Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 11th, ’06

[JackSpratts]

"Back doors are simply not acceptable. Besides, they wouldn't find anybody on this team willing to implement and test the back door." – Niels Ferguson


"It's not like having a policeman inside your computer, it's like having a mafioso inside your computer, playing by whatever rules he decides." – Nelson Pavlosky


"One would have thought they'd make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn't threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives." – Ed Felton


"We were willing to go out and replace all our computers with Macs just to be happy with the iPod. Really and truly, it's like a child to me." – Aliza Loewy


"I open up my network, leave it wide open for anyone to jump on. I'm sticking it to the man." – Elaine Ball


"On a family vacation this summer we needed to get access. I said, 'O.K., let's drive around the beach with the window open.' We found a signal, and the owner of the network was none the wiser. It took about five minutes." – Mike Wolf


"I'm a grandmother. They're not going to yell at an old lady. I'll just play the dumb card." – Beth Freeman


"So far this year, album sales have declined about 3 percent from a year ago. But if every 10 [digital] singles sold so far were bundled together and counted as albums, sales would be up about 2 percent." – Jeff Leeds


"All respondents were relaxed about their personal habits when working remotely. While about 39% of respondents of both sexes said they wear sweats while working from home, 12% of males and 7% of females wear nothing at all." – SonicWALL Survey


"Popping the collar that is huge. It's like life at New Milford High School. If you don't have your collar popped, you are not cool." – Amy Donahue


"You don't have to know many things to do a botnet like this." – Witlog





































March 11th, ’06






Copy Cats

Local Students Lead The Fight Against Efforts To Limit File Sharing
Daniel McQuade

"If you can't rip it, you got ripped off!"

A tall black-haired kid thrusts fliers into the hands of people passing by Tower Records on South Street.

He's being loud. But he's not advertising any promotion at Tower. In fact, Tower employees emerge from the store shortly after he starts handing out fliers, asking him to move away from the door and threatening to call the cops if he doesn't.

He moves. The other group members look kind of embarrassed. "Sometimes Bill gets a little too into it," laughs Luke Smith, a Swarthmore senior and one of the co- founders of the group organizing last Saturday's protest.

The group is called Free Culture, named for Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig's book of the same name. The national chapter of the group was launched in April 2004 by then-Swarthmore sophomores Smith and Nelson Pavlosky.

The two filed a lawsuit against voting machine giant Diebold, which had been issuing cease-and-desist orders to anyone hosting embarrassing leaked internal emails. The pair argued that posting the leaked Diebold emails-which exposed flaws in, among other things, Florida voting machines in the contested 2000 presidential race-was simply fair use.

Then a surprising thing happened. Diebold decided to stop fighting the distribution of their internal memos. Smith and Pavlosky had won.

A movement was born.

What began as a two-person movement at Swarthmore has spread to more than 30 campuses across the world. There are now chapters at Bryn Mawr and Penn and at schools in places as far away as Peru and South Africa.

"We're really concerned about cultural participation," Pavlosky says. "We think people should be free to build upon the past and build upon the world around them to make art to engage in discussion over issues."

Free Culture focuses on myriad related issues. Among the group's main concerns are reforming copyright law, protecting technical innovation and freedom of information, and encouraging the adoption of open-source software-i.e., software (like Mozilla Firefox) for which source code can be downloaded and that's created collaboratively by volunteers.

Members came to the group for different reasons. When they sued Diebold, Smith and Pavlosky hadn't even voted in a presidential election and were hardly looking to make names for themselves as voting-machine activists. (They became interested in the debate through the tech geek website Slashdot and open-source operating system Linux, respectively.)

Rebekah Baglini, a Bryn Mawr junior who heads up that campus' chapter, became interested in the group because of her work with scholarly journals as a linguistics major.

"I'm probably going to be in academia for quite a while," she says. "And I want to make sure that important scholarly work can be available to anyone who wants it."

Saturday's protest focused on educating consumers about digital rights management (DRM), which is one way companies protect digital media. It's come into widespread use only in the past few years.

With DRM-which is included on some new CDs and on mp3s purchased from online music stores-a consumer might not be able to play a CD on a computer, copy a CD, rip tracks to mp3 or play an mp3 on a computer not authorized by the company that originally sold the song, for example. (The most popular online music store, Apple's iTunes, allows a user to authorize up to five computers to play music purchased online.)

The anti-DRM movement, spearheaded by groups like Free Culture and by blogger Cory Doctorow's posts on the blog BoingBoing, hit critical mass late last year, when CDs released by Sony installed a secret program similar to those used by hackers on people's computers. Uninstalling the program, called a rootkit, would break a user's Windows system.

"It's not like having a policeman inside your computer," Pavlosky says. "It's like having a mafioso inside your computer, playing by whatever rules he decides."

Saturday's South Street protest went on for about two hours-until the group ran out of fliers. While members of some of the Free Culture chapters will soon be graduating-Smith and Pavlosky finish up at Swarthmore this spring-they all vow to keep up the activism.

"DRM may not seem so dire on the surface, but it's part of a dehumanizing trend in our society," Pavlosky says. "Companies seem to want to limit new creative works. That's a troublesome trend."
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=11669





Fight for your right…to party

Yes, the MPAA Is Suing Us

As Reported Everywhere, MPAA issued a press release that thay are now suing isoHunt.com, TorrentBox.com, and a number of other BitTorrent, eDonkey and Newsgroup indexing sites. I still have yet to receive a formal cease and desist letter directly from MPAA Legal, but all seems to indicate this is for real and it's only a matter of time.

This is somewhat a followup to the series of MPAA letters we've received a year ago.

At this point, it is still uncertain what they are actually suing us for, considering we have a thorough copyright policy outlining our stance and takedown procedures. It is sad that despite our best efforts in cooperating with copyright owners, in both disabling copyright infringing links to their works everyday while for others, helping them distribute their works globally and cheaply using P2P technologies, it is still not enough for the MPAA. Have they ever learned from the VCR or Napster? When will corporations stop fighting technology and learn to embrace it to benefit all of us?

To this end, us, isoHunt.com and TorrentBox.com, are forming a coalition together with other P2P operators being sued and yet to be sued, and if possible with the help of the EFF, we will fight for the right for technological progress and the legality of the search engine itself. It is too early right now to say what we need for help from you, but if the MPAA will not back down, I'm sure we are going to need your help. And no, we will not go the way of LokiTorrent or Suprnova.

Anyways, nobody panic, and let the torrents flow. If you like to talk to us live and chat with other fellows in the community, come chat on IRC on #isoHunt on P2P-IRC (SSL enabled on port 7000, you need a client like mIRC ). We'll update as we learn more.


UPDATE 26/02: Of all the P2P sites being sued I am in contact with, none of us have received anything directly from MPAA yet regarding their pending lawsuits. And so far we are not aware of any US court cases that has actually been filed yet against us.

UPDATE 28/02: It's official now, lawsuits have been filed against us and all the sites as mentioned in MPAA's press release. I have to say I am impressed by the depth of their legal research, evidently their lawyers have been watching us for at least a year, since we exchanged letters last year. However, their core accusation is false. We do NOT operate this search engine and other P2P services for the express object of infringing MPAA's copyrights, there are many other torrents of content we index that are not owned by the MPAA, copyrighted or non-copyrighted. We would comply with DMCA takedown requests, given sufficient identification. Which they did not.

We are looking for legal representation and working with the EFF. We will fight this, but we need your help. First, we need money. Estimated legal fees will be at least $20,000 per month. I will be opening a legal defense fund, you will see it on the frontpage here when it's up. Other than your financial support, which you have our best thanks, we also need media attention. Give us as much buzz as possible, or we will get buried in MPAA's "burn the pirates" campaign. We need to get our side of the story out, that we are willing to work with the MPAA and turn P2P into the new VCR. I have asked in a poll in the past, on how much is a TV episode download worth? Most of your responses varied between $0, with commercial, to $2. And I'm already working with a TV show producer who sees the potential of this. Why can't the MPAA?

So, if you know any news reporter, be it local or national, online or on dead paper, we are happy to talk! Please send all media inquiries to <media a-t isohunt.com>.
http://isohunt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38933





There’s a riot going on

uTorrent Sign Six Month PeerFactor Agreement
Michael Ingram

According to a statement by PeerFactor, the lead eveloper of µTorrent, Ludvig Strigeus, has agreed to help develop “new content distribution applications on the Web”.

The developer has signed a contract with PeerFactor for an initial six month evaluation period.

Since the public release of uTorrent in September, the client has risen to the number one spot on Slyck’s list of BitTorrent clients for Windows, as voted by users. This is mostly due to the tiny memory usage, which is around 6MB, compared to second most popular, Azureus, which is typically over 70MB. Yet uTorrent remains feature- rich.

By developing the PeerFactor software, which uses the BitTorrent protocol, Strigeus will be entitled to a share of any advertising revenue generated by the final product.

This move into the authorised distribution market is a step away from anti-P2P technology for PeerFactor, which was a subsidiary of French anti-piracy group RetSpan. The two companies became independent companies six months ago.

PeerFactor shot to notoriety in April 2004 by giving financial rewards to file sharers for spreading fake files and directing downloaders to authorised download sites.

News that µTorrent are selling their software will fuel speculation as to why uTorrent has remained close source, which is extremely uncommon for BitTorrent clients.

This is not of concern to Strigeus, who told Slyck News, “This doesn't affect µTorrent, it's just a side project. If people like to be paranoid, I won't stop them.”

Strigeus denies that he is helping PeerFactor fight the P2P community by providing the coding.

“The agreement says that the software will be used to distribute legal content over the internet. In my understanding, everything in our agreement says that it will be used for downloading legal content,” Strigeus told Slyck News.

Although Strigeus rejects that he knew PeerFactor’s history of attacking and disrupting P2P networks, he defends working with the company now he does know.

“Just because I sell cleaning services to Microsoft doesn't mean I like Windows.”

Update: Please note there is a correction to this article. It was originally reported that PeerFactor is a subsidiary of RetSpan. The two companies parted ways six months ago.

PeerFactor deny ever being involved in anti-P2P operations, despite the reports to the contrary.

“We do not distribute any fake file over P2P, but only useful content,” Frenchman Richard Rodrigues, head of PeerFactor told Slyck. “We have never distributed fakes file (unreadable) because no user would […] want to distribute [them]."
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1117





PG2 Blocks Utorrent.com
Ben Jones

Biggest news in the past few days in the p2p world is the Retspan story. Lots of inaccuracies and condemnations of Ludvig Strigeus (aka ludde) over his deal with peerfactor, subsidiary of Retspan, an anti-p2p association. Some claim its the end of the world, that the client will serve Retspan directly, and through the licensing of a single DLL file, ludde is permanently tainted as a traitor to p2p.

To this end, the current version of PG2+blocklist will block attempts to even visit the µtorrent website. The block gives the message "utorrent.com works for anti- p2p RetSpan". Mr. Strigeus described the block as 'ridiculous' and called for it to be removed. One of the admins at PG2, gong by the name "phrosty" blamed it on BlueTack, provider of their blocklist.

Over at BlueTack, admin "fa" appeared unaware of what the connection was between Mr. Strigeus and PeerFactor. When asked why the block was added, with the natural suggestion of "ignorance of what was actually going on" 'fa' replied "fuck you". Then, to Mr. Strigeus, present with me in their IRC channel, " you better pick the peeps you work for a littel better if you wanna make utorrent apps. its staying int"

Clearly BlueTack is not concerned about accuracy in any shape or form. A log of the discussion follows

[16:18.24] <+ludde> can you remove the silly PG2 "utorrent works for RetSpan" thing? I don't work for Retspan and I never will.
[16:30.45] <@fa> well, what is it that you are doing for them then?
[16:32.23] <@fa> or with them
[16:32.28] <+ludde> I'm providing a DLL file to PeerFactor, that they can use to download content through the BitTorrent protocol. It does not have any features for getting IPs or anything from users, it can only be used to download stuff.
[16:32.33] <+Benjones> I think thats been widely published everywhere
[16:32.50] <+ludde> exactly.
[16:33.56] <+Benjones> so, why was the block added?
[16:34.06] <+ludde> ignorance?
[16:34.32] <@fa> fuck you
[16:35.09] <@fa> you better pick the peeps you work for a littel better if you wanna make utorrent apps
[16:35.15] <@fa> its staying int
[16:36.24] <@fa> lol
[16:36.40] <+ludde> fa: utorrent is not related to anti- p2p. I don't see what the reason for the block is.
[16:37.10] <@fa> helping anti-p2p in any way is relating it to it
[16:37.43] <+ludde> I'm not helping anti-p2p. I'm helping a company (separate from retspan) that wants to provide a download service.
[16:37.45] <@fa> and yes, if you did the same for microsoft, you would have made the list as well
[16:38.00] <+ludde> so, microsoft is on the list?
[16:38.01] <@fa> staying in till the source is public
[16:38.27] <+ludde> that is not going to happen.
[16:39.23] <@fa> we have a list jsut for M$ yes
[16:39.46] <+ludde> fa: utorrent is not in any way related to anti-p2p. I'm just selling an "off the shelf" DLL product to PeerFactor, more or less.
[16:39.48] <@fa> they are the biggest anti-p2p organization
[16:40.23] <+ludde> this agreement is not about µTorrent.
[16:40.30] <+ludde> so I don't see why you punish utorrent.
[16:41.57] <+ludde> fa: can you remove the block please? If I was anti-p2p, I would never have created utorrent.
[16:42.32] <@fa> everyone should get to make the Decision for themselves, first they need to see that you have worked with them, then they can choose to use the app or not
[16:42.43] <@fa> the block is the best way atm to show peeps
[16:43.33] <+ludde> why put the decision on the people? They don't have enough information to tell what the deal is about. they just have the information provided by media, which is written in a way to generate attraction.
[16:44.25] <+ludde> this deal is really nothing, they contract doesn't even MENTION µTorrent.
[16:44.27] <@fa> the whole thing is dodgy as hell, they prolly needed that dll to build an anti-p2p torrent app, and you just handed it to them

Phrosty at Phoenix Labs was also present, and said "i don't think it utorrent.com should be blocked, but it's out of control of phoenix labs until we launch our own lists (soon)". As Ludde suggested, its clear that this is a decision made from ignorance. The value of these sorts of programs has never been proven either. Whilst protecting from overt lists might well keep you from the corporate networks, no-one rely on well known sources to search for copyright infringement. If you are relying on these lists to protect you from being found and prosecuted, you're investing in a false sense of security. Whilst they act on empty rumours and show little attention for the facts in compiling their lists, it leaves the question of just what value their lists are.

Can I recommend peerguardian? not until their blocklists are compiled by people who know what they're doing.
http://neuron2neuron.blogspot.com/20...orrentcom.html





Little-Used Corner Of Net Becomes Piracy Battlefield

Movie industry sues companies that aid downloads on Usenet
Hiawatha Bray

An obscure data network technology called the Usenet has become the newest battleground between the entertainment industry and digital music and movie pirates.

Late last month, the Motion Picture Association of America filed its first-ever lawsuits against Internet companies that help people download illegally copied films over the Usenet. The association says that the companies, NZB-Zone, BinNews, and DVDRS, provide a Google-like search service for Usenet, one that lets its users find thousands of pirated films, including recent hits such as ''King Kong," ''The Chronicles of Narnia," and ''The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

The three companies did not respond to e-mail messages requesting comment. Their websites do not list physical addresses or phone numbers, and one of them, DVDRS, has apparently been shut down. Even the lawsuits filed against the companies identify them as John Does, and do not include contact information.

A successful action against the three firms could lead to more lawsuits against other Usenet index sites, such as Newzbin.com and Nfonews.com. ''A common misconception among people who use networks like these is that they're in a group that is above the law," said movie industry association spokeswoman Kori Bernards. Indeed, she said the popularity of the Usenet as a place to swap illegal files has grown recently, perhaps because the music and movie industries have successfully shut down several distributors of peer-to-peer software, the most popular means of file swapping.

In a peer-to-peer system, users run software that links their computers to thousands of others on the Internet. The users can then search each other's computers for desirable files, and download the ones they want. But it's relatively easy to identify people using such software, because each computer must reveal its unique Internet address. Entertainment industry investigators can simply join the file-sharing network, then record the addresses of all the other machines. Armed with this information, investigators have sued thousands of people for downloading files illegally.

In addition, the entertainment industry last year won a major victory at the US Supreme Court, which held that companies that distribute file- swapping software can be held liable for encouraging people to break copyright law. Since then, several major peer-to-peer software distributors have shut down, including Grokster, WinMX, and i2hub.

Meanwhile, huge numbers of illegal video and music files are traded every day on the Usenet. Invented in 1980 at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, Usenet is like a giant bulletin board, featuring tens of thousands of ''newsgroups," each devoted to a particular subject, such as baseball, computer gaming, or anthropology.

Originally separate from the Internet, the Usenet is still not as fully integrated into the network as e-mail or the World Wide Web. Many Usenet bulletin boards can be accessed through the Google search service, which maintains an index of Usenet messages. Internet companies like Verizon Communications Inc. provide their customers with Usenet access at no additional charge. However, America's biggest Internet provider, AOL, stopped offering Usenet access last year.

The Usenet also has long been a center for illegal file swapping. The Usenet accepts only files of a limited size, written in plain text. But programmers wrote software that would take any kind of file, translate it into strings of text, and chop the strings into thousands of separate files. A downloader collects these files, and uses another program to turn them back into music, movies, or pirated software. Usenet also offers the downloader an extra measure of privacy, because the Internet address of his machine is known only to the Usenet server and can't be intercepted by investigators.

The Usenet has long been one of the primary sources for the illegal files found through peer-to-peer services, according to Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne Media Measurement, a Los Angeles company that tracks illegal file downloads.

Garland compared Hollywood's attack on the Usenet companies to ''a strategic strike to cut off the supply, like a drug cartel. This is top of the food chain stuff."

Until now, it's been relatively difficult for ordinary Internet users to get at illegal Usenet files. They aren't indexed by Google, and downloading them is often a slow, painstaking process.

The three companies being sued by the movie industry use a technology that goes a long way toward solving this problem. The sites don't actually store illegal files. Instead, they offer indexes of the files based on NZB, a new search technology. NZB identifies and indexes millions of individual Usenet postings, sorting them into thousands of music and movie files. A visitor to one of the sites can type in the name of a movie and quickly get a list of the Usenet postings he must download. With software available at low cost over the Internet, a user can then connect to his Usenet account and easily download and reassemble the messages into a viewable movie.

The rise of NZB has attracted file downloaders like ''Frew," the Internet chatroom nickname of a 21-year-old network administrator in Tampa Bay, Fla. ''I have used newsgroups for a long while, but just started using NZBs to make things much easier about three months ago," wrote Frew, who didn't want to be identified for fear of prosecution. So far, Frew has downloaded ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," ''Jarhead," ''Flightplan," ''Full Metal Jacket," and ''Top Gun," among others. Frew said that he felt safe doing his downloads on Usenet, because unlike peer-to-peer systems, it's hard for investigators to identify the individual downloaders. ''The servers I use do not monitor what files you download," Frew wrote.

James Toledano, director of digital music at SafeNet Inc. in Morristown, N.J., said that Usenet trading of illegal files hasn't become a a large-scale problem yet. ''It is pretty small, but it's growing," Toledano said. One reason is that NZB downloading isn't free. The NZB search sites charge membership fees -- Binnews.com charges $5.50 a month, for instance. By contrast, peer-to-peer systems are free.
http://www.boston.com/business/techn...y_battlefield/





File Sharing? It's Great Business

Just months ago, the writing seemed to be on the wall for popular peer-to-peer technologies. How quickly things change
Bernhard Warner

When the US Supreme Court ruled last year that two popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks had knowingly facilitated mass copyright infringement, digital rights advocacy groups predicted the stifling of innovation, while Hollywood moguls cheered the decision as a victory for artists and the fatal blow to piracy.

How things can change in a few months. Today, P2P has an enormous user base using it for entirely legitimate purposes - and names from the entertainment industry such as Sky, NTL and Warner Brothers are rolling out services that rely solely on P2P technology.

Millions use the technology to make free internet-based phone calls through Skype. Academics use its grid-linking qualities to conduct scientific research. And on February 23 the technology received its highest endorsement of legitimacy yet. A group of policy makers from the European Information Technology Observatory and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) presented a study to lawmakers in Brussels calling P2P technology an important catalyst for job creation and economic growth; they advised governments to allow the proliferation of P2P applications.

"Peer-to-peer technology will be among the essential components of everyday communication ... chilling its legal use is like being against the steam engine in the 19th century," said Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, an OECD economist in its IT division.

Committed enemies

The biggest benefit of file-sharing technology may be felt in Hollywood - still a committed enemy of P2P networks.

Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group broke ranks with other studios by announcing the rollout this spring of a European TV and movie download service based on P2P technology developed by Arvato Systems, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, which owns the music giant BMG.

Expect more media conglomerates to focus on converting freeloaders into paying downloaders. Sky, working with P2P technology specialist Kontiki, is offering 200 movies and 1,000 sports highlight packages via download. The technology's ability to dice up large files enables relatively speedy downloads for viewers while minimising network bottlenecks for Sky - though it means that viewers' PCs will use their processing power and bandwidth to send parts of the files to other users, a fact some do not realise when they install the software (see http://tinyurl.COM1j02ah and http://tinyurl.com/z6uc6).

Meanwhile, the creators of BitTorrent, the popular file-sharing technology, are in discussions with movie studios, record labels and internet service providers to introduce online download services. The first such service for NTL, in which BitTorrent Inc has developed a video portal and download tool specifically for licensed content, will begin this month in select areas of Britain. The Norwegian web browser developer, Opera Software, has made BitTorrent the prominent download function for its latest Opera 9 release; more than 500,000 users downloaded the new browser in its first week.

And perhaps the most significant indication of P2P's rehabilitation came in November, when BitTorrent signed a deal with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to remove its members' copyrighted materials from BitTorrent.com's search engine.

What makes the alliance so extraordinary is that BitTorrent users are stealing business, downloading 650,000 movies daily, according to the MPAA. A year ago, lawyers might have cited such statistics as rationale for suing.

"The movie industry has seen the pain of the music industry and is determined not to go down that road," said Ashwin Navin, president and chief operating officer of BitTorrent Inc.

With more than 55 million users, some studios see BitTorrent downloads as the next DVD market. As BitTorrent traffic accounts for roughly a third of all internet traffic, telecommunications firms would like to work more closely with the outfit in a pay-for-download scheme.

BitTorrent is a vast improvement on the widespread file-sharing technology popularised by Napster in the late 9os. The latter had a central index of which computers had which files, and told your computer which computer to ask for a copy of that file. The two computers then moved the file directly. With BitTorrent, large files are chopped into manageable pieces that can be retrieved from multiple computers and reassembled into whole files. The pieces are simultaneously passed on to users, greatly reducing network congestion. The brilliance of the application is a twist on the network effect. Files passed on by the largest number of users also become the quickest to download. Not surprisingly, it has become the preferred way to download 500MB TV and film files.

One BitTorrent user who has benefited is 26-year-old Timo Vuorensola, from Tampere, Finland. Last year, Vuorensola and a crew of amateur Finnish actors and filmmakers created a feature-length Star Trek parody distributed solely over the internet. The 550MB file has been downloaded 10m times in the past six months, making it, by some estimates, Finland's most popular film.

Sell-out showings

Vuorensola's decision to offer free downloads of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning from his website (www-fi3.starwreck.com) has had unforeseen commercial results. In January, Finnish TV station Yle TV2 aired it on a Saturday night, and the film had two sold-out screenings at a Norwegian film festival. Vuorensola said he sold more than 5,000 DVD copies, bringing in more than €100,000 (£68,000). Not bad for a film that cost €13,000 to make.

His success he owes to P2P, he said. "Some people - the older generation of filmmakers not so familiar with the internet - might have seen Star Wreck as some sort of bubble, which will explode. This is not a bubble. I believe it is a new form of film-making and film distribution."

It is unlikely major studios will ever seed BitTorrent with new releases. But a generation of filmmakers is exploiting the widespread adoption of P2P. Even so, working with a technology that is difficult to control will continue to limit investment in the short term. Warner says that without strict digital rights management it would not be launching its German video-download service. And the music industry is still wary of P2P.

"Everyone agrees that P2P is a fantastic technology but we will have to see whether it can be successfully converted into a legitimate and commercially viable business model," said Adrian Strain, a spokesman for the music industry's lobbying group, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Even Vuorensola has a horror story: pirated versions of Star Wreck recently hit the market in China and Russia claiming to be a Twentieth Century Fox production starring Russell Crowe. "But these things are inevitable," he said. "Giving away something or [setting a low price for] a download is the best way to fight the piracy problem. It doesn't make sense to demonise the whole technology."

·Bernhard Warner is a technology writer based in Rome.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...726242,00.html





French Government Overturns Legalization Of File-Sharing Networks

The French government has suddenly withdrawn the "Global License" that the country's National Assembly had already approved for the legalization of file sharing, including copyrighted works, from its current proposal for controversial copyright reform. A number of parliamentarians protested vehemently when the executive filed the latest version of the bill last Tuesday evening, but thanks to the majority of the conservative governing party Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) the National Assembly nonetheless managed to prevent the opposition from having the revisions put back on the agenda.

Before the government made this move, the music industry and a number of well known singers and composers led by such veterans as Johnny Hallyday, Charles Aznavour, and Jean-Michel Jarre had protested against the "cultural flat rate" that this blanket approval of file sharing would have allegedly entailed. The artists argued that the flat fee of 8 to 12 euros that was being discussed would not have been equal to their traditional revenue from album sales. Home Secretary Nicolas Sarkozy also called file sharing "theft."

Consumer protection organization UFC-Que Choisir countered that some 10 million of France's 60 million citizens had already used Peer-2-Peer networks according to market research studies and that a business and compensation model was therefore already needed. UFC maintains that it is wrong to put the private use of works by consumers entirely under the control of companies by means of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems.

Oppositional socialist leader Jean-Marc Ayrault accused the government's harsh strategy as "a panic reaction." At the same time, his party colleague Christian Paul called for the whole reform project to be withdrawn, not just parts of it. Other representatives spoke of a "betrayal" of parliament. Christine Boutin, a representative of UMP who originally voted in favor of the P2P clause, voiced her concern that the government's plan would "drive Internet users into piracy."

Despite this criticism, Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres aims to get his proposals for a revision through parliament in the next few days. Among other things, they include a ban on private copies of DVDs. But the Minister did reduce the penalties for such non-commercial violations of copyright. After a number of upcoming debates, the final vote on the revision of copyright is to take place in mid-March.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/70605





Web Site Courts Fans Looking to Swap CDs
Alex Veiga

The firm behind a new music Web site is hoping to lure fans looking to swap their used, album-length CDs for the price it typically costs to buy a digital single.

