Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 12th, '08

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I know that it was risky behaviour but that was part if the thrill." – Laura Michaels


"My concern is for the next generation of sexually frustrated, hormone-ridden 17-year-olds that are sitting in a bedroom about to possibly, and I hope, write something like Teenage Kicks." – Feargal Sharkey


"Years ago, we saw cybercrime as a speciality. Now we have added cybercrime in every form of police training, so we are raising the level of the entire Dutch police force. There’s no crime anymore where there are no digital components built in." – Eric Loermans


"It’s a cold, sterile world on the Internet, and people get an experience here you can’t get online. If there are five stores left standing, I think we can be one of them." – Jon Lambert


"People are made of squishy wet stuff, and any resonance will be very damped out. This sort of sharp resonance at this frequency has never been observed before." – Philip Chadwick


"Oklahoma's Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that taking pictures up someone's skirt in a public place is not a crime." – Polls Boutique


































April 12th, 2008




Home Copying - Burnt Into Teenage Psyche

Calls for action as study reveals 95% of youngsters are illegally copying music
Katie Allen

More than half of young people copy the songs on their hard drives to friends and even more swap CD copies, according to research that reveals the huge challenge home copying poses to a music industry already battling internet file-sharing.

Three decades after cassette decks first allowed people to make free music tapes for friends, a study by the industry group British Music Rights suggests home copying remains just as ingrained in UK culture.

BMR's chief executive, the singer Feargal Sharkey, said the research underlines the urgent need to adapt to consumers' attitudes or face serious repercussions for the next generation of musicians.

The industry's anti-piracy efforts have largely focused on illegal online music swapping - with estimates suggesting only one in 20 digital downloads is paid for. But the online problem is potentially dwarfed by "offline copying", argues BMR. Its research, carried out by the University of Hertfordshire, suggests that, for 18-24-year-olds, home copying remains more popular than file sharing. Two-thirds of people it surveyed copy five CDs a month from friends.

Overall, 95% of the 1,158 people surveyed had engaged in some form of copying, including taking the music contents of a friend's hard drive - 58% - and the more old-fashioned method of recording from the radio.

BMR, which lobbies on behalf of composers, songwriters and music publishers, claims its research is the first academic study of its kind, and fills a hole in the industry's understanding of how people consume music.

Former Undertones frontman Sharkey said the aim was not to lambast young music consumers but to create business models that fit their behaviour and tap into the unrelenting demand for music. He hopes the findings will provide impetus for change.

"For somebody who has spent 30 years in the music industry, you instinctively know this stuff is going on. But when you actually sit looking at your computer and see a number that says 95% of people are copying music at home, you suddenly go, 'Bloody hell'," he said.

Many record label executives see the piracy problem getting worse before it gets better. The BMR research echoes other studies signalling that knowing something is illegal is no longer a deterrent. Well over half its respondents who know that copying music from a CD to a recordable disc is illegal do so anyway.

But Sharkey believes a combination of education projects and new ways of providing music to consumers - for example, advertising-funded downloads - will change that.

"Ultimately it has to get better ... At some point musicians and songwriters have to make enough money out of it otherwise they stop doing it," he said.

"My concern is for the next generation of sexually frustrated, hormone-ridden 17-year-olds that are sitting in a bedroom about to possibly, and I hope, write something like Teenage Kicks," he said, referring to the Undertones song the late DJ John Peel made his anthem.

The aspect of home copying that most worries BMR is the speed with which friends can now swap music, whether from one hard drive to another or on to MP3 players. Almost half the music in the average MP3 player collection comprises tracks that have not been paid for, the report says. People aged 18-24 keep around £750-worth of unpaid-for music on their MP3 players.

The study was carried out against the backdrop of government deliberations over how to introduce an exception in law so that people can legally copy music they have bought for private use.

Currently, UK consumers are technically breaking the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 by copying tracks from CDs to their PC or digital player, or making an extra copy to play in the car.

The Intellectual Property Office concludes consultations on changing the law tomorrow and BMR is submitting some of its research.

The music industry says it accepts consumers should not be punished for shifting music from one format to another, but some are concerned an exception will increase the perception music can be freely copied with impunity.

BMR has "no problem in principle" with the concept of changing the law. But Sharkey is urging the government to look to European law, which dictates that where a private copying-style exception is created there is also some sort of compensation for the creators and performers.

Whatever the outcome, the prevalence of offline and online music copying shows the music industry has "a lot of big challenges it needs to face up to very quickly", said Sharkey.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...gitalmusic.drm





Big Content in Worldwide "Whisper Campaign" Against Fair Use
Nate Anderson

If you've been following copyright debates for more than, say, 10 minutes, you're probably aware that "some rights good, more rights better!" might well be the motto of many content owners. Fair use and fair dealing put limitations on these otherwise exclusive rights, and they do so on the theory that copyright is not an absolute right to control and profit from every single use of a particular work. News reporting, classroom use, commentary, parody; in the US, at least, these don't require either permission or payment. But content owners aren't necessarily down with this way of thinking, and copyright expert William Patry believes that a "counter-reformation" is in the works to crimp worldwide plans to expand fair use.

Patry, a former law professor and advisor to the US Register of Copyrights, now works for Google, which as an indexer (and not producer) of information, is generally in favor of a more liberal copyright regime that allows it to use thumbnails of copyrighted works, excerpt short snippets of copyrighted books, and index copyrighted web page text. But Patry is one of the foremost US experts on copyright law, and if he sees a secret gathering of the Pro-Copyright Magisterium, it's worth paying attention.

Is fair use "un-Coventional"?

"The purpose of the movement," he says in a recent blog post, "is to chill the willingness of countries to enact fair use or liberal fair dealing provisions designed to genuinely further innovation and creativity, rather than, as is currently the case, merely to give lip service to those concepts as the scope of copyright is expanded to were-rabbit size."

The counter-reformation in question takes the form of a "whispering campaign" in which ministries in different countries are told that plans to expand fair use rights might well run afoul of the Berne Convention's "three-step test." The Convention, which goes back to the late 1800s, was one of the earliest international copyright treaties and is now administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Article 9 of the Convention, which has been updated repeatedly over the last century, lays down the limits on the limits that countries can make to copyright. "It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union to permit the reproduction of such works in certain special cases, provided that such reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author," says the Convention.

A copyright protestant?

The whisper campaign that Patry describes uses this provision to suggest to various countries that most liberal fair use rights don't qualify as "certain special cases" and that they would in fact interfere with the "normal exploitation of the work." Some are even suggesting that the well-known four-part test enshrined in US copyright law might run afoul of the Convention.

Patry takes on these arguments by pointing out that extensive Congressional hearings in the 1980s generated no such dispute from European and WIPO copyright experts. In 1996, the US also responded to questions from other countries, telling the Europeans that fair use was designed as a safety valve which permitted "precisely those types of uses which do not interfere with the copyright owner's normal exploitation of the work or unreasonably prejudice his or her rights." There were no objections to such answers.

Welcome to the war

Since then, fair use has become an unlikely hot topic. If the current campaign to curtail such rights is the counter-reformation, then groups like the EFF, Public Knowledge, Ars, Boing Boing, and more have been the Martin Luthers of the movement, arguing stridently for reform and posting their 95 theses to the web. In recent weeks, we have seen advocates of strong copyright use various WIPO treaties as bludgeons to suggest that countries like Israel and Canada both adopt stricter measures, especially when it comes to circumventing DRM.

The various campaigns to increase copyright power have also ended up in the US Congress, where the PRO-IP Act currently looks set to come to a vote this year. The bill, which has the backing of copyright owners (and which Patry once called "gluttonous"), would increase statutory damages that the groups could seek without needing to show any actual harm.

According to Patry, today "it is not enough to have vast rights: corporate content owners see a need to eliminate any limitations on those rights too." Fortunately, when it comes to intimidating ministers who might not be copyright experts or to rewriting US law, the Internet has brought much-needed transparency to the process and made activism simpler to organize.

Despite the power of the pro-copyright lobby, though, the much greater power of the public is finally be harnessed in these copyright debates. For instance, the EFF is today reporting that a major European report on copyright to be voted this week has already been stripped out its proposals that would have encouraged ISP filtering and disconnection of alleged copyright infringers. In their place could be an amendment that talks about the importance of due process and "proportionality" of penalty.

Whatever happens, the good news is that these new "wars of religion" don't look likely to turn as bloody as their European namesakes.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...bbit-size.html





Europe Rejects Plan to Criminalize File-Sharing

In a close vote, the European Parliament rejected attempts to criminalize the sharing of files by private individuals and to ban copyright abusers from the Internet
Paul Meller

The European Parliament rejected attempts to criminalize the sharing of files by private individuals and threw out the idea of banning copyright abusers from the Internet, in a plenary vote Thursday.

The vote was close, with 314 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) voting in favor of an amendment to scrap what many consider draconian and disproportionate measures to protect copyright over the internet, and 297 voting against the amendment.

"The vote shows that MEPs want to strike a balance between the interests of rights holders and those of consumers, and that big measures like cutting off Internet access shouldn't be used," said Malene Folke Chaucheprat, a European Parliament spokeswoman, shortly after the vote.

The report isn't legally binding, but it could help thwart efforts by France, which has already adopted such measures, to push the issue at a European political level.

France's so-called Oliviennes strategy to combat copyright abuse includes a "three strikes and you are out" approach: Offenders lose the right to an Internet account after being caught sharing copyright-protected music over the Internet for a third time.
France takes over the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union in the second half of this year and many observers, including the U.K.-based Open Rights Group, expect it to push for E.U.-wide rules similar to its own.

The report is significant because it "signifies resistance among MEPs to measures currently being implemented in France to disconnect suspected illicit filesharers," the Open Rights Group said in a statement.

The record industry was disappointed with the vote. "One badly drafted, rushed through amendment was adopted which is in contradiction to the rest of the text," said Frances Moore, executive vice president of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), in a statement.

"If the aim of the report is to protect creative content, including in the online environment, we should be looking at all options available in the fight against copyright theft. Instead, this amendment suggested discarding certain options before there is even a proper debate," the IFPI said.

But the Open Rights Group argued that criminalizing copyright abuse by individuals eager to build their media library and not profit from copyright-protected material is draconian and inefficient at tackling illegal file sharing.

"As the European Parliament have recognized today, [the measures] are disproportionate, they lack consumer safeguards and they won't stop illicit filesharing," the Open Rights Group said.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...sharing_1.html





Copyright Laws Updated for Digital World
NZPA

A bill that brings copyright laws into the digital age was passed by Parliament yesterday.

The Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill changes the Copyright Act 1994 to clarify its application in the digital environment and to take account of international developments.

It does not change the balance between protection and access to copyright material, but makes sure the balance can continue to operate when new technologies are involved.

It introduces an offence, carrying a sentence of a maximum fine of $150,000 or up to five years imprisonment, or both, for commercial dealings in devices, services or information designed to circumvent technological protection measures.

The National Party supported the bill and it passed its third reading by 111 votes to 10. The Greens and the Maori Party opposed it.

The Internet Society of New Zealand, InternetNZ, said the bill did not fully grasp the nature of the new technologies it dealt with.

Executive director Keith Davidson said it failed to enshrine the right for consumers to format-shift all their digital media so they could listen or view it on the device of their choice.

"The legalising of format-shifting of audio files - such as from a purchased CD to an iPod - is a very modest step in the right direction," he said.

