Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 4th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"If someone comes to my computer, they won't find any music on there." – Nathalie Neree-Thompson


"The laws are too lenient and [Canada has] one of the worst peer-to-peer, file-sharing statistics in the world." – John Kennedy


"Just as we continue to educate fans about the right ways to enjoy music online, we will continue to enforce our rights through the legal system. Songlifting is not without consequences." – John Kennedy


"They're running roughshod over the Constitution, and they're hiding behind inflammatory rhetoric." – Patrick Leahy



















Word of the week: "Songlifting"




















March 4th, ’06






Film Industry Shuts Down P2P Sites
Louisa Hearn

Peer-to-peer file sharing networks have long been the bugbear of the recorded music industry, but now the film industry is putting its might behind initiatives to stamp out movie piracy.

Late last week The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed seven lawsuits against file sharing and newsgroup websites for allegedly facilitating illegal swapping of copyrighted files.

The MPAA's key targets are networks associated with the Torrent and eDonkey networks but it is also taking action against some newsgroups - the electronic bulletin boards that it believes have also become a source of pirated content.

"Website operators who abuse technology to facilitate infringements of copyrighted works by millions of people are not anonymous - they can and will be stopped," said John Malcolm, director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the MPAA.

Any music companies blame peer-to-peer networks for large downturn in sales and the movie industry is keen to avert similar losses. Current estimates are that all forms of piracy cost the movie industry $5.4 billion last year.

But while file-sharing networks are often associated with piracy, civil libertarians argue that they have many legitimate uses that should not be overlooked.

Matt Black, chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia, said: "We want anti-piracy laws to develop in a way wont unduly inhibit the use of these technologies in legitimate areas."

Others argue that no matter how many file-sharing operations are closed down by organisations like the MPAA, users will simply migrate to another network.

Nevertheless, the MPAA said its international campaign had recently notched up some "significant victories" in Europe with the help of officials in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. In the last year it said it had shut down 75 Torrent and eDonkey sites around the world.

However Mr Black said: "In the long run it's a tactic that is not going to work.

"The real answer is for the content industry to define business models that don't make it worthwhile for users to go through those channels. As has been proved in the Australian music industry which now sells content legally online, people are willing to pay for this stuff. The systems just have to be in place for content to be available in the market," he said.

While there were no recent activities documented by the MPAA in Australia, the local music industry has been very active in pursuing the Kazaa network owned by Sydney-based Sharman Networks which was found guilty last year of encouraging users to infringe copyright on the network.

The Kazaa network has now ceased to operate in Australia pending an appeal against the Federal Court's finding last week, and whatever the outcome, most parties agree the case is likely to move to the High Court.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/...191781212.html





ED2K-It.com Calls it Quits
Thomas Mennecke

It's a situation of contrasts. ISOHunt and TorrentSpy, two of the major players in last week’s copyright enforcement actions, have decided to hold the line and fight the MPAA's lawsuit. The same cannot be said about the once popular eDonkey2000 indexing site ED2K-It.com, as it has succumbed to the pressure of the MPAA.

The identity of those administering ED2K-It.com is currently unknown. In an effort to obtain the identity of the administration of ED2K-It.com, the movie industry followed the music industry’s example by filing a “John Doe” lawsuit. Because the extent of the ownership structure is unknown, John Does 1-10 were named in the complaint.

"Defendants Does 1-10 are currently unknown to Plaintiffs (Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Disney Enterprises, Inc., Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.) They operate a website, www.ed2k-it.com, at the Internet Protocol address 67.43.11.190, by virtue of which Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works are unlawfully copied and distributed. That website is hosted by Liquid Web, an internet service provider headquartered in Lansing, Michigan, on a server located in or around Lansing, Michigan. On information and belief, all of the Defendants participate in and profit from the activities alleged herein."

The main thrust of the lawsuit against ED2K-It.com claims the defendants "...enable their users to locate and download infringing copies of Plaintiffs’ valuable copyrighted motion pictures and television shows for free and without authorization. Defendants operate their website with the express object of promoting its use to infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights."

Another serious point of contention the movie industry articulates is the defendants “…profit unlawfully from the distribution of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted movies and television programs.”

Overall, the complaint against ED2K-It.com concludes the administrators are liable for three forms of copyright infringement; inducing, contributory, and vicariously enabling copyright infringement.

The complaint states ED2K-It.com is liable for inducing copyright infringement because the administrators are actively involved in the daily operations and maintenance of the site. With an overwhelming abundance of indexed copyrighted material, the complainants contend the administrators had to power to curb infringing material, but chose not to.

Plaintiffs also claim administrators of ED2K-it.com are liable for contributory copyright infringement. This is substantiated by the claim the defendants knew their indexing site was used overwhelmingly in the ultimate goal of infringing on the Plaintiff’s copyright.

Lastly, and perhaps most seriously, Plaintiffs contend ED2K-It.com is liable for vicarious copyright infringement. Because ED2K-It undoubtedly profited from banner ads, donations, and other advertisements, the complainants insist there was a “direct financial benefit attributable to the infringement by users of their website.”

Perhaps the monumental task of defending against the lawsuit has proven too much for ED2K-It.com. Although they have maintained their silence with the media, they have informed Gary Fung of ISOHunt this once popular eDonkey2000 indexing site will in all likelihood not return. The correspondence dictated the administrator of ED2K-it.com has decided to close their site for a “while / forever.”

The Plaintiffs in this case bring many of the same arguments as brought before the Supreme Court in the MGM vs. Grokster case. Specifically, the Supreme Court found that Grokster could be retried in the lower courts and be found guilty of inducing copyright infringement. There are many parallels to these cases; Grokster, like ED2K- It.com, merely indexed files. Also, the Grokster client only served as an interface to this index. The future of such file-sharing indexes, at least in the United States, is in serious doubt.
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20117





A Bit of BitTorrent Bother
Adam Livingstone

As Newsnight's resident ubergeek, I've been asked to respond to the torrent of abuse streamed our way over our piece on Friday 24 February about BitTorrent and encryption.

As a man who hacked his first home internet connection back in 1994 (my then boss used his daughter's name as a password) and downloaded his first Star Trek off Peer to Peer back in 2000 (for research purposes only of course - I never inhaled) I hope I know my way around the block.

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We're very, very sorry.

If copyright infringement was theft then I'd be in jail every time I accidentally used football pix on Newsnight without putting "Pictures from Sky Sport" in the top left corner of the screen. And I'm not. So it isn't. So you can stop telling us if you like. We hear you.

Railways and canals

Now we've got that out the way, let us ask you a question. Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Although internet service providers sell their internet connections as unlimited usage, if people actually take them up on the offer then they can't actually cope with demand

Well here's one answer - it sells copy. Another answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals,
and you all just know how that's going to end.

So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate freudian level, there's some truth to that accusation.

Traffic shaping

But there's a third explanation as well. Sometimes it's legitimate.

Friday's piece sought to make a very sophisticated point in the space of four minutes. The point was this: a file sharing protocol called BitTorrent now takes up a third of internet traffic, even by the most conservative estimates. The true figure is probably higher.

Some internet service providers aren't very pleased about that, because although they sell their internet connections as unlimited usage, if people actually take them up on the offer then they can't actually cope with demand.

"Boo hoo," I hear you say to them. "Build some more wires in or whatever it is you do. That's what we pay you for." But no. The wicked ISPs have, increasingly, opted to block BitTorrent (and indeed other P2P protocols as well) using technology known as traffic shaping.

Encrypting torrents

A couple of months ago a person of my very close acquaintance [cough cough] was giving his in-laws their weekly fix of Desperate Housewives when he noticed that their Plusnet connection was resolutely not shifting the torrent.

But as soon as he switched to another torrenting program called Bitcomet, the data just came pouring through. What was going on? Well the answer was simple. There's a mysterious man somewhere on this planet called "RnySmile". He creates and updates the Bitcomet programme, and he'd reprogrammed the damn thing to encrypt the torrents so that it was goodbye "traffic shaping".

Now this was such a good idea that all the other BitTorrent programmers leapt on it within weeks. As of last weekend the three biggest torrent programs carry automatic encryption and Plusnet and friends are looking at a big hole in their metaphorical dyke. Happy ending, you might say? I couldn't possibly comment.

'Swamp of encryption'

However all this made us think the following: if torrent traffic is 30% and more of the internet, and it's going encrypted at a rate of knots, then where does that leave the spooks, spies and other law enforcement professionals who sit around monitoring the internet all day?

Sure, the RC4 encryption in question isn't so very powerful, but the sheer quantity of it we're envisaging will make decrypting it all an impossibility.

At the moment, there's little enough encrypted data flying around that using encryption for villainous purposes would just attract attention to yourself. But in the swamp of encryption that's in prospect, that will no longer be the case.

Debate

Which brings us back to paedophiles and terrorists. If you ask the security services and the police why they monitor the internet, those are the bogeymen they claim to be chasing.

In a four minute piece, we're sort of obliged to take that at face value. And it's our contention that they're not very well going to be able to do that if they're swamped by encrypted torrent data.

This proposition brought us so much sh*t that it had to be continued on the next fan. A howl of primal outrage uttered from cyberspace that we were equating copyright infringement with theft (yes we did - sorry about that) and with paedo-terror (no we didn't).

What we'd really like to hear is a debate on the issue we did raise. If the ISPs can't now detect torrent data, then how will the security services manage it? And if they do figure it out, won't RnySmile and company just up the ante again?

And is this secret war between Hollywood and the ISPs on the one side and the P2P community on the other one that can ever end in a truce, or will the stakes just keep raising and raising to the detriment of us all?

Answers on a plain text postcard please.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ht/4758636.stm





3 Guilty of File Sharing
Nate Mook

The United States Department of Justice on Tuesday heralded a victory in federal court against three members of the "Apocalypse Crew" warez group. The individuals were sued for sharing digital pre-release copies of songs and albums through P2P networks, and have pleaded guilty.

The RIAA, meanwhile, sued another 750 people in its own crackdown on piracy.

In a statement, the DOJ said Derek Borchardt, 21, of North Carolina; Matthew Howard, 24, of Colorado; and Aaron Jones, 31, of Oregon obtained the music through insiders at record companies, magazine publishers and retail outlets. Songs were stored on servers run by the group.

From there, the copyrighted material was distributed "to peer-to- peer and other public file sharing networks accessible to anyone with Internet access and potentially appearing for sale around the world," the DOJ said.

The Justice Department previously sued another individual, George Hayes, 31, of Virginia, who pleaded guilty to one count of criminal copyright infringement.

The four men could face up to five years in prison and fines reaching $250,000. It's not clear when the sentences will be handed down.

In a separate action, the Record Industry Association of America announced it had filed another 750 lawsuits against unnamed individuals as part of its long-running legal efforts against P2P users. These "John Doe" suits include the individual's IP address, which the RIAA uses to discover his or her identity.

In a statement, RIAA president Cary Sherman hailed the lawsuits as protecting the integrity of the market so legal music services like iTunes can prosper. Sherman also coined a new phrase for those who download music illegally, likening them to retail shoplifters with the term "songlifter."

"Just as we continue to educate fans about the right ways to enjoy music online, we will continue to enforce our rights through the legal system. Songlifting is not without consequences," he said.
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...750/1141156875





Oh The Irony: DRM For The Dark Side
Fernando Cassia

" Mininova is cool because it tells you if the torrent requires a password or not. This way you don't waste your time searching for a password. It also tells you if the site the torrent is at requires registration." -poster on usenet newsgroup

" what's the f*****g point of putting passwords on files anyway when it's clearly identifiable what the file is ?? - another, not-so-happy user

IT'S ENCRYPTED! I heard, loudly. I was waiting in line to send a fax at an internet cafe when I overheard a pair of teens, complaining in front of their rent-by-the-hour internet connected computer. "You need a .zip password cracker", I replied trying to be nice and sniff what they were up to. "For a 700mb cd image? forget it!" he replied. "But you know, the .zip password protection is pretty weak", I challenged the know-it-all. "Oh yeah, but this is a 700mb .RAR, we're f****d!". Oh yes they were, so I decided to mind my own business.

I sent the fax and headed home. Before leaving the place, I looked back at the teens... they were still trying to brute-force, guess the password or somehow decrypt the file. "The password must be somewhere... I spent a week downloading this movie!" one told the other with some resignation. That got me thinking and after arriving home I finally found what they were talking about.

Complaints and comments from P2P downloaders

It turns out that 'groups' - that is, the folks who routinely 'release' copies of movies, software, and porn on pirate boards, and even more so, Peer-to- Peer file sharing networks- have been encrypting -password protecting with Winrar - their releases, apparently for quite some time by now... with the first reports of such practice appearing two years ago. And this practice seems to be only increasing. Now, one can find even password- trading forums, and torrent password "search engines", so that gives you an idea of how widespread the use of such practice is as of late.

Pay to discuss the passwords... for files shared by others... on P2P networks

This is very ironic, indeed, on one side you have the industry -at least the movie and music industry- trying to force ugly, often windows-only Digital Rights Management (DRM) down the users' throat, all in the name of fighting the pirates. On the other, poorly lit side, you have the pirates breaking the industry protections, repackaging content to smaller sizes (DVD to xvid/divx, for example) and then releasing such pirate copies, but now *encrypted* once again, but supposedly to protect their own backs, or perhaps for some, even for profit.

While speaking to a local who's very knowledgeable about the "P2P scene", he told me that some groups include links on the encrypted releases to their site forums. And that you must then pay them for the privilege of getting access to the "passwords discussion" forums. Now while this probably won't protect anyone from getting busted by the powers that be, it certainly makes things more difficult for the whistle blowers and the people like RIAA or MPAA. But hey, if the P2P users can eventually find the passwords, so can the lawyers.

But if you add to it traffic encryption, things get even more interesting, and harder to control by ISPs as well. Where, how, and when will this end?. I don't know. Perhaps when the same movie industry gets their "on demand" content purchase -notice I said "on-demand purchase" not rent -people like to own their bits, not pay through the nose every time as greedy execs would hope.

The only hope we consumers have is that IPTV is done right, with "on demand" and DRM-free content purchases act together. Will that happen? I'm not holding my breath. So instead of just ending this here, I leave you with this quote from "Pirates of the Caribbean": "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can't. But pirate is in your blood, boy, so you'll have to square with that some day".
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29941





Illegal File-Sharing Accusation 'Crazy,' Woman Says
Andy Nelesen

Nathalie Neree-Thompson of De Pere was shocked when she got a letter from the recording industry telling her she's being sued for copyright infringement.

"I think it's crazy, because I don't even know how to download music," said the 24-year-old mother of two.

But before one might blame the kids, it's best to know that they are 7 and 3, too young to be downloading Bob Marley's "Pimper's Paradise," Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and William Hung's "She Bangs" — just some of the tracks a group of record companies accuse Neree-Thompson of trading on Kazaa, an online file-sharing service.

The suit seeks an injunction ordering Neree-Thompson to stop violating the recording artists' copyrights and seeks legal fees and damages.

Neree-Thompson, a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay graduate who said she's working on a doctorate in educational psychology, was one of a half-dozen Wisconsin residents to be sued by the recording industry in recent weeks.

Two of the suits — including Neree-Thompson's — were filed in U.S. District Court in Green Bay. The other suit listed the defendant only as "Jill Radar" and did not include a hometown or contact information for the defendant.

"I don't know what to do," Neree-Thompson said Tuesday. "There was a phone number there to call (on the lawsuit) and when I called, they said to just write a letter to dispute it.

"I have a computer at home. They said because my phone number is under my name, that's why my name is on (the suit)."

The recording industry maintains its hard-line approach to music piracy, which has led to suits like these all over the country in recent years.

"For legal online services to continue to break new ground, we must do our part to protect the integrity of the marketplace," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. "Just as we continue to educate fans about the right ways to enjoy music online, we will continue to enforce our rights through the legal system. Songlifting is not without consequences."

The latest round of lawsuits includes 750 individuals in 12 states. Many of the current suits — unlike the one filed against Neree-Thompson — name "John Doe" as the defendant, indicated the recording industry has not yet identified who is behind the music downloading.

Neree-Thompson said her name should be off the RIAA's list. The Internet music pilfering was done using a Kazaa account for "Posse31," a handle she's never heard of.

"I said they should probably try to find the name on that account … because it's not me," Neree-Thompson said. "I don't even listen to music. Right now, I'm going for my doctorate degree. I am too busy with two kids and school.

"If someone comes to my computer, they won't find any music on there."
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/...603010548/1207





Recording Lobbyist Lashes Canada On Copyright
Guy Dixon

Canada is one of the world's worst copyright infringers and is not far removed from China, Brazil and India, argues John Kennedy, the head of the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a leading global lobby group for tighter copyright controls.

Canada is "nearly a piracy haven. And I'm astonished that those words are even coming out of my lips for Canada!," he said in an interview from London. "The laws are too lenient and [Canada has] one of the worst peer-to-peer, file-sharing statistics in the world."

Last year, in a report by the IFPI, Canada ranked just out of the top 10 of the globe's worst countries for copyright piracy, Kennedy said. To remedy this, he plans to continue lobbying Ottawa (either directly or through the Canadian Recording Industry Association) to enact stiffer laws and to ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty. These could make Internet service providers, for instance, more responsible for unauthorized file-sharing of music.

There is a large camp of legal experts, artists and even record-label owners who oppose tighter legislation, particularly if it would mean suing file-sharers as the recording industry has done in the United States and other countries.

Kennedy, who will be in Toronto today for Canadian Music Week, says, however, that the lawsuits against file sharers have worked as a deterrent.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...PEntertainment





ILN News Letter
Michael Geist

French Supreme Court Reverses Private Copying Of DVDS Ruling

The French Supreme Court has overturned an appellate court ruling that blocked the application of technological protection measures since it inhibited private copying of DVDs. The prior decision involved the use of TPMs on the DVD Mulholland Drive.

French language decision at <http://tinyurl.com/lvpel> [Cour De Cassation]


Spain Implements National Electronic ID Card

BNA's Electronic Commerce & Law Report reports that the Spanish government Feb. 16 put into place its electronic national identity card certification system, which will allow citizens to use chip-equipped national identity cards for electronic transactions starting as early as March. By replacing the standard national identity card with the obligatory electronic version, the government said citizens will be able to carry out transactions that previously required their physical presence. Article at <http://pubs.bna.com/ip/bna/eip.nsf/eh/a0b2k1c1v6>
For a free trial to the source of this story, visit http://www.bna.com/prodcuts/ip/eplr.htm


Eu Data Prot. Working Party Releases Email Screening Report

The European Union Data Protection Working Party has released new recommendations on email screening practices including screening for viruses, spam, and certain content. The report expresses concern with the false positive problem on spam filtering. Moreover, it is of the view that "email providers are prohibited from engaging in filtering, storage or any other kinds of interception of communications and the related traffic data for the purposes of detecting any predetermined content without the consent of the users of the services." Report at http://europa.eu.int/comm/justice_ho...6/wp118_en.pdf





Soribada to Charge Fees in April
Han Eun-jung

The music industry claimed another victory in its ongoing war against digital contents pirates, with the country's largest file sharing network Soribada announcing plans to relaunch with a new subscription service Monday.

Soribada will resume services in March with latest version `Soribada 5,' the peer-to-peer (P2P) network said in joint press conference with the Korean Association of Phonogram Producers (KAPP) in Seoul.

``And as of April 1, after a month study of patterns of use in `Soribada 5,' we will charge subscribers of file exchange services,'' said Soribada CEO Yang Jung-hwan.

KAPP, a lobby representing music artists and record labels, said that it has also accepted an out-of-court settlement of 8.5 billion won in damages from the company.

A vocal advocate of copyright protection, KAPP was responsible for Soribada's 2005 shutdown.

The new Soribada will be modeled after other subscription services like SKT Melon, Bugs and MaxMP3, but will be somewhat different, Yang said.

Law-enforcement officials ordered the local peer-to-peer (P2P) service pioneer to terminate their file sharing software and servers in November, 2005, two years after KAPP filed a suit against the company.

Soribada was developed in 2000 by Yang and grew to become the most popular P2P music-sharing service in South Korea with more 22 million registered users.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/2006...7195410220.htm





CBS Radio Sues Stern for Breach of Contract
Bill Carter

CBS Radio filed a lawsuit against Howard Stern yesterday, charging that he used his last months on the air there to build up his future employer, Sirius Satellite Radio, and gained financial advantages through a stock sale at the expense of CBS.

The suit was filed in New York State Supreme Court only hours after Mr. Stern pre-emptively took the offensive at a news conference, accusing CBS of trying to threaten and bully him. Mr. Stern denounced the legal action as a "personal vendetta" intended to "distract the media" from bad financial results at CBS-owned radio stations.

After Mr. Stern's attack, CBS filed its 43-page complaint, which accused him of "multiple breaches of contract, fraud, unjust enrichment and misappropriation of CBS Radio's broadcast time." Also included in the suit were Sirius Satellite Radio, which was accused of unfair competition over Mr. Stern's CBS contract, and Mr. Stern's agent, Don Buchwald.

In its complaint, CBS said that Mr. Stern "misappropriated millions of dollars' worth of CBS Radio air time for his own financial benefit, and fraudulently concealed his interest in hundreds of millions of dollars of Sirius stock while promoting it on the air." The suit did not specify the amount of financial damages that CBS planned to seek.

CBS is claiming that Mr. Stern secretly withheld from it one aspect of his deal with Sirius — that he was to be given 34 million shares of stock, valued at approximately $220 million, if Sirius reached certain subscriber levels at a date as early as this year. CBS said the contract Mr. Stern signed with Sirius provided that he would receive the stock payment in 2010.

