Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - Dec. 21st, ‘02

[JackSpratts]

A tremendously polarized week: First comes the great news about the verdict in the DMCA trial, a case that should never have gone to court in the first place with a jailing that remains an outrage, and then the disturbing news that the fastest U.S. consumer broadband service will cut off its customers’ high speed uploads to Peer To Peer networks! Cablevision says that P2Ps allow people to “access the files on your hard drive”. No kidding. Hiding behind a smokescreen they call “security concerns” and with a flick of the corporate switch Cablevision just threatened to cut an entire group of their users out of the worldwide file sharing systems. No court, no law, no suit. No nothing. Just a self serving business decision and one that will reverberate throughout the community. ISPs were always the weakest link but is OptimumOnline the weakest of them all?

- Jack Spratts



ElcomSoft Verdict: Not Guilty
Lisa M. Bowman

SAN JOSE, Calif.--A jury on Tuesday found a Russian software company not guilty of criminal copyright charges for producing a program that can crack antipiracy protections on electronic books.

The case against ElcomSoft is considered a crucial test of the criminal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a controversial law designed to extend copyright protections into the digital age.

The company faced four charges related to directly designing and marketing software that could be used to crack eBook copyright protections, plus an additional charge related to conspiring to do so.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978176.html

NYT Piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/te...gy/18DIGI.html

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Copyright Verdict, New Technology Are Reasons to Hope
Dan Gillmor

The past several days have brought good news on two fronts in the copyright war. An unjust prosecution has ended in acquittal, and some pro-freedom activists launched some useful new technology.

In a case that may have enormous implications, a federal jury in San Jose brought back a not guilty verdict against a Russian software company charged with violating copyright law. The company, ElcomSoft, had sold a tool that gave purchasers of electronic-book software more flexibility in how they could use e-books but which also broke the e-books' copy protection.

This was an outrageous prosecution from the beginning. It was instigated by San Jose-based Adobe Systems, which complained to federal authorities that ElcomSoft was selling products designed to hack Adobe's eBook Reader. When ElcomSoft programmer Dmitry Sklyarov spoke at a conference in Las Vegas, he was handcuffed and tossed in jail.

Adobe, facing justified fury from many in the tech community, tried to back off. But the feds kept going. At least they freed Sklyarov and prosecuted the company only, on the condition that he testify.

I find myself wondering if the jury did a little of what legal folks call ``nullification'' -- refusing to convict a defendant when the law itself is a bad one or a conviction feels unjust. Various press reports Tuesday afternoon said the jury just didn't feel the government had proved intentional law breaking.

Actually, ElcomSoft's product was entirely legal -- in Russia. And among the company's better customers have been U.S. law enforcement agencies.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ss/4764684.htm

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DMCA Critics: Reform Still Needed
Declan McCullagh

A congressman who is trying to defang a controversial copyright law said Tuesday that he's not deterred by an acquittal in the first criminal prosecution brought under it.

Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who in October proposed rescinding part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), said the law remains a problem even though a jury ruled a software maker ElcomSoft was not guilty of willfully violating it.

"As far as the bill going forward is concerned, the need for the legislation is as great as ever," Boucher said in an interview. "While this jury reached a commendable decision, another jury in a future case that involves similar facts could well convict. The law clearly contemplates conviction in circumstances where no infringement occurs, but the technology facilitates bypassing a technological protection measure."

By repealing key portions of the DMCA, Boucher's bill would have prevented the Justice Department from prosecuting ElcomSoft, a Russian company that sold a program to remove the copy protection from Adobe Systems' e-books. If the proposed Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, co-sponsored by John Doolittle, R-Calif., were to become law, ElcomSoft's Advanced eBook Processor would become legal to sell.

Boucher said he will reintroduce his bill without any changes when the 108th Congress convenes in January. "The result of such a law remaining on the books is that companies will be more reluctant to introduce new technology that has lawful uses such as facilitating the exercise of fair use rights, but which also circumvents technological protection measures and could facilitate copyright infringement," Boucher said. "And so to encourage the introduction of useful technologies, the legislation is needed and it will go forward."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978296.html

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Court Throws Out Warden's Libel Suit
AP

RICHMOND, Va., Dec. 14 — A federal appeals court threw out a Virginia prison warden's lawsuit against two Connecticut newspapers on Friday, saying articles posted on the Internet were not aimed at a Virginia audience.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed a lower court's ruling that the warden could sue in his home state because that is where he said his reputation was damaged.

