Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 27th, '07

[JackSpratts]

"Vista is NOTHING but a DRM platform that also happens to run Windows applications." – JRHelgeson


"Using a bucket full of weasel words does nothing to convince me that Vista isn't screwing the consumer." – Chicapoo


"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." – Bill Watkins


"I think ultimately, the studio is going to get the names that they want." – Tom Ferber


"You cannot have zero piracy and if you try to get to zero piracy you will make the experience of consuming music so painful you'll have zero industry." – Chris Anderson


"DRM is like polonium to some people." – John Kennedy





































January 27th, 2007







Movie File-Sharing Booming: Study
Press release

As the movie industry is trying to find the right business model for Internet distribution for its first-run and catalogue content, a new research study shows that American consumers are increasingly viewing the movies they download or rip from DVDs on their PCs.

Among key highlights of the research: * 32 million Americans aged 12+ (18% of the US online population) downloaded a full-length movie at some point in the past — 20 million of these are regulars, having downloaded in the last month. - A majority of movie downloaders (80%) only use peer-to-peer file-sharing sites. The population of regular file-sharing users doubled between 2005 and 2006. - A typical movie downloader from file-sharing sites is 29 years of age and has 16 titles stored on their PC — 63% are male and 37% are female. * The PC is moving from a workhorse to a life-hub and video entertainment center. - 56% watched a DVD on a PC at some point and 29% viewed a DVD on a PC last month. - 25% watched a streaming TV show on their PCs. * Unauthorized downloads of copyrighted movies are not perceived as a serious offense. - Only 40% believe downloading "copyrighted movies off the Internet" is a "very serious offense" — compared to the 78% who believe "taking a DVD from a store without paying" is a very serious offense. As another point of comparison, Americans are much more likely to believe that "parking in a fire lane" is a very serious offense (59%).

"There is a Robin Hood effect — most people perceive celebrities and studios to be rich already and as a result don't think of movie downloading as a big deal," commented Kaan Yigit, Study Director. "The current crop of 'download to own' movie services and the new ones coming into the market will need to offer greater flexibility of use, selection and low prices to convert the current users to their services — otherwise file-sharing will continue to thrive," added Yigit.

This information comes from Digital Life America, a syndicated consumer trend study. Between June and late September 2006, the research covered nationally representative samples of over 2,600 Americans by telephone (1,016) and online (1,600). The results cited in this release are accurate to plus or minus 2.4 percent, 19 times out of 20.

To maintain an unbiased perspective, Solutions Research Group funds its own syndicated research. This is the first of a series of releases from Digital Life America.
http://digital50.com/news/items/PR/2...ing-study.html





Mystery Musician Rescues Peer-To-Peer Campaigner
Simon Aughton

The future of popular peer-to-peer campaign site, pro-p2p, appears to be secure following fresh investment from a mysterious backer from the music industry.

The site's founder, Jon Newton, had been forced to put the anti-DRM site up for sale, after his main sources of revenues gradually withdrew their advertising and financial backing.

However, in addition to his mystery backer, Newton has also secured technical backup and a hosting service that will enable him to relaunch the site within a matter of weeks.

Newton did not reveal details of the rescue package, at the request of his new backer. 'I'll be working with a guy who has sites of his own and the technical know-how and people to back them up,' Newton said. 'This means I'll be able to concentrate on content, and that's fine with me. My new partner is presently up to his eye-balls in work of his own and doesn't want to be named just yet. But there's good reason and I'll let you know who he is in the fairly near future. For now, it's enough to say he's also a musician.'

The site will now be redesigned, with content restructured to make it easier to sell advertising space.

However, the site may struggle to attract fresh advertisers following heavy pressure from the music industry. 'Early in the year, the Big 4 Organized Music gang [Newton's name for the major record companies] turned on LimeWire, one of my advertisers,' Newton said last week. 'LimeWire pulled their booking, and then it was BearShare's turn. Two down, and I was in deep trouble. Again, I had to borrow money to stay online.'
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/102893/m...ampaigner.html





High Court in Italy Says Sharing Copyrighted Content Can be Legal

The High Court in Italy, decreed that even if content is copyrighted it can, nevertheless, be shared - as long as there is no profit being made.

This after hearing a case presented by two students from Torino, who were appealing a conviction for having “duplicated and distributed” copyrighted content (in particular games from the PSX, videos) through sharing via an FTP server from where “they could be downloaded from authorised users with a username and password”.

Apparently, after carefully reviewing copyright laws in Italy the judges decided that sharing copyrighted content is legal.

Now, this is Italy - so things are never simple. In fact the judges did not apply the most recent legislation (of 2004), which instead is much stricter, because the case dates to before the 2004 law that makes sharing of copyright content illegal.

So, where does that leave copyrights and file-sharing in Italy? Well, the debate is still open and more cases in court are required in order to really determine the exact state of play. At least, the High Court has now set a precedent that sharing files where no profit is gained from sharing those files is not a crime.

At the same time one of the students was also not found guilty of having software that could remove encryption from copyrighted material.

So, overall you have a decision of the High Court that would make Italy one of the most liberal countries in terms of allowing file-sharing but on a case where the latest law (which is anyway three years old) has not been applied.

Spaghetti anyone?
http://www.theoryvspractice.com/2007...-can-be-legal/





Labels Deny Italian File-Sharing Victory

Labels still chase the Italian p-2-p dragon
Philip Willan

A court ruling previously hailed as a victory for the free downloading of copyright material from the internet actually leaves Italian law unchanged, claimed a spokesman for the Italian Music Industry Federation (FIMI) on Tuesday.

Earlier this month the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, quashed a three month and ten day prison sentence that had been meted out to two students by the Turin Court of Appeal for illegally exchanging copyright-protected files. The Turin Polytechnic students were acquitted of breaking the law because the exchange of files had not been carried out for profit, Italian newspapers reported over the weekend.

The students' alleged offence occurred in 1999 and a number of laws have been passed since, including one that implements the European Union’s 2003 copyright directive, which outlaws using the internet to acquire copyright material for free, the FIMI spokesman pointed out.

"The significance of the ruling was wrongly reported by the mass media," the spokesman said. "They said people who downloaded copyright material would no longer be punished. But that is not correct. Whoever downloads illegally will be punished."

People downloading material illegally would still be subject to fines, the FIMI spokesman said, and if the download involves P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing those responsible could be prosecuted for a criminal offense. "The current law is perfectly satisfactory. There is no need to seek a modification of the law because of this verdict," he said.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=17027





Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music
Victoria Shannon

As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.

Executives of several technology companies meeting here at Midem, the annual global trade fair for the music industry, said over the weekend that at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months.

Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in the MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, cellphones, portable music players and compact discs without limit.

The independents see providing songs in MP3 partly as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales.

For the major recording companies, however, selling in the MP3 format would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their control over the worldwide distribution of music.

Until last year, the industry was counting on online purchases of music, led by Apple’s iTunes music store, to make up the difference.

But digital sales in 2006, while 80 percent ahead of the year before, grew slower than in 2005 and did not compensate for the decline in physical sales, according to an industry report released in London last week.

Even so, the move to MP3s is not inevitable, some insiders warn.

Publicly, music company executives say their systems for limiting copies are a way to fairly compensate artists and other copyright holders who contribute to the creation of music.

But privately, there are signs of a new appreciation in the industry for unrestricted copies, which could be sold as singles or through subscription services or made freely available on Internet sites that support advertising.

The EMI Group said last week that it would offer free streaming music on Baidu.com, the leading Web site and search engine in China, where 90 percent of music is pirated. EMI and Baidu also agreed to explore developing advertising-supported music download services. This summer EMI licensed its recording to Qtrax, an ad-supported music distribution service.

Experiments by Yahoo — last year it offered a handful of tracks from Norah Jones, Jessica Simpson, Jesse McCartney and Relient K without any digital restrictions — will continue this year, David Goldberg, vice president and general manager of Yahoo Music, said in an interview at Midem. Two of the major labels, Sony BMG and EMI, agreed to the tests in 2006.

In a handful of European countries, especially in France, consumer frustration has led to government proposals to legislate interoperability.

“There is a groundswell, and I say that on the basis of private conversations,” said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, which sells digital music protected against piracy through the Rhapsody subscription service.

“It will happen between next year and five years from now, but it is more likely to be in one to two years,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/te...y/23music.html





Washington Tries Its Best To Kill Internet Radio
Medialoper

Remember that election last October? You know, the one that signaled the need for change. Well, apparently that change doesn’t include taking a more enlightened approach to legislation involving new technology. Earlier this month a bipartisan group of Senators lead by Diane Feinstein (D-CA) introduced a bill that would create a variety of new restrictions for both Internet broadcasters and listeners.

Bill S.256, also known as the “Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act” (PERFORM), would, among other things, require that Internet broadcasters protect their audio streams with DRM technology. Apparently the RIAA has convinced Feinstein that unencrypted audio streams are contributing to the global piracy problem.

In a world where just about every song ever recorded is available from any number of online sources, it’s hard to believe that a significant number of listeners are sitting around waiting for their favorite song to play on some Internet station so they can record the stream, cut the song out of the stream, tag it, then transfer it to their iPod. No, something tells me that people who don’t want to pay for songs have more efficient ways of stealing music.

It’s unfathomable that lawmakers would spend time attempting to cripple a new industry that is still in its infancy. Worse yet, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this bill. It was introduced last year and ultimately failed. The fact that it’s been reintroduced is a testament to the RIAA’s persistence as a lobbying group.

It’s conceivable that, if passed, the law would eliminate a large number of existing Internet broadcasters. If the cost of investing in proprietary DRM streaming systems doesn’t run broadcasters out of business, the new royalty and licensing fees just might. Keep in mind that Internet broadcasters are already paying the same licensing fees that terrestrial broadcasters pay, as well as additional fees that terrestrial broadcasters don’t pay.

Then there are the issues related to the use of DRM. Since there’s no such thing as an open DRM standard broadcasters will likely pick and choose from the motley assortment of available options. Not only will this create confusion among consumers, but it will likely leave many users out in the cold. Very few DRM schemes are cross-platform, and the ones that are (FairPlay) would likely not be available to Internet broadcasters.

Chances are that many broadcasters would select Microsoft’s DRM system, effectively turning Internet radio into a Windows-only medium (and ironically leaving Zune users out of the loop).

If I didn’t know better I might think that these politicians and lobbyists were actively trying to kill Internet radio. If this bill passes they’ll be off to a good start.

We encourage you to take action by contacting your local lawmaker and sharing your opinions on this matter. Follow the links below for more information:


· EFF Action Center
· Public Knowldge Disappointed With PERFORM ACT
· WFMU: Will The PERFORM Act Kill Online Radio

Article





What Can Money Buy?
Dan Mitchell

SEVERAL news reports, all relying on anonymous sources, have suggested that the Federal Communications Commission will soon announce a settlement with four major radio broadcasters over payola.

The first report came on Jan. 11 in an article by The Hollywood Reporter (found at mediaweek.com). According to that and subsequent reports, including one this week on National Public Radio (npr.org), the companies — Clear Channel Communications, CBS Radio, Entercom and Citadel — will agree to adhere to a code of conduct and to give more airtime to independent music, but they will not admit wrongdoing.

The broadcasters were accused of taking payments from large music labels to play certain songs. Several labels, as well as CBS Radio and Entercom, have settled lawsuits lodged by the former New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, now governor of New York.

Kevin Martin, the chairman of the F.C.C., is to appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on Feb. 1, prompting speculation that he will reveal details of the settlement then. Mr. Martin told Radio and Records magazine on Jan. 17, “the commissioners are trying to decide what is the most appropriate thing for us to do.”

After the reports surfaced, Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote an open letter to Mr. Martin urging the F.C.C. to “instead seek strong binding settlements” with the broadcasters that would “reassure consumers they will have access to small, independent and local labels and artists via the public airwaves”.

The Future of Music Coalition issued a statement asserting that the settlement “must be judged a failure” if it does not include a “credible oversight plan” and “serious penalties.” In a report on its Web site, the coalition said last month that consolidation “has led to fewer choices in radio programming and harmed the listening public and those working in the music and media industries, including DJs, programmers and musicians.”

Local ownership of radio stations has declined nearly a third since 1975, just 15 formats account for three-quarters of all commercial programming and the top 10 station owners draw nearly two-thirds of all listeners, it found.

Free Press, a nonpartisan media-focused advocacy group, called the reported settlement a “slap on the wrist” that “won’t stop payola”.

‘Reviews’ Critics of another kind of payola — paid-for blog posts — were chagrined to learn recently of a new entrant. SponsoredReviews.com, a product of 360 Enterprise, joins the existing services PayPerPost.com, Reviewme.com, and others in brokering payments to bloggers for “reviewing” or mentioning products or services in their posts. SponsoredReviews has not gone live yet, but Tony Hung of the Blog Herald noted that its payment system will differ from others in that bloggers will name their price, to be matched by interested advertisers. “It’s the simple law of reciprocity,” Mr. Hung wrote. When someone “showers you with gold coins, how is that NOT going to affect what you write or how you’ll write it?”

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch noted that SponsoredReviews promotes its ability to get advertisers’ Web pages good placement in search engine results. “So the third-party costs are becoming pretty clear: misled readers, search engine pollution and credibility questions around the entire blogosphere,” he wrote. “All for a few dollars a post.” Defenders of sponsored reviews say that as long as financial arrangements are disclosed, there’s no harm done.

More ‘Reviews’ Booksurge, the self-publishing service recently acquired by Amazon, offers its client authors a review by “New York Times best-selling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh,” Slate noted last week. Ms. Marsh was last on the best-seller list in the early 1980s for bodice-rippers like “Reap the Savage Wind.” In her review of “The Beer Drinker’s Diet,” a self-published work, she wrote it was “motivating and significant.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/te.../27online.html





An Industry that Hates its Customers
John Whiteside

Imagine an industry that was so hostile to its customers that it regularly sued them; that resisted all new technologies for distributing its products, even as their best customers were embracing them; and that lobbies in Washington to try to take away its customers' legal rights to use its products.

Sounds insane, right? I agree; the industry in question is the recording industry, whose trade association seems intent on alienating every music purchases in the United States.

The latest story: the RIAA is challenging the established legal right to "time-shift," to record programming off the air and listen to it later. In other words, what you do every time you use a DVR or VCR.

Under attack right now are satellite radio company XM's combination receivers/MP3 players, which can record what XM is broadcasting so you can listen later.

The labels' basic worry is that one could potentially use XM's devices to record high-quality digital streams from XM stations, split them into individual files, and upload them onto a computer. XM hired Hilary Rosen to defend themselves against her old pals, but the labels continue to attack new technology. They tried to kill the MP3 player in exactly the same way back in '99, and failed. Now they're trying to kill the satellite-connected MP3 player.

It doesn't stop there. Recording industry lobbyists have also been busy attacking our time-shifting right on the Congressional front too. Senator Diane Feinstein's re-introduced PERFORM Act would make digital recording products such as XM's and others yet to come illegal from the get-go, and would even bar legally-licensed online radio stations from streaming in the MP3 format. Luckily, the EFF is all over Feinstein about this, with a special page where you can let your own Senators know exactly how you feel about the PERFORM Act.

The concerns of the industry are not ridiculous; the digitization of music (and video) makes it possible to make near-perfect copies. If, like me, you're old enough to remember the warnings that making cassette tapes was going to destroy music, their reaction is not so surprising; with taping, every copy degraded, and people generally wanted to buy real copies of music they liked. With digital music, that's less of an issue.

But so what? That won't make the technology go away. And so they have a challenge: when music can be distributed electronically, what is the value that a recording label is adding? That's not a rhetorical question; the industry needs to answer it, and the answer will let them make money.

I think that there are answers, but those answers will probably change the entire financial structure of the industry... and there will be some big losers.

And I question whether today's recording labels will be the ones to figure those answers out. They're too busy trying to protect their command-and-control business with lawsuits and legislation to take a realistic look at their future.

When an industry decides to run from the future and crap all over its customers in the process, it's likely that the established players will not do well when the inevitable restructing takes place.
http://blogs.chron.com/bluebayou/200...s_its_cus.html





@ MidemNet

MPAA, RIAA, CEA Execs Clash Over DRM & Hardware Controls
Staci D. Kramer

[By Robert Andrews] This conference on the digital music business got off to a bang here in Cannes this morning when the opening-session discussion broke into a tense and sometimes bitchy disagreement about DRM between representatives from music, movie and electronics industry associations. MPAA executive vice president Fritz Attaway and RIAA chairman Mitch Bainwol immediately set their stall against Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro. A sample:

Attaway: “Technology should not be expected to respect existing business models, but the people who use technology have a responsibility to respect the rights of intellectual property owners. When one consumes a movie by viewing it, there is some obligation to compensate those involved in making it. It does cost a lot of money to make this product—there is no business model where one invests several million dollars in making a movie and then gives it away for free; that just doesn’t work for movies and it doesn’t work for music, too. Restrictions should not be put on technology, but they should be put on the people who use technology.”

Bainwol: “Technology is not a license to steal and it doesn’t sanitize theft. Technology needs to respect the law. It can challenge business practises [but] there is not an excuse to bypass the rule of law when you build a business model based on theft.”

Shapiro: “Consumers have certain rights to move content around their home. DRM is clearly desired by components of the motion picture and music industries, but consumers have started to revolt against it and you’re beginning to hear it. It’s confusing and resented by consumers. Business models are emerging and major record labels are starting to pick up on this. [If you drop DRM], you’re taking a risk that unethical consumers will spread the content around the world—but that’s a risk you’re going to have to take. ... When the law penalizes so much, something is wrong and has to be changed. When consumers are afraid to do something for a school project because they’ve listened to the RIAA disinformation campaign, something is wrong. Consumers are rejecting DRM [because it’s confusing]. Independents and some major labels soon are going to be saying ‘no DRM on our products.’”

Responding, Attaway said: “We are investing a lot of time and energy with Gary’s members to improve DRM. It needs to be better. We are all for technological innovations that make DRM more acceptable, allowing consumers to do more with their content but to also protect creators.”

The gloves quickly came off between Shapiro, whose association runs a campaign to brief consumers on what he calls the “facts” about copyright, and the two industry reps. Bainwol said the CEA president, because of his pleas to abandon restrictions and liberalize fair use policies, sometimes resembled “a fringe, ideological leader”: “We are in a very, very significant transition,” Bainwol said. “Technology is the basis of our future. We have to be able to monetise product and, every time we try, you want to make it available for free so people can buy devices. Gary stretches the concept of fair use to the point where the notion of ‘fair’ has been eliminated. You have to protect the market value. [Gary] wants to morph fair use into a concept that justifies any consumer behavior to the point where you eliminate the value of property. Kids grow up not understanding that music and movies are intellectual property. You teach disrespect for intellectual property. Gary takes a concept, morphs it, makes us look like we’re evil.”

