Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 21st, '05

[JackSpratts]

Out Of The Xbox

How Bill Gates built his new game machine—and changed your living room forever
Lev Grossman

Bill Gates' time is valuable. There are Microsoft employees who wait their whole career to be alone with Gates for 45 minutes. As the richest man in the world and, arguably, the greatest philanthropist in history, at any given moment Gates could and probably should be off feeding the hungry or curing some horrible disease.

But he isn't. Instead he's sitting in a suite at the Las Vegas Hilton wearing a sweater vest and talking about video games and laughing his head off. Gates is here for a trade show and to talk up Microsoft's new video-game console, the Xbox 360. In person Gates is not at all the stiff, unsmiling mandroid people make him out to be, or at least he isn't at this exact moment. He's loose and happy, cracking jokes and making fun of himself and talking smack about his competitors. True, his hair is weird, and his voice sounds as if still changing even though he's 49. But he seems different.

Funkier. "I feel sort of unleashed," is how he puts it. Somehow humanity's most famous nerd has become kind of cool.

It's a decent metaphor for what Microsoft is trying to do in making the Xbox 360. Microsoft, known more for its bullying business tactics than its technological innovation, is trying to act in a very un-Microsoft fashion. It's trying to be quick and nimble, radically innovative, and play well with others. It's trying to reinvent itself from the corporate DNA on up.

But this isn't just a story about Microsoft. It's also a story about a sea change in American culture, which has embraced video games, formerly a despised hobby, as a vital force in pop culture. Gates and his team have spent the past 3-1/2 years working in obsessive secrecy to build the greatest piece of game-playing hardware the world has yet seen. And they don't want to sell it just to a niche audience: they're gunning for all of us.

Even more than that, this is a story about a stealthy technological revolution that has taken place over the past five years, with very little fanfare, and is turning the U.S. living room into a digital, wireless, networked nerve center. You may think the Xbox 360 is a game machine—a toy—but if it does what it's supposed to, it will change the way you consume music, movies, photographs and TV. It might even transform your social life.

Bill Gates would really like a piece of your nerve center. He's bet billions of dollars that the Xbox will get it for him, and hasn't seen one thin dime of profit yet. True, since it launched in November 2001, the Xbox has sold 20 million units, earning it a comfortable, if distant, second place to Sony's PlayStation 2 in the North American market. But the game-console business is a peculiar one: you have to spend a bundle on promotions, and you lose cash on every box you sell, hoping to make it all back by taking a cut of game sales.

That hasn't happened yet for Microsoft. "At some point you have to decide, O.K., when do you stop investing to be credible in the marketplace and start investing to make money?" says Robbie Bach, Microsoft's chief Xbox officer. "A billion dollars of losses each year based on the hardware is tough to sustain."

It certainly is. But insane as it sounds, that is all according to the master plan. The whole point of doing the first Xbox was to have a shot at making money next time around. "The first generation, it's just like a video game," Gates says. "If you play perfectly, at the end it says, 'You get to play again.' That's all it says!" He's cracking himself up. He has a surprisingly infectious laugh. "You put your hand in the till. There's no quarter down there. There's no, like, even tickets to buy funny dolls or anything. It's just, Hey, play again."

If all goes well, the Xbox 360 will be out around Thanksgiving; Sony and Nintendo are expected to follow with consoles of their own in 2006. TIME got exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the minds and the strategy that built the new Xbox. Welcome to the future of fun.

Licensed To Chill

Xbox headquarters is a surprisingly unimpressive place, a generic office park in Redmond, Wash., across the road from a large gravel pit. Microsoft's inspiring name for this low-rent nerd farm is the Millennium campus, and it's where the company's money-losing projects live. Not for them the manicured lawns and sculpted berms and softball fields and fancy cafeterias of Microsoft's main campus. They get the gravel pit.

But, in a way, the isolation of the Millennium campus has worked in the Xbox team's favor. The Xbox project is run by five guys, all Microsoft vice presidents, and one thing they realized early on is that while Microsoft was the right place to get the next Xbox built financially, it was totally wrong for it culturally. Microsoft moves slowly and doesn't make sharp turns. It also doesn't play especially well with partners—like the people who write games and make consumer electronics—has little experience building hardware and has never shown much aptitude for nurturing fun, cool brands. So they set up a kind of separate minicompany within Microsoft, insulated from the institutional lameness of its parent. "They allowed us to set up a separate division almost, that is physically, geographically, psychologically and spiritually different from what Bill himself calls the Borg," says Peter Moore, the V.P. in charge of marketing the new Xbox. Moore knew that whatever has made Microsoft successful thus far wouldn't help it here. And Gates seems to recognize that too. "[The games industry] expects us to act like Microsoft: very formulaic, very product oriented, very march-down-the-straight-path," Moore says. "Bill is very important to us, but he's not driving this thing. God bless him, I think he wants to be more a part of it than we actually, you know, feel comfortable with."

So who is driving this thing? More than anybody else it's a manic, shaven-headed character named J Allard. (Yes, it's just the one letter.) In 1993, as a 25-year-old wunderkind Microsoftie, Allard wrote an 11-page memo that almost single-handedly persuaded Gates that maybe personal computers should be able to connect to something known as the Internet. Now a 36-year- old V.P., Allard is one of the few people who can get the Microsoft juggernaut to change direction; he's known as one of the "Baby Bills," the company's young up-and-comers, and Gates often talks about how much the two of them have in common. Allard is what technology people call an evangelist: a charismatic guy who's so hysterically excited about a product, he gets other people excited by the sheer force of his psychic mojo.

One of the first problems Allard had to solve was what the new Xbox would look like. It's not a trivial question. The old Xbox is large and forbidding, a matte black and poisonous green plastic crate the size of a VCR. Perfect for hard-core gamers, maybe, but if Microsoft wanted to grow its audience, Allard knew the new Xbox had to look kinder and gentler. The goal was a design that was welcoming but not wimpy, that snagged the soccer moms and NASCAR dads and Britney girls—without losing the Halo boys.

Allard's solution was a good example of un-Microsoft thinking. "Guess how you get great design?" he asks. "You don't try to do it with computer scientists from M.I.T. You don't try to do it the conventional way one would think about from a Microsoft point of view." Instead, Allard hired a sculptor from the Rhode Island School of Design and gave him a long leash. The sculptor turned around and hired a dozen extremely expensive boutique design firms to each come up with a design for the new Xbox. He then picked two winners, one from San Francisco and one from Osaka, Japan, and made them work together to build something cool yet approachable--"inviting" was the key concept. To make sure everything was absolutely as pretty as it could possibly be, he also hired a company that specializes entirely in color schemes. "Serious color meetings went down," Allard informs me.

The end result? A modest little pedestal just over 1 ft. high and 3 in. wide, with a gently convex front and slightly in-curving sides.

It's sleeker and slimmer than the old Xbox. (One of the reasons the first one tanked in Japan is that Japanese consumers, having smaller apartments, are very space conscious.) It's also a little feminine—there's a hint of an hourglass figure. There are very few cables because the controllers are wireless. It has chrome accents, but it's mostly a creamy, calming off-white that the color geniuses call chill. And if you don't like chill, it has a snap-off faceplate, so you can customize it.

If the old Xbox looked like something recovered from a fallen asteroid—an angry, evil asteroid—this looked like something created on planet Earth, albeit a near future, slightly utopian planet Earth.

It definitely wasn't from planet Microsoft. "We knew we had finalized it when the research came back from Japan," Moore says. "We asked people, Who do you think designed this? And they said, 'This has to be from either Sony or Apple.' That was the seminal moment."

The Tolstoy Machine

The xbox 360 does, of course, have a function beyond looking pretty. Its first order of business—but only its first—is to play video games. It's not high praise to say the Xbox 360 is the greatest piece of gaming hardware ever created, because gaming hardware gets better all the time. But there is a wow factor to the Xbox 360 because it's the first console for which all the games will be in high definition, wide screen, with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. It's like putting on a pair of glasses: everything is clearer and sharper and more vivid.

Take the old Xbox's flagship golf game, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005.

Put it side by side with the 2006 version, currently a work in progress. The grass in the old version looks like a green carpet; in the new version, each blade of grass is animated individually and sways to its own rhythm. In the old version, trees make crude, round, blobby shadows; in the new version, each individual leaf has its corresponding individually rendered leaf shadow. The play of light on the water hazards is not readily distinguishable from a filmed image.

The fidelity is disconcerting: it gives you a vertiginous feeling, as if you were going to fall into the screen and come out in Narnia.

And fidelity is important. One reason games aren't taken seriously as art is that they don't look like art. They look like cartoons, and not fancy Pixar cartoons either. They look like lame Saturday-morning cartoons. That's going to change. Characters in the Xbox 360 game based on The Godfather have a gravitas and dramatic weight to them that we haven't seen before. Those blocky, too smooth cartoon faces are starting to fill in with wrinkles and lines and freckles.

Suddenly, they emote.

But that's just the beginning. Some game developers may point out that it's not that hard to make a pretty-looking game when you have enough megahertz and gigabytes to throw at it. The real trick is expanding what is called game play: the ineffable, alchemical mixture of pace and structure and balance and story that make a game work.

Consider a military fighting game like Call of Duty: Finest Hour, in which players take part in the major battles of World War II. In the old version, you're constantly bumping into invisible barriers that force you from place to place down preset trails, accomplishing a predetermined chain of tasks. Don't look too closely at the extras: they're not particularly detailed, or all that smart.

In the Xbox 360 version, Call of Duty 2, the game play is a startling leap forward. You can run around at random like the battle-panicked infantryman you are, surrounded by hundreds of your fully realized, equally panicked brothers in arms. You can accomplish your goals (or die trying) in whatever order seems expedient: no more invisible barriers. Clouds of dust and smoke float up and block the sun, interfering with the ambient light—war is finally getting its fog.

The chaos is astonishingly visceral: you're Joe Grunt, playing your little part in vast events that are beyond your puny ken. This is war the way Tolstoy described it, or Stendhal, or Stephen Crane, seen from the bottom up. Suddenly video games have added a couple more octaves to their emotional register.

Of course, war gamers aren't what really occupies Gates. He has them already. (Note to the hard-core faithful: the next version of Halo will not, repeat not, be ready in time for the launch of Xbox 360. It will be part of the all-important second wave next spring. "It's perfect," Gates says, radiant with bloodlust. "The day Sony launches [the new PlayStation], and they walk right into Halo 3." Microsoft is expected to announce that Xbox 360 will play Halo 2 and other Xbox games.) But there's still a significant demographic that for some reason doesn't consider wiggling a joystick to pretend they're shooting somebody a major priority in their lives. To woo this wider group, video games will have to get easier, more approachable, and they will have to expand into genres that don't yet exist.

Most video games are action movies. Where are the romantic comedies?

And the dramatic weepies? "We're not gonna get so everybody in the family loves this thing just with sports and shooters and racers," Gates admits. "We're gonna have to fund, both internally and externally, some high-risk genres and see if those can stick. We can't just stay with the tried and true."

