VERY,VERY HOT READS, I Would Read The News In This Thread This Thead Is To post Any Thing Ye Want About The News,,NEWS WAS MOVED,READ MY FIRST POS...

Canada's 'angry copyleft crowd'

p2p news / p2pnet: "In my job I am so enmeshed in the current copyright reform process in Canada (hell, there is a meeting of the Creator's Rights Alliance going on down the hall from me right now) it is sometimes hard to pull back and get real perspective, but real perspective is the thing most needed right now, as far as I can tell," posts John Degen on his blog.

"I'm confused," he continues. "Please explain. Why the intense anger and recrimination from the anti-copyright, or copyleft crowd? Their blogs seem filled with bile - check out Copyrightwatch.ca, faircopyright.ca, excess copyright, the ever-angry Russell McOrmond in this letter to The Hill Times, or the less angry Michael Geist at michaelgeist.ca.

"Compare all that high blood pressure argumentation with the calm, rational approach of Canada's creative community at creatorscopyright.ca."

And there's more. Go here to read it.

Meanwhile, here's McOrmond's response. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

If some copyright is good, is more is better?

I invite John Degen and everyone else to continue this conversation. I live in Ottawa, and I'll buy him a meal next time he's in town and would like to chat.

If all the people who have written comments on their own websites could provide links then we can all read them.

I have to admit to being very confused by John Degen's views expressed on his blog.

For literary works, he seems to think collective licensing, whether voluntary, extended or statutory (I can define in later article), is a good idea. He's a strong supporter of Access Copyright, a royalty collecting administrative body for a mixture of voluntary and extended licensing. Access Copyright is also a lobby group, lobbying for more extended and statutory licenses into non-traditional areas such as the Internet.

Access Copyright is dominated by paper-publishers (I'm told mostly the educational publishers), as well as some authors who use those publishing methods. The Internet marketplace is very different than paper publishing, with a very different set of copyright holders. These Internet-publishing creators use a wider spectrum of business models that include, but aren't limited to, those used for paper.

I also strongly believe that once adequate studies are done, it will be found Access Copyright members don't represent a significant repertoire of works on the public (no membership/password required) part of the Internet, and thus any attempt to administrate an "extended" license should be rejected.

When it comes to private copies of music such as downloads onto iPods or other personal music devices, Mr Degen seems to be opposed to the statutory licensing system that was created by Sheila Copps. This is the much discussed "private copying regime", which has both its supporters and its detractors.

Why is what Access Copyright is doing a good thing when they reach beyond their repertoire, but the legalization of putting any music from any source on your personal music devices (as long as you don't share this music) with a payment to the CPCC for "blank audio recording media" a bad thing?

Either authors (and other copyright holders) and their audiences should be able to privately negotiate business arrangements (whether royalty licensing or otherwise), or the government should "step in" with a non-voluntary regime (extended or statutory licensing) and bureaucratically impose these arrangements.

The non-voluntary regimes area is one where there's disagreement among the people John Degen incorrectly suggested was "one side".

Michael Geist, a law professor, author and editor, has been a proponent of collective licensing for unauthorized music filesharing. This is a system that would mirror the regimes that legalized the recording industry (payments to composers/publishers/etc) and the common practises broadcasters ("right of remuneration" replacing copyright for music, as well as the "retransmission" regime for television).

I strongly agree with his goal, which is to keep private citizens out of the courts for doing things that shouldn't have resulted in lawsuits in the first place. I worry about the unintended consequence of such a non-voluntary regime perpetuating the existing "superstar" system at the expense of the vast majority of musicians. When the government steps in and imposes a business model, this tends to freeze the marketplace such that the incumbents never being able to be unseated by innovators.

As an author, I prefer the bureaucrats stayed away from my creativity. I don't personally support "collective" royalty-collecting regimes, and use alternatives for my own creativity. Where these regimes are voluntary I can live with them as both my customers and I can "opt out", but I have a big problem with extended or statutory licensing as it removes all the control and choice that copyright holders and their audiences would otherwise have.

Note to John: For a system to be "voluntary," it means my customers and I can "opt out". Sayine you're not "forcing me to collect a cheque from a collective" only infuriates people. If my customers can't "opt out" of payments to a collective and use competitors, then there's no money to pay these competitors and their businesses die.

In my business, the collective societies fill the same roll of stopping the flow of money to me as infringement does in your business.

I think this is long enough for now. I'll end with a copy of a reply I just posted on my own blog.

I'm not comfortable with this pro-vs-anti copyright type of language. I'm not anti-copyright, even though an Ottawa Citizen article in 2002 used that as the headline.

When compared to those who believe "if some copyright is good, more is better" I seem anti-copyright. To those who want copyright to just go away, I seem strongly pro-copyright.

I believe that copyright is to creativity like water is to humans; too little and you dehydrate and die, too much and you drown and die.

John Degen seems to believe creators are dehydrated, and I believe creators are drowning. Unfortunately the debate is not yet at the maturity to allow John and I to discuss the issues as his community is still of the mistaken belief that we want creators to die.

John Degen and I both want to retain our control over our creativity, but have very different ideas of how to achieve this. He calls what I do "giving away" as I don't charge per-copy royalties. I call what he does "giving away" as he gives up his control to a statistically driven bureaucracy (Access Copyright, Copyright Board, etc) which works well for the "superstars" but screws most creators.

Neither John Degen or I are "anti-Copyright", if you ignore his unfounded accusations for the moment. We are both trying to make a living at our creativity, and at least one of us is fighting for the right of authors and their audiences to have a full spectrum of choices of methods of production, distribution and funding.

Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons).]

Also See:
Go here - Anti-copyright: a rebel sell?, February 10, 2006

(Monday 13th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7909

Anti-copyright: a rebel sell?

Posted by john_d at February 10, 2006 11:20 AM

Okay, the title of this posting is intentionally provocative, but the intent is pure. In my job I am so enmeshed in the current copyright reform process in Canada (hell, there is a meeting of the Creator's Rights Alliance going on down the hall from me right now) it is sometimes hard to pull back and get real perspective, but real perspective is the thing most needed right now, as far as I can tell.