Shapiro countered: ”I don’t make you look evil - your lawsuits against old people around the country make you look evil. You’re very good at paraphrasing things I never said.”

Attaway: “The CEA has initiated this campaign against DRM which is against a lot of your your own members, who are making great strides in DRM to provide consumers with choices. You’re the one that is trying to stifle innovative technology and we’re trying to use it. Gary is trying to enact laws that limit the use of technology to create new business models.”
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/mid...When:13:47:00Z





Blu-ray DRM Defeated
John Leyden

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month. The coder known as muslix64 used much the same plain text attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG 2 file.

The latest Blu-ray hack was performed by muslix64 using a media file provided by Janvitos, through the video resource site Doom9, and applied to a Blu-ray copy of the movie Lord of War. In this case, muslix64 didn't even need access to a Blu-ray player to nobble the DRM protection included on the title.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray use HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) for playback display authentication and similar implementations of AACS (Advanced Access Content System) for content encryption.

The hack sidesteps, rather than defeats, the AACS encryption used as part of the content protection technology used by both next-generation DVD formats. The approach relies on obtaining a particular movie's unique "key" and can't therefor be trivially replicated to rip content across all titles encoded via a particular format, as tools like DVD Decryptor make easy with standard DVD titles.

muslix64 has however posted a 18KB tool that allows other to try their hand at extracting the keys of other Blu-ray Disc movies

BD+, the second type of content protection on Blu-ray, is yet to fall by crackers but this is something of a moot point today as the technology is yet to be widely applied on discs.

Blu-ray and HD DVD both allow for decryption keys to be updated in reaction to attacks, for example by making it impossible to play high-definition movies via playback software known to be weak or flawed. So muslix64 work has effectively sparked off a car-and-mouse game between hackers and the entertainment industry, where consumers are likely to face compatibility problems while footing the bill for the entertainment industry's insistence on pushing ultimately flawed DRM technology on an unwilling public.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01...ked/print.html





Big Labels Offer Free Music to College Students
Saul Hansell

In one more attempt to counter music piracy, major music labels have agreed to support a service that will offer free music downloads — with some substantial restrictions — to any college student.

The service, from Ruckus Network, will be supported by advertising on its Web site and on the software used to download and play songs. The four major record labels and several independent labels have agreed to license their music to Ruckus at lower rates than they charge other mass market music services on the theory that college students would rather steal songs than pay the $10 to $15 a month that such services normally charge.

Phil Leigh, president of Inside Digital Media, a research firm, said that the move also represented a way for labels to experiment with advertising-supported music, a model that he said might be better for the labels than radio, because they could share in the advertising revenue. Music publishers, which represent the composers, are paid by radio stations, but the labels, which represent performing artists, are not.

Ruckus had originally hoped universities would pay a fee to offer free downloads to their students, thereby reducing the legal risks and some of the network expense associated with the use of illegal file-sharing networks. Only 20 universities agreed.

Last year, however, Ruckus decided to switch to a free, advertising-supported approach, although it still required universities to agree and to install a server on their campus networks.

That increased participation to about 100 schools, with “several hundred thousand” active users, said Michael J. Bebel, chief executive of Ruckus.

The new service, which is available now, does not require a university to participate. Rather, it will be made available to those who have an e-mail address ending in .edu, the top-level domain associated with educational institutions.

Because faculty members and many alumni also use an .edu e-mail address, Mr. Bebel said that the service would ask users if they were students, staff members or alumni. Those who are not students will be asked to pay $8.95 a month for the service.

Ruckus uses Microsoft’s Windows media technology, so songs can be played only on a user’s personal computer. For $4.99 a month, users can buy the right to transfer the songs to portable devices compatible with the Microsoft format, including those made by SanDisk and Creative.

But the music will not play on Microsoft’s Zune player or, more important, on the Apple iPod.

These restrictions have led to at least some protests on campus that the service discriminates against users of iPods and Macintosh computers (also not supported).

Mr. Bebel says that about 60 percent of the students on the campuses offering the Ruckus service had registered for it.

“Even iPod users on campus will use Ruckus because they can find music they like before they buy it from Apple or get it another way,” Mr. Bebel said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/te.../22ruckus.html





Had no idea it was this low…

22% of Windows Installs Non-Genuine
Nate Mook

Microsoft disclosed Monday that over one in five Windows installations were deemed non-genuine through the company's Windows Genuine Advantage program, which requires users to validate their operating system before downloading updates from the company.

Since WGA launched in July 2005, over 512 million users have attempted to validate their copy of Windows, Microsoft said. Of those, the non-genuine rate was 22.3 percent. 56,000 reports have been made by customers of counterfeit software, which grants that user a free replacement copy of Windows.

While high, that number is less than the average software piracy rate around the world, according to the Business Software Alliance. The BSA reports that 35 percent of the world's software is pirated (22 percent in North America specifically), and a Yankee Group study noted that 55 percent of organizations report instances of counterfeit or pirated software.

As it prepares to launch both Windows Vista and Office 2007 to the public next week, Microsoft has kicked off what it calls the "Genuine Fact Files" campaign for educating consumers on the downfall and risks associated with non-genuine software. It hopes to discourage users from downloading illicit software in the process.

Acknowledging that potential customers may be tempted to "try the new products first before they make the decision to buy" through the use of pirated software, Microsoft has posted an online "test drive" of Windows Vista, which joins an existing Web-based preview of Office 2007.

The Vista test drive, which requires Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and runs the operating system in a small Active X based virtual machine, lets visitors explore various new features of the forthcoming operating system, and guides them through common tasks. Meanwhile, a 60-day trial download of Office 2007 is also available.
http://www.betanews.com/article/prin...ine/1169497163





Adobe and it’s P2P Ambitions
Om Malik

Adobe Systems, now the owner of Flash multimedia technology, seems to be getting pretty serious about spreading its tentacles into new product categories – from VoIP to peer-to-peer networking. But it is P2P that is at the heart of San Jose, Calif.-based company’s grand design.

In pursuit of this strategy, the company has acquired amicima, a privately held start-up founded in 2004 to “develop improved Internet protocols for client-server and peer-to-peer networking, and to develop new applications based on these protocols.” After being tipped off by one of our readers, we were able to confirm with our sources that Adobe has bought out this tiny company, which can help Adobe achieve its VoIP and P2P ambitions. An Adobe spokesperson declined to comment.

Amicima’s publicly available product is amiciPhone, a p2p-based VoIP client that combines presence, text messaging and file transfers with voice chat. In addition, Adobe recently announced a partnership with VeriSign, which is now in the CDN business. Together, expect a lot of Flash and P2P going forward, perhaps making it a lot easier to move rich content around the Internet.

Though a pint-sized start-up, amicima carried a hefty intellectual punch. Through LinkedIn, we were able to find that amicima co-founder Mathew Kaufman has been working as Senior Computer Scientist for Adobe since October 2006. His co-founder, Michael Thornburgh, is also said to be at Adobe. Both of them have vast experience in networking and P2P technologies. The two of them worked at Tycho Networks, and later at DSL.net, after that company acquired Tycho.

It is unclear whether Adobe acquired amicima for the technology or for the talent. What is clear is that the company is very serious about making the Flash technology an integral part of the “webization of voice,” as we had previously reported.

Amicima’s acquisition, while seemingly voice-centric, could also be viewed as part of company’s multi-pronged P2P strategy. Adobe recently announced a partnership with VeriSign, owners of the Kontiki grid content distribution platform. In an email earlier this month, VeriSign told us, “[we] will be collaborating with Adobe for delivery of Flash video including movies, TV shows, broadcast media and user interface technologies.”

Later, at the CES Show in Las Vegas, the two companies announced their alliance, though it was lost amidst the noise around new phones and gadgets.
The two companies expect to work together to integrate future versions of next generation media technologies leveraging VeriSign’s Kontiki peer-to-peer technology and Adobe’s award winning Flash Video software.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that Adobe could bundle Kontiki’s command-and-control P2P technology into a forthcoming version of Flash. Given the wide scale adoption of Flash, Adobe-Kontiki will be able to create an Internet-wide peer-to-peer cloud.
Publishers are expected to be able to lower their development, quality assurance, and customer support costs because the combined Flash/VeriSign service reduces the problems of deploying video on-demand applications across multiple platforms and browsers.

In other words, the two companies can make it easy to seed and distribute video content, as long as it is published to the Kontiki platform and uses Flash. The Adobe-VeriSign combo could also help overcome some of the issues surrounding the current torrent-based content distribution systems.

There are fears that a coming balkanization of BitTorrent resulting from increased commercial efforts will thwart it from becoming a widely adopted distribution platform. And more and more ISPs are increasingly blocking torrent-based content. Kontiki, however, monitors the flow of pieces of content around a network, and should be able to avoid that backlash. This is a way for P2P to really — really — go mainstream.

We will be tracking this story pretty closely, rustling up more details from our sources
http://gigaom.com/2007/01/24/adobe-a...p2p-ambitions/





Canada's IsoHunt is Back, Online, As Promised
P2PNet

It has the weight of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), owned and operated by Hollywood studios Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, on its back, and went down, briefly.

"Lawyers from our primary ISP decided to pull our plug without any advance notice," said Gary Fung at the time.

The move was, "No doubt related to our lawsuit brought by the MPAA, but we don't have more information at this time until people responsible comes to work tomorrow. We will be back in operation once we sort out this mess with our current ISP, or we get new hardware ready at our new ISP."

Now once again, "Welcome to isoHunt," it says.

"This site is home to the most comprehensive BitTorrent search engine, with cross-referenced trackers data you can't find anywhere else. Along with integrated XDCC, Fserve and NFO search for files on IRC (currently offline). In short, this is your all-in-one P2P files search engine .........."
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/11103#comments





Turtle

"Turtle is a new tool for facilitating free speech by combining encryption with peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. Turtle users can exchange information deemed ``controversial'' or ``risky'' (for example whistleblowers exposing government or corporate abuse) without being exposed to legal or economic pressure from parties that may want to censor or suppress this information. Such users are likely to be found in countries where the government routinely snoops on citizens' communications. It will also be attractive to people in all countries who value their privacy.

Technically, Turtle is a friend-to-friend (F2F) network - a special type of peer-to-peer network in which all your communication goes only to your friends, and then to their friends, and so on, to the ultimate destination.

The basic idea behind Turtle is to build a P2P overlay on top of pre-existing trust relationships among Turtle users. Each user acts as node in the overlay by running a copy of the Turtle client software. Unlike existing P2P networks, Turtle does not allow arbitrary nodes to connect and exchange information. Instead, each user establishes secure and authenticated channels with a limited number of other nodes controlled by people he or she trusts (friends). In the Turtle overlay, both queries and results move hop by hop; the net result is that information is only exchanged between people that trust each other and is always encrypted. Consequently, a snooper or adversary has no way to determine who is requesting/providing information, and what that information is. Given this design, a Turtle network offers a number of useful security properties, such as confined damage in case of node compromise, and resilience against denial of service attacks (for more details on this see the Documents section)." http://www.turtle4privacy.org/
http://www.dp2p.net/software-technology/turtle





File Sharing with Acritum Femitter HTTP-FTP Server

Acritum Software has released Femitter HTTP-FTP Server 1.0, a handy file sharing application for Windows. The program makes your files and other data available to your friends and colleagues without much trouble.

With the Femitter HTTP-FTP Server v1.0 for Windows, any web browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla FireFox enables users to download or upload files to computer via Internet or LAN. Program may be used as web-based Bulletin Board System or as storage for music, video, or photos with capacity only limited by size of hard drive. Files can be transferred via HTTP or FTP protocol. Users may protect access to server by creating user accounts with passwords.
http://www.ecnasiamag.com/article.asp?id=12373





Snakebite
Aug. ‘06

"It's easy to download files with BitTorrent, but sharing your files over BitTorrent is somewhat complicated. You have to generate torrents for each file you want to share, run a tracker, and run a seeder. Most people don't even know what any of that means. It's much more complicated to share files using BitTorrent than with a webserver. To put your files on the web, you just drop them in the correct folder and then webserver does the rest.

Now we have Snakebite, which provides all of the power of BitTorrent with the ease of use of a webserver. Simply install snakebite, launch it, and drop files in the correct folder. They are then shared over BitTorrent with no additional effort. Additionally, snakebite automatically generates a user-customizable page with links to all of your torrents. That way you can just point people to your links page and they can download anything that you have."http://actlab.tv/snakebite_guide.html
http://www.dp2p.net/software-technology/snakebite





The Insanely Great Songs Apple Won't Let You Hear
Paul Collins

"Killer Tune" is just that: It sounds like the Killers, and it is killer. It's one of the most popular iTunes downloads for the band Straightener—but you haven't heard it.

You can't hear it.

The iTunes Music Store has a secret hiding in plain sight: Log out of your home account in the page's upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you're dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you've never even heard of. And they're nowhere to be found on iTunes U.S. You can listen to 30-second song teasers on the Japanese site, but if you try purchasing "Killer Tune"—or any other tune—from iTunes Japan with your U.S. credit card, you'll get turned away: Your gaijin money's no good there.

Go to iTMS Japan's Terms of Sale, and the very first three words, which berate you in all caps, are:

Japan Sales Only

So, what's going on here?

Music labels have a good reason to lift up the drawbridge: iTunes spans 22 countries, often with somewhat uneven pricing between them, and the specter of cross-border music discounting has already been raised by services such as Russia's much-sued allofmp3.com. But in Japan's case, the blockade becomes downright tragic. If your knowledge of Japanese music barely extends beyond the Boredoms, you're in for a shock at iTMS Japan: There are thousands of Japanese bands that play circles around ours—and they're doing it in English.

It hasn't happened overnight. Japan's long been a music geek's paradise, a Valhalla of reverent remasters of American and British albums that time and fashion have passed by in their native lands. Want a CD release of Rick Wakeman's 1976 LP No Earthly Connection? There's no such thing over here—but there is in Japan, and you can even buy it from the Disk Union chain at a downtown Tokyo store dedicated entirely to prog-rock. Like the British invaders of 40 years ago, the Japanese seem to care more about our music than we ourselves do.

The result? Japan's bands are by turns bracingly experimental and jubilantly retro, a land where our own greatest music returns with an alienated majesty. How else can one describe the King Brothers' "100%," a song that could make the Black Crowes eat Humble Pie? Or Syrup16g's Elvis Costello-esque "I Hate Music"? Or "Johnny Depp" by Triceratops, an amp-crunching reanimation of Physical Graffiti-era Zep? And you'd swear that the Pillows' "Degeneration" was a hidden track on Matthew Sweet's Altered Beast. Other bands, less easily categorized, are no less revelatory: The Miceteeth's "Think About Bird's Pillow Case" conjures up a Japanese troupe stranded in a 1930s British music hall, while NICO Touches the Walls' "泥んこドビー" boils Franz Ferdinand over into a waltz.

Next, there's power pop. If ever a song cried to be played on late and lamented The O.C., it's "4645" by the Radwimps. Like many J-pop songs, "4645" is almost entirely sung in English. After pop diva Yumi Matsutoya started mixing bilingual lyrics in the 1970s, bands perfected the art of seamlessly fusing Japanese verses with English choruses. You can mondegreen their songs in the shower for weeks without even realizing it.

So, what happens when this irresistible rock encounters immoveable corporations? Inevitably, Straightener's "Killer Tune" has shown up in its entirety on YouTube, where the band amuses themselves in an exuberantly goofy lip-sync. With YouTube sporting the clever animated video for the blistering follow-up "Berserker Tune," American fans might get the Straightener they need after all.

Meanwhile, a back door has appeared in the Music Store itself: While iTunes Japan pegs foreign undesirables from their credit card numbers, it can't screen fake Japanese addresses provided by prepaid iTunes Card users. There's a small but ardent underground economy among Americans in dummy addresses and e-mailed scans of Japanese iTunes Cards, picked up by friends in Tokyo convenience stores or openly sold online.

It certainly beats buying CDs. Import shops and Amazon.com lack most Japanese bands, and while Amazon.co.jp maintains a somewhat-English-language version, you may find yourself plunged into hair-raisingly incomprehensible pages while entering credit card information. If, for instance, this audio clip of the math-rock single "Japanistan" by the band Stan sends you running for their album Stan II, you'll find nothing at U.S. Amazon. Buying it from Amazon Japan costs 3,090 yen ($25) with international shipping. And, since Amazon Japan pages often lack audio samples, you have to already know what you're looking for. If you didn't catch that Stan video on NHK while jet-lagged in a Shinjuku hotel, you're out of luck.

iTunes United States maintains its own hamstrung Japanese Music playlist, where a few bands have broken into our realm of 99-cent downloads. Listen to the Rodeo Carburettor's head-rattling "R.B.B. (Rude Boy Bob)," the stuttering art-punk of the Emeralds' "Surfing Baby," and the propulsive stop-time of "Riff Man" by the Zazen Boys—a room-clearing roar of gloriously unhinged vocals—and you start to sense what's maddeningly out of reach across the Pacific.

And there are 20 more countries where iTunes users can lurk among the samples, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, and Australia. They won't let you buy their songs, either. You can find an EP of Scottish sensations the Fratellis at iTunes United States, for instance, but their hit glam singalong "Chelsea Dagger" is in nearly every country except the United States. (Their randy burlesque video for it, naturally, is all over YouTube.)

Even so, window-shopping in the Japan store remains particularly instructive. Why? Because variable pricing—a label demand that Apple loudly and successfully fought off in other countries—has quietly appeared there in the form of 150- and 200-yen songs. Whether "Killer Tune" gets the success it deserves or not, someday we might all be turning Japanese.

==============================

Log on to iTMS for Slate's "jTunes iMix" playlists: one at iTunes Japan of Japan-only songs, including those mentioned in this article (foreign users can sample, but not purchase, them), and this domestic Slate jTunes iMix of songs available for purchase by U.S. users. U.S. iTMS users must log out of their account and switch countries at the bottom of their screen before accessing the Japanese iMix.

Note: Occasionally iTMS Netherlands refuses to allow you to change countries from the bottom of the home page. Simply click any song's "Buy" button, and a prompt asking if you're from abroad will get you to the Country Selection menu.
http://www.slate.com/id/2158151/





iTunes DRM Called Out by France and Germany
Jacqui Cheng

Apple is being challenged once again to open up its DRM by consumer groups in Europe. This time, Germany and France have joined the slowly-growing number of countries who are asking Apple to allow the protected songs purchased from the iTunes Store to be played on other music players besides the iPod. Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon told the Associated Press that France's consumer lobby group, UFC-Que Choisir, and Germany's Verbraucherzentrale are now part of the European effort to push Apple into an open DRM system, with more countries considering joining the group.