Because of this unknown "acceleration clause," CBS said, Mr. Stern had an incentive to promote Sirius before he left CBS in mid-December. Mr. Stern and Mr. Buchwald did receive the shares three days after Mr. Stern began on Sirius in January, and Sirius allowed them to sell the shares right after that. CBS charged that Mr. Stern had used "these advertisements" to pocket more than $200 million.

At the news conference, Mr. Stern aimed angry comments at the chief executive of the CBS Corporation, Leslie Moonves, saying that in "coming after me," Mr. Moonves was trying to cover up for "record losses in ratings" for CBS's radio station by beginning the legal assault on its once-brightest star.

"The radio division at CBS is in a shambles," Mr. Stern said. Many CBS stations have seen severe ratings declines since Mr. Stern left for Sirius.

Mr. Stern said the suit did not make sense in the context of his actions during the time he remained on CBS stations after having signed a deal to switch to Sirius.

Mr. Stern said that, in contrast with CBS's claim that he had some form of "secret agreement" with Sirius, his departure from CBS had been widely known and publicized for 14 months before his exit.

As for the idea that he promoted Sirius on his show to the detriment of CBS, Mr. Stern said he had cleared with the top CBS radio executive, Joel Hollander, his intentions to talk on the air about moving to satellite radio — while never specifically mentioning the name Sirius. He added that his show was equipped with delay buttons that could cut off his commentary at any time and CBS did not chose to exercise that option when he discussed his future. Mr. Stern did concede that CBS suspended him for one day because of concerns of how he was promoting the shift to Sirius.

Finally, he dismissed CBS's claims that he damaged the company financially, saying that advertising for his program was "completely sold out" in the months before he left CBS. "I made them record profits," he said.

Mr. Stern said he met with Mr. Moonves recently to ask why the suit was being contemplated and that Mr. Moonves told him, "I'm the one who kept you on the air and I knew I could sue you afterwards."

Through a CBS spokesman, Mr. Moonves declined to comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/bu...dio.html?8hpib





Apple Offers Hi-Fi System to Use iPod in the Home
Laurie J. Flynn

Apple Computer furthered its push into home entertainment on Tuesday with the introduction of a high-fidelity stereo system for the iPod music player, as well as a new version of the Mac Mini computer with features for managing digital music and video.

The announcements, which come as Microsoft pushes its own approach to digital home entertainment based on its Windows Media Center technology, shows Apple's increasing focus on consumer electronics.

In recent quarters, sales of Apple's iPod devices and iTunes music downloads have overtaken the company's sales of Mac computers, rising to 60 percent of sales last quarter from 40 percent a year earlier. Just last week, the online Apple iTunes music store sold the billionth song since the service was introduced three years ago. To date, Apple has sold more than 42 million iPods.

"We've put a lot of work into making the iPod a part of on-the-go living," said Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, in a presentation to reporters at the company's headquarters here. "Now our second focus is in the home."

Apple's iPod Hi-Fi, an all-in-one speaker system housed in a case roughly the size of a shoebox, is priced at $349 and available in stores this week. The docking device, though not being promoted as portable, can run off six D batteries or AC power, and comes with a remote control.

Mr. Jobs said the device offered better home stereo quality than more expensive systems already on the market.

"It's home stereo reinvented for the iPod age," Mr. Jobs said.

The announcement of the iPod Hi-Fi also indicates an increasing desire by Apple to take part in the lucrative market for iPod add-ons and accessories, a business that until recently Apple had left almost entirely to third-party companies.

Today, the iPod accessories market is valued at more than $850 million, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. At the Macworld Expo in January, Apple introduced an FM radio tuner for the iPod, and on Tuesday Apple also introduced a $99 leather iPod case.

The company's new Mac Mini computer, the third in Apple's computer line to use an Intel processor, also appears to fit squarely in Apple's home entertainment strategy. Available in two models offering greater speed than earlier versions, the new Mac Mini comes with Apple's Front Row software for managing video collections, music playlists and slideshows, and also comes with a remote control. Apple's enhanced Bonjour software, which works with Front Row, allows users access to content stored on other computers over a wireless network.

The new Mac Mini, priced at $599 and $799 depending on the microprocessor, can connect with displays from Apple as well as other companies, and like the earlier Mac Mini can connect directly to a digital television set.

Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner, a market research firm, said the new products heralded the beginning of Apple's aggressive push into home entertainment. "I fully expect to see more directed at the living room cabinet," he said.

With the new Mac Mini, fully half of Apple's product line is now based on Intel chips, Mr. Jobs said. In January, several months ahead of schedule, the company announced an iMac and a new notebook computer using Intel processors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/te...tZV9udYYU8xxrQ





Apple Laptop Has Looks and Brains
David Pogue

REMEMBER the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance? If you're a fan of the Macintosh computer, meet the five stages of switching to Apple's new laptop: lust, anticipation, delight, dismay and waiting.

Ordinarily, it's not really news when a computer company introduces a new laptop model. You don't see newspaper headlines blaring, "Gateway's New P32-XC5 Adds Faster Processor, Third U.S.B. Port."

But the new Apple MacBook Pro ($2,000 and up) is a different story. Although it looks nearly identical to the company's existing 15-inch PowerBook, something radical is going on under the hood.

Apple's high-end laptops are beautiful, thin and light, clad in scuff-hiding aluminum and crammed with features: Wi-Fi wireless networking, Bluetooth wireless, DVD burning, light-up keys for typing in the dark, stereo speakers, batteries with illuminated "fuel gauges" and much more. But the speed of Apple's laptops has only inched forward in recent years, no thanks to the suppliers of its processor chips ( I.B.M. and Freescale).

Apple made the eyebrow-raising decision, therefore, to replace that chip family with chips from another company you may have heard of: Intel.

Now, changing chip families in a computer isn't as simple as changing a CD in your stereo. The entire operating system and every single software program must be rewritten — recompiled, the geeks would say — to speak the new chip's language. That process can take weeks or months.

But Apple deemed the big transition to be worth the effort. In return, it gets the state of the art in laptop horsepower: Intel's new Core Duo chip, which bears two electronic brains instead of one. By the end of this year, every Macintosh model will receive an Intel brain transplant. (The same Core Duo chip, running at the same speeds, is also showing up in new Windows laptops. And no, the Intel chip does not make a Mac vulnerable to Windows viruses. It does, however, mean that in theory, with the help of a conversion kit that someone will surely write, a Mac could run Windows.)

Last month, Apple put an Intel chip into the iMac; on Tuesday, it put one into the Mac Mini. And this week, the first Mac laptop containing the Intel processor is reaching customers — a 15-inch PowerBook that's been inexplicably renamed the MacBook Pro. (Why do Mac fans despise the new name so much? Partly because all those harsh consonants — K, K, P — make the name uglier and harder to say.)

APPLE calls the MacBook "the finest laptop in the world." In truth, a more accurate description would be "the finest laptop in the world, with a small serving of disappointment on the side."

You can see why Apple might be fond of its latest machine. The one-inch-thick MacBook is only 0.1 inch thinner than the PowerBook, but somehow feels worlds sleeker and more futuristic. Fit, finish and quality are spectacular.

The wireless antenna has been moved, so Wi-Fi reception is much improved. The guts, from the bus (circuitry) to the graphics card, have been substantially accelerated. Battery life is pretty much the same as on the PowerBooks: 3 to 3.5 hours.

The MacBook trumps its predecessor in five substantial areas. First, the gorgeous, 1,440-by-900-pixel screen is much whiter and brighter. It's very, very bright. At half brightness, it matches the brightest setting of other laptops; at full brightness, it could illuminate a runway. It's really bright.

Second, a tiny video camera is tucked inconspicuously above the screen. It's ideal for taking Web pictures (640 by 480 pixels), capturing video or creating video blogs to post online. (The laptop's bounteous software collection includes programs for making blogs, Web sites, videos and podcasts.)

Better yet, the camera makes the MacBook a perfect companion to the iChat program, which lets you hold smooth, full-screen video conferences with up to three other people over the Internet — free. Other Mac laptops can join such virtual meetings (using an external camera), but the MacBook is the first laptop with the horsepower to start one. (One high-speed Mac must be the "host" of an iChat conference; slower machines connect afterward.)

The third enhancement is a slim finger-length remote control. You can use it to operate the MacBook from across the room, summoning slide shows of your photos, concerts of your music collection, playbacks of your movies or playback of a DVD you've inserted.

In addition, there's a new power cord. Now, most people probably wouldn't consider a laptop's power cord worth writing home about, let alone taking up precious newspaper space. But this one's a breakthrough.

It attaches to the laptop magnetically. If someone trips on the cord — which, in the real world of laptops, is practically an inevitability — your $2,000 computer doesn't crash to the floor. Instead, the cord politely detaches and drops, leaving the laptop sitting exactly where it was, grinning away on battery power.

This new connector still lights up helpfully to indicate that it's plugged into a working outlet. On the other hand, the white plastic power brick — in the middle of the cord — is much bigger and bulkier than before. And, of course, the new connector means that you can no longer interchange the cord with that of any other Mac laptop, as Apple fans have been able to do for years.

The biggest change of all, though, is in the MacBook's speed. It's nothing like the 4X or 5X speedup measured by Apple's benchmarks. Even so, this machine flies. It starts up fast, programs open fast, iTunes imports CD's fast, iMovie processes high-definition video fast and Web pages blink onto the screen, fully formed. This laptop makes you aware of how many little pauses you've been tolerating on your old computer.

Note, though, that all of that speed is available only when you're using programs that have been revised to work with the Intel chip — so-called Universal programs. In that category, you'll find Mac OS X itself; all of the programs that come with the MacBook (iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, Web browser, e-mail program, calendar and address book, and so on); over 900 programs from other companies (they're listed at www.apple.com/universal/applications); and, later this month, Apple's professional programs (Final Cut, Aperture and so on).

Unfortunately, most of the big-name programs, like Microsoft Office and Adobe everything, won't be released in Universal format for quite some time. These older programs still run acceptably on the MacBook, thanks to the magic of Apple's smooth, invisible translation software. But they run slowly, with pauses here and there. Even Photoshop runs all right, although photo editors won't want MacBooks as their primary Photoshop machines.

Now, Apple always giveth and taketh away. This time around, though, Apple hath taken away quite a few PowerBook features. The S-video connector, for high-quality TV playback of movies, is gone — a weird omission, considering the multimedia emphasis implied by the new remote control. (You can restore the S-video jack with a $20 accessory cable.) The FireWire 800 connector, for high-speed hard drives, is also missing. The DVD burner is only half as fast as the previous model (4X instead of 8X) and can no longer burn dual-layer DVD discs. Current PC expansion cards (including high-speed cellular Internet cards) don't work or fit in the new narrow-format ExpressCard slot.

Most mystifying of all, Apple has removed the laptop's dial-up modem, so you can no longer send or receive faxes. You can't go online in hotels that don't offer high- speed connections (or that charge way too much for them), either. Apple points out that you can buy its tiny external modem for $50, but that's another piece to pack, track and lose.

It's also worth noting that a few programs, here and there, will require updates to iron out problems on the Intel Macs. They include the Now Up-to-Date calendar (the menu-bar list of today's appointments doesn't appear), Microsoft Virtual PC (doesn't run at all) and, at least on my test system, Microsoft Word (jitters like mad when you use the MacBook's "drag on the trackpad with two fingers to scroll" trick). And programs designed for pre-Mac OS X machines, now called Classic programs, don't run on any Intel Macs and never will.

Over all, the MacBook Pro is a beautifully engineered machine. If it's not the world's finest, it's darned close. (Apple hints that its 12-inch and 17-inch siblings are on the way.)

But in so many ways, it's a forward-thinking laptop. It won't achieve true greatness until the important programs have been rewritten for the Core Duo chip's blazing speed, expansion cards for the new slot are available, and wireless Internet is offered by every hotel, bed-and-breakfast and friend's house. Until then, call it the MacBook Po — for Potential.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/te...s/02pogue.html





Napster Plays Blame Game
Adam Pasick

NAPSTER'S chief executive has blamed technical glitches from Microsoft and music player makers for hampering his company's ability to compete with Apple's iTunes music service.

"There is no question that their execution has been less than brilliant over the last 12 months," Napster chairman and chief executive Chris Gorog said at a New York conference.

"Our business does rely on Microsoft's digital rights management software and our business model also relies on Microsoft's ecosystem of device manufacturers," he said.

Microsoft had to grapple with the complexities of dealing with a number of different services and device makers, Mr Gorog said.

"It's a lot more complex to get organised properly than it is to build one device and one service as Apple has done," he said. "It's always been painful at the introduction of new technologies. But it always takes shape like it's done in the past."

Mr Gorog, whose company has one of the best known names in the business but has failed to put a dent in Apple's market share, argued that eventually the "Microsoft ecosystem" and its Windows Media format would prevail, with new devices on the way from firms like Samsung and Sony.

"Ultimately, the consumer electronics giants ... are all going to come to this Windows Media party," he said. "This is really going to be the ubiquitous format."

Apple's seamless combination of music player and download service has not yet faced a significant challenge from devices made by groups such as Samsung, Sony or Creative, or from services such as Napster or RealNetworks' Rhapsody, which offer monthly subscription plans using a Microsoft format.

"Apple set the bar ... it just worked," a spokesman for RealNetworks said. "That's one of the things - it's hard to make it easy and easy to make it hard."

Napster, which shares a brand but little else with the free service that originally shook up the music industry in the late 1990s, has struggled to make its case with investors and consumers, Mr Gorog said.

"We have not been as successful as we might in articulating the real value of this business," he said. Napster's market capitalisation is about $US160 million ($215 million), but it has cash assets of about $US112 million, leaving it with a relatively small enterprise value.

The company's third-quarter net loss widened to $US17 million for the three months to December 31, from a loss of $US12.8 million a year earlier. Revenue rose to $US23.5 million from $US12.1 million.

Napster has faced persistent speculation that it may be bought by a larger rival - possibly a device manufacturer or a telco - but Mr Gorog insisted there was no sale in the works, despite numerous approaches.

"We have not ever sought any sale of our business. But we have received many enquiries from around the world and I think we well continue to receive many inquiries," he said. "We will do a deal if and when we feel it's in our shareholders' interests."

The company was working on an advertising-funded music service hosted at Napster.com. It was also developing a platform for mobile phones in partnership with Ericsson, but so far it has only stuck one deal with a mobile phone carrier.

Mr Gorog insisted that despite Apple's dominance, the competitive landscape would be far different "in the next 12 to 24 months".

"A lot of people following this story in the media and investors ... are really focusing on the tree and are not stepping back and looking at the forest. To date, only 5 per cent of (music) sales have migrated digitally. We are in the very, very early days of this."
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html





Microsoft Gives Away USB Drives

Sort of

Nick Farrell

THE SOFTWARE giant Microsoft is giving away USB drives to all and sundry.

The drives, which are stamped with Microsoft’s distinctive logo, contain Volish press releases on the need to buy Microsoft licences.

We assume that punters will treasure these press releases and will not wipe them to put something else on them.

You can sign up for your licence information pack here.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29978





In Sony's Stumble, the Ghost of Betamax
Ken Belson

AT first glance, Amir Majidimehr does not look like a game-changer in the battle to develop the next generation of DVD players and discs. As the vice president for Windows digital media at Microsoft, he neither steers a Hollywood studio nor controls one of the many consumer electronics giants that are betting billions of dollars on one of the two new formats that promise to play high-definition movies and television shows.

Yet when he and his team in Redmond, Wash., decided last September to abandon their neutral stance and to support Toshiba and its HD-DVD standard over the Blu- ray format led by Sony, the unexpected change of heart reverberated through the technology industry.

Suddenly, Toshiba's seemingly quixotic defense of its format had new life. Intel joined Microsoft in backing HD-DVD. Hewlett-Packard withdrew its exclusive support of Blu-ray. This month, another member of the Blu-ray camp, LG Electronics, hedged its bets, too, signing a deal to license Toshiba's technology.

And earlier this month, one of the main reasons underpinning Microsoft's move to shuck its neutrality — the complexity of producing Blu-ray technology — led to Sony's acknowledgment that it might delay this spring's scheduled release of its PlayStation 3 game console partly because the needed technology was still being worked out.

The possible delay and the Blu-ray group's loss of its once-commanding lead are not encouraging developments for Sony in its attempt to revive its electronics group after a series of bungles. PlayStation 3 is crucial to Sony's future, and not only because the latest version of its gaming consoles could generate billions in revenue; the new machines will include disc drives that will turn them into Blu-ray DVD players as well.

"The PlayStation is more than a game system to them; it's one of their attempts to own the digital living room," said Robert Heiblim, a consultant to electronics companies. "Blu-ray is also critically important to get right. They don't want to be weak in an area they feel they can dominate."

A DECADE ago, a prospective death match between competing first-generation DVD players was averted when Sony and Philips agreed to back down and join the Toshiba/Warner Brothers side, in exchange for a share of royalties that all DVD player producers pay to the format's creator. Now, no truce seems near, as neither side wants to settle for a small piece of what could be a big electronics success.

So consumers and retailers may be in for a reprise of the confusing VHS-Betamax showdown of the early 1980's, with Toshiba replacing Matsushita as Sony's adversary. But Sony hopes to have a happier resolution this time. Sony lost the battle two decades ago when its highly regarded Betamax technology was defeated by VHS, a more widely accepted alternative.

Once again, the differences between the two technologies are not huge. And a growing chorus of critics, including some studio chiefs eager to sell new products as quickly as possible, call the Blu-ray format unnecessarily elaborate and expensive.

The first HD-DVD machines from Toshiba and the competing Blu-ray players from Sony, Samsung and the other Blu-ray companies will all play movies with crisper pictures, enhanced sound and a bevy of interactive features like pictures within pictures and links to the Internet. The machines will also play older DVD's.

Technophiles got a preview of the HD-DVD technology on Wednesday at an electronics store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As Jessica Simpson and Johnny Knoxville cavorted in the movie "The Dukes of Hazzard," prospective buyers were able to see the difference between a plain old DVD and the high-definition kind. But the main feature was the price. Toshiba will sell two players starting in March; one will cost just $499, half the price of the cheapest Blu-ray machines, the first of which will hit the stores this spring. Samsung's first machine will cost $1,000, while Pioneer's Blu-ray player will run $1,800.

Toshiba executives have said that because more high-definition movies will be distributed over the Internet in coming years, they have essentially upgraded existing DVD technology to keep prices down. Blu-ray discs, however, include an architecture that Sir Howard Stringer, Sony's chairman, calls "revolutionary, not evolutionary."

The Blu-ray camp is trying to create a brand-new technology that will accommodate features that are still to be created. In preparation for that future, Blu-ray discs will store 25 gigabytes of data, compared with the 15 gigabytes on comparable Toshiba discs and 4.7 gigabytes on today's DVD's.

The first batch of high-definition DVD's from the studios' vaults will highlight rich graphics, vivid scenery and fast-moving action. The films include "Rambo," science fiction thrillers like "The Matrix" and "Dune" and animated features like "Ice Age." The DVD's are generally expected to cost $19 to $25.

But movies are only one front in the format war. In throwing its weight behind Toshiba, Microsoft has expanded the fight into the computer and game industries. Later this year, Microsoft will start selling an external drive for its Xbox game that will play HD-DVD discs, countering Sony's effort to turn PlayStation into a high-definition DVD player by adding Blu-ray technology. Microsoft and its ally Intel have also convinced Hewlett-Packard to consider making HD-DVD drives for computers. This would give Toshiba an answer to Dell, which remains committed to the Blu-ray format.

"The pendulum is swinging back to the HD-DVD camp," said John Freeman, who runs a technology research firm, Strategic Marketing Decisions, which last year declared Blu-ray the front-runner. "It will be interesting to see if the Blu-ray group can recover. It's only a matter of time before people start backing out of the Blu-ray camp."

Still, even with Microsoft on board, Toshiba may have only closed the gap, not overtaken the Blu-ray group. With Samsung, Panasonic and others siding with Sony, consumers will see more Blu-ray machines in the stores. And Blu-ray has more studios in its camp, which means more choice in movies. Every major studio except Universal plans to release Blu-ray DVD's, while Toshiba has commitments from only Universal, Warner Brothers and Paramount.

But one thing is clear: given Microsoft's growing power and scope in the entertainment realm — thanks to its Xbox machines, its media player software and forays into Internet television — its support of HD-DVD has deepened, and has probably prolonged, the format battle. That means consumers must figure out each format's advantages and risk being stuck with obsolete machines if one camp backs down.

This is giving retailers fits, not only because they have to carry twice as many machines and discs, but also because they have to train their employees to explain the differences between the standards.

"Both sides are digging in their heels and stupidity has prevailed," said Joe McGuire, the chief executive of Tweeter, a high-end electronics chain. Mr. McGuire called the failure of the two camps to agree on a single format "criminal" and said he would have a hard time advising consumers. "The answer to which is better is: 'We don't know,' " he said. "I'm tempted not to sell anyone these machines."

But sell they will, because retailers — and studios — need something new to throw at consumers now that DVD players are in 82 percent of American homes. Sales of DVD players are "pretty dead," said John LaRegina, a senior buyer at P.C. Richards, which has 49 stores in the New York area.

But Mr. LaRegina said format battles confused consumers and gave them an excuse not to buy. The uncertainty over who may win also forces film studios and electronics companies to hedge their bets.

Warner Brothers and Paramount, which were originally committed only to HD-DVD, decided last fall to make movies in both formats.

"It was very, very clear that Sony was not going to back down from Blu-ray, and they are basically betting their company on it," said Kevin Tsujihara, the president of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group. But, he added, Toshiba has mounted "something of a comeback" by winning endorsements from Microsoft and Intel.

Some Blu-ray companies are also waiting to see how the market develops before jumping in with machines of their own. If the PlayStation 3 is priced below Toshiba's $500 player, it could double as the poor man's Blu-Ray player and undercut Sony's partners. (It will also cost Sony dearly; Merrill Lynch issued a report on Feb. 17 estimating that the first PlayStation 3 players would cost about $900 to produce. If so, Sony could end up with substantial losses on those machines if they are priced around $299, as analysts expect, to compete with the Xbox 360, which has been out since November.)