I'm confused. Please explain. Why the intense anger and recrimination from the anti-copyright, or copyleft crowd? Their blogs seem filled with bile -- check out Copyrightwatch.ca, faircopyright.ca, excess copyright, the ever-angry Russell McOrmond in this letter to The Hill Times, or the less angry Michael Geist at michaelgeist.ca.

Compare all that high blood pressure argumentation with the calm, rational approach of Canada's creative community at creatorscopyright.ca.

Specifically, why the hatred in the copyleft camp of Access Copyright, which is Canada's copyright licensing agency. AC is NOT, as far as I can tell, (full disclosure: I work closely with them and as a published writer I am an affiliate and receive a yearly cheque as part of their creator repertoire), controlled by some radical corporate agenda to lock down free speech and creativity. In my dealings with this agency, I have NEVER met a person who wants to restrict an academic's right to cite, quote or use portions of someone else's work in their own writing. In fact everyone I know at Access Copyright would go to war to protect an academic's, or anyone else's, right to do those things (this is stated clearly at creatorscopyright.ca). I have never met anyone at AC who wants kids to be personally out of pocket for everything, or anything, they use in their classroom. I have never met anyone who wants giant American corporate interests to lock down the public domain; and they certainly would never claim, as Mr. McOrmond suggests on his blog "that if people want to read books multiple times without additional payment that [sic] they are "pirates." Why such a ridiculous, obviously false claim about the purpose of a copyright licensing agency?

In my experience, Access Copyright is made up of hard-working creative Canadians who work in one of the lowest paid sectors of our economy -- culture -- and who desperately want to ensure access for everyone (thus the name) to their work and/or product. These people respect fair dealing, and the public domain. They simply do not share the opinion that the Internet contains an implied license for royalty-free copying and use.

More than anything, I want to find common ground in this struggle, and as far as I can see, once the anger is dropped, there should be plenty of common ground. Michael Geist is very fond of talking about a balanced copyright approach that respects the rights of users. Balance, of course, implies two sides; so if we respect the rights of users, as every copyright holder I know does, shouldn't we also respect the rights of the copyright holders, whether they are individual artists making a crap living or gigantic corporations with enormous budgets?

Honestly, the copyleft arguments are so littered with anti-corporate rhetoric, I can't help wondering if this isn't some gigantic Rebel Sell (TM) akin to the most naive excesses of the anti-globalization movement (anybody seen the parkour cell-phone commercial now playing on Canadian television?).

There is a pretty solid rumour about that CC is looking into creating a Rights Management System whereby members can collect royalties for work they have licensed under CC. The Commons, for sale? How is this essentially different from what AC has been doing for copyright holders for years? My understanding is Access Copyright has informally approached Creative Commons to discuss how these two groups can cooperate to create a balanced copyright paradigm. Yet all the rhetoric from the other side is that AC works at odds with CC's noble goal of a free public domain.

Someone please explain, minus the angry rhetoric, what is so wrong with the creator of a work, or someone who has licensed limited copyright (like a publisher), wanting to protect their limited control over that work, and/or wanting to make limited money from that work within traditional or even non-traditional market economy ways (licensing use, including certain educational uses). What is so wrong with that?

Previous: Spirit of the Rainforest
http://blog.thismagazine.ca/archives/2006/02/anticopyright_a.html

 

i aint read it but its probaly funny so LMAO!!!

 

Woman Victimized By Keylogger Spyware

keys Joy Mills said she is extremely careful when using her computer. Despite changing her account passwords every few months and never doing business with unsecure Web sites, someone broke through her defenses, according to a WJXT-TV report. She found out after she couldn't log into her Yahoo account. "I got an e-mail on my business account saying that my password had been changed and my account had been canceled," Mills said. Mills knew something was wrong, and soon learned that someone had hacked into her accounts and starting changing her passwords.

"I was a little spooked, because I do a lot on eBay," Mills told WJXT's Casey Black. "Then I realized that that password had been changed, too." local6.com - News - Woman Victimized By 'Keylogger' Spyware

GO HERE TO READ THE STORY ITS A GOOD READ... AS ITS COPYRIGHTED
http://www.local6.com/news/6981673/detail.html

Copyright 2006 by Internet Broadcasting Systems and Local6.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

god damm thats terrible...yeh im gonna read that s***..

it scares you that..

 

How best to protect kids from online porn

lock Wenda Huang has nothing against Paris Hilton. But when she found the socialite lounging naked in her sons' bedroom last year, she had to give the Hilton sister the heave-ho.

After Huang, a legal secretary from Orinda, found erotic pictures of the hotel heiress on her sons' computer, she installed filtering software to prevent her 13- and 15-year-old boys from accessing other suggestive material. How best to protect kids from online porn

How best to protect kids from online porn

Kim Zetter, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Wenda Huang has nothing against Paris Hilton. But when she found the socialite lounging naked in her sons' bedroom last year, she had to give the Hilton sister the heave-ho.

After Huang, a legal secretary from Orinda, found erotic pictures of the hotel heiress on her sons' computer, she installed filtering software to prevent her 13- and 15-year-old boys from accessing other suggestive material.

"I didn't even know that (Hilton) had those kinds of pictures," Huang said in a phone interview.

Huang's discovery makes parents mourn for the days when a child's access to porn was limited to a few airbrushed bunnies hidden beneath his mattress. Now parents face video iPods with 150 hours of viewing storage that seem tailor-made for illicit flicks and an always-on Internet that delivers a wealth of porn that neither the government nor software companies are able to adequately block.

Some think filtering software is the answer. Others, due to filtering flaws and the omnipresence of the Internet, advocate better communication between parents and children about appropriate Web behavior. Still others want the government to make it more difficult for porn and other material to get to minors.