But maybe the new Xbox doesn't need fancy-dancy games or new, risky genres. Maybe it doesn't need games at all.

The Conquest Of The Living Room

There's a top-secret 147-page internal document at Microsoft called "The Book of Xenon." Xenon is Microsoft's private code name for the Xbox 360, and "The Book of Xenon" spells out the company's entire strategy for it. Large chunks of "The Book of Xenon" deal with something it calls the D.E.L., which stands for the Digital Entertainment Lifestyle. This is shorthand for the notion that all media—movies, music, games, cameras, phones, TV—are becoming digital media, and that's changing how we relate to them and how they relate to one another. They're merging into a single integrated, portable, customizable media gestalt. This is what used to be known, in the quaint parlance of the now distant 1990s, as convergence.

Which is why, in addition to games, the Xbox 360 plays CDs. You can also use it to rip songs off CDs and play them from the hard drive.

You can plug your iPod into the Xbox 360 and play songs off that too.

You can watch DVDs on it. If you have a digital camera, you can plug it into the Xbox 360 and pop the images up on your TV, which beats making everybody crowd around the computer monitor in your study. If you have sufficient techno-gumption, you can even connect the Xbox 360 to your PC wirelessly, via wi-fi, and access whatever music and pictures you have stored there.

That's not all. The Xbox 360 has ambitions as a communications device. Unlike either Sony or Nintendo, Microsoft has a fully fledged online service, called Xbox Live, to go with its game console, and with the launch of the new Xbox, Gates & Co. is hoping to turn it into a major online community with Friendster-like features that match up compatible gamers. Companies will use Live to distribute game trailers and sell mini-games and new game levels. It will be a free-for-all bazaar. Players will be able to customize games—say, the way the skateboards might look in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland—and then sell their custom wares to one another online.

Right now you can use Xbox Live to talk to people you're playing with via voice chat—think free long distance over the Internet. Soon you will also be able to send e-mail and instant messages. If you have a camera peripheral, you will be able to send short video messages and even videoconference. And here's an important point: with Xbox 360, you don't even have to be playing a game. You will be able to chat with other people over Xbox Live when you're just plain watching TV.

The words appear over the show, or you can chat aloud using a headset. That is, arguably, much more useful than actually playing games. Gates is so stoked about it, he can't believe other companies haven't done it before him. "If there's anything we're confused about, about what Sony's thinking, it's when do they get their act together on the equivalent of Live?"

The New Ecosystem

Let's not miss what's happening here. Microsoft, a company known primarily for making highly profitable business software, has put a box in your living room. It entered your house under the humble pretense of being a game machine, a toy for the kids, but it just ate your CD player and your DVD player, and it's looking hungrily at your telephone. It's all up in your media cabinet. It's talking to your iPod, your digital camera, your TV, your stereo, your PC, your credit card and the Internet. It has created a miniature electronic ecosystem inside your home, with itself at the center.

Games are just the condiment. This is the main course, and it's what Gates is really after. Games just get you in the door. "You can't just sell it as a convergence device," Gates says. "You gotta get in there because certain members of the family [I.e., teenage boys] think it's a must-have type thing. But the way to cement it is as a family experience. And the way that it really makes sense for Microsoft, and we justify this sort of circuitous route that we went down, is because of how it fits in the living room."

Gates is anxious that the extent of his ambitions not be overstated: "Think of it as not taking over the digital ecosystem but being a prime player in that digital ecosystem." Duly noted. But the question remains: Is Microsoft about to do in the living room with the Xbox 360 what it did in the office with Windows? Will it create a technology so well positioned and well marketed and so devilishly useful that it becomes the de facto standard and creates an insanely profitable quasi-monopoly around itself? As music and movies become more and more digital, the entertainment business is transforming into a software business, and somebody has to build the master platform on which all that software runs, and the hardware through which it flows. Turn to page 13 in your "Book of Xenon," please: "As the world's software leader, Microsoft is among the best suited to enable and capitalize this transformation. This is our opportunity to lose."

Game On
They could very well lose it. Rumors surrounding the PlayStation 3's processor make it sound like the Ark of the Covenant wrought in silicon, and it may be much further along than Gates gives it credit for. "We look at delivering a quantum leap in technology, not just Xbox version 1.5," a Sony spokeswoman said recently. ("Kutaragi's good at rhetoric," Gates says of Sony PlayStation czar Ken Kutaragi.)

For all the Xbox's underdog pluck, the PlayStation 2 still has an overwhelming hold on the $25 billion global video-game market: 68% at last count, to Microsoft's 17%; Nintendo has 15%, according to DFC Intelligence, a market-research firm.

Microsoft doesn't come to the table with a handheld device like Sony's PSP or the Nintendo DS. It doesn't have the in-house multimedia expertise Sony has, or Nintendo's big-time kids' franchises like Mario and Pokemon. All three companies will be showing off their demos at this week's Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Even beyond the world of video games, Microsoft is looking a tiny bit peaked. You wouldn't want to say that it's vulnerable, but last quarter Microsoft missed its earnings estimates by a whisker.

Open-source gadflies like Linux and Firefox are chipping away at its market share in small but irritating ways. Google is making scary noises and hiring away its talent. Apple is winning rave reviews for its new operating system Tiger, which incorporates features that Microsoft was planning for the next version of Windows—which won't be out till 2006. Microsoft isn't going out of business anytime soon, but if it were going to hit a home run, now would be a really great time to do it.

Give Gates credit. He and his company have correctly identified the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment industry in the world and hitched one of their many wagons to it. He's still willing to put down big bets when there's big action. And in this case Microsoft has managed to bind together cultural and technological trends in the same densely engineered overdetermined artifact. We tend to write off the past five years, the post-dotcom years, as a period of relative technological stagnation, especially when compared with the furious frenzy of Internet innovation that preceded it. But since 2000 we've experienced a massive, largely uncelebrated transformation. We've seen the rise of digital music. Digital cameras have become ubiquitous. HDTV is finally coming into its own. Broadband Internet access has become common, as has wi-fi—a coffee shop without a hot spot now feels positively Victorian. If 1995-2000 was the dotcom era, the dot-home era is now upon us. One way or the other, the Xbox 360 gets Microsoft a piece of all this.

The trick going forward is for Microsoft to walk a delicate line between two opposing principles: openness and, for lack of a better word, closedness. Whoever is king of the living room will control the flow of 1s and 0s that very soon will make up the entire fabric of our living culture. That's a big responsibility, and a big test for any company—it's always tempting to use that kind of power to squeeze out the competition. If Xbox 360 were to take over your media cabinet, would it play DVDs with Sony Pictures movies on them? Of course. But would it play songs from a Sony-owned online music store?

Would it accept messages from AOL Instant Messenger? Would it network with a computer running Mac OSX and not Windows? If a platform is too open, you can't make money off it. Too closed, and nobody else uses it, and it withers away and dies.

The final step in the process has nothing to do with what's inside the Xbox: Microsoft will have to make it cool. In addition to giving it that iPod-esque design, Peter Moore will run a very hip, very un-Microsoft ad campaign featuring quirky hipsters wearing the Xbox logo. Moore just threw the Xbox 360 the equivalent of a movie premiere: a party, broadcast on MTV, with Elijah Wood as host and featuring beyond-trendy rockers the Killers. For the Xbox 360's theme song, Moore licensed an obscure Sex Pistols B-side titled C'mon Everybody, with Sid Vicious on vocals. "Bill and Steve, Gates and Ballmer—when we make marketing presentations, they'll sit and watch and say, 'I have no idea what's going on,'" Moore says. "But at the same time, that's what I need to hear. Because if they do understand it, that's when you know you're in trouble."

If it seems incredible to you that, a year from now, there could an Xbox 360 in your living room—or a PlayStation3 or a Nintendo whatever-they're-calling-it—and that you could be using it to videoconference with your brand-new gamer buddies while grooving on a Mahler symphony, think of all those iPod owners who, five years ago, didn't know what an MP3 was. Jaded as we are, the future can still surprise us. It might just be both nerdier—and cooler—than anybody expected.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050523/story.html


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New Consoles Raise Stakes For Video Game Industry
Daisuke Wakabayashi and Yukari Iwatani Kane

The bright side of dying a horrible death in a video game is that resurrection is only a button hit away, but for game developers facing a steep upward spiral in costs, there may not be room for a second bad move.

Two companies with some of the deepest pockets in the world -- Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp. -- are building new consoles, creating new levels of opportunity and risk for game makers.

At this week's Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video game industry's annual trade show known as E3, the immense cost of creating games with movie-quality graphics and unparalleled processing speeds was seen potentially wiping out some companies.

"Some developers are scared. They are as white as ghosts," said Ankarino Lara, a director of online gaming site GameSpot.

Within the next 18 months, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo Co. Ltd. each plans to launch its next generation game console, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Revolution.

That raises the technology bar for every developer in the $10 billion industry, and some may not be able to pay the hefty price.

The development cost of a high-end game, now about $10 million, could rise to $15 million to $20 million in the next five years, said Doug Lowenstein, president of industry trade group Entertainment Software Association.

"I think any developer or publisher without a lot of capital is not going to be very successful competing in the next five years of this market," he said. The industry defied one business trend, he added: "When we introduce new technology, it becomes more expensive to compete."

Even the world's largest game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. said it is feeling the pinch on its earnings.

"If you look at the balance sheet and profit and loss numbers, it doesn't always look that pretty. We're spending an awful lot of money right now to do all the heavy lifting," said John Schappert, the head of EA's biggest game studio.

The ability to make those investments could ultimately widen the gap between big players like EA and a huge community of small privately owned developers ill prepared to handle the ups and downs of a hit-driven industry.

But that would just be a case of history repeating itself.

Once proud names like Japan's Hudson Soft, known for classic games like "Bomber Man" and "Bonk's Adventure," and U.S. publisher Acclaim Entertainment Inc. are cited by analysts as victims of the previous console cycle.

Konami Corp. agreed to acquire Hudson Soft last month, while Acclaim filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2004 after a series of disappointing software titles that failed to match the popularity of past hits, such as "NBA Jam."

Say Hello To Hollywood

The cost of creating next generation games, and the risk of an expensive flop has drawn parallels to another pillar of the entertainment industry, Hollywood.

"It's going to become like the movie industry. Game publishers will spend big money. If something looks mediocre, then it will be killed even it's already in development," said Naoya Tsurumi, chief executive of Sega of America Inc.

But similar to Hollywood, good talent is in high demand.

Most major game publishers are out shopping for game developers that can maximize the power and speed of the new consoles along with the ability to create games that appeal to what is expected to be a larger, more diverse audience.

Activision Inc. < said it plans to increase the number of in-house game developers by up to 30 percent from 1,000 this business year.

"This industry has grown so quickly. There are not enough bodies out there to fulfill all the development needs," said Kathy Vrabeck, president of Activision Publishing.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Edward Woo, speaking at an E3 workshop, said in the search for creative talent, don't overlook another important personnel decision.

"A key member to add to the team is a very good accountant," said Woo.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...O-COSTS-DC.XML


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Microsoft Sued Over Excel

Microsoft illegally took technology used to link spreadsheet data between two of its programs from a Guatemalan inventor, lawyers said during opening statements at a jury trial that started on Tuesday.