"It is a great pity...they have not extended format-shifting to other media such as video."
http://stuff.co.nz/4470672a28.html





Demonoid To Be Resurrected Under New Admin
enigmax

Deimos, the administrator of Demonoid has announced that he is stepping down for good due to his preoccupation with ‘real-life’ issues. For those tearing their hair out with dismay, you can stop now. The site will be resurrected under a trusted new admin and Deimos is asking the community to give him support.

Ever since Demonoid had to leave Canada, there has been speculation about the future of the site. Although the tracker has been returning periodically from various places - the latest being Ukraine - no solid news has been coming out about a proper comeback. Deimos, the Demonoid admin, has been very quiet - until now, that is.

In a message on the SubDemon forums, Deimos breaks his silence:

Hello Everyone,

It is with great sadness (and not a little relief) that I announce that I will be stepping down as admin of Demonoid, with effect from today.

Demonoid is currently suffering from a number of things, prime amongst these being my distraction with real-world issues, and so I have handed the reins over to a new administrator - a close friend of mine, which I trust completely and has the knowledge and time to take care of the site.

He will, in due course, be making his own announcements about the future of Demonoid. Of course, speculation over the future of the site is fun, but it is ultimately fruitless - you will all, in the near future, become aware of what the future holds. I trust that you will all give your support to the new admin as he finds his feet while he resurrects Demonoid.

Thanks again for your support in making Demonoid what it was and is.
Goodbye and good wishes - it has been a blast!

- Deimos

It’s great news for the BitTorrent community that the future of Demonoid is in trusted hands and for some, quite a surprise after such a long wait. But it just might be worth it if one of the world’s most popular trackers does indeed come back with a bang.

Update: The Demonoid RSS feeds started to work again.
http://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-to-...-admin-080410/





After Rocky Stint Around The Globe, Demonoid Reappears
Sean P. Aune

Back in November of last year, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) pressured Demonoid, a popular BitTorrent tracker site, into shutting down. Now, just as suddenly as they disappeared, they’ve returned with all of their data seemingly intact, and with a new administrator in place.

This is but another chapter in what has been a highly volatile 10-months for the tracker. In June of 2007, they were asked to leave their host in Amsterdam, LeaseWeb, after being pressured by the BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group. After staying at a temporary home, they went down in September, 2007 for a few days, suddenly reappearing in Canada. On November 9th, 2007, their front page was removed informing users to use the forums, but not to trade torrents. November 11th found the trackers stopped responding.

There were a couple of times over the following 6-months where the trackers would suddenly reappear in some far-flung country, only to disappear again. Now Ernersto of TorrentFreak is reporting that they seem to be back up to full speed, but they are under new management, and the founder, Deimos, is no longer working with them. The new admin, Umlauf, was chosen by Deimos to take over, and the old moderator team is in place to help continue running the site.

Only time will tell if the site will stay up-and-running this time, but they do warn they may go down a few times over the coming days as they work out problems.
http://mashable.com/2008/04/12/demonoid/





Protecting and serving

Australian Police Caught Pirating Movies
Ben Jones

A recent audit of computer systems belonging to the South Australia Police has found that hundreds are being used to “share” films. In a move smacking of hypocrisy though, officers involved will not be charged.

According to The Australian, during an audit of computer systems by the South Australian police force’s IT branch, police computers belonging to hundreds of police officers were found to contain movies.

The origin of these movies is not clear, but it is probable that they’ve been downloaded via p2p at some point, either on these systems, or on the personal systems of officers and transferred over.

Senior officials of the SA police force have been made aware of the findings, including its commissioner Mel Hyde. However, police sources have told press that there will not be any investigation into this, citing the large numbers of police officers involved.

The Australian Federation against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has said it will write to the commissioner to seek an explanation, presumably as to why the police officers are being let off with what it considers a heinous crime. Quite ironically, AFACT boasts of “working closely with police” - perhaps this closeness has shown the police officers involved just how unimportant and meaningless this so-called ‘crime’ is in the grand scheme of things.

If the officers do go unpunished, it could create a favorable precedent for filesharers in South Australia. If police officers, who are expected to be held to a greater level of accountability regarding the law, show this level of contempt for the current copyright laws, are unpunished, it will make it harder to convince a court that regular citizen should be punished for similar acts.

On the other hand, if the officers are punished under the law, which allows for upto AUS$60,500 (About US$55,700 or 35,500Euro) per infringement and up to 5 years imprisonment, the ability to effectively police the state will be severely diminished.

Either way, this case will bring to a head the vastly disproportionate penalties for an act that, as yet, has never been proven to be even financially damaging. One thing is certain, when even the police officers join large numbers of citizens in flouting such laws, the law’s place in society should be called into serious question.

The South Australian police force had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
http://torrentfreak.com/aussie-police-pirate-080407/





Judges Take Opposite Sides on Legality of Uploading Music Files to Share
Mark Jewell

Leaving a copyrighted song where others can get at it with peer-to-peer software doesn't constitute a copyright violation until someone downloads it, a federal judge said in a record industry lawsuit against college students.

The Boston judge's comments in a Monday pretrial ruling conflict with statements, also made Monday, by a New York federal judge that leaving a copyrighted file accessible could be illegal, even if nobody downloads it.

At issue in both cases is whether people who initially download or own copyrighted music are legally liable if they leave music files accessible to be shared by others. Peer-to-peer sharing services allow computer users to make files on their PCs available to a multitude of other users.

"Both of these rulings are important because it is the first time judges have thoroughly analyzed these questions," said Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit and online free-speech advocate that filed briefs as an interested party in both cases.

Neither judge questioned that copy infringement occurs when people using peer-to-peer software search the Internet for a particular piece of music and then download it without authorization.

However, Judge Nancy Gertner of Boston found that "merely exposing music files to the Internet is not copyright infringement." The student-defendants could claim "they did not know that logging onto the peer-to-peer network would allow others to access these particular files," Gertner wrote.

But Judge Kenneth Karras in New York, ruling in a case against a single computer user, said just placing a copyrighted music file in a computer folder shared by peer-to-peer software users could amount to illegal publication of it.

The music industry has sued more than 30,000 people for illegal downloading, many of them college students using university Internet services. Many of the cases have been settled by the defendants agreeing to pay record companies a few thousand dollars apiece.

Some of the defendants may never have known whether anyone else downloaded the music they put in shared folders.

Gertner temporarily blocked record companies from seeking the identities of Boston University students they suspect have downloaded music illegally. The record companies that brought the case are trying to identify the students through their addresses on the university's computer network.

"It's important to note that the decision is not final," the Recording Industry Association of America said in a statement regarding Gertner's ruling. "The court has put forth a specific process to address its concerns before the relevant information is transferred to us. We're confident that the court will ultimately allow us to obtain the identifying information, as have courts across the country in similar cases."

Raymond Sayeg, a defense attorney representing students in the Boston University case, called Gertner's finding "a landmark decision that will change how these cases go forward.... The level of proof has gone up significantly."

If courts maintain that a copyright violation occurs only when a music file is downloaded, record companies would have to track down evidence that downloads occur and who is involved, von Lohmann said.

"The industry doesn't want to be put to the trouble to prove that someone actually downloaded it from you," he said.
http://www.wsbt.com/news/consumer/17309949.html





First Person Indicted in P2P ID Theft Case Given 51 Months

Seattle-based Gregory Kopiloff, who made security history last November by becoming the first person to be indicted on peer-2-peer (P2P) identify theft charges, has been sentences to 51 months in prison.

The case, says David Hobson, managing director of Global Secure Systems, a IT security consultancy, proves the danger that using P2P services for illegal software and media downloads now poses. "Not only do P2P users faces the risk of prosecution by the authorities and even disconnection by their service provider under the new 'three strikes' UK government proposals, but now they also stand a chance of being defrauded," he said.

According to Hobson, the fact that millions of UK Internet users are continuing to use P2P networks for file-sharing should be of great concern to company IT managers, as the three strikes proposal could see illegal file-sharers installing P2P software on their company PCs.

"P2P file-sharing using BitTorrent software like Azureus and BitLord poses a serious headache for the already hard-pressed IT manager as, whilst standard P2P streams are easy to detect and lock down, savvy users are now encrypting their P2P connections to escape detection," he explained.

Whilst encrypting the P2P data stream using Azureus slows down the rate of transfer, Hobson says it makes detection of the transmissions on a company network doubly difficult. "This is why we are now recommending IT security systems from the likes of AppGate, Blue Coat Systems and Lumension to help companies of all sizes discover what's really moving around their networks," he said.

"With this new threat of P2P-enabled fraud, the message is clear - IT managers must take steps to prevent any and all threats, including next-generational ones, using all the security technology at their disposal," he added.
http://www.itseccity.de/?url=/conten...resystems.html





Defendants: RIAA's Private Eyes are Watching Us—Illegally
Eric Bangeman

Last week a pair of rulings further muddied the waters around the RIAA's argument that making a file available over a P2P network constitutes distribution as defined by the Copyright Act. This week, the hot issue is the role that MediaSentry plays in the RIAA's legal campaign and whether the company should be licensed as a private investigator. A pair of defendants in separate cases are arguing that the company does need a license and that all evidence gathered by it should be excluded. The RIAA, in turn, is arguing that no license is necessary—and that even if MediaSentry's evidence was obtained illegally, it should still be admissible.

Defendants: MediaSentry needs a license and the evidence it collected is worthless

A college student at Northern Michigan University representing him or herself recently submitted a motion seeking to quash a subpoena directed at the school, arguing that the data collected by MediaSentry was "obtained through felonious conduct." The motion refers to a ruling made last month by the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth that MediaSentry needs to be licensed in order to "perform regulated activities." Regulators at the department have reportedly sent the company a letter informing them of the decision, although MediaSentry refused to confirm receipt to Ars. The company has also received a cease-and-desist order from the Massachusetts State Police saying that its investigative activities violate state law.

Doe number 5 in LaFace Records v. Does 1-5 believes that's enough to exclude MediaSentry's data. "[E]quity demands that Plaintiffs not be permitted to benefit in any way from the felonious conduct of their agent," argues the student. "It shocks the conscience to think any subpoena would be sustained when based solely on such outrageous conduct."

A newly-reported contested case in Florida raises many of the same issues. In Atlantic v. Boyer, Eva Boyer has filed her answer, affirmative defenses, and counterclaims in response to a lawsuit filed against her by the RIAA earlier this year. Boyer accuses the RIAA of "abusing" the federal judiciary and hiring "unlicensed private investigators" who "receive a bounty to invade private computers and... networks."

Under Florida law, private investigators are required to obtain a license. Boyer points out to the court that MediaSentry lacks such a license, saying that the labels have "conspired among themselves and others" to illegally investigate Florida residents.

RIAA: no license necessary

For its part, the RIAA has consistently argued that MediaSentry doesn't need PI licenses, telling Ars that the information the company collects is available for "anyone to see." A new filing by the RIAA in Lava v. Amurao seeks to thwart the defendant's motion to exclude the evidence collected by MediaSentry. The labels argue that MediaSentry is a "copyright investigator," not a private investigator, and therefore the New York law requiring PIs to be licensed doesn't apply.

The RIAA appears to overstep by arguing that licensing is also impractical because MediaSentry "can have no way of knowing... the location from where [the files] are being distributed." Yes, an IP address is obviously insufficient to pinpoint the name or address of someone who might be using that address. But a simple nslookup can often be enough to determine that a KaZaA user is a Comcast subscriber in the Los Angeles metropolitan area or is using the Harvard University network. In short, MediaSentry should be able to quickly figure out roughly where a user is located.