"When we were teens, we had that curiosity too. But nowadays the Web sites are so bad," Huang said. "(My sons) don't even have girlfriends yet, and then they jump onto sites that tell them what they can do (sexually). That is inappropriate to me."

Huang, a single parent, didn't initially tell her sons she installed the software. She was too embarrassed to broach the topic. But her secretive action has born results: now if the boys type words like "sex" or "Hilton" into a search engine, the Cyber Sitter software Huang installed prevents pornographic sites and images from appearing on the screen.

It also prevents her older son, Wilson Cheung, a sophomore at Miramonte High School in Orinda, from conducting searches related to his homework.

"I did a history project on Napoleon, and when I typed in the word 'Napoleon,' it wouldn't let me search for images of him," Wilson said.

The filter, which his mother set at the most restrictive level, also prevents him from reading his Yahoo e-mail and locks him off the Internet except for two hours at night when his mother is home.

Wilson isn't too bothered by the e-mail restriction, however. He simply circumvents it by using filter-free computers at his friends' homes.

"I feel like a fool," Huang said. "There seems to be no way to be certain what Wilson is or isn't looking at online."

Although there is a strong contingent of parents and educators who believe the government should implement new legislation to protect minors from porn and other material, this approach has drawn criticism, particularly from civil liberties groups who say the solution is tantamount to censorship.

This year, the subject of protective censorship is likely to get a lot of attention when the Justice Department and American Civil Liberties Union battle over the 1998 Child Online Protection Act in court. Under the act, commercial sites that offer material deemed harmful to minors would have to verify that users are 18 or older through registration with a credit card or some other means of identification. The law has never been enforced, however, because of an injunction.

The ACLU challenged the Child Online Protection Act on grounds that it violated First Amendment rights related to free speech and prior restraint. Other groups opposed it because it forced adults to identify themselves to obtain legal material.

"In the United States, adults are allowed to view legal pornography without having to leave behind a trail as to who they are," said Parry Aftab, a privacy lawyer and executive director of the child-safety group WiredSafety. "But if the law went into place, you would have to identify who you are, and when you run for the PTA or for mayor, someone somewhere could prove that you were buying porn."

The Supreme Court upheld the injunction against the Child Online Protection Act in 2004, suggesting that filters might just as effectively keep harmful material out of minors' hands. This year the Philadelphia federal district court will examine if filters are effective enough to preclude the need for the act. The ACLU thinks they are.

"Parents should be able to use whatever tools they want to use to make sure that their children are seeing material they're comfortable with," said Aden Fine, staff attorney for the ACLU's national office. "It's not for us or for the government to decide what parents can or can't let their children see."

Aftab, who wrote "The Parent's Guide to Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace," said filtering is better than the Child Online Protection Act because the law wouldn't prevent kids from accessing porn on sites administered outside the United States, attached to e-mails or posted to online message boards.

"It annoys me a great deal that parents are not using software and now someone is trying to impinge on the privacy of adults, when the easy solution is using a filtering software. They work, and they have been working for the last five or six years," Aftab said.

According to a study released last year by the Pew Internet Project, 54 percent of U.S. families connected to the Internet use filters, up from 41 percent in 2000.

Aftab thinks that number is inflated and fewer parents use filters than are willing to admit.

"If you call and do a survey, there isn't a parent on Earth that's going to say no, they don't filter, because it makes them look like a bad parent," she said.

Although far from perfect, filtering software has improved since it went on the market a decade ago. The programs allow parents an array of configuration choices that can block porn, gambling and other sites. Filters generally come with preset lists of Web addresses that they block, to which parents can add sites.

Some products also block sites on the fly, scanning pages for objectionable words and blocking them even if they're not on the list. For example, if the word "breast" appears without the words "feeding," "chicken" or "cancer" nearby, the filter might block the site or the sentence in which "breast" appears. Additionally, some programs scour instant messages and e-mail for language that suggests inappropriate activity.

The programs cost between $20 and $70, although some programs are available for free on the Internet. America Online and MSN include parental controls in their subscription services. All the programs require configuring, and oftentimes parents, confused by different configuration choices, opt for the default that can be the most restrictive. This can result in excessive blocking, such as what Huang's son experienced.

In June, Consumer Reports tested 11 filters, including AOL and MSN parental controls, and found they were very good at blocking porn compared with when the magazine tested them in 2001, but were less effective at blocking other material deemed harmful to children, such as content pertaining to hate speech, violence and illegal drugs. The programs also blocked many sites they shouldn't block.

The best programs for stopping porn were the worst at distinguishing harmful material from informational content. They blocked sex education sites as well as sites dealing with civil rights issues and drug abuse prevention.

"I don't care which program you use, it blocks sites you need," said Susan Geiger, a librarian at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward, which uses filters required by a federal law that says schools and libraries that receive federal funding and computer discounts must restrict Internet access.

"Sites on genital mutilation and socially transmitted diseases get blocked. All of the health sites end up getting blocked. Kids can't get the negative information, but they also can't get positive information," Geiger said.

Geiger thinks that instead of using filters with young children, parents should provide supervised access.

Debbie Abilock, who edits a magazine called Knowledge Quest for the American Association of School Librarians, agrees.

"There's always a trade-off between allowing that free access to information and having kids makes poor choices," she said. "But it's part of growing up. It's part of the process of learning to say no and learning to identify and complain when something makes you uncomfortable."

Aftab said preteens should be blocked from everything that's not preapproved.

"Younger kids don't need to go to a million sites. They only need Sesame Street and Disney and Nickelodeon. So you want to protect them from inadvertent exposure that occurs when they type a Web site's name incorrectly or search for a skateboard site and land on a porn site masquerading as a kids site," she said.

But beyond that age, Aftab said filtering is ineffective. Teens who are just a little tech-savvy can circumvent filters or download porn from file-sharing networks if a filter doesn't block them.

"You have kids who are sexually inquisitive, they're either going to download it at a friend's house to their cell phone or to their new video iPod. At some point, you have to trust the filter you put between their ears," Aftab said.