The warden, Stanley Young, claimed that The Hartford Courant and The New Haven Advocate had falsely depicted him as racist in articles that reported mistreatment of Connecticut inmates sent to Virginia to relieve prison crowding.

The fact that the Internet postings could be viewed by Virginians was not enough to support filing the lawsuit in the federal court in Big Stone Gap, Va., the three-judge panel ruled.

"The facts in this case establish that the newspapers' Web sites, as well as the articles in question, were aimed at a Connecticut audience," Judge M. Blane Michael wrote in the unanimous opinion. "The newspapers did not post materials on the Internet with the manifest intent of targeting Virginia readers."

The decision came days after Australia's highest court ruled that an Australian businessman could sue Dow Jones over an article posted from New Jersey. Legal experts said they feared that ruling could restrict Internet communication.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/na...PAPE.html?8bhp

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Teen DVD Hacking Trial Comes to End
Reuters

OSLO, Norway--The landmark trial of a Norwegian teenager over Hollywood charges of DVD piracy ended Monday with prosecutors urging a suspended 90-day jail term.

Jon Johansen, known in Norway as "DVD Jon," is charged with having unlocked a copyright-protection code and distributed a computer program enabling unauthorized copying of DVD movies, angering U.S. movie studios who fear mass piracy and loss of revenue.

The defense focused on Johansen's copying of DVDs he already owned. "The thief who breaks into his own flat is not committing any crime," Johansen's lawyer, Halvor Manshaus, told the Oslo court in his closing argument of the case--seen as a battle between cyber Davids and corporate Goliaths.

Johansen, 19, has become an icon for those who say making software like his is an act of intellectual freedom rather than theft. Johansen wrote the DeCSS program, which unwraps the copy protection found on DVDs, when he was 15.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978009.html

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Congress Undermines Cyber-Security
Jonathan Band

Since 9/11, much public attention has focused on the trade-off between security on the one hand and civil liberties and privacy on the other. We see this conflict
every day when we read about the detainment of foreign nationals or the latest homeland security initiative such as the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program. We personally experience it when we are searched before we board an airplane.

There is, however, another post-9/11 policy conflict that has received far less public attention. This is the growing conflict between cyber-security and intellectual property.

For several years, the entertainment industry had argued that the Internet in general and peer-to-peer networks in particular enable intellectual property infringement on an unprecedented scale. Industry representatives claim that this infringement cuts their profits and diminishes their incentive to invest in new products.

Accordingly, the entertainment industry has lobbied Congress to adopt a variety of measures aimed at facilitating the enforcement of intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, these measures have the unintended consequence of undermining cyber-security.


For example, in 1998 Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. One provision of the DMCA prohibits the circumvention of technological measures that protect access to copyrighted works. The provision's intent was to impose legal penalties on hackers who penetrated the encryption and other technological measures copyright owners would use to protect their works in the digital environment.

As the DMCA was working its way through Congress, technologists pointed out that the bill as drafted could outlaw the research and testing necessary to develop new cyber-security products. In response, Congress included in the DMCA two narrow exceptions for encryption research and security testing.

In the four years since the DMCA's enactment, it has become increasingly clear that these exceptions are simply too narrow. Computer science professors have found themselves entangled in litigation because of their academic activities, and universities and software companies have had to include attorneys in the research and development process to ensure compliance with the DMCA's arcane terms.

In this way, the DMCA has hindered the development of technologies that can protect computer networks from cyber-attacks. Indeed, Richard Clarke, the head of the White House office of cyberspace security, recently called for the amendment of the DMCA because of its ``chilling effect on vulnerability research.''
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/4750224.htm

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Music Industry Fading Away
Mark Brown

This is the time of year when the music industry pats itself on the back.
Journalists, radio stations and others are getting pressure from labels to pick their best albums of the year. The Grammy nominations are coming up soon. Christmas gives the music industry the best sales of the year.

It makes for a good but temporary buzz. This year, many in the industry know the party is just about to end. A high-powered player in the music industry for the past quarter century recently remarked privately that "the music industry is over."

Not completely over, but certainly over as we know it.

People are going to still listen to music and go to concerts, but everyone has finally realized - way too late - that the old way really isn't going to work, no matter how hard the industry tries to resist change.

For many fans, the response to this is "Duh." Downloading and burning CDs has been a way of life for a generation of fans. And with sales slumping, it's finally dawned on the industry that no amount of bullying or bluster is going to make it go away. The old world is gone.

