*HOT* Tech News And Downloads, I Would Read This Thread And Post Any Good Info

Gadgets Built to Fail


By Kris Wagner| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Dec, 11, 2006

Someday, much sooner than you'd like, that shiny new toy you just bought will break. When it happens, you'll swear, you'll cry -- then you'll sigh and open your wallet. You've been here before, with the jammed Walkman, the DOA answering machine, the fritzed digicam, the blue screen of death.



As map editor and go-to tech guy at Backpacker magazine, I deal with more gadgets in a summer -- from GPS systems to laptops -- than most people will use in a decade. Over the past two years, I've grappled with digital cameras that spontaneously lost the ability to focus, GPS units that were unable to find themselves, memory cards that forgot, and a cell phone that refused calls from my wife. I've missed deadlines, lost data, and made wrong turns onto one-way streets, all thanks to technology we claim we can't live without.

Of course, no R&D department would ever admit to creating products that are intended to crash and burn. But I believe that, like humans, the PDA holding your business contacts and favorite songs has a preordained lifespan. It's simply a matter of when it will die.

Let's call it the buy-die-buy theory: Manufacturers design technology to fail so you're forced to upgrade regularly.

It may sound paranoid, but buy-die-buy is established gospel among longtime MP3 player owners, many of whom are on their second or third devices. It's a predictable routine: Purchase a player, enjoy several months of stress-free use, then notice minor bugs or shortfalls that slowly, or not so slowly, turn into major problems.

For proof, look no further than Orem, Utah, where dozens of flatlined iPods rest like miniature tombstones beside Luis Gamero's workstation. Gamero, a technician at Brokenipods.com, has seen enough conked-out 'Pods to know that their main assailant is normal use.

"These iPod hard drives weren't designed to move around. Jostling and bumping will eventually break them," Gamero says. "And devices like these are harder to repair because there are few fixable parts."

Or the repair isn't cost-effective. Generally, it's easier to replace a broken product than to fix it; that's especially true for tech toys, for which prices routinely drop even as performance improves. A member of Best Buy's Geek Squad tells me that the age of a device usually determines its destiny when it breaks: Under two years, likely salvageable. After that, dumpster-bound. Also, there's an inverse relationship between cost and recoverability: Companies that make low-end products rarely bother to manufacture spare parts. Meanwhile, companies that make premium gear invest in the replacement parts needed to salvage broken machines.

These truths echoed in my head when my 26-month-old cell phone died. I took it back to the T-Mobile store and asked the young clerk, who was thumbing a new Sidekick 3, if my phone had been programmed to self-destruct after a couple of years. He shrugged, then proceeded to show me an ultrathin upgrade offered at discount with -- can it be coincidental? -- a two-year contract renewal.

"It really is the case that what you buy today is obsolete tomorrow," says Richard DeMillo, dean of computing at Georgia Tech and former CTO for Hewlett-Packard. But DeMillo says manufacturers are simply responding to what the market requires. "The business revolves around the constant turn of products," he says.

Other experts insist that buy-die-buy is a myth. "I have no data that suggests planned obsolescence," says Mark Hurst, president of Creative Good, a New York City marketing consulting firm. "I happen to like my five-year-old camera, but someone else may not. A lot of obsolescence is by consumer choice."

Consumer choice or something more sinister? If there is a vast obsolescence conspiracy, Pentax isn't part of it. "We do not plan a set lifespan for our digital cameras," says John Carlson, product manager at Pentax Imaging. "We use the best technology available to make them last as long as possible. Many times, the camera will continue to function long past when the customer wishes to upgrade."

Yet Carlson concedes that the mechanical shutter and mirror on digital SLRs is designed for anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 shots. Sounds like a lot, until you figure that atmospheric conditions like humidity and dust can significantly shorten the shutter's lifespan.

So what's the verdict? Are our gadgets built to fail? I can speak only from my own experience. In the time it took me to research and write this article, my cell phone died, my wireless modem flaked, and my wide-angle lens was returned to Nikon when the auto-focus croaked. It's tough to blame all of that on operator error.
http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,72274-0.html?tw=rss.index

 

Study shows one in twenty-five search results are risky

12/13/2006 5:31:00 PM, by Jeremy Reimer

Security researcher Ben Edelman has revisited his May 2006 report on the relative risk of search engine results. In the original report, Edelman found that 5 percent of the results provided by search engines were marked as either "red" or "yellow" by SiteAdvisor, indicating that they presented some risk to the user. Now, Edelman says that his new study has shown that only 4.4 percent of such sites are risky, representing a drop of 12 percent since May.

SiteAdvisor is a service provided by antivirus vendor McAfee that rates sites based on their affiliation with spyware, viruses, excessive pop-up advertisements, and junk e-mail. Edelman used the tool to run 2,500 popular keywords through several search engines, including Yahoo, MSN Search (now Windows Live Search), AOL Search, Ask.com, and of course Google.

The study found that not only can regular links found by search engines be dangerous, the sponsored links that appear in prominent positions in the results pages can also be harmful. In fact, in the May study, sponsored links were more than twice as likely to be linked to malware than non-sponsored links (8.5 vs. 3.1 percent).

What this data indicates is that search engine companies are not doing a very good job of filtering out the types of companies they are willing to sell advertising to. Some sites, such as Google, will sell advertising on an automatic basis to anyone with a credit card, without a single human present during the entire interaction. Google, for their part, states that they are working hard to eliminate fradulent links, and have started flagging links to sites that they deem risky, although this applies only to their unsponsored links.

What can web surfers do to combat these threats? Many of the malware-infested web sites attempt to use security holes in the operating system to install their payload, so keeping your computer's OS updated is paramount. Updated browsers such as Firefox 2, Opera 9, and Internet Explorer 7 contain extra security protections to protect against bad links, including phishing scams, which are quickly becoming the most popular form of online attacks as they do not require an unpatched system or even a particular operating system in order to work. As always, skeptical computing is the order of the day.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061213-8417.html

 

How to login to an expired Windows
Dec 14, 2006 - 7:54 AM - by Digital Dave
Just sheer genius. I never would have thought of doing this.

However, for those who do not and have been so unfortunate enough to have their Windows expire on them, I present to you a bit of relief. How to gain access to your files on an expired Windows, with even enough functionality to surf the web, talk on MSN Messenger, and load up most of your applications. It doesn't give you full functionality of Windows, but it will be enough to get the job done until you can find the time to activate your Windows.


How to login to an expired Windows

Microsoft has a neat little way to prevent software piracy of their Windows operating system. "Windows Genuine Advantage" with its "Product Activation" requirement. Essentially, even with a valid product key, you still need to activate your Windows to ensure that only one computer is using that specific product key. If you can't activate your Windows, there being many reasons for this, you are left with a 30 day grace period to change your product key to one that is fully valid or get in contact with Microsoft and plea your case.

Once your grace period is up, Windows refuses to let you login anymore. You cannot access your files. You cannot go on the Internet. You cannot do anything, except the thrill of trying to activate Windows.


Well, luckily for me I do not have to worry about this issues, as my Windows is valid and activated. However, for those who do not and have been so unfortunate enough to have their Windows expire on them, I present to you a bit of relief. How to gain access to your files on an expired Windows, with even enough functionality to surf the web, talk on MSN Messenger, and load up most of your applications. It doesn't give you full functionality of Windows, but it will be enough to get the job done until you can find the time to activate your Windows. Best of all though, it's all very simple and easy to do!!!

First, turn on your computer and wait until you get to the Windows login screen.

Next, click to login as usual. You should get an error from Windows telling you that your Windows has expired and is asking whether you would like to activate Windows now. Click Yes.


A "Let's activate Windows" window will appear. Let's minimize it. DO NOT close it.


Now, hold down the Windows Key on your keyboard while you also press the "U" key. This will open up the Narrator program to help assist those with poor vision. It is this program that will help us login to our Windows.

Click the little computer icon in the top left hand side of the Narrator window. A drop down menu should appear. The last option in this menu is named "About Narrator...". Click it. This should open up another window called "About Narrator".

In this window, there should be the text "Microsoft Web site". Click it, as it is a link and will open up your Internet Explorer, taking you to the Microsoft Accessibility website. Howrah! Internet access!

As if Internet was not enough, in the address bar of Internet Explorer, type "c:\". This should display all your hard drive contents on drive "C". From there you can load navigate your way around your computer, loading specific programs, and most whatever else.