Aftab believes many parents are frustrated by programs that offer too many set-up options or require too many steps to override when they block content they shouldn't block.

Geoff King, chief executive officer of a small Hayward company who has an 18-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son, has found conversation with his children his best resource. He used AOL parental controls when his kids first went online but found it didn't shield them from sexual ads. So he educated them instead.

"If you tell them this is something forbidden, they tend to rebel," he said. "But if you just let them naturally treat it as what it really is, which is something they don't particularly want to see, they'll turn it off. They don't like (encountering it) any more than we do."

Thomas Gonda Jr., father of an 8-year-old boy and 11-year-old daughter, doesn't use filtering software but does use a spam filter to catch e-mail porn and has set up his children's browser to block pop-up ads. He also placed their computer in a central area where he can observe their activity.

"All they're looking at now is Pokémon, game cheat (sites) and Nintendo shortcuts," he said.

He did discuss the issue of porn with his son after he noticed a lot of obscene messages in the forum of a chess site he and his son frequent.

"I tell him just to ignore it and go on to the next game, and he does that," Gonda said. "Maybe I'm a little naive and I don't see it. But at this age they're just not interested." Gonda said he might have to re-evaluate his position when his kids get older and more curious.

What's evident for most parents, though, is that there is no single solution to this dilemma.

"Filtering is a noble fool's errand. Save your money," said Liz Perle, editor in chief of Commonsense Media, a parental advocacy organization in San Francisco. "And the Child Online Protection Act is important conceptually, but putting the onus of protection on a third party is not going to work because the bad guys out there don't abide by the rules.

Perle, like others, puts the onus on parents to communicate with their children.

"What you need to do is not cover your kids' eyes but teach them to see. Install that software in their heads."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/12/MNGD0H7AH81.DTL

 

Man they had her ebay pasword and were buying games consoles..that realy sucks..man if i found the b****** that did that i would just...AAARRRGGH!!!

 

lol some boys and there porm..

lock Wenda Huang has nothing against Paris Hilton. But when she found the socialite lounging naked in her sons' bedroom last year, she had to give the Hilton sister the heave-ho.

After Huang, a legal secretary from Orinda, found erotic pictures of the hotel heiress on her sons' computer, she installed filtering software to prevent her 13- and 15-year-old boys from accessing other suggestive material.

LMAO....

btw this porm one is my 666th post for any supersticious people out there, so it must be a sign..

 

sorry i jus have to write anything because i need to get off 666 posts!!

 

Xbox 360 shortage coming to end

2/13/2006 10:58:11 AM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

Nearly three months after launch, Microsoft's Peter Moore is saying that the Xbox 360 shortages are coming to an end. Moore's comments came at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, which kicked off last week. Moore said that "Within the next four to six weeks, anybody will be able to walk into a store and buy an Xbox 360."

Four-to-six weeks clearly isn't today, however. While shortages were expected early on, by Christmas time it was clear that Microsoft had overstated its shipping goals. The question is: why? The answer is pretty simple: the company overestimated its production capabilities. Additionally, many fault Microsoft's bold decision to launch in North America, Europe and Japan simultaneously. While units in North America could barely make it to shelves before being snapped up, only 25-50 percent of the Japanese allocation was sold in the first few days of the launch. The Xbox 360 is still widely available in Japan, and interest is mild.

The Street started sounding the alarms in late January, warning investors that Microsoft's second quarter sales (4Q calendar year) estimates would likely be off. The company came out looking strong, regardless, although they did revise their overall shipping estimates. The company still believes that its Xbox business will be profitable by the middle of this year.

At DICE, Peter Moore continued to back the simultaneous release strategy.

"Was it controversial? Yes. But it's what we needed to do to bring next-gen gaming to a global audience. There have been short-term shortages, but we're driving a clear advantage as we go forward. It was the right decision," he said. "There were component shortages, but they've been fixed. Now we're starting to cook. We're building a vibrant, rich and profitable business model for the future."

For North America, the shortages may be over, and it's about time. While the initial launch list for the Xbox 360 was strong for a console launch, few of the titles were seen as "must-haves" that would really shine on the Xbox 360 (PGR 3, represent!). That all changes over the course of the next few weeks, when a smattering of highly-anticipated titles is set to hit the stage. Tomorrow Full Auto hits shelves, and a week later Fight Night Round 3 will show off its fancy footwork. In the weeks that follow, Burnout Revenge will be given the Xbox 360 treatment, Ghost Recon Advanced Warrior will sneak up on you, and the The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will hope to enchant you out of 60 bucks.

With the Xbox 360 hitting a fully ramped, fully loaded production cycle in the next few weeks, it will be time for the company to push like a woman with quintuplets. Both the Nintendo Revolution and the Sony PlayStation 3 are due out sometime later this year, and both look to be promising in their own ways.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060213-6165.html

 

Target.com sued by blind student

2/13/2006 11:45:46 AM, by Nate Anderson

A blind student at the University of California-Berkeley is suing national retailer Target over the design of the company's web site, which is allegedly unusable by the blind. Bruce Sexton Jr., who is president of the California Association of Blind Students, filed the suit in conjunction with the National Federation of the Blind. Their goal is to use the suit to bring attention to the issue of corporate web sites that do not interact well with screen reader technology, which is essential for blind web users. As the Internet becomes increasingly important for daily tasks such as buying products and online banking, blind users are afraid of being left behind—and Sexton hopes to remind companies that this is more than a niche issue.

"What I hope is that Target and other online merchants will realize how important it is to reach 1.3 million people in this nation and the growing Baby Boomer population who will also be losing vision," said Sexton.

Making websites accessible to the blind is much easier when they are built on the ground up to do so. Target's well-established site (which is powered by Amazon backend technology) is alleged to lack enough "alt" tags to make the site functional, and the site's image maps are also alleged to be inaccessible. ("Alt" tags provide invisible descriptive text for images and provide screenreaders with the material they need to describe a graphically-rich page.) A quick check of the site shows that many product pictures do, in fact, have "alt" descriptions associated with them, though such crucial page elements as the "Add to Cart" graphic do not.