The Web site, lala.com, allows members to list which CDs they wish to put up for trade and then use a search engine to browse for album titles being offered by other members.

Unlike eBay or other trading sites where computer users bid on goods and then arrange payment and shipping themselves, buyers on lala.com always pay $1 plus 49 cents for shipping.

Palo Alto-based la la media, which runs the Web site, sends prepaid envelopes for the site's users to mail their CDs.

The site also sells new CDs and digital album downloads at retail prices, in case someone on the Web site isn't offering a particular album.

The company began testing the site in November with select users. Prior to this week, it had 250 members trading some 12,000 CDs out of a catalog of 1.8 million album titles, said co-founder Bill Nguyen.

On Tuesday, the company expanded access to the site to people who are referred by existing members. It plans a full launch this summer.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/at...-toptechnology





Labels Halt Downloads to Increase CD Sales
Jeff Leeds

As blockbuster hits go, the R&B smash "So Sick" is hardly new territory for the 23-year-old singer known as Ne-Yo. Before crooning the song on his own album, he was a co-writer on the 2004 chart-buster "Let Me Love You" for the singer Mario.

But there's one big difference: even though fans could hear "So Sick" on the radio for the last two months, they couldn't buy it at popular online services like iTunes or Rhapsody, or anywhere else for that matter. Breaking from the music industry's current custom, the singer's label — Island Def Jam — decided not to sell "So Sick" as an individual song before Ne-Yo's album hit stores last week. Label executives worried that releasing the track too early might cut into sales of the full CD — a fear that figures heavily in the music world's lumbering entry into the digital marketplace.

The results of fans' pent-up demand for Ne-Yo are now clear: his CD "In My Own Words," burst onto the national album chart yesterday at No. 1, with sales of more than 301,000 copies, easily ranking as the biggest debut of the year so far. And just as eye-popping: the digital single of "So Sick" sold almost 120,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

There is still plenty of debate over the effect of holding off on sales of the digital single; many also note that Island Def Jam offered a discount to retailers who stocked the album, allowing it to sell at stores like Target for $7.98 last week.

But if the industry determines that restricting digital sales pays off with bigger album sales, fans may soon find the instant gratification of snapping up new songs online becoming a little less instant.

No one is talking about a wholesale shift away from the now-common practice of selling singles online ahead of new albums.

But even before Ne-Yo's big debut, some music executives fretted that they were offering too many songs too early, particularly from pop and R&B acts.

So consumers looking for some hot new songs may have trouble finding them before the corresponding albums are released. "S.O.S.," a rising radio hit from the Caribbean-born ingénue Rihanna (a label-mate of Ne-Yo), is not expected to be available for sale online before her forthcoming album. And Shakira fans will not find her new song, "Hips Don't Lie," for sale at any of the major online music services, music executives said. (Shakira's label, Epic Records, did strike a deal to sell the song to customers of Verizon's V-Cast cellphone service. "Hips" is to be included on a repackaged edition of Shakira's recent CD.)

The restricted sales are evidence that record companies are a re-examining the fledging digital music field, where consumers have become accustomed to easy — and early — access to new stars' work. In the early days of paid digital sales, major labels routinely refused to sell singles or albums online until well after the "physical" recording went on sale at brick-and-mortar stores.

Since at least 2004, however, record companies have been selling songs online at the same time they begin lobbying radio stations to play them — generating a bit of cash as each song gained popularity. Holding back on new singles now, critics charge, may end up doing more harm than good in the long run, especially if music continues to be available on free, unauthorized online networks.

"The labels are shooting themselves in the foot," said Tim Quirk, executive editor of the Rhapsody music service. To the labels, Mr. Quirk advises, "every single track that you are worried about is available for free whether you want it to be or not."

"You need to take advantage of every possible opportunity for people to pay in legitimate ways," he said.

But in the case of Ne-Yo, whose real name is Shaffer Smith, the first-week sales figures vindicate their strategy, executives say. It is impossible to know how many fans would have bought Ne-Yo's single as it became a radio smash, but the executives reckon that whatever price Island Def Jam paid in lost singles, it more than made up for in extra sales of the album, which costs more.

Contrast the Ne-Yo experience with another new R&B star, Chris Brown. He had a similarly inescapable radio hit with the song "Run It!" on the eve of his debut album's release late last year. "Run It!" was available for sale online for more than three months before his eponymous CD hit stores. During that time, Mr. Brown's song sold more than 300,000 copies. When the album finally went on sale, it sold roughly 154,000 copies in its first week — about half the sales of the Ne-Yo recording, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Steve Bartels, chief operating officer of Island Def Jam, a unit of the music giant Universal Music Group, said the early availability of hot singles online could hurt albums of consistent quality throughout.

"If you know you have something of depth, you have to be careful about how you bring it into the marketplace," he said. "We're in the business of having consumers believe in an artist. If everything is up and gone before you have a chance to listen to the album, what do you have?"

Mr. Bartels added, however, that decisions to hold back singles are being made on a case-by-case basis, and could vary widely depending on genre. He noted that the label is already selling a single from the rock band Damone, even though its album is not expected in stores until May.

It is also worth noting that, as analysts said, the single has been still heavily traded on free file-swapping networks for weeks. Ne-Yo's "So Sick" was downloaded approximately 3.4 million times on the networks during the week of his album release, according to the tracking firm BigChampagne. By comparison, Chris Brown's "Run It!" was downloaded approximately 5.3 million times during the week of his album release last year.

Elsewhere, however, as consumers shift into a world dominated by singles, custom playlists and iPod song shuffling, there are efforts under way to preserve the old- fangled album. Fans who are still willing to shell out for a full album are rewarded with exclusive bonus items: Universal Records recently offered a downloadable coloring book to fans who bought its "Curious George" soundtrack by Jack Johnson. And fans of the made-from-television band INXS who bought its full album received an exclusive bonus track.

Industry caution about early sales of singles, however, actually comes as fans are buying individual songs at such a rapid clip that they are — for the first time — regularly offsetting the decline in full album sales. So far this year, album sales have declined about 3 percent from a year ago. But if every 10 singles sold so far were bundled together and counted as albums, sales would be up about 2 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Even so, some music executives insist the "unbundling" of the album — letting fans buy individual tracks — still spells trouble.

Tony Brummel, the owner of the independent rock label Victory Records, says he is not interested in selling individual songs from his albums, though he may give them away to build buzz. The label this week captured the No. 3 spot on the chart with the new album from the emo-rock band Hawthorne Heights. The band's CD sold about 114,000 copies — a solid figure for an independent rock band, but somewhat less than expected given the label's shipments of roughly 800,000 copies. A rock album, Mr. Brummel said, "is a work of art."

"If you're buying a Picasso," he continued, "you can't just buy the upper right-hand corner."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/ar...in&oref=slogin





World Box Office Dipped 7.9 Pct to 23 Billion Dollars Last Year: Study

Hollywood movie ticket sales around the world dropped by 7.9 percent last year to 23 billion dollars, with the US box office accounting for nearly 40 percent of the haul, a study showed.

Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in 2005 to nine billion dollars, according to a study by the ratings statistics firm Nielsen Entertainment/NRG that comes as movie-goers increasingly stay out of cinemas.

The study, released by the powerful lobby group of the major Hollywood studios, the Motion Picture Association of America, however gave the industry some reason for hope amid sliding ticket receipts, the MPAA maintained.

Most movie-goers were satisfied with their recent experiences at the movies and felt the movies were a "good investment of their time and money," the Nielsen study reported.

"Despite increasing competition for consumers' time and entertainment dollars, theater-going remains a satisfying constant in people's lives," said MPAA chief executive Dan Glickman.

"That said, we can't bury our heads in the sand. We have to do more to attract customers and keep regulars coming back. It is no secret that our industry faces new challenges but with every challenge, there is an exciting opportunity," Glickman added.

The MPAA noted that eight movies had raked in more than 200 million dollars at the box office last year, compared with just five in 2004.

The total number of films released in the United States increased by 5.6 percent from 2004, while new releases by the major motion picture studios grossed an average of 37 million dollars in 2005, an increase of seven percent over the past five years," the industry group said.

Most movie-goers in 2005 went out to catch family films, with movies rated PG-13, meaning that children under 13 must be accompanied by an adult, accounting for 85 percent of the most watched films in 2005.

The MPAA also reported that the average production cost of a movie in 2005 remained below 100 million dollars and dipped slightly to 96.2 million dollars.

Marketing costs however rose by 5.2 percent, while production costs went down four percent from 2004.

The big studios that make up the MPAA spent more on network television and Internet advertising and less on newspapers and local television, the group said.

"Technology has not only changed the way people are able to view movies, it has changed the way our industry produces and advertises movies," said Glickman.

"We are exploring new ways to reach more people using innovative methods of communication and distribution. This data reflects those changes and also demonstrates the strength of the movie industry." MPAA members include the top Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Universal Studios Inc, Walt Disney Co. and 20th Century Fox.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/0....c3imi3s8.html





Peering into the Future:

Why P2P Is the Future of Media Distribution Even If ISPs Have Yet to Figure That Out
Robert X. Cringely

"If you build it, they will come."

Maybe.

Residential broadband use is still growing in America, but the rate of growth has fallen significantly according to a pair of studies covered last week in this column. This is nothing dreadful and nothing permanent, but under the current system of solely personal computers using the Internet, it will take another generation (20 years) to reach near-100 percent market penetration comparable to telephones. Ironically, by that time homes with traditional hard-wired phone lines will have dramatically decreased, showing us the other end of the bell curve as technologies become obsolete. But it doesn't have to be this way, as technology companies well know. The way to kick broadband growth back into top gear is to change the nature of the network and its interfaces, adding phones, television, and home automation to the mix. And that's why we see huge efforts in all these areas. But the point I made last week that inspires this week's column is the idea that only through peer-to-peer data distribution can this new network operate efficiently.

It is very hard to get your mind around the enormity not of the Internet, but of the Internet-on-steroids we'd need to absorb most other forms of communication and media distribution, but let's try anyway. "Desperate Housewives," in its puny 320-by-240 iTunes incarnation, occupies an average of 210 megabytes per episode. A full-resolution version would be larger still. In theory, it would be four times as big, but practically it would probably come in at double the size or 420 megabytes. But let's stick with the little iTunes version for this example.

Twenty million viewers, on average, watch "Desperate Housewives" each week in about 10 million U.S. households. That's 210 megabytes times 10 million downloads, or 2.1 petabytes of data to be downloaded per episode. Fortunately for the download business model, not everyone is trying to watch the show at the same time or in real time, so iTunes, in this example, has some time to do all those downloads. Let's give them three days. The question on the table is what size Internet pipe would it take to transfer 2.1 petabytes in 72 hours? I did the math, and it requires 64 gigabits-per-second, which would require an OC-768 fiber link and two OC- 256s to fulfill.

There isn't an Internet backbone provider with that much capacity, much less excess capacity. Fortunately, it wouldn't have to all go over a single link and could, instead, be injected centrally into the network and fan out to viewers all over the country, in which case the OC-48 and OC-192 links used by Global Crossing, Sprint, MCI and others just might be enough.

But that's just one popular show. What will we do, then, with American Idol?

Ah, but remember Moore's Law, which is going to increase our bandwidth dramatically over time! It doesn't matter. Throw 250 million viewers watching 180 channels up on the Net, raise the resolution to full broadcast then raise it again to HDTV, and even Moore's Law won't catch up. Just carrying all the viewers of "Desperate Housewives" at the current iTunes resolution won't be economically viable for another decade according to Moore's Law.

I am no Luddite. IP is the future of global communication on all levels. But adding video to the mix is so bandwidth intensive that using current techniques will push back total IP conversion for decades.

Still, there is incredible incentive to push this digital conversion and a heck of a lot of money on the line. So we'll just have to cheat.

And that brings me back to the peer-to-peer schemes I discussed a little last week. By using excess upload capacity of client nodes as repeaters, putting together 64 gigabits-per-second actually isn't that hard. Stealing 256 kilobits per client would require a total of 256,000 participating clients to do the job, which is only 2.5 percent of the total "Desperate Housewives" viewer population.

There are some who believe Bit Torrent alone can do the job, but I feel that a true media market is going to require more components than are currently offered in Bit Torrent. There have to be payment systems, rights management systems, and some underlying quality-of-service layer that can save the day just in case you are the only person in the world who wants to watch that particular episode of "The Green Hornet."

Last week, I wrote about Seattle-based Grid Networks, which has many of the networking components in place. Grid, which already has more than 100,000 active nodes, can reliably deliver massive amounts of data at bit rates as high as clients are capable of receiving. That's a key differentiator -- being able to aggregate bandwidth to deliver not only lots of data, but lots of data FAST. Grid also appears to be the only major player in this new space that plans to offer Windows, Linux, and Macintosh clients, while most of the other services seem to be Windows-only.

Another emerging player in this space is Network Foundation Technologies (NFT), a startup in Louisiana that is taking the very non-Bit Torrent approach of using a binary-tree (one parent) distribution model rather than Bit Torrent (or Grid's) multi-parent distribution. Binary-tree distribution means that every node in the network has a single parent and no more than two children, which limits the total available bandwidth per connection. So where Grid and Bit Torrent can dump a lot of data very quickly on a given client, NFT is limited to half the capacity of the node above it in the distribution tree. While this would appear to be a disadvantage, there is one very good reason for doing it: NFT's binary distribution trees support live video.

NFT's binary trees form and re-form dynamically as client nodes appear and disappear from the network. The system is based on TCP, not UDP, and has been shown to support 14 or more levels, which is enough for tens of thousands of nodes, all fed from a single master connection equivalent to DSL. That means if you are willing to live with sub-megabit bandwidth, you could start an NFT video channel from your cable modem. Every man a TV network. System delay varies from 30 seconds to two minutes, but you could watch a live football game on NFT, where you couldn't easily do so on the multi-parent systems.

The emerging Big Kahuna in commercial peer-to-peer seems to be Wurld Media's Peer Impact, which has similar technology to Grid Networks (though Windows-only), but where Grid is a networking company, Peer Impact is a media company and actually has a pretty compelling business model.

Peer Impact is up and running right now, though most of what the network has available isn't TV or music, but video games. About 1,100 video games from most major publishers except Electronic Arts are available through Peer Impact. The network has also announced it is adding video content and movies from NBC/ Universal, and says it will have all major film studios and all major record companies onboard by the end of this year.

Peer Impact is similar to iTunes in that Apple sets the price ($0.99 per song and $1.99 per show). Where Peer Impact is different is in its use of Microsoft DRM, Windows client software, and a peer-to-peer distribution scheme. But where the company is REALLY different is in its relationship to participating nodes: Peer Impact pays users.

Ten percent of gross revenue for Peer Impact goes back to the participating nodes through two different programs. The first program is simple carriage: If someone downloads a song through your node, you get paid based on what percentage of the total bytes you provided, with five percent of gross revenue devoted to that task. The other five percent is for people who actively promote certain content through fan sites, for example. If you run a web site honoring the works of John Cassavetes, it could include links to his movies. If someone downloads "Minnie and Moskowitz" through your site, you get five percent of the download fee even if you don't actually carry any of the bits. If you carry some or all of the bits, you can get up to another five percent. All this is handled through PayPal and Peer Impact assumes most participants will spend most of that on more movies, which is part of their reason for doing it this way.

Here, finally, is a business model for video distribution that makes some sense. Nobody gets rich, but members are at least partially compensated for their participation, which ought to make the network robust and explains all those content deals with studios and record companies.

The best way to make money with Peer Impact, it seems to me, is through video games, which cost up to $30 or more and can be downloaded as 30-day demos. The trick, then, is to have a game fan site, stock it with demos that establish you in the distribution system without having to actually buy the games, and collect $1.50 to $3.00 every time someone downloads through your site.

Of course, there is an argument against all of this, that the ISPs won't allow it. But understand that it is my job to look into the future, and as explained above, there simply is no alternative to this kind of solution if the Internet is to grow and subsume these more traditional media types. That means IT IS IN THE INTEREST OF THE ISPs FOR THIS TO HAPPEN. It helps them, too, by creating a distribution system that jumps 20 years ahead of Moore's Law yet not putting a significant impact on the most expensive part of their operation, their Internet backbone links. Intra-ISP bandwidth is cheap, especially if it is within the same Point of Presence or data center. Inter-ISP bandwidth is expensive. By having enough peering nodes inside the ISP, connections to the greater Internet can be minimized and costs kept under control.

In short, if this technology didn't already exist, the ISPs would have to invent it, even if they don't yet understand that concept. In time they will. In fact, it would be to their advantage to take it upstream and put the client software in the DSL or cable modem, and effectively become a reseller for peer-to-peer content.

That last bit is a frigging brilliant idea and somebody should run with it.

I've mentioned three companies here, so which will be the winners and which the losers? Right now, they all look like winners to me. Peer Impact has the business model and the distribution deals. Grid Networks is cross-platform and more flexible so it will appeal as a second standard as well as having a deep IP portfolio that could become quite strategic. And Network Foundation Technologies plays the live TV card, which means sports and news events can be watched live just like we are used to doing in the current cable and broadcast TV systems.

They could succeed on baseball, basketball, and football alone.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060302.html





In Praise Of Always-On Connectivity
Asher Moses

Contrary to popular opinion, always-on connectivity isn't eliminating our social lives. In fact, it's giving us more time to do the things we've missed whilst stuck in the 9-to-5 grind, writes Asher Moses.

There are two dominant schools of thought surrounding the impact that ubiquitous wireless networking and always-on connectivity will have on our working and personal lives. The first is that it'll totally eliminate any semblance of a social life we once had, since we'll be able to cart the office around with us wherever we go and, as a result, the demands on our productivity will increase exponentially.

The second -- and this is the one that I happen to favour -- is that rather than obliterate our social lives, always-on connectivity and the increased flexibility it brings will allow us to break free from the office and actually socialise more. Sure, you'll be on call at unusual hours of the day, but think about how much more efficient you'll be -- particularly if your most productive hours aren't between 9am and 5:30pm! And besides, all newfangled technology comes with an "off" switch should you find yourself needing some down time.

Picture this. It's 10am on Monday morning. You've just woken up and are perched in your home office, downloading the plethora of weekend e-mails that await your response. You took the liberty of sleeping in this morning, since you spent an hour or so finishing off some work in your idle time on Saturday and Sunday.

You're in the process of bashing out an e-mail when your mobile rings. It's your mate from across the street, wondering if you're able to take an hour or two out from your day to catch up for breakfast. A plate of bacon and eggs would go down nicely after the booze-infested weekend you've just had, and your stomach rumbles in agreement.

You agree to meet with your friend, save a draft of the e-mail you're currently working on, grab your PDA and head out the door. You're not worried about getting behind on your work, since you know you'll be able to pick up from where you left off wherever you are. All of your important files and applications -- including e-mail -- are stored online, so there's no need to sync your PDA with your desktop each time your leave the office. Further, the wireless network that blankets your city ensures constant access to these files, so you can continue responding to your messages whilst waiting for your food at the café.

Are you starting to see past the Luddite cries of the naysayers yet? Are the social benefits of always-on connectivity becoming more apparent? What's more, we've just touched on one of the many scenarios where a seamless, completely mobile home office could benefit you.

Ubiquitous wireless networking isn't as far away as you may think. It's already close to becoming a reality in the UK, while a number of US cities have city-wide Wi-Fi plans including San Francisco, Manhattan, New Orleans and Philadelphia. It's just a matter of time before similar ventures hit Australia.

The only other ingredient necessary for a fully mobile workforce is the storing of our most-used files and applications online, and as we've noted previously, this is also a concept that is rapidly gaining followers in both tech savvy and mainstream circles.

Ultimately, rather than working for one solid eight-hour (or longer) slog each day, your work and social lives will be mixed. This may sound scary at first, but it'll undoubtedly result in increased leisure time and greater productivity. The implications of this are truly astounding, as basic economic theory has long seen leisure time and productivity as opportunity costs of one another.
http://www.cnet.com.au/mobilecomputi...0060780,00.htm





I hear you knocking

Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless
Michel Marriott

For a while, the wireless Internet connection Christine and Randy Brodeur installed last year seemed perfect. They were able to sit in their sunny Los Angeles backyard working on their laptop computers.

But they soon began noticing that their high-speed Internet access had become as slow as rush-hour traffic on the 405 freeway.

"I didn't know whether to blame it on the Santa Ana winds or what," recalled Mrs. Brodeur, the chief executive of Socket Media, a marketing and public relations agency.

The "what" turned out to be neighbors who had tapped into their system. The additional online traffic nearly choked out the Brodeurs, who pay a $40 monthly fee for their Internet service, slowing their access until it was practically unusable.

Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else's wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture.

"I don't think it's stealing," said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment.

"I always find people out there who aren't protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it," Mr. Caroso said. He added that he tapped into a stranger's network mainly for Web surfing, keeping up with e-mail, text chatting with friends in foreign countries and doing homework.

Many who piggyback say the practice does not feel like theft because it does not seem to take anything away from anyone. One occasional piggybacker recently compared it to "reading the newspaper over someone's shoulder."

Piggybacking, makers of wireless routers say, is increasingly an issue for people who live in densely populated areas like New York City or Chicago, or for anyone clustered in apartment buildings in which Wi-Fi radio waves, with an average range of about 200 feet, can easily bleed through walls, floors and ceilings. Large hotels that offer the service have become bubbling brooks of free access that spill out into nearby homes and restaurants.

"Wi-Fi is in the air, and it is a very low curb, if you will, to step up and use it," said Mike Wolf of ABI Research, a high-technology market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

This is especially true, Mr. Wolf said, because so many users do not bother to secure their networks with passwords or encryption programs. The programs are usually shipped with customers' wireless routers, devices that plug into an Internet connection and make access to it wireless. Many home network owners admit that they are oblivious to piggybackers.

Some, like Marla Edwards, who think they have locked intruders out of their networks, learn otherwise. Ms. Edwards, a junior at Baruch College in New York, said her husband recently discovered that their home network was not secure after a visiting friend with a laptop easily hopped on.

"There's no gauge, no measuring device that says 48 people are using your access," Ms. Edwards said.

When Mr. Wolf turns on his computer in his suburban Seattle home, he regularly sees on his screen a list of two or three wireless networks that do not belong to him but are nonetheless available for use. Mr. Wolf uses his own wired network at home, but he says he has piggybacked onto someone else's wireless network when traveling.

"On a family vacation this summer we needed to get access," Mr. Wolf recalled, explaining that his father, who took along his laptop, needed to send an e-mail message to his boss on the East Coast from Ocean Shores, Wash.. "I said, 'O.K., let's drive around the beach with the window open.' We found a signal, and the owner of the network was none the wiser," Mr. Wolf said. "It took about five minutes."

Jonathan Bettino, a senior product marketing manager for the Belkin Corporation, a major maker of wireless network routers based in Compton, Calif., said home- based wireless networks were becoming a way of life. Unless locking out unauthorized users becomes commonplace, piggybacking is likely to increase, too.

Last year, Mr. Bettino said, there were more than 44 million broadband networks among the more than 100 million households in the United States. Of that number, 16.2 million are expected to be wireless by the end of this year. In 2003, 3.9 million households had wireless access to the Internet, he said.

Humphrey Cheung, the editor of a technology Web site, tomshardware.com, measured how plentiful open wireless networks have become. In April 2004, he and some colleagues flew two single-engine airplanes over metropolitan Los Angeles with two wireless laptops.

The project logged more than 4,500 wireless networks, with only about 30 percent of them encrypted to lock out outsiders, Mr. Cheung said.

"Most people just plug the thing in," he said of those who buy wireless routers. "Ninety percent of the time it works. You stop at that point and don't bother to turn on its security."

Martha Liliana Ramirez, who lives in Miami, said she had not thought much about securing her $100-a-month Internet connection until recently. Last August, Ms. Ramirez, 31, a real estate agent, discovered a man camped outside her condominium with a laptop pointed at her building.

When Ms. Ramirez asked the man what he was doing, he said he was stealing a wireless Internet connection because he did not have one at home. She was amused but later had an unsettling thought: "Oh my God. He could be stealing my signal."

Yet some six months later, Ms. Ramirez still has not secured her network.

Beth Freeman, who lives in Chicago, has her own Internet access, but it is not wireless. Mostly for the convenience of using the Internet anywhere in her apartment, Ms. Freeman, 58, said that for the last six months she has been using a wireless network a friend showed her how to tap into.

"I feel sort of bad about it, but I do it anyway," Ms. Freeman said her of Internet indiscretions. "It just seems harmless."

And if she ever gets caught?

"I'm a grandmother," Ms. Freeman said. "They're not going to yell at an old lady. I'll just play the dumb card."

David Cole, director of product management for Symantec Security Response, a unit of Symantec, a maker of computer security software, said consumers should understand that an open wireless network invites greater vulnerabilities than just a stampede of "freeloading neighbors."

He said savvy users could piggyback into unprotected computers to peer into files containing sensitive financial and personal information, release malicious viruses and worms that could do irreparable damage, or use the computer as a launching pad for identity theft or the uploading and downloading of child pornography.

"The best case is that you end up giving a neighbor a free ride," Mr. Cole said. "The worst case is that someone can destroy your computer, take your files and do some really nefarious things with your network that gets you dragged into court."

Mr. Cole said Symantec and other companies had created software that could not only lock out most network intruders but also protect computers and their content if an intruder managed to gain access.

Some users say they have protected their computers but have decided to keep their networks open as a passive protest of what they consider the exorbitant cost of Internet access.

"I'm sticking it to the man," said Elaine Ball, an Internet subscriber who lives in Chicago. She complained that she paid $65 a month for Internet access until she recently switched to a $20-a-month promotion plan that would go up to $45 a month after the first three months.

"I open up my network, leave it wide open for anyone to jump on," Ms. Ball said.

For the Brodeurs in Los Angeles, a close reading of their network's manual helped them to finally encrypt their network. The Brodeurs told their neighbors that the network belonged to them and not to the neighborhood. While apologetic, some neighbors still wanted access to it.

"Some of them asked me, 'Could we pay?' But we didn't want to go into the Internet service provider business," Mrs. Brodeur said. "We gave some weird story about the network imposing some sort of lockdown protocol."

Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Miami for this article, and Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/te...wireless.html?





The High-Speed Money Line
Ken Belson

Are consumers going to start having to spend a lot more to surf the Web?

Phone and cable companies have stoked those fears recently by floating plans that would have Amazon, Yahoo and other Web sites paying new fees to ensure that their content will be delivered to customers faster.

This possibility has raised the prospect that consumers may end up having to pay twice for access to the Internet — once to the phone or cable company that sells them a dial-up or broadband line, and again to Internet companies that pass along new charges for fast access to content from their sites.

Late last year, the Bells proposed to share the burden of upgrading their networks — particularly as big video files, which take up a lot of bandwidth on the networks, become more common — with the companies sending out that data. The plan quickly drew fire from consumer groups, technology companies and lawmakers eager to preserve open access to the Internet and fearful that the Bell companies have too much power.

