spyware are troubling, and we look forward to reviewing the CDT report," she said. "We'll continue to review this issue and pursue law enforcement where it's appropriate."

Several U.S. lawmakers have introduced legislation during the past two years to control the distribution of spyware, but Congress has failed to pass any bills.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Nov18.html


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Electronic Voting Debacle
Scott Granneman

Grave concerns over the security of electronic voting machines in the United States means the heart of American democracy is at risk, writes SecurityFocus columnist Scott Granneman.

My grandmother, Ruth Scott, was passionately interested in politics her entire life. She never missed an election (an attitude she instilled in her descendents), she followed political debates with great fervor, and, in perhaps her most selfless action, she worked for decades as an Election Judge on election day. These were long days for her, as she had to be there before the polls opened and stay until they closed and the votes had been counted. I'm sure she would have appreciated any tool that made her job easier and enabled her to get home sooner. It seems that such a tool may now be gaining traction all over America: the electronic voting machine. But is it really a good thing for our country and our electoral system?

After the 2000 election debacle in Florida (and actually in plenty of other locations around the U.S.), with its hanging chads and pregnant chads and other punch-card problems, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. One of the functions of the new law was to provide $4 billion for states to use in updating their often antiquated voting equipment. With federal money available, and the cautionary story of Florida as a warning, states began turning in droves to electronic voting machines.

Georgia uses voting machines made by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems throughout the state. Maryland signed a $55.6 million deal with Diebold in July to supply the state with 11,000 voting machines. Other states using machines made by Diebold include Ohio, Texas, and California. Overall, there are more than 55,000 Diebold machines in use around the country.

A Litany of Problems

An election held in Houston just a few days ago was marred when election judges incorrectly set up twelve eSlate voting machines, resulting in a malfunction. The paper ballots that were supposed to be present were not, so judges gave voters pieces of paper torn in half and told them to write their votes down. Other voters simply left without casting their ballot. Some voters were told that they should come back later in the day, when the machines would be working, thereby casting their ballots twice.

The Oakland Tribune reported last week that several thousand voters in Alameda County used electronic voting machines made by Diebold that were never certified for use by state and county voting officials. Diebold altered the software running on the machines prior to the election, but never bothered to submit the software for testing or even notify the state that the software update had been made.

Another election last week also displayed troubling irregularities. After Rita Thompson, a school board member who lost a close race in Fairfax County, Virginia, complained, tests were performed on a WINvote machine made by Advanced Voting Solutions of Texas. Lo and behold, one out of every hundred votes for Thompson actually resulted in a subtracted vote for the candidate. But there's more. Ten machines broke down during the day, so they were brought to the county government center, repaired, and sent back to be used by voters ... with no oversight. But there's still more. At 7 p.m., most of the 223 precincts in the county attempted to report tallies. At the same time. The system, overworked, crashed. "Fiasco" is not a word I would disagree with in describing this situation.

In Georgia during the 2002 elections, some voters using Diebold machines tried to vote for one candidate, but the machine would instead register a vote for the opponent. It got weirder in Georgia in 2002. There were six electoral upsets in that election, including one in which the incumbent senator, who was far ahead in the polls, lost by 11 points. Diebold had changed the software used by the voting machines seven or eight times, without anyone examining it, and then after the election the company immediately overwrote the flash memory of all the cards used by those machines, so it is now impossible to know what the vote counts really were.

Also during the 2002 elections, machines made by Omaha-based Election Systems & Software erroneously reported that no one in several large Florida precincts had voted for governor. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Problems abound. But it's actually much, much worse.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34051.html


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Cisco, Others Plan To Ban Insecure PCs
Robert Lemos

Cisco Systems has teamed up with three top antivirus companies in a security initiative intended to ban insecure mobile devices from corporate networks.

The initiative, dubbed the Network Admission Control program, would allow companies to set their network devices to refuse connections from any mobile PCs or devices that fail to meet corporate security policies, such as not having the latest software patches and antivirus updates. Antivirus companies Network Associates, Symantec and Trend Micro joined Cisco in making the announcement Tuesday.

The plan is meant to combat one of the common weaknesses of company networks: workers who log on from outside a company using
insecure PCs or who bring those computers inside the company and connect to the network.

"Currently, no check is made to see if the PC is compliant with corporate security policies," Charlie Giancarlo, senior vice president of product development for Cisco, said on a conference call Tuesday. "The user might become infected at home or through a hotel Internet connection...(and) immediately spread a worm throughout a corporate networks."

The move by the companies is a reaction to recent computer worms and virus epidemics that have managed to spread into businesses due in large part to the insecure PCs mobile workers use. Both the Slammer worm in January and the MSBlast worm in August were able to get past corporate defenses by hitching rides on the laptops of mobile workers who were lax with security.

"The explosion of wireless, mobile devices and pagers has made the corporation much more vulnerable to attack through the devices," said George Samenuk, CEO of Network Associates.

Other companies have reacted to the problems the worms have highlighted. Microsoft announced in October that it would augment its focus on securing its software through patching, because the earlier system of updates hasn't been able to stem the epidemics. Other companies, including Internet service providers, have blocked certain types of traffic for weeks at a time to stop threats.

Putting agents in place
Cisco's Network Admission Control program would enable companies to install on every PC and mobile device a client, called the Cisco Trust Agent, which could attest to certain levels of security, such as whether the device has been recently patched or has the latest virus recognition files. Antivirus software makers would modify their products to provide information to the software that could be used by companies to determine how secure the PC might be.

Giancarlo stressed that completely locking out mobile users is not an answer. "Clearly, the solution is not to eliminate one of the most important aspects of these devices: their mobility," he said.

The secure connections that allow employees to connect to the internal corporate network from home, virtual private networks, are also seen as a major threat to businesses' security.

Cisco has already focused on delivering such connectivity in its products. Earlier this month, the company announced an upgrade to the Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator to add secure network functionality, dubbed WebVPN, based on the Secure Sockets Layer protocol browsers widely use.

Cisco's concentrators are network devices that act as central connection points for virtual private networks and, as such, are an ideal place to put in additional network defenses.

However, the technology won't work unless security software can tell the Trusted Agent application the current state of security on the computer or mobile device.

"This important problem can't be addressed individually," said John Thompson, CEO of Symantec. "Collaboration is a must."

The technology might also spur sales of PCs and devices that use trusted-computing hardware--controversial technology that uses encryption, special memory and security software to lock away secrets on a PC from prying eyes. Adding further protections to the system that attests to the security of a computer owned by a company is a reasonable use of the system, said Bob Gleichauf, chief technology officer for the Network Admission Control program at Cisco.

"We need a trust boundary between the network and these devices, and the system needs hardware and software to do that," he said.

Cisco plans to introduce the technology in the middle of 2004.
http://news.com.com/2100-7355_3-5108883.html


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Billy Bragg

This Machine Kills Fascists
Juan Aboites

There is a Billy Bragg song titled "Valentines Day Is Over" off of the album Workers Playtime, which contains the lyric, "That brutality and the economy are related; now I understand." Bragg, ever the politically charged folk-punk troubadour, has, throughout his career, loudly rattled the collective chains of the status quo. But from organizing the successful implementation of tactical voting to unseat conservatives in his native England, or to his newest project, the "Tell us the Truth Tour" (with Lester Chambers, Tom Morello, and Steve Earle), Bragg has essentially been saying the same thing; he has underscored the intrinsic overlap of the political and the artistic; the political and the personal. "I just write about the world the way I see it," he said.

Unlike Bragg, many musicians today operate in a distinctly apolitical realm, and it is no secret that the general majority cleaves toward apathy (think new FCC regulations, biodefense labs). The reason? According to Bragg, it's because even value judgments have become increasingly depersonalized; they are, more often than not, the product of the undifferentiated nature of consolidated media. Expressions of how people feel have less to do with those feelings than what is actually saleable. In his typically curt style, Bragg vied away from my initial skepticism: "I don't think monopolies are good for the whole idea of what capitalism is. I once went to a place where they had one radio station and one record company; it was called the Soviet Union."

But forget free market capitalism. The recent RIAA/Peer 2 Peer debacle lends itself to the same idea. Ostensibly, the need for unconsolidated media reflects itself in the need for unconsolidated musical taste.

"I think the record industry needs to look at other reasons why it's losing money," Bragg said. "I think one of those problems is the lack of diversity. Not just a diverse record company, but a diverse media that can handle different opinions and different styles of music in a way that doesn't force us all to conform to a particular stereotype, whether it's a video stereotype or glamour stereotype. There are different values out there in the wide world; it's not all about booty."

But what sets Bragg apart from most is his unwillingness to compromise. Throughout a 20-year career, he continues, as the need presents itself, to offer the alternative perspective. And it is in this way that the title of his newly released compilation discloses the work that underlies its content: Must I Paint You a Picture? You must, Billy. Indeed you must.

You've credited Joe Strummer with infecting punk music with political consciousness. Do you think that that has worn off at all?

It's not worn off on me, mate. I mean, my last album was called England Half-English, and it addressed the issue of the politics of identity as a way of dealing with racists and xenophobes of which we have a serious problem here in the UK, and in Europe. The first political thing I ever did was, when I was 19 years old, go to see The Clash at a rock against racism march. So that's where I came into all this. I am now making albums that try and deal with that issue by looking at it through the prism of identity, so I'm still doing what I came here to do.

I assume, then, that you have a general faith in people. That once they understand an alternative viewpoint, they will act on it.

In the end you have to engage them, mate. 'Cause what's the alternative? You know, you just give up and become a fuckin' cynic. So the level of our participation is really, like, the same as your level. It's engaging. Whether or not the perspective that we offer makes a huge difference is hard to judge, and I really don't care. My point is to engage and do as much as I can and not sit around and be a cynical bastard about it. So I do it, through producing songs and talking to your readers and you do it by writing up interviews and by reviewing records and reviewing shows. It's the same thing, trying to offer a different perspective. I don't go out on this tour, or any tour, or any album that I make and think it's going to change the fuckin' world, man. I just think to myself, "OK, I've done the best I can here to articulate how I feel about the issue. Now we'll see how it goes and how it chimes with other people." But the important thing about that is keeping your feet on the ground, and realizing that it's up to the audience to change the world.
http://www.weeklydig.com/dig/content/5132.aspx


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CNET To Buy, Retune MP3.com
Matt Hines and John Borland

Internet media company CNET Networks announced Friday that it is acquiring the assets of online music distributor MP3.com.

San Francisco-based CNET Networks said it has signed a definitive agreement with Vivendi Universal Net USA to acquire the assets of MP3.com, with the deal scheduled to close in December. Terms of the transaction were not released. CNET Networks operates an array of technology-oriented Web sites including CNET.com, Builder.com, GameSpot, mySimon.com, News.com and ZDNet.

News of the deal first surfaced in an e-mail sent by MP3.com to its customers and posted to its site late Thursday. In the e-mail, MP3.com informed users that its Web site would no longer be accessible in its current form and that CNET Networks plans to reintroduce the music site with new features and services. MP3.com said that after the site's removal, all of the online content on its servers will be deleted and promised that previously submitted musical works in its possession will be destroyed.

MP3.com was once the standard-bearer for digital visionaries looking to the Internet to undermine the power of the traditional music business. By offering free online storage space and access to any band, signed or not, the company and founder Michael Robertson hoped to create a new distribution mechanism that would expand how people got music and what kind of music they listened to.

