Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – September 18th, '04

[JackSpratts]

Quotes Of The Week


"I promise you, no one is collecting dead, black musicians." – Anna Ross


"I think everyone just assumed that the two ears were essentially interchangeable." – Dr. Yvonne Sininger


"A network where only point-to-point communication is encrypted is not private!" - Gwren


"IMlogic releases free P2P blocking software." - TechNewsWorld


"New P2P software could end illegal music squabbles." – Ashlee Vance


"We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes." - Earthlink






Big Anti-Induce Campaign Planned
Katie Dean

Thousands of people have signed up to call their congressional representatives Tuesday to protest the Induce Act, a controversial copyright bill that many fear would undermine the legal protections that allow consumers to make personal copies of music or movies they've bought.

The Induce Act, officially known as the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560), was introduced in June by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont). It would hold technology companies liable for making products that encourage customers to infringe copyright.

Critics believe the Induce Act conflicts with the landmark 1984 Betamax Supreme Court decision, which ruled that home videotape recorders were legal because they have "substantial non-infringing uses," even though some people might use the machines to infringe copyrights. Though the entertainment industry opposed the machine at the time, the ruling paved the way for the development of the enormous home video and DVD market, and other technological innovations of the past 20 years.

"We really needed to get the attention of senators and representatives and show them that people really care about this," said Nicholas Reville, co-founder of Downhill Battle, a music activism website that is organizing the call-in campaign. "So much of the back-and-forth is between the movie and music industries on one side and the electronics industry on the other side. This isn't just about what one company wants versus what another company wants, but it's about the public good."

Downhill Battle -- which also organized a February protest against the music industry called Grey Tuesday - - created a special website, Save Betamax, to rally citizens to call their legislators. More than 2,800 people had signed up as of late Monday, according to the website.

"A lot of politicians just think this is a business issue and it's not on the public radar," Reville said. "I think it's going to be a real wake-up call for these members."

Reville said the group is targeting the most influential members of Congress on this issue: Sens. Bill Frist (R- Tennessee), Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota), John McCain (R-Arizona), Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina), Hatch and Leahy; and Reps. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), John Conyers (D-Michigan), Joe Barton (R-Texas) and John Dingell (D- Michigan).

Entrepreneur Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat and founder of digital publishing technology company Lulu, has signed up to call Congress to protest the bill.

"We need legislators to spend more time thinking more carefully about protecting the innovation engine that drives the American economy and to be highly suspicious of any initiative proposed by the existing dominant players," Young said. "The Induce Act will make it more difficult for the next generation of entrepreneurs to be successful."

He said heavyweights like the music industry have spent more time convincing legislators to protect their current business models than serving their own customers' needs.

Television, movie and music companies have given $168,928 in campaign donations to Hatch since 1999, according to Opensecrets.org, a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks campaign donations. Leahy received $232,050 in the same period. The internet, computer and telecommunications industries donated less money to each.

"It simply makes our task (as entrepreneurs) that much more difficult," Young said. "It tilts the playing field in favor of the established suppliers at the expense of innovators."

Reville said it is critical that people express support for the Betamax decision and oppose Induce now, before the legislation moves any further.

"Once (the bill) is through, it's going to be 10 times as hard to win those rights back," Reville said.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64935,00.html


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Hello Linux

Microsoft Tells Music Biz To 'Back Lock-Down CD Standard'
MusicAlly (tony.smith at theregister.co.uk)

Microsoft is attempting to force a last-minute pact with record labels over the future of copy- protected CDs, according to a letter seen by MusicAlly. The allegedly leaked document is purportedly from Alain Levy and David Munns of EMI via Tom Silverman of Tommy Boy Records, who was asked "to reach out to the independent sector to achieve quick consensus on this issue [and] report back to Microsoft."

Any such deal would see Microsoft support "an industry-wide copy control platform" built in to its next-generation Longhorn operating system, with the computer giant instructing labels that the compatible secure CDs must contain additional multimedia content, such as bonus tracks, "as a quid pro quo for adding effective [DRM] into the consumer experience".

The letter, dated 2 September 2004, says that Microsoft's offer came "literally in the last few days" but requires that labels across the entire industry agree upon a specification for the functionality of the protected discs by 20 September. Though Longhorn has been in the planning for years, the implementation of CD audio copy protection will apparently be finalised "in the next few months".

It is not clear from the letter whether Microsoft's proposal is to enforce the "Secure Audio Path" concept (which would protect content all the way to a computer's speakers, making it impossible to make digital copies by recording from the soundcard) or to build in the "Active Software Protection" currently used by the likes of Macrovision.

For their part, Levy and Munns have allegedly provided a "strawman" proposed framework, which covers familiar ground such as the ability for CD buyers "to make a specified number of protected copies of the disc". But there are also some more ambitious requests, such as "when copying the files to the hard drive the consumer can use any protected music file format of their choice". We imagine Apple won't be willing to play ball on this front.

Many independent labels are rumoured to be terrified by the proposal, our sources suggest, which could grant Microsoft the mandate on CD copy protection and, if it is accepted by the industry, potentially increase the costs of CD production.

Is this the biggest hope yet for preventing piracy - or a deal with the Devil?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09...py_protection/


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New Adventures In Hi-Fi
Will Hodgkinson

When Peter Buck called the band for which he plays guitar "the acceptable edge of the unacceptable," he coined the perfect way of describing the world's only alternative stadium rock group. Growing out of the tiny, insular music scene of Athens, Georgia at the end of the 70s, REM marked the point at which punk ended and what Americans call "college rock" began, and 25 years later, the band remains essentially the same, even if their bank balances do not. "Ultimately the music will tell us if we're doing it right or not," says Mike Mills, the band's bassist, on the eve of the release of REM's melancholic and emotive new album, Around the Sun. "Circumstances and people change - especially since Peter moved to Seattle, given that we once all lived in the same house - but as long as the results are OK, then the band is still making a contribution."

Mike Berry and Michael Stipe still live in Athens, which has always had a strong music scene, but the bands there developed their own style. "Anywhere outside of Athens, southern boogie rock was hugely popular," says Mills, who stills seems like he is fired with the enthusiasm of just having discovered alternative rock despite being well into his 40s. "Athens was an island of young and hip people, and the music was made by art students who weren't musicians. Their whole tenet was to reject everything and create a sound pastiche. Pylon and the B-52s came out of that and they worked well, and you also got plenty of other bands that were ... somewhat less accessible."

"Atlanta was really off the map, which meant that you had no choice but to do your own thing, a bit like how PJ Harvey comes from Dorset and sounds like nobody else," adds Michael Stipe, who talks quietly in a nervous staccato, and has a habit of flicking his scarf around his neck every minute or so. "But also because the B- 52s and Pylon were touring and bringing things back, Athens discovered this really cool band called Joy Division and this really cool band called U2 before anyone in New York did. If that sounds like bragging I'm sorry, but it really was the case." At the centre of the Athens music scene was Peter Buck, who worked in a record shop and introduced Stipe and Mills to such eternally hip underground bands as Suicide, Kraftwerk and Silver Apples. "I used to go in there and ask for the New York Dolls and the Velvet Underground," says Stipe. "So he would then recommend things that I would like. He's still doing it now."

While Stipe and Mills have developed other interests in their adult life beyond the band and music, Buck hasn't. He recently filled up the iPods of everyone who worked on REM's new album with songs that he thought they might like - and considering iPods can take up to 10,000 songs, this was a Herculean feat of downloading. "He's become obsessed with it," says Stipe. "He has done this for everyone who worked on our new record, including the engineers, who he had only known for a couple of weeks. What's interesting is to discover what he thinks we should be listening to. Mike got entire albums by Miles Davis, for example, while I only got the greatest hits. It must have taken him weeks, but he really isn't interested in anything apart from his family and music," adds Mills. "He reads books, and plays music, and hangs out with his family. That's it. So he loves the iPod because it gives him a chance to go through thousands of records that he hasn't played for the last 20 years."

The band that really inspired REM in the early days was the angular British new wave group the Gang of Four. "We opened for the Gang of Four and worked with them, and I lifted plenty of things wholesale from that band," admits Stipe. "From the way they looked on stage to the way the singer used phrasing and musical instruments at the same time." What made them so good? "You can't say why anyone is so good. You can put in psychology until you are blue in the face but it won't help you. I always really fucking hate it when people tell me why Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote great songs together because they just did. You should accept it as a given and walk away."

"They were one of the best live bands ever; focused and raw," says Mills, sensing my unease at having possibly incurred Stipe's wrath. "Growing up in Macon, Georgia, where not a lot of hip stuff filtered through, it was all very educational for me. I had never heard of the Velvet Underground until I moved to Athens, for example, and all of a sudden there was this world that I never knew existed before. The Gang of Four must have hit me at just the right moment." Macon, Georgia was, however, the place where Little Richard was born, and James Brown came from nearby Augusta. So Mills has been getting back to his roots and listening to those R&B legends, alongside Al Green and Marvin Gaye, whose music he heard as a child.

"I listen out for new bands, but I keep seeing the second generation of things. I mean, the White Stripes are great, but we knew the Flat Duo Jets, who the White Stripes got all their ideas from." Stipe, meanwhile, still likes all those awkward, angry new wave bands he discovered in his youth, in particular the electronic duo Suicide, who emerged from New York at the time of punk to be met with almost universal hostility. "Mike's the beauty guy and I'm the ugly guy," he says. "I still really like Suicide. They were so ahead of the curve and therefore really unpopular, as well they should be."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/homee...300799,00.html


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Dispatch From New Orleans

Room at the Tomb for Musicians

A family's crypt is opened to local artists who need a final place to rest.
Lianne Hart

NEW ORLEANS — She rode to the lounge in a pink limousine, cradling the box that held her husband's ashes. Inside the bar, under a ceiling of paper stars, she placed the box on a table that would serve as a shrine: There were candles, ceramic angels and an album cover showing the Ink Spots, the fabled quartet he had toured with for 20 years. Overseeing the tableau was a pink-suited mannequin arranged on a rattan throne draped with Christmas tinsel.

Here at the Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge lie the ashes of vocalist Lloyd Washington, who was 83 when he died of cancer in June. His shrine, a tribute by friends and fans, is a makeshift response to a sad and familiar problem: How to bury with dignity the artists who have enriched the musical legacy of this city but not themselves.

Like Washington, many of New Orleans' musicians never have seen a royalty check. Some are buried in a paupers' cemetery that is pocked with trash and crumbling, homemade tombstones.

Washington's widow, Hazel, wouldn't hear of such a thing. She'd sooner cast his ashes to the wind — and might have if friends hadn't talked her out of it. So, Hazel brought his ashes to the shrine, then went home to grieve and await some sort of resolution.

It came in the form of Paul Barbarin, heir to a large family tomb and part of a New Orleans musical dynasty. In a room at the Mother-in-Law lounge, with a bust of rumba-boogie pianist Professor Longhair nearby, Barbarin recently signed documents to grant use of his family's tomb to local musicians — rich or poor — who register to be buried there.

The Barbarins' musical roots in New Orleans date to the 1800s, when patriarch Isidore Barbarin played alto-horn and mellophone in the Excelsior Brass Band. Paul Barbarin, 73, is named after an uncle who died while leading a brass band in a Mardi Gras parade. More recently, his nephew — jazz trombonist Lucien Barbarin — has worked with Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr.