The industry has tried to ignore downloading. Then it tried to quash downloading. This year it tried copy-protection, which doesn't work. In advance releases sent to the media and radio stations, it has tried putting digital watermarks on the CDs to keep them from leaking on the Internet. Others have gone more low- tech; Epitaph Records sent out the new Nick Cave CD with a letter imploring the recipient to please not leak the disc.

It just can't go on; it has finally reached critical mass. As noted here last week, concert ticket prices are starting to come back to Earth.

But this year it has finally dawned on the industry as a whole that the ship is sinking, and it's not about to stop.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drm...606645,00.html

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Curtain Call
Robert X. Cringely

Markets hate equality. That was the problem with this battle between LPs and 45s -- both were better than the old standard, and each had advantages over the other. In the world of music, circa 1948, it just wasn't immediately clear which standard would be dominant, so the third parties in the industry did not know how to align themselves. If either CBS or RCA had been a couple of years later, the market would have had a chance to adopt the first new standard and then consider the second. Everybody would have been listening to more music.

Now jump to the present day when digital music is the norm, but are we talking about CDs, MP3s, or DVDs? It is 1948 all over again. And what's the successful business model? Nobody knows. That's what we've been talking about in this space for the past two weeks. And in this third and final (I promise) installment, we will converge on the technologies and business models that are actually likely to succeed.
The question I posed last week was whether young people would buy music by the minute. Though I thought it was a great idea, the consensus among bewildered parents is that it just won't happen if there is a cheaper -- albeit illegal -- alternative. Once music or video is available digitally to people who have no stake in protecting it, it will be ripped. Copy protection won't work, either.

So digital technology may ultimately mean bands have to make their money the old- fashioned way -- by touring, selling out concerts, constantly writing new music, and ignoring the undercurrent of their older music being free. To those readers who decried my emphasis on rock music examples over classical or jazz, those two genres are already living in the future where musicians survive by performance rather than because they have a recording contract. If they had to rely solely on record sales, Branford Marsalis and Yo-Yo Ma would starve.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021212.html

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Where Goes The Record Biz? Tommy Mottola Thinks He Knows.
Laura Holson

IF Thomas D. Mottola, the veteran chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, were a political candidate, you might well think he was campaigning for re-election.

Early last month, the usually press-averse Mr. Mottola announced a marketing deal with Chrysler and the pop diva Celine Dion, who will soon begin peddling minivans. Three weeks later, Mr. Mottola was on the cover of Billboard magazine, pushing a new marketing venture with Pepsi. More recently, he talked up the value of Sony's acquisition of the song catalog of the rock group AC/DC, as well as the marketability of the superstar Jennifer Lopez.

Then, on Monday afternoon, a harried Mr. Mottola took a few moments to detail how those announcements fit into his new plan to overhaul Sony Music, home to a stable of artists that includes Ms. Dion, Ms. Lopez, Bruce Springsteen, Destiny's Child and Shakira. "This is the very beginning of a whole strategy to completely transform the company," Mr. Mottola, 53, said between bites of a Krispy Kreme doughnut and sips of espresso. "We are going to go into the management business."

That brazen pronouncement is sure to elicit ire among some artists and their managers; they already say record executives exert too much control over their careers. But what has many in the music business chattering is whether Mr. Mottola is fashioning a new image not only for Sony Music but also for himself. He became famous fostering global pop stars like Ms. Dion, Mariah Carey (his former wife) and Michael Jackson but has had limited success exploiting the growing urban genre.

Now, with profits dwindling, music companies have little choice but to find new sources of revenue. Sales of compact discs have fallen as much as 10 percent this year as CD-burning and Internet file-sharing proliferate. Blockbuster acts have less staying power. And artists and legislators are pressuring music companies to shore up their accounting practices.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/bu...MOTT.html?8bhp

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Interview – Pressplay CEO Michael Bebel
By Chris Marlowe

Pressplay was the first music subscription service to enable its
subscribers to burn, download, stream and transfer songs to portable players. An equally held joint venture between Sony Music Entertainment and Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, it now has the rights to content from all five major labels and most of the important independents. Pressplay's CEO Michael Bebel discussed the venture's achievements, challenges and future plans with The Hollywood Reporter's new media/technology reporter Chris Marlowe.

THR: All of the industry analysts said music subscription services needed to have all five major labels in order to succeed. Did pressplay see an uptake spike after it achieved that goal in November?