Robertson did succeed in winning the enmity of the major record labels, who sued the company for tens of millions of dollars when he launched a service that allowed people online access to music they owned. But the rise of Napster and file- swapping did as much to eclipse MP3.com's star.

With free access to major label and other music available through Napster, people flocked to it and other trading networks instead. Robertson ultimately sold the MP3.com property to Vivendi Universal, which maintained the unsigned artist database but used the company's technology to launch Pressplay, the digital music subscription service co-owned with Sony Music Entertainment.

After a corporate shakeup, and the realization of mounting debt, Vivendi lost interest in maintaining money-losing digital assets. It sold Pressplay to Roxio to let it run Roxio's new Napster service. MP3.com is one of the last music assets to go, following the sale of digital music company Emusic to a New York investment firm last month.

CNET Networks representatives said the company aims to augment its position as a provider of interactive content through the acquisition, with plans to enter the online music market through MP3.com. However, a company representative said the revamped site would not compete with music download services such as Napster. Instead, the company plans to turn MP3.com into a source of information for digital music.

CNET Networks believes MP3.com can attract an audience similar to visitors of its GameSpot Web site, which features video game reviews and downloads. The company did not announce a timeframe for its planned relaunch of MP3.com but said it is interested in connecting with artists and record companies that have previously distributed their music via the site.

CNET Networks is the publisher of News.com.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5107696.html


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''These Are Your Movies On Piracy''
Posted by Steven Wu

A few days ago Lawmeme posted a story on pre-movie advertisements meant to counteract the perception of piracy as a victimless crime (or, at least, a crime whose victims were all fat cats anyway). The New York Times now has an article (editorial?) on those advertisements.

"The piracy issue," Mr. Goldstein says in the spot, "I don't think will affect the producers. I mean it does affect them, but it's minuscule to the way it affects me, the guy working on construction, the lighting guy, the sound guy, because we're not million-dollar employees." According to the respect- copyright Web site, if you download a movie illegally, "you're threatening the livelihood of thousands." . . .

[T]he thrust of this campaign is not to address a present crisis but, somewhat remarkably, to attack the cultural roots of one that looms just over the horizon. The easy exchange of sounds and pictures makes it easy to forget that someone--a lot of people--made them, and that someone (else) owns them, and that taking them without paying is a kind of stealing.

The article doesn't really make a novel argument, but I think it's missing at least two points. First, it's disingenuous to believe that the MPAA (and the RIAA) cares so much about copyright because of the impact piracy has on the ordinary guys working in the industry, although that's what the advertisements would like you to believe. At least part of my reaction to these advertisements is a feeling that ordinary people are being used to mask the real interests behind the anti-piracy campaign .

Second, the editorial mis-characterizes the nature of the movement against the MPAA and the RIAA. It's not just that people want to pirate movies, though there are those out there; rather, I like to think that most people are resentful of the incredibly unfair and rent-seeking copyright laws as a whole, and piracy is one way of protesting the system. Piracy may hurt the people who work on movies and music, but it also hurts industries who care nothing about crippling the public domain. Maybe the Eldred people should start putting out counter-advertisements about how existing copyright law hurts us, the larger public, by keeping intellectual property out of our reach and within the pockets of corporations and collectives.
http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/mod...ticle&sid=1278


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China moves from DVD to EVD

Government-backed firm unveils Enhanced Versatile Disc to bring more innovation to the country.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China, the world's biggest maker of DVD players, moved Tuesday to create its next-generation rival -- the EVD -- the first step toward creating a possible new national industry standard.

Beijing E-world Technology Co. Ltd., the corporate entity of a government-backed consortium of businessmen and academics, and two DVD manufacturers unveiled the indigenous, higher-definition Enhanced Versatile Disc.

"It's not a question of whether we walk the EVD path. It's a question of how fast or slow we go," Hao Chieh, president of E-world Technology which designed the new standard, told Reuters.

But analysts doubt that EVDs would be widely adopted in the rest of the world even if China were to adopt it.

The move aims to reduce the drain of what domestic DVD makers consider exorbitant patent royalties they must pay to a group of mostly Japanese electronics conglomerates.

It also aims to avoid over-reliance on foreign technology and could transform China from a mere copier and global factory to an innovator in audio visual technology.

Hao is convinced domestic DVD makers will switch to EVD because royalty payments totaling 2.7 billion yuan, or $325.3 million, have eaten into their profits.

Talks also are under way between domestic DVD makers and the foreign conglomerates to pay royalty for DVDs sold in China.

But EVD may not knock DVD from its leading position just yet.

The Ministry of Information Industry will set up a task force this month to deliberate whether to adopt EVD as the new national industry standard, a ministry spokesman said. There was no timetable for a decision.

DVD is the current unofficial national standard. More than 100 domestic DVD makers produced about 30 million players last year, almost double the 2001 figure, state media said.

China exported 20 million players in 2002, accounting for up to 70 percent of the global DVD market.

Reigning TV maker Sichuan Changhong is in the process of developing its own format and still considering whether to shift production to EVDs, company spokesman Liu Haizhong said.

Only five of China's more than 100 DVD makers have signed up to make EVDs. SVA Electronics, one of China's biggest DVD makers with annual output of about five million, has started mass production, a company spokesman said.

Up to 1.8 million EVD players will be manufactured in 2004, Hao said. Production will be boosted to three million in 2005 and nine million in 2006.

An EVD player costs up to 1,900 yuan, or $230, compared with an average of 800 yuan for a DVD player.

The government contributed 10 million yuan, or one quarter of R&D costs, in 1999 after nine big electronics makers, including Sony Corp and Toshiba Corp., pressured Chinese DVD makers to pay $9 in retroactive royalties for each player exported.

"The DVD dispute makes our enterprises truly understand the implications of possessing our own intellectual property rights," Vice Minister of Information Industry Lou Qinjian said at the unveiling ceremony.

The consortium charges 500,000 yuan in licensing fees and $2 in royalties for each player manufactured.

"Even if China were to adopt EVD, it seems unlikely that it would be widely adopted in the rest of the world," said Helen Davis Jayalath, a senior analyst with the London- based Screen Digest, a market research journal on audio visual media.

"For this to happen the Hollywood studios, which drive the world video software business, would have to release their titles on EVD," she said.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/11/18/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes


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Musicians Back Copyright Change In Australia
ILA

A survey conducted by music industry services firm Immedia, at its Australasian Music Business Conference, says most musicians and other music professionals believe Australian copyright laws are too harsh. The survey found that 81 per cent of the 200 respondents felt that the Copyright Act should be changed to allow the copying of a user's own legally purchased CDs, but not borrowed or downloaded music.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E%5Enbv%5E1530


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FCC Rule Could Harm Tech Innovation
Zoe Lofgren

The Federal Communications Commission recently gave itself unprecedented powers to keep new television sets, digital video recorders, handheld devices, third-generation cell phones and even computers out of the hands of American consumers.

How? The FCC issued new rules on the so-called ``broadcast flag,'' a proposal first put forth by the Motion Picture Association of America purportedly to encourage broadcasters to offer more digital programming.

The broadcast flag is a single bit of data added to the digital television shows beamed out across the country. By itself, the bit does nothing. Instead, the meat of the new rule requires every future device capable of playing these shows to recognize the flag and include built-in technologies that prevent them from being pirated.

But here's the kicker. Under the new rules, the FCC gets to decide if a particular technology provides sufficient protection. If you're not on the FCC's pre- approved list, you can't sell your product.

So what does this mean to you and me? It could mean that future consumer electronics and computing products will never come to market. In our digital world, the FCC is not only targeting television sets. Computers, DVRs and handheld devices can handle flagged content. Indeed, any future device capable of handling digital content could potentially be covered.

Do we want the FCC wielding veto power over a new Apple computer, Palm handheld or Motorola cell phone? Of course not. This country's technological leadership is rooted in our ability to quickly adapt and innovate, words that are not often used to describe the federal government.

The FCC's plan sounds a little like the old Soviet Union. And we know how well centralized state control worked for them. That's why Congress never gave the FCC the power to dictate the design of new computers or consumer electronics devices.

In fact, in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress specifically disavowed such mandates. Apparently, the FCC never got the message. Instead, the FCC believes that its ancillary authority over broadcasting extends to every product that brushes up against digital television. To justify their absurd conclusion, the commissioners even argue that they have the authority to regulate these industries because Congress never said they couldn't.

The main problem with this or any other government mandate is that they are rooted in the present. It is impossible to predict where American ingenuity will take us. We should do everything we can to foster this ingenuity, not put up roadblocks that will only place our inventors at a competitive disadvantage.

The FCC's attempt to become the self-anointed gatekeeper to future innovation will undoubtedly benefit the small consortium of companies with approved technologies. But it will also diminish the incentive to bring new technologies to market, hurt consumers who have bought pre-flag devices, and set a dangerous precedent for government mandates on technology.

That's not to say that the broadcast flag proposal should not be discussed. If Congress, not the FCC, decides that the broadcast flag is necessary, then it should examine ways to implement the flag without stifling innovation and competition. For example, voluntary, non-proprietary standards that preserve interoperability could be set by international non-governmental bodies.

The real goal should not be to slow down innovation, but to find ways for broadcasters to get paid when they deserve payment.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/7281987.htm


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Microsoft Eyes Music Service In 2004

Report: Microsoft in talks with music companies; could undercut price of Apple, Napster services.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Software company Microsoft Corp. plans to roll out a song-downloading service next year that will rival offerings from Apple Computer and Roxio Inc.'s Napster.

A spokeswoman for the company confirmed to the Wall Street Journal, in an article published Monday, that Microsoft's MSN Web site will have such a service in 2004, but she declined to provide more detail.

Citing a person familiar with the matter, the newspaper said Microsoft has been in close contact with major music companies to discuss plans for a service.

The story noted that Microsoft might be able to undercut the per-song price of competitors, and that its dominant Windows operating system gives the company a strong position from which to expand into new markets.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/11/17/tech...ft_music.reut/


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Compact Disc ‘Too Big’

Bands 'urged to cut album tracks'
BBC

Record labels are urging artists to put fewer tracks on albums because fans are put off by too many average songs, the Los Angeles Times has reported.

"There's been a tendency to overload CDs because the technology permits it," Sony US president Don Ienner said. CD sales are competing with websites that give fans songs cheaply or free.

On Monday, Microsoft unveiled its online music service plans while free site Kazaa launched a campaign to fight the music industry's anti-piracy drive. Record labels are urging the clampdown on album tracks as a way of reversing a three-year-long slump in album sales. "The final choice will always be the artist's, but I feel - and consumer research bears it out - that the public thinks albums have too much filler," Mr Ienner told the paper.

"We all should be concerned about giving music buyers good value, whether they're getting eight, 10 or 20 songs." Digital technology mean CDs can fit twice as much music - 80 minutes - as vinyl albums..

The LA Times said changes would mean a "shake-up" in the music industry, which was structured around albums of up to 16 tracks selling for $12 (£7.50). The article compared Bruce Springsteen's 1975 album Born to Run - which had only eight tracks - against the recent chart-topping album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which had 34 songs. Some record company executives are now saying albums should have 10 or fewer songs, the paper reported.

Meanwhile, Microsoft unveiled plans to launch a downloadable music service to rival legal online music sources such as Apple's iTunes and Napster, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Analysts said the company's Windows operating system - installed on millions of PCs - could give it an advantage. The service could also be adapted to run through Microsoft's Windows Media player, which allows people to play music and video files, which is loaded on many computers. The service will be run through Microsoft's MSN website, but further details were not provided.