The RIAA also argues that the cost of obtaining licenses in all 50 states would be "prohibitive." The labels cite the $10,000 bond required in New York and say that multiplying that by 50 states would "seriously interfere with a copyright owner's legitimate right to investigate and protect its copyrights from infringement." This, coming from an organization that has shown zero hesitation to spend millions of dollars pursuing well over 20,000 individual copyright infringement lawsuits, seems implausible.

Even if it turns out that the evidence was obtained illegally, the RIAA argues, the evidence collected by MediaSentry should still be admissible. "Ultimately, the law is clear that even illegally obtained evidence, which Defendant cannot show here, is still admissible in a civil case," reads the RIAA's filing. "Contrary to Defendant's contentions, there is simply no policy justification whatsoever that would support the exclusion of relevant evidence of copyright infringement."

Copyright attorney Ray Beckerman reports on Recording Industry vs The People that the motions in Lava v. Amurao will be argued this Friday in White Plains, NY, so it's possible that the judge will issue a ruling on the PI licensing issue in the weeks or months ahead. The RIAA is seeking to dismiss the case against Rolando Amurao after determining that his adult daughter is the alleged copyright infringer.

As was the case with the making available rulings, we could see different judges coming down on different sides of the issue. There's a lot at stake here, especially if it turns out that some of MediaSentry's evidence was collected illegally. The uncertainty around MediaSentry's status may be behind the company's recent decision to remove all references to its "investigative services" from its website.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...illegally.html





The Cease and Desist Order in Massachusetts, Which MediaSentry May Have Been Violating, is Now Available Online
Ray Beckerman

We have obtained a copy of the cease and desist order issued by the Massachusetts State Police on January 2, 2008, against SafeNet/MediaSentry. We have also received at least one report that they continued their unlicensed investigation after receipt of the order.

January 2, 2008, cease and desist letter
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...04353449218408





Universal: You Don't Own Those Promotional CDs We Gave You
Nate Anderson

Is throwing a record label's promo CD in the trash an "unauthorized distribution" of the music? According to Universal, the answer is yes. The claim surfaced as part of a legal case against an eBay reseller who offered Universal promo discs for sale in violation of the "not for resale" label printed on each disc. While the case sounds almost farcical, it raises an important question: can Universal and other labels in fact control the distribution of a product once they have sent it to others, or does the US "first sale" doctrine give people the right to do as they like with the promo discs?

Universal demands takedown of homemade dancing toddler clip; EFF sues

Record labels aren't thrilled about people who sell the promo discs that are sent out to music magazines and radio stations, though even a casual visit to a used music store will show that the restrictions printed on the discs aren't followed with any sort of rigor. Normally, this is no big deal, but when it escalates into an eBay business model, the labels get a bit jumpy.

Universal is currently suing one Troy Augusto, who runs Roastbeast Music Collectibles and offers items for sale on eBay. Augusto makes three-quarters of his income from reselling promo CDs as "collectible" items on eBay. He's been sued before for such behavior, and has in the past agreed to a consent judgment that admitted the sales violated record labels' exclusive rights to distribute the music. After Universal used eBay's "Verified Rights Owner" program to request that Augusto's sales of its promo CDs be halted, Augusto sent counter-notices to eBay that said Universal's notices were "mistaken." That got Augusto's items listed once more, but it drew a lawsuit from Universal (read the complaint [PDF]).

At issue here is who owns the promo CDs. Universal argues strenuously that it never transferred ownership when it sent them out and that the discs are merely "licensed" to those who receive them. Each disc includes text that makes clear that "this CD is the property of the record company and is licensed to the intended recipient for personal use only." According to Universal, the label could recall the discs at any time (though it has never done so). In fact, even giving the discs away or tossing them in the trash constitute "unauthorized distributions."

License or gift?

The EFF, which has taken up Augusto's case, says that the case is far more serious than a dispute over whether someone can sell (or trash) a promo CD; the issue is whether companies can do an end run around the "first sale" doctrine that gives a purchaser the right to resell and otherwise control an object he or she has purchased. If slapping a sticker on a CD can override the first sale doctrine, then could book publishers limit used book sales with a sticker of their own?

The EFF's Fred von Lohmann, writing about the issue when the EFF first took the case last year, described the stakes this way: "If UMG is right, then copyright owners of all kinds can strip away our first sale rights by putting these kinds of 'label licenses' on their wares. Next thing you know, CDs, books, DVDs, and video games could be festooned with 'notices' that erode a customer's first sale, fair use, and other rights."

Universal says that the first sale doctrine doesn't apply in this case "because there was no first sale of the UMG Promo CDs (but only a limited license to specific recipients)." It points to US law that codifies the first sale doctrine and notes a key exception. According to the law, the first sale privilege "does not, unless authorized by the copyright owner, extend to any person who has acquired possession of the copy or phonorecord from the copyright owner by rental, lease, loan or otherwise, without acquiring ownership of it." Universal says that this is exactly how people acquired ownership of the discs.

But the EFF's filing (PDF), made on Monday, argues that gifts have long been seen by courts to fall under the "first sale" rule. When a product is sent (unrequested) through the US Postal Service, case law says that it must be seen as a gift. In other words, the EFF claims that Universal can't simply send people an item and impose its idea of license conditions on it. (Believe it or not, there is actually a long case long history behind the idea of "unordered merchandise" that comes through the mail.) The filing is worth reading, if only for the fact that it opens with a lengthy quote from Harry Potter.

Augusto has filed a counterclaim against Universal for interfering with his business and for filing knowingly false DMCA takedown notices with eBay.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ur-rights.html





Courts Chip Away at Web Sites' Decade-Old Legal Shield
Anne Broache

For more than a decade, Web site operators have enjoyed a broad legal shield against lawsuits filed over material posted by their users, which has let user-driven sites like YouTube and MySpace.com flourish.

But a pair of recent rulings by federal district judges have chipped away at that protective shield. If those decisions are upheld on appeal, and if more judges follow suit, Web site operators and Internet service providers may find themselves compelled to police what their users post--or face the unsettling prospect of being held liable for the contents.

"We fear these cases might inspire a wave of new lawsuits that, even if ultimately dismissed, will create a chilling effect," said Sophia Cope, an attorney for the Center for Democracy and Technology, which has filed briefs supporting broad immunity and gets some financial support from a number of prominent Internet companies. "Many small start-up Web services might find that the costs of defending such suits--in terms of time and legal fees--are too much to bear."

The legal shield comes from a portion of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which generally says Web sites aren't liable for their users' posts or other content they provide. That has immunized the dot-com industry from a wide range of civil lawsuits spanning everything from defamation to--in a case decided last year involving MySpace--lawsuits alleging that better child safety and age verification measures should have been put into place. (Individual "content providers" who post defamatory comments, upload inflammatory videos of their own creation, and the like, are still vulnerable to lawsuits.)

In early test cases such as Zeran v. AOL, courts have interpreted Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act to supply fairly broad immunity for Web hosts. That trend has largely continued in recent years, with judges finding, for example, that dating site Matchmaker.com was immune from a lawsuit involving an unknown prankster's phony profile impersonating actress Christianne Carafano, and that Craigslist wasn't responsible for allegedly discriminatory housing ads posted by users of the online classifieds site.

Perhaps ironically, the recent decisions that seem to be taking a narrower interpretation of Section 230 also stem from disputes over online dating and roommate matching.

'Bogus' FriendFinder profiles

The first of the two cases pits an anonymous New Hampshire woman against the FriendFinder Network, an operator of dating sites--some sexually explicit--including AdultFriendFinder.com and LesbianPersonals.com. Jane Doe accused FriendFinder of causing her various sorts of harm by allowing "bogus" sexually explicit profiles that could be "reasonably identified" as portraying herself to be published without her knowledge by someone else to its Web properties, as well as in snippets in FriendFinder advertisements on search engines and other third-party Web sites.

FriendFinder Network (screenshot shown here) was accused of allowing an unknown user to post a "bogus," sexually explicit profile of a New Hampshire woman on its online dating Web sites and in its ads.

A recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante in New Hampshire federal court on March 27 partially sided with FriendFinder, ruling against some of Jane Doe's claims against the company.

But LaPlante also differed from previous opinions in one important area. He refused to dismiss Jane Doe's argument that FriendFinder's republication of her profile invaded her "intellectual-property rights" under New Hampshire law. She claimed to be concerned about violations to her "right of publicity," which says an individual generally has the right to control how his name, image, and likeness is used commercially--and the court ruled that Doe's argument fell into the category of intellectual-property law.

That point is crucial because, when writing Section 230, Congress explicitly said its shield does not extend to lawsuits "pertaining to intellectual property." Until Judge LaPlante's order, courts had viewed that only as applying to federal claims mostly about copyrights and trademarks--and not state lawsuits over more amorphous publicity rights.

The reasons this could create headaches for Web publishers are twofold, said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. For one thing, laws governing "rights of publicity" are not uniform across the states, which means e-commerce companies would be forced to align their operations with the most restrictive state's law.

And unlike in copyright or trademark cases, where there are fairly well-established rules governing how Web sites are supposed to respond to such infractions posted by third parties, "we don't know what rules are; we have no good case law" on rights of publicity, Goldman added.

Others fear that the ruling could prompt legal mischief. For instance, courts have ruled in the past that Web publishers can be immunized for posts that tarnish someone's reputation--a practice typically covered by defamation laws. CDT's Cope said she's concerned the intellectual-property exception will "swallow the rule," inspiring other courts to allow plaintiffs to slip in defamation claims and others under the guise of "intellectual property" claims.

Judge LaPlante's ruling, however, is not the end of the case. The court can now hear evidence on whether to agree with Jane Doe's remaining allegations. Judges aren't exactly known for changing their minds, once they've made a decision. But Ira Rothken, the lead attorney defending FriendFinder in the case, said he believes any subsequent appeal to the 1st Circuit would result in a finding that state-level intellectual-property laws, too, are subject to the Section 230 exemption.

Roommates.com's matchmaking woes

The other Section 230 saga concerns a Web site called Roommates.com, which allows users to set up profiles and seek roommate matches in thousands of U.S. cities. One of the ways the site attempts to spark matches is through requiring members to complete questionnaires that stock their profiles with a number of personal details, including their gender, sexual orientation, and whether they have children, according to court documents.

Those personal queries drew a lawsuit from the Fair Housing Councils of the San Fernando Valley and San Diego, which claimed they violated the federal Fair Housing Act and California state housing discrimination laws. A federal district sided with Roommates.com's argument that Section 230 immunized it from such claims, but a divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently disagreed, and that's why implications for other Web publishers could arise. (Here's a PDF of that 54-page opinion.)

The majority, led by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, ruled that Roommates was not covered by Section 230's shield because it helped "to develop unlawful content" through its requisite questionnaire, which featured preprogrammed drop-down menus containing various possible answers for the allegedly offending questions. The judges also said that because Roommates.com engineered its site in a way that allows site users to search for and sort roommate listings based on those criteria, it's an "information content provider," which, by law, isn't immune to Section 230.

"If such questions are unlawful when posed face-to-face or by telephone, they don't magically become lawful when asked electronically online," Kozinski wrote. "The Communications Decency Act was not meant to create a lawless no man's land on the Internet." (The CDA, the "antiporn" sections of which were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds, was included in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.)

By contrast, the same judges found that it was no problem for Roommates to ask users to write an open-ended summary of what they're seeking in a roommate, since that request was "neutral."

If that way of thinking is ultimately applied more broadly, the millions of Web sites that routinely use prompts and drop-down menus to solicit, publish, and sort information from their users could be forced to change their practices or face new legal liability, the three dissenting judges argued.