Those worries were highlighted yesterday when AT&T announced plans to buy BellSouth for $67 billion, a merger that would create a telecommunications giant with $130 billion in sales and 70 million local phone customers in 22 states.

If a plan like the one the Bells are proposing were to come into effect, consumer prices might not increase immediately, consumer advocates, industry analysts and telecommunications executives say. But one way or another, consumers are likely to shell out more in the future for Web content.

The reason, they say, is simple. As Internet traffic booms and competition intensifies, the phone and cable companies are spending billions of dollars to expand their networks — and they want someone to help them foot the bill.

"The networks of today have to be upgraded," said Carl Russo, the chief executive of Calix, a company that sells Internet television equipment. "You can push this bag around all you want, but at the end of the day, we will pay for it."

The most obvious tactic would be to raise consumers' subscription rates. But Mr. Russo and others say that is unpalatable to the Bells, which portray themselves as the low-cost broadband providers, and even harder for cable companies, which already charge subscribers premium prices for their faster connections.

The government is unlikely to fork over any money to help the cable and phone companies expand their networks. Lawmakers would be pilloried if they used taxpayer dollars to subsidize the highly profitable telecommunications companies directly. So phone and cable companies are turning to a new source: Web content providers. For the most part, the Internet sites now get a free ride because network operators have to transport equally all data that travels on their networks. Some content providers do buy extra servers so that consumers can zip around their sites more quickly, but they absorb that cost themselves.

The idea of the service providers is to create a system where Web sites can, for a fee, bump their data into a kind of fast lane, where it will not be mixed in with everyone else's. A mom-and-pop online retailer might consider this unnecessary, but a company selling, say, videos online could see it as crucial.

"If other players want to take advantage of our network and need something to make their applications available to consumers, we will work with them as partners," said Thomas J. Tauke, executive vice president of public affairs, policy and communications at Verizon. "We anticipate that they will develop applications that need more bandwidth" in the future.

Companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google fear that if they do not buy faster access, they could end up in a slow lane.

The Bells contend that the fast lanes they are proposing will not slow down other traffic because their networks are big enough to accommodate everyone.

"No one service takes away from the other because of the huge pipes," Mr. Tauke said of his company's network.

Some critics are skeptical and say the Bells' plans to sell television routed over their networks will leave less space for other content. Regardless, if two tiers of delivery speed were offered, content providers would feel compelled to get the faster service if only to keep up with their rivals who had the service. That could become costly.

"There's no limit to what they could charge for this high-speed lane and they could make the slow-speed lane as slow as they want," said Rich Tehrani, president of Technology Marketing Corporation, a media company that promotes Internet phone service. "There's no way to know today what the prices might be, but it could be anything, and that's the fear."

Mr. Tehrani and others fear that companies that compete with the network providers — for instance, the Internet phone provider Vonage — may not get the chance to sign up for faster access, even if they want it.

But the phone and cable industries have powerful allies in Congress who are already proposing legislation that would let them introduce this tiered service. If the telecommunications companies get their way, the most obvious candidates to pay for the premium service are companies that offer videos, music and other data-heavy products. Consumer advocates worry that if Apple, which runs the iTunes site, starts paying network operators for faster access, it may try to offset the cost by raising the price of a downloadable TV show, now $1.99, by a dime or two.

But the charge-for-delivery model is already under attack in a slightly different forum. A collection of public interest groups are protesting a plan by America Online to charge high-volume senders of e-mail fees for guaranteed premium delivery of their messages. The groups fear that charities, small businesses and others that do not pay the fees will be at a disadvantage.

As an alternative, Apple or other content providers that sign up for premium delivery could set up tiered services of their own. They could, for example, create premium sites where customers would pay annual subscription fees to download songs and videos faster than at the company's free site.

The trouble is that only the most passionate iTunes fans might pay for a subscription, analysts say, so Apple could be forced to absorb the cost of paying network operators for access to their "fast lanes."

"Economics 101 says that if iTunes raises its rates, some consumers will switch to other music download sites, download fewer songs or even make more illegal downloads," said Bruce Leichtman, who runs the Leichtman Group, a market research group which follows the cable and phone industries. "The higher price would lower demand in some shape or form."

Another possibility, critics say, is that smaller Web sites would be crowded out. A big company like Apple, they argue, has the money to pay network providers for faster access and absorb the cost. But mom-and-pop online Web sites might not. If they were unable to compete with bigger, faster sites, the result could be less diversity of content on the Internet.

"Tollbooths and gatekeepers are the exact opposite of what the Internet is all about," said Michael J. Copps, a Democratic commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission. "Down that route consumers can count on paying more and getting less — less content, fewer services and reduced innovation."

The big network operators argue that they would never deliberately slow or block access to Web sites, because doing so would raise a furor in Washington. Besides, they say, angry consumers could switch Internet providers in protest.

That may be true in big cities like New York and Washington, where there is a variety of Internet service providers. But in many other cities, there are typically two and sometimes only one broadband provider — the cable or phone company.

In many cases, "there's nowhere else to go," said Paul Misener, the vice president of global public policy at Amazon. "The market power that these folks have is real, and it is not going to change any time soon."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/te...roadband.html?





Vonage Protests Special Fees On VoIP Telephones
CBC News

Vonage Canada, a leading provider of internet telephones, wants federal regulators to investigate what it calls a "thinly veiled VoIP tax" by one of its competitors.

Joe Parent, vice-president of marketing for Vonage Canada, said Tuesday that Shaw Communications was using the so-called tax to unfairly drive up VoIP prices in Western Canada.

He filed a request to the CRTC asking for an investigation.

"Shaw's VoIP tax is an unfair attempt to drive up the price of competing VoIP services to protect its own high-priced service," Parent claimed, adding that Shaw charges a fee whenever Vonage customers route their calls over Shaw's internet lines.

The case is one part of a growing battle across North America between internet providers and their users.

Internet companies such as Shaw want to charge extra fees whenever people use their lines. The users naturally disagree, saying they already support the internet providers through their monthly bills.

Much of the controversy is around VoIP calls, an acronym for Voice over Internet Protocol, a system whereby telephone calls are routed through a computer internet service instead of the usual telephone system.

Long-distance calls are considerably cheaper because the user does not have to pay telephone charges.

In his announcement Tuesday, Parent said Shaw wants its high-speed internet customers to pay a $10 "quality of service enhancement" fee if they use a VoIP phone service from a provider such as Vonage Canada. He said Shaw argues that its fee is necessary to maintain the quality of independent VoIP services.

Shaw did not immediately return a telephone call to its head office in Calgary.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/business/nat...ge-060307.html





Taming ‘Over-The-Top’ Services

PCMM balances sub satisfaction, network capacity and capital
Barry Hardek

Most industry veterans acknowledge that bandwidth has long been the advantage that cable has held over competitive access technologies. Hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) networks have been modified in myriad, creative ways to expand network capacity. The continuing evolution of HFC distribution systems has allowed the cable industry to offer incremental services horizontally (more video channels and types) as well as vertically (data and voice), while maintaining some amount of overhead for future services and applications.

Cable’s unique ability to maintain the equilibrium between network capacity and bandwidth utilization is what has made this expansion not only possible, but fundable as well. HFC networks have proven to be exceedingly adaptive, but capacity always comes at a price, especially when bandwidth expansion efforts ripple across thousands of miles of physical plant, touching thousands of homes along the way.

Increasingly, the relationship between revenue, investment, and bandwidth utilization is eroding. In recent times, peer-to-peer (P2P) services (primarily audio file sharing services) have absorbed a disproportionate amount of network capacity on cable data networks with no corresponding revenue contribution. Dealing with this application put many operators in the awkward position of containing the “few” to better serve the “many,” bolstered only by the fact that much of the P2P traffic is being used to support the illegal duplication of copyrighted material.

Unlike these first-generation P2P applications, a new breed of “over-the-top” (OTT) services will put cable operators in a more contentious position. Some distinguishing characteristics of these new OTT services are as follows:

• Video as the predominant form of distributed content - Video content requires five to 50 times more bandwidth than audio files, affecting both the bandwidth and session length of each user session–both of which are critical factors in network traffic models and system design.

• Lawful content distribution - The concept of lawful content distribution is becoming increasingly complex, with subscriber-activity largely based on the adage, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

• Peer-to-peer seeding schemes for video content - P2P (used by some, but not all, second-generation OTT services) stands to dramatically impact traffic modeling metrics, all of which are designed to manage “peak” utilization periods.

In theory, cable operators have the tools at their disposal in the form of node splits, advanced modulation techniques (DOCSIS 2.0), and even channel bonding (DOCSIS 3.0) to address their capacity issues for years to come. The gaps between theory and practice, however, is proving to be substantial, and the implementation of these advanced capabilities may be outpaced by evolving usage patterns and video-rich applications.

Conventional bandwidth expansion challenges

Up to now, network capacity has effectively been able to outpace utilization, with bandwidth-per-user increasing at a rate of 10 percent to 30 percent per year. But what happens as network traffic becomes increasingly video-based, resulting in user sessions that consume exponentially more bandwidth for longer durations?

Node splits–the first line of defense for expanding network capacity–can potentially cut serving area size in half, but this approach has complex network operational implications, not to mention significant construction costs and timing constraints. And evidence suggests that employing DOCSIS 2.0/advanced PHY techniques as a bandwidth expansion solution is equally unattractive. To date, no cable operator in North America has deployed DOCSIS 2.0 in a meaningful way, stemming from the complexities of intermingling different modulation schemes. Some suggest that DOCSIS 3.0 may represent a more viable solution than DOCSIS 2.0, but any next generation solution is only effective to the extent that compatible CPE is deployed in the field, and no DOCSIS 3.0 CPE devices are readily available today. As a practical matter, node splits and advanced modulation techniques have only been employed on a selective basis to solve “hot spot” problems. Network-wide upgrades that exceed the basic capabilities of DOCSIS 1.1 have not yet been justified on a risk/return basis.

To be fair, most broadband network traffic models were conceived based upon “pre- broadband” (dial up) metrics, with a heavy dose of over-provisioning added to account for the unknown. As previously indicated, P2P file sharing applications have absorbed much of the initial over-provisioned capacity that had served as the levee for network capacity. Unfortunately, over-the-top video content could represent, in aggregate, a network burden that is substantially greater than any other broadband application. As such, this new generation of OTT services can engender either unprecedented network contention or massive infrastructure costs with no offsetting increase in revenue.

Regardless of cost, broadband service providers will likely be in the position of providing the “best for the most.” One vehicle for providing such service lies within PacketCable Multimedia (PCMM) platforms, which allocate “Quality of Service” parameters such as bandwidth, latency, and jitter (video stability) for any selected application on a DOCSIS-based high speed data network. Used properly, PCMM can create a kind of flood control system that manages fair use in times of congestion, but is otherwise inactive and unobtrusive.

Implementation Guidelines
While proposed legislation and service provider sentiment certainly favors content prioritization, the actual implementation of reasonable stratification system must be fair and rationale. Our “inclusion-based” philosophy is derived from the following market generally-accepted usage data and factors:
• ~50% of peak broadband network traffic is simply surfing the web surfing, but content is increasingly becoming video-oriented and bandwidth intensive.
• ~25% of peak broadband network traffic is used for instant messaging, although the user experience is largely “elastic” --- the user experience is largely unaffected by bandwidth, delay, and latency.
• P2P traffic represents ~ 10-15% of peak network traffic, although the vast majority of these sessions are used for unlawful duplication of copyrighted material.
• Email represents 10%-15% of peak network traffic but has varying levels of elasticity depending on whether it is associated with commercial or residential users.
• Digital voice traffic, which represents a small-but-growing percentage of broadband network traffic, must be given priority to achieve appropriate levels of service.
Service Implementation

Given that network contention will likely be unavoidable in the near future, we believe that the appropriate approach for service providers is to provide the best service for most subscribers during peak times, with the flexibility to re-allocate bandwidth during less contentious intervals. In essence, certain priority traffic must be statically provisioned for QoS (such as PacketCable 1.X voice), while other priority applications (email) can be easily tagged for QoS by DPI platforms, or via other application marking technologies. A more flexible, dynamic solution is required to address the increasing amount of streaming video content that is embedded in, or linked to, most web portals.

Use Cases
Clearly, every major web portal is adding enhanced video distribution and search capabilities to their service in order to keep ahead of the burgeoning demand for media-rich content. While web surfing is considered a utility function by most consumers, the fact remains that the load placed on the broadband network --- whether the content is elastic or inelastic in nature, the broadband network is rapidly transitioning to a world of more concurrent users and longer online sessions. The challenge for cable operators going forward will be to maintain subscribers’ perceived right to certain utility services while enabling differentiated capabilities that meet the demands of applications and users. For the general surfer, adding QoS to the media- rich portal content makes optimal use of network capacity while preserving the crisp responsiveness that broadband users have come to expect.
For premium users, broadband network operators need to provide both content providers and consumers with the opportunity to accelerate the performance of their chosen application. Some content providers may chose the “pay for performance” construct promoted by several telecom executives. As a practical matter, the doctrine of fairness will likely require operators to offer QoS-enhanced capabilities beyond their own content portfolio. To complete the scenario, a manual turbo button-style burst of bandwidth can be used for any-and-all network traffic not already integrated into the PCMM back office infrastructure, giving consumers the ultimate control over the rate at which content is delivered to them.

Summary
Without question, cable operators are now facing the challenge of managing over-the- top content and, in particular, the proliferation of video-over-IP. Finding the equilibrium point between customer satisfaction, network capacity and capital investment will be a delicate balance. Fortunately, PacketCable Multimedia systems, accompanied by complementary technologies like packet inspection platforms and smart agent subsystems, will give service providers the ability to manage their strained capacity in a manner that best serves their customers.
http://www.telephonyworld.com/cgi-bi...&id=1141779314





AT&T-BellSouth Merger May Force Job Cuts
Peter Svensson

AT&T Inc. plans to cut up to 10,000 jobs, mostly through normal turnover, if its $67 billion purchase of BellSouth Corp. is approved by shareholders and regulators, AT&T's chief financial officer said Monday.

The work force reduction would take place over three years, AT&T's Rick Lindner said. Before the cuts, the combined company would have around 317,000 employees, including Cingular Wireless LLC, which is now an AT&T-BellSouth joint venture.

The new company would be the country's largest phone company - with nearly half of all lines. It also would be the largest cell-phone carrier and the largest provider of broadband Internet service.

Still, investors and analysts expect it to pass regulatory muster due to the fact that phone companies are facing increasing competition, especially from cable operators.

The acquisition, which was announced Sunday, is expected to close next year.

The 10,000 planned job cuts are in addition to the 26,000 cuts AT&T has already announced - 13,000 due to SBC's acquisition of AT&T Corp., which closed in November, and 13,000 due to shifting priorities in the business. The combined SBC-AT&T took the name AT&T Inc.

At the Communications Workers of America, which would have about 200,000 workers at the combined company, spokeswoman Candice Johnson said the merger would be a "good opportunity for job growth" as the company expands into new technologies.

"We're not looking for job losses at all," Johnson said. The union has not yet endorsed the merger.

San Antonio-based AT&T expects the acquisition to save it $2 billion annually at first, increasing to $3 billion a year by 2010.

Slightly more than one third of the savings would come from reduced labor costs and consolidation of support functions and corporate staff, Lindner said.

The combined company would be based in San Antonio, depriving Atlanta of one of its largest corporate headquarters.

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said Monday they both will fly to Texas soon to try to persuade AT&T's executives to move their headquarters to Atlanta.

"It's hard to replace BellSouth," Franklin said. "They've contributed so much over the last decade. We're anxious for their national headquarters to move here."

Cingular's headquarters would remain in Atlanta.

More savings from the proposed acquisition would come from reduced advertising expenses and combining the companies' backbone network and information- technology operations.

"Over the last couple of years as we have operated Cingular and our Yellow Pages venture, it became clear that there was a lot of duplication that could be eliminated," said Duane Ackerman, chief executive of BellSouth.

"This merger will allow us to move to a single brand for wireline, for wireless, for business and consumer, and that's AT&T," said Randall Stephenson, AT&T's chief operating officer. "A single brand is much more cost efficient and far more effective."

Under the terms of the deal, AT&T is paying 1.325 of its own shares for each BellSouth share. AT&T shares closed Monday down 97 cents, or 3.5 percent, at $27.02 on the New York Stock Exchange.

That put the value of the offer at $35.80 per BellSouth share. Those shares rose $3.04, or 9.7 percent, to close Monday at $34.50.

The narrow difference between AT&T's offer and the market price for BellSouth shares indicated that investors believe the merger is almost certain to get through regulators.

AT&T plans to buy back stock worth at least $10 billion in the next two years, effectively paying for the premium given to BellSouth shareholders in cash, executives said.

David Kaut, a telecom regulatory analyst at the financial services firm Stifel Nicolaus & Co., said the merger would likely gain approval with modest conditions, such as the sell-off of business lines in overlapping territories.

One wild card, he said, may be Federal Communications Commission nominee Robert McDowell, a Republican who would take the open seat at the commission if approved by the Senate. McDowell is a lobbyist on behalf of the local phone carriers that compete with the Bells and could be more open to their concerns.

"We don't think he's going to go completely off the reservation and try to block" the merger, said Kaut. "He would probably try to work out some conditions that allow the deal to happen but also address competitive concerns."

Regulators are likely to buy the telephone companies' argument that other technologies will provide sufficient competition, Merrill Lynch analyst David Janazzo wrote in a research report.

Telephone companies are losing a few percent of their phone customers every year to cable, Internet and wireless telephony.

Janazzo also noted that the deal would not change the competitive landscape among cellular carriers, because Cingular is already an AT&T-BellSouth joint venture.

Justice Department officials said the proposed purchase would be reviewed by antitrust regulators, but offered no assessment of whether it was likely to generate objections.

The merger also needs approval from state regulators.

If either company calls off the merger, it may have to pay the other company $1.7 billion, according to a regulatory filing by AT&T on Monday.

The deal would substantially expand the reach of AT&T, already the country's largest telecommunications company by the number of customers served. BellSouth is the dominant local telephone provider in the Southeast.

The merged company would have 70 million local-line phone customers, 54.1 million wireless subscribers and nearly 10 million broadband subscribers in the 22 states where they now operate.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





How Much Profit Is Lurking in That Cellphone?
Richard Siklos

IN some ways, wireless is the new China. Both are huge, largely untapped markets for news and entertainment media companies. And media executives have made a lot of dreamy statements about both of these markets and funneled a lot of effort into them. Yet neither has yet translated into a significant new businesses for established companies, which are feverishly seeking ways to grow in a world of technological and competitive obstacles.

While China's media moment seems eternally right around the corner, mobile may be approaching its own at last — it may just take a lot longer and be less earth-shaking than the recent hoopla may suggest. Last week, there were announcements of three ventures by media companies looking to insinuate themselves into the hip pockets of teenagers and their elders. All three are part of a deluge of wireless moves and offer glimpses at new ways of both distributing existing products and using big-media power to start new businesses.

In one of the deals unveiled last week, the MTV Networks unit of Viacom said it would sell mobile versions of its MTV, VH1, CMT and Comedy Central channels to Sprint customers; the services will include video clips from shows including "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

The most intriguing announcement came from a tentacle of the News Corporation, in the form of Mobizzo, which is essentially a kind of online studio and store for selling games, ring tones and adornments for mobile handsets.

CBS, meanwhile, which is perhaps best known for its notably unhip television network, plans to start a venture along the lines of Mobizzo in a few weeks. For now, CBS unveiled a plan to sell multimedia message alerts nationwide that will play short video clips on some cellphones. In a way, CBS aims to show that it wants to compete in this arena along with MTV, NBC and ESPN — rivals that have been making their content available across a range of new mobile formats and gizmos.

What is significant about the News Corporation and CBS announcements is that both companies plan to sell their new services directly to consumers. Instead of buying these services through a mobile phone carrier, users can go directly to Web sites or can send text messages to an address that will instantly sign them up for, say, a "Napoleon Dynamite" wallpaper that they can use to amuse themselves and their friends. In the case of CBS's new service, users can sign up to pay 99 cents a month for news alerts from CBS News, and $3.99 for alerts from the syndicated program "Entertainment Tonight."

For media companies, direct selling is just one advantage that mobile technologies have over other forms of distributing information and entertainment, including the Internet.

Another is that young consumers, in particular, have come to view their mobile phones as fashion accessories, giving rise to a whole new category of personal media products, such as ring tones and avatars, which are animated images of oneself that are sent to friends with messages. (If you have to ask what these are, you probably don't need one.)

A third advantage is that anything bought through a mobile phone — even if not purchased through your service provider itself — can be automatically added to your monthly phone statement, avoiding the bother of having to enter a credit card number.

Add them up and these features illustrate why mobile media could be a big deal: they turn consumption into both a fashion statement and an impulse purchase, while further letting the genie of what-I-want-when-I-want-it out of the bottle.

This has proved to be the case in other countries that have more advanced mobile networks. Much has been made, for instance, about how the United States' mobile market compares with markets in places like South Korea — where users enjoy all sorts of interactive features and pristine television signals on their handsets — and how wireless carriers here have invested some $10 billion to catch up quickly. It's only understandable that established media companies, as well as the Internet titans Google and Yahoo, want to try to capture everything from the growth of the ring tone and games markets to emerging forms of mobile advertising.

The nagging question about all the activity around mobile — the China factor, you might say — is whether the United States will embrace these new products the way other nations have.

As for the China analogy, think about this: A conventional view among American media executives is that if the Chinese government would only allow a truly progressive market for information and ideas (with attendant copyright protections), foreign media companies would flourish.

But that assumes that China has a latent entertainment consumption culture as powerful as the one that drives the United States economy, and that its citizens' tastes are very similar to those of Americans.

It is absurd that only 20 new Hollywood movies are allowed into China's theaters each year. Yet even if audiences there could legitimately go to a theater to watch "Brokeback Mountain," "Munich" and the other contenders for tonight's Academy Awards, they might not be as interested in doing so as both the censors in Beijing and the moguls in New York would like to think.

Similarly, it would be prudent to temper expectations about the prospects for wireless media in the United States — especially until it becomes clear how much people are willing to spend on these newfangled services and the fancy phones needed to use them.

CONSIDER a survey, released last week by the banking firm RBC Capital Markets, of nearly 1,000 people aged 21 to 65. When asked to respond "true" or "false" to the statement "There are many new and cool wireless products coming on the market that I am eager to purchase," 71 percent said "false." And when asked to respond to "I am not interested in watching TV programs or movies on my handheld device," 76 percent said "true."

Of course, even if this view of consumer desires proves accurate in the short term, there is plenty of business to be done selling new and cool wireless products for 20- odd percent of the 200 million cellphones currently in use nationwide.

And surveys about nascent products don't always tell the whole story. Most people probably didn't sit around thinking that they wanted to watch video clips on their computers or send instant messages to one another until these services hit critical mass.

For now, though, it seems premature to set the buzz for wireless at anything but the low setting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/bu...=1&oref=slogin

[JackSpratts]

How Long Can the IPod Stay on Top?

Apple's media player rules its market, thanks to rapid innovation.
Terril Yue Jones

Since the iPod's debut in 2001, Apple Computer Inc. has worked feverishly to keep its iconic portable media player two beats ahead of the competition. Last week's introduction of the iPod Hi-Fi home stereo was the latest in a rapid succession of updates and add-ons designed to maintain Apple's dominance in digital music.

So far the strategy has worked. In January, iPods accounted for 78% of the portable music players sold in the United States, according to market research firm NPD Group. Apple's online iTunes Music Store has sold more than 1 billion songs in three years and is transforming the way masses of people buy music and video.

But rivals around the world — including titans Samsung Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. — are catching up with devices that often are cheaper than Apple's offerings and sometimes do more.

Some Apple watchers also suspect that the iPod's innovation curve may be flattening as the company runs out of obvious ways to jazz up or shrink down its best- selling product.

Bigger hard drives? Been there.

Video? Done that.

FM tuner? Now an option.

Sleeker design? But of course.

"The music iPod was a tidal wave in the music industry," said Rob Yarin, vice president for entertainment at Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting firm. "The video iPod is more than a ripple, but it's not a tidal wave. Whether the addition of video is enough to keep the iPod in a leadership position is something Apple will have to keep an eye on."

Despite iPod's substantial lead in the market — 42 million have sold since 2001 — Apple is in no position to get comfortable. In many ways, the emerging market for portable media players mirrors the early PC market.

The runaway popularity of the iPod recalls the success of the iconoclastic company's Macintosh personal computer, whose elegance and reliability made it a luminary of the digital age.

As rival computer makers churned out cheaper machines powered by Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, though, Apple's market share dropped steadily — from 11.6% in 1994 to 4.2% today, according to research firm IDC Corp.

With the iPod, Apple is determined not to let history repeat itself.

"Our formula for success has been and still remains to make a better product than anyone else and to out-innovate everyone faster and better," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide marketing. "So by the time they try to copy and target what we've done, we've already moved on."

For now, Apple still dominates a relatively small niche.

Sure, iPods are ubiquitous in hipper circles. Snowboarders, bobsledders and ice skaters sported them at the Winter Olympics in Italy. In the U.S., though, just 15% of households have a digital music player, compared with 98% that own a television, 71% with a wireless phone and 73% with a PC, according to the Consumer Electronics Assn.

And despite the iTunes Music Store's selling its billionth song and 12 millionth video, its success is dwarfed by the 599 million CDs and 1.1 billion DVDs sold in the U.S. last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan and Adams Media Research.

Apple's competitors concede that the Cupertino-based company has won the first round, but they still see plenty of opportunity. Early leaders, they note, don't always win. TiVo Inc., for instance, is synonymous with digital video recorders that can pause live television, but as demand for that type of device has grown, cable and satellite companies have taken control.

"The market is growing overall, not just for Apple," said Louis Masses, Toshiba America's director of business development. "Are we going head to head with Apple? No. Our approach is to give people an option."

This month, Toshiba plans to release the second generation of its Gigabeat media player. Powered by Microsoft's new Windows Mobile operating system, the device will play music, photos, home videos and downloaded movies and TV shows.

Samsung has a similar device arriving this month, Sony continues to enhance the capabilities of its hand-held PSP and Creative Laboratories seems always to be updating its extensive line of portable multimedia players.

Already, investors are getting nervous. Although Apple posted record earnings last quarter — and hasn't had an annual loss since 2001 — its stock has fallen 22% from its 52-week high of $86.40 in January.

Among the challenges facing Apple is that digital media players are relatively simple to make. They're basically a portable hard drive — or, increasingly, flash memory — and a liquid crystal display plus silicon and software to convert data to sound. The differentiating features boil down to the user interface and the design of the case.

Apple has excelled in both areas. The iTunes software that enables iPod owners to fill their players with music and video is easy to use and versatile. And iPod's austere design has made it as much a fashion accessory as an entertainment device.