And free file-sharing network Kazaa launched a campaign urging its 60 million users to help it "fight back" against efforts to stop "piracy" on popular networks. Kazaa, which allows people to swap songs through their computers, has been one of the services accused of letting fans make unauthorised copies of songs. Nikki Hemming, chief executive of Sharman Networks, which owns Kazaa, said: "It's a call to action. We want to pump up the volume." The $1m (£640,000) campaign, which features on the internet and in magazines, includes an ad that argues music executives are "missing the opportunity to capture an enormous market".

"The world of entertainment is changing," it said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3280429.stm


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A Fair User's Manual

Know Your Rights Before The Copyright Cops Read Them To You
Brendan I. Koerner

The story's always the same: A media giant slaps a small fry with a cease-and-desist order, citing copyright infringement. In defense, the small fry yelps, "Fair use!" But what does that really mean? Ask a hundred lawyers and you'll get a hundred different answers - fair use can be as malleable as obscenity. Crossing the line could earn you a $150,000 fine, no matter how funny that Family Guy WAV file on your homepage is. Thanks to the 1976 US Copyright Act, federal judges decide whether your use of someone else's material is fair or foul. The courts ask four key questions:

1. Is the use transformative? The court considers how the material has changed, if at all. A blogger who annotates a Dick Cheney quote is in the clear; one who merely reprints a news article is not. Parody is also protected. 2 Live Crew's "Pretty Woman" borrows the opening riff from the Roy Orbison tune. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that the rap song didn't infringe on Orbison - it poked fun, and the borrowed element was only enough to "conjure up" the source. Parody also let Al Franken incorporate Fox News' motto into the title of his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

2. What's the nature of the copyrighted work? Facts can't be copyrighted, so a Web site can probably get away with reprinting an account of, say, the diet of a minke whale. If the account hasn't made its way into a journal or other fact-heavy tome, though, that use may not be fair; courts reason that the use of unpublished material kills its creator's chances of ever making a dime. Same with educational versus commercial uses. Nonprofit educational uses are OK, but when Kinko's starts to make a killing off photocopying fees, courts start to wonder. As for online course packets, nobody's really figured that out.

3. How much did you change? The teensier the content chunk, the more likely its use is kosher. That's the de minimis defense, a popular tactic that says a sliver is too small to qualify as infringement. But size doesn't matter if a court finds that the excerpt is the "heart" of the original. A few pilfered notes can land a sample-happy producer in hot water if a judge believes those notes are the essence of a song (and the new version isn't a parody, natch). In 2000, Lucasfilm sued Dr. Dre for filching the THX sound check; the suit was settled, and Dre hired a musicologist to avoid any future entanglements.

4. What's the effect on the market? Diminish demand for the original work and you're asking to be sued. An unauthorized fan book about a sitcom may seem innocuous, yet courts have ruled that such works adversely affect the market for authorized material. But proving economic harm is tough. Earlier this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a photographer who objected to thumbnails of his pictures showing up in a search engine's results. The photographer's potential customers were unlikely to settle for tiny JPEGs, it said. And in 1984's famous Betamax decision, the Supreme Court held that video recording primarily time- shifted TV programs, which didn't mess with Hollywood's profits. The decision helped launch the VCR revolution, and it's still Citation Number One when Big Media tries to put the kibosh on newfangled recording devices.

Even if the answers tip in favor of the accused, a favorable verdict isn't guaranteed. Courts ask an unofficial fifth question: Is the defendant a good guy or a bad guy? "It's called the slimeball factor," says Thomas Field of the Franklin Pierce Law Center. "You've got to account for the judge having his finger on the scales to nail the slimeball and help the little old widow." Or the big media conglomerate.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...rt.html?pg=13/


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Major Music Industry Survey Reveals Stats On Music Use & Legalities

A major survey compiled from 200 music business professionals at all levels who responded to a set of 30 questions on their use of music technology, purchases of CDs and online music, downloading & CD burning habits as well as the need for legislation changes to better serve music consumers has just been released with surprising results. The survey, titled "Music--The Business, Law & Technology Report" was taken at the 6th AustralAsian Music Business Conference August 14-16 and the results compiled by IMMEDIA!--leading music industry service company and publisher of the AustralAsian Music Industry Directory.

Compiled results-in graphic form, percentages & outcomes-are online at Australian music business portal site, TheMusic.com.au at http:// www.themusic.com.au/stats & also posted on IMMEDIA!'s corporate site at http://www.immedia.com.au/stats. The details include all questions asked with numbers of respondents answering, bar graphs of the results showing percentile ranking of replies. Interviews with music analyst Phil Tripp are also available.

Of the 200 professionals responding who anonymously answered the questions on the paper survey--from 600 attendees of the three day music industry conference--42% were musicians or songwriters, 16% were artist or band managers, 14% music business students, 6% record company staff, 6% music media, with 14% falling in the ëother' category including music publishers, agents, lawyers, producers, engineers and copyright association staff.

Some sample results from music professionals' technology use include:

1. Of the 76% who play music through their computers-47% listen to CDs, 19% to MP3s, 10% via streaming media websites including online radio and 24% listen to all the above.

2. 77% have a CD burner, 11% use someone else's and only 5% have never used one.
3. Even though it's illegal in Australia, 48% burn music from their own purchased CDs, 21% from borrowed CDs, 6% from downloaded songs while 25% burn CDs from all the above.
4. In the past year, 47% burned fewer than 5 CDs, 25% 5-10 CDs, 14% 10-20 CDs, 7% 20-50 CDs, 3% 50-100 CDs & 4% of music professionals burned more than 100 or more a year.
5. Of 45% who download music, 50% take free music only, 18% pay for it, 31% do both.

Purchasing of CDs and music/DVD/vinyl ownership habits were also polled:
1. 25 % purchased 10-20 CDs this year, 24% 0-5 CDs, 21% 20- 50 CDs & 4% over 100 CDs.
2. Only 14% had purchased CDs online this year. Top sites are Chaos, Amazon & HMV.
3. CD ownership was high-32% had 200-500CDs, 24% 100- 200CDs, 16% owned 50-100 while 8% had collected 500-1000 and 8% admitted to owning more than 1000 CDs.
4. DVD ownership is not as high-32% had 0-5 DVDs, 25% had 10-20 & only 6% had 50+.
5. Vinyl owners numbers 68% and 24% of those had 100-500LPs, 26% less than 20 LPs.
6. Surprising result-21% sample music via P2P before buying, 33% do not.Ý

But the attitudes of music industry pros toward CD burning, file sharing and copying your own music CD elicited a response that ARIA & record companies probably don't want to hear. It's time to change the law to allow consumers to copy their own music they say!

1. 55% considered it an inequity that it's against the law to make a copy of your own bought CDs, make a personal use compilation (CD or tape) or copying them to a digital device.
2. A whopping 81% believe the Copyright Act should be changed to allow personal copying of purchased CDs (but not other peoples borrowed or downloaded music).
3. 57% considered burning CDs stealing from artists, 29% from labels and 14% did not.
4. 48% regarded downloading free music theft from artists, 25% from labels, 27% did not.
5. Yet 54% admitted they illegally copied computer software. 26% copied games illegally.
http://mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=59371

[JackSpratts]

Music sales continue to rise – who knew?

Record Sales Break Records In UK
BBC

Up 3%

A record number of albums were sold in the UK in the last year because they are now cheaper than ever, industry figures have revealed.

More than 228 million albums were sold in the 12 months from June 2002 - up 3% on the previous year - according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). And they were on sale for an average of £9.79 each, which is a new low, the BPI said. But despite the healthiest album sales recorded, music industry profits are down.

The BPI said the total UK music market for the first six months of 2003 was down 7% in sales values, compared with last year. Artists such as Robbie Williams, whose Escapology album has sold 1.8 million in the UK since its November release, have dominated the album charts in recent months. Other album successes have come from Norah Jones, with sales of 1.5 million, and Avril Lavigne and Justin Timberlake, with 1.2 million each.

ALBUM SALES

12 Months from June ‘02: 228 million
Five years ago (1998): 210 million
Ten years ago (1993): 153 million
Twenty-five years ago (1978): 107 million

CD prices have dropped as record shops have been forced to compete with supermarkets and websites, which are able to sell them for less. Tesco recently said it had overtaken Virgin to become the UK's third-largest music retailer. "It is clear that cheap retail prices on offer to the consumer, combined with strong new release titles, are sustaining the UK album market at a high level," a BPI statement said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3158767.stm


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Australian Music Sales Rise
Kate Mackenzie and wires

MUSIC DVD sales have led Australia to buck a global fall in music sales around the world in the first half of the year.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry blamed piracy and illegal MP3 downloads from the internet for a 10.9 per cent decline in recorded music sales worldwide.

Sales of all audio and music video formats were worth $US12.7 billion ($19.9 million) in the first six months of the year, compared with $US14.3 billion in the same period of 2002, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in its interim report.

IFPI Germany, Japan, the United States and Canada have been particularly hard hit by piracy, seeing the numbers of unauthorised downloads of tracks and copied CDs reach or exceed the levels of legitimate track and CD album sales.

Australia's total music sales growth was attributed to rising music DVD sales. Several other countries, including Russia, Finland and Hong Kong also saw net rises for various reasons.

Australia also falls outside the top 10 countries IFPI has listed as their main piracy concerns. Brazil, China, Mexico, Paraguay, Poland, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand and the Ukraine are on the list.

DVD music videos, which grew by 46 per cent by volumes and 55 per cent by value in the first half, took a 5 per cent shares of global music sales.

"Despite some healthy signs that a legitimate online music business is now taking hold, the music industry continues to suffer from the unauthorised file-sharing and commercial piracy," said the federation's chairman, Jay Berman.

"We are responding to this decisively, however: on the physical piracy front, seizures of discs rose four-fold last year; on the Internet piracy front, the US industry is leading a highly effective global public awareness drive on the legal risks of file-sharing; and on the new business front, a marked change in the landscape is visible as a number of legitimate online music sites take hold."

The format has proved a big hit with movie watchers and the music industry is hoping to cash in on its popularity to boost flagging revenues.

At the same time the music giants are battling to win a share of the online music market, having initially opposed all forms of online music downloads.

There was a marked increase in the availability of legitimate online music in the first half of this year, with 300,000 tracks now on offer online, the report said.

Europe now has more than 30 sites offering legitimate online music either by pay-per- download or subscription, it said.

The London-based federation comprises a membership of more than 1,500 record companies, including independents and majors, in over 70 countries.
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...=date&Intro=No


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Global Music Sales Continue To Fall
Owen Gibson

Things are going to get worse before they improve for a music industry brought to its knees by music piracy and file sharing, a report released today claims.

For the major record labels, which are cutting costs and engaged in a game of brinkmanship over a series of proposed mergers, the predictions will come as gloomy tidings ahead of the Christmas sales season.

The Informa Media research predicts the value of global music sales will drop for the fourth year in a row to £16.5bn this year and will fall even further next year.

The total number of CD sales, which fell for the first time in 2001, will continue to slide, dropping by 8% to 2.1 billion units in 2003.

Online peer-to-peer piracy, counterfeit CDs, the end of the CD boom - when music fans updated their vinyl collections - and the rise of competing leisure products such as video games, mobile phones and DVDs have all been blamed for the industry's current crisis.

However, the Informa analysis predicts a recovery will be under way by 2005 provided record labels can get to grips with piracy and support legal digital download services.