"It's too early to move into this market," said Katsuhiko Machida, the president of Sharp, a Blu-ray company that has not released details for its players in the United States. "Blu-Ray won't be a big business until probably 2008," he said, so "we can watch and see what happens."

Those doubts are a far cry from Blu-ray's bravado last summer and fall, when it won endorsements from Fox, Lions Gate, Warner Brothers and Paramount. Those agreements, coupled with the presumed sway of the PlayStation 3, led industry analysts at Forrester and elsewhere to predict that Blu-ray would ultimately win the format war.

But two unexpected and little-noticed decisions by the Blu-ray group last spring managed to alienate Microsoft and ultimately revive Toshiba's sagging fortunes.

First, Sony and the Blu-ray group adopted a Java program for interactive features. Microsoft favored a rival called iHD because, among other things, it would work better with its new Vista operating system. The Blu-ray group's board also approved an encryption technology called BD+, which Mr. Majidimehr, Microsoft's vice president for Windows digital media, deemed superfluous.

THESE decisions led Mr. Majidimehr to take a deeper look at the Blu-ray format and whether it would be more expensive to produce, as Toshiba had long contended. Mr. Majidimehr and his deputy, Jordi Ribas, spent the next few months on the phones and flying to Asia to meet with Sony, Panasonic and the other Blu-ray companies.

"We asked them if they are serious, and they told us they were," Mr. Majidimehr said, referring to the added software. Microsoft also received more data that showed that the Blu-ray group was not meeting its targets for producing discs and optical drives. "We were getting a lot of data saying the HD-DVD format was a walk in the park and Blu-ray was having trouble developing theirs," Mr. Majidimehr said.

Microsoft's announcement last September raised alarm bells at Hewlett-Packard, which was coming to similar conclusions. Hewlett-Packard worried that the software included in the Blu-ray format would cost so much in royalties that H-P would be unable to add affordable DVD drives to its computers.

Blu-ray drives cost up to 75 percent more than HD-DVD drives, according to Maureen Weber, the general manager of the personal storage group at Hewlett-Packard and a former spokeswoman for the Blu-ray coalition. "There's not a lot of elbow room," she said of the thin profit margins on computers. "The economics of HD-DVD make a lot more sense for us. I'm starting to wonder about the manufacturing ability of Blu-ray."

A Blu-ray spokesman, Andy Parsons, says his group's royalties, which have not yet been set, will be far lower than critics expect. He also disputed the idea that Toshiba had any advantage because Microsoft or Hewlett-Packard might promote the use of HD-DVD in computers.

"DVD's are about movies and people watch them in their living rooms," he said. "How many people actually use their computer drives to sit and watch movies?"

He added that the price of Blu-ray machines and discs was bound to fall as volume rose. Besides, he said, Toshiba is missing the point by selling cheaper machines, because the first people who buy new technologies typically care less about cost and more about the technology.

There are other industry analysts who contend that Microsoft is simply propping up Toshiba to further its own aims, like countering the PlayStation and combating the spread of Sun's Java software. Nonetheless, Toshiba is happy for the backing, given that the format was written off for dead just a few months ago.

"There's no doubt that everyone has various agendas," said Mark Knox, an adviser to the Toshiba promotion group. "But whatever their agenda, Microsoft's support has been a huge boon to HD-DVD."

For Sony, a fortified rival spells trouble. Not only does it make it harder for Blu-ray to catch on, but it raises questions about Sony's approach of trying to create new formats when consumers turn out to be content with something less ambitious.

That is the lesson Sony learned the hard way in the 1980's with Betamax, and more recently when Apple outdid the Walkman with the iPod. Now it is Toshiba's and Microsoft's turn to challenge Sony's strategy.

Martin Fackler contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/business/26disks.html





Rules of the Road:

Internet Growth Is Slowing, So We Instinctively Seek New Ways of Growing and New Rules to Make It Happen
Robert X. Cringely

Internet use in American homes is still growing, but the pace of that growth is slowing according to a study released this week by Parks Associates, a market research firm from Dallas, Texas. Based on a sample of 1,000 U.S, households, the survey concluded that 42 percent of U.S. homes have broadband, 22 percent use dial-up, but that 29 percent have no computers at all, thus placing a firm upper limit on potential Internet penetration. Not to put too much faith in a single study, this Parks report generally supports a similar Pew report from last year. This has to be a kick in the head to pundits who have seen Internet access quickly becoming as ubiquitous as electric power, telephone, televisions, or indoor plumbing. It also does a lot to explain much of the current Internet hype that emphasizes non-PC applications. By applying a couple Cringely rules of thumb, we can take these study results far beyond the Parks analysis and figure out where things are really headed and why.

There are two ways to build market share for a major new technology: 1) by attracting early adopters followed by normal consumers, and 2) through a generational change where non-users literally die-out to be replaced by a whole new generation of consumers who are comfortable with the technology. An innovation can generally reach about two-thirds of the market through the first method, but to reach near 100 percent market share you need the latter. And that's the way it always is, even though we choose to forget that fact when it is more convenient to do so.

That's why electricity and telephones, both of which have been with us for over a century, have almost 100 percent market share. People aren't born today who can imagine being without a telephone or electricity, so of course they have both. The only communication product class to buck this inter-generational trend is broadcast television, which grew to 97 percent market penetration in less than 30 years, but that probably confirms my feeling that television was really perceived by the consumer as an extension of radio, which would given it a much longer effective adoption cycle.

Today Internet use and cable television use in the U.S. are roughly comparable at just under 70 percent market penetration. That means the commercial Internet, which effectively dates from the late 1980s, has grown at about three times the rate of cable TV, which began in the late 1940s and took until 1976 to reach 15 percent penetration. In fact, cable TV market penetration stood at 50 percent in 1987, about the time the commercial Internet came into being.

So the Internet has grown a lot faster than these earlier communication technologies, but then the Internet is technically dependent, for the most part, on some other host network. At the very least you need to first be a telephone customer to then become an Internet customer. That makes cable TV, even for its slower growth rate, actually the more impressive act, since its numbers are truly ab initio.

Yet it seems obvious to me that while a generation shift will make Internet access almost universal in another 20 years, the same probably won't be said for cable TV, which may well peak and decline before then simply because there will be other ways to get television. That's the distruptive nature of the Internet, which threatens telephone companies, cable companies, and TV broadcasters, alike.

The result is that each of these industries is trying to poach the others. As such, cable TV is the very heart of the U.S. broadband industry even though broadband is what will probably end up eating cable's lunch. Telephone companies like the Internet, too, just as they are also trying to find ways to enter the television business while their voice business is being savaged by VoIP.

While waiting for the inter-generational boom or bust that is inevitable, each industry is building-out to maximize the revenue from its existing subscriber base. Cable TV companies do this by hawking pay-per- view, digital cable, and video-on-demand. Telephone companies are starting to do the same. But Internet companies have a slightly different task, and that's finding ways to connect more devices and more device types to their networks. That's because, as a stupid network that offers nothing more than bandwidth and a gleaming smile to its users, the value of the Internet is increased solely by the number of connections to it. So if you have already maxed-out your PC connections, it is logical to start connecting non-PC devices.

And that's the motivation -- the real motivation -- for all these TV shows and movies suddenly being made available over the Internet. It is to get more types of devices connected to the net to, in turn, increase the business value of that network to its nominal owners, which unfortunately would not be you or me.

This is just the simple motion of tectonic plates -- slow but inevitable, and also irresistible. Against this glacial scene of course there is still a subtext of local politics and short term business advantage, but the trends are clear, and here they are:

1. All networks will eventually be subsumed into the Internet, because only as a single network can their value be maximized. This is kind of a cock-eyed interpretation of Metcalfe's Law, which says the value of a network is the square of its number of nodes. I think using a square function was Bob Metcalfe going a bit far, and the real value here is to acknowledge that network unification is a primal technical urge and -- whatever the actual value achieved =- will drive all the existing networks into a single technology with wired and wireless varieties.

2. If all networks are eventually to merge, then all the whining from this special interest or that is just whining. When SBC (now AT&T) or BellSouth complain about having to carry Yahoo or Google bits for free, they are just trying to fool us into paying even more than we already are for the same network services they would give us for free if they had to. Sharing the increased value of the larger network is worth more to these companies than the incremental revenue of bleeding Yahoo. Either they don't get this, which is very possible, or they are lying, which is equally possible.

3. This is a stretch, but it makes sense to me: If the prime directive here is simply to grow the Net as big and as fast as possible, then the best way to do that is through the balancing of data loads as much as possible across the Net. This is contrary to the client-server model that has dominated the Internet for most of its existence. Put differently, the major impediment to eventual Internet hegemony is the problem of scaling client-server applications. How big a data center do you need before you realize that no data center is big enough for some applications? Only a server-server or peer-to-peer architecture makes sense in the long run.

Here we have what might be three new laws to guide future growth of the Internet. And they tell us a lot about where things are headed. It is logical to assume that all devices will eventually be networked but we will start with devices that are either already intelligent (computers) or are very important to us (televisions). Any political or business obstacles in the path of this transition are most likely temporary. And the only way for the network to maximize its value is through server-to-server or peer-to-peer networking.

So if your ISP doesn't want you to share or re-sell your Internet connection, it is just because they don't yet realize that such sharing is really to their advantage. In time they will come to see it or they will die. If your ISP doesn't like all that Bit Torrent traffic, it is just because they haven't yet figured out that it is the long term key to their success as a business.

For the transition of television to the Net, then, heavily data center-based ventures are unlikely to be successful in the long-term. Google and its distributed shipping containers might be right for this moment or next, but they can do the math and that math tells them that pumping tens of millions of simultaneous HDTV unicasts from a Google server is no way to make money. It is much better to use Google servers to seed video content, which is then shared by many peers. This is pretty much the only way the system can scale high enough to functionally replace and then improve on today's TV.

The poster child for television 2.0, it seems to me, is a company like Grid Networks, which might be a new name to you. Like Bit Torrent, Grid has built a peer-to-peer distribution system. Like Mike Homer's Kontiki, Grid has married Digital Rights Management and a business model of sorts to its Torrent-like distribution system. But unlike most of the others, Grid (no, I am not an investor but thanks for asking) most approximates what my Mom thinks of as TV.

Kontiki has been around for a long time, and are definitely first mover in the market. They adopted a subscription model (RSS+P2P=Video), but for that the videos have to be downloaded in entirety, and there really is no "browse, click, watch" functionality in their system (at least yet). It is certainly better than waiting 2 days for NetFlix at the mail box, but it's just not quite user friendly enough in my opinion.

Grid's system, on the other hand, accomplishes two things from the end-user perspective: it is point, click and watch; and it is very very high quality. Using p2p, they can afford to send 1.5Mbps - 2Mbps video over their network because it costs the same as sending 150Kbps-200Kbps video. I was shocked by the video quality, watching a DVD-quality movie at Starbucks on my notebook computer with virtually no waiting.

But a successful commercial system can't count on anarchy, so Grid has a full Content Management System built into the network (called Media Vaults) that allows for media uploaded to a media vault to be monetized and then syndicated with XML to as many vending websites you as the content owner wants. Mix that with a ubiquitous platform player and, well, you get the point.

Apple is selling one-hour TV shows on iTunes for $1.99 with 67 percent of that revenue going to the content owner ($1.33), and a cost of 25 cents for the network delivery leaves them $0.41 for marketing and operations per video -- very thin margins. Reducing the cost of the video delivery to as low as five cents while raising the bit rate would seem to be a no-brainer.

Right now, Grid only has about 100,000 clients installed, but that's enough for 80 percent lower prices for instant-on video. A new multi-platform client is on its way; the company will become 95 percent "grid efficient" with as few as 1,000 downloaded clients. This isn't rocket science, and there may be other, even better, solutions to the same problem, but it works, it is available now, and it could change television forever.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060223.html





Single-Platform Solutions
Matthew Phillips

While improving technology and consolidation among entertainment companies has opened up new ways to reach customers, the real challenge is providing the right content affordably enough to deter illegal file sharing. Matthew Phillips reports

‘Convergence’ has long been a buzzword in the media and communications sectors. Are we now, finally, witnessing the start of a seismic shift in the consumption of audiovisual content or are the commercial, legal and regulatory challenges likely to prove too great?

Recent M&A activity — such as ITV’s acquisition of Friends Reunited, Sky’s purchase of broadband provider Easynet and the likely takeover of Virgin Mobile by NTL — demonstrates how ‘traditional’ broadcasters and television distributors are seeking to expand into new areas.

Broadband, in particular, is becoming an increasingly viable distribution method for TV content. The recently-launched ‘Sky by broadband’ service enables existing Sky subscribers to download a range of full-length movies and sports clips to their PCs, while the BBC is reaching the end of its Integrated Media Player trial, which has tested licence fee payers’ interest in a ‘catch-up’ broadband TV service.

Convergence also presents opportunities for new entrants to become distributors of third-party content, alongside the established players. BT is expected to launch a set-top box in the autumn combining a Freeview tuner with a broadband connection — the latter enabling viewers to watch a range of programming on a ‘pay on demand’ basis.

In the mobile sector, network operators are taking advantage of increasingly sophisticated handsets to offer rich media content to their subscribers. Orange, Vodafone (in conjunction with Sky) and 3 are all now offering mobile television services over their third-generation networks, while Virgin Mobile plans to launch its own nationwide service using Digital Audio Broadcasting radio capacity to deliver televisual content to mobile phones.

O2 recently conducted a mobile television trial which used digital terrestrial television (DTT) spectrum to deliver a range of channels to mobile handsets equipped with a DTT tuner, although the prospects of a national mobile television service using DTT capacity seem slim unless Ofcom releases spectrum for these purposes after the completion of the ‘digital switchover’ in 2012.

As the number of available audiovisual distribution channels increases, so do the rights and regulatory challenges. The need for appropriately tailored definitions in rights-related agreements becomes of fundamental importance, particularly where any form of exclusivity has been granted or acquired. What does ‘television’ mean in a converged world, where audiovisual content can be distributed at high quality over broadband and can be viewed away from home on mobile phones?

While lawyers can always update standard form agreements to reflect technological developments, new distribution platforms raise further questions as to who is best placed to exploit the associated revenue opportunities. Production companies are understandably keen to maximise the value of their programming in an ‘on-demand’ world. However, commercial broadcasters need to counter their declining advertising revenues from traditional television by broadening the reach of their services across new platforms, and argue that they deserve to share in the revenues from new media exploitation in return for their funding and promotion of programmes for broadcast on ‘traditional’ television.

Ofcom’s recent review of the television production sector has suggested that, in agreements between public service broadcasters and production companies, broadcasters should be free to exploit programming on any UK free-to-air platform during a ‘primary rights’ period, and to restrict exploitation by production companies during a subsequent holdback period. This ‘when, not where’ approach to new media rights makes sense in a world where distinctions between different distribution methods are becoming less clear. However, the key question is whether broadcasters and production companies can now agree on the length of these periods.

The increasingly blurred distinctions between traditional and new forms of content distribution have also raised questions over whether the existing regulation of linear television channels should be extended to new forms of content delivery. Following its review of the ‘Television Without Frontiers’ Directive, the European Commission (EC) has proposed that audiovisual content which is distributed via ‘non-linear’ methods should be subject to limited regulation. While not as extensive as that applied to traditional linear channels, non-linear service providers would be required to obey certain minimum requirements intended, for example, to protect minors and regulate commercial communications. The UK Government opposes the EC’s new proposals and, while the objectives of a minimum level of regulation are understandable, it must be questionable whether it is appropriate to impose this regulatory burden at such a crucial time in the development of these nascent distribution methods.

Even if the rights and regulatory challenges can be overcome, are consumers actually interested in these new services — and, perhaps more significantly, are they prepared to pay for them? With these questions in mind, Olswang conducted a survey at the end of last year into 1,500 UK consumers’ attitudes to convergence.

The survey results indicate that consumers are interested in having the freedom to choose what to watch and when to watch it. Indeed, timing was the most important factor among respondents who wanted to watch television over broadband — perhaps not surprising, given the popularity of Sky+ as a device to liberate viewers from the constraints of traditional scheduled television.

More revealing was the finding that 70% of respondents did not want to watch television on their mobile phones. While the concept itself held little interest, concerns about price and about picture/sound quality were also raised.

The survey also suggested some potential behavioural changes in UK homes, with traditional television and radio no longer the dominant source of home entertainment. Some 42% of respondents said they used their computers every day to listen to music, while nearly three- quarters send e-mails or browse the internet at home on a daily basis.

Furthermore, limited attention is now being paid to traditional television, with nearly half of all respondents saying they send e-mails or browse the internet while watching television.

The experience of the music industry suggests that piracy should be a further concern to current and would-be distributors of films and television programmes. The rise of next-generation peer-to-peer networks has led to an explosion in the illegal dissemination of audiovisual content. In the US, the Motion Picture Association of America has taken well-publicised action against websites associated with the illegal distribution of movies using BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology. However, while the film and television industries can learn from the music industry and take action against file sharers, there are also positive indicators for distributors of audiovisual content via new platforms.

If applied to ‘legitimate’ content, peer-to-peer technology offers an efficient delivery mechanism for the large files required to distribute television programmes and movies over the internet, provided that the content being distributed is appropriately protected by digital rights management technology. Sky and the BBC are already using peer-to- peer technology to deliver their broadband content services, while NTL is planning to trial a content distribution service using BitTorrent technology.

Furthermore, the results of the Olswang convergence survey suggest that those consumers who are currently illegally downloading pirate movies are actually the most willing to pay. Of the survey respondents, those who downloaded movies were most likely to watch payper-view movies and to rent or buy DVDs — and were also more willing than average to pay for programmes via PCs, mobiles and other portable devices.

The challenge is, therefore, to develop legitimate online alternatives to BitTorrent, which are sufficiently attractive for users to be prepared to pay for them.
http://www.legalweek.com/ViewItem.asp?id=27844





Yahoo Says It Is Backing Away From TV-Style Web Shows
Saul Hansell

After proclaiming grand plans to bring elaborately produced sitcoms, talk shows and other television-style programs to the Internet, the head of Yahoo's Media Group said yesterday that he was sharply scaling back those efforts. He said the group would shift its focus to content acquired from other media companies or submitted by users.

The executive, Lloyd Braun, the former chairman of ABC Entertainment, was the subject of speculation in recent weeks that he was leaving Yahoo over differences with its chief executive, Terry S. Semel.

Mr. Braun said yesterday that he had called a meeting of his group tomorrow in Santa Monica, Calif., where he would outline the new strategy. He said Mr. Semel would attend to endorse it.

"I thought it would be a good time, given all the rumor and innuendo, for me to reiterate once and for all that I am not going anywhere," Mr. Braun said.

Yahoo said Mr. Semel was not available for comment yesterday, but Daniel L. Rosensweig, the company's chief operating officer, said, "We are very happy with Lloyd, and Lloyd is very happy with Yahoo." Mr. Braun acknowledged some differences with Yahoo's management — his initial budget requests for this year were rejected, he said — but he dismissed that as normal corporate back-and-forth. And he said he had been engaged in a discussion with Mr. Semel and others at Yahoo's corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., about his revised strategy for the media group, which includes Yahoo's news, sports, finance and entertainment sites.

"I didn't fully appreciate what success in this medium is really going to look like," he said. "This is not about creating one-off hits like in my old business. That is not going to create a sustainable competitive advantage over the long term."

With advertisers moving large parts of their budgets online, the market for content, created by professionals, bloggers and individual users, is expanding rapidly — as is the competition. Major media companies are developing video-based programming for the Internet. Myspace.com, purchased last year by the News Corporation, has become a major site based on user-contributed content. Many start-ups, like youtube.com, seek to follow suit.

Indeed, Mr. Braun said yesterday that the way to keep users on Yahoo's site longer — and thus be able to show them more advertising — was to offer ways they can create their own content and look at content created by others. He pointed to the site Yahoo built for the 2006 Winter Olympics, which prominently featured photographs from Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site, along with articles both by news agencies and by a few columnists exclusive to Yahoo.

"I now get excited about user-generated content the way I used to get excited about thinking about what television shows would work," he said.

Mr. Braun insisted that Yahoo would not abandon its efforts to have original material, but he said it would embark on only a handful of new ventures this year, not the dozens he had been promising last year.

The company is not canceling its initial forays into programming — "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," a series of war reports, and "Richard Bangs Adventures," travelogues about unusual locales. But other initiatives, like a revival of "The Runner," an elaborate reality concept Mr. Braun originally developed for ABC, have been shelved.

"Original content is the salt and pepper on the meal," he said. "It is certainly not the engine driving this."

He acknowledged that coming off developing ABC programs like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," he had overly grand expectations for what he should do at Yahoo.

"I realized I have to check my ego at the door for a moment, and forget whatever expectations people had about me because of my former life, and really take a hard look at who should this business be built for the long term — a business that is not dependent on a series of expensive one-off's to survive," he said. Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said Yahoo's shift in strategy was sound. "Embracing things like blogs and sharing of content between individuals" is at least as important as "coming up with the next mega-online event," he said. "The Internet is such a niche content environment that the broadcast model does not really work."

Mr. Rosensweig, the chief operating officer, said Yahoo's intention had always been to combine content from users, media companies and to a lesser extent its own creation.

"Where the confusion has come in, and maybe the emphasis has evolved, is we always felt that kind of programming was a component of what we were going to do, not only what we do," he said. "It happened to be the part people associated with Lloyd, because that is what he had been doing."

