The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

You can run but you must read

Apple sings the praises of DVD
Apple Computer on Monday said it had shipped nearly half a million computers with DVD recording drives capable of making movies that consumers can play in home DVD players. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company also said it had shipped more than 2 million DVD recording discs. Manufacturers shipped more than 600,000 DVD recording drives last year, according to Gartner. Manufacturing sources put the number shipped by Pioneer Electronics, the manufacturer making Apple's drive, below 400,000.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-877789.html

Court gives go-ahead to Hewlett suit
A Delaware judge ruled Monday that Walter Hewlett may pursue a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard, a decision that could potentially pose problems for the company's proposed merger with Compaq Computer. Hewlett, the HP director who opposes HP's acquisition of competitor Compaq, alleges in his lawsuit that HP's management effectively bought shareholder votes by striking a business deal with a major shareholder and misled investors about integration plans.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-878145.html

SBC: Tighten rein on MS Web plans
Antitrust sanctions in the Microsoft trial should aim to preserve competition in the emerging market for Internet-based services, an SBC Communications executive testified Monday. Larry Pearson, leader of a team at the No. 2 regional telephone company that is developing SBC's Unified Messaging Service (UMS), said Microsoft was well-placed to crush this product, scheduled for initial release later this year. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is considering the demands of nine states for stiffer sanctions against Microsoft for illegally maintaining its Windows monopoly in personal computer operating systems.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-877930.html

Watch out for pop-up downloads
Web surfers who thought online advertisements were becoming increasingly obtrusive may be dismayed by a new tactic: pop-up downloads. In recent weeks, some software makers have enlisted Web site operators to entice their visitors to download software rather than simply to view some advertising. For example, when visiting a site a person may receive a pop-up box that appears as a security warning with the message: "Do you accept this download?" If the consumer clicks "Yes," an application is automatically installed.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-877592.html

Can Bertelsmann's copy lock stop leaks?
BMG Entertainment, the major record company owned by German media giant Bertelsmann, said it will begin this month to protect promotional releases of its CDs against copying. That means free samples of new albums sent to U.S. radio stations, retailers and the press will come packaged with software that prevents songs from being copied onto computer hard drives. BMG will begin the trials with the April promo releases from artists Cee-Lo and Donnel Jones. Recipients of free CD promos have been at the top of a list of suspects behind leaks of unreleased tracks onto the Internet.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-878106.html

Sony shrinks PS2 chips -- cuts costs
Sony Computer Entertainment says it has combined two of the processor components of its PlayStation 2 on a single die, which should significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing the market-leading video game console. The company has combined the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesiser chips into a single unit using a 0.13-micron manufacturing process, said Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi in Japanese trade publication Nikkei Microdevices. The original PlayStation 2 chips were designed to be manufactured on a 0.18-0.15 micron process.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-877756.html

Win XP to upgrade with more -- or less
Microsoft this summer will institute some changes to Windows XP as part of a proposed settlement agreement meant to benefit consumers and increase competition. But some state trustbusters and Microsoft's chief rivals aren't convinced that those changes go far enough. The software maker says it plans to start testing Windows XP Service Pack 1 as early as next month, with a final release slated for late summer. The update will introduce support for Mira wireless devices and the Freestyle digital media interface.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-876747.html

AOL's Parsons looks to digital future
Broadcasters must embrace new technologies and develop products for the next generation of digital entertainment, Richard Parsons, incoming CEO at AOL Time Warner, said Monday. In an opening keynote speech to a crowd of media executives at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Parsons emphasized a need for the industry to work together to address the opportunities and threats that technology brings to the marketplace. He flagged interactive TV and video on demand as areas of development. He then quickly described enemies the industry "dare not ignore:" digital piracy and technologies that strip advertising out of content.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-878170.html

Clinton backs tech war on terror
Bill Clinton has been outlining how technology can play a key role in defeating the new brand of terrorism. The former US president said that information management systems similar to those used by the big mass mailing companies could provide an early warning about suspicious behaviour. "More than 95% of the people that are in the United States at any given time are in the computers of companies that mail junk mail and you can look for patterns there," he told BBC World's ClickOnline.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1912895.stm