"The music industry is in a bad way at the moment but the continued fall in the value of music sales is certainly not irreversible," said Simon Dyson, the author of the report.

"The success of the new download services proves there is a viable market for legitimate digital sales, but the music companies must act decisively to stop the growth of illegal services and the widespread copying of CDs," he added.

The world's four biggest music companies are engaged in an unprecedented wave of consolidation, with EMI courting a long-awaited merger with Time Warner's music arm and Bertelsmann-owned BMG announcing a joint venture with Sony.

Although EMI and Warner have been discussing the proposed tie-up for months, BMG and Sony have sought to leapfrog their rivals by submitting their plans to competition regulators ahead of the EMI/Warner camp.

Only one of the two deals is expected to be allowed.

To further complicate the situation the former Seagram chief executive, Edgar Bronfman, is expected to make a solo £1.5bn bid today for Time Warner's music assets.

He has teamed up with a range of other investors, including the Power Rangers entrepreneur, Haim Saban.

Since Apple's launch of iTunes - the only legal download service to have a wide roster of songs from all the major labels at a reasonable price - software companies and music labels have been falling over themselves to launch their own versions.

US software group Roxio bought the rights to the famous Napster brand and recently relaunched it as a legal site, while Real Networks, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! have all either launched digital music services or have well-advanced plans to do so.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia...088783,00.html


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Music Industry Recovery on Pause Until 2005 – Study
Reuters

The music industry is in for at least two more years of pain, with a sales recovery not expected until 2005 at the earliest, a report said on Tuesday.

According to London-based research firm Informa Media Group, the retail value of global music sales will drop to $28.2 billion this year from $30.9 billion in 2002 and to $28 billion in 2004 before returning to growth in 2005 as new Internet music services take off.

"The music industry is in a bad way at the moment but the continued fall in the value of music sales is certainly not irreversible. The success of the new download services proves there is a viable market for legitimate digital sales," said Simon Dyson, an Informa analyst.

Dyson said the major music labels Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and Bertelsmann's BMG have not acted decisively enough to stem the rise of digital piracy, which is blamed for sinking sales for three straight years.

A host of industry-backed subscription download services have emerged to address the practice of consumers making copies of their CDs and downloading songs from the Internet for free, but consumer uptake has been slow.

One rare early success, the Apple Computer Inc. iTunes service, shows consumers are willing to buy individual songs online, but Dyson warned digital music sales will always be a niche sector, accounting for a low double-digit share of overall sales.

Informa predicted global Internet music sales, which includes sales of CDs from retail Web sites such as Amazon.com and song downloads for iTunes, will reach 3.9 billion by 2008, up from $1.1 billion in 2002.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...media_music_dc


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It's Certainly A Thrill: 'Sgt. Pepper' Is Best Album
Edna Gundersen

To everyone's complete lack of surprise, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has been anointed the best album ever in a new Rolling Stone poll. (Related item: See statistics from their list)

The Beatles' consecrated 1967 classic tops "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time," a collector's issue on stands Friday. Though typically the odds-on favorite for such rankings, Sgt. Pepper wasn't a slam-dunk.

"There was a horse race," says Rolling Stone music editor Joe Levy. "Early on, any number of albums in the top 10 were in the lead. The final result is no shock, but there's a reason for that. The Beatles, after all, were the most important and innovative rock group in the world. And Sgt. Pepper arguably set the tone for what an album could be."

The Beatles have four albums in the top 10. Predictably, the list is weighted toward testosterone-fueled vintage rock.

The top solo female is Joni Mitchell, whose 1971 Blue is No. 30.

The newest entry is this year's Elephant by the White Stripes, landing at No. 390. The most current disc in the top 20 is Nirvana's 1991 breakthrough, Nevermind. Recent albums by Coldplay and The Strokes also made the cut, as did all three Eminem (news - web sites) releases and a wide range of hip- hop.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...today/11955063


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Australians Escape Jail In Country's First Online Music Piracy Case

SYDNEY, (AFP) - Two Australian men who ran a music website from their parents' homes escaped jail Tuesday in what the recording industry described as the country's first criminal prosecution for online music piracy.

Charles Kok Hau Ng, 20, and Peter Tran, 19, pleaded guilty to copyright breaches which prosecutors estimated cost the Australian music industry 60 million dollars (43.2 million US).

The pair were in charge of the "MPW3/WMA Land" site, which attracted seven million hits in 12 months, allowing users to download 1,800 copyrighted tracks free of charge.

Ng, Tran and a third man, Tommy Le, 21, were arrested in April after police raided their homes following a joint investigation with Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), a record industry-funded watchdog.

The trio had faced up to five years' jail and 60,500 dollars (43,560 US) in fines.

Magistrate Graeme Henson said Ng and Tran's offences warranted a jail term because the men knew they were acting illegally and went to great lengths to cover their tracks.

But he gave them 18-month suspended sentences because of their youth and the fact that they never made a profit from the site. Tran was also ordered to pay a 5,000 dollar fine, while Le and Ng were given 200 hours community service.

MIPI manager Michael Speck described the court's decision as "a slap on the wrist".

"It's most disappointing," he told AFP. "Australia had the opportunity to show the world how seriously it was taking this type of crime.

"Instead, the court has allowed them to walk away after saying that they deserved to go to jail -- it's virtually an invitation for Internet pirates to set themselves up in Australia."

When the trio were first charged, MIPI said the case was the first criminal prosecution of its type in the world.

Speck said since then a number of other prosecutions had now been completed overseas, resulting in jail terms of at least 12 months from those involved in Internet piracy on such a scale.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said the case showed convictions could be secured under government legislation to crackdown on copyright pirates.

"A conviction resulted and penalties have now been imposed so that would suggest to me that the law is working as intended," he told public radio.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...y_031118072229


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New Zealand DIA Investigates 111 P2P Users, Prosecutes Two

Wider eye may pose problems for work environments
Stephen Bell

A Computerworld Official Information Act (OIA) request shows only two prosecutions have resulted from Department of Internal Affairs investigations into more than 100 peer-to-peer users.

Department censorship inspectors have turned their attention earnestly to peer-to-peer trading channels, but to date seem to be having little success.

The OIA request earlier this month showed that while 111 users of P2P services have been “investigated”, there have only been two prosecutions, with another five cases are being readied for court.

The department does not specify to what degree of “investigation” the unsuccessful cases proceeded.

Department attention to P2P channels, such as Morpheus and Kazaa, could signal to IT managers a need to be more assiduous in policing what their employees do at work. IRC channels, a longer-established porn trading medium, are sectioned by subject, and inspectors concentrate on those where illegal material is traded.

While an employee is unlikely to blatantly join a channel with an explicit title from their work machine, P2P services, by contrast, are more general with legal and illegal porn mixed in with mainstream pictures and audio and video files.

Employees committing a mere misdemeanour, such as seeking tracks from the latest Dido album or a Lord of the Rings trailer, may find a department porn inspector looking over their shoulder.

Trading of pirated music and video tracks is regarded as a serious matter by the film and music industries, which have begun to threaten ISPs with legal action.

The two successful P2P prosecutions to date are for trading, not merely possessing, objectionable material. Computerworld asked the department whether the cases had brought any delicate legal argument, since “supply” of a file on P2P services is typically automatic on the consumer’s (or inspector’s) clicking on the file icon. Most IRC trades, by contrast, have been the result of an online conversation where the owner of the file is specifically requested to send it and has to take a physical action to do so.

Department censorship compliance head Keith Manch says that there has been no legal argument to date on P2P files, as both offenders pleaded guilty. Only one of the offences, however, is under the section “involving knowledge”, suggesting that the other trader may have been unaware that the image “supplied” was illegal.
http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news....4?OpenDocument


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Quantum MP3 May Soon Be Reality
Mike Martin

"Our approach to quantum audio signals has close similarities with the MP3 compression used for sound treatment in usual classical computers," says French researcher Dima Shepelyansky.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. lab in Urbana, Illinois, on the 12th of January."

When the intrepid astronauts of Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" heard those ominous words from their future nemesis, they could have been hearing the voice of a quantum computer, though Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick might not have envisioned such technology at the time.

Just how a quantum computer could speak and make sounds is the subject of a new paper by three French researchers who claim that "classical audio analysis methods cannot be directly applied to quantum signals, and it is important to adapt them to the new environment of quantum computing."

In what might be a first study of quantum-computer audio transmission, "our results show that sound signals stored in a quantum memory can be reliably recognized and recovered on realistic quantum computers," explained Jae Won Lee of the French Center of National Scientific Research.

Lee and colleagues Dima Shepelyansky and Alexei Chepelianskii used HAL's famous first words to prove their point.

A Thousand Years of Sound

Conventional information processing uses binary bits that are either zero or one.

Computer scientists want to use subatomic particles -- which can be in more than one state at one time, a quirky quantum property -- to create a new type of bit that can be both zero and one -- at once.

This quantum bit, or "qubit," can move information and process sound far faster than its conventional binary-bit counterpart.

"A quantum computer with 50 qubits may store an amount of information exceeding all modern supercomputer capacities (1,000 years of sound)," writes Shepelyansky, director of research at the French Center.

Shepelyansky and his collaborators found that HAL's voice "could be encoded in the wave function of a quantum computer" with 18 qubits. "A quantum wave function is 'written' in the memory of a quantum register formed by qubits," he told NewsFactor.

HAL Now?

MP3 is a well known example of audio compression that uses a mathematical technique called the "Fast Fourier Transform" for rapid access to the audio-signal spectrum. Sound signals have to be reduced or "compressed, in order to achieve real-time audio communication," Chepelianskii told NewsFactor.

MP3's quantum counterpart -- the Quantum Fourier Transform -- allows far faster audio transmission.

"Our approach to quantum audio signals has close similarities with the MP3 compression used for sound treatment in usual classical computers," Shepelyansky explained. "Measurements of qubits are performed on the quantum register that allow us to extract the stored sound signal. We performed numerical simulations of this process and developed an optimal strategy to restore the original sound."
http://sci.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22456.html


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Q U O T E D

I'm figuring out a meditation wall for my apartment in New York. Eight feet high by 12 feet wide, with an array of overlapping rear projectors, each with a tiny Linux box and connected by gigabit Ethernet. I would love to get 72 dpi but will probably settle for less - about 30 megapixels for the whole thing. [Former Walt Disney Imagineering guru] Bran Ferren and Danny Hillis [inventor of massively parallel supercomputing] at Applied Minds are building it for me. It's very bright. Given that it's in an apartment, the main limitation will be power availability. I'll also need some great 30-megapixel images. Any ideas? I can always put a picture of stars on the wall. In Manhattan, you can't see them - except, of course, in a blackout.

- - Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, explains what he's doing for fun these days.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...sv/7319476.htm


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Rights Advocates Urge Patriot Act Amendments
Caron Carlson

Two years after granting the FBI (news - web sites) a series of new electronic surveillance and search powers to combat terrorism, Congress is taking a closer look at the impact of those powers and of other provisions in the USA Patriot Act. What makes the matter particular pressing for politicians is that the act's critics span the entire political spectrum.

It comes as no surprise that the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) would be wary of expanded police powers, but the issue became more complicated when former congressman Bob Barr, known for his conservative leaning, joined the ACLU's cause.

According to Barr, who voted for the USA Patriot Act, the government's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has had an adverse affect on individual liberties.

"Little did I, or many of my colleagues, know [the Act] would shortly be used in contexts other than terrorism, and in conjunction with a wide array of other, privacy-invasive programs and activities," Barr told lawmakers Tuesday in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee (news - web sites).