"The majority's unprecedented expansion of liability for Internet service providers threatens to chill the robust development of the Internet that Congress envisioned," Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote for the dissent. "Instead of the 'robust' immunity envisioned by Congress, interactive service providers are left scratching their heads and wondering where immunity ends and liability begins."

This case was closely watched, leading Amazon.com, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a number of news organizations to file briefs with the court in support of Roommates. They argued that a decision in favor of the fair-housing groups would choke innovative new Web services and stifle free speech in online forums--particularly the "sortable" user ratings and feedback at sites like eBay and Amazon.com, and "tagging" features at sites like YouTube and Flickr.

One attorney who analyzed the case said the majority's stance, which clearly took aim at business practices considered unfriendly to fair-housing laws, said the case may represent a narrowing of the law but could actually be good for Web site operators who value Section 230.

"Imagine, shall we say, a 'progressive' congressman standing up in Washington and saying, hey, with this Section 230 scheme, we give a license to Web site operators to run hate mills, build up bastions of bigotry, and sanctuaries for racism," Evan Brown, a Chicago-based attorney who focuses on Internet law, wrote in a recent blog post. "In short, a Roommates.com victory could have given a battalion's worth of ammunition--in the form of emotional, irrational, rhetoric--to Section 230's critics. Some in Congress would have called for its head."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-991...?tag=nefd.lede





CRTC Asked to Stop Bell's 'Throttling'

Internet providers' group claims traffic-shaping practice `an abuse of dominance in the market'
Chris Sorensen

A group representing some of the country's Internet service providers is asking Canada's broadcast regulator to stop Bell Canada Inc.'s practice of "throttling" Internet traffic on bandwidth it sells to third-party clients.

The Canadian Association of Internet Providers has lodged a complaint with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission over Bell's decision last month to expand its Internet "traffic shaping" policy from its own retail service to include its wholesale ISP customers.

Traffic shaping generally refers to the use of special software to sniff-out and slow down data packets associated with bandwidth-intensive services such as file sharing.

The group claims Bell's move left their customers with Internet service that has been "degraded beyond recognition," with some clients complaining they're unable to transmit and receive files, listen to Internet radio or use their VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) phone service.

"We believe this is an abuse of Bell's dominance in the market and it puts Canadian ISPs at a competitive disadvantage," Tom Copeland, the association's chair, said in a statement yesterday.

Bell says traffic management is necessary in order to prevent a small number of users who download music, TV shows and other media from file-sharing sites such as BitTorrent from clogging up its entire network during peak hours.

"The facts are that 95 per cent of subscribers are affected by a very small minority of heavy high-bandwidth users," said Mirko Bibic, Bell's chief of regulatory affairs.

Bell began applying traffic management techniques to its own retail customers last year along with other Canadian ISPs such as Rogers Communications Inc.

Telus Corp., however, has said it does not engage in the practice.

While the CRTC requires Bell to provide access to parts of its network in the interest of promoting competition, Bibic said Bell has the right to manage its network as long as it doesn't discriminate against third-party clients.

"It's a well-understood principle in wholesale regulation that an incumbent is entitled to treat wholesale customers the way it treats its own customers."

Throttling has been a hot topic in some quarters, but has so far failed to emerge as a mainstream issue – likely because of a widespread perception that most file-sharing traffic flouts copyright rules. That could be starting to change. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. recently said it would make an episode of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister available on BitTorrent as part of an experiment in new distribution methods.
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/410454





New Traffic Shaping Can Disrupt a Comcast Internet Connection

Recently, it has been observed that Comcast is disrupting TCP connections using forged TCP reset (RST) packets [1]. These reset packets were originally targeted at TCP connections associated with the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. However, Comcast has stated that they are transitioning to a more "protocol neutral" traffic shaping approach [2]. We have recently observed this shift in policy, and have collected network traffic traces to demonstrate the behavior of their traffic shaping. In particular, we are able (during peak usage times) to synthetically generate a relatively large number of TCP reset packets aimed at any new TCP connection regardless of the application-level protocol. Surprisingly, this traffic shaping even disrupts normal web browsing and e-mail applications. Specifically, we observe two different types of packet forgery and packets being discarded.

Data collection methodology

We synthetically generated TCP SYN packets at a rate of 100 SYN packets per second using the hping utility [3]. The packets were destined for the reserved IP address 2.2.2.2, on which no host is present. We simultaneously collect network traces using tcpdump [4]. This data collection process was repeated at various times throughout multiple days. In addition, we could monitor a destination host to determine if outgoing packets reached their destination, and to determine if responses are generated by the destination host or by a third-party. Finally, this data collection was conducted from multiple Comcast accounts, all within close geographical proximity.

Analysis of network traces

In this section, we present our network traces that show the network behavior while the TCP SYN packets are being sent. All traces were collected during peak usage hours (7-9pm local time). The first trace demonstrates an HTTP (web) connection being established, and subsequently being reset. The IP Time to Live (TTL) field for these forged TCP RST packets is consistently set to 255 (indicating that the forged RST packets are originating on one of the local Comcast links).

4717 41.307584 192.168.0.5 -> 207.68.173.231 TCP 53759 > www [SYN] Seq=0 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=504421360 TSER=0 WS=7

4718 41.308767 207.68.173.231 -> 192.168.0.5 TCP www > 53759 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=2048 Len=0 MSS=1460

4719 41.308792 192.168.0.5 -> 207.68.173.231 TCP 53759 > www [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=5840 Len=0

4720 41.308852 192.168.0.5 -> 207.68.173.231 HTTP GET / HTTP/1.1

4721 41.310260 192.168.0.5 -> 2.2.2.2 TCP 7038 > www [SYN] Seq=0 Len=0

4722 41.310880 207.68.173.231 -> 192.168.0.5 TCP www > 53759 [RST] Seq=1 Len=0

The next trace shows a secure shell (SSH) connection being established and immediately reset. For this trace, we also captured the network traffic on the 128.138.x.x host. Surprisingly, absolutely no packets were received or sent from 128.138.x.x! This indicates that outgoing traffic from 192.168.1.104 is being dropped, and that the incoming responses from 128.138.x.x are being forged by Comcast.

3 0.036409 192.168.1.104 -> 128.138.x.x TCP 50051 > ssh [SYN] Seq=0 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=4498697 TSER=0 WS=5

4 0.038646 128.138.x.x -> 192.168.1.104 TCP ssh > 50051 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=2048 Len=0 MSS=1460

5 0.038672 192.168.1.104 -> 128.138.x.x TCP 50051 > ssh [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=5840 Len=0

6 0.040426 128.138.x.x -> 192.168.1.104 TCP ssh > 50051 [RST] Seq=1 Len=0

The final trace is perhaps even more remarkable. A TCP SYN packet is sent to a non-routeable, reserved IP address (2.2.2.2) and a SYN, ACK packet is received in response. The only problem is that no host exists at 2.2.2.2! This again shows that the outgoing SYN packet is being dropped, and the "expected" response is being forged by Comcast. The IP TTL field for these forged TCP SYN, ACK packets is consistently set to 30.

4912 43.259271 192.168.0.5 -> 2.2.2.2 TCP 7222 > www [SYN] Seq=0 Len=0

4913 43.260406 2.2.2.2 -> 192.168.0.5 TCP www > 7222 [SYN, ACK] Seq=4159779480 Ack=1 Win=2048 Len=0 MSS=1460

From our experiments, we noticed that only outgoing TCP connections trigger TCP reset packets. Also, TCP connections established before the traffic shaping is activated are not effected, and it is possible to establish TCP connections to a host experiencing the traffic shaping. Finally, only TCP connections are effected.

Implications

Although the traces given above were generated synthetically, it is possible to produce the TCP reset packet flood using peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent. Users may find it extremely difficult to establish new TCP connections while using any application that has a relatively high rate of TCP connection establishment on a Comcast link. For instance, the Firefox browser will give the following error message when an HTTP connection is reset:




People

"Kevin Bauer", Ph.D. student

Damon McCoy, Ph.D. student

"Dirk Grunwald", Associate Professor

"Douglas Sicker", Assistant Professor

http://systems.cs.colorado.edu/media...ork_Management





Rush to Judgment: Comcast Not Blocking Web Traffic After All
Eric Bangeman

Over the weekend, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado reported evidence that Comcast's traffic management had extended beyond the realm of BitTorrent to plain old HTML traffic. The results caught Comcast's eye, not because it was doing anything to throttle non-P2P traffic, but because the company wasn't. The researchers have since said that their initial conclusions were "incorrect."

Here's how it went down. The researchers at the University of Colorado discovered that they were able to generate the same type of forged TCP reset packets used by Comcast to block ("delay," according to the cable provider) BitTorrent uploads. During peak traffic periods, the researchers saw TCP reset packets popping up all over the place, which they said were "aimed at any new TCP connection regardless of the application-level protocol."

With Comcast having recently announced its intention to adjust its traffic management practices, alarm bells went off. Instead of giving up the practice of using TCP reset packets to manage BitTorrent traffic, it appeared that Comcast was doing the opposite: extending it to cover all sorts of traffic.

Upon finding the story, we asked Comcast for comment. Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas said that the company was mystified by the researchers' findings. "It doesn't jibe with anything we know we're doing," Douglas told Ars. He promised that the company would contact the researchers in an attempt to discover what exactly was going on.

In an official statement, Comcast said it had yet to make the announced changes to a protocol-agnostic network management policy. "We are currently attempting to contact the PhD students and associate professors at the University of Colorado to better understand their analysis," the company said in a statement.

Not long afterwards, the researchers confirmed that they were reexamining their data with the help of Comcast. "Comcast has approached us to better understand our test, the equipment we used and the results of our analysis," they wrote. "We understand that their current network management techniques should not be producing the results we found and that they are not blocking access to any Web sites or e-mail applications. We are committed to working together and will update our analysis once we have additional information."

That analysis has been updated and the verdict is in: their conclusions were wrong. The Systems Research Lab wiki page pins the results on the network address translator used in the lab. "Further experiments have led us to believe that our initial conclusions that indicated Comcast's responsibility for dropping TCP SYN packets and forging TCP SYN, ACK and RST (reset) packets was incorrect," reads the explanation. "The anomalous packets were generated when the outbound TCP SYN packets exceeded the NAT's resources available in its state table. In this case, TCP SYN, ACK and RST packets were sent."

While at first glance it appears that this story is a case of much ado about nothing, it does show how a company's bad behavior can set it up for further scrutiny. Had Comcast not been caught throttling BitTorrent traffic last year, chances are that the researchers would not have given the company a second glance. And as the saying goes, once bitten, twice shy—once customers have been burned by a company, they're more likely to read malice into what they would otherwise not take notice of.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...after-all.html





BBC and ISPs Clash Over iPlayer
Jane Wakefield

A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC.

ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope.

Ashley Highfield, head of future media and technology at the corporation, has said he believes the cost of network upgrades should be carried by ISPs.

Simon Gunter, from ISP Tiscali, said the BBC should contribute to the cost.

He said the BBC did not understand the issues involved.

'Bit odd'

The popular iPlayer service lets users download or stream programmes to a PC.

In its first three months more than 42m programmes have been accessed via the catch-up TV service.

According to figures from regulator Ofcom it will cost ISPs in the region of £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.

Mr Gunter is leading the call for the BBC to help pay for the rising costs.

"The question is about whether we invest in extra capacity or go to the consumer and ask them to pay a BBC tax," he said.

Bandwidth problems

Mr Highfield told the BBC's Today programme such "inflammatory" comments were not helpful.