"People just want to do something for musicians who have done so much for this city," said Rob Florence, president of the preservation group Friends of New Orleans Cemeteries. Paul Barbarin, who lives in Los Angeles, declined to be interviewed.

Six of the eighteen vaults in the 20-foot-high Barbarin family tomb will be reserved for musicians, Florence said. Most crypts here are built above ground because the water table is so high. And with space at a premium, they often are reused. By law and tradition, a casket can be reopened a year and a day after interment. The remains may be removed and placed in a bag, which goes in a common area inside the tomb. This makes room for a new coffin.

Under this system, the musicians' tomb will be almost eternal, said Anna Ross, a member of the Friends of New Orleans Cemeteries. Ross is more than familiar with the city's pragmatic approach to death: In 2001, her daughter — a classically trained harpist — donated a vault in her family tomb for rhythm and blues man Ernie K-Doe. Last year, she reopened the tomb for musician Earl King.

K-Doe — known for the 1961 No. 1 hit "Mother-in-Law" — could have been buried in a family plot in the countryside, but he wanted to stay in the city. "If you're from New Orleans, you want to be buried in New Orleans," said his widow, Antoinette, who operates K-Doe's namesake bar. "It's good to have the musicians buried in one place so people don't have to go all over to look for them."

She fusses with the life-size mannequin at the club, meant to resemble her eccentric late husband. It's currently dressed in a Pepto-Bismol-pink suit. "See, our manicures are the same," she said, wriggling her fingers next to the mannequin's long, pink-and-white nails. "Sometimes, I take the hands off to get them manicured across the street."

She recalls when K-Doe, who was black, was buried in the tomb belonging to a white family. "We took a lot of heat for that," she said. Ross said that "some people asked: 'What are those white women doing with those bodies?' I promise you, no one is collecting dead, black musicians. It was just the right thing to do."

Washington will be the first to be interred in the musicians' tomb after it is dedicated in October. He was an early supporter of the idea, performing at a benefit last year where revelers tossed cash into a velvet and sequined coffin that half a dozen "pallbearers" paraded across the dance floor. Similar fundraisers will help pay for a $20,000 renovation of the Barbarin tomb's brick and plaster interior, Florence said.

On Nov. 2, All Saints' Day — set aside for paying respects to the dead — Washington's friends plan to meet at the Mother-in-Law lounge. A brass band is scheduled to lead a jazz procession to the historic St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, not far from the French Quarter. As Hazel Washington raises an index finger and drops it down — signifying the release of her late husband's spirit — the high-stepping, umbrella-twirling celebration will at last begin.

"My husband gave his voice and service to the world by singing and making many people happy," Washington said. "With the musicians' tomb, now people will know where to find him."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...la-home-nation


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Peer2Mail - Use Your Email Space to Share Files
Thomas Mennecke

A few months ago, Google launched G-Mail with stellar success. One of the enticing features of this free (for now) service is the allure of 1 gigabyte of storage space - probably way more than most people need. However, for those in the file-sharing community, this is an excellent apparatus for sharing files.

While breech of intellectual property rights may be the first thing to come into mind, the uses of such enormous space have many benign uses also. Those looking to send family or friends home movies, pictures, etc are also finding such space very useful.

Whatever your reasons happen to be, an interesting new tool has been developed to upload and download files to your email account. Rangeva, the developer of Sigster, Maileet and URLBlaze has another program to add to his string of middling P2P technology - Peer2Mail.

Peer2Mail is a program that does several things. Peer2Mail provides the framework necessary to upload large files onto your web email account. It breaks down a large file into 10, 5. 2.5 or 1 megabyte chunks since most email providers limit the attachment size. The upload is also encrypted to help protect one's privacy. In addition, Peer2Mail has a built in SMTP component so you do not have to provide your ISP email account information.

Peer2Mail also functions as a downloading client. If you wish to share a 100 mb file with your friend, you provide them with a password to your shared directory on the email server, and the individual can begin the download. Peer2Mail also reassembles the split file.

The potential uses of this program are many. However, the reaction of web email providers should prove interesting if their SMTP bandwidth goes ballistic.

Peer2Mail is free, fully functional and has no spyware/adware.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=566



About Peer2Mail

Peer2Mail is the first software that let you store and share files on your web-mail account. If you have a web mail account with large storage space, you can use P2M to store files on it. Web-mail providers such as Gmail (Google Mail), Walla!, Yahoo and more, provide storage space that ranges from 100MB to 2GB.

P2M splits the file you want to share/store zips and optionally encrypts it. P2M then sends the file segments one by one to your account. Once P2M uploaded all file segments, you can download them and use P2M to merge the segments back to the original file.

Peer2Mail is 100% FREE.

It’s as easy as sending an email.

· Peer2Mail gives you the ability to store files on your web-mail account. You can access and download those files from any computer.

· You can share files with your friends and family. Just create an email account, upload files to it, and give access to your family and friends.

· Peer2Mail automatically zips each segment; This way you save precious storage space on your web-mail account.

· Each segment is encrypted using AES algorithm to protect your privacy. You can set your own encryption key (password) to maximize your privacy.

· Peer2Mail has a built in SMTP component, so you can directly send files without a need for an SMTP server. If you wish, Peer2Mail can send files using your Outlook client.


http://www.peer2mail.com/


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The big get bigger

A Merger of Labels Puts Trove in Limbo
Allan Kozinn

In the weeks since American and European authorities approved the merger of the recorded-music businesses of Sony and Bertelsmann , two of the world's five biggest record companies, virtually all the discussion has been about what the deal means in the vast popular-music market, with barely a mention of the labels' classical catalogs.

From a corporate perspective that is probably as it should be: a hit pop disc, after all, will sell in the millions, but a classical release can sail to the top of the Billboard chart with sales of 10,000.

Yet along with the high-profile catalogs of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Franz Ferdinand (on the Sony side) and Elvis Presley, Avril Lavigne and Outkast (on the BMG side), the vaults of each company hold a priceless trove of master tapes that document the work of many of the greatest musicians of the last century. More broadly, these recordings offer an overview of American musical life through the late 1970's, when both companies began to lose interest in recording the top American orchestras, and European labels like Decca and Deutsche Grammophon moved in to take up the cause.

No one at either Sony or BMG, either in their classical divisions or among corporate spokesmen (to whom journalists are immediately referred by workers terrified to talk, lest they earn an instant spot on the list of 2,000 employees expected to be sacked), has been able to say what will become of the labels' classical operations. So faintly do the classics register on the corporate radar that BMG's spokesman, when told that his company had recorded the likes of Enrico Caruso, Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubinstein, said he was pleasantly surprised to hear it.

The future of the labels' backlists, alone, makes the decisions significant. Sony Classical, formerly known as Columbia and CBS Masterworks, owns the hundreds of recordings Leonard Bernstein made with the New York Philharmonic from the 1950's into the 70's. Prominent, too, are aging but revered recordings by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra; Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra; the violinists Isaac Stern, David Oistrakh and Zino Francescatti; the Juilliard String Quartet; and the pianists Rudolf Serkin and Vladimir Horowitz. And the extensive series of composer-directed recordings by Stravinsky, Copland and others, undertaken in the 1960's, shows how visionary the label once was.

In its heyday, RCA Red Seal, BMG's classical arm, also recorded a healthy chunk of the Horowitz catalog, as well as many Ormandy-Philadelphia recordings. For decades RCA recorded the Chicago Symphony, with Fritz Reiner, Jean Martinon and Georg Solti on the podium, and the Boston Symphony, with Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch and Erich Leinsdorf. Its archives also include much of the recorded legacy of Arturo Toscanini, leading both the New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony.

Those lists, of course, barely skim the surface. Both labels once ran important opera programs. The combined label's current stars would include the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; the pianists Emanuel Ax, Yefim Bronfman, Murray Perahia and Evgeny Kissin; the violinists Joshua Bell and Midori, and the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and the early music ensemble Sequentia.

The merger of Sony and BMG puts two of the record world's oldest rivals under one roof. RCA, through various permutations, can trace its artists and repertory program back to Fred Gaisberg, an 1890's defector from the Columbia Phonograph Company. But by the time both passed from American ownership in the 1980's, these venerable companies had been through tough times. Both had virtually abandoned operatic recording, and the rising cost of recording American orchestras led both to drop their contracts with the major American ensembles in favor of British, German and French orchestras that work less expensively. And both had devoted themselves increasingly to crossover projects - pop-tinged hybrids that sold briskly and briefly as novelties, but contributed little to the discourse of classical composition or performance and were regarded by most collectors as embarrassments.

So as sad as it was to watch what could only be seen as the abandonment of classical music by American corporations that had once prized it, there was also the hope that Sony, based in Japan, and Bertelsmann, based in Germany, might value these labels' classical lines in ways that their American owners did not.

For a time, that seemed to be the case, thanks in part to a spike in classical sales occasioned by the introduction of compact discs in the 1980's, and the subsequent rush by classical music fans to replace their favorite LP's with CD reissues.

As it turned out, the CD boom leveled off, and expansive new programs proved too costly for Bertelsmann and Sony. The Sony managers were laid off in 1995, and Peter Gelb moved from Columbia Artists Management (where his principal projects were Horowitz and a video line) to Sony. Mr. Gelb has essentially dismantled the line, now called Sony Classical, as a classical label. Although soloists like Mr. Ma and Mr. Ax occasionally release purely classical recordings, the push has been toward crossover projects. Bizarre releases, including an opera aria program ventured by Michael Bolton, the pop singer, have been vigorously promoted. So have soundtracks, an increasingly large share of the label's output ever since it had a freak hit with James Horner's score for "Titanic."

At BMG, things have been even more dire. Over the last five years, the label has dropped most of its stars, including the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, the conductors Leonard Slatkin and Sir Colin Davis, and the flutist Sir James Galway.

The company's current roster lists fewer than 10 performers, including Mr. Kissin, the soprano Vesselina Kasarova and the tenor Ramón Vargas. There is also, at the moment, no one really in charge. Gilbert Hetherwick, who moved to BMG from EMI Classics less than two years ago, has been administering the company's American arm and has undertaken an ambitious plan to remaster some of the company's great recordings in Super Audio, a new high-definition multichannel format.

But Mr. Hetherwick has not had full control of the company's recording program. That authority has rested with Nicholas Firth, who is also the head of Bertelsmann's music publishing arm. Because publishing is not part of the Sony-BMG merger, neither is Mr. Firth. It seems likely therefore that Mr. Gelb will end up at the helm of the combined company. He has proved, after all, that he can rake in heaps of money with soundtracks and crossovers, and although he has whittled the straightforward classical recording program to a trickle, he has kept a significant chunk of the back catalog in circulation, generally at reduced prices.

But unless the company's new recording program grows momentously - which is unlikely, given current corporate priorities - the most interesting and important material here is in the back catalog. Most of it was recorded decades ago for a fraction of what it costs to make a recording today, and because the greatest recordings have been steady if modest sellers, their costs were amortized long ago.