Two provisions that expand the government's power to obtain personal records without the traditional checks and balances surrounding search warrants and subpoenas are particularly troubling to rights advocates. One provision (Section 215) allows the FBI to demand business records, such as a subject's medical history, Internet use patterns and gun purchases, with an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, even if the subject is not a suspected terrorist. Critics say the order amounts to a rubber stamp.

Another provision (Section 505) gives the government greater power to use what is known as a "national security letter"—also known as an administrative subpoena—to obtain records such as credit reports, financial documents, and telephone and email bills. A national security letter does not require law enforcement to show probable cause, nor does it require even the low standard of judicial review required by a FISA Court order.

The Department of Justice (news - web sites), trying to assuage the concerns, recently announced that Section 215 has not been used to obtain business records. However, that announcement served to underscore one of the broader concerns about the Patriot Act, which is that lawmakers enacted broad new powers without determining if the powers were necessary.

James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, told Congress today that the Justice Department (news - web sites)'s concession that Section 215 has not been used illustrates the need to repeal or amend it.

Proponents of the Patriot Act charge that critics have overblown the breadth of the new surveillance powers. Viet Dinh, a former Justice Department attorney who was instrumental in crafting the Act, told Congress that fears over Section 215 are unfounded. Dinh, who now is a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that the section gives courts the same power to order the production of business records that grand juries have long had.

The ACLU and CDT are urging Congress to pass a bill called the SAFE (Security and Freedom Ensured) Act to render the FISA court order more than a rubber stamp. Before law enforcement agents could get a FISA Court order to obtain personal records from banks, universities, doctors, travel agents and employers, they would have to show a reason for suspecting that the records relate to a spy, terrorist or other foreign agent. Under the legislation, additional search and Internet monitoring provisions would expire at the end of 2005.

Rights advocates have achieved considerable success in raising awareness on Capitol Hill about the concerns regarding executive branch data-mining projects, but they urged lawmakers today to remain vigilant. Congress has blocked funding for the controversial Operation TIPS and Total Information Awareness programs, but critics say these programs are re-emerging under different guises. The MATRIX (Multi-state Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) program, for example, could be TIA by another name, Barr cautioned.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...8/tc_zd/112802


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AT&T Wireless Jumps Into Data Arms Race With Speedier Service
Bruce Meyerson

AT&T Wireless (news - web sites) weighed into the mobile Internet arms race on Tuesday with a national upgrade to its mobile data network that will enable laptop connections at twice the speed of dial-up access.

Gearing up for the industry slugfest expected to break out next week, when cellphone users can begin switching wireless carriers without giving up their phone numbers, AT&T Wireless boasted Tuesday that it now offers the fastest national data service. That claim is essentially true, though only by a small margin.

Either way, compared with the data service AT&T Wireless is replacing, the $300-million upgrade to Edge technology brings a major improvement to the company's lineup at a crucial time.

Cell companies have been hurrying out new products and promotions in a bid to attract new customers and retain old ones once new rules take effect Monday freeing them to switch services without losing their phone numbers.

Sprint, for example, rolled out a new "walkie-talkie" feature and aggressive pricing. T-Mobile has expanded its free weekend calls to include all of Friday.

The new $79.99 US per month unlimited service is billed with average data speeds of between 100 and 130 kilobits per second for a laptop equipped with a wireless modem card that costs $250. Under optimal conditions, such as off-peak usage times and close proximity to a network transmitter, the maximum speed is 200 kbps.

By contrast, the "1xRTT" technology used by arch rivals Sprint and Verizon Wireless are billed as providing average speeds between 50 and 70 kbps, with bursts of up to 144 kbps.

The announcement by AT&T Wireless goes right to the heart of a Sprint ad campaign that directly attacks AT&T Wireless as offering inferior data speeds of only 20 to 40 kbps with the GPRS technology it has been using.

"We are now twice as fast as (Sprint and Verizon), and we offer the service at the same price they offer for their services," said Andre Dahan, president of AT&T Wireless Mobile Multimedia Services, adding that his company won't be shy in its marketing efforts. "Most big publications (Wednesday) will have ads, and yes, we are naming names."

None of these cellular-based data services compare with the speed of a wireless data connection using the popular Wi-Fi technology. But they provide coverage over a much wider area than Wi-Fi, whose current range is limited to about 300 feet.

In September, Verizon launched an even faster generation of wireless Internet access in two cities, Washington and San Diego, promising average speeds of between 300 and 500 kbps, almost on par with the wired broadband connections provided by DSL and cable TV, and bursts of up to 2,000 kbps.

However, Verizon has no immediate plans to roll out that service nationally.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...speed_wireless


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Searching For Harmony
Laura Rohde

AOL launches audio- and video-finding features

Hoping to attract broadband customers to its service, AOL today began offering a new audio and video search feature that promises to simplify searches for multimedia content across the web as well as through AOL's exclusive media content.

The company, a subsidiary of Time Warner, has also acquired Singingfish, which provides the technology for the multimedia searches. Representatives of AOL and Singingfish could not immediately be reached for comment.

Singingfish's search engine technology is already included in media players by companies such as Microsoft and RealNetworks. Peer-to-peer (P2P) file- sharing programs like Kazaa and Morpheus also allow audio and video searches, though the services are often accused of violating copyrights. Singingfish claims it only searches for content that is authorised for use.

Along with the audio and video search, AOL is also offering a preview version of a neighbourhood search technology called "In Your Area," which includes local yellow-page listings and movie showing times. The company did not say when the full version of the search tool would be made available, or detail the limitations of the preview version.

New navigation tabs for audio and video searches as well as the In Your Area searches have been included on the integrated AOL Search service.

AOL has been aggressive in its efforts to compete in the growing online search market. Last month, the company added new query options and navigation tools to its service and expanded its agreement with search engine Google to include access to Google's index and sponsored links.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/index.cfm...view&news=3665


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Kazaa Launches Legitimacy Campaign
David McGuire

The world's largest Internet music-trading service launched a $1 million advertising campaign Tuesday designed to rally the public to pressure lawmakers and the entertainment industry to embrace digital file sharing as a legitimate distribution tool.

The campaign is the latest push by the Kazaa file-sharing service and its parent company, Sharman Networks, to counter a multi-million-dollar legal and lobbying effort launched by music, software and movie firms convinced that peer-to-peer (P2P) services are a major source of online piracy.

The ads invite readers and Kazaa's estimated 60 million users to "join the revolution" by proclaiming their love of Kazaa to "politicians, journalists, record labels, movie companies and friends." They also exhort the entertainment industry to embrace the "revolution" or get left behind as technology passes them by.

Sharman Networks's Nikki Hemming said that the campaign will feature three ads scheduled to run in several widely read newspapers and magazines including Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and London's Guardian.

The campaign follows Sharman Networks's backing earlier this year of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a group formed to lobby Congress on the merits of file sharing. It also is the latest step by Kazaa to cast itself as the way that the music industry should sell its products online.

"I think we're in the last mile right now," Hemming said.

Entertainment industry officials were unimpressed with Hemmings's attempts to redefine Kazaa.

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) spokesman Rich Taylor dismissed the campaign outright. "Kazaa is a service that is preying on copyrighted works, and no amount of advertising can change what you see when you go online there," he said. The MPAA estimates that file sharing has cost the film industry more than $1 billion in the last year.

Until the file-sharing companies filter copyrighted works, there won't be much ground for discussion, said Recording Industry Association of America spokesman Jonathan Lamy.

Gigi Sohn, president of Washington, D.C.-based civil liberties group Public Knowledge, said it will be hard to rally millions of people to support something that they know in their hearts is illegal.

"Whenever I talk to people about Kazaa, they treat it like marijuana -- as much as they love it, they have a sense that what they're doing is a little bit wrong," Sohn said.

But Hollywood and the recording industry deserve their share of the blame for the ongoing problem, she said, because they seem unwilling to understand why millions of people use file sharing as their only way to get music, legally or otherwise.

"There's something about peer-to-peer that people like, and it's not just that it's free," Sohn said. "It's that they're involved in a community of people. I don't know why [entertainment companies] wouldn't want to appeal to an instant audience of tens of millions."

Sharman Networks is the primary backer of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) which starting in July tried to break that stalemate. The group has gotten the ear of several prominent file-sharing critics, including Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), but there are no signs that it has been able to change entrenched industry perceptions.

If anything, the DCIA has caused trouble for Kazaa because it is butting heads with P2P United, a rival lobbying group formed by several of Kazaa's competitors, including Grokster, Morpheus and BearShare.

These other networks have responded bitterly to Sharman Networks's decision to pursue its goals without them, especially because Kazaa with its 60 million users brings more clout to the debate.

Wayne Rosso, chief executive of OptiSoft SL, the Spanish company that owns the Blubster and Piolet P2P networks, said that Kazaa refuses to band together with its competitors because it foresees a future in which it outlasts them and becomes the music industry's primary online music distribution method.

"They think they're Microsoft," said Rosso, the former head of the West Indies-based Grokster. "It's just a shame that we're in a business where the industry's dominant player demonstrates the same kind of arrogance and hubris the record industry displays."

Sohn of Public Knowledge said that the file-sharing industry -- in-fighting aside -- has performed poorly in trying to get policymakers to understand their position. "They need to learn a little better how things work, particularly how they work in this town," she said. "It's a far cry from using Kazaa to marching on the steps of the Capitol."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Nov19.html


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Judge Rules In Favor Of Pop-Up Purveyor
Stefanie Olsen

A federal court judge dismissed Wells Fargo's motion to block a software maker that launches rival pop-up advertisements when customers access the bank's Web site.

Judge Nancy Edmunds of the U.S. District Court of Michigan's Southern Division on Wednesday denied Wells Fargo's motion for a preliminary injunction against WhenU, a distributor of free advertising software, that was aimed at disarming the pop-up purveyor. The judge also issued a memorandum opinion on the case.

Wells Fargo and plaintiff Quicken Loans charged that WhenU violated their copyrights and trademarks by delivering ads for rival Web sites to consumers while they were visiting their own sites.

"The fact that some WhenU advertisements appear on a computer screen at the same time (the) plaintiffs' Web pages are visible in a separate window does not constitute a use in commerce of the plaintiffs' marks," Judge Edmunds wrote as one of the arguments against an injunction.

While only a preliminary opinion, it echoes an earlier judgment in favor of WhenU in its case against U-Haul International. Like Wells Fargo and a handful of other litigants, U-Haul had charged WhenU with trademark and copyright violations, among other complaints, as a result of pop-ups for competing movers that appeared on U-Haul's Web pages. In September, a Virginia U.S. District Court judge granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of WhenU.

WhenU makes software that tracks the movement of Web surfers and serves up targeted ads to those who are likely to make a purchase. For example, an ad for travel site Priceline.com might appear while a surfer is visiting Travelocity.com. The software is bundled with other popular downloads, such as peer-to-peer software BearShare or weather applications, that consumers use for free by agreeing to receive occasional ads. About 30 million Net users have WhenU's software on their desktops.

"The fact is that the computer user consented to this detour when the user downloaded WhenU's computer software," the judge's summary read. "While pop-up advertising may crowd out the U-Haul advertisement screen through a separate window, this act is not trademark or copyright infringement, or unfair competition."

These decisions could add up to approval for a controversial sector of online advertising--and lend a hand in a more well-known case that involves "adware" company Claria, formerly Gator. Like WhenU, Claria develops an Internet "helper" application that often comes bundled with popular free software such as peer-to-peer applications. When downloaded, the programs from Claria and WhenU serve pop-up and pop-under ads to people at various times while they're surfing the Web or when they visit specific sites.