Bebel: We purposely had not done a lot of direct consumer marketing. We've relied a lot on our positioning in the marketplace with our partners and the publicity that we've been able to generate. So whenever we've had a good positive announcement, we've seen an improvement in the uptake. This one, though, has been sustained and continues to grow, which is great news for us.

THR: How large is pressplay's current library?

Bebel: We have approximately 200,000 tracks in the system right now. And now we are clearing many, many tracks on virtually a daily basis @ many more than we had been, because we have opened up all the catalogs. So that number will be improving at a good rate going forward, and it is great to be able to say that. It adds a lot of energy to our group.

THR: Do you have Billboard's current Top 20 songs available?

Bebel: We have a good sample of the top product. The challenge there continues to be process. There is still a lot of work and a lot of fine-tuning on clearance processes, digitization, the front end and the back end. These are all the first steps in getting content into a service like ours. We are all in the industry focused on improving that hit rate. But that is the biggest challenge for us to collectively be able to move quickly enough to get material cleared and in the service, to be there when it is at the top of the charts.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hol...ent_id=1782185

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KaZaA's Altnet & Copyrights
Simon Hayes

CONTROVERSIAL Australian file sharing network Altnet has moved peer-to-peer a step closer to legitimacy with file identification technology designed to stop piracy.

Altnet - which piggybacks Australian-owned peer-to-peer network, KaZaA - has hired well-known technologist and investor Ron Lachman as chief scientist, licensing his Truenames system to better identify its files.

Truenames - known in the peer-to-peer community as hashing - assigns a unique number to each file by multiplying its size by a patented algorithm.

The move could help reassure the music industry Altnet is serious about stamping out piracy in file sharing.

Altnet offers copyright-protected, authorised music and videos for a fee, competing with its host network and other file sharing systems, many of which offer pirated content uploaded by users.

Altnet also operates as a distributed computing network, allowing users to rent unused storage and computing power to corporate clients.

Altnet owner, Brilliant Digital Entertainment, chief executive Kevin Bermeister admitted a successful attempt by the US recording and movie industries to include KaZaA in legal action for copyright violations had influenced his plans.
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...E15306,00.html

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Shots Fired in Copyright Cold War
Karen Dearne

ATTEMPTS to block copying of music CDs will spark an arms race between record labels and hackers, according to Gartner analyst Daniel McHugh.

Next year, all releases from EMI Australia will feature copy control technology that prevents digital copying.

But Mr McHugh said hackers would quickly respond with ways to beat each new measure.

"Protecting CDs is warranted in the short term to send a clear message that copying and distributing music files will no longer be tolerated," he said. "Trying to protect artists' intellectual property is a noble act.

"But these attempts to block copying will only fuel an arms race."

Music companies needed to look at alternative ways of distributing music to the masses.

"They should be working to create a format that allows a single user to play music files over multiple devices – MP3 players, personal computer, car and home audio systems – while preventing the content being shared with third parties," Mr McHugh said.

"This is difficult, and some time off being a reality.

"But the music companies would be better advised to invest in solving this problem rather than in a fruitless arms race with hackers."

Mr McHugh said that while lawmakers and content producers in the US continued to debate the rights of customers to make backup copies of their purchases, an overwhelming majority of consumers believed the practice was legal.

A GartnerG2 survey released earlier this month found that 82 per cent of consumers believed it was legal to back up software and prerecorded music CDs; 75 per cent believed it was legal to back up video games and 73 per cent believed they could legally back up videotapes and DVDs. Must Read
GartnerG2 research director Mike McGuire said current US laws were vague and content companies were pushing for strict controls over consumer copying – a situation that would stunt the growth of the online media distribution market.

Mr McGuire said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act must be modified to allow consumers to make backup copies of their content.
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...E15306,00.html

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For a thought provoking rebuttal to the RIAA’s assertions that piracy-for-profit and bedroom file swapping (same thing in their eyes!) is killing the music industry - and by extension the U.S.’s balance of payments and security, see George Ziemann’s edgy article RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy. He uses the RIAA’s own published statistics to debunk their arguments and let the gas out their windy obfuscations.
http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html

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Sprint Hears Echoes of Mobile Music
John Borland

Sprint PCS is jumping back into online music services, but far more tentatively than during the height of the dot-com days.

The company is expected to announce Wednesday that it is offering a new music information service through its Vision mobile Internet plan. The service will tap into music company Listen.com's Rhapsody 411 database of artist and album information, allowing browsers access to data such as musicians' discographies and music recommendations via cell phones.