It would be sensible to put the back catalogs in the care of someone with a good grasp of what they hold, someone who understands them and is prepared to treat them as the cultural legacy that they are. And although the temptation will be to merge the catalogs, there is something to be said for letting the CBS and RCA backlists stand as separate pillars of the new company. They should remain as tributes to the producers who built CBS and RCA into the great labels they were, and as a reminder to the current crop of executives of what was once possible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/ar...ic/14sony.html


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It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood

"I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the 'Neighborhood' off- the-air, and I'm speaking for the 'Neighborhood' because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family's television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been 'You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.' Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."

- The Late Fred (Mr.) Rogers

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Sony-Led Group Makes a Late Bid to Wrest MGM From Time Warner
Andrew Ross Sorkin

A consortium led by the Sony Corporation of America reached a tentative agreement yesterday to buy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Hollywood studio famous for James Bond and the Pink Panther, for about $4.8 billion in cash, snatching it from Time Warner at the 11th hour.

The deal, which ends an auction that was filled with behind-the-scenes machinations for months, included one last surprise twist: Comcast, the cable giant, joined Sony's consortium as a strategic partner and a possible investor.

The Sony-led group, which includes the buyout firms Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group and DLJ Merchant Banking Partners, struck the deal with MGM just 24 hours before the studio had scheduled a board meeting to approve a deal with Time Warner.

If the transaction is completed, it will be the third time that Kirk Kerkorian, MGM's controlling shareholder, has sold the company since he first acquired shares in it in 1969. Final details of the deal are being worked out and it is subject to approval by both boards.

The deal caps a come-from-behind story for Sony, which originally bid for MGM in April but was unable to complete the deal after becoming bogged down in negotiations with its backers, opening the field to a rival offer from Time Warner.

With the last-minute addition of Comcast to the Sony-led consortium - a pact that was negotiated over the Labor Day weekend on Martha's Vineyard, where executives from Sony and the other investors converged on the summer house of Brian L. Roberts, Comcast's chairman - the group decided to raise its bid to $12 a share from $11.23 and also sweeten its offer further by offering a nonrefundable $150 million deposit. Time Warner had offered $11 a share and had guaranteed the deal's completion.

The Sony-led group could justify the higher bid because part of its deal with Comcast calls for the creation of several premium cable channels that will broadcast both Sony and MGM movies, adding an additional revenue stream for the company. In addition, Comcast will offer the movies through its video-on-demand service.

"We are very pleased with these new content agreements, which confirm the value of our scale and distribution platform," Mr. Roberts said in a statement.

For Comcast, its participation came with some reluctance. Having lost its hostile bid for the Walt Disney Company and been derided by investors for even making the offer, Mr. Roberts was wary about being part of another potentially unsuccessful bid for a content provider, executives close to the negotiations said. He was so insistent about not being on the losing team that he only signed onto the deal as a programming and distribution partner. He indicated to the group that Comcast would become an investor only after the deal was completed. To keep Comcast's role secret, MGM and even bankers for the Sony-led group were kept in the dark until the very last moment.

Time Warner pulled its offer off the table and decided against a higher bid when it learned early yesterday that the Sony-led group appeared to be the winner.

"Although MGM is a valuable asset, we have decided to withdraw our bid," Richard D. Parsons, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, Time Warner could not reach agreement with MGM at a price that would have represented a prudent use of our growing financial capacity."

While MGM may be famous for making films like "The Wizard of Oz," under the plan being developed by the Sony-led group, most of the movie studio operation would be shut down. Sony would license and distribute MGM's most valuable asset, its library of more than 4,000 films. Only the studio's best-known film series, like James Bond, would continue to be produced under the MGM brand through Sony.

In recent years, Alex Yemenidjian, the chief executive of MGM, turned the company around by focusing on its library while shrinking its studio business. As a result of the moves, the company produces an enormous amount of free cash flow compared with its rivals; the company forecasts $150 million to $200 million in free cash flow for 2004.

The arrangement with the consortium was originally conceived and structured by Sony, which already owns the Columbia and TriStar studios, so that it could gain access to MGM's library without having to pay the entire bill and take on additional debt, a requirement of its Japanese parent. MGM's library of films will not only give Sony additional revenue from next-generation DVD's, it will give it added weight in the looming fight over technology standards for those DVD's.

Despite nearly five months of back and forth inside the Sony-led group, the bid was kept alive by Jonathan M. Nelson, a founder of Providence Equity, and Robert S. Wiesenthal, Sony's executive vice president and chief financial officer, according to participants. Under the terms still being negotiated, Providence has committed to invest the most money, $450 million. Sony and Texas Pacific Group will each invest about $300 million, as will Comcast if the deal is completed. DLJ Merchant Banking Partners, a unit of Credit Suisse First Boston, will invest about $250 million. J. P. Morgan Chase will finance the deal with a $4 billion loan. Quadrangle Partners has been invited to become investor, the executives said, but has yet to make a commitment.

First Boston, J.P. Morgan and Citigroup advised the Sony-led consortium. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advised MGM.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/bu.../14studio.html


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Sony Set to Exert Influence on Discs
Ken Belson and Andrew Ross Sorkin

The purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by a group led by Sony will not only give the company an enormous film library but also considerable power in its fight to set the format for the next generation of digital video discs.

The transition to the new discs, which are not expected to be widely available until next year at the earliest, could generate billions of dollars in royalties to the developers of the technology that runs them. Sony, as part of the Blu-ray Disc Association, a consortium of major electronics makers, is at the forefront of efforts to develop the new technological standard.

As a major consumer electronics company, Sony could also reap the benefits of selling the new generation of disc players the new format would require. Sony's success in the standards battle is far from certain, because the rival HD DVD group, led by Toshiba and NEC, is championing its own format.

By buying MGM's studio and its library of movies, industry experts say, Sony is trying to tilt the long fight over the new DVD format in its direction.

Both consortiums say their new discs will hold four to five times more digital video and audio data than the DVD currently on the market, enough to store the high- definition programs and films that are slowly making their way to the consumer market.

The HD DVD group, which is showing off its technology to Hollywood studios this week, contends that its new discs are cheaper to make and more compatible with existing DVD technology. The Blu-ray group, which includes Panasonic, Philips and Samsung, however, says that its discs have the advantage because they offer superior images, among other benefits.

The key to resolving the tug of war between the two groups, experts say, will depend on the Hollywood studios because they provide most of the content that will go on the discs. The studios also have a huge stake in the change to the new technology because they now make more money from DVD sales than from box office sales. They also lose millions of dollars a year from pirated DVD's.

But with the exception of Sony's movie division, which includes the Columbia and TriStar studios, that naturally backs the Blu-ray format, the movie studios have so far avoided backing one standard despite intense lobbying by both the Blu-ray and HD DVD groups. By buying MGM, Sony will be adding another studio to the list of Blu-ray backers, and a catalog of 4,000 movies that could be issued exclusively in the Blu-ray format.

"It further tips scales that were already tipped toward Blu-ray," said Ross Rubin, a consumer electronics analyst at the NPD Group.

Executives close to Sony said that bolstering its position in the battle of DVD formats was one of several important factors in its decision to pursue MGM. Indeed, the management of Sony of America helped sell the idea of bidding for MGM to its Japanese parent in some early internal meetings by promoting "the Blu-ray angle," the executives said.

Still, the executives noted that the Blu-ray format was "only one reason" for pursuing a bid for MGM. The executives cited a litany of other financial and strategic reasons for the deal, including being able to exploit MGM's films on Sony's other platforms like its PlayStation game consoles and even its cellphones, which it makes through a joint venture with Ericsson.

A spokeswoman for Sony declined to comment.

Sony, though, faces several risks in buying MGM. By building a large film library, which makes up an estimated 17 percent of available film titles, Sony could end up threatening the same studios it is trying to win over to the Blu-ray group. Sony, intentionally or not, may give the appearance that it is willing to start producing Blu-ray discs on its own, regardless of what the HD DVD group does, or what the studios want.

The studios and retailers do not want two formats because that would confuse consumers, and may mean having to produce two sets of DVD's for each film release.

Sony "can pose a more credible threat to launch on their own," said Tom Adams, the president of Adams Media Research in Carmel, Calif. "On the other hand, Sony of all companies has been badly burned by having new technologies launched in two formats." Sony was the big loser in the battle over the video cassette format, with VHS becoming the dominant format over Sony's Betamax.

Indeed, if the studios sense that Sony and the Blu-ray group is pushing its format too hard, it may benefit the HD DVD group. The other studios could try to counter what they see as Sony's growing influence by backing the opposing format, industry analysts say.

A Toshiba spokesman, Keisuke Oomori, said Sony's acquisition of MGM would not affect the plans of the HD DVD group. The HD DVD group, he said, has made "substantial progress standardizing our formats" and is "gaining positive understanding for our format from the Hollywood studios."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/15/bu...ia/15sony.html


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The Right Ear Is From Mars
Anahad O'Connor

Belting out a few notes on key might take years of practice, and perfect pitch the right genetics, but when it comes to something as simple as telling noise from symphony, speech from music, all ears are created equal - or so it was once thought.

But in a new study, scientists have found that the left and right ears process sound differently. From birth, the right ear responds more to speech, while the left ear is more attuned to music, according to the study, published in Science on Sept. 10.

The findings could have substantial implications for deaf people who need cochlear hearing devices, which are implanted in only one ear, said Dr. Yvonne Sininger, a visiting professor of head and neck surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author of the study.

While the idea that the left and right ears are not identical is new, scientists have known for decades that the two sides of the brain sort out sound in different ways. Speech is processed primarily in the left hemisphere of the brain, while music is handled largely by the right, hence the tendency to associate creativity with "right- brain" dominance and analytical thinking with "left-brain" supremacy.

But until now, most researchers overlooked the possibility that differences in auditory processing originated in the ear. "I think everyone just assumed that the two ears were essentially interchangeable," Dr. Sininger said.

With help from researchers at the University of Arizona, Dr. Sininger tested hearing ability in thousands of infants using miniature microphones that emitted sounds in the subjects' ears and measured amplification. Tiny cells in the ear respond to sound by expanding and contracting to enhance vibrations, which are then converted to nerve impulses that travel to the brain. But some of those vibrations bounce back in the opposite direction, allowing scientists to analyze the extent of amplification, a measure of how well the ear is responding.

Dr. Sininger found that a series of rapid clicks - resembling the rhythm of speech - produced a greater response in the right ear. The left ear seemed more attuned to tones representing music.

In other studies, researchers have found that children with hearing loss in the right ear tend to have more problems in school than children who are deaf in the left ear. The new findings suggest that the right ear is critical for learning situations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/science/14ear.html


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In Brief

"So when people come up to me and say, 'Well, sure wish we had wonderful American shows like that the way we used to in the 50's,' I say, 'Let me tell you who wrote those scripts.' Yes, they were good Americans, and they were in jail." – Lassie star June Lockhart on the TV show’s blacklisted writers.

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File-Sharing Leaps From Internet To Cellphones
Will Knight

Music, videos and games could soon be swapped between cellphones using a mobile file-sharing network developed by phone maker Nokia.

Lorant Farkas and colleagues, at the Nokia Research Center in Budapest, Hungary, have adapted the peer-to- peer (P2P) schemes used by internet users to share files and tested them on their 6600 model cellphones.