A unified theory of software evolution
Software evolution, i.e. the process by which programs change shape, adapt to the marketplace and inherit characteristics from preexisting programs, has become a subject of serious academic study in recent years. Partial thanks for this goes to Lehman and other pioneering researchers. Major thanks, however, goes to the increasing strategic value of software itself. As large-scale programs such as Windows and Solaris expand well into the range of 30 to 50 million lines of code, successful project managers have learned to devote as much time to combing the tangles out of legacy code as to adding new code. Simply put, in a decade that saw the average PC microchip performance increase a hundredfold, software's inability to scale at even linear rates has gone from dirty little secret to industry-wide embarrassment.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/0...man/index.html

How to uninstall Brilliant Digital's software
Brilliant Digital Entertainment quietly installs its own software with every copy of the Kazaa file-swapping software. The Brilliant Digital software, which is being progressively distributed over the next few weeks, can later be remotely "turned on" to become part of a new network. Executives from Brilliant Digital and Kazaa's parent company say people can uninstall the Brilliant Digital or Altnet software from their computers without interfering with the Kazaa program itself. This is true, but it's not an easy process.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-875274.html

Theft of data tops security woes
U.S. companies and government agencies report losing more money from theft of proprietary information than any other type of attack on their computer systems, according to a new study. Viruses remain the most common type of cyberattack, according to the seventh annual joint FBI/Computer Security Institute (CSI) Computer Crime and Security Survey released Sunday. "What's particularly impressive is that financial losses seem to be really rising," said Richard Power, editorial director of San Francisco-based CSI, an association of information security professionals.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-877427.html?tag=cd_mh

Will Wi-Fi overwhelm satellite radio?
Satellite radio stations aren't too happy rubbing bandwidth shoulders with Wi-Fi wireless networks. The two wireless industries broadcast their signals on radio waves separated by only a small buffer. So far, that buffer has kept the millions of Wi-Fi networks from interfering with radio broadcasts by Sirius Satellite Radio or XM Satellite Radio. But the radio companies don't think the relative calm will last, so they are asking the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to step in.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-877572.html

Broadcasters conference digs into digital
Internet and digital TV streaming technology is poised to take center stage at events held during the National Association of Broadcasters 2002 conference, which opens Monday in Las Vegas. The 79th annual conference, which highlights the convergence of Internet, cable, satellite and traditional broadcasting, will showcase a variety of emerging technologies for digital set-top boxes, video on demand, personal video recorders, and Internet audio and video streaming.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-877566.html?tag=cd_mh

Lessig's doomsday look at cyberspace
The hype is deserved: Lawrence Lessig's "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World" offers a devastating analysis of how the freedom and creativity originally built into the Internet are now being built out of it by corporations and lawyers with a vested interest in controlling what people do online and deciding who has access to what. An impassioned follow-up to Lessig's celebrated "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace," written in 1999, "The Future of Ideas" is an elaborate warning: about who is calling the shots in cyberspace; about what it means that controlling interests such as the Recording Industry Association of America, Fox Networks and AOL Time Warner have made the Internet a war zone of intellectual-property disputes.
http://news.com.com/2009-1023-877317.html?tag=cd_mh

Overture sues Google over search patent
Paid-search listing company Overture Services has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google, saying the rival search service overstepped its bounds with its ad-placement tools. Overture said the suit, filed late Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, applies to all Google products that are not related to its mathematical search methods -- techniques whose results have endeared Google to Web surfers the world over for their objectivity and relevance. The lawsuit follows a similar case that Overture filed against FindWhat.com in January.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-876861.html?tag=cd_mh

More news later on

[walktalker]

Videndi sues over online game tool
Media conglomerate Vivendi Universal has sued a St. Louis Internet service provider, claiming online gaming software distributed by the company infringes on copyrights for Vivendi games. The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, claims that ISP Internet Gateway and company founder Tim Jung violated copyrights held by Blizzard Entertainment, a Vivendi subsidiary. The charges center on "bnetd," free software Jung helped develop and distribute to allow individuals to run servers for hosting online versions of popular Blizzard games such as "Diablo II" and "StarCraft."
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-878212.html?tag=cd_mh

DVD adds new dimension to storage
Las Vegas is no stranger to bright lights, but next week will see an entirely new laser show as breakthrough technology shows off 3D storage for digital video. InPhase Technologies, an offshoot of Bell Labs, will be showing the first commercial holographic video recorder at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show on April 8. The device uses the company's Tapestry technology to hold 100GB of data on a single CD-sized write-once disc as a succession of 1.3MB holograms.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-876820.html?tag=cd_mh