Mr. Braun's track record so far is mixed. The sites he took over, which generally have been among the most popular in their respective fields, have been neither leaders nor laggards in audience growth. Yahoo News, for example, was the most popular news site in January, with 27.5 million users. But that is only a 2 percent growth in users from a year earlier, compared to 19 percent growth for the No. 2 site, MSNBC.com.

Yahoo's original-content efforts have yet to create the sort of hit Mr. Braun had talked about. "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" had 791,000 users in January, according to figures from comScore Networks provided by Yahoo. That was more than popular blogs like Gawker and DailyKos, but marginal for Yahoo, with more than 400 million monthly users.

Joanna Stevens, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said the company was pleased with the site because it attracted an affluent audience that was attractive to advertisers and because of "the positioning it gives Yahoo News as a serious news brand."

One possible consideration for Yahoo in its original-content efforts was concern among movie studios and television networks that it might be a competitor rather than a potential distribution arm — perhaps encouraging them to offer content first to Google, which says it has no interest in creating its own content.

"Hollywood is always paranoid about that sort of thing," said John Rose, a media consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. But he said their fears were overblown.

Mr. Rosensweig said concerns among studios were misguided. "We still think today, we have the best relationships with — and are the best partner for — the big media companies," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/te...y/02yahoo.html





Film Distribution Firm Debuts New Streaming Tech
Sebastian Rupley

The Web has already become a major medium for delivering TV, video content, and movies, but costs and long download times have loomed as problems. Now, startup company Itiva (www.itiva.com) is out to change that with its unique Quantum Streaming technology. It allows users to execute lickey-split downloads of high-definition video content over standard broadband lines.

In a demonstration for PC Magazine, Itiva president Michel Billard showed a two-minute hi-def 720p movie trailer from a major studio downloading in seconds, at a transfer rate of 5.5 Mbps. The trailer even played while the download was finishing. To put that in perspective, a general rule when downloading high-def video using competitive technologies is that it takes much longer to download the content than it does to watch it. With the speeds Itiva is achieving, users could download a 90-minute movie in well under 10 minutes.

The major movie studio seen in the demonstration has already signed on to have Itiva distribute its content, and Itiva is seeking deals with more film studios as well as concert promoters. But the company has its eyes on independent filmmakers, too. "Scaling small is as important as scaling big," says Itiva director Tom Taylor.

Using technologies such as BitTorrent to download films can mean long wait times, when there's only one source. That's primarily because client computers must compete to access the pieces that a movie has been broken down into (although once other clients receive the data they can independently pass it along to even more clients, accelerating the process).

By contrast, Itiva breaks hi-def content up into http-based Web pages called "Quanta," which can be cached at an ISP just like standard Web pages. ISPs already have the infrastructure they need to host such pages, so users can go direct to the ISP to get very fast downloads over standard broadband lines.

Public applications for Itiva's technology are only weeks away. It may play a key role as the Web goes Hollywood.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1927282,00.asp





TiVo to Offer Tighter Rein on Children's Viewing
Saul Hansell

In a new twist on helping parents control what children watch on television, TiVo will announce today a service that lets its video recorders limit children to watching shows approved by one of two groups promoting family programming.

Parental controls have been built into most television and cable set-top boxes for the last decade, allowing parents to limit their children's viewing to shows that have certain ratings as assigned by the networks. TiVo as well had a parental control system based on these ratings. Many digital cable boxes offer even more options, letting parents select individual programs to block.

But Tom Rogers, TiVo's chief executive, said existing technology and ratings had been rarely used because both the software and the ratings were too difficult to understand.

"Ratings have had a marginal effect because parents don't fully understand how to use them," Mr. Rogers said. "Nor do they bring forward what they want their kids to watch."

TiVo has been hard hit by cable and satellite companies that are selling set-top boxes with video recorders built in, and its share price is off about 30 percent since last July. So the company is focusing on software that will differentiate its offering from generic alternatives. Another feature under development will let users share lists of their favorite shows with their friends.

The move on children's viewing comes at a time of increasing focus on giving parents more control. Several large cable companies have said they will offer a "family tier" or bundle of channels deemed appropriate for children.

Under the TiVo plan, parents will be able to designate ratings issued by one of two groups — Common Sense Media or the Parents Television Council.

Common Sense Media was formed in 2003 with backers including Charles R. Schwab, the brokerage company executive, and Philip F. Anschutz, the billionaire investor; the Parents Television Council, formed in 1995, is headed by L. Brent Bozell III, a conservative commentator.

The new TiVo service will let children watch only programs the designated group deems appropriate for the age range specified by the parent. In addition, parents can automatically record programs designated by the groups as especially worthwhile.

Parents can overrule the groups' choices or make their own list of approved and banned programs from scratch. They will also be able to type in a password to view programs denied to their children.

TiVo's software, called KidZone, will be made available without additional charge in June to the 1.4 million users of TiVo's stand-alone set-top boxes.

It will not be offered to the 2.6 million users of DirecTV boxes that also include TiVo recorders, because DirecTV has largely stopped selling them.

TiVo has typically charged $200 and up for its recorders, depending on capacity, and $12.95 for the service required to make the box work. It has recently been experimenting with deep discounts on the boxes or even giving the boxes free to customers who pay a higher monthly fee.

Even with its new feature, one issue that children's groups have been concerned about — advertising aimed at the young— will have to be addressed manually. The new service does not automatically edit out commercials.

Mr. Rogers said the company did not want to alienate the television networks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/te...gy/02tivo.html





Mandriva 2006 to be 1st Linux Desktop to Offer Built-in Online Music Service Feature Through Mindawn
Press Release

Mandriva and The Kompany, the creator of Mindawn, a Linux-friendly online music and video service, have announced their partnership to provide customers with built-in software to take advantage of legitimate digital content using Mandriva Linux 2006. Thanks to the collaboration between the two companies, Mandriva Linux 2006 users can access high quality music and video files at the Mindawn website.

Mindawn has been supporting Linux for over a year. The Mindawn platform makes it easy and convenient for Linux users to access a growing library of diverse music. Mindawn is open to all artists as well as all consumers, so the many amateur, home and professional musicians using Rosegarden, Ardour or any of the other music sequencing and recording systems available for Linux have a ready-made channel to distribute their music.

Most online music services tie the user to one or at best two computer platforms: iTunes is only for Mac OS X and Windows; Napster is Windows-only. Mindawn, on the other hand, works with all three major platforms including Linux. With Mindawn's cross-platform client software, users can hear a full preview of the entire song, unlike competing services which only offer brief excerpts.

Customers can perform any function of the system on the Mindawn website aside from previewing songs, which requires the Mindawn player. This software allows customers to preview a song up to three times in full length, without having to pay for it. When users are ready to buy, the player will provide several download and file format options. Mindawn's player is a full featured audio client with robust library capability and integrated Internet radio client.

Mindawn's competitors typically offer music files that are reduced in quality through what's called "lossy compression". The more compressed a file is, the greater the loss in sound quality. By contrast, Mindawn offers its files in both Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats. Ogg Vorbis employs lossy compression, but unlike MP3, is a totally free and open sound format. It offers superior sound quality compared to MP3 and other lossy compression techniques. Meanwhile, FLAC employs lossless compression, allowing it to offer full CD quality in a file 50% smaller than a WAV file. FLAC can easily be converted to AIFF or WAV files and burned to disc for use in standard CD players. It can also be converted to virtually any other lossy format for use on any portable media player.
http://br.sys-con.com/read/187403.htm





Dumb’s the word

Variety: MPAA Can't Even Sell Its Tech Partners On Complex Analog Hole Crippleware
David S. Cohen

The Hollywood Post Alliance Tech Retreat isn't usually a hubbub of controversy. But the MPAA's Brad Hunt got a testy reception Feb. 22 when he gave a half-hour talk on the movie industry's plans for digital content protection in next-generation home entertainment hardware.

The problem is the "analog hole": Since many TVs, even hi-def sets, aren't digital, next-generation players need to be able to send out an analog signal. But it's fairly easy to record that signal onto pirated disks nearly as good as the hi-def original -- and of better quality than today's DVDs.

For content owners counting on selling their libraries all over again on hi-def DVD, that's a mighty large hole. So they've insisted on a slew of complex copy-protection schemes.

The industry hopes those schemes will be easy for consumers to use. But when Hunt took questions from the audience, it was clear they were skeptical.

One questioner asked who would be responsible for the extensive consumer education needed. Hunt's answer -- that he hoped retailers would do it -- drew dubious groans.

The final question summed up the problem: "This is a room full of people whose living depends on this working. You're getting pushback to the point of hostility. If you can't sell this to us, how are you going to sell it to the target 16-45 demographic?"

Hunt said the marketplace would ultimately sort it out.

As Cory often says, the marketplace doesn't want crippled technology and anti- consumer restrictions. Just look at the Sony BMG Rootkit debacle. So what does Hunt really mean? More lawsuits and government tech-mandates? More content cartel "licensing societies" that limit innovation? I suspect the MPAA's "marketplace" solution will end up looking a lot more communist than competitive.
http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2...y_mpaa_ca.html





A-Hole Bill Would Make A Secret Technology Into The Law Of The Land

If the controversial Analog Hole bill makes it into law, US technologists will have to obey a law whose most important details are a trade-secret.
Cory Doctorow

The entertainment industry, always a bastion of media savvy, has proposed its "A-Hole" bill as a legal means of limiting the conversion of analog music and video to digital files. Under the bill, every maker of a device that can convert analog signals to digital ones (like iPods, camcorders, and PCs) would be required by law to be built with a detector for a proprietary watermarking technology called VEIL (the use of free/open source in these technologies would be outlawed to prevent the removal of VEIL detectors).

The idea is that any time you attempted to make a digital recording, your device would seek out the VEIL watermark and respond to any special instructions (e.g., "No recording allowed") it discovered there.

But what the hell is VEIL? No one really knows. The sole commercial deployment of this technology to date has been in a Batman toy (why this makes it fit to be included by law into every American recording device is beyond me).

Copyfighting Princeton Prof Ed Felten called the company that makes VEIL to find out how the technology works. Their answer? They'll tell Ed how VEIL works only if he pays them $10,000 and signs a non-disclosure agreement. And they'll only tell him how the decoder works -- there's no price you can pay to find out how VEIL encoding works.

As Ed points out, this should be a deal-breaker for even considering the A- Hole bill (of course, there are lots of other deal-breakers in that bill, but this is a big one). How can the American public and its lawmakers determine whether this is a fit technology to mandate if its workings are a secret?

The details of this technology are important for evaluating this bill. How much would the proposed law increase the cost of televisions? How much would it limit the future development of TV technology? How likely is the technology to mistakenly block authorized copying? How adaptable is the technology to the future? All of these questions are important in debating the bill. And none of them can be answered if the technology part of the bill is secret.

Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it?

The A-Hole bill is making the rounds of the House, EFF has an easy way to write to your Congresscritter about this. Link
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/23...would_mak.html





Watermarking as a Strategy for Insisting on Corporate "Creators": Is DRM the Killer App for Corporate Authorship?
Kathryn Cramer

Ed Felton at Freedom to Tinker has a good post on the problem of digital watermarking, How Watermarks Fail (via BoingBoing), in which he concludes that watermarking schemes (such as Koplar's VEIL technology, discussed in my post VEIL Technology: Four Patents & an Application the other day) are not well suited for Digital Rights Management (preventing unauthorized copying of copyrighted material).

The discussion in the comment section is particularly interesting. Consider this comment, for example:

Let’s imagine a case where Microsoft’s post-Vista OS, codenamed Blacksheep, will only work with video cards that require a watermark in order to play Super-HD video (2048-4096 lines of resolution). Then such videos could be distributed in encrypted form with the watermark embedded. The decryption and watermark detection algorithm could be public; however the encoding/embedding algorithm would be secret.

Users could use the public decryption algorithm to create raw MPEG files with the watermark stripped, but would not be able to play them on commercially available video cards (similar to how video cards are now requiring monitors with HDCP support in order to play HD video). Users would not be able to create new videos with altered watermarks because the algorithm to do that is secret.

If digital watermarking schemes for DRM are put into practice, they may have little effect on the problem of bootleg versions of mega-corporate products. However, as discussed in the comment section, they may be quite effective about keeping digital artistic productions by individuals out of the distribution system: in the end, what DRM may accomplish is forcing individuals to give big corporations a cut for distribution just to get the authorized watermarking.

My experience in the early-mid 90s teaches me that part of the purpose of setting the production standards of early CD-ROMs absurdly high was to promote corporate authorship over individual authorship with the idea that digital products could be authored like film and TV, not like books, thus empowering the executive level and disempowering the actual creators, or rather reconfiguring relations such that executives become part of the creative "team."

Now computers are being sold that allow individuals, and small groups of individuals, to produce works to very high production standards on very low budgets. This also threatens the rise of corporate authorship. So watermark-style DRM may do very little to prevent the "piracy" about which the big media corporations are up in arms, it may be the killer app of corporate authorship.

It needs to be said over and over that in the early '90s, corporations did not own or control most of these digital rights they now claim the right to defend. In large part, these rights were taken, without additional compensation, from the artistic creators. (I know who the real pirates are!)

Transitioning from a world where art is created by individuals to a world where it is "created" by corporate "creative teams" is the second part of an overall stratgey to consolidate corporate control over the revenue that can be extracted from the popular arts; for creating a future in which consumers remain consumers and don't try to horn in on the revenue due to producers of artistic commodities.
http://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn...arking_as.html





Fight For Your Rights

The upcoming Gower Review, which will address the ownership of digital rights, has focused attention on the conflict between the needs of consumers and the commercial imperatives of content providers.
Simon Chapman and Dan Caunt

Over the last few years there has been massive growth in online media, forcing digital rights owners to come to terms with an entirely new way of delivering their services to consumers. The media industry now needs to be more alert than ever to the need for good digital rights management (DRM).

Consumers now expect fast and instant access to every kind of media, at a time convenient to themselves. This increasing desire for on- demand content can conflict with the media industry’s desire to control their rights. The industry needs to be in a position to offer this kind of service but is reluctant to do so unless it is satisfied that it can retain control over those rights.

The umbrella term DRM refers to any of several technologies used to enforce pre-defined policies controlling access to digital data. DRM is not simply a digital method of preventing copying; it also has the practical role of administering ways in which rights owners can offer and control their online sales.

So how can the various media industries best achieve effective DRM? Rights owners understand that they need to keep up with technology and be prepared to offer their services to consumers via new and fast- evolving methods. Rights owners who fail to do this risk missing out on a lucrative chunk of the market and could potentially end up pushing consumers towards unauthorised alternatives. In this context, the three main players are: the rights owners, such as Sony and Warner Bros; the companies, such as Google or Apple; and the consumer.

There are a number of barriers to the provision of online digital content. It has been suggested by some commentators that attempts to offer legal film downloads have been delayed because of copyright fears by the rights owners.

Film or record companies are concerned about losing control of their rights and also losing their rights to just one distributor.

Currently, it is music delivery companies that are at the forefront of DRM use, employing various methods to protect the copyright held in the products they are selling. For example, the Apple iTunes Music Store allows users to purchase tracks online to burn that song on to a CD or an iPod device. The purchased music files are encoded so that only iPod devices — and not other MP3 players — can play the protected files.

However, DRM systems do have weaknesses and can be easily bypassed through widely available freeware programs. This may explain why rights owners have been slow on the uptake offering films by similar means. Warner Bros has only recently launched its In2Movies service, where viewers can download Warner Bros movies and regional programmes. Initially, this service is to focus on the German-speaking market but will be rolled out globally using peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.

Following news of the launch, Warner Bros Home Entertainment Group president Kevin Tsujihara said: "One of the most effective weapons for defeating online piracy is providing legal, easy-to-use alternatives."

In the UK, individual users face primary liability for copyright infringement where they copy or issue copies of copyright material. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), copyright is infringed by reproducing a work in any material form, including storing it by electronic means. The UK is one of a handful of countries in the European Union (EU) whose laws do not offer an exception for private usage or copying, meaning individual users infringe copyright when they copy music files from CD to their computer. Despite having no such right, most consumers believe they are allowed to make personal copies of music.

The absence of a private use exception in the UK offers much comfort to rights owners. They can offer media to the public in the knowledge that any additional copying will still infringe the CDPA. That said, it can be very difficult to find and prosecute online infringers as the relatively few actions brought against peer-to-peer network users demonstrate.

The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 implement the European Copyright Directive. Under these Regulations, it is also a criminal offence to create or promote means in order to circumvent DRM systems built into copyright works. Such circumvention is now a civil offence in the traditional sense if it leads to infringement.

In late 2005, the Chancellor announced an independent review to examine the UK’s intellectual property regulation. The Gower Review, expected to be delivered in the autumn, will examine whether the present legal framework reflects the challenges of the digital age. It is inevitable that the review will address private usage.

The use of DRM raises numerous issues about competition and consumer rights. It allows rights owners a complete monopoly over their digital content, something many companies would argue is a good thing. However, consumer groups such as the National Consumer Council argue that DRM prevents competition and drives up prices for the public.

The All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group met in February 2006 to hear oral evidence, prior to its report on DRM which is due to be published in April. The committee was told that existing copyright law was sufficient, but that consumers do not have enough understanding of it.

The ultimate aim is for a balance to be found between the interests of the rights owners and the demands of the consumer. We are seeing attempts to achieve this being played out in the current row over online books, where Google has been under attack from book publishers over plans to put millions of titles online. Google’s Print Library Project aims to index and scan books from five major libraries. The publishers are concerned that Google’s actions will infringe copyright, but Google maintains that users will not be able to download whole books from their ‘catalogue’.

Sony’s online book service has taken the different approach of securing licence deals with publishers to sell e-books via its Connect online store. Google, while wanting to side with the consumer, will likely have to cede to the rights owners by taking out the necessary licences to offer a comprehensive digital book service similar to Sony’s.

This may bring comfort to rights owners, but it is likely that Gower Review will significantly affect the future of DRM in the UK. The success of services such as iTunes in this country owes a great deal to the balance between UK copyright laws and good DRM. However, if the Gower Review introduces a ‘private use’ exception, then we may see a change in attitude from the rights owners. If consumers are allowed by law to make copies of copyrighted content for their own private use, then rights owners such as record labels or publishers may be reluctant to offer such a broad service to the public.

The online market for digital media could be severely damaged without robust copyright regulation. Rights owners will only offer their copyrighted content to the public in the knowledge that they will be rewarded for their investment. Yet consumers’ interest in instant access to all kinds of media cannot be ignored and is only likely to increase. As a result, the outcome of the Gower Review is awaited with much anticipation.
http://www.legalweek.com/ViewItem.asp?id=27843





Nokia N91 Music Phone Delayed Due to DRM

Moconews is reporting that Nokia’s high-end N91 phone— the hefty, metal model with a built-in 4GB hard disk—has been pushed back to the third quarter of 2006, despite originally being scheduled to ship around last Christmas. The hangup? Implementing Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM, which for unstated reasons has proven more difficult for Nokia to include than they first anticipated.

There’s also mention that the bundled Symtella peer-to- peer file sharing software might not be included after all. The Gnutella-based P2P software would have allowed Nokia N91 owners to share files via the phone’s built-in Wi-Fi, but now Nokia’s spokesperson is said to be “talking guardedly about sharing N91 playlists by Bluetooth or MMS.”

Almost a year late and short features. Not good for a phone announced in April of ‘05.
http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/cellph...drm-156598.php





Skyperiffic!

Skype 2.0, now with video calling

Official release. Version: 2.0.0.90. Release date: March 1, 2006
File name: SkypeSetup.exe File size: 9.5 MB

The new, shiny Skype 2.0

Our best ever call quality.

· Smile, wave or say hello to anyone, anywhere in the world with free one-to-one video conversations.
· Easily sort your contacts into groups like ‘colleagues’, ‘friends’ and ‘family’.
· Display mood messages and your local time, so people know where you are and how you’re feeling.

http://www.skype.com/download/skype/windows/





AMD's Lawyers Call On Skype
Tom Krazit

As part of its ongoing antitrust case against Intel, Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday served Skype with a subpoena demanding documents related to its deal to make one feature in Skype 2.0 available exclusively to Intel users.

The legal filing joins a long list of subpoenas AMD has filed in search of evidence that Intel has used its dominant market share of x86 PC and server processors to prevent AMD from winning business with certain partners. Intel has denied those accusations, and the companies are preparing for an antitrust trial that promises to reveal loads of details about the inner workings of the PC industry.

AMD is now focusing on a feature in Skype 2.0 that enables the ability to make 10-person conference calls only with Intel dual-core processors. Users with AMD dual-core chips or single-core chips are restricted to hosting five-person conference calls because only Intel's chips offer the performance necessary to host the 10-way call, according to Skype.

AMD disagrees. It believes Intel has provided Skype with incentives to limit the feature to Intel's chips, said Chuck Diamond, a partner with O'Melveny & Myers and lead counsel in AMD's antitrust suit against Intel. Intel has denied doing so, but even if no financial incentives were included in the deal, as a company with dominant market share, Intel is subject to different rules, he said.

"The law requires a monopolist to compete on the merits. This is not competition on the merits," Diamond said.

A Skype executive declined to comment earlier this month when asked whether the company had tested the performance of its software on both Intel's and AMD's dual-core chips. An Intel representative confirmed that there are no instructions that specifically enhance the performance of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software like Skype's in Intel's dual-core chips. He also said that Skype's software is using a function called "GetCPUID" to permit 10-way conference calls only when that function detects an Intel dual-core processor on start-up.

A Skype representative had no immediate comment on the subpoena. An Intel representative declined to comment.
http://news.com.com/AMDs+lawyers+cal...3-6044365.html





Fusion Acquires Proprietary SIP Peer-to-Peer Technology
Johanne Torres

VoIP technology service provider Fusion Telecommunications International Inc. announced on Tuesday that it acquired proprietary intellectual property that will allow Directed Peer-to-Peer Internet phone connections between Session Initiated Protocol (SIP)-enabled devices without having to route the calls through a network of third-party computers, as typically occurs in a peer-to-peer environment.