"The success of the iPlayer should be of benefit to the whole UK broadband industry, increasing those who want to take up broadband," he said.

In his BBC blog last week Mr Highfield laid out a 19-point plan of action for ISPs, and warned they should not try to charge content providers.

"Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content works best on (and which to avoid)."

In response Mr Gunter said it was a "bit rich that a publicly-funded organisation is telling a commercial body how to run its business".

"Inflammatory comments about blacklisting ISPs do not help. There seems to be a lack of understanding about how networks are built. Either we are not explaining it properly or it is falling on deaf ears," he added.

So-called traffic throttling has long been controversial and has been used by ISPs to control those users who eat up bandwidth by downloading huge amounts of material from often illegal file-sharing sites.

But the BBC's iPlayer service has changed the nature of the problem.

"The iPlayer has come along and made downloading a legal and mass market activity," said Michael Phillips, from broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk.

He said he believed ISPs were partly to blame for the bandwidth problems they now face.

"They have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing," he said.

ISPs needed to stop using the term 'unlimited' to describe their services and make it clear that if people wanted to watch hours of downloaded video content they would have to pay a higher tariff, he added.

He said he believed the BBC needed to compromise.

"There has been talk, for instance, of the BBC bringing their servers into the loop as a way of lowering the backhaul costs," he said.

But Mr Gunter said he was not convinced this would help.

"I have heard that the BBC is working on building a caching infrastructure so that storage devices can go on an ISP's network but even if it goes ahead it doesn't save costs on the backhaul network," he said.

Gridlock warning

Geoff Bennett, director of product marketing at optical equipment maker Infinera, said he believed the government should broker a deal between the BBC and ISPs.

While allowing BBC content to be 'cached' by ISPs might be an instant fix to the problem it may not be the answer as more on-demand, bandwidth heavy applications come online, he said.

"There is a broader issue about the downloading of content and this requires an increase in the pipe where the bottleneck is occurring," he said.

This would mean upgrades in the so-called backhaul or second mile network, he said.

"The industry has talked a lot about upgrading the last mile network with fibre to the home but the question needs to be asked about whether we should upgrade the second mile. The price of this would be ten times less," he said.

Some reports, including one from US analyst firm Nemertes Research, have warned of net gridlock as early as 2010 as networks struggle to cope with the amount of data being carried on them.

But the BBC believes that the growth is "manageable", said Mr Highfield.

"We estimate that currently the iPlayer is having between 3-5% impact on the network," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/7336940.stm





The Future of Broadband: We're Totally Screwed

As turtle-tastic as broadband is in the US compared to Asia, other than Time Warner's experiment to charge by the byte, at least consumption-based billing has mostly been a problem for Canadians. Until now. Justin from Bend, Oregon just sent us his ISP's new pricing plan, which makes Time Warner's look supremely generous: $55 a month buys you a measly 50GB running at a respectable 16Mbps downstream. If you run over, it's an extra $1.50 per GB. We hope Bend residents aren't huge fans of iTunes rentals—they'll chew through your allowance mighty quick. Welcome to what's shaping up to be the scary future of broadband in this country: It'll be faster, but it's either going to be filtered, slowed down or capped. [BendBroadband]
http://gizmodo.com/377955/the-future...otally-screwed





Big ISPs Push P4P as Substitute for Net Neutrality
Matthew Lasar

In their latest filings with the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T and Comcast argue that new breakthroughs in "P4P" network management lessen or eliminate the need for the agency to enact stronger net neutrality rules. Comcast's statement, filed with the FCC on April 9th, hails an announcement by P2P developer Pando Networks that its experiments with P4P technology on a wide variety of U.S. broadband networks have boosted delivery speeds by up to 235 percent.

This news, Comcast vice president Kathryn A. Zachem wrote to the Commission, "provides further proof that policymakers have been right to rely on marketplace forces, rather than government regulation, to govern the evolution of Internet services."

P4P stands for Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P, a system of support for peer to peer protocols that allows tracking devices to communicate with network management systems about P2P flow. The objective, as four University of Washington and Yale scholars recently concluded in a paper on P4P, is to encourage "a more effective cooperative traffic control between applications and network providers." In short, the technology helps file-sharers pick each other in ways that contribute to a more efficient network.

Ars spoke with Verizon senior technologist and Distributed Computing Industry Association's (DCIA) P4P Working Group co-chair Doug Pasko in March, who reported 200 to 600 percent boosts in download speed in their experiments with Pando. Pando's April 9 release says that since late February it has now performed experiments in broadband video delivery to over one million people via networks that include AT&T, Bell Canada, Cablevision, Comcast, Telefonica, Time Warner, and Verizon—all with positive results.
On April 7, AT&T filed comments with the FCC's net neutrality docket that included the U. of Washington/Yale study and a PowerPoint presentation on network management. Three top AT&T reps also met with legal advisers to Commissioners Deborah Taylor Tate, Jonathan Adelstein, and Michael Copps. The presentation observes that broadband networks are inherently shared and that "P2P is not necessarily an efficient technology in its present form." In addition, the AT&T trio warned that an FCC policy of "strict nondiscrimination" would only serve "the interests of elitist users," presumably P2P file sharers.

The presentation backs this claim with a chart that asserts that AT&T end-user bandwidth has been increasing by about 35 percent a year from 2001 through 2007. In addition: "heavy bandwidth applications such as streaming media (Web & Multimedia) and Peer-to-peer are driving approximately 80 percent of total bandwidth on AT&T's broadband network." The chart does not break down what percentage of that 80 percent can be attributed to P2P use.

P2P is upsetting

The AT&T presentation concludes that increased bandwidth won't help alleviate this problem, "because the need to managed shared networks doesn't go away as bandwidth increases." The filing claims that in the end there's no escaping the fact that certain P2P technologies have "upset network architecture assumptions—increasing the challenge and complexity of network management."

AT&T's solution? The telco points to the DCIA P4P group's efforts as one solution. In the meantime, "resolve disputes as to what constitutes a reasonable network management practice on a case-by-case basis."

Pando's press release includes a comment by Comcast CTO Tony Werner praising "the applicability of P4P to cable ISP infrastructures." Comcast's FCC comments promise a collaboration with Pando "to ensure that all of us can continue to deliver ever-improving services to consumers."

AT&T and Comcast's remarks also indicate that P4P technology has already become politicized as the FCC prepares for its second hearing on network management practices, scheduled to take place at Stanford University on April 17. The Commission hasn't released a list of panelists yet, but it has disclosed the titles of the two panel discussions, one on "Network Management and Consumer Expectations," the other on "Consumer Access to Emerging Internet Technologies and Applications."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...egulation.html





Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet
John Markoff

Contradicting earlier studies, conventional wisdom and politicians’ rhetoric, European researchers say that the Internet infrastructure of the United States is one of the world’s best and getting better.

The Global Information Technology Report issued on Wednesday found that the United States now ranked fourth in the world behind just three European nations: Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. Last year the United States was ranked seventh.

The study, which has been issued annually for the last seven years, is an effort to draw a more complete picture of national network readiness.

The study was done by Insead, the business school near Paris, on behalf of the World Economic Forum, a policy and conference group based in Switzerland. It used an index generated from 68 variables including market factors, political and regulatory environment and technology infrastructure rather than just bandwidth capacity and data transmission speeds.

Some Internet industry veterans were skeptical of the positive claims about the United States compared with the rest of the world. “My gut feeling is that we don’t have the type of deployment you have abroad,” said David J. Farber, an Internet pioneer and a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. “If you are looking at broadband, we have a lot of problems. We are slow as molasses in deploying the next generation.”

The Insead assessment offers a stark contrast to other appraisals based on single measures that have portrayed the United States, the nation that invented the global data network, as both lagging and declining in the broadband boom. Last year a range of statistics on global bandwidth use indicated that the United States was trailing other industrial nations in both broadband network consumption and penetration as a percentage of population.

For example, statistics maintained by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development gave a conflicting message. The average advertised broadband download speed of 23 American providers was 8.8 megabits a second, while the average for 23 providers in Denmark was a considerably slower 5.9 megabits. At the same time the number of broadband subscribers in Denmark was 34.3 for every 100 inhabitants, compared with 22.1 in the United States, according to a study in October 2007.

However, one of the authors of the Insead report said the narrow measures had failed to capture the true impact of the Internet when it was considered in a cultural, economic and political context.

“What the U.S. has is a number of strengths along a number of dimensions,” said Soumitra Dutta, a professor of information systems at Insead and the director of the study. “It is not just a question of technology. Political and economic factors become extremely important.”

He pointed to France as a country that was a technology leader in terms of network services that had trailed in the study, ranked at 21. “It’s not because France is lacking in technology,” Professor Dutta said. “If you look at other kinds of regulatory issues and labor conditions, you find a rigid situation that prohibits companies from making the most effective use of technology.”

An O.E.C.D. economist acknowledged the nuances in taking into account government regulatory and related factors, and said it was hard to draw a single conclusion from the data. “I think we can say that a lot of the situation in the United States is a result of the lack of competition,” said Taylor Reynolds, an economist in the Internet and Telecommunications Policy section of the O.E.C.D. “In Europe we have adopted an unbundling strategy wholeheartedly.”

That has led to more competition in markets outside the United States, he said, which in turn has driven Internet service providers elsewhere to offer speedier service and lower prices.

One aspect of global competition that is being watched closely, he added, is the way fiber optic networks are being introduced in different regions. Even though the United States has begun to accelerate the availability of fiber optic services, it is lagging Europe and Asia in network speeds.

While Verizon is offering 50 megabit FIOS in the United States, 100 megabit services are common in Europe, and the Japanese are offering 1 gigabit services.

Still, there are puzzling aspects to the American market, which has higher broadband availability than many countries but lower adoption rates. More customers have retained dial-up services than most countries, which might be explained by price or lack of attractive broadband services.

Industry executives in the United States said the Insead report was a significant counterweight to the one-dimensional O.E.C.D. statistics. “Being an optimist, I’m seeing some significant and promising things happening in the United States,” said Robert Pepper, senior managing director, Global Advanced Technology Policy at Cisco Systems, the world’s largest networking equipment company.

The study portrayed a number of global trends. Five Nordic countries were reported among the world’s top 10. South Korea posted one of the most significant improvements in the last year, moving up 10 places in the ranking to ninth, and China moved up five positions to 57th.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/te...9internet.html





How Should I.S.P.’s Tell You if They Want to Track Your Surfing?
Saul Hansell

The term “unavoidable notice” has been bandied about by a group of Internet advertising executives recently as they explored whether to endorse proposals for Internet service providers to keep track of where their customers surfed and what they searched for.

One theory goes that such systems would be acceptable if customers were informed of the plan in a way that they were sure to see, with a clear way for users to choose not to have their activities recorded. (There are some who say that it is simply unacceptable for an I.S.P. to record the content of its customers’ communications under any circumstances.)

One of the leading companies involved in this concept, Phorm, says it is developing a plan that would in fact force users to see an explanation of its program and give them an explicit choice about whether to participate. Since the company won’t start operations for a few weeks, the details, which are very important, haven’t been disclosed.

The other company, NebuAd, which started operation last fall, seems to be going out of its way to avoid being noticed by the users it monitors. It won’t disclose the Internet providers or advertising companies it is working with. And after the Washington Post discovered two Internet providers it works with — Embarq and Wide Open West — those companies have refused to answer any questions about their relationship with NebuAd.