Some common directories as to where you can find personal files and programs are:

C:\program files\
C:\documents and settings\username\Desktop\
C:\documents and settings\username\Documents\
C:\documents and settings\username\Start Menu\Programs\

On a side note, certain programs cannot be opened while Windows is still not activated. You will also not have a Task Bar at the bottom of your screen, as trying to open it will just result in it shutting itself down a few moments later. MSN Messenger works though, as well as most other non-Windows-based components.

Disclaimer: I do not applaud piracy, but I do feel people should have access to their personal files, regardless of whether Windows has expired or not. This tutorial should not be used to bypass Windows Activation, nor does it restore full Windows functionality, but I provide it to those who are in desperate need of accessing files that are suddenly lost to them through the Microsoft Genuine Advantage activation system.

GO HERE TO SEE THE PICTURES
http://tomorrowtimes.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-to-login-to-expired-windows.html

 

Default Password List (Updated 12-13-06)
Dec 13, 2006 - 2:42 PM - by Digital Dave
This is just interesting.

If you have a device you need to login to and forgot the password, this list just might have the default password listed.

Default Password List Page
http://www.phenoelit.de/dpl/dpl.html

 

FREE,Wireless Key View/Finder 1.00
Dec 14, 2006 - 10:28 AM - by Digital Dave


WirelessKeyView recovers all wireless network keys (WEP/WPA) stored in your computer by the 'Wireless Zero Configuration' service of Windows XP. It allows you to easily save all keys to text/html/xml file, or copy a
single key to the clipboard.

Major Geeks.com Post and Download
http://www.majorgeeks.com/WirelessKeyView_d5413.html


WirelessKeyView 1.00
Author: Nir Sofer
Date: 2006-12-14
Size: 37 Kb
License: Freeware
Requires: Win XP/2K/2003

WirelessKeyView recovers all wireless network keys (WEP/WPA) stored in your computer by the 'Wireless Zero Configuration' service of Windows XP. It allows you to easily save all keys to text/html/xml file, or copy a
single key to the clipboard.

WirelessKeyView doesn't require any installation process or additional DLL files. Just copy the executable file (WirelessKeyView.exe) to any folder you like, and run it.
After you run it, the main window should displayed all WEP/WPA keys stored in your computer by Windows 'Wireless Zero Configuration' service. For WEP keys, the key is also displayed in Ascii form. Be aware that this utility can only reveal the network keys stored by Windows operating
system. It cannot recover network keys stored by any other third-party software.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/WirelessKeyView_d5413.html

 

DVDFab 3.0.5.0 is out
Dear all,

DVDFab products 3.0.5.0 is out (12/14/2006):

DVDFab Platinum/Gold 3.0.5.0:
http://www.dvdfab.com/download.htm

DVDFab Decrypter 3.0.5.0:
http://www.dvdidle.com/free.htm

What's New:
* New: Added support for a new Sony ARccOS protection as found on "Attack Force" (US).
* New: Added support for ISO Image source.
* New: Added support for ISO Image output.
* New: Added "Write Data" to burn existing DVD folder or ISO image file to DVD writer, or convert DVD folder to ISO image file.
* New: Added chapter range selection for "DVD to Mobile".
* New: Added display for current preview chapter.
* New: Preview will only show the selected chapter range.
* New: Updated VSO burning engine.
* New: Updated language files.
* Fix: Layer break is not set correctly in certain cases.
* Fix: "Cannot open file" error when burning ISO files on FAT/FAT32 drive.
* Fix: A crash problem when opening DVD from hard disk folder.
* Fix: Several minor problems.

Best Regards,
Fengtao
__________________
DVDFab - The ultimate DVD copying/converting/burning software!
DVD Region+CSS Free - Watch and copy any region code CSS-encrypted DVD on any DVD drive!
DVDIdle - Extend lifetime of your DVD drive!
http://www.dvdidle.com/

 

New Zealand 'DRM criminals'

p2pnet.net News:- The Big Four Organized Music cartel already has things pretty well sewn up tight in the US where the outgoing Bush administration openly acts as an industry copyright enforcer.

And elsewhere, no matter which way you turn - Canada, Australia, the UK - Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) are trying to achieve the same kind of hands-on control, using the mainstream media to paint entirely false pictures of the "devastation" (their word) they claim they're suffering under the wave of copyright crime they dreamed up and are using as a tool to force changes in national copyright laws.

Now, in New Zealand, they want anyone who breaks DRM consumer control software on music downloads to be designated a "criminal".

The Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' Rights) Amendment Bill, awaiting its first reading in Parliament, "puts a maximum penalty of a $150,000 fine and five years in prison for anyone caught selling devices or publishing information which could be used to get around any technology used to protect digital copyright," says Stuff.co.nz.

The current Copyright Act bans the cracking of DRM but has no criminal penalties, says the story, going on, "Colin Jackson, president of non-profit society InternetNZ, calls the anti-circumvention clauses a 'toxic provision' and warns they could be used to 'suppress all kinds of legitimate valuable work and speech'."

He compares the bill to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and says it also stops people from, "removing information from files, such as terms and conditions of use or who owns the copyright, if they believe it'll be used to violate copyright".

However, says Stuff.co.nz, "the bill allows people to crack digital rights for personal use, and libraries, archives and educational institutions can do it provided it is to correct software errors, make software interoperable or to do encryption research. The bill would allow format shifting - converting CDs to MP3s, for example. People would be able to make one copy of a song they own for personal use for each device they own."

But, "people could lose this right if they signed a contract, for example, if a music download service banned format-shifting in its terms. Format shifting video files - from DVD to Dvix, for example - would still be illegal, as would format-shifting audio tracks to sell or give to others."

And, "It puts the fear of God up the ISP because they know if they don't take it down they could be liable for that infringement," the story IS lawyer Earl Gray saying, although it's an improvement on the current situation, "where Mr Gray says the ISP can be sued for damages along with the copyright infringer, in theory at least, though plaintiffs don't usually go after them."
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you're Chinese and you're looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

Also See:
Stuff.co.nz - Fears over copyright law change, December 11, 2006


(Thursday 14th December 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/10729?PHPSESSID=dc2101ee29050ba065d9b7b395351ac7

 

Adobe kicks off public beta of Photoshop CS3

12/14/2006 3:30:22 PM, by Dave Girard

Adobe has officially announced the public beta of Photoshop CS3 and you can almost hear the MacIntel users salivating. It's difficult to conceive of a more-anticipated program for professional pixel pushers on the Mac so let me help ease the pain by assuring people that it indeed exists. The beta will also be available to Windows users and reportedly runs fine on Vista.

Mac users get a true Mac OS X Universal Binary of Photoshop and everyone gets a spiffy new icon to boot. It's no secret I wasn't a fan of the older CS2 icons, which still kill me with their relative similarity and holistic medicine vibe, so this is a welcome change for me at least.

Now the bad news: it won't be posted until tomorrow, December 15, and unlike the public beta of Lightroom, it requires a valid CS2 serial number. That serial number is used to get a beta CS3 license for the installer and if you don't have that, then it is installed as a two-day demo. This isn't the beta love-fest that many were hoping for—it's mostly a gesture to those Mac customers who have been waiting to demonstrate that Adobe values their support and patience. I'd love to see the final product released yesterday too, but I can't even get a Universal Binary of screenshot program Snapz Pro X. Adobe has done pretty well considering immensity of the Photoshop code base. Still, there are bugs in the beta and Adobe has made it clear that they do not intend for it to replace a copy of Photoshop CS2 in day-to-day work.
The most notable bugs are a slight aliasing to drastic bicubic image reduction (which I've found you can get around by using the image size option on export to web) and a lack of brush size preview on Intel Macs. Also keep in mind that CS2-compatible plug-ins will not work with CS3 on Intel Macs unless you run it under Rosetta—and what fun is that? This is due to Photoshop's code base being migrated to Xcode, so it's not a bug, and Windows and PowerPC CS3 users should have full access to their CS2-compatible plug-ins.

Now for the good news again: despite its beta status, it has heaping portions of snappy, but you can't see that in a screenshot. Instead, let me whet your appetite with pics of some of the new features.

Live filtering on smart objects, with a mask for these Smart Filters

Notice the new look of the palettes, which can be collapsed to a smaller set of icons:

The clone tool works on 32-bit images now. Great for removing your naked reflection from those 3-D environment maps.

The curves dialog now has a histogram in it (which is why it's also bigger).