By now, everyone who owns a digital music player of any sort is painfully aware that buying music from a particular online store locks them into that platform. Apple, the current market leader in both online music and digital music player sales, has been particularly stubborn about allowing its protected AAC files to be played on anything but iPods.

However, the company has been under some fire over the last year due to those restrictions, first with France and then Denmark looking to open up restrictive DRM schemes (including, but not limited to iTunes). Neither of those forced Apple to open up their FairPlay DRM, but last June, Norway ruled that the iTunes-iPod tie-in was unreasonable. Norway's Consumer Ombudsman gave Apple a deadline of June 21, 2006 to come up with a solution, but the deadline then got pushed back to August 1, 2006. Norwegian consumer groups were unimpressed by Apple's response.

Norway has now given Apple a new deadline of September of this year to change its policies, and the pressure on Apple will likely grow in the months leading up to the deadline. "This is important because Germany and France are European giants. Germany, in particular, is a big market for digital music," Thon said to the AP. Who will be next to join the group and how will Apple respond to the growing pressure?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070122-8676.html





Norway Declares Apple's iTunes Illegal
David Ibison in Stockholm, Emiko Terazono in London and Richard Waters in San Francisco

Apple was dealt a blow in Europe on Wednesday when Norway's powerful consumer ombudsman ruled that its iTunes online music store was illegal because it did not allow downloaded songs to be played on rival technology companies' devices.

The decision is the first time any jurisdiction has concluded iTunes breaks its consumer protection laws and could prompt other European countries to review the situation.

The ombudsman has set a deadline of October 1 for the Apple to make its codes available to other technology companies so that it abides by Norwegian law. If it fails to do so, it will be taken to court, fined and eventually closed down.

Apple, whose iTunes dominates the legal download market, has its proprietory system Fairplay. Songs and tunes downloaded through iTunes are designed to work with Apple's MP3 player iPod, but cannot be played on rival devices.

Torgeir Waterhouse, senior adviser to the Norwegian Consumer Council, who originally launched the complaint, told the Financial Times he was in negotiations with pan-European consumer groups to present a unified position on iTunes' legality.

Sweden and Finland have already backed Norway's stance, but have yet to take action, and Mr Waterhouse said the campaign was joined on Wednesday by Germany and France.

"We are satisfied the Federation of German Consumer Organisations and the French UFC Que Choisir are addressing this important issue. It means that iTunes is now being told by more than 100m European consumers to offer them a fair deal," he said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16793043/





Apple's Jobs Questioned by U.S. Authorities: Reports

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs has been questioned by U.S. investigators about stock options backdating at the company, according to several reports citing unidentified lawyers.

The company behind the popular iPod digital media player is under investigation by federal authorities for its past option-grant practices, according to media reports.

Jobs was questioned by federal investigators in San Francisco last week, according to reports by the San Francisco Chronicle and Bloomberg, citing unidentified legal sources.

Jobs' attorney, Mark Pomerantz, declined to comment on the reports. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling also declined to comment, but repeated prior company statements that "we have voluntarily and proactively provided all details."

Apple has said it has provided the details of its own internal review and independent investigation to the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Spokesmen for the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco and the SEC also declined to comment.

Apple said in December it would take an $84 million charge for misdating more than 6,400 options. It said an internal review found two questionable options awarded to Jobs, but found no wrongdoing by current management, including the CEO.

The meeting with authorities was first reported on January 19 by The Recorder, a legal newspaper in San Francisco.

Chris Steskal, the lead attorney in the Justice Department's investigation, left in January to join law firm Fenwick & West LLP as a partner, according to the firm's Web site.

Apple is among the more than 160 companies that are under government investigation or conducting internal probes into past stock options award practices.

Stock options represent the right to buy company shares at a set price. Some companies are accused of backdating grant dates to days when the share price was lower, giving the recipient the opportunity to collect extra profit.

Backdating is not in itself illegal, but needs to be properly accounted for and disclosed.

Apple shares fell $1.09 to close at $85.70 on Nasdaq.

Article





What’s the Coolest Way to Accessorize an iPod? Buy It a Car.
Jim Motavalli

APPLE’S iPod seems to be everywhere. We can attach them to our home stereos and stick them into portable devices to bring them into our bedroom, kitchen and even the bathroom. With cases that clip to a shirt pocket and Velcro holders that wrap around an arm, it is hard to imagine a place where an iPod can’t go.

But the one place that has long been a challenge has been the car. Vehicles built before the iPod revolution have had to make do with FM transmitters and cassette adapter connections, neither attractive solutions. After market companies provide sound systems with iPod and generic MP3 player connectors, but owners often have to rip out or alter their factory systems.

In new vehicles, however, the iPod has found a home. Manufacturers are routinely providing sound systems with auxiliary jacks to hook up MP3 players and, in a nod to the supremacy of the iPod, which Apple says has 75 percent of the market, many manufacturers are also offering dealer-installed kits just for that device.

And digital music in cars is beginning to move beyond the iPod. The latest thing is hard drives, so owners can move their music collections out to their cars and leave their players at home. Of course, the hard drives were the latest thing a few weeks ago, but Ford Motor’s announcement at the Detroit auto show this month that it had teamed with Microsoft on a voice-activated audio system shows how fast the technology is changing. What’s next, an iCar?

“The growth is exponential,” said Christina Ra, a Honda product planner. “When we look at new car models three to five years out, we’re almost leaving a blank space for the audio technology.”

For now, the basic universal music connection is an auxiliary jack, but it has limitations. While the music from the player is easily passed via its headphone jack to the car’s sound system, the player can’t be controlled from the dashboard. Functions such as next song, searching for music and viewing playlists have to be done from the player, a distraction best left for a passenger.

IPod-only connections, made through a cable that is often placed in the glove box, let owners control, and charge, the player right from the car’s sound system. If the car has a display and it’s large enough, like the screen on a navigation system, that can be an easy process, but small displays that let users read the information only in bits and pieces can be more distracting than scrolling through the player itself.

“The most commonly used piece of equipment is the iPod, and from Honda’s point of view it’s the most important to accommodate,” Ms. Ra said.

Honda, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Lexus and BMW are among the automakers that offer an iPod kit for some of their models. These kits often cost about $200 installed, and some can be retrofitted on older cars. Honda also tackles the distraction problem with its Music Link system, offered as a $200 dealer-installed option on Hondas and Acuras. In addition to charging and controlling an iPod, it offers hands-free music searching through voice commands.

DaimlerChrysler is one of the companies offering a hard-drive-based system. Nick Cappa, a company spokesman, said its MyGIG music system, built around a 20-gigabyte hard drive (which also stores data for the car’s navigation system), had space for about 1,600 songs in about 6 gigabytes of dedicated space. It is offered as an option on the Chrysler Sebring, Jeep Wrangler and Dodge Nitro.

Heather May, manager of engineering communications for DaimlerChrysler, said owners would be able to copy music into the hard drive from CDs or from a portable hard drive through a U.S.B. connection.

It’s unclear if hard-drive systems will spread. Ford, for example, considered them, but has stepped away for now. One reason is that while MP3 players are ready to use as soon as they are plugged into a car, hard drives require work. All that music in iTunes on your home computer has to be transferred into your car. Imagine sitting in the garage for hours copying all your CDs onto your car’s hard drive (it took me eight minutes to load the CD “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” by the group Traffic onto the Lexus LS hard drive) after having already done the same thing on your home PC.

Using a portable hard drive that is connected to your home PC is easier, but you still have to put your collection onto the drive, remove it from the PC and plug it into the car’s U.S.B. connection (if it has one), then copy the music to the car’s hard drive.

Daniel Eran, a technology consultant who runs the tech-oriented RoughlyDrafted.com, said hard-drive systems “couldn’t be easily kept in sync with a user’s home system.”

Mr. Eran said that most automakers “are interested in extending the iPod, not trying to replicate it.” Indeed, Ford said it had not offered a hard-drive system because customers were showing little interest.

“Our customers are saying, ‘Why would I want to have a whole other hard drive in the vehicle if I already have an iPod?” said Nick Twork, a Ford spokesman.

The Microsoft system the two companies announced at the auto show does not have a hard drive. The system, called Sync, will be initially offered on 12 Ford, Mercury and Lincoln models this fall. Kevin Keling, the marketing strategy manager for Ford, said users would be able to plug in and play from many digital players and U.S.B. thumb drives through a U.S.B. connection. The system will also recharge the players, allow users to see a full music display and choose songs using voice commands. The audio system will also read incoming text messages from a connected cellphone.

Honda’s Music Link also offers voice commands, but some owners have had problems with the system. Steve Vigneau of Shelby Township, Mich., said he had Music Link in his Civic and found the system hard to use and slow to operate. The software uses Honda’s text-to-speech technology and needs to be installed on a home computer so it can link with iTunes.

Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman, said that text-to-speech “has not been as trouble-free as we expected, but many Music Link users are still quite pleased that with a single connection they can get a high-quality audio connection, head unit control and constant charging.”

For older cars with no MP3 connections, audio companies are also working with the iPod. Jaed Arzadon, a spokesman for Pioneer Electronics USA, said the company had been making its stereo units “iPod-capable” for two years.

At Fairfield Auto Radio and Security in Connecticut, Alfonso Chiulli was recently installing a $2,500 stereo, with a subwoofer and a trunk-mounted amplifier, into a 1987 Porsche Carrera. Aside from lighting up in rainbow colors, the Pioneer unit also had an iPod connector.

“Ninety percent of the stereos I sell today have some form of iPod connectivity,” Mr. Chiulli said.

Logan Fox, president of Neo Car Audio Systems of San Diego, which makes a $200 iPod adapter for many cars, said that specialist suppliers sometimes offered the best way to play digital music in a car.

“We try to stay ahead of the trends,” he said. “By the time carmakers put something into the vehicle, it can already be obsolete.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/au...es/21IPOD.html





Cingular Users Not In Coverage Area Are Out Of Luck On The iPhone, Apple Says
Darla Mack

I think this might be my first post regarding the iPhone. (That is the most positive statement that I can make).

Recently, I've been reading different stories regarding this device. Apple's lawyers pulling sites down because now they are all of a sudden concerned about copyright infringement on themes... when developers have been making themes using Apple's icons for years! Lol, I even remember that Nokia fluke on one of the sites where they replicated the iTunes icon. But hey... we don't have to be pushy with "Big Business" here.

My recent finding is just too much for me, or any Cingular customer to bare. Apple now states "No Cingular Service, No iPhone"... excuse me but WHAT??

"Apple signed an exclusive, multiyear deal with AT&T's Cingular Wireless to distribute the handset, and the bottom line is this: No Cingular service in your area, no iPhone."

How fair is that? And what right do they have to even make a statement to that affect? IF I were interested in the iPhone, I couldn't walk into a store and purchase it with service because I'm not in the coverage are? If AT&T/Cingular is behind this... then consumers shouldn't be able to purchase ANY phone if they aren't in the coverage area... right?

"Cell phone users in more than a dozen other states, mostly in rural locations, face the same predicament. Cingular, like most other wireless service providers, allows users to "roam" on other carriers' networks but requires new customers to live in communities the company serves directly.

That means the iPhone will be unavailable in, among other locations, all or large portions of Alaska, Colorado, the Dakotas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, upstate New York, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming."

So, um, does this mean that the iPhone is incapible of roaming?

An Apple spokesman, Tom Neumayr, said the company would have no comment on the lack of availability of the iPhone in communities where Cingular offers no service.

Typical.

...and in the words of Forrest Gump... "Thats all I have to say about that".

Article





Plain Cellphones Can Overachieve, With a Little Help
Larry Magid

IF you have an ordinary cellphone — the type that you got free, or cheaply, when you signed up for service — you might envy those with phones that are also personal digital assistants, like BlackBerrys, Treos, Sidekicks and Windows smartphones.

Those devices, typically costing $200 to $400, let you do more than just make phone calls and take pictures. They are pocket-size computers equipped for many functions, including e-mail, Web browsing and contact management, note taking, financial recordkeeping and a calendar.

But as it turns out, that humble cellphone in your pocket may be able to do all this and more, depending on its built-in features and the available add-on software.

The screen may be a bit smaller than on a palmtop, and you will lack an alphanumeric keyboard, making typing a lot harder — but as anyone who has sent text messages or entered names into their phone’s address book knows, you can peck out letters using the numeric keypad.

Cellphone manufacturers, carriers and independent application providers are now offering lots of programs and services that can be used on a wide number of phones. Not all services work on all phones. Some are carrier-specific, and some work only on certain phones.

Many require that the phone be able to handle programs written in Java (most new ones are). Some services are free; others charge a monthly fee.

There are a variety of ways to get these applications, and you probably already have some. In addition to Bluetooth and a camera, the Nokia 6102i, effectively free after a rebate from Cingular Wireless, comes with software applications including an audio recorder, an alarm clock, a calendar, a to-do list, a note taker, a calculator, a countdown timer and a stopwatch. It also has AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and MSN instant messengers, a text messaging program, an FM radio, e-mail and, of course, an Internet browser.

And all of this is before you download any applications over the wireless network from the Cingular Mall, where you can buy games, ring tones, graphics and other applications.

Sprint’s Samsung M500, available for as little as $9.99 after rebate, has a comparable list of built-in features, along with a dictionary and the ability to store files and play music. Like more expensive hand-helds, it comes with a U.S.B. cable to sync with a PC and a 64-megabyte microSD card (for about $30 you can buy a one-gigabyte card) to store MP3 files that you can play on the phone.

It can even display an analog clock, but the real power of this and many other phones is the applications you can buy and download.

Some of the productivity programs that can be downloaded from Sprint are RandMcNally StreetFinder, MapQuest Mobile, Vindigo City Guide, Zagat restaurant guide and FlyteSource Mobile, which gives real-time flight status. These or similar services are also available on phones from other carriers.

All cellular carriers offer some type of e-mail service, sometimes for an extra fee. But consumers have choices. In addition to the carrier’s services, there are free third-party services you can use, including Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Flurry.

Before using any of these services or downloading any applications, check to see what, if anything, it will cost. Even if the application is free, there may be data or air-time charges from your carrier, and there may be plans that can reduce those charges.

Flurry, a free service that works with several carriers, is both an e-mail application and an R.S.S. (for Really Simple Syndication) news reader, which you can use to subscribe to frequently updated content. You start by visiting www.flurry.com from your PC and entering your cellphone number, carrier name, e-mail address and password, and any R.S.S. feeds you wish to subscribe to. The service then sends a text message to your phone with a link for downloading the program.

The service works with most publicly available e-mail accounts, the company’s chief executive, Sean Byrnes, said. It can also import up to 430 contacts from Outlook, Gmail and any other program or service that can export standard comma separated values, or CSV, files. You can also dial a phone number from that contact list.

Google recently started offering a free cellphone version of its popular Gmail service. If you have signed up for a Gmail account, you can download the application by pointing your cellphone browser to gmail.com/app. You enter your Gmail user name and password, and a few minutes later you are reading your mail. You can also compose and respond to mail and bring up your Gmail contact list.

Yahoo is conducting a public beta test of its free Go 2.0 service, which has numerous applications, including a phone-centric Internet search tool. You tell it where you are (a satellite-based locator will be available later) and it can find nearby restaurants, movie show times, stores and services and display a map to your destination. Because it is a downloaded application (at mobile.yahoo.com), it is faster than using a Web page, but it can also link you to Web pages through your phone’s browser.

Yahoo Go also gives you access to Yahoo e-mail synchronized with your Web account. Mail is searchable, and you can display JPEG graphic files. You can track your stock portfolio, follow sports teams and get weather reports. You can also connect to a Flickr photo account to see or share photos from the road. Yahoo Go works with a limited number of phones from Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, Alltel, Telus and Rogers.

You’re not going to find Microsoft Outlook on a run-of-the-mill cellphone. But with SoonR, a free application (at www.soonr.com) that runs in your cellphone’s browser, you can use your phone to gain access to data from Outlook and other programs running on a PC or Mac.

You can view thumbnails of Word and Excel files, and Windows users can read, respond, compose and send Outlook e-mail. You can make calls from your Outlook contact list and consult and update Outlook’s calendar. The files and programs are not on the phone — you are using the phone for remote access to your home or office computer, and any changes you make on the phone show up on the PC.

You can remotely use most popular PC and Mac desktop search programs and forward files through your computer’s broadband connection. You can even run the Internet phone service Skype on your PC from your cellphone.

Many of today’s phones make use of the satellite-based Global Positioning System, mainly to help responders find you in an emergency, but the technology can also be tapped for location-based services, like turning your phone into a portable navigation device with turn-by-turn maps and audible directions through the phone’s speaker.

I test-drove both the TeleNav service, which works with select phones from most carriers, and Verizon’s VZ Navigator. Both are $10 a month. VZ Navigator can also be bought for $2.99 a day. Both use the phone network to provide directions, maps and points of interest that are updated on an ongoing basis. They have a “points of interest” database with millions of listings. TeleNav also has a “gas by price” feature that taps into an online database of gas station prices to lead you to the cheapest gas in your area.

So instead of lusting over that palmtop or Apple’s highly anticipated iPhone, reach into your pocket and see what that phone of yours has to offer. You might just be carrying around a poor man’s BlackBerry — minus the keyboard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/te.../25basics.html





Toshiba Eyes Faster Chips to Win in iPhone Era

Japan's Toshiba Corp. said on Wednesday it will match rival Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s March launch of the industry's first 2-Gigabyte NAND flash chip by mass-producing a chip with as much storage a month later.

Toshiba, the world's second-largest NAND chip maker after Samsung, is eyeing an expected a surge in demand propelled by Apple Inc.'s music-playing iPhone, analysts said.

The iPhone -- which will come with 4 or 8 gigabytes of NAND -- has fueled hope among flash memory makers, weary of price falls eating away at profit margins, said Mizuho Investors Securities analyst Yuichi Ishida.

"The iPhone is testament that price falls are giving birth to new applications and new NAND demand," Ishida said.

Toshiba, which aims to take a combined 40 percent market share with partner SanDisk Corp. by 2008, will begin by shipping samples of its 2-Gigabyte chips in March, using 56-nanometre process technology, and plans monthly shipments of 300,000 chips from April.

Cutting edge 50- and 56-nanometre microchips have smaller gaps between transistors than 60- or 70-nanometre ones, meaning more power can be packed into less space for lower per chip costs.

Toshiba also expects to begin mass production of 1-Gigabyte NAND chips using 70-nanometre processes by the end of January.

Memory makers have been boosting plant spending in quest of ever smaller circuitry, despite price falls of some 70 percent in 2006.

"Whether NAND is going to be profitable or not in the short term is not the question," said Ishida. "Despite price falls, neither Toshiba or Samsung means to stop capital spending for fear of losing market share."

Article





Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power
John Markoff


Mark Bohr, an Intel physicist who
led the research, holds a 45-nanometer
wafer using new metal alloys that led the
insulation advance.

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors.

Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.

The microprocessor chips, which Intel plans to begin making in the second half of this year, are designed for computers but they could also have applications in consumer devices. Their combination of processing power and energy efficiency could make it possible, for example, for cellphones to play video at length — a demanding digital task — with less battery drain.

The work by Intel overcomes a potentially crippling technical obstacle that has arisen as a transistor’s tiny switches are made ever smaller: their tendency to leak current as the insulating material gets thinner. The Intel advance uses new metallic alloys in the insulation itself and in adjacent components.

Word of the announcement, which is planned for Monday, touched off a war of dueling statements as I.B.M. rushed to announce that it was on the verge of a similar advance.

I.B.M. executives said their company was planning to introduce a comparable type of transistor in the first quarter of 2008.

Many industry analysts say that Intel retains a six-month to nine-month lead over the rest of the industry, but I.B.M. executives disputed the claim and said the two companies were focused on different markets in the computing industry.

The I.B.M. technology has been developed in partnership with Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s main rival. Modern microprocessor and memory chips are created from an interconnected fabric of hundreds of millions and even billions of the tiny switches that process the ones and zeros that are the foundation of digital computing.

They are made using a manufacturing process that has been constantly improving for more than four decades. Today transistors, for example, are made with systems that can create wires and other features that are finer than the resolving power of a single wavelength of light.

The Intel announcement is new evidence that the chip maker is maintaining the pace of Moore’s Law, the technology axiom that states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, giving rise to a constant escalation of computing power at lower costs.

“This is evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, but it will generate a big sigh of relief,” said Vivek Subramanian, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

For several decades there have been repeated warnings about the impending end of the Moore’s Law pace for chip makers. In response the semiconductor industry has repeatedly found its way around fundamental technical obstacles, inventing techniques that at times seem to defy basic laws of physics.

The chip industry measures its progress by manufacturing standards defined by a width of one of the smallest features of a transistor for each generation. Currently much of the industry is building chips in what is known as 90-nanometer technology. At that scale, about 1,000 transistors would fit in the width of a human hair. Intel began making chips at 65 nanometers in 2005, about nine months before its closest competitors.

Now the company is moving on to the next stage of refinement, defined by a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers. Other researchers have recently reported progress on molecular computing technologies that could reduce the scale even further by the end of the decade.

Intel’s imminent advance to 45 nanometers will have a huge impact on the industry, Mr. Subramanian said. “People have been working on it for over a decade, and this is tremendously significant that Intel has made it work,” he said.

Intel’s advance was in part in finding a new insulator composed of an alloy of hafnium, a metallic element that has previously been used in filaments and electrodes and as a neutron absorber in nuclear power plants. They will replace the use of silicon dioxide — essentially the material that window glass is made of, but only several atoms thick.

Intel is also shifting to new metallic alloy materials — it is not identifying them specifically — in transistor components known as gates, which sit directly on top of the insulator. These are ordinarily made from a particular form of silicon called polysilicon.

The new approach to insulation appears at least temporarily to conquer one of the most significant obstacles confronting the semiconductor industry: the tendency of tiny switches to leak electricity as they are reduced in size. The leakage makes chips run hotter and consume more power.

Many executives in the industry say that Intel is still recovering from a strategic wrong turn it made when the company pushed its chips to extremely high clock speeds — the ability of a processor to calculate more quickly. That obsession with speed at any cost left the company behind its competitors in shifting to low-power alternatives.

Now Intel is coming back. Although the chip maker led in the speed race for many years, the company has in recent years shifted its focus to low-power microprocessors that gain speed by breaking up each chip into multiple computing “cores.” In its new 45-nanometer generation, Intel will gain the freedom to seek either higher performance or substantially lower power, while at the same time increasing the number of cores per chip.

“They can adjust the transistor for high performance or low power,” said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a Web portal for technical professionals.

The Intel development effort has gone on in a vast automated factory in Beaverton, Ore., that the company calls D1D. It features huge open manufacturing rooms that are kept surgically clean to prevent dust from contaminating the silicon wafers that are whisked around the factory by a robotic conveyor system.

The technology effort was led by Mark T. Bohr, a longtime Intel physicist who is director of process architecture and integration. The breakthrough, he said, was in finding a way to deal with the leakage of current. “Up until five years ago, leakage was thought to increase with each generation,” he said.

Several analysts said that the technology advance could give Intel a meaningful advantage over competitors in the race to build ever more powerful microprocessors.

“It’s going to be a nightmare for Intel’s competitors,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSI Research. “A lot of Mark Bohr’s counterparts are going to wake up in terror.”

An I.B.M. executive said yesterday that the company had also chosen hafnium as its primary insulator, but that it would not release details of its new process until technical papers are presented at coming conferences.

“It’s the difference between can openers and Ferraris,” said Bernard S. Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist for the systems and technology group at I.B.M. He insisted that industry analysts who have asserted that Intel has a technology lead are not accurate and that I.B.M. had simply chosen to deploy its new process in chips that are part of high-performance systems aimed at the high end of the computer industry.

Intel said it had already manufactured prototype microprocessor chips in the new 45-nanometer process that run on three major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/te... tner=homepage





Skype Off The Hook

Racketeering charges bought against eBay, Skype, its founders and a cast of related defendants has been thrown out of court according to an Associated Press Report.

U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, concluded Streamcast had failed to make in a January 18 ruling on a motion for dismissal, according to the report.

The Judge dismissed all claims against Skype, eBay and more than a dozen other defendants.

Streamcast Networks the company behind peer to peer file sharing system Morpheus was seeking "unspecified damages" of more than US$4.1 billion. It also wants a court order to stop eBay selling Skype services, which it claims is based on technology it was cheated out of.

You can read the background here, but basically, Streamcast claims that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis promised to sell it the FastTrack file sharing technology the two used to help millions of Internet users steal copyright protected
material back in the Kazaa days.

It was the duo's first steps to becoming billionaires. After selling Kazaa when the copyright holders started closing in they launched Skype a peer-to-peer phone system. Ultimately they then sold that business to eBay for US2.6 Billion plus earn-out.

Streamcast claims the FastTrack technology is the peer-to-peer technology used in Skype and that Zennstrom and Friis sold to eBay without giving them the first refusal of refusal as per the agreement.

Streamcast's legal counsel says the case is "far from over" and that either an appeal or a newline of legal action pursuit is the next step.

Zennstrom and Friis contributed a reported US$100 million for a settlement deal between Sharman Networks, the company that acquired Kazaa, and the music industry which had their copyright content stolen as a result of the FastTrack technology.

Zennstrom and Friis didn't develop FastTrack themselves but in fact contracted a team of Estonian developers to do the work.
http://www.voipnews.com.au/content/view/1384/124/





Rising Dead Pool Indicates Web 2.0 Bubble is Popping
Steve Rubel

The Web 2.0 "bubble" - where a thousand ventures can bloom and thrive - is starting to pop. In the last few weeks the number of startups to go belly up or teter on the brink has increased. TechCrunch is my yardstick for all things Web 2.0. Let's take a closer look at some hard data.

In all of Q4 2006 TechCrunch wrote about six companies/products entering what Michael Arrington calls the Dead Pool. These include Audioblogger (October 4), LiveLocker (October 16), Odeo (October 25), Shadows (November 22), Google Answers (November 29) and RawSugar (December 30).

Flash forward to 2007. In just January alone, already we have seven companies and products that have been sacked or are "in the grasp." These include FilmLoop (January 6), Browster (January 7), Insider Pages (January 7), Judy's Book (January 9), Findory (January 14), BitPool (January 19) and Performancing (January 22).

So, does this mean that Web 2.0 is dead? No, but what we have already is a clear winnowing thanks to supply and demand.

Startups are launching by the boatload and getting funded too. Every day I get emails about a dozen of them and I read about another two dozen more. These days it's cheap to start an online venture. Digg launched for $200.

However, with the IPO market closed, almost everyone has two end games - grow through advertising or get acquired by Google, Yahoo, etc. This is creating an environment where there's far more supply than demand. The number of startups launching way outweighs the number of acquisitions. Further, advertisers are timid when it comes to spending on unproven startups. They've been burned before during Web 1.0. So while money is shifting from TV, it's going to larger players.

Web 2.0 is definitely here to stay. The tools overall empower people to do what they have been for thousands of year and that's express themselves. Soon it will invade the enterprise too, as CNN noted earlier this week. However, already in 2007 the shakeout seems to be underway.

Article





Hollywood Shines on Sundance; Independent Film Gets Burned
Manohla Dargis

The big news last January from the Sundance Film Festival was the $10.5 million that Fox Searchlight, a specialty division of 20th Century Fox and part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, paid for the independently produced charmer “Little Miss Sunshine.” One year, numerous 10 Best lists and many millions of dollars later, the Little Independent That Could has become Fox’s best hope for a major Oscar.

As this year’s festival gets under way, the success of “Little Miss Sunshine” marks an impressive victory for Fox, but feels like a Pyrrhic one when it comes to authentically independent cinema. Once upon a time not very long ago, it seemed as if the studios’ specialty divisions might take independent film to another level, like the rich uncle who plucks you out of the weeds and makes you a star. One day you’re working in a video store; the next day you’re Quentin Tarantino.

Much as the Republicans shifted the political center to the right during the 1990s, the sale of Miramax Films to Disney in the mid-’90s shifted public perception of what constitutes an independent film. It’s old news that once Miramax hit the $100 million mark with “Pulp Fiction,” the company changed focus, growing bigger and bigger until it sized itself out of the Magic Kingdom. Still, it proved that a studio division could make money, win awards, attract talent and excite the audience, which is why Miramax and all it helped wrought is one of the best things to happen to Hollywood since the end of the old studio system.

In the last decade the divisions have released some of the finest movies being put out by the studios. Specialty division films tend to be well-made and directed at thinking adults; they’re prestige pictures and star Helen Mirren. Some are bad, some are brilliant. Few rock the world or the art, and fewer and fewer speak in foreign tongues. But in a studio context of franchises and repurposed television shows, these films are often the designated Saturday night alternatives. Alternatives that are sold, it is worth noting, on television and in big-city newspaper ads costing $100,000 apiece. To put it another way, an ad rate that is about half the take for another Sundance favorite, Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy.”

The two films had their premiere the same day, within a half-hour of each other: “Old Joy” played in a 150-seat house, and “Little Miss Sunshine,” in a packed 1,270-seat theater. People who actually saw “Old Joy,” a low-fi story about two friends on a weekend trip in the Oregon woods, seemed to love it, but, like many Sundance films, it left the festival without a buyer. Four months later it was picked up by the small New York distributor Kino International for what Gary Palmucci, the head of its theatrical sales, called the “low five figures.”

“Old Joy” first opened in Portland, Ore., before moving to Film Forum in New York on Sept. 20. Mr. Palmucci was leery about opening on that date because September marks the start of the most competitive season, when studios and independents alike roll out many of their prestige titles. But this was the time frame Film Forum offered, so Kino bit. “Old Joy” did spectacularly well at Film Forum, bringing in more than $29,000 the first week. It earned more than $21,000 the second week, but by then was competing with new studio-division arrivals, including Miramax’s film “The Queen.”

Mr. Palmucci estimated that by the end of its nearly six-month theatrical run “Old Joy” will have played in almost every major market in the country. Kino can’t afford to buy full-page ads in big-city newspapers but did run a few small ones. It also spent about $40,000 to blow the film up from 16 millimeter to 35 millimeter; $24,000 on 22 prints; $6,500 on 200 trailers; $4,000 on 50,000 postcards and about $3,000 on Web advertisements. Kino also bought posters and radio spots, and hired outside publicists. It has been a heroic effort, but the postcards, the trailers and all the glowing reviews have not been enough to make the film a hit for the distributor. As I write, “Old Joy” has pulled in less than $200,000.

OUR choices now in entertainment are “staggering,” said Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia Pictures, adding “something needs to be extremely compelling to get people motivated to leave the house.”

Magnolia’s parent company, 2929 Entertainment, has decided that if people won’t leave the house, then it will start knocking on their doors. The company has begun releasing films simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on cable, a strategy called day-and-date. It tested the waters in 2005 with “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” but its splashiest day-and-date release was Steven Soderbergh’s “Bubble” last January.

A story about murder in a small town, “Bubble” was shot in high definition, the first of six such features Mr. Soderbergh plans to make for 2929. Its release was widely deemed a failure (it earned about $150,000 the three weeks it was in theaters), but Mr. Bowles maintains that the film racked up more revenue through day-and-date than it would have with a traditional release.

“Bubble” didn’t rock the world; it didn’t have to. Paradigm shifts happen slowly and the day-and-date model is just one promising survival strategy being tried out by independents. This year Kino will introduce downloads on its Web site. Other distributors meanwhile are joining with Netflix — and its more than 5.7 million subscribers — to widen their reach.

Last year Netflix and the distributor Roadside Attractions combined forces on a tiny film called “The Puffy Chair” (Class of Sundance 2005). Netflix sent E-mail alerts to its subscribers when “The Puffy Chair” was in theaters, where it earned $200,000 after two months. And when the film hit DVD, 100,000 subscribers put it in their Netflix queue. “If those people were buying tickets, it would have made a million dollars,” said Howard Cohen, a co-president of Roadside Attractions.

Last March IFC Films, which is owned by the Cablevision Systems Corporation, inaugurated a day-and-date series called First Take. The idea was blissfully simple: Each month two films would open in theaters, including the IFC’s destination art house in Greenwich Village, and be made simultaneously available as video on demand available to subscribers of major cable companies like Comcast. Among the films released through First Take were such critically well-received titles as Patrice Chéreau’s “Gabrielle” and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Three Times,” voted the best undistributed film in The Village Voice’s 2005 critics poll. Cable subscribers in cities like Fresno, Calif.; Pensacola, Fla.; and Birmingham, Ala., could watch a film by the internationally revered Mr. Hou, whose work has been largely unavailable in this country.

“Every month our number of buys has increased,” said Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Entertainment. “Right now I think there are 24 million homes out there that are digital-cable homes, and we’re probably, on a monthly basis, 1 percent of them, sometimes more, sometimes as high as 2 percent, sometimes as low as six-tenths of a percent. But that’s anywhere from 60,000 to 150,000 people buying a month. It’s fantastic.” All those cable viewers are watching six to eight IFC movies a month. But, as Mr. Sehring explained, “if you extrapolated it, a lot of movies would be doing a million or two million at the box office.”

Those numbers sound puny, but they are startlingly good in a climate in which even an American independent like “Half Nelson,” another 2006 Sundance favorite and one with a recognizable name (Ryan Gosling), earned only $2.7 million in theaters last year. For filmgoers a series like First Take means they no longer have to wait months for “Gabrielle” to come to their local art house — if they even have one — or wait even longer for the DVD. Instead they can read about “Gabrielle” or a documentary like “Drawing Restraint 9” on the day the film opens in New York and then watch it at home that night. “Gabrielle” certainly looks better on the big screen, but for many Americans this is a moot point because it will never show up at the local multiplex.

“I believe in the idea of the big tail,” Mr. Sehring said, invoking the title of Chris Anderson’s best seller “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.” In a nutshell Mr. Anderson argues that the Internet has allowed companies like Amazon to thrive from selling a little bit of lots of different things. Mr. Anderson cites Netflix as another example, but what works for a DVD rental company with 70,000 titles won’t necessarily work for a distributor like Zeitgeist Films, which releases five to six features a year. Much like the studio divisions, distributors like IFC and Magnolia are owned by companies with diverse holdings and are thus part of two “long tails.” That gives them a strategic advantage over small distributors like Kino and Zeitgeist.

Film critics wax nostalgic about the golden age of art-house cinema, back when Jean-Luc Godard was making news not specialty films. But releasing independent fare has always been a tough racket, and distributors were talking about getting out of the art-house business as far back as the 1960s when there was a perceived glut. To survive, companies are being forced to think outside the theatrical box with downloading and day-and-date, and that isn’t a bad thing. These days, intrepid cinephiles know that some of the best films are playing in one of the hundreds of festivals that have sprung up around the country; they also know some of those same films can be bought online.

In March IFC will release Ken Loach’s origin story about the Irish troubles, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year, through First Take. I could buy that same film online from British Amazon or a video store that sells imported DVDs, but it will be cheaper to watch it at home through my local cable company, and my soda won’t be watery. For right now IFC has found a way to get interesting films to audiences that have long been radically underserved. Video on demand may not be the great savior of independent film, but it bodes well for those who will never go Hollywood and wouldn’t want to even if Harvey Weinstein himself signed the check.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/movies/21darg.html





M dot Strange Finds a Way at Sundance
David Carr

In the daunting hierarchy of the Sundance Film Festival, with its hype machine, big stars and indie royalty, a young movie maker named M dot Strange would seem to have little chance of gaining much attention.

A 27-year-old guy from San Jose, he gave new meaning to the term “studio apartment” by jamming eight computers into his place and producing “We Are the Strange.” The movie has a wide visual vocabulary borrowed from the far reaches of the Web, anime, video games and children’s nursery rhymes. And dolls. Lots of dolls.

But his film received a premiere last Friday night at midnight at the Egyptian Theater, a coveted slot at Sundance, and quite a few members of the audience left midmovie.

But what would have been crushing for another young filmmaker was no big deal for M dot Strange, who arrived at Sundance with a huge audience in tow. During the last two years, he has been posting a video blog on YouTube letting people know how the movie was coming along. And then two months ago, he finally posted a trailer, and almost immediately it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

While we were talking at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, he checked the site and showed me that over 648,000 people had already viewed the trailer for a film where he served as writer, director, animator and effects coordinator.

Kevin Donahue, vice president of content at YouTube, said M dot Strange has created an audience in part by talking to it. “The originality of the work is quite high, but he has also built a real rapport with his audience,” said Mr. Donahue. “He has an online film school and a very active community.”

And so what about his big fancy premiere?

“Well, it all felt very foreign to me, watching it in a room with strangers,” M dot Strange said Saturday. “Some YouTube kids came up from Salt Lake, which was cool, and they seemed to really enjoy it.”

Wearing a black stocking cap and sporting a wisp of hair under his lip, M dot Strange, whose actual name is Michael Belmont, looks more like a snowboarder who wandered over from the nearby chairlift than a big deal filmmaker (see for yourself at carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com), but he represents a new paradigm of filmmaking that could have a profound effect on the traditional models of film production, distribution and animation.

The money is not there yet — M dot Strange is doing a brisk business in T-shirts associated with the film — but the Web has proved that if you produce something the consumer wants, a business model might follow.

Another Sundance film, “Strange Culture,” premiered at the Egyptian on Friday, but will get a second premiere today on Second Life, the online virtual community, including a live Q. & A. with the director Lynn Hershman Leeson, and the stars Tilda Swinton and Peter Coyote, among others.