Los Angeles architect Patti Poundstone appreciates the curves of both of her aesthetically essential possessions: her iPod and her Volkswagen Passat.

Most of her 50 or so colleagues at KAA Design Group in Marina del Rey have variations of the iPod and regularly use them at work. "It's the most must-have object for an architect," Poundstone said.

But trends come and go — especially in the technology industry.

Technology can be fleeting when it is developed for its own sake, said Van Baker, an analyst with market research firm Gartner Inc. "The ones that have staying power are ones that have appeal above and beyond the value of the technology itself, and clearly the iPod would fall in that category."

Apple so far has been able to tap into shifting tastes and change the iPod with them.

"The thing that's got most of their competitors scared is how fast they can move," said Richard Doherty of technology consulting firm Envisioneering Group. "Because they don't have an 85-person audio consumer marketing department spread over three continents, decisions can be made over dinner."

Toshiba, Doherty said, "has to pull marketing people together from three continents — during which time Apple will have come out with two new iPods."

For example, Doherty said, Apple quickly developed the iPod nano, a flash memory-based player that's no thicker than a couple of sticks of chewing gum.

"They get a deal on flash memory, and six weeks later there's the nano," Doherty said.

That speed was on display in 2005. Apple came out with three new versions between January and October: the screenless iPod shuffle, the slim iPod nano, which has a tiny color screen and also stores photos, and the video iPod, which plays videos and TV shows on its 2.5-inch screen.

"Saturday Night Live" spoofed the iPod's lightning-like product cycle, with comedian Fred Armisen playing Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs introducing the iPod Micro, the size of a paper clip. But wait — as he is talking about it, the Micro is superseded by the iPod Pequeno, as small as a vitamin pill, which is replaced 30 seconds later by the iPod Inviso, the size and weight of a speck of dust.

"It holds 8 million songs, every photograph ever taken — and 'Pong,' " the Jobs character intones gravely.

Increasingly, the iPod is tied to Apple's online iTunes store, which has branched out from 99-cent music downloads to video.

Apple is not the first or only provider of video over the Web, and its rivals are expanding their offerings. America Online Inc., Microsoft's MSN, Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. offer TV shows and clips, while Movielink and CinemaNow focus on feature films. Vongo is an Internet download service optimized for Windows Mobile.

While Google's video site attracted 3.04 million U.S. users in December, MSN video had 9.46 million visitors and Yahoo's video site drew 2.15 million, iTunes had 20.7 million visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google acknowledged in late January that it had mishandled the launch of its video store that month. Shows for sale were poorly promoted at Google Video, and customers couldn't find hit TV shows such as CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "Survivor."

"By comparison with what Apple has done with the iPod and iTunes, they fell far short," Gartner analyst Allen Weiner said.

As Apple tries to keep the iPod fresh, a favorite of the rumor mill is that the company will try more directly to target the digital home. Its vehicle may be a device that can record, store and burn DVDs of photos, music and videos and beam them wirelessly around the house, similar to what "entertainment PCs" from rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. can do today.

But is that really a role for a beefed-up iPod?

"It's a delicate balance: Do you go more to a living-room, stationary product or to a mobile device?" said Mike McGuire, a consumer technology analyst with Gartner. "Creating a product for which there's not a tangible market is risky. The challenge is, which thing are they going to put their weight behind to go after in rich content?"

The iPod has the potential to change the very fabric of how people interact, some imaginative thinkers say. For now, it's a static device — you put stuff on, you play it back.

But Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, imagines a world where people socialize by tapping into strangers' iPods in a cafe, on a train or at the gym.

"This provides opportunities to hear some new stuff, or at the very least take a break from your own music collection or strike up a conversation. 'Oh, I see you have the Grateful Dead concert at Cornell in 1977. Wasn't that a fantastic show?' " Pang said.

Such interaction would flip the conventional dynamics in which people are introduced before the talk may turn to music.

"There already is a sense among many iPod owners that they're part of this iPod nation, and the sense of citizenship in this group makes it easier for people to adopt this sharing," Pang said

For now, the ranks of iPod loyalists show no signs of thinning. The devices have changed the way some people run their lives. Ask Aliza Loewy, a musical theater performer who lives in the Hell's Kitchen district of Manhattan. She switched from Windows to Macintosh computers all because of her iPod.

"We were willing to go out and replace all our computers with Macs just to be happy with the iPod," she said. "Really and truly, it's like a child to me."
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology





Almost iPod, but in the End a Samsung
David Pogue

ALL right, we've now entered Year 5 of the iPod Era. Apple's rivals have had plenty of time to study the iPod, figure out what makes it such a hit and offer reasonable competition.

As you may have noticed, however, that hasn't happened. Of every 100 people walking by in their little music isolation bubbles, 78 of them seem to have telltale white iPod earbuds. Year after year, the iPod's market share drifts upward, leaving its rivals to fight over the scraps; call it Snow White and the 20 Dwarfs.

The iPod's competitors have wasted years of opportunity by assuming that they can beat the iPod on features and price alone. They're wrong.

In fact, at least six factors make the iPod such a hit: cool-looking hardware; a fun-to-use, variable-speed scroll wheel; an ultrasimple software menu; effortless song synchronization with Mac or Windows; seamless, rock-solid integration with an online music store (iTunes); and a universe of accessories. Mess up any aspect of the formula, and your iPod killer is doomed to market-share crumbs.

This week, Samsung is the latest company claiming to have cracked the iPod formula — specifically, that of the wildly popular iPod Nano. Its new Z5 player has the same-size sleek facade as the Nano (3.5 by 1.6 inches), comes in a similar choice of colors (silver or black), is offered in two of the same capacities (2 or 4 gigabytes) and even costs the same ($200 and $250).

Samsung wouldn't be the first; Archos and Creative offer Nano clones. And featurephiles await a similarly sized SanDisk Sansa player, arriving later this month, that will have FM radio recording, removable battery and memory card, video playback and 6-gigabyte capacity (a first among memory-based players).

But Samsung took one additional step: To design the Z5's software, it hired Paul Mercer, a former Apple employee whose software toolkit was used to design the iPod software. The result is the easiest-to-navigate software since the iPod. Here's the familiar main menu (Music, Pictures, Playlists and so on); here's the center Select button; here's the button at the top that backtracks toward the main menu. If you've ever used an iPod, you'll feel instantly at home. (In fact, at first, I caught myself tracing circles on the Z5's face with my thumb, turning a scroll wheel that wasn't there — a reflex that Samsung acknowledged isn't uncommon among first-time users of the Z5.)

INSTEAD of a wheel, the Z5 has a big square button surrounded by a clickable frame. The frame's four edges precisely replicate the clicky edges of the iPod scroll wheel: Menu at the top, Play/Pause at the bottom, Next Track and Previous Track on the sides.

Inside the frame is a touch pad. You step through lists by lightly tapping the pad; you hold down to scroll quickly. The best part is that your thumb doesn't have to move between scrolling and clicking; after scrolling by touching, pushing harder to click — in exactly the same spot — does the trick.

Samsung has even improved on the iPod's design in several important ways. For example, you can adjust the playback volume even when you're not on the Now Playing screen (such as when you're adjusting the settings or perusing your music list), thanks to dedicated volume buttons. The name of the current song appears at the bottom of every screen, too.

More thoughtful touches: Whenever you highlight a song or album name, a thumbnail image of the CD cover appears right there in the list — a handy visual aid. Holding down the Menu button takes you all the way back to the main menu, so you don't have to tap it repeatedly.

And you know that iPod moment of befuddlement when the buttons don't seem to be working — and then you realize it's because you've engaged the Hold switch? On the Z5, pressing any button makes a tiny padlock icon glow on the screen to help clue you in.

Finally, the Z5 plays music for a staggering 35 hours between charges, according to Samsung, which is 2.5 times the duration with the iPod. Unfortunately, that beefier battery means that the Z5 is no Nanoesque wafer. At just under half an inch thick, it's two-thirds thicker than the Nano.

Like almost all non-iPod music players, the Z5 is based on Microsoft's music-player software. That is, it doesn't work with the Macintosh. And while the Z5 can't play songs from Apple's iTunes Music Store, it can play songs from Rhapsody, Napster, Musicmatch, MSN Music, Wal-Mart, AOL Music Now, Yahoo Music and other members of the "MMS-MMS" consortium (Microsoft-based Music Stores with Minuscule Market Share).

Many of the MMS-MMS stores offer something that Apple doesn't: subscription plans. For a flat $12 or $15 a month, you can download as many songs as you like. (The wrinkle is that if you ever stop paying, all of your music self-destructs.)

It's also worth noting that unlike songs from iTunes, music from MMS-MMS stores also works on gadgets like the Roku SoundBridge, which broadcast music from your computer to your stereo wirelessly.

Is the Z5, then, the fabled iPod Killer? Let's review the checklist.

LOOKS Not quite. It's sleek and nice-looking, but thicker than the Nano. The metal case conceals fingerprints, unlike the mirrored chrome of the Nano. But it doesn't look as classy and doesn't feel as nice in your palm. SCROLL WHEEL No. The Z5's controls are thoughtfully designed. But the touch scroller is finicky; perhaps to screen out accidental taps, it registers a tap only if your finger sits on the surface longer than a quarter-second but less than half a second (after which fast scrolling begins). You need the reflexes of a frog's tongue.

Worse, you can't control the speed of the scrolling; you can't slow down as you approach one part of the alphabet. How could Samsung have missed this one?

SOFTWARE MENU Ultrasimple. Samsung nailed this aspect.

SYNCHRONIZATION Mostly effortless. But in the case of the iPod, Apple designed the music store, the player and the jukebox software on the computer; no wonder it all works so smoothly. When you use the Z5, you get some jarring reminders that three different cooks were at work. For example, during the Z5's on-screen tutorial, the narrator cheerfully tells you that the Z5's U.S.B. cable might not match the one illustrated on the screen. "But the connector will match a port on your portable music player," she says reassuringly. Well, let's hope so.

Similarly, Samsung provides a table called "How Many Songs Will Fit?" But it lists 128 megabytes, 256 megabytes, 1 gigabyte, 2 gigabytes and 5 gigabytes (and not 4 gigabytes). Doesn't Samsung know that the Z5 comes only in 2 and 4 gigabytes?

Evidently, Paul Mercer was not involved with the help system.

MUSIC STORE INTEGRATION No. At Samsung's suggestion, I tested the Z5 with Rhapsody's store, which is available directly from the copy of Windows Media Player provided by the Z5's installer. After banging my head on the keyboard for an hour, unable to get it to work, a Rhapsody rep finally let me know that, in fact, Rhapsody's subscription store doesn't work in Media Player — only with Rhapsody's own software jukebox. (So much for the Microsoft "Plays for Sure" logo. Try "Plays for Some People.")

ACCESSORIES Not so much a universe as a shelf. You can buy generic adapters for the car and your home stereo. There will soon be a carrying case, and Samsung will sell its own speakers. But there's no remote control of any kind, and the overall accessory situation looks pretty grim — a drawback of any non-iPod player.

The Z5, then, will not cause any discernible dip in iPod market share.

It does, however, deserve to be a hit for Samsung. For someone who wants a Nano that's not a Nano, it's a close enough match in looks, sleekness, capacity and crystal-clear software design. In fact, if iPod didn't loom over every conversation as the screamingly obvious point of comparison, the Z5 could be the next little thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/te...s/09pogue.html





Amazon Considering Downloads
Richard Siklos

Amazon.com is in talks with three Hollywood studios about starting a service that would allow consumers to download movies and TV shows for a fee and burn them onto DVD's, according to three people briefed on the discussions.

If the advanced negotiations are successfully concluded, Amazon's service would position itself in the media world alongside rivals like Apple Computer's iTunes as a place where people go not just to order goods to be sent by mail, but to instantly enjoy digital wares as well.

So far, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers are engaged in the talks, said one person close to the talks who, like the others, asked not to be identified because the negotiations are continuing.

Although it is not clear when it might begin, an Amazon downloading service would be sure to send waves through both the media and retail worlds. Players in both industries are racing to offer new ways to give technology-savvy audiences instant access to their favorite shows and songs, in a field crowded with potential rivals using Internet and on-demand technologies.

Amazon, which was created as an online bookstore and now sells a wide range of goods, is already among the largest sellers of DVD's and VHS tapes. Other retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores and Target, are also working with the studios on new ways to distribute programming in digital formats.

Keen to maintain as much control over their product as possible, the studios have also invested in new video-on-demand movie rental services like MovieBeam, which is backed by Walt Disney, and Movielink, which counts several other studios including Paramount, Universal and Warner among its backers.

Warner is also involved in IN2TV, a service on America Online that offers a library of free vintage TV shows, and also plans to begin selling downloads of other programming this year. Both companies are divisions of Time Warner.

None of these services so far plans to offer a way to let people buy, burn and keep DVD's — or stream them at a lower price — as the contemplated Amazon service does. Other retailers, however, are working to develop similar businesses.

One advantage Amazon would hope to have over competitors is its ownership of the Web site imdb.com, which stands for Internet Movie Database. The site was acquired by Amazon in 1998 and is a repository for all manner of movie information for professionals and fans alike. One person involved in the deal said that as more people use search engines like Yahoo and Google to find their favorite videos, imdb.com would be a valuable asset because it appears, with increasing prominence, in the results of online searches.

For example, when entering the name George Clooney on Google, the actor's page on imdb.com is the first of 17.1 million results that are cited. According to comScore Media Metrix, imdb.com is the most-visited movie Web site, having posted a 41 percent increase in unique visitors between February 2005 and February 2006.

Last month the site had 15.1 million unique visitors, surpassing Yahoo Movies, whose tally of unique visitors declined 17 percent year over year, to 12.1 million.

As previously reported, Amazon is also working on a digital download service for music and an Amazon-branded portable MP3 player to compete with Apple's market-leading iPod.

Patty Smith, an Amazon spokeswoman, declined comment.

Depending on the pricing of downloaded movies and the agreed split between the studios and Amazon, electronically selling DVD's to consumers could represent a way to increase profit margins, as the overall growth of DVD's has cooled. But the studios also face a delicate balancing act in ensuring that physical retailers like Wal-Mart, which account for the bulk of their existing sales, do not feel left in the lurch by the new digital endeavors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/te...10movies.html?





British Royalty Group Unveils Trial Podcasting License

British music licensing organization MCPS-PRS Alliance has just unveiled a trial podcasting licensing scheme. The pilot will involve over 10 million works, of which the MCPS-PRS consortium administers both mechanical and performance rights. As part of the Alliance Music Podcast Scheme, podcasters will be charged 12 percent of overall revenues for usage of MCPS-PRS Alliance works, or 1.5 pence (2.6 cents) per full track, whichever is greater. Usage of half-tracks, defined as less than 50 percent of the work, will require a .75 pence (1.3 cents) per usage payment. The trial will last through December 31st of this year.
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/#030806uk





iTunes Offers New "Multi-Pass" Bundling Option

Why grab just one beer when you can have a six-pack? The bundled purchase is a time-worn concept across many industries, but something the music industry has been struggling with recently. For years, music fans have been moving away from the album, which creates some consumer pain by tying a collection of songs into one purchase. The effect is being felt both offline and online. "The sad fact is that given the choice online, people choose songs over albums," said Eric Garland, CEO of media tracking firm BigChampagne, during a recent discussion at Music 2.0 in Los Angeles.

Enter iTunes, which helped to popularize paid, a-la-carte downloads with an easy interface, simple iPod syncing, and a uniform price point. But one billion downloads later, the recording industry is finding it very easy to argue with success. Cherry-picking is something labels have resisted for decades, though P2P file-sharing networks may have broken the levee first. Regardless, Apple is beginning to experiment with its own bundling ideas, including a new "multi-pass" option. The concept, which allows consumers to purchase a set of shows, is being rolled out with Comedy Central series "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report". Elsewhere, iTunes also offers digital album purchases, which recently accounted for a significant chunk of overall buying activity on the Jack Johnson project, Curious George. And others, like independent online music store eMusic, are successfully selling bundled downloads within monthly subscription accounts, potentially part of a larger trend.
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/#030806uk





Winapple? Wapple?

Needham's: 'Apple Could Grab 9% Marketshare'
Jonny Evans

Needham & Co analyst Charles Wolf believes Apple is in position to achieve a massive growth in its market share - with consumers very ready to make the switch.

Apple should make every effort to eliminate every last obstacle that may prevent a PC user moving to Mac, he says, particularly as the Intel processor switch means Apple can now "match the performance of Windows PCs".

Huge migration possible

Wolf's research suggests that consumers and others may be on the edge of a mass Mac migration: "The magnitude of possible Windows defectors suggests that Apple should go all out to remove the few remaining hurdles to running Windows apps on a Mac," Wolf writes.

"Our online survey of college students reveals the possibility of a dramatic increase in switching," he adds.

The analyst also pointed out that the move means Intel Macs "should" be able to run Windows applications as fast as they run on PCs, "after a few technical problems are solved".

Wolf's survey showed that if Apple was to make it easy for Macs to run Windows applications the number of students who would buy an Apple computer would double.

Windows + Mac = Apple 10% market share

"To measure the possible impact of the Mac's impending versatility, we conducted an online survey of 255 college students. Two important statistics emerged when the Mac could run Windows apps. First, the mean likelihood of purchasing a Mac rose dramatically - from 24.7 per cent to 44 per cent. Second, the percentage of Windows users who would definitely buy a Mac rose from 1.8 per cent to 13.5 per cent.

Wolf sees the ability to run Windows applications on a Mac as potentially even more beneficial to Apple's market share than the iPod halo effect.

"Our results are almost too good to be true in highlighting the possible increase in the Mac's market share once it can run Windows apps. The increase from 1.8 per cent to 13.5 per cent in the percentage of respondents who would definitely switch underscores this potential. And if
applied to the US home market, the 80 per cent increase in the mean switching rate (from 24.7 per cent to 44 per cent) would raise Apple's share in this market to 9.2 per cent. Such an increase would translate into almost one million additional sales, equivalent to a 22 per cent increase in Apple's 2005 Mac shipments."

Will they, won't they, are they?

However, Apple is it's own Achilles Heel, Wolf warns. When the company announced its shift to Intel processors in June 2005, Apple took the line that it would not sell or support Windows itself, "but would do nothing in its hardware design to prevent users running that OS if they liked," Wolf writes.

"In our opinion, Apple comments are important for what they don't say. They leave open the possibility that it will support the efforts of others to bring Windows to the Mac platform. Indeed, there have been unconfirmed reports that Apple itself may be secretly working on virtualisation software
that would provide native support for Windows," he writes.

Apple has the most to gain from allowing such support to emerge, Wolf said.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...ge=1&pagePos=2





No Vista on Mac's Horizon
Ina Fried

Hoping your Intel Mac will easily run Windows Vista?

Don't bet on it, one Apple Computer engineer said Thursday.

One of the big obstacles is that although both the Macintosh OS and Windows now use Intel chips, the two operating systems have different ways of booting up.

Mac fans have held out considerable hope that the next version of Windows would be easier to load on Macs than Windows XP, because like Mac OS X, Vista will use Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) to aid the boot process. Older versions of Windows have used Basic Input Output System (BIOS).

However, Apple Senior Software Architect Cameron Esfahani said that his understanding is that only 64-bit versions of Vista will support EFI. To this point, all of the Intel Macs have used 32-bit chips.

"I don't think so" he said, when asked whether Intel Macs should easily run Vista. Esfahani was speaking at the Intel Developer Forum here--to a packed room despite the session being the last of the conference.

In addition, while EFI has prospects for supporting many older types of software and hardware, Apple has not included much of that "legacy" code in its EFI implementation.

"Windows is a legacy OS," he said to laughter and applause from the crowd. "We don't have legacy support."

Ever since Apple released the first Intel Macs--and even before--enthusiasts have been trying to get both the Mac OS running on non-Apple machines and Windows booting on Intel Macs. Both tasks have proved thorny, with myriad issues both legal and technical that must be overcome.

Apple has said that it won't stop Mac owners from running, or trying to run, Windows on their Macs, but it has said it is not supporting such efforts, a point Esfahani's talk made all the more clear. On the other hand, Apple has taken steps to prohibit people running Mac OS X on anything other than Apple's own hardware.

Apple announced last June that it would move the entire Mac product line to Intel-based chips. The first Intel Macs, a revamped iMac and the MacBook Pro laptop debuted in January. Earlier this month, Apple added an Intel-based Mac Mini.

In more bad news for the Vista-on-Mac crowd, Microsoft reportedly told another IDF session on Thursday that the initial release of Vista won't be supporting EFI at all.

APCmag.com reported that a Microsoft panelist told IDF attendees that EFI support won't be coming until some later release of Vista.
http://news.com.com/No+Vista+on+Macs...3-6048250.html





Mac OS X Hacked Under 30 Minutes
Munir Kotadia

Gaining root access to a Mac is "easy pickings," according to an individual who won an OS X hacking challenge last month by gaining root control of a machine using an unpublished security vulnerability.

On February 22, a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast set his Mac Mini as a server and invited hackers to break through the computer's security and gain root control, which would allow the attacker to take charge of the computer and delete files and folders or install applications.

Participants were given local client access to the target computer and invited to try their luck.

Within hours of going live, the "rm-my-mac" competition was over. The challenger posted this message on his Web site: "This sucks. Six hours later this poor little Mac was owned and this page got defaced".

The hacker that won the challenge, who asked ZDNet Australia to identify him only as "gwerdna", said he gained root control of the Mac in less than 30 minutes.

"It probably took about 20 or 30 minutes to get root on the box. Initially I tried looking around the box for certain mis-configurations and other obvious things but then I decided to use some unpublished exploits -- of which there are a lot for Mac OS X," gwerdna told ZDNet Australia .

According to gwerdna, the hacked Mac could have been better protected, but it would not have stopped him because he exploited a vulnerability that has not yet been made public or patched by Apple.

"The rm-my-mac challenge was setup similar to how you would have a Mac acting as a server -- with various remote services running and local access to users… There are various Mac OS X hardening guides out there that could have been used to harden the machine, however, it wouldn't have stopped the vulnerability I used to gain access.

"There are only limited things you can do with unknown and unpublished vulnerabilities. One is to use additional hardening patches -- good examples for Linux are the PaX patch and the grsecurity patches. They provide numerous hardening options on the system, and implement non-executable memory, which prevent memory based corruption exploits," said gwerdna.

Gwerdna concluded that OS X contains "easy pickings" when it comes to vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to break into Apple's operating system.

"Mac OS X is easy pickings for bug finders. That said, it doesn't have the market share to really interest most serious bug finders," added gwerdna.

Apple's OS X has come under fire in recent weeks with the appearance of two viruses and a number of serious security flaws, which have since been patched by the Mac maker.

In January, security researcher Neil Archibald, who has already been credited with finding numerous vulnerabilities in OS X, told ZDNet Australia that he knows of numerous security vulnerabilities in Apple's operating system that could be exploited by attackers.

"The only thing which has kept Mac OS X relatively safe up until now is the fact that the market share is significantly lower than that of Microsoft Windows or the more common UNIX platforms.… If this situation was to change, in my opinion, things could be a lot worse on Mac OS X than they currently are on other operating systems," said Archibald at the time.

An Apple Australia spokeswoman said today it was unable to comment at this stage.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/securit...9241748,00.htm





eEye Flags More iTunes, QuickTime Flaws
Ryan Naraine

Security flaws in Apple's popular digital media products are beginning to add up.

Researchers at eEye Digital Security have pinpointed two high-risk vulnerabilities in iTunes and QuickTime that could put millions of Windows and Mac users at risk of code execution attacks.

Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based eEye issued two alerts on its upcoming advisories Web page to warn of heap overflows and integer overflows in the two Apple products.

Apple's iTunes is a wildly popular online media service that sells music downloads and QuickTime is the company's flagship media player.

Click here to read about more bugs in Apple's iTunes and QuickTime media players.

eEye said the vulnerabilities affect QuickTime/iTunes on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Mac OS X users are also vulnerable to the code execution attacks.

Apple does not comment on potential security vulnerabilities in its products until a fix is available. eEye only releases basic information on the existence of the bugs but withholds technical details until a patch is ready.

In the meantime, users are urged to avoid clicking on untrusted media files.

The latest flaw discoveries come at a sensitive time for Apple. The company is under intense scrutiny after the recent release of exploit code for a Safari browser flaw and the discovery of two pieces of malware affecting Mac OS X users.

Do your resources meet and defeat every cyber threat? Keep your systems operational as they defend against a variety of threats. Find out how on March 21 at 4 p.m. ET, live at eSeminarsLive.com. Sponsored by Symantec.

On March 1, Apple shipped a Mac OS X security update with patches for more than a dozen security vulnerabilities. The monster update included five patches for Safari, including an "extremely critical" flaw that could cause remote code execution attacks if a user simply viewed a maliciously rigged Web page.
http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/...=173264,00.asp





Apple: Finding the Root of the Problem
Arik Hesseldahl

To maintain public confidence in its operating system, Jobs & Co. should consider hiring a security czar

The second potentially major Mac security incident in as many weeks has thankfully been debunked. Earlier this week I wrote a blog entry about a Mac Mini owner in Sweden who configured his machine as a server and challenged hackers to gain access to it. The Mini was -- as hackers like to say -- "owned" only 30 minutes after the challenge started. By "owned," I mean rooted. An outside attacker, through a remote Internet connection, was able to get "root" access -- the highest and most powerful level of administrative access on a Unix-based computer (which Macs running OS X happen to be).

Root access gives the bearer free reign on a machine, no questions asked. Files can be altered or deleted. Accounts assigned to other users can be changed or deleted altogether. The potential for misuse of the privilege has caused Apple to ship its machines with root access disabled by default. Root can be re-enabled only through a series of technical contortions understood by advanced users.

Even so, the Swedish attacker said he succeeded with an "unpublished" exploit -- a method that hasn't been publicly documented. If your Mac is connected to the Internet all day, as mine is, you can see the fright such news might generate. It's like knowing a criminal gang has a master key to your home and thousands of others, and that the only defense you really have so far is that they haven't found you yet.

BIASED STUDY. That is, if it were true. It turns out the original reports weren't forthcoming with all the facts. The person who "rooted" the Mac already had a user name and password, as if he were a regular day-to-day user. In fact, having an account on this Mac was a prerequisite to taking part in the challenge. From there, the person used some method -- most likely having to do with weaknesses in the Unix underpinnings of the Mac operating system -- to gain escalated access.

These kinds of "privilege escalation" vulnerabilities have cropped up on the Mac over the years and date back decades to FreeBSD, the variant of Unix on which Mac OS X is based. But remember, you can't take advantage of this type of vulnerability unless you already have access to the machine -- which implies having been given permission for that access in the first place.