Computers connected to a P2P network act as both client and server and also relay messages to neighbouring computers, removing the need for a centralised server. Popular internet file-sharing networks such as Gnutella and Kazaa allow users to search one another's hard drives for music or video files and then download them directly.

The prototype network developed by Farkas can currently be used to share images and text. "Nowadays you can take pictures and record videos with a smart phone," Farkas told New Scientist. "We were primarily thinking of this kind of content."

But future versions should go further. Farkas says developing the ability to share digital music, compressed in formats such as MP3, is also a priority.

Design challenges

Nokia's system works on cellphones that connect to GPRS networks, which are designed to make it cheap to
stay online. Users are charged for the data they receive and send rather than the length of time they are connected.

Even so, the team faced several challenges when designing the file-sharing system. The network is less resilient than the internet and cellphones have less bandwidth, processing power, storage and battery life than the average internet-connected PC.

In conjunction with researchers at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the Nokia researchers developed a cellphone network simulator to model the way different types of P2P network would work.

They began with an optimised P2P network structure known as “parallel index clustering”. This divides the users of a network into clusters to increase efficiency. Each member of a cluster keeps a list of the files stored within their cluster and can respond to queries from outside on behalf of everyone inside it.

The researchers then tried several schemes for communicating between users and clusters to see which worked best. They found a complex structure known as "deterministic ring" to be ideal, blending fast searching with network resilience.

Movie industry pressure

But, even with a workable network structure, mobile file-sharing may not mirror the development of internet file-
sharing. For one thing, file-sharing has faced massive pressure from the music and movie industries, because the majority of files traded are copyrighted.

Adam Langley, a UK-based P2P programmer says the biggest obstacle to mobile file-sharing is likely to come from this quarter. "The major problems with them are not technical," he says.

Richard Edwards, research analyst with the Butler Group, based in the UK, adds that network operators have traditionally controlled what can be downloaded, because they can make money from providing access to content.

"It will continue to be a walled garden for quite some time," he told New Scientist. "But the phone companies have to be seen to be innovative." Edwards foresees a different version of file-sharing appearing for mobile devices: "We'll probably see various mutant ideas emerging."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/pri...?id=ns99996394


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Wireless Gets Up Close

Wireless transmissions that travel only a few centimeters may be just the ticket for embedding cell phones with smart-card technology.
Eric S. Brown

When comparing wireless transmission range, longer is almost always better. Yet the developers of a new technology called Near Field Communications, or NFC, boast not about how long a distance it works over, but how short.

With a range of just 10 centimeters, NFC can get by with a very small, low-cost radio transmitter that draws only a pittance of power. Its very feebleness of transmission helps to ensure security. Forget about a hacker snooping on your Wi-Fi session from a laptop outside the building— with NFC, even a colleague sitting next to you at a meeting may be too far away to sniff the signal. Yet if you do want to swap data and move your NFC device next to hers, the connection is immediate. What's more, you can take the same device down the hall and use it to buy a soda from a vending machine. These attributes were enough to convince Nokia, and as of August 30, Samsung, to announce that their next-generation cell phones will come equipped with NFC chips. Nokia's NFC-enabled handsets are promised by the end of the year.

For handset vendors, NFC represents a low-cost entry into the smart card market. Cell phone users could potentially use their phones as “contactless” smart cards for electronic turnstiles, event ticketing, and even checking out at the supermarket. The technology would also let users display images from a digital camera phone on a nearby TV, graze promotional offers from subway billboards, or swap contact information between devices. And with the help of Philips and Sony, the two consumer electronics giants that jointly developed the technology, the low-cost radio chips could appear in everything from TVs to PCs to digital cameras. The market research firm ABI Research predicts that by 2009, NFC-enabled products will account for half the cellular handset market.

Near Field Communications adheres to a standard ratified last year that specifies transfer speeds up to 424 kilobits per second operating at a frequency of 13.56 megahertz. (Early NFC devices will be limited to half that speed.) NFC offers a much shorter range than the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology on which the new standard is based: 10 centimeters instead of 2 to 5 meters. But like RFID, NFC transmits information via inductive electromagnetic coupling in the radio frequency portion of the spectrum.

The key difference is that NFC adds software that enables instant setup of peer-to-peer networking. As with P2P wireless communications between Bluetooth- or ZigBee-enabled devices, NFC devices automatically seek each other out and establish a communications link. (The popular Wi-Fi wireless networking technology is different, as it requires an access hub.) This P2P approach also differs from RFID networks, which are set up in a master/slave relationship in which passive chips are read by expensive, powered “reader” devices. NFC devices, on the other hand, can be set to either passive or active mode, so they can send identification data even when the device is turned off (passive mode), making it ideal for smart card applications. At the same time it is also capable of playing the active role, orchestrating communications with other active or passive RFID-based devices.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...091404.asp?p=0


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New P2P Software Could End Illegal Music Squabbles
Ashlee Vance

Welcome to the world of legal online music ambiguity. Say hello to Grouper.

Grouper - a temporarily stealth software project - has gone up for download and instantly created a confusing divide between the old world and the new. Unlike most P2P software that shares music and other files with world+dog, Grouper focuses on sharing files between friends. Users can set up mini-P2P networks and open up their photos, music, movies and documents. This approach seems much more similar to old-style content swapping where friends handed each other a mixed CD or recording of the UT versus Texas A&M football game, just with a techie twist.

In addition, the Grouper software does not let users download each others' music. Instead, it only permits streams of music files, while permitting downloads of other content. This creates a nice response to subscription services from the likes of Real and Napster that allow customers to stream and download all the music in the world, ignoring the fact that most consumers want music they like instead of all the music ever produced. People can now browse their friends' music collections - a tempting proposition given that friends will likely have similar tastes but also have new flavors to share as well.

The software itself isn't particular new. It has been possible to set up these types of peer networks for ages. What Grouper does is make the process painfully easy.

The software only works on Windows 2000 and Windows XP at the moment, which has left 7GB of my Mac music in a hostage crisis. And it's still in beta form, crashing once in the last couple of hours. It has, however, worked like a champ once ActiveX was enabled in XP - seemed worth the risk at the time - and has been tapped into a friend's machine in Texas for some time without problem.

Users link into the Grouper network via an e-mail confirmation process. Once in the software, you can pick the files you'd like to share and off you go. Grouper has a nice GUI that shows all the available files, the users linked in, the transfers and a Microsoft media player.

The music labels have complained for ages that P2P software allowed people to share files on an unnaturally large scale, and Grouper seems to solve this problem. Now, you're just using technology as a better means of sharing among friends. In addition, since it does not allow actual downloads of music, the software seems to be treading an uncomfortable line that the labels should not be able to complain too much about. How much of an effect on sales could just streaming chums' music have?

Beyond all of this, the software ensures solid downloads for users. No more dealing with suspect files put out by the RIAA or script kiddies. It's your friends' good name on the line, and that should be trusted.

At the moment, the company won't say word one about its plans. It hopes to have an official launch in 10 days time and will talk to the press then. A company official told us that it hoped to be in stealth mode until that time. Too late (http:// www.grouper.com/).

There is a goofy quality to the About section of the Grouper web site. One coworker suggested that it's so childishly Google-like that the whole site could be some kind of teenager's fantasy. We, however, have been assured that this is the real deal. Maybe Google can loan the Grouper folks some colored balls.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09...per_p2p_launc/


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Court Rules Against Pennsylvania Law That Curbs Child-Pornography Sites
Tom Zeller Jr.

A federal court struck down a Pennsylvania law yesterday, ruling that the state could no longer force Internet service providers to block customers' access to Web sites thought to be distributing child pornography.

The decision is considered a broad victory for both free speech and Internet-rights advocates who have argued that although the Internet Child Pornography Act of Pennsylvania was well-intentioned, its methods and unintended effects were unconstitutional.

Sean Connolly, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania attorney general, Jerry Pappert, said his office was reviewing the 110-page decision and might appeal. "We're disappointed with the court's ruling," he said. "This law was designed to block access to child pornography. We believe it has worked well in Pennsylvania."

The law - the only one of its kind in the United States and one that other states have watched closely as it was challenged in court - required Internet service providers doing business in Pennsylvania, upon notification by the attorney general's office, to disable access to specified child pornography items "residing on, or accessible through, its service." That proviso, opponents of the law argued, made Internet service providers liable for offending material that might reside on a private computer on the other side of the globe.

Fearing criminal penalties and the negative publicity associated with appearing to resist legal curbs on child pornography, many local and national Internet carriers had little choice but to comply with the Pennsylvania law.

"The blocking affected the global network," said John Morris, a staff lawyer with the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. "So a customer in England might not be able to access a site in Spain because of a law in Pennsylvania."

The Center for Democracy and Technology, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and a small Pennsylvania Internet carrier, filed a challenge to the law last year. They argued that, in addition to procedural problems with the law, it was technically impossible for providers to isolate a single offending site, and so entire swaths of innocent sites were being blacked out with each blocking order.

Judge Jan E. Dubois was ultimately persuaded that given the current state of technology "the Act cannot be implemented without excessive blocking of innocent speech in violation of the First Amendment."

The court also found that the law violated interstate commerce rules established by the Constitution.

"The Pennsylvania law was an aberration in the way the states approached this," said Stewart A. Baker, the general counsel for the United States Internet Service Providers Association, a trade group. "Our members always thought it was a distraction from the extensive efforts they make to work with law enforcement to address child pornography."

For its part, the Pennsylvania attorney general's office maintains that the technological shortcomings cited by the plaintiffs and Internet service providers, or I.S.P.'s, were simply untrue. "We argued in court that the technology does exist to block individual sites that contain child porn," Mr. Connolly said, "and if other sites were blocked by the I.S.P., then the I.S.P. was doing something wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/te.../11filter.html


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ANts P2P2P: A New Approach to File- Sharing
Michael Ingram

With traditional P2P, file sharers make a direct connection to the computer that is hosting the file they demand. Both parties in the transaction know what file is being transferred, and each other’s IP addresses. This provides users of the network with no privacy and ultimately makes them vulnerable to lawsuits in many countries.

But now there has been increasing interest in anonymising networks. These use clever mathematics to route data through the network in such a way that nobody knows who released the file onto the network, or who wants it, only what direction it needs to travel to get there. Although users on the network know the IP addresses of their neighbors, when those neighbors receive a file, users do not know if the sender is the file seed, or just a proxy from another user. This is oversimplified in comparison to the complexities of these networks, more details of which can be found on the MUTE website.

The first of these anonymising networks to attract attention was MUTE, but now another developer has given us a second, called ANts.

ANts is being developed by Gwren, who lives in an undisclosed coastal town in Italy. He has an interest in software engineering solutions, algorithms and computation theory, which he turned to the development of ANts as part of a university project.

Although inspired by MUTE, Gwren is keen to emphasize the different motivation behind the two projects. Jason Rohrer, the developer of MUTE, is motivated through disgust of how the music industry has behaved in reaction to the perceived threat from file sharing. This contrasts with Gwren, who has been developing ANts because of its potential importance in future communication systems. Unlike Jason, Gwren does not promise, or even believe, that ANts can provide full legal protection.

Slyck decided to investigate the features and power of MUTE and ANts. This article features Fred von Lohmann, who is currently one of America’s most important Intellectual Property Attorneys, Gwren, the developer of ANts, and Graham Morris, who is an information security specialist from England.