"This technology will give Fusion the opportunity to expand its existing suite of paid service offerings and participate in the growing peer-to-peer telephony market through its efonica brand, including the free call segment now dominated by Skype," said Fusion's president and chief operating officer Matthew Rosen.

The technology incorporates an approach that builds upon worldwide accepted VoIP standards and integrates with Fusion's carrier-class network and back-office infrastructure. Fusion's service offerings do not require a computer to work. Customers will be able to make calls between any combination of computers, Internet connected telephones, wireless devices, and other SIP-enabled hardware. When placing a call using Fusion's Directed SIP Peer-to-Peer (DSP) technology, customers automatically access a central registry for authentication, enhancing security when compared to many peer-to-peer alternatives. A routing engine then facilitates a connection directly between calling parties without having to go through another user's computer or calling device, as is required in other peer-to-peer models. Connections can be accomplished from any location worldwide and typically occur in a fraction of a second.

"It is widely believed that SIP is quickly becoming the de facto VoIP standard for communication between VoIP hardware devices such as ATAs, IP phones, wi-fi phones, and many new mobile and wireless devices," said Dr. Joel Maloff, Fusion's chief technology officer. "Utilizing SIP as its standard gives Fusion the ability to provide services to the large and growing population of consumers buying SIP- enabled devices. Additionally, most VoIP hardware manufacturers are rapidly deploying new advanced SIP devices that will work with Fusion's service offerings. Fusion's technological strategy will allow us to continue capitalizing on the growing popularity of SIP throughout the VoIP industry, while leveraging the significant cost advantages of peer-to-peer."

Fusion made news back in November when it announced that it entered into an agreement to acquire the assets of iFreedom Communications International Holdings Limited, which markets monthly recurring International VoIP service plans. The purchase price was reported to be $500,000 in cash going towards retiring certain liabilities of iFreedom and 1,100,000 shares of stock, of which 750,000 shares holding in escrow and subject to a performance based earn out. The transaction was anticipated to close prior to the end of the first quarter of 2006, subject to certain conditions.

Under the terms of the agreement, Fusion was to acquire iFreedom's customer base and operations in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The assets also included a call center in the Philippines, complementary sales and support staff, and licenses in both Malaysia and the Philippines.
http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2006/02/28/1416034.htm





Hello it’s me

Mobile Tracking Devices On Trial
Spencer Kelly

Your mobile phone is a beacon - a radio transmitter in a box. Therefore it is possible to trace the signal and work out where it is.

There are now several web companies which will track your friends' and family's phones for you, so you always know where they are.

But just how safe is it to make location details available online?

There are several reasons why you may want to track someone. You may be a company wanting to keep tabs on employees during work hours, or a parent wanting to check up on a child's whereabouts.

These sorts of tracking services, now available in the UK, get information from the network about which cell your phone is currently in, and, for a small fee, display the location on an online map.

As well as checking where a certain phone is right now, you can run scheduled lookups, or snail trails, to record the phone's movements throughout the day, and produce a report for you to peruse at your leisure.

Obviously you cannot just enter any mobile phone number and expect to track someone.

First of all you need to prove your identity, via a credit card, and then, crucially, the owner of the phone in question needs to consent to being tracked.

The owner is sent a text message telling them about the tracking request, to which they must reply.

Experiment

The question is: is it possible to circumvent this security, and track someone without their knowledge?

I attempted to find out, using regular contributor Guy Kewney, an independent technology journalist and, for one day only, human guinea pig.

I sent him on a tour of London. He could go anywhere he wanted, and I planned to meet up with him later and tell him, hopefully, where he had been.

Guy did not know that when I borrowed his phone for a few minutes earlier in the day, I took the opportunity to register it on one of the tracking services.

I received the incoming text message warning him about the tracking, responded to it and then deleted it from his inbox.

When I gave him his phone back, Guy had no idea he was now in possession of a consenting tracking device.

Hence, a little while later, I could watch him emerge from the tube at the start of his tour.

But just borrowing someone's phone for a few minutes is too obvious a loophole. It is one which has already been closed by an industry body which oversees new technologies such as mobile tracking services.

Voluntary rules

The Mobile Broadband Group has drawn up a voluntary code of conduct which the networks in the UK ask location providers to stick to.

One of the conditions of the code is that after a phone is registered as a tracking device, reminder texts should be sent to the phone at random intervals.

This way, it should be impossible for a malicious tracker to intercept every reminder.

The problem is, those random reminders are not required to be sent very frequently.

We tracked several phones over several days, and often had to wait for a day or two before receiving a reminder message.

Hamish Macleod from the Mobile Broadband Group, who came up with the code of conduct, argues this is enough.

He said: "We assessed this risk during the development of the code and consulted obviously with all the experts that we did, and the schedule of random alerts that we came up with we thought was adequate to protect against the risks.

"This is a situation to be kept under review as the service is developed."

Child-safe?

With more and more children owning mobile phones, special attention needs to be given to who can track them.

If you are not a genuine parent or guardian, the code requires location services to check that both the tracker and the person being tracked can prove they are consenting adults.

Mr Macleod says: "The person that is to be located has to demonstrate to the service provider they are at least 16 years old.

"They can do this through various channels, for example they can get a credit card number which is used as a proxy for age verification, or something like that."

At least, that is what is supposed to happen. But neither of the services we tested asked the person being tracked to prove they were an adult.

Although they did ask us for the age of the person we wanted to track, they did not check we were telling the truth.

The companies were not following the letter of the code and, what is more, no-one was holding them to account.

Neither service would comment on this oversight.

Although the code of conduct was well intentioned, the Mobile Broadband Group admits it will need refining as loopholes become apparent.

It also highlights the limits of such voluntary codes, and the problems with policing them.

Jago Russell from the human rights group Liberty says: "We have concerns in general about industry codes of practice. They aren't legal regulation;
they don't give the consumer an effective legal remedy if the code of practice isn't complied with.

"So in many ways they're not really worth the paper they're written on."

Changes

As a result of our investigation, The Mobile Broadband Group is making some changes to the code of conduct.

The frequency of the random reminders is going to be increased, and the code will make clearer the appropriate way to check the age of the participants.

Guy Kewney says: "It's a shame but then if you start regulating new technology you usually fall down because people don't expect the unexpected.

"The real problem is that you can't actually perceive the unintended consequences of your technology change, so a hard and fast rule that says 'don't do this' won't stop you doing that, in which case you've wasted your time passing it."

Should we really be worried about being tracked by mobile phones?

Guy Kewney says: "You can worry about anything in this society. If I wanted to track you, the easy way to do it is - well you've found one way, but if they've closed that loophole or if it becomes tricky - then I just hire a private detective.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ne/4747142.stm

[JackSpratts]

TIA Lives On
Shane Harris

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

A $19 million contract to build the prototype system was awarded in late 2002 to Hicks & Associates, a consulting firm in Arlington, Va., that is run by former Defense and military officials. Congress's decision to pull TIA's funding in late 2003 "caused a significant amount of uncertainty for all of us about the future of our work," Hicks executive Brian Sharkey wrote in an e-mail to subcontractors at the time. "Fortunately," Sharkey continued, "a new sponsor has come forward that will enable us to continue much of our previous work." Sources confirm that this new sponsor was ARDA. Along with the new sponsor came a new name. "We will be describing this new effort as 'Basketball,' " Sharkey wrote, apparently giving no explanation of the name's significance. Another e-mail from a Hicks employee, Marc Swedenburg, reminded the company's staff that "TIA has been terminated and should be referenced in that fashion."

Sharkey played a key role in TIA's birth, when he and a close friend, retired Navy Vice Adm. John Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser, brought the idea to Defense officials shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The men had teamed earlier on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which agreed to host TIA and hired Poindexter to run it in 2002. In August 2003, Poindexter was forced to resign as TIA chief amid howls that his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s made him unfit to run a sensitive intelligence program.

It's unclear whether work on Basketball continues. Sharkey didn't respond to an interview request, and Poindexter said he had no comment about former TIA programs. But a publicly available Defense Department document, detailing various "cooperative agreements and other transactions" conducted in fiscal 2004, shows that Basketball was fully funded at least until the end of that year (September 2004). The document shows that the system was being tested at a research center jointly run by ARDA and SAIC Corp., a major defense and intelligence contractor that is the sole owner of Hicks & Associates. The document describes Basketball as a "closed- loop, end-to-end prototype system for early warning and decision-making," exactly the same language used in contract documents for the TIA prototype system when it was awarded to Hicks in 2002. An SAIC spokesman declined to comment for this story.

Another key TIA project that moved to ARDA was Genoa II, which focused on building information technologies to help analysts and policy makers anticipate and pre- empt terrorist attacks. Genoa II was renamed Topsail when it moved to ARDA, intelligence sources confirmed. (The name continues the program's nautical nomenclature; "genoa" is a synonym for the headsail of a ship.)

As recently as October 2005, SAIC was awarded a $3.7 million contract under Topsail. According to a government-issued press release announcing the award, "The objective of Topsail is to develop decision-support aids for teams of intelligence analysts and policy personnel to assist in anticipating and pre-empting terrorist threats to U.S. interests." That language repeats almost verbatim the boilerplate descriptions of Genoa II contained in contract documents, Pentagon budget sheets, and speeches by the Genoa II program's former managers.

As early as February 2003, the Pentagon planned to use Genoa II technologies at the Army's Information Awareness Center at Fort Belvoir, Va., according to an unclassified Defense budget document. The awareness center was an early tester of various TIA tools, according to former employees. A 2003 Pentagon report to Congress shows that the Army center was part of an expansive network of intelligence agencies, including the NSA, that experimented with the tools. The center was also home to the Army's Able Danger program, which has come under scrutiny after some of its members said they used data-analysis tools to discover the name and photograph of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta more than a year before the attacks.

Devices developed under Genoa II's predecessor -- which Sharkey also managed when he worked for the Defense Department -- were used during the invasion of Afghanistan and as part of "the continuing war on terrorism," according to an unclassified Defense budget document. Today, however, the future of Topsail is in question. A spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., which administers the program's contracts, said it's "in the process of being canceled due to lack of funds."

It is unclear when funding for Topsail was terminated. But earlier this month, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, one of TIA's strongest critics questioned whether intelligence officials knew that some of its programs had been moved to other agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and FBI Director Robert Mueller whether it was "correct that when [TIA] was closed, that several ... projects were moved to various intelligence agencies.... I and others on this panel led the effort to close [TIA]; we want to know if Mr. Poindexter's programs are going on somewhere else."

Negroponte and Mueller said they didn't know. But Negroponte's deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who until recently was director of the NSA, said, "I'd like to answer in closed session." Asked for comment, Wyden's spokeswoman referred to his hearing statements.

The NSA is now at the center of a political firestorm over President Bush's program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who the agency believes are connected to terrorists abroad. While the documents on the TIA programs don't show that their tools are used in the domestic eavesdropping, and knowledgeable sources wouldn't discuss the matter, the TIA programs were designed specifically to develop the kind of "early-warning system" that the president said the NSA is running.

Documents detailing TIA, Genoa II, Basketball, and Topsail use the phrase "early-warning system" repeatedly to describe the programs' ultimate aims. In speeches, Poindexter has described TIA as an early-warning and decision-making system. He conceived of TIA in part because of frustration over the lack of such tools when he was national security chief for Reagan.

Tom Armour, the Genoa II program manager, declined to comment for this story. But in a previous interview, he said that ARDA -- which absorbed the TIA programs -- has pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. "That's, in fact, what the interest is," Armour said. When TIA was still funded, its program managers and researchers had "good coordination" with their counterparts at ARDA and discussed their projects on a regular basis, Armour said. The former No. 2 official in Poindexter's office, Robert Popp, averred that the NSA didn't use TIA tools in domestic eavesdropping as part of his research. But asked whether the agency could have used the tools apart from TIA, Popp replied, "I can't speak to that." Asked to comment on TIA projects that moved to ARDA, Don Weber, an NSA spokesman said, "As I'm sure you understand, we can neither confirm nor deny actual or alleged projects or operational capabilities; therefore, we have no information to provide."

ARDA now is undergoing some changes of its own. The outfit is being taken out of the NSA, placed under the control of Negroponte's office, and given a new name. It will be called the "Disruptive Technology Office," a reference to a term of art describing any new invention that suddenly, and often dramatically, replaces established procedures. Officials with the intelligence director's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njw...06/0223nj1.htm





Senators Press For Details Of NSA Spying
Declan McCullagh

U.S. senators on Tuesday accused the Bush administration of "stonewalling" a congressional investigation into the legality of the National Security Agency's domestic spying.

Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary committee, said that the White House apparently believes that "there's no place for congressional or judicial oversight of any of its activities related to national security."

"They're running roughshod over the Constitution, and they're hiding behind inflammatory rhetoric" about the war on terror, Leahy said during a hearing that lasted almost three hours. Because of administration "stonewalling," Leahy added, the committee may have to resort to issuing subpoenas to obtain the information it wants.

The domestic spying program, which was publicly disclosed in December, involves using the NSA and perhaps other government agencies to eavesdrop on international phone calls and Internet activities of people within the United States. Such eavesdropping is done without the approval of the court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for this purpose.

Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, also expressed concern about the administration's reluctance to disclose even a broad outline of how the program works. The Justice Department sent a letter to Specter saying that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who reportedly expressed reservations at one point about the program's legality, should not be called to testify.

Specter is also readying legislation, called the National Security Surveillance Act, that would force the executive branch to revise its surveillance procedures to bring them under the scrutiny of a secret court created in 1978.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales vigorously defended the program's legality during an earlier appearance on Feb. 6 before the Senate committee, but offered no new information about how it operates. Gonzales did offer more details during a classified briefing to a congressional intelligence committee on Feb. 8.

During Tuesday's hearing, former CIA Director James Woolsey claimed that FISA was outdated because of technological developments.

"The operation of Moore's Law has given us the Internet and disposable cell phones that terrorists have access to," said Woolsey, now a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, in reference to the idea that processor developments would steadily boost performance. "That was not remotely envisioned (by the drafters of FISA)."

Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said he appreciated the testimony of the panel of witnesses, which included a lineup of law professors, but said their opinions about the law can't be that useful without more facts from the administration.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, on the other hand, said that during a time of war, Congress should be deferential to the White House. "When he makes an argument on constitutional grounds, we have to give him some slack," Hatch said about President Bush.
http://news.com.com/Senators+press+f...3-6044120.html





Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data
John Markoff

A small group of National Security Agency officials slipped into Silicon Valley on one of the agency's periodic technology shopping expeditions this month.

On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration's anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information.

The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases.

Supercomputer companies looking for commercial markets have used the practice for decades. Now intelligence agencies, hardly newcomers to data mining, are using new technologies to take the practice to another level.

But by fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance, high-tech data mining raises privacy concerns that are only beginning to be debated widely. That is because to find illicit activities it is necessary to turn loose software sentinels to examine all digital behavior whether it is innocent or not.

"The theory is that the automated tool that is conducting the search is not violating the law," said Mark D. Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. But "anytime a tool or a human is looking at the content of your communication, it invades your privacy."

When asked for comment about the meetings in Silicon Valley, Jane Hudgins, a National Security Agency spokeswoman, said, "We have no information to provide."

Data mining is already being used in a diverse array of commercial applications — whether by credit card companies detecting and stopping fraud as it happens, or by insurance companies that predict health risks. As a result, millions of Americans have become enmeshed in a vast and growing data web that is constantly being examined by a legion of Internet-era software snoops.

Technology industry executives and government officials said that the intelligence agency systems take such techniques further, applying software analysis tools now routinely used by law enforcement agencies to identify criminal activities and political terrorist organizations that would otherwise be missed by human eavesdroppers.

One such tool is Analyst's Notebook, a crime investigation "spreadsheet" and visualization tool developed by i2 Inc., a software firm based in McLean, Va.

The software, which ranges in price from as little as $3,000 for a sheriff's department to millions of dollars for a large government agency like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, allows investigators to organize and view telephone and financial transaction records. It was used in 2001 by Joyce Knowlton, an investigator at the Stillwater State Correctional Facility in Minnesota, to detect a prison drug-smuggling ring that ultimately implicated 30 offenders who were linked to Supreme White Power, a gang active in the prison.

Ms. Knowlton began her investigation by importing telephone call records into her software and was immediately led to a pattern of calls between prisoners and a recent parolee. She overlaid the calling data with records of prisoners' financial accounts, and based on patterns that emerged, she began monitoring phone calls of particular inmates. That led her to coded messages being exchanged in the calls that revealed that seemingly innocuous wood blocks were being used to smuggle drugs into the prison.

"Once we added the money and saw how it was flowing from addresses that were connected to phone numbers, it created a very clear picture of the smuggling ring," she said.

Privacy, of course, is hardly an expectation for prisoners. And credit card customers and insurance policyholders give up a certain amount of privacy to the issuers and carriers. It is the power of such software tools applied to broad, covert governmental uses that has led to the deepening controversy over data mining.

In the wake of 9/11, the potential for mining immense databases of digital information gave rise to a program called Total Information Awareness, developed by Adm. John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser, while he was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Although Congress abruptly canceled the program in October 2003, the legislation provided a specific exemption for "processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence."

At the time, Admiral Poindexter, who declined to be interviewed for this article because he said he had knowledge of current classified intelligence activities, argued that his program had achieved a tenfold increase in the speed of the searching databases for foreign threats.

While agreeing that data mining has a tremendous power for fighting a new kind of warfare, John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said that intelligence agencies had missed an opportunity by misapplying the technologies.

"In many respects, we're fighting the last intelligence war," Mr. Arquilla said. "We have not pursued data mining in the way we should."

Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.

"Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think," he said.

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.

But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. One application of the database technology, called Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform, or Scamp, offers access to about nine weeks of calling information. It currently handles about 70,000 queries a month from fraud and law enforcement investigators, according to AT&T documents.

A former AT&T official who had detailed knowledge of the call-record database said the Daytona system takes great care to make certain that anyone using the database — whether AT&T employee or law enforcement official with a subpoena — sees only information he or she is authorized to see, and that an audit trail keeps track of all users. Such information is frequently used to build models of suspects' social networks.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive corporate matters, said every telephone call generated a record: number called, time of call, duration of call, billing category and other details. While the database does not contain such billing data as names, addresses and credit card numbers, those records are in a linked database that can be tapped by authorized users.

New calls are entered into the database immediately after they end, the official said, adding, "I would characterize it as near real time."

According to a current AT&T employee, whose identity is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing his job, the mining of the AT&T databases had a notable success in helping investigators find the perpetrators of what was known as the Moldovan porn scam.

In 1997 a shadowy group in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was tricking Internet users by enticing them to a pornography Web site that would download a piece of software that disconnected the computer user from his local telephone line and redialed a costly 900 number in Moldova.

While another long-distance carrier simply cut off the entire nation of Moldova from its network, AT&T and the Moldovan authorities were able to mine the database to track the culprits.

Much of the recent work on data mining has been aimed at even more sophisticated applications. The National Security Agency has invested billions in computerized tools for monitoring phone calls around the world — not only logging them, but also determining content — and more recently in trying to design digital vacuum cleaners to sweep up information from the Internet.

Last September, the N.S.A. was granted a patent for a technique that could be used to determine the physical location of an Internet address — another potential category of data to be mined. The technique, which exploits the tiny time delays in the transmission of Internet data, suggests the agency's interest in sophisticated surveillance tasks like trying to determine where a message sent from an Internet address in a cybercafe might have originated.

An earlier N.S.A. patent, in 1999, focused on a software solution for generating a list of topics from computer-generated text. Such a capacity hints at the ability to extract the content of telephone conversations automatically. That might permit the agency to mine millions of phone conversations and then select a handful for human inspection.

As the N.S.A. visit to the Silicon Valley venture capitalists this month indicates, the actual development of such technologies often comes from private companies.

In 2003, Virage, a Silicon Valley company, began supplying a voice transcription product that recognized and logged the text of television programming for government and commercial customers. Under perfect conditions, the system could be 95 percent accurate in capturing spoken text. Such technology has potential applications in monitoring phone conversations as well.

And several Silicon Valley executives say one side effect of the 2003 decision to cancel the Total Information Awareness project was that it killed funds for a research project at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox, exploring technologies that could protect privacy while permitting data mining.

The aim was to allow an intelligence analyst to conduct extensive data mining without getting access to identifying information about individuals. If the results suggested that, for instance, someone might be a terrorist, the intelligence agency could seek a court warrant authorizing it to penetrate the privacy technology and identify the person involved.

With Xerox funds, the Palo Alto researchers are continuing to explore the technology.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/te...=1&oref=slogin





hey mr. spaceman

NASA 'Shoots' for Crime Investigators with New Technology

What do a NASA engineer and a detective have in common? The answer is a new NASA photographic laser device that helps look for damages on NASA’s Space Shuttle that can also be used to "shoot" more details in crime scenes.

Engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Kennedy Space Center, Fla., developed the Laser Scaling and Measurement Device for Photographic Images (LSMDPI) to assist scientists who were unable to determine the exact scale of hailstorm damages to the Space Shuttle’s external tank by viewing photographs of the spacecraft on its launch pad.

The LSMDPI is a half-pound black box, powered by a single nickel-cadmium battery that attaches directly to a camera’s tripod mount. Twin lasers, an inch apart, shoot from the box, and add scale to photographs. In other words, the laser offers the ability for someone to look at these special photographs and have a better understanding of just how big or small objects really are. In the case of the Space Shuttle, engineers are now able to measure the distance from one part of the shuttle to a dent from a hailstorm.