Other notable features include a Lightroom-style black and white adjustment with channel mixer, better photomerge for panoramic shots, with auto layer alignment and blending, a clone source palette for using multiple images for cloning and the ability to clone without sampling adjustment layers. Also included with the public beta is Adobe Bridge CS3, which carries on what is presumed to be the new look of the CS3 apps:

That's either Brownium on the periodic table or someone with a shifty set of Scrabble tiles

Set your alarm for sometime tomorrow afternoon, bookmark the

Adobe Labs web site,
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/
and
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs3/

and kick everyone off the Internet because it's a big download (about 355MB for the Windows version and 684MB for the Mac since it has both the PPC and Intel builds on the disk image). People on 56k should have it by Spring, easy.

SEE THE PIXS HERE
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061214-8425.html

 

RIAA won't state wholesale pricing,

p2pnet.net News:- The Big Four Organized Music cartel is apparently, and understandably, leery of telling anyone exactly how much it's charging for digital music wholesales.

We say "understandably" because maybe the Big Four are embarrassed to have to make a public statement about their rates?

They are, after all, charging anything from 60 to 80 cents wholesale per digital track, Mashboxx chairman Wayne Rosso told p2pnet in 2005. If they were being fair and reasonable, they'd be asking for perhaps 20 - 30 cents at most.

Ray Beckerman, who's defending Marie Lindor, the New York home-health aid who, with her son, is being accused of being an online distributor of copyrighted music, wants to know and has asked for the information in court. But Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG aren't saying claiming, among other things, the information is sensitive and needs a protective order.

The Big Four's RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), "has refused to supply defendant's lawyer with a timetable for its production of 'all relevant documents' concerning its wholesale prices for downloads in UMG v. Lindor," says Beckerman on Recording Industry vs The People.

So after a month of wasted effort in trying to get them to agree to a schedule, he's asked the magistrate to step in and fix a date.

"The RIAA responded, but its response does not even suggest to the Magistrate a date on which it would be willing to comply," says Beckerman.

They're locked into the old pre-p2p way of thinking where a) they could more or less rip people off at will and get away with it; and b) consumers weren't able to commnicate with each other in the way that they are now, thanks to the Net, blogs, chats, IM, messaging, and so on.

However, several victims, including Lindor, have now suggested the $750-per-song damages demanded by the Big Four is unconstitutional and that in fact based, even, on a much higher rate than might be thought by some to be fair and reasonable, roughly 70 cents per song wholesale, it's far too much ------ 1,071 times too much, she says.

Stay tuned.
http://p2pnet.net/story/10735?PHPSESSID=797b7564d9410d56bc560bfca3a97bd7

 

Philips video DRM

p2pnet.net News:-Looking to cash in on the online video sector epitomized by GooTube, Philips Electronics, the company which produced the DRM technology behind Snocap, say it's now launching a form of video DRM.

Called MediaHedge, it'll, "help sift through the growing volume of online video files and give copyright holders more say over their content," says The Associated Press.

Gracenote now owns the rights to the Philips' audio "fingerprints" technology which makes Snocap - whose founder, Shawn Fanning, created the original Napster (not to be confused with today's pale look-alike) - what it is. Gracenote's service identifies music by holding a cell phone up to it, says AP.

"Philips has been working on a similar technology to identify video files, which Gracenote will also gain rights to," says the story. "As part of the agreement, Philips has taken an undisclosed equity stake in Gracenote."

Philips hasn't said who'll use MediaHedge, "which works by checking the digital 'fingerprint' or unique characteristics of video files and looking for a match in Philips' database of video content," says the story, adding:

"Copyright holders can specify in advance whether they want to allow videos containing their footage to be posted on sites running MediaHedge, or whether they should be blocked or otherwise restricted."
http://p2pnet.net/story/10738?PHPSESSID=15c1168e93cd4846d9b3caba2fead365

 

IMAGE MINIMIZER..........Image Minimizer is a light and fast program that changes quality, size and format of any picture. You can input any picture file you want in "Image Minimizer" with one easy drag and drop or with right click and "Send to". You can resize many picture at the same time .....(free).....GO THERE!
http://www.phoenixbit.com/site/products.asp?productid=imageminimizer

info
Image Minimizer v1.0
Description : What is Image Minimizer : Image Minimizer is a light and fast programs that Change Quality , size and format of any picture that you want.
You can input any picture file you want in "Image Minimizer" with one easy drag and drop or with right click and "Send to". You can resize many picture in the same time .

Author : FxBit
Type : Freeware
Size : 405KB
Views : 3743

 

MYAH OS..........Myah OS is a performance desktop operating system using the powerful linux kernel.


With the rich full featured KDE desktop. And 3D video acceleration and multimedia support. So you can have a powerful simple to use home operating system. Multimedia and Gaming has always been the focus, and 2.3 really brings that into focus. Firefox 2.0rc2 has been jam packed with support for Flash, Java and embedded video. But now embedded video is also available within Konqueror. Settings for DVD playback has been optimized for best possible playback. 3D drivers for ATI and nVidia has also been optimized, both for ease of use and best performance.....(free).....GO THERE!

http://www.myah.org/

 

Kids With High IQs Grow Up to Be Vegetarians

December 15, 2006 01:55:36 PM PST
By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Yahoo! Health: Children's Health News

FRIDAY, Dec. 15 (HealthDay News) -- As a child's IQ rises, his taste for meat in adulthood declines, a new study suggests.

British researchers have found that children's IQ predicts their likelihood of becoming vegetarians as young adults -- lowering their risk for cardiovascular disease in the process. The finding could explain the link between smarts and better health, the investigators say.

"Brighter people tend to have healthier dietary habits," concluded lead author Catharine Gale, a senior research fellow at the MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre of the University of Southampton and Southampton General Hospital.

Recent studies suggest that vegetarianism may be associated with lower cholesterol, reduced risk of obesity and heart disease. This might explain why children with high IQs tend to have a lower risk of heart disease in later life.

The report is published in the Dec. 15 online edition of the British Medical Journal.

"We know from other studies that brighter children tend to behave in a healthier fashion as adults -- they're less likely to smoke, less likely to be overweight, less likely to have high blood pressure and more likely to take strenuous exercise," Gale said. "This study provides further evidence that people with a higher IQ tend to have a healthier lifestyle."

In the study, Gale's team collected data on nearly 8,200 men and women aged 30, whose IQ had been tested when they were 10 years of age.

"Children who scored higher on IQ tests at age 10 were more likely than those who got lower scores to report that they were vegetarian at the age of 30," Gale said.

The researchers found that 4.5 percent of participants were vegetarians. Of these, 2.5 percent were vegan, and 33.6 percent said they were vegetarian but also ate fish or chicken.

There was no difference in IQ score between strict vegetarians and those who said they were vegetarian but who said they ate fish or chicken, the researchers add.

Vegetarians were more likely to be female, of higher social class and better educated, but IQ was still a significant predictor of being vegetarian after adjustment for these factors, Gale said.

"Vegetarian diets are associated with lower cardiovascular disease risk in a number of studies, so these findings suggest that a such a diet may help to explain why children or adolescents with a higher IQ have a lower risk of coronary heart disease as adults," Gale said.

One expert said the findings aren't the whole answer, however.

"This study left many unanswered questions such as: Did the vegetarian children grow up in a household with a vegetarian parent? Were meatless meals regularly served in the household? Were the children eating a primarily vegetarian diet at the age of 10?" said Lona Sandon, an assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

"In addition, we don't know the beliefs or attitudes of the parents of the children, nor do we know if there was a particular event that led these children to becoming vegetarian in their teens or adulthood," Sandon said.

As the study showed, more women than men chose a vegetarian diet, Sandon noted. "Other research shows that women in general will focus more on their health than men. So, if they believe that a vegetarian diet will have health benefits, they are more likely to follow it," she said.

Given these factors, "we cannot draw any solid conclusions from this research," Sandon added.

Another expert agreed that a vegetarian diet is healthy.

"The evidence linking vegetarianism to good health outcomes is very strong," said Dr. David L. Katz, the director of the Prevention Research Center and an associate professor of public health at the Yale University School of Medicine.

"Studies, for example, of vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists in California suggest that they have lower rates of almost all major chronic diseases, and greater longevity, than their omnivorous counterparts," Katz said. "Evidence is also strong and consistent that greater intelligence, higher education, and loftier social status -- which tend to cluster with one another -- also correlate with good health."