The service, which has also been implemented on a lesser scale by AT&T Wireless, marks some resurgence in interest in the music realm by wireless companies once keenly interested in tapping the MP3 boom.

"I think they're getting smarter in how to package it," said P.J. McNealy, research director with Gartner G2, a division of the Gartner research company. "But their challenge has always been integrated billing, and there is always a question of consumer demand."

Interest in wireless music services of some variety is unquestionably climbing among record label executives. Many say that the new fast wireless networks give them a new venue for marketing, if not necessarily distributing, their music.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978299.html

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BT Tunes Into Music Downloads
Reuters

BT is aiming to cash in on the music download craze, launching a subscription-based Internet service called "dotmusic on demand".

The venture, a partnership between BT and OD2, the technology firm co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel, will enable BT to sell music downloads and audio streams of up to 120,000 songs on BT's new music site www.dotmusic.com.

The emergence of free file-sharing Internet services such as Kazaa, Grokster and the now-grounded Napster has triggered a massive illicit trade in copyright-protected songs, movies and video games.

Now a variety of retailers, music labels and Internet firms want a cut of the action, hoping the introduction of regulated, subscription services will sway music fans to opt for "legal" music downloads.

With subscription services, the music labels and technology firms, such as BT and OD2, each share a percentage of the revenues, introducing a new compensation scheme into this emerging platform for distributing music.

For BT, adding a music download service to its Internet operation is an important revenue booster, especially as online advertising revenues show no sign of recovery.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2127591,00.html

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Very Broadband for Londoners

Bulldog Communications has launched a two megabits broadband service for residential users.

Its Primetime 2000 offering will offer speeds up to four times faster than standard ADSL services.

The speeds will be available between 6pm and 8am weeknights and all weekend, reverting to a standard 512 kbps at other times.

The £40-a-month service is initially only available to customers within reach of its existing Central London network.

But the company told PC Pro it plans to establish networks in a dozen other UK cities during the course of next year.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...ews.technology

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Warchalking…

UK Wi-Fi Map

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/specials...pots/map.html#

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Why am I not surprised…

Military Seeks Major Limits On Wireless Internet Access
John Markoff

The Defense Department, arguing that an increasingly popular form of wireless Internet access could interfere with military radar, is seeking new limits on the technology, which is seen as a rare bright spot for the communications industry.

Industry executives, including representatives from Microsoft and Intel, met last week with Defense Department officials to try to stave off that effort, which includes a government proposal now before the global overseer of radio frequencies.

The military officials say the technical restrictions they are seeking are necessary for national security. Industry executives, however, say they would threaten expansion of technology like the so-called WiFi systems being used for wireless Internet in American airports, coffee shops, homes and offices.

WiFi use is increasingly heavy in major American metropolitan areas, and similar systems are becoming popular in Europe and Asia. As the technology is installed in millions of portable computers and in antennas in many areas, industry executives acknowledge that high-speed wireless Internet access will soon crowd the radio frequencies used by the military. But industry executives say new types of frequency spectrum sharing techniques could keep civilian users from interfering with radar systems.

The debate, which involves low-power radio emissions that the Defense Department says may jam as many as 10 types of radar systems in use by United States military forces, presents a thorny policy issue for the Bush administration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/te...gy/17WIRE.html

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Worst News Of All For OOL Customers. Truly Sorry - JS.
Inquirer staff

READERS USING CABLEVISION'S "Optimum" broadband connections have received a message in a bottle from the firm warning them that using a list of peer-to-peer file services could mean the firm might restrict access to its services.

It sent a message to some of its customers yesterday headed "potential security brief" and listed which peer-to-peer file services could cause their bandwidth to be throttled, if the file sharing option is not disabled.

The services Cablevision specifies are Aimster, KaZaA, iMesh, Audiogalaxy, eDonkey2000, NeoModus, BearShare, Gnotella, Gnucleus, GTK-Gnutella, LimeWire, Mactella, Morpheus, Phex, Qtella, Shareaza, SwapNut, and XoLoX.

Cablevision's justification is that these peer-to-peer file services mean "the entire Internet can access the files on your hard drive".
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6818

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Ares starts own network.

With just a handful of users the start of this little used-to-be-Gnutella net is indeed humble. On the other hand I remember FT clients like Grokster with about that many and look at ‘em now. Ares has just about everything you’d expect in a client except a lot of users.

That may change, remains to be seen.
http://www.softgap.com/

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On eBay, No One Can Hear You Scream (Over High Price of Hot Toys)
Merry Christmas Baby
Tina Kelly

Td49244, known to some of his hundreds of satisfied customers as Santa Tony, has three dozen jovial Chicken Dance Elmos staring him down in his Staten Island basement, but he is hardly unnerved.