In a lawsuit, Carlos Armando Amado said he filed a patent application in 1990 for software that links Microsoft's Excel program with its Access database application via a single spreadsheet, and that he unsuccessfully tried to sell it to Microsoft two years later.

Amado is seeking damages that could exceed $500 million in the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of Central California.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., began using his software without permission in various versions of Access, such as Access 95, 97, 2000 and 2002, according to Amado, who said he created the technology while he was a graduate student at Stanford University.

The suit did not specify a figure for damages, but Amado's attorneys estimated that it was about $2 per software copy sold, which would equal about half a billion dollars based on the software sold to date.

Joel Freed, Microsoft's attorney, disputed Amado's claims, saying Microsoft started working on such technology in 1989, three years before Amado approached the software giant with his idea.

At issue is a technology that lets computer users transfer data back and forth between Excel and Access by using a spreadsheet.

Freed said the plaintiff had re-created the data transfer for the courtroom. "It's never happened with anyone outside this courtroom," he said.

Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said the company currently has about 35 other patent infringement suits pending.

The jury trial is expected to last two weeks.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=8523263


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High Stakes In The Music Business

Free music needn't be stolen music
Michael O'Hare

"Dad, it just doesn't feel like stealing!" How many parents have heard this, after a Serious Talk about sharing music files, from good kids who wouldn't dream of shoplifting a CD?

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to put its oar in by deciding the Grokster case, a plea by publishers to shut down a file-sharing service that enables what the publishers claim is simple theft.

Whatever the court decides, however, it will be wrong, because existing law cannot get us what we really want no matter how it is interpreted.

The file-sharing conflict appears to pit legitimate values against each other in a paralyzing standoff. On the one hand, artists, creators and distributors deserve to be paid for their work, and it's in our interest to pay them if we want anything to listen to. On the other hand, the kids understand a central fact about digital media: listening to a song, even having MP3 files on their hard drives, doesn't leave any less of it for other people to enjoy. You shouldn't pay for what you don't use up (economists worship this idea as "marginal cost pricing"). Obviously, either the listeners or the artists have to win. But, as with many obvious propositions, this one is wrong.

Have we ever resolved a conflict like this? Indeed we have. Consider city parks and sidewalks. My stroll doesn't leave any less of them for you to enjoy. It's tempting to say "Parks should be free" but wiser to speak more precisely if less pithily: "Parks should be available at no charge to the users." After all, parks are not "free": If we don't pay contractors, landscape architects and gardeners for them, we won't have any. Understanding that we need to pay for parks and that there are good reasons to make them available at a zero price, we instruct government to do so. No case of turf theft is before any court known to me. It's not perfect, because some people who never go to the park have to pay for it. But it's the best available system, and good enough.

Turning to the arts, we find the British have recently reduced museum admission prices to zero. There's been no mass closing of museums, curators are not enslaved, the maintenance people still get paid for their work and paintings are bought from artists and collectors just as before, because the government pays everyone's "admission price." (Note that this principle does not lead to free symphony tickets. If I'm in a gallery and it's not packed, you can be there, too. But if I sit in seat 2, row F tonight, you can't.)

Digital media are a little more complicated than these examples, but the only way out of the mess we are in is to follow the same principles: Pay creators for their work and provide the product to users for free. What makes music tricky is knowing how much to pay for which song, but it's not impossible. After all, how do we decide if we should have another park or a bigger museum? Essentially, we see how many people are using them now, ask some questions in public hearings and editorial pages, and predict: If we build more, will they come? When there's no one on the lawn and people waiting to shoot hoops, we tear up the grass and make some more basketball courts, enriching the people who lay asphalt and signaling the bent grass suppliers to find some other work.

What we need for music is analogous: a reasonably good assessment of how much play a given recording gets and a mechanism to steer public funds mostly to the ones people are listening to a lot. No amount of suing downloaders, or yelling about whether file-sharing is theft or music "wants to be free," nor any court proceeding, can create such a system. Congress must legislate public machinery that: 1) observes music use without compromising listeners' privacy and 2) bureaucratically steers a public royalty fund to creators according to how much their work is listened to.

The technology to do this is neither impossible nor science fiction, and law professors William Fisher and Lawrence Lessig have outlined the legal model in their recent books. Irreversible technology has trashed the system that parcels out music as physical objects that can be locked up, and neither tinkering with the rules nor wielding "property rights" like a club can repair it.

How big does this royalty fund have to be? The Recording Industry Association of America reported about $11 billion in recorded music sales in 2004, so about $40 per year each from 300 million Americans will cover it. For the price of three CDs in taxes, we can each get free access to anything we want to hear and have clear consciences. Not bad. Will it be easy? Nope: Big music will lobby against this system apoplectically and apocalyptically. The fight will be a wonderful spectacle, scary and awesome to behold, but in the end artists and their audiences will both be better off. Bring it on.

Michael O'Hare is a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...DGM7C907H1.DTL


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Internet Television
Bret Primack

That pretty sounds cool, right? It certainly has to be better than regular television. During the fifth season of the Sopranos, I had digital cable, access to hundreds of channels, and most of time, nothing of interest. I don’t like sports or shopping so that immediately cuts out a lot of channels. And in Arizona, where there are few African Americans, the local PBS station airs old Lawrence Welk programs every Saturday night.

What do I like that I can’t find? Jazz. It’s largely absent from existing television. Oh yes, there’s that gloried public access channel, BET on Jazz. But nobody watches that. And I mean nobody. It’s on so few cable systems it’s nonexistent.

We can thank Viacom for that, who owns the BET networks. Media companies like Viacom, Clear Channel, Disney, Vivendi, EMI, etc., they just about own the entertainment business, don’t they? Not for long.

These companies are dinosaurs in waiting. And they know it. That's why they're engaged in a legal battle over content. A battle they can't win. After the shakeout, there will probably be only one or two major content providers left. Then finally one, Walmart like company. But not all the content will come from China.

And then, when this new day dawns, as it already has, billions of others channels.

That’s because the Internet is transforming itself, from being primarily an information medium to a content distribution vehicle. It's filesharing that fired up this revolution. When Napster took off, that's when people started to share digital content. Overnight, ten of millions of people were doing. And are still doing it.

P2P networks, those damned and much feared sources of content have become the inspiration for the next incarnation of the Net.

I shot a video of the web to document its 1995 incarnation, around the time I started producing content and sites. The web was primitive but fascinating, even its largely text based state. You got on the web to get information. The possibilities were so endless that the dot.com thing took off like a rocket.

For the past decade, its been websites, websites and websites. There are literally hundreds of millions of websites.

Then came streaming media, digital audio and video files, broadband, and now, content distribution.

Dear Website creators. You better get with the program folks, otherwise your website is going to obsolete very soon. Two words, INTERNET TELEVISION.

(I hate it when people use all caps in email. It’s like shouting.)

Take two.

Internet Television.

(Sorry, I’m excited about this.)

A convergence of trends serve as the catalyst for the era of Internet Television. We are soon to witness the birth of thousands of channels of video programming.

The democratization of video production drives this.

With the advent of digital video, low cost hardware and software have enabled the skill and discipline of video production into something that’s obtainable on a mass scale. Video has become a potent creative tool that anyone can utilize (skill and discipline do matter), and a new level of sophistication for video production has extended into nearly every business and institution.

Video Distribution is also going through a transformation.

This is, in fact, the latest chapter in the continuing saga of mass media. In the first wave, at the beginning of the 20th century, theatres around the country served as the distribution vehicles for films that appealed to the largest commercial audience, produced by a handful of studios.

And then, after World War II, a handful of broadcast networks followed suit, distributing only programs with the broadest appeal.

Then came cable. Fifty channels of programming. Uncut movies.

Today, with digital cable and satellite, there are hundreds of channels dedicated to a myriad of interests and demographics. Still little Jazz though.

Wait, the good part is coming.

Welcome to the third wave of content distribution, Internet Television, where the physical, geographic and economic restraints of cable and satellite disappear. We’re moving, very quickly, from the world of the big guys, the cable operators and their network controlled content, to a new paradigm.

We’re shifting to a media landscape that’s open and global, where consumers and publishers are empowered in ways we can only begin to comprehend.

Significant technology trends have enabled Internet Television.

1. Mass adoption of broadband Internet connectivity has created an open, unencumbered distribution conduit for high quality video.
2. The adoption of home wireless networks connecting PCs and TVs.
3. Rich media formats that provide a quality viewing video experience across PCs and TVs.
4. The growth of portable devices capable of carrying internet based video programming.

As the cost of video production plummets, far more producers than we’ve ever seen before are being enabled. In this soon to be very real world of Internet teleivison, we’ll see as many video channels as there are websites today, in as many and varied areas of interests, including some real Jazz channels. Finally.

With such easy access to video, I suspect nearly all websites will feature video, or just be a front-end for video content distribution. There's a reason for the growing popularity of video on the web. We are a culture of watchers, not readers. As a writer, I hate to say that but it's true. Most people would rather watch a video then read a book.

And although they will be empowered, content publishers will face the same challenge they're trying to surmount today -- how to reach their audience. One thing the Net does very very well is network people. There’s already a pretty extensive global network for Jazz people.

This website, All About Jazz, is a good example. Nearly half a million different users visited this website last month. Half a million. That’s a lot of people.

For today’s broadcast and cable networks, a channel that reaches only half a million people would be a failure. The new paradigm suggests a more positive outcome.

A Jazz Internet Channel, offering high quality programming that reaches a half a million people will be very successful, selling transportable digital media, both in streaming and downloadable formats.

It’s the combination of the low cost of production of video and music and the global distribution channel, the Internet, that makes this all possible.

Stay tuned. Your choices are going to get a lot more interesting.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/arti...t.php?id=17340


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The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth
Cory Doctorow

America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters -- the BBC -- is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience.

The BBC's news website is the first mainstream news-gathering organization in the Western world to solicit and give prominence to photographs and reporting provided by its visitors.

Professional photographers spluttered at the presumption of the BBC to use amateurs' efforts. But the BBC is doing its job: engaging the audience, and picking the best from all worlds, commercial and public alike.

The BBC isn't perfect. It's a public broadcaster known as much for hidebound bureaucracy as nimbleness and foresight. Its internet offerings have always been forward-looking, but paranoia over its public image has led it to restrictive policies on things like outbound linking. Until recently, the otherwise stellar BBC News site hardly linked to anything apart from other BBC pages.

Stef Magdalinski, a hacker-agitator-entrepreneur, responded with a guerrilla project called Wikiproxy, which rips all the news stories coming off the BBC news wire and mixes them by linking every proper noun to its corresponding Wikipedia entry. Of course, this burns to a crisp the old BBC policy against linking to external sites.

Rather than sue, the BBC created BBC Backstage, a service for remixing the Beeb that launched last week.

With Backstage, BBC's online department takes all the goop in its content-management system -- breaking news, editorials and conferences -- and exposes it as a set of standard programming interfaces. Anyone who can hack a little Perl or Python can mix these into any kind of service they can imagine.