'Crappy' WAP Bridging Gap
"The WAP protocol browsing experience was simply and is clearly not tuned for the phone," said Thomas Reardon, vice president of Openwave, the software company that pioneered WAP. "It set the expectation that people would get the Netscape-browsing Internet experience on their phones. 'WAP is crap,' in that sense, was fair." But Reardon hasn't given up on WAP altogether. His company, Openwave (OPWV) remains an active member of the WAP Forum. Openwave, whose WAP browser is embedded in 70 percent of all handsets on the market, is banking on the success of WAP 2.0 -- the latest version of the protocol that is a hybrid of XML (extensible markup language) and HTML.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,51516,00.html

IPod: Music to Hackers' Ears
Jean-Olivier Lanctôt-David is a 14-year-old hacker who has figured out a way to display online news headlines on Apple's iPod digital music player. Lanctôt-David, who has been using Macs since he was 4 and programming since he was 11, was given an iPod for Christmas and immediately wanted to make it do more than just play music. So he whipped up PodNews, a program that fetches headlines from the Web in XML format and displays them on the iPod's small screen.
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,51586,00.html

Cure for South Africa's Ills
Call her an idealist or call her a geek, but the CEO of the only bioinformatics company in South Africa believes many of Africa's problems will be solved by scientists, hackers and open-source networks. Even over a phone line heavy with static from Cape Town, South Africa, Tania Broveak Hide's enthusiasm is apparent as she describes a recent event called the "biohackathon." Her company, Electric Genetics, sponsored the meeting of some of the top bioinformatics minds in the world. Bioinformatics -- a combination of biology, information technology and open source -- could help Africans address health problems and create jobs, she said.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,51533,00.html

Microsoft Goes to the Movies
Microsoft is moving forward with its efforts to court entertainment industry companies as it tries to move into yet another new market: movie and television distribution. At the National Association of Broadcasters industry conference Monday in Las Vegas, the software company is announcing that several behind-the-scenes audio and video production companies, including Adobe, Avid Technology and Thomson Grass Valley Group, will make some of their products compatible with Microsoft's Windows Media Player format.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,51621,00.html

Proposed copyright law raises controversy
Nearly a century ago, the music industry argued that its future was threatened by a new method of creating and distributing multiple copies of a performed song. The new technology? The player piano roll. Two decades ago, the movie industry fought against an innovative device that it claimed was as dangerous as the Boston Strangler: Sony's Betamax videocassette recorder. Now a bill introduced last month in Congress, which attempts to protect copyrights in the age of CD burners and online file sharing, could break significant new ground.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...8/BU140716.DTL

Mars called key to quest for alien life
Chris McKay's album of family photos opens with a picture of fossilized bacteria, entombed within rock billions of years old. "This is one of (my family's) oldest, oldest, oldest ancestors," declares the NASA scientist, showing a slide of the photo and drawing a big laugh from his packed audience. But he's only half joking. The quest for "alien" life forms on the primeval Earth and their possible counterparts on Mars has consumed much of McKay's career at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, he said on the opening day of the space agency's biannual Astrobiology Science Conference.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...8/MN115342.DTL

Your Cell Phone Is Watching You
Tracking devices were once a staple of old science fiction and action movies. One typical scene: The good guy slaps a tracer on the villain's getaway car and follows him -- at a safe distance -- to his lair for the final showdown. Or a team of leering, white-coated technicians forces a microchip-sized homing device into the hero's brain cavity. These days, such scenarios aren't so fantastical. For blanketing the United States are 140 million human-tracking devices: cellular phones.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12776

Local TV Station Tackles On-Demand Web Video
While it may not be unique on the Web, the local ABC affiliate in St. Paul, Minn., is offering an unusual news video-on-demand service its general manager hopes will lead his local TV station to the leading edge of Webcasting. KSTP-TV today debuted its 5Cast service, which allows Web site users to select video segments from archived TV newscasts in any order they choose, giving them, in some sense, the keys to the editor's desk.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175722.html

More news later on

[Smoketoomuch]

Hey, I barely finished reading the previous one... I thought I can rest a bit.... but second part looks even more interesting... Damn.

[JackSpratts]

another fine job wt, and you scooped me on two stories today, lessig and pop-up downloads!

- js.