Ms. Hershman Leeson, an established filmmaker and artist, made “Strange Culture” to bring attention to the case of Steve Kurtz, an artist and professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who called 911 when his wife died of heart failure in her sleep.

The medics who responded to the call became suspicious of his art materials — his work centers on germ warfare and genetically modified foods — and called the F.B.I. Agents in Hazmat suits showed up immediately and began impounding his computers, books, his cat and even his wife’s body. Mr. Kurtz was detained as a suspected bioterrorist, eventually accused of mail fraud and is now part of an ongoing federal trial.

Ms. Hershman Leeson, 65, felt that the film needed to get out quickly by all means, and after working with the Stanford Humanities Lab to create a digital archive of her work on Second Life, building a theater there and premiering the film seemed like a natural step. Admission is by invitation only so that demand does not swamp the servers.

“These are important social networks that we could not have had before,” she said over coffee in Park City last week. “By having the film both here at Sundance and on Second Life, we have two streams that we hope will eventually become many. And that’s really exciting.”

In the past, a filmmaker had to throw a Hail Mary pass at a place like Sundance, hope for attention amid the clutter, and then against all odds, get a film picked up for distribution. For every “Little Miss Sunshine,” a breakout Sundance film that has been a critical and commercial success, there are hundreds of films that never found an audience.

But a number of digital commercial initiatives, including The Daily Reel, an online video site (www.thedailyreel.com), allow audiences and filmmakers to meet in new ways. Jamie Patricof, the producer of “Half Nelson” and one of the people behind The Daily Reel, said he wanted to create “a breeding ground for new filmmakers and a place to find them. It’s hard enough navigating a film festival like this one, let along finding the people who are doing great work online.”

Because of the limits of bandwidth and attention span, most of the film content online is short-form, but that will change. M dot Strange, who has a series of 10 films planned, already has members of his active, vocal community around “We are the Strange” weighing in on a proposed ending after he put up 18 minutes of the film. “It’s like a real-time focus group,” he suggested.

There have been talks about traditional distribution, but M dot Strange said he didn’t really care one way or the other. Other than attending his own premiere, he hasn’t been in a movie theater in six months.

“I’m already part of a big campfire,” he said. “We talk to each other all the time about what we are seeing and thinking. It’s a personal experience without anybody in between.”

The playing field between audience and filmmaker is shrinking as well. When M dot Strange blogged about his rather awkward pursuit of buzz at Sundance on Thursday, one of his fans made an animation overnight with a hilarious bee motif in response. M dot Strange laughed and called his colleagues over to look at it on YouTube. “This guy is amazing. He’s faster than I am,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/bu...ia/22carr.html





The World Is Watching. Not Americans.
A. O. Scott

This month the National Society of Film Critics picked its winners for 2006 — one of the last such bodies to do so. (The Iowa and Central Ohio critics would weigh in a few days later.) The announcement of the Society’s awards followed a month of frenzied balloting by various Circles and Associations in New York, Los Angeles and just about every city, state and region in between, an annual festival of critical self-assertion — a protest against irrelevance, perhaps — before the big Oscar show on Feb. 25.

The society’s vote stands out a bit amid all this welter because its top three choices for best picture of the year were all movies in languages other than English. The third-place finisher was Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which is in Japanese; the runner-up was “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a Romanian film directed by Cristi Puiu; and the winner, by a narrow margin, was “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro’s tale of magic and malevolence in 1940s Spain.

The honors bestowed on those three movies, not only by the National Society of Film Critics, might be taken as evidence that foreign films are flourishing. So might the memory of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which made more than $125 million here in 2001. And the proliferating Web sites and blogs devoted to the robust, often contentious discussions of movies from all over will only confirm the impression, as every imaginable form of cinema from Danish noir to South Korean horror, finds vocal advocates and analysts.

But on these same Web sites you will also find frequent, justified expressions of frustration, even despair, at the state of foreign-film appreciation in the United States. The movies are out there, more numerous and various than ever before, but the audience — and therefore the box-office returns, and the willingness of distributors to risk even relatively small sums on North American distribution rights — seems to be dwindling and scattering. For every movie that manages to solicit a brief flicker of attention, there are dozens that will be seen only at film festivals or on region-free DVD players.

Of course “foreign film” (or, as the academy prefers, “foreign-language film”) is a category so broad as to be nearly meaningless. Mr. Eastwood, notwithstanding the spaghetti westerns and the admiration of the French, is as American as, well, Mel Gibson, who also made a subtitled movie released by a major studio in 2006. (“Letters From Iwo Jima” nonetheless won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.) And Mr. del Toro, whose current film is the Mexican selection for the foreign-language Oscar, is hardly a stranger to the world of Hollywood franchise and genre moviemaking, having “Hellboy” and “Blade 2” on his résumé along with “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

The boundaries separating national cinemas are more porous than ever. Globalization is not only the blurry subject, for example, of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel,” winner of the Golden Globe for best drama, but also the condition of its existence. Released by Paramount Vantage, the newly rebranded specialty division of Paramount Pictures (itself a constantly mutating satrapy of the Viacom empire), “Babel” has both English subtitles (translating dialogue from Spanish, Berber and Japanese) and Anglophone movie stars (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett). The fluency with which Mexican filmmakers like Mr. González Iñárritu, Mr. del Toro and their friend and compatriot Alfonso Cuarón (“Children of Men”) move from place to place and idiom to idiom is impressive in its own right, but it also mirrors the transnational flow of money, which is after all the universal idiom of movie production and consumption.

Few movies made anywhere these days can claim a singular national identity. “The Painted Veil,” adapted by an American director from a British novel, with American, British and Australian actors in the major roles, is nonetheless partly a Chinese movie, and not only because of the picturesque locations. As part of a complicated co-production deal, the government of the People’s Republic of China had approval rights over the final cut of the film.

More often than not, the opening titles of movies from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa reveal the international origins of even the most defiantly local stories. French and German cable television companies, investment funds overseen by national governments or the European Union, philanthropic foundations and even American movie studios — these are some of the entities that routinely throw money into film production around the world.

Anyone fortunate enough to attend a major international film festival in the coming months — Sundance, with its expanded World Cinema programs, is already upon us, to be followed in short order by Rotterdam and Berlin, with Cannes hovering on the horizon in May — will see ample evidence of this cosmopolitanism. Especially for Americans, to step into the festival circuit is to enter a kind of parallel universe, where directors whose names are barely known in the United States are recognized as major artists, and where each day brings news of creative ferment from a different corner of the globe.

It can be hard to keep track of where the action is, or to predict where the next cinematic hot spot will be. As soon as you grow accustomed to anticipating interesting new work from South Korea or Argentina, say, you find your attention pulled in the direction of Thailand or Algeria or Portugal or Romania, and your mental map of the world is crowded with pins. Even the most worldly cinephile will succumb to a moment or two of naïve wonder. Such a big world. So many movies. Who knew?

But then, back home, nobody seems to know — or, more discouragingly, to care. The cosmopolitanism of international filmmaking is matched by the parochialism of American film culture. And this brings me back to “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” the runner-up for the National Society of Film Critics award, a fixture of end-of-the-year 10 Best lists and the winner, by a wide margin, of the first-ever online critics’ poll published on IndieWire.com. This movie, a harrowing but grimly humane two-and-a-half-hour tour of the Romanian health care system, caused a minor sensation at the 2005 Cannes festival, where Mr. Puiu won a second-tier award.

The critics were, if anything, even more taken with it than the jurors. As we watched, in more or less real time, the final agonies of an unremarkable middle-aged alcoholic — the movie’s title is a succinct piece of truth in advertising — we also seemed to be witnessing the birth, or rebirth, of a vibrant national cinema in a place where few of us would have thought to look. The next year this hunch was confirmed by the presence of two films from Romania, “The Way I Spent the End of the World” and “12:08 East of Bucharest,” both of which looked back, one with sentiment, the other with jaundice, at that country’s 1989 revolution.

“The Way I Spent the End of the World” is the official Romanian submission for the Academy Awards — one of 61 films, one per country, contending for five nominations, to be announced on Tuesday — but it does not have a distributor in North America. After traveling from Cannes to the New York Film Festival “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” did make it to a few American theaters last year, thanks to a small, scrappy distributor called Tartan Films, which also plans to distribute “12:08 East of Bucharest.” Which is surely encouraging: an ambitious, challenging movie with limited commercial potential had a chance to find its audience. But it is hard to celebrate when dozens — hundreds — of movies had no such chance. And it is also hard to quiet a nagging question: Where was the audience?

“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” which made all of $80,000 in its brief theatrical run, is far from the only foreign movie to open here to the applause of critics and the silence of the public. I don’t mean the mass public — I have never put much stock in the Utopian fantasy that, if only the multiplex chains would see reason, internationally beloved auteurs like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami would become box-office powerhouses — but rather the aesthetically adventurous, intellectually curious segment of the population that has historically been there for foreign films.

The gap between critical approbation and cultural currency has widened, even as the number and variety of critics has expanded. The arguments — in the virtual salons of the Internet and the actual rooms where movie critics hold their year-end meetings — are perhaps more intense and contentious than ever, but they also seem to take place in a series of echo chambers, sealed off from wider, less specialized conversations.

Is it just me? I’m leery of nostalgia, but it does seem that things were different once. One of the big movie events of 2006 was the release, by the Criterion Collection, of the “Essential Art House” set, a home library of 50 movies distributed over the past half-century by Janus Films, accompanied by a handsome illustrated volume of learned essays and notes. At $850 it was clearly aimed at a market of connoisseurs, a luxury item that could serve equally as an emblem of taste and a resource for viewing.

The Janus box also represents a canon of masterpieces, including many of the films — L’Avventura,” “Jules and Jim,” “The Seventh Seal,” “La Strada” — that helped to make moviegoing in America a serious cultural pursuit as well as a source of entertainment. I’m skeptical of the idea that the great works belong only to the past; it is only the passage of time that consecrates some works as great in the first place. But I do worry about the conditions that would allow the great works of the present to travel into the future with some chance at recognition.

Partly it is a problem of numbers. Every year many more movies are made than can be released, and the ones that do make it into theaters have to compete with one another for a share of the audience. Except for anomalies like Mr. Gibson’s “Apocalypto” and Mr. Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima” — two in one year; what are the odds? — the major studios steer clear of subtitles, except when marketing their blockbusters overseas. And their specialty divisions are, with the notable exception of Sony Pictures Classics, generally more interested in producing medium-budget prestige pictures — in the mold of “The Queen” or “Brokeback Mountain” or, for that matter, “Babel” — than in acquiring more exotic and commercially risky fare.

There are certainly exceptions: early last year Warner Independent released “Duck Season,” a quirky and charming coming-of-age story from Mexico, and “Pan’s Labyrinth” is being distributed (and heavily advertised) by Picturehouse, Warner Indendent’s cousin within the Time Warner corporate family. Movies that have the backing of these companies have a somewhat better chance in the marketplace than those acquired by smaller distributors with less money to spend on ads and less cachet with theater owners.

And the result is that more difficult movies — movies without a directorial pedigree or a well-known international star — are pushed further to the margins, becoming objects of cultish adoration rather than topics of general discussion. If you have seen “Three Times” or “L’Enfant” — to name two other hits of the 2005 Cannes Festival that came and went here in the blink of an eye last year despite choruses of critical praise — then you can perhaps feel the flush of specialness that comes from belonging to an exclusive coterie. All the more if you are familiar with the festival-only titles on some critics’ lists of undistributed movies, like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Syndromes and a Century” or Pedro Costa’s “Colossal Youth.”

But ultimately such snobbery is bad for the soul, and for art. Movies like these, which demand close attention and serious reflection rather than passive absorption, deserve to have a skeptical audience as well as a devoted one, and to be subjects of an argument capable of expanding beyond the narrow circle of specialists. At the moment that doesn’t seem likely. It is certainly true that a limited discussion — or a small-scale release — is better than none. Perhaps the old style of connoisseurship — the idea that the hardy few who sought out movies from faraway places, or who turned the revival houses into shrines of art, were part of a vanguard — has been replaced by something more modest and democratic.

The old film culture was based on hierarchical assumptions about taste and quality that have all but vanished, replaced by niches and networks of fans. You like your Romanian hospital movie, I like my Asian horror, and we have our Web sites and DVD rental queues to keep us happy; everything’s cool. And maybe, in these circumstances, no movie is really foreign. Or maybe every movie is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/movies/21scot.html





After All That Goodness, a Sudden Fall From Grace
Caryn James

Before she set a toe on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last week, Angelina Jolie’s carefully molded image as humanitarian and mom was already showing some cracks. The Internet had been flooded with reports, picked up from European interviews, that she had called her biological daughter “a blob” with less personality than her two adopted kids, and had criticized Madonna’s adoption of a baby boy from Malawi. Women’s Wear Daily reported she was being difficult about designs from St. John, the staid company whose ads she appears in and whose conservatively elegant gown she wore to the Globes.

By the time she reached the end of a haughty, humorless walk down that red carpet on Brad Pitt’s arm, the Good Angelina image had crumbled to dust. In the next days columnists from The Washington Post to LA Weekly attacked her for a television interview with Ryan Seacrest on E! that made it clear she was above such drivel. His red carpet questions were drivel, but that was no reason to sneer the words “Cereal, we made cereal” when asked how the family had spent the morning.

Video of the interview was spread and ridiculed on Web sites like TMZ and YouTube; Mr. Seacrest complained about her on his radio show; the current issue of Us Weekly reported on more behavior fit for a queen in an article headlined “An Angelina Backlash?” There was really no need for the question mark.

Once famous as a tattooed wild woman, Ms. Jolie has soared to the saintly realm and plummeted again in record time. Madonna, her only rival in shape-shifting, has maintained the devoted wife and mother image for more than six years now, despite her recent adventures in adoption. Good Angelina didn’t even last two. That shattered image, a lesson in the limits of spin, is the product of a lethal combination: a public that never bought into the reformed persona and a star who may have bought into it too much.

The backlash had been building all along, and not simply because, while married to Billy Bob Thornton, she wore a vial of his blood around her neck. (No fair blaming the press for her vampirish image.) She adopted her son, Maddox, from Cambodia just before that marriage broke up, and has always seemed sincere about motherhood. But from the minute her name was linked to Mr. Pitt’s, there was plenty of snickering at her claim that they were just friends while filming “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” when he was married to Jennifer Aniston. Only the Jolie-Pitts know the truth; let’s just say the public remains skeptical. Once they became an acknowledged couple, Ms. Jolie assumed a saintly manner, deglamorizing to the point of wearing a bandanna on her head for a “Today” interview while visiting orphans in Africa; did she think viewers wouldn’t spot her cat’s-eye makeup and heavily glossed lips?

Such doubts about the noble Angelina accelerated especially fast over the last month. In the January issue of Vogue, talking about how her relationship with Mr. Pitt developed, she restated that they were “very, very good friends” for a long time, sounding as disingenuous as ever. And she added, “It was clear he was with his best friend,” which on the surface is matter-of-fact, yet manages to desexualize Ms. Aniston. Venom in the guise of kindness?

The new Us Weekly article reports that Ms. Jolie was “a nightmare” during the Vogue photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz; that she pushed through a crowd at the premiere of “God Grew Tired of Us,” a do-gooder documentary about the lost boys of Sudan that Mr. Pitt helped produce; and that she coolly pulled him away from a conversation with Courtney Cox Arquette, Ms. Aniston’s close friend, at the Golden Globes. Even if some of those incidents are exaggerated, the backlash is real. A kitschy painting of Ms. Jolie as the Virgin Mary holding her children and hovering saintlike above a Wal-Mart, a work too banal to be half-good as satire, made a media splash when it was shown at Art Miami 2007.

The backlash isn’t entirely her fault. The press helped it along by playing fast and loose with her quotations, gleefully picking up the Shiloh-is-a-blob comment without context. In the full interview in British Elle, when Ms. Jolie hesitated in describing her newborn daughter, the reporter suggested the word blob. Ms. Jolie foolishly responded: “Yes, a blob! But now she’s starting to have a personality.”

In response to a question about Madonna, she did tell the French magazine Gala that adoptions are illegal in Malawi and, “I prefer to stay on the right side of the law.” You can almost hear her coo her superiority as she says it, and you can almost hear anyone who reads it thinking, “Witch.” But her first response was to say that the happiness of Madonna’s child is all that matters; most second-hand reports made that seem like an afterthought.

Still, at best her own bumbling led her to this state. At worst, blame her self-importance. When she was interviewed on the Globes red carpet for “Access Hollywood,” she was shown an old clip of herself jumping into a swimming pool fully clothed after the 1999 awards, not exactly a tough reminder of her wild past. Yet New Angelina seemed royally unamused. And while she looked ultra-glamorous at the premiere of her latest film, “The Good Shepherd,” the perfectly upswept hair and self-contained demeanor of her recent appearances have also made her seem plastic.

In part she is suffering from a common problem: movie stars who make too few movies and are forced to coast on their fame. In “The Good Shepherd,” as the wife of a buttoned-down C.I.A. agent (Matt Damon), she goes from vibrant young femme fatale to brittle, middle-aged alcoholic. It’s a fine performance but a minor part. Her next film, “A Mighty Heart,” isn’t scheduled to arrive until June. That leading role might help restore her saintly image; she plays Marianne Pearl, whose husband, Daniel, was kidnapped and murdered while reporting in Pakistan.

But as Ms. Jolie’s horrific month has shown, reshaping an image is harder than you might think. Despite the charity work and the bun on her head, the burning question all along has been: Who is that woman in the St. John suit, and what has she done with Angelina Jolie?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/movies/22back.html





Hope You Saved Your Glow Stick
Sam Knight

TO most people in Britain, rave is a memory, and a blurry one at that. For four years at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Britain’s youth took to the fields, forests and warehouses, took Ecstasy, wore some of the silliest outfits ever devised — like cricket hats, white gloves and gas masks — and ushered out Thatcherism in a strobe-lighted haze of electronic music that shook the ground they danced on.

Then Parliament passed the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which humorlessly characterized rave music as “the emission of a succession of repetitive beats,” and gave police the power to shut raves down. That swiftly put an end to the scene’s drug-induced violence — and to the scene itself.

But if you happen to be in London these days, there are signs that something like rave is stirring again.

“The first time around, rave really seeped into the mainstream,” said Carri Mundane, 26, a designer who was a child during the first rave scene but kept the fliers amassed by her older brother. “The music was in the charts, and everything just became a little bit more psychedelic.”

This time, it’s more insular. And it’s different in other ways, too: some of the music is rock, not electronica, and the scene is no longer as defined by the twin illegalities of drugs and trespassing.

But a collection of young creative types are dressing up and making music that unmistakably refers back to the garishness, the euphoria and the escapism of 15 years ago.