The crowning glory of the Beeb's openness is the Creative Archive.

The Creative Archive is an attempt to digitize all the programming the BBC has commissioned, clear the copyrights and post it online with a Creative Commons-like license. This will allow Britons to download the BBC's content, distribute it and noncommercially remix it into their own films, music, gags, projects and school reports.

It's a shame that Auntie couldn't find the political will to use a proper Creative Commons license, but this is the kind of reversible error that I expect the BBC to correct soon enough.

Meanwhile, the BBC has shown itself to be awfully clueful with its announcement that the Creative Archive will not employ useless, consumer-hostile digital rights management technology of the sort that Movielink and Apple's iTunes Music Store waste so much time and money on.

Take digital TV. Practically every country in the world needs to come up with a strategy for the "analog switch- off" -- the day when the analog TV towers go dark, leaving only digital TV behind. To get there, citizens need to get new digital receivers, or risk having their TVs stop working after the switch-off. In most countries, the switch- off will be sometime before 2010.

In Britain, the BBC led the charge with something called Freeview, a system for transmitting 30 free digital TV stations and 20 free digital radio stations to the nation's analog TV sets.

A digital receiver sits on top of the TV, attached to a set of rabbit ears, and provides as many channels as most Americans get on basic cable, for free, forever.

Britons have embraced Freeview in spades, and the United Kingdom will likely effect the first major analog switch-off as a result. Quite a payoff, considering the billions that the analog TV spectrum can be sold for in a market of spectrum-hungry mobile carriers.

In the United States, the "solution" was the doomed broadcast flag. The Federal Communications Commission decided the way to get Americans to junk analog sets was to offer high-definition programming.

But Hollywood wouldn't open up its high-definition coffers unless the FCC gave it a veto over the design of digital television receivers.

These companies -- who tried to ban the VCR -- wanted to be in charge of all digital television apparatus (including PCs), forever.

How this was supposed to result in an American analog switch-off is beyond me.

Hollywood tried this kind of blackmail on the BBC, too.

In 2003, when the BBC switched off the encryption on its satellite feeds, allowing anyone who bought a receiver (including the French and Belgians) to watch free satellite TV, the studios went nuts, saying that they would lose licensing revenue from continental Europe.

Hollywood swore it would boycott the BBC: No movies for you!

The BBC stood fast -- after all, anyone with a camera can be a filmmaker, but to be the BBC, you need 29,000 employees and 78 years of history -- and when the studios' fiscal year wrapped up, they came, hats in hand, to the BBC, asking if they couldn't please have some of the money they were accustomed to for satellite licensing.

The greatest irony here is that it takes a publicly-funded broadcaster from a cozy liberal democracy to teach America's lumbering, anti-competitive Hollywood dinosaurs what a real, competitive offering looks like.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67552,00.html


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FCC Seeks New Data For Cable Ownership Rules

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday began anew its review of ownership limits for the cable television industry, more than four years after its rules were struck down by a U.S. appeals court.

The agency, under new Chairman Kevin Martin, is seeking public comment on developments in the pay television market over the last several years, where there has been significant consolidation since the court ruled in March 2001.

"The commission intends to take a fresh look at rules that will foster competition and diversity in the video programming market," the FCC said.

The FCC's rules had barred companies from owning systems reaching more than 30 percent of pay television customers and limited channels affiliated with the cable companies to no more than 40 percent of a system's menu.

The appeals court told the FCC it failed to sufficiently justify the limits it set and unduly burdened cable companies' free-speech rights under the Constitution.

In 2001, the FCC sought comment on what it should do but never voted on new rules. Now the agency is seeking new and updated data to try again.

"We ask commenters to supplement the record where possible by providing new evidence and information to support the formulation of horizontal and vertical limits, and we invite parties to undertake their own studies in order to further inform the record," the FCC said.

Since the rules were struck down, a number of acquisitions have occurred and the satellite industry has taken some of the market share from cable operators.

Comcast became the largest cable operator when it bought the cable assets of AT&T and says it reaches about 29 percent of the pay TV market, based on the FCC's calculations.

Adelphia Communications filed for bankruptcy and is being sold off to Comcast and Time Warner, the No. 2 cable company. News Corp., a television broadcaster and big content provider, acquired the biggest U.S. satellite television operator, DirecTV.

In addition to a long history of trying to set cable ownership regulations, the agency has had trouble adopting ownership rules for the rest of the media industry.

The FCC's rules easing limits on television and radio station ownership were put on hold last year by another court.

The two Democrats on the commission voted in favor of issuing the request for comment on the cable restrictions and praised it for recognizing that the law requires such ownership limits.

"Against that backdrop, we hope cable operators and other parties do not argue that there should be no numerical limits, but instead provide appropriate and necessary information to help us implement the clear command of the statute," Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps said in a joint statement.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents the biggest cable operators and programmers, declined to comment.
http://www.reuters.com/audi/newsArti...toryID=8521874


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Court: TV Directors Get Royalties, Too
Tamara Lev

After a protracted five-year legal battle, the Tel Aviv District Court recently ruled that directors have copyrights to movies they have directed, as they have contributed their creativity to the productions. This is a landmark decision because until now no court had ruled on the question of directors' copyrights to their works.

The ruling means that directors can now demand the payment of royalties for films or programs they have directed which are broadcast on television, just as screenwriters and score composers can. The decision is likely to have a significant effect on the royalties paid by various bodies, particularly the TV stations.

The suit was filed by Collecting Society of Film and TV Directors in Israel (known by its Hebrew acronym, Tali), along with directors Shai Carmeli and Doron Tsabari, against Channel 2 franchisees Keshet and Telad.

The plaintiffs asked the court to declare that Carmeli held copyrights to episodes of TV series "Zbeng," broadcast by Keshet, and that Tsabari similarly owned copyrights to the documentary "The X- Ray," which was shown by Telad. The court was also asked to declare they had a right to royalties for every broadcast of films and programs they had directed.

The franchisees countered that directors are not due any royalties as they were not authors of the works.

Tel Aviv District Court Judge Zipora Brun noted that even though copyright law does not specifically mention directors, since the law dates back to the early 1900s when films and TV did not yet exist, it should not be interpreted as excluding directors.

Brun said in her ruling that directors invest considerable energy and creativity in directing their works, and it is thanks to the director's work that the "final product" presented to viewers is different than the materials from which it is formed: the film footage, sound, etc.

After examining each director's contribution to the works, Brun determined that they did have copyrights to the works, which could then not be broadcast without their permission, and they could now charge royalties.

As for the broadcasts that had already taken place, Brun ruled that there had been no copyright infringement, as the directors had consented to the broadcasts.

The level of royalties is not mentioned in the law, and collection is usually handled by collective organizations. Tali now plans to commence negotiations for the payment of royalties to directors.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/577805.html


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Actor Freeman Warns Film Industry Of Piracy Threat
Mike Collett-White

With high-speed Internet connections on the upswing, piracy could hit the movie industry as hard as it did the music business, Hollywood actor Morgan

Freeman warned.

Freeman is telling movie makers that they must wise up quickly to stay ahead of illegal downloaders and file sharers who are using new software and high-speed broadband connections.

His company Revelations Entertainment and chip maker Intel Corporation have set up a "virtual digital home" in a hotel suite to demonstrate to industry movers and shakers in town for the annual Cannes Film Festival the potential of new technology.

Downloading films on to a PC and playing them in different rooms through an integrated system is one of many benefits digital technology can bring. The downside is that file sharing could cost studios and actors dearly in the future.

"One of the things that is terrifying the industry about digital content is that once it gets into the home, what happens to it?" Freeman told Reuters in an interview late Wednesday.

"Some government entities say that if it's on the Internet and accessible, then how can we call it piracy?"

By using an electronic key system, Intel's Kevin Corbett said that films could not be used by unauthorized users. But it would offer the unauthorized user the opportunity to pay for the movie and watch it legally.

"This technology can help us to stop the same chaos (as in the music industry)," Freeman said. "It is too late when the public is two or three steps ahead of you, and then you are playing catch-up," he said.

Citing the example of Sweden, where he said illegal peer-to-peer file sharing was a growing problem, he warned that the spread of broadband would only make life harder for the movie industry.

Freeman believes smaller, independent companies will develop the technology to protect new films, while major studios appear relatively unconcerned about their movie libraries, as opposed to new releases, being shared.

Freeman recalled how the music industry failed to adapt to the peer-to-peer networks that allowed users to share MP3 music files. The industry estimates that piracy has cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue over the last few years.

While a movie involves a far larger file, broadband and increasingly popular file-sharing programs like BitTorrent are making it increasingly easy to handle the information.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...-PIRACY-DC.XML


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P2P and Radio Play

P2P isn't going away any time soon and, "The music industry must adapt or risk being swamped by technical progress," says Waynn Lue in his fascinating new paper, Peer-to-Peer Networks and Radio Play: An Unexplored Link.. "Technology cannot be held back once developed, and trying to stamp it out through litigation is impossible."

Lue told us he's a CS/Econ double major at Stanford, "starting my Master's in Computer Science.

"I've been interested in p2p networks since the original Napster, so I was hoping to combine a few areas of expertise when I wrote this thesis."
http://p2pnet.net/story/4856

PDF


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New Law To Protect Online Copyright
Cui Ning

Online copyright will be protected in China when an administrative rule takes effect from May 30.


A road roller crushes the pirated discs seized from
local market in Shenyang, capital of Northeast
Liaoning Province April 27, 2005. [newsphoto]

The regulation was jointly created by the National Copyright Administration and the Ministry of Information Industry.

The rule applies to services including uploading, storing, connecting or searching online literary, audio and video products in accordance with the instructions of the Internet content provider, without any content revision.

Under the rule, when copyright owners notify the Internet service provider (ISP) that their copyrights have been violated, the provider should take measures to remove relevant copied content.

ISPs that know about copyright violations but don't remove the violating content will face punishment themselves. All income from the illegal act will be confiscated, and a fine of up to three times the illegal income will be assessed. If the illegal income proves difficult to calculate, the maximum fine will be 100,000 yuan (US$12,000).

Internet services have developed at a rapid pace in China in recent years. The country has more than 1,000 ISPs, 10,000 Internet content providers and 100 million Internet users, according to Li Guobin, an official of the Ministry of Information Industry.

The rule states that serious and potentially criminal cases will be investigated by judicial departments.

"Copyright violations on the Internet are running rampant in the past few years, causing damage to the information industry," Xu Chao, an official of the National Copyright Administration, said at a news conference on Monday in Beijing.

"Though there are no specific statistics on economic loss caused by the violations, such violations will impair relevant industries if not curbed."

Sources from the National Copyright Administration said that a higher-level legal regulation will be worked out within two years. The administration is writing a draft to be submitted to the State Council for approval late this year.

China has adopted two ways to protect intellectual property rights -- through administrative and judicial departments. Therefore, administrative rules and legal regulations often work in parallel.

"This rule sounds good to our company and other counterparts," Li Bing, an editor of Sohu.com, said in a telephone interview.