[ssj4_android]

I've seen the popup downloads before, but gator is the only one that I've seen. On the wi-fi thing, wasn't it out before satellite radio? Why make the people who came out with it first spend money to help stupid people who might interfere with their network?

[TankGirl]

An excellent issue again, WT - thanks for keeping us Napsterites so well informed!

The story on Lawrence Lessig's book was interesting and highly relevant to us p2p activists:

Published the same week that Microsoft released its controversial Windows XP operating system, "The Future of Ideas" is a timely cautionary tale about how best to understand such inter-related phenomena as Napster's fall, Time Warner's merger with AOL, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the proprietary games cable and wireless companies are playing as high-speed Internet service providers. The Internet, Lessig reminds us, was originally designed to be an intellectual "commons," a free public space open equally to all (see, for example, the mission statement of the World Wide Web Consortium). But in recent years corporate heavyweights have begun using copyright and patent law to turn large swathes of the Internet into their own private property. Code is kept secret; content is restricted. Increasingly, ideas are not free; increasingly, the fact that they are being regulated is invisible; increasingly, we are not free - to make use of the innovations of others or to innovate ourselves.

In contrast to Lessing's manifesto it was also interesting to read AOL's Richard Parsons's reflections on new technology:

He flagged interactive TV and video on demand as areas of development. He then quickly described enemies the industry "dare not ignore:" digital piracy and technologies that strip advertising out of content.

The freedom from advertising was one of the core elements of what became known as 'Napster experience'. There we had a wonderfully interesting zone of virtual interaction with huge amount of content and virtually no commercial 'noise' spoiling the quality of experience. With later p2p services (and web services in general) it has become increasingly clear that this is exactly what the 'consumers' want. Aggressive advertising that intercepts our surfing and other online activities is simply a nuisance that nobody but the advertising companies and their customers seem to want. Faced with this challenge the advertisers have resorted to spyware/adware technology that they are symbolically trying to push down our throats and the consumer reaction is even more negative.

Does this mean that the consumers are not interested in new products, new artists, new content? No. They are just increasingly fed up with hype and intrusive technology that is being forced on them. There is a lesson here to be learned for the advertisers but it may take some time and struggling until they get it. Just like in real world, there is a need and justification for commercial services and places in cyberspace. It's great to have sites like Amazon from where you can order books to anywhere in the world when you need to. I don't need any aggressive popups to find my way there as my occasional need for new books is a real one. But an overcommercialized cyberspace with no privacy and no free public space for social interactions is a disgusting, suffocating idea. We don't want to spend all our days in malls even if it nice to go shopping now and then. If we go to a club or a restaurant to have good time we don't want to have a salesman sitting in our table and stealing the attention that belongs to our friends. A healthy cyberspace would be mostly private and uncommercial in nature, the commercial services being easily available when - and only when - we are interested in them. P2P holds a promise to provide pleasurable and interesting non-commercial areas for online interaction but as we have seen the commercial pressures to squeeze this free space away from us are strong indeed.

- tg

[mozart]

Originally posted by TankGirl
The freedom from advertising was one of the core elements of what became known as 'Napster experience'. There we had a wonderfully interesting zone of virtual interaction with huge amount of content and virtually no commercial 'noise' spoiling the quality of experience. With later p2p services (and web services in general) it has become increasingly clear that this is exactly what the 'consumers' want. Aggressive advertising that intercepts our surfing and other online activities is simply a nuisance that nobody but the advertising companies and their customers seem to want. Faced with this challenge the advertisers have resorted to spyware/adware technology that they are symbolically trying to push down our throats and the consumer reaction is even more negative.

I could put it even more simply: as a consumer, you want the best delivery you can get for what you're after: that pretty much means content on demand, with all it implies for speed and quality.

After that, there should also be a minimum of negative experience - some of these things are purely technical, such as systems failing, but many are commercial: how much bandwidth to buy, choice of 'paying' by adverts or in cash.

Probably just about everyones ideal is going to be 100% quality content, with no bills whatsoever

being forced on them. There is a lesson here to be learned for the advertisers but it may take some time and struggling until they get it. Just like in real world, there is a need and justification for commercial services and places in cyberspace. It's great to have sites like Amazon from where you can order books to anywhere in the world when you need to. I don't need any aggressive popups to find my way there as my occasional need for new books is a real one.

...

I often wonder why such intrusive advertising actually works - if it manages to get itself noticed, its on the basis of nuts to them - but bizarrely enough, it does seem to be effective