Typically, when you use a camera to zoom in on an object, you lose track of the scale that informs you of an object’s actual size. When a picture is taken with the LSMDPI, the image loads into software designed by NASA electrical design engineer Kim Ballard. The user chooses a set of reference points such as a laser pattern of reference point dots that will appear along with the image of the target object. The user also inputs the distance between the reference points. The software then sets the scale based on that distance. This allows the viewer quantifiable perspective on the size of the object. The size of the object’s features can then be found and measured by using the computer software to mark the laser points.

“I think that the greatest contribution that the Laser Scaling Measurement software offers to law enforcement is it ‘un-cuffs’ the investigators hands with digital image evidence by facilitating fast and accurate measurement analysis of anything in a crime scene photo, not just the intended target,” said Ballard. “This aspect opens up the possibility for serendipitous evidence detection after the fact that may not have been obvious at the crime scene. For example, the software may be instrumental in attaining dimensions of articles or their proximity locations within a room that were not previously part of the investigation.”

As it is useful at NASA, the laser device is very helpful for law enforcement. Contractor Jeffrey Kohler of ASRC Aerospace, a company that supports NASA's Innovative Partnership Office, and his colleagues did an assessment to review the technology and how it could apply to potential commercial markets. “Forensics was at the top of the list,” said Kohler.

Not only can they use it to fully view photos of components from crime scenes such as blood-spatter patterns and graffiti, but can also see the images from different angles (including diagonally, horizontally and vertically) to better analyze and understand the scenes.

In fact, just recently, Ballard was asked by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to add more capabilities to the LSMDPI software to enable forensics experts to zoom in and out of the image to measure blood spatter details across a wall as well as specific areas. At the FBI’s request, NASA has also enabled compatibility of the image files with.tiff, .png, .gif, and .bmp files as add-ons to .jpg images.

Armor Holdings, Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla., is a leading manufacturer of crime scene investigation accessories, including the new LSMDPI. They manufacture a variety of instruments used by industries that rely on technology to perform efficient and safe tasks. Through Armor, LSMDPI is not only benefiting crime scene investigations, but also photographers and surveillance personnel. It is also becoming increasingly popular in crime laboratories around the world. Following a recent request from Armor, NASA also included English/Metric units -- millimeters, centimeters, meters, and kilometers -- to support European customers and aerial photography.

Today's crime investigations often rely on the device to scale evidence since its unique laser beams allow viewers to see image components much more clearly than traditional camera images. Similar technology is also useful in oil and chemical tank monitoring and aerial photography.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/...echnology.html





Stealth Sharks To Patrol The High Seas
Susan Brown

IMAGINE getting inside the mind of a shark: swimming silently through the ocean, sensing faint electrical fields, homing in on the trace of a scent, and navigating through the featureless depths for hour after hour.

We may soon be able to do just that via electrical probes in the shark's brain. Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling.

That team is among a number of groups around the world that have gained ethical approval to develop implants that can monitor and influence the behaviour of animals, from sharks and tuna to rats and monkeys. These researchers hope such implants will improve our understanding of how the animals interact with their environment, as well as boosting research into tackling human paralysis.

More controversially, the Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted. The project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia, was presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, last week.

Neural implants consist of a series of electrodes that are embedded into the animal's brain, which can then be used to stimulate various functional areas. Biologist Jelle Atema of Boston University and his students are using them to "steer" spiny dogfish in a tank via a phantom odour. As the dogfish swims about, the researchers beam a radio signal from a laptop to an antenna attached to the fish at one end and sticking up out of the water at the other. The electrodes then stimulate either the right or left of the olfactory centre, the area of the brain dedicated to smell. The fish flicks round to the corresponding side in response to the signal, as if it has caught a whiff of an interesting smell: the stronger the signal, the more sharply it turns.

The team is not the first to attempt to control animals in this way. John Chapin of the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn has used a similar tactic to guide rats through rubble piles (New Scientist, 25 September 2004, p 21). Chapin's implant stimulates a part of the brain that is wired to their whiskers, so the rats instinctively turn toward the tickled side to see what has brushed by. Chapin rewards that response by stimulating a pleasure centre in the rats' brains. Using this reward process, he has trained the rodents to pause for 10 seconds when they smell a target chemical such as RDX, a component of plastic explosives.

The New York Police Department is considering recruiting Chapin's rats to its disaster response team, where they could be used to detect bombs or even trapped people, and Chapin met them to discuss the possibility last month.

However, Chapin's "mind patch" only works in one direction: he can stimulate movement or reward an action, but he cannot directly measure what the rat smells, which is why he has to train them to reveal what they are sensing. DARPA's shark researchers, in contrast, want to use their implant to detect and decipher the different patterns of neural activity that indicate the animal has detected an ocean current, a scent or an electrical field. The implant sports a small pincushion of wires that sink into the brain to record activity from many neurons at once. The team plans to program a microprocessor to recognise which patterns of brain activity correlate with which scents.

Atema plans to use the implants to study how sharks track chemical trails. We know that sharks have an extremely acute sense of smell, but exactly how the animals deploy that sense in the wild has so far been a matter of conjecture. Neural implants could change all that. "You get much better information from a swimming shark than from an anaesthetised animal that is strapped down," says Atema. "It could open up a whole new window into how these animals interact with their world."

At the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Tim Tricas is using the implant to investigate what information scalloped hammerhead sharks glean from their electric field sensors. Gel-filled pores, scattered across a shark's head connect to nerve endings that make them sensitive to voltage gradients. Sharks can use these electroreceptors to spot the weak bioelectric fields around hidden prey, such as a flounder buried in sand.

For decades, marine biologists have suspected that sharks might also use these electroreceptors for navigation. Tiger and blue sharks can swim mile after mile in a straight line with no view of the ocean floor and only scattered, changing light coming from above. Some researchers suspect they maintain their heading by using the Earth's magnetic field.

When a conductor - in this case the shark - passes through a magnetic field, the interaction sets up a voltage across the conductor. The strength and orientation of that voltage depends on the conductor's angle to the magnetic field. If a shark could detect those changes, it could use its electrical receptors like a compass. The only way to test this, Tricas says, is to monitor electroreception in a freely swimming shark.

Other animal behaviour researchers are setting their subjects loose too. Jaideep Mavoori at the University of Washington in Seattle has developed a neural implant for monkeys that can monitor brain activity while the primates play. "We believe we are the first to record neural activity from a monkey doing a somersault," Mavoori says.

Mavoori's implant can also stimulate one part of the brain in response to activity in another, and has a microchip that can interpret the neural signals and send a message to another part of the brain or a muscle accordingly. He and his colleagues believe such an implant might ultimately help humans compensate for lost nerve function caused by injury or disease.

They have found that when a monkey is free to move around, sets of neurons controlling opposing muscle groups - those that extend and flex a joint - are both active throughout many movements. However, when a monkey is restrained in a chair and taught to extend its hand for a food reward, say, only the neurons that control the extensor muscles tend to be active.

Understanding this difference may be vital in creating a muscle-stimulating prosthesis to restore movement to a limb paralysed by nerve damage. For some loose movements, such as gently extending your arm in and out, sending signals to opposing muscles in turn works quite well. However, for movements that require some rigidity in the joint, such as inserting a book into a bookcase, you need to engage opposing muscles simultaneously. A successful neural prosthesis will need to mimic both patterns.

Meanwhile DARPA too plans to take its shark implants out of the laboratory. Project engineer Walter Gomes of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, says the team's next step will be to implant the device into blue sharks and release them into the ocean off the coast of Florida.

However, the radio signals used to direct the dogfish in the tank will not penetrate water, so the engineers plan to communicate with the sharks using sonar. According to Gomes, the navy already has acoustic signalling towers in the area that are suitable for relaying messages from a ship to a shark up to 300 kilometres away. The team has designed a sonar receiver shaped like a remora fish to minimise drag when attached to the animal.

The scientists will be particularly interested in the sharks' health during the tests. As wild predators, it is very easy to exhaust them, and this will place strict limits on how long the researchers can control their movements in any one session without harming them. Despite this limitation, though, remote controlled sharks do have advantages that robotic underwater surveillance vehicles just cannot match: they are silent, and they power themselves.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...25416.300.html





RSF Claims Yahoo Smoking Gun
Correspondents in Beijing

A GLOBAL media watchdog said court documents proved that Yahoo had collaborated with Chinese authorities in sending a second political dissident to jail.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières, or RSF) said a copy of the court verdict on Li Zhi showed Yahoo and Chinese internet company Sina supplied information to prosecutors.

Li, 35, was jailed for eight years in December 2003 on subversion charges for posting anti-government essays on the internet and contacting overseas branches of the outlawed China Democracy Party.

The verdict, issued by a court in Dazhou city in Sichuan province, was posted on the group's website.

Although the verdict listed Li's Yahoo account as evidence in the trial, it did not say specifically if any of the email sent through his account was used as evidence against him.

Yahoo first came under fire last year when it was revealed that internet records it handed over to police helped to convict another Chinese political activist, Shi Tao. He was jailed for 10 years for subversion.

Yahoo said it was unaware of the case of dissident Li Zhi when RSF first raised the issue early this month, while dismissing what it said were mischaracterisations of its past practices in China.

Officials in Yahoo's Beijing office could not be reached for comment on the latest allegations.

Li used to work in Dazhou city's finance department but was arrested in August 2003 after posting an essay on an overseas website accusing Sichuan officials of corruption.

In the essay, he made references to China's Minister of Public Security, who recently served as communist party secretary for the Sichuan province.

Other major US internet and tech firms, such as Google, Microsoft and Cisco, have also been criticised for complying with or aiding in China's censorship efforts.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html





Mr. Williams, calling Mr. Sherwin-Williams!

Slapping on a coat of silence

Company Says Its High-Tech Paint Will Block Cell Phone Calls
Jon Van

The intrusion of cellular phone rings into theaters, schools and nearly every other nook and cranny of modern life may soon hit a wall.

Playing to the backlash against ubiquitous communication, a company called NaturalNano is developing a special high-tech paint that relies on the wizardry of nanotechnology to create a system that locks out unwanted cell phone signals on demand.

The paint represents a dream to those who seek a distraction-free movie or concert experience, and a nightmare to those who compulsively monitor their BlackBerry phones.

It is also another breakthrough application of nanotechnology, the emerging science of harnessing sub-microscopic organisms for everyday uses, like stain- resistant pants and transparent sunblock. The National Science Foundation has predicted that nanotechnology eventually will be a trillion-dollar industry.

"You could use this in a concert hall, allowing cell phones to work before the concert and during breaks, but shutting them down during the performance," said Michael Riedlinger, president of NaturalNano of Rochester, N.Y.

His firm has found a way to use nanotechnology to blend particles of copper into paint that can be brushed onto walls and effectively deflect radio signals.

The copper is inserted into nanotubes, which are ultra-tiny tubes that occur naturally in halloysite clay mined in Utah. The nanotubes are about 20,000 times thinner than a piece of paper, too small to be seen with even a conventional microscope. At this size, which is near the molecular scale, materials have different physical properties than they normally do.

By filling these tubes with nano-particles of copper, the company can create a medium to suspend the signal-blocking metal throughout a can of paint without significantly changing the way the paint adheres to a surface.

NaturalNano will combine this signal-blocking paint scheme with a radio-filtering device that collects phone signals from outside a shielded space, allowing certain transmissions to proceed while blocking others.

Wireless chill

Even the thought of such a thing upsets the wireless phone industry.

"We oppose any kind of blocking technology," said Joe Farren, spokesman for The Wireless Association, the leading cell phone trade group. "What about the young parents whose baby-sitter is trying to call them, or the brain surgeon who needs notification of emergency surgery? These calls need to get through."

Farren said that any scheme to selectively block calls is illegal.

But Robert Crowley of AMBIT Corp., which designed the radio filtering device for NaturalNano, said the system is legal. The nanotech-augmented paint that blocks signals is a passive device, not an illegal radio jammer, he said.

The radio filter would allow all emergency radio communications to pass through the shield, Crowley said. With all other signals, like cell phones, the filter would act like a spigot to block or allow them to pass through—say, only during intermission.

"There'd be no limitation of public service radio access," he said.

Crowley said there's a lot of pent-up demand for people to have more control of the radio space in their own buildings. His Ashland, Mass.-based firm, which develops equipment to enhance cell phone reception inside moving vehicles, often hears from such people.

"Our No. 1 request comes from churches," he said. "Pastors want a way to stop cell phones ringing in church and people taking calls during worship services."

Schools seek control

School administrators would also want to keep students from taking cell phone calls or sending text messages to one another during class, he said.

Most schools ban cell phone use in class, but administrators would like more control over wireless traffic.

Bill Smith, director of instructional support services for Sioux Falls, S.D., schools said his district is interested in NaturalNano's signal-blocking paint because administrators are worried about what would happen in the event of an emergency in a school.

"During a crisis, students using cell phones would overwhelm the system, making it impossible for administrators to use cell phones to call authorities," Smith said. "I don't know if there's a way to manage that."

Smith said students are allowed to have phones in their backpacks or lockers, but if they use a phone during class, the device is confiscated and their parents are called.

"That works pretty well," Smith said. "Whether we'd want to install a system to add further control would really depend on how much it cost. We run a pretty austere system."

Jamming illegal

Even though they're illegal, jamming devices that emit radio signals to prevent cell phones from working are widely available, said Tim Kridel, a wireless industry analyst.

"You can find plenty of jammers on the Internet that are shipped from other countries," said Kridel. "But using them risks getting into trouble with the Federal Communications Commission."

Farren, the wireless industry spokesman, said that jamming doesn't seem to be a major problem.

"But it's hard to detect," he said. "Nothing shows up on your phone that says 'Your signal's being jammed.'"

Based on phone inquiries and Web site visits, AMBIT's Crowley said many people apparently want a legal way to control wireless bad behavior.

"We tell pastors they can't be bashful about asking their congregation to turn off their phones, because there's nothing else available," he said. "The system NaturalNano proposes would be a cost-effective alternative."

But even though cell phones can be a nuisance, not all pastors seek a technical solution.

"I've had them go off during a service, although it's rare," said Tom Allen, pastor of the Bible Fellowship Church in Yardley, Pa., and an associate professor at Philadelphia Biblical University in Langhorne, Pa. "I use humor or just ignore it. Obviously, the person is embarrassed. One ring reminds everybody else to check their phones.

"I've never heard that it happened twice in one service."
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationwo...news-headlines





Patriot Act E-Mail Searches Apply to Non-Terrorists, Judges Say
Josh Gerstein

Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism.

The disagreement among the jurists about the scope of their powers simmered for more than two years before coming to light in an opinion unsealed earlier this month. The resolution, which underscored the government's broad legal authority to intercept electronic communications, comes as debate is raging over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program and the duties of Internet providers to protect personal data.

A magistrate judge in Orlando, James Glazebrook, first questioned the so-called nationwide-search provision in 2003, after investigators in a child pornography probe asked him to issue a search warrant requiring a "legitimate" California-based Web site to identify all users who accessed certain "password-protected" photos posted on the site. The Web provider was not named in public court records.

Magistrate Glazebrook said that in passing the Patriot Act, formally known as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, Congress made clear its focus was on terrorism. He said there was nothing in the language Congress adopted in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that suggested the nationwide-search provision should apply to garden variety federal cases.

"The statutory language is clear and unambiguous in limiting district court authority to issue out-of-district warrants to investigations of terrorism, and that language controls this court's interpretation. The government has shown no legislative intent to the contrary," the magistrate wrote. He also noted that many of the examples given during legislative debate involved terrorism. The then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, described the nationwide- search language as applying in terrorism cases, the court noted.

Magistrate Glazebrook denied the search warrant, but it was recently disclosed that the government appealed to a federal judge, G. Kendall Sharp, who granted it without explanation.

The scenario played out again late last year, after prosecutors presented Magistrate Glazebrook with an application for a search warrant directed to a Sunnyvale, Calif.- based Web portal, Yahoo. The government asked that Yahoo produce web pages, documents, and usage logs pertaining to two e-mail addresses and a Web site allegedly linked to an Orlando man, Earl Beach, under investigation for involvement in child pornography. Magistrate Glazebrook allowed searches of Mr. Beach's home and computers, but again rejected prosecutors' request to acquire data located across the country. "Congress has not authorized this court to seize out-of-district property except in cases of domestic or international terrorism," the magistrate handwrote on the application.

Again, prosecutors appealed. Judge Gregory Presnell took up the question and concluded that "it seems" Congress did intend to authorize nationwide search warrants in all cases, not just ones pertaining to terrorism. However, the judge acknowledged that the language Congress used was far from clear. "The court rejects the assertions made by both the United States here and the magistrate judge... that the statutory language is unambiguous. Although the court ultimately comes to a determination regarding the meaning of this language, by no means is it clearly, unambiguously or precisely written," Judge Presnell wrote.

The chief federal defender in Orlando, R. Fletcher Peacock, said the dispute was a straightforward one pitting literal interpretation against legislative intent. "Judge Presnell was more willing to go behind the language of the statute and look at the statutory intent, and clearly Judge Glazebrook was not," the attorney said.

One of the most striking aspects of the dispute is that there appears to be no other published court ruling addressing the nationwide-search provision, known as Section 220. The magistrate involved cited no cases directly on the point and neither did the government.

An attorney with a group that pushes for online privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said yesterday that the lack of published cases on the subject reflects the fact that search warrant applications are presented outside the presence of defense lawyers, often before a defendant even knows he is under investigation. "It's fairly typical that search warrants for electronic evidence would be kept under seal," the privacy advocate, Kevin Bankston, said. "In most cases, they wouldn't be reported."

Mr. Bankston said there is no question that the Justice Department wanted the Patriot Act to include nationwide-search authority for all crimes, but whether lawmakers accomplished that task is another question. "I don't know that Congress knew what it was voting on," he said.

Civil libertarians have objected to the nationwide-search provision on the grounds that it allows prosecutors the discretion to pick judicial districts where judges are seen as more friendly to the government. Critics of the Patriot Act have also warned that allowing search warrants to be filed from across the country will discourage Internet service providers from fighting such requests even when they may be unwarranted.

"The only person in a position to assert your rights is the ISP and if it's in their local court, they are more likely to challenge it if it is bad or somehow deficient," Mr. Bankston said.

A spokesman for the prosecutors did not return a call seeking comment for this story. However, the Justice Department has said the nationwide-search provision was "vital" to its investigation of the gruesome murder in 2004 of a pregnant Missouri woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, whose unborn child was cut from her womb with a kitchen knife. Investigators claim that they used the Patriot Act authority to quickly obtain email evidence from an Internet provider across state lines in Kansas. That data led them to a woman who later confessed to the attack, Lisa Montgomery.

In his ruling, Judge Presnell did not mention that episode, but suggested it was simpler for the courts and prosecutors to issue all warrants in a case from one place.

"As a matter of judicial and prosecutorial efficiency, it is practical to permit the federal district court for the district where the federal crime allegedly occurred to oversee both the prosecution and the investigation (including the issuance of warrants) thereof," he wrote. The government has also complained that the former procedure caused court backlogs and delays in jurisdictions, like northern California, that are home to many Internet companies.

It is unclear whether any charges resulted from the 2003 investigation, but the suspect involved in the disputed 2005 search, Mr. Beach, was indicted earlier this month on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography. He has pleaded not guilty. A trial is set for April.

Magistrate Glazebrook said in a brief interview yesterday that he could not discuss the specific cases that prompted the legal disagreement over the Patriot Act, but that he expects the question to arise again. "It is certainly something that will come up," he said. "There are a lot of interesting issues surrounding that."
http://www.nysun.com/article/28232





Press Release

Let the Sun Set on PATRIOT - Section 220:

"Nationwide Service of Search Warrants for Electronic Evidence"

How Section 220 Changed the Law

Before PATRIOT, the FBI could execute a search warrant for electronic evidence only within the geographic jurisdiction of the court that issued the warrant - for example, the FBI couldn't get a New York court to issue a warrant for email messages stored by your ISP in California.

After PATRIOT, courts can issue warrants for electronic evidence -- your email messages, your voice mail messages and the electronic records detailing your web-surfing -- anywhere in the country. Notably, Section 220 isn't reserved for terrorism-related investigations, despite the fact that PATRIOT was sold to the American public as a necessary anti-terrorism measure. Instead, it applies in any kind of criminal investigation whatsoever.

Why Section 220 Should Sunset

Section 220 significantly increases the chances that search warrants that fail to meet Constitutional standards will be used to search and seize your electronic communications:

Section 220 allows the FBI to pick and choose which courts it can ask for a search warrant. This means it can "shop" for judges that have demonstrated a strong bias toward law enforcement with regard to search warrants, using only those judges least likely to say no -- even if the warrant doesn't satisfy the strict requirements of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
By allowing courts to issue warrants to be served on communications providers in far-away states, Section 220 reduces the likelihood that your ISP or phone company will try to protect your privacy by challenging the warrant in court, even if the warrant is clearly unconstitutional. A small San Francisco ISP served with such a warrant is unlikely to have the resources to appear before the New York court that issued it. Yet because you won't be notified if the FBI uses a warrant to get your electronic communications, your ISP is the only entity in a position to fight for your rights.

The FBI argues that having to secure search warrants from more than one court during an investigation is a waste of time. But local judicial oversight is a key check against unreasonable searches. Further, the FBI already has the ability to conduct emergency searches without a warrant when it doesn't have time to go to a local judge.

Even worse, Section 220 isn't necessary even to help combat terrorism -- PATRIOT section 219 already allows nationwide search warrants in terrorism-related investigations. In fact, the only practical result of Section 220 is less paperwork for the FBI -- at the expense of your Constitutional rights.