Privacy

Before looking at the legal protection offered by anonymising P2P, we will first analyse the protection of privacy they provide.

“Privacy, sadly, doesn't mean protection against the law," Gwren explains.

Fred von Lohmann, the Senior Intellectual Property Attorney for the EFF, highlights the importance of the privacy provided by these networks. “It is important to remember that anonymizing proxy networks have lots of uses unrelated to file- sharing, including for anonymous web browsing, email, and instant messaging,” he told Slyck.

MUTE provides very low-level privacy. Although the information travelling between individual nodes is encrypted, each node has full access to the data travelling through the network.

This contrasts with ANts, which also encrypts data sent between the source node and the destination node. This is called endpoint encryption. Theoretically, endpoint encryption means proxy nodes cannot identify the data they proxy.

“A network where only point-to-point communication is encrypted is not private! Every node can read everything it is routing (is this privacy? The Internet works like this and we know its limits). Using endpoint encryption, which implies only an insignificant amount of overhead, you get real privacy, because only the two who communicate can decrypt the messages,” Gwren explains.

To discover the effect endpoint encryption, Slyck contacted an information security specialist, Graham Morris, who is a graduate of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Morris was impressed with the security level provided by ANts, describing it as, “a file sharing program that goes a long way to offering anonymity and confidentiality.”

However, he also had some criticism. To obscure the files being transferred so that proxies cannot identify them, the encryption mechanism “The Advanced Encryption Standard” (AES) is used. To be able to do this, the two file sharers must have a secret code (or “key”) that only they know. For them both to know the key, the Diffe- Hellman (DH) Key Exchange Protocol is used, but Morris raised some questions over the implementation of DH in ANts.

“The security of the system relies on this key exchange, but anyone could potentially launch a man-in-the-middle attack. This attack would allow an adversary to obtain the secret key and see the file being transferred,” he said.

This is usually combated with trusted third party involvement using “certificates”. These certificates are not implemented in the ANts network. To a determined node, ANts therefore provides no extra information security.

“I never said this program will not support certificates,” Gwren defends, “ANts is still beta, the next releases will support this feature. This means it will be possible to create internal communities based on certificate exchanges. The current endpoint DH exchange is very important, as it provides the bases for easily adding the certificate exchange at a later date. It is therefore not just an overhead.”

Endpoint encryption is a suitable system for groups of trusted peers to use. However, Morris still has some concerns.

“Implementing a certificate system is not a simple task. You need to be able to create, issue and revoke certificates, and you need a party that you trust to do this securely. You also remove anonymity, and may even introduce the concept of non- repudiation. This means that after sharing a file, you can’t later deny that you were the source.”

Ultimately this raises further questions of the use of an anonymising system between trusted peers. Indeed, if you trust them, why not make a direct connection? However, Morris is clear that there are many different methods of employing certificates. To discuss and analyze even one system would be a report in itself.

Whatever structure is used for trading amongst trusted peers, we know this is not how mass scale P2P networks operate. Users mainly communicate with untrustworthy peers, existing only as an IP address. As demonstrated by Morris, ANts cannot promise security between these majority transfers, due to lacking certificates.

But how much does this even matter? If the file is public enough to be in a shared folder, then how much does it really matter that proxy nodes can read the message?

Gwren described this issue as, “very complex, almost philosophical.”

This practical result is easiest summarized in two sections. The first, what ANts means to those who are trading in trusted groups. The second section looks at the more common scenario of users trading with unknown peers.

Trading in trusted groups

Highly dependant on the realization of certificates, communication between endpoints will be virtually impossible to break. This will ensure absolute privacy. Such a system will be akin to the waste network, but with the benefits of swarming.

The MUTE network does not provide this confidentiality.

However, questions remain as to how ANts will remain an anonymising system, whilst sources and recipients certify the file transfer.

It also represents the use of some very important software technology.

Trading between untrustworthy peers

Who reads the message is of little or no importance, as the information is public anyway. In turn, the weakness in the endpoint encryption is of no relevance.

Instead of privacy, users are provided anonymity.

“Anonymous means that nobody knows who puts something in the network. Say you want to talk ill of your employer. What do you do? You write anonymous letters to 200 people… each one of them will know perfectly well who their mailman is (in ANts’ case, it’s their neighbor, a well-known IP): the mailman is delivering the letter. But nobody will know who sent the letter,” Gwren explains.

The network also provides security for this through point-to-point encryption, as Gwren nicely illustrates:

Continuing his postman theme, “Regarding security, it refers to those cases in which someone puts a video camera in your house and gets a tape proving that you’re the one who wrote the letter. Thanks to encryption, ANts impedes an attack of this sort. Nobody can sniff out the packets to prove that you put any content on line.”

It should be pointed out that this anonymity and security, although very strong, is no more than provided by MUTE.

Legal Protection

Legal protection is increasingly what file sharers are caring about when choosing a file sharing application. Numerous music lovers have fallen victim to lawsuits against file sharers. With over 4500 such cases in America, along with a mass of cease and desist letters worldwide, protection from the prying eyes of organizations who think they are the law becomes ever more important.

In anonymising networks, it is impossible to detect who seeded a file. The same routing mechanism that provides anonymity also provides legal protection. As files make their way through the network, no peer can know if the file they are receiving has come from the original source or a proxy.

This system destroys the current targeting method used by organizations that object to the sharing of certain files. In traditional file sharing systems, file sources are tied to an IP address. But it is this attachment of IP address and file that makes targeting users sharing copyright works, for example, such an easy process. In anonymising networks, files are tied only to a virtual address. More details of how this provides legal protection can be found on the MUTE website.

Any two computers that are directly connected in a network are called neighbors. Neighbours must know each other’s IP addresses in order to keep the connection. As already established, when neighbors send each other files, the receiver does not know if their neighbor is the original seed, or a proxy. However, they do know their IP address and what has been sent.

“ANts and MUTE are anonymous, you never know who put the information onto the net,” Gwren explains nicely. “The problem is that you do know who is passing that information on to you. It’s like anonymous mail: you know the postman but you don't know the sender. ANts offers an additional element of security, because the postman cannot read your mail (unless he is the sender himself, but you have no way of knowing this!).”

Proxies are therefore in a weak position, as any peer can catch their neighbor proxying an objectionable file.

Slyck therefore sought to discover the legal implications of being a proxy in a file sharing network.

“It would be like killing the postman because he delivered a letter you don’t like,” Gwren joked.

Turning to a lawyer instead, Fred von Lohmann explained, “The law is simply unclear. No court has ever considered whether you can be held liable for copyright infringement simply for proxying data in a network. EFF strongly believes that the answer should be that, assuming you have no knowledge of what the packets are that you're passing, you should not be liable for the contents of the packets. That is, after all, the rule for ISPs. The same rule should apply for individuals,” he explained.

If the law favors the EFF view, then neither MUTE nor ANts peers can be held liable for proxying objectionable files. Although ANts provides endpoint encryption, the average user of MUTE would not know where to begin discovering what they are proxying. The overhead of endpoint encryption provided by ANts would therefore be wasted in a legal context.

When questioned about this, Gwren admitted that he does not know if the encryption is a wasted overhead or not. After all, the encryption is not in place for legal protection.

“Sorry, I'm not a lawyer, and I have no idea of law-related issues,” he explained. “I can only say that ANts protects your privacy and it is 100% secure only if you are communicating with a known trusted peer. The point is that a “cancerous” peer [any node which challenges the integrity of the network] can easily identify its neighbors; making them vulnerable to legal action should proxies be held responsible for the data they unknowingly pass on. Using ANts, it is possible to provide scientific evidence that the intermediate node did not know what it was routing, as a DH- secured channel between two endpoints is unbreakable.”

When questioned further about legal issues and encryption, Gwren reminded Slyck, “ANts was not born to break the law, it was born to give endpoint privacy in ad-hoc routing systems.”

So it currently appears that ANts and MUTE do provide protection from the law, but it will be last word to the lawyers and the courts. The biggest question will be whether proxies can be held responsible. Then we will see the value, if any, of endpoint encryption. It is also worth noting that the EFF are convinced that proxies will be safe even in the event of the INDUCE Act passing.

In the mean time, users can help themselves by manually connecting to neighbors they know and trust. By doing so, users can download from untrustworthy peers, with the safety of the information being sent via a trusted peer.

By having all users connecting solely to IP addresses they trust, users can develop sub-networks, where each user can operate safe in the knowledge that the only people who can see their IP address, are those who they have deemed trustworthy to.

The Future of Anonymising P2P

File sharers swapping the latest pop-track is one thing, but less savory characters may use the system to commit crimes. Pedophiles for example could use the system to hide their activities. Users of the network would unknowingly be proxying child pornography.

Gwren is quick to defend the development of anonymous P2P, saying, “with this way of reasoning, people should still live in caves. Do you think the US forefathers thought of this sort of thing when they first set up the US Mail service? Our mail is still protected today. No one can open a letter I send to you, and doing so is breaking the law. Privacy is a constitutional right all over the world and it must be protected."

Although there may not be a worldwide constitutional right, Gwren makes a valid point that such people should not hold back development of the Internet. The risks involved of proxying such material will be down to individuals to think about before joining. It really is impossible to have it both ways.

As networks become more anonymous, further problems will arise. Anonymity is also provided to those fighting the development of P2P technology. Data and information can be corrupted in transit. Rohrer, the MUTE developer, once said, “It is impossible to have both true anonymity and true message security/integrity.” A view supported by Gwren. This may translate into more corrupt files and wasted bandwidth in the future, as groups corrupt files in transit, rather than sharing files already corrupted.

Beta tests of MUTE have so far been successful. ANts in comparison is still too young to be making any judgments.

Both networks will be working hard to improve their services. ANts already features multiple source downloads, swarming and resumable transfers, all absent from MUTE.

MUTE is the easier network to connect to, as there is no need to visit an IRC room. However, Gwren argues this represents a more sophisticated connection system.

“MUTE uses a web cache. I preferred not to use a web cache because I don't like to store the user’s IP on a website. So ANts uses a volatile IP cache that is hosted on the network itself,” Gwren explains, “In comparison, the system is very advanced, because it can exchange IPs through the network itself and be transparent to NATs and firewalls.”

The value of the endpoint encryption used by ANts and not MUTE can only be determined by the file sharers themselves.

So where is anonymising P2P taking us?

“Have you seen Jurassic Park?” Gwren asks. “Remember what the park creator said... ‘Life will find a way’. I don't know what this way will be, but I'm sure that people will find a way to exchange information in a secured and efficient way... this is what people want, and we live in democracy.”
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=567


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College Backs Off Wi-Fi Ban
Richard Shim

High-tech tensions at the University of Texas at Dallas are easing, as administrators are curtailing the regulation of private hot spots in campus housing, but problems with interference may continue.

Administrators issued a regulatory policy last Wednesday barring students from installing certain types of Wi-Fi networks in campus housing. Students were not allowed to use 802.11g or 802.11b products, but they could set up equipment using the less-popular 802.11a standard. The policy was in response to complaints that the unregulated hot spots were interfering with the university's own wireless service, which is offered freely to students and staff, campus technology administrators said.