In mid-December, the Klaxons — an indie rock band and the self-appointed leaders of the scene — invited a pack of D.J.’s, artists and other performers to play a final gig of the year under the railway arches of London Bridge.

The location was the site of illegal parties in the early 1990s but, in keeping with the more sanitized character of today’s movement, is now a well-appointed nightclub with a bouncer, sofas to lounge on and $7 beers.

The music didn’t sound like rave. Though tinged with electronica, the Klaxons and two other bands played stripped-back rock, not unlike much of the music that has been in vogue in Britain the last few years. And the dance floor was more of a punkish mosh pit, with lots of shoving revelers, than a blissed-out, synchronized community of dancers.

Still, there were glow sticks — a kind of waving coral reef of neon pinks, yellow and greens — and between acts, young men in leather jackets nudged their way around the dance floor, offering Ecstasy. Teenage fans wore reflective jackets, neon paint, sunglasses, beads and whistles as they hurled themselves back and forth, up and down, suggesting that if this wasn’t rave, then it was certainly a somehow-related cousin.

Like the original, the new rave scene may be a refuge from reality. Although neither incarnation of rave would claim anything as coherent as an ideology, there may be an echo of Margaret Thatcher’s frustrated youth among those experiencing the last days of Tony Blair’s Britain, said Tahita Bulmer, the lead singer of the band New Young Pony Club.

“That spirit of contentment has faded,” she said, with the country vehemently opposed to the way the prime minister has handled the war in Iraq. But it’s when people are unhappy, she added, that “everything goes neon and gets exciting.”

Ms. Mundane, the designer, who wears brightly colored clothing that has made her an arbiter of rave fashion, said, “What I like about rave is the positivity of it, the fact that it is so utopian.”

The rave renaissance may be a reaction to the country’s dour political state or to the tyranny of indie rock. “There’s only so much partying you can do to these shoe-gazing indie bands,” said Jaimie Hodgson, a music journalist, referring to Britain’s emo-heavy music scene.

Many participants say they are nostalgic for a movement they are old enough to at least remember, even if they have not experienced it themselves. Or perhaps they’re just looking for an excuse to dress up and take Ecstasy, otherwise known as MDMA, a drug best known for inducing a touchy-feely, sensation-inducing high.

The new rave scene is a small, tightly connected movement of artists, D.J.’s, bands and partygoers forged in a series of warehouse parties that, beginning in 2003, were organized by a gang of artists called the Wowow Boys, in New Cross, a ragtag neighborhood of students and boarded-up buildings southeast of London Bridge.

As in the 1990s, the gatherings attracted newly formed bands that were eager to create an environment “where the specific aim was to party, “ said Jamie Reynolds, the bass player of the Klaxons.

Hence, the outrageous outfits: At a New Young Pony Club gig, Oisin Butler, a psychology student who said he was starting a band called Aids Baby, sat wearing a purple bow tie, a red cardigan and glasses with Day-Glo frames and no lenses. His jeans were so tight there was no room for his keys. “You can wear anything, as long as it’s odd, or glittery, or neon, or is really disgusting,” he said.

At a popular monthly dance party in Islington, North London, people are encouraged to download smiley masks — a throwback to the original rave scene and an Ecstasy reference — from a Web site. The event started in 2003 with a party in an abandoned public bathroom; this summer 3,000 people in fluorescent attended its Glade Festival.

The dance-music scene has been “snowballing” for the last three years, says the party’s D.J. and promoter, who calls himself Saint Acid. He added that his early events were mainly attended by people in their 30s, wearing old clothes and looking to relive the dance parties of their youth, but now the crowd is “getting younger and younger.”

Mark Archer is half of Altern8, a riotous dance act last seen playing the violin in biological warfare suits in 1991. After 15 years of relative quiet, Mr. Archer, now 38, played at the recent Islington party and is enjoying the unlikely satisfaction of seeing a young band, Trash Fashion, cover one of Altern8’s old tracks.

“If someone had told me 16 years ago that I would still be playing now the same music I was then, and that rock bands would be covering our songs, I would have laughed,” he said. “All of a sudden rave has become cool again. It’s been a bit of a shock.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/fashion/21Rave.html





Turkish Police Arrest Teenage Suspect in Editor’s Killing
Sebnem Arsu

The Turkish police on Saturday arrested a 17-year-old suspect in the killing of a newspaper editor who championed Armenian rights, Turkish authorities said.

The editor, Hrant Dink, 52, a Turk of Armenian descent, was shot Friday afternoon outside the office of his newspaper, Agos. A gunman was recorded by a surveillance camera nearby, and the police appealed to the public for help in identifying him.

On Saturday night, Ogun Samast was captured in Samsun, a Black Sea port, after his father recognized his images from the surveillance video and notified the police in Trabzon, their hometown, said Muammer Guler, Istanbul’s governor, at a news conference just before midnight.

“The suspect was captured in Samsun on a passenger bus destined to Trabzon, together with all the evidence, including his gun and the white beret” seen in the video, Mr. Guler said.

Mr. Samast, an unemployed secondary school graduate who arrived in Istanbul a week ago, admitted killing Mr. Dink, the Samsun police said.

The police are also looking into possible links between Mr. Samast and the killing of a Catholic priest, Andrea Santaro, last February. The assailant was a 16-year-old who, like the priest and Mr. Samast, was from Trabzon.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised the efforts of the security forces Saturday and expressed satisfaction that an arrest had been made before Mr. Dink’s funeral on Tuesday. “We’re going to continue investigations with the same determination,” Mr. Erdogan told the reporters, assuring that the arrest was only the start.

Mr. Guler said at a news conference earlier Saturday that Mr. Samast had visited the Agos office on Friday. He apparently posed as a university student hoping to meet Mr. Dink, whose secretary told the young man he would need an appointment.

The secretary later saw him loitering outside the office before Mr. Dink was attacked, Mr. Guler said.

Kazim Kolcuoglu, head of the Istanbul Bar Association, noting that Mr. Samast and the killer of Mr. Santaro were under 18, said that minors in Turkey are used in slayings because they face lower penalties than an adult convicted of the same crime.

As a 17-year-old, Mr. Samast will be interrogated by a public prosecutor instead of the police, and will be tried at a minors’ court, which will lead to certain reductions on his possible jail term, Mr. Kolcuoglu said.

Mr. Dink’s murder has shocked Turkey. Mr. Erdogan condemned the shooting as a direct attack on Turkey’s stability, and analysts from diverse political backgrounds appeared to agree.

“If the trigger finger aimed at the air of stability and confidence in Turkey, it hit the bull’s eye,” wrote Mehmet Barlas, a columnist for the center-right newspaper Sabah.

Although analysts like Mr. Barlas saw the assassination as a politically motivated attack on Turkey’s progress toward membership in the European Union, others blamed a controversial law under which Mr. Dink had been convicted of insulting the Turkish identity.

Mr. Dink, who angered many in Turkey by challenging the official Turkish version of the 1915 Armenian genocide, was given a six-month, suspended sentence. But in the eyes of many radical nationalists, it made him a target.

Meanwhile, people continued to flock to the Agos office in Istanbul. Chants of “We are all Armenians, we are all Hrants,” filled the air.

“We’re here because we lost one of us,” said a 33-year-old woman. As a teacher, she declined to give her name because it is illegal in Turkey for public workers to make public comments. “I want to see the perpetrators be brought to justice and the plot behind this assassination clarified immediately,” she said.

Agos, the only bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper in Turkey, was founded and run by Mr. Dink since 1996.

“We lost the voice that spoke for us, but Turkey lost as much as we did,” said Nadya Ismezoglu, an Armenian woman standing outside the Agos office. “Our pain is indescribable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/wo...rtner=homepage





Surveillance

Computer Privacy in Distress
Jennifer Granick

My laptop computer was purchased by Stanford, but my whole life is stored on it. I have e-mail dating back several years, my address book with the names of everyone I know, notes and musings for various work and personal projects, financial records, passwords to my blog, my web mail, project and information management data for various organizations I belong to, photos of my niece and nephew and my pets.

In short, my computer is my most private possession. I have other things that are more dear, but no one item could tell you more about me than this machine.

Yet, a rash of recent court decisions says the Constitution may not be enough to protect my laptop from arbitrary, suspicionless and warrantless examination by the police.

At issue is the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents. As a primary safeguard against arbitrary and capricious searches, property seizures and arrests, the founding fathers required the government to first seek a warrant from a judge or magistrate.

The warrant has to specifically describe the place to be searched and the items to be seized.

Searches and seizures without such a warrant are presumed to be unconstitutional. There are times, of course, when it would be unreasonable, burdensome, ineffective or just plain silly to require police to get a warrant before searching, so courts have carved out many, many exceptions to the warrant requirement. The fundamental thread in these decisions is a subtle and case-specific determination of what is "reasonable" conduct by law enforcement.

Because reasonable minds can differ on reasonable courses of action, the resulting Fourth Amendment law is complicated, sometimes contradictory and very fact-dependent.

Computers pose special Fourth Amendment search problems because they pack so much information in such a small, monolithic physical form. As a result, courts are grappling with how to protect privacy rights during searches of computers.

Three digital search topics in particular are converging in interesting, and foreboding, ways.

First, there are several new cases that suggest that agents can search computers at the border (including international airports) without reasonable suspicion or a warrant, under the routine border search exception to the warrant requirement.

Second, a recent case in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held that private employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus no Fourth Amendment rights, in their workplace computers (gulp!).

Third and finally, the 9th Circuit is struggling, and failing, to define ways to judicially supervise police searches of computers to ensure that law enforcement gets the information it needs, while leaving undisturbed any private information on unrelated matters that may be on the same disk drive.

Together the computer search cases can paint a scary picture. But if you read the decisions carefully, there is ample room for courts to follow up with more nuanced opinions that protect computer privacy and allow reasonable government access.

For example, the border search exception allows "routine" searches without reasonable suspicion or a warrant. "Non-routine" searches still require reasonable suspicion. Is the examination of computers at the border a routine or non-routine search? The cases so far don't answer this question head on. Future cases will have to.

The Supreme Court has said that the definition depends on the "dignity and privacy interests" implicated by a search. Thus, strip searches and cavity searches are non-routine, but searches of vehicles and baggage are routine.

Given the sensitivity of information stored on a computer, the way people tend to archive everything, how long a comprehensive search takes and the likelihood of discovering contraband with such a search, courts may well find that computer searches are allowed at the border only based on reasonable suspicion, not as a baseless fishing expedition.

I hope for the best, as I do in United States v. Ziegler, the case that found private employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their workplace computers. Defense attorneys have asked for a rehearing, and the court may do better next time.

Ziegler is important, because if employees have no protected privacy rights, then the government can enter a private workplace, without cause, without a warrant, with or without the employer's consent and search employee computers. The business might try to sue, but the employee would not have the right either to challenge the government's actions in court, or to suppress any discovered evidence.

Similarly, defense attorneys in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing have asked the 9th Circuit for a new hearing, and the court has an opportunity to issue a more careful opinion in that case, which arose from the Balco doping scandal.

The government is investigating whether 10 professional baseball players were illegally taking steroids. In the course of its probe, it obtained multiple warrants for the results of drug tests taken by the players. But it didn't just seize the results for the players under scrutiny -- it grabbed the entire database, with samples from hundreds of other athletes.

Lower courts ordered the government to return the information that was not related to the Balco-linked players, but the government appealed and the 9th Circuit ruled in its favor.

The facts of the case are complicated, but the proper result is clear: In every computer or database search case, information responsive to the warrant is going to be intermingled with information about other matters. Warrants should not only state whether the computers will be removed from the premises, and how the search will be done, but should also establish a way agents will try to segregate private information from the data they are entitled to obtain pursuant to the warrant.

Otherwise, we will find that the government can use a smaller investigation as a stalking horse to obtain information about a vast number of other people.

These Fourth Amendment trends should be closely followed.

Of course, there's a chance that the courts will not recognize the different scope of privacy interests at stake in computer searches, or will not be adept at crafting a rule that gives enough leeway and guidance to law enforcement, while also protecting privacy. At that point, the Constitution may fail us, and we will have to turn to Congress to create rules that are better adapted for the information age.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...tw=wn_index_18





Internet Subpoena Invalid, Appeals Court Says

Police violated Lower woman's Web privacy in tampering case, according to ruling
Trudi Gilfillian

A Lower Township woman's state constitutional rights to privacy were violated when police used an “invalid subpoena” to obtain her Internet subscriber information, a state appeals court ruled Monday.

The court's decision allowed for the fact that, while federal courts have found Internet subscribers under the Fourth Amendment have no right to privacy with respect to identifying information on file with their Internet service provider, or ISP, they do have a right to privacy under New Jersey's constitution.

The case stems from an August 2004 incident in which Shirley Reid's employer, Jersey Diesel of Lower Township, reported that Reid had likely tampered with the company's computers.

The company learned that changes had been made to a password and shipping address for suppliers, and found the changes were made by someone with an ISP address that was owned by Comcast.

Township police had the Municipal Court administrator issue a subpoena to Comcast to get the name of that subscriber, which led to Reid's arrest Oct. 8, 2004.

Reid is charged with computer-related theft, a second-degree crime punishable by a minimum three-year prison sentence.

Superior Court Judge Carmen Alvarez last year ruled in favor of a defense motion to suppress the evidence obtained via that subpoena, and the appeals panel agreed with that decision, declaring the subpoena invalid.

“Clearly, it was utilized simply as a device to obtain the desired information,” the court wrote. “And while a court clerk may issue a subpoena … the crime under investigation here involved an indictable offense, not within the jurisdiction of the municipal court.”

The court's decision emphasized that the state allows citizens greater privacy protection than the federal government.

“The right to privacy of New Jersey citizens under our state constitution has been expanded to areas not afforded such protection under the Fourth Amendment,” the court wrote.

It continued, “Only New Jersey appears to have recognized a right to what has been called ‘informational privacy.'”

Informational privacy is defined by the state as the ability to control the release of information about oneself.

“Writing on a nearly clean slate, we conclude that defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in her ISP account information” obtained from Comcast, the court continued.

Calling Reid's interest in anonymity both legitimate and substantial, the ruling noted that by using an anonymous ISP address and a screen name, Reid “manifested an intention to keep her identity publicly anonymous.”

The court added, however, that such information could be obtained through a proper judicial process.

“This is not an onerous burden to place on law enforcement. Just as with telephone or bank records, computers cannot be used with impunity for unlawful purposes. When there is probable cause to believe unlawful use has occurred, law enforcement has the tools to respond,” the court wrote.

“Rather, here the police unlawfully obtained the identity of defendant as the user of an ISP address which did not of itself reveal her identity,” the court wrote. “Because defendant had a right of privacy in the subscriber information obtained by the invalid subpoena, that evidence was properly suppressed by Judge Alvarez.”

Reid's attorney, Joseph Grassi, did not immediately return calls for comment.

Cape May County Prosecutor Robert Taylor said Monday his office has not decided whether it will seek a review of the case by the state Supreme Court.
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/n...-6994290c.html





Tighter Passport Rules for U.S. Citizens Start Tuesday
Julia Preston

A United States citizen flying home today from a ski jaunt in Canada, a beach break in Mexico or a honeymoon in Jamaica can flash a driver’s license or a birth certificate at airport customs officials and walk on through.

Tomorrow, those documents will no longer work.

Starting then, United States citizens, including children, returning to this country by air from any country in the Western Hemisphere will have to present a passport.

In another change, citizens of Canada and Bermuda traveling to the United States by air will also have to show passports to enter the country. Previously, they too could use driver’s licenses and birth documents.

United States officials, parrying complaints from Canada and Caribbean nations, said the measure was mandated by a 2004 law in which Congress adopted many proposals of the Sept. 11 commission. The purpose is to reduce the types of documents travelers can use to enter the United States, simplifying the job of inspectors looking for fake or invalid ones.

More than 8,000 styles of birth certificates are issued by agencies in the United States, according to Maura Harty, assistant secretary of state for consular affairs. “No inspector could ever possibly master all of those,” Ms. Harty said.

The United States passports now being issued can be read by scanners in airport customs booths and instantly verified in most cases through a federal database.

The new measure applies only to air travelers. Officials in the Department of Homeland Security said they expected to roll out the same restrictions for passengers arriving by land and sea by Jan. 1, 2008.

Until recently, only 27 percent of eligible Americans had passports. The new requirements set off a rush, with a record 12.1 million passports issued last year, Ms. Harty said. Despite that rush, she said, the normal time of six weeks or less to process a new passport has not increased.

Customs will also accept merchant marine cards and Nexus air cards, which are issued to citizens and legal immigrants in the United States and Canada who are frequent travelers and have passed a background check. Active duty military personnel are exempt.

Canadian travelers are most miffed by the change. Randy Williams, president of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, said confusion about when the new restrictions would go into effect had cost Canada $1.6 billion in lost American tourist dollars since 2005.

Canadian tourism representatives did not object to the passport requirement, Mr. Williams said. But he said publicity from Washington explaining the new measures was insufficient and late. Although the new requirements had been in the works since 2004, the Bush administration announced the start date only two months ago, on Nov. 22.

“All our lives, Canada and the United States have enjoyed freedom of travel across a trusting border,” Mr. Williams said. “Now adding these new costs and bureaucracy to that invisible line will change the psyche. That freedom will become a little more restricted — in some regards, a victory for terrorism.”

In Canada, passport offices have received 21,000 applications a day in recent weeks, and people have waited in line for up to four hours, said Francine Charbonneau, a spokeswoman for the passport agency.

Mexican air travelers have long been required to present passports and visas to enter the United States. Mexican tourism officials said their deeper concern was about Washington’s plans to require passports next year from all returning Americans. In a statement, Mexico said that that “could discourage the movement of tens of millions of visitors who live in the border areas.”

In Bermuda and the Caribbean, many hotels have offered to reimburse fees for new passports, said Peter Odle, president of the Caribbean Hotel Association.

Homeland Security officials said 94 percent of the United States citizens who returned to this country last week by air had documents that met the new requirements. Customs officials said they would have extra staff on duty this week and would not turn away United States citizens.

“The goal is to solicit compliance,” said Kelly Klundt, a customs spokeswoman. “The goal is not to strand people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/us/22passport.html




Maine Rejects Real ID Act
Declan McCullagh

Maine overwhelmingly rejected federal requirements for national identification cards on Thursday, marking the first formal state opposition to controversial legislation scheduled to go in effect for Americans next year.

Both chambers of the Maine legislature approved a resolution saying the state flatly "refuses" to force its citizens to use driver's licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the U.S. Congress to repeal the law.

The vote represents a political setback for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Republicans in Washington, D.C., which have argued that nationalized ID cards for all Americans would help in the fight against terrorists.

"I have faith that the Democrats in Congress will hear this from many states and will find a way to repeal or amend this in the coming months," House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview after the vote. "It's not only a huge federal mandate, but it's a huge mandate from the federal government asking us to do something we don't have any interest in doing."