 

Did ye loose ye Slysoft AnyDvD key

Here's a link:
https://secure.slysoft.com/lostkey.php

When you enter your email address, Slysoft will send you your orginal email invoice when you purchaced AnyDVD with the attached KEY.

 

I often wondered what to do if I ever needed to get my key for whatever reason or another, thanks Irealnd.

 

FREE, FileASSASSIN 1.00
Author: Malwarebytes
Date: 2006-12-16
Size: 82 Kb
License: Freeware
Requires: Win NT/2K/XP/2003

FileASSASSIN can delete locked malware files on your system. It uses advanced techniques to unload modules, close remote handles, and terminate processes to allow the removal of the file.

Simply download FileASSASSIN from the link below. Unzip to a convenient location such as C:\FileASSASSIN. Navigate to the folder you unzipped the files to and double click on the file named FileASSASSIN.exe. Then select a file by dragging it onto the text area or select it using the (...) button. Next, select a removal method from the list. Finally, click delete and the removal process will commence.

Compatible with Windows 2000, NT, XP

download here
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download5416.html

 

RIAA: trying it on with MediaSentry

p2pnet.net News:- If you're corporate, or corporate linked, you're corporate cool. It won't matter what you get into, how often you screw up, or whether you're credible or totally incredible.

Ask SafeNet's MediaSentry, an online scalp-hunter held up by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel, as well as Hollywood, as honourable, authoritative and accurate and whose findings are routinely flaunted as reliable court evidence.

But on Recording Industry vs The People, Ray Beckerman, the lawyer defending New York home health aide Marie Lindor, continues to demand that the cartel's RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) either puts up verifiable details of MediaSentry 'evidence' it's using in 'file sharing' allegations against his client, or shuts up.

Tapped by various means

The idea is that MediaSentry locates an IP address and from that, the RIAA (or any of the other many so-called trade organizations using MediaSentry) can figure out who the alleged file sharer, aka "massive illegal online distributor," is or was.

An IP (internet protocol) address is like a street address. And in the same way anyone in a house can be doing literally anything, and you wouldn't know unless you were there in person in real time, it's impossible to know what a specific individual was doing from a computer IP address alone, unless it can be indisputably shown that absolutely no one else has, or had, access to that system in any way.

Moreover, a computer can be tapped by various means without the knowledge or permission of the user, this possibility being even more likely in the case of someone who doesn't know a whole lot about them.

In a fascinating [read it] cross-examination of MediaSentry's Gary Millin in 2004, he admits, "We don't have the identity of the person operating the computer, so we - we have the IP address that we could see where that piece of content was being offered from."

"But," observes lawyer Charles Scott, "This ... doesn't take account of the problems of static or dynamic IP addresses; it doesn't take account of wireless routers; it doesn't take account of people using a router being behind a router; it doesn't take account of any of those things ..."

And Millin admits, "All we can see is the IP address that that content is coming from, and it - it would depend on how a person set up a router or a wireless device to give it public access or not. If they had multiple people using that IP address is something that we can't tell. We see just the IP address that the content is coming from."

False positives

"Has anybody received 'Notice of claimed infringement' from MediaSentry for IP addresses which, while registered to you or your organization, are in a range not actively in use?" - asks a post on Neohapsis.

It goes on:

"I recently received two notices from MediaSentry for MPAA material, each listing a single file shared via Kazaa, for two very different IP addresses for which I am a contact.

"In both cases, the IP addresses reported were in fact within the range allocated, however the address shown is not only not in use, no address with the same first three octets is either used or announced via BGP, nor have they ever been publicly visible.

"I see two likely possibilities - either MediaSentry is not using due diligence in verifying that the material for which they send infringement notices is actually shared from the address they show in the complaint, or somebody on the Internet is spoofing BGP route announcements for unused address space out of larger allocations."

Largely of heresay

Judges in Canada and Holland, among others, have similarly questioned MediaSentry's veracity.

In Canada, in a case brought by RIAA clone the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) and which touted MediaSentry evidence, Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled putting music into a computer directory that might be shared remotely by someone else didn't constitute copyright infringement under Canadian law.

Millin, then MediaSentry's president, "described MediaSentry's findings with regard to the file-sharing activitied of the 29 unnamed defendants," said von Finckenstein. "The major portons of these affidavits ... consist largely of heresay."

In Holland, the District Court of Utrecht decided MediaSentry's investigation of p2p file sharing wasn't only flawed, it was "unlawful".

Evidence was given by one Thomas Mizzone III, who's also delivered the same kind of testimony in Australia where, according to CNET News, Mizzone said IP addresses allocated for Internet service providers in Australia can be traced through "scanners" his company uses to, "track down sound recordings and user information ...."

Total lack of concern

The Big 4 Organized Music cartel's RIAA hired MediaSentry, "to invade private home computers and collect personal information," said Tanya Andersen, an Oregon mother who's suing the RIAA under the RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization).

She was told she'd "been viewed" by MediaSentry downloading "gangster rap" music and that she'd logged on with gotenkito@kazaa.com.Ms. But Andersen doesn't like 'gangster rap,' doesn't recognize the name 'gotenkito,' isn't awake at that time of the morning, and has never downloaded music.

"The continuing victimization of Ms Anderson and the unwillingness of the record companies to conduct even the most basic investigation before turning her life upside down betrays the total lack of concern they have for any concepts of fairness, due process and the rights of the individuals who they have wrongfully targeted," her lawyer, Lory Lybeck, told p2pnet.

'Inherently unreliable'

In the Lindor case, material submitted by MediaSentry's Tom Mizzone is "inherently unreliable," states Beckerman, saying there's a "heightened" need, "for a thorough deposition and crossexamination of Mr. Mizzone, since the RIAA's attorneys had revealed at the oral argument that Mr. Mizzone was the sole MediaSentry witness they were intending to call".

And, "I am taking the liberty of making a post-argument submission, in opposition to the motion, of something not so readily available to the Court, and which is at the same time much more relevant, because it directly relates to the revelation by Mr. Gabriel during the oral argument that Tom Mizzone of MediaSentry is the only MediaSentry witness they are planning to produce," says Beckerman in a court document.

He's talking about the expert witness statement by Henk Sips and Johan Pouwelse mentioned earlier and which discusses in detail, "the unreliability of Mr. Mizzone’s so called 'investigations', and the decision of the District Court of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, which relied upon that declaration. These demonstrate clearly the importance of a thorough deposition and crossexamination of Mr. Mizzone as to the 'instructions', 'parameters', and 'processes' of his 'investigations'."

The Netherlands court refused to permit the ISP’s to divulge the information sought by the RIAA’s Netherlands counterpart, "due to the unreliability of Mr. Mizzone's 'processes'," adds Beckerman.

Below is the Sips / Pouwelse witness statement:

Background and expertise

Henk Sips and Johan Pouwelse are employed by Delft University of Technology. Professor Sips leads the Parallel and Distributed Systems (PDS) research group, has decades of experience, and co-authored numerous scientific papers and books in this field. Dr. Pouwelse works within the PDS group and both conducts and coordinates Peer-to-Peer file sharing research.

The PDS group has conducted numerous measurements of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems since 2001. In 2003 onwards, we started the worlds largest measurement of the Bittorrent file sharing network1. As of June 2004, the Bittorrent network is the largest P2P file sharing network2. During our file sharing measurement study we followed over 100,000 files, many of which contained copyrighted works. We followed one file in detail for several months and estimated that over 90,000 people downloaded it illegally. Dr. Pouwelse has appeared before the American Federal Trade Commission to testify as an expert on P2P file sharing.

On June 8th 2005 we were asked to create this statement about P2P file sharing in general, the Kazaa network, and the MediaSentry findings under standard university contract work rules.

General statements on Peer-to-Peer

The topic of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is attracting wide spread attention. This new technology enables people to distribute information and communicate at only marginal cost.

For example, the telephony software from Skype.com can be used to call ordinary telephones in the Argentine and Australia from The Netherlands at a rate of roughly one Euro per hour. This software only requires an Internet PC, microphone, and speakers. The Skype software exploits P2P technology to reduce telephony costs significantly. The paradigm shift of using The Internet and P2P technology for costs reduction is changing the entire telephony industry. Numerous companies are at risk of being put out of business3.