It always struck me that one good test of an idea is whether the people behind it are willing to stand up in public and say exactly what they are doing and why. And that seems a particularly apt way to look at these companies, which claim that their seemingly invasive plans are in fact very sensitive to the privacy of Internet users.

Both NebuAd and Phorm understand this. Both have hired public relations consultants and reached out to privacy advocates. Indeed, as I’ve written, the chief executives of both Phorm and NebuAd reached out to me and spent a long time discussing their companies and how their systems worked.

It’s early, but so far Phorm appears to be more committed to openness than NebuAd. It may have more of a hurdle to overcome to build trust. The company, under its previous name 121 Media, distributed software that displayed pop-up ads on users’ computers. Privacy groups, like the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the company’s software was spyware because it wasn’t disclosed properly when it was installed and was hard to remove.

Now that it has changed its business, Phorm says it is pursuing an open approach. It has published the names of the I.S.P.’s it is working with and some sites that will use its advertising system. It has hired Ernst & Young to audit its system. And it says it will allow others to examine the system as well.

Most significantly, Kent Ertugrul, Phorm’s chief executive, told me that it would not start monitoring users until after it pops a screen in front of their browsing to explain the system. He wouldn’t say what the screen would look like. And the choice to opt out of the system, he said, might be on a second screen, not right next to the choice to opt in. Still, he promised that “the opt-out will be more transparent than anything else,” referring to other ad targeting systems.

BT Broadband, one of the three British Internet providers that are working with Phorm, will in fact give users the choice to participate or not on the same screen, at least in its initial tests. Emma Sanderson, BT’s director of value-added services, sent me this in an e-mail describing how the disclosure will work:

The concept though is pretty straightforward…. the webpage will appear when a customer starts browsing, there will be a description of the service and three buttons - Yes I want the service, No I don’t want the service and I want more information (not these words exactly). If they request more information they will be taken to another page with more detail on it.

She said the company would start testing the service with 10,000 customers in coming weeks. It will be presented as a way to both reduce the number of irrelevant ads users see and also as an aid to online safety because Phorm also helps detect some fraudulent Web sites.

Ari Schwartz, the chief operating officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that this approach may well be appropriate, depending on how easy it is for consumers to understand and how actions are interpreted. If someone closes the pop-up window without making an explicit choice, he said, it should not be considered consent to have their actions monitored.

NebuAd’s approach to disclosure, by any measure, is much further away from “unavoidable notice.” Robert Dykes, NebuAd’s chief executive, told me the company would force I.S.P.’s that participate to notify their customers about the program. But this can be by e-mail, an insert in a billing statement or some other format where boilerplate that consumers don’t read is placed. Of course, it requires that the companies also disclose the system in their privacy statements, another graveyard for unread legalese.
The privacy statement of Embarq is particularly terse. It doesn’t mention NebuAd. It does have a link to opt out of the system which goes to a Web site called Faireagle.com, which is run by NebuAd. Wide Open West has a somewhat more articulate privacy statement. It gives a brief example of how the system may work. It names NebuAd and gives several links where consumers can get more information.

In what other way, if any, did these companies notify their customers? That is one of many questions I had for them that they refused even to consider answering. Peter Smith, the vice president of programming for Wide Open West, declined to comment and declined to say why he was declining to comment.

I then called David Burgstahler, a partner of Avista Capital, the private equity firm that owns Wide Open West. He wouldn’t talk to me either. Amanda Heravi, an Avista spokeswoman, said she would see if she could find someone to talk to me, but I haven’t heard back yet.

At Embarq, Debra Peterson, the company spokeswoman, e-mailed this statement, saying she would entertain no further questions:

Like other companies, we are evaluating behavioral marketing tools, but we have not decided whether to move forward with them. Our Privacy Policy anticipates and alerts customers to possible future use of these tools, and offers customers the opportunity to simply and quickly opt out. EMBARQ takes its customers’ privacy very seriously and we take every precaution to ensure information about our customers remains secure and anonymous.

Embarq by the way is the big local phone company unit spun off from Sprint that is publicly traded.

In my conversation with Mr. Dykes, I asked several times why he wouldn’t name the Internet providers he works with. He said, “It is inappropriate for a vendor to talk about its customers.”

I asked him why users should feel comfortable being involved with a system when the companies using it are afraid to stand up in public and discuss it. I also suggested that customers may want to know in advance whether Internet providers they may choose to do business with will sell information about their browsing to ad targeting firms. He said there is no need to disclose that in advance, particularly because NebuAd allows people to go to its site and request a cookie on their computers that will indicate they don’t want to participate in its tracking program on any Internet provider.

“If someone thinks this is really important, they should simply opt-out,” Mr. Dykes said.

It’s not clear to me that these are the policies that will build the trust level that Mr. Dykes says he needs in order to convince the large Internet providers to sign up for his service.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...ing/index.html





More Crappy Censorship From Your Friends at Yahoo!
Thomas Hawk

Mike Arrington has a blog post over at TechCrunch regarding a recent censorship case over at Yahoo where taking down and destroying user's content seems to be business as usual.

In this most recent case, Loren Feldman uploaded a video mocking Shel Israel and the Village People to Yahoo Video only to see his video taken down after an extremely weak DMCA notice was presented by Scorpio Music.

The video in question, embedded above, certainly would fall into the fair use category. It is absolutely parody which is protected as fair use and the amount of the song used is a brief snippet, also brief enough to count as fair use even if the video was not parody.

But in typical Yahoo "shoot first ask questions later" fashion, they have removed Feldman's video. They also sent him a threatening email saying that they could terminate all of his yahoo services and deactivate his Yahoo ID. Fortunately a copy of the video in question still exists over at Google on YouTube as embedded above. I guess Google cares a little bit more about a user's fair use rights than Yahoo does.

It is terrible that it seems that anybody in the world can send a DMCA notice, valid or not, to Yahoo and get them to censor user content. Personally I think Yahoo has a higher obligation to the users who use their sites.

A while back Michael Crook sent Yahoo a bogus DMCA takedown request for one of my photos on Flickr. How did Yahoo handle this? They not only removed the perfectly valid and legal photo in question. But they *permanently* destroyed the uploaded photo along with dozens of comments. Later on Crook resceinded his bogus DMCA notice in my case but it was too late. The photo I'd posted and all of the comments were permanently erased by Yahoo from the internet.

A similar thing happened to Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir who also saw Yahoo destroy her photo along with over 450 comments which Flickr Chief Stewart Butterfield later chalked up as a "mistake," to the BBC News.

The problem with Yahoo! is that these "mistakes," only seem to get apologized for when they receive a lot of publicity. How many hundreds or thousands of Yahoo users have simply seen their content destroyed by Yahoo and didn't really have the voice or reach to really do anything about it.

Shame on Yahoo for censoring Loren. And shame on them for treating their users so poorly. Yahoo should take more care when reviewing DMCA takedown notices and give their users the respect that they truly deserve.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft does a better job with the censorship once they take Yahoo over here shortly.
http://thomashawk.com/2008/04/more-c...from-your.html





FBI Data Transfers Via Telecoms Questioned
Ellen Nakashima

When FBI investigators probing New York prostitution rings, Boston organized crime or potential terrorist plots anywhere want access to a suspect's telephone contacts, technicians at a telecommunications carrier served with a government order can, with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico.

The circuits -- little-known electronic connections between telecom firms and FBI monitoring personnel around the country -- are used to tell the government who is calling whom, along with the time and duration of a conversation and even the locations of those involved.

Recently, three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Chairman John D. Dingell (Mich.), sent a letter to colleagues citing privacy concerns over one of the Quantico circuits and demanding more information about it. Anxieties about whether such electronic links are too intrusive form a backdrop to the continuing congressional debate over modifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs federal surveillance.

Since a 1994 law required telecoms to build electronic interception capabilities into their systems, the FBI has created a network of links between the nation's largest telephone and Internet firms and about 40 FBI offices and Quantico, according to interviews and documents describing the agency's Digital Collection System. The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group in San Francisco that specializes in digital-rights issues.

The bureau says its budget for the collection system increased from $30 million in 2007 to $40 million in 2008. Information lawfully collected by the FBI from telecom firms can be shared with law enforcement and intelligence-gathering partners, including the National Security Agency and the CIA. Likewise, under guidelines approved by the attorney general or a court, some intercept data gathered by intelligence agencies can be shared with law enforcement agencies.

"When you're building something like this deeply into the telecommunications infrastructure, when it becomes so technically easy to do, the only thing that stands between legitimate use and abuse is the complete honesty of the persons and agencies using it and the ability to have independent oversight over the system's use," said Lauren Weinstein, a communications systems engineer and co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, a group that studies Web issues. "It's who watches the listeners."

Different versions of the system are used for criminal wiretaps and for foreign intelligence investigations inside the United States. But each allows authorized FBI agents and analysts, with point-and-click ease, to receive e-mails, instant messages, cellphone calls and other communications that tell them not only what a suspect is saying, but where he is and where he has been, depending on the wording of a court order or a government directive. Most of the wiretapping is done at field offices.

Wiretaps to obtain the content of a phone call or an e-mail must be authorized by a court upon a showing of probable cause. But "transactional data" about a communication -- from whom, to whom, how long it lasted -- can be obtained by simply showing that it is relevant to an official probe, including through an administrative subpoena known as a national security letter (NSL). According to the Justice Department's inspector general, the number of NSLs issued by the FBI soared from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005.

The administration has proposed expanding the types of data it can get from telecom carriers under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, so FBI agents can gain faster and more detailed access to information sent by wireless devices that reveals where a person is in real time. The Federal Communications Commission is weighing the request.

"Court-authorized electronic surveillance is a critical tool in pursuing both criminal and terrorist subjects," FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said.

A Justice Department spokesman said the government is asking only for information at the beginning and end of a communication, and for information "reasonably available" in a carrier's network.

Al Gidari, a telecom industry lawyer at Perkins Coie in Seattle who handles wiretap orders for companies, said government officials now "have to rely on a human being at a telecom calling up every 15 minutes to send law enforcement the data."

He added: "What they want is an automatic feed, continuously. So you're checking the weather on your mobile device or making a call," and the device would transmit location data automatically. "It's full tracking capability. It's a scary proposition."

In an affidavit circulated on Capitol Hill, security consultant Babak Pasdar alleged that a telecom carrier he had worked for maintained a high-speed DS-3 digital line that co-workers referred to as "the Quantico Circuit." He said it allowed a third party "unfettered" access to the carrier's wireless network, including billing records and customer data transmitted wirelessly.

He was hired to upgrade network security for Verizon in 2003; sources other than Pasdar said the carrier in his affidavit is Verizon.

Dingell and his colleagues said House members should be given access to information to help them evaluate Pasdar's allegations.

FBI officials said a circuit of the type described by Pasdar does not exist. All telecom circuits at Quantico are one-way, from the carrier, said Anthony Di Clemente, section chief of the FBI operational technology division. He also said any transmissions of data to Quantico are strictly pursuant to court orders.

Records, including who sent and received communications, the duration and the time, are kept for evidentiary purposes and to support applications to extend wiretap orders, he said.

Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis said no government agency has open access to the company's networks through electronic circuits.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040702364.html





Dial D for Disruption
Quentin Hardy

Want to build a phone company for $100? Give Mark Spencer a ring.

In a research park outside the low-key bustle of downtown Huntsville, Ala. Mark Spencer finishes his barbecue and resumes wreaking havoc on the multibillion-dollar phone equipment business.

Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco, Nortel or Avaya.

"We have to figure out ways to get into everything: Carriers, businesses, equipment companies," says Spencer. "For better or worse, I don't tend to think small."