The pseudo break-in and misleading reports didn't sit well with Dave Schroeder, a network systems engineer and Mac enthusiast at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He's been outspoken on the issue of Mac security, portraying recent reports as overblown. So he set up his own challenge, inviting the world to hack a Web page -- the very page he used to tell the world about the challenge -- running on a Mac Mini he set up as a Web server.

His challenge mirrored the one in Sweden, with one critical difference: No one would have an account on the machine. They'd be locked out and therefore would have to break in. His aim was to demonstrate the flaws in the Swedish test, and provide a more realistic test of Mac security. The tech news site Slashdot picked up news of the challenge and quickly spread the word.

A NEW CHALLENGE. Attacks on the machine surged. It recorded more than 4,000 login attempts, and Web traffic to it spiked to 30 megabits per second. Half a million people visited the Web site (http://test.doit.wisc.edu/). That little Mac Mini was one busy server, but it remained online.

Most of the network traffic conveyed attempts to break in: Web exploits seeking a wedge into the machine via the public page; dictionary attacks, which make repeated guesses at passwords at high speed; and a scanning tool known as Nessus, software that scans for known vulnerabilities. The machine even came under what's known as a denial of service attack, in which an attacker hammers a machine with thousands of requests for information in an attempt to overwhelm the server and thus create an exploitable weakness.

For 38 hours, nothing worked. The Mac Mini held its ground against the worst that the multitudes could throw against it. The contest ended earlier than originally planned and even appears to have gotten Schroeder in trouble with his employer, since it wasn't sanctioned by the university. I'm hearing he may face some kind disciplinary action. The University of Wisconsin apparently isn't interested in such a real-world ad-hoc test, no matter how successful and harmless it proved to be. Schroeder wasn't available for comment.

This illustrates changing perceptions about Mac security. The Mac is increasingly on the radar screen of people who have long ignored it and who, for whatever reason, want to find the chinks in as-yet virtually impregnable armor. And while it may indeed be a more secure system than anything put out by Microsoft (MSFT ) and its many hardware partners including Dell (DELL ), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), Gateway (GTW ) and others, the level of attention can only increase. Hackers love nothing more than a difficult challenge -- which Windows ceased to be a long time ago.

SOWING FEAR And as Apple Computer (AAPL ) gains attention for its innovation, superior software and so far relatively airtight security, people in the media -- including myself -- will be watching with interest and not a small amount of anxiety for the moment when the first really nasty and widespread Mac security vulnerability shows up. Until that happens, even little hiccups are going to trigger an avalanche of negative publicity.

Uninformed media sources will do what they do best -- sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And the first time a really big Mac security incident occurs it will cause some people who are considering a Mac over a cheaper Windows-based system to change their minds.

Vulnerabilities in Windows are so common they don't really make the news anymore. But a large-scale, widespread incident on the Mac could badly wound Apple's reputation.

LOCK DOWN. It's for this reason that I think the time has come for Apple to consider doing what many other companies like IBM (IBM ) and Oracle (ORCL ) have: create a position of chief security officer. This person would be a well-known computer security expert, ideally from outside Apple, who would wave the flag for all things related to Mac security, debunking myths, correcting the record, and providing a public face when issues crop up.

And when something does go wrong -- and I think eventually something will -- he or she would be Apple's ombuds officer evaluating what failed, where, when and how, and then take responsibility for seeing that it's fixed, reporting on the matter to CEO Steve Jobs, Apple's board of directors, and (where appropriate) its shareholders and customers.

I talked briefly with Apple's Bud Tribble, vice-president of software technology. He called my idea a "good suggestion" but said the company would be reticent to assign security issues to any single individual, and that the responsibility of a CSO instead tends to rest with everyone. "For pretty much all the senior people at Apple, security is one of the top jobs on their list," he says. "When we think about security and how we design software, the basic approach is to make it as secure as possible, because most people really aren't security experts. We try to make sure things are pretty well locked down out of the box."

CONFIDENCE BUILDER. While the Mac's Unix underpinnings suffer from the occasional vulnerability, they still present a security advantage, Tribble says. "Unix is sort of a kid that grew up in a tough neighborhood," he says. That neighborhood was a networked environment where people were constantly trying to figure out tricks to log into the system. So over the decades, lots of holes have been plugged. You can't say that about Windows.

And I admit, creating a CSO position may be viewed by some as an admission of weakness. Still, I say it would be a good way for Apple to inoculate itself against the perception -- warranted or not -- that Mac security may be eroding, and get ahead of the curve for any troubles that may be inevitable. That may not be the case, but in matters related to product marketing, it's the public perception, not the reality that really matters.

And once you've lost a user's confidence, it's hard to get it back. Just ask Microsoft.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...campaign_id=ds





Shadowboxing With a Bot Herder
Brian Krebs

Security Fix had an interesting online conversation Tuesday night with a hacker who controls a vast, distributed network of hacked Microsoft Windows computers, also known as a "botnet."

I went into the interview knowing very little about this individual, other than his online alter ego, "Witlog," and that he has infected close to 30,000 Windows PCs with his computer worm, which he claims is powered by code that he downloaded from a Web site, modified slightly, and set loose on the 'Net. I came away from the interview no more knowledgeable about his background, age, location or motivation, but perhaps with a stark reminder of how just a little bit of knowledge can be such a dangerous thing.

Witlog claims he doesn't use his botnet for illegal purposes, only "for fun." I found that claim pretty hard to believe given a) the income he could make installing ad-serving software on each computer under his control, combined with b) the risk he is taking of getting caught breaking into so many computers. The kid I wrote about in the Post magazine story on the connection between botnets and spyware was making $6,000 to $10,000 per month installing adware on a botnet half the size of the one Witlog claims to have.

I was introduced to Witlog through several security experts who are part of the Shadowserver.org crew, a group of talented volunteers who dedicate a great deal of their free time and energy toward making life more difficult for bot herders like Witlog. Shadowserver has been cataloging Witlog's every move for the past two months or so, and shared with me records showing Witlog seeding his botnet with adware from DollarRevenue.net, which pays distributors $0.30 for each install of their pop-up ad-serving software on a computer in the United States; distributors can earn $0.20 per install for Canadian PCs, and ten cents per install for computers based in the United Kingdom. Installs on PCs in other countries net the distributor two cents or less.

Witlog admitted to me that he made at least $400 by installing adware on his bots and conducting a petty distributed-denial-of-service attack against a couple of Web sites that knocked them offline for a while. For all I know, that could be the extent of it. He also admitted that he lets his buddies use his botnet for their own purposes, which he claims not to know much about.

But what blew me away was how he created the botnet, which is powered by a worm that spreads only through known network security holes in Microsoft Windows and which require no action on the part of the victim other that the failure to apply security patches and (maybe) use a simple firewall. Had he decided to spread his worm through more conventional means -- via Web links sent in instant message or as attachments in e-mail - - his botnet could probably have grown to twice its current size.

In this snippet of our conversation, I asked Witlog how and why he got his botnet started:

Witlog: why i did it? i've read an article on yahoo or smth like this
Witlog: so when i've read that article, i thought "why not to make my own"?
SecurityFix: so did you just download the source from some site and set it loose?
Witlog: yes
Witlog: changed settings, and started it
Witlog: thats all
Witlog: anyone could do that
Witlog: you don't have to know many things to do a botnet like this

Over the past month and a half, Witlog used freely available source code for SDBot and built his botnet to 45,000 PCs. That is, until botnet hunters like Shadowserver and others put enough pressure on Witlog's Internet service provider to shutter Witlog.com, the domain name he was using to control his bot herd. That was only a temporary setback for Witlog, however, who simply registered a new bot control channel at Witlog.net. So far his network is back up to about 65 percent of its original size and growing by several thousand newly infected machines per day.

But again, Witlog says it's not about size, it's all about the fun of it. For guys like Witlog, building botnets can be akin to a kind of digital hide and seek. On Monday, he began using a new version of the code that runs his botnet (this is the sixth iteration). Less than 24 hours after he released it, the bot code was only detected as malicious by two out of more than a dozen or so of the major anti-virus scanners employed by the free virus-testing service over at VirusTotal.com; Two other anti-virus engines flagged it as "suspicious," but could not tell whether the file was overtly hostile.

Witlog may in fact be the product of a new generation of "script kiddiez"; the chief distinguishing feature of this generation being that instead of using Web site flaws to deface as many Web sites as possible, these guys are breaking into thousands of home and work PCs and taking them for a virtual joyride, often times all the way to the bank.

And it's not just hacked home PCs we're talking about either. According to stats released this week by computer security giant Symantec Corp., the most common computer operating system found in botnets is Microsoft's Windows 2000, an OS predominantly used in business environments. Indeed, the vast majority of bots in Witlog's network were Win2K machines, and among the bots I saw were at least 40 computers owned by the Texas state government, as well as several systems on foreign government networks. At least one machine that he showed me from his botnet was located inside of a major U.S. defense contractor.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...6/03/post.html





Video Crypto Standard Cracked?
Ann Harrison

Noted cryptographer Niels Ferguson says he's broken Intel's vaunted HDCP Digital Video Encryption System, but fear of U.S. law is keeping him silent on the details.

ENSCHEDE, NETHERLANDS--A Dutch cryptographer who claims to have broken Intel Corp.'s encryption system for digital video says he will not publish his results because he fears being prosecuted or sued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Niels Ferguson announced last weekend that he has successfully defeated the High- bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) specification, an encryption and authentication system for the DVI interface used to connect digital cameras, high- definition televisions, cable boxes and video disks players.

"An experienced IT person could recover the master key in two weeks given four standard PCs and fifty HDCP displays," said Ferguson. "The master key allows you to recover every other key in the system and lets you decrypt [HDCP video content], impersonate a device, or create new displays and start selling HDCP compatible devices."

Ferguson, who announced his results at the Hackers At Large 2001 (HAL) security conference, is not providing details of how he defeated HDCP. But he says it is a textbook example of a cryptographic attack.

Intel spokesperson Daven Oswalt says the company has received several reports from people claiming that they have broken HDCP. But he says none have held up, and the company remains confident in the strength of the system.

"Intel believes that HDCP meets the intended goal of preventing the casual copying and distribution of entertainment content of DVI outputs," said Oswalt. He declined to comment on Ferguson's decision to withhold publication of his research.

A respected cryptographer, Ferguson helped design the Twofish algorithm, one of the algorithms selected as candidate for the U.S. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

In his address at HAL, Ferguson reviewed a well-known published attack on a reduced- round version of the Rijndael algorithm, which was discovered before Rijndael became the final AES. The cryptographer also presented an algebraic formula that describes the structure of Rijndael. If the formula is solved, Ferguson believes that the Rijndael block cipher could be broken.

Ferguson says he has contacted Intel and informed the company of his HDCP findings, but added that he declined to email the results to the U.S., because he is not sure of the legal risks.

Intel has not threatened him in any way, says Ferguson. But he says he was informed by a lawyer from the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that he could be sued or prosecuted under the DMCA for publishing his research, even on his own Web site. And if Intel chooses not to sue, Ferguson fears that the motion picture industry, whose movies are encrypted with HDCP, may haul him into court.

Ferguson is a Dutch citizen, but travels to the U.S. regularly for both personal and professional reasons. He worries that if he presents his research, he will not be able to enter the U.S. without fear of persecution. "This is a country that tells others they should protect human rights, but they have trampled on mine," says Ferguson. "The U.S. Congress is telling me what I can or cannot say in my own country."

Ferguson notes that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) used the DMCA to pressure Princeton professor Ed Felten to withhold his research on audio watermarking technology. Felten's subsequent suit against the music industry will be decided this month. But Ferguson, who filed a declaration in the Felten case, says he is not going to gamble on a favorable ruling that could be appealed and reversed.

Robin Gross, an EFF staff attorney for intellectual property, says chances are good that Ferguson could be prosecuted under the DMCA, like Russian researcher Dmitry Sklyarov who was arrested in Las Vegas following the Def Con hacker convention last month. Sklyarov is now free on bail.

Gross says Ferguson could be at risk for simply posting his results, despite the fact that he is not distributing software or presenting a paper. "Even though Ferguson is not doing these things, someone else could distribute his research in this country and he could potentially be liable," said Gross. "There is very little First Amendment protection for scientists in this country."

Gross added that other security researchers, including Alan Cox and Ross Anderson, have stated that they are concerned about traveling to the U.S. for fear of being prosecuted under the DMCA. She said U.S. technical conferences are considering moving offshore so as not to place attendees at risk.

According to Ferguson, his right to freely publish his scientific findings is upheld by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.S. Constitution and Dutch law. In practice, he says, his opponents have unlimited money and could drag the case along until he is forced to give in. "I would lose my pension, I would lose everything and probably go bankrupt," said Ferguson. "That is the threat."

Ferguson argues that, ultimately, the DMCA will end up costing Intel and the content industries money. While they are spending millions on HDCP, he says, they will be denied the benefits of research that can help fix the technology. Ferguson predicts that a year from now, someone will post a HDCP master key on the Internet, and the money spent on the system will be wasted.

"You can be sure that somehow, somewhere, someone will duplicate my results especially because I am telling them that I have results," says Ferguson. "Someone who is braver, who has less money, and who doesn't travel to the U.S."
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/236





Geek Threat: We'll Take You Down
Jano Gibson

Computer technicans are threatening chaos at fast-food outlets, supermarkets, banks and airports unless they get a pay rise.

More than 100 staff from NCR - a company responsible for repairing computer breakdowns at KFC outlets, Aldi supermarkets and Sydney Airport's baggage handling systems - are planning to to walk off the job on Monday morning.

"In terms of industrial action in the IT industry this is easily the most significant one we've had in Australia," said Australian Services Union secretary Sally McManus. If the strike goes ahead, it might last up to a week, she said.

"If you are Qantas and people can't get on planes, it's an enormous amount of money. For the banks, it's really the consumers who'll be affected.

"For KFC and Aldi supermarkets, if the cash registers are broken down it's going to cause delays," she said.

However, NCR area general manager, Noel Pettitt, said the ASU was exaggerating the potential effects of the proposed industrial action.

"I think that's a gross exaggeration," said Mr Pettitt. "I don't think it's a major concern for the community.

"If [the strike] does happen, and at this stage it's not certain, we have contingencies in place that will ensure that NCR continues to meet its service obligations," he said.

"We've re-jigged our workforce and arranged things such that we'll certainly deal with priority calls in the first instance but continue to deal with the balance of calls."

Mr Pettitt said the union had exaggerated how many workers would take part in the industrial action.

The strike has been called following a breakdown in negotiations over pay, Ms McManus said.

"[The workers] are concerned that NCR is attempting to stonewall so they can use the Howard Government's new WorkChoices laws to cut away at wages and conditions. These workers do not want to inconvenience the public, but have no option to achieve pay increases."

Mr Pettitt said: "We continue to work directly with our employees to reach a conclusion to the negotiations."

The union said their industrial action could affect:

- baggage handling and ticketing technology at Sydney Airport

- regional ATMs across Australia

- ATMs operated by CBA, Westpac, ANZ and some credit unions

- IT systems for Wollongong University

- KFC outlets

- Aldi supermarkets

- public schools with Apple computers

- private companies with Dell computers

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/...701680534.html





Tougher Hacking Laws Get Support

Both the Tories and Lib Dems have backed government measures to increase penalties for UK computer hackers.

Anyone hacking a computer could be punished with 10 years' imprisonment under new laws.

The move follows campaigning from Labour MP Tom Harris, whose ideas are now being adopted in the Police and Justice Bill.

There will be a clearer outlawing of offences like denial-of-service attacks in which systems are debilitated.

Typically, this is done by massively overloading the system and thereby exhausting its computing power.

'Perfectly sensible'

The bill - which was being debated for the first time in the House of Commons on Monday - would also boost the penalty for using hacking tools.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke said: "We need to recognise that in our increasingly interdependent world, work with international partners to tackle terrorism and serious organised crime will be increasingly important.

"One of the growing new threats that can only be tackled through extensive international cooperation is the continued threat posed by computing hacking and denial-of-service attacks."

During the first debate on the legislation, Nick Herbert, for the Tories, criticised much of the rest of the bill, but said measures to tackle hacking were "perfectly sensible" and would enjoy support from across the Commons.

For the Liberal Democrats, Lynne Featherstone also said there was support for measures on computer hacking, while dismissing the bill as a whole as pernicious.

The bill passed on to its second reading without a vote.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/4781608.stm





The Big DRM Mistake
Scott Granneman,

Digital Rights Managements hurts paying customers, destroys Fair Use rights, renders customers' investments worthless, and can always be defeated. Why are consumers and publishers being forced to use DRM?

One of my favorite magazines is The New Yorker. I've been reading it for years, and it never fails to impress me with its vast subject matter, brilliant writing, and the depth, wit, and attention it brings to important matters. When it was announced over a year ago that The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine would be released on eight DVDs, I immediately put in my pre-order. After it arrived, I took out the first DVD and stuck it in my Linux box, expecting that I could start looking at the collected issues.

No dice. The issues were available as DjVu files. No problem; there are DjVu readers for Linux, and it's an open format. Yet none of them worked. It turned out that The New Yorker added DRM to their DjVu files, turning an open format into a closed, proprietary, encrypted format, and forcing consumers to install the special viewer software included on the first DVD. Of course, that software only works on Windows or Mac OS X, so Linux users are out of luck (and no, it doesn't work under WINE ... believe me, I tried).

Even worse, if you do install the software, and then perform a search using the somewhat klunky search tool built in to the proprietary DjVu reader, you'll soon find yourself in DVD-swapping hell as you jump from issue to issue. It is sheer painful tedium, and takes me back to 1985 when I was using the first Macs. Remember the floppy shuffle, as you inserted floppy 1, then floppy 2, then floppy 1, then floppy 2, then floppy 1, then floppy 2, ad infinitum? Now it's the DVD shuffle, 20 years later. That's progress for you! You could try copying the disks onto your hard drive, but the DVDs are encoded with Macrovision's copy protection scheme, so you can't legally do so.

The final indignity is that, although other DjVu readers provide for text selection, The New Yorker has removed that feature from its DjVu reader. You can print, but you can't select or copy. As a teacher of several technology courses at Washington University in St. Louis, this limitation, frankly, completely sucks. Suppose I want my students to read ten paragraphs from a New Yorker story that I provide on a password-protected web page. Too bad! I want to copy and paste some sentences into a presentation? Nope! A student expresses an interest in a topic, and I want to send her a New Yorker article via email that would help further her education? No can do.

I finally got so frustrated that I decided to break through The New Yorker's limitations and DRM, both to access the content I wanted to use and to prove to myself that it could be done. I opened up the article I wanted to copy on a Mac OS X machine, and printed it to PDF using the Mac's built-in support for that format (on Windows, I could have used the open source PDFCreator). I then opened the PDF in OCR software, selected the regions I wanted to scan for text, performed the scan, corrected the results, and saved my output to a text file. It took a while, but it worked.

Other folks have come up with strategies for getting around the annoyances I mentioned above. It turns out that it's entirely possible to copy all the DVDs to your hard drive and then make one simple change in the SQLite database. The result? The slow-as-a-turtle, multi-DVD-swapping The New Yorker turns into super-duper fast The New Yorker. Ta-da!

My experience with The Complete New Yorker is not unique. DRM is cropping up, it seems, everywhere, and people are discussing ways of getting around it.

More bad DRM examples

TiVo added DRM allowing TV shows to include a flag that prevents users from storing shows for any length of time. As a TiVo owner who has left some movies on my box for years, waiting for just the right day to watch them, this outrages me. Sure, TiVo said it was a "bug," but that sounds fishy to me, and I don't buy it. Remember: timeshifting is legal. (One solution: get the files off of TiVo, strip the DRM, and save 'em to a hard drive. A better solution: MythTV.)

Apple's successful iTunes Music Store, in addition to forcing users to accept a pretty sonically-limited format with a proprietary DRM scheme called "FairPlay" (using Orwellian language to mask what you're doing is double-plus ungood, Apple). FairPlay limits what you can do with the music you buy, leaving Apple in charge of your music, not you. Want to play a song you purchased from iTMS on a device other than an iPod? Uh-uh. Want to load music onto an iPod using something other than iTunes? Silly boy. Even worse, some universities are now making lectures and classes available using iTMS, a slap in the face to the open nature of learning and education. Sure, you can remove FairPlay's DRM, but you're still left with a music file recorded at a pretty crappy level, and converting it to a more open format only makes it sound worse. The iTunes Music Store isn't the only offender, as a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation made clear. iTunes is just the most popular, by far. (Solution: Music stores that give you real choice, without DRM.)

The British equivalent to the Oscars is the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award. Members of BAFTA are sent "screeners", free DVDs of the movies they're supposed to vote on, so they can view the movies and make judgments. In an effort to prevent the release of those screeners to non-BAFTA members, the DVDs are encrypted to only play on special DVD players that were also sent free to BAFTA members. As you can imagine, this is a royal pain in the posterior for many BAFTA members, who have to hook up special hardware just to watch a few films. In a bit of supreme cosmic irony, the screeners for Steven Spielberg's Munich were encoded for Region One (the US and Canada) instead of Region Two (Europe), so BAFTA members couldn't view the movie to vote on it. Oops.

What are the lessons to learn from DRM?

1. DRM hurts paying customers

Customers have paid for the texts/pictures/music/movies they purchased, and they expect to be able to use them as they'd like. You can argue that they're not really buying the content, they're just buying licenses for that content, but that argument, while technically legal, is facile and doesn't take into account how real human beings think. When a normal person buys a song, he considers it his ... after all, he just paid for it!

Intelligent people can disagree about the economic impact of file sharing - it seems pretty clear to me that it actually encourages sales and awareness of movies, music, and other content - but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about moving pictures and movies between devices, about transferring files between the many computers I own, and about changing formats as I please.

When I realized that I couldn't copy text out of The Complete New Yorker, I felt like a sucker - a sucker that had been conned by the same people to whom I willingly gave my money. As a college instructor, I especially thought of the loss to my students, which brings us to the next objection to DRM.

2. DRM destroys Fair Use rights ...

... unless the consumer is willing to break the law. Thanks to the wonderful DMCA (did you catch my sarcasm?), it's illegal for anyone to break the DRM protecting a file, no matter how trivial it might be to do so, in order to exercise the Fair Use rights that are legally granted to American citizens. Rick Boucher, a Representative in Congress who actually "gets it," had this to say about the DMCA and Fair Use in 2002:

"... section 1201 of the DMCA ... created the new crime of circumvention. Section 1201 (a)(1), for example, prohibits unauthorized access to a work by circumventing an effective technological protection measure used by a copyright owner to control access to a copyrighted work. Because the law does not limit its application to circumvention for the purpose of infringing a copyright, all types of traditionally accepted activities may be at risk. Any action of circumvention without the consent of the copyright owner is made criminal."

So even though a Fair Use exemption is granted for "nonprofit educational purposes," I can't really exercise that legal right with The Complete New Yorker, since it would require the commission of a felony to do so. Other uses of Fair Use include, and I'm quoting from the United States Copyright Office, "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research." If I can't copy the text, that makes criticism or comment incredibly onerous, does it not? And so on. DRM means that Fair Use for the file protected via DRM is at the whim of the file's creator, which flies in the face of the whole idea of Fair Use. We shouldn't have to beg for our Fair Use rights, since that's the whole point of Fair Use!

3. DRM renders customers' investments worthless

DRM means that my investment in The Complete New Yorker will one day be completely worthless, unless the publishers can ensure that they will continue to support their encrypted, crippled version of DjVu for years into the future. Or, should they go out of business or decide to switch to a new format, that they'll either open the code (riiiiight) or provide some sort of conversion mechanism (suuuuure).

TiVo is a different matter, since it's essentially a closed box (although there are ways to get around that). In this, we need to trust that TiVo will not use a forced upgrade to further decrease functionality that was there when the machine was originally purchased. Seeing that the company has already done this once, by adding support for a type of broadcast flag that limits timeshifting, I don't have high hopes that TiVo will do the right thing. Hello, MythTV.

I feel especially sorry for the people that have spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars at the iTunes Music Store. What happens when Apple downgrades iTunes again, further limiting what users can do with the songs they bought? What happens in five years, when Apple moves on to another format? What happens to your music collection when the iPod is no longer de rigueur, and you want to switch to a new portable player? How are you going to get your encrypted AAC files to play on that new device, with something approaching the same level of quality?

DRM means that you have no control over the files on your computer. You can only do what the company supplying you with the DRM'd files want you to do.

4. DRM can be defeated

It may take some time, but all DRM can be defeated. Or rather, as Chris Anderson, the thinker and writer behind The Long Tail contends, "Any protection technology that is really difficult to crack is probably too cumbersome to be accepted by consumers." And anything that is not that cumbersome can be defeated (although so-called "Trusted Computing" is going to make that process a lot harder ... but I think it will eventually be overcome by those determined to get around it). Cory Doctorow put it best when he explained that the only way that DRM can work is if all of the following conditions are met:

Every copy of the song circulated, from the recording studio to the record store, had strong DRM on it
No analog to digital converters were available to anyone, anywhere in world, who might have an interest in breaking the DRM (since you can just avoid the DRM by ... taking the analog output off the player and re-digitizing the song in an open format)

· Peer-to-peer networks ceased to exist
· Search engines ceased to index file-sharing sites
· No "small worlds" file-sharing tools were in circulation

Although Cory is talking about music here, the same principles apply to any kind of file that can be protected with DRM. Even if Trusted Computing and Microsoft's vision of DRM'd Word documents and emails comes to fruition, if it's hot enough to protect, it's hot enough for someone looking at it - and someone does need to eventually look at it, or how can it be used? - to copy it by hand.

Of course, some might argue that it's enough that the average Joe can't break the DRM. If that's true, then why use DRM? What's the goal? If the goal is to prevent all unauthorized copies from being made and circulated, then it isn't enough to put up roadblocks; you must seek to lock down your "content" (as a writer, I hate that word) completely. If the goal is just to frustrate users, then why use DRM at all, since you must realize that un-DRM'd copies of your materials are going to circulate? And even if Joe can't break the DRM, he'll eventually figure out how to use a P2P network, or ask his nerd friend for help, and then you've got another unauthorized copy and an upset and now more knowledgeable former customer. What publisher wants that?

DRM has wormed its way into the imaginations of Hollywood, the RIAA, and publishers, and they in turn have convinced the computer industry (who, it must be admitted, needed little convincing) that DRM must be applied and supported throughout their products. To The New Yorker, I'm sure that DRM made lots of sense. In reality, though, it doesn't. DRM has angered this customer (and many others), eviscerated my Fair Use rights, ultimately rendered the money I spent moot, and it can still be copied anyway! Where does that leave the publisher? It sounds to me like we were both - consumer and publisher - sold a bill of goods. Welcome to the future!
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/390





A DRM Threat To Lives And Infrastructure?
Bill Brenner

The controversy over Sony BMG Music Entertainment Inc.'s use of rootkit-based copyright protection software has faded from the headlines. But the story continues to play out in the background, where information security advocates are pushing for the right to let users remove Digital Rights Management (DRM) software from their computers when the software is deemed a threat to security and privacy.