P2P file sharing is both controversial and popular. File sharing means connecting millions of computer hard disks together into a single network. Roughly two thirds of all Internet traffic consists of P2P file sharing traffic4. According to a study by Intomart GFK, more than half of the Dutch broadband users have used file sharing to download content5. Content creators are under pressure from two sides. On one side, their customers are using P2P file sharing to download movies, music, and songs for free6. On the other side, artists are also using P2P to bypass them. With P2P artists themselves can reach a worldwide audience of millions at only marginal cost. Within Kazaa, users can use “micropayments” to pay artists directly and download legally. The economic impact of file sharing is still poorly understood. For For instance, a leading study by Harvard researchers was unable to find a relation between illegal downloading and decreases in Audio CD sales7.

Measurements of file sharing networks

File sharing networks are difficult to measure. Only a few companies and universities in the world have the required expertise to conduct measurements of file sharing networks. It is very difficult to directly establish that a certain computer contains copyrighted works and makes them available to others through a file sharing application.

The first problem is that we need to have an understanding of the file sharing application itself. This is difficult due to the complexity of such applications and lack of detailed documentation about their inner workings. The second problem is that we often do not have physical access to the computer under investigation. When we can only observe this computer through The Internet, we are severly limited in our observational power. The third problem is that The Internet and P2P are dark places where people commit fraud and abuse. All obtained information must be treated with suspicion. Users use fraudulent means to obtain a higher download speed from their broadband ADSL connection, install abusive software to obtain higher downloads on a file sharing network (at the cost of other people), and like to fool other people with fake content on file sharing networks.

The Kazaa file sharing system

Only one detailed study has been conducted of the Kazaa file sharing network8. This study is conducted by the research group of Professor Keith Ross from Brooklyn Polytechnic University. They investigated how Kazaa operates and measured it extensively.

This research group focused the polution in Kazaa9. Pollution refers to meaningless files and mismatches between filenames and their actual content. Kazaa was found to be severly poluted. For many recent pop songs, more than 50% of the copies were polluted. Our research group at Delft University has found similar polution levels in Kazaa for all types of content.

There are three causes of pollution. First is the unintentional pollution by average users when they insert files such as “credit_card_statements.doc” into the system10. Second is the intentional pollution by users for fun. For example, a file named “hot big blond women playing around.mpeg” that contains a movie of a laughing clown. Third is the active pollution by companies in an attempt to reduce piracy. Several companies exploit weaknesses in Kazaa in order to pollute the search results of popular queries11. Their aim is to reduce the usability of Kazaa in searches for popular copyrighted works.

The Kazaa-lite software is also described in the measurements of Keith Ross's team. This popular, modified version of the official Kazaa client provides improved performance. However, this performance gain comes at the cost of others and Kazaa-lite lies to Kazaa users to obtain more performance. This phenomenon indicates that information from the Kazaa network must be treated with suspicion.

The Kazaa software communicates with numerous other computers on The Internet during its operation. Communication can consist of transmission of advertisement data, instant messages, actual file transfers, and control traffic for maintaining the file sharing network. Kazaa has a special feature to increase file downloads, called multi-peer downloading. When the same file is present on several computers it is possible to download pieces of this file in parallel from multiple computers.

Accurate file sharing measurements

Due to the complexity of file sharing applications, limited observation powers, rampant lying, high pollution levels, and multi-peer downloading it is nearly impossible to obtain solid evidence and detailed checks are therefore required.

We believe that the following procedure takes the necessary precautions when trying to establish if a user is making copyrighted works available for download.

- Collect filenames by searching the network using keywords.

- Filter out polluted files by checking the actual content.

- Establish that a specific file can be downloaded from a certain computer. File sharing applications often talk to numerous other computers at once. Sufficient hygiene precautions should be taken by blocking traffic from all possible other computers.

- Investigate if the computer is possibly highjacked. Check if a computer is cracked, for instance, running an open proxy or a hacked Microsoft Internet connection sharing application. A thorough measurement would check if there is a significant difference in traceroute timings and Kazaa protocol response times.

- Track this computer for several days if it does not go offline for reliable IP-address translation by an ISP.

Approach of MediaSentry

The technical information provided by MediaSentry is limited and their measurement procedure is simplistic. MediaSentry did not conduct a thorough investigation such as outlined above to provide evidence of infringement.

The statement from Tom Mizzone hints in item 27 that they systematically searched the Kazaa network for certain keywords, by means of modified Kazaa software. How they resolved relevant technical problems such as superpeer hopping, NAT translation, and firewall relaying by Kazaa is unclear.

In item 28, it is stated that no actual complete file transfer took place; It was only initiated at this stage. Item 30 again hints that MediaSentry simply took filenames at face value and did not mention any correction for pollution on Kazaa. Pollution levels can be as high as 90% for some files.

Item 33 indicates that MediaSentry has no knowledge of the limitations of Kazaa in file searching. Not many of the 2,499,121 users online would be able to see the mentioned 736 files. Reliable global searching in P2P file sharing networks is still an unsolved problem. Only users connected to the same Kazaa Superpeer are guaranteed to see these files when Kazaa operates properly (roughly 100 to 150 users as measured by Prof. Keith Ross).

Item 36 states that no computer hygiene precautions where taken. The collected evidence of the spacemansam@KaZaA alias cleary contains multi-peer downloading contamination. Therefore, it is difficult to establish the contribution of the various IP-addresses. It is possible that some IP-addresses contributed 0 Bytes to an actual download, thus there was only involvement and no actual contribution.

Delft, 10 Juni 2005,

Prof. Dr. Ir. H.J. Sips
Dr. Ir. J.A. Pouwelse

References:

1 http://www.isa.its.tudelft.nl/~pouwelse/Bittorrent_Measurements_6pages.pdf
2 http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide9.php
3 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/10/skype_euro_telcos/
4 http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide12.php
5 http://www.muziek-en-beeld.nl/Live_2005_juni/
6 http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/25/technology/piracy/
7 www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf
8 http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/KazaaOverlay.pdf
9 http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/pollution.pdf
10 http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2002/apr-jun/kazaa.html
11 http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/08262003a.php

Stay tuned.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you're Chinese and you're looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

Also See:

Recording Industry vs The People - Marie Lindor Submits Papers from Netherlands courts Showing Media Sentry's Tom Mizzone's Investigations are Unreliable, December 15, 2006
continues to demand - RIAA MediaSentry controversy, October 23, 2006
Neohapsis - MediaSentry false positives?, January 4, 2005
Konrad von Finckenstein - Keep on downloading! Cdn file sharers told, March 31, 2004
"unlawful" - MediaSentry's Dutch p2p foul-up, November 14, 2005
Racketeering Influenced - Victim sues RIAA under RICO Act, October 1, 2005
CNET News - Witness assaults Kazaa filter claims, December 2, 2004
wrongfully targeted - The 'We're Not Taking Any More' club, September 17, 2005

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(Sunday 17th December 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/10758?PHPSESSID=1b79ea3a7ee66529f5dcdd4720a551d6

 

Utrecht MediaSentry decision

p2pnet.net News:- To say so-called MediaSentry evidence offered up by the the Big 4 Organized Music cartel in its sue 'em all court cases is suspect is a very considerable understatement.

Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG are suing their own customers in an increasingly desperate attempt to convince online music lovers that buying over-priced, low fidelity 'product' is the thing to do.

The Big 4 use the excuse that files shared equal sales lost and that hundreds of millions of men, women and children around the world are hard-core dedicated "criminals" and "thieves" bent on "massive" illegal online distribution.

The Big 4, worth uncountable billions of dollars, claim they're being "devastated" by file sharers, among whom they're naming Marie Lindor, a New York mother who barely knows one end of a computer from the other.

With their RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) carrying the ball, Warner Music (US), EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France) and Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) say data supplied by MediaSentry are enough to support their claims.

And they say this despite the fact the material has been called into question time and time again.

Ray Beckerman, who's defending Lindor, has been trying to get sight of MediaSentry material and recently cited a Dutch appeals court decision in Foundation v UPC Nederland, "agreeing with the lower court that the MediaSentry investigation by Tom Mizzone was insufficiently reliable to form a basis for directing ISP's to turn over confidential customer information," as he says on Recording Industry vs The People.

'Brien' is the Dutch 'trade' organization fronting for the Big 4 and among other things, the ruling states:

When describing the accuracy of the search method deployed by Brein regarding the users of the IP addresses in question, Brein refers to a statement made by E. Schmersel, Internet Anti-Piracy Manager at Brein, as submitted to the appeal. The ISPs observe that, in this regard, the statement is not objective and independent, as opposed to the statements which were submitted by the ISPs. They also state that the appendices which Schmersel refers to (A – G) are missing and Schmersel’s considerations regarding IP addresses are largely incorrect. In this context, the ISPs refer to the statement which they submitted made by ir. H. Rood (Exhibit III b First Instance), which indicated that consumers are usually assigned dynamic IP addresses. This means that the user can be assigned a different IP address for each internet session. If Brein fails to provide at least three combinations of IP addresses with the corresponding dates and times, there is a possibility that the wrong person could be identified, according to the aforementioned statement ...