Gator's software has landed it in court against The Washington Post, catalog retailer L.L. Bean and hotel chain Extended Stay America. In February, Gator settled a case brought by The Washington Post, and its other lawsuits have been consolidated and will be decided by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in Washington, D.C.

Wells Fargo characterized the decision as "a set back" for consumers.

"This form of advertising can create confusion for impacted customers who visit financial sites and believe the offers they are receiving are from that financial institution," according to a Wells Fargo representative. "The source of these pop-up advertisements may not always be clear to the customer. It's important for customers to know who they are dealing with online, and we took action to eliminate this source of confusion for our customers."
http://news.com.com/2100-1024-5109596.html


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Kazaa Rings in Royalties for Artists

New Kazaa Version Launches With Ringtone Channel, Faster Searching And New Content Distribution, Packaging and Pricing Technology
Press Release

Sharman Networks Limited today launched Kazaa v2.6, the latest update of the world's most popular file sharing software. The new version includes a pre-installed Ringtone Channel, which will provide revenue to major record labels and artists by offering Kazaa users over 3,500 monophonic and polyphonic mobile phone ringtones for purchase through the Kazaa application. The ringtones available include tracks from the Top 10 UK, US and Euro charts.

This latest version of Kazaa also introduces advanced features that make browsing, trying, buying, promoting and selling downloadable content easier, including the option to run 24 multiple searches at the same time, access to streaming previews of licensed content, single click purchasing, Kazaa Kapsules and Magnet Links.

Through The Ringtone Channel, Kazaa's estimated 60 million users worldwide can buy licensed mobile phone ringtones using a global payment system that takes into account the different networks and licensing requirements in each country.

According to Nikki Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks, "Kazaa users are already downloading and buying mobile phone games through the Air Arena Channel. The Ringtone Channel expands Sharman's mobile content offering by providing thousands of licensed musical ringtones, screensavers and logos for download through Kazaa. The mobile and wireless platform is a rapidly growing and exciting marketplace."

Key new features and technologies in Kazaa v2.6 include:

Kapsules

New to Kazaa v2.6, Kapsules are a collection of multiple individual files digitally packaged together as a 'single click' download. "Kapsules are like buying the 'CD case and booklet', rather than just a music track," said Ms. Hemming. "They're about delivering a unique entertainment bundle in high quality digital format." A Kapsule can include music, exclusive footage of live performances, lyrics, tour dates and images from the same band or artist. Equally, computer game companies can include game guides and hints, and movie distributors can include 'behind the scenes' footage.

Magnet Links

Magnet links are a powerful promotional tool offering significant bandwidth savings to content providers. Kazaa v2.6 will enable users and content creators of all types, such as record labels, musicians, artists, photographers, and software developers, to promote and sell their content at around 20% of the cost of traditional website distribution. Consumers benefit from a greater variety of content that can be downloaded faster and more cheaply. With Kazaa v2.6 installed, clicking on a magnet link in any web browser, email or document will initiate a file search and download via the Kazaa application directly to the user's computer.

A magnet link can be created simply, then pasted into emails or websites for public or targeted promotion. This will allow a broader range of content creators and distributors to leverage the bandwidth efficiencies offered by peer-to-peer distribution. Existing audio, games, software and video content partners have experienced reductions in server loads as high as 94% by using Kazaa peer-to-peer distribution.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+11:48+AM


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Macintosh Users Join Kazaa Network
John Borland

A new piece of file-swapping software for Macintosh computers is drawing thousands of downloads by offering peer-to-peer options previously available largely to Windows computers.

Originally released in July, and updated substantially since then, the "Poisoned" file-swapping software allows connections to the hugely popular FastTrack system as well as several smaller networks. That means that for the first time Apple Computer owners have direct access to the vast Kazaa network, which includes millions of people.

"The Macintosh has been very underserved, very neglected," said Julian Ashton, the Atlanta contract programmer who is leading development on the project. "That's why this is an ideal project."

Poisoned's quick rise during the past few months appears to pull the Macintosh closer to the Windows world, in which competition from the free file- swapping world is widely viewed as one of the steepest hurdles for authorized music services like Apple's own iTunes song store or RealNetworks' Rhapsody subscription service.

According to Download.com, a software aggregation site owned by News.com publisher CNET Networks, Poisoned has been downloaded more than 165,000 times in 10 weeks of availability there, making it the second most popular piece of Macintosh software on the site, behind fellow file swapper Limewire.

Several other peer-to-peer programs are available for the Macintosh that tap into FastTrack and eDonkey, the most popular Windows-based networks, but none has grown as quickly as Poisoned. Previously, the most prominent option was the Gnutella-based Limewire, a well-regarded piece of software that nonetheless tapped into a network far smaller than Kazaa's sprawl.

Some analysts say iTunes has established a reputation for simplicity and high-quality downloads, particularly among loyal Macintosh users, that could keep people paying for songs instead of searching for free content on Poisoned or any other service. According to Apple, by early November it had sold more than 17 million songs from its iTunes store, which by that time served Windows and Macintosh computers.

"If Apple is doing its job they should be able to compete against free based on quality and reliability," said Michael McGuire, an analyst with GartnerG2, a division of the Gartner research firm.

The Poisoned project is one of the first based on a long-running attempt by independent programmers to tap into the FastTrack file-swapping protocol--the technology underlying Kazaa, iMesh and Grokster--without the authorization of Kazaa or the technology's creators. That so-called gift project is also the inspiration for Poisoned's name-- "Poison" is German for "gift," Ashton said.

Several times in the past few years, the FastTrack creators have changed the encryption scheme that keeps outsiders from tapping into the proprietary file-transfer system, but the independent programmers have caught up each time. If FastTrack changes again, Ashton says he is confident that a new version of Poisoned can be developed quickly to tap back into the larger swapping service.

Currently, bugs in the software allow downloading only from the Kazaa network, while files can be uploaded to Gnutella, as well as the smaller networks OpenNapster and OpenFT, another variation based on FastTrack's features.

That lack of uploading capacity could help keep some Poisoned users out of the sights of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is in the midst of a campaign of lawsuits against individuals alleged to have offered large number of copyrighted songs for download by others online.

It's not a perfect shield, however. Already, Poisoned users in the project's online discussion forums have reported that at least one Macintosh file swapper has been targeted by the RIAA's legal actions.

Ashton said he doesn't encourage use of the software for illegal purposes. In fact, by day he works to create content protection technologies for media companies in California.

"I'm very much for digital rights management," he said. "I don't promote people distributing copyrighted material, but I do feel that people should be able to access any kind of network they want to."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5109645.html


Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne


iTunes Gets File-Sharing Helping Hand
Ina Fried

An independent software developer has created a program called MyTunes that lets users of Apple Computer's iTunes for Windows grab song files from other people on a computer network.

While iTunes' main purpose is let people buy music online and play songs stored on their PC, the software also includes a feature that allows customers to listen to songs stored on another PC on their local network. Apple's software makes no permanent copy of the song, but the new MyTunes software captures that 'stream' of music, making a copy that can be burned to a CD, uploaded to the net or streamed to another PC.

MyTunes' creator, Bill Zeller, said on his website: "iTunes does not allow you to save this music to your hard drive. MyTunes lifts this restriction by allowing you to save music from other computers to your hard drive."

While stream recording is not new - a myriad programs exist for recording web radio and other streaming net services for Windows and Macintosh computers - the ease with which the MyTunes software fits into iTunes pushes the experience to a new, and perhaps legally risky, level.

Running the program makes creating your own MP3 songs from someone else's collection as easy or easier than grabbing MP3s via traditional file-swapping software like Kazaa. That could complicate things for Apple, which depends on the music industry's support - and indeed, has won unprecedented kudos from labels and artists - for its iTunes music store.

The iTunes stream-sharing feature has already been widely adopted inside companies and on college campuses, where computer users can sample co-workers' or fellow students' music collections, as long as they're both using iTunes and their computers are on the same network.

As set up in iTunes, this is more akin to on-demand webcasting than true file-sharing - but even tiny webcasters are in theory required to pay a royalty to record companies and artists for streaming songs online.

With the advent of MyTunes, the large iTunes collections become more like a collectively distributed database of songs from which anybody can download - something that looks a lot like Kazaa, although without the search features.

Only unencrypted MP3 files are easily captured and copied using the MyTunes software, however. Songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store, which are protected by the company's proprietary digital rights management technology, do not work with Zeller's software.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) declined to comment on the iTunes or MyTunes features. Previously, the RIAA has targeted corporations in which large MP3 libraries were available to employees through an internal computer network, settling for $1m in one case. The group has also sent letters to businesses and colleges warning about the potential legal dangers of letting employees or students use file-swapping services to exchange copyrighted works.

The ability to stream music stored on another computer has been part of iTunes for the Mac for some time. Apple scaled back the feature after some people started sharing songs over the internet.

For his part, Zeller said on his website that he expects that MyTunes users will not do anything illegal with the software.

"And remember, copyright infringement is illegal," he says at the bottom of the page. "If you have any question whether what you're doing constitutes an infringement, visit the RIAA's great antipiracy website."
http://www.silicon.com/software/secu...9116896,00.htm


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AudioGalaxy founder starts new file-sharing firm

Software Allows File Access From Different Computers

The founder of Austin-based AudioGalaxy Inc. is entering a new business realm.

Michael Merhej, former CEO of AudioGalaxy, has formed a company called ByteTaxi Inc. that will distribute file-sharing software to the masses. The software, called FolderShare, allows users to access files on different computers, update those files and save the changes.

File sharing is how AudioGalaxy became notable. Its software allowed users to share music files for free over a peer-to-peer network. Several music industry associations alleged the service violated copyright laws.

In May 2002, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit against AudioGalaxy alleging copyright violations. The suit was settled in June, with AudioGalaxy agreeing to ask permission before letting users download music. It also made an undisclosed payment to the trade association.

Fast forward to 2003: Merhej has recruited two AudioGalaxy employees with him to ByteTaxi. He no longer is CEO of AudioGalaxy but remains on the company's board. AudioGalaxy has two employees, down from 10 at its height.

One-year-old ByteTaxi employs three people and shares space with AudioGalaxy at 707 West Ave. in downtown Austin. An advertisement for FolderShare appears on the AudioGalaxy site.

"We're very separate companies with different employees," Merhej says. "We came to the conclusion that there's really nothing new we can pursue with AudioGalaxy. We are kind of burned out on the music business. From that point forward, we felt we could turn to something else."

He hopes that something else will become a source of revenue for ByteTaxi once the startup releases the FolderShare software in three months. For now, ByteTaxi isn't charging for the software but eventually plans to launch a subscription costing about $3.50 a month for consumers and $9 a month for business users.

"We're not going to hire a big sales force or anything. We want to keep the company as small as possible and get the maximum number of people to use [FolderShare]," Merhej says. "That's what we did with AudioGalaxy."

AudioGalaxy's Web site once received about 4 million daily visits and was profitable. Despite its limited offerings today, AudioGalaxy's site still receives about 20,000 unique visits a day. Merhej says he thinks ByteTaxi also can turn a profit.

"It's not like we are going to be this large, wild software company that has an IPO or outside investors," Merhej says.

Already, without the official launch of its product, ByteTaxi has about 75,000 accounts and 10,000 regular software users. Merhej hopes to keep that number growing through word of mouth and by encouraging users to bring the software to their workplaces.