He takes the long view and will not sell short, at least through Dec. 25. Toys-as-commodities are a big game for him, as he watches the fickle fluctuations of the market for fun.

"Two weeks ago, FurReals were $70 each, and now they're $40 or $45," said Td49244, a Staten Island utility worker who buys popular toys at regular prices in stores and then sells them to the highest bidder on eBay, the Internet auction site where hard-to-find items are not so hard to find. "The people that want it are going to get it as early as possible."

Who knew that buying something as soft and purring as a FurReal Friend, a robotic cat, could require the hard-core economic calculus used in the world of pork belly futures?
Those who handicap hot toys each holiday season are intrigued by the snapshot of the market provided on eBay, where seller and buyer come together.

"I think it's a real testament to the power of the free market economy," said Chris Byrne (he spells it "B as in boy, Y as in yippee"), an independent toy consultant, researcher and analyst. "I use eBay as kind of the Nasdaq for toys, to really see what people are believing is going to be hot."

"There are thousands of little Toys `R' Us impresarios out there," he said. "And you know what? They're as likely to guess as Toys `R' Us."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/14/te...gy/14EBAY.html

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The top technology search term for 2002 was MP3
Linux out-Googles Microsoft
Matt Loney

Spider-Man was the fastest climber among search terms on Google in 2002, according to statistics released by the popular search engine on Monday, which give an insight into the zeitgeist of the online community.

Google averages about 15 million visitor hours each month, compared with Yahoo! search at six million hours, according to Danny Sullivan, who runs Searchenginewatch.com. Search hours are calculated by multiplying the number of site visitors by the average number of minutes each spends at the site.

As memories of the millennium slipped away, so too did the popularity of Nostradamus -- who famously predicted the end of the world but not, it seems, his own speedy demise in Google's rankings.

The fall of Nostradamus was followed by bankrupt song-swapping service Napster, the assets of which were finally bought in November by Roxio, a company best known for creating CD-burning technology.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2127587,00.html

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The Real Deal for Mac OS X?
Paul Festa

Macintosh users are finally getting a finished version of RealNetworks' streaming media player, but they will have to wait at least another several months to rip a CD or play QuickTime files like their Windows counterparts.

RealNetworks on Monday launched its RealOne player for Apple Computer's Mac OS X, following test versions of the software that came out in July and August. RealOne for Windows, by contrast, came out in its final, or "gold," edition in March, with a follow-up release in September.

In addition to having waited longer for the release, Mac users will find their options significantly more limited than those of their Windows counterparts.

While Windows customers can pay for a premium service that lets them play back Windows Media Player files and Apple QuickTime files through their RealOne player, Mac users will have to wait for a future release for that cross-platform option.

Mac users of RealOne will also have to wait--perhaps indefinitely--for features that come standard with RealOne for Windows. These include the RealNetworks Jukebox software for organizing music titles, support for portable devices, and a ripping engine.

RealNetworks blamed the Mac release's delay and the absence of these additional features on the difficulty of writing the OS X-based application from scratch--particularly as the introduction of Mac OS 10.2, the so-called Jaguar release, complicated programming efforts midway through the player's development.

"We made a strategic decision to get our OS X player to market as soon as we could," said Ryc Brownrigg, general manager for consumer software at RealNetworks. "We decided our first version would be a player that would support our subscription services."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978047.html

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Philips Hears Sweet Music for PCs
Richard Shim

Philips Electronics is fine-tuning audio playback for PCs.

The consumer-electronics giant announced Monday its Sound Agent 2 software, designed to play music files on computers at the best audio quality possible by analyzing the file type and hardware involved. The software is particularly effective in restoring sound quality to compressed audio files, such as MP3 files, according to Philips.

Sound Agent 2 is available bundled with Philips' Dynamic Edge 4.1 and Sonic Edge 5.1 sound cards. The Dutch company is considering bundling the software with consumer- electronics devices as well as with PC hardware, said Dennis Johnson, a product marketing manager at Philips.

"This software works in harmony with device drivers and the (operating system) to create optimal sound," said Johnson. "It's also very portable, so it can be bundled with other platforms…(consumer electronics) is where we are headed."

The software is part of a trend, with the growing popularity of digital media, to cross-pollinate PC and consumer-electronics technologies.