Those behind the lawsuit believe that companies such as Target should be forced to treat their web presence as an extension of their physical stores, and that they should therefore be required to make them accessible to the disabled. This kind of case is not new, but it has so far had little success in the court system. Most lawsuits argue that Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provisions for places of "public accommodation" should apply, but judges have not concurred. Though several lawsuits have been filed by blind Internet users in the last few years, none have garnered a ruling that the ADA applies to websites. The National Federation of the Blind sued America Online on these very grounds, but the case was dropped before going to trial when AOL agreed to modify their site. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer argued that the law did apply to websites, and he threatened both Priceline.com and Ramada.com with lawsuits in mid-2004 unless they made their sites accessible and paid for the costs of his department's investigation. They did so, but probably wished they had waited a few months, because in September, a similar case against Southwest.com did go to trial, but a judge interpreted the ADA to apply only to physical spaces.

This ruling may spell trouble for the current lawsuit, though California also has a number of anti-discrimation laws that might apply even if the ADA does not. Regardless of the legal outcome, though, it might be helpful to have some updated national legislation that helps to clarify issues about discrimination in cyberspace. Just as the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is currently undergoing revision to bring it up to date with changes caused by the Internet's explosive growth, the ADA may need clarification as well. Applying existing laws to virtual worlds can be tricky, but is increasingly being done by groups that feels they are suffering discrimination, like the recent gay guild in World of Warcraft. A national conversation about the issue grows increasingly important as the Internet assumes a vital role in interpersonal communications and entertainment.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060213-6166.html

 

Vista's Aero Glass: a tiered graphical experience

2/13/2006 12:22:42 PM, by Ken "Caesar" Fisher

Nearly two years ago Microsoft announced that Windows Vista would sport a so-called "tiered" graphical experience. The user interface would remain the essentially the same no matter what graphical prowess a machine was blessed with, but the best of the eye-candy and the whiz-bang effects would be reserved for the most modern of computers. While Microsoft has not put the official seal of **CONFIRMED** on any recommended hardware configurations, we have a good idea of what the company will consider as the base for the full-flavored, full-bodied Aero Glass experience.

What will it be? First, let's talk about what it won't be. It won't be grandma's 486, it won't be that anything fueled by your 3Dfx relic, and it probably won't even be that bargain basement PC you bought from Dell last year. No, as with many major OS upgrades, Windows Vista will be launched not only with 2006 in mind, but the next few years, to boot. Shocking, isn't it?

Maybe it's not that surprising, but Jon Peddie Research is looking for the best possible way to get you all hot and bothered. Late last week the company issued a report that Aero Glass won't run on over 50 percent of the computers out there. Noting that "over 600 million PCs shipped in the last 3 years," JPR reports that more than half of them likely have integrated graphics that are "antiquated," in some sense. It is not entirely clear what qualifies as antiquated from the materials made available by JPR, but presumably these are all machines with less than 64MB of VRAM, no support for DirectX 9, nor support for the Windows Driver Model.

However, the most shocking part of the report is also the most factually incorrect part, which we'd be remiss not to address. According to JPR:

"ecause of the low graphics performance of integrated graphics chips found in most of the PCs, they would not be able to take advantage of the richness and benefits of Vista's new Aero Glass GUI and the graphics-based operating system would be unusable on most of them." Emphasis added.

Whatever JPR's intent, the above statement has been read by many people to mean simply that Windows Vista will not run on machines that cannot support Aero Glass. This is entirely false. Microsoft is planning at least two but probably three tiers of "experience" in the user interface, meant to take advantage of varying levels of graphical power. At least in terms of basic support, machines that can run Windows XP can expect to run Windows Vista's graphical component in a "classic mode" without too much trouble; Microsoft is going to support software rendering so that older machines can handle the Vista GUI.

While details are not finalized, I still believe that DirectX 9 class graphics cards below the 64MB will be able to handle a subset of Aero Glass' features. Other DirectX 9 cards should be more than capable of handling the load. But in all cases, a lack of support for Aero Glass does not equate to an inability to run Vista per se. An analogy could be seen with Apple's line of computers. While OS X Tiger has a number of interesting and visually appealing graphical effects, those effects do not work throughout Apple's product line. Low-end iBooks and the Mac mini, for instance, cannot handle all of accelerated graphical effects in the operating system.

Until a release candidate sits before us, predicting the future remains a risky business. However, Microsoft has been clear that Vista would be designed to deliver a visual experience that is appropriate to the level of graphical power in any given machine.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060213-6167.html

 

Webroot survey confirms worst fears

Security 2005 a bumper year for the bad stuff

By Guy Matthews: Monday 13 February 2006, 15:11
A REPORT from security vendor Webroot confirms that 2005 was an annus horribilis for malware.

Webroot says it picked up 400,000 sites being used to spread spyware, Trojans, worms, and other examples of malware among business and home PC users.

The company says what every security analyst has been predicting, namely that malware is now serious business for organized criminals.

Last year a record 55 million US computer users, and an unknown number of others, experienced security troubles. The US is also the biggest source of malware, with just over a third of all sources detected being American. China’s next and Holland third. The UK is home to only 2.2% of malware sites, says Webroot. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29664

 

DDR3 DRAM gets ready for prime time

Fast as the fastest frame

By Nebojsa Novakovic: Monday 13 February 2006, 12:55
DURING THE recent ISSCC 2006 event, there was much focus on new stuff like IBM POWER6 componentry early insights, for instance. The 2.5 GHz 0.8 ns, 256 Mbit GDDR3 graphics memory chips from Hynix, as well as their 2 GHz 1 ns, 512 Mbit GDDR3 brethren from Infineon, were there too, whetting the appetites of 3-D graphics buffs expecting these rapid-fire memories in the next graphics card generation Nvidia 7900GTX and its ATI equivalent, I guess.