The decision, by the District Court of Utrecht, has often been referred to and now Beckerman has tracked down an English-language translation,. You can read it in full below:

The appellate proceedings

The appellants in the main appeal and respondents in the conditional cross-appeal, hereafter jointly to be referred to in the singular as Brein, and the respondents in the main appeal and the appellants in the conditional cross-appeal hereafter to be referred to as the ISPs.

In a writ dated 3 August 2005, Brein appealed the judgement of the Preliminary Injunction Court of the Utrecht Court of 12 July 2005, rendered in interlocutory proceedings under KG No. 194741/KG ZA 05-462 between Brein as the plaintiff and the ISPs as the defendants.

In its statement of appeal, including exhibits, Brein adduced grounds of appeal against the appealed judgement and moved that – briefly stated – the Court of Appeal should reverse the judgement and – in rendering a new judgement – allow Brein’s claim after all, and order the ISPs to pay the costs of the proceedings in both instances.

In their respondent’s notice on appeal, including notice of cross-appeal, the ISPs disputed the grounds of appeal and moved that the Court of Appeal should declare Brein’s appeal inadmissible, or at any rate should uphold its judgement, ordering Brein – as understood by the Court of Appeal – to pay the costs of the main appeal. Furthermore, the ISPs – in the cross-appeal – adduced three grounds of appeal and moved – briefly stated – that the Court of Appeal should order Brein to pay the costs of the experts engaged and for the rest, should uphold the judgement, and order Brein to pay the costs of the cross-appeal.

In its respondent’s notice in the cross-appeal, Brein disputed the grounds of appeal in the cross-appeal and moved that the Court of Appeal order the ISPs to pay the costs of the cross-appeal.

The ISPs subsequently submitted a number of exhibits to the proceedings by deed.

At the hearing of 9 June 2006, the parties explained their positions by means of pleadings submitted to the Court of Appeal. On behalf of Brein, this was done by J.M. van den Berg, L.L.M., solicitor in Amsterdam, and on behalf of the ISPs, by their procurator litis. On this occasion, the ISPs withdrew their third ground of appeal in the cross-appeal and stated that the cross-appeal should be classified as a conditional one. The parties also responded to questions asked by the Court of Appeal.

Finally, the parties applied for a judgement regarding the documents submitted to the proceedings in both instances.

2. The Facts

The Preliminary Injunction Court – in consideration 2 of the judgement under 2.1 up to 2.16 inclusive – gave an enumeration of the facts that should be used as starting points in these proceedings. Brein observed that it is partially wrongly claimed in 2.12 that Brein stated incorrect times in the email message of 11 March 2005, while furthermore – in 2.14 – it is incorrectly stated that 41 subscribers failed to respond. According to Brein, this should be 42. If necessary, the Court of Appeal will return to this later on. Otherwise, the enumerated facts are not disputed, so that the Court of Appeal will also use them as a starting point.

3. Admissibility

3.1 The ISPs adopt the position that Brein’s appeal should be declared inadmissible, as

Brein has failed to formulate clear grounds of appeal against the judgement, so that it is unclear to the ISPs what they have to defend themselves against.

3.2 This defence is rejected. It cannot be reasonably stated that Brein failed to make their

objections against the judgement sufficiently clear. Subsequently it also becomes clear from what the ISPs adduce in the “discussion of the grounds of appeal” that they have understood the grounds on which Brein objects to the judgement, so they have not been adversely affected in their defence.

3.3 Furthermore, the ISPs argue that the present case is complicated and does not lend itself to a hearing in interlocutory proceedings. This is why they have commenced proceedings on the substance of the case before the Haarlem Court, in which they claim – insofar as is currently relevant – that it will be ruled that the ISPs have not acted wrongfully vis-à-vis Brein by refusing to provide the latter with the Name, Address and Residence particulars and that the ISPs also do not have an obligation to do so pursuant to the Personal Data Protection Act (Wbp). During the pleadings in the appeal, the ISPs’ procurator litis adduced – by way of an increase of the claim – that it has also been claimed in the proceedings on the substance that it be ruled that the appealed judgement in the interlocutory proceedings was correctly rendered and – when asked – declared that the rejoinder in the counterclaim had already been delivered in the proceedings on the substance.

3.4 The Court of Appeal concurs with the consideration made by the Preliminary Injunction Court in the first part of Legal Consideration 4.1 and adopts this consideration. Otherwise, the Court of Appeal will discuss the consequences of the proceedings on the substance which have already been instituted, later on.

4. Assessment

4.1 These proceedings evolve around the question as to whether the ISPs have an obligation to provide Brein’s counsel with a written list of the names and addresses (hereafter: the NAR particulars) of the subscribers to whom each of the ISPs has assigned an IP address on the dates and times stated on the list provided by Brein, which was appended to the initiating summons. The Preliminary Injunction Court has denied Brein’s claim to that effect. Brein contests the considerations made by the Preliminary Injunction Court in Legal Considerations 4.22 – 4.33, while the ISPs contest Legal Considerations 4.9 – 4.10, 4.12 - 4.15 and 4.33.

4.2 Primarily, Brein contests Legal Consideration 4.30 of the judgement, in which the Preliminary Injunction Court considered that allowing a claim such as the present one could not take place until it has been established without reasonable doubt that the IP addresses relate to users who are actually offering illegal music or other files on their computer. In this regard, Brein refers to the less strict criterion used by this Court of Appeal in the Lycos/Pessers case (Judgement by the Court of Appeal, 24 June 2004, cause-list number 1689/03 KG). The Court of Appeal considered in that judgement (Legal Consideration 4.10) that - when it has been made sufficiently plausible that the published information could be wrongful vis-à-vis a third party and he could consequently suffer damage – it would not be desirable from a social and economic point of view if this third party were to have no realistic possibility of calling the website holder to account for this – if necessary – at law. However, the present case does not relate to the wrongfulness of the published information, but to whether the IP addresses gathered by Brein relate to subscribers who have actually infringed on the copyrights of the organisations and persons affiliated and represented respectively by Brein, and whether – if this is the case – the IP addresses of the subscribers in question have been rightfully obtained. These are different questions and that is why the Preliminary Injunction Court was justified to use a stricter criterion. The key requirement is that there can be no reasonable doubt about whether the IP addresses relate to subscribers who are illegally offering music files from their computer’s ‘shared folders’.

4.3 When describing the accuracy of the search method deployed by Brein regarding the users of the IP addresses in question, Brein refers to a statement made by E. Schmersel, Internet Anti-Piracy Manager at Brein, as submitted to the appeal. The ISPs observe that, in this regard, the statement is not objective and independent, as opposed to the statements which were submitted by the ISPs. They also state that the appendices which Schmersel refers to (A – G) are missing and Schmersel’s considerations regarding IP addresses are largely incorrect. In this context, the ISPs refer to the statement which they submitted made by ir. H. Rood (Exhibit III b First Instance), which indicated that consumers are usually assigned dynamic IP addresses. This means that the user can be assigned a different IP address for each internet session. If Brein fails to provide at least three combinations of IP addresses with the corresponding dates and times, there is a possibility that the wrong person could be identified, according to the aforementioned statement (page 4, first and penultimate paragraph).

4.4 Considering these contradictory statements, it cannot be properly established in advance whether Brein’s investigation was carried out with sufficient accuracy and due care and could serve as a basis for allowing the claimed injunctions. Moreover, the ISPs have asserted – without contest – that the music industry – next to legal means - also uses technical means to fight the unauthorised offering of music files, to wit the use of so-called ‘decoy files’ and ‘spoofed content’, files that resemble music files but, in reality, are not. Currently, 50% of the entire Kazaa network allegedly consists of spoofed content, while 90% of particular files are polluted. These figures have apparently been derived from the statement by Prof. Dr. Ir. H.J. Sips and Dr. Ir. J.A. Pouwelse (Exhibit II d of the ISPs in the first instance, p.2, 4th paragraph and p. 3, 4th paragraph). The latter is an expert in the field of P2P file sharing and has appeared before the American Federal Trade Commission in this capacity.