"Developers are selling and creating their products on the promise of digital media," said Susan Kevorkian, an analyst with research firm IDC.

Kevorkian added that projects combining PC and consumer-electronics technologies are already happening and further integration is where the industries are headed. Kevorkian noted, for example, that flash memory and hard drives are being added to digital audio players. In addition, Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition OS and hardware from companies such as Hewlett-Packard are improving the playback of music and other media, something that has largely been done only by consumer-electronics devices.

"With increasing storage capacities and improving network capabilities, as well as the merging of PC and CE worlds, we expect audio to play a major role in the connected home of the future," said Johnson.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-978001.html

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MasterCell 3.0 Highlights Services Trouble-Shooting
Paula Musich

As more enterprises try to dissect system failures and performance problems, IT Masters Inc. is readying updated tools that can automatically show the impact of IT trouble on services and business processes.

The company's newest MasterCell product, Version 3.0, includes new services modeling functions that allow the status of services to be correlated with the availability and health of the IT infrastructure components that deliver those services, according to officials. The product was originally designed to be more scalable than traditional client/server- oriented ESM (enterprise systems management) frameworks or suites.

MasterCell is made up of cells, or lightweight event processors, placed strategically across an enterprise IT infrastructure. The cells form a peer-to-peer network to share the processing load and results for events and information gathered from third-party elements. The P2P cell network allows information to be pushed to appropriate users.

Despite the difficult IT spending environment, privately held IT Masters managed to increase its revenues by 30 percent in the third quarter—on top of 15 percent growth in the second. The 7-year-old company, which has 80 employees, says it has more than 1,000 customers.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,767760,00.asp

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WiredRed Offers Robust System
Francis Chu

Version 3.0 of WiredRed Software Inc.'s E/pop Enterprise Instant Messaging software suite provides a secured end-to-end IM service for employees and business partners.

The updated E/pop system, released this month, has a server-to-client architecture, but companies can also run the system in peer-to-peer mode. The E/pop server and client provide text-based IM, chat, voice over IP, secured presence and collaboration features, as well as application-sharing capabilities and remote control.

Currently, E/pop can talk only to its own clients using a proprietary TCP/IP-based protocol. WiredRed officials said E/pop next year will support Session Initiation Protocol, which will hopefully allow E/pop to talk to public IM services such as those from America Online Inc., The Microsoft Network and Yahoo.

In tests, eWeek Labs found it surprisingly straightforward to set up the E/pop suite. We installed E/pop Enterprise Server and E/pop Audit and Reporting Server on a Windows 2000 system in a domain with AD (Active Directory) configured. AD is not required, because E/pop has its own directory for authentication and storing user information, but we recommend installing AD so corporations can quickly port current users over to E/pop.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,768025,00.asp

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U.S. awards ICQ founders patent for instant messenger software

The U.S. patent office has approved the ICQ inventors' patent on their technology for instant messaging via the Internet. The office also granted a patent on the entrepreneurs' technology for the transmission of instant messages over cellular networks. The patents will be valid until 2017- 2018.

America Online, which bought ICQ with its owner Mirabilis in 1998 for $400 million, can file patent infringement suits against Yahoo! and Microsoft which develop and market similar software for the transmission of instant messages, or, alternatively, can demand the companies pay royalties. An estimated 400 million people worldwide use instant messaging, about 135 million of them ICQ users.

Though the technology is attributed to the Israeli company's four founders - Arik Vardi, Amnon Amir, Yair Goldfinger, and Sefi Vigiser - the two patents belong to AOL.

The technological premise ICQ invented wasn't new, but the company's founders succeeded in improving it to make it usable in the age of many communications systems connected to a single network - the Internet. The software allows surfers to identify in real time which members of his "buddy list" are also connected to the Internet, using a massive database that records each member's entry and exit from the Internet. When a user wants to send a message or file to another user, it is done directly using peer-to-peer technology.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pa...ID=0&listSrc=Y

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LocustWorld recently announced a hardware/software implementation of an open access point platform capable of meeting the needs of community networks. The system is available for purchase as a ready- to-go system (the "MeshBox"), or the software can be freely downloaded from LocustWorld's website.

Originally released as a bootable CDROM called "MeshAP," MeshBox is now implemented as an under-32MB system image which can fit within a small CompactFlash card. But despite its small size, MeshBox extends the basic access point and mesh routing functionality of the original MeshAP. MeshBox now provides the capabilities of a set-top box Internet Appliance, wireless mesh router, connection to remote windows terminal servers (or other PCs), web browsing, mp3 audio and mpeg video streaming, connection to multiple peer-to-peer networks, instant messaging network chat, and file exchange.