However, the policy was lifted last Friday, because it was not clear that the university had the legal right to enforce the policy, according to Steve McGregor, spokesman for the university.

"That campus housing is not a traditional dorm...they're not owned by the university, so, upon review, we didn't feel comfortable regulating those private hot spots," McGregor said.

Students also pointed to a public notice from the Federal Communication Commission dated June 24, which affirmed the consumer's right to install and operate unlicensed equipment.

Interference from overlapping Wi-Fi hot spots is becoming a common problem with the growing popularity of the technology. The radio spectrum used with Wi-Fi technology is unlicensed, or unregulated. This makes Wi-Fi easy to develop and cheap to sell, but it leaves individuals or technology makers to solve problems such as interference as they arise.

"We've seen substantial growth of hot spots in campus housing, which has led to interference between apartments," McGregor said. "Folks will have to figure it out individually."

The inexpensive and easy-to-install nature of Wi-Fi technology has made it popular in colleges and universities, which have been a hotbed for experimenting with and developing new wireless broadband services.

Restricting installation of Wi-Fi networks has been a common tactic to prevent interference. Large companies have even gone as far as buying technology to seek out "rogue access points"--unauthorized Wi-Fi hot spots within businesses--and to disabled them. The risk being that those hot spots are essentially unsecure holes, exposing corporate information.

The University of Texas at Dallas was founded as a private research institution by Texas Instruments, which is a major player in the wireless networking industry. The institute was turned over to the state in 1969. More than 14,000 students attend the school.
http://news.com.com/College+backs+of...3-5369921.html


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SIPShare: P2P SIP-Based Filesharing From Earthlink
Clay

Acronym-laden craziness! Earthlink has released SIPShare, a proof-of- concept P2P filesharing network that uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a tool originally designed for voice and video communications, to set up file sharing networks.

EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler —- much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way. The emerging ubiquity of SIP as a general session-initiation enabler provides a rare opportunity to offer users all manner of P2P applications over a common protocol, instead of inventing a new protocol for each new P2P application that comes along.

Written in Java, with a BSD-style license, so it should be extensible in a way that Skype, Grouper, et al are not. Will be interesting to see if anyone uses this as a base for file-sharing + group communications.
http://www.corante.com/many/archives..._earthlink.php


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P2P from the folks at Earthlink

Standards-based Distributed Networking
EarthLink Research and Development

Introducing EarthLink SIPshare

EarthLink SIPshare, a simple, SIP-based proof-of-concept content sharing application, demonstrates the viability of SIP as a protocol over which peer-to-peer (P2P) applications other than the well-known voice and video cases may be implemented. (SIPshare is not a supported EarthLink product. Please see the Disclaimer below).

Features

· Peer discovery - Given a few bootstrap hosts, peers learn of other peers using standard SIP messages.
· Fully distributed content search - Searches for content are distributed across the network from one peer to another, on behalf of a third peer.
· File Transfer - As a proof-of-concept application, share documents, photos, and other files with peers on the network via standard SIP messaging, and completed using a simple UDP-based file transfer protocol.
· Standards based - Network assembly, search, and download are all established using standard SIP messaging.
· Cross-platform - Written in Java, so EarthLink SIPshare runs on many platforms --- without modification.

Motivation

EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler --- much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way.

The emerging ubiquity of SIP as a general session-initiation enabler provides a rare opportunity to offer users all manner of P2P applications over a common protocol, instead of inventing a new protocol for each new P2P application that comes along.

EarthLink wants to point the way and aid the cause of these new applications by demonstrating in open source working code that SIP can host poweful applications beyond those that immediately come to mind, that is, voice and video.

We chose file sharing to illustrate how SIP can be used to build an alternate P2P application, but file sharing itself is not the point --- file sharing, of course, has been done. EarthLink SIPshare demonstrates that it is conceivable that voice over IP, where voice is just content of a different form, itself can be implemented using SIP in a fully standards-based P2P network. In other words, the effect of Skype, but with one important difference: using standards-based protocols, as EarthLink SIPshare does for content sharing.

We are not the first to consider voice over P2P, or alternate P2P implementation methods, but we want to help herald the possibilities with an application like EarthLink SIPshare. SIP is too important to consider use only for voice, or only for video.
http://www.research.earthlink.net/p2p/


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Piracy Patrol Eyes Radio

Music could record broadcasts
Evan Pondel

The recording industry, which has shut down online jukeboxes and sued individuals to stem massive losses in music sales, now fears songs streamed over Internet radio sites could be pirated.

The Recording Industry Association of America is turning its focus to software that essentially allows listeners to use a personal computer just like a conventional tape deck for AM/FM radio.

But as Internet radio becomes increasingly popular, so does the drive to monitor how consumers receive music.

"The problem arises when people record broadcasts and turn them -- potentially -- into music libraries with songs they haven't paid for," said Steven Marks, general counsel for the RIAA. "And we are very concerned about the actual software that permits people to transform broadcasts into music libraries."

Jambalaya Brands is the manufacturer of Audio Xtract, software that enables consumers to record Internet radio broadcasts. The St. Louis-based company says the recordings are intended only for personal use, eliminating any legal friction that has surfaced for peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as Napster.

But concern has also surfaced regarding continuous streaming of radio broadcasts versus the transfer of individual music files. That issue is particularly close to Vytas Safronikas, who owns and operates Santa Clarita-based bornagainradio.com. Broadcasting Christian contemporary music 24 hours a day, Safronikas streams the music so listeners receive it much like a broadcast from a conventional radio. The process -- requiring a combination of digital and analog equipment -- eliminates the ability to extract individual music files.

"The quality is probably just as good as an FM station," said Safronikas, who also works as a news reporter for KNX-AM (1070).

Though the RIAA hasn't brought any formal action against purveyors of Internet radio, the Washington-based lobbying group has warned federal regulators about the dangers of high-definition radio. The superior quality could be ideal for pirating, prompting yet another thorn in the side of the music industry.

Such vigilance has its downside, though. Russell Hauth, senior vice president at radio station operator Salem Communications, said the RIAA is using Internet radio as a justification to charge unreasonable royalties. The result: Camarillo-based Salem is not streaming nearly as much as it otherwise would, Hauth said.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 dictates the method in which radio stations stream via the Internet. Many executives perceive the act as an overzealous bandage that obstructs more business than it protects. "In many ways the act has put so many restrictions on the broadcaster that many have stayed away from the Internet in droves," Hauth said.

Safronikas pays about $3,000 in royalties on an annual basis. And while the amount is relatively trivial when compared with what a large commercial station pays, Safronikas said he certainly feels the financial effects.

Don Barrett, publisher of Valencia-based LARadio.com, said if people are paying the appropriate royalty fees there shouldn't be concern about illicit behavior. "And by the time you factor all of the effort the masses go through to record movies and music, people still go and buy the material," Barrett said.

But Jambalaya officials believe the RIAA's agenda is focused on Internet recording devices because other anti-piracy campaigns have failed. "When courts recently ruled that peer-to-peer technology is legal, the urgency of the RIAA's other angles of attack were heightened," a company spokesman said in a printed statement.

The RIAA disagrees. Instead, Marks said, companies such as Jambalaya are creating software that enables consumers to slice and dice music, something analog devices were not able to do. And the more popular the software, the greater the risk that people will not pay for music, he said.

Posing a solution is Transmedia, a New York-based company that helps consumers and companies manage audio and video files. Subscribers pay for the service and immediately have access to a multimedia network.

"And then you share the information and get away from the problem of duplication," said Donald Leka, chairman and chief executive officer. "People need to start getting behind the idea of sharing as opposed to being reactive."
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1...04230,00.html#


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RIAA After Consumers...Again
Agitator!!

In a quietly-submitted letter dated August 16, 2004, lawyers for the RIAA warned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of a "real and imminent" threat, citing the recently introduced internet radio recording software Audio Xtract, which allows consumers to use their PC -- just like a VCR for TV or a tape deck for AM/FM radio -- to legally record internet radio broadcasts for personal use.

Over the past couple of years, the RIAA has aggressively pursued individuals who use the popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks, bringing lawsuits against thousands in support of the powerful music industry it was created to protect and promote. Their legal position in these civil suits may be less than crystal clear, however. A recent New York Times article asserts that downloading music from the internet is legal, stating that " ... the fine print of those lawsuits makes clear that fans are being sued not for downloading but for unauthorized distribution ... "

So when the courts recently ruled that peer-to-peer technology is legal even if used for illegal purposes, the urgency of the RIAA's other angles of attack was heightened, with the RIAA even more determined to use its vast political clout to change the laws. On one front is the proposed Piracy Deterrence and Education Act which would outlaw certain peer-to-peer file-sharing activities. On another, the RIAA wants the government to require "broadcast flags" on streaming digital content to gain control over what hardware devices can play the music. Once encrypted with this broadcast flag, decoding a digital stream could then be considered a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a controversial law that provides little leeway for consumers, even for personal use. HR 107 has been proposed to restore a fair use provision in the DMCA, but there has been limited progress recently with upcoming elections and a strong lobbying effort by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). On a third front, the proposed "Induce Act" would hold manufacturers liable for products that allow illegal downloading or file-sharing. The opposition from groups like the Consumer Electronics Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been predictably fierce.

And what are consumers up to amidst all this legal maneuvering? While internet radio recording hardware and software -- like Audio Xtract -- have been available in some form for years, surging consumer interest in internet radio threatens the current business model of the recording and music industries. Rather than pursue a solution that meets the time-shifting and device-swapping needs of today's consumers, the industry continues to fight, preferring to legislate rather than innovate. The net result is the continuing erosion of consumers' fair use rights as granted by copyright law.

"For many consumers, that means just one thing," said Gene Schenberg, Vice President of Business & Customer Development at Jambalaya Brands, maker of Audio Xtract. "Get it while you can."
http://www.d-silence.com/archives.ph...2 1&limit0=50


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IMlogic Releases Free IM and P2P Blocking Software
ECT News Desk

"Many corporate executives are in denial, which quickly turns to anger when they discover unauthorized IM and P2P use in their companies and realize the increased security and legal risk and lost productivity," said Matt Cain, senior analyst at market research company Meta Group.

IMlogic today released free software to help companies fight copyright piracy, avoid lawsuits from illegal file sharing and prevent damage from viruses and worms.

IM Detector Pro is designed to help corporations detect and block unmanaged instant messaging (IM), peer-to-peer (P2P) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) traffic while they plan the most appropriate strategy to deploy and leverage managed instant messaging as a real-time business-communications tool.

"IM Detector Pro enables organizations of all sizes to secure their networks from the inherent risks of unmanaged IM and P2P usage while determining the best approach to managing and leveraging IM for their business," said IMlogic CEO Francis deSouza.

"We're offering IM Detector Pro for free because we believe organizations will want to immediately protect themselves from security threats and legal risks while implementing best practices and policies for leveraging IM to enhance real-time communications."

Meteoric Rise of IM

According to Genelle Hung, market analyst at industry research firm The Radicati Group, IM's meteoric rise has left many companies in desperate need of an effective means of managing it.

"Today, more than 80 percent of enterprises have IM or P2P in use, but less than 15 percent have the necessary IM management or enterprise IM solutions in place to protect against security breaches , meet corporate governance guidelines or avoid inappropriate use of file sharing," she said.