4.5 This is also clear from the ruling submitted by the ISPs, as given by the Federal Court of Canada on 31 March 2004 (Exhibit XII f of the ISPs in the first instance) in proceedings of the “Members of Canada’s Recording Industry (..) to seek disclosure from five Canadian internet service providers (..) of the identity of certain customers who, it is alleged, have infringed copyright laws by illegally trading in music downloaded from the internet”.

Just like Brein (cf. Judgement, Legal Consideration 4.25) the music industry in Canada – when gathering IP addresses – used the services of MediaSentry Inc. In the Canadian proceedings, the President of MediaSentry, Gary Millin, was heard as a witness. The following can be derived from the ruling by the Federal Court:

© 2006 SOLV Advocaten, www.solv.nl

[19] Mr. Millin also testified that his company provided a service called MediaDecoy which distributes bogus or inoperative files over the internet. People downloading these files think incorrectly that they are music files. The files are made to look like real music files, but they are inoperative. When he was asked whether he could tell whether any of the files allegedly copied from the alleged infringers were MediaDecoy files, Mr. Millin stated that he had not listened to any of the files copied from the alleged infringers and that listening to the files was not work that his firm was contracted to do (...). There is, thus, no evidence before the Court as to whether or not the files offered for uploading are infringed files of the plaintiffs.

[20] As discussed above, the plaintiffs would like the ISPs to furnish the names of the account holders of certain IP addresses at certain times. How-ever, neither the affidavits nor the cross-examination of Mr. Millin pro-vide clear and comprehensive evidence as to how the pseudonyms of the KaZaA or iMesh users were linked to the IP addresses identified by MediaSentry.

[26] No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings. They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service.

The Federal Court’s decision was: “this motion is denied”. The Federal Court of Appeal – in the appeal against this decision – considered in its ruling of 19 May 2005: “the appeal will be dismissed without prejudice to the plaintiffs’ right to commence a further application for disclosure of the identity of the “users” (..)”. Millin’s statement was not disputed or called into question during the appeal.

4.6 So even if the user of the IP address was offering files from his/her computer to the internet at the time established by MediaSentry, it has not been consequently established that this constituted an infringement on any copyright or neighbouring right which belonged to the parties involved.

4.7 Insofar as Brein complains – as a ground of appeal – that the Preliminary Injunction Court based its disallowance of Brein’s claim partially on defences made by the ISPs which Brein was unable to respond to properly, Brein currently no longer has any interest in this ground of appeal.

4.8 After having claimed otherwise in its statement of appeal, Brein has acknowledged at the hearing of the appeal that IP addresses can ‘in principle’ be classified as personal data. Furthermore, there is no longer a dispute between the parties as to whether the Civil Court is authorised to order the ISPs to provide the requested NAR particulars. Pursuant to Art. 8, opening words and under f. Personal Data Protection Act, the ISPs may provide personal details to Brein if this information is necessary to the promotion of Brein’s justified interest,

unless the interests or the fundamental rights and freedoms of the subscribers in question, more specifically the right to privacy protection, prevail.

4.9 The Court of Appeal argues that, primarily, an infringement of the right to privacy protection would, in principle, constitute a wrongful act. The presence of a ground for justification would remove the wrongful nature of such an infringement. According to Brein, such a ground for justification can be found because it has been established that the persons involved acted wrongfully by the unauthorised offering of music files on the internet and Brein is authorised to take action against such wrongful acts, and it has also been established that Brein will not be able to do this without the co-operation of the ISPs. This key position means – according to Brein – that there is a legal duty upon the ISPs to assist Brein in the protection of its interests and rights. By failing to do so, the ISPs are acting wrongfully.

4.10 The Preliminary Injunction Court – summarised very briefly – ruled (Legal Consideration 4.24 ff.) that (a) processing personal data pursuant to the Data Protection Act is subject to very strict conditions, (b) it is significant that the Data Protection Board (CBP) ruled that Brein’s gathering of IP addresses is lawful provided that it observes the instructions given by the CBP, but (c) it has been established that Brein employed the services of MediaSentry, a third party, when gathering IP addresses, thus Brein failed to meet the conditions under which gathering IP addresses is lawful, according to the CBP. The Preliminary Injunction Court also considered the fact that MediaSentry is an American company and that the United States of America could not be considered to be a country that has an appropriate protection level for personal data. Furthermore, MediaSentry – by means of the software it employs - investigates the contents of the IP addresses’ ‘shared folders’, and these ‘shared folders’ can also include files that do not infringe on the rights of third parties, or files which are of a private nature. This led the Preliminary Injunction Court to conclude that the manner in which Brein had the IP addresses gathered and processed lacks a lawful basis, so that the ISPs must deny the request to disclose any NAR particulars. This is, therefore, the ground on which allowing Brein’s claim fails, according to the Preliminary Injunction Court.

4.11 Brein adduces that the ‘shared folder’ is the part of a subscriber’s private files which he/she puts in the ‘public space’ of the internet, accessible and available to everyone, so it is the subscriber who decides whether he/she opens a ‘shared folder’ to other users of P2P programs such as Kazaa. There is, therefore, no infringement on his/her right to privacy. Brein speaks in the context of a ‘public place’ or browsing market.

4.12 The Court of Appeal does not consider this argument to be conclusive. Users of IP addresses open their computers for a specific purpose, i.e. the exchanging of files with other users of the network, during which they should not need to make allowances for the possibility that an organisation, such as MediaSentry (employed by Brein), might peruse their ‘shared folder’ for possible infringements on copyright. Moreover, this data processing remains unnoticed by the person involved. The CBP writes in its letter of 16 April 2004 (page 2, end): “The fact that the CBP has the possibility of instituting a preliminary investigation, pursuant to Article 31 (Data Protection Act, Court of Appeal) must be considered a compensating guarantee for not informing the user.” With regard to this investigation, the CBP then informed Brein, in a letter of 5 December 2005, that the CBP – considering the fact that this Court of Appeal “will fully discuss the parties’ points of view (regarding the lawfulness of the manner in which Brein gathers and processes IP addresses, Court of Appeal)” – will suspend the investigation until the Court of Appeal has ruled in this matter.

4.13 However, the CBP – in the position it adopts - fails to appreciate that these are interlocutory proceedings, and the Court of Appeal cannot independently order an (expert) investigation in such proceedings. In the preliminary opinion of the Court of Appeal, such a drastic decision as the one requested here (see Legal Consideration 4.1) – which will have a great impact on society – cannot be made dependant on the outcome of the procedural debate about the lawfulness of the manner in which Brein collects and processes IP addresses. Also in view of the considerations made under Legal Consideration 4.6 above, the Court of Appeal deems further expert advice is necessary.

4.14 Furthermore, the Court of Appeal also considers that the present dispute is currently pending before the court which is adjudicating on the merits of the case, and that, in these proceedings, the rejoinder has already been filed in the counterclaim proceedings. When asked about the pressing interest of its claim, Brein – at the hearing of the appeal – indicated that they would rather have a ruling today than tomorrow, but that does not mean, nor has it been shown, that its interest is such that they cannot wait for the ruling in the proceedings on the merits of the case, which will be rendered – it may be assumed – within a reasonable term.

4.15 The conclusion is that the grounds of appeal in the main appeal, which need not be discussed separately, must be denied. As the condition on which the cross-appeal was instituted – that (one of) the grounds of appeal in the main appeal is successful – has not been met, these grounds of appeal need not be discussed further. The appealed judgement will, therefore, be upheld. Brein, as the unsuccessful party, will be ordered to pay the costs of the proceedings of the main appeal. In the conditional cross-appeal, there will be no order to pay costs.

5. Decision

The Court of Appeal:

Upholds the appealed judgement

Orders Brein to pay the costs of the main appeal, which are estimated at the date of this judgement to amount to EUR 291.00 for out-of-pocket expenses and EUR 2,682 for wages on behalf of the ISPs;

Hereby declares this cost award to have immediate effect.

This judgement was rendered by M.Coeterier, L.L.M., N. van Lingen, L.L.M., and R.J.F. Thiessen, L.L.M. and was pronounced in public by the cause-list justice on 13 July 2006.