Talking about memory, one talk - not talked about much, though - was covering Elpida's "standard" DDR3 memory, the one meant for next-generation PCs and servers, for instance. Their 512 Megabit DDR3 SDRAM with a column access time of 8.75 ns (CL7 latency) and data transfer rate of 1.6 Gigabits per second (Gbps), or 1.6 GHz DDR3 for the laymen, would be the fastest DDR3 general purpose memory chip announced by now - all that at the usual 1.5v DDR3 voltage level, saving some electricity compared to the DDR2. What is more interesting is that, at an even lower 1.36 volts, the RAM runs fine at 1.333 GHz (DDR3-1333) grade with CL6 latency (8.4 ns total CAS time), which matches the CAS time of the fastest current DDR2 memory, the Corsair 5400UL (DDR2-667 CL3) at 1.9 volts.



All that in a 90 nm CMOS (not even the newer 80 nm process used by Samsung, for instance). How? Well, according to Elpida/Hitachi, their 8:4 data transfer multiplexer with shielded I/O lines, and dual-clock (separate for odd and even clock counts) latency counter to reduce cycle time to 1.2 ns (DDR3-1600 grade), combined with multiple on-dire termination merged output drivers. Why do you need all that stuff? Well, as DDR read two bits simultaneously from the DRAM memory array for each signal pin (i.e. for 100 MHz memory array, the outside transfer was 200 MHz per pin) and DDR2 read four bits for each signal pin, the DDR3 blanket-reads 8 bits, a whole byte, of date per each external signal pin, multiplexing 8 bits to one pin effectively using time division. So, a 200 MHz DDR3 memory array will correspond to 1,600 MHz effective outside per-pin thoughput.

Both Samsung and Infineon launched their DDR3 chips before Elpida, in fact early DDR3-1066 samples from these two vendors reached the OEMs late last year already. But these initial 512 Mbit 1.5 volt circuits aren't far ahead in performance compared to the best current DDR2 ones. However, the Elpida entry tempts with substantially higher performance, where ultrahigh bandwidth was not compromised by very high latency, yet the voltage was kept very low to ensure cool, power-saving operation even at DDR3-1333 CL6 - a very nice, clock-synchronised fit to the FSB1333 "Cointreaus"? Or maybe a dual-FSB1333 "Woodcrest" workstation variety where the improved latency and cheaper generic memory will be a preference over complicated, high-latency FB-DIMMs? Or, on the AMD side, the 1.36 volts level for the memory at DDR3-1333 is just a notch above the expected 1.3 volts Vcc for the upcoming 65 nm Athlon64 and Opteron series, making the on-chip memory controller integration that much easier, since the voltage levels are almost the same for the CPU cores, memory and the upcoming HyperTransport 3.0 links which will again double the data rate per port. After all, a dual-channel low-power, low-latency DDR3-1333 memory system would give you 21 GBytes/s of peak bandwidth, and probably close to, say, 18 GB/s Sandra memory benchmark if it was running via on-chip memory controller of a hypothetical 2007 Athlon64 CPU.

Knowing these are the first "chips on the block" of their kind, the performance is impressive. If you remember the initial DDR2 circuits, they were noticeably slower latency-wise compared to their DDR1 predecessors. In this case, the very first one (at least the Elpida entry) matches the best DDR2 parts in latency, and beats them twice in bandwidth, yet runs at or below 1.5 volts.

The DDR3 is still a year away from first mainstream PC implementations, although I do expect the initial support to appear late this year, in combination with volume production of these first chips from Elpida, Samsung and Infineon. The market researchers iSuppli expects DDR3 DRAM to finally replace DDR2 as the main volume product only in 2008, with a projected 55 percent market share that year. Of course, it's a long way till 2008, and there could be various potholes and roadblocks on the DDR3 highway before then. But again, the ultra-bloated Vista freight truck is coming along, in need of all the "performance and capacity fuel" it can get, so don't be surprised to see, among other things like quad-core CPUs and multi-super-duper GPUs, this DDR3 become a recommendation, then a requirement, in the upcoming Age of Vista - for Micro$oft-occupied lands only, that is: the Linux/UNIX 'free realms' can still do as they deem fit. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29669

 

Microsoft's Valentine's Day gift: Seven new patches
Ah... and I didn't get them anything.

While romance will undoubtedly be in the air for many on Tuesday, Microsoft next week will celebrate Valentine's Day by releasing more than a half dozen new security patches.

In a posting Thursday on its TechNet site, Microsoft outlined what to expect in its next regularly scheduled "Patch Tuesday" release, which this month falls on Valentine's Day, Feb. 14.

Microsoft's Valentine's Day gift: Seven new patches
By Eric B. Parizo, News Editor
09 Feb 2006 | SearchSecurity.com



While romance will undoubtedly be in the air for many on Tuesday, Microsoft next week will celebrate Valentine's Day by releasing more than a half dozen new security patches.

In a posting Thursday on its TechNet site, Microsoft outlined what to expect in its next regularly scheduled "Patch Tuesday" release, which this month falls on Valentine's Day, Feb. 14.

The software giant will make public a critical bulletin affecting Windows Media Player and four critical bulletins affecting the Windows operating system. It didn't reveal any further details, other than that some of the Windows updates will require a system restart.

Also, Microsoft announced it will release a pair of "important" bulletins Tuesday, one affecting Microsoft Office and another affecting both Windows and Office. Each is likely to require a restart.

Per usual, all seven of the updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, its tool to help small and midsize businesses stay on top of its patch releases.

It's possible that Microsoft's upcoming bulletins will address a number of software flaws revealed this week. The company issued a pair of advisories Tuesday, one involving a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a user's system, and one involving a security hole in Windows in which a certain tool could allow a malicious user to launch a privilege escalation attack.

Earlier in the week, the software giant acknowledged it was looking into reports of another Windows flaw, for which exploit code has been circulating.

Microsoft had been easing up on its monthly patch totals recently, but this month's releases will mark its largest number of simultaneous bulletins in four months. Last month it threw security pros a curveball by initially saying it would wait until Tues., Jan. 10 to release the much-anticipated patch for the Windows meta file (WMF) glitch that had been the target of numerous exploits, but it later reversed course and released the patch five days early.