The Real ID Act says that, starting around May 2008, Americans will need a federally approved ID card--a U.S. passport will also qualify--to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service. States will have to conduct checks of their citizens' identification papers, and driver's licenses likely will be reissued to comply with Homeland Security requirements.

In addition, the national ID cards must be "machine-readable," with details left up to Homeland Security, which hasn't yet released final regulations. That could end up being a magnetic strip, an enhanced bar code or radio frequency identification (RFID) chips.

The votes in Maine on the resolution were nonpartisan. It was approved by a 34-to-0 vote in the state Senate and by a 137-to-4 vote in the House of Representatives.

Other states are debating similar measures. Bills pending in Georgia, Massachusetts, Montana and Washington state express varying degrees of opposition to the Real ID Act.

Montana's is one of the strongest. The legislature held a hearing on Wednesday on a bill that says "The state of Montana will not participate in the implementation of the Real ID Act of 2005" and directs the state motor vehicle department "not to implement the provisions."

Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project, said he thinks Maine's vote will "break the logjam, and other states are going to follow." (The American Civil Liberties Union has set up an anti-Real ID Web site called Real Nightmare).

Pingree, Maine's House majority leader, said the Real ID Act would have cost the state $185 million over five years and required every state resident to visit the motor vehicle agency so that several forms of identification--including an original copy of the birth certificate and a Social Security card--would be uploaded into a federal database.

Growing opposition to the law in the states could create a political pickle for the Bush administration. The White House has enthusiastically embraced the Real ID Act, saying it (click for PDF) "facilitates the strengthening by the states of the standards for the security and integrity of drivers' licenses."

But if a sufficient number of states follow Maine's lead, pressure would increase on a Democratic Congress to relax the Real ID rules--or even rescind them entirely.

A key Republican supporter of the Real ID Act said Thursday that the law was just as necessary now as when it was enacted as part of an $82 billion military spending and tsunami relief bill. (Its backers say it follows the recommendations that the 9/11 Commission made in 2004.)

"Real ID is needed to protect the American people from terrorists who use drivers licenses to board planes, get jobs and move around the country as the 9/11 terrorists did," Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said in an e-mailed statement. "It makes sense to have drivers licenses that ensure a person is who they say they are. It makes the country safer and protects the American people from terrorists who would use the most common form of ID as cover."
http://news.com.com/Maine+rejects+Re...3-6153532.html





China's Hu Vows to "Purify" Internet

Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to "purify" the Internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country's sprawling, unruly online population.

Hu made the comments as the ruling party's Politburo -- its 24-member leading council -- was studying China's Internet, which claimed 137 million registered users at the end of 2006.

Hu, a strait-laced communist with little sympathy for cultural relaxation, did not directly mention censorship.

But he made it clear that the Communist Party was looking to ensure it keeps control of China's Internet users, often more interested in salacious pictures, bloodthirsty games and political scandal than Marxist lessons.

The party had to "strengthen administration and development of our country's Internet culture", Hu told the meeting on Tuesday, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

"Maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online," he said. "We must promote civilized running and use of the Internet and purify the Internet environment."

In 2006, China's Internet users grew by 26 million, or 23.4 percent, year on year, to reach 10.5 percent of the total population, the China Internet Network Information Center said on Tuesday.

The vast majority of those users have no access to overseas Chinese Web sites offering uncensored opinion and news critical of the ruling party. But even in heavily monitored China, news of official misdeeds and dissident opinion has been able to travel through online bulletin boards and blogs.

Hu told officials to intensify control even as they seek to release the Internet's economic potential. "Ensure that one hand grasps development while one hand grasps administration," he said.

Article





Chinese Professor Cracks Fifth Data Encryption Algorithm

SHA-1 added to list of "accomplishments"
Central News Agency

In five years, the U.S. government will cease to use SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm) and convert to a new and more advanced computer data encryption, according to the article "Security Cracked!" from New Scientist . The reason for this change is that 41-years old associate professor Wang Xiaoyun of Beijing's Tsinghua University and Shandong University of Technology has already cracked SHA-1.

According to a Beijing digest, this SHA-1 encryption includes the world's gold standard Message-Digest algorithm 5 (MD5). Before Professor Wang cracked it, the MD5 could only be deciphered by today's fastest supercomputer running codes for more than a million years.

However, professor Wang Xiaoyun, a graduate of Shandong University of Technology's mathematics department, and her research team obtained results by using ordinary personal computers.

In early 2005, Wang and her research team announced that they had succeeded in cracking SHA-1. In addition to the U.S. government, well known companies like Microsoft, Sun, Atmel, and others have also announced that they will no longer be using SHA-1.

Two years ago, Wang convened an international data encryption conference to announce that her team had successfully cracked the four world-class standards of data encryption algorithms of MD5, HAVAL-1 28, MD4 and RIPEMD within 10 years.

A few months later, she then cracked the even more advanced and difficult SHA-1.

According to the article, Hash was Wang's area of research. Hash is the basis of MD5 and SHA-1, the two most extensive data encryption algorithms now used in the world.

These two main algorithms are currently the crucial technology that electronic signatures and many other password securities use throughout the international community. They are widely used in banking, securities, and e-commerce. SHA-1 has been recognized as the cornerstone for modern Internet security.

According to the article, in the early stages of Wang's research, there were other data encryption researchers who tried to crack it. However, none of them succeeded. This is why in 15 years Hash research had become the domain of hopeless research in many scientists' minds.

Wang's method of cracking the encryptions differs from all others. Although encryption analysis usually cannot be done without the use of computers, according to Wang, the computer only assisted in cracking the algorithm. Most of the time, she calculated manually, and manually designed the methods.

Wang said, "Hackers crack passwords with bad intentions. I hope efforts to protect against password theft will benefit [from this]. Password analysts work to evaluate the security of data encryption and to search for even more secure encryption algorithms."

She added, "On the day that I cracked SHA-1, I went out to eat. I was very excited. I knew I was the only person who knew this world-class secret."

Within ten years, Wang cracked the five biggest names in data encryption. Many people would think the life of this scientist must be monotonous. However she said, "That ten years was a very relaxed time for me."

During her work, she bore a daughter and cultivated a balcony full of flowers. The only mathematics related habit in her life is how she remembers the license plates of taxi cabs.
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-1-11/50336.html





Vint Cerf: One Quarter of all Computers Part of a Botnet
Nate Anderson

The World Economic Forum takes place this week in Davos, Switzerland, and leaders around the world gather to discuss issues like the Iraq war, global climate change, and globalization—along with the incredible prevalence of botnets.

The BBC's Tim Weber, who was in the audience of an Internet panel featuring Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, John Markoff of the New York Times, and Jon Zittrain of Oxford, came away most impressed by the botnet statistics. Cerf told his listeners that approximately 600 million computers are connected to the Internet, and that 150 million of them might be participants in a botnet—nearly all of them unwilling victims. Weber remarks that "in most cases the owners of these computers have not the slightest idea what their little beige friend in the study is up to."

If Cerf's estimate is accurate, that's one quarter of all machines connected to the Internet. So is the Internet doomed? Well, you're reading this, so no, not yet. But the botnet menace is no phantom, and it has been growing in strength for years. In September 2006, security research firm Arbor Networks announced that it was now seeing botnet-based denial of service attacks capable of generating an astonishing 10-20Gbps of junk data. The company notes that when major attacks of this sort began, ISPs often do exactly what the attacker wants them to do: take the target site offline.

What is it that keeps the "botherders" so fascinated with amassing large flocks like modern-day, digital shepherds? Money. Once millions of "little beige friends" have been compromised with bot software, the creators can then use or rent the network to deliver spam, denial of service attacks, and log passwords and usernames.

All of these uses can be lucrative if you know the right wrong people. Several months ago, Wired published a great story about the extended botnet attack on Blue Security that captures the shadowy nature of the botnet world. Even after weeks of attacks and public tauntings from the spammer behind them, neither the security firm nor its ISPs could fully halt the attacks or identify the person who was launching them. In the end, Blue Security folded.

Botnets have been behind a significant increase in spam in recent months, and some security vendors have warned that these networks are now large enough to pose a potential threat to major government networks (at least those which operate or are connected to the public Internet).

It can be difficult to locate and prosecute botnet operators. Blue Security officials believed that their antagonist was in Russia, but American teenagers have also been involved in the practice, and several have been prosecuted. Two were sentenced last year to 57 and 37 months in jail, respectively—sentences designed to send a message that the government is serious about the issue.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070125-8707.html





Free is bad

PR's 'Pit Bull' Takes on Open Access

Journal publishers lock horns with free-information movement.
Jim Giles

The author of Nail 'Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses is not the kind of figure normally associated with the relatively sedate world of scientific publishing. Besides writing the odd novel, Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.

Although Dezenhall declines to comment on Skilling and his other clients, his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace. "He's the pit bull of public relations," says Kevin McCauley, an editor at the magazine O'Dwyer's PR Report.

Now, Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

From e-mails passed to Nature, it seems Dezenhall spoke to employees from Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society at a meeting arranged last July by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). A follow-up message in which Dezenhall suggests a strategy for the publishers provides some insight into the approach they are considering taking.

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles".

Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000–500,000.

In an enthusiastic e-mail sent to colleagues after the meeting, Susan Spilka, Wiley's director of corporate communications, said Dezenhall explained that publishers had acted too defensively on the free-information issue and worried too much about making precise statements. Dezenhall noted that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn't matter if they can discredit your statements, she added: "Media messaging is not the same as intellectual debate".

Officials at the AAP would not comment to Nature on the details of their work with Dezenhall, or the money involved, but acknowledged that they had met him and subsequently contracted his firm to work on the issue.

"We're like any firm under siege," says Barbara Meredith, a vice-president at the organization. "It's common to hire a PR firm when you're under siege." She says the AAP needs to counter messages from groups such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open-access publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information. PLoS's publicity budget stretches to television advertisements produced by North Woods Advertising of Minneapolis, a firm best known for its role in the unexpected election of former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura to the governorship of Minnesota.

The publishers' link with Dezenhall reflects how seriously they are taking recent developments on access to information. Minutes of a 2006 AAP meeting sent to Nature show that particular attention is being paid to PubMed Central. Since 2005, the NIH has asked all researchers that it funds to send copies of accepted papers to the archive, but only a small percentage actually do. Congress is expected to consider a bill later this year that would make submission compulsory.

Brian Crawford, a senior vice-president at the American Chemical Society and a member of the AAP executive chair, says that Dezenhall's suggestions have been refined and that the publishers have not to his knowledge sought to work with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. On the censorship message, he adds: "When any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity's interests."
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/0701...l/445347a.html





Rivals Voice Complaints About Microsoft’s New System
AP

Rivals of Microsoft renewed their call Friday for European regulators to act against what they say are “illegal practices,” charging that the new Vista operating system is the company’s effort to extend its monopoly to the Internet.

They asked the European Commission to make a decision “as fast as possible” on a complaint they filed last February. It had accused Microsoft of working to keep its existing monopolies and trying to extend its market dominance into other areas, including Web-based computing.

Microsoft had no immediate comment beyond saying that the rivals — represented by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems — were not saying anything new. The company has described the group as a front for I.B.M. and other competitors that have tried to use regulatory complaints to their business advantage.

The group said Microsoft’s XAML markup language — which it said was positioned to replace the current Web page language HTML — was designed “from the ground up to be dependent on Windows.”

“The very same practices the European Commission found to be illegal almost three years ago have now been implemented in Vista,” the group of rivals said.

A spokesman for the group, Thomas Vinje, said Microsoft was seeking to impose its own Windows-dependent standards and displace existing ones.

“The end result will be the continued absence of any real consumer choice, years of waiting for Microsoft to improve — or even debug — its monopoly products, and, of course, high prices,” Mr. Vinje said.

The rival group represents I.B.M., Nokia, Sun Microsystems, RealNetworks and Oracle along with smaller software companies like the Web browser maker Opera Software and two Linux operating system businesses: Red Hat and Linspire.

The complaint that the group filed in February 2006 accused Microsoff of monopoly abuse in sectors not covered by Europe’s 2004 antitrust ruling. That decision found Microsoft had abused its position by bundling media software into its Windows software and squeezing out rival media players.

As a remedy, the European Union ordered Microsoft to share communications code with rivals to make their software work smoothly with Windows. It fined the company last July for dragging its feet over supplying the ”complete and accurate” data required.

Microsoft challenged the regulators’ conclusions and is awaiting a ruling from the Court of First Instance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/te...y/27vista.html





Required Reading

Windows Vista Content Protection - Twenty Questions (and Answers)
Nick White

A conversation has cropped up since the recent publication of a paper scrutinizing how Windows handles digital rights management, especially for HD video (WiR – Dec 23rd ’06). I've since looped back with Dave Marsh, a Lead Program Manager responsible for Windows' handling of video, to learn from him the implications involved and to learn to what extent the paper's assertions are accurate. The following is an article Dave has put together to address the misconceptions in the paper, followed by answers to what we expect will be the most frequent questions in the minds of our customers. Leave us a comment to let us know what you think. -- Nick

Over the holidays, a paper was distributed that raised questions about the content protection features in Windows Vista. The paper draws sharp conclusions about the implications of those features for our customers. As one of the Lead Program Managers for the technologies in question, I would like to share our views on these questions.

Windows Vista includes content protection infrastructure specifically designed to help ensure that protected commercial audiovisual content, such as newly released HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, can be enjoyed on Windows Vista PCs. In many cases this content has policies associated with its use that must be enforced by playback devices. The policies associated with such content are applicable to all types of devices including Windows Vista PCs, computers running non-Windows operating systems, and standalone consumer electronics devices such as DVD players. If the policies required protections that Windows Vista couldn't support, then the content would not be able to play at all on Windows Vista PCs. Clearly that isn't a good scenario for consumers who are looking to enjoy great next generation content experiences on their PCs.

Associating usage policies with commercial content is not new to Windows Vista, or to the industry. In fact, much of the functionality discussed in the paper has been part of previous versions of Windows, and hasn’t resulted in significant consumer problems – as evidenced by the widespread consumer use of digital media in Windows XP. For example:

· Standard definition DVD playback has required selective use of Macrovision ACP on analog television outputs since it was introduced in the 1990s. DVD playback on and in Windows has always supported this.
· The ability to restrict audio outputs (e.g., S/PDIF) for certain types of content has been available since Windows Millennium Edition (ME) and has been available in all subsequent versions of Windows.
· The Certified Output Protection Protocol (COPP) was released over 2 years ago for Windows XP, and provides applications with the ability to detect output types and enable certain protections on video outputs such as HDCP, CGMS-A, and Macrovision ACP.

It's important to emphasize that while Windows Vista has the necessary infrastructure to support commercial content scenarios, this infrastructure is designed to minimize impact on other types of content and other activities on the same PC. For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop. Similarly, if someone was listening to commercial audio content while viewing medical imagery, none of the video protection mechanisms would be activated and the displayed images would again be unaffected.

Contrary to claims made in the paper, the content protection mechanisms do not make Windows Vista PCs less reliable than they would be otherwise -- if anything they will have the opposite effect, for example because they will lead to better driver quality control.

The paper implies that Microsoft decides which protections should be active at any given time. This is not the case. The content protection infrastructure in Windows Vista provides a range of à la carte options that allows applications playing back protected content to properly enable the protections required by the policies established for such content by the content owner or service provider. In this way, the PC functions the same as any other consumer electronics device.

With that introduction, here are the top twenty questions, and answers, that aim to address some of the other points raised in the paper.

Dave Marsh - Lead Program Manager for Video

Twenty Questions and Answers

Do these content protection requirements apply equally to the Consumer Electronics industry supplied player devices such as an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player?

Generally the requirements are equivalent for all devices. For example, an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc always requires HDCP protection for DVI/HDMI outputs regardless of the type of device playing the disc. There are some cases, such as DVD-Video, where PCs have slightly different protection requirements than CE devices, but these differences are mainly historical and as dictated by the licenses associated with the systems providing access to the content (e.g., CSS for DVD).

When are Windows Vista's content protection features actually used?

Windows Vista's content protection mechanisms are only used when required by the policy associated with the content being played. For Windows Vista experiences, if the content does not require a particular protection, then that protection mechanism is not used.

Will the playback quality be reduced on some video output types?

Image quality constraints are only active when required by the policy associated with the content being played, and then only apply to that specific content -- not to any other content on the user's desktop. As a practical matter, image constraint will typically result in content being played at no worse than standard definition television resolution. In the case of HD optical media formats such as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the constraint requirement is 520K pixels per frame (i.e., roughly 960x540), which is still higher than the native resolution of content distributed in the DVD-Video format. We feel that this is still yields a great user experience, even when using a high definition screen.

Will this affect things like medical imagery applications?

Image constraints only apply to protected content being played and not to the desktop as a whole; therefore, the resolution of other non-protected media, such as medical images, is not affected.

Do things such as HFS (Hardware Functionality Scan) affect the ability of the open-source community to write a driver?

No. HFS uses additional chip characteristics other than those needed to write a driver. HFS requirements should not prevent the disclosure of all the information needed to write drivers.

Will the Windows Vista content protection board robustness recommendations increase the cost of graphics cards and reduce the number of build options?

Everything was moving to be integrated on the one chip anyway and this is independent of content protection recommendations. Given that cost (particularly chip cost) is most heavily influenced by volume, it is actually better to avoid making things optional through the use of external chips. It is a happy side effect that this technology trend also reduces the number of vulnerable tracks on the board.

Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?

Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality. Windows Vista's content protection features were developed to carefully balance the need to provide robust protection from commercial content while still enabling great new experiences such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback.

Aren't there already output content protection features in Windows XP?

Yes. Output content protections are not new requirements for commercial content. The CSS content protection system for DVD-video discs requires output protections such as Macrovision ACP and limiting the resolution on component video outputs to standard definition. Windows XP has supported these requirements for some time.

Is content protection something that is tied to High Definition video?

While HD content has some unique content protection requirements, many of the requirements apply to commercial content generally, independent of resolution.

What about S/PDIF audio connections?

Windows Vista does not require S/PDIF to be turned off, but Windows Vista continues to support the ability to turn it off for certain content -- a capability that has been present on the Windows platform for many years. Additionally, in order to support the requirements of some types of content, Windows Vista supports the ability to constrain the quality of the audio component of that content. Similar to image constraint for video, this quality constraint only applies to the audio from content whose policy requires the constraint, not to any other audio being played concurrently on the system. As a practical matter, these audio restrictions are not widely used today.

Will Component (YPbPr) video outputs be disabled by Windows Vista's content protection?

Similar to S/PDIF, Windows Vista does not require component video outputs to be disabled, but rather enables the enforcement of the usage policy set by content owners or service providers, including with respect to output restrictions and image constraint.

Will echo cancellation work less well for premium content?