Stay tuned.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you're Chinese and you're looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

Also See:
very considerable understatement - RIAA: trying it on with MediaSentry, December 17, 2006
"devastated" by file sharers - RIAA losing p2p file sharing war, November 17, 2006
Recording Industry vs The People - Appeals Court Decision in Netherlands case, Foundation v. UPC Nederland, December 18, 2006

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(Monday 18th December 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/10773?PHPSESSID=5f9ccbd10606583244d1ef3c1c3e7788

 

Great Low-Cost Graphics Tools That Actually Work
Dec 18, 2006 - 8:00 AM - by Digital Dave
I'm not a big graphics person but then again, my daughter is. She might find some of these quite useful.

You can't put a price on creativity. But with the best image-editing and graphics-design tools retailing for $500 or more, it's easy to feel as though you can't afford to be creative. Pay attention to the download scene, however, and the picture looks a lot brighter.

PCWorld.com
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128140-page,1-c,tools/article.html


Great Low-Cost GraphicsTools
Tap into your inner Van Gogh with these 13 great utilities. We recommend everything from free photo editors to drawing tools to screen grabbers.
Leigh Anne Jones

You can't put a price on creativity. But with the best image-editing and graphics-design tools retailing for $500 or more, it's easy to feel as though you can't afford to be creative. Pay attention to the download scene, however, and the picture looks a lot brighter.

We checked out a sampling of tools that ranged from graphical one-trick ponies to full-featured application suites that compare favorably with big-ticket graphics superstars. The best news: Most of these programs have a free trial period, nothing listed here costs more than $80 to register, and a bunch of them are just plain free.
Free and Easy

It's amazing what you can still get for nothing. Our freebie picks range from a small but useful tool for identifying the color of any pixel on your screen to an image-editing application that is like margarine to Adobe Photoshop's butter. We've also collected some time-saving screen-capture tools for grabbing screen shots and recording moving images.

There's also a lot to love about "lite" versions of industry-leading graphics packages intended for the home market. Take Corel Painter Essentials 3, a scaled-down version of its professional-quality parent application, Corel Painter IX.5. Billed as a "home art studio," the program lets you create original artworks by wielding tools that replicate the look of fine-art techniques, such as painting with oils or drawing with pastels. You can start with a blank canvas, or use the program to embellish an existing image, such as a photograph. Take a snapshot of your house, say, and you can transform it into what looks like a painting by Van Gogh.

Maybe you're more interested in straightforward photo editing, the kind that corrects bad exposures and eliminates unsightly blemishes. Or perhaps you'd just like help managing, storing, and sharing the thousands of digital images that pile up on every digital photographer's storage drives. For you, we've spotlighted a handful of helpful resources, including ACDSee's workhorse Photo Manager 9.

You'll also find a handful of screen-capture utilities listed below. If you're grabbing screens the old fashioned way, with the print-screen key, you should definitely download one of these newer tools and try it out. You'll wonder how you ever got by without it.

Next page: Photo Editors and Managers

ACDSee Photo Editor 4 This capable $70 photo editor can do everything from simple fixes (red-eye removal, poor exposure) to special effects (old-fashioned vignettes; brush, paint, and text effects; stamp tool; flaw removal) to elaborate projects that seemed geared to the mother-daughter demographic (stylized greeting cards, scrapbook pages, party invites, CD covers, even a T-shirt transfer). This program contains more effects than does Photo Manager 9 (immediately below), and the projects are unique to it. Also, ACDSee includes step-by-step tutorials right in the software.
Click for enlarged image.

ACDSee Photo Manager 9 For $40, Photo Manager 9 combines many of the best traits of various consumer-grade digital photo programs in one fast, good-looking package. It includes endless ways to organize your images, plus surprisingly good image-editing and special-effects tools, password-protected storage, slick tutorials, and lots more. Choose this program over Photo Editor 4 if you prefer breadth and security in your photo management options to artsy photo effects and craftsy projects.

Serif PhotoPlus 6 PhotoPlus 6 is a free program that holds its own in comparison to older versions of the venerable, category-leading Adobe Photoshop. Its appeal is probably strongest to novices and would-be graphics artists interested in learning to use photo-altering features that range from basic painting, drawing, and text manipulation to erasing, filling, and cloning regions. There's even a Layer Manager that lets you work with multiple layers and masks, and a lasso-like Freehand tool.
Click for enlarged image.

Photo Resizer Pro This $18 program makes it easy to resize individual images or whole batches of shots for displaying on the Web or e-mailing to friends. The program also lets you convert images to various popular file formats. New in this version is the capability to crop, rotate, or adjust the color balance of an original or resized image.

Next page: Paint and Creation Tools

Paint and Creation Tools
Click for enlarged image.

Corel Painter Essentials 3 This digital painting program packs much of the artistic punch that you'd get with Corel's $220 Painter IX.5--but for just $80. You'll have fun using different types of virtual implements, media, and paper to create original digital artwork. Basically, the package amounts to a useful and varied sampling of the much wider array of tools available in Painter IX.5. Painter Essentials 3 also lets you turn ordinary digital photographs into suitable-for-framing "paintings." Video tutorials ease the learning curve.

Microangelo Toolset 6 The latest version of this $50 bundle of tools for creating, editing, and modifying icons and cursors adds support for Windows Vista's high-resolution icons and image compression. Use it to search for icon and cursor sets, to modify or replace existing icon libraries, or to create new libraries from scratch. (It's easier than you might think.) You can animate them, too.

Color Detector 1.01 Take the guesswork out of duplicating colors that you find on the Web. Run this small, free, stand-alone color picker program, click anywhere on the screen, and Color Detector will return the RGB values and HTML hex code of the pixel you clicked on. Just like that, the perfect color you found now belongs to you.

Next page: Display and Print Utilities

Display and Print Utilities

Webshots This sprawling, interactive photo-sharing site can replace your desktop wallpaper. After installing the free Webshots Desktop software, you can create and update a custom wallpaper mix of gorgeous stock photos (download up to five per day free at the Webshots site), personal photos of your own, and favorites from the Webshots community. Also, upload your own images to the site, where visitors who stop by can view and comment on them.
Click for enlarged image.

ProPoster Want to make posters, signs, or banners without resorting to special plotters or scary math? If you can manage scissors and tape, the $20 ProPoster software may be for you. Just grab an image, Word, or Excel file, and ProPoster will divide its contents into pieces of equal size that you can then patch together.

Picaboo Picaboo lets you create and upload a design (with pictures) for a photo album, which the company then produces and ships to you. A 20-page softcover book starts at just $10. A larger, 8.5-by-11-inch book with a linen cover runs $30. Write captions or create a full-fledged storybook or photo journal. The free Picaboo software can double as your photo organizer and photo-sharing tool.

Next page: Screen Grabbers

Screen Grabbers
Click for enlarged image.

SnagIt This powerful $40 screen-capture utility has lots of tricks up its sleeve. Image-editing features let you add arrows, call-outs, text, and other effects to your screen captures, making SnagIt a good choice for preparing PowerPoint presentations. SnagIt will auto-scroll down a long screen to capture everything on it, even hyperlinks. You can use the program to capture video with audio or to capture just the text on a page. The software can convert file formats, too, and it can create thumbnails in batches. Customize capture profiles to streamline repetitive capturing tasks.

ScreenHunter 5.0 When it comes to capturing screen shots, this free tool is more powerful and less demanding than pressing your Print Screen key, pasting a screen shot into Microsoft's Paint tool, and saving the result as a bitmap. You can choose how much of the screen you wish to capture--a region you select, the window, or the full screen--and you can save your screen shot as a bitmap, JPEG, or GIF file. Register a $20 copy of ScreenHunter Plus for more capture options. For the beefiest feature set, though, get the $30 ScreenHunter 5 Pro, which compares favorably to SnagIt.

AutoScreenRecorder 2.0 This program lets you record and play back events, ranging from a series of mouse clicks to a streaming online movie, as an AVI video file. You can capture the full screen, the active window, or a region you specify. But you won't get audio with your visuals. For $50, AutoScreenRecorder 2.1 Pro adds sound recording, better video quality, and the ability to generate Flash movie files and add annotations to your video captures.

Leigh Anne Jones is a San Francisco Bay Area-based freelance technology witer.

link to site
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128140-page,1-c,tools/article.html

 

FREE,...REGISTRY REPAIR..........

Users gradually experience a degradation in their Windows performance. Much of it can be attributed to Windows Registry Errors. By using Free Window Registry Repair regularly and repairing your registry your system should not only be more stable but it will also help Windows run faster. For your convenience it automatically backs up any repairs made so that you always can restore Windows registry to the original state.....(free).....GO THERE!

http://www.regsofts.com/