LinuxDevices.com asked Jon Anderson, the creator of MeshAP and MeshBox, to provide some background on these interesting projects -- and here's what we learned . . .
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5073214560.html

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Streaming video via P2P
This was only a test…but it was cool

As part of the research on End System Multicast at CMU, we are building a prototype system that enables video broadcasting using a peer-to-peer approach. We invite you to join in our one-day broadcast and test the scalability of our system. While you tune into the system, we will be collecting logs about your application and network performance for research purpose. Hope you enjoy our broadcast program!
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~ESM-streaming/index.html

Overlay tree
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~ESM-streaming/tree.html

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Three Out of Four Use Web Apps

Nielsen//NetRatings Wednesday reported that more than 72% of the total U.S. online audience is using Internet applications. This suggests that nearly three quarters of all Web surfers have incorporated Internet applications, including instant messengers, peer-to-peer file sharing and media player viewing, into their daily online experience. Windows Media player claimed the top spot for all Internet applications, reaching more than 31% of the active online population and attracting nearly 41.5 million unique visitors at home and at work in November 2002. AOL Instant Messenger drew more than 27.8 million surfers and was one of the stickiest applications, with the average user spending nearly four hours during the month using the service. RealOne Player/RealPlayer followed closely with more than 27.2 million unique visitors, attracting nearly 21% of the active online population. Instant messaging applications from MSN and Yahoo! rounded out the top five, recording 22.7 million and 15.6 million unique visitors, respectively.
http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_ne...?newsID=190307

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Uh Oh - Music File Flaws Could Threaten Traders
Robert Lemos

A security firm on Wednesday warned that people using Windows XP or popular music player WinAmp could fall prey to a vulnerability, enabling a modified music file to take control of a person's PC.

Flaws in both pieces of software could introduce malicious MP3 or Windows Media files--which sound identical to unmodified music--into the file-swapping systems, said George Kurtz, CEO of Foundstone.

"These particular vulnerabilities are definitely attack vectors for any people or entity that is looking to go after those that are taking part in file-swapping activities," he said. http://news.com.com/2100-1001-978403.html

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"Instead of plucking a guitar, I pluck the Internet"

An Aria With Hiccups: The Music of Data Networks
Anne Eisenberg

LISTEN carefully to the sound of the network, and you will hear the difference between congestion and the seamless flow of data.

So says a music professor who has applied his ear for subtle changes in pitch to the problem of delayed or dropped data on the Internet.

Chris Chafe, a composer, cellist and director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, has devised a system that uses sound to show minute lapses in network connections.

This musical detection service translates the behavior of data packets into a range of sounds worthy of John Cage: a packet that loses information along its route emits staccato hiccups. Delayed packets sound at a lower pitch than packets zipping along more quickly, which give a clear, high tone.

Dr. Chafe, who says that listening is a neglected skill in the world of computer diagnostics, hopes his new tool will come in handy in future interactive Internet technologies that rely on tight, uninterrupted connections, like high-quality video teleconferencing. "Our musical senses can be useful, intuitive tools for understanding how a network is behaving at a given instance," he said.http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/te...ts/19next.html

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The Year in Copyright

Napster finally died in 2002, but the file-trading phenomenon it sparked continued unabated on other peer-to-peer networks. In response, the entertainment industry went a bit nutty with its anti-piracy efforts. It cajoled some members of the U.S. House into introducing one bill requiring electronics manufacturers to embed copy protection in their devices, and another allowing copyright owners to hack into copyright- infringing trading networks. Mercifully, neither effort got very far -- but there's always next Congress.

The recording industry also hinted that it may start suing individual file traders, and it stepped up pressure on colleges and universities to go after song-swapping students. Like much else the music industry does, those moves caused it more than a little embarrassment, and the industry now seems hated by everyone -- consumers as well as artists. (To the labels' credit, though, they do seem to be slowly changing their ways. By year's end, they had licensed music to many subscription- based, legitimate song-downloading services -- though none offered the illegal services' range.)

There were some bright spots for the foes of out-of-control copyright law. In October, Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig argued for the repeal of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act at the Supreme Court; justices are expected to issue a decision in 2003. And on Tuesday, Elcomsoft, the Russian software firm that was the first criminal defendant prosecuted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was acquitted of any wrongdoing.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ear_in_review/


Until next week, Happy Holidays!

- js.




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