This week, Ed Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, used his Freedom to Tinker blog to lash out against what he called an "utterly astonishing argument" copyright protection groups are making against that effort.

In the wake of the rootkit controversy, Felten and Princeton Ph.D student Alex Halderman asked the U.S. Copyright Office for an exemption allowing users to remove certain DRM software from their computers when it is found to cause "security and privacy harm." Felten said the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and Open Source and Industry Alliance (OSAIA) made an "even simpler" (.pdf) request to exempt DRM systems that "employ access control measures which threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives."

"Who could oppose that?" Felten asked before answering the question himself: "The BSA (Business Software Alliance), RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and friends -- that's who."

What Felten finds "utterly astonishing" is a statement those organizations make in their (.pdf) written arguments against the DRM exemptions. Felten cited pages 22 and 23, where they said, "the claimed beneficial impact of recognition of the exemption -- that it would 'provide an incentive for the creation of protection measures that respect the security of consumers' computers while protecting the interests of the record labels' … would be fundamentally undermined if copyright owners -- and everyone else -- were left in such serious doubt about which measures were or were not subject to circumvention under the exemption."

The industry groups added, "This uncertainty would be even more severe under the formulations … in which the boundaries of the proposed exemption would turn on whether access controls 'threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives.'"

To that, Felten responded, "One would have thought they'd make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn't threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives."

The truly amazing part, he said, is that in order to protect their ability to deploy this "dangerous" DRM, "they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives."

He ended on a pessimistic note: "If past rulemakings are a good predictor, it's more likely than not that the Copyright Office will rule in their favor," he said.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com...172053,00.html





Indie Label Uses Heartfelt Note Instead Of Copy-Restriction
Cory doctorow

An independent label is eschewing copy-restriction technology on its promo CDs in favor of a handwritten notes on a stickie reading:

Dear Recipient of Promotional CD,

Just a note to beg (if you were even thinking about it in the first place) you not to post our CD to the "internet" in any way...I know it's offensive even to bring it up, but we have our many babies to consider, and the landlord wants to reposess Donnybrook farm and the album cover art is important. Thanks for your consideration.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/07..._uses_hea.html





Add Intel DRM To Your Product, Pay $8m Fine
Cory Doctorow

If you cripple your products by adding Intel's DTCP-IP DRM to it, you could be liable for more than eight million dollars in fines if your implementation gets cracked. In this Intel Developer Forum presentation, Intel's Brett Branch explains everything you need to know about implementing Intel's DTCP-IP (including a complicated philosophical argument about why this isn't really DRM, even though it satisfies the primary definition of DRM: technology designed to give control of a device to someone other than its owner).

It's pretty creepy: you have to allow for "system renewability messages" that can revoke features and even disable the DTCP-IP when they're submitted. Ever wonder why enemy space-stations always seem to have a big red "press this to make the whole space-station explode" button in science fiction movies? I mean, wouldn't it be smarter to just not build "self-destruct" into your space-station? Well, that's what DTCP-IP demands of its implementers.

Scariest of all, though, is slide 25, shown here, which explains what happens if your DTCP-IP implementation results in a breach: $8m in fines, more fines from copyright holders (see update below), and revocation of your devices in the field (meaning potential lawsuits from your customers).

The presentation ends with a bunch of "call-to-action" slides for the people in the audience who are supposed to go out and add this to their products. But none of those slides says this: "If you subtract value from your products by adding our crippleware, we might reward you by bankrupting you when the inevitable breach occurs." It would also be nice to see this slide: "All of the 'premium content' crippled with DRM can also be downloaded for free from the Internet without any of these locks. Hey, entertainment industry cats -- do you think that adding DTCP-IP anti- features might provide an incentive to otherwise honest users to get their TV shows from Bittorrent instead?" 1.4MB PDF Link (via Hack the Planet)

Update: EFF's Fred von Lohmann sez,

Here's the accurate description of how the DTCP license works (all of this is in the public documents): 1) Liability to DT Licensing Authority for a material breach is capped at $8 million (DTLA has never sued anyone to date).

2) Liability to qualified third party beneficiaries (i.e., movie studios) for a material breach is limited to injunctive relief only (no monetary damages payable to movie studios for breach).

3) DMCA and secondary liability claims that a rights holder might want to bring for whatever reason are simply not covered by the contract one way or the other . . . they remain creatures of statute that the DTLA agreement does not affect.

So the DTCP license does expose technology companies to breach of contract damages if they fail to meet the relevant requirements (including robustness and compliance rules), but only DTLA can sue for money. Movie studios can sue as third party beneficiaries, but only for injunctions (e.g., stop manufacturing that tamper-friendly chipset).
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/07...rm_to_you.html





Unhappy Upgrades

Software Users Seek Help 'Downgrading' Their PCs
Andrew LaVallee

When Yahoo Inc. released an upgrade to its free MusicMatch jukebox software, Kyle Keeton didn't think twice about installing it on his home computer. "I try all the new programs I can," said the 47 year-old restaurant manager.

But the new version of MusicMatch didn't seem to agree with his PC: He noticed several programs were slower, and there were frequent crashes. When Mr. Keeton tried to revert back to the earlier version, which ran smoothly, he discovered that it was gone from his computer, and he couldn't find any instructions for rolling back the new program.

Yahoo's Web site was no help. Like other companies, Yahoo links only to the latest versions of its programs. After some Web searching, Mr. Keeton was able to download a previous version of MusicMatch from OldVersion.com, a Web site set up by a computer enthusiast that serves as a repository of outdated programs. "When you upgrade, it doesn't [always] mean that the program's better," Mr. Keeton said.

Software makers have long convinced consumers they need to regularly upgrade their products, from multimedia players to games, to keep them running well and to take advantage of the best features. The prevalence of high-speed Internet connections has made upgrading much simpler, and many software makers use automatic notifications to encourage users to download new files. But the newer versions aren't always improvements in the eyes of users: The updates may fix problems or plug security holes, but some may add more advertising or other unwanted features.

Users often try to downgrade when they find confusing changes in a new version or encounter software bugs, or just decide they want to go back to a more familiar version, said David Smith, an analyst at research firm Gartner. Often, they discover that the downgrade process is complicated, if not impossible.

A spokeswoman for MusicMatch said it generally doesn't make old versions of its software available to users, but said customer-service representatives will help users downgrade if they press the issue.

Uncertain Upgrades

Part of the problem, analysts say, is that users are sometimes lured into updating their software without fully understanding what will change. For instance, users of Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes program were recently met with a prompt that said simply, "A new version of iTunes (6.0.4) is available. Would you like to download it now?"

Those who took advantage of an iTunes upgrade earlier this year discovered that it added a new "Mini Store" to the software's music player, which recommended songs for sale from Apple based on the music the user was playing on their computer. Blogs and online support forums lit up with requests for instructions on how to revert to the previous version. An Apple spokesman said iTunes can't be downgraded once a user has installed a newer version, though a feature in the software allows users to disable the Mini Store.

Since few software vendors make past versions of their products available online, computer users are turning to specialized Web sites for help. Collections of long-lost versions of free programs have been amassed on sites like OldVersion.com, MajorGeeks.com, and Jumbo.com, where consumers can download them.

At MacFixIt.com, a technical-support site for owners of Apple Macintosh computers, downgrades are a frequent topic of discussion, said Ben Wilson, the site's editor. Users regularly seek instructions on rolling back upgrades to the Mac's operating system. That process can be daunting, he said, and sometimes requires users to hunt around their computers for specific files to alter.

Tracking Old Versions

OldVersion.com offers more than 600 versions of about 65 different programs. The site focuses on programs that are distributed by their makers for free, such as Adobe Systems Inc.'s Acrobat Reader and Yahoo's instant-messaging software. The old versions are submitted by volunteers who save copies before they get replaced on software makers' Web sites.

"Companies make a lot of new versions. They're not always better for the consumer," said Alex Levine, a 16-year-old who runs OldVersion as a hobby from his family's home in Fayetteville, N.Y. Text advertisements on the site help pay for his monthly Web hosting bill, he said.

Mr. Levine recently tried the latest release of America Online's instant-messaging software, called AIM Triton, but found it had "a whole bunch of advertising." He ended up downgrading, using an installation file from an older version of the program.

AOL, for its part, doesn't mind when users downgrade, said a spokeswoman for the unit of Time Warner Inc. About 6.5 million of the company's 43 million instant-messaging users have upgraded to Triton since it was released in November, she said.

The sites that maintain old versions generally operate without the permission of software makers, but rarely run into trouble, since the programs they're distributing were free to begin with. Mr. Levine said he has only been asked to remove old versions of two programs – iTunes and the file-swapping program Kazaa – and he complied both times.

Some software makers have gone out of their way to make it easy for users to downgrade their programs. Mozilla Corp., which makes the free Firefox Web browser, maintains an archive of old versions on one of its support sites.

Downgrading became an issue following a major update of the software last fall. The new version contained potential security vulnerabilities, and didn't support some extensions, or add-on features, that independent programmers had created for the browser. "Two extensions that I relied on really heavily wouldn't install," said Sarah Perez, a systems administrator in Tampa, Fla. Ms. Perez said she was able to easily revert to the previous version of the browser. She later upgraded after the company addressed the issues.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs





Can Microsoft Save the Net?
Lawrence Lessig

Working late one night a few months back, I was just about to sign off when I decided to check my email. At the top of my inbox was a message from PayPal, "confirming" a change in my email address. But I hadn't changed the address. In an exhausted panic, I clicked the link to correct an obvious fraud.

For a split second the browser opened not to PayPal but to an unrelated IP address. Then, almost instantaneously, the screen was replaced by what looked exactly like a PayPal window, requesting my password to sign in. This wasn't PayPal; it was a phishing bot. Had I been just a little drowsier, I might have been snagged by the fraud in the very act of trying to stop it.

We who celebrate the brilliance of the Internet - and in particular, its end-to-end open design - tend to ignore the maliciousness that increasingly infects it. The Net was built on trust, and it lacks an adequate mechanism to prevent fraud. Thus, it's no surprise that phishing expeditions nearly doubled last year - and phishing is just one of many evils proliferating online. It's only a matter of time until some virus takes out millions of computers or some senator's identity is stolen. When that happens, the liberties inherent in the Internet's early design will erode even faster than the liberties said to be protected by the Constitution.

Now, with the debut of the InfoCard identity management system, Microsoft is leading a network-wide effort to address the issue. To those of us long skeptical of the technology giant's intentions, the plan seems too good to be true. Yet the solution is not only right, it could be the most important contribution to Internet security since cryptography.

The InfoCard system will first be distributed with Vista, Microsoft's newest Windows OS, set for release this year. The system effectively adds an "identity layer" to the Internet, accomplishing what security companies have been promising for years: making it difficult to falsify an identity and easy to verify your own. Here's how it works: Users' computers (and potentially cell phones and other devices) will hold files called InfoCards that give encrypted sites access to authenticated information about the user. An American Express InfoCard, for example, might carry your name, address, and account number, all authenticated by American Express. When a Web site requests personal data, you choose whether to release that information, securely and with the verification of the card's issuer.

The resulting system is more precise and comprehensive than the hope-it-works hodgepodge of security measures we use now, argues Kim Cameron, Microsoft's chief architect of identity and access. "Auto-complete and cookies and passwords are part of a patchwork solution. With InfoCards, users will always know exactly what's happening and can always control it."

This might sound scary to friends of privacy. It shouldn't. The InfoCard system gives you more control over your data, not less. The protocol is built on a need-to-know principle: While an InfoCard might hold 30 facts about me, only the data I choose to reveal is shared. If I need to certify that I am a US citizen, then that fact is verified without also revealing my name, age, or place of birth. And when it comes to that fake PayPal site, the InfoCard system wouldn't recognize it - it wouldn't have theproper credentials.

Again, if this sounds scary to those suspicious of Microsoft, it shouldn't. It's a protocol - a set of rules for exchanging information - not a Microsoft product. Any company can provide certified protection for data using the protocol, and many will. So unlike Microsoft's Passport system, the dubious personal info repository that alarmed many people a few years ago, no central administrator decides how privacy is protected or trust secured. Instead, the protocol solves the problem of security the same way the Internet solved the problem of browsers - through competition on an open, neutral platform. This is infrastructure for a digital age. It's TCP/IP for privacy and security.

None of this means there isn't a role for (smart) government policy and laws against online fraud or theft. There plainly is. But if this identity layer sticks, then there is a wider range of solutions to the problem. In particular, there is one that seemed impossible to me just a year ago, one that's consistent with the decentralized design of the Internet. That's an extraordinary gift to the online world, from a giant that increasingly depends on the Net's extraordinary design.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...osts.html?pg=7





One way out

Microsoft: Vista Won't Get A Backdoor
Joris Evers

Windows Vista won't have a backdoor that could be used by police forces to get into encrypted files, Microsoft has stressed.

In February, a BBC News story suggested that the British government was in discussions with Microsoft over backdoor access to the operating system. A backdoor is a method of bypassing normal authentication to gain access to a computer without to the PC user knowing.

But Microsoft has now quelled the suggestion that law enforcement might get such access.

"Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows," a company representative said in a statement sent via e-mail.

The discussion centers on BitLocker Drive Encryption, a planned security feature for Vista, the update to the Windows operating system. BitLocker encrypts data to protect it if the computer is lost or stolen.

This feature could make it harder for law enforcement agencies to get access to data on seized computers.

"The suggestion is that we are working with governments to create a back door so that they can always access BitLocker-encrypted data," Niels Ferguson, a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft, wrote Thursday on a corporate blog. "Over my dead body," he wrote in his post titled "Back- door nonsense."

Microsoft is talking to various governments about Vista. However, the talks are about using the new operating system and BitLocker for their own security, Ferguson wrote. "We also get questions from law enforcement organizations. They foresee that they will want to read BitLocker-encrypted data, and they want to be prepared," he wrote.

"Back doors are simply not acceptable," Ferguson wrote. "Besides, they wouldn't find anybody on this team willing to implement and test the back door."

Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP, is slated to be available by year's end.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+Vista+...3-6046016.html





Ich bin ein Penguin

IBM Will Not Use Windows Vista - But Will Move To Linux Desktops
William Henning

IBM switching to Linux destops in Germany according to a Linux Forum 2006 presentation by their head of open source and Linux sales in Germany.

Interesting news from LinuxForum 2006

During a presentation on IBM's involvement with Open Source, Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, who heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM made a very interesting statement...

"Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista."

The question is, does this only apply to IBM in Germany, or IBM world wide?

If ALL of IBM switches to Linux desktops and OpenOffice... that would be a very significant loss to Microsoft; not only in direct licensing revenues, but also in speeding adoption of Linux by other companies. After all, if IBM can run on Linux desktops...
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/5436/





Google Is Reportedly Switching to AMD

Google Inc. is switching its servers to run on Advanced Micro Devices Inc. chips instead of those made by Intel Corp., according to a Morgan Stanley report.

Google, which has more than 200,000 servers, has started to buy Advanced Micro's Opteron processors with almost all new purchases, Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Edelstone said. He raised his earnings estimates for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro.

"Most of Google's near-term server purchases will use AMD's Opteron for the first time," Edelstone said. Google "will help AMD to enjoy a significant sequential increase in their server business in the first quarter."

Winning Google as a customer may help Advanced Micro beat analysts' estimates this quarter, San Francisco-based Edelstone wrote.

The switch may also come as a blow to Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini, who sits on Google's board. Advanced Micro, the No. 2 maker of computer processors behind Intel, last quarter took more than 20% of the market for the first time in more than four years.

Edelstone raised his estimate for Advanced Micro's first-quarter profit to 33 cents a share from 31 cents. He raised his 2006 estimate by 10 cents to $1.70 a share.

Shares of Advanced Micro rose $1.40 to $40.07.

Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv said she wasn't able to comment on the Morgan Stanley report.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...ck=1&cset=true





Intel Says Sales to Fall Short

The chip maker warns it will miss quarterly revenue forecasts, a further sign that rival AMD is grabbing more market share.
Terril Yue Jones

In another sign of Intel Corp.'s eroding market share, the world's largest chip maker warned Friday that it would miss quarterly sales targets as demand slips and archrival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. grabs customers.

It was the latest indication of vulnerability from Intel, which supplies 80% of the microprocessors that run computers. In recent quarters, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has grappled with component shortages, canceled products and gains by AMD.

"Intel is far from out of the woods; they may just be getting into them," said Rick Whittington, a chip analyst with Caris & Co. "AMD now has 20% market share, and AMD is producing more chips this quarter from their new [plant] in Germany. So Intel is being pressed, and we'll see more of that."

Since mid-January, when Intel reported fourth-quarter profit and revenue that fell short of projections, the Silicon Valley icon has watched its stock slide 20%. Its shares fell as low as $19.86 on Friday, a 52-week low, then closed at $20.32, down 17 cents.

"The fact that the stock is holding up reasonably well is that there's not really new news now," said James Ragan, an analyst with Crowell, Weedon & Co. in Los Angeles. "This is a continuation of the bad news that we got in January. Everybody knows that AMD did gain market share in the fourth quarter, and it appears it's a continuation, and Intel for the first time is acknowledging that. So they're being more conservative."

Intel said revenue this quarter would be $8.7 billion to $9.1 billion, a lower range than the $9.1 billion to $9.7 billion it forecast in January. Intel executives declined to comment further Friday.

The sales warning underscores the advances that Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD has made in recent years in hacking away at Intel's position. Intel still dominates the overall computer processor market, but AMD has been taking market share in processors for PCs and for server computers.

Last quarter, for instance, AMD outsold Intel for the first time in U.S. retail desktop sales.

"We know Intel's a little behind AMD, which is getting a lot of positive ratings on the performance of their chips," said Ragan, who owns Intel shares and rates them a "buy." "There's a lot of different kinds of chips sold now, but AMD has some chips that are offering better performance at a better price, and it's hard to compete with that."

Intel began shipping processors late last year that are built with wires as narrow as 65 nanometers across, the most state-of-the-art process available. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

AMD's chips are still made at the 90-nanometer level but provide more performance for the price.

That means "Intel could have a difficult second half," said Whittington, who rates Intel "below average" and AMD "buy."

"AMD has superior performance at lower power, and their cost to manufacture, even though they're behind a generation, is commensurate with Intel," Whittington said. "Hence when AMD catches up in process, they will lengthen their lead."

But AMD has troubles of its own, including slowing PC demand and the continuing refusal of Dell Inc., the world's biggest PC maker, to use AMD processors in its computers.

AMD's shares fell $1.82, or more than 4%, to $39.51 on Friday. They are up 29% this year.

AMD executives declined to comment.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology





Record Labels Expect 30 Percent Revenue From Satellite Radio
Posted by Seán Byrne - Source: Morningstar

When it comes to digital radio, the music industry is trying to control it as much as possible, not to mention trying to restrict how its listener's capabilities also. So far, their talks with Sirius Radio Inc. has a long way to go yet, particularly over the issue with Sirius' S50 satellite radio receiver which has the ability to record its broadcasts. Besides trying to enforce restrictions on what consumers try to record, the record labels feel that they are entitled to around 30% of revenue generated from satellite radio.

At present, terrestrial radio broadcast services must pay compulsory rates for the right to play music, however radio companies must negotiate their own rates instead. According to the RIAA, they see satellite radio as an interactive service, which they claim makes them entitled to higher rates, particularly as its audience continues to grow. Also, unlike terrestrial radio services, most satellite radio services are subscription based like satellite TV, which is likely another reason why music labels would like to tap into this revenue stream. The labels and satellite radio companies have until June 30th to make an agreement to avoid a hearing. Thanks to DamnedIfIknow for letting us know about the following news:

Speaking a Bear Stearns media conference Wednesday, which was web cast, Sirius Chief Financial Officer David Frear said he feels satellite radio companies shouldn't have to pay music labels anything in royalties while labels feel they should get something like 30% of revenue.

"There's been some tough talk from some of the labels," he said. Record labels haven't been happy with Sirius's new S50 radio which includes an MP3 player that allows users to record several hours of programming. The music industry insists that because of this "interactive" service, which is entitled to higher fees, satellite radio companies should have to step up and pay more.

If the RIAA and its music labels have their way, the future of digital satellite radio does not look good. First, if the satellite radio companies are forced to pay around 30% of their revenue to the music labels, chances are that they will not be able to absorb this cost, so this will mean a significant hike on subscription costs, not to mention a further 30% of this going to the music labels for the extra revenue generated from the hike. Next, if the Bill for the digital radio “broadcast flag” goes into effect, consumers will lose the ability to record certain broadcasts, particularly music and possibly the ability to keep or transfer most of their recordings. Finally, this bill would also mean that digital radio receiver manufacturers would have to fork out on extra costs to implement these copy-protection features, not to mention the cost of getting them approved for each model they develop.

DamnedIfIknow: Man, colludding on digital music pricing, a digital radio broadcast flag, and 30 percent royalties? Someone needs to give the record labels a swift kick in the ***.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13148





TiVo To Expand TV Recording To Cell Phones
May Wong

TiVo subscribers will soon be able to program television recordings straight from cell phones using the Verizon Wireless network.

An agreement with Verizon Wireless, to be announced Tuesday, expands on TiVo Inc.'s strategy to bring the digital video recording pioneer's capabilities beyond its set- top-boxes and the television, and directly to cell phones for the first time.

Dubbed TiVo Mobile, it's also the latest feature the Alviso, Calif.-based company is introducing to help differentiate itself from the growing number of rival DVR offerings from cable and satellite TV operators.

A DVR records TV programming onto hard disks and gives viewers the ability to pause live TV and fast-forward through commercials.

Terms of the TiVo-Verizon deal were not disclosed, but TiVo said Verizon would be the first cellular carrier to offer the remote TiVo scheduling feature on its handsets.

"TiVo isn't just about a great way to watch television but it's also about a great way to manage your TV life, and to do that, we realize TiVo can't be isolated. It has to be integrated with all these other digital devices in people's lives," TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said in an interview.

TiVo subscribers already can program their recordings through the TiVo Web site and Yahoo Inc.'s online TV guide, so users with Web-enabled cell phones can schedule recordings that way.

TiVo Mobile, however, is specifically tailored to work on cell phones, making the on- the-go scheduling process easier and faster, said Naveen Chopra, TiVo's director of business development.

Verizon subscribers will be able to access TiVo Mobile through its "Get It Now" service menu starting in the early summer. Verizon's pricing for the service will be announced then, TiVo said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





AOL Bows to Nonprofit E-Mailers
AP

Less than a week after interest groups complained about a proposed bulk e-mailing fee, America Online Inc. said nonprofit organizations would not have to pay to send mass messages to their members after all.

The Dulles, Va.-based company said Friday that it would offer qualified groups a bulk e- mail service comparable to one that would be available to commercial e-mail senders. It also said it would pay the fees for the nonprofits and advocacy groups.

AOL's original plan would have required all bulk e-mailers to pay a fee — 0.25 cent to 1 cent per message — to route e-mail to a user's mailbox without passing through junk mail filters.

But Monday, a consortium of nonprofit groups, including the AFL- CIO and political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, blasted plans to charge for the service, saying it would stifle communication from organizations that couldn't afford to pay.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology

[JackSpratts]

Maryland House Votes To Oust Diebold Machines

It would replace $90M worth of e-voting machines with systems offering a paper trail

The state of Maryland stands poised to put its entire $90 million investment in Diebold Election Systems Inc. touch-screen e- voting systems on ice because they can’t produce paper receipts.

The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch- screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections.

The legislation calls for the state to lease paper-based optical scan systems for this year's votes. State Delegate Anne Healey estimated the leasing cost at $12.5 to $16 million for the two elections.

Healey is the vice chairwoman of the Maryland House Ways and Means Committee, which recommended the passage of the bill.

The bill was sent on to the State Senate for a vote after the House action, she said.

Healey said the effort was inspired in part by concerns raised by officials in California and Florida that the Diebold systems have inherent security problems caused by technological and procedural flaws.

“We’ve been hearing from the public for the last several years that it doesn’t have confidence in a system without a paper trail,” Healey said. “We need to provide that level of confidence going forward.”

If the bill becomes law, the state’s Diebold systems will be placed in “abeyance” and the vendor will be required to equip them to provide the requisite paper trail, she said.

Healey said the law would require the vendor to provide a paper trail before the 2008 elections or risk losing its contract to supply machines in the state.

The bill also requires that any leased optical-scan system be equipped to accommodate the needs of handicapped voters, to ensure compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act statutes.

Healey said she expects the Senate to vote on the bill sometime in the next few weeks, before the legislative session ends.

A Diebold spokesman said the company will “certainly work with the state of Maryland, as we always have, to support their elections as they see fit.”

The spokesman noted that Maryland has been using Diebold machines for several years without problems. The state first contracted with the company to provide the systems in January 2002.

Maryland is following in the footsteps of several other states in expressing concern over the lack of a paper trail in the Diebold machines.

Earlier this month, Florida adopted a new set of security procedures for users of e- voting systems from all suppliers of e-voting machines.

The implementation of these new procedures in Florida was largely a response to reports issued last month by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson that tests of the Diebold systems found them vulnerable to external access via hacking or bugs.

Nonetheless, McPherson has granted conditional certification for the Diebold machines in California’s elections — with the proviso that supervisors adhere to new security guidelines when using the gear.

The guidelines require that administrators reset the cryptographic keys on every AccuVote-TSx machine from the factory-installed default before every election. Additionally, each memory card must be programmed securely under the supervision of the registrar of voters.

Over an unspecified long term, Diebold must fix the security vulnerabilities to retain the California certification.

In a statement, Diebold said it “wholeheartedly agrees” with the proposed security procedures and said it plans to improve the security of the optical-scan firmware in its machines and create digital signatures to detect tampering.
http://www.computerworld.com/printth...109436,00.html





An Army of Davids: After Action Report
Robert Rose

Previously, I reported this piece of NJ legislation (NJ a1327) that would require any online forum to register legal name and address of every person posting public comments. The NJCSD membership responded in force with phone calls and emails, along with many other people across the state and nation. Together, acting in concert as a Reynoldsian Army of Davids, we have made our collective voices heard. Assemblyman Biondi, who authored the bill, is saying he will reconsider and withdraw the bill. In fact, he admits his mistake but stops short of being contrite. Here is Biondi's letter to NJCSD member Ambush:


Thank you for your e-mail. I understand your concerns with my recently proposed legislation. Based on the number of negative responses I have received about this legislation I have asked the NJ Office of Legislative Services to prepare an opinion regarding this bill's enforceability and constitutionality.

I did not draft this bill with intent to limit freedom of speech. The intent behind this legislation was to bring some civility back to public forums, in particular the forums on www.nj.com. As I receive more feedback from, literally, around the country, it is becoming apparent that the bill may be too broad in scope and in reality not enforceable.