Conclusion

Section 220 threatens your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. EFF strongly opposes its renewal, and we urge you to oppose it, too. We also support the Security and Freedom Ensured Act (SAFE Act, S 1709/HR 3352) and encourage you to visit EFF's Action Center today to let your representatives know you support the bill.
http://www.eff.org/patriot/sunset/220.php





NYT Sues Pentagon Over Domestic Spying

The New York Times sued the U.S. Defense Department on Monday demanding that it hand over documents about the National Security Agency's domestic spying program.

The Times wants a list of documents including all internal memos and e-mails about the program of monitoring phone calls without court approval. It also seeks the names of the people or groups identified by it.

The Times in December broke the story that the NSA had begun intercepting domestic communications believed linked to al Qaeda following the September 11 attacks. That provoked renewed criticism of the way U.S. President George W. Bush is handling his declared war on terrorism.

Bush called the disclosure of the program to the Times a "shameful act" and the U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation into who leaked it.

The Times had requested the documents in December under the Freedom of Information Act but sued upon being unsatisfied with the Pentagon's response that the request was "being processed as quickly as possible," according to the six-page suit filed at federal court in New York.

David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, acknowledged that the list of documents sought was lengthy but that the Pentagon failed to assert there were "unusual circumstances," a provision of the law that would grant the Pentagon extra time to respond.

The Defense Department, which was sued as the parent agency of the NSA, did not immediately respond to the suit.

McCraw said there was "no connection" between the Justice Department probe and the Times' lawsuit.

"This is an important story that our reporters are continuing to pursue and of the ways to do that is through the Freedom of Information Act," McCraw said.

The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the federal government to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for surveillance operations inside the United States.

But the Bush administration says the president as commander in chief of the armed forces has the authority to carry out the intercepts and that Congress also gave him the authority upon approving the use of force in response to the September 11 attacks.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060227/...nsa_nytimes_dc





Prof can’t hack it says critic

An Assignment From Professor Packetslinger of the School of Loose Screws
Deborah Hale

Update #1

We have received an overwhelming number of emails as a result of this diary. This is to clarify a couple of things. Yes this professor could have set up its own system for the students to use, yes they could have been instructed that they were to get permission from the owners of the systems first, yes they could have done any number of things to make this a valuable, worthwhile learning experience. That was not done unfortunately.

We have also received several emails asking us to release the name of the institution that this refers to. We won't do that as we were asked not to in the diary. It is our policy at the ISC to provide confidentiality when requested. That is what allows us to cover such controversial subjects as we do. Yes what is being done by this Institution of Higher Education is incorrect. We are pursuing a satisfactory resolution to this as best we can. We also have not and will not publish the entire document.

John Bambenek one of our handlers that works at University of Illinois had this to say on the subject:

It's high time that the principles of academic freedom stop providing shields for felonious conduct or eventually the people and the government will take it away all together.

We also have received a number of emails suggesting that we have a legal obligation to report this. We are aware that this maybe a possibility. We will assure all of our readers that we will indeed do what is right. We may not talk about what we did but we will do our best to make sure that this type of activity does not continue to go on. We truly want the Internet to be a safe place for all to work and play.

Hopefully this will answer some of the questions and concerns that are arising from this article.



Update #2

We have received indications there has been a partial callback of the assignment. We're inviting the professor to contact us directly for any statement and/or clarification he might want to offer.

If he does contact us with a statement we will update the diary again. Again thanks to all who did contact us concerning this. Both the good and the bad. We have responded to as many as we could (of course not to the ones that gave us phony email addresses). We at the ISC appreciate the participation of everyone, whether you agree with us or not. We learn a lot from the pro's and the con's and enjoy the interaction.



Update #3

Since this article is now referenced directly just a note there is a follow up diary on how to setup such assignments in a responsible manner.
Furthermore the amount of feedabck we get will mean that we're unlikely to individually answer unless you are a bit exceptional in remark or are the professor himself. Please no more "portscanning is not illegal" and assumptions the assignment was portscanning only, we've seen those remarks by now a few times.

But again, we'd love to have a chat with the professor himself.

We received an email today from a concerned colleague at one of the state colleges in the US. We promised the colleague that we would not reveal name or school so I won't. It is tempting, but I won't. This is an actual assignment. I am not making this up, this IS the real thing.

So here is the story of the assignment from Professor Packetslinger. In a Computer Security class in the Winter of 2006 (which by the way is next year if I remember correctly) the students have been given an assignment. The assignment is worth 15% of the final grade for the class. (So refusing to do the assignment very well could drop a student from an A to a B or worse in the blink of an eye).

The "TASK"

Student is to perform a remote security evaluation of one or more computer systems. The evaluation should be conducted over the Internet, using tools available in the public domain.

You got it. This is verbatim. Professor Packetslinger wants the students to conduct illegal activity involving port scanning and vulnerability scanning. He wants them to write an evaluation of what they find: what ports are open and what service could be running on them, Host names and IP addresses, OS, version, last update, patch status, what shares are available, what kind of network traffic and what vulnerabilities they see.

Hmm – seems to me that Professor Packetslinger wants the students to do all of the background work for him.

Ok so now what must the students submit in writing to Professor Packetslinger?

Let's see what he wants:

What the student must submit

The note to the students:

In conducting this work, you should imagine yourself to be a security contracted by the owner of the computer system(s) to perform a security evaluation.

(This tells me that Professor Packetslinger is well aware of the laws and the fact that doing this without express permission and authorization IS against the law in most countries and municipalities. The same laws that the students are being asked to violate).

The student must provide a written report which has the following sections: Executive summary, description of tools and techniques used, dates and times of investigations [AKA break ins, our words], examples of data collected, evaluation data, overall evaluation of the system(s) including vulnerabilities.

Can you believe it? Amazing, simply amazing. One important thing Professor Packetslinger failed to request:

Dates of student's incarceration so that they can be excused from class and not counted absent.

Ok, so the concerned colleague who contacted us about Professor Packetslinger and his assignment went on to explain:

"We've barked this one up our own tree of management. Word came down this morning that no direct action will be taken against the professor, but if we catch any students doing these scans against our computers we will not be exempting them from our existing procedure. Specifically, disabling their student account and referring them to the Student Dean of Corrections."

In other words, we won't discipline Professor Packetslinger, we won't stop the assignment from going forward. As long as the students don't scan our computers, it is ok. If they scan our computers they will be reprimanded and lose their privileges on campus.

This is incredible; this University is encouraging illegal activity. They are encouraging students to do something that is, in the words of fellow Handler Adrien:

Illegal, unethical, immoral.
How about just plain stupid and ignorant.

And handler Swa had this to say:

Doing it is illegal in many parts of the world. But using authority to have somebody else do something illegal is in some places on this world even worse than the act itself and any decent prosecutor should chop the prof in fine pieces over this.

Actually inciting somebody to do something illegal (even if the act isn't performed) might be a case on its own. Now if he fails a student over this, they might have no more reason not to put down an official complaint for being asked to perform illegal acts.

First thing to do: recall the assignment; tell the students they should not even consider it. Next (public) apologies from the professor are the least. But at the _very_ least don't let him near kids anymore, as an educator he's a miserable failure.

This from our resident comedian Tom:

Spamming for Fun and Profit.

It is hard for me as a security professional to understand the logic of Professor Packetslinger. I have relatives in the fair city in which this prestigious state university resides. I am going to ask them to keep an eye on the local paper and shoot me off articles about the arrests. And I definitely will not recommend this school to my friends and relatives. My sympathy goes out to the students that will be forced into completing this assignment. My sympathy to their families, especially those who are caught and charged with computer crimes. I just hope that the dear professor gets to experience the full impact of his illegal, unethical and immoral acts and he too gets to spend some time behind bars.

How about the school?

As fellow Handler Lorna put it

Wonder how the school would feel about a law suit launched against THEM because of this assignment!

The school is allowing this assignment to go forward. They are as guilty of this crime as the professor and the students. They too need to pay the price and a lawsuit against them would be a small price to pay.
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1155





Indiana State adds ThinkPad to List Of Essential School Supplies

Indiana State University has selected the Lenovo ThinkPad as its preferred computer for students and faculty as the university moves toward becoming a notebook institution.

Developed by IBM, the ThinkPad is now manufactured and marketed by Lenovo, the world’s third-largest personal computing company after its acquisition of IBM’s personal computer business in 2005.

ISU will become the first public university in the state to require all students to have notebook computers, beginning with incoming freshmen in fall 2007.

The university is one of a handful of institutions nationally, including the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Clemson University, to institute similar mobile computing initiatives.

“When we announced the Notebook Initiative last September, we pledged that our students would receive high quality, business-grade laptops worthy of the investment they and their parents are making in an ISU education,” said C. Jack Maynard, ISU provost and vice president for academic affairs. “The selection of the Lenovo ThinkPad fulfills that pledge.”

ISU chose Lenovo because of its superior service and support, the quality of ThinkPad notebooks and the advanced wireless capabilities of the PCs.

ThinkPads help simplify the network connectivity process through ThinkVantage Access Connections 4.1, which helps mobile users set up and automatically switch from one available network connection to the next.

Through Access Connections, students and faculty will be able to seamlessly move from classes to dorm rooms and wired to wireless environments.

The widespread use of laptop technology will leverage the power of mobile computing to provide campuswide access through the university’s extensive wireless network, said Susan Powers, professor of curriculum, instruction and media technology and chairwoman of ISU’s notebook implementation committee.

“The notebook initiative gives us an opportunity to use technology to support learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered and community-centered learning environments. It is a window of opportunity for true innovation. Lenovo ThinkPad will be an excellent partner in our strategies to expand the learning environment of ISU,” Powers said.

For more information, see www.lenovo.com.
http://www.tribstar.com/features/loc...yword=topstory





P2P Can Help The Music Industry
Adam Dylewski

The music business is in need of a radical shake-up. While the Recording Industry Association of America goes around suing their own customers, the music corporations they represent continue to grossly under use peer-to-peer file-sharing, online social networks like MySpace and the Internet, in general, as a new mode of distribution and marketing.

Music sales are down, but it’s not illegal file sharing that’s hurting the “Big Four”—EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group—the most. According to “Music’s Brighter Future” in The Economist, “an internal study done by one of the majors [showed that] between two- thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in the United States had nothing to do with Internet piracy.”

The rest seems to stem from other underlying problems with the music biz—less retail space, competition from other media, the rising cost of CDs and, above all, the quality of the music itself. So what’s a multi-national music corporation to do?

First off, turn to Big Champagne for marketing advice. BC started off by analyzing the same P2P networks that cost the Big Four an absurd amount of legal fees, but soon after started tracking online music sales, streamed songs and videos and more traditional mediums for music distribution.

The hearty digital soup that results from this diverse collection of meta-data can find “whether listeners have found a hit before radio” and give the music industry a better measure of an artists’ success, according to “The Chumbawamba Factor,” an article by Chris Dahlen at the online music critique hub Pitchfork Media.

Dahlen wrote that modern music dominates the hits on download charts, but exceptions can arise—last August, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” broke into the iTunes top 25 when “Family Guy” and “Laguna Beach” both used the song.

The Big Four should heed this phenomenon and peddle their back catalogs the same way they market their new music—there is an enormous audience of music fans out there, both young and old, that don’t pay much attention to releases after 1990.

Where did this audience come from? My guess is they got fed up with modern music outlets. Music execs need to realize that MTV and the thousands of Clear Channel-owned stations out there aren’t the tastemakers they used to be.

While a lot of these disgruntled consumers run to classic rock and oldies radio for their musical fix, many indie music fans turn to www.pitchfork.com and www.metacritic.com to find new artists. While I don’t always agree with Pitchfork’s snarky and overwrought reviews, a lot of the time these guys get it right, to the benefit of fledgling artists and music fans everywhere.

The “Pitchfork” effect can be seen in the success of bands like the “Arcade Fire” and “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.” The latter, then-unsigned group became an overnight Internet sensation after their self-titled record got a 9.0 on Pitchfork. Thousands downloaded the album and, after a few months of online acclaim, sold over 40,000 records—all without a record deal.

If the major labels took a closer look at MySpace profiles and Pitchfork, they could get nearer to the hearts and minds of file-traders... as well as their wallets.

Still, the music industry would have to do a whole lot more to regain their lost audience. In 2004, the mobile ringtone industry grew to one-tenth of the size of the music business. The Big Four have made inroads towards this market through Motorola’s new iTunes-ready phones, but this is only the first step.

The inevitable success of a wireless-enabled iPod that could access iTunes has huge implications for the music industry. Instead of grappling with Steve Jobs about the prices of songs on iTunes, the Big Four needs to strengthen this partnership to stay afloat in the future.

And while Big Champagne’s data mining is already informative, it cannot track BitTorrent downloads. According to British Web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent downloads account for 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet. As it stands, Big Champagne is missing a huge chunk of downloaders in its statistics.

All of this will take time, of course, but when iTunes sold its billionth song last week, it heralded a future shift in the music industries’ business model and the de-stigmatization of downloading music. Like the New Pornographers—a Pitchfork favorite—sang, “It was crime at the time / but the laws, we changed `em.”

Adam Dylewski is a junior majoring in genetics and life science communications. His iTunes top 10 is composed solely of Journey songs—he never stopped believing.
http://www.dailycardinal.com/article...toryid=1029026





Throw another right on the barbie

Copyright Makes Web A Turn-Off
Simon Hayes

SCHOOLS have warned they will have to turn off the internet if a move by the nation's copyright collection society forces them to pay a fee every time a teacher instructs students to browse a website.

Teachers said students in rural areas would bear the brunt of cuts if the Copyright Agency was successful in adding internet browsing charges to the $31 million in photocopying fees it rakes in from schools.

The agency calculates the total due by randomly sampling schools each year for materials they copy, and extrapolating the results.

The battle between the schools and the agency will go to the Federal Court over its attempts to make schools pay for asking students to use the web.

Negotiations between the Ministerial Council on Education Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, representing the schools, and the agency have broken down over plans to change the scheme to include a question in the survey on whether teachers direct students to use the internet.

"If it turned out we'd have to pay them, we'd turn the internet off in schools," the council's national copyright director Delia Browne said.

"We couldn't afford it; it would not be sustainable. How on earth are we going to deliver education in the 21st century? How are taxpayers going to afford this."

The move has teachers up in arms, with some warning "ludicrous" charges for using websites would increase the gap between haves and have-nots.

"Kids in rural areas, particularly, depend on websites," said Sui-Linn White, creative and performing arts head teacher at a Sydney school.

"There's a whole section of the NSW Art Gallery website aimed at education, and teachers in rural areas depend on sites like that."

The Copyright Tribunal held three days of hearings on the issue in September 2005, but it is now expected the matter will be heard in the Federal Court later this year.

Agency chief executive Michael Fraser said schools paid only $10 per student per year for photocopying.

"For less than the cost of maintaining the grounds, emptying the garbage bins and managing the tuckshop you can access all the material you want and make photocopies," he said.

"It would be tragic if schools had to shut down the internet, we don't want that. "What they pay will be for the tribunal to determine."
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15318,00.html





New Solution Cuts Escalating Cost of Bandwidth for ISPs by up to 70 Percent
Press Release

“Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic consumes up to 70 percent of Internet bandwidth and promises to increase as the entertainment industry embraces P2P for distribution, the popularity of VoIP and personal audio and video players grows, and its use for business and government communication increases,” says Robert Mayer, CEO, PeerApp, which developed new technology that enables Internet Service Providers to cut bandwidth costs and increase network efficiency.

Newton, MA (PRWEB) February 28, 2006 -- PeerApp, today, launched UltraBand 2000™, a new Clustering Bandwidth solution that cuts the Internet Service Providers’ cost of providing bandwidth for P2P traffic by up to 70 percent.

UltraBand 2000™ enables Internet Service Providers (ISP) to significantly reduce bandwidth lease charges and better serve all subscribers, including those who share information using P2P technology. The extra network capacity enables ISPs to offer new services and attract additional subscribers.

PeerApp introduced and tested its product worldwide, especially where demand is growing and bandwidth is more limited and far more costly. The huge customer base of ISPs in the US, such as Verizon, Comcast and AOL, plus the volume of traffic on US networks make PeerApp’s technology vital for North American ISPs.

Recognizing growth potential, Pilot House, Cedar Fund and Evergreen Venture Partners have funded development and marketing of PeerApp’s technology.

Pressures on ISPs to provide more bandwidth is expected to increase with the motion picture industry looking to the P2P infrastructure for distribution of home entertainment, the growing popularity of iPod and other personal audio and video players, as well as increasing use by government and business of P2P applications. Adoption of Voice over Internet Protocols (VoIP) and IPTV will further increase bandwidth demand here and internationally.

The Technology. To increase bandwidth capacity and improve network efficiency, UltraBand 2000™ separates P2P communication from the rest of Internet traffic and caches the P2P traffic locally. With the PeerApp (www.peerapp.com) Protocol Based Bandwidth Solution in place, P2P traffic is cached on scalable Dell blade servers using EMC SAN storage technology.

The PeerApp solution manages millions of concurrent connections, supports all major P2P file-transfer protocols and resides in a centralized location to expedite maintenance.

“By deploying UltraBand 2000,™ ISPs gain control over their bandwidth costs, are able to manage peak and seasonal P2P traffic, and will be prepared for future P2P traffic growth. The PeerApp solution is transparent to the subscriber and maintains quality of experience for all ISP users -- both P2P and non-P2P," says Robert Mayer, CEO of PeerApp, in announcing the worldwide launch of UltraBand 2000™.

During testing over the past year, UltraBand 2000 ™ was able to reduce the overall bandwidth cost by over 50% for leading ISPs around the world. ISPs can expect a return on investment measured in months and the added benefit of gaining control over future P2P bandwidth costs by markedly reducing the need to lease additional capacity at market rates.

Contact PeerApp
381 Elliott Street, #140-L, Newton, MA 02464, tel 617-795-0977

About PeerApp
PeerApp is the leader in providing Protocol Based Bandwidth Solutions. PeerApp develops and services technologies and products to help ISPs enhance network efficiency, reduce bandwidth cost and enhance subscribers’ quality of experience and service. PeerApp products and solutions are suitable for all ISPs providing broadband, DSL or cable service. They are designed to allow ISPs to manage their networks in compliance with applicable laws. For further information about PeerApp, its products, technology, and services, visit PeerApp at www.peerapp.com.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2006/2/emw352639.htm





Japanese Data at ASDF and GSDF Also Leaked Onto Internet

Ground Self-Defense Force and Air Self-Defense Force data stored on privately owned computers have leaked onto the Internet via peer-to-peer file- sharing software following a similar case at the Maritime Self-Defense Force last week, Defense Agency sources said Thursday.

But no confidential information was among the leaked GSDF and ASDF data, the sources said.

Investigations show that the GSDF files included members' address lists and drill plans and those from the ASDF included a mock air base construction plan to be used for training.

The computers were apparently infected with a virus that causes information disclosure from an infected machine using the file-sharing software Winny, the sources said.

The GSDF, ASDF and MSDF are currently checking to see if there have been more leaks, the sources said.

Last Friday, the Defense Agency instructed all its officials and SDF members to delete all peer-to-peer file-sharing software and work-related confidential data stored on private computers to prevent leaks.
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/-data-...01/1422503.htm





New Technologies, New Anxieties

The tools that are making your users’ lives easier—USB thumb drives, DVD burners, peer-to-peer file-sharing tools—are making your lives harder. Here’s how to ease the strain.
Christopher Lindquist

Internal data theft. The problem was bad enough 10 years ago, when remote connections to your office were limited by modem speeds, and the most anyone was going to take was a couple of floppies or a briefcase-load of printouts. It could be damaging, sure, but it was mostly petty theft—the equivalent of a stolen lipstick dropped in a handbag.

But the same modern technologies that have made your users’ lives more convenient and entertaining—USB thumb drives, portable media players, DVD burners, peer-to-peer file-sharing tools—have also created a situation where something no bigger than a lipstick might just contain gigabytes of your corporate data.

Worse, such tools can make data thieves out of even well-intentioned users with goals no more insidious than getting out of the office early enough to pick up their kids from school. Where these unwitting burglars once might have tried to sneak a single file onto a floppy to work on later at home, now it can be just as easy to download an entire directory to a thumb drive or to open an assortment of files to remote synchronisation using an inexpensive online service such as BeInSync.com.

Unfortunately, traditional security tools are often completely ineffective against these new threats. And locking down USB ports with Windows Group Policy or by tweaking PC BIOS settings is kludgy at best—if not downright unmanageable for large, dispersed corporations.

A recent CIO-conducted poll of more than 200 IT professionals showed that 62 percent were at least very worried about the loss of critical data via USB drives and other portable devices—outpacing concern over e-mail by 12 percent. And 48 percent of respondents expressed significant concern about data loss through Web-based services such as online backup and remote access tools.

It’s easy to understand the fear. Every day new devices and services appear, forcing IT managers to play a never-ending game of catch-up.

So what are you going to do?

Here’s an escalating plan for securing your company’s data.

Take a Stand
There is no magic bullet for the problems these latest threats present to your data. Policies, procedures and technology must work together to create a proper balance of security and convenience. “I think these measures—technical or otherwise—need to be part of a healthy balanced diet,” says Andrew Jaquith, Senior Analyst for security solutions and services at Yankee Group. “The pendulum can’t swing so far that you’re hampering productivity.”

Jaquith gives the example of a financial services firm he knows that went so far as to actually solder shut the USB ports on a number of its workstations in order to safeguard critical financial information. But, he cautions, that approach would be unreasonably restrictive for many companies.

Instead, a good place to start is with simple, well-defined and well-distributed policies regarding the use of removable mass storage devices, service providers and peer-to-peer software. The goal is to guarantee that no one on your staff can truthfully say that they didn’t know they shouldn’t attach their MP3 player, PDA or other device to their PC, or that signing up for that remote access service wasn’t a serious mistake. Publicising your policy should make people think twice about doing these things in the first place, and it also will provide a firmer footing for disciplinary action later on, should that become necessary.