In recent years, many articles produced by Sohu and published on its website have been copied by other Internet service providers.

The worst violation is that some ISPs have published plagiarized works. Sohu, which reprinted and published those works saying it did not know they were plagiarized, was involved in copyright disputes, Li said.

"Hopefully, the rule can better manage Internet services," she said.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english...ent_443209.htm


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Give Your DVD Player the Finger
Katie Dean

Researchers in Los Angeles are developing a new form of piracy protection for DVDs that could make common practices like loaning a movie to a friend impossible.

University of California at Los Angeles engineering professor Rajit Gadh is leading research to turn radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags into an extremely restrictive form of digital rights management to protect DVD movies.

RFID tags have been called "wireless bar codes" -- though they hold more data -- and are commonly used for things like ID badges or keeping track of inventory in a retail store or hospital.

Though RFID tags are usually read by a wireless data reader, the proposed DVD-protection scheme would make no use of RFID's wireless capabilities.

Rather, the researchers are interested in the ability to write data to the tags, which can't be done on a DVD once it's been burned.

Here's how the system might work:

At the store, someone buying a new DVD would have to provide a password or some kind of biometric data, like a fingerprint or iris scan, which would be added to the DVD's RFID tag.

Then, when the DVD was popped into a specially equipped DVD player, the viewer would be required to re-enter his or her password or fingerprint. The system would require consumers to buy new DVD players with RFID readers.

Gadh said his research group is trying to address the problem of piracy for the movie industry.

"Content owners would like to have extremely tight control on the content so they can maximize revenue," Gadh said. "Users want to move stuff around."

Gadh said the proposed system is "absolutely" more restrictive to users than anti-copying methods already used to protect DVDs.

"By definition this is a restrictive form (of digital rights management)," Gadh said.

Gadh said he could not reveal specifically how the system would work, as it is still in the research stage. A prototype will be available by the end of the summer, he said, and at that point, it will be shopped around to movie studios and technology companies.

"I don't know quite what is going to work in the real world," Gadh said.

Most DVDs are already encrypted with an anti-copying mechanism called Content-Scrambling System. The encryption has been broken, however, and programs to descramble DVDs can be found all over the internet.

DVDs are also "region coded" so that discs sold in the United States, for instance, cannot be played in the United Kingdom. The region coding gives the movie studios control over where and when films are released on DVD.

Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton University, called the proposal the "limit of restrictiveness."

"I think people would find it creepy to give their fingerprint every time they wanted to play a DVD," Felten said. "It's hard to think that would be acceptable to customers."

He said it seems unlikely that people would buy new DVD players with RFID readers in order to purchase DVDs that are less functional.

Privacy advocates have expressed concern about RFID technology because the tags can tie products to individuals, potentially without their knowledge.

Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it's unlikely this DRM plan will be any more effective than others preceding it.

"It only requires one person to break it," Schoen said.

Schoen said this is the "smart cow problem": Once one of the cows opens the gate, the others will follow.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67556,00.html


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SBC, Time Warner Can't Kill Commercials On VOD/Network DVR

Hollywood Saying No to Network Timeshifting. Can Microsoft persuade them otherwise?

SBC budgeted Lightspeed without the DVRs, thinking they would instead record all the programs on video servers and play them on demand. CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC are refusing to allow telcos or cable companies to timeshift their shows - especially if people can fast forward through the commercials. Brian Roberts of Comcast thinks the networks will cave, because people will just buy DVRs themselves. The mogul resistance isn't pure Luddism however, they know it will be years before DVRs get to even 40% of the audience. Comcast is only at 5% today, early adopter Time Warner at 20%. In the meantime, a Time Warner compromise reported in the WSJ will let viewers watch their favorite shows within an hour of airtime. Can anyone at the networks spell TIVO?

Microsoft is privately telling the telcos "We'll persuade Hollywood to change." That would be a remarkable show of power or money. Meantime, satellite vendors and cablecos are competing to give away the boxes.

"80% Of The Channels Come From About Six Companies."

SBC's ultimate demonstration of media concentration

While in D.C. they argue about how concentrated the media is, Lea Ann Champion who buys the programming for SBC's Project Lightspeed, offers a real world answer. She has "Eighty percent of the channels come from about six companies," she tells the DSL Forum ( LR. ) Mike Powell underestimated the opposition to raising the station owning limits, resulting in 200 Congressmen in opposition and a court sending it back to the FCC to re-decide. Powell may have been right that there's little practical difference between a 31% and 35% limit, but couldn't compromise. Martin doesn't intend to make that mistake.
http://www.futureoftv.net/

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Surveillance

In War on Terrorism, New Cybersearch Tool Seeks Hidden Vulnerabilities

To thwart the plans of potential terrorists, the Federal Aviation Administration is supporting the development of a new search engine by University at Buffalo researchers that is designed to detect "hidden" information that can be gleaned from public Web sites.

(A diagram showing how the search engine linked previously unconnected concepts in the 9/11 Commission Report is available.)

As part of an effort to anticipate -- and thwart -- the plans of potential terrorists, the Federal Aviation Administration is supporting the development of a new search engine by University at Buffalo researchers that is designed to detect "hidden" information that can be gleaned from public Web sites.

Once the technique is developed and validated, it has the potential to make the Web searches that the public performs daily far more effective in locating meaningful information on the Internet.

The UB team recently completed an initial prototype system, designed explicitly to enable searches for "hidden" information within the 9/11 Commission Report.

The system permits users to find the best trail of evidence through many documents that connects two or more apparently unrelated concepts.

Funded by the FAA, as well as by the National Science Foundation specifically for anti-terrorism applications, the UB project is based on Unintended Information Revelation, or UIR, a search technique designed to uncover hidden information.

The premise of UIR is that pieces of information that by themselves appear to be innocent may be linked together to reveal inadvertently highly sensitive data.

The need for such a tool arose after 9/11 when the FAA started focusing on information being disseminated on its Web site.

"It couldn't tell if it was possible to infer things that the FAA doesn't want others to infer by putting together data from this page and that page and that page," said Rohini Srihari, Ph.D., UB professor of computer science and engineering, who is developing the new search engine with her colleagues in the Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Existing search engines process individual documents based on the number of times a key word appears in a single document, she explained.

In contrast, UIR is based on the construction of concept chain graphs that search for the best path connecting two concepts within a multitude of documents.

"A concept chain graph will show you what's common between two seemingly unconnected things," Srihari said.

The UIR is designed to detect automatically the "hidden" revelation of sensitive information.

At the same time, Srihari's NSF research is geared toward developing the core algorithms that expose hidden paths in trails of numerous documents that may have been generated by different individuals or organizations.

While a single Web site or document may not reveal malicious intentions, a concept chain graph may reveal such intentions "hidden" among numerous documents.

"With regular searches, the input is a set of key words," Srihari explained. "The search produces a ranked list of documents, any one of which could satisfy the query.

"UIR, on the other hand, is a composite query, not a keyword query. It is designed to find the best path, the best chain of associations between two or more ideas. It returns to you an evidence trail that says 'This is how these pieces are connected.'"

To develop the method, the UB researchers used the chapters of the 9/11 Commission Report to establish concept ontologies -- lists of terms of interest in the specific domains relevant to the researchers: aviation, security and anti-terrorism issues.

According to Srihari, the key was coming up with a sophisticated content representation method for processing, or mining, text.

"UIR is an example of text mining, going across documents and uncovering things that are not apparent to the user," she said.

One search the UB researchers used to test their prototype involved exploring the chapters in the 9/11 Commission Report for connections between the three terms that they knew had a connection: "Hamburg," "San Diego" and "imam" (a Muslim leader).

Srihari explained that the model generated by the system on the basis of the 9/11 corpus found that terrorists Binal Shibh and Mohamed Atta shared apartments in Hamburg, Germany; Atta and Nawaf al Hazmi were hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks and Hazmi found an apartment in San Diego with the help of Anwar Aulaq, an imam named at a mosque in San Diego.

"The concept chains show you what may be of interest, but the real intelligence here is gleaned from looking for patterns of interest," said Srihari. "Once a pattern of interest is identified, then you can ask, 'Are there more patterns like this?'"

A more robust prototype is expected to be delivered to FAA for evaluation by the end of the year.

Eventually, the UB search tool may also be used for other applications, such as helping biomedical researchers conduct more effective investigations into the connections between genes, proteins and disease.

Sudarshan Lamkhede, Anmol Bhasin and Wei Dai, graduate students, in the UB Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Nick Schwartzmeyer, a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, are working with Srihari on the project.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/511828/?sc=swtn


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Personal Data For The Taking
Tom Zeller Jr.

Sen. Ted Stevens wanted to know just how much the Internet had turned private lives into open books. So the senator, a Republican from Alaska and the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, instructed his staff to steal his identity.

"I regret to say they were successful," the senator reported at a hearing he held last week on data theft.

His staff, Stevens reported, had come back not just with digital bread crumbs on the senator, but also with insights on his daughter's rental property and some of the comings and goings of his son, a student in California. "For $65, they were told they could get my Social Security number," he said.

That would not surprise 41 graduate students in a computer security course at Johns Hopkins University. With less money than that, they became mini-data-brokers themselves during the last semester.

They proved what privacy advocates have been saying for years and what Stevens recently learned: All it takes to obtain reams of personal data is Internet access, a few dollars and some spare time.

Working with a strict requirement to use only legal, public sources of information, groups of three to four students set out to vacuum up not just tidbits on citizens of Baltimore, but whole databases: death records, property tax information, campaign donations, occupational license registries. They then cleaned and linked the databases they had collected, making it possible to enter a single name and generate multiple layers of information on individuals. Each group could spend no more than $50.

Although big data brokers can buy the databases they crave--from local governments as well as credit agencies, retail outlets and other sources that students would not have access to--the exercise replicated, on a small scale, the methods of such companies.

They include ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, which have been called before Congress to explain, after thieves stole consumer data from their troves, just what it is they do and whether government oversight is in order. And as concerns over data security mount, inherent conflicts between convenient access to public records and a desire for personal privacy are beginning to show.

The Johns Hopkins project was conceived by Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science and the technical director of the Information Security Institute at the university. He has used his graduate courses before to expose weaknesses in electronic voting technology and other aspects of a society that is increasingly dependent on--and at the mercy of--digital technology. "My expectations were that they would be able to find a lot of information, and in fact they did," he said.

Several groups managed to gather well over a million records, with hundreds of thousands of individuals represented in each database.

"Imagine what they could do if they had money and unlimited time," Rubin said.

In some instances, students visited local government offices and filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the data--or simply "asked nicely"-- sometimes receiving whole databases on a compact disc. In other cases, they wrote special computer scripts, which they used to pick up whole databases from online sources like Maryland's registry of occupational licenses (barbers, architects, plumbers) or from free commercial address databases like Verizon Communications' SuperPages, an online yellow pages directory.

Rubin said he was pleasantly surprised that his students turned up fewer Social Security numbers than he expected, although he wondered if even the benign tidbits--property details, occupations, political parties--when combined on a single individual, would be troubling to some.