"Microsoft originally planned to release the update Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2006 as part of its regular monthly release of security bulletins once testing for quality and application compatibility was complete," the vendor said last month in a statement. "However, testing has been completed earlier than anticipated and the update is ready for release. In addition, Microsoft is releasing the update early in response to strong customer sentiment that the release should be made available as soon as possible."

The following week it released a pair of regularly scheduled critical fixes for Windows, Exchange and Office. Looking back over recent months, Microsoft released two bulletins in December and one in November. In October it released a whopping nine security patches.

As is often the case, Microsoft this month will also release one non-security high-priority update, which will be available via Microsoft Update and its Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). It will not release any non-security high-priority updates for Windows on Windows Update or its Software Update Services (SUS).

A new edition of its malicious software removal tool will also be released next week. Offering its standard disclaimer, Microsoft said the number of bulletins, products affected, restart information and severities are all subject to change until the bulletins are released.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.co...d14_gci1165520,00.html?track=NL-102&ad=541674

 

IIPA goes after Russia

p2p news / p2pnet: 'Trade' group the the IIPA (International Intellectual Property Alliance) wants the US government to censure Russia for "serious" copyright infringements.

Like most groups wholly, or almost wholly, funded by the entertainment industry in one form or another, the IIPA, a purely commercial organization, is given to issuing what amount to edicts aimed at countries which displease its owners, among whom are the RIAA and MPAA.

It recently "congratulated" Brazil on the "termination" of an American US GSP investigation into the country.

Now, it wants the Shotgun Dick Cheney and George W. Bush administration to, "recognize serious copyright violations in Russia and to designate the country for possible sanctions," says the IDG News Service.

"The recommendation was contained in an annual submission made Monday by the International Intellectual Property Alliance to the U.S. Trade Representative ahead of the USTR's 'Special 301' review of piracy worldwide. The review gets its name from provisions of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974 and allows the U.S. to impose penalties on countries judged to not be offering effective protection of intellectual property rights.

"The IIPA is recommending that Russia be named a Priority Foreign Country, a designation reserved for countries that are judged to have the most onerous and egregious acts, policies, and practices that have the greatest adverse impact on U.S. products and to not be engaged in good faith negotiations or making significant progress in negotiations to address these problems."

That should be no problem. US trade representative Rob Portman is well known for his support of the entertainment industries.

One of his more recent efforts was to facilitate Hollywood's efforts to force more 'product' on an unwilling South Korea at the expense of the country's home movie industry.

Also See:
IDG News Service - IIPA piracy petition criticizes Russia, February 13, 2006
"congratulated" Brazil - Well done, RIAA tells Brazil, January 17, 2006
force more 'product' - S Korea vs Hollywood, February 12, 2006

(Monday 13th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7910

 

Napster, Ericsson deal

p2p news / p2pnet: The IDG News Service is another media outlet which believes p2p means 'producer-to-punter'.

"Ericsson has announced a new service allowing users to pay and download music, ringtones and artist images from the Napster peer-to-peer network to their mobile phones and PCs," it says.

Of course, the Napster p2p network no longer exists, thanks to the corporate music industry. In its place is a pale, and seriously troubled, imitation which is trying unsuccessfully to enrich its shareholders by renting out lossy, over-priced Big Four digital tracks.

"The phone manufacturer will offer Napster Mobile as a hosted service to mobile operators that, in turn, make the offering available to their customers," says IDG. "The service will be available in the first half of this year, said Hans Vestberg, executive vice president and general manager of Ericsson's global services business unit."

Napster will be responsible for music programming and back-end integration while Ericsson will look after wireless application development, operator integration, hosting, and content settlement through its Internet Payment eXchange, adds the story.

(Thanks, Masha)

Also See:
IDG - Ericsson to offer hosted Napster service, February 13, 2006
seriously troubled - More $ problems for Napster, February 9, 2006

(Monday 13th February 2006)
http://p2pnet.net/story/7911

 

Nielsen tracks DVR data, but how should it be used?

2/13/2006 1:27:01 PM, by Nate Anderson

Television ratings are big business. They are the basis for the ad rates set by television networks and paid by ad agencies, and are therefore often a source of contention between the two groups, which have diametrically opposed goals (charge more money vs. spend less money). Ratings, for obvious reasons, are turned over to a third party who is charged with providing objective information that both groups can trust. In the world of television, that company is Nielsen Media Research, and they have recently kicked up a bit of controversy between the networks and the ad agencies over the subject of time-shifted content.

Beginning last December, Nielsen started to track the use of digital video recorders (DVRs) among its test families. The results are broken out in three ways: live (the number of those who watch the broadcast), live plus 24 (the number of those who watch the broadcast or who view the show within a day of broadcast), and live plus seven days (the number of those who watch the broadcast or view the show within a week of broadcast). Networks enjoy the bump in ratings they get when DVR is measured, but the advertisers aren't so happy. Why? Because they know that most DVR users skip the commercials.

Nielsen is trying to stay out of the matter of how its data should be interpreted, but the networks are pretty sure they have it figured out: they should charge advertisers for at least a portion of the DVR viewings. The advertisers don't agree, and they're vocal about their opinion. After all, serious money is at stake.

"Several major media agencies have published reports saying that they want only live ratings to count when they sit down to negotiate with the broadcasters to buy commercial time for the coming TV season. Those negotiations, for what is known as the upfront market, are expected to begin in May for 2006-7; last spring, before the start of the 2005-6 season, the broadcasters booked about $9 billion worth of commercials in advance."

The advertisers' contention is that most people don't watch the ads anyway when using a DVR, so they shouldn't have to pay for it. But what about the percentage of people who do watch the ads? Advertisers still don't want to pony up the money, because they argue that ads have less effect when watched at a time of the user's own choosing. Ad agency VP Bill McOwen said that "one has to question whether any viewing after the date intended is worth anything to them [his clients]."