One user of the ByteTaxi software is Ryan Hoge, president of Austin-based information technology consulting firm Capitol Technology Group. He uses the software for himself and some of his clients. The software offers an inexpensive way to back up network systems for disaster recovery.

Capitol Technology provides a backup service using FolderShare for about $430 a month. If a customer wants to back up its systems using existing hardware and software, it could cost about $2,000 just for equipment on the customer's end, Hoge says.

By making its software available over the Internet for free, ByteTaxi is gaining valuable insight from potential customers, says Bryan Menell, president and CEO of Austin-based e-learning company Fusion Learning Systems Inc.

Menell, who has started a few businesses, says determining whether customers will buy your product or service is key. One of his companies, KnowledgeBeam Inc. spent about 5 percent of $500,000 in angel funding but determined a market for the product didn't exist. So Menell says he returned the investors' money and closed KnowledgeBeam.

"You can do research and pull numbers on how big the market is, but until you talk to people who will buy your services, it's tough to validate your ideas," Menell says.
http://austin.bizjournals.com/austin...10/story5.html


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26Mbps on DSL

Full Speed Ahead For Japan's Broadband
J Mark Lytle

With BT set to launch its new 1Mbps Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) broadband net service on 20 November, it is worth taking a moment to consider just how broad the UK's band really is.
According to Bruce Stanford, BT Wholesale's product director, trials in October showed there was a "strong consumer demand" for the service, which is twice as fast as the company's current offering.

As statements go, that is rather like those surveys showing that most people feel undervalued at work, or that they would like to be having a little more sex than their current ration.

Blindingly obvious, in other words.

The more important issue is whether British internet users are being sold short. After all, a speed boost of 512kbps is no great shakes, especially when you consider that you will be lucky to get half of that when network congestion and distance from the telephone exchange are factored in.

Here in Japan, ADSL is a firmly established technology, with the locally owned arm of Yahoo, called Yahoo BB, the market-leading net service provider. This summer, Yahoo BB signed up its three millionth customer for services running at eight and 12Mbps. This success was almost entirely down to the aggressive marketing masterminded by parent company Softbank's CEO Masayoshi Son.

For the last year, it has been nigh on impossible to take a stroll in the capital without being asked, "Yahoo BB wa ikaga desu ka? (How about Yahoo BB?)," by one of Mr Son's army of street salespeople ready to sign you up and send you on your way with an ADSL modem in a bag.

Now, with the latest tranche of upgrades taking the maximum download speed to a blazing 26Mbps - remember, this is still over standard telephone lines, just like in the UK - one can be forgiven for wondering why BT and its competitors are languishing in the slow lane.

Japanese surfers clearly have a good deal. Yahoo BB's 26Mbps package costs just 3,838 yen, or about £20 per month, which is around £10 cheaper than the new BT deal. The Japanese package includes modem rental, the service provider fee, and a subscription to the company's IP (Internet Protocol) phone service, BBPhone, offering dirt-cheap phone calls.

For an extra 1,000 yen, there is a wireless LAN pack available. On top of all that, the whole caboodle is free for the first three months.

We asked a few members of the public about their perceptions of internet use in Japan. The overriding impression was that net access is no longer the domain of geeks it was five years ago. Rather, it is seen as a utility like gas or water that is "simply there".

"I'm online for just few hours a day, mainly sending photos to clients, but fast internet access makes all the difference," explains Eriko Tohno, a freelance photographer working out of her Tokyo apartment.

"It used to take me far longer, as I tended to send discs by courier."

Or like one peer-to-peer fan who says, "I like to download movies and music from file-sharing networks, which is fast and simple these days.

"If I like them, I just go out and buy the CD or a cinema ticket."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3278375.stm


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Korea to build 100M bps Internet system

Infrastructure will offer telecom, broadcasting and Internet access from a variety of devices
David Legard

South Korea plans to build a nationwide Internet access infrastructure capable of speeds between 50M bps (bits per second) and 100M bps by 2010, the online edition of the Chosun Ilbo daily newspaper reported Tuesday.

The infrastructure will be known as the broadband convergence network (BcN) and will offer telecommunications, broadcasting and Internet access from a wide variety of devices, the paper said, quoting the Ministry of Information and Communication.

Construction of the BcN will be worth 95 trillion won (US$80.4 billion) in output of equipment and services, and will create 370,000 jobs by 2010, according to the Chosun Ilbo.

South Korea is already regarded as the world's leading broadband nation, with 11.3 million broadband subscribers in a population of 48 million, and with 85 percent of new subscribers opting for broadband, according to telecommunication equipment vendor Alcatel SA.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...HNkorea_1.html


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Music Biz Exposes Parental Irresponsibility
Keith Girard

When the Recording Industry Assn. of America launched the first wave of lawsuits against illegal downloaders, it indirectly raised an important question: Where were the parents?

It quickly became apparent that in many cases, they were nowhere to be found. It seems as though computers had become to the 21st century what TVs were to the 1950s -- high-tech babysitters.

You know the old adage, out of sight out of mind? Well, many parents seemed to take the attitude, "If it keeps the kids out of my hair, all the better." As long as they were glued to the video display screens in their room, what possible trouble could they get into, right? As it turns out, they could get into quite a bit.

The RIAA legal campaign revealed a serious disconnect between kids and their parents. There's not much new about that. The generation gap is probably as old as civilisation itself. But the lawsuits served as a dramatic wakeup call.

The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it's also a lot like the Wild West. We're still on the frontier of the Information Age, and it's pretty much a place where anything goes.

In its effort to rouse concern about illegal music downloading, the record industry discovered that kids were exposed to a lot more potentially damaging material -- such as child pornography.

The good news is that in the wake of the RIAA's campaign, at least some parents are taking more responsibility for what their children do on the Internet.

In August, as many as 1.4 million families in the U.S. deleted all of their digital music files, according to research firm NPD Group. What's more, the company attributed much of the trend to the RIAA's lawsuits.

It also claimed that the number of households downloading peer-to-peer file-sharing software had declined by 11% from August to September.

Now for the bad news. It appears that illegal file swappers are heading underground. According to one university professor, trading on open P2P networks may be declining, but private file-sharing systems are on the rise, using everything from specialised software to Microsoft Messenger, which is free.

So while the RIAA may be putting a dent in mass file sharing, it's facing an ever more difficult problem -- and technology won't make things any easier.

For one, the storage capacity on computers is growing. The newest personal computers come with 100- gigabyte hard-drives. But it's possible to get them with up to one terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of storage. And by 2008, experts say 15-terabyte systems will be common. That's enough to hold every song ever recorded -- about 5 million tracks -- using today's MP3 format.

That means the RIAA had better be ready to carry on its legal war indefinitely. Or how about this: Find a way to harness that technology. You know the old saying: If you can't beat 'em, step in and take away their market.
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackage...7&section=news


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Banks Could Teach Music Firms How to Click
Michael Hiltzik

These are cynical times, and journalists are a cynical bunch. But that's no reason not to give proper credit to a large corporation — indeed, pretty much to an entire industry —that figures out how to do right by consumers while doing right by itself.

This thought occurred to me a few weeks ago while I was reviewing my Bank of America checking account via the bank's Web site. By chance, I discovered that BofA had quietly added a new function: A click of the mouse brought up the image of any check that had been written and cleared within the last few months.

That reminded me of how much BofA's online service had improved over the five years or so that I had been a regular user. Electronic bill payment was easier and faster, with most payments made within two days. I can order checks, stop payments, download my monthly statement to my home computer, even receive electronic bills — all free. The check-image feature wasn't one I ever would have thought to request, but there it was. When was the last time a big consumer-service company offered you a convenience you hadn't asked for?

This isn't meant to be an advertisement for Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp. or a general endorsement of its services over those of competing retail banks. Like any other huge institution, this one commits enough embarrassing mistakes to make its slogan, "Higher Standards," sound sometimes like an exercise in corporate irony. (Consider its admitted complicity in an illicit "market-timing" scam uncovered this fall that victimized investors in mutual funds.)

But even experts seem to have noticed that BofA, along with other big banks, has found a way to make the Internet work for its retail customers as well as for itself. For a couple of years, the dot-com crash led Silicon Valley to think there was no money to be made in pushing online technology at consumers, but the banks have quietly shown the logic in spending heavily to lure their clientele online and to make sure their systems are secure and reliable.

This didn't happen overnight. The first electronic-home-banking experiments date back to 1995, when customers of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. and a few other institutions could check their balances and see their transaction histories on a Web page.

"Almost every bank stumbled when it first came online," Chris Musto, the vice president for research at Gomez Inc., a technology consulting firm, told me.

"The customer representatives didn't even know how to use the service, and some banks had issues with outages. But they know now that they have a vested interest in maintaining a very reliable Web site because it's your money, and if you ever have trouble accessing your money, it's very bad for the bank."

At this point, according to Musto, about 1 in 4 banking customers nationwide access their accounts online.

BofA has found that its attrition rate among online users is 80% lower than among those who do their banking in person. Sanjay Gupta, who heads a 200- person online banking team at BofA split between San Francisco and Charlotte, also notes that users of the bank's online bill-paying service maintain 38% higher deposit balances at the bank. That's presumably because they concentrate more of their overall transactions in the online account.

Those statistics, Gupta says, were enough to convince the bank that it should make online banking and bill paying free for all account holders — a move that has helped build its online customer base to 6.6 million users, growing by 50% a year.

Some banks, including Wells Fargo and Washington Mutual Inc., still charge a monthly fee for bill paying unless the user maintains a minimum balance of several thousand dollars. Some experts think this is being penny-wise and pound-foolish, because it's almost impossible to make online services pay for themselves.

Years ago, it was assumed that banks promoted online or telephone bill paying because they profited from the "float": If the bank debited your account for a payment you ordered on a Monday but the payment didn't clear until Friday, it earned four days' interest on your money.

But that was never a profit generator. "The float pales in comparison to the effect online bill pay has on your retention of customers and the higher balances customers maintain," Musto says. The expansion of electronic bill payment, moreover, has cut the period that funds remain in transit to only a day or two.

It's easy to say that the banks don't deserve credit for only doing what they must to keep customers happy. But developing and maintaining a reliable and user-friendly Web service is a lot harder than it looks. Just consider the hash that other industries have made of their ventures online, starting with a business for which the Internet should have been a lifeline: recorded music. (For those under 40 who may not be familiar with this industry, it was a profitable business prominent during the last century.)

It became obvious as far back as 1997 that music in digital form could be easily transmitted over a network and played from a computer. Instead of snapping to attention, the music labels snoozed. Napster arrived two years later, introducing the concept of home-cooked music piracy to the masses. In response, the industry rolled out a few sites offering downloadable pop tracks at exorbitant prices, ensuring that tens of millions of users would opt for free samples instead.

The appearance this year of numerous pay-per-download services — such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes, RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody and Roxio Corp.'s redesigned Napster — has hardly solved the problem. Leaving aside that the free-music horse has long ago left the barn, the new sites are highly variable in ease of use; they all seem to offer different catalogs; and none has found the right balance between subscription and pay-as-you-go models. The industry's defense is that these are new services still finding their way, but that only underscores its dereliction in waiting so long.