David Albright is one such individual. In a single query, one student group's master database turned up his precise address, his phone number, his occupation (his architect's license expires in November), the name of his wife, their birth dates, the price he and his wife paid for their 2,200-square-foot brick home in 1990, his party registration and the elections he has voted in since 1978.

The query also highlighted the hazards of data aggregation: A gubernatorial campaign donation from 2002 was not made by him, Albright said, but apparently by another David Albright in Baltimore.

"It's hard to fully digest," Albright said when contacted by a reporter with these details. Albright thought that while the individual bits of information weren't that "creepy," their easy aggregation was troubling. "What would be disturbing is if by having all this information consolidated, it made stealing an identity easier," he said. "That would be a concern."

Like any other American, Albright deposited these tidbits in various databases as he conducted the routine transactions--voting, buying a house, donating money to a campaign--and they became public records. As more of those records are made available on the Internet (a Government Accountability Office study last November estimated that as many as 28 percent of county governments now make public records available online), anyone with Internet access, anywhere in the world, can dig them up.

"I think what this professor and students have done is a powerful object lesson in just how much information there is to be found about most of us online," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, "and how difficult it is, how impossible it is, to control what's done with our information."

Journalists, private investigators, law enforcement officials and others who gather background information on individuals for a living tend to view as a boon the migration of public records databases to the Internet, as well as the combination of those records at one-stop shops like ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, which is owned by Reed Elsevier.

But some privacy advocates are arguing that ease of access has a downside, too. Social Security numbers, they say, remain easy to come by, particularly in the thousands of public documents now being scanned and made available online. Social Security numbers present a particular threat because they are the primary identifiers that let thieves open credit lines, apply for loans or otherwise pose as another person.

Betty Ostergren, a former insurance claims supervisor in Virginia, has become an expert in digging up scanned documents and other information from local government Web sites around the country.

"I don't want these records on the Internet," said Ostergren, whose Web site, the Virginia Watchdog, documents her efforts, complete with defiant instructions on how to find sensitive information on public officials. "I hate to do it," she said, "but I'm trying to get my point across."

That includes the Social Security numbers and signatures of the director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, and his wife. They can be found in records made available on a county court Web site in Florida.

David Bloys, a private investigator in Texas, is equally concerned. He has helped draft a bill now before the Texas Legislature that would prohibit the bulk transfer and display over the Internet of documents filed with local government.

There are real dangers involved, Bloys said, when such information "migrates from practical obscurity inside the four walls of the courthouse to widespread dissemination, aggregation and export across the world via the Internet." However convenient online access has made things for legitimate users, the information is equally convenient for "stalkers, terrorists and identity thieves," he said.

The bill, introduced in Austin by Rep. Carl Isett, a Republican, was unanimously approved by the State Affairs Committee on May 3, but did not make the deadline for a House vote. A spokesman said Isett was seeking to amend another bill with language from his proposal.

And just two weeks ago in Alaska, the American Civil Liberties Union--a strong advocate of openness and access to public documents--took up the cause of Maryjane Hinman, a nurse who had lobbied unsuccessfully to have her home address removed from the state's online registry of occupational licenses.

"We feel that open access to public records is key to a free society," said Jason Brandeis, the ACLU lawyer handling the suit, which seeks to bar Alaska from disseminating contact information for licensed nurses. "But a balance needs to be struck between the public interest in open access to government information, and the need to protect individual privacy."

Whether such a balance can ever be achieved when so much information is already available is an open question. And some people are troubled by recent trends against access.

"I have no problem with an individual who faces unusual threats from publication of her identity or identifying details being able under the law to seek special exception from openness," said Rebecca Daugherty, the director of the Freedom of Information Service Center for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Virginia. "But the secrecy should be the exception not the rule."

Several Johns Hopkins students came to a similar conclusion. Despite their surprise at the number of records they could amass and combine, many still felt that the benefits of openness outweighed the risks.

"If some citizen is concerned about dead people remaining registered to vote, he can simply obtain the database of deaths and the voter registration database and cross-correlate," said 21-year-old Joshua Mason, whose group discovered 1,500 dead people listed as active registered voters. Fifty of those dead people somehow voted in the last election.

"The problem is, we don't know what we want," Rubin said, referring to the competing social interests in openness and privacy.

"It is clear that there are strong negative consequences to being able to collect and correlate all this information on people," he said, "but it is also possible that the consequences to personal freedom would be worse if it were outlawed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/te...gy/18data.html


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Is Your Boss Monitoring Your E-Mail?
Ed Frauenheim

If you're working for a U.S. company, there's a good chance you're being watched--and you may get fired for how you use your computer or office phone.

That's the gist of a study on electronic monitoring and surveillance released Wednesday by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute.

The report found that companies increasingly are "putting teeth in technology policies." About a quarter of employers have fired workers for misusing the Internet; another 25 percent have terminated employees for e-mail misuse; and 6 percent have fired employees for misusing office telephones, according to the report.

"Concern over litigation and the role electronic evidence plays in lawsuits and regulatory investigations has spurred more employers to implement electronic technology policies," Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, said in a statement.

Although liability and regulatory issues may be convincing companies to peek in on their employees, such surveillance raises privacy concerns. Employers can monitor workers to a greater degree these days, thanks to newer technologies such as keystroke-logging software and satellite global positioning systems that can track a cell phone user's whereabouts.

The survey, which involved 526 U.S. companies, found that 5 percent use GPS technology to monitor cell phones and 8 percent use GPS to track company vehicles. About 75 percent of companies monitor workers' Web site connections, and 65 percent use software to block connections to inappropriate Web sites.

Computer monitoring takes various forms, according to the study, with 36 percent of employers tracking "content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard." Another 50 percent of companies store and review employees' computer files, according to the report. "Companies also keep an eye on e-mail, with 55 percent retaining and reviewing messages," the report said.

The number of employers who monitor the amount of time employees spend on the phone and track the numbers called has jumped to 51 percent, up from 9 percent in 2001, the report said.

Fifty-one percent of the companies surveyed use video monitoring to counter theft, violence and sabotage, up from 33 percent in 2001. "The number of companies that use video surveillance to track employees' on-the-job performance has also increased," the report said, "with 10 percent now videotaping selected job categories and 6 percent videotaping all employees."

Of those organizations that engage in monitoring and surveillance activities, 80 percent inform workers that the company is monitoring content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard; 82 percent let employees know the company stores and reviews computer files; 86 percent alert employees to e-mail monitoring; and 89 percent notify employees that their Web usage is being tracked, according to the report. Among companies that videotape workers, 85 percent notify employees of the practice, the report said.
http://news.com.com/Is+your+boss+mon...3-5712677.html


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UK Office Workers: 20% Using IM
Mike Slocombe

Despite the corporate wires buzzing with office gossips, chatting clerks, bored employees and downloading demons, a survey warns that IM remains unregulated in the workplace.

An online survey by YouGov, commissioned by security firm Akonix, has revealed that a quarter of users admitted to using Instant Messaging for office gossip, with another quarter admitting that they have used it to send something their boss wouldn't approve of.

A further 16% have admitted to sending or receiving sensitive company information via IM.

Once the domain of hyperactive teens chatting incessantly online with their chums, IM has become one of the most widely deployed communications tools in corporations today with research firm Gartner predicting that the number of IM messages sent will outweigh the number of e-mail messages by 2006.

IM has grown hugely popular with users aged 18-29 years, with 80% of people in this age group saying they use it to blather away with friends and family at work.

Some 25% of particularly bored office workers have also used IM to download music and film trailers at work.

According to research firm Gartner, nearly three quarters of IM services are installed on to office PCs by employees sneakily downloading them for their own purposes.

Despite Bill Harmer, managing director of Akonix, warning of the risks of letting employees install software that has not been vetted by the IT bods, 62% of firms admitted to having no policy or technology in place to manage or block IM.

With most instant messaging in the workplace taking place over free, public IM networks, there is a danger that IM systems can open up dangerous security holes in a corporate network.

Public IM traffic is not encrypted, leaving it susceptible to 'orrible hackers, identify spoofers and pesky packet-sniffers, increasing the possibility of networks becoming vulnerable to a wide variety of attacks.

For example, anti-virus firm Symantec reported a 400 percent increase in IM and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking viruses, worms and trojans over the last 12 months.

Harmer noted that IM could bring big benefits to firms but it needed policies to regulate its use and technical solutions to ward off spammers and virus writers targeting IM.

"The findings of this survey should be a wake-up call to UK companies. IM should be embraced but protect your business adequately or the consequences can be severe," finger-wagged Mr Harmer.

The YouGov survey found that in addition to its gossiping potential, IM can be an invaluable business tool for improving communications with customers or partners, gathering information or maintaining contacts.

Worryingly for many an office time-waster, Mr Harmer urged firms to archive all IM messages and be mindful of government regulations that demand that company data be stored for longer periods of time.

The survey was carried out by online pollsters YouGov with two thousand UK residents taking part.
http://digital-lifestyles.info/displ...ion=cm&id=2233


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Opera And Firefox: A Side-By-Side Review
Kris Shaffer

Opera Software recently released version 8.00 of its eponymous Web browser. I decided to see how the new version of the popular commercial browser compares to the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0. I found both Firefox and Opera are capable browsers, and though they are very different, each has much to offer any user.

While Firefox is widely known, the Opera browser may need an introduction. Opera is known for its speed and its multitude of features. It's available for a wide range of platforms; in addition to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, Opera runs on FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows Mobile, and OS/2, among others.

Opera includes an embedded chat client and mail client, the latter of which includes support for RSS news feeds. (In this review, I will focus only on the RSS features of the mail client, for the sake of a fair comparison with Firefox, which lacks email capabilities.) Because it's not open source software, Opera has no "extensions" like those of Firefox. Despite being closed source, Opera is very customizable, via both the preferences menus and the manipulation of the plain-text configuration files.

I tested Opera and Firefox on SUSE Linux 9.1, Mac OS X Panther, and Windows 2000.

Look and feel

The user interfaces of the two browsers are strikingly different. By default, Firefox has a clean interface, with only the basic necessities (back, forward, reload, stop, and home buttons, an address bar, and Google search). Opera, on the other hand, displays many more tools and buttons by default. While this may be more daunting to a new user than Firefox's clean interface, the standard buttons are easy to find. The advantage with Opera is that a first-time user can see many of the unique options that Opera offers, which they might not know about otherwise.

Both exhibit consistency of interface, but in different ways: Opera's default look and feel are for the most part consistent from platform to platform, whereas Firefox's default look and feel are for the most part consistent with other applications on the platform (though both applications allow users to customize their interface and install themes or skins). Either of these properties can be seen as a strength or a weakness. For instance, someone who works regularly on multiple OSes may prefer Opera, which looks and acts much the same on each machine. Someone who works regularly on one OS may prefer Firefox because it looks and acts more like other applications on that platform.

Firefox and Opera also have different menu structures and occasionally incorporate different keyboard shortcuts for common tasks like opening a new window or a new tab. In most cases, Firefox is more consistent with "standard" shortcuts and menus than Opera is (i.e. Firefox's shortcuts are more often the same as those of Safari, Netscape, or IE). The differing Opera shortcuts and menus are not difficult to learn, but they may be a stumbling block for users beginning with Opera or going back and forth between Opera and another browser.

