The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

A possible successor to Napster
A new online file-sharing program created by a Dutch company is poised to become the next Napster and could be much harder for the music industry to stop, a Web research firm said yesterday. The program, known in different versions as Morpheus and KaZaa, attracted about 225,000 simultaneous users who downloaded 370 million files in June, according to a study by Webnoize Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl....DTL&type=tech
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/200.../morpheus.html

New Mexico Settles With Microsoft
New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid has announced a settlement with Microsoft to end her state's participation in the government's historic antitrust case against the software company. "To my mind, this matter is now ripe for a speedy resolution," Madrid said in a statement. "It is time to settle this case and move forward." Madrid's announcement Thursday comes a day after Microsoft said it will allow computer makers to modify Windows XP to remove end-user access to the Internet Explorer Web browser because of the appeals court ruling.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27896,00.html

Napster Makes Its Peace With Metallica and Dr. Dre
Digital music's highest-profile legal dispute has come to an end. Napster announced Thursday that it has settled its copyright infringement suit with heavy metal band Metallica. The high-profile suit brought the first mainstream media attention to the Napster issue last summer and resulted in dozens of televised debates between Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich and Napster interim CEO Hank Barry. Also Thursday, Napster showed that it did not forget about Dr. Dre, settling a similar suit with the rap star and former member of the group N.W.A.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27883,00.html

Sad Songs Sung at MP3.com Summit
The digital music services the major record labels plan to launch this summer will fall on deaf ears, and once-hyped wireless music services won't be taking off anytime soon. The muted forecasts, a stark contrast to expectations for online music just a year ago, were among the opinions offered by speakers at the fourth-annual MP3.com Summit at the University of California at San Diego on Thursday. Lower attendance, in addition to the more subdued tone, marked a major change from last year, when the Napster controversy was coming to a boil and a host of online music firms jockeyed for position.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27894,00.html

MS to Netscape: Get Well Soon
Pinch us. Is one over-argued Microsoft antitrust issue finally, truly settled? MS announced that computer manufacturers will be allowed to remove Internet Explorer icons and add icons for the competition, such as AOL, to the Windows XP desktop. There's no way to tell whether Microsoft "is willing to accept the court decision, modify its behavior and take significant further steps to settle the suit," said the New York Times. Most media reports seemed to lean toward "no." The sources du jour were Iowa's attorney general, analyst Chris Le Tocq and AOL spokeswoman Kathy McKiernan, who all appeared to have busy Wednesday afternoons on the phone with reporters.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27857,00.html

CNN's Convergence Pitch: Still A Bit Of A Reach
Claiming that it is a glimpse of how media planners will evaluate the impact of buys made across TV and the Internet, CNN this week released the first wave of data intended to measure the combined reach of the two media. The data, from Nielsen Media Research's so-called ''Convergence Lab,'' were derived from a panel of 500 people who recorded both their TV and Web usage. Not surprisingly, CNN is touting the results because they show impressive reach across its TV and Web news properties. The combination of CNN's and Headline News' TV and Web outlets reached a monthly average of 52.8% of respondents between December 2000 and May 2001.
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?arti...4596&pod_id=13

Ads Become Content On Streaming Media Sites
In the heady early days of the Internet, many pioneers saw the new medium as a noncommercial source of information and entertainment, an alternative to the traditional advertising-dominated media, particularly television. What a difference a decade makes. The demands of the marketplace have accelerated the Web's evolution from a noncommercial public service into a business. So much so that the Internet is now boldly going where broadcast and cable TV tread gingerly-producing programming that is virtually nothing but advertising, but looks like information and entertainment.
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?arti...4400&pod_id=13

Microsoft to schools: Give us your lunch money!
The conflict between educational priorities and intellectual property protection is, on one level, a moral question -- what do we as a society think is more important? But there's also a practical aspect to the struggle that may ultimately make the moral question moot. By ratcheting up pressure on schools and imposing financial penalties, Microsoft is inviting educators to search for other, cheaper alternatives. And in today's software industry, there actually may be another choice, or at the very least, the potential for another choice. Impelled in part by fiscal realities and in part by intellectual curiosity, educators are beginning to take a hard look at free and open-source software programs -- products that are created by volunteers and can be distributed without restriction.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/20...ool/index.html

Can WinXP Product Activation be reverse engineered?
When Fully Licensed GmbH published details of its analysis of Microsoft's Windows Product Activation (WPA) system earlier this week, it had deliberately removed a small piece of the picture. The company made a fully-working executable of its XPDec utility available for download along with the XPDec source code, but it removed the encryption key from the source. It seems, however, that this is only a minor obstacle for anyone wishing to have the complete source; The Register has been passed an explanation of how it can be restored, and it really sounds quite simple.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/20337.html

A major leap in CD jewel case technology
If you're finding that regular sized CD cases are too fat, and those slimmer style ones are too flimsy, then have we got news for you. Designers and boffins seem to be tackling the important issues, which means the manufacturer Stomp can sell DiscSavers. These are made of polypropylene plastic [as used in very cheap 1970s skateboards] which makes 'the cases durable and impact-resistant, and available in bright red, blue, green and yellow, as well as clear'. And they're half the width of a regular case, so you don't have to spend a DIY weekend putting up new shelves to hold your collection.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/20342.html

Phew... that's all for now