"He gave as examples the kinds of marketers that prefer to buy commercial time on Thursday nights, like retailers, automakers and movie studios, all of them seeking to stimulate demand for the coming weekend."

The networks, for their part, are talking tough. An ABC negotiator has already said that he is not willing to work with agencies that insist on using live ratings only. The issue will only get more contentious if it is not cleared up, because DVR use is on the rise. Right now, DVRs are used only by 7 percent of US households. As that number rises, it will put pressure on the traditional business model of the television networks, all of which rely on traditional advertising revenue. Expect to see new tactics to overcome the commercial-skipping tendency of consumers, such as increased use of product placements, "sponsored" television shows, and shorter ads that fit into more frequent ad breaks. You might even see DVR makers inserting their own ads when users skip the recorded ones.

Nielsen, for its part, simply wants to measure television advertising in as much detail as possible. To that end, they are experimenting with a new (and voluntary) technology called Project Apollo. Neilsen's CEO describes it this way: "In Project Apollo, people scan all their product purchases and also have a ppm [portable people meter] that keeps track of what media they're exposed to." The idea here is to discover a correlation between the advertising that people have watched and the products that they buy. Creepy? Sure, but it might provide a better way for advertisers to measure how well their message is getting across. After all, even when viewing live, you can always get up and go to the bathroom.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060213-6169.html

 

Mostly cold fusion

2/13/2006 2:48:45 PM, by John Timmer

Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, requires a tremendous amount of heat and pressure to force two particles with positive charges close enough for the strong nuclear force to bind them together. As that fusion takes place, a great deal of energy is released. The challenge for those of us here on earth who view fusion as a potential clean energy source is to figure out how to create the heat and pressure needed in a way that's efficient enough that the resulting fusion releases more energy than we put in.

Most of these efforts, such as the long running ITER project, have involved large scale equipment designed to create environments similar to the sun. But a handful of researchers have focused on creating a hot, high pressure micro-environment within an apparatus that can operate near room temperature. Following the Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fiasco, such research is now generally termed "desktop fusion", in order to distinguish it from its less credible relative. Most desktop fusion efforts use the same heavy isotope of hydrogen, deuteurium, as are used in the large scale reactors. Scientists just use various tricks to create a limited environment in which fusion is more probable.

A big success in this field came last year when UCLA researchers reported a new method for getting reasonably efficient desktop fusion. In simple terms, the researchers immobilized some deuteurium based on its affinity to a metal surface. Next up, they took advantage of what's called a "pyroelectric crystal". These crystals, when heated, build up a large charge difference. When such a crystal was placed in a container of deuteurium gas, the charge on the crystal stripped the electron off of deuteurium atoms and accelerated them towards the deuteurium coated metal. Once they got there, the speed was enough to cause the accelerated particles to fuse with the immobilized ones.

Although successful, the amount of energy required to run the system still outweighed that produced by the fusion. The authors, however, noted, "Although the reported fusion is not useful in the power-producing sense, we anticipate that the system will find application as a simple palm-sized neutron generator." So the power of the sun in your hand is still a long way off, but you may at least get access to some of its output from a palm-sized device. Neutrons have a number of potential uses, including radiation treatment of cancers and sterilization of equipment or food, so the commercialization of this technique holds promise. In a recent paper in Physical Review Letters, researchers took another step in that direction. In addition to confirming the UCLA team's results, the researchers improved the efficiency of the device by targeting two of the pyroelectric crystals at each other, an arrangement that seems designed to create head-on collisions between the deuteurium atoms. Although this new device still won't power a flying Delorean, its small size and high neutron output may place fusion in your doctor's office long before it gets anywhere as an energy source.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060213-6170.html

 

Creative Labs prepares to launch wireless speakers

Tesla speakers work out, eventually

By Fuad Abazovic: Monday 13 February 2006, 20:28
OUR VERY well informed sources informed us that Creative Labs is preparing to launch its first surround speaker set.

Whether it is a 5.1 or 7.1 system we're unsure, but we would suggest the latter

It should be announced and available around CeBIT and we are suggesting that Creative could show those speakers at the Hannover, Germany based show and that it will start shipping them in weeks after the show. Cebit 2006 starts on March the 9th.

It is time to finally move on from "wired speakers" as it is so hard to manage all the cables. It takes ages to do and it is almost impossible to conceal seven cables. I am of course talking about the most extreme case where you have seven cables for seven satellite speakers. If you want one of the best speakers you can get Creative Gigaworks S750 7.1 set that goes perfectly with Audigy 2 or X-Fi Generation of card. Those speakers have the power to make your neigbours mad at you, but they also have the cables. It is the real "bushel" and we do think that wireless is the right way to go.

We heard about wireless speakers some time ago but we didn't expect to see them soon. If Creative works this out properly, well the days for wired speakers are numbered and we cannot wait to see these new ones. We wonder how Creative Labs plans to power all those satelite speakers but we suspect some kind of battery power. For Serbian guy Nikola Tesla, this was a dream. µ

See Also
Marconi re-ignites radio debate
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29673

 

ATI prepares to ship X1900 256 MB

In quantities

By Fuad Abazovic: Monday 13 February 2006, 19:36
ATI IS preparing a cheaper version of its X1900 card powered with 256MB of memory. ATI's partners are expecting this card in a week or two and as far as we know the price should settle at around €500€ At this time all ATI's partners are concentrating at more expensive 256 MB card.

The card is meant to fight Nvidia's 256MB offering - especially the Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB. It will sit at the right price point and performance wise it will be faster than Nvidia's offering.

This is just the latest edition of price wars that we seen before and we are sure that it can lead to Nvidia's price drop. It is rather simple if you have the fastest card in the category you can set the price and if not you have to offer your card cheaper that is how this market works for years. The strategy is good as we seen some good and bad times of the both graphic players. They both managed to survive.

There might be a new GTO in a few weeks but we are still working to confirm its existence. Or not. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29672