Ultimately, though, look and feel are about preference. I like Opera's look better than that of Firefox, but I prefer Firefox's consistency of functionality with other applications on the host platform, particularly in adopting standard shortcuts.

Default features and customizations

One also sees a strong difference in philosophy between Firefox and Opera in their default configurations. To avoid bloat, Firefox developers created a browser that is lean, fast, and by default includes no extraneous features or closed source plugins. This makes for a small application download and a fast browsing experience, though there are hundreds of plugins and extensions that a user can find and install with relative ease. The biggest downside to this approach is that Java and Flash are not installed or enabled by default. Opera, on the other hand, does not provide extensions, but includes many more features by default, including Java, Flash, the optional disabling of sound and GIF animation, dictionary search, the automatic filling out of forms, identifying itself as a different browser, reloading pages at regular intervals, URL filtering, and paste-and-go URLs in the address bar. Thus, of the two, Opera is the browser that provides the most functionality upon initial installation.

While it's important to note what each browser can do "out of the box," both browsers are known for their customization, and Firefox in particular is designed to be extended. I ran some tweaks on each browser and installed some Firefox extensions, to try to get a more complete and realistic impression from each browser. Most default features in Opera that are not part of the default Firefox installation can be installed into Firefox as plugins or extensions, including all of those noted above. In fact, there are more than 400 extensions for Firefox that add to the browser's functionality, and advanced users have the opportunity to write their own extensions and share them with other users. This customization method gives a lot of power to even novice users.

Opera, on the other hand, cannot be customized by extensions, but it contains many more options in its Preferences menus than most browsers, and the Opera Community site contains a large number of skins (comparable to Firefox's themes) and language packs for downloading. Opera can also be customized by editing its configuration files. Though the application is closed source, Opera developers have not applied proprietary code to many of their configuration files, allowing advanced users to edit them manually or through a script, to make use of more advanced features like URL filtering or adding additional email tags and labels to the mail client. This gives more control to power users than other proprietary browsers do, but it is not as easy to use as Firefox extensions, especially since the smaller Opera community has not generated as many scripts and helper applications as the Firefox community has generated extensions.

Ad blocking is a good practical example of this. In Firefox, no ads -- except for pop-up ads -- are blocked by default. However, there is an adblock extension, which allows a user to choose specific images, files, and scripts to block, as well as wildcarded URLs (such as "*/ads/*"). After a short time (in my case, just a week or two), one can accrue a list of URLs (with wildcards) which will block most ads on the sites one visits regularly. There is also an extension that automatically disables all Flash items, replacing them with a "play" button, allowing a user to pick only the Flash items he wants to view. These items are easy to install and to use, and they can drastically improve -- and speed up -- one's browsing experience.

Opera, on the other hand, has a configuration file where one can create a list of URLs to block, which also allows wildcards. If one has a good list (say, exported from the Firefox adblock extension), one can add it to this file and have most of the ads removed on the pages one visits most often. However, it is not as convenient to add individual items to this file as in Firefox. There is a third-party application that updates this file to match a regularly updated list available online, and it allows users to add their own URLs as well. This works well, and the list is well-maintained, but it is available only for Windows, and being a separate program, it does not allow a user to simply right-click on an item in a Web page to add it to the list, as Firefox's extension does. Like Firefox, Opera does block pop-up ads, but as for Flash, Opera does not have as convenient a tool as Firefox. It can, however, filter out URLs for specific or wildcarded Flash items and it can disable Flash completely with a choice in the quick preferences.

With many features, like ad blocking, the difference between Opera and Firefox is really a matter of convenience. In most cases, both browsers can do many of the same things. If, for example, your browsing experience typically requires features that are provided by default in Opera but not Firefox, Opera will likely be more convenient. However, if neither browser includes some of the features upon which you rely by default, and a Firefox extension already exists, Firefox will likely be more convenient. I hope more users and developers will write scripts for Opera that are comparable to some of Firefox's extensions; if they do, the playing field may begin to even out.

Opera incorporates several features with no counterparts in Firefox. For example, when one clicks in Opera's address bar, a dropdown menu offers links to the home page, the 10 most visited sites, bookmarks, an Amazon.com search, and a price comparison search. This nice feature can be a time-saver if you use it, but if you don't, it does not interfere with your browsing. Opera's mail client automatically detected and imported my address book contacts (on the Mac only), and whenever I made a change to the Mac's address book, Opera picked it up. (I was disappointed, though, to find that changes made to the Opera contacts did not make their way to the Mac's address book.) However, my favorite feature unique to Opera, and one I would like to see more applications incorporate, is quick preferences.

Invoking quick preferences (by pressing F12 in Linux and Windows, or selecting Quick Preferences in the Mac's Opera menu) brings a short list of preferences commonly used or changed, especially upon first installation. Critics have often complained that Opera was too complicated for an average user. Quick preferences is a response to that concern, and it's a great way to make the application a little easier without removing any of its advanced functionality.

RSS news readers

Both browsers include RSS news readers by default, but they are quite different. Firefox uses Live Bookmarks. By clicking on the RSS icon in the status bar when visiting a site that has an RSS feed, one can subscribe to the feed and see the regularly updated headlines in one's bookmarks list. Opera too has an RSS icon (though in the address bar), and clicking on this icon subscribes the user to that news feed. Opera, however, uses its mail client as the news feed reader, and the headlines, synopses, and links to the articles are delivered to the feed's mail folder, where they can be tagged, searched, and saved for future research.

Both of these methods have their advantages. I prefer the Opera method for tech articles. I am more likely to browse through all the tech articles than I am regular news articles, and if I don't get around to reading them right away, the links will still be in my inbox where I can find them later. Once I read them, I tag the ones I may refer back to at a later time, and I can search the headlines and abstracts for the topics I am researching. On the other hand, I prefer the Firefox method for regular news sites). I can quickly see the headlines of the day and decide what articles I want to read. I am not likely to save these articles for future reference or searching, nor am I likely to look at news from several days previous (which has been bumped from the list), so I don't need an inbox in which to keep those items. (On the occasion that I want to save an article, I can always bookmark it.)

Closing thoughts

Overall, I have been happy with both Opera and Firefox. Both are rich in features, and though only Firefox is open source, both browsers offer many options for customization beyond mere cosmetics. I cannot say that one browser is superior to the other. If one is willing to consider both open and closed source options, than picking one of these browsers over the other will likely come down to issues of convenience, personal preference, or the particular tasks one typically uses his browser for. One user may choose Opera for its one-time install with no assembly required, while another may choose Firefox because of a handful of extensions he simply cannot do without. Perhaps Opera's integrated mail and chat clients or method of RSS implementation will win over one user, while another will gravitate towards Firefox's lack of banner ads and choose Mozilla's Thunderbird for email.

As for me, I'll be sticking with Firefox as my main browser for now. All else being equal, I prefer to use an open source application, and there are some Firefox extensions that I really miss when I'm on Opera (notably Adblock, GooglePreview, Linky, and the Web Developer toolbar). On the other hand, I'll likely keep using Opera at work, where most of my browsing involves RSS news feeds and other forms of research. Others, however, will make different choices. At the end of the day, both Opera and Firefox are excellent browsers, with a lot to offer any user. No one has to settle for the default, and Mozilla and Opera are both doing their part to see to it that no one does.
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?.../05/10/1626233


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1 Mbps down - and up - for $19.95

Moorhead, Minnesota Gets Citywide Wi-Fi

Moorhead Public Service (MPS) of Moorhead, Minnesota is rolling out a citywide wireless broadband network (GoMoorhead!) to provide wireless Internet access for $19.95 per month to residents. Businesses pay $24.95 per month. Customers can also lease ($5/month) or purchase ($150) a wireless bridge or access box if they have difficulty getting the wireless signal in their houses. MPS expects to be able to deliver 1 Mbps symmetrical to each customer.

The network covers the entire 13 square miles of the community, which has 33,000 people, and will go live in July 2005. MPS says that many in the community were simply fed up with the high price of cable and DSL Internet service, so they decided to deliver what people wanted: cheap access.

"I don't think the community can afford NOT to do this," says Bob Swenson, Moorhead Public Service Commissioner. "The price point is right on for residential and business customers looking for reliable and affordable Internet service."

The City of Moorhead is the largest Minnesota community west of the Twin Cities. MPS estimates that about 5,000 its households will sign up for the service along with some 600 or so smaller businesses that don't need or can't afford T-1 services. Small businesses can subscribe for GoMoorhead! Internet service for just $24.95 a month.

"I've been waiting for affordable broadband access here in Moorhead and can't wait to utilize the network as soon as it's operational," said Brad Grosz, 45-year resident of Moorhead. "Residents and small businesses alike are tired of slow dial-up service and have been looking for an alternative to the expensive cable and DSL service that is available today."

Moorhead's network is using Tropos equipment. Twin-Cities based First Mile Wireless provided design, consultation, RF engineering, and support services to GoMoorhead! First Mile Wireless previously worked on Chaska, Minnesota's citywide wireless broadband network, among others.

Moorhead Public Service is a customer-owned electric, water, and broadband utility, serving approximately 14,000 electric and nearly 10,000 water customers within a community of about 33,000. The Moorhead Public Service Commission is comprised of five customer- owners who govern the utility, approve the utility's budget, and establish rates for our customers. MPS receives no tax dollars; instead, over $4 million in utility revenues are transferred annually to the City of Moorhead's general, capital improvement, and economic development funds.
http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/000643.html


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A New Wave For Computing

The IT revolution of the past two decades has moved into a new phase, with a trio of developments that could bring many changes to the way we live.
Clive Akass

Three developments are accelerating changes that have finally forced the music industry to come to terms with the internet and their effects will spread far beyond the record companies.

Always-on fast web links, cheap high-capacity storage and ubiquitous wired and wireless networking will change profoundly how we work, communicate and obtain information or entertainment.

The three aspects of this new wave of IT are the marriage of the handheld and Digital Audio Broadcasting (Dab); the larger untethered computer, as exemplified by the smart display; and the changing face of broadband.

Today's entry-level broadband hardly lives up to its name by delivering just 500Kbps. It's 10 times faster than dial-up, yet barely fast enough for a video stream.

I have been trying Telewest's pilot 2Mbps cable service, which is more like the web should be, delivering pages for the most part as fast as flicking through a book.

This should be the entry level, and it surely will be one day when the economies of access allow. Danes typically use links twice as fast, and Swedes commonly enjoy 10Mbps access, but their compact populations are said to be easier to mesh than in Britain.

Of course, a slow server, or a sluggish link en route, stays slow however fast your own line, so you are never immune from the world wide wait.

And today's content is designed for slow lines, which will not always be the case; pages are likely to pack more kilobytes as delivery speeds rise, so we will be clawing for faster links for a long time.

Currently, the problem is rather the reverse. There is little content available that needs 2Mbps, and little incentive for people to pay a premium for the extra speed.