Spencer, who is all of 29 years old, is poised to disrupt the $7 billion market for office telecom switches (often called PBXs) much the way the Linux open-source computer operating system crushed the price of business computing and brought woe to established leaders such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

Since Spencer released Asterisk to the world in 1999 as a phone operating system, it has been downloaded 500,000 times, and it continues to be downloaded 1,000 times per day. Some 350 contributors have taken it from a rocky voice system to one with clear calling and more than 100 features.

Electric utility Southern Co. is using Asterisk in a pilot program to translate voicemail into text messages for 30 managers' BlackBerrys.

The town of Manchester, Conn. is about to begin using Asterisk to run an application tied to the 911 service that will cost less than $1 million, half the price it would have paid had it used traditional phone equipment, and at 10% of the operating costs. Outsourcing company Sutherland Global Services has tested Asterisk in 400-person call centers, finding it cuts telephone costs by two-thirds.

In Rensselaer, Ind. computer science professor Brian Capouch has built a commercial-class phone system that already touches 20 communities and covers more than 1,000 square miles with just $100 in personal computer equipment and $125 to customize each location.

For a little more he built an Asterisk system of motion detectors and Web cameras that send video to his office laptop and can call any phone when something happens at his house. One of his students created a business sending other kids automated wake-up calls. Other Asterisk hacks include a way to pay your parking meter by phone.

"You couldn't set out to build a system like this. No one company could do it all. When you open source, people just keep improving things," says Spencer.

Asterisk could lead to the creation of thousands of businesses, as people begin thinking about the phone the same way they saw the personal computer in 1980, as a platform on which to build. Spencer had this in mind when he named his software after the symbol used in Unix computer programming to signify "everything."

Digium, the company Spencer created in 1999, now has 50 employees and more than $10 million in revenue from selling hardware loaded with a tested business edition of the otherwise free Asterisk, much the way Red Hat charges for a widely used standard for Linux. Digium makes a profit, though Spencer won't say how much.

Overhead is low. Spencer pays less than $15 a square foot for space (per year) and does up his own quarters in geek chic: reworked computer guts, testing screens, a fridge filled with caffeinated sodas and a sculpture he made of a robot holding a rotary phone. He shares his office with a 23-year-old programmer who was still a teen when they met. Spencer once had to write a note to his principal years ago when a job conflicted with the school day.

Spencer's parents are professors at Auburn University (his American father teaches education, his Egyptian mother French). In eighth grade he wrote a grading program for his teacher and sold it for $5. While still in high school, Spencer hung around Auburn's electrical engineering department, designing integrated circuit structures for fun. "I'd go over to his house [to discuss semiconductors] and he'd be finishing writing a symphony on his synthesizer," says Thaddeus Roppel, an Auburn professor and early mentor. "He kept up with his high school homework, too."

While on a full scholarship at Auburn, Spencer started Digium as a Linux consultant. He sold one-seventh of the firm for $500,000 to Adtran, a Huntsville telecom equipment maker where he had interned two years before. He wanted a really cool phone switch to handle sales orders, but when he learned that it would cost $10,000, he began writing Asterisk. "I'd never touched a traditional pbx," Spencer says.

But he knew a ton about open-source software, whose source code is given away in order to attract improvements. He had earlier built an instant-messaging client called Gaim, which has become popular among the open-source crowd. Spencer based Asterisk on Apache, the freebie software that powers many a Web server. Aided by a couple of Internet telephone veterans, he put the telephone switch at the center of the operating system and made it possible to connect it to almost any Internet phone system (except Skype).

Asterisk was still a hobby until the spring of 2001, when the tech crash killed Digium's Linux business. Spencer saw there was interest in Net phones and shifted gears. By the end of the year Digium was selling computer cards with custom boards and Asterisk software.

Spencer is picking up a few big allies. Intel now makes Asterisk-compatible cards for computers and has tested large deployments. "Open source is one of the hottest topics in telecom today," says Intel marketing director Timothy Moynihan.

Yet IBM, which styles itself a champion of all things open, will only say it has a "positive but very informal" relationship with Asterisk and Digium. That distance may owe something to the fact that IBM resells Cisco's Internet telephone gear to big firms like Ford and Dow Chemical.

In an internal study last summer Cisco identified 100 corporate customers making big use of Asterisk. Open-source Internet phones, the document said, will force Cisco to excel in "reliability, productivity, enhancements, features, vendor reputation, service [and] support." Cost was unlikely to be Cisco's selling point.

"I used to go on industry panels, and the guys from Cisco would be nice and baby me, never saying anything bad about Asterisk," Spencer says. "Lately they've stopped seeing me as a charity. It's their business."

Says Cullen Jennings, a senior Cisco engineer: "The bulk of PBXs that people deploy five years from now will not be open source, but that is just a guess." Either way, he figures that if Asterisk destroys Cisco's valuable PBX business, Cisco can sell services and related networking gear based on it, the same way ibm embraced Linux-based computing.

Spencer hopes he doesn't have to choose between spreading the Asterisk gospel or getting rich on Digium. "The existing telephony business, for some companies, is going to get collapsed way down," he says. "What will be the new services? The new industries? Like a lot of things, you do this because it's interesting, and you don't really know where it's going to go."
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0410/063.html





The Story Behind Opera Mini on Google Android
Chris Mills

Introduction

This article takes a look at one of Opera's latest and greatest projects - the creation of an Opera Mini version that will run on Google's Android open mobile development platform. Over the course of the article, we'll explain why we created it, how, challenges we faced, and how you can try it out for yourself. We'd like to encourage you to try it out, and give us as much feedback as you possibly can. Enjoy!

Why did we do it?

When we first heard about Google Android, we were very excited about the possibilities it presents, and thought it would be very cool to make Opera Mini available on it, plus it would give mobile developers a better choice of browsers to make available on handsets. But it goes beyond just cool factor - one of Opera's central doctrines is providing the best internet experience on any device - the Android platform is another missing piece of the puzzle for us to fill in.

There are also practical reasons - the Opera Mini browser renders web pages that have been transcoded to the binary OBML format, meaning much smaller downloads and a faster browsing experience on mobiles, than would be provided by other browsers (the Android WebKit-based browser component has a switch in the public API allowing the use of a transcoding proxy that transcodes web pages to a simpler form of HTML. Whether this is as small and fast as Opera Mini's OBML remains to be seen.)

How did we do it?

How did we do it? We decided to use the existing Opera Mini code base (even the binary package) instead of creating a separate port, to save on resourses. We created a special wrapper that translates Java ME (mostly MIDP) API calls into Android API calls. The tool used was MicroEmulator - this is an open source (LGPL) implementation of Java ME that runs on top of Java SE. The lead Opera Mini Android developer is also the lead developer of MicroEmulator, so it was an inspired choice! The Android platform is similar to Java SE, with the exception of several libraries normally included in Java SE (like AWT/Swing - these are excluded because they would likely be too heavy to fit into the embedded environment.) It is therefore fairly simple to port MicroEmulator to run inside Android environment. The only major task was to replace the AWT/Swing graphics backend of MicroEmulator with Android specific APIs.

Issues we faced

This section details the issues we faced when making the Opera Mini port over to Android:

1. First, the Android platform is a very fresh set of APIs. There is not much information available on the web, and the community around Android is just forming, so sometimes it is difficult to find an answer if something during development is not going very well and you have questions. Other people involved in Android development are very willing to help others, however
2. Next, you need to consider that Android is not a finished product yet - for example, the last SDK update changed a large number of the APIs, so as we fixed existing issues, new problems appeared; the most serious being performance degradation of the emulator, which we are currently working on
3. We still have no access to any hardware that will run Android. It is currently impossible to say how fast Opera Mini will run on real devices
4. Integration between the Eclipse IDE and the Android SDK is seamless, making for a nice coding experience. The Android emulator however runs inside QEMU, which is a bit to slow even on fast desktops. This is quite annoying and we hope it will improve in the next SDK updates

Try it yourself!

As mentioned above, there is currently no hardware available that will run Android, but you can still try the Opera Mini Android version out using the Android SDK and emulator. Here's how (these steps are basically the same on any platform that runs the SDK):

1. Download and install latest version of Android SDK
2. Obtain the Opera Mini for Android package
3. Once you have installed the Android SDK, start the Android emulator that comes with it (this can be found at {Android home}/tools/emulator
4. Transfer and install the Opera Mini package into the emulator - you can do this with the following command line input - {Android home}/tools/adb install OperaMini.apk

Opera Mini should now appear in the emulator Applications folder.

Known issues

• Small painting issues
• The Back command isn't yet mapped to the device back button
http://labs.opera.com/news/2008/04/10/





IBM Chip is Fastest on Earth
Tom Abate

IBM Corp. began shipping high-end computers Tuesday built around the fastest chip on Earth, a microprocessor that can carry out up to 5 billion instructions per second, surpassing the speediest competing processors built by rivals like Intel or Sun Microsystems.

The new IBM processor, called the Power6, was designed to run big-ticket, water-cooled machines that drive corporations or tackle scientific problems, but slower versions of this same family of chips are already being used in inexpensive, consumer devices like the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation.

Cranking up the speed is only one way to improve overall system performance, say chip experts from Intel and Sun, which have evolved different ways to coax more work from chips - and therefore stay competitive in the never-ending race to sell computers that do more and cost less.

But if a stopwatch were the only ranking system, the 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun.

"It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is," said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two "laggards."

"Hold your index finger out in front of your face," Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.

Light would presumably have to travel more than a finger's length to get each task done on the slower processors from Intel and Sun - and at billions-of-cycles per second, slow is a bit of a misnomer.

Then why don't Intel and Sun just crank up the speed? Well, just as is the case with cars, the faster chips run, the hotter they get, and IBM has created water-cooling systems akin to the radiators in cars to keep its processors from overheating. Not doing so, Meyerson quipped, "results in setting fire to the user, which is bad."

Intel spokesman George Alfs said his company, which sells millions upon millions of processors for all sorts of stuff like laptops, where lugging around a water jug would be a chore, said there's no technical reason why Intel chips can't run faster.

In fact, Alfs said, sophisticated game enthusiasts buy water-cooling kits that they fit into desktop PCs, then use software tricks inside the Windows operating system to crank up their own speeds into the 5 gigahertz range.

"But that can void your warranty," Alfs said.

Sun spokesman Mark Richardson took umbrage at the focus on speed. "It's an easier marketing message to deliver to say that faster gigahertz means a faster processor," he said. His colleague, chip expert Fadi Azhari, explained how the Mountain View firm uses a different technical trick, called multithreading, to make a computer faster but not hotter.

Imagine a long line of airport passengers waiting for the ticket agent to check them in, Azhari said. The IBM speed trick would have that ticket agent working faster and faster - with maybe a blower overhead to cool the agent down. But multithreading would be like putting two or more ticket agents on duty, which is another less-heat-intensive approach to processing, he said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...BUBI10258F.DTL





Windows is 'Collapsing,' Gartner Analysts Warn

The researchers damn Windows in current form, urge radical changes
Gregg Keizer

Calling the situation "untenable" and describing Windows as "collapsing," a pair of Gartner analysts this week said Microsoft must make radical changes to the operating system or risk becoming a has-been.

In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the Redmond, Washington developer acts.

"For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable," said Silver and MacDonald in their prepared presentation, titled "Windows Is Collapsing: How What Comes Next Will Improve."

Among Microsoft's problems, the pair said, is Windows' rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft -- frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new OS -- hit the "reset" button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista.