As an aside, this bill was only introduced in January. There have been no committee hearings regarding this bill and there are none scheduled to my knowledge. I am getting inundated with responses which I will review and use to better educate myself on the implications of this bill. If, after reviewing all of the correspondence and the opinion of OLS, it turns out that the bill is, in fact, unworkable, I will certainly reconsider and withdraw it. In other words, this is not something that will happen overnight.

It is unfortunate, from my perspective, that while my intention here was civility and respectfulness, it turns out that it may have gone too far.

Thank you again for your e-mail.

Sincerely,

Pete Biondi
Assemblyman


You bet the scope of the bill was "too broad." If a politician can't handle criticism, warranted or not, he is the wrong person for the job.

Just goes to show that the Internet, unlike the antique media, is a tool tailor-made for libertarians and as we organize and use this tool, we have the power to make our collective voices heard and to generate change. Let the libertarian revolution begin.
http://njcsd.org/index.php?option=co...d=298&Itemid=9





Thousands Of Federal Cases Kept Secret
Michael J. Sniffen and John Solomon

Despite the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of public trials, nearly all records are being kept secret for more than 5,000 defendants who completed their journey through the federal courts over the last three years. Instances of such secrecy more than doubled from 2003 to 2005.

An Associated Press investigation found, and court observers agree, that most of these defendants are cooperating government witnesses, but the secrecy surrounding their records prevents the public from knowing details of their plea bargains with the government.

Most of these defendants are involved in drug gangs, though lately a very small number come from terrorism cases. Some of these cooperating witnesses are among the most unsavory characters in America's courts - multiple murderers and drug dealers - but the public cannot learn whether their testimony against confederates won them drastically reduced prison sentences or even freedom.

In the nation's capital, which has had a serious problem with drug gangs murdering government witnesses, the secrecy has reached another level - the use of secret dockets. For hundreds of such defendants over the past few years in this city, should someone acquire the actual case number for them and enter it in the U.S. District Court's computerized record system, the computer will falsely reply, "no such case" - rather than acknowledging that it is a sealed case.

At the request of the AP, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts conducted its first tally of secrecy in federal criminal cases. The nationwide data it provided the AP showed 5,116 defendants whose cases were completed in 2003, 2004 and 2005, but the bulk of their records remain secret.

"The constitutional presumption is for openness in the courts, but we have to ask whether we are really honoring that," said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and now law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "What are the reasons for so many cases remaining under seal?"

"What makes the American criminal justice system different from so many others in the world is our willingness to cast some sunshine on the process, but if you can't see it, you can't really criticize it," Levenson said.

The courts' administrative office and the Justice Department declined to comment on the numbers.

The data show a sharp increase in secret case files over time as the Bush administration's well- documented reliance on secrecy in the executive branch has crept into the federal courts through the war on drugs, anti-terrorism efforts and other criminal matters.

"This follows the pattern of this administration," said John Wesley Hall, an Arkansas defense attorney and second vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "I am astonished and shocked that this many criminal proceedings in federal court escape public scrutiny or become buried."

The percentage of defendants who have reached verdicts and been sentenced but still have most of their records sealed has more than doubled in the last three years, the court office's tally shows.

Of nearly 85,000 defendants whose cases were closed in 2003, the records of 952 or 1.1 percent remain mostly sealed. Of more than 82,000 defendants with cases closed in 2004, records for 1,774 or 2.2 percent remain mostly secret. And of more than 87,000 defendants closed out in 2005, court records for 2,390 or 2.7 percent remain mostly closed to the public.

The court office also found a sharp increase in defendants whose case records were partly sealed for a limited time. Among newly charged defendants, the numbers in this category grew from 9,999 or 10.9 percent of all defendants charged in 2003 to 11,508 or 12.6 percent of those charged in 2005.

But the AP investigation found, and court observers agree, that the overwhelming number of these cases sealed for a limited time involve a use of secrecy that draws no criticism: the sealing of an indictment only until the defendant is arrested.

AP's investigation found a large concentration of both kinds of secrecy at the U.S. District Court here: limited sealing of records and extensive sealing that continues even after the courts are done with a defendant.

"When the sentences are sealed, that's a con on the community," said Lexi Christ, a Washington defense lawyer for a man acquitted in a crack cocaine case.

In that case, all the defendants' names became public when the indictment was unsealed. But all other records for six defendants who pleaded guilty remained sealed more than two years after the public trial in which two of the drug dealers were convicted.

One of the cooperating witnesses admitted to seven murders and testified in open court against co-defendants who had committed fewer, Christ said. But like the others who pleaded guilty and cooperated, that witness' plea deal and sentence were sealed.

"Cooperating witnesses are pleading guilty to six or seven murders, and the jury doesn't know they'll be sitting on the Metro (subway) next to them a year later. It's a really, really ugly system," Christ said.

Prosecutors argue that plea agreements must be sealed to protect witnesses and their families from violent retaliation. But Christ said that makes no sense after the trial when the defendants know who testified.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press found the U.S. District Court here has 469 criminal cases, from 2001-2005, that are listed by this court's electronic docket as "no such case." An AP survey over a shorter period found similar numbers here and got oral acknowledgment from the clerk's office that the missing electronic docket numbers corresponded to sealed cases. However, these figures include an unknown number of sealed indictments that will be made public if arrests are made.

"That's horrifying," said Loyola's Levenson. "When I was a prosecutor from 1981 to 1989, I never heard of secret dockets."

No matter how few turn out to be almost totally sealed after the defendant's case was completed, "it's still significant," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee and a pioneer in campaigning against court secrecy.

"The Supreme Court has said that criminal proceedings are public," Dalglish added. "In this country, we don't prosecute and lock up convicts and have no public track record of how we got there. That violates the defendants' rights not to mention the public's right to know what it's court system is doing."

Although Justice Department does not keep comprehensive nationwide statistics on secrecy in federal prosecutions, it does track how often prosecutors ask permission from headquarters to hold a secret court proceeding, like an arraignment, hearing, trial or sentencing.

The department estimates it got 100 such requests from October 2000 though October 2004, Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said. Another 100 arrived during the 12 months that ended October 2005, he said.

Sierra said the large recent increase occurred because the department sent a memo to all federal prosecutors in 2004 reminding them they need Washington's approval before requesting or agreeing to secret courtroom proceedings. Filing of secret papers in cases doesn't require such permission.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Book Review - The Science of Secrecy, by Simon Singh
March 8th, 2006 by Sparky

‘The Science of Secrecy: The History of Codes and Codebreaking’
Simon Singh
ISBN: 1841154350

Ever since the first codes and ciphers were developed, there has been a battle between those who want to keep their information secret, and those who want to read that information. It has been a purely intellectual war, but one that is often driven by motives from above that are far more violent. This book chronicles that battle, from it’s inception, to the modern day, and outlines the techniques used to obfuscate information, and the fascinating history of the application of those techniques.

Cryptography has been a tool largely used by governments to avoid their communications being read by the enemy or other unfriendly states, but historically it has also been utilised by individuals to protect their more questionable or taboo activities from discovery.

This battle is presented in the book as a rather bipolar trend; cryptographers trying to protect data and crypt-analysts trying to discover the meaning of that data. I found this to be slightly misleading. The representation of the history of the field as a constant struggle between two distinct parties does make for a more entertaining read, and adds an element of conflict by conjuring images of an ancient and continual intellectual game, but in reality these two groups are often one and the same.

Whilst I admit that the race to develop stronger codes and ciphers was in many ways separate from the race to break them, they were also inextricably linked, and undertaken by the same people. One has to allow a certain amount of poetic license in popular science books, especially in this case, as it has lightened what could have been a dry topic.

The way in which the book is structured allows a complete novice access. Starting from the first discoveries in cryptography and working forward chronologically, whilst explaining the method behind the discoveries, educates the reader in basic technique without effort. One reads a fascinating historical account, and later realises that they now have a good understanding of the mathematical concepts behind these approaches they’ve been reading of.

The book places these techniques into context, giving historical examples of their use. Often they are revealed to have played large and important parts in famous events, ranging from wars and political plots, to events which are not even strictly related to cryptography.

For example is is shown how crypt-analytic approaches were utilised in the decipherment of ancient languages such as hieroglyphics. These languages are dead, in that there are no living individuals who have the ability to read them, and no information was available to help in their decipherment. By studying the frequency of letters or symbols in the text, as when attempting to break a cipher, it was possible to slowly read meaning into the text, and map the alphabet.

Many of these scripts were decrypted by amateur crypt-analysts, rather than academics. One point the author makes is that there are still many that remain a mystery, such as the Etruscan and Indus scripts. One has to wonder whether a book like this, combined with the current national fixation with puzzles such as Soduko, would create a resurgence in interest, and lead to some of these being broken.

One interesting point that the book makes is that the vast majority of work performed by cryptographers is done in secret, largely for security agencies all over the world, and that this has been true for some time. Therefore it is not uncommon for crypt-analysts to receive no recognition for their work, or to have a discovery attributed to them long after their death. These organizations must classify the work in the interest of national security, so in a way this book stands as an anonymous tribute to their cunning and multidisciplinary talent.

Examples from the book of such discoveries include Charles Babbage breaking the Vigenere cipher in 1854, which only came to light in the 1970s. The author suggests that the work was kept secret to aid the Royal Navy, as it occurred just after the Crimean War started. The credit for the discovery instead fell to a retired Prussian army officer who independently discovered it in 1863.

This is shown to be one of the enduring themes of the story of cryptography, leading right through to the 1970s where credit for developing the RSA cryptographic technique went to Diffie, Hellman and Merkle in 1975, despite being developed in 1969 at GCHQ, a fact that was only publicly admitted in 1997.

A section of the book that will be of particular appeal to computer scientists is where cryptography is shown to have given birth to computing. Born from the desire for a method to perform simple operations on numbers very quickly. Computers now dominate the field of cryptography and crypt-analysis, and their ability to perform a task millions of times with no errors has transformed the science. It is also noted how much we rely on cryptography daily, in areas such as e-commerce, where our details are encrypted without us even being aware of the fact.

The final chapter is an examination into the politics of cryptography, and a balanced look into the ethical implications of governmental snooping on communication, versus the possible benefits of reducing serious crime and terrorism. This is clearly a very pertinent point in todays political climate, and a balanced look at this issue is a very valuable thing. With the heightened risk of terrorist attack, or at least the public perception of such, the government are intercepting more and more communications for analysis, and encryption by criminals is becoming more and more popular.

The book covers the topic well; from governmental use, to anecdotes about lovers exchanging secret messages. Throughout this the reader is constantly being eased into the mathematical technique behind, in a manner that does not require a background in mathematics. There is an appendix to the book, in the form of 5 cipher challenges for the reader to attempt to crack. The knowledge gleaned from the book should be preparation enough to do so, and will fascinate the curious nature of the books audience.
http://non-tech-city.com/category/book-reviews/





Police blotter: Ex-Employee Faces Suit Over File Deletion
Declan McCullagh

"Police blotter" is a weekly report on the intersection of technology and the law.

What: International Airport Centers sues former employee, claiming use of a secure file deletion utility violated federal hacking laws.

When: Decided March 8 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

Outcome: Federal hacking law applies, the court said in a 3-0 opinion written by Judge Richard Posner.

What happened, according to the court: Jacob Citrin was once employed by International Airport Centers and given a laptop to use in his company's real estate related business. The work consisted of identifying "potential acquisition targets."

At some point, Citrin quit IAC and decided to continue in the same business for himself, a choice that IAC claims violated his employment contract.

Normally that would have been a routine business dispute. But the twist came when Citrin dutifully returned his work laptop--and IAC tried to undelete files on it to prove he did something wrong.

IAC couldn't. It turned out that (again according to IAC) Citrin had used a "secure delete" program to make sure that the files were not just deleted, but overwritten and unrecoverable.

In most operating systems, of course, when a file is deleted only the reference to it in the directory structure disappears. The data remains on the hard drive.

But a wealth of programs like PGP, open-source programs such as Wipe, and a built-in feature in Apple Computer's OS X called Secure Empty Trash will make sure the information has truly vanished.

Inevitably, perhaps, IAC sued. The relevance for Police Blotter readers is that the company claimed that Citrin's alleged secure deletion violated a federal computer crime law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

That law says whoever "knowingly causes damage without authorization" to a networked computer can be held civilly and criminally liable.

The 7th Circuit made two remarkable leaps. First, the judges said that deleting files from a laptop counts as "damage." Second, they ruled that Citrin's implicit "authorization" evaporated when he (again, allegedly) chose to go into business for himself and violate his employment contract.

The implications of this decision are broad. It effectively says that employees better not use OS X's Secure Empty Trash feature, or any similar utility, because they could face civil and criminal charges after they leave their job. (During oral argument last October, one judge wondered aloud: "Destroying a person's data--that's as bad as you can do to a computer.")

Citrin pointed out that his employment contract permitted him to "destroy" data in the laptop when he left the company. But the 7th Circuit didn't buy it, and reinstated the suit against him brought by IAC.

Excerpts from Posner's opinion (click here for PDF), with parentheses in the original: The provision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on which IAC relies provides that whoever "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer (a defined term that includes the laptop that Citrin used)," violates the Act. Citrin argues that merely erasing a file from a computer is not a "transmission." Pressing a delete or erase key in fact transmits a command, but it might be stretching the statute too far (especially since it provides criminal as well as civil sanctions for its violation) to consider any typing on a computer keyboard to be a form of "transmission" just because it transmits a command to the computer...

Citrin's breach of his duty of loyalty terminated his agency relationship (more precisely, terminated any rights he might have claimed as IAC's agent--he could not by unilaterally terminating any duties he owed his principal gain an advantage!) and with it his authority to access the laptop, because the only basis of his authority had been that relationship...

Citrin points out that his employment contract authorized him to "return or destroy" data in the laptop when he ceased being employed by IAC (emphasis added). But it is unlikely, to say the least, that the provision was intended to authorize him to destroy data that he knew the company had no duplicates of and would have wanted to have--if only to nail Citrin for misconduct. The purpose of the provision may have been to avoid overloading the company with returned data of no further value, which the employee should simply have deleted.

More likely the purpose was simply to remind Citrin that he was not to disseminate confidential data after he left the company's employ--the provision authorizing him to return or destroy data in the laptop was limited to "Confidential" information. There may be a dispute over whether the incriminating files that Citrin destroyed contained "confidential" data, but that issue cannot be resolved on this appeal. The judgment is reversed with directions to reinstate the suit, including the supplemental claims that the judge dismissed because he was dismissing IAC's federal claim.
http://news.com.com/Police+blotter+E...3-6048449.html





Surgeon General: Obesity Epidemic will Dwarf Terrorism Threat
AP

America's obesity epidemic will dwarf the threat of terrorism if the nation does not reduce the number of people who are severely overweight, the surgeon general said Wednesday.

"Obesity is the terror within,'' Richard Carmona said during a lecture at the University of South Carolina. "Unless we do something about it, the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9-11 or any other terrorist attempt.''

Obesity rates have tripled over the past 40 years for children and teens, raising their risk of diabetes and other diseases. For the first time, Carmona said, children are being diagnosed with high blood pressure.

"Where will our soldiers and sailors and airmen come from?'' he said. "Where will our policemen and firemen come from if the youngsters today are on a trajectory that says they will be obese, laden with cardiovascular disease, increased cancers and a host of other diseases when they reach adulthood?''

Lowering the nation's obesity rate depends on changing behaviors, but too many Americans are health illiterate, meaning they cannot understand medical terms and directions from doctors, Carmona said.

The surgeon general offered few specific solutions but said public policy reforms would not be helpful in curbing obesity, explaining that common-sense health decisions cannot be legislated.
http://www.livescience.com/humanbiol...2_obesity.html





No disappearing acts for him

Jailed Killer's Magic Books Ban

A maximum security prisoner has been banned from reading magic books - in case he picks up escapology tips.

Prison authorities told convicted murderer Shaun Tuley he was not allowed to buy the conjuring guides on grounds of "operational security problems".

He told of the ban in a letter from his cell in HMP Frankland, County Durham, to prison newspaper Inside Time.

A spokesman for the Prison Service said: "The titles requested were not thought appropriate."

Tuley, who murdered a 20-year-old prostitute in September 2000, said he had been "refused permission on grounds of 'operational security problems' to purchase a selection of books on the subject of magic, sought in order to be able to pursue my hobby whilst serving a life sentence".

Attitude

He asked other prisoners with a "like-minded passion for magic" to correspond with him.

Magic Circle spokesman David Beckley said: "I can't understand the Prison Service's attitude - unless this man has asked for books on escapology.

"Magicians do have skills which enable them to deceive but this is only in an environment which is controlled by the magician himself.

"The Prison Service should change their minds.

"Having something objective which he can focus his mind on could actually help him become a model prisoner. It's a great hobby."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4775532.stm





A Break-In To End All Break-Ins

In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.
Allan M. Jalon

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago today, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.

The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.

Within a few weeks, the documents began to show up — mailed anonymously in manila envelopes with no return address — in the newsrooms of major American newspapers. When the Washington Post received copies, Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell asked Executive Editor Ben Bradlee not to publish them because disclosure, he said, could "endanger the lives" of people involved in investigations on behalf of the United States.

Nevertheless, the Post broke the first story on March 24, 1971, after receiving an envelope with 14 FBI documents detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.

More documents went to other reporters — Tom Wicker received copies at his New York Times office; so did reporters at the Los Angeles Times — and to politicians including Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and Rep. Parren J. Mitchell of Maryland.

To this day, no individual has claimed responsibility for the break-in. The FBI, after building up a six-year, 33,000-page file on the case, couldn't solve it. But it remains one of the most lastingly consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in is far less well known than Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature.

Found among the Media documents was a new word, "COINTELPRO," short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The Media documents — along with further revelations about COINTELPRO in the months and years that followed — made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups — many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups — that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening.

For instance, agents sought to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself just before he received the Nobel Prize. They sent him a composite tape made from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms when he was entertaining women other than his wife — and threatened to make it public. "King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is," FBI operatives wrote in their anonymous letter.

Under COINTELPRO, the bureau also targeted actress Jean Seberg for having made a donation to the Black Panther Party. The fragile actress ultimately committed suicide after a gossip nugget based on a FBI wiretap was leaked to the L.A. Times and published. The item, suggesting that the father of the baby she was carrying was a Black Panther rather than her French writer-husband, turned out to be wrong.

The sheer reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most frightening revelations of the Media documents. Underground newspapers were targeted. Students (and their professors) were targeted. Celebrities were targeted. The Communist Party of the U.S.A., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent Organizing Committee, the Black Panther Party, the Women's Strike for Peace — all were targeted. "Neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.," one memo said.

Eventually, the COINTELPRO memos — some from Media and some unearthed later — prompted hearings led by Rep. Don Edwards of California and by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho on intelligence agency abuses. In the mid-1970s, the wayward agency began finally to be reined in.

It is tragic when people lose faith in their government to the extent that they feel they must break laws to expose corruption.

But a war that had been started and sustained by lies had gone on for years. And a government had betrayed its citizens, manipulating their fear to strengthen its grip on power.

Today, again, many people worry that their government may be on the road to subverting its own ideals. I hope that the commemoration of those unknown activists being held today in Media, Pa., will serve as a reminder that fighting for democracy abroad must remain more than merely an excuse to weaken civil liberties at home.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...ome-commentary





Popular Web Site Falls Victim to a Content Filter
Tom Zeller Jr.

THERE are lots of ways to describe Boing Boing, the Web's obliquely subtitled "Directory of Wonderful Things," which draws millions of eyeballs to its relentless, stylistically minimalist scroll of high-weirdness each month.

It is a site where, on Saturday morning, there were links to video games that "subvert post-industrial capitalism," federal legislation aimed at digital radio technology, a guitar made out of a toilet seat and a new species of brown shark.

But nudity?

"Access denied by SmartFilter content category," was the message a Halliburton engineer in Houston said he received last Wednesday when he tried to visit BoingBoing.net from his office computer. "The requested URL belongs to the following categories: Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies, Nudity."

Yep.

"When it happened I was pretty put off," said the employee, who did not want to be named because the topic involved company filtering policies, "as I enjoyed the little distractions it provided me during the workday."

It was a sentiment that, over the last two weeks, united oppressed employees — and citizens — all over the globe.

The culprit, SmartFilter, is a product of Secure Computing of San Jose, Calif. It is marketed in a few different flavors to corporations, schools, libraries and governments as a sort of nannyware — a way for system administrators to monitor and filter access to Web sites among users of their networks.

This is accomplished with a central database of millions of Web sites organized into 73 categories — things like "General News" or "Dating/Social" or "Hate Speech."

At some point late last month, it seems, a site reviewer at Secure Computing spotted something fleshy at Boing Boing and tacked the Nudity category onto the blog's classification. The company's database was updated and, from that point on, any SmartFilter client that had its network set up to block sites with a Nudity designation would now automatically block Boing Boing.

The impact quickly rippled across the globe, which had the ancillary effect of outing corporate and government SmartFilter clients, as their employees and citizens, now deprived of their daily fix of tech-ephemera, blasted their overlords in anonymous e-mail messages to Boing Boing's editors, who then posted them to the blog.

Halliburton is a customer. So, apparently, are Fidelity Investments and American Express. And in the space of a few days at the end of last month, reports came in that citizens in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had also been blocked.

Cory Doctorow, a Boing Boing co-editor, contacted Secure Computing to inquire about the classification. In an e-mail message to Mr. Doctorow, a representative of the company pointed out that a post from early January about two books on the photographic history of adult magazines contained "pornographic" images. The representative also noted a separate image of "a woman nursing a cat."

But a look back reveals that the January entry made reference to two new books from the graphic design imprint Taschen. Yes, the books are about adult magazines, but they are history books. And as for the thumbnail-size image that appeared alongside the original post, well, if you have to squint, is it really smut?

But that did not appear to be Secure Computing's concern. According to the company's definition, the Nudity classification applies to sites containing "nonpornographic images of the bare human body. Classic sculpture and paintings, artistic nude photographs, some naturism pictures and detailed medical illustrations" are included.

"We classify Internet content into over 73 different categories so that customers can chose, by category, what types of Web content they want available to their organization," the company's chief executive, John E. McNulty, said in an e-mailed statement, adding that Secure Computing "has no control over, or visibility into, how an organization implements their filtering policy."

But even if one accepts that argument, the larger problem of context — a problem that has dogged would-be Internet rating and filtering schemes for years — remains.

"There is far too much content on the Internet for any one company to review manually," said Bennett Haselton, the proprietor of the anticensorship site peacefire.org, "so they have to cut corners. And they're going to fall further behind as the Web gets bigger."

Indeed, as the Boing Boing team noted last week, of the 692 posts made in January, only 2 contained any nudity.

And while there is no question that the tens of thousands of posts made at Boing Boing over the years have been weird, kitschy, cyberpunky, often techno-political and sometimes techno-sexual, they are very rarely nude.

"Committing resources necessary to properly identify the nature of tens of thousands of Boing Boing posts — and a handful of images with that total — would bankrupt Secure Computing," Mr. Doctorow said. "So in order to fulfill their promise to their customers, for Secure Computing, half a percent is the same as 100 percent."

The absurdity of that calculus, along with the fact that sites featuring classical art like Michelangelo's "David" have also earned SmartFilter's Nudity designation, has inspired some bloggers to begin posting images of the statue — or just as frequently, a zoomed-in crop of David's germane anatomy — in protest.

And Boing Boing has also begun soliciting other "dumb" page classifications made by the SmartFilter reviewers.

In an e-mail message to Xeni Jardin, another of Boing Boing's chiefs, Tomo Foote-Lennox, a director of filtering data for Secure Computing, asked why the bloggers were starting a war. "We discussed several ways that you could organize your site so that I could protect the kids and you could distribute all the information you wanted," Mr. Foote-Lennox wrote.

Those "ways" included putting questionable images in a separate directory that SmartFilter could easily flag and block, or otherwise altering the URL's for certain kinds of Boing Boing content.

According to Ms. Jardin, the team considered it, but in the end it was a thought to be a devil's bargain. "Why help censors become better censors?" she said.

Instead, Ms. Jardin and her co-editors are compiling a catalog of tips and tricks that oppressed users everywhere, from corporate cubicles to China, can use to get around Internet censors and access information freely.

The growing list, published at boingboing.net/censorroute.html, includes one nifty workaround, first published in December at OReillynet.com, that simply pushes a forbidden URL through Google's translation tool.

The trick generated some positive chatter at OReillynet after it was first posted, but not from one user, atef25, who was still struggling to gain access to a site he was being blocked from — "the 2006 pornguide."

"Pls help me to open it," he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/te...rssnyt&emc=rss





Chinese Bloggers Grapple With the Profit Motive
David Barboza

Last October, a colleague persuaded Xu Jinglei, a Chinese actress and filmmaker, to start writing her own Web log.

Now, five months later, Ms. Xu, 31, is the country's most popular blogger, and her runaway success has given rise to an online debate here about the economic value of blogs and who should profit from them.

Ms. Xu's blog has already received more than 11 million visitors. She now says companies have contacted her about placing advertisements on her blog.

But Sina.com, the big Chinese Web portal that puts the blog online, says it has no plan to commercialize its celebrity blog spaces.

The discussion is one of the latest signs that blogs could eventually become a highly profitable way of musing rather than simply a lonely stage for online blathering. There are already an estimated 30 million blogs worldwide, about 2 million in China alone. But almost none of them garner significant advertising revenue, and Internet executives are still unsure if blogging will become a powerful force in online commerce.

The debate here in China was touched off a few weeks ago when Ms. Xu — who is a well-known actress, screenwriter and independent film director — hinted in a television interview that she might be able to cash in on her blog's soaring popularity by selling advertising on the space.

In a telephone interview this weekend, however, Ms. Xu clarified her view, saying she was open to commercial opportunities but was not sure whether placing ads next to her blog was appropriate.

"I'd like my blog to be a comparatively quiet space," she said. "If there's some very good advertising idea, I'll consider it, but there's not right now."

Many people on the Web have sided with her right to profit from her blog, but executives at Sina.com, which is based in Beijing, say they have no plans for blog ads. Sina.com, which is listed on Nasdaq, had revenue of $194 million in 2005, including $85 million from advertising; it is the sixth-most-viewed Web site in the world.

"There's no commercial use of blogs on Sina today, and whether there's going to be in the future is not clear," said Meng Xiangpeng, a company spokesman.

Sina introduced many of its celebrity blogs late last year, and they are extremely popular. Movie stars, singers and even corporate executives are now blogging and seeing their blogs as a way to reach new audiences and even, perhaps, brand themselves.

Li Yuchun, the winner of China's "American Idol"-like contest "Supergirl," has a blog; so do Wang Shi and Pan Shiyi, two real estate tycoons.