This is a reprise of the Catch 22 that has long plagued the web: you won't get the content until you get the users, and you won't get the users until you get the content.

"This is why we are offering this service for the first time to consumers. Someone has to make a start," said Telewest web consultant, Fergal Butler.

It has to be said that 2Mbps is also available from some ADSL operators, at a price. A second reason for the Telewest pilot (which was offered free on a first- come basis to 1,500 subscribers to its 1Mbps service) is to establish how much people will be willing pay.

Not that these early adopters - keen online gamers, teleworkers, or people sharing a connection - are a typical slice of web users.

In the long run, broadband operators are likely to move away from a flat-rate charge. The very mention of the possibility sends ripples of fury through web discussion groups, yet it seems a perfectly sensible move that could be good for all involved if properly implemented.

You would probably get a flat-fee basic service much like you do today (better, one might hope), though perhaps with a cap like the 1GB-a-day limit imposed two months ago by NTL.

If you wanted a faster link for a while, perhaps to watch a film, you would pay a little extra and if you visit an online shopping mall, say, the faster access might be paid for you.

But you'd pay for quality of service as much as speed. Indeed you do already when you make a dial-up phone call rather than messing with telephony over the internet, which is not good at the timely delivery required.

Operators, for a price, could set up an IP link of the required quality and it could be used for video phoning as well.

This touches a sore point, as videophones require bandwidth upstream, which is restricted to 250Kbps even on the 2Mbps pilot. It is likely to remain so.

Butler blames peer-to-peer (P2P) users swapping audio and video files: "If we increased the upstream speed they would simply swallow up the bandwidth."

P2P users tend to blame greedy operators, record companies, movie companies - everyone, that is, except greedy P2P users.

The problem lies not with their own downloads, so much as the fact that their machines act as file servers for others, crowding out local traffic.

The cap on upstream speeds is one reason for the relatively slow take-up of videophones (or video messaging) and remote surveillance, which are sure to become major web applications.

They could be seen as intrusive and oppressive but on the plus side they could transform the lives of housebound people by easing their isolation. Working parents could check up on their children, or see whether it was a thief or the cat that tripped the burglar alarm.

Fast downstream speeds give the operator a chance to establish a potentially profitable portal that gives users much better transfer rates than the wider web. Dial-up users won't know the difference because their local link is usually the slowest in a connection.

With 2Mbps links and fast local servers, we have the start of a system in which you can have any amount of programmes, films, music and other material on tap.

The BBC, which has one of the world's best content archives, already has this in embryo on its site where you can listen to recent radio programmes. Clearly, people will want scheduled programming too, but even this is changing with the advent of high-capacity storage.

Low-cost hard disks can easily store the equivalent of 25 movies, and allow you to time-shift TV to the extent that some in the industry believe that within 10 years only 10 per cent of programmes will be seen at the time they are put out.

Storage at the user end also gives operators the option of providing programmes as a single file on a low-quality IP stream, rather than broadcasting or streaming them in real time.

There are many possibilities here for a flexible pricing: you might pay more for an instant video streamed movie, slightly less to have it sent as a file within a few minutes, or less still to have it delivered in the slack night hours.

Butler reckons a content-on-tap system like this will be functioning within five years.

Over at NTL Broadcasting, head of product development Simon Mason stresses that for a mass market such systems will have to be "easy enough for my grandmother to use".

It wouldn't be hard to design a graphical interface friendlier than that of the average video recorder. But there is a wider point here: some of the trickiest problems of this new wave of IT could turn out to be ergonomic rather than technical.
http://www.computeractive.co.uk/pers...wave-computing


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Penguins love cigars

Cuba To Switch Computers To Linux, Dumping Windows

Cuba will gradually switch to the open-source Linux operating system for its state computers, eliminating its exclusive use of Microsoft Windows, the government daily Juventud Rebelde reported.

Roberto del Puerto, director of the state office of information technology, told the daily that Cuba already has about 1,500 computers using the Linux system, a free operating system whose technical data is open for public viewing. Del Puerto said his office was working on a legal framework that would allow the replacement of the Windows system. Although Windows is used on about 90 percent of the world's personal computers, some governments and large organizations have switched to the free Linux system or have threatened to do so to get discounts. Linux was developed by Finnish computer scientist Linus Torvalds based on the Unix operating system.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050517/323/fj0v3.html


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Bogus Mariachi Bands Rob Music-Lovers
Catherine Bremer

In the latest crime ruse to hit Mexico City, thieves are dressing up as mariachi musicians in embroidered suits with wide-brimmed somberros to rob unsuspecting music-lovers.

Mingling among the roughly 1,700 licensed mariachi who serenade people with raucous folk songs in a central city square are hundreds of "pirate" mariachi more adept at picking pockets than strumming guitars, city officials say.

In a city where organized crime gangs make an easy living from armed assault and kidnapping, police fear the bogus musicians could trick people into taking them home to play at family parties, where mariachi are a popular treat.

"Since the end of last year we have been seeing mariachi who are not mariachi," said Jose Luis Tamayo, the government official in charge of a crackdown to weed them out.

"They are pinching wallets. They are going up to cars and signaling to accomplices if there's a bag or cell phone in sight. What worries us more than anything is that people could be robbed in their homes," he told Reuters.

The cantina-lined Plaza Garibaldi, which fills with mariachi bands and tequila stalls after dusk, is a notoriously shady area in Mexico City's crime-ridden historic center.

Mexicans have flocked here since the 1920s to pay for a romantic serenade or hire a band for a party. Many still brave it to hear harmonic melodies like "Cielito Lindo" sung to trumpet, violin and guitar and see the richly-colored mariachi suits trimmed with silver or gold buttons up the legs.

The Garibaldi crackdown will involve checks to see which mariachi have permits and a push to make them display them.

"We have reports of muggings," said Tamayo, who estimates there could be 800 "pirate" mariachi. "The problem is if you see someone approach dressed as a mariachi you don't worry."

Mexicans cite crime as one of their biggest worries. High unemployment and corrupt police have made the capital of around 18 million people one of the world's most dangerous cities.

"They do us a lot of damage because we get put in the same category," said mariachi violinist Vicente Monjardin. "They are crooks. People who let them into their homes will be robbed."
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=8487203


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Stuck in the Orbit of Satellite Radio

The technology connects you to the world--but not the one outside your window
Walter Kirn

Tornadoes were touching down all over Iowa, but I wouldn't have guessed it from listening to satellite radio. Outside, boiling up on both sides of Interstate 80, black prairie thunderheads sizzled with greenish lightning. Inside my car the only sound was that of an E! Entertainment biography of celebrity rock-widow Courtney Love. I reached for the dial and turned to CNN, then Fox, then NPR. But because all the news was national rather than local, not a single voice I came across could tell me that the town near the next exit--where I'd reserved a motel room for the night--was being shredded at that very moment by winds of over 180 m.p.h. I switched to a channel devoted to Old Skool Rap, which normally can't be enjoyed in western Iowa, and tapped my left foot as the roofs were blown off houses only a couple of miles away.

When I bought a new car equipped with Sirius satellite radio, I had no idea how the technology would alter my sense of the passing American landscape. With its clear, unvarying signal, which seems to arrive from a spot beyond the moon, and its vast profusion of music, news and talk shows, the medium places you at the center of everything, even when you're in the middle of nowhere. The problem is that the center of everything is not an actual, inhabitable place but a floating media mirage, an invisible digital bubble of information located somewhere in the fifth dimension. Having passed through the canyonlands of Utah while listening to Caribbean pop and having crossed the Black Hills of South Dakota immersed in a disco channel called the Strobe, I feel after a year of nonstop driving (50,000 miles in all) that I haven't, in fact, gone anywhere except deeper and deeper inside my radio.

It used to feel different out there on the road. Until just recently I measured my progress on cross-country driving trips by the rise and fall of radio signals that strengthened as I approached a town and fuzzed away as I entered the countryside. The airwaves were jumpy, uncertain and alive, a patchwork of distinctive accents and peculiar regional interests. I knew I was getting close to Texas from the twang of steel guitars. I realized I might reach Omaha by suppertime when I started hearing crop reports. Often, when I was traveling through North Dakota, the only voices I could hear spoke in Native American languages, whose singsong tones, though I found them unintelligible, eased the loneliness of the long, straight highways.

The character of those conventional radio signals responded to the weather and time of day in a way that satellite transmissions don't. Late at night, if the skies were clear enough to make out every star in the Big Dipper, the empty spaces on my AM dial would suddenly and mysteriously fill up with broadcasts from a thousand miles away. Minneapolis' WCCO, the powerful station that I grew up listening to and whose chuckling, easygoing announcers shaped my identity as a Minnesotan, reached out to me late one evening in eastern Washington as I sat parked on the shoulder of a state highway waiting for a tow from AAA. I felt grateful for that little miracle, then desolate when those hometown announcers faded back to static.

Satellite radio never fades, which is why I subscribed to the service in the first place and why I'll maintain my subscription despite the fact that it often makes me feel as though America were a high-tech hologram and I were a futuristic ghost. This feeling struck me acutely during a yawn-inducing 10-hour drive from Montana to Colorado via Wyoming. Except in feeble, quivering bursts, normal radio signals can't conquer that barrenness, but thanks to some wonderful gizmo in outer space, I was able to stay in touch with the most minute developments in the Michael Jackson trial and the Brad Pitt--Jennifer Aniston breakup. I couldn't have been more clued in to those events if I'd been living on Sunset Boulevard, nor could I have been more detached from central Wyoming, whose raw sagebrush flats were looming in my windshield but were entirely absent from my consciousness. Until an antelope crossed the road, that is, and I had to swerve hard and hit my brakes.

As the antelope dashed off, I briefly awakened to my real environment, but in no time the satellite beamed me up again. I was back in the ether with the Gloved One, orbiting America without touching it--until I got to Rawlins, Wyo., where the antenna on my roof blew off. When I couldn't fix the suction cup that held it there, I tuned in to local AM radio. A voice--a low, male, unhurried Western voice--was describing a school lunch menu for the week. "Chicken-fried steak," the voice said, "and green beans." The words were astonishing. Startling.

News from Earth.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...061496,00.html


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Star Wars III Bootleg Hits the Internet
Matthew Borghese

A leaked workprint copy of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, has already begun floating around the internet.

After fears of bootleggers sneaking a video camera into the theater and recording the movie, LucasArts ordered theaters to search moviegoers during special screenings and during its release overseas. LucasArts also never released a screener CD to movie companies, which is often the way pirated movies make their way online.

According to the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, a screener is an advance video or DVD copy of a film sent to critics, awards voters, and other movie industry professionals, including producers and distributors.

However, the copy circulating online through IRC and Peer-to-Peer software is not the work of a camera inside the theater, which is called a “cam” or a “telesync,” according to the differing qualities of the recording.

The online copy is supposedly a “workprint,” meaning it was an unreleased copy of the film obtained from within the film company, LucasArts.

Online copies have attributed the leak to a pirate group called ViSA, but that claim is unconfirmed.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/2233020862


















Until next week,

- js.














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