"This is a large part of the reason [why] Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements," they said. In turn, that became one of the reasons why businesses pushed back Vista deployment plans. "Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile."

Other analysts, including those at rival Forrester Research, have pointed out the slow move toward Vista. Last month, Forrester said that by the end of 2007 only 6.3 percent of the 50,000 enterprise computer users it surveyed were working with Vista. What gains Vista made during its first year, added Forrester, appeared to be at the expense of Windows 2000; Windows XP's share hardly budged.

The monolithic nature of Windows -- although Microsoft talks about Vista's modularity, Silver and MacDonald said it doesn't go nearly far enough -- not only makes it tough to deliver a worthwhile upgrade, but threatens Microsoft in the mid- and long-term.

Users want a smaller Windows that can run on low-priced -- and low-powered -- hardware, and increasingly, users work with "OS-agnostic applications," the two analysts said in their presentation. It takes too long for Microsoft to build the next version, the company's being beaten by others in the innovation arena and in the future -- perhaps as soon as the next three years -- it's going to have trouble competing with Web applications and small, specialized devices.

"Apple introduced its iPhone running OS X, but Microsoft requires a different product on handhelds because Windows Vista is too large, which makes application development, support and the user experience all more difficult," said Silver and MacDonald.

"Windows as we know it must be replaced," they said in their presentation.

Their advice to Microsoft took several forms, but one road they urged the software giant to take was virtualization. "We envision a very modular and virtualized world," said the researchers, who spelled out a future where virtualization -- specifically a hypervisor -- is standard on client as well as server versions of Windows.

"An OS, in this case Windows, will ride atop the hypervisor, but it will be much thinner, smaller and modular than it is today. Even the Win32 API set should be a module that can be deployed to maintain support for traditional Windows applications on some devices, but other[s] may not have that module installed."

Backward compatibility with older, so-called "legacy" applications, should also be supported via virtualization. "Backward compatibility is a losing proposition for Microsoft; while it keeps people locked into Windows, it also often keeps them from upgrading," said the analysts. "[But] using built-in virtualization, compatibility modules could be layered atop Win32, or not, as needed."

Silver and MacDonald also called on Microsoft to make it easier to move to newer versions of Windows, re-think how the company licenses Windows and come up with a truly modular operating system that can grow or shrink as needed.

Microsoft has taken some new steps with Windows, although they don't necessarily match what the Gartner analysts recommended. For instance, the company recently granted Windows XP Home a reprieve from its June 30 OEM cut-off, saying it would let computer makers install the older, smaller operating system on ultra-cheap laptops through the middle of 2010.

It will also add a hypervisor to Windows -- albeit the server version -- in August, and there are signs that it will launch Windows 7, the follow-on to Vista, late next year rather than early 2010.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...fp;;fpid;;pf;1





Blockbuster Considering Set-Top Box for Movie Downloads
Erica Ogg

Trips to the video rental store may be a thing of the past sooner than thought.

Netflix and Blockbuster are already offering DVD rental service by mail. Amazon.com, Microsoft's Xbox Live, and Netflix deliver movies directly to the PC. TiVo, Vudu, and Apple TV--not to mention cable and satellite companies--are doing the same for TV sets. Local independent stores notwithstanding, the only major brick-and-mortar options left for renting discs are Hollywood Video/Movie Gallery, which is close to bankruptcy, and Blockbuster.

But The Hollywood Reporter says Blockbuster may be giving customers more reasons not to visit its stores. The rental chain is said to be making a set-top box that will allow video content to be streamed directly to a television. The announcement should come sometime later this month, according to THR

A Blockbuster spokeswoman said it is "talking to numerous companies" about ways it can provide "access to media content across multiple channels--from our stores, by mail, through kiosks, through downloading, through portable content-enabled devices--so it's not surprising that there are rumors out there."

The service would take advantage of video-on-demand technology from Movielink (which Blockbuster bought last year) that allows movie downloads from Universal Studios, Paramount, Sony Pictures, MGM, and Warner Bros.

There was no mention of price or how such a service would work in the report. But let's think about this: to compete with Apple TV or Vudu, the device would have to cost around $200, and rentals of movies and TV shows should be around $3 to $4 each, which would be slightly cheaper than rentals of new releases from Blockbuster currently. The big advantage Blockbuster would enjoy over Apple TV, Vudu, and TiVo, it seems, would be selection. Considering its longstanding relationships with the studios, it would likely have the largest library of films and TV shows to choose from. See my colleague John Falcone's excellent comparison of set-top rental boxes.

No matter the details of the how the device would work, this represents a new direction for Blockbuster and the video rental market. Money spent on DVD ownership and rentals has been decreasing steadily for the past four years, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, which tracks sales of disc media. And though there's no indication Blockbuster would eliminate its brick-and-mortar stores, a streaming video service would clearly cannibalize some of that business.

Assuming the report is spot-on, and Blockbuster attempts to make this transition to digital content, it's time to wonder how much longer physical media will be a factor for mainstream movie renters.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-991...l?tag=nefd.top





Online Commercials: Now That’s a Hard Sell
Randall Stross

LONG ago, in the heyday of broadcast television, when networks did pretty much as they wished, rule No. 1 was this: Viewers shall sit still and obediently watch commercials.

Later, technology gave viewers the option of disregarding the network’s commandments. The arrival of the remote control’s mute button, and then TiVo, did their part to undermine commercials, and so has the more recent rise of YouTube. When viewers seek entertaining videos there, commercial breaks are not part of the picture.

Now the television industry is moving online and mounting its most ambitious attempt to date to restore mandatory viewing of commercials. Their instrument is Hulu, a company that was founded jointly in March 2007 by NBC Universal and the News Corporation and provides free, advertising-supported television shows for viewing on the Web. It ended its test period last month and declared that Hulu.com was officially open for business.

The site has a smart look, is easy to navigate and allows users to embed any of its programs on their own blogs, on social networking sites or anywhere else, without directing viewers back to Hulu.

Hulu describes itself as the online destination for “premium” video, but in its current form it has serious limitations. Though it has the backing of NBC and Fox (owned by the News Corporation) and has more than 50 recognizable names in the television and movie industries as its content partners, its offerings are surprisingly meager. It provides only a handful of popular television series, like “The Simpsons” and “The Office,” and even in these cases it offers little more than samplers — a paltry five “Simpsons” episodes and nine of “The Office.”

Hulu has only short clips for other programs, rather than full episodes. That’s understandable for “Saturday Night Live” but not for “Law & Order.” It also has 110 movies, mostly titles that failed to impress critics, like “Dude, Where’s My Car?,” and fills out its catalog with long-forgotten television shows like “Adam-12.”

Acknowledging that Hulu’s library is less than what could be wished, Christina Lee, a company spokeswoman, said it was working with its content providers “to navigate complex rights and clearance issues to bring together the best collection of programming online, legally.”

Hulu’s founding assumption is that viewers will appreciate the convenience of having all their favorite television shows at one Web site, no matter what channel broadcast them originally.

This assumption may turn out to be fatally flawed. For branded content, it’s easy to use a search engine to find online whatever one wants. In an instant, for example, a Google search leads to “South Park” episodes on a Web site dedicated to the show; the site opened last month as a joint venture between the “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Comedy Central. They, too, are offering television programming free online, relying upon commercials. Rather than throwing their lot in with Hulu and ceding a portion of revenue, however, they set up their own operation and put everything they owned online — every episode from the entire 12 seasons. A complete archive like this puts Hulu’s mostly empty shelves to shame.

Jean-Paul Colaco, Hulu’s senior vice president for advertising, said last week that Hulu’s advertising is designed to be “elegant and non-obtrusive.” Instead of running eight minutes of commercials with multiple sponsors in a half-hour slot, Hulu runs only two minutes from a single commercial sponsor: an announcement of sponsorship and “limited commercial interruption” at the beginning, then three 30-second spots interspersed during the show.

“We don’t want to oversaturate the viewer with commercials,” Mr. Colaco explained, which he acknowledges is much easier to do when the viewer’s eyes are only a few inches away from the screen. He and others in the industry call watching television on computers a “lean-forward environment.”

On paper, Mr. Colaco’s offer to run “only 25 percent of the advertising on broadcast television” would seem much appreciated by viewers, and advertisers get exclusive sponsorship of entire episodes. All parties should be happy.

The viewing experience, however, will not necessarily please everyone. The two minutes of single-sponsor commercials in a Hulu program can feel as engaging as a dentist’s drill: there’s no arguing that they get your attention.

On the first “Simpsons” episode I watched, the program stopped for a Sudafed commercial in which unrelieved congestion inflated the suffering victim’s head. A few minutes later, the program halted to show the same commercial, with the same imminent danger of cranial explosion. More minutes passed, and the identical commercial made its third appearance. Of course, no fast-forwarding is permitted.

Hulu must somehow persuade viewers who have become accustomed to snacking on video tidbits at YouTube, free of commercials, to return to the Hulu version of the old broadcast model, in which programs are halted for enforced advertising breaks.

For movies, Hulu is testing a “pre roll,” a two-minute movie trailer at the beginning, which viewers could choose to watch instead of intermittent commercials. It has not tried this, however, for shorter-form programs, knowing that asking viewers to first sit still for two minutes of commercials just to see a 22-minute sitcom is unlikely to be acceptable. “The industry is running away from pre-rolls,” Mr. Colaco said.

YouTube has been slow to explore ways of generating revenue. Its parent, Google, has yet to report earning material revenue from its YouTube operations. But YouTube has recently introduced a new format for advertising that is decidedly less intrusive than Hulu’s. It displays a commercial message for 10 seconds shortly after a video begins, in a small translucent overlay at the bottom of the screen; if a viewer clicks on the message, only then will a full commercial play. Instead of Hulu’s “limited interruption,” YouTube can say, “no interruption whatsoever, unless you choose otherwise.”

We lean forward, yes, but we are leaning into a cornucopia of entertainment options. Advertisers must accept that the old quid pro quo — they bring us television and we give them our full, undivided attention — no longer is acceptable.

But advertisers should not feel singled out. Today, viewers do not give their full, undivided attention to anybody.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/te...gy/06digi.html





HD Radios With iTunes Tagging Hit Stores
FMQB

iBiquity Digital Corp. announced that the first HD Radio receiver with HD Radio iTunes tagging technology has arrived at retail. Polk Audio's I-Sonic Entertainment System 2 is now available at Apple Stores around the country, as well as online, and will hit Best Buy in June.

"iTunes Tagging is an early example of the outstanding capabilities HD Radio technology will enable beyond new multicast content and higher quality audio," said Bob Struble, iBiquity President/CEO of iBiquity Digital.. "Leading entertainment brands, like Polk and Apple, are embracing HD Radio technology and creating the most advanced experience of the digital lifestyle."

iTunes tagging was announced last fall. At the time, the HD/iTunes radios were expected in stores in time for the holiday season.

In related news, Clear Channel Radio has announced that over 340 of its stations broadcasting in HD are also now compliant with HD Radio iTunes tagging technology. The iTunes tagging allows for listeners to tag a song heard on the air for purchase later via the iTunes Music Store.

"Radio continues to be the number one way that people discover new music, and the HD Radio iTunes tagging capability lets listeners add songs to their iPod playlists with just a push of the button," said John Hogan, President/CEO of Clear Channel Radio. "With the vast majority of our HD primary stations now offering this exciting feature, we’re demonstrating how radio’s collaboration with the iPod benefits consumers."

Clear Channel currently is broadcasting over 400 stations in HD nationwide, with over 340 HD-2 side channels.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=645253