We believe that Windows Vista provides applications with access to sufficient information to successfully build high quality echo cancellation functionality.

Will it mean that there will no longer be unified graphics drivers?

The Windows Vista content protection requirements for graphics drivers will not lead to movement away from unified drivers. In fact, all graphics drivers shipped with Windows Vista are unified drivers.

Will Windows Vista audio content protection mean that HDMI outputs can't be shown as S/PDIF outputs?

It is better if they show as different codec types, as it allows the difference to be reflected in the UI, thus providing the user help with their configuration and creating a better user experience. The user wants to know the difference between HDMI and S/PDIF, as they are different physical connectors.

What is revocation and where is it used?

Renewal and revocation mechanisms are an important part of providing robust protection for commercial audiovisual content. In the rare event that a revocation is required, Microsoft will work with the affected IHV to ensure that a new driver is made available, ideally in advance of the actual revocation. Revocation only impacts a graphics driver's ability to receive certain commercial audiovisual content; otherwise, the revoked driver will continue to function normally.

Does this complicate the process of writing graphics drivers?

Adding new functionality usually introduces new complexity. In this case, additional complexity is added to the graphics driver, but that complexity comes with the direct consumer benefit of new scenarios such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback.

Will the 'tilt bit' mechanism cause problems even when the driver is not under attack from a hacker, e.g., when there are voltage spikes?

It is pure speculation to say that things like voltage fluctuations might cause a driver to think it is under attack from a hacker. It is up to a graphics IHV to determine what they regard as an attack. Even if such an event did cause playback to stop, the user could just press 'play' again and carry on watching the movie (after the driver has re-initialized, which takes about a second). Again, it is important to note that this could only occur in the case of watching the highest-grade premium content, such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. In practice I doubt it would ever actually happen.

Does Windows Vista's use of OMAC-authenticated communication impact graphics driver performance?

The authenticated communication mechanisms used for Protected Video Path in Windows Vista are only actively used while commercial content is playing. This means that while there is a performance impact, it is limited to the scenarios where it is required to provide robust protection for commercial content.

Do content protection requirements mean that graphics chips have to provide hardware acceleration for video decode?

No. The Windows Vista content protection requirements do not require that graphics hardware include hardware acceleration for decode for many years, but such support is highly recommended to improve the user experience for HD content.

Will the video and audio content protection mechanisms affect gaming on the PC?

The Windows Vista content protection features were design for commercial audiovisual content and are typically not used in game applications. A game author would have to specifically request these features for them to impact game performance.
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/wi...d-answers.aspx


In Response

Posted by jamieplucinski

After e-mailing a request to see this addressed, I didn't think it'd be done so soon. The main outrage came from the fact that Microsoft sold out to the industry that is attacking everyone from pre-teens, the dead, and everything in-between; I refuse to buy anything with DRM or copy protection added, if it means going without new movies/music then I am happy to do so.

I personally haven't brought a movie or music CD in more than 3 years, and since then many high-profile events have occurred that have made me feel good about that decision.

Handing over complete control to the RIAA/MPAA and allowing them to have the final say on what a Windows machine can and cannot do is completely unacceptable. I don't care if an exploit has been found in my drivers, unless it's to do with security in the sense of someone being able to compromise my machine I don't expect to see driver revocation just to satisfy some lawyer.

If you are going to offer the ability to playback movies and music but only on the condition that our machines satisfy the checklist that someone who has never worked in the computing industry has made, then thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather do without DVD-Playback and video/music playback from Microsoft, if Ultimate N was available I'd have asked for it at the end of the Beta. VLC and other open-source offerings that do without all the extra copy-protection that Microsoft add, if we're not going to use it, then why should it be forced upon us?

Do Corporate users have the ability to be exempt from Microsoft updates for "compromised" drivers, will the first playback of premium content result in my system being unable to render 3d images and games because I'm using basic drivers? What if the development cycle for third-party drivers doesn't fit in with Microsoft's revocation schedule? What about the users of DreamScene? Looping Video that's flagged as premium content would cause full-desktop image control into the copy protection system.

So for those out there who are willing to hand over control of their system's drivers to Microsoft and a team of lawyers have fun. But for the rest of us, what choice do we have?


Posted by mind

I think a big question that has not been answered is one of choice. If I were to live in an area where I was not bound by legacy copyright law, would I be able to turn off these features so that I wouldn't have a crippled operating system?

If as a user, I can't even install my own non-signed drivers, this sounds very much like a scheme to keep any non Microsoft-blessed manufacturer from making their own hardware (*cough* antitrust).

End-user choice and responsibility for those choices are hallmarks of the free world. I truly hope the market sees through this deliberate crippleware masquerading as an 'upgrade'.


Posted by prh99

It's still anti-consumer, and is there for one purpose and that's to give Hollywood control, often far beyond what copyright requires. There are people already punching holes in AACS (decrypting content and more recently finding the keys to do so in memory so they don't necessarily have to post those keys in public, making revocation harder) an HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are barely off the ground. Renewable or not this doesn't bode well for AACS. If the keys are exposed it doesn't matter how strong the crypto is.

Schneier's Law: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it."

I am disappointed that Microsoft has been so willing to cripple users PCs at Hollywood's request. I can only hope that some of features that got pulled (like WinFS) get released cause right now Vista isn't looking like an attractive upgrade.


Posted by dila813

6-9 months ago I couldn't wait for Vista to arrive.

I got my free upgrade certificate for a laptop and a PC that I just bought.

I will send it in to get the upgrade, but until I am convinced they will never be installed.

I was planning to purchase upgrades for my other 4 computers, now I am not.

Until every possible risk associated with this technology is solved and known I won't install this os. I can't afford to have myself cut off at the knees for this.

A black and white easy to read warrantee where Microsoft will give full replacement value for hardware and software that is caused to fail or degrade plus the cost of business disruption would be the only thing that would even make me reconsider.

If anything, the post above makes me feel like an idiot for installing XP in the first place and choosing to buy a PC last year.

Microsoft has done something for someone else's benefit, why don't you have them pay for my PC then? I bought the computer, the software, etc... They have no right to mess with it!

When I buy something, it is mine mine mine mine! I don't want someone going in and violating what I own. This is trespassing and sabotage! If I buy a graphics card, I expect full performance 100% of the time or I demand a refund. I don't care if my graphics card is 6 years old, it better play or else I expect a full refund!

If they don't want to sell their stinking filth on DVD, then don't, that's their choice, but what gives them the right to mess with my PC?

They should have to give us a rebate on every purchase of either MS Software or other software that may be impacted by their scheme. They are decreasing the value of our investments in computers and other software.


Posted by chickenboo

This essay has essentially CONFIRMED every horrible charge leveled at Vista by Gutmann. Using a bucket full of weasel words does nothing to convince me that Vista isn't screwing the consumer--or worse, the media/medical professional--for the sake of. . . of what? At the end of the day, the most infuriating thing about this crippleware is that it was done with such a blatant disregard for the consumer without a moment's hesitation. In what universe is it appropriate to give a content producer the power to turn off a user's hardware? How can you have no moral qualms with this?


Posted by JRHelgeson
Vista is DRM

Vista is NOTHING but a DRM platform that also happens to run Windows applications.

I am currently running Vista Ultimate on my laptop, a closed system with an integrated nvidia video card running Microsoft Certified drivers... I cannot play videos that *I* have created of screen recordings at full screen, I have to play them back in a window. Running full screen in Windows Media Player causes the playback to simply pause. I also cannot play videos that I have created from scratch and integrated into newly created powerpoint 2007 slides. When playing back on my laptop screen, the video plays fine, but when feeding the signal to the projector screen through the analog video output, the video plays for 1 second then pauses for 1/4 second repeatedly.

This is not protected content.

Sure, it isn't *supposed* to be applying DRM "features" to *MY* content, but it is.

This is horseshit, horseshit, horseshit! And for any of those who don't know what I'm talking about, its the shit that comes from a horse.

You cannot build restrictions into every device, every driver and expect it not to have unintended consequences in everyday usage.

Vista is completely defective by design.

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/01/21/0042202.shtml





My MythTV Install Experience
Gianfranco Berardi

I have long wanted to make a MythTV box instead of paying a monthly fee for something like TiVo. I figured that if I made my own machine, I would be in control of my time shifting. I wouldn’t have to worry about some media company telling me what I can do, nor would I pay a monthly fee for the “privilege”. Also, the Broadcast Flag is apparently very hard to kill, and the media companies seem intent on getting it out there. I wanted to build my own digital video recorder sooner rather than later.

That said, I did not find the MythTV installation experience to be very smooth at all. I did not realize before starting this project that MythTV only recently hit v0.20 and is still very rough around the edges. I had done quite a bit of research, learning what hardware worked well and what problems people encountered. Somehow I manage to avoid finding all of the complaints and show-stopper problems people have encountered until after I had already purchased the hardware and made the decision to make this machine.

As I write this, I am watching live TV while recording another channel. Also, in about 10 minutes, the first recording will end, and another recording session on yet another channel is scheduled. Earlier this afternoon, my girlfriend wanted to watch two shows that were airing at the same time, so it was the perfect first test. That test failed, but I wasn’t home when it happened. I don’t know if there was an actual problem with the system or if there was a problem with the user interface. I think the database or the capture cards crashed. Either way, I wasn’t happy.

But let me start from the beginning:

The Initial Hardware Purchase

I made the decision to put together this machine at the beginning of December. In order to get everything ready in time for Christmas, I didn’t want to order the parts online and risk something going wrong in shipping. I went to Fry’s to purchase everything. My goals with this machine:

· I wanted to be able to watch TV while recording something at the same time.
· I wanted it to be quiet.
· I wanted it to look like it belongs in the living room.

Of course, none of my preferred hardware was available, but I was mainly concerned with the capture cards. I picked out a small Antec case, a miniATX Abit motherboard with onboard sound and video (including integrated TV-Out), an AMD64-X2 processor that was energy efficient, and 2GB of DDR2 memory. From what I had read, I had way too much processing power and memory for my needs, but I figure that this machine might be able to do more in the future.

As I said, I couldn’t find my preferred capture cards. I wanted to find a Hauppauge PVR-500, which is one PCI card that has two inputs. I read that there are some slight problems with it, especially compared to the PVR-150, but they seemed to have workarounds or fixes. It seems that miniATX motherboards do not have more than two PCI slots, and so freeing up one slot would mean that air flow through the case would be unhindered as well as allowing upgrades to the machine in the future. Maybe I might want to get another capture card, or I might get a sound card if I find that the onboard audio isn’t sufficient.

Well, I couldn’t find anything by Hauppauge. The next thing I thought I could get was the ATI TV-Wonder card, which is not to be mistaken for the ATI All-in-Wonder card. The former is actually usable in GNU/Linux; the latter isn’t. I found the HD version of the TV-Wonder, but I was not sure if I could use it with standard cable. In the end, I settled for the Avermedia AverTV Go 007 FM. There were two of these cards, and both were discounted. I think I had read about it and knew that it was slightly tricky to get working, but it was doable.

I bought a 300GB Seagate SATA hard drive and a Samsung DVD writer. I bought the SATA drive because I wanted it to be quick, and I bought the Samsung because I had read that it was a quiet drive.

In the end, the total price came out to almost $900, which is $400 more than I expected a MythTV box to cost. Yeesh!

The First Problem

I put everything together on Christmas Eve, only to find that the capture cards wouldn’t fit in the PCI slots! At first I thought that it was a manufacturing defect of the PCI cards, but a few days later I found that the problem was with the motherboard. Apparently someone decided to put some tall capacitors right next to the PCI slots, and the capture cards have something sticking down. By the laws of physics, they can’t fit in the same space at the same time, so I had to bring back the motherboard and get a new one. Having already purchased a processor and memory, I needed to find a motherboard that was compatible. I managed to get an MSI miniATX board that allowed me to install the CPU, the memory, and the PCI cards. It didn’t have integrated TV-Out, but I didn’t really have a choice unless I wanted to order something online and wait for it.

More Hardware

When I was ready to start installing the software, I realized that I didn’t have a way to connect the machine to my television. I also didn’t have a cable splitter, so I couldn’t use both tuner cards either. After doing some more research, I found that I could get an external converter to connect VGA output to A/V inputs. I bought the converter, the cable splitter, and some high-quality cables.

The Software: First Attempt

My first choice was to try using Knoppmyth. It is basically a MythTV installation based off of the Knoppix distribution. I read that it is very easy to install MythTV with it, so I obtained the latest version, R5E50, and burned a CD.

I want to point out that the The Pamphlet of KnoppMyth never mentions how to select and create the four partitions it suggests. I kept getting strange errors about a drive being read-only, and I just assumed it was a problem with Knoppix/Knoppmyth not handling SATA correctly. No, it turns out that it is a problem of not letting me easily see what it was I was supposed to do. When you select Partition, you should also press SPACE to select the drive. If you don’t select the drive in this way, you will basically run cfdisk without any arguments, which gives the same error message. Of course, the UI should do a better job than highlight the entire line. It should highlight the spot that lets me see that I should put an asterisk in the ASCII box. Better yet, since I only had one drive anyway, it should automatically put one in there for me so that just hitting Enter should do the right thing. Interestingly, the boot-loader installation works by defaulting to one of the choices, so why not the do the same in the partition option? It took me over 40 minutes before I realized why I was having this issue.

Now that that headache is out of the way, I had to go through the install process multiple times. First, apparently because I was installing with the computer connected to the television, it wouldn’t start the X server correctly and I had nothing but a blank screen at startup. Then I had a strange problem of the drive being mounted by the installer and then preventing the installer from doing its job:

Error: Formatting of /dev/sda1 failed. Some messages
from mkfs.ext3: mke2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
/dev/sda1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!

I got the above error at two different points in the installation process, and I found that it seems to happen after it is done copying files. At one point I decided to start over from scratch, making sure to read all of the directions carefully, and I finally got the nice message:

KnoppMyth was successfully installed to hd.

w00t! All it seemed to take was knowing that I had to press the spacebar at certain points.

So, the pamphlet says “Once complete, reboot the system.” Ok, but do I take the CD out? It seemed to make sense, but it would be nice if it was clearer on this point. Maybe it still needed the CD for further work? I had to hit the spacebar, so maybe it would make sense for it to need the CD again. I took my chances with removing the CD.

After staring at a blank screen for a few minutes, I decided that I needed to get a spare monitor in my living room. I knew there was a reason not to get rid of it yet. Of course, I still get disturbing error messages:

Mounting local filesystem .. mount: you must specify the filesystem type
FAILED

That FAILED part is in bright red, by the way.

And I still get a blank screen. Soooo….start over? Sure!

Except I still get a blank screen once the install is finished and I’ve rebooted. Well, there is a non-blinking white cursor at the top left, and the computer doesn’t seem to take any input from the keyboard except CTRL+ALT+DEL. I think that the X server was somehow running, but I wasn’t able to see anything. Hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL seems to let the installation actually shutdown correctly.

Knowing that something is working doesn’t make me feel better that the entire system isn’t working. Somehow, I only now found out that Knoppmyth is apparently not as easy as it is made out to be. I find a few articles about people experience problems with MySQL not starting correctly and incorrect default pathnames during setup. I also don’t know why the X server didn’t startup correctly. Knoppmyth is still a young project, and I look forward to using it in the future, but it just wasn’t going to work for me without a lot of manual effort. Effort defeated the purpose of using Knoppmyth in the first place, and so I decided to try something else.

The Software: Second Attempt

After reading about the success people had with Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu, I decided to use Ubuntu. It is based on Debian, which is what I use on my desktop, so I could feel comfortable installing and maintaining the machine. I found an AMD64 version of the Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 install CD image, burned a copy, and set to work installing. I was amazed that it installed a complete desktop system within what seemed like minutes. It seemed like all of my hardware was detected, but I found that the nForce 410 chipset is not getting detected. I couldn’t get the onboard audio working, but it may have to do with the fact that the drivers are not available for the kernel version I have. Luckily, I had a spare USB audio device laying around. This Turtlebeach device would not install on a Windows 98 system sometime last year, but Ubuntu automatically detected it. It just worked!

Installing the packages for MythTV was actually fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, I ran into more trouble.

Even More Hardware

It turned out that the two Avermedia cards didn’t act the same. One of them worked fine, although I couldn’t seem to get audio working. I read that someone had to redirect /dev/dsp to another dsp device, so I wasn’t too worried. The other card, however, would not get detected correctly. lspci -v can tell me that it comes from Avermedia, but it sees it as an unknown device. I even tried using it in a different PCI slot and with the good card removed from the machine, but nothing seemed to work. Another frustrating thing? It turns out that the Avermedia cards weren’t hardware encoders. So I went to Microcenter and bought a Hauppauge PVR-150. I replaced the bad card, installed the ivtv drivers and firmware, and I was able to get video on both devices. While the PVR-150 worked great, the Avermedia card was still silent and video stuttered. I bought a second PVR-150, replaced the remaining Avermedia card, and now I am testing everything.

Those two cards cost about $100 each. Sorry, Wallet.

What’s Next?

The PVR-150 came with a remote control which is supposed to be easy to setup with the MythTV box. Right now, I have to use a keyboard to control the Myth frontend, and the keyboard does not reach all lthe way to the couch. The remote will make things more convenient.

I also want to try to install some Myth plugins. MythWeather, MythDVD, MythNews, and MythGame should be fairly self-explanatory. MythWeb would allow me to manage the recording schedule from a remote web browser.

General Issues

While I was trying to get the non-hardware encoder cards working, it was terribly unstable. The backend crashes, the MySQL database crashes, and the frontend crashes, and way too often to be usable. Sometimes the capture cards seem to get corrupted, requiring a reboot. It needs to be more stable to stay in the living room.

Now

I just finished recording two shows while I watched live TV. The well-supported hardware encoders really ease the load on my machine. Both shows seem to have recorded just fine, and I didn’t notice much more than a short stutter when it started recording the second show in the background. I am watching one of the recordings, and I am pleasantly surprised to find that it doesn’t have any strange video or audio problems. And it just automatically skipped a commercial break for me! Sweet!

If I were to do this project all over again, I would probably have saved some money by getting a cheaper processor. From what I understand, 1GHz might have been good enough, although I could probably spend only a few more dollars to get at least 2GHz. I may not have needed more than 512MB or 1GB of memory, so there could be some significant savings right there. I also would have bought a better motherboard that didn’t use an unsupported nForce chipset, and I would have bought the hardware encoder capture cards in the first place.

Hopefully this information will be helpful to someone who is looking to install MythTV. Basically, unless you have well-supported hardware, you will likely run into installation problems that remind me of what GNU/Linux installation was like years ago. Knoppmyth may work out of the box with the right motherboard and capture cards, but it may be easier to just install a different distro and install MythTV on top of it.
http://gbgames.com/blog/?page_id=553