Many other industries are also squandering a chance to build customer loyalty through their online services. A recent survey by the San Mateo, Calif., market research firm Vividence Corp. found that among customers of telecommunications services — encompassing phones, Internet and cable TV — users of online Web sites are twice as likely to change their providers over any six-month period as offline customers. Among the reasons Vividence cited was that the longer those customers spent on the companies' Web sites, the more chances they had "to experience frustrations." Until telecom companies start offering online users valuable promotional deals or convenient account management options, Vividence says, this phenomenon will continue.

By contrast, the banks have plainly learned how to use online offerings to keep customers in the house.

This is a lesson first taught by Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit and Yahoo Inc. They recognized that once a user gave out aol.com or yahoo.com as an e-mail address, he or she would be loath to move to another service because that would mean informing all those correspondents of the switch. The concept was known as "stickiness." A savvy bank, by the same token, knows that once a user has built up a critical mass of payees in its bill-paying service, he or she will be reluctant to go through the process with some other bank.

Could anyone have predicted that an industry once known for the insensitivity of its customer relations would become a leader in deploying new technology, even given its aggressive rollout of automated teller machines in the 1970s? Starting with the founding of Amazon.com Inc., in 1994, the received wisdom in the cyberspace community was that a successful online service would only be held back by bricks and mortar. It will be a long time before banks, no matter how sophisticated their Internet systems, can dispense with local branches or ATMs. People, after all, still need cash. "But the banks aren't into the Web as a fad," Musto says. "This is part of the mainstream."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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U.S. Agency Reviewing Internet-Related Patent
AP

In an unusual move, the Patent and Trademark Office is reconsidering a patent affecting Internet pages that critics contend could disrupt millions of Web sites.

Citing "a substantial outcry from a widespread segment of the affected industry," Deputy Patent Commissioner Stephen G. Kunin ordered the agency's examiners to reconsider the patent they awarded in November 1998 to three University of California researchers.

The patent affects how Internet sites build into Web pages small interactive programs that power features such as banner ads and interactive customer service.

Eolas Technologies Inc., which was founded by one of the inventors and has licensed the patent exclusively, has begun enforcing its claims and recently won a $520-million jury award against Microsoft Corp., which quickly appealed the judgment.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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EBay, Microsoft Form Internet Security Group
Bloomberg News

Executives from EBay Inc., the world's largest Web auctioneer, and Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software maker, are forming a group to address security issues on the Internet.

The Global Council of Chief Security Officers is starting with 10 members from some of the largest U.S. companies and will be expanded to include members from outside the U.S., according to EBay Vice President of Security Howard Schmidt.

Concern about the security of personal and financial information on the Internet has risen as companies use it for commerce and communication. Problems range from computer viruses to identity theft and fraud.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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California Secretary of State Orders Audit of All Counties' Voting Systems

Review of upgraded touchscreen software leads to discovery that two registrars installed it without state's OK.
Allison Hoffman and Tim Reiterman

Responding to revelations that at least one county used unapproved voting software in the Oct. 7 recall election, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has ordered an audit of voting systems used in all 58 California counties.

State elections officials reviewing an upgraded version of Diebold Inc.'s Accuvote touchscreen voting machines for future certification were told by company employees that the new software had already been installed in Alameda and Plumas counties — without state approval.

The software had been certified by a federal panel for use in the states.

"We believed that with the federal certification [of the software], we were meeting state certification," said Diebold spokesman David Bear. He said the company would cooperate with the audit.

Shelley also said he would require the chief executive of each voting system company to affirm, under penalty of perjury, that no significant changes be made to elections systems or software without asking for approval from the secretary of state's office.

Terri Carbaugh, a spokeswoman in the secretary of state's office, said, "From our point of view, modifications to software require certification."

Alameda and Plumas counties are the only two in California using the Diebold touchscreen systems. Bradley Clark, Alameda County's registrar, said that the new software had been installed before the recall election, but Kathleen Williams, Plumas County's registrar, said that she had not installed the upgrade before the election.

Los Angeles County Registrar Conny B. McCormack said the incident highlighted ongoing uncertainty in Sacramento about how to regulate electronic voting.

She said all counties in the state, whether they use electronic or mechanical voting systems, had installed significant software upgrades in the past several years to accommodate changes to primary voting and to handle the unique recall election itself.

"All of us have made changes to our software — even major changes — and none of us have gone back to the secretary of state," McCormack said. "But it was no secret we've been doing this all along. [Shelley] knew we were making changes."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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DRM Music Goldrush Is A Race For Losers - Mp3.Com Founder
Andrew Orlowski

Apple is leading a race of lemmings into the zero-profit business of closed music downloads, says the founder of MP3.com, Michael Robertson.

"It seems kind of crazy to me, the economics don't make sense," Robertson told us Thursday. "Why are all these guys like Microsoft and Wal-Mart rushing into a business where the industry leader says 'we cannot make money with the contracts that we have'?"

"This is a race where the winner gets shot in the head."

And William Tell-style, Apple volunteered to be the first into the firing range. Canny Apple has had to swallow the pigopolists royalty fees, and DRM restrictions, but it thinks it has a business because its closed business model sees downstream profits from iPods sales.

Robertson started MP3.com in 1998 and after a barrage of lawsuits, sold it to Vivendi Universal in 2001. Last week, after a night on the tiles, Vivendi sold the mp3.com domain name to CNET, leaving the million-song archive to the vultures. (Robertson is striving to find a host for this, and we shall have more news of this later today).

The computer industry traditionally opposed the copyright cartel, but Apple was the first snitch to cut a deal with the pigopolists. Was this wise, we wondered?

"If one company got a huge market share - say 50 per cent or higher - they could negotiate better royalty rates," notes Robertson. "But they forget something. The music industry is tens of thousands of publishers and just five major record labels. Getting all of them to agree is a real tough thing to accomplish even if you're market leader."

Without any Beatles songs, and with only one Roxy Music track on its music kiosk, Apple is currently in a position of begging the big five for content, rather than dictating the terms of the deal. It's the rebel without a clue. Can it turn the tables?

Well, there are several factors that ought to halt the wannabee players in the DRM goldrush in their tracks. A compulsory licensing scheme (which is now backed by the libertarian rights group the EFF) is one. But Robertson points to another: the decision by courts to permit KaZaA peer to peer-style sharing.

"It's the wild card," says Robertson. "KaZaA has been ruled legal, so why pay for restricted music?" he asks.

"Apple really haven't sold that much music. And they've received millions of dollars in free advertising. Don't get me wrong, Steve Jobs is a smart guy who knows the economics. He's clearly betting that he can subsidize it with profits from iPods, or get enough scale to begin renovating the royalty deals."

"It's a real dilemma for me," he says, echoing the thoughts of millions of peer to peer music lovers. "If I 'steal' music from KaZaA I get all this music, but if I pay I have all these restrictions."

If people can get unrestricted music for free, why would they need to go to a DRM store to get a low-quality version with all the strings attached, Robertson wonders. KaZaA, and future P2P technologies make file sharing so simple and fun.

"People will use P2P and people will buy CDs," he predicts.

With so many people - other than the DRM gold rush entrepreneurs - accepting such constraints, accepting that people will always want to share music, and technology will always outwit DRM controls - we're left with the ethical problem of how to compensate the artists.

(Which is why there is such momentum behind compulsory licenses right now. Many people accept that stopping music-sharing is a lost battle, so our better minds are thinking of schemes to use the technology to compensate artists fairly).

Robertson doesn't agree with the idea of a levy, but agrees "there needs to be a radical change here".

And pundits should be wary of Apple's early apparent success, he warns. "I'm not sure if an Apple user is representive sample of the population," he says.

True enough.

Paying for restricted versions of songs they could have got unrestricted and for free has been the real litmus test for Apple loyalists. It's a hurdle they've leaped over with glee. But how many will follow them? Has Steve Jobs mistakenly extrapolated cult behavior and assumed the rest of the world follows shares these values, and follows these assumptions?

That's not what we hear from you.

It's rather tasteless to remind you that this week is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre - where a charismatic San Franciscan decamped to the jungle and persuaded almost a thousand followers to commit suicide, by drinking toxic fruit juice. It gave birth to a lasting idiom: "have you drunk the Kool-Aid?"

Well, have you?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34125.html


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Spinning Your CDs Through Yoghurt

WANT to listen to something different? A Melbourne scientist suggests smearing yoghurt on your favourite CD, then let it dry.

Slide the disc into the player. Crank up the volume. And hear that music in a completely fresh, possibly spine-chilling way.

The bizarre innovation -- an "optical biocomputer" if you must know -- is the brainchild of Cameron Jones, who, as well as being a mathematician with a record of published research, also owns a nightclub and bar in Melbourne, New Scientist reports.

Jones' pet area of research is how signals can be transmitted through biological cells, which grow in a so-called "fractal" way, like tree branches.

He became intrigued by experimental musicians and DJs who sanded, varnished or even slapped paint onto CDs to create new sounds to sample.

Music on CDs comes from tiny etched pits in the tracks that represent binary digits, the "0" or "1" that make up a computer code. The code, reflected back by the laser in the CD player, is then processed back into an electronic signal and converted to sound.

Mutilating the surface, so some of the pits are missed, thus changes the sound.

But Jones found much subtler sounds could be achieved using fungal or bacterial growth, rather than scraping or coating the disc's surface. This is because these life forms introduce tiny errors on a micron or nanoscale level rather than a far bigger millimetric scale.

In addition, fungus and bacteria can shape the sound in weird ways. Bacteria grow by cell division, while fungi grow by branching. Both processes can be controlled by adding malt extract to the disc as food.

Jones told New Scientist he came across the discovery quite by accident, when he was DJing in his bar.

"I often change CDs when my hands are wet with beer," he told the British weekly. "One night I must have changed the CDs, touched the data surface, then left them for use on another night."

The following week, he put on a CD by Nine Inch Nails and found it would not play properly because fungus had grown on it.

But the fungus had not ruined the disc. The original audio sequence was there, but it would sometimes change in pitch and there were small staccato noises in the background.

He asked himself: "What would happen if I purposely grew fungi, yeast or bacteria in direct contact with the media, and manipulated their fractal dimensions?"

Judge the sounds and work for yourself at www.swin.edu.au/chem/bio/fractals/ refslist.htm
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...=date&Intro=No












Until next week,

- js.










~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Due to technical reasons there has never been a bookmarkable link to the Week in Review so anyone who takes a look has to start someplace else. Occasionally someone will post a story on another board and include a link back to the current weeks issue but such a link is frozen to that page forever. For the most part people come to the latest WiR by first coming to www.p2p-zone.com and following the thread chains to WiR from the Peer-to-Peer forum which I moderate, having taken over the job from TankGirl a few years ago. Recently however with her help we created a semi-permanent link. From now on it will be found here at the bottom of every final issue.

Current Week In Review.


Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17925 November 15th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17877 November 8th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17835 November 1st
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17790 October 25th





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

[theknife]

great stuff, as always, Jack

there are so many ostensibly disparate threads in the news, across the whole tech/internet/content/media landscape...but seeing them all in one place in the WIR illustrates nicely what a tightly woven fabric it all really is

the Pearl Jam story is really heartening...i'd like to think any future music industry growth will include an ever-dwindling cut for the labels as other artists take note and take the initiative to follow suit

[SJ56]

Happy 1st anniversary



Congratulation to Jack.

[TankGirl]

Congratulations and big kudos for the first year of WiR, Jack!

- tg

[napho]

[JackSpratts]

to multi, tankgirl, theknife, napho, goldie, s2m, sj56, sa_dave, diego, pod and all the wir readers, regular and occasional, a big thanks! i could not have done it without your continuous input and support.

here's to good news!

- jack.