Without detection and management solutions in place, companies, universities and government organizations can be at risk of lawsuits stemming from media piracy, failure to meet legal governance guidelines, sexual harassment and other unmonitored P2P user behavior.

Security Risks

Furthermore, unmanaged IM and P2P use leaves networks open to the security risks associated with these types of communication, including viruses, identity spoofing and others.

"Many corporate executives are in denial, which quickly turns to anger when they discover unauthorized IM and P2P use in their companies and realize the increased security and legal risk and lost productivity," said Matt Cain, senior analyst at market research company Meta Group.

"The logical step for companies is to deploy software which detects and blocks IM and P2P traffic if necessary, so executives can determine what to do next. Ultimately, most of these executives will see IM's inherent benefits and deploy tools which allow use in a controlled fashion."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/36609.html


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WinMX MP3 Music Sharing Software Review
Joanna Gurnitsky

1) Overview of the WinMX software: This product is designed to trade songs and videos across the Internet using "peer to peer" (P2P) networking.

It works like this: thousands of users install WinMX on their PCs, and willingly open their hard drives to each other. As these thousands of people log on to the Net using WinMX, the pool of available WinMX hard drives changes moment-to-moment. Every WinMX user is empowered to search for songs and movies, and then begin downloading and uploading music files to each other. Equitable sharing of music and movies is promoted, and people will often share gigabytes of files with their fellow WinMX users.

This WinMX P2P network system employs its own custom file sharing client software, created by FrontCode Technologies. The current version of WinMX is 3.31, and is free to download here: http://www.winmx.com/

2) Warning: WinMX is a highly controversial software because of copyright laws, and WinMX users do risk possible fines and lawsuits.

3) What You Need to Run WinMX (System Requirements)" : Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP. Pentium166 with 64MB of RAM or better recommended. MacIntosh "grey-market" versions are available for around $50USD.

3) Why WinMX is a Good P2P Software: WinMX is simple to install, easy to use, available for free, and is the only no-cost P2P software that is free of malignant spyware. In short, if you choose to participate in P2P file sharing, WinMX is the friendliest and cheapest choice available.

4) The Downsides of WinMX: Other than in Canada, it is a copyright infringement in most countries to share music and movie files. WinMX users risk being fined or even sued everytime they trade music files.

Next: The Legalities of Using WinMX Music-Sharing Software:

Related article: Canadians can legally download music!

Part 2: Legalities and Technicalities

6) The Legalities of Using WinMX Music-Sharing Software:

True WinMX software is FREE, but you must decide if you will risk being sued for copyright infringement. The only country that legally sanctions Internet music- and video-sharing is Canada. If you are in the USA, the UK, Mexico, Australia, or elsewhere, you do run a risk of being caught and fined for sharing music.

Example of an American User Being Fined: On May 6th, 2004, a woman from Connecticut was fined six thousand dollars for downloading copyright-protected music from the Internet, and was barred from downloading, uploading or distributing copyrighted songs over the Internet. (Article here)

7) Warning About a Consumer Scam: some P2P networks will unethically sell you paid versions of various file sharing software, including WinMX, and claim that this paid software absolves you of copyright responsibility. This is a lie. While the software itself may be legal (you paid for it), the copyright aspect is not addressed by these surchages.

These unethical scammers will obscure the issue with hazy statements like: “Due to the nature of peer-to-peer software, we are unable to monitor or control the types of files shared within the peer-to-peer communities”. In the end, despite what these unethical vendors will tell you, you are still liable for music sharing copyright regardless if you pay for the software or not

8) Technical Concerns for Using WinMX P2P Software:

a. Always check your files with a good anti-virus program.

b. If you are behind a router-firewall and are curious how to set up your file sharing, go here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.bucha...l?routers.html

This website contains detailed information you can use to “open up” certain ports on your router to allow the “in” and “out” file sharing traffic.

c. Personal comment: I would highly recommend that you get acquainted with some tips and tricks that will make your WinMX-life easier. These tips include: how to avoid downloading fake files, and what to do if the movie you just downloaded refuses play on your computer. You can also find a lot of information about the fine-tuning of your transfer speeds and other WinMX expert features here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/candyst...llingWinMX.htm

Related Link: US copyright law: http://www.copyright.gov/

9. Final Comments:

If you are willing to assume the risk of copyright infringement, then I highly recommend WinMX over its competitors. The software is free, it is quite stable, it is free of malignant spyware, and the interface is quite friendly.
http://netforbeginners.about.com/cs/...nmx_review.htm


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Q ‘n’ A

Take Along the Music in All Its Many Formats
J.D. Biersdorfer

Q. Are there digital audio players that support not only MP3, WAV and Apple Lossless file formats, but also SHN and FLAC files?

A. Digital audio file formats abound on the Internet, and two types that are becoming more common as a result of legal online sharing of concert recordings are Shorten, or SHN, and Free Lossless Audio Codec, FLAC. While you can usually find a software program to play the files on your desktop computer, finding a portable audio player that can understand some of the lesser-known formats can still be a bit of a challenge.

Both SHN and FLAC are lossless formats, meaning that they do not discard audio data while reducing a file's size, as do so-called lossy compression formats like MP3. Sites like the Live Music Archive (www .archive.org/audio/etree.php, where there are more than 16,000 live concerts available to download) tend to use lossless formats to preserve as much of the original sound as possible.

The Apple Lossless format was created by Apple for use on the iPod only, which can also play MP3, WAV, AIFF and AAC files. Although it cannot play Windows Media Audio (WMA) files itself, Apple's iTunes program can convert unprotected WMA files to AAC.

At least one player, the 20-gigabyte Rio Karma, plays FLAC files as well as MP3, WMA and files in the open-source format Ogg Vorbis.

If you are not particular about the sound quality of a file and simply want to be able to play it on your portable device, you may want to consider getting a program to convert files from incompatible formats.

The dbPowerAmp Music Converter for Windows and Linux can convert a number of formats and has a clearly written guide to working with digital audio at www.dbpoweramp .com. Information about using different audio formats with Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems can also be found at www.etree.org.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/te...rint&position=


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Record Now, Listen Later: Radio Programs on Demand
Tim Gnatek

Radio listeners looking for on-demand access to talk and music programs might want to consider a new Internet service that records radio shows.

Like a kind of TiVo for Internet radio, AudioFeast can be set to save hundreds of shows, from "Washington Journal" to "Stamp Talk," and manage their transfer onto certain audio players.

AudioFeast carries news, weather, business and entertainment programs from dozens of media partners, including National Public Radio, the Arts and Entertainment Network, and The Wall Street Journal.

Operating until recently as Serenade Systems, AudioFeast also offers 100 music channels in 16 genres, including blues, jazz and electronica.

AudioFeast costs $49.95 a year; a free 15-day trial is available at www.audiofeast.com.

The shows are copy-protected and cannot be burned to CD's or transferred to unlicensed machines. Listeners will have to tune in on a PC or with one of a handful of Windows Media-compatible players from Dell, RCA and Rio.

For now, AudioFeast's music shows can also be played on PC's. In October the company's licenses for portable music will take effect, and the channels will be available only on certain players made by iRiver, although the company says it expects this list to grow quickly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/te...pagewanted=all


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TiVo, ReplayTV Agree To Limits

Pay-per-view would be subject to restrictions
Dawn C. Chmielewski

The makers of TiVo and ReplayTV digital video recorders have agreed to limit how long consumers can keep pay-for-view movies stored on future versions of the VCR-like devices.

The new technology also will allow Hollywood movie studios and broadcasters to regulate how often movies purchased through pay-for-view services can be watched. Digital video recorders that recognize these new copy restrictions will begin appearing in the spring of 2005. But it could be years before entertainment companies begin to take advantage of the technology, according to ReplayTV President Bernie Sepaniak.

Max Ochoa, associate general counsel of San Jose-based TiVo, said consumers won't be ambushed by the copy restrictions.

Their television screen will display warnings that a pay-per-view movie a viewer is about to rent comes with certain restrictions. The limitations are the trade-off for advanced services, such as video-on-demand, he said.

Macrovision, the Santa Clara company that developed and licensed the copy protection technology, said it should not change the way consumers now use their TiVo or ReplayTV devices. People still will be able to record baseball games or follow every episode of ``Survivor: Vanuatu.''

Rather, it is intended to allay the piracy and business concerns that prevent the studios from releasing films to cable pay-per-view services on the same day they appear on DVD. Such issues also have made premium cable networks reluctant to offer on-demand services that would allow subscribers to watch any episode of, say, ``Six Feet Under'' they choose, at any time.

But Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, described the technology as anti-consumer. ``Consumers are not the ones who are asking for this so-called feature. And I hope that the marketplace will respond by punishing TiVo and Replay and others that do this.''

The copy protection technology also will begin appearing next year on other consumer electronics products capable of recording television shows and movies, such as personal computer ``media centers.''

At issue is the growing storage capacity of such devices. Consumers can now store more than 100 hours of television shows and movies on their TiVo and Replay machines, amassing veritable digital libraries. This makes studios reluctant to release current movies to cable subscribers through pay-per-view for fear that it would undermine lucrative DVD rentals and purchases.

One control would limit recording to 90 minutes -- essentially enough time for a viewer to watch an on-demand movie. Another would allow a movie to be stored for up to seven days but once the film was started it must be viewed within 24 hours. Another would allow unlimited viewing within a seven-day period.

Sepaniak of ReplayTV in Santa Clara said his company's devices already come with an earlier, more rudimentary version of Macrovision's copy protection. It either allows viewers to make copies of a movie or television show or blocks copying.

He said ReplayTV owners are likely unaware that restrictions exist because broadcasters and the studios have elected not to activate the technology.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/9616558.htm


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Powell: Bells' Broadband Lines In TV's Future

U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell on Wednesday said technology and telecommunications companies are racing to develop ways to pipe television shows into consumers' homes via high-speed Internet lines.

Telephone companies like SBC Communications are trying to fend off mounting competition from cable television companies that are able to offer consumers a bundled package of products, including phone and Internet service.

"Almost every major phone company I'm aware of has an initiative under way to begin to try to plug the hole with partnerships with satellite-delivered video, but what they're really working on is broadband-delivered IP (Internet Protocol) television," Powell told reporters. "That's a major component that's moving fast," he said.

Powell said it is unclear what regulatory obligations would apply to television via the Internet, if any.

In another sign that television via the Internet is gaining traction, Verizon Communications, the biggest U.S. local telephone company, on Wednesday appointed a new executive to manage entertainment content and marketing, Terry Denson, formerly at Insight Communications.

Verizon is rolling out high-capacity fiber-optic lines that can carry huge loads of data, with the goal of signing up 1 million homes by the end of this year and another 2 million homes in 2005.

"His experience with Insight, MTV and ABC rounds out our capability to compete powerfully over our broadband services," said Marilyn O'Connell, Verizon senior vice president of broadband solutions.

Qwest Communications International already operates a small IP television service in Arizona, and the other three Baby Bells are also ramping up their efforts. All four carriers already resell satellite television services from DirecTV and EchoStar Communications as part of their voice and Internet packages.
http://news.com.com/Powell+Bells+bro...3-5368429.html


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Real Curtails Half-Price Music Sale
John Borland

RealNetworks is closing down its half-price online music sale for all but a handful of songs that will continue to sell for 49 cents apiece.