Hung Huang, an irreverent magazine publisher and media darling, started her own blog on Sina.com last Valentine's Day. Within days, she wrote somewhat critically about her ex-husband, the director Chen Kaige, and his recent martial arts fantasy film, "The Promise," which has been parodied on the Web in China.

Suddenly, Ms. Hung's blog shot up to the top spot in Sina's daily poll of the most popular blogs.

No one, however, is as popular as the elegant and intellectual Ms. Xu (pronounced Shew), who became well known here as a television and movie actress soon after she graduated from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy in 1996. Later, she began directing and producing independent films, like her 2004 remake of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's novel, "A Letter From an Unknown Woman," which earned her the best director award at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain.

On her blog, Ms. Xu writes about her daily life, posts photos of meals, lists her favorite flower (the tulip), colors (black and white), and movies, and muses about philosophy, filmmaking and the economics of blogging.

"I may have some business sense, but very limited," she conceded in a recent blog entry.

"The only thing I'm concerned is to be a good writer. How to develop an economic model for the blog? I will leave such a confusing question to my colleagues and the I.T. elite."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/te...y/06blog.html?





How to

Build Your Own PVR, Then Trash It
Ryan Singel

First, the good news. Plummeting storage costs and the availability of special hardware have finally made it cheap and easy to shrug off the shackles of TiVo and build your own personal video recorder out of an old PC.

The bad news is digital-rights management technologies will probably make your homebrew PVR obsolete faster than you can say "Super Bowl Sunday."

It was a Super Bowl sale that inspired this reporter to undertake assembly of his own home media center, which proved both delightfully easy and cheap, ringing in at less than $200 -- about the same as 18 months of subscription dues to TiVo.

I started with a program called GBPVR, a free (but not open-source) solution developed by a New Zealander named Graeme Blackley. It's configurable and has an active developer community building plug-ins and skins.

GBPVR plays nicely with a unique $100 extender device called the MediaMVP that sits in the living room and bridges your computer to your TV and stereo. It's about the size of a CD wallet, and is powered by PowerPC chip and a trimmed down version of Linux.

The MediaMVP comes with a very basic interface, but GBPVR tricks it into running different software through an ethernet cable. You can then use MediaMVP's included remote control device to navigate the interface.

My two other purchases were a TV-tuner card (in my case a Hauppauge Win-TV 150 PCI card on sale for $50, though many others will also work) and a 200-GB hard drive found for another $50.

The initial set up was simple. The hardest parts involved stringing CAT5 cable out one apartment window and into another, and figuring out how to install the hardware

Now my 6-year-old Pentium III box whirs away in the office, while my living room TV tells me the weather forecast, plays back internet radio streams, pauses live television, shuffles through thousands of mp3s -- complete with displays of the album art -- and records hours upon hours of The Simpsons, and it never uses more than 5 percent of my CPU's power.

Plenty of other options exist for the self-help mediaphile. The Linux-based, open-source MythTV is, by most accounts, now almost painless to install once you have a Linux box set up. SageTV offers inexpensive commercial software that runs on Windows or Linux and works well with MediaMVP. BeyondTV has a fine solution as well.

The only real obstacle is getting a network connection between your computer and the living room. The $150 wireless version of the MediaMVP will be out soon. Hard-core geeks have also avoided the whole cable-running process by building quiet PVRs that can sit in an entertainment center, even fitting the hardware into the shell of an old DVD player.

For those suspicious of free software, a host of commercial options are at your disposal.

You can buy a brand new PC, running Windows Media Center Edition, and pair it with an Xbox 360 in the living room. You can plug in a series of Apple's clever AirPort Express wall plug-ins to play digital music files. You can use the long-awaited TiVoToGo service to burn television to DVD or watch it on a PSP. And the Squeezebox and Sonos elegantly stream digital music throughout your house.

After overcoming my initial reluctance, I chose the do-it-yourself approach. It's not just the pleasure of avoiding the $12 a month to get television listings -- some expensive TiVo alternatives get free listing data. It's the joy of playing my music files everywhere, and knowing that I can save a television show to a DVD without jumping through TiVo's hoops or worrying about copy protection. I can also transcode videos and play them on the PSP or Video iPod without buying locked-up versions from iTules for $2.

In short, it's TV your way. More experienced tinkerers describe the same feeling.

"To be honest, it really isn't about saving the subscription fee," says PVR guru Erik Pettersen. "That's nice since I'm annoyed by subscriptions. But if you are going to take a PC and put all this time and effort into it, it's not going to be cheaper than a TiVo."

Pettersen, a manager of technical solutions for the Connecticut United Way runs BYOPVR.com (short for build your own personal video recorder) in his spare time. He founded his site a couple of years ago after drooling over a TiVo without having the early-adopter cash to buy one.

Being in control is the real driver, he says.

"If you are using TiVoToGo, you can only use their sanctioned DVD burning software partners … and it just gets in the way," Pettersen says. "I'm not running a pirate option -- it's just fair use. If I want to archive Lost off my PVR in order to make room for a Monster Garage marathon, I want to do that without jumping through a billion hoops or feeling like a criminal."

Dave Gruska built a PVR to give to his wife as a unique Christmas present and is now sharpening his .NET skills by building a "Sports Score" plug-in for GBPVR.

Aaron Brassard built his homebrew unit after finding out that the birth of his child made him miss his favorite TV shows, and diaper costs put TiVo out of his reach. Now he has 10 hours of Thomas & Friends to entertain his son.

But the entertainment industry hates Brassard's little boy. Probably all children, really. Puppies, too.

How else to explain the dark cloud on the homebrew PVR horizon: the so-called digital rights management schemes that aim to control how consumers use audio and video content.

DRM includes technology like Apple's FairPlay (which prevents devices other than Apple's own from playing an iTunes song) and encrypted high-definition channels like ESPN's that can't be recorded in high resolution, unless it's by a device that has been approved by a cable TV consortium.

The movie and music industries say DRM is necessary to curb piracy of digital copies of movies and music. But DRM tends to be finicky, and perfectly legal uses of content, such as making a backup copy of a DVD, ripping a CD to MP3s, or extracting video snippets to create a parody or commentary, all become collateral damage.

For the home brewer, this means their solution won't work if they upgrade to high-definition cable, because the cable box won't send a readable signal to any tuner card that isn't part of a locked-down environment, such as TiVo or Windows Media Center.

You could always unplug your cable box and record free HDTV off the public airwaves, but perhaps not for long. The industry is trying to get Congress to make it illegal to build TV tuners that record broadcast HDTV without including DRM on the recording.

That means the only option for a future-proof PVR is to use something like TiVo, Windows Media Center or a cable company-provided recorder, which may or may not think your mp3 player or your second television is secure enough to access your own media.

Even Mike Machado, the CEO of SageTV, admits his company's software, which currently records television into the unlocked MPEG2 format, will have to make concessions to get access to encrypted cable HDTV.

"We are trying to give consumer all the freedom they can get, but when it comes to accessing content that the studios and content industry are very cautious about, we'll have to incorporate some rights management," Machado says. "Hopefully those industries will work on easy- to-use, affordable services that give you good value. It's hard to tell; it's their choice, it's their content."

Do-it-yourselfers are already feeling the pinch. Website administrator Joe Cancilla built his MythTV machine years ago. But now, his shared apartment in San Francisco sports a Comcast PVR so he can record high-definition cable shows from HBO. Now he uses his old MythTV box as a music server.

"I really get upset that you can’t do what you want with what you record," Cancilla says.

Cancilla isn't trying to share HBO's programming on eDonkey -- he just wants to watch it on a portable video player while working out on his gym's elliptical trainer. He's now resigned to trying to get MythTV to record a degraded analog signal through a FireWire port that cable companies are supposed to, but often don't, make available on their digital boxes.

It's a cruel time to be a digital couch potato. Just as homebrew PVRs slide into everybody's reach, their future usefulness is shrouded in uncertainty.

But there's always a chance that if enough people build their own media masters and refuse to play the DRM game, mounting political and market pressure will prevent cable companies, online music retailers and movie studios from treating everyone like criminals.

And maybe then, Joe Cancilla won't have to struggle to watch Six Feet Under with his two feet on the trainer.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70328-0.html





Tennessee Pondering Violent-Game Ban

Democratic Senator Tommy Kilby's SB3981 seeks to outlaw the sale of violent games within the state
Brendan Sinclair

Add Tennessee to the list of states considering gaming legislation. Last week, Democratic Senator Tommy Kilby filed SB3981, which would make it illegal to sell or rent an "extremely violent video game" in the state of Tennessee.

The bill defines the phrase "extremely violent video game" as "a video game in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being," with a number of clauses specifying that a game would have to be patently offensive to prevailing community standards, among other things, to be considered extremely violent.

The law also takes into account whether or not the virtual victim is an authority figure, whether the victim is conscious of the abuse taking place, and whether the player of the game intends to inflict severe mental or physical pain or suffering on the virtual victim.

Other factors that would nudge a game into the "extremely violent" category "include infliction of gratuitous violence upon the victim beyond that necessary to commit the killing, needless mutilation of the victim's body, and helplessness of the victim."

If passed, the bill would take effect July 1.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2006/03..._&subj=6145720





Digital Methods Help Replicate Artworks
J. D. Biersdorfer

As Hippocrates noted, art is long and life is short. But the life of some ancient art is growing shorter, hampered by environmental factors like climate, light, pollution — or by dynamite.

To keep cultural artifacts from fading from view and collective memory, a blend of art reproduction and digital technology is being used to produce precise replicas of original works. But the process is more than just snapping a digital photo of a painting and shooting the resulting file out of a desktop printer.

The Kyoto Digital Archive project in Japan has recently reproduced large-scale art from three temples by this process. The results — and the methods — are on view until Monday afternoon in an exhibit called "Releasing the Spirit of Kyoto" at the Artexpo fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

The replicas are of "Tigers," a four-panel work from the Nanzenji Temple painted by Tanyu Kano in the 17th century; "Five Great Guardian Gods of Secret Buddhism," a 13th-century work from the Daigoji Temple, by an unknown artist; and "Landscape of Katata," a watercolor originally mounted as a sliding screen for a part of the Daitokuji Temple and attributed to Mitsunobu Tosa in the 16th century.

Kyoto, a 1,200-year old city tucked into Japan's western mountains, is home to more than 3,500 Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. The Kyoto International Culture Foundation, working now with Hewlett-Packard, started the digital archive project to create accurate replicas of the city's religious art over several years.

The subtle aspects of Japanese paintings, which often include fine line work on delicate materials, could be lost or muted during reproduction. So the process involves creating high-resolution images of the originals with a scanner or camera that can capture images with more than 100 megapixels (compared with, say, the 5 or 6 megapixels of most consumer-oriented digital cameras).

Using a combination of software and the human eye, the colors in the digital image are matched to the original work. The image is then printed out on a large-format Hewlett-Packard Designjet 5500 UV inkjet printer with fade-resistant inks. The printer is able to produce the image on washi, a traditional Japanese paper made from the inner bark of trees.

To finish the reproduction with a human touch, an artist applies gold leaf to certain areas of the work. The process can be seen on a documentary at the Artexpo exhibit.

This project is not the only one trying to preserve fading Kyoto treasures through replication. Nijo Castle, which includes Ninomaru Palace, has had numerous 17th- century works restored and replicated over more than two decades. Hitachi, another technology company, used its Digital Image System to help restore some paintings, but before digital technology came into its own in the late 20th century, the castle's artworks were copied by hand.

"For the Nijo Castle project, painted reproductions have been produced," said Gregory Levine, an associate professor of Japanese art at the University of California, Berkeley, who noted that the process was quite different and arguably more culturally rich compared to the high-tech approach used today.

"By having contemporary painters who are trained in traditional painting style and technique reproduce 17th-century paintings," he said, "there seems to be more of an ongoing cultural life story embodied in such a replication."

Preservation and replication efforts are intended to keep ancient artworks vibrant and alive for new generations. Another factor to consider for art preservation, however, is the global impact of the pollution hastening the deterioration in the first place. (Kyoto was the host of the 1997 conference on greenhouse gas emissions that resulted in the eponymous protocol on climate change.)

There is also scholarly concern that in a future world filled with replicas, while original art is safely tucked away, images could be seen out of context and authentic works may be inaccessible to historians. "Many of these objects were created for enshrinement and display within specific architectural and ritual spaces," Professor Levine said of Kyoto's temple art. "If we remove them from their home structures, we can no longer study them in situ, on site, and that's going to transform our understanding of them."

When the art has disappeared, however, technology can be all that's left. Such is the case of the giant 1,600-year-old Buddha statues in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan that were dynamited by the Taliban in 2001. The artist Hiro Yamagata (born near Kyoto in 1948) hopes to use laser holograms to create more than 160 faceless statues across the Bamiyan cliffs, all powered by solar energy and windmills. If the project is approved, completion is scheduled for 2009, and the artist has said that many of the windmills could also provide power to nearby villages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/arts/04shri.html?





Their skins are so white

Sandi, Singer In The Basement, Plays The World
John Elliott

MEET the singer who is in the middle of a “world tour” without leaving the confines of her suburban basement.

After the runaway success of the Arctic Monkeys, who built up their international following on the internet from their base in Sheffield, Sandi Thom, a 24-year-old Scot, is using the web to entertain nightly audiences put at more than 60,000.

Seating at the venue underneath her home in a Victorian terraced house in Tooting, south London, consists of six stools bought from Ikea for about £3 each.

Thom uses a webcam to record a nightly performance before broadcasting it on the net later in the evening. In the past eight days she has entertained more than 250,000 fans worldwide. By contrast, her live audiences usually total about 200 when she plays in clubs around Britain.

The blossoming success of Thom’s web tour illustrates how a new generation of unknown singers and bands are connecting with fans directly through the internet before achieving conventional chart success.

Earlier this year, the Arctic Monkeys’ first album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, became the fastest-selling debut album of all time. Thom’s first album is released next month although her only single to date — I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker — failed to hit the top 40.

According to Thom, who has been likened to the singers KT Tunstall and Janis Joplin, the basement tour began because of the prohibitive cost of hiring minibuses and hotel rooms for conventional tours.

“A web tour is basically what you do when you have a lack of money and no car,” she said. “With the webcam, it’s a great opportunity to play in front of the whole world — and cost- effective.”

Audiences have grown strongly since just 70 people logged on to her website to watch her first (free) concert on February 24. Last Thursday night, the figure was 62,138, according to Streaming Tank, the web broadcast company that makes the show available on computers around the world. This is only about 3,000 less than the capacity of the Milton Keynes National Bowl.

Chris Dabbs of Streaming Tank said 42% of the audience was in Britain and 23% in America, with viewers as far afield as Pakistan.

Such figures pale beside those achieved by Madonna — 9m fans tried to log on to see her perform live at Brixton Academy in December 2000. Sir Paul McCartney won 3m viewers for his show at Liverpool’s Cavern Club in 1999.

Thom, originally from Banff, studied at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, where she took advice from McCartney, its patron, to “keep it simple”.

Gareth Grundy, deputy editor of Q magazine, said: “Sandi isn’t on our radar screen yet, but this sounds impressive. Since the Arctic Monkeys, every record company is now trawling the internet trying to find the next band. Being on the internet is now a key first step for bands — people visit their pages time and again to check for something new.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...070179,00.html





You always load your Pentax when I’m in the nude?

Survey Shows Employees Rate Productivity High, Security and Clothing Low When Working From Home

SonicWALL Survey Shows Greater Freedom Among Out- of-Office Worker Community Keeps Dishes and Workload Up-to-Date, Bad Temper at Bay
Press Release

SonicWALL Inc., a leading provider of integrated network security and productivity solutions, today announced the results of a survey of 941 remote and mobile workers worldwide. The survey, conducted by Insight Express and SonicWALL at the end of 2005, indicates that the growing trend towards home working is likely to breed a more productive and liberated international workforce.

76% of employees surveyed believe that working remotely is an aid to productivity and 61% are also convinced that their managers agree with them. Security came low on the list of priorities, however, with 88% of the individuals surveyed admitting to storing passwords in easily-discovered locations, and only 12% employing encrypted files to store and manage their login data. 56% said they rely on their memories to keep track of their network passwords, while others used the same passwords for all devices, stored the information on cell phones, or stuck notes with the login information onto their computer (4%).

Yin and Yang of clothes, chores and cleanliness

All respondents were relaxed about their personal habits when working remotely. While about 39% of respondents of both sexes said they wear sweats while working from home, 12% of males and 7% of females wear nothing at all. In matters of cleanliness, the difference between the sexes was more pointed: 44% of women surveyed said they showered on work-at-home days, as opposed to men, who were slightly more likely to shave (33%) than wash (30%). 18% of men regularly break off to do household tasks such as laundry, dishwashing or dusting whereas many more women -- over 38% -- found their attention claimed by chores.

Respondents also said they took the opportunity to eat and drink outside standard times (about 35%); listen to music (45%) or watch TV (28%); and 21% of all respondents admitted to sneaking in an afternoon nap. A small percentage of those surveyed (9%) admitted to feelings of guilt about being away from the office. Taking a longer lunch than at the workplace was also relatively rare (12%).

This easy-going approach keeps tempers on an even keel, according to the survey. More than 80% of surveyed workers have never lost their temper with support staff trying to help then fix a problem. Only 40% of polled respondents said they experienced problems when accessing their corporate networks remotely, although fewer than 50% accessed any applications other than Web mail when working outside the office.

More than half of the survey's respondents accessed the corporate network from home on a daily basis, with 86% logging in remotely several times a week. Respondents said that the chief attraction of working remotely was the ability to maintain a flexible schedule. Only 22% of workers used cell phones or PDAs to work from home, but respondents said they expected this type of usage to grow in the coming year.

"We are experiencing a sharp rise in demand for simple, secure remote access to networks of all sizes," said Steve Franzese, vice president of marketing at SonicWALL. "The growing popularity of remote and mobile working means that the perimeter of the network has become indistinct, and is therefore more difficult to protect. With our new SSL VPN appliance range, SonicWALL offers organizations of all sizes a very simple, powerful way of keeping remote workers connected and protected."

In 2005, SonicWALL launched the industry's first range of SSL- VPN solutions for remote network access supporting unlimited numbers of concurrent tunnels at no additional cost. The powerful family of appliances makes remote clientless access simple and affordable. These solutions will interoperate seamlessly behind third party firewalls and deliver enhanced Unified Threat Management protection to remote users who access a SonicWALL-protected network. In November, 2005 SonicWALL acquired the technology assets of startup enKoo in order to enrich the feature set of its SSL-VPN offering. In January, 2006 the company introduced the SSL-VPN 200 appliance for networks of under 50 users.

650 responses to the survey came from the United States, with the remainder from Australia, Canada, Asia Pacific, Japan and Europe. The majority of respondents were in the 25 to 45 age range.
http://sonicwall.mediaroom.com/index...eases&item=708





Local news

The '80s
(they're back ... )
Heather Barr

All right I will admit it. I wish I would have kept my Guns N' Roses cowboy hat.

It was white with a sash around the brim that bore the name of the hard rock band and its popular logo, which depicted, of course, guns and roses. The hat went well with my Guns N' Roses shirt and dark Pepe brand jeans, which you better believe were always rolled at the bottom.

The hat was carefully positioned on my head so as not to ruin my ratted (that is, teased up) hair and curled bangs that I spent about 30 minutes on.

Bangs were big and full in my middle school years in the late 1980s. I remember a girl in my music class had bangs that were like a waterfall – tiered and heavily hair-sprayed. The teacher actually measured them to see how high they were.

Not long ago I was in a video store and the speakers blared a Guns N' Roses song. I'm not sure it's because of the high notes Axl Rose could hit or the way he swayed his hips, but I still love that band.

Another day, at the mall, I recognized another blast from the past. A teen with skinny little legs wore a miniskirt and leggings that ended at her calves.

That was me, some 17 years ago. For my eighth-grade prom, I wore a black ruffled skirt, white leggings, a large red belt, and a black-and- white polka dotted tank top with a red tank underneath. All that was covered by a short-sleeved, cardigan- looking thing. My earrings were huge with black and white polka dots.

Now I'm finding what was once "old-school" has become "bodacious" (an '80s term meaning great) once again. The '80s are back in full swing from the clothes to the sayings to the music.

"I see a lot of shirts that say, 'I was born in the '80s,' or, 'I love the '80s,'Ÿ" said Julie Seiter, a Brookfield High School senior. She said last year, fellow students wore off-the-shoulder shirts like Jennifer Beals in the 1980s movie "Flashdance."

Seiter said she has seen people wear miniskirts and legging tights. Not her, though. "It's too out there," she said.

"It was so colorful, so much fun," Seiter said of the '80s styles. For the last couple years, Brookfield High has held an 1980s dance where students dress in the style of the "me-decade." This year, one of the props was a giant Rubik's Cube.

Take a walk through the Danbury Fair mall and you'll find '80s looks everywhere. In the Abercrombie & Fitch store, the polo shirts are displayed with collars popped up.

At Delia's, leggings paired with miniskirts are a top item. Then there are vintage-looking shirts with the band name Blondie or the space alien "E.T." A few months ago Delia's had a T-shirt that read "R is for Rad."

The Hot Topic store even has bustiers just like the kind worn by an ultimate '80s icon. "Madonna is my idol," said Laura Langlois, a Danbury High senior. "I love it," she said of the '80s style. "It seems a lot more carefree."

On a recent day at Danbury High School, junior Stephen Conlon gestured to his car. "I have 'Sweet Cherry Pie' in my car," said the shaggy-haired 16-year-old. "Cherry Pie" was a hit by the '80s band, Warrant.

Conlon likes other '80s heavy metal rockers like Whitesnake.

"I like a lot of the music," said Ari Spector, 15, a New Milford High sophomore who digs the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Blondie, to name three punk and new wave bands that were popular at the dawn of the 1980s.

Seventeen-year-old Pat Kearney likes "kickin' it back" with music from Iron Maiden, Guns N' Roses and AC/DC. A musician who plays the drums in the local band Cold Fire, Kearney said the '80s music "takes so much talent to play."

He also likes that '80s rock was fun. Today's rock is often less melodic, with lyrics that speak of anger and disillusionment. "I kind of think we need to turn back the clock," said Kearney.

He even thinks it's time to look like the '80s rockers. "I have an urge to grow out my hair," said the Brookfield High senior.

"I love the '80s music," said Mike Diker, 16, a Danbury High sophomore who likes the band Def Leppard.

Schoolmate Brian Johnston likes '80s hip-hop music. He also has a tie-dyed Pink Floyd T-shirt, a band that dawned in the 1960s but had one of its biggest hit albums, "The Wall," in 1982.

Like the prep-school girl characters from the '80s sitcom, "The Facts of Life," people are wearing their collars up. Teens call it "popping" the collar. "It's just chill," Johnston said of the laid-back '80s look. "It was a great time."

"Popping the collar that is huge," said New Milford High freshman Amy Donahue. "It's like life at New Milford High School. If you don't have your collar popped, you are not cool."

The 14-year-old said if a person is wearing a collar and doesn't pop it up, there is not doubt that in a course of the school day someone will say "pop the collar."

"At first I thought it was just preps, but then I saw skaters (people who skateboard) and ghetto (those who dress like rappers) people" wear their collar up, said Nicci Lariccia, 17, a Danbury High junior.

"People are big on that," said Lindsay Brown, an Immaculate High School senior of students "popping" their collars. She also sees people layering polo shirts, an '80s style.

"I guess it's cool to go back in the past," said Brown. "I like it."

Amy Donahue heads for the thrift store for her eclectic '80s styles. One day last week, she wore a polka-dotted shirt, a miniskirt with patches, stretchy shorts and pink satin pumps.

Other return-to-the-'80s trends she's noticed include chunky jewelry, beaded necklaces and "insanely huge earrings that are bright and colorful."

Donahue wears one popular '80s hairstyle – a side ponytail. But she draws the line at the teased "big hair" styles. "That hair was just disgusting," she said.

Why are the '80s back in? Donahue thinks it might have been the 2004 movie "13 Going On 30," whose star, Jennifer Garner, sports 1980s styles.

"We take the fads of other decades and combine them" to make them our own, said Marissa Pisarick, 17, a Brookfield High student.

New Milford freshman Stephanie Tyler, 14, likes to snag her mom's threads from the 1980s. On Wednesday, she wore huge gold and pearl circle earrings and a fuchsia blazer complete with shoulder pads. Her mom was in her late teens and 20s during the 1980s.

Stephanie's mom, Cindy Tyler said "it is really kind of fun" to see her daughter and her friends wear the '80s looks. Cindy Tyler mentioned the fuchsia blazer, which she wore for semi-formal occasions, like to her bank job or to church.

Now Stephanie wears the bright purple-pink blazer to look casual and cool.

"What we thought could be used one way for the business world is now mixed and matched with casual and traditional pieces," said Cindy Tyler. "I like seeing things recycled with a kind of new personality attached."

Thanks to DVDs, teens also are exploring 1980s movies. Brookfield High's Pat Kearny mentions a semi-classic, "The Terminator."

Others are more fond of the rebellious teen movies. Amy Donahue said kids will quote lines from "The Breakfast Club," which is about high school students serving detention.

Ryan Partelow of New Milford High likes to watch actor Matthew Broderick, before his Broadway days, when he starred in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," a comedy about a Chicago teen playing hooky.

As for those sayings: Rad means awesome. Gnarly means pretty much the opposite. And then there are some phrases that just aren't back in vogue yet.

Amy Donahue said people will laugh if you say "gag me with a spoon."
http://news.newstimeslive.com/story....&channel=Local





Make Circuit With Me
(Tim Worman - Phil Bloomberg)

A sweet romance is not for me
I need electricity
If you wanna make me flip
Hit me with a micro chip

I'll be a diode, cathode, electrode
Overload, generator, oscillator
Make a circuit with me

Just plug in and go-go-go
I'll be a human dynamo
Signals in my power cord
Impuls on my circuit board

I'm an AC/DC man
You can read my circuit diagram
I feed on electric jolts
I need fifty-thousand volts

A sweet romance is not for me
I really need electricity
If you wanna make me flip
Come on and hit me with a micro chip

I'm an AC/DC man
You can read my circuit diagram
I feed on electric jolts
I need fifty-thousand volts

The Polecats, from Polecats Are Go - 1981















Until next week,

- js.


















Current Week In Review






Recent WiRs -

March 4th, February 25th, February 18th, February 11th

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

[RDixon]

I've had a very bad experience with copy protection on a game that I bought.

I will not be buying anymore games with sony's draconian protection on them.

Copy police encouraging piracy?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060313-6365.html

[JackSpratts]

Originally Posted by RDixon

I've had a very bad experience with copy protection on a game that I bought.

I will not be buying anymore games with sony's draconian protection on them.

that's a very good policy rd, one that more and more gamers (and media consumers in general) are realizing.

- js.