Fabi Gower, IT director at medical staffing and recruitment company Martin Fletcher, is a firm believer in policy. She oversees two days of IT orientation training during the 30-day training period for all new employees at the company, and she makes it crystal clear what is and what isn’t OK. And that policy is pretty simple: If the company didn’t give it to you, it’s not allowed.

“I’m very proactive when it comes to my network,” Gower says. “It’s my baby.”

John Loyd, Director of Information Technology for engineering consultant Patton, Harris, Rust and Associates (PHR&A), also makes sure that company policies—no webmail, no webpages unrelated to the business during business hours, no software installed by anyone but IT— are made clear on the company intranet and to new employees during orientation. (He depends on an honour system for compliance and concedes “mixed success.”)

But in an effort to bring security home for PHR&A users, Lloyd’s department sends out regular e-mails concerning various security issues, pointing users to additional resources, and even giving advice on protecting their home PCs. And, he notes, the bulletins have a side benefit. “It makes our IT department look knowledgeable and competent.” To further boost the “we’re here to help” image, Lloyd purchased a number of inexpensive PC antivirus licenses from Symantec and gives them out for free to employees for use at home.

Keep Your Eyes Open
Having and communicating a security policy isn’t enough. Some kind of monitoring is the next step. But monitoring doesn’t necessarily have to mean buying new software. Eric Ahlm, Vice President of emerging technologies at security consultant Vigilar, says monitoring can be as simple as having IT personnel make a visual audit of what types of devices people are using, especially at smaller companies. “It doesn’t have to be a big huge thing,” Ahlm says. “Just walk around the premises and see how widespread personal devices are.”

Even if you do decide to invest in tools, you shouldn’t feel obligated to go for full lockdown from the get-go. Simply monitoring—and letting users know you’re monitoring—might be sufficient. “Monitor rather than block is the best policy,” says Yankee’s Jaquith, noting a personal experience with a former employer who didn’t block employee Web browsing, but who made it very clear that they were logging it—and that they would review those logs regularly. Even then, some employees wandered to sites that violated company policy. But, Jaquith says, “it only takes a couple publicised examples [of people being caught] to put the fear into users and get them to straighten up and fly right.”

Block If You Must
If policy and monitoring don’t seem sufficient to address the threat, next come tools for restricting access. For Gower, the equation was simple: Martin Fletcher’s value is contained in its database of job-seeking health-care professionals; anything that could expose that database to theft or loss would be unacceptable. Coming to the company six years ago, Gower quickly recognised that personal mass storage devices and other tools—including locally attached USB printers—could present a serious threat. So she began looking for a solution.

It wasn’t easy. After two years of examining Windows Group Policy hacks and PC BIOS settings and even mulling over the “epoxy the ports shut” option, Gower finally found her solution with SecureWave’s Sanctuary Device Control, a remotely managed tool that shuts off USB and FireWire ports, disc drives of all types, Bluetooth connections and more. IT can then selectively activate devices as needed—even to the point of letting individual users have time-limited access to specific ports on an ad hoc basis. “We have a couple of VPs and maybe our COO who have USB printers,” Gower says. “I can allow each of these people USB printer access.”

PHR&A’s Loyd—also a SecureWave customer—notes that implementing the company’s product can take a few months (largely from building the whitelist of allowable activities and having to scan every executable file to determine which are permitted). But, he says, the result is a much safer, more controlled environment.

Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
Addressing current problems is also a good first step toward dealing with upcoming issues. For instance, recently released USB drives based on the U3 standard allow users not only to transfer data in a frighteningly efficient manner but also to carry USB-stored applications and desktop settings. A user simply pops a U3 driver into an available port, and the applications automatically install—regardless of whether the user has administrator privileges.

While the drive is installed, users can copy files, run U3 compatible applications (for a list of such apps, visit software.u3.com and take advantage of all their customised Windows settings, such as Web bookmarks. When they remove the drive, all traces of its presence vanish. But tools that can block USB ports (and sometimes other types of connections, such as FireWire and Bluetooth)—including SecureWave’s Device Control, SmartLine’s DeviceLock, Ardence’s Port Blocker, Reflex Magnetics’ DiskNet Pro, Safend’s Protector and myriad others— can prevent U3 and other device usage.

Unfortunately, no product provides a complete solution for the latest security problems. Port blockers can sometimes be defeated by using bootable CD- or DVD-ROMs (or the latest geeky toy—bootable USB drives), giving dedicated attackers free access to local hard drives. Modifying and password-protecting the BIOS on every machine to support hard-drive-only booting solves that problem, but only at the price of tedious configuration processes—especially if you have thousands of machines with which to deal.

And there seems to be no all-encompassing solution coming down the road anytime soon to such end-user-induced threats. Attempts at enterprisewide digital rights management, for instance, are in their infancy. For his part, Yankee’s Jaquith says that they’re also in the world of fantasy. “I don’t think we’ll ever get to a place where we can track every piece of data we create,” he says. Instead, companies might want to take a cue from the open-source world and services such as photo-posting site Flickr, which allows users to apply simple tags to their photos, such as “San Francisco” or “wedding,” making it easy to locate and control access to various pictures. “That kind of semantic tagging is a lot flatter and simpler and easier to use,” he says. “That’s where we really need to be. Label it as product plans. Strategy. Pricing.” And then use those tags as keys to which you can attach security policies.

Jaquith also points to security vendor Verdasys as having an interesting alternative solution. Rather than blocking connections, Verdasys tools begin monitoring when something happens that’s worth watching. For instance, noticing when a spreadsheet is attached to an e-mail message. According to the company, the Verdasys software can simply log such events for later review. It can also block the attachment. But a third option provides the opportunity for some social engineering; the software can pop up a message window warning users about the hazards of attaching spreadsheets to e-mail, but still allow the user to do so if he types a reason into a text field explaining why he needs to do it.

“Just warning people is enough to get them to stop doing what they’re doing,” says Dan Geer, Vice President and Chief Scientist at Verdasys and a widely acknowledged security expert. “Nine times out of 10, people are doing things against policy because they forget policy,” Geer says. And tools such as those from Verdasys act as very potent reminders.

“The best proving ground for this is the sales guy,” says Jaquith. “[Think about] Joey the sales manager. How frustrated would he be if you put some of these measures in place?” If your answer is “extremely frustrated,” Jaquith says, you’re probably better off finding a different solution or combination of solutions. “Monitoring and blocking mixed with some good old-fashioned human deterrents is the right way to do this.”
http://cio-asia.com/ShowPage.aspx?pa...d=5&issueid=83





HDClone Free Edition 3.1.8
Webcopy

HDClone Free Edition enables you to move the content from an entire hard drive to another, larger one. The program installs itself on a bootable floppy or CD, and include it`s own operating system, so it runs completely independent from Windows. Once HDClone has created the bootable floppy or CD for you, you can use it to boot your computer and copy the drive content to the new (installed) drive, using a graphical interface. The free version is perfectly suitable to upgrade your existing drive to a larger one. It supports IDE/ATA/SATA hard disks and is able to copy up to 300 MB/min. The software does not recognize a USB mouse or keyboard (after boot), so you need to connect a non-USB mouse and keyboard to operate the copy interface.
http://www.snapfilespro.com/gnomeapp.php?id=109804





TVNZB: Under New Management
Drew Wilson

TVNZB, a website known for hosting NZB files for Usenet users to find their favourite TV shows has sold their domain to a new management. The pressure against NZB websites after news circulated that the MPAA made unprecedented movements against such websites.

TVNZB was a website that specialised in NZB files that pointed to TV shows on Usenet. NZB acts similar in nature to a .torrent file on a BitTorrent network only UseNet doesn't require a tracker like BitTorrent does.

Unlike BitTorrent, the NZB websites seemed immune to pursuit by the MPAA. An idea that was shattered when reports came of NZB sites being recipients of cease and desist orders.

Although TVNZB were not included as targets in the round of lawsuits, the MPAA press release was enough to shake the TVNZB administration. Jon of TVNZB decided to pull the plug on his free NZB service. Users noticed yesterday that all they could see was the following in the message:

"tvnzb is for sale."

Expanding on this surprising message, Slyck.com caught up with "Jon", administrator of TVNZB.com. "Yes [the news report] was mainly the cause," Jon told Slyck.com. "We did not receive any lawsuit or notification, but, quite simply, it just wouldn't be worth the trouble to move the server offshore we don't have the resources to deal with any type of lawsuit.

"It was fun while it lasted, but as many of your readers are no doubt aware; this is the nature of internet filesharing. It evolves and changes. I am accepting offers for the site, maybe someone else will want to pickup where I left off."

It didn't seem to take long before someone decided to take the TVNZB torch. Jon later updated Slyck, "There is a buyer and we are in the process of transferring the site over. It should be done in a week max."

The main website was then changed to, "TvNZB has been sold! The new owner should commence operations in a few days, so check back!"

What the new management plans on doing with the domain is anyone’s guess. However, the speed of the handover suggests that there is enthusiasm to continue where Jon left off. With this enthusiasm that new management brings, this may herald a brighter future for the site.
http://slyck.com/news.php?story=1109





That’s all she wrote

STATEMENT OF CONCLUSION

Many are now aware that the MPAA have filed a lawsuit against us regards the indexing parts of the site. We have expressed and believe that these sections are not illegal and have tried to work with the MPAA to a satisfactory resolve. The MPAA however have failed to respond to our requests and we feel we must act on this situation ourselves.

DVDRS has been evolving for sometime and has been steadily moving away from its initial purpose. Indexing Usenet is still a part of the site granted, but we are now far more than that with in depth articles on DVD-R/W, DVD+R/W, DVD+R DL, DVDRAM, BLU-RAY and HD DVD media, software and hardware technology We also have a healthy movie, game and hardware review section as well as active news. Our forums are also more about technology than Usenet.

To this end we feel its time to drop reference to Usenet entirely. We understand that this may be seen as defeat or guilt by some parties but we feel its more about compliance and adaptivity. If a governing body feel that what we do is illegal we wish no part of it and will show willingness to comply by removing areas that may be in dispute. This isn't about acceptance of guilt, this is about removing anything that people deem offensive.

DVDRS will reach its final evolvement and we hope you understand why and where we are heading. We also understand that DVDRS will always be seen, in light of recent press, as a site that dealt in illegal file sharing. We feel there is no way we can recover from this and thus will re-launch Talk DVD with some of DVDRS database and ideas. This decision has not come easy for us and it pains us to do so.

We understand many members will not appreciate these changes and all we can do is apologize. As a site we must evolve and hope you can likewise do so. If you do not wish to be a part of these new changes we hope you will vote with your feet and not your negative opinions. What we do now is for the good of the site and any negativity will only result in instant removal. Any site that wishes to slam or slander us may do so willingly, we will not fire any shots back and quite frankly are not interested in your adverse opinions.

I have to confess that the site has caused my family a huge amount of stress over the last year. We have had many issues to deal with and the recent lawsuit is the final action that has decided our course.

“I am a family man and this is not a business, i cannot take the fight to anyone without fear of risk. Money has changed hands but remember i have always invested this back into the site. If you feel i have got rich from these dealings i feel for you, however many will see that this simply wasn't the case. Granted some will not be happy about that but at the end of the day this is a hobbyist site and one i enjoy working with. Talk DVD will feature the same morals and goals as DVDRS and we will re-invent and invest a huge amount of time in sections there to make us a fun, friendly place to be.

We will move the site to that location, streamline the member base to active membership and hopefully develop as time permits. We hope that you see our actions as the only recourse and that we feel passionately enough about what we do to try and evolve.”

The site will be closed for restructure. All reference to Usenet will be removed, the logo adapted (its a long time coming anyway) and NZB indexing sections dropped.

We will prune our membership database and remove any inactive member who have not logged the site for 6 months. Members who are still active and wish to be removed after this time will be allowed to submit a request for their account to be terminated.

Site supporters will still have all benefits of their donations minus the NZB section and Usenet reviews. We will not issue any refunds under the grounds of our TOS and no funds to do so :-

(a) Payment Obligation and PayPal® Authorization.
There shall be no Refunds, except in demonstrated cases of payment fraud or under the terms agreed to when purchasing a product or service as agreed to during the payment process.

(b) Termination of Your Subscription
DVDRS may also, in its sole discretion, at any time discontinue providing the Service, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of your access to the Service under any provision of this Agreement may be effected without prior notice, and acknowledge and agree that DVDRS may immediately deactivate or delete your account and/or bar any further access to the Service. Further, you agree that DVDRS shall not be liable to you or any third-party for any termination of your access to the Service.

(c) NZB Section Access
Access to the DVDRS NZB section is considered to be a Site Supporters Club membership free benefit and is not a condition or entitlement of the membership fees. You acknowledge that DVDRS, in its sole discretion, may terminate your access to the NZB section for any reason, including, without limitation, if DVDRS believes that you have violated or acted inconsistently with the letter or spirit of this Agreement or any DVDRS Terms of Service or User Agreements.

All site supporter funds have been used for that, to support the site. There is no funds to issue our members refunds, if there had been, we would willingly give them.

Danish speaking sections will be removed. We understand that we have a large population of Danish speaking members and encourage them to stay as part of the active membership base but they will, unfortunately, need to speak English from now on. This is not for racialist reasons but so we can better effectively moderate our forums.

We will be moved to shared hosting as the services of a dedicated server will no longer be required.

We understand that these changes will bring some negativity and expect the worse. However we also feel that its this or close the site entirely and we have worked far too long and hard for this to happen.

Since the PR press release broke we have been seen as an organized pirate network and this is unacceptable. In the first day of the press release we had 100 new members sign up looking for pirated movies. This has continued everyday since and we will not allow DVDRS to be used this way. We have not, will not and never shall host illegal files here. To this end we tried to control the situation with locking out both site supporters and new registrations.

We feel our actions are justified to keep the site free from such problems in the future.

These decisions are not open for debate and have been thought over long and hard. We still voice we have done nothing wrong but feel that the stress of the last few days has not been worth it. We hope that the MPAA can finally see that we are willing to work alongside them to resolve any disputes they may have on anything we do and hope they will next time contact us directly before they decide on a course of action.

D9 at binnews has expressed his dismay at our actions but understands them. We feel we are far more than an indexing site and although what we have done is not illegal, feel its not worth risk for us to pursue. However D9 has expressed he will continue the fight and would welcome your support on these matters. We wish him well.

If, after we move, restructure and remodel, negativity becomes the main voice on the site, we will be forced to close. We hope it doesn't come to that and hope each and every member understands our need to evolve. If you still have a passion for DVD in any form (be it games, movies, or technology) we hope you'll become an active member.

We wish to thank every active member and hope you can see our actions as just.

Thank you

Descds

http://www.dvdrs.net/





Senate Bill to Address Fears of Blocked Access to Net
Ken Belson

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others.

The bill is meant to ease growing fears that open Internet access may be blocked or compromised by the Bell phone carriers and cable operators, which may create tiers of service for delivering content to consumers, much the way the post office charges more for overnight mail delivery than for regular delivery.

Consumer groups and Internet companies like Google and Amazon contend that any move by the network operators to levy fees for premium delivery service would harm Web sites that are unwilling to pay for faster delivery.

The Wyden legislation, called the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, aims to prohibit network operators from assessing charges that give some content providers better access than others or blocking its subscribers from accessing content.

"You best compete by letting every company play on a level field, but these proposals would tilt the field," Senator Wyden said of the plans discussed by some network operators. "The Net has been about access and equal treatment and giving everyone a fair shake, and people who own these fat pipes, these cable and telecommunications people who say that they can't keep doing this, want to undermine that."

He added that his bill would prevent network operators from giving preferential treatment to affiliated companies. Time Warner Cable, he said, should not be able to give other Time Warner companies better access to the network than their rivals.

The bill more squarely confronts the concerns of consumer groups than a broader bill proposed last summer by Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, which would prevent Internet service providers from blocking access, but would largely leave network operators to manage their own networks, including potentially charging content providers for a premium service.

That bill has won support from 16 Republican senators.

The Federal Communications Commission has largely stood on the sidelines as this debate as evolved. Though the commission has said it supports the principle of open, undifferentiated access to the networks, it has not taken any regulatory action.

"One reason I'm hesitant to have the commission jump in is because we don't want to impede companies' ability to invest," said Kevin Martin, the commission chairman.

Phone and cable companies largely agree that they should have the right to offer Internet companies the option of paying for faster delivery of their content. They argue that since traffic over their networks is rising, companies may want to pay to ensure that their Web sites can be accessed quickly by consumers.

Executives at Verizon, for instance, want to give companies a chance to buy a dedicated link to Verizon's customers so that their data would be set apart from general traffic on the network.

But consumer groups say that creating a "fast lane" for those who can pay would ultimately result in a series of "walled" networks run by the phone and cable companies, which is very different from the open Internet model that exists now.

"We're concerned that even if you have a robust basic Internet and higher-speed lane, they will only make it available to their favorite partners, and that's discrimination," said Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that focuses on telecommunications and intellectual property issues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/te.../02online.html





iTunes, One Billion Suckers Served
Thomas hawk

ABC News: iTunes: One Billion Served Crank up the old PR and spin machine. Apple today announced their one billionth iTunes download today. The song? Speed of Sound by Coldplay.

"Over one billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs.


Personally I've never bought an iTune and I don't own an iPod. I think Apple's DRM is awful and represents a major step back for us all. I think those that are investing in iTune digital libraries are suckers. You are basically betting that Apple's proprietary DRM laced format will be the standard for the rest of your life. You are paying too much for your music and tying yourself to only Apple products going forward. More innovative ways to play your music may indeed come in the future but unless they are marketed by Apple you will not likely be able to use these devices with your iTunes files due to Apple's tight proprietary control.

Personally I want nothing to do with it. I still collect my digital music the old fashioned way, I rip it straight from CDs to crystal clear high bit rate DRM free mp3s. These files of course can be played on any device and represent better value in my opinion for today's consumer.

What happens when the killer phone is finally here? You know the one, built in terabyte of storage, lightening fast file transfer speeds, full satellite radio, a breathalyzer, your car and house key, a tiny little thing the size of credit card with a 12 mega pixel camera on it (hey it's the future right, we can dream). What happens when this phone is out and you really want it and unfortunately Apple didn't make it? That's right, you're a sucker then aren't you. I thought so. You paid all that good money for your iTunes and now you can't put them on your new phone because your new phone threatens Apple's dominance. So who owns the music anyway? You or them? They do. You bought nothing. You bought the right to play their song on their product. It might work today. But I'm not about to bet that this will be the format du jour 10 years from now.

Of course the record labels won't care about you being screwed because they'll be happy to just have you buy your same music all over again. Just like you did when you bought it on LP, then cassette, then CD then from iTunes. Why charge you once when they can keep charging you over and over and over again?

And if you think Apple will be opening up their proprietary format anytime soon, think again. Apple makes virtually nothing on their iTunes downloads, after paying the labels, marketing costs, bandwidth costs, etc. they make peanuts. They make a *ton* of money on the other hand on selling iPods. This was the genius deal between Steve Jobs and the hacks over at the record labels who are just as big of suckers as you are and basically have done nothing but cannibalize existing more lucrative CD sales. They were short sighted and never thought to try to get a piece of the hardware sale and now they are yammering on about raising iTunes prices on you because they are bitter dogs over the screwing that Jobs gave them. Jobs of course is quick to turn around and call them greedy hacks, but can anyone here say "pot" "black".

They will do everything they can to protect this market including screwing over you the customer who mistakenly thought you bought a song from them.

Above and beyond all though this has done absolutely zero to stop online digital music piracy despite Jobs' central point in Apple's spin release this morning.

Just look at the latest P2P numbers from BigChampagne, and I'm not even going to get into BitTorrent which makes the numbers BigChampagne tracks look tiny. And this does not even begin to scratch all of the other ways that music is being traded. Let me ask you a question. Can you rip your friends CD on your PC? Yeah I guess you can. Can you rip your brother's CD on your PC? Yep this works too. Can you copy your entire digital music library of 100,000 mp3s and give a copy to your brother on Seagate 500 gig drive? Theoretically it's possible right? What about sneakernet? Again, theoretically. Would it be possible to send that same hard drive via the U.S. mail to your new friend that you met last month on your My Space account? And would it be considered sharing if he sent it back to you in the mail full of his own 70 or 80 thousand favorite tunes. Welcome to the darknet ladies and gentlemen.

And what if you are just dying to get the latest CD from that hot new band. Again, theoretically, would it be possible to go down to Amoeba records, buy it for $14, take it home and rip it, then return it within 7 days to get 75% credit back? What's that like $3.50 for the new CD? And with 12 songs that's like what 29 cents a track? Hmmm... would I rather have a crystal clear high bit rate mp3 track for 29 cents or a sure to be antiquated DRM bloated track from iTunes for 99 cents?

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating piracy here, per se. But the way I see it, if Apple is going to go to war with me the consumer to lock up my music and keep it off my innovative new devices of the future, then this doesn't really represent a valid step forward away from piracy at all.

It will also be interesting to hear what Xeni Jardin has to say about the billionth download later tonight. I can't tell if she was on World News Tonight Last night or will be on next Thursday. I'll try to find out.

Also for more on the iTunes saga be sure and check out downhill battle's great site on the subject.

And..... let the Appleheaded fan boys flame comments begin.....5, 4, 3, 2, 1… now.

http://thomashawk.com/2006/02/itunes...ved.html#links















Until next week,

- js.


















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


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

[telefunkin_u47]

Canada is "nearly a piracy haven. And I'm astonished that those words are even coming out of my lips for Canada!," he said in an interview from London. "The laws are too lenient and [Canada has] one of the worst peer-to-peer, file-sharing statistics in the world."


---------He forgot to mention that we are one of the only countries where blank media(cd's, hard drives and mp3 players) have a mandatory percentage added to the price which is then distributed to canadian recording labels.