The company on Thursday labeled its music promotion a success, with more than 3 million singles sold during the three-week campaign. The aim was in large part to highlight its new "Harmony" technology that allowed songs sold through RealNetworks' store to be played on Apple Computer's iPod, despite Apple's opposition.

"It was very successful for us in terms of signing up thousand and thousands of new customers," RealNetworks Chief Strategy Officer Richard Wolpert said.

The digital media company launched its promotion in mid-August, slashing the prices of hundreds of thousands of songs and albums in its catalog.

The marketing campaign came at an important time to keep RealNetworks in the public eye. Much of music market focused on the new rivalry between Apple and Microsoft's new music store, which launched last week.

Apple has established its iTunes store as the dominant force in the digital singles business, and many analysts say the next year could be difficult for second-tier players lacking Microsoft's deep pockets. Analysts said the RealNetworks promotion and its Harmony technology is likely to keep them high in consumers' minds for a while.

"It helped push Real back to the forefront, and reminded people that they are indeed a player here and are not willing to roll over in the wake of Apple and Microsoft," Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg said.

The company has a long way to go to catch Apple, which has said it has sold more than 3.3 million songs in a week during one of its peak periods. However, RealNetworks says it also relies on its Rhapsody subscription service, which has considerably higher profit margins than do individual song sales.

The company said it will maintain an ongoing 49 cent sale for a list of 10 songs a week, jointly chosen by editors at Rolling Stone and RealNetworks.
http://news.com.com/Real+curtails+ha...3-5357461.html


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Critical Mozilla, Thunderbird Vulnerabilities
Posted by timothy

d3ik writes "An advisory has been issued on several buffer overflow exploits in the Mozilla and Thunderbird code. Coincidentally, one of the exploits takes advantage of a unchecked buffer in the bitmap parser, very similar to recent Microsoft JPEG vulnerability. The good news is that if you have an updated version (Mozilla 1.7.3, Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8) you won't be affected."
http://it.slashdot.org/it/04/09/15/1...id=154&tid=218


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Canada

Free Lunch Unsustainable, Maintains Music Industry
Brian Robertson

These are momentous times for Canada's creative industries and cultural communities. At no other time in our history have our intellectual property rights been so much under siege, at no other time have opportunities for developing talent in all intellectual property fields been so slim — and yet, surprisingly, at no other time has the future offered something that could be compellingly and tantalizingly brighter.

For the creators and rights owners of music, movies, software and games, the current economic climate is clouded by grossly outdated copyright laws, widespread digital piracy, segments of the public feeding on the `culture of free' and a handful of opportunistic commentators chasing media attention by fostering this misconception.

Widespread internet piracy has destroyed the carefully crafted balance of copyright law in the important digital realm, and Canada's cultural industries have borne the brunt of this imbalance. The music industry has taken the hardest hit to date. In Canada, retail sale losses have now reached upwards of $465 million, with the resulting spiral of huge staff layoffs, lost career opportunities for artists, and, from the public's point of view, less music to enjoy. The livelihoods of the more than 45,000 Canadians who depend directly or indirectly upon the health of the recording industry in Canada — including artists, songwriters, musicians and those in recording studios, manufacturing, distribution, retailing, broadcasting, music publishing, concert promotion, management and myriad other primary and support services — hang in the balance.

But as we peer down the tunnel, that may indeed be a shaft of light we see and not the train. In May, in a report representing a rare, unanimous consensus of all four major parties, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage urged the Government of Canada to take prompt steps to bring Canadian copyright laws into the digital age, including the immediate ratification of the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT). The Committee stipulated that legislation to ratify the WIPO treaties be introduced in the House of Commons by November 15th, 2004.

Recently, the Supreme Court of Canada took the extraordinary step of weighing in on Ottawa's failure to act on copyright reform. The Supreme Court conspicuously noted that unlike Australia, the United States and leading European countries, Canada has failed to implement the WIPO treaties that we helped draft and agreed to seven years ago. In the meantime, the Supreme Court noted, Canadian courts must "struggle to transpose a Copyright Act designed to implement" copyright treaties enacted in the Nineteenth Century "to the information age, and to technologies undreamt of by those early legislators".

Thus, for the first time in the long, drawn out saga of recent copyright reform, we have two ringing endorsements from informed, impartial and respected sources for the reforms necessary to restore the balance of copyright protection in the digital realm.

One might ask what significance the relatively obscure issues of copyright hold for consumers, when their natural and more basic priority is enjoying the music they love. It may seem odd that economic and legislative issues should share the same platform as the creative process, but, as is currently being demonstrated as declining artist rosters have paralleled declining retail sales, legal certainty and a healthy economic base are necessary preconditions for the fostering of creative opportunities.

In the business of recorded music, the record company — be it small or large — is the primary investor and risk taker. A record company in Canada may invest a million dollars in an artist's career with no guarantee of a return. However, if the recordings are successful, not only will the artist benefit, but the return will also subsidize the search for the next generation of emerging artists and, just as importantly, investment in genres that do not accumulate great sales, but form an important part of our cultural heritage, such as aboriginal, classical, jazz, folk, blues and the myriad of genres often grouped together as "world music".

As devastating as internet piracy has been and continues to be for Canadian intellectual property owners, the astonishing technology of the internet still offers the greatest opportunities. Millions of Canadians have demonstrated — albeit mostly illegally to date — that they want to access music online. One of the Canadian record industry's primary objectives is to ensure that music lovers have safe and easy access to legitimate on-line services that provide digital quality music efficiently and without the lurking threats of viruses, spyware and pornography that prevail on peer-to-peer services.

We already have three legal online services in Canada. Puretracks, ArchambaultZik and Napster currently collectively offer over a million songs, and new services are due to launch in the near future.

The new and legal online experience is complemented by dynamic new developments in audio technology. Innovative formats such as the DualDisc, which offers a digital audio recording on one side and a DVD format on the other, add a wide range of special features such as music videos, interviews, photo galleries, web links, concert footage and lyrics, and the emerging DVD-Audio format offers 5.1 channel surround sound as well as access to video content.

The urge to create is as old as humanity. We know that the creative process in all intellectual property fields will continue, but in order for it to flourish and be sustainable in this country, it has to be reasonably protected from theft and underpinned by a fair and equitable level of compensation for all rights owners. Only then will our cultural heritage remain vital and vibrant.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=971886476975


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China

Shanghai Strives To Monitor Internet Bars

BEIJING, Sept.14 (Xinhuanet) -- Shanghai will invest 7 million yuan, or nearly 850,000 US dollars, to monitor internet bars. The monitoring is also aimed at keeping underage youngsters away from the bars.

The government will supervise the operations of nearly 1400 bars to make sure they don't stay open past the official closing time of midnight. China Radio International reported Monday.

The monitoring is also aimed at keeping underage youngsters away from the bars.

The government will foot the bill for the monitoring, which is estimated to be around 2.58 million yuan, or 312,000 US dollars a year, but bars will face stiff penalties if they break the law.

Central government regulations limit internet bars to opening only between 8:00am and 12:00 midnight.

The monitoring will be in place by the end of the year.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_1979731.htm


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Don't Mess With Librarians
Adam L. Penenberg

Jessamyn West is a 36-year-old librarian living in central Vermont. But she's not your stereotypical bespectacled research maven toiling behind a reference desk and offering expert advice on microfiche.
She's a "radical librarian" who has embraced the hacker credo that "information wants to be free." As a result, West and many of her colleagues are on the front lines in battling the USA Patriot Act, which a harried Congress passed a month after 9/11 even though most representatives hadn't even read the 300-page bill. It gave the government sweeping powers to pursue the "war on terror" but at a price: the loss of certain types of privacy we have long taken for granted.

What got many librarians' dander up was Section 215 of the law, which stipulates that government prosecutors and FBI agents can seek permission from a secret court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to access personal records -- everything from medical histories to reading habits. They don't need a subpoena. In fact, they don't need to show that a crime has even been committed. And librarians, stymied by a gag order, are forbidden to tell anyone (except a lawyer).

Naturally, this hasn't sat well with West, a self-described anti- capitalist blogger who was invited to the Democratic National Convention, and who has posted a page with links and photos that might best be described as library soft-core porn.

She worries that a researcher could check out a book on Islam and suddenly end up on the no-fly list, forced to take the Greyhound with Teddy Kennedy for the rest of her life. Or an HIV-positive teen living in a conservative community could be outed after reading about the disease. If this sounds far-fetched, two years ago, in Punta Gorda, Florida, a British man was arrested in a public library after visiting websites that posted material on mineral supplements and the world's first chemical generator of electricity, the Baghdad Battery.

"In a democracy, citizens can access information they view as important," West said, "and traditionally we as librarians have kept it private. We are in favor of free speech and against censorship, and believe in the right to research material without the government looking over your shoulder."

While mainstream media have blandly stood by as the free flow of information is threatened, some librarians have been agitating. They have been collecting signatures -- close to a million of them -- to petition the government to amend portions of the Patriot Act. They have purged circulation records. They have pushed elected officials to propose legislation to exempt libraries from government snoops, and have worked with more than 300 cities across the country to adopt measures to weaken the most extreme aspects of the law.

West, for her part, has created a series of popular, quasi-legal signs to warn users. One -- "The FBI has not been here. (Watch closely for the removal of this sign)" -- was provided to every library in the state by the Vermont Library Association.

Others include:

• "We're sorry! Due to national security concerns we are unable to tell you if your internet surfing habits, passwords and e-mail content are being monitored by federal agents; please act appropriately."

• "Q. How can you tell when the FBI has been in your library? A. You can't."

• "The Patriot Act makes it illegal for us to tell you if our computers are monitored; be aware."

Still another lists organizations like the Red Cross, Boy Scouts, Rotary Club, United Way and FBI that have not stopped by this week, except FBI is crossed out.

After the American Library Association, or ALA, came out against the Patriot Act, Attorney General John Ashcroft called librarians' resistance "baseless hysteria." He ridiculed the organization, claiming that "some have convinced (it) ... that the FBI is not fighting terrorism; instead, agents are checking how far you've gotten in the latest Tom Clancy novel."

The ALA challenged Ashcroft to reveal the number of times law enforcement had requested library records. In response, the Department of Justice released a declassified memo that claimed the number was zero, which was contradicted by a University of Illinois Library Research Center study that found more than a dozen libraries had received visits and requests for information from law enforcement.

"That's the problem," West said. "The government wants us to trust them, but how can we without greater transparency?"

She believes that you have to be somewhat radical to become a librarian in the first place. In addition to a good education, you need to devote yourself to low-to-middle-paying jobs where even your friends make jokes about you, and fear that one day you will be replaced by a computer.

And she's not the only one trying to recast her profession's image. For instance, at the Modified Librarian, users relate stories of their tattoos and piercings. The Anarchist Librarians Web posts links to radical book fairs and information on anti-filtering software. At the Librarian Avengers, the battle cry is "Thwart not the Librarian."

What does the irascible West say to people who tease her by asking if she has taken classes on holding her finger up to her lips and saying shush?

"I'm pretty good with this finger already," she replied.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,64945,00.html



















Until next week,

- js.














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Jack Spratt's Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


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